The Best American Poetry

New Work from David Alexander

We hear from the artist David Alexander:

<<<<
A selection of digital art pieces related to a recent print project of mine can now be seen on the website of the literature and art journal The New Engagement.

https://thenewengagement.com

 

The opening art on the site is a detail of one of these.  To see all, scroll down to the visual arts section.

 

[About]  the method involved in many of my larger pieces: I start with a photographic image and do many (many!) variations in Photoshop.  Then I take parts of the best and combine them collage-wise to create the final work.  What is on view is a selection of some of the individual transformations, something I don't usually show.  On paper the finished version is 74 by 12 inches in four sections. >>>>

 

 

 

Met Percent: Week Ten [by Alec Bernstein]

Sonrientes

Smiling Figure (Sonrientes), 7th-8th c. Remojadas, gallery 358. 

Not much is known about this happy figure. There are mixed cues: male and female, old and young, spirit and human, dwarf and child. It’s too small to stand alone and too large to admire in the hand. Emotional facial expressions, as in this figure, are very uncommon in Mesoamerica. I was captured by it from across the gallery and spent a good amount of time with that smile . . . 

Variations On An Ancestral Theme

Left: Purrukuparli, Enraeld Munkara, Tiwi people, 1955, gallery 354. The sobbing Purrukuparli is an ancestor from the Dreaming (primordial creation period). He chooses not to bring his dead son back, but instead announces the concept of mortality and creates the Tiwi burial rituals. “Humans too will someday die”. The very beginning of ancestors. 

Center: Ancestor Figure (Tsmas), 19th–early 20th c., Paiwan people, gallery 354. Of the Paiwan high nobles, minor nobles and commoners, only the high nobles were allowed to commission human ancestral images. These ancestors have powers, but their influence (help or harm) is controlled by the nobility. Class spirits. Very clear. 

Right: Male Diviner's Figure, 19th–mid-20th century, Baule people, gallery 352. High artistic achievement, the “more expensive the better”, presents not only the wealth and status of the diviner (and owner) of the image, but also “Dazzles the potential clients” of the artist, building his reputation and social position. The professional artist.

 

“   ”  Art

Upper left: Seated Figure, Djenne people, 13th c., gallery 350, Upper right: Constantin Brancusi, Mlle Pogany version I, 1913, MoMA, NYC, Bottom: Recumbent Figure, Henry Moore, 1938, Tate Galley, London.

“The term primitive is to be avoided or used in quotation marks”. - Tate, London. 

Originally, Nelson Rockefeller’s collection was called the Museum of Indigenous Art and later the Museum of Primitive Art. His museum and private collections became the Art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the Met in 1984. The Met had previously turned down the collection - considered by critics an American "Salon des Refusés".

 

Lime Paraphernalia

Lime Spoon with Seated Figure, Inca, 13th–16th c., not on view.  Lime Container, Usiai Island, late 19th–early 20th c., Lime spatula (Tap), Latmul people, late 19th–early 20th c., Gallery 354.

This container (center) was designed to hold powdered lime made from calcined seashells. The lime was removed through a hole in the top by a spoon (left) or a little spatula (right). Lime was a necessary part of the ritual of coca-leaf chewing; the coca leaves were put into the mouth to form a quid, and the lime was added to activate the drug. 

got montaigne? - 8oz Hip Drinking Alcohol Flask, Black (right) by Knick Knack Gifts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Foot Jars ‘n Cowboy Boots

Pair of Ceramic Foot Jars, Peru, Inca Valley Paracas, 2nd-1st c. B.C. Gallery 354

      “Some boys went to look for his feet. His toes are made of crystal, so he can hide them, and the boys could not find them. Then the boys threw stones at the rainbow.

      When he enters the body of a man or a woman they become very sick and to cure them they are given a ball of seven-colored wool to unwind.”

From “The Rainbow”, Anonymous, Quechan, Peru, translated by W.S. Merwin.

Plastic cowboy boot cups, 1950s, U.S.A

As I pondered my interest in these charming foot jars, I recalled the three cowboy cups from childhood. My two siblings and I each had our own color cup. Mine was red. I loved that cup.

Met Percent: Week Nine [by Alec Bernstein]

In Situ (Ex Situ)

(Left)  Asmat Tribe, New Guinea. 
(Right) Bis (funerary) Poles, Asmat peoples, 1960, gallery 354 (Nelson Rockefeller Collection).

The question that surfaced, after 3 trips to the Africa, Oceania, and the Americas galleries was one of context. Who were these made for? 

“Two polar types [of art] stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view.” - Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.”

(Left) Prestige Stool: Female Caryatid, Buli Master, possibly Ngongo ya Chintu, 19th Century, gallery 352.
(Right) Prestige Stool: Female Caryatid, Songye Peoples, possibly, 19th-20th Century, gallery 352.

Many Important ritual items were not made to be seen. For the powerful leaders, prestige stools were wrapped in white cloth and hidden in a distant village. As exhibition value has increased (by capital according to the Marxists) cult value is harder to access. The artifacts are gorgeous, even when clearly not viewed as they were meant to be.

“I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.” - Frida Kahlo

 In Absentia

Michael C. Rockefeller, son of Nelson Rockefeller, adjusts his camera before taking pictures of Papuan men in New Guinea in 1961.
Revenge: Ber, head of one of the Asmat villages, was related to the men who killed Michael Rockefeller.

In 1969, the journalist Milt Machlin investigated Rockefeller's disappearance. Several leaders of Otsjanep village, where Rockefeller likely would have arrived had he made it to shore, had been killed by a Dutch patrol in 1958. This provided some rationale for the tribe’s revenge against someone from the "white tribe". Neither cannibalism nor headhunting in Asmat were indiscriminate, but rather were part of a tit-for-tat revenge cycle. So it is possible that Rockefeller found himself the inadvertent victim of such a cycle started by the Dutch patrol.

“After having a long time treated their prisoners very well, and given them all the regales they can think of, he to whom the prisoner belongs, invites a great assembly of his friends. They being come, he ties a rope to one of the arms of the prisoner, of which, at a distance, out of his reach, he holds the one end himself, and gives to the friend he loves best the other arm to hold after the same manner; which being done, they two, in the presence of all the assembly, despatch him with their swords. After that, they roast him, eat him amongst them, and send some chops to their absent friends. They do not do this, as some think, for nourishment, as the Scythians anciently did, but as a representation of an extreme revenge.” - Montaigne, Of Cannibals

“I am not sorry that we should here take notice of the barbarous horror of so cruel an action, but that, seeing so clearly into their faults, we should be so blind to our own. I conceive there is more barbarity in eating a man alive, than when he is dead . . . ” - Montaigne, Of Cannibals

 

“Warming the Dance Space”

(Left) Helmut Mask, 19-20th c., Mende or Sherbro peoples, Gallery 350.

