purple motes

The Corkinhorn Gallery's current exhibition, Painting Transversally, rides the frontiers of literary criticism and literary theory to raise profound questions for modern art.  Painting Traversally violently interrogates modern arts' failure to become post-modern.  It complicates the relationship between art object and art consumer and implicates mass media and corporate America in the symbolic commercialization and dissignification / dissemination of art impulses.

I found this marvelous little gallery just south of the Phillips Collection.  I would describe it further, but I don't have time right now.  Here's my favorite piece, Masterwork in Bluish.

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Imagine plucking a lute slowly and deliberately.  The impulse could arise from emotions within yourself.  But possibilities for inspiration other than the self also exist.  Sukeyasu Shiba's Gagaku Universe, performed this past Wednesday evening by the Reigakusha Gagaku Ensemble at the Freer Gallery, drew inspiration from within and from without, from relations with objects and with others, and from specific, real places and from imaged scenes.  The whole universe was inspiration for this music.

An emotion from within is longing for home.  The work Chosa Join expressed a young girl's longing for home after being called away for  service in the Chinese Imperial Court.   The music was reconstructed from a manuscript found in the 5'th to 11'th century manuscript collection at Dunhuang, and it was played on instruments preserved from the Nara Period (8'th century) in the Japanese Imperial Treasury.   The music easily moves persons far removed in time and place from its historical source.

A member of a clan of gagaku musicians stretching back more than a thousand years, Sukeyasu Shiba played a flute solo called Ichigyo no Fu.  The sliding, turning transitions between tones were exquisitely beautiful.  The phrasing of the music was in deep, long breaths that emphasized the performer's body.  In the program, Mr. Shiba explained that the piece presented devotion to flute playing.  The piece did that not through technical virtuosity, nor through historical and familial authority, but by giving "full voice to the performer's personal expressiveness."  It thus related inner emotion to an external object.

Interpersonal communion was another source of inspiration.  About 1050 years ago in Japan, an gagaku musician who played a double-reed pipe yearned for the lute music of a blind monk.  For years he traveled a great distance hoping to hear it.  Finally, the monk, sensing the pipe musician hiding nearby, resolved to play.   According to the program notes, the monk said, "Let me pluck my strings to his music.  Let him breathe through his instrument to my music." [*]  As far from romantic as the distance that remained between the scarcely moving players, the resulting duet, Souan no Kai, presented beautiful, selfless music.

Other pieces expressed specific, real places and imaginary scenes.  Mr. Shiba described the first movement of his work Shotorashion with multiple senses other than sound:

Here is the solemn magnificence of the old Buddha Hall, shadowy with the slight chill and the fragrance of incense hovering in the air.  And the hanging mandala scroll with its faded colors bespeaks the weight of the years gone by.

Most persons probably wouldn't know what sort of music that description implies.   But having heard nothing, you might be able to imagine the sound of this scene:

Fujin -- the God of Wind -- rides high on the clouds, his mouth drawn into a great screech as he squeezes his huge bag of winds with such fearsome power that it feels as though at any moment he will come swooping down on the intruder.

The Reigakusha Gagaku Ensemble included two mouth organs (sho), two double-reed flutes (hichiriki) and two side-blown flutes (ryuteki).  They made sounds of fearsome power.

Unlike the music, the dancing incorporated in Shotorashion lacked inspirational scope.  Stephen Pier's dancing was balletic, with some gestures from jazz and flamenco dance.  His emphasis on arm and leg lines, along with his placid torso, clashed with the forceful breathing of the music.  His dancing also seemed exclusively egoistic, with head movements anticipating and paralleling arm and leg lines.  That quality of movement would have been more appropriate for a performance of ancient Roman pantomime.  More weighted, floor-oriented modern dance would have made for a more appealing re-interpretation of gagaku dance.  Maya Sakai performed a mikomai dance.  This dance harmonized with the music, but added little to the over-all effect.   A collaboration with a group like Shen Wei Dance Arts would produce more interesting work.

Sukeyasu Shiba's Gagaku Universe presented a living tradition of Japanese classical music stretching back for more than a thousand years.  It communicates just how encompassing music can be.

