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I'll add artists who I mention in 1:1 conversations to this Padlet so you can get a sense of the context of the problems we're working on.

The first problem deals with VALUE, how light or dark a color is on a scale. Modeling in value is one of the oldest tricks in Painting (add white to a color to make it lighter, add black to make it darker...figuring that out more or less kicked off the Renaissance in Italy in the 14th century). To make things easy, we are going to start in MONOCHROME (the use of one color - in our case, Raw Umber). Since the pigment in Raw Umber (an organic pigment originally made from the clay rich soil of Italy) is pretty bark, we'll take is the darkest value and build a minimum of five lighter values + Titanium White

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I may be overstating what Charles Gaines proposes in the video, but I think he makes an important point in the way drawing sits in relation to contemporary art.

Toward the close of the film, Gaines says something that rang a bell for me. Painter & teacher John Moore used to say that if you wanted to be a visual artist, you had to make visual art - and I largely agree with him in that there are forms of making that emerge from traditions and maintain a context within them. But the jobs that art (and not just visual art) is called on to perform in contemporary life make the idea that drawing is the sin qua non of being an artmaker seem quaintly out of touch.

I remember years ago when I was teaching at UArts and students would fret about their disciplinary identity it occurred to me that a possible way out was in revisiting your Linnean classification - rather than focusing on your species (ceramicist), you could think about your genus (craftsperson) or your family (maker)...

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Painters I was reminded of or introduced to by students

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Painters I was reminded of or introduced to by students

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This weekend was admissions interviews for fall graduate class. It is always interesting to hear who younger painters are looking at. I was delighted to hear that more than a few were thinking about painter Lois Dodd. Dodd belonged to a circle of painters who kept the representational flame burning when all anyone wanted to talk about was abstraction (Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, Rackstraw Downes, and Neil Welliver are in that club). She is worth keeping in mind, and I am ashamed not to have been steering young painters to her.

The other painter I was introduced to - that's Aubrey Levinthal who lives and works here in Philadelphia. Her paintings have a kind of casual formality that makes me think of Katherine Bradford. I look forward to getting to know her work better...

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Lois Dodd - Natural Order - Exhibitions - Alexandre Gallery

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Module 1 Color Ideas - Part 2: Graham Nickson

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Module 1 Color Ideas - Part 2: Graham Nickson

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The other painter who might inspire you to be bold with your use of color is Graham Nickson, a contemporary artist and the main inspiration for this project (when Professor Susan Moore began teaching it).

Notice how Nickson plays the same game as Matisse, using surprising unexpected colors in place of values in his paintings (this is especially apparent in the Bathers, and Balloon Woman from 2001 is as good an example as any).

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I was reflecting on class yesterday and wanted to take a moment before your color studies are due to encourage you to be as bold as you can be in thinking about the relationship between color and value.

So I am offering two specific examples for you to consider what I mean when I say "use color as a value"

This painting, by Henri Matisse from his Fauve period, seems to be wildly colorful, but if you look at it carefully, you notice that he has substituted vibrant, saturated hues for the sorts of neutrals normally used in portraiture. If you look at the values of the image (just how like or dark things are - not their hue) the image makes perfect sense.

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Henri Matisse is a true world-class artist, and his Portrait of Madame Matisse. The Green Line, depicting his wife, Amélie Matisse, is a masterpiece of twentieth-century portraiture and one of SMK's ten main highlights.

SMK owns one of the world's largest and most significant collections of Matisse outside of France. Around World War I, Copenhagen was home to two major collectors of Matisse, and the paintings brought to Denmark during this period would form the basis of SMK's important collection.

Portrait of Madame Matisse. The Green Line is a major work of art because it demonstrates how a painting can become hugely, powerfully expressive with very few, simple devices. The strong contrasts in colour, a typical feature of Matisse's paintings from the beginning of the twentieth century, are instrumental in giving this small painting (40.5 x 32.5 cm) its great visual strength.

'The picture was probably painted in the autumn of 1905, following Matisse's return to Paris after having spent the summer in the fishing village of Collioure in the south of France. While there, he and his friend André Derain threw themselves into ever-wilder painterly experiments, seeking to release colour from its descriptive function, allowing it to act as an independent force,' says chief curator and senior researcher Dorthe Aagesen. Indeed, the year 1905 sees Henri Matisse get his major breakthrough, partly due to the works painted that summer in the company of André Derain.

Modernity
While Portrait of Madame Matisse. The Green Line has many features that are instantly recognisable from the real world, it is not a naturalistic depiction of the artist's wife. Matisse does not seek to paint what he sees as accurately as possible and is not concerned with displaying specific aspects of his model or with creating a psychological portrait. Nor is the painting about the relationship between him and his wife; rather, it seeks convey an inner experience. The green line dividing the face into two halves, a cold and a warm one, contributes to a plane-like effect that makes the portrait mask-like and abstract.

'Every brush stroke is very deliberately placed, and the painting is a good example of how you can experiment with the portrait format. It illustrates how one can manipulate and control meaning, how to stage things, and also shows the impact of what you don't tell. That offers useful perspectives on our use of images today,' says Dorthe Aagesen.

Stein and the Danish collectors
In addition to being an important masterpiece of portraiture, the painting also has an interesting story. It first came into Danish ownership right after World War I. At that time, Portrait of Madame Matisse. The Green Line was bought by the businessman Christian Tetzen. His collection was dissolved in the 1920s, but he kept this particular portrait right until his death in 1936, and SMK bought it at the sale of the estate.

The other major Danish collector of Matisse during the period was Johannes Rump, who bought several works from the Christian Tetzen-Lund collection. The majority of the museum's collection of French art was donated by Rump.

Before arriving in Denmark, the painting was part of the famous Stein collection in Paris. From 1905 up until World War I, American art collector Michael Stein, his wife Sarah, and Michael's siblings Gertrude and Leo Stein built important collections of paintings from Paris, exhibiting them in their private homes.

'Photos of Michael and Sarah Stein's flat show us that the painting was quite prominently hung in their living rooms. It would have been well known in its own time and stands among the works that helped build up Henri Matisse's reputation,' says Dorthe Aagesen..

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Portrait of Madame Matisse. The Green Line - Henri Matisse - Google Arts & Culture

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Henri Matisse is a true world-class artist, and his Portrait of Madame Matisse. The Green Line, depicting his wife, Amélie Matisse, is a masterpiece of twe...

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This is a good form for students to read...

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A Painter With an Eye for the Ridiculous https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/t-magazine/ambera-wellmann.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

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For Yerin Park

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We took to Twitter recently, and asked people who grew up using a language other than English to share some words that their primary language has and ours does not. There were too many to list all of them here, but below are some of our favorites.

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Words from around the globe which have no equivalent in English

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Human languages with greater information density have higher communication speed but lower conversation breadth

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Human languages with greater information density have higher communication speed but lower conversation breadth

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A study by Pedro Aceves and James Evans published in the journal Nature Human Behavior

ABSTRACT

Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (for example, time, space, colour, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing about its relation to human communication. We first show that across a sample of ~1,000 languages, there is broad variation in how densely languages encode information into words. Second, we show that this language information density is associated with a denser configuration of semantic information. Finally, we trace the relationship between language information density and patterns of communication, showing that informationally denser languages tend towards faster communication but conceptually narrower conversations or expositions within which topics are discussed at greater depth. These results highlight an important source of variation across the human communicative channel, revealing that the structure of language shapes the nature and texture of human engagement, with consequences for human behaviour across levels of society.

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Language and literature, made only of words, live both in words and beyond them. Sometimes between them. But also, always, in us: their human practitioners, beneficiaries, chorus, convocation, cocreators, progeny, and flock.

When I was seven or eight years old, I joined that congregation, going into a New York City stationery store on First Avenue between 20th and 21st Streets to scan the circular wire racks near the front door. I was there on my own, allowance money in hand, to select the first book I would buy for myself. I browsed, sampled, pondered-and brought home a Peter Pauper Press book of Japanese haiku. Now, over six decades later, it seems that I've followed the sounds and scents of that book for a lifetime.

Even for a child growing up in a housing project on the lower East Side of Manhattan, rain and moon, heat and shadow, are recognized as carrying meanings beyond the physical. Something allusive, elusive, awake, dappled, mysterious lived in those translated pages' weathers, frogs, and blossoms, something beyond their bringing news also of "elsewhere." They carried the sense that a surplus seeing and saying existed, that an altered, altering relationship to my own life and language might exist as well. And, too, the news that elsewhere and here were not separate, nor separate from me.

A good poem, it's been said, expands the available stock of reality. Even more then, perhaps, a good translation. Reading in childhood the work of Bashō, Issa, and Buson, I could not have understood their words' deeper dimensions. Yet through them I began to recognize the world as the Belfast-born poet Louis MacNeice described it: "incorrigibly plural."
We take on faith that what we read is close to, or at least close enough to, the work's experiencing in the language of its creation.
My great good luck, as a reader and as a person, has been to have come of age in an era of blossoming translation. I've spent a lifetime reading works from languages I don't know: Greek tragedies, Nahuatl flower songs, erotic love poems written in second century Sanskrit. Kafka and Sappho, Hildegard of Bingen, Borges. Lady Murasaki, Primo Levi, and José Saramago, Su Tung Po and Marina Tsvetaeva. The Eddas, Gilgamesh, The Dream of the Red Chamber, War and Peace. The world's sacred texts and trickster tales, Sei Shōnagon's diary, Turgenev's sketches, the ghazals of Ghalib, Van Gogh's letters to his brother, anonymous song-lines mapping the interior of Australia.

All given me by their translators' hours and years of close-work pondering, self-doubt, and questioning; by their middle of night, insomniac searching for a more accurate or more resinous word. This verb or that one? The definite or indefinite article, as one must be added in English? Should some extra information be offered to make clear a meaning that would have been understood by anyone alive in the place and time the work was written, or should that context, however indispensable, be left for a footnote? Is the original's tone sincere or might it be comic? How to translate, or not, the name of a bird that does not nest in the new language it's being brought into, of a fish never seen there, a dish not tasted?

And what of the music, the rhythms? A native Japanese speaker hears alternating patterns of five and seven syllables, whether in poetry or prose, as the sound of a different order of thinking and feeling. A speaker of American English hears rhyming iambic pentameter, the recurrences of litany or blues. The rhythms of a limerick are instantly recognized by an American-English reader as also an attitude and an intention. But an Urdu ghazal's repeated end-word may seem at first only baffling, the parallel tones of Chinese unconveyable, and the prosody of alternating five and seven syllables will go unnoticed.

The Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott, in an essay on the self-translating Russian poet-in-exile Joseph Brodsky, speaks of "the desolations that accompany translation." Walcott describes the translator's cul de sac problem when the month-name "August" takes a masculine grammar in one language, while in another, the poet-in this case, Walcott himself-has personified August as "a housemaid-cook, her ebony head in a white kerchief as she whipped sheets from a clothesline in a house near the sea..."

Any writer who translates or is translated knows these problems. The pronoun "you" in English is gender-neutral and can turn toward any of seven or nine different meanings. In Polish, though, it must be male or female-making it simply impossible to translate, one translator told me, a poem of mine whose full effect depends on shifting from one meaning of "you" to another.

And yet, a few years later, a different Polish translator included that poem in an anthology of American poets. I do not read Polish. I have no idea what Julia Hartwig's translation of my poem may seem to say, or how the poem's larger meaning is affected. Yet I am glad, on faith, that the poem has been brought into Polish.

There is the famous Italian saying, a cliché to evoke here: Traduttore, traditore. "Translator, traitor." For a person doing the translating (or in my case, cotranslating), the act seems, however humbling, at least possible. One tries, in bringing a thousand-year-old Japanese five-line tanka into English, to choose the grammatical voice and verb tense that most strengthen the poem. The original grammar often specifies neither; the receiving language requires them; you must choose.

Being translated, though, I've shaken my head at the complete implausibility of the task, when even within what seems a single language, confusions abound. In the U.S., pumpkin pie is the traditional closing sweet of the fall-harvest holiday dinner. In England, "pie" means a savory main dish, not a dessert (which is called, in the English of England, a "pudding"), and pumpkins are eaten only by livestock. A Japanese translator once asked, "By 'end,' did you mean 'finishing point,' 'goal,' or 'edge' like a board of wood has?" "All those, yes, you understand the meaning exactly." "Japanese doesn't do that." A Russian translator emailed that "long-legged" is a cultural stereotype for Americans, did I mean to imply that, and if not, might she say "spindly-legged" instead? "Does it sound good, musically?" I asked. "Very good," she replied, then moved on to whether the "foreign" in "foreign dust" should be of the invading barbarian kind or indicate only "from elsewhere."

And still, even knowing all this, when I read a work in translation, I take what is offered at its word. What else can a reader do? We choose a book, we start to read, and the pages include no crosshatch marks of the arduous choice-making, no smoke scent of sorrowful compromise, no crumpled sheets from the vertiginous liberty-takings slipped into the printed text. We take on faith that what we read is close to, or at least close enough to, the work's experiencing in the language of its creation.

In books where style is clearly foreground-Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony comes to mind, a triumph of singular brushwork in Tim Parks's translation, as does the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska, whose distinctive sensibility Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak's collaborative translations brilliantly carry - the reader can't help but hope their own experience is at least kin to that of readers of the Italian or Polish.

And yet... I once began rereading War and Peace in the then-new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky but hadn't quite finished before leaving on a month-long trip. The book was heavy. I completed reading it in the only translation available at my destination: the Constance Garnett, published in 1904. Much was different-sentence rhythms, diction, even the characters' names-and still it was, after some readjustment, the same book.

I am, as by now must be evident, a forgiving reader of translated works. We all must be forgiving to read at all. The very act of turning ink shapes or pixels into meaning and world is a cognitively generous act, requiring of us every benefit of the doubt.

Translators are surely the harshest critics of one another's work, objecting to one another's choices with continuous, demurring dismay. At scales large and small-as is broadly evident in the pages of this anthology-philosophies of translation can honorably widely differ. In "The Task of the Translator," the German critic Walter Benjamin propounds the preservation of difference-a sentence originally in German should, brought into English, retain an audible reminder of the original grammar and soundscape. (We might think of this as translation speaking as a living person does after changing places and languages: with an accent and syntax that hold their full background and history.)

The Mexican poet Octavio Paz felt differently-he proposed that a translator must try to evoke the same effects by different means. Robert Fitzgerald, whose translations from Greek gave me my first entrance into the tragedies, believed that what was not strange to a work's original readers should not seem odd to readers in the receiving language. Beauty should echo beauty, he felt-and his translation of the Roman poet Catullus's elegy for his brother remains, for me, among the most moving and beautiful translations ever made (and contains at least one invention of Fitzgerald's own). Libyan poet, editor, and translator Khaled Mattawa (who is among the translators included in this collection) has in turn compared translation to playing a musical score-an act not of mechanical repetition, but of interpretation, bringing a work newly to life each time.

Some translators of poetry hew to the work's original forms, convinced that what was conceived in dactylic hexameter should remain there. Stephanie McCarter, a current classicist, chose to set her 2022 translation of Ovid's Metamorphosesinto the iambic pentameter of blank verse, finding it the nearer equivalent. For an Anglophone, she writes, that meter "simply sounds like poetry, even to the untrained ear." Others choose hybrid or half-forms, slant rhymes, free verse. Visual conventions may come into poetry's translation also. In Western traditions, the jagged right margin tells you a poem is a poem, yet the translator-scholar Hiroaki Sato is adamant that haiku should be printed as a single line, not broken into three. In Japan, a poem's essential poemness is set by ear, not eye.

Any choice made in these realms, whether in poetry or in prose, risks losing something the writer would feel inextricable to the work; yet choices must still be made. For instance, how does one translate a pun, when even the use of homonyms has different resonance in different languages? In English, puns tend toward the comic; in other languages they are a neutral device for increasing meaning. (I know of only one that holds between languages: the word "pine" is used for trees and the emotion of longing in both English and Japanese.)

There's also the question of time. Some translations of older works deliberately keep the fragrance of antiquity in them-the King James Bible, for instance, was famously brought by its committee of translators into a style and diction of English already a little archaic, to instill in its words the authority of a sacred text long in place. In her illuminating translator's preface to the Metamorphoses, Stephanie Carter advises not antique diction, but the practice of a stringent temporal hygiene.

When later cultural attitudes and habits of mind are brought into earlier texts, she writes, those intrusions shift not only qualities of surface, but the work's fundamental worldview and world. Other translators are blatantly and unapologetically anachronistic. This collection includes an Eleventh-Dynasty Egyptian hymn whose singer, four thousand years ago, surely knew nothing of origami, microchips, or bulletproof vests.

Most often, translated works are brought into a more quietly contemporary diction and current aesthetic. This transmigration can make older pieces available in new ways. I was once asked to present The Ink Dark Moon, my cotranslation of the work of the two foremost Japanese women poets of the Heian era, to a graduate class at a Tokyo university. Ono no Komachi wrote in the ninth century, Izumi Shikibu at the turn of the millennium. I'd thought the request odd-would a group of students in Boston want to hear Emily Dickinson in Japanese? I was mistaken.

The students said they were hearing the poems for the first time as relevant to their own lives, as genuinely moving-a response I attribute more to the erasing of a thousand years of dust than to the specifics of Mariko Aratani's and my choice of words. Poems brought into current-day English could speak as they did when first written: as this moment's murmur into this moment's ear.

In his five Massey Lectures delivered for the CBC in 2022, the Indigenous Canadian writer, playwright, and musician Tomson Highway spoke of the different selves his three different languages evoke. English, as he experiences himself in speaking it, is a language "above the neck," good for matters of mind. French he finds the language of heart and stomach. His birth-language, Cree, he describes as sexual, scatalogical, and immutably funny-onomatopoetic, quickening, a language that laughs at and along with existence.
The act of translating, especially, asks of a person a willing vulnerability and agreed-to exposure.
Languages, then, have their own sensibilities, and these qualities, too, a translation must try to convey, bending the receiving language beyond its home-ground capacities, opening tongue and ear to alternative ways of being, hearing, knowing, feeling. By this process of exchanging capacities, news, gossip, worldviews, and knowledge, cultures broaden, become more capacious. This, too, is the gift of the translations found in this volume. They hold specific experiences, yes, to be tasted and walked inside of, but carry also translation's fundamental increase of perspective, perception, and possibility, of what can be said, and how.

I will not attempt to describe here the full range of what these pages hold-readers can turn the pages and see for themselves. Their writers come from Eritrea, Chile, Iran, Korea, Norway, Poland, Kurdistan, India, the island of La Réunion. Past, present, and future in turn find their recordings, envisionings, and imagining. A sea krait titles one piece, a lion another. One selection here was assembled from the words of a group of gathered ex-combatants from a conflict zone. Another is missing, withdrawn by its author for reasons of conscience, as described elsewhere. Its absence, though the decision must be respected, grieves me. The larger causes for its absence raise a grief far greater.

*

It's said that the world loses a language every two weeks. With that language, a unique ecosystem of knowledge and history vanishes also. As with the disappearing animals and plants, we race against quickening extinction. Each work in Best Literary Translations 2024 is a small act of both preservation and cross-pollination-each writer's vision, sensibility, and concerns are, as the word "translation" holds at its root, carried across. In those moments of carrying, a conjoining occurs. Both receiver and text live afterward changed; some new hybrid of experience, language, and understanding comes into being.

