Monday, June 30, 2003 :::
It's hard to believe it's been so long since I've been a blogging. I'm just now getting my balance back since a lot of personal stuff took over.
Went to Boston last week and spent the AM in Forest Hills cemetery. It's a lovely place, a Victorian Garden Cemetery filled with beautiful memorial sculptures and famous old bodies like Eugene O'Neill and ee cummings. I don't go to cemeteries for the memories (thanks, anyway...), but for the art. Forest Hills realizes that there are plenty of people like me and it now features a sculpture trail in which contemporary artists get to install their stuff around the grounds. Each piece has something to do with death and/or memory.
http://www.foresthillstrust.org/path_intro.html
The idea was grand, though there were plenty typically ill-concieved pieces along the trail. The most effective, I thought, were the ghost gowns hanging in trees (schlocky at first, but they were haunting and they did stick with you), a woman peering over a low wall in back of some graves and a group of asian influenced forms in a field in the back of the cemetery.
::: posted by patti at 10:00 PM
Friday, June 20, 2003 :::
I went hunting statues today for the documentary. I was just about to leave Colt State Park when the statue of John Chaffee (former Senator from RI) came into view. It's an unpretentious thing. The figure is caught in the act of striding toward yet another appointment. It reminded me a lot of the John F Kennedy at the State House in Boston. But what really made me stop to shoot it (with the camera) was the fact that I had read an article just the other day about it. It seems that Chafee's wife likes to go to this place and be with him. He seems so real to her. Far more than sitting on a grave and talking to the dirt. And his aide said he likes to go behind the piece, because that's the way he mostly saw Chaffee- chasing after him. I took pictures from behind and closeups of the worn shoes, a point both aide and wife remarked on as being remarkable lifelike. It made me think of how wonderful it would be to have a lifelike cast (even if it were considerably less than life size) of all of our dead relatives. Touching them, talking to them, at a graveyard could be so much more satisfying that talking to a stone. Of course, the tradition of putting a picture into the stone would work as well. Against my will, I'm being drawn more and more to cemeteries and their art...
::: posted by patti at 2:42 PM
Saturday, June 14, 2003 :::
Yesterday I saw a new French film called "The Housekeeper". It was about a recently divroced older man who hires a young girl as housekeeper and falls in love more or less. The reason that it worked so well was that it was really a study of loneliness and what people do to counteract it. The man, obviously, was lonely and his life, shown in a series of vaguely connected episodes (going to a jazz club, shopping for groceries, working) was aimless and flat. The housekeeper's life wasn't really shown except insofar as it interacted with his. She really had no life of her own, which seems to have been the point. But she was the one who initiated and moved the relationship along. Each movement was her idea. And, it was obvious, she was moving not out of any real feeling, but as a way to combat boredom. Somehow a romance would pierce the solid ennui that surrounded her. Otherwise, she watched vacuous TV and listened to radio- both loudly enough to drown and numb her own feelings and/or thoughts. He, on the other hand, had enough of a life to be able to read or sit quietly. The ending was predictable. He, who responded dreamlike to her advances, began to drift into some sort of feeling, and she, looking for more excitement, moves on.
::: posted by patti at 9:40 AM
Thursday, June 12, 2003 :::
I went to a lecture today on the use of sculpture in gardens. The speaker was actually addressing private garden sculpture, but the theories between that and public sculpture obviously bleed into each other. The big lessons I learned was that a garden is no spot for small works. They need to be large scale, even if the garden is small. it makes sense, because even if the immediate vicinity is cramped, it is set against the sky, nature and the unvierse. it's no spot for dainty devices. Maybe that's why garden gnomes are so irritating (aside from the fact that they're downright UGLY!). They're little and don't belong in a garden, except with slugs and snails, who have the good grace to blend in with their surroundings. Another point the speaker made was that modern (read, abstract) large pieces require empty spaces. They don't do well among flowers and hedges and trees as a rule. They need to dominate an empty-ish landscape. I'm not sure why this is true, but I suspect it's because of the scale of abstraction. It simply elbows out the "real" world and demands to be noticed. This, I think, can be seen as a weakness, rather than a strength.
::: posted by patti at 3:51 PM
Wednesday, June 11, 2003 :::
I'm fascinated by the history of public sculpture. It's not just the work itself (which can sometimes be fairly boring), but the stories around it, the way it reacts to its world and its world reacts to it, that intrigue me. For example, when the Declaration of Independence was first read in NYC, the listeners were so inflamed that they tore down an equestrian statue of George III and smashed it into pieces. The shrapnel were sent to CT to be melted into bullets. In return, the British soldiers toppled the William Pitt (champion of the colonies' rights). In France during WWII, the Vichy Government destroyed many of the bronze statues of the Enlightenment. They told the people that they were to be used for the farmers, but everyone knew they were going to foundaries to feed German guns. The photographs that were taken of the process were like seeing death camps in operation. And just last year, a theatre producer in London decapitated Maggie Thatcher's statue for political reasons. When he was brought to trial, the jury was hung due to questions of motivation. I love this stuff!
::: posted by patti at 6:17 PM
Monday, June 09, 2003 :::
::: posted by patti at 10:16 AM
Sunday, June 08, 2003 :::
I spent yesterday searching the byroads of Rhode Island for War Memorials for my new doc. A lot of them are plaque on a rock stuff, but there are a lot of granite soldiers in vairous poses, mostly straight and ready. In the 1890's one woman sculptor was asked what she thought of modern men's garments and she replied that they were ugly, certainly for sculpting. She longed for the retun of tighter fittting clothes, knee breeches, etc. that were easier to model. I filmed some Civil War soldiers on posts and found their coats, split backs and neat uniforms to be somehow graceful and appealing. There was a certain flow, a certain "fitness to what they wore. They surely held their attractiveness to me 140 years later.
::: posted by patti at 10:36 PM