(Center) Headdress  Janus Mask, 19-20th century, Ejagham, Bale peoples, gallery 352. 

(Right) Moon Face Mask, 1880, Baule peoples, gallery 352, worn to “warm the dance space” at the beginning of a sequence known as “gbagba” or “mblo”.

Worn during funerals and initiations. Some are startlingly naturalistic and may be portraits of known individuals; others are highly stylized. There are three overall types: helmet masks that cover the wearer's head entirely, headdresses that are attached to basketry caps worn on top of the head, and masks that cover only the face.

Pre-Colombian Gold

Significant precious metalwork from the early Americas surpasses local 5th Avenue Retailers . . .

“The practice (from 2000 BC) only ceased when indigenous American societies lost access to gold during the Spanish Conquest in the sixteenth century.” - Met Text

Nice way to put the economic workings of colonialism. After 3,000 years of brilliant design, all gold ore went directly to Europe; do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

Read Before Traveling

“These stick charts are memory aids used to navigate island positions and wave patterns. The exact significance was known only to its maker, and they were never carried to sea. That would question the navigator’s skill. They represent a system of mapping ocean swells, which was never before accomplished. 

Marshallese navigators used their senses and memory to guide them on voyages by crouching down or lying prone in the canoe to feel how the canoe was being pitched and rolled by underlying swells. there are four main ocean swells: the rilib, kaelib, bungdockerik and bundockeing.” - Met Text

Imagine figuring out that by lying in a canoe, you could feel the cross currents and tell where the islands are . . . .

This is impressive. 

Or . . . You can use your Hos for weather magic. With its legs of Sting Rays and a chant. As the climate crisis grows, if you can’t navigate it, pray.

Weather Charm (Hos), Caroline Islands, Micronesia, 19th-20th c., gallery 353

What Picasso Saw (1940) [by David Lehman]

after fifty-nine years
he saw
the woman
with two faces

there was no such thing
as an ex-Catholic
or an ex-Spaniard
living in France
first Paris with Max
then back to Madrid
an old guitarist

what can you do
with blue, blindness
and the female nude
with two faces

Ma Jolie Fernande
Eva, Gaby, Pacquerette,
Irene Lagut, Olga,
Marie-Therese,
Francoise, Jacqueline

I the harlequin and the minotaur
you the women in the mirror

10 / 25 / 19 (Picasso's birthday)

Met Percent: Week Eight [by Alec Bernstein]

Medallion with Christ from an Icon Frame, Byzantine, 1100, gallery 303

At the Met, lingering in the darkened galleries of the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, I select a few favorites:

Eikonomachía - literally, "image struggle" or "war on icons" - is a controversy over the proper use of religious images, and it results in the destruction of icons in all media. 

Iconoclasts - "breaker of icons" - is the deliberate destruction within a culture of its own symbols . . . for religious or political motives.

Iconolater, Iconodules, and Iconophiles are derisive terms for those who revere or venerate religious images.

Electric Chair, 1971, Andy Warhol [Met, not on view]. Gold necklace with Cross, Byzantium, 6th century, gallery 301.

“If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.” - Lenny Bruce

 

“Guillotine of History”

Head of Christ, Netherlands, 1480-1520, gallery 306; Head of a Cleric from a Tomb Effigy, France, 1450-60, [not on view]; Head of Emperor Constans, Byzantine, ca. 337–40, gallery 301.

Throughout the image wars, the destruction of the head, face (and nose) was rampant, because the head was the most potent symbol of the body. 

“During the High Middle Ages, portraiture did not rely on likeness . . . thus individual selfhood was subsumed in broader forms of corporate identities.” - The Face in Medieval Sculpture - Met Heilbrun Timeline of History. 

In my  twenty years of business air travel, I would study Tiepolo or Raphael and draw heads - of no one in particular - a flight attendant, a sleeping passenger, the occasional celebrity . . . by abstract construction or memory. Apparently my “corporate identities” philosophy is in accord with the Medieval masters. Nice to know.

Montaigne concludes Of Physiognomy with a pair of anecdotes in which his life was threatened, but his kindly demeanor and honest words saved him. “If my face did not answer for me, if people did not read in my eyes and my voice the innocence of my intentions, I would not have lasted so long without quarrel and without harm.” But he also writes, “The face is a weak guarantee.”

 

Bread Branding

A ceramic Bread Stamp, Byzantine, 500-900, gallery 300. Inscribed in Greek in reverse,“IC, XC, NIKA”: Jesus Christ Victorious. Used for The Eucharist breads. Interesting the “victory” (NIKA) stems from Nike in the Greek.

The Uzbek still carries the tradition of bread stamps: now decorative and secular, the stamps appear all over Etsy for “lively flatbreads” (advertisement below).

-  We guarantee you'll love our bread stamp(s) or your money back 

-  Makes an ideal Central Asia-theme gift 

-  Added durability (made from walnut tree) 

-  Safer from injury (blunted pins) 

-  No chemical or artificial substances used 

-  Comes with a short maintenance guide 

-  As a bonus, you get Uzbek bread recipes in pdf format

-  By buying this product, you contribute to a better quality of life for rural Uzbek craftspeople 

 

 

 

Nike, the personification of victory, late 5th century B.C., gallery 156

 

 

 

 

 

Your Skull Here

Abbey Head-Shaped Coffin, France, gallery 306

This carved wooden coffin was for an important skull. And in the next display case, a “valuables” coffin. Important to preserve both. But not together. I note how different the terms “coffin” and “sarcophagus” feel.

Valuables Coffin, France, gallery 306

 

Paul Klee Anyone?

Footed Cup with Falconer, Byzantine, 15th century, gallery 300. Angelus Novus, Paul Klee, 1921, Israel Museum.

Walter Benjamin bought Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, an oil transfer drawing with watercolor, for 1,000 marks in Munich. Benjamin passed it to Theodor Adorno, and Adorno to Gershom Scholem.

