Borobudur

Yesterday was a different story. My visit to Borobudur was blessed with gorgeous weather.

It was a glorious sight to see, from the top of this colossal Buddhist temple built between 750 and 850 AD, the sun rise on furious Mount Merapi (an active volcano constantly spewing sulphurous fumes) and its tamer brother Mount Merbabu (which means hare-lip according to my guide).

A rainy day in Yogyakarta

I was supposed to have a 10 hour tour of the Dieng Plateau in Central Java today, and my guide was promptly here at 6 AM to pick me up. But it was raining abundantly and it looked as if the sky had enough rain in it that it would probably take the whole day to unload it. We both agreed that it was best to cancel the trip as this weather would hide the beautiful landscape of terraced rice fields and make rather unpleasant the stops to visit the ancient Hindu temples on the tour.

So, here I am, trapped by rain at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. After an early breakfast, the prospect of spending the day in the Regency Club lounge is not altogether unpleasant, as it will give me time to read Popper and Russell and reflect.

The well-lit and comfortable surroundings of the lounge and the landscape through the large window facing me make an ideal backdrop for my meditations. I can see golf players undeterred by the rain ambling across the gently undulating green fairways interspersed with graceful palm trees. Female caddies, covered head to foot in ponchos, hold umbrellas and pull the bags of clubs on wheeled carts.

The woman sitting at a table nearby does not however appear to react to this soothing atmosphere in the same manner. Wiry and intense, she nervously picks food in her plate with one hand, and continually fumbles with the other on her iPod, probably jumping from one tune to another, not having the patience to listen to any single one to its end. Not for her the joys of rambling idle thoughts …

I find much to agree with in Russell's Why I am not a Christian, a collection of essays written from the late 1890s to the 1950s and re-published together in 1956. Russell was a rationalist through and through and his attack of religion is devastating (for people guided by reason) and witty. These writings must have inspired Richard Dawkins'God Delusion, a much more recent similar attack. Of course these attacks will not convince many believers to change their convictions, since, as Russell points out, "it would seem that the three human impulses embodied in religion are fear [fear of death in particular], conceit and hatred". Reason is hard put to prevail against such passions.

Russell's wit is manifest. Here is, as an example, the first paragraph of an essay first published in 1930 (Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilisation?)

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilisation. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.

I do find that Russell, although keenly aware of the strength of the human impulses embodied in religion, was perhaps too optimistic about reason's ability to win against them, for he concludes this essay with the following sentence: "It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion." The first part of the sentence (the possibility of mankind being at the threshold of a golden age) shows Russell's optimism, rooted in the progress of science and industry and the impact it should have on education and the provision of resources sufficient to ensure "tolerable subsistence for everybody". The last part shows that he saw the strength of the perceived enemy of progress, religion, since he describes it as a "dragon".

It is easy to see, with hindsight, how misplaced that optimism was, expressed as it was in 1930, when mankind, far from being on the threshold of a golden age, was about to enter a very dark period of wars and unspeakable atrocities during which freedom nearly succumbed to the threats of fascism and communism. And we could perhaps say that Russell was choosing the wrong enemy when he saw religion as the dragon to slay. This would be, however, a superficial analysis, for a strong case can be made that fascism and communism were fundamentally new religions born as reactions against the progress of reason.

This case is powerfully made by Popper in the second volume of The Open Society and its Enemies, published in 1945. I will quote the first paragraph of the next to last chapter, which eloquently summarizes Popper's analysis.

Marx was a rationalist. With Socrates, and with Kant, he believed in human reason as the basis of the unity of mankind. But his doctrine that our opinions are determined by class interest hastened the decline of this belief. Like Hegel's doctrine that our ideas are determined by national interests and traditions, Marx's doctrine tended to undermine the rationalist belief in reason. Thus threatened both from the right and from the left, a rationalist attitude to social and economic questions could hardly resist when historicist prophecy and oracular irrationalism made a frontal attack on it. This is why the conflict between rationalism and irrationalism has become the most important intellectual, and perhaps even moral, issue of our time.

