Stendhal Syndrome

kvetchlandia:

Jacques Henri Lartigue Pablo Picasso 1955

i’m sorry, but this just made me think of…

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Study for the Composition of the Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci, 1495, Accademia, Venice

“Leonardo da Vinci, that master of polished lyrical effects, believed that many artists of his day were far too fond of their own virtuosity. “When the painter has achieved a beautiful and graceful and well-defined rendering” of the human body, Leonardo wrote, “it seems to him an outrage to raise or lower the position of the limbs, or move them further back or forward.” Leonardo urged these artists, who were so quick to reach a conclusion, to consider the heavily worked manuscripts of their literary friends: “Have you never reflected on the poets who in composing their verses are unrelenting in their pursuit of fine literature and think nothing of erasing some of these verses in order to improve upon them?” Leonardo was pressing artists to accept a kind of dialectical process, to put something down and then respond to it, to draw, to erase, and then to redraw — to do battle with the images that they had made. A work of art that holds our attention has an underlying pressure, a pressure that is distinct from but in some ways in sync with the work’s ultimate structure or design, a pressure that registers as an echo of the struggles involved in the making of the thing, a pressure that gives a saving rough edge to even the most refined creations.”

The Artist in Conflict: Ways of Thinking about Style, Jed Perl, 2003

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A View from an Apartment, 2004-05, Jeff Wall

This is Wall’s most recent work. It was photographed between May 2004 and March 2005 in an apartment specially rented for the purpose. Wall says he wanted to make a picture of an interior that included a view, something he had not done before. He asked one of the women in the picture to furnish the apartment and to live in it as if it were her own. Shooting occurred at various points during this time and the resulting photographs were then digitally combined. With A view from an apartment Wall achieves a remarkable synthesis of a number of his preoccupations: a commonplace interior opens onto an urban panorama; documentary material is treated with cinematographic dynamism; the everyday is heightened through composition and the effects of light; and a narrative is suggested but left incomplete. (from Heilan.com)

Wall’s style mixes documentary photography with elements of cinematography, staged moments that capture the essence of unphotographed reality. Wall comments - “I can’t draw a sharp distinction between the prosaic and the spectral, between the factual and the fantastic, and by extension between the documentary and the imaginary.”

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pleasebequietplease:

In published compilations of their materials, numerous historical figures have left behind doodles. Erasmus drew comical faces in the margins of his manuscriptsand John Keats drew flowers in his medical note-books during lectures. Ralph Waldo Emerson, as a student at Harvard, decorated his composition books with somber, classical doodles, such as ornamental scrolls. In one place, he sketched a man whose feet have been bitten off by a great fish swimming nearby and added the caption, “My feet are gone. I am a fish. Yes, I am a fish!” In many other situations he commented that they helped with compositions. Stanislaw Ulam the mathematician is another example: he discovered the Ulam spiral while doodling during an academic conference.

FDR

Nixon

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from Marc Johns

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Failure, Change, Adaptation

“The first inhabitants of Brasilia’s superquadras simply rejected the anti-street because it contradicted social practice. Constituting a cross-section of the bureaucracy, these settlers were predominantly from the urban Brazil, where the street is the focus of public activity. As people accustomed to the bustle of the street, they quickly grasped and repudiated the radical intentions of the Master Plan. They refused the proposed garden entrances of the commercial units and converted the service backs into store fronts. Associated with sidewalks, traffic and movimento, the original backs were perceived as customary areas of exchange and sociality. As a result, habit reproduced the street in practice where it had been architecturally denied….

To this day, the garden sides of most of the commercial units in Asa Sul remain undeveloped. Facades obviously designed as fronts are masked by storage crates, locked gates, and general neglect.”

