Medusa in Zurich

I am just strolling out of a car park in Zurich this week, on my way to the marvelous Chagall painting exhibition at the Kunsthaus, when I see an eye-catching post. A young woman has has been decapitated and her head is placed on a circular plate. Spaghetti frames her head, like blond snakes emerging from her hair.

Elena or Medusa

 It is simply an advertisement for this DJ's show, "Elena zum Zmittag", on a popular local radio station.  If you visit the website of the radio station, you find that there are, in fact three such posters, each featuring a different DJ.  One of the DJs, the local celebrity Jonthsch, is a former student of mine.

Earlier this month I spent a few days in Florence with five of my students.  At the end of the trip I asked the students to name the one art work that made the deepest impression. One student picked Caravaggio's Medusa. He was impressed by its almost surreal hyper-realism. Caravaggio painted Medusa's decapitated head on canvas, mounted on a circular shield, the snakes of her hair coiling convulsively. In his recent biography of the artists Andrew Graham-Dixon describes the painting as "a work of such flourish and bravado that it has the look of a painting submitted for a prize." (Andrew Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane, Penguin Books, 2011, p. 157)

Caravaggio: Medusa

I don't know if the radio station deliberately referenced the Caravaggio work, but the connection seems clear to me and I like to think that it is an example of the memory provoked by an art work emerging in contemporary advertising.  What do you think?

Will Mali Become the next Afghanistan?

When NATO forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001 their objective was to get rid of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaida fighters. This was soon successfully achieved. But 12 years later, NATO forces are still bogged down in a war that they will not win. Meanwhile, the war had totally unexpected outcomes, particularly the destabilizing of a nuclear armed and fragile Pakistan. The situation in Pakistan has become so violent that the response of the USA is more violence, by means of President Obama’s weapon of choice, the drone. The use of the drone has made Obama the world’s leading assassin.

When NATO forces bombed Libya in 2011 their objective was to get rid of Gaddafi and his henchmen. This was soon successfully achieved. But that war is now seeing some totally unexpected outcomes. Many of Gaddafi’s soldiers were Tuareg tribesmen form Mali.  Out of a job and persecuted in Libya, they have now returned home to Mali, well-armed and seething with rage. Islamic jihadists have joined the fray, and Mali’s fledgling democracy has been brought to an end in a military coup. This week, with the blessing of the UN, France, a member of NATO, has sent its troops into Mali to fight yet another Muslim enemy.  Mali has become the Pakistan of the area. It now looks like it is about to become the Afghanistan of West Africa.

We lurch from military crisis to crisis, most of them of our own making. One can only wonder what the unexpected outcomes of this military intervention will be.

Article first published as Mali: The Next Afghanistan on Technorati

Put down, but never discarded

There are books, read in youth, the content of which we still remember decades later. And there are books, of which the act of reading itself can be vividly recalled as if it were yesterday. It was July 1980. I had been travelling for three years. In the multitudinous din that was India, I was alone. Emaciated, jaded and worryingly low on funds, I arrived in the holy city of Madurai. Near the grand temple I found a room in a cheap hotel, a loveless place called Venus...

If you would like to read the rest of my article which appeared in Australia this morning, just click here.

Two Days in Paris - the Trailer to the Movie

I recently got back from my annual autumn trip to Paris, where my students give presentations on site at a variety of  locations linked to the French Revolution. This is the trailer to a documentary about our trip.

Skin by Esther de Vries

I do like this new poem from my favourite poet, Esther de Vries.

Goya Prints Defaced

During the Napoleonic occupation of Spain the Spanish artist Francisco Goya created a series of powerfully evocative prints – The Disasters of War.  Goya’s The Disasters of War provides us with an unparalled, brutally realistic rendering of the horror that is war, including graphic depictions of executions, rape, torture and dismemberment.

Goya: The Shootings of May 3rd 1808

 We don’t know what Goya’s exact intentions were when he created The Disasters of War. It certainly did not serve as anti-French propaganda, like his painting The Shootings of May ^3rd, 1808 (see above), because he never published the prints during his lifetime, nor did he attempt to.  Indeed Goya’s The Disasters of War series was only first published in 1863, decades after his death. Since then, the prints have become among the most renowned and influential depictions of war in art and an inspiration to the likes of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and others.

