Carl Kruse | Ars Lumen - Page 6 of 9

Metropolis

by Hazel Anna Rogers for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

The stage is set. Three pyramids built up of myriad buildings and angles forge forth unto the screen. Spotlights dance in symmetrical lines, lighting up sections of the structures like a stage. The buildings blur into three black pieces of machinery plunging up and down, then these blur and a montage begins showing cogs and valves and compressors and axles whirring around and turning and grinding. The screen dissolves and we are shown a clock with numbers from 1-10. The hour of 10 is about to strike. Another image of cogs churning covers the screen. The second-hand ticks forward and finally hits the hour. The image switches to another scene where a jumble of pipes sits amongst a cityscape, this time ta view of the ‘Below’ – the worker’s city (the first city was that of the above-ground). These pipes begin bursting with clouds of steam from every hole. The screen turns black, reading the words ‘Shift Change.’

A new scene. Crowds of workers clothed in black overalls stand in rigid lines behind a gate to the left of the screen, and, to the right, another crowd of workers stands in front of a separate gate. Each gate lifts, and the workers on the left walk forwards to begin their shift. The workers on the right walk towards the other gate to rest briefly before they must work again. These men move like puppets, mechanically swaying side to side in unison as they shuffle. Their heads are bowed, and each man is indistinguishable from the next. They are the tools of the machine, the people who hold up the city from deep below the earth’s surface while the rich dine and drink and dance and merry away the hours. This is the introduction to Fritz Lang’s 1927 film, Metropolis.

Carl Kruse Blog ars lumens - Worker shift change Metropolis

Workers change shift. METROPOLIS

It had been some time since I had watched a silent film when I came around to watching Metropolis. Though to call such a film ‘silent’ seems to diminish the visual and philosophical noise that perpetuates the entire 153 minutes it runs for. Furthermore, the film is near-constantly accompanied by the haunting militaristic soundtrack of Gottfried Huppertz, so to call this movie silent is somewhat inaccurate in all senses of the word. The last silent film I had watched prior to Metropolis was The Artist, Michel Hazanvicius’ 2011 part-talkie (whereupon sparing dialogue is used in an otherwise silent movie) black-and-white picture made in the style of a 1920s Hollywood silent film, full of romance and hilarity and warmth – a world away from Lang’s dystopia.

I recently learned that I have been accepted for an MA Acting degree program at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, during which I will have the opportunity to experiment with different theatrical techniques from various acting theorists, predominantly those working during the twentieth century. Among these myriad approaches to learning the art of acting, there is one theorist who I am most excited to discover: Jacques Lecoq. Lecoq worked primarily in the realm of physical theatre (using movement to tell stories, as opposed to words). His method involves the use of six different types of mask – the neutral mask, larval mask, expressive mask, commedia mask, half mask, and finally the clown’s eponymous red nose – to encourage his students to act from a base of ‘newness’ or ‘unknowing’, as the mask works as a blank canvas upon which an actor can express themselves playfully and openly. The final stage of mask work, the red nose, is the stage at which the student may finally discover their own unique ‘clown’, because it allows them to finally use their face to express their emotions and thus to communicate through facial AND physical mime.

Carl Kruse Ars Lumens - Metropolis poster

Original poster for METROPOLIS, 1927.

The reason that I am bringing up this method is because I note similarities between the acting in German expressionist films, such as Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari – the 1920 silent horror directed by Robert Wiene – and the techniques used by Lecoq. Most of the emotion and action in Metropolis is explained by dramatic movement and facial expressions, along with the occasional use of mouthing and captions, though these are limited. In a time where language seems to be the most prominent device used by contemporary film to guide and explain a storyline, it is refreshing and fascinating to watch a film that relies on the skill and versatility of its actor’s mime to develop and carry a storyline. Maria – the love interest of protagonist Freder and also the ‘saint’ of the underground workers, who prophesizes the arrival of a ‘mediator’ who will unite the ruling and working classes – has her face ‘taken’ and transposed onto the face of a robot by the dictator of the city (Joh Fredersen, Freder’s father) in order to quell the possibility of a rebellion by the workers. Maria is a mesmerizing character, because her actor – Brigitte Helm – takes on both the role of the innocent Saint Maria and the robot, or The Machine Man. Helm’s captivating use of body contortion and facial expressions makes her equally credible in both roles; the robot is highly sexualized, with heavy eye makeup and a malicious, crazed grin, while Maria is meek, near-bare-faced, and gentle.

Carl Kruse ars lumens - maria and robot, Metropolis — *The transformation of Maria into the robot. METROPOLIS*

Watching Helm work made me want to discover more about the Expressionist film movement, and to learn how I could learn to use my body and face as tools upon which to create stories and words without ever opening my mouth to speak. I have always relied on language throughout my acting career to date, though this might sound like an obvious claim to make. For most acting jobs, one is required to learn a script and is then told how best to move in order to create meaning from this script. I would generally consider myself to be a method actor; when learning to play a character, I find my thoughts and feelings begin to become one with the part I am to play, and even sometimes implementing aspects of these characters into my ‘real’ life. When learning the script for Measure for Measure (Shakespeare’s 1604 dark comedy), I quickly understood the advantage I had over some of the other actors in that I understood what Shakespeare was saying, whereas those from a less-literary background (I studied Literature for my Undergraduate degree) found more difficulty in interpreting the early modern vernacular of the play. But when I look back now, I think that what may have seemed to be an advantage – the ability to dissect and interpret Shakespeare’s work from a linguistic point of view – might have impeded my ability to freely embrace and embody my role as Isabella. I placed too much importance on what I was saying, and not enough on how I could say just as much by using movement and facial expressions. I was complimented on my performance, and I do believe that I did justice to Isabella’s character, but I find it interesting to think back on the methods I used to approach my role and to consider how I could have bettered my interpretation.

In the 1920s, countries were beginning to experiment with new techniques and styles of cinema, partly due to the poor economic states of many European countries after World War II. Many directors started to create dystopias and science fiction works to illustrate the changes that were occurring around them in technology, authority, fashion, art, and writing. Some of the earliest Expressionist (art which employs a distortion of reality to express the ideas and emotions of its creator) film creators were forced to be innovative in their approach to film-making due to the limited budgets they had to play with. This led to such techniques as painted shadows (see The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari) and paper set-designs (Metropolis) which create a sense of distortion and unease due to the oddity of the images they produce. In Metropolis, the images of the city are terrifyingly oppressive due to their harsh angles and oddly inaccurate shadows. The trend in these films was a rejection of realism and an emphasis on the possibilities of the future and whatever shapes, textures, and emotions the director might have believed the future would materialise in.

