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After the launch of my website at Brooklyn’s annual mermaid parade, I can’t seem to quite escape the theme of mermaids. Of course, this is arguably the symbolic point of mermaids, which represent the intensity of an impossible longing which can never be escaped. Most of the mermaid pictures from the 19th century show sailors leaping to their doom in the watery depths, unable to resist the siren song or the beautiful & unreal people who live in a different realm. The besotted swains die in beautiful pale arms which may not even exist…watery arms which may represent strange ideas, inimical to the patterns of life. Like the tale of Apollo and Marsyas, it is a theme which artists come back to again and again. Painters know what it means to embrace self-annihilation following an impossibly gorgeous song which nobody else can seem to hear…
To illustrate this aspect of the mermaid theme…and of art itself–I am returning to Franz Von Stuck, the cofounder of the Munich Succession. Stuck’s mythological themed art transcended the chocolate-box aesthetics of turgid 19th century academic art. It spoke directly to the doom and sadness and impossible dreamlike beauty of life. The mermaids in his art seem to have a carnal energy & bestial strength which is taken directly from human struggle. They embody the wild energy of symbolism and the avant garde as art broke from the glacial forms of 19th century realism. Yet, like the mermaid, which is half one thing and half another, Stuck’s art directly partakes of 19th century realism too. It is superb figurative art and the 20th century would embrace a much different form. Stuck was a transitional artist, and when he was old, his work was regarded as old-fashioned and irrelevant to a generation of artists who witnessed the horrors of industrial warfare in the trenches of the Somme and Verdun.
Most of the successful artists of the 19th century were disgusted by the raw broken forms of early 20th century art, but Stuck, to his enormous credit, recognized that success means being left behind. He taught the next generation of artists the forms he knew so that they could break them to pieces. He used his connections to uplift the careers of his students Hans Purrmann, Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, and Paul Klee. It is ironic that the figurative painter taught a generation of rebels who fractured art and brought it to strange abstruse realms.
There is a dark shadow cast by Stuck’s art as well. The art professor who was married to an American divorcee and taught diverse students from across Eastern Europe had a shadow disciple he never knew about. Stuck was Hitler’s favorite artist from childhood onwards. How different the mermaid’s song sounds in different ears! Did Hitler look at these same sea maidens and see Teutonic beauty? Was Hitler angry that the nostalgic art of the German Empire was debased by 20th century abstraction? It must have been so.
This brings us to a large question which I wish to address more frequently: what is the point of art? People who dislike art will say “there is none” and people who love art will be speechless at the temerity of the question. Yet it is a question which must be asked every generation. Indeed the answers vary from generation to generation, just as the art varies (although I suspect the ultimate answers are of a similar transcendent nature).
When I was younger I imagined that art was like homework…perhaps like an essay. You went home and created the best work which you could in solitude. If you crafted a sufficiently dense tapestry of artistic, literary, and scientific allusions with appropriate bravura and craftsmanship, the world would take note of your ideas. It is a Disney princess view of art, where the pure spirit disdains the ghastly politics of the world until a prince swoops in and takes her to the apex of society… but life has taught me otherwise. Art is like politics…it might BE politics. It is about finding an effective way to share ideas and meaning with a group of people. It is about organizing social networks in order to do so. Perhaps that involves painting mythological allusions from Greco-Roman society or perhaps it involves dance or performance or the internet or even more experimental and unexplored forms.
Art is the mermaid’s song. It is where our ideas of beauty and meaning come from. It is how we conceptualize the world as it is and as it should be. I am unhappy with the world. It seems to be drifting along the way Stuck’s world was when he died (in Munich in 1928 amidst a time of political rancor and a hollow economic boom which was followed by a crippling depression). His true students were busy representing these problems in abstract forms which nobody understood. His shadow student found a more direct way to move people by standing up in Munich and saying “Germany First!” So what is the good of art? How can we stop the would-be-Hitlers. How can we save the fish of the ocean from going extinct?
