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| It's no' Borge's... it's mine! |
Kelvingrove galleries were once full of a particular chair.
The
chair is called a Spanish-Chair and is by the Danish designer Borge Morgenson. Each upstairs room at Kelvingrove had at least a dozen. The Impressionist and
Post-Impressionist room alone must have had around thirty of those chairs. Some
time in the 1990’s the Art Gallery and Museum underwent a refurbishment.
After the refurbishment the chairs were gone. Where had they gone? It was only
when I attempted to buy one that I realised how expensive they were. A new
Borge Morgenson Spanish-Chair costs anywhere between £3,500 and £4,500. I
bought mine at auction. It was damaged but I still paid almost £2,000 for it. I had
money then.
What
happened to the chairs after the refurbishment? Were they sold? Thrown out?
Given away? I like to imagine that all over Glasgow there are living rooms,
bedrooms, garden sheds and green-houses filled with Borge Morgenson chairs
which the security-guards and night-watchmen of the Kelvingrove took home with
them, with no idea of their value, just knowing that they liked the design.
Mogensen took furniture seriously. It was his ideal to create furniture
with a restrained aesthetic. He believed that furniture should create a sense
of tranquillity and have a modest appearance that encourages people to live
their lives unpretentiously - he would probably have liked the old wardrobe dumped on the football pitch. He was acclaimed for his masterful sense of
materials and proportions, and for his ability to create beautiful and
distinctive furniture by emphasising simple horizontal and vertical lines and
surfaces. While working strictly within his self-imposed dogmas, Mogensen’s
artistic temperament often led him to break his formal rules without abandoning
their original intent. Thus, Mogensen’s furniture can be described as both
modest and very self-confident - just like their creator. Throughout his life
Mogensen was one of the boldest voices in the critical debate on furniture
design. Some people take these things seriously. He often criticised his peers for surrendering their artistic
authenticity in favour of short-sighted fashions, but he always welcomed
innovations that he found offered real progression. He died when he was only 58 years old.
Morgenson chairs haven't disappeared from Glasgow. In the
Burrell Collection in Pollock Country Park there are about a dozen or two Morgenson chairs.
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| The Burrell foyer. |
The foyer is a perfect setting for the Spanish-Chairs. It has a serenity
about it. The sunlight which comes through the extensive glass surroundings
gives it a warm embrace and the feeling is akin to sitting in a courtyard
outside a church in Spain, Italy or the South of France. The floor is tiled,
there is large ornamental bowl which may have belonged to a fountain and the
entranceway to the main collection incorporates a grand stone gateway to a
castle. It was conceived as a portal to the past.
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| Portal to the Past - Interior entrance in the Burrell |
At
the moment of writing, the Burrell Collection is closed for a major
refurbishment. I wonder if the chairs will survive this refurbishment? In 2017,
in the Architectural Journal, an article was headed with the sensational title:
Glasgow is butchering the Burrell. The author, Robin Ward, described the
Burrell Collection as one of the finest post-war buildings in Britain which the
refurbishment threatened to change forever. The Burrell Collection was opened
in 1983 in the grounds of Pollock Country Park in the south of Glasgow. The architects
were Sir Barry Gasson and Brit Andresen. As the name implies, the contents of
the collection had been owned by Sir William Burrell, a very wealthy
ship-owner, who donated his collection to the City of Glasgow in 1944, on the
provision that the collection was to be housed in a purpose-built building at
least 16 miles from the centre of Glasgow in order that it might be shown to
its best advantage and not suffer the effects of air pollution. The Trustees of
the collection, if that’s what they can be called, tried for over twenty years
to find a location that suited the criteria stipulated in the donation.
Eventually they gave up, changed the terms of the deed, and decided on the
current site which is 3 miles from the centre of the city. A design competition
was organised for the building in 1971 but the successful candidates were only
successful because a postal strike allowed them to finish their design which
otherwise would not have made the deadline. Due to financial problems the
building was not completed and opened until 1983. It was immediately acclaimed
a masterpiece and was granted A-list status by Historic Scotland in 2013.
Whether that is enough to save it from refurbishment remains to be seen.
