Week 8 assignment: essay – interrelationships reflection apa format | Applied Sciences homework help
- Bernini’s sculpture is famous for its virtuoso perfection of carving. Yet in this work, “truth to materials” is largely bypassed. Does that fact diminish the effectiveness of the work?
Ovid portrays the moment of metamorphosis as a moment of drowsiness as Daphne becomes rooted and sprouts leaves. It is this instant that Bernini has cho- sen, an instant during which we can see the normal human form of Apollo, while Daphne’s thighs are almost enclosed in bark, her hair and hands growing leaves. The details of this sculpture, whose figures are life-size, are extraordinary. In the Galleria Borghese in Rome, one can walk around the sculpture and examine it up close. The moment of change is so astonishingly wrought, one virtually forgets that it is a sculpture. Bernini has converted the poem into a moment of drama through the medium of sculpture. Certainly Bernini’s sculpture is an “illustration’’ of a specific moment in The Metamorphoses, but it goes beyond illustration. Bernini has brought the moment jac16871_ch15_378-396.indd 389 12/9/17 11:19 AM 390
CHAPTER 15
into a three-dimensional space, with the illusion of the wind blowing Apollo’s garments and with the pattern of swooping lines producing a sense of motion. From almost any angle, this is an arresting interpretation, even for those who do not recognize the reference to Ovid. Drama Interprets Painting One of the remarkable connections in the arts is the musical theater piece Sunday in the Park with George (1984) (Figure 15-6), the Pulitzer Prize–winning play that interpreted George Seurat’s (1859–1891) painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte (1884). The theater interpretation centered on an imaginative biography of Seurat, who was famous for his pointilistic painting style, in which he painted using tiny points of paint that the eye merges so as to perceive an image of people, animals, and things. Seurat’s figures in the painting are quite static, posed as if waiting to be photographed. He said he had in mind a Greek bas-relief in the Parthenon that showed a procession of ordinary Greek citizens. At the time he painted the picture, he was known for his general democratic ideals. The island of the Grande Jatte was a favorite place for Parisians to “hang out” in the warm weather. It was where people of many stations of life would socialize. The theater interpretation ends each act with a tableau vivant that re-creates the painting. The first act of the play is set in 1884 Paris, with Jake Gyllenhaal portraying Seurat in a vain effort to save his love for Dot, his mistress. But she rejects him because she feels they do not belong together. The second act is set in 1984—or the present—in which Gyllenhaal plays Seurat’s grandson and Ashford plays his grand- mother. Modern critics have seen the play as a commentary on the democracy of the modern world. FIGURE 15-6 Sunday in the Park with George (1984), by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford appeared in the 2017 revival of the play. ©Sara Krulwich/The New York Times/ Redux jac16871_ch15_378-396.indd 390 12/9/17 11:19 AM FOCUS ON Photography Interprets Fiction Although a great many classic paintings were stimulated by narratives, such as Bible stories, Homeric epics, and Ovidian romances, the modern tradition of visual art inter- preting fiction has been limited to illustration. Illustrations in novels usually provided visual information to help the reader imagine what the characters look like and what the setting of the novel contributes to the experience of reading. The traditional novel- ist usually provided plenty of description to help the reader. However, in recent years the profusion of cinema and television interpretations of novels, both historical and contemporary, has led writers to provide fewer descriptive passages to help the reader visualize the scenes. The cinema and television images have substituted for the tradi- tional illustrations because people know what England, France, Ireland, Asia, and Africa look like, and the actors playing the roles of Heathcliff, Anne Elliot, Cleopatra, Hamlet, Macbeth, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, and many more have provided indelible images that make book illustration superfluous. Jeff Wall, a Canadian photographer, is known for his careful preparation of the scenes that he photographs. For example, he spent almost two years putting together the materials for his photograph of After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue (Figure 15-7). Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) concerns a character known only as the invisible man. The invisible man is a young Afri- can American who realizes, in the 1940s, that he is invisible to the general American public. He explains in the prologue to his story that after beating a white man who insulted him, he relents, realizing that the man probably never even saw him. As an African American, he re- alizes that he has no status in the community, no real place in his own country because of the power of racism. Ellison’s novel, widely consid- ered the best American novel of the mid-twen- tieth century, exposes the depth of racism and how it distorts those who are its victims. Jeff Wall concentrates on a single moment in the book—in the prologue, in which the in- visible man explains how he has tried to make himself visible to his community. Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death. I myself after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility. That is why I fight my battle with Monopolated Light & Power. The deeper reason, I mean: It allows me to feel my vital aliveness. I also fight them for taking so much of my money before I learned to protect myself. In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1,369 lights. I’ve wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it. And not with fluorescent bulbs, but with the older, more-expensive-to-operate kind, the filament type. An act of sabo- tage, you know. I’ve already begun to wire the wall. A junk man I know, a man of vision, has supplied me with wire and sockets. Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light. The truth is the light and the light is the truth. FIGURE 15-7 Jeff Wall, After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue. 1999–2000. Museum of Modern Art 1999–2000, printed 2001. Silver dye bleach transparency; aluminum light box, 5 feet 8½ inches × 8 feet 2¾ inches (174 × 250.5 cm). The invisible man sits in his underground room where even all the lighting he has assembled cannot make him visible to the community of which he is an important part. Courtesy of the artist 391 continued jac16871_ch15_378-396.indd 391 12/9/17 11:19 AM Architecture Interprets Dance: National Nederlanden Building In what may be one of the most extraordinary interactions between the arts, the cele- brated National Nederlanden Building in Prague, Czech Republic, by the modernist architect Frank Gehry, seems to have almost replicated a duet between Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. The building in Prague has been called “Ginger and Fred” since it was finished in 1996 (Figure 15-8). It has also been called “the dancing building,” but everyone who has commented on the structure points to its rhythms, particularly the windows, which are on different levels throughout the exterior. The building definitely reflects the postures of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire as they appeared in nine ex- traordinary films from 1933 to 1939 (Figure 15-9). Gehry is known for taking consid- erable chances in the design of buildings (such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; see Figures 6-24 to 6-26). The result of his effort in generally staid Prague has been a controversial success largely because of its connection with Rogers and Astaire’s image as dancers. Painting Interprets Dance and Music: The Dance and Music Henri Matisse (1869–1954) was commissioned to paint The Dance and Music (both 1910) by Sergei Shchukin, a wealthy Russian businessman in Moscow who had Jeff Wall has done what the invisible man has done. He has installed 1,369 filament lights in the space he has constructed to replicate the basement that the invisible man refers to as his “hole.” It is his safe place, where he can go to write down the story that is the novel Invisible Man. Critics at the Museum of Modern Art contend that Wall has completely rewritten the rules for illustrating fiction by his efforts at making us come close to feeling what the invisible man’s lighted place means to him. Illustrators usually select moments and aspects of the fiction’s description, but Wall tries to include every- thing in the basement, even beyond the text’s detail. Photography is celebrated often for its ability to document reality; Wall uses photography to document unreality, the only partly described basement room. In this sense, the photograph is hyper-real and thereby reveals the values in the novel in a new way. PERCEPTION KEY Photography Interprets Fiction 1. The Museum of Modern Art says that Wall’s approach to illustrating fiction es- sentially reinvents the entire idea of illustration. To what extent do you agree or disagree? Could the same be said of Sunday in the Park with George?