Savigny and Correard were able to publish their account of what had happened on the raft of the Medusa and this account is the basis for the creative process instigated by the artist Gericault that resulted in the painting that now hangs in Louvre, Paris.
For this correspondent the painting in question has become significant as an early example of a work of modern art functioning as a nexus for myriad cultural shifts.
The witness of the survivors coming into existence, and, most importantly, accessible within in a public domain, to some extent determined the material the artist chooses to process, and along with the thinking necessary in making choices and decisions in considering how to represent and communicate what is at the heart of the matter. To refuse to represent, or present is an option when representation cannot do justice to the matter concerned. This is therefore a modern situation, and a prototype perhaps, for the forms of modernity in art that have the potential to wake us up from our incipient somnambulism.
The image above is a representation by the artist Thomas Struth, and as an image it is a depiction of a situation more than a reproduction, or a positive print of a negative plate. It is a recovery process involving the transformation of a cliche into an archetype. In an artnet webpage on his work it points out that:
http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/tuchman/tuchman7-8-03.asp
When, for example, he discusses the engaging situations of actual gallery-goers looking at photographs of other gallery-goers looking at paintings, he has a lot to say about his work not found in the critical literature on it.
Says Struth, "I wanted to remind my audience that when art works were made, they were not yet icons or museum pieces." "When a work of art becomes fetishized," the affable, articulate artist points out, "it dies." Struth feels the paintings in his museum photographs regain aspects of their original vitality when seen anew in the context he renders so seamlessly.
In more than two dozen photographs Struth expressed his "interest in the fate of art in museums." Are picture galleries, he asks, "like cemeteries or a living organism where people can nourish themselves about aspects of human existence?" While he didn't become a conceptual artist like many of his contemporaries -- he just wasn't all that interested in theory per se -- he treats themes that appeal to his intellect.
Using a European 13 x 18 camera, which is somewhat comparable to an American 5 x 7, Struth, in the past, would wait for hours or even days to get his shot. At the Louvre, for example, he depicted a group of people in a formation that echoes the ship wrecked survivors clustered by Theodore Gericault on The Raft of the Medusa. There's even a chord of irony as a woman with a fashionable coat and a Louis Vuitton handbag contemplates a painting of distraught men who eventually would succumb to cannibalism.https://rsf.org/en/news/erol-onderoglu-turkeys-tireless-free-speech-advocate
REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS
FOR FREEDOM OF INFORMATION
NEWS
June 21, 2016
Erol Önderoglu, Turkey’s tireless free speech advocate
PROTECTING JOURNALISTS - MEDIA INDEPENDENCE - JUDICIAL HARASSMENT
IMPRISONED - FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION
Erol Önderoglu
The media freedom principles defended by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) have been represented in Turkey for the past 20 years by Erol Önderoglu, who was placed in pre-trial detention yesterday in Istanbul along with two fellow journalists. Today, their second day in prison, RSF reiterates its call for their immediate and unconditional release.
Today, their second day in prison, RSF reiterates its call for their immediate and unconditional release
Önderoglu’s now greying curls hide a tireless intellectual rigour, while what he lacks in physical stature is offset by a will of steel. The prison in which the Turkish authorities locked him yesterday will not make him change course. For more than 20 years he has campaigned for media freedom and for more than 20 years he has worked for RSF, the NGO he represents in Istanbul.
He began his career as a campaigner in 1996, in the wake of the murder of Metin Göktepe, a reporter for the left-wing daily Evrensel (“Universal”) who was beaten to death by the police. It was a time of great tension in Turkish society and frequent clashes between the armed forces and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). In an irony of history, Önderoglu’s arrest has come at a time of renewed intense fighting between the Turkish state and Kurdish rebels.
What is Önderoglu’s crime in the Turkish justice system’s eyes? Having acted, like other journalists, as temporary editor of the Kurdish daily Özgur Gündem in a gesture of solidarity with the Kurdish media, which had been especially affected by President Tayyip Recep Erdoğan’s increasingly frenzied crackdown and arbitrary use of an anti-terror law to gag any criticism of the government.
It was under this anti-terrorism law that Önderoglu has been jailed because of his actions as a journalist. The same goes for the other two journalists jailed yesterday – Ahmet Nesin and Sebnem Korur Fincanci, who is also president of the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey.
Journalism was Önderoglu’s first profession. In 1997, he began working for Bianet, a news website that pioneered human rights reporting. He was its editor for several years and has stayed faithful to it, nowadays sharing his time between RSF, Bianet and his wife and young son, a soccer fan.
