You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Art’ category.
One of life’s lesser disappointments is how boring everything here in America looks. I am not sure if this is a result of banal & puritanical tastes of home buyers or if the regulatory capture which is such an aspect of life here has allowed developers and zoning boards to prevent everything but prefab ranches and ugly co-ops. Probably it is a result of a combination of these things (along with a real desire by builders to keep people safe and an equal desire to make things that appeal to everyone). Anyway I am looking forward to a future of wilder and more eclectic buildings and we can already see inklings of such possibilities by looking abroad.
For example this is “Quetzalcoatl’s Nest” a complex of ten different apartments built by renowned Mexican architect Javier Senosiain in Naucalpan, Mexico. Senosiain is an advocate of organic architecture, which takes its inspiration from a combination of preexisting landscape features and natural forms. Quetzalcoatl’s Nest is built in a hilly landscape of natural caverns, serpentine ridges and old oak groves. looking at this landscape, Senosiain saw the shape of a colossal mythological serpent. He incorporated a large cave into the building as the snake’s head and then set out to build other textures of snake ribs and scales and serpentine patterns into the compound.
The fantastical lair includes water gardens, strange modern hideaways, and fantastic stained glass show spaces in a hard-to-describe architectural tour-de-force which spreads over 16,500 square feet. I have included a selection of pictures here, but you should really find a video somewhere so you can get a better sense of what is going on. Why couldn’t the Barclay’s Center people hire this guy so that their rattlesnake could look awesome instead of sinister and corporate.
Because of last week’s post about the Thai coronation I got sucked into spooling through pictures of the astonishingly beautiful and crazy sights of Thailand. We really need to all visit that exquisitely beautiful land! What a place!
At any rate, as long-term Ferrebeekeeper readers will recall, I once made a (sadly unpublished) book on how to build toy vehicles out of household refuse. The industrious Buddhist monks of Thailand however did not stop at making toys. Thus, the temple which most caught my eye was Wat Pa Maha Chedio Kaew also named “Temple of Million Bottles.” As you can tell by the name, this temple (and all of its outbuildings like the crematorium and the restrooms) are built of empty bottles which have been carefully mortared together to form an exquisite . Actually though, the name is a bit of a misnomer–thus far the complex is constructed not of a million bottles but of around a million and a half bottles.
The project started back in 1984, when some monks decided to clean up the refuse around their temple. Perceiving the inner beauty of the discarded beer bottles, the monastics chose not to throw them away, but instead to clean them and use the brown and green glass vessels for constructing temple accessories. The project took on a life of its own as visitors brought ever more bottles–mostly Heineken bottles (green) and Chang Beer bottles (brown).
Anyone who has ever tried to piece together recalcitrant materials into desired order will start to fathom the scope of the monks’ accomplishment. Beyond the novelty of the material and the satisfying moral component of seeing something so complete made of something everyone throws away, the temple is simply beautiful though. Buildings in America are made of heavily regulated prefabricated materials expressly created for crafting buildings…and yet so many new buildings here are appallingly heart-wrenchingly ugly. Perhaps we could take some lessons from the monks not just in upcycling but also in imagination, patience, and craft.
Yet even if that isn’t going to happen, you can still contemplate the shadow side of Maha Chedio Kaew: in order for it to exist people drank one and a half million beers. That is a moral lesson which the Frauenkirche simply does not offer.
Here is an image of a wild horse made fifteen to twenty thousand years ago by a Cro-Magnon artist in the caves of Lascaux (which are now in France but were then in the hunting lands of these ancient hunter-gatherers). The horse, which looks for all the world like a Przewalski’s horse, is painted with the carbon black of charcoal and with a swoosh of yellow umber. This week accidentally became sponsored by the color yellow (maybe to celebrate the new Thai king–since yellow is the color of royalty in Thailand as in China). Yellow ochre (which is a clay that derives its hue from hydrated iron hydroxide) is one of the most ancient and straightforward pigments–yet it is beautiful and lasts forever. It is in my paintbox too, next to all sorts of strange synthetic pigments and esoteric heavy metals.
