History, the arts, and pandemics
Paintings, literature, and films, amongst other forms of art, are repositories of a society’s collective memory. They have much to tell us about prior pandemics, their impact, and what we can learn from these impressions today.
“Ars longa, vitas brevis” (Art is long, life is short) is an aphorism attributed to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates.
It has been said that art imitates life; yet, we can look back through the annals of history and see that in fact today, life imitates art, offering us a sense of déjà vu. There have been various pandemics in the past, and we should see the current coronavirus crisis in perspective, while we seclude ourselves from the world around us.
The past and the present
The Plague of Justinian in the 5th century affected Constantinople and led to over 30 million deaths, half the world’s population; pestilence was recorded at the time of the Prophet (peace be upon him and his family), with perhaps 25,000 dying during the plague of Emmaus (Syria), including some of his Companions; the Black Death of the 14th century caused 200 million deaths; smallpox eradicated 90 percent of the indigenous people of the Americas, allowing Cortez to conquer the Aztecs; and AIDS led to 35 million lives being lost.
Many historic catastrophes have been depicted by artists, perhaps the most famous and vivid canvas being “The Triumph of Death,” painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1562, a time between the plagues and wars that engulfed Europe. Many others have painted scenes of epidemics illustrating the despair and helplessness experienced at such times. We are fortunate that our current situation, while challenging, is no comparison to those of times past, as we have modern medicine, facilities, and hope — commodities unavailable then.
“April is the cruelest month,” wrote poet T.S. Eliot in his masterpiece, “The Waste Land.” He wrote after the First World War, when millions had suffered and perished from the ravages of battle and the 1917 influenza pandemic, misnamed the “Spanish Flu.” Europeans at the time thought they indeed faced the apocalypse.
During the next war, Albert Camus’ 1947 novel, The Plague, described an Algerian town afflicted and quarantined a century earlier due to cholera. It has been interpreted as an allegory, comparing the devastation caused by uncontrollable forces of nature to those caused by humanity out of control.
That same year, Iraqi poet Nazik al-Malaika wrote about the agony of cholera engulfing Cairo, a grief-stricken city with 10,000 deaths. It is instructive to read her poem and contrast the description to our own times, despite our healthcare system being strained to capacity.
“It is dawn.
Listen to the footsteps of the passerby,
in the silence of the dawn.
Listen, look at the mourning processions,
ten, twenty, no… countless.
…
Everywhere lies a corpse, mourned
without a eulogy or a moment of silence.
…
Humanity protests against the crimes of death.
…
Even the gravedigger has succumbed,
the muezzin is dead,
and who will eulogize the dead?
…
O Egypt, my heart is torn by the ravages of death.”
Tripoli, Libya, was also afflicted by the plague in 1785. Miss Tully, an English resident at the time, wrote about fumigation and social distancing, as well as the spread of the disease to Sfax, Tunisia, where 15,000 perished — half the town’s population.
Even earlier, in 1349, Syrian historian Ibn al-Wardi, in “An Essay on the Report of the Pestilence,” described the Black Death with an eerie similarity to what we face today.
The plague began in the land of darkness. China was not preserved from it. The plague infected the Indians in India, the Sind, the Persians, and the Crimea. The plague destroyed mankind in Cairo. It stilled all movement in Alexandria. Then, the plague turned to Upper Egypt. The plague attacked Gaza, trapped Sidon, and Beirut. Next, it directed its shooting arrows to Damascus. There the plague sat like a lion on a throne and swayed with power, killing daily one thousand or more and destroying the population.
Al-Wardi ends with a prayer: “Oh God, it is acting by Your command. Lift this from us. It happens where You wish; keep the plague from us.” He was to succumb to the disease himself two days after completing his work.
The prescience of film
Film buffs may be familiar with some recent productions that have dealt with imaginary epidemics. They include the 1995 film, Outbreak, starring Dustin Hoffman, and Contagion, which describes societal collapse following a virus pandemic, one of the latest in this genre. It does, however, end on a positive note, with the line, “Society is better off in a plague when everyone works together and cares for one another, and tries to muddle through a nightmare.” Certainly, an apt description of what we are witnessing today, as we grasp at numerous potential solutions for salvation.
The acclaimed South Korean film, My Secret Terrius, mentions coronavirus and depicts social distancing as a prophylactic. And the popular animated children’s film, Tangled, tells us that Rapunzel lived in the kingdom of Corona, was kidnapped by a witch, and imprisoned in a tower. Children today will relate to the main character in this tale: claustrophobic and unable to play outside. This story may have its origins in the story of Rudabeh, found in the Persian epic, the Shahnameh of the 11th century.
History repeated
“There is no present or future — only the past, happening over and over again now,” wrote playwright Eugene O'Neill. It certainly seems so, as we recall bubonic plague, tuberculosis, typhoid, cholera, the “Spanish Flu,” polio, AIDS, SARS, and Ebola — just a few of the epidemics that have decimated populations in recent memory and recorded in great detail in historical accounts, as well as in art and literature.
In our globalised world, the threat of disease is even more palpable now, as populations cross frontiers in a matter of hours, perhaps carrying with them invisible microbes.
We can recall the leadership of Mawlana Sultan Mahomed Shah during the bubonic plague that engulfed Bombay in 1897. He provided facilities and supported the research of a vaccine there that eventually countered the disease. As the public was wary of the vaccine, he led by example, writing in his Memoirs: “It was in my power to set an example. I had myself publicly inoculated, and I took care to see that the news of what I had done was spread as far as possible and as quickly as possible.” Emboldened by his example, countless others in the city followed.
The threat of pandemics was noted by Mawlana Hazar Imam in his 2010 LaFontaine-Baldwin lecture, when he said, “Almost everything now seems to ‘flow’ globally — people and images, money and credit, goods and services, microbes and viruses, pollution and armaments, crime and terror.” The veracity of that observation is clear.
Lessons from the pandemic
What do these impressions of life and death by artists, poets, and novelists inform us about conditions today? Perhaps the most important lesson is that of humility, that nature is a force far greater than the ability of humanity to control and mould to its will. Whether it be weather-related events, natural disasters, or epidemics, we have limited responses.
We have been given a collective shock with the realisation that we are in fact not masters of the universe, and our ability to determine the future is not all in our control. However, there are actions that can be taken to mitigate disasters for the human race and its future. This may be a warning to show greater concern for the environment, as Pope Francis suggested recently. We do understand the causes of environmental degradation, and that the environment must be protected and nurtured, as it is the source of life, from the water we consume, to the trees that offer us shade and the clean air we breathe.
In our march for progress, humans have polluted the atmosphere, the rivers, and the seas. Yet, an unseen microbe can be the cause of destruction, affecting anyone and everyone, from the leaders of countries, to the rich and poor alike, and even to the remotest tribe, the Yanomami, hidden deep in the Amazon forest. Indeed, scientists have suggested a link between deforestation and the rise in infectious diseases, of which the Amazon region is a prime example.
Today’s heroes
Traditional wars are fought and won with soldiers, superior weapons, military strategy, and tenacity. None of these are useful for today’s global threat. It is the doctors, nurses, emergency personnel, farm workers picking vegetables and fruit, delivery drivers bringing us supplies, and the grocery store staff on the frontlines, risking their lives in a war to save the rest of us, sometimes losing their own. They are the soldiers of today, heroes and heroines who deserve medals in their effort to fight this scourge, and who offer us hope.
Our own Ismaili healthcare workers all over the world are a part of this contingent of soldiers, working in the emergency rooms and ICU wards. Others from our global Jamat have offered personal protective equipment from their stores, made and donated masks, as well as food and needed items to hospitals, neighbours, and others. We are all in this together.
This crisis will end but it will not be forgotten, as there are lessons here for future generations. And because artists and novelists are keen sensors who reflect the social conditions of their time, this episode in history, with its impact, failings, successes, and new soldiers, will be revisited, recalled, and immortalised, both in word and paint — for life may be short but art transcends time.
https://the.ismaili/global/news/feature ... -pandemics
General Art & Architecture of Interest
A Cog in the Machine of Creation
The many roles involved in producing a film rule out the notion of a single, indispensable artist.
As an artist, I am a creator, though referring to myself that way makes me somewhat uncomfortable. For most of my life, the word “creator” has meant the Creator of all things, especially in the native tradition, and I would not by any means compare my meager efforts at creation to Creation.
But art is truly an act of creation. And creation is an act of art.
When we create art, it’s a product of three components: the mind, the heart and our past experiences. As an actor, sculptor and author, I have found that this interconnectedness is a large part of why art matters.
The mind, of course, is where initial ideas are conceived, whether through whimsy, inspiration or suggestion. What matters at the inception of creation is deciding whether an idea is worth pursuing. The heart then reveals to us how we feel about the idea, and we again ponder the worthiness of the pursuit. Past experiences help us weigh the personal significance of the creation we are considering. As artists, we ask ourselves: Will it serve a purpose beyond our own need to create? Does it need to?
As an actor, I have at times wondered whether acting is a true art form. Is an actor merely an interpreter of an idea created in a screenplay, script or play? Is performance in this context merely a craft, or is it an act of creation itself?
In this context, the answer might seem simple: The writer is the artist, the creator. The actor is the journeyman who interprets the plan, the story to be told.
But the actor must also rely on many other people to do his work: makeup artists, hair stylists, costume designers, directors. Photography and set design are also prime considerations. The many roles involved in producing a film rule out the notion of a sole creator or artist. The actor becomes a cog in a larger machine of creation. And each cog is an absolute necessity.
As for the question of whether an actor is a creator or an interpreter, I lean toward considering myself an indispensable craftsman tasked with a particular act of creation: a performance worthy of the story being told.
While the original idea may have been created by another, it falls to the performer to fit the situation.
Filmmaking is an especially collaborative function, and acting encompasses a bit of craftsmanship. “Dances With Wolves,” for instance, the 1990 film in which I played a Pawnee warrior, required the coordination of thousands of bison for a hunting scene, and battle scenes featured dozens of riders on horseback, along with actors doing their part to bring to life a unique story. I had to learn some of the Pawnee language to better portray my character. In fact, in my career I have spoken some 20 languages for various roles, including one that did not exist: I was asked to work with linguists crafting the language of the Na’vi, the Indigenous culture in “Avatar,” because I spoke Cherokee and had studied phonetic languages, a valuable part of my past that I brought to that film.
As a Native American actor, I’ve remained keenly aware that the wars and invasions that ravaged native populations throughout the Americas have never really ended. That knowledge, along with my own past experience, enabled me to empathetically portray characters like the Apache warrior Geronimo onscreen, and to better convey the deep sense of injustice that the real Geronimo faced.
While as an actor I’m either an arty craftsman or a crafty artist, adding and building on another’s idea, as a sculptor carving stone I find things a bit different. I remove rather than build, shaping and carving, transforming a stone from its original organic form into something familiar and pleasing to the eye. These carvings satisfy both my need to create and control the process as much as the stone allows; an added factor is the journey of creating something unique. That these pieces of art are appreciated is, of course, additionally gratifying.
I can say the same for book writing: “The Adventures of Billy Bean,” a children’s book I wrote in Cherokee and English many years ago, was also an act of creating characters in my mind and heart, and rooted in past experiences. I hope that the stories in the book provided entertainment and an uplifting message about life for young people becoming acquainted with the world around them.
If sculpting makes me a sculptor, then so be it. If writing makes me an author, then so be it. With minds, hearts and pasts, we all commit acts of creation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The many roles involved in producing a film rule out the notion of a single, indispensable artist.
As an artist, I am a creator, though referring to myself that way makes me somewhat uncomfortable. For most of my life, the word “creator” has meant the Creator of all things, especially in the native tradition, and I would not by any means compare my meager efforts at creation to Creation.
But art is truly an act of creation. And creation is an act of art.
When we create art, it’s a product of three components: the mind, the heart and our past experiences. As an actor, sculptor and author, I have found that this interconnectedness is a large part of why art matters.
The mind, of course, is where initial ideas are conceived, whether through whimsy, inspiration or suggestion. What matters at the inception of creation is deciding whether an idea is worth pursuing. The heart then reveals to us how we feel about the idea, and we again ponder the worthiness of the pursuit. Past experiences help us weigh the personal significance of the creation we are considering. As artists, we ask ourselves: Will it serve a purpose beyond our own need to create? Does it need to?
As an actor, I have at times wondered whether acting is a true art form. Is an actor merely an interpreter of an idea created in a screenplay, script or play? Is performance in this context merely a craft, or is it an act of creation itself?
In this context, the answer might seem simple: The writer is the artist, the creator. The actor is the journeyman who interprets the plan, the story to be told.
But the actor must also rely on many other people to do his work: makeup artists, hair stylists, costume designers, directors. Photography and set design are also prime considerations. The many roles involved in producing a film rule out the notion of a sole creator or artist. The actor becomes a cog in a larger machine of creation. And each cog is an absolute necessity.
As for the question of whether an actor is a creator or an interpreter, I lean toward considering myself an indispensable craftsman tasked with a particular act of creation: a performance worthy of the story being told.
While the original idea may have been created by another, it falls to the performer to fit the situation.
Filmmaking is an especially collaborative function, and acting encompasses a bit of craftsmanship. “Dances With Wolves,” for instance, the 1990 film in which I played a Pawnee warrior, required the coordination of thousands of bison for a hunting scene, and battle scenes featured dozens of riders on horseback, along with actors doing their part to bring to life a unique story. I had to learn some of the Pawnee language to better portray my character. In fact, in my career I have spoken some 20 languages for various roles, including one that did not exist: I was asked to work with linguists crafting the language of the Na’vi, the Indigenous culture in “Avatar,” because I spoke Cherokee and had studied phonetic languages, a valuable part of my past that I brought to that film.
As a Native American actor, I’ve remained keenly aware that the wars and invasions that ravaged native populations throughout the Americas have never really ended. That knowledge, along with my own past experience, enabled me to empathetically portray characters like the Apache warrior Geronimo onscreen, and to better convey the deep sense of injustice that the real Geronimo faced.
While as an actor I’m either an arty craftsman or a crafty artist, adding and building on another’s idea, as a sculptor carving stone I find things a bit different. I remove rather than build, shaping and carving, transforming a stone from its original organic form into something familiar and pleasing to the eye. These carvings satisfy both my need to create and control the process as much as the stone allows; an added factor is the journey of creating something unique. That these pieces of art are appreciated is, of course, additionally gratifying.
I can say the same for book writing: “The Adventures of Billy Bean,” a children’s book I wrote in Cherokee and English many years ago, was also an act of creating characters in my mind and heart, and rooted in past experiences. I hope that the stories in the book provided entertainment and an uplifting message about life for young people becoming acquainted with the world around them.
If sculpting makes me a sculptor, then so be it. If writing makes me an author, then so be it. With minds, hearts and pasts, we all commit acts of creation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Erdogan Talks of Making Hagia Sophia a Mosque Again, to International Dismay
The World Heritage site was once a potent symbol of Christian-Muslim rivalry, and it could become one once more.
ISTANBUL — Since it was built in the sixth century, changing hands from empire to empire, Hagia Sophia has been a Byzantine cathedral, a mosque under the Ottomans and finally a museum, making it one of the world’s most potent symbols of Christian-Muslim rivalry and of Turkey’s more recent devotion to secularism.
Now President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is making moves to declare it a working mosque once more, fulfilling a dream for himself, his supporters and conservative Muslims far beyond Turkey’s shores — but threatening to set off an international furor.
The very idea of changing the monument’s status has escalated tensions with Turkey’s longtime rival, Greece; upset Christians around the world; and set off a chorus of dismay from political and religious leaders as diverse as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Mr. Erdogan’s opponents say he has raised the issue of restoring Hagia Sophia as a mosque every time he has faced a political crisis, using it to stir supporters in his nationalist and conservative religious base.
But given the severity of the challenges Mr. Erdogan faces after 18 years at the helm of Turkish politics, there may be more reason than ever to take the talk seriously. Having lost Istanbul in local elections last year, the president has watched the standing of his party continue to slide in the polls as the Covid-19 pandemic has further undone a vulnerable economy.
On July 2, a Turkish administrative court ruled on whether to restore Hagia Sophia, or Ayasofya, its Turkish name, as a mosque, and revoke an 80-year-old decree that declared it a museum under Turkey’s secular state. The ruling will be announced within two weeks, and then Mr. Erdogan is expected to make the final decision.
For more than 25 years since he became mayor of Istanbul, Mr. Erdogan has been working to leave his stamp on his beloved home city. He cleaned up the Golden Horn, built bridges and tunnels across the famous waters and placed new mosques at the most prominent sites.
But it is Hagia Sophia, one of the oldest and architecturally one of the most impressive cathedrals in the world, that commands pride of place on the historical peninsula.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The World Heritage site was once a potent symbol of Christian-Muslim rivalry, and it could become one once more.
ISTANBUL — Since it was built in the sixth century, changing hands from empire to empire, Hagia Sophia has been a Byzantine cathedral, a mosque under the Ottomans and finally a museum, making it one of the world’s most potent symbols of Christian-Muslim rivalry and of Turkey’s more recent devotion to secularism.
Now President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is making moves to declare it a working mosque once more, fulfilling a dream for himself, his supporters and conservative Muslims far beyond Turkey’s shores — but threatening to set off an international furor.
The very idea of changing the monument’s status has escalated tensions with Turkey’s longtime rival, Greece; upset Christians around the world; and set off a chorus of dismay from political and religious leaders as diverse as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Mr. Erdogan’s opponents say he has raised the issue of restoring Hagia Sophia as a mosque every time he has faced a political crisis, using it to stir supporters in his nationalist and conservative religious base.
But given the severity of the challenges Mr. Erdogan faces after 18 years at the helm of Turkish politics, there may be more reason than ever to take the talk seriously. Having lost Istanbul in local elections last year, the president has watched the standing of his party continue to slide in the polls as the Covid-19 pandemic has further undone a vulnerable economy.
On July 2, a Turkish administrative court ruled on whether to restore Hagia Sophia, or Ayasofya, its Turkish name, as a mosque, and revoke an 80-year-old decree that declared it a museum under Turkey’s secular state. The ruling will be announced within two weeks, and then Mr. Erdogan is expected to make the final decision.
For more than 25 years since he became mayor of Istanbul, Mr. Erdogan has been working to leave his stamp on his beloved home city. He cleaned up the Golden Horn, built bridges and tunnels across the famous waters and placed new mosques at the most prominent sites.
But it is Hagia Sophia, one of the oldest and architecturally one of the most impressive cathedrals in the world, that commands pride of place on the historical peninsula.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/worl ... 778d3e6de3
To deface a monument is to engage critically with history
The head of a statue of Sir John A. MacDonald is shown torn down following a demonstration in Montreal, on Aug. 29, 2020.
Take it from a historian: If heads are going to roll, it’s preferable they be cast in bronze.
We tend to have inconsistent opinions regarding the toppling of monuments. When they’re brought down by mobs of jubilant Iraqis or Eastern Europeans, we celebrate the triumph of liberty and freedom of expression – our core democratic values. But when it happens here at home, it’s all anarchy and cancel culture.
If it rubs you the wrong way to know that people might compare aspects of such tyrants to Sir John A. Macdonald, whose statue was pulled down in Montreal by protesters this weekend, you’re likely not Indigenous. We tend to have a remarkable ability in this country to identify brutality abroad, but also to ignore it here at home in our own history.
Chalk it up to a maddeningly persistent national inferiority complex, but we often make false idols of our forebears. Statue fetishists insist that removing them erases history, and with this thinking, we’re left with a pedophile watching over tourists in Vancouver, a slave owner welcoming university students in Montreal and vast swaths of Kingston dedicated to the man chiefly responsible for our national shame.
If I had to hazard a guess, up until Saturday most Canadians likely had no idea that the largest and most elaborate monument to Macdonald is in, of all places, downtown Montreal. Fewer still know that the statue had been decapitated once before, in the wake of the stillborn Charlottetown Accord, and left headless for a couple years in the mid-1990s. It was more than a smidge ironic to now see Quebec nationalists of the hard and soft varieties jumping on the outrage bandwagon, demanding that order must be maintained.
Indeed, most of us likely don’t think twice about monuments until someone defaces them. Most Canadians were surely surprised to learn of a monument in Oakville, Ont., devoted to Nazi collaborators after it was vandalized in June – and shocked when Halton Police opened a since-suspended hate-crime investigation into the incident. Meanwhile, our leaders will appeal for calm and dialogue on matters of contested commemoration, but they will rarely admit that, left alone, monuments often say very little. Indeed, for the most part, monuments and memorials are little more than park decorations. Defenders of the status quo may swear that monuments are history incarnate, but without such instances of direct action and public participation, no conversation actually occurs.
