tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18473308551895875452024-02-01T21:47:25.395-05:00Views from RomeThoughts, observations, and maybe some insights on Rome during my spring as a Rome Prize fellow at the American Academy in Rome -- Max PageUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger189125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-59320903799685034382014-07-13T09:21:00.004-04:002014-07-13T09:21:48.127-04:00Hello Amherst, and FamilyI am back at 84 McClellan Street with my family, which means I am truly home. <br />
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And this morning the story I wrote for the Boston Globe about my research in Rome was published. If you have been following this blog, lots of the observations and photos will be familiar!<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The Roman architecture of Mussolini, still standing</span></h1>
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<span style="font-size: large;">One of the world’s great cities bears the signature of a Fascist dictator, and nobody wants to talk about it</span></h2>
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<img alt="Clockwise from left: The Foro Italico sports complex still retains its mosaic floors with Mussolini’s title of “Duce.”" data-fullsrc="//c.o0bg.com/rf/image_371w/Boston/2011-2020/2014/07/08/BostonGlobe.com/Ideas/Images/foroitalicomosaics.Rome-013.jpg" src="http://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_371w/Boston/2011-2020/2014/07/08/BostonGlobe.com/Ideas/Images/foroitalicomosaics.Rome-013.jpg" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; font-size: 16px; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.2em; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; width: auto;" /><div class="figcaption" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; font-size: 0.75em; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.58333333; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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The Foro Italico sports complex still retains its mosaic floors with Mussolini’s title of “Duce.”<span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.625;">T</span><span class="span" id="U7493686885jDC" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.625; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: baseline;">HE MAYOR </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.625;">of Rome, Ignazio Marino, made a splash when he first took office last August: He proposed to tear down the Via dei Fori Imperiale, the four-lane boulevard that cuts right through the heart of the city’s most prominent ancient excavations.</span></div>
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Nearly all visitors know the road, and most have likely walked on it. One of the few long, straight arteries in a city of tangled lanes and alleys, it’s something of a monument itself, running from Piazza Venezia and its “wedding cake”-like Victor Emmanuel Monument to the ancient Colosseum.</div>
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But to anyone familiar with the history of the city, this road is more than just a central thoroughfare: It is one of the ways Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, who ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943, signed his name across the city. In one grand destructive act, he connected himself to the ancient Roman emperors, modernized the city for the automobile, and created a huge open-air space for his frenzied balcony speeches. Hitler would be given a hero’s welcome along the avenue in 1938, celebrating the newfound alliance between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.</div>
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To outside observers, it’s easy to imagine that the argument over the road would really be an argument about the legacy of a dictator: Mayor Marino, at long last, removing a garish and offensive symbol of Fascist ambition and Italy’s dismal history in WWII. But this is not how Romans are discussing it. Marino bills the closing as an environmental and quality-of-life move for Romans, clearing the polluted air while making space for civic events. The vitriol of the debate arises not over the road’s political meanings, but from drivers, who wonder how the heck they are going to get to work.</div>
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<img alt="A monogram bisected by a stylized fasces. " data-fullsrc="//c.o0bg.com/rf/image_1920w/Boston/2011-2020/2014/07/08/BostonGlobe.com/Ideas/Images/foroitalicomosaic.2014-028.jpg" src="http://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_1920w/Boston/2011-2020/2014/07/08/BostonGlobe.com/Ideas/Images/foroitalicomosaic.2014-028.jpg" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; font-size: 16px; list-style: none; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" /><div class="figcaption" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; font-size: 0.75em; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.58333333; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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A monogram bisected by a stylized fasces.</div>
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Via dei Fori Imperiale is but one of the dozens of Fascist legacies hiding in plain sight here. Though Mussolini came from the north and had once disdained the Eternal City, after his 1922 coup he remade the urban landscape as only a few before him had. Today he might be surprised, and pleased, by how little of his legacy has been erased. Public reckonings are a big part of how other nations have moved forward from morally repugnant pasts. Not so in Italy. Today a handful of people are trying, openly, to confront Mussolini’s architectural imprint on Rome, but they’re a small minority. In an Italy and Europe rumbling with the newfound power of the right wing, the more typical response is a deafening—and troubling—silence.</div>
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<img alt="1930s-era fasces are still scattered through the city. " data-fullsrc="//c.o0bg.com/rf/image_1920w/Boston/2011-2020/2014/07/08/BostonGlobe.com/Ideas/Images/doorstopfasce.2014-046-001.jpg" src="http://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_1920w/Boston/2011-2020/2014/07/08/BostonGlobe.com/Ideas/Images/doorstopfasce.2014-046-001.jpg" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; font-size: 16px; list-style: none; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" /><div class="figcaption" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; font-size: 0.75em; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.58333333; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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1930s-era fasces are still scattered through the city.</div>
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F<span class="span" id="U7493686885E7G" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; font-size: 16px; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: baseline;">ROM ATOP </span>the Janiculum, a hill where Giuseppe Garibaldi fought unsuccessfully for the independence of the city in 1849, visitors can look out at centuries of ambitious visions for the city. Squint a little and you can make out the monuments of Roman emperors: the Baths of Diocletian, the Pantheon, Palatine Hill. Later the planners were popes, usually scions of wealthy Roman families, who gave rise to the city so recognizable today, of palazzi and church domes and grand squares anchored by obelisks.</div>
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With virtually no modern buildings added to the city’s historic center since the 1950s, one might easily get the sense that Rome has been largely unchanged for centuries. There was, however, one last great builder. Benito Mussolini and his stable of architects and planners built post offices, sports facilities for youth, apartments and schools, public markets. They remade the road system, not only with the massive Via dei Fori Imperiale, but also the Via della Conciliazione, the equally famous boulevard leading to St. Peter’s Square. They built entire new towns in agricultural lands south of Rome, made possible by massive draining and reclaiming of the Pontine marshes.</div>
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Some of the most surreal sights in modern Rome are Mussolini’s surviving spectacles of propaganda. To the south of the city is the EUR, a necropolis of white neo-classical forms, including an abstracted, cube-like homage to the Colosseum, all part of an unfinished plan for a 1942 world’s fair—the Esposizione Universale Roma—that would celebrate 20 years of Fascism. The Foro Mussolini (now Foro Italico), a large sports facility north of the Vatican, features a mosaic plaza—the largest built here since the fall of Rome—celebrating the colonial conquest of Ethiopia in 1936. The mosaic includes 248 crumbling but still-visible repetitions of the favorite roar at Fascist rallies: “Il DUCE.”</div>
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<img alt="Elsewhere, new small brass markers installed by German artist Gunter Demnig remind Romans of citizens sent to concentration camps during World War II." data-fullsrc="//c.o0bg.com/rf/image_1920w/Boston/2011-2020/2014/07/08/BostonGlobe.com/Ideas/Images/stolpersteinerome.trastevere-001.jpg" src="http://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_1920w/Boston/2011-2020/2014/07/08/BostonGlobe.com/Ideas/Images/stolpersteinerome.trastevere-001.jpg" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; font-size: 16px; list-style: none; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" /><div class="figcaption" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; font-size: 0.75em; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.58333333; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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Elsewhere, new small brass markers installed by German artist Gunter Demnig remind Romans of citizens sent to concentration camps during World War II.</div>
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Mussolini’s own image rarely makes an appearance, but throughout the city you can spot hundreds of copies of the ancient Roman military emblem that gave Fascism its name. The “fasces”—a bundle of sticks with an axe—was affixed to public buildings, fountains, manhole covers, even doorstops during Mussolini’s dictatorship. Many were removed after the war, but, as is typical here, the removal was inconsistent, and dependent on the politics of neighborhoods. In Germany, the swastika is outlawed, and you will find no examples in public spaces. But in Italy, the fasces remain sprinkled throughout the urban landscape.</div>
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<img alt="The “Mussolini Dux” obelisk stands at the entrance to the Foro Italico." data-fullsrc="//c.o0bg.com/rf/image_371w/Boston/2011-2020/2014/07/11/BostonGlobe.com/Ideas/Images/ForoItalico.Rome-086[1].jpg" src="http://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_371w/Boston/2011-2020/2014/07/11/BostonGlobe.com/Ideas/Images/ForoItalico.Rome-086[1].jpg" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; font-size: 16px; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.2em; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; width: auto;" /><div class="figcaption" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; font-size: 0.75em; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.58333333; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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The “Mussolini Dux” obelisk stands at the entrance to the Foro Italico.</div>
