John Pitcher in a recent Omaha.com article, Americans' fear of feeling sad may be threat to great art, questions if there’s a connection between melancholy and creativity. Pitcher’s article makes specific reference to Eric Wilson’s new book Against Happiness which, according to Pitcher, “paints a disturbing portrait of what happens to art in a world filled with ‘happy types’.”
I haven’t read Eric Wilson’s book, but a quote from Pitcher’s article caught my attention. The article quoted Dr Thomas Svolos, an adjunct professor and the vice chairman of the department of psychiatry at the Creighton University School of Medicine, as saying: “When you’re melancholy, you tend to step back and examine your life. That kind of questioning is essential for creativity.”
The article further states, “It’s especially true because the psychiatric community has long known about the link between artistic genius and manic-depressive disorder. History is full of examples. Composer Ludwig van Beethoven, painter Vincent van Gogh and writer Sylvia Plath all were famous depressives.” Among another few thousand personalities from the arts and sciences.
In fact, a fellow blogger, recently, also made references to a possible link between melancholy and creativity while reviewing the writings of Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth – both Austro-Hungarians from early 20th century. This made me think of Karl Marx – perhaps a genius in his own right from half a century or so before Zweig and Roth – who had perpetually suffered from melancholy and creativity.
Karl Marx, like his workers in a capitalist society, struggled forever to be accepted by the world around him. His writing was considered belligerent and anti-government and he was driven out from many places. He was forced to move from Prussia to France to Belgium to, finally, England, where he lived in poverty most of his life.
In spite of Frederick Engels supporting him financially, Marx and his family lived in squalor, were constantly ill, losing three of his four children to illnesses of various kinds, making him incapable of thinking, reading or writing. Although I cannot be certain if Marx was a manic-depressive, his depression did reflect in his productivity and it took him over twenty years to deliver his first volume of Das Kapital in 1867. And, as everyone knows, it was the book that changed the world.
Of course, by that time Marx had written and published various other material, the most famous of which was The Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848. But nothing compared to Das Kapital, his magnum opus, the later three volumes of which were published after his death (in 1883).
Interestingly, Karl Marx was well-read in philosophy and literature, and Das Kapital includes many such references. Although Das Kapital is a work of economics (or political economy), Marx’s initial ambition was to become a poet. In fact, he had published some of his poetry earlier in his life. Marx believed philosophers and poets only analysed and reflected upon the world. What he wanted was to change it.
[Citation: Americans' fear of feeling sad may be threat to great art by John Pitcher in Omaha.com, 19 May 2008.]
31 May 2008
27 May 2008
Marilyn, the Portrait
Marilyn Monroe
from the Ballerina series
photographed by Milton Greene
©2008 Joshua Greene
www.archiveimages.com
“Marilyn never had a father, and she shuttled between foster families… Milton incorporated her into his family. He provided a kind of sanctuary that was both professional and personal. She trusted him and relaxed with him, so there’s not that sex-goddess tension you see in most Marilyn pictures.”
– Carol Squiers, curator at the International Center of Photography in New York
The quote above is reproduced from a wonderful article, titled Model Arrangement by Michelle Stacey, in the May 2008 issue of Smithsonian magazine, on the relationship between Marilyn Monroe and photographer Milton H Greene during the 1950s.
In this article, Greene’s son Joshua is quoted as saying, “Everything leading up to 1953 was either on-set photography or glamour shots… My father was determined to break that mold and capture the real person, the soul, the emotion.”
The ballerina series on Marilyn Monroe (by Milton Greene) can be found here.
[Citation: Image, quotes and the title of this blog are reproduced from Model Arrangement an article by Michelle Stacey, Smithsonian magazine, May 2008.]
26 May 2008
Ishiguro: the butler as a metaphor
INTERVIEWER
How did the English setting come about for The Remains of the Day?
ISHIGURO
It started with a joke that my wife made. There was a journalist coming to interview me for my first novel. And my wife said, Wouldn’t it be funny if this person came in to ask you these serious, solemn questions about your novel and you pretended that you were my butler? We thought this was a very amusing idea. From then on I became obsessed with the butler as a metaphor.
INTERVIEWER
As a metaphor for what?
