permanence and (im)perfection

From top: 15th century bowl with 18th century porcelain yobitsugi repair, mid-17th century stoneware cup with kintsugi, 19th century tea tea bowl with kintsugi, mid 15th century bowl with maki-e repair.
All from the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution

12th century Korean ewer with replaced spout. V&A museum

All images of western repaired objects below from Past Imperfect, a blog by Andrew Baseman

My favorite items from Past Imperfect are unequivocally the glassware with prosthetic bases

First: kintsugi, I'm rather taken with the concept. Kintsugi ("gold joinery") is a traditional Japanese method of repair for cracked and broken ceramic ware. Lacquer is used to reattach broken pieces, the resulting "veins" of adhesive are then coated with silver or gold powder. Yobitsugi and maki-e are related techniques, the first utilizing "alien" pieces of ceramic to fill in for missing fragments, the latter replaces loss with areas of solid, decorated lacquer.

From a beautiful almost overwhelmingly sensitive essay by Christy Bartlett in Flickwerk:The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics interpreting the exquisitely subtle aspects of Japanese aesthetic philosophy:

Not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, but the repair is literally illuminated... a kind of physical expression of the spirit of mushin....Mushin is often literally translated as “no mind,” but carries connotations of fully existing within the moment, of non-attachment, of equanimity amid changing conditions. ...The vicissitudes of existence over time, to which all humans are susceptible, could not be clearer than in the breaks, the knocks, and the shattering to which ceramic ware too is subject. This poignancy or aesthetic of existence has been known in Japan as mono no aware, a compassionate sensitivity, or perhaps identification with, [things] outside oneself.

Quite a while ago I wrote briefly on the related Japanese sensibilities of wabi and sabi. The terms wabi-sabi taken together identify and connote appreciation of qualities such as impermanence, humility, asymmetry, and imperfection. (These underlying principles are diametrically opposed to their Western counterparts: values based in Classicism, perfection, rationality and the heroic.) I was dumbstruck when I first learned of these concepts. This dialectic or opposition appeared to explain one of my longstanding issues: a certain loneliness I'd felt growing up, in part because most everything I found aesthetically interesting, pleasing, or desirable seemed to be the farthest thing from what was all around me. (This was Queens in the 1970s and 80s. I carried with me a sense mild alienation most of the time.)

I have to clarify that it is the idea of kintsugi— mending as transformation, a sort of reified transience— rather than the physical ceramic objects themselves that truly seems beautiful to me.//

From the philosophically suffused, rarefied aesthetics of kintsugi to the stalwart thrift and ingenuity of necessity: Interior designer Andrew Baseman's blog, Past Imperfect, the art of inventive repair is a great find for anyone interested in the beauty of mended objects. Andrew's blog focusses on his collection of artfully repaired items, mostly 18th and 19th century western artifacts. Professing a longstanding appreciation of "make-dos"— folksy or crude homemade repairs— Baseman prefers the term “inventive repairs” for describing and appreciating the embellishments on the pieces. His collection is a parade of charming, quirky, even mystifying, everyday items from the past made even more so by the eclectic methods employed in mending physical mishaps. These objects lie somewhere outside but near the boundaries of "folk art." They seem to be animated with a spirit that pristine examples don't necessarily hold, a paradoxical demonstration of perseverance and resilience.

ancient face book

archaic statue fragment, possibly Apollo, 6th c BC
I dont quite understand the tremendous aesthetic shift in Greek art: This and the many stylistically related kouroi are all completely unlike anything envisioned with the (later) Classical eye

mummy of a cat from Abydos, Egypt, c. 1st c AD, British Museum.
A shipment of as many as 180,000 mummified cats was brought to Britain at the end of the nineteenth century to be processed into fertilizer...

