Ars et Natura

Não sou nada.  Nunca serei nada.  Não posso querer ser nada.  À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.        ~ Álvaro de Campos (Fernando Pessoa)

I only like to walk in cities; I don’t like to walk. You know the people who like to take walks in the country—this I don’t like at all. I like to stroll along. I like to be on the street in New York. I like it.   ~ Fran Lebowitz

Angkor Wat (2012) Buddha in der Glorie Mitte aller Mitten, Kern der Kerne, Mandel, die sich einschließt und versüßt,— dieses Alles bis an alle Sterne ist dein Fruchtfleisch: Sei gegrüßt. Sieh, du fühlst, wie nichts mehr an dir hängt; im Unendlichen ist deine Schale, und dort steht der starke Saft und drängt. Und von außen hilft ihm ein Gestrahle, denn ganz oben werden deine Sonnen voll und glühend umgedreht. Doch in dir ist schon begonnen, was die Sonnen übersteht. — Rainer Maria Rilke (Paris, 1908) Santa Barbara, CA (2015) Translation: Center of all centers, core of cores, almond, self-enclosed and sweetening,— this Universe up to all the stars is your fruit’s pulp: Greetings. See, you feel no more tethers upon you; your rind is cast to the Infinite, and there the stout sap is pressed. And from without, he enters Enlightenment, above whom your many suns illuminate,  as they revolve glowing at their zenith. But something in you is yet conceived: what will outlast even all the suns. (Gr

Ryozen Kannon Temple, Kyoto (2015)                          The Buddha, even in masculine form, exhibits feminine delicacy, especially in the act of intense contemplation. At the Ryozen Kannon Temple in Kyoto, his enormous figure of bone-white concrete looms at the foot of the Higashiyama mountains. It is a memorial to the Pacific War dead, and the Buddha is the Lord Who Looks Down on the lamentations of the suffering.                          He is presented as the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara: he who embodies the compassion of all Buddhas. He sits serene in lotus position, but in his compassion defers his own enlightenment. In East Asia, his rounded face signals a maternal benevolence, and the Japanese Kannon or Kanzeon could indeed be a female figure except for the breasts missing or lost in the folds of her shawl.                          Indeed, the Chinese Guanyin conflates the Buddha with the beloved Goddess of Mercy, and they become one and interchangeable. His sex retreats to a

Urbana, IL (2009) Herbst Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit, als welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten; sie fallen mit verneinender Gebärde. Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit. Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt. Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen. Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält. — Rainer Maria Rilke (Paris, 1902) Kuhrhaus, Wiesbaden (2017) Translation: Leaves are falling, falling from afar as if distant gardens in the skies are withering; they fall gesturing in self-surrender. At night the heavy Earth also falls far from all the stars into the vast solitude. We all fall. There, this hand also falls. And look at all the others: it is in all. But there is One who with infinite care catches in His hands all that falls.  (Wiesbaden, 2017 - Houston, 2020)

Camille Paglia TVO Interview with Daniel Richter I believe I’m the first rock-and-roll intellectual. I believe that people who like my writing hear in it the hard, hammering rhythms of rock.      ~ Camille Paglia

Jimmy Page and Keith Richards                          Hard rock is male. It’s aggressive. And people who like rock love me because my voice is the voice of rock. I love hard rock…                          Keith Richards is the founding father, as Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, of a lot of this hard core stuff. Now, in the 70s I didn’t particularly like Heavy Metal, but I feel that Heavy Metal is preserving the rock impulse. And the rock impulse is always a breaker of taboos.                          So I love the bad boy image of rock, and I think the aggression of rock is everywhere in my work. What I’m doing essentially is a kind of lead guitar work. Okay. I think I’m the first great lead guitarist as a woman, but I’m using words, and not the instrument.                          And I was heavily influenced by acid rock—that searing, cutting sound of the lead guitar. So people, again, who like rock love me. People who like soft, woman’s music hate me. They think “Oh, she’s sooo obnoxio

                         TV is a medium that rejects the sharp personality and favors the presentation of process rather than of products. It is a cool participant medium. The TV image is of low intensity or definition, and, therefore, unlike film, it does not afford detailed information about objects.                          The TV producer will point out that speech on television must not have the careful precision necessary in the theater. The TV actor does not have to project either his voice or himself. Likewise, TV acting is so extremely intimate, because of the peculiar involvement of the viewer with the completion or “closing” of the TV image, that the actor must achieve a great degree of spontaneous casualness that would be irrelevant in movie and lost on stage. For the audience participates in the inner life of the TV actor as fully as in the outer life of the movie star.                          Newscasters and actors alike report the frequency with which they are approache

