Mathew Pokoik - news

I’m currently in Birmingham, UK, for my first ever-formal portfolio review at Rhubarb-Rhubarb, such a strange and curious event. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with this type of thing, a large group of photographers meet over a couple of days with a wide variety of photo industry reviewers, ranging from museum and gallery curators to magazine editors, stock photo agencies, and variety of other industry types, its a great way to make contacts and begin relationships.

After presenting my work time after time today, honing my “spiel”, frankly I’m a bit tired of all this talk about myself! When I came upon the following passage while reading this evening, It temps me to embrace it and speak only in mythological images for the next two days of reviews. This is from the Italian novelist Italo Calvino’s Six Memos For The Next Millennium, a lecture on literature titled Lightness:

The only hero able to cut off Medusa’s head is Perseus, who flies with winged sandals; Perseus, who does not turn his gaze upon the face of the Gorgon but only upon her image reflected in his bronze shield. Thus Perseus comes to my aid even at this moment, just as I too am about to be caught in a vise of stone - which happens every time I try to speak about my own past. Better to let my talk be composed of images from mythology.

To cut off Medusa’s head without being turned to stone, Perseus supports himself on the lightest of things, the winds and the clouds, and fixes his gaze upon what can be revealed only by indirect vision, an image caught in a mirror.

Maybe Perseus needs to become the patron saint of photography? This particular art form based on images caught in a mirror

Looking at Bruegel’s beggars made me think of this photo by Garry Winogrand:

American Legion Convention - Dallas, Texas , 1964

The deeper I immerse myself in the work of Bruegel and the historical context that he lived and worked in, the greater my amazement becomes of his creative and social vision. He expanded what the visual arts could look at in its illustrative capacity; he expanded the possibilities of what subject matter could be in the visual arts. Not to say that their are no precedents for the work he did, but I am convinced that he cracked open this nut far deeper and with greater commitment than anyone else before him. Consider if you will this small oil painting he made a year before his death.

Pieter Bruegel the elder, The Beggars, 1568, The Louvre, Paris

There is no precedent I know of in the European visual arts that takes in such a clear and straightforward view of an image directly dealing with suffering and poverty. Previous efforts dealt with these themes through the mythological, such as Christ’s suffering on the cross, Bruegel takes us to the real thing with his gaze that does not turn away. Of course there may be additional messages hidden in the symbols of this work whose meanings have been lost to time, such as why are there foxtails pinned to the beggars? And what of the begging monk in the far right background, who begs by choice, rather then as the result of war, plague, or nature?

Recently in Berlin I was able to see in the flesh this tiny and mysterious panel:

Pieter Bruegel the elder, Two Chained Monkeys, 1562, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

Bruegel deals with suffering as an equal partner to the absurd, I’m suddenly curious if Cervantes had the chance to see any Bruegel’s? They seem to share an interest in the nature of suffering as something of an absurdist jobian parody. He is after all a most literate of painters, at a time when paintings function was to illustrate a known story - often for the church - Bruegel freed up what painting could look at while also being a master storyteller. He takes advantage of narrative visual suggestions, and cultural meaning -such as this well known parable of the blind leading the blind - to create a meaning that the viewer creates in active engagement and question making. Their are no easy interpretations when looking at these paintings, they encompass the dark as well as the light.

Pieter Bruegel, The Parable of the Blind Leading the Blind, 1568, Galleria Nazionale, Naples

Albrecht Durer one day wrote in his journal that he visited the studio of Joachim Patinir, “a good landscape painter”, and with that simple statement, we find the first known written reference to the idea of landscape in art as its own distinct form.

Joachim Patinir, St. Jerome in the Desert, 1515. Louvre, Paris.

Would we today describe Patinir’s work in Durer’s footsteps and entitle him a landscape painter? Imagine this as if he were alive and working today, and I think the description would be more like “a painter of religious scenes that take place within a landscape”. He doesn’t quite make the cut in terms of this funny idea we’ve formed of landscape.

Yet if you study his work and the handful of facts known about him it becomes clear that he missed this mark by a hair’s breath. He was ready and willing, but first the very role and function of art in culture had to change, which the Reformation helped along.

Saint Jerome in the Desert creates a visual equality between man and nature, with nature standing in for the role God traditionally played in painting. Shifting away from the strict Aristotelian hierarchy that placed us in the center of the universe, Patinir places St. Jerome as a relatively small figure in the lower central foreground. 53 years latter Bruegel took this idea and pushed it the next step in his Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, where all we see of Icarus is a leg poking out of the water in the lower right foreground.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, 1558, Musees Royaux, Brussels.

Both painting are still holding on to the traditional role of using painting and the landscape as a backdrop for the illistration of a religious or mythological subject. Both painters consciously point the way towards a new functionality of art, the detailed study of the world - a discipline of seeing and the study of nature. As a photographer I’d say this is the very roots of my tradition.

A poem by W. H. Auden on Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow !n a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

As to this form of landscape and our cultural mental image, I’ve noticed that students, when asked to visualize and draw their ideal landscape will make creations that almost uniformly contain mountains, water, human occupants, and a horizon line in the upper third area of a horizontal composition. Amazing that an eleven year old child when asked to draw a landscape will make it in a manner much as Joachim Patinir did with his Saint Jerome in the Desert.

I just finished teaching an Aesthetic Education Lincoln Center Institute workshop on these two paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and felt that this could hardly be a better subject to start the blog off with. Additionally working on the planning of this workshop, raised some questions that led to curating the show The Interactive Landscape. Over the next few days I will be exploring the context of the origins of landscape in western art as seen in the work of these two terrific painters who worked in Antwerp in the early and mid 16th century, Joachim Patinir and Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Joachim Patinir, The Penitence of Saint Jerome, triptych, ca. 1518, MET, NY.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565, MET, NY

A wonderful element of these two paintings is that the development of landscape as a visual language, its own genre, is so well illustrated. Bruegel in particular was a radical innovator, not just as the potentially first serious painter to make large scale dedicated landscape paintings in Europe, but as the first visual artist, in my knowledge, to look towards the poor and the peasant class. In doing, expanding the parameters of what an artist could look at, becoming a mirror of the world, the birth of a tradition.

The Peasant Dance, ca. 1568, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Until roughly 3 months ago I had remained relatively unconcerned and unaware about this much hyped new form of media, blogging. A chain of events, or a series of links, led me to an interesting blog one evening, and I have been entranced with the possibilities and diversity of voices creating content ever since.

So in likely folly, I am entering into the cacophony of voices, this experiment in on-line community and discussion. We’ll see where it takes me, and hopefully something more will come of this than just used up hard drive space.

A part of the 3rd annual Mt Tremper Arts Festival

The Interactive Landscape - A group photography show curated by Mathew Pokoik.

Featuring, Ian Baguskas, Aaron Diskin, Emmet Gowin, John Daido Loori, Daido Moriyama, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Christian Patterson, Mathew Pokoik, Matthew Porter, Susana Raab, Stephen Shore, Amy Stein, and Mark Wyse.

Opening party and Q&A at 8:30pm

Dance Performance at 7:00pm.

More information can be found on the Mt Tremper Arts web site, and will be coming to this blog soon.

Dubai, 2007, Mathew Pokoik