v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Interview with Albarrán Cabrera

 

From Global Voices, an interview with this duo photographers who fashion unique images via photography:

Omid Memarian: Notions of memory and identity figure prominently in your photography. What's your personal connection with these themes and how are they reflected in your work?

Anna: Everything we are is memory. When dealing with anything related to science, you draw on what scientists have already discovered to understand the world. Regarding identity, you are who you are because of your memories. You are your first anniversary, you are your mother’s memories, you are the memories of your school days. You are all this. Even the way we conceptualize time to understand reality is based on memory. This is more evident in people who suffer from memory loss. For them, time does not exist.

We hope that our photographs trigger subconscious associations in viewers based on their memories. We even prefer that the viewer interpret the photograph in a way totally different from what we had originally imagined. Thus, they will create a new set of ideas for themselves.

Memory is the thread that weaves all of our series. “The Mouth of Krishna” is the core series. It is the result of all our learnings so far. It is related to how our memories keep our reality consistent, how we categorize what we perceive and how we interlink it.

From time to time, we realize that some concepts gain more importance and then this generates a new portfolio. Thus, “This is you here” studies the concept of identity and how it is created based on our memories.

“Kairos” revolves around the idea of how humans perceive time. Time is not something tangible, it’s just a property of the universe. We create the concept of time with the help of our memories, and we divide it into past, present and future.

OM: You have spent a lot of time in Japan. How does this particular geography connect to your worldview of art and culture?

Angel: Japanese culture is very important for us and our work. This culture, as many others, is subject to many stereotypes and enormous misconceptions. At the beginning, you can fall into the trap of its aesthetics and philosophy. But once you study the language, its people and history, you discover the reality about this country: the good, bad and horrible things that any country has. And yet, there is still something fascinating: Japan offers us a completely different interpretation of reality compared to our Western conception. We all live in the same world, but it is interpreted from many, and totally diverse, points of view.

The Western world is obsessed with symmetry and perfection. We understand beauty shaped by universal laws, granting great importance to the perfect and the eternal. Japanese aesthetics are, however, very different. They see beauty in the impermanent, the imperfect, the rustic and the melancholy. They long for what is not eternal, slightly broken, modest and fragile.

OM: The aesthetic aspect of your work is very bold. In a world in which classical depictions of beauty have been pushed aside, how is your work being received in the art world?

Anna: Beauty is a very complex topic. It is not only difficult to define what beauty is, but also to deal with it. Prettiness worries serious people a lot. They are afraid that beauty will make you forget what life is really like. But as the philosopher Alain de Botton stated: “We need pretty things close to us not because we are in danger of forgetting the bad stuff, but because terrible problems weigh so heavily on us, that we’re in danger of slipping into despair and depression…The art a country or a person calls ‘beautiful’ gives you vital clues as to what is missing.”

We do not consciously look for beauty in our work. We search through the mystery of the unknown to experiment with the beauty of discovering.

OM: You have done nature photography in both Europe and Japan. What differences do you see in these two series of works?

Angel: As Westerners, we are surprised and amazed by the aesthetic and philosophical interpretation that the East has developed about the world. It seems very different from ours and yet, both Western and Eastern schools of thought have a simultaneous origin. Reviewing the pre-Socratic Greek thinkers of the Miletus school, we can find in their line of thought a common motivation with the Oriental culture: nature.

Oriental thought, and even more specifically, Japanese thought has not lost this ancestral contact with nature, maintaining it throughout the evolution of its culture. The ideals and concepts of Japanese aesthetics are mainly influenced by religion. In both Shintoism and Buddhism, the Gods are not the creators of nature, but nature is an individual entity. In our Western tradition, the Judeo-Christian concept of a creator or God broke this link and made us separate ourselves from the traditional aesthetic ideals of ancient Greece. The meaning of terms such as Wabi-sabi, Miyabi, Shibui or Yuugen originally existed in our Western culture but they did not evolve as in the Japanese case. We are gladdened by the fact that this common root is present in our work: usually viewers cannot differentiate between the images taken in Japan from those taken in other places.