Anthropologists tell us that this horse served some unknown ritualistic purpose for the artists and their original audience (whose names…and whose very language are completely lost), but that strikes me as a bit simplistic. No doubt I would say the same thing about any mystery artwork from an unknown culture. What IS obvious is that the Cro-Magnon recognized how closely they lived to nature and they admired the the strength and grace of the animals they preyed on and lived next to. It goes without saying that they recognized how important their fellow creatures were, because they knew that without these animals they would die. They would literally starve to death and freeze.
I wonder sometimes if that vital piece of knowledge has gotten lost to the artists of today who are busy contextualizing the injustice of social paradigms or examining the insider/outsider dynamics of status hierarchy. We no longer need Equus ferus for food or clothing. We don’t even need their domesticated descendants for milk and transportation. But we are as inextricably a part of nature as ever. Even if we must exploit it to live we must protect it and save it or we will die. There is no outside of nature for us. We are nature’s progeny as surely as were the Cro-Magnon…or the wisents and aurochs which they lived off of. Great art lives in a timeless modernity. Look upon the round (pregnant?) yellow mare and think about what it really means. In 20,000 years nobody will know our names or who we were. Our language might be lost…and all of our works except for a few strange oddball things will be gone. But the people of then (if there are any) will surely know us by what we took. Will they admire us for what we understood and preserved or will they just curse us as vicious primitives who lost life’s most critical lesson that all living things are connected?
A sculpture of the Yellow Emperor in the Mausoleum of the Yellow Emperor in Shaanxi
The Han people claim to be descended from a mythological cultural hero known as the Yellow Thearch, the Yellow Emperor, or as “Huangdi.” Chinese history is long and complicated and so is the history of Huangdi! At times the Yellow Emperor was regarded as a real person–the first emperor of China. In other eras he was regarded as a matchless Daoist sorceror or as a great shaman or even as a god of the Earth itself. Modern scholars argue endlessly about how the myth came into being. The Communists tried to ban the cult during the cultural revolution, but quickly realized that it was a dreadful mistake. Different eras imagine him differently, but he is always there at the beginning. Imagine if Moses, Aeneas, George Washington, and Merlin the Magician lived five thousand years ago and were somehow one person–that would be the Yellow Emperor.
Inquiring of the Dao at the Cave of Paradise (Dai Jin, ca. mid 15th century AD) ink on silk
From time to time Ferrebeekeeper refers to the Chinese calendar (this is year 4716, the year of the Earth Pig). That calendar was putatively started by the Yellow Emperor (which sort of puts a date stamp on him, come to think of it). An incomplete list of the other accomplishments/inventions/innovations which have been attributed to Huangdi includes:
- invention of houses
- domestication of animals
- first cultivation of grains
- invention of carts/the wheel
- invention and successful use of the war chariot
- invention and popularization of clothing
- the invention of boats and watercraft
- discovery of astronomy
- invention of archery
- creation of numbers and mathematics
- the creation of the first diadem
- the invention of monarchy
- The invention of writing and the creation of the oracle bone script
- the invention of the guquin zither
Huangdi did not invent sericulture (the cultivation of silkworms): that was accomplished by his main wife, Leizu. Yet, as you can see above, he still has a fairly impressive CV. I haven’t even gotten into his military accomplishments or his physical prowess. Suffice to say they were very great–like the time he defeated the bronze-headed monster, Chi You, and his 81 horned and four-eyed brothers…or the time he defeated the nightmare sorcerers from the mirror dimension and imprisoned them forever in mirrors (although it is a bit disturbing to think that that figure in the bathroom every morning is a dark magician who is forced to dress like you and act like you and LOOK like you because of the Yellow Emperor’s magic).