It only took toppling a single statue and suddenly we’re all talking about Macdonald’s legacy. A blockbuster biopic wouldn’t generate half as much discussion. And it’s a discussion we desperately need to have. Macdonald played a central role in the dispossession, disenfranchisement and damn-near disappearance of the Indigenous of this land. Over a century-and-a-half later, we’re still coming to terms with the mess he created. Late biographer Richard Gwyn perhaps accidentally demonstrated the extent of Canadians’ aversion to historical complexity when he speciously stated “no Macdonald, no Canada,” as if such reductionism was wildly illuminating.
The nation has changed considerably since Confederation. Our monuments? Less so. A considerable bulk of our nation’s historic markers and monuments predate the Second World War and represent a particularly imperial interpretation of our history. Indeed, when the monument in question was unveiled in Montreal in 1895, Macdonald was lauded not so much for founding Canada but for his loyal service to the British Empire.
Meanwhile, the recently renovated city park in which the Macdonald monument sits contains no contemporary public art and says almost nothing about Canadian history. In doing so, however, Place du Canada unintentionally speaks volumes about the nation. It is a large open space, paved charcoal-grey and adorned with reminders of death, war and empire. Along the plaza’s edge are cannons from the Crimean War, the Macdonald monument, the city’s cenotaph, and an arbitrary howitzer, pointing at nothing in particular. Surrounded by old baggage, this great grey emptiness awaits a statement about who we truly are and what we hope to be.
We are long overdue for new commemoration. Statuary does little to inform; rather than illuminate, it tends to occlude historical reality by literally putting people on pedestals.
We have the means and the imagination to do much better. All that’s missing is the courage to step boldly forward, accepting that we come not from greatness, but aspire to it.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
The head of a statue of Sir John A. MacDonald is shown torn down following a demonstration in Montreal, on Aug. 29, 2020.
Take it from a historian: If heads are going to roll, it’s preferable they be cast in bronze.
We tend to have inconsistent opinions regarding the toppling of monuments. When they’re brought down by mobs of jubilant Iraqis or Eastern Europeans, we celebrate the triumph of liberty and freedom of expression – our core democratic values. But when it happens here at home, it’s all anarchy and cancel culture.
If it rubs you the wrong way to know that people might compare aspects of such tyrants to Sir John A. Macdonald, whose statue was pulled down in Montreal by protesters this weekend, you’re likely not Indigenous. We tend to have a remarkable ability in this country to identify brutality abroad, but also to ignore it here at home in our own history.
Chalk it up to a maddeningly persistent national inferiority complex, but we often make false idols of our forebears. Statue fetishists insist that removing them erases history, and with this thinking, we’re left with a pedophile watching over tourists in Vancouver, a slave owner welcoming university students in Montreal and vast swaths of Kingston dedicated to the man chiefly responsible for our national shame.
If I had to hazard a guess, up until Saturday most Canadians likely had no idea that the largest and most elaborate monument to Macdonald is in, of all places, downtown Montreal. Fewer still know that the statue had been decapitated once before, in the wake of the stillborn Charlottetown Accord, and left headless for a couple years in the mid-1990s. It was more than a smidge ironic to now see Quebec nationalists of the hard and soft varieties jumping on the outrage bandwagon, demanding that order must be maintained.
Indeed, most of us likely don’t think twice about monuments until someone defaces them. Most Canadians were surely surprised to learn of a monument in Oakville, Ont., devoted to Nazi collaborators after it was vandalized in June – and shocked when Halton Police opened a since-suspended hate-crime investigation into the incident. Meanwhile, our leaders will appeal for calm and dialogue on matters of contested commemoration, but they will rarely admit that, left alone, monuments often say very little. Indeed, for the most part, monuments and memorials are little more than park decorations. Defenders of the status quo may swear that monuments are history incarnate, but without such instances of direct action and public participation, no conversation actually occurs.
It only took toppling a single statue and suddenly we’re all talking about Macdonald’s legacy. A blockbuster biopic wouldn’t generate half as much discussion. And it’s a discussion we desperately need to have. Macdonald played a central role in the dispossession, disenfranchisement and damn-near disappearance of the Indigenous of this land. Over a century-and-a-half later, we’re still coming to terms with the mess he created. Late biographer Richard Gwyn perhaps accidentally demonstrated the extent of Canadians’ aversion to historical complexity when he speciously stated “no Macdonald, no Canada,” as if such reductionism was wildly illuminating.
The nation has changed considerably since Confederation. Our monuments? Less so. A considerable bulk of our nation’s historic markers and monuments predate the Second World War and represent a particularly imperial interpretation of our history. Indeed, when the monument in question was unveiled in Montreal in 1895, Macdonald was lauded not so much for founding Canada but for his loyal service to the British Empire.
Meanwhile, the recently renovated city park in which the Macdonald monument sits contains no contemporary public art and says almost nothing about Canadian history. In doing so, however, Place du Canada unintentionally speaks volumes about the nation. It is a large open space, paved charcoal-grey and adorned with reminders of death, war and empire. Along the plaza’s edge are cannons from the Crimean War, the Macdonald monument, the city’s cenotaph, and an arbitrary howitzer, pointing at nothing in particular. Surrounded by old baggage, this great grey emptiness awaits a statement about who we truly are and what we hope to be.
We are long overdue for new commemoration. Statuary does little to inform; rather than illuminate, it tends to occlude historical reality by literally putting people on pedestals.
We have the means and the imagination to do much better. All that’s missing is the courage to step boldly forward, accepting that we come not from greatness, but aspire to it.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
To Protest Colonialism, He Takes Artifacts From Museums
Mwazulu Diyabanza will appear in a Paris court this month after he tried to make off with an African treasure he says was looted. France and its attitude to the colonial past will be on trial, too.
PARIS — Early one afternoon in June, the Congolese activist Mwazulu Diyabanza walked into the Quai Branly Museum, the riverfront institution that houses treasures from France’s former colonies, and bought a ticket. Together with four associates, he wandered around the Paris museum’s African collections, reading the labels and admiring the treasures on show.
Yet what started as a standard museum outing soon escalated into a raucous demonstration as Mr. Diyabanza began denouncing colonial-era cultural theft while a member of his group filmed the speech and live-streamed it via Facebook. With another group member’s help, he then forcefully removed a slender 19th-century wooden funerary post, from a region that is now in Chad or Sudan, and headed for the exit. Museum guards stopped him before he could leave.
The next month, in the southern French city of Marseille, Mr. Diyabanza seized an artifact from the Museum of African, Oceanic and Native American Arts in another live-streamed protest, before being halted by security. And earlier this month, in a third action that was also broadcast on Facebook, he and other activists took a Congolese funeral statue from the Afrika Museum in Berg en Dal, the Netherlands, before guards stopped him again.
Now, Mr. Diyabanza, the spokesman for a Pan-African movement that seeks reparations for colonialism, slavery and cultural expropriation, is set to stand trial in Paris on Sept. 30. Along with the four associates from the Quai Branly action, he will face a charge of attempted theft, in a case that is also likely to put France on the stand for its colonial track record and for holding so much of sub-Saharan Africa’s cultural heritage — 90,000 or so objects — in its museums.
“The fact that I had to pay my own money to see what had been taken by force, this heritage that belonged back home where I come from — that’s when the decision was made to take action,” said Mr. Diyabanza in an interview in Paris this month.
Describing the Quai Branly as “a museum that contains stolen objects,” he added, “There is no ban on an owner taking back his property the moment he comes across it.”
President Emmanuel Macron pledged in 2017 to give back much of Africa’s heritage held by France’s museums, and commissioned two academics to draw up a report on how to do it.
The 2018 report, by Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr, said any artifacts removed from sub-Saharan Africa in colonial times should be permanently returned if they were “taken by force, or presumed to be acquired through inequitable conditions,” and if their countries of origin asked for them.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/arts ... ogin-email
Mwazulu Diyabanza will appear in a Paris court this month after he tried to make off with an African treasure he says was looted. France and its attitude to the colonial past will be on trial, too.
PARIS — Early one afternoon in June, the Congolese activist Mwazulu Diyabanza walked into the Quai Branly Museum, the riverfront institution that houses treasures from France’s former colonies, and bought a ticket. Together with four associates, he wandered around the Paris museum’s African collections, reading the labels and admiring the treasures on show.
Yet what started as a standard museum outing soon escalated into a raucous demonstration as Mr. Diyabanza began denouncing colonial-era cultural theft while a member of his group filmed the speech and live-streamed it via Facebook. With another group member’s help, he then forcefully removed a slender 19th-century wooden funerary post, from a region that is now in Chad or Sudan, and headed for the exit. Museum guards stopped him before he could leave.
The next month, in the southern French city of Marseille, Mr. Diyabanza seized an artifact from the Museum of African, Oceanic and Native American Arts in another live-streamed protest, before being halted by security. And earlier this month, in a third action that was also broadcast on Facebook, he and other activists took a Congolese funeral statue from the Afrika Museum in Berg en Dal, the Netherlands, before guards stopped him again.
Now, Mr. Diyabanza, the spokesman for a Pan-African movement that seeks reparations for colonialism, slavery and cultural expropriation, is set to stand trial in Paris on Sept. 30. Along with the four associates from the Quai Branly action, he will face a charge of attempted theft, in a case that is also likely to put France on the stand for its colonial track record and for holding so much of sub-Saharan Africa’s cultural heritage — 90,000 or so objects — in its museums.
“The fact that I had to pay my own money to see what had been taken by force, this heritage that belonged back home where I come from — that’s when the decision was made to take action,” said Mr. Diyabanza in an interview in Paris this month.
Describing the Quai Branly as “a museum that contains stolen objects,” he added, “There is no ban on an owner taking back his property the moment he comes across it.”
President Emmanuel Macron pledged in 2017 to give back much of Africa’s heritage held by France’s museums, and commissioned two academics to draw up a report on how to do it.
The 2018 report, by Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr, said any artifacts removed from sub-Saharan Africa in colonial times should be permanently returned if they were “taken by force, or presumed to be acquired through inequitable conditions,” and if their countries of origin asked for them.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/arts ... ogin-email
Black Monuments Matter
A Virtual Exhibition of Sub-Saharan Architecture
Presented by:
Zamani Project - University of Cape Town
Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations - Aga Khan University, London
Exhibition curators and organizers
Professor Stephane Pradines and Professor (emeritus) Dr. Heinz Rüther
The Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations and the Zamani Project at the University of Cape Town are pleased to present the online exhibition “Black Monuments Matter”.
Black Monuments Matter recognises and highlights African contributions to world history by exhibiting World Heritage Monuments and architectural treasures from Sub-Saharan Africa.
In doing so, this exhibition sweeps away ideas based on racist theories and hopes to contribute to both awareness of African identity and pride of African Heritage. The exhibition is inspired by the “Black History Month” in the United Kingdom.
Black monuments matter and Black cultures matter. Sites and monuments are physical representations of histories, heritage, and developments in society. This exhibition aims to display the diversity and richness of African cultures as part of world history through the study of African Monuments; bringing awareness and pride of African roots and contributions to other cultures.
African cultures suffered extensively from slavery from the 16th to the 19th Century, and during the acceleration of European colonisation through the 19th and early 20th Century. Black Monuments Matter aspires to create links to living African heritage by making it visible, assessable, and known to as many people as possible.
In general, we would like to raise awareness of and respect towards Black cultures and Africa’s past to a larger audience. At the Aga Khan University, the University of Cape Town and the Zamani Project, we believe in the relevance and knowledge of cultures, and the importance of education towards its understanding and appreciation.
Through an approach founded on the latest knowledge and technology, this online exhibition offers visitors an opportunity to learn more about the glorious monuments and sites of African heritage and black cultures across Sub Saharan Africa.
The African continent has numerous sites and monuments of historic and cultural importance, and our exhibition showcases some of its diversity and richness. From the Pyramids of Sudan, the Great Mosque of Timbuktu, to the Swahili cities of East Africa, each site is presented in a virtual room and is introduced by short texts written by African scholars.
Many of Africa’s monuments are protected by UNESCO and have been given world heritage status. They are also protected and supported by national heritage authorities and by the support of international organisations such as the World Monument Fund and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.
Our hope is that visitors to this exhibition will recognise and support the work of national and international organisations committed to the support of African heritage.
All the documentation presented in the exhibition are the result of many years of dedicated work by the Zamani team from the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
Access the exhibition at:
https://black-monuments-matter.zamaniproject.org/
A Virtual Exhibition of Sub-Saharan Architecture
Presented by:
Zamani Project - University of Cape Town
Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations - Aga Khan University, London
Exhibition curators and organizers
Professor Stephane Pradines and Professor (emeritus) Dr. Heinz Rüther
The Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations and the Zamani Project at the University of Cape Town are pleased to present the online exhibition “Black Monuments Matter”.
Black Monuments Matter recognises and highlights African contributions to world history by exhibiting World Heritage Monuments and architectural treasures from Sub-Saharan Africa.
In doing so, this exhibition sweeps away ideas based on racist theories and hopes to contribute to both awareness of African identity and pride of African Heritage. The exhibition is inspired by the “Black History Month” in the United Kingdom.
Black monuments matter and Black cultures matter. Sites and monuments are physical representations of histories, heritage, and developments in society. This exhibition aims to display the diversity and richness of African cultures as part of world history through the study of African Monuments; bringing awareness and pride of African roots and contributions to other cultures.
African cultures suffered extensively from slavery from the 16th to the 19th Century, and during the acceleration of European colonisation through the 19th and early 20th Century. Black Monuments Matter aspires to create links to living African heritage by making it visible, assessable, and known to as many people as possible.
In general, we would like to raise awareness of and respect towards Black cultures and Africa’s past to a larger audience. At the Aga Khan University, the University of Cape Town and the Zamani Project, we believe in the relevance and knowledge of cultures, and the importance of education towards its understanding and appreciation.
Through an approach founded on the latest knowledge and technology, this online exhibition offers visitors an opportunity to learn more about the glorious monuments and sites of African heritage and black cultures across Sub Saharan Africa.
The African continent has numerous sites and monuments of historic and cultural importance, and our exhibition showcases some of its diversity and richness. From the Pyramids of Sudan, the Great Mosque of Timbuktu, to the Swahili cities of East Africa, each site is presented in a virtual room and is introduced by short texts written by African scholars.
Many of Africa’s monuments are protected by UNESCO and have been given world heritage status. They are also protected and supported by national heritage authorities and by the support of international organisations such as the World Monument Fund and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.
Our hope is that visitors to this exhibition will recognise and support the work of national and international organisations committed to the support of African heritage.
All the documentation presented in the exhibition are the result of many years of dedicated work by the Zamani team from the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
Access the exhibition at:
https://black-monuments-matter.zamaniproject.org/
China Disappeared My Professor. It Can’t Silence His Poetry.
Against overwhelming state violence, poetry might appear to offer little recourse. But for many Uighurs, it’s a powerful form of resistance.
I last saw my old professor Abduqadir Jalalidin at his Urumqi apartment in late 2016. Over home-pulled laghman noodles and a couple of bottles of Chinese liquor, we talked and laughed about everything from Uighur literature to American politics. Several years earlier, when I had defended my master’s thesis on Uighur poetry, Jalalidin, himself a famous poet, had sat across from me and asked hard questions. Now we were just friends.
It was a memorable evening, one I’ve thought about many times since learning in early 2018 that Jalalidin had been sent, along with more than a million other Uighurs, to China’s internment camps.
As with my other friends and colleagues who have disappeared into this vast, secretive gulag, months stretched into years with no word from Jalalidin. And then, late this summer, the silence broke. Even in the camps, I learned, my old professor had continued writing poetry. Other inmates had committed his new poems to memory and had managed to transmit one of them beyond the camp gates.
In this forgotten place I have no lover’s touch
Each night brings darker dreams, I have no amulet
My life is all I ask, I have no other thirst
These silent thoughts torment, I have no way to hope
Who I once was, what I’ve become, I cannot know
Who could I tell my heart’s desires, I cannot say
My love, the temper of the fates I cannot guess
I long to go to you, I have no strength to move
Through cracks and crevices I’ve watched the seasons change
For news of you I’ve looked in vain to buds and flowers
To the marrow of my bones I’ve ached to be with you
What road led here, why do I have no road back home
Jalalidin’s poem is powerful testimony to a continuing catastrophe in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Since 2017, the Chinese state has swept a growing proportion of its Uighur population, along with other Muslim minorities, into an expanding system of camps, prisons and forced labor facilities. A mass sterilization campaign has targeted Uighur women, and the discovery of a multi-ton shipment of human hair from the region, most likely originating from the camps, evokes humanity’s darkest hours.
But my professor’s poem is also testimony to Uighurs’ unique use of poetry as a means of communal survival. Against overwhelming state violence, one might imagine that poetry would offer little recourse. Yet for many Uighurs — including those who risked sharing Jalalidin’s poem — poetry has a power and importance inconceivable in the American context.
Poetry permeates Uighur life. Influential cultural figures are often poets, and Uighurs of all backgrounds write poetry. Folk rhymes pepper everyday conversation — popular wisdom like “Don’t forget about your roots / keep the shine on your old boots” — and social media pulses with fresh verse on topics from unemployment to language preservation. Every Uighur knows the words of the poet Abdukhaliq, martyred by a Chinese warlord in 1933: “Awaken, poor Uighur, you’ve slept long enough…”
Uighurs have lived for a millennium at the crossroads of Eurasian civilizations, and their poetry draws on the artful concision of Turkic oral verse, the intricate meters of Persian poetry, and modernist currents from Europe, the Arab world and China. Oral and written forms intermingle in the work of contemporary Uighur poets like Adil Tuniyaz, while genres range from the classicism of my professor’s camp poem to the avant-garde iconoclasm of the Nothingist poets. (“A poem flies with the lonely owls that grant gloomy beauty to the night,” declared the exuberantly inscrutable 2009 Nothingism Manifesto.)
For generations, this vibrant poetic culture has allowed Uighurs to hone verse into a source of communal strength against colonization and repression. We can look back to the 19th century for an example: Sadir Palwan, a resistance fighter against the Qing empire, galvanized anti-imperial sentiment with the folk poems he spread by word of mouth. Imprisoned time and again, Sadir spun verses from his cell and during his multiple escapes, often bitterly satirizing the colonial authorities. “On the road to Küre, did your carriage break down, Magistrate? Having captured Sadir, is your heart content now, Magistrate?”
A century later, during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, when Uighur writers were imprisoned and their books burned, folk poets sustained their art by memory and word of mouth. Their work was instrumental in reviving Uighur culture in the 1980s, as large audiences once again gathered to hear their epic poems.
In the 2000s, Uighur anthropologist Rahile Dawut began recording these documents of collective memory, which provide grassroots perspectives on local history. In the Qumul region of eastern Xinjiang, for example, Dawut recorded an epic recounting a 17th-century insurrection against the Zunghar Mongols following their bloody conquest of Qumul. “Listen as I share the past,” sang a well-known Qumul folk poet before narrating the tragic story of Yachibeg, who led the rebellion to a string of victories before a local official betrayed him.
Dawut celebrated the richness and vitality of Uighur culture while remaining keenly aware of the pressures it continued to face. “Every time I went off on fieldwork,” she noted in a 2010 essay, “I would return from the ‘living museum’ of the people determined to gather even more material. Sadly, by the time I went back, these materials would be gone,” as local officials obstructed the performance and transmission of oral poetry. Dawut herself is now gone, detained since late 2017 along with many of Xinjiang University’s other Uighur professors.
Today, as the Chinese state bans Uighur books and paves over Muslim graveyards, poetry remains a powerful form of persistence and resistance for the Uighur people. Uighurs around the world are turning to poetry to grapple with the calamity in their homeland. “The target on my forehead / could not bring me to my knees,” wrote the exile poet Tahir Hamut Izgil from Washington in 2018.
Even as intellectuals in the Uighur diaspora chronicle the atrocities, most prominent Uighur intellectuals in Xinjiang — liberals and conservatives, devout Muslims and agnostics, party supporters and party critics — have already vanished into the camps as China escalates its campaign to extinguish Uighur identity.
