#Pieter Brueghel The Elder (Visual Artist)

[orebic-travel]

Belgium: Bruges and Brussels

Belgium: Bruges and Brussels

Rick Steves’ Europe Travel Guide | We start in Bruges to check into a medieval hospital, savor the exquisite art of Memling, climb a bell tower to get up close and …

[deutscheshausnyu]

INTERVIEW WITH HANS WEISS

Hans Weiss was born in Hittisau, Vorarlberg, Austria in 1950. He studied Psychology, Philosophy, and Pedagogy at the University of Innsbruck where he did his Ph.D. in 1976. In 1978 he completed a postgraduate course in medical sociology at the Vienna Institute for Advanced Studies. He received a research grant from the British Council with stays at the Universities of Cambridge and London in 1978/79. In 1980, he worked as a pharmaceutical consultant, collecting material on the business practices of the pharmaceutical industry for journalistic reasons. Based on his research, he wrote two books “Gesunde Geschäfte” and “Bittere Pillen,” which caused a sensation at the time. “Bittere Pille” sold more than three million copies in the meantime and became one of the greatest German-language book successes. From 1994 - 1995 he trained at the International Center of Photography in New York and in 1997/1998 as well as in 2010/2011 at the School of Artistic Photography in Vienna.

On April 1, Deutsches Haus at NYU presented the opening of the exhibitoon “The Towers of Babel” by Hans Weiss. His exhibition will be on view until     June 7.

Your current photography exhibition at Deutsches Haut at NYU captures the view from the 10th floor of NYU’s Bobst Library, from the same spot, between 2014 and 2018, at different times of the day and during different seasons. What made you choose this particular spot? 


Whenever I stay in New York - usually five or six weeks every year - I use the reading room on the 10th floor of Bobst Library as my work space. It is quiet, I am surrounded by students and books, and I have this great view in front of me: nature (Washington Square Park) and culture (Manhattan skyline with Empire State and Chrysler Building). There are huge windows from floor to the ceiling and even though it is always the same view, it is also always different: changing lights, changing colors, changing impressions.

The photos in the series “The Towers of Babel” were all taken with an iPhone. Why did you choose this medium over a traditional camera?

I started the project not knowing that it would become a longtime project. I use my iPhone regularly as a visual diary. So, the first pictures were shot for private memory. I only started thinking about turning this body of work into an exhibition in 2017. Until 2017 I used an iPhone 4 and after that an iPhone 8. Photographically there is a big difference between the two: I can enlarge iPhone 8-prints a lot bigger than iPhone 4-prints. I am surprised about the quality and the sharpness of the photos. I think it has to do with the fact that I did not take the pictures by holding the iPhone in my hand, but pressing it to the window - with the same stabilizing factor like using a tripod. Using a traditional camera would have meant carrying it with me all the time, which is bulky and heavy.

You have spent four years documenting New York City’s skyscrapers. When you first set out, did you think it would take four years to complete this project? How many pictures did you take during this time and how do you go about the editing process? 


When I started thinking of this as a serious project, I did not set myself a deadline. Although in my mind the project is finished, I still take pictures at Bobst Library. When you have run a long distance, it takes some time until your pulse is back to normal. After I showed some of my pictures to Juliane Camfield in 2018, I was invited to exhibit them at Deutsches Haus at NYU. I was happy but at the same time scared. How to select a small number of pictures out of about 3000? How can I bring them into an order which makes sense?

By chance I came across a famous picture from the Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder: “The Tower of Babel” (1563). It illustrates a story from ancient times. People started building a tower, to reach the clouds and the sky. It was the first skyscraper. God, who was an almighty figure at that time, felt offended and punished the builders. Everyone was given a different language and all of them were scattered all over the world.  My series symbolizes the opposite of this story. People from all places on earth come to New York. They build skyscrapers, they speak 170 different, languages and they understand each other and feel united and at home.

To bring order to the infinite diversity of the world, artists, writers, and philosophers of Pieter Brueghel’s time used magic numbers like 7 or 4. For example, seven vices or four cardinal virtues. This was an important artistic tool in ancient and medieval times - and it helped me too.

In the exhibition you see 4 times of the day, 4 seasons, a group of 4 pictures with the universal topic “love,” and a group of 4 “virtues,” which I defined as curiosity, hard-working, ambition, and dream. Dream not in the meaning of Sigmund Freud’s teaching, but in the sense of Martin Luther King’s  “I have a dream” - a very conscious effort of creating a better world. In addition to these four groups of four pictures there are 7 pictures representing “emotions”: fear, pride, sadness, courage, hope, anger, joy - scattered all over Deutsches Haus at NYU.