German Expressionism was cut short after the 1930s, but its impact was long-lasting and Nazi films made use of the tropes of Expressionism to create anti-Semitic propaganda. Later on, directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Tim Burton, and Ridley Scott would use techniques in their films influenced by the Expressionist film movement. The acting in German Expressionist cinema was just as impactful in the cinematic world as the sets and styles of the films themselves. During the filming of Metropolis, Lang forced his actors into near-perilous circumstances in order to increase the veracity of their performances. When, near the end of the film, Maria (Brigitte Helm) as The Machine Man is burned at the stake, Lang insisted on using actual fire to burn the detritus beneath her tied-up body. This purportedly led to Helm’s dress catching fire. Prior to this moment, Maria is forcefully dragged by her hair by another actor (Grot, the man who works the ‘heart’ machine which keeps the city running), which she said was ‘[not] fun at all’ in a later interview. Lang wanted to create an environment whereby the actors would be forced to act more genuinely in their roles, and despite the controversy of such techniques, it certainly did lead to an astounding performance by all of the actors in the film. The suffering, anger, distress, and panic of the characters in the film is almost haunting in its sincerity, and almost all these emotions are conveyed to us without the use of any dialogue.

Human language has evolved so far as to develop the unprecedented ability to use words to form abstract thoughts about the future, to recall past events, and to create new ideas in the present. How wonderful it is that we have the capability to produce innovative works of fiction using our complex grasp of language and our knowledge of literary history. In theatre and film, however, I think that language can sometimes impedes an actor’s ability to freely embrace their art because they find themselves too focused on perfectly regurgitating lines as opposed to really feeling what those lines actually mean. Metropolis was, for me, a perfect study on how powerful physical acting can be, and how easily one can follow a narrative without the need for dialogue. This form of theatrical expression seems intrinsic to humans; children, while they might lack the linguistic ability to communicate freely with other humans, learn to navigate their world by reading the faces and bodies of people around them, and by taking in stories through picture books and objects around them. We need only look at a young child’s face to understand if they’re happy, hungry, uncomfortable, distressed, or tired. If we look to one of the most popular children’s television shows, Pingu, we see that it uses a fictional dialect to tell its stories, yet we have no problem understanding its narratives because we can use the visual cues it offers as well as the tonal implications of the language it employs.

Metropolis ends on a happy note, whereupon the ‘mediator’, Freder Fredersen, joins together the ‘head’ (the ruling class) with the ‘hands’ (the working class) using the ‘heart’. Trumpets blare an uplifting final hoorah as the workers walk up the steps to the cathedral in a pyramid formation and watch as the head and hands shake hands. A black screen covers this happy scene with the words ‘THE END’.

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The home page of this Carl Kruse blog is at h ttps://carlkruse.net
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel include Reflections on Montmartre, the Legacy of the Satyr, and the World of Wearable Art.
Also find Carl Kruse on the Princeton academia site.

Short Reflection on Kraftwerk

by Fraser Hibbitt for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

Four men, a measured distance apart, standing disinterestedly over four synthetic sound systems. There is a small crowd seated in front of them. The sound that permeates the room comes from the barely moving men, and it is one of melodic and harmonic simplicity. It is entirely electronic apart from the short vocal phrases.

Carl Kruse Art blog - Kraftwerk — *Kraftwerk. Photo by Peter Boettcher*

This is the sound of Kraftwerk, one of the pioneering electronic music groups arising out of Düsseldorf, Germany in the later 60s. The music they produced would help kickstart electronic music across the world. When measured with the other popular music of their day, it is a striking juxtaposition. 60s, 70s, we think of the high-energy performances of blues influenced rock, expressive jazz and spiritual psychedelia bands; Kraftwerk seems terse and objective by comparison.

It is an entirely different strain of artistic thought. Let’s go back to the second decade of the twentieth century and into the city of Weimar. This is where the German art school, Bauhaus, was founded. A staple of Modernist thinking, Bauhaus grounded itself on an idea of design; designing in accord with functionality; an experiment in trying to join mass production with aesthetics. It was a meditation upon modernity, the experience of modern life.

Artwork that came out of Bauhaus was geometric and abstract; their architecture, functional for its purpose alone – not for lavish expression. Function and purpose, Bauhaus’s work was an image of the ideal modernist city (Bauhaus was founded eight years before Metropolis came out). It is a subsuming idea, one that seeks to interconnect art and the object; art and society. This aesthetic was diametrically opposed to a traditional view of beauty that had been evolving along lines laid out since the Renaissance: this was a modern beauty, new, and expressive by its sparsity.

Carl kruse Art Blog - Image of Bauhaus Building — *Building that housed the Bauhaus School in Dessau, Germany*

Beauty had to be delineated in a different way. Technology was rapidly changing the experience of living, especially city living. Technology would also grant new ways to be connected. However, the Utopian modernist city is not without its flaws. It’s no surprise that modernity was fraught with an aggressive anxiety; humanity as a machine, humanity as an abstraction, flies in the face of our spiritually nourished past and, even, sense of selfhood.

Returning to Kraftwerk, then, we find a continuation of the Bauhausian aesthetic; much of their music centers around functional city living. ‘Fun, fun, fun on the Autobahn’; sparse lyrics joined with the simplicity of their pleasing melodies. Robotic pop, a logical following of Bauhausian thinking – a term Kraftwerk begun to use to describe their music. Their image as a group of robots blurs the line between their life as musicians and their functionality as musicians; robots built to serve the public by creating these sounds. A quote from early EDM musician and producer, Richard Burgess, comes to mind: “computer programmed to perfection for your listening pleasure”.

Again, this line of thought is not without its anxiety. It is perhaps this underlying stress that gives their music its allure. The celebration of technology and modern living, despite the interconnectivity that they provide, co-aligns with a growing sense of alienation from vital human contact. The two sides balance out in the gesture of the four performers standing straight over their synthesizers, working out the sound of modernity.

Of course, electronic music spread quickly into many different directions, avenues, and sentiments. Kraftwerk’s influence, however, ranges the entire spectrum; the consoling melodic line of modern living has echoed into the twenty-first century with relative ease. Unlike the common musician celebrity, Kraftwerk maintains an eccentric reclusiveness – perhaps better to control their image. In some way, it is fitting that this should be so. As their influence and music permeates world-wide, they stay relatively, personally, unknown; the music’s functionality has masked the performer.

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This Carl Kruse blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.net
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Former articles by Fraser Hibbitt include those on Segovia and the Art of Atari.
For a more in depth look at electronic music, including an ongoing exhibit in Düsseldorf, Germany focusing on the genre have a look at the other Carl Kruse blog article on electronic music.
Catch Carl Kruse and his music on Soundcloud.

Segovia and the Guitar

by Fraser Hibbitt for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

The seventy-four-year-old maestro sits plump in a large wicker chair. His gut ovals as he looks out from his balcony towards the Mediterranean Sea. His home is large upon the hill, overlooking an olive grove which blinks out the Andalusian heat. Close by is Granada, the spiritual birth place of Andres Segovia.

“This will be the first time in thirty-five years that I have spent a single summer in one place” – not pensively, but as if harboring a certain emotional depth, he slowly walks along the balcony where a young shepherd dog jumps up to greet him. The man offers his forearm for the dog to playfully wrap its jaws around. The balcony extends along the perimeter of the house, larger than the man expected: “when they sent me the plans, I was very busy, I picked what I thought to be the larger, not looking at the scale; I was not expecting this monster”.

