http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/science/01alch.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
August 1, 2006
Transforming the Alchemists
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
PHILADELPHIA — Historians of science are taking a new and lively interest in alchemy, the often mystical investigation into the hidden mysteries of nature that reached its heyday in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and has been an embarrassment to modern scientists ever since.
There was no place in the annals of empirical science, beginning mainly in the 18th century, for the occult practices of obsessed dreamers who sought most famously and impossibly to transform base metals into pure gold. So alchemy fell into disrepute.
But in the revival of scholarship on the field, historians are finding reasons to give at least some alchemists their due. Even though they were secretive and self-deluded and their practices closer to magic than modern scientific methods, historians say, alchemists contributed to the emergence of modern chemistry as a science and an agent of commerce.
“Experimentalism was one of alchemy’s hallmarks,” said Lawrence M. Principe, a historian of science at Johns Hopkins University and a trained chemist. “You have to get your hands dirty, and in this way alchemists forged some early ideas about matter.”
Bent over boiling crucibles in their shadowy laboratories, squeezing bellows before transformative flames and poring over obscure formulas, some alchemists stumbled on techniques and reactions of great value to later chemists. It was experimentation by trial and error, historians say, but it led to new chemicals and healing elixirs and laid the foundations of procedures like separating and refining, distilling and fermenting.
“What do chemists do? They like to make stuff,” Dr. Principe said. “Most chemists are interested not so much in theory as in making substances with particular properties. The emphasis on products was the same with some alchemists in the 17th century.”
Pamela H. Smith, a history professor at Columbia, said alchemy “was the matter theory of its day” and was “incredibly multilayered and therefore a powerful way of viewing nature.”
Yet on the whole, historians say, the widespread practice of alchemy impeded the rise of modern chemistry. While physics and astronomy marched slowly but inexorably from Galileo to Kepler to Newton and the Scientific Revolution, chemistry slumbered under alchemy’s influence through what historians call its “postponed scientific revolution.”
The new research and revised interpretations concerning the role of alchemy in the history of chemistry as well as pharmacology and medicine were discussed at a three-day conference late last month at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. The meeting, attended by more than 80 scientists and historians, was organized by Dr. Principe, who said, “Only in the last 15 or 20 years have we learned how crucial alchemy was to the emergence of modern science.”
No one at the meeting tried to turn lead into gold. But the historians conjured up quite a lode of pyrite, fool’s gold, in the colorful characters they had found buried in previously neglected archives.
A few practicing alchemists, it seems, may have been certifiably mad — probably, like mad hatters, from sniffing the mercury they worked with.
One notable alchemist of the 16th century, a Swiss named Paracelsus, was not mad, but cantankerous and iconoclastic. “He was equal parts metallurgist, pharmacist, physician and crackpot,” Dr. Principe said.
Historians have found that Paracelsus made some advances in the detection of disorders by analyzing urine and claimed marvelous cures through alchemy.
In his chemical cosmology, he saw the world as a great distillation vessel and its changes as parallel to the operations carried out in a laboratory. But he recorded his material and spiritual ideas in the deliberately opaque writing typical of many alchemists, who expressed themselves in codes, symbols and emblems to conceal their findings from the uninitiated.
From his study, Dane Thor Daniel of Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, concluded that Paracelsus’s unwavering objective was to find a Christian alternative to pagan natural philosophy — science.
Other alchemists were outright charlatans or fools, ridiculed in contemporary art and literature. On display in a gallery at the conference hall were several 17th-century paintings by Flemish and Dutch artists, who depicted alchemists toiling in the disorder of dark workshops and the poverty of futile quests. The paintings were said to be popular among Dutch burghers as a caution to anyone contemplating a life in alchemy instead of steady trade.
But many an alchemist drew support from royal courts where visions of newfound wealth and power danced in crowned heads. It was not always a happy alliance.
In 1601, Hans Heinrich Nüschler signed a contract with his patron, Duke Friedrich of Württemberg in Stuttgart, to demonstrate his process for extracting a substantial amount of gold from a sample of silver. The duke, keen on mining technology, promised a generous reward. Nüschler agreed to conduct the experiments at his own expense.
After several months of failure and mounting debt, the desperate alchemist resorted to fraud. He asked his brother to help by surreptitiously adding gold to the alchemical sample. His ploy exposed, Nüschler was tried, convicted and hanged.
“Only a handful of alchemists actually ended their careers on the gallows,” said Tara E. Nummedal, a historian at Brown. “But this underscored that alchemy was very serious business in the Holy Roman Empire.”
In her report, Dr. Nummedal concluded that the relationships of patrons and alchemists showed that “alchemy was a direct engagement with the political, economic, religious and intellectual realities of the early modern world.”
At the turn of the 17th century, King Henry IV of France surrounded himself with alchemists who sought to resurrect plants from their ashes and experimented with ways to extend the monarch’s life. Even the diplomats had orders to seek out the cryptic methods of alchemists in other countries.
An alchemist in the court of a German prince scored a profitable success quite by accident. Looking for materials for creating precious metals, Johann Friedrich Böttger analyzed a “white earth” that duplicated the ingredients for imported Chinese porcelain. The discovery was the beginning of the Dresden china industry.
Even geniuses of the first order, like Isaac Newton, found alchemy irresistible. It was an accepted method of seeking knowledge — or confirmation of received truth — in early modern history.