The Modernist City, An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia, James Holston

Superquadra garden entrance, Provavelmente na 104 sul, Brasilia, by le Monsieur

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“No work better embodies Huang Yongping’s attitude towards art and the world than Bank of Sand, one of Huang’s iconic works. Made out of 40 tons of sand, concrete and water, the piece is meant to fall apart over the course of display. The model is based on the former HSBC bank in Shanghai. The building was built　in 1923 and is regarded as a colonial monument. Later, it housed the Shanghai Municipal Government and since the 1990s, it turned into a bank again. The subtle message is that no truth holds forever and that change is the rule.

House of Oracles: A Huang Yongping Retrospective

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“Souk’s mercantile roots come from narrow and streets; an attenuated alternative to a western version of market - easily inhabiting portions of the city - not gathering but squeezing into underused space. Agora is destination; souk is more like city - it streams out and occupies the ground level of a city.

The ragged old souk [of Kuwait] of mud-bricks and rusty corrugated steel is now all gone. Ever since the 1950s Kuwait has tried in numerous ways to update its old souk. What remains are various manifestations of modernism rejected and revised. Stores built in the 1950s from concrete and brick to replace the mud-brick stalls have seemingly transformed themselves back into what they once were - a patina of wear and resistance returns ancientness.

Sometimes modernism is embraced, at other times it is swallowed by a stronger, more ancient order. Storefront shops unfold out onto designated sidewalks, opening facades to be extensions, if not replacemets, for interior spaces. Shoppers are then directed to walk in roads rather than sidewalks. The squeezing of modern voids to a minimum; souk makes an etymological return to narrow.”

Kuwait Souk, Todd Reisz, Volume Magazine 12 - Al Manakh

Old Kuwait Souk, 1961, by Ali

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Vitra Fire Station, Zaha Hadid, Weil Am Rhein, 1993

Hadid’s angular design for a fire station failed to provide enough space to accomodate the station’s full complement of fire engines. As such another fire station was built nearby and Hadid’s building now houses the Vitra Chair Museum. Released from the author(ity) of the architect’s design as the user takes control, the building has finally achieved a practical purpose and expression.

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Shearing layers is a concept coined by architect Frank Duffy which was later elaborated by Stewart Brand in his book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (Brand, 1994), and refers to buildings as composed of several layers of change.

The Shearing layers concept views buildings as a set of components that evolve in different timescales; Frank Duffy summarized this view in his phrase: “Our basic argument is that there isn’t any such thing as a building. A building properly conceived is several layers of longevity of built components” (quoted in (Brand, 1994)).

The layers are (quoted from Brand, 1994):

Site - This is the geographical setting, the urban location, and the legally defined lot, whose boundaries and context outlast generations of ephemeral buildings. “Site is eternal.” Duffy agrees.
Structure - The foundation and load-bearing elements are perilous and expensive to change, so people don’t. These are the building. Structural life ranges from 30 to 300 years (but few buildings make it past 60, for other reasons).
Skin - Exterior surfaces now change every 20 years or so, to keep up with fashion or technology, or for wholesale repair. Recent focus on energy costs has led to re-engineered Skins that are air-tight and better-insulated.
Services - These are the working guts of a building: communications wiring, electrical wiring, plumbing, sprinkler system, HVAC (heating, ventilating, and air conditioning), and moving parts like elevators and escalators. They wear out or obsolesce every 7 to 15 years. Many buildings are demolished early if their outdated systems are too deeply embedded to replace easily.
Space Plan - The Interior layout—where walls, ceilings, floors, and doors go. Turbulent commercial space can change every 3 years or. so; exceptionally quiet homes might wait 30 years.
Stuff - Chairs, desks, phones, pictures; kitchen appliances, lamps, hairbrushes; all the things that twitch around daily to monthly. Furniture is called mobilia in Italian for good reason.

Wikipedia entry - Shearing Layers

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Marginal

A convincing fictional world depends as much upon its cast of extras as it does upon its central characters.