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Erasing the past is hardly the answer to confronting the past, but when it comes to Mussolini’s legacy, one of the world’s great cities has simply looked the other way. Serious critical reflection on Fascism here is relegated to history books and outliers on the political left. What remains in popular discourse is a hazy understanding of the period, which has provided an opening for disturbing revisionist sentiments about a leader who tied his future to Hitler.</div>
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If it is unfair to equate Mussolini with Hitler, it is also disdainful of the past not to recognize the brutality of his regime—the dictatorial takeover of government, the murder and bullying of the opposition, the suppression of free speech and press, a brutal invasion of Ethiopia marked by the use of poison gas and concentration camps, and race laws which paved the way, after the Nazi takeover of Italy in 1943, to the deportations of thousands of Jews and others, usually to their deaths in German concentration camps.</div>
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To be sure, there are many who continue to rally against Fascism, past and present, invisible and visible. “When I walk across the bridge to go to the soccer stadium and I see ‘Mussolini Dux’ on that obelisk, I want to blow it up,” a famed historian of the resistance to Fascism, told me. At a recent Liberation Day, or Festa della Liberazione, a national holiday to mark the end of Nazi occupation of Italy, a World War II partisan, now well into his 80s, declared it “a shame” that Fascist buildings at Foro Italico still stand. The T-shirts sold at the Liberation Day rally capture the sentiment of those on the left: “Yesterday, partisans, today, anti-fascists.”</div>
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But a far more common response to the debate about Mussolini’s Fascism is the one described by Rosalia Vittorini, the head of the Italian chapter of DOCOMOMO, the organization that fights to preserve modern architecture around the world. In a café in the Piazza Augosto Imperatore, I asked her what Romans think when they walk by a Fascist building, or sit, as we were, in a building built expressly to proclaim his vision for a “Third Roman Empire.” She responded simply: “Why do you think they think anything at all?”</div>
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<img alt="Mussolini’s burial crypt in the town of Predappio has become a pilgrimage site for modern-day Fascists." data-fullsrc="//c.o0bg.com/rf/image_371w/Boston/2011-2020/2014/07/08/BostonGlobe.com/Ideas/Images/predappiocryptmussolini.2014-119.jpg" src="http://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_371w/Boston/2011-2020/2014/07/08/BostonGlobe.com/Ideas/Images/predappiocryptmussolini.2014-119.jpg" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; font-size: 16px; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.2em; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; width: auto;" /><div class="figcaption" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; font-size: 0.75em; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.58333333; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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Mussolini’s burial crypt in the town of Predappio has become a pilgrimage site for modern-day Fascists.</div>
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To understand why Italians don’t actively discuss Mussolini and the era of Italian Fascism is to enter the stew of Italian politics, bubbling with half-truths and rationalizations, nostalgia and guilt, and a jockeying for position in a sharply divided country. Italy never repudiated Mussolini the way German repudiated Hitler and the Nazis. Many Italians, under the influence of post-war efforts (supported by the United States) to purge the far left from political life, argued that it was possible to separate out all that was good about Mussolini in his first decade or so from his “mistakes” later in the 1930s. This oversimplified history was a convenient consensus that allowed Italians to avoid the political discord of real debate about the lasting legacy of Fascism.</div>
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The buildings, the most visible aspect of Mussolini’s legacy, have undergone a bit of intellectual laundering: A growing number of people argue that Fascist-era architecture—especially with a modernist, or “rationalist” aesthetic—stands on its own, and, except for the overtly propagandistic buildings, should not be linked to the values of the regime that built them. Especially loved are the works of Luigi Moretti, who built sleek modernist buildings for the regime in Rome. His GIL building, a former sports center named for the Gioventu’ Italiana del Littorio—the organization of the Italian Fascist youth—has been lovingly restored, down to the bronze eagles over the front entrance. Although Moretti was a true believer in Mussolini, he was rehabilitated and continued his career after the war, including building a dramatic apartment complex in our own capital: The Watergate. Paolo Nicoloso, a leading historian of Mussolini’s architecture, argues that the renewed, and sometimes nostalgic, appreciation of Mussolini’s buildings of stone and marble is understandable, given the background of Italy’s long economic decline: “When Italian people see a monumental building they are grateful to Mussolini. They believe he did well for the people. They forget the dictatorship, the racial laws, the war.”</div>
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All this might be important only to debates about Rome’s cultural heritage, except that Fascism is quite alive in Italy. Mussolini still has a constituency, and a growing one, despite the recent victory of the centrist Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. While a small band of anti-Fascists gathered on Liberation Day this past April to remember the few living partisans who fought Mussolini and the Nazis 75 years ago, neo-Fascists were hiking up a flag on the obelisk outside the Foro Italico. Mussolini’s granddaughter holds a Senate seat; Rome’s previous mayor, Giovanni Alemanno, was closely identified with the Fascist movement. Italian Fascists gather in growing numbers in Mussolini’s hometown of Predappio three times a year; there you can find bottles of Nostalgia Cologne for Men, with Mussolini on the label giving his right-arm-raised salute. Swastikas, too, are common graffiti around Rome, to attack rival sports teams and politicians, as well as Jewish leaders. The popularity of Italy’s former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is due in part to the ways in which he invoked the personality and imagined accomplishments of Mussolini.</div>
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In a country—and a continent—faced with long-term economic weakness and with an influx of immigrants from throughout the Mediterranean, the silent witness of Fascist buildings gives a perch for a resurgent right, something we might have naively thought would be swept away forever.</div>
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<img alt="Swastikas appear in modern graffiti. " data-fullsrc="//c.o0bg.com/rf/image_371w/Boston/2011-2020/2014/07/08/BostonGlobe.com/Ideas/Images/swastikarome.jpg" src="http://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_371w/Boston/2011-2020/2014/07/08/BostonGlobe.com/Ideas/Images/swastikarome.jpg" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; font-size: 16px; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.2em; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; width: auto;" /><div class="figcaption" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; font-size: 0.75em; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.58333333; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 0.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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MAX PAGE</div>
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Swastikas appear in modern graffiti.</div>
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I<span class="span" id="U7493686885QnG" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; font-size: 16px; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: baseline;">F GERMANY’S</span> memorial efforts have been in the service of never forgetting and Buenos Aires’s efforts to bring the perpetrators of state terror from the 1970s to justice have sought to use memory to achieve legal justice, Italy’s engagement with its Fascist past in the city might best be called a policy of organized forgetting. While much has been written by Italian scholars about the rise of Fascism, there has been little effort by the city and nation to confront the physical propagandistic legacy that Mussolini left one of the world’s great cities.</div>
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To confront does not mean to erase. What countries like Germany and, more recently, Argentina and South Africa, and even the United States, have done is to make public interpretation—monuments, memorials, innovative public art—an ongoing commitment, as if to say: We have to keep talking about our difficult pasts, here, where the past took place, where it was built.</div>
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Nearly a year later, Mayor Marino’s plans to eliminate the Via dei Fori Imperiale have gotten little traction, though he has managed to close off the street on weekends and holidays. Others are busy trying to deal more explicitly with the legacy of Mussolini, with a nervous intensity borne of concern about the rise of right-wing movements across Europe.</div>
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Siblings Adachiara and Luca Zevi, children of the Jewish modern architectural historian and critic Bruno Zevi, have separately taken on projects to remind Romans of the dark side of Fascism. Adachiara and her Arte in Memoria Foundation have brought German activist Gunter Demnig to install some of his <i class="i" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; font-size: 16px; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">stolpersteine</i>, “stumble stones”—small brass cobblestones, with the names of victims of Fascism—in front of the homes of Romans (largely Jews, but not exclusively) who were persecuted and then, starting in October of 1943, deported to Nazi death camps.</div>
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Luca has designed a Holocaust memorial museum which will be built, starting in 2015, in a park adjacent to Villa Torlonia, an 18th-century country estate just a mile beyond the walls of ancient Rome. The villa itself is already a museum, though one that glosses over its many layers—especially the one involving Mussolini. The Villa, where he lived, often with his mistress, during much of the 1920s and 1930s, sits atop his personal bunker and a Roman-era Jewish catacomb system; nearby is the private English school that now educates Mussolini’s great-grandson.</div>
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Finally, the South African artist William Kentridge was recently in town to advance his project for drawing 90 huge figures of “victory and lament” in Roman history along the high walls that channel the Tiber river near the Vatican. One of those will be an image drawn from a Naples mural that still stands, shot through with World War II bullet holes, of Mussolini on a horse, like so many previous Roman leaders, giving his infamous salute.</div>
