DIRTMUSIC: CROSSING BORDERS (CRUZANDO FRONTERAS, 2018)

Sobre este conglomerado norteamericano, australiano y turco, véase, quizá, este enlace

THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST TODAY (VI, 2, Febrero de 2018): SUMER AND THE MODERN PARADIGM

http://www.asor.org/anetoday/2018/02/Sumer-Modern-Paradigm?utm_content=buffer11bda&utm_medium=social&utm_source=plus.google.com&utm_campaign=buffer

El texto sin imágenes es:

SUMER AND THE MODERN PARADIGM

Pedro Azara

The identification of pictures hanged on the walls of Son Boter -a XVIIIth century mansion at Palma de Mallorca (Balearic Islands, Spain) used by Joan Miró as his studio for sculptures since the sixties-, by the professor and architect Marc Marín, as images of Sumerian masterpieces from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad –and not images of ethnographic or traditional art as most historians of modern art have written-, led the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona to organise a large exhibition of the relationship between “Sumerian art” and modern art.

 The exhibition is devoted to the discovery of “Sumerian art” by modern artists at the time large Anglo-North-American archaeological missions working in the south of Iraq between both world wars, when Iraq was an English colony, were making discoveries such as the hoard of worshipper statues at the Diyala valley. However, archaeologists like Charles Leonard Woolley, head of the mission in Ur (Iraq), were not fascinated by their finds, as they considered Mesopotamian art inferior to Egyptian and to Graeco-Roman art. They thought Mesopotamian iconography was an expression of a violent and barbaric culture. Sacrificed bodies found at the Royal Tombs of Ur were the proof that the Bible was right. However, the archaeological discoveries, published by magazines as popular as the Illustrated London News and by newspapers, and promoted by archaeologists in spite of their disdain for finds, found a very favourable reception outside the archaeological world. Modern or surrealistic writers like Michel Leiris and George Bataille, who published the journal Documents at the very end of the twenties and early thirties, and Christian Zervos, collector and publisher of Cahiers d´Art -both journals appreciated by modern artists and collectors-, wrote illustrated articles of “Sumerian” culture. They considered it as a new “primitivism” at the time when the fascination for African art was vanishing. Christian Zervos asked to the known Argentinian photographer Horacio Coppola, who was working at the photographic studio at the Bauhaus, to portrait Mesopotamian works of art or artefacts at the Louvre Museum and the British Museum for the journal. These magnificent black and white pictures –shown publicly for the first time at the Joan Miró Foundation- framed the way modern artists perceived and judged “Sumerian” art: Coppola took black and white frontal and lateral pictures of different parts of sculptures, mostly heads, shown isolated against an abstract background. During the same years, different economic illustrated instalments of L´Encyclopédie de l´Art, with short commentaries by the purist painter Amédée Ozenfant –who worked with the architect Le Corbusier-, on Mesopotamian art and culture, promoted black and white images that structured and conditioned the way “Sumerian” art would be perceived. These journals and magazines mediated between modern artists and ancient art. For instance, Giacometti, who made quite a large number of Sumerian heads, did not draw from life. His drawings of Gudea heads are of a plaster copy he bought at the Louvre museum. Other drawings of “Sumerian” heads are of photographs by Coppola. Even Miró, whose sculptures from the 60´s were inspired by Mesopotamian art –an art Miró loved and considered not only the first art but also the only true art, as he declared to the French writer Pierre Schneider during a visit to the first rooms of the Département des Antiquités Orientales at the Louvre Museum-, are based on photographies of Mesopotamian works of art published in the French Arts & Loisirs magazine –which main copywriter was the writer George Perec-.  So the knowledge of Mesopotamian art, and the way it was looked at, was due, not to permanent and temporary exhibitions –Museums did not show too many Early Mesopotamian art before the Second World War-, but to illustrated publications on modern art, as “Sumerian” art appeared as a new and different “primitive” art.

Sumer and the Modern Paradigm would like the spectator to stand at the same position of surrealistic artists. What he should look at is not archaeological material but its interpretation by modern photographers, graphic designers and writers. For instance, an economic book on Neo-Assyrian reliefs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with black and white pictures and a careful lay out by the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler, during the Second World War, was an important contribution to the appreciation of “barbaric” reliefs.      

The exhibition combines graphic and written original documentation, modern works of arts by Miro, Moore, Hepworth, Giacometti, le Corbusier, Smith, de Kooning, Baumeister, and a few but outstanding archaeological items from the Louvre museum, the British Museum and the Vorderasiatisches Museum. The exhibition visualises nets of relations between ancient and modern works and documentation. We would like the spectator to look at works and their connections, not to isolated works of art. Written and graphic documentation, such as pictures by Coppola or texts by Bataille, are part of the archaeological material, part of its meaning. 

The exhibition deals with what some modern –surrealistic- artists have seen in early Mesopotamian material. What has raised their attention?  How they have reacted to this interest? How they have communicated their interest or discoveries? Some artists, like Moore –who wrote an early article on Mesopotamian sculpture-, Hepworth, de Kooning, or Miró have focused on the interpretation of “Sumerian” worshipper statues. For them, the gravity of the statues, the large eyes, the clasped hands, have been formal solutions to express feelings of tranquillity and restrain. Meanwhile, the French poet and artist Michaux was fascinated by cuneiform writing because he considered it a primal writing, able to express directly, without any mediation nor distortion, the being of the called and described things. The North-American sculptor David Smith focused on cylinder seals. They were a mean to create compositions without any beginning nor end, endless compositions able to suggest the distorted or destroyed times of the war. While the German painter Baumeister, during the Second World War, looked at the Poem of Gilgamesh and other “Sumerian” texts recently translated, he illustrated, as way of looking for a refuge in the past when there was no future, trying to find an explanation to violence and destruction. The Poem, dealing with the human condition, was a way to accept it. This poem was not the first ancient eastern text known in the XXth century. Ancient Testament possesses myths and legends inspired by Mesopotamian texts. One of these myths, the Tower of Babel, was a mythical recreation of the ziggurat of Babylon. Architects like Le Corbusier and Loos used the ziggurat typology for projects symbolising the mixture of languages –a hotel called Babylon, by Loos- and the power of human knowledge – the Mundaneum, a museum for all kind of arts and technics, by Le Corbusier-. These architects used the ziggurat motif having in mind the mythical symbolism of the Babel Tower.

