Fragments about Raft of the Medusa

fragment 1:
On his return to Paris, Géricault exhibited Raft of the Medusa at the 1819 Salon. Although it received the gold medal, it also caused a political scandal because of its subject. The potential sinking of the frigate Medusa took place in June 1816, near the West African coast. The crew left 150 passengers to their fate on a raft. When, two weeks later, the raft was found, there were only 15 survivors, 5 of them died after rescue. The case was silenced by the government; and when, a year later, it became public knowledge and caused criticism of governmental negligence and corruption, related to the instance.

fragment 2: On the Composition of the figures in the painting from http://www.geocities.com/rr17bb/geri1.html
The division of four dramatic groups determined the entire subsequent composition. The group of dead, dying or despondent men was the core from which the whole composition originally grew and the first group to be fully developed. The four men who stand, alert and watchful, on the other side of the mast form a second group. This group took shape very early and changed little in the further development. The third group composed of men who struggle to rise to their feet. It is the most vividly pantomimic of the groups, Gericault kept modifying these figures until the end, gradually increasing their number from three to five. The fourth group consists of three men who mount some barrels at the Raft's forward end and signal to the Argus. It is the most important of the four groups, that gives a culmination to the dramatic narrative and compositional structure of the Medusa. Yet it is the last that he invented. The Nero's powerful torso stands out against the sky high above the horizon, the cloth unfurling in the wind from his uplifted arm and gives the scene a splendid climax.
fragment 3: from http://www.victorianweb.org/art/crisis/crisis4d.html
Géricault's influence made such close-up views of imperiled mariners and the ship in danger popular in Romantic painting. For example, Delacroix, who paints few explicit shipwrecks, employs such a vantage-point in Dante and Virgil (1822, Louvre), Christ on the Sea of Galilee (1854, Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore), and The Shipwreck of Don Juan (1840, Louvre), and one encounters it in the works of Ryder, Homer, Stanfield, Turner, and many others.
Géricault, however, did not rely solely upon a close vantage-point to encourage the spectator's empathy with the endangered victims of sea disaster. In an intermediate version of the picture, which Eitner calls Hailing an Approaching Rowing-boat, he first made the decisive changes of employing a close vantage-point and also opposing the position of the nearby victims to the distant one of their rescuers. As Either has shown, 'The effect of the scene now hinges on the juxtaposition of near and far elements' (26). The closeness of the raft leads the spectator to identify with those on board, and his eye is led by their actions to the small boat approaching. Géricault intensified this crucial juxtaposition in the final version, in which the men on the raft experience, not hope, but disappointment:
His final enlargement of the figures was intended not only to give them the impressiveness - or 'sublimity', to use Delacroix's word which a superhuman scale can confer, it was also to serve an expressive function essential to the meaning of the picture. Without representing the vastness of the ocean directly, Géricault sought to dramatize the isolation of the men on the Raft and the strain of their effort, by withdrawing beyond hope the rescue, toward which they [195/196] defiantly strive. He activated the distance, making it appear as a plunging recession, rather than a horizontal expanse, and intensified the illusion or space by means of radical foreshortenings. The enormous foreground figures push the horizon back; the few inches of canvas which separate the signaling men from the speck which signifies the Argus demand to be read as miles. It was clearly Géricault's purpose to draw the beholder into a close, empathetic participation with the action of his picture, and to make him feel the drama of the scene with his muscles as much as with his eyes.
More Here: http://www.victorianweb.org/art/crisis/contents.html

more about The Raft:
The artist has a nose for truth. He does not doubt the officers' account of the causes of the original shipwreck. The pig-headed assumption of power by people unfit to rule - the Captain and his cronies - is allowed to stand as a symbol for the parlous state of France under the recently restored Bourbons. The Captain's perfectly able second-in-command is prevented from saving the day by a mixture of ineptitude and the perfidy that so often surfaces in ineptitude's wake.
Underpinning it all is an assiduously crafted set of perceptions, with the painting as a frequently reiterated microcosm of early 19th-century France and its mixture of refinement and grossness, its shambolic political instability. There is a sense of immutable patterns of cyclical injustice, inequality and occasional reform.

In Progress: 2 details

Holy Land U.S.A.

Schama on Kiefer

Above images Anselm Kiefer.

Simon Schama from "Landscape and Memory"

Kiefer: "In 1945, after the 'accident'as it is so emphatically put, people thought now we start from scratch. The past was taboo, [my] dragging it up only caused repulsion and distaste." He was committed to becoming a cultural nuisance, worrying away at the scabs of memory until they revealed open and livid wounds again.

Kiefer was provocative, even brazen about his challenge to conventional decorum, confessing that to understand fascism he needed to some degree to re-enact its megalomania. The stance was perverse, threatening, daring to be misunderstood, which it certainly was. But he was saved from obscene tomfoolery about the crematoria by his aggressive historicism, born, I believe, from an authentic determination to explore the modern fate of landscape myth.