ISHIGURO
Two things. One is a certain kind of emotional frostiness. The English butler has to be terribly reserved and not have any personal reaction to anything that happens around him. It seemed to be a good way of getting into not just Englishness but the universal part of us that is afraid of getting involved emotionally. The other is the butler as an emblem of someone who leaves the big political decisions to somebody else. He says, I’m just going to do my best to serve this person, and by proxy I’ll be contributing to society, but I myself will not make the big decisions. Many of us are in that position, whether we live in democracies or not. Most of us aren’t where the big decisions are made. We do our jobs, and we take pride in them, and we hope that our little contribution is going to be used well.
[Citation: Excerpt from an interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, The Art of Fiction No.196, The Paris Review, Issue 184, Spring 2008.]
How did the English setting come about for The Remains of the Day?
ISHIGURO
It started with a joke that my wife made. There was a journalist coming to interview me for my first novel. And my wife said, Wouldn’t it be funny if this person came in to ask you these serious, solemn questions about your novel and you pretended that you were my butler? We thought this was a very amusing idea. From then on I became obsessed with the butler as a metaphor.
INTERVIEWER
As a metaphor for what?
ISHIGURO
Two things. One is a certain kind of emotional frostiness. The English butler has to be terribly reserved and not have any personal reaction to anything that happens around him. It seemed to be a good way of getting into not just Englishness but the universal part of us that is afraid of getting involved emotionally. The other is the butler as an emblem of someone who leaves the big political decisions to somebody else. He says, I’m just going to do my best to serve this person, and by proxy I’ll be contributing to society, but I myself will not make the big decisions. Many of us are in that position, whether we live in democracies or not. Most of us aren’t where the big decisions are made. We do our jobs, and we take pride in them, and we hope that our little contribution is going to be used well.
[Citation: Excerpt from an interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, The Art of Fiction No.196, The Paris Review, Issue 184, Spring 2008.]
23 May 2008
Penguin Books
“We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at low price, and staked everything on it.”
– Sir Allen Lane, 1902-1970, founder of Penguin Books
I’ve been reading books published by Penguin ever since I can remember. And yet, I’ve never known the history behind Penguin Books… until last evening, when I bought a copy of Neil Griffiths’ Saving Caravaggio. For, inside this book, on the very last page, was a brief history of Penguin Books… from which I’ve included an excerpt narrating the origin of Penguin Books:
“He just wanted a decent book to read …
Not too much to ask, is it? It was in 1935 when Allen Lane, Managing Director of Bodley Head Publishers, stood on a platform at Exeter railway station looking for something good to read on his journey back to London. His choice was limited to popular magazines and poor-quality paperbacks – the same choice faced every day by the vast majority of readers, few of whom could afford hardbacks. Lane’s disappointment and subsequent anger at the range of books generally available led him to found a company – and change the world.”
The page I refer to offers a representation of the evolving Penguin logo and continues to reinforce the Penguin philosophy of quality reading in the paperback format. You are likely to find such a page in other Penguin paperbacks as well. Should you wish to know more about the history of Penguin Books, you may look up the Penguin UK website here.
[Citation: Quote and text reproduced from inside (last) page in Neil Griffiths’ Saving Caravaggio, Penguin Books, 2007.]
– Sir Allen Lane, 1902-1970, founder of Penguin Books
I’ve been reading books published by Penguin ever since I can remember. And yet, I’ve never known the history behind Penguin Books… until last evening, when I bought a copy of Neil Griffiths’ Saving Caravaggio. For, inside this book, on the very last page, was a brief history of Penguin Books… from which I’ve included an excerpt narrating the origin of Penguin Books:
“He just wanted a decent book to read …
Not too much to ask, is it? It was in 1935 when Allen Lane, Managing Director of Bodley Head Publishers, stood on a platform at Exeter railway station looking for something good to read on his journey back to London. His choice was limited to popular magazines and poor-quality paperbacks – the same choice faced every day by the vast majority of readers, few of whom could afford hardbacks. Lane’s disappointment and subsequent anger at the range of books generally available led him to found a company – and change the world.”
The page I refer to offers a representation of the evolving Penguin logo and continues to reinforce the Penguin philosophy of quality reading in the paperback format. You are likely to find such a page in other Penguin paperbacks as well. Should you wish to know more about the history of Penguin Books, you may look up the Penguin UK website here.
[Citation: Quote and text reproduced from inside (last) page in Neil Griffiths’ Saving Caravaggio, Penguin Books, 2007.]
20 May 2008
Do the right thing
Here's Paul Verhaeghen’s acceptance speech for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2008 (Actually, it’s Paul Verhaeghen’s ‘non-acceptance speech’, in which he accepted the award but donated the prize money.):
Ladies and gentlemen,
When I started writing Omega Minor, in the nineteen nineties, my intent was to write historical fiction. A story about the rise of fascism, a story about the horrors of war, a story about genocide. It is all over, I thought. Long past. Historical fiction.
