During his 9th year he began hearing voices. They were clipped whispers which in the perfect silence of the walled world echoed like a Sybil’s fiat. At first he was terrified; His bull’s brain bred to fear the hunter. He crouched deeper into his chosen shadow, hyperventilating, his tongue lolling and slick. He hid and he listened and for weeks kept still as a stone.

Slowly, one by one, the voices quieted until the only sound remaining was that of a single pair of sandals, their light steps tapping out a confused staccato once or twice a day. Emboldened by familiarity and hunger he began venturing out in their intervals of inaction.

The first body he encountered was thin and small. It laid face down in a corner, its knees bent, its hindquarters in the air. The smell of blood from its scraped knees and cheeks was faint but enthralling. He emptied his bladder dramatically, snorting and stomping and dropping his horns low, then, satisfied that the body was submissive, he sniffed carefully about its edges. It was dead and it was the first meat he’d seen since the voices invaded. He choked it down looking again and again over his shoulder.

He found 12 more bodies in as many days; All dead. 7 were large and 5 more, like the first, were small and soft. He dragged each to the center of the world and stacked them in a pile. He’d never seen so much meat in one place at one time, and were it not for the staccato sandals which still made their ragged music occasionally, he might have been… happy. He wasn’t bored any longer, nor was he hungry. What was happiness if not that?

The last body he found was also small and soft. It lay in the middle of a hall with a little sack clutched in its arms. At the sound of his water smacking the floor it moved, its sandals scraping two lazy parabolas in the dust. It was not dead but neither did it run. When he jabbed it experimentally with his horn it did not cry out. He dragged it to the center of the world but did not drop it on the meat pile.

For months he shared his meals with it. He shared the water which arrived via Daedalus’ hidden shoots and ladders. He inhaled its smell deeply, he mated with it, and he watched daily as it moved an ivory stylus across one of the tablets from its sack. He’d never known companionship, never known the pleasure of watching another empty their bowels, never known that rattling sobs and wet eyes could be so beautiful.

Learning to read had been a wonder. Once he was made to understand that the symbols in the wax tablets held meaning, were connected each to an idea outside itself, he wanted to lay eyes on little else. Meat was plentiful and mating was easy, but reading! That was different. It revealed to him existence beyond his confused hallways. She explained and explained again, every day for months. His first hard-earned moments of comprehension, when they came, were like a long dawn over a new world. Everything was transformed. The walls no longer seemed so infuriatingly uniform. The shadows seemed half as dark and simultaneously twice as deep.

But, alas, these were merely quiet contentments before a gathering storm of anguish.

One day, after mating, his female lay down in the corner where he threw his marrow-sucked bones, and never got up again. He poked at her bruised flanks with a gentle horn but knew instinctively that he was alone once more. He thought of her weeping face, her pink parts, the days of sounding out words between sobs. Though he snorted nervously and his fur bristled, his spirits were not completely broken. “I have the sack of tablets” he thought wanly as he moved her battered body to the meat pile.

He spent the next months plodding through every tablet in the sack, those which he’d read before as well as those which his mate had kept from him. (She’d always say of these “They are too difficult for you.”) It was here, reading alone in the heart of the labyrinth, that the sun set on his new world. In its dusk he learned the truth of things, of men, of gods, of his parents, and of himself.

He read of Poseidon’s agreement with Minos. He read of Pasiphae’s lust and of Daedalus’ means of assuaging it. He read of his own birth and the construction of his world built for amusement and agony. He read of Athens’ defeat and Aegeus’ bargain to send 7 youths and 7 maidens every nine years into the labyrinth. He learned his own name – Asterius – and turning finally to the tablet his mate had written, was impelled for the first time in his life to sound out the word “minotaur” in his mind.

This last tablet was an account of life in the labyrinth. It was filled with bitterness and horror, made up as it was of words like “monster,” “revulsion,” and “misery” flanking the ever repeating phrase, “I wish to die, please Gods let me die.” Had he but known how Asterius would have wept like the soft one who so despised him.

