December's reading

Published in 1993

The Anni Albers exhibition took me to "Women's Work: textile art from the Bauhaus", which has been on my shelves for about 20 years, to look for information on the other (female) weavers trained in the Bauhaus, and their successors: "In exile, Anni Albers and Marli Ehrman educated a new generation of students, who have since become teachers, designers or both".

In the post-1960s upsurge of serious attention to the history of the Bauhaus, the Weaving Workshop has received little attention, says the introduction. "It has had two strikes against it: in the hierarchy of art and design, textiles and women share equally low positions. Moreover, like women, textiles have equally been cast in the supportive role: one notices the chair, but not the cover."

First published in 1944

"Temple spent most of the following morning delving into the files of the Egyptologists' Journal ... This ;monthly publication, published from an obscure address near the ritish Museum, presented a most forbidding appearance to any layman not interested in its particular subject, with its severe buff colour, endless pages of small print and very dull pictures rather indifferently reproduced.

"Somewhat to his surprise, Temple found the two articles by Sir Felix Raybourn countained an occasional flash of whimsical humour to relieve their rather erudite discourse. Both concerned a series of excav ations undertaken by Sir Felix, which, as far as Temple could see, had proved singularly unproductive save for a few ancient weapons in very poor condition, and a vessel containing a strange liquid which had not been analysed. Sir Felix dilated at some length upon the medicines of ancient Egypt and the cures they were reputed to have effected, and thus hecleverly concealed the paucity of the actual results of his expedition. As a writer himself, Temple admired the ingenious manner in which Sir Felix had contrived this little deception."

As someone familiar with the world of academic journals through working as librarian and editor, I found that passage most amusing, and admired Durbridge's dexterity in avoiding the potentially confusing "he" in the second paragraph.

2012; "152 illustrations, 135 in colour"

"More than 75 contemporary artists" (some are pairs of collaborators) choose an influential work by another artist to write about. The book includes these women artists, many of whom were new to me:

Tomma Abts

Eija-Liisa Ahtila - https://www.mariangoodman.com/artists/eija-liisa-ahtila - video works

Eleanor Antin - american performance artist - https://www.moma.org/artists/8183

Vija Celmins

Spartacus [now Monster] Chetwynd - https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/monster-chetwynd-12108 - mixed/cross media

Tacita Dean

Marlene Dumas

Katharina Fritsch - http://whitecube.com/artists/artist/katharina_fritsch - sculpture, including blue rooster on 4th plinth

Susan Hiller

Candida Hoefer - german photographer of empty interiors - http://www.artnet.com/artists/candida-h%C3%B6fer/

Cristina Iglesias

Annette Messager

Beatriz Milhazes - brazilian; painting, drawing, collage - https://whitecube.com/artists/artist/beatriz_milhazes

Cornelia Parker

Sophie Ristelhueber - french photographer of territory and effects of war - https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1996/newphoto12/sophie.ristelhueber.html

Gillian Wearing

Rachel Whiteread

Lots of food for thought here. I could have spent a day copying down great chunks... but it's due back at the library.

Virago Classic "with an introduction by the author"

 It was the cover and the pithy wit of the introduction (2004) that attacted me, in the charity shop, so it came home. Unfortunately the story (1983) wasn't up to the introduction, or the wit had worn thin. Back to the shop it goes.

Sometimes you buy a book to give as a present, and it doesn't leave your hands. On dipping into Dava Sobell's "The Glass Universe", I was gripped by the storytelling. It's "the hidden history of the women who took the measure of the stars" - they were called "computers" because of the calculations they did; they worked at Harvard's astronomical observatory, and by extension the book is a history of the observatory itself and of developments in astronomy in the decades either side of 1900. Highly recommended, even if you don't know Betelgeuse from Polaris, or what a spectroscope is (a woman is important in that, too).

Books - read, started, acquired in September

Rather than losing track of what I've been reading, or have lying around the house "somewhere" with intent to finish reading it, or have taken back to the library, the plan is to photograph the covers when books enter the premises, and perhaps write a note or two about them.

"Made in England" is fascinating - written in 1939, a record of a bygone age.
The others were found on the "2 for £1" table at my local charity shop: trees and
butterflies for the reference shelf. I've wanted and needed a tree book.
Nora Ephron's introduction to Heartburn, written years after the novel, is brilliant, the novel less so.

