Monday mood (22)

Charles Émile Auguste Durand, Retrato de Anna Oblenskaya, 1887.

Da influência improvável

David Hockney está a braços com o estudo da perspectiva, interessa-lhe sobretudo a possibilidade da perspectiva reversa. Um colaborador vai à net, esse mundo de quando em vez admirável, e a busca leva-o a um pequeno ensaio de um padre moscovita, com obra até em crítica de arte. 

Florensky, born in 1882 in Azerbaijan the scion of secular Westernizing parents (his father a Russian railway engineer, his mother the cultured product of ancient Armenian nobility), proved a mathematical prodigy from his earliest years and went on to do pathbreaking work in non-Euclidean mathematics while also pouring himself into wider scientific studies more generally. But apparently, after a visit to Tolstoy in 1899, Florensky fell into a growing spiritual crisis in which he came to doubt the primacy of the scientific positivism that had guided his studies thus far. Following graduation from Moscow State University in 1904, he declined the offer of a teaching position in mathematics, instead repairing to the nearby holy city of Sergiev Posad (site of the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, the most important monastery in the Russian Orthodox Church), where his theological studies culminated in his being ordained as a priest in 1911 (though he married and would have five children). Although he wrote widely on philosophy and theology (his essays on the idea of the Divine Sophia would later become central to the concerns of feminist theologians), he nevertheless continued his equally far-flung scientific investigations, all the while trying to meld the two vocations. Following the Bolshevik Revolution, and even though the Communists shut down many of his most beloved Orthodox institutions, he threw himself into technical work, particularly on behalf of the electrification of rural Soviets, under the sponsorship of Trotsky himself (notwithstanding his insistence on wearing clerical robes all the while). By 1932, however, Trotsky was gone, and Stalin, finding the charismatic and querulous cleric an increasing nuisance, had him exiled to Siberia, where he launched into investigations on the nature and properties of permafrost, further path-breaking research that has become increasingly relevant in recent years with the rise of global warming. Meanwhile, in 1937, at the height of his Red Terror, Stalin had Florensky brought back to St. Petersburg and, following a brief trial, summarily executed—that being the very year, as it happens, of the birth of David Hockney in Bradford, England. 

(...) His reverse perspective essay, in particular, dates from a moment in 1920 when Bolsheviks were busily imputing the value of the medieval Orthodox icons they were tearing off the walls of museums and monasteries, dismissing them as hopelessly primitive for their allegedly clumsy handling of modeling and perspective (the way, for instance, a nose might be seen to be going one direction while the lips went another and the eyes a third—not in any way, at any rate, as in real life). But Florensky fired back, marshaling tremendous erudition to argue that if, as far back as Babylonian and Egyptian times, artists and craftsmen continually made similar errors, it was not because they didn’t know about rigorous one-point perspective (they would have had to call on such knowledge to be able to build pyramids and the like) but because they sensed there was something wrong with its practice when it actually came to the depiction of real life in all its timely and timeless vivacity—and they chose not to use it. Florensky showed how conventionally one-point perspectival tricks first began being deployed on theater sets in ancient Greece and Rome with the express intent of deceiving audiences, such illusionistic effects being likewise prized on the walls of decadent villas, say, in Pompeii, even though they really only registered as accurate from one specific location, completely falling apart from any other point of viewing. Over and over again, Florensky marshaled arguments that Hockney himself would start deploying more than sixty years later (...)

E tudo ganha forma e perspectiva. Pode ler-se na íntegra aqui. 

Monday mood (21)

Artista desconhecido, Retrato de Senhora (provavelmente Philippine Welser), c. 1545-50.

A morte da cidade

Vê-se a morte da cidade no despovoamento; vê-se a morte da cidade na museificação que a torna terra de ninguém para o turismo; vê-se a morte da cidade na sua perda de memória, que é uma crise na relação com o passado; vê-se a morte da cidade quando ela fica inteiramente voltada para a inércia patrimonial dos “bens culturais” (esvaziados de todo o significado histórico) e perdeu completamente de vista o sentido da palavra “habitar”; vê-se a morte da cidade quando ela se sujeitou à homogeneização e ficou conforme a um modelo global, que se repete em todas as cidades europeias (...).

António Guerreiro, A morte da cidade, aqui. 

Papar tudo

Um museu de Lisboa, para mim o melhor e mais bonito (é o que fica às janelas verdes, pois...) posta uma imagem da Anunciação com a correspondente frase latina de quase todos conhecida e recorre à tradução da Bíblia Grega, de Frederico Lourenço, académico que estudo, estimo e admiro por todas as razões, para dar a conhecer aquela frase aos gentios. Foi ontem, o dia em que o Cristiano Ronaldo marcou o golo que a Juventus aplaudiu.

Trocando por miúdos: uma pessoa está no restaurante e trazem-lhe o mais delicioso bacalhau espiritual, garantindo que é a mais deliciosa carne de porco à alentejana. (Pratos escolhidos por mim ao acaso, mas que estão no topo das minhas predilecções gastronómicas.) São ambos pratos excelentes, mas um não é o outro. Não pode ser. Os sabores são tão diferentes quanto os diferentes ingredientes, tempos e modos de preparação. Não importa quão esmerada tenha sido a confecção, não importa o currículo do chefe, nem sequer importa que tudo seja comida, tudo se digira, assimile e desassimile. Que diria se isto lhe acontecesse num restaurante? Eu, de mim para mim, digo you should have known better, por que não viste o jogo do Cristiano?

On a brink of a mental crisis

Gen X managed to stretch adolescence beyond all previous limits: Its members started becoming adults earlier and finished becoming adults later. Beginning with Millennials and continuing with iGen, adolescence is contracting again—but only because its onset is being delayed. Across a range of behaviors—drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised— 18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds. Childhood now stretches well into high school. 

Why are today’s teens waiting longer to take on both the responsibilities and the pleasures of adulthood? Shifts in the economy, and parenting, certainly play a role. In an information economy that rewards higher education more than early work history, parents may be inclined to encourage their kids to stay home and study rather than to get a part-time job. Teens, in turn, seem to be content with this homebody arrangement—not because they’re so studious, but because their social life is lived on their phone. They don’t need to leave home to spend time with their friends. 

If today’s teens were a generation of grinds, we’d see that in the data. But eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders in the 2010s actually spend less time on homework than Gen X teens did in the early 1990s. (High-school seniors headed for four-year colleges spend about the same amount of time on homework as their predecessors did.) The time that seniors spend on activities such as student clubs and sports and exercise has changed little in recent years. Combined with the decline in working for pay, this means iGen teens have more leisure time than Gen X teens did, not less.  

So what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in their room, alone and often distressed.

Jean M. Twenge, Have smartphones destroyed a generation?

De outras Joanas -21

(...) one feels as though “something important is hidden” in Murray’s work and that “repeated readings may not reveal it, but the mere act of reading Murray’s poetry always seems to be pushing one closer to the brink of a momentous discovery.”

A vida e pós-vida incríveis de Joan Murray, aqui.