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Sukeyasu Shiba's Gagaku Universe, presented by the Reigakusha Ensemble at the Myer Auditorium, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Feb. 24, 2010, as part of the Music From Japan Festival, 2010.

Notes:

[*] This is the legend of Hiromasa Minamoto, who sought out the monk Semimaru at Mt. Osaka.

A video is included above.

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One thousand, three hundred, and thirty years ago at Karbala in present-day Iraq, Iman Husayn ibn Ali, a grandson of the prophet of Islam, led a small, traveling group of 72 persons. This group included children, women, and elderly persons, as well as a small number of horsemen and infantrymen dedicated to Husayn. They confronted an enemy force of about 40,000 trained soldiers. Husayn offered his men the opportunity to desert him in the cover of night rather than face certain death. None of the men left Husayn.

Husayn and his men challenged the enemy to single combat, and each defeated many. The enemy, however, prevented Husayn and his group from getting water. Husayn's comrade Abbas ibn Ali crossed through the enemy force and gathered some water. But he was killed as he struggled to bring the water back to Husayn's group. In the mass combat that followed, Husayn and his men penetrated to the elite core of the enemy force and dispersed it. But the vastly greater enemy numbers eventually overcame Husayn and his warriors. Husayn was beheaded and dismembered. Some of the children in his band were killed, and women, taken captive.

Abbas Kiarostami's Ta'ziyeh / The Spectators presented this story, the Mourning of Muharram, in a present-day Iranian village, in the Sackler Gallery, this weekend.   A color video of the ritual dramatization was flanked by two larger screens showing monochrome videos of spectators. The spectators sat on cushions in front of the screens in a narrow room specially prepared in the Sackler.   Husayn's group was dressed in green, and the enemy, in red.  Husayn circled on a white stallion and sang plangently.  The women, who sat on the upper level of the theater, looked formal and elegant in their black hajibs.  The women's hajibs were subtly individualized, and the women manipulated them expressively.  The men, who sat on the lower level of the theater, wore a motley, unattractive assortment of clothes, including Adidas sports jackets, poorly fitting shirts, and ugly sweaters.  In the dramatization of the slaughter of a child, fake blood drenched the child's white cloak of captivity.  Even spectators who watched the middle, colored screen with detachment or ethnographic curiosity felt the deep, authentic sorrow of the monochrome spectators on the left and on the right.

The event provided a profound meditation on being a spectator and on the cinema effect.  Abbas Kiarostami's latest film, Shirin (2008), shows the twelfth-century Persian love story of Sassanian king Khosrow and Armenian princess Shirin  through the faces of 112 Iranian actresses as they apparently watch a film of it.   Human beings, male and female, are unique, wonderful, and mysterious media.

Abbas Kiarostami's Ta'ziyeh / The Spectators (Iran, 2003, 80 minute video) was presented in five showings at the Sackler Gallery on January 24-25, 2010.  Kiarostami's Shirin will be shown in the Freer Gallery's Myer Auditorium on Friday, Jan. 29, and Sunday, Jan. 31.

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Umm, that's Part-of-Speech tagging.  What a POS.

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If the price of an artwork were set according to the hours of labor put into it, Sun Xun's animations would cost an enormous amount.  He makes animations by hand-drawing each individual frame.  He recently stated that one animation cost him two years to make, working ten hours every day.  All this labor is transformed into a video that today can easily be shared globally on magical services like YouTube.  Our time is fundamentally unsettling to a mass of scholarly economic theory-writing spanning the centuries from Smith through Marx to the present.  But at the Sackler Gallery, Sun Xun's videos Chinese Words: War and Shock of Time are not offered for a price.  Anyone can come and freely view them in the Moving Perspectives exhibition.  But hurry, because these videos will vanish from the Sackler after November 8.

Chinese Words: War animates Chinese characters and fragments of characters in the development of military technology.  Its concern with the development of characters and the relationship between character form and meaning is similar to that of Xu Bing's The Living Word and Book from the Sky, both of which were installed at the Sackler in 2001.   Sun Xun's work has less sense of eternal aesthetics and balance, if only between illusion and disillusionment; instead, Sun Xun's animation invokes an urgent, forward-driving menace to humanity.  But humans and other animals do not need writing to fight with each other.  In truth, human groups have been fatally attacking each other since long before the invention of writing.   War is not simply a problem of words or other externally constructed technologies.  Chinese Words: War is psychologically superficial in way that doesn't, despite its primal soundtrack, promote ironic appreciation for its flatness.

