The Power and the Glory

Hermine tracked by wunderground.com

Hermine was stagnated off the Northeast. Tropical storm warnings had been issued from Virginia to New England; at the very least erosion and riptides lay in the offing. However on Sunday of the Labor Day week the sun was shining in the town of East Hampton. In fact, contrary to some earlier reports the weather was particularly gorgeous. Nevertheless residents of the resort community lined up on Main Beach occupying benches and tables in front of the gray shingled snack bar famous for its freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and clam chowder to watch the rising waters. The onlookers gazed out with the serenity that derives from watching an increasingly angry sea. It was the kind of scene that merited the talents of a nineteenth century painter like Thomas Eakins who captured the community of emotion surrounding emblematic events. Thomas Struth who photographs museum goers looking at paintings might also have made something of the mesmerizing effect the churning tides were having on the assembled crowd. At one point the iconic white lifeguard's chair was shifted from its normally secure position and a gaggle of strong young bodies immediately raced out onto the sands, turning the cumbersome structure on its side, then effortlessly portaging it further inland as if it were an aluminum canoe. Going to the beach is generally a selfish pursuit aimed at satisfying the "oceanic feeling." However, what was going on Sunday morning on Main Beach was a little closer to worshippers reciting the Lord's Prayer, a mile or two down the road at St. Luke's Episcopal Church. People were experiencing the kind of awe that’s manifest when nature’s power and glory are imminent.

Rineke Dijkstra

Proust coined the term  “involuntary memory”—in short a kind of memory that is not normally accessible like that ignited by his iconic madeleine. The Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra, a retrospective of whose work was recently exhibited at the Guggenheim, traffics in the visual equivalent of the concept, capturing visual moments that elude everyday perception. In a series of videos shot at the Liverpool Tate, she filmed a group of school children looking at Picasso’s Weeping Woman (l937). We never see the painting of Picasso’s wife Dora Maar, but we see the reactions of the students. It’s a little like the work of the Viennese photographer Thomas Struth who created a famous series of photographs of museum visitors. One particularly arresting image from the video is that of a young girl.  Her head is canted to the side in a look of distraction, perhaps her way of absorbing an unsettling image. It’s not surprising that Dijkstra is interested in adolescence to extent that it constitutes an awakening from the cocoon of childhood and thus contains many of these quiet epiphanies— in which subjects straddle the line between knowing and unknowing, innocence and experience. She follows the development of a woman from childhood to pregnancy. She records a member of the French foreign legion from his induction as a callow young man through his development into a seasoned fighter. She also captures subjects following exhausting activities—Bullfighters, New Mothers— in which they are totally bereft of self-consciousness. In Buzz Club and The Nugent R.C. High School, she identifies two different kinds of uniforms in trendy club dress and parochial school garb and the ways in which personality, like the butterfly born from the pupa, emerges from each.

The Age of Insight

Photograph: August Wieselmayer

The Nobel prize winning neuropsychiatrist Eric Kandel used sea slugs to study memory. Of course Freud’s early work had been with eels and as everyone knows eel makes for very delicious sushi. Kandel’s latest book The Age of Insight, deals with Klimt, Koskoshka and Schiele, artists who Kandel describes as  “uncovering unconscious mental processes in their drawing and painting in parallel with Sigmund Freud and Arthur Schnitzler, who were doing so in their writing.” In commenting on the ideas that he deals with in the book, in the summer issue of Columbia Magazine, Kandel makes the following statement: “We even have an idea of why people fall in love with works of arts. What accounts for Ronald Lauder’s paying $135 million in 2006 for Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the painting on the dust jacket of The Age of Insight?” Kandel goes on to remark that the “love of art involves a number of brain systems, but it particularly involves the brain chemical dopamine…The dopaminergic system is recruited for love, for addiction, for food, for sex.” Dopamine and love make sense, but the love of art? The statement actually makes one think about the work of another Austrian whose work came much later than the artists Kandel cites and that’s the photographer Thomas Struth. Struth took a classic series of photographs of Prado visitors looking at Velasquez’s Las Meninas. Generally, the FMRI is recruited to study dopaminergic reactions.  But the FMRI only tells us what part of the brain is affected by x,y or z emotions. When you look at Struth photograph of a visitor to the Prado or other museums like the State Hermitage, you may conclude that art is more revealing about the relation of esthetics to emotion than science can ever be. Stanley Kubrick once made a movie about trying to understand the mind. Based on Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, he cannily titled it Eyes Wide Shut.