Benjamin’s friend Charlotte Wolf then recalled how this “gauche and inhibited man” had “behaved as if something marvelous had been given to him." By simply looking at the drawing.

This is the first time I have seen the word “humor” in the MetTexts. The  cup has a “sense of humor”, according to the museum documenters. But to Benjamin, “This is how one pictures the angel of history.”

From Eroticism to Extinction 8 | 83 | 22 | 00 | 44 [by Katie Peyton Hofstadter]

8 years | 83 days | 22:00:44

I recently gave an art-tour to a group of graduate design students. It was the week of the Climate Strikes, Greta Thunberg was at the UN, and our President was mostly skipping school for a discussion of "Religious Freedom" (unless you're Muslim, I'm assuming).

After some soul scratching, I decided to twist the classic theme of love and death, in a way that spoke to this week. Here are a few stops in the tour, From Eroticism to Extinction.

The first stop is Greene Naftali gallery, where we see Paul Chan's The Bathers Dilemma. Industrial fans blast air upwards into nylon air dancers, which dramatically stiffen and wilt, over and over again, in a simulation of sex and flags and, hey, let’s say freedom (religious or otherwise).

In other words, they respond to pressure by dancing.

The androgynous bather's tiny (tiny!) suits draw attention to what is hidden (the tiny, but oh so important, bits these turgid tube balloons definitely do not have). "Progress takes a toll, especially on those who want it most," writes Chan. From his statement:

Resistance wears down the spirit, and makes a mess of the body and mind. It is a shame that it feels natural to expect suffering in oneself for the sake of ending it in others, and commonplace to accept this terrible symmetry as the price one pays for progress.

The bather in art breaks with this terrible symmetry by offering an image of another way forward. Works that take up this motif invite us to reflect on how pleasure renews us. They are reminders that pleasing and being pleased – without aggression or guilt – expands our capacity for fellow feeling. 

This "other way forward" channels the words of poet Audre Lorde, who said in 1978:

In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.

The most-discussed piece is an air dancer in a glass case. Is it happy, my students want to know? Is it trapped in the display, or does it enjoy being watched? We spend a moment watching the wiggler in its double bikini bottoms, contemplating our own gazes. It feels like we are in school and getting away with something.

We end with a passage from writer, scholar and activist adrienne maree brown (from Pleasure Activism). "Feeling good is not frivolous," writes brown. "It is freedom.”

The exit leads through a beach installed outside the gallery. Our feet crunch in the white sand. Across the street, we climb up to the High Line, Chelsea’s award-winning park, built on an old elevated freight rail line.

Ruth Ewan's monumental Silent Agitator is installed at 24th Street. It celebrates historic labor victories, like the five-day work week and eight-hour workday. (Victories being eroded by the decades-long right-wing assault on labor unions and the more recent rise of the "gig economy”) 

Ewan’s installation is inspired by Ralph Chaplin's classic turn-of-the-century illustration for the Industrial Workers of the World labor union. They feature a call-and-response, echoed in Ewan’s work: "What time is it? Time to organize!" The illustrations were distributed as “stickerettes” (drawings and slogans printed on small slips of gummed paper), which were also called "silent agitators."

Ewan’s Silent Agitator is funded by members of the Mugrabi family, whose 5-billion-dollar empire and aggressive art-trading and market-making (think: 800 Warhols in a warehouse) pretty blatantly undercut the idea that an hour's work entitles a laborer to a fair slice of our planet's finite wealth and resources.

Speaking of the planet's finite resources, we are now on to the Extinction part of the tour.

Earlier that day, a group of artists (full disclosure: I regularly see one of them naked in my apartment) had launched ClimateClock.world, an effort to put carbon budget countdown clocks up all over the world. Responding to a special request, they’d also custom-built one of these clocks for Greta Thunberg, but when she attempted to bring the physical clock into the UN for her speech, it was confiscated by security. (It did, after all, kind of look like a bomb.) Anyway, the clock is up and running here. It's open-source, so you can install the digital clock widget, or use the maker-kit to build your own physical clock.

This climate clock was erected in Berlin by Fridays for the Future just a few weeks ago.

 

Every morning, my phone tells me exactly how much time has passed (2019 years, 10 months, 9 days, 8 hours, etc) since some god-like dude was born in a manger. It's standardized for our global techno-capitalist economy, and accurate enough for high-frequency trading—but is it helping us survive?

Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory, painted in 1931 96

 

My students love clocks. They love Dali’s Persistence of Memory. They love Ewan’s Silent Agitator. Since they were young, they've been told they were going to "save the world." How about a clock for that?

 

 

Event: Tomorrow at 6pm, comedic performer Morgan Bassichis will host an event at the Silent Agitator monument, called "There's a better life and you think about it, don't you?" The title is taken from Dolly Parton's 9-5. The event will feature Tayo Aluko, Ruth Ewan, Brooklyn Women’s Chorus, the New York City Labor Chorus, the Sing in Solidarity Chorus, and Lynn Marie Smith “aka” The Motown Diva. It will celebrate "the uplifting significance of song in the exhausting work of labor organizing,” and it’s billed as an “evening of fun, lively performances” that “invites musicians and organizers from across the city—and the world—to come together in affirmation that the time we have together need not be all work and no play."

Credits:
Paul Chan, installation shots from The Bather's Dilemma
Ruth Ewan, "Silent Agitator," photo by Timothy Schenck
Fridays for the Future, carbon clock at the Gasometer, photo by Euref AG/Schwarz
#ClimateClock widget available here

Elizabeth Turk, Sculptor Extraordinaire [by David Lehman]

Do you know the work

Of Elizabeth Turk?

You should!

It's awfully good.

http://www.elizabethturkstudios.com/

Met Percent: Week Seven [by Alec Bernstein]

Byzantine Leads to Gothic

Sarcophagus, Byzantine, early 300s, gallery 300    Capital with Four Heads, Gothic, 1225–50, gallery 304

Just never saw it that way

1,000 years from the end of Rome to the Renaissance: the gigantic new Christian colloid of Rome, Greece, Persia, Scandinavia, England, Syria: no wonder I never saw the connections . . . and the imagery was a continuum of  controversy. 

 

“The human spirit cannot keep on floating in this infinity of formless ideas; they must be compiled for it into a definite picture after its own pattern.” - Montaigne

 

Break bitter furies of complexity,

Those images that yet

Fresh images beget

 - “Byzantium”, William Butler Yeats

 

“As a living man does not have to give reasons for his breathing, he does not need to explain his beliefs.” - Montaigne

 

“It’s Byzantine”

 

Keystone from a Vaulted Ceiling, Germany, 1220-30, gallery 300

It’s too too complex is the consensus.

