Moon River: History

Helmets, powder horns and an Old map corset

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 16:06:09 GMT

War time in Israel. Even though we in the center live normally, go to work, movies, sit in coffee places and act "normally", we are all connected more then ever to all media channels and watch the events in the north of Israel and Lebanon, as well as Gaza at the south. I find it hard to post my regular escapist beauties i love so much to post, so, here is item that is related and connect to war but from other angle...just preying we are not facing a huge battle that will end up with lots of casualties for us and for the Lebanese. as far as Hisbula - i believe more then ever that the line that guide most of us Israelis "live and let live" - this line, this mantra, exclude the Hisbua, and they should be banished from the face of earth, them and all their alike.

U.S. WW1 78th Division painted Map Helmet. This is an original painted panel camouflage helmet, with a fine 78th Division insignia "The Lightning Division" & the Regimental number "309" painted on it, also painted on it are names of his Battles & Bivouacs within the panels. read more

During the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, soldiers often embellished their powder horns with maps and other images. The more elaborate works are thought to have been prepared as campaign souvenirs for British officers. The St. Lawrence River and the cities of Quebec and Montreal are depicted on this powder horn. Read here and here.

Now, this corset below, has nothing to do with war directly. But it does evoke in me of war times,
Only here it is an Artist Work, that treat subject with humor, and the metal wire up this corset does remind me of other wire fence in history, boundary, borders, restriction and at the same time protective barrier.

And all wrapped in an old map...could i ask for more?

Meridith McNeal Old map corset

Graffito with parody of Christ's crucifixion

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 21:27:10 GMT

After learning of Prehistoric Teen Graffiti. This didn't came as a surprise: Graffito with parody of Christ's crucifixion; Graffito depicting a crucifixion, from the Palatine Hill, Rome, first half of 3rd cent. AD. The crude graffito shows a crucifix with a donkey's head, seen from behind and dressed in a short tunic.

To the left stands a man with the same clothes and his arm raised. Between the two figures is a Greek graffito: "Alexamenos sebete theon" (Alexamenos worships his god). Apparently, the author of the drawing is making fun of a Christian, Alexamenos, who is praying to a god with a donkey's head. The Y visible on the plaster, to the right, at the top, has been interpretered as a symbol of a gallows, or a transcription of a scream of pain. This is one of the oldest representations of the crucifixion.

Sometimes the world really is in black & white

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 18:50:49 GMT

Today is The Holocaust Memorial day in Israel.

Halina Olomucki was born to the Olszewski family in Warsaw on 24 November 1919.Halina's family were Jewish but not religious. She went to a Yiddish-speaking elementary school in Warsaw and then to a Gymnasium (high school). She showed artistic talent from a young age and her earliest memories are of herself drawing:

Halina Olomucki A Mother and Her Two Children 1947

I drew and drew, this is my life. I know very little about anything else except painting. I love it.

Olomucki was 18 when World War II broke out and was sent to the eastern side of the Warsaw ghetto, where she also immediately began to draw and paint.

She tells of the great strength she got from her artistic creation, to the extent that she couldn't actually control it - it was a need which could not be overcome:

Of course there were no paints and colors, but always a pencil and always a piece of paper somewhere. My main job was to observe, I was always good at observation.

I need to point out [...] the most important point. My observation, my need to observe what was going on, was stronger than my body. It was a need, a driving need. It was the most important. I never thought rationally what I am doing, but I had this incredible need to draw, to write down what was happening. I was in the same condition as every other person all around me, I saw them close to death but I never thought of myself close to death. I was in the air. I was outside my existence. My job was simply to write down, to draw what was happening.

The situation in the ghetto was very difficult. Olomucki worked outside the ghetto and smuggled in food for her family. But her main goal was to paint. When she was outside the ghetto, among non-Jews, she met a man to whom she gave her drawings - "This was a very special moment for me" she said, "and this saved me some of my drawings."

From the Warsaw ghetto Olomucki was deported to Majdanek, where she was separated from her mother, who was sent on to her death. After several more "selections", this was also Olomucki's intended fate. But as a result of a momentary confusion, which drew the guards' attention, she was able to escape her queue and join another group of women who were carrying pails of water and food. Despite her extreme thinness, she managed to carry a pail of water and appear as if she belonged there.

In the camp, Olomucki was so weary that she lay down and thought of nothing but dying. The head of the block came in and asked if there was anyone who knew how to paint and she volunteered. She was required to draw slogans on the walls. Her work satisfied the head of the block and she received coffee and several slices of bread for it. After this she was asked to decorate the walls of the block, producing complex and colorful paintings for which she received praise from the camp administration.

