Ideally, the graphic arts work their magic without words. They bypass verbal understanding and reach directly into the emotional centers of perception. But some people demand explanations of even the inexplicable. They want to contextualize, rationalize, process. The best titles, though, don’t do that. Instead they initiate the viewer into another world, the world of the print. Like poetry, they use words to go beyond words. Often the title once arrived at through intense thought-association appears obvious, as if pre-destined.

Leaf-whispers started as a search for poetic associations of ‘leaves’. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Song of Myself contain numerous leaf-references involving communication between himself and vegetation, but none short enough for a print title. Spring festivals feature various characters covered in leaves, and there is the Millais painting of Ophelia

Ophelia

Leaf-whispers

With Mind the Gap, at first, descriptive terms like ‘rocks and trees’, such as are used in Chinese ink-brush painting, occurred to me. One of the Chinese ink-brush paintings I looked at was entitled ‘Rivers and Mountains Without End’, and that idea seemed to resonate with the islands disappearing into the mist, and the suggestion of a limitless, though ethereal expanse. But what would ‘islands without end’ mean? Perhaps instead of highlighting the islands themselves, the image is about the spaces around them — the gap. The apparently empty space embodies form and gives shape to what it surrounds. But just ‘the gap’ seemed too abrupt, not to mention redolent of a clothing store. What is the significance of the gap? How are we to think of it? Think of it, consider it, of course! — Mind the Gap. That’s what the conductor tells you when getting on or off the train. It’s also a reminder of the void that awaits us, awareness of which makes the present more vital.

Mind the Gap

The persistence of autumn grasses in midwinter suggested the co-existence of seasons in time, encompassing an entire cycle of growth, decay, and rebirth in one scene. The pattern also suggested musical staves, and at the same time, a kind of calligraphy: ‘Notes’, as if Nature had hastily scribbled some messages from seasons past. The notion of recollection inherent in these contemporaneous seasons prompted ‘last time’, as in ‘remember the last time we did such and such a thing?’ or ‘remember when this snow-covered field was green with fresh grass?’ Remembrance of the cycle of seasons implies that the sequence will be repeated, that we will have another and yet another opportunity to revisit the scene anew. All of these meanings coalesce in Notes From Last Time.

Notes From Last Time

Vaclav Havel, the playwright-statesman and former president of the Czech Republic, who died last Dec 18, understood from the inside out the meaning of the fall of communism. One of the great dramas of our time, its significance for the West is no less than its significance for the lands behind the former Iron Curtain. In a speech to the World Economic Forum in 1992, Havel reminded us:

‘For many years, decades in fact, the West was defined against the background of the communist world. As a common enemy and a common threat, it was this communist world that kept the West united both politically, and in terms of security arrangements. Against its will, it also helped the West strengthen, cultivate and develop its time-tested principles and practices, like civil society, parliamentary democracy, the market economy, and the concept of human and civil rights. Confronted by the gloomy, dangerous and expansionist world of communist totalitarianism, the West was continually required to prove its commitment to freedom, truth, democracy, broader cooperation and growing prosperity. In other words, the communist world was instrumental in the West’s own self-affirmation….

‘As the Eighties became the Nineties, the whole Second World, as it used to be known, exploded and, in a rather frenzied fashion, collapsed in upon itself. In its place, a crater has suddenly opened up before the eyes of an astonished world, one that is now spewing forth a lava of post-communist surprises. Mixed up in this lava, we will find a long-forgotten history coming back to haunt us, a history full of thousands of economic, social, ethical, ethnic, territorial, cultural and political problems that remained latent and unnoticed under the surface of totalitarian boredom.’

The collapse of communism took everyone by surprise, releasing long-suppressed ethnic and other grievances and re-aligning (to use Havel’s metaphor) the geo-tectonic plates of the continent. But Havel focuses on what he regards as the more lasting effects for human thought and freedom everywhere:

‘The end of communism is, first and foremost, a message to the human race. It is a message we have not yet fully deciphered and comprehended.

‘In its deepest sense, the end of communism has, I believe, brought a major era in human history to an end. It has brought an end not just to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but to the modern age as a whole.’