The act of translating, especially, asks of a person a willing vulnerability and agreed-to exposure, a dropping away of the boundaried defenses of a fixed self. The act of translating opens the psyche's innermost rooms to the unknown. Free of preconceptions and opinion, you must know what is there on its own terms before you can judge it. This is the opposite of this moment's barraging news, inside the US, of acts of stand-your-ground deadly violence and the deliberately fanned fear of the "other" that lies behind it. A translator is a person offering home ground and welcome to others, as is also a reader, first starting a book. This simple, basic widening of self, psyche, and sense of community-to curiosity; to the magnets of beauty, story, laughter; to the tastes and shapes of the new; to the embrace of questioning, embrace of feeling, embrace of eros over thanatos and mutuality over power-this is one counterweight to the fear, self-assertion, tribalism, and division of our current socio-political era.

Translation, then, and our continuing practice and support of it, has a transformative social dimension. Welcoming the sheer variousness and plurality of all lives; holding the desire to feel what others have felt, to see what they have seen, to imagine what they have imagined; wanting to know oneself not as soloist but as part of a larger chorus and wanting that full chorus heard, its full music sung across time, place, culture, language, causes and conditions-this is the path of kinship rather than closure. To write, translate, read the stories and poems of our lived interconnection is to be part of the work of tikkun olam, the repair of the world-needed now, needed always. Yet we need not feel this as weight or obligation. It is simply what happens when a person is curious enough to pick up a book about things they don't already think, holding lives they don't already know.

__________________________________
-May 1, 2023 Mill Valley, California Mount Tamalpais Arroyo Corte Madera del Presidio Watershed on the unceded land of the Coastal Miwok people
From Best Literary Translations 2024, edited by Jane Hirshfield, Noh Anothai, Wendy Call, Öykü Tekten and Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún. Copyright © 2024. Available from Deep Vellum Publishing.

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In Words and Beyond Them: Jane Hirshfield on the Transformative Art of Translation

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Language and literature, made only of words, live both in words and beyond them. Sometimes between them. But also, always, in us: their human practitioners, beneficiaries, chorus, convocation, cocr...

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When are you a painter? A palette problem

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When are you a painter? A palette problem

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First off, I want to talk about palettes more -how there are colors that only become possible in certain moments...These can be divided into three basic units:

Pre-modern: Colors made from ochres, metals (lead, especially), or other naturally occurring materials which may have been manipulated in some ways (heating, for example). This would be a good time to talk about alchemy and James Elkin's What Painting Is.

Modern: These are colors that began to appear in the 19th century - Mauve, Prussian Blue, etc. Chemical colors that were not possible before the industrial revolution. Cadmiums would go in this group.

Contemporary: These are colors that have become available in the last 30 years. They would include more lightfast fluorescent pigments, cadmium substitutes, etc.

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I have struggled with this question since I was first assigned this class in 2017. I don't think painting advances or retreats - each era gets the art is deserves (to paraphrase David Hickey).

But I am beginning to feel like we don't offer enough instruction before we let folks loose. Sophomore painting has been pretty rigorously taught here for a while. But after that you're basically on your own...

It's time to change all that.

Here is where I am going to work on ideas for assignments that suit Advanced painting that are more rigorous than, "Okay...make a painting" I appreciate any advice current or past students can offer...thanks in advance!

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I often refer to this letter when teaching - mostly because Matisse's inclusive definition of 'composition' as being more than just the arrangement of shapes on a surface appeals to me. Here is an important passage to whet your appetite:

Composition, the aim of which should be expression, is modified according to the surface to be covered. If I take a sheet of paper of a given size, my drawing will have a necessary relationship to its format. I would not repeat this drawing on another sheet of different proportions, for example, rectangular instead of square.

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A professor worried no one would read an algae study. So she had it put to music

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Intersemiotic songs: translating data to music

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Intersemiotic songs: translating data to music

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An anthropology professor at the University of South Florida recently published a paper she knew barely anyone would read. At least, not outside her field.

The paper, co-authored with three other professors, had to do with the impact of algae blooms and depletion of coral reefs on the region's tourism industry. The work was glum, says Heather O'Leary. It involved tracking visitors' reactions to the environment on social media.

"Part of the data for months was just reading tweets: dead fish, dead fish, dead fish," she recalls. "We were really thinking every day about the Gulf of Mexico and the waters that surround us, especially in St. Pete as a peninsula, about those risks, and the risks to our coastal economy."

But attending concerts at USF's School of Music inspired and gladdened her. So she reached out to its director of bands, Matthew McCutchen.

"I'm studying climate change and what's going down at the coral reefs," he remembers her saying. "And I've got all this data and I'd like to know if there's any way that we can turn it into music."

Indeed there was. Composition professor Paul Reller worked with students to map pitch, rhythm and duration to the data. It came alive, O'Leary says, in ways it simply does not on a spreadsheet.

"My students were really excited to start thinking about how the other students, the music students, heard patterns that we did not see in some of the repetitions," she says. With music, she added, "you can start to sense with different parts of your mind and your body that there are patterns happening and that they're important."

In this case, she says, the patterns revealed the economic impact of pollution on coastal Florida communities. The complex challenge is a symptom of other, bigger problems. "The world is going to see more and more of these purportedly 'wicked problems,' the ones that take multiple people with different types of training and background to solve," O'Leary says.

The University of South Florida is excited about this composition. Other departments are getting involved, including communications, education and library science. Now, a group of faculty and students are working to bring together music and the environment in related projects, such as an augmented reality experience based on this composition. The group, which calls itself CRESCENDO (Communicating Research Expansively through Sonification and Community-Engaged Neuroaesthetic Data-literacy Opportunities) wants to spread awareness about the algae blooms, data literacy and democratizing science.
Edited for radio and the web by Rose Friedman. Produced for the web by Beth Novey. Produced for the radio by Isabella Gomez Sarmiento.

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A professor worried no one would read an algae study. So she had it put to music

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Professors and students at the University of South Florida mapped pitch, rhythm and duration to data about algae blooms and depletion of coral reefs to create an original composition.

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More about Dario Robleto (interview from "On Beling")

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More about Dario Robleto (interview from "On Beling")

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We talked a little about Dario Robleto in the context of using labels as an affordance for translation. You might remember that he had really elaborate materials lists and that he suggested the label is an unused area for artists to stake out their identity. All that is cool, but what really makes him worth knowing about is how he views artmaking in the first place. I like this interview and think it would be a good introduction to his approach...enjoy!

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Krista Tippett, host: Dario Robleto has been called a sculptural artist, a philosopher, and a "materialist poet." At the heart of his work is a fascination with human survival and the creative response to loss.

Tippett: I just want to actually read some very beautiful words that you wrote about time and memory. "Time is, of course, doing it's steady work on every object ever made. This complex relationship between the maker, and emotionally-invested objects, and the growing distance between them is not new, only rediscovered each generation," - I love this - "whether by an artist, a mourner, a mother, or a soldier." These objects ask very human moral questions. What right do we have to forget? What do we owe to each other's memories?"

Dario Robleto: So memory now takes on a moral dimension, because - when I go, I'll hope someone grabs hold of me. But I have to promise I'm grabbing hold of who's gone before. The vast majority of human lives, they're just gone. Nobody remembers, even, two, three generations down the road, it's easy to start forgetting. And so memory has a spiritual dimension in that way to me. Like there was the title of a piece called "Heaven Is Being a Memory to Others."

Tippett: Yeah.

Robleto: And I just like knowing I'm going to hold on, I'm going to grasp, pull hard into the last moment. I like that art can do that. So, and I think it should. It should do that.

Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.

Over the last twenty years, Dario Robleto's art has been displayed at galleries and museums across the U.S. He's also been a creative partner to an eclectic range of projects, including the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and university faculties in engineering and neuroaesthetics. He was born in San Antonio, Texas and currently lives in Houston. I spoke with him in 2014 as part of a series of live events with the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

[ Music: "Seven League Boots" by Zoe Keating]

Tippett: It's great to be back at Minneapolis Institute of Arts. I feel like I'm an old-timer now, so I welcome you.

Robleto: Well, thank you. [ laughter]

Tippett: So, I've really been looking forward to this for several months, as we first planned it.

Robleto: Thank you. Me, too. Very much.

Tippett: Yeah. So, if I ask you about the spiritual and religious background of your childhood, where would you start to think about what that means?

Robleto: My grandfather was a Baptist minister. I didn't grow up around him so much, but his influence definitely was there, in the back of my head. And he was definitely a passionate man. My mother - religion in the home was not ever really an issue, but as, with anyone, I searched it out on my own. I'd ask my friends if I could come to church: Catholic, Methodist, I probably sampled every church of a friend I had. So in my childhood, I would say it was very self-directed. Maybe always within the background knowing that thing about my grandfather that was still this kind of mysterious thing that I didn't really understand. So maybe it was partly fueled by that, too. This searching.

Tippett: It sounds like, you know, you were interested in science, you were a football player. You weren't that kid who everybody thought would grow up to be an artist.

Robleto: No.

Tippett: Right? Or that you didn't think that about yourself.

Robleto: No, I didn't, no. No. It was quite a shock. Yeah. [ laughter]

Tippett: You know there are two stories that you've told, um, across the years that I wondered if you would tell us. And one of them has to do with your mother, one of them has to do with your father. About how you became an artist. You talk about your mother working in a honky-tonk in Texas for a while when you were pretty young, and going with her. And it really is the whole experience, being there with her, taking in the people, taking in the life in that place, taking in the music of Patsy Cline and others, and listening to the jukebox. And it almost feels like the jukebox was your first art object, although you wouldn't have called it that originally.

Robleto: Yes. Incredibly influential on my life, definitely leaves a mark. [ laughs]

Tippett: So how old were you then? You were pretty young, right?

Robleto: Yeah. Six - six, seven. And, there are a full range of emotional experiences, you would imagine, in a honky-tonk. As a six-year-old camped next to the jukebox watching it play out, it really did leave a mark. And what I mean is, you know, having Patsy Cline soundtrack what I'm actually witnessing in the room as she's singing about it, made this one-to-one connection between the pop song, or the country song, or the art object, and life. And I think that has left a lasting impression on me, which ties into science in maybe an unexpected way in that I want what I do to be metaphor and have a practical - I want it to do something, too, in life.

Tippett: Mm-hmm. And then the other stories, later on, your father was a biologist, correct? And ...

Robleto: Mm-hmm.

Tippett: And was from Nicaragua. And you didn't really spend that much time with him growing up?

Robleto: No.

Tippett: But then, um, you've told the story about, sounds like when you were maybe in your early 20s, you were depressed, and you went to stay with him in Miami. And we have the Beatles to thank - your father and the Beatles to thank for you truly having this epiphany.

Robleto: Yes. No, I really, I didn't know what an epiphany was until I had one.

[ laughter]

Robleto: It really was that. I mean, within 24 hours. I still don't know how to explain it. It was related to this experience of what was clearly deep depression. Now, when I look back, visiting him, sort of - you know, every young man has to sort of come to terms with that at some point. And I just - I guess I needed to spend time with him. And really the only thing we could communicate on was music. And he was a huge Beatles fan. He pretty much learned English many - and his brothers, from Beatles records, I love that story that he told me - from the lyrics. But I don't know. One day he left and accidentally left "Sgt. Pepper" playing on repeat on the CD. And I was, you know, locked in my room in some terrible state, and so for 24 hours I heard "Sgt. Pepper" through the muffled wall in the other room. And something just changed. I don't know how to explain it. But when I came out of the room, I was an artist. [ laughter]

Robleto: And, I haven't looked back since.

Tippett: And you've said that - I mean, you did bring out some pastels and a pad of paper? Right? And you started ...

Robleto: Yeah, the first thing I told him was, please take me to an art store.

Tippett: Oh, you did. You didn't happen to have - I wondered about that. You didn't have pastels on hand.

Robleto: No, no. And that shows you, too, that I didn't know what it meant to be an artist, so I thought, well, pastels, or paper? [laughter] I didn't even know what I needed. So, that was where I started. And I'll never forget that. Every artist has it, that blank page, and the fear, this guttural fear in my stomach, like oh, my God, anything's possible. I don't know what to do. I was scared and drawn to it in the same way. And I still have that feeling. It never goes away, I realize that now.

Tippett: So it's interesting that both of these stories have music in them. Music is absolutely central to them. And, there's a kinship in you, a kinship with the DJ, and the idea of the DJ runs all the way through a lot of the art projects you've done over the years.

Robleto: Yes. It's - for me to begin to talk about "the sacred," I have to start with music. And, you know, oddly, I never learned how to play an instrument, and I always - I mean, one of my great - one of the things I'm so envious of to this day is being in a band. And I've never been in a band. And I wish so much I had been, and could have been, and even to this day, I - since I was a little boy, to this day, I've kept a journal of potential band names and song titles.

[ laughter]

Tippett: Really?

Robleto: Just in case I ever got in a band. That - because I couldn't play an instrument, I could contribute a great band name right away.

[ laughter]

Robleto: And that's turned into its own art object over the years. I found ways to finally get those things out without the music. But, yeah, it's just part of, I don't know, the science part of my brain wonders what - how am I wired to lean this way?

Tippett: Yeah, and actually though, some of your earliest sculptures were made from grinding vinyl records.

Robleto: Mm-hmm. You know, like how do you take the actual skills of the DJ - song selections, sampling, scratching, beat matching, just all these things a DJ would do. So very simply, for example, the idea of mixing two records together. I thought, well what if I really melted them in a pot and mixed them together? And what would happen? Why did I choose those two songs? And then, DJs already handle the vinyl as an object as much as an audio experience. So I just kind of took that to an extreme. Like, what if you kept scratching your record until it turned to dust? Like I kept giving myself these kinds of challenges.

Tippett: Mm-hmm. So, you know, there's a phrase - there's some phrasing that I really appreciate now of the citizen scientist, and this is also language you use, because you work with science. The citizen artist. And so, as I was, you know, preparing to talk to you, I felt like, you know, you're kind of a DJ/artist, but I really also think you are an artist philosopher. And I think that's how I want to draw you out tonight. You know, you deal in all your work either directly or indirectly with the big subjects, you know, life, love, death.

Robleto: Mm-hmm. Yes.

Tippett: Somebody wrote about you, "Dario Robleto is a resurrector of dead things."

Robleto: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a compliment, yeah.

Tippett: And you - but what you don't do, and I can imagine that people might think this when they hear about your work - it's not about found objects. It's about, as you say, alchemy.

Robleto: Mm-hmm. That's a great distinction. It's about the transformation. It's about what was hidden inside of it that only the artist's touch could have teased out through alteration. And that's alchemy 101 probably. And I like thinking of myself in that lineage, that through transformation of materials that there are other things at stake in the transformation, some of it being spiritual, even.

Tippett: Mm-hmm. And some of it being just chemical, right?

Robleto: Yeah, I'm interested in ...

Tippett: That gets at the scientist in you, as well.

Robleto: Yeah, no, I'm interested in the molecule, up to the spiritual and everything in between in the material. But also the language of what the material was. Which is why I use this term, materialist poet. That I - I always try to ...

Tippett: To describe your work.

Robleto: Yeah. I always try to emphasize the role of language in this process, because for an object maker, it's a little backwards in that the language often comes first, rather than the object comes first and then the language. So, often, I write my title, my material list is completely worked out before I ever start the object.

Tippett: Somewhere, I think this was part of - I looked at so much and I didn't keep good notes about where it came from - but this was on a website that was about one of your exhibitions. And it said that you ask yourself questions, jot down instructions or toy with a poetic phrase, which is what you just described for us. And that here's a to-do list that you'd culled from challenges you've presented to yourself across the years. Do you remember this list?

Robleto: I do.

Tippett: I mean, I'm just going to read a few of them. There are 20 questions - questions or wonderings, I'd say. You know what this reminds me of? It reminds me of how Einstein said that, you know - I mean, his science was all about pursuing wondering. Right? So, like, here you said, "culture dormant bacteria from grooves of mother's rock and roll records." That's just really an enduring theme.

[ laughter]

Robleto: And I did do that, by the way.

Tippett: Yeah. You did? [ laughs] "Number six, how do I change the sound of the ocean?"

Robleto: Mm-hmm. Still working on that.

Tippett: "How do I reunite a million-year-old rain drop with a million-year-old blossom?"

Robleto: I did do that.

Tippett: Did you?

Robleto: I did.

Tippett: How did you find a million-year-old rain drop?

Robleto: Yeah, so this is where only language could have gotten me there, and then I have to figure out - because I just wrote that down.

Tippett: So you write the question, and then you have to pursue the question.

Robleto: Yeah. And I have to pursue, is this possible? Does such a thing exist? If it does, where is it? Can I get it? So, yeah, so for example, a million-year-old blossoms exist, uh, trapped in amber, for example.

Tippett: Right.

Robleto: You know, it rained tens of thousands of millions of years ago. A particular rain drop got caught just in the right moment when some sap was coming out of a tree. And before it had a chance to evaporate, another layer of sap formed a perfect air pocket over it.

Tippett: Oh, that is amazing.

Robleto: And there it is, a preserved rain drop from another time. And these things exist in the world, and I didn't know that until I had just poetically challenged myself, as language.

[ Music: "Glide and Prejudice" by Daniel Alflatt]

Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, I'm with the artist- philosopher Dario Robleto.

Tippett: It's very hard to talk about art on the radio. You know? Or even in a room where we're not looking at something. But for example, a project you had called "A Sadness Silence Can't Touch." A small memento box containing six Civil War pain bullets, which were the bullets that soldiers bit on when they were undergoing surgery before the era of painkillers. Made - so what were the ...? You tell that. They were made from ...

Robleto: This is a piece that language was being used as a material. And the role of the war poet - so the war poet's voice is this vital memory of a thoughtful, reflective mind in the most worst-case scenario of what we can produce on the planet. And those voices are really important. So those pain bullets are made - each one is made from a different recording of a war poet from different wars.

Tippett: So, these were audio tapes, cassette tapes?

Robleto: Yeah it was audio tape ...

Tippett: Melted down ...

Robleto: It was melted down and then made into - I cast the original pain bullet. So the pain bullets, they have marks of soldiers' teeth in them. Everybody knows that term, "bite the bullet." This is where it originates, which we've lost the context with that history. But, it has a much darker background, which is, they're literally biting on a piece of lead more than likely as an amputation is occurring. And, so those marks, as a person sensitive to materials and form, when I see a tooth mark in a chunk of lead that's been buried in the ground for 150 years, it's as deeply moving to me as anything I've ever seen. But as a form, a forgotten form of memory, I wanted to cast it, and remake it in the - what I think is the power of the poet's voice. And all of these poems, I should say, were chosen because they were forms of protest by the poet.

Tippett: And it was ...

Robleto: Who was on the front line.

Tippett: ... Walt Whitman, Tennyson, T.S. Eliot, Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas.

Robleto: Yes.

Tippett: Siegfried Sassoon, I believe.

Robleto: Yes, Sassoon. Yeah, who were all in some way, they were speaking to the gruesomeness of it, which can't ever be forgotten or lost. I imagined the poets, the force of their voice moving their mouth, moving their teeth, and making new impressions into the bullet. But they're impressions of protest, rather than the original impression made from pain of an amputation, for example. So, it was very specific, why I chose language in the form that was made by the mouth.

Tippett: And that also gets at something that is so evocative that you talk about, also as your work as an artist, of healing back through time.

Robleto: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's ...

Tippett: I mean, which is an amazing thing for any of us to think about.

Robleto: At least for me as an artist, my point about, I don't think I have the right to forget certain things. That I think it's a luxury of our time that should be pressed harder against. Every generation of warriors comments on the gulf they feel when they come back. So, could I at least try to heal that divide? And so that's more of a metaphorical divide, but it's also a real direct psychological - it could have real-world consequence if you could initiate a conversation of - between the home front and front line. So, the healing thing takes on many forms in my work.

