Tag: Auden

Islands of Safety and Ironic Points of Light

Posted on by Mark DeLong

by Mark R. DeLong

1.

A screenshot from My Dinner with André (1981). Two men sit conversing at a table in a fancy restaurant. We see the balding head of Wally (Wallace Shawn) from the back and the face of Andr´(André Gregory). André is holding his hand up to emphasize a point of discussion.
Screenshot from My Dinner with André (1981).

Roger Ebert labeled it the one movie “entirely devoid of clichés.” “It should be unwatchable,” he said, “and yet those who love it return time and again, enchanted.” It was My Dinner with André, which I watched with my wife and a couple of friends at the Carolina Theatre in Durham, North Carolina, back in 1981 when the movie was released. Years later, I picked up a used VHS of the film and baffled my children with it.

One scene struck me from the first viewing, and my memory has returned to it especially in recent months. Toward the end of their dinner, Wally (Wallace Shawn) and André (André Gregory) discuss matters of preserving culture—or perhaps, more accurately, André steers the conversation through his wild and impossible adventures in new age-y communities, recounting events that would defy the laws of physics or at least stretch our imaginations.1For instance, a community, “Findhorn,” that built “a hall of meditation” seating hundreds of people with a “roof that would stay on the building and yet at the same time be able to fly up at night to meet the flying saucers.” Findhorn actually exists, though the architecture that André describes was fanciful, to say the least. The fascination with flying saucers was real, though, in the 1960s, when a leader of the Findhorn community felt that extraterrestrials could be contacted via telepathy and the community built a landing strip for the saucers.

One of the leaders of such a group, André says, was “Gustav Björnstrand”—a fictional character, not a real “Swedish physicist” as André claims—who is trying to create

a new kind of school or a new kind of monastery … islands of safety where history can be remembered and the human being can continue to function, in order to maintain the species through a Dark Age. In other words, we’re talking about an underground, which did exist during the Dark Ages in a different way, among the mystical orders of the church. And the purpose of this underground is to find out how to preserve the light, life, the culture. How to keep things living.

Wally listens, entranced but not convinced that André’s unhinged stories make sense. He’s “just trying to survive,” he says, and takes pleasure in small comforts: dinner with his girlfriend, reading Charlton Heston’s autobiography, sleeping under a warm electric blanket on cold New York nights. “Even if I did feel the way you do—you know, that there’s no possibility for happiness now,” an exasperated Wally replies to André, “then, frankly, I still couldn’t accept the idea that the way to make life wonderful would be to totally reject Western civilization and to fall back to a kind of belief in some kind of weird something.” Read more »

Footnotes

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    For instance, a community, “Findhorn,” that built “a hall of meditation” seating hundreds of people with a “roof that would stay on the building and yet at the same time be able to fly up at night to meet the flying saucers.” Findhorn actually exists, though the architecture that André describes was fanciful, to say the least. The fascination with flying saucers was real, though, in the 1960s, when a leader of the Findhorn community felt that extraterrestrials could be contacted via telepathy and the community built a landing strip for the saucers.

Monday, May 3, 2010

On being in Rome: visiting de Chirico’s home and Richard Serra at Gagosian

Posted on by Sue Hubbard

Inv. 138 Sue Hubbard

It was the week after Easter in Rome and the sun was out. The Spanish steps were heaving with tourists and ice cream sellers. Algerian immigrants hawked cheap leather goods. For most the steps simply provided a place to rest; as one ample lady from Texas put it: “ok, so I’ve seen them now, is that it?” Clearly she wasn’t impressed. Relaxing with their maps and bottles of water wondering what to do next few seemed to realise that just yards away from where they were sitting the 26 year old Keats had died a horrible death from tuberculosis (the wonderful museum was practically empty when we visited) let alone that one of the 20th century’s most puzzling artists, Giorgio de Chirico had lived over the road.

The Giorgio and Isa de Chirico Foundation was founded in 1986 by Isabella Far de Chirico, the painter’s widow, who in 1987 donated 24 of her husband’s works to the Italian state.Upon her death, in November 1990, the Foundation inherited the painter's apartment in the Piazza di Spagna – the 17thcentury Palazzetto dei Borgognoni – where he had lived and worked until his death in 1978. In November 1998 it opened as a museum filled with his late paintings, drawings, sculpture and lithographs, along with manuscripts and photographs.

It is a strange place,a haven of quiet above the crowded street below. I had expected something rather more bohemian from this ‘metaphysical’ painter, but found, instead, an airy bourgeois apartment full of antique furniture, comfortable sofas and rugs. Not what I had predicted from this one time friend of Apollinaire, Picasso, and that arch surrealist André Breton, who had hailed de Chirico’s early dream-like cityscapes as pivotal within the development of Surrealism. Most odd was the tiny monk-like bedroom, Spartan in its decor except for a few books, with its narrow childlike bed under a white cover, where the ‘maestro’ slept across the hall from his Polish second wife, the intellectually and emotionally powerful, Isabella Pakszxwer, whose rather large double bed sported a flamboyant red counterpane.

The enthusiastically hailed period – the pittura metafisica – on which de Chirico’s reputation is based, lasted until around 1918. Then his work changed. Why? The official version is that he was paying homage to the Old Masters of the Renaissance, pitting himself against the greats of art history by going to Florence and studying techniques of tempera and panel painting. As Robert Hughes wrote rather pithily, “he imaged himself to be the heir of Titian”.[1] Denounced by the French avant-garde de Chirico counter-attacked with diatribes on modernist degeneracy signing his work Pictor Optimus (the best painter.) But why should an artist who had written: “It is necessary to discover the demon in all things….to discover the eye in all things – We are explorers ready for new departures,” turn his back on contemporary aesthetic discourses in favour of producing second rate paintings that would not, if it weren’t for the significance of his early work, get a look in within the annals of art history?

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