Internet Stuff and Scraps

My friend HSW said something profound in reference to our political disaster of a government today. He said, "We're all just sitting here talking about how crazy the country has gotten but it's OUR country. We're doing it - we're allowing them to define torture and rendition and allowing this to happen."

Here are two people who didn't allow it...

Heroe: Sugihara

Heroine: Andrée Geulen-Herscovici

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To my chagrin, and with no prior notice, I am on Youtube at the same time that a really bad piece of my art is being sold on ebay. I donated the Ebay piece to the American Cancer Society auction during the very early '80's. It is bad art coming back to bite me. But it originally went for $250 so that's good.

Fall is here and Chief Illiniwek is gone! I actually worked on this logo as an undergraduate. Oren Johnson produced this and he was/is a brilliant artist. I helped cut the large films that were turned into the smaller version (this was before Photoshop or any major computer design). He had a studio in a farmhouse beyond Champaign. I would ride ten miles every morning to get there. I'm sure it's all condo's now but his serigraphy studio in the basement was extraordinary. I was a little concerned with the Chief then but we were more intensely fighting South African apartheid on campus.


Then, I remember talking to a really talented American Indian woman who started the great fight to get rid of this crazy Chief dingbat. She was recruited to the department of art and design - to diversify the program. She said, "I arrived and the head of the painting department invited me and my children to a basketball game. We got there and this guy - this "Chief" comes out and does this dance and I looked over at my kids and their mouths are wide open. I said to the faculty member, 'This is not good.' and he says, laughing, 'Come on - are you kidding? You know your culture is dead'." She said she had spent a lot of time trying to get her kids to see the authentic spirit of her people. This was not good. She sat out in front of the stadium with cardboard signs for months until others joined her. She had death threats. She did a great thing.
I would call her a warrior.

Graceland Cemetery was closed because of a microburst storm in August that tore down Irving Park Road toward the lake. The weather is becoming more extreme. No doubt Versace helmets will be available for spring.

Jake's birthday cake. Oh for a mom like that that bakes the cake and knows what's important.

The worst could be over. This is not a staged photo but a moment of Rick Santorum's life and I kind of feel bad about putting it up. On the other hand, he had no problem with trading in his "family values".

Bring the boys home. These are family values. Bring them home.

But How Do You Mend A Broken Heart?

Yesterday, over a greek salad with an art historian on the side, I was searching my brain for a great word. My brain responded today. The word is 'anastylosis'.

Anastylosis describes the somewhat controversial practice of reconstruction in archaeology, historic preservation and even can be extended to object conservation. It is a thing of degrees, a subject of quality and a slave to the time in which it occurs. It effects what we see on buildings, in art and culture in general.

There is a poem here somewhere. The Japanese idea of wabi-sabi is central to a romantic ideal of restoration.

My fascination with this subject runs deep because important preservation decisions have consistently been derived from passionate, intense, personal ideas as experts and amateurs defend their understanding of style and material.

Sometimes the temptation to express our individuality can easily corrupt the authentic. This is the nature of history.

Contemporary art often includes an element of decay to intentionally frustrate the whole industry of preservation. Think conceptual art.

Just to set the scene, I imagine 56 shards of a red and black Greek vase lying in pieces on a steel table. Eight pieces of varying sizes are missing. Old Anastylosis goes about gluing the original pieces together with duplicated replacement pieces then painting them to match by assumption of style. The conservator becomes a secondary artist in the process – sometimes centuries after the original artist lays down their brush.

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The conservator continues painting lines across blank areas, interprets subject matter and aesthetics. A foot continues from the ancient leg to the modern toes, a face gets a modern nose but God is in the eyes and you can always tell from the eyes. Then the whole pot was varnished or rubbed with petroleum jelly (vasoline was a common gimmick to bring out the designs and in the last few decades "el marko" was used to touch up the Greek pots.)

The historical, moral and aesthetic consequences of this unpopular process have been exhaustively debated. But how interesting is a pile of fifty-two shards of an attic crater?

The contemporary compromise includes assembling original fragments and replacing the missing pieces with a neutral ground that can be easily differentiated from the original. All restorations must be reversible and with a material that decays faster than the original. The shape of the vase can reasonably be assumed from the existing pieces.

The exquisitely evocative settlement of Petra is an example of architectural anastylosis that is undergoing extensive revision as funds are raised for yet another restoration. The relentless hot winds of the desert reclaim the sandstone every moment.

Another Example: The Library at Ephesos

A Famous Example of Error in Anastylosis is the Laocoon

Restored Version. Note the Left Arm.