Are there any particularly memorable experiences from your time in the library that you would like to share with us? 


In the fall of 2015, when I was a regular at NYU’s Library, I exchanged a few friendly words with a staff member named Allan. A short time later we became friends. Allan’s Jewish father, who came from Freiburg in Germany, survived Hitler, because in the 1930s he had read Hitler’s infamous book “Mein Kampf.” He was shocked and thought: “Oh, that sounds life threatening for the Jewish people!” Allan is serious about what he writes. He called his family to immediately leave Germany, but they were hesitant. He was the only one who left for New York - and the only one who survived the Holocaust.

Allan’s mother came from Vienna. She was half Jewish. During the Nazi era, she was a member of an underground resistance group, which helped Polish Jews fleeing via Vienna to Hungary - which until March 1944 was allied with Germany, but still an independent state. Therefore, Jews were not deported and killed like in Poland or Austria. But the resistance group was betrayed and the German secret police “Gestapo” caught all members, including Allan’s mother. She was sent to the concentration camp “Ravensbrück” in Germany, but survived. After the war, she spent some time in Vienna, but because the eastern part of Austria was occupied by the Soviet Union, she saw no future by staying and emigrated to New York, where she met Allan’s father.

Allan himself now owns several houses in the Catskills, which he only rents out to very poor people. He does not make any money with that, but he sees this as a moral and spiritual commitment to his mother’s attitude: Helping other people to survive.  

You divide your time between Vienna and New York. How do you perceive these two metropoles? How has living in these two places shaped you as a person and photographer?

Until the 1980s Vienna used to be at the edge of Europe. Kind of a dead city, living from and with the past. Gray, old fashioned, slow pulse. That has really changed. The overall quality of life in Vienna is certainly much better than in New York. Now it is more diverse than a decade ago. A very well-maintained city (public transport and other public services). The museum scene is almost as vibrant as in New York. If you are a lover of classical music or German speaking theatre or timeless sitting in a coffeehouse or “dolce far niente,” then Vienna is the right place to stay. I love New York, because it is so fast and dense and New York people are the friendliest and most open minded in the world in my opinion. Vienna is a great place to raise kids and live an easygoing life, but for me it is honestly a bit boring. Whereas New York is an exciting place for photographers - in this regard I feel at home here.

Your fiction and nonfiction books sold more than five million copies and are translated into 20 different languages. What are the main differences in your approaches to writing and to photography? 


For about three years now, I have become more interested in photography than in writing. Before that, I made my living mainly with non-fiction (books and reports for big German magazines). However, from time to time I also wrote literary pieces. Some non-fiction books were the result of huge undercover projects like working as a salesman for big pharma companies - to find out, how they bribe doctors and use patients as guinea pigs. These projects were very demanding and adventurous. You have to organize so many things at once, you have to be constantly aware of yourself playing a role, and you have to be on alert all the time as well as take enormous personal and legal risks. After all, you have to write, which is the most demanding effort. I know quite a few very successful writers. And with only one exception they all think, that writing is a terrible job. The thinking, the editing, the re-writing, the polishing of the words! Awful! But when you have finished something, it is great! Fiction writing is another thing altogether. Did I change the world with my writing? Well, maybe here and there, a little bit, I hope. But all in all, it is rather disappointing, I have to admit.

Photography is very different from anything I write. For me it is more emotional, more spontaneous. At the beginning of photo-projects, I do not think a lot about it. I am more instinct-driven, like an animal. I shoot and I instantly see the result. And only then, possibly, I start thinking. About light, shape, color, improvements, quality, meaning. After that there is the rather technical part of the job: Thinking in files, pixels, color grades, density, and so on. And transferring the images into images and prints, which are of interest for others. And all the organization, which is necessary for an exhibition.

What projects (either in writing or in photography) are you currently working on? 


Currently I am working on three photo-projects: First, on portraits for which I use an app in the wrong way. The pictures look like portraits the cubist painters produced in France at the turn of the last century: distorted, divided, and reassembled. Second, I am currently working on “Tourist” which is a longtime project I began in 1996. Third, I am working on “Smoke” which has nothing to do with cigarette smoking. And I also began writing my autobiography.

[simonconsultancypage]

Art, Travel, Nostalgia

Winged Victory of Samothrace at the Louvre Museum in Paris.

