Oma Vika:: Own Fault

 Olli Kortekangas, composer, gave us tickets to attend the premier of his newest opera, Oma Vika at Manilla in Turku.  Libretto was by Michael Baran.

The opera was held in an old rope factory near the river in the center of the city. The floors were cobblestone, brick and cement. There were curbs and ramps, and the chairs were arranged a simple stage curtained with black sheers.
 Here is a plot summary from Kortekangas:

The work is a monologue opera called Oma vika ("Own Fault"), and it is based on the diaries of baritone singer Sauli Tiilikainen who will sing the only role of the opera himself. The "orchestra" is an instrumental ensemble of four players.
Sauli's adult daughter, mother of four small kids, committed suicide seven years ago. The text is written by Michael Baran, and as said, is based on Sauli's life and texts. There are 13 short scenes. Here are the titles in a very rough and quick translation, with some additional notes:

1. Sun, black (Four days later); (Sauli had just retired and was living in Spain)
2. Cause-of-death statement (Two-and-a-half months later)
3. Funeral program (Three weeks later)
4. No, we're not No (five months later); (dream scene)
5. Oh f--- f--- F--- (three months later)
6. What is happiness? (three years earlier); (speech at her wedding)
7. Notebook (a year or two earlier)
8. Farewell (November 13); (her farewell letter to her kids and husband)
9. What was and will be ruined (three months later); (this was very hard to translate, maybe you get an idea...!)
10. A dove and a fox (ten months later); (dream scene)
11. So that my sorrows would not end (six months later); (partly dream scene)
12. Mother and You-Butterfly (one-and-a-half years later); (partly dream scene)
13. Daddy (now)

The set was simple.  Black sheers surrounded the stage on 3 sides.  The orchestra of four instruments (piano, viulu, sello, Klarinetti) was on the right hand side. The audience's chairs were front and left side.  The stage was bare, except for long and narrow gray box. It stood on end initially. When the father arrived on stage, he laid it down on the floor. It looked like a coffin, or a storage box.  It was filled with letters.  The scenes were rapid, each a song.  The actions were simple -- opening the box, or laying on the box, or putting the box back on end, and leaning against its door.   Opening the door, to an empty space, stepping into the empty space.   I wrote notes on the back of the program (see below).  The music was fantastic.

 

Turku

 Turku is an old city. After dinner at Mami (I had crown of lamb, and Kathy had perch), we strolled along the river.    

Checking Out

 Hotelli Finn can be seen from the window of the Sis.Cafe where we had Viikonloppu Amiainen Buffet  (The weekend breakfast buffet).

Today is Oct 31, Halloween and the government holiday, All Saint's Day.  Most of the stores were closed in downtown Helsinki, making for a quiet morning.

On to the Onnibus to Turku!

Demonstrating Minds: Is Arts Activism Effective?

At Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, a thought provoking exhibit about the role of art provided important food for thought.  Is art activism effective?

In an essay in the exhibit catalog, art and terrorism were examined.  In the past, artist and warriors had a connection. Artists would present images of war, and warriors needed the artists -- there was a relationship between the two. Now things have changed. "The act of war coincides with its documentation and representation."

Terrorists have been posting video and visual images of beheadings, torture, and war.  The art is seemingly been eliminated. These images (such as the one of Abu Graib) have stunning impact. Bin Laden was a video artist, but unlike other artists, he was not an iconoclast. He was an iconophile, a propagandist. He, like many terrorists, use images to manipulate others.

What kind of arts activism can have equal impact? Is it hopeless? The point was made that our art institutions house a long history of war and peace time images, and they enable viewers to consider the context and history of violence in our culture.  The artist continues to be relevant. Historically, the word iconoclast referred to individuals who discarded or destroyed the images of religious expression. The iconoclastic response is necessary to counter the iconophile. The images that the terrorist presents can be effectively questioned and broken.

So yes, we need art. We need the creativity and independence characteristic of artists.

To see the work of Tanya Boukal, one artist's activism, see: http://www.boukal.at/en/the-melilla-project

A link to images and description of the exhibit: http://www.kiasma.fi/en/calendar/demonstrating-minds/

Helen Schjerfbeck

At the Ateneum Museum, the first of these self portraits were on exhibit. Helen Schjerfbeck, 1862-1946, is an important Finnish painter. She often painted women and children, as well as thirty six self portraits.  

