by Jean Marie Carey | 13 Sep 2018 | Animals, Animals in Art, Art History, Contemporary Art, Expressionismus, German Expressionism / Modernism, Michelangelost©, Stuff Found in Library Books
Art History at the Library
I was very happy to have the grant renewed and be invited back to the SouthShore Regional Public Library for another series of “Art History at the Library” discussions.
The library had in mind a series that was a little more intensive than “art appreciation”-cruise ship type talks. I did try out some kind of conceptual themes last time, but I also was able to implement my tech whirligigs and to do something I had wanted to do for a long time, have the audience be able to drive a lot of the content. I experimented with this just by stopping often to ask if people had questions or comments, and to my delight they did.
I try to memorise what I’m going to talk about so it’s possible to both extemporise as desired by the patrons’ concerns and also not get thrown off track.
Anyway the schedule for the fall is below. Thank you again to the Hillsborough Public Library Cooperative for supporting this project.
15 September: “Special Guest Appearances: Art in Movies and on Television.” Participants are invited to think of their own favorite examples to discuss and share. This talk will examine the appearance of artworks and references to famous works of art in popular movies and television programs, including Vikings, Bojack Horseman, The Young Pope, Skyfall, and more. We’ll also discuss films that are about artists and art. I am especially excited to be able to talk about some of the painterly images from The Young Pope, which so centre the body. I know a lot of people hated this show, but I liked how it looked, and found director Paolo Sorrentino and cinematographer Luca Bigazzi neomodernist visual world were stunning but also very ambiguous about the questions of faith and the supernatural raised by the narrative.
20 October: “The Body in the Book: Beauty and Suffering in Illuminated Manuscripts.”The session will be about the process of making illuminated manuscripts and scrolls including well-known examples such as the Book of Kells and the Grimani Breviary as well as less-familiar secular texts.
17 November: “What’s the Difference Between Arts and Crafts? Fashion, Textiles, and Design.” Rather than trying to come up with a definitive answer to this question, we will discuss how aesthetic hierarchies come to be. Which tdo we prize more, purely aesthetic innovation, of the form of utilitarian objects, and why? Participants are invited to share examples of their own works and of course their opinions!
15 December: “A Celebration of Animals in Art.” This discussion will cover artwork that recognizes the power of animal life, from the cave paintings of Chauvet and Alta to Tanja Thorjussen’s endangered Arctic wildlife and everything in between.
Franz Marc’s Blaues Pferd I (1911) in Bojack Horseman, above, and shots from The Young Pope (2016) below.
The only social media I participate in; this feed is mostly about art history and animals.
by Jean Marie Carey | 19 Jun 2017 | Art History, Re-Enactments© and MashUps
One of the paradoxes that has emerged from documenta 14 is that many of its spectacular installations make very simple statements about global consumerism using enormous material expenditures. In fact it can be difficult to see past the pyramids, windmills, and tents erected to comment on issues such as migration and the market-possessed-body – elaborate efforts to illustrate political generalities – to documenta’s truer theme, an attempt by curator Adam Szymczyk to assail, or at least supplement, canonical art history with work by indigenous and overlooked artists.
iQhiya, Monday, 2017, Performance und Installation, Ehemaliger unterirdischer Bahnhof (KulturBahnhof), Kassel, documenta 14, Foto: Fred Dott
But the contemporary art fair world floats above scholarship on a bubble of self-satisfaction. The documenta participants who are the big draws – Mona Hatoum and Pierre Huyghe for example – aren’t worried about posterity. So what was meant to be exposure becomes competition for a footnote. Some of this lesser-known work also really struggles when removed from its local context. Poor facture and inappropriate plinths meant as faux–naïf comes across as a weird form of doubled sociological good intentions gone awry, and, amid Kassel’s half-hearted Brutalist buildings, calls to mind Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs of Bavarians dressed as Native Americans. In this respect, perhaps it was afterall an important achievement, and more consistent with Szymczyk’s goal, to move the most of documenta to Athens.
One excellent work, shown above, is iQhiya’s Monday (2017), which unfortunately was performed only once on 13 June. Staged in Kassel’s “little” Bahnhof, the spoken, moved, video, books, saws, pens, needles cloth, and film endurance piece used an eight-hour projection loop of Sarafina! (1992) to examine the “hidden curriculum” experience of black, South African women college students. Mimicking the rhythm of a real school day, naturally people wandered in and out. The coming and goings of the Eurobahn and Regio trains moving through the station plinked the hour glass and also made a rumbling vibration that was unsettling and comforting at the same time. I’m not sure if the reference to Pascale Marthine Tayou’s Human Being @Work (2009) was intentional or ephemeral coincidence, but the eleven-member iQhiya troupe made use of sound and light in a similar way as Tayou’s (also very successful) occupation of the Biennale di Venezia’s Arsenale – only with real trains.
Now, about Olu Oguibe…
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by Jean Marie Carey | 23 Mar 2014 | Animals, Animals in Art, Art History, Dogs!, Franz Marc, German Expressionism / Modernism, LÖL, Re-Enactments© and MashUps
Franz Marc’s family home in the München suburb of Pasing.