Socialism and Communism were seen as harbingers of progress towards economic justice, and the hope, nay, the conviction, that they were an inescapable historical necessity, was shattered by the disillusionment of seeing these movements degenerate in horrible totalitarian regimes responsible for the misery and death of millions. As a result, many in the West, particularly in the United States, concluded that reason (which can mistakenly be perceived, at least until one reads Popper, as the progenitor of the socialist and communist movements) cannot be the sole answer to man's quest for truth and happiness, and they turned with renewed fervor towards the traditional religions. Russell's book is a useful reminder that disillusionment with reason is not a reason to find refuge in nonsensical religious dogmas.

According to Marx, Communism was to be the ineluctable victory of the working class and the end of history. After the collapse of the communist regimes in the USSR and Eastern Europe, some thought that we had attained a different end of history and that the Western liberal views and capitalism (not the unrestrained capitalism of the 19th century, whose inhumanity, as Popper points out, rightfully roused Marx's indignation, but a capitalism tempered by state intervention) had won the battle for freedom and the open society. There were reasons for thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama to hold such views, as China, after 40 years of communist rule, was not yet an economic and political great power and Muslim fundamentalism was not yet perceived as an existential threat.

China's success, which may rekindle belief in the new religion of Marxism, and the Islamo-fascist movements sponsored by Iran and others are threats to the Western liberal democracies, and urgent reasons to read again the works of Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell, those two great 20th century rationalist philosophers.

Both thinkers help us to understand that there is no substitute to reason to improve the lot of mankind and that, ultimately, Russell was not far off the mark when he saw religion as the dragon to slay, in its old and new manifestations.

Muallaf

One movie only was showing at the Picturehouse yesterday ... Muallaf.

"What can this possibly be?" I asked myself. Google ... Yahoo movies ... et voila: "Muallaf tells the story of two Malay sisters, 20 year old Rohani (Sharifah Amani) and 14 year old Rohana (Sharifah Aleysha) who are on the run from their wealthy, abusive father. Finding refuge in a small town, they meet Robert Ng (Brian Yap), a 30 year old Catholic school teacher who finds himself irresistibly drawn to the sisters and their extraordinary courage. This relationship inevitably forces Robert to confront a haunting memory of his own troubled childhood."

It sounded interesting. I decided to go ... and I was immensely rewarded. I will not tell more about the movie's plot than what is said in the teaser from Yahoo Movies. The movie is by Yasmin Ahmad, a Malaysian film director and writer. Obviously made on a small budget, it tells a simple story of relationships between parents and children, believers and non-believers.

Religion, the love of books, enquiring minds, good and evil, gentleness and brutality, joy and sadness, love, respect for and rebellion against parents, all these intersect and blend in this wonderful story told on the background of great music, in which silences and looks tell as much as words.

A rewarding time on a Saturday evening, delighting in a movie which, with a deftly used sense of humour providing comic relief, makes you feel and think about the depth and complexity of ordinary human relationships.

A last look from the terrace of our room at the Whare Kea Lodge

The Whare Kea Lodge is a magical place in New Zealand's Southern Alps (South Island). Its lounge, walled in glass from floor to ceiling, is like the bridge of a ship floating on Lake Wanaka, taking in the majestic grandeur of the Southern Alps. We spent three days there, and never tired of admiring the massif of Mount Aspiring under various lights. This was the last morning, on a slightly overcast day, and a soothing and gentle light on this tableau was urging us to stay in this haven of peace and beauty.

Two days earlier, on a bright sunny morning, the light was so different ... Even the moon looked sharp ...

Kyrie Eleison

Dark skies all day long over Singapore ...

The entrance of Orchard Road at the junction with Scotts is a tunnel under a dark cover of black clouds heavy with rain ... rain that has been falling over this equatorial city for so many days that one does not remember what a sunny day is like.

