#53 Sat (8/13/22) - [OW] two encounters - camera obscura and Arthur Rimbaud

Secret Knowledge

David Hockney's Secret Knowledge is a documentary program on BBC in which the British artist examines and in some cases recreates famous art works from the Renaissance period (after 1430).  He starts with an examination of the Arnolfini Wedding, pointing out tiny details, not to try to understand their symbolism, but rather to try to understand the technique for creating such realistic depictions.  Notably, he looks at the curved branching chandelier above the couple.  It is so intricate with so many branching metal leaves, that he says it would not be possible to paint or even sketch this object and get it right, however with the use of 3D modeling techniques, he says that you can map the object just from the painting and get a perfect 3D likeness of the object.  After looking at other curious phenomenon and wondering aloud 'why did painting just get so much better after about 1420?' he presents a curious hypothesis.  One that we all must know, but have forgotten. The common received wisdom - that people just suddenly got better at drawing - seems shallow and unbelievable.  No, he says, lens and mirrors, glass blowing.  Leonardo da Vinci had a camera obscura.  With the use of a lens and a dark room (camera obscura literally means dark room) you can project a perfect reflection of a scene or object on a screen or canvas and then just trace or paint it in.  He shows that prior to this period, metal and armor were painted in flat or matte finish, after this period, armor and metal shined and gleamed in exactly the right way.  Almost photo-realistic.  He looks at proportions of painting sizes and says they are all curiously about 30 centimeters, the size that could be easily accommodated with a 5 inch lens, which was the size they could produce easily.  He also shows that mirrors (especially convex ones, which we knew they had in that period, not least because one appears in the Arnolfni Wedding) can be used to project an image as well.  An image of a landscape can be projected on an inside wall next to a window.  The realistic depth perception, that we have attributed to a sudden awareness of perspective and geometry, he says came first from tracing photo reflections and only then was extrapolated into a mathematical process to extend the area of the picture, outside of what could be shown from a single projection.  

He brings up the case where Brunelleschi painted the front of the Baptistry in perspective and then used a keyhole in the door and had people look through it to the painting, they could not tell it was a painting and not the Baptistry.   but we know that the perspective was painted from about 7 feet inside the doors, in the darkened foyer of the adjacent building, why? Camera obscura. It looks real, and proportional because it was a painting of a reflection.

This does not seem remarkable really, it is fascinating nonetheless. (In Bruges (Antwerp?), the painters' guild and the mirror makers' guild was the same. Why?)

The form of the poem

The second encounter was a conversation with a friend about the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, enfant terrible of the Parisian poetry scene, who died at a young age, but gave up poetry altogether and became something of an adventurer in Africa. What explains his sudden dismissal of poetry and the seemingly abrupt change of his circumstances? Did his poetic inspiration burn out? Given that his poetry is about dispossession of the self, did he put his aesthetic ideals into practice, instead of just writing about them?  What if the abrupt cessation of producing poetry is another form of the poem.  The shape of the poem may have changed but the idea being worked perhaps did not.  Can an artist incorporate punctuation into his own corpus of produced 'visible' works?  Does that include the 'full stop' (British term for the period at the end of sentences.) Does the pause or the terminus add anything to the work beyond simply making it unfinished.  Is a lack of written 'visible' works mean that no 'invisible' works are being produced?  I was struck by the similarity to Pierre Menard and also to the works of Herbert Quain, both of which include some unfinished business.  Hladik's The Enemies also has an invisible, unfinished aspect to it.  I think Borges would have agreed that the poet could have been working in an unseen register and yet continuing the work in secret, internally, obscured.  No one would ever read The Enemies, nor the labyrinthine novel of T'sui Pen's ancestor.  No one could know of the creative act that took place in a darkened jail cell in The God Script.  Poetry is still poetry, even if only the writer ever sees it.  To be written, to be read, are just two sides of the same coin.