First Works

WikiPaintings allows visitors to view all works by a given artist in chronological order.  The Salvador Dalí "collection" includes paintings dating from 1910, when the artist was 6 years old.  Moving forward in time, Dalí's predecessors show their faces one after another.  This leads to the invention of a game: begin at the beginning and move forward until you come across a work in which you can perceive nothing but the artist's own style.  Call this the First Work.

Salvador Dalí, The Station at Figueras, 1926, age 22

(The shadows, the shadowy figures, the desolate landscape of unexplained shapes, the trees obviously preparing for The Persistence of Memory.  If, in the application of paint, there is not yet Dalí, neither is there anyone else in particular [so far as is evident from the picture].)

Of course, there can be no winning this game.  Disputation can only lead further discovery.  If you, readers, decide to play this game, comment here with your findings.  I will perhaps post them, and more of my own, in future posts.

Another suggestion:

René Magritte, Nocturne, 1925, age 27

The Faces of Alexei Korzukhin

Alexei Korzukhin, Russian realist painter, 1835–1894. Wikipedia styles his portraits as "generally accepted as masterpieces of Russian portrait painting." Some highlights from a timeline on rusartnet:

• Born to a family of gold panners at Uktussky Zavod near Ekaterinburg (1835).
• One of the rebellious fourteen students who refused to paint the set topic in the competition for a major gold medal and resigned from the Imperial Academy of Arts with the title of second-class artist (1863).

[It isn't clear what the "set topic" was, but it seems the group was protesting the strict guidelines and divisions between high and low art that the Imperial Academy endorsed. They wanted to make art more accessible to the masses, and after leaving the Imperial Academy of Arts founded a collective called the Peredvizhniki, or The Wanderers, which later became the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions. Evidently Korzukhin was a member of the society but did not participate in the exhibitions. More here, and, of course, here.]

• Suffered from nervous shock and poor health after witnessing the assassination of Tsar Alexander II on the Ekaterinburg Canal in St Petersburg (1881).

Master of portraiture thought Korzukhin may be, the extent of his mastery is more clearly evident in his portrayal of faces in action. Examples below, with details. Click on the full paintings for large versions.

Separation, 1872

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Before Confession, 1877

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Peasant Girls in a Forest, 1878

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In a Monastic Hotel, 1882

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The Sunday, 1884

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There Goes Petrushka, 1888

Fragments II: Symbol

Anima Sola

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blood flight by Jenny Hval

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[The Parnassians] still treat their subjects as the old philosophers and orators did: that is, present things directly, whereas I think that they should be presented allusively. Poetry lies in the contemplation of tings, in the image emanating from the reveries which things arouse in us. They take something in its entirety and simply exhibit it; in so doing, they fall short of mystery; they fail to give our minds that exquisite joy which consists in believing that we are creating something. To name an object is largely to destroy poetic enjoyment, which comes from gradual divination. The ideal is to suggest the object. It is the perfect use of this mystery which constitutes symbol. An object must be gradually evoked in order to show a state of soul; or else, choose an object and from it elicit a state of soul by means of a series of decodings.

Attributed to Stéphane Mallarmé.

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Iamblichus:

Granting, then, that ignorance and deception are faulty and impious, it does not follow that the offerings made to the gods and divine works are invalid, for it is not pure thought that unites theurgists to the gods. Indeed, what then would hinder those who are theoretical philosophers from enjoying a theurgic union with the gods? But the situation is not so: it is the accomplishment of acts not to be divulged and beyond all conception, and the power of unutterable symbols, understood solely by the gods that establishes theurgic union. For this reason, we do not bring about these things by thinking alone. If we did, their efficacy would be intellectual, and dependent on us. But neither assumption is true. For even when we are not engaged in thinking, the symbols themselves, by themselves, perform their appropriate work, and the ineffable power of the gods, to whom these symbols relate, itself recognizes the proper images of itself, not through being aroused by our thought.

