Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 515
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
“Under [General Francisco] Franco,” he said, “attendance at Catholic holidays was obligatory and much Catalan folklore was banned. People avoided the religious processions and, once they were no longer mandatory, ignored them… Marvesa’s [Spain] festive license of demons and dragons is no longer of darkness. If Franco claimed the mantle of Catholic light, then to party as Catalan devils is a happy celebration of freedom.
Demons and dragons are a customary feature of saints’ days and Corpus-Christi festivals throughout Spain and its former empire. They are also common in Carnivals. Indeed, it is partly because of the presence of demons, dragons, and other masked transgressive figures that Carnival has been so often designated – by defenders and detractors alike – as a pagan or devilish season, a time of unrestrained indulgence before the ascetic penances of Lent.
Julio Caro Baroja, the father of Spanish Carnival studies, scorned the antiquarian notion that the masked figures and seasonal inversions of Carnival were “a mere survival” of ancient pagan rituals. Carnival, he argued, was first nurtured by the dualistic oppositions of Christianity. Where it survives – for when he wrote it had been banned by Franco – it still enacts these old antagonisms. “Carnival,” he concluded, “is the representation of paganism itself face-to-face with Christianity.”
... Peter Burke, one of the more lucid historians of popular culture, has proposed that “there is a sense in which every festival [in early modern Europe] was a miniature Carnival because it was an excuse for disorder and because it drew from the same repertoire of traditional forms.
Max Harris in Carnival and Other Christian Festivals: Folk Theology and Folk Performance
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Pearls from artists* # 420
‘Science in Surrealism,” published by Gallery Wendy Norris
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
During the early period of Einstein’s great fame, which began in 1919, Breton wrote an essay for the first one-man show in Paris of Max Ernst. There, for the first time, he expressed what would become the central mechanism of Surrealism’s theory of poetry: the experience of ‘disorientation,’ engendered by what Breton called ‘the marvelous ability to reach out, without leaving the field of our experience, to two distinct realities and bring them together to create a spark.’ Perhaps in search of authorization, Breton gave this definition in the context of the ‘separate systems of reference’ posited by Einstein’s Relativity. This, Breton argued, helped make sense of weird juxtapositions to be found in Ernst’s collages of the time, shown in Paris in the same year that the German to French translations of both Einstein’s Relativity: The Special Theory and the General Theory and [Sir Arthur] Eddington’s, Space, Time, and Gravitation were published. This in turn gave Breton and his friends a glimpse of the ‘real’ world ushered in by the new physics.
“Sibylline Strangeness: Surrealism and Modern Physics,” by Gavin Parkinson in Science in Surrealism, published by Gallery Wendy Norris
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Pearls from artists* # 399
The Great Hall at the Met
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Science is concerned with the general, the abstract, and the knowable. In contrast, art deals with the particular, the unknowable, the singular. This applies not just to the content of artistic works but also to the way this content is received. Even in the case of a film or concert attended by large numbers of people, the artistic experience remains fundamentally a solitary one. Each one of us lives the work alone. Whatever sense of togetherness accompanies the experience comes precisely from the fact that, faced with the singularity of the aesthetic moment, each percipient feels his aloneness before the radical mystery that enfolds us all. Wherever an act of creation is shared with others, then, there is individuation – not just for the author of the work but for the audience too. The singularity of art awakens us to our own singularity, and through it to the singularity in the Other. I have argued that artifice unifies by imposing an univocal image that replicates itself identically in each spectator. True art tears the spectator out of the mass of sameness, calling forth from the numberless crowd a new people and a new communion.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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Pearls from artists* # 356
Some of Barbara’s pastels
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Science is concerned with the general, the abstract, and the knowable. In contrast, art deals with the particular, the unknowable, the singular. This applies not just to the content of artistic works but also to the way this content is received. Even in the case of a film or concert attended by large numbers of people, the artistic experience remains a fundamentally solitary one. Each one of us lives the work from the work alone. Whatever sense of togetherness accompanies the experience comes precisely from the fact that, faced with the singularity of the aesthetic moment, each percipient feels his aloneness before the radical mystery that enfolds us all. Wherever an act of creation is shared with others, then, there is individuation – not just for the author of the work but for the audience too. The singularity of art awakens us to our own singularity, and through it to the singularity in the Other. I have argued that artifice unifies by imposing a univocal image that replicates itself indefinitely in each spectator. True art tears the spectral out of the mass of sameness, calling forth from the numberless crowd a new people and a new communion.
Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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Pearls from artists* # 121
Sri Lanka
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Artists, when they are absorbed in their work, are also deeply connected to other human beings. The theologian Matthew Fox said, “The journey the artist makes in turning inward to listen and to trust his or her images is a communal journey.” The psychologist Otto Rank argued that, “The collective unconscious, not rugged individuality, gives birth to creativity.”
To be sure, artists are not making real contact with real human beings as they work in the studio, but they are making contact in the realm of the spirit. The absence of the pressures real people bring to bear on them allows them, in solitude, to love humankind. Whereas in their day job they may hate their boss and at Thanksgiving they must deal with their alcoholic parents, in the studio their best impulses and most noble sentiments are free to emerge.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts
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