                         People who are in television routinely are recognized by everyone: every single person that you will see on the street. I personally found that to be too much fame. Fame is something very much sought after in this culture—like money. Now, I don’t believe there’s such a thing as too much money, but there is such a thing as too much fame. And I think that writers have the perfect amount of fame. You have just enough to get a good table in a restaurant, but not so much that people come over and annoy you while you are eating. But if you are on television. I know people who are in television—they can’t walk down the street, people will come up constantly.                          Also, it’s not just the number of people who recognize you, it’s the way in which you are perceived if you are in television because television is a very intimate medium—it’s in their house, they think they know them. A TV personality will be approached much more—and with much more familia

Imaginary Prison (Carcere XIV) (1760, Giovanni Battista Piranesi) It is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.      ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Hearst Castle ( www.slocal.com )                          Hearst Castle was the inspiration—or more like the object of satire—of Orson Welles’ Xanadu in Citizen Kane . A tour of its interior and grounds makes it quickly apparent why the owner and his oddball tastes became targets of parody.                          Xanadu was itself after an ancient Mongol city in China (Shangdu), the summer capital of Kubla Khan, visited by Marco Polo, and made famous by the opium-induced poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It has become an elusive, fantastical place (a “stately pleasure-dome”) re-created in the Romantic imagination.                          Figures of wild men, purchased lock-stock from Europe, adorn the fasçade of the entrance. Such antique spoils from decaying castles and churches embellish the modern steel-reinforced concrete underneath, reflecting the vivid fantasies of its owner.                          Despite the gaudy mish-mash of Old World opulence, William Randolph Hearst r

Opium (1985, Erté) Look at me. I’m in another world—a dream that invites oblivion. People take drugs to achieve such freedom. I’ve never needed them. I achieve a high through work.      ~ Erté

Top Hats by Erté                          Art historians and scholars define Erté’s unique style as transitional Art Deco, because it bridges the visual gap between fin-de-siècle schools of Symbolism, with its ethereal quality, Art Nouveau, with its high ornament, and the mid-1920s movement of Art Deco, with its inspirational sources and concise execution. Jean Tibbets Erté

St. Peter Receiving the Keys to Heaven                          The Smith Museum of Stained Glass Windows was the hidden gem of the Chicago Navy Pier–a space for sacred art amidst vulgar carnival entertainments. Too bad they closed it down in 2014.                          A highlight of the exhibit were several fine examples from Louis Comfort Tiffany.                          Tiffany developed new techniques for producing glass to create different effects, such as opalescence, iridescence, texture, and mottling that gave his landscapes a hazy, impressionistic quality.                          These stained-glass angels in the Art Nouveau style look more New Age than Roman Catholic. Their wings are refracted like a jeweled scarab’s as if they belong instead in an Egyptian tomb.                          There’s an amorphousness to New Age spirituality in its syncretic absorption of elements from Oriental religions, as opposed to the solid edifice of Catholic orthodoxy, refined and rest

Clarté light statue (1928, France, Max Le Verrier)                          Not at all the voluptuous odalisque of the Turkish harem.                          The Art Deco woman is a sleek, androgynous ephebe. Taut, athletic, streamlined.                          Long-limbed, short-haired, flat-chested. The better to hang a slinky pearl necklace on, or a loose flapper dress.                          Efficient and modern. (SFO Art Deco Exhibit, 2015)

Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent. ~ Charles Baudelaire

Orpheus (1865, Gustave Moreau) La Destruction Sans cesse à mes côtés s’agite le Démon; II nage autour de moi comme un air impalpable; Je l’avale et le sens qui brûle mon poumon Et l’emplit d’un désir éternel et coupable. Parfois il prend, sachant mon grand amour de l’Art, La forme de la plus séduisante des femmes, Et, sous de spécieux prétextes de cafard, Accoutume ma lèvre à des philtres infâmes. II me conduit ainsi, loin du regard de Dieu, Haletant et brisé de fatigue, au milieu Des plaines de l’Ennui, profondes et désertes, Et jette dans mes yeux pleins de confusion Des vêtements souillés, des blessures ouvertes, Et l’appareil sanglant de la Destruction! — Charles Baudelaire ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧ Translation: Restless, the Devil moves by my side, Swirling about like an elusive air; I swallow some and feel fire in my lungs, Overcome with shameful, unquenchable lust. Knowing my passion for Art, he assumes The most seductive form of woman, And under specious pretexts of deceit

Left: The Pre-Arranged Flight (1772-1773, Jean-Honore Fragonard); Right: Salome, detail (1906, Franz von Stuck) Correspondances La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers. Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent. II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants, Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies, —Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants, Ayant l’expansion des choses infinies, Comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens, Qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens. — Charles Baudelaire ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧ Translation: Nature is a temple of living colonnades, At times whispering a tangle of words; Man passes through this thicket of symbols That watches him with knowing

