May 172012
Apr 252012
Centurion is supposed to be historical fiction about the disappearance of the Legio IX Hispania in the third century in something like the Battle of Teutoberg Wald but it kind of lapses into … semi-fantasy. There is a lot of snow and awesome alpine scenery and fun costumes. Basically the only reason to see Centurion is for Dominic West in one of his typically movie-stealing supporting roles (as “General Titus Flavius Virilus” — really!) and Etain, the “guerra picta” played by Olga Kurylenko. Etain doesn’t speak, takes the wolf as her attribute animal, and endures a strange sort of Penthesilea-like death. She has fantastic Pict ordnance and body decorations.
I was sort of half-waking up, half-dreaming about the movie when the song “Signs” came on dataheaven.us… I haven’t paid much attention to Bloc Party previously but I was blown away by this particular song. Maybe it was just the combination of sound and imagery but it really shook me up.
What do these two things have in common that together they should make such a resonant impression? I don’t know.
Here
is the link to “Signs” on Soundcloud, and a snippet of lyric: “I could sleep forever these days because in my dreams I see you again.”
Mar 182012
Feb 082012
“I saw what the moorhen sees as it dives: the thousand rings that encircle each little life, the blue of the whispering sky swallowed by the lake, the enraptured moment of surfacing in another place. Know, my friends, what images are: the experience of surfacing in another place.”
{ Ich sah das Bild, das in den Augen des Teichhuhns sich bricht, wenn es untertaucht: die tausend Ringe, die jedes kleine Leben einfassen, das Blau der flüsternden Himmel, das der See trinkt, das verzückte Auftauchen an einem andern Ort, – erkennt, meine Freunde, was Bilder sind: das Auftauchen an einem anderen Ort. }
Franz Marc, Aphorismen 82, 1915.
The images are Vier Füchse, a postcard from 1914, and Liegendes Pferd, a water color from 1911.
Aug 092011
Franz Marc holding a cell phone, 1915.
Here is a mysterious photograph from Franz Marc – Paul Klee: ein Dialog in Bildern, a volume beautifully illustrated with the artists’ postcards to each other and some interesting photographs. Klee seems more vulnerable and less arch than you might expect in these letters and drawings. Marc, maybe predictably, sort of absorbs and reflects Klee; yet the images and texts on the cards seem both entwined and quotidian. One of the photos is this fascinating unsourced image, captioned “Franz Marc im Unterstand, 1915/1916.” It’s hard to tell what kind of shelter this is…it appears shell-shocked and comfortable at the same time. There are some binoculars and map cases hanging, and an eerie prophetic broken mirror. FM is smoking, of course, but the captivating question is what is he holding?
It looks like a cell phone, the kind you would expect FM to have, not a Blackberry or an iPhone, just a functional Nokia with Alpenlaendische Volksmusik ringtones. Photography professors, librarians, and two photo archivists who specialize in early 20th Century images looked at this photo and everyone was perplexed about the photo shows. That’s just how FM rolls.
What do you think this object is?
This book (which is confusingly cataloged with lots of commas instead of the conjunctions and articles that appear actually in print) forms the combined catalog from three retrospectives from 2010 at
the Franz Marc Museum in Kochel am See; the Stiftung Moritzburg (“Kunstmuseum des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt” in Halle, the craziest city in Flemish Brabant and the planet); and Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern.
May 302011
I was fortunate recently to acquire a copy of Franz Marc, the 1936 biography by Alois J. Schardt. This is a cool book with a lot of drawings I had not seen before, including this study. This bat is a lot more cheerful than the one in Hoffnungslos. The echolocation abilities of bats were not identified until 1938 (but bats flew first, 53 million years ago, and then developed this type of sonar also used by dolphins and moles), so Marc wouldn’t have known about it. It is really cool to see that Marc realized how amazing bats are, though.
Anatomical study of bats and birds from Franz Marc (1936)
- Anatomischestudien 1907 detail of bat, from Franz Marc
Apr 032011
Mar 202011
Franz Marc Hrsg. von Maria Marc, borrowed from The Clark in Williamstown, Massachusetts. This is pretty fantastic; the bat is carrying away a cow!
Feb 082011
Fabeltier, Franz Marc, 1912
This is a really big week for birthdays: Bob Marley on 6 February (1945) ["it takes a revolution to make a solution"] and Saint Thomas More on 7 February (1478). More and more scholars agree ...the New Isle Called Utopia is a true socialist manifesto and I concur!
Most importantly though, 8 February (1880) is the birthday of painter, writer, animal sanctuarist, soldier, and millinery fashion icon Franz Marc.
Fabeltier (1912) is a plate from Der Blaue Reiter. Is the image a tiny (Italian Greyhound-looking) fanciful creature by a regular-size strawberry, or a giant strawberry with a little dog, or something else? I don’t know; it’s just fun and mysterious. Marc made a few illustrations like this called various iterations of Fabeltier but like gargoyles the animals resemble dogs, horses, lions…I especially like this one but they are all fantastic.
Breyer Model Text and Photo of Ruffian
This is an eerie item to find and I would return it if I could because I love Ruffian and also I have had almost the entire collection of Breyer model horses since I was little. Unshockingly I played with the toy horses the way other kids did dolls.
I did not have this one though…I looked on the Breyer Website where the Ruffian model is listed as “retired” along with the Clydesdale! That’s terrible; the Clydesdale is awesome.
Here is the text printed on the card:
“A Thoroughbred blessed with blazing speed, Ruffian’s brief but brilliant career was marked by triumph and tragedy.
In 1972, a nearly black filly with a tiny star was foaled in Kentucky. Bred by Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Janney Jr. of Locust Hill Farm, she was a tough, independent tomboy who was big for a filly (16.2 hands) and unstoppable from the start.
With Frank Whiteley Jr. training, Ruffian won her debut race easily, dismissing the first of many records, in her next four outings. As a 2-year-old, she established an explosive, fly-to-the-front-style that overwhelmed her competition and earned her the Two-Year-Old Filly Championship. But could she do this over longer distances, and against colts?
At three, Ruffian reeled off five more victories, racing longer and faster and dominating the New York Filly Triple Crown. Then, the New York Racing Association proposed a contest between the three winners of the all-male Triple Crown races. Still undefeated, Ruffian was invited to test her speed against the country’s best colts. But Avatar and Master Derby scratched, leaving her to duel only with Kentucky Derby Winner Foolish Pleasure.
Billed as “The Battle of the Sexes,” the match race occured July 6, 1975 at New York’s Belmont Park. Headed briefly at the start, Ruffian battled to a 1/2-length advantage when, suddenly, her right foreleg gave way.
So great was Ruffian’s courage that she fought jockey Jacinto Vasquez’s attempts to pull her up. Veterinarians struggled all night to save her shattered ankle, but Ruffian proved a poor patient, injuring herself even further after awakening from anasthesia. Ultimately, the difficult decision to euthanize her was made.
Now considered the greatest racing filly of all time, Ruffian was buried at Belmont Park and is remembered in the Hall of Fame.”
Dec 152010
Do you love Lupa Capitolina? Then you are going to be extremely happy with the forthcoming manifesto on the Capitoline Wolf.
Today at her home at the Capitoline Museum the wolf has many admirers, visitors whose fingers itch to twirl the regular, S-shaped curls of her mane and to caress her sinewy legs, her elegant tufted paws, and her smooth, distended udders. The infinitely abundant images of the wolf on Rome-affiliated merchandise seem to increase rather than dilute the potent aura of the statue herself. What is it about the she-wolf that makes her so compelling?
Scholarship on the origin of disputed bronzes such as Lupa Capitolina (in fact the origin of a number of works including some Etruscan hand mirrors is contested) tend to focus on issues of the absolute. Are the bronzes authentically Etruscan, Roman copies, or 19th Century knockoffs? Do they come from a single workshop? Are they cast by one artist and engraved by another? Whom were these objects made for? Were they part of one group?
I take it as a good thing that, even despite the most thorough scrutiny of Lupa Capitolina imaginable, we do not have answers to any of these questions about her, nor are we likely to find them. No matter what technology can eventually answer about when she was made, Lupa will be able to keep a lot to herself, rendering her enduring mystique, even in its ubiquity, largely impenetrable. Yet this does not mean that questions cannot or should not be asked of or about the wolf; there is satisfaction, not frustration, in this type of open-endedness.
Stay tuned…
Tin Tin and Milou in "The Secret of the Unicorn"
Oct 072010
Landscape with Snow
Vincent Van Gogh’s Landscape With Snow (1888) is a bit of an oddity amid the nearly 200 paintings Van Gogh made during his relatively brief (fifteen months) but exceedingly productive sojourn to the outskirts of Arles, France, following his immersion in Parisian café culture. As with the canvas depicting the storm on the shore at Scheveningen, Landscape With Snow seems to have recorded a real weather event, a heavy and rare blizzard that happened just as Van Gogh arrived in what he must have been surprised to find was not a sunny early spring day in the south of France. Of greater interest for my research, however, is the rare appearance of an animal – a dog – in this painting.
The dog and his man are walking away from the viewer, and the painter, on the left side of the raised rut between a slushy dirt road and an adjacent fallow field, also patched with snow and maybe ice, though the cold and precipitation seems not to have discouraged the emergence of a few early bursts of foliage. The sky overhead is the cold grey of a European late afternoon, but the village, not too far distant, offers the shelter of steadfast trees and some inviting-looking structures. Still it is the presence of the dog that lends this canvas a sense of comfort – the man and the dog are just out walking and will soon reach the village – rather than the foreboding and isolation a solitary figure would indicate.
Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski describes Van Gogh’s fascination with Arlesian agrarian labor practices (and the impingement upon those practices as evidence by the occasional appearance of modern machinery) in a way that echoes Griselda Pollock’s pieces (supported by an even greater amount of first-source historical data) about Van Gogh and the peasant population around Nuenen. Both scholars more than suggest that Van Gogh was a bit clueless as to the actual monotonous particularities of the type of manual labor required by life on a farm, with or without the assistance of efficiency-making devices. However, while Pollock’s interest in Van Gogh is more or less in envisioning the social practices of capitalism realized in painting with the painter as the generalized fulcrum, Jirat-Wasiutnski concentrates on a favorable understanding of Van Gogh’s intentions. I say intentions because while Jirat-Wasiutnski intuits a good bit of bonhomie from Van Gogh’s visions of companionship with like-minded artists as he imagined existence in Japan and an almost Futurist-like faith in the benefits of embracing modernity, the landscape paintings do not precisely, in many cases, reflect this sense of community and optimism. In fact despite its chilly setting, Landscape With Snow (because of the dog) is much more emotionally vibrant than, for example, the invitingly titled but simultaneously cluttered and barren Orchard With Blossoming Apricot Trees (1988) from just one month later.
Flying Fox
My favorite Van Gogh painting, period, is Flying Fox (1885) from the Nuenen period. I have always wondered why, after so viscerally animating a creature he could never have seen when it was alive and in its natural environment, Van Gogh’s interest never again turned intensively to the many available creatures of the earth in Nuenen, Paris, and Arles who invited the same types of projections of innocence and typicality as the peasants, fieldhands, and café attendants Van Gogh was so fond of. Franz Marc saw something in Van Gogh’s work that made the German painter immediately embark on his canonical horses. I am still curious and will continue to search for whatever this galvanizing influence is.
See: Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski, “A Dutchman in the South of France: Van Gogh’s Romance of Arles,” Van Gogh Museum Journal 2002, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. (78-89)
Jul 182010
Marcie's Teeth
Marcie recuperating
So for the sake of completeness, here is a story about Marcie Carey and her dental adventures, which actually compare okay to those of her sisters.
Marcie had kind of unfortunate childhood and young adulthood in a puppy mill. Most of the dogs who were recovered with her — 11 of the 16 — died shortly after they were seized by animal services in Georgia. I can only imagine that her taciturn nature is both a result of the horrible experiences she had (three litters of puppies before she was 18 months old among other things) and part of her survival strategy. Marcie is very reserved and quiet — she had lived with me for three years before I ever heard her make a sound — and very loving with cats and people she knows well; I wonder sometimes if she is completely cheerful but she seems content most of the time.
Anyway, like a lot of puppy mill dogs, Marcie has always had terrible teeth. They’ve been extracted one by one over the years, but today, recognizing that all of her canine teeth were practically parrallel to the jawbone and that none of the molars met, the very nice dog dentist Dr. Michael Peak recommended that it was time for total toothlessness. (Also, the spaces around the teeth accumulate bacteria which affect dogs’ health in other ways.)
This is a challenging procedure not just because of the tiny bones of Italian Greyhounds but because their low body fat makes anesthesia tricky. Dr. Peak used only light sedation (isoflurane) with Marcie and some nerve blocking shots around the gumline. And of course Marcie had plenty of dog tranquilizers and painkillers plus subcutaneous and IV fluids.
Also, Marcie is simply much younger — Astra was 16 years old when she had her major extraction and bone graft! — than her sister was undergoing the same procedure.
Naturally I asked to keep the teeth, which you see here, and to have lots of photos.
However I do not think either Marcie nor myself was prepared for embarking on the new adventure of canine cuisine we are now faced with addressing. Marcie already was used to a lot of food — soup, stew, oatmeal, various kinds of cooked vegetables — she just sort of slurped up (not to mention the diet staples of ice cream and yogurt — what can I say?) but if people have ideas about what else a tooth-free IG might subsist on, that would be great.
The excision of Marcie’s tusks are certainly a loss to the world of Italian Greyhound glamour but I think you can see she is going to quickly make a good showing of the “tongue as accessory” thing.
Feb 212010
“When he saw me thus launched on yet another enraptured description of what I had observed, he looked at me with desperately sad eyes and said in obvious despair: ‘But Selye try to realize what you are doing before it is too late! You have now decided to spend your entire life studying the pharmacology of dirt.’ ”
– (Hans Selye, The Stress of Life, 1956)
Look at this hip art show poll! I will be curating an as-yet-to-be-named art show going up September 7 at USF’s Centre Gallery. The special guest artists will be USF Masters of Fine Arts candidates, maybe, and maybe some other local and regional art stars too. The reason the show is lacking a name is because its title will be decided the democratic way: through your votes.
A manifesto detailing the curator’s philosophy and the inspiration for this cultural insurgency will be forthcoming, but for now I welcome your vote. Please feel free to post your suggestions for alternative names in the comments section, and thank you for participating. — Jean Carey
What should be the name of the mid-September show at USF's Centre Gallery?
- Over Everything (82%, 9 Votes)
- Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (18%, 2 Votes)
Total Voters: 11
Loading ...Continuing the experiment, here is a video from YouTube of Astra and Marcie napping Italian Greyhounds Sleeping filmed in 2007.
May 022009
To get back with the blog, I am experimenting with Blackberry uploading technology.
Jan 102009
Astra Carey, 31 October 1992-9 January 2009
My darling girl and the love of my life Astra died at 6:30 p.m. 9 January 2009.
She spent her final day being extremely boisterous for her breakfast at 5:30 a.m., being variously sat beside and sat upon by her young sister, Marcie, and taking in as many B-movies as it is possible for a deaf, blind, elderly dog to absorb, all things she did most days for many years.
Astra was an amazing Italian Greyhound. During her long life she climbed the Bridal Veil falls trail and played in the falls’ freezing spray, ran on Miami Beach at sunrise, chased armadillos and wild boars, aspirated a sandspur, consumed an entire bag of dark chocolate, was stung by a bee, dove into an alligator-infested river, and walked thousands of miles with me in all sorts of environments. Astra survived all her adventures and misadventures with good cheer and a hearty appetite. Over the years I said many prayers to Saint Francis and Saint Mary imploring them to watch over and protect this loving, gentle soul and I believe she is receiving a warm welcome in paradise tonight and rejoining her sister, Queequeg, who went first as always a few years ago.
Until arthritis affected her range of motion these final years, the first sound I heard every morning after the alarm clock was Astra’s tail, thumping the bed, ready to greet another day in happiness and with love.
Astra was frequently infatuated with animals of other species, particularly rabbits and cats, and though her affections were often misunderstood she remained steadfast.
I have no other words to express my grief but also my ineffable gratitude at having had so many wonderful years with such a wonderful child.
[Green turtle, albino. By David Monniaux]
“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”
On Photography, Susan Sontag’s exhaustive critique of photography, which excoriated photographers even as it elevated the art form, opens (in the 1977 book form of the collected essays) with the chapter “In Plato’s Cave.” Arranged and edited in this manner this chapter is meant to serve as the introduction to Sontag’s collection of ideas on the sociological implications of the medium of photography.
So much has been written by and about Sontag with respect to the construction and importance of these essays, and so much biographical detail about Sontag has come to light since her death a few years ago, that is it difficult to consider “In Plato’s Cave” unto itself, separate from that information, let alone separate from the other essays in the collection.
Basically, Sontag takes humankind to task, as did Plato, for sitting around accepting whatever images that happen to dance past as a perfect mirror (or projection) of reality and judges photographers equally harshly for approaching their subjects with acquisitiveness and predation. Sontag investigates the simile of the cave but more deeply the metaphor of the mirror.
I was interested to learn that Sontag had also written extensively about Persona, the 1966 Ingmar Bergman film, probably around the same time she began the series of essays that are collected in On Photography. Persona can also be construed as being about mirroring, and also about a kind of (seemingly) passive transmission and reception of knowledge, as well as a complicated examination about the relationship between the beholder and the beheld. Persona is open to interpretation as a horror movie rather than a psychological study, one in which a very modern sort of vampire sucks the being from a similar but not identical human. Continue reading »
Jul 032008
Pere Ubu by Dora Maar, 1936
Authorship by Dora Maar gives this photograph authentic historic and even feminist credibility but I chose it because my main interest in art overall is the representation of animals. This is a very interesting view of a creature commonly seen in Florida (and all over), an armadillo (though this armadillo is of a different species than the nine-banded creatures who sadly cannot navigate traffic).
There is something primitive and otherwordly about armadillos and whatever Maar’s intent may have been in elevating such a seemingly lowly creature into this eerie portrait it is quite a lovely study. Since Maar was interested in primitivism, this seems apt.
With respect to technique, placing the pale, scaly armadillo against a grainy dark background removes it from a natural setting and allows for contemplation of the texture of its skin. The shadows on its chest accentuate its claws. There is no way to tell, framed in this manner, how big the armadillo is, whether he is, as Maar’s title suggests, “king” sized, or tiny like a fetus, which the armadillo also resembles.
May 262008
Though Trent Reznor allegedly dislikes this video and will not perform “The Perfect Drug” live, here is further proof, as if any is needed, that this is one of Nine Inch Nails’s best efforts.
San Francisco Art Institute Suspends Animal Snuff Video Exhibit
Public forum scheduled for Monday, March 31st to open up dialogue
An installtion by Adel Abdessemed exhibit entitled “Don’t Trust Me” consisting of six televisions displaying video images of six different animals — a doe, a goat, a horse, an ox, a pig, and a sheep — being bludgeoned to death with a largesledgehammer has been removed by the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), the installation’s sponsor. For once I think this redaction, which can and will be called censorship, was correct. What do you think?
Jan 012008
Astra finds her way to the doorway.
Astra has a New Year’s present, a motion-activated dual 150 watt sensor light that activates when she steps close to the path to the door.
Since her cataract debrasion Astra can apparently detect a general sense of brightness and she has taught herself very quickly to keep the sensor activated by remain in in its sphere and to then to navigate by the flagstones.
Dec 222007
The Horse Fair: It’s not Nivernais
“Labourages Nivernais (Ploughing in the Nivernais)” by Rosa Bonheur
If 19th century French painter Rosa Bonheur believed in reincarnation, she would surely have chosen to return to life not as one of the regal lions or leggy gazelles she shared her Bordeaux estate with, but as a sturdy, common barnyard bull. The slyly successful painter had great affection for domestic animals, and enjoyed her greatest artistic success depicting them.
Bonheur was especially adept at imbuing cattle with nobility without giving them airs of humanity.
Though best known for The Horse Fair (1853), a canvas from a few years later in her career, Labourages Nivernais, completed in 1850, is actually a less derivative, more personal, visually individualistic image of Bonheur’s favorite creatures. Nivernais also marks the beginning of a period of commercial and public success for Bonheur, a good fortune enjoyed by few women artists then as now.
At first glance, Nivernais seems a relatively innocuous, though beautifully rendered, ode to agrarian life, and there is nothing “incorrect” with that interpretation. However, Nivernais offers much more to viewers who, like the team of oxen shown, take the time to turn over the well-trodden earth.
Rosa Bonheur, was born in Bordeaux, France on March 16, 1822, the eldest child of Sophie Marquis and Raimond Oscar-Marie Bonheur. The couple called the baby Marie Rosalie, but she almost immediately came to be known as Rosa.
Her father, himself a painter and philosopher, and artists with whom he was friends captured many images of the youthful RB.
Her father shows RB the infant idolized as a cherub in a crib in a painting in 1823. By the time Raimond Bonheur captured Rosa at Four, the child had the set jaw, solemn gaze, erect posture and short tousled hair that would identify her for the rest of her life.
One alleged portrait of RB, showing a square-jawed, serious child in a brimmed hat with feather trim, was painted by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot. After RB’s death, though, her companion Anna Klumpke, came forward to say that she thought the sitter for the portrait was instead a male. Such confusion regarding appearance and gender shadowed RB all her life.
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