Next, Next Adventures

I've been pretty lucky with my traveling schedule. Nothing exotic lately, but a closer look around my new homeland. Included on some recent trips are the Germanic parts of Hill Country, west of Houston near Austin, coastal experiments down the Gulf, and the most extreme visit: far, far West Texas. For this we drove and drove and drove clear across the state for two days until we made it to incredibly magical Marfa.

I'll get back to that story next time, because all I can think about right now are the trips I'm threading through the following six weeks.

First: MARDI GRAS!

Mardi Gras, 2002.

Second: MEXICO!

Coatlicue, National Anthropology Museum, Mexico City

Pre-Cinematic Bruegel.

Hunters in the Snow, Bruegel, 1565.

I'm consistently drawn to the expression of proto-cinematic movement in art that predates the motion picture. I'm always on the lookout for it and have seen examples in everything from prehistoric cave paintings to ancient Greek vessels to, as I argue, the Romanesque portal sculpture at Ripoll.

I pulled this from the Tufts Art History site:

Professor Martin Schulz, Academy of Arts, Karlsruhe, Germany, describes his lecture: "Animated and Animating Landscapes: Space Voyages and Time Travel in the Art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder."

"The lecture will explore the famous painting "Hunters in the Snow" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. I will focus on the spatial effect of the landscape as an animation of the gaze and a translation of images through and across different media: from illumination via drawing to panel painting and finally, in a long leap ahead, to the immersive possibilities of film, video, and many digital based images.

I am going to argue Bruegel's landscape appears to have a pre-cinematic quality. The immersion of the gaze lends itself to a travel through time and space from the depictions of the months in the medieval books of hours up to the cinematic adaptation and transformation of the painting, as it was accomplished by Andrei Tarkovsky in his film "Solaris" from 1972. This leads to a crystalline compression of space and time, in which past and present, actual and virtual space, material and mental images, painting and film and, not least, technology and gaze permeate and determine each other."

Sounds like a very interesting paper. Space Travel!

ITALY...GREECE...Only In My Dreams, But Not For Long.

Finally, finally after all these years of learning and looking from afar:

I'M GOING TO SEE IT ALL. 

RENAISSANCE: Masaccio's Trinity, 1427, Sta Maria Novella, Florence.

RENAISSANCE: Masaccio's Expulsion, 1426, Brancacci Chapel, Sta Maria del Carmine, Florence.

PROTO-RENAISSANCE! Giotto, Virgin and Child Enthroned, 14th c., The Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

BRONZE AGE, MINOAN: Knossos Palace, 1800 BCE, Crete.

MINOAN: Knossos Palace, 1800 BCE, Crete.

RENAISSANCE: Alberti's Sant'Andrea, 15th c., Mantua.

Commitments have been made and for 30 days and 30 nights I will travel back in time to:

Rome...Florence...Ravenna...Mantua...Padua...Venice
Athens...Mykonos...Delos...Thera...Crete

This includes works (most in situ!) from the Bronze Age, Antiquity, Byzantium, the Medieval era, the Proto-Renaissance and of course the Renaissance and even more and more! The Vatican, the Uffizi, the monastery at San Marco, the Pantheon, the Parthenon, Knossos Palace, Palladian architecture in Venice, maybe the lady in a red coat! Ah! I hope not!

I'm putting my lists together and planning to have several Stendhal experiences. Is there medicine for that? I need a suitcase full.

RENAISSANCE: Palladio's Redentore, 16th c., Venice.

BYZANTINE: San Vitale, 6th c., Ravenna.

Mosaics! Ravenna.

I can't even express how excited and overwhelmed and thankful I am. To my homeland!

Finals Season Gives Me Comps Flashbacks.

Watching my classes take their exams gives me a sense of panic. I know how they feel! Sick with worry. Brain bursting with information, mind racing to keep it organized and coherent. Heart hoping that there would be no meltdown.

Or maybe that isn't quite how my students were feeling...
Still, the air is palpable with anxiety.

After finishing my first year of graduate school, that summer was spent studying Art History from beginning to end in preparation for the Comprehensive Examinations that would take place in early September. Not only did this entail careful reading of the 1,000 page primary textbook, meeting twice a week as a group to present our individual lessons (I spent two weeks writing mine on Latin American art which was not represented in the textbook), but also doing intensive specialized reading in order to answer two field questions and one methods essay. I had never even taken a survey class before, eek! The great news is that I learned a ton of stuff and it felt amazing, but at the time it felt like preparing for the Apocalypse.