Of the cardinal mistakes the writer can make, this one is unforgivable: To assume that there is a wall between the world he creates and the world he lives in.
I was translating the novel when the news of Abu Ghraib broke. This was the paragraph I was translating: “What if the terrorist networks and the political reality overlap? What if the violence of the new state is the same as the violence of the vanquished Reich? What if those who liberated the camps fill them up again with ideological adversaries?” It is still possible to shrug one’s shoulders at the news of Abu Ghraib or Blackwater. Bad apples.
But the signs of something bigger are unmistakable. The concentration of all power within the executive branch, the suspension of habeas corpus, the de facto censorship and bullying of the media, the secrecy, the warrantless spying, the trivialization and outsourcing of torture. All is now permitted, we are told, for we are Good, and we fight Evil, and by the very nature of our Goodness, all we do, no matter what it is, is justified, for it is done for Goodness’s sake. Invading a country that never posed a threat, killing at least 83,336 of its civilians, detaining 25,000 of them, building cages on faraway shores for prisoners who, it seems, will never get justice but-at most-a verdict. It’s all Good.
It is not.
For instance: My country has now all but legalized torture, including mock executions, beatings, electrical shocks, forced nakedness, sexual humiliation, the infliction of hypothermia and heat injuries, and waterboarding. This is not the work of a few individuals, a few bad apples. Or if it is, their names are Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet and Ashcroft.
This is the twenty-first century. Torture should be as unthinkable as slavery.
In my country, it is not.
These are things you cannot say or write, or you will be branded as ‘un-American’.
Nobody, in all those years I have lived in the US, has pointed out even this obvious truth: That George W. Bush is now personally responsible for the killing of more Americans than Osama Bin Laden. Let me repeat that: George W. Bush has sent more than 4,000 American soldiers to their deaths, for no reason at all: They were not fighting the terrorists who brought down the Twin Towers; they were not defending America’s liberties; they were not bringing lasting peace to the Middle East; they were not making the world a safer place.
I know this is a lapidary statement. But it needs to be said.
Their families deserve to know why they died.
They deserve to know that power is not the only truth that matters.
I apologize if my statement offends you. If it sounds out of place at a forum like this. But it needs to be said.
In the light of all this, and to avoid supporting the regime with more tax dollars than I already owe them, I have asked the Arts Council England to donate the money associated with the Prize, all 10,000 pounds of it, to the American Civil Liberties Union. Withholding the tax portion of those 10,000 pounds from the US Treasury will shorten the war by a mere eye-blink — its cost is currently 3,810 dollars per second — but the ACLU can use that money to great effect in their legal battles against torture, detainee abuse, and the silence surrounding it.
We are not immune to history. But neither is history immune to us.
Be diligent, my friends. Do the right thing.
And may we all fare well.
– Paul Verhaeghen, London, 8 May 2008
[Citation: Reproduced from the Dalkey Archive Press. Paul Verhaeghen’s Omega Minor won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for 2008.]
Ladies and gentlemen,
When I started writing Omega Minor, in the nineteen nineties, my intent was to write historical fiction. A story about the rise of fascism, a story about the horrors of war, a story about genocide. It is all over, I thought. Long past. Historical fiction.
Of the cardinal mistakes the writer can make, this one is unforgivable: To assume that there is a wall between the world he creates and the world he lives in.
I was translating the novel when the news of Abu Ghraib broke. This was the paragraph I was translating: “What if the terrorist networks and the political reality overlap? What if the violence of the new state is the same as the violence of the vanquished Reich? What if those who liberated the camps fill them up again with ideological adversaries?” It is still possible to shrug one’s shoulders at the news of Abu Ghraib or Blackwater. Bad apples.
But the signs of something bigger are unmistakable. The concentration of all power within the executive branch, the suspension of habeas corpus, the de facto censorship and bullying of the media, the secrecy, the warrantless spying, the trivialization and outsourcing of torture. All is now permitted, we are told, for we are Good, and we fight Evil, and by the very nature of our Goodness, all we do, no matter what it is, is justified, for it is done for Goodness’s sake. Invading a country that never posed a threat, killing at least 83,336 of its civilians, detaining 25,000 of them, building cages on faraway shores for prisoners who, it seems, will never get justice but-at most-a verdict. It’s all Good.
