Bruce Barone ~ Journal

The Retreat of Morning.

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Church.

Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns,  and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. ~Matthew 6:26

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Some Trees.

Friday, September 25, 2009

Thursday, September 24, 2009

The Divine Details. A new friend, Mylène Dressler, writes to me today:

I love putting my friends together. Vladimir, meet Bruce. "Caress the divine details." ~Vladimir Nabokov I'm sitting down to do so.  May you have a glorious, finely observed day. ~Mylène Dressler

Ah, the divine details. I love the thought. And this is I believe what I do. In one bio/statement I wrote:

Often, I ask myself, "what am I called to do" and "how can I make the world a better place." To paraphrase Rumi: I need to be permanently astonished. The second thing I need is to love. And the third thing is to sacrifice--give the light that is myself. Tielhard de Chardin wrote: ”Seeing: We might say that the whole of life lies in that verb - if not ultimately, at least essentially.” Maybe I should call this sense of astonishment an Epiphany. I strive to find, see, and experience an epiphany in the richness of the ordinary day. To see. To be astonished.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Miracles. Eknath Easwaran writes today:

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle. Every square yard of the surface of the earth Is spread with the same. . . . What strange miracles are these! Everywhere . . .   – Walt Whitman   Once when I was giving a talk I used the word “miracles,” and someone in the audience asked skeptically, “Tell us about one.” Every moment you remain alive is a miracle. Talk to medical people; they will tell you there are a million and one things that can go wrong with this body of ours at any given instant. It is only because we haven’t developed the capacity for appreciating miracles that we don’t see them all around us. Life is a continuous miracle: not only joy but sorrow too; not only birth but death too. But the most precious miracle of all is to see the divinity in every creature – when we see that the divinity in our hearts is our real Self, and that it is the same Self shining in all. ~Eknath Easwaran

Yes, every moment you remain alive is a miracle--and see:

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

I Say It IS Art. See Under: Photo, "The Autumn Equinox."

Barbara Rose, writing in today's Wall Street Journal:

Recently 500 British art experts were asked to identify the most influential modern art work. They picked "Fountain," a mass-produced urinal Marcel Duchamp claimed was a work of art. That Duchamp's "Fountain" ranked ahead of works by Picasso and Matisse reveals how totally the Dada master obliterated the line between art and nonart. Once museums exhibit the urinal as art, the banal bathroom fixture is instantly elevated into a work of art. With context rather than content defining what art is, anything in a museum, gallery, biennale or art fair is validated as an artwork, obviating critical judgment of any kind. Though it was not necessarily his intention, Duchamp opened the door to the junk, jokes, mass-media appropriations, refuse, bodily fluids and dead sharks now filling museums all over the globe. Now his strategies and postures provide the basic curriculum for proliferating graduate art programs that replace artistic innovation with strategic moves to gain instant attention. Duchamp's career did not look promising when he failed the exam to enter the École des Beaux-arts in Paris. Later he was turned down by Parisian juries because he was not particularly gifted as a draftsman or painter. Nobody doubts Duchamp was a genius. But that genius was not for creating painting or sculpture. Concluding he could not beat Matisse and Picasso at their game, he decided that he could win with scandal where he could not with esteem. When his painting "Nude Descending the Staircase" was the shocker of the 1913 Armory show in New York, the young Duchamp saw a far brighter future in the U.S. than in Europe. Installed in New York, he became the darling of a long list of wealthy patronesses. Handsome, charming and nattily dressed, Duchamp was the ideal ladies' man. What he lacked in talent he made up for in impeccable taste—which is ironic since he claimed to eliminate taste from art by simply pointing to and selecting common objects and identifying them as artworks. As a consultant to dealers, collectors and museums he was probably the single most important influence on the collecting of modern art in the U.S. In New York, he met Louise and Walter Arensberg, his close friends for 42 years. Heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune, Arensberg was a cryptography buff who spent his life proving Bacon was Shakespeare. He was Duchamp's ideal patron. In 1918 Duchamp painted his last painting, "Tu m'," an enigmatic title interpreted as tu m'ennui—you bore me. Finished with "retinal" art, he would henceforth concentrate on mental constructs, complex puzzles that he claimed would "strain the laws of physics." The Arensbergs owned Duchamp's studio and accepted the work he made there in lieu of rent. So from 1915 to 1923 Duchamp was able to concentrate on producing "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even," a novel and complex work now permanently installed, with the rest of the collection donated by the Arensbergs, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Large Glass, as it is popularly known, consists of two transparent pieces of glass inlaid with metal and split by a frame. The top half is the realm of the untouchable virgin bride, while the bottom is populated by her rejected male suitors. Though some of the forms are depicted in perspective normally used to give the illusion of deep space, the transparency of the field frustrates any attempts to perceive the three-dimensional illusion on which pictorial space is based. Looking through rather than at the mechanistic images fixed in the glass is a jolting experience for the viewer. While it was being installed, the glass was cracked, an element of chance Duchamp accepted. For many years, the Large Glass drew visitors attracted to its enigmatic images and startling presence. In 1969, a year after Duchamp died, it was joined by the even more mysterious "Étant Donnés," now the object of a fascinating and thorough scholarly show. Organized by Michael Taylor, the extensive exhibition documents with hundreds of objects the genesis and production of the multimedia assemblage that occupied Duchamp, in secret, for the last 20 years of his life. "Étant Donnés" can be viewed only through two peepholes drilled into a weathered wooden door. Planning for its transfer from his studio, Duchamp left precise and detailed instructions for how to put the elements of the peepshow back together. Forcing the viewer to become a conscious voyeur, the work defines the act of vision as a furtive private experience—the very opposite of the collective viewing of today's blockbuster exhibitions. Because the contents of the diorama can be seen only through the two peepholes, the stereoscopic effect is like the 3-D effects popular in today's animated movies. The experience is hallucinatory not only because of this effect, but also because of what Duchamp has chosen to present. In the landscape collaged together from photographs, there is a gleaming, churning little motorized waterfall, which we perceive to be in the far distance because of its scale. Closer to us is a nude woman lying on her back spread-eagled on a bunch of twigs and brush, her exposed genitals spotlighted by the lamp she holds up. The raised arm calls to mind the torch of the Statue of Liberty, reminding us that Duchamp became an American citizen in 1954. Scholars and puzzle buffs have been decoding the hidden messages and puns in "Étant Donnés" for 40 years, producing a library's worth of literature. The work is a ricocheting assortment of esoteric illusions and allusions. Yet at the same time it rivets the general public because it resembles nothing so much as the sensational crime scenes that make up so much of TV programming today. Indeed it has been suggested that the macabre vision Duchamp constructed was based on the notorious and still-unsolved murder of the girl known as the "Black Dahlia," whose body was found in Los Angeles dumped in the grass in a pose similar to that of Duchamp's creepy nude. Although Duchamp had begun accumulating elements he used in "Étant Donnés" earlier, the sensational murder was making headlines when he returned from a rendezvous in Paris with his lover Maria Martins, a seductive Brazilian Surrealist sculptor whose body was the model of the torso Duchamp cast and assembled in "Étant Donnés." One thing is certain: Duchamp knew how to get attention by creating mysteries so compelling that they continue to generate speculation and interpretation. At the same time, his last work provides a frisson for the general public as well. No one who sees "Étant Donnés" will ever forget the experience. Like the Large Glass, "Étant Donnés" rejects the illusionism of painting to create unique optical experiences, and it is also an obsessive work of painstaking artifice. Since it can never be moved, nor photographed in its entirety, it requires a trip to Philadelphia to see Duchamp's strange, disturbing chef- d'oeuvre and all the works, paraphernalia and processes that led up to its creation. It is a worthwhile excursion. Marcel Duchamp: Étant Donnés Philadelphia Museum of Art Through Nov. 29