Olomucki was able to put aside some of the art materials she received and began to secretly paint her own works, as always based on her careful observations. In these works she depicted the women who were imprisoned with her, hiding her drawings in as many places as she could find.

Due to the additional food she received for her "conscripted" work, she became much stronger - even stronger than she had been the previous year, when she had been just skin and bones.

Later, Olomucki was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau as prisoner number 48652. Some of the prisoners there were employed in the textile industry, but Olomucki had no talent in this area and was instructed to continue painting. She was sent to the Germans, who ordered various works from her. She received richer food as payment - bread and cheese - which she believed enabled her to survive. The prisoners also asked, and sometimes even begged her, to draw their portraits or those of their daughters - in the belief that this was perhaps their last opportunity to be commemorated. They were certain that, unlike them, Olomucki would survive since she was an artist. They asked Olomucki to take the hidden art works with her to the "outside world" after her liberation. She has stated that the faces of the prisoners were so deeply inscribed in her memory that she could draw them even years later.

From Auschwitz she was forced out on the Death March, which began on 18 January 1945. The group reached Ravensbrück camp and from there Olomucki was transferred to Neustadt camp, where she was liberated by the Allies.

Olomucki's mother and brother perished in the Holocaust. She returned to Warsaw after the war and married the architect, Boleslan Olomucki. Later she moved to Lodz, studying at the art academy there. In 1957 she emigrated to France, living in Paris, and from there, in 1972, to Israel, settling in Holon. Olomucki has continued painting all her life and in the 1960s held many exhibitions in Paris and London. She now lives in Ashkelon, Israel.

Immediately after the war - from 1945-1947 - Olomucki drew her memories of that period, well aware that, in addition to their artistic merit, the works had an important documentary value.

Olomucki donated her works from the Holocaust period and immediately afterward to the art collection of Beit Lohamei Haghetaot (the Ghetto Fighters' House Museum). Other works can be found in the Yad Vashem collection in Jerusalem, and in collections in other countries, including the Musée d'histoire contemporaine and the Auschwitz Museum.

(Dr Pnina Rosenberg)

Learning about the Holocaust through Art

A Timeline of Timelines

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 07:07:49 GMT

"Millions and millions of years would still not give me half enough time to describe that tiny instant of all eternit when you put your arms around me and I put my arms around you." Jacques Prévert

A Glimpse From an expanded version of a timeline that appeared in Cabinet's "Histories of the Future" issue.

2ND CENTURY AD

Jewish scholar José ben Halafta calculates the exact length of time between Creation and the destruction of the Second Temple. By the Julian calendar, existence begins on Monday, 7 October 3761 BC at 10:10 pm.

10th CENTURY

An anomalous graph appears in an edition of Macrobius's commentary on Cicero's In Somnium Scipionis, an analysis of physics and astronomy. The drawing, probably added to the text by a transcriber, plots planetary and solar movement as a function of time. Although the graph does not seem to convey accurate information, it is nonetheless the first known example of changing values measured against a time axis.

1493

The Nuremburg Chronicle of the World depicts the creation of the earth with seven concentric circles. Also of note, the Chronicle represents royal ancestry with portraits interconnected with vines to indicate marriage and parenthood, thereby participating in a broader tradition that associates genetic lineage and arboreal growth.

c. 1500

Leonardo da Vinci is both the first to use rectangular coordinates to analyze the velocity of falling objects and the first to recognize a correlation between the particular climate and precipitation of a given time period and the shape of the resultant tree rings.

1627

Religious and political ferment in England produces numerous apocalyptic tracts including Joseph Mede's Key of the Revelation. The Key maps the end of history onto a complex graphical figure combining cyclical and linear forms.

1658

Three years after La Peyrère's Praeadamitae, the Jesuit missionary Martino Martini published the first Chinese chronology in the West: Historiae sinicae decas prima. Father Martini based his work on the traditional Chinese chronologies and came to the shocking conclusion that authentic Chinese history goes back to the year 2952 B.C., i.e., 600 years prior to the year fixed by the Hebrew Bible for the Great Flood.

1687

Isaac Newton's Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica proposes a theory of absolute time. Newton's posthumous Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) uses astronomical observations to argue that the Kingdom of Israel antedated those of Egypt and Greece.

1760-7

Laurence Sterne's novel, Tristram Shandy, includes a set of sketches indicating the non-linear path of a well-told story; narrative digressions appear as deviations from a straight line.

1769

Louis-Sébastien Mercier publishes perhaps the first future fiction. The Year 2440 describes French society and culture after seven centuries of progress.