Newton, whose laws of gravity and optics ushered in modern physics, also delved into alchemy with relentless energy. His notebooks contain thousands of pages on alchemic thoughts and experiments over 30 years.
William R. Newman, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at Indiana University, said many manuscripts had not received the scrutiny they deserved. He reported on a text in the Smithsonian Institution that he called “an overlooked gem.”
In these notebook entries, Newton cited the ideas of German alchemists for imitating the processes by which metals were generated in nature, deep inside the earth. These involved the familiar alchemical theory of metallic generation through interactions of sulfur and mercury.
But Newton, expanding on the theory, wrote: “These two spirits above all wander over the earth and bestow life on animals and vegetables. And they makes stones, salts and so forth.”
As Dr. Newman noted, “Thus we have passed from a theory of mere metallic generation to one that is intended to explain the totality of life on earth, as well as the production of all mineral materials, not just metallic ones.”
In this sense, Dr. Newman continued, Newton’s repeated experiments for the rest of his life were aimed at fulfilling the words of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes, considered the founding text of alchemy in ancient Egypt. Newton expected to achieve what the tablet said was the una res, “the one thing” by which “the world was created” and with which one could “perform miracles.”
So it seems that Newton was no ordinary alchemist interested in making gold. He apparently aspired to a theory of alchemy more comprehensive than even his laws of gravity. But it could be said, in a paraphrase of Newton’s famous expression of modesty, that the giants on whose shoulders he stood in this endeavor did not measure up to his antecedents in physics and astronomy.
Newton’s alchemical bent was not out of character, Dr. Smith of Columbia said. “He was drawn to the occult,” she said. “Gravity for him was an occult force, and so was alchemy as an explanation of how things transform into other things.”
The British chemist Robert Boyle, a Newton contemporary, also had a foot on each side of the alchemy-modern science divide. He dabbled for years in an alchemical obsession, the search for the philosopher’s stone — the long-sought agent for transmuting lead to gold and unlocking other material and spiritual secrets. The stone was the unified theory of everything in that time.
Boyle wrote enviously in 1680 that “there exists conceal’d in the world” a group of chemists “of a much higher order able to transmute baser Metalls into perfect ones.”
At the same time, Boyle hurled harsh criticism at alchemists, particularly Paracelsians and the obscurity of their language and concepts. His purpose, he wrote, was to draw “the Chymists Doctrine out of their Dark and Smoakie Laboratories into open light” and to engage in “better Experiments and Arguments.”
Citing Boyle’s “swinging critique” and even earlier attacks on alchemical practices, Stephen Clucas, a University of London historian, raised questions that he said require deeper research by historians: Why did a “scientific revolution” in experimental chemistry not occur earlier in the 17th century? Why was a clear separation of alchemy and exact chemistry delayed until the 18th century?
Bruce T. Moran, a historian at the University of Nevada at Reno and the University College London, said it was not all that unreasonable at the time to be attracted to alchemy. “For a variety of practical and intellectual reasons,” Professor Moran said, “the idea of transforming one thing into another was to be expected.”
In everyday life, grapes were turned to wine and wheat to bread. A sour green apple grew into a sweet red one. It was in the nature of things to change, even metals. Miners and refiners already knew that lead ore almost always contains some silver, and silver ore almost always contains some gold. This implied that the metals changed one into the other over time.
In the booklet “Transmutations: Alchemy in Art,” written with Lloyd DeWitt, an art historian, Dr. Principe noted that in 1600, chemists knew of just seven metals — gold, silver, iron, copper, tin, lead and mercury. (Since then scientists have discovered another 60.) The original seven known metals had properties in common. They were shiny and, except for the liquid mercury, could be hammered, shaped and cast.
“The commonality of properties implied to early thinkers a commonality of composition,” Dr. Principe wrote., “And thus it was theorized that all the metals were composed of the same essential ingredients in different proportions and degrees of purity.”
“Even if in the modern view alchemy is all nonsense or very spiritual,” Dr. Moran said, “many people drawn to it for whatever reasons were actually creating very useful, practical chemistry and bringing to it an artisan know-how.”
The conference on the history of alchemy opened with a program of chamber music called “The Philosophers’ Tone.” The scholars delighted in Handel’s transmutation of Ben Jonson’s “The Alchemist” into pure gold. Over coffee between sessions, they pondered new directions of research and topics for dissertations. They said, for example, that more attention should be paid to alchemy’s role in the history of medicine.
They also remarked, somewhat conspiratorially, over parallels between the misguided certainties and self-delusion of alchemy and today’s political and religious attacks on modern science. Of Boyle’s efforts to replicate experiments from alchemical writings, Joseph E. Early, a retired Georgetown University professor who studies the philosophy of chemistry, said, “He couldn’t do it any more than we could find the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”
Then the scholars departed Philadelphia, leaving the city’s lead-to-gold ratio unchanged.
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Tuesday, March 31, 2009
micheal morley project drawing year 3
Galileo and the Pendulum
In 1581, Galileo began studying at the University of Pisa University of Pisa, where his father hoped he would study medicine. While at the University of Pisa, Galileo began his study of the pendulum while, according to legend, he watched a suspended lamp swing back and forth in the cathedral of Pisa. However, it was not until 1602 that Galileo made his most notable discovery about the pendulum - the period (the time in which a pendulum swings back and forth) does not depend on the arc of the swing (the isochronism). Eventually, this discovery would lead to Galileo's further study of time intervals and the development of his idea for a
pendulum clock.