Tippett: How did you get interested in war? You know, you are not really of a generation - you kind of missed the Vietnam War, you were born in 1972. I mean, of course you live in this post-9/11 world, but I'm just curious about this...

Robleto: It was 9/11.

Tippett: ... intensity. It was 9/11?

Robleto: Yeah, it was absolutely 9/11.

Tippett: And then that also took you back to Civil War and World War I.

Robleto: Yeah. No, I tend - when I get involved in a project, I go all in. And I, you know, I thought - you know, if everybody remembers what was the big question in the moment, it was why? Why us? There was this complete confusion about how? Why? And I was like everybody else, I was like I realized I didn't have a good answer.

Tippett: Were you in Houston at that time?

Robleto: San Antonio. And, I was so frustrated with myself that I couldn't answer that question. So I decided, I'm going to make work - as long as the country was at war, I thought, okay, I'm going to make work in response to it, because I was grappling with this, what's the artist's responsibility in a time of war? Of course, nobody knew we were entering the longest war in our history. And so, a decade later, I was still making work about the war.

Tippett: But I think what's important about that is, you know, the news cycle - yes we've been at war all this time in some sense - but the news cycle moves on. But you've actually, as an artist, you've continued to hold that reality. And also I think the fact that you're doing it in a spirit of a question, can you heal back through time?

Robleto: Yeah. No, it - the idea of a sustained meditation on a problem, you know, seems like this format quickly going out of style. So, that takes on another dimension in our time of trying to go against the grain of immediate gratification or short-term memory, short-term attention spans, which, you know, have - many artists have used that in brilliant creative ways in their work. And, you need the sustained meditation - you need those voices on certain problems.

Tippett: Yes, in that mix.

Robleto: Yeah, and you need artists on the front line, in a sense, with the other people in other fields who are also not losing their attention to this problem. I really believe that. So, I tend to latch on to a topic for many years when I commit to something.

Tippett: And it's interesting because you - you reflect sometimes about being part of your generation. I don't know, are you a Gen X? Is that ...?

Robleto: Yeah.

Tippett: Yeah.

Robleto: Gen X, mm-hmm.

Tippett: Yeah, I get - I can't keep track anymore.

Robleto: I don't know what we're on. What letter are we on?

Tippett: Yeah, I don't know what letter we're at. But you're right. The stereotype of Gen X is not too deep, cynical.

Robleto: Yes, it just drove me crazy.

Tippett: Yeah.

Robleto: That I was being lumped in with this apolitical, apathetic, cynical, overly-ironic generation, which was all true ...

Tippett: Also lazy is, I think, is the stereotype.

Robleto: Yeah. And certainly that was there, but...

Tippett: It's not the whole story.

Robleto: Yeah, no, and no generation is all that. And I really wanted to push back against that.

Tippett: I mean, you pushed back against it, just in by being who you are. I really appreciate you said, "I assume that my viewers are smart and want to engage." Again, that's kind of a countercultural statement. We're comrades in this.

Robleto: Yes.

Tippett: Assuming the best of our audiences.

Robleto: Yes. I like assuming the audience is smart when pretty much everywhere else in culture, I think they think we're stupid. I'd rather assume the opposite. Because that actually changes decisions I make in the studio. It has a studio value in how I make an object.

Tippett: Mm-hmm. Say some more.

Robleto: Well, in that the layers of meaning in my work that I purposefully put there hoping that if someone were to want to continue through those layers that I promise there'd be something interesting. You don't have to go, but the door's open.

Tippett: I just want to actually read some very beautiful words that you wrote about time and memory. This subject. This long view of time you have. "Time is, of course, doing it's steady work on every object ever made. This complex relationship between the maker, and emotionally-invested objects, and the growing distance between them is not new, only rediscovered each generation" - I love this - "whether by an artist, a mourner, a mother, or a soldier." Later you say, you know, that you have to let go, right? Loss is about letting go. "But that we let go with the hope that others will grab hold. These objects ask very human moral questions. What right do we have to forget? What do we owe to each other's memories?"

Robleto: So memory now takes on a moral dimension, because - that's why I take it so serious - because when I go, I'll hope someone grabs hold of me. But I have to promise I'm grabbing hold of who's gone before. And I love that memory binds us in that way. And, of course, those lines get severed all the time and, I mean, I just sometimes I'm overwhelmed when I think of how many people have ever been on this planet and the actual tiny, tiny fraction of them that are actually remembered to this day. Nobody remembers, even, two, three generations down the road, it's easy to start forgetting. And so memory has a spiritual dimension in that way to me. Like there was the title of a piece called "Heaven Is Being a Memory to Others."

Tippett: Yeah.

Robleto: Like, my grandmother who I was deeply close to. I remember her, deeply, every day. And when I go, probably no one's going to remember her in that way again. So, for the next few decades her memory is still in a sense, life after death. This is in a sense what I think memory can do on the planet. But it's going to taper off at some point, with her in particular. And many of our family members. So I just like knowing I'm going to hold on, I'm going to grasp, pull hard into the last moment. I like that art can do that. So, and I think it should. It should do that.

[ Music: "Together We Build the Nest" by Don Bodin]

Tippett: After a short break, more with Dario Robleto. You can always listen again, and hear the unedited version of every show we do on the On Being podcast feed - wherever podcasts are found.

[ Music: "Together We Build the Nest" by Don Bodin]

Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Today with the artist philosopher Dario Robleto. He explores how ordinary objects - in life and in culture - can become meditations on love, healing and loss. We had this conversation at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, in 2014.

Tippett: In about 10 minutes we're going to open up and have some back-and-forth and see what's on your mind. Before we do that, I'd love to talk about - you allude to this - but you really do have a cosmic view. Right? It's not just about history. And you're working on this project about the Golden Record. And somewhere I saw this described as, you know, returning to love and memory, like what we were just talking about, across vast reaches of time and space.

Robleto: Mm-hmm. Yes. The Golden Record. It's a big topic for me. I take it very seriously, too. Just as a quick preface, if you don't know what it is, it's literally a gold record, that's attached to the Voyager probes that were launched in the late '70s. And Carl Sagan had been asked to basically produce a document of life on earth. And he had to do it in the space limitations of a record, which at the time were about two hours of content. Which, think of everybody's phone in here right now, has thousands of time - of more power than he and his team had to work with.

So it was just incredible - incredible problem to tell the complexity of the planet through sound and image, in the space limitations of two hours, and on a medium that we ourselves have already long ago got rid of. But in September of just last year Voyager crossed a milestone - what scientists call the solar bubble. It had essentially entered interstellar space and attached to the side of the probe, which had this whole other mission of planetary exploration. But attached to it is this symbol, a long playing record with our story on it. And what's on it is a much longer story, and a beautiful one.

Tippett: And you've called Carl Sagan the ultimate DJ.

Robleto: Yeah.

Tippett: And that the Golden record is the greatest mixtape of humankind ever compiled. [ laughter]

Robleto: Well, no, it really is. And I mean - well because my point earlier about what's at stake with your musical selections? Forever is at stake with that record. But you bring an artist in, and I feel they look at it differently. And I was determined to find something that had been overlooked. And I feel confident I did.

Tippett: Can you tell us what it is?

Robleto: Well, it's a longer story ...

Tippett: Is it top secret? [ laughter]

Robleto: But ...

Tippett: Can you put it in one of those poetic sentences?

[ laughter]

Robleto: Love survives the death of cells. Yeah.

Tippett: The death of cells?

Robleto: Yes.

Tippett: I think it's fascinating that you - that love is that thing you honed in on. There's this, you know, that the philosopher in you also talks about love a lot. In a very philosophical poetic way. There is a sentence that you repeat, and you actually use this in the context of the Golden record. "With nothing to risk, love can't exist." Tell us what that sentence means to you.

Robleto: Well, I can very specifically - also, honky-tonk memory. During those years I remember just being floored when I read in Ripley's Believe It or Not! - somewhere, I don't quite remember what it was. And it's become this urban myth of the mother who lifts a car off their child who's been injured. And I remember reading that and just being - I was shocked. And that, you know, in my young mind, sitting in a honky-tonk, mixing with all the other songs on that jukebox, I see now it started to turn into a philosophy, which I feel like I'm more fully exploring today. But, god, it was mysterious in youth when you first realized that loving something can actually physically change your body. And that connection, that my science mind again comes in, as far as that something abstract had a real-world consequence. So I love my child, and then I turned into the Incredible Hulk in the process ...

[ laughter]

Tippett: Right. Yeah.

Robleto: ... to lift this car off them. And yeah I think, I mean, it's so simple but it's an important thing, that something has to be at risk. Something's got to be on the line to reveal these, I think, the much more strange, complicated parts of love. That I'm more interested in. Because you say love and our minds go to cliché often. But no, it's really weird and strange if you know where to look. And it's on these weird edges of love when it's at risk and the things people will do in that moment that I find tell this beautiful alternate history of aesthetics.

Like, I like to say that if you could put on the table everything anyone's ever made in a moment of loss, that that would tell as beautiful a history of aesthetics and creativity as the proper art history that we all know. But that discussion doesn't happen in art history because it's - the people making it aren't artists or it's just - it's all of us. When push comes to shove what would you do? What could you make? What are you capable of? And something has to be at risk. So I'm interested in the creative response that comes. And often it's some form of love that we didn't see coming until that happened.

Tippett: There's a - there was a project you did called "Lunge for Love as if it Were Air," which I think also had that story.

Robleto: Yes.

Tippett: In its DNA.

Robleto: Yeah, I like - it's just one of the my titles that I wrote. It was actually a song title on my song title list.

[ laughter]

Robleto: So, that - my titles have become - they find their form finally in my objects. Even though I thought they would be for a band. So in a way, I still released them in a way, I guess.

Tippett: Yeah. So, I think there are some microphones wandering around that we can pass around. Oh, here it is. I like this method, I was saying beforehand, because I think the format where you have the microphones up here and people have to come to the microphone privileges the extroverts in the room.

[ laughter]

Tippett: And so I want to encourage introverts to raise your hand. And you don't have to be too conspicuous, the microphone will come to you. Yes.

Audience Member 1: It seems like a lot of your work - it has to do with materials and material objects. And I'm just wondering how you feel about a world that seems like it's increasingly digital and has a lot of information that's not necessarily embodied in physical objects.

Robleto: I'm definitely not an anti-technology, back-in-the-old-day kind of guy. I always resist going down that road. But, for example, the past several years the only growth industry in music has been the sale of vinyl records. And I find this - these kind of forgotten little charts, indicators of something deeper happening in culture.

Tippett: Because I was wondering what would the Dario Robleto of today - you know, he might not grind of vinyl records to dust. I mean, what would you do? Grind dead iPods to dust or something?

[ laughter]

Robleto: Yeah, no. No, it's not the same, yeah.

[ laughter]

Robleto: But I suspect people will surprise us in how they answer this question, in ways we just don't know yet. Which I always - never worries me about this question because it's just too human to need to attach emotions to things. And, a quick little anecdote to your iPod point that really floored me that happened recently. A group of students I was talking to - one of the students mentioned that his father had willed it to him his record collection, and how touched he was by it. And the other students were sort of making fun of him, like, you've got to carry that in life now? They were thinking of it as a burden, a physical burden, to carry records forward in life. And I just had this impromptu thought. Like, I asked them, "Has everybody had an iPod?" Of course everybody raised their hands. And then I said, "Has everybody had several iPods?" Everybody raised their hands. And I said, "How many of you could foresee a day when you will your iPod collection to your child?" Nobody raised their hands. But what was so interesting is that instinctually they knew that seemed odd. And I don't know what to make of that, I'm just saying that there's weird things like that that will happen that I will be excited to see how we solve it in the future.

Tippett: Where's the microphone? Raise your hand. Okay.

Audience Member 2: Hi. I really appreciate the way that you honor the spirit of your material that you're working with. And I like the way you talk about memory. Particularly, I'm interested in the memory of water. And I was wondering what it felt like when you reunited that million-year-old water drop with that million-year-old blossom.

Robleto: What did it feel like? You know, just to me? Well...hmm.

Tippett: We'd like to know what it felt like to the water drop, but...

[ laughter]

Robleto: Yeah. It's such - I think I'm being articulate and then I stumble here, because I don't know. There's still this area where I don't have quite the words for it sometimes. You know, I prep so long, I look so hard, so much time and energy went into finding that rain drop and that blossom, and then the moment comes when they're together again. And it's - I don't know. I don't know how to explain it. I couldn't have done it, as I'd mentioned earlier, what do I need to do to earn the respect of that material? And all those things that I did to get to that moment produced this sensation that's hard for me to describe. So, I'm sorry I'm stumbling on that.

Tippett: Was there actually a moment though where you brought them together? I mean ...

Robleto: Mm-hmm.

Tippett: And that you ...

Robleto: Yeah. The idea was to bring them together again. I have this question I like to ask about. Can art finish something that never got finished? And in this way it was, could that drop finished hitting that blossom all these years later? So, that was a manifestation of that question. And that question's propelled many artworks. Can art finish something that never got finished? That leads to these kinds of interactions.

[ Music: "Quiet" by This Will Destroy You]

Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Today I'm with artist-philosopher Dario Robleto. We're taking questions from the audience.

Audience Member 3: I think it's true that there's this common perception that art connects us with the artist in a way that art is a self-expression, and so kind of the idea is that it's a way to get inside the artist's head. When I look at your work, and then when I listen to the way you describe it, it feels like instead of connecting us with you, it connects us with other lives. Another way I was thinking about it is when I've looked at your work, it's almost like walking into a natural history museum. And that I'm connecting with something else kind of bigger, or other lives, or something distant. How do you think about the role of the self in the artwork? Do you consciously try to erase or cover up?

Robleto: To me, this is a great fundamental art question about - because as most artists, we tap into our own history as a starting point. Many young artists do that. And, you know, Patsy Cline is - we believe her, because she's singing about her heartbreak, and that's why it counts. But my relationship to those histories that I'm often referencing in the work, the dynamic's different. It can't be about me. I mean, I'm making it. I'm initiating it, but the point is not me. And I do try to taper out myself as much as I can, because it's not, you know, especially when we're talking about the suffering of war. I mean, come on, how can I - how can I even pretend to know? So to answer you, I do try to taper out my voice in that way because the narrative I'm trying to talk about is what I want all the attention on. But then, you know, I made the object and the artist can never remove themselves totally from it. So it's not always possible.

Tippett: But I would think that it must please you to hear someone describe your work that way.

Robleto: It does.

Tippett: That your work connects our lives with other lives.

Robleto: It really does. Because I - you know, like I ask young artists that I work with, "Why should anybody care about your problem?" And, when you make work about that problem, and I think every artist should be hard on themselves about that. And, you know, that's why someone like Billie Holiday or Patsy Cline have done this. They've somehow solved this riddle of singing about their own experience, but it means - but it was all of our experience. And I mean that's like this puzzle I'll always be trying to figure out, of how do you tap in to the personal, but it's meant to be for the public interaction and meaning.

Tippett: I think the microphone is over here somewhere, right? Here?

Audience Member 4: Hi. You had mentioned earlier something that I found intriguing, and it just kind of got glossed over. Being very badly depressed when you were younger and visiting your dad, and having this experience in the room with hearing "Sgt. Pepper's," and you came out and you were an artist. And it seemed like - I guess the way my mind thought, it was like, well, that must also mean that you were very depressed and you came out of the room and you weren't depressed anymore. I don't know if that resolves as quickly as becoming an artist, but I just was wondering if you could speak a little bit more on what was out of kilter that was causing that depression. And how did that resolve?

Robleto: Hm. Yeah. Hm.

[ laughter]

Robleto: You know, this is one of those topics we're afraid to talk about, and we shouldn't be at all. And I really believe that. But yeah, I hesitate because it's related to the previous question where I don't like my work to be about that. But clearly, when I look back, it was depression absolutely. But I mean, five years old, it was a constant in life, and I just didn't understand what it was. And it has never gone away. If anything I'm an artist because partly I need - it gives me a way to harness it. And to funnel it into something that takes it beyond my own problem, as I was saying. But, I didn't - when I left the room it was still there. And it just had a purpose that it didn't have before. And I struggle every day to keep that purpose on sight. But there's nothing like reading a story of a Civil War soldier carving their leg from scratch that will set you straight very quickly on your own personal depression. And I am constantly looking for those narratives to help put things in perspective.

Tippett: You talk a lot about your lifelong fascination with survival. And the human creative response to loss. And it sounds to me like that's just a huge root for you of that in your own life.

Robleto: Yeah. If I had to say in one word what's the overarching theme of my work, it's survival. And then it divides off into all these other things. But yeah, the two terms I like to use are the logic of loss and the creative response to loss as histories that cross over culture and time. That speak to something basically human. That every era, every culture deals with grief, and mourning, and loss, in that the creativity was the response to the loss. That the loss insisted on some sort of aesthetic. Writing a poem. Making an object. Something. So that notion that loss and love are connected at some fundamental level like that I find just beautifully human.

Tippett: Or even I think as you - you talk about memory, you know, intentional memory is itself a creative response to loss, right?

Robleto: Yes. Memory, yeah. Memory is one of our tools.

Tippett: You don't even have to be an artist. Yeah.

Robleto: Right. It's a tool. It's a weapon against decay and against loss being permanent. And that's a very human thing to want to struggle against that.

Tippett: You are also working more recently on a project called "The Boundary of Life is Quietly Crossed."

Robleto: Yes.

Tippett: Which does come a bit to this notion of the big, philosophical, existential reality of death. And my understanding is that a kind of central motif for that is your experience of your grandmother's heartbeat as she died. Is that right?

Robleto: Yes. Yes. I had the, what's clearly now seems like a privilege of being by her as she passed away and just instinctually put my hand on her chest. And I'll never forget those last five beats. And what they felt like. And, that deeply changed me. And the time span between the last beat up to the moment we're sitting here is a very distinct space that I feel. Because you always assume there's a beat after the last one. And then the brain realizing that's not coming is something I still grapple with. But I think what hit me the hardest in that moment was that I didn't know anything about the heart. And it was like 9/11 in that I thought, how am I ever going to understand this experience if I don't understand the heart? It's cultural history. It's mechanics. It's, I mean, everything. So right now I'm in this long process of trying to answer to myself that question of, what does the heart mean?

Tippett: Right, "the largely unexplored history of the human heartbeat."

Robleto: Yeah. And as usual, there's 100 things that nobody knows about, that I'm sure nobody knows that are fascinating about this story, about this unknown history of the human heartbeat. But it originates with her, definitely.

Tippett: It's moving to think about it. That's moving to think about you with your grandmother, because now, anyone who has a baby now, it's one of the first things that happens, that you hear the heartbeat, and it's so incredibly exciting.

Robleto: Right.

Tippett: Thrilling beyond measure. But really when you tell that story about being with your grandmother and hearing her last five heartbeats ... You know, I think that kind of comes back to some of these driving questions in your work. Does art have the power to fix something that never got fixed? To correct a wrong that's never been resolved? What can art do anymore? I wonder, just in closing, if you would talk a little bit about how those questions and how you live those questions changes as you go through life, and changes you, changes how you live your life.

Robleto: My idealism has not budged at all. And I'm not going to let it budge. I love the nonsense that it seems like when you hear an artist say, art can change the world. And I don't care if it's true or not, I like believing in it. Because it changes how you make things. So I'm constantly trying to find ways to still create objects that there's something at stake with them. And, of course, changes me in the process. And in no way am I suggesting I'm there, or that I'm ever going to get there, but that's almost not the point. It's - the point is the struggle to keep trying to find it. I don't know if that answered you so well.

Tippett: Yeah, no, it does. And I think the piece you didn't say is then to hear it come back at you, you know, the idea that then you have created objects that join our life with other lives.

