by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning [1962]
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Musee des Beaux Arts, W.H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. [1938]
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. [1938]
Ovid on Icarus
These, as the angler at the silent brook,
Or mountain-shepherd leaning on his crook,
Or gaping plowman, from the vale descries,
They stare, and view 'em with religious eyes,
And strait conclude 'em Gods; since none, but they,
Thro' their own azure skies cou'd find a way.
[Ovid, Metamorphosis, VIII:183-235, Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et al trans.]
Or mountain-shepherd leaning on his crook,
Or gaping plowman, from the vale descries,
They stare, and view 'em with religious eyes,
And strait conclude 'em Gods; since none, but they,
Thro' their own azure skies cou'd find a way.
[Ovid, Metamorphosis, VIII:183-235, Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et al trans.]
Bruegel's Icarus
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1558
by Pieter Bruegel
hi-res image
it's like Where's Icarus?
by Pieter Bruegel
hi-res image
it's like Where's Icarus?
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Review of Jeff's work
STAGES OF TRANSCENDENCE -
Sculptor Jeff Becker's twin exhibits beautifully blend a stage designer's sense of drama with a post-K sense of dread
Friday, December 21, 2007
By Doug MacCash, Art critic
The students at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts may be just high-school age. But a list of their visual arts teachers reads like a university faculty. Keith Perelli, Erzy Schwartz, Mary Jane Parker, Courtney Egan: The roll call of instructors is a list of some of the most accomplished artists in the Crescent City.
NOCCA sculpture teacher Jeff Becker is best known for his ambitious, inventive stage designs that date back to the 1990s. Times-Picayune theater critic David Cuthbert described Becker's set for ArtSpot's 2004 production of "Maid of Orleans" as a "brilliant piece of stagecraft," including a "whirling circular platform . . . ingeniously refashioned into a gyroscope."
Becker, 44, sees the ingenious, toy-like sculpture he's produced over the past two years as models for possible future stage designs. Clusters of miniature bombs hang beneath a tiny couch, bed and easy chair. The small-scale furniture hangs like surrealistic porch swings beneath the wings of abstract stealth bombers. Marionettes, holding bells in their tiny hands, balance precariously atop tall metal towers that sway back and forth on rounded bottoms. Other marionettes are carried toward the heavens by old-fashioned hot air balloons.
Becker envisions real live actors someday seated on life-sized versions of his dangling furniture, rocking atop his towers and swaying beneath his balloons. He probably has the skills to pull it off.
From welded iron, to cast paper pulp, to poured bronze, to embossed metal repousse, Becker has mastered myriad sculptural techniques. But he tells his students that technique shouldn't be their first concern.
"Don't worry about the how," he tells them, "worry about the what."
The what, in Becker's recent works, is flight.
"I'm intrigued by how our desire to fly has created innovations and consequences that are ongoing and unpredictable," he said.
But he's not just interested in flight as it pertains to aircraft; he's interested in flight in the sense of fleeing danger. Becker and his family fled Hurricane Katrina to Charleston, S.C., where they spent three months on what he sarcastically calls a "hurrication."
He said he didn't exactly set out to create metaphors for New Orleans' jarring experience when he returned to art making. But like so many artists, the trauma seeped into his work anyway.
As Becker pointed out, a pair of feet being carried aloft by wings brings to mind the helicopter rescue of so many stranded citizens. A cow borne by a hot air balloon implies a search for "greener pastures." The suitcases and figurines that dangle from balloons at the Contemporary Arts Center symbolize "people and possessions that are caught in some state of limbo awaiting eventual transcendence."
For Becker, transcendence has come sooner. The beautifully made, whimsical objects in his pair of exhibits deftly describe the longing for deliverance so many of us in post-Katrina New Orleans still have somewhere deep in our hearts.
