The Ultimate Specimen

The Manchester Museum Hermit’s blog, webcam and twitter are now online!

For 40 days and 40 nights, artist Ansuman Biswas lives in the Manchester Museum’s secluded Victorian tower, reflecting on issues of collecting, loss and extinction. Here’s a passage from his statement:

I feel a deep dismay at the ecological crisis facing humanity, which I experience as a loss of beauty. And I feel challenged to respond using the full weight of my training as a contemplative and an artist. But, along with this strong agenda, I am also interested in an art which is abstract or open-ended.

This tension between purpose and play is also an essential condition of the hermit, who is introverted but has a social role. I am interested in exploring precisely this ambiguity.

The hermit is conventionally a benign and pious figure, but I also want to invoke his destructive aspect. Artistic precedents for this approach are in the auto-destructive art of Gustav Metzger and John Latham. Eremetic forerunners include the great Hindu ascetic Shiva, who is celebrated as the destroyer of the world, and the Christian anchorite, Anthony the Great who burned away his wilfulness in order to surrender himself to the will of God. My own hermetic training is in the Theravada Buddhist technique of vipassana.

Vipassana is essentially an exhaustive cataloguing of every aspect of experience, up to and including the cessation of everything. The vipassana yogi, like the Victorian collector, is engaged in taxonomy – a taxonomy of things which are disappearing. Someone practicing vipassana trains his or her awareness on every minute detail of experience, and observes it while it burns away. At the completion of this enlightenment nothing is left. The literal meaning of the Sanskrit word nirvana is ‘extinguishing’, referring to the going out of a light.

Trees + Flowers – Insects Animals

Man Ray, Picasso pictured on the beach in 1935
with his Afghan hound, Kasbel.

For the month of June, I’m looking forward to – yes, warmer weather, but also – this book of Man Ray’s lesser known photographs of cars, masks, insects, flowers, leaves, starfish, landscapes, and artist friends with their dogs.

This is what the publisher has to say:

“The 320 photographs and drawings selected for this publication are among the rarest of Man Ray’s works, and will be a revelation to even his most devoted admirers. At the core of Man Ray: Trees + Flowers – Insects Animals is a series of landscape photographs made by Man Ray from the 1920s through the 1950s, many of which bear the distinct influence of Eugène Atget. With subjects including castles and ruined buildings, street scenes, and the objects from which he drew inspiration for other artworks, the photographs and drawings in this book represent an intermediary step in Man Ray’s creative process.

The title of the series, Trees + Flowers – Insects Animals, was discovered by the editor, John P. Jacob, scrawled across the backside of a photograph, and provides a key to this most unusual collection.”

Read an article about the book here and see here for a preview of some of the photographs.

Odder

Odder is Manchester’s wunderkammer bar. Is there one near where you live?

Horror Vacui

Part of Mark Dion’s collection in his New York flat.

Mark Dion’s New York apartment.

(Image in Modern Painters, March 2009, pp. 28-29.)

Dion explains: “I think some people generate ideas better in an empty room, where there are no distractions. I don’t see these things as distractions, though. I see them as elements that feed into the thought process. So I prefer to have as much stuff around me as possible.”

Are you a collector or hoarder? Do you accumulate stuff? Which are the things you’re surrounded by? Which are the objects that feed into your thought process?

The Collector (VII)

Early on I learned the value of making lists from watching Mister Salgado. He was a great one for lists. He would listen to The Mikado and write page after page of lists: shopping lists, laundry lists, book lists, betting lists, things-to-do lists, things-not-to-do lists, diary lists, repair lists, packing lists, record lists, larder lists, letters-to-write lists. I would find these on his desk, in the pockets of the clothes I had to put away, sometimes by the telephone and sometimes in his bag, like charms or favourite poems.

From Romesh Gunesekera, Reef.

See in this context these online list, to-do list and grocery list collections, and listography, an online tool for creating a personal database of lists.

I stop for hours to watch butterflies.

Jean-Henri Fabre studying insects in July 1907, anonymous photograph.

Nature

by Jon Glover

I stop for hours to watch butterflies. I am tempted not to draw them but to collect them. Sometimes I think I would like to watch them grow and breed. Then I fancy arranging them, to kill and preserve their abundance, their colours, their alien delicacy. Still I have nowhere for this. And, finally, to set things in a house would create a stillness shut from the sun, a civilization that I go on trying to leave.

From earth colours and its skin
of thin, dry crystal,
its fragile liquids snap out and are gone.
Without tenderness
or anything sensual
it holds my gaze, meets food,
flower or parasite
across void after void:
the blank spaces come
and go on coming.

Touching their fine dusts
tempts me to indifference -
all those designs, fantastic eyes,
and mimicked leaves grow
without fear or knowledge,
display purpose and beauty
without love and die raggedly
or freeze. These human qualities
want them collected, row upon row,
preserving each as a separate
kingdom of man’s desire?
Like cold, pinned galaxies?

[The exile]

From Jon Glover, To the Niagara Frontier: Poems New and Selected, Manchester: Carcanet, 1994.

Butterfly collection at Deyrolle, Paris.

Taking leave of the world.

Manchester Museum Hermitage.

For two months this summer, an artist will live in the Manchester Museum’s Victorian Gothic tower 24/7, reflecting upon biodiversity, climate change, sustainability and the future of the planet. The chosen performance artist, writer, poet, visual artist, sculptor or musician will reside in a set of rooms accessed by a steep, windy spiral stone staircase, which are not normally open to the public, after a short period of intense engagement with the Museum’s collections. The only means of staying in touch with the outside world during the whole secluded residency will be by digital or audiovisual media, such as blogging or video statements.

According to the artist brief, the project presents a “unique opportunity to explore a tradition, with a long history and extending across many cultures, of men and women who made the decision to flee the company of their fellow humans to dwell alone in retirement and total solitude, often living on islands, in caves, or in the desert.”

Thus the urban hermit might be a modern Saint Simeon Stylites the Elder, who lived on top of a pillar for 37 years

St. Simeon Stylites.

a contemporary Saint Jerome in his study

Albrecht Dürer, Der heilige Hieronymus im Gehäus, 1514.

or a reincarnation of the poor poet.

Carl Spitzweg, Der arme Poet, 1839.

Also (the Manchester Museum houses a natural history collection, after all):

Hermit crab.

For more information on the project, see artist brief, BBC coverage and Museum website.

Butterfly

Max Ernst, Untitled (Papillon), painted doors from Gala and Paul Éluard’s house in Eaubonne, 1923.

Pair of doors outside the bedroom leading to the bedroom and bathroom. The opening doors must have given the sense of a butterfly in movement… or severed butterfly wings.

Dragonfly

Curtis Moffat (1887-1949), Abstract Composition,
solarised gelatin silver print photogram, c. 1925.

Alcoholism, birds and orchids.

Pedagogical posters, second half of 19th century.
Maison Deyrolle, Paris.