Gonzalo Barr

An arresting passage from Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of The Odyssey –

The three sages bowed before their sovereign and with a flourish presented a heavy book bound in tarnished silver containing a thousand thick, densely written pages.  When opened the book released a waft like hot iron in a winter forge.  Within Agamemnon read of many things:

The history of his ancestors the Atreides.

The detailed plans of the castle on the highest peak of Mount Olympus, and what dolorous event will transpire there on the day the engines of the world shudder, hesitate and begin their slow deceleration.

The mathematics underlying the populations of herring in the sea, the evolution of the stars and the fencing style of a certain little-known sect of Sicilian masters, and how these disparate things are secretly rules by a single idea.

A survey of the many layers of the Earth and the currents and tidal schedules of its vast seas of magma.

A lexicon of the hidden language of cities, in which buildings are nouns, the inhabitants verbs, and empty spaces adjectives in an endlessly changing narrative.

Image:  Unknown though sometimes attributed to Piero della Francesca, Città ideale (1480-1490), Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino, Italy, Wikipedia article on the painting; Source: Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of The Odyssey (2007, 2010), at 25-26

From an essay on the Japanese print in which Frank Lloyd Wright discusses the representation of a pine tree –

The Japanese artist, by virtue of the shades of his ancestors, is born a trained observer; but only after a long series of patient studies does he consider that he knows his subject. However, he has naturally the ready ability to concentrate upon essentials, which is the prime condition of the artist’s creative insight. Were all pine trees, then, to vanish suddenly from the earth, he could, from his knowledge, furnish plan and elevation for the varied portrayal of a true species — because what he has learned… is the specific and distinguishing nature of the pine tree. Using this word “Nature” in the Japanese sense I do not of course mean that outward aspect which strikes the eye as a visual image of a scene or strikes the ground glass of a camera, but that inner harmony which penetrates the outward form or letter and is its determining character: that quality in the thing that is its significance and its Life…what Plato called …the “eternal idea of the thing”…

Ideas exist for us alone by virtue of form. The form can never be detached from the idea; the means must be perfectly adapted to the end. So in this art the problem of form and style is an organic problem solved easily and finally.

Source: William J.R. Curtis, “Grammar of Earth,” Times Literary Supplement (Oct. 24, 2008), at 10, quoting The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright (Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, editor)

The Turner Prize is given yearly to a British visual artist under 50.  It is organized by the Tate gallery.  The prize is GBP 40,000. The works of the artists on the shortlist are exhibited in October and the winner announced in December.

Richard Dorment, a critic for The Telegraph, had this to say about the works being exhibited this year –

The Turner Prize shortlist this year consists of four nearly perfect examples of Euro-art, a term I’ve made up to describe a certain kind of technically competent, bland, and ultimately empty art made specifically for international biennales.

The Euro-artist builds up a successful career by making art intended to appeal not to the general public but to curators, and to be bought not by private collectors but by museums and private foundations. Often it is art about art or the making of art, and is based on the artist’s extensive research into an esoteric subject of interest only to him or her.

Invariably its meaning is so opaque that it needs the intervention of the professional exhibition organiser to explain it, which is why you see two kinds of visitors at a Euro-art exhibition - the ordinary punters, who wander through these shows stupefied with boredom, and groups of people paying close attention to gallery guides explaining work that would otherwise be impossible to understand.

[…]

The wall label tells us that the art of Polish-born Goshka Macuga “examines the conventions of archiving, exhibition making and museum display”. Do you care? Neither do I. Ah, but much more important to the Euro-artist is that the people who do care are museum professionals, who fall over themselves to show her sterile work.

Macuga is showing sculptures that look like tubular towel rails made out of polished steel and backed with glass. In fact, they are her copies of display stands designed to show textiles by Lilly Reich, who was the professional and personal partner of Mies van der Rohe. Reich originally made such display units for the 1929 World Exhibition in Barcelona. By giving her work the title Haus der Frau, the younger artist casts Reich as the downtrodden female overshadowed by her partnership with a much more famous man. Notice that by presenting her work out of the historical context of the originals, Macuga can imply almost anything she likes without challenge.

Cathy Wilkes’s installation consists of two supermarket check-out counters covered with used cereal bowls, spoons and cups still encrusted with her own child’s food and juice. A female mannequin surrealistically festooned with various emblems of Woman’s Sad Lot - a nurse’s cap, a teacup - sits on a lavatory. Another mannequin, standing near a pram, has a birdcage on her head to signify her status a trapped and defenceless creature.

Never mind that Wilkes is using a surrealistic vocabulary that was out of date in 1940, or that her take on feminism is one that that Betty Friedan would have recognised 40 years ago. What worries me is that her installation doesn’t have much relevance for most young women today.

