Gusts of Wind

Katsushika Hokusai, Ejiri in Suruga Province (Sunshū Ejiri), from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei), 1830

Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai), 1993, color photo displayed in light box

Muhamed Kafedžić , Ejiri at Nite (A Sudden Gust of Wind) after Hokusai, 2009, acrylic on canvas Source, more info

 

Describing Brueghel

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, or a follower of Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, 1595

Musee des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, or a follower of Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, 1595

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

William Carlos Williams

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, or a follower of Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, 1595

LINES ON BRUEGHEL'S "ICARUS"
by Michael Hamburger
The ploughman ploughs, the fisherman dreams of fish;
Aloft, the sailor, through a world of ropes
Guides tangled meditations, feverish
With memories of girls forsaken, hopes
Of brief reunions, new discoveries,
Past rum consumed, rum promised, rum potential.
Sheep crop the grass, lift up their heads and gaze
Into a sheepish present: the essential, 
Illimitable juiciness of things,
Greens, yellows, browns are what they see.
Churlish and slow, the shepherd, hearing wings --
Perhaps an eagle's--gapes uncertainly;
Too late. The worst has happened: lost to man, 
The angel, Icarus, for ever failed,
Fallen with melted wings when, near the sun
He scorned the ordering planet, which prevailed
And, jeering, now slinks off, to rise once more.
But he--his damaged purpose drags him down --
Too far from his half-brothers on the shore,
Hardly conceivable, is left to drown.

Ovid's Account of Daedalus and Icarus, from Metamorphoses, Bk VIII:183-235 Daedalus and Icarus

posted at the Library of the University of Virginia. 

    Meanwhile Daedalus, hating Crete, and his long exile, and filled with a desire to stand on his native soil, was imprisoned by the waves. ‘He may thwart our escape by land or sea’ he said ‘but the sky is surely open to us: we will go that way: Minos rules everything but he does not rule the heavens’. So saying he applied his thought to new invention and altered the natural order of things. He laid down lines of feathers, beginning with the smallest, following the shorter with longer ones, so that you might think they had grown like that, on a slant. In that way, long ago, the rustic pan-pipes were graduated, with lengthening reeds. Then he fastened them together with thread at the middle, and bees’-wax at the base, and, when he had arranged them, he flexed each one into a gentle curve, so that they imitated real bird’s wings. His son, Icarus, stood next to him, and, not realising that he was handling things that would endanger him, caught laughingly at the down that blew in the passing breeze, and softened the yellow bees’-wax with his thumb, and, in his play, hindered his father’s marvellous work.

    When he had put the last touches to what he had begun, the artificer balanced his own body between the two wings and hovered in the moving air. He instructed the boy as well, saying ‘Let me warn you, Icarus, to take the middle way, in case the moisture weighs down your wings, if you fly too low, or if you go too high, the sun scorches them. Travel between the extremes. And I order you not to aim towards Bootes, the Herdsman, or Helice, the Great Bear, or towards the drawn sword of Orion: take the course I show you!’ At the same time as he laid down the rules of flight, he fitted the newly created wings on the boy’s shoulders. While he worked and issued his warnings the ageing man’s cheeks were wet with tears: the father’s hands trembled.

    He gave a never to be repeated kiss to his son, and lifting upwards on his wings, flew ahead, anxious for his companion, like a bird, leading her fledglings out of a nest above, into the empty air. He urged the boy to follow, and showed him the dangerous art of flying, moving his own wings, and then looking back at his son. Some angler catching fish with a quivering rod, or a shepherd leaning on his crook, or a ploughman resting on the handles of his plough, saw them, perhaps, and stood there amazed, believing them to be gods able to travel the sky.