Robleto: Yeah, I hope that happens. You never know. But the artist in me keeps trying for that to happen.

Tippett: Well, Dario Robleto, citizen, DJ, philosopher, artist. It's been a pleasure to be in your company tonight. Thank you.

Robleto: Thank you. Thank you so much.

[ applause]

[ Music: "Awake" by Tycho]

Tippett: Dario Robleto is currently an artist-at-large at the McCormick School of Engineering of Northwestern University. His work is held in collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. You can also see some of his work online, at dariorobleto.com.

[ Music: "Awake" by Tycho]

Tippett: Special thanks this week to the Minneapolis Institute of Art - now known as MIA - and the former curator there, Elizabeth Armstrong.

The On Being Project is Chris Heagle, Lily Percy, Laurén Dørdal, Erin Colasacco, Kristin Lin, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, Lucas Johnson, Suzette Burley, Zack Rose, Serri Graslie, Colleen Scheck, Christiane Wartell, Julie Siple, Gretchen Honnold, and Jhaleh Akhava

The On Being Project is located on Dakota land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. And the last voice that you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn.

On Being is an independent production of The On Being Project. It is distributed to public radio stations by WNYC Studios. I created this show at American Public Media.

Our funding partners include:

The Fetzer Institute, helping to build the spiritual foundation for a loving world. Find them at fetzer.org.

Kalliopeia Foundation. Dedicated to reconnecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. Supporting organizations and initiatives that uphold a sacred relationship with life on Earth. Learn more at kalliopeia.org.

Humanity United, advancing human dignity at home and around the world. Find out more at humanityunited.org, part of the Omidyar Group.

The Osprey Foundation - a catalyst for empowered, healthy, and fulfilled lives.

And the Lilly Endowment, an Indianapolis-based, private family foundation dedicated to its founders' interests in religion, community development, and education.

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Dario Robleto - Sculptor of Time and Loss | The On Being Project

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The philosopher-artist on creative responses to communal loss.

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Gabby and I got into an interesting conversation about the way time shapes an artist's palette the other day. I posted a list of colors that are associated with different eras of history...it may be worthwhile to look at this as you think about an interlingual (painting to painting) translation from a work that is remote in history... (Lily T and I also talked about the difference between colors of the 1920s and other times...)

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Eli and I have been talking about implicit narrative and the geometry of pictures. I wanted to share this menacing, unusual image from Degas' early career, as well as works by Jeff Wall (here and here) which approach the same questions from intralingual and intersemiotic angles.

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A translation between horror and decoration

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A translation between horror and decoration

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I couldn't recall artist Reneé Green's name in class the other day (I am old and my head is full of artists...) But I wanted you all to see this...I think it's an interesting example of translating horrible historical episodes into contemporary art ...

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"The mathematicians are a sort of Frenchman: When you talk to them, they immediately translate it into their own language and right away it is something entirely different"

Mario Livio, quoting Goethe, The Golden Ratio p.196

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Why is math education in primary school so freakin' bad? I keep bumping into stories about people who don't learn to love math until later in life. So why do we teach it in such a way that it puts people out?

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You don't always have to understand math to see its beauty.

In second grade, I stopped being able to do math. One night I went to do my long-division homework and I couldn't figure it out. My mom demanded that I sit with my math teacher because my sudden inability made no sense. Two weeks later, I was sent home with a disciplinary note for turning in only empty or incorrect homework and was accused of not paying attention in class.

Up until then I had been a "good" student, a "smart" girl. I remember the secret bliss I felt when I knew before my peers how to count fractions without the help of manipulatives, and how to subtract negatives. This can be only partially explained by the teaching I got in school. My mom, who was then studying computer science and psychology in her master's program, was determined to instill a love of learning in my life. Over the course of a year, she built me a computer out of parts and installed all kinds of educational games on it. When I arrived home every day, I attended my mother's academy, where I spent most of my afternoons watching the sun fall on the walls of my bedroom as I finger-punched my way through the programs.

I loved Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? and You Can Be a Woman Engineer, but Math Blaster was my favorite. I remember the illustration of the game as vividly as any beloved book: an astronaut, tethered to a spaceship, floating their way through the starry landscape of space with simple mathematical expressions on their chest, and on each planet, a foreign landscape with different levels of math problems to solve. That image in my head of the astronaut working diligently in the vast expanse of space, the stars an infinite backdrop to a mathematical cosmos, is exactly how I see math in my head now-fantastical, endless, and enchanting. But I had to lose that relationship with math to be able to find math again.

My mom would later connect the dots between the rapid deterioration of my learning abilities and another, correlative timeline. After getting in trouble one day for saying something so inappropriate in class that it boggled even me, I went home and told my mom what my older cousin had been doing to me while she was at work and my grandma wasn't home. Immediately, the evidence began to click: the inexplicable spotting in my underwear, the change in my emotional regularity, my 68 score on a math test I'd have more than passed two summers before.

Learning of the violent trauma I'd been experiencing caused a radical 180 in both our lives. Lawyers, doctors, judges-I watched my mom attempt to be strong every day as she worked to manage the worst crisis she could ever have imagined happening to her. Math classes were getting harder as my brain attempted to process the initial trauma and what followed the trauma's reveal. I went to school, and most mornings, the board seemed too far away. Greater-than and less-than symbols were like commas to me, nearly indistinguishable in function and in form. I was tested for vision impairments twice that month, though the eye doctor recorded 20/20 vision. Division amplified the inadequacy I felt. I would come home, blank, my mom imploring me to think: "You must have remembered something, Camonghne." But I didn't remember anything.

Some part of my brain stopped working the way it was supposed to once the assaults started happening. But I was the only one who could see the size of the injury and just how it was affecting me physically. I was tired, uninspired, easily triggered, and quick to fire, always ready to fight. I knew I needed extra help, maybe to go to school somewhere else where they'd rehabilitate me. I spent countless school nights researching boarding schools for troubled kids. But when my mom asked me if she should tell my teachers the full story about what was going on, I refused. I didn't want eight hours of sympathy; I just wanted to be able to get through my math homework. She told them anyway. It was worthless, as their incapacity to understand how living in my head felt at that time only highlighted the significance of my needs.

Years later, while researching bipolar disorder and executive-function disorders, I found one scientific explanation for all of my mathematical confusion. In 2018, psychologists published a study on the association between adverse childhood experiences and traumatic brain injury in adulthood. Both can affect developmental skills, mood, regulation, the ability to process and synthesize new information. Both affect some of the same parts of the brain. I began to think of the experience of childhood trauma, especially related to abandonment, neglect, and sexual abuse, as similar to a concussion. Imagine a child's ability to cope with that, particularly when the injury remains invisible to the people she spends eight hours a day with.

Doctors and scientists have only just begun to develop a more complete understanding of how trauma works and how it affects individuals psychologically throughout their lifetime. But what we're starting to understand confirms much of what people who've struggled with trauma and PTSD have long been trying to articulate: Emotional trauma is an injury. Trauma hits you, and your brain absorbs the shock.

In high school, my inability to point to where the wound was earned me the label of underperformer, troublemaker, someone who didn't want to learn. I wished I could project myself onto the whiteboard and, with a bright-red cursor, point to the front lobe of my brain, and then to my heart, to show the teachers how badly it all ached. But that hungry and inquisitive child who devoured mathematical challenges was so afraid that those labels were true that she decided it was less disappointing to just give up-on math, on school, on life.

High school continued to go on despite the fact that I felt incapable of going on with it. I spent more time locked up in mental-health facilities than I did in classes. I shuttled from one high school to the next, kicked out, failed out, behind. I knew that I wanted to go to college; I knew that I wanted to study literature and language. I couldn't focus in most classes, but I hid novels in my textbooks and wrote fan fiction in the evenings, losing myself in imaginary lands and complex world building, skills that would later revolutionize what I thought I was capable of. By junior year, when my transcript indicated a 1.4 GPA (NYC schools evaluate on a 0.0-4.0 scale), the high-school counselor responsible for helping me get into college told me it was too late, that I would have had to have at least gotten an A in one of my math classes to be anywhere near qualified for admission to any of the schools I was interested in. I was confronted with a series of closed doors as I watched my adolescence spiral out of my control.

I was eventually transferred to an alternative high school (also known as a last-chance school), where a Cornell-educated and Bronx-raised scientist who'd returned home to teach saw something in me and promised she wouldn't let me fall through the cracks. She spent every lunch period tutoring me, showing me how to calculate momentum, teaching me that nutrition started with an understanding of how the body quantifies energy, offering me tangible, material ways to understand math. Another math teacher across the hall attempted to teach me calculus. I still couldn't do the arithmetic I'd need to be able to grasp it at its most complex form, but there was something about calculus as a study in continuous change that made sense to me.

Noticing my curiosity, my lunchtime tutor gave me a copy of Einstein's Dreams, a novel that reintroduced me to the magical qualities of mathematics, reminding me of the sense of wonder that the illustrations in Math Blaster had made me feel as a kid. It turned numbers back into metaphors and images and poetry instead of scores on the exams I'd failed. I graduated from high school a year later than I should have, but with an A in calculus. For the first time since I was 9 years old, I no longer felt inadequate in the face of something my body knew it had once loved.

But it would be almost a decade before math and I would begin to have a conversation about what had happened to us, and why it had left me behind.

After graduating from high school, I managed to build a career, to become a writer and poet and to put the trauma of my childhood in a corner of my mind where it couldn't disturb me. But years later, after a destabilizing breakup and a subsequent suicide attempt forced me back into psychiatric treatment, I decided that someone had to be in charge of figuring out where this wound was, and what the hell was still wrong with me. In almost no time, I was diagnosed with severe ADHD, and then later with bipolar 2 disorder.

Bipolar disorder, characterized by periods of depression and mania or hypomania, works kind of like a blowtorch. When an individual is having an episode, it causes stress to the brain, which can affect cognitive skills and executive function. It can be degenerative, meaning that as one gets older, and with each episode, the brain's ability to do what it needs to do deteriorates.

After my diagnosis, I spent months researching a connection between math and bipolar disorder. I learned about dyscalculia, a kind of math dyslexia, and called the doctor who'd tested me for ADHD. "Do I have this?" I asked him. He told me, "I'd say it's extremely likely based on the severity of your results."

Immediately, I let out a sigh I'd been holding for decades. All at once, I felt betrayed, grateful, and relieved. After some months of treatment for my bipolar diagnosis, I couldn't believe the clarity with which I began to see and feel. As my treatment adjusted (I tried a couple of mood stabilizers before ending up on lithium last year), I felt my ability to compute improve too.

I'm still no mathematician; I probably couldn't even pass a sophomore-level college course. But I don't have to be able to solve every equation for math to mean something to me. Math, after all, is infinite; no human can best it. I try to challenge myself to approach mathematics from a place of wonder and admiration instead of anxiety. And as I study basic techniques such as estimation, and continue to refamiliarize myself with division, I feel the slow death of that earlier block that kept these basics away from me. I feel the excitement I felt when I played Math Blaster, or when I first read Einstein's Dreams. Losing my ability to learn and understand math represented the frailty of the human mind, but my ability to relearn it represents the mind's innate resiliency.

Recently, I was out at dinner when, over steaming bowls of rice and half-eaten platters of bulgogi, my friend slid the bill across the table, a gesture with only one meaning. "Why me?" I asked her. "You're the one who went to Johns Hopkins!" She waved me off. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, but you do mental math better than I do." For a moment, I stared down at the check and I swore it was staring back at me.

This scene with my friend has become pretty typical. She hands me the bill and I calculate the tip. And every time feels like the first time. I hover over that bill with the focus of worship, willing my brain to do what the numbers ask of it, nothing less and nothing more. My respect for math is born from a deep desire to understand it. I'm always nervous when it's my turn to split the bill, but I don't wish for those nerves to go away. The chance to correct the narrative of the past feels transcendent.
This essay was adapted from the memoir Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation

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rapid deterioration of my learning abilities

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summers before.learning of the violent trauma

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You don't always have to understand math to see its beauty. In second grade, I stopped being able to do math. One night I went to do my long-division homework and I couldn't figure it out. My mom demanded that I sit with my math teacher because my sudden inability made no sense.

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Okay - it's time for this Padlet to evolve into the center for Illuminati Studies and get on board with the spring, 2023, version of Advanced Painting - Math and Art!

It's fitting that we begin that with a new color (orange for math and art!) and with a video about whether or not we have a choice about liking certain kinds of images...I am super eager to hear people's thoughts on neuroaesthetics and look forward to your input...

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"Current Progress in the Neurofields: Neuroaesthetics," Anjan Chatterjee, MD

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One of my favorite writers talking about some of the issues in translation...

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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with author Jhumpa Lahiri about her latest book 'Translating Myself and Others,' and the impact translating has had on her own writing in both Italian and English.

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Jhumpa Lahiri on how she fell in love with translating and how it shapes her writing

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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with author Jhumpa Lahiri about her latest book 'Translating Myself and Others,' and the impact translating has had on her own writing in both Italian and English.

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One more painter...because both Jessica and Kyle have been looking at this person, though for different reasons. Thayer stands at the doorway of modern American Art and never really crosses over...he is truly, deeply strange but that strange never shows up in his disturbingly generic paintings. I mean, who would know we are talking about the father of camouflage here?  I recommend you look at a facsimile of his book on the subject, available from the remarkable Hathi Trust

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Painter, best known for his idealistic and allegorical paintings of women as angels and madonnas.

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...this painter of the Arts and Crafts movement in 19th century England came up in a conversation with Emily...mostly because of the way his work was not some things. Among the things it was not were Art Nouveau, Pre-Raphaelite painting, or Vienna Secessionism. See, when you do translation, you really need to know your target language. I was very pleased that we were able to get that specific with what Emily is after...hope you find this work as specifically interesting and relevant...

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Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet, (; 28 August 1833 - 17 June 1898) was a British artist and designer associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked with William Morris on decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.

Burne-Jones was involved in the rejuvenation of the tradition of stained glass art in Britain; his works include windows in St. Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham, St Martin in the Bull Ring, Birmingham, Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Square, Chelsea, St Peter and St Paul parish church in Cromer, St Martin's Church in Brampton, Cumbria (the church designed by Philip Webb), St Michael's Church, Brighton, Trinity Church in Frome, All Saints, Jesus Lane, Cambridge, St Edmund Hall, and Christ Church, two colleges of the University of Oxford. His stained glass works also feature in St Anne's Church, Brown Edge, Staffordshire Moorlands, and St Edward the Confessor church at Cheddleton Staffordshire. Burne-Jones's early paintings show the inspiration of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but by the 1860s Burne-Jones was discovering his own artistic "voice".

In 1877, he was persuaded to show eight oil paintings at the Grosvenor Gallery (a new rival to the Royal Academy). These included The Beguiling of Merlin. The timing was right and he was taken up as a herald and star of the new Aesthetic Movement. Burne-Jones worked in crafts; including designing ceramic tiles, jewellery, tapestries, and mosaics.

Edward Coley Burne Jones (the hyphen came later) was born in Birmingham, the son of a Welshman, Edward Richard Jones, a frame-maker at Bennetts Hill, where a blue plaque commemorates the painter's childhood. His mother Elizabeth Jones (née Coley) died within six days of his birth, and he was raised by his father, and the family housekeeper, Ann Sampson, an obsessively affectionate but humourless, and unintellectual local girl. He attended Birmingham's King Edward VI grammar school from 1844 and the Birmingham School of Art from 1848 to 1852, before studying theology at Exeter College, Oxford. At Oxford he became a friend of William Morris as a consequence of a mutual interest in poetry. The two Exeter undergraduates, together with a group of Jones' friends from Birmingham known as the Birmingham Set, formed a society, which they called "The Brotherhood". The members of the brotherhood read John Ruskin, and Tennyson, visited churches, and worshipped the Middle Ages. At this time Burne-Jones discovered Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur which was to be so influential in his life. At that time neither Burne-Jones nor Morris knew Dante Gabriel Rossetti personally, but both were much influenced by his works, and met him by recruiting him as a contributor to their Oxford and Cambridge Magazine which Morris founded in 1856 to promote their ideas.

Burne-Jones had intended to become a church minister, but under Rossetti's influence both he, and Morris decided to become artists, and Burne-Jones left college before taking a degree to pursue a career in art. In February 1857, Rossetti wrote to William Bell Scott

Two young men, projectors of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, have recently come up to town from Oxford, and are now very intimate friends of mine. Their names are Morris and Jones. They have turned artists instead of taking up any other career to which the university generally leads, and both are men of real genius. Jones's designs are marvels of finish and imaginative detail, unequalled by anything unless perhaps Albert Dürer's finest works.

In 1856 Burne-Jones became engaged to Georgiana "Georgie" MacDonald (1840-1920), one of the MacDonald sisters. She was training to be a painter, and was the sister of Burne-Jones's old school friend. The couple married in 1860, after which she made her own work in woodcuts, and became a close friend of George Eliot. (Another MacDonald sister married the artist Sir Edward Poynter, a further sister married the ironmaster Alfred Baldwin and was the mother of the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and yet another sister was the mother of Rudyard Kipling. Kipling and Baldwin were thus Burne-Jones's nephews by marriage).

Georgiana gave birth to a son, Philip, in 1861. A second son, born in the winter of 1864 while Georgiana became gravely ill with scarlet fever, died soon after birth. The family then moved to 41 Kensington Square, and their daughter Margaret was born there in 1866. In 1867 Burne-Jones and his family settled at the Grange, an 18th-century house set in a garden in North End, Fulham, London. For the 1870s Burne-Jones did not exhibit, following a number of bitterly hostile attacks in the press, and a passionate affair (described as the "emotional climax of his life") with his Greek model Maria Zambaco, which ended with her trying to commit suicide by throwing herself in Regent's Canal. During these difficult years Georgiana developed a friendship with Morris, whose wife Jane had fallen in love with Rossetti. Morris and Georgie may have been in love, but if he asked her to leave her husband, she refused. In the end, the Burne-Joneses remained together, as did the Morrises, but Morris and Georgiana were close for the rest of their lives.

In 1880 the Burne-Joneses bought Prospect House in Rottingdean, near Brighton in Sussex, as their holiday home, and soon after the next door Aubrey Cottage to create North End House, reflecting the fact that their Fulham home was in North End Road. (Years later, in 1923, Sir Roderick Jones, head of Reuters, and his wife, playwright and novelist Enid Bagnold, were to add the adjacent Gothic House to the property, which became the inspiration and setting for her play The Chalk Garden).

His troubled son Philip, who became a successful portrait painter, died in 1926. His adored daughter Margaret (died 1953) married John William Mackail (1850-1945), the friend and biographer of Morris, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1911 to 1916. Their children were the novelists Angela Thirkell and Denis Mackail. In an edition of the boys' magazine, Chums (No. 227, Vol. V, 13 January 1897), an article on Burne-Jones stated that "....his pet grandson used to be punished by being sent to stand in a corner with his face to the wall. One day on being sent there he was delighted to find the wall prettily decorated with fairies, flowers, birds, and bunnies. His indulgent grandfather had utilised his talent to alleviate the tedium of his favourite's period of penance."

Burne-Jones once admitted that after leaving Oxford he "found himself at five-and-twenty what he ought to have been at fifteen". He had had no regular training as a draughtsman, and lacked the confidence of science. But his extraordinary faculty of invention as a designer was already ripening; his mind, rich in knowledge of classical story and medieval romance, teemed with pictorial subjects, and he set himself to complete his set of skills by resolute labour, witnessed by his drawings. The works of this first period are all more or less tinged by the influence of Rossetti; but they are already differentiated from the elder master's style by their more facile though less intensely felt elaboration of imaginative detail. Many are pen-and-ink drawings on vellum, exquisitely finished, of which his Waxen Image (1856) is one of the earliest and best examples. Although the subject, medium and manner derive from Rossetti's inspiration, it is not the hand of a pupil merely, but of a potential master. This was recognised by Rossetti himself, who before long avowed that he had nothing more to teach him.

