Arrival

 

  

arrival
(by nicola gold)
 
the excitement
the curiosity
 the beating heart

 
the joy



with sharpened senses i

bathe in unfamiliar sounds

float in the fragrant ambience


let strangers 
look into the eyes of strangers



i smile



 abandoning myself to the unknown
i throw myself into this strange rhythm 

  

i let myself melt into this place until
everything falls into place and
i become someone new

 happily
i set out to explore her and
embrace her transience

The pictures in this post blend stazione di Venezia Santa Lucia with images of the Biennale, a speedboat or plain blackness.  A big "thank you" goes out to Nicola Gold for her wonderful poetic contribution to this blog post. 

Reality TV

Photos taken at the Lido di Venezia in July 2015 blend with television screens displayed at the 56. Biennale di Venezia.

Reality TV #1

 Reality TV #2

 Reality TV #3

Reality TV #4

EXPO versus Biennale

It's been a while since I last published a blog post featuring new "images of the subconscious".  But I've nevertheless been busy with various other analogue experiments like caleidoscopedia, fotocubism or the usage of Revolog-films (as in this album). 

Visiting the EXPO 2015 in Milano and the 72nd Biennale in Venice within only 72 hours seemed like the perfect occasion to resume my favourite project "Images Of The Subconscious".   

 Breathe In The Art

 The Austrian pavilion versus paintings by (if I remember correctly) various Swedish artists.

 Seeking Asylum In Africa

The Brazilian pavilion versus "She’s Got The Whole World In Her" by Kenias artist Wangechi Mutu.

 Give Us (Today) Our Bread

The pavilion of the Vatican versus "Latent images / Diary of a photographer" by Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige.

N'Est

 The pavilion of Angola versus "Latent images / Diary of a photographer"

 Selfie

And finally reflections of myself in the ENEL-pavilion versus "Latent images / Diary of a photographer".

Psychedelic Vienna (Part One)

I've published these images before on other websites.  Today I thought it was the right time to put them on this blog and use the opportunity to add captions.

 Psychedelic Vienna #1

Karlskirche (St. Charles's Church) blends with Schoenbrunn Palace.

+

 Psychedelic Vienna #2

Twice the Donaukanal ("Danube Canal") and once the Rossauer Kaserne ("Rossauer Barracks").  This image is the result of me spending a whole afternoon in one certain area of Vienna and exposing one cartridge two times with pictures of (more or less) the same motif, thus reducing to the absolute minimum what I consider the two main dimensions of organic random photography - namely
a) time elapsed between the two "takes" and
b) variations in motif.

 Psychedelic Vienna #3 / L'Empire Des Lumières #3

Same story as with #2. I certainly stole the title from Magritte.  Just in case you wondered why this is not only "#3" of a series of slightly surrealistic images taken in Vienna but also of a series of "empires of light": please allow me to enlighten you right here and right now :-)  

Psychedelic Vienna #4 - Painting Dreams

A colleague at work becomes part of a graffito that is just being sprayed.

 Psychedelic Vienna #5 - Night & Day

Once more the Danube Canal times two, once in bright daylight and once at night.

Psychedelic Vienna #6 - The Escape

Thomas and the famous "Riesenrad".

 Psychedelic Vienna #7 - The Sound Of "Musik" 

Schoenbrunn Palace and a "zither" which I found at Vienna' s biggest flea market (the "Naschmarkt") make their way into the same image.  The name is actually the song title of one of the few modern Austrian artists that enjoy(ed) global success: Falco.

 Psychedelic Vienna #8 - Wiener Ringelspiel

 Ringel... what???  

 Psychedelic Vienna #9 - The Real Wiener Ringelspiel ?

 This Carousel (or "Ringelspiel") can be found in the "Prater".  Judging from the green dots I can tell that the film I used was a "Revolog Volvox".

 Psychedelic Vienna #10 - The Cucumbers Strike Back

 Yet another Volvox...

 Psychedelic Vienna #11 - Norma Jeane Mortenson

Marilyn in Vienna?  Yup, at the Viennese Madame Tussaud`s.

Psychedelic Vienna #12 - Smash Fascism

...and neo-nazism.

Psychedelic Vienna #13 - Faces

A couple of Falcos as well as my wife Nina and some unknown woman.

 

Psychedelic Vienna #14 - Drowning In The Sea Of Absurdity

The entrance door to one of the most legendary cafes of Vienna - the "Hawelka" - gets flooded by "Riesenrad" bouncing balls. 

Psychedelic Vienna #15 - Walking In Space

Tourists at the "Burggarten".

 Psychedelic Vienna #16 - Face In The Trees

Danny from my previous blog post vogues right into one of the trees in "Burggarten".

Vogue!

Enough of philosophising - let's have some fun!

A few months back Nina and I hung out with dance artist Danny "Hakan" Red.  It was with great interest that I listened to Danny's first-hand stories from the world of dancing, something I know very little about despite my great love for music.

My interest in listening turned into curiosity when he spoke the word: "vogueing".

 

"Vogueing?  What's vogueing?", I asked.

(The dancers among you will probably ask now: "Hey Robert, where have you been living over the last 20 years - behind the moon?"

  

Vogue magazine (from which the dance style got its name, as you guessed) defines vogueing [ˈvəʊgɪŋ] as "a dance style of the late 1980s, in which a fashion model's movements and postures are imitated in a highly stylized manner." 

In other words: the dancers take on model-like poses integrated with angular, linear, and rigid arm, leg, and body movements.

 

Egyptian hieroglyphs and fashion poses serve as the original inspirations.

I learned from Danny that there currently are three styles of vogueing:

1. old way (pre-1990)
2. new way (post-1990) and
3. vogue femme (circa 1995).   