Shock of Time is much more ambitious and thought-provoking.  Industrialized print and a public wired-speaker system over-write worlds in this animation.  "Mythos can expel truth" declares a closing character string.  Yet in the U.S., the power of traditional media is being revealed as myth: print publications like newspapers are rapidly dying, despite their increasingly desperate efforts to write themselves into the future.  And yet, with black-and-white, hand-drawn animations centered on industrial machinery and dead or dying communications technology, Shock of Time remarkably captures life lived in the midst of ubiquitous screens continuously refreshed with conventional symbols.  Newspapers are the first draft of history.  "History is a lie of time."  Shock of Time's new-media sense points to a world without time and a world without the public direction that time/history implies.

The viewing room in the Sackler is well-arranged for appreciating Shock of Time.  Movie theaters and living rooms typically have viewers confined in seats.  Viewers in front of a computer are similarly confined in seats.  The new wave of screens are mobile devices that allow persons to move the screen and move themselves while they peer into screens.  The viewing room in the Sackler has two benches placed against the back wall of the stark, square viewing room.  This arrangement frees viewers to choose widely their positions relative to the screen and to move about the space while watching.   Shock of Time retains its impressive force even when viewed from widely different physical angles.  One important arrangement was beyond the power of this exhibition.  Play Shock of Time backwards in your head, if you can.  Shock of Time is beyond time.

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Sun Xun's animated videos, Shock of Time (2006, 5:29 min) and Chinese Words: War (2005, 2:12 min) are on display at the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery, in its Moving Perspectives exhibition, through November 8, 2009.

Additional notes: At a presentation he gave in conjunction with the exhibition, Sun Xun stated that he refuses to use computers to create animations because he wants to control every aspect of his creative tool.   His animations, however, are far from technologically naive or primitive.  A member of the audience at that talk told Sun Xun that she recognized a newspaper that he incorporated in Shock of Time, and she asked him why he chose that newspaper.  He said he used it just because it was ready at hand.  Mashing up readily available video and image sources is a characteristic feature of much new-media work.

At least in the Soviet Union, wired public-speaker systems were once roughly as ubiquitous as newspapers.  In the late 1980s, a wired, monophonic public-speaker system reached 85% of the Soviet population.

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The FTC's revised Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising have created a brouhaha in the blogosphere. Most persons already understand principles of ethical blogging. Don't lie, but you can write fiction. Don't steal, but fair use isn't stealing. Don't manipulate, but you can display your rhetorical skills.   Don't write as if you have no interest in a subject; make your interests clear.   Persons who fully understand these principles should find the FTC guides straight-forward.

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A reconstruction of an ancient Greek trireme, the Olympias, had its first sea trials off the Greek island of Poros in 1987. The emblem above is from the participants' t-shirt.  It shows the three different designs of oars, one for each level of rowers.  Given the project leaders' deep classical learning, the graphic design of the ship is probably based on an ancient pottery decoration.

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The title page declares:

Seneca's

Oedipus

Adapted by Ted Hughes

Introduction by Peter Brook

Illustrated by Reginald Pollack

Doubleday & Company, Inc.,

Garden City, New York 1972

The next page notes:

Note: Seneca's Oedipus is the sole property of the author and is fully protected by copyright. ... All rights, including professional, amateur, stock, radio and television broadcasting, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public readings, and the rights of translation in [sic] foreign languages are reserved.  All inquiries should be addressed to the author's agent: Olwyn Hughes....

This conception of authorship isn't romantic; it's horrible and fearful. It's a worse curse than Merwin's.  Hell, if I foolishly believed I would generate some pity, I would stick my head into the oven.

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Jack:  "There will never be another like Walter Concrete.  He was the most trusted man in America."

Jill:  "How do you know he was the most trusted man in America?"

Jack: "Somebody said so on television."

Jill: "...and that's the way it is."

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