We’ve featured the work of Spanish filmmaker Cristóbal Vila before: His short film “Inspirations” celebrated the mathematical art of M.C. Escher. “Fallingwater” animated one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s finest creations. And “Nature by Numbers” showed us geometrical and mathematical formulas found in nature.
Today, we bring you Vila’s latest “Wabi-Sabi: A Handful of Memories from Traditional Japan.” As he notes on his site, the animation captures the “aspects that interest me the most about traditional Japan,” featuring “scenes inspired by nature, gardens, architecture, interior scenes, etc.” And it attempts to “create a calm and balanced atmosphere through the use of light, composition, materials, movement… and the choice of the motifs themselves.”
Above, you can watch “Wabi-Sabi,” a Japanese term that refers to “the [aesthetic] beauty of the impermanent, the imperfect, the rustic, and the melancholy,” as explains The School of Life video below. If you’re entranced by Vila’s short film, also watch the “Making of” video (middle).
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If we can consider some cooks artists, surely we can consider some artists cooks. Madeleine Conway and Nancy Kirk surely operated on that assumption when they put together The Museum of Modern Art Artists’ Cookbook, which collects 155 recipes from 30 such figures not primarily known for their culinary acumen as Salvador Dalí, Willem de Kooning, Louise Bourgeois, Andy Warhol, Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude. (“Strangely,” write the wags at Phaidon, “there are no wraps.”)
Published in 1978, the Artists’ Cookbook has long since left print, though pricey second-hand copies of the MoMA-issued edition and somewhat more affordable copies of the spiral-bound trade edition still circulate: Nick Harvill Libraries, for instance offers one for $125.
“Simplicity is a recurring theme,” says their site of the recipes contained within, which include Dalí’s red salad, de Kooning’s seafood sauce, Bourgeois’ French cucumber salad, Andy Warhol’s perhaps predictable boiling method for Campbell’s canned soup, Frankenthaler’s poached stuffed striped bass, Lichtenstein’s not entirely serious “primordial soup” (involving “8cc hydrogen” and “5cc ammonia”), and Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s complete “quick and easy filet mignon dinner party.”
Taken as a whole, the project captures not just a distinctive moment in American culture when you could publish a cookbook with pretty much any theme — we’ve previously featured Dalí’s own, which came out in 1973, and the rock-star-oriented Singers & Swingers in the Kitchen, from 1967 — but an equally distinctive moment, and place, in American art. MoMA, as you might expect, brought in the artists with whom they had the closest connections, which in the mid-1970s meant a particularly influential couple of generations who mostly rose to prominence, and stayed in prominence, in New York City.
That’s not to say that the contributors to The Museum of Modern Art Artists’ Cookbook were born into the art world. Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova quotes excerpts of the book’s interviews with the artists about their early culinary lives: Bourgeois rues the “wasted hours” spent cooking for her father (“in those days a man had the right to have his food ready for him at all times.” De Kooning recalls his childhood in poverty in Holland where, “when you had dinner, it was always brown beans.” Dalí and Warhol put their eccentricities on display, the former with his all-white table (“white porcelain, white damask, and white flowers in crystal vases”) and the latter with his declaration that “airplane food is the best food.” De gustibus, as they say in food and art alike, non disputandum est.
The great Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, it is said, drew his conceptions of god and the universe from his work as an optician, grinding lenses day after day. He lived a life singularly devoted to glass, in which his “evenings to evenings are equal.” So wrote Jorge Luis Borges in a poetic appreciation of Spinoza, of which he later commented, “[Spinoza] is polishing crystal lenses and is polishing a rather vast crystal philosophy of the universe. I think we might consider those tasks parallel. Spinoza is polishing his lenses, Spinoza is polishing vast diamonds, his ethics.”
The polishing of lenses, and work in optics generally, has a long philosophical pedigree, from the experiments of Renaissance artists and scholars, to the natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution who made their own microscopes and pondered the nature of light. Over a century after Spinoza’s birth, polymath artist and thinker Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published his great work on optics, just one of many directions he turned his gaze. Unlike Spinoza, Goethe had little use for concepts of divinity or for systematic thinking.
But unlike many freethinking aristocratic dilettantes who were a fixture of his age, Goethe–-writes poet Philip Brantingham—“was a universal genius, one of those talents whose works transcend race, nation, language-and even time.” It’s a dated concept, for sure, but when we think of genius in the old Romantic sense, we most often think of Goethe, as a poet, philosopher, and scientist. When he turned his attention to optics and the science of color, Goethe refuted the theories of Newton and created some enduring scientific art, which would later inspire philosophical iconoclasts like Wittgenstein and expressionist painters like Wassily Kandinsky.
