Matter Lent: The Photographs of Sally Mann

From Erika Ritter’s The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath:

Early in the twenty-first century, American photographer Sally Mann disinterred the year-old remains of her beloved pet greyhound, Eva, salvaged what fragments she could, and took them back to her studio to reassemble and photograph. Eventually, those photographic studies of Eva’s hide and bones became part of a larger exhibition Mann called “What Remains”.

That 2004 exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery was subtitled “Matter Lent”. As art critic and scholar Alice Kuzniar points out, “Lent” conveys a sense of gravity, similar to the forty-day period of mourning called Lent that precedes the resurrection of Christ.

What Remains is a five-part series that explores the ineffable divide between body and soul, life and death, earth and spirit. The project visually depicts the eternal cycle of life, death, and regeneration. What Remains draws upon the artist’s personal experiences as inspiration for a haunting series about the one subject that affects us all: the loss of life and what remains.

The subtitle also serves to evoke the fleeting way in which pet animals – espeically in view of their comparatively short lifespans – are “lent” to us, only to be taken away too soon by mishap, disease, or decrepitude. The bleakness of that little pile of bones and hair that Eva has dwindled down to in her posthumous photos strikes Kuzniar as “suggesting an unutterable, choking grief that can only put on display but not verball express what essentially is a void.”

The text Sally Mann wrote to accompany the imaes of Eva’s remains documents her wanting to find out what had “finally become of that head I had stroked, oh ten thousand times, those paws she so delicately crossed as she lay by my desk, rockk-hard nails emerging from the finest white hairs.”

Never one to shy away from challenging subject matter, Mann asks us in What Remains to contemplate the beauty and efficiency with which nature assimilates the body once life is over. Here she seamlessly connects the landscape of the earth to the topography of the body and examines how both are tightly interwoven. Yet she creates tension between the two. As the exhibition progresses, portrait faces of her children emerge from the darkness of the alchemical photographic process, surrounded by murky images of the landscape, as if struggling to become free of the earth that inevitably reclaims the body.

For humans in general, the extent to which we summarize animals in terms of their physical essence may cause us to treat their remains either as enormously significant or as completely inconsequential. On one end of the spectrum, there are pet cemeteries and Sally Mann’s photographed remains of her beloved Eva’s bones. On the other end, there’s the commodified carcass hung in the utcher’s window or the meaningless tuft of fur on the roadshide that once was a chipmunk.

Discussion of the exhibition at Artnet.

Image: Sally Mann, Untitled #17, 2003.

Raven Steals the Sun

This is an ancient story told on the Queen Charlotte Islands about how Raven helped to bring the Sun, Moon, Stars, Fresh Water and Fire to the world.

Long ago, near the beginning of the world, Gray Eagle was the
guardian of the Sun, Moon and Stars, of fresh water, and of fire.
Gray Eagle hated people so much that he kept these things hidden.
People lived in darkness, without fire and without fresh water.

Gray Eagle had a beautiful daughter, and Raven fell in love with her.
In the beginning, Raven was a snow-white bird, and as a such, he
pleased Gray Eagle’s daughter. She invited him to her father’s
longhouse.

When Raven saw the Sun, Moon and stars, and fresh water hanging on the sides of Eagle’s lodge, he knew what he should do. He watched for his chance to seize them when no one was looking. He stole all of them, and a brand of fire also, and flew out of the longhouse through the smoke hole. As soon as Raven got outside he hung the Sun up in the sky. It made so much light that he was able to fly far out to an island in the middle of the ocean. When the Sun set, he fastened the Moon up in the sky and hung the stars around in different places. By this new light he kept on flying, carrying with him the fresh water and the brand of fire he had stolen.

He flew back over the land. When he had reached the right place, he
dropped all the water he had stolen. It fell to the ground and there
became the source of all the fresh-water streams and lakes in the
world. Then Raven flew on, holding the brand of fire in his bill. The
smoke from the fire blew back over his white feathers and made them
black. When his bill began to burn, he had to drop the firebrand. It
struck rocks and hid itself within them. That is why, if you strike
two stones together, sparks of fire will drop out.