Juan Manuel Castro Prieto-Photographer Whose Book I found in Mexico

Daido Moriyama Speaks

National Gallery of Art July 17, 2024

We went to the National Gallery on my birthday and I got to take detail shots of larger paintings from 500 years ago. It confirmed in my brain that things really haven't changed much. Check these out.

Vallejo Nocturno 2022-The Museum

The Pencil Method

From The NYRB, J.M. Coetzee writes in 2000 regarding Robert Walser:

In 1913 Walser left Berlin and returned to Switzerland “a ridiculed and unsuccessful author” (his own self-disparaging words). He took a room in a temperance hotel in the industrial town of Biel, near his sister, and for the next seven years earned a precarious living contributing feuilletons—literary sketches—to newspapers. For the rest he went on long country hikes and served out his obligations in the National Guard. In the collections of his poetry and short prose that continued to appear, he turned more and more to the Swiss social and natural landscape. He wrote two more novels. The manuscript of the first, Theodor, was lost by his publishers; the second, Tobold, was destroyed by Walser himself.

After the World War, the taste among the public for the kind of writing Walser had relied on for an income, writing easily dismissed as whimsical and belletristic, began to wane. He had lost touch with currents in wider German society; as for Switzerland, the reading public there was too small to support a corps of writers. Though he prided himself on his frugality, he had to close down what he called his “little prose-piece workshop.” He began to feel more and more oppressed by the censorious gaze of his neighbors, by the demand for respectability. He moved to Bern, to a position in the national archives, but within months had been dismissed for insubordination. He moved from lodgings to lodgings, drank heavily. He suffered from insomnia, heard imaginary voices, had nightmares and anxiety attacks. He attempted suicide, failing because, as he disarmingly admitted, “I couldn’t even make a proper noose.”

It was clear that he could no longer live alone. His family was, in the terminology of the times, tainted: his mother had been a chronic depressive; one brother had committed suicide; another had died in a mental hospital. It was suggested that his sister should take him in, but she was unwilling. So he allowed himself to be committed to the sanatorium in Waldau. “Markedly depressed and severely inhibited,” ran the initial medical report. “Responded evasively to questions about being sick of life.”

In later evaluations Walser’s doctors would disagree about what, if anything, was wrong with him, and would even urge him to try living outside again. However, the bedrock of institutional routine would appear to have become indispensable to him, and he chose to stay. In 1933 his family had him transferred to the asylum in Herisau, where he was entitled to welfare support. There he occupied his time with chores like gluing paper bags and sorting beans. He remained in full possession of his faculties; he continued to read newspapers and popular magazines; but, after 1932, he did not write. “I’m not here to write, I’m here to be mad,” he told a visitor. Besides, he said, the time for litterateurs was over. (Recently one of the Herisau staff claimed to have seen Walser at work writing. Even if this is true, no trace of such post-1932 writing has survived.)

Being a writer was difficult for Walser at the most elementary of levels. He did not use a typewriter, but wrote a clear, well-formed hand, on which he prided himself. The manuscripts that have survived—fair copies—are models of calligraphy. Handwriting was, however, one of the sites where psychic disturbance first manifested itself. At some time in his thirties (Walser is vague about the date) he began to suffer psychosomatic cramps of the right hand that he attributed to unconscious animosity toward the pen as a tool. He was able to overcome them only by abandoning the pen and switching to a pencil.

Use of a pencil was important enough for Walser to call it his “pencil system” or “pencil method.” What he does not mention is that when he moved to pencil-writing he radically changed his script. At his death he left behind some five hundred sheets of paper covered in a microscopic pencil script so difficult to read that his executor at first took them to be a diary in secret code. In fact Walser had kept no diary. Nor is the script a code: it is simply handwriting with so many idiosyncratic abbreviations that, even for editors familiar with it, unambiguous decipherment is not always possible. It is in these pencil drafts alone that Walser’s numerous late works, including his last novel, The Robber (twenty-four sheets of microscript, 141 pages in print), have come down to us.

