Dali House

Continued from Part 1.

Wikipedia deserves a bit of credit for linking Mario Irarrázabal’s hands to J Seward Johnson Jr’s sculpture near Washington, “The Awakening”, a five-piece assemblage representing a giant embedded in the soil. The tallest part, the right arm, is nearly six metres in length.

Johnson erected it during the International Sculpture Conference Exhibition in 1980. It was on Hains Point, in view of what became Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport across the Potomac River, and sat there, occasionally half-submerged in floodwaters as well, for 27 years.

Then in 2008 the National Park Service figured it had better tell “The Awakening” to move along, since it only had a temporary permit. They hauled it to National Harbor in nearby Prince George’s County, Maryland.

In the meantime, someone bought it for $750,000. It’s kind of nice when an individual comes along and buys a monument and then lets it remain in public view. All art should be so lucky.

That’s assuming that everyone likes the monument. Here’s another “abandoned” piece from Artificial Owl: the bust of Ferdinand Marcos, the Philippines’ leading thug for 33 years.

Those 33 years have way too many bad memories for many Filipinos, so on December 30, 2002, some of them blew the concrete visage to pieces. Tellingly, no one’s bothered to initiate repairs.

Marcos, the country’s unopposable president from 1965 until People Power growled too loudly in 1988, figured his giant face would look swell sitting alongside the incredibly winding Marcos Highway he’d built through the hills between the cities of Pugo and Baguio.

An indigenous tribe called the Ibalois happened to be living on the spot where Marcos wanted his face, so they were moved, but not before slaughtering a water buffalo and dousing the site with its blood.

Did they come back in 2002 and blow up the statue? Maybe, but treasure hunters are also suspected. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos had millions of dollars stashed all over the world. This could well have been one hiding place.

Marcos’ head could see the South China Sea from its mountain perch. Now it can’t see anything because its eyes were amputated with high explosives. Obviously it’s an even better monument now than it ever was.

Of course the history of monuments and explosives reached its culmination over the course of several weeks in March 2001, when Afghanistan’s Taliban government used dynamite to try and scrape an alien religion from its constituents’ memory banks. See the rest.

The website Artificial Owl has an interesting page on man-made buildings and other structures that have been abandoned for various reasons. Some are trite and quite justifiably left behind, others have been evacuated for scary reasons, and some aren’t “abandoned” at all. They just feel that way.

One of the most haunting of the last group of sites is a work of art: Mario Irarrázabal’s “Hand of the Desert” (”La mano del desierto”), which is way out in the middle of nowhere in Chile’s mountain-cloistered Atacama Desert.

The 11-metre-tall iron and cement sculpture was unveiled 1,100 metres above sea level in March 1992, which was the same month I uprooted from Canada and moved to Thailand, and Thailand — if you dig a hole straight the Earth — is directly opposite the northern coast of Chile.

Is that stretching too far for a personal connection?

Anyway, the Internet loves pictures of Irarrázabal’s giant hands in Chile, Uruguay, Spain and Italy, but little is offered about the artist, or the fact that his inspiration is largely Catholic. I was raised Catholic too, but —

Okay, I’ll drop that one cold. See the rest.

What an extraordinary thing: the auction houses are still finding paintings of poor old Mazeppa and people are still buying them. Sotheby’s has this one by Thomas Woodward (1801-52) up for sale … and not for much, either.

I wonder what the owners of these artworks tell people when they’re asked, “Hey, what the hell is with this picture of a guy strapped to a horse?”

The back story’s a great one, of course, but it’s rather complicated. Maybe the owners just advise curious guests to look it up at Dali House, where the tale’s already been told.

Thomas Woodward was renowned for his paintings of noble steeds, so it came as a shock when he showed up at the Royal Academy in 1828 with this picture.

The art crowd of the day would nevertheless have been familiar with Byron’s tiresome poem “Mazeppa”, about the Ukrainian Cossack caught messing with a court official’s wife and being given suitably equine punishment.

Woodward was zeroing in on the bit in the poem that goes, “They snort, they foam, neigh, swerve aside / And backward to the forest fly.”

Hilarious. Still wouldn’t want it on my wall.

This post is about a dream. But first, a short film starring Kiki de Montparnasse, who at 14 began her career as a naked model for every artist in Paris back when the 1900s were young. She had some wonderful dreams, not always while sleeping. The clip is from “l’Etoile de Mer” by Man Ray, her long-time boyfriend. Read more about Kiki in this post.

Finished? Let’s proceed.

Google Earth only poked a big enough hole in Madrid’s Prado Museum to see a few paintings, so it’s not surprising that those few — suddenly seen startlingly up close by millions of people — generated a fair bit of natter online.

One of these paintings, now viewable on Google Earth as closely as any professional restorer has seen it, is “Jacob’s Dream” by Jusepe de Ribera, dated 1639. Unfortunately some of the talk about it on the Internet has been as wildly presumptuous as much of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim interpretations of Jacob’s original dream itself.

In fact those opposing interpretations are being repeated now in the context of this painting’s fresh “availability”.

What was Jacob dreaming about? Angels running up and down a ladder connecting Heaven and Earth, everyone agrees. Ah, but what does it signify? It depends on your peacher.

The Jews, who owned the copyright to the story to begin with, were magnanimous. The angels represented people’s souls descending to and ascending from their bodies, which, yes, could imply reincarnation. (That’s going to be a problem for the Christians.)

Or, said the Jewish scholars, the angels are Heaven’s stevedores, hoisting souls on board. Or, hey, maybe Jacob was just dreaming about life’s ups and downs.

The Christians saw no reason for ambiguity: This is obviously a sign from God, right there in the Bible, that Jesus saves. The Muslims said that’s right, except for the part about Jesus — the ladder clearly belongs to Muhammed. See the rest.

I hate to generalise about a nationality, but the Russians are awfully stoic in their art, as in politics. So Ivan Vladimirovich Kosmin’s “Water Spirit” makes a fun change.

Others would seem to agree: Sotheby’s New York is expecting to get as much as $350,000 for it at its “Russian Art” auction later this month.

The salespeople admit that little is known about Ivan Kosmin (1882-1973), other than he was born to “peasants” in a village outside Moscow, and attended the “prestigious” Penza Art College through 1909, then the St Petersburg Academy until 1912.

He did very well in school, Sotheby’s says. Yes, he did!