Without sanctuary

If you were wondering how it's possible that soldiers in Iraqi prisons send pictures they took of the crimes they comitted home, there's a history to that that you may not be aware of:

A man called Joe Meyers sent this card to his mother on May 17th, 1916.

"This is the barbecue we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it your son Joe".

The front of the card will no doubt bring back memories of a lynching that took place 88 years later in Falluja.

Many such cards were made: The Musarium has 81 of them. Musarium: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

Los Desastres de la Guerra

I was looking for the complete series of Goya's Los Desastres de la Guerra, and came across all 80 Capricios instead. The Desastres may be what's needed now, but the Capriocios are what's needed once we've gotten ourselves out of the mess.

Wesleyan: Goya Images from the DAC Collection

I did find the Desastres of course, all 82 of them in the Biblioteca Nacional de España

The war depicted by Goya is the war of independence fought between 1808 and 1812 against the French after Napoleon had installed his brother Joseph Bonaparte as king.

Goya continued to work as a court painter under the French occupation. The prints were not published until 1863, 45 years after his death.

Tristes presentimientos de lo que ha de acontecer | Con razon ó sin ella | Lo mismo | Las mugeres dan valor | Y son fieras | Bien te se está | Que valor! | Siempre sucede | No quieren | Tampoco | Ni por esas | Para eso habeis nacido | Amarga presencia | Duro es el paso! | Y no hai remedio | Se aprovechan | No se convienen | Enterrar y callar | Ya no hay tiempo | Curarlos, y á otra | Será lo mismo [dos veces] | Tanto y mas 1810 | Lo mismo en otras partes [dos veces] | Aun podrán servir | Tambien estos | No se puede mirar | Caridad | Populacho | Lo merecia | Estragos de la guerra | Fuerte cosa es! | Por qué? | Qué hai que hacer más? | Por una navaja | No se puede saber por qué | Tampoco | Esto es peor | Bárbaros! | Grande hazaña! Con muertos! | Algun partido saca | Escapan entre las llamas | Todo va revuelto | Tambien esto | Yo lo vi | Y esto tambien | Esto es malo | Así sucedió | Caridad de una muger | Madre infeliz! | Gracias á la almorta | No llegan á tiempo | Espiró sin remedio | Clamores en vano | Lo peor es pedir | Al cementerio | Sanos y enfermos | No hay que dar voces | De qué sirve una taza? | No hay quien los socorra | Si son de otro linage | Las camas de la muerte | Muertos recogidos | Carretadas al cementerio | Qué alboroto es este? | Extraña devocion! | Esta no lo es menos | Que locura! | Nada | Ello dirá | No saben el camino | Contra el bien general | Las resultas | Gatesca pantomima | Esto es lo peor! | Farándula de charlatanes | El buitre carnívoro | Que se rompe la cuerda | Se defiende bien | Murió la Verdad | Si resucitará? | Fiero monstruo! | Esto es lo verdadero

Desastres de la guerra - Lista1

Truth in quotes

From one of thos famous quotes sites:
"Of all lies, art is the least untrue."

What Flaubert really wrote was this: "De tous les mensonges, c'est encore le moins menteur." in a letter to Louise Colet, August 8-9, 1846.

Quote DB :: Gustave Flaubert :: Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

The price of freedom

Ruben asked what kind of traffic violations I was thinking of in response to yesterday's post. I had to look them up (I don't drive, so I have no idea). One of the things that struck me was the relationship between the maximum imprisonment sanction and the maximum fine sanction for reckless driving (in some states). 6 months = $2,500. Freedom isn't very valuable in the US, if you go by these numbers. A day in prison is the equivalent of barely $14.

Economists have estimated that the value of a human life is around $7 million. That's about $50,000 for the -same- 6 month period.

Freedom, therefor, makes up a measly 5% of the value of a life. One would think it ought to be more than that.

Summary Table of Aggressive Driving Laws

On the reintroduction of slavery

Salon reports on the increase in the number of inmates in US prisons. They don't make a big fuss over it, it all seems to be completely normal, a bit out of the oridinary perhaps, and there is some concern over the increase of course.

