Little Packages

Women think in little packages. I understand nothing in the way their minds work.  They make an envelope for each subject, attach a label to it, and that's the end of the matter.  Little packages. Little packages.


---Edgar Degas, in conversation, Oct 1891 [included in the Degas exhibit at the Naples Museum of Art]


Hmmmm....Well, I've always heard that women were not terribly good at compartmentalizing.  According to Degas, that's a falsehood.  

Like the Knife of the Carver

Language is the principal tool with which the Eskimo make the natural world a human world. They use many words for snow, which permits fine distinctions, not simply because they are much concerned with snow, but because snow takes its form from the actions in which it participates: sledding, falling, igloo-building.  Different kinds of snow are brought into existence by the Eskimo as they experience their environment and speak; words do not label things already there.  Words are like the knife of the carver: they free the idea, the thing, from the general formlessness of the outside.  As a man speaks, not only is his language in a state of birth but also is the very thing about which he is talking. 

---Edmund Carpenter, "Arctic Realities." Taken from the exhibition pamphlet for "Upside Down: Arctic Realities" on display at the Menil Collection, April 15-July 17, 2011. 

Modern

"Anna is 'modern'---I believe that's what it's called when you read unsettling books and admire hideous pictures."

---Edith Wharton, The Reef (1912)

Joy

"IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY"
   
                          ---Jenny Holzer Untitled (In A Dream)


Note that joy and happiness are not exactly the same thing.  Look HERE and closer HERE, and  HERE and my favorite, HERE.  (scroll down)

Plum Blossoms and Moonlight

Taken from the back of a box of Metropolitan Museum of Art Correspondence Cards featuring a plum blossom design modeled on a woodblock print by Suzuki Harunobu:

" One Japanese Poet said, 'On a spring night when the moon shines through a blossoming plum tree growing by the eaves, the moonbeams themselves seem filled with perfume.' "

Iron Bones

"Iron Bones Giving Birth to Spring"

"Learning from Bamboo's Lofty Spirit Though it is Hollow;
     Following the example of Plum Blossoms Which Bloom on Iron Boughs"

"Before Peach and Pear Trees Come into Bloom, Winter
     Plum Blossoms Spring out of Iron-like Trunks"

"Tested by Wind and Frost, Plum Blossoms Smell Stronger;
     People Who Expect Nothing Have More Noble Quality"

---Wang Chengxi, titles from his paintings, collected in A Hundred Plum Blossom Paintings (1992)

Wang Chengxi, a contemporary painter of plum blossoms, continues a tradition in existence since the Tang Dynasty.   In explaining his interest in the plum blossom, Chengzi echoes those of the artists and poets who preceded him who appropriated the plum blossom to signify the coming of spring in both the literal as well as the more figurative sense--rejuvenation after a difficult time, such as illness.  Chengxi writes, "Braving snow and frost, plum trees blossom defiantly to spread their fragrance .  The noble character and morals of the people can be likened to plum blossoms which are burst forth in adverse circumstances and bring encouragement to the world."

The plum blossom is one of the "Three Friends of the Cold" (which includes pine and bamboo, mentioned above) as well as one of "The Four Gentlemen" , which includes orchid (spring)  bamboo (summer) and chrysanthemum (autumn). The plum blossom is an example of what we might call the spiritual underpinnings of the material world.   The strength of the plum tree's "iron bones" which bring forth blossoms in abundance even amidst cold and ice offers us a narrative of resurrection.

Tomorrow's entry will feature plum blossoms once more to celebrate the advent of spring. 