I miss travel. No, I don’t miss the crowded airports, the delayed departures, the missed connections, or the lost luggage.  I miss the experience of discovering a city for the first time, tasting new and delicious foods, and learning about unfamiliar languages and cultures.

  I also miss art. I miss encountering painting, music, architecture, and sculpture, as I do when I am traveling.

  For me, exploring museums, visiting cultural sites, and attending concerts are all such important parts of traveling. In the day-to day work-from-home life that we are all now living, I often find myself reminiscing about the many rich cultural experiences I have enjoyed over the years during my travels. Although my cultural travel nostalgia encompasses many pleasurable memories,  for now it has a bittersweet edge. It seems likely that it will be many, many months before we may once again travel freely.

  I decided that if none of us can travel for now, we can at least share our memories.  We can reminisce together. Here’s what I propose.

  I have set out below pictures of and notes about some of my favorite cultural travel memories, to share them with readers but also to encourage readers to send me pictures and thoughts of their own about their favorite or most important cultural travel memories. Please send me pictures of your own travel encounters with art — painting, music, architecture, and sculpture. Even literature or drama, if you have pictures that capture your encounter. I will select the best pictures and publish them in future post(s), “best” being a measure of the photographs and descriptions that most creatively or interestingly capture the experience.

  The great thing about cultural experiences while traveling is that precisely because you are away from home and outside your familiar surroundings and activities, it is possible to perceive even familiar artistic works in a new, thought-provoking way. What this affords is not only an appreciation for design, execution, and detail, but even artistic meaning and purpose.

  Here I am — cleverly disguised as a middle-aged American tourist, complete with cargo shorts and fanny pack — at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria, contemplating Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, a beautiful, interesting work rich with detail and meaning. (Note to self: Got to work on posture. Shoulders back, head up.)

  There is also something to be said for encountering directly the original of an artwork of which you have often seen many copies.

  At the Kunsthalle Hamburg, I encountered Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich. I have always admired this painting. Unfortunately, the picture has been appropriated and misappropriated a few too many times, which robs the image of some of its power. I was glad to have a chance to see the original. In my eyes, the picture is a work of conception, composition, and control – and yet it is also a mystery. The figure at the painting’s center has his back to us, which has the effect of drawing us into his perspective, inviting us to contemplate the world with him. He sees, and we see with him, a world of subtle, inscrutable beauty. There is much more to say about the painting. Buy me a glass of wine sometime and we can discuss this transcendent painting’s many-layered meanings.

  Truly great art will also challenge you, particularly when it take unfamiliar or unaccustomed forms.

  From a special exhibit called Le Bord du Mondes (The Edge of Worlds), featuring contemporary art from around the world (particularly Southeast Asia), at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

  Of course, one of the most important parts of travel is the experience of discovery, and of encounter with the unexpected.

  When we visited the Pergamon Museum in Berlin in January, I was astonished to discover the reconstructed Ishtar Gate, from ancient Babylon, built at the time of King Nebuchadnezzar II and in modern times removed to Berlin by the German archaeologists that excavated the ancient city remnants. An astonishing sight, but it does make you wonder what it is doing in Germany.

  Sometimes you find the art somewhere other than where you expected to find it, even when you were actively looking for it.

  The Fondation Louis Vuitton in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. The flamboyant building, designed by the American architect Frank Geary, is somehow both massive and flowing, and its visual effect is so stunning that it almost overwhelms the art inside. The building itself is a work of art.

  The visual arts of course also include sculpture, which, though static, can convey movement as well as form and depth.

  During a visit to Oslo a few years ago, my wife and I visited the Vigeland Sculpture Garden, which features the odd and unusual statuary of the late 19th and early 20th century Norwegian artist, Gustave Vigeland. All of the many statues and sculptures in the garden involved variations on the human form. Statuary can be difficult to photograph, owing to the perspective that is lost when moving from three dimensions to two. However, this photo, and in particular the contrast between the blue sky and the grey stone, captures something of the sculpture’s actual effect.

  The most important part of experiencing visual art is learning how to see, how to slow down your vision so that you see all of it, both the constituent parts and the work as a whole. If you can slow your vision down, you can see both how the art was put together and also perhaps glimpse the inner meaning as well.

  The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

  As much as I enjoy the visual arts, I think I enjoy the performance arts even more, especially live musical performances. There is something about the energy and interpretation of the performer that captures my own imagination. I have been fortunate to attend some great musical performances while traveling over the years, including quite a number in truly fabulous venues.