Raven’s feathers never became white again after they were blackened
by the smoke from the firebrand. That is why Raven is now a black bird.

Ravens symbolize many things in different cultures. Native American tradition honors the raven as a symbol of courage and of magical guidance. The Arab culture calls the raven Abu Zajir which means “Father of Omens.” They are seen as oracular birds, used in divination. They are seen as symbols of death, life, the sun, magic, shapeshifting, and tricksters.

Legend from Ella E. Clark: Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest, University
of California Press, 1953.

Image:  Raven Stealing Sun, by Ken Mowatt.

Andrew Thornton, jewellery artist, discusses inspiration at Flight of the Raven King. The necklace shown is The Raven Queen.

Raven Frees the Moon, an argillite pendant by Haida artist P.J. Ellis, from Spirits of the West Coast dot com, soon to be part of a Canuck version of The Raven Queen…

Nelvana of the Northern Lights

Nelvana, aka secret agent Alana North, is the daughter of a mortal woman and Koliak the Mighty, King of the Northern Lights. Koliak’s marriage to Nelvana’s mother so angered the gods that his spirit was transformed into the Northern Lights.

Nelvana is able to fly and she can travel at the speed of light on a giant ray of the Aurora Borealis. She can also call upon other powers of the Northern Lights, including Koliak’s powerful ray, which can melt metal and disrupt radio communications. As well, she can make herself invisible.

Nelvana is called upon to assist the Inuit. She discovers that the “evil white ones”, led by Commander Toroff, are destroying fish and other food stocks with time bombs. Koliak assists Nelvana and transforms the Northern Lights into a gigantic magnet which draws the bombs skyward, where they explode harmlessly. Toroff then attacks Nelvana with killer boats armed with Thormite Rays, all the while surveying the battle from his Devil Ship by means of his aeroscope.

Meanwhile, Nelvana discovers that enemy warplanes are amassing for an invasion of the North. The invasion is thwarted by Koliak’s ray, which disrupts communications and leads to the defeat of the enemy force by the Royal Canadian Air Force. As a result, Nelvana’s existence becomes known to southern Canadians and to Hitler, who is so frustrated by “Dis Arctic girl” that he dispatches two agents to the Arctic to foil Nelvana.

The rest of the story is at Guardians of the North, Library and Archives Canada.

Labradorite, also known as the Shaman’s Stone, or the dark side of the moon, is believed to reveal that which is present but which can not be seen by the light of the conscious mind without reflection.

Labradorite is a crystallized stone belonging to the family of Feldspar. The color is mainly blue, green or gold, but it can also be purple, pink or show interplay of the whole rainbow. The color is due to the presence of microscopic plates of different metals such as iron, copper and nickel and their disposition is strict parallel lines. A piece may look like an ordinary stone until you turn it to catch the light and reveal its many colors.

An Inuit legend recalls a time when the Northern Lights became imprisoned in the rocks of Labrador. An Inuit Shaman saw the lights and struck the earth with his spear and freed them. However some of the lights hid in it’s rocks, but they were discovered by the sun and water, hence we have Labradorite.

Image:  Adapted from Bill Wise, 2006

Inspiration:  The extraordinary gemstones of Bead It, Montreal, Quebec

Budget-savvy fashionistas string their own bling

Early Morning Rain: Mary Travers

Back in the late sixties, a bunch of us (Stew(art), Jan and raven-haired Diane) would get together and sing folk songs, mostly by Peter, Paul and Mary. Stew was the real talent in the group because he could play guitar. He was also tuned into the Child Scottish ballads. (Francis Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads are considered to be the canon of folk music.)

Diane and I just liked the idea of dressing up like folk singers. I cut my bangs straight across so I’d look just like Mary Travers. I listened to PP&M albums constantly. My mom sort of supported it in an effort to be Hip.

