Hot Air Balloons

I'm not sure why the idea of hot air ballooning is fascinating to me- it is something I have always wanted to do.  The idea of crossing a landscape in silence, with only air between myself and what is below, appeals to me, but there is also an anachronistic romance to ballooning that I like.  The first manned balloon flights took place in France in 1793, in a balloon built by the Montgolfier brothers.  (The brothers also demonstrated their invention at Versailles, floating a sheep, a duck and a rooster above the heads of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette) The subsequent French fascination with the balloon- soon used in military campaigns and for entertainment-  is beautifully documented in the Library of Congress archives in the Tissandier Collection.  A selection follows....

   

And yet, despite all the grandness and carnivalesque delight of the above images, it is the ballooning disasters that interest me the most.  Perhaps I am morbid- but there is something about the mad risks of the early inventors and explorers that fascinates me.  And the dramatic failures- of equipment, of planning, of financing, of ego- are so evident in the following images.  A punctured balloon is almost an archetype- there are platitudes about popping someone's balloon, aren't there?  Or deflating someone's ego?  What better image of human hubris than a collapsed balloon, taken from an era when the ambitions of humans were driving us across the globe, to greater and more far-flung conquests and discoveries.
I especially love the woodcut below, of Felix Nadar's balloon "Le Geant" in 1863.  The combined disaster of fallen balloon and oncoming locomotive, rendered in the ominous grey values of printer's ink, undermines the frolicsome colors of the Folies-Bergere advertising above.

Even more compelling; images from the failed expedition of S.A. Andreé, the Swedish balloonist who attempted to fly a balloon from Svalbard over the North Pole in 1897.  Andreé's faith in technology was so strong that he ignored apparent defects in his French- made balloon, and two days after departure, he and his two companions crashed onto pack ice, where they later died of exposure.

from Wikepedia

Andreés polar balloon was made in Henri Lachambre's balloon workshop in Paris (image from Wikepedia)

The following images of the Andreé exhibition are taken from the site 
http://www.zwoje-scrolls.com/zwoje41/text08p.htm, which appears to be in Polish, so I can't give much information about what it says.  Though it appears to be thorough.... 

I love the above image- the inception of the trip, so optimistic!  And the trailing ropes, and their wake in the water- such an image of something too weighted down to succeed....

The three men had supplies and sledges with them, and were able to survive a couple of weeks....

The remains as discovered in 1930.












As far as I can tell, no one is reading this blog- which is oddly liberating.  It gives me permission to drift, and to free-associate, which is an important and delightful part of being an artist.  And perhaps reveals a little of how visual culture operates- the links from image to image building a network of understanding, of attitudes and conceptions and even prejudices.  Neuroscience tells us that memories are linked by likenesses- if you have a memory regarding a horse, for example, your next experience with a horse will be stored in the same area- the neural passageways will be laid down right next to each other, linking, and possibly distorting, your two horse-related memories.  Which means that a recollection of one will bring up the other, and so on, through the whole messy post-modernist network of images.  Images are liked in our minds, in radiating webs of relationship, as they are linked in the broader cultural consciousness, and, of course, on the world wide web.
Which is why we call it a web, of course.
I digress, but as I mentioned above, my digressions are the luxury of an unread blog.
So after thinking of balloons long enough, and drifting into their darker territories of hubris and nightmarish failure, I naturally thought of Redon's weird surrealist print, Eye-Balloon, of 1878.  Which I share with you- or at least with me- here:

reposted from http://picasaweb.google.com/112903412228597938783/RedonOdilon












Also worth check out are the very odd and melodramatic surrealist short of Guy Maddin- Including Odilon Redon or the eye Like a Strange Balloon  (which you can see onYouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSZYkv4Ad2Q&feature=related).  The image below is from one of Maddins' films.....

Well- from lighthearted to progressively darker.  How did I go from colorful balloons to dead horse heads?  Personal predilections for gloom, I suppose.

Do you remember the cold?