Ptolemaic noblewoman, said to be Cleopatra or one of her court, 50-40 BC, British Museum

Bronze portrait of Sophocles, 5th century BC, British Museum

Bust of Julius Ceasar in green schist, Berlin
What an insane choice of material

limestone and stucco portrait of Nefertiti, 1345 BC, Berlin
Serene and unsettling at the same time

"Egyptian princess", Louvre

sycamore wood statue of Kaaper, chief lector priest, 2465-2458 BC, Cairo
He looks like a hit man

marble portrait of Lucius Verus, ca. 166–170, co-emperor with Marcus Aurelius,
Metropolitan Museum of Art
He was said to have blond hair that glinted in the sun, as if sprinkled with gold dust

bronze bust of Lucius Junius Brutus founder of the Roman Republic, c 3rd or 4th c BC,
possibly by an Etruscan artisan, Capitoline Museums
It is an odd mix of primitive and virtuosity

a Roman, unknown, Capitoline Museums
I think this is one of the most captivating portraits of any age. He and Kaaper (above) could be in The Godfather.

Bronze portrait from Delos, c 80BC
He seems to project Romantic weltschmerz 1800 years early

a wood and gesso portrait of King Tutanhkamen emerging from a lotus, ca. 1354 BC
Notice the folds of skin on the neck

a wooden Ka statue of pharoah Hor, c 1757 BC, Cairo
It is so much more animated, jovial, than most royal portraiture— if idealized funerary statuary can be jovial

A selection of compelling portraits I gathered along the way.

The Romance and Pain of Penn Station

UPDATE: One of the original watercolor renderings of the proposed Penn Station by Jules Crowe, 1906
(New-York Historical Society)

A terrific shot of the station during WWII,
with an amazing graphic installation by Raymond Loewy
images by Peter Moore
The"clamshell" ticket counter was an attempt to update the station.
I don't not like it (even if a double negative conveys my hesitance).
It reminds me of Saarinen's TWA terminal and is very much of its time.
It was a total surprise to discover that the demolition did not disrupt essential day-to-day operations: commuter service and access to the tracks and platforms were in full operation throughout. Image by Peter Moore
An advertisement from a 1968 Progressive Architecture Magazine showing Charles Luckman Associates' model of what fills the space of the former Penn Station: the Madison Square Garden Center complex.

This fascinating and embarrassing artifact, a brochure issued by the LIRR about the demolition,
construction and what was happening, breezily informs riders "you'll have one of the most modern, spacious,
cheerful and functional terminals in the nation." (municipal art society)

On October 28, 1963 New York began its long painful farewell to McKim Mead & White's monumental Pennsylvania Station. The supremely majestic nine-acre structure of travertine marble and granite, its columns more than 6 stories tall, didn't go quietly. It took 3 years to hack up and cart away, with parts haphazardly dumped in the NJ Meadowlands, like the remains of a Mob hit.

I can't help but see many of the demolition images as documenting a crime, and I don't mean figuratively. There truly is something unsettling, obscene even, in the partially exposed steel framework, a slow-motion dismemberment, the tremendous hulk lurching under the raining blows from workmen.

Photojournalist Peter Moore and his wife Barbara documented the "unbuilding" process in thousands of images. A selection of these became The Destruction of Penn Station, a book issued in 2000, described as both romantic and painful.

Critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote at the time,

"The tragedy is that our own times not only could not produce such a building, but cannot even maintain it..." "It confirms the demise of an age of opulent elegance, of conspicuous, magnificent spaces, rich and enduring materials, the monumental civic gesture, and extravagant expenditure for esthetic ends."

I'll be working on an exhibit about Penn Station in the next couple months, so I've been going over the arc of its archetypal moral tale: elegance and beauty sacrificed to base money interests. In reviewing all with fresh eyes I was astonished to find myself almost being able to understand the decision to replace it.

