Sinkhole

omfg.

Looking as Memory

Just listened to a great Radiolab piece about memory. You know, this crazy research about selectively erasing memories? It's all over the internets. Well, what I found most interesting about it (other than the heartbreaking story about the man with the worst amnesia of all time and his love for his wife) is how they talk about memory as a constantly creative rather than a conservative or a retreiving process. The idea is that when you remember something, you are actually creating a new memory, while slightly distorting the old one. They even use the metaphor of painting or sculpture (as opposed to file cabinets or hard drives, as one might think).


Well, this reminded me of a pet theory I once had and never quite got rid of about looking at painting as a kind of performance.* I used to experience the act of looking at paintings as a very absorbing, active process (still do, but this was especially intense when I was younger and a bit newer to both museums and being by myself in public). I would stand there and trace all the lines of paint with my eyes, trying to discover all the hills and furrows in its texture. I'd get really close and try to figure out what was under the top layer, and then go back and see how the whole thing came together into a whole impression. Basically, I was that annoying person you would have to wait for to leave before you could have a look, and I didn't care one bit that you were waiting.

Anyway, this active memory thing made me think that looking at paintings is probably kind of like remembering. Think about it: you are looking at something that (in most cases) represents reality, an entity you're likely familiar with. So you are matching up the representation with your memory of the world. Also, at the level of the composition and the paint, you may be remembering other paintings and their solutions to the problem of representing the world (what kind of perspective did they use to show depth, how did they create light, how did they handle the paint to create an illusion of a world in the canvas). Even with abstraction this works, since the painter is solving some kind of problem (what to paint? how to paint?) that other painters have solved in other ways and that your subconscious mind is comparing in a way that is like remembering. But the thing that makes this idea even more compelling to me is this thing about memory as creation. If looking at a painting is kind of like remembering, and memory is itself creative, then looking becomes creative too. The brain is not just imprinting what's there in front of it, but actively generating a picture or an impression by interacting with the painting on both a conscious and subconscious level! How awesome is that? Go brain!

*Performance in the neutral, active as opposed to passive sense, not the Judith Butler sense.

Snort

"Meanwhile, Georgia said it will close the Museum of Joseph Stalin in the city of Gori and reopen the building as the Museum of Russian Aggression."

Awesome. Sucks about the monasteries though.

ETA: Just in case you missed it, Gori is Stalin's birthplace. That's a neato reassignment of nationality to the native son.

Gather Round, Children, and I'll Tell You a Story

It all started with snow. This is Tuesday, November 25. We are walking around Chistye Prudy.

There they are behind our Canadian friend.

Basically, people went crazy for a little while. The rolling of snowboules for snowmen began immediately, and the launching of snowballs. The next day, most of the snow was gone, and it was like nothing at all had happened.

The next evening, we boarded an overnight train to St. Petersburg. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of the kupe in which Josh is not chewing a sandwich and Venus and Rachel are not moving around. I do, however, have my next myspace profile picture at the ready! Should I ever be in need of such a thing.

The Leningrad trains station had an amazing bronze schematic covering one of its ginormous walls illustrating all the places its trains go. Think a big metro map in bronze up on the wall with places like Omsk and Ufa connected by spidery bronze phalanges with inflamed joints. Who wants to take the Trans-Siberian in June?


Next was a trip to Anna Akhmatova's apartment at the Fountain House, where she lived from the 20s to the 50s. Though the courtyard is romantic, it was actually more of a communal apartment inside an old palace. A young Isaiah Berlin apparently visited her there, when everyone thought she was dead.

We found this hanging between two trees in Akhmatova's courtyard. Who is Andersen, I wonder?

And this is Venus, harmonizing perfectly with this amazing wall. Who was I just telling about how there are walls that feel as rich as paintings to me? I guess Aaron Siskind showed us this already...and he used a camera. Sneaky devil.

Next, I spent several more days eating art. And though sensibly, both the Hermitage and the Russian Museum allow photography of their collections, the only things I wanted to take pictures of were the views from the windows. (These museums are in palaces, remember? Beautiful birdcages with beautiful views.) There's that old stiletto of the Admiralty off in the distance. This view reminded me of the last shot of Russian Arc, where it's just the sea stretching out forever from the window of the Winter Palace.

And speaking of the Winter Palace...people, the Bolsheviks totally did some taking over here.

But more interestingly for me, they had a pretty amazing exhibit of Timur Novikov's paintings. I wouldn't even call them that, though. At some point, he decided to just sew two sheets together, making a horizon line and adding a few little ships or buildings to it. Like a strange hybrid of aerial photographs and views of the overwhelming sky and sea. They are sublime and (oh, cliche) impossible to photograph. The above photo (the exhibit was on the 3rd floor of the building to the left) kind of captures his scale of huge world/tiny buildings. But his language is totally minimalist, like little legos scattered on a blanket. You can kind of see it in the slideshow here. Also, I guess his present champions (he died in 2002) are kind of uncomfortable with the queer content. That's Oscar Wilde & Bosie.

Here's another one under his influence.

Oh, and look, Buster opened a cafe in St. Petersburg. Right next door to an emergency massage parlor that also sells flowers.

By the way, getting pictures all up and arranged on blogger is a pain in my tuchus. The rest of the trip took place in Novgorod, and is going to have minimal commentary, cause I'm tired.

Rest of that 9 am view.

Monastery in Yurievo.

Ditto.

River's edge by the monastery walls.

Ditto plus Josh.

Russians are good at wooden architecture.

Also trees.


More pinholes from the bridge:

And this is the point on the bridge where I imagine I'm this guy:

Архипушка! Летю! Летю!

I wonder if Novikov saw Rublev?

Dear Readers,

Forgive me... [for tagging your wall
with the cutest graffito of all time]

Last we spoke, I was back stateside eating bahn mi, putting up a show, and being grateful for everyone's generosity with their cars, coffee-makers, and soft horizontally-oriented furniture. Well, I came back to the Moskva, got back into the swing of things, then a long-lost pal some of you may know as the rocking-est Canadian grad student at the U of C came to Moscow, we went to St. Petersburg and Novgorod with a couple of fellow displaced dissertators, and I'm finally back and freaking out a little bit that it's December already. Where do these short short days go every day? They must be sneaking their friends in through the turnstiles without paying, cause I can't figure out how it can be December already! I'm not going to indulge in a numerical tally of trivialities I farted out this month, but I will just say that, standing on the bridge between Novgorod's Kremlin side and the Old Market District side (connected by the Volkhov River, geography buffs) and feeling the cold wind blow that cold river spittle in my face and nearly blow the camera out of my cold, nearly dead hand and resulting in this pseudo-pin-hole gem:

Volkhov River, Veliky Novgorod

yea, I did go swimming in December, hallelujah! Not in the Volkhov, back at my usual yellow dot in Filyovsky Park. But it was a nice way to end my month of travel and touch back down on familiar ground. I'll post some more photographic evidence soon, but in the meanwhile, here's the crazy view out my window in the Novgorod hostel. This picture of a sunrise was taken at 9 o'clock in the morning.

Also, there was a guy frying sausages on a hotplate in the common room, so don't let's get too excited now.