Pittsburgh

At a certain point in a conference, it is necessary to have a break. That happened to me on day two. I gave my paper at 9 a.m. that morning. At 10:40 Robert Richards gave the keynote speech, in which he maintained that Goethe and Schelling had anticipated Darwin's theories, including those of species generation. Bob, by the way, has written a fascinating book, which I have used in my own research, called The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Some of us then went to lunch at the Carnegie Museum cafe, after which, at 1:30, facing the prospect of a talk entitled "Epistemology of Sensing and Feeling in Goethe's Faust I," I decided to take a break and go instead to see some paintings in the Carnegie Museum of Art.

What is it I like about museums? Probably being by myself for an hour. Solitary museum visits also replicate my first experience of museums, when I was 18 and visiting Europe for the first time. Europe: that means, museums, right? There was a lovely small museum in Paris, then called the Jeu de Paume, devoted solely to the Impressionists. For a person who had never been to a museum before, the Impressionists are immediately accessible. Thus I would spend hours there, taking notes in a small notebook I always carried and trying to decipher the French in the labels next to the paintings. I was particularly intrigued by the phrase "nature morte."

Despite the fact that Pittsburgh was once an important industrial city and that the Fricks and Mellons established their fortunes there, the art acquired by those men has gone for the most part elsewhere, to the Frick Museum here in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Wahington, D.C. (the Mellons). Thus, there is not the fullness of representation at the Carnegie Museum of Art, despite being the obvious recipient of the largesse of Andrew Carnegie (though many of the older public buildings in the city bear the Carnegie profile), that you find at, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The paintings in the first two galleries are in fact arranged in a very 19th-century style, as in the charming scene of schoolgirls drawing.

What I find interesting about the three paintings below, by Edvard Munch, Pierre Bonnard, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, is that they were painted within the same decade, from 1904 to 1914. The same for the painting at the top, "The Picnic" by Maurice Prendergast, a wonderfully cheery painting from 1914. (Check out this better image of the painting at the Carnegie website.) If you look at a painting by Raphael or any of his contemporaries, you usually assign it to a "period," in their case the Renaissance. The very different styles of the paintings by Munch and his contemporaries, however, are indicative of what we now called "Modernism" or even modernity itself: multiplicity of  styles, without any authoritative one, an era when art is about individual sensibility and is dependent for its reception on taste, but mostly on the marketplace.

It should be mentioned that the Carnegie is a very public- and family-friendly museum. Besides the schoolgirls who were drawing in the galleries (above), the large rooms invited antics from the two munchkins below.

Goethe Society of North America

I'm off this afternoon for Pittsburgh, where I will be giving my paper on Fritz Strich. Here is something to feast the eyes on, prepared by Rick, for our Haloween evening with friends. Am I a lucky wife, or what? (Click on picture for larger image.)

Procrastination

Since I work at home, with occasional forays to the library, procrastination is always an issue. Of course,  I am always working on something; often, however, the thing I am working on has nothing to do with the one thing that most needs to be done. I guess this is avoidance. There is a new book on the subject, which I will not read since I have so much to do, but I enjoyed the interview (heard as a podcast on my iPod) with the two German writers, Kathrin Passig and Sascha Lobo, who were promoting the book at the Frankfurt Book Fair, recently ended. Passig is an interesting person, not only a web designer but also a writer. She was winner of last year's Ingeborg Bachman Prize with her story "Sie befinden sich hier" and is also the author of the intriguingly named Lexikon des Unwissens. Check out Sasch Lobo's hair here.

The interview was courtesy of one of my favorite sites, Das Literatur-Cafe. Wolfgang Tischer is the impresario, reporting on the literary goings-on in Germany with much flair and intelligence. Passig and Lobo's book on procrastination is called Dinge geregelt kriegen: ohne einen Funken Selbstdisziplin (Rowohlt), or "How to get things done, without an ounce of self-discipline." They call it an anti-self-help book. Check out their website, where they tell you why they have written it.

The cartoon above (click on it for a larger version) is from another favorite site, Harold's Planet, from which I receive daily a lovely message.

Piper Rocks!

Is Piper Palin cool, or what? The above picture was taken at a rally in Nevada by "Shirley B." I love the picture of her at the left, microphone in hand, at another rally by Ron Devito.

"All My Good Countrymen"

There is usually much disagreement in Goethe Girl's household when it comes to movies, but last night we both enjoyed the film All My Good Countrymen, made by the Czech director Vojtech Jasny back in 1968. Since it concerns the changes wrought in a Moravian village in the decades after World War II, in particular the Sovietization of life, it was immediately banned right after it was made. Jasny  himself, like a million of his countrymen, left for the West after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Hard to believe, but the Prague Spring was 50 years ago

The film was in the "New Wave" style of European movie-making (or La Nouvelle Vague) of the 1950s and 1960s, what Wikipedia refers to as filmmaking linked by its self-conscious rejection of classical cinematic form. Translated, that means the films can be unbearable to watch (Jean-Luc Godard), but there are exceptions, Eric Rohmer and Francois Truffaut being among my favorites. I particularly like Rohmer's talky movies of contemporary social manners.

