A collection of the most relevant sources which have informed the fragmented icon series and The Beyond. Within the visual collection some photographic and cinematic referents who influenced the final construct of the visual material. And within the literary collection, the writers and academics whose literature has had a definitive impact on the theoretical substance and making of the screenplays.
Visual Sources
Spirit Photography
Vampyr by Carl Theodor Dreyer
Poster References
La Jetée by Chris Marker
Virgin Mary Postcards
Literary Sources
L’au delá Sources:
L’art:
Communion sublime avec toute l’âme du passé. Patrimoine grandiose de l’humanité défunte.
Art:
Sublime communion with all souls of the past. Grandiose heritage of the departed humanity.
Relation of art and memory, reflected upon, as he establishes through his memoires, through the tone of a principle. These sentences condense to him the transcendental meaning of both life and creative effort, they become then philosophical stances.
Sublime:
L’art plastique est mort sous le souffle de l’infini.
Sublime:
Plastic art dies under the breath of the infinite.
In this case we can easily relate his brief reflection on the sublime, absolutely imbued by the spirit of romanticism and accepting the powerful strength of nature over man and all his makings.
Spiritualisme:
Il y en a qui demandent ce que veut dire le mot spiritualisme. Ce sont ceux qui n’écoutent que leurs instincts et qui prennent pour la folie les suprêmes révélations de la poésie. L’idéal est une chimère: l’éclat de la verité, les certitdres de la conscience ont pour unique cause la nature de notre education première et le milieu où nous avons vécu.
Spiritualism:
There are some who aks what the word Spiritualism means. It is those who only listen to their instincts and who are overcome by the madness of the supreme revelations of poetry. The ideal is a chimera: the euption of truth, the certitude of cosnciousness only have the cause of our first education and the place where we have lived.
This quote is specially relevant in relation to the film project because it links closely together creation and spiritualism involving them both in a transcendental truth that envelops their meaning and nature. Bound to each other as he establishes, the contact of symbolism and the afterlife becomes solid and rotund.
Melancolie:
La douleur parle, ils se taisent. Les meilleurs sentiments sont au fond de leur âme, et, dans leurs yeux mouillés de pleurs, on ne voit que la bonté.
Melancholy:
Pain speaks, they remain silent. The best feelings lie at the depths of their soul, and, in their watery eyes humid from their crying, we can only see goodness.
The praise of a melancholy countenance again enhances the ideal of beauty of romanticism, that which establishes that lament is an absolutely necessary experience to create and to belong within the bohemian circle.
La vérité de l’artiste:
Ce qui distingue l’artiste du dilettante est seulement dans la douleur qu’éprouve celui-là. Le dilettante ne cherche dand l’art que son Plaisir.
The truth of the artist:
What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante is only the pain he himself suffers. The dilettante only looks for pleasure in art.
Here we encounter his very common tendency to raise moral standards from introspection. Entangled in his intimate recollections a Christian consciousness and spiritual attitude arise and overcome, very often, the content of the writing.
Écrire:
Écrire est le plus grand art. Il traverse le temps et l’espace, supériorité manifeste qu’il a sur les autres comme sur la musique, don’t la langue se transforme aussi et laidde dans la nuit des temps son oeuvre passé.
Writing:
Writing is the most grand art. It travels through time and space, its superiority manifests over even music, whose tongue transforms and faints in the night for its past oeuvre.
This statement confirms his interdisciplinary involvement, although judging from his material creations we could envision a purist painter, Redon is profoundly engaged with writing even placing it above the visual arts. In this epoch decorative art was at the highest place for any artist, producing pieces that were primarily devoted to the cultivation of beauty and in its nature truth. The referents of these paintings tend to circle around religious and mythological themes, which allow for moral content to come through and affect its audience, taking them always back to the consideration of good and evil as well as the virtues of paradise of those who act from goodness of heart. I am interested in this viewpoint for the contrast it offers to my portrayal of sacred objects of art which is anchored in the perspective of an atheist. The role of the atheist in this case, hasn’t been that of condemning the icon, but rather to question it and pull it apart, recognising in it both strength and weakness.
Giorgio Agamben on The Contemporary
Rolan Barthes is quoted to establish the basis of the whole subject:
“The contemporary is the untimely.” A brief and full bodied reflection which then branches out into several features of the portrait Agamben procures.
He begins on the most human side of the question, determining the contemporary individual as the one who neither perfectly coincides with his time nor adjust himself to its demands. That is to say somebody who is in a way strategically misplaced, with enough perspective and distance to envision the darkness of his epoch. Darkness as physical phenomenon and theoretical place, obscurity as a triggering agent which allows for a new form of vision to come to be. In his turning towards the nocturnal sphere and questioning the bleak sky Agamben speaks of the light that is directed toward us and simultaneously distances itself from us. The unfeasible trip.
