north wales in 1802

Cornelius Varley. Craig Goch, Moel Hebog, North Wales, 1802. Watercolor over graphite. 16.4 x 36.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum, New York

This calm small watercolour of 1802 was done the year before Lusieri's Parthenon, below.  The description on the Metropolitan Museum website says that Varley left painting in favour of the development of optical instruments.  
Both are about seeing, the relationship between detail and sight, between recording and looking. 

the southeast corner of the Parthenon, 1803

Giovanni Battista Lusieri. The South-east Corner of the Parthenon, Athens, 1803. watercolour, 64 x 83cm. The National Galleries of Scotland, Lady Ruthven bequest, 1885.

When Lord Elgin was removing the sculptures from the Parthenon, the ones held in the British Museum as the Elgin Marbles and the subject of a long and intense campaign by Greece for their repatriation, he had Giovanni Battista Lusieri record the removal process.  

Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin was the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire between 1799 and 1803.  Clearly the Ottoman Empire, which had reigned from 1299 to 1923 – the remains are today's Turkey – didn't much care for Greece, indeed relations between Greece and Turkey simmer and seethe still.  Why were Canadian UN Peacekeepers in Cyprus for so long, for example?  Greece, Greek history, the Parthenon, the Phidian sculptures would have seemed archaeological, not particularly essential to a centrally located but culturally marginal part of a vast empire which occupied the Middle East, North Africa, the northeast Mediterranean and surrounded the Red Sea, the Black Sea and touched the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf.

Greece was lost to the Ottoman Empire in 1821, but by then the archaeological looting was complete.  Britain purchased the marbles, already in their possession, in 1816. The legality of the removal was questioned immediately after it happened; even Byron protested the removal, so it is not just a recent 20th century controversy. During the Greek War of Independence of 1821-1833, the Ottomans used the Erechtheum as a munitions store, confirming a basic disinterest in the spatiality of history in occupied territory.  

It was the beginning of the era of the Grand Tour however, and a British love of things Greek: language, architecture, philosophy.  It was felt that the marbles of the Parthenon were safer in England than in a place with a growing independence movement which predictably ended in a 12-year war.  

The moral justification for looting during a war often rests on salvation and protection.  At the end of the 20th century, the Elgin Marbles remained in the British Museum because Athens is considered too polluted – had they been left on the Parthenon, they would have dissolved away.  Now, I suppose Greece is considered to financially unstable to look after them. 

burning down the house

ah, the 80s.

Louis Edouard Fournier: the funeral of Shelley

Louis Edouard Fournier, The Funeral of Shelley, 1889. Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 213.4cm. The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in 1822 when his yacht was wrecked in a storm in the Gulf of Spezzia, Italy. His body was cremated and his remains later buried at the Protestant cemetery in Rome.  He is watched over here by Trelawny, Leigh Hunt and Byron.  He was 29; Keats had died the previous year, Byron two years later: the Romantic triumvirate, their recklessness with life and limb echoed in the romance we still attach to Kurt Cobain – the dead boy.  Romance is all in the perception of death, not the reality.

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an interesting read: Richard Holmes on the mythologising of Shelley's death, part of the National Portrait Gallery's Interrupted Lives lecture series in 2004.

Linda Kitson: Sir Galahad

Linda Kitson, Sir Galahad moored at Fitzroy. She continued to burn until she was towed out to sea and sunk as a War Grave. 16 June 1982. Imperial War Museum 15400

In this year of anniversaries of death by sea, here is a drawing by Linda Kitson who was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum in 1982, as a war artist, to go with the British troops to the Falklands. The Sir Galahad was a supply ship, hit by Angentinian planes on June 8th.  It was carrying explosives, and 200 men were killed, or injured, many of whom were Welsh Guards, a dreadful irony given the Welsh history in Patagonia in southern Argentina. 

Bengal River Fish, 1804

Bengal River Fish, ca. 1804 India; Calcutta School Pencil, gouache, watercolor, and gilding on paper 14 1/4 x 20 1/2 in. (36.1 x 52 cm) Metropolitan Museum, New York.

