Possibilities of the Predatory

I'd been doing all my sculpture blogging here http://www.eleanorcrook.com/sculptors/
But I missed catching all the other passing fads and notions ;  and this BLOGGER page stores many of my friends in the linkages down the side. So I return to it....

This summer's topics on my workbench are building up to the centenary of the outbreak of the "Great" War, as my work on WW1 plastic surgery has received some centenary attention, and I am producing a wax group of soldiers and some writings about faces rearranged by artillery and surgery. The rearranged face (or, as the title of a 1960s ICA show puts it "The Wonder and the Horror of the Human Head " ) puts me in mind again of Francis Bacon; the elegant threat and insolent violence he painted. I'm reading a recent  book on an important topic : Francis Bacon and Nazi Propaganda by Martin Hammer, a  study of Bacon's iconographic sources from Tate publishing. Early on Hammer quotes from Sam Hunter's 1952 essay "Francis Bacon, the Anatomy of Horror", and the Hunter passages lash off the page like Bacon's smears by comparison with the exegeses of the contemporary art historian. The vigour of such writing seems lost beyond hope,  impossible today now the language has been professionalised and formulated , mashed up with management jargon and cultural studiousness. Hunter also made public Bacon's use of, and choice of, photographs as awakeners of his imagery, and photographed a selection of his "incunabula".

 A taster, then , from Sam Hunter in 1952: "Needless to say, Bacon's record of contemporary history reads like a lesson in ignominy. His art deals with our most ubiquitous public images and discloses unimagined possibilities of the predatory in the private individual."
Image: Francis Bacon, "Man with Dog" 1953 ( detail)

A monochrome painting by Stieg Persson

It is 1939 in Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles. On Stage 6, Basil Rathbone is rehearsing a fencing duel which will end with his stage death. An electrician’s error drops the set into darkness; the last whipping pass of his sabre whiffs out a candle and leaves a ribbon of light curling across the blackness; he laughs.

It is 450000BCE off the coast of what will be Guam. Thousands of feet below the surface there is no light but a small fish is evolving to phosphoresce. His luminosity would be the envy of his forefathers. He is ugly. His eyeless face is like a melting wax fist.

It is 2007. An artist flies Quantas at night over Australia. She looks down and sees nothing for many hours. She sees a tiny light and wonders who is down there. Otherwise all is darkness. This means she is free to sculpt anything. She has not been to Australia before.

It is 1947 and Robert Motherwell realises “I belong….to a family of “black” painters and earth colour painters in masses, which would include Manet and Goya and Matisse.” Later he thinks his colour world developed as he looked at his mother’s waxed fruitwood furniture.

It is 1952 in Nevada. Harold Edgerton sets up his rapatronic cameras. Soon an atom bomb will explode. It begins. One nanosecond after detonation, the ball of gas hovers in the night sky, pale, smooth, swelling, its surface formed of regular geometric patterns. He is reminded of something he has known. Three nanoseconds later, the gas ball is the size of Manhattan and seven times hotter than the sun.

It is 1972 in Birmingham, England. A six year old girl is sitting in the dark waiting for a film to begin. Some music she does not know fills her with grandiosity and horror. A black monolith swings into view on the screen; dark shafts of light sweep across it. She should not be here but her parents have smuggled her in.

It is 2525. The air is dark and thick with tarry particles , the sun is a waxy glow, and it has been like this for 200 years. It’s not pretty but no one is here to see it. Some moths miss the moon so much they have learned to glow for each other; the only art now is the light ribbons they draw to attract a mate.

It is 1981 in Melbourne. A young painter is giving away his tubes of colour. He feels he will not be needing them; from now on he will say it all with black. His tutors are irritated.

It is 1998 in a hospital in Toronto. An 18 year old man lies in a persistent vegetative state after an unexplained accident four years ago. He can see a confusion of pale lights and hears everything. He is not anxious. His mother is there reading to him a novel , “Tlooth”. He hopes that next she will read him “Notes from Underground” .

Eleanor Crook

re: Stieg Persson's painting "Filling the Void" 1986 Oil on canvas 182.7 x 167.5 cm Collection Monash University, Melbourne

Jordanian funerary artefacts

A

funeral mask in stone from Nahal Hemar, 7th milennium BC, and a collection of overmodeled skulls with shell eyes and the mandibles removed; sometimes the chin is sculpted, in a compressed way, over the lower teeth. (photo by Jeff Rozwadowski, whose photostream from the Archaeological Museum at Amman, Jordan, is here)

This Siamese twin is from Ain Ghazai, c. 6500bc, and the faces on it somehow resemble the current director of the Jordanian Automobile Museum, below. These physiognomies echo down the years. When I was learning portraiture at Central St Martins, our tutor Monty identified that our Italian fellow student's face - pale, severe, dark melancholy eyes - had its ancestor on a 1st cent. AD encaustic coffin mask from Fayoum.