Masculine Charms

"Woodcarver Bert Ohnstad carved canes, bowls, totem poles, and a number of sculptures, but his masterpiece was his Friendship Cane, to which he devoted more than fifty years in the making.  The cedar limb used to make the cane was cut in 1928, as Ohnstad led a Boy Scout troop on a hike in Oklahoma.  A fellow scout leader gave Ohnstad a memento to attach to it, a tiny gold heart with an inscription of the Lord's Prayer.  From then on, people gave him tiny charms and keepsakes to attach to what he had begun to call his Friendship Cane.  Ohnstad carved little niches into the cane and embedded such wonders as a tiny 64-square checkerboard, a shark's tooth, and a petite compass taken from a deceased German soldier's wrist during World War I.  Close inspection reveals six miniature peek-holes embedded into the body of the cane, which reveal glimpses of Niagara Falls ,the Golden Gate Bridge, the White House, a Greek nymph, the Washington Monument, and the Lord's Prayer.  Other attachments include a diamond-studded Rotary pin, a gold coin, a locket, a tiny "arrow head," a Scottie dog charm, a charm commemorating the Piccard statosphere flight, an eagle mascot pin from the 15th Wisconsin Regiment of the Civil War, and a Norse Immigration Centennial Medallion.  Ohnstad counted more than one hundred objects and images carved into, attached to, or embedded into the cane, which exists as a travel diary, masculine version of a charm bracelet, and a remarkable piece of art and Americana."

--Leslie Umberger, Messages & Magic: 100 Years of Collage and Assemblage in American Art

Leslie Umberger's account of Bert Ohnstad's Friendship Cane, a part of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center Collection, gives us a glimpse of an art form that clearly draws upon the much older tradition of the reliquary as well as the Victorian interest in keepsakes, secular relics, and tokens of friendship and memory.  Ohnstad's cane, produced between 1928 and 1979, is the material record of those with whom his life intersected through friendship. His efforts to embed keepsakes within the cane and to create nostalgic "peep holes" suggests privacy, insight, and interiority--a glimpse of the artist and of the era.  Yet in transforming the typically utilitarian cane into a numinous object, Ohnstad's artwork also prompts us to reflect more deeply  about our own private history.

A Play of Light: The Still Life Paintings of Janet Fish

"When people look at realist paintings, they focus on the objects, which I don't think are the subject at all.  I think the object is one of the tools, like the paint and the brush.  The real subject is the light, movement, and color, and echoes of the objects in one's mind.  All those things are part of what I use to make the painting."

    --Janet Fish, qtd. in the exhibition pamphlet for "The Art of Janet Fish" (October 2, 2009-January 17, 2009, Naples Museum of Art).

Janet Fish is known for her vibrant and colorful paintings which play with light, shape, and texture. Like still-life, many of her works feature glassworks, foodstuffs, cut flowers, and domestic objects--all rendered in jewel-like colors that she suggests are inspired by her island upbringing.  Yet as the curators of this exhibit suggest, Fish is not a "realist" proper, but an artist whose work intersects abstract expressionism with realism to create expansive, bright and "juicy surfaces."   

  As is well-known, the sensory perception of fragrance is closely linked to memory. A familiar fragrance can prompt a mental journey into one's past.  Yet the sensory perception of subtle differences in light similarly draws the mind away from the mundanities of the present and into an alternative dimension.  On my first pass through this exhibition--which was sort of like a domestic coral reef---nothing much caught my eye.  But on my third pass, as I began to linger over certain paintings, I moved into a more meditative state---developing a keener awareness of the possibilities of the present and a heightened interest in the everyday.  The domestic scenery--while exotic--is not unfamiliar.  

 I was most drawn to one painting, "Cracked Eggs and Milk" (2005) featuring some particularly poignantly rendered cantaloupe-orange glass bowls and raw golden yolks set off in morning light.  The preparations of breakfast or brunch (I'm not attuned enough to the subtleties of light to discern the precise hour of the morning that Fish captures but in my mind's eye it is 8 am) appear in freeze-frame---we have no desire to see the ingredients to come together or to watch the meal being consumed.  There is an intense feeling of pleasure in the moment-- taking note of it, being in it. It is a very rare experience to linger over anything, to reflect on anything, to be rather than to do--to experience the luxury of time. Fish's art thwarts our desires to get to the end of things. She captures a familiar reality and yet makes it startlingly unfamiliar in its delicate allusion to what we fail to notice and what we take for granted.    

