Picture Post #70: Civilisation!

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be

neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Tessa den Uyl

Rooftop Madrid. 2021. 

The last two picture posts did regard a certain idea of decay, and as a threesome, this picture might enhance that subtle fascination that surrounds those layered surfaces.

The abstract has often been criticized as either easy art or difficult thinking. Even when we became used to abstract ideas and turned them into what is called: rational thinking. Do we not mostly accept what is convenient in some way or other, no matter how illusory things are, and all the rest we prefer to discard? 

We overlap thoughts with actions and emotions; overlapping is our strength and our misery. Continuous overlapping sketches the picture we live in, and so, rather unawares, we shake a cocktail that we define as ‘our life’. 

What we can apprehend simply by viewing even trash, so complicated by its nature for refuse(d), and often wished unseen, is that everything traces into something else, and transforms. 

Symbolically, when we look at ourselves, we might find a trashy landscape far worse than this rooftop. Although the terror of seeing the veritable junkyard from within also shows the many forgotten things that we touched and related to during our life. And we’re all that, not just a part. 

The picture we prefer to see cannot match the reality we imagine. How real can we truly be?

Picture Post #66 What a Can Can Do

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be

neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Tessa den Uyl

Malaga, Spain  2021

Unlike randomly dropped trash, this Coca Cola can seems to have been placed in cardinal Ángel Herrera Oria's hand very carefully. Tiny gestures, what thoughts do they provoke? The photo seems to conjure up three phases in time:

• Materially, the alloy metal of the bronze statue and the aluminium can link together. The originally clay molded figure reveals striped structures on the cloak of the statue—and somehow striped movements are very human gestures indeed. These connect to the stripes of the bar code on the industrial can.  

• The deformed horizontally placed can offers more dynamism to the inclined direction of the Cardinal’s hand. The sky, a stone church in the background, the bronze statue, the can and the bar code together offer a kind of idea about a tangible timeline. So far, we can follow it.

• But lately, when thinking of algorithms, or something like crypto currencies, digital data creates ‘new images’ which are mostly only comprehensible to programmers, and for a vast majority of people remain invisible. No tiny tangible innocent gestures can interfere there, and perhaps we’ve come to the time in which: what a can, cannot do…

Picture Post #63: Paradise Lost

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be 

neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Tessa den Uyl

Italy 1960's .  Picture credit: Antonio Borrani

A nude man seems to sprout out of the earth, just like the vegetation. And in a way there is not much to say, except that most often people focus on people, and more so when these people are naked. 

The spectator’s interpretation depends on how they consider the naked body. Even when the nude figure has inspired general acceptance in the Western world, especially in forms of art, we might think it a bit strange if we would see an undressed person walking on the street. The quintessence of humankind certainly is undressed, although we are used to seeing the body covered up. 

Turning to the decade of the sixties when some of the younger generation longed for freedom from the conservatism at that time, the exaltation of the uncovered body symbolised that quest for freedom. No wonder the pureness of nudity is similar to taking off a mask. To live without pretence is nevertheless not an easy goal to set. 

Indeed, almost sixty years ahead, particularly at the beach and also on the streets, bodies are surely covered up less than they were. Although that progress of freedom seems to have translated itself rather into an imposed fashion these days, than the acquisition of a free spirit, as some were looking for when this picture was taken. 

In the West, nudity belongs to private atmospheres to this day, and the naked body, most often, is conflated with sexuality. To exploit nakedness is an optional which does not withstand the fact that we are all born naked. Yet somehow we seem to have trouble owning that nakedness, in which we become unspoiled by structures, and can accept ourselves not as objects or art-forms, but simply for what we are. To put it a bit crudely: for one of those standing upright animals. 

Picture Post #61: Outside the Image

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Tessa den Uyl

Picture credit: Robert Saltzman ‘La Fe’, 2017.

It might take a while to see that the creative feeling in this picture moves beyond the representation of a worshiper who touches the depiction of a Maria. The movement within the sobriety of this picture is of such subtlety that it exposes itself as a feeling rather than a seeing.