Text, design, and layout by Megan Wilde for the Electronic Text Center. This biography is based upon information culled from The Galileo Project website.
In 1581, Galileo began studying at the University of Pisa University of Pisa, where his father hoped he would study medicine. While at the University of Pisa, Galileo began his study of the pendulum while, according to legend, he watched a suspended lamp swing back and forth in the cathedral of Pisa. However, it was not until 1602 that Galileo made his most notable discovery about the pendulum - the period (the time in which a pendulum swings back and forth) does not depend on the arc of the swing (the isochronism). Eventually, this discovery would lead to Galileo's further study of time intervals and the development of his idea for a
pendulum clock.
Text, design, and layout by Megan Wilde for the Electronic Text Center. This biography is based upon information culled from The Galileo Project website.
project drawing; micheal morley year 3
GALLERI NICOLAI WALLNER
njalsgade 21 • building 15 • 2300 copenhagen s • denmark • phone:
+4532570970 • fax: +4532570971 • contact: nw@nicolaiwallner.com
http://www.nicolaiwallner.com/artists/joachim/morningtext.html
Morning of the Magicians by Joachim Koester
The history of the occult is also a history of the obscure. A history of ideas shrouded in secrecy seeping through the darkness of centuries, before suddenly resurfacing in the 'mystic' 1960s, and settling as a minor but constant presence within mainstream consumer culture. The 'occult' hasn't left many monuments, mostly dusty manuscripts found or 'rediscovered' in forgotten boxes in libraries or bookstores, or an occasional alchemical symbol engraved in a church or on a building, which surprisingly survived the vigilant eye of the Inquisition. Nor are the historical figures of this 'occult' easy to trace. Real identities are typically veiled by disguises and pseudonyms making me doubt if these people ever actually existed. Some relatively recent and verifiable sources can be mentioned, however. One is the French Socialist and Kabbalist, Alphonse Louis Constant (1810-1857) better known as Eliphas Levi, who in his book "The History of Magic" (1861), brought together several different strands of esoteric thought - in effect, inventing occultism - and influenced artists like Arthur Rimbaud, J. K. Huysmans, André Breton and Erik Satie. Another is The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an early twentieth century esoteric society in London, and its renegade member, Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). Crowley's portrait was included on the cover of The Beatles's "Sergeant Pepper" album, and his imagery finds its way into the songs of John Lennon and David Bowie among others revealing Crowley's position as a progenitor and avatar of the occult's thriving within the counter-culture.
On March 1, 1920, Aleister Crowley and a group of devotees, arrived at Cefalù, Sicily, and moved into a small house at the outskirts of town. The house, formerly called "Villa Santa Barbara", was renamed "The Abbey of Thelema", inspired by the French writer Rabelais, who in the concluding chapters of his book "Gargantua" (1534), describes an ideal community named "Theleme", which had the governing maxim "Do what you will". Though hedonistic, centered around Crowley's own version of magick - Kabbalah and yoga, with a particular empasis on tantric practices, hetero- and homosexual rituals, and the use of drugs to heighten intensity - life in the Abbey was often described as bleak. The house had neither gas nor electricity, and no plumbing. General conditions were unsanitary in the extreme, and in the summer the air was thick with flies, gnats and mosquitoes. With Crowley as a drugged, benevolent dictator at his best, and a gruesome, perverted manipulator at his worst, the days at the Abbey could be harsh. On top of that, the magical training was rigorous and unrelenting. Newcomers would spend the night in "La chambre des cauchemars" - "The Room of Nightmares" - its principle features - three large walls painted in fresco, representing earth, heaven and hell, depicting mostly demons, goblins and graphic sex scenes. Here, the new student of magick would experience "The nightside of Eden" primed by a "secret process" - probably a potent mixture of hashish and opium, administered by Crowley - as the walls came alive. The idea behind the ordeal was to contemplate every possible phantom that can assail the soul, to face the "Abyss of Horror", and thereby gain mastery over the mind. This approach was strikingly similar to what was practiced 43 years later in Timothy Leary's community, Catalina, founded in a vacant hotel in the sleepy Mexican beach town of Zihuatenjo, where members would sit alone in a lifeguard tower on the beach, dosed on LSD, summoning the forces of the 'irrational', trying to break through to the other side.
With a curriculum of ordeals like nights spent in "The Room of Nightmares", daily evocations in the Temple, and solitary and exhausting 'magical' retreats on the nearby cliff, coupled with the Spartan living conditions, it is perhaps evident why the "Abbey of Thelema" never attracted more than a small group of visitors and benefactors. So much for free love, and "Do what you will". Crowley was decidedly more lenient with his own sexual excesses than with others and there was a catch to the word 'will'. It also didn't help the cause of Thelema that a number of visitors left with a heroin habit as an unwanted souvenir. But in the end it was not the liberal use of drugs, the inherent contradictions in the teachings, or local prejudice that eventually led to the demise of the Abbey - the Cefalù locals did tolerate the community, though they were frequently shocked by the members' preference for bathing nude. It was the tragic death of Raoul Loveday - from enteric fever, contracted by drinking water from a mountain spring in the Cefalù countryside - and the ensuing storm in the British press against Crowley and the Abbey, which prompted headlines like "Orgies in Sicily", that led Mussolini to order the community closed. The directive came as part of a crackdown to suppress breeding grounds for dissent. If not exactly politically dangerous, Crowley and the others were at best undesirable. On April 22, 1923, the Abbey came to an end. The Italian authorities carefully covered the frescos, the magic circle on the floor and other traces of the previous activities with a coat of whitewash.
