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How to Age Exhuberantly

January 27, 2012

OK kids, you’ve got to check out this book: 30 Lessons for Living - Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans. It is the distillation of 300 interviews undertaken by a professor at Cornell University with elderly Americans deemed by outside consensus to have lived a good life.

The lessons are spread over several different areas of concern, but “there was no issue about which the experts were more adamant and forceful” than work. The title of that chapter is “Glad to get up in the morning – Lessons for a successful and fulfilling career”. And it ain’t about the money, bub.

“You know those nightmares where you are shouting a warning but no sound comes out? Well, that’s the intensity with which the experts wanted to tell younger people that spending years in a job you dislike is a recipe for regret and a tragic mistake”. Big money may not accompany one’s bliss, but following it is the only way a happy denouement might.

And there’s a related lesson in this week’s Economist: “Exercise and Longevity – Worth all the sweat”. Doctors (including Dr Brother) have long known that regular vigorous exercise helps thwart all kinds of ailments, from headbone to footbone to decrepitude.

Research is beginning to suggest that exercise helps by enhancing ‘autophagy’ which is the body’s own process of scrapping and recycling surplus, worn-out, or malformed proteins. It thus slows down the biological clock.

Combine a fulfilling career and vigor and you just might get, well, somebody like Lucien Freud, pictured above in his eighty-third year. He died last summer at 89, but for the nearly sixty years leading up to two weeks before passing he worked with a subject for several hours in the morning, a different one in the afternoon, seven days a week, standing up.

“And the moment he lifted his hands, most of his ailments seemed to melt away.” Big money did follow his bliss, but to him it mattered not. The only manner in which wealth changed him was that it diminished his love of gambling: “It’s not fun when you have the money…”

*30 Lessons for Living, Pillemer,Hudson StPress, 2011

The Lessons are for: Happy Marriage, Fulfilling Career, Parenting, Ageing Fearlessly and Well, Living Life w/o Regrets, and Happiness (Time spent worrying is time wasted – Your choice).

*Economist Jan 21 – 27, 2012

***Psychoanalyzing Lucian Freud, Vanity Fair, Feb 2012

****CF Blogpost October 12, 2010

*****And, uh, Freud didn’t read the part of the book about marriage and parenting. He fathered at least sixteen children with six different women. And though he clearly enjoyed himself, I guess I do not commend to you his particular brand of exuberance…

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Wash of the Zeitgeist

November 11, 2011

The three pictures you see below were all painted by Iowa native son Marvin Cone. All come up for auction next week. All are interesting – all the more in juxtaposition.

The first, just below, is titled “Sunlight and Shadows – Luxembourg Gardens Paris 1929”. Though it is expected to draw the least interest and least dinero I quite like it for a number of reasons. First, it is indeed pleasant to look at. Though not exactly exuberant, it conveys a fine sense of the joy concomitant with a stroll through a park in the height of fall foliage.

And I know that park. It’s not far from the Louvre and my first perambulations therein followed shortly after an eye-opening Art History 101 and during a revelatory term abroad. I fell under the spell of the ‘City of Light’ the moment I stepped off the train.

And further to that point – the painting, having been executed in 1929, came well after the height of impressionism and a decade after the creation of cubism by Picasso and Braque probably just blocks away. I relate in a proud and positive way to the combination of naiveté and insouciance indigenous to this great state.

The painting below – “White Barn No.1” clearly, if blandly, has turned away from what some (still!) would call European avant-gardism. Stated more positively, it is a visual metaphor for the hard working, simple and straight-forward valued folks of our nation’s heartland.

“Farm Silhouette” at bottom is expected to make the highest bid of the three lots – $125,000 to $175,000 – and for me also has the most complex emotional tone. On one hand it evinces a crepuscular nostalgia for rural America.

On the other, well, it made me think of the Cormac McCarthy title Outer Dark and the outer dark is not a good place to be… “They aint a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me… I’ve seen the meanness of humans till I don’t know why God aint put out the sun and gone away…”

Cone painted “Farm Silhouette” in 1948 – long after the sunset of Regionalism, after the horrors of WWII, after the incredible industrialization ofAmerica, and after he and his better known brethren (Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry) were compared with the social realists of 1930s Russia. As an artist, on that bluff, he must have felt from afar the wash of the abstract expressionist zeitgeist.