Here and here are some earlier accounts of those traumatizing days.

Check out some of the twenty or so images we were shown on the exam (these are just the ones that I remember/answered). They look so friendly now. 

Ancient: Dura Europos Synagogue (detail of interior fresco, Torah niche), Damascus, Syria, 3rd c., Jewish.

Byzantine: The Annunciation, Echmiadzin Gospels, 6th c., Armenian.

Traditional African: Ife (Yoruba) Female Portrait Head 12th c., Nigerian.

Ancient Latin America: Jade Mask, 10th-6th c. BCE, Olmec (Mexican).

Medieval: Stavelot Triptych, True Cross Reliquary, 12th c., Mosan (modern Belgium).

Islamic: Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, 691.

Italian Renaissance: Ecstasy of St. Francis, Bellini, 15th c., Venetian.

Modern Japanese: The Tale of Genji, 12th c. 

Modern European: The Meeting, Fragonard, 1773, French.

Modern Latin American: Black Kites, Gabriel Orozco, 1997, Mexican.


Modern African: El Anatsui, 20th c.

 Modern Latin American: El Abrazo Amoroso, Frida Kahlo, 1945, Mexican.
*conceptually features Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of creation and destruction

Modern European: Rest on the Flight Into Egypt, Luc Olivier Merson, 1879, French.
*Orientalist Genre

Candidate-->Master

We look so little in our "first day of school" pictures!

Somehow, every day is a new celebration. Despite the unstinting rain and extended plague-like symptoms, spirits are high as we move together toward the ceremonial event. Papers have been turned in, caps, gowns, and special Masters regalia have been purchased and looked at with perplexity. How does the hood work? There are intricate instructions. And you are not to cock your mortar board! Parties at Professor's, colleagues, and friends, small moments of pride, unity, and joy have taken over the stressful penultimate conclusion of the program.

At one point last night, at a party given by our charmingly garrulous Methods Professor, we stood in a circle to hear a toast. It was a moving moment (ok, maybe the wine had warmed me up a bit as well!). But, it seemed to be a significant marker. We entered this program as a unit in our Methods class, with its Munchkins invariably set in the center of the seminar table, making first impressions, and now we have closed the circle, meeting again, but transformed.

MFA Boston Acquires The Clock by Christian Marclay

There were long lines when artist Christian Marclay’s latest creation, a 24-hour film, “The Clock,’’ showed in New York and London (which is why I missed out on the experience). But today, the Museum of Fine Arts will announce plans to bring this masterpiece to Boston. Check out the article from the Boston Globe here.

 

Kismet! Now all I have to do is make sure I'm in the Boston area on September 17th and 18th. 

Boston and all East Coast people: this is an absolute must see!!
See post below or follow link to see a short clip.

Puff Balls and Valborg: Primavera

Today marks the actual beginning of Spring, a season I have mixed feelings for. I used to think of it as renewal, but this time it feels like a protracted death. However, when the puff balls start fluttering in the breeze, there is no other choice but to get caught up in the fever.

The first thing to do is commence with the springtime rituals.

1. Amarcord: Fellini's 1930's set film from 1973. The beginning treats you to the advent of the puff balls then takes you directly to the burning of the winter witch. This is the first Italian film I like to watch before moving into Michelangelo Antonioni for Summer and closing the season with Travolti da un insolito destino nell'azzurro mare d'agosto (aka Lina Wertmüller's Swept Away, 1974). The music in all of these is so evocative of its respective season. Sometimes I listen to the menu music (Piero Piccioni) for Swept Away on repeat. 

2. Swedish Valborgsmässoafton. 

Originally celebrated by Viking to hasten the arrival of spring and ensure fertility of their crops and livestock. They would do this by lighting huge bonfires to scare away evil spirits and predators. This is the night when the witches ride on their broomsticks through the sky, and the natural world clashes with the super natural. I had a chance to experience this in Philadelphia, at the American Swedish Historical Museum. A bonfire in front of a majestic museum, culture>art. 


