Ms. Poiesis

Leonardo da Vinci’s brilliant 1483-90 “Lady with an Ermine” – a portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, mistress of Ludovico il Moro. Look at the beautiful way in which the heads of the woman and animal mirror each other and the sensitivity of the hands of each – fantastic.

Compare Leonardo’s revolutionary treatment with this earlier portrait from 1436 by Pisanello:

Also a very beautiful work, but without any evidence of the woman’s subjective interiority.

Bryan Berg, cardstacker

Bryan Berg makes fantastic card architecture. Formally trained as a designer and architect, Berg holds several Guinness World Records for houses of cards. He landed his first one at 17 when he built a 14 foot, 6 inch tall tower. His most recent record-holding tower is more than 25 feet tall.

 

To see more, click here.

Ken Alexander
Editor, The Walrus

Insofar as we expect our prime ministers to reflect general societal values and Canadian identity, Stephen Harper represents a unique entry into the national political landscape. Watching him and gauging his moves, clichés come to mind – know no fear, take no prisoners, and so forth – but increasingly Harper appears more than a tactical, domineering pit bull determined to win at all costs, a man who looks across the floor at Liberal leader Stéphane Dion and says to himself, “I can take him out…He’s a mark as easy for me as Stockwell Day was for Jean Chrétien.”

There is a cerebral, if calculating, aspect to Harper’s current approach that represents a fundamental challenge to the quiet way Canada has been governed since the early 1980s. Not since Trudeau have we been presented with such a complete (and opposite) template for an altered country. Sudden environmental awareness, a partnership with the Bill Gates Foundation to find a vaccine for the hideous killer of aids, and other noteworthy strategic moves, do not mask the basic fact that Harper wants to undo what he perceives as Canada’s mixed blessings: a private-public economy, an independent and active judiciary, a federal state that is not a “headwaiter for the provinces.”
At a time when Canadians are adjusting to the next huge national challenge facing us – re-tooling the economy around sustainable development and shedding our near total dependence on fossil fuels – small programs and minor inducements to business aside, by ushering in a budget with significant tax reductions and solving the “fiscal imbalance” by dumping money into the regions, Harper is essentially saying there is little role for the federal state.

Beyond his “baseless” (as per John Ibbitson in the Globe & Mail) conflation of Liberal MP Navdeep Bains’ father-in-law and the Liberal Party’s internal debate about rolling back anti-terrorism statutes; or his stacking of judicial appointment committees; or his treatment of the Ottawa press gallery as unworthy of the time of day, when regional papers are less nosy; or, even, narrative advertisements celebrating life in the military that render “There’s no life like it” a wistful reminder of a bygone era; or attack ads that make the PR flaks for the US Republicans look like cub scouts; beyond all this, Harper has presented Canadians with a central and defining question – should Ottawa exist? – and a clear preference – it should not. Let the voting begin: the golden retriever vs. the pit bull.

By Ruth Rosen, The Nation. Posted February 27, 2007.

A baby is born. A child develops a high fever. A spouse breaks a leg. A parent suffers a stroke. These are the events that throw a working woman’s delicate balance between work and family into chaos.

Although we read endless stories and reports about the problems faced by working women, we possess inadequate language for what most people view as a private rather than a political problem. “That’s life,” we tell each other, instead of trying to forge common solutions to these dilemmas.

That’s exactly what housewives used to say when they felt unhappy and unfulfilled in the 1950s: “That’s life.” Although magazines often referred to housewives’ unexplained depressions, it took Betty Friedan’s 1963 bestseller to turn “the problem that has no name” into a household phrase, “the feminine mystique” — the belief that a woman should find identity and fulfillment exclusively through her family and home.

The great accomplishment of the modern women’s movement was to name such private experiences — domestic violence, sexual harassment, economic discrimination, date rape — and turn them into public problems that could be debated, changed by new laws and policies or altered by social customs. That is how the personal became political.

Although we have shelves full of books that address work/family problems, we still have not named the burdens that affect most of America’s working families.

Call it the care crisis.

For four decades, American women have entered the paid workforce — on men’s terms, not their own — yet we have done precious little as a society to restructure the workplace or family life. The consequence of this “stalled revolution,” a term coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, is a profound “care deficit.” A broken healthcare system, which has left 47 million Americans without health coverage, means this care crisis is often a matter of life and death. Today the care crisis has replaced the feminine mystique as women’s “problem that has no name.” It is the elephant in the room — at home, at work and in national politics — gigantic but ignored. …

Read the rest here.

Is the Canadian situation any different?

Kiefer, Palm Sunday installation

How do you like your contemporary art? A quick hit of juicy mischief, a larky take on mortality, binful of bluebottles, pocketful of glitter, everything you never wanted to know and more about the artist’s entrails? Right then, give Anselm Kiefer a very wide berth – because, as the show about to open at White Cube, London, will confirm, he doesn’t do droll, he does the big embarrassing stuff, the stuff that matters: the epic slaughters of the world, the incineration of the planet, apocalypse then, apocalypse often; the fragile endurance of the sacred amid the cauterised ruins of the earth.
…

Kiefer, Aperiatur Terra

Much of Kiefer’s art represents a resistance to this inhuman virtualisation of memory; its lazy democracy of significance, its translation into weightless impressions. The opposing pole from that alt/delete disposability is to make history obstinately material, laid down in dense, sedimentary deposits that demand patient, rugged excavation. Kiefer’s work burrows away at time, and what it exposes also makes visible the painful toil of the dig, skinned knuckles, barked shins and all.

Kiefer, Palm Sunday detail

To read the complete review, click here.

