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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Today, even on the Internet, horoscopes consists of a few brief sentences.  That's a form auspicious for the economics of print newspapers, which are now dying.  For horoscopes in new media, the future offers much broader sensory possibilities.

"Take an augury.  See what your desire is.  See the shape of your beginning and end." So states the introduction to a Falnama, a book of omens, created as a gift for the Ottoman Sultan Ahmed I about 1615.  In the largely scribal cultures of Ottoman Turkey and Safavid Iran in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, large, expensive books used for divination focused on images.  The Sackler Gallery's ongoing exhibition, Falnama: Book of Omens, along with the scholarly, beautiful exhibition catalog, presents these fortune-showing books.[1]

The construction of the books prioritizes seeing.  Like the Hamzanama of Akbar, these monumental Falnamas have large images framed to form complete pages.  The books open to an image on the right page and text on the left page.  Since reading in Persian and Turkish progresses from right to left, the image is read before the text.  Visually, the images are colorful and ornate.  The texts on the facing pages are also highly decorative.   At least with these books, taking an augury was an impressive sight.

Consider, for example, the above image of Adam and Eve expelled from paradise.  It is from the Topkapı Persian Falnama, attributed to the last quarter of the sixteenth century and to a Shi'i artistic center outside of the Safavid royal court.[2]  The figures of Adam and Eve contrast expressively.  Adam is in confident motion; Eve is stationary and concerned.  Eve has the same flesh-tone as the angel in the doorway on the upper right of the image, and she gazes dejectedly downward.  Adam, in contrast, has a darker, more earthly tone, and he gazes confidently out on the world. Adam's smoothly curving hand clasps Eve's rigid, outstretched hand.  With her other hand, Eve holds sheaves of wheat with a fist that also conveys fear and tension.   In addition, notice Eve's slightly angled left foot and raised big toe.  Far away in time and space from Hollywood caricatures, that's a poignant gesture of shyness and hesitancy.

Three out of the four Falnamas represented in the exhibition include an image entitled "People of the Cave".  A Falnama known as the dispersed Falnama, probably created for the Persian Shah Tahmasb about 1560, includes a "People of the Cave" image.  The composition is balanced and circular.  At the visual center, a white dog is curled up sleeping against the black cave background.  In a crescent above the dog, the companions (people) sleep peacefully with intertwined bodies and arms.  The colorful cave, anchored with three equally spaced green trees, circles around them.  Dispersed around the cave are active men with different types of dress, arms, and standards, and different complexions and facial characteristics, especially noses.  The cave appears as a place of tranquility separated from the world's turmoil.

Textual sources other than the Falnama provide insight into the image.  In sura 18, Al-Kahf, the Qur'an provides guidance about the associated story.  It indicates (18:9) that the story was already well know among the Qur'an's first audience.  Syriac Christians of that time referred to the story as the Youths of Ephesus.  The earliest surviving reference occurs  in one of Jacob of Serugh's homilies from early in the sixth century.  In the story, youths from Ephesus hide in a cave to escape  Roman Emperor Decius' order to do homage to his gods Zeus, Apollo, and Artemis.  Decius condemns the youths by sealing the opening of the cave.   Many years later in the reign of the (Christian) Eastern Roman Emperor Theodorus II, God awakens the youths from their death-sleep.  One youth returns to Ephesus to get food.  The youth is astonished that Christianity reigns in Ephesus, while the Ephesians cannot understand why the youth attempts to pay for the food with ancient coinage.  The youths and the Ephesians eventually realize that the youths have been resurrected from a long death-sleep in the cave.[3]

The "People of the Cave" image comes from a story of an astonishing future, unrecognizable from the past and the present.  If the "People of the Cave" image were understood to present that theme, it would undermine analogical interpretation of historical-traditional figures and events depicted in the Falnamas.  As guidance concerning the cave story, the Qur'an warns, "Nor say of anything, 'I shall be sure to do so and so tomorrow' Without adding, 'So please Allah'" (18:23-24) .  The dispersed Falnama and the Topkapı Persian Falnama, both of which include a "People of the Cave" image, typically add to the end of the auguries conditioning on God's wishes or will.  The Falnama of Ahmed I, which does not include a "People of the Cave" image, does not explicitly include such conditioning in its augury texts.  Moreover, Ahmed's Falnama explicitly urges in its introduction analogical interpretation of the images.  Its compiler apparently had good reason to exclude a "People of the Cave" image.