The films of Michael Haneke document, amongst other things, what happens when the parallel lines of social stratification converge. During the opening minutes of his movie Code Unknown the camera pans back and forth, in one continuous shot, along 3 city blocks. A delivery truck emblazoned with the logo ‘Detroit’ collecting or dropping off at a storefront, a guy in a leather jacket with a bouqet of roses, two businessmen greeting each other, a girl in a yellow raincoat, buskers playing music, a beggar in an alleyway, a poor maghrebi deciding whether to enter the store of a luxury real estate agent, a well-dressed elderly lady and the lean dog on her leash. Any of these figures could prove pivotal in the narrative to come.

Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys, Michael Haneke, 2000

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Wong Kar Wai’s movies similarly emphasise a juncture of narratives, suggesting narratives arcs that began and continue far beyond the confines of the screen. In filming Happy Together Wai arrived in Buenos Aires without a script, and filmed a number of nascent stories following a variety of characters. He planned to stay for six weeks but did not return to Hong Kong for four months. When it came to editing the footage into a coherent story they found out the reels ran to a length of over 400,000 feet. Some stories and characters were edited out completely, yet it seems as if their echoes resonate on-screen, others cut down to a second or two, appearing with strange significance before disappearing forever.

The Lake Shore Drive Apartments by Mies Van Der Rohe, photorgraphed by Michael Wolf, from The Transparent City

The Crisis of Foundationalism that Jameson outlined as being essential to the state of post-modernism extends to focus. There are far too many streams of information live at any given moment than is possible for one human to comprehend. Overwhelmed by Wikipedia, tumblr, the urban environment, society suffers from a form of mass ADHD. Rather than close in and follow one specific subject we present numerous, nameless subjects simultaneously, zooming in only for the merest glimpse. And what we extract from that glimpse depends more on how we think than on what we see, such is the superficiality of immediate information.

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In Truffaut’s early movie Shoot the Piano Player this sense of a larger world does not depend so much on details simultaneous to events but on the rhythm of those events themselves. In hoping to recover from a previous tragedy the main character Charlie Kohler, portrayed by Charles Aznavour, compels another tragedy into being. The opening and ending scenes in the bar are so similar that I cannot tell, if seeing either outside its context, which is the ending and which the beginning. The bar is crowded, a man is singing, Charlie plays the piano, a pretty girl tries to get his attention, and the camera pans. The choreography of the dancing, the similarity in structure all suggest a roundness, that this story has occured before and will occur again as a form of eternal recurrence, that Charlie has stored in his consciousness trauma that he cannot purge, compelling him to repeat events over and over to the same grim conclusion.

Shoot the Piano Player, Francois Truffaut, 1960

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“And moreover, as the carriage drove up to the inn, a young man chanced to pass wearing white twill trousers that were very tight and short and a swallow-tail coat with claims to fashion from under which a shirtfront was visible fastened with a Tula bronze pin in the shape of a pistol. The young man turned his head, looked back at the carriage, caught hold of his cap, which the wind was about to blow off, and then went his way.”

Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol, 1842

“Another special touch is exemplified by the chance passer-by - that young man portrayed with a sudden and wholly irrelevant wealth of detail: he comes there as if he was going to stay in the book (as so many of Gogol’s homunculi seem intent to do - and do not). With any other writer of his day the next paragraph would have been bound to begin: “Ivan, for that was the young man’s name”… But no: a gust of wind interrupts his stare and he passes, mever to be mentioned again.”

Gogol, Vladimir Nabokov, 1961

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Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1558

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Incidental scenes included in the cinema release of James Bond: Quantum of Solace evoke the sense of place in Haiti more than reams of fast-paced action scenes - a guy ironing in the street, girls leaning out of a window, a chicken taking flight. The shots depict the ruined elegance of a failed utopia, reminiscent of Guy Tillim’s pictures of Angola. They emphasise the difference between mere backdrop and active context - vignettes that widen the scope of the story, suggesting, like those Bolivian peasants waiting for a bus at the end, or the Russian apartment blocks in the coda, that action and events are of complex and global significance.