More interesting than the script itself is the question of what the “pencil method” made possible to Walser as a writer that the pen could no longer provide (he still used a pen for fair copies, as well as for correspondence). The answer seems to be that, like an artist with a stick of charcoal between his fingers, Walser needed to get a steady, rhythmic hand movement going before he could slip into a frame of mind in which reverie, composition, and the flow of the writing tool became much the same thing. In a piece entitled “Pencil Sketch” dating from 1926-1927, he mentions the “unique bliss” that the pencil method allowed him. “It calms me down and cheers me up,” he said elsewhere. Walser’s texts are driven neither by logic nor by narrative but by moods, fancies, and associations: in temperament he is less a thinker or storyteller than an essayist. The pencil and the self-invented stenographic script allowed the purposeful, uninterrupted, yet dreamy hand movement that had become indispensable to his creative mood.

Robert Walser as a Young Man

Photographer George Nobechi Interview

 

George Nobechi Photograph

Lili Anolik, biographer of Eve Babitz

Smithsonian Interview with Eve Babitz 2000

Interview with Eve Babitz for the Smithsonian, here is a sample:

MR. KARLSTROM: And you were being-just to put this into a bit of context-you were being interviewed for a video for a documentary over at Castle Green-

MS. BABITZ: Yes.

MR. KARLSTROM: -Green Hotel in Pasadena

MS. BABITZ: About the Duchamp photograph.

MR. KARLSTROM: Mm-hmm. And the-

MS. BABITZ: You know, I'd never thought of myself as a model in that thing, but I guess I was volunteering for that job.

MR. KARLSTROM: Why don't you -

MS. BABITZ: I thought of myself as, I was like an art groupie/art model and I wanted to-I never modeled for anything like that and never again did, and really most artists, you know, when they have models they really are drawing them basically, like in sculptures, not taking photographs, so I don't know who-and it wasn't Duchamp's idea so I figured I was the artist and the model in that one.

MR. KARLSTROM: Well, Julian Wasser was the photographer.

MS. BABITZ: Right.

MR. KARLSTROM: And I gather that this was something, aside from the official events around the-it wasn't at the opening.

MS. BABITZ: No.

MR. KARLSTROM: Some people think it was at the opening.

MS. BABITZ: That's good.

MR. KARLSTROM: And then that's not right. It really was kind of-what should we say-it was kind of a guerilla act it seems to me.

MS. BABITZ: That's right, it's a guerilla act. It happened in the morning, 7:00 in the morning.

MR. KARLSTROM: Why don't you tell me just, you know, what led up to it, how it came about?

MS. BABITZ: Well, Julian came and there was the-they had the big party at the Green Hotel, even though Julian doesn't remember it; he has photographs that he took there at that time. And so I didn't get invited to it because Walter Hopps [curator of Duchamp retrospective at Pasadena Art Museum, 1963] was mad at me.

MR. KARLSTROM: Why was that?

MS. BABITZ: Because his wife was in town, basically.

MR. KARLSTROM: Is that Shirley? [Art historian later married to dealer Irving Blum.]

MS. BABITZ: Yes. I mean she came back, she suddenly did come back in a flash the minute that Duchamp thing happened and I was like not allowed in. So, but then I found out Jim Elliott wasn't invited either, so maybe nobody under 20, maybe 21, under 21 you weren't allowed in. So, so, he didn't invite me, so, and he wouldn't call me back, and he wouldn't call my mother back. And so I decided that if I could ever, like, you know, create any vengeance or havoc in his life I would, even though I was pretty powerless because I was only 20 and there was no way I could get to him. But, this Julian came up to me at the opening, the public opening, which I went to with my parents and-

MR. KARLSTROM: That was at the museum?

MS. BABITZ: Yeah. At the Pasadena Art Museum, and he said he had this great idea that I should play chess naked with Marcel Duchamp and it seem to be such a great idea that it was just like the best idea I'd ever heard in my life. It was like a great idea. I mean, it was, not only was it vengeance, it was art, and it was like a great idea. And even if it didn't get any vengeance, it would still turn out okay with me because, you know, it would be sort of immortalized. I would be this, you know, here's this Nude Descending the Staircase guy and now he's going to be The Nude in the Pasadena Art Museum. But, of course, I said, you know, I didn't think that the Pasadena Art Museum old ladies would go along with this. So-

MR. KARLSTROM: Was that part of what attracted you to the idea?