I don’t know the answer to that, but I am working on it and thinking about it. You should be too.
Artists need to stop navel gazing and concentrating on social problems solved back in the sixties. and look at our real global-sized problems of the Anthropocene. The environmental and economic problems of the world are leaving the corporate and identity art which fills up Chelsea’s galleries far behind. In a hundred years nobody will care about who Tracey Emin slept with, but they might well wonder why the oceans have no fish or how America became a imperial principate. I don’t know if art can help solve these problems, but maybe talking about them can help. In the meantime don’t listen to the corporate siren song of infinite growth and absolute greed which says sit at your cubical 15 hours a day and do what you are told and you might have leather bucket seats. Listen to the artist’s siren song which says “Why? Why? Why? Oh can’t we do better? Oh can’t we come up with new things?”
Imagine that you are sitting in a great baroque theater filled with fashionable and cosmopolitan people from around the world. A hush falls upon the crowd and the house lights go out, plunging you into darkness. There is a palpable intake of breath from the audience, and then trumpets, oboes, French horns, violas, and that haunting musical saw (which is played like a violin but sounds like a warbling ghost) all launch into a dazzling overture which reminds you of the ocean. The music deepens and becomes more ominous and yet more lovely too: it is as though you were sinking down into the briny deep to the nacreous halls of Poseidon. The spotlight shines on the shimmering blue velvet curtain which lifts and behold!
Today, after a long development period I present the Great Flounder! In your mind’s eye you can see the fish–a great behemoth lying on the bottom of the world ocean. Its body is pockmarked like an ancient asteroid. Its great fins are oddly transparent and yet occasionally they flicker to remind you the great sage is alive. Its eyes are huge glabrous pearls glistening in the watery depths—they are blank, yet they see all of the secrets of the ocean deep. If you dared, you could ask the fish a question about the past…about the present…lo verily, about the future itself—that unknowable realm which mortals cannot kin.
Or actually you don’t have to imagine this at all. Together with my friends (a team of brilliant computer programmers) and some books of forbidden lore (lure?) I have built this online oracle for you! Now all of your questions will be answered! Now you will truly know all the secrets of the deep!*
[Timpani pound out a thunderous melody and a cymbal crashes at the crescendo!]
Of course, long-time readers will know that I am a humanist and a rational thinker, so it is possible that this great oracular fish is really a toy, like the magic eight ball, the Ouija board, or the oracle bones. The Mermaid Parade on Saturday was the official launch (the parade was a huge success by the way). I always liked the magical eight ball, fortune cookies, and the fortune telling machine that gives out cards, but their answers were never quite what I wanted to hear. Instead of a bland platitude wouldn’t you prefer an enigmatic yet deep riddle of the sort one encounters in classical drama? For a long time, I sought until I found an oracle which gives such answers. Now you can ask all of your questions too.
This is Great Flounder 1.0 so please, please let me know what you think in the comments below. Perhaps, if your comment is trenchant enough, the great sagacious fish will magically change to be more like what you want! You know you want to click the link! Go on! It is destiny! [fading laughter]
*for novelty purposes only. Void where prohibited. Flounder is not affiliated with that stupid sidekick from “The Little Mermaid” or with the portly naif from “Animal House”
Loteria is a bingo-style game of Latin America (although it descends from an Italian game of the 15th century). A designated frontperson pulls cards from a deck and calls the images out to players with boards/cards marked with the same images. The players are trying to get markers on four squares in a row to win a prize. The card-reader often talks in riddles or humorous rhymes to present the cards–which are appealingly heterogeneous.
As with many other card games through the ages, loteria cards are also used as a mechanism for divination. This brings us to today’s subject: “la sirena” the mermaid card in the lottery game. La sirena is represented as a classical mermaid—a beautiful nude woman with a green fish tale in lieu of legs. As you might imagine, the siren can mean many things when she crops up in divinatory readings—representing all sorts of distaff beauty and beguiling opportunities–but the main message is the one which is read in the boilerplate riddle associated with the cards:
Con los cantos de sirena, no te vayas a marear.