As an arch to this tunnel, a huge Merry Christmas banner greets you, ornamented with large plasticky childish figures and christmas trees ... It is too early for it to be lit yet and it looks drab in this drab stormy light. Yes, Christmas comes early in Singapore. Those signs have been up for two weeks already. They are supposed to make you merry and tell you that it is time to buy presents for your family and friends.

But, far from evoking these happy thoughts, the ugliness of these decorations is for me a dark reminder of how infantile a society Singapore is. At night, swarms of people come to Orchard Road, the commercial Mecca of Singapore, with their cameras and tripods to take pictures of these illuminations, which, presumably, they find beautiful!

This rich city state is apparently not prepared to pay for artful Christmas decorations that would elevate the taste of its people. No ... those are paid for by Hitachi. A red sign reminds you of it ... "Hitachi Inspires the Next" this sign proudly claims in white letters on the bloody background ... The next what? Who knows? Who cares?

Lacrymosa dies illa ... Mournful that day ...

Post Post Scriptum

I discussed my posting on the Biennale with my wife, and she offered an interesting insight.

It is not because beauty defies definition that true artists need a long and hard apprenticeship. True artists know what beauty is. But attaining it is extremely difficult, and requires long and hard work.

She added that beauty appeals to the senses and cannot be explained in words. Contemporary art does not appeal to the senses but to the intellect. Now most artists want to make a statement, an intellectual statement. No great artistic skill is required for this.

If we accept that their work is artistic work, in spite of the fact that it is not an aesthetic pursuit, then the definition of art in our dictionaries needs to change.

Art is whatever you want it to be ... whatever concretization of your thoughts that you want to produce and exhibit ...

Post Scriptum

My previous posting should not be taken as a criticism of art in Singapore. In fact the Biennale is not about art in Singapore. None of the artists whose works I saw is Singaporean.

No, my comments are on the state of contemporary art in general. And that state, from my point of view, is dismal. Much of contemporary "art" is not art at all; it is often a pretentious, pedestrian, uninformed, political statement or, simply, some "happening" or "installation" mixing various media without any aesthetic concern.

This trend feeds on the uneducated tastes of snobbish yuppies who have too much money but never got the educational background in the humanities necessary to develop an aesthetic sense. They are ready to follow whatever is presented as art, with a seemingly profound but unintelligible philosophical commentary.

I wonder what will happen to these installations I saw in and around the Containart Pavilion. Perhaps spme of them will find their way in a museum, although they do take a lot of space ... They certainly are not collectible by private art collectors.

They are, for the most part, temporary happenings making an ephemeral statement or no statement at all, a testimony of the emptiness of the modern soul.

The Singapore 2008 Art Biennale

What is Art? This is a big question, and it is overly ambitious of me to tackle it in a necessarily short posting, perhaps even pretentious, since I never studied art history.

But I was driven to ask myself this question during a visit of some of the installations of the Art Biennale in Singapore. Certainly, nothing that I saw there falls under the usual conception of what constitutes what most people would think of as art exhibited in museum galleries: paintings and sculptures.

But, even though they are not like the paintings or sculptures seen in galleries, are these installations still art?

The Oxford Shorter Dictionary defines Art as follows:

"A pursuit or occupation in which skill is directed towards the production of a work of imagination, imitation or design, or towards the gratification of the aesthetic senses; the products of any such pursuit."

In those definitions, the adjective "aesthetic" is used. The same dictionary provides this definition of the word, when it is applied to a thing: "in accordance with the principles of good taste; beautiful".

If we accept those definitions, we can agree that works of art are works of imagination, imitation or design which should gratify our sense of good taste and of the beautiful. The production of these works requires the application of skill.

This definition is broad, for it encompasses classical art (which most often mainly attempted to reproduce, through imitation, the beauty of what we see around us), and modern art (which mainly produces abstract works of imagination). It also encompasses, within the broad category of design, architecture, fashion design, decorative arts, etc.

