Outdoor Hour Challenge Blog Carnival - July Newsletter Edition - Sunflowers and More!

Summer nature study is so much fun! There is never any shortage of great topics and this carnival reflects how each family is taking the OHC and making it their own. (If I missed your entry, please email me and let me know and I will add it. The Blog Carnival website had some issues again this month.)

Thanks so much for sharing your nature study.

Make sure to check back tomorrow for the August Newsletter post with fresh ideas for your summer nature study. I will also announce July's giveaway winner in that post. 

July Newsletter Topics

Sunflowers

Kristin shares their mammoth sunflowers with carnival readers in her entry: Jack's Beanstalk May Have Been a Sunflower.  You can also read about and see their huge sunflower seed harvest in her follow-up entry: Harvesting Sunflower Seeds.

Tricia and her children share their sunflower study....their second summer taking a closer look. You can read their entry on their family Hodgepodge blog, Summer Sunflowers.
  
Mary Jo from Seeds of Peace contributes their Nature Study-Sunflowers entry for carnival readers. Her son did a great job with the details on his notebooking page.

Nicole and her daughter did a sunflower study complete with artwork and baking! Read on her blog, Journey to Excellence, their entry, Sunflowers.

Jenny from Grace in Loving Chaos joins the carnival with her entry: Nature Study Sunflowers. 

Bees or Other Insects

Backyard Beauties from Tricia's daughter's perspective is a great entry showing how when our children are trained to see common things in a new way they have gained a whole new window to their own world. My favorite image is the mimosa blossom....now that would be in my nature journal! Thanks for sharing your backyard with carnival readers.

Nicole from One Hook Wonder writes about their experience with Painted Lady butterflies as part of this challenge. My favorite part of the entry is when they release the butterfly and it goes straight to their garden flowers! Perfect ending to the story of the butterfly.

Brandy writes about their Creepy Crawly Critters on her blog Half-a-Hundred Acre Wood.

Tricia and her family had an bee/insect study in their own backyard. Read their entry, Bees and Buzzy Insects, to see how they learned so much about their bees and wasps.

Susan from Learning all the Time shares their July Nature Study: Honeybees entry with carnival readers.Make sure to see their very well done nature journal entries.

Tristan shares their surprise insect study on her blog Our Busy Homeschool: We Play in the Rain and Meet a Furry Friend. What a colorful critter they found...don't miss seeing it!

Nighttime Critters

The HodgePodge family contributes their Nighttime Critters: Flying Squirrels and More entry for carnival readers. They did a fantastic job of learning more about their nighttime visitors.

Ann from Harvest Moon by Hand writes about their Bats/Outdoor Hour Challenge. They went on a bat hunt!

Nicole from One Hook Wonder shares their Night Critters post...complete with a sound recording of their subject. 

Summer Weather Study

Kristin from Broom and Crown shares their entry Tiny Birds and a Blue Tailed Lizard. She tells how they complete their nature study in 110 degree weather.

Tricia shares their Summer Weather entry on her HodgePodge blog. They share one day of cloud observations and end with an art project! 

Potpourri

Angie and her son share their on-going study of the Yellow Pond Lilly using lots of up-close observations and the Handbook of Nature Study. I love the way they learn all aspects of a subject that is right in their own back yard (or lake in this case).

Heather from the Tully Telegraph shares their OHC #3 Green Anoles.  Don't miss reading their entry and seeing the nature journals. I love that each one captures a different aspect of their study. Great example!

A Little Fun With Our Fine Feathered Friends is a wonderful account of Kim's path of nature study. She reflects on her experiences with her older sons and then shows us how things are going with her younger son. Wonderful entry to the carnival! Thanks Kim.

Ann and her daughters share their Clover Study on her blog Harvest Moon By Hand. What an interesting entry covering so many aspects of this everyday plant. She's included some recipes again and some wonderful images. Ann also shares their Summer Cattail Study and their One Small Square Study with carnival readers. One last entry from Anne and her girls shows their wonderful Summer Tree Study, updating from their spring study.

Kristin from Broom and Crown shares a wonderful preschool nature study with carnival readers this time. Check out their entry: What's Under the Dirt. 

Kim writes on A Child's Garden about their Dandelions: A Bilingual Lesson on Plant Study. She used the ideas from the Spring Dandelion Challenge and then added some great activities. Thanks for the great ideas.

Beachcombing- Shark Teeth is another entry from Kim and her blog, A Child's Garden. She shows us how they studied shark's teeth using resources other than the Handbook of Nature Study....I love to see how families take the ideas from the HNS and apply them to their own subjects. Great job.

Serena from Casting Pearls shares their Nesting Robins with carnival readers. She has some beautiful images of the eggs and wonder nature journal examples. Don't miss the update to this entry where they make a positive identification of their nesting bird.

Kim also shares a great bird entry in their post Summer Bird Study: Blue Jays. She shows how their family pulled together a number of resources, including the Handbook of Nature Study, to make their bird study complete.

That completes this edition of the Outdoor Hour Challenge Blog Carnival. I look forward to reading your August entries and seeing how nature study is accomplished in your part of the world. 

Street Art

East London is synonamous with street art - on both "legal" and "illegal" walls. I went on a guided walk with RJ Rushmore who was a mine of information. He also took us to a street art gallery called the Black Rat Project, tucked away under railway arches in Shoreditch. Check out the gallery site and RJ's blog Vandalog.

The James Bond Turning Point

Cause for celebration during senior year was Sean Connery returning as James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever. Dog-like loyalty had inspired my boycott of On Her Majesty's Secret Service for its lacking the real 007, thus years' delay seeing this perhaps best of Bonds. Headed toward an end of high school, I wanted not for certain things to change, even as surely they would, both television and movie-wise. Connery Is Bond, said UA in 1967's You Only Live Twice publicity, making OHMSS all the more a violation of their aesthetic contract with fans (how many others ducked Lazenby in 1969?). Connery being back amounted to restoration of proper order and spiked interest in Diamonds Are Forever.

Our trip to Winston-Salem's opening day, six wedged in and me driving, was 1971 Christmas come early, the Thruway Theatre's holiday attraction held over into a next annum. Already at seventeen was I embarked on nostalgia trips like this and there'd be more at the Thruway two years later when Jack The Giant Killer turned up as a kiddie booking (me again the oldest kiddie there). Movie-going seemed so utterly changed between the mid-sixties and 1971. I'd begun to feel old seeing so much disappear. Double-features first, even at last-stand Liberty, then concessions $oared. Pictures bad or good lingered longer ... no more three changes a week as before. Diamonds Are Forever seemed a lifeline to ways past, though seeing it was to know James Bond and theatres hosting him would never again be the same.

