art

Role model: art teaches us the way to live

This video

http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/feb/24/ukraine-president-viktor-yanukovych-palace-video

shows a first look inside one of the palaces of President Yanukovych of Ukraine. There are no subtitles for the Ukrainian voiceover, but you will recognize the word Голлівуд.

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“But,” inquired John curiously, “who did plan all your wonderful reception rooms and halls, and approaches and bathrooms — ?”

“Well,” answered Percy, “I blush to tell you, but it was a moving-picture fella. He was the only man we found who was used to playing with an unlimited amount of money, though he did tuck his napkin in his collar and couldn’t read or write.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”

 

 

 

“Lapis Lazuli”: the short view and the long

1. The short view:

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and the fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.

 

2. Wyndham Lewis, a contemporary of Mr. Yeats who views himself as a destructive mechanism, charges his palette.

 

3. Ascending in the mechanism, Mr. Yeats takes the long view. 

Zeno Diemer, “German Airships over the Thames.” Postcard, ca. 1915. Photoshopped. http://stampcircuit.com/Stamp-Auction-Collectable/sonstiges?page=47

There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

 

Nude for Norway: on the culturally limited expressiveness of the human body

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Sources and translations

The Oldsmobile advertisement, from 1942, is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jon_williamson/11982067064/

The image of women on the battlefield can be found in many locations online. It was taken by Dmitri Baltermants in Kerch, 1942.

The painting of the girl writing to the soldier wearing Norwegian mittens in Germany’s SS Wiking division, like the two other propaganda images in color, is by the Norwegian Nazi artist Harald Damsleth. All three of the Damsleth images are at http://gasskammer.blogspot.com/2013/02/en-nasjonal-samling-bilder-av-harald.html

Austrvegr, literally  “eastern road,” is an Old Norse word referring to Russia. I have also written about this image at http://jonathan-morse.blogspot.com/2010/01/home-front-art-familiarizing-defamiliar.html

Enten eller translates as “Either / or.” The red-and-yellow sun disk was the emblem of the Nasjonal Samling (National Gathering), Vidkun Quisling’s Norwegian Nazi party. In the image titled Kultur-Terror, the dialogue at the bottom translates as, “The U.S.A. will save Europe’s culture from destruction. . . .  with what right?” I thank Domhnall Mitchell for correcting the translations.

Exegi Polaroidum aere perennius

“Hi, this is Steve,” said the voice on the phone. “How are you?” The voice was a breathy basso and the intonation oozed with benevolence. A few seconds after that, Steve revealed that he was calling to offer me a reverse mortgage and I realized that Steve was an interactive audio file.

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A cynosure of the international art world in the first decade of this century was the American artist Dash Snow (1981-2009). A member of the princely Menil family of art patrons, Dash devoted his life as an artist to wearing hats, vandalizing hotel rooms, and not much else. But he was also an almost unbelievably handsome young man, with waist-length blond hair and a really big trust fund, and he took tens of thousands of Polaroids of the life his Dionysiac force created around him. Most of these images are of people being drunk or drugged.

It was the drugs that got him. At

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2012/10/asx-tv-dash-snow-talking-about-dash-snow-2012.html

you can see an elegiac interview about that event with a gallerista who fondly remembers the fun she unfailingly experienced when Dash was in the room. Even as a little boy, the gallerista recalls, Dash was a nonstop source of creative energy: throwing things, smashing things, and setting fires until the very moment he was sent off to reform school. After a while, the interviewer cuts the conversation short and abruptly leaves the room. It’s time, he explains to the gallerista, for him to pick up his little boy.

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At

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/09/asx-tv-dash-snow-interview.html

you can see Dash in extreme closeup with cigarette, aetatis suae XXIV. If he had lived, he would have looked like Mitch McConnell by the time he was 40. But art, even Dash’s art, admits you to an interior zone from which the human reaches out toward immortality. Back from the immortal, in this case, come a couple of sentences’ worth of Dashtalk: “I don’t believe in the laws or the system by any means whatsoever. I try not to obey them at any time.”

The words are just phatic sound, of course, like Steve’s “How are you?” They might as well be the clay language of a Grecian urn, stilled into perdurable ceramic. Yet when the speaker fills his lungs with smoke and speaks the words to the video track, he looks as real as Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

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Dash-in-the-Polaroid doesn’t believe in the laws. He thinks of what he does generally, in the abstract. (The drugs probably have something to do with that.) Steve-in-the-computer doesn’t believe only in the Do Not Call List. He thinks of what he does in a focused pragmatic way, with the help of lawyers who edit his script and computer programmers who help him speak it. Dash represents inhuman art. Steve represents the humanity of the hucksters who ascribe a value to art.

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At the end of The Bacchae, Dionysus destroys first those who didn’t worship him and then those who did. Look at this image and discuss.