Epilogue

The Athenian meat eventually ran out and though it might seem masochistic Asterius just sat reading and re-reading the tablets each day. There was nothing else but his hunger pains and the silence. By turns he became sullen and angry. First brooding over his own newly realized miseries, then imagining, in great detail, what he would do to the next batch of children who dared drag their sandals into his darkness. He shat on the bone pile and slept clutching the sack of tablets.

More Athenians did come in time, 7 youths and 7 maidens, whom he watched from the darkness, his snorting anger tempered by longing. At first he approached them submissively with a tablet in hand, but each time they only shrieked and cursed him and fled into the darkness. Finally he lost patience and began hunting them, tearing with his horns and mating with their corpses. Even with a full belly and empty balls, however, his life as one with knowledge was a misery.

Eventually the realization struck him that he might take up the ivory stylus himself and write his own words into the margins of a tablet. It took much trial and error, but after nearly a year he set down that stylus having written a single message to the world above with its cruel men and capricious Gods:

“Had I only been born opposite of what I am, with a bull’s powerful heart and a man’s cunning mind, I might have been a beloved hero among you. Instead I find myself with the weak heart of a man and the dim mind of a bull, a monster, who you’ve trapped in the dark and universally despise. – The Minotaur.”

Theseus would find him brooding over this very passage 9 years later.

Truth: The Minotaur Reading

In that I can not not find any information specific to this piece I will instead offer a pertinent section from a review written by Roddy McDevitt from Queen Street gallery:

“Carters’ work is fresh and authentic. It is both daringly simple and deeply resonant. This is a result, of course, of her subject matter. She poeticizes the figure by creating eerie composite creatures. Whether cast in bronze or drawn in charcoal, the work, it seems to me, breaks down into either the lyrical single figure or the dramatic interaction of two or more figures. Her single figures, naked men with perfectly integrated animal heads: bull, horse, bear, fox, rabbit, all seem lost in contemplation of the mystery of their own existence.

The dramatic configurations are fabulous and thus exotic. We are like Alice through the looking glass, propelled into a dreamworld overflowing with marvelous creatures thoroughly absorbed in their own encounters with each other. This ‘Carter world’ is exciting, magic-fueled, utterly mysterious yet completely realized. The bold and beautiful visions of Beth Carter help us dream the mythology of our own existence.”

For my part all I’ll say is I came across this piece by accident but was, in fact, oddly moved by it, as I hope the extrapolated story above testifies.

For more of Beth’s work see the following:

Queen Street gallery.

Picasso Mio.

Badcocks.

A gallery.

For a pervious “extrapolation” see:

The Old Musician.

For previous alternate mythologies see:

The Myth of Ironus.

Hope you enjoyed.

Though he’s produced a huge amount of work, much of it landscapes from his wide travels, in general David’s previously exhibited pieces have dealt with a kind of aesthetic subversion, playing with the balance between each picture’s pleasant surface and its darker underbelly. Most of the paintings which immediately precede the group I’m showing here are very colorful and layered. On first glance they might be thought of as “pretty” containing as they do birds, elements of landscape, etc. But a closer inspection will readily yield symbols of a political system gone awry and what David refers to as “religious warfare.” If I remember correctly, from our brief conversation, some of the pieces go so far as to subvert their own content over time, with reactive surfaces that eventually have those “pretty” birds falling out of the sky.

As you all know by now I’m most interested in a pictures aesthetic payload, much more so, in the final reckoning, than the underlying concept. So “subversion” and “tension” aside let me say much of the work was in quite nice. The new work though, for me, is something else all together. Less obviously beautiful but more compelling. He’s a young artist, only having graduated Parsons in 2001, but this new group, created as it was both under emotional difficulty as well as material limitations, seems to me a step toward something much better.

As David put’s it:

“These particular paintings differ greatly from the work I have done in the past. I began them when my mother broke her neck at c5 and c6 earlier this year and I moved back to Minnesota from New York to help take care of her. Leaving much of my materials and studio behind me I did not expect to make much work, let alone head-off in an entirely new direction. Art making itself seemed to have fallen a bit flat for me, the particular forms and images I had been previously engaged with seeming to have little or no relevance suddenly.

