Tyger, Tyger in a Folded World

I just came across this, pretty much by accident.  It's amazing, a small film by Guilherme Marcondes, a Brazilian filmmaker, based on the William Blake poem. He uses puppetry, illustration, photography and CGI to make a fantastically rich little gem:


Mr. Marcondes is influenced by the pastiche of Brazilian culture and the DIY quality of the Brazilian film schools of which he came.  Clearly, he uses anything he can get his hands on, including things like origami and the ancient Japanese puppet-art of bunraku.  It's all very stylized and fabulous, and makes me want to know more about his earlier life -- did he study all these kinds of art?  He must have.

I went to his website, where he has samples of his work, and I found this, from a movie called Bunraku, the opening sequence of which he was given carte blanche to do:


 I never heard of this movie, Bunraku.  It looks like it was released in France and Canada, but not here...?  It looks like a very violent movie, definitely not my type of thing, but the art direction looks really interesting: the pans through cities seem to unfold like a pop-up book, and the scenery is an odd conglomeration of bits.  Which leads me to the fact that Mr. Marcondes originally studied architecture: 

"I like experiencing architecture, not practicing it. Just as I go to the movies or listen to music, I like to wander around a city, paying attention to how the space is organized, how the transportation works, etc. I’m interested in how the environment we live in changes and conditions our personalities. That’s clearer in Tyger than in any other film I’ve made. That also explains why I like J.G. Ballard so much!"  [link]

And on that note, I will leave you to ponder a world where cities are made to pop up as you move through them, and when the apocalypse comes, flowers of light grow through the cracks of the world.

Rural Old New York

Janice McIntire just sent me a link to a New York Times article about a man who has spent 30 years turning his 1-bedroom Manhattan apartment into a rustic cabin á la Abe Lincoln. Check out the amazing interactive tour, which allows you to see a panorama of both his living room and his kitchen. I took a couple of screen shots just to give you a taste (check out the computer in the kitchen, and don't forget you can look at the ceiling and floor).

The things one can do if one has enough time! Who says Steampunk is a recent development? It's been in the works a long time.


Thanks, Janice! (via Bettershelter)

Menageries: Exotics in a Box

Historically, menageries are to zoos what Wunderkammern are to museums. In other words, like Wunderkammern, menageries were expressions of power and influence, collections of oddities from around the world designed to wow people and give the wealthy something to design, maintain, and pay attention to - in effect, an expensive hobby that also served to prove the owners' wealth and cultural prowess. As Wikipedia says, exotic animals, alive and active, were less common, more difficult to acquire, and more expensive to maintain."

Originally, menageries were the purview of royalty, a place where exotic gifts from foreign powers were kept on display as a reminder of the royal family's many good relations with powerful people around the world. In 1235, for example, a menagerie was begun at the Tower of London when Henry III received a gift of three leopards from Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor; the menagerie was opened to the public during Elizabeth I's reign. Two hundred years later, "the price of admission was three half-pence or the supply of a cat or dog for feeding to the lions." [wiki]


Louis XIV's menagerie at Versaille, begun in 1664, was the first example of a Baroque-style menagerie, being built on a circular layout around a beautiful pavilion, so that all the pens were on view when one strolled around the pavilion, but not on view from outside.


In the nineteenth century, with the influx of Scientific Thinking and the move from simple curiosity to logic and a more definitive view of the cataloguing of the universe, most menageries were displaced by zoological gardens, which reflected a more public and educational approach to the keeping of exotics. The only remaining Baroque-style menagerie is the zoo in Vienna, which has modernized enough to make the animals comfortable without losing its essentially radial layout.

I think about the progression from the menagerie at Versaille to the ulititarian zoos of my youth, where tired-looking animals sat or lay in cement enclosures. I'm sure the animals didn't have it any better in the early days, but it seems to me that a royal menagerie must surely be a more intriguing experience than watching the most annoying person in one's class throwing popcorn at beautiful and listless tigers. It seems to me that a royal personage could be more inclined to try to make the enclosures interesting to the eye.

Besides that (and always setting aside early ideas about how little animals cared about their environment), it must have been amazing to be invited into the inner circle, so to speak, and promenaded past animals which surely must have felt more mythological than concrete.

