A Titian tour this morning with students from Harding High School in East St. Paul. My group was largely Asian, Hmong for the most part. They were attentive and responsive. At the end Peng and Veng, two boys who had shown a lot of interest, reached out and shook my hand. An adult gesture. Surprised me. Made me feel surprisingly good, too.
Second tour, also from Harding, had kids in a drawing class focused on a project to produce symbolic portraits of themselves. An interesting tour to design, to think through. Not sure how this group, also all Asian though with some Chinese students, too, reacted. They were more closed off, but remained engaged through eye contact.
After that, over to the Sierra Club to return the material from yesterday’s event at North Hennepin Community College. Spent a half-hour talking to Margaret about mining, volunteers, fund-raising, then drove home in the heart of rush hour. Bushed.
It is never safe to speak and act for freedom in an unfree place. How many have learned that lesson? American revolutionaries. French. East Indian. American Indian. The South African blacks. The list could go on and on. Spartacus. Socrates. Even Jesus. It is never safe to be unfree. That’s the paradox, the motivator.
And freedom will have its way. History, though I know the arguments against this position, is on the side of freedom. It is an ache in the human heart that never goes away until satisfied. Ask the African-Americans or undocumented folks in the USA today. Ask the Muslims in France or the Turks in Germany, the Romany especially in the Slavic countries. Ask the Jews of the diaspora anywhere.
To stand on the side of freedom is to stand with the future and against the past. Each of us takes a position every day, with every purchase we make, every political decision we try or fail to try to influence, every value we pass on through our behaviors and our teaching. To live is to choose. Always.
I spoke with a man today about the political environment for working against climate change, for healthy and sustainable forests, agriculture, cities. The political winds today blow against us. Is that a reason to sit down and wait them out? No. It is a time to stand up, to find the actions we can take that will move us toward a more just and verdant world
One of those actions, always, is to work on the side of freedom. Ai Weiwei and others held in China today need and deserve our help. Not as an action against China, but as one for it. For a world where political speech and action has a place of honor, not a jail cell.
from the friendly folks at Dissent magazine: (please note: in deference to recent activity about copyright, I’m going to only post excerpts and links of magazine and newspaper articles.
WHY WAS Ai Weiwei allowed to say the things he did? Any journalist who interviewed him in the last several years would eventually ask him the question, and it was incredible how Ai could reformulate the same answer again and again. Here he is on CNN in 2009: “On the one hand, the prime minister would memorize my father’s poetry in front of the great public, but on the other hand, the police were, you know, following me. So it’s hard to say.” In other words, Ai did not know why, but he suggested that whether he was going to get away with it or not remained to be seen.
By chance I had a sculpture tour today and went to a presentation by Steve Tobin at the Arboretum tonight. He is the sculptor of the new steel roots works now on display there. He said his ambition lies outside time and culture; his works, he hopes, will work in any place on the planet and in any era, including the past.
This struck me because only this morning I took six Champlin sculpture students on a tour of the MIA’s sculpture and I began with the Woman of Lamouth. What amazes me about her is that 20,000 years ago a paleolithic artist sat down with simple tools, probably little thought to the future beyond their own life, and made this object, a swollen belly, two milk-rich breasts and a round head with knit cap. The most amazing part to me? We recognize her as a woman. In other words this sculptor worked in a visual language so universal that no one needs to identify this object in stone; we can see, even through the abstract elements of its form, its identity.
Tobin’s ambition made sense to me in light of this ancient object, still speaking 20,000 years later in the corridors of the Minneapolis Art Institute.
On a less positive note I went to a Forest Service information session on an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on prospecting in the Superior National Forest. A Forest Ranger wanted my comments, my opinions. I said, no prospecting, no mining. Therefore no need for an EIS. Save everybody a lot of time, effort and money and would save vast acres of forest and the lifeforms it supports.
She answered me by saying that they were required by law to develop the EIS without taking into account the probability of mining. This is a splendid example of double think. The EIS weighs such things as noise bothering animals, the intrusion of new forest roads, the impact of deep drilling. When she asked me if I had a particular area in mind, I answered, “Northern Minnesota.” To not take the environmental impact of mining into account when deciding whether or not to permit prospecting is like a teenager concerned about the possibility of STD’s without wondering about the consequences of producing a baby. Drill, baby, drill.
