a flash of orange

THAT WOMAN

Look! A flash of orange along the river's edge --
"oriole!" comes to your lips like instinct, then
it's vanished -- lost in the foliage,

in all your head holds, getting on with the day.
But not gone for good. There is that woman
walks unseen beside you with her apron

pockets full. Days later, or years, when you least
seem to need it -- reading Frost on the subway,
singing over a candled cake -- she'll reach

into a pocket and hand you this intact
moment -- the river, the orange streak parting
the willow, and the "oriole!" that leapt

to your lips. Unnoticed, steadfast, she gathers
all this jumble, sorts it, hands it back like
prizes from Crackerjack. She is your mother,

who first said, "Look! a robin!" and pointed,
and there was a robin, because her own
mother had said to her, "Look!" and pointed,

and so on, back to the beginning: the mother,
the child, and the world. The damp bottom
on one arm and pointing with the other:

the peach tree, the small rocks in the shallows,
the moon and the man in the moon. So you keep on,
seeing, forgetting, faithfully followed;

and you yourself, unwitting, gaining weight,
have thinned to invisibility, become
that follower. Even now, your daughter

doesn't see you at her elbow as she walks
the beach. There! a gull dips to the Pacific,
and she points and says to the baby, "Look!"

Sarah Getty

From The Land of Milk and Honey, by Sarah Getty, published by the University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Sarah Getty. All rights reserved.

mackintosh & vienna

i began to notice the similarities between the scottish designs, metalwork, glass, and of course embroidery, and that of the wiener werkstatte. this is not coincidental, as it turns out.

In 1900 Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his group "The Glasgow Four" were invited to show their work at the VIIIth exhibition of the Viennese Secession. Their designs, especially those of Charles Rennie Macintosh, exerted a profound influence on German and Austrian exponents of Jugendstil. Contact with Charles Rennie Mackintosh was crucial for Josef Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann, and Koloman Moser in particular. 1

mackintosh's design, with its nature-based simplicity and breakdown of the separation between art and craft (both things clearly influenced by the influx of japanese arts and crafts), was more appealing to the viennese than was the art nouveau they saw in france and belgium, which they saw as excessive. they, unlike mackintosh's fellow glaswegians, saw him as a genius.

Influenced and encouraged by ... Mackintosh, Hoffmann and Moser realized their dream of founding a workshop for the applied arts to promote the best in design matched by the finest in craftsmanship. In June 1903 the Wiener Werkstätte was established; it "represented a not-previously achieved international high point in the applied arts, and, with its unmatched fine workmanship and exquisite taste, became the educator of the whole civilized world." 2

The Wiener Werkstätte believed that artistic endeavour should permeate all aspects of everyday life; no object was so menial that it could not be enhanced by beauty of form and execution ... [When] Mackintosh and [his wife] Margaret Macdonald had exhibited their work to the Viennese public, Hoffmann and Moser were intrigued with the elegance and sensibility of their creations, which is evident in the puristic simplicity and geometric austerity of their early objects.

The Japanese-inspired components of the workshops’ products were also important. The Secession had dedicated their sixth exhibition (1900) to Japanese art, and in Vienna in 1901 the Österreichisches Museum für Kunst und Industrie (now Österreichisches Museum für Angewandte Kunst) exhibited the woodcuts of Katsushika Hokusai. The textile patterns and inlay designs of Hoffmann and Moser share strong similarities with Japanese stencils and prints.

The distinctive trademark of the Wiener Werkstätte included the initials of both the designer and the executing craftsworker. The fine arts and the applied arts were awarded the same level of importance. The primary concern of the group was to respect the inherent decorative and functional qualities of the material used and to work within its natural properties. © Oxford University Press 2007

The story began with a competition launched in December 1900 by Zeitschrift FürInnen- dekoration, an innovative design magazine published in the German city of Darmstadt. European architects were invited to design an Art Lover's House. Mackintosh sent in his entry in March 1901, his one chance to design a house unfettered by financial constraints or a conservative client. But he was disqualified for failing to include the required number of drawings of the interior. He hastily completed the portfolio, which he then resubmitted. Delighted with the designs, the judges awarded Mackintosh a special prize (there was no outright winner).

Publication of these drawings did much to establish Mackintosh's reputation abroad as an original and distinctive architect, particularly in Austria and Germany. The Art Lover's House is an important twentieth-century building because it anticipates the abstract forms of Modernism. At first glance it could be an illustration from the thirties. Artists of the avant-garde Vienna Secession described Mackintosh as “our leader who showed us the way” – an acclaim that he was never able to gain at home. Rich Glasgow businessmen never quite took him seriously. 3

in france, poiret (dufy) and lalique were later to feel the influence of this style, but were, of course, french.

the birth of the blues, greens, yellows, reds....

(this post was inspired by Changes in the Wind )

SHE'S A RAIN- BOW

She comes in colors every- where;
She combs her hair
She's like a rainbow
Coming colors in the air
Oh, everywhere
She comes in colors

She comes in colors everywhere;
She combs her hair
She's like a rainbow
Coming colors in the air
Oh, everywhere
She comes in colors

Have you seen her dressed in blue
See the sky in front of you
And her face is like a sail
Speck of white so fair and pale
Have you seen the lady fairer

She comes in colors every- where;
She combs her hair
She's like a rainbow
Coming colors in the air
Oh, everywhere
She comes in colors

Have you seen her all in gold
Like a queen in days of old
She shoots colors all around
Like a sunset going down
Have you seen the lady fairer

She comes in colors everywhere;
She combs her hair
She's like a rainbow
Coming colors in the air
Oh, everywhere
She comes in colors

She's like a rainbow
Coming colors in the air
Oh, every- where
She comes in colors

© Mick Jagger & Keith Richards

shadow, reflection, perspective

of course artists in the west started feeling like maybe they didn't need them as often as they had thought.

The crisis of tradition early in the twentieth century — signaled by the collapse of perspective in painting and tonality in music and evident in the explosive ferment of the avant-garde movements — opened a new stage of modern art, which aesthetic theory is still struggling to comprehend. David Roberts situates the current aesthetic and cultural debates in a wider historical frame which extends from Hegel and the German Romantics to Lukács and Adorno, Benjamin and Baudrillard. Art and Enlight- enment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno is the first detailed analysis in English of Theodor Adorno’s seminal Philosophy of Modern Music, which can be seen as a turning point between modern and postmodern art and theory.

Adorno's diagnosis of the crisis of modernist values points back to Hegel's thesis of the end of art and also forward to the postmodernist debate. Thus the paradoxes of Adorno’s negative aesthetics return to haunt the current discussion by representatives of the second generation of the Frankfurt School, Anglo-American Marxism, and French poststructuralism. Going beyond Adorno's dialectic of musical enlightenment, Roberts proposes an alternative model of the enlightenment, of art applied to literature and exemplified in the outline of a theory of parody. In its critique of Adorno, Art and Enlightenment clears the way for a reconsideration of twentieth-century artistic theory and practice and also, in offering a model of postmodern art, seeks to disentangle critical issues in the discussion of the avant-garde, modernism, and postmodernism. 1

(i always wonder when not a word is mentioned about the japanese.)