The stories associated with Falnama images did not consistently control interpretations of the images.  Falnama images are distinct, specific and highly articulated, e.g. "Imam Riza Saves the Sea People," "Imam Ali Slays Murra ibn Qays," "Khaybar: The Conquering Palm of Ali," "Alexander Builds a Wall against Gog and Magog," and "Moses Challenges Pharaoh's Sorcerers."  The images can easily be identified with well-known stories.  Most of the stories, however, do not have obvious implications for auguries.  In two cases in the four monumental Falnamas' surviving images, the same visual topos is associated with an auspicious augury in one Falnama, and an inauspicious augury in another.[4]

Apart from Qur'anic or image-specific verses at the beginning of the texts, the augury texts themselves are largely as abstract and insipid as modern horoscopes.  A representative excerpt:

you have found freedom from sorrows, and the doors of joy and happiness have been opened to you, and your affairs, as you would wish, will turn out well, and day by day your fortunes are on the rise.  The intent is good with respect to everything, especially travel, buying and selling, contracting marriage, entering a city, and transporting and consigning things.  In short, the auspiciousness of this intent and the goodness of the augury cannot be denied, and every desire that you have in your heart will turn out beautifully.[5]

Across the three Falnamas with original auguries, the auguries emphasize good news: good auguries outnumber bad auguries by a factor of 2.4.  The auguries typically conclude with exhortations to "almsgiving, charity, performing obligatory prayers and good works."  Occasionally the texts make points bearing on intra-Islamic controversies over Islamic authorities.[6]  Overall, the augury texts are characteristic products of bureaucracy.

Recognizing the augury texts to be bureaucratic work suggests that the monumental Falnamas were for elite use, but not for elite reading.  These Falnamas obviously are lavish, expensive works.  Auguries designed for a specific, elite reader probably would have a literary form like that of Daniel's interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar's dream.  In contrast, the auguries in the Falnamas all begin with the generic address, "O augury user!" or "O augury seeker."  Moreover, the auguries address concerns common to persons of all levels of wealth and status, e.g. "buying or selling anything, or renting or renting out land, a garden, or a house, or forming a partnership, or moving into a new house, or making a request from important people or others." [7]  The Falnamas seem to me to make most sense as a tool for an elite's bureaucracy to provide auguries for ordinary persons who seek them from the elite person.[8]

The pretense that the elite person himself will seek auguries from the Falnama would help to enhance the Falnama's value.  The introduction to the Falnama of Ahmed I declares the book to be "the Book of Auguries of His Majesty the Padishah, Refuge of the World, and Shadow of God."[9]  Ordinary persons might reasonably and urgently seek auguries from a person understood to be "Refuge of the World, and Shadow of God."  On the other hand, the introduction explicitly anticipates that Ahmed will seek auguries for himself from the Falnama.  That anticipation should be interpreted in the context of the introduction's extravagant rhetoric.[10]  It can be interpreted as supporting the Falnama's value, where its value was primarily to serve persons seeking auguries from Ahmed.  An augury based on the Falnama that Ahmed is described to use is an augury associated with Ahmed's authority.

Understanding the Falnamas as elite tools for providing auguries to ordinary persons suggests that images were more important than words for making an impressive, royal augury.  I foresee the future for horoscopes on the Internet to be visual.  For a glimpse of this future's shape, see the Sackler Gallery's magnificent and unique exhibition, Falnama: Book of Omens.

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Falnama: Book of Omens, is at the Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC, through January 24, 2010.  It is the first exhibition devoted to these works.  The Sackler Gallery is the sole venue for the exhibition.

Update: Here's some related discussion of the Companions of the Cave / Seven Sleepers of Ephesus story and images.

Notes:

[1] The exhibition catalog, Farhad and Bağcı (2009), unfortunately lacks the notes to the text translations in Appendix A.   I hope that these notes will be posted on the exhibition website.

[2] Id. pp. 53, 58, 100-1.  "The Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise" image in this Falnama is attributed to the Ottoman painter Hasan Pasha.  On the development of images of Adam and Eve expelled from paradise, see Section III.A. Sense of Scripture, in my work, Sense in Communication.

[3] For an analysis of the story and its sources, see Griffith (2007).  The story is celebrated on the Orthodox Christian calendar under the title, The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.  Al-Thaʻlabī, a great Islamic scholar who wrote early in the eleventh century GC, provides many details associated with the story.  Farhad and Bağcı (2009) p. 160 describes the youths as living "some time before the birth of Christ."  Milstein (1998) p. 152, summarizing sixteenth-century "Stories of Prophets" (Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā ̓) manuscripts, states, "All the authors agree that the personages may have lived before the time of 'Isa (Jesus)".   The "may" makes this statement difficult to interpret.  Al-Thaʻlabī states, "Exegetes and historians have said that the affair of the People of the Cave took place during the days of the petty kings between Jesus and Muhammad."  Trans. in Brinner (2002) p. 691.