Diamonds Are Forever recently streamed from Netflix. I watched for whatever memories it would bestir from Thruway's forty-year ago opening day. There's no calling this a best of Bonds, except among tastes running toward jokey installments to come. Of these, Diamonds earns laughs most honestly, but whose idea was it to make 007 a figure of fun? I guess 1971 was the point at which camp finally caught up with the series (in hindsight, you wonder why it didn't happen sooner). Certainly Diamonds' success indicated this as direction a public wanted to go. I read at the time how UA offered Connery the moon to come back, which raises another question I've still not got straight ... Was Lazenby fired or did he quit?

The seriousness of OHMSS's ending was not maintained for even a moment of Diamonds Are Forever. A recast Lazenby would've gone about the pre-credit search for Blofeld with far greater intensity than a disengaged Connery visibly aged since You Only Live Twice of four years back. There's a feeling throughout Diamonds of Connery being there purely for cash. He had tired of the part and made no secret of it. Too much compensation had gone to his jowls and midsection. The wit of SC's earlier Bond had become indifference. Still, we were happy to have him back because Connery was, if nothing else, a link to adolescent discovery of James Bond and the glimpse of grown-up-ness that afforded.



Connery Getting Ready To Fall Asleep While Standing Up During Diamonds' Casino Sequence.

There were aspects of Diamonds Are Forever that we knew would date quickly. A precursor to the redneck sheriff who'd contaminate the first two Roger Moores was here, as car chases once played at least moderately straight became stunt driven extravaganzas a network might have animated for Saturday mornings. The Howard Hughes inspired character that was Jimmy Dean was merely two bad ideas among many inappropriate to James Bond, while a homicidal homosexual couple, good for biggest laughs among 1971 viewers, play not so well to heightened 21st century sensibilities.

What Diamonds Are Forever had was tempo. It's like serial chapters wired together and never mind coherence lacking. There must've been hard decisions made going into this one. Surely producers realized that, from here, we'd not take James Bond seriously again. Still, there are fun enough moments in Diamonds to forgive what we'd lose, sort of like eating out on a credit card you know is overdrawn. DAF seems closest to an imagined Bond picture Howard Hawks might have directed: Just give the audience good scenes and don't annoy them too much the rest of the time (if only he had been in charge here!).


There were grosses. Oodles of that. Diamonds was an early occasions I remember Variety talking about a monumental opening weekend. Playboy saluted Bond girl Lana Wood with an extravagant pictorial. She'd later slap-back the franchise writing of an off-set Connery canoodle ... He smelled like the bottom of a lion's cage! ... said Lana. It was tough regarding him the same after that. Someone else talked of SC wandering Vegas casinos during the shoot sans hairpiece and outer-wear appropriate to Bond. Handlers had to hustle him upstairs for a change to avert fan disillusionment (in fact, a lot of tourists didn't even recognize 007).

Sign

Must be very frustrating for the staff at the Museum.

Risk & Experimentation in Video Art: Project 35, Gertrude Contemporary, Fitzroy, Australia.

Text by Emily Bour

Melbourne's icy months present the perfect occasion to nestle in the dark and spend some quality time with Project 35. The new travelling exhibition is a video show, selected by 35 international curators, set up by the Independent Curators International (ICI) to celebrate their 35th Anniversary. ICI is a New York-based organisation, and as the name suggests, they are committed to promoting an international network for curators, having set up over 116 travelling exhibitions in 23 countries.

This show is touring throughout the year in a host of international art spaces. Currently, the show is on at Al Hoash Gallery, East Jerusalem, SPACE Gallery, Portland, Maine and Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York, and the journey will continue as it migrates to a range of geographically disparate lands including Cero Inspiración, Ecuador, Göteborgs Konsthall, Sweden and San Art, Vietnam. This physical dislocation is precisely the foil for contrast, however. There is something inherently connective to know that the work you are privy to in a gallery in Australia, is also being watched and digested by a viewer on the other side of the planet. This, of course, is no new phenomenon. Such cross-cultural interconnectivity happens on a daily basis, with our addictive penchant for information gloriously delivered to us by the net. However, the nature of the experience here is more formal.

Presented across Gertrude Contemporary’s two gallery spaces in four specially designed video projection spaces, these video works offer a diversity of approaches to video making, reflecting varying techniques, exploring a range of ideas and reflecting an enormous breadth of socio-cultural contexts. That being said, Project 35 has no thematic glue. It is organised into four DVD's, each playing 8 to 9 videos. The ad hoc manner may well be a response to the challenge of presenting 8 hours of video art, splitting up the range for a time-starved audience.

In an ideal world, all the works would be watched in their entirety. But some are less watchable than others. For example, Chen Chieh Jen's The Route (2006), a soundless, 20 minute video, is undeniably beautiful. We are initially pulled in by the imagery, but our attention wanes, largely due to our modern disaffection for patience. This should not necessarily be used to quantify its merit, however. Although different in context, compare that to an outside work such as Sleep (1963), Andy Warhol's six-hour video of a man sleeping. Despite its un-watchability, its conceptual roots anchor its place in art history, as with a lot of the works on show.

This form of presentation is vital, in the sense that we are given a choice. Each selection is idiosyncratic, of course, but the democracy of video as a medium is clear. Observe Columbian artist Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz's work: Topic 1: Contemporary Art (2006) that borrows from the DIY, viral video aesthetic. The Latino character Chuleta, is speaking directly to the camera, trying to bridge the gap between the art world and the world like us, like me and you, demystifying terms such as post-modern using colloquial vernacular. It is refreshing, and in her own words: “Yo, it's ill!”

But therein lies the irony. Much of contemporary art is cryptic, and many of those who will come see this show expect to be bemused. Thankfully, some critique this. Mai Abu Eldahab's choice of Guy Ben-Ner’s Berkeley’s Island (1999), leaves us in a position to question the position and role of the artist. Basic in its construction of makeshift sets and lighting, the humorous island placed in the middle of a domestic kitchen is, according to the narrator, “not a metaphor, it is a thing it itself and therefore does not exist.” He holds up a mirror to our expectations, and yes, we scratch our heads willingly. It is thought-provoking, intentional and also, fun.