Island with Zappa on it.

... what Frank Zappa chose for Castaway's Choice in 1989 (the US version of Desert Island Discs, I assume):
• Octandre by Edgard Varese
• The Royal March from L'Histoire du Soldat by Igor Stravinsky
• The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky
• Third Piano Concerto, first movement by Bela Bartok. (FZ: ``I think it is one of the most beautiful melodies ever written.'')
• Stolen Moments by Oliver Nelson
• Three Hours Past Midnight by Johnny Guitar Watson(which FZ would save if only allowed one)
• Can I Come Over Tonight by The Velours
• Bagatelles for String Quartet by Anton Webern
• Symphony, Opus 21 by Anton Webern

Shamelessly stolen from Belgianwaffle's blog so I don't lose it. Thanks Mr Jones.

Sir Richard Burton: notes towards a wax essay

Burton's tent-tomb at Mortlake, London SW14.

How to gender a skull

I am often asked how to determine the gender of a skull, and have recently found these instructions.

Facets of the shin

Part-finished crucifix figures, Upper Rhenish, c. 1500. Historisches Museum, Basle.

Which are most instructive for the shaping process, stripped down as they are to facets and an outline.
Technical thoughts:
Few of the facets are directly facing the viewer, which may contribute to the sense of jutting 3d form.

The mannered shins are , especially in the second figure, impossibly attenuated and give full play to the curved blade of the tibia. The tensile strength in the wood can be felt, as a tense, brittle stiffness. There is great discomfort in the toes. In each figure at the stage where the carving was abandoned the leg on our left is more curvaceous and expressive.The leg on our right in each case is cut very straight, perhaps to maximise the straight grain, and being behind, is more load-bearing.

The drapery is surprisingly well finished on the left, and would have been rather vulnerable during the remaining carving.

Worse things happen at sea

The Royal Navy 's 19th century medical journals have been made available by the National Archive

Sardines

Mike Goldberg's "Sardines", the subject of Frank O'Hara's "Why I am not a painter"


More O'Hara images here

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

(1971)

A bone of which I am fond

....is the calcaneus, or human heel bone. Many years ago an old friend made me aware of its robust , compact form and surprising size when he showed me x rays of his: a rock guitarist, he had, intoxicated in the moment of performance, stepped off the front of an 8-foot high stage and, landing heel first, shattered it. Pinned, it was clumped back together and he hobbled in plaster for months. Until then, I had never really paid it any attention when drawing skeletons as an art student. Now I know it as the anchor of the Achilles tendon, and knowledge of it is key to drawing or sculpting convincing feet.

As a by-product of my search for crucified legs images whilst carving the lower half of my dying man for Belgium, I found an archaeological calcaneus, of a man in his 20s found at Givat'ha Mivtar, a Jewish district in North - East Jerusalem from about the time of Christ. The nail is 11.5cm long and bent against a knot in the upright of the cross after it was hammered through the bone. Note the nasty practicality of the wooden washer between the ankle and the head of the nail, designed to stop the victim from pulling his leg away sideways, a carpenterish refinement of the procedure. The legs were either nailed to the sides of the upright, or doubled sideways against the front of the cross as shown above. The calcaneus must have proved solid enough to support the body, whereas passing the nail through between bones would not. A torturer's knowledge of anatomy never ceases to impress me - but then, they must have had a lot of experience.

Tomoaki Suzuki

Sculpts very recognisable friends in wood, rather small. He sculpted the sister of an ex-student of mine. His gallery is Corvi - Mora.

Statue of Newton at Trinity Cambridge

And from my pillow, looking forth by light

Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold

The Antechapel where the Statue stood

Of Newton, with his prism and his silent face,

The marble index of a Mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone

(said Wordsworth after 1805)

1755, sculptor Louis Francois Roubiliac

Looking at details of facial anatomy

Today's task on the workbench had me running for more detail in the anatomy textbooks, as I worked on modelling up nasal cartilage that was both accurate and idiosyncratic, and lip muscles that did justice to the interlacing of muscle fibres into other muscle fibres and skin tissue that seems to happen . Buccinator was a surprise to me , being larger and shapelier than I had seen on specimens in the DR, and the accessory cartilages shown in the netter drawing of the nasal structure , while perhaps subject of individual variations, make me want to go back again and look at my embryological development books. They make me think of a coelacanth....