Salon.com News | Report: 1 of every 75 U.S. men in prison

They don't give the link to the report, but this is it:

Bureau of Justice Statistics Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2003

But here's something that I find -un-be-lievable-
1 in 8 black men in their 20's is now in jail. 12 %! Every eighth man, and people just shrug, and get on with their lives. I don't believe that 12% of any population is criminal. They must have done something with the definition of crime. A strange one at that. what do I care if people use illegal substances, I want those murderous bastards in their cars behind bars.

If we had a zero tolerance policy for traffic violations, how many people would be in prison?

Imagine the benefits: no more traffic jams, and the prisons would be filled with office workers, who could continue to do their job from their slightly-reduced-in-size cubicles. Labour costs would go down, the economy would boom.

Stupid idea of the month

Even Boing Boing's own Cory Doctorow, seems to fail to understand why this will not happen. Rendering requires massive amounts of data, and the bandwith requirements are so high there's no point to trying. Still, inspired by Seti@home no doubt, the idea resurfaces every other week or so. I should take some time to explain once and for all why no one is going to bother implementing this. Don't feel like it though.

Download Aborted!: Can I Help to Render Shrek 3?

Sontag

Sontag writes: "the photographs are us", but fails to mention that in the context of their use in Abu Ghraib, they show one aspect in particular. They were intended, it seems, to scare other prisoners into collaborating with their interrogators. What they show is not so much what the prisoners are afraid of, but what we think they are most afraid of, and those projected fears are the torturer's own.

The New York Times > Magazine > Regarding the Torture of Others

visionaries

This is an artist's rendering of terminal 2 at Charles-de-Gaulle airport in Roissy.

088b.jpg (JPEG Image, 850x349 pixels)

It reminds me of the drawing style of science fiction illustrators. This work is truly 'visionary', detached from the practise of building. Form does not follow from constructing, but from imagining space.

There is no mention of the collapse of the terminal on Paul Andreu's website yet.

Le monde quotes him as saying: Je suis bouleversé." I am upset. L'Humanité has an interview with Paul Andreu.

Warm things to chew for the dead

We went to see Diane Borsato's show at Gallery TWP. It's been ages since we found ourselves laughing out loud in an art show.

It's too bad you can't see the texts that accompany the photos here. Borsato's writing is just as much part of the work.

Gallery TPW -Diane Borsato: WARM THINGS TO CHEW FOR THE DEAD

vending machine

After seeing a movie, I went to the toilet in the cinema. While drying my hands, I look at the vending machine next to the drier. Condom machine, I think. I check the labels: mints, chewing gum, lip balm, toothpaste.

incomplete

CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN ART

Free Culture

I posted about this book earlier , and now I've finally finished reading it. It took me a while, I've been reading the pdf version on my palm while riding the subway and I don't take the subway very often. It's good, is's important, go read it!

How am I using the tool?

We have as site with four public blogs, and another four for testing, prototyping, practise, etc. There are four authors (2 parents, 2 children) an an occasional guest. They each have their own URL, all on the same domain.

Six Log: How are you using the tool?

29 years old

Memorial for Cyclist Killed: May 19

One week following the death of a 29-year-old cyclist, Toronto cyclists will ride to the site of the fatality to pay their respects to a fellow cyclist.

This happened at the Dundas Dupont intersection, not far from where I live. Dundas is the shortest way between home and work for me, and it's one of the worst streets to ride. Once, on Dundas some moron in a black Ford Explorer threatened to "kill me next time". Some motorists don't seem to understand they have a license plate that makes it pretty easy to report them to the police.

Advocacy for Respect for Cyclists (ARC)

ArtScience

In his editorial, ArtScience: The Essential Connection Robert S. Root-Bernstein asks if "scientists, wittingly or unwittingly, dismiss artistic contributions in order to objectify their results"

Leonardo - The MIT Press

If someone mentions Maurits Escher one more time, I'm going to scream.

New American Radio

In its ten years as a weekly national series, NAR commissioned and/or distributed over 300 original works: conceptual new drama, associational documentary, language explorations, sonic meditations, environmental compositions, musical explorations and works that pioneer new dimensions in acoustic space.

