The Ophelia that was Icarus

Pieter Brueghel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (ca. 1554-55)

Julia Fullerton-Batten, Floating in the Harbor (2005)


Tadeusz Różewicz's Rights and Duties is a better review of the above work than I could try to make. So here it is, in my humble translation:

A time ago I know not when

a time ago I thought I had the right the duty

to shout at the ploughman

look look listen you piece of wood

Icarus is falling

Icarus is drowning the son of a dream

let go of the plough

let go of the earth

open your eyes

there Icarus

drowns

or the shepherd here

turning his back to the tragedy

the wings the sun the flight

the fall

I would say you blind men

But now when now I know not

I know that the ploughman should plow the earth

the shepherd should watch the flock

Icarus’s adventure is not their own

this has to end that way

And there is nothing shocking

in the ship moving on

to the port of destination

I can't resist finding an excuse to put some more Julia Fullerton-Batten images, so let me quote another Polish poet, Czesław Miłosz:

Song on The End of the World (transl. Anthony Miłosz)

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A Fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through fields under their umbrellas
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet,
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world there will be,
No other end of the world there will be.

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Michal Chelbin: the body's eye

Michal Chelbin's pictures are a constant game. The game between the norm and the exception is played out in a delicate dance of proportions that leads to harmony. But this harmony is not defined as a selection of perfect elements, but rather, by the very way things are: perfect on their own terms.

Do not be fooled by the apparent disproportion or outsiderism: those people belong right here.



Their attributes, often those of small-town perfomers, are incredibly rich: they give away their profession, status, personal/national culture... Yet this is no show-off. They look us straight in the eye, giving us a clear message: they know who they are.

They seem acutely aware of their freakishness, of their UFO-like qualities. And still, they are at the same time assuming their belonging, to this place, to this often rough and difficult place that is home.




Those are not happy people. Finding as much as a shadow of a smile is quite a task (the central boy with the swimming cap on one of the pictures above, I think). Yet they are far from desperate, or depressed. They are, above all, serious. This is a form of sharing that makes the encounter all the more meaningful: they might be stuck at this time and place, but their look (how very often the very same look comes back!) does not allow for condescending attitudes. This is my world. My name, my color, my friend or dog or car or parent. Now you have to deal with that. I've done my share.


Yet, in Michal Chelbin's work, there is an element we might skip at first glance.

Eroticism. Even in the most innocent-looking pictures, even in the strangest ones or "decent" ones, the body is exposed. It is not attractive, but problematic. Maybe, because it is appealing, noticeable, after all, before all. It exists, somehow too early, and too late. It plays with our senses, making us too touchable, too lookable, too objectifiable - and thus somehow always too bodily.

How beautifully the look competes with the body.

Technorati: erotic art, photography, visual art, art, contemporary art, vvoi

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ARTISTS IN LOVE, part eleven

James Montgomery Flagg had an ugly view of beauty.

"I have never had any slight interest in homely ladies," he said, "no matter how charming and intelligent they are reputed to be. They do not exist for me." And even if a woman satisfied his standards for beauty, she'd better not nag or be jealous about his many infidelities:

[I]f I ran the world...I'd have my FBI corral all the ugly people [along with] all nagging and jealous women,...and take them out to Death Valley and drop an atomic bomb on them.

He also believed that beauty, at least in women, diminished as they approached middle age:

Usually former models of mine whom I don't see for a quarter of a century have become distinctly middle aged.... in an almost invariably shocking way....I occasionally tell these dames they look like zombies. They naturally resent it and usually come back with "Well, you don't look so hot yourself!" But that has no sting whatever....

Flagg never ran out of of girlfriends to mistreat (will some kind female reader puhleeze write in and explain this?), but toward the end of his long career, Flagg fell head over heels in love for the first time.

In his autobiography Flagg described Ilse Hoffman, a young model and photographer, as "the most important thing in my life." Newly humbled, Flagg admitted, "I shall have to testify that there is such a thing as love at first sight. And I do mean love." The two had a passionate romance. He painted her as often as she would permit.