A lovely drawing, delicate, precise, and gilded.  The description on the Met website says: This painting shows two views of a Bengal river fish, executed in pencil and watercolor with traces of gilding on paper. The twin images of each side of the fish are placed by one another, the upper image in a dark gray tone and the lower one in a paler shade of the same color. The mottled, scaly surface of the fish's body is carefully rendered, as are its mouth and eyes. The painting is from the collection of Marquis Wellesley, governor-general of India from 1798 until 1805. Wellesley had large menageries and hired native artists to paint each of the birds and animals in them.

flussbad, berlin

realities:unlimited. Flussbad, Berlin. 2011

Holcim has given a bronze award to this project by realities:unlimited, planned to start in 2019. 

From Holcim's press release: 'An urban plan for transforming an under-used arm of the River Spree in Berlin into a natural 745m-long swimming pool, the Flussbad project in the heart of the historic city creates a swimming zone equivalent to 17 Olympic-sized pools, and provides a public urban recreation space for both residents and tourists adjacent to the Museuminsel. The project, which includes a 1.8ha reed bed natural reserve with sub-surface sand bed filters to purify the water, was developed by a team led by architects Jan and Tim Edler of realities united, Germany.'

This is how it works:

realities:united

Emel Mathiouthi: bin el wediane

A different kind of avalanche.

the Big Bend Highway

Map of Big Bend Highway from the commemorative booklet. 29 June 1940. Big Bend, Selkirk Mountains, British Columbia

Before Roger's Pass there was the Big Bend Highway, a long loop of road following the Columbia River between Donald and Revelstoke.  It went north from Golden up one long valley which separates the Selkirk Range from the Rockies, and then south down the next valley leading to Revelstoke.  A dam at the top of the loop at Mica Creek was built in the early 1960s, after the whole route was made redundant by the section of the Trans-Canada that goes over Roger's Pass. Another dam in the 1980s and much of the Big Bend highway was lost to the consequential new lakes.

Originally there had been a wagon road along the Columbia River, as there had been a gold rush on it in the 1890s.  In the 1930s relief camps were established in the Big Bend: single, homeless and unemployed men who, in exchange for housing food and a very small wage, logged the route for the highway and contributed to the building of the road which was to be part of the Trans-Canada Highway.  It was opened in 1940.

The Big Bend was never paved, indeed great stretches of the BC sections of the Trans-Canada remained unpaved until the late 1960s. I often wish it was still there, the Big Bend, as it avoided the steep elevation change of Roger's Pass.  But, like the Coquihalla Highway built in 1985 bypassing another longer but safer section of the Trans-Canada between Kamloops and Hope, and also subject to horrible winter weather and endless closures, these new sections of road cut the mileage.  Fine in the summer, often fatal in the winter.

avalanche clearing

The importance of not being in a hurry:

March 5, 2012

Although a slide over the highway might seem small by air, as above, on the actual road it is a mess.  These avalanches, usually small because larger slips have already been released farther up the hill by avalanche control, shut down the passes for at least a day, often longer.  All the trucks line up in tight ranks at brake checkstops, wide laybys or at Rogers Pass itself where there are services.  Cars turn back, if they can, and try another, invariably longer route.

Glacier National Park, on the Trans-Canada, January 17, 2011

avalanche control

There is a small Canadian Forces detachment positioned in Roger's Pass, which, as it is only the Canadian Forces who can legally operate howitzers and such, triggers avalanches.  This film is from April 3, 2010. 

These are avalanches that might hit the Trans-Canada Highway or the railway lines where they are exposed, not the back country avalanches set off by skiers and snowmobilers that kill so many people each winter.  

equinoctal weather

The aftermath of the 4 March 1910 avalanches at snow shed 14 in Rogers Pass, British Columbia. Revelstoke Museum and Archives, Photograph #268

It is curious that the days this week are the same length as they are at the end of September which, unless there was a Labour Day frost – once typical now rare, is still full of the heat of summer.  In fact September is our summer.  

On the eastern slopes of the Rockies, our highest snowfalls are in March and April, and although there are avalanches in the mountains all winter, there is a tide of them in the spring.  It has to do with warm Pacific storms on the coast which continue east precipitating heavy warm snow onto cold mountains.  The snow pack is made top-heavy and it topples.  