[4] See Farhad and Bağcı (2009) pp. 32, 34, and 310 (n. 29).  The topoi are "Alexander Builds a Wall against Gog and Magog" and "Abraham's Fire Ordeal."

[5] Excerpt from augury for "Uvays-i Qaran and the Camal", dispered Falnama, trans. by Thackston, id. p. 260.

[6] The good/bad ratio is calculated from the augury classifications in id., Appendix B.  The quoted exhortation is from "Uvays-i Qaran and the Camal", dispered Falnama, id.  Id. p. 54 notes that the texts of the Topkapı Persian Falnama persistently invoke Imam Ali and underscore the superiority of Shi'ism.

[7] Id. p. 32, makes this point, but emphasizes the universal appeal of the texts, including to elite readers: "each augury includes several prognostications, at least one of which could apply to the most august seeker."  The quote is from the dispersed Falnama, "Salomon and Bilqis Enthroned," trans. by Thackston, id. p. 257.

[8] Id. 28, 30 provides evidence of extensive popular demand for image-based auguries in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Istanbul and Isfahan.

[9] Trans. by Sergei Tourkin, id. p. 295.

[10] For example, Kalender, the powerful court administrator who wrote the introduction, describes himself as "this humble writer, the least and most insignificant of his [Ahmed's] servants and smallest of the slaves in his retinue."  Trans. Tourkin, id. p. 296.  The description of Ahmed's status is also a matter of extravagant rhetoric.  But the exalted status of the Sultan Ahmed I relative to that of ordinary persons cannot be doubted.

References:

Brinner, William, trans.  2002. ʻArāʻis al-majālis fī qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā, or, Lives of the prophets as recounted by Abū Isḥāq Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Thaʻlabī.  Leiden: Brill.

Farhad, Massumeh with Serpil Bağcı. 2009. Falnama: the Book of Omens Washinton, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Griffith, Sydney. 2007. "Christian Lore and the Arabic Qur'an: The 'Companions of the Cave' in Surat al-Kahf and in Syriac Christian Tradition," in Gabriel Said Reynolds, ed., The Qur'an in its Historical Context.  New York: Routledge, pp. 109-40.

Milstein, Rachel, Karin Rührdanz, and Barbara Schmitz. 1998.  Stories of the prophets: illustrated manuscripts of Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā ̓. Costa Mesa, Calif: Mazda Publishers.

Images courtesy of the Sackler Gallery.  Image credits:

• Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise, from the Ahmed I Falnama; by Nakkas Hasan Pasha; Turkey, Ottoman Period, 1614-16; Opaque watercolor and gold on paper; 49 x 36.4 cm; Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul, ELS2009.5.37

• People of the Cave, from the dispersed Falnama; Iran, Safavid period, mid 1550s-early 1560s; Opaque watercolor and gold on paper; 58.4 x 45.1 cm; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1935, ELS2009.5.16

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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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Among the cocky young men in the new ruler's entourage, one wears a t-shirt declaring, "business is good."  The back of his t-shirt adds, "my business is killing."  Such a combination of power, inhumane interests, and brutality, writ large, animates Shakespeare's King Lear.  For a production with the Shakespeare Theatre Company, Director Robert Falls has set King Lear in the disintegrating Yugoslavia of the early 1990s.  This magnificent King Lear presents a morally devastating realism for our times.

This realism is far from a fairy-tale synopsis of the play. Falls observed,

So many people come at King Lear with this misguided story of 'once upon a time, there was a nice king who had two evil daughters and a good daughter'. I still see productions like that! I felt that this play had to really honor every single character. All the characters are capable of good and evil, and we don't often recognize the monsters that move among [within] us until it's too late.

The opening scene is a banquet jumbling long-recognized markers of high and low social status.  A huge portrait of King Lear as a young man hangs in the background.  The image is that of the young Stacy Keach, the great Shakespearean actor who is playing King Lear.  Like many rulers of dictatorial nation-states that have emerged over the past century, King Lear appears as a despot who has created his own national history and his own personal position of power.

