Thinking about Rodin

 Gustav Mahler provided my version of punk rock. When I was of that age when other kids slouched in button-and-pinned leather jackets, filched cigs on the sly and snuck under-aged into Hardtimes to see clangorous shows by bands unknown to me, I, the despairing Chesterfield County adolescent, lay upon my bed blaring Gustav the only way he can be understood — that is, really really loud.

His manic and depressive torment wrestled in the air above me like combative weather fronts colliding into a storm. This was Leonard Bernstein whipping the New York Philharmonic into frantic frenzies, directing them through tempestuous clashes, romantic odes and sardonic symphonic asides. 

Meanwhile, my sister – my younger sister – discovered Parliament Funkadelic. 

We quarreled over use of the turntable while Mahler provided the dramatic soundtrack. And this was just Symphony No. 1, "The Titan," composed with the energy and vigor of the precocious 17-year-old he was. The first measures of the first movement summon up all creation before announcing innate absurdity by the calls of the cuckoo bird. He also uses “Fréres Jacques” as a funeral dirge.

Gustav remains my man.

How pleased I was to come across a 1909 bust by

Rodin of my punk idol Gustav. This plaster bust is but one of 200 objects related to Rodin and his studio, many of them furrowed by Rodin’s fingers and filigreed by his written notes. The immense show, “Rodin: Evolution of a Genius” fills the same galleries at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as did previous exhibitions of Picasso and the Forbidden City, and embraces plaster casts and metal pieces created for casting, photographs and film images of Rodin wandering about his work.

The galleries writhe and throb with bodies; young, old, male, female, some nude and others partially clad, they are smooth and sensual and rough and earthy as

they emerge from plaster through the imagination that conceived of them and the hands and tools that realized them into  form.

Rodin’s work isn’t still. His figures are captured in motion.

A Bit of a Showman

You’ll see a film of the master chiseling out a massive bust of the writer Balzac. Nathalie Bondil, director and chief curator at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, pointed out at Wednesday’s media preview, “There Rodin is shown like a hero — but the image is fake.” Rodin built his giant pieces with the aid at times of 50 to 60 artisans. Some of them were talented artists in their own right and not all of them are known. They followed his directions.

Rodin, though, understood the power of public perception. One gets the sense that he knew he was in his own movie.

This one shows Rodin taking his star turn on film, and, you sense, art history, but also now in Richmond, in particular – although the move reminds me of that perennial YouTube favorite of a certain furry animal meme (wait 'til the end):

OK, cue the music.

Dramatic Juxtaposition

Mitchell Merling, the VMFA’s Paul Mellon curator and head of the European Art Department, in collaboration with his Montreal counterpart, created an impressive and majestic presentation that as with any good art, starts small, goes through several movements of varying content and emotive power (like old Gustav), toward a big finish.

In this case, the finish is the massive figures of Rodin’s incredible Burghers of Calais. His dramatic 1885 interpretation features six figures representing the Calais’ prominent men who sacrificed themselves to prevent English King Edward III from destroying the city.

Merling couldn’t have known when planning this show, but the events of recent days makes the juxtaposition of the good and brave burghers against The Defense or Call to Arms more poignant, highlighting the ongoing bleeding tragedy of the world.

Rodin, a Parisian, experienced the city’s upheavals. He went through the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 and toward the end of his life, Europe erupted in the first World War.

During the Franco-Prussian conflict, the Germans besieged Paris while the Commune tried to take over the municipal administration. The Communards' brief experiment received brutal and gruesome reprisal by the national government.

Rodin’s vigorous Call to Arms was supposed to be a monument commemorating the 1870 conflict but the 1879 commissioners found it too strident and unconventional. The piece was enlarged and improved until, in 1919, a Dutch monument committee gave it to the war-wracked city of Verdun.

The Burghers of Vancouver

Now, I apologize here, because I was able to run upstairs to the Lewis Focus Gallery to see a video installation called the Burghers of Vancouver. The piece is a contemporary performance art piece by Adad Hannah and filmmaker Denys Arcand.

And I offer my apology because I got to see the installation the way nobody else will. That is, I came upon workmen putting the finishing touches on the piece. One of them wanted to be sure that his efforts wouldn’t distract me and another asked me to be mindful of a vacuum cleaner cord. Their presence added yet another layer to this piece, because it involves six random people hired out of the Vancouver streets to stand in tableaux in imitation of Rodin’s masterpiece.

The six men who offered themselves up to save their city were Sir Eustache de Saint Pierre, the first to volunteer (and the only one whom Rodin was supposed to sculpt), soon joined by Jean d’Aire, Jacque de Wiessant, Pierre de Weissant, Andrieu d’Andres, and Jean de Fiennes. These were basically members of city council.