Glasgow Council doesn’t have a good track record in looking after its
architectural heritage. Is it because councillors are bureaucrats with no
aesthetic sense? Pragmatists who think only of commercial considerations and
the expediencies of the moment? It might seem that way.
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If
I sound a little partisan in my description of the plans for refurbishment, I
admit I am. Like Chevalier said of Paris, I want the entrance to remain just the same. I am
not a fan of making places like the Burrell and Kelvingrove Art Gallery and
Museums ‘user-friendly’. Prior to refurbishment, all the rooms on the upper
level of Kelvingrove were galleries filled with artwork relating to style or
period. Downstairs contained the museum exhibitions, such as the Armoury room.
After the refurbishment the whole place resembled one very-grand collection of
bric-a-brac, everything here, there and everywhere as though positioned on a whim.
Paintings were removed form the upstairs galleries and all sorts of other
objects were inserted. But what to do with the paintings? Stick them in the
hallways! Paintings have been piled onto the walls of the corridors around the
rooms, one on top of the other, to such an extent that you can't see those up
high. In the history of art-exhibitions, this was known derogatively as having
a painting ‘skied’. It was considered a great insult to the artist. It was
something which was done if his picture was not considered worthy enough of
being decently displayed and came to be a manoeuvre deliberately employed to
infuriate artists, to ‘put them in their place’. I suspect the people
responsible for hanging the pictures in the Kelvingrove don’t know much art history
or care much how they hang the works. It is like being in the house of someone
who has a lot of ‘things’ but is unable to decide what is worth displaying and
tries instead to put everything out. It would also seem that no one has given a thought
to lighting. If a painting is not too high to see then often it is positioned
in such a way that it is impossible to look at clearly without a bright splash
of light from one of the overhead-lights being reflected off its surface. The
is very evident with Dali’s Christ of St. John of the Cross. It has been tucked
in a cupboard. Supposedly, this is to reflect the conditions under which T.J.
Honeyman, the man who bought the painting for Glasgow, first saw it. Previously
it could be seen in a niche at the end of one of the long corridors, and it
could be seen, very dramatically, from one end of the building to another. The
long approach to the painting lent it the quality of a pilgrim’s procession. It
also allowed many people to view the picture at the same time. In the cupboard,
only two or three people can squeeze in. Any more and they would block one
another’s view. Also, in the cupboard, the painting is spotted with large
splashes of reflected light from the overhead bulbs. The light shows up every
fingerprint on the glass, every smear and every rubbing it has taken when being
positioned. If you want to view the picture now the best way to do so would be
to look at a good quality reproduction in a book. In this instance – until the
painting is repositioned – the copy is better than the original.
So
what will happen to the Burrell after refurbishment? Will the foyer disappear? Will
the chairs disappear? Will the atmosphere be changed irrevocably? I don’t know.
But given the history of Glasgow Council’s past treatment of its treasures it is difficult to remain optimistic.
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| Robert Delauney's jewel-case |
I took a photograph of one of the Burrell's chairs. But only one arm of the chair and a
portion of the leather back. I had no idea why I'd taken such a picture until later. Then I realised it wasn’t the chair I was taking a picture of but the sunlight on the chair.
For sunlight to be photographed it
must be photographed indirectly, through its effect on something. The French
artist Robert Delauney had a studio in the living room of his home. He put
shutters over the window to transform it into a darkroom during the day. Into
the shutter he drilled a small hole. Now he was ready to study sunlight. He had
prepared his canvas and ground his own colours. A tiny ray of light filtered into
the room. He began to paint it, studying it, analysing its form, colours,
components. He was attempting to study pure light, solar light. He had divested
art of subject matter. Light was his subject. Slowly, after weeks, months, he
enlarged the hole, little by little. Then he would paint the play of light on a
transparent material. His canvases came to look like jewel cases and, in fact,
he began to grind precious stones for the colours he used. Eventually the hole
became so wide that it was no longer practical. He opened the shutters and the
world of light flowed in. From the play of light in a sunbeam he began painting
the explosion of light all over Paris. Had a similar obsession with sunlight momentarily taken over the
photographer?