• “Pension savers caught out by ‘byzantine’ tax-relief rules,” reads a headline in The Times of London.
• “Experience in byzantine water policy key in elections at Coachella Valley agencies,” says an editorial in the Desert Sun.
• “It’s Complicated: Bosnia’s Byzantine System Of Government,” puns Radio Free Europe.

 

The Formats of Old Friends . . . The Storyboard

Ivory Altarpiece, ca. 1390–1400, Italy, gallery 306

Stories in units in framed cells. Time divided into sequence in space. Grids of progression. The DNA for films, graphic novels, cartoons, comics . . . 

Stories in Light

Stained Glass Panels, 15th C., German, gallery 306

Q: How do you tell those biblical stories - Mary as Virgin, Queen, Bride, Mother, Intercessor - to a largely illiterate congregation? 

A: Stained glass.

I have heard that the origin of the term kike comes from Jewish immigrants at Ellis Island who would not sign their names with crosses (X), and signed instead with small circles: kikel or kikeleh in Yiddish shortened to kike, i.e. the people who make little circles.

 

The Articles We “Know”

The Last Supper, ca. 1500–1530, German or South Netherlandish, gallery 305

Yes, of course. The Last Supper, The Apostles, The Annunciation, The Madonna, The Child, The Pieta . . . familiar, the stuff of Western Civ. Not “chapter and verse” to me, but by osmosis in school, by television, and my childhood neighbors on their way home from Catechism.

In Los Angeles I discovered all the freeways have articles; a Spanish influence. New Yorkers take 95 to 395. Angelenos take The 405 to The 101.

Un-naming modern primitivism and Beauty in Mondrian’s abstraction [by Tracy Danison]

Rene Rimbert, "Nature morte au jeu de cartes"©Musée Maillol, Paris

Two lovely and intriguing painting exhibitions ongoing at Musée Maillol and Musée Marmottan Monet offer more than their titles suggest. Les Grands maîtres naïfs: du douanier rousseau à Séraphine at Musée Maillol debunks the notion of “naïf (primitive)” and does a great job of showing color, shape, form in daily life in France 1920-1940 by outsider painters. Mondrian Figuratif at Marmottan Monet uses some lovely figurative painting to anchor a well-made walk-through of Piet Mondrian’s painterly quest for Beauty.

Piet Mondrian, "Crépuscule", 1906 © Kunstmuseum Den Haag

 

The thing one learns from Les Grands maîtres naïfs is that modern primitive painting applies not to style but to painters who didn’t attend official art schools. Whether the subject is the outside or “natural” world, food or male desire, the Grands maîtres in question paint “what they see and what it feels like”.

 

André Bauchant, "L'Hibou" © Ewald Graber © Adagio, Paris 2019

What they see becomes visual lyric: intimate, even indiscrete, warm, colorful. Visitors will enjoy the little irony of tourist-targeted views of Montmartre by these often commercially struggling artists as well bigger and more recondite ironies such as Dominique Peyronnet’s slipping of the iconic La Femme à la Perle into the sharp symmetry of a modern urban landscape.

Camille Bombois, "Nu de face"  Courtesy Fondation Dina Vierny © Adagio, Paris

And there’s plenty more work by these marginal maîtres that just enables the eye to enjoy while the mind wanders: feathery flower bouquets by Séraphine Louis (which put me in mind of Shaker prints, even Jung drawings), Le Douanier Rousseau’s powerfully-imagined “exotic natural” scenes (which put me in mind of William Blake prints), René Rimbert’s bistro-inspired still lifes (which brought Cezanne’s to mind), the graded colors and perspectives of sea- and landscapes by André Bauchant and Ferdinand Desnos, or Camille Bombois’ good-tempered almost-porn.

"Le Douanier" Henri Rousseau, "Deux lions à l'affût dans la jungle" © Archives de l'Hôtel des Ventes de Monte-Carlo

And if Grands maîtres naïfs puts pay to the notion that modern “primitive” painting is anything more than a nasty little kick against painters of “marginal” social origins, Mondrian Figuratif  puts in doubt the “Father of abstraction”’s parental role in that particular style.

Piet Mondrian, "Composition avec large plan rouge, jaune, noir, gris et bleu ", 1921 © Kunstmuseum Den Haag

Marmottan Monet’s exhibition in fact highlights Mondrian’s personal spiritual quest for beauty. I mean “Beauty”in a Neo-Platonic, 19th-century sense, with a capital B, the one that was supposed to exist with Love and Truth at the core of the universe and Christian society. “Mondrian figuratif”’s walk-through arrangement makes the visual case that painter Mondrian knows in his heart, like poet Keats, that Truth is Beauty and Beauty is Truth. This puts a lot of water between him and a painter like a Picasso, or Jasper John’s who knows who else in the modern era whose search is mostly for new and satisfactory expressive style(s).

Piet Mondrian, "Moulin dans le crépuscule",1908 © Kunstmuseum Den Haag

In the entry way of the Mondrian Figuratif  walk-through sits a ‘still life” of a “naturalist” dead hare in the Dutch Renaissance style, made by a 19-year old Mondrian. Next to it is the painter’s very first “abstract” painting. The hare’s ‘naturalism’ is on its head, subjected to the effect of light on a graded color and texture (the hare’s fur) while this first “abstract” work is clearly a study of the subtle line and color of tar and worn tiles in somebody’s floor.

Piet Mondrian, "Ferme près de Duivendrecht", 1916 © Kunstmuseum Den Haag

Turning into the exhibition from there, some wonderful examples of Mondrian’s figurative work greets visitor eyes. But raise them, look right. There at the bottom of the exhibition is Mondrian’s 1921 Composition avec large plan rouge, jaune, noir, gris et bleu, which definitely isn’t somebody’s tile floor! But then, those colors, those lines! Why, of course, it’s the Beauty of all tile floors! Of all windmills! Then, catching their breath and looking back and forth, there certainly seems a relation between the capture of the exact chromatic quality of early moonlight in the 1906 Crépuscule and Large plan, between the swathes of horizontal color and “natural” geometry of the 1908 Moulin dans le crépuscule and Large plan… The walk-through between these paintings is a visual discussion of Mondrian becoming toward Beauty and, maybe, Truth: all we need to know.