3. Risi Bisi (Spring Pea Risotto) and Carrot and Pine Nut Cake.
Venetian style dining. It is said to be the first dish served at the end of April, at the Venetian feasts honoring St. Mark.

St. Mark, Carolingian Ebbo Gospels, 9th c.

Otherwise, in my small world of academia, things come to a close. My last class took place on Tuesday, though I attended not as a student, but as a teacher. It was a bittersweet moment. Many moments these days are. For two years my world revolved around this campus, this consuming experience at Tufts. Watching the seasons change, the sparkling beauty of the warm naive days, the stunning colors in the fall, the long, cruel winters, and now Spring, where we will disperse like so many seeds. All of these served as a silent, stable backdrop to emotional ups and downs, articles read with giddy curiosity while working on three hours of sleep, research, papers, nervous firsts, camaraderie, exams, presentations, lesson plans, overdue books, the special Tower tea, shared snacks, late night library delirium, challenges and epiphanies with faculty, students, each other, office hour tears, friendships made and unmade, isolation, triumphs and disappointments. None of these mundane descriptions can fully illustrate this complex experience. Somehow, Peggy Lee sums it up for me.





Exiting this small universe comes with questions of identity and the future. The program went by so quickly, as quickly as it is now coming to an end. Complete immersion in this atmosphere makes the abruptness of the end much more dramatic, as though we are completely ejected from the safe nurturing home. This month will consist of non-stop efforts to fully realize all academic possibilities and then, that's it. We are no longer students, no longer teachers. The transitions between high school and college and post college were never so harshly distinct as this. In two weeks, I will complete my academic duties. Soon after that, the occasion of commencement. Then, the slow fragmentation of our community.


For now, I am spending quality time finishing my second QP and this weekend, with a stack of papers and exams to grade. I'm excited to see how my students have grown since the first half of the semester, which centered on traditional African art. Some of my favorites from Modern and Contemporary: a major theme comments on freedom, identity, and movement (in terms of recreating, leaving traditional static compositions, and literally leaving for the diaspora), so maybe there will be a sort of renewal, I just can't see it yet.

Nuit de Noel, Malick Sidibé, 1962

Between Heaven and Earth, El Anatsui, 2006

"I am pleased to inform you that your proposal has been accepted."

Kursaal Congress Palace, San Sebastian, Spain

Greatest news ever! Now I will spend the entire summer in the library preparing my paper for peer review and possible publication in the affiliated journal. I am so incredibly excited to be a part of this.

Spain has everything I need. The conference is located directly, exactly in between two of the most important places (Ripoll and Santiago de Compostela) relative to my paper. Fate?

San Sebastián: in the Basque region of Spain, known for being one of the best food cities on earth. It has more Michelin stars per capita than any other city, even Paris. YES!

Abbey Church of Ripoll.

Santiago de Compostela

The prospect of visiting these places: magical. The prospect of having to present at my first conference, in another country: petrifying.

Oh, AND the conference is being held in conjunction with this film festival which will work magically with my topic. Hooray hooray!!

Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World)

Rajastani Room, 2004-2005

Le Corbusier Sink, 2006

 This is exactly what I need. Bonus: In March visit The Pop Up Store Called Milton where Kalman will be selling egg slicers, postcards, cans of mushy peas, bouncing balls from Argentina, and other ephemera of daily life.
Organized by the ICA at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (curator Ingrid Schaffner), this show will be at the Jewish Museum through the end of July.  Must make plans for another visit to New York.

TIME: FuturePast in New York City

The CAA conference proved to be an interesting experience. Everyone walks around wearing name tags, so instead of searching for faces we look for names. The first session had us sitting in front of Robert Ousterhout, famed Byzantinist who teaches at Penn. How did we know? Name tag. Giddy feelings circulated among us.

The following day I ended up at the morning session, late, but in time to hear two of the best lectures of the conference.

-Theirs, Mine, or Ours? Untangling the Experience of Ancient Art
Irene Winter, Harvard University
-Talking to Statues and Conversing with the Dead
Ingrid D. Rowland, University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, Rome Program

These ladies knew how to weave a story, entertaining us with joy. The panel was entitled Experience, and each discussed the role of the historian in his own research. There was some provocative exploration of the historian who borders on fetishistic, wooed by his objects.

