OLD NEWS

BORN ON THIS DAY IN 1591, JUSEPE DE RIBERA.
Painted some extremes of ugliness and of beauty,
here the latter:
Holy Family w/ Saint Catherine.
<https://tinyurl.com/3fm95ek4>
The horror:
Apollo flaying Marsyas,
whose friends cover their ears
against the dreadful sound of his cries.
Painted in 1637 by Jusepe de Ribera
of Spain and Naples,
<https://tinyurl.com/nhjfv924>
A fellow satyr covers his ears
so he doesn't hear the agonized cries of tortured Marsyas.
<https://tinyurl.com/d9sxhujm>
Screaming mouths.
And some noses.
Etching by Jusepe de Ribera,
<https://tinyurl.com/yxer57wy>
Jolly moments of classical mythology
brought to you by Jusepe Ribera,
<https://tinyurl.com/2ttcrw2c>
Sculpture speaks to the blind man
while painting says nothing.
Sense of touch, as painted for the sighted
<https://tinyurl.com/4khyvr9x>
Another blind man
exploring a sculpture of the human head
<https://tinyurl.com/27xu42x7>
through the sense of touch,
<https://tinyurl.com/2esxn3mb>
A knight of the Order of Santiago,
flashing his cool specs in 1640.
<https://tinyurl.com/znc2k5xu>
A Jesuit missionary with his tame lion.
Because he has power
to overcome the savage heart!
Painted in 1638 by Jusepe de Ribera.
<https://tinyurl.com/33ht9mhv>
Duel between Isabella de Carazzi and Diambra de Pottinella.
Real event, happened in 16th-century Naples.
Don't you wish you'd been there?
<https://tinyurl.com/4u7havv5>
Procession to the witches' sabbath where,
I'm guessing,
human infants are on the agenda if not the menu.
<https://tinyurl.com/ymyar4hm>
Holy Family, now refugees in Egypt.
Joseph still makes a living as a carpenter.
Mary has been asked to take care of cousin John
for the duration.
Baby J (she shows Joseph)
is champion sleeper.
<https://tinyurl.com/3p6zshv4>
Just an ordinary saint:
Mary of Egypt,
painted in 1652
Such a lovely picture, this.
<https://tinyurl.com/mumwttdv>
Baroque depression:
Mary Magdalene, painted around 1640
<https://tinyurl.com/2p9vymzk>
A more elegant Mary: M. Magdalene,
penitent but skull of death is shoved back into cave
and she has at least B+ red drapery.
On the downside,
her left foot belongs to some other saint.
<https://tinyurl.com/3fkrs2c3>
Freed by an Angel:
Saint Peter in Prison, 1639,
<https://tinyurl.com/437zdn72>
Flayed alive:
martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, 1640s.
A gruesome subject fabulously treated
by Jusepe de Ribera (fan of flaying),
<https://tinyurl.com/2rz984ay>
Martyrdom market was big in mid-17th-century Naples,
and here is Saint Philip getting his.
As painted in 1639
<https://tinyurl.com/2d4y9k5t>
Mary: Lord, you did not warn me
about public involvement in this job.
Adoration of the Shepherds
<https://tinyurl.com/muru8xcv>
Holy beauty: Madonna & child, 1646, b
<https://tinyurl.com/yc57ehh9>
Surprised by an angel:
Saint Jerome, 1626.
Marvelous, very moving painting
<https://tinyurl.com/59s284n8>
Jacob dreams a stariway to heaven,
with angels climbing it.
But we dont' really see the angels because we aren't asleep. Yet.
1639 by Jusepe de Ribera,
<https://tinyurl.com/3vtsf5ec> _Dr.PeterPaulRubens

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TEHCHING HSIEH ARTIST
<https://tinyurl.com/5at5yf6w>
For one year, beginning on 30 September 1978, Tehching Hsieh lived in an 11ft 6in x 9ft wooden cage. He was not permitted to speak, read or consume any media, but every day a friend visited with food and to remove his waste.
The vital context here is that this incarceration was voluntary: Hsieh is a Taiwanese-American artist whose chosen practice is performance art, undertaking durational “actions” for long periods. Marina Abramović has called him the “master” of the form. In 1980, seven months after the end of Cage Piece, Hsieh began another year-long work, Time Clock Piece, which required him to punch a factory-style clock-in machine in his studio, every hour of each day for 365 days.
