Week 6: Isolating the Senses

Something William Gallagher said at the Tate Britain that really struck me was this simple, obvious statement: paintings are silent.  He also talked about how paintings are motionless and often have to imply motion, an idea I've thought about before with Greek sculptures in the contraposto pose.  It had never really occurred to me, though, that paintings make no noise!

(An example of contraposto--one knee bent, the foot slightly raised, the other leg straight):

Polykleitos, Doryphorus, 450-440 BC

However, just as paintings can imply motion, they can imply sound.  I'm thinking of Munch's The Scream, which implies sound through not only its title and the figure's classic 'O'-shaped mouth, but through the intense, swirly colors--perhaps a shrill yet echoing scream.

Munch - The Scream (or, as Spanish Wikipedia here in Barcelona calls it--El Grito)

That sense of visual art as silent really opened up Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" for me, too.  When I first read it at the beginning of the semester, it seemed Keats was going on and on about how the depictions in the urn were still and so on.  I'm not sure why, but that stillness just came to life to me this time.

Also, I noticed the title this time as "Ode ON a Grecian Urn" rather than "TO".  Is that out of the ordinary?  I was wondering what to make of it--I guess just that the poem's thoughts don't revolve totally around the urn but seem to suggest thoughts on life in general--but then again, don't most poems or odes do that?

Grecian Urn

(http://maggiefelisberto.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/urn.jpeg)

One other thing: thinking of how paintings (and other visual art) isolate the actual sensual experience to the single sense of the visual reminded me Tom Espiner's talk in class.  He talked about how they isolate the aural sense, but how it can intimate space as well--a kind of visual quality.

I got to thinking--are there arts that appeal to simply one of the other senses--the "secondary" ones as we might call them?  Taste, smell, touch.  Are they just too close to "home" or the body for art to be able to interact comfortably with them?  (Food is definitely an art, but it is always meant to be pleasing--never to make one think or be sad or horrified, as far as I know.)

This seems like too easy an answer to me--after all, revolutionary art has always been extremely uncomfortable at first even to the visual and aural senses.  I'm thinking of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (1913) and of some Manet works, like Le Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe:

I talked about this idea with my parents, and the only "arts" we could think of that appeal to those other senses were:

-Eating chili peppers or spicy food

-Roller coasters--a rush of wind

Yeah, so not much.

Could there be an exhibit of many different textures on the walls?  Of rooms of different smells?  It would be really interesting.

Week 5: Hardy and Cézanne Presentation Follow-Up

-Paul Cézanne, An Old Woman with a Rosary (1895-6)

(http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/upload/img/cezanne-old-woman-rosary-NG6195-fm.jpg)

Thomas Hardy, "Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?"

(originally published 1913, published in collection 1914)

"Ah, are you digging on my grave 

          My loved one? -- planting rue?" 

-- "No, yesterday he went to wed 

One of the brightest wealth has bred. 

'It cannot hurt her now,' he said, 

          'That I should not be true.'"  

"Then who is digging on my grave? 

         My nearest dearest kin?" 

-- "Ah, no; they sit and think, 'What use! 

What good will planting flowers produce? 

No tendance of her mound can loose 

         Her spirit from Death's gin.' "  

"But some one digs upon my grave? 

         My enemy? -- prodding sly?" 

-- "Nay: when she heard you had passed the Gate 

That shuts on all flesh soon or late, 

She thought you no more worth her hate, 

         And cares not where you lie."  

"Then, who is digging on my grave? 

         Say -- since I have not guessed!" 

-- "O it is I, my mistress dear, 

Your little dog, who still lives near, 

And much I hope my movements here 

         Have not disturbed your rest?"  

"Ah yes! You  dig upon my grave . . . 

         Why flashed it not on me 

That one true heart was left behind! 

What feeling do we ever find 

To equal among human kind 

         A dog's fidelity!"  

"Mistress, I dug upon your grave 

         To bury a bone, in case 

I should be hungry near this spot 

When passing on my daily trot. 

I am sorry, but I quite forgot 

         It was your resting-place." 

_____________________________________________________

This project made me think more about the medium of each work of art as essential to what it is.  The poem is set up like a joke, all leading up to a "punchline."  A joke requires expectation and result, playing out through growing tension and eventual release, which are only possible through temporality—something a work of writing is good at depicting--not a painting.

The painting plays with expectation and result in another way more inherent to its medium though: space.  I struggled mightily with the painting's strange, obscure background.  Together with my group I was eventually able to grasp onto the wood panels in the wall behind the figure--why don't they line up from the left to the right?  By presenting a pattern (a straight line), Cézanne sets us up to expect continuation--then denies us.  It is the same feeling in the poem--both denial of the woman-in-the-grave's expectations and the reader's.

