Ed Heinzelman – Page 158 – an intuitive perspective

July 17, 2020July 18, 2020

A Tale Of Two Cities: Notre Dame Cathedral and Hagia Sophia

In the past week or so there have been major announcements that will affect two of the world’s most famous and most popular tourist attractions. One announces the plans to rebuild Notre Dame in Paris and the second to re-convert the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul to a mosque.

First the good news about Notre Dame. After a devastating fire that nearly destroyed the cathedral in April of 2019, there were several discussions about restoring the building. Several suggestions include wild new components that would have significantly altered the buildings appearance and some that might have been welcome enhancements.

But French President Emmanuel Macron has declared that the cathedral will be rebuilt exactly as it was…well as of the 19th Century after the restoration completed by Viollet-le-Duc. That would include the spire that we are all familiar with that replaced the aging and deteriorated spire that Viollet-le-Duc replaced during his work on the cathedral.

This on the face of it is good news…but I am wondering what President Macron means by: “the “redesign” will look exactly the same as the original Gothic design.”

Will the roof be reconstructed of wood? Something that isn’t as readily available as it was in the 13th Century. There is no reason that the roof and upper portions can’t be re-created in modern materials to resemble the original materials. After all, the cathedral at Chartres which also suffered damage to its roof by fire and it was replaced with an iron roof without changing its appearance dramatically.

And I would hope that a substitute is found for the lead that was used extensively throughout the roof and spire. After the fire there was serious concern about the amount of lead that was distributed throughout the area by the fire and smoke itself as well as the efforts of the fire fighters. There certainly must be other materials that will serve without compromising the feel and look of Notre Dame.

This fire took on a personal aspect as I was planning a vacation in Paris for May and June of 2019. I had climbed the tower in the past but in January during semester break but was looking forward to doing it again and seeing a lush and green Paris from this bird’s eye view. Instead I was greeted by this (some of the scaffolds in this photo were left from the work teams who may have started the fire):

President Macron’s plan is to have the work completed in time for the 2024 Olympics that are being hosted by Paris. I look forward to visiting it shortly after that.

And now I am just showing off a bit: here is what the under roof and over cathedral space currently looks like at Chartres:

So let’s move on to Istanbul! The Hagia Sophia has a long history as a place of worship. Built originally as a Roman Catholic basilica by the Roman Emperor Justinian I as the centerpiece of Christendom in Constantinople, it later served the Eastern Orthodox Church, and finally became an Islamic Mosque when the city fell to the Ottoman Empire. But in 1934 it re-opened as a museum in the modern secular nation of Turkey.

Now, during its original conversion to a mosque a large number of the Christian mosaics were covered with plaster. Most followers of Islam do not believe that man should create images of living things. But during the conversion to a museum, the surviving mosaics were cleaned and restored and Hagia Sophia showed off the best artistic practices of the Christian and Islamic eras in the region.

But now in 2020, there has been a renewed movement toward nationalism in Turkey as in other nations, and after some controversial legal maneuvering, Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has declared the Hagia Sophia will once again serve as a mosque. This decision has roiled the Catholic and Orthodox worlds as well as UNESCO which has named Hagia Sophia as a world heritage site. President Erdogan has assured the world that the site will be open to visitors from around the world but not during prayers.

Erdogan, who said the first Muslim prayers would begin in Hagia Sofia on July 24, has insisted the building will be open to all, including non-Muslims.
“We will preserve Hagia Sophia’s status as a cultural heritage the same as our ancestors did.”
“There is no obstacle from a religious perspective to Hagia Sophia Mosque being open to visitors outside prayer times,”

President Erdogan isn’t totally insensitive to the issues he is causing but:

“I want to stress that Hagia Sophia turned into a mosque from a museum, not from a church”

So, the site should be open most of the time…but I don’t know exactly what ‘outside’ of prayers will mean in the future. And this may be an example of cutting off one’s nose…as 3.8 million people visit Hagia Sophia each year. That has to be a sizable revenue source for Turkey and if this change discourages tourists….it may be a very expensive decision indeed.

But my biggest concern is the mosaics and other non-Islamic imagery that remains and that was restored when the old version of the mosque became a museum. Currently this is the plan:

Diyanet (Istanbul’s religious authority) said in a statement on Tuesday that the Christian icons in Hagia Sophia were “not an obstacle to the validity of the prayers”.
“The icons should be curtained off and unlit through appropriate means during prayer times,” it said.

That’s today. Last month we didn’t anticipate this renowned museum becoming a mosque. Will the icons and mosaics at some point become a liability and religious leaders or worshipers demand their removal or worse yet destruction? I am not feeling comfortable with this change in status for Hagia Sophia. We’ll just have to wait and see.

June 24, 2020

Michele Dall’Ongaro’s La Primavera

Over the past several seasons, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra has been including pieces by modern composers in many of their regular subscription concerts. And wisely so. Instead of having a modern music weekend that is poorly attended, they are gradually acclimating their audience to new works. Some of this works very well but sometimes not.