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Who knows? In a few years, the thousands who walk along the Lungotevere, on their way to work, or on their way to a soccer game at the Foro Italico, might pause for a moment to take in a dramatic public art installation, and start to consider again Mussolini, Italian Fascism, the danger of empires, and regimes—then and now—that traffic in brutality. Inch by inch, project by project, perhaps the arc of memory in the Eternal City can be bent.</div>
</content><tagline><em style="background: transparent; border: 0px; font-size: 16px; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Max Page is professor of architecture and history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, and editor of “Memories of Buenos Aires: Signs of State Terrorism in Argentina” (UMass Press).</em></tagline></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-50118478324449919672014-07-12T09:14:00.000-04:002014-07-12T09:14:00.381-04:00Goodbye, Rome<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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"....the city of always" -- Anthony Doerr</div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-38227838975099157952014-07-11T11:00:00.000-04:002014-07-11T11:00:03.725-04:00Funes and Freud<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14pt;">My studio, like much of Rome,
was built for a giant.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">I type on my
three-pound-laptop, and look up at the ceiling which feels a time zone away,
twenty or thirty feet up in the sky.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">The
windows span the whole of this height; to open them is to open up a massive
hole in the building.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The first thing went up on
the wall is a map I purchased, just to make my mark on the twenty-foot long
expanse, to justify my use of this glorious studio when in fact I’ll be using
exactly none of it for most of my work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(The truth is that the invitation of the wall space, arrives at the
Doorstep of Lost Careers and Avocations -- my passion for photography -- and
led me, come June to do an exhibit of my photographs of Rome and Italy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I ended up using an entire wall to describe
the work I have been doing here). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The map I put up at the end
of the first week is a highly detailed map of ancient Rome in the era of
Constantine, in the 4<sup>th</sup> Century AD.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It shows a city of marble -- beautiful, temples and courtyards,
monuments, and walls.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is the
Temple of Marcellus, rebuilt and awaiting spectators.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Circus Maximum is complete, and the Emperor’s
loggia on the Palatine Hill is returned, whole, to its place overlooking the
entire field.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is the Theater of
Pompey and the temples of Largo Argentina, where Caesar was murdered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rome is re-created as it must have been at
its height, before the fall.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The map is not an accurate
rendition of a city, but a dream, created by crushing together a century of building,
cleaning it up in order to produce a mirage of the Eternal City. This kind of
map imagines history as we would like it to be, as culminating in a moment,
where trajectories of politics and building projects manage to get into
lockstep, move together in a singular rhythm, like a phalanx of soldiers along
the Appian way, clicking their boots along the stones in perfect perscussionary
harmony, ending with an image of a city as whole complete an unchanging.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no kinetic energy here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All has come to a rest. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Sigmund Freud didn’t know of
this map, but he knew of this dream, of making the entire history of a city
visible. The opening of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Civilization and
Its Discontents</i> tells a tale this longing, to make all layers visible at
once, to remove repression, remove history, and lay before us our entire
history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is impossible, but becomes
the fundamental metaphor for the entire book.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">At the start of the book he
acknowledges that indeed, in Rome “</span><span style="color: #262626; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">much of the old is still there, but
buried under modern buildings. This is how the past survives in historic places
like Rome.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But then he paints a picture
for his readers, asking them to make a “fantastic assumption</span></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">that
Rome is not a place where people live, but a psychical entity with a similarly
long, rich past, in which nothing that ever took shape has passed away, and in
which all previous phases of development exist beside the most recent. For Rome
this would mean that on the Palatine hill the imperial palaces and the
Septizonium of Septimius Severus still rose to their original height, that the
castle of San Angelo still bore on its battlements the fine statues that
adorned it until the Gothic siege. Moreover, the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus
would once more stand on the site of the Palazzo Caffarelli, without there
being any need to dismantle the latter structure, and indeed the temple would
be seen not only in its later form, which it assumed during the imperial age,
but also in its earliest, when it still had Etruscan elements and was decorated
with terracotta antefixes. And where the Coliseo now stands we could admire the
vanished Domus Aurea of Nero; on the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not
only the present Pantheon, bequeathed by Hadrian, but the original structure of
M. Agrippa; indeed, occupying the same ground would be the church of Maria Sopra
Minerva and the ancient temple over which it is built. And the observer would
perhaps need only to shift his gaze or his position in order to see the one or
the other.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">He wakes us from our dreamy longing:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“It is clearly pointless to spin out this
fantasy any further: the result would be unimaginable, indeed absurd.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia;">The absurdity of seeing all of Roman history at once is, for
Freud, the tragedy of the human psyche.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We cannot exist with all layers visible, on an equal plane.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Repression is necessary for survival; but
uncovering the layers, and the legacy of those layers, is necessary to thriving
as a healthy adult.</span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">This powerful image
immediately brings another writee to mind, Jorge Luis Borges, whose most famous
character, Ireneo Funes, seems almost invented to play out that absurdity and
to question the excess of memory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Borges’ Funes is man who is all memory. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Funes was once a man who was “what every man
was – blind, deaf, befuddled, and virtually devoid of memory….he had lived, he
said, for nineteen year as thou in a dream:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>he looked without seeing, heard without listening, forget everything, or
virtually everything (p. 134 to 135).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After
a riding accident, he awoke from unconsciousness with his memory perfect.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And more so:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>he felt every memory with great intensity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The narrator tell us that for Funes, “the
most trivial of his memories was more detailed, more vivid than our own
perception of a physical pleasure or a physical torment (p. 137). Funes could
continually perceive the quiet advances of corruption, of tooth decay, of
weariness…..he saw – he <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">noticed</i> – the
progress of death, of humidity” (p. 137, 136). The capacity of his brain to
capture memories – all memories, every one, no matter how significant turns his
mind, and his very being, into a “a garbage heap.” And it made him seem old,
desperately old, at the age of 19:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“He
looked to me as monumental as bronze – older than Egypt, older than the
prophecies and the pyramids.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Borges ends the story: “Ireneo
Funes died in 1889 of pulmonary congestion.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The excess of memory transmuted into a congestion of the lungs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He breathed memory with every intake and
exhale. The memories were too much. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Borges’s story seems almost
to be commentary on Freud.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For Funes is
in fact the man whose memory is completely unrepressed. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It flows like a mighty stream; it drowns him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We long to remember so much; and need,
equally, to survive and grow, to forget. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-61282073643324611492014-07-11T09:03:00.000-04:002014-07-11T09:03:00.352-04:00Spolia<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">To visit great buildings of the Roman past is to visit even older buildings of the Roman past. Spolia -- materials reused for later buildings -- is almost the essence of the Roman urban landscape. To visit St. Peter's is to visit the Colosseum and other ancient buildings, because in those walls are the materials from those ancient buildings. Freud, in making his famous analogy between repressed memory and the layers of the Roman past, notes that <span style="color: #262626;"> "many of the baroque palaces of Rome bear to the ancient ruins, whose hewn stones and columns have furnished the material for the structures built in the modern style" (Interpretation of Dreams). </span>(By the way, before you lash out agains the Catholic Church or the Renaissance more generally, for destroying by appropriation so much of the Roman past, read my colleague David Karmon's book, <i><a href="http://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-ruin-of-the-eternal-city-9780199766895?cc=it&lang=en&" target="_blank">Ruins of the Eternal City</a></i>, who argues that as much as they pillaged Roman buildings, the Popes and leaders of city government had thoughtful approaches to historic preservation, even if we not agree with them today). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Here are a few images I have taken over the past several months of spolia.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmIw0XlCsnNFOjmZOaXa_-KAwYYOnhUMd9eFWQHvNty0CmPjJVhJZXIyZwYmMxwdrWr7wvjw-62dYfRsnh6t9JlK8PTLIAkfZSw3WlkT_-h-4_hKa7NgzQr-DtXq598YdhKUCmh9OB6cdp/s1600/Santa+Sabine+church.aventine-007.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmIw0XlCsnNFOjmZOaXa_-KAwYYOnhUMd9eFWQHvNty0CmPjJVhJZXIyZwYmMxwdrWr7wvjw-62dYfRsnh6t9JlK8PTLIAkfZSw3WlkT_-h-4_hKa7NgzQr-DtXq598YdhKUCmh9OB6cdp/s1600/Santa+Sabine+church.aventine-007.JPG" height="640" width="426" /></a></div>
