Street Life, III: Santiago’s Benches

August 20, 2018August 12, 2018 / coordinatinggoldhagens / Leave a comment

Of all the distinctive ways that street life is enlivened in Santiago, the most artistically enticing concerns the city’s myriad cast-iron-supported wooden benches. For the past decade, art dealers have been commissioning local artists — a dash of the internationally known, a smattering of the well-established, and many neither– to choose a bench and do their thing. The program spread from a single commissioning gallery on a single street to many benches spread through three neighborhoods. You may now set down your derrière and lounge on works of art in the city center, Las Condes, and Vitacura.

Some artists have adopted the shout-it-out, Peter Max approach, indulging themselves in the wavy shapes, lilting lines, and acid-inspired colors that also recalled Hans Eidelmann’s 1968 Yellow Submarine album cover for the Beatles. My favorite was the quintipartite-structured composition enlivened with flat, child-like images of faces and hands, and inscribed with awkward script that exhorted: nada mas noble que VIVE HOY (nothing more noble than to live today). Words which, if lived by, forfend the kind of melancholy perseveration that destroys too many people’s days.

Animals and insects appeared repeatedly, sometimes diaristically (as in “Oh my gawd, don’t you think my wonderful dog is SO cute!!”), but more often than not, artistically. Whatever that Alice-in-Wonderland insect is on the left, I like it. The bench on the right elicited thoughts of a well-painted detail from a historic Japanese landscape.

In several instances, folk art provided inspiration.

My favorites, I suspect predictably, were mainly abstract, though the bottom right bench does hearken back to the ever-popular dog motif.

And the absolute, all-time winner, with its allusions to earth, horizon, sky, and water, its hasty, indecipherable script, and its slightly skewed perspective, almost a quirky modern riff on a scene by Piero della Francesca:

In all, these benches rarely failed to delight and give pause, prompting me to muse, yet again, on the potential for cities to offer moments of vitality by aesthetically enriching even the humblest of public places.

I could show many more, but then, that might discourage you from heading off to see and enjoy them for yourself.

— Sarah

Street Life, the Santiago Way: II

August 16, 2018August 12, 2018 / coordinatinggoldhagens / Leave a comment

Between the high-rises, Providencia is dotted with colonial-era aspirational mansions stuccoed orange and pink and yellow and blue

and occasionally, white.

Only a few of the newer buildings were special, but as Danny has written, the overall design (and construction) quality is of a level most Americans can only yearn for.

And the streetscapes and landscapes!

Those Chileños devote more loving attention to the many different ways they can vitalize their public spaces than I’ve ever encountered, anywhere. Yes, it was Christmastime, and the country’s Catholicism was on display in full regalia, with creches everywhere.

But in higher-end neighborhoods,

and in lesser neighborhoods (including where Pablo Neruda lived with his partner), deliberate design was everywhere. Even the street art was impeccably maintained.

After Mabel’s, we moved to a different place in a different part of Providencia, and then to an even tonier neighborhood called El Condes, a bit further out still from city center, closer to the mountains. From our second, 20^th-floor perch we enjoyed those canonical Santiago views, mountains plus smog.

We could also see just how green the city is.

View from Residencia #2. Alcalde (mayor)’s mansion at center.

Our second place was situated near the mayor’s mansion (Providencia, like El Condes, is separately incorporated), a grand old Victorian pile set into a plaza that progressively filled with kids as the day went on. At dusk, the mayor’s mansion glowed in neon purple and lime green,

surrounded by streets twinkling tiny Christmas lights wrapped round the Avenida’s parade of trees.

Chile’s capital is huge: the population of the metropolitan area numbers around 7 million. An aerial view from 2014 of its 250 square miles reveals how, over the centuries, settlers have seeped across the entire valley and up into the foothills. But every part of the city that we saw – even the poorer, more downtrodden neighborhoods– bore the character of an invitation. Walk here. Look at this sculpture, this fountain.

Come hither, to this sidewalk, to enjoy the shade of these old, old trees; have a seat in this plaza; listen to the fountain roar. Shop down here, beneath this kite-like awning slung over a pedestrian mall– it’s cooler.

Slow down.

Slow down. Perhaps an espresso in an outdoor café?