Repays slow reading. Lots of lovely images. My current breakfast book.

Of the crime fiction, Ian Sansom's grew on me, and Donna Leon is consistently good.
The language history is trying to do too much in a small book. Haven't read much of Silt Road.

Who knew sheep were so fascinating? I'm loving it.
Ed Yong's talk about bacteria (at RI) was SO good; haven't started reading it.
Micromastery is an interesting idea, and I've tried mastering the omelette,
but feel my "old" way is better....
Stephen Fry - "poignant, funny, intellegent, frank" and only 50p, why not?

Additions to the reading list

Wandering past a bookshop on a Sunday morning, I saw several books in the window display that might have come home with me if the shop had been open. (Narrow escape!)

So English!!

"exploring themes of Britishness, identity, craftsmanship and the art establishment"

How - and why - are women's self-portraits different
from men's?

"A spotter's guide to the British landscape"

The "medieval" book is wonderfully illustrated,
and I love reading essays

(Still re-reading His Dark Materials....)

Words by Robert MacFarlane (from his Landmarks), visuals by
Jackie Morris, who spent two years immersed in this "book
for all ages"

Reading about John Berger

At the top of the piles of books are those I want to read soon - they get shifted up as more books are added to the heap - 

About Looking (1980) is not, of course, his memorable tv series Ways of Seeing (1972), but it will be worth another look.

The memories published in the Guardian included a couple of paragraphs that struck a chord with me. Geoff Dyer wrote:

he was reliant, to the end, on his art school discipline of drawing. If he looked long and hard enough at anything it would either yield its secrets or, failing that, enable him to articulate why the withheld mystery constituted its essence. This holds true not just for the writings on art but also the documentary studies (of a country doctor in A Fortunate Man and of migrant labour in A Seventh Man), the novels, the peasant trilogy Into Their Labours, and the numerous books that refuse categorisation. Whatever their form or subject the books are jam-packed with observations so precise and delicate that they double as ideas – and vice versa. “The moment at which a piece of music begins provides a clue to the nature of all art,” he writes in “The Moment of Cubism”. In Here Is Where We Meet he imagines “travelling alone between Kalisz and Kielce a hundred and fifty years ago. Between the two names there would always have been a third – the name of your horse.”

Olivia Laing wrote:

His essays on painting are packed with unforgettable images, the diligent, inspired seeing of an artist who’d given himself over to written language. Vermeer’s rooms, “which the light fills like water in a tank”. Goya, whose cross-hatched tones gave “a human body the filthy implication of fur”. Bonnard’s “dissolving colours, making his subjects unattainable, nostalgic”. Pollock’s “great walls of silver, pink, new gold, pale blue nebulae seen through dense skeins of swift dark or light lines”. Art criticism is rarely this plain, this fruitful, or this adamant that what happens on a canvas has a bearing on our human lives.

I also liked the idea of "reapprehending possibilities". Whatever that actually means, it sounds fruitful...

His readers are the inheritors, across all the decades of his work, of a legacy that will always reapprehend the possibilities. 

Berger at home in Paris in 1999 (via)

Ali Smith said that without him, we must continue to pay "creative attention", and  his friend Simon McBurney wrote:

He was never not listening.

Books coming and going

Updike's essays on art shouted out to me from the window of Waterstones-that-used-to-be-Dillons. On making my way to the remainders section in the far reaches of the basement, I was delighted to see that every page spread had at least one and up to three colour pictures. Words-only essays on art are all very well if you already know a lot about art and can remember the works they discuss (or have the internet to hand), but how much better to be able to gaze at the work, right there on the page!

Right there at the start is a touching photo, taken by his mother, of the nine year old Updike reading -

... so of course you're drawn in to reading about the photo, the boy ... and right there is unexpected fuel for my Home project:

the site ... was one of my favorite places in the world: the side porch of the house [that] belonged to my maternal grandparents; due to the exigencies of the Depression my parents and I lived there as well. On this long side porch, half of whose length stretches out of sight to my right, I would play by myself or with others - setting up grocery stores out of orange creates and crayoned paper fruit, making cozy homes out of overturned wicker porch furniture. A grape arbor extended outward from the porch roof, throwing its dazzling dapple down upon the steps and a brick patio where ants usily came and went between the cracks. The grapevine's tendrils curled with such intricacy that I imagined they would spell the entire alphabet if I looked hard enough.