This is a simplification, for there are classical works of art that are purely imaginative. Much of Hieronymus Bosch's work is such. And classical works are rarely only imitative. The artist interprets imaginatively the reality that surrounds him, to extract and enhance its beauty or its sublime character: one can think for instance of Rembrandt's or Turner's use of light. Similarly, modern works often blend abstract and representative elements.

Our definition mentions good taste and beauty. These are, of course, subjective concepts, and they may vary across cultures and times. But I believe that there is a universal idea of Beauty that crosses cultural and time boundaries. Without it, how could we explain the reaction of a Westerner stirred by a Tang Dynasty vase, or of a Chinese or Japanese awed by Picasso's Guernica?

Beauty will be found in the harmonious proportions of an object, in the rich colours and brush strokes that will give depth to an abstract painting, in the play of light on the models reproduced in a classical painting, in the amazing lines and volumes of a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti or Henry Moore. Beauty is what inexplicably arrests us, stirs us deep inside, and makes us look in awe and admiration. It is because beauty defies any precise definition that, to produce it, an artist needs to be skilful. And the acquisition of such skill requires a hard and long apprenticeship.

Works of art also are usually durable. And this is a salutary characteristic, for they can be enjoyed through decades, centuries or millenia, and, if initially rejected, they may be eventually appreciated, as taste evolves and finally recognizes an artist who was ahead of his time.

Contemporary art sometimes is not, however, durable. Andy Goldsworthy's art immediately comes to mind as an example. Although ephemeral, Goldsworthy's creations show his artistic skills. First, he is able to visualize how materials he finds in nature will, after they have been cut, shaped, molded, assembled, or simply thrown in the air or dissolved in a stream, form, for a short period of time, a thing of beauty. And these ephemeral aesthetic events can be immortalized with photography.

The works of art displayed at the Singapore Biennale, at least those I have seen so far, fail to qualify as art, if we accept the definition of art elaborated here, using as reference the Oxford Shorter Dictionary.

They are all temporary installations, but this, in itself, does not disqualify them as aesthetic works, as Goldsworthy's art shows.



The one work that comes closest to deserving the label of art is a piece of architecture, the Containart Pavilion, a temporary building designed by Shigeru Ban which houses several of the Biennale "art" installations.

As a piece of architecture, it is not beautiful, for it uses, as principal structural components, 150 20-foot long shipping containers (together with reusable paper tubes and other materials). Containers are big steel boxes designed to transport goods on ships, trains and trucks around the globe. They are not beautiful, and purely utilitarian. However, the Japanese architect demonstrates his skill by arranging these containers in such a manner that they let light and wind from the outside flow freely through the building, while being wide or long enough to ensure that, even with violent winds, rainstorms will not penetrate inside the building through the empty spaces between the containers.

There is a certain aesthetic appeal in the rythmical geometric arrangement of the containers, and the contrast between the unexpected steel boxes as huge bricks and the more traditional classical shape of those tall columns made of paper tubes.

But the art installations inside are another matter.


This wood structure and its contents are called Location (6), an installation conceived by Hans Op de Beeck, a Belgian artist. The circular shape at the end of the corridor contains the heart of the installation.
You leave your shoes outside before entering the corridor, which is entirely lined with a white fiber fabric. It takes you to a circular room, also entirely white, furnished with three white leather sand-filled ottomans, on which you can sit to contemplate through translucid plastic windows the landscape surrounding you.


The landscape is dismally bleak. You feel as if you are at the center of a hole on a grey winter day, surrounded by low-grade slopes covered with snow as far as you can see, with only sparse small naked trees standing out as sentinels watching you. This is otherworldly, but it is not beautiful. And, although it is not like anything you ever saw before, after the original idea has come to the artist, it does not require great skill in realizing it. It is interesting, but it is not art.