Because Chinese history is so long and so vast it encompasses different cosmologies and pantheons. Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism have somewhat pushed out the ancient religions of the Han Dynasty (although figures like Nüwa linger on in the background). Huangdi sort of transcends change itself though and so he is in myths with great primordial Daoists like Guangchengzi and in stories with the now moribund goddess Xuannü, “the mystery lady” who was goddess of war, sex, magic, and longevity (we should maybe look into her backstory at some point). Also he was maybe a yellow dragon.
Although there are many stories about the Yellow Emperor’s life and accomplishments (and about his birth, which I will write about some other time), the stories about his death are somewhat exiguous. He met a quilin and a phoenix and moved on from this world. He has two tomb in Shaanxi (including the Mausoleum of the Yellow Emperor, which is pictured up there at the top of the post), in addition to other tombs in in Henan, Hebei, Gansu, and other places. Perhaps these stories are unsatisfying by design. Like King Arthur or Durin, the Yellow Emperor might not be entirely dead, but might be lying low somewhere, waiting for a moment of crisis which requires him.
Like a currency crisis?
To my point of view, there is no afterlife or magic, but the dead aren’t really gone–they live on in their descendants. This is a satisfying conclusion to me because it means that the Yellow Emperor IS the people of the Han. He is China the way Uncle Sam is the US (except 4500 years longer). He never really existed yet the Yellow Emperor is 1/6 of humankind…or at least their mascot.
Walpurgisnacht (Engraving by W. Jury after original by Johann Heinrich Ramberg, 1829)
There is a sort of second Halloween on the calendar: Walpurgis Night (Walpurginacht) is the eve of the Christian feast day of Saint Walpurga, an 8th century Frankish Abbess. The event was celebrated from the night of April 30th until the end of the night of May 1st, and although putatively sacred to Walpurga (a healer and exorcist), it was really counter-holiday against the ancient pagan rituals of spring. In German folklore, May Eve was the night that the witches had a great dark feast/sabbath/orgy with unholy beings on the top of the Brocken, the tallest peak of northern Germany. Similar tales of similar events are widespread across Europe.
Walpurgisnacht appears in many German operas and plays (perhaps most notably at the epic conclusion of Faust, a play which truly brings the sturm and drang!) but today I thought I would celebrate with a picture, up there at the top by Johann Heinrich Ramberg, a Hanoverian illustrator of great prowess. Since the Elector of Hanover was also, by strange quirk of dynastic succession, the King of England, Ramberg’s illustrations had broad importance, and had great influence on opera backgrounds, storybooks, engravings, and such like popular arts. Perhaps there is even still a dollop of his fantasy left in Hollywood and on tv and the internet. His Walgurgisnacht picture is fairly tame (although perhaps that is because the engraver, Jury, cleaned it up) but some of his other illustrations are rather saucy. Also, I am sure my favorite graphic novelist, Jim Woodring stole a character from this engraving for his contemporary “Frank” books, which are arguably the finest works of our time.
At any rate, happy May Eve! Next year I will try to be more timely and mention the dark sabbath on the actual night so you can go out and rave with witches, instead of (checks yesterday’s post)…writing essays about Jesus??? Oh man…I need to get out more.
April is poetry month! Poetry allows us to say afresh things which need to be said (but which are not being heard properly because of popular conventions or dark political malfeasance). Yet once these truths are framed in sacred beautiful language and hung up in the great library of human endeavor, they take on an enduring character which the despots, brutes, and vulgarians of the past can no longer suppress (and which the despots, brutes, and vulgarians of the present do not understand).
Portrait of Swinburne (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1861) Watercolor, chalk, pencil on paper
For example, here is a short poem by Alernon Charles Swinburne, a sort of half-forgotten poet who was so exceedingly popular during the Victorian era that his work was set aside during the subsequent anti-Victorian backlash (which seems like a pity, since his poetry is lyrical and beautiful…and has a haunting & desolate sadness beneath all of its rich, fulsome opulence).