Australia, regardless of globalisation, is still an island of considerable distance to its neighbours. To have its voice heard on the international art scene requires curatorial strength and insistence, so it is no wonder that the only Australian curator, Alexie Glass-Kantor has chosen local Tracey Moffatt's Other (2009). Of this work, Glass-Kantor says: “Other is rich and diverse, providing a funny, robust, and critical riff on the way ‘the native’ has been portrayed in popular cinema.” As a comment on Australia’s position within the broader global art context, Glass-Kantor’s selection mirrors the tongue-in-cheek nature of Moffatt’s collaged content as she goes on to say, “Other disrupts mild manners by resisting subjugation and not flinching from complexity, often using pre-existing moving images ironically to create an unsettling yet ribald narrative of compromised part.”

The mash up of videos from popular culture archives showcase the way the “native” is portrayed in film. This conversation includes the issue surrounding Aboriginal Australians as well as the universal construction of gender, identity and race, by imagery. It's fast-paced and also a little intimidating, as was the process of curation for Kantor in selecting for such a large project.

There is an abundance of copy/pasting and cross-editing in Project 35. It makes the issues of authorship and copyright seem ever so passé. The nature of the medium has changed the way we look at ownership, undoubtedly so. And in Alice in Wonderland, or Who is Guy Debord? (2003), Robert Cauble literally rips the images from the Disney classic, meticulously re-configuring the narrative, to drive Alice on a search for French Situationist, Guy Debord. It's You Tube magic, with art school twist.

Even if you don't know who this Guy really is, it's alright, because as Alice exclaims of her encounter with the Dodo, we don't need “extinct birds rambling about art and transcendence.” And yet contrary to her statement, it seems, we do.

Project 35 continues until 18 August.

gertrude.org.au

Aesthetica Magazine
We hope you enjoying reading the Aesthetica Blog, if you want to explore more of the best in contemporary arts and culture you should read us in print too. In the spirit of celebration, Issue 41 includes a piece on Guggenheimn Bilbao where the Luminous Interval features internationally acclaimed artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith and Damien Hirst, ArtAngel's new commission at MIF, Bruce Nauman's retrospective at The Kunsthalle Mannheim and Cory Arcangel's Pro Tools at the Whitney in NYC. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)1904 479 168. Even better, subscribe to Aesthetica and save 20%. Go on, enjoy!

Image:
Still from Tracey Moffatt's Other (2009).
Courtesy the artist and Gertrude Contemporary.

Run down, and needing rest and change?

Are you a nerve-exhausted town dweller? Dyspeptic, depressed, anaemic? Trying to think and just getting no response from your brain no matter how hard you press down on the accelerator?

Late July, and schools across the United Kingdom have closed for the summer. Departure lounges and roads to the south are clogged with families heading off on holiday, whilst back in the office even for people without children the atmosphere changes: we may not any longer be bound by the school timetable but prolonged exposure to it in formative years hammers home the message that the six weeks coming up are different in some way. One of the saddest discoveries of starting most jobs is the realisation that from now on, commuting will go on through much of August as well, and one may cling fondly to the idea that there will be at least some form of summer slow-down in blatant contradiction of the evidence.

Well, for most of us the long summer holidays of childhood are gone for ever; but to cushion the blow, we invite you to take at least a short weekend break courtesy of the Wellcome Library. The Library, as regular users will know, is rich in travel writing: wherever humans go, disease and injury follow them, so no matter how obscure a corner of the world one selects, the chances are that a doctor will be there recording his or her impressions. (See our guide to unpublished travel writings in the archives for an overview ; or, for some ripping yarns of medical men going into the unknown, come along to the next running of our “Around the World in 100 Years” Insights Tour.) This posting, however, is intended simply to be a quick weekend break to keep you going until your proper holiday, so we will stay closer to home and allow ourselves to be pampered at a good hotel rather than plunging into the unknown…

One of the frequently-used sources in the Library’s special Quick Reference Area is the Medical Directory (earlier volumes here), of which the library has a long and virtually complete run described in an earlier blog post. As a tool for biography and family history, a means of finding out about individual medical men and women, it is unrivalled. There is, however, a lot more to it: each annual volume represents a snapshot of the medical profession in the UK, listing not merely practitioners but also hospitals, medical societies, benevolent funds, dispensaries … and healing spas. In addition to the official Directory, too, there are advertisements for medical services and equipment, and here again spas and resorts occur. Using this material, we will treat ourselves to a weekend away at a spa in the years between the World Wars.

Spa treatment has been recommended over the years for a huge variety of ailments. In the Medical Directory advertisements, we see it indicated for bronchial complaints, tuberculosis, arthritis, scrofula, sciatica, alcoholism, obesity and constipation – to pluck some conditions completely at random. This blog, of course, cannot offer medical advice and we would urge anyone suffering from most of the complaints listed above to consult a doctor – we will concern ourselves with the more general, vague feeling, so common at this time of year, that there are better places to be than at one’s desk.

But where will we go? The range is huge. Health resorts occur in all corners of the country, linked by the thousands of miles of pre-Beeching Report railway (and, despite the founding of the Irish Free State some years before that gave Ireland her independence, the Directory also lists resorts in Ireland, such as Lisdoonvarna in County Clare). Some are spas in the strict sense of the world, growing up around a mineral spring with medicinal value, but others are health resorts in the broader sense, allowing one to relax and recharge in a pleasant environment. Sometimes this is the seaside, sometimes the mountains. Levels of activity vary: in many cases the sedate stereotype of the genteel watering-place is clearly appropriate, but in others it most certainly is not: the Directory lists Blackpool as a health resort, for example, and whilst that may or may not be true even its best friends could never call Blackpool sedate. Climate varies too, from one end of the country to another, and whilst one patient may need a mild climate for another a brisk breeze may be called for. There is clearly the need for an online flow-chart that will take people through the intricacies of choice and work out the precise spa that would be appropriate for someone suffering from lethargy and constipation but able to deal with chilliness and averse to sea-bathing – here, all we can do is set out some examples…

The resorts of the south and south-west, where winter is mildest, are recommended for people struggling to cope with the British climate. Torquay proclaims itself good for “delicate children of Anglo-Indian stock” and Ventnor, similarly, targets “delicate, Indian-born, children, weakly girls at puberty, and ... the infirm and aged who have no cardiac weakness.” The adjoining towns of Hastings and St Leonards, meanwhile, boast a winter climate notable for “mildness and equability”: there is “a fine sea-front where invalids can walk, sit or drive almost daily during the winter, and good sea-bathing in summer.” In general, although St. Leonards (to the west of Hastings itself) is less sheltered and “rather more bracing”, the two resorts form

“a harbour of refuge for those who are physically unequal to the struggle against the inclement, changeable and sometimes severe wintry weather experienced in other parts of the British Isles.”