Like so many Latin cities, Santiago’s urban fabric and streetscapes were designed with strong bones, the scaffolding of a robust, unending public life. What did these streets look like during the Pinochet regime, I wondered? As we explored the city, I couldn’t but imaginatively replace what we were enjoying with scenes from the last part of Isabelle Allende’s House of the Spirits, when terrorized aristocrats hid behind lace curtains while learning of disappeared friends and acquaintances. What did Santiago feel and look like then?

— Sarah

Australia express: art

December 20, 2017December 20, 2017 / coordinatinggoldhagens / Leave a comment

One cannot but judge the architecture of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV- International), on St. Kilda Road in Melbourne, as falling somewhere between the unfortunate and the disgraceful — this photo of kids playing in the plaza outside it makes it look more serenely seductive than it is. And the interiors! Mostly they’re grim, just grim, especially after a renovation completed in 2004 by the Italian architect Mario Bellini, who created new gallery spaces by dropping opaque stone boxes into the existing building’s glass-covered courtyards, thus destroying what was in all likelihood the principal redeeming feature of the original design.

Even so, it’s the premier museum in one of Australia’s two most cosmopolitan states (Victorians will assert, usually only half-jokingly, Melbourne’s superior cultivation and cosmopolitanism in comparison with Sydney, which we heard characterized — more than once — as some kind of over-the-hill Lady of Questionable Virtue). So, as this building houses National Gallery of the State of Victoria, whatever that means, one is obliged to look.

We found: some nice moments, a couple of welcome surprises, a few terrific pieces, and one stunner, a work of contemporary art.

Inside the dark gray perimeter facades sits a single a light-drenched atrium. If you stay on the ground floor and venture toward the rear, you stumble into this.

In the 1960s, Leonard French, a celebrated Australian artist, worked for five years on a stained glass ceiling for what’s called the Great Room, as if this were some kind of edgy update of the great rooms in historic British manor houses. Impressive, and to my eye more pleasurable to behold than the verging-on-kitsch Tiffany glass compositions that the ceiling recalls. The museum’s curators seem a bit flummoxed as to how to use this space; basically, they’ve thrown a few cushiony pieces in there and invited the children in to play. And they do.

Upstairs (where the windows are, on the upper right), we found galleries devoted to the decorative arts, including one offering up an abundance of very fine Wedgewood — all those aspirant 19th-century Australians adopting British tastes, I suppose. I’ve come to appreciate Wedgewood’s refinement quite a lot, thanks to the enthusiasm and beneficence of my beloved mother-in-law, Norma. This amusing Egyptian piece struck my fancy, though Danny predicted that Norma would not take to it.

Though we agreed that this one, below. was just her sort of thing.

The NGV and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney exhibit a good deal of Aboriginal Art; this, from Sydney, captivated me with its absolutely perplexing pictorial space.

Back in Melbourne’s NGV-International, this beautiful installation, below, of medieval sculptures made these works-from-another-world arresting in a way that the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s installations in its medieval galleries are not. One oddity: in this openly Christian-dominant country (nativity crèches and decorated Christmas trees appear everywhere in the public sphere), the NGV’s wall texts assume not an iota of background knowledge about the religion or its traditions. One went something along the lines of this: Christians consider saints intermediaries between humanity and the divine. Another offered a careful definition of just what an attribute is, and explained how they function iconographically in Christian art.

Saint Catherine of Alexandria, a scholar-princess who converted many wayward souls to Christianity merely by dint of her incisive intellect and oratorical powers of persuasion, has always been a secret favorite of mine, and this ca. 16th century Catalan representation of her holding the wheel, a torture device that shattered when her persecutors tried to use it on her, stuck with me. I love the combination of her serene, aquiline features and her slightly dynamic but not-quite-contrapposto-esque pose. Then we practically ran straight into one of the best Hans (aka Jean) Arp sculptures, from his “Growth” series, that I’ve ever encountered. I was really tempted to hug it.

Finally, looking at the art at the museums in Sydney and Melbourne heightened my appreciation for that artist whose work Danny is so taken by, Del Kathryn Barton. We included one image from her exhibition at the NGV-Australia (which is in a different building from the NGV-International, down the street), a couple of posts ago. Danny loves DKB’s complex compositions, jewel-like colors, the over-the-top patterning and refined detail; I appreciate these but just can’t get over the questionable mythologies she’s drawing on in her depiction of women and their bodies. In any case, this painting is quite typical of what’s on display at her solo retrospective exhibition, and I appreciated it more after reading the catalogue essay, which discussed how influenced she is by medieval painting, with its lapidary colors and lack of recessive spaces.