Laura Odeh, playing Cordelia, effectively brings out questions about Cordelia's moral commitments. When asked to declare her love for her father as part of a shallow public ritual, Cordelia literally says, "Nothing."  This is conventionally interpreted as indicating her sincerity, earnestness, and dutifulness. Odeh's acting admits no such myth.  Most sympathetically interpreted here as being slightly autistic, Cordelia soon shows acute social skills.  Her farewell to her sisters contains sophisticated relational aggression:

I know you what you are;
And, like a sister, am most loath to call
Your faults as they are named. Love well our father.
To your professed bosoms I commit him;
But yet, alas, stood I within his grace,
I would prefer him to a better place.
So farewell to you both.

The phrase "most loath to call your faults" is like "I won't mention your drunkenness"; "your professed bosoms" is like "your so-called love"; and "I would prefer him to a better place" is hardly sisterly.  Odeh delivers these lines brilliantly.  Few in the audience could miss how Cordelia is using words.

Jonno Roberts as Edmund and Chris Genebach as Cornwall play well contrasting types of male monsters.  Edmund is a psychopath who consciously acts all his own emotions  as instruments of his small, hard, amoral core of interests.   Edmund preys on his father's childish credulity.  Cornwall is Edmund turned inside out.  The socio-economic-cultural circumstances of competition for high status among men and sexual access to women determine who Cornwall is and what he does.  In the setting of this production, Cornwall is a brutish thug.

The trajectory of King Lear is squalor and death.  Falls' production takes King Lear all the way to being a homeless person rummaging in a battle-ravaged city transformed into a garbage dump.   The elaborate setting includes strewn plastic garbage bags, twisted piles of metal, an upended half of a destroyed car, and partially demolished, black buildings.   The broken sections of the buildings are shiny black like the plastic garbage bags.   They thus add a surreal overtone to the scene.

Death is insistently represented and magnified in this production.  Cornwall and the servant who intervenes to try to stop Cornwall from gouging out Gloucester's eyes both die in horrifying ways that go beyond the texts of King Lear.  Regan's response to her husband's death shocks emotionally with actions that none of the texts requires.  Gloucester dies onstage in his son's arms.  Lear appears carrying the naked, dead Cordelia in a scene worthy of Greek tragedy.   Lear's death, in turn, Stacy Keach powerfully plays with a fleeting taste of his daughter's spirit.  Both Goneril and Regan die onstage with savage, terrifying actions.

These and other directorial choices that modify or augment the texts of King Lear accentuate the brutish horror of the play.   One reviewer praises Falls for being "willing to show us the truth of this story full in the face."  Another reviewer observes:

There's choking and shooting and raping in this show, too - all done on stage. Gosh! I don't think I want to be an actress when I grow up anymore!! How it was all staged is remarkable, but still very confusing and disturbing to me.

Gloucester declares, "As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods; / They kill us for their sport."  King Lear truly is a confusing and disturbing play, and this production, especially so.

The realism of this production overwhelms a key play within King Lear.  Edgar pretends to take his blind father Gloucester to a high cliff at Dover.   Gloucester jumps from the imagined cliff.   This play within the play is produced only in the imagination, without any help from the stage's setting.  Yet later a hole for disposing bodies is opened in the stage.  An image of that hole, slightly depressing that stage section, or some other staged effect would have better connected Edgar's play to the play as a whole.

Just like King Lear, Edgar's play deserves to be taken seriously.  Following Gloucester's illusory leap, Edgar explains to the audience, "Had he been where he thought, / by this had thought been past."   But he wasn't where he thought, and thought and life go on.

Hadst thou been aught but gossamer, feathers, air,
So many fathom down precipitating,
Thou'dst shivered like an egg; but thou dost breathe,
Hast heavy substance, bleed'st not, speak'st, art sound.
...
Thy life's a miracle. Speak yet again.

Shakespeare, a profoundly self-conscious playwright, recognizes that real life is made from more than realism.

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King Lear by William Shakespeare, directed by Robert Falls, at the Shakespeare Theatre Company's Sidney Harmon Hall, June 16 to July 26, 2009.

Note: Texts of King Lear quoted above are from Harbage, ed., William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, The Pelican Text Revised (Viking Penguin: 1977).

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With an insightful display of different viewpoints, the Smithsonian's exhibition, Jamestown, Québec, Santa Fe: Three North American Beginnings, explores settlement and unsettlement.  An opening theme of the exhibition is "unsettling the continent."  Text on a large sign-barrier at the beginning of the exhibition presents in three languages this one text:

Societies of indigenous peoples inhabited the North American continent for thousands of years. In the 1500s, limited contacts with European explorers, traders, and fishermen introduced deadly germs and disrupted established alliances, rivalries, and ways of life. Soon, however, European efforts to create permanent settlements would introduce more devastating disease and challenges on an earth-shaking scale.

