Psychobox

New this month from the Redstone Press is their Psychobox: a fascinating collection of psychological tricks and tests, which includes 48 cards which variously illustrate inkblot tests, drawing completion tests, what-comes-next tests, optical illusions, etc. On the reverse of the cards are notes and commentaries on the images, and a number of text-based tests. Also in the box are an introductory pamphlet, and a piece of ‘reverse perspective’ artwork by Patrick Hughes.

Turning through the brain-molesting material on the cards made me grateful that I’ve never had to undergo much in the way of psychological testing myself. The most irksome such I ever had to do involved a list of 400 statements requiring yes/no responses, this part of a whole battery of tests I was obliged to complete further to a job-application I was ultimately unsuccessful in pursuing. I was reminded of this by one of the cards in the Psychobox listing similar statements, for example: I am not afraid of toads; My father could be described as dominating; People who do not know me hesitate before shaking my hand; I am sometimes fearful without any particular reason; People who are jealous of me have hindered my career; I am not afraid of going to my doctor… To these, by the way, I would reply yes; no; no; no; no; and yes - unless one counts dentists.

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Another of the cards in the Psychobox has a ‘complete the following sentences’ test. Here are my answers to the first half-dozen of these:

1. When I look at the sky at night: I am filled with awe & feel at one with the world, or, I get a faceful of rain: it depends.
2. When I think of my mother: I most often feel a little guilty that I haven’t called her in a while.
3. From the time I was born: which was at the stroke of midnight, I have had the greatest difficulty in staying awake (or so I tell people when they remark that I look sleepy… I guess I must often look tireder than I feel).
4. Sometimes I like to think: that I know what I’m doing.
5. In the middle of winter: it seems that much harder to get out of bed in the morning.
6. When my father saw me trying: to breathe after getting a plastic block lodged in my throat (I was three or four years old), he grabbed my legs and held me upside-down until the obstruction was dislodged.

To be honest, I found it inordinately difficult to think of an answer for that sixth question. The Psychobox’s editor Mel Gooding comments, with regard to this test that ‘it is not surprising that for some subjects [it] induces anxiety.’

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One last test that I’ll mention here is that where the subject is required to write a story guided by a sequence of questions: You enter a wood: is it dark or light?; Is there a path, or is way forward blocked?, etc. Ones responses are supposed to indicate ones underlying attitudes to issues symbolised in the story. A few years ago I tried my hand at one such that I happened upon during my internet browsing: here is the result.

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The Discovery of America

Saul Steinberg (1914-99) was ‘one of America’s best known artists’, yet, until a month ago, I was completely ignorant of his work. I am grateful then, to Mr P___ for his e-mail, in which he warmly recommended that I look up Steinberg’s book The Discovery of America, or, more specifically, the German-language edition of the same, Die entdeckung Amerikas, as published by Diogenes Verlag in Zürich in 1992. The images that follow are thumbnails from scans of pages in my lately-acquired copy of that book. Click on the thumbnails to see the drawings in full.

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Born in Romania, he studied philosophy and literature in Bucharest. After enrolling at the Politecnico in Milan as an architecture student in 1933, he began contributing cartoons to the satirical biweekly Bertoldo. On October 25, 1941, while awaiting an entry visa to the United States, Steinberg published his first drawing in The New Yorker. Over the next six decades, 642 drawings and 85 covers captivated New Yorker readers. In these same years, more than 80 one-man shows of Steinberg’s art were mounted in museums and galleries throughout America and Europe.

The Discovery of America presents nearly 200 drawings dating from 1945 to ‘91 selected and sequenced by Steinberg himself. My first impressions were of a great diversity in the drawings’ styles and subjects, coupled with a tremendous vitality in their execution. Steinberg drew vibrant cityscapes, sleepy small-town scenes, stylised portraits, empty landscapes. His cartoons variously ‘quote’ from art-deco, modernism, expressionism and pop-art. Humour pervades his work, and is as often good-natured as it is quizzical or ironic.

