Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore: Giants of Modern Art

Fantastic exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts bringing together works by Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore, particularly those that depict, use or evoke bones. 

The pairing of these artists made me think of bone or sculpture as camera or framing instrument: while O’Keeffe would often place bones against the sky or landscape and paint a framed segment of her vista, Moore’s sculptures in the exhibition space itself, with their holes and negative space, framed O’Keeffe’s paintings, creating layers of circular or oval frames both pictorially and in situ. 

Thinking about framing and photography, I also had in mind the process of making bronze sculptures whereby there is an original plaster cast. While we often take sculptures to be unique and one of a kind, the process of making bronze sculpture is not so dissimilar to, for example, the making of etchings or photographs from an  absent “original” - the decision to limit editions to one or few taken (or not) by the artist. In a video of interviews, Moore expressed his wish to avoid the fate of Rodin’s sculptures, whereby preserved casts were used to make multiple copies of the same sculpture, which could be found in a number of places all over the world simultaneously. Moore I stood took action to destroy his casts to ensure reproductions were controlled. Of course, Walter Benjamin comes to mind. 

Vigdis Hjorth, Will and Testament

Will and Testament is an extremely powerful book, packed with the messiness of emotion, trauma, memory and family dynamics - it holds nuance and contradiction brilliantly. 

I read this passage in a moment when I was thinking about influence and different paths that lead to different versions of yourself/your life:

Dealing with the aftermath and trauma of childhood sexual abuse, Hjorth makes use of Freudian proposals around exploring repressed memories and containing anger - she examines how people use extreme thinking and lies to justify their actions and render their enemy worse, all bad, to ensure a clear narrative of victim and aggressor. Interwoven with Freud's theories on repression and anger are conversations the protagonist has with a friend on war mentalities - specially in relation to Israel/Palestine. They discuss the slippery slope of abuse, where victim can become aggressor and use justifications for attacks - how victims inherit beliefs and narratives use them to justify self-defence or acts of aggression. 

What would it mean to end the cycle of violence and not to use the comfort of 'victim status' to perpetuate suffering? What might a person have to confront and absorb to ensure they don't become the next aggressor? What is the cost of this absorption and how can a person manage their self-destructive impulses to be freed by the truth, and healed by the recognition of others of this truth? What happens when you don't get the recognition from the people you want it from? 

The protagonist's friend describes his discomfort in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv which mirrors almost perfectly what I felt on my visit in 2018. In sum, the strange atmosphere where a modern and shiny city was built with walls that keep perceived threats or aggressors out - these walls hide the suffering of others and support those inside to try to forget what sits behind those walls and live under illusions of peace, kindness, happiness and fairness. To truly heal however is to acknowledge the blurred lines of victim/aggressor, not to conceal your aggressions behind sophisticated architecture and technology but to endure the ambiguity, acknowledge the suffering and manage this alongside the good without self-destructing acts or shame. 

Digital collages from oil paintings

Self portrait 2, oil on canvas paper