Reflections on Art and Transcendence for the Holiday Season
Happy Holidays! As the year winds down, I’m tremendously excited to share two different art-related subjects with you.
The first has to do with the photographs of a young, Florida photographer whom I think you’ll be hearing more about in the future, while the second is a story about the Christmas gift I’ve given myself this year and how it relates to an enigmatic, 300-year-old piece of music that I have come to absolutely adore.
Studio visit with an artist to watch:
Anastasia Samoylova
Many of you know that I am a photographer by training and thus my entry into understanding the visual arts is closely tied to the experience of framing things with my eye and my lens.
Moreover, I have spent the past five years or more exploring both art and nature all across my adopted home state of Florida. During this time I came across several outstanding exhibitions of photography by a young artist named Anastasia Samoylova.
This past week Ana invited me to her lovely studio in Miami Beach to learn more about her exceptionally strong practice. I had been eagerly anticipating meeting her for some time, considering her somewhat of a kindred spirit. After all, Ana and I are both transplanted Floridians (who once lived in Russia) and share a deep understanding and appreciation for photography and art.
Much as I once photographed Russia and the republics of the former Soviet Union, Ana has been shooting all over Florida for the past seven years, achieving some unusually sophisticated results in her images. This is no easy feat: after all, Florida is the third most populous state in the Union and has long promoted itself as a tourism juggernaut and tropical wonderland.
For better or for worse, our projections of contemporary Florida inevitably include palm trees, alligators and sunsets painted in what I might refer to as death-by-pastel color palettes. Cliches and memes of “Florida Man” abound while the state’s perception as being on the front line of climate change and epic political and cultural battles sharpens.
Ana’s work encompasses these complexities while delving much deeper conceptually to the point where I can confidently say that she is among the very best fine art photographers working in Florida today.
Apparently the curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York agree, for Ana has earned the extremely prestigious honor of an exhibition dedicated to her work in Florida. This show is expected to open in October 2024, and I hope that at least several of you would join me in going to see it.
What’s even more remarkable is that the Met, which maintains one of the most robust collections of photography in the world, has invited Ana to place her work in dialogue with vintage, Works Progress Administration-era photographs of Florida by one of the giants of 20th century American photography, Walker Evans.
For rough comparison, this would make Ana’s show Floridas the equivalent to that of paintings by an emerging landscape painter being exhibited side-by-side with work by, say, Claude Monet.
With her medium-format digital camera, Ana frames exceptional and banal scene all across Florida with a very keen eye towards color, formal structure, contrasting images, and a popular-yet-difficult-to-overrate art-historical technique known as trompe l’oeil, giving these photographs a painterly look.
Why do I use a French term that means “fool the eye” and insist on saying “difficult-to-overrate?” Well… I’ll tell you: because that whenever you see an image within an image, the artist is trying to make you question whether what you’re seeing is real, or simply a visual facsimile of reality.
Originally this trick was has been employed in painting (there are examples all over the art-historical spectrum), but when an artist attempts it through photography, she opens a host of theoretical considerations and questions about the nature of the medium itself.
To be brief I must gloss over Ana’s formal training as a painter and photographer and the inspiration she takes from Russian, American, and international artists. Suffice it to say that most of these — e.g. Natalia Goncharova, Alexander Rodchenko, William Eggleston, Steven Shore, Thomas Demand among others — are all among my favorite artists of all time, not least because they incorporated elements of both the extraordinary and the banal in their work.
Ana’s photographs underscore contemporary Florida’s status as ground zero for some of the 21st century’s starkest contrasts and contradictions. With the magic of Disneyworld on one hand and the mundanity of the strip mall on the other, her images appear both exotic and familiar, with a particular shade of sun-washed pastel pink periodically resurfacing throughout her work.
Furthermore, Ana does not shy away from the issues behind the rising temperatures and high-water marks (both politically and environmentally) making her photography the kind of work I’d expect to see referenced in art criticism and museum collections for decades to come.
Photoshopping nothing, Ana prints virtually all of her work by herself on a large printer in her studio (up to 40” x 50”) in small editions of 5 images, retaining two artist’s proofs (one of which she designates for museum acquisition). She has shown her work extensively throughout the United States and Europe, and will be exhibiting her work in Korea next year.
In addition to her books, which you can buy online from Amazon, there are a limited amount of editioned photographs Ana has available for sale to serious collectors. I would expect these to sell quickly, as her star is rising fast, especially in anticipation of next fall’s show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. However, if you’d like to know more, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me for details.
What does the greatest job application of all time have to do with the Christmas present I just gave to myself?
I’m not too shy to say that I’m betting that one or more of you will seriously consider taking me on as your art advisor in 2024, allowing me to guide you through space and time towards transcendent art experiences and outstanding acquisitions that will generate meaning and appreciate in value for years to come.
