Living Memory

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/503203633/
Image: Flickr

Part of New York is standing still. In 1978, artist Alan Sonfist reclaimed a rubble-strewn lot on the corner of West Houston Street and La Guardia Place in Greenwich Village and re-established the vegetation, soil and rock formations that had existed there before the Western settlers arrived.

“As in war monuments that record the life and death of soldiers, the life and death of natural phenomena such as rivers, springs and natural outcroppings need to be remembered,” he wrote in a 1968 manifesto proposing the project. Interestingly, he’d hoped to do even more than this: “On Canal Street I propose to create a marshland and a stream; on Spring Street I propose to restore the natural spring; in front of City Hall I propose to restore the historical lake. There are a series of fifty proposals I have made for the City of New York.”

Only this one, called Time Landscape, has been realized. But it’s still growing after 44 years, a tiny piece of history that Sonfist says helps the city remember its heritage.

| Art · History

You Are There

Prague artist Robert Barta’s installation Crossing Half a Million Stars consists of 500,000 ball bearings covering the floor of a room.

The visitors themselves create a spontaneous performance as they try to make their way across it.

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Paperwork

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Mary_Delany

Twice widowed, English artist Mary Delany (1700-1788) took up a remarkable new career in her 70s: She created a series of detailed and botanically accurate portraits of plants, devising them from tissue paper and coloring them by hand:

With the plant specimen set before her she cut minute particles of coloured paper to represent the petals, stamens, calyx, leaves, veins, stalk and other parts of the plant, and, using lighter and darker paper to form the shading, she stuck them on a black background. By placing one piece of paper upon another she sometimes built up several layers and in a complete picture there might be hundreds of pieces to form one plant. It is thought she first dissected each plant so that she might examine it carefully for accurate portrayal …

She kept it up until she lost her eyesight at 88, filling 10 volumes with 985 of these “paper mosaiks.” Eventually they were bequeathed to the British Museum.

(Ruth Hayden, Mrs Delany: Her Life and Her Flowers, 1980.)

| Art · Science & Math

Big Finish

http://conquest.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/f/f9/IMSLP282318-PMLP458131-Froberger_-_Libro_Quarto_(Colour).pdf

Here’s one way to end a composition: Johann Jakob Froberger’s Suite II in C major, Lamento sopra la dolorosa perdita della Real Msta di Ferdinando IV, Re de Romani, ends with a picture of the clouds of heaven welcoming the soul of Ferdinand IV as it climbs up a scale of three octaves.

It was written to lament the death of the King of the Romans in 1654. Elsewhere Froberger had marked the fatal fall of lutenist Charles Fleury down a flight of stairs with a descending scale of two octaves. Perhaps he was just very literal-minded.

(From Wilfrid Hodges, “The Geometry of Music,” in John Fauvel et al., Music and Mathematics, 2006.)

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Multimedia

https://books.google.com/books?id=WyBTTLkl-EoC&pg=RA1-PA9

I don’t know why I find this so striking: It’s a diagram that accompanies the article on deer hunting in Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie. Rather than presenting a single image with a caption, it combines a vignette of a deer hunt with an illustration of the antlers and piles of dung that are dropped by stags of different ages, together with a musical score showing the notes sounded by the hunting party at different stages of the pursuit.

“Taken as a whole the hunting plates offer few clues for reading their complex hybrid of imagery and notations as an ensemble,” write John Bender and Michael Marrinan in The Culture of the Diagram (2010). Perhaps as a result, the encyclopedia article requires nearly 10 pages.

“The Encyclopedia’s treatment of stag hunting is extraordinary for mobilizing a full range of written language, abstract and arbitrary notations, indexical icons, and pictorial tableaux in an attempt to diagram the highly ritualized, courtly craft of tracking animals under the Ancien Régime.”

Diderot provided similarly remarkable diagrams for “hunting at force,” the kill, boar hunting, and wolf hunting.

| Art · Literature

A Forgotten Face

Conservators at the National Galleries of Scotland have discovered “what is almost certainly a previously unknown self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh.”

The image emerged in an x-ray of the artist’s 1885 painting Head of a Peasant Woman, taken in preparation for an upcoming exhibition. To save money, van Gogh sometimes used both sides of a canvas; in this case the reverse image had been hidden by layers of glue and cardboard that were applied before an exhibition in the early 20th century. It’s not yet clear whether these layers can be removed without harming Head of a Peasant Woman.

This isn’t the first time a “lost” image has been discovered in a van Gogh painting. In 2008, x-rays revealed the portrait of a woman behind the artist’s 1887 painting Patch of Grass — apparently he had painted over an image he’d completed two years earlier.

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Double Duty

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10547050r/
Image: Gallica

In 840 the Frankish Benedictine monk Rabanus Maurus composed 28 poems in which each line comprises the same number of letters. That’s impressive enough, but he also added painted images behind each poem that identify subsets of its letters that can be read on their own.

The final poem of the volume shows Rabanus Maurus himself kneeling in prayer at the foot of a cross whose text forms a palindrome: OROTE RAMUS ARAM ARA SUMAR ET ORO (I, Ramus, pray to you at the altar so that at the altar I may be taken up, I also pray). This text appears on both arms of the cross, so it can be read in any of four directions.

The form of the monk’s own body defines a second message: “Rabanum memet clemens rogo Christe tuere o pie judicio” (Christ, o pious and merciful in your judgment, keep me, Rabanus, I pray, safe).

And the letters in both of these painted sections also participate in the larger poem that fills the body of the page.

(From Laurence de Looze, The Letter and the Cosmos, 2016.)

| Art · History · Language · Literature · Religion

A Little Decorating

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Narcissa_Niblack_Thorne_-_E-10_English_Dining_Room_of_the_Georgian_Period.jpg

This is a miniature, a tiny replica of an English dining room of the late 18th century. Between 1932 and 1940, American artist Narcissa Niblack Thorne made about 100 such diminutive rooms, often enlisting architects, designers, and craftsmen whose talents became available during the Depression.

Of the miniatures still in existence, most are on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, where they serve as documents of the decorating styles of periods past. Generally designed on a scale of one inch per foot, many of them include authentic materials: bowls of real silver, chandeliers of real crystal, even original paintings and sculpture contributed by admired artists.

In 2010, the institute began to decorate them for the holidays each year, after researchers discovered Thorne’s affection for Christmas. But “Some of the rooms will never have a holiday theme,” the museum’s Lindsey Mican Morgan told the Chicago Tribune. “That is because many of them depict a room from a time when holidays were simply not celebrated as they are now.”

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Symmetry

The second act of Alban Berg’s 1937 opera Lulu includes a three-minute sequence that’s a musical palindrome — after the first 90 seconds, there’s an ascending piano arpeggio, a pause … and then the music unfolds in reverse, a perfect mirror image back to the start.

This music accompanies a silent film that is itself a palindrome in some ways — for example, three people arrest Lulu and put her in prison, and then three liberate her. And Lulu’s husbands in Act I are played by the same singers as her clients in Act III.

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