  During our Berlin visit in January, my wife and I attended a concert at the Konzerthalle, a beautiful building that was brilliantly illuminated in a fascinating light display. The concert included several Beethoven string quartets.

  Sometimes the venue can enhance the music and contribute to the relationship between the performer and the audience.

  When I was in London last November, I attended a Royal Philharmonic Orchestra concert at Cadogan Hall (pronounced “Kah-DOH-gun”) in Sloane Square. Cadogan Hall is an intimate jewel box of a music venue. It only seats 950, but it actually feels much smaller. At the Tuesday evening concert I attended, Elizabeth Sombart was the pianist in a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1. My seat in the upper level was perfectly positioned to allow me to watch Sombart’s hands as she played the cadenzas. It was a truly extraordinary experience. The venue and the musicianship of the soloist and the ensemble make for a really special evening.

  While there are a number of venues that can enhance the audience experience, a few can even allow for actual intimacy between the audience and the performer.

  During a visit to Paris several years ago, I attended a concert at the ancient Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre church (reportedly Paris’s oldest extant church structure). The concert featured a performance by the French pianist, Jean-Christophe Millot, who played several pieces by Beethoven and Chopin. The church’s acoustics are superb, and the sanctuary’s small size and the subdued lighting made for a particularly intimate feel. I was also sitting close enough to watch the performer’s hands, which was absolutely brilliant.

  While different building structures can have differing effects on the audience, by far the most moving and memorable musical performance I attended while traveling did not involve a building at all.

  On a warm sunny Sunday afternoon in late May several years ago, my wife and I were hiking around Suomenlinna, an island in the harbor of Helsinki, Finland. After touring the famous island fortress, we were strolling though the island parklands when we came across a group of musical students performing for their families and friends. The warm spring sunshine, the relaxed atmosphere, the absolutely positive vibe made for a truly unbeatable experience. We sat and listened to the various student ensembles for over two hours. My wife and I reminisce about this event frequently; we both agree that as we sat in that beautiful place to listening to the beautiful music, we felt truly blessed. It was completely unplanned, but it was one of the most wonderful afternoons of my entire life. That, my friends, is the essence of why I miss travel.

  My cultural traveling memories include many more events and experiences. I could go on and on and on, with many more examples from many different times and places. Indeed, while I was reviewing my photo files as part of the process of pulling this post together, I disappeared into the pictures and the related memories for an entire afternoon. Limiting myself to just the few pictures above was very difficult for me.

  I hope my pictures and notes encourage readers to go back through their own  travel experiences and review their pictures, and I hope that many readers will be encouraged to send their pictures along to me for possible publication in future blog post(s). If you do decide to submit some pictures, please include your name and company affiliation, as well as a brief description of the circumstances under which you took the picture and why the experience was meaningful to you. Please send your pictures to my work email mailbox at  kevin.lacroix@rtspecialty.com.

  I am looking forward to seeing readers’ pictures. We may not be able to travel right now, but we can at least share our travel memories.

Art, Travel, Nostalgia published first on http://simonconsultancypage.tumblr.com/

[mengfeihe-blog]

Context lecture

Design for Anthropocene 人类世（A proposed the term for the present geological epoch from the time of the industrial revolution onwards during which humanity has begun to have a significant impact on the environment.) 

1. Why should we care about climate change? we went establish the first where we are? and when?

Human population has an impact on the planet, human activity is a power emigration since 3000 years ago which has an influence on climate, think about the extinction of the dinosaur. 

2. The time we live in ( geological studying) When are we? what’s the period we live in?—the time since last the ice age (glacial periods)began 2.6 million years ago.

Everything start changed since now. 

eg: Imagine aliens looking at the earth 6,000 times and finding if they started with the invention of the cell phone, and they found thousands of pieces of white trash, all the trees were facing carbon dioxide problems. 

3.Anthropos- Human and Cene- Geological Epoch period time. (人类进入了新时代）

When it started since we born for? Living together is a good way? or bad way? ( War, the industrial revolution)

eg: a series interval experience, a line puts everything together, animal, human, plants, everything we created. Chthulucene And tentacular thinking Tentacularity- Thinking with the inhabitants of the world, creatures of all kinds, human and non-human, even mushrooms, we are all wayfarers, moving from place to place. Mother nature— Changing depends on how we are reacting to the planet.