As he announced in a series of self-consciously grandiose paintings, the Bilderstreit (The Dispute of Paintings), Kiefer had more weighty things on his mind then silk-screened Marilyns. And to express those things, he needed a reinvention of traditional forms; above all, landscape and history painting.

Kiefer was concerned with a different kind of integrity: that of the undisguised storyteller, the orchestrator of a visual Gesamtkunstwerk: a total experience, at once operatic, poetic, and epic. So he pushed the plane back down, using aggressively deep perspective to create the big operatic spaces in which his histories could be enacted.

At the core of this strategy of embarrassment was an obsinate determination to force together culturally acceptable elements of the German heroic and mythic tradition with its unacceptable historical consequences.

The Day after Columbus Day

a few choice quotes directly from Mr. Columbus's diary, on occasion of meeting the natives. From Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

From the pen of Columbus:

They [the Arawak villiagers]...brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned...They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features...They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane...They would make fine servants...With fifty men we could subjugate them and
make them do whatever we want.

and:

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some fo the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information [tell him where to find the gold] of whatever there is in these parts.

of course, the Natives were put to work in mines, made slaves of, and killed off, and raped by the thousands. Thousands were sent back to Spain to be slaves, the huge majority of them dying en route. Fifty Eight years after Columbus landed on Haiti only 500 natives were left of the 250,000 original inhabitants. The rest were killed off by working them to death in gold mines, by general slaughter, or shipping them off to Spain for slavery, among other reasons.

The Island of Cuba shared the same fate. A quote from Bartolome de las Casas, a priest who documented the history of the Spanish in the Americas from first hand experience, and also translated Columbus's journal:

The [native] husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides...they ceased to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7,000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation...In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk...and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile...was depopulated...My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write..

and finally, one last quote from Columbus after the slave trade began creating profit:

Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.
-Cristopher Columbus

Running a Bath, and Throwing Out the Baby

I made a drawing from the above image, and called it called "Running a Bath."

the quote below is relevant to the strategy of my work, and to the screenplay I am working on. I think one of the characters will paraphrase this somehow, in a folksy way. I like the idea of throwing out the baby, and confronting the bathwater. It is from Slavoj Zizek in The Plague of Fantasies:

The weak point of the universal multiculturalist gaze does not reside in its incapacity to 'throw out the bathwater without losing the baby too': it is deeply wrong to assert that when one throws out the nationalist dirty water ('excessive' fanaticism), one should be careful not to lose the baby of the 'healthy' national identity - that is to say, one should trace the line of separation between the proper degree of 'healthy' nationalism which guarantees the necessary minimum of national identity, and 'excessive' (xenophobic, agressive) nationalism. Such a common-sense distinction reproduces the very nationalist reasoning which aims at getting rid of the 'impure' excess. One is therefore tempted to propose an analogy with psychoanalytic treatment, whose aim is also not to get rid of the dirty water (of symptoms, of pathological tics) in order to keep the baby (the kernel of the healthy Ego) safe, but, rather, to throw out the baby (to suspend the patient's Ego) in order to confront the patient with his/her 'dirty water', with the symptoms and fantasies which structure his jouissance. In the matter of national identity, one should also endeavour to throw out the baby (the spiritual purity of the national identity) in order to reveal the phantasmic support which structures the jouissance in the national Thing.

what is a good symbol of the "Baby" of American national identity? What is the untouchable symbol that no one has really taken on, even by the most ardent critics of American National Identity?

Painting I Could Learn a Thing or Two From

Ernst Fuchs's The Peacock

Fuch's Southern French Landscape
http://www.ernstfuchs-zentrum.com/

Twilight of the Gleaners

Currently I am working on a series of paintings of piles of computers that suggest human habitation. In India there are dumps where communities of gleaners live, many of them orphans. They live in the dumps, and by day sift through the gigantic mounds of waste, and sell the findings for next to nothing to brokers. Above are images of electroscrap gleaners. Thousands of tons of computers, tvs, cellphones, etc. are shipped to poor communities all over the world by the U.S. under the auspices of a recycling project, but it is really just a cheap way of exporting toxic waste, since huge fines are leveled on dumps that take toxic waste, and it costs so much to responsibly dump these computers. This is one of the dark sides to globalization, and the utopian promises of connectivity via internet, instant media, etc. The computer I currently am working on is comprised entirely of shit people didn't want anymore that I have built into a mostly perfectly functioning desktop. It looks like hell, but works mostly fine. Every day Americans toss thousands of pounds of this stuff. Every monitor, or TV you seen on the sidewalk on garbage day, or otherwise, has an 80% chance of ending up in a poor area somewhere else in the world, the dumping grounds of America, making these places the outlands of our privileged, globalization civilization.

Below are facts and images compiled by BAN (Basil Action Network.) The Basil Treaty has been signed by all European and 1st world nations like Japan...the only glaring hold out is our United States, which produces the most electronic waste. The treaty basically states that a nation will not export electronic waste to developing or impoverished nations, and instead will responsibly deal with the waste it produces on it's own territory.

