Piracy and Liberty

An excerpt from my ongoings readings on the history of piracy. Marcus Rediker compares the frontispiece of Historie der Engelsche Zee-Rovers to Delacroix's Liberty Leads the People.

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Pleasure Steamers

I was reminded today of the English artist Stanley Spencer. I doubt he's well known outside of the UK: he was in some ways a very provincial figure. He lived almost his whole life in the small village in which he was born, Cookham-on-Thames, just to the West of London. And very many of his most famous paintings are of Cookham and its inhabitants, as he translates religious edict and prophecy into the vernacular of rural England.

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refinery and rapport

"It occurs to me," Peter de Bolla writes in Art Matters, "that closing one's eyes the better to see is no bad thing" (52). Later, de Bolla will suggest we "close our ears" the better to hear (81). Aesthetic appreciation cannot be reduced to a single sense: it must be affective; it must be tactile. Indeed, the aesthetic is here defined precisely as an affective response to a work of art. And art? Art is any object that provokes such affect, since "the quality of being 'art' lies not, in any sense susceptible of description or analysis, in the object but in the response it elicits" (18).

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No competition

You may have first heard about the work of Steve Mumford via something or other in relation to Steven Vincent's murder, on Daily Kos.  Later, n+1 online hosted a nice engagement with Mumford's work – final installment and links to the preceeding three may be found here:

Grad programs train artists in political response, yet few responded to our new war. This summer’s Greater New York show contained more painting about fake wood paneling than about the situation in Iraq. Ironic retrospection was the wrong strategy for the new historical situation, but most artists continued knitting and referencing video games anyway. In this context, Steve Mumford’s Iraqi watercolors stood out. The intimacy, both of the situations he painted and of his brush on the paper, gave us something we hadn’t seen from this war. As the publication of his Baghdad Journal approaches, some have begun to question the attention he’s received. Such questions would be more interesting if he had any competition. His work alone has dared to confront the war where it happens, as it happens. If he deserves anything, it is precisely our attention.

Today, Mumford was interviewed by NPR on the occasion of his book's publication.  Worth a look, read and listen, all

utopia and loneliness

To the Guggenheim's show Russia! this afternoon, by way of a brisk walk down from Morningside Heights and across Central Park, clearing away any residual effects from last night's New Year's Eve indulgence.

The museum was packed, so we decided to take the exhibition in reverse order, starting at the top with the Soviet and post-Soviet era, and winding our way down to the medieval icons with which the show opens. We were glad we did this, as it's the Stalinist and post-Stalinist era pieces here that are on the whole the most interesting. We were also able to track back the show's genealogical impulses, its attempt to explain and justify the Putin-sanctioned present by means of this investigation of 900 years of artistic creation.

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A Removeable Feast

R.Mutt: Looking for the meanings in Belshazzar's feast, it may be helpful to remember that it's a story about interpretation; and I think that Daniel's explanation of the writing already points to all the paradoxes of Rembrandt's painting. Daniel says "you have praised the gods of silver, and gold, or bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which do not see, nor hear, nor know. And you have not glorified the God in whose hand is your breath and all your ways."

Fair enough, but how does the God in whose hand our breath is manifest himself? He is present first in the "golden and silver vessels" taken from the temple. After that he expresses himself in money: a mina, a mina, a shekel, and half minas. A price tag - not so different from the gods of silver and gold. That contradiction seems be at to work on every level. While the story is a play on the "embarrassment of riches", at the same time as an oil painting it is what John Berger calls "a celebration of private property". And Rembrandt goes even further by turning the feast into a painting that, like you said, attempts to make its value, the magic of gold, concrete...

Alphonse van Worden: Do you think this could be the divine here straining to expand to accommodate itself to the greater abstraction of the prime relation of the social order, property? It - god, property, the divine principle - can't be stuck in this specific statue or estate, although it has a kind of preference for these sensual things, a gravitation toward them. But it has to be mobile as light, and yet tangible, detectable and incontestable all the same.

The contradiction here is provoking the radical style, this new art in this newly important medium. And so the relation of content to surface works out a complex relation to 'the ineluctable modality of the visual' which Calvinism and related protestant Christianities also put into action. Samson's blindness is the route to the divine; and the visual obsession of the (catholic) Paul - where the divine is seen directly, without metaphor, in its true form, and the eyes are the perfectly adequate organs of revelation - is critiqued as both inescapably fetishist and sort of artistically (as it is commercially) stagnant. More scuro, less chiaro! The relation of service between light and shadow is reversed from the great commercial Italian culture to the greater commercial and at least quasi-capitalist Dutch empire.

Property's presence - the idea of wealth as well as its form - strains to retreat from the golden goblet, the gorgeous object of art/craft, and becomes instead a vaporized and gaseous version, a golden glow in the atmosphere. And the value which adheres in this golden-ness only grows more powerful and intense when the edges of the objects it inhabits are in the shadows, mutable, permeable, and the spirit of property (or the divine) which was trapped or locked into figures is revealed as not reducible to them; not latched to these unique material condition nor limited by the dimensions of objects. This is commercial wealth in the very act of transforming into capital proper.

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