4. MAN (2012) Steve Cutts illustration animation. 

5. eg: Hurricane Florence 

Collecting ströms—the time we live in, How to visual see? how to do we contact them? The destruction of the storm to humanity at the time. 

eg: wildfire with summer temperature change, England, California

6.  Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow (Winter) (1565), Oil on wood panel

     Peter Brookes (2013) The Spectator Christmas Edition 

How climate would change at that point? How he reacts to that? or present what he saw?

7. How we respond as a designer or artist?  

eg: Pieter Brueghel The Elder, The Labours of the year (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), Dr. Steven Zucker & Dr. Beth Harris (missing late spring)

8. What shapes how we see the world?

eg: panting— google map —YouTube…

Digital life deceives us. We need to know about what really happens to the environment. 

eg: Blue planet, Put together beautiful surroundings and create mass to the audiences. 

Drowning in plastic BBC: the real problem we faced. 

9. OH HEY MARS! (Even going to Mars won't solve the problem.)

eg: Space enthusiasts speak of humanity being saved by interplanetary colonization, but it wouldn’t be the whole of humanity going to Mars

As a designer, we have some power to change something

eg: The Simpsons, Season 11, episode 4: "Treehouse of Horror X"; aired on October 31, 1999

‘While I would like us to explore Mars more I think the only thing we’ve demonstrated is that we’re very good at destroying the habitability of Earth, rather than improving the habitability of a completely alien world. The idea that Mars will somehow save us from the decisions we have made here is a false one, and it’s a little like saying you are going to live in the lifeboat when even lifeboats need somewhere to land.’

10. Art working protect the environment. What are we facing?

eg;  Sea-Chair (2013) Studio Swine 

eg:  Justin Hofman (2017), Wildlife Photographer Of The Year 2017

eg:  Some of the plastic bags extracted from a whale’s stomach in Thailand. Photograph: Social Media/Reuters

eg:  The Great Pacific Garbage Patch/ Trash Gyre between California and Hawaii( the diagram art)

eg:   Gyrecraft (2015) Studio Swine

11. fashion

eg: RAW for the Ocean (2014) G-Star Raw, Pharrell Williams ( waste materials)

eg: Adidas Parley Range(abound fishing nets)

eg: The cleanup operation started this year on the 3rd of October

(THE OCEAN CLEAN UP has started the mammoth task of decreasing the levels of plastic pollution in the Pacific Ocean.)

eg: Plastic Dreams, Wonderfruit 2018 

eg: John Cancalosi, Stork In A Bag

eg: Juergen Teller (2011) Photograph of Vivienne Westwood in Nairobi, Kenya

12. The arctic pole

eg: Kirsten Langenberger (2015) Emaciated Polar Bear, Svalbard, Norway

eg: Global Seed Vault, Svalbard, Norway

Monstera Deliciosa/ Swiss Cheese Plant/ As well as being aesthetic AF, Monstera, is also called the Hurricane Plant for its ability to withstand strong downpours and winds in its natural habitat on the rainforest floor.

13. the Virtual illusion live in the green 

Google research —real or illusion?

GET YOUR HANDS DIRTY.

“Tending to a plant gives millennials a chance to take a break from their

screens and connect with something tangible in the ‘real world’.(The Independent. 2018. Millennials are obsessed with houseplants because they can't afford kids | The Independent. [ONLINE] Available at https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/millennials- houseplants-children-kids-money-families-succulent-cactus-bonsai-how-to-dying-a7937021.html. [Accessed 18 September 2018].)

Limbic Resonance

... refers to the energetic exchange that happens between two people who are interacting in a caring and safe relationship. Their interaction stimulates the release of certain neurochemicals in the limbic region of the brain.

Cash, H. (2011). The Online Social Experience and Limbic Resonance. [online] Psychology Today. Available at: https:// www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/digital-addiction/201112/the-online-social-experience-and-limbic-resonance [Accessed 26 Sep. 2018].

 DO NOT LIE TO YOURSELF. 

[taidemuseo]

The Triumph of Death

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563

This painting depicts a customary theme in medieval literature: the dance of Death, which was frequently used by Northern artists. Brueghel casts the entire work in a reddish-brown tone that gives the scene an infernal aspect appropriate for the subject at hand. The profusion of scenes and moralizing sense applied by the artists are part of Hieronymous Bosch´s influence on this work. Bruegel combines two distinct visual traditions within the panel. These are his native tradition of Northern woodcuts of the Dance of Death and the Italian conception of the Triumph of Death, as in frescoes he would have seen in the Palazzo Sclafani in Palermo and in the Camposanto Monumentale at Pisa.