One of the diseases that Europeans carry is a strain of fanaticism that makes them prone to bizarre delusions.  According to Wikipedia, which may be more credible than the Smithsonian, 18 European attempts at colonizing North America failed prior to the founding of Jamestown.   Why did these Europeans again and again voyage to bring disease and earth-shaking challenges to North America?  Of the 104 European colonists who landed in Jamestown in April, 1607, only 38 survived through January, 1608.  Why didn't the rest just return home and stay there?  Instead, hundreds more arrived, and hundreds more died during the "starving time" in the winter of 1609-1610.  Fanaticism along with delusions must have driven those early settlers.

Maybe it's their religion.  The curators of this exhibition hold positions roughly analogous to those of high-ranking clerics in seventeenth-century Europe.  A large sign in the exhibition declares in three languages:

Europeans believed in an orthodox theology, whether Catholic or Protestant.  English, French, and Spanish settlements each established a state church and prosecuted dissenters from what they considered "the one, true faith."

Indigenous peoples were more tolerant of new beliefs and ways of connecting with the divine.  Yet Powhatan, Algonquin, Huron, and Pueblo peoples all encountered newcomers who expected them to abandon their religious beliefs and embrace European ones.

"Europeans believed in an orthodox theology, whether Catholic or Protestant."   Do most ordinary persons actually believe this?  The Orthodox in eastern Europe, who understand themselves to be neither Catholic nor Protestant, believe in Orthodox Christian theology.  Jews and Muslims living in Europe have probably believed that their faith is true, and other faiths, false.  Perhaps that makes Jews and Muslims living in Europe orthodox, but they're neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Orthodox.

Europe was fertile ground for new, competing religious ideas and organizations.  For example, among Christians living in England in the seventeenth century were Protestant Episcopals (who divided into High-Church Anglicans versus Latitudinarians), underground atheists and underground Roman Catholics, Lutherans of various reform orientations, Presbyterians, Calvinists, Baptists and Anabaptists, Pietists of various sorts, Quakers, and Puritans, among others.  Looking back about 2500 years, the tribal religions in Northern Europe and the gods of the Greeks were altogether different forms of religion.  It's highly unlikely that peoples living in North America prior to European settlements had as much spiritual innovation and re-organization as did peoples living in Europe.  That's because the sort of social elaboration, stratification, and competition that led to the Smithsonian Institution and its exhibition of seventeenth-century North American history fosters religious innovation.

At the exhibition exit is a large standing sign-board.  It's titled, "The Year is 1700: Where Does Everything Stand?"  It declares:

There is not yet a nation called Canada or a country called the United States.

Settlement is taking place not only from east to west but begins at many points and moves in many directions.  Unsettlement -- the loss of population and disruption of Native societies -- may be the key characteristic of the era.  Still, Native peoples outnumber European colonists at least nine to one.
...

As  yet, neither Spain, France, nor England dominates.  Native nations and European ones will continue to contend with one another, some for domination, others for survival.

Leaving the exhibition, persons living here, now, in both Europe and North America, should worry about their future.

Jamestown, Québec, Santa Fe: Three North American Beginnings is on display at the Smithsonian's International Gallery, Ripley Center, through Nov. 1, 2009.  The Virginia Historical Society and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History co-organized the exhibition.  The sculpture pictured above is Ron Mueck's "Untitled (Big Man)," 2000.  It is in Strange Bodies: Figurative Works from the Hirshhorn Collection, on display at the Hirshhorn though the fall, 2009.

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With Systematic Landscapes, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art through July 12, 2009, Maya Lin brings landscapes into an art gallery.  This one, generative, earthly reality is an unsought gift to every human being.   Systematic Landscapes presents works that make visible within the Corcoran Gallery unseeable forms of this gift.

The works build upon familiar models of the natural world.  Prior to cheap maps, many persons living around the Chesapeake Bay probably would not recognize what most persons now understand to be the shape of the Bay.  The poured-silver map-shape of the Chesapeake Bay in Systematic Landscapes builds upon that new understanding.  Water Line is a room-sized line-contour sculpture of an underwater landmass that, according to the exhibition brochure, is located in the South Atlantic Ocean near Antarctica.  To a native of South America a millennium ago, it probably would look like a fishing net.  Blue Lake Pass models "an actual mountain range near the artist's Colorado home."  If one of the Bodies of Water Series (Caspian Sea, Red Sea, and Black Sea) was turned over, enlarged, and cubed, it would look a lot like Blue Lake Pass, except for a significant difference in the direction of movement of the contours.  What stabilizes and informs the works are common knowledge of the map-shapes of seas and the conventions of topological representations.