The eye immediately selects the strong vertical upward movement of the man with his arm against the painting, accentuated by the stick that the worshiper keeps in his right hand. Instead, the upper left of the frame of the painting, to the lowest forms one diagonal. Repetitive diagonals in opposed direction are drawn by the lower point of the angles of the pews' end-panels to the highest, with the upper right angle of the painting in its midst. In the picture, the vanishing point is to the left (imagine the benches as the floor), which brings us outside of the picture.

Within this classical framework of more- and less-visible lines, exalts the shadow of the man that is cast directly below the Maria. It is this shadow which accentuates the ascendance of the depicted Maria, visually and symbolically.

When one imagines this picture just with the man and the painting, without the shadow, and not in this room, the ‘inexplicable’, the ‘something more’ to life does not show. The eye focuses on a specific form, which the mind elaborates, and hands existence to the selected subject. Though it is not in the main subject but in the space, through the tension and the affinities between things of the surroundings, a subject receives empathy.

The unnoticed is deeply rooted in human being. The synthesis of every creative process is to verify this transpersonal union with the personal, within the contingent, transitory reality in which everything would become insignificant, remaining only personal or only eternal.

If in this picture we would see solely a religious man in a church, we would harm ourselves. Being moved is through the transformation of what we see and feel, and depends on an intrinsic secret of invisible images.

Picture Post 56: Fate on the Verge of Extinction

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl

Photo credit: African shared pictures. Cameroon.

The woman in white, called ‘the female pastor’, cures a woman affected with COVID-19. Interesting in the picture is the physical approach this female pastor takes in regard to a contagious disease. Noteworthy is also the posture of the patient, which completely surrenders to this kind of aid.

Superstition. Can it or can it not cure?

When we dive into other cultures, we should be careful in responding to this question. In the case of this specific picture, we are talking about a place where the native language itself is in the throes of extinction. And with a language that is only spoken, not written, the population of such an ethnic group becomes extremely vulnerable towards misinformation.

Suppose you have grown up believing in magic, and regular medicine has never reached your habitat, beyond perhaps an aspirin. To reach out for what your people have always known is not stupid, is simply obvious. Less apparent is the exploitation of the superstition of minority groups, to create personal benefit in a context of capitalism and mass urbanisation. Hence they often go together!

To exploit a virus’s nature like COVID -19 with a blow in the face, is not taking care of ‘your flock’; rather it traces upon very old traditions that cannot endure the loss of the mind as a mystical labyrinth, in favour of the power of the human mind alone to find cure.

Inherently, this picture questions where the idea of destiny, which is characteristic of superstition, is going to stand in a globalising world.

Picture Post #51: Nobody Excluded

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.' 

Paris, October 2019.

Picture credit: Olivia Galisson

Posted by Tessa den Uyl

Activists draw attention to global ecological devastation in front of the fountain of Place du Châtelet. This monument was ordered by Napoleon in 1806, and built by the sculptor Boizet. It pays tribute to the victories achieved in battle, and reminds us of Napoleon’s decision to provide free drinking water to all Parisians.

Victories bring along statues, which serve historical commemoration -- though foremost, symbolically, they are built upon the idea of a future. A future that, seen from a once-upon-a-time perspective, might not have been that imaginable, as to how it would turn out.

The beginning of the world alike the end is not new to our imagination. But things have changed. We have interfered too much in the flux of ecology, for profit. We might think we are smart, but how smart we truly are will have to be proven. For neither rage nor love might provide a statue to remember.

This planet does not care about our extinction. Though we are this planet -- for without it, we simply wouldn’t be. This is not new to our imagination. More recent, instead, is the question whether our extinction is truly a problem, or do we make it a problem because we have created a mess? This time, what is foreseen is that nobody is excluded.

Picture Post #49: Vision in a Suitcase

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.' 

Posted by Tessa Den Uyl

Florence, 2019


The Venus by Botticelli, the David by Michelangelo, the Thinker by Rodin, names which resonate, and celebrate moments in our history which are now in the lap of technology. With new materials and with lasers, these images, and thus the names, are copied and cast into gadgets which we can grasp quickly and transport (even) in hand luggage.