Let's just absorb that for a moment.

And Edward ordered them beheaded. The burghers in the work don’t know that the intervention of English Queen Philippa will save them.

The men’s trepidatious attitudes went against heroic 19th-century convention — a man must be equal to his fate and that rot — but Rodin knew that going to your probable death is a predicament that each person would meet in a different manner.

The unnamed six who participated in the Burghers of Vancouver include a financial malfeasant so recently released from prison that he’s wearing an ankle bracelet to keep track of him. There’s a recovering junkie who is surprised when she’s recognized on the street as a participant and an older Korean woman who doesn’t speak English (in her segment, she’s shown soaking her feet after the long day).

The use of these people reflects back to Rodin’s practice of using models not plucked from art schools. His roster included a battered-face street sweeper named Bibi, an athletic circus performer, Cailloux, flamenco and Cambodian dancers and Maria Caira, an Italian woman in her 80s when Rodin posed her as She Who Was the Helmet Maker’s Once-Beautiful Wife.

Rose Beuret, a seamstress, became a major model and his partner for a half-century. 

If you can, glimpse the people observing the work and how they are reflected within and by the art. At right, Rodin’s 1888 interpretation of Marianne Russell as Indian Bacchus compares alongside Juliana Comer, the public relations coordinator for Richmond Regional Tourism.

But Rodin's lover and artistic soulmate, Camille Claudel, is the one most remembered. The late writer Robert Wernick tells of Claudel here.

Claudel, an artist in her own right who actually carved the marble that Rodin did not, is memorialized in the exhibition as Thought  — the creative force merging from a block of rock. The piece is fantastical, as though an enchantment has transformed pure matter into a recognizable figure that is emerging into existence among us. This is Pygmalion but with the sculptor absent — is the woman pushing her way into life, or, has the maker stepped away?

(By the way, the 1988 film Camille Claudel with Isabel Adjani and Gérard Depardieu is getting screened at the VMFA on Sunday, Jan. 10, fro 1 to 5 p.m., introduced by curator Mitchell Merling. The whole roster of events, an exciting sculptor-in-residence program, lectures and  films related to Rodin at the VMFA, some requiring reservation and tickets, is here.)

One of the Vancouver “burghers” is an underemployed steelworker. While at the breakfast table where his wife tries sussing through the morning crossword, the man observes, “You know, I’m old, but the world just doesn’t seem the same place any more.”

He’s got that right. As Sun Ra said, “It’s already been the end of the world, don’t you know that, yet?”

More Powerful than a Speeding Locomotive

The night prior to seeing Rodin, I went to the Science Museum of Virginia for the first of many discussions about public art in the city of Richmond and then to outer space. Well, Sediment Arts on Grace Street downtown.

First, idea-strewn earth-bound matters. 

Whether they knew it or not, the public art conversation conveners stood at a podium situated in front of a speeding locomotive, at least a picture of one, which serves as a metaphor about the beauty and hazards of public art.

At present, the city has amassed a public art fund of around $3.2 million. This cache of cash was generated from a 1-percent set aside of city construction projects costing more than $250,000. Our burgeoning communal art pot comes by way of the building of the problematic city jail.

As my colleague Tina Griego wrote earlier this year, the city in anticipation of carrying out the public art vision once it’s articulated hired in July a full-time public art coordinator. Ellyn Parker, a Virginian, moved here from San Francisco and she explained why to Griego.

The city also hired two outside public art consultants. Gail M. Goldman and Gretchen Freeman, who’ve worked together on drafting master plans in San Antonio and Calgary.

Coming down the track are public charettes to get people thinking about the nature and qualities of public art about and for Richmond. The event was well-attended and featured enthusiastic participants who viewed many slides of inventive and stylish public art projects from throughout the nation and world. Some permanent, others temporary (my favorite of the latter, portable parks in, naturally, San Francisco) and not a bearded and booted general among them. They also pointed out how artists can contribute to airports, bridges and parking lots.

A kind of oneupsmanship followed when participants offered their favorite public works. I admit my guilt in this. However, I thought when seeing it that Richmond might learn from the temporary Coronation Park installation at the recent Venice Biennial by the New Delhi-based RAQS Media Collective.

The word “raqs” that occurs in Arabic, Persian and Urdu describes a practice of whirling meditation. For this group of makers, the term also means “Rarely Asked Questions.”

The row of plinths, plaques and partially completed sculptures examined the nature of monuments and monumentality, and people’s apparent desire to have them in public spaces. The pieces featured such inscriptions as, “He was hated by large numbers of people, the only time in his life that he had been important enough for this to happen to him.”