This work represents a bit of a departure for me especially in terms of materials. Much of my past work is very technique-heavy, utilizing a wide range of materials. These new pieces are much more pared-down using just a few types of ink and some black and white paint. They developed in a very organic way as well, with much less planning than most of the pictures I have made in the past.

For me they are meditative, composed with meticulous gestures leading to unstable and dangerous looking structures. There is a feeling here of something tumultuous happening, or about to happen, though they maintain a kind of almost static distance as well, with the space often flattened completely. From my point of view they are a stark depiction of the frailty and fragility of life both on a personal as well as in a larger sense. There are, of course, many different ways that one could interpret them.”

One last note as to scale: The dimensions of these particular paintings range from forty inches to over six feet.

Hope you enjoyed, and hope to see more from David in the future.

The Artist’s Dilemma

By Mark Rothko (probably written between 1940-41)

What is the popular conception of the artist? Gather a thousand descriptions, and the resulting composite is the portrait of a moron: he is held to be childish, irresponsible, and ignorant or stupid in everyday affairs.

The picture does not necessarily involve censure or unkindness. These deficiencies are attributed to the intensity of the artist’s preoccupation with his particular kind of fantasy and to the unworldly nature of the fantastic itself. The bantering tolerance granted to the absentminded professor is extended to the artist. Biographers contrast the artlessness of his judgments with the high attainment of his art, and while his naivete or rascality are gossiped about, they are viewed as signs of Simplicity and Inspiration, which are the Handmaidens of Art. And if the artist is inarticulate and lacking in the usual repositories of fact and information, how fortunate, it is said, that nature has contrived to divert from him all worldly distractions so he may be single-minded in regards to his special office.

This myth, like all myths, has many reasonable foundations. First, it attests to the common belief in the laws of compensation: that one sense will gain in sensitivity by the deficiency in another. Homer was blind, and Beethoven deaf. Too bad for them, but fortunate for us in the increased vividness of their art. But more importantly it attests to the persistent belief in the irrational quality of inspiration, finding between the innocence of childhood and the derangements of madness that true insight which is not accorded to normal man. When thinking of the artist, the world still adheres to Plato’s view, expressed in Ion in reference to the poet: “There is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him.” Although science, with scales and yardstick, daily threatens to rend mystery from the imagination, the persistence of this myth is the inadvertent homage which man pays to the penetration of his inner being as it is differentiated from his reasonable experience.

Strange, but the artist has never made a fuss about being denied those estimable virtues other men would not do without: intellectuality, good judgment, a knowledge of the world, and rational conduct. It may be charged that he has even fostered the myth. In his intimate journals Vollard tells us that Degas feigned deafness to escape disputations and harangues concerning things he considered false and distasteful. If the speaker or subject changed, his hearing immediately improved. We must marvel at his wisdom since he must have only surmised what we know definitely today: that the constant repetition of falsehood is more convincing than the demonstration of truth. It is understandable, then, how the artist might actually cultivate this moronic appearance, this deafness, this inarticulateness, in an effort to evade the million irrelevancies which daily accumulate concerning his work. For, while the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.

Let us not delude ourselves with visions of a golden age freed of this cacophony. This gilding is an artistic falsehood. We deal in fantasy ourselves and know how alive dreams can seem. And an age like ours, which demands so clear a facing of realities, will not allow us the pleasure of narcoticism. With the knowledge that man’s tribulations, at least, are always with him, we can safely say that the artist of the past had good reason, too, to play the mad fool—so as to salvage those moments of peace when the demands of the demons could be quieted and art pursued. And if nature, in fact, contrived to give him the appearance of a fool, so much the better. For dissimulation is an exacting art.

Ill hath he chosen his part who seeks to please
The worthless world,—ill hath he chosen his part,
For often must he wear the look of ease

Assent with lying tongue.