These persons had a vision. In this light it just seems odd to exploit ready-mades for commerce that are not urinals, thinking of Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ and placing a non-art object in an art space.What happens in this shop window might be thought of as the reverse. The art (and its creator) are objects available to everyone. But nothing within these statues reminds us of a vision. They are vision-less, though apparently they remind us of something else.

Does this mean that, when we have merely heard about something, scraps of such something are enough to live through the original, with all its implications and compulsiveness, in which and for which the creation came into being?

Picture Post #47: Joyful Shades, A Riddle

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.' 

Mountain View, Kareedouw, South Africa

Posted by Tessa Den Uyl

For a light to shine, it has to burn something, and within this transitional process, it is able to illuminate shapes. The stronger a directional light shines, the clearer the shadows become, and without the shadows, we wouldn’t see forms but flat surfaces.

Certain shapes we can touch, but when we try to grasp their shadow, this doesn’t work. In this image, where the shadows are almost as clearly outlined as the physical bodies, it comes to mind that no problem is situated within the space of an outline, but merely in the identity of that which establishes it. 

This means that we can put confidence in the cosmic order, in which no person has a right to self-contained certainty, since everything is opened up by something else, and liberated the moment it is touched by light.

The Myths That Shape Us

The Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence, Italy

Posted by Tessa Den Uyl

The shadow of Benvenuto Cellini’s sculpture of Perseus holding Medusa’s head is cast triumphantly on the wall. And was it not also for the shield that the goddess Athena gave to Perseus, that he could sever Medusa’s head? Is such reflection a kind of indirect contact, that tells us something about our own eyes?

The myth tells that everything which came into direct contact with Medusa’s sight petrified, even after her beheading. As miraculously, from her bleeding neck she gave birth to two other creatures, Pegasus and Chrysaor. For the idea of myth is to continue, indeed the force of Greek tragedy reflects on those who have grown up in its shadow, until this present day.   

Such stories have shaped generations, and we ourselves are shaped by stories we may not even have read or heard of. Romanticism, for instance, didn’t take place in Africa, which partly explains how love is perceived within a completely different coding in the West. Similarly, Indian philosophy stimulates a distinct view on life and the Taoist another.

Humankind has searched for meaning, and meaning stems from what happened before us, whether completely invented or not. Through our eyes, we see a past which we are very often unable to recognise, and without recognition, how can we deal with it? Often we see as in a mirror, although we do not see the origin of the image.

When Athena later depicts the decapitated head of Medusa on her chest (the same image is portrayed on the shields of heroic warriors), this image served to frighten the enemy, and surely eyes have become symbolically charged with expressions for us. ‘She looked at me as if I should drop dead.’

You might mistrust someone for the look of one’s eyes more than their words or actions. And friendly eyes make you feel comfortable? Such impressions are generally not much our own creation. They were passed on from generation to generation. Terror is similarly conveyed, and the Ancient Greeks have been masters in paving the path.

We have woven our lives in oblivion. When we seek to find meaning, the effort is to understand what is there. And what is there is filled with symbols that seemingly hand us meaning. We become immensely stimulated by a specific agglomeration of symbols that we make meaningful while their randomness is overlooked.

We give deep attention to a particular combination of images and thoughts whose impressions are immediately accessible to us. Certain gestures, phrases, ideas, and emotions are highlighted which we do remember indeed. Everything we do remember detaches from all other experiences, yet all together they weave the tapestry of our lives. This is the complexity of memory.

Everybody builds up memory in different combinations. What we keep consciously present in our mind tells us how to react, how to pick up a concept, how we feel. We react on what our mind and body have memorised, though not all that is memorised is recalled.

Then, to see our memory as a minor part of a vaster landscape which is not remembered does not sound that illogical. Nor does the notion that oblivion includes everything from which we do not draw conclusions, although the tragedy might just be that this is not that true.