It is not.
For instance: My country has now all but legalized torture, including mock executions, beatings, electrical shocks, forced nakedness, sexual humiliation, the infliction of hypothermia and heat injuries, and waterboarding. This is not the work of a few individuals, a few bad apples. Or if it is, their names are Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet and Ashcroft.
This is the twenty-first century. Torture should be as unthinkable as slavery.
In my country, it is not.
These are things you cannot say or write, or you will be branded as ‘un-American’.
Nobody, in all those years I have lived in the US, has pointed out even this obvious truth: That George W. Bush is now personally responsible for the killing of more Americans than Osama Bin Laden. Let me repeat that: George W. Bush has sent more than 4,000 American soldiers to their deaths, for no reason at all: They were not fighting the terrorists who brought down the Twin Towers; they were not defending America’s liberties; they were not bringing lasting peace to the Middle East; they were not making the world a safer place.
I know this is a lapidary statement. But it needs to be said.
Their families deserve to know why they died.
They deserve to know that power is not the only truth that matters.
I apologize if my statement offends you. If it sounds out of place at a forum like this. But it needs to be said.
In the light of all this, and to avoid supporting the regime with more tax dollars than I already owe them, I have asked the Arts Council England to donate the money associated with the Prize, all 10,000 pounds of it, to the American Civil Liberties Union. Withholding the tax portion of those 10,000 pounds from the US Treasury will shorten the war by a mere eye-blink — its cost is currently 3,810 dollars per second — but the ACLU can use that money to great effect in their legal battles against torture, detainee abuse, and the silence surrounding it.
We are not immune to history. But neither is history immune to us.
Be diligent, my friends. Do the right thing.
And may we all fare well.
– Paul Verhaeghen, London, 8 May 2008
[Citation: Reproduced from the Dalkey Archive Press. Paul Verhaeghen’s Omega Minor won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for 2008.]
19 May 2008
Montana Forbes – a celebration of the female form
‘Untitled’
Montana Forbes
home page,
www.montanaforbes.com
According to an entry in ‘The Fashion Spot’ (July 2005), Montana Forbes acknowledges:
“My work is heavily influenced by a number of things like Fine & Pop Art. I draw a lot from music, photographs, magazines and Japanese animation and set out to capture a certain mood or presence that I get from these mediums.
My background in fine art and graphic design certainly contributes to being aware and sensitive of various mediums and approaches to projects and to comfortably use vivid colours and fluid lines whilst still maintaining a sense of simplicity to my work.
Currently I’m experimenting with infusing real life elements to add depth and peculiarity.”
Eyestorm.com, a famous British online publisher and distributor of contemporary art, concurs. In a recent feature on Montana Forbes, Eyestorm states:
“Montana Forbes’ striking illustrations are a celebration of the female form. With simple lines and flat blocks of colour or monochrome tones, this body of work documents the perception of today’s women in western society.
Hugely influenced by images of popular culture and all things vintage, whether fashion shoots from the seventies, or the innovative record covers from the 1980’s, Forbes draws the women in poses similar to those taken by models in a magazine.
The artist’s objective is simplicity with attention to line and form, and her distinctive use of bright colours comes from travelling a lot between the USA, Southern Africa and the UK whilst growing up.
Forbes has been a resident illustrator for The Sunday Times’ weekly ‘Style’ Magazine for the past two years, and subsequently some of these pieces stemmed from commissions. These works are more than just a drawing to illustrate a newspaper article however – they are powerful and dominant artworks; perhaps suggesting Forbes’ own perception of ‘the fairer sex’.”
Without much ado, go directly to Eyestorm’s Montana Forbes’ exhibition here.
See lot’s more of Montana Forbes’ work here and here.
[Citation: The Fashion Spot, July 2005; Eyestorm’s Montana Forbes’ page; Illustration Ltd’s Montana Forbes’ page; SAA Illustration Hub’s Montana Forbes’ page. ‘Untitled’ image reproduced from Montana Forbes’ website (website not ready yet).]
14 May 2008
Maria Lassnig: body-awareness paintings
Spell 2006
Maria Lassnig
Oil on canvas
I had no clue who Maria Lassnig was until a day before yesterday, when her name came up during a discussion with a friend and an Internet search on feminism and art. What I found left me unnerved and awed. For Maria Lassnig’s art is indeed unnerving, confusing and awe-inspiring at the same time.