According to experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger, the villa subsequently sat abandoned for more than 30 years. Maybe also forgotten - sleeping - until Anger in 1955 re-found the villa and obtained permission to remove the whitewash, which had "turned to stone". Anger spent three months working on the walls and floors, gradually revealing "all those hyper-psychedelic murals" in "The Room of Nightmares" and on doors and shutters, planning a photo shoot on location, in which the costume of the sorcerer in the dreamy film Children of Paradise (1945) - a blue velvet robe emblazoned with the word "ABRA" - would appear. Whether the shoot actually happened is unclear. Anger's documentary, made during his stay, was lost by Hulton Television. What still circulates is a series of photographs of the restored Abbey. One of them depicts Anger in conversation with the sexologist Alfred C. Kinsey. On the back wall is Crowley's portrait and on a door, one of the newly uncovered paintings, a mountainous landscape made in a fantasy-like style. Anger had met Kinsey when the doctor approached him to purchase a print of his first film Fireworks. While Anger was an ardent follower of Crowley's magick, Kinsey thought that Crowley was "the most prominent fraud that ever lived". Kinsey nevertheless saw Crowley as a brilliant homoerotic writer, and was interested in discovering more information about Crowley's sex magick practices. More than likely it was Kinsey who funded Anger's stay in Cefalù.
Today Cefalù is not the small Sicilian fishing village Anger and Kinsey experienced in the fifties. Situated one hour from Palermo, it's better described as a booming beachside town, or as a guidebook states: "the premier destination on the Tyrrhenian coast". The change in size and appearance of the town, and the vague directions I had managed to obtain from an older book, made finding the Abbey a challenge. As I walked through the area, which once was "the southeastern outskirts" of Cefalù, I started to doubt whether the house still existed. This area did not share the characteristics of a place that might accommodate 'leftover' or 'ambiguous' spaces. Instead of vacant lots I found my way blocked by the barrier of a gated community, or newly built condos with BMWs and Porsches crowding the parking lots. It was only after hours of walking in circles, almost by chance and out of the corner of my eye, that I caught a glimpse of a caved-in rooof near the stadium. I realized I had been within meters of the house several times before, standing in the parking lot of the stadium, scanning the sloping hillside without noticing the house right next to me, hidden behind a wall of greenery and palm trees.
The house and garden of the Abbey were completely overgrown in a strangely evocative way. As I walked the faintly visible path to what was once the main entrance, I was so overwhelmed by the scene's dormant qualities that I had to pause. It seemed to me as if sediments, pieces of leftover narratives and ideas from the individuals that once passed through this place had formed knots, as tangled as the bushes and trees that where now taking over, creating a kind of sleeping presence.
I continued my exploration wondering if the Abbey could be seen as a sort of monument, when the gaping hole in the roof reminded me of Robert Smithson's site specific sculpture "Partially Buried Woodshed". Even though Smithson, in this and other pieces, intentionally worked with a narrow but very deep historical space, the "Partially Buried Woodshed" was transformed into a political landmark by someone adding the graffiti "May 4 Kent 70", to commemorate the four students killed by Ohio National Guardsmen during an anti-war protest. The later attempts by Kent University to get rid of the Woodshed were in reality efforts to obscure this particular history, since what Smithson's ruin symbolized was viewed as an embarrassment. Eventually, the university planted a circle of trees around the Woodshed so it couldn't be seen from the road. And so, the monument dissolved and came to an end, discretely hidden by a veil of trees.
Thinking about this I climbed through the only window that was not boarded up, and made my way into "The Room of Nightmares". The room bore traces of vivid green paint and I recognized a few of the frescos from Anger's photographs, though in a much worse state. Its walls were scrawled with graffiti and the rest of the house a mess of tiles, dust and discarded furniture - it felt like being in a hollow place. As I climbed out, and stood in the garden again, I suddenly noticed how close the newly built houses were - just on the other side of the bushes.
Joachim Koester, 2005
njalsgade 21 • building 15 • 2300 copenhagen s • denmark • phone:
+4532570970 • fax: +4532570971 • contact: nw@nicolaiwallner.com
http://www.nicolaiwallner.com/artists/joachim/morningtext.html
Morning of the Magicians by Joachim Koester
The history of the occult is also a history of the obscure. A history of ideas shrouded in secrecy seeping through the darkness of centuries, before suddenly resurfacing in the 'mystic' 1960s, and settling as a minor but constant presence within mainstream consumer culture. The 'occult' hasn't left many monuments, mostly dusty manuscripts found or 'rediscovered' in forgotten boxes in libraries or bookstores, or an occasional alchemical symbol engraved in a church or on a building, which surprisingly survived the vigilant eye of the Inquisition. Nor are the historical figures of this 'occult' easy to trace. Real identities are typically veiled by disguises and pseudonyms making me doubt if these people ever actually existed. Some relatively recent and verifiable sources can be mentioned, however. One is the French Socialist and Kabbalist, Alphonse Louis Constant (1810-1857) better known as Eliphas Levi, who in his book "The History of Magic" (1861), brought together several different strands of esoteric thought - in effect, inventing occultism - and influenced artists like Arthur Rimbaud, J. K. Huysmans, André Breton and Erik Satie. Another is The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an early twentieth century esoteric society in London, and its renegade member, Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). Crowley's portrait was included on the cover of The Beatles's "Sergeant Pepper" album, and his imagery finds its way into the songs of John Lennon and David Bowie among others revealing Crowley's position as a progenitor and avatar of the occult's thriving within the counter-culture.