    And now Samos, sacred to Juno, lay ahead to the left (Delos and Paros were behind them), Lebinthos, and Calymne, rich in honey, to the right, when the boy began to delight in his daring flight, and abandoning his guide, drawn by desire for the heavens, soared higher. His nearness to the devouring sun softened the fragrant wax that held the wings: and the wax melted: he flailed with bare arms, but losing his oar-like wings, could not ride the air. Even as his mouth was crying his father’s name, it vanished into the dark blue sea, the Icarian Sea, called after him. The unhappy father, now no longer a father, shouted ‘Icarus, Icarus where are you? Which way should I be looking, to see you?’ ‘Icarus’ he called again. Then he caught sight of the feathers on the waves, and cursed his inventions. He laid the body to rest, in a tomb, and the island was named Icaria after his buried child. 

https://www.etsy.com/listing/217741460/the-parasite-primer-16-page-handbound?ref=listing-shop-header-3




here's a good example of a narrative describing process
http://proof.nationalgeographic.com/2015/01/05/shooting-chauvet-photographing-the-worlds-oldest-cave-art/

Visual to Verbal" Describing the Color Blu

Vija Celmins, Untitled (Ocean), oil painting, 1988. Source

Rebecca Solnit, on the color blue, from, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, 2006

1  The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

2  For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.

3  “If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrivals.”  

Giotto di Bondone, known as Giotto, frescoes in the Arena Chapel, 1304. Fresco. Source

Marcel Proust on the BLUE of Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel (more on Proust)

4  …after walking in the glare of the sun across the garden of the Arena, I entered the Giotto chapel the entire ceiling of which and the background of the frescoes are so blue that it seems as though the radiant day has crossed the threshold with the human visitor, and has come in for a moment to stow away in the shade and coolness its pure sky, of a slightly deeper blue now that it is rid of the sun’s gilding, as in those brief spells of respite that interrupt the finest days, when, without our having noticed any cloud, the sun having turned his gaze elsewhere for a moment, the azure, more exquisite still, grows deeper. In this sky, upon the blue-washed stone, angels were flying with so intense a celestial, or at least an infantile ardour, that they seemed to be birds of a peculiar species that had really existed, that must have figured in the natural history of biblical and Apostolic times, birds that never fail to fly before the saints when they walk abroad; 5  there are always some to be seen fluttering above them, and as they are real creatures with a genuine power of flight, we see them soar upwards, describe curves, ‘loop the loop’ without the slightest difficulty, plunge towards the earth head downwards with the aid of wings which enable them to support themselves in positions that defy the law of gravitation, and they remind us far more of a variety of bird or of young pupils of Garros practising the vol-plané, than of the angels of the art of the Renaissance and later periods whose wings have become nothing more than emblems and whose attitude is generally the same as that of heavenly beings who are not winged

Giotto's The Sacrifice of Joachim and The Dream of Joachim (1304-6)  

Carol Mavor on Giotto and Blue from Blue Mythologies

6  When entering the ‘semidarkness’ of Giotto’s Arena Chapel, blue is ‘the first color to strike the visitor’. This was ‘unusual in Giotto's tirne because of its brilliance'. It takes your breath away. One is struck by a feeling of pleasure that is as enchanting as  the azure background of the surrounding walls, which gives way to narrative depictions of the lives of the Virgin and Christ. The blue walls are as dazzling as the sapphire ceiling above, which is patterned with stunning stars and roundels of the son of God, his mother and Prophets. 

7  Indeed, in this blue cocoon writ large, Giotto has 'transplanted'3 the sky on to the walls and ceiling. The paradise above is an unreal, moonlit blue, twinkling with painted gold stars that have been arranged with the skill of a first-class patissier. The stars appear like Moravian cookies on a vast midnight-blue baking sheet; their divineness is a taste of heaven. To enter the chapel is to  fall into another world, a blue one, as blue as our own 'blue marble'. The effect of Giotto's blue is bliss: what Julia Kristeva calls 'jouissance'. 'Giotto's Joy' is a most-fitting title to Kristeva's essay on the artist's frescoes (1300-1305), perfectly denoting the Florentine painter's radical and breathtaking use of blue. 