But identity is a stubborn thing, as Uighur poet and novelist Perhat Tursun asserted in a well-known poem beginning with these defiant lines:
Like the waters of the Tarim
we began in this place
and we will finish here
We came from nowhere else
and we will not leave for anywhere
If God made humanity
God made us for this place
If man evolved from apes
we evolved from the apes of this place
For months after Tursun first posted this poem online over a decade ago, friends of mine in Urumqi would quote snatches of it by heart. In early 2018, as China’s purge of Uighur intellectuals widened, Tursun was sent to the camps. Yet his voice still reverberates: As I was writing this, I saw that a diaspora Uighur activist had posted Tursun’s poem to social media, where it continues to circulate widely.
The world has much to learn from a culture that has made art its antidote to authoritarianism. From behind the barbed wire and guard towers, my old professor has reminded us that we must not stand silently while that culture is annihilated.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Against overwhelming state violence, poetry might appear to offer little recourse. But for many Uighurs, it’s a powerful form of resistance.
I last saw my old professor Abduqadir Jalalidin at his Urumqi apartment in late 2016. Over home-pulled laghman noodles and a couple of bottles of Chinese liquor, we talked and laughed about everything from Uighur literature to American politics. Several years earlier, when I had defended my master’s thesis on Uighur poetry, Jalalidin, himself a famous poet, had sat across from me and asked hard questions. Now we were just friends.
It was a memorable evening, one I’ve thought about many times since learning in early 2018 that Jalalidin had been sent, along with more than a million other Uighurs, to China’s internment camps.
As with my other friends and colleagues who have disappeared into this vast, secretive gulag, months stretched into years with no word from Jalalidin. And then, late this summer, the silence broke. Even in the camps, I learned, my old professor had continued writing poetry. Other inmates had committed his new poems to memory and had managed to transmit one of them beyond the camp gates.
In this forgotten place I have no lover’s touch
Each night brings darker dreams, I have no amulet
My life is all I ask, I have no other thirst
These silent thoughts torment, I have no way to hope
Who I once was, what I’ve become, I cannot know
Who could I tell my heart’s desires, I cannot say
My love, the temper of the fates I cannot guess
I long to go to you, I have no strength to move
Through cracks and crevices I’ve watched the seasons change
For news of you I’ve looked in vain to buds and flowers
To the marrow of my bones I’ve ached to be with you
What road led here, why do I have no road back home
Jalalidin’s poem is powerful testimony to a continuing catastrophe in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Since 2017, the Chinese state has swept a growing proportion of its Uighur population, along with other Muslim minorities, into an expanding system of camps, prisons and forced labor facilities. A mass sterilization campaign has targeted Uighur women, and the discovery of a multi-ton shipment of human hair from the region, most likely originating from the camps, evokes humanity’s darkest hours.
But my professor’s poem is also testimony to Uighurs’ unique use of poetry as a means of communal survival. Against overwhelming state violence, one might imagine that poetry would offer little recourse. Yet for many Uighurs — including those who risked sharing Jalalidin’s poem — poetry has a power and importance inconceivable in the American context.
Poetry permeates Uighur life. Influential cultural figures are often poets, and Uighurs of all backgrounds write poetry. Folk rhymes pepper everyday conversation — popular wisdom like “Don’t forget about your roots / keep the shine on your old boots” — and social media pulses with fresh verse on topics from unemployment to language preservation. Every Uighur knows the words of the poet Abdukhaliq, martyred by a Chinese warlord in 1933: “Awaken, poor Uighur, you’ve slept long enough…”
Uighurs have lived for a millennium at the crossroads of Eurasian civilizations, and their poetry draws on the artful concision of Turkic oral verse, the intricate meters of Persian poetry, and modernist currents from Europe, the Arab world and China. Oral and written forms intermingle in the work of contemporary Uighur poets like Adil Tuniyaz, while genres range from the classicism of my professor’s camp poem to the avant-garde iconoclasm of the Nothingist poets. (“A poem flies with the lonely owls that grant gloomy beauty to the night,” declared the exuberantly inscrutable 2009 Nothingism Manifesto.)
For generations, this vibrant poetic culture has allowed Uighurs to hone verse into a source of communal strength against colonization and repression. We can look back to the 19th century for an example: Sadir Palwan, a resistance fighter against the Qing empire, galvanized anti-imperial sentiment with the folk poems he spread by word of mouth. Imprisoned time and again, Sadir spun verses from his cell and during his multiple escapes, often bitterly satirizing the colonial authorities. “On the road to Küre, did your carriage break down, Magistrate? Having captured Sadir, is your heart content now, Magistrate?”
A century later, during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, when Uighur writers were imprisoned and their books burned, folk poets sustained their art by memory and word of mouth. Their work was instrumental in reviving Uighur culture in the 1980s, as large audiences once again gathered to hear their epic poems.
In the 2000s, Uighur anthropologist Rahile Dawut began recording these documents of collective memory, which provide grassroots perspectives on local history. In the Qumul region of eastern Xinjiang, for example, Dawut recorded an epic recounting a 17th-century insurrection against the Zunghar Mongols following their bloody conquest of Qumul. “Listen as I share the past,” sang a well-known Qumul folk poet before narrating the tragic story of Yachibeg, who led the rebellion to a string of victories before a local official betrayed him.
Dawut celebrated the richness and vitality of Uighur culture while remaining keenly aware of the pressures it continued to face. “Every time I went off on fieldwork,” she noted in a 2010 essay, “I would return from the ‘living museum’ of the people determined to gather even more material. Sadly, by the time I went back, these materials would be gone,” as local officials obstructed the performance and transmission of oral poetry. Dawut herself is now gone, detained since late 2017 along with many of Xinjiang University’s other Uighur professors.
Today, as the Chinese state bans Uighur books and paves over Muslim graveyards, poetry remains a powerful form of persistence and resistance for the Uighur people. Uighurs around the world are turning to poetry to grapple with the calamity in their homeland. “The target on my forehead / could not bring me to my knees,” wrote the exile poet Tahir Hamut Izgil from Washington in 2018.
Even as intellectuals in the Uighur diaspora chronicle the atrocities, most prominent Uighur intellectuals in Xinjiang — liberals and conservatives, devout Muslims and agnostics, party supporters and party critics — have already vanished into the camps as China escalates its campaign to extinguish Uighur identity.
But identity is a stubborn thing, as Uighur poet and novelist Perhat Tursun asserted in a well-known poem beginning with these defiant lines:
Like the waters of the Tarim
we began in this place
and we will finish here
We came from nowhere else
and we will not leave for anywhere
If God made humanity
God made us for this place
If man evolved from apes
we evolved from the apes of this place
For months after Tursun first posted this poem online over a decade ago, friends of mine in Urumqi would quote snatches of it by heart. In early 2018, as China’s purge of Uighur intellectuals widened, Tursun was sent to the camps. Yet his voice still reverberates: As I was writing this, I saw that a diaspora Uighur activist had posted Tursun’s poem to social media, where it continues to circulate widely.
The world has much to learn from a culture that has made art its antidote to authoritarianism. From behind the barbed wire and guard towers, my old professor has reminded us that we must not stand silently while that culture is annihilated.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Toward an Optimistic New Architecture
Rebuilding, while a reminder of what’s been lost, is also a defiant act of hope.
When we were closing last year’s spring Design issue, it was the beginning of an era; now, 12 months later, we’re nearing its end. Of course, it’s not really the end, but on some days we’re able to pretend otherwise — we’re able to make plans again; we’re able to anticipate. Many of the crushing uncertainties we lived with for months have been answered (though in many cases, the answers are crushing, too).
March is always an unpredictable period in New York. There are days when you can feel the promise of not just spring but summer: The air becomes soft, the trees froth with green seemingly overnight and people gather outdoors on stoops and park benches in the relative warmth. The next day, though, the bone-chilling damp returns, or the whipping winds or, often, the snow. The month is not a transition between February and April so much as it is a combination of the two, the weather at its most fickle.
It also marks the return of twilight, with the sun lingering a little longer each day. Despite spending a significant part of my childhood in Hawaii, I’ve never been fond of the heat. But over this past year, I have grown to crave the sun, which feels like a bestowal. In a life spent largely indoors, the sun is a gift, a reassurance, a beckoning. An Italian fashion designer once pointed out to me that, unlike London, Milan and Paris, New York has bluebird days year-round; that combination of cold and sun is, he said, what he loves about the city. It is, he told me, a promise of hope.
The houses and buildings in this issue are also expressions of hope. This is perhaps most true of the civic structures (a school, a plaza, a church) designed by a number of Latin American architects in the aftermath of the 2017 earthquake that devastated the Mexican town of Jojutla. As Michael Snyder writes in his story, post-disaster reconstruction unites architects and governments to create projects that sometimes solve real, urgent problems ... but, often, can become exercises in self-indulgence and opportunities for grandstanding. In Jojutla, though, the architects tried to listen to the residents about their needs, as well as their aesthetic desires. The result is a collection of spaces that, as Snyder writes, may have been designed by outsiders, but now belong to the residents of Jojutla, who will eventually make them their own. “Over time,” he writes, “the buildings will reflect the community they serve, and the community may, in turn, be reshaped by the buildings, with fatalism and distrust slowly replaced by optimism for a future that need not repeat the present.”
Let this be the case for all of us: May fatalism and distrust be replaced by optimism. May we remember that the future need not repeat the present. And may we remember, too, that many things can be rebuilt — and that even if the world that emerges doesn’t resemble the one we knew, it is up to us to make it our own.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/15/t-ma ... iversified
Rebuilding, while a reminder of what’s been lost, is also a defiant act of hope.
When we were closing last year’s spring Design issue, it was the beginning of an era; now, 12 months later, we’re nearing its end. Of course, it’s not really the end, but on some days we’re able to pretend otherwise — we’re able to make plans again; we’re able to anticipate. Many of the crushing uncertainties we lived with for months have been answered (though in many cases, the answers are crushing, too).
March is always an unpredictable period in New York. There are days when you can feel the promise of not just spring but summer: The air becomes soft, the trees froth with green seemingly overnight and people gather outdoors on stoops and park benches in the relative warmth. The next day, though, the bone-chilling damp returns, or the whipping winds or, often, the snow. The month is not a transition between February and April so much as it is a combination of the two, the weather at its most fickle.
It also marks the return of twilight, with the sun lingering a little longer each day. Despite spending a significant part of my childhood in Hawaii, I’ve never been fond of the heat. But over this past year, I have grown to crave the sun, which feels like a bestowal. In a life spent largely indoors, the sun is a gift, a reassurance, a beckoning. An Italian fashion designer once pointed out to me that, unlike London, Milan and Paris, New York has bluebird days year-round; that combination of cold and sun is, he said, what he loves about the city. It is, he told me, a promise of hope.
The houses and buildings in this issue are also expressions of hope. This is perhaps most true of the civic structures (a school, a plaza, a church) designed by a number of Latin American architects in the aftermath of the 2017 earthquake that devastated the Mexican town of Jojutla. As Michael Snyder writes in his story, post-disaster reconstruction unites architects and governments to create projects that sometimes solve real, urgent problems ... but, often, can become exercises in self-indulgence and opportunities for grandstanding. In Jojutla, though, the architects tried to listen to the residents about their needs, as well as their aesthetic desires. The result is a collection of spaces that, as Snyder writes, may have been designed by outsiders, but now belong to the residents of Jojutla, who will eventually make them their own. “Over time,” he writes, “the buildings will reflect the community they serve, and the community may, in turn, be reshaped by the buildings, with fatalism and distrust slowly replaced by optimism for a future that need not repeat the present.”
Let this be the case for all of us: May fatalism and distrust be replaced by optimism. May we remember that the future need not repeat the present. And may we remember, too, that many things can be rebuilt — and that even if the world that emerges doesn’t resemble the one we knew, it is up to us to make it our own.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/15/t-ma ... iversified
Thank God for the Poets
Their words remind us that suffering is not our only birthright. Life is also our birthright — life and love and beauty.
NASHVILLE — When the poet Amanda Gorman stepped to the lectern at President Biden’s inauguration, she faced a much-diminished crowd of masked people on the National Mall, but she was speaking directly to the heart of a bruised nation:
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew,
That even as we hurt, we hoped,
That even as we tired, we tried.
Ms. Gorman’s poem — addressed to “Americans, and the World” — was timeless in that way of the most necessary poems, but it was more than just timeless. After a year of losses both literal and figurative, she offered a salve that soothed, however briefly, our broken hearts and our broken age.
Poets have always given voice to our losses at times of national calamity. Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is an elegy for Abraham Lincoln. Langston Hughes’s “Mississippi — 1955” came in direct response to the murder of Emmett Till. Denise Levertov wrote one poem after another after another to protest the war in Vietnam. In 2002, Billy Collins delivered a memorial poem for the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks before a special joint meeting of Congress.
The poems inspired by Black Lives Matter are almost too numerous to count, and their ranks continue to grow, in spite of the personal cost of “chasing words / like arrows inside the knotted meat between my / shoulder blades,” as Tiana Clark writes in “Nashville.”
Many Americans, probably the vast majority of Americans, feel they can get along just fine without poetry. But tragedy — a breakup, a cancer diagnosis, a sudden death — can change their minds about that, if only because the struggle to find words for something so huge and so devastating can be overwhelming. “Again and again, this constant forsaking,” Natasha Trethewey calls it in her poem “Myth.”
I was 18 when I learned that lesson in the hardest way such lessons can be learned: by burying someone I loved. For three years she was my beloved teacher, the kind of teacher who opens worlds but who could also somehow hear me saying much that I couldn’t yet say.
“Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?” she would say, smiling, in autumn, quoting Hopkins when she found me among the dogwoods after school. If she knew I lingered there in hopes of continuing our classroom conversation far from my classmates’ ears, she never let on. Though she must have been in a hurry to get home to her husband and her little boys, she just listened.
When she died so young, the summer after my graduation, I could not believe how the world went on. People were still honking their horns in traffic. People were still balancing their checkbooks, still mowing their lawns, still hurrying to put supper on the table. Why hadn’t it all screeched into silence? How could there be anything left to do in this world but grieve?
Then I remembered Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” a poem she taught us late in her last year, when her voice was already growing fainter, quavering until she swallowed again:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
About suffering Auden was also not wrong, and through many seasons of grief in all the years since I was 18, I have remembered that poem.
Nevertheless, as the poets remind us, too, suffering is not our only birthright. Life is also our birthright. Life and love and beauty. “When despair for the world” is all we can feel, as Wendell Berry puts it in “The Peace of Wild Things,” the world itself — with its wood drakes and its blue herons “who do not tax their lives with forethought / of grief” — may be our greatest solace.
The poets are forever telling us to look for this kind of peace, to stuff ourselves with sweetness, to fill ourselves up with loveliness. They remind us that “there are, on this planet alone, something like two million naturally occurring sweet things, / some with names so generous as to kick / the steel from my knees,” as Ross Gay notes in “Sorrow Is Not My Name.”
We are a species in love with beauty. In springtime you can drive down any rural road in this part of country — likely in any part of the country — and you will find a row of daffodils blooming next to the shabbiest homesteads and the rustiest trailers. Often they are blooming next to no structure at all, ghostly circles around long-vanished mailboxes, a bright line denoting a fence row where no fence now stands. The daffodils tell us that though we might be poor, we are never too poor for beauty, to find a way to name it while we are still alive to call the gorgeous world by its many generous names.
For isn’t our own impermanence the undisputed truth that lurks beneath all our fears and all our sorrows and even all our pleasures? “Life is short, though I keep this from my children,” writes Maggie Smith in “Good Bones.” “Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine / in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways.”
Carpe diem is the song the poets have ever sung, and it is our song, too. “I think this is / the prettiest world — so long as you don’t mind / a little dying,” Mary Oliver writes in “The Kingfisher.”
This April is the 25th anniversary of National Poetry Month, and it arrives in the midst of a hard year. Last April brought lockdowns and rising infections, but we didn’t know last April just how much harder the year was about to become. We know now. And despite the helpful treatments that have emerged, despite the rising vaccination rates, despite the new political stability and the desperately needed help for a struggling economy, it is hard to trust that the terrors are truly receding.
We know now how vulnerable we are. We understand now that new terrors — and old terrors wearing new guises — will always rise up and come for us.
Thank God for our poets, here in the mildness of April and in the winter storms alike, who help us find the words our own tongues feel too swollen to speak. Thank God for the poets who teach our blinkered eyes to see these gifts the world has given us, and what we owe it in return.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Their words remind us that suffering is not our only birthright. Life is also our birthright — life and love and beauty.
NASHVILLE — When the poet Amanda Gorman stepped to the lectern at President Biden’s inauguration, she faced a much-diminished crowd of masked people on the National Mall, but she was speaking directly to the heart of a bruised nation:
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew,
That even as we hurt, we hoped,
That even as we tired, we tried.
Ms. Gorman’s poem — addressed to “Americans, and the World” — was timeless in that way of the most necessary poems, but it was more than just timeless. After a year of losses both literal and figurative, she offered a salve that soothed, however briefly, our broken hearts and our broken age.
Poets have always given voice to our losses at times of national calamity. Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is an elegy for Abraham Lincoln. Langston Hughes’s “Mississippi — 1955” came in direct response to the murder of Emmett Till. Denise Levertov wrote one poem after another after another to protest the war in Vietnam. In 2002, Billy Collins delivered a memorial poem for the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks before a special joint meeting of Congress.
The poems inspired by Black Lives Matter are almost too numerous to count, and their ranks continue to grow, in spite of the personal cost of “chasing words / like arrows inside the knotted meat between my / shoulder blades,” as Tiana Clark writes in “Nashville.”
Many Americans, probably the vast majority of Americans, feel they can get along just fine without poetry. But tragedy — a breakup, a cancer diagnosis, a sudden death — can change their minds about that, if only because the struggle to find words for something so huge and so devastating can be overwhelming. “Again and again, this constant forsaking,” Natasha Trethewey calls it in her poem “Myth.”
I was 18 when I learned that lesson in the hardest way such lessons can be learned: by burying someone I loved. For three years she was my beloved teacher, the kind of teacher who opens worlds but who could also somehow hear me saying much that I couldn’t yet say.
“Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?” she would say, smiling, in autumn, quoting Hopkins when she found me among the dogwoods after school. If she knew I lingered there in hopes of continuing our classroom conversation far from my classmates’ ears, she never let on. Though she must have been in a hurry to get home to her husband and her little boys, she just listened.
When she died so young, the summer after my graduation, I could not believe how the world went on. People were still honking their horns in traffic. People were still balancing their checkbooks, still mowing their lawns, still hurrying to put supper on the table. Why hadn’t it all screeched into silence? How could there be anything left to do in this world but grieve?
Then I remembered Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” a poem she taught us late in her last year, when her voice was already growing fainter, quavering until she swallowed again:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
About suffering Auden was also not wrong, and through many seasons of grief in all the years since I was 18, I have remembered that poem.
Nevertheless, as the poets remind us, too, suffering is not our only birthright. Life is also our birthright. Life and love and beauty. “When despair for the world” is all we can feel, as Wendell Berry puts it in “The Peace of Wild Things,” the world itself — with its wood drakes and its blue herons “who do not tax their lives with forethought / of grief” — may be our greatest solace.
The poets are forever telling us to look for this kind of peace, to stuff ourselves with sweetness, to fill ourselves up with loveliness. They remind us that “there are, on this planet alone, something like two million naturally occurring sweet things, / some with names so generous as to kick / the steel from my knees,” as Ross Gay notes in “Sorrow Is Not My Name.”
We are a species in love with beauty. In springtime you can drive down any rural road in this part of country — likely in any part of the country — and you will find a row of daffodils blooming next to the shabbiest homesteads and the rustiest trailers. Often they are blooming next to no structure at all, ghostly circles around long-vanished mailboxes, a bright line denoting a fence row where no fence now stands. The daffodils tell us that though we might be poor, we are never too poor for beauty, to find a way to name it while we are still alive to call the gorgeous world by its many generous names.
For isn’t our own impermanence the undisputed truth that lurks beneath all our fears and all our sorrows and even all our pleasures? “Life is short, though I keep this from my children,” writes Maggie Smith in “Good Bones.” “Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine / in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways.”
Carpe diem is the song the poets have ever sung, and it is our song, too. “I think this is / the prettiest world — so long as you don’t mind / a little dying,” Mary Oliver writes in “The Kingfisher.”
This April is the 25th anniversary of National Poetry Month, and it arrives in the midst of a hard year. Last April brought lockdowns and rising infections, but we didn’t know last April just how much harder the year was about to become. We know now. And despite the helpful treatments that have emerged, despite the rising vaccination rates, despite the new political stability and the desperately needed help for a struggling economy, it is hard to trust that the terrors are truly receding.
