文明

BBC新版《文明》，2018年献礼，共九集。覆盖六大洲，三十一个国家，五百多件艺术品。主讲人历史学家 Simon Sharma、学者 Mary Beard 和 David Olusoga 将探讨人类的创造欲望。此外，“文明节”将通过...解说写的实在太漂亮，决定挑一些喜欢的誊下来。时隔一年半，我终于把剩下的三集看完了。一集一集写。E06 Radiance26’20’’ GoyaThe Black Paintings seem to me to be an endgame for Goya, not just in his own life and career in his 70s, but also his feeling about an endgame for art, the art that aspired through beauty to ennoble the spirit of civilization.Shock at his own monstrousness, Francisco de Goya,1820-1823 https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/saturn/18110a75-b0e7-430c-bc73-2a4d55893bd6One of the most terrifying of all these paintings, perhaps the most famous one, shows Saturn devouring one of his children. That’s what it’s come to. The huge tradition of classical mythology reduced to a mad, antic, capering monster, chewing on the stump of a small body, but look at that body. Not a child at all. It’s the body miniaturized of a female nude. Two millennia of looking at the nude, of seeing it as a symbol of art’s perfection is reduced to this horrifying image of sadistic cruelty. Fight with Cudgels, or Fight to Death with Clubs, Francisco de Goya, 1820-1823https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/duel-with-cudgels-or-fight-to-the-death-with-clubs/2f2f2e12-ed09-45dd-805d-f38162c5beafIn one of the paintings, he puts the lights back on. We’re able to see something, but what is it we’re seeing? The light is given to us to reveal another kind of horror. These two huge peasant-like figures beating the living daylights out of each other. Blood is streaming down the head of one of them, even as they sink deeper and deeper into a kind of sandy quagmire. This is what Spain has become. Endless, relentless, mutual slaughter. Now, all these monsters and horrors and demons and dragons of course had appeared all over European art before, but where had they appeared? They’d appeared in images of the Last Judgment and the Apocalypse, and they were always balanced by a sense of the optimism of salvation. But Goya has come to the conclusion that God is absent without leave and there is one painting, which in a sense is least likely to have the horrifying pessimistic eloquence, but it does.The Drowning Dog, Francisco de Goya, 1820-1823https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-drowning-dog/4ea6a3d1-00ee-49ee-b423-ab1c6969bca6There are no figures, there’s just a dog, a mutt. But for this dog, the master is gone, dead, slaughtered, missing. He’s no longer going to be fed. He’s simply faced with drowning inside this formless brown vacuum. It’s all come down to this, then. A dog without a master. Spain without its god. Humanity absolutely without civilization.E01 Second Moment of Creation4’53’’We can spend a lot of time debating what civilization is or isn’t, but when it’s opposite shows up, in all its brutality and cruelty and intolerance and lust for destruction, we know what civilization is; we know it from the shock of its imminent loss as a mutilation on the body of our humanity.16’58’’With this exquisite, intensively carved female head, we have for the first time, something immensely and movingly momentous. We have the revelation of the human face. It’s a tiny thing, it can just go in the palm of your hand and it could have only been made by an extraordinary array of dexterous skills. 39’36’’Ultimately, all civilizations want exactly what they can’t have: the conquest of time. So they build bigger, higher and grander as if they could build their way out of mortality, and it never works. There always comes a moment where the most populous of cities with their markets and temples and palaces and funeral tombs are simply abandoned. And that most indefatigable leveller of all, mother nature, closes in, covering the place with desert sand, or strangling it with vegetation. And then, civilization dies the death of deaths, invisibility. E02 How do we look?25'41"The one thing you really get here is that size matters. These vast monumental figures, perhaps four or five times life size and with that nice hint that they’d been even bigger if they bothered to stand up for you, simply dominate. They take over your field of vision. It’s an assertion of the power of the pharaoh through his huge, superhuman, enthroned body.33’31”If early Athenian pottery reflects how man and women were expected to live within the social context of the city, its statues attempt to embody the interior life within. The beginning of the fifth century BCE saw an amazing transformation in Greek sculpture. Rigid figures with the fixed gaze of phrasikleia give way to daring new experiments in the human form. One of the first of these is known as the Kritios boy, and he would transform how we see the sculpted human body.The Kritios boy show us that you can signal anteriority through the person’s movement, through their stance. But particularly, if you lose the archaic smile, and you have an expression which isn’t necessarily blank, that immediately invites you, the spectator, to psychologise it. So with that one step, the statue acquires not just a body that is an organism rather than a mechanism, but also what we would probably call, a soul.41’57’’“This was quite simply the most sublime statue of antiquity to have escaped destruction. An eternal springtide, clothes the alluring virility of his mature years with a pleasing youth and plays with soft tenderness upon the lofty structure of his limbs."49’46’’We still have a lot of really unexamined assumptions about what constitutes a beautiful or desirable body. We have a lot of unexamined assumptions about what constitutes an attractive, or aesthetically appealing way to look. And you have only to open up the pages of a women’s magazine, as people are commonly pointing out, to see how incredibly narrow the space is in a certain kind of western aesthetic consciousness, for what a woman can look like. Similar kinds of things can be applied to men as well.Reinforced by commercial interests, the cult of youth and beauty begun by the ancient Greeks, is perhaps more powerful than ever today. E03 Picturing