None of the illustrations in The Discovery of America carry titles or captions, so I can’t add much by way of explanation to these images. One exception is the picture thumbnailed immediately above, which evidently reworks this apparently famous 1976 New Yorker cover image of Steinberg’s, View of the World from 9th Avenue.

Steinberg defined drawing as ‘a way of reasoning on paper,’ and he remained committed to the act of drawing in an era dominated by large-scale painting and sculpture. Throughout his long career, he used drawing to think about the semantics of art, reconfiguring stylistic signs into a new language suited to the fabricated temper of modern life.

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To see more of Steinberg’s work on-line, check out the gallery at the The Saul Steinberg Foundation pages, or peruse the Steinberg Collection at the New-Yorker-affiliated Cartoonbank site.

Burnet’s Sacred Theory

Thomas Burnet’s Telluris Theoria Sacra, or, ‘The Sacred Theory of the Earth’, was, we are told, the most popular book on geological matters in 18th-century England, its sonorous prose combining natural philosophy, scriptural exegesis and outright speculation. Burnet (1635-1715) was motivated by a desire to understand and explain the origin of the world’s landscapes, its oceans and mountains. During his travels as a younger man, he had crossed the Alps and the Apennines, and ‘the sight of those wild, vast and indigested heaps of Stones and Earth’ affected him such that he was ‘not easie till I could give my self some tolerable account how that confusion came in Nature.’

Burnet believed in the truth of the Biblical Genesis (albeit not always literally), and central to his Theory was a novel and unorthodox interpretation of the story of the Flood. He conjectured that the antediluvian Earth had formed as a smooth, regular sphere wherein a relatively thin crust of earth rested eggshell-like upon a vast watery abyss. The Flood itself, he reckoned, had not been caused by forty days and nights of rain, but rather had occurred when ‘by Divine Providence […] the frame of the Earth broke and fell down into the Great Abysse.’

Besides being an important contribution to the on-going debate as to the origins of the natural world, Burnet’s Theory had a secondary, accidental influence on aesthetics. The book is suffused with its author’s ambivalent view of the natural world. He regards the post-diluvian Earth as a ‘broken globe’, a ‘great Ruine’, a ‘little dirty Planet’, ‘a World lying in its Rubbish’, yet his condemnations are often tinged with awe, as in the following description of the sea-bed & the ocean-floor…

…the Chanel of the Ocean, that vast and prodigious Cavity that runs quite round the Globe, and reacheth, for ought we know, from Pole to Pole, and in many places is unsearchably deep: When I present this great Gulf to my imagination, emptied of all its waters, naked and gaping at the Sun, stretching its jaws from one end of the Earth to another, it appears to me the most ghastly thing in Nature. What hands or instruments could work a Trench in the body of the Earth of this vastness, and lay Mountains and Rocks on the side of it, as Ramparts to enclose it?

Some authors have argued that Burnet’s text should be considered a formative influence in the development of the 18th-Century notion of ‘the sublime’ in nature, and that in his ambivalence, we can see the seed of the succeeding generations’ growing taste for natural grandeur.

The greatest objects of Nature are, methinks, the most pleasing to behold; and next to the great Concave of the Heavens, and those boundless Regions where the Stars inhabit, there is nothing that I look upon with more pleasure than the wide Sea and the Mountains of the Earth. There is something august and stately in the Air of these things, that inspires the mind with great thoughts and passions; We do naturally, upon such occasions, think of God and his greatness: and whatsoever hath but the shadow and appearance of INFINITE, as all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and over-bear the mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and admiration.