“Farm Silhouette” is the only one of the three I’ve seen in person and an interesting experience it was. Next to last on the scene, I took a call from a soon to arrive expert. “Where do you have it?” “We’re in the vault.” “Get it out of there; the blue tone of the fluorescents won’t do it justice.”

We moved to a room bathed in natural light and even though not directly before the sun, what a difference it did make. Slapped myself in the head for the umpteenth time.*

Clearly the painting is in very good condition with original frame and stretcher. Black light inspection showed no in-painting or restoration. Paper trail (aka provenance) seamless all the way back to the artist.

Lot to think about…

*cf post of Sept 23, 2011. Also, I recently listened to a tenured painting professor bemoan a temporary studio classroom lit with fluorescents. “Unbelievably shitty…”

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What Good Is It?

October 28, 2011

Across the wires earlier this week (AP I think) came the latest in the long line of contradictory studies regarding longevity. This one holds that secrets lie in DNA. “…it’s very hard to get there without some genetic advantages”. How else could there be centenarians who drink like fish and smoke like smokestacks?

Made me think of Picasso for a variety of reasons not least because the anniversary of his birth was just a few days ago (October 25) and that he lived to be nearly ninety-two. More to the point, he was conjured into this world on a puff of smoke. Stillborn in Malaga in 1881 the attending physician gave up and gave way to Uncle Ruiz who exhaled cigar smoke into the newborn’s nostrils.

Sr. Picasso was awake, in the largest sense of the word, from that point forth and the expansiveness of his vision pervades his work and words. Some is multivalent, some is clearly prescient: “Computers are useless, they only give you answers.” Remember that he died in 1973. Gates and Jobs were both only eighteen. (BTW, Gates’ bday is today.)

Few great people would make it through the pearly gates on the first try and Picasso’s no exception. He’s probably a drag queen in hell. Still, though, confusingly I guess, he led his life in a fashion to be admired having done so contrarily demonstrative of the admonition of Jung that you’ve previously seen here: “The more a man’s life is shaped by the collective norm, the greater is his individual immorality.”

Picasso: “If you jump, you might fall on the wrong side of the rope. But if you’re not willing to take the risk of breaking your neck, what good is it? You have to wake people up. To revolutionize their way of identifying things. Force them to understand that they’re living in a pretty queer world. A world that’s not reassuring. A world that’s not what they think it is.”

You know, great artists look back upon the zeitgeist.

*Story of his birth and the quote came from: Picasso by Norman Mailer.

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Haruspex

October 15, 2011

The painting above is “The Ray” by Jean-Simeon Chardin (1699-1779) and is remarkable for the rendering of a gruesome scene as something compellingly sublime. Of it Marcel Proust wrote: “strange monster…tinted with red blood, azure nerves, and white sinews like the nave of a polychrome cathedral”.

Imagine! An intellect as great as Proust comparing a painting of mangled dead sea ray with the central aspect of a type of architecture that reached its zenith there inFrancesome centuries earlier. Philosopher Diderot wrote of Chardin’s talent: “secret of redeeming through skill the disgusting aspect” of a reality.

Reminds me of writer Cormac McCarthy who accomplishes the same feat (maybe even outdoes Chardin) with his prose. Check this out: “His entrails were hauled forth and delineated and the four young students who bent over him like those haruspices of old perhaps saw monsters worse to come in their configurations”.

OK. It is clearly impossible to convey, with a short excerpt, the entirety of a book in the way one can of a picture with a reproduction. But of its essence a great writer might. Let me elaborate a bit on that sentence and hopefully you’ll get an idea of the magnitude of McCarthy’s skill.

Those words come near the end of Child of God and describe the final stages of a med-school dissection of the corpse of the chief protagonist and in their brevity almost recapitulate the entire work. Elmer Ballard was a murderer and necrophiliac who roamed the hills of East Tennesse, was never indicted, and checked himself into the state home (“I’m supposed to be here”) where he died.

Ballard was then the referent to the idea of “monsters worse to come” and one of those he indeed was. The redemptive qualities of McCarthy’s prose McCarthy draw us inexorably through the stunning tale. It’s not that we can’t look away – we don’t want to.

The title of the book is also a referent of a word in the sentence quoted above. Taken at face value, Child of God says that yep, white with the black, we are all part of the Lord’s flock. Taken ironically: the thought of a dude up there in a robe and slippers is no less nuts than the reading the future in entrails – which is what a particular sort of ancient Roman priest (a “haruspex”) did.

