nevermind the bricolage

Letter

This is a great letter. Others of equal interest can be found here, what a great site.

Bonfire Night

I always loved 'bonfire night,' officially, Guy Fawkes night, but either way, the cold winter air, smell of fire and the beauty of fireworks and joy of sparklers!!

Claude Levi-Strauss

After spending much of Monday afternoon discussing structuralism and post-structuralism in my art and theology class, I was saddened to hear of the passing of the founding father of the movement, Claude Levi-Strauss. He was a giant of French philosophy and a huge influence on the world of anthropology, turning many of its widely held ideas upside down with his research and writing on the commonality of human experiences, busting particularly the myth that primitive cultures are less intelligent than more developed ones. He was greatly interested in oppositions, one of the elements that we discussed in Mark Tansey's painting Mount Saint-Victoire, Levi-Strauss used those binary oppositions to find fundamental truths about humanity. He did his field research in the Amazon jungle and this journey proved to be the launching point for a shift in philosophy in the 20th century. In a review of Tristes Tropique, one of his seminal works, the New York Review of Books declared that Levi-Strauss "transformed an expedition to the virgin interiors of the Amazon into a vision quest, and turned anthropology into a spiritual mission to defend mankind against itself."

Hardy

I have never particularly followed the rules of fashion strictly, but have always admired from afar those whose lives are shaped by them. My love affair with clothing stretches way back into my early teens. I had an after-school/weekend job at Cox County Clothiers, stacking shelves, folding clothes etc. One weekend my friend Steve and I were clearing out a section of the stockroom and came across some fantastic suits from the 40s, plaids and checks, light-weight tweeds, a treasure trove of pre-war fashion. These became our staple work dress for ages after that. One of the greats of British sartoriality, Hardy Amies, couturier and dress-maker to the Queen, will be featured in an upcoming exhibit on Savile Row. 14 Savile Row will be the address for Sir Hardy Amies: A century of couture, which opens this week I believe. Letters, photos, clothing (he did the clothing for 2001 A Space Odyssey) will all be on display. Amies, wrote a couple of definitive men's style guides, ABC of Men's Fashion was one of them. I realize that suiting is not everyone's cup of tea, but should you be in London and feel like a stroll on the Row, this might be something to drop into, I would if I was able to be there.

Parapluie

 
I think that I made some headway in my class yesterday helping some of the students connect some dots between art and theology, by introducing the work of Mark Tansey. We looked at four paintings, The Triumph of the New School, End of Painting, Doubting Thomas and most importantly perhaps, Mount Saint-Victoire. Tansey's paintings are loaded with symbolism and layered meanings. Mount-Saint Victoire is a painting inspired by Cezanne's painting of the same name, and another of his works called the Bathers.

Tansey takes these two ideas and uses them to generate his own fascinating reflection on the shortcomings of deconstruction. The painting features a group of men in various states of undress hanging around the edge of water, a mountain looming in the background. But all is not as it seems, if you really examine the painting, if in fact, you turn it upside down, you notice that the reflection of the bathers turns them into naked women! In fact the whole painting reflects on binary oppositions--male/female, earth/ater/dress/undress/concave/convex, on and on. It also turns out that the figures are not just any men but are the post-structuralists/postmodernists themselves--Derrida, Barthes, Beaudrillard, interesting. Everything in the painting can be inverted and has a reverse meaning, except for one thing, an umbrella on the far left of the painting. Umbrella's are a symbol of surrealism, and in this painting it offers a way of understanding the limits of the structuralist/poststructuralist argument and offers a way past this into some new territory. Mark C. Taylr has written a lot about Tansey and his book, The Picture in Question, has really openend my eyes to this artist whom I have been fascinated with for quite some time. Quoting J. Hillis Miller, he writes that the umbrella is the "ambiguous transition between" that traces the "boundary line, threshold, or margin" where forms form and thus order emerges...heady stuff, but everything in a Tansey painting is pivotal. What the painting hopes to do is point us away from binary oppositions--this or that, towards a different horizon, towards the edge of choas, towards complexity. Why I think this is important for a discussion on art and theology, and particularly in thinking about art as a model for theology is linked to this very idea. I think art has always traded in complexity, the challenges of life, etc. and this is it's gift to us and its potential for theology. Again, I turn to Taylor who writes about Tansey, "(he) finds in complexity theory, a way to understand the intricate diversity of the networks within which we are forever caught. Different systems structured in different ways and interact differently to produce the inescapable rhythms of life...Life is neither totally ordered or completelychaotic but it is always lived ar the edge of chaos, Tansey figures whatcan never b completely figured and thus must forever be refigured." This is the theological enterprise for me, and art is the means of grasping this conceptually for me. 

Dia de los muertos

 

Hallows Night

Two things I did on Hallows Night:—

Made my house April-clear;

Left open wide my door
To the ghosts of the year.

Then one came in. Across the room
It stood up long and fair—
The ghost that was myself—
And gave me stare for stare.