Now aged 46, Önderoglu spent most of his youth in France, where his parents settled when he was a child, and it was in France that he met his wife, also the offspring of Turkish immigrants, before they went back to live in Turkey. He has kept his French passport and is still fluent in French.
Staunch defender of the right to inform
Önderoglu recounted his career in 2014 in one of RSF’s books of photos. He spoke of Metin Göktepe, the newspaper Özgur Gündem and other milestones such as the map of the world that RSF displayed in Paris in 2002. It identified Turkish army chief of staff Hüseyin Kivrikoglu as a “predator of press freedom.” “I will never forget the threats I received from Turkish nationalist circles and media,” he recalled. “Phone calls, defamatory articles and summonses by the Istanbul police.”
This tireless activist does not boast about his unflagging determination and impartiality. His defence of the principle of media freedom applies to everyone, whether they are Islamists, republicans, nationalists, Kurds or leftists.
He spends several days a week at the Istanbul law courts observing the hundreds of trials of journalists, and often goes on field trips, producing widely-read reports like the one he wrote about journalist Cihan Hayirsevener’s murder in northwestern Turkey in 2009.
His quarterly reports on free speech in Turkey for the Bianet website are also widely read. As a result of his detailed research for these reports, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) chose him as an expert on imprisoned journalists. He is also member of IFEX, the global network defending and promoting free expression, and was in Berlin last weekend for an IFEX strategy meeting. Last month, he and RSF secretary general Christophe Deloire met officials at the Ministry of Justice in Ankara on the subject of freedom of expression, alongside several international and Turkish NGOs.
Trial of strength
The decision to target RSF’s representative in Turkey was no doubt partly symbolic. By targeting him and the others, the Erdoğan government is clearly sending a message to all Turkish journalists and human rights defenders, a message that says no one is safe from persecution.
The jailing of Önderoglu, Nesin and Fincanci marks a news stage in the criminalization of human rights activism and the continuing decline in media freedom in Turkey, which is ranked 151st out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2016 World Press Freedom Index.
https://rsf.org/en/erol-onderoglu-rsfs-representative-turkey
Sign this petition
On this day in 1545 the Tudor warship Mary Rose sinks off Portsmouth; in 1982 the wreck was salvaged in one of the most complex and expensive projects in the history of maritime archaeology.
The Guardian
Newly decked out Mary Rose reopens after £5m makeover
Henry VIII’s warship has been revamped to give visitors a more intense experience of what life must have been like for its crew
Tuesday 19 July 2016 16.14 BST Last modified on Tuesday 19 July 2016 22.00 BST
Almost 500 years after Henry VIII’s favourite warship, the Mary Rose, sank off the south coast of England as the king watched despairingly, visitors are being treated to an extraordinary new view of the vessel.
The Mary Rose was dramatically raised from the seabed in 1982 and first went on display the following year but has always been obscured by the pipes, supports and sheets of glass necessary to preserve the precious timbers.
Thanks to another £5m revamp on top of the £34m already spent on conserving the ship, the paraphernalia has gone and an upper viewing platform with no glass between viewer and vessel has been created that should make visitors feel closer to it and get a better experience of what life on board must have been like.
Helen Bonser-Wilton, the chief executive of the Mary Rose Trust, said it had been an emotional experience when a huge Tudor standard that had been hiding from view at its resting place at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard dropped away on Tuesday.
“So many of us we saw the wreck come up so we have had an emotional connection with the ship for very many years,” said Bonser-Wilton. “But to see her like this uninhibited for the first time is huge. I don’t think people realise how big she is. We’ve been spraying her with water, with chemicals, drying her. Nobody has ever really seen Mary Rose since Henry VIII in the way you’re seeing her now. You’re breathing the same air as Henry VIII’s warship.”
Many people at the grand reveal were clearly moved at the sight of the ship, on which more than 400 men died as it did battle in the 3rd French war. The setting is dim, partly to help protect the precious structure but also to give an impression of how dark and oppressive it must have been to be on the ship. It makes for a haunting experience.
New filmed vignettes giving a glimpse into the life of the crew are beamed on to screens showing shadowy, ghostly figures playing, working and fighting. A clever feature is that the visitor can see an image of, for example, the ship’s carpenter with his dog, then turn to see his tools that were found buried in the silt of the Solent along with the ship.
The historian David Starkey, who describes the Mary Rose as Britain’s Pompeii – because of the snapshot it affords into life in Tudor Britain, said he was delighted at the new view. “There were obstacles between you, the visitor, and the ship. Now all of that has been taken away and you can see the thing, it’s there, it’s a three-dimensional object.”
No comments:
Post a Comment