After Ballard’s remains were interred the bodies of more victims were discovered in a cave. Here’s how the book ends: “In the evening a jeep descended the log road towing a trailer in the bed of which lay seven bodies bound in muslin like enormous hams. As they went down the valley in the new fell dark basking nighthawks rose from the dust in the road before them with wild wings and eyes red as jewels in the headlights.”

*Chardin’s painting came to mind from reading Mary Tompkins Lewis’ take on it in the 10/8+9 WSJ.

Posted in Art, Literature | 1 Comment »

Sunlight and Socks

September 23, 2011

Next time you’re trying to match a pair of dark socks and fold them up into one of those little balls, go to the trouble of holding them next to each other in direct sunlight. Don’t be surprised if two first thought to be mates turn out not to be when smiled upon by the sun.

Sunlight of course is a natural cause of degradation – stuff fades. But it also is by far the best source of illumination with which to regale an object’s reflection toward perception by a visual system human or otherwise.

That quality is behind the motivation of some architects to go to great and expensive lengths to incorporate natural light into special spaces by means of skylights and elaborate translucent roofing systems.

Though such design elements can be problematic (leak), their effects upon objects below can be magnificent.

Italian architect Renzo Piano established his career with series of museums exploring such possibilities with first the Menil, then Twombly* in Houston, the Beyeler in Basel, and lately the top floor of the new addition to the Art Institute in Chicago.

Andy Sedgwick of Arup was the engineer of several of those solutions and it is his sketch of the light boxes for the Figge Art Museum that you see above. Though rough, it is conceptually demonstrative of the finished product.

Their several components begin with the glass lights (panes) on top, then mechanical louvers to allow for modulation, then on the sides supplemental fluorescent tubes (cloudy days, night), and finally “stretched diffusing fabric”. This last, in the end, turned out to be special scrim imported from France.

Louvers opened, the finished product exudes the sort of generosity that Abbott Suger referred to during the early stages of gothic architecture as the “metaphysics of light”. Standing below one once on a sunny summer afternoon, I looked down from Chase’s Mrs. Chase in Pink **to watch shadows of huge Midwestern cumulus roll across the floor. Sent shivers up and down my spine.

*The light in the Twombly reminded me of a near death experience: cf 3/4/11 below.

**And Mrs Chase and I go way back: cf 4/10/09

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Think With Your Hands

September 9, 2011

OK, the other day I was near a bookstore in its final death throes, having been killed by the internet, Amazon, et al. Sign said “80% off” so I decided to go in and see if there was anything interesting left. There was! Edward Tufte’s Visual Explanations – Images and Quantities, Evidence, and Narrative.

The Boston Globe calls the book “A Visual Strunk and White”. The New York Times calls Tufte: “The Leonardo of Data”. No understatements. With wit, verve, and beauty the author convincingly shows how good design matters.

One of many cases in point. We learn that it was poor design that allowed the Space Shuttle Challenger to explode, and I’m not referring to the engineering of the Shuttle or its launch vehicle themselves, but rather that of charts engineers used the day before the launch in an unsuccessful attempt to convince NASA that an explosion was likely.

The physical problem was that the cold temperatures predicted for launch date would attenuate the resilience of critical rubber o-rings allowing propellant to escape and conflagrate. The chart below is but one of several holding data describing the danger. Of their many faults Tufte cites inadvertent visual dissembling: “Chartjunk”. In contrast “Good design brings absolute attention to data”.

Then he recounts the famous experiment undertaken by the Nobel Prizewinning Physicist Richard Feynman in front of the commission investigating the accident. Using a small c-clamp he’d brought with him, he squeezed an o-ring and put it in a glass of ice water for a few moments.

As he removed and released the bit of rubber, it became immediately apparent that the cold kept it from springing back. “I believe that has some significance for our problem”. The utter clarity of his presentation and his deadpan understatement blew the minds of the masses who saw it on TV or read about it in the printed press.

“Never have so many viewed a single physics experiment. As Freeman Dyson rhapsodized: “The public saw with their own eyes how science is done, how a great scientist thinks with his hands, how nature gives a clear answer when a scientist asks her a clear question.”

So, now, my questions are first: Without shelves loaded with books in a store through which to meander, how will one be able to occasion such moments of serendipitous edification? Seriously. And more important (again) what will the internet do to the potential for the development of great minds that “think with their hands”?