Mondrian Figuratif runs at the Musée Marmottan Monet until 26 January 2020.

Les Grands maîtres naïfs: du Douanier Rousseau à Séraphine runs at Musée Maillol until 19 January 2020.

"In Search of the Sublime": The Art of Ricardo Jose Mujica

<<<
Born and raised in New York City, Ricky Mujica studied art at the High School of Art and Design, Parsons in Paris, and at Parsons School of Design. 

The artwork of Ricky Mujica was initially influenced by the old masters and this connection has helped him achieve a high level of success as an illustrator. Before returning to his roots as a fine artist, Ricky Mujica created art for all the top publishing companies including Harper Collins, Harlequin, Bantam, and Scholastic. He has created art for major magazines including the New York Times Magazine and Ebony. His work has been seen in commercials for such products as Cherry 7-Up, on murals for Sony and Loews theaters, and on clothes for fashion designer Rachel Roy. His artwork has been represented at the Museum of American Illustration on several occasions
>>>

Click here for a gallery of Ricky's figurative work, or go here for more about the artist http://rickymujica.com/home/index.html

Left: a self-portrait. Right: "Multitasking" (2012). About the latter, Ricky writes, "Multitasking is my homage to the working mom. My muses are my wife, Heather Joy Harlan and my daughter, Violet Mujica. But this painting is every mother who nurtures life. I painted it with love and admiration."

Met Percent: Week Six [by Alec Bernstein]

Have We Met?

Suddenly the ancient gods are part elephant (Cambodia) gallery 245,  or have “groups” of arms (Myanmar) gallery 250, or are standing on a buffalo (Java) gallery 247. With so many cultures in close proximity, the differences are as surprising as the similarities.

The elephant Ganesh in Cambodia is the god for the removal of obstacles - an unusual power - guarding daily existence. Ganesh is a pan-Hindu “crossover” whose role changes in Buddhism and Hinduism throughout Asia. Today, Ganesh Tattoos are very popular.

“God sends the cold according to the coat.” - Montaigne

 

“What has become of the discs?”

In China, “Bi” - the notion of a covering sky (gaitian) that revolves around a central axis - is like an early form of the carpenter’s square. Often jade is the measure of the owner’s moral integrity.

The uses are many, and many uses, unknown.

Buddah Records first album was Safe as Milk by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band. 

CLEMO UTI – "THE WATER LILIES"
By Ring Lardner

CHARACTERS
PADRE, a priest.
SETHSO}
GETHSO} both twins.
WAYSHATTEN, a shepherd’s boy.
TWO CAPITALISTS 1
WAMA TAMMISCH, her daughter.
KLEMA, a janitor’s third daughter.
KEVELA, their mother, afterwards their aunt.

{TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: This show was written as if people were there to see it.}
1. NOTE: The two Capitalists don’t appear in this show.

ACT I

The Outskirts of a Parchesi Board. People are wondering what has become of the discs. They quit wondering and sing the following song.
CHORUS: What has become of the discs?
What has become of the discs?
We took them at our own risks,
But what has become of the discs?

(WAMA enters from an exclusive waffle parlor. She exits as if she had had waffles.)

ACTS II & III

(These two acts were thrown out because nothing seemed to happen.)

 

The Recumbent Pig

Pigs in Recumbent Position, China, 1st-2nd Century, Gallery 207 (top, bottom pigs not on view).

These recumbent pigs were often placed in the hands of the deceased to express the wish for wealth in the afterlife. If you got pigs (dead or alive), it’s good news . . .  wealth, abundance, plenty.

Met Percent: Week Five [by Alec Bernstein]

Streams and Mountains Without End

I did some Met mezzanine stuff, but now the second floor . . . 

China: The landscape in length: “The Mountains in Fog” is a scroll (1’ high and over 20’ long) and is “time over size”, “like time over strength” in “ruin lust” (see Week Two). The involvement of the viewer - walking the path - is a “different” form of  contemplation. 

The landscape in sheer size: “The Palace of Nine Perfections” [Yuan Jiang, Qing dynasty, 1691] is over 6’ high and 18’ long. It dominates the room; the impact is immediate. 

 

On the Importance of Being: Flowers and Birds

Exaltations of Nature. 

Vase with flowering plants and birds, China, late 17th-early 18th century, gallery 200.

Mankind . . . we regard as only one of Nature’s varied manifestations, and less worthy of appearing in the annals of Art than any other element: the fragile beauty of a flower or the graceful motions of a bird in flight rouses in our hearts, an emotion as poignant as any human loveliness or pain. - The Chinese Eye, Chiang Yee, 1935.

 

Moon Vase

Moon-shaped bottle, China, 18th century, “slippery stone”, gallery 200.

“Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do”. - Montaigne

 

The Celebration of Error

Kenzan-style Dish with Bamboo Leaves, Japan, 17th–18th century (not on view) kintsugi (kintsukuroi) gold lacquer repair.

Artist Uses Kintsugi to Mend Cracked Streets with Gold. https://mymodernmet.com/sidewalk-kintsukuroi-kintsugi-art/

 

Window onto Bamboo on a Rainy Day

“There are four principal ways of painting bamboo. In fair-weather, the leaves are spread out joyously; in rainy-weather, the leaves hang down despondently, in windy-weather, the leaves cross each other confusedly, and in the dew of early morning the leaves all point up vigorously.” - Henry P. Bowie, On the Laws of Japanese Painting, 1911.

Family apocrypha claims that at 2 I was bilingual in English and Japanese. Our gardener Mr. Yamamoto spoke no English, but our talks gave me an appreciation of bamboo, gardens, and the Japanese grid.

 

On Jane Freilicher (1924-2014) [by John Ashbery]

Jane Freilicher and John Ashbery at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1952. Photo: Walter Silver.

I’M WRITING THIS in a room that contains a number of pictures, mostly by women, as it happens. One is by Jane Freilicher, a still life in pastel that brings together a half-dozen miscellaneous objects, including a few roses that are having the floral equivalent of a bad hair day, a reddish-brown pamphlet that was probably an address book sent to customers by the phone company (remember those?) and a copy of Art News, flopping over the edge of the table, confronting the viewer, in the time-honored tradition of trompe-l'oeil perspective, but also subtly spoofing it. Jane gave the pastel to me once, perhaps to commemorate my becoming an editor at Art News in 1965 and moving back to New York after ten years in France.

