I started thinking about how I could re-purpose the keyboard of the dismantled piano I keep in the garden, so I thought to build a new instrument by combining it with some other parts I had laying around. I ended up with this mechanical hybrid thing I thought to call “Bassoforte” (bass + pianoforte).

The neck is from a broken electric bass, as a bridge I used a cabinet handle, the pickups are from a guitar, and the part at the top where the strings are attached is a chimney cap, which works as resonator as well as percussive sound.

One of Paul Gauguin's Tahiti paintings.

Paul Gauguin was a strange guy who spent his life in search of paradise, which he tacitly but clearly recognized as an illusion. For over a hundred years he’s been considered one of the most important of the French post-impressionist painters but, in his own time, he was a commercial failure.

The predominant subtext of the short film Gauguin: Maker of Myth, is that, in fact, “Mr. Flop City But I Don’t Care Gauguin” very much wanted to be a commercial success. This, says Myth, despite the fact the that he vehemently eschewed the trappings of bourgeois culture and went so far as to call himself “un sauvage,” a savage. This driven man fled as far as possible as it was in his day (which was very far, indeed) from the sources of capital, fame, and “civilization.” Gauguin fled, mind you, but he did so complaining about his poverty every inch of the way. Like James Joyce, he was of a contemporary milieu that found its satisfaction, even joy, in exile.

This lovely short film, produced by the National Gallery of Art, is a vivid and concise introduction to the artistic career of the pivotal and influential Gauguin. Oddly, though, no director or writer is credited; distressing, that. The film is edited by the talented and keen-eyed John Warnock (the photographer, not the CEO of Adobe who announced Photoshop in 1987–unless I’m deeply confused, of course, and the universe is in fact running in a course deeply in tune with the desires of mortal humans).

Also not credited is the, so to speak, book of the exhibit, as both book (which came out a few months ago) and the nonfiction film are based upon an exhibit that played at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. That one branch of the government forgets to credit another happens, to the annoyance of all souls concerned, all the time. Buck up, don’t just be grateful to have a job (you’re employed for your skill and talent and you’re the grateful one?), but share that joy with your fellow strivers by activating the activism of employment and demanding a playing field of opportunity that extends in just balance to all seekers among the various cultural and regional capitalisms (give us a break for being smart enough to recognize the jungle rules at play here and to thus exude the linguistic plural in lieu of a full explication of the geophysical realpolitik) dependent on the exploitation of dynamic costs of labor, goods, and willingness to pay, across the globe.

(And if the Tea Partiers hold against the federal or any other bureaucracy the fact that the creative origins of this film are lost in the mists of history or otherwise obscured by internal politics, I shall, as a respected and publicly valued member of aforesaid bureaucracy, personally diminish them each and every one with a savage pea-shooter pleasure, for we are, after all, engaged in a culture war, and therefore far be it from me to shirk my body count, and far be it from me to dismiss as redundant to the free-market productions which, on no accounting, should in fact be funded by, regardless of profit to, capitalists [except, perhaps, and only once the glass ceiling is once and truly broken, upon the whim of post-menstrual might-have-been CEOs in search of a write-off] demanding filmic profit and who are last-of-all interested in neither your welfare nor your education. Partisanship aside, folks, we simply wouldn’t have info-images [narrated by that sexy homo William Defoe!] like these unless we all band together as a nation or… Goddess forbid, depend on the Europeans to tell us what’s good.)

Gauguin wasn’t always a painter. He worked the first part of his career as a stockbroker, and apparently stoked up a pot of money. He was good enough at it, in any case, that he started collecting art (and banged out five kids with the wife he later dumped for the savage life). In the 1870s, though, he left all that to take up painting. In those days, paintings were like guitars, and you could lose your man to some muse, some passion other than you.