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Santa Sabina on the Aventine </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0zoRi4NEN0GJ4RKPuDB1fs_dMOaPEARtFfl5ttnuzAUAaM6lgHCP0HZSAKdjaw_8DXhgIz73-8oesW-qV4DyF6Vrew_N0OqqK6VF4eyKqzEMRDRKYsR7zg6IOB0yusEsOzb96_JRcj7BE/s1600/Santa+Sabina-001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0zoRi4NEN0GJ4RKPuDB1fs_dMOaPEARtFfl5ttnuzAUAaM6lgHCP0HZSAKdjaw_8DXhgIz73-8oesW-qV4DyF6Vrew_N0OqqK6VF4eyKqzEMRDRKYsR7zg6IOB0yusEsOzb96_JRcj7BE/s1600/Santa+Sabina-001.jpg" height="426" width="640" /></a></div>
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Santa Sabina</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguoTB-4URd_mubEZkEbapjYiMtHfwFzC-tnmVS6ce1gA53vkHznpwYGI1LfQ_xijtLPCsQqh9G-jdPaQHdcVU7nLnbkJmocqu5F1HUKROhjAVwM6_Ga7fb0bitQrLY5aDVPhvt8KpGFM0B/s1600/via+capo+di+ferro.spolia.near+campo+dei+fiori.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguoTB-4URd_mubEZkEbapjYiMtHfwFzC-tnmVS6ce1gA53vkHznpwYGI1LfQ_xijtLPCsQqh9G-jdPaQHdcVU7nLnbkJmocqu5F1HUKROhjAVwM6_Ga7fb0bitQrLY5aDVPhvt8KpGFM0B/s1600/via+capo+di+ferro.spolia.near+campo+dei+fiori.JPG" height="480" width="640" /></a></div>
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Theater of Pompey, near Campo dei' Fiori</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieHqqKzfyyK7K30_T89MSumrq13ObYkkCNmI95wEBhZxOUh09YoZK7sRJw0boVQjLZ0lU_QW60K3Pfc3UBiebIwNCd56j0gPf504aBTjLWBeRhZPM2Dl-ftwohTEkQxzV_RAMhIKz4HrFO/s1600/spolia.avenue+near+cosmedin+church.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieHqqKzfyyK7K30_T89MSumrq13ObYkkCNmI95wEBhZxOUh09YoZK7sRJw0boVQjLZ0lU_QW60K3Pfc3UBiebIwNCd56j0gPf504aBTjLWBeRhZPM2Dl-ftwohTEkQxzV_RAMhIKz4HrFO/s1600/spolia.avenue+near+cosmedin+church.jpg" height="640" width="480" /></a></div>
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near Santa Maria in Cosmedin</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPjChhGPppfvRAXsA8ObZyZgX4HGI9ZSOtH3hakk100jejOPX842-qVAykAjuIl7m7YMWPWRMo4H4aqZBxaBIn8S26f9GNDp7qvMkCP4G-L1xKBA4_e4fpNRY2qlaVuSlZT8ZwvgTL9BpI/s1600/spolia.small+street+just+a+block+or+two+before+Largo+Argentina.closer+to+Tiber-002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPjChhGPppfvRAXsA8ObZyZgX4HGI9ZSOtH3hakk100jejOPX842-qVAykAjuIl7m7YMWPWRMo4H4aqZBxaBIn8S26f9GNDp7qvMkCP4G-L1xKBA4_e4fpNRY2qlaVuSlZT8ZwvgTL9BpI/s1600/spolia.small+street+just+a+block+or+two+before+Largo+Argentina.closer+to+Tiber-002.jpg" height="426" width="640" /></a></div>
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Near Largo Argentina</div>
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Via Coronari</div>
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San Clemente</div>
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Santa Maria in Trastevere</div>
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St. Peter's Basilica</div>
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Georgia; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;"><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-88764667306462464382014-07-11T06:45:00.000-04:002014-07-11T06:45:00.112-04:00Wim Wenders, Urban SolitudeBy chance, or otherwise, I happened upon Wim Wenders' <i>Urban Solitude</i> photography exhibition in Rome, on the very last day it was open. I'm glad I was drawn there. The images reminded me of my old high school friend <a href="http://www.woodsmark.com/images.html" target="_blank">Mark Woods' photographs</a>, which I saw soon before I left for Rome, as well as those of another Amherst high school graduate, <a href="http://www.davistim.com/thenewantiquity/intro.php" target="_blank">Tim Davis</a>, who was a Rome Prize fellow several years ago. Wenders images are of silent corners of cities, the odd-man-out building, the stencil peeking through stucco in the back of a building, the emptiness of a Safeway parking lot, the Hopper-like stillness of a small-town commercial strip.<br />
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But it was his words which struck me as much as the images: "Sometimes the absence of a thing makes you so much more aware of it." This reminded me of a line from Anthony Doerr's book about a year at the American Academy, where he says that perhaps the idea of snow falling through the oculus of the Pantheon -- a rare event -- is better just that way, and not realized.<br />
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And in his <i>Act of Seeing</i>, Wenders writes that "A city does not tell you a story, but it reveals history. Cities do that in different ways: some make their history visible, others rather hide it. They can open your eyes, like movies, or they can close them. They can leave you abused, or they can nourish your imagination."<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-18221203086195084992014-07-10T06:04:00.000-04:002014-07-10T06:04:00.317-04:00Views of VeniceI walked from the train station in Venice through Cannaregio and on to San Marco and then took a vaporetto to Punta della Dogana museum, whose interior was redesigned by Tadao Ando.<br />
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Punta della Dogana</div>
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The Arsenale</div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-32405901748902034182014-07-10T05:18:00.000-04:002014-07-15T15:22:52.750-04:00One of Van Gogh's Last PaintingsI loved that one of Vincent Van Gogh's last paintings (which I saw in Amsterdam( was this one, <i>Almond Blossom</i>, which he painted in honor of the birth of his nephew, also Vincent.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-41934359923844259302014-07-10T04:13:00.000-04:002014-07-10T04:13:00.306-04:00Return to the Via Appia AnticaEver since my first walk to the Via Appia with Tom Mayes, back in late February, I've wanted to get back. Here are some photographs of my walk with Anna Betbetze, her friend Jacob, and Eric Nathan.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-70406009590469121862014-07-09T05:09:00.001-04:002014-07-10T08:44:34.511-04:00Giorgione, The Tempest (1508)I came across a postcard of this image as I packed up my studio. It is one of the most enigmatic paintings in the history of art -- Giorgione's <i>The Tempest</i>. I saw it in the Accademia in Venice and overheard a guide suggest an interpretation to a painting which has defied any consensus as to its meaning. He suggested that the background had to be the League of Cambria which, in the very year the painting was being created, was threatening Venice's power. Some argue that the rise of this challenge was the beginning the long, two-century end to the Venetian empire.<br />
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The guide suggested that we often paint that which we fear we are losing So, while most viewers look to the foreground and the fascinating figures -- the gypsy/prostitute/mother and baby, the soldier/gypsy/single man nearby, the guide was suggesting we look to the rest of the painting, to the river and bridge, and townscape. Venice's lands were threatened, and they would steadily lose their landed empires; Venice was becoming a purely urban empire. Giorgione seems to fetishize the landscape, and to picture that which Venice would no longer have. </div>
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It is a very different sentiment than the forceful image of the winged lion from just a few years later, which hangs on the Doge Palace, and <a href="http://viewsfromrome.blogspot.it/2014/07/the-eyes-of-lion-venice-at-its-height.html" target="_blank">I discussed</a> in conjunction with the Tiepolo from the mid 18th century. The earlier image -- from around 1518 -- seems to have none of the worry and longing quality of the Giorgione. It seems almost desperate to repress the fear that the empire was threatened, but rather reasserts, proudly, and naively, that the land and sea empire are two parts of the same animal. </div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-65508400698996157712014-07-09T05:09:00.000-04:002014-07-09T05:09:00.327-04:00Art as TherapyThe Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam is spotted with gargantuan yellow post-it notes. The philosopher Alain de Botton, whose <i>Architecture of Happiness</i> I regularly assign to my Philosophy of Architecture class, has taken on as his latest project to reinvent the museum label. His <a href="http://www.artastherapy.com/" target="_blank">Art as Therapy</a> project -- which started in England, and may go to other museums -- in a way takes us backward in time. His "chat labels" want us to look at art as offering lessons for our lives.<br />
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I was thrilled to see this at the Rijksmuseum and wholeheartedly support the purpose. Over the years, I have found myself almost always annoyed by what curators choose to put in the labels. They range from the purely academic art historical, with detailed discussions of provenance, or analyses of the painting purely on formal grounds, with no reference to the subject, to the mildly annoying biographical, a litany of dates that flit in and out of our brains. This kind of information is invaluable for some, and should be available, but it is not what most are interested in. At the very least we should be embracing the simple notion of the de Botton exercise, which is to offer different approach to "reading" a work of art.<br />
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So, I was thrilled to see someone stating what I think is common for most regular people who visit art museums: we look for what is beautiful and meaningful. In a sea of paintings and sculptures, we are drawn to those that seem to speak to us, that call to something we wish for, are disturbed by, are working out, are missing in our lives. De Botton is absolutely right that so much of art of the past was indeed meant to convey ideas, even teach lessons. Indeed, it is safe to safe that most art was created with more didactic purpose in mind than some "pure" appreciation for "art for art's sake." George Steiner, in <i>Real Presences</i>, mocks this notion, not because he is against art as an important endeavor. Indeed quite the opposite:<br />
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<!--StartFragment--><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; color: #333333; font-family: "inherit","serif"; font-size: 10.5pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; padding: 0in;">"‘Art for art’ is a tactical slogan, a necessary rebellion against
philistine didacticism and political control. But pressed to its logical
consequences, it is pure narcissism. The ‘purest’ work of art, the most
abstemious from conceivable empirical instruction or appliance, is, by virtue
of that very purity and abstention, a sharply political gesture, a
value-statement of the most evident ethical import."</span><!--EndFragment--><br />
<br />
Why should we shy from exploring the ethics expressed through art? Visiting an art museum is, in part, an object lesson in flattening time. We do not act as historians, visiting a "foreign country" to understand how people thought and felt in a different time. Mainly, we want to see ourselves in the past, and want to see how others have tried to capture universal dilemmas of living on earth. No doubt, we can learn much by recognizing how foreign the past is -- this is the basis of historical study and I was well-trained not to be a Presentist -- slur of all slurs in graduate school. But when I go to an art museum, I do hope, as de Botton suggests, to find some answers, or refuge in possible answers, whether it is in Giotto's kiss of Joachim and Anna in the Scrovegni Chapel, or the clean starched sheets in a de Hooch painting of bourgeois life in Amsterdam.<br />
<br />
So, the "Art as Therapy" project is a brilliant idea, a necessary endeavor.<br />
<br />
