Heian Shrine, Kyoto, Japan

Yesterday I went on a marathon walk around Kyoto, a city full of shrines and their gardens.  Unlike nearly every other city in Japan, Kyoto was fortunate not to be firebombed to ashes by the U.S. during WW2 (they don't teach us that in school).  The Shinto Heian Shrine is relatively young, built in 1895 to commemorate the 1100th year since the founding of Kyoto.  It has numerous buildings all painted vermilion, a color that was apparently first derived from the application of clay (see more about vermilion below).  It also has a garden so beautiful you walk around in a daze of blissful revery---it was designed by Ogawa Jihei (1860-1933), one of Japan's great gardeners. 

the main gate

Had Monet been here he would have called for his paints.

Note all the Japanese women carrying parasols!  It was in the high 80's. 

a prayer "shrub"

Stepping stones that form the tail of a dragon.  The island forms the dragon's body.

These rope decorations hang over doorways in many of the shrines and are called shimenawa (the rope) and shime (the strips of white paper).  They are meant to ward off evil spirits and the white paper symbolizes purity in the Shinto faith.  DIY?

the inherent duality of life?

From wikipedia:  Vermilion, when found naturally occurring, is an opaque orangish red pigment,  used since antiquity, originally derived from the powdered mineral cinnabar. Chemically, the pigment is mercuric sulfide,  HgS, and like many mercury compounds it is toxic. Its name is derived from the French vermeil which was used to mean any red dye, and which itself comes from vermiculum, a red dye made from the insect Kermes vermilio.  Today, vermilion is most commonly artificially produced by reacting mercury with molten sulfur. Most naturally produced vermilion comes from cinnabar mined in China, giving rise to its alternative name of China red.

Heian's Torii, one of the largest in Japan, is the traditional gateway to a Shinto shrine marking the transition between the sacred and the profane.

Banksy, Where's the Gift Shop?

I had the pleasure of seeing Banksy's new movie Exit Through the Gift Shop a few days ago.  Banksy is a British street artist who is well-known for his graffiti take on anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-establishment themes.

I think if William Morris had lived today he would have been a big fan of the anonymous and pseudonymous Banksy.  He shared the same strong anti-war, anti-capitalistic views, views which of course led Morris to become one of the founding father's of the British socialist movement.

Exit Through the Gift Shop is one of those movies that stays with you for days afterward as you try to unravel and decipher the message and meaning of the "story".....specifically, was it all an elaborate joke and if so, on whom?

As we left the movie, my friend and I both wondered "Where was the gift shop?" ---it was never shown or mentioned in movie (Banksy escaping museum guards, for instance?).  Upon reflection, an obvious interpretation is that Banksy is commenting on the commercialization of art and how it is all a large money-making undertaking that ultimately corrupts the point of the art.  Go to the gift shop and get your William Morris mug or Monet umbrella....take home your bit of kitsch and leave your dollars, euros, pesos, yen behind.  But then I thought maybe it goes even deeper, and that Mr Brain Wash's one-man show was the gift shop.  For a street artist, the world is the "museum".  Maybe Banksy set up MBW in this large space reproducing hundreds of kitschy spin-offs of real art, and was able to so perfectly manipulate the LA art scene that he had hundreds (thousands?) of people lining up in the "museum" (outside) to exit through the gift shop where they bought the derivative crap.  

I realize you can't really follow this without seeing the movie but I'm still left wondering if MBW (Thierry) was a willing, perfect, unwitting pawn of Banksy's or an integral co-conspirator?  Thierry seemed so utterly and genuinely daft it is hard for me to imagine anyone being that good an actor.
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Wall and Piece is an entertaining retrospective of Banksy's work.  My teenage son loved it.

Have you ever walked through spider silk?

Along a sidewalk?  In the woods?  In your garden shed?  It feels a bit sticky, is translucent.  Now imagine that thread is still sticky but is gold----it is from a Nephila madagascariensis, a female Golden Orb spider from Madagascar.  And imagine you had dozens of people collecting a million of these spiders from around the city and countryside over the course of four years.  And then another few dozen spider-techs "milking" the spider silk for a few hours before releasing her, the spider, back into the wild.  And then you took hundreds of individual silk strands and twisted them to make a single thread.  And then you wove those golden threads into a cultural tapestry 11 feet by 4 feet in dimension......

Wouldn't you then have something of singular and mystical beauty!?!

You can see this one of a kind shawl at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City-----and watch a video about its story here.

From the MNH website:  "This unique textile was created drawing on the legacy of a French missionary, Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar in the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué worked to collect and weave spider silk but with limited success, and no surviving textile is now known to exist. Previously, the only known spider-silk textile of note was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, and it was subsequently lost."