What Havel somewhat wishfully had in mind was the end of the idea that civil society could be engineered. It seemed to Havel that those who overthrew communism understood from their own experience, and all who witnessed it understood sympathetically, that using the State to force-march entire societies into so-called rational organization could never work. But those who seek dominion over others will always find some principles, be they communist, liberal, conservative, relativist, or fiscal to justify their own aggrandizement. Those who bear the hardships imposed on them by Statist intrusions into their lives can, if they will see for themselves, pierce these various guises and rationalizations. Havel’s view of history helps in this endeavor:

‘The modern era has been dominated by the culminating belief, expressed in different forms, that the world — and Being as such — is a wholly knowable system governed by a finite number of universal laws that man can grasp and rationally direct for his own benefit. This era, beginning in the Renaissance and developing from the Enlightenment to socialism, from positivism to scientism, from the industrial revolution to the information revolution, was characterized by rapid advances in rational, cognitive thinking. This, in turn, gave rise to the proud belief that man, as the pinnacle of everything that exists, was capable of objectively describing, explaining and controlling everything that exists, and of possessing the one and only truth about the world. It was an era in which there was a cult of depersonalized objectivity, an era in which objective knowledge was amassed and technologically exploited, an era of belief in automatic progress brokered by the scientific method. It was an era of systems, institutions, mechanisms, and statistical averages. It was an era of freely transferable, existentially ungrounded information. It was an era of ideologies, doctrines, interpretations of reality, an era where the goal was to find a universal theory of the world, and thus a universal key to unlock its prosperity.

‘The fall of communism can be regarded as a sign that modern thought — based on the premise that the world is objectively knowable, and that the knowledge so obtained can be absolutely generalized — has come to a final crisis. This era has created the first global, or planetary, technical civilization, but it has reached the limit of its potential, the point beyond which the abyss begins. I think the end of communism is a serious warning to all mankind. It is a signal that the era of arrogant, absolutive reason is drawing to a close and that it is high time to draw conclusions from that fact.’

Berlin Wall, 1989 (photo: Sue Ream)

And yet..

‘We are looking for new scientific recipes, new ideologies, new control systems, new institutions, new instruments to eliminate the dreadful consequences of our previous recipes, ideologies, control systems, institutions and instruments. We treat the fatal consequences of technology as though they were a technical defect that could be remedied by technology alone. We are looking for an objective way out of the crisis of objectivism.

‘What is needed is something different, something larger. Man’s attitude to the world must be radically changed. We have to abandon the arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be solved, a machine with instructions for use waiting to be discovered, a body of information to be fed into a computer in the hope that, sooner or later, it will spit out a universal solution.’

Instead of which, Havel has the courage to assert that personal, private experiences afford a scope of action that is inaccessible to the rationalist central planners. In the multitude and variety of unique personal experiences lie great untapped energy for self-governance, peace, and prosperity. These are the very qualities that experts find so uncomfortable and therefore dismiss as ‘merely subjective’. Havel’s genius as an artist, statesman, and philosopher, is to restore this experiential wisdom to its proper central place in human affairs. It is an inherently democratic approach, since everyone’s personal experience is of use, and it emboldens the populace to shake off its passivity and seek guidance from their own common sense.

‘It is my profound conviction that we have to release from the sphere of private whim such forces as a natural, unique and unrepeatable experience of the world, an elementary sense of justice, the ability to see things as others do, a sense of transcendental responsibility, archetypal wisdom, good taste, courage, compassion, and faith in the importance of particular measures that do not aspire to be a universal key to salvation. Such forces must be rehabilitated. Things must once more be given a chance to present themselves as they are, to be perceived in their individuality. We must see the pluralism of the world, and not bind it by seeking common denominators or reducing everything to a single common equation. We must try harder to understand than to explain. The way forward is not in the mere construction of universal systemic solutions, to be applied to reality from the outside; it is also in seeking to get to the heart of reality through personal experience. Such an approach promotes an atmosphere of tolerant solidarity and unity in diversity based on mutual respect, genuine pluralism and parallelism. In a word, human uniqueness, human action and the human spirit must be rehabilitated.