Burne-Jones's first sketch in oils dates from this same year, 1856, and during 1857 he made for Bradfield College the first of what was to be an immense series of cartoons for stained glass. In 1858 he decorated a cabinet with the Prioress's Tale from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, his first direct illustration of the work of a poet whom he especially loved and who inspired him with endless subjects. Thus early, therefore, we see the artist busy in all the various fields in which he was to labour.

In the autumn of 1857 Burne-Jones joined Morris, Valentine Prinsep, J. R. Spencer Stanhope and others in Rossetti's ill-fated scheme to decorate the walls of the Oxford Union. None of the painters had mastered the technique of fresco, and their pictures had begun to peel from the walls before they were completed. In 1859 Burne-Jones made his first journey to Italy. He saw Florence, Pisa, Siena, Venice and other places, and appears to have found the gentle and romantic Sienese more attractive than any other school. Rossetti's influence persisted, and is visible, more strongly perhaps than ever before, in the two watercolours of 1860, Sidonia von Bork and Clara von Bork. Both paintings illustrate the 1849 gothic novel Sidonia the Sorceress by Lady Wilde, a translation of Sidonia Von Bork: Die Klosterhexe (1847) by Johann Wilhelm Meinhold.

In 1861, William Morris founded the decorative arts firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. with Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown and Philip Webb as partners, together with Charles Faulkner and Peter Paul Marshall, the former of whom was a member of the Oxford Brotherhood, and the latter a friend of Brown and Rossetti. The prospectus set forth that the firm would undertake carving, stained glass, metal-work, paper-hangings, chintzes (printed fabrics), and carpets. The decoration of churches was from the first an important part of the business. The work shown by the firm at the 1862 International Exhibition attracted notice, and later it was flourishing. Two significant secular commissions helped establish the firm's reputation in the late 1860s: a royal project at St. James's Palace and the "green dining room" at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert) of 1867 which featured stained glass windows and panel figures by Burne-Jones.

In 1871 Morris & Co. were responsible for the windows at All Saints, designed by Burne-Jones for Alfred Baldwin, his wife's brother-in-law. The firm was reorganised as Morris & Co. in 1875, and Burne-Jones continued to contribute designs for stained glass, and later tapestries until the end of his career. Nine windows designed by him and made by Morris & Co were installed in Holy Trinity Church in Frome. Stained glass windows in the Christ Church cathedral and other buildings in Oxford are by Morris & Co. with designs by Burne-Jones. Stanmore Hall was the last major decorating commission executed by Morris & Co. before Morris's death in 1896. It was the most extensive commission undertaken by the firm, and included a series of tapestries based on the story of the Holy Grail for the dining room, with figures by Burne-Jones.

In 1891 Jones was elected a member of the Art Workers Guild.

Although known primarily as a painter, Burne-Jones was active as an illustrator, helping the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic to enter mainstream awareness. He designed books for the Kelmscott Press between 1892 and 1898. His illustrations appeared in the following books, among others:

In 1864 Burne-Jones was elected an associate of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours-which is known as the Old Water-Colour Society, and exhibited, among other works, The Merciful Knight, the first picture which fully revealed his ripened personality as an artist. The next six years saw a series of fine watercolours at the same gallery.

In 1866 Mrs Cassavetti commissioned Burne-Jones to paint her daughter, Maria Zambaco, in Cupid finding Psyche, an introduction which led to their tragic affair. In 1870, Burne-Jones resigned his membership following a controversy over his painting Phyllis and Demophoön.

The features of Maria Zambaco were clearly recognisable in the barely draped Phyllis, and the undraped nakedness of Demophoön coupled with the suggestion of female sexual assertiveness offended Victorian sensibilities. Burne-Jones was asked to make a slight alteration, but instead "withdrew not only the picture from the walls, but himself from the Society."

During the next seven years, 1870-1877, only two works of the painter's were exhibited. These were two water-colours, shown at the Dudley Gallery in 1873, one of them being the beautiful Love Among the Ruins, destroyed twenty years later by a cleaner who supposed it to be an oil painting, but afterwards reproduced in oils by the painter. This silent period was, however, one of unremitting production. Hitherto Burne-Jones had worked almost entirely in water-colours. He now began pictures in oils, working at them in turn, and having them on hand. The first Briar Rose series, Laus Veneris, the Golden Stairs, the Pygmalion series, and The Mirror of Venus are among the works planned and completed, or carried far towards completion, during these years. These years mark the beginnings of Burne-Jones's partnership with the fine-art photographer Frederick Hollyer, whose reproductions of paintings and-especially-drawings would expose an audience to Burne-Jones's works in the coming decades.

At last, in May 1877, the day of recognition came, with the opening of the first exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery, when the Days of Creation, The Beguiling of Merlin, and the Mirror of Venus were all shown. Burne-Jones followed up the signal success of these pictures with Laus Veneris, the Chant d'Amour, Pan and Psyche, and other works, exhibited in 1878. Most of these pictures are painted in brilliant colours. A change is noticeable the next year, 1879, in the Annunciation and in the four pictures making up the second series of Pygmalion and the Image; the former of these, one of the simplest and most perfect of the artist's works, is subdued and sober; in the latter a scheme of soft and delicate tints was attempted, not with entire success. A similar temperance of colours marks The Golden Stairs, first exhibited in 1880. The almost sombre Wheel of Fortune was shown in 1883, followed in 1884 by King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, in which Burne-Jones once more indulged his love of gorgeous colour, refined by the period of self-restraint. He next turned to two important sets of pictures, The Briar Rose and The Story of Perseus, although these were not completed.

Burne-Jones was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1885, and the following year he exhibited uniquely at the Academy, showing The Depths of the Sea, a painting of a mermaid carrying down with her a youth whom she has unconsciously drowned in the impetuosity of her love. This picture adds to the habitual haunting charm a tragic irony of conception and a felicity of execution which give it a place apart among Burne-Jones's works. He formally resigned his Associateship in 1893. One of the Perseus series was exhibited in 1887, two more in 1888, with The Brazen Tower, inspired by the same legend. In 1890 the second series of The Legend of Briar Rose were exhibited by themselves, and won the admiration. The huge watercolour, The Star of Bethlehem, painted for the corporation of Birmingham, was exhibited in 1891. A long illness for a time checked the painter's activity, which, when resumed, was much occupied with decorative schemes. An exhibition of his work was held at the New Gallery in the winter of 1892-1893. To this period belong his comparatively few portraits. In 1894 Burne-Jones was made a baronet. Ill-health again interrupted the progress of his works, chief among which was the vast Arthur in Avalon. In the winter following his death a second exhibition of his works was held at the New Gallery, and an exhibition of his drawings (including some of the charmingly humorous sketches made for children) at the Burlington Fine Arts Club.

In 1894, theatrical manager and actor Henry Irving commissioned Burne-Jones to design sets and costumes for the Lyceum Theatre production of King Arthur by J. Comyns Carr, who was Burne-Jones's patron and the director of the New Gallery as well as a playwright. The play starred Irving as King Arthur and Ellen Terry as Guinevere, and toured America following its London run. Burne-Jones accepted the commission with enthusiasm, but was disappointed with much of the final result. He wrote confidentially to his friend Helen Mary Gaskell (known as May), "The armour is good-they have taken pains with it ... Perceval looked the one romantic thing in it ... I hate the stage, don't tell-but I do."

Burne-Jones's paintings were one strand in the evolving tapestry of Aestheticism from the 1860s through the 1880s, which considered that art should be valued as an object of beauty engendering a sensual response, rather than for the story or moral implicit in the subject matter. In many ways this was antithetical to the ideals of Ruskin and the early Pre-Raphaelites. Burne-Jones's aim in art is best given in his own words, written to a friend:

I mean by a picture a beautiful, romantic dream of something that never was, never will be - in a light better than any light that ever shone - in a land no one can define or remember, only desire - and the forms divinely beautiful - and then I wake up, with the waking of Brynhild. No artist was ever more true to his aim. Ideals resolutely pursued are apt to provoke the resentment of the world, and Burne-Jones encountered, endured and conquered an extraordinary amount of angry criticism. Insofar as this was directed against the lack of realism in his pictures, it was beside the point. The earth, the sky, the rocks, the trees, the men and women of Burne-Jones are not those of this world; but they are themselves a world, consistent with itself, and having therefore its own reality. Charged with the beauty and with the strangeness of dreams, it has nothing of a dream's incoherence. Yet it is a dreamer always whose nature penetrates these works, a nature out of sympathy with struggle and strenuous action. Burne-Jones's men and women are dreamers too. It was this which, more than anything else, estranged him from the age into which he was born. But he had an inbred "revolt from fact" which would have estranged him from the actualities of any age. That criticism seems to be more justified which has found in him a lack of such victorious energy and mastery over his materials as would have enabled him to carry out his conceptions in their original intensity. Yet Burne-Jones was singularly strenuous in production. His industry was inexhaustible, and needed to be, if it was to keep pace with the constant pressure of his ideas. Whatever faults his paintings may have, they have always the fundamental virtue of design; they are always pictures. His designs were informed with a mind of romantic temper, apt in the discovery of beautiful subjects, and impassioned with a delight in pure and variegated colour.

In 1881 Burne-Jones received an honorary degree from Oxford, and was made an Honorary Fellow in 1882. In 1885 he became the President of the Birmingham Society of Artists. At about that time he began hyphenating his name, merely-as he wrote later-to avoid "annihilation" in the mass of Joneses. In November 1893, he was approached to see if he would accept a Baronetcy on the recommendation of the outgoing Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, the following February he legally changed his name to Burne-Jones He was formally created a baronet of Rottingdean, in the county of Sussex, and of the Grange, in the parish of Fulham, in the county of London in the baronetage of the United Kingdom on 3 May 1894, but remained unhappy about accepting the honour, which disgusted his socialist friend Morris and was scorned by his equally socialist wife Georgiana. Only his son Philip, who mixed with the set of the Prince of Wales and would inherit the title, truly wanted it.

Morris died in 1896, and the health of the devastated Burne-Jones declined substantially. In 1898 he suffered an attack of influenza, and had apparently recovered when he was again taken suddenly ill, and died on 17 June 1898. Six days later, at the intervention of the Prince of Wales, a memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey. It was the first time an artist had been so honoured. Burne-Jones was buried in the churchyard at St Margaret's Church, Rottingdean, a place he knew through summer family holidays.

Elected member of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium in 1897.

Burne-Jones exerted a considerable influence on French painting. He was influential among French symbolist painters, from 1889. His work inspired poetry by Swinburne - Swinburne's 1866 Poems & Ballads is dedicated to Burne-Jones.

Three of Burne-Jones's studio assistants, John Melhuish Strudwick, T. M. Rooke and Charles Fairfax Murray, went on to successful painting careers. Murray later became an important collector and respected art dealer. Between 1903 and 1907 he sold a great many works by Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelites to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, at far below their market worth. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery now has the largest collection of works by Burne-Jones in the world, including the massive watercolour Star of Bethlehem, commissioned for the Gallery in 1897. The paintings are believed by some to have influenced the young J. R. R. Tolkien, then growing up in Birmingham.

Burne-Jones was also a very strong influence on the Birmingham Group of artists, from the 1890s onwards.

On 16 June 1933, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, a nephew of Burne-Jones, officially opened the centenary exhibition featuring Burne-Jones's drawings and paintings at the Tate Gallery in London. In his opening speech at the exhibition, Baldwin expressed what the art of Burne-Jones stood for:

In my view, what he did for us common people was to open, as never had been opened before, magic casements of a land of faery in which he lived throughout his life ... It is in that inner world we can cherish in peace, beauty which he has left us and in which there is peace at least for ourselves. The few of us who knew him and loved him well, always keep him in our hearts, but his work will go on long after we have passed away. It may give its message in one generation to a few or in other to many more, but there it will be for ever for those who seek in their generation, for beauty and for those who can recognise and reverence a great man, and a great artist.

But, in fact, long before 1933, Burne-Jones was hopelessly out of fashion in the art world, much of which soon preferred the major trends in Modern art, and the exhibit marking the 100th anniversary of his birth was a sad affair, poorly attended. It was not until the mid-1970s that his work began to be re-assessed and once again acclaimed. Penelope Fitzgerald published a biography of him in 1975, her first book. A major exhibit in 1989 at the Barbican Art Gallery, London (in book form as: John Christian, The Last Romantics, 1989), traced Burne-Jones's influence on the next generation of artists, and another at Tate Britain in 1997 explored the links between British Aestheticism and Symbolism.

A second lavish centenary exhibit - this time marking the 100th anniversary of Burne-Jones's death - was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1998, before travelling to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Fiona MacCarthy, in a review of Burne-Jones's legacy, notes that he was "a painter who, while quintessentially Victorian, leads us forward to the psychological and sexual introspection of the early twentieth century".

Early works

The Grosvenor Gallery years

The Legend of Briar Rose (second series)

Later works

The Burne-Jones and Morris families in the garden at the Grange, 1874, photograph by Frederick Hollyer

1. ^ Ward, Thomas Humphry (1901). "Burne-Jones, Edward Coley" . Dictionary of National Biography (1st supplement). London: Smith, Elder & Co.

2. (Subscription or ^ Newall, Christopher. "Jones, Sir Edward Coley Burne-, first baronet (1833-1898)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/4051. UK public library membership required.)

3. Mackail, John William (1901). "Morris, William (1834-1896)" . Dictionary of National Biography (1st supplement). London: Smith, Elder & Co.

4. ^ Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Burne-Jones, Sir Edward Burne". Encyclopædia Britannica. 4 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 848-850.

5. ^ Edward Burne-Jones Archived 24 July 2006 at the Wayback Machine Southgate Green Association "His work included both stained-glass windows for Christ Church in Oxford and the stained glass windows for Christ Church on Southgate Green."

6. ^ PreRaphaelite Painting and Design Archived 14 October 2008 at the Wayback Machine University of Texas

7. ^ "Miss Terry as Guinevere; In a Play by Comyns Carr, Dressed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones". The New York Times. 5 November 1895.

8. ^ Index biographique des membres et associés de l'Académie royale de Belgique (1769-2005). p 44

9. "The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Watts: Symbolism in Britain 1860-1910". Archived from the original on 28 March 2006.

10. ^ Bracken, Pamela (4 March 2006). "Echoes of Fellowship: The PRB and the Inklings". Conference paper, C. S. Lewis & the Inklings.

11. ^ "Centenary exhibition of Sir Edward Burne-Jones at London Tate Gallery". The Straits Times. 24 July 1933. p. 6.

Arscott, Caroline. William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press (Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art), 2008). ISBN 978-0-300-14093-4.

Mackail, J. W. (1899). The Life of William Morris in two volumes. London, New York and Bombay: Longmans, Green and Co. Volume I and Volume II (1911 reprint)

Mackail, J. W. (1901). "Morris, William (1834-1896)" . In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography (1st supplement). 3. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 197-203.

Marsh, Jan, Jane and May Morris: A Biographical Story 1839-1938, London, Pandora Press, 1986 ISBN 0-86358-026-2.

Marsh, Jan, Jane and May Morris: A Biographical Story 1839-1938 (updated edition, privately published by author), London, 2000.

Robinson, Duncan (1982). William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and the Kelmscott Chaucer. London: Gordon Fraser.

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Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet, (; 28 August 1833 - 17 June 1898) was a British artist and designer associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked with William Morris on decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.

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This was a good one on how languages are more than means of communication but are also an inseparable part of culture...I was fascinated by the way the two guests related to the Russian language...

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subscribe to Rough Translation podcast

subscribe to Rough Translation podcast

Vladimir Putin has spent years turning Russianness into a weapon. Restoring Russian greatness, protecting Russian speakers, reuniting the Russian world: these have provided a rationale for military aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere. Now, many Russian speakers (in the US and other places) are seeking to distance themselves not only from Putin, but from Putin's Russia.

In this episode we bring you conversations with Russian speakers from the diaspora who are rethinking their relationship to their languages and identities.

First, we talk to Victoria and Michael Drob, founders of a Facebook group for Russian-speaking parents, about what they learned when they tried to take "Russian" out of the name.

Then, we bring you a conversation with Maria Reva and Michael Idov, two writers who are questioning their use of the Russian language as a cultural bridge.

Reva is a Ukrainian-Canadian writer whose short story collection, Good Citizens Need Not Fear, was a finalist for the 2020 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Her op-ed "On Loving and Hating Russian, My Mother Tongue" was published in The Globe and Mail.

Idov, born in Latvia, is an American screenwriter, novelist and director who lives in Los Angeles. He was the former editor-in-chief for GQ in Russia, and has written for Russian television. His latest article for Vanity Fair was "Language Is Never The Enemy": Why I Will Not Write In Russian As Long As Putin Is In Power.

For the latest coverage of the war in Ukraine, listen to NPR's State of Ukraine.

Read Reva's story collection, set in an apartment building in Ukraine before and after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Idov also wrote the screenplay for the Palm d'Or-nominated film, Leto. Watch the trailer here.

Send us an email at roughtranslation@npr.org.

Listen to Rough Translation wherever you get your podcasts, including NPR One, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and RSS.

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subscribe to Rough Translation podcast subscribe to Rough Translation podcast Vladimir Putin has spent years turning Russianness into a weapon. Restoring Russian greatness, protecting Russian speakers, reuniting the Russian world: these have provided a rationale for military aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere.

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Maybe more secret message than translation...?

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Maybe more secret message than translation...?

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There are some interesting attempts to interpret the use of the letter Z in Russian graffiti related to the nation's invasion of Ukraine...

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Messages featuring the letter "Z" have spread widely across social media since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Billboards have recently popped up in Russian cities featuring the letter. Stickers have appeared on cars and commercial vehicles. Russia's state-owned RT is currently selling T-shirts on its website in apparent support of the ongoing conflict.

But the origins of the symbol remain a mystery.

Prior to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the letter "Z" was seen painted on tanks as well as other military vehicles massing near the border. With both countries using similar tanks and trucks, it was originally thought this was meant to distinguish different units to help prevent friendly fire and assist with mobilization.

Some speculate that the "Z" could stand for "zapad," which means west in Russian. Some have snidely suggested that the symbol stands for other words such as "zhopa," meaning ass in a reference to stiff Ukrainian resistance. The letter does not appear in the Cyrillic alphabet used by both Russia and Ukraine.

The Instagram account of the Russian Ministry of Defense has featured both "Z" and "'V" symbols with messages of " to victory" and " we finish wars." Another message states " we are responsible for the world/peace." The black-and-orange ribbons that make up the "Z" are St. George's ribbons, which are symbols of remembrance of Russians who died during World War II similar to the U.K.'s usage of the poppy for the fallen during World War I. Russia has repeatedly framed its invasion of Ukraine as defending its people from neo-Nazis although Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish.

It's not uncommon for military vehicles to feature markings to help both soldiers and their commanders organize during the chaos of combat - one of the most famous markings being that of the red cross or red crescent to discern medical vehicles.

Regardless of its original military meaning, "Z" has become a symbol for support of Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine both at home and abroad.

Russian gymnast Ivan Kuliak is facing disciplinary action by the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) after taping the symbol to his uniform in place of the banned Russian flag at a gymnastics World Cup event in Qatar. Kuliak was standing next to Ukrainian Illia Kovtun. The FIG has since banned both Russian and Belarusians athletes from competing in its events.