Old way is characterized by the formation of lines, symmetry, and precision in the execution of formations with graceful, fluid-like action.  It's the style that Danny, Nina and I decided upon for the photo shoot. 

Vogueing gained mainstream exposure when it was featured in Madonna's song and video "Vogue" (1990).

Many thanks to Danny "Hakan" Red for agreeing on this photo shoot during a very busy schedule here in Vienna!

Thanks also to the people who put all that extremely helpful information about "vogueing" on Wikipedia :-)
    

L'Art Pour L'Art Pour L'Art

Have you ever wondered why you like to listen to music, read books, watch movies and even are willing to wait for hours in a queue just to see an art exhibition?

L'Empire Des Lumières # 1

I know very well how wonderful it feels to be creative and I guess so do you (unless you are one of those artists/people with creative hobbies who are at their creative best when feeling depressed).

L’Art Pour L’Art Pour L’Art #4

But what about the other side of the coin?  The viewer's or listener's side. What do we get from looking at the "Mona Lisa", listening to "Bohemien Rapsody", reading "The Da Vinci Code" or watching "Avatar"? Why do we appreciate and consume art? 

L’Art Pour L’Art Pour L’Art #6

Bono, frontman of Irish rock band U2 once said that "the job of art is to chase away ugliness". Nice words - but if that was really the role of art, how can we explain the fact that seemingly "ugly" paintings like e.g. those by Jackson Pollock can be worth millions of dollars to galleries (while in the view of an interested buyer only five, as was the story of a woman who actually bought a Pollock that was mistakenly priced five dollars)?

And what about Munch's "The Scream" and the late works of Pablo Picasso?  Is this really art that chases ugliness away? 

L’Art Pour L’Art Pour L’Art #1

According to American neuropsychiatrist and Nobel Prize laureate Eric Kandel, the Vienna School of Art History in the 1930s emphasised that the function of the modern artist was not to convey beauty, but to convey new truths.

(Kandel, Eric: "The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present", The Random House, New York, 2012).

L’Art Pour L’Art Pour L’Art #3

What exactly these truths are, depends to a large part on the beholder, the reader, the listener.  And that is you.  Experiments have also shown that these truths - your reactions to a work of art - are influenced by what you are told about it.  In other words:  You are more likely to respond positively when you are told a painting is a genuine work by Rembrandt, even if it is not (read more about this here).

Merci De Faire Ma Chambre

This digression still does not answer the question of why we like and consume art, and why we choose to decorate the rooms of our apartments with paintings.

L’Art Pour L’Art Pour L’Art #2

In his blog post "Why do we appreciate art?", Surya Ramkumar says that while enjoying a work of art, we lose ourselves in a tiny self created world, where there is just us and the work before us.  I agree, and I would add that this self created world is either somebody else's reality or my own.  I consider this apparently trivial addition important because in the first case I am looking at another's reality for distraction whereas in the second case I introspect and want to intensify a certain positive or negative emotion that I am currently under.

 Towers Tour The Louvre

Therefore it seems to me that the main reason why we like art is because it helps us escape our reality. Or gets us to really dive into it.

That Was One Small Step For A Man ?

Heimlicher Atomtest

In "The Change Book",  authors Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler identify six dictatorships in the so-called "free world" which should be toppled. One of these is the "dictatorship of breaking news". They claim that if a piece of news was really so important then we would hear about it sooner or later anyway.  Instead, we should draw our attention to what is overlooked.  I couldn' t agree more.  I feel like I am permanently exposed to a cacophony of information, most of all in my mailbox - the "real" and the electronic one.

I consider myself a person who by nature is not very interested in breaking news, for the reasons that Messrs Krogerus and Tschäppeler outlined above.  However, every now and then there comes that certain "one in one thousand" headline that manages to catch even my attention... 

 Baba, Papa
 

On 28 February 2013 A.D. pope Benedict XVI resigned, aged 85. The last pope to do so was Celestine V in 1294.  If you are not a Roman-Catholic you probably couldn't care less.  But if you are like me someone who can best be categorised somewhere between pious church-goer and christened atheist, you might have wondered during the last weeks what the implications of this development are and whether you need to adjust your world view a bit.

That Was One Small Step For A Man ?

Some say that Benedikt XVI (now - again - Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger) was forced to resign.  If that really was the case, I do not think that we would ever know.  Assuming it is not the case, I congratulate Mr. Ratzinger for having taken this bold step.  More people should have the courage to do what they know is the right thing to do even if their society tells them otherwise. 

 

Primary Colours 

But what about those things which some societies approve of while others - alongside the church - resent?  Who can give the unequivocal verdict on what is really ethically correct or morally wrong?

 

Some Things Are Almost Indestructible

What about fun things which some priests are trying to make us feel bad about?  What is really so wrong about heavy metal, premarital sex, or a good joke about god?  

La Décadence Aux Tours De Notre Dame

And are they practicing what they preach?  The ones who do must be super-humans.

Shortsighted In The Church

In religious discussions I like to bring the example of the indigenous man living in a jungle somewhere on this planet.  All of his life he does his best to be a reliable partner, a caring father and a responsible member of his tribe.  He also shows great respect for nature.  However, when he dies will he fail the test at the gates of heaven because he does not know who Jesus is? 

 Notrenotre Damedame

If there is a god then He will judge us by our behaviour towards others and towards nature rather than by our religious rituals I would hope.  He would certainly also apply this rule of judgement to a man who some humans had called their "pope" for a few years.  Was this also what the man formerly known as Benedikt XVI was thinking when he decided to step down instead of completing a questionable religious duty which foresees retirement only via death?  If yes, then Mr. Ratzinger's move would symbolise a modernised Catholic church that I could identify with, one I would be proud to be a member of.  Then - from my perspective - Benedikt XVI's resignation would have been much more than just one small step for a man.