Between sessions we fit in a refreshing walk to the edge of Central Park.

Next:
Carved/Recarved: The Surface of Sculpture

-Transforming the Antique: Donatello and the Martelli David
A. Victor Coonin, Rhodes College
-Gothic Recarves Gothic: The Case of the "Annunciata della Porta del Campanile" in the Museum of the Opera del Duomo in Florence
Francesco Di Ciaula, Museum of the Opera del Duomo, Florence
-A French Face-Lift for a Seated King at the Metropolitan Museum
Ludovico Geymonat, Bibliotheca Hertziana-Max Planck Institut für Kunstgeschichte
-The Nineteenth-Century "Fonte Gaia": Quercesque Vision or Purist Revision?
Chiara Scappini, Rutgers University
-Carving, Recarving, and Forgery: Working Ivory in the Tenth and Twentieth Centuries
Anthony Cutler, Pennsylvania State University

Anthony Cutler, Byzantinist, is another of those prolific scholars. I was holding my breath for his arrival at the podium, thinking of the image I had conjured of him to match his writing style. I imagined something like a masculine European with thick black hair, a heart breaker. His confidence as a scholar and writer leaves me feeling like I've been seduced. In my methodology class we often wondered what these guys looked like, at one point we started including snapshots with discussions. Usually they were unsurprising nerd-ish. Anthony Cutler turned out to be a small and frail man, whose hands shook through his entire presentation. That did not stop him from working the crowd with his acerbic wit and never ending knowledge. I think we were all mesmerized and/or bordering on slumber since he spoke for nearly an hour (at the end of a two and half hour session) with a very lilting voice. No one dared to cut him short, because it's Anthony Cutler!!!

Later that evening my room mate, Sophia, and I had Vietnamese sandwiches and discussed art with an artist (!, so unusual). One thing that came up was a show that he highly recommended: Christian Marclay, The Clock, at the Paula Cooper Gallery, a "24-hour timepiece that ticks off the minutes — and sometimes the seconds — of a full day, using thousands of brilliantly spliced-together film clips from all kinds of movies. All of them feature clocks or watches or people announcing the time, or more obliquely conjure up the passage of time." (Read more in the NYT link above)



This is the only video that I could find, it's a bit silly but still worth taking a look at. I forgot about the show until the next day when I got up early to see this session:
The Erasure of Contemporary Memory, Part I

-Archives for the Future: New Media Art and the Erasure of Memory
Timothy Murray, Cornell University
Renate Ferro, Cornell University
-Video Art as Prosthetic Memory
Jacqueline Millner, University of Sydney
-Illegibility: Luc Tuymans’s Strategies of Obfuscation in History Painting
Alison Gass, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
-“You Sir Are a Space Too!” What Ad Reinhardt and Jacques Derrida Have to Tell Us about Erasure
Bruce Barber, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University
-Eroding Documentary: Walker Evans and the Polaroid
Katherine Alcauskas, Yale University Art Gallery

Jacqueline Millner, in her fascinating talk, brought up a personal experience she'd had while watching a similar sort of film called Love, from 2003. In this case, she was in Brisbane and the artist was Tracey Moffatt. In her film, Moffatt has spliced together penultimate love scenes from Hollywood movies from the last sixty years. Her work interrogates the connection between familiar memory and present time response through the presentation of images that are at times, misogynistic, racist, stereotypical, or violent. Despite these cliches, the familiarity and seemingly intimate relationship to the imagery, both in content and context, can cause emotional response.

Millner described how the short film sent her into sobs, right in the middle of a stark gallery. She showed us a clip and sure enough it only took a few minutes to make me feel something. She brought up James Elkins' book Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings which asks why people cry or do not cry in the presence of art, comparing the religious "compunctive" tears to modern ones. It is a good question and as I contemplated it, I thought back to The Clock and I decided I had to see it. Alas, I was not the only one who was interested. After waiting in line for nearly an hour with I swear one hundred people, I gave up. And I am sad that I did because that was the final weekend.

Slightly more surreal: while passing through Times Square on my way back to our temporary place in the West Village, I saw the news projected on huge screens: manhunt on for 24 hour killing spree in Brooklyn. Giving chase overnight in Manhattan's subway tunnels, he was captured Saturday morning right where the news reel that I saw was running on a loop. Apparently he stabbed someone on the train who was reading a news article about him! There is something strange here about the collision of coverage and events.