I came across a reference, looking into this, to an exhibition at the Getty a couple of years ago, of paintings done of animals in menageries. The featured artist was Jean-Baptiste Oudry, a rococo painter:

"Jean-Baptiste Oudry was one of the finest painters of animals...in 18th-century Europe, and he employed his prodigious talents...to produce life-size paintings of star specimens from the menagerie...of French king Louis XV. Never intended as an encyclopedic zoo, the Versailles menagerie was compiled through royal commission and diplomatic gifts. Exotic animals were imported on merchant ships along with sugar, coffee, and indigo, and were intimately connected with colonialism and the luxury trade. Oudry painted these animals as individuals. He used portrait conventions such as theatrical poses, dramatic light effects, imaginary landscape backdrops, and sensual color to give his paintings great drama." [from the exhibition website, above]


The thing about these paintings is their formality, the way the creatures seem to pose for the artist. They are not, in any sense, natural, though they are very lifelike. They remind me of the stuffed specimens in old natural history museums (like the one Curious Expeditions went to in Romania), for exactly the reasons stated above: the unnatural stillness; the artificial environment; the strange lighting. And yet, they are huge, real artworks, something from another time.


"The entrance to Hagenbeck's zoo in Hamburg, c1910. Hagenbeck was a flamboyant character who supplied zoos and circuses with wild animals and native people. His zoo was the first to remove cages and build fake scenery and mountains so the animals could be seen in their 'natural' habitat. The entrance expresses the victorian confidence in their command of the natural world perfectly." [Thanks to Tim Hunkin. To me, both these photos (above and below) remind me of nothing so much as If I Ran the Zoo, by Dr. Seuss.


Of course, like all things, the menagerie must in the end come to the common person, who until recently didn't travel much. Traveling menageries became quite the thing, particularly in America, where distances were wide and people easily amazed. During the Civil War, however, these traveling menageries all but disappeared, and were swallowed up into the traveling circuses, which continued to flourish. Even small circuses were able to collect animals from the dying menageries, and this added attraction actually contributed to the health of circuses for many years. Nowadays, even Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey, once the "World's Greatest Menagerie," is considering letting go the lions and tigers and concentrating on what is humanly possible.


Links:

Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West - a very different presentation of zoos through history, looking at the sociological side of how people view wild animals and how that has changed over time. Really, a marvelous-sounding book, with over 400 unusual illustrations.

The Fantastic Menagerie Tarot Kit - based on the drawings of J.J. Grandville, an illustrator of strange animal-headed people.

More about the Tower's menagerie, courtesy of the BBC.

Decrepit But Not Abandoned

Walking on Marjan, the high hill-park here in Split, I have walked past this fascinating spot a number of times.



It's rare, in the States, to see glass greenhouses anymore - and rarer still to see one in such a wonderful state of organic funk. I wondered what this was for ages before I went to investigate.


I found that it was the Botanički Vrt, or the Botanical Gardens, a largely futile exercise in signage, as it is crumbling and seems to have very little in the way of exotic plants. There are several greenhouses, of which this is the largest (the others seeming to be a poor storage area for a motorcycle and a bunch of cast-off window-frames). The gardens are tiny and pretty, but this greenhouse held my imagination. Walking around it was an exercise in mysterious snooping.





After I'd been there for awhile a guy came out of one of the buildings to smoke a cigarette. He looked at me curiously, then asked me a question in Croatian. After awhile I realized he had unlocked it for me, so I went inside, to a scene of curiously domestic disintegration and decay.




Proof positive that it's always worth investigating...

Venice, part 2

Okay, more pictures. Been struggling tooth and nail with Blogger for two days, but finally got the pics to go up (and also fell down some stairs - the paving here is slippery limestone - so my right arm isn't working too well at the moment). But here we go!

This is my favorite picture - for the actual beauty of the photo, but also, look at those locks! I have some other pictures of wonderful locks from Dubrovnik which I will post soon that are beautiful and beat this out in complexity...These prison photos are from the prison that the Bridge of Sighs leads to, from the Doge's Palace. It's part of the admission to the Palace to see the prison.

Strange to me that they would label the cells and then put the capacity on the label. I can't decide if this was for later tourists or not. It looks almost like a street sign.

Prisoner's graffiti

Non-prisoner's graffiti. I always photograph silly graffiti, ever since I lived in London and never got a picture of the best graffiti ever: on Mare Street in Hackney. It said, "Treacle People: sticky like us" and had these little melty marshmallow creatures. Sigh. I'm sure it's gone now, but it really got stuck in my head. ...What do you think this one used to say before someone added onto it?

