erhebung

Exploring Today (Yesterday)

Wrote this yes­terday, but didn’t get chance to post it here:

Exploring today: found some deli­cious speakers, but decided they were probably too expensive; also found some very cheap in-​the-​ear head­phones, but decided they were probably too cheap; bought some apples and had a bizarre exchange with the apple-​seller; was told by a lady in a DVD store that I was pretty, then told her that she was pretty too (there was blushing); tasted a nice syrupy cake; wandered around and thought about whether or not I needed a digital camera (pretty sure I don’t, but…); met some amusing, lively people at work, one of whom used to study in Xi’an (“I miss the food”, she said); chatted with a wise lady who remembered being given candy by US soldiers when they lib­er­ated Germany (and last night that same lady talked about how once, while living in Paris and missing home, she had listened to Gounoud’s Faust; her descrip­tion of some of the closing scenes — the depic­tion of The Brocken? — has stuck in my mind). More exploring tomorrow.

Do Anything

The most con­sist­ently inter­esting thing I read last year was Warren Ellis’ Do Anything, a series of columns pub­lished on the Bleeding Cool website. Here are links to each of the indi­vidual install­ments: 001, 002, 003, 004, 005, 006, 007, 008, 009, 010, 011, 012, 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 018, 019, 020, 021, 022, 023, 024, 025, 026. I highly recom­mend taking a look.

Sites of Incarceration

I found Pete Brook’s thought-​provoking Prison Pho­to­graphy blog via con­sumptive (another thought-​provoking blog), and since finding it I’ve spent a lot of time exploring its archives. It’s def­in­itely worth exploring. Brook is using his blog to ask per­tinent questions:

If a camera is within prison walls we should always be asking; How did it get there? What are/​were the motives? What are the responses? I consider the pho­to­graph as social document, there­fore, what social and polit­ical powers are at play in a photograph’s man­u­fac­ture? And, how is know­ledge, related to those powers, constructed?

It’s implicit, I think, that these are ques­tions we could — should, even — direct at all pho­to­graphy, not just the pho­to­graphy of “sites of incarceration”.

On the first day of this fresh new decade, I read some­thing that lodged itself in my mind and promptly began gnawing:

[…] I think pho­to­graphers are talking pretty much to each other with their photos these days. Does anyone else really even notice pho­to­graphy these days, much less whether it is good or bad? […]

I think other people do notice pho­to­graphy, and I think that some will notice the aes­thetics, others, the content, and others still, an product of the two. But I do wonder if a large amount of con­tem­porary pho­to­graphy (and likewise con­tem­porary poetry, con­tem­porary fine art, etc.) is created solely for appre­ci­ation within a quite insular, self-​contained, elitist milieu.

Big Dark Eyes

While on a par­tic­u­larly lengthy ramble through the interweb last night, I stumbled upon an article about Pablo Picasso ori­gin­ally pub­lished in a 1950 edition of Time magazine. Here is a snippet:

Today Picasso’s own face is leathery, seamed and wrinkled, illu­min­ated by big dark eyes which some­times sparkle but more often stare off into the distance. He is old and fat, but still powerful: his chest and belly, brist­ling with white, goatlike hairs, are mahogany-​tanned. At 68, he still dom­in­ates the whole canvas of modern art.

The internet, today, is full of stars.

A portrait of Pablo Picasso by Gjon Mili. (Source)

Kicking His Something Something

A gem from the Time magazine archives:

No one really expected Painter Henri Matisse to bother to answer the attack that British Royal Academy Pres­ident Sir Alfred Munnings had made on his work (TIME, May 9). But last week Matisse did. Sitting up in bed in his suburban apart­ment at Nice to talk to a TIME cor­res­pondent, the 79-​year-​old master gently con­tra­dicted Horse-​Painter Munnings’ views on modern art in general.

“If you want to paint a tree,” gruff Sir Alfred had snorted at a recent R.A. banquet, “for heaven’s sake make it look like a tree!” Matisse’s La Forêt (in London’s Tate Gallery) did not look a bit like trees to Sir Alfred. Argued Matisse, why should it? Such “material truth,” he said, might as well be left to pho­to­graphy. The truth modern painters like himself are after is some­thing else again; it “comes out of the mind of the artist… the sen­ti­ment of an artist moved by the spec­tacle of nature.”

“There are always two kinds of paint­ings,” Matisse went on. “First there is the kind that intro­duces some­thing new. Such paint­ings begin by being worth­less but even­tu­ally they ascend the heights of value. Then there are those which are accepted at the outset because they offer nothing new but simply flatter the public taste. They are later found to be worthless.”