8  Curiously, there is 'no rivalry between background and figure':4 the effect is positively dynamic. The characters (not too large, not too small) tear themselves away from the blue to touch us: they come to us out of the blue, while (at the same time) these same figures recede into the blue. Likewise, the blue foundation cascades out to soak us in its pigment. Yet, this nearly unadulterated blue also recedes behind the figures. Figure and ground push and pull (like Hans Hofmann's use of pure colours in his abstract paintings), rise and fall, like a song, like the sea and the sky, like the gloomy contentment of a melancholic, the nostalgic who is joyful-sad. 

Giotto's blue gives us wings: we invisibly sprout them, so to speak, and achieve a 'genuine power of flight'. 5 Gliding like an angel, or, even like a student of the great aeronaut Roland Garros, we join celestial creatures in 'looping the loop',  as in the panel The Pieta. 

9  It is as if Yves Klein has gone back in time to miraculously join hands with Giotto. Flying is blue. It is as if Giotto had gone forward in time to miraculously join hands with Yves Klein. Dreamily,  I alight inlo Klein’s Anthropometry entitled  10 People Begin to Fly (1961), made by, perhaps, the bluest artist of all time, a boyish man who really believed that he could fly. ('He was sure he could fly’, so claimed his wife.7)

11  Giotto's blue gives us a bath, a pool, a sea, a river, as in the panel, The Baptism of Christ. Here, the nearly naked, full-length body of Christ stands in turquoise-blue water; its colour is oddly reminiscent of David Hockney's early paintings of Los Angeles pooIs. These turquoises, swimming-pool blues of Giotto's River Jordan, also evoke those particular cyans of the instant Polaroid picture. 

***

12  Returning to Giotto's The Baptism of Christ, I see a similar primitive Polaroidicity in the spirit of Giotto's fresco.  Above Christ is a flash of light suggesting the magical creation of an image; like those legends from the nineteenth century  concerning flashes of lightning imprinting extraordinary images on glass window panes'.18 Within the boom of light is the fore­shortened hand of God, in a delicate pink sleeve. God is reaching down out of the blue. God is in touch ( or nearly so) with his secreted double (Christ, who is man in God's own image). God as, and within, a flash of light evokes the etymology of photography  (light-writing) and its spirit (saving the dead), centuries before the medium's invention. With a modern vision towards the photograph, which he would never know, 'Giotto hearkens ... the Byzantine-inspired conception of baptism as photismos, literally illumination”

David Hockney, The Splash, 1966

 

Art Opportunities around Winston Salem

 

I highly, highly recommend this conversation! 

If you can, please catch this gallery tour with the curator, which should add rich meaning to our trip to SECCA.  

The Exhibition Happy Hill Neighborhood Association Art Anthology Exhibition Curated by local artist and neighborhood resident, Kayyum Allah, is open now. Reception with the artists is Feb 1, 5:30-7. More info here. 

Lascaux Rediscovered

 One day in 1940, four teenagers:

Marcel Ravidat, 

Jacques Marsal, 








Georges Agniel, 

& Simon Coencas, 

And Marcel's dog Robot

adventured in search of legendary treasure in the French woodlands. Robot took the adventure a step further by digging himself stuck in a hole beneath the roots of a recently-fallen oak. When they managed to pull the pup to safety, the boys discovered that the hole went on and on. One by one they slid down a tunnel, deep into a cave. 14 year-old Jacques was the youngest, and reported his terror at sliding down the deep shaft (what beasts would they find? How would they get out?) and his incredible awe on arrival.  

Two of the discoverers with their teacher Laval and paleontologist Abbe Breuil after the cave opening had been greatly widened. Can't find the photographer to credit!

At the bottom of the shaft, they found a cavern 100 feet long and 20 wide, painted with layers of animals that pranced to life as if freshly conceived across the ceiling of the great hall of the cave of Lascaux, what would come to be known as “The Sistine Ceiling of the Paleolithic.”

Lascaux photograph Sisse Brimberg National Geographic, Sistine Ceiling photo Wikipedia. 

The boys returned day after day, soon relinquishing their vow of secrecy, for this was treasure beyond what they could keep to themselves. They introduced commerce, charging admission first to their friends, and then to a wider audience. 