Our next stop is Between You and I (sic), an installation by Anthony McCall, who lives in the US.
You enter a tall, relatively narrow dark room, where you see nothing but two beams of white light originating from sources in the ceiling. They intersect the black floor on which one inscribes a cross which has the rough shape of an incomplete svastika, and the other a circle. A haze coming from humidifiers invisible in this very dark room rises in the beams of light.

It is difficult to see this as a work of art, according to our working definition. Here is what the Biennale guide has to say: "McCall's solid -light films deal with light in space and something elemental that can have the effect of opening up existential questions for us as viewers [really?]. This, combined with the inherent elegance and scale of Between You and I, may allow us an experience that is essentially sublime in nature when we encounter the work in Ban's open structure ..."

We immediately regognize the pseudo-philosophical babble often used to describe worthless contemporary "art": "something elemental ... opening up existential questions ... an experience that is essentially sublime in nature ... [whatever this may mean]". This language is used by the "sophisticated" people (those who go to the openings of these modern art installations and really get it) to intimidate the uninitiated into believing that they are seeing and "experiencing" something great. You do not understand this babble (do not feel bad, nobody does, even those who speak or write it), but it sounds profound, and, surely, this work of art, to inspire such deep thoughts, must be something you must admire, even though you do not find it beautiful and do not respond in any way to it.

The other large installation in Ban's Containart Pavilion was Manas (Utopian City) by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Ukrainian artists who live and work in the US. This work is a model, assembled with plywood, of a utopian city, presumably located in Northern Tibet. Eight steep mountains stand around a perfectly circular crater, illuminated by a light issued from a crater in the ceiling, also surrounded by eight mountains, mirroring those on the boat-like structure supporting this imaginary city.


This structure is enclosed in an oval room made of plywood, with just enough space to walk around the model of the city. The room is surrounded by a doughnut shaped gallery where you can see maquettes of the mountains surrounding the crater, with the buildings they support.
In case you do not appreciate the beauty or the meaning of this installation, the guide provides a helpful explanation: "The Kabakov's narrative maintains that the inhabitants of this city had contact with the cosmos, and on the peak of each mountain a structure was built to hold an object with singular abilities. Their stories, or rather the purposes of these utopian structures, are elucidated in accompanying texts. In one, time can move in several directions; in others, cosmic energy or transcendent experience can be transferred. Some are shown to be observatories to witness other universes. As such, each maquette acts as a node, or conduit to another world. Manas is our escape route from the banality to the commonplace."

This is less than clear to me ... except for the last sentence ... This installation is an escape from the banality to the commonplace.

Aside from those three large installations, which are anything you like but not art, more modest displays could be found in some of the containers, such as this one, Art of the T Bungalow 50. This is nothing more than a few zany T-shirts suspended on a rack, with intermittent neon lighting at the center.

This T-shirt proudly proclaims, in French, "We are young, we are proud." Perhaps it was created in 1968 when Paris burnt under student riots. There were many proud young people then, who thought they made a revolution, when in fact they accomplished nothing.
A titillating T-shirt, but who would dare wearing it? I think that we can all agree that this installation is not art. Some of the T-shirts themselves are interesting, but putting them on hangers on a rack in a container and illuminating them with neon lights is not art, and it certainly does not require any artistic skill.



Another container had been transformed into a projection room. A video showed the prow of a boat being tossed on a heaving sea, flipping over and flipping back up. This is Floating, a creation of Yuan Goang Ming, a Taiwanese artist. According to the guide, "the artist was inspired while he was studying in Germany, where he felt an invisible cultural gap that caused a sense of isolation." Well, perhaps ...
On one side of the Containart Pavilion stood a forest of 4000 bamboo poles, on top of which could be seen plastic slippers. This is Flight, by Alfredo Juan Aquilizan and Maria Isabel Gaudinez-Aquilizan, both from the Philippines, but living and working in Australia. Here is a detail.
A guide in the pavilion explained to me that these slippers perched on the bamboo poles had actually been worn by prisoners in Singapore's Changi Prison.
Our last stop in this exploration of art installations at the Singapore Biennale will be Fog Sculpture "Noontide", by Fujiko Nakaya, with a lighting design by Takayuki Fujimoto, both of Japan.