The best art store display I have ever seen. It made me want to eat it.

Inside the Great Council room of the Doge's Palace. The room is something like 25 meters long, with a fully carved-and-gold-leafed ceiling over the whole thing. Another illegal photograph.

There are these little walkways that go all around the upper levels of San Marco, less than a meter wide, with stone balustrades on both sides. It's a common Gothic thing, little high-up walkways (see the Hunchback of Notre Dame), but I was struck by these particular ones for being so intensely circuitous and narrow (and because it's rare to be allowed above them, so I really saw them from a new angle). I wish I could have gone walking on them; they went all the way around the inside of the place. They remind me of dreams I have had, of tall and tottering walkways...

The floors of San Marco are a dazzling display of pure Byzantine geometry. Such an amazing place.

As far as I can tell, this actually says "Beware of Falling Stuff."

Soon: more - on the Leonardo Da Vinci mechanism show - plus locks and other oddities.

Photography, Space, and the Brain: In Appreciation of Drawing

(Continued from last week)

Here we are: some of the great plates from Ruins of the palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia by Robert Adam, a Scottish architect who visited Split during the last forty years of Venetian rule (which ended in 1797). As a consequence, I get to see aspects of the city as it was over two hundred years ago, before some of the more significant growth of the town.

Of course, many of these images feel much more romantic and exciting than they probably really were. Adams came from a Romantic appreciation of ruin, so the elimination of unsightly modern clutter and the artful placement of fallen capitals, etc. is likely. As a result, my modern attempts to recreate his "views" with a camera are significantly lacking by comparison!

Also, please excuse the imperfect Photoshopping; I had neither the time nor the stitching-software which might have made for a more sophisticated look... still, you get the picture - so to speak. I am heartily aware how dull these images make the city look, yet I still find them fascinating: they speak of changing attitudes and how the vision of the age can affect what we record. The modern world is not always beautiful, but we do need to beware of romanticizing the ancients. Doing this project was a real eye-opener [sic] for me in terms of how we look at and record the world. I learned a lot.



One of the first things I learned is that you can't always count on the environment to co-operate. It is probably good that this gate is in restauro, but it doesn't help my cause much. Still, you can see it hasn't changed too significantly, except for the hilarious little windows (into houses on the other side) now have modern windows in them, and people can actually pass through this gate now (in Adam's time it was bricked up). And please note the little piece of column is still lying on the ground there, after all these years! It's much less prepossessing than Adam made it look (though, to be honest, it's probably not really the same one).



The Peristyle has changed hardly at all, except somehow the floor in front of it has been lowered; there are steps just beyond the woman striding through the foreground, and on the opposite side, under the entrance to the domed Vestibulum, someone has made an opening with stairs down to the lower levels of the Palace, the place where, historically, things were unloaded and loaded from ships at the sea-gate. Nowadays, of course, this area in front of the South wall is filled in and the famous Riva, where people like to promenade, lies there. But Adam describes a difference:

"From the Peristylium we ascend by a flight of steps into the Porticus [the gateway area at the top of the steps]... From this there were two doors to two winding stairs, which led to the ground story, in order that the slaves might have access thither, without passing through any of the apartments."

Nowadays, of course, these two little spaces lead nowhere and are merely decorative, with souvenir shops inside. And, of course, modern people simply don't look as interesting as all those people in turbans lounging and looking at textiles (but did they really look like that?). As anyone who's ever taken snapshots of something and discovered a horrible pipe going right across what you were looking at but didn't notice, cameras aren't smart about clutter. So when Adam sat down to draw - and there was that pile of broken pots or the horrible old man with leprosy, the kid peeing against the steps, the graffiti - he simply left them out, and concentrated on the architecture (with of course some Picturesque-ing of the filler subject, to keep it interesting).



Another thing I learned is how different a camera is than drawing with one's own eyes. I know, there's tons of discussion about this in the art world and beyond, but it has never been brought home to me so strongly the limitations of the camera. When I tried to capture the Vestibulum, I discovered to my horror that Adam's beautiful flat projection of this spot took in more than half of the actual surrounding space. Without magically hovering in the air twenty feet away and using my x-ray vision to photograph it (which wouldn't have satisfactorily flattened the space, anyway), I couldn't possibly fit even a small part of it into the lens of my camera.