Turning back to the picture above, Benvenuto Cellini’s sculpture exposes a rather violent historic representation. Likewise the other exhibited sculptures by various artists. Today their elevated greatness in the history of art confuses famous names with underlying stories which are represented within the sculptures. The symbolism which reaches out to offer us insight into our current being, ‘a touch into oblivion’, is generally overlooked.

Today, a fair amount of literature and film marches on the key element of tragedy to entertain us. Creating tragedy seems to come naturally to us. Yet indirectly we give meaning to something that was created long before we were there.

The shadow in the picture reminds us how reflection indirectly connects us to oblivion, how oblivion can make us act, and is triumphantly present, silently exhibiting its influence. As this statue by Cellini moves far beyond its time, backward as forward, it is properly charged with oblivion. And this is the art of seeing, the force of myth, that we all carry along.

Picture Post #45: Undesired and Eliminated

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl

Paris - France 2018

The more imagination you put into the display of products for a shop window, the more people will remember it. Here the dead rats are eye catching indeed, aside from the large golden letters announcing: Disinfestation of Harmful Animals.

We remove the unwanted, to justify our own characteristics? 

No animal knows about our bounds, nor do we know about theirs. Living along together, this very often human being simply cannot. Though all those unwanted creatures need an earth to live on. 

Perhaps when these undesired beings are there, we might have something they need? And we need them, whether we like to see them or not. It’s a fair contract, made by nature.

The problem does not originate in nature, but it is a problem how nature will survive with us, and this is one of the most outstanding contradictions in the nature of humankind.

Picture Post #42: Space in a Nutshell

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl

Picture credit:  A Mundzuku Ka Hina, communication workshop, Maputo, Mozambique

   

Things might look a bit disorientating in this picture. Who’s going where? All move and get blocked. To unblock, one needs movement. 


But where does movement occur? When there is space. And is the suggestion of space not primarily evoked by the idea of chaos? 




Back to the picture above. All were moving to a point that ultimately leads into an impasse. ‘The road’ no longer exists, so to speak. 
Symbolically, this image reflects the Taoist notion that the essence of life consists in never stopping the flow, for no point will ever reward us.




Then perhaps chaos is chaotic only by a misconception about space?

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Picture Post #38 What Happened Next to the White Rabbit

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

A shop window in Paris, captured en passant by Tessa den Uyl

      

This cozy scene reminiscient of Lewis Carroll's imaginary ‘wonderland’, is in fact, something rather more grim.

No surprise would fall upon us to discover a boar’s head hanging on the wall in a hunter’s lodge. But most often today, to encounter embalmed animals in non-rural houses reminds of gestures of excess that echo as non-virtuous.

This shop window in the centre of Paris offers a sitting room full of real dead animals. Yet perhaps it is not the embalmed animals that particularly draw the attention here, but rather the way that they are displayed with more or less anthropomorphic features.

The White Rabbit, in Lewis Carroll's famous story, Alice in Wonderland, occupies a particular role: he appears at the very beginning of the book, in chapter one, wearing a waistcoat, carrying a pocket watch, and in a great hurry muttering ‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!’ And Alice encounters him again at a stressful moment in the adventure when she finds herself trapped in his house after growing too large.

Most emblematic of all though, the Rabbit  reappears as a servant of the King and Queen of Hearts in the closing chapters of the book, reading out bizarre verses as ‘evidence' against Alice. In this scene, the stuffed white rabbit, too, seems to have a prosecutorial air, rather as though the animal is a judge surrounded by courtroom flunkeys.

In Alice’s case, the White Rabbit’s case for the prosecution is so convincing that the Queen of Hearts immediately announces ‘Off with her head!’ at which point, mercifully, Alice wakes up. In this real-life shop, too, a similar return to earth is marked by a neatly framed message held by the only fake animal in the shop.  It notifies the observer that all the animals have died naturally in zoos or zoological parks. Potential clients can presumably put their consciences to ease.

Aristotle mentioned that art is a representation of life, of character, of emotion and actions, and in contemporary art, animals in formaldehyde are exhibited in famous museums for world-scaring prizes. So why not admire a similar thing by looking into this shop window? Yet there is a repulsion.

