Aspen Art Museum Summer Magazine 2023

2135 LT (Linear Time) 1377,Pi–B CT (Carbon Time)

Example A

Begin Argument Notes Example B: Stilleven met vergulde bokaal

ACC places Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer in the middle of the ACC entrance hall, where it greets residents upon arrival. A small, U-shaped channel on the ground supports it. In this way, the maximum dose of micro-pearl dirt is immediately charged. Upon dispossession, the auditory hallucinations of this resident ceased instantly. Over the last two dekayears CT, the back of the painting has grown a face with olive-green eyes. It will remain unvisited until further notice. Begin Argument Notes for Example. A: Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer This painting was called Wanderer above the Sea of Fog . Caspar Da- vid Friedrich painted it circa 1818 LT. Previously this work of Ger- man Romanticism qualified as a masterpiece. A male, pink-skinned, Caucasian, blond subject, with a narrow, straight back, square and tight buttocks, thick wiry, muscular legs covered by a dark navy overcoat, stands with no help from his cane atop a tall cliff or a mountain summit. His hand is stroking his left thigh. His head is between two hillsides, inhaling the vapors below. The subject turns his back to the viewers. This position was termed Rückenfigur (in German Der Rücken denotes the back of a human body). Unlike in traditional portraiture painting, where a posing subject faces us, Friedrich championed people with their backs turned and fronts obscured. The rest of the painting (scanning from the bottom up) depicts a horizontal band of mist holding a range of near rocks with trees, covered by a second layer of mist, two intersecting plateaus, a third horizontal band of mist, then hills and mountain ranges on the left met by a vertical cliff on the right receding into a horizon line and a thinly-clouded day sky. The Wanderer gazed over the landscape, feeling what is canonized as fernweh (in German fern = “far” + weh = “pain”, meaning sickness or longing for the faraway, antonym of Heimweh , from the German heim meaning “home”, thereby “homesickness”).

This painting, called Still Life with a Gilt Cup , was painted in 1635 LT by the Dutch still life painter, Willem Claesz Heda. His work was almost strictly stilleven (or “dead nature” as in the French, nature morte , the Russian, натюрморт , and the Spanish, la naturaleza muerta ). Heda’s compositions often included pewter, silver, gold, damask, tapestry, oysters, salt, lemons, glass, porcelain, tea, exotic fruits and mother-of-pearl among other rare and luxurious items. Slight color accents enhanced Heda’s refined, low-key palette. Heda’s shine and light had at the same time immense detail and differed vastly from his colleagues’ more energetic arrangements.

Stilleven resides at ACC for three prescription arguments:

1. Each thing here depicted—placed just so, as though coming from nowhere—flows from colonial conquest and economic warfare. The violence of this taking and those violated are fully absent from the scene, and this absence varnished over, presented as so much living, so much difference miraculously made still. Yet as much as the painted stuffs, Heda’s panel itself was a prestigious object: still more movable finery positioned to incite further extraction. 2. Stilleven obscures a line of meaning blatantly present in all paintings of its kind. It classes things, administers life. The lemon is peeled, the butterfly is alive, the fabric is inanimate, as is the salt as well, the cup is a thing, the bird is an animal. These classification codes are buried one floor below the surface, and catalog a second intelligence, separating what is living and what is dead, training their spectator to think they know the difference. Ultimately, such a thinking eye gave itself the freedom to decide what lives or dies, what is human and what is thing. It imagined that mental looking alone transformed the very states of the beings and things of the world. 3. Stilleven is the progenitor of product photography. In the light of Climate Asset Wars, all pictures inciting desire for consuming alienation and abstracting violent production form a kind of catalog. This cata- log serves as a reminder that it destroyed everything it pictured.

The Wanderer resides at ACC with three prescription arguments:

End Argument Notes Example B: Stilleven met vergulde bokaal

1. The Wanderer’s fernweh formalized and transmitted the idea of ambiguous, unconditionally available landscape, extended to the earth’s horizon, depopulated of its expendable inhabitants. The Wanderer is a double of the colonial explorer who aimed to own the whole world, its unknown parts especially. The Wanderer could not live with the unknown. His desire meant a freedom over all to capture, define, map, grid, list, rename and rebuild. From the terra firma atop his cliff, he surveyed all. Where will he go next? What will he next acquire? Master? Voiceless lands called. Freedom itself became his possession, an asset to trade, gift, rescind. Like fire he consumed the world. 2. The Wanderer modeled a noxious spectatorship: to those follow- ing he says looking is enough. His spectatorship incited no action, regardless of what transpired ahead. 3. The companionless, certain Wanderer’s position forced viewers to follow his turned back. The summit beckoned, the panorama steps away. A bit ahead, we are where he is, in a way who he is. This abstraction is Friedrich’s most dangerous device: to beckon us to join the Wanderer in his desire to walk, look and see alone. As one. End Argument Notes for Example A: Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer

Smoothing. . .

Are Prescription Argument Notes available for all residents of ACC? No. Only the residents open to Dream State Visits make their argument notes available. Before you approach, to keep you both safe, their notes will imprint on your unconscious vent. Your current psy-notes will imprint on theirs.

If you have any additional questions and concerns the host glare will hear them now.

Smoothing . . .

To proceed, grant access to your psy-notes now.

Smoothing . . .

To complete your Dream State Permit and initiate charge recalibration of your Biotic Tag, ping now.

Example B

Smoothing . . .

Stilleven met vergulde bokaal prescription mandated that for the first dekayear CT of its residence, the painting be placed, face-up, on a freestanding rock left of the entrance to the ACC. Just now this resident has absorbed enough micro-pearl dust to have lost 300mg of mass. It is now a warm clay gray with slight yellow accents and allows Dream State Visits.

Enter.

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