Though Becker has shown his sculpture regularly in local group shows, the current twin shows represent a solo breakout for the high-flying artist, who says he will translate some of the designs into stage sets for an Artspot production titled "Flight" at the CAC in June.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
vocalizing in the dark 12-10 session
this links to an 8mb, 10 minute file of the 12-10 vocal experiment
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Cocteau's Blood of a Poet
I'd like us to watch Blood of a Poet (45 min., I could do excerpts if necessary). There are some nice ways of disorienting space that if so inspired we can draw on. Also, Cocteau was interested in mixing drawing and the 3-d human form on film - some things I'd like to try with mixing the body with projection. The image of the man falling into the pool of water began with him looking into a mirror that exactly fit the size of the pool - with the cut, it appeared he was passing into the mirror with a splash.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Emergence
since we've been doing so much flocking, here's a little info about it. Evidently scientists have worked hard to figure out how flocking happens, and it's because of something called Emergence. from what I gather it's a phenomenon found in self-organizing systems, and guess what else is a self-organizing system? a hurricane. the link takes you to a pbs site and there's a video too.
-Courtney
-Courtney
Monday, December 10, 2007
Video on Blog
I will start posting video on the artspot server, and Sean or I will email you and post the links to the video here.
look for it after Friday.
look for it after Friday.
Friday, December 7, 2007
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Art serves evolution!
Scientists concur: Art creates and cements community.
And it all starts with the babies, the babies and their mothers . . .
from today's NY Times
The Dance of Evolution, or How Art Got Its Start
By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: November 27, 2007
If you have ever been to a Jewish wedding, you know that sooner or later the ominous notes of “Hava Nagila” will sound, and you will be expected to dance the hora. And if you don’t really know how to dance the hora, you will nevertheless be compelled to join hands with others, stumble around in a circle, give little kicks and pretend to enjoy yourself, all the while wondering if there’s a word in Yiddish that means “she who stares pathetically at the feet of others because she is still trying to figure out how to dance the hora.”
I am pleased and relieved to report that my flailing days are through. This month, in a freewheeling symposium at the University of Michigan on the evolutionary value of art and why we humans spend so much time at it, a number of the presenters supplemented their standard PowerPoint presentations with hands-on activities. Some members of the audience might have liked folding the origami boxes or scrawling messages on the floor, but for me the high point came when a neurobiologist taught us how to dance the hora. As we stepped together in klezmeric, well-schooled synchrony, I felt free and exhilarated. I felt competent and loved. I felt like calling my mother. I felt, it seems, just as a dancing body should.
In the main presentation at the conference, Ellen Dissanayake, an independent scholar affiliated with the University of Washington, Seattle, offered her sweeping thesis of the evolution of art, nimbly blending familiar themes with the radically new. By her reckoning, the artistic impulse is a human birthright, a trait so ancient, universal and persistent that it is almost surely innate. But while some researchers have suggested that our artiness arose accidentally, as a byproduct of large brains that evolved to solve problems and were easily bored, Ms. Dissanayake argues that the creative drive has all the earmarks of being an adaptation on its own. The making of art consumes enormous amounts of time and resources, she observed, an extravagance you wouldn’t expect of an evolutionary afterthought. Art also gives us pleasure, she said, and activities that feel good tend to be those that evolution deems too important to leave to chance.
What might that deep-seated purpose of art-making be? Geoffrey Miller and other theorists have proposed that art serves as a sexual display, a means of flaunting one’s talented palette of genes. Again, Ms. Dissanayake has other ideas. To contemporary Westerners, she said, art may seem detached from the real world, an elite stage on which proud peacocks and designated visionaries may well compete for high stakes. But among traditional cultures and throughout most of human history, she said, art has also been a profoundly communal affair, of harvest dances, religious pageants, quilting bees, the passionate town rivalries that gave us the spires of Chartres, Reims and Amiens.
Art, she and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade — a proposal not surprisingly shared by our hora teacher, Steven Brown of Simon Fraser University. Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what Ms. Dissanayake calls “artifying,” people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world. As David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary theorist at Binghamton University, said, the only social elixir of comparable strength is religion, another impulse that spans cultures and time.