Swinburne was fascinated by Christianity and by the great Christian art and literature of antiquity and the Middle Ages. Yet a comprehensive reading of his poems makes it fairly clear that he himself was not devout. He harbored particular reservations about the afterlife and his sophisticated contemporaries saw him as a sort of “poet laureate of atheism.” Despite this (or…because of it?) Swinburne wrote a poem about Christian persecution as anathema to Jesus. The poem was not about persecution of Christians, but persecution by Christians. Here it is:
On the Russian Persecution of the Jews
by Algernon Charles Swinburne
O SON of man, by lying tongues adored,
By slaughterous hands of slaves with feet red-shod
in carnage deep as ever Christian trod
Profaned with prayer and sacrifice abhorred
And incense from the trembling tyrant’s horde,
Brute worshipers or wielders of the rod,
Most murderous even that ever called thee Lord;
Face loved of little children long ago,
Head hated of the priests and rulers then,
If thou see this, or hear these hounds of thine,
Run ravening as the Gadarene swine,
Say, was not this thy Passion, to foreknow
In death’s worst hour the works of Christian men?
Written in 1882, the poem is addressed to the “Son of Man,” which is Christ’s appellation in the gospels. Swinburne describes the savagery of contemporary Christians and poignantly asks whether the cruelty of Jesus’ followers towards Jews, foreigners, and outsiders would hurt Christ more than the physical agony of the passion. Since the apotheosis of compassion was the exact point of Christ’s ministry and his death, the answer is clearly a resounding yes. However, the poet (and, implicitly, his sophisticated reader) both recognize that contemporary Christians often overlook the meaning of Christ’s words and actions in their zeal to attain a piece of some imaginary paradise.
The poem is aimed directly at Russian Orthodox Christians, who were indeed guilty of terrible pogroms against the great Jewish communities within the Pale of Settlement. Since Russia was the hated national adversary of late Victorian England, the message would be roundly appreciated by Swinburne’s readers. Yet the poet perhaps casts a wider net upon the lord’s flock than it initially seems. The poem’s title aside, these lying tongues, slaughterous hands, and profane precants could almost be found anywhere in Christendom. Perhaps the eagerness of the reader to attribute such sins to other Christians is its own clue. Did not Christ ask his followers “Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?”
And like all great poetry, the message is hardly trapped within its time. A clear-sighted observer might be able to look at any Christian period or any puffed-up sanctimoniously “Christian” nation and find terrible cruelty to Jews and foreigners enacted by zealots incapable of grasping the fundamental message of the gospels. Such acts could even be encouraged by self-interested czars who not-very-convincingly pretend to be Christian! Great art lives in timeless modernity after all.
At any rate, I will leave you, dear reader, to contemplate Swinburne’s real meaning on your own (maybe after you peruse the news of the day). Oh, also the Gadarene swine were the herd of pigs which Christ cast the demons into as recounted in Matthew 8:28-34. It is worth remembering that the Gadarenes begged Jesus to leave after the incident…as though they preferred money and security to the actual Son of God! Shocking!
Happy Earth Day! I am afraid I am a bit under the weather (which seems appropriate, since our beautiful blue planet is catching a fever too). However it is worth devoting some time today to thinking about our planet and the entwined webs of ecosystems which support all living things (very much including human beings).
The great masters of global capitalism claim that the Earth is inexhaustible and made solely for human delights. To hear them tell it, only if ever more people consume ever more consumer rubbish will we all thrive. However that claim always seemed suspect, and the notably swift decline of entire ecosystems within even my lifetime suggests that fundamental aspects of our way of life and our long-term goals need to be rethought. It is a formidable problem because the nations of Earth are facing a near-universal political crisis where authoritarians are flourishing and democracies are faltering. So far, the authoritarians don’t seem substantially concerned with a sustainable future for living things (or with any laudatory goal, really). This trend could get worse in the future as agricultural failures, invasive blights, and extreme weather events cause people to panic and flee to “safe” arms of the dictators (this would be a stupid choice since strongmen, despots, and tyrants are anything but safe in a any context).