‘The world, too, has something like a spirit or soul. That, however, is something more than a mere body of information that can be externally grasped and objectified and mechanically assembled. Yet this does not mean that we have no access to it. Figuratively speaking, the human spirit is made from the same material as the spirit of the world. Man is not just an observer, a spectator, an analyst or a manager of the world. Man is a part of the world and his spirit is part of the spirit of the world. We are merely a peculiar node of Being, a living atom within it, or rather a cell that, if sufficiently open to itself and its own mystery, can also experience the mystery, the will, the pain, and the hope of the world….

‘In a world of global civilization, only those who are looking for a technical trick to save that civilization need feel despair. But those who believe, in all modesty, in the mysterious power of their own human Being, which mediates between them and the mysterious power of the world’s Being, have no reason to despair at all.

‘Thank you for your kind attention.’

Full text of Vaclav Havel’s speech

Obituary

Vaclav Havel, statesman and playwright, born 5 October 1936; died 18 December 2011

Here at ‘Views’ we regard political economy as a subsidiary of the arts and culture. It’s the value of our culture that determines our wealth, not the other way around. Occasionally we have to deal with exchange rates, those rather arbitrary equations affecting what we pay for things. This, dear viewers, is one of those times.

Starting March 1, 2012, the Yen/Dollar exchange rate at http://kamprint.com/ will be reset to 80 Yen per Dollar, with a consequent upward adjustment of Dollar prices. All purchases of photogravure etchings made by March 1, 2012 may take advantage of the artificial 100 Yen/Dollar rate which has under-stated Dollar prices for several years.

Whatever currency you’re using, this is the time to convert your wish-list into real photogravure etchings, with all of the depth, texture, and tonality of original limited-edition intaglio. Shipping to anywhere in the world remains free, with the prints well-protected in flat containers sent by EMS. Yen prices are unchanged. Shipping to buyers in Japan also remains free, by JapanPost Yu-Pak or takyubin. Please see http://kamprint.com/ or http://kamprint.com/xpress/ for full-screen images with direct purchasing links. A symbol like the one above provides the link.

The prints can also be seen and purchased in person through these fine dealers and galleries:

Conrad R Graeber Fine Art, Box 264, Riderwood, Maryland 21139, Tel 410-377-6713.
http://www.conradgraeber.com/index.htm
cgraeber [at] conradgraeber.com
Member, International Fine Print Dealers Association

Parish Gallery – Georgetown, Canal Square, 1054 31st Street, NW, Washington DC 20007; Tel 202-944-2312; parishgallery [at] bigplanet.com

Devin Borden Gallery, 3917 Main Street at Isabella Court, Houston, Texas 77002; Tel 713-529-2700; devinborden [at] gmail.com

Japonesque, 824 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, California 94133; Tel 415 391-8860, Fax 415-391-3530.

Let this be the year you give yourself and others the incomparable gift of photogravure etching.

Sarah Dunant’s novels of religious and political intrigue bring the 16th-century Medici era to marvelous life. The Birth of Venus sets Medici opulence against Savonarola’s preachings of imminent damnation, in a story of forbidden love between a novice nun-to-be and a young artist. Sacred Hearts relates the story of another girl unwillingly sent to a convent, delirious with rage at her incarceration, whose saintly devotion to heavenly music eventually brings her and the convent a sort of peace. The world of the Renaissance is strangely familiar to us, and Sarah Dunant knows why.

She writes about the contradictory apocalyptic visions that trouble us today: One version of the contemporary apocalypse tells us that the only way out of the black hole of debt is to spend more, lest eternal stagnation and misery engulf us all. Another version tells us that economic growth itself is destroying the planet, that the oceans will rise, tempests will rage, the very climate and atmosphere of the planet will turn malevolent if we don’t mend our ways. No one except Sarah Dunant seems to have noticed that these two versions of hell are diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive.

The Medici era which gave rise to modern banking 500 years ago was also, by no coincidence, beset by visions of impending doom, especially for those engaged in the idolatrous pursuit of money for its own sake. The succeeding centuries have witnessed a seemingly endless sequence of apocalyptic visions, heralded by a collision of the sun with the earth (1603), the passage of comets (1719 and 1910), earthquakes (1805), planetary conjunctions (1919), and Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast (1938). And who can forget Y2K, the year when a couple of missing digits would doom everything from banking to air traffic control.