In the case of Goethe’s Theory of Colors (1810), we get a high-quality look at the images in what the author himself considered his best work. “Known as a fierce attack on Newton’s demonstration that white light is composite,” writes the Hagerstromer Library, “Goethe’s colour theory remains an epochmaking work.” Goethe’s illustrations came directly from “a large number of observations of subjective colour-perceptions, recorded with all the exactness of a scientist and the keen insight of an artist.” It’s partly the bridging of sciences and the arts—of Enlightenment and Romanticism—that has made Goethe such a remarkable figure in European intellectual history. But as many of the finely illustrated, carefully observed texts at the Hagerstromer Medical Library show, he wasn’t alone in that regard.
In addition to these classic texts, the Hagerstromer also hosts the Wunderkammer, an eclectic archive of (often quite bizarre) naturalist images and illustrations from the 16th to the 20th centuries. One MetaFilter user describes the collection thus:
Through the darkness of future’s past, the magician longs to see…
The incantation that kicks off Detective Cooper’s dream vision in Twin Peaksis part abstract clue and part divination, and occult elements reoccur through the David Lynch-Mark Frost created series. So it makes sense that pop artist Benjamin Mackey would look at combining characters from the show with the designs of the well known and well loved Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck from 1910.
Initially, Mackey created just the 22 Major Arcana from the deck and sold them as prints. Detective Cooper is the Magician, Sheriff Truman is Justice, the Log Lady is the High Priestess, Benjamin Horne is the Emperor and so on. (Guess who the Devil is!)
Not too surprisingly considering the show’s devoted fan-base, the Twin Peaks Tarot was a hit, and Mackey focused on completing the full deck of 78 tarot cards (view them all here), riffing on the Rider-Waite-Smith deck’s penchant for enigmatic and mystic tableaux. And now, 10 months later, he’s offering the entire deck for sale through an Indiegogo campaign for what looks like a very affordable price.
The initial campaign ask of $5,000 was reached within days, and now is heading towards $50,000. There are also extra goodies too for those who want to give more, including a booklet and an original sketch.
The Minor Arcana shows Mackey’s deep love for the television show and film, and gives a chance for even minor characters to have their own card, from Lili with the Blue Rose to Donna Hayward’s sister Harriet.
“The Magician Longs to See” decks are scheduled to arrive by December, just in time to help you tell your friends’ fortunes while reading the upcoming Twin Peaks book, waiting for the new series, or drinking some damn fine coffee.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Never meet your idols, they say. It can put a cramp in your appreciation of their work. There are always exceptions, but maybe Bill Murray proves the rule. On the other hand, you should always learn from your idols. There’s a reason you admire them, after all. Find out what it is and what they have to teach you. In the series we feature here, Advice to the Young, many an idol of many an aspiring artist and musician offers some broad, existential advice—ways to absorb a little of their process.
Laurie Anderson, above, tells us to “be loose.” Widen our boundaries, “make it vague,” because “there are so many forces that are trying to push us in certain directions, and they’re traps…. Don’t be caught in that trap of definition. It’s a corporate trap…. Be flexible.” Good advice, if you’re as eclectic and loose as Laurie Anderson, or if you seek artistic liberation ahead of sales. “I became an artist because I want to be free,” she says.
Just above, Daniel Lanois, superstar slide guitarist and producer of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, U2, Peter Gabriel, and Emmylou Harris, tells us what he learned from working with Brian Eno. His advice is impressionistic, alluding to the importance of atmosphere and environment, as one might expect. It’s about appreciating the process, he suggests. He does get concrete about a difficulty nearly every artist faces: “if you have a financial limitation, that might be okay. You don’t have to have everything that the other people have. I think a financial limitation or a technological limitation may free up the imagination.” In an age of home studios, that’s always welcome news.
David Byrne has always told it straight, in his cultural criticism and songwriting, and in his segment, above, he steers hopeful musicians and artists away from the dream of Jay Z‑level fame. “Often the artists who are very successful that way” he says, “they don’t have much flexibility. In achieving success, they lose a little bit of their creative freedom. They have to keep making the same thing over and over again.” Byrne’s advice solidly underlines Anderson’s. If you want creative freedom, be prepared to fly under the radar and make much less money than the stars. Ending on a starkly realist note, Byrne admits that in any case, you’ll probably need a day job: “it’s very, very hard to make money in the music business.”
Novelist Umberto Eco also brings us down to earth in his interview, saying “not to think you are inspired,” then slyly dropping a cliché: “genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.” The old wisdom is truest, I suppose. He also urges writers to take their time with a book. “I cannot understand those novelists who publish a book every year. They lose this pleasure of spending six, seven, eight years to tell a story.” Eco’s advice: rise through the ranks, “go step by step, don’t pretend immediately to receive the Nobel prize, because that kills a literary career.”