In this summer of rest, casually strolling through the murmuring sound of water that envelops Granada – the city cut into a mountain with the blend of Moorish intricacy and the tiles of houses which bloom in the sun – Segovia muses on how a mere boy could have left his life here: “Destiny only” he emphasizes.

Segovia was around eight when he took an interest in music, taking lessons in both the piano and violin. His experience with his teachers, whom he called ‘mediocre’, even at that age, as the story goes, reveals a characteristic of Segovia that never strayed far from him: an un-denying sense that the musician had to live the music.

It was when he heard average guitar players, be it on the street or in the bars of Granada, that he became fixed with what he called its ‘melancholy’ nature. Melancholy was a distinct representation for Segovia, and the word should not be misread as ‘depression’. The feeling seemed to incite in him, intuitively, a sensitivity to what the guitar was capable of. Thus, distancing himself from the ‘mediocrity’ of his local teachers, he became both student and teacher, working towards a closer connection with the instrument.

The guitar became a way of dialoguing with the heart, much like the prose-poem of Juan Jimenez, Platero y Yo, which Segovia admired. Platero y Yo tells of the eponymous Donkey, who serves as a constant companion and listener to the poet’s observations and confessions. The poet believes Platero can understand all that is said to him by the fact of his constancy, his tenderness, and his innocence. Like Platero, the guitar for Segovia seemed to transcribe the inner world into a living statement.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Segovia, Platero and I

Cover art work to Segovia’s 1963 “Platero y Yo” in English, “Platero and I.”

Segovia’s passion and skill lead him to an aspiration of situating the guitar amongst the canon of concert instruments (piano, violin etc.). Guitar was then considered not above a parlor performance, despite the contemporary efforts, and tours, of Miguel Llobet and Francisco Tarrega. They were among the classical guitarists Segovia respected, and although rumored to be an adequate flamenco player, and an admirer of Flamenco culture, Segovia saw the guitar as a conduit for classical compositions and distanced himself from the folk-influenced Flamenco.

It was obvious to Segovia that, despite his Spanish contemporaries, the guitar needed rescuing and securing; not only that, it needed to be passionately understood as an instrument: “I had to rescue the guitar twice: first from the noisy hands of the Flamenco players, and secondly from the devoted incompetence that was given to the guitar in the nineteenth century”. The first rescue involved Segovia’s self-taught precision in playing, and the second meant scouring through, and transcribing, pieces for the guitar which would show off its slumbering, enchanting dynamics.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, he had traveled to Europe and then to South America giving performances of a revitalized repertoire that increasingly drew the guitar into focus: a short man, left leg slightly raised, and cradled in his lap, the varying strains of a wooden guitar. This kind of guitar had only taken its form since the mid-nineteenth century. The luthier Antonio de Torres had perfected the modern guitar. However, in the first few decades of the twentieth century, Segovia was cradling another name: Ramirez.

Before his rise to fame, Segovia had met the luthier responsible for the sound, Jose Ramirez. Although dressed lavishly, as Segovia tells us, like a dandy, he was poor. He was in Madrid, playing in Tarrega’s city. After striking up a friendship with Ramirez and performing for him, Ramirez handed him his most diligently crafted guitar. Thinking he wanted to hear him play it, he did so. After the piece was played, Ramirez refused to take it back. “but I have no money” Segovia explained. “I know”, spoke Ramirez, “pay me back in another way, play that music around the world”.

Luthier Jose Ramirez, whose guitars are still played the world over.

Segovia’s fulfillment of the promise awakened more possibilities in the luthier’s craft. The guitar’s awakening, especially in the concert hall, gave impetus to greater developments in the instrument: to make the guitar ring louder; to emphasize the intricacies of the dynamics which existed within the hollow body. It was a sustained effort amongst luthiers to concert new techniques for expression, and undeniably helped to shape the evolution of the guitar.

Much of what we take for granted on, and about, the guitar is realized in Segovia’s mission to obtain respect and admiration for the guitar. He speaks of the guitar as possessing all of the orchestra, only in minute forms. Tonality can differ greatly according to where the right hand is placed; it can imitate brass or the cello, beckoning attention or intimacy; and, it is polyphonic. The master of the guitar needs to control these dynamics to evoke the quality of what the guitar is.

The problem was, according to Segovia, is that those who had composed for guitar in the past did not understand the intricacy of the instrument. It was only Fernando Sor at the beginning of the nineteenth century and Francisco Tarrega at the end thereof. Segovia felt himself responsible to transcribe the music of great composers, to show the guitar could not only replicate the concert instruments, but evoke beauty in a new way. This led him to Bach, Albeniz, Granados, Handel and countless others. Increasing the repertoire exposed the guitar as an incredibly versatile and expressive instrument. Segovia and his guitar were serving as a conduit for the music of the past and present.

Segovia’s sensitivity towards the guitar as a medium of melancholy, of beauty, led him to found his own distinctive performance style. Although, in the beginning, the students of Tarrega thought him idiosyncratic at best, they would ultimately be silenced by what became known as the ‘Segovia hush’: amazement, respect, and awareness of grace.

Thus established, Segovia pushed further and began to ask contemporary composers to write for the guitar. Manuel Falla, Alexandre Tansman, Castlenuovo-Tedesco, Manuel Ponce, and many others took up the challenge. Writing for any instrument, of course, means intimately knowing the range and dynamics of that instrument. This call to the contemporaries led not only to an increased repertoire, but a heightened focus on what the guitar could do – each testing the performative style of Segovia and expanding his vision of musicality. Some virtuosos, so enthused by Segovia, took it upon themselves to write for him unasked, here we note the famous 12 Etudes by Villa-Llobos.

Carl Kruse Arts Blog - Composers — *Italian composer Castelnuovo-Tedesco a favorite of the Carl Kruse Arts Blog and of Segovia 🙂*

Segovia’s eight decades of performing permeates through the legacy of the guitar, and music itself. He was a source for many new compositions, and he was a translator of old into the new. Segovia certainly had a vision for what the guitar should transmit: Latin-based, Baroque, and Romantic pieces. This meant modern atonal, experimental pieces written expressly for Segovia were denied entry; a purist often functions by restrictions. Always happy to steal concert goers away from The Beatles, often lamenting the rise of the electric guitar, Segovia functioned as a counter to much of the popular music of the twentieth century.

Even so, the spectacle of Segovia produced a sustained image of the guitar’s inherent melancholy. Just as his obliviousness to check the scale of the house which was being built for him, his work spawned a web of influence too large for him to realise. His personal affectations were, for the next generation, something to either improve upon or rebel against. This could mean new ways of utilising the guitar or excepting new pieces into the repertoire. Either way, the guitar keeps moving; the vision of its beauty still stands.

