those of you who write about 1930s design....

I have decided to post a possible writing opportunity (and possible press trip with editorial guarantee of publication) on the joculum blog where my diverse readership seems more consistently into the non-contemporary and the well nigh traditional re-read in an untraditional sense. joculum.livejournal.com

palimpsests

Palimpsest Projects of All Sorts

There is in fact in Atlanta at the moment a Palimpsest Project designed to approach history through fiction, to allow the revelation of past layers through the productively distorting lenses of a present buffered by imagined narrative. There will be a time to consider this one at length. But for the moment I want to write about layerings and palimpsests in general, and someplace else.

Anyone who has been reading me for any length of time knows that I am fascinated by restorations that go awry, adaptations that aren’t quite, and in general things that are not what they seem, even or especially when they try oh so seriously to be exactly that.

It is a model for the self that we inherited from Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud alike, those figures of nineteenth century modernism whose models of the psyche bespoke the era from which they sprang—whether they intended it or not.

It is also a model of postmodernity, a now-dated term that I like to keep using because modernity was such an identifiable project that anything that came after it was indisputably “post-.” And since the postmodern was irredeemably plural and plurisignative, the twists and turns of the contemporary since the heyday of the postmodern have remained, irresistibly, postmodern, even if it is no longer cool to call them that. Contemporaraneity takes place under the sign of the aftermodern; the altermodern is somewhere else and something else, no matter what Nicolas Bourriaud may think.

As with all overlapping epochs, there are still quintessentially modern and modernist moments in contemporary history, and I hope to write about one of them in a subsequent Counterforces post—or, rather, to write about the story I wish I were capable of telling, which is a typically postmodernist take on a modernist tale of historical restoration and homage to the failed determination of a previous generation. But let that pass.

Back when my own palimpsest had considerably fewer overlays and erasures, I wrote in Art Papers about the Spanish monastery in Miami, Florida: a medieval cloister, disassembled for transport to the Hearst mansion and then hopelessly jumbled when its packing straw was burned to prevent the transmission of hoof and mouth disease. “The world’s biggest jigsaw puzzle” was eventually put together, sort of, in Miami as a tourist attraction that only partially resembled its lost original, and is currently both a not-quite-museum and an Episcopal church.

That is a different kind of palimpsest of history from the exquisite piece of medieval architecture of central Germany that turns out to be a completely reconstructed replica of a building that itself was actually a Wilhelmine replica of medieval architectural fashions. It is also not the same as the Margaret Mitchell House that was twice reconstructed in the wake of arson and today serves as a center for contemporary literature that contains the apartment in which Gone With the Wind was written, in which it is uncertain what, if anything, is original. These two are instructively variant reconstructions, belonging to the same species as “This is my grandfather’s hammer. My father broke the handle and put on a new one. I broke the head and put on a new one. This is my grandfather’s hammer.”

It is, as I wrote in Counterforces a while ago, fascinating that the palimpsest of the imagined and the real that is symbolized and summarized by and in the Margaret Mitchell House should now exist in proximity to the Millennium Gate’s faultless mix of reproduced-Roman and plate-glass-Parthenon architecture. The blend is brilliant, and as fine a tribute to the irresistible acids of postmodernity as the Ikea store in the complex to which it forms a point of entry. As I wrote in that truncated essay, when the Millennium Gate is combined with the statues of Peace and Justice whose pedestals already look like they have been restored after a conflict, it constitutes the filling in of a niche of architectural history that had been missing because of the South’s postbellum poverty. Atlanta did get, and later barely preserved, the neo-Egyptian and neo-Orientalist Masonic syncretism of the Fox Theatre; now, thanks to the Millennium Gate, Atlanta has a neo or creatively alternative version of the Greco-Roman triumphal-arch syncretism it didn’t get.

What occasioned this particular chain of reflection was a press release from Bénédictine liqueur regarding the art exhibition they are staging in honor of the liqueur’s 500th anniversary. It is a more multi-layered tale than one might expect.

Curator Ami Barak’s exhibition of work by Yves Klein, Wim Delvoye, Davide Balula, Richard Fauguet and others is apparently focused on an alchemical metaphor, with the unexpected and distinctive transformations of material in these artists’ assemblages being considered parallel to the transmutation of Bénédictine’s 27 herb-and-spice ingredients into the unique liqueur of which the integrity is reported to have been maintained over the course of five centuries.