The most viscerally magical moment of the trip, for me, came after a tranquil lunch at HanGawi, in Koreatown . While putting my shoes back on I heard a distinct voice and covertly scanned the surroundings to find: Antony of Antony and the Johnsons! Thrilled, my eyes lingered and drifted for only a second. I was then rewarded with the one and only Bjork, Antony's dining companion. My heart was pounding in that little Korean oasis. I made myself look away and give them privacy, but hearing their voices was so transporting, I was on cloud 9.

This woman played a large part in my formative teenage years and through my adult life. One of the most memorable concerts I've been to was at Radio City Music Hall in 2001, where I saw her perform on the Vespertine tour.

Although I had big plans to take advantage of the free entrance to all museums perk, I didn't spend more than twenty minutes in the MoMA and I skipped the Museum of Biblical Art. I wanted to be outside, soaking up the energy of a world unlike my own, cloistered in book stacks. Sunday was a day of adventuring with no agenda, other than to find Bond Street, which took us on twists and turns through Soho. Before departing I caught Somewhere at the Angelika and decided that even though Marie Antoinette was a misstep, I actually really enjoyed Sofia Coppola's latest. I found it to be relaxing, a transitory atmosphere that seemed right for just that moment in time.

At the train station I picked up a beautiful little book, On Solitude by Michel de Montaigne, a sixteenth-century Humanist writer. There are essays in the book which range from the virtues of solitude, the pleasures and dangers of reading and books, the importance of sleep and why we sometimes laugh and cry at the same time. So far, it's proving to be quite extraordinary.

Finally, A. O. Scott's pick of the week seems to weave all of these things together.

CAA Conference 2011: The Art History Event of the Year?

This will be my second official conference. Last year it was the Medieval Academy of America, not devoted to art, but plenty of interesting things going on there. Spring was upon us as we explored the compact Yale campus (we were disappointed to find that the ancient Dura Europos paintings usually installed in the museum were undergoing conservation, but the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library made up for it). The warm sun was a relief after hours of academic lecturing, some inspiring, some sleep inducing, yes, I did fall asleep during one lecture. That won't be happening this time!

This conference is on a much larger scale, taking place in Manhattan, with four days of packed itineraries and hundreds of major scholars of every kind. There are some exciting sessions to look forward to, but what I am most excited about is reuniting with art history people from every phase of my career so far.
I love imagining all of us set free in an art history Disneyland. It is going to be so much fun.

The first session I plan to attend is
Thursday The Other Middle Ages: The Medieval Mediterranean as Theater of the Arts
Dedicated to the memory of Oleg Grabar.
Chairs: William Tronzo, University of California, San Diego; Caroline Bruzelius, Duke University

Buildings beyond the Sea: Illustrations of Islamic Sanctuaries in the Libro d’oltramare (1346-50)
Kathryn Blair Moore, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Opus Sectile in Norman Southern Italy
Ruggero Longo, Università della Tuscia, Viterbo

Over the Pyrenees: France and the Medieval Mediterranean
Elisa A. Foster, Brown University

Conformity through Syncretism: San Giovanni degli Eremiti and the Creation of a Norman Architecture in Palermo
Lara Tohme, Wellesley College

Art of Itinerancy: Seeing the Spaces of Martin the Humane and Benedict XIII
Amity Nichols Law, Harvard University and Tufts University

That last speaker happens to be the third reader for my qualifying paper!

Fumée d’Ambre Gris

Fumée d’Ambre Gris – Smoke of Ambergris by John Singer Sargent, 1880.

 Clark Institute in Williamstown, MA.

Enchanting study in whites.
I saw this while adventuring around the museums of western Massachusetts and I could not look away.

Also in western Mass. and very good:
the Williams College Museum of Art.















At the Worcester Art Museum I saw the Antioch mosaics that we studied in my Medieval Art in the Mediterranean class.

This is Ctesiphon, a personification of home. Late Roman.
Bonus: very close to the museum is a Swedish bakery, Crown Bakery and Cafe. During Lent they have semlor, my absolute favorite!