Maker of Myth emphasizes Gauguin’s self-creation, his “guises”: the painter tried to market himself with various personas, none of which gained him any success. He visited (and worked on the canal cutting across) Panama, then Martinique, and later and most famously, Tahiti. Of his huge oeuvre, it’s his mythic representations of Tahiti that most of us know. Naked ladies do have their charms, especially when they sparkle with the intelligence and inquisitiveness Gauguin manages to portray. No doubt the stockbroker had talent; let us acknowledge of the power of imagination of those trapped in “sales,” for imagination is nowhere more powerful than when engaged in the art of persuasion. It is widely known, rra, as one might say in Botswana or, less opaquely, with a wink to a reader of the detective ladies’ mysteries perpetuated by Alexander McCall Smith.

Gauguin went to Tahiti in the late 1800s in search of paradise but, if it had ever been there, it was long gone by the time he arrived. Tahiti was a French colony, ravaged by European diseases, its native proclivities dumbed down by the plague of Christianity spread by its myrmidons, the missionaries. So, like he did with the rest of his life in images, he invented the Tahiti he wanted to see. He drew on a memory enhanced by engravings and that all-new-thing, photography; Gauguin’s “post-impressionism” made him one of the planet’s first global mash-up artists. Kudos to this 28-minute film for emphasizing the encircling musculature of influences shaping Gauguin’s art.

I have a small quibble with the film’s biographical verisimilitude. Contrary to the film’s narrative arc, Gauguin’s guises were not always invented out of whole cloth. Gauguin wrote that he was born an Incan (and a savage one, at that), a claim that is, to be sure, not strictly true. However, the film leads us to believe that he only hooked up with this idea after a visit to Peru as an adult. In fact, his mother was Peruvian (and therefore no doubt mestizo and thus quite possibly a descendent of Incans) and the family of pater familias Clovis Gauguin lived in Peru for four years when Paul was yet but small and highly formative.

Indeed, his mother was a proto-feminist, at least according to one or another wave of sources, while both his parents were for sure and for their time of a socialist inclination, thus lending context to the artist’s later distaste for the hustle and bustle of capitalism, its blatant exploitation of self and other, and Gauguin’s consistent portrayal of women as the interrogators of his paintings’ mises en scenes. Except, that is, when they weren’t, in which case he was painting a self-portrait. It seems that his picturative fictions of self are what engaged his avant grade and early adherents, while it was his exotic nudes that claimed fame for his work in the long run. It’s good, once and a while, to think of a Gauguin bigger than all that.

Even as his reputation back in France began to expand and his paintings began to sell, Gauguin grew even wearier of the so-called civilization he had left behind. Perhaps deeply depressed about the illusion of paradise, perhaps crushed by the exhausting stress of poverty, from Tahiti he fled to an island deep in the Polynesian outback of the Marquesas chain.

The film says he wanted to be alone, but let us note that in his travels Gauguin always, in the parlance used in this production, took a local “girl as a lover.” Artistic solitude, apparently, is all relative. In any case, his final years were highly productive (“feverish”) and we all, on the other side of some sort of great divide separating us from paradise or anything but the most technical of adventures (all now prerequisite upon in-advance shopping adventures), can only look back in wonder at the thoughts he must have thought in a cultural milieu so different from ours that we, now, hardly recognize its anonymity and mobile poverty as our own.

Gauguin died just before his 54th birthday. He was buried and is now enshrined by his market–the lovers of his art and the economic power they wield–on that distant island in the south Pacific.

Ginevra's Story

Using X-rays to literally delve beneath the surface of this mysterious portrait, Christopher Swann’s 1999 documentary is a fascinating examination of a beautiful painting.

One of only three portraits of women by Leonardo da Vinci, the subject of the painting was the 16-year-old Ginevra de Benci, a member of a wealthy family. The portrait may have been Leonardo’s first commission; he is thought to have been 22 when he painted it in 1474. The picture hangs in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. – or, rather, the upper half of the painting hangs there.