1815

William Smith's detailed and systematic geological maps of Britain including his Strata Identified by Organized Fossils inspire new theories of natural chronology.

William Smith's detailed and systematic geological maps of Britain

1859

Charles Darwin's Origin of Species traces species' genealogies back more than 300 million years.

1913

In their 19th-century notebook sketches, evolution theorists represented cross-generational reproduction with concentric circles. In the case of this eugenics diagram, Arthur Estabrook and Charles Davenport use these visual cues to chart the members of the Nam family, aiming to convey the dizzying expansiveness of degenerates' unchecked reproduction.

1933

In a presentation to the Board of Trustees at the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr, the museum's founding director and an amateur military historian, outlines the (soon abandoned) collection plan of MOMA with sketches of time as a torpedo. As the torpedo moves ahead through time, the work positioned at the back of Barr's torpedo passes from MOMA's collection to that of the Metropolitan, allowing MOMA to stay on the cusp of the modern.

2000

Throughout the late 20th century, professional semioticians struggle with the problem of constructing an iconographic language capable of communicating radiation dangers long after the death of current languages. Several of these symbolic systems are prepared for nuclear facilities, including the US government nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

Read it ALL

via bluewyverntea

A Portrait of Old Japan

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 06:39:36 GMT

Kimbei; Enoshima Island, c.1890

Kimbei; Girls showing Obi, c. 1885

Kimbei; Mt. Fujiyama, c.1885

Photographic Views of Meiji: A Portrait of Old Japan

Off the Face of the Earth

Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:42:32 GMT

In the spring of 1944, a group of 38 Ukrainian Jews emerged weak and jaundiced from a cave they'd used for nearly a year to escape the horrors of the Holocaust.

In 1942, as the Nazis intensified their hold on Eastern Europe, several Jewish families disappeared into the vast underground labyrinths of western Ukraine. The group ranged from grandmothers to toddlers, and for the next year and a half they lived, worked, ate, and slept in caves directly under the feet of those who would send them to their deaths. Their story is one of history's most remarkable epics of survival.

Nearly fifty years later, one caver began his quest to bring their story of survival to life.

Caver Chris Nicola rediscovered this story 13 years ago, after exploring Ukraine's Gypsum Giant cave systems. "While there, during an expedition into the tenth longest cave in the world, his team came across two partially intact stone walls and other signs of habitation." Learning about the Jewish families who had used these caves for survival, "Nicola grew determined to learn how people with no prior caving experience or specialized equipment were able to live in such a hostile environment for so long."
So Nicola returned with a photographer, Peter Lane Taylor, and he learned more of the story.
via bldgblog.blogspot

Objects of Knowledge-Cabinet of curiosities

Sat, 18 Feb 2006 13:48:21 GMT

The University of California's physical collections are vast and dispersed. The UC system contains about forty million objects, placing it among the largest university collections in the world. As the second largest collection in the Western Hemisphere, after the Smithsonian. These objects are found and used in every division and department of the university, across the spectrum of sciences, humanities, and arts. Yet, despite the huge investment in research, space, personnel, and other resources that these holdings represent, there is an almost complete absence of scholarship and discourse about the history, purpose, and future of university collections.

Get into the Gallery

Indeed, university material holdings are largely invisible outside the narrow disciplinary boundaries that contain them. As a result, there exists no consistent policy concerning development, conservation, and research purposes for material collections, no general understanding of their value, no discourse on their meaning. Microcosms: Objects of Knowledge is a multiyear, interdisciplinary project that seeks to research comprehensively a material "economy of knowledge" within the university.

Micro-Cabinet. The prize elements of any curiosity cabinets were its "curiosities": those things that were most unusual or bizarre. They might be prized for their rarity, or their association with a famous person, or because of their unlikely resemblance to other things, or because of the great skill with which they had been made. The abundance of objects within this small case creates a microcosm of the larger curiosity cabinet, re-presenting in miniature all of the ways in which objects might be associated with each other in the room at large. This micro-cabinet thus provides a key to the exhibition and to understanding the larger world it represents.

Santa Cruz Island. Geologists measure across a greater spatial scale than any other discipline (unless we count cosmologists). Here we examine one site on Santa Cruz Island, from a Landsat photograph down to an electron microscope photograph of a mineral cross-section.

Humanities. A Classic Coke bottle, the symbol of American cultural imperialism for a French audience, sits near a pistol once used by a Mexican bandit. The pistol, although a weapon and tool, resides in Special Collections in the UCSB library because of its significance as a part of California's nineteenth-century social history. Plastic foods, photographs, and albums are all used by the French department as teaching aids.