When asked, in 1967, if he knew when he was going to retire, he responded with the enigmatic line: “Depending upon my health, yes, I will have to retire someday, but I am not to be retired”. We are brought into a state of reverie by this. Is it by listening to the guitar, we remember something of what Segovia lived for? Something of that melancholy, that intimate and wholly human expressiveness which permeated so much of his work? Or that Segovia will continue existing as his repertoire and music continued to be played, and in all his offspring in whatever form who continue to explore the strange complexity of the guitar, who feel something akin to what the maestro felt when he said “to play the guitar is to dream with music”?

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The blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.net
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Fraser Hibbitt include the Art Of Atari and Realism.
The blog’s last post was on the Beat Generation.
Carl Kruse and his music are on Soundcloud.

The Beats – Driving Cross Country in Search of Eternity

by Asia Leonardi for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
[… ] with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
[… ] who drove cross-country seventy-two hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity [… ] who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus, to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose…”
Howl, by Allen Ginsberg, San Francisco 1955-56

Carl Kruse Arts Blog - Allen Ginsberg — *Allen Ginsberg*

The Beats concentrated particularly in San Francisco. The Californian revival had already begun after the Second World War, with the arrival of thousands of European refugees, and was shaping the beautiful city on its footprints, characterizing it as the American city less linked to local traditions.

In the unsettling wave of mass conformism accompanied by the economic boom beginning in the late 1940s, San Francisco opposed itself as an oasis of individualism, perhaps thanks to the Mediterranean and Mexican footprints, which had painted it with those characteristic features of the “laissez-faire,” of the “dolce far niente,” a peculiarity that would hardly be found in other American cities of the period. San Francisco thus built a reputation of the “easiest city in America, and was soon populated by avant-garde artists, old Dadaist anarchists, rebellious boys who had left their homes. In this context, was born, and strengthened the “Beat Generation,” an expression of the critic John Clellon Holmes, which was to indicate what we remember today as “burnt youth.” They were not illustrious writers supported by large publishing houses, but troubled boys who rejected the moral and social systems of bourgeois society, in search of discovery -of a full self, of real-life, of new methods to approach life. It almost seems from the moment Holmes called them Beat Generation, these guys started drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana, writing poetry, hitchhiking around America.

Of course, this is not the first youth anti-bourgeois movement and perhaps Baudelaire’s drunkenness was not so different from Hemingway’s, even though their literary programs were certainly so. Both anti-bourgeois, they led a violent battle to overcome the conformism of the time and impose their aesthetic creed even before the moral one.

Bourgeois conformism flattens the personality, levels the souls, implicitly establishes the moral and social structures of the mass community, which becomes increasingly impersonal, anonymous, and flat. The boys feel suffocated, silenced in a “misunderstood” silence. Hence the need for expression, living experiences, through which to seek an autonomous reality, free from conventional norms. Their experiences tend to take over the extremes of personality, perhaps because in this very one they hope to find the moral key that will serve as a solution to the eternal problem of good and evil.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - group photo in Princeton — Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Barbara Rubin, Bob Dylan, and
Daniel Kramer backstage at McCarter Theater, in Princeton, New Jersey, September, 1964.

To the Beat Generation belong, writers and poets, whose texts were negatively received by bourgeois and conformist critics, who, in the particular case of Allen Ginsberg, was described as “totally negative and unnecessarily obscene.” The violence with which the art of the Beat Generation has been welcomed is the same violence of the mass society that has led them to separate themselves from it.

The character of the American Beat Generation and their literary productions consists in their poetic proposals and experiences of a spiritual nature. Their way of acting was a reflection of the adolescent anxieties cultivated in bourgeois worldliness. The typical characters in Jack Kerouac’s books perform gestures whose families would pay handsomely for not seeing their children perform –watching them get drunk on alcohol and drugs, live as vagrants, piercing the sole of their shoes as they step on the accelerator, venting their energy, their anxiety for life, in an intensity that if taken out of context would seem unjustified. “We have to go and we don‘t have to stop until we get there.” “Where are we going?” “I don‘t know, but we have to go.“

To see it this way, it would seem that their need is to escape, but it is clear that in reality, it is a search. And it has been said that the most desperate drama of the Beat Generation was to find a transcendent reality in which to believe, such as to supplant a conformist middle-class life. They are not part of a movement: they have no prospects, they have no plan to reach, nor an eschatology to pursue. There is no future, there is no past, there is only an immanent present, inexplicable, that only liberation from space and time can temporarily overcome.

The means to do so may be physiological (such as orgasm), or mystical (such as visions), or passionate (such as jazz), or artificial (such as drugs). Only by this momentary overcoming can one arrive at a poetic reality, together with a reality of life.

“[…] and I shambled after as usual as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes -Awww!-”
On the road, Jack Kerouac, 1957

In reality, the Beat Generation does not make a difference between religious and alcoholic exaltation, what matters is to feel freedom flow in them, independence, living and individual energy. They are extreme means, of course, but the children prefer to take the risk rather than face a stale, empty, meaningless, and perhaps ultimately worthless community life.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Kerouac — *Jack Kerouac*

Their tormented search for a new moral reality, new answers to the questions of the world, make them a generation of mystics and philosophers: some are Catholics, others are Buddhists, and everyone believes in God. When a journalist asked Kerouac to whom he prayed, he replied: “I pray to my dead brother, my father, Buddha, Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. I pray to these five people”.

The identity they seek is an identity based on faith, whatever faith maybe, but which must be attained by the realization (and therefore discovery) of their personality. They rely on themselves to find, in themselves, a trace of transcendent values that can guide them on an even shorter, faster, futile, and tormented journey of life. So when they asked Jack Kerouac, “It‘s been said that the Beat Generation is a generation looking for something. What are you looking for?” He said, “God. I want God to show me his face”.

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The Ars Lumens blog is curated by Carl Kruse. The homepage is here.
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com.
Asia Leonoardi has written about Bowie’s Alter Ego, Pop Art, Frida Kahlo, Brunelleschi and Lost Architecture.
The blog’s last post announced a photo exhibit in Berlin by Adele Schwab.
If on Pinterest stop by and say hello.

Upcoming: Adele Schwab Photo Exhibit in Berlin

by Carl Kruse

My friend Adele Schwab has organized a photo exhibit in Berlin on two dates:

19 November 2021 (Friday) from 21.00-22:30.

20 November 2021 (Saturday) from 17.00-18.30.

Adele Schwab. Photograph from the artist’s website.

Her exhibit is titled, “Seeing the Unseen” an audio visual project that attempts to make air “visible” and investigates the issue of how to capture the unseen. The exhibit explores methods to capture an important yet unseen element, air.

Her work is part of a series on the environment, and was part of the “48 Stunden Neukölln Arts Festival,” which took place this last summer. This is the first time it is shown in a public exhibit.

The interior of the space will be darkened at first, then alit by photos of trees as they turn during the year, sometimes in rain, other times in glaring sunlight. The concept is for the viewer to be immersed in it.

The exhibit takes place at St. Clara Church, which is on Briesestrasse 13, in Berlin, Germany

Much of Schwab’s images show everyday life in a manner that is ultra real. She is captivated by the relationship between nature and people, and by how the environment shapes culture.

