Walt Whitman - One Hour to Madness and Joy

One hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms?
What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)
O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my children,
I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)

O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me
in defiance of the world!
O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!
O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of
a determin'd man.

O the puzzle, the thrice-tied knot, the deep and dark pool, all
untied and illumin'd!
O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
To be absolv'd from previous ties and conventions, I from mine and
you from yours!
To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of Nature!
To have the gag remov'd from one's mouth!
To have the feeling today or any day I am sufficient as I am.

O something unprov'd! something in a trance!
To escape utterly from others' anchors and holds!
To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!
To court destruction with taunts, with invitations!
To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!
To rise thither with my inebriate soul!
To be lost if it must be so!
To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fullness and freedom!
With one brief hour of madness and joy.

Source:
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (The 'Death Bed' Edition), 1892.

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Bite 26: Jusepe Ribera - St. Paul the Hermit, 1640

St. Paul the Hermit, 1640, oil on canvas, 143 x 143 cm

Paul of Thebes, the first Christian hermit, lived in a cave in the Egyptian desert for much of his life, almost 100 years. Here he is old, weary from a life lived in seclusion and frugality. 

He seems in conversation with a skull. He gestures towards himself - hand touching hand touching chest - contemplating mortality with a complex ardour. 

Muscles sagging and a deep furrowed brow, his bones tight against his skin, the saint has been painted with startling realism, using a chiaroscuro technique borrowed from Caravaggio, emphasising the hermits intensity, and hinting at the rich interior life the man surely lived.

Sources:

The Art Book, Phaidon, 1994.

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Bite 25: David Hockney - Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1971

Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1971, acrylic on canvas, 214 x 305 cm

The California sun illuminates the swimming pool. An anonymous figure swims beneath the cool water. Peter Schlesinger, fully clothed, stares into the pool. 

A 19 year-old art student when Hockney met and fell for him, Schlesinger soon moved in with the artist and became his favourite model, appearing in many of his famous pool scenes. Seen as inherently homoerotic these works were created at a time when such themes were rarely presented in art and almost never so conspicuously. In this work even the detailed landscape behind the figures seems to suggest the phallic.

Shall we then take the swimmer to be Hockney himself? Regardless, the complexity of the at-first-glance 'sterile' work lies in the relationship between the two figures. There is something intense about Schlesinger's stare, hinting at the unsaid. A vast distance seems to exist between these men, even as their intimacy is suggested. 

For all the brightness and vibrancy of the L.A. sunshine something darker lurks just beneath the surface. But what a glorious surface it is.

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Bite 24: David Hockney - Looking at Pictures on a Screen, 1977

Looking at Pictures on a Screen, 1977, oil on canvas, 188 x 188 cm

The act of spectatorship itself as the subject of an artwork is a major revolution of 20th century art and a primary tenant of Post-Modernism. In Hockney's Looking at Pictures on a Screen the artist's friend Henry Geldzahler stands in profile before photographic reproductions of paintings tacked to a screen. 

The flat surface of the picture plane is referenced (or even in this case: of the computer screen) as we watch Geldzahler regarding a picture. The viewer steps back and in a way watches themself looking.

This self-reflexivity opens the viewer up to a raft of conceptual angles as the space, social position, culture and overall context of the viewer is highlighted as relevant and highly influential to the art experience. Many of us today more often see art in books and online than we are able to in galleries. This cannot have no influence on how we view art today compared with previous generations. 

 It is only by being conscious of our own looking that we can fully embrace the art of seeing.

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Bite 23: Unknown - Couple Holding Daguerreotype, c. 1850

Couple Holding Daguerreotype, c. 1850, daguerreotype

There are three subjects in this highly reflexive image: a man, a woman, and a photograph. From the couple's solemn expressions - one looking away, the other confidently apprehending the lens, fist clenched - it would appear the family in their precious daguerreotype (they clearly value this image, holding it tenderly on a pedestal; far more than today we would value a material image) it seems the people in the image must have past, or be physically distant from them, the couple grieving on time past just as it is 'present', in some frustrating form, with them here.

It being a work by an anonymous artist/photographer heightens the mystery and ambiguity already present in the image. We do not know these people or their names. This object - an object of an object - has been separated from its extended family, yet we are intensely interested in this couple and what they are feeling here. The interest lies also in that we are unsure what the very purpose of this image even is, the life it lived for these people.

Photographs, as icons of nostalgia, are objects which seem to grow in authenticity and interest as they age. It seems appropriate then, and even adds to the value of this object, when it is scratched, damaged or even smashed.

This image, a powerful statement on what photographs are and mean to us, has an entire new life of its own, fully divorced from the people it depicts and its intended purpose. Perhaps unintentionally Couple Holding Daguerreotype comments strongly on the simultaneous tangibility and ephemerality of photographs, and their subjects. This image is well deserving of long meditation.

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Bite 22: Édouard Levé - Pornographie, 2002

Untitled, from the series 'Pornographie', 2002

A twisted family portrait or a bizarre, neutered porno? It appears an awkward couples dinner party gone haywire. Private fantasy as a perversion of social convention.

While employing the established language of filmed sex the scene evokes the absent, the subjects' faces hidden just as their sexual organs are. 

Explanation is withheld also. Clinically cold and bland, the environment is stifling to even regard, the characters appearing profoundly alienated even as they mock intimacy. Being a portrait (or rather non-portrait) without faces, encourages viewing the tableau as a dead-pan, geometric study in shape or even as a still-life. Reduced to the almost abstract, and lacking eroticism, the situation plays on the inherent absurdity of human sexual scenarios.

Sources:
Frieze Magazine, Issue 134, October 2010.

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Bite 21: Steve Woodward - Step Touch Stone, 2009

Step Touch Stone, 2009, granite

A solid, dignified, upright sculpture, sitting among skyscrapers, suggesting momentum - simultaneously upward and downward - Step Touch Stone is an efficiently minimalist work alluding to a raft of complex ideas and paradoxes.

Consisting of twin inverted staircases standing in St. Patrick's Square next to the Catholic Cathedral the work is successfully spiritual in its associations while remaining open, interpretable under many cultures and belief systems, least of all being Buddhism.

The staircases combine in tension: Yin, yang. Light, dark. Hope, despair. The work remains both grounded and transcendent, solid and ephemeral.

It is a open reflexive object, encouraging silent meditation on the human condition.

Sources:

www.aucklandcity.govt.nz

Image

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Bite 20: Duane Michals - The House I Once Called Home, 2003

The House I Once Called Home, 2003

The raw material of photography is light and time. Each photograph then, although appearing solid, contains the ephemeral. This is a fundamental paradox of the medium and the key reason for its inherent ambiguity.

Duane Michals in his series The House I Once Called Home combines an exploration of the ephemerality of photography with that of place, returning to his childhood home to recreate family photographs, eerily absent of people.

Here he stands in for an uncle. The courtyard has now overgrown; nature has reclaimed where people once lived. The middle image, a transition between the two states - then and now - is inhabited by ghosts of the past. For Michals they are still present in this space, as he pensively overlooks it. Any understanding of a sense of place, of location, then, is inseperable from an exploration of personal history, a meditation on time past. The photographic medium, by its very nature, is equipped to explore these concerns.

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