Monthly Archives: January 2009

Connections: VanGogh and Nietzche; Too Much in the Sun

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Both died mad at the end of the 20th Century, and their incipient fame and death in their prime only suggested how much more of which they were capable. But the similarities between philosopher Nietzsche (1844-1900) and painter Van Gogh (1853-1890) are more than the biographic (e.g. syphilis) or zeitgeist-related. I imagines the same anguished ethos formed the works of both, but I could be imagining things. Their style, however, is palpably similar in different mediums. According to Nietzsche, all philosophers had to be artists in order to completely express their thoughts.

Reaper. 1889.

Deceptively joyous, their works make one feel as if the creator has stared at the sun too long without seeing the fingerprint of god on it. They take radical ways to express a view of the world that is intense and yet accessible on the surface. Influential as they have been, they remain isolated iconoclasts in their paeans.

Their works are accessible only in their apparent joyousness. Van Gogh is repeated on shirts and posters because people find his work pleasant. Nietzsche becomes the easy catch phrase for the undergrad searching for a strident, carefree tone. This view confuses the bright veneer of a conclusion with the strenuous wrestling that went into its making. Within Nietzsche words lies the horror that is in the root of the oldest fairy tales, and Van Gogh paints as one who must paint the flatness of life in the purest pigments and thickest layers because the world enters his consciousness with the cunning of the light that finds the hungover man and makes him wince. Such heightened feeling is not always pleasant, even when it has been transformed into the aesthetic object.

“There are endless corn fields under dull skies, and I’ve not shied away from portraying this sadness and utter loneliness…”- Van Gogh

Wheat Field with Cypresses
Painted around Saint-Remy in early June 1889

Merely the madness of artists on view? Perhaps, in that these men used their art to express a worldview that Conrado de Quiros, a writer for the Phillipean Enquirer, puts it well by saying, “That’s the truly depressing part of it, that the suicidal tendencies afflict the creative and not the destructive. I wouldn’t mind it if our public officials were seized by a sudden epidemic of wanting to commit suicide. But no, the tendency afflicts Plaths and Van Goghs and Nietzsche’s of this world and my friend and my son’s friend and others of their kind. People who feel life so intensely, so acutely, so sharply they are often crushed by it.”

It is a mistake to view these two artists as unrelated raving lunatics. I would venture rather that they are raving artists depict the intensity of life head on and struggle in their valuation thereof. If their similarities do not depict the same temperament exactly, they do the same view of a world as one to reckoned with, in all its glory. A glory that became overwhelming.

Go Guggenhiem Tonight

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I have a cold, and am lame, etc, so I will not be attending, but this day- (or night-) long free event at the Guggenhiem is jampacked with cool stuff. So if you’re free all tonight, or tommorow all day, definitely head out to the 24 Hour Program on the Concept of Time, based off the theanyspacewhatever exhibition.

“Comprising interviews, lectures, discussions, and performances, the 24-hour event will function as a platform for the presentation and exchange of ideas, research, and projects across a wide spectrum of fields, engaging diverse participants in vibrant, mutually illuminating dialogue. Modeled on the renowned thematic “marathons” conceived by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London, this New York-based program organized by Guggenheim Chief Curator Nancy Spector will be conducted as a strenuous, experimental exercise geared toward both the academic and the general, art-going public.”

Stendhal Syndrome and the Uffizi

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Where medicine and art align, from my friend Sarah (and the Wall Street Journal):

“Stendhal Syndrome. The tendency to develop a rapid heartbeat, dizziness and hallucinations when exposed to great art seems like a great exit line for tired museum-goers. But it seems particularly prevalent in Florence, Italy. An Italian psychiatrist observed it in more than 100 visitors in the 1970s and named it after the French author, who described similar symptoms upon visiting Florence in 1817. More than 100 additional cases have been documented, including some in which a particular detail of a painting seemed to bring on acute anxiety. Effects are usually temporary.”

Anxiety like in Stendhal Syndrome isn’t the emotion I would have imagined a trip to some museum in Florence would impart, unless it was because of the crowds of tourists.

Florence is where I had one of my best museum experiences. I reserved a ticket in line exactly when the Uffizi opened on a Sunday. I was the first person in the U-shaped museum and rushed to the other end in a mad dash. Then I made my way through the galleries backwards, so methodically room by room I was alone with Rebramdts, Rubens, and Raphaels. It felt deliciously illegal and private–not at all anxiety inducing. Yet I kept looking over my shoulder expecting to see a guard or someone. My solitude lasted for one glorious wing, and then I met the crowd again in that wide corridor that overlooks the Arno. Those Medicis knew how to live–being alone with the foundations of the Western canon was incredible.

I wonder what sort of hallucination art would inspire in the case of Stendhal Syndrome. Would you get drawn into the world of the painting, or would they reach out to you from beyond the frame? If I had only had both wings of the museum to myself, I could probably tell you.