Here’s a response to question #2. Reformed nerd Nick Carr has written a Pulitzer nominated book, The Shallows, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains and penned an article for The Atlantic titled “Is Google Making us Stupid?” Slate called his work “Silent Spring for the literary mind”.

Carr believes that “…there’s legitimate reason to be fearful. I’m just suggesting that data technology is becoming so dominant that we’re losing the opportunity and the encouragement to engage in what I think is the highest form of thought.”*

I’m gonna get some sort of grip exerciser.

*”The Reluctant Luddite. Nicholas Carr is a Net user of the first order, but he believes his brain is paying for it.” Article by Dirk Olin in the Sept/Oct ’11 Dartmouth Alumni Review.

Posted in Art, consciousness/psychology, couch potato | Leave a Comment »

Joe, Joe, and Joe

August 26, 2011

Artist Hiroshi Sugimoto did a series of black and white photographs of Richard Serra’s Joe, a sculpture which sits in an outside courtyard at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis. Sugimoto’s work is interesting for a variety of reasons not least because of Serra’s own surprise: “This is not about me”.

The several ton piece was Serra’s first torqued spiral and he was shocked that the Japanese photographer had not undertaken a documentary style project. Instead, Sugimoto used the opportunity to create a work of his own and with it a more effective conveyance of the sense of Serra’s ideals than a more literal interpretation ever could.

The images abstract and cerebrate the unexpectedly complex physical experience of the huge hot rolled steel spiral. The two dimensional representations are thus elemental forms manifested and manipulated by Serra and returned to the Platonic realm by Sugimoto.

Furthermore, fascinatingly, Sugimoto doesn’t see Joe as relating to its namesake, Joseph Pulitzer. “I see it as related to my seascape series as a metaphor of human memory.” He tells us that a seascape is likely the least changed vista since the rise of consciousness. A gaze upon one thus shares an ethereal resonance with those of our earliest ancestors as well as all those between.

An early product of this awareness was remembrance of the dead. The first proto-human efforts beyond feeding, fighting, fleeing, or f______ (making babies) were the creation of graves, tombs, and then cenotaphs. Sugimoto calls Joe a “metaphor and system of remembrance”. Seems to me that the relationship between Joe and Photographs of Joe is a metaphor for the evolution of consciousness.

*Quotes from the exhibition brochure “Hiroshi Sugimoto – Photographs of Joe; edited by Matthias Waschek; published by the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts; 2006.

**cf “Conquistadors of the Useless” 1/21/08

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… the ongoing danger of collectively creating scapegoats

August 6, 2011

Last week one lone deranged man killed seventy-three young people on an island near Oslo, Norway. That terrible event was sort of an inverted reflection of another horror that took place in the far north of that country many years before. During the course of the seventeen century, the 3,000 citizens of county Finnmark convicted ninety-one men, women, and young girls of witchcraft and burned them at the stake.

If you’re with me so far, you’ll find it quite the coincidence that a memorial for the earlier event opened just this past June. It is the Steilneset Memorial To The Victims Of The Witch Trials and was a collaboration between Swiss architect Peter Zumthor* and the late great nonagenarian Louise Bourgeois. During the ceremony, presided over by Queen Sonja, general secretary of the Vardo Church City Mission Sturla Stalsett that “the memorial is meant to remind us of the ongoing danger of collectively creating scapegoats”.**

Zumthor designed two structures for the barren rocky site. Of the first, pictured above he said: “I didn’t want an aggressive massive monument. Creating a light delicate structure was best for this rough space”. It is 410 feet long, narrow, and has ninety-one randomly placed windows. Behind each is suspended a single light bulb. “The feeling is like being in the stomach of some prehistoric creature…except there is a glimmer of light”.

At the south end a gangplank leads into the other glass and Cor-Ten cubiform volume housing Bourgeois’ work pictured below. It is comprised of an aluminum chair with flames emanating from the seat and is encircled by seven oval mirrors. “…like judges circling the condemned”.

The location is remote, but not off of the beaten path. The Varanger National Tourist Route program consists of eighteen major routes to facilitate interesting travel while punctuating the country’s magnificent geography with integrated points of interest. It is overseen by the Norwegian Public Road Authorities and is scheduled to be complete in 2020. Phew. Guess don’t need to hurry

*For more about Zumthor read post of 4/24/09 “Reading about Reincarnation is not the same thing as being reborn”

**Much of the information above was drawn from an article by Suzanne Stephens in the August 2011 edition of Architectural Record.