Stew, Diane and I were part of the artsy crowd at our high school. This wasn’t such a big deal, because it was a jock school, and there were maybe a handful of artsies, always on the lunatic fringe of football and cheerleading. My best friends, Jackie, Carol and Sharon, were part of that fringe. We adored our art teacher, Zoltan Temesy, who we felt was on the leading edge of the Hungarian New Wave.

Gordon Lightfoot was big at the same time. He still is. He’s our Canadian icon.

PP&M covered one of the pieces he wrote: Early Morning Rain.

There was something about that song that made it our favourite – being stuck in the rain at Malton (now Pearson) Airport with no hope of getting where we needed to For Love – appealed to our teen angst. We loved their idealism. We did a thousand variations of the song, including one in Locrian mode (I think). I tried to sing harmony exactly the way Mary did.

Stew Cameron succumbed to cancer in 1989. We lost this talent way way too early. And now we’ve lost Mary.

Thank you, Mary, for being a part of me. Thank you, too, Gordon and Stew.

In the early mornin’ rain with a dollar in my hand
And an aching in my heart, and my pockets full of sand
I’m a long way from home, and I miss my loved one so
In the early mornin’ rain with no place to go.

Out on runway number nine, big seven-o-seven set to go
But I’m out here on the grass where the pavement never grows
Well the liquor tasted good and the women all were fast
There she goes my friend, she’s rollin’ down at last.

Hear the mighty engine roar, see the silver wing on high
She’s away and westward bound far above the clouds she’ll fly
Where the mornin’ rain don’t fall and the sun always shines
She’ll be flyin’ o’er my home in about three hours time.

This old airport’s got me down, it’s no earthly good to me
Cause I’m stuck here on the ground,
Cold and drunk, as I might be.
Can’t jump a jet plane like you can a freight train
So I’d best be on my way in the early mornin’ rain.

So I’d best be on my way in the early mornin’ rain.

Mary Travers was an iconic folk singer, a dedicated activist, a writer and a poet, a mother, and, along with Peter Yarrow and Noel (Paul) Stookey, a member of perhaps the most influential folk music trio in American history.

Peter, Paul & Mary became famous for their ability to convey powerful personal and political messages through a repertoire of songs that became, for millions of Americans, an introduction to political awareness and activism in the movements born in the 60’s; movements for freedom, justice and social equity. For many, Peter, Paul & Mary became the soundtrack of their participation in an ongoing commitment to a progressive American vision of social equity, justice and freedom.

More at the official website for Peter, Paul and Mary

A Sense Sublime

“The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone.”

The words, redolent with centuries of arrogance, are from a hymn written by a British missionary stationed in Calcutta at the time the first cotton mills were beginning to fill the sky above Manchester with soot.

The blindness is  ours. No people, regardless of the simplicity of their culture, ever took a stone carving to be divine. Rather, things were once transparent, and greater realities moved behind and within them, were seen in this and that, here and there. This is where the concept of spirit comes from – the once-homely, utterly normal sense that something other than matter moves behind matter, animates it, sustains it.

When we deny there is consciousness in nature, we also deny consciousness to the worlds we find by going through nature; and we end with only one world, the world of McDonald’s, and that is exploitable.
~ Robert Bly

Of that something, tribal people stood in awe, as Wordsworth did when he reached back to salvage the remnants of a visionary childhood in language that can still speak to us:

And I have felt [he tells us]
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Source: Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth

Image: Andy Goldsworthy, found on Graeme Mitchell’s photography website

The Madness of Art and Poetry

It is no coincidence that the advent of industrialism in the late eighteenth century was paralleled by a fascination with madness on the part of artists and philosophers. During the next two centuries, the outward expansion of human power into nature was accompanied by an ever riskier exploration of the unconscious mind and its many strange passions. With each generation, the investigation of dream, nightmare, hallucination, trance, ecstasy has delved deeper into the secret recesses of the psyche.

 

The Romantics, who initiated this descent into the irrational, soon to be followed by the Decadents, the Surrealists, the Expressionists, were a compensatory response to the excesses of Newtonian science: “single vision”, as William Blake called it.