Jake and Dinos Chapman: The Disasters of War

The British contemporary artists Jake and Dinos Chapman provided an addition to the legacy of Goya’s  The Disasters of War when they exhibited their own The Disasters of War in 1993 (see above).  They had created three dimensional plastic sculptures based on Goya’s eighty scenes. They then went on to produce a life-size version of one of these: Great Deeds Against the Dead, which was based on one of Goya's particularly brutal prints, of dismembered male bodies.

Jake and Dinos Chapman: Great Deeds Against the Dead

So far so good, the Chapman’s work, though grotesque, seemed to be a homage to the work of the truly original artist, Francisco Goya. The Chapmans continued to achieve attention and a great deal of critical acclaim with a variety of provocative work, for instance mannequins of children with genitalia instead of faces and work that referenced Nazism.  Their piece, Death, which showed two sex dolls having oral sex in the 69 position, almost won them the Turner Prize, Britain’s most prestigious art prize.

The original print - Goya's Great Deeds Against the Dead

In 2003 they exhibited their Insult to Injury.  For this postmodern intervention they took an entire set of Goya’s The Disasters of War and systematically defaced every print by drawing the heads of clowns, mice and other funny faces on Goya’s work (see below). Writing in The Guardian, Jonathan Jones commented “in any terms, this [Goya’s The Disasters of War] is a treasure - and they have vandalised it.”

Jake and Dinos Chapman; from Insult to Injury

I am reminded of this now. I recently wrote a post about how a self-styled artist walked into the Tate Modern last month and defaced a work of Mark Rothko. For his pains, he will have his day in court. But the Chapmans have been widely celebrated for their defacement of Goya’s work. Is this a case of rich and famous artists being praised for defacing the work of another, while a poor and unknown artist is jailed for doing so? Does it matter that the Chapmans owned the copies of the prints that they vandalised, while the Rothko vandaliser did not?

Rothko Painting Defaced

The fact that a Mark Rothko painting was defaced has been big news, reported by every British newspaper as well as the the BBC. In Rothko's homecountry the Washington Post reported, with horror, that the vandal was still "on the loose", making it sound like it was dangerous to let your children out of your sight with such a maniac at large.

On October 7^th a man walked up to the Mark Rothko painting "Black on Maroon" and, with a thick black ink pen, defaced a work held in great reverence, by writing "Vladimir Umanets, 12, A Potential Piece of Yellowism". Cries of outrage were widely issued – how dare anyone vandalize a work from Saint Mark (though, it has to be admitted, with this particular painting experts don't even know which side is up). 

Entering the Rothko space in the Tate Modern is like entering a sacred sanctuary. The pilgrims talk in hushed tones; they gaze at the pictures, like the Eastern Orthodox bowing down and praying before their sacred icons.  The fact that Rothko committed suicide simply adds to his aura.  He must have been touched by the ineffable; his mysterious paintings provide gateways into another realm, an escape from our tedious everyday existence. If you can drag yourself away from your iPhone briefly, and gaze into the depth of Rothko’s paintings, like the priesterly Simon Schama, you too will be saved, for a few moments. That’s why the Rothko space has more worshippers these days than Saint Paul’s cathedral. Never mind that Rothko and his fellow American Abstract Impressionists owed their popularity, and their inflated prices, to the CIA, operating covertly behind their front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

The 21st century vandal, was operating in the name of Yellowism, whatever that means. Their manifesto seems as silly as, well, admiring a Rothko painting only to discover later that it was hanging the wrong way round.

What the Yellowist's action has done is simply add another layer to the Rothko mythical narrative. We will no longer simply stare at Rothko’s painting, yearning intently for the promised calmness to embrace us, but we will then take a further moment to look at the bottom right hand corner, to assure ourselves that, once scared by a defacer, it has survived this crucifixion and been resurrected to its former sacred self.