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I’m Glad I Don’t Have A Tail

May 13, 2011

Please, please, please don’t repeat this to anyone. Last Friday wife and I rode our bikes along the river to a brew pub for dinner. On way home via a different route just before dusk she (up ahead) exclaimed: “Is that what I think it is!? Let me have your knife!”

I did so and then watched as she cut the tail off of a dead black squirrel. Jeesh. Unfortunately I’ve many times found myself part of that peculiar sort of excision separating tail from torso of skunk, deer, raccoons, and more. All in service to art. She makes fine brushes with the hair.

Jung wrote some interesting stuff about artists: “The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts for two forces are at war within him (her) – on the one hand the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire”.

Furthermore: “The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his (her) own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him (her)”.* Mission for god as the Blues Brothers put it.

Demanding a muse might be, but a grand thing which to follow should an audience later manifest. What a way to live if people would cathect emotion and fork over dinero in response to what might express from the depths of one’s soul through a trained and tamed skill set. Two examples:

Mick Jagger arranged for Lucien Freud to paint his then wife Jerry Hall and baby. Sitting for Sigmund’s grandson is an arduous process and Mrs. Jagger spent many many hours in his studio over the course of four months.

One day Freud called his dealer William Acquavella: “I want you to be the first to know, the painting’s had a sex change.” “What!” Acquavella responeded. “Well, Jerry didn’t show up for two sittings so I changed her into a man”. Jagger rang up Acquavella but there was nothing that could be done.**

Similarly, if not quite as obstinately, architect Peter Zumthor picks his clients not visa versa. “Normally architects render a service. They implement what other people want. This is not what I do.” What he does is to take the measure of a site and client from which to distill his vision. Not theirs.

Actor Toby Maguire hoped for a Zumthor house in the LA hills. The architect said he’d look at the site if Maguire’d educate himself by visiting several projects in Europe such as his spa in Vals Switzerland and museum in Bregenz Austria. House went ahead. Maguire asked for a basketball court, but apparently got a garden instead.***

Uhm, I’m glad I don’t have a tail.

*Both Jung quotes are from his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul

**WSJ Weekend April 2011 by Tom Vandrbilt

***New York Times Magazine by Michael Kimmelman

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Beyond the Blare of the News

May 6, 2011

There are small minds everywhere, but fortunately there are about big ones too. Above you see the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar. It was designed by IM Pei who went to very great effort – wide peregrination and deep cultural immersion – to find the heart of Islamic architecture. “Might it not lie in the desert, severe and simple in its design, where sunlight brings form to life?”*

Most collections of Islamic art are in the west, minded by non Muslims. The original vision of The Emir and his wife Sheikha Moza was not only to emplace fine objects in the region of their origin, but also to provide a center of culture and education. “Here is a museum in the Muslim world capable of bridging the gap between tradition and modernity” said the original curator Sabiha Al-Khemir.

As you may know, pictorial representation contravenes a precept of Islam. There is thus no tradition of landscape or portraiture. Think then about how it must currently be for visitors to that museum to look upon the likes of Rembrandt, Hals, and Vermeer for the first time in an exhibition of the Dutch golden age.

For an article in the May 2011 Art Newspaper editor Anna Somers Cocks toured the show with a young volunteer. The responses of the latter to Ms Cocks’ “just tell me what you see” were fresh and felt and fascinating. About Church Interior by Emanuel de Witte (below) she said:

“I like this very much; if you stand back you feel like you can go inside it. I like that he drew if very well; you can see the small things like the details of the column. They told me that they put dead people under the floor and I said how can you prey with dead people beneath you? I am told that when a woman got married the only thing she could do for fun was to go to church.”

Above you see Jan Steen’s The Very Merry Family: “Because everybody is happy about something, everyone is doing a different thing, but because they are ignoring each other, the small child is on its own, drinking. So this is a troubled family and very dirty and things are falling down.”

She liked Rembrandt’s Self Portrait: “I love this person because he has been painting himself since he was young. Maybe this is his last portrait. I have heard that he painted himself all through his life, how his face, how his body changed. It’s a very nice idea. You can feel he is very old, even from how he is drowning his hair. He does not put in many details so that you can focus on the face”.

Hmm. There is so much behind and beyond the blare of the 24/7 news cycle…

*I.M. Pei Complete Works by Jodido and Strong, Rizzoli, 2008