On March 1, 1920, Aleister Crowley and a group of devotees, arrived at Cefalù, Sicily, and moved into a small house at the outskirts of town. The house, formerly called "Villa Santa Barbara", was renamed "The Abbey of Thelema", inspired by the French writer Rabelais, who in the concluding chapters of his book "Gargantua" (1534), describes an ideal community named "Theleme", which had the governing maxim "Do what you will". Though hedonistic, centered around Crowley's own version of magick - Kabbalah and yoga, with a particular empasis on tantric practices, hetero- and homosexual rituals, and the use of drugs to heighten intensity - life in the Abbey was often described as bleak. The house had neither gas nor electricity, and no plumbing. General conditions were unsanitary in the extreme, and in the summer the air was thick with flies, gnats and mosquitoes. With Crowley as a drugged, benevolent dictator at his best, and a gruesome, perverted manipulator at his worst, the days at the Abbey could be harsh. On top of that, the magical training was rigorous and unrelenting. Newcomers would spend the night in "La chambre des cauchemars" - "The Room of Nightmares" - its principle features - three large walls painted in fresco, representing earth, heaven and hell, depicting mostly demons, goblins and graphic sex scenes. Here, the new student of magick would experience "The nightside of Eden" primed by a "secret process" - probably a potent mixture of hashish and opium, administered by Crowley - as the walls came alive. The idea behind the ordeal was to contemplate every possible phantom that can assail the soul, to face the "Abyss of Horror", and thereby gain mastery over the mind. This approach was strikingly similar to what was practiced 43 years later in Timothy Leary's community, Catalina, founded in a vacant hotel in the sleepy Mexican beach town of Zihuatenjo, where members would sit alone in a lifeguard tower on the beach, dosed on LSD, summoning the forces of the 'irrational', trying to break through to the other side.
With a curriculum of ordeals like nights spent in "The Room of Nightmares", daily evocations in the Temple, and solitary and exhausting 'magical' retreats on the nearby cliff, coupled with the Spartan living conditions, it is perhaps evident why the "Abbey of Thelema" never attracted more than a small group of visitors and benefactors. So much for free love, and "Do what you will". Crowley was decidedly more lenient with his own sexual excesses than with others and there was a catch to the word 'will'. It also didn't help the cause of Thelema that a number of visitors left with a heroin habit as an unwanted souvenir. But in the end it was not the liberal use of drugs, the inherent contradictions in the teachings, or local prejudice that eventually led to the demise of the Abbey - the Cefalù locals did tolerate the community, though they were frequently shocked by the members' preference for bathing nude. It was the tragic death of Raoul Loveday - from enteric fever, contracted by drinking water from a mountain spring in the Cefalù countryside - and the ensuing storm in the British press against Crowley and the Abbey, which prompted headlines like "Orgies in Sicily", that led Mussolini to order the community closed. The directive came as part of a crackdown to suppress breeding grounds for dissent. If not exactly politically dangerous, Crowley and the others were at best undesirable. On April 22, 1923, the Abbey came to an end. The Italian authorities carefully covered the frescos, the magic circle on the floor and other traces of the previous activities with a coat of whitewash.
According to experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger, the villa subsequently sat abandoned for more than 30 years. Maybe also forgotten - sleeping - until Anger in 1955 re-found the villa and obtained permission to remove the whitewash, which had "turned to stone". Anger spent three months working on the walls and floors, gradually revealing "all those hyper-psychedelic murals" in "The Room of Nightmares" and on doors and shutters, planning a photo shoot on location, in which the costume of the sorcerer in the dreamy film Children of Paradise (1945) - a blue velvet robe emblazoned with the word "ABRA" - would appear. Whether the shoot actually happened is unclear. Anger's documentary, made during his stay, was lost by Hulton Television. What still circulates is a series of photographs of the restored Abbey. One of them depicts Anger in conversation with the sexologist Alfred C. Kinsey. On the back wall is Crowley's portrait and on a door, one of the newly uncovered paintings, a mountainous landscape made in a fantasy-like style. Anger had met Kinsey when the doctor approached him to purchase a print of his first film Fireworks. While Anger was an ardent follower of Crowley's magick, Kinsey thought that Crowley was "the most prominent fraud that ever lived". Kinsey nevertheless saw Crowley as a brilliant homoerotic writer, and was interested in discovering more information about Crowley's sex magick practices. More than likely it was Kinsey who funded Anger's stay in Cefalù.
Today Cefalù is not the small Sicilian fishing village Anger and Kinsey experienced in the fifties. Situated one hour from Palermo, it's better described as a booming beachside town, or as a guidebook states: "the premier destination on the Tyrrhenian coast". The change in size and appearance of the town, and the vague directions I had managed to obtain from an older book, made finding the Abbey a challenge. As I walked through the area, which once was "the southeastern outskirts" of Cefalù, I started to doubt whether the house still existed. This area did not share the characteristics of a place that might accommodate 'leftover' or 'ambiguous' spaces. Instead of vacant lots I found my way blocked by the barrier of a gated community, or newly built condos with BMWs and Porsches crowding the parking lots. It was only after hours of walking in circles, almost by chance and out of the corner of my eye, that I caught a glimpse of a caved-in rooof near the stadium. I realized I had been within meters of the house several times before, standing in the parking lot of the stadium, scanning the sloping hillside without noticing the house right next to me, hidden behind a wall of greenery and palm trees.
