Tuesday, February 26, 2002

Which leads me to further digression on animal obsession. Painleve. Friend to the Surrealists (he apparently used his father's social status to spring surrealists from jail from time to time), French documentarian, brilliant and quirky pioneer of the "science film." He used an underwater camera while Jacques Costeau was in his jams. And it all started, he tells us, with an affection for the octopus (this from a 1984 Liberation interview, when Painleve was 86): "(I began making scientific films)to convey my passion for the octopus. It was a dream I had ever since meeting one during a childhood vacation in 1911. In 1925, during an internship at Roscoff, I would bring an egg to this octopus at 11:00 every morning. She soon began to recognize me by my shirt. Whenever she saw me, she turned black; the three layers of her skin - blue, red and green - would swell with pleasure. Then she went off to eat her egg. We got along very well. "But then one day out of perversity, I brought her a rotten egg. She turned totally white. In extreme fury, an octopus's cells contract and the underlying whites of the dermis appears. With one of her tentacles, she threw the egg back at me over the acquarium's glass window. She never greeted me again. Innstead, she'd retreat to the back of the aquarium and turn white. I realized then she had a memory. This mollusk was as intelligent as a human." 3:47:05 PM

The artist as researcher: In the 1890s, the playwright Auguste Strindberg writes a series of works of natural science, collected in part in a book called Inferno. In one chapter, "Essay on Rational Mysticism," he contemplates the death's-head moth, or Acherontia atrapos, which bears the imprint of what appears to be a human skull on its corselet. Strindberg is struck by the fact that the moth's larvae feeds on toxic plants which have a corpse-like odor, and thus the moth frequents graveyards. He posits a causal relationship between these encounters and the moth's appearance, as the moth takes on the markings of that which distresses it: "We can imagine, then, a Death's head being led astray by its deceptive sense of smell to cemetaries, to refuse dumps, to scaffolds and gallows...and we may ask well ourselves whether this could act upon the nerves of the moth that is impressionable to the point of emitting plaintive cries when it is teased, a butterfly doubly delirious from being in heat and from the intoxicating venom of henbane; a double intoxication equal to hysteria." Lamarckian hysteria. What what humans wind up imprinting themselves with if such were the case? (There's an old Italian folk belief that if you crave a food during pregnancy, and you don't get to eat it, then your child will be born with a birthmark shaped like this food. My mother used this to cadge recipes during preganancy.) 11:29:18 AM

The researcher as art: Yves Fissuialt. Yves Fissiault was an imaginary scientist that conceptual artist Eve Andree Laramee invented in 1997; in a Manhattan gallery show, she exihibited his "secret" artistic work supposedly produced during the Cold War, when Fissiault was working as a defense scientist. The exhibit (which claimed, among other things, that Fissiault had been fired from his job as an electrical engineer on a massive govt' project when his artistic bent was discovered) was taken at face value by the New York Times; in a credulous review about Laramee's "discovery," a reporter wrote: For much of his life, Fissiault simultaneously inhabited two worlds -- the concrete realm of applied science and the mystical domain of alternative realities and utopian longings that led him to experiment with communal living and mind-altering drugs. By the mid 1960s, his unorthodox ideas became increasingly suspect to his aerospace industry employers, who forced him out as a security risk." So my question of the morning is -- if a concept artist were to mount an exhibit of the 'Yves Fissiault' of Silicon Valley, the man who was too dangerous to fit in, what would exactly would he do that would make him a threat? 8:32:24 AM

© Copyright 2002 Lisa Lynch.