Paradise6’34’’李成《晴峦萧寺图》http://collection.sina.com.cn/zgsh/20121116/152092655.shtmlWhat makes Li Cheng’s painting a masterpiece, is that it literally rises above royal propaganda. As our eye ascends through the painting, so our whole approach to it also ascends to a higher order of question. And Li Cheng has changed the wash of the ink. It’s lighter, finer, more ethereal. It suggests deep distance. But depths of our own response as well as physical depths. What is nature? What lies beyond surface appearance? What truly moves the universe? And how above all, does the dialogue between flowing water and the adamant face of that eroded rock, bring us harmony?18’56’’But renaissance humanism took a different attitude to the serpent of temptation. This is Villa Barbaro. … A place where renaissance ideals of culture and sophistication could meet the earthy pleasures of the country. A building of harmony, grace and pleasure, where it would be forever summer. Leonardo Da Vinci wrote something fascinating. He says, “one of the values of painting is it can show you the beauty of nature and perhaps your lover in nature, in the middle of winter.” When you’re stuck inside, you’re stuck indoors, but you can remember what the meadows and what lovely picnics were like last summer by looking at a painting of it.If you extend that into a kind of a theory of landscape art, you might say that the first way that people express the desire to escape into landscape is by actually creating escapist worlds.30’41”Hunters in the Snow, Pieter Bruegel 1565https://www.wikiart.org/en/pieter-bruegel-the-elder/hunters-in-the-snow-1565Bruegel painted these compendious, visually inexhaustible masterpieces after the longest, bleakest, coldest Flemish winter anyone could remember. Let’s just think for a minute the way in which Bruegel makes us look at these pictures. On the one hand, they are an invitation into a wealth of detail, wherever our eye travels, it picks out these lovely minutiae of work and play. The skaters gliding across the ice. Our eye travels from one kind of landscape, a village huddled on the hill, to a completely different one. A frozen mountain or a storm tossed estuary out to the broad open sea. But there are moments as well when the pure compositional muscle that Bruegel can command makes everything come together in one great universal vision. It makes us stop. It makes us have a moment of contemplation. And then If we’re very, very lucky, like these wonderful paintings, it all seems to add up. A whole of the human condition and our special little place within it. 40’30”There were a few kind of particular characteristics that marked out the American approach to the landscape. One of those was a sense of inferiority and competition with Europe that Americans in the 18thcentury and the early 19thcentury, were the poor country cousins. And they were on the outermost fringe of an European world in which they had been taught that Rome is the centre of all art, that the best landscapes, the tallest mountains are to be found in Switzerland. And here are Americans, on the threshold really of their own great continent, which they are beginning increasingly to move west across, trying to say, “wait, you know what, we have really high mountains also. And we have really big animals that we can celebrate in the same terms you guys are using but with our characters instead.” And I think that was out of inferiority in a funny sense, that a kind of American pride in the American landscape was born. 43’21”More and more (Ansel) Adam’s photographs became preachy. But those vision sermons were radiant, mystical, ecstatic. They were passionate statements about how humanity could be redeemed through the encounter with nature. But throughout, he remains steadfast that his job in life is to give visual form to that silken cord, tying together the fate of man with the fate of the earth.E04 The Eye of Faith43’49’’What all of these movements within religions have in common is that they come along saying we have a purer form of faith than the one that is currently being practiced, and if your fundamental goal is purity, then one of the central things you might try to do would be to eliminate opulent aesthetic or potentially sinful representations of things to act as intermediaries, because then maybe you’re just worshipping the object, you’re not actually worshipping the divine. So it makes sense that protestants in the Reformation went into the monasteries and stripped everything out saying “it’s time to get rid of these images.” 51’35’’We passionately want to rediscover the spiritual in art, we passionately want to discover that kind of power and purpose that religious art has. Whether it’s reinventing Christian art in cathedrals or whether it’s reinventing Islamic art, it’s about wanting to resacralise art, wanting to rediscover that wonderful, almost magical, charismatic purpose that religious art has. For much of history, art has been religious art. For some, the creative impulse has been the very expression of divinity. For others, a challenge to God’s authority. For those that believe, religious art has always been transformative; yet for everyone, art retains a primal, spiritual feeling, a way to express the mysterious and it speaks to our earliest human drive to touch and define a world beyond our own. E05 The Triumph of Art50’49’’Out there the western hurly burly is getting ready to make terrible mischief to smash its way into the domed heavenly vault, to stick its bloody great brutal boots right into the paradise garden. It’ll make an empire based on machines, money and muskets. Then slowly but surely, the Moghul Empire will disappear entirely inside its courtly refinement, becoming inextricably just a cultural ornament. After centuries of extraordinary flowering, the eastern Renaissance was transformed by the twin forces of empire and colonialism. The delicate blooms and glowing jewels survived in what Europeans wore on their bodies and how they decorate their homes. While painters were mislabeled as miniaturists, as they were forced at