Adele Schwab has a BS in Physics from MIT and studied photography at the Ostkreuz School of Photography in Berlin. She currently lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.

The Carl Kruse Arts Blog invites all of its followers to what should be a special and unique exhibit. I will be there the night of the 19th if anyone would like to say hi personally.

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The Carl Kruse Arts Blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.net
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other blog posts focusing on photography include, Steve McCurry: Vulnerability Made Immortal and Between Introspection and Surrealism – the Photography of Francesca Woodman.
The blog’s last post was on David Bowie’s alter ego Major Tom.

Bowie’s Alter Ego That Transcends Death: Major Tom

by Asia Leonardi for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

It is 1969, and the young David Jones, better known as David Bowie, begins to ascend the world stage thanks to the launch of his latest single, Space Oddity. Likely influenced by the space race, the tales of Ray Bradbury, and undoubtedly by 2001: A Space Odyssey. The single was supported by two video clips and would have profound influence.

Here we meet Major Tom for the first time: an astronaut readying to leave Earth who communicates with Ground Control. After takeoff, the shuttle (or rather, the Tin Can) soon floats in space. Looking back at earth, Tom sees it blue — “Planet Earth is blue and there is nothing I can do,” a meditation perhaps on abandonment, isolation, and the smallness of humanity compared to the vastness of space. From earth, Ground Control is triumphant, enthusiastically wanting to know everything about Tom and telling him the mission is a success. But Tom loses interest in earth, decides to cut contact while drifting towards the immensity of space, towards the infinite.

There are two versions of the Space Oddity video. The first is from 1969, and is part of the film Love you ‘Till Tuesday (a collection of Bowie’s promotional videos). Bowie plays the parts of both Ground Control and Major Tom, displaying his skill at acting. It is an experimental video, following the dystopian science fiction atmospheres of the 60s. The second version, the one we know as the official one, dates to 1972: Bowie appears with the garments of his new alter ego, the androgynous, histrionic, alien Ziggy Stardust. This time the atmosphere is darker and heavier, fragmented by turns of red and the occasional overlaps of an oscilloscope.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Major Tom image — *First appearance of Major Tom: Space Oddity’s video clip, 1969*

Time passes, Ziggy Stardust gives way to the White Duke. The Spiders from Mars have disbanded, Bowie has crossed the streets of a short dystopian path in Diamond Dogs; drug problems, the contract disputes with agent Tony Defries, as well as the general discomfort caused by the growing celebrity, threw Bowie into a deep crisis.

Perhaps the need to cling to new ideas, to renew his music, his figure, and himself, led him to resurrect in a new song, extending his hand once again to his old alter ego Major Tom: this is the time of Ashes To Ashes. Perhaps the most autobiographical, deep, and poignant track of Bowie’s music trajectory. After years of launching into space, Major Tom, lost in an alien world, halfway to an asylum and to a wasteland, contacts Ground Control. But he isn’t the old Major Tom: he is a character still in the throes of addiction, depression, a glimmer of madness, an uncomfortable person ( “we know Major Tom is a junkie” ), one to be avoided ( “My mama said to get things done, you better not mess with Major Tom” ), inept ( “I never done good things, I never done bad things, I never did anything out of the blue” ). But it is only a reflection of the past that breaks in the condition of this dystopian and introspective present. Bowie abandons Tom in a wasteland, and it will be ten years before the insane astronaut returns to the scene.

Carl Kruse ART BLOG - David Bowie in Ashes to Ashes — *Major Tom in Ashes to Ashes’ videoclip, 1980*

In the inimitable masterpiece, certainly not easy to understand, which is 1.Outside, our old Major Tom returns. The concept album, dark and complex, tells the story of the murder of the young Baby Grace Blue at the hand of the artist Minotaur, followed point by point by Nathan Adler’s investigations in a New Oxford Town bordering on dystopia and a materialized paranoia (Nathan Adler writes: “it was art alright, but was it murder?” ). It’s in the track that follows the girl’s last words ( “ … and I think, something is going to be horrid ” ), that with an angry, contemptuous, and explosive fury returns to the stage, Major Tom. The song is Hallo Spaceboy (an interesting pun on the words “Hallow”, “Halo”, and “Hollow”). Tom no longer recognizes his world, nor any other world. In a state of confusion, drowsiness, loss, the astronaut has become a static figure, motionless in various dimensions in which he traveled, he wants to be free, but what is, after all this time, the true meaning of the word “free”? Tom curses those who listen to him: “the moon dust will cover you”. In the live video of the song, played by Bowie and the Pet Shop Boys, a second verse is added: PSB, as Ground Control, say goodbye to Major Tom. The countdown does not work, the circuits are damaged, so bye-bye Tom.

But Major Tom is not dead. He always disobeyed death’s call, reappearing in different scenes in Bowie’s life. The end of the first alter ego of David Bowie coincides with the end of the songwriter himself. We are at the most complex and most difficult to digest movement, more than everything in his path — Blackstar.

Shocking eulogy to himself, the Blackstar album was announced at short notice and released only two days before the death of Bowie. The track that gives the title to the album brings together rhythms and sonorities of jazz with ecstatic interludes, text functions as a long prayer of repetition, litanies, and different quotes to Aleister Crowley. The refrain is evocative, symbolic, and poignant: “Something’s happened on the day he died, Spirit rose a meter and stepped aside, Somebody else took his place and bravely cried: I am a Blackstar “.

The music video narrates the demise of Major Tom. In a desolate planet, dotted with black stars, humanoid creatures find the remains of Tom in an astronaut suit, whose skeleton is crowned with jewels. They make an altar where they revere his skull, while the remains of the skeleton are seen floating in space towards a black star.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - David Bowie Blackstar — *Major Tom in his last appearance: Blackstar’s videoclip, 2016*

Major Tom is the first alter ego of David Bowie and the only one that has never abandoned him, marking his beginning and his end. It remained floating in a forgotten space, metaphorically material, but probably abstract and internalized. Originally, perhaps, embodied the American dream, the exploration of new worlds, which corresponded, paradoxically, to the launch of Bowie in the circle of celebrity, vices, and drugs. Then confused, lost, inept, insane, always hovering between the destruction of himself and a glimmer of sanity which never allows him to gain the awareness of the dimension that he is passing through. There are plenty of wires that connect the evolution of Major Tom to the arc of Bowie’s life, his figure is always a return to the past and a new launch to the future: from the moment when he leaves earth to the moment he fluctuates towards a big, sad and desperate black star.

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The Carl Kruse Art Blog homepage is here.
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com.
Other articles by Asia Leonardi are on Filippo Brunelleschi, Marina Abramovic, and Lost Architecture.
The blog’s last post was on artist Yury Kharchenko.
Carl Kruse is also at USGBC.

Upcoming: An Artist Talk With Yury Kharchenko

by Carl Kruse

Our artist friend Yury Kharchenko joins a debate titled “Art, Culture and Memory” at the Wallraf Museum in Cologne, Germany, on 5 October 2021 from 19.00-21.00.

The chat will deal with issues surrounding Holocaust remembrance, the culture of remembrance and the cult of guilt.

