Cutting the Gordian Knot

The Gordian Knot is a legend associated with Alexander the Great. It is often used as a metaphor for an intractable problem, solved by a bold stroke ("cutting the Gordian knot"):
"Turn him to any cause of policy,The Gordian Knot of it he will unloose,Familiar as his garter" (Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 1 Scene 1. 45-47)

At one time the Phrygians were without a legitimate king. An oracle at Telmissus (the ancient capital of Phrygia) decreed that the next man to enter the city driving an ox-cart should become their king. This man was a poor peasant, Gordias, who drove into town on his ox-cart. He was declared king by the priests. This had been predicted in a second way by a sign of the gods, when an eagle had landed on that ox-cart. In gratitude, his son Midas dedicated the ox-cart to the Phrygian god Sabazios (whom the Greeks identified with Zeus) and either tied it to a post or tied its shaft with an intricate knot of cornel (Cornus mas) bark. The ox-cart still stood in the palace of the former kings of Phrygia at Gordium in the fourth century BC when Alexander arrived, at which point Phrygia had been reduced to a satrapy, or province, of the Persian Empire.
In 333 BC, while wintering at Gordium, Alexander the Great attempted to untie the knot. When he could find no end to the knot, to unbind it, he sliced it in half with a stroke of his sword, producing the required ends (the so-called "Alexandrian solution"). Once Alexander had sliced the knot with a sword-stroke, his biographers claimed in retrospect that an oracle further prophesied that the one to untie the knot would become the king of Asia.
Plutarch disputes the claim that Alexander sliced the knot with his sword, and relates that according to Aristobulus,Alexander pulled the knot out of its pole pin rather than cutting it. Either way, Alexander did go on to conquer Asia as far as the Indus and the Oxus, fulfilling the prophecy.

Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom (born July 11, 1930) is an American author, intellectual and literary critic. Bloom defended 19th-century Romantic poets at a time when their reputations stood at a low ebb, has constructed controversial theories of poetic influence, and advocates an aesthetic approach to literature against feminist, Marxist, New Historicist, poststructuralist (deconstructive and semiotic), and other methods of academic literary criticism. Bloom is currently a Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University.

Bloom said: "Poetic influence, as I conceive it, is a variety of melancholy or the anxiety-principle." A new poet becomes inspired to write because he has read and admired the poetry of previous poets; but this admiration turns into resentment when the new poet discovers that these poets whom he idolized have already said everything he wishes to say. The poet becomes disappointed because he "cannot be Adam early in the morning. There have been too many Adams, and they have named everything."

In order to evade this psychological obstacle, the new poet must convince himself that previous poets have gone wrong somewhere and failed in their vision, thus leaving open the possibility that he may have something to add to the tradition after all. The new poet's love for his heroes turns into antagonism towards them: "Initial love for the precursor's poetry is transformed rapidly enough into revisionary strife, without which individuation is not possible."

Bellini

A Bellini is an internationally well-known long drink cocktail that originated in Italy. It is a mixture of sparkling wine (traditionally Prosecco) and peach purée often served at celebrations. It is one of Italy's most popular cocktails.

The Bellini was invented sometime between 1934 and 1948 by Giuseppe Cipriani, founder of Harry's Bar in Venice, Italy. Because of its unique pink color, which reminded Cipriani of the color of the toga of a saint in a painting by 15th-century Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini, he named the drink the Bellini.
The drink started as a seasonal specialty at Harry's Bar, a favorite haunt of Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis and Orson Welles. Later, it also became popular at the bar's New York counterpart. After an entrepreneurial Frenchman set up a business to ship fresh white peach pureé to both locations, it was a year-round favorite.

Populism

Populism is a discourse that claims to support "the people" versus "the elites". Populism may comprise an ideology urging social and political system changes and/or a rhetorical style deployed by members of political or social movements. Generally, populism invokes an idea of democracy as being, above all, the expression of the people's will.