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| Hopper. New York... but it might be Glasgow tenements. |
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| Hammershoi |
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| The Stepping Off Point - Hopper |
J.M.W
Turner was also fascinated by sunlight until eventually his paintings became
almost abstract in their play of light in different atmospheric conditions. One
of his paintings was called Study of Sunlight. Others were The Sun Reflected on
the Sea and Sun Rising Through Vapour. He once said, ‘The Sun is God’, which, of course, it was to many ancient cultures, including the Egyptians, and he was a devotee of staring at the sun directly with the naked eye,
which, in his time, was reputed to relax the eyes. It Turner’s case it resulted
in what is known as ‘glassblower’s cataract’. Another side-effect of staring at
the sun is that it would have limited his perception of the colour yellow,
causing him to over-use the colour in order for him to see it as clearly as he
once did. A great many of his paintings have yellow in them, lots of yellow,
and for a time he was called the ‘Yellow Dwarf’. There is a cartoon of a very
small Turner standing before a canvas about to paint with a large dripping mop
in his hand and a bucket labelled Yellow. Turner’s fascination with the sun
itself, rather than what it illuminated, occurred at the same time of William
Herschel’s lecture at the Royal Society in which he argued that the sun was at
the centre of the solar system, a ‘physical entity’ with ‘openings, shallows,
ridges, nodules, corrugations, indentations and pores’. Herschel’s lecture
caused a sensation. Not long afterwards Turner began to paint solid suns, not
just impressions of bright, circular, radiating light, but what Herschel called
a ‘solid globe of unignited matter’.
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| A lot of yellow by Turner. |
These days, of course, light illuminates in more than one way. It is used to convey information. Light is any electromagnetic wave across the whole EM spectrum and includes visible light, radio waves, microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays, and gamma rays. All of these things are light waves to a physicist. Each of them has a different wavelength and frequency (or colour), but they're all electromagnetic waves. A fibre-optic cable is a wire containing transparent materials that carry light. The outside of the cable contains a material that will reflect the light, keeping it moving along the length of the cable. Digital information is sent through these cables using light pulses. A strong pulse of light indicates a one, and no pulse indicates a zero. Through rapid changes in the light, you can send highly complex signals down the cable. These are most often used either for high speed internet connections, or for sending sound signals to home-entertainment systems. Usually, infrared signals are sent along these fibre optic cables since these kinds of waves spread out the least and, thereby, lose the least amount of data during transmission. Infrared can also be used without a cable. The most common everyday example of this is a remote control.
If you shatter a holographic
image every piece, no matter how small, contains enough information to recreate
the entire image, though with less information as the pieces get smaller. A
holographic image is a standing wave pattern, or interference pattern, of light
waves. In physics, of course, light is characterised as being both a particle
and a wave. It is quantized into small energy packets called photons that
travel through space at… the speed of light. 186,282 miles per second. That
seems pretty fast but on the scale of the universe it’s slow. If the sun were
suddenly to disappear, we wouldn’t know about it for eight minutes, which is
the length of time it takes for sunlight to reach us. A light we see from a
galaxy ten million light-years away is ten million years old. The cosmic field
of light is really an asynchronous flow of electromagnetic waves converging at
every point to create standing wave patterns. That means, when you look up at the night sky you are looking at a field of light where everything which appears to your eyes at that precise moment of your time is a collage of light in which every point began its journey at a different time from every other point. It is like being in a gallery which has paintings of many different periods - they might have been painted at any time within the past five hundred years but they are all appearing to you now in your present time. The photons that are emitted from
every source (whether as radiation from stars, or as reflections from planets) are carrying information about the source itself – that is, its
location in space and time, its colours and temperatures, its atomic and
molecular composition, its speed of rotation and direction of movement. The light field is a field of information. Light, quite literally, carries information in its photons. David Bohm said
there is meaning at every level of existence, from the quantum to the
macrocosmic. ‘From this perspective,’ said Bohm, ‘the particle [i.e.
electron] would seem to be gathering information about its environment and
responding according to the meaning of the information.'