Some useful illustrations and resources here:

I am s-ee-k to death of Albert

Reading David Kennedy's book of poems from Salt, "The Roads" , and drawn in by a poem at the grave of someone I'd not heard of - Anton Walbrook at St John's in Hampstead.

A little investigation turned up the Good German Officer from Colonel Blimp, an Austrian half - Jewish actor who fled to England and was in many of the afternoon matinee films people like me remember from their childhood Sundays. He died in Bavaria but had asked to be buried here in London.

An interview with him is here

He had been a number of Austrian and German heroes -- Johann Strauss, Ludwig 1, Prince Albert, acted in La Ronde, The Red Shoes, even as Esterhazy in J'Accuse.

I won't break Kennedy's copyright by reprinting his poem here; suffice to say it's a grower (like his whole volume) , available from Salt Publishing, and Anton's ghost gives utterance.

Note to self: DK also dedicates a poem to Jack Beeching. It ends with him drinking with the fictitious Australian poet Ern Malley. Priceless.

So today at 44 I discover for the first time Walbrook, Beeching and Malley. Education by poet.

Thai wax festival

A suitable passtime for the rainy season. Film of it is here:

Face down on the slab

Credit: Wellcome Library, London
An écorché figure (life-size), lying prone on a table: the right arm hangs down below the table. Red chalk and pencil drawing, with bodycolour, by C. Landseer, 1813 (?).
1813 By: Charles Landseer
Size: sheet 54.5 x 75.2 cm.
Collection: Iconographic Collections
Library reference no.: Iconographic Collection 583992i
Full Bibliographic Record Link to Wellcome Library Catalogue

1813! Our corpse is likely to be a hanged man, although nothing disturbs the elegance of that nape. This is one of the choice exhibits in the Wellcome Collection's "Skin" exhibition, and I was pleased today to see the actual drawing which I have long admired in reproduction.

The red chalk is added after the pose has been laid in lightly in black chalk , which is how the muscle fibres are so confident, so taut. The pose, its back to the sky, is quadrupedal and reminds one of the gleaming racehorses and greyhounds of Charles's more famous brother. The red flanks are groomed like a pelt, visually edited to exclude the ooze , fat, vessels and imperfections of a real dissection.

The strokes which describe the choppy hair and the shadows concealing the face are skilled and schooled - hours spent in the Academy rendering plaster busts and light on geometric solids have trained the life out of that part of the drawing. It's not the bit Charles is interested in; he's after the sleek organic mechanism, the life that's just been suspended, the abjection (face down on the slab!) which makes the handsome form all the more denuded, the hump in the spine that tells you the body's weight and pliability. The beastlike pose makes you wonder what this individual did not live to regret.

From the Strasbourg museum

The Glory of the Trenches

By Coningsby Dawson.
Each night we panted till the runners came,
Bearing your letters through the battle-smoke.
Their path lay up Death Valley spouting flame,
Across the ridge where the Hun's anger spoke
In bursting shells and cataracts of pain;
Then down the road where no one goes by day,
And so into the tortured, pockmarked plain
Where dead men clasp their wounds and point the way.
Here gas lurks treacherously and the wire
Of old defences tangles up the feet;
Faces and hands strain upward through the mire,
Speaking the anguish of the Hun's retreat.
Sometimes no letters came; the evening hate
Dragged on till dawn. The ridge in flying spray
Of hissing shrapnel told the runners' fate;
We knew we should not hear from you that day--
From you, who from the trenches of the mind
Hurl back despair, smiling with sobbing breath,
Writing your souls on paper to be kind,
That you for us may take the sting from Death.

Candles at Selfridge's

Dolls in performance with Perchten

Researching the Perchtenslaufen I come across Gisele Vienne's dance performance "Kindertotenlieder" which brings teenage dolls onstage with Perchten ( Is this the etymolgy of Berchtesgarten - the garden of an Alpine Freya - goddess?) G_V has a back catalogue of performances involving dolls and a novellist called Dennis Cooper, whose seedy and trendy novels and pop-culture journalism I have noticed but not read and who won a Sade prize in France a few years ago ; better than an Orange or a Booker then.

http://www.g-v.fr/creations/ve-kindertotenlieder-frameset.htm
Dolls’ creation, Raphaël Rubbens, Dorothéa Vienne-Pollak, Gisèle Vienne

She has a show in Cardiff on Feb 5 2011.
Jerk ( creation 2008 )
Gisèle Vienne / Dennis Cooper / Peter Rehberg / solo for Jonathan Capdevielle


February 3, 2011 / Manipulate Visual Theater Festival - Edimbourg (UK)
February 5, 2011 / Chapter Arts Centre - Cardiff (UK)