We know now how vulnerable we are. We understand now that new terrors — and old terrors wearing new guises — will always rise up and come for us.
Thank God for our poets, here in the mildness of April and in the winter storms alike, who help us find the words our own tongues feel too swollen to speak. Thank God for the poets who teach our blinkered eyes to see these gifts the world has given us, and what we owe it in return.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Early Humans Made Animated Art
How Paleolithic artists used fire to set the world’s oldest art in motion.
Stone steps descended into the ground, and I walked down them slowly as if I were entering a dark movie theater, careful not to stumble and disrupt the silence. Once my eyes adjusted to the faint light at the foot of the stairs, I saw that I was standing in the open chamber of a cave.
Where the limestone wall arched into the ceiling was a line of paintings and drawings of animals running deeper into the cave. The closest image resembled a bison, with elongated horns and U-shaped markings on its side. The bison followed several horses painted solid black like silhouettes; above them was an earthy-red horse with a black head and mane. In front of that was a very large bison head that was completely out of scale with respect to the other images.
It was the summer of 1995, and in the dim glow, I gazed at the ghostly parade just as my ancestors did roughly 21,000 years ago. Radiocarbon dates from Lascaux cave suggest the art is from that period, a time when wooly mammoths still roamed across Europe and people survived by hunting them and other large game. I stood in silence as I tried to decode the work of the ancient people who had come here to express something of their world.
When Lascaux cave was discovered in 1940, more than 100 small stone lamps that once burned grease from rendered animal fat were found throughout its chambers. Unfortunately, no one recorded where the lamps had been placed in the cave. At the time, archeologists did not consider how the brightness and the location of lights altered how the paintings would have been viewed. In general, archeologists have paid considerably less attention to how the use of fire for light affected the development of our species, compared to the use of fire for warmth and cooking. But now in Lascaux and other caves across the region, that’s changing.
Artists at Lascaux used fire to see inside caves, but the glow and flicker of flames may also have been integral to the stories the paintings told. “Today, when you light the whole cave, it is very stupid because you kill the staging,” says Jean-Michel Geneste, Lascaux’s curator, the director of France’s National Center of Prehistory, and the head of the archaeological project I worked on that summer. Worse yet, most people only see cave paintings in cropped photographs that are evenly lit with lights that are strong and white. According to Geneste, this removes the images from the context of the story they were meant to tell and makes the colors in the paintings colder, or bluer, than Paleolithic people would have seen them.
Reconstructions of the original grease lamps produce a circle of light about 10 feet in diameter, which is not much larger than many images in the cave. Geneste believes that early artists used this small area of light as a story-telling device. “It is very important: the presence of the darkness, the spot of yellow light, and inside it one, two, three animals, no more,” Geneste says. “That’s a tool in a narrative structure,” he explains. Just as a sentence generally describes a single idea, the light from a grease lamp would illuminate a single part of a story. Whatever tales may have been told inside Lascaux have been lost to history, but it is easy to imagine a person moving their fire-lit lamp along the walls as they unraveled a story step-by-step, using the darkness as a frame for the images inside a small circle of firelight.
Geneste supports his hypothesis by pointing to the various sizes of animals. “If you want to have several animals in a narrative relationship it is necessary to have them small,” he says. “If you want only one animal, you make them big.” If Geneste is right, the paintings I saw in the Hall of Bulls could have been read like a comic strip, as a series of frames: first the bison, then two black horses, more horses, a focus on the bison, and so on down the length of the chamber.
“When you light the whole cave, it is very stupid because you kill the staging.”
What’s more, a flickering flame in the cave may have conjured impressions of motion like a strobe light in a dark club. In low light, human vision degrades, and that can lead to the perception of movement even when all is still, says Susana Martinez-Conde, the director of the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Ariz. The trick may occur at two levels; one when the eye processes a dimly lit scene, and the second when the brain makes sense of that limited, flickering information.
Physiologically, our eyes undergo a switch when we slip into darkness. In bright light, eyes primarily rely on the color-sensitive cells in our retinas called cones, but in low light the cones don’t have enough photons to work with and cells that sense black and white gradients, called rods, take over. That’s why in low light, colors fade, shadows become harder to distinguish from actual objects, and the soft boundaries between things disappear. Images straight ahead of us look out of focus, as if they were seen in our peripheral vision. The end result for early humans who viewed cave paintings by firelight might have been that a deer with multiple heads, for example, resembled a single, animated beast. A few rather sophisticated artistic techniques enhance that impression. One is found beyond the Hall of Bulls, where the cave narrows into a long passage called the Nave.
FREEZE FRAME: Five stag heads in the Nave region of Lascaux cave might represent a single stag in different stages of motion.Photo by Norbert Aujoulat
High on the Nave’s right wall, an early artist had used charcoal to draw a row of five deer heads. The images are almost identical, but each is positioned at a slightly different angle. Viewed one at a time with a small circle of light moving right to left, the images seem to illustrate a single deer raising and lowering its head as in a short flipbook animation.
Marc Azéma, a Paleolithic researcher and filmmaker at the University of Toulouse in France, has studied dozens of examples of ancient images that were meant to imply motion and has found two primary techniques that Paleolithic artists used to do this. The first is juxtaposition of successive images—the technique used for the deer head—and the second is called superimposition. Rather than appearing in sequence, variations of an image pile on top of one another in superimposition to lend a sense of motion. Superimposition can be seen in caves across France and Spain, but some of the oldest examples come from Chauvet cave in France’s Ardèche region. Burned wood and charcoal streaks along Chauvet’s walls indicate that campfires and pine torches lit the cave.
At 32,000 years old, the oldest paintings at Chauvet cave are about 10,000 years older than those at Lascaux, but they are no less accomplished. One of the most extensive images in the cave is the “Grand Panneau,” a large panel that shows lions, rhinoceroses, bison, horses, and a wooly mammoth. Azéma explains that the panel may relate two separate narratives of lions stalking prey. Near the center of the panel is a charcoal drawing of a rhinoceros that seems to have seven or eight horns, as well as several backs. The rhinos look as if they are piled on top of one another, but Azéma has teased apart each section of the image to show that it could in fact be one rhino in varied positions. In this superimposition, he says, the rhino raises and lowers its horn. Azéma refers to these images as the beginning of cinema because they depict both narrative and motion.
ANCIENT HERD: Running horses, cattle, and deer line the walls in the Hall of the Bulls at Lascaux cave.Photo by Norbert Aujoulat
During my visit, the light inside Lascaux shined steady and just strong enough for me to make out the colors in the rock walls and the paintings. We were only permitted to stay for about 20 minutes, which was enough time to see all the images except for a few that are difficult to reach. Preserving the artwork there has been a constant battle. Intermittently since 2001, Lascaux has been closed due to infestations of molds and fungus that threaten many of the paintings. One type of black mold even seems to feed on the light that people bring into the cave.
I had stood in the Nave with barely enough room to turn around without brushing against the walls. Looking at the art felt like reading a partially translated language. The shapes of the animals were familiar, but their meaning was obscured by the distance between my mind and those of 21,000 years ago. Paleolithic art may have been spiritual—prayers for a successful hunt—or maybe they related specific events—the time when a pride of lions hunted a large rhinoceros. Or perhaps it was like modern-day art, and fulfilled a variety of roles that aren’t easily put into categories. Even though the images were mostly of animals, what the art conveyed to me was humanness. The images were an attempt to express a reaction to a dynamic environment. Now that we live in a halogen and LED lit world, it’s easy to forget that the way we illuminate the world affects how we see it.
https://nautil.us/issue/11/light/early- ... imated-art
How Paleolithic artists used fire to set the world’s oldest art in motion.
Stone steps descended into the ground, and I walked down them slowly as if I were entering a dark movie theater, careful not to stumble and disrupt the silence. Once my eyes adjusted to the faint light at the foot of the stairs, I saw that I was standing in the open chamber of a cave.
Where the limestone wall arched into the ceiling was a line of paintings and drawings of animals running deeper into the cave. The closest image resembled a bison, with elongated horns and U-shaped markings on its side. The bison followed several horses painted solid black like silhouettes; above them was an earthy-red horse with a black head and mane. In front of that was a very large bison head that was completely out of scale with respect to the other images.
It was the summer of 1995, and in the dim glow, I gazed at the ghostly parade just as my ancestors did roughly 21,000 years ago. Radiocarbon dates from Lascaux cave suggest the art is from that period, a time when wooly mammoths still roamed across Europe and people survived by hunting them and other large game. I stood in silence as I tried to decode the work of the ancient people who had come here to express something of their world.
When Lascaux cave was discovered in 1940, more than 100 small stone lamps that once burned grease from rendered animal fat were found throughout its chambers. Unfortunately, no one recorded where the lamps had been placed in the cave. At the time, archeologists did not consider how the brightness and the location of lights altered how the paintings would have been viewed. In general, archeologists have paid considerably less attention to how the use of fire for light affected the development of our species, compared to the use of fire for warmth and cooking. But now in Lascaux and other caves across the region, that’s changing.
Artists at Lascaux used fire to see inside caves, but the glow and flicker of flames may also have been integral to the stories the paintings told. “Today, when you light the whole cave, it is very stupid because you kill the staging,” says Jean-Michel Geneste, Lascaux’s curator, the director of France’s National Center of Prehistory, and the head of the archaeological project I worked on that summer. Worse yet, most people only see cave paintings in cropped photographs that are evenly lit with lights that are strong and white. According to Geneste, this removes the images from the context of the story they were meant to tell and makes the colors in the paintings colder, or bluer, than Paleolithic people would have seen them.
Reconstructions of the original grease lamps produce a circle of light about 10 feet in diameter, which is not much larger than many images in the cave. Geneste believes that early artists used this small area of light as a story-telling device. “It is very important: the presence of the darkness, the spot of yellow light, and inside it one, two, three animals, no more,” Geneste says. “That’s a tool in a narrative structure,” he explains. Just as a sentence generally describes a single idea, the light from a grease lamp would illuminate a single part of a story. Whatever tales may have been told inside Lascaux have been lost to history, but it is easy to imagine a person moving their fire-lit lamp along the walls as they unraveled a story step-by-step, using the darkness as a frame for the images inside a small circle of firelight.
Geneste supports his hypothesis by pointing to the various sizes of animals. “If you want to have several animals in a narrative relationship it is necessary to have them small,” he says. “If you want only one animal, you make them big.” If Geneste is right, the paintings I saw in the Hall of Bulls could have been read like a comic strip, as a series of frames: first the bison, then two black horses, more horses, a focus on the bison, and so on down the length of the chamber.
“When you light the whole cave, it is very stupid because you kill the staging.”
What’s more, a flickering flame in the cave may have conjured impressions of motion like a strobe light in a dark club. In low light, human vision degrades, and that can lead to the perception of movement even when all is still, says Susana Martinez-Conde, the director of the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Ariz. The trick may occur at two levels; one when the eye processes a dimly lit scene, and the second when the brain makes sense of that limited, flickering information.
Physiologically, our eyes undergo a switch when we slip into darkness. In bright light, eyes primarily rely on the color-sensitive cells in our retinas called cones, but in low light the cones don’t have enough photons to work with and cells that sense black and white gradients, called rods, take over. That’s why in low light, colors fade, shadows become harder to distinguish from actual objects, and the soft boundaries between things disappear. Images straight ahead of us look out of focus, as if they were seen in our peripheral vision. The end result for early humans who viewed cave paintings by firelight might have been that a deer with multiple heads, for example, resembled a single, animated beast. A few rather sophisticated artistic techniques enhance that impression. One is found beyond the Hall of Bulls, where the cave narrows into a long passage called the Nave.
FREEZE FRAME: Five stag heads in the Nave region of Lascaux cave might represent a single stag in different stages of motion.Photo by Norbert Aujoulat
High on the Nave’s right wall, an early artist had used charcoal to draw a row of five deer heads. The images are almost identical, but each is positioned at a slightly different angle. Viewed one at a time with a small circle of light moving right to left, the images seem to illustrate a single deer raising and lowering its head as in a short flipbook animation.
Marc Azéma, a Paleolithic researcher and filmmaker at the University of Toulouse in France, has studied dozens of examples of ancient images that were meant to imply motion and has found two primary techniques that Paleolithic artists used to do this. The first is juxtaposition of successive images—the technique used for the deer head—and the second is called superimposition. Rather than appearing in sequence, variations of an image pile on top of one another in superimposition to lend a sense of motion. Superimposition can be seen in caves across France and Spain, but some of the oldest examples come from Chauvet cave in France’s Ardèche region. Burned wood and charcoal streaks along Chauvet’s walls indicate that campfires and pine torches lit the cave.
At 32,000 years old, the oldest paintings at Chauvet cave are about 10,000 years older than those at Lascaux, but they are no less accomplished. One of the most extensive images in the cave is the “Grand Panneau,” a large panel that shows lions, rhinoceroses, bison, horses, and a wooly mammoth. Azéma explains that the panel may relate two separate narratives of lions stalking prey. Near the center of the panel is a charcoal drawing of a rhinoceros that seems to have seven or eight horns, as well as several backs. The rhinos look as if they are piled on top of one another, but Azéma has teased apart each section of the image to show that it could in fact be one rhino in varied positions. In this superimposition, he says, the rhino raises and lowers its horn. Azéma refers to these images as the beginning of cinema because they depict both narrative and motion.
ANCIENT HERD: Running horses, cattle, and deer line the walls in the Hall of the Bulls at Lascaux cave.Photo by Norbert Aujoulat
During my visit, the light inside Lascaux shined steady and just strong enough for me to make out the colors in the rock walls and the paintings. We were only permitted to stay for about 20 minutes, which was enough time to see all the images except for a few that are difficult to reach. Preserving the artwork there has been a constant battle. Intermittently since 2001, Lascaux has been closed due to infestations of molds and fungus that threaten many of the paintings. One type of black mold even seems to feed on the light that people bring into the cave.
I had stood in the Nave with barely enough room to turn around without brushing against the walls. Looking at the art felt like reading a partially translated language. The shapes of the animals were familiar, but their meaning was obscured by the distance between my mind and those of 21,000 years ago. Paleolithic art may have been spiritual—prayers for a successful hunt—or maybe they related specific events—the time when a pride of lions hunted a large rhinoceros. Or perhaps it was like modern-day art, and fulfilled a variety of roles that aren’t easily put into categories. Even though the images were mostly of animals, what the art conveyed to me was humanness. The images were an attempt to express a reaction to a dynamic environment. Now that we live in a halogen and LED lit world, it’s easy to forget that the way we illuminate the world affects how we see it.
https://nautil.us/issue/11/light/early- ... imated-art
Beethoven - His Life & Music: 5-Minute Narration By Agata Fugat
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjYvWNnjATE
Western Classical Music Awareness Series
Episode 1 - Beethoven
JollyGul.com has launched a Western classical music appreciation series for our community and for our audience.
Our first episode will be about Beethoven, one of the most admired composers in the history of Western classical music. Jakub Niewiadomski plays Beethoven’s 5 compositions on the piano for a minute each for 5 minutes for our Main Music Channel on YouTube (separate video, link below). In this video, singer and composer Agata Fugat talks for 5 minutes on JollyGul Movies & Documentary Channel about Beethoven’s life and music as well as about the specific pieces that Jakub played in his video.
On JollyGul Movies & Documentaries Channel:
Beethoven - His Life & Music: 5-Minute Narration By Agata Fugat
https://youtu.be/xjYvWNnjATE
Beethoven - 5 Pieces in 5 Minutes - Jakub Niewiadomski
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9pfbizTZXQ
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjYvWNnjATE
Western Classical Music Awareness Series
Episode 1 - Beethoven
JollyGul.com has launched a Western classical music appreciation series for our community and for our audience.
Our first episode will be about Beethoven, one of the most admired composers in the history of Western classical music. Jakub Niewiadomski plays Beethoven’s 5 compositions on the piano for a minute each for 5 minutes for our Main Music Channel on YouTube (separate video, link below). In this video, singer and composer Agata Fugat talks for 5 minutes on JollyGul Movies & Documentary Channel about Beethoven’s life and music as well as about the specific pieces that Jakub played in his video.
On JollyGul Movies & Documentaries Channel:
Beethoven - His Life & Music: 5-Minute Narration By Agata Fugat
https://youtu.be/xjYvWNnjATE
Beethoven - 5 Pieces in 5 Minutes - Jakub Niewiadomski
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9pfbizTZXQ
They Didn’t Want to Sing Spirituals, but They Did — and Changed American Music
NASHVILLE — In an account of her years as assistant director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Ella Sheppard, a gifted musician who had been enslaved as a child, recalled one of the student ensemble’s earliest excursions outside Nashville, only a handful of years after the Civil War. The singers were all students at Fisk University, a school for emancipated former slaves. They were stranded at a rural train station with Ms. Sheppard and their director, a white abolitionist named George White, when an angry mob arrived. In the face of the white men’s fury, the students began to sing.
“One by one, the riotous crowd left off their jeering and swearing and slunk back until only the leader stood near Mr. White and finally took off his hat,” Ms. Sheppard wrote. “The leader begged us, with tears falling, to sing the hymn again.”
When I stepped into Jubilee Hall on the campus of Fisk University last week, 150 years after the original Fisk Jubilee Singers sang a racist mob into silence, the lobby of the historic building was under renovation and covered in drop cloths. There was no sign directing me to the rehearsal space of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, whom I had come to hear, but a student soon appeared to lead me through the halls. “I’m Hezekiah,” he said. “One of the tenors.”
Hezekiah Robinson, a junior, may look like an ordinary college student at this historically Black university, but he sings like an angel. In fact, the Fisk Jubilee Singers is an entire ensemble of angels occupying the bodies of undergraduates. They have been bringing audiences to tears for the last 150 years with their renditions of the spirituals first sung by enslaved Americans before the Civil War.
This year has been extraordinary for the group. In March their new album, “Celebrating Fisk!” received a Grammy Award for the Best Roots Gospel album. In September, an anonymous donor gave $1.5 million to establish a permanent endowment to support the ensemble. At the 20th annual Americana Music Awards, also in September, the Fisk Jubilee Singers received the Legacy of Americana Award. This week it will celebrate its sesquicentennial, an anniversary that Nashville Public Television has commemorated with a new performance film called “Walk Together Children.”
Fisk University opened its doors in 1866, shortly after the end of the Civil War. It was run by white abolitionist missionaries and operated in the barracks of an abandoned military hospital in Nashville. The school’s treasurer, George White, happened to love music and formed a student chorus, quickly tapping Ella Sheppard to serve as his assistant director.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/opin ... 778d3e6de3
NASHVILLE — In an account of her years as assistant director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Ella Sheppard, a gifted musician who had been enslaved as a child, recalled one of the student ensemble’s earliest excursions outside Nashville, only a handful of years after the Civil War. The singers were all students at Fisk University, a school for emancipated former slaves. They were stranded at a rural train station with Ms. Sheppard and their director, a white abolitionist named George White, when an angry mob arrived. In the face of the white men’s fury, the students began to sing.
“One by one, the riotous crowd left off their jeering and swearing and slunk back until only the leader stood near Mr. White and finally took off his hat,” Ms. Sheppard wrote. “The leader begged us, with tears falling, to sing the hymn again.”
When I stepped into Jubilee Hall on the campus of Fisk University last week, 150 years after the original Fisk Jubilee Singers sang a racist mob into silence, the lobby of the historic building was under renovation and covered in drop cloths. There was no sign directing me to the rehearsal space of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, whom I had come to hear, but a student soon appeared to lead me through the halls. “I’m Hezekiah,” he said. “One of the tenors.”
Hezekiah Robinson, a junior, may look like an ordinary college student at this historically Black university, but he sings like an angel. In fact, the Fisk Jubilee Singers is an entire ensemble of angels occupying the bodies of undergraduates. They have been bringing audiences to tears for the last 150 years with their renditions of the spirituals first sung by enslaved Americans before the Civil War.
This year has been extraordinary for the group. In March their new album, “Celebrating Fisk!” received a Grammy Award for the Best Roots Gospel album. In September, an anonymous donor gave $1.5 million to establish a permanent endowment to support the ensemble. At the 20th annual Americana Music Awards, also in September, the Fisk Jubilee Singers received the Legacy of Americana Award. This week it will celebrate its sesquicentennial, an anniversary that Nashville Public Television has commemorated with a new performance film called “Walk Together Children.”