[artotate]

TANGLED HIERARCHIES: remnants, collective endurance and strange loops

Essay by Sunshine Frère

A strange loop is a phenomenon that occurs when someone, or something, moves either upwards, downwards or through multiple levels of an abstracted hierarchical system. At some point, moving through the system, the person or thing doing the moving, unexpectedly arrives back where they or it started. MC Escher's Lithograph, Drawing Hands (1948) illustrates this concept in a succinct manner. These types of experiments form what author Douglas Hofstadter describes as a tangled hierarchy, “a complex system where beginning and ending are undefined, and even the direction or movement of a system is not apparent”i.

The Course of a Distant Empire, is an installation by artist Jay Senetchko, it consists of five large-scale paintings. The artist invites the viewer to navigate a maze of strange loops within this series. Tangled hierarchies of communal polytely and historical referencing, conflate past, present and future. All tenses collide, forming a cacophonous vortex.

A cluster of human figures feature prominently in all five paintings, the majority of them carve out a large elliptical shape in the foreground on each canvas. The group is not exactly a unified anomaly, they are more of a loose configuration of active beings, in close proximity. Process and polytely feature overtly; each individual, or small group, is focussed on the completion of a particular task: the removal of debris, the building of a fence, barbecuing, thinking, clearing snow, or even, simply relaxing. What we observe is a collective of people working, but not necessarily symbiotically towards a common goal. This central foregrounded space is simultaneously everyone's, and yet, also, no one’s; a busy commons of sorts where intertwined cycles of action and non-action recur throughout the seasons. An interesting tension is established between the individual and the collective in this series.

A sea of red poppies coats a huge portion of the surface of What the Thunder Said, a bewitching depiction of summer. The people of the commons perform contemplative gestures, relaxing on a blanket, stopping to chat, daydreaming. Traces of productivity hang in the air, the laundry is being put out to dry, truck parts, buckets and fan belts are left in limbo - part of a project that is finished, or something to start, it is not clear. This scene is arguably the most pastoral of the series; visual tropes form tethers that connect it to genre painting and even abstraction. Senetchko's colour palette, particularly in reference to the clothing on the figures, is a nod, not only to Malevich's abstract Peasant Paintings, but also to genre painters like Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and Ukrainian painters such as Nikolai Pimonenko and Vladimir Makovsky. Nature is in all its splendour at this point in the painted polyptych cycle; bright blossoms, lush greenery, and a big blue sky demonstrate the season's awe-inspiring presence.

A Game of Chess features many work strategies unfolding. Someone examines a smoking truck engine, whilst others transform tree trunk cut-offs into shingles, and others still, stack and roll away log piles. Nearly everyone is focussed on a productive task, preparing for the winter ahead. As a sun sets over a crisp sky, autumn casts a shadow into the valley. Productivity also runs throughout Death By Water. Most individuals are working away; there is an attempt to revitalize the melted cross-walk, and to salvage parts from the truck. Someone is framing up a house, whilst someone else is sowing seeds in a field in the distance in preparation for spring.

Both of these paintings are haunted by a past genre of themselves. In socialist realism, painters portrayed daily life in a celebratory manner propagating life under communist rule as idyllic; paintings often featured a happy and productive proletariat. Ukrainian and Russian painters such as Arkadiy Plastov and Tatiana Yablonskaya depicted farming folk hard at work and loving every minute of it. Senetchko used found imagery of Ukranian immigrants, as well as Ukrainians working in the Carpathian Mountains as source material for some of his figures. Productivity is infused in the painting as is pastoralism, but the sentiment of joyful labour has been subsumed by a practical and pragmatic focus. The artist introduces disparity as a harbinger of reality in these works. Absent in socialist realist painting is the messiness of productivity which is amply represented within Senetchko's work. The remnants of failed attempts are multifarious: a smoking truck, a broken down fence, the fragments of a collapsed house, old parts and tools strewn about. The neat and orderly fashion of production lines is eclipsed with a chaotic bric-a-brac collection of objects and individuals working through specific tasks, often in too-close-for-comfort proximity.

There is a vibrancy of colour found in The Fire Sermon. The painting's blood red sunset suggests the peak of summertime, heat is felt throughout the composition. It can be found in the glowing embers of a smouldering fire and in the watery white lines of a melted cross-walk. The colour red is peppered throughout, found on a jerry-can, clothing, beer cans and a barbecue.  In this work, individual appearances are at their most contemporary. Clothing design coupled with the way items are worn, serve as queues that speak to our present everyday. A tangled hierarchy presents itself in the form of understanding action and inaction within the painting. Is the fence being built, or taken apart? Are people waiting to go somewhere, or just arriving? What is going on with the scattered back lawn detritus, the result of a big party, or simply collective negligence over time? Transformation subsists in a tangled manner as well, represented in the form of the between states of the objects scattered throughout the composition.