Too bad so many of the "post-it notes" were so pathetically simplistic or downright offensive. To <a href="http://www.artastherapy.com/#love/i-want-to-get-divorced" target="_blank">Adrian Coorte's still-life of strawberries</a> we are told that the lesson we must learn is to appreciate our loved ones more: Don't always go looking for a more beautiful or more tasty bowl of strawberries. Confronted with an awful scene of war at sea, we are blithely told that the lesson is obvious: sometimes we need to fight for what we believe in. As I read more and more of these commentaries, I was more and more frustrated. Here was a great idea which deserves to be embraced, but might not be because of the weak execution.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-41213566297871329822014-07-09T04:16:00.000-04:002014-07-09T04:16:00.311-04:00Campidoglio -- The Forum, and Some Body Parts<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-940018023365690272014-07-09T03:00:00.000-04:002014-07-09T03:00:01.846-04:00Amie Siegel's ProvenanceThe very best piece in an exhibit I saw at the MAXXI (love the name) museum, the main contemporary art museum here, is a film by <a href="http://amiesiegel.net/project/provenance" target="_blank">Amie Siegel</a>, which slowly reveals, backwards, the story of chairs from the capitol building in Chandigarh, designed by Le Corbusier, as they are auctioned, as they are measured and packed, as they travel across the ocean, as they sit awaiting their fate in the chambers of Chandigarh. It is amazingly document about global trade, the art market, and the fetish for modernist design.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-23531159045039841512014-07-08T13:04:00.000-04:002014-07-09T04:19:53.676-04:00Memory as Shock AbsorberNear the end of her <i>Shock Doctrine</i>, Naomi Klein turns to the power of memory in returning power to the people of Latin America and other places where the shock troops of free-market, privatization ideologies have left disaster in their wake. And one tool of the shock troops has been the "erasure-- of history, of culture, of memory" (p. 589).<br />
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All shock therapists are intent on the erasure of memory," she writes. "Memory, both individual and collective, turns out to be the greatest shock absorber of all" (p. 585-86).<br />
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This just about sums up the mission I have in arguing for public confrontation with difficult pasts. It is why I am excited about curating an exhibit at the American Academy next January, which will show artist proposals for a public art project in the Foro Italico, one of Mussolini's largest propaganda sites. It is why I believe the Buenos Aires grassroots memory movement is so important, and why the efforts in Berlin to demand the presence of the memory of Nazism in public places is so important.<br />
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Many have rightly asked How much power do these memorials really have? It is a good and worrisome question. But I am convinced that good history is invaluable in the struggle for justice, and against destructive political movements. But public memory -- in the form of public art, memorials, innovative informational panels, temporary interventions -- is equally important.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-23084847128404067632014-07-08T06:00:00.000-04:002014-07-08T06:00:08.908-04:00Some last details of RomeFrom a walk through Prati to Via Coronari and on to Largo Argentina.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-57434477943989858602014-07-08T05:05:00.001-04:002014-07-08T05:06:45.862-04:00The Eyes of a Lion: Venice at its Height and in its Decline<div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The lion of Venice growls at us, its rear feet in the water, symbolic of Venice's empire of water. Its left front paw is on land -- Venice's empire of lands across the Mediterranean. Its right paw holds open a book displaying the traditional inscription to the city's patron saint, whose bones they acquired: <span style="background-color: white; line-height: 15.600000381469727px;">"Peace be upon you, O Mark, my Evangelist."</span></span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 15.600000381469727px;">The wings of the lion frame the full sails of ships entering the harbor; by its haloed head is the Doge Palace, San Marco, the tower. </span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 15.600000381469727px;">Here is Venice in 1516 at its height, unbowed despite attacks just a few years earlier by the League of Cambrai. </span></span><br />
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A few rooms later, in the Doge Palace, comes another painting, from two centuries later. The mighty are falling. <br />
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Mary McCarthy, in her <i>Venice Observed</i>, argues that "the Venetians (like the Americans) hated the idea of death" (p. 252). It may be, but in one of the very last images commissioned by the Venetian Republic, Tiepolo could not help but portray the impending end of the Republic, which was in the air, even if Napoleon would not finally conquer Venice until 1797. In <i>Neptune Offering to Venice the Riches of the Sea</i>, from somewhere in the 1740s or 1750s, Tiepolo seems to be showing the faithful Neptune continuing to share his riches with the queen of the lagoon. But all eyes are drawn to the eye of the lion, no longer walking on water and land at once, but wheezing under the hand of the queen. The postcard sold in the gift shop captures just this detail of the eye -- tired, cloudy, eyebrows raised to look at Neptune because the head is to heavy to lift.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-73974886966503717262014-07-08T04:03:00.003-04:002014-07-08T04:03:46.438-04:00After the Tokyo Ballet at the Baths of Caracalla<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-8091590169267571652014-07-07T09:39:00.000-04:002014-07-07T09:39:00.385-04:00Mary McCarthy on VeniceOn my quick trip to the architecture biennale in Venice, I read Mary McCarthy's breezy but highly entertaining book from 1961, <i>Venice Observed</i>.<br />
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Here are some of my favorite lines:<br />
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"The rationalist mind has always had its doubts about Venice. The watery city receives a dry inspection, as though it were a myth for the credulous -- poets and honeymooners." (p. 173, Penguin Edition, 1972)<br />
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"Among Venice's spells is one of peculiar potency: the power to awaken the philistine dozing in the sceptic's breast. People of this kind -- dry, prose people of superior intelligence -- object to feeling what they are supposed to feel, int eh presence of marvels. They wish to feel something else." (p. 174)<br />
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"There is no use pretending that the tourist Venice is not the real Venice, which is possible with other cities -- Rome or Florence or Naples. The tourist Venice <i>is</i> Venice: the gondolas, the sunsets, the changing light, Florian's, Quadri's, Torello, Harry's Bar, Murano, Burano, the piegeons, the glass beads, the vaporetto. Venice is a folding picture-post-card of itself." (p. 177)<br />
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"Nothing can be said here including this statement) that has not been said before.....One accepts the fact that what one is about to feel or say has not only been said before Goethe or Musset but is on the tip of the tongue of the tourist from Iowa who is alighting in the Piazzetta with his wife in her furpiece and jewelled pin." (p. 181)<br />
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"A commercial people who lived solely for gain. Ruskin tried to show that this started with the 'degenerate' Venetians of the Renaissance, who sold their birthright for a mess of architectural pottage. He pictured Gothic Venice as a holy city flowering in its churches and its convents, in its religious processions and ceremonies -- a sacred garden tended by humble artisans, supervised by upright doges, and defended by brave captains.....Poor Ruskin, with his slide-rule and his ladder, a worshipper of the pragmatic fact, who was always flying int eh face of the facts of life and of recorded history, for the sake of a vision." (p. 189)<br />
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"Venice, unlike Rome or Ravenna or nearby Verona, had nothing of its own to start with. Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes." (p. 194)<br />
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"But why should it be beautiful at all? Why should Venice, aside from its situation, be a place of enchantment? One appears to be confronted with a paradox. A commercial people who lived solely for gain -- how could they create a city of fantasy, lovely as a dream or a fairy-tale?This is the central puzzle of Venice, the stumbling-block that one keeps coming up against if one tries to thin about her history, to put facts of her history together with the visual fact that is there before one's eyes." (p. 195)<br />
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"A wholly materialist city is nothing but a dream incarnate. Venice is the world's unconscious: a miser's glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon." (p. 196)<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-77036527728263853302014-07-07T05:42:00.004-04:002014-07-23T22:19:20.829-04:00Early morning at the Ganicolo and St. Peter'sUp at 5:30 a.m. to catch sunrise on the Ganicolo with Brad Cantrell and Catherine Chin, and then on to climb the 550 steps up to the top of the dome of St. Peter's.<br />
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Zamboni in St. Peter's</div>
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I believe Catherine said that official Vatican hazard tape was the souvenir she most wanted.</div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-45767018106943210762014-07-06T05:35:00.000-04:002014-07-06T05:35:00.304-04:00The Shock DoctrineWhy would I bring a book on the "The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" to Rome? What might Noami Klein's <i>The Shock Doctrine</i> possibly have to do with Mussolini and fascism and historic preservation?<br />
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I think I brought it to remind myself -- or convince myself -- that my political commitments (to public higher education, to challenging the free market, privatization regime that has come to dominate so much of our lives) and my academic interests (historic preservation and the politics of the past) are linked, are mutually supportive, fit together in a way that is something more than bipolar.<br />
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This book is the clearest and most powerful reconceptualization of the past forty years of international political economy. It argues, very simply, but so convincingly, the following:<br />
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"The fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance...these bold experiments in crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of strict adherence to the shock doctrine....Seen through the lens of this doctrine, the past thirty-five years look very different. Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market "reforms." (p. 11)<br />
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I was stunned to realize how little I understood how tightly linked were free-market reform ideologies pushed by Milton Friedman and the "Chicago Boys" (the University of Chicago economics department) and repressive dictatorial regimes, and the regimes of torture and repression. I had fallen into the belief that these were "entirely unrelated" developments in the 1970s and 1980s, in the ironic words of Orlando Letelier, assassinated Chilean President Salvador Allende's Ambassador to the United States, who was himself murdered by Augusto Pinochet, with the apparent approval of the CIA.<br />
