virtual philosopher

3 New Posts on my Art and Allusion Weblog

I have recently resurrected my Art and Allusion weblog at www.artandallusion.com. There are 3 new posts there:

1. A catalogue essay 'Re-Imagined Prisons' for artist/photographer Emily Allchurch's new exhibition Urban Chiaroscuro.

2. An interview with Mark Haworth-Booth, curator of the centenary exhibition The Art of Lee Miller at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

3. An essay on the photographer Sze Tsung Leong 'Who Controls the Past Controls the Future' which was originally published in Portfolio Magazine.

Notes on Session 2 of Beyond Seeing, Tate Modern

Notes from the second session of the course I'm leading at Tate Modern, Beyond Seeing, including short clips from an interview I made with artist Oswaldo Macia, are available here.

Notes from session one.

Course Outline.

Next week: Taste and 'Taste'...

Interview with artist Sadie Murdoch on my other weblog

Click on this image to enlarge it...

Why did Sadie Murdoch dress up in black and white clothes, put on black and white make-up, and pose as Charlotte Perriand for this photograph? Find out here.

Interesting New Article on Allan Ramsay's Portraits of Hume and Rousseau, 1766

Art historian Douglas Fordham has written a fascinating and very thoroughly researched article about Allan Ramsay's portraits of David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau painted in 1766:

'Allan Ramsay's Enlightenment : or Hume and the Patronizing Portrait' Art Bulletin, September 2006.

These are undoubtedly two of the finest paintings of Enlightenment thinkers (and possibly the best painted  portraits we have of any philosophers), yet there has been surprisingly little written about them. Fordham sets the portraits in their social and political context (including raising questions about imperialism) and provides an antidote to  Edgar Wind's writing about Hume and the Heroic Portrait which seemed to miss quite a lot about the portraits and their original context. My speculative article about these two paintings 'Art and Allusion' even makes it into Fordham's footnotes, which is gratifying, given that it was published in The Philosopher's Magazine, and wouldn't be on the radar of most art historians - I put that down to the power of the Internet. For more on the context of these two paintings, see David Edmonds and John Eidinow's recent book Rousseau's Dog.

On Allan Ramsay's Portraits of David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Allan Ramsay painted  remarkable portraits of the great philosophers David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1766. Rousseau had fled persecution and come to England at Hume's invitation. The portraits were painted while Rousseau and Hume were staying in London, where Rousseau, who at this time was best know as a novelist, was something of a celebrity. The relationship between the philosophers began well, but later dissolved in acrimony, with Rousseau accusing Hume of all kinds of betrayals (some of which he might just have been guilty of). Terrified that Rousseau, who was writing his Confessions at the time, might put his semi-paranoid beliefs into his autobiography, Hume pre-empted him by publishing  a pamphlet which included transcripts of letters sent by Rousseau.

The two portraits are both in their way Rembrandtian (Hume's is like the Kenwood Self Portrait; Rousseau's closer to the Cologne Self Portrait as Zeuxis - sometimes known as The Laughing Philosopher). They hung side by side in Hume's house in Edinburgh. They're still in Edinburgh, but sadly not side by side any more.

I had intended to publish a book on this philosophers' quarrel one day, but never got round to it. I did write an article, though, about the portraits:[36KB rtf] Download art_and_allusion.rtf . A shortened version of this was published in The Philosophers Magazine. Fortunately David Edmonds and John Eidinow hit on the same idea recently and produced Rousseau's Dog - a better researched book than I think I'd have managed - and on the basis of their excellent earlier book Wittgenstein's Poker , I happily handed over my notes to them.

Update. See my post for 23/11/06 for link to a new article by Douglas Fordham on Ramsay's Hume/Rousseau portraits.

A Thought on Photographic Self-Portraits vs Painted Self-Portraits

While making the radio programme 'Rembrandt Today' (to be broadcast on Radio 4 11.30 a.m. 26th October) I came across the idea that most painted self-portraits don't accurately reflect left-right sides of the face because made using mirrors. What we usually see in a self-portrait by Rembrandt relates to what he saw in the mirror rather than how others would have seen him in this respect. In at least one case, the Kenwood House self-portrait with two circles, he corrected the left/right hand switch that painting from a mirror gave him - i.e. he put the palette in his left hand to avoid him looking like a lefthanded artist (something revealed by x-rays of the underpainting which showed him holding a brush in his left hand originally).