Yury Kharchenko. Photo: New York Times.

In his more recent art works, Yury has dealt with the Holocaust in a seemingly offensive way, using iconography that takes up well-known figures and ideas from pop culture and mixes them with references to the Holocaust. He confronts viewers with violent fantasies, breaks taboos, shocks sensibilities. We see Scrooge McDuck guarding his money at the gates of Auschwitz. Bugs Bunny has sex in front of a concentration camp. Goofy trots along happily in front of Buchenwald. Batman stares at us as in front of Auschwitz. These and other works are part of Yury’s series “Waiting for a Superhero,” where he seems to ask, among other things, why didn’t any of the superheros or pop greats save the jews from genocide? The discussion at the Wallraf Museum will take up the role of Yury’s art in the context of Holocaust remembrance and the extent it can (or cannot) contribute to the discourse surrounding the holocaust.

The event will feature Yury, Rita Kersting (Deputy Director Museum Ludwig), Prof. Dr. Micha Brumlik (Publicist, emeritus professor of Educational Sciences University, Frankfurt), Kay Heymer (Head of Modern Art, Museum Kunstpalast Foundation) and will be moderated by Dr. Michael Köhler (freelance author, moderator, editor).

About Yury Kharchenko: Yury was born in Moscow in 1986 and studied from 2004 to 2008 at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Between 2010 and 2012 he devoted himself to the study of the Torah, Talmud, Jewish ethics and philosophy as well as the topic of Jewish thought influences in postmodernism with a focus on Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. He lives and works in Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

Registration with address and telephone number (for contact tracking) is required at miqua@lvr.de Registration closes on September 29, 2021

Corona information: Due to restrictions related to the corona pandemic only a limited number of spots are available. If you plan to attend, please review the corona virus precautions for the event at: www.miqua.blog

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Blog home page at https://carlkruse.net
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
We covered Yury during his last exhibitions here.
The blog’s last post was Reflections of Montmartre.
You can find Carl Kruse on TED.

Reflections of Montmartre

by Hazel Anna Rogers

The sun has been shining for some time now. At first, warmth came from behind bulbous grey clouds, yielding a muggy, wet heat, but now light has taken precedence and grass glows white in its piercing rays.

We were walking on one such sunny day and stopped beside the book shop some two and a quarter streets from our home. This particular shop habitually puts books out on a small, raised shelf just to the left of its entrance. On the shelf are titles it has found difficult to shift and each is priced at one pound. A small white spine was crammed between two larger tomes, and I reached in to take it out for a closer look. There are often gems to be found amidst the clutter on the one-pound-shelf, and this appeared to be one of them.

On the cover of the white book was a whimsical image of a side street in Montmartre, Paris, with a single bare tree at the fore and snow covering the paving stones. Below the painting was the name ‘Utrillo’ in dark pink, and below this was the name ‘Montmartre’ in block capitals.

I fingered through the book and found numerous pages with colored images of scenes in Montmartre, some cheerful and filled with city-dwellers, others people-less and barren. These paintings, though created some hundred years prior to my escapades in Paris, nevertheless brought back memories of my time in the city. I heard the sounds of life from Utrillo’s depictions; bustling corners with rows of vendors, and the loud ringing of bells that erupts from the ‘dômes blancs’ of the basilica.

Maurice Utrillo – La Place St. Pierre et le Sacré Coeur de Montmartre

It was a warm late October morning when I decided to make my way up to Montmartre. I had the weekends to myself when I was working as an au pair and would use my free time to explore known and lesser-known quarters of the city. It was peaceful to walk as the sun rose slowly up the white apartment blocks and shed its watery light over the glistening streets. I walked some twenty minutes up the continual mild incline towards the white dome in the distance and came across the Cimitière du Nord, or Cemetery of the North (as is officially named the graveyard of Montmartre) in the 18^th arrondissement. The cemetery passes below several archways and bridges which one can walk over to admire the city of dead below it. As is expected of such a large necropolis, the graveyard boasts wonderfully elaborate monuments amidst the 20,000 burial plots within its walls. I walked down the stone stairs from the road and walked among the dead.

Émile Zola’s grave was one of the first graves I came across. Above the tomb stands an ominous bust of Zola’s face in bluish-grey stone, placed in the center of a curvaceous speckled-brown marble arch. The clouds came over as I wandered on, and Zola’s eyes trailed me as I went.

The grave of Emile Zola

Shortly after my encounter with Zola, I discovered the brutal memorial attributed to Berlioz. A grey mount of Berlioz’ profile is buried in the middle of the three black marble walls which solemnly protect his body. A cross is marked in silver above Berlioz’ head. It is a cold grave, unlike Berlioz’ music.

I checked the time and concluded I should get on my way to Montmartre, considering it was a weekend and it would likely begin to get busy around late morning. I found my way back to the same stone steps I had walked down from and emerged back into Paris. The dead remained below.

I turned off of the main road after around ten minutes and found myself in some cobbled side streets. The only establishments open were a few bakeries wafting intoxicating clouds of freshly baked loaves and pastries. I didn’t buy anything, as I had already eaten. I continued on.

Up, up, up the roads went, and the white dome of the Sacré-Cœur became ever bigger as I made my way towards the inner-village of Montmartre. My legs ached, and my back was sweating beneath my bag when I finally entered the ‘old’ village via the Rue Lepic. Many shops were open offering tacky trinkets and memorabilia of the various artists who once called Montmartre home. I stopped to watch a crepe maker swirl batter over a black cast iron cylindrical block. Once the batter was spilled, he deftly swirled it right to the outer edges of the flat-topped iron with a wooden baton that looked somewhat like a shortened croquet stick. Once the crepe began to bubble, the gentleman took a flat spatula and flipped it over,revealing a perfectly pale-brown beneath. I watched him for some time, and took my camera out to film him. He laughed at me, and I laughed too. I walked on.

Faces smiled in the tepid morning sun. Each house was as charming as the last. I followed the street on past the Moulin de la Galette and its enchanting little wooden windmill, and entered onto Rue Norvins, the road that would lead me to the Place du Tertre. Time went slowly, and the breeze ruffled my hair softly. I felt I was no longer in Paris. The rush and racing of city life fell away when one walked these calm streets, and all that remained were images and poetry.

The Place du Tertre was a bustling hubbub of heckling artists, artisans, and musicians, yet somehow everything blended together into the sweetest symphony of village noise. I stopped to gaze at a few tableaus. Some were quite wonderful. An artist came up to me and demanded I sit for a portrait. I glanced at his work, and his depictions were indeed lovely – softly penciled faces with wistful expressions – but I politely declined. He continued to ask, and I responded by asking whether I would have to pay for his eagerly-requested sitting. The artist looked sheepish and scuttled back to his wicker chair.

Over on the far side of the Place, one can look out over the city. To the west is the leafy Square Louise Michel.

Between the two silver birches standing by the wall in front of the outlook, someone had fastened a tightrope. Down near my feet was a red beret with a few coins of change. I turned and walked back the way I had come, towards the Sacré-Cœur.

