March 26, 2005
Art dreams
Here's a random one. I've never tried to make art, save for a required elective class during my freshman year of high school, yet about once a month I have fairly vivid dreams about art of my own design. This morning, right after the "ice hockey pick-up game with the (invented) sons of two art dealers" dream and right before the "trying to wash my hair in a public water fountain in a foreign country so I could go to a surprise birthday party, all the while being bothered by a food vendor in a language I didn't understand" dream, the somnambulist me created an entirely new--and quite stunning, I thought--body of work for a painter whose work I like. It will be interesting to compare my dream to her next solo show.
An artist friend in LA recently recorded her dreams for an entire year, made miniature maquettes of all the artworks therein, and then placed the models in a dollhouse-scale rendition of her childhood home.
Does anyone else have these kinds of dreams? Have any non-artists been inspired to try and make what they invent in their sleep?
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
March 20, 2005
Ruttmann and Vertov
I signed up for a Netflix account to begin rectifying the fact that I know very little about film, and this morning watched two early documentaries. Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) are a natural pair: both explore urban life in late-‘20s metropolises, focusing largely on locomotion; both are non-narrative and accompanied by a musical score prepared especially for the film; both run about an hour. But Vertov’s work is in almost every way the superior film. Ruttmann’s film is hampered by its modest goal—to “present a more or less realistic picture of big city life from early morning to late at night,” according to Walter Laqueur—and has been critiqued frequently (and to my mind, somewhat rightly) for its uncommitted stance during what was an incredibly complex moment in modern Germany’s history. It need not have expressed the correct politics, of course, but any politics would have sufficed. Instead it is merely a pretty film, showing what we could have experienced had we been there, then. Vertov, on the other hand, starts out with a hubristic manifesto—Man with a Movie Camera is his expression of an “absolute language of cinema…based on its total separation from the language of literature and theater”—and follows through with what is, formally, a truly radical work. He consistently inserts images of cameramen and editors making the film we are watching; plays with shadows, split-screens, extreme angles (note the similarity between some of his shots and avant-garde photography produced in Paris around the same time), and the film’s speed; and is deliberately pointed in his juxtaposition of image of the upper class and the destitute. It is a near-dizzying whirlwind of imagery.
Can anyone recommend other films that might follow naturally from these two? (Here's looking at you, Greg.) Back on March 6th, at Ocularis, I watched Antonioni’s Nettezza Urbana (1948), a beautiful chiaroscuro portrait of Roman street sweepers, and Bambini in Citta (1946), a moving “testament to the innate joy, adaptability, and optimism of children” (to quote Sophie Fenwick, who put them on the same program). I would appreciate any recommendations of urban documentaries from the first half of the last century.
Posted in Film. Found always via this permanent link.
Descriptions I like
Let artists and musicians and filmmakers be writers! Let novelists and poets be critics! Here's Tom Waits describing the first time he heard opera (Link via TMFTML):
I heard 'Nessun Dorma' in the kitchen at Coppola's with Raul Julia one night, and it changed my life, that particular Aria. I had never heard it. He asked me if I had ever heard it, and I said no, and he was like, as if I said I've never had spaghetti and meatballs—'Oh My God, Oh My God!'—and he grabbed me and he brought me into the jukebox (there was a jukebox in the kitchen) and he put that on and he just kind of left me there. It was like giving a cigar to a five-year old. I turned blue, and I cried.
And, another favorite, Caroll Dunham on Joe Zucker:
Zucker's offbeat subject matter opened many doors onto territory that was not common for his generation of New York painters. It is meaningless to consider his practice without it, but it is difficult to isolate a value there. New subjects have always prompted him to explore new ways of making things, and the reciprocity between the objects and their narrative equivalents is always active. In the past this reciprocity has been invoked to justify his odd subject choices (the history of cotton constructed of cotton balls), but ultimately this effort fails. He engages subjects the way folk music does, blurring the distinctions between history and folklore, personal and public, memory and story. The paintings are truly alchemical and, as such, somewhat mysterious and obscure. He has compulsively turned the usual inert materials of painting, mixed with flotsam from the world, into surprising artistic gold, and the very reimagining and reinvention is a lot of the point.
And an earlier post in appreciation of Zadie Smith's writing on other novelists.
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
Connections
Continuing this thought: will someone please read Ian McEwen's new novel Saturday, which is getting its first Stateside review attention this weekend (see here, here, and here; the UK review pileup can be found here), and compare it to Robert Gober's new show at Matthew Marks? Thanks.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
Worth Reading
- Nancy Levinson of Pixel Points on Thom Mayne's Pritzker Prize nod. (Link via Design Observer.)
- Jerry Saltz on "Greater New York 2005" in this week's Village Voice.
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
March 16, 2005
Keep an eye out
A few books floating around the office have caught my attention. Here are three worth noting.
Martin Jay's Songs of Experience (California, January, 0-520-24272-6): I missed Refractions of Violence, his last book, but was taken with Downcast Eyes, and his new tome, subtitled "Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme," seems promising. From the jacket flap: "Songs of Experience is a remarkable history of Western ideas about the nature of human experience. With its sweeping historical reach and lucid comparative analysis...[it] explores Western discourse from the sixteent century to the present asking why the concept of experience has been such a magnet for controversy."
Hannah Arendt's The Promise of Politics (Schocken, June, 0-8052-4213-9): A collection of previously unpublished texts that "addresses the problem of political philosophy, the problem of action after the French Revolution, and the promise inherent in political practice." According to the uncorrected galleys, it will feature an introduction by Arendt scholar Jerome Kohn, professor of philosophy at Cooper Union.
Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Viking, July, 0-670-03421-5): Solnit, whose 2003 book River of Shadows garnered much acclaim and a National Book Critics Circle award, wanders from scholarly exegesis into the realm of the autobiographical, using personal stories to "[explore] losing yourself in the pleasures of experience." From the publisher's PR materials: "Written as a series of autobiographical essays, it draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit's own life to explore issues of uncertainty, trust, loss, memory, desire, and place."
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
Los Angeles connections
Something I'd like to read: A comparison of Sarah Morris's film Los Angeles and Bruce Wagner's new novel The Chrysanthemum Palace (review coverage here, here, and here). From what I've gathered by watching the film and reading a dozen reviews of the book, they both peek behind the scenes of a Hollywood-centric version of the city. Who would I assign it to? David Thomson, perhaps, author of two somewhat related books, and who was recently interviewed at length by Robert Birnbaum.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
March 10, 2005
Worth reading
- Mark Kingwell, "The city of tomorrow: searching for the future of architeture in Shanghai," from the February 2005 issue of Harper's.
- John Elderfield's review, in the Guardian, of Matisse the Master, the second volume of Hilary Spurling's biography of the artist.
- Adam Zagajewski on Czeslaw Milosz in The New Republic. (Link found via The Page.) Zagajewski also wrote recently about Witold Gombrowicz in the February/March issue of Bookforum. On Milosz:
Yet the key to Milosz's imagination, if such a key exists, is indicated by the locus of his writing: he had an uncanny capacity for placing his writer's desk in the very center of his century's storms. Maybe that is a definition of poetic intelligence in general: not only craft and knowledge of the tradition (though this is a necessary ingredient), or wisdom concerning the human comedy, but also the more or less instinctive ability to detect the peculiar locale where the gods are sitting and throwing dice.
Milosz's trouble, and his luck, had also to do with the fact that his century was not only obsessed by philosophies but also polluted by ideologies, by murderous intellectual passions.