The word populism is derived from the Latin word populus, which means people in English (in the sense of "nation," as in: "The Roman People" (populus Romanus), not in the sense of "multiple individual persons" as in: "There are people visiting us today"). Therefore, populism espouses government by the people as a whole (that is to say, the masses). This is in contrast to elitism, aristocracy, synarchy or plutocracy, each of which are an ideology that espouse government by a small, privileged group above the masses.

Populism has been a common political phenomenon throughout history. Spartacus could be considered a famous example of a populist leader of ancient times through his slave rebellion against the rulers of Ancient Rome. In fact, such leaders of the Roman Republic as Gaius Marius, Julius Caesar, and Caesar Augustus were called populares, as all used referendums to go over the Roman Senate's head and establish the laws that they saw fit.

Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes (12 November 1915 – 25 March 1980) (pronounced [ʀɔlɑ̃ baʀt]) was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes's work extended over many fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism and post-structuralism.

Barthes's earliest work was very much a reaction to the trend of existentialist philosophy that was prominent during the 1940s, specifically towards the figurehead of existentialism Jean-Paul Sartre. In his work What Is Literature? (1947) Sartre finds himself to be disenchanted with both established forms of writing, and more experimental avant-garde forms, which he feels alienate readers. Barthes’ response is to try to find what can be considered unique and original in writing. He determines in Writing Degree Zero (1953) that language and style are both matters that appeal to conventions, and are thus not purely creative. Rather, form, or what Barthes calls ‘writing’, the specific way an individual chooses to manipulate conventions of style for a desired effect, is the unique and creative act. One’s form is vulnerable to becoming a convention once it has been made available to the public. This means that being creative is an ongoing process of continual change and reaction. He saw Albert Camus’s The Stranger as an ideal example of this notion for its sincere lack of any embellishment or flair.

Barthes's earliest work was very much a reaction to the trend of existentialist philosophy that was prominent during the 1940s, specifically towards the figurehead of existentialism Jean-Paul Sartre. In his work What Is Literature? (1947) Sartre finds himself to be disenchanted with both established forms of writing, and more experimental avant-garde forms, which he feels alienate readers. Barthes’ response is to try to find what can be considered unique and original in writing. He determines in Writing Degree Zero (1953) that language and style are both matters that appeal to conventions, and are thus not purely creative. Rather, form, or what Barthes calls ‘writing’, the specific way an individual chooses to manipulate conventions of style for a desired effect, is the unique and creative act. One’s form is vulnerable to becoming a convention once it has been made available to the public. This means that being creative is an ongoing process of continual change and reaction. He saw Albert Camus’s The Stranger as an ideal example of this notion for its sincere lack of any embellishment or flair.

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida (15 July 1930 – 8 October 2004) was a French philosopher born in Algeria, who is known as the founder of deconstruction. His voluminous work has had a profound impact upon literary theory and continental philosophy. Derrida's best known work is Of Grammatology.

Derrida began speaking and writing publicly at a time when the French intellectual scene was experiencing an increasing rift between what could broadly speaking be called "phenomenological" and "structural" approaches to understanding individual and collective life. For those with a more phenomenological bent, the goal was to understand experience by comprehending and describing its genesis, the process of its emergence from an origin or event. For the structuralists, this was precisely the false problem, and the "depth" of experience could in fact only be an effect of structures which are not themselves experiential. It is in this context that in 1959 Derrida asks the question: must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something?

In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis. At the same time, in order that there be movement, or potential, the origin cannot be some pure unity or simplicity, but must already be articulated—complex—such that from it a "diachronic" process can emerge. This originary complexity must not be understood as an original positing, but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality. It is this thought of originary complexity, rather than original purity, which destabilises the thought of both genesis and structure, that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which derive all of its terms, including deconstruction.

Derrida's method consisted in demonstrating all the forms and varieties of this originary complexity, and their multiple consequences in many fields. His way of achieving this was by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, with an ear to what in those texts runs counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating the aporias and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle ways that this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects.

Gregory Crewdson

The photograph seems utterly serendipitous: a boy stands under a bridge, framed by lush trees, and directs his (and the viewer's) gaze heavenward through backlit fog toward some unseen attraction.