Blake was among the first to link scientific sensibility to the killing pressure of the new industrial technology upon the landscape. His attack upon “Satan’s Mathematick Holiness” only served to qualify him as one of the first mad artists of the modern world.

A generation later, when Percy Shelley produced his famous Defense of Poetry in 1820, the battle lines had been drawn. The dichotomies on which modern psychiatry would be built had been mapped out. Emotion against reason, the primitive against the civilized, the child against the adult, raw nature against the city, the organic against the mechanical, poetry against science.

The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world has, for want of the poetical faculty, propoertionally circumscribed those of the internal world. From what other cause has it arisen that these inventions which should have lightened, have added a weight to the curse imposed on Adam?

Shelley nominated poetic imagination as the antithesis of “the owl-winged faculty of calculation”. Poetry, he said, “is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. It is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind.

He meant this to be the imagination’s redeeming power, but what he described was madness, as people were coming to understand the word, namely the rational mind swept by impulse, fallen to the influence of forces outside its power.

By the end of the century, Freud, seeking to bring that madness into the province of medical science, admitted that he had discovered nothing the poets had not known before him.

~ Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth.
Image: Max Ernst, The Fireside Angel, 1937

The Twelve Dancing Princesses

Twelve princesses slept in twelve beds in the same room; every night their doors were securely locked, but in the morning their shoes were found to be worn through as if they had been dancing all night.

The king, perplexed, promised his kingdom and a daughter to any man who could discover the princesses’ secret within three days and three nights, but those who failed within the set time limit would be put to death.

An old soldier returned from war came to the king’s call after several princes had failed in the endeavour to discover the princesses’ secret.

Whilst traveling through a wood he came upon an old woman, who gave him an invisibility cloak and told him not to eat or drink anything given to him by one of the princesses who would come to him in the evening, and to pretend to be fast asleep after the princess left.

The soldier was well received at the palace just as the others had been and indeed, in the evening, the eldest princess came to his chamber and offered him a cup of wine. The soldier, remembering the old woman’s advice, threw it away secretly and began to snore very loudly as if asleep.

The princesses, sure that the soldier was asleep, dressed themselves in fine clothes and escaped from their room by a trap door in the floor.

The soldier, seeing this, donned his invisibility cloak and followed them down. He trod on the gown of the youngest princess, whose cry to her sisters that all was not right was rebuffed by the eldest.

The passageway led them to three groves of trees; the first having leaves of silver, the second of gold, and the third of diamonds. The soldier, wishing for a token, broke off a twig as evidence.

They walked on until they came upon a great lake. Twelve boats with twelve princes in them were waiting.

Each princess went into one, and the soldier stepped into the same boat as the youngest.The young prince in the boat rowed slowly, unaware that the soldier was causing the boat to be heavy.The youngest princess complained that the prince was not rowing fast enough, not knowing the soldier was in the boat.

On the other side of the lake was a castle, into which all the princesses went and danced the night away. The princesses danced until their shoes were worn through and they were obliged to leave.

This strange adventure went on the second and third nights, and everything happened just as before, except that on the third night the soldier carried away a golden cup as a token of where he had been.

When it came time for him to declare the princesses’ secret, he went before the king with the three branches and the golden cup, and told the king all he had seen.

The princesses saw there was no use to deny the truth, and confessed.

The soldier chose the eldest princess as his bride for he was not a very young man, and was made the king’s heir.

What does it all mean? And who cares about the princesses anyway? What’s really interesting is the trees with silver, gold and diamond leaves!

An Aubrey Beardsley interpretation.

Kay Nielsen illustrations

Magic Forest image: Dwyn Tomlinson

Séraphine

Art history has proven that madness and genius may be inexorably linked, that the more tortured the creator, the more emotionally resonant their work becomes.

Martin Provost’s haunting film, Séraphine, which chronicles the troubled life of spinster painter Séraphine Louis in post-WW I France, exemplifies this theory. The picture, which swept the Cesar’s (France’s equivalent to Oscar), is slow, meditative and spare in its time-spanning storytelling. It’s also an utterly spellbinding work of serious cinema – elegant, unpretentious, poetic and unforgettable.