This is a huge waterfall-like fog, created by steam emanating from a drain below the Esplanade Bridge. People stop to take pictures of it and kids love getting wet running through it.

So what are those installations, if they are not art? Modern art works are not always created for aesthetic purposes. Sometimes, the artist wants to deliver a message, often a political message. In those works, it is difficult to see a message. Perhaps the creator of Location (6) has a deep concern about the environment and wants to show us the desolate world that would result from industry and pollution running amok. This is the closest the art on display comes to a political message.

But art, in my opinion, should not carry a political message, or any message. The more art wants to tell us something specific, the less it succeeds as art.

Unless we change the definition of "art" in the dictionaries, the works on display at the Biennale are not art. People still associate art with the pursuit of the beautiful, which can be attained only through rigorous training.

Those works are not art, and the artists who produced them did not, in the doing, display any artistic skill.

The Feast of Han Xizai

Tomorrow is the celebration of the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival. Chinese cultural events were organized in Singapore for the occasion. I was invited by a Chinese colleague to see one of them this evening at the Esplanade Theater.


The Feast of Han Xizai is a theatrical production inspired by a one thousand year old painting of the same name. It blends drama, poetry, music, dance and opera of the Tang era to tell the story of Han Xizai, a courtier who is attempting, not very successfully, to dispel his deep sadness at the decadence of the Tang Dynasty by immersing himself in a feast of music, dance and revelry with friends and courtesans.

The show was produced by a Taiwanese group and staged in a modern and minimalist setting of impeccable taste (almost Japanese). The costumes, however, were pure Tang era and magnificent. The action (to the extent that there was any) was arranged in five or six scenes, which were like tableaux of the successive stages of the party taking place on stage.

I loved the music, particularly the pipa played by a woman who was also singing a piece of poetry. It was a slow rythmic incantation, punctuated by chords plucked on this ancient string instrument. It reminded me of the biwa played by a blind young man in a Japanese movie I saw eons ago. There was a very catching drum dance performed by 5 women. They were facing the audience sitting at five drums arranged in front of the stage, with their left foot varying the pressure on the skin of the drum, which they were playing with two sticks.

The dancing was exquisitely graceful. There was in particular a "long sleeve" dance, which I liked very much, and also a "four clappers" dance, in which the dancing women were producing rattling and clapping sounds with wooden clappers they held in their hands.

It was a wonderful show, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. My only criticism is that the dramatic part, when the music and dancing stopped or took backstage, was at times excruciatingly slow and excessively mannered. But these are the characteristics of an ancient art form that are most likely to make modern audiences impatient. The staging of a tea ceremony was far too long, even though it was accompanied by arresting sounds plucked out of an ancient Chinese string instrument.

My friend asked to stay for the discussion with the artistic director and two of the artists after the performance. It was all in Chinese, which was of course entirely lost on me. I could not even amuse myself by taking pictures. I managed to snatch the one reproduced here of the two artists during the question and answer session. Although I did not use the flash, the noise of the shutter attracted the attention of an usher who almost jumped on me to remind me that taking pictures was strictly verboten. I would not have taken pictures during the performance, but I thought that it would not be distracting during the Q&A session. However, in Singapore, the rules are the rules and they are followed blindly by people who are not trained to exercise judgment.

But, nevermind these negative comments ... This was a superb show.

A Few Memorable Days in Pittsburgh

I spent a few days in Pittsburgh in August on the occasion of my son's wedding. It was only my second visit to this city in Western Pennsylvania, on the threshold of the Midwest.


The wedding ceremony took place in the Heinz Chapel, built on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh with Heinz money and inspired by the Sainte Chapelle of Paris (tall and thin, with amazingly high stained glass windows).