Dick asked the question, 'What is our
subconscious?' For Jung, there was the individual unconscious consisting of
unconscious events particular to the individual and relating to their lifetime,
and the collective unconscious, an unconscious shared by the race and formed by
many millennia of accumulated racial experience. An individual or a people
might become energised by archetypes of the collective unconscious, literally
receiving information from it which leads to action. Jung's notion is similar
to Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere. For Chardin there is the geo-sphere, the
bio-sphere and the noosphere. The noosphere might be described as the realm of
spirit or thought, not of collective unconsciousness but of collective
consciousness. It is this greater consciousness that Chardin believes to be the
evolutionary goal of humans. Rather than tachyons carrying information from
great distances, might it not be that the noosphere, the collective
unconscious, the morphic field, whatever you might wish to call it, is a field
of information all around us, something capable of being accessed by humans and
other animals, the information received relative to the species? What of the
near- death experience of the tunnel of light? When the individual dies, might
it be akin to an uploading of their individual experience to the information field, to be utilized by future generations? Dick has suggested
things a lot stranger. If this information field functions at the quantum level
then it might be 'out of time', not subject to sequential laws as we experience
them. Dick wrote: 'I feel I have been a lot of different people. Many people
have sat at this typewriter, using my fingers. Writing my books.' Nietzsche, in a late letter to Jacob Burkhardt, wrote; 'I am all the names in history,' by which, he seems to have been implying, in line with his philosophy of amor fati and Eternal Return, that all previous events had to happen exactly as they happened in order for him to be exactly as he was. To affirm one moment was to affirm all events, good or bad, which had led to that moment. Or as Edith Piaf put it; 'Je ne regrette rien.' Such an affirmation was, for Nietzsche, the benchmark of a healthy spirit, of a non-decadent.
A
friend of mine had a recipe for what he claimed was the perfect dry martini.
His recipe included sunlight. Ice would be placed in a frozen glass, four drops
of Angostura Bitters would be added, a splash of Vermouth and then the gin. The
crucial part was the gin. First it had to be poured separately into a glass and
then the glass placed in direct sunlight in order that the sun’s rays should
pass through the gin. Only then was the gin added to the main glass. Was there
any reason for this? Of course, he said. The sunlight purifies the gin, the
miniscule doses of radiation killing off certain toxins in the alcohol which
cause the maudlin melancholy often associated with gin drinking.
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| Have you seen the light? |
The knowledge that light carried information was of immense significance to Philip K. Dick. He believed that light was a signal. Not that 'it was like' a signal but 'it was' a signal
being sent in the form of light with a message to be received. He wasn't the
only receiver. Everyone, he believed, was a potential receiver, much as any TV
might potentially receive any signal. But whether or not the signal was picked
up depended upon the sensitivity of the receiver and also whether the receiver
tuned in or dismissed the signal as something they did not want to receive, or
was not worth receiving. It was by the medium of light, Dick believed, that he was receiving his
stories, which was why his stories often related to future happenings. For
instance, in Flow My Tears Dick wrote a 19-year-old girl called Kathy. As he
describes her; 'She is a girl of the gutter... living a quasi-illegal
existence.' The year after the book was published, he met a girl of the same
age, living the same existence, 'living a life so similar to that of the girl
in the novel as to frighten me... Her name - Kathy.' Dick has a theory for such
things which relates to the concept of tachyons. Tachyons are theorised to be
particles of cosmic origin which fly faster than light and consequently in a
reversed time direction. Arthur Koestler, from whom Dick picked up the notion,
speculates that they would 'carry information from the future into our present,
as light and X-rays from distant galaxies carry information from the remote
past into our now and here. In the light of these developments, we can no
longer exclude on a priori grounds the theoretical possibility of precognitive
phenomena.' (Harper's, July 1974)
Dick believed this was nothing new. What was new
was having a scientific framework with which to describe it. Prior to the
tachyon theory the reception of these messages would have suggested a mystical
contact with a transmundane or alien god who can communicate in the form of a
ray of light. The blinding light of the epiphany which Saul received on the
road to Damascus, for instance. The moment of illumination when the long-sought
solution to a problem is suddenly revealed. We can call it many things; ESP,
precognition, instinctual awareness, a message from the subconscious - which,
as Dick says, suggest the question; What is the subconscious? Without the
scientific framework to describe the experience he would have had to declare, 'God
has shown me!' Considering the distance these units of information travel,
their velocity, the contamination and signal-loss that might be experienced, it
is inevitable, thought Dick, that much information is lost or misinterpreted,
like the mistyping of a message when one is in a hurry or not paying complete
attention to what is being transcribed. Not everyone is an adept at
transduction as is a mystic or a saint.