A (bad) translation might be “Don’t let the songs of the siren disorient you.” In Spanish “sirena” is synonymous with dangerous beguilement: the bewitching song and the sea-maiden are one and the same. The mermaid’s tempting beauty disguises a dangerous situation or is, at best, an illusion. This is a standard truism of the prediction business: It is indeed wise to look carefully at all aspects of an apparently desirable opportunity. This is especially true in our mercantile world which has become a rigged marketplace. Anyone looking at the internet will know that every worm online has a hook in it.
Yet look at the siren: she is the standout knockout of the loteria cards. Additionally, she has a mythological gravitas which the flowerpot, the boot, and the saucepan (other loteria cards) sorely lack. Surely her otherworldly beauty (and the beauty of her ocean habitat) have a worth which transcends a sententious admonition about temptation. It is true that mermaids are fantasy, but that doesn’t mean the longing they represent isn’t a puissant force.
Such thoughts also bring us to the dangerous misogyny inherent in mermaid concepts. In classical art and literature, beautiful sea maidens are most often an allegory for the trouble which lust brings men into. This seems unfair to mermaids who should be free to be who they are without being chastened as temptresses. Perhaps the real message of the mermaid is in her fundamental irreconcilable juxtaposition—she is a being who is one thing above and another thing below—a hybrid entity who lives in two incompatible worlds. That sounds like most people torn by the conflict of pursuing our own dreams and being forced by wage capital to help other people work on awful alien dreams which mean nothing to us. Perhaps we should spare some sympathy for the mermaid. That doesn’t mean we should let pretty flippers blind us to the perils of the ocean. Maybe when we look into her lovely features we shouldn’t see a trap, we should see a mirror–ourselves in an impossible predicament we have always been in.
I was going to showcase a mermaid painting from the glorious 19th century–a golden age of exquisite oil painting (when the technique of the masters combined with stupendous wealth and the camera made visual refernces available for the first time without yet stealing the show), but then I looked up at the wall and noticed I have my own mermaid painting–it just isn’t finished yet. So I am afraid the 19th century masters will have to rest on their laurels until another day…and I am also afraid you will have to use your imagination to fill in some of the unfinished details of this work in progress. This is one of the last of my torus-themed paintings, and you can see the great flounder lurking beneath it, preparing to take over as the central leitmotif of this era of my art. The torus is made of a coil of strange purple cells (or rope) which is surmounted by an alien lotus blossom. On the left a classic mermaid sings meltingly of the splendor of the seas, while on the right a trio of sinister dark carnival “mermaids” race towards the enigmatic central shape. All around them the ocean blooms with life–mollusks and crabs desport themselves as a made-up roosterfish swims by and a moray looks on in wonder. Yet humankind is also present. The lost lure with its beguilement and hooks hints at our trickery, although a masked diver suggests we are not inured to the lure of the dep in our own right. Tune in later to see how it looks when it is done!
For the first time in a long time, Ferrebeekeeper is presenting a theme week. This is mermaid week! We will explore the mythology and meaning of fish-people (a theme which occurs again and again throughout world culture). And there is a special treat waiting at the end of the week, when I reveal the project I have been working on for quite a while. I wonder if you can guess what creative project could I possibly be up to involving fish?
We will get back to the exquisite long-haired beauties with perfect figures and beautiful green tails later this week, but let’s start out with the Ningyo, the poignant & disquieting Japanese “mermaid”. The mythical Ningyo is indeed described as a sort of fish-person; but they were far more fish than person with a piscine body covered in jewel-bright scales. They had a strange bestial human head, almost more like a monkey’s face and a quiet beautiful voice like a lilting songbird or a flute.