In the heat of the summer, a tiredness and sense of boredom permeate. The individuals depicted in The Fire Sermon seem disconnected to a greater degree than any of the others in this series of paintings. Lost in solitary thought, passed out, and minimally engaged in menial chores; there is a lot of waiting and hanging around. This particular piece finds some roots within social realismii; individuals perform mundane tasks, and apathy prevails. Excess is reflected in overindulgence with alcohol, the pile of burning timber, the melted cross-walk and carelessness with cleaning up after oneself. These signs serve as subtle indicators signalling the demise of the immediate surrounds, and also, perhaps the planet and humanity itself. Reality has seeped onto the canvas, leaving one to wonder... are boredom and apathy coping mechanisms for survival in today's world?

The Burial of the Dead is the only painting where the group of individuals appear to be working collectively towards a common goal. This is also the only painting where the entire group is uniformly clad. Dark snow suits contrast against the white snow and grey-blue sky; the suits share a resemblance to biohazard outfits, we do not see skin, faces or hair: all is covered up. Nearly everyone is facing away from the viewer. It seems just as likely that these people are on a quest to find the source of an outbreak. A pile of debris burns off on the side of the open area, the houses that once stood so tall and majestic in the background have collapsed, or been dismantled: relics of a previous civilization. One cannot say if the state of the scene occurred through human intervention, natural decay or negligence. Paralleling the clothing and individual uniformity, the landscape is unified under a blanket of snow. The cold presence of winter is ubiquitous: frozen mountains, frosted trees, icy sky, and a barren snow capped truck.      

Senetchko's Course of a Distant Empire, series cycles through the canon of painting, merging genres, and coalescing time. Seasons and states of being act as pendulum swings, propelling eyes back and forth, over the polyptych spread. Several additional elements in this series invoke a non-linear way of reading the painting suite. These reinforce the set of strange loops that pirouette across the series, giving poly-rhythm to the work.

In all works of this series, landscape and perspective remains uniform, the mountains, stacked like bookends on either side of the sky, loom large. Line the series up in a row, side by side, and the peaks and valley of each painting form an undulating wavelength that has no endpoint or beginning.  Circularity and repetition is prevalent across the suite. From the earth's seasonal rotation and the constant fluctuating state of projects to the recurring placement of circular items, such as tires, buckets, hubcaps, and logs. Beginnings and endings integrate into multiple recursive loops.

Doubling occurs frequently in this series: twin houses, twin peaks, couples sitting together, people working in pairs, the lines of a white fence next to the white lines of a crosswalk. A contrapuntal cadence further expands the series, parallel dimensions open as past and future are projected simultaneously.

Quite possibly the most salient strange loop within this suite is the symbolism and life-cycle of the pick-up truck. It is a haunting talisman that stays the course. In spring, the truck appears as an abandoned red husk. Its mechanical components spread across the painted foreground like excavated bones. In fall, now purple, the truck is running, but its eventual demise is foretold. In summer, the truck is depicted in two extreme states: in pristine condition, and also as a long abandoned relic where nature staged a coup on its core, flowers blossom and cascade outwards from both the engine and interior cavities. The state of the truck in winter is indiscernible; pillows of snow hide a large portion of the body. It seems likely that the snow removal is occurring so the vehicle can be used. In this series, which constantly reconfigures activities and individuals, the truck remains a constant; however, unlike the stoic and seemingly unchanging mountains, it is an entity of fluidity. It serves as an anchor in the paintings, a primordial symbol of life, death and change.

Senetchko also incorporated the truck an abstracted homage to Théodore Géricault's Raft of Medusa. He references Géricault's triangular composition, particularly notable in The Fire Sermon painting. Géricault's pyramid composition alludes to the struggle of man and nature; the figures within each triangular grouping representing either rescue and salvation, or death and tragedy. Senetchko sees the truck a both raft and lifeline, for him the characters on the truck are: “the survivors of a societal shipwreck, riding a conspicuous symbol of mobility.” The pick-up thus becomes a problematic vessel of salvation. In The Course of a Distant Empire, salvation is not always what it seems. The pick-up's transformation loop, through which it is absorbed back into nature by way of deconstruction, decomposition and growth, emphasizes the impact and indifference between mother nature and humanity. Senetchko guides us into murky territory, salvation comes in crashing waves, with one crest threatening human annihilation, the following one promising human ingenuity. Then, yet another wave crashes down, in swirls planetary collapse, followed by an undulation of mother nature's resilience.