In the mean time let us pursue, in our own way, this […] Idea of the Earth […] as it is a broken Globe. Nature I know hath dissembled and cover’d this form as much as may be, and time hath helpt to repair some of the old breaches, or fill them up; besides, the changes that have been made by Art and Humane industry, by Agriculture, Planting, and Building Towns, hath made the face of the Earth quite another thing from what it was in its naked rudeness. […] But to discern the true form of the Earth, whether intire or broken, regular or disorder’d, we must in the first place take away all those ornaments or additions made by Art or Nature, and view the bare carcass of the Earth, as it hath nothing on it but Rocks and Mountains, Desarts and Fields, and hollow Valleys, and a wide Sea. Then secondly, we must in our imagination empty this Chanel of the Sea, take out all the Waters that hinder the sight of it, and look upon the dry Ditch, measure the depth and breadth of it in our mind, and observe the manner of its construction, and in what a wild posture all the parts of it lie […]. And lastly, we must take off the cover of all Subterraneous places and deep Caverns, to see the inside of the Earth; and lay bare the roots of Mountains, to look into those holes and Vaults that are under them, fill’d sometimes with Fire, sometimes with Water, and sometimes with thick Air and Vapours. The object being thus prepar’d, we are then to look fix’dly upon it, and to pronounce what we think of this disfigur’d mass, whether this Exteriour frame doth not seem to be shatter’d; and whether it doth more aptly resemble a new-made World, or the ruines of one broken.

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Max Ernst's Blues

Leafing through my book on Max Ernst (as already plundered for these previous entries), I was struck by a group of illustrations featuring paintings Ernst made in the years 1957-9, when he was in his late 60s. If these are at all representative, then there must have been a good deal of blue on his palette during this time…

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Ernst, and his wife Dorothea Tanning, began the year 1957 in Sedona, Arizona, where they had previously lived, ca. 1946-53. From there, the couple returned to their new home in Paris, spending some time in New York en route. They spent most of the rest of their lives in France, and Ernst became a French citizen in 1958. This was a time when Ernst’s reputation was in the ascendant: there were exhibitions devoted to his work in New York, a prize was awarded him in Germany, books were published about him in France. Even so, it seems he still saw himself as more a marginal figure than any kind of ‘grand old man’.

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My wanderings, my anxieties, my impatiences, my doubts, my beliefs, my hallucinations, my loves, my rages, my revolts, my contradictions, my refusals to submit to any discipline, even my own, the sporadic visits of Perturbation, My Sister, The Hundred-Headless Woman, none of these have succeeded in creating a climate favourable to the working out of a calm, serene body of work. Like my behaviour, my work is not harmonious in the sense of the classical composers, or even of the classical revolutionaries. Seditious, uneven, contradictory, it is unacceptable for specialists in art, in culture, in behaviour, in morals. It has the power, on the other hand, to enchant my accomplices, the poets, the pataphysicians, some illiterates - Max Ernst, 1959.

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Click on the images to see them in much closer detail: note that the full jpegs are quite large (500 Kb +). Note also that the originals of the second, fourth and sixth of these images were all slightly larger than A4, so these were not captured in full. My source, as before, is the 1977 volume on Ernst edited by Edward Quinn.

Vertumnus, Autumns

Vertumnus was the Roman God of the seasons, of the changes and ripening of plant life. A Deity apparently imported from the Estruscan pantheon, He was the patron of gardens and of orchards. In common with most Divinities worthy of mention, He could transform Himself into various guises. It was by assuming the shape of an old woman that He came to win the attention of the garden Goddess Pomona, or so the fable tells it.

Vertumnus […] undergoes changes with an end in view, changing his figure several times to enter into the good graces of the beautiful nymph Pomona; that is, he personifies changes in cultivation to obtain the fertility of the fields represented by Pomona, the goddess of fruits - Mario Praz.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Vertumnus is one of the latest, and perhaps the very best surviving example of the artist’s ‘composed heads’. He painted it in 1591, during his final visit to his native Milan. The fruit and flora in the picture suggest the features of the Emperor Rudolf II, Arcimboldo’s patron. Vertumnus’ time is the harvest, but, as I’ve already done summer, I’ve put him in with the following pair of Autumns instead…

This is our fifth Baltic autumn: of them all, the first stands out in my mind as having been an exceptionally calm season, an almost imperceptibly gradual transition from sunlight and heat to chilly gloom, although I daresay this impression was heightened by our being so accustomed to the blustery Atlantic falls we grew up with.