New American Radio went off the air in 1998, however, NRPA—in partnership with Wesleyan University, and with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts—is now in the process of creating a digital archive. One hundred and fifteen works are archived at Wesleyan and available on this site. For the first time, you can enjoy these works in their entirety online. [read an article]

New American Radio

The New American Radio Calogue

Ruysdael

Erica asked me why I didn't include Jacob van Ruysdael in yesterday's post. Maybe I should have, but I left him out at first because I didn't remember him doing anything that related to Tuscany somehow. I looked him up in the Rijksmuseum's online collection. They have digitized their entire collection of paintings and made it searchable (the interface is in dutch, you have to click on zoeken) at http://token.rijksmuseum.nl.

A search for Ruysdael turned up two paintings by Jacob's uncle, Salomon van Ruysdael, one of which was a painting of the river near the village where I grew up.

For those of you who don't read dutch, I've translated the search form

Zoeken = Search
Wis Formulier = Reset form
Uitgebreid zoeken = Advanced Search
Eenvoudig zoeken = Basic Search
Help = Help

Sorteer op: = Sort by
Geen sortering = No sort
Begindatum = Start date

Objectnummer = Object number
Vervaardiger = Creator
Objectnaam = Object Name
Titelwoord = Title word
Beschrijving = Description
Collectie = Collection
Verworven van = Acquired rrom
Verwervingswijze = Method acquired
Verwervingsdatum = Date acquired
Vrij zoeken = Free search

Pleinairism

Much to my embarrasment, I discovered this week how little I know about landscape painting. Eliane called me at work and asked me to name a few painters who made these typical tuscan landscapes, and all I could say was : "well, errrmmm, that all started with Piero Della Francesca, didn't it?"

These should have come to mind, of course:

Théodore Caruelle d' Aligny, Adolphe Appian, Cornelis Apostool, Achille Benouville, Nicolaes Pietersz. Berchem, Jean-Victor Bertin, Albert Gerard Bilders, Carl Blechen, Arnold Böcklin, Richard Parkes Bonington, Jan Both, Eugène Boudin, Paul Bril, Jan Brueghel, Jean-Charles Cazin, Antoine Chintreuil, John Constable, Gustave Courbet, Aelbert Cuyp, Cornelis Van Dalem, Charles-François Daubigny, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, Paul Delaroche, Narcisse Diaz de la Peña, Jules Dupré, Gaspard Dughet, Simon van der Does, Karel Dujardin, Jean Louis Demarne, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Johannes Glauber, John Glover, Paul Guigou, Armand Guillaumin, Jean-Michel Grobon, Timotheus de Graef, Joris van der Haagen, Louwrens Hanedoes, Willem de Heusch, Nicolaes van Helt Stockade, Gerard Hoet, Thomas Jones, Kerstiaen de Keuninck, Josephus Augustus Knip, Barend Cornelis Koekkoek, Claude Lorrain, Gerard de Lairesse, Johannes Lingelbach, Károly Markó, Joos de Momper, Maxime Maufra, René Ménard, Georges Michel, Alexandre Pau de St. Martin, Frederik de Moucheron, Adriaen van Ostade, Camille Pissarro, Antoine-Claude Ponthus-Cinier, Adam Pijnacker, George Andries Roth, Théodore Rousseau, , Willem Romeyn, Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, Jan Siberechts, Auguste Salzmann, Giovanni Segantini, Dirk Stoop, Herman van Swanevelt, Abraham Teerlink, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, Eugène Joseph Verboeckhoven, Hendrik Voogd, Louis-Étienne Watelet, Jan Wildens, George Pieter Westenberg, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Jan Baptist Wolfaerts

and Corot of course, always Corot.

Cold Turkey

I'm not looking forward to getting old. I don't find the getting old that I'm doing right now in the least amusing. But one of the truly great things about being really old, I imagine, is that at some point, you can pretty much do and say anything you like.

Kurt Vonnegut is getting there, at 81.

Cold Turkey -- In These Times

SMART videoserver

via Hinke

video streams of works by

Tiong Ang, Bianco-Valente, Nina Brudermann, Antony Discenza, Torsten Z. Z. Burns, Marc Bijl, David Haines, Diane Nerwen, Ivan Istochnikov, Yael Bartana, Joao Louro, Lluis Escartin Lara, Charles Labelle, Ottonella Mocellin, Javier Marchan, A.P. Komen, Karen Murphy, Begoña Muñoz, Francis Gomila, Kiki Seror, Mark Dean, Dan Shipsides, Peter Westenberg.