The Ningyo was reputedly quite delicious and anyone who ate one would experience tremendous longevity…but there was a price. Eating the creature would result in terrible storms and dire misfortune. Additionally eating a magical sentient creature carried…spiritual risks which are hard to quantify but certainly sound detrimental to the immortal soul.
One story about a Ningyo, starts with a humble fisherman from the Wakasa Province (the seafaring “land of seafood” for the Chūbu region of Honshū). He caught a fish with a human face, the likes of which he had never seen and he butchered and prepared the creature as a special banquet for his closest friends and neighbors. Yet one of the guests peaked into the kitchen and saw the doleful eyes of the ningyo’s severed head and warned the other diners not to partake. One woman hid her portion in her furoshiki, and forgot about it. Later, her daughter was hungry and obtained the forgotten fish-morsel and gobbled it up. The woman expected catastrophe, but nothing happened and the whole sorry incident was forgotten…
Except…the little girl grew into womanhood and married and had a family. The people around her lived their lives and, in the course of time, grew old and got sick and died, but she maintained her youth and kept on living and living and living. Everywhere she went the people she cared for grew old and died to the rhythm of human life, but she stood outside watching like a child watching mayflies. She became a lonely religious recluse and eventually, after the better part of a millennium, she returned to the ruined, forgotten port of her childhood and took her own life, unable to bear existing in a world that she stood so far outside of.
The idea of the Ningyo asks uncomfortable question about our relationship with the natural world. Do we consume other beings for our own selfish amelioration or must we do so to survive? The fairytale above also asks painful questions about some of our most treasured fantasies. Would extraordinarily long life be a blessing or would it be a curse? Best of all (but hardest of all) it asks us to look again…at our relationship with the natural world and at our timeframe bias which prohibits us from seeing some of the things that are really happening (since our perspective is too brief).
Actually I feel like fish already actually have bestial human faces and are precious in mysterious ways. Yet we eat them anyway…in ever greater abundance… to the extent that almost all the fish are becoming scarce. Humankind is destroying the ocean, the cradle of life and all-sustaining backstop to every ecosystem. We are doing this, like the fisherman in the tale through a terrifying mixture of ignorance, hunger, and the attempt to impress other people. The Japanese (who have astonishing technological savvy, profound generosity, and enormous erudition) eat whales and dolphins with a special spiteful relish. Is this then our fate, to gobble up our miraculous fellow beings and then live on and on in a world stripped of vitality and meaning? Every thoughtful person I meet, worries that it is so.
Then too there is the other half to the Ningyo myth (unadressed in the myth I told above… that abusing them would lead to storms, inundation, and catastrophe. It is not hard to see parallels in contemporary society. It isn’t only eschatologists, astrophysicists, and ecologists who note the changing temperatures and cannot find analogies in the strange and diverse climate history of our world. Humans live longer and longer (outside of America, I mean) yet the storms grow worse and worse. Have we already eaten the Ningyo?
I am still working away at my flatfish project. Here are four recent drawings/mixed media works which I made. The flounder above is a cosmic flounder and represents humankind’s aspirations for the stars. The mathematicians and engineers (here represented as ancient Egyptians) do their best with the tools and calculations they have available, but the universe is so vast. The flounder represents all Earth life waiting to be lifted to the heavens. As they struggle, insouciant aliens fly by waving. The combination of ancient and modern elements make one think of the biblical ark (which is represented in the next picture. The flounder is, of course, a watery beast and is unmoved by divine wrath, although it does look a bit appalled at the inundation.
Next is a picture of a crude and vigorous flatfish made out of thick lines. The fish swims by a Viking long hall as seabirds wheel about in the sky, but thanks to some trick of the world (or perhaps the artist’s whimsy) a coati is raiding the pumpkins and fruiting vines. Is this scene unfolding in the old world or the new?
