"Play Stella by Starlight for Lady Macbeth" — Bob Dylan
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For enthusiasts of arithmetic rather than geometry —
"4 + 12 = 16."
And for fans of Christoper Nolan — Window Panes :
Sunday, November 26, 2023
Stella for Macbeth
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Wednesday, June 22, 2011
A Flag for Sunrise
Thomas N. Armstrong III, a former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, died at 78 on Monday in Manhattan.
William Grimes in this morning's New York Times—
"… Mr. Armstrong set about strengthening the museum’s permanent collection, buying Frank Stella’s 1959 black painting “Die Fahne Hoch!” for $75,000 in 1977…."
See also "Fahne Hoch" in this journal and the following from the date of Armstrong's death—
"Sunrise — Hast thou a Flag for me?" — Emily Dickinson
Related material: Piracy Project and, from Flag Day,
"Dawn's Early Light" and "Expressionistic Depth."
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Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Wednesday February 16, 2005
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Saturday, August 23, 2003
Saturday August 23, 2003
Pictures of Nothing
‘”The artist delights to go back to the first chaos of the world… All is without forms and void. Some one said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing, and very like.”
— William Hazlitt, 1816, on J. M. W. Turner
“William Hazlett [sic] once described Turner’s painting as ‘pictures of the elements of air, earth, and water. The artist delights to go back to the first chaos of the world…All is without form and void. Some one said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing and very like.‘ This description could equally well be applied to a Pollock, Newman, or Rothko.”
— Sonja J. Klein, thesis, The Nature of the Sublime, September 2000
The fifty-second A. W. Mellon series of Lectures in the Fine Arts was given last spring at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., by Kirk Varnedoe, art historian at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.
Pictures of Nothing:
The lectures, 2003: Survivals and Fresh Starts … April 6 |
Varnedoe died on Thursday, August 14, 2003,
the day of the Great Blackout.
Pictures of Nothing:
“Record-breaking crowds turned up at the National Gallery for Kirk’s Mellon Lectures….
… the content of Kirk’s talk was miraculously subtle, as he insisted that there could be no single explanation for how abstraction works, that each piece had to be understood on its own terms — how it came to be made, what it meant then and what it has gone on to mean to viewers since.
Dour works like
Frank Stella’s early
gray-on-black canvases …
“Die Fahne Hoch,”
Frank Stella,
1959
“Gray on Black,”
or “Date of Death”
seemed to open up under Kirk’s touch to reveal a delicacy and complexity lost in less textured explanations.”
— Blake Gopnik in the Washington Post,
Aug. 15, 2003
For another memorial to Varnedoe, see
A May 18 Washington Post article skillfully summarized Varnedoe’s Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery:
Closing the Circle on Abstract Art.
For more on art and nihilism, see
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Monday, August 18, 2003
Monday August 18, 2003
Entries since Xanga’s
August 10 Failure:
Sunday, August 17, 2003 2:00 PM
A Thorny Crown of…
From the first episode of
the television series
“The West Wing“:
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Original airdate: Sept. 22, 1999 MARY MARSH CALDWELL MARY MARSH JOSH TOBY [A stunned silence. Everyone stares at Toby.] TOBY (CONT.) JOSH |
Going There, Part I
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Crown of Ideas Kirk Varnedoe, 57, art historian and former curator of the Museum of Modern Art, died Thursday, August 14, 2003. From his New York Times obituary: ” ‘He loved life in its most tangible forms, and so for him art was as physical and pleasurable as being knocked down by a wave,’ said Adam Gopnik, the writer and a former student of his who collaborated on Mr. Varnedoe’s first big show at the Modern, ‘High & Low.’ ‘Art was always material first — it was never, ever bound by a thorny crown of ideas.’ ” For a mini-exhibit of ideas in honor of Varnedoe, see Verlyn Klinkenborg on Varnedoe: “I was always struck by the tangibility of the words he used…. It was as if he were laying words down on the table one by one as he used them, like brushes in an artist’s studio. That was why students crowded into his classes and why the National Gallery of Art had overflow audiences for his Mellon Lectures earlier this year. Something synaptic happened when you listened to Kirk Varnedoe, and, remarkably, something synaptic happened when he listened to you. You never knew what you might discover together.” Perhaps even a “thorny crown of ideas“?