Of the various forms taken by popular fear, Dunant writes:

It is almost Darwinianly protean in the way it changes shape — from the four horsemen, through fears of nuclear destruction after World War II, to the contemporary debate about the raping and over-heating of the planet. For those who passionately believe it, the difference between this scenario and apocalyptic fears of the past is that those were misguided, but this one is correct.

History suggests, though, that each age begets its own sort of anxiety, related more to conditions here on earth than in the heavens. The dates often coincide with times of impending warfare, extreme deprivation, or revolutionary conflict. Every apocalypse features punishment of the wicked amid massive destruction, followed by the reign of the few who are saved. In earthly terms, they may be viewed as implicit threats against the elites of the day, warning them of the limits of their power.

Perhaps hellfire and damnation restrained the avarice of the first bankers. Back when usury was a mortal sin, the Scrovegnis (14th-century) who had

Giotto, Last Judgment

Hellfire (detail of Giotto fresco)

Sarah Dunant expresses perfectly the confusion of contemporary mixed apocalyptic messages:

But what has happened this year — which I think goes some way to explaining the confusion and despair that many of us have been feeling — is that we have basically experienced two potential apocalypses colliding. While on the one hand we are being told that if we are to save our planet we simply cannot go on exploiting its resources and must drastically reduce our levels of consumption – we are also being told that in order to pull ourselves out of the nightmare of spiralling recession, we must have growth and that growth depends on continued spending and consuming, ie more credit and more debt. I can’t be the only one, who while listening to these two voices simultaneously, has experienced mental vertigo.

She ends by quoting the eminent philosopher Woody Allen:

More than any time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter helplessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

As the history of apocalypse suggests, it might be wise to seek inspirational visions in everyday life here and now rather than in the hereafter. Depriving oneself indefinitely of the little pleasures of everyday life actually impoverishes that life rather than enriching it. Such things as a glance at a favorite print, the discovery of something new in a familiar image, the caress of the eye across the textured surface of a hand-made object, remind us that all happiness is fleeting, but not on that account to be put off indefinitely.

Real wealth consists in the accumulation of a lifetime of little impressions, chance meetings, journeys through the unexpected, memories, and perspectives developed from art and music, science and engineering, literature and philosophy. Denying onself the visual resources to do this is simply false economy. Especially in times of distress, bold acts of imagination are required to create a future different from the present. Original artwork presents us with imaginary alternatives contrary to the apocalyptic nightmares we are immersed in, and in so doing helps to realize more benign visions of our future. That is my mission at The Kamakura Print Collection and kamprint.com/xpress/

I don’t know whether the planet is boiling over or drowning in debt, but I intend to continue pressing on with the work of photogravure etching that I started 20 years ago. I hope you’ll join in this deeply satisfying endeavor soon.

Renaissance city Urbino

The Three Peaks of the Phoenix, a range midway between Fuji-san and Japan’s second-highest mountain Kita-dake, offer incomparable views to either side. At sunrise Fuji-san appears red for about 10 minutes, and the early light on Kita-dake opposite warms that formidable mass of rock. The mist on distant peaks gives a sense of unlimited vistas. As the day brightens, Yatsugatake (Eight Peaks) with its distinctive 3000-meter high Aka-dake (Red Peak), and Yarigadake, become visible, bringing memories of other ascents.

Takushi-dake summit

The Asian phoenix and the Arabian-Egyptian phoenix are not really birds of a feather — more like distant cousins. The Arabian-Egyptian phoenix rises every half-millennium from the ashes of its own pyre, a resurrection myth that informs Christian lore and inspires hopes of triumph over adversity. It appears as a double-headed eagle in European heraldry and coinage, and as the Firebird of Russian and Slavic lore involving heroic quests. Stravinsky made wonderful use of the legend in his Firebird Suite.

The Asian phoenix, like its distant cousin, is also associated with the sun and with ascent toward the light, a feeling we can readily appreciate among the brightly lit rock outcroppings of these three peaks. But the Japanese version, having been introduced during the Asuka Period (7th century) from China, is more of a Yin/Yang creature, an embodiment of both harmony and conflict. As such it is both an Imperial and a marital symbol. Its best-known Imperial incarnation in Japan is atop the Byodoin in Uji, between Nara and Kyoto. The kanji 鳳 凰 mean male and female phoenix.