Patti Smith, comfortably addressing an audience from an outdoor stage, urges them to “just keep doing your work” whether anyone’s listening, reading, etc. To those people who criticize her success as selling out her punk rock roots, Smith says, to laughs, “fuck you.” She then transmits some advice she received from William S. Burroughs: “build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t’ make compromises, don’t worry about making a lot of money or being successful; be concerned with doing good work.”
Easy perhaps for Burroughs the adding machine-heir to say, but good advice nonetheless, and consistent with what each artist above tells us: do it your way, don’t get pigeonholed, work with what you have, don’t worry about success or money, keep your expectations realistic.
You can watch more interviews with Marina Abramović, Wim Wenders, Jonas Mekas, and many more on this Advice to the Young playlist assembled by The Louisiana Channel. All 21 talks in the series can be viewed below:
Last year, fans of modernist Irish literature and impressionist art saw a must-own volume go under the hammer at Bonhams. “In 1935 the French artist, Henri Matisse, was commissioned to illustrate an edition of Ulysses for subscribers to the Limited Edition Club in America,” announced Artlyst. “Each of the 1,000 copies was signed by Matisse and 250 were also signed by James Joyce. A copy of the book signed by both men is estimated at £6,000 to £8,000.”
In the event it went for £6,250, not a bad deal considering the hands that wrote those signatures and the rarity, signed or unsigned, of this unusual book itself. (It certainly beats, say, $37,000.) Brainpickings’ Maria Popova writes that, after first spotting the Matisse-illustrated Ulysses here on Open Culture, “I gathered up my year’s worth of lunch money and was able to grab one of the last copies available online — a glorious leather-bound tome with 22-karat gold accents, gilt edges, moire fabric endpapers, and a satin page marker.” Versions signed by Matisse are apparently available–at a steep price–on Amazon.
Popova adds that “the Matisse drawings inside it, of course, are the most priceless of its offerings — doubly so because, for all their beauty, they’re a tragicomedy of quasi-collaboration.” From whence the tragicomedy? Publishing lore has it that, despite the provision of a full French translation of the Ulysses text, Matisse made his illustrative etchings — in the fashion of many an undergraduate with a paper due — without ever having got around to reading the book himself.
“I’ve never ‘read’ Joyce’s Ulysses, and it’s quite plausible that I never will,” Matisse’s countryman Pierre Bayard would write seventy years later in his bestselling How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Yet “I feel perfectly comfortable when Ulysses comes up in conversation, because I can situate it with relative precision in relation to other books. I know, for example, that it is a retelling of the Odyssey, that its narration takes the form of a stream of consciousness, that its action unfolds in Dublin over the course of a single day, etc.” — all things that Matisse, too, probably knew about Ulysses.
He certainly knew that it supposedly retold the story of the Odyssey, and so, in a now-ingenious-looking strategy to not just talk about an unread book but to illustrate it, he went to the source. Or rather, he went to one of the countless cultural, literary, historical, and linguistic sources upon which Joyce drew to compose his masterpiece, basing his art directly on Homer’s epic poem, in its own way a work more talked about than read. Joyce himself, who once described much of the textual content of Ulysses as intended to “keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant,” may well have admired Matisse’s clarity of vision, no matter how much-non reading it took to refine.
The skilled chef has always held a place of honor amongst gourmands and the fine dining elite. But it took television to bring us the celebrity chef: Julia Childs and Jacques Pepin; Dom DeLuise and Paul Prudhomme. Those were the good old days, before reality TV turned cooking into a competitive sport. Still, we’ve got many quality cooks on the tube, entertaining and hugely informative: Alton Brown, Anthony Bourdain, Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver…. Many of us who take cooking seriously have at one time or another apprenticed under one of these food gurus.
My personal favorite? Well, I’m a fan of haute cuisine as fashioned by Salvador Dalí. Sure, the surrealist painter and all-around weirdo has been dead since 1989, and never had anything approaching a cooking show in his lifetime (though he did make a few TV ads and an appearance on What’s My Line?). Nor is Dalí known for his cooking. As you might guess, there’s good reason for that.
Dishes like “Veal Cutlets Stuffed with Snails,” “Thousand Year Old Eggs,” and “Toffee with Pine Cones” were never going to catch on widely. But when it comes to food as art—as an especially strange and imaginative form of art—it’s hard to beat Dalí’s rare, legendary 1973 cookbook Les Diners de Gala, just reissued by Taschen.