The very fact that Penn Station carried the standard of "conspicuous space" and "extravagant expenditure" made its demise, in the era of the Jetsons, inevitable. It had been on a long slide down toward becoming what even the New York Times called "a grimy monument to an age of expansive elegance." Under years of careless structural intrusions and minimal upkeep, with the automobile stripping the glamour —and convenience— from railroad travel, Penn station was a cavernous empty space with an expensive maintenance ticket. It was a glaring anachronism at 50, still evoking starched collars and walking sticks when the public was thinking about space travel, Tang, and GoGo boots. I could almost—almost— see what it was they were thinking.
. . . . . .
See several stunning images, and a few harrowing scenes of carnage.

A Portrait of the Artist Pinching Himself

A contemporary remarked that this was first and probably only time the underside of the tongue has been rendered in a sculpture

For reference, here is a typical early Messerschmidt commission, Kaiser Joseph from 1765

I'd heard of the German-Austrian sculptor Franz Xavier Messerschmidt (1736–1783) several years ago—I've forgotten how—and was absolutely stunned when I saw a few of his Kopf-Stücke or "character heads." How could these have been done in the 18th century? So I made a point to go up to see the first-ever Messerschmidt exhibit in this country, now on (until January 10, 2011) at that little boutique of a museum, the Neue Galerie.

The stunning installation is by Federico DeVera, owner of my favorite store which I cannot afford anything in. The walls of the exhibition rooms are decorated with light and spidery drawing. An opulent rococo crest encrusted with scrolls and all manner of frippery, hand drawn in silvery gray graphite, opens the show. Each room thereafter has the barest ghostly intimation of sconces and panelling in outline. DeVera has a genius for stark drama.

Messerschmidt, a well-respected young Viennese sculptor, garnered a steady stream of impressive—even royal— commissions, and assumed an assistant professorship at the Academy. He produced attractive, gorgeously modelled busts, some with florid piles of Rococo drapery, others becoming notably more severe and plain. He is credited with the exemplifying earliest shift in taste to the Neo-Classical with his innovative and "reductive" portraits. At some point though he seems to have suffered some sort of serious emotional difficulty and in 1774 he was passed over for a full professorship at the Academy due to "confusion in the head."

Crushed and humiliated he left Vienna and returned to his birthplace, a small town in Bavaria. He withdrew to a small workshop,

'on the bank of the Danube, the entire furniture of which consisted of a bed, a flute, a tobacco-pipe, water pitcher, an old Italian book about human proportion and a drawing of an armless Egyptian statue.'

There he would receive visitors as he worked on a startling series of 64 "heads" that are unlike anything ever seen in art until that time. Tormented by what he called the Spirit of Proportion, Messerschmidt was afflicted with pains in his abdomen and thighs, and was haunted by nightly visitations. In some labyrinthian mental construct which he related to visitors, if he were to pinch himself in the side producing grimaces and odd facial contortions, all the while looking in a mirror, he could carve the result in alabaster or marble—thereby keeping the Spirit, and pain, at bay. In addition to stone also used tin and lead— soft metals that allowed him to etch eerily realistic details such as stubble and hairlines.

Some believe he had what today would be called a "psychotic break" coupled with unacknowledged sexual issues as he was not known to have had any relationship whatsoever. A visitor at the time reported in his diary he thought Herr Messerschmidt merely suffered from indigestion exacerbated by his superstitious nature. (I, myself, would put money on the psychotic break).

It is fascinating to note, however uncanny and singular the heads are, the many ties to the 18th century zeitgeist the works evince: caricatures become popular in art; physiognomy and other pseudo-scientific studies of anatomy, intellect and character are widespread; psycho-supernatural parlor entertainment is on the rise. It is even thought Messerschmidt stayed for a time with Franz Anton Mesmer, whose demonstrations of electro-magnetism induced mild convulsions in his patients.

Had Messerschmidt not experienced his mental torment his art might never have strayed into such radical and 'modern" expression; he probably would have been relegated to a passing mention, if that, in art history surveys. He died of unknown causes at the age of 47.

An influence? The compact intensity of Roman busts or, above, an Egyptian portrait head of about 400-500 BC