Visitation

Higgins

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I was wondering, as usual, about the problem that what we see as "our culture" is in fact no longer anyone's culture at all. Which I think is just as well, it's not like having a coherent culture ever did anyone any good...

So anyway, there are three related problems: looking at things that are sort of outside one's current cultural space and two: defining the edge of one's cultural space and three, considering the nature of the culturally-induced nothingness that shrouds objects beyond the edge of one's cultural space. For example, I'm pretty sure Classical Art exists out there in a new region of nothingness. What about the Renaissance? Quite or not quite?

Here's a book review (I haven't seen the book)

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3664/is_200501/ai_n9468530

And a painting:

http://www.kfki.hu/~/arthp/html/p/pontormo/3/05visita.html

And another visitation:

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/m/master/ms/1visita.html

and another:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariotto_Albertinelli
 

robeiae

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Higgins

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I think this is kinda old hat. Sorry.

Try this: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

Or this: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0262521644/?tag=absolutewritedm-20

Of course, I thin Benjamin was mostly wrong, though incredibly perceptive of the moment. And that's the problem with culture: it always tends to disappear in the present, though be readily identifiable in the past.

I'm sure there are old-hat-like aspects...I was thinking more like "we define the boundaries of our culture in the present" by a special set of acts that toss a veil of arbitrary obscurity over things that just happen to be outside that boundary.

Here's a link to some earlier puzzling of mine:

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=75225
 

robeiae

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It's an observer-player problem. I think we are saying the same thing, only I'm looking from outside. The veil is only effective from the inside.

Compare Heart of Darkness to Apocalypse Now. It's why HoD says much more, imo.
 

Higgins

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Snapshot from the edge of nothing

It's an observer-player problem. I think we are saying the same thing, only I'm looking from outside. The veil is only effective from the inside.

Compare Heart of Darkness to Apocalypse Now. It's why HoD says much more, imo.

Here's the Virgin from one of Pontormo's Annuciations:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Jacopo_Pontormo_024.jpg

Does the inside/outside really work very symmetrically? This fresco seems to have nothing but what you might call painting on the very veil of culture itself. For example: Orange is at first glance an odd color for a Virgin, but there is an earlier set of orange beds in Annuciations....so the orange here is a kind of Freudian condensation of orange-bed-sex with the Virgin getting the news that she is going to be pregnant in an unusual way. She is also alone and looking back. Sometimes the Virgin does a pivoting away, but this might be the only Annuciation in which she just looks back. Plus in this early 16th-century fresco, there are signs of the rediscovery of the power and strangeness of Classical Art: the molding and the small orange grotesque style thing (maybe its her candlestick?).
 
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