“I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful
and rich an expression of life as growth.”
Henry Miller
The Empire in a state of dissipation, portrayed as a post-industrial nightmare on the brink of total ruin, is a theme common to art since, well, the Industrial Age. [I'm doing my best Robert Hughes impression here]. The theme has many artistic commentators working in various media, but there's something about engraving that lends itself best to burned-out apocalyptic landscapes.
Piranesi (1720-1778) was above all an architect who loved recording ancient ruins in his etchings, but it's his Carceri (1745), or Prison Views, that are called to mind in the works of French engravers Charles Meryon (1821-1868) and Gérard Trignac (1955-). Supposedly conceived as "visions during the delirium of a fever," it's Piranesi's surrealist side that is his most enduring legacy, and it's illustrators like these who've carried the torch.
Why do we love dead things? From "live fast, die young," to Shakespeare, to furniture with a fake patina, we have a double-edged relationship to physical decay. We like to surround ourselves with stuff that looks old. Edgar Allen Poe said that "the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world." Besides it's morbidity and sexism, he touches on a powerful subject.
The Freudian preoccupation with Eros and Thanatos, sex and ruin, is all around us.
This fascination with memento mori lies partly in the puritanical reminder that while everything dies we are here now, hanging on to life. That ruin lies just around the corner for all of us is something we enjoy being reminded of now and then, if only from a distance.
"But far from nihilism, tragedy is a storyteller laying the cards on the table and asserting that even though the journey ends in a cliff, the miles are worth it for their own sake." [S. L. Wilson]
All that death and decay making you feel frisky? You can even book your wedding at the neon boneyard in Las Vegas. This acreage in downtown Vegas is off the tourist trail, but has been a steady spot for nuptials amid the detritus of old casinos and storefronts slowly falling to dust in the desert sun.
The exhibition and Book, "Beauty in Decay" showcases the photographs of "urban explorers", anonymous artists who risk police records and safety by busting into "overgrown industrial complexes, disused lunatic asylums, abandoned palaces and forgotten monasteries," recording what they see and then leaving with no trace but their footprints.
Flickr groupAbandoned Urban Decayis a pool of hundreds of great shots taken by these intrepid explorers the world over.
Jason deCaires Taylor's work wrests life from decay. His "eco-sculptures" are essentially lifeless, but they take on the living and morph into magnificent coral gardens. Ignoring the morbid preoccupation with death as an endpoint (but perhaps referencing it), deCaires Taylor emphasizes the cyclical nature of life while reminding us that 40% of the world's reefs have disappeared in recent years. But, rather than disappear in Poe's adolescent funk and hug gravestones all day, deCaires Taylor does something about it, and in the meantime creates art of the most sublime beauty.
See that little SpongeBob Squarepants in the fresco? No? Look again, bottom right. To give you an idea of just how close you can zoom into this image from Halta Definizione , here he is again in all his glory...
Digital photography is taken to extraordinary levels of detail on this Italian site, with paintings from Da Vinci, Bronzino and Botticelli among others.
Here are a couple more details from one of my favorites, Andrea Pozzo's illusionistic masterpiece of perspective in fresco painting; the ceiling of the church at San Ignazio.
"Excuse me sir; which way is Leonardo's Statue of David?"
Your mission should you choose to accept it: Travel all around Europe and...eh, that's it. For two hundred years starting in 1660, the mission of young men of means was to tour the classic sites of the Old World and bring back what they learned, but sometimes they found a bit more than they bargained for.
My own European Grand Tour involved run-ins with the police of Denmark, Germany, Italy, Spain and Yugoslavia and had absolutely nothing to do with Art or Culture whatsoever, but that's a story I'm going to keep until we meet sometime for a beer.