Jane was in fact the first person I met in New York. When I arrived in June, 1949, fresh out of Harvard, my friend Kenneth Koch had said I could stay at his apartment while he was away; I had only to pick up the keys from Jane, who lived above him in a small walk-up building overlooking the Third Avenue El at Sixteenth street (one of Kenneth's favorite diversions was to don a rubber ape mask and gaze out the window at trains as they passed by). I rang the bell and Jane came down and invited me up to her place for a coffee. I didn't know much about contemporary art at the time, and had never heard of the exciting teacher Hans Hofmann, whom Jane and other painters I would soon meet had studied with. It turned out that Hofmann, an abstract expressionist, didn't try to impose his own ideas about art on his students, but somehow encouraged them to be more like themselves. I did notice a few small paintings of Jane's in her living room. They seem, in retrospect, funny, discreet, comforting—all things I associate with her.

• 

  Jane Freilicher, Untitled (Still Life with Copy of ARTnews), c.1963, pastel on paper, 23 x 18”.

• 

  Jane Freilicher, Portrait of John Ashbery, c.1968, oil on canvas, 20 x 18”.

On my desk is the announcement of her last show in September, 2014, a color lithograph still life called Roses and Chrysanthemums, 2014. It is more straightforwardly realistic than the Art News pastel, yet there are “mysteries of construction,” in Marianne Moore's phrase. For instance, one rose is so meticulously, magic-realistically rendered that it seems to belong to another picture, indeed to another century. But its “lovely companions,” more summarily sketched in, don't seem to notice or mind particularly. Each has a different agenda. Democracy rules.

That's what I love about her work—the democratic vistas. Her pictures seem to have come into being all by themselves—almost. The painter sort of showed them how to do it and then returned to her other work—fixing lunch, maybe, opening the mail, and coming back to check on the picture and make sure it hasn't gone off the rails. The resulting creations look unfinished and incredibly strong. I made this, each of them seems to say. The artist? Yeah, she helped a little, maybe even a lot. Okay, so it was her idea all along.

John Ashbery is a poet based in New York.

Jane Freilicher, Roses and Chrysanthemums, 2014, color lithograph, 27 x 34”.

 

From Artforum International (January 19, 2015).

 

For Summer: Florida Poets: Sean Sexton [by Emma Trelles]

stump garden, 9" x 12" etching on zinc, sean sexton

Nest Eggs
by Sean Sexton

Yesterday morning I prepared the roe of the mackerel queen
my son caught on a Saturday morning off-shore excursion.
I exhumed two swollen, pink, vein-bound bags from the silver
damsel, and sliced them into pieces to sauté.
I lament her demise, eggs never laid, fish lives
that never will be--eaten and relished with shame.

And the pea-hen that set five eggs in our dooryard
at the foot of St. Francis beneath the penumbra of a sapling
as we watched in awe of her sorry chosen nest, her
unfaltering devotion to the task. She'd stand
a moment, shift the eggs like a careful cook frying
chicken pieces, managing warmth, and some kind of order.

The curvature and needling devise of her beak revealed
its perfection for such, as did her shape, crouched
like morning fog upon a hollow. Day or night, rain or shine,
she stayed. In a downpour at dusk, we tried to help her,
swiped a shower curtain from the guest bath, to drape
in the branches of the tree, affixed with clothespins
and best of intention. We left a radio blaring through the night,

wakened to the crying, same as last month's hen that hatched
three fuzzy balls with legs she led half a week, feeding,
gathering them in when they strayed, until in a single
obliterating moment they were taken. For days she wandered
yelping, searching aimlessly. Now shells lie asunder
like smashed crockery. She's afoot and again, loose in the air--
the sound the world makes. 


Sean Sexton was born in Indian River County and grew up on his family's Treasure Hammock Ranch, eight miles west of Vero Beach, Florida.  He divides his time between taking care of a 600 acre cow-calf and seed stock cattle operation, painting, and writing.  He is married to artist Sharon Sexton; they have two grown children and live on their ranch in a house they built with their hands. He has kept journal-sketch books drawn from his life since 1973 and was awarded an Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the State of Florida in 2000-2001. He is the author of Waldo’s Mountain: A Brief History of a Small Elevation; (Waterview Press, 2001); Blood Writing, Poems (Anhinga Press, 2009), and The Empty Tomb (University of Alabama's Slash Pine Press, 2013). He was a presenter at the National Grazing Lands Coalition Conference in Orlando on the subject of Art and Agriculture. He has been a panelist at the Florida Literary Arts Coalition Conference in St. Augustine, FL, since 2012, and a regular performer at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, since 2011. He became inaugural Poet Laureate of Indian River County in 2016. "Nest Eggs" is from his most recent collection of poems, May Darkness Restore (Press 53, 2019).

 

Met Percent: Week Four [by Alec Bernstein]

Almost a Hero

I was given the middle initial “C” in memory of my grandmother Celia, who had not yet died. The “C” was a placeholder for a middle name I would select. At 15, I chose Clisthenes, the Athenian tyrant and founder of the first democracy. 

History contains so much quiet violence.

After 9/11, my “C” and my Clisthenes were removed by the Social Security Administration. Apparently my parents had not included  the “C” on the birth certificate, and I never filed a legal name change (who knew). 

“On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.”- Montaigne

 

Difficult Vocabulary

Catullus, Tibullus, Horace and Ginsberg [Carpe Diem, 1968-1972]. 

It was a difficult time. As teenage poets, Simon Schuchat and I published Buffalo Stamps, a poetry magazine, costs partially paid with my Bar Mitzvah money. We would take the Greyhound Bus to NY and search for poets. We found them, and kindly many gave us poems: Ted Berrigan, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Anselm Hollo, Lewis MacAdams, Bruce Andrews. Simon continued on (and continues today!).

Simon somehow got Allen Ginsberg’s phone number and got him to read at our high school. The condition was an airport pick-up and drop-off at his hotel. Simon agreed, not mentioning we weren't old enough to drive. A prize moment, the master reading in the gym, including what our faculty deemed “difficult” vocabulary. “Mouth my tongue touched once or twice all ash [ . . . ] youthful cock tip, curly pubis” - “On Neal’s Ashes” (1971).

Catullus, Carmen 16: My Harvard Loeb Classic edition includes the “difficult” lines  (“Fuck you, up your ass and in your mouth”) in Latin but excludes them in the English on the opposing page. Other editions presented this complete poem as a “fragment”. Ancient censorship! I was proud that our high school allowed vocabulary that Harvard Press did not.