Finally, there is a scene of a medieval styleeremitic brother who has forgotten his scriptures and is now contemplating the life-giving sun. A saintly duck and a far-flying swallow look kindly on his devotions, but the monk’s cat seems unmoved by his devotion. Crystals hint that religious fervor is becoming convoluted by the vagaries and appetites of the modern world, which can be witnessed all around the verdant turbot. Yet the fish and its inhabitants maintain a solemn and studious otherworldliness. Whatever this mysterious devotion is, it is represented in each of these 4 fish, but the viewer will have to devote some time and thought of their own in order to elucidate the subject of this devout zeal.
Do you ever miss the 70s? That time will never return (although stagflation and oil crunches might make an unexpected comeback from the weird devil’s brew of bad economic and geopolitical policies which we are experimenting with) however there is a more positive reminder of the age of disco in the very heavens themselves. At present, there are three disco balls in orbit around Earth. The first and most significant is actually a 70s artifact: LAGEOS (Laser Geodynamics Satellite) was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on May 4th 1976. The 408 kilogram (900 pound) satellite has no electronic components ore even moving parts: it is a brass sphere studded with 426 jewel-like retroreflectors. 422 of these retroreflectors are made from fused silica glass (to reflect visible light), however the remaining 4 are germanium, for infrared experiments.
Orbiting the entire planet every 225.70 minutes, LAGEOSl is a pretty stupendous piece of space art in its own right, however it was designed for a serious scientific purpose. Lageos provides an orbiting laser ranging benchmark. To quote space.com:
Over the past 40 years, NASA has used LAGEOS to measure the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates, detect irregularities in the rotation of the planet, weigh the Earth and track small shifts in its center of mass via tiny changes in the satellite’s orbit and distance from Earth.
Measurements made using LAGEOS have also been used to confirm Einstein’s general theory of relativity, since measurements made on this scale demonstrate a measurable “frame dragging effect” (which you are going to have to figure out with some help from your favorite physicist). The satellite also illustrates the Yarkovsky effect, which explains how an object is heated by photons on one side will later emit that heat in a way which slows the object. This latter effect will eventually cause LAGEOS’ orbit to deteriorate and bring it tumbling to Earth. Scientists estimate this will happen 8.4 million years from now, so there is still time to contemplate this sphere. Also there is a small time capsule on board to capture certain scientific truths and human ephemera for the long ages.
LAGEOS was so useful and proved to be such a success that NASA launched an identical sister craft in 1992 (how did I miss all of these interesting events?). This still leaves one disco ball satellite unaccounted for. The final craft is “The Humanity Star” which serves no purpose other than being art. Launched on January 21st of this year (2018), the humanity star is a regular polygonal solid with 65 triangular sides. It is made of carbon fiber embedded with enormously reflective panels and is meant to be seen twinkling in the night sky to make humankind collectively reflect on our shared home, the Earth. The Humanity Star orbits much lower than the LAGEOS satellites. They are 5,900 kilometres (3,700 miles) from Earth’s surface, whereas the humanity star is only 283.4 kilometers (176.1 miles) away from the planet at its perigree. It whips around the Earth every 90 minutes on a circumpolar orbit (which means it is visible from everywhere at some point. You could look up where it is online and go out and find it with fieldglasses. The object glimmers and shimmers in unusual ways, sometimes appearing as bright as Sirius (the brightest star save for the sun), but usually twinkling like barely visible stars. The Humanity Star won’t last long—it is scheduled to fall into Earth’s gravity well and burn up in fall of this year, so check it out before it is gone. The craft was controversial: some serious aerospace mavens objected to launching an object into orbit to serve no purpose other than art, yet, as an artist I am happy to know it is out there. Maybe go look at it and let me know if it inspires you.
Days in May pass so quickly (well maybe not the part in the office…but the part when I got home and was supposed to write my blog). Instead of writing an essay I am going to put up one of my flounder pictures for you. This one is a cellular flounder–a reminder that whenever we look at a living thing it is made up of much smaller individual living things. It is a truth which is hiding in plain sight (like the flounder) but it is continuously astonishing to me. This amoeba flounder reminds to think on the microscopic level too, as we contemplate the world.