As we all know, that inclement and wintry weather doesn’t have to happen in winter – it can come at any time, as much of June demonstrated! For most of us, however, summer is a time to look for something a bit more bracing. Here the Scottish resorts come into their own; latitude (and in some cases altitude) gives them a cooler climate akin to that some way up in the Alps, with the added bonus of the Northern summer's long days. Speyside – a chain of small towns centred on Grantown-on-Spey - offers air that is “singularly fresh and pure, and the atmosphere translucent and free from excess of humidity, owing perhaps partly to the formation of granitic rocks…” Further north still, Strathpeffer – Britain’s most northerly spa – makes similar claims:

“The climate of Strathpeffer is sheltered and sedative, but on the upper slopes the air is fresh and invigorating…. Strathpeffer is therefore eminently a tonic spa.”

All the Scottish spas offer golf, of course; other physical activities available might include walking on the hills or in the sheltered forests of the Spey valley, tennis or bowls. Permits for fishing can also be obtained (we are in the world of John Buchan and would expect no less) and Nethy Bridge, on the Spey, markets itself particularly to “the tired health seeker who is also a trout fisher.”

It all sounds wonderful and definitely one would expect it to have “a powerful restorative effect in many cases of nervous and mental fatigue and overstrain, insomnia, nervous dyspepsia and depression, especially in middle and later life” (as Speyside sells itself). One must, however, be careful not to overdo it – as Braemar counsels, “It should be remembered that the northern and stimulating air is an incentive (sometimes undesirable) to active exercise”, even if one has been ordered expressly to relax.

Strathpeffer, as well as golf and walking, offers also the unappetising prospect of the “one of the most highly sulphuretted waters in Europe”, to be quaffed medicinally by the residents. Downing vast stoups of something that tastes like someone else’s used bath-water is, of course, the downside to residence at many health resorts. No such drawbacks await you at Blackpool: the “chief watering place of Lancashire” takes its water externally, on the seven miles of sea-front. Emerging from the sea, one may amuse oneself in all sorts of ways: “the promenades and rock gardens, the covered colonnade and piers…cinemas, tennis, golf, bowling … the children’s playgrounds, sea and motor excursions.” However, as the advertisement coyly points out, “The annual number of visitors and excursionists is believed to be more than five millions, and Blackpool is not an invalid’s resort in the summer season” – which is certainly one way of putting it.

On the facing page, through the random action of alphabetical order, we find the more genteel resort of Bude in Cornwall. Here, there is sea-bathing, and for those unwilling to face the sea the Bude Canal can be pressed into service (built in the nineteenth century to carry fertiliser inland, by now the canal was curtailed to the bottom mile or so: its state today). Facing west, it receives strong Atlantic winds which make it less suitable than some resorts for the physically frail but

“In the early summer and the autumn months… the climate is very good for those who require a pure and invigorating air. Cases of bronchial catarrhs and early phthisis, anaemia, debility and ‘brain-fag’, are stated to respond favourably at Bude.”

“Brain-fag” …. we can all relate to that, can’t we? Jeeves, pack our bags and bring the Bentley round to the front; we’re off to to the seaside to recharge the bean.

Images: all from the 1933 Medical Directory.

Friends

Friendship is a wonderful thing even if others don't understand it.

TEST Presents...The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Town Hall Hotel, London.

Text by Emily Sack

TEST Presents… provides Londoners with a different take on an art event. The online fashion, photography, and film magazine provides monthly screenings of films. The TEST team invites a local artist to select a film to share with the audience that has been influential in some way to their career, aesthetic or philosophy, and for the second event this summer, artist Julie Verhoeven selected The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972). Verhoeven, after struggling to find an adequate term to describe how the film influenced her life, stated the film leaves her emotionally drained although it is a “super duper movie.”

The film, directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, is based on a play of the same title written by the director, and several aspects of theatre certainly come to play in character of the movie. The soundtrack of the film is rather minimalist – only when the characters actively place a record on the gramophone is there music. The film begins with two cats bathing themselves on a set of stairs as the opening credits roll to the sound of the cats’ licking. With the minimalism of sound and setting, the acting and costuming comes to the foreground.

The small cast consists entirely of women and focuses on the relationships between them in terms of family, friendship and romance. The protagonist, Petra von Kant is a successful fashion designer, though it soon becomes obvious that her secretary Marlene is the one who actually does the work. Marlene, present through the entire film does not utter a word and never changes her facial expression. Despite the lack of traditional means of communication, Marlene, through her manner of typing and walking subtly, though clearly, conveys an entire range of emotions.

After two failed marriages, Petra becomes infatuated with a young, aspiring model, Karin Thimm. The two live together though from the outset there is a clear power struggle throughout their relationship. Petra is wealthy and has an established career leaving her materially powerful; however, Karin does not reciprocate Petra’s love, which ultimately causes Petra to break down. Karin, ironically, chastises Petra for her treatment of Marlene who is clearly in love with Petra, though she acts in the same manner. The relationships throughout the film are tragic and filled with pain, but to a certain extent the audience can sympathize with unrequited love or troubled families.

What makes the film interesting, and explains Verhoeven’s selection, is the aesthetic that is simultaneously elegant and quirky. The entire movie takes place within one space – Petra’s bedroom/studio, and the alteration of furniture signifies the passage of time. The characters wear exquisitely fashioned dresses with jewelled bodices and luxurious fabrics, but Petra wears a selection of peculiar wigs that are a bit jarring by contrast.

The complexity of emotions is contrasted by the previously mentioned minimalism of setting, but the surroundings play a definitive role in the film. The cast of women is countered by the mural-scale replica of Poussin’s Midas and Bacchus, prominently featuring male genitalia. As a fashion designer, von Kant’s studio contains life-sized female mannequins, but only once in the film is a mannequin actually used for clothing. The majority of the time, the mannequins’ haunting stillness serves as a foil to the drama of the women’s lives, and their bizarre posing is a welcome relief in the intensity of the film.

The film, in German with English subtitles, is indeed draining to watch as Verhoeven initially stated, but it is certainly a worthwhile experience. The rather experimental cinematography and daring depiction of love and passion are still relevant today. The overall event with TEST Presents held in Bethnal Green’s Town Hall Hotel is an enjoyable evening out to experience fashion and film in a new light.

TEST: Presents next event will be with Penny Martin. Tickets are £5 each and must be purchased in advance. Check the website for further information.

testmag.co.uk

Literary Art: Covergence, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast.

Text by Angela Darby

Literature has long been an essential driving force behind many contemporary visual artists’ practice. The exhibition Convergence at Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast seeks to illustrate the symbiotic relationship between the two. Curators Chista-Maria Lerm Hayes, a lecturer at The University of Ulster and Peter Richards, Director of The GT Gallery have set out to ‘dispel the Modernist myth that artists needed to serve writers, that they were feeding the tribute industry, or lacked in rigour.’ Their strong selection of international and regional artists effectively supports the exhibition’s objectives.