The Apparition (1876-1877, Gustave Moreau)                          Symbolism made the night world visible… A symbol is a sign, but “symbol” also means a tally. Something is split in two. Each takes half. When the two are combined, they become one again. A symbol is also evidence of a contract. A symbol can be thought of as a switch or key. When the key is inserted in the lock, the door opens, light appears, something becomes visible. Hiroshi Unno The Art of Decadence: European Fantasy Art of the Fin-de-Siècle

The Art of Decadence: European Fantasy Art of the Fin-de-Siècle  (2017)                          Modern Art begins with the Impressionists. Famed for their brilliant, sunlit scenes, the Impressionists produced what might be called “art by day.” Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Abstraction all belong to this same art by day lineage. All were attempting to grasp the here and now.                           But if theirs was an art by day, wasn’t their [sic] also an art by night lurking behind them?                          Night is, by definition, a time of darkness, of things unseen. Being able to see at night is the gift of modernity. At the end of the nineteenth century gas lamps and then electric lights showed us the night. That was the era in which night life appeared in modern cities and an art by night also emerged. Here I would like to discuss the period of “Fin-de-Siècle Decadence” at the end of the nineteenth century as the discovery of the art by night. Hiroshi Unno The Art of D

View of the Bayon by H. Clerget based on an illustration by Louise Delaporte                          Most mysterious of temples around Angkor Wat for the massive stone faces that decorate its towers.                          Multiple faces are embossed on each tower, each on its facets. You would think they all share a single consciousness.                          There is a face that greets you at every turn. A face always with a countenance of contentment. They smile mysteriously as you lose your way in this endless labyrinth.                          Perhaps the temple is a single organism, its more than two hundred visages, the elaborate ruse of a many-headed trickster god? (Angkor, 2012)

Prasat Bayon (Angkor, 2012)                ~ After Rilke’s  Buddha in der Glorie                            Some say they resemble the face of their builder, King Jayavarman VII. Others say they have the aspect of the Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. Or they could be both, king and god.                          They all look similar, but not identical. Often times their eyes seem shut, and with those serene smiles, as if delighting in enlightenment. This was after all a Mahayana shrine.                          But up close, the eyes are opened wide. At every turn in this endless labyrinth, you meet the gaze of the devaraja —the god-king—and you are diminished in his majesty.

Dumaguete, Philippines (2015)                          Jesus is blind in one eye, but knows where to find the clownfish in the coral reef. He is weather-worn but still hale, and hardly says a word. He simply gestures to show us the starfish and the sand dollars, conserving as much effort at speech.                          Is it the humid heat of the tropics? The doldrums at noontide? Perhaps it’s having a deaf-mute boy for his first mate. They are in tune like the wind to the sea. Even gestures become needless. Together, they steer the boat in silence.

Self Portrait / Shoe (July 1956, Vivian Maier)                          The most succinct of flash fictions is attributed to Hemingway:  For sale : baby shoes, never worn                           The master of omission was purported to have jotted this down on a piece of napkin on a bet of who can write a short story in six words. The spareness of the prose has the startling emotional resonance of a photograph. The image of the shoes, apparently from a dead child, lingers in the mind.                           Street photography in turn foreground the textual nature of the photograph. The shoe, the shadow, and the stroller in Vivian Maier’s photo invoke possible stories around them. We tend to fill in what is outside the frame of view.                           The shoe by itself, removed and on its side, is a disturbing image. Is it a crime scene? Is the child on the stroller possibly orphaned?                           Christopher Isherwood said of himself:  I am a camera with its

(Wiesbaden, 2018) For the flâneur, a transformation takes place with respect to the street: it leads him through a vanished time. The ambiguity of the arcades is an ambiguity of space.      ~ Walter Benjamin      The Arcades Project  

Jorge Luis Borges en la Biblioteca Nacional (1940, E. Comesaña)                          Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, blind at the end of his days, had a vision of a fictitious planet, Orbis Tertius –a Third World. It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers… directed by an obscure man of genius… This plan is so vast that each writer’s contribution is infinitesimal… It is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.                          It is an endless labyrinth built in secret by anonymous busy bodies, the self-similar hallways of the Library of Babel , the recursive spirals of Circular Ruins , the bifurcations of the Garden of Forking Paths .                          The orb (globe) is the metaphorical sphere in Universal History: it is Xenophanes’ one god, Plato’s ge

Time conquers all. Beauty fades. Beauty is transient. That is why we value it… [Even] if a woman manages to achieve it for a particular moment, she has contributed something to the culture.      ~ Camille Paglia