Fisk University opened its doors in 1866, shortly after the end of the Civil War. It was run by white abolitionist missionaries and operated in the barracks of an abandoned military hospital in Nashville. The school’s treasurer, George White, happened to love music and formed a student chorus, quickly tapping Ella Sheppard to serve as his assistant director.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/opin ... 778d3e6de3
SONGS OF JUSTICE
SONGS OF POWER
By Tom Morello
Mr. Morello has spent over three decades melding music and political activism as a power guitarist with Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, with the acoustic chords of the Nightwatchman and in protests around the country.
SONGS PROVIDED BY SPOTIFY
Harmonizing and hell-raising, rhythm and rebellion, poetry and politics, singing and striking. The Industrial Workers of the World — the shock troops of the early-20th-century labor movement — virtually invented the protest song for the modern age.
The I.W.W. was formed in 1905, advocating a militant revolutionary unionism, a cocktail of socialist, syndicalist and anarchist labor theory put into practice. It was always known as a singing union, and its songs were written by hobos and the homeless, itinerant workers and immigrants. I.W.W. songs — like “The Preacher and the Slave” and “Solidarity Forever” — looked an unjust world square in the eye, sliced it apart with satire, dismantled it with rage and then, with mighty sing-along choruses, raised the roofs of union halls and holding cells, “from San Diego up to Maine, in every mine and mill.”
The goal of the Industrial Workers of the World — or Wobblies, as members were widely known — was revolution, not just winning strikes. Unlike other unions of the time, it accepted all workers as members: Black people, women, unskilled laborers, sex workers, immigrants of every race and creed. It sought to forge “one big union” of the entire global working class and used direct action, sabotage and the power of song in class war against the ruling class. Its reputation as a kick-ass union fueled by kick-ass songs remains the stuff of legend.
Its songs, some more than 100 years old, addressed the same issues facing us today: poverty, police brutality, immigrant rights, economic and racial inequality, militarism, threats to civil liberties, union busting. “Casey Jones (The Union Scab),” “We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years,” “Bread and Roses,” “Ain’t Done Nothin’ if You Ain’t Been Called a Red” — often set to familiar tunes and popular hymns of the day, these songs united workers from diverse backgrounds under the banner of solidarity. What’s the antidote for divide and conquer? Work together, fight together, sing together.
Defiant and hopeful, these songs have an unapologetic mission: to fan the flames of discontent by lifting the spirits of those fighting for a more just and humane planet. The I.W.W. aimed to “create a new society within the shell of the old,” and I hope you can hear that new world echoing here, where song meets struggle.
The Wobbly songwriters also laid the sonic and ideological groundwork for those who followed: Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, Utah Phillips, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Nina Simone, Bruce Springsteen, the Clash, Public Enemy, Billy Bragg, Ani DiFranco, System of a Down and Rage Against the Machine. Without them, there’d be no “This Land Is Your Land,” no “We Shall Overcome,” no “Masters of War,” no “London Calling,” no “Killing in the Name.”
Much of my career has been one long audition to become a part of that legacy. I’m a union man and an unapologetic musical rabble-rouser. I’ve been a member of the Local 47 musicians’ union in Los Angeles for 32 years, and I’m a proud card-carrying member of the Industrial Workers of the World — it lives on! My mom was a union high school teacher, and the Morellos were hardworking coal miners in central Illinois. The cause of workers’ rights is in my blood.
[Read more about this project from Jane Coaston and Kathleen Kingsbury here.]
I’ve been greatly influenced by many of the songs and songwriters who carried that red union card. Playing acoustic protest music under my folk singer Nightwatchman moniker, I’ve written and sung dozens of tunes that owe a significant debt to this union’s remarkable musical history. My song “Hold the Line,” from my new album, is an example of how I’ve tried to carry forward that legacy.
My guide has been Joe Hill, who epitomized the I.W.W.’s anarcho poet warrior. He is my favorite musician of all time, even though there are no known recordings of him playing or singing. He was a tireless crusader for justice through his music, and his jams are a fine starting point for aspiring rebels. Hill was an I.W.W. organizer and a true musical and political revolutionary. He walked it like he sang it. That’s why the mine owners and the other bosses out West, and the politicians who did their dirty work, were afraid of him. And in the end, that’s why in 1915 he was executed in Utah on a trumped-up murder charge.
“A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over,” Hill famously said. His songs (“There Is Power in a Union,” “We Will Sing One Song,” “Joe Hill’s Last Will”) are sung today and will be tomorrow.
I’ve traveled far to pay my respects to the heroes of the I.W.W. I’ve placed flowers on Mother Jones’s grave in Mount Olive, Ill. I’ve hummed “The Internationale” at the resting place of Big Bill Haywood’s ashes in the Kremlin wall. And while on tour in Sweden, I made the hundred-mile trek from Stockholm to Gavle, Hill’s birthplace.
I sat by a little tree in the backyard that blooms where his ashes were spread, and I sang “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” written in the 1930s by Earl Robinson from a poem written by Alfred Hayes in the years after Hill’s death. The tiny room in the building where he and his family lived now serves as a union headquarters and museum. Fascists bombed the place 20 years ago. After all these years, they’re still afraid of Hill; they’re still afraid of his songs.
And they should be.
“‘The copper bosses killed you, Joe. They shot you, Joe,’ says I. ‘Takes more than guns to kill a man,’ says Joe. ‘I didn’t die.’”
“I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” by Tom Morello: the Nightwatchman
The songs live on wherever working people stand up for their rights, dreaming and scheming and struggling for something better than what was handed to them. These tunes are still sung on picket lines, at the barricades and through the tear gas haze of Group of 8 protests. They’re even more relevant now as workers throughout the country — like those at Kellogg’s, Nabisco and John Deere — are striking and taking to the picket line.
The I.W.W.’s mighty music of equality, justice and freedom is a reminder of struggles won and lost, as well as the battle hymns of struggles to come.
So get out there and start creating that new world. Maybe learn some of these world-changing jams. Then write some of your own.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... 778d3e6de3
SONGS OF POWER
By Tom Morello
Mr. Morello has spent over three decades melding music and political activism as a power guitarist with Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, with the acoustic chords of the Nightwatchman and in protests around the country.
SONGS PROVIDED BY SPOTIFY
Harmonizing and hell-raising, rhythm and rebellion, poetry and politics, singing and striking. The Industrial Workers of the World — the shock troops of the early-20th-century labor movement — virtually invented the protest song for the modern age.
The I.W.W. was formed in 1905, advocating a militant revolutionary unionism, a cocktail of socialist, syndicalist and anarchist labor theory put into practice. It was always known as a singing union, and its songs were written by hobos and the homeless, itinerant workers and immigrants. I.W.W. songs — like “The Preacher and the Slave” and “Solidarity Forever” — looked an unjust world square in the eye, sliced it apart with satire, dismantled it with rage and then, with mighty sing-along choruses, raised the roofs of union halls and holding cells, “from San Diego up to Maine, in every mine and mill.”
The goal of the Industrial Workers of the World — or Wobblies, as members were widely known — was revolution, not just winning strikes. Unlike other unions of the time, it accepted all workers as members: Black people, women, unskilled laborers, sex workers, immigrants of every race and creed. It sought to forge “one big union” of the entire global working class and used direct action, sabotage and the power of song in class war against the ruling class. Its reputation as a kick-ass union fueled by kick-ass songs remains the stuff of legend.
Its songs, some more than 100 years old, addressed the same issues facing us today: poverty, police brutality, immigrant rights, economic and racial inequality, militarism, threats to civil liberties, union busting. “Casey Jones (The Union Scab),” “We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years,” “Bread and Roses,” “Ain’t Done Nothin’ if You Ain’t Been Called a Red” — often set to familiar tunes and popular hymns of the day, these songs united workers from diverse backgrounds under the banner of solidarity. What’s the antidote for divide and conquer? Work together, fight together, sing together.
Defiant and hopeful, these songs have an unapologetic mission: to fan the flames of discontent by lifting the spirits of those fighting for a more just and humane planet. The I.W.W. aimed to “create a new society within the shell of the old,” and I hope you can hear that new world echoing here, where song meets struggle.
The Wobbly songwriters also laid the sonic and ideological groundwork for those who followed: Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, Utah Phillips, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Nina Simone, Bruce Springsteen, the Clash, Public Enemy, Billy Bragg, Ani DiFranco, System of a Down and Rage Against the Machine. Without them, there’d be no “This Land Is Your Land,” no “We Shall Overcome,” no “Masters of War,” no “London Calling,” no “Killing in the Name.”
Much of my career has been one long audition to become a part of that legacy. I’m a union man and an unapologetic musical rabble-rouser. I’ve been a member of the Local 47 musicians’ union in Los Angeles for 32 years, and I’m a proud card-carrying member of the Industrial Workers of the World — it lives on! My mom was a union high school teacher, and the Morellos were hardworking coal miners in central Illinois. The cause of workers’ rights is in my blood.
[Read more about this project from Jane Coaston and Kathleen Kingsbury here.]
I’ve been greatly influenced by many of the songs and songwriters who carried that red union card. Playing acoustic protest music under my folk singer Nightwatchman moniker, I’ve written and sung dozens of tunes that owe a significant debt to this union’s remarkable musical history. My song “Hold the Line,” from my new album, is an example of how I’ve tried to carry forward that legacy.
My guide has been Joe Hill, who epitomized the I.W.W.’s anarcho poet warrior. He is my favorite musician of all time, even though there are no known recordings of him playing or singing. He was a tireless crusader for justice through his music, and his jams are a fine starting point for aspiring rebels. Hill was an I.W.W. organizer and a true musical and political revolutionary. He walked it like he sang it. That’s why the mine owners and the other bosses out West, and the politicians who did their dirty work, were afraid of him. And in the end, that’s why in 1915 he was executed in Utah on a trumped-up murder charge.
“A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over,” Hill famously said. His songs (“There Is Power in a Union,” “We Will Sing One Song,” “Joe Hill’s Last Will”) are sung today and will be tomorrow.
I’ve traveled far to pay my respects to the heroes of the I.W.W. I’ve placed flowers on Mother Jones’s grave in Mount Olive, Ill. I’ve hummed “The Internationale” at the resting place of Big Bill Haywood’s ashes in the Kremlin wall. And while on tour in Sweden, I made the hundred-mile trek from Stockholm to Gavle, Hill’s birthplace.
I sat by a little tree in the backyard that blooms where his ashes were spread, and I sang “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” written in the 1930s by Earl Robinson from a poem written by Alfred Hayes in the years after Hill’s death. The tiny room in the building where he and his family lived now serves as a union headquarters and museum. Fascists bombed the place 20 years ago. After all these years, they’re still afraid of Hill; they’re still afraid of his songs.
And they should be.
“‘The copper bosses killed you, Joe. They shot you, Joe,’ says I. ‘Takes more than guns to kill a man,’ says Joe. ‘I didn’t die.’”
“I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” by Tom Morello: the Nightwatchman
The songs live on wherever working people stand up for their rights, dreaming and scheming and struggling for something better than what was handed to them. These tunes are still sung on picket lines, at the barricades and through the tear gas haze of Group of 8 protests. They’re even more relevant now as workers throughout the country — like those at Kellogg’s, Nabisco and John Deere — are striking and taking to the picket line.
The I.W.W.’s mighty music of equality, justice and freedom is a reminder of struggles won and lost, as well as the battle hymns of struggles to come.
So get out there and start creating that new world. Maybe learn some of these world-changing jams. Then write some of your own.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... 778d3e6de3
"Take Me Home, Country Roads" (Guitar Cover) - Robyn Grey
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJhyMxMgNPk
"Take Me Home, Country Roads"
Guitar Cover
Robyn Grey sings John Denver's song "Take Me Home, Country Roads" with a guitar accompaniment.
"Take Me Home, Country Roads", also known simply as "Country Roads", is a song written by Bill Danoff, Taffy Nivert and John Denver about West Virginia. It was released as a single performed by Denver in April 1971, peaking at number two on Billboard's US Hot 100 singles. The song was a success on its initial release and was certified Gold in 1971, and Platinum in 2017. The song became one of John Denver's most popular songs.
The song is considered a symbol of West Virginia, which it describes as "Almost Heaven". In March 2014, it became one of the four official state anthems of West Virginia.
Robyn Grey is a singer and songwriter from London, England. Robyn started playing music at the age of 7 and has been writing and performing ever since. Her work is influenced by Norah Jones, Eva Cassidy and Birdy.
JollyGul.com plans to bring more songs from Robyn for our audience in the near future.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJhyMxMgNPk
"Take Me Home, Country Roads"
Guitar Cover
Robyn Grey sings John Denver's song "Take Me Home, Country Roads" with a guitar accompaniment.
"Take Me Home, Country Roads", also known simply as "Country Roads", is a song written by Bill Danoff, Taffy Nivert and John Denver about West Virginia. It was released as a single performed by Denver in April 1971, peaking at number two on Billboard's US Hot 100 singles. The song was a success on its initial release and was certified Gold in 1971, and Platinum in 2017. The song became one of John Denver's most popular songs.
The song is considered a symbol of West Virginia, which it describes as "Almost Heaven". In March 2014, it became one of the four official state anthems of West Virginia.
Robyn Grey is a singer and songwriter from London, England. Robyn started playing music at the age of 7 and has been writing and performing ever since. Her work is influenced by Norah Jones, Eva Cassidy and Birdy.
JollyGul.com plans to bring more songs from Robyn for our audience in the near future.
"Pulse of Raag Kirwani" - Mahesh Pathmakumara (Sitar), Peshala Manoj (Tabla), Ravindya Nishi (Dance)
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH-Ud-W-DbA
JollyGul.com has now launched a Indian Classical Music & Dance Series to enhance the awareness and understanding of this tradition in our community and in our audience.
Our first episode is "Pulse of Raag Kirwani", a piece with sitar, tabla and a Kathak dance component produced by our friends in Sri Lanka led by Mahesh Pathmakumara who also plays the sitar. Tabla is played by Peshala Manoj and the Kathak dance graciously performed by Ravindya Nishi.
Raag Kirwani is said to be adapted into Hindustani music from Carnatic music. The scale is the same as the harmonic minor in Western music. There are a few shades of Raag Pilu in Kirwani. It is suited for playing (9PM - 12AM) in the 2nd Prahar of the Night.
Kathak is one of the eight major forms of Indian classical dance. The origin of Kathak is traditionally attributed to the traveling poets in ancient northern India known as Kathakars or storytellers. The term Kathak is derived from the Vedic Sanskrit word Katha which means "story", and Kathakar which means "the one who tells a story", or "to do with stories".
In a separate video (link below), Mahesh talks for 2 minutes on JollyGul Movies & Documentary Channel about "Pulse of Raag Kirwani".
Pulse of Raag Kirwani - A Narration
JollyGul Movies & Documentaries Channel
https://youtu.be/6Oo4jvWfWdQ
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH-Ud-W-DbA
JollyGul.com has now launched a Indian Classical Music & Dance Series to enhance the awareness and understanding of this tradition in our community and in our audience.
Our first episode is "Pulse of Raag Kirwani", a piece with sitar, tabla and a Kathak dance component produced by our friends in Sri Lanka led by Mahesh Pathmakumara who also plays the sitar. Tabla is played by Peshala Manoj and the Kathak dance graciously performed by Ravindya Nishi.
Raag Kirwani is said to be adapted into Hindustani music from Carnatic music. The scale is the same as the harmonic minor in Western music. There are a few shades of Raag Pilu in Kirwani. It is suited for playing (9PM - 12AM) in the 2nd Prahar of the Night.
Kathak is one of the eight major forms of Indian classical dance. The origin of Kathak is traditionally attributed to the traveling poets in ancient northern India known as Kathakars or storytellers. The term Kathak is derived from the Vedic Sanskrit word Katha which means "story", and Kathakar which means "the one who tells a story", or "to do with stories".
In a separate video (link below), Mahesh talks for 2 minutes on JollyGul Movies & Documentary Channel about "Pulse of Raag Kirwani".
Pulse of Raag Kirwani - A Narration
JollyGul Movies & Documentaries Channel
https://youtu.be/6Oo4jvWfWdQ
"Hava Nagila" (Jewish Folk Song) - Agata Fugat
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYhq-QWmE6E
JollyGul.com presents "Hava Nagila" sung by Agata Fugat and produced by Jakub Niewiadomski, who also plays the piano in this rendition. Michalina Jastrzębska is the cellist and Dominik Maciąg plays the bass guitar.
We had presented this song as part of our celebration program for New Year 2022. We have now created a stand-alone video for this song for the listening convenience of our audience.
Hava Nagila is one of the first modern Jewish folk songs in the Hebrew language. It went on to become a staple of band performers at Jewish weddings and bar mitzvah celebrations. The lyrics are based on Psalm 118 (verse 24) of the Hebrew Bible. Hava Nagila means “let’s rejoice”
------------------
Hava Nagila
Let's Rejoice
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYhq-QWmE6E
JollyGul.com presents "Hava Nagila" sung by Agata Fugat and produced by Jakub Niewiadomski, who also plays the piano in this rendition. Michalina Jastrzębska is the cellist and Dominik Maciąg plays the bass guitar.
We had presented this song as part of our celebration program for New Year 2022. We have now created a stand-alone video for this song for the listening convenience of our audience.
Hava Nagila is one of the first modern Jewish folk songs in the Hebrew language. It went on to become a staple of band performers at Jewish weddings and bar mitzvah celebrations. The lyrics are based on Psalm 118 (verse 24) of the Hebrew Bible. Hava Nagila means “let’s rejoice”
------------------
Hava Nagila
Let's Rejoice
Re: General Art & Architecture of Interest
From Morocco With Love - "Habibi Ya Nour el Ein" (Cover)
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pncAVv51Z8o
"Habibi Ya Nour el Ein"
My darling, you are the glow in my eyes
Our friends from Morocco led by Oualid Ekami and Max Team Production present the popular Arabic love song "Habibi Ya Nour el Ein" in time for Valentine's Day 2022 celebrations on our platform.
"Habibi Ya Nour el Ein" is the title song of Egyptian singer Amr Diab's most successful album. "Nour el Ein" album was released in January 1996 and became a tremendous success not only in the Middle East but worldwide. The title track was an international phenomenon, becoming a crossover hit in Pakistan, India, Brazil, Iran, Argentina, Chile, France, and South Africa. The song was remixed by several European arrangers and has become a big pull on the dance floors of Europe.
The presentation of this song, with lyrics and translations, also launches the JollyGul Arabic Music Series on our platform.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pncAVv51Z8o
"Habibi Ya Nour el Ein"
My darling, you are the glow in my eyes
Our friends from Morocco led by Oualid Ekami and Max Team Production present the popular Arabic love song "Habibi Ya Nour el Ein" in time for Valentine's Day 2022 celebrations on our platform.
"Habibi Ya Nour el Ein" is the title song of Egyptian singer Amr Diab's most successful album. "Nour el Ein" album was released in January 1996 and became a tremendous success not only in the Middle East but worldwide. The title track was an international phenomenon, becoming a crossover hit in Pakistan, India, Brazil, Iran, Argentina, Chile, France, and South Africa. The song was remixed by several European arrangers and has become a big pull on the dance floors of Europe.
The presentation of this song, with lyrics and translations, also launches the JollyGul Arabic Music Series on our platform.
Re: General Art & Architecture of Interest
"Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh" (Cover) - Yasmin Amlani
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqaYfMbInKc
"Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh"
It is a strange story
Yasmin Amlani presents a wonderful rendition of "Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh" a very popular song by late Lata Mangeshkar from the 1960 movie "Dil Apna Aur Preet Parai". The lyrics were written by Shailendra and music composition was done by Shankar Jaikishan. The movie was directed by Kishore Sahu and starred Meena Kumari and Raj Kumar.
Yasmin Amlani is a vocalist based in Toronto, Canada and has been performing for over a decade in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Gujarati, Swahili and English. She was born in Tanga, Tanzania and attributes her musical interest and talent to her late grandfather Hassamali Kassam who had a gifted voice and used to sing Ismaili devotional hymns (ginans). The whole family on her father's side is musically inclined and Yasmin grew up in that environment listening to devotional and movie songs. Yasmin won singing awards from PMG (Punjab Music Group - Doha Qatar) in 2021 performing alongside well known artists from Pakistan and Dubai. Yasmin is a linguist and interpreter by profession and has been working in this field for over 20 years.