And here I have to stand back for a moment and ponder.

We go through the world, looking at everything and never fully appreciating how wonderful our sense of sight is. If I include peripheral vision - without turning my head - I can see throughout approximately a 240 degree radius. This means, when confronted with an awe-inspiring view, I can gasp at its vastness; I can appreciate the spacial intensity of a place, from top to bottom and side to side, without working very hard at it. It's true, as the Cubists said, that our way of seeing is actually made up of dozens, if not hundreds, of little glances. But our brain stitches this together so seamlessly together into a wondrous whole.

Artificial Intelligence researchers have spent years and tons of money trying to figure out how to replicate this ability of the brain's, but it simply takes too much processor power to reproduce. What we do unconsciously, without hardly trying, computers simply flail at. And cameras - well, cameras just simply... well, suck. I mean, they are a wonderful instrument, and create art out of thin air. But there are places where they just can't compete with someone sitting and looking. Looking through a camera is, of necessity, like looking through a square hole at something (probably because you're doing just that).

When Adam decided to draw the dome, or the entrance to the Temple of Jupiter (now a church), he didn't worry about "getting it all in the frame." He simply drew what he saw, with his marvelous eyes that Nature had given him. And - as natural as anything - he laid it all out flat, so it made sense. Not like my weird, distorted attempts above.

And to take it a bit farther, I find myself wondering how hard could it be for someone to create a digital camera with a fixed fish-eye lens and pre-programmed hardwiring that would compensate for the fish-eye distortion, allowing us to take pictures much more like what we see...and laying it into a flat format much like what Adam created two hundred years ago? I don't believe it could ever produce as lovely a product as we can create with trained eyes and hands like he did, actually looking around us and putting down what's important about what we see, taking in as much as we need to make the picture work. But it could help us to escape that feeling of looking down a well at the world when we want to capture it with a camera.



Case in point: when I went to take a picture of the entrance to the church, I found that the place I really needed to be standing to take a picture was about eight feet off the edge of a drop-off, standing fifteen feet in the air. How did Adam draw it? Simple, I think: he looked around him, drew what he saw, and then extrapolated, drawing people to scale and making it appear farther away than it really was (thus encompassing it all).


And, unfortunately, they don't allow photography in the church. Perhaps sometime I'll go back and do a sketch, though I hear from others in my family that the interestingly patterned bricklaying in the ceiling is still on view. above all the rich trappings of the church itself.



As you can see, some things have changed a great deal. The Temple of Aesculapius, for example, used to include a building and a great forecourt as part of its status as a temple (see the map at the bottom). However, with Christianity and the pressing need for more dwellings, this temple is now in a tiny back-alley (as you can see below). It is, of course, in restauro - which in the long run is good. I had to crouch in a smelly doorway to take my seven photographs of the poor thing in order to get it all in, and then warp it like crazy in Photoshop to get it all to fit together! (And the graffiti is indeed cut off like that, it's not an artifact of the stitching).





The gate in the western wall of the old Palace seems to be slowly disappearing, swallowed by buildings from the 19th century, mostly.

In any case, the search goes on to try and grasp the details of the changes and convolutions the city has gone through as it ages. I want to see it in my mind, turning and twisting, rising and falling: and use it somehow, provide a rich and changing backdrop for something, because even before the Venetians it was an interesting place. It has always been a refuge, where people came when hordes came over the mountains, or during war-torn years. It has never been unoccupied, and it shows: like the beautiful lines on the face of an old woman who has been everywhere and seen everything, and is still here to remember it for us.

Inside, Outside, Upside Down (And Inside Out)

I'm thrilled to have discovered the Ruins of the palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia by Robert Adam, a Scottish neoclassical architect who is "considered by many to be the greatest architect of the late 18th century" [wiki]. Spalatro, in this case, being a Scottish architect's spelling of Spalato, the Italian (and more importantly, Venetian) name for Split.

I've been slowly becoming obsessed with this city. I wander the streets when I have time, trying to figure it out, making sketches and peering through archways. It's not just that the city is old, that the streets are crooked and narrow (sometimes extraordinarily narrow) and the buildings are an interesting hodgepodge of eras and styles; it's not even that every part of the Old Town is full of Roman bits, arching over streets and providing structure for other, less well-planned building efforts. It's really more about a strange Escher-esque quality. The city feels as if, sometime in the past, parts of its stony, unforgiving insides have been turned inside out.