The representational characteristics of digital technology strongly shapes Systematic Landscapes.  Digital works are composed from a large number of discrete, uniformly organized, sharply bounded bits.  2x4 Landscape, which has a steeply rising protrusion in the midst of a room-sized base, is made from more than 50,000 2x4's arranged in a tight, regular grid in two dimensions.  Blue Lake Pass and Bodies of Water Series are composed from equal-width wooden slices.   Pins are the bits in Pin River -- Volga.   A topologically square grid of wire forms the fabric for Water Line.  Compared to mosaics, works in this exhibition more insistently highlight regularity in their constituting bits.

The exhibition encourages viewer engagement and consideration of new computer technologies.  The exhibition brochure explains:

Each [large-scale sculptural installation] offers a different means for viewers to engage with and comprehend a schematic representation of landscape forms.  In this exhibition, Lin examines how our modern relationships to the land we inhabit are extended, condensed, distorted, and interpreted through new computer technologies.  She translates a series of dramatic landscape environments, selected for their inspiring beauty and connection to life-supporting habitats, into spatial environments with which viewers can engage in an art gallery setting.

When I took out my digital camera to make an image of 2x4 Landscape, the guard ordered me to stop.  While Maya Lin has even encouraged the Corcoran to allow visitors to walk on this work, photographing the landscapes is prohibited.  Whether the source of this prohibition is the artist, the artist's gallery, or the Corcoran exhibition director, isn't clear.  In the brochure, every photograph is tagged, "Courtesy of PaceWildenstein."  Why not courtesy of wind, water, and time?  PaceWildenstein is a New York Gallery that represents Maya Lin.   Economic reality is part of the total earthly landscape.   But economic landscapes, like physical landscapes, can be seen in different ways.   Prohibiting viewers from using digital cameras to engage with Systematic Landscapes seems to me disappointingly inconsistent with the exhibition's spirit.

This September, Maya Lin is planning to premiere a work entitled What is Missing? This work will focus on the loss of habitats and the extinction of species.  Her website describes this work as involving a multi-site video project, an Internet site, and a book.  I hope What is Missing? will allow user engagement using modern digital technology and foster a variety of new creations.  Human beings can add to our common gifts.

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Garden & Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur, a recent, magnificent exhibition at the Sackler Gallery, included paintings memorializing the life of Maharaja Bakhat Singh. He was an eighteenth-century Rathore-Rajput ruler of the Jodhpur-Marwar kingdom, now in the Indian state of Rajasthan. A number of paintings depict the royal, cultured Bakhat Singh at his Nagaur Palace in a garden amidst a crowd of beautiful young women. They rub his legs, bring him food, play music for him, and bath with him. In one painting, Bakhat Singh, bare-chested in a large garden pool with twenty-one young women, playfully squirts, with an elongated pumping toy, water at one of the women.[1] Being a ruler gave Bakhat Singh extraordinary pleasure.

Before the Sackler Gallery's exhibition re-introduced them to the international art world, the Nagaur Palace garden paintings had never been published and apparently were largely unknown. Why these paintings were not previously celebrated isn't explained in the exhibition or accompanying book. Perhaps the paintings' subject matter was a cause of intercultural moral concern in the past. Some tragic history may also have caused unease: Bakhat Singh gained his position in Nagaur by killing his father, the reigning ruler of Marwar. The book accompanying the exhibition explains:

It is unknown whether Abhai Singh [the eldest son] incited the murder so he could gain the throne for himself or, as was rumored at the time, Bakhat Singh was enraged that his father was having an illicit affair with his daughter-in-law, Bakhat Singh's wife. Perhaps, as some historians have speculated, it was a joint effort formulated by the brothers to further their dual political and personal agendas. What is known is that when Abhai Singh returned to Jodhpur in late 1724, he gave Nagaur to Bakhat Singh in what many have interpreted as a reward for the murder. The Rathore nobles, however, never forgave this monstrous act. They found the patricide so abhorrent that no prominent structure was built for Abhai Singh at Mandore, the strikingly picturesque Rathore ancestral site where Marwar rajas' deaths are honored with elaborately carved, red sandstone cenotaphs.[2]

Bakhat Singh's Nagaur Palace garden paintings were not created to evoke horror and pity. But appreciating the pleasure they depict requires a simple heart.