He goes on about the kitchen, canning, how household items became toys, brooms, sweeping and other rituals, his mother's camera, and the book he's reading in the photo: Mickey Mouse in The Treasure Hunt, 1941 - a Big Little Book, "chunky little volumes sold for ten cents, made of single panels from a comic strip opposite a short page of narrative text. My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words."

Buying books rather goes against my "project" of getting rid of books, but this one was irresistible, and reminds me that I may have another book of Updike's essays somewhere among the old paperbacks that are mostly destined for giving away; I remember reading one of the essays at random when much younger, perhaps still at university ... but not what it was about ... though it did lead to more reading of Updike and of essays. 

The purchase of these essays spurred me on to de-select a few more books ... goodbye ...

Random readings - on creativity

At the final Extended Drawing class we were given a copy of a jolly little book written by a member of the art department staff -

Opening it at random I found a great bit of advice, something we should all keep in mind -

But you know, we don't always know what we like, do we? Often it gets mixed up with what we think we should like. Or, what we would like to like... Or the things we think we like seem to be in conflict with each other.  Or, we're in such a bad mood that we don't like anything!

Even so, there's something - call it a passion, perhaps - lurking or waiting to be discovered. The thing that keeps on being interesting, that provides deep and sustainable pleasure.

Rod Judkins writes, as part of No.27, about Cindy Sherman, who loved playing dressing up as a child, and then went on to make that the basis of her art work.

He concludes: "Whatever it is you most enjoy, make it the basis of your life and work. You will never lose interest in it."

Volcanoes

"Volcano: Nature and Culture" by James Hamilton is an offshoot of a 2010 exhibition at Compton Verney, Volcano: Turner to Warhol. The book considers artists' and writers' perception of volcanoes and its change over time.

I've been curious about Krakatoa since reading Twenty-One Balloons (William Pene du Bois, 1947) as a child, in which the protagonists escape the eruption in a hot-air balloon raft. Yes, science fictional fantastic, and the illustrations are very old-fashioned; for the reality of the event, Simon Winchester has written an excellent account. "Volcano" has Krakatoa, and rather a lot of Vesuvius, and Etna, and lots of other volcanoes, as seen and recorded by artists - and these are set in the context of scientific thought.

Three things I was particularly drawn to in this book:

1. "Kilimanjaro Southern Glaciers 1898" by Georgia Papageorge (2010), incorporates poured ash from the mountain and represents the oldest known photograph of the mountain -

(via)

She is "among the first artists to begin the task of creating an iconography for the dormant volcano in Tanzania. Her palette consists of paint and canvas, photographs, charcoal, tree bark, red and white chevron barrier cloth and the fertile product of the volcano's own interior, lava dust. [The photograph] is enlarged by her and streaked with trails of liquid lava, and articulated by a red zigzag line representing temperature fluctuations and glacier melt on the volcano over the twentieth century."

2. Ilana Halperin's visit, aged 30, to Eldfell, the Icelandic volcano born in the same year she was. The result was an exhibition, Nomadic Landmass, in Edinburgh in 2005, and some of the work was shown in "The Library" at the National Museums of Scotland in 2013. I saw it there and would have liked to spend more time with it. This drawing wasn't part of "The Library" -

Ilana Halperin, Nomadic Landmass

"Nomadic Landmass" says James Hamilton, "included photographic images taken from the aie over Eldfell, and geological specimens and drawings taken from photographs of the destruction caused by the birth of the mountain. ... Halperin has taken the extreme detachment of volcanic activity as her subject, and has personalized it, drawn it to herself, and invited it to become intertwined with her own life. The mountain's pulse, and hers, become one."

3. In 1665 Mundus Subterraneus, by the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, was published, with many illustrations (see some here); in 1669 it was translated from Latin into English.