“Crown of Thorns” Varnedoe’s death coincided with “To what extent does this idea of a civic life produced by sense of adversity correspond to actual life in Brasília? I wonder if it is something which the city actually cultivates. Consider, for example the cathedral, on the monumental axis, a circular, concrete framed building whose sixteen ribs are both structural and symbolic, making a structure that reads unambiguously as a crown of thorns; other symbolic elements include the subterranean entrance, the visitor passing through a subterranean passage before emerging in the light of the body of the cathedral. And it is light, shockingly so….” — Modernist Civic Space: The Case of Brasilia, by Richard J. Williams, Department of History of Art, University of Edinburgh, Scotland |
Going There, Part II
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Simple, Bold, Clear Art historian Kirk Varnedoe was, of course, not the only one to die on the day of the Great Blackout. Claude Martel, 34, a senior art director of The New York Times Magazine, also died on Thursday, August 14, 2003. Janet Froelich, the magazine’s art director, describes below a sample of work that she and Martel did together: “A new world of ideas”
Froelich notes that “the elements are simple, bold, and clear.” For another example of elements with these qualities, see my journal entry The flag design in that entry
Note that the elements of the flag design have the qualities described so aptly by Froelich– simplicity, boldness, clarity:
They share these qualities with the Elements of Euclid, a treatise on geometrical ideas. For the manner in which such concepts might serve as, in Gopnik’s memorable phrase, a “thorny crown of ideas,” see “Geometry for Jews” in ART WARS: Geometry as Conceptual Art. See also the discussion of ideas in my journal entry on theology and art titled Understanding: On Death and Truth and the discussion of the word “idea” (as well as the word, and the concept, “Aryan”) in the following classic (introduced by poet W. H. Auden):
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Saturday, August 16, 2003 6:00 AM
Varnedoe’s Crown
Kirk Varnedoe, 57, art historian and former curator of the Museum of Modern Art, died Thursday, August 14, 2003.
From his New York Times obituary:
” ‘He loved life in its most tangible forms, and so for him art was as physical and pleasurable as being knocked down by a wave,’ said Adam Gopnik, the writer and a former student of his who collaborated on Mr. Varnedoe’s first big show at the Modern, ‘High & Low.’ ‘Art was always material first — it was never, ever bound by a thorny crown of ideas.’ “
For a mini-exhibit of ideas in honor of Varnedoe, see
Verlyn Klinkenborg on Varnedoe:
“I was always struck by the tangibility of the words he used…. It was as if he were laying words down on the table one by one as he used them, like brushes in an artist’s studio. That was why students crowded into his classes and why the National Gallery of Art had overflow audiences for his Mellon Lectures earlier this year. Something synaptic happened when you listened to Kirk Varnedoe, and, remarkably, something synaptic happened when he listened to you. You never knew what you might discover together.”
Perhaps even a “thorny crown of ideas”?
“Crown of Thorns”
Cathedral, Brasilia
Varnedoe’s death coincided with
the Great Blackout of 2003.
“To what extent does this idea of a civic life produced by sense of adversity correspond to actual life in Brasília? I wonder if it is something which the city actually cultivates. Consider, for example the cathedral, on the monumental axis, a circular, concrete framed building whose sixteen ribs are both structural and symbolic, making a structure that reads unambiguously as a crown of thorns; other symbolic elements include the subterranean entrance, the visitor passing through a subterranean passage before emerging in the light of the body of the cathedral. And it is light, shockingly so….”