Today, it is a hundred degrees, quite literally and exactly.  And so I am holed up in my living room- the studio will be too hot, the ac there can never keep up with a top-floor, south-facing, insulation-free, 1,000 sq foot space- and so I work here, fairly cozily, during the summer.  Closer to the fridge.  I shall get fat with all the food breaks.  In my garden, the morning glory vines have become a wild, voracious, trembling green mass- they look like Dr Seuss characters and seem to grow a foot a day.  The heat has baked certain- crucial- bits of plastic off our bicycles, which we unwisely left outside in a sunny corner.  Yesterday, when we searched out a pool for swimming, the swim was quite delightful- but after a few lap of exertion, the water started to feel hot on my skin.  But evening walks in search of gelato are lovely....  

To slip into another time and another temperature, I offer up today's crop of photos, taken last winter.  These were taken in Flushing, at the site of the 1964 World's Fair.  Original photos of the fair show a grand, even grandiose, experience- one that spoke of a certain space-age optimism, a clear eyed gaze into a glorious future.... with just a touch of Jetsons aesthetic.  On the day we went it was appallingly cold- "perishing," as my English father would say- and the wind screamed across the broad fields of dead grass and right through our coats.  Everything was abandoned, and empty, and rusting away.  The only other people there were a young couple, seated at the very base of the giant globe- you can just see them in the photo below.  I didn't realize that they were trying to make out, and kept interrupting them as I circled the globe myself, awed by the massive thing looming over me.

Later, we headed over to downtown Flushing for a noodle bowl in a hot, steam-filled mall basement with very low ceilings.  Everyone shared space on rickety tables with vinyl table cloths, and was we ate we watched the chefs making the noodles from scratch, repeatedly slapping great loops of dough against the counters.  Outside, heading for the subway, I bought hot chestnuts off the street and we all shared them as we walked, getting too involved in the de-shelling process and crashing into rushing pedestrians.

Remember the cold?  Remember how it actually sucked at the time, and how wonderful hot things felt by contrast?  I am trying to remember that right now…

views from cars

New Work....

New work.... these are each 50 x 40."  The substrate has a sort of milky transparency, so the paintings are actually on both sides... the red is on the surface facing you, and everything else shows through from the back, somewhat ghosted...

Ernst Haeckel- Art Forms in Nature plates from early 1900's

I am not sure quite why I started this post with the above images (of objects for sale in a little boutique in Tucson, AZ, called Mast).  I have a sort of gut feeling that they somehow relate to the main body of today's post, but need to pick apart the nature of that relationship...  Certainly it has to do with the air of antiquity, popular in many shops and design collections, and the actual antiquity of Haeckel's prints (seen below).  Nostalgia has a powerful draw- and nostalgia for times that precede our own is particularly seductive.  Easier to drift through images of an older time, in which the narrative can be completely fictionalized.   Whereas, a photo album of our own histories may inadvertently trigger not just forgotten canoe rides, hazy summers and dim campfires- but also the discomfort of Uncle So-and-So's violent temper, poison ivy rash on the butt from an ill-considered pee in the woods, and various other embarrassments, mistakes, and small and large deaths.  And so we are drawn to antiques, and old things, where histories can be invented, without the intrusion of truths.  Which is not to say that we do not revise our own memories to suit our needs.... I'm rambling.

I also think that there is a Wunderkammer relationship between these images.  Haeckel, the scientist and artist, worked during a time when the world had gone mad for collecting.  Objects and curiosities from all over the world, oddities and fragments of grotesque aberrations, exotic things displaced into the parlors and cabinets of curious Victorians... the fascination of the antique shop or DIY boutique is not so different.  

And, most interestingly to me, what is a blog if not the most contemporary expression of a Cabinet of Curiosities?  There seems to be a segment of the blogging world that provides tours through personal collections of objects and artifacts in/ for the home- and, more, collections of images of objects and experiences that are desired by the blogger.  It is no longer necessary to actually own the object- to tour the wilds of the New World to bring back unheard-of flora and fauna, to pay vast sums for objects of historical import.  Now, we just have to find the image of the thing on Google, and collect it into our blog-cabinet, and somehow we have a sense of the pleasure of ownership in doing this.  The fascination of collecting is somewhat satisfied, without ever having to purchase, hold, transport, store, or protect the actual object.  We own the thing, while being freed from the ownership of the thing...

I'm still rambling.  On to Ernst Haeckel, artist of the day...

All prints and text taken from the book Ersnst Haeckel; Art Forms in Nature.  2004 Prestel Verlag, Munich, Berlin, London, New York.