Apart from the contents of the exhibition, which runs from May 13 through October 17, the building in which it is being held is already a metaphor of creative transmutations of history.

The Bénédictine Palais (so the press release names it, though one might think it is the Benedictine Palace or the Palais Bénédictine) in Fécamp has nothing to do with the Benedictine order in which Dom Bernardo Vincelli created the liqueur in 1510. The monks passed the recipe down through the generations in Fécamp until 1789, when the Revolution sent them fleeing from the country. How the recipe was discovered by Alexandre Le Grand in 1863 would be worth discussing, were it not for the more immediately relevant fact that what the industrialist did with it is a model of proto-postmodernity in the heart of the nineteenth century's moment of the high modern. (The company website reports that Le Grand found the formula in a “book of spells” acquired for a private library in 1791 and thereafter forgotten.)

Le Grand persuaded the Benedictine order to allow him to use their name commercially, in exchange for royalties. (The preceding words are borrowed verbatim from the press release.) He registered the brand as a trademark, designed a label, and the rest is history.

After that, things really get interesting. Circa 1888, give or take a reconstruction after a catastrophic fire, Le Grand erected the Bénédictine Palais in Fécamp. The press release describes this building as “Le Grand’s ultimate marketing tool, a modern building with a 16th century feel, completely dedicated to his beloved spirit.” It’s the sole distillery for the liqueur. It is also home to the Le Grand family’s collection of religious artifacts from the 13th century onward, plus a library of a thousand volumes dating from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Since 1998, it has also been a gallery for contemporary art, in spaces previously used as industrial bays. It has hosted 70 or so exhibitions that included such figures as Niki de Saint-Phalle and Andy Warhol.

The liqueur has its own mystique without the hybrid history and architecture of the building…I’m sure the description can be found online readily enough, including the fact that only three people know the secret formula at any one time (I omit the obvious reference). But it is the Palais that caught my attention.

As much as other buildings I have discussed, the Palais was clearly created to fill in a gap. I am curious as to what became of the Fécamp monastery after 1789*, but even a secularized medieval building, had it survived, would scarcely be appropriate for the production of a liqueur in 1864…even though the monastery presumably housed a distillery of some sort or another prior to its dissolution.

Thus we got a Palais that looks authentically 16th century but is authentically of its 19th-century industrial day. And that, plus the juxtaposition of Klein and Delvoye in the same exhibition, is enough for me.

*An innocuous press release, on which the draft of this was based, often leads into thickets of Wikipedia entries. We learn if we are persistent that the abbey church survives in the city (but the entry is vague as to details) and that Fécamp was noted for miraculous doings: “According to legend, the trunk of a fig tree carrying the Precious Blood of Christ collected by Joseph of Arimathea was washed ashore on the riverbank at Fécamp in the 1st century. Immediately, a fountain of Holy Blood gushed from the site and the relic quickly attracted many pilgrims, enhancing the reputation of the city. The name ‘Fécamp’ was artificially connected with this legend by monks: Fici-campus, the camp of the fig tree.” A church associated with the Precious Relic still exists in Fécamp, which shrine apparently was unconnected with the Benedictine monastery. The “ruined buildings of the Benedictine abbey” are mentioned in conjunction with the Bénédictine Palais, so apparently there was some effort on Le Grand’s part to build on the original site.

If so, the Palais would be a literal as well as a metaphoric palimpsest. But I have traced this particular palimpsest as far as I am going to.
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and if you're passing through Valenciennes this Friday....

The retrospective of the work of the late Mildred Thompson that opened a year ago in Düren, Germany continues in Valenciennes, France, though only her semisculptural wall pieces will be exhibited (the one illustrated here is from the Düren exhibition):

March 12, 2010 6 p.m., opening

Place: Galerie Laquarium, 6 rue Ferrand, 59300 Valenciennes

Falling Through the Cracks: "Folium darwinii" at the Seen Gallery, Decatur, through March 17

One of the many pitfalls of transitional art reviewing in metro Atlanta is that shows presenting a certain number of practical and conceptual challenges tend to slip by unreviewed.