Which brings us to the second episode of my fabulous new TV show, America's Most Wanted: Arts and Craft Edition......in case you missed the first episode, click here.

M. H. Baillie Scott, Art and Soul

Baillie Scott was one of the most well-known architects of the British Arts and Crafts movement, along with Voysey, Gimson, and Mackintosh, and most certainly studied the work of William Morris.  In 1906, in his early forties, he published his opus, Houses and Gardens, which carefully and systematically laid out his philosophy of architecture and interior design, complete with dozens of drawings, floorplans, photographs, and his own watercolor paintings (some of which are reproduced here, all click to enlarge).

I particularly enjoyed this passage from the book's Introduction:  "And so the art of building as practised in modern times is not so much an Art as a disease.  In the early stages of the Victorian era it took the form of a pallid leprosy.  Nowadays, it has become a scarlet fever of red brick, and has achieved a development of spurious Art expressed in attempts to achieve the picturesque, which in its smirking self-consciousness has made the earlier candid ugliness appear an almost welcome alternative.  There is no town or village but is being gradually disfigured by this plague of modern building, and one has almost forgotten that houses have been and may yet be an added beauty rather than a disfigurement on the land."

Nothing like a good rant, eh?  I am reminded of all the quarter acre lots across our country upon which the ugly McMansions of our day have been built.  Will these houses seem much more attractive, even sought after, a century from now?  The leprosy and scarlet fever Baillie Scott alludes to above are now our gorgeous old Queen Anne, Italianate, Stick Style, and Mansard Victorians.  Does time heal all wounds, architectural or otherwise?

(Dan, thanks for lending me this beautiful book.) 

 

The House as True Romance, M. H. Baillie Scott

From Houses and Gardens, Arts and Craft Interiors, Chapter 17 - The Soul of the House, published 1906,  by M. H. Baillie Scott:

"A house too may possess that strange inscrutable quality of the True Romance.  Not shallow, showy, and pretentious as most modern mansions are, but full of a still, quiet earnestness which seems to lull and soothe the spirit with promises of peace.  Such a house is the greatest achievement possible to the art of man better than the greatest picture, because it is not a dream alone, but the dream come true - a constant daily influence and delight."

This quote reminded me of two previous posts, the first one about Edward Burne-Jones's view of art as a dream of something too impossibly beautiful to be real and the second post about "gesamtkunstwerk", a perfect synthesis of all the arts.  Having a Burne-Jones painting in your Baillie-Scott house would make for good gesamtkunstwerk I reckon.

 detail of stair risers in house above

 

The house photographs are from a beautiful book, Baillie Scott, The Artistic House by Diane Haigh.  I'll write more about Baillie Scott, and his interior work, in a day or two.

Green and blue never looked so good together....

 Circe Invidiosa by J. W. Waterhouse, 1892

(in the Art Gallery of South Australia)

One of the first images from the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory, launched in February on a five year mission to study Sun's magnetic field (false color image, blues and greens above 1 million kelvin in temperature).

Perseus and Andromeda, 1876, Edward Burne-Jones

 (in the Art Gallery of South Australia)

Aurora borealis over Eyjafjallajokull volcano/glacier in Iceland....possibly even caused by the solar flares seen in sun picture above?  Photo by Albert Jakobsson.

Ten Things I Love About Australia

Back home to New England....will greatly miss....

10.  Ordering coffee --- short black, flat white, long black, etc.

9.  Being called "mate" by a guy with an aussie accent.

8.  Outback vehicles and 4-wheel-driving.

7.  Kangaroos, emus, and all the other wacky and colorful animals.

6.  That every town, no matter how small, seems to have a museum of local history.

5.  Old stone buildings with corrugated iron roofs.

4.  Time zones that are 30 minutes and 45 minutes off the hour.

3.  Desolate beaches.

2.  Aboriginal art.

1.  The OUTBACK!   Hope to be back soon......

Vernacular Architecture of Australia

Favorite Minerals of the South Australian Museum, Adelaide

Imagine my glee upon seeing this piece of the Mundrabilla Meteorite as the very first thing upon entering Adelaide's South Australian Museum!  You may remember it, and Mundrabilla, from this earlier post.  A fellow nerd pointed out later that I should have put a pencil down next to it for scale----it is about the size of a large coffee table, maybe just under two meters across.  It is an iron meteorite and this piece weighs about 2500kg.  It is one of the largest and most famous meteorites in the world.

While this is kind of like a librarian sorting books by color, it is so much more aesthetically pleasing than sorting by, say, lattice structure or chemical composition.  I'm sure this display has inspired many a budding geologist.

Amorphous silica in main stairwell.  Always beautiful.