un canadien errant

Un Canadien errant,
Banni de ses foyers,
Parcourait en pleurant
Des pays étrangers.
Un jour, triste et pensif,
Assis au bord des flots,
Au courant fugitif
Il adressa ces mots
"Si tu vois mon pays,
Mon pays malheureux,
Va, dis à mes amis
Que je me souviens d'eux.
"Ô jours si pleins d'appas
Vous êtes disparus,
Et ma patrie, hélas!
Je ne la verrai plus!
"Non, mais en expirant,
Ô mon cher Canada!
Mon regard languissant
Vers toi se portera..."

Friedrich to Gropius: winter tragedies

Caspar David Friedrich. background detail of das Eismeer, 1921

C D Friedrich's das Eismeer is explained at length in an entry on de.wikipedia.  The English wikipedia entry is about 3 paragraphs, the German one is a great long essay that links the tragedies of Arctic exploration with the tragic failed hopes of the German state, plus a lot of painting analysis, studies, influences, parallel works, modern reinvestigations.  The google English translation of this long entry is anarchic in the extreme, sometimes giving up and leaving whole chunks in the original German.  It says something about the metaphoric habit of critical writing on art that a word for word translation is so hilarious. 

The proportions of Friedrich's das Eismeer are very familiar: a great pile of rock or ice leaning to the left, seemingly aspirational but looking backwards.  The focus is at the right hand base of this great pile.  It is a diagrammatic lens that painters still use for the Rockies, especially Mt Rundle which from the Trans-Canada highway lookout, leans steeply to the left and could be neatly mapped onto das Eismeer.

The entry includes Gropius' 1922 Monument to the March Dead in Weimar, memorialising the victims of the Kapp Putsch – again, failure, conflict and defeat.  The vantage point of the photograph take at the time shows the same left-leaning precipice. 

It is the Werther at the heart of the German soul.

Walter Gropius. Monument to the March Dead, 1921-22. Weimar, Germany

Caspar David Friedrich: winter

Caspar David Friedrich. Skizzen von Eisschollen zum Gemälde das Eismeer, 1821. Hamburger KunsthalleFriedrich's studies of ice floes on the Elbe, 1820-21.

Anselm Kiefer: winter

Anselm Kiefer, Gescheiterte Hoffnung (C.D. Friedrich), 2010, Charcoal on photographic paper. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York. Gescheiterte Hoffnung translates as Wreck of Hope.The last of a series of four photographs done for the New York Times: winter.  By far the most memorable image of the series, and perhaps of the year.

The title refers to Caspar David Friedrich's Das Eismeer, an 1823 painting inspired by one of Parry's ships caught in the ice on an expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1819.

granite, ice and brooms

'tis the season to be curling.  The Galt Museum in Lethbridge posted all their old curling photos at the Lethbridge Curling Club last fall hoping that some of the older curlers could identify the people in them.  It was on the radio and someone from the museum was talking about the very earliest curling there where the rocks were carefully and cunningly selected river boulders with flat bottoms.  A hole was drilled and a handle attached.  These were personal rocks: each curler would learn the peculiarities and weight of each rock, all of which would have been different.

Compare this to the official description of curling stones: 'traditionally, curling stones were made from two specific types of granite called Blue Hone and Ailsa Craig Common Green, found on Ailsa Craig, an island off the Ayrshire coast in Scotland'.  The Ailsa Craig quarry has closed; now granite comes from north Wales: Trefor, in blue-grey and red-brown, and is sent to the Canada Curling Stone Company for manufacture.  However, Kays, the Scottish stone manufacturer that took the last of the Ailsa Craig granite out in 2002, has stockpiled 1500 tons of it and supplies the curling stones for the Olympics. 

Did we want to know any of this?  Well, no, but it is sort of interesting.  Evidently Blue Hone, the preferred stone, does not absorb water, thus escaping freeze-thaw cycles which weaken the stone.  This is all worlds away from going down to the Oldman River and choosing a lovely stone.  If it freezes and cracks, well there are a zillion more there for the taking.

This is a rather sweet film of the Queenshill Cup at Castle Douglas in 1952.  It clearly shows why curlers all hold brooms.  I thought it was to polish the ice. Silly me. 

The Queenshill Cup, Castle Douglas, Scotland. 1952

1916, Krazy Kat

George Harriman, Krazy Kat goes a wooing. 1916

okay, it's Christmas. Let us all go a-wooing.