The book, writes This is Colossal, represented “a dream fulfilled” for Dalí, “who claimed at the age of 6 that he wanted to be a chef.” As is sometimes the case when a life’s goal goes unmet—it is perhaps for the best that the Spanish painter never seriously attempted to interest the general public in his sometimes inedible concoctions. He did, however, entertain his coterie of admirers, friends, and celebrity acquaintances with “opulent dinner parties thrown with his wife Gala.” As the cookbook suggests, these events “were almost more theatrical than gustatory.” In addition to the bizarre dishes he and Gala prepared, the guests “were required to wear completely outlandish costumes and an accompaniment of wild animals often roamed free around the table”…..
If only Dalí had lived into the age of the Kardashians. Likely he would have leapt at the chance to turn these art parties into great TV. Or maybe not. In any case, we can now reconstruct them ourselves with what design site It’s Nice Thatcalls “a delicious combination of elaborately detailed oil paintings and kitsch 1970s food photography.” Along the way, Dalí drops aphorisms like “the jaw is our best tool to grasp philosophical knowledge” (recalling Nietzsche’s preoccupation with digestion). And despite the absurdity of many of these dishes—and paintings like that above which make the turducken look like casual fare—many of the actual recipes, This is Colossal notes, “originated in some of the top restaurants in Paris at the time including Lasserre, La Tour d’Argent, Maxim’s, and Le Train Bleu.”
However, even as far back as 1973, home cooks had begun to fret about the healthiness of their food. Dalí gives such people fair warning; Les Diners de Gala, he writes, “is uniquely devoted to the pleasures of Taste. Don’t look for dietetic formulas here.”
We intend to ignore those charts and tables in which chemistry takes the place of gastronomy. If you are a disciple of one of those calorie-counters who turn the joys of eating into a form of punishment, close this book at once; it is too lively, too aggressive, and far too impertinent for you.
As if you thought Dalí would bow to something as quotidian as nutrition. See many more surreally sensual food illustrations and quotes from the book at Brain Pickings, where you’ll also find the full, extravagant recipe for “Conger of the Rising Sun.” You can order Les Diners de Gala online.
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45 years ago, four eminences took the stage at the University of Toronto: Irish actor Jack MacGowran, best known for his interpretations of Samuel Beckett; English poet and dramatist W.H. Auden; American architect and theorist of humanity’s way of life Buckminster Fuller; and Canadian literary scholar turned media technology oracle Marshall McLuhan. Now only did all four men come from different countries, they came from very different points on the intellectual and cultural map. The CBC recorded them for broadcast on its long-running series Ideas, prefacing it with an announcement that “the ostensible subject of their discussion is theatre and the visual arts.”
Key word: ostensible. “That topic is soon forgotten as two modes of perception clash,” says the announcer, “that of Professor McLuhan, who is one of the most famous interpreters of contemporary 20th-century cultural trends, and that of W.H. Auden, who cheerfully admits to being ‘a 19th-century man’ and sees no reason to change.” And so, though Fuller and MacGowan do occasionally provide their perspective, the panel turns into a rollicking debate between McLuhan and Auden, more or less from the point where the former — making one of his characteristically compelling proclamations — declares that modern media brings us to a world in which “there is no audience. There are only actors.” But the latter objects: “I profoundly disapprove of audience participation.”
By the early 1970s, television had long since found its way into homes all across America, Canada, and Britain, but the thinkers of the time had only just begun to grapple with its consequences. “We’ve just seen Apollo 14, which has some visual effects going with it. It’s a new type of theater, obviously,” says McLuhan, drawing one of many audience laughs. On the subject of television’s conflation of fact and fiction, Auden doesn’t mince words: “I think TV is a very, very wicked medium. That’s all I can say.” McLuhan emphasizes that, as a professional observer of these phenomena, “I have steadfastly reserved moral judgment on all media matters.” Auden: “I don’t.”
Yet the author of The Age of Anxiety and the author of The Gutenberg Galaxy turn out to have more in common than their conflict might suggest. Both in their 60s by the time of this discussion (“Thank God I can remember the world before World War I,” says the poet) and both 1930s converts to Catholicism, they also both harbored deep suspicions of technologies like television. Auden, who insists he would never dream of owing a TV set himself, seems to look down on it as merely lowbrow, but McLuhan has darker suspicions: “You are missing the name of the game, sir. You are actually imagining that those little images you see on TV are TV. They are not. What is TV is that fire stream pouring out of that tube into your gut.”
Even while predicting still-unheard-of advances in televisual technology (at one point attempting to engage MacGowran on “the immediate prospect of four- and five-dimensional TV”), McLuhan also foresees it as the potential spark for such cataclysms as a global race war, going so far as to suggest that “if you want to save a fantastic bloodbath on this planet, which will be very traumatic, very cathartic, and very tragic — in the Greek sense — we turn off TV totally. For good.” Auden, of course, actually approves of that particular idea of McLuhan’s, though he evinces little optimism about its feasibility. “Why won’t it happen?” asks McLuhan. “Because people like the damn things,” he replies.
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