A Christmas Kiss from Alfred Eisenstaedt

Posts are proving to be much more difficult at home without a scanner, instead of providing you with beautiful images you will have to put up with some stolen things from the internet along with my own photographs!

On August 14th 1945 Alfred Eisenstaedt captured what was to be his most famous photograph. 'V-J Day in Times Square' is a spontaneous moment of elation and excited energy following the announcement of the end of the war on Japan. You wouldn't know it from the photograph but this sailor and his nurse were total strangers. At one moment they were locked in an embrace and in the next they were lost in crowds of celebrations and anonymity. A sailor celebrating the victory by kissing strangers in the street (and rather forcefully) has become an iconic image. 'Kissing the war goodbye' has a beautiful poetry to it. But the image evokes passion and sentiment, it calls for other stories and the attachment of new meanings. So today these will be the lost lovers reunited for Christmas.

In 2005 John Seward Johnson created Unconditional Surrender, a sculpted version of the iconic kiss for a re-enactment in Times Square on the sixtieth anniversary of the event. These are photographs of a 25 feet tall version in aluminium and plastic displayed in San Diego by the naval base. Catching the fading light and shipwrecked by the sea, this immense sculpture made a powerful impression. Taken out of the photograph the couple can be circled and examined from every angle. They become dancers, dreamers, everything we want. They represent the American dream; the desire to keep those things that are important in the foreground, to make gestures bigger and in so doing increase their power.

'I was walking through the crowds on V-J Day, looking for pictures. I noticed a sailor coming my way. He was grabbing every female he could find and kissing them all — young girls and old ladies alike. Then I noticed the nurse, standing in that enormous crowd. I focused on her, and just as I'd hoped, the sailor came along, grabbed the nurse, and bent down to kiss her. Now if this girl hadn't been a nurse, if she'd been dressed dark clothes, I wouldn't have had a picture. The contrast between her white dress and the sailor's dark uniform gives the photograph its extra impact.'

The Eye of Eisenstadt

Ascending form

Not everybody lives within the second largest collection of contemporary women's art work in the world. However I am lucky enough to say that this is the case. Art adorns the walls of the dining room, the bar and the corridors which track the path to our bedrooms. But it is the sculptures which have become landmarks in the gardens which are my interest today.

http://www-art.newhall.cam.ac.uk/

Sculpture, more than other arts has the power to adapt to its surroundings and to communicate with its environment. With the garden coated in fresh inches of snow we are reminded of sculpture's adaptability. Barbara Hepworth's Ascending Form holds the garden in its magical orbit, it is the focal point of all views, the silent observer of snow dancers and sun bathers.

Hepworth made many upright forms based on the idea of the figure in the landscape. Ascending Form has the grace of the anonymous female silhouette with its large human eye. It also draws us beyond the woman, through the hole of its view finder and in to the landscape.

In the snow it transforms again. The snow highlights, it clings to form and depth drawing our attention to details lost through frequent viewing. In the snow I look out of my kitchen window at the solitary Ascending Form and remember how beautiful I think it is.

"my approach to bronze isn't a modeller's approach. I like to create the armature of a bronze as if I'm building a boat and then putting the plaster on is like covering the bones with skin and muscles. But I build it up so that I can cut it. I like to carve the hard plaster surface" (in conversation with Alan Bowness 1971).

Cage against the machine

Last year in the UK hundreds of thousands of people raged against the machine that is the X-Factor and bought Rage Against the Machine's song of rebellion, in defiance of powerful musical institutions. We got it to Christmas number one and suddenly everybody felt the power of the people, the power of Facebook to spread the messages of real people. This year there is a whole collection of similar campaigns, but I don't believe that any have the power to succeed. Raging against the machine was about fighting repetition and monotony and the predictability of the British music industry. If every year there is a facebook campaign then all we succeed in doing is initiating a new kind of predictability; we produce a new mould for music to be forced in to. However in the light of a recent Kettles Yard exhibition there is one campaign which interests me; Cage against the machine http://www.facebook.com/cageagainstthemachine.

John Cage's '4'33' is a composition of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. The statement is inherent. We would rather listen to silence than your manufactured rubbish. But paying 79p for a track of complete silence on Itunes, is definitely not the point. It is an absolute waste. Cage's composition is a performance piece in which the audience are given a unique opportunity to experience silence and to consider their experience of this. When Cage's composition is a track on your itunes which can be skipped or that passes by as an unnoticed interruption, it loses all meaning and effect. This is how 4'33 should be experienced, and you can't recreate this in your bedroom;

The campaign also annoys me because I'm sure for many people Cage is unknown or obscure. I don't think his silent composition heard in isolation is a representative introduction to the artist. So here are some real reasons to be interested in Cage.

Not Wanting to say Anything about Marcel, Lithograph 1969

Mushroom Book, Plate X, 1972

River Rocks and Smoke 4/11/90 1978 and 17 Drawings by Thoreau 1978

Hopefully this introduces the expansive stretch of Cage's work,;encompassing music, film, painting and printing. At one moment cage has the precision of a printer, the chaos of mapping ideas and feelings and the next is free in his abstraction. With lyricism and musical sense in all that he does, if you are going to Cage against the machine, make sure you understand what it's all about.

Snowdrifts and Winter light

Last night I came out of a Carol service in to snow blizzards in the dark, with only the Christmas lights to guide our slippery way home I considered the beauty and merits of snow. Here are some photos of my little village looking very magical in the snow last year, I love the quality of light in these photographs. I'm not going to write very much about them, today it is all about the visuals. Let the images speak for themselves.


It felt to me, taking these photos, as if I had discovered some other quiet world, as if the snow had metamorphosed everything.