Portrait of the Hon. Mrs Ernest Guinness (Frank Dicksee, 1912) oil on canvas
Of all the colors in my paintbox I am most dissatisfied with blue. There are a lot of strong greens and there are vivid cadmium yellows, oranges, and reds. There is ivory black which as dark as the depths of the void and dioxazine violet which is a great purple, but blue is a difficult color. The brightest blues of the sky are from sunlight which has been scattered by the atmosphere. The blues of bird feathers and butterfly wings are from careful refraction of light from reflective structures in the wings: if you ground peacock feathers fine enough there is no more blue….
The main blue pigments in the painter’s palette are cobalt blue (which is ancient and robust but a trifle subdued) ultramarine blue (a sulfur-containing sodium-silicate) which inclines toward purple, and cerulean blue a sky blue cobalt stannate which is painfully expensive. Oh! there is a manganese blue out there in the paint stores, but I never used it until I bought a little tube a month ago, so we’ll see how it turns out: it is sort of a tropical powder blue. They are each beautiful but they each have their problems and none is the pure royal blue in the center of the spectrum which is bright, non-toxic, and lightfast (although the poisonous cobalts and…ultramarine too… last through the long ages). This is why I was excited when my old painter friend Brendan (a raven painting specialist) sent me a link to an article about a new blue pigment.
YInMn blue
The new blue is called YInMn blue. Discovered a couple of years ago by Robin Young, the new blue is lightfast, stable, and seemingly nontoxic (although sometimes in the past problems have taken a while to become evident). The new blue is made of yttrium oxide, indium oxide, and manganese oxide. It seems to be extremely lasting, and best of all it is very very blue. Unfortunately, right now it is expensive (and the paint companies are still testing it out), but I have a feeling it might hit the market soon, and whatever its faults it can’t be worse for one’s health than carcinogenic cobalt.
Kudos to Robin Young for the new color. I can’t wait to get a tube and paint some truly blue flounders…speaking of which, i better head back to the easel.
Regular visitors know that my alter-ego/spirit animal is the flounder (or, at any rate, the flatfish is definitely the leitmotif of this period of my ecology/history themed art). During lunchbreak or on the train I work on little “lesser” flounder drawings. In the near future I plan to put them all on a little internet store…along with some of the prints of the intricate flounder I have been drawing. Also there will be an interactive online flounder…it will all be the glorious artistic unveiling I have been hinting at for a while. You are going to love it!…erm…hopefully. In the mean time though, here are three of the most recent small flounder drawings I do during my busy Midtown days to keep from going crazy. The one at the top is some sort or oracle emerging from the underworld depths of the flounder itself. I don’t know what secrets this augur has…or even what gender they are, but they have brought unfathomable mysteries to light from the cave depths. A vile chef-beast lurks to the right roaring of appetites which can never be sated, while, at left a young mother nurses an infant: the next generation arises to take a place within the great weal, yet always there is appetite.
Speaking of which, this second flounder is meant to evoke the ifrits which always pop out of of ancient middle eastern oil lamps. A mysterious world of gauzy spirits, mystery beasts, and apparitions swirl around the lit lamp, but whether any of these blue spirits offer helpful advice or magical munificence is unclear.
Finally, I made a flounder which represents the bloodstream (my very first readers will recall that I had a childhood epiphany about the nature of living things based on blood). The cells stream forth to build the organism and carry out needed maintenance, but strange viruses swirl within the plasma. most ominously a parasitic tapeworm stares in hunger at the feast of little lives. It is unclear whether the aristocratic woman is a parasite or whether she is the host. This is a whole little ecosystem with the long-suffering flounder in the middle.
I will add all of these flounder to my Instagram feed (which you should follow), but you can see them here first, and read the perplexing explanations I have offered.