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More than ever, the trip that Eve and I organized to Argentina with UMass students in 2011 was wise to pair students of architecture and historic preservation with students of labor studies. We effectively were looking at efforts to remember and rebuild in the long wake of the destruction wrought by the shock doctrine as applied in Argentina -- economic shock of free-market reforms, which were prepared and furthered by ruthless murder and terrorizing of those deemed to be obstacles in the way of reform.<br />
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It was a hopeful trip, in the sense that we saw remarkable grassroots memorial efforts, new museums, and met activists committed to recovering and interpreting the memory of the violent repression in the 1970s, and we visited and met with activists who took back -- or rather "occupied" -- factories where they worked, but which some distant multinational investor hoped to close down as part of some accounting gimmick. These were combined struggles, which the activists in both arenas recognized to be parts of a whole, a doctrine of shock that the country is still recovering from.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-49832509647767834602014-07-05T04:54:00.000-04:002014-07-05T04:54:00.166-04:00The Trouble with Authenticity<div class="MsoNormal">
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If there is anything that Rome has
taught be clearly and convincingly, day after day, is that “authenticity” is a
mirage and a chimera, both unrealistic, and a delusion, something we only
imagine exists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are no real,
living places that are not an accumulation of layers of the past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Every building we deem to be “as it was” or
“perfectly preserved” is simply not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Each building is made of pieces of previous buildings – a church is
built upon an earlier church, which is built upon a Roman villa and temple. The
Acqua Paola, the glorious Baroque fountain a hundred yards from the American
Academy where I am writing these words is largely made, like so many Roman and
Renaissance buildings, of “spolia” from Roman buildings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rome is about recycling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ruins have been covered and uncovered,
rearranged, their context altered by new buildings, new roads, dirt and
garbage, pollution and graffiti.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To insist
on the pursuit of the “authentic” which is often cloaked as the “original” and
to demand “integrity” of our historic buildings is a fools errand, which leaves
us with a fetish of the past that does violence to the past as well as to the
present. <o:p></o:p></div>
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My longstanding concerns about this
central term in preservation theory and practice, were beautifully discussed in
Richard Todd’s book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Thing Itself</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Todd, who lives in Ashfield, and teaches
writing and historic preservation in Maryland, and has written some truly
outstanding articles I have used in classes – on Las Vegas, for example – was
after what so many of us are after:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>authentic objects, places, experiences, and relationships in the midst
of a world that seems increasingly designed<o:p></o:p></div>
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There is a nostalgic and vaguely
reactionary tone to the book at times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But it is a deeply personal meditation on this issue. I have assigned it
several times to my students.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most have
loved it, while a few have found him cranky.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But each have focused on two stories in the book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first is toward the very beginning of the
book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He relates how he went to the huge
antique fair in Brimfield, Massachusetts, one of the largest of its kind in the
U.S.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is drawn to a small box that is
close to two hundred years old.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He pays
a good chunk of change on it and puts it in the front passenger seat as he
drives to visit a friend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He continues
to glance at his cherished new purchase, but slowly feels a sense of discomfort
about it. He has suspicions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He arrives
at the home of his friend, an expert in material culture who very quickly
confirms those suspicions – this is a fake. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The other story is about his house,
definitively from the 18<sup>th</sup> century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He decides to replace the windows.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He is thrilled to find, one day, someone in his area in the midst of
getting rid of his 18<sup>th</sup> century windows.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He overly eagerly buys them – again, dropping
a good amount of money in the process – and proceeds to install the
windows.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is pleased that he has
managed to be authentic in his rehabilitation of his home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He has been a good steward to the past.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But there is a nagging doubt. He
has taken windows from another building and inserted them, like a surgeon, into
his own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The house is not quite true
anymore; it is an artifice of sorts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The windows are “authentic” but not authentic to this particular
house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Passersby might marvel at the
completeness of this mid-1700 house, but what they are looking at is in fact a
composite, something rigged to look complete.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In both stories, Todd is searching
for something “real” in a world he sees as unmoored from reality, a world
immersed in inventing places, fabricating reality, abandoning the sincere and
the authentic.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Todd’s book pointed me to the great
literary critic Lionel Trilling, and his thin volume, <i>Sincerely and
Authenticity</i>, the product of a series of lectures in the early 1970s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I bought the book, and it sat on my
shelf.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It felt like something that could
be revelatory; I needed the time and space to think about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so I brought it all the way to Rome, so I
could sit in the library and read it closely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I was not disappointed. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The book meanders through much of
western history and literature to ask why “at certain point in history certain
men and classes of men conceived that the making of this<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>effort [of being sincere] was of supreme
importance in the moral life, and the value they attached to the enterprise of
sincerity became a salient, perhaps a definitive, characteristic of Western
culture for some four hundred years.” (p. 6)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He makes a startling – if simple – point that “there have been cultural
epochs in which men did not think of themselves as having a variety of selves
or roles.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(p. 10, footnote no.1) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was a powerful backlash in the 19<sup>th</sup>
century. Indeed, the quest for sincerity was seen by many on both sides of the
Atlantic as in fact the height or arrogance and the clearest sign of
insincerity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
As diverse thinkers as Emerson and
Nietzsche had a “principled antagonism to sincerity, both spoke in praise of
what they call the mask.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(p. 119)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Emerson put it bluntly in 1840:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“There is no deeper dissembler than the
sincerest man.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> (p</span>. 119)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wilde not only condemned the quest for
sincerity but embraced the falseness of public presentation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Oscar Wilde famously said that<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The first duty in life is to be as
artificial as possible…what the second duty is no one has yet discovered.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(p. 118)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Trilling was writing from the
vantage point of the early 1970s when artifice and insincerity<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>were not to be valued, but condemned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Trilling’s purpose was to shine an historical
light on the terms bandied about at the time, and to suggest the dark underside
to a glorification of the slippery ideas of sincerity and authenticyt.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
One of the lasting impressions of
the book is how Trilling distinguishes the etymologies of his two keywords,
sincerity and authenticity. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sin cere</i>
is the latin “without wax.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a word
more linked to the physical world, and refers to something that has not been
fixed, its holes not filled in with wax.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Trilling wants to link this to Ruskin and his notions that the greatest
buildings, like cathedrals, are built over time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were, by the terms of the time,
“organic.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is Ruskin who becomes the
archenemy of modernists and especially the most eloquent, aggressive and
ultimately violent of the modernists, the Futurists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For Marinetti, Ruskin is the enemy, the symbol
of all that is weak, “lympathic” about England and more broadly European
culture:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
With his sick dream of a primitive
pastoral life: with his nostalgia for Homeric cheese and legendary
spinning-wheels; with his hatred of the machine, of steam and electricity, this
maniac for antique simplicity resembles a man who in full maturity wants to
sleep in his cot again and drink at the breasts of a nurse who has now grown
old…. (p. 129)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Marinetti asks his British audience:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“When, then, will you disencumber yourselves
of the lymphatic ideology of your deplorable Ruskin, whom I intend to make
utterly ridiculous in your eyes…..”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> (</span>p.