A slender, soft-spoken woman with a bouncy gray pageboy, a grandchild and an eclectic background, Ms. Dissanayake was trained as a classical pianist but became immersed in biology and anthropology when she and her husband moved to Sri Lanka to study elephants. She does not have a doctorate, but she has published widely, and her books —the most recent one being “Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began” — are considered classics among Darwinian theorists and art historians alike.
Perhaps the most radical element of Ms. Dissanayake’s evolutionary framework is her idea about how art got its start. She suggests that many of the basic phonemes of art, the stylistic conventions and tonal patterns, the mental clay, staples and pauses with which even the loftiest creative works are constructed, can be traced back to the most primal of collusions — the intimate interplay between mother and child.
After studying hundreds of hours of interactions between infants and mothers from many different cultures, Ms. Dissanayake and her collaborators have identified universal operations that characterize the mother-infant bond. They are visual, gestural and vocal cues that arise spontaneously and unconsciously between mothers and infants, but that nevertheless abide by a formalized code: the calls and responses, the swooping bell tones of motherese, the widening of the eyes, the exaggerated smile, the repetitions and variations, the laughter of the baby met by the mother’s emphatic refrain. The rules of engagement have a pace and a set of expected responses, and should the rules be violated, the pitch prove too jarring, the delays between coos and head waggles too long or too short, mother or baby may grow fretful or bored.
To Ms. Dissanayake, the tightly choreographed rituals that bond mother and child look a lot like the techniques and constructs at the heart of much of our art. “These operations of ritualization, these affiliative signals between mother and infant, are aesthetic operations, too,” she said in an interview. “And aesthetic operations are what artists do. Knowingly or not, when you are choreographing a dance or composing a piece of music, you are formalizing, exaggerating, repeating, manipulating expectation and dynamically varying your theme.” You are using the tools that mothers everywhere have used for hundreds of thousands of generations.
In art, as in love, as in dancing the hora, if you don’t know the moves, you really can’t fake them.
And it all starts with the babies, the babies and their mothers . . .
from today's NY Times
The Dance of Evolution, or How Art Got Its Start
By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: November 27, 2007
If you have ever been to a Jewish wedding, you know that sooner or later the ominous notes of “Hava Nagila” will sound, and you will be expected to dance the hora. And if you don’t really know how to dance the hora, you will nevertheless be compelled to join hands with others, stumble around in a circle, give little kicks and pretend to enjoy yourself, all the while wondering if there’s a word in Yiddish that means “she who stares pathetically at the feet of others because she is still trying to figure out how to dance the hora.”
I am pleased and relieved to report that my flailing days are through. This month, in a freewheeling symposium at the University of Michigan on the evolutionary value of art and why we humans spend so much time at it, a number of the presenters supplemented their standard PowerPoint presentations with hands-on activities. Some members of the audience might have liked folding the origami boxes or scrawling messages on the floor, but for me the high point came when a neurobiologist taught us how to dance the hora. As we stepped together in klezmeric, well-schooled synchrony, I felt free and exhilarated. I felt competent and loved. I felt like calling my mother. I felt, it seems, just as a dancing body should.
In the main presentation at the conference, Ellen Dissanayake, an independent scholar affiliated with the University of Washington, Seattle, offered her sweeping thesis of the evolution of art, nimbly blending familiar themes with the radically new. By her reckoning, the artistic impulse is a human birthright, a trait so ancient, universal and persistent that it is almost surely innate. But while some researchers have suggested that our artiness arose accidentally, as a byproduct of large brains that evolved to solve problems and were easily bored, Ms. Dissanayake argues that the creative drive has all the earmarks of being an adaptation on its own. The making of art consumes enormous amounts of time and resources, she observed, an extravagance you wouldn’t expect of an evolutionary afterthought. Art also gives us pleasure, she said, and activities that feel good tend to be those that evolution deems too important to leave to chance.