Now, self-portrait photography doesnt usually involve this left/right switch unless the printer accidentally flips the negative...not so likely in this digital age. Why would this matter at all, since nothing is added or taken away by a left/right switch. You might think it could have something to do with reading images of faces from left to right. John Walters, who makes non-reversing mirrors he calls True Mirrors, has another theory: he thinks that laterality matters in facial interpretation because of the hemisphere specialism of the brain. If a feature appears on the left side of someone's face we interpret it slightly differently from if it occurs on the right. Certainly if you look at a few portraits in mirrors the character of the sitter seems to change. If Walters is right, this suggests a further difference between photographic and most painted self-portraits: the photographic ones are truer to laterality, and this might result in a specific kind of realism beyond the usual ones trotted out when describing photographic realism - this one particular to facial reading...Just a thought.

Veronica Bailey

I first came across Veronica Bailey's photography when I was writing about the architect Erno Goldfinger. Bailey photographed some of Goldfinger's books from his house in 2 Willow Road, Hampstead, end on, using a digital process, to create formally striking images, which, combined with the books' titles produced a kind of indirect biographical comment on Goldfinger and his wife Ursula. I wrote a short piece about a later series of images, Postscript, for Portfolio Magazine. This series uses the letters of Lee Miller and her lover/husband Roland Penrose as the basis for large-scale colour digital prints. Download this article [12Kb Rtf]Download veronicabailey.rtf .

There is an interesting feature article by Sue Steward on Veronica's photography from Eye magazine.

CORRECTION: 'Rembrandt Today' will be broadcast at 11.30 am (not 11) on Radio 4 on 26th October

I'm presenting the programme 'Rembrandt Today' on Radio 4 at 11.30 a.m. on 26th October (not 11 a.m as previously suggested!). The programme focuses on the famous self-portrait at Kenwood House in Highgate on the edge of Hampstead Heath (it is well worth a visit if you havent been - free entry, and there is a beautiful Vermeer painting of a young woman playing a guitar in the same room as the Rembrandt). 'Rembrandt Today' includes interviews with artists Maggi Hambling and Idris Khan, art critic/curator Bill Feaver, and art historian Joanna Woodall.

Previous posts relating to this programme here and here.

Conversation with Brian Alfred

I had an email conversation with the artist Brian Alfred on the occasion of his recent exhibition 'Surveillance' at the Haunch of Venison Gallery in Zurich. The text of this as it appeared in the catalogue can be downloaded here Download brian_alfred_surveillance.rtf [40KB rtf]. Alfred's images, which owe something of their appearance to pop art, are of surveillance devices, and sites associated with surveillance. Brian Alfred's website includes images and animations and is well worth a visit. See also my earlier post.

Idris Khan

I spent yesterday morning interviewing the artist Idris Khan for a radio programme 'Rembrandt Today' (to be broadcast at 11.30 am on 26th October on BBC Radio 4 - the interview with Idris is at the end of the programme). His first solo, exhibition at the Victoria Miro Gallery, is just coming to an end. The pretext for the interview was a composite image of Rembrandt built from every Rembrandt self-portrait digitally superimposed. This image at first glance looks like a vignetted soft-edged late self-portrait, but look at it for a minute or so and the younger self-portraits start emergering in a succession of aspect-shifts, as if it were a video of the images.

Born in 1978 Khan's work already demonstrates maturity and musicality. He works by building up images by scanning series of images on top of each other, much as the 19th century French photographer Batut had done. So, for example, Khan scanned every page of a modern version of J.S. Bach's cello sonatas to produce an image in which ghostly clusters of notes are visible, but which blend into abstraction. Indeed, the three large monochrome musically-inspired pieces which hang as a triptych in the exhibition share underlying proportions with Rothko's Seagram murals - a conscious influence for the artist. Another visible link is to finely patterned Islamic carpets - Khan was brought up as a Muslim. Most illustrations fail to do justice to the subtle textures of these large-scale prints.

Khan has taken his project one step further by making a video piece, currently on show at INIVA (until 22nd October). For this he extracted three minutes of each of the six Bach cello suites and overlayered both the musical sounds and moving images of the cellists hands and bow. Filmed in black and white, the effect at times is close to Moholy-Nagy's abstract film-making (again, a conscious allusion). The sound, although abstracted and overlayered is surprisingly musical and rhythmic. Snatches of familiar motifs are audible, but new dissonances too. In making the film, Khan used the rhythms he'd recorded from his father, a Muslim, praying. The film is mesmerising.