the greycat blog

This month, in honour of the London Games Festival Fringe (25 October to 2 November) the theme of All The Rage is ‘games’. In accordance with this splendid theme, I have written an article on that celebrated painting by Pieter Breugel the Elder, ‘Children’s Games’:

At first sight Bruegel’s Children’s Games might appear to represent a lost world of innocence, where children live out their days in endless play – a representation of the happy state that all must leave behind as they grow to adulthood and maturity. Yet its message is in reality quite the opposite. The games of children show us that the adult world is no more than a game itself, and that all the roles and activities which adults value are mere instances of play. Bruegel’s playful children teach their adult viewers a lesson, with their mimicry of the grown-up world: that all is folly, futility, and the chance of the game.

It’s a bumper issue, as they say, so hurry along and read the gamey October 2008 issue (PDF) of All The Rage.

‘Dreams’ is the theme of the July 2008 issue (PDF) of All The Rage, the world’s favourite freely-available PDF magazine. I’m in it, as usual, writing about the dark dreams of the Spanish painter Francisco Goya.

And what fills the author’s dream? Behind his figure gather the monsters of the image’s title: owls, bats, cats, nameless creatures with wings and horns. Creatures of the shadows, half-glimpsed, cluster at his back and flutter about his lowered head. Eyes glow in the dimness, beaked mouths open to utter cries that we cannot hear but the dreamer, perhaps, can. Bats that seem horned like devils circle menacingly, an oversized cat or lynx crouches on the floor, head raised and eyes staring. On the author’s right an owl raises a pen in its talons, inviting him to continue with his work, to make new images, filled with the shapes that emerge from his dreams.

Much more excellent content can of course be found in the July 2008 issue (PDF), available now from the All The Rage website.

The May 2008 edition (PDF) of All The Rage is organized around the theme of ‘age and maturity’. I contribute an essay on Camille Claudel’s sculpture ‘L’age mur’ (’maturity’).

If it is Camille’s own maturity that the sculpture is asserting it seems an ambiguous celebration. Perhaps the paradox of the sculpture is that this kneeling figure is the only one of the three to be asserting independence. The man has let himself be conquered by age, who is herself a force of destiny rather than a willed individual, but the y6oung woman, even as she implores, lets him go, does not rise to restrain him. This is the maturity of the title: however painful the parting, the time is ripe for turning away from the past.

You can find the May 2008 All The Rage here (PDF), and the main All The Rage site here. There was no April 2008 edition, by the way.

‘Most-read’ may not be strictly accurate; ‘most-visited’ is perhaps closer to the mark. The statistics for greycat.org show that ‘Representing the Victorian railway: the aesthetics of ambivalence’ has received far more visitors than any other essay over the last week, almost all of them over the last 24 hours. This essay always receives a good number of visitors but the recent surge is solely down to the fact that the page has just been ’stumbled’ - i.e. recommended and shared within the StumbleUpon community.

StumbleUpon brings in a lot of visitors, but, at least for a site like this, most of them aren’t worth having. It’s like a hose that soaks your site in visitors, most of whom rapidly drain away. In the case of this page, only 12% of Stumblers stayed for more than 30 seconds, and 41% stayed less than 5 seconds. Lots of traffic, not much real interest. Still, every visitor is welcome and if even one person who comes here via StumbleUpon takes the time to read the essay and finds it interesting and/or useful then it’s worthwhile.

‘Representing the Victorian railway’ is derived from my doctoral research and was originally written for an academic conference in 1998. It has been much updated and revised since.

The railways constituted one of the most significant technological phenomena of the nineteenth century and, contrary to what some historians have argued, it took many years for the emotions they stirred up to become submerged in a general indifference; as Jack Simmons has noted, expressions of fear and alarm did not come to an end in the 1840s, but continued to be felt far into the Victorian age. As a presence in the nineteenth-century landscape, the railway was a source of a highly significant collective experience of technology, and of a powerful, liberating and disturbing vision of what technology could symbolize, offer, and threaten. Railways could be seen as a symbol of progress, promising economic and social betterment, freedom from old restrictions, democracy, energy, all the benefits and opportunities of modern mechanized civilization. Yet they were also associated with pollution, destruction, disaster and danger, bringing about the destabilization and corruption of social order, the vulgarization of culture, the defilement of natural beauty.

The essay uses two case studies to illuminate the ambiguities of nineteenth-century attitudes to the railway: J. M. W. Turner’s painting Rain Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway (1843-4) and Michael Reynolds’s book Engine Driving Life: Stirring Adventures and Incidents in the Lives of Locomotive Engine-Drivers (1889). To read more, visit ‘Representing the Victorian railway: the aesthetics of ambivalence’.

Picture: Great Western Railway locomotive, c.1880 [Source]

A mere two months after it was featured in The Guardian (and right here on this blog), the Zerefos et al analysis of paintings depicting sunsets between 1500 and 1900 has turned up on the Discovery Channel’s news pages: ‘Art as a window to climate change’.

The article quotes some skeptical responses to the Zerefos approach from, among others, Kevin Trenberth of the Climate Analysis Research Center, who points out that ‘Painters are not scientists trying to do an accurate picture of nature’, and James Hamilton, biographer of J. M. W. Turner, who comments that ‘It’s very hard to tell when artists are being absolutely accurate and when they’re using vivid sky as a platform to more vivid painting’.

I agree with those reservations, and have my own doubts about the study, which I noted in my original post, but it’s still an interesting approach and, if nothing else, provides some illuminating insights into the interaction between artists and nature (however they saw that nebulous concept) over a long period. This is a direct link to the Zerefos article (PDF) in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, August 2007.