1961, when girls were women

Deutsche Kinemathek. Hansjürgen Pohland, director. 1961click on the image to take you to this delightful, optimistic film of sophisticated urban life in West Germany just 16 years after the end of WWII.  It's an ad, but also a display of moving, definitively, into a future. 

distressed fabric

  Joseph Beuys. Felt Suit, 1970. Felt, 1700 x 600 mm sculpture Tate Collection T07441Shelley Fox and scorching fabric reminded me of Beuys's use of felt: distressed fibres for one reason or another, aesthetic or metaphoric.  The material of construction is changed in some way, not just the form. 

As architects we tend to use material as it comes to us, at most the colour changes.  A long time ago , so I don't even know if it was recorded but the idea was a powerful one and so persists, Wally Mays, a Calgary sculptor, built a wall out of warped 2 x 4 studs.  It curved, it leant, its form was entirely dependent on the natural tendency that thin pieces of wood have to bend.  It was a lovely thing.

Joseph Beuys told the story often of his winter rescue in the Crimea during WWII by nomadic Tatars who covered him in fat and wrapped him in felt: felt was protection, life-giving, dense and felted with meaning. 
Shelley Fox found the qualities of fabric burned in machinery, something that could normally cause the operator his job, gratuitously more interesting than perfect production.  Somehow the materials are given a history of making, a history of use, a social and cultural history that, if one wanted to deconstruct them, simply add more layers of meaning to the form such fabrics make.

There appears to be an interest in both abraded material and form – Oikos  and Jellyfish, the theatres made of scraps and pallettes as examples.  I wonder if this is a harbinger of an architecture interested in material processes and a collaborative understanding of materials which might lead to a different understanding of a building's deep context.

Nicole Dextras 2

Nicole Dextras. Nylon-arm-dress-light, 2010

Some new work from Nicole Dextras.  On her website she talks about this winter ephemera series, garments frozen in ice, as an investigation into 'nature’s capacity for stability and its capacity for flux: ice is imbued with this sense of duality, the work questions whether such pairings ultimately exist in symbiosis or in contradiction'.

All garments exist in both symbiosis and contradiction with the body, climate, weather, time.  Symbiosis in that we support garments, we are their armature.  Contradiction in that garments have all the immanence that has long preoccupied Peter Eisenman.  That immanence is autonomous, auto-directed. 

Nicole Dextras's deconstructed pieces of clothing never lose their identity, no matter how dispersed they become.  Caught in ice, they appear fugitive, but they really aren't.  They are surprisingly vivid, even durable.  

Barbara Johnson

Barbara Johnson. Album of Styles. V&A Museum.

Barbara Johnson lived between 1738 and 1825 and kept a record of everything she had ever worn with drawings, swatches of fabric and notes.  This is the span from Handel's Serce to Beethoven's 9th Symphony, i.e. in that vague past that we never seem to synchronise.  

If you go year by year on Wikipedia for Canada, in 1738 it didn't exist, but smallpox had reached the prairies, and La Vérendrye was still working his way downstream from what would be Winnipeg.  Primitive, very distant.  By 1835, Canada still didn't exist, but the Irish poor had started to arrive.  By 1830, a flu epidemic hit many of the first nations in BC: the Fraser Canyon people disappeared completely. 

Meanwhile, Barbara Johnson, a member of a genteel class in a well-developed country was recording the nuances of seams and structure, textiles and line, and writing her own biography in dress.  As I write about Barbara Johnson, I also wonder whether we mark our lives against a greater history, or if our own identities are really charted against the sweaters we have loved.  Mine, and I still have it, a dark camel ribbed poor-boy like Françoise Hardy's – if you think this is an obscure reference, it actually encapsulates a very rich little era of no historical account at all. The history is that Pearson went to the States and called for a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam.  Both were equally identity-forming, one is known by everyone, the other history is mine alone.  Perhaps the purpose of work is not to speak, to demonstrate, to lecture, but is to sychronise such disparate histories.  

Shelley Fox

Shelley Fox. Installation, Fashion at Belsay, 2004.

Shelley Fox was one of the fashion designers invited to an exhibition at Belsay Hall, Northumbria in 2004.  She took a small anteroom, typically with a 15' ceiling as Belsay Hall is an early Georgian house.  It was built between 1810 and 1817, but so badly afflicted by dry rot by the 1970s that it was made structurally sound and then left as an empty shell.  This is why it is used for art installations, one of which is Fashion at Belsay Hall. 