The Tale of Shuten Dōji, now on exhibit at the Sackler, depicts a morally sanctioned response to a male with unauthorized, wicked relations with beautiful young women. The tale of Shuten Dōji goes back in illustrated form to fourteenth-century Japan or earlier. Shuten Dōji is a demon-ogre typically depicted as large, ugly, stupid, and barbaric. He kidnaps beautiful young women to serve him at his castle-fortress. The emperor dispatches samurai to rescue the women and destroy the ogre. Carrying out this mission leads to a series of prototypical incidents involving wise men, a distressed woman, some brave woman, a magic potion, and disguises. Ultimately, the samurai prevail in a ferocious battle. They behead Shuten Dōji and kill many of his demon-helpers. They rescue many beautiful women from the ogre. Returning the women to the city, the samurai parade through the streets and display Shuten Dōji's head on cart.

An early nineteenth-century Japanese wall hanging depicts Shuten Dōji with food and two beautiful women amidst blossoming cherry trees.   While one of his demon-helpers kneels on the ground in a guarding position, Shuten Dōji, in attractive human form, sits on a tiger skin.  The two women wear lavish, noble dress and have extraordinarily long, black hair.  One woman serves sake to Shuten Dōji, who does not look at her but rather gazes out on the cherry blossoms.  Below, a lone woman washes a kimono undergarment in a stream.  The remaining parts of the voluminous kimono rest on the river bank.  The kimono belongs to one of Shuten Dōji's unpictured female victims.  The wall hanging is large, about 1 by 2.5 meters, and sumptuous, made from gold on silk.  It presents an elegant composition with hints of barbarism and horror.  It is a well-designed as a noble incitement to anger and retribution.[3]

The tale of Shuten Dōji was represented in a variety of media and became known throughout all levels of Japanese society. As a treasure made for the royal Japanese court about the year 1700, the tale of Shuten Dōji was represented in three, 20-meter long scrolls illustrated with color ink, silver, and gold on silk.  A noted painter made the illustrations, and an imperial prince and two other noblemen contributed calligraphy. Two large six-section folding screens, dating from 1625-1650, display scenes using ink and gold on paper scenes. During the Edo Period (1615-1868), the tale of Shuten Dōji was also depicted on lavish hanging scrolls and arrangements of multiple paper fans.[4]

The tale of Shuten Dōji was also represented through much more modest means. In nineteenth-century Japan, the tale was depicted in small, printed books with black-and-white woodcut illustrations and very little text.[5]  The book was relatively cheap and accessible to the illiterate. At the end of the nineteenth century, the tale of Shuten Dōji, with English text, was printed in Japan in a small, color-illustrated book series entitled "Japanese Fairy Tales." Book no. 19, Ogres of Oeyama is on display in the Sackler exhibition. Book no. 18, The Ogre's Arm, is available online through the Internet Archive (thanks to Armchair Asia for the link). Drawing on popular English Gothic clichés, the text at one point declares, "It happened one dark and stormy night...." The Japanese fairy tale series seems to be designed for middle-class Japanese readers eager to learn to read English novels.

Male sexual desire is a powerful motivating force. It plays out within interpersonal fields of authority, resentment, and anger.  Resentment and anger at an imaginary ogre's access to women was probably easier to generate and distribute than appreciation for a historical ruler's fantastic sensual delights.

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The Tale of Shuten Dōji is ongoing at the Sackler Gallery through September 20, 2009.

Notes:

[1] "Maharaja Bakhat Singh Rejoices during Holi," Nagaur, ca. 1748-50, Mehrangarh Museum Trust, catalog number 20, in Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur (Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C., 2008).  For a similar painting, click on the upper right thumbnail for the online gallery.

[2] Glynn, Catherine, "Rathore and Mughal Interactions: Artistic Development at the Nagaur Court, 1600-1751" p. 14, in Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur.

[3] "Shuten Dōji on Mount Oe Viewing Cherry Blossoms," Suzuki Kiitsu (1796-1858), from the Feinberg Collection, USA.

[4]  Kano Shōun illustrated the scrolls, which include calligraphy by Imperial Prince Fushiminomiya Kuninaga (1667-1726).  All the works described here, unless otherwise noted, are on display in the exhibition.  Some of the works can be seen online here.

[5] The exhibition displays such a book with illustrations by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849): Ehon Wakan no Homare, Japan, 1850, thread-bound, woodblock-printed, Sackler item V20.2006.195.