A widely spread image shows patients and staff of a children's hospice forming the symbol in a snow-covered courtyard in Kazan, the capital and largest city of Tatarstan a semi-autonomous republic in Russia.

A video with over a million views has spread online showing people waving the Russian flag behind a group wearing hoodies bearing the symbol.

"The task of our troops now is to tighten the noose around the neck of fascism. To finally end the 8-year war of terror in Donbas," a man in the video says. "Get to work, brothers! For Russia. For the president. FOR RUSSIA FOR PUTIN!'

It's still unclear if the recent swell of support is a coordinated attempt by the Russian government to coalesce the country behind its war-fighting efforts or an organic expression of public backing.

Russia is currently facing some of the harshest sanctions levied against a country in modern history, with President Putin equating the financial penalties to a declaration of war.

The symbol has also reportedly been painted on the doors of prominent Russians such as film critic Anton Dolin as well as Pussy Riot member Rita Flores in an apparent attempt at intimidation.

Whether "Z" will continue to represent the conflict is still unknown. But for now, the symbol has become a visual representation of Russia's war in Ukraine.

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The letter Z is becoming a symbol of Russia's war in Ukraine. But what does it mean?

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Messages featuring the letter "Z" have spread widely across social media since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Billboards have recently popped up in Russian cities featuring the letter. Stickers have appeared on cars and commercial vehicles. Russia's state-owned RT is currently selling T-shirts on its website in apparent support of the ongoing conflict.

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We're not going to read it, but you should...

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We're not going to read it, but you should...

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I would feel very bad if I didn't give you a link to this essay - the one everyone reads by Walter Benjamin (and which few people read closely enough to understand...). You'd be hard pressed to find a single essay that has had a greater impact on art making in the 20th century than this. Since art making in the 21st century so far seems to be largely a continuation of art making in the 20th century, it seems that this is still relevant...enjoy!

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The Death of the Author is the Birth of the Reader

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The Death of the Author is the Birth of the Reader

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I mentioned the profoundly influential theory of the death of the author in class today (since Venuti is really talking about it without naming it). Here is an adequate summary...

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" A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would not have written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations."

...is the birth of the reader.

Death of the Author is a concept from mid-20th Century literary criticism; it holds that an author's intentions and biographical facts (the author's politics, religion, etc) should hold no special weight in determining an interpretation of their writing. This is usually understood as meaning that a writer's views about their own work are no more or less valid than the interpretations of any given reader. Intentions are one thing. What was actually accomplished might be something very different. The logic behind the concept is fairly simple: Books are meant to be read, not written, so the ways readers interpret them are as important and "real" as the author's intention. On the flip side, a lot of authors are unavailable or unwilling to comment on their intentions, and even when they are, they don't always make choices for reasons that make sense or are easily explainable to others (or sometimes even to themselves).

Likewise, as some critics note, it is elitist to assume that all artists are intellectuals or they have to be intellectuals, i.e., that works with deep meaning and ideas come only from people who are culturally and philosophically learned, rather than deriving from instinct, observation, creative inspiration, and artistic genius. Many consider this the Shakespeare authorship fallacy, i.e., that because Shakespeare was unlikely to possess the intellectual wherewithal to write his plays, the alderman's son from Stratford cannot have been the author of deep philosophical plays with dazzlingly complex characters. The academic consensus and textual studies overwhelmingly support William Shakespeare as the author and they note that whatever makes the plays deep comes entirely from command of language, stagecraft, and dramatic intuition, and while these skills can be intellectualized they are not innately intellectual, and while there's great depth, power, and meaning to a number of scenes in his plays the reasons for such meaning can vary between appealing to different kinds of audiences, subverting or parodying a convention that had already gotten stale way back then, or simple playfulness.

Although popular amongst postmodern critics, this has some concrete modernist thinking behind it as well, on the basis that the work is all that outlives the author (hence the concept's name) and we can only judge the work by the work itself. The author's later opinions about their work are themselves a form of criticism and analysis, and therefore are not necessarily consistent with what's written unless the author or publisher actively goes back and changes it-and it can still be argued that, since the original work still exists, the author has merely created a different version of it. One critic's understanding of the author's background and opinions is likely to be just as accurate as another's, especially if the author has an idiosyncratic or even anachronistic perspective on their own work. Modernists are more likely to appeal to the similar-yet-different concept of the Intentional Fallacy, which does not discount biographical information or other works by the same author. Playwright Alan Bennett claims he responded to students asking for assistance on analyzing his works as part of their A-Levels to "treat [him] like a dead author, who [is] thus unavailable for comment".

Needless to say, many writers as well as many other critics, don't like this or believe that this view holds true for all authors and all works. Margaret Atwood famously remarked that if the Death of the Author theory became prevalent, then "we [writers] are all in trouble". They also disagree with the implication that the Death of the Author/Birth of the Reader means that all interpretations are equally valid or that a reader's creative sensibility (whether it exists) is equal to that of a writer. Obviously, some writers are more talented and capable than others, and certain works can only be written by certain individuals. The notion also offends writers since it potentially leads to an overvaluing of the intellectual property of their works rather than the creative/legal rights of the author which has a contentious history in much legal and copyright disputes between creators and publishers. J. R. R. Tolkien acknowledged the influence of his experiences on his works (The Lord of the Rings), but he denied that he had written allegory, insisting that his works simply had Applicability; this arguably makes him an early supporter of the Death of the Author, since pointless speculations about an author's allegorical intent are exactly what the concept seeks to avoid, favoring an analysis of the "applicability" of the text itself. On the other hand, Tolkien and his estate are quite protective of his works to ensure that it respects the overall basic intent of his work and restrictive over what filters in adaptations. In his essay "Creative Writing and Daydreaming" Sigmund Freud broached on the concept by noting that writers who work in popular genres tend to create works more reflective of the tensions and desires of the society as a whole than more artistic writers whose works mainly reflect their own sentiments and desires, which was an early attempt at qualifying intentionality in a work of art while also providing nuanced views on which kinds of works and authors display stronger intent than others.

Some people have noted that Roland Barthes, who actually wrote the trope naming essay, probably had to say "No, that's not what I meant at all!" at least once in his lifetime while discussing it. They have a point. In that essay, while discussing a story by Honoré de Balzac through a very close reading, Barthes simply noted how in the act of writing a complex work, Balzac's voice as author diffuses into multiple planes, so that one cannot know from reading closely if the narrative voice, character voice, and plot voice truly expresses the author's perspective; one cannot necessarily extract insight into Balzac's own thoughts, viewpoints, and beliefs from the work through such a reading. For Barthes, the act of writing (and he meant writing only, with no hint as to how this trope applies to other media), allows the author to lose some of his conscious self and that for a work to be enjoyed, a reader has to project some of his own thoughts and views. Barthes' argument was based on close-reading i.e. the scattered random sentences in a story and other bits of detail, Rewatch Bonus and so on, not, as this trope is usually applied, on basic fundamental story beats and major plot points, in which the author's intent is far more conscious and clear. Barthes was challenging the assumption that the author had clear and conscious intentions about every part of his work, but was not proposing that the author had no intentions at all.

Barthes was also discussing a 19th Century author who-while certainly popular-did not write in genres with a vocal fanbase who had questions about everything and a medium to transmit those discussions and views to a wider community. Because fandom and other conventions have grown so much in modern times, prominent authors tend to be interviewed far more often than they might have been in the past, putting greater pressure on them to stay consistent. Some authors, such as Ray Bradbury and William Gibson can't be bothered to stay consistent when talking about the major themes or concepts in their books for more than a few years at a time.

In the case of non-literary media, some critics note that the material nature of the medium and the logistics of production often require some amount of clarity of intent. For instance, for a film to be made, in most cases the director, the cast, and the crew have to know beforehand what the story is, what a scene does, and what choices have to be made in terms of costumes, lighting, and special effects. Producers and others also need to get permissions to shoot scenes in locations and in many cases and oftentimes such permissions depend on the approval of the scene by the location hosts. In such cases, there is less room for the author to be ignorant of the overall intent of their work than in writing and Death of the Author defenses in such cases can be disingenuous, and at times dangerous. For instance, the Nazi film-maker Leni Riefenstahl in the post-war era claimed that her propaganda film Triumph of the Will should be celebrated as a pure work of art independent of its politics and that she didn't really have political intentions in making it. This claim is belied by the obvious logistics of the entire production, the level of state backing needed for the shooting of many scenes, and the fact that it was obviously intended for propaganda purposes. The level of documentation during production-from screenplay drafts, to shooting script, to the different stages of production and editing-are also often documented publicly, with much information on multiple productions noting the variety of subtle and major changes made at different stages. As such, it's quite possible to really arrive at what the intent really is by noting the changes and shifts at multiple stages of productions.

An author at a later moment may come around to rejecting their own work, or express dissatisfaction with certain parts and not others. Hence, "the perfect is the enemy of the good" (i.e., "coulda, woulda, shoulda"). This is why some, but not all, auteur filmmakers oppose the notion of a Director's Cut or in some cases, further alterations of a film after production even by creators, on the grounds that the "real" film will always be the one people saw in cinemas in the year of release, not the ideal film in the director's head. Others note that this is largely a fait accompli since directors in the vast majority of instances do not have a choice in the matter, since very few of them have the legal and fiscal resources to actually do this. This is a given in works where the authors don't hold a copyright and can be replaced, especially Shared Universes; if a writer is fired and replaced by another, anything the old writer has stated in interviews can be (and often is) freely Jossed by the new writer.

There is an Older Than Feudalism example about some Jewish sages having an argument about their law...and ignoring God's interpretation in favor of their own. Because you see, the Torah is not in Heaven. There is another in the Apology of Socrates: Socrates testifies that in his search for a wiser man than himself, he listened to the great poets. He thought their works very fine, but when they tried to explain them, he thought they were hopeless-and that the dumbest spectators around would do a better job. (He took this as proof that their poetic skills were a divine gift rather than an exercise of intellect.) It could be argued, however, that this hypothesis removes the only objective standard by which a text can be said to have a given meaning, or even any meaning at all. For since there are few times one could back up their interpretation of a poem with evidence, this hypothesis reduces all possible interpretations to mere subjective opinions (or at best, educated guesses). It might also be asked that, if it is meaningless for someone to say "That's not what I meant" when talking about any literature they might have written, then how can it be meaningful for any other situation where one might say that? How, for example, could a general criticize an underling for getting something absurd out of a set of instructions he or she may have given them? "Sir/ma'am, what makes you think you know what the orders meant just because you wrote them?"

Bottom line: A) when discussing a fictional work with others, don't expect "Author intended this to be X; therefore, it is X" to be the end of or your entire argument; it's universally expected that interpretations of fiction must at least be backed up with evidence from within the work itself and B) don't try to get out of analyzing a work by treating "ask the author what X means" as the only or even best way to find out what X means - you must search for an answer yourself, young seeker. Writing is the author's job; analyzing the work and drawing conclusions based on it is your job - if the author just gave away the answers every time, where would the fun be in that?

Related tropes include Shrug of God, The Walrus Was Paul (when the author encourages fans and critics to find their own interpretations), and Misaimed Fandom (which is what can happen when they do so). Often the driving force in Fanon Discontinuity where the fans dislike the author's interpretation to the point of ignoring it. This trope can be particularly useful and sometimes even encouraged in regard to tropes like Accidental Aesop, Broken Aesop, Unfortunate Implications, and others; see Warp That Aesop.

This trope does not mean "there is no such thing as canon for a work's events", which is a common misinterpretation of this theory used to justify Canon Defilement. It only proposes that questions not explicitly answered by the text of the work cannot simply be resolved by Word of God or by trying to guess the author's intention. Compare this trope with Applicability and the Fiction Identity Postulate. A somewhat related trope is Word of Dante. Do not confuse this trope with Author Existence Failure, a literal death of the author.

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" A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would not have written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations." ...is the birth of the reader. Death of the Author is a concept from mid-20th Century literary criticism; it holds that an author's intentions and biographical facts (the author's politics, religion, etc) should hold no special weight in determining an interpretation of their writing.

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One of a handful of books we casually referred to in class today...a very good one if you are trying to understand the transformation of storytelling from oral culture to written culture...

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Ths translation of slang, or any language that belongs to an inside group is a special challenge. When a community's words "go viral," they can take on very different meanings than they were initially tasked with...
Two examples of this appeared in the news this week. One addressed the use of the word "woke" by the conservative movement and by white liberals, both of whom have pulled it away from its original meanings in African American political discourse.

The second comes from the widespread use of specific psychological terms in daily life. The authors point out that 'trauma' has specific meaning (and, for that matter, so does "love bombing"). Equating every trauma leaves us little place to turn in language for the powerful experiences the word was coined to help us comprehend.
I know in pointing this out, I am living in a repetitive loop. In my youth, the word awesome became widely used to describe skateboard flips and potato chip flavors, and those who thought it should be reserved for exploding supernovas wrote op-ed pieces saying the world we going to hell. That wouldn't be awesome at all. But I have come to think these curmudgeons were on to something...now we regularly see articles about the importance of experiencing awe regularly. To me, it doesn't matter if it comes in the form of a dying star or an awesome Nollie Backside 360...

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This work came to mind as I watched you drawing in class today...I am a huge fan of Joesph Salavon. Here he takes the movie "Titanic" and averages the colors in each shot to make a color script of the film...a translation of the whole into a slowly shifting palette of greys and golds...

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The Top Grossing Film of All Time, 1 x 1 | The Art Institute of Chicago

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I mentioned to Kati Gegenheimer that y'all had done an exercise translating fraktur and she was pretty excited. She pointed me to painter Amie Cunat, whose work "nods" to fraktur...thought you might be interested...

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This is a good one for cultural competency in translation...

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This is a good one for cultural competency in translation...

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In this essay, the author looks at an idiom (the word "inshallah") and how its use in the context of its original language connotes hope, but its increasing use as a figure of speech in English is as an exasperated outcry. A good short read on what it means to be literate in the source and target languages - enjoy!

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Whatever language you speak, “inshallah” can bring you hope.

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From 1/27/22 - Interlingual Translation Exercises

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From 1/27/22 - Interlingual Translation Exercises

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I think it was in the context of looking at Julianna's work that I starting think of Margaret Kilgallen, whose work often translated mass cultural images into graffiti-style works...she had an amazing visual language, and I invite you to check it out here...

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Margaret Kilgallen was born in 1967 in Washington, DC, and received her BA in printmaking from Colorado College in 1989. Early experiences as a librarian and bookbinder contributed to her encyclopedic knowledge of signs, drawn from American folk tradition, printmaking, and letterpress. Kilgallen had a love of "things that show the evidence of the human hand."

Painting directly on the wall, Kilgallen created room-size murals that recall a time when personal craft and handmade signs were the dominant aesthetic. Strong, independent women-walking, surfing, fighting, and biking-are featured prominently in the artist's compositions.

Her work has been shown at Deitch Projects and the Drawing Room in New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Luggage Store in San Francisco, Forum for Contemporary Art in St. Louis, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Kilgallen's work was presented at UCLA Hammer Museum. She died in June 2001 in San Francisco, where she lived with her husband, Barry McGee.

53:40

Deep Focus

Curator Courtenay Finn reflects on how Margaret Kilgallen's work prioritized female figures-from her various inspirations to her monikers-on both canvas and urban facades.

Interview

Margaret Kilgallen discusses her process, and her personal connections to the heroines featured in her work.

Interview

Margaret Kilgallen discusses her influences and the goals she worked towards in her art.

Artist at Work

24 Images

Artwork Survey: 2000s

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Artwork Survey: 1990s

6 Images

Art21 is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization; all donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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This story has some interesting thoughts about computer code...

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NFTs have brought an onslaught of attention to gifs and other phone-friendly passive media. But not all digital art practices translate easily to singular, collectible assets. Esolangs, programming languages designed as forms of self-expression, are very possibly the least NFT-able digital art. Open ended, community based, and collaborative, they serve as a reminder that digital art has other histories and other futures.

The term esolang is a portmanteau of "esoteric" and "language." It was coined in the 1990s, when hacker-hobbyists began creating odd languages with no practical use. While they had little interest in the art context of their work, they brought a sense of play and conceptual sophistication that feels at home alongside art by the MFA-educated. Then came digital poets and artists who recognized the potential of the medium.

One of the reasons esolangs have remained on the periphery of computational art is that they are programming languages, requiring a certain amount of computer-language literacy to understand and appreciate. It is my goal to make them accessible and worthy of appreciation to the novice and unfamiliar. I offer three entry points drawn from 10 years of interviews I've conducted with practitioners across the spectrum. First up is multicoding, a technique in which multiple meanings can be gleaned from the same text. Next, I explore ethnoprogramming, a recent challenge to the hegemony of English in the text of code. And finally, we turn to conceptual languages, idea-art that runs in our heads, not on our machines.

MULTICODING

Piet, a computer language created by David Morgan-Mar in 1991 and named for Mondrian, is perhaps the canonical example of a multicoding esolang, meaning a language that layers multiple readings of a single text. In the case of Piet, that "text" is not textual at all, but an image that serves as code in the language.

A program in Piet is an image, made up of blocks of color called codels. Each codel is like a letter; in combination, they create a command. A transition from light blue to dark red means "NOT," while moving from red to yellow of similar brightness will tell the machine to "ADD." The program is read from the upper left, but some commands shift its directional flow, allowing serpentine paths through the image.

Piet has become the most well-known multicoding language not only because it is visual, but because of its almost ideal aesthetic elasticity. Piet programs are usually recognizable as such by people familiar with the language. Yet its aesthetic is continually personalized, expanded on, and challenged by the programmers who use it. Some create illustrations where only part of the image functions as Piet, obscuring its programmatic nature. Other programs are strictly utilitarian, without adornment. The most extreme are computer-generated themselves, appearing like bar codes or schematics for complex circuits. Tomas Scoch and Matthias Lutter have used it to make Mondrian-like images for Piet's namesake, while others make heavier use of colors like cyan and magenta eschewed by Mondrian. One of the most astonishing, the Pi program by Richard Mitton ( discussed by Morgan-Mar here) uses the image of a circle to represent a circle in code. It calculates Pi by literally dividing the area of that circle, as drawn in the program, with the square of its radius; the larger (and thus less pixelated) the circle is drawn, the more digits of Pi can be accurately calculated. This combines the lexical and semantic aspects of the circle together in a way that could only be accomplished in Piet.

There was no way for Morgan-Mar to foresee the directions people would take his language. The creator of an esolang begins a conversation with the set of rules demarcated by the language, but it is the programmers who discover its limits and intricacies. One parallel is the Oulipian challenge to write without using the letter E, which we can attempt ourselves or observe the approach of a writer by reading George Perec's novel La Disparition (1969). Similarly, the creative potential of Piet is in the field of possibilities it creates, which we experience through the actual works programmers have created for it.

Where Piet's code is made up of images, in:verse programs generate images or moving content. Its code doubles as poetry. What is unique in in:verse is its variable lexicon: the mapping of vocabulary to command is different for each poem (via a "wordtable"), allowing programmer-poets to finely tune their input and output. To calculate the sine of a number, one program might use the word "alien," while another uses "mushrooms." The most interesting in:verse programs find a resonance between their vocabulary and their visual output. Its creator, Sukanya Aneja, is an engineer and artist who built on some traditions of esolanging (in:verse's stack-based architecture is similar to many early esolangs) while refining it for artistic purposes. Like Piet, it allows individual programmers a lot of control, but each piece is still recognizable as an in:verse work.

Jon Corbett, "The Ancestral Code" programming interface, with an active story "program" (left pane) and an "open feather" code block (right pane) (© Jon Corbett 2021)

ETHNOPROGRAMMING

Jon Corbett's language Cree# is part of a new wave of languages described by theorist Outi Laiti as "ethnoprogramming." Corbett, who is of Métis heritage, is designing the language, which is still in progress, to reflect the language and logic of Métis culture. But before we explore it in detail, some context is helpful.