— Modernist Civic Space: The Case of Brasilia, by Richard J. Williams, Department of History of Art, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Friday, August 15, 2003 3:30 PM
ART WARS:
The Boys from Brazil
It turns out that the elementary half-square designs used in Diamond Theory
also appear in the work of artist Nicole Sigaud.
Sigaud’s website The ANACOM Project has a page that leads to the artist Athos Bulcão, famous for his work in Brasilia.
From the document
Conceptual Art in an
Authoritarian Political Context:
Brasilia, Brazil,
by Angélica Madeira:
“Athos created unique visual plans, tiles of high poetic significance, icons inseparable from the city.”
As Sigaud notes, two-color diagonally-divided squares play a large part in the art of Bulcão.
The title of Madeira’s article, and the remarks of Anna Chave on the relationship of conceptual/minimalist art to fascist rhetoric (see my May 9, 2003, entries), suggest possible illustrations for a more politicized version of Diamond Theory:
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Fahne, |
Dr. Mengele, |
Is it safe?
These illustrations were suggested in part by the fact that today is the anniversary of the death of Macbeth, King of Scotland, and in part by the following illustrations from my journal entries of July 13, 2003 comparing a MOMA curator to Lady Macbeth:
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Die Fahne Hoch, |
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Thursday, August 14, 2003 3:45 AM
Famous Last Words
The ending of an Aug. 14 Salon.com article on Mel Gibson’s new film, “The Passion”:
” ‘The Passion’ will most likely offer up the familiar puerile, stereotypical view of the evil Jew calling for Jesus’ blood and the clueless Pilate begging him to reconsider. It is a view guaranteed to stir anew the passions of the rabid Christian, and one that will send the Jews scurrying back to the dark corners of history.”
— Christopher Orlet
“Scurrying”?! The ghost of Joseph Goebbels, who famously portrayed Jews as sewer rats doing just that, must be laughing — perhaps along with the ghost of Lady Diana Mosley (née Mitford), who died Monday.
This goes well with a story that Orlet tells at his website:
“… to me, the most genuine last words are those that arise naturally from the moment, such as
Joseph Goebbels |
Voltaire’s response to a request that he foreswear Satan: ‘This is no time to make new enemies.’ ”
For a view of Satan as an old, familiar, acquaintance, see the link to Prince Ombra in my entry last October 29 for Goebbels’s birthday.
Wednesday, August 13, 2003 3:00 PM
Best Picture
For some reflections inspired in part by
- Today’s anniversary of a
1727 Moravian Pentecost, - An April 7, 2003,
lecture at Moravian College, and - St. Bonaventure’s 1259
remarks on the Trinity,
Tuesday, August 12, 2003 4:44 PM
Atonement:
A sequel to my entry “Catholic Tastes” of July 27, 2003.
Some remarks of Wallace Stevens that seem appropriate on this date:
“It may be that one life is a punishment
For another, as the son’s life for the father’s.”
— Esthétique du Mal, Wallace Stevens
“Unless we believe in the hero, what is there
To believe? ….
Devise, devise, and make him of winter’s
Iciest core, a north star, central
In our oblivion, of summer’s
Imagination, the golden rescue:
The bread and wine of the mind….”
— Examination of the Hero in a Time of War, Wallace Stevens
Etymology of “Atonement”:
“Middle English atonen, to be reconciled, from at one, in agreement“
At One
“… We found,
If we found the central evil, the central good….
… we and the diamond globe at last were one.”
— Asides on the Oboe, Wallace Stevens
Tuesday, August 12, 2003 1:52 PM
Franken & ‘Stein,
Attorneys at Law
“Tue August 12, 2003 04:10 AM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Fox News Network is suing humor writer Al Franken for trademark infringement over the phrase ‘fair and balanced’ on the cover of his upcoming book, saying it has been ‘a signature slogan’ of the network since 1996.”
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Franken: |
‘Stein: |
For answers, click on the pictures
of Franken and ‘Stein.
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Saturday, August 16, 2003
Saturday August 16, 2003
My Personal Thorny Crown
Kirk Varnedoe, 57, art historian and former curator of the Museum of Modern Art, died Thursday, August 14, 2003.
