Tag: statue

Hotel Room Views, Brussels

We spent last week in Belgium as tourists. We walked around Brussels for a few days, then took a train to Ghent for a day, a train to Ostend the next day and Bruges the day after that. Then we shifted to Antwerp for a few days. Lots of pictures coming up, many of them just touristy snapshots and postcard images. I will attempt to weed out too many you could just see in a guidebook and focus on those with a slightly more artistic or, at least, I hope, interesting perspective. As always, click on any image to see them all full sized (if you’re getting this in email you may need to click through to my site first by clicking on the post title, above).

Roman Wall and Rougemont Castle

Whilst in Exeter we also walked some of the ancient Roman Wall and through Rougemont Gardens and Northernhay Gardens to the remains of Rougemont Castle. Click any image to see them all enlarged.

Beaney House of Art and Knowledge

Back in the High Street, we visited the Beaney House of Art & Knowledge. While in America we tend to revere the Magna Carta (statues of them above) for expanding the rights of the people, in fact, the Barons were wresting power from the King with no regard for the ‘people,’ beyond their own right to exploit them.

Once again, I confronted a museum mirror, this one with a sign encouraging photography adjacent. What else could I do? Click any of the pictures to see them all big.

Photo, Sculpture and Painting

Victor Brauner, Conglomeros, 1945. Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris

In Plato’s cave allegory we are bound and can only see images of the shadows cast by statues of real things. As we free our minds, we first discover that we are looking at mere images, shadows. Next we discover that the shadows are cast not by the real but by statues, imitations of the ideals which they represent. Only when we emerge from the cave do we discover the world of real things.

Bird Girl Irony

This “bird girl” statue used to be in the Bonaventure cemetery when it was photographed by Jack Leigh and used on the cover of the hugely popular book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, by John Berendt.

As a result of it’s fame, the grave site was overrun with tourists so the statue was removed and now stands in a room at the Telfair Academy in Savannah in front of a wall-sized mural of the cemetery background so you can take a photograph of it just like the one on the cover of the book.

Image result from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_in_the_Garden_of_Good_and_Evil

Teaching the Controversy

79th St and Central Park West, New York

The plaque says, “Addressing the Statue,” and notes that while some love the historic statue, others abhor the clear subservient stance of the Native and African American.

In fact, the plaque does not so much address the statue’s problematic nature as leverage it to invite visitors to enter the museum “to learn more,” one of the natural long-term outcomes of Ronald Reagan’s charge to mediate everything in the marketplace.

A few months ago the statue was surrounded by stanchions to keep anti-racists at bay. Evidently the Museum has calculated that zealousness to have abated.