Anxiety, Hope: Bruijn's Images

    "Ansel Adams once said that the principal attribute required of a good photographer is knowing where to stand.  But he and Brynn know that, even standing in the perfect place, the photographer must, in a split second, capture that special moment while also noting a multitude of issues, including light, shadow, composition, shutter speed and focus. 
    
     Brynn's photographs are illustrative of her mastery over these complexities. Look, for instance, at her exquisitely eloquent composition Still Waiting. In this image, where the sun is just beginning to push away the night, workers wait in the cold early morning darkness to be selected for that day's field work.  Some have already been chosen and are lining up for the bus that will take them to work; those not selected sit huddled while trying to keep warm with coffee or stand with their hoods up and hands jammed into their pockets.  The stark dualities of the moment are powerfully captured--the contrast between day and night, work and idleness, inclusion and exclusion, hope and uncertainty.  Instead of a dawn ripe with possibilities, Brynn helps us recognize in this metaphorically brilliant image that, for these individuals, each new day begins with the same overwhelming anxiety."

---Michael Culver, Director and Chief Curator, Naples Museum of Art, Exhibition pamphlet for "Images of Hope: Immokalee--Looking Forward, Looking Back, Photography by Brynn Bruijn" on exhibit December 1, 2009--February 7, 2010.

Michael Culver's close reading of this Brynn Bruijn photograph suggests that the technical competence and artistry of the photographer resides in his or her sense of perspective in the physical/geographical as well as the narrative sense of the word.  In this exhibition, Bruijn captures the tensions inherent in the lives of the residents of Immokalee, a town of 25,000 whose population "expand[s] to 40,000 during the agricultural season" (Mary George, President and CEO of the Community Foundation of Collier County.)  With grossly inadequate housing--with respect to quantity and quality--many of Bruijn's photographs document the physical interiors of impoverishment.  Indeed, about half of these families live below the poverty line. 

But as Culver acknowledges, Bruijn's perspective also exposes the psychological interiors of Immokalee's citizens, whose struggles, anxieties, and desires are not so easily discerned.  Currently on exhibit at the Naples Museum of Art--a mere 30 miles from Immokalee--the discordant environs of wealthy and luxurious Naples throws Bruijn's subject matter into relief.   Yet her work evokes deeper thinking more so than pity and elides the simpler dichotomies that we might be inclined to ascribe to it.  In this sense,  Bruijn's work as a photographer also shifts our perspective as viewers, drawing us in, mandating our reflection on where we reside in relationship to the people featured in these images.

The curation of this exhibition supports this end. For example, one placard informs the visitor that 70% of all vegetables consumed between late October and May are produced in southern Florida. We begin to reflect on what we consume, whether it was touched by the photographic subjects--whether they are a part of us--are actually sustaining us.  This is only the beginning of this line of thought, which takes us to an uncomfortable place in which we are prompted to acknowledge the arbitrariness of our own good fortune and (perhaps) the essential insecurity of our own position. Yet, we ultimately turn back in fascination at the subjects themselves whose anxious hope is so painstakingly rendered.  "Hope" is not a simplistic term to describe this state, but one that captures what it means to be unsettled---in every sense of the word.  

Mother Love

"At bedtime, instead of my charming boy, ... I found a lifeless corpse--laid out in the white robes of innocence and death.  Though I wept and pressed him, he could not look at me.  How could I endure it--much less compose myself--but by believing him gone to perfect rest and happiness.--there to wait for his father and mother."


        ---Diary of Louisa Park,  qtd. in Robin Jaffee Frank's Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures (2000).  Frank accredits Louisa Park's diary entries for Dec 14 and 24, 1800 (American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA) and  quotes from Nancy Schrom Dye and Daniel Blake Smith, "Mother Love and Infant Death, 1750-1920" Journal of American History 73 (September 1986), 332.