Lizette Woodworth Reese, 'All Hallows Night'

Creation

"nature selects for survival, man for appearance."

Creation, the film about Darwin, had trouble finding a US distributor over the volatility of the content for some on these golden shores, but even the hardest creationist shouldn't worry too much about this film because Darwin's theories take quite a back seat to a larger narrative in the movie, namely, the death of his much-loved daughter. Of course, there is plenty of stuff showing Darwin at work honing his theory and refining his experiments, but essentially it is a homage to a man's love for his child and the awful pain that the death of a child wreaks upon the soul. Darwin was broken by the death of his daughter (not the only one of his children not to make it either) and combined with an already fragile belief in God, it only helped him move towards his idea that natural selection shapes creation and not God. It is quite difficult to imagine the furour at this, but the film does attempt to put the theory into it's historic context and it does a pretty good job of pitting science against religion (which is a bit of an unnecessary stretch I think. Having read On the Origin of the Species recently, I still don't get the antagonism some argue that it expresses towards God--that is not to say it is without bias, but I think we have to take Darwin off of the contemporary theist/atheist continuum, and put him, his life, his times and his contexts, into the broader Victorian world he inhabited. I realize that his ideas are still viewed as blasphemous by some, but having discovered that most people I ask have never read the book itself,  I would hazard that a false dichotomy is being set up).

Darwin is played by Paul Bettany and his real wife Jennifer Connelly plays Emma, Darwin's wife. Together they capture the tensions in a marriage torn by both loss and opposing views of faith. Much of the film moves at a glacial, almost dreamy space, matching Darwin's grief malaise. He struggles to write, to engage with his family, to live essentially, and spends most of his day in a stupour recalling moments with his daughter. In fact it is only in the last ten or fifteen minutes of the film, when he has found healing between himself and his wife, in spite of their theological differences, that the film picks up pace and he actually writes his book. The ending is rather abrupt if you are waiting for big moments concerning his theory or responses to it, but as I said, this film is more about the role that grief played in this man's life than about his theory that changed the world.

It is a lovely film, shot in classic BBC Film style, with enough contemporary effects to make it more than simply a period drama, and it is hard to fault Bettany, who plays this grief-stricken man with empathy and tenderness. Everyone else is essentially a bit-player, including Connelly, but everyone is on their game and it makes the film rich and immensely watchable.

In spite of continuing resistance from some quarters, we seem to have embraced evolutionary concepts and their effects on virtually all aspects of our lives, it is amazing to think that this is a new idea in the grand scheme of things, 150 years old or thereabouts, and not exclusive to Darwin---as with most ideas it seems to emerge in the cultural ether and any number of people find their lives circling around similar thoughts and ideas. And, as with most ideas, the theory itself is morphing and changing--many of Darwin's original ideas have been tweaked, rejected, developed, as our knowledge grows about the world around us. Yes, even evolution is evolving!

Krink Mini

 

Craig Costello, New York-based street artist and creator of Krink, has applied his singular silver line style to the Mini. His Mini Cooper S is on currently display, it's probably hard to see out of the windows, but the look is cool. You could also get  a matching laptop carry-case if you wanted to.

Nowhere Boy

Sam Taylor-Wood's bio-pic about John Lennon.

A Little Bit More by Jamie Lidell

Live performance of A Little Bit More by Jamie Lidell.

From the Basement tv.

Brain

Der Mensch als Industriepalast [Man as Industrial Palace] from Henning Lederer on Vimeo.

Began a new discussion group last night: If I Only Had A Brain, a chat about the brain and whether or not a 'right brain' church might look different from our present models. A device really to think about faith in different categories. We began with a general conversation about the brain and our perception of it, the mechanistic model of humanity versus Jill Bolte Taylor's Stroke of Insight, and a few rightbrain/left brain games.

The Flowmarket

Flowmarket is a globe-travelling pop-up store that sells a unique brand of goods. What they sell are concepts--cans of aspiration, desire, and other aspects of our shared humanity. Their site declates that, "A change process begins with an awareness that something needs to change." The products, which are essentially, cool packages containing nothing, are designed to make us think twice about what we are buying. Flowmarket is the brainchild of Mads Hagstrom, a Norwegian designer.

Perspective

Myoung Ho Lee offers us trees in their natural surroundings and then messes with our perception by separating them from nature, placing huge white space like a canvas behind them--great effect.

 

Logorama

Logorama is short film by French design collective H5. The video interview is in French, which you may or may not parlez (moi? Je parle un peu), but you can get the general idea from the accompanying images and repeated watching!!

"logorama presents us with an over-marketed world built only from logos and real trademarks that are destroyed by a series of natural disasters (beginning with a hurricane, cyclone, tidal wave...). logotypes are used to describe an alarming universe (similar to the one that we are living in) with all the graphic signs that accompany us everyday in our lives. this over-organized universe is violently transformed by the cataclysm becoming fantastic and absurd. it shows the victory of the creative against the rational, where nature and human fantasy triumph."

"Logorama", le film dont les héros sont des logos
by lemondefr