The lament is Michelangelo’s (a translation of this madrigal can be found in The Life of Michel Angela Buonarroti [1807]). Even this great man—who lived in an age when the rapport between the artist and the world seemed to have been ideal, and when fetes and processions celebrated the completion of works by the artists of renown, for whose services dukes, popes, and kings fought — even he bore his full share of calumny and disapproval. The principles of his art were constantly assailed; and, after parrying those criticisms, his morals were found wanting. Aretino attacked the nakedness of the nudes in the Last judgement as inconsistent with Christian piety. The reasonableness of Aretino’s point cannot be denied. Michelangelo’s vision of the Celestial Court can be easily mistaken for an orgiastic bout. These doctors and moralists, they are always right! Like our own social moralists and critics, their facts are so neat, and their reasoning so pretty: but what disastrous falsity to the cause of truth!

Most societies of the past have insisted that their own particular evaluations of truth and morality be depicted by the artist. Accordingly, the Egyptian artist had to produce a definitely prescribed prototype; the Christian artist had to abide by the tenets of the Second Council of Nicea or be anathematized or, like the monk of the iconoclast age, work in danger and by stealth. We should note that Michelangelo’s nudes were forced to wear, in the end, the appropriate panties and drapes. Authority formulated rules, and the artist complied. We shall not speak here of those whose daring periodically revitalized art, saving it from its narcissistic mimicry of itself. We can accurately say that, within these periods, the artist had to submit to these rules or simulate the appearance of submission, if he were to be permitted to practice his art.

It will be pointed out that the artist’s lot is the same today, that the market, through its denial or affording of the means of sustenance, exerts the same compulsion. Yet there is this vital difference: the civilizations enumerated above had the temporal and spiritual power to summarily enforce their demands. The Fires of Hell, exile, and, in the background, the rack and stake, were correctives if persuasion failed. Today the compulsion is Hunger, and the experience of the last four hundred years has shown us that hunger is not nearly as compelling as the imminence of Hell and Death. Since the passing of the spiritual and temporal patron, the history of art is the history of men who, for the most part, have preferred hunger to compliance, and who have considered the choice worthwhile. And choice it is, for all the tragic disparity between the two alternatives.

The freedom to starve! Ironical indeed. Yet hold your laughter. Do not underestimate the privilege. It is seldom possessed, and dearly won. The denial of this right is no less ironical: think of the condemned criminal who will not eat and who is fed by force, if need be, until his day of execution. Concerning hunger, as concerning art, society has traditionally been dogmatic. One had to starve legitimately—through famine or blight, through unemployment or exploitation—or not at all. One could no more contrive his own starvation than he could take his own life; and for the artist to have said to society that he would sooner starve than traffic with her wares or tastes would have been heresy and dealt with summarily as such. Within the dogmas of the totalitarian states of today, you may be sure, the artist must starve correctly, just as he must paint by the dictates of the State.

But here, today, we still have the right to choose. It is precisely the possibility of exercising choice wherein our lot differs from that of the artists of the past. For choice implies responsibility to one’s conscience, and, in the conscience of the artist, the Truth of Art is foremost. There may be other loyalties, but for the artist, unless he has been waylaid or distracted, they will be secondary and discarded in his creation of art. This artistic conscience, which is composed of present reason and memory, this morality intrinsic to the generic logic of art itself, is inescapable. Violate her promptings and she will ferret out the deepest recesses of thought and conjecture. Neither sophistries nor rationalizations can quiet her demands.

What did those artists of the past do about their conscience? The Law of Authority has this saving grace: it can be circumnavigated. One can pay lip service to the letter and with equanimity violate its spirit. One bows to necessity, then schemes to defeat it. We are told that there were times when the Truth of the Law coincided with the Truth of Art. Granted! But when the divergence became too great, what ingenuity the artist displayed in disguising one to have the appearance of the other. What guile and shrewdness in this seeming moron. One needs but but recall the great Apollo. How easily this Hellenistic deity, with all his draperies and trappings, was slipped into the niches of the Christian saints. He had merely to change his name, and to look much sadder than he really felt.

What abetted the artist in his little game was the dogmatic unity of his civilization. For all dogmatic societies have this in common: they know what they want. Whatever the contentions behind the scenes, society is allowed only one Official Truth. The demands made upon the artist, therefore, issued from a single source, and the specifications for art were definite and unmistakable. That, at least, was something: whether submission or deceit were intended, one master is better than ten, and it is better to know the size and shape of the hand that holds the whip. In a master, definiteness and stability are preferable to caprice.