But nothing has been left to chance. The photographer, Gregory Crewdson, scouted the spot under a Massachusetts railroad bridge for a month, and a crew of about 40 people spent days setting up the shot. The illumination comes from lights suspended from cranes, and the fog rises from hidden machines. Crewdson instructed the boy, who had been hanging around the bridge, to imagine "a dream world where everything is perfect."

Such preparation for a single photographic image may seem a bit much, but this was a relatively simple Crewdson shoot. For some of the photographs collected in his new book, Beneath the Roses, he shut down public streets, used rainmaking machines to produce downpours—even simulated a raging house fire. He uses such Hollywood-scale production techniques to create what he calls "in-between moments"—interludes just before or after unspecified but obviously momentous events. His pictures set the stage for a story, but the viewer has to flesh it out.

"When I'm making my pictures, I never really think about what happens before or what happens after," says Crewdson, 45. Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1960s, he was intrigued by his father's work as a psychoanalyst. "The fact that his office was in our house always suggested some sense of the furtive or the secret," he says. Dyslexia eventually drew Crewdson to photography. "I have a very difficult time thinking linearly," he says. "I tend to think more in terms of images."

While at the Yale University School of Art, where he earned an MFA in 1988, Crewdson spent lots of time taking pictures in western Massachusetts, where his family had a cabin. Since then, he has used that landscape as a giant photo studio, seeking locations that he says evoke the "familiar and unfamiliar."

The resulting pictures, typically stitched together from negatives scanned into a computer, "look like paintings, but they give you an emotional feeling stronger than a lot of movies you'd walk away from," says Rick Sands, Crewdson's director of photography, who has also worked on films. "If you read a screenplay, it is telling you where to go....You take yourself places in one of his pictures."

The photographs in the book were taken over seven years at a cost of "less than you think it would," says Crewdson. He and his wife, Ivy, an art consultant, live in Greenwich Village with their children, Lily, 3, and Walker, 1. He often gets his ideas while swimming (he tries to get in some laps every day), but it takes months to produce a finished image. For outdoor scenes, he'll drive around to find sites; interiors are built on a soundstage at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. Crew members say he knows what he wants but is open to possibilities. "He'll tell me he wants women that look haunted or somebody who looks like they've lived a hard life," says casting director Juliane Hiam.

Crewdson teaches photography at Yale, but making pictures is his "main job"; a Crewdson print can sell for up to $150,000. He insists it's not about money. "It's just about trying to find something elusive and beautiful and mysterious in the world," he says.

David McMillan

Winnipeg photographer David McMillan has visited the Chernobyl evacuation zone six times since 1994, recording the solitary decay of this modern Pompeii in a series of images that now form part of the permanent collection of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottawa.

In the 19th century, the art theorist John Ruskin described the aesthetic category of the "picturesque." Picturesque art typically dwelled on charming rustic scenes that had the attributes of age, ruggedness and decline. Ruskin considered the picturesque a suspect genre, for it indulged a "delight in ruin" that allowed the viewer to suspend any concern for the human implications of a scene. McMillan's photographs call to mind Ruskin's critique of the picturesque in that, despite the tragic ruin they record, their most noticeable attribute is beauty. Many are interiors: paint peels in enormous flakes from walls, and despite the terrifying meaning of this decay, the eye luxuriates in the softly saturated turquoises and greens with which these rooms were once so optimistically decorated. Some are infused with a pearly light pouring in sideways from windows; others, facing a window head-on, are flooded with a glare that obliterates everything beyond — an overexposure that is more metaphorical than technical.

Of course, this work shares more with documentary photography than with Victorian notions of beauty. Found objects provide ample scope for political critique: one image records an incomplete arrangement of flags on a wall, vestiges of a dismantled Soviet Union; in another, a shattered portrait of Lenin stands among the debris of a nursery school. The political hubris is clear. Not to mention the sheer environmental madness of it all: perhaps the most telling photograph shows the burying of heavy military equipment that became contaminated during the clean-up process.