"Folium darwinii" is an exceptionally interesting portfolio of prints produced in 2009 for the Darwin bicentenary by Asheville Book Works and the Atlanta Printmakers Studio. My attempt to photograph the individual works failed dismally and insofar as I can determine from a quick survey of websites, the actual pieces are not reproduced online.

The works range from an attractively ambitious timeline with portraits to allegories of the voyage of the Beagle to an evocatively lyrical nightscape. The whole portfolio holds its own against other Darwin homages from the bicentennial year, and deserves the kind of reflectively critical review that I have found myself unable to write for a wide variety of reasons.

Apparently no one else was able to write one, either. As one might expect from a collaboration that was based on a call for entries from two membership organizations, some of the contributions are more conceptually inspired than others, but none are unworthy of consideration. In a less disordered art critical universe than the one we currently inhabit, "Folium darwinii" would have gotten its due, even if that due would have included some moments of negative critique.

In the year 2009, in the American South, the simple collaboration on an homage to Charles Darwin, using traditional printmaking media for contemporary critical purposes, was a political act as well as an artistic intervention. It should have stirred at least a little conversation.

But first somebody would have had to have found the time and the mental energy to discuss the individual pieces in some depth, evaluating their successes and failures and asking whether any of them delivered a successfully complex message as well as an aesthetically pleasing homage to the author of The Origin of Species.

And this, for many reasons, I was unable to do. Given competing needs and the brief time remaining before the close of the exhibition, I am assuming that no one else will feel inclined to do so, either.

If they do, I hope they find it easier to produce acceptable photographs of the artwork.

Limitless horizons, or museum illusions, with theremin

The Roman playwright Terence (I think) is famous for his “Homo sum; puto nihil humanum alienum a me.” Kwame Anthony Appiah points out that this Family of Man type of saying, “I’m a human being; I don’t think anything human is alien from me” is followed up with the line that therefore “if I think you’re right, I’ll leave you alone; if I think you’re wrong, I’ll endeavor to set you right.”

But those of us who never feel completely at home in any situation are painfully aware of the problem of communicating across cultural boundaries, including the communities we actually live in, and of the particular difficulties of ever “being right.”

So imagine my surprise the other weekend when I dropped by Agnes Scott College’s art gallery to take another look at “Limitless,” and found myself in the midst of what appeared to be a tour group of retirees from Eastern Europe. I imagined how the tour guide must be challenged with explaining Didi Dunphy’s padded see-saws, E. K. Huckaby’s deliberately distressed paintings and Department of Dysiatrics, Klimchak’s theremin and homemade musical instruments, and Martha Whittington’s erasing machine, where its origins in a Leonardo da Vinci design would be the easy part of the explanation.

Actually, the group was as sophisticated as you would expect a tour group from somewhere in the former Soviet bloc to be, one of them asking to be reminded if the theremin wasn’t invented by a Russian “twenty, thirty years in the last century” (meaning the 1920s-1930s), and another taking enormous pleasure in Huckaby’s not-so-Southern Gothic sensibilities and asking how to get in touch with the artist.

I was tremendously worried, though, as to what they would think of Joe Peragine’s huge, allegorical diorama of a military invasion, a commentary on the tidied-up world of history dioramas in general. Peragine mixes historical era and levels of skill, emphasizing the artificiality of the diorama genre by using unpainted cardboard cutouts in the foreground, more convincingly painted ship models behind those, and a large background painting continuing the theme of overwhelming seapower, with fleets of B52-like bombers massed in formation overhead.

It’s a complex commentary on how we perceive the messiness of history through a romanticized filter. (The luridly sentimentalized colors of the backdrop refer to Peragine’s previous series of paintings exploring this topic.) I suspected that all the retirees would see was a vivid reminder of the Wehrmacht rolling across the plains of Ukraine and Byelorussia or blitzing the cities of the Russian Front.

And I was right. They said through their translator that this reminded them of things they had seen in the Second World War, and one wanted to know if this represented a specific battle. So the work required some explanation of the place of artifice in the representation of history and how combining successive generations of military hardware and levels of sophistication in the representation meant that…well, actually, gallery director Lisa Alembik and I made no such remarks. She did talk about museums and how they tidy up history with adorable miniatures when the original was a big, horrible in-your-face reality. This latter fact, these folks remembered very well.