Disembodied arches sprout from the sides of walls, going nowhere; ancient stoneworks stride through shiny boutiques, contemptuous of their surroundings. In some places, ancient corridors have shed their roofs and become alleyways, complete with balconies and shutters - and turning, without warning, into corridors again, which lead unceremoniously into rooms whose arched Roman windows look out over the waterfront: rooms without roofs, patios with glass windows.


My favorite alleyway dead-ends in a half dome which springs from the walls of two houses, covering the end of the little street with its lost interior. Who knows what living-space the dome used to cover? And below it, a lovely Venetian window, complete with stone tracery, which used to look out on some view of the Temple of Aesculapius, perhaps; but now it is filled in by a modern window-frame which looks through the same window in the opposite direction, out into the alleyway which, perhaps, used to be a corridor.


I marvel at this ability of a town to twist itself around, passing through the eye of a tracery and back again. It seems to me different than any other place I've been, and yet I keep remembering cities - York, Jerusalem, Istanbul - full of the layerings of past and present. They, too, have the richly overembellished rooflines; they, too, have achieved a fanciful arrangement of spaces possible only through centuries of adding structure onto structure onto ruin.

But Split defies them, somehow. There is something about the core of this town which is different from the organic growth-patterns of other ancient cities, and I think I may have finally put my finger on what it is. It stems from the origin of the city as a 9-acre Roman palace, planned and executed with typical Roman efficiency, strength and symmetry.

Only part of the massive Iron Gate peeks out at you from behind a Venetian palace. The rest of the buildings came later still.

It is these, the strong 1700 year old bones built by tidy minds, which poke resolutely through the 300 odd years of high Venetian dash and dazzle, 10 years of Napoleonic facelifting, and 100 years of Austrian absentee-landlording. As you walk, you encounter a mobius strip of sorts, as the city flips around you - but then there they are, those tenacious bones, marking that single few years in history when a Roman emperor built a special place for himself to retire to.

Diocletian, the emperor who retired to this singular palace, was an extraordinary man, lowborn and local (from near Solano, just around the corner of the bay), who rose through the ranks of the Roman legions to be declared Emperor on a hilltop near Antioch. He co-ruled for twenty years (284-305) with his friend and fellow-officer Maximian, securing previously unsecurable borders and restructuring the governing system so that what was a crumbling Empire lasted another hundred years. In 305, after a prolonged illness, he became the first Roman emperor to voluntarily abdicate from his position - and moved to his palace to live out the next seven years, gardening and looking out over the sea. He was said to be proud of the cabbages he had planted with his own hands.


(By the way, I recommend the Wikipedia article on Diocletian. Sometimes Wikipedia can be a bit dry, but Diocletian's inimitable personality seems to simply pop through the listing of battles, conflict, and death, much as the bones of his palace continue to pop through the modern walls of everyday Split. The Roman ruling class always reads like a cheesy soap-opera, with people poisoning people and other people sleeping with their sisters; but Diocletian comes across as a really smart, straightforward idealist with plenty of discipline who was... well, charismatic).

So now I'm letting all this stuff run around inside my head, in the hopes that some interesting fiction will come out of it. I leave the back of my head open as I go about the business of living, and hope the spores come and settle - and grow. Is that enough mixing of metaphors? Mushrooms with legs come to mind.


But back to the wonderous book by the blessed Robert Adam: the man came during the Venetian reign, at a time when those lovely bones were still very much out in the open, and - thank you, thank you! - the man did engravings of familiar places all around the city. Not only that, but he did sectionals of the Palace as it must have been, comparison drawings of the ruins all around him and what they must have looked like originally, and a complete floor-plan of the Palace as it was in his own time and as it likely was when it was brand-new (based, in part, on his own studies in Rome, where he read all the ancient architectural writers such as Vitruvius and Pliny the Younger).


Included - get this! -is also a comprehensive description of the uses of all the spaces within the original palace.

Check it out at the Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture, a resource I won't be forgetting soon.

So, in the interests of capturing a bit of the fascination, I've included a few of his fabulously Picturesque plates below, with my own pictures of the same angle and the same spot. Okay, this turned out to be harder than I thought, so I'm saving it for a whole 'nother blog post, probably in the next day or two, so hang with me, please. Cheers!