Explaining her work, Wilkes tells us that it “apprehends an end point in our understanding of things as they are - a point at which words become insufficient, and the naming of objects is disconnected from our experience of them.” This is pure Euro-art speak, because, if words are insufficient, then the artist absolves herself from having to address its meaning. Brilliant.

Good thing this only happens in the plastic arts, right?  Good thing this kind of self-reflective, navel-gazing nonsense doesn’t happen in fiction writing.

The rest of the review is here.

Sources: Richard Dorment, “The Turner Prize 2008: Who Cares Who Wins?” The Telegraph (Sept. 29, 2008), article on the Turner Prize, wikipedia

El nuevo Herald reports today that a painting by Mexican Rufino Tamayo sold for USD 7.2 million, breaking the record for the auction of Latin American art. Tamayo completed the painting, Trovador, in 1949. It was auctioned at Christie’s, in New York, last night. The previous record had been held by the sale of Frida Kahlo’s painting, Raíces, in May 2006.

Sources: “Rufino Tamayo el más cotizado,” El nuevo Herald (May 30, 2008), christies.com

The Times reports that three Goya drawings were recently “rediscovered” when a Swiss family took them to Christie’s for appraisal. The drawings were last seen as part of a collection of unrelated drawings, the earliest of which dated back to 1796.  In 1877, the group of drawings sold for between 6 and 140 francs.  One of the three “rediscovered” drawings was not among those sold then. The Swiss family currently in possession of the drawings cannot recall how they got them.

The highest a Goya drawing has sold for is GBP 1.3 million (USD 2,568,482).  The three “rediscovered” Goyas will be auctioned by Christie’s London in July and are expected to sell for more than GBP 2 million (USD 3,952,062) each.

Image: Francisco Goya, El aguacil Lampiños cosido dentro de un caballo muerto (1812-1820), from the article in The Times; Source: Dalya Alberge, “Buyers Drawn to Goya Sketches Rediscovered After 130 Years,” The Times (May 27, 2008)

This Tuesday, a nude by Lucien Freud became the most expensive work of contemporary art by a living artist ever auctioned. Barely 24 hours later, another record was broken when Triptych, by Francis Bacon, was auctioned for USD 86 million.

The Times has more here.

Some people have been looking under the sofa cushions and finding quite a bit of loose change to spend, don’t you think?

Source: The Times

“What if…?” It is the beginning of story writing. “What if the young, happy couple next door were really…” You imagine alternatives and play them out. Most of the time they don’t work for any number of reasons. But when they do, you have the beginning of something.

Below is not a story, it is a video by Adam Buxton. And the question he asked himself was what if there were no news one day? No news at all. There would be nothing for the talkingheads to read, nothing to say. What would the dead air sound like?

The result is uncomfortable and peaceful at the same time. It might make you think of a story too.

Video: Adam Buxton, No News, YouTube

That’s the consensus. Of course, that doesn’t mean it will happen. The record is held currently by the auction of Jeff Koons’s Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold), which sold for USD 23.5 million last year. Experts expect Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping to sell between USD 25 and 35 million.

Previously, I wrote about this here. And The Telegraph has more here.

Source:  “Lucian Freud nude painting expected to break auction records,” The Telegraph (May 13, 2008)

The sense of place is fundamental in literature. It is fundamental in the literature that lasts inside us.  Think about the books you remember vividly years later and I bet that place was strongly developed.Place is not something that can be established simply, in a single sentence. It comes through colors, smells, the way the ground feels, or the streets and the people. In Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls, the country was brown. There were soft hills with tall pines. Who can forget the feel of the pine needles against your skin when lying on the ground? That’s not just from the last scene, the one where the injured Robert Jordan stays behind, waiting for the enemy. The place, the characteristics that make it unique, are repeated throughout the novel. It’s curious to me that when novels are discussed in school the subject of place is rarely one that is examined in its own right.

Some writers claim a location as their own until it is hard to imagine it belonging to anyone else. London is that way for me. As far as I’m concerned, contemporary London belongs to Martin Amis. I couldn’t help thinking about Amis when I was there over Christmas. It wasn’t that I was reading any of his books. (I was actually reading a lot of Roth back then — different country, different time.) But I couldn’t get away from the thought that the London I walked each day had a twin sister in his words. I suspect that the same thing would happen to me if I went to Istanbul. I would look for the narrow, angled streets that Orhan Pamuk walked as a young man. The atmosphere of incompleteness, hollow yearning, which is what I remember best from The Black Book would come back, even if it’s been ten years since I read it.

