Week 9: Overheard Conversations / Overlooked Moments

Henri Cartier-Bresson

This is with Spring Break in mind. Good time to listen up--with all the senses...!

Best to each one of you!

(ps. my starting points were overhear and catch sight of...)

____

Follow-up from last Tuesday evening:

Lauren asked that I post a link to the some of the Soviet-era videos (film clips) we watched on Tuesday:

Очи черные - YouTube  (Ochi Chornye)
YouTube - Изабелла Юрьева "Только раз..."/Izabella Yurieva    (Tol'ko Raz)
Марк Бернес - Темная ночь - YouTube  (Temnaya Noch')

The point I was making was about the way a "high culture" tradition (operatic, let's say) can merge with a "folk" tradition. We also looked at some John Singer Sargent's paintings (his spontaneous portraits in relation to his commissioned work--the extreme example being his Boston City Hall murals). And briefly, Michaelangels's late, "unfinished" works in relation to say the Sistine Chapel. And then a couple of Thomas Eakins portraits-as parallel and counter. The spontaneous in relation to the planned. As so often happens, when the discussion itself is spontaneous, "you had to be there..." But the film clips remain wonderful...

Week 8: ENJOY (DELIGHT)

Bilaspur (Pahari Miniatures): Nala and Damayanti, Reunited

Bilaspur (Pahari Miniatures): Nala and Damayanti, Return

Scenes from Sriharsha's epic poem, the Naishadhiya Charita, written in Sanscrit in the 12th century (a version of which David Shulman tells very beautifully at the conclusion of Spring, Heat, Rains...) The miniatures are late 18th century...

Week 7: HOLD (ESTEEM)

Joseph Cornell, untitled, 1935

The new word(s):  HOLD (ESTEEM).

Good class last night, even with two missing. Hope to see everyone together next week!

I liked very much that you came forward in the discussion (sometimes by my stepping back)--I'd like you to do that more at the beginning of the evenings, too--when we look at work on the screen. For Zara and Isabella--tale a look at the collages of Kurt Schwitters--some of the "printer's bin" works from 1919-20, and then the later collages from during and just after WWII, when he was a refugee in England. The shape of Schwitters' life--the number of approaches he employed (the Merzbau, the collages, the object assemblages, and also the more traditional paintings and drawings that seem to have gone on in the background--often during summers in Norway) all treated and re-treated over the course of an historically fraught lifetime (two world wars, loss and displacement)--all give us a lot to consider as to how an artist exists within his (or her)  own time...

Joseph Cornell (an earlier work, above) also lived a mysterious--and much more private life. But the way he developed a personal set of references and symbols--ones he returned to time and again--offer an interesting parallel. We'll look at more of both next time...