A few more images from Tel Aviv

I never can resist spirals:

And have a deep fashination with the hetrotopias of reflections:

A Trip to the White City: On the Joys of Exhaustion, and Rediscovering Photography

I recently (has it been almost a week?) went to Tel Aviv to try out a new sculpture class. I--who am not a morning person--had to be out of the house by 6:00 A.M. I hadn't slept well the night before, and so walked through the sunrise-kissed, quiet streets in that exhausted airless high where everything looms remorselessly real, and yet strangely disconnected. Like the eyes have a jerky zoom and pan button that isn't quite working.

There is something oddly invigorating about it. Sitting outside the door, waiting for the studio to open, I couldn't stop sketching. The stairway was an abstract composition. The candlesticks a perfect still life of moving lines.

I thought: I need to try this more often. This is an energy I can use to have a small morning painting every day, before the house comes to life with all its distractions.

The floating rush carried me through the sculpture class, one of the best I had all year. I decided to make a Tel Aviv day: walk through the Bauhaus architecture that gave Tel Aviv its moniker, and maybe check out some of the galleries.

But when I stepped outside, the adrenaline dropped , and I was left with the faint nauseas four-hours-of-sleep headache combined with a day that was getting progressively too hot for the clothing I had put on for a rainy Jerusalem morning. When I finally found a gallery that was open, I was too tired to appreciate it properly.

So my conclusion is:

Exhaustion is a useful commodity, but like everything, good only in moderation. Push it too far and you can destroy an entire day. If I want to begin painting before sunrise, I need to leave time and place for a short afternoon nap, or get to sleep before the a.m.s (hard to imagine...)

When I found Rothschild Boulevard completely blocked, I gave up, and wandered into Neve Tzedek and down towards the beach. One good thing about the collapse of my grand plans of exploring artistic Tel Aviv is that I finally took out my camera in an attempt to wake myself up. There was a time when I would not leave the house without my SLR semi-manual camera. But when it broke--and digital replaced the darkroom--I lost my connection to it.

Spending a few hours wandering around with a camera rather than my sketch pad reminded me why I loved it. There is something about the immediate imagery of photography that connects me to the moment. I begin to look at these small details that I usually would miss. The framing isolates compositions within the burley of phenomena. Patterns and echoes come alive. And the ordinary is for a moment blessed by the extraordinary.

There is poem I love by Dylan Thomas that somehow encapsulates for me the possible power of photography to bestow a "radiance" to what is usually, maybe rightfully, missed:

Here are some photos from my afternoon walk:

I love this composition in blues, but as usual find the color quality of photos disappointing. It was one of the main reasons I stopped using the camera: the sense of loss when I saw the photo was too deep.

Anna Ticho and the drawing biennale

Once I was at the Anna Ticho House, I nipped upstairs for a quick visit to the regular exhibition space. After a day of looking at the photography and prints section of the Jerusalem Drawing Biennale, Anna Ticho's familiar drawings struck me anew. There is something incredibly moving about the sense of infinite patience in her large charcoal drawings. You feel that she would be happy to rest forever on each blade of grass. There is no hurry to get done, no worry about a final product: it is all in the process, in the loving contact of mark with landscape.

I was reminded of my thoughts at the Sotheby’s auction of Israeli art last year. For me, Ticho's work embodies within it the innocence and idealism of early Zionism--the dream of regeneration through contact with the soil, the melding of soul with land. Something in the complete unison of philosophical commitment with material expression makes these relatively unsophisticated drawings more complete works of art than most the sleek modern works of the biennale.

A Matter of Hanging

This Wednesday, I went to see the last two section of Jerusalem’s fourth drawing biennale: one in the more out of the way Jerusalem Print Workshop; and the other in one of my favorite hidden jewels, the Anna Ticho House--now shaken out of its magical calm by the roar of construction. Brief moment of mourning for a lost oasis.

One thing that struck me in the one room exhibit of photos at the Ticho house was the power of presentation-- the mode of hanging. The small, dimly lit temporary exhibition space is not the most conducive to highlighting a piece. But the two works that worked best for me where Gilad Ophir's digital prints, seen alongside.

Part of it was the size: other than Sharon Yaari's haunting picture of a ruined house (below), they were by far the largest.

But even more was their lack of frame. I realized that the scroll- like hanging gives them a presence that seems to expand outwards, spreading across the room, while the simple yet clearly defined frames delimit a constricted space. They seem to say: this is the picture, and it goes no further.

While I love the experience of framing a small work, and suddenly having it leap into focus as a finished piece, I suddenly realized how frames can help make a work eminently ignorable.

I'm not sure if it is the fact of the frame, or the frame's nondescript nature (see below).

Or perhaps it is the interaction of work and frame--photos of a limited tonal range with pale, plain frames.

This is an old question. I think of the way Eakins carved notes into the frame of his "Concert Singer," or how Seurat painted his late frames, creating a transition between painting and world.