At the gallery’s reception area the sound of a piano playing intermittently greets the viewer. The artist Michalis Pichler presents a spectral homage to the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé in both video and book form. The artist has cut the lines of text from Mallarmé's free-verse poem Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard (A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance) carefully following the typographic layout of the 1914 edition. These laser-cut paper sheets have then been placed into the mechanism of an auto piano. As the piano's drum rotates the video records the paper roll passing over the reading mechanism and in the process the perforations are translated into musical notes. Where words and verse once occupied the pages we are left with empty extractions that conceptually exist outside the constraints of their own function. The work is in it’s own right is aesthetically beautiful, captivating and truly haunting. Pichler’s contribution not only serves as an introduction to the exhibition but also sets a high standard and builds expectation for the rest of the selected works.

Situated in Gallery One the artist Pavel Büchler, has three works displayed. Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften (2006), is part of a series of studies originally created in preparation for a wall installation at the Goethe Institute in Dublin. The title references Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1810) and the text Pathologische Farben originates from the title of a chapter found in the book. Goethe’s theory was formulated in direct opposition to Newtown’s reductive mechanical model. In the poet’s view colours arise within a tripartite relationship in which light and dark are mediated through transparent matter. The artist claims that “the work is not about color, or nature or theory...it moves back and forth between reading and seeing, between philosophical and aesthetic experience.” The suggestion seems to be that we need to constantly question those conditioned preconceptions, which ‘colour’ our reading of our own perceptions.

A questioning of ownership is prevalent in the works of Tim Rollins, Andrea Theis and Simon Morris. In The Red Badge of Courage, (1988) the artist Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) have appropriated a section of pages that have been removed from Stephen Crane’s war novel, (written c.1871). The pages have been collaged together and parts of the text are obscured by paintings of blood red wounds and weeping postulations. This blatant appropriation is not an act of vandalism or defilement on the part of the artist and KOS but instead a tribute to the fight that one must endure in order to survive the rigors of life. Rollins described this collaborative outcome with his South Bronx students as a testimony to the 'civil war' of existence.

Over the course of five days Andrea Theis vigilantly stood beside the Goethe-Schiller Monument in Weimar, Germany. By refusing to move or leave her position when implored by the tourists the artist purposely sabotaged their attempts to photographically record their visit. Reviewing Image Disturbance displays documentation from this interventionist performance alongside footage taken from the Bauhaus Museum’s CCTV camera. Both sets of images reveal a diverse range of responses covering physical attacks, verbal abuse, laughter and handshakes. With overtones of a sociology experiment Theis lays claim to the monument to explore a theme which informed many of Goethe and Schiller's works, that of the human condition. Form reflecting content is also apparent in Simon Morris’ piece Fan nr 10: Reading as Art (2011). His black and white photographic composition features documented images of the artist reading text by Jacques Derrida alongside the text being read. The proximity sets in motion a perpetual re-contextualization as we move between reading and implied reading presented as image.

The love letters of Franz Kafka to his fiancée Felice Bauer are presented as documents to be examined and analyzed. Within this poignant and captivating piece the artist Joanna Karolina lays bear the personal existential crisis that this revered author endured within his own psyche. In response to the author’s self-negation Karolina symbolically defaces the letters by incrementally overlaying the text through repeated photocopying obscuring Kafka’s tortured thoughts. According to the curator Lerm–Hayes, the work of the ‘typosopher’ Ecke Bonk 'bridges the domains of typography and art pratice.’ The artist's miniaturized version of Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus logico philosophicus demands attention by forcing the viewer to move in close to examine a typeface that can only be deciphered with the aid of a magnifying glass.

Positioned in the centre of the gallery, The Buddhas of Bamiyan and a reconstructed Assyrian gate at the Iraq National Museum are rendered by artist Julie Bacon as puzzles to be played with. In the sculptural installation entitled The Twins two jigsaw boxes sit separately on the top of two tall, slim white plinths, spectres of 9/11 hauntingly placed on a Kalashnikov patterned Persian rug. Images of the aforementioned national treasures are depicted on the jigsaw box lids illustrating the violent destruction of culture by conflict. On an adjoining wall Bacon has reassembled the jigsaw pieces as a whirling constellation, directed by energies of a different order to those that have laid waste in the here and now. Entering a darkened space we are met with a blown up page from the Irish Times dated April 24th 1986. Accompanying the editorial a slide projector and the voice of a female narrator comments on the significance of the article. In Dear JJ, I read with interest..., Sean Lynch explores the story of an unofficial monument which was erected on top of Carrantuohill mountain in Ireland. The monument we learn was a commemoration of Flann O’ Brien’s work The Third Policeman.

Emerging from the partial darkness of Lynch’s investigative installation one is welcomed by a splendorous light emanating from David Cascio’s immense polyhedron sculpture Space for reading Ulysses by James Joyce (2004). Constructed from cardboard and neon lights with white fabric flowers strategically placed at adjoining corners in reference Joyce’s fictional protagonist, Leopold Bloom, the construction is an astoundingly beautiful space in which to repose. It offers a formal geometry in which to engage with a text that eschews linear narrative. Watt,the last novel written in English by Samuel Beckett is the subject of Nick Thurston’s piece He Wore, He Might Find, & He Moved, 2009. The triptych of bright orange and white screen-prints imitates the iconic cover design of the John Calder edition.

In the work Extreme Reading by Kenneth Goldsmith we experience the spoken word preserved, through transcription, in printed text. Artist’s Pavel Buchler and Simon Morris have recorded their telephone conversation discussing Kenneth Goldsmith’s book Soliloquy in which he catalogued every word he spoke over a week. Their utterances are presented, as a separate transcription which if read in isolation would lead to a speculative understanding. By preserving the formed sounds that would have otherwise been lost in the passing air they cleverly retain meaning within the necessity of context.

Cerith Wyn Evans' screenprinted text Permit yourself to...(2009) induces a trance like state through a guided visualisation relying on suggestion to transform conscious awareness of place and time. In another meditative work Brian O’Doherty systematically repeats sigla forms originally used as shorthand by James Joyce to denote characters from Finnegan's Wake. As an artist known to adopt aliases it seems appropriate that his print Sketch for H.C.E presents abstracted simulacra.