There weren’t many people on the stone steps leading up to the basilica when I arrived. I sat and took my bag off, then leaned back and looked up at the blue sky. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, the world had changed color. The bells of the Sacré-Cœur began ringing and I jumped slightly at how very loud they were. The ringing continued in my ears for a few minutes after the basilica had become silent once more.

A man came and sat on a step below me, retrieved a small piano accordion from his bag, and began playing Le Temps des Cerises. I almost laughed at how very perfect it all was, how ridiculously French this little village was. An elderly woman came and stood beside the gentleman and began singing. I smiled, and did not stop smiling until I returned back to my apartment in the 8^th arrondissement.

Maurice Utrillo’s paintings make me nostalgic. They make me think on a Paris that is charming, romantic, and playful, one that captivates with its cobbled streets and wooden shutters, that mesmerizes with its secret alleyways and green balconies. His depictions of Montmartre create a Paris that one might meet in a dream, where colors are bright and time passes gently and calmly. For Montmartre is a reverie, a moment that cannot be grasped or held. It is a fragment of history that one passes through, then just as quickly leaves behind. Montmartre is the old beating heart of Paris, remaining static and unchanging while the city expands and modernizes around it.

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The Carl Kruse Art Blog home page is at https://carlkruse.net
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel Anna Rogers include Legacy of the Satyr and Grimes and the Future of AI Art.
The blog’s last post was Art of Atari.
An old Carl Kruse blog is here.

The Art of Atari

by Fraser Hibbitt for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

Tim Lapetino’s book The Art of Atari is a celebration of the visual worlds that emerged from Atari’s mission to market their video games. It is also a compendium of a certain time, the nascent culture of video gaming. An unavoidably nostalgic book – one flicks through and is brought into the images, made to ponder, made to relive distant memories. It is now that enough time has passed that a cultural paradigm can be seen and explored in its pages.

The reason why The Art of Atari is so successful amongst its followers is because Lapetino has struck a wonderful balance between image and text. Out of curiosity, I once picked up a book called A Study of Toys. It was a deceptively long-winded book that I did not finish, considering it could be held in my hand. The book’s cover was a mute red and the author, I forget the name, was printed in leaf-gold on the spine. It reminded me of a late Victorian publication – tiny words, much writing on a page. Somehow, as you may expect, the essence of what a toy is, means, or even celebrates, didn’t quite fit in the form presented.

Logo of Atari, Sunnyvale, California U.S.A.

It is that the gloom, even solemnity, of that dark print belied the content of the book. A toy gladdens the heart in some inexplicable way, a bridge to wonder and play. Where but in the image of some old toy does this fact ring true? Lapetino’s book is charged with this sentiment. Of course, it is no mere picture book. Respect could, perhaps, be paid by these emotionally charged images alone, but a little text and some history serves to contextualize this world. This is why it is not only a nostalgic book but a celebration of a culture. The cover centers itself with the bold Atari symbol while images of classic games revolve around the unchanging center.

A copy of Art of Atari on the floor of the Carl Kruse office. Gift from Angelo Cioffari.

On to the art. The art of Atari was functional. The media surrounding an Atari game was not decked with screenshots of game play but described with sentences hoping to draw in a viewer’s interest. The art, then, was crafted for the market. If the imagery captured the heart, then so much luck for the company. Atari was special in that it had artists internally working for them – and we can draw the comparison with early twentieth century illustrators and painters working commission for advertisements – much of the work now coveted and esteemed.

This in no manner dampens the craftsmanship of the art. The art was a companion to the game, and artwork for a video game was new aesthetic territory. The artists employed under Atari, such as Cliff Spohn, Susan Jaekel and George Opperman, gave a new distinctive visual vocabulary to Atari’s games – along with the iconic company logo. This new aesthetic helped to steer buyers in Atari’s direction, but it also served as an imaginative directive. It is an incredible thing that the mind can pick up a narrative out of the most abstract shapes – for example, a triangle following a square. Likewise, the artwork of Atari was to match the pixelated abstract games with an imaginative foreground; players don’t see a pixelated duck, they see a dragon.

Artwork for the ATARI game “Millipede.”

The stylistic devices of the artwork, the subtle detail of perspective and attractive colors, forged a language with which to express these strange excitements exacted by game play. It was the infancy of home video gaming that provided this new space to experiment artistically, and what someone takes into their home had to be of some worth. The artwork for Atari games accepted a challenge of individually crafting each game’s image to a high standard, and the art had to endow the abstract geometries of actual game play with an emotional attachment both in and outside of the game. The particularity of each artistic design was a potential particular world that consumers would bring into their homes.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Space Invaders Art

Artwork for the ATARI game “Space Invaders.”

The artists rarely, if ever, actually played the games. Most often, they had a loose understanding of the idea of the game, and after that, the concept was theirs. Tim Lapetino cites the artwork of Atari as one of those prime movers which sets the gears turning, which in his case, was a career in graphic design. For surely as the romanticism of the art wears off to a tinge of nostalgia, one begins to inspect the art from an entirely new perspective. The design, the ability to conjure images to match abstract ideas – a concept.

Carl Kruse Art Blog - Image of Missile Command

Artwork for the ATARI game “Missile Command.”

For this was implicitly the message of the art of Atari. It is possible to create, and in that creation, define an experiential activity. The ability to prove the likeness of the art to the game serves as an example in conceptualizing which can enlighten sensitivity to other facets of experience. This is not to say that all the concept art of Atari perfectly reflected the game. I’ve now heard a few people say that the leer of the pirate above the swell of waves has no particular agreement with the squares of flagship. In cases such as these, the effect is comical hyperbole.

Tim Lapetino’s book, then, unearths the mission that inspired this memorable art. The retrospective glance gives a unity to this cooperative effort to not only sell games, but to create a lasting cultural paradigm. However unified the vision now seems, it is far from obvious why a game comprised of simple geometry should be endowed with companionable art until Atari took the decisive step. It is difficult to unsee the connection. The logical progression of video games has nullified the need for such intricacies between art and the game, for such command of the imagination to link the two worlds. Lapetino’s book is drawing attention to something which is now taken for granted: the investment of imagination and emotion which is part of the gaming experience. Atari brought into the home enduring symbols which were shared by a generation of gamers, laying the foundations for the interactive and immersive spirit that the progression of gaming has supplied.

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The blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.net
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Fraser Hibbitt include Thinking About Realism and the Museum of Old and New Art.
The blog’s last article was the Legacy of the Satyr.
You can also find Carl Kruse on fstoppers.