Dick was not the only one who believed he was
receiving messages or that he was writing future events. In what many people
took as a typical Dalinian mystification, Salvador Dali said the points of his
moustache were antennae receiving cosmic messages which inspired his painting.
The neglected Arthur Machen said many of his stories contained elements which
'became real' in the future. In his autobiography he notes that after writing
Three Imposters he met with people exactly like the characters he had written
who offered him advice. William Burroughs believed that the purpose of a writer
was to write the future and that he also was a vehicle for messages received.
When Norman Mailer said of Burroughs that he was possessed of genius, Burroughs said
Mailer had used the correct terminology - not that he 'was' a genius, but that
he was 'possessed' by genius which might come and go as it wished. Burroughs
believed that all artists had to leave themselves open to influences and that
such openness was dangerous because you never knew exactly what you might be
letting in. A receiver never knows what it might receive. All artists, of whatever variety, for Burroughs, were vehicles of
such decoding, some better at it than others. In his short essay on Hemingway,
Burroughs notes that 'Hemingway wrote his life and death so closely that he had
to be stopped before he found out what he was doing and wrote about that.... He
who writes death as the pilot of a small plane in Africa should beware of small
planes in Africa, especially in the vicinity of Kilimanjaro. But it was written
and he stepped right into his own writing. The brain damage he sustained... led
to a hopeless depression and eventually his suicide.'
Dick came to wonder if he wasn't actually living
in one of his own stories, or that by writing about his environment, his
reality, he was changing it as the physicist changes the quantum event by
attempting to measure it. Burroughs had a similar belief that what we posit
onto the universe is reflected back to us, thus proving its reality, that is,
confirming our interpretation. As Blaise Cendrars said, adapting Schopenhauer, 'The world is my representation.' Therefore, by writing it, by believing it, by thinking it, we create it. In
the beginning was not the word but the concept. Dick worried that speculation
of this sort might lead to solipsism.
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| It's cosmic, man. |
'I must conclude,' said Dick, 'that my or perhaps even our collective
environment is only a pseudo-environment.... Maybe getting other people to read
my writing I change reality by their reading it and expecting it to be like my
books.' Anomalies were something Dick used in Ubik to prove to his
characters their environment was not real. He then discovered the same
anomalies happening to him in real life. He was in good company there. Charles Fort was a
man also interested in anomalies, the anomalies that science attempts to ignore
but which will not go away. There is a logical possibility that we are
characters in the pseudo-environment of a computer simulation or something
similar. Perhaps we are characters within a simulation, within a simulation,
within... etc. Ad infinitum. I wonder if the photographer was not only
confirming the reality of what he photographed by taking its picture but
changing its reality - showing how it might be seen, as any other artist might
show how the world might be experienced?
There is though, always the possibility that the beams of light which Dick experienced were repeated transient ischemic attacks, or temporary strokes. It was a stroke that finally killed him. If it was a series of small strokes, the changes to his personality suggest that the neural circuitry associated with his conscious mind was reconfigured, something which is often witnessed in a particular type of stroke when, for instance, an individual with no prior appreciation of art suddenly because obsessed with painting, taking art lessons, visiting galleries, collecting a library of art books. The same has happened with food, people never before cooking anything other than a tin of beans suddenly becoming fascinated by cooking to the point of mortgaging their homes to own restaurants. The literature on such changes is prolific. My father had a stroke which was relatively minor. It had a curious side-effect though, in that he suddenly found everything hilariously funny. One of the best laughs I have ever had in my life was when I sat beside his sick bed at the Western Infirmary in Glasgow. Neither of us could say a word without the other laughing to the point of breathlessness. We got some very strange looks from the other patients and their visitors. The opposite, though, is also true. Another man in another room found everything intensely sad and upsetting. His daughter appeared one evening and said, 'I've brought you the paper.' He began bawling his eyes out. The theologian Rudolph Otto once said, 'Do we not rather experience ourselves than command ourselves?' Jean Cocteau is reported to have said on awakening every morning; 'There is nothing you can do about it: submit...' I submit and experience myself. |
I
never tried his recipe. I don’t like gin.