What might that deep-seated purpose of art-making be? Geoffrey Miller and other theorists have proposed that art serves as a sexual display, a means of flaunting one’s talented palette of genes. Again, Ms. Dissanayake has other ideas. To contemporary Westerners, she said, art may seem detached from the real world, an elite stage on which proud peacocks and designated visionaries may well compete for high stakes. But among traditional cultures and throughout most of human history, she said, art has also been a profoundly communal affair, of harvest dances, religious pageants, quilting bees, the passionate town rivalries that gave us the spires of Chartres, Reims and Amiens.
Art, she and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade — a proposal not surprisingly shared by our hora teacher, Steven Brown of Simon Fraser University. Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what Ms. Dissanayake calls “artifying,” people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world. As David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary theorist at Binghamton University, said, the only social elixir of comparable strength is religion, another impulse that spans cultures and time.
A slender, soft-spoken woman with a bouncy gray pageboy, a grandchild and an eclectic background, Ms. Dissanayake was trained as a classical pianist but became immersed in biology and anthropology when she and her husband moved to Sri Lanka to study elephants. She does not have a doctorate, but she has published widely, and her books —the most recent one being “Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began” — are considered classics among Darwinian theorists and art historians alike.
Perhaps the most radical element of Ms. Dissanayake’s evolutionary framework is her idea about how art got its start. She suggests that many of the basic phonemes of art, the stylistic conventions and tonal patterns, the mental clay, staples and pauses with which even the loftiest creative works are constructed, can be traced back to the most primal of collusions — the intimate interplay between mother and child.
After studying hundreds of hours of interactions between infants and mothers from many different cultures, Ms. Dissanayake and her collaborators have identified universal operations that characterize the mother-infant bond. They are visual, gestural and vocal cues that arise spontaneously and unconsciously between mothers and infants, but that nevertheless abide by a formalized code: the calls and responses, the swooping bell tones of motherese, the widening of the eyes, the exaggerated smile, the repetitions and variations, the laughter of the baby met by the mother’s emphatic refrain. The rules of engagement have a pace and a set of expected responses, and should the rules be violated, the pitch prove too jarring, the delays between coos and head waggles too long or too short, mother or baby may grow fretful or bored.
To Ms. Dissanayake, the tightly choreographed rituals that bond mother and child look a lot like the techniques and constructs at the heart of much of our art. “These operations of ritualization, these affiliative signals between mother and infant, are aesthetic operations, too,” she said in an interview. “And aesthetic operations are what artists do. Knowingly or not, when you are choreographing a dance or composing a piece of music, you are formalizing, exaggerating, repeating, manipulating expectation and dynamically varying your theme.” You are using the tools that mothers everywhere have used for hundreds of thousands of generations.
In art, as in love, as in dancing the hora, if you don’t know the moves, you really can’t fake them.
Falling Up, 2000
ran across this while researching performer - controlled video. another Flight theme, without the "flee" aspect
"Falling Up explores concepts of gravity, flying and many of its related metaphors: the physical self, imagination, and how old beliefs hold us in place, limit and color our experiences. Inspired by inventors and pioneers, the first pilots, astronauts, and digital explorers, we examine moments in the 20th Century where technology enabled us to do something previously impossible and changed how we think forever. We also speculate on future technologies, enabling the body to be transported, modified and projected..."
"Falling Up explores concepts of gravity, flying and many of its related metaphors: the physical self, imagination, and how old beliefs hold us in place, limit and color our experiences. Inspired by inventors and pioneers, the first pilots, astronauts, and digital explorers, we examine moments in the 20th Century where technology enabled us to do something previously impossible and changed how we think forever. We also speculate on future technologies, enabling the body to be transported, modified and projected..."
Jeff's wing piece
The link is to a group of transcripts from the cockpit voice recorders (black boxes) of various flights that crashed. oddly technical and tragic a the same time.
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