129)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
It is the modernists, with the
Futurists in the violent lead, that will bring out another term, which Trilling
wants to see as related to sincerity but with a far greater “moral intensity”
and is dominated by a “censorious tone” (both from p. 101) and is animated by a
call to “rigor” and is, to Trilling’s mind far more dangerous:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>authenticity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Sincerity is a word based in a negative
– something that is “without wax.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
authenticity is derived from the Greek word <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">authenteo</i>,
which means “to have full power over” and “to commit a murder.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">authentes</i>
is “not only a master a doer, but also a perpetrator, a murderer, even a self-murderer,
a suicide.” (p. 131)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
I have long loved Heidegger’s
essay, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Building Dwelling Thinking</i>, in
part because of its emphasis on the echoes of language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bauen</i>,
he argues, has within it, the ancient German roots, which take us away from
“building” to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">baun</i>, which is related
to “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ich bin</i>” – I am.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In other words, at the root of the word we
use casually for construction is something much deeper – a call to be, to
dwell.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He argues at the end of the essay
that the real problem is not building of housing (he initially gave the speech
that became the essay at a post-war housing conference) but of dwelling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How should be dwell on earth?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That question must be answered before we can build
true homes for people. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
I like to believe, therefore, that
the echoes of the original meanings are there, somehow present.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And that should give us pause.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Part
of what has made me rebel against authenticity is the certainty that lies in
the word, and in the concept as it is applied to preservation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no “partial” authenticity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A place is either authentic or not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has been a word used to make black and
white distinctions, and to mask the layers of history that exist in almost all
places.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Trilling’s book seems to meander
from author to author, example to example. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it builds to a powerful and disturbing
conclusion. The entire last chapter examines Freudian theory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What he argues is that the “informing idea of
Freud’s mature social theory” is the “virtually resistless power of this
principle of inauthenticity.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> (p. </span>150)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are all inauthentic, not because
we are flawed, but because inauthenticity is essential for human survival.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(This is discussed at great length in
another book of roughly the same period, by another Jewish intellectual, Ernest
Becker, in<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> The Denial of Death. </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our necessary denial of death dooms us to
acting in ways that submerge this most basic of fears. We are, by necessity, to
survive, inauthentic because we fail – we cannot! – completely confront the
truth that our effort are for naught, and that we, our physical being, and our
achievements, everything, will disappear). <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The very last lines concern the
valorization of the insane, which he finds in contemporary culture and
psychology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He can barely contain his
contempt for those who find that true expression, some pure authenticity, can
only be found among the insane.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The
doctrine that madness is health, that madness is liberation and authenticity,
receives a happy welcome from a consequential part of the educated public,” he
writes. (p. 171)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Trilling might have
noted this is hardly a new notion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Aristotle himself wrote that “no great intellect has been without a
touch of madness,” while Plato said that “A man sound in mind knocks in vain at
the doors of poetry.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both men were
quoted by Seneca at the very end of his essay, “On Tranquility of Mind,” who
adds that the creative individual must desert the usual track and race way,
champing the bit and hurrying its driver in its course to a height it would
have feared to scale by itself.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> (p.</span> 106) <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
I cannot help but think about
Walter Benjamin’s influential but deeply difficult essay, “Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction.” The epilogue to the article, written in 193??,
focuses on fascism and its relationship to art.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He quotes the Italian futurist Marinetti and his embrace of war – “war
is beautiful.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
I always puzzled over this
ending.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How have we moved from new ways
of printing photographs to fascism?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
have come to believe that Benjamin was arguing far beyond the question of art
and the machines of reproduction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was
suggesting that our technology has leapt far beyond our ability to comprehend
it, or manage it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our notions of
aesthetics – and so much else – have been upset by industrialization,
proletarianization, by machinery that we have turned to new avenues for aesthetic
pleasure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fascism, and war, are in a
sick way, our quest for a new, yes, authentic, feeling.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
You can already see the ridiculous
leap coming:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the quest for authenticity
in preservation is fascist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Again,
ridiculous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I think we can step back
from that intellectual pothole and suggest something less shocking, but still
disturbing in the relationship between notions of personal and societal authenticity
and the authenticity in an historic building or site.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
I think we crave in a historic
building an authenticity we know – or don’t know – that we don’t have in our
lives otherwise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think there is also a
reason why authenticity rises and falls as a value in preservation. Why does it
feel so central now?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Trilling’s book
makes us ask what it is about our society that directs us toward this sentiment
of “authenticity.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
When we seek in the external world
– in people, in buildings and landscapes – that which we crave internally,
there is bound to be a disjunction, a scraping, a conflict.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The intensity of the quest for the authentic
in historic places is born out of our own sense – perhaps fundamental as Freud
and then Becker argued, and perhaps heightened in our own particular social
setting – of the lack of authenticity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And that is a dangerous mix.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Could it be that by battling
against accepted notions of the “authentic” in preservation we can even assist
ourselves, as individuals, or as society, to confront this unending, and always
unsuccessful, quest?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-91576031838283715732014-07-04T12:02:00.000-04:002014-07-04T12:02:00.187-04:00Seneca, On the Shortness of Life<div>
I recently read Seneca's essay, On the Shortness of Life. In one of those coincidences that make you wonder about some other-worldly force, I came upon this bust of Seneca, by Guido Reni, just before the Palazzo Venezia was closing. I wasn't even intending to go to the museum -- my goal was to get to the famous balcony where Mussolini delivered his epic speeches to the thousands of people who gathered in Piazza Venezia. In typical fashion, there is not a word about the balcony anywhere, and no access to it. I guess this compelling bust was compensation for my failed search.<br />
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Here are some quotes from the self-help guide of two thousand years ago.<br />
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Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested.<br />
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Look at those whose good fortune people gather to see: they are choked by their own blessings. How many find their riches a burden! How many burst a blood vessel by their eloquence and their daily striving to show off their talents!<br />
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...how much you have lost through groundless sorrow, foolish joy, greedy desire, the seduction of society; how little of your own was left to you.<br />
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Call to mind when you ever had a fixed purpose; how few days have passed you had planned; when you were ever at your own disposal; when your face wore its natural expression...<br />
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But learning how to live takes a whole life....<br />
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So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long.<br />
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But putting things off is the biggest waste of life...the whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.<br />
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But life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.<br />
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Let us turn to private possessions, the greatest source of human misery.<br />
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But nothing delights the mind so much as fond and loyal friendship. What a blessing it is to have hearts that are ready and willing to receive all your secretes in safety, with whom you are less afraid to share knowledge of something than keep it to yourself, whose conversation soothes your distress, whose advice helps you make up your mind, whose cheerfulness dissolves your sorrow, whose very appearance cheers you up!<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-40263345229283003922014-07-03T09:21:00.000-04:002014-07-07T06:10:55.335-04:00Mussolini's BalconyI went in search of Mussolini's balcony, the one where he gave his epic speeches to thousands of rabid supporters in Piazza Venezia. The balcony is there, in the center of the facade of Palazzo Venezia, where Mussolini had his office throughout the 1930s. But it is impossible to visit from the inside, even though in 2011 it was, apparently, reopened. But a guard on Sunday told me that because of staffing cuts there are only a few rooms open -- just the exhibition spaces and that there is no way to get to the balcony. <br />
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So, I went to see the collections. An opening panel told the history of the building. The only thing that referred to the fascist use of the building was this : "From 1929 to 1943 the Palace became the Fascist head-quarters and after the Second World War the museum opened again to the public."<br />
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The role of Mussolini doesn't even get a full sentence, but just one part of a long sentence! I asked how I could see the balcony and the ticket-taker shook her head -- there is nothing to see and it is not accessible.<br />
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The temporary exhibition on display was about the war in Syria and how it is destroying so much of that country's ancient heritage.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-17459969977012866042014-07-02T06:48:00.000-04:002014-07-02T06:48:00.047-04:00Central Montemartini: Attic for Urban RenewalIn the first electric power station in Rome, the Giovanni Montemartini Thermoelectric Center, stand hundreds of ancient sculptures, part of a wonderful adaptive reuse project by the City of Rome. Setting Roman sculptures against a background of two-story turbines makes for a unique experience and gave the city of Rome a new space in which to show parts of their collections that were hidden away due to lack of exhibit space.<br />
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But you realize as well, as you read the captions, about where each sculpture was found, that the museum is also a record of Mussolini's massive urban renewal of the 1920s and 1930s, in pursuit of Roman antiquities and an efficient car-oriented city.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-76044783997103231252014-07-01T08:46:00.000-04:002014-07-01T08:46:00.370-04:00Moses, Michelangelo, FreudI returned to San Pietro in Vincoli, to stare at Michelangelo's Moses, in the unfinished tomb for Julius II, just as Freud did, repeatedly after finally overcoming his fear of going to Rome in 1901.<br />