Leda and the Swan (c. 1930, France, Neva)                          Art Deco objet d’art from the SFO exhibit. The story of Leda raped by Zeus in the form of a swan became an erotic art motif in Renaissance Venice, and continued to be so during Modernism's heyday. W.B. Yeats wrote an oft anthologized poem in the same period.                 A sudden blow: the great wings beating still                Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed                By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,                He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.                How can those terrified vague fingers push                The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?                And how can body, laid in that white rush,                But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?                          Neva’s sculpture is rather tame compared to the poet’s recollection of the scene. What about it was so erotically charged? The tentacular neck wrapped arou

Portrait of Hugh Lane (1906, John Singer Sargent)                          In Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence there is a M. Rivière, a minor character, a plain-looking man at that, who was tutor to the nephew of the Archers’ London dinner hosts. Despite M. Rivière’s lowly material and social stature, Leland Archer was impressed by the enthusiastic tutor, “who thought the life of ideas the only one worth living… and to whom good conversation appeared to be the only necessity.”                          In fact, Archer realized he envied how M. Rivière is unburdened by wealth and the tethers of upper crust society. He had obviously always been desperately poor and anxious… and it was apparent that his literary ambitions had failed. [But] he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally… Archer looked with a sort of vicarious envy at this eager impecunious young man who had fared so richly in his poverty.                          More than th

“Jump No. 2” Dumaguete (2015) The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.      ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

Om Urbana, IL (2011)                          Susan Sontag in her essay, On Photography (1973) describes the photographer as a Baudelairean flâneur : The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world “picturesque.”                          This is best exemplified by photographers I admire: André Kertész and Henri Cartier-Bresson, celebrated by Roland Barthes in his essay, La chambre claire (trans. Camera Lucida , 1980).                          The smartphone camera, with its handy portability, enables the opportunistic flâneur to capture what Cartier-Bresson calls the “decisive moment.” The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your litt

                         My favorite director is, of course, Alfred Hitchcock. He has been notoriously pilloried as a misogynist by feminists, whereas I think he’s got it right [about women]. From my perspective, I really think that Hitchcock had an eye for beautiful women’s or sexy women’s relationship to their bodies, to costume, to self-presentation. There was a kind of glamorous, sexual woman that feminism has never taken seriously, and has always attacked as being merely a pawn of male fantasy. And that’s not what I say at all.                          I do worship the beautiful, glamorous woman. Time conquers all. Beauty fades. Beauty is transient. That is why we value it. This is what the ancient Greeks knew about beautiful boys, and beautiful, perfect, athletic bodies. To me, it is feminism’s failure to acknowledge that beauty is a value in itself—that even if a woman manages to achieve it for a particular moment, she has contributed something to the culture. And thank heavens

Beauty is a form of Genius -- is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation.      ~ Oscar Wilde  

                         Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown are the linked triad I would substitute for Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault… North American intellectuals, typified by McLuhan, Fiedler and Brown, achieved a new fusion of ideas—a sensory pragmatism or engagement with concrete experience, rooted in the body, and at the same time a visionary celebration of artistic metaspace–that is, the fictive realm of art, fantasy and belief projected by great poetry and prefiguring our own cyberspace.  Camille Paglia  “The North American intellectual tradition” Salon, 2000

Isak Dinesen, author of Out of Africa                          I have become accustomed to signing emails with Je responderay . It is Old French for “I will answer.” I formed this habit after reading Isak Dinesen, who borrowed it from the family crest of her lover, Denys Finch-Hatton. Like all mottoes, the spareness of the formula belies a profound meaning. To answer seems such a simple gesture, but as Dinesen observes,  An answer is a rarer thing than is generally imagined. There are many highly intelligent people who have no answer at all in them. A conversation or a correspondence with such persons is nothing but a double monologue… How, then, can you yourself go on speaking?                           To converse or correspond is an invitation to communion. It requires of the individual a certain availability of the self, a gracious welcoming, a willingness to be freed from self-containment. She describes finding such community in Africa:  My daily life out there was filled with ans

(Photo Credit:  Ron Bentley )                           Das Passagen-Werk represents research that Benjamin carried out, over a period of thirteen years, on the subject of the Paris arcades — les passages — which he considered the most important architectural form of the nineteenth century, and which he linked with a number of phenomena characteristic of that century’s major and minor preoccupations… Benjamin’s intention from the first, it would seem was to grasp such diverse material under the general category of Urgeschichte , signifying the “primal history” of the nineteenth century… It was not the great men and celebrated events of traditional historiography but rather the “refuse” and “detritus” of history, half-concealed, variegated traces of the daily life of “the collective,” that was to be the object of study, and with the aid of methods more akin — above all, in their dependence on chance — to the methods of the nineteenth-century collector of antiquities and curiosities, or