The Mnemonics of Afghanistan and Titian
Aviva Rahmani 1980s, Fremont Pond (Sleepy Hollow), Egg Tempura on Wood, 10” x 10”.
It seems paradoxical, but I often use conventional landscape studies as a means to think out complex adaptive systems, relationships between disparate agents that culminate in foreseeable patterns, and my next steps as a new media/ interdisciplinary artist. It is all about how mnemonics manifest as the embodiment of insight.
The study attached to this post is from the eighties. I painted it from my parents’ home in Sleepy Hollow, NY. 10"x10" egg tempera on wood. It reminds me to consider edges and communities in ecosystems: the ecotones of habitat. I write as Hurricane Ida bears down on New Orleans. By the time this is posted, the impacts will be self-evident. The sky is falling across the planet. We are living on borrowed time on the edge between stability and instability
Events in Afghanistan continue to horrify, terrify and shock but not surprise me. Apparently, we completely failed to correctly assess the implications and repercussions of relationships between the local factions. Evidently these events were inevitable and invisible to too many and too many who were trying to make themselves visible and heard were invisible with silent voices warning of menace ahead. The warnings were too small and faint to be noticed.
There is a show I want to see at the Isabella Gardiner Museum in Boston of works by Titian.
Titian painted through the beginning of the Renaissance and at the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment. As a student of Bellini, he was deeply engaged in the transition between egg tempera and oil painting which culminated with the free brushwork of Rubens. Titian was, of course a white man who rose to significant power. There is no record of a woman or a person of color having the opportunity to also contend for entry to that particular challenge in those times except to presume the obstacles would have presented as an impossible bar. So all we know about that cultural transition as reflected in his painting is in the brushwork and color he explored from the POV of a white man, a white male artist embodying the expansive freedom of his identity in that time of transition in the actual brushwork that released an energy previously contained by the careful constraints of egg tempera work. Titian saw himself as interdisciplinary, particularly in the “Poesies,” being shown at the Gardiner. He declaring that he was a visual poet. Titian painted at the dawn of the age of European colonialism, long before feminism might have questioned his metaphors. As in Afghanistan, there was zero advance consciousness of the kinds of threats to civility and civilization that wouldn’t fully manifest for centuries to come. The difference between Titian’s brushwork and Afghanistan’s meltdown was in how quickly invisible warnings manifested as catastrophe for many, whether as genocide or ecocide.
Both Afghanistan and Titian represent responses to change in varying degrees of chaos on a spectrum from disorder to order. But I believe in runes. I foresee studying Titian’s brushwork as a study in runes. So I will go to the Gardiner and contemplate his brushwork to try to make sense of the catastrophe in Afghanistan and discern ancient patterns in recurrent ecological events, such as the message from Hurricane Ida at the edge between sea and land in the Gulf of Mexico.
What predictive patterns might I have seen in my own brushwork in the painting I attach to this post? It was painted in the eighties, a time of apparent stability. The brushwork was meditative. But the colors are faded, as though the present were already the past. The eighties were a time when the first rumblings of resurgent fascism were being heard across the globe which arguably fueled attitudes towards what has happened in Afghanistan or will happen in New Orleans (thanks to the unfettered enterprise of fossil fuel corporations). As with the poison of colonial aggressions in Titian’s time we didn’t heed small warnings in the eighties that might have forestalled behaviors that flowered in dead Afghan bodies this past month, let alone the scale of threats from fossil fuel use which might have been arrested forty years before Ida. Is there a way to divine the future from the brushwork of the past? That is what I will consider when I get to the Gardiner.