Way back in the day when I owned the Milwaukee record store, On Broadway Plays (on Broadway south of Wisconsin Ave), Thursday was classical music day. I only played classical music and had specials on classical albums. During that time I learned about contemporary and modern composers and ran the gamut from Aaron Copland to Philip Glass…with Steve Reich becoming one of my favorites. So I look forward to finding new music during my MSO subscription concerts.

The MSO featuring Orion Weiss on piano played Michele Dall’Ongaro’s La primavera during the last concert that I was able to attend before the season was canceled as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to hear. I had never heard anything by Mr. Dall’Ongaro before…so off we went.

Now this short piece (at under six minutes) is set for piano and string orchestra and is part of a four season suite, each season from a different composer. Mr. Dall’Ongaro wrote La primavera : Spring.

The piece opens very softly with single note piano inserts and plucked strings in return. At first I feared this seeming call and response would yield a tedious and drawn out piece but that thought quickly disappeared as the strings took on a resilient forward flow that draws out the piano and pulls it along. And then they each find their own voices and play off each other, sometimes against each other, and sometimes despite each other. It is an amazingly captivating piece…pulling in points and counterpoints and rhythms familiar to us all but with tones and ideas from contemporary serious music as well without disrupting the feeling…that this is familiar but we’ve never experience quite the like before!

In fact after I got over my initial concern, I totally got lost in the music and was just swept along until we reached the end…and I was so involved that I missed that it had ended and I felt lost because I wanted…felt that I needed more.

Maybe because I was there and became so invested in the experience, that I feel Mr. Weiss and the MSO did a better job of this that the recording I included below. But this recording is phenomenal as well and is the version recommended for listening in the MSO program. Give it a listen and only then read the MSO program notes that I have copied in below.

this ‘video’ is just the photo plus audio

OK, I have copied in the program notes for this piece from the MSO. I think that my experience of this piece may have been limited if I had read this before I heard it. I like to experience new art without too many preconceived notions. But when going back after reading them, it gave me something more to think about! And I hope you enjoyed La primavera as much as I did!

La primavera is set for solo piano and string orchestra. At its outset, pizzicato strings and pointillistic interjections from the piano seem to evoke raindrops, which become ever more frequent. The rain stirs nature to awaken, with perpetual motion from the plucked strings and colorful piano chords and figuration across the whole of the keyboard. Streams of 16th notes from both piano and strings ensue, then portamento strings and more pointillistic pianism tell us that the whole of nature is quivering with new life. Before we even realize it, this delightfully exuberant work seems to end before it even began.

I hope that the MSO’s 2020/21 season will be unaffected by COVID-19 and I am looking forward to their new venue!!

June 10, 2020

Can We Conserve Time Based Media in the 21st and 22nd Centuries?

When we visit our favorite art museums, we’ve gotten pretty casual about our expectations. Of course our favorite pieces of art will be there…properly presented…perfectly maintained…carefully preserved. The Mona Lisa is always at the Louvre (albeit you have to look around 500 other heads and selfie takers), the Impressionists are all at the d’Orsay or the Art Institute of Chicago, and of course David is in the Accademia in Florence!

But we forget how lucky we truly are. Not only have these works literally survived for centuries on their own, some of them have survived vandals and thieves as well. And sometimes it takes something like the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris to remind us of how lucky we are.

But there is more to luck than simply luck. We are also lucky that museums, collectors, and other institutions have trained and retained conservators over those centuries. Professionals who can repair flaking paint, replace darkened glazes, strip smoke and soot from frescos, and on occasion repair fire or flood or vandalism damage.

But we are talking about traditional materials. And when they have completed their work, we accept that the artwork is still the work of the master even though we know that there has been more recent intervention.

From the 19^th Century and primarily in the 20^th Century (and into the current periods), technology has introduced a myriad of new innovations…materials for lack of a better word…time base media…essentially film, video, audio, recordings, and of course photography and slides. And artists from that time to this have adopted those new media as art media or adapted them into their otherwise more traditional offerings. So that now brings to mind, are we training conservators to think about how they will conserve ‘modern artifacts’ as the technologies change and morph in the coming centuries.

Why am I thinking about this? Well as I approach my 70^th birthday, I realize that just in the realm of commercial music, there has been the move from 78s to 45s to LPs to CDs to digital to streaming to ???. Not to mention the sidebar of reel to reel tape and 8-tracks and cassettes. So it is easily assumed that time based media are going to continue to change and ‘improve’ as we move forward. And that has certainly happened already as I’ll discuss as we go along here.

But we also realize that there has been a fairly vigorous discussion around the sound quality and atmosphere surrounding the music as we’ve made these advances. Particularly the move from LPs to CDs. Despite their hiss and pop, LPs are held to be warmer and more accessible, while CDs, though often clearer, are considered to be colder. And often, for commercial rather than artistic aims, the music is remastered for the newer technologies…CDs…to other digital…to streaming. Not always from the original master recordings and not always with input from the artist. So are these recordings true to the artist’s vision?