Lassnig is a painter with a strong feminist viewpoint. And her paintings, like many feminist works of art, are not always pretty to look at. Her abstractions challenged my mind and left me clueless on most occasions. To be honest, I found some of them grotesque. But then, mine is an uncultured mind.
Further search led me to more information about Lassnig, and what impressed me was the fact that although she is now almost 90 years old, she still manages to exhibit her work in exhibitions around the world – like the one currently on at the Serpentine Gallery in London.
According to the Serpentine Gallery website on Maria Lassnig’s exhibition:
“Lassnig uses bold forms and strong colours to create portraits and semi-figurative abstractions, which reject the static tendencies of traditional portraiture. She coined the phrase ‘body-awareness paintings’ to describe a visual language that she invented and uses in her work to depict the invisible aspects of inner sensations where there is a continual resistance against the repetitive and static. She has repeatedly used her own body, in her view an inexhaustible subject, as a tacit source to explore human sensory experience.”
As I found out, this is just the introduction to Maria Lassnig’s art. There’s more, lot’s more. Like the moving 24 April 2008 article on Lassnig’s Serpentine Gallery exhibition in The Guardian by Adrian Searle. Or, the straight-talking review by Laurie Attias in Frieze Magazine from May 1996 on Lassnig’s exhibition in Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Or, the Jörg Heiser interview of Lassnig in the November-December 2006 issue of Frieze Magazine.
Slowly, Maria Lassnig’s thoughts and world of body-awareness paintings opened up before me, swallowing me in its bold, unnerving, confusing and awe-inspiring beauty.
Some of Maria Lassnig’s art can be found in Adrian Searle’s article link in The Guardian and at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery.
[Citation: Serpentine Gallery; Friedrich Petzel Gallery; Adrian Searle’s article in The Guardian, April 2008; Laurie Attias’ review in Frieze Magazine, May 1996; Jörg Heiser’s interview in Frieze Magazine, November-December 2006 issue.]
NOTE: It seems the Friedrich Petzel Gallery link has been withdrawn. Please try the Art Moco link instead to see a few samples of Maria Lassnig's work.
08 May 2008
Reading
“Even though reading itself is a solitary experience, the impulse afterwards or even during is to want to talk to someone about the book, even if this ‘talking’ takes the form of reading what critics have to say.”
– John O’Brien, Founder, Dalkey Archive Press, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
– John O’Brien, Founder, Dalkey Archive Press, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
06 May 2008
Doisneau
Kiss by the Hotel de Ville, 1950
A pretty French girl who sits next to me at work introduced me to Doisneau the other day. Ever since my mind has been a swirling haze of Black & White images. For Doisneau’s B&W photographs, which I take sneak peeks at every now and then on the Internet, are some of the best examples of street photography I’ve seen in my life.
Doisneau (pronounced ‘doh-uh-noh’), or Robert Doisneau, French photographer, 1912-1994, is best known for his images of Parisian street life. His B&W photographs include not just strangers in casual moments captured on the streets, but also celebrities in their most perfect moods. For instance, this photo of Pablo Picasso:
Picasso and the loaves, 1952
Word has it that, although Doisneau was trained in the fine arts in his teens, he was soon interested in photography and, apparently, started off as a professional photographer just before WW2. He worked for Renault, but got fired. He became an independent photojournalist, left it to join the army during WW2, and left it to join the French Resistance, earning money producing postcards. After the war he got his break with Vogue magazine.
Fox terrier on the Pont des Arts, 1953
According to his website,
Robert Doisneau, one of France’s most popular and prolific reportage photographers, is known for his modest, playful, and ironic images of amusing juxtapositions, mingling social classes, and eccentrics in contemporary Paris streets and cafes. Influenced by the work of Kertesz, Atget, and Cartier-Bresson, in over 20 books Doisneau has presented a charming vision of human frailty and life as a series of quiet, incongruous moments. He has written: “The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.”
Hell, 1952
To see Robert Doisneau’s work, please visit his website. Some amazing Doisneau photographs are also on display at Masters of Photography website (click on any image and scale it up to ‘full’).
Doisneau’s most famous photo, Kiss by the Hotel de Ville, Paris 1950 (shown here at the beginning of my post), was under a controversy as it was found to be a posed shot, and not a natural photograph as Doisneau had initially claimed it was. The photo was sold at an auction a couple of years ago at a huge price.
[Citation: Quote from Robert Doisneau’s website; text taken from ‘The Encyclopedia of Photography’ (1984). Doisneau images from Masters of Photography website.]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)