Is it a reduction of the animal - or is it rather the excess - the building up of animals into fine decor for homes? Or is the display less commercial than in itself an artistic exploration? Or is it more a philosophical challenge, something to do with Aristotle’s notion that we seek to discover the universal hidden in a world of the everyday and particular?

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To Be is to Inherit

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'



Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Picture credit: Harry Rutter

Words, by repeating their connotation, their application seems to follow rather rigid schemes, hence we might even think that, after all, words work. Authority depends on making words effective. Don’t move! Stop! Words that are not only verbal but follow a series of physical gestures as well, that we should understand, not question.

Now let us enter this door in the picture above. After all, there is written welcome. If there would be a person behind that door we would be told we are not allowed to be there. “Have you not read there is written No Entry?” Well no, we focused on the welcome, and would a welcome not be open to all?

This is not how it works, and we do understand this. Even when the combination of more words clearly carries along a form of incongruous meanings, most often the no rejects the yes.   

Being human is to be ambivalent by nature. We cannot avoid contradictions within our own selves, a plural reading of meaning, of relations. But somehow we have learned that property is connected to prohibition. Exclusion is our logic. Hence this is why, in our language, a welcome can be offered to some but not to all?

Picture Post #36 A postcard from Taroudant

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'


Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

A postcard from Taroudant, Maroc

One piece of advice offered is to lower the gaze, to not allow it to dwell, as if the eye serves distraction.

The woman seated in front of the painting is possibly homeless. Her posture dissolves with the two figures on the wall, characterised by their carved-out eyes, and urge us to imagine where this woman can put her gaze.

Eyes and hearts, their combination invites a myriad of symbolic attributions. One of them is that a woman with her eyes can reach the man in his heart. The carved-out eyes suggest that women, even when veiled, still look (and distract), which they should not... Or is the image saying something quite different, that the time for women to be veiled is consigned to history and that these days we can 'forget about the eyes’?

An eye is connected with light, and light with reflection. The ‘seduction’ begins with the question of where the reflection should pose its attention.

Picture Post #35: An Omission in Addition

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'


Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Havana, Cuba 2018    Picture credit: Patrizia Ducci

As your eye enters this image, it moves between characters, names and signs that we recognise and do not recognise. We have some knowledge of some but not of others, and so, along our limited acknowledgment we move forth, leaping over the unknown parts.

Above a closed entrance on a building, seemingly in disuse, is written the word ‘circus’. Kirkos or krikos in ancient Greek, meaning something curved, something that is happening all around. In Latin, circus means circle. The idea of ‘something’ happening in a circle is whispered to us by the letters of   an alphabet that we happen to read.

What of the two portraits painted? One on each side of the entrance. They seem to enhance the bricks that should keep the outside from the inside. Yet these depictions do not seem to deal with whatever was the forgotten function of the building - if the word circus has, or once had, anything to do with the building at all.

Visible is a form of what is called decay, a melancholic deterioration that somehow relates the images and characters to ‘their’ past. And when a stranger sprouts in their midst, he does not seem to belong  with either the portraits or the building, far less with a circus.

And yet, the presence of the stranger completes this image in which past time is always present time. In this way, the stranger hands us the possibility of revisiting what we think to recognise, what we think we know, and rediscover it as more mysterious.

Picture Post #34: Watching the Tide

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'


Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Photo credit: students of  A Mundzuku Ka Hina, communications workshop. Mozambique

From the plastic on the lower right corner, moving to the left, arise a man and woman, both with one hand touching their face and each with one arm posing on their leg, the diagonal movement flows into the blankets behind them out of the picture. This ‘line’ creates a certain ‘zone’ in which we seem to stand in front of a threshold.

Our eyes may enter ‘the gate’ ‘guarded’ between the two seated persons and the boy standing on the right, to look into a ‘dark’ space where people gather in a circle and diagonally expand to the left into another lateral diagonal line. The composition is as if we are introduced carefully in a gathering, ‘a zone’ we cannot truly enter, we glance at something that is far from us, almost secret.