Some cities no longer exist. To find the Dublin of James Joyce you have only one place to look. Dublin itself has become another place entirely. Joyce and even Bloomsday are still celebrated there, but the city is firmly part of the new century. The same is partly true of the Buenos Aires created by Jorge Luis Borges. It is gone. To recover it, you have to page through his stories, try to recreate the light, the fervor of Buenos Aires in the 1930s. Unlike Dublin, the city itself has succumbed to decades of inebriated politics that made one of the seven richest countries in the world into an economic basket case and the subject for opera buffa.

There are pictures too. An exhibit currently showing in Madrid gathers the photographs of Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola (1906 — ), who was a friend of Borges and who took walks through the city. Each claimed 1930s Buenos Aires for himself. What survives of that city, that time, is thanks to them and to the tangos sung by Gardel.

The Portuguese language blog, O que cae dos dias has a lyrical post on the place of writers and cities that I wish I could translate in full here. I can’t do that, but I will give you a paragraph –

Numa noite chuvosa de 1936, o fotógrafo Horacio Coppola e o escritor Jorge Luis Borges faziam um de seus habituais passeios pelas ruas de Buenos Aires. Coppola parou diante de uma poça. Ajustou a câmera e disparou. No espelho de água, estava refletida a silhueta de uma casa do bairro de Palermo. Quando viu revelada a foto do amigo, Borges exclamou: «Isso é Buenos Aires». A mesma cidade que encontro agora reflectida na exposição do fotógrafo argentino, em Madrid. Uma metrópole fervilhante. Gente elegante cruzando amplas avenidas da moda, descendo e subindo de eléctricos ou parada à porta dos teatros ou apenas entrevista através das vitrinas dos cafés. E, ainda, subúrbios desertos, esquinas silenciosas, barcos ancorados na Boca.

* * *

On a rainy night in 1936, photographer Horacio Coppola and writer Jorge Luis Borges went out on one of their regular walks through the streets of Buenos Aires. Coppola stopped at a puddle, focussed, and shot. The water reflected a house in the neighborhood of Palermo. When Borges saw the picture after it was developed, he exclaimed, “That’s Buenos Aires.” It is the same city that I find mirrored in the exhibit in Madrid of the Argentine photographer [Coppola] – a city with fervor, with elegant people walking across the broad and fashionable avenues, climbing onto or descending off trams, waiting at the theater entrance, seen through cafe windows, of deserted suburbs, silent corners, and ships anchored at Boca.
João Ventura, “Buenos Aires pelos passos de Borges,” O que cae dos dias (May 5, 2008)[translation to English mine]

Pictures of the Coppola exhibit in Madrid are no longer available on the Internet, but you can also look here for pictures from another exhibit of Coppola’s work, this time from a museum in Buenos Aires.

Robert Wright, a travel photographer in Buenos Aires and author of the blog, Line of Sight, has a post comparing Buenos Aires in the 1930s and now. Here is Coppola’s 1936 picture of the obelisk –

Here is Wright’s more contemporary view –

It is the same location, but it is not the same place.  And yes, if you do the math, you will figure out that Coppola is 102 this year.

Photos: Horacio Coppola, Obelisco, 1936 and Robert Wright, line of sight blog (Aug. 11, 2006); Source: João Ventura, “Buenos Aires pelos passos de Borges,” O que cae dos dias blog (May 5, 2008)

The Times reports that the record for the sale of a work of art (USD 23.56 million for a Jeff Koons last year) “looks set” to be broken. Christie’s will auction Lucien Freud’s “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” (1995). They expect to get USD 35 million.The subject of the painting, Sue Tilley, still lives. She weighs 280 pounds. Freud gave her a print of his own for posing. Tilley must have run into trouble with her creditors because a few years ago bailiffs came to her house with an order to collect objects up to a value of GBP 700 (USD 1,382 at the exchange rate today.) When she offered to give the bailiffs the print, they laughed and took her kettle instead, among other things. In 2005, the print sold at auction for more than GBP 26,000 (USD 51,324)

Wendy Weitman, in the website of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, wrote about Freud’s work –

Freud’s prints are distinguished by their penetrating psychological tension and radical compositional arrangements. Paring down to essentials of line, he achieves a degree of abstraction by eliminating any background or context for his figures. … In “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping,” Freud creates one of his most frank and unnerving images of nakedness. The resulting tension between the physicality of the figure and the flat plane of the paper gives this subject its disturbing impact.

Tilley was interviewed in 2002 by The Guardian. When asked about her slump on the sofa, she admitted that it was not a pose but her favorite position. “A friend once told her ‘never stand when you can sit and never sit when you can lie down’, and when she poses for Freud she says she tries to get into positions where she can fall asleep without him noticing.”

The work will be auctioned in New York on May 13.

Photo:  The Telegraph; Sources: The Times, The Guardian, moma.org, christies.com