Played space invaders again this morning. My ophthalmologist insists on calling it a visual field. It tests peripheral vision, a clue to advancing glaucoma. I have already been treated with laser holes for narrow angle glaucoma, but now, in a not surprising development, my pressures have inched up past high normal, so I’m adding another drug to my list. These bodies definitely have a sell-by date and mine is beginning to turn brown like the lettuce in an old batch.
In addition, to add insult to the diagnosis, my ophthalmologist, whom I’ve seen for twenty years or so, has decided to retire. This is my last visit with her. So, not only does the body begin to retire from its functions, so do the folks who take care of it. My dentist retired two years ago; my internist left three years ago. Pretty soon I’ll be the only one left.
Sculpture. Here’s a peculiar lacunae. I bought the Grove Dictionary of Art on sale. It’s 30+ thick volumes of wonderful information. But. It has no sculpture section. Strange. Lots of stuff on individual sculptors, traditions, sculptures, but no general article.
Just finished the legcom call, now into Oceanaire for a birthday dinner with Mark.
An encyclopedic museum like the MIA has such a broad collection–by definition–that gaining familiarity with all of it is a practical impossibility. This may sound like a disadvantage, but from my perspective, it’s pure joy. Why? Because it means I get to discover new art and new artists, even if they’ve been in our collection for a very long time.
Case in point. John B. Flanagan, a graduate of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (1916-1919), a hard luck story wedded to artistic success and an early death. The New One, brand new to me, has been in our collection since 1951. I found it because I have a sculpture tour on Thursday and, since I’d never done a sculpture tour, I had to poke around the many, many sculptures we have. In the process I discovered this artist and our example of his work.
He attempted to keep the personal distant from his work which he saw as searching for the unity that exists in nature. This unity led him to the belief that a powerful organizing and vitalizing force could be found in all creatures, not just humankind. This small sculpture, 6 x 11 x 6 inches, shows the unfolding of a fetus. His work shows no identifiable influence, so wrapped up he was in this quest for what nature could reveal.
Flanagan and his search for the heart of the natural world expresses in stone a search I identify as my own. How do we, all of us, living and non-living, express a link, a bond, the link, the bond that finds us all born of the same atoms and, in our decay, returning those atoms for use again and again and again.
This is not pantheism, as one art critic labeled Flanagan’s perspective. It has no need for a deity, rather, it grasps the kernel of sameness that makes us all one: star, toad, stone and whale. What a wonder to find someone on the very same path as your own, someone skilled enough to turn stone into personal vision. Miraculous. Delightful.
We have hundreds of daffodils just about ready to bloom. A few scylla have popped up in the front and crocus, too. Tulips have also broken through. It’s an exciting time for a perennial lover, especially if you are, like me, a lover of the spring ephemerals, those hardy flowers that have their timing down to avoid the shade of leafy trees and shrubs, opening up and going to seed long before the darkness covers their little patch of land. These little guys can’t wait to get out of the ground, sort of like greyhounds or whippets.
My next favorite flowers are the lilies and they don’t show up until July. After that, I’m ok with whoever wants to bloom.
Lunch at Stacy Pydych’s, an Italian, Venetian theme. Lots of good table conversation, good food and sunshine. A perfect day with friends. Thanks to everybody who got there.
All morning on 5 verses of the Actaeon story. I’m not sure now that I’ll make it before May 1st when the Titian exhibit leaves. I’m aiming that way still. It’s a goal, but one dependent on my continuing to gain skill as a Latin novice and gain skill fast. I’ve only now just gotten to the good part where Actaeon has entered the sacred grove, seen Diana and she’s going for her arrows and her bow. After that? Well, it’s not good news for our Actaeon.
Translating Latin, and I’m sure this is true with other languages too, requires holding several different pieces of information in mind, all at the same time. That’s different conjugations, declensions, clause forms, word meanings (usually multiple for the same word). The thing I still find hardest is not jumping to a conclusion and locking in a translation. If I do that, I end up with words that don’t fit and decisions that go down wrong paths.
The very complexity of it is what appeals to me right now, that and the fact that I’m digging deep into a text and therefore an author and therefore a world that fascinates me, the world that sustained Greek and Roman gods and goddesses. Ovid challenges this world, challenges it vigorously, with stories of transformation and injustice, but, in a great irony, also propagates it.