Of course, for most people, carousing around and being waited on hand and foot seems like a luxury and, well, it is. The ability to breeze around Europe implies lots of free time and money. The traditional Italian Grand Tour was taken by pretty much everyone of means; aristocrats, intellectuals, the curious and bon vivants alike. Stendhal seemed to speak for a generation of over-indulged rich kids when in 1817 he wrote of his impending voyage: “Outbursts of joy, heart pounding. How crazy I still am at twenty-six! I’m going to see beautiful Italy!” I probably wouldn't have burst into flames like Stendahl, but I do know what he means. Viva Italia!
Grand Tourists passed through the Alpine wonderland of South Tyrol on their way to Italy
Hippolyte Taine wrote that "Venice is the pearl of Italy. I have seen nothing equal to it."
Grand Tourists were often drawn to Italy by Romantic notions of languorous evenings sketching under crumbling ruins. Pampered toffs from all over Northern Europe wore pot-pourri bags under their armpits and foreswore bathing for months on end to endure such physical hardships as dozing under trees and endless social engagements in Venice or Florence. Poor Rupert must be exhausted.
But while on one level it was all a "larf" to the English, they also took it all very seriously. Almost like doing military service. Young men [I'm not sure if any women were included in this rite of passage] galloped off as cultural spies to bring back all they could glean from the Old World to use as valuable fodder for Empire, King and Country.
Thomas Cole, 'The Course of Empire - Desolation', 1836
British historian E.P. Thompson explains that the Grand Tour of the 17th and 18th Century was a very serious matter: If the British were to maintain control of their Empire they must be seen to be at the forefront culturally, and that meant studying the classics at their source. According to Thompson, "ruling-class control in the 18th century was located primarily in a cultural hegemony, and only secondarily in an expression of economic or physical (military) power."
"The primary value of the Grand Tour lay in the exposure both to the cultural legacy of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and to the aristocratic and fashionably polite society of the European continent. In addition, it provided the only opportunity to view specific works of art, and possibly the only chance to hear certain music. A grand tour could last from several months to several years" New York Times
Rome was, of course, the main destination. Sure there was always Florence, which according to Kenneth Clark, was a "city of hard heads, sharp wits, light feet, graceful movement", but it was still Rome with all it's bustling humanity, "a city that is like a huge compost heap of human hopes and ambitions, despoiled of its ornament, almost indecipherable, a wilderness of imperial splendor", that enticed countless young suitors from England's shores.
An Assassination at the Porto Del Popolo
No wonder it struck travelers from England as a bit of a shock when they arrived. Charles Dickens himself seems to have been not a little grossed out when he arrived "travel-stained and weary" at the Roman gate of Porta del Popolo in 1844 (his few lyrical descriptions of monuments notwithstanding). Perhaps he came like the rest; expecting to learn Empire from the best, only to find a dissipated soup of Old and New.
Dickens complained in Pictures from Italy that Rome is filled with "a multitude of chattering strangers" and "narrow streets choked by heaps of dunghill rubbish." At one point, he turned a corner and ran right into the Dead Cart, with the bodies of the poor on their way to an unofficious dumping outside the city walls.
He seemed underwhelmed by other tourist destinations too, saying of St.Peter's Basilica that he'd "been infinitely more affected in many English Cathedrals when the organ is playing." The Jewish Quarter he described with casual anti-semitism as a "miserable place reeking of bad odors, but where the people are industrious and money-getting." He even called Bernini's monuments "intolerable abortions"! Ouch.
Beautiful Albumen Silver print of a panorama of Rome, 1885
"Italy and in particular the State of the Church had come out of the Napoleonic wars very impoverished. Pope Gregory XVI, then aged 80, was afraid of novelties and considered the railway an invention of the Devil. According to the French poet Lamartine, Italy was the "Land of the Dead" and for the Austrian Chancellor Metternich it was "a mere geographic expression"."(source)
Dickens went to bed that night "with a very considerably quenched enthusiasm."
I traced the traditional Grand Tour route in red on this antique map of Europe.
