Christine Palma
“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” –Theodor Adorno
Archive for Art
December 18, 2007 at 6:00 am ·
In the entry for December 18, WIkipedia notes:
In one of my five years of studying Latin, I had to translate parts of Livy’s (59 BC to AD 17) The War with Hannibal.
Synopsis
In The War with Hannibal, Livy (59 BC AD 17) chronicles the events of the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage, until the Battle of Zama in 202 BC. He vividly recreates the immense armies of Hannibal, complete with elephants, crossing the Alps; the panic as they approached the gates of Rome; and the decimation of the Roman army at the Battle of Lake Trasimene. Yet it is also the clash of personalities that fascinates Livy, from great debates in the Senate to the historic meeting between Scipio and Hannibal before the decisive battle.
It was during the Second Punic War that Hannibal, a Carthaginian commander and military genius, defeated the Romans by winning several early key battles. Despite heavy losses Hannibal led an army of roughly 80,000 men (disputed), complete with a herd of 37 war elephants, from Iberia over the Pyrenees and the Alps (!) into Northern Italy. The feat was accomplished in under a month.
Excerpt:
Livy 21.32.6-37.6; translated by Iana Scott-Kilvert
Getting on the move at dawn, the army struggled slowly forward over snow-covered ground, the hopelessness of utter exhaustion in every face.
Seeing their despair, Hannibal rode ahead and at a point of vantage which afforded a prospect of a vast extent of country, he gave the order to halt, pointing to Italy far below, and the Po Valley beyond the foothills of the Alps. ‘My men,’ he said, ‘you are at this moment passing the protective barrier of Italy - nay more, you are walking over the very walls of Rome. Henceforward all will be easy going - no more hills to climb. After a fight or two you will have the capital of Italy, the citadel of Rome, in the hollow of your hands.’
…
The track was almost everywhere precipitous, narrow, and slippery; it was impossible for a man to keep his feet; the least stumble meant a fall, and a fall a slide, so that there was indescribable confusion, men and beasts stumbling and slipping on top of each other.
…
But even so he was no luckier; progress was impossible, for though there was good foothold in the quite shallow layer of soft fresh snow which had covered the old snow underneath, nevertheless as soon as it had been trampled and dispersed by the feet of all those men and animals, there was left to tread upon only the bare ice and liquid slush of melting snow underneath. The result was a horrible struggle, the ice affording no foothold in any case, and least of all on a steep slope; when a man tried by hands or knees to get on his feet again, even those useless supports slipped from under him and let him down; there were no stumps or roots anywhere to afford a purchase to either foot or hand; in short, there was nothing for it but to roll and slither on the smooth ice and melting snow.
In art history and currently on exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, we find:
J. M. W. Turner
Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps
Oil on Canvas, exhibited 1812
This picture exemplifies Turner’s achievement in the , combining personal experience with complex historical and literary associations. The picture originated in observations of a storm in Yorkshire, though it represents Hannibal’s invasion of Italy in 218BC. Turner does not show the General himself, but focuses instead on the distress of Hannibal’s army. He thus aims at a universal, pessimistic vision of mankind, a theme Turner elaborated in poetry written to accompany this work. Nonetheless, the picture invites a contemporary parallel, between Hannibal and Napoleon, who had crossed the Alps to invade Italy in 1797.
(From the display caption August 2004)
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Filed under: Classical Civilizations, Roman History, Art, Into the Dark Wood
December 17, 2007 at 8:59 pm ·
Hopefully I’ll be able to see this exhibit before it closes and write a review. Gordon Matta-Clark is one of my top five favorite artists. I’m a big fan of his films documenting his cut buildings, as well as, the cut building performances themselves. He first captured my heart fifteen years ago at Sci-Arc and during a city-wide retrospective with lectures and screenings at MOCA and UCLA.
The NY Times has background on Matta-Clark:
Few artists could match his ability to extract raw beauty from the dark, decrepit corners of a crumbling city. Fewer still haunt the architectural imagination with such force.
Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artist’s Rights Society
An image from Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Splitting” (1974). H
ouses that the artist carved with a power saw commented on the American city’s decay.
A trained architect and the son of the Surrealist artist Roberto Matta, Matta-Clark occupied the uneasy territory between the two professions when architecture was searching for a way out of its late Modernist doldrums. His best-known works of the ’70s, including abandoned warehouses and empty suburban houses that he carved up with a power saw, offered potent commentary on both the decay of the American city and the growing sense that the American dream was evaporating. The fleeting and temporal nature of that work — many projects were demolished weeks after completion — only added to his cult status after an early death in 1978, from cancer, at 35.
The show brings home just how cleverly he challenged the high priests of architecture who, in Matta-Clark’s mind, inhabited a world of lofty abstractions divorced from the physical reality of everyday life. That critique is newly resonant, when even the most radical architectural ideas are quickly gobbled up by the cultural mainstream and take on the slickness of advertising slogans.
This is from the MOCA press release:
Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure is a full-scale retrospective of one of the key figures to emerge in the generation of artists that followed minimalism. During the brief but highly productive ten years that he worked as an artist, and even more so since his death at the age of 35, Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–78) has exerted a powerful fascination on artists and architects who know his work. The son of surrealist painter Roberto Echaurren Matta, Matta-Clark produced a body of work that incorporated spatial, social, and psychological experiences. Best known for the variety of his often spectacular, planned architectural interventions, Matta-Clark’s works transformed everyday experiences into extraordinary visual encounters. Among the major works featured in the exhibition are sculptures made from his acclaimed architectural building cuts, as well as drawings, films, photographs, and notebooks. A wealth of documentary material related to his interactions with architecture and space, community events, and collective activity is also shown.