*All facts and images gleaned from www.crra.com/ewaste/ttrash2/ttrash2/

with credits going to: Jim Puckett, BAN Leslie Byster, SVTC Sarah Westervelt, BAN Richard Gutierrez, BAN Sheila Davis, MFF Asma Hussain, SCOPE Madhumitta Dutta, Toxics Link India Edited by: Jim Puckett, BAN Ted Smith, SVTC
China Investigative Team: Clement Lam, Investigator, Interpreter Jim Puckett, Investigator

*1. Millions of pounds of electronic waste (E-Waste) from obsolete computers and TVs are being generated in the U.S. each year and huge amounts -- an estimated 50% to 80% collected for recycling -- is being exported.

*2. This export is due to cheaper labor, lack of environmental standards in Asia, and because such export is still legal in the United States.

*3.The E-waste recycling and disposal operations found in China, India, and Pakistan are extremely polluting and likely to be very damaging to human health. Examples include open burning of plastic waste, exposure to toxic solders, river dumping of acids, and widespread general dumping.

*4. Contrary to all principles of environmental justice, the United States, rather than banning exports of toxic E-waste to developing countries, is actually facilitating their export.

*5. China has banned the import of E-Waste and yet the United States refuses to honor that ban by preventing exports to them.

*6. Due to a severe lack of responsibility on the part of the federal government and the electronics industry, consumers, recyclers and local governments are left with few viable, sustainable options for E-waste.

On Monsters

"The 'monster' comes to embody Frankenstein's inner monstrocity-aspects of himself which he finds dangerous or unacceptable."-Sarah Kember "NITS and NRTS."

Below from Monsters by John Michael Greer:

"The word 'monster' comes from the Latin monstrum, "that which is shown forth or revealed." The same root also appears in the English word "demonstrate," and several less common words (such as "remonstrance") that share the same sense of revealing, disclosing, or displaying. In the original sense of the word, a monster is a revelation, something shown forth.

This may seem worlds away from the usual modern meaning of the word "monster"-a strange, frightening, and supposedly mythical creature-but here, as elsewhere in the realm of monsters, appearances decieve. Certainly, monsters are strange, at least to those raised in modern ways of approaching the world. As we'll see, too, monsters have a great deal to do with the realm of myth, although this latter word (like "monster" itself) has older and deeper meanings that evade our modern habits of thought. The association between monsters and terror, too, has practical relevance, even when the creatures we call "monsters" fear us more than we fear them.

The myth, the terror and the strangeness all have their roots in the nature of the realm of monsters and the monstrous-a world of revelations, where the hidden and the unknown show furtive glimpses of themselves. If we pay attention to them, monsters do have something to reveal. They show us the reality of the impossible, or of those things that we label impossible; they point out that the world we think we live in, and the world we actually inhabit, may not be the same place at all.

On Meaning of the Monstrous

For thousands of years, monstrous beings have been a source of revelations of this kind. In earlier times, in fact, monsters and what they showed forth were seen as matters of very great importance. Monsters were news, and not just for the reasons that draw crowds to monster movies and UFO sighting areas nowadays.

To the ancient Greeks and Romans, for example, the appearance of any strange being waas a message from the hidden realms of existence, and needed interpretations by skilled professionals. ...the appearance of monsters could be read and understood by the wise, and used to cast light on future events, the unknowns of the present, and the always-mysterious purposes of the gods and goddesses.

...The monkish chroniclers of medieval times noted sightings of werewolves and mermaids in much the same spirit that leads modern newspapers to report the doing of such equally mysterious entities as the Gross National Product. The appearance of a monster was news, not just because of what the monster was, but because of what it meant-in other words, what it showed forth about the universe and humanity's place in it." -John Michael Greer

Below from David D. Gilmore "Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors." :

"...I have always believed-perhaps based more on intuition than anything else-that the endless fascination with monsters derives from a complex mix of emotions and is not simply reducible to the standard Freudian twins of aggression and repression. The point of this book is to show that for most pepole monsters are sources of identification and awe as well as of horror, and they serve also as vehicles for the expiation of guilt as well as aggression: there is a strong sense in which the monster is an incarnation of the urge for self-punishment and a unified metaphhor for both sadism and victimization (after all, the horrible monster is always killed off. usually in the most gruesome manner imaginable, by humans.) We have to address this issue of dualism, of emotive ambivalence, in which the monster stands for both the victim and the victimizer."
-David D. Gilmore

Who are the monsters in your neighborhood?

Apocalyptic Painting

Image: John Martin The Last Man

On the Strategy of Apocalyptic Imagination:

"...to locate humanity within a cycle of cosmic time, and to legitimate or subvert the structures of existing power through the resources of Myth. It is a way of ordering experience that gives a grand, overreaching shape to History, and thus ultimate meaning to the lives of individuals caught up in History's Stream." -Paul Boyer

My work is not Apocalyptic in the moral sense, nor is it Futuristic...it lacks religeous meaning, is relatively amoral, and is about now.