Yoland Moreau stars as the titular working class artist, who spends the first half of her life humbly cleaning the dirty floors of moneyed snobs who look down on her station and her eccentric ways.

When famous German art dealer Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur) arrives at the country hotel where Séraphine’s works are on display, it’s only a matter of time before he takes notice of this strange, naive woman’s stunning yet somewhat frightening paintings. But as interest in Seraphine’s work increases, and her financial situation changes for the better, her quirks slowly evolve into full-blown psychosis.

Sequences of the frumpy Séraphine weaving her way through a landscape of wind-whipped trees, flowing rivers and natural beauty juxtaposed with the dimly-lit misery of her working life are lyrical and hypnotic, as impressionistic as the demented floral explosions she captures on canvas.

And that seems to be Provost’s aesthetic – to create a film that captures in tone and mood the soul of Séraphine’s imagery.

Dreamboat Annie

Ann and Nancy Wilson just keep on rockin’ with this vintage piece from their 1976 debut album. We didn’t think the guys had bad hair back then but I suppose times have changed.

This is for all the floaters and free thinkers who need to set goals and do something with their lives before it’s too late…

You know who you are.

Heading out this morning into the sun
Riding on the diamond waves, little darlin’ one

Warm wind caress her
Her lover it seems
Oh, Annie
Dreamboat Annie my little ship of dreams

Going down the city sidewalk alone in the crowd
No one knows the lonely one whose head’s in the clouds

Sad faces painted over with those magazine smiles
Heading out to somewhere won’t be back for a while

Image: Yaver Sultanov, Ship of Dreams, 2000

The Creatures

Franz Marc was an Expressionist painter who formed Der Blaue Reiter group with Wassily Kandinsky. They were part of an artistic movement who were searching for spiritual truth through their art. Marc believed that colour had a vocabulary of emotional keys that we instinctively understand, much in the same way that we understand music. This language of colour was one tool that Marc used to raise his art to a higher spiritual plane; another was his choice of subject.

Franz Marc painted animals as they symbolised an age of innocence, like Eden before the Fall, free from the materialism and corruption of his own time. Animals in Marc’s art are seldom painted in isolation. They are viewed as idealized creatures in perfect harmony with the natural world they inhabit.

I am trying to intensify my feeling for the organic rhythm of all things, to achieve pantheistic empathy with the throbbing and flowing of nature’s bloodstream in trees, in animals, in the air.

Tiger is a typical example of Franz Marc’s painting style. It is a fusion of several influences: the expressive and symbolic use of colour that he discovered in the paintings of Van Gogh and Gauguin combined with the fragmented and prismatic compositions of various Cubist styles.

Blue is the male principle, astringent and spiritual. Yellow is the female principle, gentle, gay and spiritual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy and always the colour to be opposed and overcome by the other two.

The Tiger and its surroundings are composed of geometric shapes whose similarity suggests both the camouflage of the tiger in its natural habitat and the harmony between the creature and its environment. Colour is the main element used to separate the tiger from its background. Strong yellow and black shapes outline its form to convey the markings of the beast. The geometric shapes that make up its form are carefully scaled and simplified to represent the tiger’s features and its muscular body, while their rhythmic movement is echoed in the stylized shapes of the rocks and foliage of the background. This is indeed an idealistic view of nature – an image designed to lift its subject above the brutality of nature in the raw.

Franz Marc yearned for a life on a higher spiritual plane. In fact, before he took up art, he studied theology with a view to entering the priesthood. Ironically, his death was a sad contradiction of his hopes and dreams. He volunteered for service in the army at the start of World War 1 and never painted again. He was killed by a piece of shrapnel in 1916, during the assault on Verdun, the longest and bloodiest battle of the war.

The Creatures:  a poem by Glen Downie, a Toronto poet who won the 2008 Toronto Book Award for his collection of poems, Loyalty Management. He has also published fiction, non-fiction, reviews and six books of poetry.