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

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.

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.

Obama Hope at National Portrait Gallery

You might remember that red, white and blue illustration of Barack Obama, staring off into space with the word “Hope” underneath his face.

That illustration got a lot of attention during the presidential campaign. Now people visiting Washington can see the original, up close and in person, at the National Portrait Gallery.

The work by artist Shepard Fairey can be seen in the gallery’s new arrivals section. The Los Angeles artist presented the illustration to the gallery on Saturday, three days before Obama’s inauguration.

Fairey says he made the image in mid-January last year, and then the posters were distributed at campaign events and made available to download online.

Source: Christine Simmons, AP

In related news, here in the Great White North, the Stephen Harper Conservatueurs have cancelled plans for a National Portrait Gallery.

And I quote:

The Harper government has abruptly cancelled plans for a National Portrait Gallery that has been in the works for years.

Newly minted Heritage Minister James Moore announced Friday that none of the proposals received from developers is acceptable to the government.

He said it’s important for the government to act prudently in a time of economic instability and the project cannot go ahead.

He made the announcement after 5 p.m. on a Friday — a tried-and-true strategy to minimize bad press.

And, if you’re a design aficionado, head over to Art Threat to see the Stephen Harper portrait contest. The prize is $1,000 (Canadian), but hurry, the deadline is March 1, 2009!

The Glasgow Art Club

We in the colonies are delighted to discover, via the Intertubes, that there really is a Glasgow Art Club in the European City of Culture, 1990, akin to the famous Willow Tea Rooms but with artists who lunch…

Glasgow Art Club, which has occupied its existing Bath Street premises since 1893, was founded in 1867 by William Dennistoun, a young amateur artist who had been forced by ill health to leave the city. His friends who used to sketch with him at his cottage in rural Old Kilpatrick and Dennistoun proposed that they should form an art club. He and 10 others, all amateur artists, held preliminary discussions in a tearoom above a Candleriggs baker’s shop before launching the club in the Waverley Temperance Hotel in Buchanan Street.

At their monthly meetings each member would bring a painting, usually a watercolour, and the others would comment. At times there could be fiery disputes.

Membership grew in the 1870s, professional artists began to join, and exhibitions were held. Not surprisingly, the limitations of a temperance hotel began to be felt and in 1875 the club moved to a Sauchiehall Street hotel, also called Waverley, where something stronger than tea was to be had and annual dinners could be held in suitable style.

“The Art Club is my sanctuary, paradise in the middle of bubbling Hell of businesses, trendy bars, killer traffic, over priced restaurants and horribly crass shopping malls.”
~ Peter Howson

The continuing need for cash  helped to propel the club towards a critical move – the admission of lay members, which in any case was in tune with Glasgow’s awakening interest in the arts. This proposal was strenuously resisted at first but by the mid-1880s the painter James Guthrie was among influential members arguing successfully for change and male lay members began to be admitted, although women had to wait until 1983.

Two adjacent town houses were bought in Bath Street. There is recent evidence that the young Charles Rennie Mackintosh had a hand in some of the gallery’s ornamental details.The scene was thus set for countless dinners, dances, concerts, lectures and not least, exhibitions.

More at Glasgow Art Club

Little Art Box

Another market meltdown day, and few things in life are as pleasing to the soul as an October sunflower. Little Art Box is an art supply shop that runs workshops for kids and adults, tucked away in the heart of funky Roncesvalles Village.

Gourds and flowers in Bloor West Village. Animorphic gourds at a vegetable market on Roncesvalles.

A Great Nation’s Art

Canada’s CEO, Stephen Harper has sparked a culture war in the federal election campaign with a claim that “ordinary people” don’t care about arts funding.

We at the Café could understand the Harperian logic of $45 million in cuts to arts and culture funding where less efficient heritage arts programs (as determined by his bean-counters and their economic models) were being trimmed. And we might ask where that money is now going – perhaps to arts ventures with better ROI? To the Calgary Stampede, more likely.

In a bizarre statement yesterday, the Conservative leader and populist hockey dad sans lipstick said average Canadians have no sympathy for “rich” artists who gather at galas to whine about their grants.

“I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a gala of a bunch of people at, you know, a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough, when they know those subsidies have actually gone up – I’m not sure that’s something that resonates with ordinary people.”

He shrugged off his opponents as elitists preoccupied by “a niche issue.”

Rejecting Harper’s suggestion artists are privileged, Liberal Party leader, Stéphane Dion said their average wage is $23,000 a year.

In a play on the Conservative Party’s French name, an electronic NDP ad running in Montreal’s subway system shows a “Conservateur” logo evolving into “Conserva-tueur de la culture,” or “culture killer.”

Story at Canada’s national rag (don’t miss the comments!), the Globe and Mail

This beleaguered taxpayer is happy to buy some artist a glass of wine, as opposed to the government and corporate collectives where most of our tax dollars get squandered. At least we are not bailing out the Wall Street porkers.