Monday, September 21, 2009

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Cross to Bare.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Friday, September 18, 2009

Thursday, September 17,2009

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Wallace Stevens and Dennis Barone.

An Ordinary Evening

His house is empty when
He arrives--empty and
Quiet and large. Perhaps,

It is too large for one man
And two women. From
The window of his study

He can look toward the town
He travels to each morning
And returns each night.

It is winter and the slope of
His yard, so green six months
Ago, is now awash in white,

Patterned slight by the paws
Of the neighbor's cat. Of the
Garden nothing remains but

The dried out sticks of roses
Trimmed low to the ground
And protruding some above the

Snow. He sits in his study
And thinks of the green of May
And red of June. He awaits

The return of his daughter and
The start of his dinner,
Hearty, he hopes, and hot. He

Dreams the sound of her feet
Upon the stairs, but realizes
That if he has fallen asleep he

Is no awake for she has entered
His room. He smiles,
Stretching forth his hands,

Hands that she steps forward and
Holds. He remembers how
He used to write to her mother

When he went to such distant places
As Greensboro and Elsie stayed
Here at home to guard the fort,

As they used joke. Holly pulls
Slightly and he stands, shaky
At first, yet, recalling

The hikes he took last spring.

~by Dennis Barone
"Visiting Wallace, Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Wallace Stevens"
University of Iowa Press, 2009

September 15

Nadine. Nadine's Facebook page was deleted because she is not regarded as an entity. She wrote in her Blog, The Cat Nadine.

Monday, September 14

Yes. At the vet's office today, I ran into an acquaintance who I had not seen since I moved out of Eastworks. She said she had recently left her old job and started a new one. She said she was tired of always saying "No" to customers and was happy to be employed where she always has the opportunity to say "Yes."

Sunday, September 13

Sunset.

Saturday, September 12

Mattoon Street Arts Festival.

Friday, September 11, 2009

Remembering. My father at Twin Tower Memorial in New Jersey.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Seeing. I took Nadine outside late in afternoon. She poked around the flower bed. I photographed the zinnia and was again reminded of Arthur Dove's watercolors.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Freedom. Nadine looks forward everyday to going outside. If either Susan or I walk any where near a door, she runs to the spot. And when she is not anticipating the opening of a door, she sits near us, more so me, or so it seems, when I am working at my desk and she meows and meows and meows. It is the "meow" not of hunger but of desire to be out in the jungle of the yard; the jungle calls to her. Her jungle. Meow.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

The Old Ways.

Wild Geese 

You do not have to be good. 
You do not have to walk on your knees 
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. 
You only have to let the soft animal of your body 
love what it loves. 
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. 
Meanwhile the world goes on. 
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain 
are moving across the landscapes, 
over the prairies and the deep trees, 
the mountains and the rivers. 
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, 
are heading home again. 
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, 
the world offers itself to your imagination, 
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place 
in the family of things.

~Mary Oliver

Monday, September 7, 2009

Change. I have been wanting to combine my two websites for years: Birch Lane and Bruce Barone. It was too costly to make changes at the most recent Bruce Barone site; wanting to incorporate a Blog or Journal and deleting some of the Photo Tabs so I decided today to simply delete the site and build one myself.