Akseli Gallen-Kallela

All of these paintings are by Finnish visual artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela.  Click on this link for a timeline of his life and works: http://www.gallen-kallela.fi/en/akseli-gallen-kallelas-lifespan-and-timeline/

The Boat's Lament

Akseli_Gallen-Kallela_Lake_Keitele_1905

Sauna Girl

Swan of Tuonela

Waves

Biography Information:

http://www.kansallisbiografia.fi/english/?id=3194

Photos of the artist: https://www.flickr.com/photos/gallen-kallelanmuseo

Philip Apeloig and Roland Barthes' Fragments of a Lover's Discourse

At the Stedeljk Museum, I saw this work. Philip Apeloig recreated all of the individual pages of this Barthes' book, printed on cashmere and silk.  The text is not on the fabric. The white represents paragraphs, each page with different spacing and arrangement of lines on the page.

See more of his projects:
http://apeloig.com/

Tiina Pystynen

Tiina Pystynen in Finnish Comics Annual 2013 (images via Rackham)

In her books, Tiina Pystynen combines her own visual art and text. These are modern-day illuminated manuscripts.

Tiina Pystynen is a writer and a graphic artist, born in Finland in 1955. Since 1987 she has published novels, non-fiction, illustrated poems and autobiographical graphic novels for adults. 
She dwells mainly on sensual, eternal, female subjects like love, motherhood and sexuality. Pystynen deals with her subject matter with experience, wisdom and broadmindedness. She is well loved among comic and poetry readers as well as all women fiction readers who, in turning points of their lives, look for knowledge, joy and support in her work. 
Among her works are an autobiographical picturebooks for adults, The Memoirs of the Queen Widow and The Lonely Woman´s Love Stories, about life of a family after the father´s suicide. A novel, The Cage of Shame, showing the process of psychotherapy from a patient´s point of view.

See more of her artistry on her website: http://tiinapystynen.com/IN-ENGLISH/

Interview: https://www.lukulamppu.fi/mita-luet-tiina-pystynen/

Profile: https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.fi&sl=fi&u=http://www.kirjasampo.fi/fi/kulsa/kauno%25253Aperson_123175949240251&usg=ALkJrhjbirN278EerAkoima8WqsrKn5ytg#.VkzCBt-rRp8

Teemu Mäki - Research with Art

In Art and Research Colliding, artist Teemu Mäki presents a strong case for art and research:   

"I am more interested in the valuable insights that art or artistic research can produce about the world and in the kinds of changes it can cause in society than in what research of art can tell me about the family tree of artistic movements, the structure of artworks, or the way some of the players in the field manage to steer the art world according to their own agendas.

…
"art's greatest strength is in the continuation of thinking beyond verbalisable reasoning. Especially when perceiving, testing, and creating values, this is an essential dimension, since the ability to appreciate things, the will to live, and the joy of living are mainly experiences, not conclusions of rational pondering."

...

"Art creates and distributes the kind of silent, tacit, or experiential knowledge and values that are only partially verbalisable. Art (and philosophy) are essential, because values cannot be derived from mere facts. In other words: from how things are we cannot directly draw any conclusions about how things should be. 

... 

"Art is the most efficient (though not the most used) human-made method for moulding our lifeworld, and thus an excellent form of innovative and embodied moral pondering." 

Read the entire article, and see many examples of his strong artwork at
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/49919/49920

He recommends his book, A Practical Utopia, as the one that best represent his ideas and teaching:  https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/89494/89495

Visit the artist's website for more images and current projects: http://www.teemumaki.com/

Picasso Said

Everything you can imagine is real.

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

Action is the foundational key to all success.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

                                     --Pablo Picasso

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.

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.