a callipygian book

Some thoughts on

Museum bums: A cheeky looks at butts in art
Mark Small and Jack Shoulder
Chronicle Books 2023

Back in the good old days of twitter, I used to follow @museumbums for a daily dose of cheeky art, but now our ways have parted as they're on bluesky and apparently haven't bridged to Mastodon (yet). Hence it made my day when I accidentally discovered their book in charity shop and I mainly bought it as a souvenir to remind me of the happy days of twitter.

Turns out, however, that the cheeky text accomppanying the callipygian photos is very educational too, so I gave the book a proper reading. In the process I learned that callipygian means "with a beautiful bum" - I don't know how I missed that before, that's what you get for not having Ancient Greek at school. I will now use this word at every opportunity to make up for lost time.

The authors are proper museum bums, sorry, experts, who know their art history from the bottom up, and they manage to tie it in with today's social concerns in a highly entertaining way, bringing up all the inherent biases and prejudices in the Western art canon without ever losing the fun side out of view.

Now if only they could bridge their account to Mastodon, I could continue to educate myself every day ...

PS I hear they may be doing wall calendars as well - will look out for that!

ukbookshop.org

a fine lady

Following the instructions of the nursery rhyme:

Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
And she shall have music wherever she goes

I went to Banbury and found this fine lady:



And I thought she really did look like a fine lady. And she had the bells on her toes all right, though one couldn't move the bells, so she couldn't have any music. But the horse is looking very nice too:



The sculpture isn't historic, by the way, it was put up 5 or 6 years ago, probably in an attempt to attract more tourists to Banbury, which is in fact a charming market town with a shopping area that's probably larger than Oxford's.

happy shark day

Last week I had things to do up the hill in Headington and decided to visit the Headington shark, an iconic work of art which I've blogged about before but which I had only seen from a safe distance (i.e. from the main road) so far. So here's at last, one of my own photos of it:



It looked different from the Wikipedia picture I posted three years ago - the shark lost the white paint on its belly, and someone cut back the plants that covered the facades of the houses in the older picture. Plus, someone put a stupid traffic sign too close to the shark (New road layout ahead, or something similarly important). People can be so inconsiderate around art ...

But other than that, it looked really good for a shark that's been stuck in a roof for 24 years. Pleased to report that it has found acceptance to an extent that the PR work for Headington shops now uses the shark in various icons (e.g. here) and it has its own official page on the Headington website (where you'll also find the whole back story, including various attempts of authorities to have it removed). Oh, and it's the shark's birthday tomorrow, 9.8.(Nagasaki day). So happy shark day to all.

Henry Moore at Tate Britain

I enjoyed visiting the Henry Moore exhibition at the Tate Britain yesterday, just in the nick of time as it closes at the end of next week.



(one of his reclining figures in elm wood)
More photos from my visit to the Tate here.

I liked the early work especially, but also the reclining figures he did throughout his career. Should visit the Henry Moore Foundation at Perry Green, too.

PS As a former ribosome researcher, I tend to see the crude structures of the ribosome in Moore's abstracted "mother-and-child" pieces. I think one of them appeared on the cover of one of the ribosome books in the 90s. How amazingly prescient of Moore to sculpt the ribosome decades before scientists figured out its shape.

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In other arts news, I also visited the Howard Hodgkin exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, but didn't quite know what to make of it. The Guardian's Jonathan Jones managed to write an interesting article about it though: Howard Hodgkin - the last English romantic painter

finding the sculpture inside the tree

Last week I had a very interesting chat with a local artist, Dominique Lussier, who showed me some of the sculptures he's produced from wood, which he gets locally from tree surgeons. So branches cut off from people's cherry trees might turn into something like this:



(untitled - photo courtesy of the artist)

He very much works with the natural grain and structures of the wood, which often results in a mixture of abstract and human or animal forms, or a combination of art and nature, so to speak.

I really like the work, and the way he interprets the natural fabric of the wood (or liberates the sculpture inside, as Michelangelo famously said), my only problem is I don't have space to put up a sculpture. Oxford Colleges have a bit more space, so you can admire some of his work at Keble (in the Sloane Robinson Building) and at Wolfson.

antiques fair

I only discovered last year or so that we have a lovely antiques fair in this town, which happens every Thursday and is always good for some surprising discoveries.