Mesmerized then and now: the comfort of re-reading Kaddish and “Ave atque vale” (“Hail and farewell”) when my father passed away. Two musical tongues: one with and one without definite and indefinite articles. 

 

Honey, Milk, Wine and a Prayer

No matter how humanistic it got, much of the ancient arts served as entry tickets to the underworld.

“The Romans, by reason that this poor syllable death sounded so harshly to their ears and seemed so ominous, found out a way to soften and spin it out by a periphrasis, and instead of pronouncing such a one is dead, said, ‘Such a one has lived,’ or ‘Such a one has ceased to live’ . . . provided there was any mention of life in the case, though past, it carried yet some sound of consolation”. - Montaigne

 

Lonely?

I was drawn in: Greek sculptures: their anatomy, their balance, their contrapposto. But also static: perfect musculature but never tense. Repressed, idealized, or both? The abstraction was key. Ivins remarks there are few groups of interacting subjects. A singular wrestler. “The figures are frighteningly lonely.” *

I spent many years engrossed in the Classics. My shift from Beat poetry was triggered by the sounds of Virgil’s Bucolics in Latin. I stepped away from the contemporary: the counterculture, DC politics, and student riots, after my unplanned presence at the Chicago Democratic convention of 1968 (not to mention being arrested for high treason; I was 14). I entered abstraction and stayed there for a very long time.

Art and Geometry, William Ivins, Harvard University Press, 1946. (Curator of the Met’s Department of Prints, 1916 - 1946).

 

Every Poem is a Momentary Stay Against Confusion: Didi Jackson's "Moon Jar" [by Elizabeth Powell]

One of the questions poetry asks us is how do we live in a fractured world? Suicide rates in the United States over the past two decades have been on an alarming rise. According to the American Psychological Association there has been a 30 % rise between 2010 and 2016. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in our country. Mental health is still less understood and accepted and treated as is physical illness. The brain is a complex organ.

Poetry is art and art knows truths that science doesn't have terms for yet. Medical studies on the effectiveness of treating emotional disorders is mixed, but expressive writing in psychological therapies has long been used. Confessional poetry was birthed from the womb of psychiatry. Today, the medical humanities and the study of literature as a means to heal and understand is gaining traction, deepening understanding, and building bridges. 

Robert Frost once said that every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world. And so it is with Didi Jackson's forthcoming book of poems from Red Hen Press, Moon Jar. To heal from the terror and pain of surviving the suicide of a loved one is a tall order. Moon Jar seeks to find wholeness in the fissure through art and the natural world.

I spoke with Jackson about the title poem recently. Moon Jar is an ekphrastic poem that uses ancient Korean ceramics as a way to build a metaphor and allegory. The moon jar’s beauty lies in its imperfection. The surface of the moon jar is like the surface of skin, full of various markings and freckles, but perhaps the better for it. The moon jar defines beauty to include imperfection. Here, ekphrasis understands that nothing is perfect. It reminds me of quilters of yesteryear who used to make sure to have one imperfection in their quilts because only God is perfect. 

The idea of modesty in the act of creation informs the tone of this achingly beautiful lyric. The finely hewn couplets and elegant syntax draws us down the page using assonance and shorter lines. The poem has a quiet power in its own testimony. The speaker is lit up by the moon’s nudge toward epiphany, which allows the speaker to merge with all color, all light, a kind of redemption that fills the fissure. A momentary stay.

Moon Jar 

My wedding ring is missing
one small diamond, and 

I like it that way: a reminder
of the imperfect in 

all of us, like that keyhole
size of grief that remains crystalline. 

In Korea, ceramicists for centuries
have made moon jars: testimony

to the virtue of modesty: asymmetrical
warping on the wheel, slumping 

in the pine-heated kiln,
impurities when fired — black

dots and pocks on its surface
like freckles on skin.

I have been kept awake
so many nights by the moon:

its pull on the pines and night birds
and who, like a monk, keeps a sharp order of time.

Never a perfect sphere,
the milky moon jar joins two 

clay hemispheres into one. 
When the light of the moon

finds me, I am the color
of everything in the winter night. 

                (originally appeared in Southern Indiana Review)

EP: Suicide continues to be a major killer in the United States. Your forthcoming book “Moon Jar” speaks to the suicide of your second husband. How did you navigate the difficult terrain of healing and writing? Artistically, were their beacons of light that lead the way?

DJ: So many who take their lives believe there is some part of themselves that is flawed. Maybe someday we will come to value each other exactly as we are. I took consolation and inspiration in the works of a number of poets and artists who served as guides in my writing of Moon Jar. I found myself looking for poets who write about their grief, whether it be from the loss of suicide or not. Ruth Stone, Matt Rasmussen, Mary Jo Bang, Nick Flynn, Edward Hirsch, Anna Akhmatova, Beth Bachman all served as inspirations as writers who have seen the darkest of days and moved through that darkness with their poems. Just after my husband’s suicide, I was especially buoyed by Kevin Young’s anthology on grief, The Art of Losing. Just to know that I wasn’t alone in facing what seemed to be an impossible recovery was incredibly beneficial. Visual artists helped too, modern and abstract artists especially Alberto Giacometti, Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, and Richard Serra. In his essay, “Why Modern Art Matters Now,” Kirk Varnedoe argues that modern art “is a source not of absolutes and enduring truths, but of uncertainties constantly exacerbated, of pieties constantly exploded” and therefore opens itself to a range of human experiences. The work of writing the poems in Moon Jar became a way for me to process what had happened and a way for me to begin to recover by investigating  my own range of emotions. 

EP: In the title poem, Moon Jar, the speaker is reckoning with the imperfect life and how to live it. The moon jar itself is an object that represents a larger trope. I know you are also a teacher of art history, but what made you want to write about the Korean ceramic moon jar and how it relates to the overall narrative of the collection?

DJ: I taught art history for almost ten years. Recently, I was teaching a course on the intersection of language and visual art. Before I could introduce my students to any type of art, I wanted to offer several good reasons why we should look at art in the first place. The moon jar, as Alain de Botton and John Armstrong mention in their book Art as Therapy, is a great example of morality taught through visual art. They ascertain that art can serve many functions. Moon jars are made by joining two hemispheres of clay. That metaphor alone is so beautiful. My poem mentions a wedding ring, a western symbol of unity. But, what I love most about the moon jar is that it is beloved for the imperfections that come from combining the two halves, firing in the kiln often adds blemishes and spots. In a time when we are obsessed with perfection, this idea is refreshing. 