The same friend had another
theory regarding a famous painting by Vermeer. The painting was once called
Woman Weighing Gold until it was realised that the balance in her hand is
empty. Then the name was changed to Woman Holding Balance, or Woman Testing
Balance. Not everyone agrees the balance is empty. Some believe it shows the
woman weighing pearls against gold – except my friend, who believes that the
scales are neither empty nor is she weighing any precious materials, or rather,
she is weighing a precious material of a different sort. I have come around to
his way of thinking. Find the best reproduction of the painting you can. Get
yourself a magnifying glass. Look at the scales. There appears to be nothing on
them. But there is something on them. Two areas, one on each plate of the
scales, has a portion of white paint. It was once thought that these might be
pearls – and some still claim they are - until cleaning of the painting
revealed them to be two areas highlighted by the sun entering the room from the
upper left. My friend was of the opinion that the woman is weighing sunlight.
The painting behind the woman was once so dark as to be barely discernible but
the same cleaning which revealed the pearls of light also revealed the image.
It is a Last Judgement. Some critics took this to be a comment on the vanity of
the worldly-goods on the table before the woman; the gold, silver, pearl,
bracelets, bangles, chains; ‘… everything that mortal man tries to hold on to.’
But the woman is perfectly serene. There is no indication of decay, death,
dissolution. She has a calm equanimity. She is - why not - well-balanced. The
Last Judgement also indicates something more than apocalyptic devastation.
There is a famous Dutch painting by a predecessor of Vermeer’s named Rogier van der
Weyden. It is a Last Judgement which focuses on St. Michael, weighing souls. He
stands with a balance in his hand and his fingers raised delicately, as though
he were sipping tea, just like the woman in the Vermeer. Souls have often been
associated with light – the beam of light which departs the recently deceased
being as their soul ascends to heaven, and also with the luminous angels. But my
friend didn’t believe the light on the scales represented any of these things.
The light represented light. It was as precious to Vermeer, and any painter, as
the materials on the table. It was something so common as to be taken for
granted but which, it goes without saying, is absolutely essential. Let there
be light. Light is the condition of life. Without light no life.
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| Vermeer. Woman weighing... light? |
Vermeer was also reliant on
the particular characteristics of light for the quality of his work, which Dali
called hand-painted photographs. This wasn’t just Dali pointing out the
photographic verisimilitude of Vermeer’s work. He was indicating the process by
which Vermeer’s paintings were created. It is generally accepted now by art
historians that Vermeer used a camera obscura. The camera obscura
functions on the same principle as a camera and they have been popular with
painters since the later part of the 16th century. A natural
optical-phenomena occurs when a small hole is made on a screen splitting a room
in two, one side of which is completely dark. The image from the lit side of
the room is then reproduced on the dark wall of the opposite room, upside down.
The artists can then trace the image perfectly onto canvas or paper. A
hand-painted photograph. I am certain Dali used the same principle by
projecting photographs onto canvas and then painting them. I once heard someone
call this ‘cheating’ but artists have always made use of whatever technology is
available. It is not the technique that matters but the conception of the
image. And speaking of conception, in various obscure branches of Catholic
theology it was once stated that Mary’s virgin birth was facilitated by a beam
of light. She was, quite literally, impregnated by a divine light. The Divine, of course, often takes the form of light. There are a
lot of odd theories on the go these days and one of them claims that Mary’s
impregnation by a beam of light indicates that she was made pregnant by aliens
who routinely interfere in human affairs to guide the human race to its
appointed destiny, and one method they employ is to introduce great men and women
into the gene-pool every now and again, such as Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and
others of a less religious nature such as Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and
Albert Einstein. According to Philip K. Dick's theory, they wouldn't have to go to the trouble of interfering with the gene-pool or by introducing alien-human hybrids. They would just have to find a suitable receptacle for their light signals - Eureka! We are all camera obscura.
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