Tacita Dean re-presents a publication as a landscape-format panaorama of its contents. W.G. Sebald relates to a collision of personal ancestry, national history and sychronicity through which we learn that a random reading of Sebald's The Rings of Saturn placed Dean's great, great uncle as presiding Judge at the trial of Irish nationalist Roger Casement. This incorporation of existing narrative can also be seen in Rodney Graham's The System of Landor’s Cottage. The artist 'completes' Edgar Allen Poe's unfinished short story by inhabiting the existing protagonist and placing him in a set of new circumstances within an additional interior room. The emphasis on densely descriptive prose and self imposed formal constraints seem to reference Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus in which a group are given a tour of a series of inventions that progressively become increasingly complex and bizarre.

The curators, Richards and Lerm Hayes decision to invite the editors of the Happy Hypocrite, antepress and Allotrope to contribute are a welcome addition to Convergence. Maria Fusco, the editor of The Happy Hypocrite profiles a selection of articles from the publication. Allotrope is a new initiative by University of Ulster PHD students Keith Winter and Emma Dwan O’Reilly. According to Winter ‘the editorial process involves a making and remaking of meaning.’ With submissions from renowned artists such as Amanda Coogan, Deirdre McKenna, and Paul Hamlyn nominee Daniel Jewesbury the editors of Allotrope display an ability to harness a range of quality contributors providing images, prose, poetry and written criticism. An achievement, which perfectly reflects that of the curators’ vision for this excellent and thought-provoking exhibition.

Convergence continues at Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast until 6 August.

goldenthreadgallery.co.uk

Aesthetica Magazine
We hope you enjoying reading the Aesthetica Blog, if you want to explore more of the best in contemporary arts and culture you should read us in print too. In the spirit of celebration, Issue 41 includes a piece on Guggenheimn Bilbao where the Luminous Interval features internationally acclaimed artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith and Damien Hirst, ArtAngel's new commission at MIF, Bruce Nauman's retrospective at The Kunsthalle Mannheim and Cory Arcangel's Pro Tools at the Whitney in NYC. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)1904 479 168. Even better, subscribe to Aesthetica and save 20%. Go on, enjoy!

Image:
Courtesy the artist & The Golden Thread Gallery

Fans

What do you call a group of mostly young teenage girls screaming? This is surely a perfect candidate to add to the Mensa new words list.
What was the cause of the hysteria? New boy band One Direction from the X factor, arriving at a recording studio for rehearsals.

Historic Arabic medical manuscripts go online

The Wellcome Library is pleased to announce the launch of Wellcome Arabic Manuscripts Online, a digital manuscript library created in partnership with the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and King's College London Department of Digital Humanities.

From the official press release:

Arabic medicine was once the most advanced in the world, and now digital facsimiles of some of its most important texts have been made freely available online. The unique online resource, based on the Wellcome Library's Arabic manuscript collection, includes well-known medical texts by famous practitioners (such as Avicenna, Ibn al-Quff, and Ibn an-Nafis), lesser-known works by anonymous physicians and rare or unique copies, such as Averroes' commentaries on Avicenna's medical poetry...

Simon Chaplin, Head of the Wellcome Library, expressed his enthusiasm for the project: "Providing global access to our collections is at the heart of our mission to foster collaborative research, and we are delighted to see these particular treasures become freely accessible online. We are grateful to the Library of Alexandria and Kings College London, whose partnership in this project has enabled us to extend the availability of these rare materials to the countries of their origin."

Funded by the JISC and the Wellcome Trust, the Wellcome Arabic Cataloguing Partnership (WAMCP) was initiated in 2009 with the aim to make the Wellcome's Arabic manuscripts available and to establish a standard in Arabic manuscript cataloguing and display.

This began with the creation of the "cataloguing tool". A schema was adapted from the existing ENRICH schema to allow for non-Western manuscript description. The tool, the repository, and the website was developed by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina with direction from the Wellcome and King's College London team members.

Although the cataloguing tool has been in use for many months now (with over 450 manuscript records now completed or in progress), the website was only released to the public today, with a sample of around 120 manuscript records available to view. The remaining manuscript records will be made available online throughout the summer.

Image: WMS Arabic 529 - Anonymous book of magic spells

Three-Dimensional Bibliography: The Book on Books on Artists' Books, Bloomberg Space, London.

Text by Lara Cory

Arnaud Desjardin is a French-born, London artist and author of catalogue: The Everyday Press (2011) and Business as Usual (2010). He is also the founder of The Everyday Press, publishing the work of visual artists as printed matter since 2007. Desjardin’s latest installation The Book on Books on Artists’ Books is showing in The Bloomberg Space as Comma 38, and nears the end of the gallery’s current series of exhibitions called Comma.

Desjardin’s offering seems dry and rather academic at first but on closer inspection reveals a challenging, complex and unexpectedly engaging piece. Walking into the expansive space, the viewer encounters a long desk to the right, two tables in the centre and seven cabinets that skirt the edges of the mezzanine corridor. Everything is white, plastic and utilitarian in design. It is like entering the special reserve room in a university library.

The cabinets and tables display books about Artists’ Books from all over the world with titles like Artwork in Bookform, Printed Matter, Artists Books, Livre’s d’artists and Artists Bookworks, whispering names like Ed Ruscha, Yves Klein, Dieter Roth, Robert Filliou and Germano Celant. On the desk sits a computer, printer and a few stacks of various paper and card, next to which are a manual guillotine, a binder and some rubber stamps. This is the production line that facilitates the installation’s main event – the publishing of Desjardin’s latest book, The Book on Books on Artists’ Books.

But here’s the tricky part, The Book on Books on Artists’ Books is not simply Desjardin’s latest book. It is a working prototype which could also be seen as Desjardin’s own Artists' Book, sort of…

Desjardin’s contribution to The Bloomberg’s Comma series is like one of those pictures, within a picture, within a picture. The concept is dizzying and profound which comes as a surprise from an installation that looks like an arbitrary and casual selection of art books and a do-it-yourself printing press. This exhibition certainly doesn’t speak for itself, and understanding won’t be gained by simply looking at it. You have to almost enter into it. Look at the machines on the desk; see the stacks of paper and the red-stained rubber stamps. And then pick up the prototype that lies in front of you and take a glimpse through it. Go over to the table and pick up the books. Read them. Evaluate and assess. Walk over to the cabinets and see the rows upon of rows of books about Artists Books, exhibition catalogues, artist monographs, periodicals, publisher catalogues and other examples of secondary literature about the recording, promotion and distribution of Artists' Books.

You will notice that some are tomes of academia, some are instructive how tos, some are simply photocopied pages that are stapled together and some are ironic or even humorous. The point is there are galaxies of books referenced here, just in this small collection; imagine how many others are out there?