For more information on this exhibition, click here.

For Gregory Crewdson, a graduate lecturer at Yale School of Art and mentor to a whole generation of young (and, coincidentally, mainly female) photographers, the dying light is singularly suited to his spooked vision. “My photographs are about the moment of transition between before and after,” he explains. “Twilight is evocative of that. There’s something magical about the condition.” The eerie effect of twilight crossed with strong artificial light – street lights, house lights, lights from the sky – is exaggerated by Crewdson’s choice of backdrop, which is almost always nondescript suburban America. “I have motifs I work and rework,” he says. “I have created a kind of iconography for myself, but I’m not sure how it all adds up – and maybe I don’t want to know.”

Crewdson is one of eight artists featured in a group show at the V&A later this month, Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour, which also includes work by Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Boris Mikhailov. He is not the first photographer to be drawn to twilight – “nature at its most impressive”, according to the exhibition catalogue – but his images are uniquely tense, pregnant with atmosphere.

‘I have always been fascinated by the poetic condition of twilight. By its transformative quality. Its power of turning the ordinary into something magical and otherworldly. My wish is for the narrative in the pictures to work within that circumstance. It is that sense of in-between-ness that interests me.’ Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson reworks the American suburb into a stage-set for the inexplicable, often disturbing, events that take place at twilight. In creating what he calls ‘frozen moments’, he has developed a process akin to the making of a feature film. Operating on an epic scale, he uses a large crew to shoot and then develop the images during post-production.

Every detail of these images is meticulously planned and staged, in particular the lighting. In some instances, extra lighting and special effects such as artificial rain or dry ice are used to enhance a natural moment of twilight. In others, the effect of twilight is entirely artificially created.

All the images propose twilight as a poetic condition. It is a metaphor for, and backdrop to, uncanny events that momentarily transport actors from the homeliness and security of their suburban context.

For more on Crewdson, click here.

For more on the Twilight exhibition at the V & A Museum, click here.

Robert Polidori (Canadian, b. 1951), one of the world’s premier architectural photographers, has recorded the disasters of our time as well as the failures of contemporary society. Amid the scenes of destruction and chaos in New Orleans, as in his past projects in Havana, Versailles, and Chernobyl, Polidori finds a formal beauty that radiates stillness and compassion and invites contemplation.

2732 Orleans Avenue, New Orleans

The wrecked rooms, collapsed houses, and ravaged neighborhoods on view in “After the Flood” become metaphors for human fragility. Using a large-format camera, natural light, and unusually long exposures, Polidori records the destruction with a mastery of color, light, shadow, and texture that brings to life discarded mementos and mud-caked belongings. In each image, the artist seems to have captured the very air of New Orleans, weighted heavily with mold, humidity, and history.

5417 Marigny Street, New Orleans

6525 Wuerpel Street, New Orleans

Text and Images from the 2006 Metropolitan Museum exhibition in New York. For more information, click here.

From Michael Gilleland:

A few years ago I tried my hand at translating a few aphorisms from Nicolás Gómez Dávila’s Escolios a un Texto Implicito (1977). Unfortunately I didn’t transcribe the original Spanish. Here are a few of my translations:

The imagination is the only place in the universe where it is possible to live. (II, 132)

A cultivated soul is one where the din of the living does not drown out the music of the dead. (II, 195)

The modern world seems invincible. Like the extinct dinosaurs. (II, 226)

To be unaware of the putrefaction of the modern world is a symptom of contagion by it. (II, 451)

Guercino, Et in Arcadia Ego 1618

Advice To a Self-Tormentor
Palladas (Greek Anthology 10.78, tr. W.R. Paton):

Cast away complaint and be not troubled, for how brief is the time thou dwellest here compared with all the life that follows this! Ere thou breedest worms and art cast into the tomb torment not thy soul, as if it were damned while thou still livest.

Read more here.

Poussin, Et in Arcadia Ego 1637

‘Et in Arcadia ego’ is a phrase coined by Virgil and used in 17th century Italy expressing, in an elliptical way, the humanistic sentiment: Even in Arcadia I (i.e. Death) am to be found. That is to say, even the escapist, pastoral world of Arcady is no refuge from death. The words feature in paintings from that time inscribed on monumental stonework, especially a tomb, which stands in rural surroundings.

The earliest representation of the theme by Guercino (Galleria Corsini, Rome) shows two shepherds coming unexpectedly upon a skull – the typical memento mori – that lies on a piece of fallen masonry bearing the words ‘Et in Arcadia ego’. In the version by Poussin the skull has disappeared, and the shepherds are trying to decipher the tomb’s inscription.

Source: Web Gallery of Art

The legendary female warriors, the Amazons, often mentioned in Homer’s “Iliad” and almost all documents written by ancient Greek writers, are known throughout the world as powerful symbols of female virility and the ancient goddess sects. The Black Sea coastal city of Samsun, known as the city where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk began the Turkey’s 1919 War of Independence, also happens to be the home of the extraordinary Amazons, who were a nucleus of fear and fascination in ancient texts.

Herakles Fighting the Amazon Queen c 560 bce

Work has begun in Samsun to highlight the Amazons as yet another of Turkey’s ancient cultural assets. The Samsun Metropolitan Municipality plans to construct a miniature city reflecting the time of the Amazons in the city’s Batı Park, reported the Anatolia news agency.

The Samsun Metropolitan Municipality Governor Kenan Şara said they would be building a miniature Amazon city on a 40,000 square meter area in Batı Park. He said they were currently working on the project and that a 12-meter tall Amazon statue that will be erected in the park was under construction.

Read more here.

For more on the Amazons, click here.