James Bond, Quantum of Solace, Marc Forster, 2008

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This sense of the outside world intruding in on action can have the opposite effect. It trivialises events, to suggest that, no matter how significant they may seem to those involved, they’ll soon be consigned to history, replaced with another reality. Battles are made to seem petty, wars irrational. For a greater enemy lies just over the horizon.

Apocalypto, Mel Gibson, 2006

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The Atlas of Hidden Water

by Catherine Brahic

They are one of the world’s greatest and most precious natural resources, yet are entirely hidden. Now, for the first time, a high-resolution map shows where underground aquifers store vast amounts of water.

The map of “blue gold” (pdf format, 4 MB) is the result of nearly a decade of sometimes difficult talks between neighbouring governments, mediated by UNESCO. The hope is that it will help pave the way to an international law to govern how water is shared around the world.

Aquifers are underground layers of rocks or sediments from which water can be extracted - normally by drilling boreholes or digging wells. They hold 100 times the volume of freshwater that flows down rivers and streams around the world at any time.

What the UNESCO map reveals is just how many aquifers cross international borders. So far, the organisation has identified 273 trans-boundary aquifers: 68 in the Americas, 38 in Africa, 155 in Eastern and Western Europe and 12 in Asia.

Each trans-boundary aquifer holds the potential for international conflict - if two countries share an aquifer, pumping in one country will affect its neighbour’s water supply.

Dwindling resource

“This [map] is a fantastic resource which a lot of us have been waiting for it for,” says Mark Zeitoun, a water policy expert at the London School of Economics. “It highlights the importance of groundwater resources, which is generally misunderstood or ignored completely compared to surface water.”

The increasing reliance on aquifer groundwater - because there is more of it and it tends to be less contaminated by industrial run-off - has been called the “groundwater revolution”.

But it is a revolution with worrying environmental consequences. In many parts of the world, around the Mediterranean for example, but also in the US and the Middle East, water tables are falling and aquifers are being infiltrated by seawater as agricultural practices pump water out faster than it can be replenished by rain.

When aquifers fall between countries, sustainable management requires international agreement. Yet, historically, many agreements have been weighted towards the richest or more powerful country.

The most well-known example of this is the 1995 agreement between the Israeli and Palestinian authorities. This granted Israel rights to 90% of the water contained in four aquifers (and the Jordan river) which span both territories.

Water wars?

“I do not think that [by pinpointing where aquifers lie] the map in itself has the potential to provoke water conflicts,” says Richard Taylor, a hydrogeologist at the University College of London in the UK.

“It would be very difficult for even a very skilled person to say from this map that 40% of a particular aquifer ‘belongs’ to one country and 60% to its neighbour,” he says.

This is because there are a number of variable that could define a nation’s “right” to groundwater.

Where an aquifer lies relative to an international border is one variable, but others that could be considered include: which nation’s geography contributes most to the aquifer’s recharge, the size of the respective populations, and the amount of water removed to irrigate crops.

The UNESCO map merely helps define the geographical extent of an aquifer, which could be useful in defining international agreements.

The map could also help countries better manage their water. Taylor points out that neighbouring governments will be able to share technologies and strategies for exploiting a shared water resource without sucking it dry.

‘Law needed’

Zeitoun, who advises Palestine in its water-sharing negotiations with Israel, is one of many would like to see these variables formalised in an international legal framework for water management. “There is an urgent need for an international law on water sharing,” he says.

At the moment, the only legal framework is a 1997 agreement under the United Nations relating to “non-navigable freshwater resources”. The document was initially drafted to regulate the use of surface water, and attempts are underway to extend it to underground resources as well.

The political intricacies of such a legal framework are considerable. For starters, aquifers fall into two gross categories: those that are recharged by rainfall permeating from the surface and “fossil” aquifers, such as the famous Nubian sandstone aquifer beneath Egypt, Sudan, Chad and Libya. These contain water that can be tens of thousands of years old, relics of a much wetter climate. Crucially, they are not recharged by rainwater, making them finite resources.