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Installation views of Gordon Matta-Clark: “You Are the Measure” at MOCA Grand Avenue, 2007, photo by Brian Forrest:
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Filed under: Gordon Matta-Clark, Sculpture, Art
August 28, 2007 at 11:56 pm ·
In homage to this morning’s Full Moon Lunar Eclipse (2 to 4 AM), a revisit of Nam-june Paik’s video installation, "Moon is the Oldest TV," feels appropriate.
Moon is The Oldest Television - 1965-67 (1996)
Nam-june Paik
TV Moniter,projector and video
I.
The Moon vis-à-vis the Beholder
In 1963 America put the first man on the moon, an event broadcast live on television sets around the world. That year, that day, that hour and even those minutes are punched into the timeclock of global consciousness. Two years later, Paik reflects on this event with "Moon is the Oldest TV." The installation is composed of a single row of Philco television sets on individual pedestals. On their screens play a progression of reprocessed black-and-white video footage from full moon to new moon.
The moon as television becomes a metaphor for a philisophical view of parallax. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek (writes) in his work The Parallax View,
"…the observed distance is not simply subjective, due to the fact that the same object which exists "out there" is seen from two different stances, or points of view.
It is rather that, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are inherently mediated so that an "epistemological" shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an ontological shift in the object itself.
Or -to put it in Lacanese- the subject’s gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the guise of its "blind spot," that which is "in the object more than object itself", the point from which the object itself returns the gaze. Sure the picture is in my eye, but I am also in the picture.
Denial is also an extention of parallax and the moon landing as a staged event is a rock that revisionist historians (negationism) cling to. (Click here for video.)
As I contemplate Paik’s installation and the mythos of moon watching, I am immediately drawn to the Apollo Moon Landing hoax accusations which claim the Apollo Moon landings were faked by NASA.
From Wikipedia:
A year after the first moon landing, Knight Newspapers conducted a poll of 1721 U.S. citizens and found that more than 30 percent of all of the poll’s respondents were "suspicious of NASA’s trips to the Moon" with the number rising to over half in some demographic areas. The Newsweek article that published the poll results noted that among the respondents were "an elderly Philadelphia woman who thought the moon landing had been staged in an Arizona desert" and a "housewife" whose suspicions were based on her belief that her television could not "receive signals from the moon." Another respondent said, "It’s all a deliberate effort to mask problems at home . . . the people are unhappy - and this takes their minds off their problems." …
Fox television’s 2001 TV special "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Really Land on the Moon?" … said roughly 20 percent of the public had doubts about the authenticity of the Apollo program…
A Dittmar Associates poll in 2006 showed that among 18-26 year old college-educated students “27 percent expressed some doubt that NASA went to the Moon, with 10 percent indicating that it was ‘highly unlikely’ that a Moon landing had ever taken place.”
James Oberg, an American journalist who writes about space (and has worked for NASA’s space shuttle program), estimates that "perhaps 10 percent of the population, and up to twice as large in specific demographic groups" believe in the hoax or have some doubts about the Apollo program "It’s not just a few crackpots and their new books and Internet conspiracy sites," Oberg said in 1999. "There are entire subcultures within the U.S., and substantial cultures around the world, that strongly believe the landing was faked. …
Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong in NASA’s training mockup of the Moon and lander module. Hoax proponents say the entire mission was filmed on sets like this training mockup.
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Our American culture’s shifting regard for the both the physical truth and unifying vision of the Apollo Moon Landing just in the last 45-years, speaks to a jadedness deep in our belief system. We fear being conned. We keep one hand on our wallets. We are pessimistic about our past. We distrust the future.
This nation grown wary of shared feel-good moments is like the frog-in-the-well surrounded by a dark pit of complexity. The only way out, perhaps, is through art. In the literary and visual arts we are willing to suspend our disbelief in order to reach a simpler truth.
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Filed under: Cultural Criticism, Moon, Art
August 14, 2007 at 1:29 pm ·
Maurizio Cattelan’s La Nona Oralso (1999)
Venice Biennalle Installation
wax, clothing, polyester resin with metallic powder, volcanic rock, carpet, glass
Maurizio Cattelan’s "La Nona Oralso" (1999, translated as "The Ninth-Hour"), was auctioned off at Christie’s in May of 2001 for $886,000.
In 2006, it sold for $3 Million.
Also known as "Pope Struck by a Meteorite," Cattelan defends his installation at the 2000 Venice Biennale with a glib statement,
"In the end it is only a piece of wax."
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Filed under: Religion, Site-Specific Installation, Sculpture, Nature, Art
August 14, 2007 at 11:48 am ·
It used to be that on an occassion like the Perseid or Leonid meteor showers, I’d be in my car in a heartbeat, headed into the desert, passing Gorman, away from the light pollution of cities.
This year, I content myself by feasting on artists’ interpretations of these events.
In honor of the Perseid Meteor Shower, Belly-Timber has created:
The Swift-Tuttle Dark Chocolate Espresso Berry Comet Truffle!
Click here to view the step-by-step process.
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Filed under: Food, Nature, Art