Clive Phillpot describes Desjardin’s work as a ‘three-dimensional bibliography’ where even though we don’t get to appreciate the initial work of the artist, we receive instead the bounty of creative expression and interpretation of the designers and artists who produce this secondary literature. Desjardin is inviting us to look at this genre itself as art. He is bringing a dry collection of lists and printed paraphernalia into focus and giving it inter-textuality by cataloguing the information and making it the centre of an art installation. The Book on Books on Artists’ Books is given further context and semiotic confusion as Desjardin transforms the printing, production and distribution of the book into a piece of performance art.

It’s difficult to see the artistic quality in lists, but Umberto Eco insists that lists are ways in which we give definition to chaos and infinity. In an interview with Spiegl in 2009, Eco stated that the commonplace act of making lists is humanity’s greatest contribution to culture, to art. He suggests it is our way of making infinity comprehensible and bearable. Eco states: “lists allow us to question the essential definitions.”

The Book on Books on Artists’ Books also encourages us to question the essential definition of Desjardin’s list. It is not simply an account of books about Artists’ Books. It is saying something about the tremendous proliferation of art in the last forty years; about the ways in which the artists chose and are choosing to express themselves, about the mediums and shape of art. It reveals the artists’ desire to be democratic in the dissemination of their work, valuing affordability and availability to everyone, their desire to break free from traditional methods, limitations and prejudices. Desjardin’s list tells the story of art in the last forty years.

Desjardin’s installation is underwhelming on first impression but soon becomes overwhelming as you realise the scope and concept of his intention. The Book on Books on Artists’ Books is exactly as its title suggests and yet so much more. It attempts to give shape to practices and a genre that might be impossible to contain but it remains imperative that we try.

COMMA 37/COMMA 38: GEREON KREBBER & ARNAUD DESJARDIN continues until 18 September.

bloombergspace.com

Aesthetica Magazine
We hope you enjoying reading the Aesthetica Blog, if you want to explore more of the best in contemporary arts and culture you should read us in print too. In the spirit of celebration, Issue 41 includes a piece on Guggenheimn Bilbao where the Luminous Interval features internationally acclaimed artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith and Damien Hirst, ArtAngel's new commission at MIF, Bruce Nauman's retrospective at The Kunsthalle Mannheim and Cory Arcangel's Pro Tools at the Whitney in NYC. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)1904 479 168. Even better, subscribe to
Aesthetica and save 20%. Go on, enjoy!

Image:
Install shots of COMMA 37:Arnaud Desjardin for Bloomberg SPACE 2011

Hiking in the Sierra: Cascade Falls at Lake Tahoe

What did Harmony Art Mom do for her 27th Wedding Anniversary?



Hiked to a waterfall!



My dear husband and I took a day to hike up to one of our favorite spots at nearby Lake Tahoe. The trailhead is at Bayview Campground and the parking can be tricky. We caught someone as they were leaving and got a spot in the shade.



The trail is not steep or very long but there are sections that are covered in granite rocks that you need to scramble up on or over or around. There are plenty of spots to stop and take in the view as you hike along.



We hiked to the Cascade Falls and then sat and just enjoyed each other's company and the solitude for awhile.



The wildflowers were blooming along the trail and this one was abundant.


You actually hike to the top of the waterfall so there isn't a really great place to take a shot of the whole waterfall at one time. Here is a section of it.



We hiked back down the trail in the late afternoon and then made our way over to Tallac Historic Site to have a picnic (including a special slice of cheesecake for each of us).


I worked in my nature journal recording the wildflowers we saw earlier and my husband did some reading until we decided we better take an after dinner walk to burn off some of the picnic calories. I love the long hours of a summer evening and this time we found a place that I want to bring the kids back to.


This promenade in the middle of the forest was the connecting sidewalk between two turn-of-the-twentieth-century hotels. The hotels are long gone but the promenade remains. We tried to imagine what it would have been like to stay at one of the hotels way back then.

It was a perfect anniversary day....hope to do it again sometime!

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Skin Art

As promised a month ago I will bring you interesting tattoos as I spot them.

I've got Rhythm

Enjoying the music at the Whitecross Street Fair.

Performative Landscapes: Shaun Gladwell: Stereo Sequences, ACMI, Melbourne.

Text by Emily Bour

Arriving at Shaun Gladwell's Stereo Sequences exhibition, currently showing at the Australian Center for the Moving Image in Melbourne (ACMI), one is greeted at the top of the stairs by the large-scale video work Pataphysical Man (2005). The image of the shirtless, helmet-wearing man spinning gracefully from the ceiling is, of course, upside down, but the cumulative effect is hypnotic. Such is the appetiser for the works that await visitors below.

Curated by Sarah Tutton, Shaun Gladwell's major show launches Horizons, a series of ACMI commissioned works that will continue to show throughout the upcoming seasons. This decision alone is rather telling of Gladwell's rising star status in the art world, since his emergence onto the international scene in 2000. Engaging in a multi-dimensional practice that includes painting, photography and sculpture, Gladwell is famous for his video works recording subculture sports, from BMX bike riding, to skateboarding. This subject matter has become his signature mark.

The ambitious nature of this show could be said to demarcate from Gladwell's earlier, more amateurish modes of production. There are eight major pieces; the largest of them entitled Parallel Forces (2011). The multi-channel work presents four pairs of parallel images along a darkened corridor. Each pair displays machines of motion with a cameraman filming outwards, towards the viewer, who must venture between the choppers, muscle cars, racing bikes, and moving walkways. The observer (now the observed) must negotiate their own real-time trajectory down the hall. It is a somewhat nauseating affair. However, the artist looks to question the gaze and the hierarchy of viewpoints, not just in art history but in a modern world so mediated by the camera.

Thankfully, the sense of physical unease is thwarted by Centripetal Forces (2011), one of the most visually enchanting video series of the show. The projection panels are suspended from the ceiling, beckoning the viewer to lie down on the structures below and immerse themselves in the work. It is a solar-system formation of one central, circular screen, surrounded by rectangular satellites. We are shown a range of performers, each negative image displaying a different spinning body from a bird's eye view. Different styles all take their part, from the traditional to the contemporary, the ballerina to the pole dancer. This simple study of movement is, however, grand in its intention, alluding to the capitalised notions of Space/Time/Movement with poetically charged enquiry. Gladwell is moving onto a different platform here, teasing out a dynamic beyond the physicality of the body, expanding it to the ethereal.