(via)

"Kircher was driven by the admixture of extraordinary genius and religious obligation to become the most learned and active savant of his age. While he may not, as traditionally claimed, have been the last man to know everything, he did hold the world's knowledge in his hands and cherished it all, publishing on every subject under the sun. [He] led a charmed life that spanned the Thirty Years War and the Counter-Reformation. He had not only the intellectual capacity but also the organizing genius to prospect a route through knowledge and its accumulation, to its expression and distribution.

"Volcanology was only one of the topics covered in Mundus Subterraneus, along with the working of the tides, the weather, fossils and early man [but] it is Kircher's understanding of volcanoes and the illustrations of them that particularly caught the imagination of the fellow scholars and the narrow band of literate Europeans in his day.

"Kircher's worldview was maintained in the English version, which was liberally extended from the original by other accounts and amendments. [It] goes on to describe many other volcanoes all over the world... Kircher's central task for his readers was to try to demonstrate with engravings and text how volcanoes work.

"As a courageous example of extreme information-gathering, Kircher had himself lowered into the heaving red crater of Vesuvius at night in 1638, during one of its actively threatening periods. His report is graphic in the extreme:

Methoughts I beheld the habitation of Hell ... An unexpressible stink ... and made me in like manner, ever and anon, belch, and as it were vomit back again at it."

Magic and money markets

(via)

The world of finance is a mystery to most of us, so I was dazzled by Daniel Miller's explanation - finance as comparable to religion, viewed as a haunting of the secular world by shadowy spirits performing strange magical feats. It's like peering through the crack of the door at incomprehensible but compelling rituals.

His keynote, as he looks back over his writings on material culture in "Stuff" (2009), is that just as people make things, things make people. For instance, the way a sari must be worn in order to function is what determines how an Indian woman moves through her world. This sort of analysis slides round the door and sees the proceedings from a different angle.

"Many of us live in a world where more and more distant from any cosmology identified with established religion. But our secular world is just as haunted today by shadowy spirits that seem to perform strange magical feats that conjure vast powers out of the dross. People such as the Japanese traders in derivatives markets, studied by Mayazaki, are surely at least as incomprehensible to the uninitiated as any theological discussion of Talmud or the Sutras. Key processes in contemporary finance start not with doing something, but with an act of securitization. This is the process that turns a potential future profit stream into something that can be traded. In turn, a derivative may be formed by trading the risk involved in speculating on what that profit stream will be. This sounds obscure enough, but what is deeply unsettling is to contemplate what is thereby produced.

"In the trading known as arbitrage, experts will use models derived from theoretical physics to note tiny discrepancies between how a market should operate according to these models and how it is actually operating. But trading on the 'as though they existed' is sufficient to make these values exist. A million units can therebybe traded as a billlion units. Well more, actually. The rabbits coming out of these hats reproduce at a rate that would even astonish rabbits. The notional amounts of derivatives contracts by the year 2000 were already more than a hundred trillion dollars, a figure most of us can no longer convert into a meaningful image. During a credit crunch it can even more magically be transformed back into a mere puff of smoke.

"Now for the present purposes you don't have to understand modern finance (though perhaps we really should). The point is merely that the relationship between materiality and immateriality is no more straightforward in secular than in religious domains. Clearly this vast sum exists in some sense, but in what sense? Has derivative trading materialized something that didn't exist, or is it largely a juggling of immaterial concepts? One of the neat things about the Japanese arbitrage traders studied by Mayazaki is that they don't get paid by some share of the money they make in this trading. They accept a standard wage, because they see themselves as doing a good deed in the world. By spotting these discrepancies in the way markets operate, they are in a way punishing its imperfections, and in some small way helping to perfect the market itself. To make it as pure as its models. Is this then the secular opposite of religion? Hardly. Actually, religions were pretty good at making money on occasion also." (pp74-75)

The sequel (2012) is called Consumption and its Consequences. And he's written a few more things, besides.

1930s reading

Two (library) books from Persephone Press, republishing forgotten or neglected novels from the mid-20th century. 

The endpaper fabric is taken from 'Rope and Dandelion',
a blockprinted velvet designed and printed by
Margaret Calkin James for her new house, 'Hornbeams' in
Hampstead Garden Suburb, in 1936.