Grand Tour William Thomas Beckford.jpgThe traditional Grand Tour route was to travel from London by boat through Holland and Germany down the Rhine to Mannheim. Then hop in a coach to Munich, before crossing the border to Austria. Typically they'd travel on horseback or by foot over the Brenner pass into Italy, and on to Venice. From Venice the itinerary was to trace a meandering path through Vicenza, Verona, Mantua, Reggio, Bologna, Florence, Siena and then onwards to Rome and Naples.
I don't know, it all sounds pretty good to me. I remember my days traveling around Europe with not a care in the World as being some of the best of my life. All these old prints are making me want to hit the road again. Who's with me?
Fong Qi Wei produced these wonderful exploded view flower photographs that I find inspiring, both as images unto themselves suggestive of some grander natural order, and as abstracted elements suitable for adaptation to ornamental use.
Or, as Eugéne Grasset wrote in 1896 of his own collection of lithographic flower prints, that they "represent natural forms in their exactitude, [while] bridging the distance between form as found in nature and form conventionalized in accordance with sound traditions of art."
Contact Fong Qi Wei directly, or through his blog, to purchase prints of his flower photography.
Trompe l'oeil has traditionally been concerned with creating the painted illusion that something exists in three dimensions. But what do we call it's opposite; painting on top of a three dimensional object so that it appears invisible?
Artist Liu Bolin has been disappearing, ghost-like, into the background since 2005, as he systematically paints himself out of reality. His series, Hiding in the City, recently came to Soho in New York where he performed a disappearing act in the Eli Klein gallery that was described as "mesmerizing".
Bolin began this series as a political commentary on the tensions between the Chinese government and their people. Speaking in an interview with Yatzer, Bolin expanded on his motivation:
"After graduating from school, for a long time I had no family, no job and no love in my life. During those four years without love and income, I felt I had been dumped by this society and that I had no position within it. I was meaningless in this environment. This is the emotional reason for starting the series. The fuse of the work was ignited on the November the 16th in 2005 at Suojia Village, which was the biggest living area for artists in Asia and it was forced to demolition by the government. I was there at that time, so I started the series i opposition to the government’s atrocity. I wanted to use my work to show that artists’ state in society and their living places had not been protected"
As a painter, I am of course interested in his process. You can get some sense of it in this video from his NY trip. Using student quality acrylics, and what appears to be a handful of assistants gathered locally, you see right away that it's not just the process that interests Bolin; it would all be meaningless without that final photograph.
Along similar lines, I always felt that the meditative aspect of Andy Goldsworthy's work, where he spends countless hours alone in the wild, is somehow undermined by the insistent intrusion of the camera. (There are some striking similarities between their work, specifically in the case of the Shadow pieces, below). Although I am a huge fan of both artists, I have the hollow feeling sometimes that the work is created solely for the camera lens. In a way, it's less about the performance process than it is about creating a gallery-worthy commodity.
I admit to holding onto a ridiculous Romantic notion of the Artist as some sort of Aesthete laboring alone in a garret, compelled by an inner fire, with no egoism, conscious thought or hopes of praise or reward. Boy is my face red.
Liu Bolin, Left, and Andy Goldsworthy, Right
Questions of authorship [who actually is the artist here? the photographer who clicks the shutter, the assistants who do the painting, or the man himself who stands still for hours? Does it matter?] can be neatly side-stepped in his political thesis: this is a comment on the nature of the individual in Chinese Culture, after all.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Bolin "was the fourth most searched among contemporary and modern artists on the site Artnet, beating Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. (The American photographer Sally Mann came in first.)"
His rise in popularity is reflected in the cost of his work. "The photos are sold in limited editions for $6,000 to $12,000—about 30% higher than a few years ago, according to gallery owner Eli Klein."
Liu Bolin will be exhibiting at Eli Klein Fine Art in New York from June 29 - September 28, 2011
Liu Bolin created this piece for a UNICEF campaign in China
If you add your email address here, the only things you'll receive from me are tutorials and tons of thought-provoking and useful reference material that you won't find anywhere else, and that's it. I promise!
Posts