From his New York Times obituary:
" 'He loved life in its most tangible forms, and so for him art was as physical and pleasurable as being knocked down by a wave,' said Adam Gopnik, the writer and a former student of his who collaborated on Mr. Varnedoe's first big show at the Modern, 'High & Low.' 'Art was always material first — it was never, ever bound by a thorny crown of ideas.' "
For some background on the phrase "thorny crown of ideas," see the web page
The phrase "thorny crown of ideas" is also of interest in the light of recent controversy over Mel Gibson's new film, "The Passion."
For details of the controversy, see Christopher Orlet's Aug. 14 essay at Salon.com,
For a real "thorny crown of ideas," consider the following remarks by another art historian:
"Whether or not we can follow the theorist in his demonstrations, there is one misunderstanding we must avoid at all cost. We must not confuse the analyses of geometrical symmetries with the mathematics of combination and permutation….
The earliest (and perhaps the rarest) treatise on the theory of design drives home this insight with marvellous precision."
— E. H. Gombrich, 1979, in
The Sense of Order
This is perhaps the most stupid remark I have ever read. The "treatise on the theory of design" that Gombrich refers to is
- Dominique Douat, Methode pour faire une infinité de desseins differents avec des carreaux mipartis de deux couleurs par une ligne diagonale : ou observations du Pere Dominique Douat Religieux Carmes de la Province de Toulouse sur un memoire inséré dans l'Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences de Paris l'année 1704, présenté par le Reverend Sebastien Truchet religieux du même ordre, Academicien honoraire, imprimé chez Jacques Quillau, Imprimeur Juré de l'Université, Paris 1722.
This is the title given at the web page
Truchet & Types:
Tiling Systems and Ornaments,
which gives some background.
Certain of the Truchet/Douat patterns have rather intriguing mathematical properties, sketched in my website Diamond Theory. These properties become clear if and only we we do what Gombrich moronically declares that we must not do: "confuse the analyses of geometrical symmetries with the mathematics of combination and permutation." (The verb "confuse" should, of course, be replaced by the verb "combine.")
What does all this have to do with
As jesting Pilate seems to have realized, whenever Jews (or, for that matter, Christians) tell stories, issues of truth may arise. Such issues, as shown by current events in that damned Semitic Hell-on-Earth that used to be referred to as "the Holy Land," can be of life-and-death importance.
Scene from
The Passion
The Roman soldiers may have fashioned a physical crown of thorns, but the Jews are quite capable of fashioning a very uncomfortable crown of, as Gopnik says, "ideas."
Here is an example.
"Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, who as an author went by the name E. H. Gombrich, was born in Vienna in 1909….
The Gombrich family was Jewish, but his parents felt this had no particular relevance. In later years Mr. Gombrich said that whether someone was Jewish or not was a preoccupation for the Gestapo."
— Michael Kimmelman's obituary for Gombrich in the New York Times. Kimmelman is chief art critic for the New York Times and author of the Times's Aug. 15 Varnedoe obituary.
The web page Understanding cited above contains a link to
Pilate, Truth, and Friday the Thirteenth,
a page combining some religious remarks with a quotation of an extremely patronizing and superficial reference to my own work (and, in passing, to Truchet/Douat patterns).
This reference, and the above-quoted remark by Gombrich, constitute my own modest claim to what the Jew Gopnik jokingly calls a "thorny crown of ideas."
To me it is no joke.
This partly accounts for the rather strained quality of the attempt at humor in a web page I put together yesterday in response to Varnedoe's obituary:
Another reason for the strained quality is my being struck by the synchronicity of reading Varnedoe's obituary shortly after I had done a journal entry related to the death in July of an earlier Museum of Modern Art curator. Like Robert A. Heinlein, I think the God of the Jews is a lousy deity and an even worse father figure. I do, however, believe in synchronicity.