The CPR line was put through Roger's Pass in 1884, and remained open despite avalanches by using a system of timber snowsheds and small tunnels.  In 1910 there was a terrible avalanche disaster in the mountains when, on a very warm March 4th, a first avalanche buried the tracks and then as the work crews were digging it out a second avalanche from the opposite slope hit them, killing 62 men.  It was after this that the 5-mile long Connaught Tunnel was built, opening in 1916.  The surface rail line on that particular section was removed.

However, when the Trans-Canada Highway was put through Roger's Pass in the early 1960s, it generally followed the original CPR line, taking it through the avalanche area.  The highway is often closed; it was last week.

Can't plan anything these days, but clearly one never could.

the uses of luxury

Cecil Beaton. Vogue models in Charles James gowns in the ornate interior of French & Co, New York, 1948. Conde Nast Archive/Corbis

1948, a pointed demonstration of postwar elegance: Charles James evening gowns in one of the salons of French & Co, New York art dealers.  This tableau is meant to correct any sense that the rough levelling of society during the war was permanent.   It is like any sort of suppression, when the lid is lifted all that had previously been denied explodes in a kind of hyper-reality.  It is not the women who are desirable,  we hardly see their faces, it is the heavy satins and the room itself that are almost erotic in their complex, elegant ripeness.  

2012, Dior couture, photographed in a small grey corner, wrinkled grey flannel on the floor.  No mise-en-scène here, other than a possible insistence on luxury in the 1%  and who might, possibly, wear such dresses. The women are like flowers, their dark heads like stamens, the black eye of the pale poppy.  They are close, they break the frame of the photograph, they are defiant. 

Patrick Demarchelier. Dior Haute Couture, Spring/Summer 2011

the scale of a skirt

Cecil Beaton. Mrs Charles James, 716 Madison Avenue, New York, 1955

In this 1948 Cecil Beaton portrait, there is something very interesting in the scale of the voluminous, crumpled curtain next to the extravagant skirt of the Charles James gown.  James' wife, perversely, is made small by her surroundings.  

A similar thing happens in Tim Walker's 2006 photograph of Coco Rocha.  The glove, in all its versimilitude, seems the real scale.

Both photographers used huge rooms – eighteen-foot ceilings, twelve-foot windows, their volume, their inevitable emptiness.  Anything in these rooms, whether little gilt chairs or gilded youth, is made to seem as serious and as ephemeral as a butterfly.

Tim Walker. Coco Rocha and Giant Glove. London, England, 2006

Beaton at war

Cecil Beaton. 'Fashion is indestructible' — Digby Morton suit, in the ruined Middle Temple, 1941. British Vogue.

For Cecil Beaton architecture was an indisputable player in all his photographs, often much more complex than the subject.  It offered a narrative that transports the sitter, or the garments – it is all mise en scène. 

He was an official photographer in the North African campaign in WWII, and did a lot of work showing Britain's wartime manufacturing industries – shipyards, mineworkers, the effects of the Blitz, all a far cry from the fey pre-war portraits of society ladies in extravagantly romantic 18th century rooms where he was never against painting more frippery on the walls if it made the setting even complex, more fantastic.  I suppose the true complexity and brutality of war knocks some of that fantasy out of one.
 
These two iconic images are found in every book on Beaton there is.  It was startling, in 1941, for Vogue readers to be plunged into the shattered environment in which they were living: fashion magazines were and are for escape.  And the 1945 photograph of the Balmain coat and pants could come off the Sartorialist site today – that love of tragic urban street walls, so dark and layered, and the indomitable spirit of the women who can carry their own against them.

Cecil Beaton. Pierre Balmain Chinese Brown Woolen Coat and Trousers. 1945. British Vogue

reading fashion

Arjen van der Merwe. Malawi 2010 is a series about modern and traditional culture. From van der Merwe's website: 'The fashionable models, in dresses by Cathy Kamthunzi, and shoes of Pec Fashion symbolize modern Malawian culture. They are placed in a traditional setting.'

Barthes' seminal essay on the writing of fashion talked about it as a system of signifiers coded and intelligible only to readers already in the system.  It was written when fashion magazines showed images in black and white, low resolution.  Captions and text carried colour, texture, narratives of elegance, aspiration, possibility.  
We don't have such writing anymore, captions to fashion images are simply lists of the clothes.  The images carry everything – all the narratives of impossibility and unattainability.  As we are continually told, couture is for selling perfume, the only thing from Dior we can all afford.  

