January 17, 2011

J:

R:

Today I spent not just 30 minutes, but several hours, being creative! Thanks to Martin Luther King Jr. and J. I was able to finally get down to the National Gallery of Art to see the Pre-Raphealite Photography exhibit with MP and JQC.

A brief explanation of my interest in the exhibit is, I think, appropriate here. I am fascinated by Victorian culture, specially in England, mostly because of what follows it. I was asked by a dear friend recently, in a completely bewildered way, and after over 10 years of friendship--"What do you like about the Victorians?!" So here's a round about way of answering her!

I don't actually like the Pre-Raphealites. I find their subject matter to be cloying (and this due to subsequent mass-market reproductions, not ontologically), I find the style to be stilted and stultifying, the colors garish and lifeless. And the whole enterprise idiotically escapist. HOWEVER, following the Victorian explosion of technological change (think: industrial revolution), societal turmoil (think: the move to the city & Freud), theological paucity (think: Charles Dickens), philosophical and political upheaval (think: Marx & Henry Adams), and scientific expansion (think: Darwin & the cult of the catalogue), folks were left with a culturally undercut, but still significant experience of yearning for a real cultural metanarrative: Christianity. Christianity was abandoned because it was made obsolete by these increadibly rapid and radical changes in thinking in the 19th century. Culturally there was a gap though that had to be filled. Enter the Pre-Raphealite movement, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the resurgence of myth. The Brothers Grimm culled their fairytales at this point and Greek, Arthurian, and Romantic myth provided the subject for poetry and art, even design. I believe this is because people were substituting myth for cultural metanarrative in place of Christianity; in less than 75 years reverting culture to pre-Roman European cult--and all this in the midst of Progress.

So, I always jump at the chance to see more into the world of the artists and thinkers who were engaged in these fascinating and tumultuous ideas--to try and experience more viscerally what was sought after. But more particularly (as I think AS Byatt shows elegantly in Possession), that these questions that were felt as so pressing, so crucial, are still the questions facing us today. We are not truly post-modern. We are Modern and jaded--existing within the space of the questions, without seeking the answer.

I love the Victorians for vigorously seeking after truth, even if they failed in their quest. I love that they saw all of creation as open to their investigation. I love their systematic pursuit and lovely cataloguing of it. I love their desire to maintain a coherence of truth. I love that they asked the questions that we should still be asking.

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And so on to the exhibit. As you can tell it was stimulating! The photography was lusciously textured--heeding Ruskin's call to try and achieve as must natural detail as possible, without glossing, romanticizing, or shielding the decay or tangle of Nature. It was exciting to see the progression of photography from when it was officially announced in 1839 in Britain as studies of specific objects to framed shots (using old painting techniques such as foreshortening, perspective, and negative space), to then turning the camera on one another, and creating narrative pastiches.

Even more interesting however was the inclusion by the photography curator of a number of oil and watercolour paintings by the Pre-Raphealites to illustrate how both the photographers and the painters were trying to achieve the Ruskin ideal of naturalism.

The paintings by and large were completely uninteresting visually. There was almost no depth of field because they used as vivid colors in the shadows as they did in direct sunlight. They included "naturalistic" detail in cliffs half a mile away, similar to the rocks in the foreground. Oddly, the painters were including detail that they knew was there, but that they could not actually see. The effect was similar to Klimt or icons which deliberately create backgrounds that merge into pure pattern, with less dynamism.

Two years ago J and I attended a lecture by David Macaulay at the National Building Museum during which he was drawing. One of the things that struck me most was his admonishment, as he was drawing a long arcade (row of columns), that he really only needed to draw two or three of them in detail, the rest he could suggest with several brief lines, and your eye would fill in the rest of the detail. The paintings in the exhibit were exactly contrary to this, and therefore incredibly boring to look at.

There was one exception: the watercolors of Dante Gabriel Rosetti. They were dynamic, provocative, energetic, alluring--stunning.