As with the previous entries here about Arcimboldo, these images are scanned from the 1980 book about the artist published by Franco Maria Ricci. Click on the images to see them in much more detail.

More Free CDs

It’s been nearly three months already since my first CD giveaway, so, here’s another. The usual rigmarole applies. To lay claim to one of these discs, leave a comment below stating which of them you’d like. Then, send me an e-mail which includes your mailing address. I’ll decide who gets what (it’s almost always first-come, first-served), and will mail out the discs within a week or so. I’ll limit the offer to two single-CDs or one double-CD per recipient.

1. Spem in Alium, composed by Thomas Tallis, performed by the Tallis Scholars under the direction of Peter Phillips. I bought this choral classic because I love Vaughan-Williams’s Variations on a Theme by Thomas Tallis: alas, the theme in its original context, in this recording, anyway, didn’t make much of an impression on me.

2. String Quintet in C (D. 956), composed by Franz Schubert, performed by the Emerson Quartet with Mstislav Rostropovich. I don’t know why I’ve not been able to get into this well-regarded performance of one of Schubert’s best-loved chamber works. I may try coming back to this piece in years to come, but, for now, this disc is up for grabs.

3. Gavin Bryars: A Portrait. I thought I would enjoy this generous selection of Bryars’ works, having been intrigued by what little I’d caught of this composer’s music over the years, but these discs (it’s a 2-CD set), didn’t do it for me.

4. The String Quartets (no.s 1-3) of Michael Nyman, as performed by the Balanescu Quartet. I enjoy some of Nyman’s soundtrack & other works, and used to cherish a cassette copy of some live performances by him and his band. I found these quartets interesting enough to listen through a few times, but I’ve not returned to them since.

5. Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Piano Concertos, Nos 2 & 3, performed by the Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra with Laura Mikkola as the soloist, and conducted by Eri Klas. I already had fine recordings of the first and third concertos, and only wanted to hear the second. As it turns out, I wasn’t much taken with it… This disc also features a lovely orchestral piece entitled Isle of Bliss, which I also have on another recording.

6. Styx / Viola Concerto, composed by Giya Kancheli and Sofia Gubaidulina, respectively, and both performed by the St Petersburg Maryinsky Theatre Orchestra with Yuri Bashmet as the soloist, and with Valery Gergiev conducting. I love Bashmet’s playing, and was enthused by the reviews of these contemporary works when this disc was released, but, after trying to listen through it at least half a dozen times, I was forced to concede that it wasn’t for me.

7. Naqoyqatsi composed by Philip Glass as the soundtrack for the movie of the same name, and performed by Yo-Yo Ma with the Philip Glass Ensemble, under the direction of Michael Riesman. I do like a bit of Philip Glass from time to time, just not this particular bit, as it turns out.

8. Karma by Pharoah Sanders, and his band. I guess you could call this psychedelic jazz, and it sounds great, but, it seems, I am never in the mood to listen to it.

9. Ovalprocess by Oval, aka Markus Popp. I quite enjoyed my first acquaintance with this disc of electronic ‘glitch music’, but hardly ever felt like revisiting it after that.

10. The Contino Sessions by Death in Vegas. I heard Dirge, and really liked it. Then I saw the video for Aisha, and really liked that. So I bought the CD, but didn’t like any of the other tracks…

11. Hail to the Thief by Radiohead. The Bends was one of my very favourite CDs, ca ’96-’97, but then OK Computer came out, which everyone seemed to love - apart from me. I ignored Kid A and Amnesiac, but thought I’d give the band another try with this latest effort. I liked a few of the songs, but the album as a whole didn’t catch my imagination. I guess I’m just over my Radiohead phase.