Shelley Fox lined the walls of this small room – well, not so small, it looks about 10 x 10m and has both a beautiful sash window and a large fireplace – with bundles of white cloth representing the sheets, towels, dust covers, pillow cases, undergarments, shirts, night gowns and night shirts that went through the laundry of a typical country house with its small army of servants. 

The appearance of bundles of white cloth is transgressive: this material in this form would never have appeared upstairs.  It all had to be transformed: washed, bleached, dried, starched, ironed and folded before it could leave the nether regions for the rooms occupied by the family.  We seem to have, today, more interest in the processes of running a large house, than the occupants of the houses themselves, which over the centuries have been so very well documented. 

Shelley Fox was interviewed for Fashion Projects issue 3.   It is an interesting interview as it is not so much about fashion, but about the processes of making things, of burning cloth, of adjusting and readjusting a garment as the body underneath it changes over time.  Much of what she says is about accommodation of accident and change and the shifting of perception.  It goes way beyond frocks.

Passeig de Gràcia, 1908

Barcelona en tranvia, 1908. Filmoteca Española

oh for trams, trolleys, street cars.  oh for a slow city.

click on the image above and it will take you to Europa Film Treasures and a short film taken from the front of a tram when the streets were full of children, dogs, people going somewhere.

Andrew Piper on lists

Dimitri Nabokov, note included in The Original of Laura (Knopf 2008)Andrew Piper's essay 'Media and Metamorphosis: on notes and books' in the new everyday, a media commons project  talks about the notes made by writers as they organise a novel, or a poem cycle – anything complex that moves from idea to what is eventually published.  The fact that marginalia is a genre, that the notes themselves are a significant narrative, changes the way one thinks of the book.  It isn't just the narrative between two covers, but a book is just one piece of a much larger story that occurs in many forms, not least the act of writing itself.

Nabokov's list, above, of synonyms for removing something has one phrase completely scribbled out as if it offended him.  This isn't a list of possibles, a to-do list, rather it is a list of rejections.  Above all, it takes the words that moil around in the brain and makes them visual.  And once they are visual, they can be considered.

Goethe's list of keywords, the framework for Novella, is a map, with each country crossed off as he passed through it.

Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, collection number 25, signature W 1990

Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly. Apollo & Artist, 1975on lists: the Cy Twombly website is very generous.  It has all his work from 1951 to 2010 in 5-year periods.  If one is feeling desperate, one could do worse than to pick a year and look at all the drawings and paintings he did that year.  And then some other time, look at a completely different year.  I've always thought his work was about handwriting. The drawings seem to be full of written instructions for how to see. 

The Menil Centre in Houston has a pavilion dedicated to Twombly, solid, but it feels inside like a white canvas tent so the light is pale and completely diffuse. On the Menil website it doesn't look at all as I remember it: I remember paintings the size of the walls in quite small spaces.  They were wonderful.

Some work makes me very hopeful.

lists and letters

Juta Savage letter to Dorothy Weiss, 1984 Oct. 6. 1 item : ill. ; 36 x 43 cm. Dorothy Weiss Gallery records, [circa 1964]-2001 (bulk 1984-2000). Archives of American ArtJulia Kirwan put together Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts and Other Artists' Enumerations from the Archives of American Art from the Smithsonian collections.  There was an exhibition of all the lists in Washington through most of last year and there is a book, published by Princeton Architectural Press.

This is a case where even a shopping list has a kind of rivetting assemblage of marks on the page.  Juta Savage's collection of teapots above is not only a letter, but also the working out of variations.  The hand is an automatic extension of the eye and mind.  This is, all artists will tell you, why they are such good snooker players. 

cross-writing

Mrs. F. L. Bridgeman to Fanny West, December 15, 1837. F775 (1837-10) Archives of OntarioWhen paper and postage were expensive.
The eye follows the logic of the marks: a case where the overall appearance is at odds with the details.  

drawing

Newspaper Rock State Historic Monument, on the access road to Canyonlands National Park, Utah

Newspaper Rock is a curious mound, an erratic in the manner of Uluru – a mound projecting from a sandstone wall, covered in petroglyphs that range in age from 2000 to 100 years old, made by a number of groups from the Anasazi to the Navajo.  I saw this first in the mid 1980s on a driving trip to the four corners where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado meet, in a single point.  A surveyor's dream.  

In those days the American landscape was completely graffitied.  At the time in Canada highway crews painted over all the tags beside the road with carefully matched rock-coloured paint, so in contrast US highways were very noisy with much crude writing. 