I’ve written a little bit about (we’re saving our full repertoire for our even-bigger-screen reveal) the accidental hobby of my creative partner and myself, a sort of reverse geocaching + film. Basically we found out we like to research the addresses of art-historical places and find the spot on the earth where they once stood. In most of these cases, such as the pop-up gallery in Berlin search which ended up being recorded during a blizzard, or the colorful studio here in München destroyed in the war, we had city records and things like invitations to or posters for exhibits to go on, and it was possible to figure out, even where addresses had changed or buildings had been demolished, where they once stood. Sometimes we were able to use GPS coordinates, tagging our own maps as we went along, and sometimes we just used a compass, building keystones, and asking questions. Most of these excursions took a couple days of research and a one-shot hike.
Franz Marc’s family house in the München suburb of Pasing turned out to be our biggest challenge, though, and somewhat unexpectedly since Pasing was never destroyed and a lot of the old buildings have been preserved. However, perhaps not surprisingly, neither were Sophie and Wilhelm Marc, the parents of Franz, nor Paul, Franz’s brother, either very good with managing money nor with keeping records. Thus as it turns out the Marcs owned the house through a chain of convoluted machinations, so the normally very useful city and state records were not helpful. We assembled our clues – fragments of notes and letters mostly, and importantly, photographs showing the house and the yard – and set off to Pasing with only a couple of bottles of water because “how big can Pasing be?”.
Well, Pasing is not that big, but, never underestimate the amount of confusion Franz Marc can cause. On our first journey (like, on the Straßenbahn Linie 19 so not that far) we walked around the neighborhood with the most Altbauten – nothing. The second day we knew to bring some snacks, but, still, after many hours – nothing. We were getting a bit anxious time-wise, and looked over all our notes again. I kept going back to the photographs, which showed very clear views of the property including which way the shadows were falling, and, since they photos were clearly taken in summer, and then in winter, you could see which way the house itself faced. We decided on the third trip to just be more playful and counterintuitively left everything at home but the camera, and getting off the tram just walked in a direction that seemed, for lack of a better way to describe, enticing and pleasant.
Not even half an hour into the walk, we turned a corner, and there it was. The other times we had been going completely in the wrong directions, by the way. Even if I didn’t know from the photographs, I would have just known, I think, that this was a place the Marc family would have lived. It’s a comfortably large enough home, but kind of secluded, even though it’s on city block, with many trees that were saplings in the photographs, a sort of open gazebo, and many eaves and places for birds to live. It definitely had an aura and I was very happy to have found the place – it made me feel very light at heart – and happy that the Marcs had lived there. Sophie Marc stayed on at the house after Wilhelm Marc died in 1907 until she went to stay with Maria Marc later in 1914 (yes, Sophie Marc outlived Franz by just a few months).
Unfortunately, as you can see from the photos, the home is abandoned and in desperate need of some repairs. It’s probably not habitable the way it is now. I dearly hope someone will lovingly restore this historic treasure. If that person is you, please write to me and I will send you the address!
Once my heart had turned to being interested in “recovered biography” I realized how important it is to actually physically experience places and things important in the life of Franz Marc. It’s incredible to me that in a place as self-consciously “historic” as Bayern so many things are falling away. In 2013, the Goltz book store closed its physical location on the Türkenstraße, which should really have been outlawed or something. We did make some documentation of that location, too, though. But that is another story.
UPDATE: May 2015
In some recent research I was doing about some other property records and dates of births and things, I ran across an interesting fact: Around 1885-1900, Annette von Eckardt and her family, which then would have included her baby daughter Helene and husband Richard Simon, a professor at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität, lived in Pasing. By this time Richard Simon would’ve known Paul Marc, Franz Marc’s brother who also taught at the university, and who still lived with the family in Pasing, too. I’m writing something for publication about these interconnected relationships for soon, so…watch this space. The implications are interesting, and a little disturbing, too, but my intuition has been givine me this message for a long time…
by Jean Marie Carey | 25 Apr 2012 | Animals, Animals in Art, Dogs!, Music
Centurion is supposed to be historical fiction about the disappearance of the Legio IX Hispania in the third century in something like the Battle of Teutoberg Wald but it kind of lapses into … semi-fantasy. There is a lot of snow and awesome alpine scenery and fun costumes. Basically the only reason to see Centurion is for Dominic West in one of his typically movie-stealing supporting roles (as “General Titus Flavius Virilus” – really!) and Etain, the “guerra picta” played by Olga Kurylenko. Etain doesn’t speak, takes the wolf as her attribute animal, and endures a strange sort of Penthesilea-like death. She has fantastic Pict ordnance and body decorations.
I was sort of half-waking up, half-dreaming about the movie when the song “Signs” came on the former dataheaven.us I haven’t paid much attention to Bloc Party previously but I was blown away by this particular song. Maybe it was just the combination of sound and imagery but it really shook me up.
What do these two things have in common that together they should make such a resonant impression? I don’t know.
Here is the link to “Signs” on Soundcloud, and a snippet of lyric: “I could sleep forever these days because in my dreams I see you again.”
by Jean Marie Carey | 23 Oct 2011 | Animals in Art, Art History
So the Swede Film Festival Tampa was last night at the Muvico in Ybor City.
It seemed like about 100 people and hipsters showed out which mainly included the filmmakers and casts and their friends. Still it was fun in the way that comic events are more entertaining with a group who is into it.
Of course I was one of the animals in Dumbo. Jim Reiman made this film but his voices for the various characters are what blew me away. Adam Kitzerow and Deon Blackwell are especially hilarious in Top Gun and Robb Fladry has incredible fun original music for Weekend at Bernie’s. The Sweded Apocalypto and The Shining were pretty madcap, too.
I think it would be fun to work on a version of There Will Be Blood.