The Legacy of the Satyr

by Hazel Anna Rogers for the Carl Kruse Arts Blog

The passing-down of literature fascinates me. I find something utterly awe-inducing in the ability of human language to convey a narrative generation after generation, and for us to have the knowledge and ingenuity to understand the importance of preserving great stories and characters. I suppose the process must be akin, in some sense, to that of a distillation chamber, in that it consists of years of inter-generational storytelling that distill the story to its essence, to the very narrative blocks that birthed it to begin with. And, from then on, the story itself is open to interpretation, thus presenting us with endless possibilities of adaptation. Tales have been pummeled, pressed, and forced into eternally variable forms, starting from anonymous fables and ending in popular animated entertainment. But do we lose something when we carve away all the layers of a story, or a character, and place in it instead our own values, our own narrative, our own words? If we present a character or story to an audience as de facto, that is to say an original work, why need our audience doubt it? I wish to present here the origins and developments of one such character, the Satyr, so as to suggest the true importance of literary and cultural heritage in the modern day.

So…the Satyr. A half man, half beast creature that allegedly emerged in works of Classical Greek mythology, and was most prominently associated with the god of ecstasy and wine, Dionysus (or Bacchus/Liber Pater in Rome), son of Zeus and Semele (the only mortal to father a god, Semele was Zeus’ mistress but swiftly found her death through the wrath of Zeus’ wife, Hera). Dionysus’ artistic importance in Greek society stems from his purported powers – to produce or inspire ecstasy – and many theatrical performances were attributed to him in festivals bearing his name. His legacy was one of exaltation, pleasure, and sexuality, thus many of the ceremonies ascribed to him involved the phallus and the theme of fecundity in the form of spirits such as satyrs.

Two Satyrs, by Peter Paul Rubens, 1618

The Satyr differs from the Roman ‘Faunus’, Saturn’s grandson who was revered to bring abundance to the pastoral, in that the Satyr is endowed an (erect) phallus along with horse ears and tail, whereas Faunus is half man half goat. However, in the Hellenistic era Satyrs were also presented as being part goat and man, so this distinction can sometimes be arbitrary. Perhaps a more prominent distinction can be observed in ancient Greek artwork, where Satyrs were often painted alongside women (mortals) and nymphs, whom they would attempt to woo. In Classical Athenian theater, the triad of plays performed for the Dionysia would consist of two tragedies proceeded by a bawdy tragicomedy known as the ‘Satyr play’, in which satyrs would take on the role of the chorus. Not many complete plays of this ilk remain from the period, but Euripides’ ‘Cyclops’ is one such play that we have in its entirety. As is characteristic of ‘Satyrs’, Euripides’ play is founded on debauchery and immorality, the main themes of it being gluttony and excessive ingestion (testimony to Dionysus’ title of the ‘god of wine’). The Cyclops’ belly itself is described as the ‘greatest of all divinities’, and Silenus (Dionysus’ satyresque companion) along with his chorus of satyrs are eager for Odysseus to give them his wine in exchange for the Cyclops’ food. It is a wondrous satire of one of the scenes from Homer’s epic The Odyssey. [Carl Kruse: As an aside, Prof. Emily Wilson has released a new, modernized translation of The Odyssey, which I highly recommend).

Interestingly, the lewd and sexual nature of the Satyr and the figure of Silenus have been lost to time if we look to references of them in 20^th and 21^st Century literature and media. Mr Tumnus, the faun-like character in C S Lewis’ ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’ (1950) is exceedingly tender and tame, despite his appearance being a sort of faun-satyr hybrid (he has a long, horse-like tail but also horns and goatish legs). The ‘Nymph and Satyr’ (1908) painting by Fauvist artist Henri Matisse is distinctly unsexual, aside from the nymph lying in front of him (which I suppose could be interpreted any such way), and with the satyr looking distinctively man-like.

The Nymph and the Satyr, 1908, Henri Matisse

The satyr Grover Underwood in Rick Riordan’s popular children’s series of ‘Percy Jackson’ novels is also decidedly domestic, acting simply as a loyal friend to protagonist Percy, despite the fact that the series itself is supposedly based on Greek mythology.

Why is this important? Why is it significant that a character that continues to be portrayed in popular culture has lost its defining traits to time? Surely poetic license allows for us to make these changes? Well, yes. I agree. But I also think that this example is perfect in showing us how easily our literary and cultural heritage can fade away. In a few simple sentences, Rick Riordan has replaced the legacy of the satyr with something completely different, and I think it’s a shame to forget where these stories and characters came from in the first place. We are all influenced by what we read, listen to, and watch. As we increasingly rely on fast-paced pleasures such as social media and video games, our interest in the past wanes. Everything is moving faster, everywhere there are new possibilities, all around new futures tempt fewer people to go to university. We don’t need to spend three years learning about one field anymore in the hope of pursuing a career that brings enough money in. We can do short entrepreneur courses or make money through social media outlets. Increasing your intelligence through persistent long-term study is no longer as desirable – it has become a waste of time. You can get all the answers you could ever want through the internet.

I think there’s an alarmingly steep uphill trend of shortening attention spans aligned with the increasing normality of seeing six-year-olds with smartphones, and I find that disarming. Classics and robust tomes of literature were most definitely not shoved down my throat while I was growing up, but the names of such authors as Austen, Lawrence, and Homer were certainly not unknown to me. I loved to sit down and read thick, musty novels through day and night, often becoming so invested in the storyline of a certain protagonist that it would take an almighty level of strength to pull myself away from a book so as to have an agreeable amount of sleep. I used to get reading lights in my stockings at Christmas which only exacerbated my unhealthy night-time habits.

Through our increasing reliance on the internet to solve every question or dilemma, I do believe we have become, or are becoming, quite base thinkers. We are more inclined to rely on the satisfaction derived from a ‘like’ or ‘share’ on a social media post, our primary mode of communication, than to seek it from reading or researching the shelves in a library. Popular classic novels have been turned into graphic novels so they’re easier to ingest, and there is an ever-growing market for pseudo-babble texts that tell you how to improve your life with various methods of spirituality and finance-management. These books employ lists and short phrases to cater to our inability to concentrate on a single idea for longer than a page. Complexity seems unappealing, and ease and speed of ingestion of information is what we now seem to seek.

Reading a long book takes discipline, and time, something many of us don’t have a lot of anymore. But it also takes passion, and with a world endlessly bombarding us with all of the exciting and different things we could be doing with our time we often feel inclined to leave the quiet, secular activity of reading to one side. Even just a hundred years ago, primary and secondary schools often still taught Latin, and reading the ‘canonical’ works was non-negotiable. Though in saying that, there is much to be said about the validity of ‘canonical’ works, and I value the attempts by many university institutions to vary this ‘canon’ to include non-native English writers and literature from marginalized authors.

Why not delve deeper, why not exchange a moment of time you would normally spend binge-watching a television series on something that takes more work, more imagination? Why not pick up a fat book, one that makes you feel when you open it to the first page that it is so impossibly long that you could never possibly finish it? Why not read the books that have influenced timeless authors through the centuries, and see if they inspire you just as much? Why not invest time learning about the history of all of the art and literature around you, all that made us what we are today?

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The blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.net.
Contact: carl At carlkruse DOT com.
Other articles by Hazel Anna Rogers include When Did We Stop Criticizing Art and Paper Books, E-Book Dreams.
The blog’s last post was on Brunelleschi’s Dome.
Carl Kruse is also on the Goodreads book site.