Senetchko's series title connects back in time to Thomas Cole's The Course of Empire, a five-part painted series focussed on pastoralism as the ideal phase of human civilization. In his era, Cole was known to have quoted Lord Byron's Canto IV when promoting his series to his contemporaries. A verse from Byron's canto eloquently highlights history's own strange loop:

There is the moral of all human tales;

'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past. First freedom and then Glory – when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption – barbarism at last. And History, with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page...

Senetchko's series is also intertwined with the words of a modern writer. T.S. Eliot wrote Wasteland, an abstract poem that teeters between healing transformation and grim breakdown. The titles of each painting by Senetchko correspond to the five chapter titles found within this modernist poem. Hundreds of literary, historical and British societal references form their own interconnected web of strange loops within Eliot’s poem. Many have written about and attempted to decode it, line by cryptic line. With the lens of the present, Eliot's work is modernist triumph of hybridity. Sampling, references and appropriation collectively form both old and new meaning. The constant switching, transforming and reintegration of ideas, has an immediate resonance within our current world, where all forms of culture are endlessly cut up and collaged back together again.

This perpetual assemblage style of investigation is fascinating and hypnotic: it captures the attention of virtually all of society, keeping everyone fully distracted. As much as we are provided with limitless possibilities, we are also paralyzed by the power of too much choice, too many products and channels, and way too many opinions. Senetchko's expansive investigation into our contemporary condition essentially distils this cut-copy-paste schism down to a critical intimation. One best illustrated by one of the last lines found within Elliot's Wasteland:

These Fragments I have shored against my ruins

Senetchko's characters are practical, resourceful and resilient. But they are also wasteful and lazy; no one is perfect. Through historical tropes and visual representation, these individuals reflect a heartiness. It is this pragmatism that sustains across the series, used as a tool to combat the senselessness of life. One can see repeated attempts to decode meaning by keeping things in motion. Senetchko plays with excess, there is often detritus hanging about, but there is no real superfluity in the objects strewn from here to there. The objects are often utilitarian in nature, we primarily see industrial objects and items that could be reintegrated into other systems. Salvaging and scavenging the left-overs from previous states of existence is prevalent throughout the polyptych. A pragmatic approach that we are hard pressed to find in the buy more, buy new, buy now world that teems with products, platforms and patents at every corner. Just as with Eliot, Senetchko's characters are shoring found fragments against their ruins. The fragments are not lost - not forgotten - they are collected, stored and eventually reintegrated within the tangled hierarchy of this ever-unfolding strange loop.

But we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence. An unfolding process.

We can only control the end by making a choice at each step.

-Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

**originally published in conjunction with Jay Senetchko’s exhibition: The course of a Distant Empire in the fall of 2017.

i  Douglas Hofstadter, “I Am a Strange Loop”, (New York: Basic Books, 2008)

ii  It should be noted that Senetchko's work incorporates elements of both socialist realism and social realism.

Socialist Realism: patriotic in its intentions, this is a genre that glorifies socialist/communist values in the depiction of daily life of the proletariat

Social Realism: paintings that are intended to reflect the current state of working class and poor members of society - without the rose coloured glasses. An intentionally realistic and often critical portrayal of society  

ARTWORKS REFERENCED IN ESSAY:

Drawing Hands, 1948, Lithograph, MC Escher

Girls in A Field, 1928-1929, Kazimir Malevich (left)

Harvest Gathering in the Ukraine, 1896, Mykola Pymonenko (right)

De bruiloft dans in de open lucht (Wedding Dance in the Open Air), c1566, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (left)

Peasant Dinner in the Harvest, 1987, Vladimir Makovsky (right)

Getting Ready to Harvest, 1960, oil on canvas, Tatiana Yablonskaya

Grain, 1949, oil on canvas, Tatiana Yablonskaya

The Raft of Medusa, 1818, Théodore Géricault, oil on canvas, 193.5 x 282”

The Course of Empire Paintings, Thomas Cole, oil on canvas, 1834-1836:

Savage State, The Arcadian Pastoral State, The Consummation of Empire, Destruction, Desolation