As part of JollyGul Special Tribute Series for the much missed late Lata Mangeshkar Ji, we are presenting Yasmin's beautiful rendition of "Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh" with concurrent lyrics and translations display.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqaYfMbInKc
"Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh"
It is a strange story
Yasmin Amlani presents a wonderful rendition of "Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh" a very popular song by late Lata Mangeshkar from the 1960 movie "Dil Apna Aur Preet Parai". The lyrics were written by Shailendra and music composition was done by Shankar Jaikishan. The movie was directed by Kishore Sahu and starred Meena Kumari and Raj Kumar.
Yasmin Amlani is a vocalist based in Toronto, Canada and has been performing for over a decade in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Gujarati, Swahili and English. She was born in Tanga, Tanzania and attributes her musical interest and talent to her late grandfather Hassamali Kassam who had a gifted voice and used to sing Ismaili devotional hymns (ginans). The whole family on her father's side is musically inclined and Yasmin grew up in that environment listening to devotional and movie songs. Yasmin won singing awards from PMG (Punjab Music Group - Doha Qatar) in 2021 performing alongside well known artists from Pakistan and Dubai. Yasmin is a linguist and interpreter by profession and has been working in this field for over 20 years.
As part of JollyGul Special Tribute Series for the much missed late Lata Mangeshkar Ji, we are presenting Yasmin's beautiful rendition of "Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh" with concurrent lyrics and translations display.
Re: General Art & Architecture of Interest
"One Love" - Bob Marley (A Plea For Peace)
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_Xrn5KXByA
One Love / People Get Ready (Medley)
A Plea For Peace
JollyGul.com presents Bob Marley's "One Love / People Get Ready" medley with a plea for peace in the Russia-Ukraine conflict for the sake of safety and well-being of all the people and especially the children in both countries.
We call for immediate cessation of hostilities in the ongoing conflict and urge political leaders to resolve their differences through dialogue.
Bob Marley's idea was that everyone in the world should stop fighting and become one - a similar sentiment to John Lennon's "Imagine" and George Harrison's "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)".
This 1977 recorded rendition “One Love / People Get Ready” by Bob Marley from the album "Exodus" is a timely reminder for us all.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_Xrn5KXByA
One Love / People Get Ready (Medley)
A Plea For Peace
JollyGul.com presents Bob Marley's "One Love / People Get Ready" medley with a plea for peace in the Russia-Ukraine conflict for the sake of safety and well-being of all the people and especially the children in both countries.
We call for immediate cessation of hostilities in the ongoing conflict and urge political leaders to resolve their differences through dialogue.
Bob Marley's idea was that everyone in the world should stop fighting and become one - a similar sentiment to John Lennon's "Imagine" and George Harrison's "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth)".
This 1977 recorded rendition “One Love / People Get Ready” by Bob Marley from the album "Exodus" is a timely reminder for us all.
Re: General Art & Architecture of Interest
Traditional Ancestral African Tunes (On Kora) - Lucas Trigueiro
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWvUDr7H-PU
Traditional Ancestral African Tunes (On Kora)
Sanou & Kaira
Lucas Trigueiro presents some traditional ancestral African tunes on the kora.
Lucas Trigueiro is a musician, music producer and engineer from Brazil. Lucas is a graduate of the renowned Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts USA. He plays the flamenco guitar and kora, and has performed with international artists from Spain, Senegal and USA, as well as accompanied many performers, singers and dance groups from Brazil.
Lucas was mentored to play the kora by Zal Sissokho, a true griot from Senegal, to whom he is deeply grateful.
The kora is a mystical stringed instrument used extensively in West Africa. A kora typically has 21 strings, which are played by plucking with the fingers. It combines features of the lute and harp. It is regarded as the sacred instrument of the griots (traditional West African storytellers). Griots are a repository of oral tradition and often seen as leaders due to their position as advisors to royal personages.
Lucas has presented an instrumental medley version of 2 songs - "Sanou" and "Kaira". "Sanou" means gold, this song is also known as Bani Le (refusal) as it is about resistance to French colonial troops in Mali.
The second song "Kaira" (means "peace"), was made famous by Sidiki Diabaté in the 1940s during the last decades of colonial rule in Mali. It became a rallying point for Malians, a form of cultural protest against colonial values. Sidiki was the greatest kora player during that time and his son Toumani Diabaté carries on the griot tradition - he is one of the greatest kora player today.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWvUDr7H-PU
Traditional Ancestral African Tunes (On Kora)
Sanou & Kaira
Lucas Trigueiro presents some traditional ancestral African tunes on the kora.
Lucas Trigueiro is a musician, music producer and engineer from Brazil. Lucas is a graduate of the renowned Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts USA. He plays the flamenco guitar and kora, and has performed with international artists from Spain, Senegal and USA, as well as accompanied many performers, singers and dance groups from Brazil.
Lucas was mentored to play the kora by Zal Sissokho, a true griot from Senegal, to whom he is deeply grateful.
The kora is a mystical stringed instrument used extensively in West Africa. A kora typically has 21 strings, which are played by plucking with the fingers. It combines features of the lute and harp. It is regarded as the sacred instrument of the griots (traditional West African storytellers). Griots are a repository of oral tradition and often seen as leaders due to their position as advisors to royal personages.
Lucas has presented an instrumental medley version of 2 songs - "Sanou" and "Kaira". "Sanou" means gold, this song is also known as Bani Le (refusal) as it is about resistance to French colonial troops in Mali.
The second song "Kaira" (means "peace"), was made famous by Sidiki Diabaté in the 1940s during the last decades of colonial rule in Mali. It became a rallying point for Malians, a form of cultural protest against colonial values. Sidiki was the greatest kora player during that time and his son Toumani Diabaté carries on the griot tradition - he is one of the greatest kora player today.
Re: General Art & Architecture of Interest
"Ya Taiba" (Nasheed) - H Ahmed
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym1P4_LA75I
H Ahmed presents a beautiful rendition of the popular nasheed "Ya Taiba".
A nasheed is a work of vocal music that is either sung a cappella (vocals only) or with instruments, according to a particular style or tradition within Islam. Nasheeds are loved throughout the Islamic world. The material and lyrics of a nasheed usually make reference to Islamic beliefs, history and religion as well as current events.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym1P4_LA75I
H Ahmed presents a beautiful rendition of the popular nasheed "Ya Taiba".
A nasheed is a work of vocal music that is either sung a cappella (vocals only) or with instruments, according to a particular style or tradition within Islam. Nasheeds are loved throughout the Islamic world. The material and lyrics of a nasheed usually make reference to Islamic beliefs, history and religion as well as current events.
Re: General Art & Architecture of Interest
"Lambi Judaai" (Cover) - Shabnam Merali
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSTGtm_g3HA
"Lambi Judaai"
This Long Separation
Shabnam Merali sings "Lambi Judaai" a memorable song by legendary Pakistani folk singer Reshma from the 1983 movie "Hero". The lyrics were written by Anand Bakhshi and music composed by Laxmikant and Pyarelal.
For Shabnam's rendition, music arrangement and production was done in Canada by Avengers Productions - Nadeem Ali and Group. The song is one of the tracks from Shabnam's ghazal and songs album "Lamhe".
Reshma (1947 – 2013) was awarded with Sitara-e-Imtiaz (Star of Distinction), the third highest honor and civilian award in Pakistan among many other recognitions for her contribution to the music field and service to the nation.
Shabnam Merali is an accomplished vocalist and musician. She has skillfully mastered the world of Ghazals, Sufi Kalam, Qawwalis, Ginans, Qasidas and various other genres of music in languages such as Urdu, Gujarati, Sindhi, Kiswahili, Punjabi, Siraiki. She has performed internationally on many platforms and has released many albums worldwide with original compositions, some of her albums include Expressions, Khushi, Shan-e-Ali, Shukrana, Suhana Safar and Shahnaama e Karimi.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSTGtm_g3HA
"Lambi Judaai"
This Long Separation
Shabnam Merali sings "Lambi Judaai" a memorable song by legendary Pakistani folk singer Reshma from the 1983 movie "Hero". The lyrics were written by Anand Bakhshi and music composed by Laxmikant and Pyarelal.
For Shabnam's rendition, music arrangement and production was done in Canada by Avengers Productions - Nadeem Ali and Group. The song is one of the tracks from Shabnam's ghazal and songs album "Lamhe".
Reshma (1947 – 2013) was awarded with Sitara-e-Imtiaz (Star of Distinction), the third highest honor and civilian award in Pakistan among many other recognitions for her contribution to the music field and service to the nation.
Shabnam Merali is an accomplished vocalist and musician. She has skillfully mastered the world of Ghazals, Sufi Kalam, Qawwalis, Ginans, Qasidas and various other genres of music in languages such as Urdu, Gujarati, Sindhi, Kiswahili, Punjabi, Siraiki. She has performed internationally on many platforms and has released many albums worldwide with original compositions, some of her albums include Expressions, Khushi, Shan-e-Ali, Shukrana, Suhana Safar and Shahnaama e Karimi.
Re: General Art & Architecture of Interest
National Anthem of Ukraine - A Song of Defiance
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKGzMGZpH7M
National Anthem of Ukraine
Šče ne vmerla Ukrajiny i slava, i volja
The glory and freedom of Ukraine has not yet perished
JollyGul.com presents the National Anthem of Ukraine which has become a song of defiance all over the world.
The various renditions of the song are shared widely on social media as well as played at concert halls and sporting events as people express solidarity with the brave Ukrainian nation.
Ukraine’s national anthem is based on a poem written in 1862 by Pavlo Chubynsky and was later composed by Mykhailo Verbytskyi, a Catholic priest. The current version has been adopted since 2003.
JollyGul is a USA based independent not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote artists and spread the message of love, peace, tolerance and understanding through music of all genre to our global audience.
We stand with the people of Ukraine in this hour of need as they face Russian aggression.
Our presentation is with lyrics and English translation.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKGzMGZpH7M
National Anthem of Ukraine
Šče ne vmerla Ukrajiny i slava, i volja
The glory and freedom of Ukraine has not yet perished
JollyGul.com presents the National Anthem of Ukraine which has become a song of defiance all over the world.
The various renditions of the song are shared widely on social media as well as played at concert halls and sporting events as people express solidarity with the brave Ukrainian nation.
Ukraine’s national anthem is based on a poem written in 1862 by Pavlo Chubynsky and was later composed by Mykhailo Verbytskyi, a Catholic priest. The current version has been adopted since 2003.
JollyGul is a USA based independent not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote artists and spread the message of love, peace, tolerance and understanding through music of all genre to our global audience.
We stand with the people of Ukraine in this hour of need as they face Russian aggression.
Our presentation is with lyrics and English translation.
Re: General Art & Architecture of Interest
It’s Possible to Learn the Right Thing From the Wrong Person
In 1980, my senior year of high school, I sat in an auditorium watching “A Man for All Seasons.” The film, based on Robert Bolt’s play of the same title, won the 1967 Academy Award for best picture, as well as five other Oscars. It was also one of the formative artistic experiences of my life.
“When a man takes an oath, he’s holding his own self in his hands, like water,” Sir Thomas More tells his daughter in the film. “And if he opens his fingers then, he needn’t hope to find himself again.” In a dark room in Alabama, 4,000 miles and half a millennium distant from Tudor England, those words burned into me. In a few months, I would be leaving home for the first time. Already I wondered who I would be after I did.
In my dorm room that fall, I kept a postcard replica of a portrait of More by Hans Holbein the Younger. I love that painting still. Of all the glorious art that New York City spreads out like an endless banquet of beauty and provocation, it’s always the one I visit first. Holbein’s portrait tugs at something in me so deeply attached it feels integral. A singular, irreplaceable organ. A self.
Nearly 500 years after he painted his haunting portrait of More, Holbein is having a moment. A retrospective at the Morgan Library & Museum has inspired rapturous reviews. “A flabbergasting talent,” wrote Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker. “A mastery of optics and color theory and classical history,” Jason Farago noted in a review for The Times. “Daring on an intimate scale,” Jenny Uglow wrote in The New York Review of Books.
The centerpiece of the show is the portrait of More, on loan from the Frick Collection. The painting has always encouraged rhapsodies, and the shadowed velvet sleeve in the foreground deserves every ardent word it has generated. “The sleeve was ecstasy, the sleeve should be illegal, the sleeve was Utopia,” wrote the novelist Jonathan Lethem in an essay for the Frick last year.
But for me the portrait is moving less because of the artist’s genius than because of what its subject had come to represent. “A Man for All Seasons” primed me to see in More’s painted eyes the intelligence and integrity and resolute determination of a man who knows who he is and who cannot be tempted to forsake himself. Not even to save his own life.
A committed Catholic, Thomas More was a brilliant writer and scholar. He was also a lawyer, a statesman and a counselor to King Henry VIII, and he eventually became Henry’s lord chancellor — “the king’s good servant,” as More put it in his final words, “but God’s first.” After Henry separated his country from papal authority, More refused to swear an oath recognizing the king as supreme head of the Church of England. In 1535 he was executed for treason. Four hundred years later, he was canonized as a Catholic saint.
As the novelist Hilary Mantel depicts him in her celebrated trilogy that begins with “Wolf Hall,” More was a man less for all seasons than of his own bloody age, but her fictional portrait is no closer to the full reality of this complex man than Catholic hagiography is. But Ms. Mantel is right that Thomas More is a troubling figure in history, even in church history, and “A Man for All Seasons” does not address the other ways in which his conflation of God with Catholicism played out, including the persecution of Protestants.
The question of how much one person’s absolute moral conviction should govern the behavior of other people is not a question we left behind with Tudor England. It underlies nearly every political debate we have today. Many of the “moral” convictions being foisted upon American citizens by way of their leaders are as problematic now as they were during the political convulsions of Henry’s day.
But when I look at Holbein’s portrait of More, I don’t think about the historical role More played in attempting to suppress the Protestant Reformation. I don’t even think about his fictional counterparts in Mr. Bolt’s play or Ms. Mantel’s novels.
What I think about is an idea that first came to me as I sat in a high school auditorium contemplating a man who could more easily give up his life than his own understanding of himself. As I sat in the dark, I suddenly recognized that the world I was entering would profoundly test my understanding of myself, too. I needed to figure out where I could bend, where I could grow and where I must stand firm on trembling ground.
We don’t give robber barons like Henry Clay Frick a pass because they used their wealth to create important collections that live on beyond them, any more than we give Thomas More a pass for persecuting Protestants. But part of living comfortably in a complicated world means recognizing the complexity of human beings — their inscrutability, their ever-changing priorities, above all their capacity for self-contradiction. Much as we might prefer it to be otherwise, it is possible for a person to do unforgivable things and also things that are remarkably beautiful and good. We do human wisdom a great disservice when we expect it to be perfectly embodied in a flawed human being.
Perhaps even more important, we profoundly misunderstand the very nature of art when we think we know in advance what readers — or audience members or gallery visitors — will derive from it. Or, worse, when we presume to tell them what they should derive from it.
Whether it’s a painting or a film or a play or a dance or a poem or a novel or a sculpture or a symphony or any other artifact of creativity made by a restless, curious, questing human mind, a great work of art finds its completion in the restless, curious, questing mind of the person who encounters it. And there is no predicting how that act of transformation, that experience of utter intimacy, might unfold.
Great art of every kind allows people to place themselves, safely, into the larger world. It is transformative precisely because it is one way we come to understand our own part in the expansive, miraculous human story. A great work of art reminds us that our own lives, which too often feel small and insignificant, are part of a story that can be full of cruelty and suffering, yes, but that can also be astonishing. Very often it is magnificent.
When someone tells me that a book should no longer be read — or a film should no longer be screened or a painting hung or a play performed — because of some problematic history attached to the work or its creator, I think of the girl I was in 1980, discovering a truth I desperately needed to find, in just that moment, from a story that might or might not be true about a human being who might or might not be good. A human being who, I know now, was almost certainly both.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/14/opin ... 778d3e6de3
In 1980, my senior year of high school, I sat in an auditorium watching “A Man for All Seasons.” The film, based on Robert Bolt’s play of the same title, won the 1967 Academy Award for best picture, as well as five other Oscars. It was also one of the formative artistic experiences of my life.
“When a man takes an oath, he’s holding his own self in his hands, like water,” Sir Thomas More tells his daughter in the film. “And if he opens his fingers then, he needn’t hope to find himself again.” In a dark room in Alabama, 4,000 miles and half a millennium distant from Tudor England, those words burned into me. In a few months, I would be leaving home for the first time. Already I wondered who I would be after I did.
In my dorm room that fall, I kept a postcard replica of a portrait of More by Hans Holbein the Younger. I love that painting still. Of all the glorious art that New York City spreads out like an endless banquet of beauty and provocation, it’s always the one I visit first. Holbein’s portrait tugs at something in me so deeply attached it feels integral. A singular, irreplaceable organ. A self.
Nearly 500 years after he painted his haunting portrait of More, Holbein is having a moment. A retrospective at the Morgan Library & Museum has inspired rapturous reviews. “A flabbergasting talent,” wrote Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker. “A mastery of optics and color theory and classical history,” Jason Farago noted in a review for The Times. “Daring on an intimate scale,” Jenny Uglow wrote in The New York Review of Books.
The centerpiece of the show is the portrait of More, on loan from the Frick Collection. The painting has always encouraged rhapsodies, and the shadowed velvet sleeve in the foreground deserves every ardent word it has generated. “The sleeve was ecstasy, the sleeve should be illegal, the sleeve was Utopia,” wrote the novelist Jonathan Lethem in an essay for the Frick last year.
But for me the portrait is moving less because of the artist’s genius than because of what its subject had come to represent. “A Man for All Seasons” primed me to see in More’s painted eyes the intelligence and integrity and resolute determination of a man who knows who he is and who cannot be tempted to forsake himself. Not even to save his own life.
A committed Catholic, Thomas More was a brilliant writer and scholar. He was also a lawyer, a statesman and a counselor to King Henry VIII, and he eventually became Henry’s lord chancellor — “the king’s good servant,” as More put it in his final words, “but God’s first.” After Henry separated his country from papal authority, More refused to swear an oath recognizing the king as supreme head of the Church of England. In 1535 he was executed for treason. Four hundred years later, he was canonized as a Catholic saint.
As the novelist Hilary Mantel depicts him in her celebrated trilogy that begins with “Wolf Hall,” More was a man less for all seasons than of his own bloody age, but her fictional portrait is no closer to the full reality of this complex man than Catholic hagiography is. But Ms. Mantel is right that Thomas More is a troubling figure in history, even in church history, and “A Man for All Seasons” does not address the other ways in which his conflation of God with Catholicism played out, including the persecution of Protestants.
The question of how much one person’s absolute moral conviction should govern the behavior of other people is not a question we left behind with Tudor England. It underlies nearly every political debate we have today. Many of the “moral” convictions being foisted upon American citizens by way of their leaders are as problematic now as they were during the political convulsions of Henry’s day.
But when I look at Holbein’s portrait of More, I don’t think about the historical role More played in attempting to suppress the Protestant Reformation. I don’t even think about his fictional counterparts in Mr. Bolt’s play or Ms. Mantel’s novels.
What I think about is an idea that first came to me as I sat in a high school auditorium contemplating a man who could more easily give up his life than his own understanding of himself. As I sat in the dark, I suddenly recognized that the world I was entering would profoundly test my understanding of myself, too. I needed to figure out where I could bend, where I could grow and where I must stand firm on trembling ground.
We don’t give robber barons like Henry Clay Frick a pass because they used their wealth to create important collections that live on beyond them, any more than we give Thomas More a pass for persecuting Protestants. But part of living comfortably in a complicated world means recognizing the complexity of human beings — their inscrutability, their ever-changing priorities, above all their capacity for self-contradiction. Much as we might prefer it to be otherwise, it is possible for a person to do unforgivable things and also things that are remarkably beautiful and good. We do human wisdom a great disservice when we expect it to be perfectly embodied in a flawed human being.
Perhaps even more important, we profoundly misunderstand the very nature of art when we think we know in advance what readers — or audience members or gallery visitors — will derive from it. Or, worse, when we presume to tell them what they should derive from it.
Whether it’s a painting or a film or a play or a dance or a poem or a novel or a sculpture or a symphony or any other artifact of creativity made by a restless, curious, questing human mind, a great work of art finds its completion in the restless, curious, questing mind of the person who encounters it. And there is no predicting how that act of transformation, that experience of utter intimacy, might unfold.
