Another city better than this one.

Joseph Gandy, Sir John Soane’s Study, 1822.

The City

by Constantine P. Cavafy

You said: “I’ll go to another country, to another shore,
Find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
And my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
Where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country; another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
In the same neighborhoods, turn grey in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
There’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve waisted your life here, in this small corner,
You’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Quoted in Donald Preziosi, Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity, 2003, pp 1-2.

Cavafy’s 1910 poem is from C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, ed. George Savidis and trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, 1992.

Camouflage

Can you spot the owl(s)?

From The Guardian Weekend Magazine, 24 October 2009.

The 1/8 of Fruits

Juan Sánchez Cotán, Still Life with Quince, 1602.

Writing about French socialist and philosopher Charles Fourier’s (1772-1837) utopia of the Four Movements and the General Destinies, Roland Barthes points out that in any of Fourier’s classifications, there is always a portion that doesn’t add up. There are various names for it: passage; composite; transition; neuter; triviality; ambiguity; supplement; the 1/8 of any collection; the legal margin of error. It is, in short, the class in which everything that attempts to escape classification is swallowed up. Examples of such composite, transitional objects include

the nectarine, which damps the opposition of prune and peach, and
the quince, which forms a passage between pear and apple.

Barthes gives us the following list of transitory phenomena:

There are ambiguities in every series: the sensitive, the bat, the flying fish, the amphibians, the zoophytes, sapphism, pederasty, incest, Chinese society (half-barbaric, half-civilized, with harems and courts of law and etiquette), lime (fire and water), the nervous system (body and soul), twilights, coffee (ignominiously ignored for Mocha for 4,000 years, then suddenly the subject of a mercantile craze, passing from abjection to the highest rank), children (the third passionate sex, neither men nor women); the albino; the taste for feathered fowl; Death.

See Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971)

Facts

A cockroach will live nine days without its head before it starves to death
A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out
A snail can sleep for three years
All polar bears are left-handed
An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain
Butterflies taste with their feet
Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, dogs have only about ten
Cat urine glows under a black light
Donald Duck comics were banned in Finland because he doesn’t wear pants
Elephants are the only animals that can’t jump
If you keep a goldfish in a dark room it will eventually turn white
Humans and dolphins are the only species that have sex for pleasure
A pig’s orgasm lasts for thirty minutes
In the last 4000 years no new animals have been domesticated
More people are killed by donkeys annually than are killed by plane crashes
Some lions mate over fifty times a day
Starfish have no brains
Ants always fall over on their right side when intoxicated
The average human eats eight spiders in their lifetime at night
The catfish has over 27,000 taste buds
You are more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than by a poisonous spider

From Val Williams and Greg Hobson, New Natural History, exh. cat., Bradford: National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, 1999, p. 7.

Natural Affinities

Installation shot of The Glass Veil, New York-based artist, writer and teacher Suzanne Anker’s current exhibition at the Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité (14.07.-06.09.2009).

The Glass Veil, an installation by Suzanne Anker, in the Ruine des Rudolf-Virchow-Hörsaals pays homage to medicine’s historical past. Destroyed toward the end of WWII by bombing, after the war, the building was refitted with a roof and windows. Since the middle of the 1990s the “preserved” Ruine has been used for art exhibitions, conferences and scientific exchange.

For The Glass Veil, Anker has installed twenty four upside down parachutes that float within the aerial space of this Ruine. Accompanied by both large and small scale photographs of specimens from the museum’s collection: a brain, a fetus, a stomach and other human remains enclosed in glass, Anker employs these specimens to question the viewer’s somatic gaze. What emotions, fleeting or otherwise are invoked by gazing at preserved flesh? What are the differences between a clinical appreciation of these artifacts and an inter-subjective one?

From artdaily.org

Her Butterfly in the Brain series (2002-2008), in which she uses advanced imaging technology to superimpose MRI scans of the brain, neurological maps and charts of urban sprawl with images and shapes of butterflies, makes me think of affinity, coincidence and symmetry:

Suzanne Anker, MRI Butterfly 7, 2008.

Suzanne Anker, MRI Butterfly (installation), 2008.

The Butterfly in the Brain continues Anker’s investigation into the visualizing techniques available through high technology simulation such as the microscope and the telescope. This work focuses on a dialogue of signs within the symmetrical (or virtually symmetrical) structures of the butterfly and the brain, both of which possess an axis copy. Using neurological maps as well as charts of urban sprawl, Anker plots the shape of a butterfly in each pattern. Constellations emerge from these distinct models calling into question the ways in which biological form is replicated in the cultural domain.

From artbrain.org

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.

Some 3D street art.

Edgar Müller, The Crevasse, Dun Laoghaire, Ireland.

Müller at work on The Crevasse. It took the artist and five assistants five days to create the effect.

Edgar Müller, church reflected in a well.

Julian Beever, Butterfly, Mexico City.

Julian Beever, White Water Rafting.

Darwin’s beard.

My three favourite exhibits from the Darwin – Big Idea exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London, which I had a chance to see last Wednesday:

Pair of mockingbirds which Darwin collected on the Galapagos Islands (never before on public display). Their slight differences inspired Darwin to consider for the first time that species change in time. Aestheticised display, with the birds bedded on a cushion of purple velvet.

Treasure chest which belonged to Darwin’s daughter Etty. It mainly contains mementoes and keepsakes of her father, such as hair from his beard wrapped in tissue.

Darwin’s first sketch of an evolutionary tree of life visualising relationships between organisms (jotted down in Notebook B). Fascinating combination of ‘I think’, diagram, scribbles and notes, suggesting that Darwin developed his ideas visually, via images.

There’s also a neat reconstruction of his study on display, two life specimens (an iguana and a frog), and lots of models to be touched by visitors, or mounted specimens to be looked at through magnifying glasses.

All of this is accompanied by extensive labelling, but it’s worth taking the time to read the many quotes and extracts from letters, notebooks and manuscripts, to not only get an idea of Darwin the scientist, naturalist, collector and traveller, but also of Darwin the hesitant innovator, the obedient son, and the loving husband, father and friend.

My only complaint is that there’s no catalogue, not even a small exhibition leaflet; one is forced, for better or for worse, to read Darwin’s books or Janet Browne’s no doubt fabulous two-volume, 1200 page biography.

What my brain feels like at the moment.

Click on the image for a bigger version. Word cloud created with Wordle.

More beasts.

I’m very fond of the function in WordPress that tells me the search terms people have punched into google immediately before being directed to Mapping the Marvellous. The ones that have caught my eye lately – because I’ve been writing on Surrealism and the bestiary – are those that could be imaginary beasts.

Now I’m waiting to come across, on our false balcony, the hybrid creature that is spiderlike with ant head, or the diabolic green caterpillar with horns. The time beetle, I daydream, would help me avoid last-minute panic, and the horned catipeller (sic!) sounds infinitely cute – maybe I could get it as a cuddly toy?