The project fits into my theme of so far in London of looking at objects, as we have in Nature and Culture, and thinking about them critically.  For the first presentation we did on British Museum objects, I really struggled.  I looked at a teapot and thought, "It's a fucking teapot, why would I ever study this?"  (As it turned out, I thought the group that presented on the teapot had one of the strongest presentations, so kudos to them.)  The experimental table clock by Thomas Mudge that my group ended up choosing seemed more significant to me in that it represented a particular advancement.  Still, I didn't really know why one would study it.

Now I think I'm getting better at finding all the different threads that run through an object.  As an example, I'll use the goa stone container I've been studying for the mid-term project for Nature and Culture.  I've looked at it in terms of its medium (metalwork--gold), style (filigree), and context as a work of art in both India and Britain--all in relation to its medical thread.

Surprisingly to myself, I've been thinking about how I just wish I could've been there for the object's creation to see exactly how and why and by whom it was made, to see its exact birthplace and time, see its journey from India to Britain and its new life there.

Likewise, I thought about the Cézanne painting and the Hardy poem in terms of their contexts and their stories.  I wanted to meet the ex-nun in the painting and to see how Cézanne interacted with her.  I wanted to be in Hardy's head while he wrote a poem that seems to have to be about his dead 1st wife yet also contradicts the tenderness he showed for her in other poems.  But all we have is what we have.  It's a great challenge but really an interesting one.

        

Hardy and Cézanne - Pairing Thoughts

I've been thinking a lot about Thomas Hardy's "Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?" and Paul Cézanne's Old Woman with a Rosary for the pairings project.  I'll just share some of my thoughts.

Central to both works is a woman--the only person in the painting and one of two real characters in the poem and certainly the main character.  Both women are in the latter stages of life--the woman in the painting old, the woman in the poem dead.  Both are despairing over their state.

Each work deals with this despair in different ways, however.  I wrote in my last blog post about the lack of dissonance between background and subject in the Cézanne painting.  In fact, there is more to the background.  Characteristic of a few of Cézanne's portraits is a kind of bending, not-quite-right perspective, which we can see in the wood panels on the wall--they don't line up from one side of the woman to the other.  I'm still thinking about this and how to incorporate it into my thoughts on the painting, but the main sense of the background anyway is darkness and bleakness, a reflection of her inner state.

The poem itself could be considered the frame for its main character's voice--and here there is great dissonance.  The dead woman is plaintive, lonely, and growing more and more desperate (as evidenced by a quick glance at the first line of each of the first 5 stanzas (I included the 2nd line of stanza 4 as well):

stanza 1, line 1 (1.1): "Ah, are you digging on my grave

2.1: "Then who is digging on my grave?

3.1: "But some one digs upon my grave? 

4.1 - 4.2: "Then, who is digging on my grave? 

         Say -- since I have not guessed!"

5.1: "Ah yes! You  dig upon my grave . . . 

The poem as a frame for her voice, on the other hand, is extremely ironic, perhaps mocking of her loneliness in death.

Although one woman is dead and one is alive, there is a parallel in the state of both of them, the perspective that the works take, as evidenced by their "endings."  The poem leaves off with the dog's voice, taking up the whole 6th stanza:

"Mistress, I dug upon your grave
         To bury a bone, in case
I should be hungry near this spot
When passing on my daily trot.
I am sorry, but I quite forgot
         It was your resting-place." 

We don't get a return to the dead woman's voice, saying something like (obviously horrible writing), "Ah!  Begone you wretch!"  or "Ah, I thank you for your piercing honesty" or anything like that.  Rather, we have to imagine her reaction--does she sink back in her grave, sad but accepting?  Does she want to burst out into the air, screaming?

Paintings obviously don't "end," but just like the poem we do not see any resolution to the woman's plight--only her in the midst of it.

Neither work gives us much background at all about who these women are.  For that, we must enter into the dangerous territory of biography: the artists who depict these women.  Cézanne's woman is apparently a destitute ex-nun he took in.  All but one of the female portraits he had painted in the previous five years had been of his wife.

I also know from research that the artist was a very poorly-tempered person who had difficulty interacting with others and so missed out on many models to paint.  Not only that, but Cézanne himself was obsessed with death, having drawn up a will out of fear for death at an early age and turned to religion originally out fear.  All of these things suggest that he felt a deep connection with this woman--also seeming to fear death and her fate.  (Indeed he might've felt such a connection with anyone he painted, as he apparently took up to 150 sessions to complete a portrait.)

We can only speculate about the woman in Hardy's poem, though it is extremely interesting that the poem was first published less than a year after his first wife, Emma Lavina Gifford, had died.  Also, only a few months prior to the poem's publication, he remarried--to a close friend of Emma's, Florence Dugdale.  It seems impossible that the dead woman in the poem is not his wife, that he is not the lover gone off to wed another.  It is well known that Hardy and Emma had a mostly unhappy marriage.  Do we dare read into this poem as mocking his dead ex-wife?