The exhibition does not put an end to the research on Mesopotamian influences in modern art, but it tries to find a possible answer to this unexpected interest in artists apparently so far away from near ancient motifs such as Miró or Le Corbusier. They did not copy Mesopotamian art; they looked at it (or at images of it) for clues to understand the complexity of the modern world. 

        

METALLICA & LOU REED (1942-2013): BRANDENBURG GATE (LA PUERTA DE BRANDENBURGO, 2011)

Ahora que el grupo Metallica ha obtenido el "nobel" -Premio Polar, que han obtenido desde Ligeti hasta...Elton John- de música (¿?), quizá se pueda recordar esta canción con Lou Reed, despreciada en su momento.

KEITH MAITLAND (¿1959?): TOWER (FRAGMENTO, 2016)

TOWER trailer from keith maitland on Vimeo.

Uno de los mejores documentales de animación de los últimos años, sobre la primera matanza indiscriminada de estudiantes que tuvo lugar en los Estados unidos en 1966.
Sigue estando de actualidad

ALI SOOZANDEH (1970): TEHRAN TABU (FRAGMENTOS, 2017)

https://www.fandango.com/movie-trailer/tehran-taboo-trailer-1-trailer/208357?mpxId=1145122371558&autoplay=true

"Trailers" legales.
Película de animación aún no estrenada en España. Mostrada en el Festival de cine fantástico de Sitges

LUIS FERNANDO RAMÍREZ CELIS (1969): COMPOSICIONES LOCATIVAS (LE CORBUSIER) (2007)

Sobre este artista y arquitecto colombiano, que trabaja sobre los mitos -y su derrumbe- de los héroes de la arquitectura moderna y sus obras. véase su página web.

La obra del arquitecto Le Corbusier "tropicalizada", es decir, hecha a imagen del ser humano, "humanizada", con sus colores y sus imperfecciones, sus cesiones y sus resistencias.

Agradezco a Martina Millá (Fundación Joan Miró, Barcelona -donde Ramírez Celis expone obra, a partir de mañana, en la gran exposición Beehave sobre la suerte de las abejas como metáfora de la suerte del alma humana, der ser humano hoy) la puesta en conocimiento de esta artista y arquitecto singular, que introduce un fino humor en la adustez de la arquitectura moderna.

De la hospitalidad (teseras de hospitalidad)

Un símbolo, en la Grecia antigua, era un objeto, habitualmente de cerámica, cuyo valor no residía en el material ni en lo que representaba figuradamente, sino en lo que "representaba" en la vida de las comunidades que lo poseían. su valor residía en su capacidad por intervenir en relaciones de intercambio decisivas para la supervivencia de tribus, clanes o familias.
Un símbolo podía ser un disco de cerámica. Pertenecía a un grupo que recurría a él en determinadas ceremonias. Éstas sellaban acuerdos y sobre todo, certificaban relaciones de buena vecindad que habían permitido que se cumplieran las leyes de la hospitalidad. Cualquier persona en apuros tenía derecho a hallar cobijo en una casa y ésta tenía la obligación, tras un cierto ritual, a acoger al desamparado, darle de comer y ofrecerle un lecho para una noche. Esta acogida quedaba inscrita en la historia de las comunidades a través de un símbolo. Poco antes de la despedida, se exhibía el símbolo, se rompía y se repartía entre los representantes de las dos familias que habían cohabitado bajo un mismo techo. El símbolo sellaba la relación de acogida. Era la prueba, que el símbolo atestiguaba y recordaría, que dos familias habían sido capaces de bajar las armas. Al cabo de los años, si un conflicto estallada entre las futuras generaciones, la reunión de los fragmentos del símbolo, conservados por ambos bandos, que tenían que encajar hasta que casi desaparecía la línea de rotura, demostraba que la paz era posible porque una vez, al menos, se instauró. 

Las teseras de hospitalidad, en el mundo celta, cumplían la misma función, y la expresaban visualmente de manera más evidentes. Consistían en pequeñas placas de bronce que representaban dos manos unidas. Esos relieves tenían una cara plana. Ambos se podían unir por esas caras hasta conformar un volumen, unas "verdaderas" manos unidas. La cara plana solía tener una inscripción -en lengua íbera- que atestiguaba del rito seguido durante la hermandad de comunidades.
Algunas teseras eran aun mas "expresivas": si bien no representaban manos -de manera naturalista-, sí consistían en piezas que encajaban una dentro de otra -casi como una llave-, o animales emblemáticos como el oso que sustituían la imagen de las manos tendidas y cogidas. El animal añadía la protección que podía ofrecer, además de que quizá representara el animal del que una tribu afirmaba descender.
Estas piezas -tan expresivas de lo que simbolizan: el pacto, la mano tendida y abierta, la ausencia de armas- y esas prácticas fueron asumidas por los romanos cuando la conquista de la Península ibérica, ya en el siglo I aC, y se han encontrado por todo el territorio.

Han caído en el olvido hoy, como comprobamos cada día