Above images courtesy of the Sackler Gallery: The Tale of Shuten Dōji, Scroll 3 from a set of 3, section 7, by Kano Shoun (1637 – 1702); Japan, Edo period, 1700; Handscroll; Ink, color, gold, and silver on silk; 37.2 x 2405.2 cm; Purchase, Friends of Asian Arts, F1998.26.3.  The Tale of Shuten Dōji, Section 23, scroll 3;  Japan, Edo period, 17th century;  Handscroll; Ink, color, gold and silver on paper; 32.7 x 1338.3 cm; Purchase, F1998.303.3 .

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Music, visual art, literature, and information tend to be associated with different categories of media and communicative experiences.  Recent media convergence, however, has opened a wide range of choices in how to organize technologically mediated communication.  The U.S. National Gallery of Art's exhibition, Heaven on Earth: Manuscript Illuminations from the National Gallery of Art, displays purposive, innovative media organization that predates by more than a half-millennium our age of new media.

The exhibition includes large, beautifully illuminated choir books from Europe in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries.  The choir books were large so that the choir could read from one book the words and notes that they would sing together.  Along with these written representations of the sacred Christian music were miniature paintings related to the subject of the music and designed around the initial letter of a song-word on the page.  Known as historiated initials, these paintings both re-enforce the meaning of the music and accent its sensuous beauty.

A choir-book page created in Lombardy, 1450/1460, is a wonderful artifact of convergent sense in mediated communication.  It includes four lines of musical notation, words in two colors, a large historiated initial M, and a lavishly decorated border that undoubtedly formed the left half of a fully bordered opening for the choir book.  The choir looked into this ornate window to sing the Magnificat, a song of Mary, the mother of Jesus.   The historiated initial shows an angel announcing to Mary that she will give birth to the Messiah.  Just visible behind the central column of the M is a book.  Mary reading a prophetic book (Isaiah) became a typical feature of Annunciation iconography in the late Middle Ages.  Thus the moment of this choir music is individual, contemplative reading interrupted by world-changing bodily action of the word within Christian world history.

Prior to about a millennium ago, letters dominated the texture of texts in Europe.  Texts consisted of columns of letters, without upper-and-lower case distinctions, without spaces between words, without periods at the end of sentences (or any other punctuation), without paragraphing, and without paratextual headings and other organizational indicators. Reading meant serial processing of letters.  Transposed to audiovisual media,  reading texts was once like watching a traditional television channel.

The rise of scholasticism in twelfth-century Europe prompted reformating of texts to aid accessing and processing information in scripture. A leaf from a Tuscan bible from the fourth quarter of the twelfth century highlights this development.  The leaf provides a section of text from the Gospel of Mark.  The text has no chapter, paragraph, or verse indicators. But spaces separate the words, and periods terminate sentences. Moreover, marginal notes record scriptural cross-references, and an inserted prologue precedes the text of the Gospel. Between the prologue and the Gospel is a seventeen-point summary of the Gospel, with points that are numbered serially with Roman numerals. A huge, lively, painted bookmark indicates the beginning of the Gospel proper.  In the midst of this informational apparatus is an illumination showing a pensive St. Mark, at a lectern, looking out at the viewer.   The leaf leads the reader into analytical scripture study, but also hints at the different bodily joy that the choir books invoke.

Media in the Middle Ages were generally neither transparent nor neutral.  The exhibition includes what was originally a frontispiece (c. 1140) to an instance of Bede's Commentary on the Apocalypse.  The illustration shows a dove (the Holy Spirit) inspiring St. John who dictates to Bede.  This intricate mediation gives Bede's text its interpretive authority.  More generally, institutional church services, saints, shrines, and relics provided consciously present, differentiated media  for communication with God.  End-to-end communication was extraordinary visions or revelations.  Intermediaries that highly structured communication were normal and central to the medieval communications business.

If you can, go see Heaven on Earth at the National Gallery of Art. You may never again get such an opportunity here on earth.

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Heaven on Earth is on display at the National Gallery through August 2,2009.  Most of the works on display are from Lessing J. Rosenwald's priceless donations to the National Gallery.  Rosenwald also made a major donation of rare books to the Library of Congress.  Many of those books can be viewed online.  Sadly, Rosenwald's donations to the National Gallery are much less accessible to persons across the U.S. and across the world.

Image note: Belbello da Pavia (Italian, active c. 1430 - c. 1473), Initial M: The Annunciation to the Virgin. Miniature from a choir book (antiphonal) (Lombardy), 1450/1460. Tempera and gold leaf on vellum. Rosenwald Collection, 1948. Image courtesy of the National Gallery Press Office.

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