"The New House" by Lettice Cooper was published in 1936. Set in one day, it tells of the move from a large family home to a smaller one - a "window of opportunity" for Rhoda, who has been doing her mother's bidding for years and longs to see Life. (The author herself was yet to break free from her own mother.) It deals with the meaning of home and stability within family tradition and the clamouring of the outside world in what we now know was a prelude to WW2 and the class upheavals that followed it. The socialist undercurrents have a different slant today, and though those basic problems remain, the story is quite gripping and the characters arouse outrage at times, soon followed by sympathy. There is vivid jealousy, and poignant depiction of lost love.

Endpapers taken from 'Dahlias', a 1931 design for a dress silk by Madeleine Lawrence

"The Fortnight in September" by RC Sherriff, first published in 1931, is the story of a middle-class London family's holiday at the seaside. I'm not far along in it, not far enough to guess where it's going, but already the family is frighteningly claustrophobic. The "period details" are interesting - what are sandshoes, and were sailboats (toys) really called yachts?

Blood on Paper, text on textiles

The Blood on Paper exhibition at the V&A in 2008 was what got me interested in book arts again - particularly memorable are Anselm Kiefer's huge books, the pages from a book by Chillida, and Cai Guo Qiang's "firework", shown here. (The thumbnails on the V&A page are clickable for more info on them, and there's an essay by the curator here.)

"Danger" by Cai Guo Qiang (via)

When I started doing the "travelwriting" on my tube and bus journey, I started thinking about "the merging of text and image" - how the names of the stations or stops fit into the line drawing. When text appears on textiles, I feel that text takes over and am suspicious of using it (nor do I like my coffee mug to say COFFEE) - but books are a different medium, in fact they are vehicles for text (and/or images). Their purpose is arguably to be read.

At the Tate's Gauguin exhibition in 2010, seeing the pineapple pattern on the blue skirt was almost like reading the word "pineapple" - I simply couldn't get beyond the "word" to look at the rest of the picture. Yet seen on the actual fabric (rather than in a painting), it would have been simply a pattern element.

Of course we "read" images just as we read words - they stand for, indicate, and signify certain things, depending on context, culture, personal meanings. All rather complicated.... you can be sure that plenty has been written about this matter.

And when we read, we want to be able to understand the stories the words are telling - we don't want the words themselves to take over, to become like earworms, or to have meanings that are secret and exclude us.

Monday miscellany

Check out the sound sculptures of Swiss artist Zimoun (I came across one on itsnicethat.com, a blog with many fascinating posts, but you can see more elsewhere, eg here) -

still from Zimoun: 97 polysiloxane hoses ...

Also from itsnicethat.com, these tree forts by Patrick Dougherty -

A video about the work of Kew's Herbarium and the evolution of plants -
http://richannel.org/collections/2013/kew-gardens#/beyond-the-gardens--the-plant-family-tree

Using our imaginations should be obligatory, says Neil Gaiman in this year's The Reading Agency lecture - read it all on theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/. "Our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming." Literate people read fiction; fiction is the gateway drug to reading, and once you discover that reading is pleasurable, you're on to reading everything. Anything that children enjoy will move them up the reading ladder into literacy; there's no such thing as a bad book for children, he says. Also, fiction builds empathy, allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals - and it shows that the world can be different. (That's why China has lifted the ban on science fiction - to encourage innovative thinking.) Treating libraries as a shelf of books is to miss the point - they are about more than that. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg; libraries help people navigate the information world, giving everyone equal access. Without literacy and numeracy, people are more easily lied to and misled. Our responsibilities to the future include the obligation to read for pleasure, to support libraries, to read aloud to our children, to use the language - and writers' obligations go beyond this - but we all have an obligation to daydream, and to make things beautiful.

Witches Head nebula, photographed by David Malin (via)

"The Witch’s Head nebula [IC2118] is 800 light years away from Earth in the constellation
of Epidanus. As the colloquial name suggests, this heavenly dust storm has
the pointed nose and crooked chin of a fairytale crone. In reality the nebula is quite blue,
glowing in light reflected from the super-giant star, Rigel. "

supervoid - an area of space empty of rich superclusters (galaxies). Voids were first discovered in 1978. "Voids appear to correlate with the observed temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), due to the Sachs–Wolfe effect [says wikipedia]. Colder regions correlate with voids, whereas hotter regions correlate with filaments, because of gravitational redshifting. As the Sachs-Wolfe effect is only significant if the Universe is dominated by radiation or dark energy, the existence of voids is significant in providing physical evidence for dark energy." Wow ... physical evidence for dark energy!