The picture invites us to regard it from a distant point of view where, at first sight, a kind of picnic, a déjeuner sur l’herbe, slowly changes into something that is far more remote. And yet, this is how some people survive, these rubbish dumps are their home and their daily reality -- along with intoxication and poverty and helplessness as the other side of the coin.

And yet, there is something inspiring about the picture in the posture of the two person’s in the foreground and the boy: the impression is that of creating a ‘gate’ in which the ambiguity of contraries, that in ancient times was certainly seen as an essential element in speaking truth, yields to a logic of the inevitable raising problems that come with more recent social, industrial and political conditions, one in which words have to search for an adaption between truth and oblivion.

Thus as with many such terrible events that happen in the world, we hear about them, we see images, but it is not our skin. The observer, the spectator has a very protected stance

Last week in il Bairro di Hulene, which is the neighborhood of shanty homes raised around the lixeira (dump), seventeen people died under a mass of refuse that detached itself and slid down from the dump pile. Six houses and seven shacks were destroyed including a small ‘press’ that was there to crush the plastic and cans.

Picture Post #33: Bourgeois Reminiscence

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Mercato di Sant'Ambrogio . Florence . Italy

 Picture credit: Antonio Borrani, 2017

  

Fragments of appearance are offered in the form of leftovers, sold at a market stall by the ounce. Not by the weight per square metre, as used by some manufactures, or by the linear yard. In any case, most likely these surplus fabrics, extras left over after use, could not reach those required measurements.

So instead here we find the evidence of what is left. Fragments not big enough to decorate an entire sofa, but maybe for a cushion it will do. Limited quantities for limited decoration.

The leftover fabric is a measured out merchandise until complete exhaustion. An excess to be sold anew. But this is not the defence of the poor, but rather of a poverty that, solely by its unoffending presence (when permitted) constitutes a critique of possession -- respects the form of private property.

Making such sense of self through this projection into an external referent is a form of psychosis, or to use a Lacanian term, foreclosure. The relation of the subject to the Other is one of dialectic exclusion. Is aspiring to images that offer a make-believe form of prestige a way to enhance an illusion, or to add to alienation?

For sure, we do not find cushions cut from this cloth in the iconic depiction of The Potato Eaters by Van Gogh…

Picture Post #33: Bourgeois Reminiscence

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Mercato di Sant'Ambrogio . Florence . Italy

 Picture credit: Antonio Borrani, 2017

  

Fragments of appearance are offered in the form of leftovers, sold at a market stall by the ounce. Not by the weight per square metre, as used by some manufactures, or by the linear yard. In any case, most likely these surplus fabrics, extras left over after use, could not reach those required measurements.

So instead here we find the evidence of what is left. Fragments not big enough to decorate an entire sofa, but maybe for a cushion it will do. Limited quantities for limited decoration.

The leftover fabric is a measured out merchandise until complete exhaustion. An excess to be sold anew. But this is not the defence of the poor, but rather of a poverty that, solely by its unoffending presence (when permitted) constitutes a critique of possession -- respects the form of private property.

Making such sense of self through this projection into an external referent is a form of psychosis, or to use a Lacanian term, foreclosure. The relation of the subject to the Other is one of dialectic exclusion. Is aspiring to images that offer a make-believe form of prestige a way to enhance an illusion, or to add to alienation?

For sure, we do not find cushions cut from this cloth in the iconic depiction of The Potato Eaters by Van Gogh…

Picture Post #32 The Family Snapshot

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'


Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Archive image: Stalin with his children

Ah, what could be more innocent than a fond family portrait of a parent seated, relaxing with their children.

Indeed, we all have such snaps and maybe there is a little bit of a story lurking untold behind the smiles. But here, with Josef Stalin, ‘Uncle Joe’ to a nation, there is rather too much of a story. Should Stalin be denied the right to be considered a fond parent? And his children: what role do they play in this picture? Are they participating in a fraud, or are they wholly innocent particpants caught up in a story they never asked for nor could influence?

According to the author, Jay Nordinger, conservative commentator and author of a book on the sons and daughters of dictators, Stalin had one daughter and two sons, Yakov and Vasily, one from each of his wives. The young woman in the image is Svetlana, who died compratively recently, in 2011, aged 85. And she died not in Russia, but in the United States.

The story of Svanidze’s mother is rather tragic. She was, or so Mr. Nordinger tells us, Stalin’s great love. They wed in 1906 and had been married only 16 months when she died of typhus – while her son was still only nine months old. Her death greatly affected the future dictator. Revolutionary comrades, worried for his sanity, took away his revolver for fear he might put the gun to his temple. At her funeral, a grief-stricken Stalin told a friend, ‘This creature softened my heart of stone. She died and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity’.

Colley notes that, deprived of his father’s affections and upset by a failed romance, Yakov once tried to shoot himself, and that even as he lay bleeding, his father scathingly remarked, ‘He can’t even shoot straight’.

Dzhugashvili, by the way, was Stalin’s real name. ‘Stalin’ was his revolutionary non de plume, meaning ‘Man of Steel’.

Yakov fought in the Red Army in the Second Wolrd War, but was captured by the Germans, which Stalin considered (like the Japanese) to be a disgrace. Indeed, under Stalin the families of captured prisoners where shamed. ‘There are no prisoners of war,’ he once said, ‘only traitors to their homeland’. When Stalin was offered his son’s release in return for a senior German officer, he refused the swap saying ‘I will not trade a Marshal for a Lieutenant’.

Yakov had married a Jewish woman, called Julia, and she was arrested, and sent to the gulag. She was perhaps allowed the small privilege of release two years later.

But it is Vasily who is in the picture. He was the son of Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda, who bore  his daughter five years later.  In November 1932, Nadezhda, suffering from depression, shot herself.

Vasily seems to have been shallow and vain. He continually used his father’sname to further his career, to obtain perks and seduce women - much to Stalin’s anger. He had no sense of responsibility and Stalin once had to intervene by sacking his colonel son for ‘debauchery and corrupting the regiment’. Despite all this, Vasily rose to the lofty heights of Major-General in 1946, a rank far beyond his ability but his drinking and temper made him both unpopular.

Rarely have facts so coloured an image...  and yet there is a certain family intimacy there, or should we say, a shared complicity.

Picture Post #30 The Great Debate

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

The first televised U.S. Presidential debate, 1960

      

This cozy scene is, in fact, a screenshot of the first ever U.S. Presidential debate which was televised, attracting a great audience. (Even at this time, 90% of households in the U.S. had  televisions. Black and white ones, of course.)

Presidential debates are often more about how candidates 'look' on the screen, than on what they say. Even more than newspaper photographs, the television screen distinguishes firmly - and often cruelly - between the telegenic and the rest. And one of the novelties of the 1960 Presidential campaign was the introduction to a newly televised public  of polite, staged exchanges between the nominees.

On the left is John F. Kennedy, 'JFK' and on the right is Richard M. Nixon, 'Tricky Dickie', as he was unkindly later known. The scene is the CBS studios in Chicago and the date is September 26, 1960.

The first thing that is striking about this image is how homely it all is - truly the CBS studio could be, if not someone's front room, certainly the seminar at the local college - and the whole effect is refreshingly amateurish, with the debate moderator's feet poking out from underneath the flap of his desk. Indeed 'Tricky Dicky' looks awkward and uncomfortable, squirming in his seat, while JFK seems much more at home.

It's a homely feature too that everyone is sitting - rather than standing behind lecterns - as this immediately changes the tone of a debate, rendering the human animal less aggressive and more consensual.

The election was very close but likely the TV appearance favored Kennedy who became the nation's youngest President and first Catholic ever elected to the office.


Today's TV studio’s are all about technological sophistication and electronic screens are likely the background. The more spectacular, the better. A lot of distraction. At least here, in this sepia image, the human being is shown as such, no fancy tricks in that regard. But of course, the real tricks are weaved psychologically, then and now. Did, in those days, to see the future president in this setting, make them seem closer to ‘normal’ people in a certain way - or even more exceptional?

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