The movie was visually captivating. Jasny has said that he had the paintings of Breughel in mind. The scene of a dance in the village seemed directly taken from "The Wedding Dance" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The hero of the movie, the villager who will not go along with the communists and whom they continually try to break, is often seen in his fields scything, as in the Bruegel painting "Harvesting."

All My Good Countrymen takes place over the course of ten years, beginning in 1945, and concerns the creeping destruction of social bonds, the selling out and the betrayals among a group of friends as they seek to survive communist rule. We know that there are still people who believe the communist dream can be salvaged, and Jasny confirmed in an interview that the Italian film director Luchino Visconti initially declined to recommend All My Good Countrymen for viewing at Cannes because of its negative view of communism. No doubt about it, communism exercised a reverse Midas touch. The first thing the comrades do is appropriate the farmstead of the richest farmer in order to turn it into a cooperative farm. Naturally it fails.

For me the movie was of interest for the view it offered of a now-disappeared way of life, which one could still see when I was a student in Germany in the 1960s. In a way it allowed a measure of how far the world had "progressed" in the last fifty years, by which I mean become materially affluent. Much has been lost, no doubt about it. In a sense, affluence has made us less adult-like.

Picture: Radio Praha

"Spieltrieb"

I've been meaning to post for days, but preparation for the paper I am to give in November in Pittsburgh, at the conference of the Goethe Society of North America, is taking precedence. Still, as I was leaving the Metropolitan Museum today, leaving by the underground entrance, I encountered these boxes and could not resist posting the pictures below.

They are the packing cartons for the Jeff Koons installation "Balloon Dog (Yellow)." I would definitely say that Jeff Koons does not take himself too seriously, though it is clear that lots of work has gone into this piece. Note that each body part -- right ear, tail, snout, neck and nose knot, and so on -- has its own carton. Afterward, I went up to the Roof Garden and took a picture of the work before it was disassembled. (The installation closes on Sunday.) And naturally I did the tourist thing and had a picture taken of myself.

"Spieltrieb"

The above work of art, an 18th-century Italian porcelain sculpture depicting the River Nile, is one of the reasons I so love the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I spend a lot of time there, as a consultant, but sometimes I have only a few minutes to spare to for the art: we modern people are always running to our next appointment! But at the Met you do not have to look far to find an object that puts your heart at rest, drives all other concerns from your mind, and also gives you pleasure. Such is the effect of this allegorical work, which you can see in a really professional photograph and also read about here. I was particularly delighted by the 16 little babies climbing all over the river good. The number 16 refers to the ideal height of 16 cubits that the Nile rose annually, ensuring the fertility represented by the cornucopia.

I mentioned in my earlier posting ("Subprime Art?") Schiller's concept of Spieltrieb (the impulse to play), which seems to me well evoked by the small detail of the alligator. You can see the alligator's teeth and the god's big toes. Are these detail necessary? No, but they add to the pleasure you feel when viewing this object, much as the little guys tormenting the alligator seem to feel.

Now, according to Schiller, pictured here in a very noble representation by Gerhard von Kügelgen, modern man (and woman, too!) is divided in his essential nature: civilization (work, raising a family, all the responsibilities of life) is at odds with our desire to escape from responsibility. Our reason tells us we have to make the necessary accommodations to live in the world, in order to keep a roof over our head, gas in the car, and food in the refrigerator. Our sensuous nature urges us to escape the frustrations and irritations that such responsibilities induce in us. Some people watch TV all the rest of the hours of the day; some indulge in pornography or shop until they drop. Obviously some people lean more toward one side than the other.

Writing in The Aesthetic Letters, Schiller proposed the idea that art could help us to bring the two sides of ourselves into a more rewarding harmony. Art, in the form Schiller envisioned, should not be about reality, much as the sculpture of the Nile River god is not about any reality that has ever been experienced. Thus, when you look at that sculpture, if only for a few minutes, you are not being reminded of politics or of the war in Iraq or of the inequities of the world. Instead, the Spieltrieb comes into play, so to speak. It reminds us that, for the moment anyway, we are free of those burdensome duties. It is a great place to escape to. Applied often, it makes us more appreciative of life, despite its shortcomings. Of course, there are artists who believe it is their role to make us aware of contemporary realities, but the art they produce is a form of propaganda, made with color or plastic or whatever. Pleasure is the furthest thing they want us to feel, for it makes us forget that the world (so they think) is really a terrible place.