In his book Critical Code Studies, Mark Marino relates the history of programming languages that incorporate vocabulary from natural language. The source language is nearly always English. He argues that "the prevalence of English in the most widespread contemporary programming languages represents ... a form of digital postcolonialism, or the manifestation of a colonizing force beyond the forms of historical, geographical, or territorial colonialism."

Ethnoprogramming is an active response to the phenomenon that Marino describes. An important precedent for Corbett is Ramsey Nasser's Arabic programming language 'alb. Nasser set out to create a language for Arabic speakers learning to code, but ran into biases embedded in systems he built upon, most of which purport to be universal but had little consideration of non-English use; as a result, his work became a document of that struggle. As he asks in his essay " A Personal Computer for Children of All Cultures," "what is the Pashto translation of AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean?"

Corbett, in making Cree#, wanted to go beyond replacing English keywords (commands like "let" and "print") with Cree keywords in a static list. For one thing, Cree is a morphemic language and he wanted Cree#'s signifiers to hold programmatic meaning at the syllabic level, which is highly unusual in programming languages.

To program in Cree#, we need to understand not only Cree linguistics but also its cultural logic. To declare a variable (which can be thought of as a storage location for data), one must put it in either a mînisiwat, a berry bag, or maskihkîwiwat, a medicine bag. If the variable is everyday or transient, it would go in the berry bag. If it refers to something with cultural significance or sacred meaning, it goes in the maskihkîwiwat. Each time the programmer declares a variable, they decide where it best fits. The closest concept in mainstream languages is that of variable scope, but Corbett is encouraging the programmer to transition to a worldview that is Cree.

To that end, each Cree# program is told in the form of a story, with a set of standard characters and symbolic actions from Métis storytelling tradition, prominently featuring a trickster raven and beginning each program with a gesture of smudging. Corbett also has a variation of Cree# called Ancestral Code, designed not for general-purpose computing, but instead as a visual archive to preserve stories from Cree and Métis Elders. Corbett's nuanced writing about the project examines the difficulties with evaluating what levels of knowledge can be spread more widely and which are meant to remain only within the culture, along with issues of unintentionally incorporating Western views of Indigenous cultures into the language.

Bora Aydıntuğ, "bora_1.png." This screenshot is of a program in in:verse. It shows both the code and the output of that code (the image behind it) (courtesy Bora Aydıntuğ)

CONCEPTUAL LANGUAGES

Is HTML a programming language? This question is raised nearly constantly on Twitter. While it is really a question of what computer labor we value or consider skilled (and let it be said that html/css work is programming and can be quite challenging), the fact that this debate can happen at all points to the fact that there is no clear technical line that demarcates what is or is not a programming language. Occasionally one is attempted by equating programming languages in general with something called Turing Completeness, which roughly means the ability of a language to represent any algorithm runnable on a conventional computer. Turing Completeness is a terrible yardstick not only because of what it excludes but also because it brings in all kinds of things we wouldn't consider programming languages, including, as recently shown, human heart tissue.

For every definition of programming language, there is an esolang that sits at its border. Esolangs blur the line between computing and other activities, much like Fluxus events and interventions did between art and life. George Maciunas's "Solo for a Sick Man" (1962) recoded the involuntary actions of this frequently ill artist as performance. For Maciunas, this was part of his attempt to obliterate everything that had become artificial in art. If we cannot draw a line separating art and life, perhaps the same is true of computation. We see this in the "found" esoteric languages, designed by no one and yet serving as computation; from human heart tissue to Martin Kleppe's JSFuck, an esoteric programming style in JavaScript that uses only punctuation marks. JSFuck was always latent in JavaScript, created by mistake; it took Kleppe to recognize it and show others how it works. Now it is a popular esoteric style.

In the conceptual languages, no programming can occur. Some of these languages are extremely minimalist or maximalist. Perhaps the most minimal is Unnecessary, created in 2005 by a pseudonymous esolanger called Keymaker. For Unnecessary, any content is too much, even an empty file; only the absence of content qualifies as code within the language. The only valid program in the language is the file that doesn't exist. Once that file is (correctly) not found, it is run: its lack of code is interpreted as a command to print the source code of the file to the screen, which results in nothing since there is no file to read, no code to print (this is known as a "null quine"). The creation of nothing from nothing is a successful outcome for Unnecessary.

In contrast, the mathematician David Madore has created a series of transfinite languages that break fundamental laws of computation and can count to the infinite. They do so by running on an infinitely large computer, which can never be built in our physical universe. While no one will ever code in them, they are perfectly valid, well-defined languages.

These conceptual languages do not run on our computers, but in our heads. Other conceptual languages may rely on self-contradictory, or intentionally ambiguous, rules. The language Malbolge, for instance, has a written definition that slightly differs from its representative compiler, both created by Olmstead. Since there is no singular digital asset that defines the language, this contradiction created a schism in the community between those who think the bug is in one or the other. Anyone can create their own Malbolge interpreter that aligns with either.

This is why esolangs are poorly served by the idea of NFTs. Of course, sooner or later, someone will create an NFT of an esolang. But imagine doing so for Piet: would it be tied to the list of rules for the language as defined by Morgan-Mar? To one of the many interpreters and programming environments others have created for Piet programming? Or to any of the thousands of Piet programs?

Part of what makes esolanging exciting is that interchange among many contributors, the knowledge that the language has more to discover. While no one discounts Morgan-Mar as Piet's creator, his work finds its full expression through others' efforts. Likewise, conceptual languages with programs from the infinitely large to the infinitely small challenge the idea of digital objecthood, emphasizing concept, process, and procedure, at the expense of static form. The best esolangs, like much great digital art, are conversations.
Editor's Note: This article is part of a special edition of Hyperallergic devoted to under-recognized art histories.

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NFTs have brought an onslaught of attention to gifs and other phone-friendly passive media. But not all digital art practices translate easily to singular, collectible assets. Esolangs, programming languages designed as forms of self-expression, are very possibly the least NFT-able digital art.

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In class today, in response to Daphne's drawing riffing on Quentin Massys, we had a short conversation about the grotesque, which may be another artistic idiom...I wanted to point toward Umberto Edo's book On Ugliness, which might be something worth looking at (if ugly funny pin boards lose their luster...)

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Perhaps you remember the splash poet Amanda Gorman made when she read her work at the inauguration of President Biden and Vice President Harris. Following that moment, lots of people wanted to read her work..in a lot of languages. And there are lots of questions about the cultural competencies necessary to translate these works. Here is an overview of the argument...

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Aron Aji, a literary translator and professor at the University of Iowa, runs a Facebook group called Literary Translation with more than 4,300 members from 99 countries. For the most part, the group is an active, amiable one in which linguaphiles help one another with translator minutia. A post, for instance, asking for the English equivalent of the French word "banlieusard" yielded 177 responses. (There was no real consensus, but suggestions included "the hood," "projects" and "ghetto.")

But events last month sent the Facebook group - and the little-known, underappreciated world of literary translation - into commotion, resulting in heated exchanges about issues of race and equity in the business.

It stemmed from news regarding the commissioned translations of Amanda Gorman's "The Hill We Climb." After the young Black poet recited her stirring poem at Joe Biden's inauguration in January, the rights were picked up by Penguin Random House, and the poem is set to be translated into more than a dozen languages.

In March, news broke that two of Gorman's selected translators would no longer be working on the project. The Dutch translator, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, stepped aside after critics questioned why someone with an identity closer to Gorman's was not selected. Shortly after, Gorman's Catalan translator, Victor Obiols, was informed his completed translation would not be used, because, as a White man, he "was not suitable to translate it," he told Agence France-Presse.

White translator removed from Amanda Gorman poem, amid controversy in Europe

"The upper echelon of the translation industry or the translation market quickly fixed the problem, right? Pull somebody out, put somebody in," said Aji, who translates from his native Turkish to English. "They're already done with this, but we are now churning inside ourselves."

On his Facebook group, Aji found himself moderating as he never had before. There were 1,600 comments within a week, a handful toxic enough that he removed them. Debates ensued about whether the choice of a translator should be only merit-based or whether identity should play a part. Another thread was about publisher practices and how translators are chosen. Some White translators who have spent their careers translating writers of color into other languages questioned their own pursuits.

"They asked: Am I not supposed to be doing this? Am I wrong?" Aji said.

Achy Obejas, a Cuban American translator, said that although there are no easy answers, there is also no question that a translator's identity has an impact on the translation.

A few years ago, she discovered a Spanish translation of Toni Morrison's "Beloved" published by DeBolsillo and bought the $5.99 Kindle version; the word "slave" is translated as "serviente" - "servant." The n-word is rendered as "negros," or "blacks."

"That is major," Obejas said. "That is not a detail. That is not a minor point." Moreover, Obejas found that Morrison's African American vernacular was completely erased in the Spanish translation.

"There's no possibility of understanding from hearing these characters talk that they're Black, and this is so essential to any Toni Morrison story," she said. The book names no translator, but someone who had more familiarity with the Black communities of the Spanish-speaking world may have better preserved Morrison's voice, Obejas said.

Obejas, who was sought out by writer Junot Díaz to translate his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2007 novel, " The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, " said she thinks carefully before taking on a project, assessing first whether she can do the translation authentically.

"You may be utterly fluent in Spanish. You may be a master speaker. You may be a member of the Royal Academy. Doesn't matter," she said. "It doesn't mean that you can translate a book featuring Peruvian drag queens."

Díaz, who is Dominican American and of African descent and reads Spanish fluently, said that he liked the Spanish translation of his first book, a story collection, but knew he wanted a Caribbean translator for "Oscar Wao."

"I said, listen, I want a Caribbean. They can be from Jamaica, they can be from Puerto Rico, but it has to be someone who has lived the Caribbean experience," he said. "An immigrant, all the better. A person of African descent, all the best."

While working on the book, Obejas listened to Dominican talk radio daily and consulted Díaz and Dominican friends about specifics. The translation, Díaz said, was a successful one.

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A good translation conveys the "untranslatables," or what is being conveyed without actually being explicitly written, Díaz said. "What I'm always looking for is someone who has the depth that comes from experience."

Unlike Díaz, most authors have no control over selecting their translators. The rights are sold, and the publisher abroad handles the rest. Writer R.O. Kwon, who is Korean American, said she loves the idea of people closer to her identity translating her work, though the task of identifying someone might be challenging.

"Finding a translator who is Korean Polish is less likely," she said. "That said, I love it. Maybe that's something with the next book I'll say, just find someone."

One of the major publishers of translated literature is Amazon Crossing, which since its launch in 2010 has published 400 books by authors from 44 countries writing in 26 languages. (Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

"It's always wonderful when the translator has a personal connection to the creative project," said Gabriella Page-Fort, editorial director at Amazon Crossing. French English translator Lara Vergnaud, who was born in Tunisia and raised in the United States, connected with her family roots while translating Yamen Manai's novel " The Ardent Swarm," Page-Fort said.

Ilan Stavans, the publisher of Restless Books, a small publishing house that focuses on translating world literature for English-speaking audiences, said translators should be selected based on sensibilities, not their identity.

"In fact, to me that seems to be antithetical to the very approach of translation," said Stavans, himself a translator. "Translation is an attempt to bridge beyond identity, beyond cultures, bringing someone, something that is very different from us into our own ecosystem."

Still, he agreed that it is important to provide opportunities to translators from underrepresented groups.

And the very White landscape of literary translation in the United States is something that no one can deny. A recent survey by the American Literary Translators Association found that, out of 362 responding members, 73 percent of translators identified as White.

"The reasons for that are structural," said Elisabeth Jaquette, a translator and the executive director of the association, pointing to an industry that does not tend to pay well. "White translators who are in positions of privilege can take on unpaid work at the beginning to make a name for themselves."

This puts heritage speakers - those who might acquire language skills informally through their immigrant parents - and translators of color at a disadvantage.

This gap makes itself apparent in the formal pathways to translation. Since 2015, the master's program in literary translation at the University of Iowa has offered a diversity fellowship but, in the fellowship's history, only one student - an Asian American - has availed of it, even though Aji, who directs the program, advertises the fellowship as widely as he can, including on his Literary Translation Facebook group. This coming fall, an African American student will hold the fellowship for the first time.

In the fall of 2022, Aji and his colleagues will also launch a free-standing bachelor's program in literary translation at Iowa. Currently, most American universities that offer literary translation at the bachelor's level do so only through a certificate or a minor.

Aji and his colleagues plan to recruit at high schools across Iowa and other places where he says there is an untapped market of future translators - the children of immigrants.

"Many of them are first-generation American students," Aji said. "They have been serving as amateur translators to their families, taking them to the hospital or doctor or driver's-license exam. Translation is not unknown to them - it comes naturally."

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Who should translate Amanda Gorman's work? That question is ricocheting around the translation industry.

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Aron Aji, a literary translator and professor at the University of Iowa, runs a Facebook group called Literary Translation with more than 4,300 members from 99 countries. For the most part, the group is an active, amiable one in which linguaphiles help one another with translator minutia.

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Here is a link to the story we talked about in the New York Times yesterday. Thanks to Emily for point it out. It's an excellent account of the intersemiotic translation of Frank O'Hara's poem In Memory of My Feelings into a painting by Jasper Johns. Heartbreaking...

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How a Gray Painting Can Break Your Heart (Published 2022)

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This austere work by Jasper Johns doesn’t seem to invite much of a close read. But its cool surface belies a depth of feeling, which shows us all the power of artistic restraint.

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This is a great opportunity for Tyler students to show they are engaged in serious and creative research. If you are interested in this, let me know and we'll formulate a plan to get your first translation fast tracked in such a way as to make the best case...though it might be better for juniors to put it on next year's docket...

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Research Guides: Livingstone Undergraduate Research Awards: Home

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Honors the best research projects produced each year by Temple University undergraduates.

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https://www.visualcapitalist.com/from-greek-to-latin-visualizing-the-evolution-of-the-alphabet/

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"In an 1813 lecture on the different methods of translation, [German theologian and philosopher Friedrich] Schleiermacher argued that 'there are only two. Either the translator leave the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him' [...] Schleiermacher allowed the translator to choose between a domesticating method, a ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target language cultural values, bringing the author back home, and a foreignizing method, an ethno-deviant pressure on those values to register the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad.

Laurence Venuti, The Translator's Invisibility, 19-20

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I see translation as the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it doesn't seem to be translated. A good translation is like a pane of glass. You only notice that it's there when there are little imperfections - scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn't be any. It should never call attention to itself.

Norman Schapiro, qtd in Laurence Venuti, The Translator's Invisibility, p. 1

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Poesie is of such subtle a spirit that in pouring out of one Language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a caput mortuum

John Denham (1656) qtd. in Laurence Venuto, The Translator's Invisibility, 49)

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[...] when you translate, you're not expressing yourself. Your performing a technical stunt [...] I realized that the translator and the actor had to have the same kind of talent. What they both do is to take something of someone else's and put it over as their own. I think you have to have that capacity. So in addition to the technical stunt, there is a psychological workout, which translation involves: something like being on stage. It does something entirely different from what I think of as creative poetry writing

Lawrence Venuti, The Translator's Invisibility, 7

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[Joseph Schillinger] basically copied the fluctuations of the stock market curve as they appeared in the New York Times and, by translating the ups and downs into proportional musical intervals, showed that he could obtain a composition somewhat similar to those of the great Johann Sebastian Bach

Mario Livio, The Golden Ratio, 193

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[La Disparition by George Perec] has been translated into English (three times) Dutch, German, Romanian, Spanish and Swedish. But it is a misnomer to suggest that it has been 'translated.' The novel must be adapted and affectively rewritten by each translator since many key terms in the original may not be able to be translated because an 'e' appears in the corresponding word in the new language.

Laurence de Looze, The Letter and the Cosmos, 148

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Peter, the venerable abbot of the Reformed Benedictine monastery at Cluny [...] from 122 to 1156, commissioned Europe's first translation of the Arab Qur'an, which a team of Christian scholars (working together with a Muslim and a Jew) completed between 1140 and 1143. In this age of the crusades, Peter wished such a translation to be able to refute the holy scripture of Christianity's rivals in a manner more judicious"

Steven Roger Fisher, A History of Reading, 179

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[John] Ashberry described these curious little works [in a series called 'Translations' by Jess] as 'literal translations of old illustrations and snapshots into a strange medium [...]

Jed Perl, New Art City, 299

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"[...] translating is in no way the art of every man, as the mad saints assert; it belongs to a just, pious, true, diligent, timid, Christian, learned, experienced, skilled heart"

Steven Roger Fisher, A History of Reading, 228

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Most Americans [...] have trouble accepting the truth [...] can be converted from one medium to another. It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value. Much prose translates fairly well from one language to another, but we know that poetry does not; we may get a rough idea of the sense of the translated poem but usually everything else is lost, especially that which makes it an object of beauty. Translation makes it into something it was not.

Neil Postman, Amusing ourselves to death, 117

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Translations leave in their wake a dust cloud of images that have a life of their own and may combine with each other according to a kind of logic that is far beyond the acronym or rebus.

Massimo Scolari, Oblique Drawing, 53

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When complex ideas pass through so many lenses of language, distortion are inevitable.

Peter Hessler, Talk like an Egyptian, 51

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Goethe called translators

busy go-betweens paising as adorable a beauty only glimpsed through veils; they provoke an irresistible desire in us for the original

JD MacClatchy, Sweet Theft

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"The mathematicians are a sort of Frenchman: When you talk to them, they immediately translate it into their own language and right away it is something entirely different"

Mario Livio, quoting Goethe, The Golden Ratio p.196

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I haven't taught Advanced Painting since I was in Rome and I am excited to be doing a focussed studio on translation this semester. It's a subject I have been interested in this for a long time, and look forward to talking about it with you and seeing how these ideas impact your work..look forward to meeting you Tuesday, January 11!

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Paulo Ventura is an Italian artist born in Milan. His final works are concedered photographs, however they begin as sculptures and drawings. Ventura creates a diarama and uses special effects to photograph it like a scene oceriring in the preset. The photographs all do something the sculptures could not accomplish on their own, such as incorporating fog, fire and floating. Ventura often displays the sculptures, drawings and photographs together. Although the gallery is dominated (of course) by the photographs. This work is strikingly about memory, as the photographs reach toard a moment that feels uncannily fleeting and freezes it in time. This forces the viewer to linger on another persons memory. With the different formats the work exists in the past, present and the future (the future beings the drawings).

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I was talking to Emilia about some drawings that reminded me of Marcel Dzama and I wanted to share them around. They have storybook quality that is quite attractive, but filtered through what the Brooklyn rail describes as a "scrappy collage aesthetic, intimate and raunchily sensuous" aesthetic...

With the example, I am not talking about the imagery so much as how the paint gets put down. A kind of matter-of-factness characterizes these absurd drawings...which seems strangely appropriate to visions and memories.

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There has been a dramatic uptick in the use of embroidery in the studio this semester...so I just wonder if everyone is familiar with the of Ghada Amer...Hopefully, you'll enjoy it.

I want to direct your attention t the way loose threads work in many of her paintings...creating looping lines that meander and connect parts of images...

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Ye Jin was talking about textiles from Korea and that led to a little discussion of what it it to be 'form' someplace. This was brilliantly explored in a recent exhibit at the PMA - Vlisco: African Fashion on a Global Stage. If you missed the show, not worries - there is a great catalog and a lot of writing about the intersection of global commerce and textiles...looking forward to what comes of this...

