Dali House

Wangechi Mutu’s “Untitled”, 2003

History’s parade finds its way to cut-up specialist Wangechi Mutu by way of dada, of course, with Hannah Höch pointing out the path ahead and warning that it’s not always downhill. The course is littered with exquisite corpses.

Collage has always struck me as the poor country cousin in the art tribe, still at school and with no hope of ever actually graduating and joining the family business. I think that’s why the dadaists embraced it: It was a geeky, clumsy sort of art, more Anyman artisanship in fact, so it suited their anti-art ambitions. Plus, it involved piecing together bits of newspapers, snapshots and mementoes — putting the mundane on a pedestal — and left room for subconscious selection. And it could be done fast.

Hannah Höch’s “Grotesque”

Everyone keeps scrapbooks at some time or another, and In Europe at the time, collage was something your mother might do with her favourite pictures from the weekend magazine. Like the surrealists’ rounds of exquisite corpse, collage was something to be “played” in the parlour after supper.

But I still love collage, the big lug, and both of these women are very interesting, especially side by side — a German who, like Picasso, borrowed African art’s backwardness to push Western art forward; and an African native who cadges urban Americana to leap oceans and kick down social borders.

Back in Nairobi where Mutu was born, and in the other big African centres, contemporary artists like Bill Bidjocka, Odhiambo Siangla and Lubaina Himid have found a measure of fame, but Westerners keep asking their agents if they can get some tribal antiquities instead. These new fellows, the buyers presume, are just copying Modigliani, aren’t they?

Below, “Complete Prolapsus of the Uterus” from 2004, chiding the typical gender bias of yesteryear’s medical diagrams.

No wonder Mutu shifted to the West ASAP, albeit to study anthropology along with art at Yale. It worked out fine: Now about 36, she’s great at bending minds with her collages of women made from Mylar, flourishes of deco paint and a lot of thoughtfully chosen magazine clippings (National Geographic being an obvious source). From a distance it looks like you’re in for some eye candy, but up close Mutu’s exotic beauties turn out to be gargoyles on a feminist mission, some armoured, some haemorrhaging body parts or dragging around prosthetics.

“Mask”, 2006, archaic sculpture and modern tease.

Goddesses and glamour models there are, but they’ve clearly just been released from hospital following a horrendous accident. Their skin is inhuman and they’re at least partially bionic, not in a good way.

They are very much science fiction, but as we always discover once we get there, the future isn’t clean and stable — it’s a junkyard of the past. Our robots aren’t going to be young, curvy, soft-skinned Japanese handmaidens; they’ll be brides of Frankenstein, with serious issues that, like the glitches in Windows software, refuse to be resolved. See the rest.

As published by Britain’s Daily Express newspaper, photos taken over the years by American storm chasers Mike Hollingshead and Eric Nguyen.

“Sexy Bar” by Chris Coles

“I Cover the Waterfront” was Max Miller’s 1932 book about his gritty turn as a docklands reporter for the San Diego Sun. The title told you that nothing but trouble was ahead. Chris Coles covers the Bangkok waterfront, though not (yet) its awful Klong Toei Port. His beat is the expatriate neon triangle — Soi Cowboy, Nana Plaza and Patpong Road — where the wildlife gathers at the waterholes in the cool of the night.

I used to haunt those places, but after awhile it got to be like that scene in “Chinatown” where Jack Nicholson has had pretty much enough of banging his head against walls trying to make sense of things and Joe Mantell tells him, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

“Isan Nightclub Singer”

Coles, originally from Maine, formerly a passenger aboard Swahili trading dhows among Africa’s Bajuni Islands, once of Australia and Greenland, now bounds between Bangkok and LA, and his shield against the psychic ravages that the Big Mango’s nightlife imposes is being able to paint it up in all the lurid colours it deserves. Art as a defence mechanism is not unknown.

Chris got in touch with me about the January Dali House post “Politics and the profanity of disbelief”, regarding Warthit Sembut and Anupong Chanthorn’s run-ins with Thailand’s guardians of the moral fibre.

“There are so many creative people in Thailand and sometimes they just get stifled by the Ministry of Culture types,” Chris wrote. ” Too many pretty paintings of the countryside, passive Buddhas and pale imitations of modern concept art and not enough paintings like the ones of the monks with a real edge and power.”

“Pedophile Priest”

Chris Coles’ paintings are not (usually) pretty. He proudly waves the expressionist flag that first appeared over the mounds of bloody corpses in World War I, when German artists reacted in horror to the efficiency of their own country’s fighting machine and laid their emotions out on canvas. The impressionists could have their damned sunlight and keep on living in a dream. This was realism, scarred and scared and howling.

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See the rest.

A few days after Henri Matisse came teetering into Gertrude Stein’s apartment in Paris in that 1907 spring with the great lump of a sculpted African torso he’d just bought, making Picasso’s eyes bug out even more than usual, Pablo dragged his pal André Derain over to the Trocadéro Museum of Ethnology, as the Museum of Man at the Palais de Chaillot was then known. It had a 30-year-old collection of the African stuff. It still has (along with René Descartes’ brain, for some reason), but back then the knickknacks of colonialism were all mouldy and neglected, and the Spaniard was miffed in the must.