The most-read essay on greycat.org over the last week has been ‘Dresden: the making of a baroque city’. Aristotle remains popular, and for the first time Rousseau has featured in the top three, but Dresden was the clear people’s choice.

The single most important factor in the architectural development of Dresden during the late seventeenth and early- to mid-eighteenth centuries was its role as capital of the Electorate of Saxony, and the location there of the Saxon court. From 1694 to 1733, the ruler of Saxony was Frederick Augustus I, known as ‘Augustus the Strong’, whose ambitions for himself and his state determined the development of his capital; in particular, his acquisition of the crown of Poland in 1696 was the spur to a large-scale programme of architectural improvements in Dresden which were intended to express the power prestige and glory of Saxony and her ruler. … In order to become King of Poland, Augustus I converted to Catholicism, and the presence in the capital of Protestant Saxony of a Catholic court provides an important context for the prolonged flourishing in Dresden of the baroque style.

To read more from this essay, which includes illustrations and maps, pay a visit to ‘Dresden: the making of a baroque city’.

Picture: Portrait of Augustus the Strong by Louis de Silvestre. [Source]

The new Edward Said mural (dedicated last week: for earlier posts see ‘What would Edward Said have said?’ and ‘That mural again’) is, to be fair, no uglier than the other murals decorating the Cesar Chavez Student Center at San Francisco State University. You can read all about them here on the Student Center website.

A little detail of the Malcolm X mural caught my eye. To quote the Student Center’s description: ‘An image of the continent of Africa engulfing the United States is shown in between the images of Malcolm, and is based on the Mercator projection, which conveyed the relative size of Africa compared to the U.S.’ This is bizarrely wrong. Leaving aside the question of what exactly pointing out that Africa is bigger than the United States is supposed to prove, the muralists seem to have their cartography confused.

The world map on the mural does not use the Mercator projection. If it did, the effect would be precisely the opposite of that claimed: America would be made to appear disproportionately large compared to Africa, as Mercator maps distort land area so that the further you get from the equator the larger places appear. The map on the mural appears to use the Peters projection, which sought to overcome this distortion, and, supposedly, also serve the cause of global social justice by removing the Mercator map’s supposed bias towards the rich North American and Eurasian countries. In the mural, however, this projection is used with one significant alteration: Africa is grossly distorted to appear much larger than it ought to be, even by the standards of the Peters version. The United States, by contrast, is left at its (relatively smaller) correct size. The three images below show the results clearly: from top to bottom, Mercator, Peters, Malcolm X mural.

So, in the name of correcting an alleged distortion that didn’t suit their ideological position the makers of the mural deliberately introduced another that does, while claiming that their distortion was not a distortion.

Edward Said is in good company here.

[Map images from here (Mercator) and here (Peters); mural detail taken from here.]

The Edward Said mural at San Francisco State University (see earlier post) has been unveiled. Apparently this crass piece of kitsch with its clutter of leadenly literal imagery ‘honors Palestine’ and ‘celebrates the struggles of the Palestinian people’. The Party for Socialism and Liberation says so, anyway. Cinnamon Stillwell begs to differ: read her critique at Campus Watch.

A detailed description of the mural can be found here, at this likeable blog. Marvel at how the artists have cleverly symbolized Said’s contribution to learning through his books by depicting … his books.

[UPDATE 9 November 2007: Cinnamon Stillwell further considers the Edward Said mural, and the Said phenomenon more generally, here. Highly recommended reading.]

Thanks to the Victorian Peeper I’ve been reading about the exhibition ‘Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860′, which is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from 25 September until 31 December 2007. The Peeper’s article, with photographs, is excellent and I’m not going to try to duplicate it here; I’ll just say that this looks to be a fascinating exhibition. Apparently it is not visiting Britain, but will be at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris next year, so perhaps I’ll get to see it there.

The New York Times review of the exhibition is well-written and informative, but includes this assertion:

The bulk of the photographs here feel remarkably sedate, almost anesthetized. This is partly because moving things couldn’t be recorded in early photographs. But in his catalog essay Roger Taylor argues something else: that the peace and harmony in British calotypes mask the deep anxiety of the Victorian age, in which the life expectancy at birth for professional men was about 45, and for laborers 22.

Good grief, I’m sure Professor Taylor doesn’t say anything quite so fatuous. If an image is full of violence and angst, it’s expressing the deep anxiety of the age. If it’s peaceful and harmonious, it’s masking the deep anxiety of the age. Your classic one-size-fits-all cultural/historical critique.

Alas for the late Edward W. Said. His critics have been harsh with him over the years, and that is to be expected. But just look at what his friends and admirers have done to him:

Designing this thing took over two years, apparently; one feels a certain admiration for those responsible, for it surely takes skills of a rare order to work so long upon a project that means so much to you and end up with something that fails so comprehensively on so many levels. Admittedly, murals are rarely great art, but they can at least occasionally attain directness, clarity, vigour and - not least - visual appeal. This object manages to possess none of these qualities, and to miss out on many more. It is everything one might expect when hearing the term ‘Palestinian Cultural Mural’, and less.

A group called the General Union of Palestine Students is responsible for the thing, which is going to be inaugurated on 2 November 2007 at San Francisco State University. A page on the university web site, headed ‘Palestinain [sic] Mural Honoring Professor Edward Said’, includes a truly vast un-resized image of the mural (2800 x 2116 pixels squashed into 543 x 327 pixels, forsooth) and goes on to threaten a day-long celebration including ‘Native American Dance’ and ‘Arab-American hip hop’ to accompany the inauguration.

Edward Said, who, whatever view one takes of his politics and his scholarship, was a great aesthete with a fine critical judgement in artistic matters, must be spinning like a wind turbine in his grave.

[Found via Solomonia, to whom due acknowledgement and thanks.]