Though perhaps a bit literally, this work bears a link with Planet & Stars Sequence: Bondi (2011). In this dual projection, the artist wears a gas mask, framed against the splashing waves. Aerosol cans are used to produce images of mini-universes which, once completed and displayed to the camera, are immediately erased. He starts again. In Ihor Holibizky's interviews, Gladwell speaks of the desire to: "make the popular representation of certain subcultures problematic", which undoubtedly he has achieved. No meaning is fixed, and the artist does not wish to be dogmatic: "I consider most of my recent work as speculative and also collaborative, which moves away from the largely impossible role of clear transmitter of intention."

Repetition and introspection are central themes here. Nowhere is this more apparent than a reworking of a past work Endoscopic Vanitas (No Veins Version)(2011). Originally exhibited in 2009 at the Australian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, an open human skull suspends from a metal frame in an enclosed room. An endoscopic camera moves inside, and a second explores its exterior with an LCD screen displaying one of the images. The other is projected onto a mist screen that curtains the entrance. The image from the outside is difficult to decipher: a silhouette, a figure, an eye perhaps. We are told from the exhibition catalogue that this is his play on the 'memento mori', a reminder of our mortality. It is effective and appeals to the instinct, as I watch a child unwilling to cross the barrier, afraid. This work is challenging, a veritable collapse of logic: "I was thinking of Duchamp's exhortation to 'use a Rembrandt as an ironing board' as relevant to the subversion in terms of function."

As viewer, we are placed into positions that are unnerving, perspectives that we are unused to occupying. In Sagittarius/Domain +Prelude (2011), both shots are filmed from behind. In one screen, a figure is lying on a skateboard travelling on a moving walkway. He looks as though he is cascading toward a bottomless abyss, even though in reality his trajectory is purely horizontal. Gravity has been manipulated, and so has our method of thinking. Even as a formal experiment this work is arresting, and represents the germination of what may ultimately become the urban sublime.

Shaun Gladwell: Stereo Sequences continues until 14 August.

acmi.net.au

Aesthetica Magazine
We hope you enjoying reading the Aesthetica Blog, if you want to explore more of the best in contemporary arts and culture you should read us in print too. In the spirit of celebration, Issue 41 includes a piece on Guggenheimn Bilbao where the Luminous Interval features internationally acclaimed artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith and Damien Hirst, ArtAngel's new commission at MIF, Bruce Nauman's retrospective at The Kunsthalle Mannheim and Cory Arcangel's Pro Tools at the Whitney in NYC. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)1904 479 168. Even better, subscribe to Aesthetica and save 20%. Go on, enjoy!

Image:
Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery

Sightings of Cayley Robinson in Florence, Paris and Cheltenham

Visitors to the Wellcome Library see in the entrance hall four paintings of the Works of Mercy by Frederick Cayley Robinson. They are allegories embedding the oppositions within themes relevant to the historic mission of hospitals: institutions and individuals, children and adults, interiors and exteriors, civil and military, night and day, etc. They were previously in the Middlesex Hospital in London, and are remembered with affection by many staff members of the hospital and visitors.

Orphans 1, one of the Works of Mercy by Frederick Cayley Robinson, 1915. Wellcome Library no. 672831i.

Cayley Robinson's pictorial ideas were much enriched by his studies abroad. We have a glimpse of him in Florence in Bernd Roeck's book Florence 1900: the quest for Arcadia. [1] As Roeck points out, Florence in 1900 was of importance as an artistic centre as much for its visiting foreign artists as for its natives. "We should at least mention the three visits that Degas paid to the city, the presence of Maurice Denis during the winter of 1893-4, and the extended visit by the English symbolist Frederick Cayley Robinson, who lived in Florence between 1898 and 1902, engaging chiefly with the work of Giotto, Mantegna and Michelangelo." Other artists mentioned include Max Klinger, who established the Villa Roxane (home to Max Beckmann, Käthe Kollwitz and Gustav Klimt), and Arnold Böcklin, who lived in Florence and Fiesole for almost two decades. A painting by Cayley Robinson, The Kingdom of the Past in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, shows his familiarity with Böcklin's Island of the dead or with Klinger's etching of it. [2]

*******

Cayley Robinson is mentioned, in passing and more unpredictably, in the autobiography of the radical campaigner Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), where he appears in a completely different role: as landlord. In 1903 Edith, Mrs Havelock Ellis, "arranged with the artist Cayley Robinson to take his flat in an ancient house on the Quai [de] Bourbon in the Ile Saint Louis in Paris for month of June." [3] Cayley Robinson had been a student in Paris, and after leaving Florence evidently used a pied-à-terre in that attractive street near the cathedral of Notre Dame (above).

*******

On Thursday 28 July 2011 the auction firm of Chorley's at Cranham, near Cheltenham, will offer for sale a modello (above) by Frederick Cayley Robinson for the Orphans, one of the four paintings in the Wellcome Library . It comes from the accumulated collection of Tony Haynes, a Gloucestershire art-dealer. The modello (lot 359 in the sale) is signed and dated 1914 in the lower left corner, the same place in which the finished version is signed and dated 1915. Measuring 65 x 111 cm., it is on a scale of 1:9 compared with the area of the finished version (199 x 339 cm.).

As might be expected of a modello on this scale, the composition is completely worked out. To work out the composition, Cayley Robinson will have already painted studies on a smaller scale: there is a smaller study for the Orphans, measuring 21.6 x 37.5 cm., i.e. 1:9 again compared with the Haynes modello, or 1:81 compared with the area of the finished version. This small preliminary study in tempera formerly belonged to the parasitologist G.H.F. Nuttall (1862-1937), whose collections of photographic prints and lantern slides, aesthetically rather different from Cayley Robinson, are also in the Wellcome Library (example right: a Kentucky family of "dirt-eaters" with hookworm, Wellcome Library no. 750040i). [4]

The Haynes modello might have been painted for the approval of the patrons, Edmund Davis and the Governors of the Middlesex Hospital. It is inscribed on the verso in what looks much like the artist's hand, though, oddly, the inscription spells his name wrongly (Caley: left, from Chorley's website). As this composition is for many people their favourite among the four pictures, there must be a fair chance of the modello reaching its lower estimate of £6,000.

[1] Bernd Roecke, Florence 1900: the quest for Arcadia, Yale University Press 2009, p. 199; translation of Florenz 1900: die Suche nach Arkadien, Beck 2001

[2] Jane Munro, Chasing happiness: Maurice Maeterlinck, the Blue bird and England, Fitzwilliam Museum 2006, pp. 51-52

[3] Havelock Ellis, My life, London: Heinemann, 1940, p. 337

[4] Frederick Cayley Robinson, A.R.A., 1862-1927, Fine Art Society 1977, no. 50