These frightening projections of doom are hardly a foregone conclusion though. A great many people of all political and ideological stripes are worried about the future and are working hard to ensure that humankind and all of our beautiful extended family on the tree of life make it into the future. Part of this is going to involve engineering and biomedical breakthroughs, but political and cultural breakthroughs will be needed as well.
I am ill-prepared to write out my proposals at length (since I would really like to lie down with some ginger ale), but fortunately I am a visual artist and I spent the winter of 2018 preparing a dramatic planetary image to capture my own anxiety for the world and its living things without necessarily giving in utterly to my fears and anxieties. I was going to introduce it later, but EarthDay is a good time to give you a sneak peak (plus it goes rather well with my Maundy Thursday blog post).
Here is the Great Flounder–the allegorical embodiment of how Earth life if everywhere under our feet and around us, but we can’t necessarily fathom it easily, because of our scale. Speaking of scale (in multiple ways I guess), I continue to have trouble with WordPress’ image tool, so I am afraid that you will have to make due with this small image until I learn about computers…or until posters get printed up (dangit…why do we have to sell ourselves all of the time?). In the meantime here is a teaser detail to help you in your own contemplation of if/how we can make Earth a paradise for ourselves without destroying it for the other inhabitants.
We will talk more about this soon, but in the meantime happy Earth Day. We will work together to save our giant blue friend, I know it! Let’s just collaborate to do so before we lose African elephants, numbats, mysterious siphonophores, or any of our beloved fellow lifeforms on this spherical island hurtling through space.
Please accept my apologies for not publishing the promised Good Friday post when I said I would. I am afraid I had a spring cold, and was just struggling to get through the day. Now that it is Easter Sunday, we can put any sort of Jesus-themed artwork we want, though and we don’t have to have a ghastly crucifixion scene. So behold: this is “Triptych with the Miracles of Christ” by the Master of the Legend of St. Catherine and his (?) workshop.
The piece is a superb vision of the life and miracles of Jesus…and of day-to-day life in late Medieval Flanders. It was completed sometime between 1491 and 1495 (and it is worth imagining some team of earnest painters toiling over it at the exact time that Columbus and his crew were making their way across the Atlantic. There are nearly endless things to see in the picture (like all the endearing and strangely modern pet dogs in the foreground) but I am afraid I could not download a high-res image, so you will have to visit this link if you wish to pore over the composition (and you really should wish for that). The background is as interesting as the foreground! Look at this exquisite Flemish city (which also looks strangely modern).
It is Maundy Thursday–the day before Good Friday (when the Last Supper took place in the Passion of Christ). To celebrate, I have drawn a picture in the little moleskine sketchbook which I carry with me during my workday). Based on some comments and feedback, it is not completely clear that everybody sees the plight of my allegorical flounder in the desired light. Perhaps this tiny spiritual drawing will clarify the symbolic meaning somewhat.
“Take, eat: this is my body” (Wayne Ferrebee, 2019) colored pencil and ink on paper
Jesus was a fisherman too…as were the first four disciples–that is why his first symbol was a fish. Anyway, Happy Easter! We will be back tomorrow with the annual Good Friday post!
So…apparently I kind of dropped the ball last year and missed one of the big eye makeup trends of the spring of 2018—crown-themed eye makeup which is designed to make the wearer seem regal! I guess the theory is that by gluing rhinestones in your eyes, you will resemble the monarchs of yore. Apparently the trend was first popularized by beauty blogger Marissa Melhorn. With the right stencil, airbrush, and costume jewelry, anyone can feel like a princess! I guess princesses don’t wearily rub their eyes as much as I do.
I feel like this might be one of the things people of the future point out as they sadly shake their heads and point out the undersea ruins of Sephora (assuming there are people of the future and they still utilize heads), but you never know; this is a pretty strange era we are in and I can also imagine this trend catching on (for example if America got pushed into imbecilic monarchy somehow).
Anyway, enjoy the lustrous glittering royal eyes we have featured here, but if you decide to try this at home and it goes wrong, don’t come crying to me. Or, if you do that, make sure to capture it on video. It will look like Vogue anime “Hamlet.”