But this is documentary that, indulging in some degree of manipulation, ventures into narrative symbolism. The door of a car on a road that goes nowhere is left ajar, which might accord with our notion of the panic of evacuation, until we learn that Pripyat, the former town of 45 000 where many of these photographs were taken, was not evacuated until 36 hours after the disaster. Other things we must believe even if we cannot comprehend them: grasses and ferns growing through the floor of a hotel room, or the branch of a tree penetrating a pane of glass. Plants thrusting up through asphalt, shrubs with tiny white blooms: these are also miraculous, given the fact that a 400-hectare pine forest near the reactor died within days of the accident, the trees, their needles bright red, were buried in a concrete-lined pit.

Pripyat was built to house the workers at the power plant. In these depopulated photographs, their lives are not represented so much as implied: rusting cots lined up against a nursery wall; shelves of little potties; school records abandoned, depriving children of part of their brief history. Suspended in time, every detail enters the realm of the symbolic as a token of loss. Even nature, with its mutated regenerations, has entered the symbolic realm at Chernobyl, for it is no longer, and never will be, as it once was. A tree that grows in a radioactive schoolyard is no longer a tree, but merely the idea of one.

home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~dmcmill/

Andrew Morrow

The Toronto-based painter Andrew Morrow makes some of the most complex figurative paintings in contemporary art. Trained as an illustrator, he brings faultless technique to the rendering of his images. His mostly panorama-format works draw on the traditions of history painting and the depictions of battles in vast landscapes. Morrow’s contemporary turn, however, is to populate his canvases with stock figures from the mass culture media world and set them loose in the midst of churning apocalyptic dramas. The centrepiece of the current show is an 8-by-16-foot canvas titled Oh, Happy Meat. Morrow leaves parts of the painting in an unfinished state and adds handwritten commentary that keeps imaginative options open and the chaotic atmosphere in suspension. His immersion of viewers into media mayhem is sharp and topical, and it’s not unlike the droll visual puns of American painter Mark Tansey; only Morrow’s world has heated up and fallen apart.

andrewmorrow.com

Richard Dawkins

Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941) is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science author. He was formerly Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford and was a fellow of New College, Oxford.^[1][2][3][4]

Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982, he made a widely cited contribution to evolutionary biology with the theory, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms.

Dawkins is a prominent critic of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker. He has since written several popular science books, and makes regular television and radio appearances, predominantly discussing these topics.

Dawkins is an atheist,^[5][6][7] secular humanist, sceptic, scientific rationalist,^[8] and supporter of the Brights movement.^[9] He has widely been referred to in the media as "Darwin's Rottweiler",^[10][11] by analogy with English biologist T. H. Huxley, who was known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of natural selection. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that faith qualifies as a delusion − as a fixed false belief.^[12] As of November 2007, the English language version had sold more than 1.5 million copies and had been translated into 31 other languages,^[13] making it his most popular book to date.

richarddawkins.net

Edward Steichen

Edward Steichen (March 27, 1879 – March 25, 1973) was an American photographer, painter, and art gallery and museum curator, born in Bivange, Luxembourg. His family moved to the United States in 1881 and he became a naturalized citizen in 1900.

Having established himself as a fine art painter in the beginning of the 20th century, Steichen assumed the pictorialist approach in photography and proved himself a master of it. In 1905, Steichen helped create the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession with Alfred Stieglitz. After World War I, during which he commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces, he reverted to straight photography, gradually moving into fashion photography. Steichen's 1928 photo of actress Greta Garbo is recognized as one of the definitive portraits of Garbo.

During World War II, he served as Director of the Naval Photographic Institute. His war documentary The Fighting Lady won the 1945 Academy Award for Best Documentary. After the war, Steichen served until 1962 as the Director of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Among other accomplishments, Steichen is appreciated for creating The Family of Man in 1955, a vast exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art consisting of over 500 photos that depicted life, love and death in 68 countries. Steichen's brother-in-law, Carl Sandburg, wrote the introduction for the exhibition catalog (ISBN 0-8109-6169-5). As had been Steichen's wish, the exhibition was donated to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. It is now permanently housed in the Luxembourg town of Clervaux.