The "young heroes", with their teacher and famous paleontologist Abbe Breuil. Can't find the photographer to credit!

Marsal became so obsessed with protecting the cave that his parents finally gave him permission to set up a tent and guard the site day and night from potential vandals. Jacques would serve as a warden for the cave for much of the next 49 years until his death in 1989.

The boys brought their teacher, Leon Laval, an amateur paleontologist, who described his awe:  “Once I arrived in the great hall, accompanied by my young heroes, I uttered cries of admiration at the magnificent sight that met my eyes.... Thus I visited the galleries and remained just as enthusiastic when confronted with the unexpected revelations which increased as I advanced. I had literally gone mad.” 

Mad for the past: Amateur paleontologist Leon Laval. And what he saw. (source)


The cave captured the imagination of the time; their visual similarity to the work of artists of that time caused Picasso’s gasp, when he viewed the cave: “We have invented nothing.” Their fluidity of line, gestural liveliness and direct power belied their age, which, it soon emerged, was between 15,000 and 20,000 years old, when Neanderthals and modern humans coexisted in Europe and lived as hunter-gatherers.

Bulls from Lascaux Great Hall, Pablo Picasso, Bull Prints, 1945

Getty image, stairs to original Lascaux, source. 

Soon 1200 visitors a day traipsed through the cave, every breath they expelled in their awe wreaked havoc on its wonders. The atmosphere changed drastically, causing mineral deposits to form on the paintings. To solve this problem, the custodians installed new climate controls to nearly disastrous results.  


Workers seeking to control the fungal and bacterial growth destroying the paintings. source. 

A virulent mold began to grow on the interior of the cave, threatening, in a matter of days, to destroy the paintings that had existed in silence for 17,000 years. So cave authorities poured four tons of quicklime on the cave floor, raising the temperature rapidly, causing moisture to condense on the walls and wash away some portions of paintings. 

Lascaux remains off limits today; only a handful of scientists and scholars get permission to enter the cave each year. Destruction seems to have stabilized, and lessons learned from the modern damage to Lascaux govern archeological practices strictly today. To accommodate our desire for amazement, authorities funded the creation of exact replicas of two of the ‘rooms’ of Lascaux 200 yards from the original cave.

The cave contains 2,000 images, including more than 900 animals, abstract signs, and human figures.

Images of horses dominate. 

Stags and bovines follow in frequency, and there are a few images of felines, humans, rhinocerous.
 
There are no representations of reindeer or plants, though those were the primary food, nor  representations of landcape or dwellings. Many animals display a high degree of naturalism in their execution, and sophisticated use of perspective and composition. 

Entering Lascaux cave you walk first into the great Hall of the Bulls, where a wide band of decoration at ceiling height shows 36 animals including 17 horses, auroxes, stags, a bear,  Holes near the ceiling suggest that the artists used scaffolding to reach the heights of the ceiling on which they worked.

did the earliest representational painters use a camera obscura? Source

Great Hall of the Bulls, Lascaux, source. 

At the end of the Hall, you enter the Axial Gallery, which houses some of the most sophisticated collections of art from any time.   Artists painted three large horses, in red, black, and ochre. 











The horses rock across the cave walls with a grace that defies their exaggeratedly plump proportions, some right side up, 














some upside down, some barely missed by what look like arrows. All have exquisitely well-rendered, small, graceful black heads and dainty black hooves. 













No artist rendered perspective with the nuance achieved  in 

The Crossed Bison, Photo: © Ralph Morse—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images, http://life.time.com/culture/inside-lascaux-rare-unpublished/#1

the crossed bison, for about 15,000,000 years, until approximately 1500 c.e. with the Italian Renaissance. (One reason for the Sistine Chapel reference).

Photo and text: © Norbert Aujoulat, CNP, Ministere de la Culture, 2004

Turning back from the axial gallery, one can bear off to the left to enter the passageway that leads on the right to the apseof  Lascaux , and on the left to the nave. That paleontologists named these sections of the cave after church architecture indicates their early theory, which further discoveries and study have reinforced, that the painted caves served a spiritual function. 