In the next issue of On Site, which is on the dialectic between the periphery and the laws of urbanism dictated from the core, Jason Price has written an essay on Arjen van der Merwe,  a photographer in Malawi whose fashion portfolio uses Malawian models and garments posed in village settings.  Price, living in Malawi, takes a rapier to this work, pointing out the coded signifiers that would perhaps pass us by.  

For me, living here, i.e. not in Malawi, the narrative lodged in these images is a return to the village, surely an act of despair for anyone who has managed to escape their small town for a life of infinite possibility in the city.  Despite being dressed in wonderful urban fashion and great shoes, beautiful sulky girls are shown lugging buckets from the pump, or making bricks, or sweeping dirt floors.  

As a foil to these images, Tim Walker's portfolio of photos for Vogue with Agyness Deyn in Namibia are just as provocative.  A particularly pale girl, beautifully dressed, appears to be stranded in a sand-filled abandoned house with a highly decorative, almost-dressed young Namibian man and a docile cheetah.  It is a set of signifiers that rings all the bells of colonial privilege that allowed Europeans to live in Africa, to act badly, and yet be protected from the violence they attributed to all the peoples in the periphery.  Walker's Namibia portfolio is on a very thin line between an ironic ode to that kind of wilful innocence and the casual belief that such relationships have an aesthetic, apolitical beauty.

Tim Walker. Agyness Deyn, Simon & Kiki the cheetah in sand storm, Kolmanskop, Namibia, Africa, 2011. for British Vogue.

Naomi Bedford and Justin Currie

This is the kind of song one needs when one has fallen off the cliff of love. 

Or, in this case, when there is too much work and one desperately needs reminding that there is a life, somewhere.

another kind of memorial

French armoured cruiser Waldeck-Rousseau Off Constantinople, Turkey, on 16 December 1922, photographed from USS Bainbridge (DD-246). On that day, survivors of the French transport Vinh-Long, which had burned in the sea of Marmora that morning, were transferred from the Bainbridge to the Waldeck Rousseau. Donation of Frank A. Downey, 1973. U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph.
The  armoured cruiser Waldeck-Rousseau fought submarines and airplanes during WWI, remained in the service of the French Navy until it was decommissioned in 1932 and sent to Indochina.  During WWII it was used as a decoy in the Solomon Islands, and sank in 1943 in the Battle of Kolombangara.  

Jean Chretien once said that a politician's career always ends in defeat; fighting ships go on and on, in war after war, engagement after engagement, and then they sink.

We are a long way from Jean Jacques Rousseau on Monday.

aspect and prospect

[Jardin des] Tuileries : Mai 1906. N ° Atget : 5371. 1906. Photographie positive sur papier albuminé d'après négatif sur verre au gélatinobromure ; 21 x 17,5 cm (épr.). [Cote : BNF - Est. Eo 109a bte 1 ; n ° micr. T038908] \ Opaline 039802

Hossack mentions that before she went to the Tuileries, she looked at how Atget, Brassaï, Doisneau and Kertész had viewed the gardens.  One of Atget's images records the erotic curve of marble against sky, the bending of the figure to the curve of the railing separating the civilised from the relative mystery of the woods.  

The companion image looks at it from the other side, where all of a sudden we are aware of all the flimsy clutter of park life, the statue just one more piece of furniture.

Jardin des Tuileries : Mai 1906. N ° Atget : 5369. 1906. Photographie positive sur papier albuminé d'après négatif sur verre au gélatinobromure ; 21 x 17,5 cm (épr.). [Cote : BNF - Est. Eo 109a bte 1 ; n ° micr. T038907] \ Opaline 039801

Leslie Hossack, les Tuileries

Leslie Hossack. Waldeck-Rousseau Monument, Tuileries, Paris 2009

Leslie Hossack's photograph of the Waldeck-Rousseau Monument in the Tuileries.  As she notes, the gardens were designed by Le Nôtre in 1664, formal, rigourous, allées and monuments, swept gravel rather than humid lawns.  

Clearly she took the photo from the back, from the wall behind this monument.  Always looking at things to capture information about the thing itself rarely records how one gets to the thing, which in this case, is more interesting to us today than is the over-wrought statuary.