Week 3: SHORE (TIDE)

Milton Resnick, The Judgement of Paris, 1996

Bohemia Lies by the Sea
 
If houses here are green, I’ll step inside a house.
If bridges here are sound, I’ll walk on solid ground.
If love’s labour’s lost in every age, I’d gladly lose it here.

If it’s not me, it’s one who is as good as me.

If a word here borders on me, I’ll let it border.
If Bohemia still lies by the sea, I’ll believe in the sea again.
And believing in the sea, thus I can hope for land.

If it’s me, then it’s anyone, for he’s as worthy as me.
I want nothing more for myself. I want to go under.

Under – that means the sea, there I’ll find Bohemia again.
From my grave, I wake in peace.
From deep down I know now, and I’m not lost.

Come here, all you Bohemians, seafarers, dock whores, and ships
unanchored. Don’t you want to be Bohemians, all you Illyrians,
Veronese and Venetians. Play the comedies that make us laugh

until we cry. And err a hundred times,
as I erred and never withstood the trials,
though I did withstand them time after time.

As Bohemia withstood them and one fine day
was released to the sea and now lies by water.

I still border on a word and on another land,
I border, like little else, on everything more and more,

a Bohemian, a wandering minstrel, who has nothing, who
is held by nothing, gifted only at seeing, by a doubtful sea,
the land of my choice.

Ingeborg Bachmann

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The poem was mentioned to me by an old friend--in connection with a painting by Anselm Kiefer. To see the Kiefer, go to Bohemia Lies by the Sea (1996).

The painting I'm posting, however, is from Milton Resnick. It takes us to a very different place. And if I going to have you look at one painting for an entire week, I think that for today the Resnick's a better choice. You can ask why in class. The stories of how each of the painters arrived at these works is important--and we'll continue with it next time. And return to the work of Liu Xiaodong. 

Background on Kiefer: an Arthur Danto on Anselm Kiefer--originally in the Nation magazine, January 2, 1989. Danto's essay--with it's negative take on Kiefer's work--is a good corrective to the "swept away" affect of Kiefer's paintings in the late 1980s and 1990s.  I don't think Danto got it, entirely--there's an undeniable power to Kiefer, and it's not simply rhetorical (the manipulation of symbols). Maybe a good question would be--why did the work go into a period of occlusion? And why revisit it today. (Kiefer is 71; there's an upcoming retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao.)

All said, to look at Kiefer's paintings again today--along with all the others--is important.
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For the Walter Benjamin quotes we read together, see his Theses on the Philosophy of History." From paragraph 5: "The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again."