Amid religious themes, one can see homages to historical, artistic or scientific figures,such as this allegorical image of Abraham Lincoln raising a black man from slavery.


Next to the chapel, the Cathedral of Learning stands high and proud, a landmark of the University of Pittsburgh. I visited it the day after the wedding.

A large gathering of Indians had taken over the main hall on the ground floor of the building and were holding a festival to celebrate India's National Day. The colorful Indian dresses and saris were standing out in this austere and cavernous hall.


India's National Day is August 15, but Indians worked that day in the US, and they were holding this festival two days later on a Sunday. Both the Indian and US flags were stretched on an elaborate iron gate on each side of an image of Gandhi, and the US national anthem was sung before the Indian anthem. It was moving to see these immigrants thus honoring their new home on the day celebrating the independence of their country of origin.

Then a group of dancers performed a traditional dance on classical Indian music. It was a magnificent show, which I could see only from the back, behind that iron gate.






Where else than in the United States would such a scene take place? It was a reminder that the US, vilified by the left-wing media, hated by many for its power and wealth, and for the fact that it has on several occasions helped them to win wars and keep their freedom against oppressive and totalitarian regimes (it is unpleasant and humiliating to feel in debt), still is a beacon of hope and a land of opportunity, where immigrants flock to build better lives for themselves and their families, a country built not on race and tribe, but on the luminous ideal of living in freedom, and in pursuit of happiness.

School Assembly in Singapore

Every morning when school is in session, I hear from my bathroom the voice of a man speaking in a microphone. I can see through the window the Anglo Chinese School (Junior). It is about 7-7:30 in the morning, time for school assembly.

Students in uniforms are sitting on the ground in the school yard, in well aligned rows, silent, listening to the amplified teacher's voice. I cannot hear what he says, but it must be some morally uplifting harangue putting these children in the appropriate frame of mind to receive knowledge and wisdom from their teachers during the day, or to salute the flag, hanging flacid on the pole in the absence of a salutory breeze that would distract from the ever present humid heat.

Thus everyday it is drilled in the minds of the children of Singapore that they should respect authority, work hard, keep their heads down and not ask questions.

Moonlight Sonata

When words are impotent ... Music or pictures might do ...

A Turner exhibit at the Met

A couple of weeks ago, on a leisurely but rainy 4th of July weekend in New York, there was nothing better to do than to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This was an inspiration, for it turns out that there was a huge exhibit of Turner oil and water color paintings on display.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 - 1851) was a romantic, inspired by and in search of "The Sublime". He was very advanced for his times and controversial. A contemporary review was posted near a painting, reflecting what some art critics thought of his style, when it turned abstract: "Throwing handfuls of white, and blue, and red, at the canvas, letting what chanced to stick, stick; and then shadowing in some forms to make the appearance of a picture."

For a modern viewer however, his most abstract paintings seem familiar and reveal Turner as a great precursor to the Impressionists. It is forbidden to take pictures at special exhibitions at the Met, but I dodged the guards and managed to catch on my phone camera four of the most impressive abstract works on display.

Willows beside a stream

This charming landscape is rendered in impressionistic touches, suggesting rather than asserting, creating a relaxed and quiet mood. The eye is attracted to the left bottom corner by a few colorful and bright brush strokes, which sketch what perhaps was intended to be a pastoral scene. It is left unfinished, but it creates a welcome counterpoint to the trunks of the willow trees across the stream.

The Lake from Petworth House, Sunset


Calais Sands at Low Water, Poissards Collecting Bait

A powerful painting. In the forefront, against the backdrop of an incandescent sunset, bent-over fishermen wives collect worms in the wet sand. The thin film of water over the flat sand reflects their twisted bodies, the setting sun, the dark clouds and an isolated rock.

Sunset over Como

A late unfinished washed out water color ... an evanescent dream ... but one can distinguish the ruin of a castle, the towers of a town in the distance, the lake surrounded by dark hills under the vibrating light of an Italian sun.