Gretchen Vitamvas. Modern Plague Doctor. Art In Odd Places 2021. Manhattan, NYC. (photo © Gretchen Vitamvas)
For those of us with New York City hardwired in our DNA, this year away from the greatest city in the world has been difficult. With vaccination rates up, and with NYC’s iconic sights and institutions reopening, things will normalize very soon. Until then, we will have to be content with video visit, such as the one below.
Aboveground at Philadelphia’s famous Independence Mall visitors discover an impressive collection of monuments to American history. Often called the “Cradle of American Liberty,” the popular tourist site contains sculptures of Founding Fathers, buildings inside of which the U.S. Constitution was written and signed, and symbols like the Liberty Bell that Americans have imbued with patriotic meaning.
Underground, that American history gets complicated and challenging. Along the 200-foot platform of the SEPTA Independence Mall-5th Street subway station, Philadelphia-based artist Tom Judd created a 3,000 square foot patchwork of images from the city’s early history.
“Portal to Discovery,” commissioned through SEPTA’s Art in Transit program, is composed of dozens of images assembled like a collage. Many of the image combinations are jarring. Such as Judd’s pairings of the slave owner Thomas Jefferson and abolitionist William Sill, who is known as the father of the Underground Railroad.
Judd began work on “Portal to Discovery” by collecting hundreds of images from Philadelphia’s history and putting them together to see what would resonate for the viewer. “As a visual artist, I don’t come up with a verbal idea and then try to figure out how to make it visual,” said Judd. “I literally work in a visual language. I put images together that I find interesting. That’s how it starts.”
Opened with little fanfare during the pandemic lockdown, the installation is a permanent addition to Philly’s Old City tourist attractions.
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find – if it’s a good novel – that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
Ursula K. Le Guin in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness
Book Theater, Kadokawa Culture Museum, Tokyo
Nabokov’s annotated teaching copy
In Bruges
Everything that you need to know about our world can be learned by watching The Third Man.
In anticipation of the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, Brooklyn artist George Cochrane has worked on a contemporary illuminated manuscript of Dante’s Divine Comedy—all 350,000 characters of the epic poem, plus illustrations, in the original Italian for nearly seven years. Last month, he took the project to Kickstarter, where it was fully funded in less than six minutes. The project offered four different editions, as well as related artwork, starting at $80. Two backers chose the Empyrean Edition at $10,000; Cochrane wrote to supporters on March 16, “as far as we know that’s the SINGLE MOST EXPENSIVE BOOK ever offered on Kickstarter.”
Although they have already raised more than $260,000, the pledge page remains open, so there’s still a chance to participate. The books will be printed in Italy and San Marino.
Even if you are not a particular fan of Dante, you have to see this amazing book project.
THE WRITER
Richard Wilbur
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Rome over the last few days because of the news that a new archeological site will be opening in the coming year in the heart of the Eternal City. If you haven’t heard, the sunken square at Largo di Argentina, which is closed to the public, but home to hundreds of feral cats, is undergoing a €1 million renovation providing access to the place of Julius Caesar’s assassination for the first time in more than a century.
Of course this lead me down the internet rabbit hole until I happen to stumble upon the fabulous video below. The timelapse and hyperlapse film is the work of Russian photographer Kirill Neiezhmakov. If you have ever visited Rome, it will leave you longing to return, and if you’ve never been, A Gift from Rome will have you pricing flights.
What does palimpsest mean?
1 : writing material (such as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased. 2 : something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface.
One of the few benefits of the pandemic lockdown has been the proliferation of online library and museum exhibitions. I was particularly intrigued by this recently launched exhibition staged by Cambridge University Library which examines the history of palimpsests, and how Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scripts were all variously overwritten and underwritten. It also examines how the science involved in revealing their secrets has moved on from magnifying glasses to cutting-edge imaging technology.
Ghost Words: Reading the Past features around thirty palimpsests, the earliest dating back to the fifth century CE, the most recent from the eighteenth century. It focuses on four in particular:
* the Codex Zacynthius from the eighth century CE including a copy of the Gospel of Luke and early church writings.
* the Archimedes Palimpsest, a Byzantine prayer book from the thirteenth century written over by a Greek mathematician
* the Hexapla edition of the Bible produced by third-century Christian scholar Origen of Alexandria—this is the oldest of only two copies in existence and the overwriting includes lost poems of the late sixth-century Jewish liturgical writer, Yannai
* the Mingana-Lewis Palimpsest which includes leaves from two very early Qurʼāns
The interactive exhibition also features a Jewish marriage deed, a Byzantine liturgical book with musical notation from the thirteenth or fourteenth century CE, and a fragment of St. Augustine’s sermon for Easter Sunday from the sixth century CE. Digital images of all the palimpsests featured in the exhibition can be viewed in the Cambridge Digital Library.
I first became enamored with traditional Japanese printmaking many years ago when I saw a show at Amsterdam’s Rijksmusem on Van Gogh’s personal collection of prints. The collection is now housed at the Van Gogh Museum. There are many steps in making traditional Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e), but the short video below focuses on the printing process as demonstrated by master printmaker Keiji Shinohara. His deliberate precision is impressive and mesmerizing.
Travel Between The Pages 