It did occur to me, too, that the busyness of DKB’s surfaces bears affinities to Aboriginal painting — here’s one particularly good example, from Sydney.

And those big, haunting eyes that appear everywhere in her paintings evoke the haunting eyes in some Aboriginal sculptures, like these two, below.

The NGV Triennial was still in the process of being installed when we visited, but luckily, this piece had already been hung; it became the crème de la crème of our art-scouting day.

Entitled the PET lamp, this is by Alvaro Catalán de Ocón, a Spanish designer, who worked with the Bula’Bula Arts Aboriginal Corporation to find a group of weavers with whom he could collaborate. They gathered reeds, along with the plants necessary to make the dyes, produced the tints, organized the composition, and wove it. Technically, it’s a chandelier, I guess. Whatever: it’s a stunning, inspiring piece, which the NGV-International’s installation team displayed brilliantly, placing the lamps themselves just above eye level; the large weaving several feet above your head, suspended from the ceiling; and placing circular mirrors on a dais just above floor level. Since mirrors can be used to visually diminish the scale of the object they reflect, you get to experience the piece both as it envelops you, spreading majestically over your head and bleeding into your peripheral vision, and at the same time, regard its entirety by glancing toward the silvery pools of light near your feet.

Seeing this piece set off the kind of all-encompassing, full-body experience of a work of art that is often craved, and rarely realized. Really superb.

Danny’s been complaining that, since I’m always behind the camera, we run the risk of having few pictures of me from the trip. He gets the photo credit for this one.

— Sarah

We’re talkin’ heat

December 2, 2017 / coordinatinggoldhagens / Leave a comment

From what we saw of New Zealand’s more populous, though hardly human-overrun, North Island, its landscape suffers a poor comparison with the South Island’s. But with hardly anywhere else’s! We appreciated its wonders, at least the ones we targeted, with a deep sense of fulfillment (which Sarah has already conveyed regarding the Tongariro Alpine Crossing). In retrospect, we should have journeyed from North to South because the nagging sense that, with takeoff from Christchurch, we had left nature’s paradise, slightly occluded our capacity to experience the North Island with as much wide-eyedness as it warrants.

One place that succeeded in earning a top spot in our greatest hits album (maybe that’s this blog) was in the volcanic Rotorua region, which includes the Tarewera, a volcano that has erupted 5 times in last 18,000 years (one so extreme that it cast volcanic dust as far away as Greenland), as well as the Waimangu. The last major eruption of the volcanic craters all along Waimangu valley was in 1886, which falls easily within the era of photography. The Waimangu Volcano Valley Park exhibits pictures of what the landscape looked like before, and then immediately after the massive eruption which reconfigured the entire surrounding area.

Curated beautifully for a leisurely two-hour stroll, the Park took us past many wonderful landscapes, some of which introduced new words into our vocabulary. Here, for example, is a fumarole — that’s steam emerging directly from the crest of the mountain itself — as well as from the water below. The Waimangu regaled us with hot waters,

and hot (and cool, in both senses of the word) colors,

and with a tiny, even cute little geyser (below, at the left side of the image), wholly unlike the more conventional tower of water we saw a few years ago outside of Reykjavik in the gushing font that gave its name to this natural though relatively rare phenomenon, Geysir.

In all, lovely vistas and perspectives. This entire area of the central North Island, full of volcanic activity, gives lie to common metaphors such as that a person is “grounded” — meaning stable– and that an evidence-based assertion is “on solid ground”. In earth as in nature, it seems, all is entropy, or at least, restless, perpetual change.

New Zealand prides itself on its trees, and its lumber industry is one of the largest contributors to the national economy. At the Waimangu Park we ran across a stand of trees that reminded Sarah of one of her newish-ly favorite paintings, by Gustav Klimt, which we saw in an exhibition of landscape art from The Paul G. Allen Family Collection at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC.

We also visited a redwood forest, offering a skylet-high tree walkway, right outside the city of Rotorua, the forest the result of a tree growing commercial experiment which brought the trees over from California way-back-when-enough that the (skinny) redwoods reach (from unverified memory) three hundred feet and more.

And we saw miles and miles of commercial tree forests, some half-denuded.