“I was so depressed that I would have chosen to leave immediately,” Picasso recalled, “but I forced myself to stay.” And stay he did, elevating the centuries-old tribal “objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose” into the most modern of all European art forms. Matisse, Braque and Modigliani kept pace with him, re-moulding the rough-hewn angularity into a new way of seeing the world … but what happened to Derain?

André Derain was 27 when Pablo pulled him into the dusty Trocadéro archives. He hailed from Chatou on the Île-de-France, and was going to be an engineer, but then veered into the less reasonable side of design. He took painting classes at the Académie Carrière and sketched up and down the Parisian Seine and at the Louvre, where in 1899 he met an old classmate, Georges Florentin Linaret, who was by then studying under Gustave Moreau, as was Matisse.

To their extraordinary experiments, Derain brought his admiration for Cézanne and, following the 1901 tribute exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune, of Van Gogh. At this show Derain introduced Matisse to Maurice de Vlaminck, with whom he was by then sharing a studio in Chatou in the western suburbs, where the impressionists once conspired at the Maison Fournaise (it’s on the same street as Dali House).

Derain was drafted for a three-year stint with the army, and painted little during that time. Only two of his works have been ascribed to 1903: “The Soldiers’ Ball of Suresnes” (detail here), done while he was on leave, and “Self-portrait in the Studio”, now at the National Gallery of Australia.

The latter was a fast look in the mirror between bugle calls, but thoughtfully composed around flashes of bright hue. Compare that with “Portrait of the Artist” (Minneapolis Institute of Arts) from about a decade later, on the right, and you’ll see where this post is heading.

When Derain was through with marching, Matisse — who found him delightfully open-minded and a solid, quick worker — was ready to talk his parents out of the engineering nonsense altogether and got him into the Académie Julian. Things proceeded apace, a career blossomed, and by 1905 Derain was able to sell everything in his studio to Ambroise Vollard, and he and Matisse spent the summer in Collioure on the overbright southern coast, where they went completely bonkers with the colours. See the rest.

Dali’s “Portrait of Juan de Pareja Fixing a String of his Mandolin” from 1960 is sometimes referred to as “Maelstrom”, although, suspiciously, only the online poster shops seem to use the alternative title. It’s also typical of the whirlpool that Dali’s output has become that you’ll come across reproductions of this painting in three or four different hues, with the get-cheap-prints-here websites favouring Hallowe’en orange. The website of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where the original hangs, has it in greyish brown, as seen in the detail below. The version above comes from Olga’s ABC Gallery.

Here Dali is honouring Diego Velázquez, borrowing the palace-official-in-a-doorway from his feverishly adored 1656 “The Maids of Honour” (”Las Meninas”). Dali has him watching a commotion of a different order, and also utilises the subject of Velázquez’s “Portrait of Juan Pareja” from 1650. Pareja’s hand is at the lower centre, with a tack in the thumb. His head is in profile, with Velázquez’s quartered easel forming the bridge of the nose and the princess and her attendants his goatee.

I’m going to have a proper look at Velásquez soon, but this post is about maelstroms. Shown below is “Maelstrom” by Scottish-born Canadian Ruth Palmer.

I’m still puzzled about this notion of getting to the centre of the earth (here’s an early Dorseyland post about one hilarious plan). Is it a womb thing? Nothing to be ashamed of if so, seeing as how visionaries like Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne wanted to get back inside too.

The latter took his cues from the former, and even pushed his characters into the unknown abyss pit from a Scandinavian locale, as Poe had done, although Verne reckoned on an Icelandic volcano rather than a Norwegian whirlpool.

No one outside of Norway had heard of a maelstrom before Poe (read about his curious demise at Dorseyland) published “A Descent into the Maelstrom” in 1841. The Nordic word came from the old Dutch maalstroom, a grinding stream. It was Poe who parlayed little-known accounts into a convincing, culture-spanning argument that a maelstrom was a whirlpool, not a cranky creek.

By 2007 Disney buccaneer ships were fighting it out in the maw of a monstrous maelstrom in “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End”. The picture below comes from the 1997 TV miniseries “The Odyssey”

Ten years after Poe’s short story, Herman Melville had Captain Ahab vowing to chase Moby-Dick around the world, right “round the Norway Maelström” if he had to. Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”, published in 1870, characterised it as a “whirlpool from which no vessel ever escapes”.

It’s not that bad, really. The Moskstraumen, as it’s properly known, is fairly powerful, but it’s just a tidal current. It’s probably never sucked down a ship in its life. Don’t blame Poe — he’d been up all night reading other people’s “journalism” on the Lofoten Islands Moskstraumen. We’ll have a look ourselves in a moment.

As viewed on Google Earth, This is the scene of “the Sicilian Charybdis”, the two-mile-wide mouth of the Strait of Messina, with a prominence called Scylla shown in the foreground. They catch a lot of fish here, even swordfish, but the daily double high and low tides are barely noticeable today. They may well have been more powerful in Homer’s era. An earthquake shifted the sea floor in 1783 and calmed things down, though right up to the 19th century they could still turn around a heavy ship. See the rest.