Newspaper rock seemed of a piece with all this drawing on stone; an even array of mark-making.  We have given over our ability to make drawings to a variety of professionals.  We don't write any more, everything is typed, we don't make little drawings much: graphic design and photography is so pervasive.  Graffiti on the side of railway cars is the only thing in my environment these days that is personal, hand-done, anarchic. And this is something of a shame.   We should all spend the weekend with a pencil in hand, making lots of little marks on paper.  It would be very interesting to see what it is that we actually draw. 

Afghan war rugs

Rug, Afghanistan, 2001-2007. L88cm x W64cm. knotted pile; plain woven; wool, fringed. T2008.1.38. Gift of Max Allen, Textile Museum of Canada.Unravelling the Yarns: War Rugs and Soldiers is an exhibition of Afghan war rugs from the Fyke collection at the University of Calgary, on now at Calgary's The Military Museums. 
There was a similar exhibition, Battleground: War Rugs from Afghanistan at Toronto's Textile Museum of Canada in 2008. A different collection, but the same kind of carpet: traditionally woven but, as Max Allen said in his curatorial essay for Battleground: 'Afghan weavers depict on their rugs what they see and what matters most to them. And so over three decades of chaos, the customary images of flowers have turned into bullets, or landmines, or hand grenades. Birds have turned into helicopters and fighter jets. Landscapes have filled up with field guns and troop carriers. Sheep and horses have turned into tanks.'

They are not rare, and although the Unravelling the Yarns notes by curator Michelle Hardy seemed to suggest that they are a form of tourist art, some of the carpets are so similar to pre-conflict carpets in their graphic form that they do appear as a personal, narrative recording of war where grenades look like flowers. 

Others are like small posters, often with the world trade centre, maps and much block printing. Or they are careful and accurate depictions of AK-47s.  One can see these as using woven traditions to make souvenirs of war, notations of the tools of war that have blasted traditional landscapes into irrelevance. 
Image on the cover of Made in Afghanistan. Rugs of Resistance, 1979-2005. Calgary: University of Calgary, Nickle Museum, 2995

Sami runic drums

Jeffrey Vallance. Sami drum, 2005This is a version of a Sami drum, made by someone in California tutored by a Swedish artist.  At first glance I thought it an interesting array of marks, modernist that I am, and thinking of the metal shutters in Portugal.  However, I saw a little surfer, and a helicopter and then I read the article about it here.

It is still visually interesting, but not quite as interesting as a real runic Sami shaman drum.  This might be a misguided search for authenticity, but here is a drum from the Schøyen Collection of Oslo.  It is a copy of a drum that had been confiscated in 1837 and now resides in Germany. 

Sami Shaman's runic drum with a central sun with four rays, a number of gods and goddesses, a Sami grave, a Shaman and his runic drum, a Sami camp with tent, dog and reindeer fence, a boat with a mast, fisherman with boat and net, a Sami hunting bear, a wolf, birds and the church of the Holy Ghost. MS in Sami on reindeer skin, Karasjok, Norway, 2005, 1 drum (runebomme), 47x31x9 cm, 45 symbols and glyphs by Berit Marie Kemi, with a drum hammer of reindeer horn with cloth head.

Oh no.  Another indigenous people plundered for a museum.  When will total repatriation of such artefacts, which aren't actually artefacts but are living things, happen?  The justification for ethnographic museums is much the same as the justification for zoos: protection of species endangered by habitat loss.  Well, yes, one of the greatest losses for indigenous peoples is the loss of their medicine bags, their totems, their drawn narratives, their spoken languages, most of which are sitting somewhere in archives in Europe.

Meanwhile Sami drums are being made in California. 

José Cadilhe

José Cadilhe. Casa em Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal, 2006-7. photographer: Fernando Guerra

This house, another photographed by Fernando Guerra, appears to be built on a standard lot, the house pushed forward to the streetwall, faced with steel (maybe aluminum, I can't find out) shutters which can open up entirely to an articulated glass front with balconies and slilding doors.  The back of the house is all glass, held in a concrete frame; the back yard is an austere plane of grass, little white cubic pavilion at the end. 

There is something about Portugal and surfaces: on one side are plain gloriously turquoise tiles, on the other patterned tiles.  Póvoa de Varzim is a town on the Atlantic coast, on the northern reaches of Porto.  It appears, from various website descriptions to be a Venice California sort of place: beaches and skaters. Once a serious port, now a mild seaside town. 

It must be the weather. Although northern Portugal is not Mediterranean by any stretch, it doesn't have this climatic clamp down on ways of living.  One can have an idea such as this punched steel screen, and then actually do it.