Two tours today, 2nd graders at 10:00 am and a group of seniors from Minnetonka at 1:30. I took the kids through a mysteries of the ancient world tour. I love 2nd graders. They’re eager, uncensored, fun and often bright. We learned how sculptures lose things that stick out, why the chinese used copper and tin for weapons, that folks have been fighting in Iraq for a really long time and that an artist 20,000 years ago made a small stone sculpture we could recognize today.
With the seniors we toured Titian, going over, once again, the splendid century, filled with wealth and spices and great artists. We wandered among these great stories, the Christ child, the Three Kings, the bella donna’s, the courtesan count, the transformation of actaeon into a stag and callisto into a bear. The museum literally brings the world to us and allows those of who guide there to travel over it ever time we visit. Today, for example, we went to China, Greece, Iraq, France, Mexico and Venice. Plus Mexico and, by extension, Italy, Israel and Cyprus. Not bad for a day’s work.
This work is such a gift, a license to steal glances at objects made by some of the world’s great geniuses: Goya, Rembrandt, Titian, El Greco, Bassano, Renoir, Gaugin, Monet, Van Gogh, Rodin. The list goes on. I visit Lucretia now as an ancestor who died tragically. Germanicus, that brave general dying betrayed. The sick Goya, nurtured by his doctor. The Sufi crowd working themselves into ecstasy in Delacroix’s painting. That wonderful brook by Thomas Moran. Calypso mourning for her lost Ulysses. So many, so wonderful. Sometimes it takes my breath right away.
Is it spiritual? If, as I am beginning to take it, the spiritual moments are those moments that nurture our Self, that best and richest person we could be, want to be, then, yes, every visit to the museum affords a chance for the Self to grow further into its most creative and full expression, goaded on by others who tapped into the depths of their own Self and who gave us a choice to join them on their journey.
In all the tsunami/earthquake, nuclear crisis, air strikes in Libya, brother coming, dog biting haze I missed this story about Ai Weiwei, a Chinese dissident artist whose marble chair is in our Wu Family Reception Hall. I’ve attached a summary from the Financial Times and a video interview with Dan Rather (see above). Especially in the Rather interview I can see the problem he poses for an autocratic regime. He gets the notion of freedom, of individuality, of free expression. That’s frightening stuff to autocrats.
As a man who admires Chinese civilization, its arts, its literature, its inventiveness, its long, long history, I know China and Chinese civilization has room for Ai Weiwei and his kind. Wandering Taoist sages, eccentrics all, the mountain poets, literati painters are just the ones who come to mind right now.
The more I read Chinese literature and history I do know that they inflect the dialectic rebel/government in a way not easily understood by Americans. That is, the rebel is bad and the government good. Or mostly, anyhow. This has to do in part with the notion of the mandate of heaven. As long as the government achieves order, the people are fed and happy, then the government reflects the will of heaven. But, if the people are starving, crime and violence becomes rampant–see the Warring States period and the end of the Han Dynasty as examples–the government has lost the mandate of heaven and must be replaced.
I have also added a TED video (above) about China, one that defines it as a civilization-state rather than nation-state and speculates on the impact of China’s rise. I think the idea is germane to this topic.
Enough. I’m thinking about how to impact this man’s detention in a positive way. If you have any ideas, let me know.
Published: April 5 2011 15:22 | Last updated: April 5 2011 15:22
Fears for the safety of China’s most famous artist are growing amid international condemnation of his extralegal disappearance at the hands of the country’s increasingly repressive state security apparatus.
Family members of Ai Weiwei, whose “Sunflower Seeds” installation is currently on display in London’s Tate Modern gallery, said on Tuesday evening they still had no idea of his whereabouts after he was detained at Beijing airport on Sunday and led away by airport security.
Friends, family and associates have been warned not to speak to journalists and Mr Ai’s wife and eight employees were temporarily detained on Sunday after police raided his Beijing home and studio. Beijing police have refused to provide any information concerning his whereabouts.
A member of Mr Ai’s family said at least one of his associates remained in custody after being detained on Sunday but the others had been released.
Human rights groups and associates of Mr Ai say he is in grave danger of being tortured and is probably being deprived of medicines he needs to take regularly.