I heard no suggestions from the assembled that involved the future. For the most part, they looked to the past. Actress Bridget Gethins made a reasonable suggestion for recognition of VCU School of the Arts founder Theresa Pollak.  

Another conferee brought up Henry “Box” Brown, a slave who got himself crated up and sent to freedom who is recalled by a symbolic crate and plaza along the Canal Walk. 

The Way of the Future

Why, in Richmond, do we not have anything that symbolizes our city’s old cosmic motto — before it was reduced to “RVA” — “Sic Itur Ad Astra.” Unpacked from Latin, the term translates to “Thus Is the Way to Stars.” Or, “This is the way you are remembered for eternity in the firmament.”

Such ambition and optimism!

Sure, “Sic Itur” is a lofty and romantic sentiment that nearly hurts in its earnestness, but isn’t it worth attempting to live up to rather than maundering and grousing about ballparks  and football practice fields and kvetching about the variable natures of our elected officials?

Where an embodying symbol of our city’s ancient aspiration might go is the Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd Airport, excuse me, renamed an uninspiring “Richmond International” — because this is where we are most likely to take off. And, Adm. Byrd — despite his brother — was one of the great aviator adventurers. Why have we denied him?

Anyway, I wrote about the matter here.

Space Is the Place

Which brings me to how my evening ended, at Sediment Arts, where its exhibition “To: Pluto” lent itself to the Sun Ra phrase, "Space Is the Place."

The present multimedia show uses as its jumping off point the July 2015 flyby of the NASA New Horizons probe that gave us unprecedented looks at the unplanet Pluto. This journey took the craft nine years, five months and 25 days.

The gathering enjoyed two presentations.

The first was from anthropologist and science-technology historian Lisa Messeri. She’s spent time with scientists searching for planets outside our solar system. Her interest is what the noise generated by planets and stars means to those who take note of them and how charts and graphs of data are converted into artists' interpretations of what a distant world may look like, which often resemble the old matte paintings for science fiction shows.

She was followed by Thomas T. Stanley, ethonomusicologist and cultural theorist, who also performed a set of meditative and occasionally compelling electronic music pieces. His book, The Execution of Sun Ra Volume II (Volume I being Ra’s actual life and work) seeks to explicate Sun Ra’s philosophy-in-music. Ra declared the “official” end to time and invited the earth’s people to construct an alternative planetary destiny. The world has already ended – we are living through that fact – and must construct another.

Ra, born into the world as Herman P. Blount of Birmingham, Alabama, grew up as a musician in the Big Band era of the 1940s. But he claimed that while a scholarship student at Alabama A&M College, he met aliens who revealed to him his true identity and purpose. Stanley said that Ra was spiritual, but not religious; psychedelic in his approach, but rigorously sober and didn’t tolerate the use of alcohol and drugs in his band, the Arkestra. The transformation of consciousness needed to occur through his special brand of jazz. He toured the world and recorded maybe 200 albums, but yet remains somewhat obscure.

Ra, in his way, resembles the scientists and artists Messeri studies who rely on radio waves and blips and graphs and charts to render into understanding the unknowable and unviewable. To that end, Sediment is curating a collection of six sound works and music that responds to the exhibition and emulates the time New Horizon took in its journey to Pluto and comes at slightly over nine minutes. The gallery will release the collection on cassette tape at the show's Dec. 4 closing.

Richmond’s public art must somehow translate an understanding of our Richmond-ness into physical form.

Rodin took allegorical concepts and senses of motion and made them into some of the greatest art ever produced.

You’ll see several versions of The Kiss at the VMFA. But you may note that the lovers' lips are not touching. Rodin, for this massive Gates of Hell, used the characters Paolo and Francesca from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Francesca’s husband surprised them as they at last succumbed to their ardor. He slew them both and the two lovers were condemned to wander eternally through hell. Yet few then or now associate this loving couple with such a fatal end. The piece took on a life of its own. By commission of the state, Rodin executed a marble version of what he termed a “huge knick-knack.”

Also at the VMFA is Tristan Lowe’s  neon comet titled “The God Particle.” Lowe's artistic approach can connect to the concept of "as above, so below," seeing the contours and textures of clunky moons on the barnacled skin of a sperm whale and the tiles of the space shuttle. Comets, hunks of metal and ice hurtling around the galaxy, may have deposited the stuff of life on this planet then ready to receive the gift.

The world seems ready for something to present us with a new set of paradigms — preferably not a physical comet, but a psychical one — that’ll carve and chisel away the problems that brought us this far.

Sic itur ad astra. You dig?