During the highest Renaissance, the fragments of this ancient masterpiece were excavated and they took 'em to the Pope. El Popo sought advice from artists and scholars about restoration. Passionate debates ensued. I like to imagine the characters of the day twisting themselves into the death throes they imagined a Hellenistic murder-by-serpent would require. The Laocoon was one of the most influential finds of the period – perhaps stirring souls toward a more mannerist ideal and then of course to the Baroque. Some contemporary dance group should intrepret Laocoon.

The placement of the arm on a “restoration” would be especially important. Everybody had an opinion. It was a passionate debate. Michelangelo had a good theory that would seem like a man scratching his back but Raphael was the appointed judge and he chose a more active, outward pose - the arm lifting up toward the sky - which was sculpted and joined to the original.

Skip ahead a few centuries to 1957. The original arm was found laying around in a workshop. It was turned inward toward the figure’s back. Michelangelo’s vindication expresses his deeper understanding of classical composition, human emotion, anatomy and the classical sculptural view. An unpopular truth.

Anastylosis continues in preservation communities and conservation labs everywhere, hopefully in a more justifiable and considered way.

The reason for this post was arriving at my favorite variation on this concept - wabi sabi -which is the best approach. Conservation and repair of objects in Japan have historically encompassed Zen spirituality. Ancient earthenware tea ceremony objects were fused with 23 karat gold. This idea has respected the history of the object. The origin, violence and truth are shown with an honest love.

Raku Tea bowl, 19th century, Dosai Edo period.

One more example, of great, contemporary architectural anastylosis - Eric Lloyd Wright and Joel Silver's restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's Storer Residence in Hollywood. Don't disturb the residents but if you can see the restoration treatment of the concrete "textile blocks" up close - you'll suddenly understand. This was a diffcult proposition and the treatment is sensitive, evocative and appropriate. Each block was treated individually, respected for its history and repaired carefully with similar but not identical materials. Moss grows through some of the restoration making it one of the most romantic buildings in America. I wish I had a better photo of the exterior. Here's one from Great Buildings Online:

View of the Skidmore Bookends on a Clear Evening

Chicago Skyline

East from Ashland down the Lake Street / Green Line El

June 2007

When you fly into Chicago across the prairie you can see the grid of lights becoming more brilliant and more effervescent and it makes sense like synaptic bursts or electricity running through a microchip.

On the ground you look around and raise your eyes and the idiosyncratic expression of design seems less visually rational - except for some views like this that includes the Skidmore "bookends" - the John Hancock Building to the north and the Sears Tower to the south. These two masterpieces provide goalposts for the meat of the city - the loop.

In Skidmore's office there is a gigantic model of the city with hundreds of structures color coded to express their extraordinary dominance over the landscape. It's either shocking or fantastic to see how much work they've done.

But here's the thing - they have never surpassed or attained the excellence of "the bookends" in their work anywhere in the world. And they just seem to slump further with stuff like the Trump Tower Chicago. I would never go so far as to refer to them as Skidmorons - like a recent critic pronounced but I do wonder...

They move toward a big cash design model and they've lost branding and cache. What is SOM's height? When did they decline?

Roland Barthe's "The Lover's Discourse - Fragments"

Illustrations for "The Lover's Discourse", Mixed Media, 2007

Some of y'all already know this but I'm working a lot on a project to illustrate Roland Barthe's 1977 linguistic masterpiece "Fragments d'un Discours Amoreux" (or as translated in 1978 in English "A Lover's Discourse"). Wooosh. What a muthful.

I wanted to start uploading images of the 'pages' this weekend but google was not handling the traffic very well at all. It's a potent but different kind of anger you feel when customer service collapses in cyberspace.

Anyway here are the early images.

I have committed to completing 22 of the 84 Fragments for a preview on February 14th.

They will evolve enormously over the year -- till next Valentine's day. I wanted to get one story of one Fragment down because it's just so:

I was looking for a toy boat on ebay and I came across the most EMO and particularly appropriate carved toy boat. It was really a couple of 2 x 4's cut up and carved then painted red and cream. It was just like the early ebay ad campaign. The whole story is an ad campaign and the LD project is all about the meme so...

Here's the quick story and I'll provide the archival material later -

The ebay Seller's notes include the info that the kid who made it died. I bid $5.99 and got it. I asked the seller if he could tell me more about the boy. He did in such a forthright way. The boy's name was Roger Alquire from Sioux Falls. He got in a car crash in 1962 on his way home from college. If that weren't enough our ebay buddy goes on, "His mother just died last winter. Her mind was going and some how (sic) she locked herself out of the house and froze to death. They found her in the back yard laying on the side walk dead..ok hope this helps, thanks Bernie" This whole story will live a new life in the Lover's Discourse.