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Freud believed this sculpture to be one of the greatest works of art in the world, in part because it remained mysterious, offering new insights with each visit. This quality, he wrote in an anonymous article for an art journal, "<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.09600067138672px;">has brought me to recognize the apparently paradoxical fact that precisely some of the grandest and most overwhelming creations of art are still unsolved riddles to our understanding. We admire them, we feel overawed by them, but we are unable to say what they represent to us."</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.09600067138672px;">He continued:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.09600067138672px;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">"For no piece of statuary has ever made a stronger impression on me than this. How often have I mounted the steep steps from the unlovely Corso Cavour to the lonely piazza where the deserted church stands, and have essayed to support the angry scorn of the hero’s glance! Sometimes I have crept cautiously out of the half-gloom of the interior as though I myself belonged to the mob upon whom his eye is turned—the mob which can hold fast no conviction, which has neither faith nor patience, and which rejoices when it has regained its illusory idols."</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14.44444465637207px; line-height: 18.09600067138672px;">Freud offers a profound reading of Michelangelo's purpose. In essence, he suggests that Michelangelo is not illustrating a scene from the Bible as written, but as he wishes it had been written. Michelangelo, in Freud's reading of the sculpture, is about to destroy the tablets but holds back, resisting the urge to take out his wrath on the people this way, and instead recalls the larger purpose for which he has been called:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.09600067138672px;">"But Michelangelo has placed a different Moses on the tomb of the Pope, one superior to the historical or traditional Moses. He has modified the theme of the broken Tables; he does not let Moses break them in his wrath, but makes him be influenced by the danger that they will be broken and makes him calm that wrath, or at any rate prevent it from becoming an act. In this way he has added something new and more than human to the figure of Moses; so that the giant frame with its tremendous physical power becomes only a concrete expression of the highest mental achievement that is possible in a man, that of struggling successfully against an inward passion for the sake of a cause to which he has devoted himself."</span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14.44444465637207px; line-height: 18.09600067138672px;">I am taken with Freud's interpretation but with an eye to understanding it in the context of the Torah as written. The power of the sculpture begins with the look on Moses' face. There is no anger, no fury, no gritting of teeth (like the Bernini sculpture of young David preparing to slay Goliath, in the Boghese Gallery). Instead, the look is one of resignation, of a calm, detached view at an awful scene before him -- the worship of the Golden Calf. The tablets, the all-important, tablets, inscribed not only with the Ten Commandments, but with the whole of the Torah, have been pushed to the side, and have become an arm rest for Moses' right arm, weary from his 40 days and nights on Sinai.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14.44444465637207px; line-height: 18.09600067138672px;">Moses has returned from the greatest journey of his life, to offer the greatest gift, one delivered to him directly from the God who had rescued the people from Egypt, and to whom Moses had spent forty days with on Sinai, only to find his people worshiping an invented God. There will be anger, the tablets will be broken (and new ones created), and the disloyal will be killed, but for now, there is something worse: recognition. Moses here exhibits a feeling of recognition that this journey, which might have taken but weeks, will now take much longer. This people, his people, have not just moved more slowly toward loyalty and commitment to the covenant, but instead have slid backward into their fears, desperately coveting something simpler, even slavery, and the certainty of visible Gods. Moses is pictured at the exact moment when he has realized his greatest moment of triumph has, in an instant, slipped away. In this split second, visions of bestowing the tables on the people, and of them marching steadily towra the promised land are wiped away. This people to whom he is tied </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14.44444465637207px; line-height: 18.09600067138672px;"> will need decades to free themselves from slavery. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14.44444465637207px; line-height: 18.09600067138672px;">The tablets, thin, stuck together, resting under his arm, almost behind him, have suddenly lost their importance to the point of slipping away. Moses sees the catastrophe before him, which will lead to the deaths of many, and must suddenly have an inkling that he may not be allowed to make to the promised land. The beard is swirling in the wind, and caught in his fingers, the result of perhaps the last gusts of the storm of God's presence from Sinai. But Moses' mind may be settling, just for this moment, on the tragedy of his own life -- that he will have to see this people through the desert, through their enslaved souls, to the promised land, that he will only see from afar.</span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14.44444465637207px; line-height: 18.09600067138672px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14.44444465637207px; line-height: 18.09600067138672px;">His moment of greatest strength has turned into his moment of greatest weakness. Moses will not, as Freud, and perhaps Michelangelo hoped, conquer this feeling. He will soon, in just a moment, turn to anger. But we see a moment before, when Moses simply, honestly, resignedly, accepts the harsh journey his people, and he, will have to travel. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14.44444465637207px; line-height: 18.09600067138672px;"><br /></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1847330855189587545.post-74440912010664321542014-06-30T08:35:00.000-04:002014-06-30T08:35:00.138-04:00The Anne Frank House in AmsterdamThe line forms before the 9 a.m. opening and remains hundreds of people long the entire day until closing time at 9 pm. Could an historic site ask for anything more? For those who work in public history and historic preservation, is this not the stuff of our dreams?<br />
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Or is there something disturbing about the allure of this place?<br />
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The Anne Frank House, Amsterdam.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I continue to believe that the</span><i style="font-family: inherit;"> Diary of Anne Frank </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">was manipulated by virtually everyone that touched it after the war, including her father, Otto Frank, but also a lineup of translators, playwrights, Hollywood producers, politicians, Holocaust memory activists -- everyone. They removed references to Judaism, her fury toward the Nazis, her disgust with her parents, and her dark view of humanity, in order to reconstruct a more politically palatable and useful image for a 1950s United States. That images has continued to prove useful. I largely agree with Cynthia Ozick, who used a <i>New Yorker </i>essay (reviewing among other books, an excellent revisionist history of the diary by Ralph Melnick, an historian from western Massachusetts) to eviscerate the misuse of the story of Anne Frank to promote, in her mind, a forgetting about the Holocaust, cloaked in a story of adolescent struggle and good wishes for all humanity. She said it in her usual uncompromising way: </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">"The diary has been bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, reduced; it has been infantilized, Americanized, sentimentalized, falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, arrogantly denied." And her <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1997/10/06/1997_10_06_076_TNY_CARDS_000379287" target="_blank">1997 New Yorker piece</a> ends with this breathtaking line: </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 21px;">"It may be shocking to think this (I am shocked as I think it), but one can imagine a still more salvational outcome: Anne Frank’s diary burned, vanished, lost—saved from a world that made of it all things, some of them true, while floating lightly over the heavier truth of named and inhabited evil."</span><br />
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This was the line in my mind as I approached my visit. I was prepared to be disgusted and to scoff at the universalizing sentimentality of the displays and the responses of visitors. When I heard the American college students gasp "This is messed up!" and "Can you imagine having to live in such a small space?," I cringed.<br />
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And yet, I found the procession up through the warehouse at 263 Prinsengracht to the "secret annex" deeply moving. There, I said it. In spite of my knowledge about the history and manipulation of the Diary, I found the Anne Frank House very moving. <br />
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The Nazis emptied out virtually everything from the Secret Annex and Otto Frank, who retained virtual veto power over the museum's displays during his life, insisted that the annex not be recreated. The irony is that the curators did recreate the annex in painstaking detail, photographed it, and placed some of those images on the wall. Around the world, other Anne Frank museums used those images to make the recreations not allowed in Amsterdam. In general, I believe in this approach and am skeptical of the attempt to recreate a moment in time, as if we can remake the past. Because there is no effort to rebuild the scene in Amsterdam, visitors must focus on the procession through the space, up the stairs, through the hidden entrance, up the steep ladder stairs, and let the few remnants from that time -- the pencil markings showing the two girls' changing heights over the two years in hiding, the magazine pictures and postcards Anne pasted onto the wall -- spur the imagination. You do find yourself thinking not abstractly about the Holocaust but about one family, and one young woman's energetic mind, full of aspiration for a life of writing, and love.<br />
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This is aided by the museum's clear editing of its interpretive program, perhaps in response to critics like Ozick and Melnick. The very first words in the museum come from Anne's Diary: "I have opinions, a religion, and love," and "We will always be Jews as well." The emphasis on Anne's Jewish heritage is almost too much, as we know that the Frank's were German Reform Jews, and with a limited commitment to Jewish practice. (Ozick herself has been criticized for inventing Anne Frank as well in her own wishful image -- as a young woman who felt herself to be first and foremost a Jew). The museum also has an extensive section on the aftermath, so that the story does not end nebulously with the betrayal of the secret annex. Videos show images of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and an interview with one of her friends who saw her just days before she died. All this is anticipated at the start of the museum visit with the first video, which opens with scenes of piles of dead bodies at one of the concentration camps. One cannot leave the Anne Frank house thinking that it was simply a generic story of exciting if dangerous wartime hiding. The murder of this family and millions of others is made patently and graphically clear.<br />
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I did not leave pleased, however. There is a stunning omission, which carries over into the inevitable gift shop that concludes even this museum experience. We hear Otto Frank, interviewed on television after the war, speaking about the surprise of reading his daughter's diary. He is given the almost final word in the museum, when he declares that "most parents don't know, really, their children." In the same room, are some of the first editions of the diary in English, with Eleanor Roosevelt's endorsement of the diary as displaying a "shining nobility of spirit." But nowhere is the editing of the diary discussed, other than a small note that Otto Frank produced a diary for publication based on the initial diary, Anne's revisions, and other notes she wrote. There is no discussion of the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/10/world/five-precious-pages-renew-wrangling-over-anne-frank.html" target="_blank">five additional pages </a>discovered more than a decade ago which reveal Anne's feelings about her father and mother. In the bookstore, there are copies of the diary in a dozen different languages, but, if I am not mistaken, they are the so-called "definitive" edition which is, despite its name, neither definitive nor complete. And finally, in a bookstore filled with dozens of books about Anne, the secret annex, and Amsterdam in wartime -- many in English -- there are no copies of the books by Ralph Melnick and Lawrence Graver, the revisionist historians of the diary. Rather than acknowledging the ongoing controversy over this most famous of books from World War II, the experience is wrapped up neatly for visitors, along with postcards and blank replicas of Anne's red plaid diary.<br />
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This may be no accident. For the Anne Frank Museum has served a very important purpose, which is to perpetuate -- if not always consciously or intentionally -- the image of the Dutch as saviors to so many Jews. It is true that some 25,000 Jews were hidden and protected by courageous citizens. But I only learned on this visit -- and this is a testament to my ignorance, but is also indicative of the power of the mythology of Dutch bravery and goodness -- that a greater percentage of Jewish citizens of Holland were sent to Nazi concentration camps than from any other country in Europe. <br />
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Will the tourists who make this the number one attraction in Amsterdam leave the Anne Frank knowing this fact? Or will they leave with a warm flush of emotion, that will quickly be displaced by a canal-side beer or a bite of stroopwafel?<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0