For biographical information, see http://www.kansallisbiografia.fi/kb/artikkeli/4115/

Note: the Finnish language uses the pronoun "hän" to refer to either male or female. In this automatic translation, the pronoun he is used, which is a confusing detail.  The Ateneum Museum has a large selection of her work.  http://www.ateneum.fi/en/helene-schjerfbeck

Helsinki

Today on our flight we were discussing the work in progress --monads and functional programming (Kathy will use this programming language in her new media art) and my fictions about the dysfunctional. By this, I refer to the power dynamics and games or "theater" that people in romantic relationships deploy. Deploy may not be the right word, maybe the word is enjoy, but they only enjoy until they're fed up, and then they deploy power struggles and/or they break up (or not) and complain about the injustice (that they initially accepted or even set up) to others. I'm writing a story about these sort of insanities.

The thing about me is that I tend to rely on visual images in my thinking, in my writing, and everywhere. I am also aware of objects or visual images in relation to a subject or a situation, so I reach for an image that might represent a dysfunctional love affair.  The thing about Kathy is that she tends to focus on patterns and meta-data.  I looked over her shoulder. In the article she was reading, I noticed this sentence:

If m is Nothing, there is nothing to do and the result is Nothing. Otherwise, in the Just x case, g is applied to x, the underlying value wrapped in Just, to give a Maybe b result, which might be Nothing, depending on what g does to x. 

Of course romantic relationships are full of maybe, just, and nothing.  But functional programming is a language chaining together individual statements in imperative programming, which is similar to using semicolons to join independent clauses.

This made me ponder the way that Virginia Woolf and James Baldwin framed sentences.  The use of equal emphasis in sentences, short sentences with no dependent clauses is called parataxis (Hemingway, for example). The use of dependent clauses and independent clauses in such a way to show cause and effect is called hypotaxis (James Baldwin and Virginia Woolf, for example). Virginia Woolf tends to string together long sentences with semicolons.

I might make use of maybe, just and nothing. For the rest of the flight I stared out of the window at the cloudscape, seeing a meandering opening in the clouds that looked like a flying river. When I looked down at the openings in the clouds, I could see islands in the sheen of the sea in darkness.

We arrived in Helsinki this evening, took a city bus into the center (5 Euros for a ticket), and checked into the Hotelli Finn. This is a small hotel, more like a hostel or dorm room, but we do have a private room with its own bath. The website did say "we are not a five star hotel," and it's true. But it is in an excellent location.

Dinner was at the Kosmos Ravintola. I had glass of red wine and the arctic char, with a light cream sauce with roe, lemon, and a fennel cake (finely chopped fennel, carrot, onion). Delicious.  Kathy had an appetizer sampler of reindeer, herring, false morel mushrooms, pickled cucumbers, cheese with a tiny glass of vodka. Plus sourdough rye bread slathered with fresh butter.  Desserts: ice cream and cloudberries.

 The temperature was fine, 2+C or 35 F.  It was late, but we walked to the harbor where I took these slightly unfocused pictures of the cathedrals and the ferris wheel.  Suddenly it was 1:15 am, and we had no idea it was so late, so we turned off the lights and went to sleep.

Good Food and Ginger, Turmeric, and Lemon Tea

At a tiny restaurant in Amsterdam, ILoveSLA

Organic Roasted Vegetable Salad

It was made with arugula (known as rocket in Amsterdam), add small beluga lentils, roasted sweet potato, parsnips, celeriac, and jerusalem artichokes. On top, a scoop of s-mashed squash and sprinkled with sunflower nuts and pumpkin seeds. And this dressing: black truffle paste, parsley, white wine vinegar & oil.  It was sublime.

Ginger, Lemon, and Turmeric Tea

Boil chunks of fresh turmeric and ginger in hot water. Add slices of lemon.  Drink!! Add honey if you like.

Amsterdam

 A lunch concert at the GeBouw today--a perfect thing to offset jet lag.  This is Yuja Wang on the piano.  The photograph below is the GeBouw at night, and on the other side of the park, the RijkMusuem.

See more about Yuja Wang: http://yujawang.com/

Musing at the Museums

Van Gogh

I was at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam yesterday. In a letter (274) to his brother Theo on Oct 22, 1882, Vincent Van Gogh wrote:

What is drawing? How does one get there? It's working one's way through an invisible wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.  How can one get through that wall? -- since hammering on it doesn't help at all.  In my view, one must undermine the wall and grind through it slowly and patiently.

The Van Gogh Museum does an excellent job placing his work in the context of his family, friends, and culture.  One can see the development of his skills over ten years. I understood that too much emphasis has been placed on his mental illness and the self injury and not enough on his enormous productivity.  Besides all the paintings, the museum numbers his drawings to be around 1100 (they have archived about half).

This same question can be posed about writing, which is perhaps a way of drawing.  The selection of words, images, and arrangement of those sentences and paragraphs and pages create the whole.  How can one get through the wall between what one feels and what one can do?  Forcing it does not work, it's true.   One must go deeper. I like his choice of the word grind.  It speaks to the slow process of vision, revision, and vision.  