Winged Fuji

Each of the Three Peaks of the Phoenix represents an aspect of the Buddha, personified by a deity with specific responsibilities for our welfare. First up (if arriving by train to Kofu) is Yakushi-dake (薬師岳), for health. It has a marvelous natural rock-garden which looks like the artifact of some primordial civilization. Then Kannon-dake (観音岳), the highest of the three at 2840 meters, the Goddess of Mercy. The way its forms fit together seems to have, instead of the usual craggy rock-face, a feminine grace. From there a narrow ridge leads to Jizo-dake (地蔵岳), the god of travelers. This is one of the most distinctive peaks in the entire Japanese Alps, and the one Walter Weston chose for his frist ascent, sparking Japanese interest in mountaineering in the early 20th century. So, there you have it — health, compassion, and safe travels. What more could one wish for.

The Kamakura Print Collection’s photogravure etchings by Peter Miller are represented, since September 2011, by Conrad R Graeber, a member of the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA). Mr Graeber may be contacted at Conrad R Graeber Fine Art, Box 264, Riderwood, Maryland 21139, Tel 1-410-377-6713, email cgraeber[at]conradgraeber.com. He meets clients at print fairs throughout the year, including the large one held by the IFPDA every November in New York.

Seventh Regiment Armory

Despite headline blockbuster sales of art brand-names, private art dealers actually account for most of the art sold. This according to a report by CINOA, the Confédération Internationale des Négociants en Oeuvres d’Art, of which IFPDA is a member. Clare McAndrew, the author of the report, writes ‘Collectively dealers consist largely of discreet, low profile individuals and small businesses, preferring to focus on finding great art to match with the right client, rather than publishing high flying sales prices as the leading auction houses customarily do.’ The report notes further that art transactions are increasingly moving toward such private dealers and related on-line outlets.

A visit to an art fair such as those held by the IFPDA reveals why: Buyers and sellers know a great deal about the artwork, and connoisseurship is held in high esteem. People go there to learn, attend lectures and symposia. The trend toward private art dealers essentially reflects a ‘flight to quality’. Knowing more about the artists, and the various printmaking techniques, enhances their confidence in selecting art they can live with and enjoy for many years.

Explorer of Cambodia, freedom fighter (Spanish Civil War), Resistance leader, and Gestapo prisoner André Malraux emerged from World War II to write a book that prefigured the World Wide Web. Musée Imaginaire, translated as Museum Without Walls, written in 1947, still resonates today. Great art, he wrote, made accessible to all through reproductions in books, is liberated from the time, place, and history in which they are usually confined by museum categories. Removed from historical context, they can be rearranged in the mind according to aesthetic or philosophical qualities. Malraux drew on the thoughts of Henri Focillon, in La Vie des Formes / The Life of Forms in Art, in suggesting a kind of universal consciousness that all great art responds to. In this way it has the power to transcend the bitter partisan divisions that Malraux knew so well.

Malraux recognized that while taking the great works of art outside of museums liberated them from history, it also threatened to homogenize them into reproducible formats. Everything from the gigantic Sphinx to medieval miniatures assumes the same dimensions in art books, obliterating the effects of scale. Despite the great advances in color reproduction made by publishers like Skira (now Skira-Rizzoli), Alinari, and others, the reproductions were inevitably flat and standardized. They could never really substitute for the originals, nor were they meant to. If they served merely as a reminder of the originals, the creative connection would not be lost. The newest form of this cultural commons is the World Wide Web.

With the Google Art Project, the firm turns its mapping skills to the graphic arts, enabling viewers to zoom-in on artwork in the same way Google-Earth lets them zoom-in on the ground. The familiar slider and plus/minus controls reveal a level of detail in paintings far beyond what can be seen in a museum visit.

