Spinning Wheel 2

The mosaic belongs to the splendid old arcade of the Palais Royal, where Cocteau complained of bells ringing and where Louis XVI played with his toy cannons as a boy.

Spinning Wheel

Spinning wheel, got to go round--a Laura Nyro lyric, I believe.

Each spring we stop at Renault's flagship showroom on the Champs Elysées and sit in the driver's seat of the latest concept car. Since boyhood I have loved the futuristic élan of concept cars, knowing of course how rarely, if ever, a Sistine Chapel roadster ever makes it onto the real road. 

Here is one rim.

And another spinning wheel. I attended a small Christian school, so we didn't throw the discus in the nude as they did, undoubtedly, at the outré and irreligious high school in town. I did, however, throw the discus quite well, winning Ontario-wide in my senior year. It seems even then I had a penchant for obscure accomplishment (like writing a design blog). 

 This is a particularly refined article of Etruscan black-figure pottery, so-called though the ground here, rather than the figure, is black. It dates to the Persian occupation of Etruria in the 5th century, when occupiers imposed the pronounced stamp of Greek aesthetics on local handiwork. Just as possible, this plate may have been made by a Greek master who had emigrated to central Italy, bringing his world-beating, god-figured, discus-hurling Hellenism with him.

 

Michael Kenna

Two more pictures by Michael Kenna. (See previous entry for more discussion.)

The bridge is the Pont des Arts in Paris, an iron cobweb spanning the Seine and offering early in the morning or just as the sun is going down a perfect observatory from which to watch the slow swim of the river and feel the narcotic languor of a city so unearthly in its loveliness that you spit to reassure yourself that you're real.

Of Memory and Place

British photographer Michael Kenna creates these psalmic images of intense solitude early in the morning or late in the evening using long exposures that in turn exploit the dreamy DeChirico-like stillness at which great black and white photography so vividly and elegaicly excels. Within the tranquility of nature, some decaying vestige of man's presence may be found, quotidien relics of our existence, frayed clauses of a story lost long ago. Another feature of many of Kenna's images is the serial constitution of that relic, either planks of an old dock or the fingers of old piles driven into the sea--a numerology of decay. 

We tend to associate serialism with the mathematical clarities of Minimalism. Fine. I love a Carl André sculpture. I hope that you do too. But the pictures of Michael Kenna suggest just as potent a numerology for the uneven and mysterious integers of memory and place.

Do Stars Create Clouds?

Two do. If American architect Frank Gehry had never designed a building in his life, his eminence as this country's most imaginative furniture designer would assure his renown. His cumulus-like lantern, Cloud, made of paper modules clipped together, would be called that even if he had named it Porcupine or Margaret Thatcher.  

The second hanging lantern is by French eminence Patrick Jouin, also called Cloud, and is made up of suspended globes of hand-blown Murano glass.   

Alive and Ever Changing

This poetic image is from Bob Ivers, in response to "Puzzling Over Pattern."

"I saw two newly born fawns today in our woods.

They were patterned with white, gold and tan spots.

The leaves of tall trees moved in a slight and soft wind patterning 

white sunlight across the woods floor and the fawns.

Two patterns merged - both alive and ever changing."

Infinite Heights & White Horizons

Let's make up a movement; let's call it Purism, at least for the duration of this paragraph. It is white and it is serial--just like Meier's poem or Brancusi's plaster column. Nothing against color; nothing against single, unrepetitive shapes. It's just that these two elements have, by general agreement, become aesthetic touchstones, keys to the kingdom of modern aesthetics; our own versions of the pale plaster walls and plain stone arches of a Michelozzo monastery. Where life calls forth, as it always has, simplicity shaped by pallor and immaculate proportion, the answer over centuries has remained remarkably the same. It's a though each new generation must conserve, in its own way, some reductive and essential grail handed down by its predecessors. The redux of purity; Modernism does it particularly well.

Giotto Redux at Galerie Kreo

Pure caprice, I know, but when I saw this underexposed image of hanging lamps by the Bouroullec brothers, on display in Paris at Galerie Kreo, I thought of Giotto's great Lamentation, spangled with floating golden lamps of quite another order--halos, actually. A common feature in Gothic and early Renaissance paintings, they are often gilded (with a thin layer of pure gold) rather than painted, and gilded not by the painter (though sometimes they are), but by an artisan brought in for that purpose alone. As such, they do glow in a way that the opaque surface of the rest of the painting does not.

Jouin at the Pompidou

A consistent star in the premier league of European designers, Patrick Jouin in enjoying an ultimate accolade--a show of his own at the Pompidou Center in Paris. On display are his impressive eclecticism and brilliantly innovative mastery of many genres of design. This stool, or tabouret, folds and unfolds like an umbrella. But the most intriguing thing about it is how it was made--a process of rapid heat prototyping that remains a mystery to me, except to stumblingly suggest that lasers are beamed into a container holding a volume of powder, heating and solidifying the powder in minute correspondence to a 3-D computer design. Moving joints can even be created by this process. When done, rather like excavating some ancient relic from the earth, you chip and brush away the excess powder and what is left is this remarkable, and remarkably made, object. 

Synonyms for Serial

Modular, sequential, iterative. Minimal is often equated with serial, since the great American Minimalists usually constructed their works in austere sequences, but the two are not synonyms. Something can be serial without being reduced to a repetitive geometry, and minimal work is not always serial.  

In architecture and furniture, the term modular is used to denote the serial use of identical or similar elements, or modules.

The theatrical throne-like chair is by the French designer Matali Crasset, and was created for a book devoted to collaborations between writers and designers (Crasset coupled with Agnes Desarthe). Like this chair, most of Crasset's work abides by a very geometrical regimen, usually enlivened by brilliant color. The second is a classic seat from George Nelson Studios, the Marshmallow Chair. 

The Nelson chair is an good example of furniture that exists more for its visual panache and sculptural innovation than for comfort--furniture, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, that has the look of being looked at. Some pragmatists complain. Since most furniture is looked at more than it is actually used, why not? Ever sit on the Stone of Scone? I saw it many years ago in Westminster Abbey, though now it has been re-patriated to Scotland. It even beats the Marshmallow Chair for discomfort, being nothing more than a rough cube of rock. That said, no chair in the world means more to the wild-hearted, deep-fried-Mars-bars-eating Picts. 

Puzzling Over Pattern

More mosaics in Galerie Vivienne. Then look directly up and another circle meets the eye.

Of pattern, what may be said? The risk is that we dismiss it as simply ornamental. Not at all. As often as I have mulled the question over in my mind, I may never grasp what pattern really means or why it is so ubiquitous. Why, for instance, are circular patterns so often affliliated with religious mysticism. (Look back to my short piece on Jung's mandalas.) A wise, good friend and accomplished writer is very big on the importance of stories to human well-being. They are an essential social nutrient that he feels we are quickly losing. He is quite right. For centuries, painters and sculptors tried to emulate stories as a way of grafting their structure and gravity onto a canvas or wall. In a minor way, they succeeded. A portrait is a short story. Also, perhaps, a landscape. Or a scene from a story we recognize. At least they are fractions of stories.

Then came Modernism. Artists at last came to grips with the shortcomings of story-imitation, subordinating art, as it did, to literature. Instead, they re-discovering what architects and textile designers had never forgotten, that a far richer visual equivalent of story-telling was to be found in pattern-making; that patterns contained the same evocations of structural coherence (just look at a textile design by Annie Albers) and the intricate, progressive weave of things, that in literature narrative did.