 

Didi Jackson is the author of Moon Jar (Red Hen Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New England Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. 

Met Percent: Week Three [by Alec Bernstein]

Almost Gods

Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.” - Montaigne

Entering the galleries of Greece and Rome was startling, coming as I did from Egyptian art. Jackal heads in profile on frontal torsos had become familiar, normal. 

But a new normal arrived: geometry, anatomical form, and gods “like us”. “Numberless are the world’s wonders, but none / more wonderful than man . . .”      - Sophocles, Antigone

 

“Divine Proportion”

500-400 BCE. Big Math. Discovered, lost, and rediscovered . . . “Things which coincide with one another are equal one to another.” - Euclid

The original Met logo was based on a woodcut by Friar Luca Pacioli (1445–1517). He taught mathematics to Leonardo da Vinci, and Leonardo illustrated his “On the Divine Proportion”.

You get an actual measure of golden ratio proportion and “beauty” using the golden ratio face calculator that is included in PhiMatrix golden ratio design software (2012).

3G

“The Three Graces, so popular in their time . . . that they appear on mosaics, frescoes, sarcophagi, silver tableware, terra-cotta oil lamps, personal objects such as engraved gems, and even coins.” Roman art, gallery 169, MetText

Greece and Rome continue: Versace’s Medusa; Super Bowl Roman numerals (I - LIII); the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials; and of course the precedent for txting: the abbreviation. 

a.k.a., a.m., p.m., i.e., e.g., p.s., (sic), vs., etc.

Laws of the Folds

Veils in stone. Glorious in execution. Whenever I feel that the artistry in representing the fold is underrated, I look to George Bridgman. I used to give copies of Drawing the Draped Figure: The Seven Laws of the Folds to many design colleagues.

Although “not on view”, the annotation of the folds of an evening dress in the Met refers to Oscar Wilde’s principles of dress: "I am not proposing any antiquarian revival of ancient costume, but trying merely to point out the right laws of dress, laws which are dictated by art and not by archaeology, by science and not by fashion; and just as the best work of art in our days is that which combines classic grace with absolute reality, from continuation of the Greek principles of beauty . . .  will come, I feel certain, the costumes of the future." 

 

Figure/Ground

Q: What is it about Greek figure that makes me crazy?

A: It grounds what will become neoclassic - the “master drawing” tradition I love.

 

For Summer: Florida Poets: Angela Narciso Torres [by Emma Trelles]

flamingo hammock palm, 24 x 24 in. oil on canvas, eleanor blair

Harvesting the Heart
by Angela Narciso Torres

                                    In Florida, I shall eat a palm seed and see if that’ll grow a new heart for me.

                                                                                                                                    -D.H. Lawrence
Indeed, swallowing a seed seems the better option.
For stealing a palm’s heart from its solitary stem
is back-breaking work and spells certain death
for the tree. The part you can eat, otherwise known
as swamp cabbage, lobster of vegetables, or
burglar’s thigh, lies deep in the green trunk between
woody bark and where the fronds begin. You’ll need
a machete to work down the trunk, cutting away
fibrous layers one at a time, each about the weight
of a small child. You’ll want to give up after the third
or fourth layer. Don’t stop. Nearer the core it’s denser,
sap-drenched, and very tender. You’d be surprised,
despite how much you’ve uncovered—arms sore,
fingers splintered—the sheer size of that heart.

 

Angela Narciso Torres  is the author of Blood Orange, winner of the Willow Book Literature Award/Poetry. Recent work appears in POETRY, Missouri Review, and TriQuarterly. Her chapbook, To the Bone, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications and her second full length collection, What Happens Is Neither, from Four Way Books.  A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Ragdale Foundation. She resides in South Florida where she joins the 2020 Palm Beach Poetry Festival faculty as a manuscript consultant.

Summer studio shots with Mary Ann Strandell... [by Katie Peyton Hofstadter]

This month, I am locked in the shimmery construction sites of Mary Ann Strandell. I snapped these process shots in her studio, and then we planted a geranium border in her garden. Her husband Michael Rees also creates fantasies: giant AR-enabled inflatables into which you can project your dreams or nightmares.

I like her paintings at this stage, when it looks like they could collapse. The light is gnawing at the western edge of the scaffolding; the light is smashed into the sixth floor balcony. It is drippy with life juices. At this moment, the painting still believes it can grow up to be an astronaut. (Is the painting female? Will there will be a space suit in its size?)

Mary Ann Strandell
Image 1: Tower/construction/Tribeca, Image 2: Tower/cell

The Met Percent: Week Two [by Alec Bernstein]

Almost a Face

Faces are distant, a bit melancholy, with a youthful, somewhat automatic beauty”. Egyptian art, gallery 121, MetText 

This is the beginning of semi-circular eyes. Semi is sufficient, more than sufficient in these halls of faces.

Some faces are more distant than others . . .

 

Ruin Lust

Wooden boats to sail to the afterlife. Fragments of jewelry. Wondrous arrangements of shards. Marred lotus blossoms. Photographs when sepia reigned. 

Ruins, real or confected, embody "the triumph of time over strength, a melancholy but not unpleasant thought". - Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 1762.

‘But the closer I came to the ruins . . . the more I imagined myself amidst the remains of our civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe.” - W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 1995.

“I see a day in the future when the world as we know it has ended and the only reason I am able to survive is the experience I have gained playing these [post apocalyptic role playing] games. Crazy, I know but a man is allowed to dream right?” - Bill Wilson, [PARPG Review], Appauls, 2019. See Frostpunk, Horizon Zero Dawn, Neverdark, Wasteland 2.

 

Not Documented

“With time and custom a man doth acquaint and enure himself to all strangeness; but the more I frequent and know myself, the more my deformitie astonieth and the less I understand myself.” - Montaigne

 

On Entering the “Afterwork“

From the galleries 100-138 covering the Kingdoms of Egypt emerge the first learnings. The slow non-directed viewings of these relics allow memory to inform the present. What will my “function” be in the afterwork? I start at 65 this intuitive tracing . . . my Papyrus of Alec.

 

4.5% Met*

*At this writing, rooms 139-149 seem to be missing. So far, not one of the entry staff can explain the missing rooms or room numbers. These will be investigated.