Exploiting fossil aquifers is “a race to the bottom,” says Zeitoun. “Typically they are seen in much the same way as diamond mines.” Nations that share a fossil aquifer must agree on how to run that race - but they don’t always agree, and that can cause conflict.

Rechargeable aquifers present an entirely different political - and scientific - challenge. The best use of the water from an environmental perspective is to use the water at the same rate as it is naturally recharged, or more slowly.

This implies knowing how the aquifer is recharged and agreeing on the fairest way of sharing the water that can be sustainably extracted each year. “You have to really understand the water flow, so you can put sustainable limits on its exploitation,” says Zeitoun.

UNESCO is expected to make public a more detailed map of trans-boundary aquifers in spring of 2009.

Find a more detailed global map at New Scientist

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Two youths from the Equator District, 1904

“… A careful investigation of the conditions of native life around (Lake Mantumba) confirmed the truth of the statements made to me—that the great decrease in population, the dirty and ill-kept towns, and the complete absence of goats, sheep, or fowls—once very plentiful in this country—were to be attributed above all else to the continued effort made during many years to compel the natives to work india-rubber. Large bodies of native troops had formerly been quartered in the district, and the punitive measures undertaken to his end had endured for a considerable period. During the course of these operations there had been much loss of life, accompanied, I fear, by a somewhat general mutilation of the dead, as proof that the soldiers had done their duty.

… Two cases (of mutilation) came to my actual notice while I was in the lake district. One, a young man, both of whose hands had been beaten off with the butt ends of rifles against a tree; the other a young lad of 11 or 12 years of age, whose right hand was cut off at the wrist… . In both these cases the Government soldiers had been accompanied by white officers whose names were given to me. Of six natives (one a girl, three little boys, one youth, and one old woman) who had been mutilated in this way during the rubber regime, all except one were dead at the date of my visit.”

Report of the British Consul, Roger Casement, on the Administration of the Congo Free State, 1904

“As more villages resisted the rubber order, Leopold’s agents ordered the Force Publique army to raid the rebellious villages and kill the people. To make sure that the soldiers did not waste the bullets in hunting animals, their officers demanded to see the amputated right hand of every person they killed. As Hochschild puts it, “the standard proof was the right hand from a corpse. Or occasionally not from a corpse. ‘Sometimes’, said one officer to a missionary, ‘soldiers shot a cartridge at an animal in hunting; they then cut off a hand from a living man’. In some military units, there was even a ‘keeper of the hands’, his job was the smoking [of them].”

The Butcher of Congo, Baffour Ankomah, New African, October 1999

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“

The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin – greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday’s election.

While western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad’s principal opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran’s provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.

Independent and uncensored nationwide surveys of Iran are rare. Typically, pre-election polls there are either conducted or monitored by the government and are notoriously untrustworthy. By contrast, the poll undertaken by our nonprofit organisations from 11 May to 20 May was the third in a series over the past two years. Conducted by telephone from a neighbouring country, field work was carried out in Farsi by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award. Our polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The breadth of Ahmadinejad’s support was apparent in our pre-election survey. During the campaign, for instance, Mousavi emphasised his identity as an Azeri, the second-largest ethnic group in Iran after Persians, to woo Azeri voters. Our survey indicated, though, that Azeris favoured Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over Mousavi.

Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the internet as harbingers of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranians even have access to the internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.

The only demographic groups in which our survey found Mousavi leading or competitive with Ahmadinejad were university students and graduates, and the highest-income Iranians. When our poll was taken, almost a third of Iranians were also still undecided. Yet the baseline distributions we found then mirror the results reported by the Iranian authorities, indicating the possibility that the vote is not the product of widespread fraud.

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By Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty

The Guardian, Monday 15 June 2009 20.00 BST

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