Microcosms Essays

Riqa' script

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 08:14:21 GMT

A multi-coloured text transcribed on a black background with gold flecks. This complicated text illustrates sayings in Arabic of the Amir of Yatib, Batha and Nahhaf, which relate to the words of the Prophet Mohammad. It should be read following the sequence of the colours. Arabic; dated 1707/8; transcribed in Cairo. Wellcome Islamic calligraphy 80. (Image no.L31261 or L18576) see large version

Highlights from the Asia: body, mind, spirit exhibition

Panoptic Urbanism-'The Eye' that watchs over us...

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 10:58:45 GMT

The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham.
The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe
(-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not,
thus conveying a "sentiment of an invisible omniscience":

Panopticon blueprint by Jeremy Bentham, 1791

more about the Conceptual history and how the Panopticon influenced the buildings of Prisons.
The contemporary setting": All over the world surveillance systems and segregated communities are popping up like dandelions - where the gaze of a superior is always present in so many places and so many ways.

via http://archinect.com

The Moscow that was never built.

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 17:02:10 GMT

The Architecture of Moscow from the 1930s to the early 1950s.
Unrealised projects.

Among the far-reaching projections of the first stalinist "five year plans", the 1935 General plan for the reconstruction of Moscow overshadowed all others. According to this plan, Moscow was to become, in the shortest possible time, the showpiece capital of the world's first socialist state...' via

The Thirteenth Tribe

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 11:21:24 GMT

"The Khazar Empire and its Heritage"
by Arthur Koestler

The writer traces the history of the ancient Khazar Empire, a major but almost forgotten power in Eastern Europe, which in A.D. 740 converted to Judaism. Khazaria, a conglomerate of Aryan Turkish tribes, was finally wiped out by the forces of Genghis Han, but evidence indicates that the Khazars themselves migrated to Poland and formed the craddle of Western (Ashkenazim) Jewry...
The Khazars' sway extended from the Black sea to the Caspian, from the Caucasus to the Volga, and they were instrumental in stopping the Muslim onslaught against Byzantium, the eastern jaw of the gigantic pincer movement that in the West swept across northern Africa and into Spain.
Thereafter the Khazars found themselves in a precarious position between the two major world powers: the Eastern Roman Empire in Byzantium and the triumphant followers of Mohammed. The Khazars were the Third World of their day, and they chose a surprising method of resisting both the Western pressure to become Christian and the Eastern to adopt Islam. Rejecting both, they converted to Judaism.

Mr. Koestler, who wrote the book concludes: "The evidence presented in the previous chapters adds up to a strong case in favour of those modern historians - whether Austrian, Israeli or Polish - who, independently from each other, have argued that the bulk of modern Jewry is not of Palestinian, but of Caucasian origin. The mainstream of Jewish migrations did not flow from the Mediterranean across France and Germany to the east and then back again. The stream moved in a consistently westerly direction, from the Caucasus through the Ukraine into Poland and thence into Central Europe. When that unprecedented mass settlement in Poland came into being, there were simply not enough Jews around in the west to account for it, while in the east a whole nation was on the move to new frontiers"

"The Jews of our times fall into two main divisions: Sephardim and Ashkenazim.
The Sephardim are descendants of the Jews who since antiquity had lived in Spain (in Hebrew Sepharad) until they were expelled at the end of the fifteenth century and settled in the countries bordering the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and to a lesser extent in Western Europe. They spoke a Spanish-Hebrew dialect, Ladino, and preserved their own traditions and religious rites. In the 1960s, the number of Sephardim was estimated at 500000.
The Ashkenazim, at the same period, numbered about eleven million. Thus, in common parlance, Jew is practically synonymous with Ashkenazi Jew."
In Mr. Koestler's own words, "The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated."

As expected, The Thirteenth Tribe caused a stir when published in 1976, since it demolishes ancient racial and ethnic dogmas...

* More than two centuries later, the report of the existence of this Jewish kingdom aroused the curiosity of Hasdai ibn Shaprut (about 915-970). Ibn Shaprut was not only the personal physician of the Spanish Califs Abd-al-Rahman III (912-961) and his son Hakam II (961-976) but was also inspector-general of customs and an adviser in foreign affairs. To satisfy his curiosity he wrote to the ruler of the Khazars about 960 and some time later received an answer from Joseph, the reigning king. The letters of Hasdai and Joseph, both originally written in Hebrew, are given below in extract.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/khazars1.html

via blogenspiel