Image: Poor Artist’s Cupboard, Charles Bird King, 1815

The Architecture of Memory

This September 11, an exhibition of memorial architecture has opened at The Centre for Architecture in New York City.

Memorial Sites: New York to Nairobi Photographs by Julie Dermansky includes images from Hangar 17, at  New York’s JFK Airport where the Port Authority  of NY & NJ is storing artifacts from the World Trade Center that have been cleaned and archived. These images have never been shown before. Many of the pieces saved will go to different museums, including the one planned to open at Ground Zero.

There is a photograph of the memorial for those lost in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina at St. Bernard Parish’s Shell Beach. The memorial was meant to be unveiled on Katrina’s 3rd anniversary but was postponed because of the impending arrival of Gustav and subsequent evacuation. Dermanksy drove there to photograph it the day before Gustav hit.

The exhibition reflects on the meaning and history of memorials while addressing site specificity and the culture of place.

“History belongs to all of us, but it is the memorial site commemorating a particular historical moment and connecting it to the present that infiltrates our being and transcends history.”

Dermansky is documenting memorials in diverse locations, from the site of the destroyed US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, to the Valhalla, New York 9/11 memorial by Frederic Schwartz. Her global perspective explores the range of realized memorial design solutions. With photos selected by curator Tracey Hummer, the distinguished writer and critic, the New York to Nairobi memorial exhibition captures the irony of sacred sites converted to tourist destinations.

Dermansky’s photographs capture traces of mankind’s unthinkable acts strewn across the planet in the form of monuments and residual artifacts. By presenting a global record of architectural structures, her work engages people in addressing issues of injustice and genocide that they might otherwise avoid when presented in the form of current events. Rick Bell noted that “the photos of Julie Dermansky record the remembrance of horrific events through a lens that makes them immediate and palpable – you do not walk away from these images indifferent or unmoved.” Dermansky’s images tie the past to the present and start a dialogue about society’s obligation to honor and preserve unspoken history through the architecture of memorials.

A photographer who began her career as s sculptor, Julie Dermansky has been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times. Her background in fine arts adds to her compelling vision. Julie’s photographs make us ask if the words “never again” are just a slogan. This fall, the artist will be named as an Affiliate Scholar at the Rutgers University Center for the Study of Genocide & Human Rights.

The exhibition runs from September 11 until October 3, 2008.

Photographs of Dermansky’s work at her website

Her blog

Images:
Copper footsteps of the righteous in Nanjing, China
Katrina Memorial at Shell Beach in St. Bernard Parish
Identity photos at Manzanar Museum

Earth Art at the Royal Botanical Gardens

Earlier we blogged about the environmental art of Andy Goldsworthy and the phenomenon of earth-sensitive art in a review of art critic John Grande’s book, Balance: Art and Nature

The Royal Botanical Gardens is hosting an Earth Art Exhibit, curated by Grande and sponsored by PRIME Gallery in Toronto. The Royal Botanical Gardens is the largest botanical garden in Canada within the Niagara Escarpment — a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve.

Earth Art is also known as ephemeral art or environmental art, which has evolved from our growing environmental consciousness. The Gardens’ Earth Art exhibit showcases renowned Canadian and international artists who use natural materials and plants to create inspiring one-of-a-kind installations.

Earth Art began in the late 1960s with the seminal Robert Smithson piece known as Spiral Jetty. Created with a bulldozer on the shore of Great Salt Lake in Utah, his raised earthwork sculpture spirals in on itself — an utterly useless jetty on a half-dead lake. It can be seen as both beautiful and as a comment on the ultimate futility of our attempts to bend nature to our will.

Of the Earth Art exhibit at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Grande states that we are no longer in the age of such vast earth-moving projects. For the past 25 years, artists have been developing a more intimate approach to site and environment, which celebrates the harmonious union of artists working with materials found from the land, and creating a new sense of wonder, illusion and place. Truth to materials remains an axiom, but here we have the injection of ethics in the decision of which materials to use. And many variables play a role in outdoor nature-based art, including weather, climate, vegetation, other living species, the quality of light, and the seasons. What follows is exciting and dramatic.

Emilie Brzezinski has created a stand of willow trunks within a Stonehenge of gnarled old cherry trees at the Royal Botanical Gardens. It is entitled Willow Winds.

“Having found trunks of corkscrew willow for my installation, I felt, above all, I was to respect the wood. For this reason, I didn’t use my usual format of vertical wedges to carve the trunks. Rather I used the remarkable array of joyful and bubbly bark, characteristic of the old trees of this species, to speak for itself. The ‘human input’ focuses on the upward thrusts of the trunks to make up the gestures of the composition. Thus, the sculpture is in large part a found object that has been adapted to my sculptural needs.”

