Now that I have to spend days in my office again I’ve begun going through all the many art books I’ve accumulated in the last 18 months but was unwilling to port home. Today’s book was French Art Deco, a survey of the period based on items in the Met’s collection. Below are some favorites. The Met’s website is cruel about even increasing the size of images but the book’s listing at least links all the items featured.

Séraphin Soudbinine’s Fortissimo and Piannismo screens – which remind me of early Sienese painting.

This Robert Lallemant vase which draws on Chinese predecessors while also looking very Bladerunner:

Armand-Albert Rateau’s dressing table and (not featured) matching hand mirror:

From Eva Wong’s translation of Lieh-Tzu. I’m told it’s a rather free translation and that the recent French edition Les Fables de Maître Lie (ISBN 9782910386443) is far better but it remains en route at the moment and I don’t trust my attention span.

The Value of Emptiness

Someone asked Lieh-tzu, “Why do you value emptiness?”

Lieh-tzu said, “Most people like to be praised. They feel good when their accomplishments are acknowledged. However, I feel we would be better off if we were empty of attachments and not imprisoned by recognition, approval, and disapproval. In the long run, we’d have fewer things to worry about. That’s why I value emptiness.”

Lieh-tzu paused and then continued, “Even if you were given credit for doing something, you should realize that it was not entirely your own doing. Events occur because conditions are right, and your action only contributes to one of the many conditions. We are accustomed to thinking that when things happen, they are our ‘accomplishments’; we don’t understand that there is actually nothing to accomplish. Therefore, rather than accept credit that does not belong to anyone, why not quiet down and think about the workings of heaven and earth?

“Seeing the emptiness of things can help us cultivate stillness and peace of mind. If you do not know how to keep still in this crazy world, you will be drawn into all kinds of unnecessary trouble. You will lose your view of the Way, and, when you realize it, it will be too late, for in losing the Way, you will have also lost yourself.”

Chuang-tzu once told a story about two persons who both lost a sheep. One person got very depressed and lost himself in drinking, sex, and gambling to try to forget this misfortune. The other person decided that this would be an excellent chance for him to study the classics and quietly observe the subtleties of nature. Both men experienced the same misfortune, but one man lost himself because he was too attached to the experience of loss, while the other found himself because he was able to let go of gain and loss.

I was paging through a recent edition of the twelfth century comic ‘beast epic’ Ysengrimus and was reminded of these two papyri from the British Museum’s collection.

This first (details and expandable image here) is described as:

Papyrus with satirical vignettes: a figured scene in which animals ape human activities, but in a topsy-turvy world, they act against their natural instincts. The lion does not attack the gazelle but plays a board game, probably ‘senet’, with her. The pair grasps the playing pieces with great difficulty; the lion also holds a dice made from an animal bone. Even when the lion wins, he claims his reward in the bedroom: although the end of the papyrus is damaged, it is surely the same gazelle who is depicted there lying on her back on the bed. The rampant lion who overwhelms her certainly wears the same triumphant expression. Framed by this scene is one in which goats and geese are driven along by their natural predators the hyena, fox, and wild cat who walk upright like human herdsmen, wielding a goad, carrying their possessions in a bag slung over a pole carried on the shoulder, leaning on a staff or playing a double flute. As a further irony the cat cradles a gosling.

The second (details and expandable image here) gets a lengthier commentary:

Illustrated papyrus: fragments of an illustrated papyrus showing animals engaged in human activities, including a hippopotamus making beer, a cat waiting on a mouse, a lion making beer and a canine carrying grain.

It is uncertain how the papyrus would have been ‘read’; the scenes do not represent a narrative sequence of successive events, and are thus unlikely to be a mnemonic summary or illustration of narrative tales, or to have been verbalized into a spoken narration.

Such papyri are often composed of parodies of types of scene from official and religious art, suggesting that the effect of the humour and the manner in which the papyrus was ‘read’ were purely visual. The sequence of images representing comic role-reversals is similar to the episodic textual images of social reversals in classic poems like the ‘Dialogue of lpuur and the Lord of All’. It has been suggested that the papyrus images are social satire that mocked officials by portraying them as animals, but it is more likely that these scenes were not subversive or programmatic social satire aimed at particular classes, but principally expressed a holiday mood. The world turned upside down may be connected directly with the New Year feast and the drunkenness of religious festivals – which would explain why some similar types of scene occur on Greco-Roman Period temple walls. They are, however, also connected with relaxation of a less liturgical nature, constituting laughter pure and simple; this carnival atmosphere has left little trace in the monumental record. Although a modern audience’s response is spontaneous, it is difficult to reconstruct the original cultural context and suggest a plausible interpretation. The provenance may have been the village of Deir el-Medina.

A close-up of the brewer hippo: