Postcard to August Macke, 29 December 1910:
“Greetings to all, please give my best to your brother, and I respectfully commend your mother.”
Apr 032011
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)
The First Thilling Chapter
WARNING!
The Inspector for the Office of Literary Quality, a unit of the British Colonial Office, has determined that the following reading material is of the poorest possible grade, as it is solely structured around nonsense and simply “meaningless words on a page.”
This material is not intended for resale, and is the property of the University of Polyleritae.
Any infringement of the Statuatory Copywright by Dr. Moe Howard and the University is a violation of all applicable laws.
Please note that the names have been changed in order to encourage innocent parties to commit acts that would adulterate their innocence.
This is the first installment of the Tom Selleck/Opus the Penguin Literary Collection.
The University would like to thank you for helping us to establish the finest in InstiLit. Please remember that THIS IS A SECURED BUILDING. NO RIFF-RAFF. NO WHISTLING IN THE HALLS OR PLAYING WITH THE ELEVATORS.
THANX,
The University of Polyleritae
Unidentified Coastal Organism
It’s June 2010.
“The end of history involves, then, an ‘epilogue’ in which human negativity is preserved as a ‘remnant’ in the form of eroticism, laughter, joy in the face of death. In the uncertain light of this epilogue, the wise man, sovereign and self-conscious, sees not animal heads passing again before his eyes but rather the acephalous figures of the hommes farouchement religieux, ‘lovers,’ or ‘sorcerer’s apprentices.’ ”
– Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 7.
The Parthenon Friezes at the British Museum
At the end of the summer of 2007, the week before fall university classes began, Greece was on fire. The Peloponnese was uniformly scorched, nearly a hundred people were killed, rural economies were displaced, and flora and fauna indigenous only to Greek pine forests and mountainsides were burned, perhaps beyond any eventual recovery. Though the fires were barely held back from the famous antiquities of Olympia and Athens, other archaeologically priceless sites were not so fortunate .
Though some of the fires were attributed at their source to arsonists, Greek Prime Minister, Kostas Karamanlis, whose New Democracy party was returned to office this past September, is partially culpable in this tragedy. Karamanlis and other Greek officials were slow to acknowledge the severity of the fire emergency and have yet to admit the true extent of the damage.
“There are several well known ‘arsonists’ in Greece — garbage dumps (burning spontaneously), farmers burning brush, animal farmers burning land to sprout fresh grass for grazing,” Nikos Charalambides, director of Greenpeace in Greece, told a reporter from Reuters on October 1.
“But the biggest arsonist is the state, which has not clarified the use of land, leaving suburban forests vulnerable to rogue developers,” he added in the same piece.
“The lack of a national land registry and national zoning laws leave room for doubt about the characterization of land, whether it is forest or not,” told Reuters.
It is not a good time for antiquities, and the dire circumstances are of course more attributable to the traditional colonial superpowers than to Grecian malfeasance.
The blame for the theft of treasures from the Baghdad Archaeological Museum, the burning of Baghdad’s National Library, and the looting of more than 10,000 Ur, Sumerian, and Babylonian archaeological sites may be laid, in the name of Operation Iraqi Freedom, on the doorstep of the United States and bullied ally Great Britain.
Continue reading »
Jul 182007
Formal Analysis: Still Life With Parrots
Jan Davidsz. de Heem, who also fixed his signature as Johannes de Heem and J D de Heem , worked in Antwerp, Utrecht, and Leiden during the middle decades of the 17th Century, distinguishing himself from his mentor Balthasar van der Ast by pushing the form of the still life to include not just a signature patch 
of angled lighting but elements and objects in his reflective collections arcane to the point of being obviously grotesque. Though many of de Heem’s canvases are simply beautiful — Communion Cup and Host, Encircled with a Garland of Fruit and Vanitas — Still Life With Parrots though produced during the same approximate period, does not fall into this category. Rather its disharmonious florid colors, strategically chaotic placement of objects, and zoological inaccuracies create tensions and puzzles which are depthlessly fascinating.
Still Life With Parrots is an oil painting measuring approximately five feet high and four feet across — enormous, particularly by the standards of its date of creation sometime in the latter half of the 1640s.
In another break with his habit of observing strict and straight diagonal composition lines, Parrots is filled with jagged, broken planes and difficult, harsh contours, this despite the presence of many objects — oysters, plums, lemons — with rounded, convex surfaces unto themselves. Several objects — a extraordinarily large gold and silver tazza, a conch shell, and a macaw are presented in unrealistic perspectival distance, competing for dominance. The single level surface shown is a horizontal tabletop splitting the canvas in its lower third, but only a single, flat, right-angle of the table is shown at the left of the painting, the rest of the furniture shrouded in a cloth.
Continue reading »
“Mega-Exhibitions and the Antimonies of a Transnational Global Form” by Okwui Enwezor vs. “The Globalization of the False: A Response to Okwui Enwezor” by George Baker
Theorist and curator Okwui Enwezor, who had written and published this paper on the emerging globalization of the art market and its relationship for better and worse to capitalism as the universally dominant system of commerce, repurposed and edited his original piece to accommodate a tandem presentation at Columbia University’s 2002 Sawyer Seminar. Presenting an opposing and decidedly more personal address was art critic George Baker.
Anolis carolinensis, the green anole, Florida’s only native anole species, May 2007
Enwezor allows that the so-called globalization of the art market is not seen be a positive by all, but proposes, basically, that the world globalization be associated not just with the economic hegemony of the very wealthy individuals and institutions who collect and purchase art objects and support their creation but with a true internationalization of the art world. In this new and improved postmodernist art world, the old canon of art stars and art history would implode what would now occur would be the “broadening … of international participation across a range of cultural, social, and political spheres.â€
Continue reading »
Recent Comments