SMART streaming video server | smartvideoserver.org

Emelia

Emelia - a production diary

Free art videos

10 videoCDs you can burn yourself. Includes ready to print CD booklets.

PARK 4DTV p2park:downloadvcds downloadpage

via

Turning the pages

The British Libary has found a way to allow access to some of the worlds greatest books.

• Leonardo's Notebook
• Lindisfarne Gospels
• Luttrell Psalter
• The Sforza hours
• Vesalius' anatomy
• Golden Haggadah
• Blackwell's herbal
• Diamond Sutra
• Sherbourne Missal
• Sultan Baybars' Qur'an

The experience is quite close to reading a book, you flip the pages by moving the mouse. The Qur'an reads right to left, and the scroll really scrolls, also from right to left, as one would expect. What they don't mention is that the books are incomplete. Of each book, there are some 30 pages, and while I've only ever seen a facsimile of the Leonardo notebooks, I'm quite certain there were more than 30 pages, and I think the same is true for the other books. Still, there's plenty to enjoy.

Turning the Pages

If you're looking for a more complete and higher resolution version of "De Humani Corporis Fabrica", northwestern university offers an alternative.

Im not aware of online versions of any of the other books. If you know of anything, please let me know, and leave a comment.

Here's info on the people behind turning the pages.

Death of post-modernism

I've never been comfortable with post-modernism. I remember a discussion I had with one of my art teachers in the early eighties, where we tried to figure out wether we were post-modernists or not. She thought she was one (but she couldn't explain why), I didn't think that I was one (and couldn't explain it either). It left me confused and somewhat guilty. Was I not supposed to be one, if I wanted to be a hip and contemporary artist, even if I didn't understand any of it?

Almost twenty years later, it is with a big sigh of relief that I read of it's death. It's not so much the post-modernists themselves that I mind (they can be ignored), but their influence on the general public. In the last twenty years, it has become the norm to view any statement as merely an opinion, and consider all opinions as equally relevant. Every story, every tale, regardless of it's lack of merit, has become truth. That was a disaster. I'm not sure that there is a singular truth (especially in art), but one is more than enough. Exit post-modernism, enter Critical Realism.

Philosophy Now

Films on Art

Roland Collection of Videos & Films on Art - Home Page

The Roland Collection offers inexhaustible worlds of history, culture, philosophy, emotion, human document, celebration, protest, moral challenge and imaginative liberation - all embodied in the forms of art. This on-line resource guide is designed to give unprecedented access to those worlds.

Requisition #BZSG308

CACI Careers: Job Openings

Education and Enlightenment

Education and Enlightenment, the cures that Adorno sought to prevent another holocaust, are precisely what is so rare in the US these days.

Isn't it ironic then that Lynndie England joined the reserves to get money for college?

Adorno: Education after Auschwitz

Walter Benjamin [1892-1940] once asked me in Paris, during the emigration when I still returned sporadically to Germany, whether there were still enough torturers in Germany to carry out what was commanded by the Nazis. There were. Notwithstanding, the question is profoundly justified. Benjamin sensed that, in contrast to the masterminds [Schreibtischmörder] and ideologues, people who do it are acting contrary to their own immediate interests and murder themselves when they murder others. I fear that enacting even such a widely encompassing education can hardly prevent the development of new generations of mastermind murderers [Schreibtischmörder: bureaucratic perpetrators]. However, that there are people who, at the bottom, precisely as slaves, do that whereby they eternalize their own slavery and degrade themselves and that there will continue to be Bogers and Kaduks [sadistic concentration camp guards who were convicted in the 1963-64 Frankfurt Auschwitz trial], a little can be undertaken by education and enlightenment against this.

Godverdomme

So this POS is the top website dedicated to one of the most important 20th century modern artists?

Mondriaan

Can this be fixed please?

Somebody wants your job

With all the recent fuss about outsourcing IT jobs to India, where someone is available to do your work for 10% of what you cost, it was really just a matter of time until I would become one of the affected IT workers.

But I found myself in an even stanger position today. I received an e-mail from someone who offered to do my job for free.