In a narrow, difficult-to-reach passage is one of the most mysterious paintings of Lascaux. Paleontologist Jean Clottes, describes the scene: “This scene consists of a man with a bird’s head, a composite creature, falling backwards in front of a charging bison. The bison, its hindquarters pierced by a barbed shaft, is disemboweled. A bird perches on a post. There is another barbed sign under the bird-man’s feet. Death—that of the bird-man and of the bison—is obviously a prominent theme of this mysterious panel, and the bird a significant motif.” Clottes’ focuses on the relationship between the hunt and death.

The images in the Shaft of the Dead Man, image source. 

Theories

People have also read the scene as a rite of passage involving totem animals with the bird-headed man


suggesting a shaman; others see the scene as evidence the conception of the passage from life to death; another reading sees a sacrificial offering to the hunt. Astronomers find that the eyes of the bull, birdman and bird represent the three prominent stars of the Summer Triangle: Vega, Deneb and Altair, suggesting the cave may hold a map of the stars, full of animal constellations. Other scholars think the combination of animals and geometric patterns depict visions achieved in trance-dancing, a theory which explains the distribution of similar styles across the world.

Chauvet Cave (key work!)

Modern Relationships

30,000 years ago, artists painted on the walls of caves, and painted over paintings, and painted over those paintings, beginning a tradition of painting on walls that has lasted into today. Examples of graffiti exist around the world since the dawn of Cro-Magnon humans, in the Americas, Oceania, Africa and Asia. Later, we find graffiti in Parisian catacombs, 

the brothels of Pompeii, the great monuments of Egypt, nearly everywhen and everywhere.

 The boldly sprayed graffiti of the NY heyday in the late 1970s starring Fab Five Freddie 


and Jean-Michel Basquiat set the most recognizable style of street art, built on traincar graffiti from the 1920’s and  protest graffiti from WW II and Vietnam. In the nineties, artists like 


Barbara Kruger
 
and Jenny Holzer worked both the gallery and street scene on billboards and handbills in a hybrid of street art, gallery art, guerrilla social justice, and advertising. That work may have initiated the crossover between street art and so-called ‘fine art’ that we see in 

Banksy, 


Swoon, 

 and many artists, transforming the Robert E. Lee Statue in Richmond, Va, into a memorial for George Floyd, and a statement against celebration and romanticization of the civil war.

Today’s street artists may share more than you might conceive with the nameless first artists of the deepest history. Contemporary street artists and cave painters work in a world of risk (In Lascaux, risks included asphyxiation, starvation, bodily harm, rockslides, and getting permanently lost in pitch blackness). Today, street artists may face bodily harm, at the hands of property owners or police, and they risk legal recriminations. They inhabit dark alleys, and make work without hope of profit. The best known street artists today make work that delves deeply consequential topics that impact viewers powerfully. Their work demands confidence and the ability to achieve quality quickly despite formidable circumstances. Stone Age paintings share all these traits, and one other: young adult men dominate the world of street art, and they made most of the Paleolithic cave paintings.

So

Why do artists creep about at night, often taking extraordinary risks, to make pictures on Walls for which they will receive no public credit? Why do they need to leave their mark on public property? Why the gesture to paint and paint over and paint over again without the promise of permanence (immortality of the artist) or money or fame? What 5 works of art should everyone know from Prehistory? What can they tell us? How can we read art? (you’ll probably need to draw on both today’s and Tuesday’s materials.)

Marcel Ravidat, Simon Coencas, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel in 2010. Not shown: Robot, deceased.  

many artists, Cave of the Hands, Cueva de los Manos, 13,000-9,000 years ago, paleolithic

Mimis and Kangaroo, 16000 bce-7000 bc, eprehistoric rock art in the 'x-ray' style, (1-18) source

Caves in the Maros-Pangkep karst (Sulawesi, Indonesia). Stencils of right hands estimated between 35,000–40,000 YA

 Six tiny Therianthropes confront a huge buffalo in  Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia, now a contender for the oldest known representational art at between 43,900 and 35,100 years old.