MS. BABITZ: Yes. Yeah, because it was like the Little Old Ladies from Pasadena, you know that Beach Boys' song.

MR. KARLSTROM: Right.

MS. BABITZ: So, I thought well, you know, this will be, you know, and it is kind of like, you know, it'll just kill them to find out that this happened there. So, but, I thought that he should tell Walter so Walter would know what we were doing, that we were going to do this. Because, it didn't seem like-I mean, it was okay to do it, but they ought to know basically. But, I know that Julian did not tell anybody because he probably forgot it the minute he agreed to do it. But he did call me the next day and say "Now, you're not going to chicken out are you?" Because we were supposed to do this two or three days later when they came back from Las Vegas, maybe the next day. They went to Las Vegas; they came back, Duchamp shows up at like, I don't know, it was a Thursday morning or something. It was like seven o'clock. Julian comes to get me at, like, seven in the morning. We drive out to Pasadena to create this, you know, rape. And Gretchen meets us there. She doesn't know what's going on. No one has told her.

MR. KARLSTROM: This is Gretchen Glicksman?

MS. BABITZ: Right. They just-Julian just, likes to, you know, play it by ear, basically. So, you know.

MR. KARLSTROM: Did he just tell them that he wanted to come in to do some photographs?

MS. BABITZ: Of Duchamp. Yeah.

MR. KARLSTROM: And Duchamp didn't know what he had in mind either?

MS. BABITZ: And he brought, and he said "Put that chess table there". You know, we're going to do the chess table. So, Duchamp, he had no idea. I mean that maybe he would of chosen someone else basically. He'd never met me before.

MR. KARLSTROM: Oh, I don't know, you look pretty good.

MS. BABITZ: He'd never met me before. I'd never met him before.

MR. KARLSTROM: Did you know who he was though?

MS. BABITZ: No, I didn't know who-I mean, I had an idea when I went to the art opening that he was probably great. He was one of those great people like-

MR. KARLSTROM: But you hadn't heard of him before?

MS. BABITZ: No. I mean I'd never heard of anybody except Ed Kienholz. That was as far as my-I knew who Ed Kienholz was and I thought he was great. So, I didn't even know who Joseph Cornell was at that time. So, and I knew that everybody was like in love with him because they had this huge party and they had two ballrooms and two bands. That I didn't get invited to.

MR. KARLSTROM: And that really pissed you off.

MS. BABITZ: Yes. So I knew, I figured I-there's got to be someway to get to this deal, some way to like, you know-

MR. KARLSTROM: To be part of it.

MS. BABITZ: Right, to be part of it. So-and Julian, you know, figured out this idea. So we got there and I ran upstairs to John Altoon's studio. He was teaching art up there. It was an upstairs room. I changed my clothes and put on this like artist smock. You know, one of those blue worker shirts that guys have on and nothing else underneath it. Gretchen was like, she wasn't going to say anything because the whole thing was to be cool then and not ask what anything is going on and it's still that way today.

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Learning About Jack Youngerman

 

 

Reading The Slip made me hunt down information and art images from some of the artists in the book. Highly recommended.

Writer of The Slip, a book about the artist culture that developed in   in the mid-fifties, Prudence Peiffer writes a reminiscence Jack Youngerman, one of the artists who lived there with his family:

I began talking with Jack Youngerman three years ago, as research for a book on the artist community that emerged at Coenties Slip in downtown Manhattan in the late 1950s and early ’60s. What I imagined might be a few conversations turned into regular sessions: he was a generous philosopher of art. He’d moved out to Bridgehampton, on the East End of Long Island, full time in the ’90s, and it was there, in a kitchen that was always sunny and warm no matter the season, with a cuckoo clock singing the hours and his wife Hilary Helfant’s sculptures gracing the round table, that we talked about his childhood, his art apprenticeship in Paris, and his early days in New York City living in an old sailmaking loft by the East River, next door to Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Lenore Tawney, Agnes Martin, and James Rosenquist.