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg (born Milton Ernst Rauschenberg; October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is perhaps most famous for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. While the Combines are both painting and sculpture, Rauschenberg also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance.

Artistic Contribution

Rauschenberg's approach was sometimes called "Neo-Dada," a label he shared with the painter Jasper Johns.^[17] Rauschenberg's oft-repeated quote that he wanted to work "in the gap between art and life" suggested a questioning of the distinction between art objects and everyday objects, reminiscent of the issues raised by the notorious "Fountain," by Dada pioneer, Marcel Duchamp. At the same time, Johns' paintings of numerals, flags, and the like, were reprising Duchamp's message of the role of the observer in creating art's meaning.

Alternatively, in 1961, Rauschenberg took a step in what could be considered the opposite direction by championing the role of creator in creating art's meaning. Rauschenberg was invited to participate in an exhibition at the Galerie Iris Clert, where artists were to create and display a portrait of the owner, Iris Clert. Rauschenberg's submission consisted of a telegram sent to the gallery declaring "This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so."

Robert Rauschenberg, Riding Bikes, Berlin, Germany, 1998.

By 1962, Rauschenberg's paintings were beginning to incorporate not only found objects but found images as well - photographs transferred to the canvas by means of the silkscreen process. Previously used only in commercial applications, silkscreen allowed Rauschenberg to address the multiple reproducibility of images, and the consequent flattening of experience that that implies. In this respect, his work is contemporaneous with that of Andy Warhol, and both Rauschenberg and Johns are frequently cited as important forerunners of American Pop Art.

In 1966, Billy Klüver and Rauschenberg officially launched Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) a non-profit organization established to promote collaborations between artists and engineers.

In 1984, Rauschenberg announced his Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange, or ROCI, at the United Nations. This would culminate in a seven year, ten country tour to encourage "world peace and understanding," through Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, Beijing, Lhasa (Tibet), Japan, Cuba, Soviet Union, Berlin, and Malaysia in which he left a piece of art, and was influenced by the cultures he visited. Paintings, often on reflective surfaces, as well as drawings, photographs, assemblages and other multimedia were produced, inspired by these surroundings, and this was considered some of his strongest works. The ROCI venture, supported by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., went on view in 1991.

In 1986, he was commissioned by BMW to paint a full size BMW 635 CSi for the sixth installment of the famed BMW Art Car Project. Rauschenberg's contribution was the first to include the wheels into the project, as well as incorporating previous works of art into the design.

In addition to painting and sculpture, Rauschenberg's career has also included significant contributions to printmaking and Performance Art. He also won a Grammy Award for his album design of Talking Heads' album Speaking in Tongues. As of 2003 he worked from his home and studio in Captiva, Florida.

In a famously cited incident of 1953, Rauschenberg erased a drawing by de Kooning, which he obtained from his colleague for the express purpose of erasing it as an artistic statement. The result is titled Erased de Kooning.^[18][19] In 1964 Rauschenberg was the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale (Mark Tobey and James Whistler had previously won the Painting Prize). After that time, he enjoyed a rare degree of institutional support. In 1951 Rauschenberg had his first one-man show at the Betty Parsons Gallery^[20] and in 1954 had a second one-man show at the Charles Egan Gallery.^[21]

Boogie

Born and raised in Belgrade, Serbia, Boogie began documenting rebellion and unrest during the civil war that ravaged his country during the 1990s. He moved to New York in 1998.

artcoup.com

Bolero

Bolero is a name given to certain slow, romantic latin music and its associated dance and song. There are Spanish and Cuban forms, which are both significant, and which have separate origins.^[1] The term is also used for some art music. Ravel's Boléro is one of his most famous works, originally written as a ballet score, but now usually played as a concert piece. It was originally called Fandango, but has rhythmic similarities with the Spanish dance form, being in a constant 3/4 time with a prominent triplet on the second beat of every bar.

In all its forms, the bolero has been popular for over a century, and still is today.