Yolanda Gutierrez has placed plants and relics around a grand old pin oak in the Arboretum for an installation called Abuelo Arbol (Grand Father Tree).

“The point is the tree — a 150-year-old pin oak. I want to help people remember what the tree means for ancient cultures. For the First Nations Aztec in Mexico and the Iroquois in Ontario, the tree is the connection between earth and sky. Imagine the tree as a conduit through which energy spirals up from the earth and down from the sky. The Iroquois would carve a mask or face in the tree and perform rituals and dances around it to bring it energy and a spiritual presence. In this installation, the spiral patterns of the movement of energy in the ground involve complementary opposites, always in movement. The earth rows follow the outer lines of the spiral designs with healing plants — sweet grass, tobacco and sage — planted in them. The white painted sticks rise in height to suggest the spirals, while spiralling white flowers appear on the tree trunk itself.”

Sharon Loper’s exhibit, Nests, comprises synthesized hummingbird nests. Two oversized, fabricated hummingbird nests, ranging from 0.6 to 1.5 metres in height, are constructed from metal bars, wire, hemp hair, cotton batting, and gathered natural material. Loper states, “The nest represents nature in its most perfect symbolism, in that the nest is shelter, an enclosure, a safe place where life is sustained. We all live in a time when hyper-reality is the norm. The nest brings us back to less complicated values and uses nature as a vehicle. The nest is a window, a place where life begins.”

Deep in the woodland glade, Bob Verschueren has created XIII/08.

“Since 1978, my arts practice has been entirely oriented towards nature, using nature’s bounty as material and as the source for my inspiration. Using vegetation involves working with living material and time. Each installation is a metaphor for the fragility of the human condition. My installation, XIII/08, consists of three large urns out of which flow white fir branches, signifying that the landscape of Hamilton is punctuated by waterfalls. These waterfalls are, for me, the perfect expression of the continuing flux of life.”

Reflections Flowing is a site sculpture that touches the earth lightly, if at all. Roy Staab, who created the installation in Grindstone Creek Marsh and who is shown during the installation, says, “I think about being ‘in tune’ with nature. In this work, I use an S-curved line and consider the length of open water for its size. It is made of fragile vegetation gathered from the Royal Botanical Gardens — phragmite reeds and saplings that are invasive yet wonderful for making my art. The reeds are interlaced into the saplings. The quiet area of Grindstone Creek Marsh permits my art to almost be a part of nature, especially when reflected in the water. It is vulnerable in the stream, for a moment of life.”

In the Arboretum, Nils-Udo’s installation, Towards Nature, brings together four earth ramps that lead into the inner areas of a tree.

“The ramps are of varying lengths, the longest being about 12 metres. These bridges move from the earth upwards. Visually, they are illusionary, symbolizing our unconscious links to nature. The bridges act as a visual point of entry into the tree and are covered with plants, earth and grasses. The tree is central to all of this. Towards Nature is yet another metaphor, to illustrate this theme, as with many of my works, of that artificial gap between human culture and nature, and so this series of bridges toward nature. These are bridges between nature and humanity, and my art seeks to bring us integrally closer.”

Ground is a powerful installation by local artist, Simon Frank.

“In an earlier work, Sketch for New Forest, I used oak sawdust and shavings, the waste material created when an oak tree is transformed into lumber, to ‘draw’ a full-sized oak tree on a gallery floor — temporarily returning the material to its original form. With Ground, I use a similar material, tree mulch, but with an opposite intent — to obscure or erase the form of a dying ash tree by burying the tree beneath the material/memory of other trees. Set in one of the avenues of trees in the Arboretum, Ground also playfully echoes and exaggerates both the topography of the site and the ubiquitous mounds of mulch placed around the base of many of the trees by the gardeners.”

With all of these installations, Grande has brilliantly presented us, strolling the beautiful gardens and natural areas, with interventions where a corner is turned, and we are suddenly confronted with a piece of environmental art that plucks a deep string in the human heart.

Visit the Royal Botanical Gardens website for images of the works in progress.

For more amazing environmental art, visit the Green Museum and its blog. This is an online museum. They do not have a physical space filled with a bulky art collection. Instead, as an online museum, their strategy for sharing environmental art reflects their values. They have a very small ecological footprint and can display a wide range of art works from around the globe and include directions so you can visit exhibitions and events first-hand. They are like a traditional museum turned inside out. Instead of visiting one big box filled with art they are many tiny boxes (monitors) encouraging visitors to go out to experience art in the context of their communities and ecosystems.

Another non-traditional museum is the Nomadic Museum, which travels from venue to venue. Its current exhibit is of stunning photography relating humanity and nature: Ashes and Snow.

Starry Starry Night

Roo Borson, Ten Thousand
Image: Van Gogh, Starry Night Over the Rhone