12. The Concretes by The Concretes. I probably would have loved this CD & thought it the very height of cool had it come out when I was nineteen or twenty years old. Sadly, this Swedish band’s moody charms, such as they are, are lost on the older me. Note that the copy I’m giving away is the original Swedish release, and has a different cover to the one pictured. I think the tracks are the same, though.

13. Plastic Fang, by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. I’ve bought at least four JSBX CDs, out of which Now I Got Worry is probably my favourite, and Plastic Fang is, by quite a distance, my least favourite.

14. Chutes Too Narrow by The Shins. I downloaded a couple of songs by this band having heard only good things about them, and I liked one of those songs, Young Pilgrims, enough to make me want to buy this CD. When the disc arrived, however, I found I was none too keen on the album as a whole.

15. Walking With the Beggar Boys by Elf Power. I must be one of the last people to have heard of the Elephant 6 Collective, but, for the past couple of months I’ve been listening to the Olivia Tremor Control, to Circulatory System, and to the magnificent Neutral Milk Hotel more than anything else. I was pleased, then, when I saw this release by Elephant 6 alumni & co-conspirators Elf Power in my local CD store, only to be less than impressed when I actually played it… If you like, it’s all yours!

Elsheimer

I love the contrast between the following pair of images, two small paintings in oil on copper panels by the German-born painter Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610). They depict, respectively, the realms of Venus and of Minerva, the sensual and intellectual worlds.

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Elsheimer was schooled ‘in the dry manner of Flemish realism’, and his early works display a busy, Mannerist style. In 1598, he moved to Italy, initially to Venice, where ‘he acquired a liberating interest in light, atmosphere, and colour’. In 1600 he settled in Rome. The succeeding years saw his compositions grow simpler, more direct: perhaps influenced by the contemporary successes of Caravaggio. Elsheimer won fame, but not fortune. His work influenced Rembrandt and Claude Lorrain, amongst many others, and Rubens was his friend, but…

Unfortunately, Elsheimer had a “natural inclination for melancholy,” according to his biographer. After making a bad partnership with a rich, vain Dutch etcher, he became overwhelmed and unable to work. The etcher had the unproductive Elsheimer thrown into debtors’ prison, which led to his death - source here.

The painting shown above illustrates an episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the Goddess Ceres, searching for her daughter Proserpine, grew thirsty and tired, and, hoping to find refreshment, knocked at a cottage door, where an old woman gave her a sweet drink made from malted barley. As the Goddess gulped down the drink, a small boy came to the door and mocked her, calling her greedy. Offended, Ceres threw the dregs of her drink at him, thereby turning him into a lizard. The following painting’s subject is another classical tale of hospitality and transformation, details here.

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Elsheimer painted two variations on the theme of ‘Tobias and the Angel’. The one shown (above) is the larger and later of the two. The final image, below, ‘The Flight into Egypt’ is credited with being the earliest painting in which the night sky’s constellations were reproduced with any degree of accuracy. To my discredit, I can’t even recall if I saw this beautiful painting or not during my visit to the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.

My source for these images was a copy of the German edition of Keith Andrews’ monograph on Elsheimer. Note that in scanning the third image above, I lost part of its rightmost edge: the others should be more-or-less complete. Click on the images to see much larger versions of the same.

Bandwidth, Hotlink Protection, etc.

This site’s bandwidth usage has increased severalfold over the past year…

Rather than upgrade my hosting-plan again, I’ve decided to try economising on bandwidth by cutting out the category indexes I never used, and by introducing hotlink protection. When I first started writing on-line, I did a certain amount of hotlinking myself, and so I can hardly resent others making use of my bandwidth in the same way: also, very few of the images here are truly my own, most having originated in books, or on other websites. If anyone really wants to continue hotlinking to any of the images here, then send me a mail, and, depending on the circumstances, I may enable it.