Body, mind, water

Embodiment is the hot topic right now it seems. Whether it's the retirement of the page 3 girl, the apparent increase in nudity in London's theatres and performance spaces, or 20,000 year old statuettes, bodies and art are everywhere.

The more I read about embodiment and art, whether from a clinical, philosophical or sociological point of view, it is clear that even if you're looking at a landscape or still life, the body is still present. From the gesture of the artist to the gaze of the viewer, all art is embodied. Once this is understood it would seem that there is little left to say. Which is rather an issue given that I've got 5000 words to find. Perhaps the key is to forget the theory per se and concentrate on the art?

The exhibition 'House of many windows' consists of work by contemporary figurative artists* and looks at how they present the body. Whether it is their own, others or imagined historical portraits. I was interested in  the way the artists depicted their subjects communicating with the viewer.

An uncontroversial look at art and AIDS

In a week that has seen tentative steps towards a cure for a devastating disease, unforgivable hypocrisy in the church and the cardinals getting together to elect a new pope, rather appositely my class this week was about art and AIDS. Sometimes the connections just beg to be written about, so this is a brief one with a just a few observations on the differences between how governments, artists and commercial organisations responded to AIDS in the early 1990s. 

On the Paris Version of Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks

Science of painting reflects the mind’s divinity

Monoliths marshal and stand sentient
Silhouetted against the timeless sky
Nature’s harsh light unworthy to pierce
Mary’s loving liquid tranquility:
Divinity needs no external light.

Only a glow from within illuminating,
Awakening the soul, the mind, the spirit.
A perfect circle of composed gesture
Human intellect a divine conduit
Science/art interpreting art/science

From Dec 2011 when the two Da Vinci 'Virgin of the Rocks' were in the National Gallery

Non Regretful Regrets

So much talk carefully saying so little.
Familiar lines in well known voice

Brings bitter tears to the heart and

Conscious knowledge of what I did. 

Seated comfortably to unfamiliar music.

Familiar response to homelike room;

Fripperies, elegance, nonsense and

Sharpness which is what I loved. 

A gentle hand found in the dark;

Ghosts of scent and senses respond.

Our untogetherness is senseless and

Yet this sweet lovelessness is deserved

All of night spent in careful non moving

Wakeful sleep; no rapid heart beat to

Betray uncomfortable feelings and

So to the morning and I must go.

From a million years ago. Dec 2011