Van Gogh, Starry Night detail

that flock of sheep, or the stork, or myriad other details that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. The Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Uffizi in Florence, .. At each museum you can wander around the museum virtually as if you were there, in a simulated walk-through the galleries. To examine a particular artwork more closely, click a particular room in the museum’s floor plan, see a list of the artwork in that room at right, and select any for a detailed look in the ‘View Artwork’ mode. Unobtrusive links at right go to brief notes, history, tags, artist information, more works by this artist, and more works in this museum. The ‘Artist information’ links to a Google map showing the artist’s birthplace. Like the artwork, all the information is viewable in any level of detail that may be desired at the moment — brief notes, expandable to more detailed notes, which in turn link to scholarly treatises. The Viewing Notes are straightforward, well-informed, and thankfully jargon-free. Insights gained there can be instantly explored in closeup views.

This ‘musée imaginaire’ opens up virtually unlimited democratic vistas of exploration for everyone to ’see for themselves’. If a viewer interprets a detail in a painting differently from that of the conventional wisdom, or wishes to gather evidence for attributing it to a different artist, or sees something amiss, or uncovers a previously unnoticed marvel of the artist’s composition, the tools to do so are immediately at hand. No special permission needed, no off-days, no waiting in long lines or peering over others’ shoulders.

Just as with art books, homogenization-by-format is a risk. Pixels on a screen are not the same as paint on canvas or ink embedded in etching paper. (My Inklings essay looks into this through the innovations in optics, etching, and light-sensitive materials that led to photogravure in the 19th century.)

Les Andelys, detail of photogravure etching

The distinguished contemporary landscape artist April Gornik writes movingly, in her essay An Artist’s Perspective on Visual Literacy on the effects of losing touch with the physical and creative basis of artwork:

We are bombarded to the point of being inured with images, and clearly a vast number of people are increasingly unable to perceive the importance of the physicality of images, even when they are declared to be art. People who are looking at and theoretically being seduced by ads are typically receiving them in a flat manner, the manner of video, the computer screen, billboards, magazines, etc. Their medium is chosen to translate into a wide variety of these information-conveyors. The lowest common denominator of this flatness tends to be photography, and its ubiquitous use is helping erode the perception of physicality in both ads and art. In the case of an advertisement, its materiality is subservient to the message it’s meant to convey, and doesn’t reside in its substance (’Image is Everything’, as the Canon Camera Company unapologetically reminded us in a popular ad campaign). Its strength is its expediency.

I am a painter, drawer and printmaker of unpeopled landscapes. I came to think about what I perceive as this problem of visual literacy while noticing that, during studio visits to see my work, collectors would often look at large charcoal drawings (which to me look like nothing else in the world) and innocently ask, ‘Is this a photograph?’

The innocent question answers itself soon enough, with a moment’s closer inspection. It is merely the ubiquity of mass-media imagery that narrows viewers’ vision into a standard format they are familiar with. From her own experience, April Gornik observes that looking at artwork with a sense of how it is made enhances our ability to relate it to our own lives. In Vermeer’s View of Delft, for example:

Vermeer, View of Delft

the clouds at the top and the gently curving shore open to the middle of the painting, like an eye opening, into the exterior world the painting reveals. Light in the distance draws us towards infinity and a sense of the immensity of space extending limitlessly out from us, but which Vermeer presents with great intimacy.

[I]n the same way that a painting holds within itself the history, time, and the tale of its formation, a person looking at it is informed, enriched, and is subliminally able to experience all of that input. This physicality, the way an art object is ‘built’, speaks to us, and our response is an affirmation of our own sensory abilities, forming a connection and an interface of time and space, intent and emotion, even history.

April Gornik, Halang Bay

A painting in the flesh is, and should be, a somatic experience for the viewer. An image painted by hand, rather than reproduced in a magazine, contains in its painted surface a person, a world, in the manner in which the paint is applied and the object made, be it realistic or abstract.

April Gornik, Shining Sea

The real power of visual art is its capacity as virtual reality to create a complex physical experience. Painting is so specifically powerful, and more powerful than other mediums, because an artist who makes one builds into it their actual experience, including decision-making, intent, corrections, and (importantly) actual time passed. Paintings generate all this experience back to the viewer. The summary that a painting is of all that activity is capable of both holding and regenerating that experience. The object powers the somatic connection that remains between the work of art, the artist who made it, and the person looking at it. That connection is an essential part of the human experience, a verification of humanity, history, and our connectedness itself.