The Eye

The Eye Museum traces the history of film in an exhibit of stereoscopes, zoetropes, and the Magic Lantern and other things in between.  The stereoscope added a greater sense of depth.  The Magic Lantern allowed the operator to project an image, and then add a hand-operated moving image within. The zoetrope was a cylinder with vertical cuts, allowing the viewing to see the images inside that were arranged like a cartoon or a book. To see movement, one must spin the cylinder. It's quite pleasing.  Also shown were machines with something like a rollodex inside (and every other card was blank).  To turn the crank was to create a movement of the set of photographs, a rudimentary film. In another exhibit, the inner workings of a film projector were explained.

There is an important piece of a projector, a maltese cross, that helps to make the motion of the motion picture.  In the 15th century, according to Wikipedia, the Maltese cross was worn by knights who upheld eight obligations or aspirations:

to live in truth
to have faith
to repent one's sins
to give proof of humility
to love justice
to be merciful
to be sincere and wholehearted
to endure persecution

Later, it came to represent the beatitudes:
Observant (“that he may note the causes and signs of injury”)
Tactful (“that he may without thoughtless questions learn the symptoms and history of the case, and secure the confidence of the patients and bystanders”)
Resourceful (“That he may use to the best advantage whatever is at hand to prevent further damage, and to assist Nature’s efforts to repair the mischief already done”)
Dextrous (“that he may handle a patient without causing unnecessary pain, and use appliances efficiently and neatly”)
Explicit (“that he may give clear instructions to the patient or the bystanders how best to assist him”)
Discriminating (“that he may decide which of several injuries presses most for treatment by himself, what can best be left for the patient or bystanders to do, and what should be left for the medical men”)
Persevering (“that he may continue his efforts, though not at first successful.”)
Sympathetic (“that he may give real comfort and encouragement to the suffering”)

The trip to The Eye required a free ferry ride. 

Another gallery in the museum was dedicated to the first films, the ground-breaking and iconic.  We watched excerpts of silent movies with Charlie Chaplin, and clips of Shirley Temple movies, war & westerns starring John Wayne, Popeye cartoons, gorilla movies, The Rebel Without a Cause (starring James Dean).

The Stedelijk Museum

This museum of modern art had a special exhibit, Zero.  This explored the work of avant garde artists in the 1950s: Yves Klein and many others. The question they seemed to be asking is "what should art be?"   They rejected the old traditions in favor of the new.  White paintings, paintings done with smoke and shadows, paintings that tricked the eye.  Nails. Silver and mirrors.  Things looked modern and sleek.

Upstairs in the top gallery, I considered the photographs made by Andy Warhol.  Four were stitched together on a sewing machine. This sewn technique is so moving to me, so domestic. It's women's work, traditionally.

What makes art or writing good?

I began asking myself the question: what should writing be?  what do I think makes writing good? The use of image is very powerful, and it is certainly important to me.  And quickly, I thought good writing should project into the viewer's imagination an expanded emotion, a larger expanse, to make the reader feel more full or more hollow.  Good writing is an internal experience. It needs to be active and sensual. It needs to be capable of impact. Writing can imprint, or image (as a verb), or study an object, and it can employ fictional or dream or fantastical elements in the way of telling the truth. It can be rhythmic.  Writing is a thread that connects disparate elements.

Writing should erode the patriarchal structures and gender roles and open possibilities, not in an angry or destructive way, but with tender determination. It represents more than reality: dream, form emerging from chaos, quantum mechanics. Strange symmetries and effects like the 100th monkey.
Writing should have clarity and remove obstacles, the right words. Repetitions are a way of playing with history.

The Stendhal Box

Stendhal felt that good art caused a physical reaction that made one "fall apart."  In order to remedy this, an artist created a tall and narrow cabinet/chair for people who are suffering art's effects. One can enter the cabinet, sit down, close the door, and gather one's emotions and wits in an area that reduces external stimulation.

Flying Rivers

Jan Rocha at the Guardian writes about the drought in South America. The Amazon Rain Forest is important to the entire planet, but deforestation for agriculture is threatening its existence. Climate warming expert Jose Marenga says the forest is necessary because adds humidity to the atmosphere that turns into rain elsewhere. This evaporation of moisture is called a flying river, "massive volumes of vapour that rise from the rainforest, travel west...."

Rocha emphasizes that global warming and deforestation threaten to cause severe drought, "without trees there would be no water, and without water there is no food."

A leading climate scientist Antonia Nobre spoke with the journalist from the Guardian. “A big tree with a crown 20 metres across evaporates up to 300 litres a day, whereas one square metre of ocean evaporates exactly one square metre,” he said. “One square metre of forest can contain eight or 10 metres of leaves, so it evaporates eight or 10 times more than the ocean. This flying river, which rises into the atmosphere in the form of vapour, is bigger than the biggest river on the Earth.”

