"The cinema is an invention without a future." - Louis Lumiere
Arrival of A Train At La Ciotat
"But then something suddenly clicks, everything disappears, and there on the screen a railroad train appears. It speeds like an arrow directly towards you - watch out! It looks as if it is making a beeline for the darkness in which you are sitting, and is going to turn you into a tattered bag of skin, filled with crushed flesh and ground bones, and turn the cinema hall into rubble and ashes and destroy this house that is full of wine, women, music and vice." - Maxim Gorki, on the occasion of the first public demonstration of the cinematographe in Russia.
Francesca Woodman has been called a modernist, a surrealist and, even, a gothic artist. Her work carries echoes of all three traditions, but it evades categorisation. As a young woman, she photographed herself obsessively but often she appears as a blur of movement or a half-hidden figure, someone constantly trying to escape or hide. The end result is not self-portraiture, but a series of stills from a continuous performance in which she plays with the notion of the self, disguising, transforming and defacing her own body.
At Victoria Miro, around 50 of Woodman's photographs – small, old-fashioned-looking prints that seem to belong to a much earlier time – pay testament to a short, but creatively productive life. It ended, while still in full flow, when she threw herself off a building in New York in January 1981, following a long bout of depression. She was just 22, but left an archive of some 800 images, many of which have still not been seen.
Like Sylvia Plath, Woodman is an artist whose death has often impinged on the various readings of her work, imbuing these already complex images with another layer of mystery and, in some cases, foreboding. In a series of photographs she made in the mid-70s, when she was a student of photography at Rhode Island School of Design, her blurred, shadowy self is spectral, ghost-like.
It seems unlikely, though, that Woodman was prefiguring her own death in her work, rather than playing with themes of identity and with the role that photography, and in particular portrait photography, can play in constructing a fixed – and therefore false – identity.
Sometimes she dresses up like the heroine of a Victorian novel – she collected vintage clothes long before it was fashionable – or as Alice about to disappear through the looking glass. In one famous image, she stands alongside two other naked women, each of them concealing their face behind a photograph of her face, while a different Francesca Woodman face, in a self-portrait pinned to the wall, gazes out at us too. As an exercise in undercutting the objectifying gaze of the camera, it is both provocative and playful. There is a mischievous imagination at work here, too, that has often been overlooked in critical studies of her work.
Seeing so many photographs of Woodman, mostly naked, often posing in empty rooms with peeling paint and fading wallpaper, is a slightly disconcerting experience, though. It's not just that she becomes more elusive the more photographs you see, it's more the tightrope walk she takes between an almost adolescent self-obsession and artistic self-exploration. There are echoes in her work of older photographic, as well as artistic, traditions. Her nudes often recall Bellocq's haunting Storyville portraits of New Orleans prostitutes. One startling photograph of her legs bound tightly in ribbon or tape, her hand holding a striped glove that rests between her legs, has traces of the disturbing doll photographers of the German surrealist photographer Hans Bellmer.
For all that, there is a consistency to Woodman's vision that is almost a signature of sorts, and, as such, rare in one so young. The handful of coloured prints made near the end of her life are beautiful in their own way – softer in tone and almost painterly in their use of colour – but they highlight the importance of black-and-white film in her work, how it makes her locations more mysterious and, yes, gothic, but also more intimate. The prints are small but that, too, adds to their atmosphere, their shadowy but powerful presence.
One cannot help but leave this show with a sense of regret for what might have been, though. The earliest photograph here was taken in Boulder, Colorado, in 1972. It is called simply Self-Portrait at Thirteen. In it, the young Woodman is fully clothed, her long hair entirely concealing her face, her left hand pressing a shutter lead that extends in a blur towards the camera – and us. It is as mysterious and elusive as any of her later nudes or performance photographs, and tells us that, even at 13, Woodman had found a way to hide in front of the camera, and, in doing so, had also found her abiding theme. Nearly 30 years after her death, she is still hiding from us in full view, as elusive and beguiling as ever.
National Pursuit of Happiness Day - April 13, 2012
The birth date of Thomas Jefferson - April 13, 1743
Because we have "certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
The United States Declaration of Independence July 4, 1776
Thomas Jefferson, principle author
What is GNH:
Bhutan's fourth king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, coined the phrase GNH in 1972 on the belief that people's happiness did not depend on the nation's economic wealth alone. Many of the GNH indicators find their roots in Buddhism. Psychological well-being, for example, includes measures of meditation, prayer, nonviolence, and reincarnation.
GNH nine components of happiness:
psychological well-being
ecology
health
education
culture
living standards
time use
community vitality
good governance
What is GNH video
GNH Quotes
“We should take seriously the idea of measuring our gross national happiness, because it brings us back to our founding ideals. It makes us ask: Are we improving as a nation in protecting and exercising our right to pursue happiness? What can we – what should we do differently? If we’re serious about pursuing happiness, what should we as citizens demand of our leaders, present and future?”
Arthur C. Brooks, Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America and How We Can Get More of It
“The overwhelming majority of our people seek a greater opportunity for humanity to prosper and find happiness. They recognise that human welfare has not increased and does not increase through mere materialism and luxury, but that it does progress through integrity, unselfishness, responsibility and justice …”.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1934 State of the Union address
“There is a tremendous yearning in people’s hearts for an integrated solution to problems and GNH shows a systematic approach to all of them. People want to work together towards that. … More and more people in the world are material-oriented but there is also a yearning of the human soul beyond material possession, that’s why GNH has touched so many hearts. Will Brazil follow USA where Gross National Product increased three times in the past 50 years but people are less happy? Where community vitality has been extremely degraded, the number of people who don’t visit neighbours increased by four times, violence tripled, one in every 100 people jailed and one in every four people unhappy or depressed? Now is the time for Brazil to follow a new formula and GNH offers the most complete set of indicators for true progress.”
Psychologist and educator Dr. Susan Andrews, founder of Future Vision Ecological Park and coordinator of GNH in Brazil, November 25, 2008
“The legacy of this crisis will be a worldwide battle over ideas – over what kind of economic system is likely to deliver the greatest benefit to the most people.”
Joseph Stiglitz, coined G-192, chaired group of experts that prepared General Assembly of the UN on the economic crisis in June 2009
“For 60 years gross domestic product, or GDP for short, has been the yardstick by which the world has measured and understood economic and social progress. However, it has failed to capture some of the factors that make a difference in people’s lives and contribute to their happiness, such as security, leisure, income distribution and a clean environment–including the kinds of factors which growth itself needs to be sustainable. … We have known for years that human economic activity exhausts our natural resources and damages our fragile environment, yet economists and governments have been slow to incorporate them into their measurements. …What we measure affects what we do. We will never have perfect measures—and we need different measures for different purposes. But our work so far has shown that there is considerable room for improvement in our measures. There are reforms that can be instituted immediately; others will require more research. … Producing better, truer, ways of measuring economic, environmental and social performance, is a critical step in making progress towards building a better world.”
Joseph Stiglitz, renowned professor, author and the 2001 Nobel laureate in economics, from his article “Progress, What Progress?” in the March 2009 Observer. Stiglitz also chairs the “Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress” launched in 2008 by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The commission includes four other Nobel laureates, with Kenneth Arrow, James Heckman and Daniel Kahneman as members and Amartya Sen as advisor.
Economics of Happiness 2011 Trailer
More at:
United Nations General Assembly Resolution supporting Happiness Measures