The house and garden of the Abbey were completely overgrown in a strangely evocative way. As I walked the faintly visible path to what was once the main entrance, I was so overwhelmed by the scene's dormant qualities that I had to pause. It seemed to me as if sediments, pieces of leftover narratives and ideas from the individuals that once passed through this place had formed knots, as tangled as the bushes and trees that where now taking over, creating a kind of sleeping presence.
I continued my exploration wondering if the Abbey could be seen as a sort of monument, when the gaping hole in the roof reminded me of Robert Smithson's site specific sculpture "Partially Buried Woodshed". Even though Smithson, in this and other pieces, intentionally worked with a narrow but very deep historical space, the "Partially Buried Woodshed" was transformed into a political landmark by someone adding the graffiti "May 4 Kent 70", to commemorate the four students killed by Ohio National Guardsmen during an anti-war protest. The later attempts by Kent University to get rid of the Woodshed were in reality efforts to obscure this particular history, since what Smithson's ruin symbolized was viewed as an embarrassment. Eventually, the university planted a circle of trees around the Woodshed so it couldn't be seen from the road. And so, the monument dissolved and came to an end, discretely hidden by a veil of trees.
Thinking about this I climbed through the only window that was not boarded up, and made my way into "The Room of Nightmares". The room bore traces of vivid green paint and I recognized a few of the frescos from Anger's photographs, though in a much worse state. Its walls were scrawled with graffiti and the rest of the house a mess of tiles, dust and discarded furniture - it felt like being in a hollow place. As I climbed out, and stood in the garden again, I suddenly noticed how close the newly built houses were - just on the other side of the bushes.
Joachim Koester, 2005
year 3 michael morley project drawing
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/20/arts/review-art-juxtaposing-the-new-from-all-over.html?pagewanted=2&pagewanted=print
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
May 20, 1989
Review/Art; Juxtaposing the New From All Over
By MICHAEL BRENSON, Special to The New York Times
''Magicians of the Earth,'' which opened Thursday at the Pompidou Center and La Villette, brings together contemporary art from all over the world, juxtaposing artists from New Guinea and Italy, Australia and England, Tibet and the United States. Every culture and countless artistic approaches have been appropriated in a spectacular post-Modern bazaar in which everything seems equally valid and available.
With 100 artists, half from Europe and the United States and half from the rest of the world, this is the largest art exhibition in Paris in recent memory. At a cost of roughly $5 million, it is also one of the most expensive.
The aim was an artistic event that would be truly international and less submissive to nationalism and newness than the most prominent international art extravaganzas, Documenta in Kassel, West Germany, and the Venice Biennale. The exhibition promised to consider some pressing questions: Is there such a thing as world art? How should art from one culture be approached by another? Are there basic similarities as well as differences in the work of an American Conceptual artist, an African coffin maker and an Eskimo carver of whale bone?
Installed in two very distinct spaces, ''Magicians of the Earth'' seems like two different shows. About one-third of the artists are on the fifth-floor galleries of the Pompidou Center. There are strong works by artists like Jeff Wall and Nam June Paik, whose high-speed video installation, most of it in the shape of a beat-up truck, produces a collision between different worlds and times. But the gallery spaces are often tight, the juxtapositions jarring and the weakness of some work immediately apparent.
At the glass and steel hall of the former slaughterhouse at La Villette, on the outskirts of Paris, the space is grand, the feeling more open and the forgettable work less conspicuous. Each work has the air it needs, from the two big chunks of granite, just inside the entrance, in which Giovanni Anselmo has almost buried a compass, to the immense mud drawing by Richard Long at the other end, looming like a rose window or a red sun.
The exhibition was conceived by Jean-Hubert Martin, the director of the Pompidou Center. During four years of planning, curators traveled the world and arranged for some Western artists, including Lawrence Weiner, the American Conceptual artist who builds murals with words, to travel as well.
The selection of Western artists is questionable. While the exhibition is presented as open and fresh, many of the Americans and Europeans - including Sigmar Polke, Enzo Cucchi, Anselm Kiefer, John Baldessari, Tony Cragg, Daniel Buren, Rebecca Horn, Christian Boltanski and Francesco Clemente - are veterans of the international art wars.
While the catchy, sweet-sounding title of the show may sell tickets, Conceptual artists like Dennis Adams, Hans Haacke and Barbara Kruger -whose installation at the entrance to the show at the Pompidou Center asks, ''Who are the magicians of the earth?'' - definitely do not see their work as magic, and they are not interested in a mystique of the earth.
With few exceptions, including the French-born Louise Bourgeois, whose presence in this show is the most recognition she has ever received from her native city, the exhibition overlooks those American painters and sculptors whose study of African and Asian art and culture has helped make the present openness to non-Western cultures possible.
Perhaps most disturbing, there are no black American artists in the show, even though many have long been concerned with African art and even though in recent years world art has almost been their issue. The absence of Betye Saar, whose installations brew voodoo, offbeat materials and political commentary, is particularly distressing.