It made me think of this joke: Two men are having lunch together. One of them takes a dollar bill from his wallet and tears it into tiny pieces. "What are you doing?" , asks the other man. "Why don't you give it to me? I'll piece it back together again." "OK", says the first, "but I'll tell your boss that you're willing to work for a dollar an hour."

Walter Benjamin

Good grief, it's ugly, this site. Poor Walter. Someone should start a guerrilla web group that "fixes" ugly websites for dead people who have no control over websites dedicated to their work.

Try to read with your eyes closed:

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge--unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable."

--Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," (Spring, 1940) trans. Harry Zohn.

walterbenjamin.html

iconclass

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences may just have a solution to a problem I frequently run into: finding images.

There are really only two big search engines for images and they both have serious problems.

Altavista appears to take the most simplistic approach, it uses the name of the file. That cannot work of course, many sites (and I don't blame them) use filenames that are nondescript.

Google Images isn't much better though. While they find a lot more, a thematic search seldom yields any useful results. You'll need to use words that are used in the page itself. That isn't always very helpful. Suppose you were looking for Jacques-Louis David's The Oath of the Horatii, which is in the collection of the Louvre. If you used english, you never find the Louvre site, because it in French, and the painting is called Le Serment des Horaces, the filename the Louve uses is inv3692.jpg and there's no alt text.

Now, this can be managed, you can probably find the Louvre website yourself, and locating the painting is no big deal. But what if you wanted to know if there are other paintings with the same, or a very similar, theme?

This is where iconclass shines. If you can describe a picture using a classification system, and you can, then there's a way to find all related or similar pictures as well (provided they have been indexed using the same system). Unfortunately, very few sites use the system, but there's a great example available here:

Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts

I should try to get some practise and see if I can classify some of Eliane's work.

Now if everyone started marking up their pages with this system, we might get to a point where one could actually find a picture.

A lot of work has already been done by Mnemosyne, and it actually works

I do miss a couple of categories, and from what I understand, extending them is not possible. So where do we place a picture illustrating the pernicious influence of men , rather than women ICONCLASS Theme 33C1?

Real labour day

Today is Real Labour day. Not in Canada, not in the U.S.A. where it originated, and not in my home country. On May 1st, in 1886, american workers went on strike to force their employers to recognize a law that was passed two years earlier that stated that the legal workday was 8 hours. They refused.

MIA May Day Archive

May Day - the Real Labor Day

Labour Day - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It's remarkable that in the Netherlands, where I'm from, May 1st is also not an official holiday. Instead, we're supposed to celebrate the Queen's birthday. No the the real Queen's birthday of course, but the birthday of her mother Juliana, on April 30.

Here's a song for today:

Debout les damnés de la terre
Debout les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère
C'est l'éruption de la fin
Du passe faisons table rase
Foules, esclaves, debout, debout
Le monde va changer de base
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout

C'est la lutte finale
Groupons-nous, et demain (bis)
L'Internationale
Sera le genre humain

Il n'est pas de sauveurs suprêmes
Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun
Producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-mêmes
Décrétons le salut commun
Pour que le voleur rende gorge
Pour tirer l'esprit du cachot
Soufflons nous-mêmes notre forge
Battons le fer quand il est chaud.

L'état comprime et la loi triche
L'impôt saigne le malheureux
Nul devoir ne s'impose au riche
Le droit du pauvre est un mot creux
C'est assez, languir en tutelle
L'égalité veut d'autres lois
Pas de droits sans devoirs dit-elle
Egaux, pas de devoirs sans droits.

Hideux dans leur apothéose
Les rois de la mine et du rail
Ont-ils jamais fait autre chose
Que dévaliser le travail
Dans les coffres-forts de la bande
Ce qu'il a crée s'est fondu
En décrétant qu'on le lui rende
Le peuple ne veut que son dû.

Les rois nous saoulaient de fumées
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans
Appliquons la grève aux armées
Crosse en l'air, et rompons les rangs
S'ils s'obstinent, ces cannibales
A faire de nous des héros
Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles
Sont pour nos propres généraux.

Ouvriers, paysans, nous sommes
Le grand parti des travailleurs
La terre n'appartient qu'aux hommes
L'oisif ira loger ailleurs
Combien, de nos chairs se repaissent
Mais si les corbeaux, les vautours
Un de ces matins disparaissent
Le soleil brillera toujours.