Youngerman grew up poor in Kentucky and didn’t see any art in person until he was 19. He was immediately smitten. He went to Paris in 1947 on the GI Bill to study art at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he met the fellow American Kelly. The two often played hooky, with the city itself as their school: visiting museums and cathedrals, seeing the paper cutouts of Henri Matisse at the Salon de Mais, and making pilgrimages to the studios of Constantin Brâncuși, Alberto Giacometti, and Jean Arp. Paris was just waking up from its World War II nightmare, and cafés were crowded with arguments about politics, the war, and art. Youngerman absorbed it all. He met Delphine Seyrig, an ambitious French student and actor. They fell in love quickly and were married.

Youngerman and Kelly discovered abstraction in France, in the art and artists that surrounded them and through a series of experiments with how to compose pictures through found images and chance operations. (See Youngerman’s beautiful Untitled drawing from 1953, above, in MoMA’s collection.) Kelly returned to New York first, hopeful that Abstract Expressionism, like a powerful storm front, had cleared the air for other kinds of abstract thinking. Youngerman followed with his wife and six-month-old son Duncan a few years later, with a promise from Betty Parsons that if he moved to New York she would show him at her gallery. On a tip from Kelly, they moved in next to him at Coenties Slip, settling into one of the illegal loft spaces in the oldest neighborhood of Manhattan, a spot so secluded that Youngerman spoke about going “back into the city” when they needed supplies. Well before loft-living became a signature of artists’ life in New York, the Coenties Slip group fixed up the rough warehouse spaces. Youngerman found furniture on the street and splurged on a picnic table from Sears Roebuck at the end of the subway line in Brooklyn. (In one of our conversations, he mentioned offhand that he still had part of that table, and pointed outside to the back porch, where the 60-year-old bench held pots of herbs.)

The friendships at Coenties Slip changed each of the artists there forever, and in turn changed American art history—how we now understand abstraction, Pop art, Minimalism, textile art. But that’s another story. Kelly was a particularly important figure for Youngerman, both from their time together absorbing so much art history in Europe and from the experiments and breakthroughs that each came to individually as artists making their way in New York. Youngerman would go on to work with sculpture and prints, but it was his paintings at the Slip that set the course of his thinking.

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A Very Good Film

From NYRB, Nathaniel Rich writes about Ciro Guerra's great Embrace of the Serpent:

Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent, a finalist for best foreign film at this year’s Oscars, features the familiar fever-addled explorers, close-ups of vigilant jaguars and snakes baring their fangs, long pans of the jungle canopy, and indigenous tribesmen imparting portentous wisdom (“The jungle is fragile; if you attack her, she’ll fight back”). But the film is strange enough to resist the worst of the old clichés, which is to say it resists moral certainty. Guerra, a young Colombian director, shoots in a muted black and white (apart from a stunning montage in Technicolor during a climactic hallucinatory sequence), employs a counterintuitive narrative structure, and, most significant, empathizes not with the two white explorers whose misadventures drive the plot but with their indigenous guide, a profoundly conflicted figure who bears no resemblance to the customary noble or murderous savages.

The plot is based loosely on the stories of two scholars who traveled to the Amazon decades apart. The German anthropologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg (1872-1924) made several expeditions in the early twentieth century, and shot documentary footage that appears to have inspired Guerra’s sets and costume design. The Harvard biologist Richard Evans Schultes (1915-2001) lived in the South American rainforests in the 1940s and 1950s, becoming an expert on hallucinogenic plants and natural rubber. Guerra unites the two men through Karamakate, a shaman who is the last surviving member of a tribe destroyed by rapacious Colombian rubber plantation barons. In the Koch-Grünberg scenes, set in 1909, a skeptical young Karamakate (played by Nilbio Torres, a hunter who lives on the Vaupés River) agrees to help the feverishly ill anthropologist find the fictional Yakruna flower, the only known cure for his disease. (Koch-Grünberg did, in fact, die on one of his expeditions, but of malaria, in 1924.) In the Schultes scenes, set three decades later, the biologist begs the now hermetic, senile Karamakate (Antonio Bolivar, one of the last fifty remaining members of the Ocaína tribe) to help him find the elusive Yakruna for an equally selfish, but more cynical, reason. Guerra alternates between the two stories reluctantly, allowing each to expand and respire. The film’s pace is never slow but patient, lingering, accretionary, dilating with the logic of a nightmare.