Ultimately, Flagg was too much of an emotional miser for a successful relationship:

After about three years there came a change in our relations-- a shadow hard to define... a contributing cause may have been ...a growing feeling on her part that she wanted to get married. I didn't....Gradually Ilse's attitude toward me began to change.

Ilse moved into an apartment of her own.

When I asked if she'd give me an extra key, she refused with obviously false excuses. I reminded her that she had a key to my place that made her welcome at any time, night or day. I told her I had no notion of using it, that I wanted her to make the gesture. Nothing doing. Then I knew.

Flagg became deeply despondent over losing the love of his life. "I walked and walked, uptown, not really knowing were I was going. I was hurt to death." One would hope that this painful experience caused Flagg to know moments of thoughtfulness. However, all evidence points to the contrary.

When Ilse found another man who was willing to commit to her, Flagg had a bitter and typically clueless reaction:

I was saturated with disgust for Ilse...I said to myself: 'I truly loved Ilse. No other woman has meant a thing to me-- from the moment I saw her.' Eventually she married this young man, who was some sort of stock market runner. Yes, she was a married woman. She'd got what she desired. A wedding ring.

Flagg never loved again. He had a sour and lonely old age. He said at the end of his life,

I can't stand the look of my present age. All my life I have been a worshipper of that beauty of the human form you see in some men and women....Is it any wonder that I don't like to look at the physical mess and mental dullness that has set in for me? As far back as I can remember, I have been in the limelight; now I'd rather be dead than be passed by, ignored.

Flagg's final self portrait is haunted by the painting of Ilse over his shoulder, and the life that might have been. The old man ruminated, "A roll in the bed with honey isn't love. And the tragic part of it is that you never learn this until you're past the age for it to happen to you again."

We sometimes like to believe that art sensitizes us and heightens our awareness of the beauty around us. But Flagg had a circle of compassion no wider than one of his pen nibs, and he paid the price for it.

Read more "ARTISTS IN LOVE, part eleven..."

How to video ART

See here.

Technorati: net art, art, contemporary art, vvoi

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Beautiful Women

Susanna Hesselberg, No title

Melanie Bonajo, Bears


Why hide the face? What is there in a face that demands to be hidden? Identity, or the appearance of identity, of course. However, there is more. Although the concept of the mask has been written about extensively, and the mask as an element reappears in all sort of constellations, here we have a mask that is a non-face. It is the erasing of any face-ness. Why is that? Why would we want to go as far as run away from the perfect reference?
For one, it - the face - remains. The face tends to appear as soon as we know it's there. But that is not enough. What is here is an escape from identity, or rather, from identification.
I would like to think it is not a coincidence that both artists whose work is above are women. And that it is no coincidence that their subjects are women also (uhmmm...in the first case it may be debatable). This feminist interpretation is "false", of course, but it would lend itself wonderfully as a weapon against the beauty of this:



And to end on a pretty, feminist and identity-less line,

I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
by Emily Dickinson

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know!

How dreary to be somebody!
How public like a frog
To tell one's name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Technorati: painting, photography, art history, feminism, feminist art, fine art, visual art, art, contemporary art, vvoi

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Blue.

Untitled

Technorati: photography, fine art, visual art, art, contemporary art, vvoi

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A Few Good Poets

Not that there aren't plenty. But a few good ones can be found on this Favorite Poem Project site.
(As you will notice, the page is an absolute of absolutes of nec plus ultras of political correctness. Does that make the poems - and their readers - any more problematic?)

To all the bloggers, I dedicate the first verse of Block City, by Robert Louis Stevenson:

What are you able to build with your blocks?
Castles and palaces, temples and docks.
Rain may keep raining, and others go roam,
But I can be happy and building at home.

Mind you, Stevenson was a great traveler, author of Treasure Island and many other adventure novels, inspired by his own voyages. Read more "A Few Good Poets..."