Monday, 15 August 2011
Saturday, 6 August 2011
Sunday, 31 July 2011
THE.SUN.RISING
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Thy beams so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think ?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay."
She's all states, and all princes I ;
Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.
When Joseph Beuys visited New York in the 1970s he renamed the twin towers of the World Trade Centre after the healing saints Cosmas and Damian, who, it is said, transplanted black limbs on to white patients and white limbs on to black. Beuys's postcard of the World Trade Centre, with the names Cosmas and Damian scribbled on the towers, sits among the other jokes, drawings and relics in this intimate encounter with the artist. It is a haunting instance of his ability to claim even the largest objects as Beuys sculptures, and to replace reality with his own, personal history of the world, as if everything he touched turned to felt.
Beuys gave Germany its imagination back. His drawings with their totemic figures, his ritualistic use of felt and fat, his monumental sculptures, such as Tramstop, assert the human need for myth and symbol. He showed how the worship of oaks was not Nazi but went back to Celtic prehistory. He valued tales of plurality, flow, democracy. Hence his fascination with Cosmas and Damian and their inter-racial surgery.
What does not always come across in Beuys's large sculptures is his humour. Bits and Pieces nicely leavens our sense of Beuys. There is a joyous poem-letter about his favourite foods, reminiscent of Günter Grass's novel The Flounder in its celebration of earthy pleasure. There are postcards made out of wood, and evidence of Beuys's fandom of the bank robber John Dillinger. Bits and Pieces is a loving archive of one of the 20th century's great artists, and we are lucky to have it.
He encountered the Surrealists themselves not long after and became an official member of the group. (Surrealism wasn’t just a style, it was a movement, a “revolution”, led by poet Andre Breton.)
Tanguy’s hauntingly strange images depict landscapes populated with unreal objects, but painted with a realism that makes them tangbile. Like Max Ernst. I find his paintings have a fascinating ability to pull you in and immerse you in that state where the rational and irrational meet and mix.
In some ways Tanguy was the purest of the Surrealist painters, adhering more consistently to the ideals of unconscious imagery as extolled in the Surrealist manifestos and periodicals (to which he contributed)