Great art of every kind allows people to place themselves, safely, into the larger world. It is transformative precisely because it is one way we come to understand our own part in the expansive, miraculous human story. A great work of art reminds us that our own lives, which too often feel small and insignificant, are part of a story that can be full of cruelty and suffering, yes, but that can also be astonishing. Very often it is magnificent.
When someone tells me that a book should no longer be read — or a film should no longer be screened or a painting hung or a play performed — because of some problematic history attached to the work or its creator, I think of the girl I was in 1980, discovering a truth I desperately needed to find, in just that moment, from a story that might or might not be true about a human being who might or might not be good. A human being who, I know now, was almost certainly both.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/14/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: General Art & Architecture of Interest
The Art of Ocean Science
On board a research vessel exploring the oceans, these artists found beauty in science.
Ale de la Puente’s Bathymetry Drawings on a Moving Vessel. Credit: Courtesy of the Schmidt Ocean Institute.
Ale de la Puente’s moment of clarity arrived in the form of rock, unearthed by a robot 12,000 feet beneath the surface of the Gulf of California. De la Puente, a Mexico City-based multidisciplinary artist, was on a seafaring expedition as part of the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Artist-at-Sea residency program, joining a team of marine geologists, microbiologists, and other scientists aboard the R/V Falkor, exploring the seafloor and occasionally nicking bits of it for research.
While unremarkable in appearance, the rock’s composition and age had the Falkor’s geologists agog. It had been submerged for more than 2 million years, before the remote-controlled underwater vessel, named SuBastian, dug it up. It seemed part of our world and yet so distant and alien; it might as well have been from the moon.
HIDDEN TREASURE: Artist Ale de la Puente (left) and members of the Falkor’s crew investigate a rock found 12,000 feet under the sea. Photo courtesy of Schmidt Ocean Institute.
But for de la Puente, what made the moment so poignant was how everyone on the ship interacted with the rock: An engineer gripped it like a football, while the ship’s chef gave it a good sniff, and the geologists approached it with something like reverence. “Everyone interacted with the rock in a different way,” says de la Puente. “As an artist, my job is to create space for different points of view, and to explore why somebody might fall in love with that rock.”
De la Puente created a diptych based on the navigational path of the Falkor as it mapped the ocean floor. Her drawing, Bathymetry Drawings on a Moving Vessel, along with 19 works by other Schmidt Ocean Institute artists, will be on display at the Nautilus Ocean Exhibit at New York City’s Explorer’s Club from March 16 to 20. (Read a short profile of Kishan Munroe, an artist from The Bahamas, included in the exhibition.)
“Focus on the beautiful, the wondrous, the weird—and get the public invested in a positive way.”
The notion of art in dialogue with science inspired Wendy Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Ocean Institute (SOI), to launch SOI’s Artist-at-Sea program in 2015. “The idea was to bring artists on board to participate in the science, and to incorporate the science and the data into their art,” says Carlie Wiener, SOI’s director of communications. To date, SOI’s Falkor has hosted 42 artists on expeditions to far-flung locations around the globe. (After a total of 81 expeditions and the mapping of 1.3 million square kilometers of sea floor—and sailing the equivalent of 13 times around the world—the Falkor is being donated to another science organization to make way for a new ship, Falkor Too, with plans to set sail in fall 2022.) “The ocean is so vast and the science so overwhelming, a creative approach can help people digest the science and think about it in different ways,” says Wiener.
SIGHTS UNSEEN: Bathymetric rendering of a mountainous seafloor (top) and Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger’s Sights Unseen—Cassowary Reef (bottom). Courtesy of the artist.
Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger’s artwork embodies the idea of art making science more accessible to non-scientists. The Australian artist joined a Falkor expedition to the Coral Sea in early 2021 and created a painting based on the movements of the Falkor as it mapped the topography, or bathymetry, of the seabed below (Kannar-Lichtenberger’s work will be on view at the Nautilus Ocean Exhibit). The technical mapping process intrigued her: The Falkor’s multibeam sonar system transmits sound “pings” that bounce off the seafloor and return to the ship, which “huge banks of computers process and then spit out as an image we recognize as a landscape,” she says. Back at home, Kannar-Lichtenberger tried to print out a few minutes’ worth of this data on her printer, but the machine balked at the resulting 57,000 pages (!) of hieroglyphics. So she manually cut-and-pasted snippets of code into a Word doc, and incorporated the code into a landscape of a massive underwater mountain entitled Sights Unseen—Cassowary Reef. “Science can be so didactic in the way that it presents its outcomes,” says Kannar-Lichtenberger. “Art helps people emotionally connect with science.”
Not all art is visual, of course. Answer to the Call is a 22-channel sound installation by the Brisbane-based contemporary artist, Taloi Havini, culled in part from recordings she made while on board the Falkor’s 2020 expedition along the southern Great Barrier Reef. “As an artist, I need time and space for research and to formulate ideas, much like scientists do,” says Havini. “I could not have made Answer to the Call without the SOI residency.” Her time at sea helped her think about how ocean conservation requires input from so many different types of people and disciplines, and the first step is to really start paying attention to the ocean. “How can we care for something we don’t have a relationship with?” she asks.
OCEAN SOUND WAVES: Taloi Havini’s Answer to the Call installation. Photo courtesy of Schmidt Ocean Institute.
Art can help foster that connection, says Markus Reymann, director of TBA21-Academy, an art and ocean advocacy organization. “Many artists today are trained in critical thinking and research, and so they’re highly attuned to all kinds of injustices like social and environmental justice,” he says. TBA21-Academy has collaborated with SOI on several science art projects, including the exhibition of Havini’s Answer to the Call installation and a new ocean fellowship for indigenous artists. “When artists are exposed to scientific research, they can create alternative possibilities with profound impact by making it accessible to visitors through exhibitions. It’s not art in the service of science, but a relationship that is mutually beneficial.”
Many SOI artists have continued to work with scientists they met aboard the Falkor, says Wiener, demonstrating the success of the program. But there’s more to be done: Ocean scientists should look to other “final frontiers” like space for ideas on how culture can be a vehicle in stoking popular interest in conversation, as opposed to “cramming science down everyone’s throats,” Wiener says. To this end, SOI in collaboration with Nekton recently launched the Ocean Rising program, which explores how arts and culture can make ocean science more accessible and fun. “Space has done an excellent job of this through pop culture and shows like Star Trek, and the oceans have sort of lagged behind that,” Wiener says—and it doesn’t help that with pressing global problems like climate change and overfishing, the ocean can be kind of a bummer. But as with the artist-in-residence program, she says, “you can focus on the beautiful, the wondrous, the weird, and instead get the public invested in a positive way.”
Lead image: Ale de la Puente’s Bathymetry Drawings on a Moving Vessel. Credit: Courtesy of the Schmidt Ocean Institute.
https://nautil.us/the-art-of-ocean-science-14556/
On board a research vessel exploring the oceans, these artists found beauty in science.
Ale de la Puente’s Bathymetry Drawings on a Moving Vessel. Credit: Courtesy of the Schmidt Ocean Institute.
Ale de la Puente’s moment of clarity arrived in the form of rock, unearthed by a robot 12,000 feet beneath the surface of the Gulf of California. De la Puente, a Mexico City-based multidisciplinary artist, was on a seafaring expedition as part of the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Artist-at-Sea residency program, joining a team of marine geologists, microbiologists, and other scientists aboard the R/V Falkor, exploring the seafloor and occasionally nicking bits of it for research.
While unremarkable in appearance, the rock’s composition and age had the Falkor’s geologists agog. It had been submerged for more than 2 million years, before the remote-controlled underwater vessel, named SuBastian, dug it up. It seemed part of our world and yet so distant and alien; it might as well have been from the moon.
HIDDEN TREASURE: Artist Ale de la Puente (left) and members of the Falkor’s crew investigate a rock found 12,000 feet under the sea. Photo courtesy of Schmidt Ocean Institute.
But for de la Puente, what made the moment so poignant was how everyone on the ship interacted with the rock: An engineer gripped it like a football, while the ship’s chef gave it a good sniff, and the geologists approached it with something like reverence. “Everyone interacted with the rock in a different way,” says de la Puente. “As an artist, my job is to create space for different points of view, and to explore why somebody might fall in love with that rock.”
De la Puente created a diptych based on the navigational path of the Falkor as it mapped the ocean floor. Her drawing, Bathymetry Drawings on a Moving Vessel, along with 19 works by other Schmidt Ocean Institute artists, will be on display at the Nautilus Ocean Exhibit at New York City’s Explorer’s Club from March 16 to 20. (Read a short profile of Kishan Munroe, an artist from The Bahamas, included in the exhibition.)
“Focus on the beautiful, the wondrous, the weird—and get the public invested in a positive way.”
The notion of art in dialogue with science inspired Wendy Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Ocean Institute (SOI), to launch SOI’s Artist-at-Sea program in 2015. “The idea was to bring artists on board to participate in the science, and to incorporate the science and the data into their art,” says Carlie Wiener, SOI’s director of communications. To date, SOI’s Falkor has hosted 42 artists on expeditions to far-flung locations around the globe. (After a total of 81 expeditions and the mapping of 1.3 million square kilometers of sea floor—and sailing the equivalent of 13 times around the world—the Falkor is being donated to another science organization to make way for a new ship, Falkor Too, with plans to set sail in fall 2022.) “The ocean is so vast and the science so overwhelming, a creative approach can help people digest the science and think about it in different ways,” says Wiener.
SIGHTS UNSEEN: Bathymetric rendering of a mountainous seafloor (top) and Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger’s Sights Unseen—Cassowary Reef (bottom). Courtesy of the artist.
Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger’s artwork embodies the idea of art making science more accessible to non-scientists. The Australian artist joined a Falkor expedition to the Coral Sea in early 2021 and created a painting based on the movements of the Falkor as it mapped the topography, or bathymetry, of the seabed below (Kannar-Lichtenberger’s work will be on view at the Nautilus Ocean Exhibit). The technical mapping process intrigued her: The Falkor’s multibeam sonar system transmits sound “pings” that bounce off the seafloor and return to the ship, which “huge banks of computers process and then spit out as an image we recognize as a landscape,” she says. Back at home, Kannar-Lichtenberger tried to print out a few minutes’ worth of this data on her printer, but the machine balked at the resulting 57,000 pages (!) of hieroglyphics. So she manually cut-and-pasted snippets of code into a Word doc, and incorporated the code into a landscape of a massive underwater mountain entitled Sights Unseen—Cassowary Reef. “Science can be so didactic in the way that it presents its outcomes,” says Kannar-Lichtenberger. “Art helps people emotionally connect with science.”
Not all art is visual, of course. Answer to the Call is a 22-channel sound installation by the Brisbane-based contemporary artist, Taloi Havini, culled in part from recordings she made while on board the Falkor’s 2020 expedition along the southern Great Barrier Reef. “As an artist, I need time and space for research and to formulate ideas, much like scientists do,” says Havini. “I could not have made Answer to the Call without the SOI residency.” Her time at sea helped her think about how ocean conservation requires input from so many different types of people and disciplines, and the first step is to really start paying attention to the ocean. “How can we care for something we don’t have a relationship with?” she asks.
OCEAN SOUND WAVES: Taloi Havini’s Answer to the Call installation. Photo courtesy of Schmidt Ocean Institute.
Art can help foster that connection, says Markus Reymann, director of TBA21-Academy, an art and ocean advocacy organization. “Many artists today are trained in critical thinking and research, and so they’re highly attuned to all kinds of injustices like social and environmental justice,” he says. TBA21-Academy has collaborated with SOI on several science art projects, including the exhibition of Havini’s Answer to the Call installation and a new ocean fellowship for indigenous artists. “When artists are exposed to scientific research, they can create alternative possibilities with profound impact by making it accessible to visitors through exhibitions. It’s not art in the service of science, but a relationship that is mutually beneficial.”
Many SOI artists have continued to work with scientists they met aboard the Falkor, says Wiener, demonstrating the success of the program. But there’s more to be done: Ocean scientists should look to other “final frontiers” like space for ideas on how culture can be a vehicle in stoking popular interest in conversation, as opposed to “cramming science down everyone’s throats,” Wiener says. To this end, SOI in collaboration with Nekton recently launched the Ocean Rising program, which explores how arts and culture can make ocean science more accessible and fun. “Space has done an excellent job of this through pop culture and shows like Star Trek, and the oceans have sort of lagged behind that,” Wiener says—and it doesn’t help that with pressing global problems like climate change and overfishing, the ocean can be kind of a bummer. But as with the artist-in-residence program, she says, “you can focus on the beautiful, the wondrous, the weird, and instead get the public invested in a positive way.”
Lead image: Ale de la Puente’s Bathymetry Drawings on a Moving Vessel. Credit: Courtesy of the Schmidt Ocean Institute.
https://nautil.us/the-art-of-ocean-science-14556/
Re: General Art & Architecture of Interest
"Plyve Kacha" - Folk Song From A Ukrainian Bomb Shelter - Tatuli Abuladze
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUE8SZgPuKA
Plyve Kacha"
The duckling swims
Tatuli Abuladze plays an instrumental version of a popular Ukrainian folk song "Plyve Kacha" with her 1872 antique French cello. She is playing this sad song about war from a bomb shelter in Ukraine.
“Plyve Kacha” translates literally to “the duckling swims”, but the lyrics are a dialogue between a mother and a son going off to war. Two of the most moving lines of the song are:
“My dear mother, what will happen to me if I die in a foreign land?”
“Well, my dearest, you will be buried by other people.”
Tatuli Abuladze has been playing the cello for over 18 years. She has a professional classical music education from the best Ukrainian conservatory and is a laureate of international competitions. She also plays in a pop band and a rock orchestra. She invents, paints and arranges famous songs for the violin and cello.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUE8SZgPuKA
Plyve Kacha"
The duckling swims
Tatuli Abuladze plays an instrumental version of a popular Ukrainian folk song "Plyve Kacha" with her 1872 antique French cello. She is playing this sad song about war from a bomb shelter in Ukraine.
“Plyve Kacha” translates literally to “the duckling swims”, but the lyrics are a dialogue between a mother and a son going off to war. Two of the most moving lines of the song are:
“My dear mother, what will happen to me if I die in a foreign land?”
“Well, my dearest, you will be buried by other people.”
Tatuli Abuladze has been playing the cello for over 18 years. She has a professional classical music education from the best Ukrainian conservatory and is a laureate of international competitions. She also plays in a pop band and a rock orchestra. She invents, paints and arranges famous songs for the violin and cello.
Re: General Art & Architecture of Interest
A Super Building for Fragile Times
The Oregon State Treasury is moving into a newly constructed structure designed to withstand every disaster the designers could conjure.
The new headquarters of the Oregon State Treasury was engineered to endure earthquakes, floods, wildfires and other calamities.Credit...Mason Trinca for The New York Times
SALEM, Ore. — A giant earthquake. A huge flood. Wildfires followed by choking smoke. An ice storm that knocks out the power for days.
Four years ago, a group of employees at the Oregon State Treasury sat down and compiled a list of every conceivable disaster that could befall a government building.
And last month, the Treasury, which is responsible for paying government employees in Oregon, unveiled its answer: a new two-story headquarters. It is a Super Building inspired by those thoughts of calamity. It is an office for our fragile times.
The building, which took less than two years to complete, is barely attached to the ground — it sits on what are called base isolators, capable of reducing the violent shaking of an earthquake by as much as 75 percent.
The building can go entirely off the grid — “full island mode,” said one employee — with a backup battery, backup diesel generator and backup water and sewage systems. In case of civil unrest, the building’s large windows, designed to maximize natural light, are made of “vandal-resistant glass.”
“Regardless of what’s happening in the world around us, no matter how many natural disasters, our employees will want to come to work and deliver services to Oregonians,” said Byron Williams, the chief administrative officer of the Treasury, who led the conception and construction of the project.
Images and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/us/o ... 778d3e6de3
The Oregon State Treasury is moving into a newly constructed structure designed to withstand every disaster the designers could conjure.
The new headquarters of the Oregon State Treasury was engineered to endure earthquakes, floods, wildfires and other calamities.Credit...Mason Trinca for The New York Times
SALEM, Ore. — A giant earthquake. A huge flood. Wildfires followed by choking smoke. An ice storm that knocks out the power for days.
Four years ago, a group of employees at the Oregon State Treasury sat down and compiled a list of every conceivable disaster that could befall a government building.
And last month, the Treasury, which is responsible for paying government employees in Oregon, unveiled its answer: a new two-story headquarters. It is a Super Building inspired by those thoughts of calamity. It is an office for our fragile times.
The building, which took less than two years to complete, is barely attached to the ground — it sits on what are called base isolators, capable of reducing the violent shaking of an earthquake by as much as 75 percent.
The building can go entirely off the grid — “full island mode,” said one employee — with a backup battery, backup diesel generator and backup water and sewage systems. In case of civil unrest, the building’s large windows, designed to maximize natural light, are made of “vandal-resistant glass.”
“Regardless of what’s happening in the world around us, no matter how many natural disasters, our employees will want to come to work and deliver services to Oregonians,” said Byron Williams, the chief administrative officer of the Treasury, who led the conception and construction of the project.
Images and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/us/o ... 778d3e6de3
"Shah E Madina" (Naat) - Shabana Arif
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=deskt ... e=youtu.be
"Shah E Madina"
The Shah of Medina
Naat
Shabana Arif presents a beautiful rendition of the popular Naat “Shah E Madina” to celebrate the holy month of Ramadhan and the powerful night of Laylat al-Qadr.
Over the years, many different artists, lyricists and music composers have produced slightly varying versions of the same song.
Shabana Arif lives in Toronto, Canada. Music has been Shabana’s passion since the age of 15 and she feels it is a God-given gift inherited from her father. Shabana performs and volunteers in many Ismaili community-based physical and virtual events.
JollyGul presents “Shah E Madina” with lyrics and translations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=deskt ... e=youtu.be
"Shah E Madina"
The Shah of Medina
Naat
Shabana Arif presents a beautiful rendition of the popular Naat “Shah E Madina” to celebrate the holy month of Ramadhan and the powerful night of Laylat al-Qadr.
Over the years, many different artists, lyricists and music composers have produced slightly varying versions of the same song.
Shabana Arif lives in Toronto, Canada. Music has been Shabana’s passion since the age of 15 and she feels it is a God-given gift inherited from her father. Shabana performs and volunteers in many Ismaili community-based physical and virtual events.
JollyGul presents “Shah E Madina” with lyrics and translations.
What Does It Really Mean to Make Art?
When we set aside our romantic notions, we see that creativity is continuous, and fueled by life itself.
SAY “THE ARTIST’S LIFE” and already we are in thrall to the old romantic myths: the garret in winter with wind lisping through the cracks, the dissolving nights at mirrored bars nursing absinthe, the empty pockets, the feral hair, the ever-looming madhouse. Or let us reach further back in time to a Taoist philosophical text circa the late fourth century B.C., which tells of a Chinese lord who summons artists for a commission. They compliantly line up before him with brushes and ink, ready to compete for the job — all but one, who trails in late, then goes back home, disrobes and sprawls on the floor before starting to paint. The lord approves: “This is a true artist!”
Implicit in the phrase “the artist’s life” is the idea that this is a life apart. We are not so quick to rhapsodize about the insurance agent’s life or the plumber’s. As the cultural critic Arne de Boever argues in “Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism” (2019), the reverential way we speak about art invests the artist with a sovereignty akin to that of a monarch or even a god, unbound by the laws that rein in the rest of us. And so the artist remains a collective fantasy, an imagined rebel on the fringes, heroically immune to propriety and the demands of capitalism, who rejects work in the conventional, soul-deadening sense, who needn’t produce according to a schedule or answer to a boss or please anyone but themselves. In this construction, art itself is not a steady practice but a matter of a moment’s revelation, created in a fever that comes out of nowhere (and that the artist may secretly fear will never come again).
But who is funding all this? We want to think of art as something pure, beyond commerce, but the artist has to eat, which requires customers (turning art into a commodity and the artist into a kind of entrepreneur), benefactors, government grants or a trust fund — or else capitulating to the system and getting a plain old job (a “real” job, as the anxious parents say). Nevertheless, the romance persists, for while we grudgingly accept wage labor as the average person’s lot, we tend to believe that such toil entails a unique suffering for the artist (and a loss for the world) because it steals time from worthier pursuits. If anything, we are suspicious of the trust funders, those who have it too easy, who don’t suffer for their art. Instead, we reserve the greatest awe for artists who work as mortals do, who accept the drudgery of ordinary existence in order to make possible a second one: the artist’s life.