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Sunday, July 13, 2003
Sunday July 13, 2003
ART WARS, 5:09
The Word in the Desert
For Harrison Ford in the desert.
(See previous entry.)
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break,
under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.
The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of
the disconsolate chimera.— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
The link to the word "devilish" in the last entry leads to one of my previous journal entries, "A Mass for Lucero," that deals with the devilishness of postmodern philosophy. To hammer this point home, here is an attack on college English departments that begins as follows:
"William Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, which recounts the generation-long rise of the drily loathsome Flem Snopes from clerk in a country store to bank president in Jefferson, Mississippi, teems with analogies to what has happened to English departments over the past thirty years."
For more, see
The Word in the Desert,
by Glenn C. Arbery.
See also the link on the word "contemptible," applied to Jacques Derrida, in my Logos and Logic page.
This leads to an National Review essay on Derrida,
The Philosopher as King,
by Mark Goldblatt.
A reader's comment on my previous entry suggests the film "Scotland, PA" as viewing related to the Derrida/Macbeth link there.
I prefer the following notice of a 7-11 death, that of a powerful art museum curator who would have been well cast as Lady Macbeth:
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Die Fahne Hoch, |
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From the Whitney Museum site:
"Max Anderson: When artist Frank Stella first showed this painting at The Museum of Modern Art in 1959, people were baffled by its austerity. Stella responded, 'What you see is what you see. Painting to me is a brush in a bucket and you put it on a surface. There is no other reality for me than that.' He wanted to create work that was methodical, intellectual, and passionless. To some, it seemed to be nothing more than a repudiation of everything that had come before—a rational system devoid of pleasure and personality. But other viewers saw that the black paintings generated an aura of mystery and solemnity.
The title of this work, Die Fahne Hoch, literally means 'The banner raised.' It comes from the marching anthem of the Nazi youth organization. Stella pointed out that the proportions of this canvas are much the same as the large flags displayed by the Nazis.
But the content of the work makes no reference to anything outside of the painting itself. The pattern was deduced from the shape of the canvas—the width of the black bands is determined by the width of the stretcher bars. The white lines that separate the broad bands of black are created by the narrow areas of unpainted canvas. Stella's black paintings greatly influenced the development of Minimalism in the 1960s."
From Play It As It Lays:
She took his hand and held it. "Why are you here."
"Because you and I, we know something. Because we've been out there where nothing is. Because I wanted—you know why."
"Lie down here," she said after a while. "Just go to sleep."
When he lay down beside her the Seconal capsules rolled on the sheet. In the bar across the road somebody punched King of the Road on the jukebox again, and there was an argument outside, and the sound of a bottle breaking. Maria held onto BZ's hand.
"Listen to that," he said. "Try to think about having enough left to break a bottle over it."
"It would be very pretty," Maria said. "Go to sleep."
I smoke old stogies I have found…
Cigar Aficionado on artist Frank Stella:
" 'Frank actually makes the moment. He captures it and helps to define it.'
This was certainly true of Stella's 1958 New York debut. Fresh out of Princeton, he came to New York and rented a former jeweler's shop on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side. He began using ordinary house paint to paint symmetrical black stripes on canvas. Called the Black Paintings, they are credited with paving the way for the minimal art movement of the 1960s. By the fall of 1959, Dorothy Miller of The Museum of Modern Art had chosen four of the austere pictures for inclusion in a show called Sixteen Americans."
For an even more austere picture, see
For more on art, Derrida, and devilishness, see Deborah Solomon's essay in the New York Times Magazine of Sunday, June 27, 1999:
"Blame Derrida and
his fellow French theorists…."
See, too, my site
Art Wars: Geometry as Conceptual Art.
For those who prefer a more traditional meditation, I recommend
("Behold the Wood of the Cross")
For more on the word "road" in the desert, see my "Dead Poet" entry of Epiphany 2003 (Tao means road) as well as the following scholarly bibliography of road-related cultural artifacts (a surprising number of which involve Harrison Ford):