Sculptor Edward Ihnatowicz’s Sound Activated Mobile (SAM) was the first moving sculpture that could respond actively to its surroundings. Listening through four microphones in its head, it would twist and crane its neck to face the source of the loudest noise, like an earnest poppy.
Fascinated Londoners spent hours vying for SAM’s attention at the 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition. Encouraged, Ihnatowicz unveiled the prodigious Senster two years later.
Guillaume de Machaut’s Rondeau 14, from the 14th century, is a crab canon over a palindrome: When the singers reach the end of the line, the tenor (the lowest voice) reverses course and reads his music backward, and the other two voices follow suit, exchanging parts.
So they arrive where they started. De Machaut titled the piece “Ma fin est mon commencement” — “In my end is my beginning.”
In planning the lighting and atmosphere for Skull Island in 1933’s King Kong, animator Willis O’Brien relied heavily on Gustave Doré. In 1930 special effects expert Lewis W. Physioc had said, “If there is one man’s work that can be taken as the cinematographer’s text, it is that of Doré. His stories are told in our own language of ‘black and white,’ are highly imaginative and dramatic, and should stimulate anybody’s ideas.”
“The Doré influence is strikingly evident in the island scenes,” write Orville Goldner and George E. Turner in The Making of King Kong (1976) (click to enlarge). “Aside from the lighting effects, other elements of Dore illustrations are easily discernible. The affinity of the jungle clearings to those in Dore’s ‘The First Approach of the Serpent’ from Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ [left], ‘Dante in the Gloomy Wood’ from Dante’s ‘The Divine Comedy,’ ‘Approach to the Enchanted Palace’ from Perrault’s ‘Fairy Tales’ [right] and ‘Manz’ from Chateaubriand’s ‘Atala’ is readily apparent. The gorge and its log bridge bear more than a slight similarity to ‘The Two Goats’ from ‘The Fables’ of La Fontaine, while the lower region of the gorge may well have been designed after the pit in the Biblical illustration of ‘Daniel in the Lion’s Den.’ The wonderful scene in which Kong surveys his domain from the ‘balcony’ of his mountaintop home high above the claustrophobic jungles is suggestive of two superb Doré engravings, ‘Satan Overlooking Paradise’ from ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘The Hermit on the Mountain’ from ‘Atala.'”
Sculptor Giovanni Strazza probably completed this bust of a veiled Virgin Mary in the early 1850s. It was transported to Newfoundland and placed in the Episcopal Palace next to St. John’s Basilica.
“To say that this representation surpasses in perfection of art, any piece of sculpture we have ever seen, conveys but weakly our impression of its exquisite beauty,” wrote a local newspaper. “The possibility of such a triumph of the chisel had not before entered into our conception. Ordinary language must ever fail to do justice to a subject like this — to the rare artistic skill, and to the emotions it produces in the beholder.”
In 1919, engineer James Cowan Smith bequeathed £55,000 to the National Gallery of Scotland.
He set two conditions. One was that the gallery provide for his dog Fury.
The other was that this picture of his previous dog Callum, by painter John Emms, always be hung in the gallery.
Both conditions were fulfilled.
Robert Doisneau’s iconic photograph of young love in Paris sold thousands of posters, but the identity of the couple remained a mystery for decades. In 1988 Jean-Louis and Denise Lavergne saw it on a magazine cover and thought they recognized themselves: They’d been on the rue de Rivoli on April 1, 1950, and had a diary to prove it, and Lavergne still had the skirt and jacket she’d worn that day. They contacted Doisneau, who greeted them warmly but did not offer to share any of the five-figure income he’d been making each year from the poster.
When they sued him, he revealed that he’d posed the shot using Françoise Delbart and Jacques Carteaud, a couple he’d seen kissing in the street but had not dared at first to photograph. Finally he’d approached them and asked them to repeat the kiss. Delbart said, “He told us we were charming, and asked if we could kiss again for the camera. We didn’t mind. We were used to kissing.”
A thousand bubbles burst, the Lavergnes lost their suit, and Delbart eventually sold the print Doisneau had given her to feign a spontaneous kiss. She didn’t share the proceeds with Carteaud — they’d broken up nine months after the photo was taken.
What is Chopin’s B Minor Sonata? What constitutes its identity? Not the fact that it’s part of Chopin’s conscious experience, because it continues to exist after his death. And not the fact that it’s part of any listener’s experience, because it continues to exist when those experiences have ended. It can’t be identified with any particular performance, and it’s different from its score, since the sonata is a sounding work and the score is an arrangement of graphic signs.
If the sonata is not material, and if it’s different from the experience of both the composer and the listener (in fact, it continues to exist if no one takes any conscious interest in it at all), how can it exist? How do we discern the same “original” work in a hundred different performances?
Is the sonata an ideal object, immutable and atemporal, like a mathematical concept? Well, no, because Chopin created it at a particular time. Perhaps there is no sonata, only individual performances? But then there’d be no sense in distinguishing a performance from the work itself, or in talking about the identity of a work (“Chopin’s B Minor Sonata”), or in arguing over whether a given performance was faithful to the original.
“For what is the point of saying that one performance rather than another gives a more nearly accurate account of the B Minor Sonata when the sonata does not in fact exist and when there is nothing real with which these performances may be compared?” asks philosopher Roman Ingarden. “Are we really going to agree that such judgments concerning the sonata itself and its performances are all false and stupid?”
(Roman Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity, 1986.)
Matthieu Robert-Ortis makes cleverly ambiguous wire sculptures.
M.C. Escher hated the Dutch high school he attended between 1912 and 1918. He failed his exam and enjoyed only the drawing lessons. But now it appears that the school’s architecture informs some of his later prints.
“It recently became clear that the staircase in Escher’s secondary school was a crucial factor in several of his works,” writes Micky Piller, curator of the The Hague Escher Museum, in The Amazing World of M.C. Escher (2015). “This discovery was confirmed by analysis of this work and photographs taken in the school.
“Escher was an unhappy boy when he was going up and down this staircase. Thirty years on, he still described his school years as ‘the hell that was Arnhem.’ Here he would have seen pupils walking in every direction. Imagine this in your mind’s eye and you will understand the rotating perspective in the print.”
“It was not all imagination, we must conclude now.”
In 1924 cellist Beatrice Harrison was playing to the birds in her Oxted garden when “I suddenly stopped and thought, ‘Why should I be the only being to have the joy of hearing the nightingale and the cello sing together? If only it were possible for people, even at the other end of the world, to hear him, those who have never heard the most exquisite bird sing.'”
The BBC resisted her idea at first — no wild bird had ever been broadcast before — but on May 19 they arranged a live performance in the garden, and “the nightingale burst into song as I continued to play. … I shall never forget his voice that night, or his trills, nor the way he followed the cello so blissfully. It was a miracle to have caught his song and to know that it was going, with the cello, to the ends of the earth.”
The broadcast was heard by about a million people; those who had radios relayed it by telephone to friends who didn’t. She played again the following week, and again the following year, and received thousands of letters, some addressed to “The Lady of the Nightingales” or “The Garden of the Nightingales, England.”
The only listener who remained unimpressed was her gardener. “I loves your music, Miss,” he told her, “but I do wish it didn’t attract them birds the way it do. They eats up all the fruit, something cruel.”
(From her 1985 autobiography, The Cello and the Nightingales.)