The exhibition has its moments. The photographic installation by Alfredo Jaar, a Chilean living in New York, treats the Western dumping of toxic wastes in Africa with the pointed understatement that has made him one of the best political artists around. The sculptural tombs of Yongping Huang, from Xiamen in China, were assembled with the gray muck of newspapers from throughout the world ground up in washing machines. In his free-spirited pictorial narratives, Cheri Samba from Zaire approaches himself, his culture and the West with a bemused, committed eye.
The exhibition attacks several stereotypes. One is that non-Western artists, particularly in Africa, are nameless. Another is that many cultures outside the West are static. Although only an expert could tell what distinguishes the bark paintings from New Guinea or the tantric paintings from Nepal from the works of their ancestors, every work in the show does reflect a changing relationship to the past. To look at the contorted ebony masks by John Fundi from Mozambique is to sense how many cultures are struggling with change.
The exhibition moves in so many directions, however, that it will satisfy no one. Not political artists who want Western attitudes toward the rest of the world confronted. Not theorists who believe everything from other cultures must be seen in context. Not those who believe in a need for the kind of formal resolution that is always a sign of a mature artistic sensibility and imagination.
In some ways, the exhibition is painful. You simply cannot juxtapose highly marketable Western artists who know all the curves and angles of the international art circuit with artists from Africa, Southeast Asia, Oceania and Australia, who know nothing of its strategies and traps and for whom every work is a life-and-death matter. These artists are too vulnerable.
For example, while a few Western artists wandered about the show the day of the opening, a number of artists from outside the West not only stood by their work but also seemed to guard it. Esther Mahlangu, an artist from South Africa, remained in front of her replica of a ceremonial house, wearing a dress bearing patterns and colors similar to those she painted on the walls and fence.
After Cyprien Tokoudagba from Benin built his temple and sculptural group inspired by voodoo ritual -complete with naked father, kneeling son and eager lions and snake - he sacrificed chickens to protect himself from any wrongdoing in building the work for this show. After completing their red sand installation, six aboriginal artists announced there was no magic in their work. They waited but it did not arrive.
Joe Ben Jr., a Navajo living in Arizona, is keenly aware of the cultural differences. He spoke with eloquence about his sharply delineated floor painting, made by scattering sand like seeds. He said that curators do not understand how to collect the sand so that the painting remains within it. When the exhibition ends, he said, he will get the painting himself and carry it back to the Southwest where he will put it under a plant and return it to ''the mother earth.''
What happens when many of the artists who make nonmarketable religious work go home and no Western art official calls again? Will they feel they have been exploited by a French curatorial vision?
The exhibition also reinforces as many stereotypes as it challenges. In general, the non-Western world emerges as a place where time moves slowly, criticism is directed toward others, faith is preserved and memory, ritual and the earth are trusted friends. The West, on the other hand, appears restless, self-important, weighed down by history, tending to romanticize different cultures and unable to stop doubting itself and questioning its relations with the rest of the world. With a different selection of artists, this gulf would not have existed.
It would be nice to say that ''Magicians of the Earth'' - which continues through Aug. 14 - is a noble, ground-breaking and spellbinding exhibition. It isn't.
A replica of a South African ceremonial house, by Esther Mahlangu, is in the exhibition in Paris (Agence France-Presse)
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May 20, 1989
Review/Art; Juxtaposing the New From All Over
By MICHAEL BRENSON, Special to The New York Times
''Magicians of the Earth,'' which opened Thursday at the Pompidou Center and La Villette, brings together contemporary art from all over the world, juxtaposing artists from New Guinea and Italy, Australia and England, Tibet and the United States. Every culture and countless artistic approaches have been appropriated in a spectacular post-Modern bazaar in which everything seems equally valid and available.
With 100 artists, half from Europe and the United States and half from the rest of the world, this is the largest art exhibition in Paris in recent memory. At a cost of roughly $5 million, it is also one of the most expensive.
The aim was an artistic event that would be truly international and less submissive to nationalism and newness than the most prominent international art extravaganzas, Documenta in Kassel, West Germany, and the Venice Biennale. The exhibition promised to consider some pressing questions: Is there such a thing as world art? How should art from one culture be approached by another? Are there basic similarities as well as differences in the work of an American Conceptual artist, an African coffin maker and an Eskimo carver of whale bone?
Installed in two very distinct spaces, ''Magicians of the Earth'' seems like two different shows. About one-third of the artists are on the fifth-floor galleries of the Pompidou Center. There are strong works by artists like Jeff Wall and Nam June Paik, whose high-speed video installation, most of it in the shape of a beat-up truck, produces a collision between different worlds and times. But the gallery spaces are often tight, the juxtapositions jarring and the weakness of some work immediately apparent.
At the glass and steel hall of the former slaughterhouse at La Villette, on the outskirts of Paris, the space is grand, the feeling more open and the forgettable work less conspicuous. Each work has the air it needs, from the two big chunks of granite, just inside the entrance, in which Giovanni Anselmo has almost buried a compass, to the immense mud drawing by Richard Long at the other end, looming like a rose window or a red sun.
The exhibition was conceived by Jean-Hubert Martin, the director of the Pompidou Center. During four years of planning, curators traveled the world and arranged for some Western artists, including Lawrence Weiner, the American Conceptual artist who builds murals with words, to travel as well.