Or of Puvis de Chevannes' painted internal frames that define the structure of his paintings.

A question to consider...

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Just finished Muriel Barbery's Elegance of the Hedgehog. I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a book this much.

On a literary level, it was amazing to see how philosophical ideas can be seamlessly integrated into a work of fiction. It is thought-provoking without being pretentious, and the ideas grow out of the characters, rather than the characters becoming a vehicle for the ideas. The closest equivalents I can think of in terms of the engagement with philosophy are George Elliot and obviously (for anyone who has read this book) Tolstoy, that ubiquitous presence. But despite these rather heavy antecedents, the book remains an easy, pleasurable read.

It also offers some of the most moving ruminations on the nature of art that I have found in a long time. I found myself continuously folding down the edges of pages to mark the spot (a deplorable habit that has almost pushed me--a bibliophile!--in to the cold arms of a Kindle), and stopping to go back and re-read passages.

Before I return the book to my very kind, long-suffering, and semi-patient neighbor (he asks about it with a nice smile every time I see him), I thought I would share some of my favorite passage.

First, I loved the idea (be at as pretentious as only a 12 year old can be) of Paloma's two journals:

"I thought I ought to make up for the 'glory of the mind' side with a second journal that would talk about the body[...] Not the profound thoughts of the mind, but the masterpieces of matter. Something incarnate, tangible. But beautiful and aesthetic at the same time" (p.33. Page numbers are from the Gallic
edition)

This can almost serve as the by-line for this blog--it was the central idea that drove me to start writing it: to note down both the thoughts, and the passing stimulus and phenomena that feed art. Alas that I have not been as consistent as Paloma in keeping with my plan of Journals of Profound Thoughts and Journals of the Movement of the World.

More quotes:

""Humans live in a world where it's words and not deed that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who've been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer and make our territory safe, and the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get shafted by others, the fine talkers, despite the latter being incapable of defending their own garden or bringing a rabbit home for dinner, or procreating properly. Humans live in a world with the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction." (53)

"At moments like this the web of life is revealed by the power of ritual, and each time we renew our ceremony, the pleasure will be all the greater four our having violated one of its principle. Moments like this act as magical interludes, placing our hears at the edge of our souls: fleetingly, yet intensely, a fragment of eternity has come to enrich time. Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people love and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn--and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and untertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flame, and tears itself apart and is reborn: human life continues to throb.

...The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and the same tastes ...has the extraordinary virtue of introducing into the absurdity of our lives an aperture of serene harmony. Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, the autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And with each swallow, time is sublimed." (P. 87)

On still-life painting (the whole of chapters 10-11 are wonderful, but I bring my favorite extracts) :

"Whence comes the sense of wonder we perceive when we encounter certain works of art? Admiration is born with our first gaze and if subsequently we should discover, in the patient obstinacy we apply to flushing out the causes thereof, that all this beauty is the fruit of virtuosity that can only be detected through close scrutiny of a brush that has been able to tame shadow and light and restore shape and texture, by magnifying them--the transparent jewel of the glass, the tumultuous texture of shells, the clear velvet of the lemon--this neither dissipates nor explains the mystery of one's initial dazzled gaze.

The enigma is constantly renewed: great works are the visual forms which attain with us the certainty of timeless consonance....

In the still life with lemons, for example, this essence cannot be reduced to the mastery of execution; it clearly does inspire a feeling of consonance, a felling that this exactly the way it ought to have been arranged. This in turn allows us to feel the power of objects and the way they interact, to hold in our gaze the way they work together and the magnetic fields that attract and repel them, the ineffable ties that bind them together and engender a force, a secret an inexplicable wave born of both the tensions and the balance of the configuration--this is what inspires the feeling of consonance. The disposition of the objects and the dishes achieves the universal in the singular: the timeless nature of the constant form. " (197-198)

On art in general:

"What is the purpose of Art? To give us the brief, dazzling illusion of the camellia, to carve from time the emotional aperture that cannot be reduced to animal logic. How is Art born? It is begotten in the mind's ability to sculpt the sensorial domain. What does Art do for us? It gives shape to our emotions, makes them visible, and in so doing, places a seal of eternity upon them, a seal representing all those works that, by means of a particular form, have incarnated the universal nature of human emotions." (199)

"Beauty consist of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death...Constantly posed between beauty and death, movement and its disappearance. " (272-3)

And on life in general--echoes of Ecclesiastes here:

"Personally, I think there is only one thing to do: find the task we have been placed on this earth to do, and accomplish it as best we can, with all our strength, without making things complicated or thinking there is anything divine about our human nature. This is the only way we will ever feel that we have been doing something constructive when death comes to get us. Freedom, choice, will and so on? Chimeras. We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of the bees, but we are in truth nothing but poor bees, destined to accomplish our tasks and then die." (238)

And the closing of the book:

"It's as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, and always within never.

Yes, that's it, an always within never."