The story of Matisse’s own career clearly made him an example of the first kind of painter. Could he think of an opposite example? “Charity commands me,” said Matisse with a smile, “not to name any artists who do paint­ings of the second sort.”

The original Time article is here. And a little more back­ground:

[Sir Alfred] Munnings was elected pres­ident of the Royal Academy of Art in 1944, a post he held until 1949. His pres­id­ency is most famous for the departing speech he gave in 1949, attacking mod­ernism. The broad­cast was heard by millions of listeners to BBC radio. An evid­ently inebri­ated Munnings claimed that the work of Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso had cor­rupted art. He recalled that Winston Churchill had once said to him, “Alfred, if you met Picasso coming down the street would you join with me in kicking his… some­thing some­thing?” to which Munnings said he replied “Yes Sir, I would”.

Won­derful.

Stills #1: Days of Heaven (1978)

This great evil — where’s it come from? How’d it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who’s doing this? Who’s killing us, robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we mighta known? Does our ruin benefit the earth, aid the grass to grow and the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you too? Have you passed through this night?

Dialogue from Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line

The first Terrence Malick film I ever saw was The Thin Red Line, the second, the The New World; and after I had seen those I was left wishing for there to be more: more swaying grass, more dithering sunlight, more soulful char­ac­ters, more elegiac dialogue. Malick’s films mes­mer­ised me, and it was jarring to wake from the trance.

Up until a week or so ago, Days of Heaven was a film I had heard about but never seen, a mys­ter­ious entry on Malick’s filmo­graphy that I hadn’t been able to find in the local DVD store. But then I found it, and now I have seen it, and I’m glad I did as it is a beau­tiful and inspired me to find fields to pho­to­graph. The still below, the first in what will be an ongoing series of film stills, is from a scene towards the end of the film. Thinking about these films brings a poem by Ezra Pound to mind:

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass

Life does not slip so much as ebb and flow in Malick’s films; and the grass does get shaken, does sway, if only a little.

Fields of corn in Days of Heaven.

At the Mouth of an Inaccessible Gorge

While I was wikiwalking last week, I found a place I’d really like to visit:

Saint Catherine’s Mon­as­tery (Greek: Μονὴ τῆς Ἁγίας Αἰκατερίνης) lies on the Sinai Pen­in­sula, at the mouth of an inac­cess­ible gorge at the foot of Mount Sinai in Saint Kath­erine city in Egypt. The mon­as­tery is Greek Orthodox and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. According to the UNESCO report (60100 ha /​Ref: 954) and website here­under, this mon­as­tery has been called the oldest working Chris­tian mon­as­tery in the world — although the Mon­as­tery of Saint Anthony, situated across the Red Sea in the desert south of Cairo, also holds claim to that title.

[…]

The oldest record of monastic life at Sinai comes from the travel journal written in Latin by a woman named Egeria about 381 – 384. She visited many places around the Holy Land and Mount Sinai, where, according to the Hebrew Bible, Moses received the Ten Com­mand­ments from God.

[…]

The mon­as­tery library pre­serves the second largest col­lec­tion of early codices and manu­scripts in the world, out­numbered only by the Vatican Library. Its strength lies in Greek, Coptic, Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Georgian, and Syriac texts. The Codex Sinait­icus, now in the British Library, left the mon­as­tery in the 19th century for Russia, in cir­cum­stances that are now disputed.

Dust and sand, time and history: these things have been all been on my mind quite a lot of late.

Sunshine and Cataclysms

Yoann Lemoine (who I found on BOOOOOOOM!, a site I should visit more often) makes images, takes pho­to­graphs, that I would love to put all over my walls. This image seems pulled from some near-​future science fiction tale (is it a utopia trans­forming into a dystopia, or vice versa?), or perhaps from a novel by J. G. Ballard (Cocaine Nights came to mind first, because I vividly recall the sunlight in that book, but Super-​Cannes , with its heat, its concrete, and its glass-​walled offices, is perhaps a better fit):

Many of Lemoine’s pho­to­graphs evoke, for me, the end of the world (or could it be the edge of the world, the fringe: world’s-end?); even the pho­to­graph on her site of the singers — a choir, I think — feels ominous, somehow. She is pho­to­graphing in the present, visu­al­ising the future; and the futures artists visu­alise are always con­di­tioned by how they inter­pret the present. I would like to know more about Lemoine, about her philo­sophy, her hopes, her fears.