April Gornik, Light through the Forest

I would only add that original printmaking equally embodies the personal experience of the artist, and takes equal part in the connectedness of human experience. April Gornik’s paintings certainly testify to the truth of her observations. The Google Art Project, like Skira’s art book, is only a technology — a fascinating, wonderful bounty that will enable discovery and enjoyment for many years to come, with a creative energy of its own, expanding the territory of the cultural commons. It is a marvelous resource for artists and collectors alike to stay in touch with their senses and with the creative forces of art and the human experience.

Les Andelys, photogravure etching, Peter Miller

Henri Focillon’s La Vie des Formes is available in French at no cost from Project Gutenberg. and from the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi (dans le cadre de la collection: ‘Les classiques des sciences sociales’ dirigée et fondée par Jean-Marie Tremblay, professeur de sociologie au Cégep de Chicoutimi).

Thanks to the generous donations made through The Kamakura Print Collection to the Japan Red Cross, we have been able to assist with the JRC’s continuing humanitarian work following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. The JRC’s mobile medical teams provide essential help where the normal public health facilities were destroyed by the tsunami, and public health services are not yet functioning. From the Japan Red Cross website:

Dr Yasuo Fujita, Director of the Emergency and Critical Care Centre at Akita’s Red Cross hospital, puts it more strongly than that. Having organized response in some of the worst-hit corners of Iwate, he says, ‘The people with the biggest problems are in their own homes, cut off from care because it isn’t round the corner any more. You need a car to reach the nearest hospital. It’s why our mobile teams are so needed.’…

A woman is shown into the busy room where Dr Yoichiro Tanaka has found a space between some packing cases. She’s in her eighties and has problems with her back.
‘When did you last see a doctor?’ he asks.
‘Oh… well…I had an appointment with a doctor the day of the tsunami. I was supposed to go to the hospital.’
The doctor looks up, and waits for her to continue.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘the tsunami destroyed the place.’

Red Cross workers in Ishinomaki, March 27

The Japan Red Cross is now accepting donations via PayPal here, which can be made without incurring the usual international banking fees of $50 or more per transfer. From a PayPal account, donations to the Japan Red Cross may be made to gienkin@jrc.or.jp

The work of recovery and reconstruction will continue for a long time to come. Miyagi Prefecture (which includes Sendai) summarizes its plans as follows:
30,000 temporary houses for disaster victims.
Prompt restoration of public facilities and lifeline utilities — roads, ports, waterways, coastal areas, airport, railways, water and sewage systems, electricity, gas, communications.
Recovery or restoration of local government offices, documents, and information systems.
Clearance of rubble left by the tsunami, estimated to take three years.
Reconstruction of schools, including nursery schools, elementary, junior, and high schools.
Restoration of hospitals, clinics, sanitation, and welfare facilities.
Securing employment and living expenses for disaster victims and recent graduates.
Financial support during recovery of agriculture, forestry and fisheries industries and related distribution.
Operating capital for restoration of local commerce and industry.
Upgrading disaster planning, radiation monitoring, and law enforcement.
Alternate sites for the coastal towns of Kesennuma, Minamisanriku, Ishinomaki, Onagawa, Higashi Matsushima, Matsushima, Rifu, Shigoama, Tagajo, Shichigahama, Natori, Iwanuma, Watari, and Yamoto.

Bygones, photogravure etching, Peter Miller

Oze Spring, photogravure etching, Peter Miller

Hokokuji ・ 報国寺, photogravure etching, Peter Miller

Roofwork, photogravure etching, Peter Miller

Gandhi instructed a woman whose infant had died, ‘Go and borrow some salt from a family that has never experienced a loss’. After a few days, she came back without any salt and said ‘O Gandhiji, I understand’. Their grief was hers, hers theirs. All grief is private and individual, and at the same time universal.

When we see images of loss from far away, we ‘translate’ them and experience them as our own. Multiplied by tens of thousands, these losses become unimaginable, beyond words or pictures. The images of devastation proliferate: that pile of matchsticks once a home, ships atop buildings, a lake of mud in place of a thriving fishing village. All this coverage a well-intentioned attempt to convey an intensely private experience to billions of strangers, all of whom have their own cares and concerns. The media ’share the pain’, giving a frisson of horror to its viewers. You have seen the devastation photos and videos over and over again, that water advancing indifferently and irresistibly over homes, factories, crops, vehicles, and the invisible people for whom they were made. You imagine what it would be like to lose everything in an instant. Caught up in a swirl of emotions, your heart goes out to them, you breathe a sigh of relief that it wasn’t you carried out to sea never to return, then you feel guilty to have survived.