New Mario Santiago Papasquiaro translations

I have good news for fans of Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, Infrarealism, Roberto Bolaño, Mexican poetry, DIY publishing, book collecting, good poetry, and everything else under the sun:

La Ratona Cartonera, a small Mexican publishing group, has been working on several translations of poetry by Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. (See my translation of an interview with MSP here.) Their translation of the 538-line poem Advice from a disciple of Marx to a fan of Heidegger is available for $15, which includes shipping and a one-of-a-kind homemade cover:



The proceeds from these will help fund La Ratona's next MSP translation. If you want one, send me an e-mail () or comment here with your e-mail address. Then I will send you my friend Laura Darling's e-mail address, which you can use to contact her and pay for the book via PayPal.

Laura was kind enough to give me permission to post an excerpt from the translation:

Mario Santiago Papasquiaro

Advice from a disciple of Marx to a fan of Heidegger





                                           

To Roberto Bolano & Kyra Galvan comrades & poets

                                   for Claudia Kerik & my good fortune  at having known her

"...it's as well at times

To be reminded that nothing is lovely,

Not even in poetry, which is not the case."

W.H. Auden

The world comes to you in fragments / in splinters:

in a melancholy face you glimpse a brushstroke by Dürer

in someone happy the grimace of an amateur clown

in a tree: the tremble of birds sucking on its nape

in a flaming summer you catch pieces of the universe licking their faces

the moment in which an indescribable girl

                   tears her Oaxacan camisole

exactly next to the half-moon sweat of her armpits

& beyond the peel is the pulp / & like a strange gift of the eye

                                                                              the eyelash

Maybe not even carbon dating will be able to reconstruct

   the true facts

These are not the times in which a naturalist painter

ruminates on lunchtime excesses

between Swedish gymnastic movements

& without losing sight of the pinkish-blue hues of flowers he hadn't

    guessed at not even in his sweetest nightmares



We are actors of infinite acts

      & not precisely under the blue tongue

               of cinematographic lights

for instance today / you see how Antonioni passes by

                  with his customary camera

observed by those who prefer to bury their heads in the grass

to get drunk on smog or whatever / so they don't add

                                                               to the scandals

that already make public roads impassable

by those who've been born to be kissed at length by the sun

& its daily ambassadors

by those who speak of fabulous coitus /of females unbelievable

                                      in this geological age

of vibrations that would've made you a tenacious propagandist of Zen

                                                                                              Buddhism

by those who have once been saved

from the kind of accidents that the crime rags call substantial

& who by the way are not--for now--counted among the flowers of the

    Absurd

Sterility, mental and physical

I apologize to the readers of altarpiece for its state of disrepair. I have begun a Ph.D. program in philosophy, so I spend most of my time thinking about things that are not suitable for presentation here. I'll try to keep posting as I can, but really altarpiece-style posts will probably become more rare (if that's possible).

Yesterday I went to Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum. Here is the only image I've been able to find online of my favorite piece there:

Jean-Michel Basquiat. Andy Warhol, 1984.

In reality it's about 8 feet tall. Each limb section has a different grain, a different texture. The color is reminiscent of x-ray images.

I was captivated by this, and stood looking at it for an embarrassingly long time, from different parts of the room. Basquiat's left arm in two positions gives the impression of a captured movement, is also reminiscent of da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. The pose is Michaelangelo's David.


The x-ray quality combined with the pasted together panels gives the impression of resurrection.

I asked myself whether I would have been so interested in the portrait if it hadn't been Basquiat. The head is the most awkwardly attached limb. The contrast is starker, the seam is more exact and thus more distracting. It's only the head the objects to its positioning. The tension between the head and the body reminds me of the tension between life and self. But it doesn't detract from the beauty of the human body, which doesn't seem to be the least bit disturbed by being cut up and put back together.

Interim diversion (Spinoza)