Monthly Archives: April 2015

Origins of Modern Art

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West African sculptors have always sung while they worked. And they do not stop singing until their sculptures are finished. That way the music gets inside the carvings and keeps on singing.
    In 1910, Leo Frobenius found ancient sculptures on the Slave Coast that made his eyes bulge.
    Their beauty was such that the German explorer believed they were Greek, brought from Athens, or perhaps from the lost Atlantis. His colleagues agreed: Africa, daughter of scorn, mother of slaves, could not have produced such marvels.
    It did though. Those music-filled effigies had been sculpted a few centuries previously in the belly button of the world, in Ife, the sacred place where Yoruba gods gave birth to women and men.
    Africa turned out to be an unending wellspring of art worth celebrating. And worth stealing.
    It seems Paul Gaugin, a rather absent-minded fellow, put his name on a couple of sculptures from the Congo. The error was contagious. From then on Picasso, Modigliani, Klee, Giacometti, Ernst, Moore, and many other European artists made the same mistake, and did so with alarming frequency.
    Pillaged by its colonial masters, Africa would never know how responsible it was for the most astonishing achievements in twentieth-century European painting and sculpture.

Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors. Portobello Books, 2009 (2008).

Marketing

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At the end on the 1920’s, advertising beat the drum to spread marvellous news: “Fly, don’t ride.” Leaded gasoline made you go faster, and going faster meant getting ahead in life. The ads showed a car going at a snail’s pace, and the embarrassed child inside: “Gee, Pop, they’re all passing you!”
    Gasoline with lead additives was invented in the United States, and from the United States a barrage of advertising imposed it on the the world. In 1986, when the U.S. government finally decided to outlaw it, the number of victims of lead poisoning around the world was incalculable. It was known all along that leaded gasoline was killing adults in the United States at a rate of five thousand a year, and causing irreparable damage to the nervous systems and mental development of millions of children.
    The principle authors of this crime were two executives from General Motors, Charles Kettering and Alfred Sloan. They have gone down in history as generous benefactors of humanity. They founded a hospital.

Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors. Portobello Books, 2009 (2008)

Ten Stories of Beethoven’s Ninth

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  1. Adorno thought that Beethoven had gone too far with his Ninth Symphony, that he had made the work all too intelligible.
  2. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is woven into the fabric of life in Japan with the finale available as a karaoke disc.
  3. The demonic composer Leverkühn in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus aspires only to unwrite Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
  4. Speaking about the nature of evil, Anthony Burgess said that evil is tantamount to farting during a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
  5. Twenty-one year old contralto Carolina Unger, who sang the contralto part at the first performance of this first major symphony to use voice, is credited with turning Beethoven to face his applauding audience.
  6. In Stanley Kubrick’s interpretation of A Clockwork Orange, Mr Alexander plays Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony repeatedly in the hope of driving Alex De Large to suicide.
  7. In The Lost Steps, Alejo Carpentier replaces a madeleine with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as the trigger for a memory of his father that sends the narrator-protagonist on a quest to war-torn Europe.
  8. It is little known today that the source of the ‘Turkish music’ (seventh variation) of the ‘Ode to Joy’ theme of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was not Turkish drummers, but more likely the ‘African drum corps’, who were highly popular and active in European military and court bands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
  9. In Adrienne Rich’s poem The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at last as a Sexual Message, Rich attributes to the symphony the rage of sexual impotence.
  10. On Joseph Goebbel’s initiative, Hitler’s birthday in 1937 was celebrated with a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a performance repeated in 1942 when Hitler assumed command of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern front.

Euroeverything

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On his deathbed, Copernicus published the book that founded modern astronomy.
   Three centuries before, Arab scientists Mu’ayyad al-Din al-‘Urdi and Nasir al-Din Tusi had come up with the theorems crucial to that development. Copernicus used their theorems but did not cite the source.
   Europe looked in the mirror and saw the world.
   Beyond that lay nothing.
   The three inventions that made the Renaissance possible, the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press, came from China. The Babylonians scooped Pythagoras by fifteen hundred years. Long before anyone else, the Indians knew the world was round and had calculated its age. And better than anyone else, the Mayans knew the stars, eyes of the night, and the mysteries of time.
   Such details were not worthy of Europe’s attention.

Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors. Portobello Books, 2009 (2008).

Entering The Labyrinth

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To think is not to exit the cave, nor to replace the uncertainty of the shadows with the clear-cut contours of the things themselves, the flickering light of a flame with the light of the true Sun. It is to enter the Labyrinthe, or more exactly make the Labyrinthe be and appear whereas we could have stayed ‘on our backs, among the flowers, facing the sun’.
  To think is the lose oneself in the galleries that exist only because they are relentlessly excavated by us; it is to move around in circles at the end of a dead-end gallery where the entrance has closed behind us – until this circular movement inexplicably opens cracks in the walls that we can use.
  The myth definitely wanted to tell us something important, when it presented the Labyrinth as the work of Daedelus, a man.

Cornelius Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth (1987)