least for a time, to rely on the patronage of their new British rulers. Western art critics increasingly called the artistic beauty of the east decorative, to distinguish it from pictures they put in frames where Europeans consider real art. But it was in the east, that the ancient meaning of ars, craft was preserved in all its splendor and still is. Because here, unlike in the west, the Renaissance wasn’t about the rebirth of classical knowledge. Unlike Europe, the east had never lost touch with its ancient heritage. A rich heritage which it continues to celebrate and share with the world to this day. E06 First Contact 28’07’’《冰山屏风》圆山应举Cracked Ice, Maruyama Okyohttps://theartsdesk.com/tv/civilisations-first-contact-bbc-two-review-david-olusoga-goes-goldWhat’s regarded as his greatest work, cracked ice, combined everything Okyo knew from both eastern and western traditions. It’s so subtle, so minimal, a work of art that almost feels like it isn’t there. And everything about it feels ephemeral and frail. It’s painted on paper not canvas as in the west, and great expanses of it are just white blank areas that seem almost untouched by the artist. And yet all of that belies the fact that this is one of the most sophisticated works of cultural synthesis that I know. It shows a sheet of ice, presumably on a lake, and these broken jagged cracks in the ice disappeared into the mist. The effect is three-dimensional space. Now, that is European vanishing point perspective. And yet, this is one of Okyo’s masterworks, just could not be more Japanese, because it’s a philosophical contemplation of two concepts, fundamental to Buddism, imperfection and impermanence. Imperfection because these lines are uncontrolled and irregular; Impermanence because of course the ice will melt. And those two are just as fundamental to Japanese art, as the classical Greek roman ideas of beauty and perfection are to European art. So this is Okyo incorporating European ideas into his art, but in ways that are in keeping with Japanese philosophy and Japanese tastes. 32’11’’In this frenzy of trade and wealth, Dutch art also became the object of conspicuous consumption. A modern commercial art market was born, supplying landscapes, still lifes, portraits and scenes from Dutch life to the aspirational new merchant class. What they wanted in their art was not the pomp of monarchy, or the flamboyance of the catholic church, but a new type of realism, one that reflect their protestant desire to portray the world as it truly was, often with warts and all moral lessons. With art from renaissance, it’s about beauty. Dutch art, it’s not about that, it’s about reality. So you do paint rotten fruits, and you do paint fat ladies that just woke up in their bed. And you do look at dirty dogs in the street. Because it’s about nature in every sense, and not just in the sense that you want it to be, but in the sense it is. 33’22’’One of the star artists of this golden age of Dutch painting was Vermeer. Jan Vermeer is not an artist known for his epic landscapes. Most of his paintings are famously intimate, set within a neat, ordered, almost claustrophobic world of the Dutch home.What Jan Vermeer specialized in was the art of everyday life and his world was an interior world. What he captured on canvas were simple fleeting moments. A woman reading a letter is bathed in a delicate light that pours from a side window. But that only serves to emphasize the fact that we are in an enclosed room and the rest of the world is hidden from sight, that it’s somewhere out there. But if you look a little more closely at the details, what you realise is that Vermeer’s seemingly interior domestic space is infused with the globalism of the Dutch golden age. From the innovative pottery of his hometown of Delft, which mimicked Chinese porcelain, to prized rugs from the orient, and a geographer wearing a fashionable Japanese robe, Vermeer captures a world built on encounters with distant civilizations and peoples.50’05’’Hundreds of public buildings built in the British neoclassical tradition would follow. They represented not only a separation of cultures that had before freely intermingled, they also marked the passing of the age of discovery. The world had entered an age of high empire, in which to justify their exploitations and conquests, European powers would willfully overlook the achievements of other civilisations. It was a story that would be repeated around the globe and we are only just emerging from its cultural legacy today. In a wonderful twist, Richard Wellesley’s government house is used by the government of Bengal. It has been taken back by Indians for their own government. And so we have to unthink some of the inevitability that we tend to ascribe to encounters that ultimately led to European dominance. If you look at the history of European encounters with the non-European world, you find a huge range of ways that they took shape.And although there is a history that has to be told, a story that is one of imperialism, but a story that is also one of globalization, one of increasing interconnection across different parts of the world that has yielded the world in which we live today. Our modern world of digital communication has massively broaden the scope of our encounters, both with foreign cultures and civilisations and within the different cultural groupings of our own. And by connecting new audience with traditional artistic practices, the global art market continues to transform new encounters into new kinds of art. From the reemergence of the long overlooked sacred art, like that of North American first nations, the indigenous people of Australia and the carvings of the African Makonde people, to new artists such as Ghanaian born sculptor El Anatsui, who sews together bottle tops into large scale assemblages that comment on consumption, waste and the environment. Today, in our increasingly globalized civilization, the sheer variety of our encounters both foreign and at home continues to be a major source of inspiration, shaping both our art and our world.