Monday, April 13, 2015

Beyond Click Bait Monday

Your Golden Hair, Margarete, 1980
Anselm Kiefer (German, born 1945)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Good morning art reads:

1.  R.I.P Gunther Grass. Tributes will fly today, weighing Grass' importance, his victories, and his controversies. For those that love his fiction, however, it will just be a sad day, an opportunity to return to the absurd and incredible Tin Drum and other massive works by this German attempting to exist in the wake of World War II:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/13/gunter-grass-german-nobel-laureate-dies-aged-87


2. Elger Esser has a great show of photographs currently at Rose Galley in Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, a show on which I hope to have a full post soon. The following link is good introduction to this important photographer's career, though some of the discussion about the Becher school gets a little sticky. More to come.

http://www.dw.de/elger-esser-captures-the-landscapes-of-longing/a-16085726

3. I hope this becomes a wonderful trend: the Metropolitan Museum of Art now allows one to download 422 of its old catalogues for free. In a world where such books go out of print quickly and can only be found in expensive used editions (if one is lucky), this is a contribution to the spirit of research and knowledge that embodies the best of museum practices. Now, if only that $25 dollar suggested donation at the door of Met didn't feel so pressing . . .

http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/download-422-free-art-books-from-the-metropolitan-museum-of-art.html

4. James Wood has long been one of America's most cogent and accessible critics. I found the following account of his career and development to be enlightening, especially how he synthesized theoretical accounts of literature into a very practical, "This is what literature does in your life and why it's important," approach to writing.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/05/critic-james-wood-religious-view-of-fiction


5. I will definitely read this book. I am convinced that Colm Tóibín's advice is always worth taking in terms of book recommendations.

http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/022_01/14368


This week's video:


6. Henryk Górecki's third symphony appeared on the soundtrack of Paolo Sorrentino's film, La grande bellezza, which won the Oscar for best foreign film in 2013. The symphony is basically one repeated tone over three movements, interlaced with vocals and other instrumentation that flavor and change the character of the tones as they repeat. The three movements each feature different poetic lyrics and texts about mothers mourning their lost children: one is Christian text about Mary, the mother of Jesus, the second is a text written on the wall of a concentration camp during World War II, and the third, lyrics from a Polish folk song. I admit I've been a little obsessed with it. The symphony is simply too beautiful and tragic not to share. This video features a recording that I think is wonderful. If you don't have time for all of it, the third movement is the true highlight, it starts at 35:54.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIvEtzGEVTA


Poem for the week:

7. Persimmon Tree is an online magazine dedicated to the work of women over 60, and this issue from 2011 has sixteen poems by Kay Ryan, who was named poet laureate of the United States in 2008. The top poem, Spiderweb, is about scale, specifically that how we see is often determined and biased by scale. The poem starts there but then becomes wonderfully expansive. I, for instance, thought of all the times when I admire the ease and grace with which certain people live their lives, only to discover their deep pain and difficulty later. We often don't understand the weight of other people's burdens.

http://www.persimmontree.org/v2/summer-2011/sixteen-poems/


One click deeper: 

8. Now, one click deeper in the case of the Kay Ryan is the poem Design by Robert Frost. It too deals with scale, but, now, the spider does not carry a burden but instead is blessed (and I use this word in a demented way as you will see) with incredible power. While Ryan illuminates the local, Frost reaches for the numinous. Putting the poems together is a dark exercise indeed.

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/design