This conversation also extended to artists who are talking about national characteristics but who may not be part of the list of usual suspects for contemporary art. One of my favorite in that category is Korean artist Lee Bul, but I invited suggestions of other artists, please, send them along as comments!

Finally, we were talking about identity - specifically Asian american identity in contemporary art and this book, Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes by Elaine H. Kim, Margo Machida, Sharon Mizota, is a good introduction for those who want to get a sense of who's who in this exciting area of contemporary art.

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Memory, not monument 5: What is tht doing here?

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Memory, not monument 5: What is tht doing here?

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When I walked into the conference room at the Foro Italia, home of the International Olympic Committee, I was stopped in my tracks by huge murals depicting the glories of fascism under Mussolini, who famously began construction on the buildings in this huge sports complex in the late 1920.

What are they doing there?!? These mural just seem so horrendously wrong and out of place. And maybe that's exactly what they are doing there is reminding us just how nuts things can get...

The contrast chsrply with another fascist era landmark, the Casa Madre dei Mutilati ed Invalidi di Guerra, where Mussulini appeared in another mural. Rather than leave him there, painters covered his bald head with hair and gave him a  beard.

How a nation deals with its past is a huge question...the sort of question painting used to be made for.

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Turning from images of memory to the techniques of painting and how they reveal and conceal memory, it's time to consider the pentimento.

Pentimenti are images that were painted over that become visible over time as paint becomes more transparent or other chemical changes take place (some are not visible without technological assistance, in the Van Eyck example below...

What's great about this is the use of the material as a metaphor for memory...for its persistence, and its failure. It recalls an earlier time when artists were deeply knowledgeable about their materials. Read about it in Legend Myth and Magic in the image of the Artist by Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz.

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Memory, not monuments 3: The Birth of a Discipline

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Memory, not monuments 3: The Birth of a Discipline

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Felice Giani (1758-1823) may not be a name that comes to mind form your art history classes, but here's a winner. Giani reflects on an ancient myth about the origins of painting in this image. The story goes that a Corinthian maid so loved her beau, who was to leave her for a war or some such thing, that she wanted to keep a trace of him. So that what she did...trace his shadow on her wall and fill it in. Variations of the story have her inventing low-relief sculpture, but we'll keep with the one we like best...the one where painting and drawing are invented to fulfill the need for closeness and memory of a loved one.

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Memory, not monument 2: The Paper Memorial

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Memory, not monument 2: The Paper Memorial

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Painting gets all the air time. Let's talk about drawing for a minute.

Well, not exactly drawing...a crazy print by Albrecht Durer that really stuck in mind when I was formulating this exercise...Durer's Monumental Arch for Maximilian I (1522) was more than 8 feet high and entailed nearly 200 wood blocks worth of work.
Most emperors built themselves real marble arches, but not Maximilian I! He understood the propaganda power of the image and how these huge prints would shape his image in the minds of far-flung subjects. Think of it as a wheat paste graffiti campaign for the high Renaissance...

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I've been seeing these memorial markers all over town and they are among the most powerful I've seen anywhere. The all begin Qui abitava... (here lived...) and provide the name, date of birth, and known fate of an individual. Easily overlooked, they have the scale of the common paving blocks used on many Roman streets (though these examples are embedded in asphalt) and they recall Jewish citizens of Rome who lost their homes and, in many cases their lives, in the Holocaust of World War II. Though not strictly painting, they offer a way to think about the final assignment and its relation to the past

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Perilously close to our last assignment - the diptych - this approach, like that of Soane, uses time. But Giovani Paolo Panini makes more of a game of it in his pictures of Ancient Rome and Modern Rome.

Panini (could there be a better name for a painter of Roman subjects?) described galleries of images that reflected the modern and ancient visions of the Eternal City. At first glance, the paintings are strikingly...similar. But then you start to notice the paintings within the paintings, and what they say about the subject...maybe you connect to the differing qualities of light...the gloom of the past or the radiance of the modern. At any rate, each painting turns the other into a hide and go seek game, using parallelism to exchange comments between them.

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art, i.e. The Met Museum

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Giovanni Paolo Panini | Modern Rome | The Met

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In 1749, Giovanni Paolo Panini painted a large canvas depicting Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga surrounded by his collection of pictures (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford). Each painting in the cardinal's collection was placed within an imaginary architectural setting of a grand gallery space

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Pendants 4: This painting explains that painting

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Pendants 4: This painting explains that painting

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Tyler undergrad alumna Ankoa Faruqee is one of my all time favorite artists. I have followed her work for years and had the good fortune of working with her in grad school when she was teaching at SAIC.

Nowadays, her paintings are supercomplex technical achievements, but they used to just be really really complex. In the late 90s, the period I want to focus on, they started with the careful observation of the color changes to a piece of fruit or a flower over a period of time. She would watch her subject -a piece of fruit for example -  transform over time from unripe to ripe to rotten, charting a course in color that would guide her through her abstraction, pattern-based works.

These paintings were hard to talk about - so process driven. But to focus on the process took some of the poetry out of them. But it also couldn't be ignored; people wanted to know where these amazing spectra had come from. Anoka hit on a brilliant idea - for a short while, she would paint a small canvas or panel with the range of colors used in the final work and hang it, like a label, next to the larger work. I recall her once describing these as like 'titles' that didn't have words.

This is a great inspiration for this project, but it is also a clear hierarchy in which one painting serves another. What do you need to serve your paintings?

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Anoka Faruqee is a painter who lives and works in New Haven, CT and Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited her work in the US and abroad, including Leo Koenig Gallery (New York), Hosfelt Gallery (San Francisco), the PS1 Museum (Queens), and Albright-Knox Gallery (Buffalo).

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John Soane had a vision for the Bank of England, and by today's standards, it was weird.

The English neo-classical architect thought the Bank of England should be a monument - for all time. So not only did he draw up the renderings and plans necessary to sell the idea to the patrons of the bank, he also produced images of what the bank would look like in ruins to show how noble it would be.

So this is another form of extending the work - imagining its future. Imagining what the subject will become as time passes...imagining the impact of the work on the world.

Oh wait...how do you become the architect of the Bank of England? Well, some folks think it helped to have gone on the Grand Tour with Richard Bosanquet, whose brother was the bank director. Don't remember the Grand Tour from Art History? Look it up!

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In 1830, at the peak of his career, John Soane made an exhibition of his work in the Royal Academy of London. For it, he put Gandy in charge of a perspective of the Bank of England in ruins. This was possibly his most important and famous work.

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In 1995, David Salle was beginning to feel a chill. He had been one of the hottest painters of the 80s, and his work was in all the right collections, but he was getting less and less attention as a new generation of more conceptual and political artists overtook the painterly, neo-expressionist school of which he was a member.

So it probably looked like a good idea when, after completing Comedy, he had the idea to make another, closely relating painting of Tragedy.

And so here is another idea of the pendant - the painting that needs a partner, an opposite number, another idea to counterweight it. This could be being thorough, or it could be maximizing your earnings.

You decide.

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When David Salle emerged on the art scene in the early 1980s, his often oblique work was set squarely within the critical definition of postmodernism by virtue of its art-historical references and ambiguous combinations of original and appropriated imagery from both high and low traditions. Subverting the recognizable and allowing the familiar to become strange...

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One way to think of the pendant is as a gesture to finish the unfinished. But how do we know if something is really unfinished?

I am fairly sure the Mannerist master Agnolo Bronzino thought his portrait of a young woman (probably a Medici princess) was finished when he submitted it to his patron in the mid 1530s. But no. A child got added later, and according to the NGA, her outfit was made a little more current when he revisited the painting in 1540.

This story has stayed with me for more than twenty years from when I first saw the painting in a museum in Washington - that there are means by which paintings can escape being frozen in amber at the moment of their completion, that they can stay alive, and reflect the lives of their makers and subjects. And that realizing this creates clues about them for future viewers...

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One of the functions of undergraduate education is to provide a common core of ideas, images and references through which artists can communicate with one another. As a result, you hear the same (not always very diverse...) names all the time.

But sometimes you want to know who has done what you are interested in, who has blazed the trail you are walking? That's is not always someone form the short list, and you need to look deeper.

I was talking to Alezandria and this issue came to mind, because I wanted to direct her attention to the painter Robert Birmelin, who was active in the late 70s and 80s but never became a household name. Still, he made some really great images about the constantly shifting peoplescape of the city (below is one called Suburb).

Looking at them now, with their topsy-turvy perspectives and their figures who dissolve, dreamlike into spaces and into one another, they seem to prefigure the world of Christopher Noland's Incepetion, a pictorial space many viewers wanted to inhabit (for a couple of hours at least...)

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I was talking to Ye Jin about the shapes of her canvases and she used the phrase, "photo format" and I had to pause and ask myself..."which one?"

Photos (and their technological step siblings, movie cameras) have so many formats, from the square of the Brownie camera (recently revived for Instagram) to the widescreen (16:9)

People who make pictures with technology (photographers, cinematographers, print makers to some degree...pretty much everyone who is not a painter...) really care about the way the format shapes the viewer\s experience of the work. Here is a short discussion of it for cineasts...

So I would encourage you all to work through what the proportions of your work are and where they come from (newspapers? movies? books, magazines? So many sources!)

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Talking to Sophie, I had occasion to remember a book that has gotten a little attention by a designer you really should all know... The book is The Fine Art of Italian Hand Gestures and the designer is Bruno Munari. There is an enormous amount of potential in the discussion of gesture, as it shapes and inflects speech and belongs to the visible world with which paintings is concerned. I hope you'll all visit the site that discusses this book (Brainpickings did a feature on it; the link is above at the title), and take a look at it if you are in
a bookshop...

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In a conversation with Elliot, I mistakenly attributed this painting, found at the Getty in Los Angeles, to the painter Emil Nolde. Both were German Expressionists painters of the Die Brücke movement, but it's best to keep people straight...my apologies.
There's a good, short label-0length essay about the painting here, but look at the image...at the nature of the crowd. It's worth noting that this thing is immense - two and a half by more than four meters. The scale of a work is an important part of its impact, and again, what separates paintings from the general category of images.

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I love Mark Tansey. He is a product of my time - a figurative painter whose work has some serious theoretical and semiotic meat on its bones. He's not for everyone, and he can be a little trite and even formulaic, but I appreciate the way he uses humor to get at what are essentially in-jokes about contemporary art.

His 1981 diptych titled Modern/PostModern is a good example. In the panel on the left, we see the goal of modernism expressed. In the panel on the right, it is contrasted with the post-modern approach Tansey and his peers were defining at the time. Part of what makes this formally interesting (aside from Tansey's signature way of applying paint and wiping it off to create an image) is the warm/cool contrast between the two sides of the composition. The modern side is a warm sepia brown, suggesting a kind of humid, old feeling. The postmodern side of the composition is a cool, steely grey, implying an intellectual frostiness and a certain measure of impenetrability.

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How can you do an assignment about multi-part paintings without talking about Francis Bacon? This essay is a somewhat puffy little confection about a very serious artist who resurrected religious images and forms in his existentialist-inspired paintings of the 50's and 60's. In this one, note the separation of the frontal and profile panels and how the green ground connects them across the chasms between them...

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So one of the more famous contemporary approaches to the diptych was taken by American mid-century artist Robert Rauschenberg. He describes in interviews how he wanted to undermine some of the heroic uniqueness of abstract expressionist art (the dominant style when he was coming up) by making to very similar paintings. in 1957 he made two paintings - Factum 1 and Factum 2 that are mixed media works on canvas. They are the same size and very visually similar. Rauschenberg claimed to have worked on them concurrently and the adjusted one to the other. The idea here was to challenge a prevalent notion in NY AbEx painting that a mark was a heroic act of struggle. Rauchenberg made one, then he simply made another. There was no particular challenge...(This essay also talks about Rauschenberg's little joke in a more contemporary context...)

There is a good essay on the pieces (which reflects on what it means for a diptych to be broken up) written by Johnathan T.D. Neil at this link. Enjoy!

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Here is a great one from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (tough to bring the image over...follow this link)

In the panel on the left, we see the Virgine Mary holding the infant Jesus, who is clutching bird (this is actually a story in one of the apocryphal gospels...). Mother an child are depicted in an moment of intimate embrace, and the baby gazes adoringly at his mother...

In the panel on the right, we see Jesus 32 years later, depicted as the naked Man of Sorrows. The wounds of the crucifixion are apparent on his hands and chest. His eyes are closed in suffering, and possibly death.

The diptych has the ability to look at two points in its subject's life - infancy and death - and to give the viewer something to reflect on about them...

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The cool thing about the diptych form is that it allows an image to contrasted to another image in the same work...I am going to put twelve  cool diptychs here for you to look at...

The first is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and it's tiny...just 4 x 3 inches. But I have always had a soft spot for paintings you can carry with you.

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We talked about Paul Cadmus, who also worked in egg tempera. It's worth looking at his Seven Deadly Sins on the Met's website....

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To find the most heinous crimes I looked back to Emily Posts etiquette manuals and found the most absurd

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Adding a little color before the clear coat...

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Heres the sketch for a series of 3 paintings I'm doing for 'Girl Crime, an art show at Tattooed Mom on the 21st and also a way to really test what I dont want to leave behind in advanced/by advancing

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Gerard, this is the fiber artist we were discussing in class earlier. She creates vibrant and beautiful weavings/installations, sometimes even incorporating unconventional and natural materials, including bones and corn husks. She studied at Yale under Josef Albers and has also been compared to fellow artist Eva Hesse.
https://www.artsy.net/artist/sheila-hicks
Her artist book, Weaving As A Metaphor has been dubbed "the most beautiful book in the world. 1 copy on Amazon sells for about $900.
http://www.book-by-its-cover.com/fineart/sheila-hicks-weaving-a-metaphor

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I am looking forward to introducing you to artist Ricardo Zapata in a few weeks. I'll be sending out details about our final class meeting plan shortly, but you can look at his work here and get a sense of what he's all about...

Ricard Zapata, Action Figure, 36 x 72 inches, Oil on Canvas, 2007

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Morgan has been working with thread in some wall-based work in the corner of the studio. I think it would be useful for people to look at Fred Sandback's work to help situate her new project...here's a link to a little documentation of a long-term installation you can see at Dia:Beacon. Sandback's work is a lot more minimal, but it provides a little context...

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Varnishing paintings made on paper with Transparent Watercolor...

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Varnishing paintings made on paper with Transparent Watercolor...

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I mentioned this article from a recent Golden Acrylics newsletter to a few students, but it might be useful to others...ti talks about the effects of using a UV protective varnish on watercolors (net result: less fading)...you can read the article here...

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Animation conceits and the four finger discount

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Animation conceits and the four finger discount

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This was sort of fun...if pitched a little low and outside..

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Why cartoon characters only have three fingers

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Disney animators explain the missing digit and give the BBC a drawing masterclass.

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Juxtapoz just featured This artist in an instagram post and I immediately thought of your work
Similar colors and the depiction of a femAle characters

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Some interesting articles I found on "new casualist" art
" They ( new casualists ) also harbor a broader concern with multiple forms of imperfection: not merely what is unfinished but also the off-kilter, the overtly offhand, the not-quite-right. The idea is to cast aside the neat but rigid fundamentals learned in art school and embrace everything that seems to lend itself to visual intrigue—including failure." Sharon Butler

Hyper allergic:

http://hyperallergic.com/74330/the-new-casualists-strike-again/

Sharon Butler article that Hyperallergic is referring

Dying on Stage: New Painting in New York

Claire Grill, Game, 2012

Ariel Dill, Walk 1, 2013

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This is a notable resource for those interested in patterns...
Pattern In Islamic Art: Drawings, Diagrams & Analyses

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More about the tension between 'advanced' and other painting practices...

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More about the tension between 'advanced' and other painting practices...

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Tuesday we talked at length about the side effects of being 'advanced' in one's art. I don't like to use class time to show movies (that's a really expensive way to see a movie, if you think about it...), but I have referred to the 2006 documentary "The Lowdown on Lowbrow: West Coast Pop Art" more than a few times and so wanted to provide a link. If you log into the library, you should be able to go straight to the segment ("Conceptual Art from a Lowbrow Standpoint"). If not search databases for Films on Demand and you'll find it. Enjoy!

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Do certain genres of painting have certain inherent content?

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Do certain genres of painting have certain inherent content?

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One of the semester's ongoing conversations, which came up in our crit the other day, is whether or not certain genres of painting (still life, landscape, portraiture) are , by their nature limited to addressing certain kinds of content.

This is the kind of question that (I think) can lead to some important advances in your work - it makes you ask what is essential to your practice for you to go forward. For example, must a portrait include a likeness? Can a landscape talk about an interior world? Can still life talk about more than vanity or consumerism?

These thoughts crossed my mind as a read about painter Crys Yin's work at Amy Li Projects.  Danielle Wu, writing about the spare arrangements of objects that make up Yin's still lifes, reflects on the old Sesame Street segment, one of these things is not like the other. In her description and analysis, Wu opens a little space for still life that is way outside the conversations I've heard rerun about the genre at Tyler...

Of course, conversations happen because people want to talk about certain subjects more than other subjects. At Tyler, we pretty quickly get to conversations about labor and economy (if one more graduate student uses the world 'proletariat' in a studio visit, I will gouge my eyes out), but don't necessarily move so fluidly into other areas of concern. This review was a welcome reminder that the boundaries of the conversations in which we engage are set by the people with whom we choose to converse. If you're not hearing what you're interested in learning about need to hear, you may need to talk to more and different people.

Crys Yin, Goober Slipper Coaster Spoon, Everything Is Exactly the Same (2017), 47 x 57 in (courtesy of Amy Li Projects,via Hyperallergic)

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Gerard asked that I post some artists that are inspiring me. This is one of the artists who has been on my mind a lot. She is one of several artists of the Brazilian Neo-Concretismo artist movement (1960s). If I understood it correctly, the movement originated to create works free from the European gaze of Latin America, specifically Brazil while also referencing their political situ. The artists were highly influenced by Concretism/Concrete art but they wanted to make it their own. Helio Oiticica's Tropicalismo is from this movement , a manifesto was created, and a lot of interdisciplinary works came from it. In the past I've worked with crumpling, tearing & destroying my canvases,  but I did not know the history/significance behind it. Now that I know, I am trying to apply some of these ideas into my paintings that can exist as paintings. Specifically, paintings that show the labor and physical work involved. I'm drawn to Pape's aesthetic but also the sensory aspect, and ideas/theory of the works created by this group as whole. I put a link to Oiticica's Tropicalia below.

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The eternal question about painting is,why?
Some thoughtful answers are offered in this Q&A interview with curator Laura Hoptman of MoMA. A pull quote:

I think that, just like there are lots of art worlds, there are lots of art markets. There are certain parts of the art market that, of course, don’t need institutional validation. They’re on their own, they do their own thing.

Enjoy....

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Artists whose names you cannot remember when you need them 2: For Kaitlyn...

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Artists whose names you cannot remember when you need them 2: For Kaitlyn...

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And at our crit the other day, I couldn't remember the virtuoso watercolor painter Walton Ford...sniff around and you'll see how his work lives in the tradition established by watercolor master John James Audubon

The Island, 2009, watercolor. You can see an image of the painting in process in the photo that accompanies this profile in the New Yorker by Calvin Tomkins, one of the best journalists when it comes to writing about modern and contemporary artists' ideas...

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Artists whose names you cannot remember when you need them 1: For Tim...

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Artists whose names you cannot remember when you need them 1: For Tim...

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I was talking to Tim on Thursday and couldn't remember the name of an artist who I thought he should look at for the way ink drawings used image and text to communicate complex subjects....it was Raymond Pettibon I had in mind...I see these as descendants of Goya's Disasters of War...both of which are worth a look...