The Quality of Diamond
On February 3, 2004, archivist and abstract painter Ward Jackson died at 75. From today’s New York Times:
“Inspired by painters like Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers, Mr. Jackson made austere, hard-edged geometric compositions, typically on diamond-shaped canvases.”
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On a 2003 exhibit by Pablo Helguera that included Mr. Jackson: Parallel Lives recounts and recontextualizes real episodes from the lives of five disparate individuals including Florence Foster Jenkins, arguably the world’s worst opera singer; Giulio Camillo, a Renaissance mystic who aimed to build a memory container for all things; Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of the kindergarten education system, the members of the last existing Shaker community, and Ward Jackson, the lifelong archivist of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Parallel Lives pays homage to Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) and his system of philosophical hermeneutics built through an exploration of historicity, language, and art. This exhibition, which draws its title from the classic work by Plutarch, is a project that explores biography as a medium, drawing from the earlier innovation of the biographical practice in works like Marcel Schwob’s “Imaginary Lives” (1896) and John Aubrey’s “Brief Lives” (1681). Through display means, the project blends the lives of these individuals into one basic story, visually stating the relationship between individualism and society as best summarized by Gadamer’s famous phrase: “we all are others, and we all are a self.” |
On February 3, the day that Jackson died, there were five different log24.net entries:
Parallels with the Helguera exhibit:
Florence Foster Jenkins: Janet Jackson in (2) above.
Giulio Camillo: Myself as compiler of the synchronistic excerpts in (5).
Friedrich Froebel: David Wade in (4).
The last Shakers: Christopher Alexander and his acolytes in (1).
Ward Jackson: On Feb. 3, Jackson became a permanent part of
Some thoughts of Hans-Georg Gadamer
relevant to Jackson’s death:
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by G.T. Karnezis The pleasure it [art] elicits “is the joy of knowledge.” It does not operate as an enchantment but “a transformation into the true.” Art, then, would seem to be an essentializing agent insofar as it reveals what is essential. Gadamer asks us to see reality as a horizon of “still undecided possibilities,” of unfulfilled expectations, of contingency. If, in a particular case, however, “a meaningful whole completes and fulfills itself in reality,” it is like a drama. If someone sees the whole of reality as a closed circle of meaning” he will be able to speak “of the comedy and tragedy of life” (genres becoming ways of conceiving reality). In such cases where reality “is understood as a play, there emerges the reality of what play is, which we call the play of art.” As such, art is a realization: “By means of it everyone recognizes that that is how things are.” Reality, in this viewpoint, is what has not been transformed. Art is defined as “the raising up of this reality to its truth.” |
As noted in entry (3) above
on the day that Jackson died,
“All the world’s a stage.”