Up until reading this article, I had not known the phrase flying rivers.  I have already been fascinated with rivers on the landscape and underground rivers, but this news further captured my artistic imagination.  Rivers flow within us. They flow under, through, and above us.

Amsterdam

We stayed at the Maes B&B. In the historic center of Amsterdam, they have two homes, one on Herenstraat and this one on Singel. The building is 450 years old, but the interior is recently renovated and completely modern. Breakfast was wonderful!

The first photograph is the Singel Canal in front of our house.  A few doors down was the Greenwood Teahouse where I had the vegetarian plate, scrambled eggs, spinach and sun-dried tomatoes (and a lot of other broiled vegetables). I added a side of bacon.  I drank a cup of verveine tea.

Most people travel by bicycle, and the bicycles are comfortable, with handlebars that don't require you to crouch, and wide seats. Many also have child seats or boxes to carry goods.

The Singel B&B operated by Maes. The staircases in these houses are very narrow and steep, but they are beautiful. The stack of windows by the dining room table provides a wonderful view evening and morning.

 We might have visited the Anne Frank House,
but the line was exceptionally long.  Instead we went to Stedeljik Museum to see modern art, and then to Foam, to see film exhibits.

Iceland

Before dawn. Icelandic Air landed in Rejkavik this morning at 6:00 am. Snow was falling. Ice and freezing rain delayed the departure to Amsterdam by over an hour.  We were bleary eyed.  

I had awoken in the night before we left in order to write down some notes about narrative poetry--phrases like experimental histories, archeology of morning, noon, and night, and things about grief. There were several almost rhymes and alliterations. I couldn't stop.  

Like the water drops on the window of the plane, certain things begin to glimmer as if they had extra significance. Maybe it was the aurora borealis lights on the ceiling of the plane, a feature of Icelandic Air, or maybe it was going without sleep for twenty-four hours. The sudden appearance of snow and sleet was startling. I like these abrupt shifts in environment and watching interesting people!  The arduous trip kept me thinking about the journeys for Syrian refugees, displaced, traumatized by war, separated from loved ones, beaten, jailed, exploited.

On the plane, I was reading an article about Svetlana Alexievich, 2015 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. She is writing a history of emotion, a woman's version of history, a series of oral histories that are dramatic monologues, and they are riveting "transfers of pain," This is what the witnesses call the process of telling their stories to her. But in addition, she has demonstrated a flawless composition that the Nobel Prize recognized "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time."  Here is a link to her work:  http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2015/alexievich-prose.html

Gallivanting

Last night, the Tweed Museum opened two exhibits, the art work of Robert Minichiello and Sharon Louden.  This image is part of a large abstract painting by Minichiello.  "Spontaneous Acts," his show, were largely unstretched canvases nailed to the gallery walls. The color palette was muted, the tones subdued like dusty rose and foggy seas in washes of color, with some symbolic images and figurative elements, like this image. The artist preferred to have the viewer made meaning, and resisted explaining any of his work.

In the next gallery, Sharon Louden had a gallery installation, "Windows."  She had hung several large sheets of aluminum in the tall vertical space of the gallery. The rectangles were bent and twisted in a way that suggested they were falling or rising. In addition, she had three paintings, a study of windows. On the upper level, a musical ensemble performed work composed by contemporary classical composer, Andrew Simpson, Professor of Music at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. He conducted University of Minnesota Duluth music students performing the world premiere. More information about these exhibits is available here: https://www.facebook.com/events/397281380465749/

I saw this artwork on the eve of my going gallivanting. Going gallivanting was a phrase my mother and father often used, perhaps because its rhythm is similar to Finnish language rhythms. When they used the term, it meant taking a longer trip, i.e. gallivanting from Minnesota to California (my parents with their heavy Finnish accents pronounced this Gullafornia).

We are going to Amsterdam and Finland. In Finland, Kathy McTavish and I will be in the Enter Text artist residence at Arteles in Hameenkyro for the month of November.  Our project is "Three Rivers." It is a planned and also spontaneous act. This blog will provide a way into the back door of this project. This blog is an artist travelogue, and it is a way to keep track of my observations and encounters not just of the journey and the project but of the things that mark me along the way.

On Poetry Daily, I found a poem by Matthew Minicucci. This is from Translation, a Wick First Book Award.  Here is the beginning:

What if it's said like this: a man leaves. He takes with him all he can carry. What spoils he has slip through the cracks of a hundred rowed ships. What songs are sung sing only of distant homes.

Along the way, I will be looking for my beginnings.
Kippis!  [Cheers]

Three Rivers is funded by a career opportunity grant through the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council.