From Seattle to France, with Love
I was devastated by the Nice attacks. I don't know if it was because this has already been such a difficult year in world events, or because I was just there recently and so know the place, or because of their particularly gruesome nature, but I just can't find any words to say to myself or to anyone else about them.
Thankfully, we don't always have to say things.
I was devastated by the Nice attacks. I don't know if it was because this has already been such a difficult year in world events, or because I was just there recently and so know the place, or because of their particularly gruesome nature, but I just can't find any words to say to myself or to anyone else about them.
Thankfully, we don't always have to say things. As I tried to make clear in this talk on Poetry and the Art of Suffering, one of the key functions of art is to do the thinking for us when we can't think straight, to order our feelings when all is disorder. It's the only thing that has helped me through this awful week.
The day after the attacks, my wife was set to have rehearsal for her upcoming Romeo and Juliet at City Opera Ballet. Instead, they improvised movement in response to the Bastille tragedy. Nothing was scripted: the props in the dancers' hands are just what happened to be in our trunk. The tube in the background just happened to be sitting in the studio as a prop for another show. They just moved. She set up a camera to record the 40+ minutes of dancing but the battery died after 17.
When she came home, I spent the day cutting together this little video of their work that seemed like a gift, to me, to France, to each other. It's a single take and a single angle, but working with these images, movements, and emotions has helped. Usually, I just well up with tears seeing these bodies holding each other, but that seems to help too.
Anyway, I know it doesn't do anything, but here it is: a gift for the grieving.
Allons enfants de la Patrie. Vive la France.
Essay on Caravaggio
The Quietest Painting in the Room is an essay I wrote on this painting by Caravaggio and its relationship with Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and published over at Comment Magazine. You can read the whole article by clicking this link.
Places: Versailles
As with nearly every other spot on the ever expanding tourist map, Versailles is a place no longer to be beheld, still less to be awed by, or disgusted by–depending on the strength go one’s constitution, and the romance attached to her sense of history–but a place to be captured, recorded, digitized, and filed: less under the heading I was here, than under veni vidi, vici.
It is not a matter of course, though perhaps it is not surprising to hear the Versailles defies such capture, if not by its opulence, which can be rendered through a pictorial study of it’s minutiae, but by its sheer size. Even 1300 frames of similarly-proportioned gilt chambers do not convey the monstrosity, the monotony even, of winding through its miles of royal residence. Still, ten million visitors every year try, and if the mob on the day of my visit is indicative, 95% do not remove their eyes from the viewfinders of their handheld recording devices.
Versailles is an interesting place because for all its attempts at intimidation–it was a state headquarters designed in large part to reign in rogue nobles–it is surprisingly un-monumental. For all its marble and gold, it is surprisingly homey; cute even. Given all this, Bernard Venet is a pretty smart choice as this year’s artist-in-residence to display on the grounds. Unlike the Jeff Koons exhibit last year, which was, as always, an awful, tacky, and wierd-ly perfect sprinkling of the proverbial confettii (life is a cabaret!), Venet’s work seeks first to understand and then to participant in that enormity.
Aesthetic intimidation isn’t much a tactic the modern mind is overwhelmed by anymore…seeing the Sun-king on a gold horse at the entry of the gates feels kind of royal, but not exactly impressive, still less god-like, or sublime. Venet has gone about his project in a smart way then, by re-interpreting the scale of Versailles in standards that still provoke: if 1300 rooms in a row doesn’t make the jaw drop, 1300 tons of unfinished steel still can. A rusted arch large enough to cradle a suburban house says something about scale that was once conveyed by two enclosed stories in stone. In the age of the discount skyscraper, no one thinks “wow!” when confronted with the spectacle of a three story building, no matter how much gold tops the fence without, but set in the lens of Venet’s concentric arches, piled up in corners of the gardens like Valhallan horseshoes, one shivers with the original excess thinking at once, all that weight, all that waste, what’s the point and wow, which is what you’re supposed to have been saying all along.