Your vote of confidence by engaging my services would not only be the best Christmas gift I could imagine, it would also mean this newsletter has effectively been a kind of job application — an attempt to land an “employer” who really “gets” me and my approach to interpreting and contextualizing art.
To tell the truth, whether or not any of you “get” any of what I’m saying right now worries me little, for I plan to remain in this line of work throughout many, many Christmases to come.
Meanwhile, please allow me to entertain you by pointing to an example of what may perhaps be the most famous, yet grossly overlooked and magnificent job application in the history of Western Civilization.
Johann Sebastian Bach (b. Germany, 1685-1750) is considered one of the greatest composers of all time, and it’s fair to say there is a certain degree of mystery associated with the allure and spiritual nature of his extremely prolific musical oeuvre.
Some might compare Bach’s seemingly endless creativity as an attempt to bring humankind closer to God; others might say that, whether or not God exists is irrelevant, for the answers to why Bach’s music still fascinates in the 21st century can be found in music theory and math.
Whither the source of such transcendent music? Bach was a religious man but also a mortal with bills to pay, seeking to make a living off his talents by earning patronage from those who appreciated his talent.
In 1721 Bach compiled six concertos, writing them out in his own hand and entitling them Six Concerts à Plusieurs Instruments (six concertos for several instruments), and presented them to the Margrave of Brandenburg, hoping to ingratiate himself with the nobleman and eventually gain lucrative employment as court composer.
However, not only was Bach never offered a job in Brandenburg, there is scant evidence that the Margrave (long since fallen into historical obscurity himself) ever paid any attention to these concertos, nor does it appear they were even played much at his court. Thus these concertos were largely (for a century or so) ignored and forgotten, along with much of the rest of Bach’s work that fell out of fashion after his death.
Eventually Bach was “rediscovered” and what we know today as the Brandenburg Concertos are considered to be among the finest masterworks of Baroque music and, indeed, of all Western musical creation. What’s more: this music is likely destined to outlive every single one of us, and perhaps the Earth itself, for an excerpt of Brandenburg Concerto #2 is currently hurtling through interstellar space as analogue grooves on the Voyager Golden Record.
Now, I have been a connoisseur of classical music for a while, and I first started listening to these lively, sumptuous Baroque-style concerti grossi about five years ago while living in Manhattan and completing my Master’s thesis on “Text and Image in Soviet Nonconformist Art” at Sotheby’s Institute of Art.
Highly melodic and conducive to deep concentration, the Brandenburg Concertos struck my fancy right away, but it wasn’t until several weeks ago that I truly bonded with them, thanks to one particular recording of Brandenburg Concerto #5, which turned out to be a classic from the early 1950s led by the legendary German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler doing double duty as piano soloist.
This recording helped me understand almost immediately what’s so special and spiritual about Bach’s music. I hope you’ll take a moment to sample it for yourself; just keep in mind that it took me 5 years for me to “get” the magic behind this piece (this is often the case with classical music for me — it’s slow food and often takes years to digest).
It’s not just that Brandenburg Concerto #5 turned out to be the world’s first keyboard concerto, allowing for a very delicate balance between flute, strings, and the leading piano (or harpsichord in Bach’s day, as the former hadn’t quite been invented in 1721); rather, it’s the apparently simplicity of these instruments’ playing a pattern of four repeating notes that follow, chase, and build off of one another as they weave an abstract narrative of emotions, carrying the listener far away from home… and back again through the highly productive, classic structure of sonata-allegro form.
A lot comes up for me when I listen to Bach, but generative is the first word that comes to mind. What I mean by this is the impulsive creative tendency to take a step, lay down a block, build upon it, step back down, pick up another piece, and repeat the sequence over, and over, and over again until patterns emerge.
I don’t think this is stretching my rather elementary understanding of music theory too far into poetry because, in fact, this is exactly how things around us grow in accordance with the laws of nature and mathematics.
What pushed me over the brink of revelation to understand this was an experience I had one quiet, subtropical night not long ago and not too far from where I live. I was out for a walk, listening to that lovely, beguiling Furtwängler recording on my headphones, when I stumbled upon a cluster of snails, which I could swear were growing their own shells right before my very eyes, spiraling themselves out of obscurity, generating themselves into existence.
Deeply moved by such a simple yet transcendent discovery, I not only connected what I was hearing in the music to art and nature, I was also immediately inspired to make a new addition to a small menagerie of stuffed animals I have been collecting since the first winter of the pandemic.
Far easier to take care of than pets, these fuzzy and cuddly friends of mine originate from the same iconic, 144-year-old German manufacturer: Steiff. Last year I added a unicorn named Mysty; the year before that, a snowy owl named Bubo; and so, thanks to J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto #5, it became quite evident who the 2023 addition to my “furmily” should be and what I should name him.
After all I wasn’t quite certain whether any of you would be ready to sign on for a consultation about Charting Transcendence’s art advisory services, so I figured a small Christmas gift to myself would be in order.