This originally occurred to me maybe a dozen years ago while visiting an MFA show at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. One of the graduates was exhibiting in installation that included images projected on a backdrop of gauze. I don’t remember if the images were slides or a short film, but I wondered out loud what would happen to art like this and could they conserve this stuff in the future. A prominent Milwaukee artist who was standing nearby was sure that they would… but will they? And will it be the same?

In the past year, I have attended two shows that included films created by the artist. The first one was the Milwaukee Art Museum Show: Nares Moves, which I responded to here, and the Art Institute of Chicago’s: Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again.

Let’s start with the Warhol. In one of the galleries, a pair of Warhol short movies were running side by side in the darkened room. They were projected from on high from the back wall onto the front gallery wall. Near the ceiling on the projection wall, two old film projectors were clacking away but I don’t think they were the actual mechanisms projecting the movies. I think that we were seeing digital versions being projected with the mid-20^th Century projectors there for atmosphere and that familiar (at least to us coming from the mid-20^th C experience) clackety clack of the running projector. I should have paid more attention to how these films were being presented.

The Nares exhibition featured a number of James Nares short films. And the identity tags clearly stated that they had already been converted from film to digital.

So, contemporary art institutions have moved reel film one generation or so up the path in conservation. Can they continue to do that as ‘improvements’ in technology appear and what does it really mean for the art?

In our current mindset, when we see a painting that has had the glaze restored or flaking paint replaced or repainted, we still accept that the work is from the hand of the original artist. And I guess that it is. But as we move from what to today’s eye is a fairly primitive technology like film to cleaner more modern digital media are we still seeing the vision of the artist when the original was conceived and created? Andy Warhol certainly took into account the flicker and noise and grain and attendant scratches when he put together his originals. Sometimes he played with them and featured them. What would he think of the conversions to modern digital? What would he or any artists sense be if conservators ‘cleaned’ up the images and sound as they upgrade the media (I am ignoring commercial media here…as long as Hollywood films or mass media music remains a viable source of revenue they will be modified and upgraded at will)?

So were those Nares and Warhol films on display in 2019, in digital form, true to the vision of the artist? I don’t have a clear answer for that.

But let’s look at another example that may prove even more problematic: Nam June Paik. Mr. Paik is recognized as the creator of video art…and he used it in every possible aspect as art. From sculptures consisting of televisions, to manipulating the abstract images on the screen, to applying magnets to the picture tubes to distort the image, to utilizing Sony’s new video tape technology, to including TVs in clothing and musical instruments, to interactive video presentations, to just about anything video.

Nam June Paik, *Li Tai Po*, 1987, 10 antique wooden TV cabinets, 1 antique radio cabinet, antique Korean printing block, antique Korean book, 11 color TVs, 96 by 62 by 24 inches. Photo John Bigelow Taylor. @Artnews December 18, 2014.

Now, anything that Mr. Paik recorded would have the same issues as those I mentioned about for Mr. Warhol and Jamie Nares. As his existing videos are upgraded to newer digital formats, are they the same works as envisioned by the artist? Of have they lost some of his hand? And is the art the image or is it the whole experience? The clatter of earlier projectors? The grain of video tape (or film)? The refresh rate on the screens being used to display the work? Is the series of images or story the artwork or the entire physical experience?

Now, Mr. Paik’s work is even more problematic. He used a lot of, by our contemporary place in art history, some pretty archaic television sets. Certainly museums and collectors can conserve the old television cabinets and a competent furniture maker would repair or replace damaged wooden pieces. But what about the tubes that powered a lot of 1950s and 1960s televisions? Fortunately there is a revival of mid-century radios and musicians’ tube amplifiers so there is some limited availability to replace power tubes. But what about the picture tubes (cathode ray tubes)? Will there be a limited supply available for restorations in 2075 when an old Paik TV wears out? That’s a good question. Will the antique and collectible market along with the conservators provide enough demand for those things to be manufactured ad infinitum?

And what if someone decides to replace that old picture tube with a contemporary LCD display? What have we lost? Can they physically do it? The flicker rate is different. The image definition is different. Colors will appear with different intensities and tones. Can a LCD fit into a mid-century wooden chassis? Will the rest of the electronic portion of the unit need to be replaced as well? And if any or all of this is replaced, is this the same sculpture as created by the artist? Or is only the concept the relevant art here and not the equipment? Will we accept it as a Nam June Paik? Will a museum? Will a collector?

Btw: I asked a friend who repairs old radios. He is not aware of anyone who manufactures new picture tubes but they can sometimes be repaired.

I don’t envy future conservators. It seems to me that the conservator staff will expand beyond the experts with paint brushes and q-tips to include people who can solder and test vacuum tubes and repair picture tubes and migrate videos to whatever the new technologies bring. Oh oh, technologists! Can they get along with arty types? LOL!

P.S. I haven’t been able to find the exact quote on the internet, so I’ll paraphrase. But in Men In Black (I), Tommy Lee Jones’s character Agent K is explaining a new alien audio technology that is about to be released and he laments that he will have to buy another copy of The Beatles White Album now. Maybe we’ll all be feeling his pain in the near future.