In his analysis of The Century, by poet Osip Mandelstam, he dismembers the metaphor of the beast and in doing so puts the action of confrontation at the core of the modern effort.
A final note on the origin:
“It is not only situated in a chronological past: it is contemporary with historical becoming and does not cease to operate within it.”
Here we could start relating to more recent studies on the archival fever which imbues such a number of artworks in the current era. Agamben reclaims the ancestral to produce a new object of study, that which escapes the historical breaks we have produced to understand evolution.
Virgin Mary Sources:
Marina Warner’s cultural examination of the Virgin Mary proved to be an excellent example of eclectic resources and thorough research. This material substantiated the theoretical background of both The Vaults and Death And The Maiden.
Her approach is that of an atheist whose personal history is closely bound to ecclesiastic education, and so from an adult’s neutral disposition she executes this comprehensive study and multi-layered portrayal of the sacred icon. Through her I found access to the stories of The Apocrypha which I had a focal interest on due to their marginal nature. These texts were rejected by the church and expelled from the word of God: said to be untruthful, invented and often deceiving, all the more fascinating as historical material. I proceed now to offer some entries from my private notes which were written up throughout the reading of the book.
Where was the relationship of the archetype of a woman and mystery originated? How have they been so closely related for what seems like an eternity? Why is the moon a female entity in our poetry? (the sun is male, and the moon is fed from the reflection of his light to be seen) She walks, she stands, she is and she is always enveloped in mystery. Tragedy seems to come forward every time she enters (the room/or the scene). (Writing n.3)
The growth of her image within Art History and the church acquires a nuanced meaning and disparate functions. For instance my continuous encounters with her at museums had a more neutral context, where her features became plastic, aesthetics had the leading role in my observations. When I went into a church to find her she appeared to have an aura about her. She was a tender creature, veiled or maybe defined by love and sacrifice. (Writing n.12)
Her context plays with our own scale to provide a very specific kind of emotion.
The notion of the prayer unites the communal and the individual in a sort of condensed and frozen space.
To meet her implies observing her, establishing an intangible link, adoring her, maybe even desiring her. (Writing n.16)
Dantes Paradiso:
Virgin mother, daughter of your son
Humbler and higher than any other creature…
You are she who so ennobled
Human nature
That nature´s very maker did not disdain
To himself be made by you.
On the matter of her death, the thought does not materialize. She simply floats away veiled by clouds, her earthly experience untouched, her choice to decay taken away. To never reach peril, to be without belonging. To not be allowed to expire, rot and feed the land.
(Writing n.28)
Freedberg: Mary fuses image and prototype. Responses to them are predicated in the perception that what is represented on an image is actually present, or present in it.
She is as present everywhere as she is anywhere.
Another paradox to be reflected upon. It is through the devout, who accept the patriarchal nature of the church, that Mary acquires agency and potence. In her apparitions she returns to the flesh, she actively enters decadent spaces, she comes into contact with despair.
She is humanized by those in need who believe. The practice of the internal sequence of events believers practice whilst using rosary provokes empathy towards her.
Although as they said in the Gospels she kept all those feelings in her heart, those feelings are imagined and reflected upon. (They become.)
Catherine Emmerich (a german mystic and stigmatic.) who had visions of the house and the tomb of the virgin Mary at Ephesus, a place she had never visited. Her revelations, published in 1876 sent eager archeologists to the sites described, where they did indeed find some very ancient foundations. Including a tiny first century house, believed to be the virgin´s. Elisabeth of Shonan´s visions (p.89): Expansion of the western idea that Mary ascended body and soul into heaven. Apocryphal tales and the veil. (p.86-87)
It is only in the seventh century, when the apocryphal tales were accepted in some quarters and were old enough to be traditional, that other stories support Jerusalem as the location of Mary´s tomb. One legend says that the Empress Pulcheria, just before the important council of Chalcedon in 451, asked the patriarch of Jerusalem to send her in Constantinople the body of the Virgin Mary, for veneration in the imperial chapel of Blachernae.
The patriarch replied that it was impossible, for Mary´s body had vanished. Instead he sent the empress the long veil, or maphorion and the sash worn by the Virgin. In a later version, St John Damascene, the patriarch sent the empress the Virgin´s abandoned graveclothers and shroud- a much stronger argument for her Assumption
The centuries marvel therefore that the angel bore the seed, the virgin conceived through her ear, and, believing in her heart, became fruitful.
Yeats: The Mother of God.