The selection of Western artists is questionable. While the exhibition is presented as open and fresh, many of the Americans and Europeans - including Sigmar Polke, Enzo Cucchi, Anselm Kiefer, John Baldessari, Tony Cragg, Daniel Buren, Rebecca Horn, Christian Boltanski and Francesco Clemente - are veterans of the international art wars.
While the catchy, sweet-sounding title of the show may sell tickets, Conceptual artists like Dennis Adams, Hans Haacke and Barbara Kruger -whose installation at the entrance to the show at the Pompidou Center asks, ''Who are the magicians of the earth?'' - definitely do not see their work as magic, and they are not interested in a mystique of the earth.
With few exceptions, including the French-born Louise Bourgeois, whose presence in this show is the most recognition she has ever received from her native city, the exhibition overlooks those American painters and sculptors whose study of African and Asian art and culture has helped make the present openness to non-Western cultures possible.
Perhaps most disturbing, there are no black American artists in the show, even though many have long been concerned with African art and even though in recent years world art has almost been their issue. The absence of Betye Saar, whose installations brew voodoo, offbeat materials and political commentary, is particularly distressing.
The exhibition has its moments. The photographic installation by Alfredo Jaar, a Chilean living in New York, treats the Western dumping of toxic wastes in Africa with the pointed understatement that has made him one of the best political artists around. The sculptural tombs of Yongping Huang, from Xiamen in China, were assembled with the gray muck of newspapers from throughout the world ground up in washing machines. In his free-spirited pictorial narratives, Cheri Samba from Zaire approaches himself, his culture and the West with a bemused, committed eye.
The exhibition attacks several stereotypes. One is that non-Western artists, particularly in Africa, are nameless. Another is that many cultures outside the West are static. Although only an expert could tell what distinguishes the bark paintings from New Guinea or the tantric paintings from Nepal from the works of their ancestors, every work in the show does reflect a changing relationship to the past. To look at the contorted ebony masks by John Fundi from Mozambique is to sense how many cultures are struggling with change.
The exhibition moves in so many directions, however, that it will satisfy no one. Not political artists who want Western attitudes toward the rest of the world confronted. Not theorists who believe everything from other cultures must be seen in context. Not those who believe in a need for the kind of formal resolution that is always a sign of a mature artistic sensibility and imagination.
In some ways, the exhibition is painful. You simply cannot juxtapose highly marketable Western artists who know all the curves and angles of the international art circuit with artists from Africa, Southeast Asia, Oceania and Australia, who know nothing of its strategies and traps and for whom every work is a life-and-death matter. These artists are too vulnerable.
For example, while a few Western artists wandered about the show the day of the opening, a number of artists from outside the West not only stood by their work but also seemed to guard it. Esther Mahlangu, an artist from South Africa, remained in front of her replica of a ceremonial house, wearing a dress bearing patterns and colors similar to those she painted on the walls and fence.
After Cyprien Tokoudagba from Benin built his temple and sculptural group inspired by voodoo ritual -complete with naked father, kneeling son and eager lions and snake - he sacrificed chickens to protect himself from any wrongdoing in building the work for this show. After completing their red sand installation, six aboriginal artists announced there was no magic in their work. They waited but it did not arrive.
Joe Ben Jr., a Navajo living in Arizona, is keenly aware of the cultural differences. He spoke with eloquence about his sharply delineated floor painting, made by scattering sand like seeds. He said that curators do not understand how to collect the sand so that the painting remains within it. When the exhibition ends, he said, he will get the painting himself and carry it back to the Southwest where he will put it under a plant and return it to ''the mother earth.''
What happens when many of the artists who make nonmarketable religious work go home and no Western art official calls again? Will they feel they have been exploited by a French curatorial vision?
The exhibition also reinforces as many stereotypes as it challenges. In general, the non-Western world emerges as a place where time moves slowly, criticism is directed toward others, faith is preserved and memory, ritual and the earth are trusted friends. The West, on the other hand, appears restless, self-important, weighed down by history, tending to romanticize different cultures and unable to stop doubting itself and questioning its relations with the rest of the world. With a different selection of artists, this gulf would not have existed.
It would be nice to say that ''Magicians of the Earth'' - which continues through Aug. 14 - is a noble, ground-breaking and spellbinding exhibition. It isn't.
A replica of a South African ceremonial house, by Esther Mahlangu, is in the exhibition in Paris (Agence France-Presse)
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Tuesday, March 17, 2009
micheal morley year 3 project drawing
http://world.std.com/~mica/phusor03.jpg
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://world.std.com/~mica/phusor03.jpg&imgrefurl=http://world.std.com/~mica/cft.html&usg=__5RevRhcvwuPnVYTuM5E8ypYtG_w=&h=480&w=640&sz=32&hl=en&start=51&um=1&tbnid=mT5Vo20mIaGBGM:&tbnh=103&tbnw=137&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dart%2Band%2Bcold%2Bfusion%26ndsp%3D18%26hl%3Den%26rls%3Dcom.microsoft:en-nz%26sa%3DN%26start%3D36%26um%3D1
PHOTOGRAPH OF PHUSOR CATHODE SHOWS ASYMMETRIC ELECTROLYSIS OF A DIFFERENT TYPE OF COLD FUSION SYSTEM
(c) Dr. M. Swartz, JET Energy, Inc., JET Thermal Products
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