The commonplace hillocks of the countryside of (we’re told) now worldwide Hobbit-fame are everywhere —

make Maya Lin’s land-sculpture in Storm King Sculpture Park,

which we once admired, a bit self-mocking. Driving through hours of such hillocks made for the greenest mad-undulating landscape this side of our known experience.Sarah’s favorite tree — its name escapes us — was that black-barked fern, plentiful in much of New Zealand, which, in rain-forest-y Waimangu Park, grew really tall.

— Sarah and Danny

Volcanos and Calderas: Tongariro Alpine Crossing

November 27, 2017 / coordinatinggoldhagens / 3 Comments

New Zealanders, with their seemingly infinite capacity to charm, charmingly call trekking or hiking “tramping”, which constitutes something of a national pastime. Tourist brochures and government-sponsored websites alike advertise the Tongariro Alpine Crossing as the best one-day tramp in the country. Not for the faint of heart, though. It’s 19.4 kilometers (nary a water source along the way), with official estimates advising that hikers to plan on between six and eight hours, with the ominous addendum, “depending upon your condition”. You are also repeatedly reminded to pack for different kinds of weather events: you can shiver in pelting sleet and sweat in blazing rays of sun in a single day. Or you can find yourself at the peak of a dry, sandy, 10-foot-wide ridge huddling against 65 mile-per-hour winds, as happened the day after we set out on this monumental — just no other word for it — journey. Some years ago, authorities, knocking their heads together about how to adequately alarm hikers (any number have died here over the years) into packing sensibly, settled upon the seductive, but probably ineffectual name change, and the generations-marinated Tongariro Crossing became the Tongariro ALPINE Crossing.

The path goes up a valley to the saddle between Mt. Tongariro and Mt. Ngauruhoe, both active volcanos. We and our fellow hikers — a simpatico, hail-fellow-well-met, mostly international crew — are repeatedly exhorted to stick to the designated route. If you do, you pass a sign below Tongariro, the largest, offering instructions in the event that it erupts in your presence. Item one: “Move away as quickly as you are able”. I laughed, and we proceeded without bothering to read the rest.

How to convey the experience of that day? Readers may thank me for discarding my first idea, which was to snap a photo every five minutes through the entire trek and to post every one here, sequentially, with the logic being that nothing else would suffice to impart the dual sense the day gifted to us: arrested time, infinite space. Instead, I offer, in sequential order, highlights of some of the awesome moments which came to us, step by step by step, at the infinitesimal pace of human locomotion.

When we started, clouds draped Mount Tongariro in shades of white. Slowly, the ground cover changes: less grass, and less green, now scattered in wheat-colored clumps aside low scrub brush and lichen-covered rocks.

Eventually, the proportion of grass to dirt tips decisively in favor of earth, as the pure conical shape of the Tongariro crater comes into view.

Surprise number one: Red! The Red Crater rises 6200 feet above sea level.

Eventually, you enter a desolate, soil and rock-strewn bowl which leads around the active, still steaming vent.

As you approach the Red Crater to circumambulate its perimeter, all flora disappear and you are left with acres liberally strewn with black, volcanic rock. The last eruption was in the late 1970s.

At the crest of the next peak, this culminates in a succession of extraordinary compositions. The pictures illustrating this post were culled from the 140+ photos I shot that day.

Circumventing the Red Crater (you couldn’t actually ascend it) brought you into view of the vaginal-looking orifice from which all that lava spewed during its last eruption. From there, you began your multi-houred descent. Around one bend, you see this: the Emerald Lakes (at right). At left-center, in middle distance, you can just glimpse the Blue Lake, and behind it in the horizon, Lake Tapuo, which is a caldera of a different volcano, about 90 miles away.

The Emerald Lakes sit at the edge of a large, grass-covered pan which resembles, a bit, the Amphitheater at the Drakensburg in South Africa. This was shot from the other end of the pan, looking back at the Red Crater.

On the way down to the exit (which entailed some climbing up, too), the landscape serves up an exuberant riot of muted color.

Near the top of the descent:

And slowly, again, the proportion of volcanic rock to ground cover and grasses shifts.

By late afternoon, you’ve spent over an hour trekking through an absurdly dense, all-embracing rain forest. Nothing to shoot except deep shadows, ferns, moss, and spreading palm leaves.

And then — you’re done.

One last shot, taken en route to our next destination, showed where we’d been, from a distance. All three of us completed the trek in seven hours, without rushing. Reveling in my inexperience and my enthusiasm, I declared the Tongariro Alpine Crossing the best hike in the world.

— Sarah