Towns you never knew before March 11 — Kamaishi, Kesennuma, Miyako, Natori, Minami Sanriku, Rikuzentakata, Hachinohe, Ishinomaki, many others — are now known for death and destruction. And as the roads and train lines are repaired, and reporters venture into new news territory, more and more images and stories flow out. You the viewer, or voyeur, are saturated, yet you cannot look away for fear of being thought uncaring by yourself or others. Exquisitely attuned to what worries you most, the media call forth radiation and nuclear keywords designed to grab your attention and keep you on edge. You are left with a feeling of numbed anxiety.

Swirl, Iwate Prefecture

It left in its wake several severely damaged nuclear reactors at Fukushima. The continuing risks are real, though not apocalyptic. And the tragedies are real, however attenuated they may become to distant viewers when broadcast repeatedly through the cloud of other worries. While I care about the lives lost and the destruction in Tohoku — because I care about them — there will be no devastation photos here.

Awash, Iwate Prefecture

Veteran Facebook subscribers might see this title and go ‘Dude??!! What planet have you been on???’ Six hundred million people are onto it, it’s the 3rd-biggest ‘nation’ after China and India, and still growing. But concerns about privacy, data-mining, and distrust of the huge sums being thrown around by banksters and VCs were off-putting. It didn’t seem to add anything to ordinary email. I’m also not thrilled about increasing my exposure to advertising. But the ability to communicate in real time with large numbers of people has clearly influenced the course of events, and the gains in transparency through bypassing traditional intermediaries and gatekeepers are impressive.

So, when someone younger and wiser urged me to look into Facebook with an open mind, I found that the earlier privacy problems had been fixed, and anyway you don’t have to post everything. It’s just a way of staying in touch with people you already know. He explained to me the meaning of ‘like’ and ‘friend’ in Facebook terms, that they set in motion an organic (viral) spread of information through multiple networks of association. Friends tell each other about their likes and dislikes (though wisely Facebook only allows likes). That ‘Like’ button that you now see at this site instantly alerts viewers’ friends to something they will ‘likely’ be interested in. Like an enzyme that gets the natural yeast to rise, Facebook enables people to do what they’re already doing, unconstrained by distance or status. And this leads to a qualitative change not only in the way people relate to each other as friends, work-associates, sympathizers, fellow-travelers and fate-sharers, etc., but in society as a whole. In the way that thinking produces new neural connections in the brain, the enhanced intensity of ties among people and their networks builds a collective intelligence whose capabilities have only just begun to be realized.

My advisor also gave me a book, The Facebook Effect, for my further enlightenment. Though the author, David Kirkpatrick, is clearly an admirer, he doesn’t hide the fact that in its early days Facebook covertly obtained students’ email addresses, used Ivy-League exclusivity as long as it gave some advantage, then tossed it aside, and that the company’s competitive edge has a certain ruthless quality. To his credit, though, founder Mark Zuckerman keeps the user experience foremost, doesn’t like advertising either, and has used the site’s popularity to compel advertisers to make their pitches compatible with the overall Facebook user experience. And Zuckerman’s focus on his vision for the company enabled him to resist VC offers until just the right moment of maximum valuation, while his ability to learn from others’ mistakes enabled Facebook to grow at a sustainable rate. While his ambitions were boundless, he also describes Facebook as merely a ‘utility’. Even at its enormous size, Facebook is still about friends keeping in touch with each other.

Despite my initial skepticism, the prospect of social networks deepening existing relationships and adding new ones organically is intriguing. By ‘organically’, I mean, through friends of friends, and people showing others what they like. This is a way of multiplying and reinforcing other real-world and Web communications, and of creating personal connections that truly reflect viewers’ preferences. So, each Post in this blog now has a ‘Like’ button that will make the Post instantly visible to everyone in a self-selected group. Here’s my Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Peter-Miller/145350915529810