I have selected this quote from Robin Jaffee Frank's superb volume on portrait and mourning miniatures, a book that elegantly traces the history of this artistic and decorative form.  This particular quote does not reference the portrait (or the material culture of mourning) that are the subjects of Frank's book, but it does suggests the sentimental underpinnings of the early nineteenth century  that located comfort in portrait miniatures, hairwork, and other relics of the dead.  What draws me to this quote, however, is the way that it captures the univeral aspect of grief --the seeming impossibility of "enduring" loss.   The death of a child disrupts the natural order of things and cannot be fathomed.  The acceptance of death that marked an earlier era gives way to the more reassuring promise of reunion between mother and child. 


In my title, I tip my hat to the late blogger, Cancer Baby  who died from ovarian cancer in May of 2006 at the age of 33.  Her entry "(M)otherlove" a poem that documents her own mother's stunned --yet silent reaction--to her question, "What will you do if I die?"  comes to mind as I work through Frank's art history work. 

Summer Epiphanies

As promised, I am reprising my focus on artist Joseph Cornell.  Today's quotes come once again from the superb volume of Cornell's letters and diary entries edited by Mary Ann Caws.   Whereas the last set of quotes focused on dreams about food, these will focus on the experience of summer and its relationship to the artist's inspiration.  This season, while represented most commonly by the image of the hammock, also suggests the hum of mental activity, of progress in art.  When Cornell writes that he has a "very warm feeling at night" it's clear that he is not referring to the temperature of his room or of the outdoors.  As Caws clarifies, the asterisk (*) denotes those days on which Cornell experienced an epiphany. Summer is a season of discovery and wonder.

*On the weather beaten gray picket
fence running along the old red
Barn vibrant blue morning glories
entwined.
     ---Summer 1945


August 1946 *
during hot days gathered examples of Golden rod grasses on bike--threshed them down to pulverized
essences for OWL boxes--the pungent odor filled the cellar with Indian summer~very warm feeling at night.


7/17/56 Tues. at home
drop of water too deep for sun so-so day in box work~glistening in sun around 3 PM sunny after rain etc. yesterday grasshopper on side of house
bumblebee in the snapdragons


Friday August 29, '58 Labor Day weekend
[...] scent of mint (atomizer) brings the Adirondacks back* with that poetry of memory and surprise


--Joseph Cornell, Joseph Cornell's Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files, edited by Mary Ann Caws (2000)

Cornell Part I: Sweet Dreams

In Mary Ann Caws' superbly edited volume, the boundaries between Joseph Cornell's dream world and the space of the street begin to blur....Note especially Cornell's passive voice construction in his entry on March 1, 1947 which suggests his receptivity to his environment. This is the first part of a multi-part series which will focus on Cornell and his world....to be continued at a later date.


Feb 8, 1947


dreamed of vaults with all kinds of whipped cream pastries. Rich
day....layer cake~cherry Danish~calm feeling


Mar 1, 1947


~before going into library a pink icinged vanilla cream-filled
rolled cake had been observed~later when stopping by to purchase
some things its disappearance from its plate glass pedestal in
the window brought a real kind of regret of a delicacy that went
beyond the mere regret~lunch in a diner, banana creme pie, doughnut,
and drink


Feb 6, 1950


lunch of pancakes a complete sense of peace (rare) before leaving
for New York

--Joseph Cornell, Joseph Cornell's Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files, edited by Mary Ann Caws (2000)

Night Drama

Here, Van Gogh describes the theatrical qualities of the cafe.  Van Gogh's Night Cafe is seductive, eerie, irresistible:

"In my picture of Night Cafe I have tried to express the idea that the cafe is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime."



"Pale sulfur and greenish citron-yellow color"....a "night picture without any black in it"..."beautiful blue and violet and green"..."it amuses me enormously to paint the night right on the spot"..."A cafe, with the terrace lit up by a big gas lamp in the blue night, and a corner of a starry blue sky."

---Vincent Van Gogh, Letters to Theo, September 1888