When I asked where they were from, there was a debate about how to describe “a country that no longer exists,” and the translator settled on, specifically not Russia, but “the former Soviet Union.” (From the discussion I began to wonder if they were from two or three adjacent former Soviet republics; one of the younger members of the group, perhaps even from the immediate postwar generation, introduced herself in English as being from Leningrad.)

In any case, I suspect their country was indeed still the Soviet Union when most of them left it to come live in metro Atlanta. I once learned from the daughter of a post-WW2 Russian émigré that many members of the postwar emigration never completely mastered English even after decades of living as almost the only foreigners in the smaller cities that accepted them. Later generations of émigrés would presumably have faced even greater challenges of adopting a very different language later in their lives.

The young translator, whether out of incomprehension of my question (but not because of any lack of fluency) or unwillingness to discuss it further, would say no more than these were part of a local adult day care program that arranged day excursions. “Adult day care” might be taken to imply some degree of impairment, but the only obstacle these folks were facing was a need for company and a lack of fluency in the English language.

So I felt I had had an instructive day trip, myself. Just when you think you have gotten to know all the diverse communities in this very multicultural burg, another one confronts you with a challenge of translation in more ways than one. I once wrote about the challenges of writing art reviews just tailored for audiences aged eighteen to eighty who shared historic U.S. ethnicities; throw in not just the rest of the United States but the rest of the planet, and—well, there you have it. On the internet, but not only on the internet, the world is already here. (But the whole world is not watching, and that too is part of the problem.)

But the Truth Is Simple

I suppose that since Image Not Available didn't reach a level beyond the standard Collector's Discount on Listed Retail at the auction, I ought to play the art version of Seinfeld's soup Nazi: "No private artist's statement for you!"

The physical portion of the work can be viewed here: http://joculum.livejournal.com/243961.html#cutid1

As is stated there (and as wasn't actually visible at the auction, either), the words "image not available" are hand-printed in gloss on the seemingly blank matte white canvas. The object on the square canvas below it is a small branch coated with acrylic gesso, so it isn't an image any more than the words about lack of an image. It's the real thing.

The art historical precursors are pretty obvious (Malevich, Ad R., Magritte, Yves Klein, Tino Sehgal), beginning with witnesses to an invisible spirituality and ending with purveyors of invisible zones of commerce. The bluntly commercial offer made in the poorly written artist's statement framed above the painting(s) has now been carried out.

The presence of the material question, however, does not negate the question of the spiritual. What we don't see, don't notice, or deny is even there remains a presence and a problem just as much as the fact that the words that elucidate this mystery are invisible in all but the most unusual of lighting conditions. (I did manage to photograph them, more or less. But only the word "not" is legible.)

It's Complicated

It’s Complicated; or, And Now for a Completely Gratuitous Moment of Unconcealed Self-Promotion

Jerry Cullum

The retail value of Image Not Available as listed online for the 11th Annual Art Papers Auction (www.artpapers.org) is for the artwork illustrated only. The originally listed retail value, not amenable to automated formats, was “It’s complicated.”

As set forth in a framed artist’s statement, which should appear above the artwork on the wall and which has been added free of charge as an additional incentive for bidding, the shape of the final artwork will be determined by the final purchase price and by factors to be determined by the artist.

The "value" of the final artwork is thus a variable function of the final auction sale price.

If and only if the price and other concealed but arguably rational factors make the gesture appropriate, the artist will provide an explanatory text that completes the artwork, for the purchaser’s exclusive use and enjoyment. If any of the unstated conditions are not met, the artist reserves the right not to provide such text, or to make such text publicly available to any such persons as he deems fit. The definition of “arguably rational factors” shall be determined by the artist and not by the purchaser and need not be disclosed upon delivery of the artwork. Image rights to the nonverbal components of Image Not Available are to be made publicly available to all potential users for noncommercial and scholarly purposes by Creative Commons license, or something like that that meets the actual requirements of legally binding description of availability.

I just thought y’all ought to know.

If a spoilsport Buys It Now, you won’t get to go through all this fun. The Complimentary Framed Statement will be yours to keep in any case along with the original artwork, to avoid pointless legal proceedings. Rights to the text of the Complimentary Framed Statement, including the production of subsequent limited or unlimited editions of said Statement, are retained by the artist for his sole use and for any such purposes as he deems fit. Purchaser may quote said text under current laws governing Fair Use.