This pho­to­graph cer­tainly suggests a journey towards closure, a trip to the edge of some­where, something:

And when I saw this pho­to­graph my first asso­ci­ation, strangely, was On the Beach, (a purely arbit­rary asso­ci­ation, a con­nec­tion of “sand” and “beach”, as I’ve not actually read Shute’s novel):

My second asso­ci­ation was The Quiet Earth, the opening scene of which feature (if my memory is correct) a beach, and waves. A cata­clysm has occurred, and only a few people have survived. There is heat (a very Bal­lar­dian heat, now I think about it) and loneli­ness, the nar­rative tracking a survivor’s explor­a­tion of his newly barren world. Lemoine’s pho­to­graphs do not always depict a barren world, but they do hint at approaching cataclyms.

(On the subject of films about the end of the world, Knowing, the latest film by Alex Proyas, director of the exquisite Dark City, is a mighty thing, and I can’t under­stand why it didn’t receive better reviews when it was first released. Well, I can, in a way, but still: what flaws it may have are greatly out­weighed by its ambition, its ideas. If you get the chance, watch it: it is all that good science fiction films should be, but so fre­quently are not.)

Awful People Can Do Beautiful Things

Wise words from Ta-​Nehisi Coates:

[…] Woody Allen wooed his wife’s adopted daughter, and may well be a child molester. But I think Bananas makes me laugh. Mike Tyson is, among other things, a con­victed rapist. But I had not lived until I saw him demolish Trevor Berbick. And so on…

I guess I could peel these people out my life. I guess I could stop seper­ating [sic] art from men. Regret­tably, I think, I wouldn’t be left with much art worth admiring. Some­times awful people, do beau­tiful things [sic]. One doesn’t cancel the other. And mourning the loss of human life, does not excuse the sins of that life.

People who don’t feel that way are welcome to their opinions. I’m not sure why they insist that others share them.

I think the first time I had to grapple with this was when I studied T. S. Eliot at uni­ver­sity. I had read Eliot since sec­ondary school, but during that time I had had only a passing aware­ness of his darker side. It was while I was pre­paring papers on Eliot for my lit­er­ature degree, a time when I was looking harder and closer at his work, and at the life behind the work, than I had ever pre­vi­ously looked, that I saw sides of the man (the man who was also the poet) that I found abhor­rent. At that time, young and full of fire (for ref­er­ence, I am older, now, but still very fiery), I wanted my essays to crit­ic­ally evis­cerate Eliot, to lay out on A4 paper all of the nas­ti­nesses I’d been told (told, in some cases, by critics who quite possibly had their own personal nas­ti­nesses lurking in the back­ground) about this com­plic­ated man, this famous poet. I wanted to tear into him because some­thing about what he was, some­thing about his beliefs, his ideo­lo­gies, made me angry.

And yet the poetry and the drama (and even, at moments, the literary cri­ti­cism) still stirred me, still provided me, on a daily basis, with new and powerful ways of seeing and feeling and thinking. The lit­er­ature created by T. S. Eliot has been a lode­stone in my life, much of what I read or see or make pointing back, in some way, to that rock. (And here it might be worth noting that the name of this blog, “erhebung”, comes from a line in a poem by Eliot.) The picture I saw of the man was not the picture I saw of the poet; somehow there were, and there remain to this day, two Eliots in my mind: the one, glit­tering and evan­es­cent, whose art is tran­scendent, uplifting; the other, dark and hard, whose views are unpleasant, cruel. I had to recon­cile myself with the fact that these two Eliots were irre­con­cil­able; or, as Coates’ might put it, I had to content myself with the reality that some­times beau­tiful things are made by awful people.

Across the United States

Listen to David Lynch intro­duce Inter­view Project and I’m fairly certain you’ll instantly get caught on the project’s hook: video inter­views con­ducted with random strangers encountered during a road trip across the United States. According to the website there are going to be at least 121 of these inter­views, but so far only about a dozen have been pub­lished; so, it’s probably going to be an epic ride.

(via Tiffany Jones)

A Stravaganza

Epic:

The Pictures Generation

If you have a few minutes to kill, you might want to take a look at an inter­esting audio slide show that’s just been pub­lished on the website of The New Yorker. It’s a com­mentary by Peter Schjeldahl on some of the work, and some of the artists, featured in The Pictures Gen­er­a­tion, 1974 – 1984, an exhib­i­tion cur­rently showing at the Met­ro­pol­itan Museum of Art. Many of the artists dis­cussed were com­pletely new to me, including Dara Bernbaum, the artist behind the Wonder Woman video still at the top of this post.