For at some point in its past, the picture was mutilated: the bottom half was cut away, so that Ginevra is portrayed only from about mid-bust upwards. Ginevra’s Story shows how art historians, using computer-aided design technology, reconstructed the bottom third of the painting. The reconstruction is based on sketches of Ginevra’s hands in the Windsor Castle art collection, and on comparison with Ginevra’s “sisters,” the Mona Lisa and the “Lady with an Ermine.”The documentary also shows how the painting was restored. The varnish Leonardo applied to the surface of the painting had yellowed over the centuries, considerably dulling its colors. Before-and-after images show how Leonardo was, already at 22, a master of shading and subtle detail. And X-ray and infrared reflectography delve beneath the surface of the painting to reveal Leonardo’s preparations for the picture.

Like all of da Vinci’s women, Ginevra is enigmatic. This girl, especially, is austerely so: her pale skin, faraway eyes and sad expression make her appear as if she were resigned to a life without joy. In fact, she was likely a very expressive poet (though none of her work survives) and was the muse to the poet and Venetian diplomat Bernardo Bembo, who courted her with a knightly, platonic devotion that was the custom in Florence in her day. But, too, she was married to a much older man whom she may not have loved, so life may indeed have been sad for her.

Narrated by Meryl Streep (in English) or Isabella Rossellini (in Italian), Ginevra’s Story is highly recommended for art lovers and educators.

Peter Weibel is a fascinating artist whose career extends from the late 1960s to the present. He is not, however, the cultural saboteur (much less terrorist) art critics make him out to be.

Osvaldo Romberg, who curated the show of Weibel’s early works upon which this DVD is based, claims that Weibel’s work reflects “the strategies of the Tupamaros, a Latin American group active in Uruguay in the 1960s. This group operated not through fear [as terrorists, by literal definition of the word, would] but by exposing secret bank accounts, money laundering schemes, and other economic transgressions. In this way, the Uruguayan public was made aware of the corruption that pervaded their country.”

Artists have, on rare occasion, made the public aware of the need for change (Upton Sinclair comes to mind in this regard), but Weibel is certainly not among them. But far be it from art critics to let reality restrain their hubris or deter them from making grander-than-thou claims for Art. Christa Steinle, in her essay “A Heretic of the Art System,” claims that Weibel forced art lovers to trample on the law when he wrote the words “trampling on the law” on a gallery floor in Krems in 1968. If there’s danger of trampling here, it’s as we roll on the floor laughing at the hubris of this ludicrous assertion.

Alas, the problem with the presentation of art, at least for the past hundred or so years, is that curators and critics get to do the presenting. The art-curious should take it as a given that, after opening their copy of Peter Weibel, Rewriter, the booklet should be thrown straight into the recycling bin.

continue reading my review of Peter Weibel, Rewriter: Early (conceptual) photographs, (expanded) films, (body) videos and (contextual) works, 1964-1975 – DVD review – documentary / film directors.

Air Bear, NYC Urban Art, from William Fuentes on Vimeo.

This playful and poignant exhibition challenges visitors to think differently about the creative potential lurking in everyday objects. From an iridescent trout made from beach refuse to a flock of cheery birds made from tin cans, Trash Menagerie explores animals imaginatively made from recycled rubbish.

And that puts me in mind of local artist Jayme Jacobson’s Eclectons, likewise made form recycled materials. Lately, Jacobson has been working with a writer to unfold (so to speak) a soap-operaesque tale of Eclecton treachery and liberation. You can find the short slideshows she’s made of the first two chapters here and here. And here’s Wand Baneesh, a delightful creature made of paper.

And in case you’ve wondered what to do with those self-replicating clothes hangers cluttering up the closets of your life, you might want to consider something like these Hangeliers.

More marvelous recycling sculpture by Jayme Jacobson and witty writing by Ken O’Donnel.

And in case you missed chapter one, it’s here around here someplace.

Firekites – AUTUMN STORY – chalk animation from Lucinda Schreiber on Vimeo.