Random readings - from Wildwood by Roger Deakin

Rookery by Amanda Slater (from here)

"Rooks build their untidy-looking nests of twigs in a series of strata on top of the previous year’s structure, as storks do. … They choose live, pliable twigs and must weave them well to stand up to the winter storms, lining the nest with leaves, grass, even some clay, hair or wool. With twigs, as with food, rooks are prone of envy, and not above stealing from one another, as people do from building sites. After five or six years of layering, the structure grows top-heavy and may at last tumble down in a gale, a useful find for a cottager in need for dry kindling. ...

"The parent birds soared off in sallies of flight accompanied by crescendos of cawing, returning with breakfast for the fledglings, who expressed their satisfaction in half-choked high-pitched mewling. Each time they landed, the rooks fanned their tails in greeting: gesture is an important part of their language. A good deal of the rooks’ circling, gliding flight seemed to be nothing other than joyful orisons with no apparent destination in the fields. [They have been seen] flinging themselves into a strong wind and somersaulting wildly upward, then diving straight down again towards the wood like bungee jumpers, checking their swoop just in time with a tilt of a wing to glide far away across the valley towards the church on the far hill. Rooks like to fly high, and sometimes, when they arrive directly over the rookery at a great height, they will fold one wing flat against their body and execute a breathtaking perpendicular dive so fast it is audible, twisting at the last moment to land in the tree. This is called ‘shooting the rook’."

From Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees, by Roger Deakin (2007). He finished the book four months before he died. "Knowing what we know, the forests he celebrates and conjures feel as much a homecoming, or a resting place" said this review.

Rawan's vision

Two stills from a video of a "read-in" that happened after Al-Mutanabbi Street - the street of the booksellers in Iraq - was bulldozed by the government for the second time, after trying to rebuild itself after the 2007 bombing. 

"Within twelve days of the attack [on September 17, 2012], people were able to organize a peaceful book festival event that was held on September 29, 2012, with the title: I AM IRAQI, I READ. Private citizens brought book donations to the festival where people gathered on the green in a peaceful demonstration and a defiant public-read-in, to say we will continue reading in public, defying the abhorrent official political attempts of organized suppression of freedom of thought, reading and knowledge in Iraq. We are doing this for our children to enable them to rebuild the future Iraq."

Watch the video, and hear Rawan's stirring speech (she is one articulate kid!), at youtube.com/watch?v=nALIE5MGNU0

Witches' fingernails

The pollarded plane trees along London's streets really intrigue me. Is it the quest for negative space? The force of nature at work, spurred into greater action by the violence done to the tree's growing points? Is it a signal of persistence in the struggle against all odds?

In terms of art inspiraton, is it the quest for negative space? The structures feel random, yet nature isn't random, it's all systems; growth is charted in an organism's genes, and amputation doesn't change that system.

Maybe it's simply a memory of the Struwwelpeter story, read to me by my grandmother -

A merry tale (image from here)

While we're on the subject, here are some pollarded trees in art -

Pollarded Willows with Setting Sun by Vincent Van Gogh (image from here)

St Jerome by the Pollard Willow by Durer (image from here)

Pollarded Trees by Robert Tavener (linocut; image from here)

Pollarded Trees, Hotel Dieu, Toulouse by Lesley Trussler (lino cut and collage; image from here)

Robert Burkert, Pollarded Tree (lithograph, 1968; image from here)

Willownest by Nils Udo, 1994 (image from here)

Frances Hodgkins, Country Scene with Pollarded Trees and Wooden Gate, c1933 (image from here)

Installation by Patrick Doughtery in San Francisco, 2009 (image from here)

Etching of Gray's Court, York, by Rebecca Wright (image from her drawing blog)

Road with Pollarded Willows and a Man with a Broom by Vincent Van Gogh (image from here)

St Jerome beside a Pollarded Willow by Rembrandt (image from here)