I have on occasions found things there that we actually needed (eg an adjustable stool for the cellist to sit on) but most of the time I just enjoy the sights, and if I find something that looks really nice, I remember that our house is already 300% over carrying capacity and take a picture instead of buying.

So here are two beautiful women whom I might have taken home if I had a suitable space to accommodate them:





And here's something I spotted some time last year and photographed mainly for the irony of the leaf being inadvertently weighed, not that I was actually tempted to buy this one:



PS Turns out the painting is by Angelo Asti, whose work was used for Art Nouveau post cards and porcelain, hence appears via an indirect route in this wall calendar.

celebrating Dorothy Hodgkin

This week marks the centenary of crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin, who won the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1964. Today, Monday, there will be an event at the Oxford University Museum, which I understand involves a bust being unveiled.

On Wednesday (the actual birthday), there will be celebrations at the Royal Society in London (DH being among the first women to be elected to the ranks of the RS fellows), and on Thu, a one-woman play written by Hodgkin's biographer Georgina Ferry will be shown at Lady Margaret Hall.

Oh, and it looks like I missed the annual Dorothy Hodgkin lecture this year, it was held by Elspeth Garman in March.

PS (Tuesday) turned out that the play was also shown at yesterday's event, and it was quite wonderful.

The bust was unveiled by Dorothy's little sister, shown here just after the veil came off:



Apparently it's another "first female" for Dorothy Hodgkin, as all the other scientists represented by statues or busts around the museum are male. The style doesn't fit in with the male colleagues, I'm afraid, wo have either full statues or at least head and shoulders, and who are mostly in light coloured stone. So this severed dark head sticks out a bit, but maybe that was the idea.

PPS (Wed) just found out that one can hear a complete lecture by Dorothy Hodgkin (on the insulin structure, held at the 1970 Nobel Laureates Meeting at Lindau) here.

paris by day

This time, we only spent a night and half a day at Paris, so the photo yield is somewhat limited, but here are a few day-time snaps.

We explored the covered-up part of the Canal St Martin down to Bastille place, and discovered this exotic-looking place:



I always check the fountain next to the Beaubourg, with the sculptures by Niki de St Phalle but we were out of luck, as the fountains weren't on:



A new discovery was this DNA-like (?) sculpture in the Tuileries, which stands slightly bent, so I have one photo where the sculpture is straight but the ground is sloping, and this one where the ground is straight but the sculpture threatens to fall over:



Pix from various stops in Germany to follow ...

the artist inside

Michelangelo famously stated that his statues were already present in the marble a priori, and the hand of the sculptor did nothing but to liberate them. Although the author doesn’t mention it directly, this may well have been the inspiration behind “El cristo feo” by Alicia Yanez Cossio (Quito, 1929). All the main figures in this novel, namely a statue and three living persons, get re-sculpted in different ways.

This is the story of the poor maid Ordalisa who works for a zombie-esque elderly couple. She has inherited an excruciatingly ugly crucifix from her mother, which one day starts talking to her. It (or Christ, or whoever is talking, it might just be within her head!) has a refreshingly unorthodox take on christian values, reminiscent of the 1970s cult hit “Mr God this is Anna”. Thus, even if the story is superficially about a crucifix, it’s never preachy.

Instructed by the Voice (who is and isn’t inside the crucifix, as s/he is and isn’t everywhere), Ordalisa starts chiselling out a beautiful (and movable) christ from inside the ugly crucifix. In doing this, she also liberates the artist within herself, and a living person within one of her employers (although the other gets resculpted in a less commendable way).

Told laconically with a minimal cast and setting, this enchanting story would work just as well as a chamber piece for a small theatre. Michelangelo would have loved it, as will anybody who has a bit of an artist hidden somewhere underneath their marble surface.

PS the only one of her books that found some attention in the English speaking world seems to be the pot-bellied virgin, which is reviewed here:

http://www.msmagazine.com/summer2006/bookreviews.asp