Today, instead of one voice, we have dozens issuing demands. There is no longer one truth, no single authority—instead there is a score of would-be masters who would usurp their place. All are full of histories, statistics, proofs, demonstrations, facts, and quotations. First they plead and exhort, and finally they resort to intimidation by threats and moral imprecations. Each pulls the artist this way and that, telling him what he must do if he is to fill his belly and save his soul.

For the artist, now, there can be neither compliance nor circumvention. It is the misfortune of free conscience that it cannot be neglectful of means in the pursuit of ends. Ironically enough, compliance would not help, for even if the artist should decide to subvert this conscience, where could he find peace in this Babel? To please one is to antagonize the others. And what security is there in any of these wrangling contenders?

The truths of India, Egypt, Greece spanned over centuries. In matters of art our society has substituted taste for truth, which she finds more amusing and less of a responsibility, and changes her tastes as frequently as she changes her hats and shoes. And here might the artist, placed between choice and diversity, raise his lamentations louder. Never did his afflictors have as many shapes or such a jabbering of voices, and never did they exude such a prolixity of matter.

-

Hope you enjoyed.

In any case I recently picked up a truly beautiful book put out in 1966 called The Biography of a Painting. The text is originally from one of six C.E. Norton lectures Shahn gave at Harvard (the most famous being The Shape of Content, which is still in print). In this particular volume Shahn attempts to trace the internal and external forces which shaped his painting titled, Allegory. It might, on the surface, seem an odd thing to devote an entire book to exploring the inspiration for a single painting. Non-artists would no doubt assume that the ideas and circumstances of a painting’s creation are right there on the tip of an artists tongue, ready to be accessed, and that exploration aimed at rooting these out is a self-involved exercise at best. The truth is not so black and white, and in the case of Allegory there were extenuating circumstances which sparked the search.

As it happens a critic named Henry McBride, who was writing for the New York Sun, misconstrued the imagery of Allegory as being symbolic and sympathetic to Red Moscow and ended his column by saying for this painting alone Shahn should be deported. As Shahn put’s it in the Biography of a Painting:

What follows is a fascinating, far reaching, and often touching examination (all printed in a handwritten style, whether authentic or simply a device I’m not sure) which as it so happens is copiously illustrated with Shahn’s own print-work as well as some reproductions of his paintings.

The truth is, with a few exceptions, that before picking up this book I was not very familiar with Shahn’s work (nor his artistic philosophies) but I truly enjoyed it, his print-work especially, and under the assumption that there are others of you unfamiliar I’d like to share a cross section of pieces I particularly liked.

Well there you have it. Hope You enjoyed.

For more on Shahn try the following:

Interview with Ben Shahn from the Smithsonian’s oral histories.

Ben Shahn. Passion for justice presented by PBS.

Ben Shahn at Harvard.

Common Man, Mythic Vision: The Paintings of Ben Shahn.

Ben Shahn: Picture Maker.

Ben Shahn’s art and His Mission From George Kresky Gallery.

On Ben Shahn’s Roosevelt Mural.

Andy Warhol’s Red Beard - influence of Ben Shahn and Shirley Temple on Warhol.

Yesterday I came across a truly gorgeous book of photographs by Candida Höfer titled, Libraries, a title which pretty much says it all, because that is just exactly what it is, one rich, sumptuous, photo of a library interior after another. It’s like porn for book nerds. Seriously. They are gorgeous photos, nearly all without visitors and just begging to be entered. (ha. sorry.)

See below for 14 examples which I particularly liked, but keep in mind these 500px wide version can’t really compete with the big, glossy, real thing.

Hope you enjoyed… but not too much… you filthy, beady-eyed perv.

You can pick up your own copy here.
(I’m sure they will ship in a plain brown paper-bag if you ask really nicely.)

Alternately, since I didn’t offer much by way of reading in this post I offer the following supplimentary material:

The obligatory Wiki round-up on the subject.

A history of private, royal, imperial, monastic and public libraries

Survivor: The History of the Library from History magazine.

Libraries & culture from University of Texas Press.

And hell, though it’s only tangentially related The Briar Press page:
Eleven Presses That Made History (Via.)