This labor becomes an origin story, testament to a superhuman ability to keep the mind keen and the soul intact after hours of dulling tasks. We thrill to contemporary tales of the German filmmaker Werner Herzog pulling night shifts welding steel, the American novelist Octavia Butler monitoring quality control at a potato chip factory or the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei cleaning houses. The American composer Philip Glass famously shocked the Australian-born art critic Robert Hughes in the 1970s by showing up to install his dishwasher — now here is the plumber’s life — and the American poet Wallace Stevens worked in insurance for nearly four decades, until his death in 1955, the same year he won the Pulitzer Prize. Sometimes, an artist astounds in two fields, like the Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, who changed the course of American literature not only as a writer but as the first Black woman editor at Random House, where in the 1970s she published groundbreaking fiction by Gayl Jones and Toni Cade Bambara and the urgent writings of the activists Angela Davis and Huey P. Newton — and where she kept working for more than a decade after she’d gained renown as a novelist in her own right.
Even artists fortunate enough to be able to devote themselves wholly to their craft must draft budgets, marshal resources and sometimes manage teams to realize their visions (the administrator’s life!). As for the conception of artistic genius as a series of stray, unearned shocks of brilliance in lives otherwise given over to indolence and excess, what of the hours of training and repetition, of inhaling paint fumes, ripping out seams, running algorithms for a torqued facade, poring over books (perhaps to postpone the anguish of writing one) or plodding through scales at the piano? The epigram “If I don’t practice for one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the world knows it” has been attributed to musicians from the 20th-century American jazz trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong to the Polish pianist Ignace Jan Paderewski, born in 1860 — who, speaking of day jobs, was also Poland’s prime minister and signatory to the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.
Then there are the hours of staring into blankness, be it of a canvas, page, stage or your own soul. This, too, is work, the mind trying to remember itself and what it is capable of. From the outside, it might look like idleness (from the inside, terror). Maybe there is no such thing as the artist’s life, at least not as some insurgent or louche ideal; maybe, in a world otherwise ever more fine-tuned to boosting productivity and maximizing efficiency, there is simply a life that allows for art — that makes space for it, however long it takes.
ONCE, THERE WAS scarcely a distinction between artist and artisan. Those who made art were recognized foremost as laborers, people who worked with their hands. The word “art” did not originally signify something exalted and separate from the dailiness of life; it comes from the Latin ars by way of translation from the Greek techne, which means, simply, skill: “the skill required to make an object, a house, a statue, a ship, a bedstead, a pot, an article of clothing and moreover also the skill required to command an army, to measure a field, to sway an audience,” the Polish philosopher and art historian Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz writes in “A History of Six Ideas” (1980).
In the Western world, nearly all of what we think of today as the fine arts were once the opposite, vulgares to the ancient Romans and “mechanical” to the scholars of the Middle Ages. Painting, sculpture, architecture, theater, the making of clothes, cooking: These were considered physical, not cerebral, pursuits, alongside medicine and agriculture — utilitarian matters of expertise. Music was exempted as a subset of mathematics, while poetry, Tatarkiewicz writes, was treated as “a kind of philosophy or prophecy, a prayer or confession.” Artisans apprenticed and trained in adherence to standards set by guilds, an early form of consumer protection and quality control. (Similar systems developed in Asia and throughout the Islamic world.) They earned respect as masters of codified craft, not as innovators with unique insight and vision.
Even in the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe, when painting was elevated to the liberal arts, the polymathic Leonardo da Vinci continued to dismiss sculpture as merely manual, mimetic rather than inventive, recreating without thought what already exists in the world — although Michelangelo, a generation younger, disagreed. By this time, however, the character of the artist had become a subject of interest, the more so as members of a newly prosperous mercantile class sought to telegraph their ascendance by commissioning portraits and acquiring art. The 16th-century Italian painter Giovanni Battista Armenini wrote disdainfully of audiences who presumed artists to be creatures of vice and capriciousness (and were perhaps secretly titillated at the thought) but also of the “many ignorant artists” who promoted this caricature, believing themselves “to be very exceptional by affecting melancholy and eccentricity.”
Tatarkiewicz points out that the shift in thinking about artists started around the same time as a downturn in the European economy, which made art an appealing alternative investment. But for art to confer status, the people who made it had to be distinguished from common laborers. Cleaving artist from artisan was an assignment of value, both aesthetic and monetary. By the 18th century in Europe, this transformation was complete: from an industrious and sometimes anonymous plier of a trade to an individual with a singular perspective — a genius with privileged access to the sublime, pledged to bring the world higher truths. (Other cultures, resistant to the Western narrative of individualism, have not always embraced this definition.) Not that this new loftiness necessarily translated into material reward. Indeed, the less reward, the better: Part of the myth of the artist’s life was that artists fed off and even required poverty and torment in order to create, like the Spaniard Pablo Picasso in the early 1900s in Paris, as yet unknown, living in squalor and burning his drawings to keep from freezing to death.
The West loves dichotomies, the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han notes with a gentle jab in “Good Entertainment: A Deconstruction of the Western Passion Narrative” (2019). If we take as givens the partitioning of good and evil, heaven and earth, high and low, the world that could be and the world that is, then art that does not explicitly strive for transcendence — for “an emphatic otherness that would lift it above the false world,” in Han’s poetic evocation — risks getting muddled with the mundane. How exhausting, this insistence on art and art making as forever agonized and ecstatic. Why shouldn’t the artist also be a honer of craft, a sorter of nuts and bolts, as attuned to the quotidian as to the imagined greater beyond?
Jasper Johns’s “The Critic Sees” (1961).Credit...© 2022 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery
THE COUNTERPOINT TO transcendence, in the language of religion, is immanence: believing that the sublime is not outside the bounds of the humanly perceived world but manifest within it; that the timeless is also present in the immediate and ephemeral. “The artist rummages through the world, attends lovingly on everyday things and tells their story,” Han writes. What defines an artist may be not so much the snatching at eternity as the tinkering, the grubbing in the dirt, the quiet attention to the most seemingly ordinary and insignificant details — not the grand unfurling of the universe but life at its smallest.
And so the architect Toshiko Mori plants carrots in her garden as “part of the habit of creation,” and the choreographer Raja Feather Kelly waits for the subway, contemplating the uncertainty of arrival. For the artists in the pages that follow — not all of whom necessarily consider themselves to be artists — life unfolds, eddies, sometimes stalls. There are chores, along with reprieves from work of any kind. The procession of minutes and hours doesn’t quite add up to what we think of as a workday, in part because the border is drawn not between work and life but between making art (which might happen anywhere, at any time) and the living that sustains it. In some ways artists must function as athletes, building in moments of recovery, ice baths for the mind.
Work itself is unmoored in time and place. The conceptual artist Rirkrit Tiravanija doesn’t even have a studio: “I don’t wake up and go to a place where I sit down and make things.” Instead, a day — a life — is a continuous act of creation, of work that never properly ends but is neither fully visible. The 19th-century French writer Gustave Flaubert once took five days, working 12 hours a day, to write one page. (Note that he was single and had no children.) How to explain the song that somehow emerges out of the same chords strummed over and over; the commotion and sense of impending doom backstage and then the pin-drop hush on opening night; the vast stillness that precedes the decisive gesture?
For 30 years, the artist James Nares, now known as Jamie, has made paintings that each consist of a single, giant brushstroke, minimalist and maximalist at once. It’s “made in a matter of seconds,” she says, but it takes days to find the shape, engage the muscle and, perhaps most crucially, to make mistakes, each squeegeed off so the canvas is blank anew. The finished piece or performance, the artwork is just the iceberg’s tip, leaving unseen the labor below.
STILL, THIS IS a radical idea of work, especially in an age when we are taught that we are what we do — do to earn money, that is — and that the proper pageant of life is slotting ourselves dutifully from birth to school to the office, factory, plant, mill or farm, and then the grave. “The sacred seriousness of play has entirely given way to the profane seriousness of work and production,” Han writes in “The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present” (2020). Without play, life “comes to resemble mere survival. It lacks splendor, sovereignty, intensity.” We work and cordon off play in a window of time labeled leisure, a brief break that serves only to affirm the centrality (and stultification) of work.
By contrast, the work of art is flagrantly unproductive, even anti-productive. “The poetic does not produce,” Han writes, pointing to how poems disavow language as merely a means “to communicate information”; instead, as the 20th-century French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote, “the poetic is the insurrection of language against its own laws.” The other arts likewise conspire against the pragmatic, the optimal, the proven result. It’s not the artist’s life that’s excessive but art, in its abundance or austerity, its insistence on the urgency of a particular configuration or absence of colors, shapes, textures, gestures, sounds or words that might be brimming or bereft of meaning, that might address the most pressing issues of the day or exist only to announce, “This is beautiful,” or, “I am here.”
The American philosopher C. Thi Nguyen notes in “Games and the Art of Agency” (2019) that there are two kinds of players in any given game: “An achievement player plays to win; a striving player temporarily acquires an interest in winning for the sake of the struggle.” Art makes an argument for creation, for struggle, as an end in itself. The artist strives not to collect the most toys, rack up virtual kills or race to the jackpot square but simply to be in the game, map its corners, make time stretch — and maybe figure out a way to hack this world, change the rules and free us all. For victory is just a blip. The best games never end.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/21/t-ma ... 778d3e6de3
SAY “THE ARTIST’S LIFE” and already we are in thrall to the old romantic myths: the garret in winter with wind lisping through the cracks, the dissolving nights at mirrored bars nursing absinthe, the empty pockets, the feral hair, the ever-looming madhouse. Or let us reach further back in time to a Taoist philosophical text circa the late fourth century B.C., which tells of a Chinese lord who summons artists for a commission. They compliantly line up before him with brushes and ink, ready to compete for the job — all but one, who trails in late, then goes back home, disrobes and sprawls on the floor before starting to paint. The lord approves: “This is a true artist!”
Implicit in the phrase “the artist’s life” is the idea that this is a life apart. We are not so quick to rhapsodize about the insurance agent’s life or the plumber’s. As the cultural critic Arne de Boever argues in “Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism” (2019), the reverential way we speak about art invests the artist with a sovereignty akin to that of a monarch or even a god, unbound by the laws that rein in the rest of us. And so the artist remains a collective fantasy, an imagined rebel on the fringes, heroically immune to propriety and the demands of capitalism, who rejects work in the conventional, soul-deadening sense, who needn’t produce according to a schedule or answer to a boss or please anyone but themselves. In this construction, art itself is not a steady practice but a matter of a moment’s revelation, created in a fever that comes out of nowhere (and that the artist may secretly fear will never come again).
But who is funding all this? We want to think of art as something pure, beyond commerce, but the artist has to eat, which requires customers (turning art into a commodity and the artist into a kind of entrepreneur), benefactors, government grants or a trust fund — or else capitulating to the system and getting a plain old job (a “real” job, as the anxious parents say). Nevertheless, the romance persists, for while we grudgingly accept wage labor as the average person’s lot, we tend to believe that such toil entails a unique suffering for the artist (and a loss for the world) because it steals time from worthier pursuits. If anything, we are suspicious of the trust funders, those who have it too easy, who don’t suffer for their art. Instead, we reserve the greatest awe for artists who work as mortals do, who accept the drudgery of ordinary existence in order to make possible a second one: the artist’s life.
This labor becomes an origin story, testament to a superhuman ability to keep the mind keen and the soul intact after hours of dulling tasks. We thrill to contemporary tales of the German filmmaker Werner Herzog pulling night shifts welding steel, the American novelist Octavia Butler monitoring quality control at a potato chip factory or the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei cleaning houses. The American composer Philip Glass famously shocked the Australian-born art critic Robert Hughes in the 1970s by showing up to install his dishwasher — now here is the plumber’s life — and the American poet Wallace Stevens worked in insurance for nearly four decades, until his death in 1955, the same year he won the Pulitzer Prize. Sometimes, an artist astounds in two fields, like the Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, who changed the course of American literature not only as a writer but as the first Black woman editor at Random House, where in the 1970s she published groundbreaking fiction by Gayl Jones and Toni Cade Bambara and the urgent writings of the activists Angela Davis and Huey P. Newton — and where she kept working for more than a decade after she’d gained renown as a novelist in her own right.
Even artists fortunate enough to be able to devote themselves wholly to their craft must draft budgets, marshal resources and sometimes manage teams to realize their visions (the administrator’s life!). As for the conception of artistic genius as a series of stray, unearned shocks of brilliance in lives otherwise given over to indolence and excess, what of the hours of training and repetition, of inhaling paint fumes, ripping out seams, running algorithms for a torqued facade, poring over books (perhaps to postpone the anguish of writing one) or plodding through scales at the piano? The epigram “If I don’t practice for one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the world knows it” has been attributed to musicians from the 20th-century American jazz trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong to the Polish pianist Ignace Jan Paderewski, born in 1860 — who, speaking of day jobs, was also Poland’s prime minister and signatory to the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.
Then there are the hours of staring into blankness, be it of a canvas, page, stage or your own soul. This, too, is work, the mind trying to remember itself and what it is capable of. From the outside, it might look like idleness (from the inside, terror). Maybe there is no such thing as the artist’s life, at least not as some insurgent or louche ideal; maybe, in a world otherwise ever more fine-tuned to boosting productivity and maximizing efficiency, there is simply a life that allows for art — that makes space for it, however long it takes.
ONCE, THERE WAS scarcely a distinction between artist and artisan. Those who made art were recognized foremost as laborers, people who worked with their hands. The word “art” did not originally signify something exalted and separate from the dailiness of life; it comes from the Latin ars by way of translation from the Greek techne, which means, simply, skill: “the skill required to make an object, a house, a statue, a ship, a bedstead, a pot, an article of clothing and moreover also the skill required to command an army, to measure a field, to sway an audience,” the Polish philosopher and art historian Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz writes in “A History of Six Ideas” (1980).
In the Western world, nearly all of what we think of today as the fine arts were once the opposite, vulgares to the ancient Romans and “mechanical” to the scholars of the Middle Ages. Painting, sculpture, architecture, theater, the making of clothes, cooking: These were considered physical, not cerebral, pursuits, alongside medicine and agriculture — utilitarian matters of expertise. Music was exempted as a subset of mathematics, while poetry, Tatarkiewicz writes, was treated as “a kind of philosophy or prophecy, a prayer or confession.” Artisans apprenticed and trained in adherence to standards set by guilds, an early form of consumer protection and quality control. (Similar systems developed in Asia and throughout the Islamic world.) They earned respect as masters of codified craft, not as innovators with unique insight and vision.
Even in the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe, when painting was elevated to the liberal arts, the polymathic Leonardo da Vinci continued to dismiss sculpture as merely manual, mimetic rather than inventive, recreating without thought what already exists in the world — although Michelangelo, a generation younger, disagreed. By this time, however, the character of the artist had become a subject of interest, the more so as members of a newly prosperous mercantile class sought to telegraph their ascendance by commissioning portraits and acquiring art. The 16th-century Italian painter Giovanni Battista Armenini wrote disdainfully of audiences who presumed artists to be creatures of vice and capriciousness (and were perhaps secretly titillated at the thought) but also of the “many ignorant artists” who promoted this caricature, believing themselves “to be very exceptional by affecting melancholy and eccentricity.”
Tatarkiewicz points out that the shift in thinking about artists started around the same time as a downturn in the European economy, which made art an appealing alternative investment. But for art to confer status, the people who made it had to be distinguished from common laborers. Cleaving artist from artisan was an assignment of value, both aesthetic and monetary. By the 18th century in Europe, this transformation was complete: from an industrious and sometimes anonymous plier of a trade to an individual with a singular perspective — a genius with privileged access to the sublime, pledged to bring the world higher truths. (Other cultures, resistant to the Western narrative of individualism, have not always embraced this definition.) Not that this new loftiness necessarily translated into material reward. Indeed, the less reward, the better: Part of the myth of the artist’s life was that artists fed off and even required poverty and torment in order to create, like the Spaniard Pablo Picasso in the early 1900s in Paris, as yet unknown, living in squalor and burning his drawings to keep from freezing to death.
The West loves dichotomies, the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han notes with a gentle jab in “Good Entertainment: A Deconstruction of the Western Passion Narrative” (2019). If we take as givens the partitioning of good and evil, heaven and earth, high and low, the world that could be and the world that is, then art that does not explicitly strive for transcendence — for “an emphatic otherness that would lift it above the false world,” in Han’s poetic evocation — risks getting muddled with the mundane. How exhausting, this insistence on art and art making as forever agonized and ecstatic. Why shouldn’t the artist also be a honer of craft, a sorter of nuts and bolts, as attuned to the quotidian as to the imagined greater beyond?
Jasper Johns’s “The Critic Sees” (1961).Credit...© 2022 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery
THE COUNTERPOINT TO transcendence, in the language of religion, is immanence: believing that the sublime is not outside the bounds of the humanly perceived world but manifest within it; that the timeless is also present in the immediate and ephemeral. “The artist rummages through the world, attends lovingly on everyday things and tells their story,” Han writes. What defines an artist may be not so much the snatching at eternity as the tinkering, the grubbing in the dirt, the quiet attention to the most seemingly ordinary and insignificant details — not the grand unfurling of the universe but life at its smallest.
And so the architect Toshiko Mori plants carrots in her garden as “part of the habit of creation,” and the choreographer Raja Feather Kelly waits for the subway, contemplating the uncertainty of arrival. For the artists in the pages that follow — not all of whom necessarily consider themselves to be artists — life unfolds, eddies, sometimes stalls. There are chores, along with reprieves from work of any kind. The procession of minutes and hours doesn’t quite add up to what we think of as a workday, in part because the border is drawn not between work and life but between making art (which might happen anywhere, at any time) and the living that sustains it. In some ways artists must function as athletes, building in moments of recovery, ice baths for the mind.
Work itself is unmoored in time and place. The conceptual artist Rirkrit Tiravanija doesn’t even have a studio: “I don’t wake up and go to a place where I sit down and make things.” Instead, a day — a life — is a continuous act of creation, of work that never properly ends but is neither fully visible. The 19th-century French writer Gustave Flaubert once took five days, working 12 hours a day, to write one page. (Note that he was single and had no children.) How to explain the song that somehow emerges out of the same chords strummed over and over; the commotion and sense of impending doom backstage and then the pin-drop hush on opening night; the vast stillness that precedes the decisive gesture?
For 30 years, the artist James Nares, now known as Jamie, has made paintings that each consist of a single, giant brushstroke, minimalist and maximalist at once. It’s “made in a matter of seconds,” she says, but it takes days to find the shape, engage the muscle and, perhaps most crucially, to make mistakes, each squeegeed off so the canvas is blank anew. The finished piece or performance, the artwork is just the iceberg’s tip, leaving unseen the labor below.
STILL, THIS IS a radical idea of work, especially in an age when we are taught that we are what we do — do to earn money, that is — and that the proper pageant of life is slotting ourselves dutifully from birth to school to the office, factory, plant, mill or farm, and then the grave. “The sacred seriousness of play has entirely given way to the profane seriousness of work and production,” Han writes in “The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present” (2020). Without play, life “comes to resemble mere survival. It lacks splendor, sovereignty, intensity.” We work and cordon off play in a window of time labeled leisure, a brief break that serves only to affirm the centrality (and stultification) of work.
By contrast, the work of art is flagrantly unproductive, even anti-productive. “The poetic does not produce,” Han writes, pointing to how poems disavow language as merely a means “to communicate information”; instead, as the 20th-century French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote, “the poetic is the insurrection of language against its own laws.” The other arts likewise conspire against the pragmatic, the optimal, the proven result. It’s not the artist’s life that’s excessive but art, in its abundance or austerity, its insistence on the urgency of a particular configuration or absence of colors, shapes, textures, gestures, sounds or words that might be brimming or bereft of meaning, that might address the most pressing issues of the day or exist only to announce, “This is beautiful,” or, “I am here.”
The American philosopher C. Thi Nguyen notes in “Games and the Art of Agency” (2019) that there are two kinds of players in any given game: “An achievement player plays to win; a striving player temporarily acquires an interest in winning for the sake of the struggle.” Art makes an argument for creation, for struggle, as an end in itself. The artist strives not to collect the most toys, rack up virtual kills or race to the jackpot square but simply to be in the game, map its corners, make time stretch — and maybe figure out a way to hack this world, change the rules and free us all. For victory is just a blip. The best games never end.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/21/t-ma ... 778d3e6de3