Stuff What I'm Writing and That

I wrote this piece on the painter Jean-Etienne Liotard for Szirine.com:

Romance and Exotic Beings: Some thoughts on Jean-Etienne Liotard at the Royal Academy of Art

Throughout history, western images of the Islamic world have been subject to moulding and re-framing. 'The orient' is positioned either as the vibrant other: that strange and exotic world so unlike our own, or as an anchor, affirming the validity of established western cultures and ways of seeing. As Edward Said noted in the introduction to his book 'Orientalism':

"The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity ‘a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences. "

The rooting of this 'oriental invention' can be seen in the work of 18th century painter Jean-Etienne Liotard who, alongside his exquisite depictions of families (notably his own) and noble family life, documented the lives and fashions of the people he encountered during his travels in the east, and painted portraits of English society figures in 'oriental' dress.

Liotard lived a peripatetic existence. Born in the republic of Geneva, and having become not only a highly skilled draughtsman but an expert in beautifully detailed portraiture, he went on to seek fame and fortune throughout the capitals of Europe. His travels, moving from one commission to the next, took him from Paris, Rome, and London through to Amsterdam and Vienna. He also spent 4 years in Constantinople, where he travelled as a documentary artist, detailing the clothes and cultures of the people he encountered.

In his documentary work Liotard displayed a flair not only for brilliantly fine detail, but for an almost photographic ability to capture emotion and narrative. 

Two exhibition works particularly stand out in this regard: one of a dwarf, depicted in middle aged and lost in thought, and the second of two Turkish musicians.

These drawings also show off Leotard's skill with red and black pencil, a technique which carries over to his later 'court portraits' depicting European royalty. One of a young Marie-Antoinette is especially striking. But regardless of subject matter, this two colour approach lends a magical and highly stylised quality to his work: subjects appear as floating bright against a stark white background, details are drawn out with similar effect to Man Ray's 20th century 'Rayograph' photographic experiments. 

Humour, or at least playfulness, too, is a key feature of Liotard's work. Self portraits depict him as smiling toothily towards the viewer, directing their attention away with pointed finger towards other works nearby. 

There is a sense of comedy in the natural and candid way that he depicts his sitters. He allows them a wry grin and a knowing look, but he also refuses to beautify their flaws. The result is wall after wall of horrific women and puffily gout ridden men all painted with expert skill and attention. It becomes a constant delight to stumble now upon the portrait of a smirking woman, now on the startled and ruddy face of teenager on the verge of inheritance, and now upon the ageing, bloated aristocrat. It is not entirely clear to me how he came to get away with this trick. Perhaps was a much sought after signature, or perhaps (less likely) it was a secret in-joke only he was aware of. Either way, it is difficult to image the artist at work without a smile on his his face.

Comedy is also there in his 'Oriental' society portraits. Men appear slightly over-dressed, Women seem deliberately awkward in their foreign clothes. 

This may be a mis-reading on my part but my feeling is that Liotard, when depicting the native people of the lands he travelled through, had a keener eye for the authenticity and reality of life than he allowed to trickle through into his European paintings. And I say this fully considering the theatrics at work in these portraits. Yes, the Turkish costume worn by the European girl or boy (often dressed in costumes Liotard himself has selected) speaks to a grander idea of their character and ambitions, but is there also the suggestion of an artist aware of the absurd and enjoying the playfulness of his situation? I like to think so.

Jean-Etienne Liotard at the Royal Academy of Art runs through to January 31, 2016

Stuff What I'm Reading and That

Inspiring Stuff #10

Space Invader Keys

With / antojeda.com

Inspiring Stuff #9

Adorno on Hobbies





"I have no hobby. Not that I'm a workaholic who wouldn't know how to do anything else but get down to business and do what has to be done. But rather I take the activities with which I occupy myself beyond the bounds of my official profession, without exception, so seriously that I would be shocked by the idea that they had anything to do with hobbies -that is, activities I'm mindlessly infatuated with only in order to kill time- if my experiences had not toughened me against manifestations of barbarism that have become self-evident and acceptable. Making music, listening to music, reading with concentration constitute an integral element of my existence; the word hobby would make a mockery of them." -T.W. Adorno, from his essay "Free Time" (1969)

Inspiring Stuff #8

Anne Carson: "The form hasn't emerged yet of the thing I'm working on."

INTERVIEWER

I was wondering about your preference for things that are old and battered, flawed and tattered.

CARSON

In surfaces, perfection is less interesting. For instance, a page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains. Because the tea stains add a bit of history. It’s a historical attitude. After all, texts of ancient Greeks come to us in wreckage and I admire that, the combination of layers of time that you have when looking at a papyrus that was produced in the third century BC and then copied and then wrapped around a mummy for a couple hundred years and then discovered and put in a museum and pieced together by nine different gentlemen and put back in the museum and brought out again and photographed and put in a book. All those layers add up to more and more life. You can approximate that in your own life. Stains on clothing.

Text stolen from this interview in the Paris Review: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5420/the-art-of-poetry-no-88-anne-carson

Inspiring Stuff #7

Cannon Magazine: No. 2

I stumbled upon Cannon magazine yesterday afternoon in the LRB bookshop.

Edited by Phil Baber in Amsterdam, it is filled with poetry, letters, quotations, observations, and an editors note that runs throughout the magazine as a series of Bernardo Soares-esque diary entries.

It is printed on yellow paper. The front cover shows an abstract spillage of some sort. The back cover seems to be a photo of a man gluing grey office carpet tiles to a floor.

The spine carries a quotation from Wallace Stevens:

"It is possible, possible, possible. It must be possible."

Inspiring Stuff #6

The Surreal Object: Sketched thoughts on Poetry, Duchamp, and Things 

I've always felt that Surrealism was at its best when experimenting with objects.

In searching for a 'physics of poetry' (Breton's words) it exposed and reconfigured the 'everyday' in ways that, for me, are even more radical than the film experiments of Un Chien Andalou or Dali's photo-real dreamscapes.

Man Ray

...Or if not more radical, then at least more immediate somehow, more unsettling. They insist on a new way of looking at very ordinary 'things'.

I'm not sure how true this is, but I read an essay recently on the relationship between the work of Marcel Duchamp and American poet William Carlos Williams which seemed to suggest that the path to American Modernism could perhaps be mapped in the following way:

European Realist Painting/Sculpture > European Abstract painting/Sculpture > American Abstract painting/Sculpture > American Modernism (Which crystallises the abstract and draws out a more definite focus.)

American Modernism then insists upon a distilled 'Abstraction' that brings 'the thing itself' to the foreground.

Dada/Surrealist experiments with the snow shovel or urinal for example.

Marcel Duchamp

But I'm jumping ahead of myself really... What I wanted to say was that I was surprised during a recent visit to the 'le Surrealisme et l'objet' exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris that my first thought was of Carlos Williams' Poem 'The Red Wheelbarrow':

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Again, there is the intense focus on the object itself.

Then later, trawling through the Internet for information, I discovered a concrete connection between Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and William Carlos Williams.

My initial thoughts are that the object intersects with the poetic at two key points:

1) Object as the fulcrum for a wider narrative
2) The 'uncanny object': A moment of very ordinary disquiet

The first seems to share more with Carlos Williams' wheelbarrow - The theatre stage prop, or gun glimpsed on the wall in the first act of a play by Chekhov. The second functions as a tripwire, a perfectly structured metaphor.

I like both.

 Salvador Dali / Alberto Giocometti