Whenever I tell people about his work, the response is either admiration or incredulity. Why would anyone want to subject themselves to this kind of discipline and repetition over such a long period of time? “The kind of art I make is about how I understand the world,” says Hsieh. “It’s how I mark the passing of time. That’s all life is, and it’s the one thing that makes us all equal. It doesn’t matter if you’re lazy or hard-working, poor or rich, we’re all just passing time.” Hsieh is sitting in Dia Beacon – the museum for the Dia Art Foundation – in upstate New York, where a major retrospective, Lifeworks: 1978-1999, is three days from opening.
<https://tinyurl.com/mwfv4kmz>
Born in 1950 as one of 15 children in Nanzhou, Taiwan, Hsieh never finished school. During compulsory military service in the early 1970s, he began painting, but became interested in performance work. Jump, his first action, was performed in 1973 and involved him leaping from a second storey window (he broke both his ankles). Taiwan was a conservative society and the US beckoned as the place to continue his practice. In 1974, after taking a cleaning job on an oil tanker, Hsieh jumped ship in Philadelphia and made his way to New York.
As an undocumented migrant with no English, he took cleaning jobs and worked in kitchens. He was an outsider on multiple fronts, but doesn’t feel this influenced his drift towards performance art. “Literature and philosophy influenced me – Kafka, Dostoevsky, existentialism … but then I had no passport or social security number in America. So I couldn’t apply for grants and had to use my own money. Even when it was difficult, I still made the work. I used to think I had to go out and find ideas, but I realised that I could use my body to express things, even though I don’t think my work is autobiographical.”
<https://tinyurl.com/5x8aa5yj>
Painting would have been an easier path, but Hsieh became interested in conceptual art and pivoted. He began to plan actions for which he would create a concept, outline the project with a statement of rules, and commit to it. His first five works took place over one year; the year-long framework reflects the idea of the circle, a life lived in one year increments around the sun. The word “durational” has been widely used to describe this kind of long-form art, but Hsieh is slightly resistant to the term. “When people use the word ‘durational’ about what I do, I point out that six minutes is also a duration. I was just interested in the idea that one year is a human calculation we all recognise.”
Arguably his most difficult project, One-Year Performance 1981-1982, involved living outside for the whole year. He was not permitted to enter any building, vehicle, or use a tent. On the day a friend happened to be filming, he was arrested for vagrancy and in the footage with NYPD, is shown struggling, shouting: “I cannot go inside!” That winter was the coldest of the century in New York. At Dia, a video of collated clips shows the brutality of it: washing in the Hudson, sleeping in car parks, or carrying his backpack through heavy snow. One gallery wall is lined with printouts of downtown Manhattan, documenting the routes he took, the fluctuating temperatures, the sites of defecation.
In person, Hsieh is compact and neatly dressed. He is almost pathologically modest, playing down the hardship and commitment of those one-year projects. He is self-deprecating about the impact and groundbreaking nature of the work and ambivalent about art world praise. “This was the way for me to make art. I enjoyed the freedom – and freedom of thought – it brought. I had no desire to be rich or successful. I don’t feel I needed it. So I was never in competition with anybody.”
Occasionally Hsieh takes out his phone to look up something on Google translate. When talking about the difficulty of the performances, he searches for a word that he never wanted to be described as. The screen says: “martyr”.
The mainstream New York art world of the time was by and large run by white men. Anyone different, including those making corporeal performance art like Abramović, Carolee Schneemann, and Hsieh – often found themselves outside that. Hsieh learned to rely on himself, to be his own curator, with the cage and street as his gallery. He cites Kafka’s The Castle, in which a man struggles to gain access to a certain world. “Life is not equal for everyone and it can be tough, but you have to be your own character. I was very stubborn and had to survive.”
<https://tinyurl.com/bdnuusve>
Despite his outsider status at the beginning of his career, Hsieh doesn’t feel the actions he created were political. The pieces emerged from a personal perspective, he says, even if others detected topical undercurrents. Outdoor Piece explored themes of homelessness, carcerality, navigating a city without transport or the comfort of a home to return to. “People often tell me what they think the work is about, or what they feel are my themes or ideas. It was never about politics – it was always about just passing time.”
I ask if Outdoor Piece was his hardest work to undertake and he is typically droll. “It’s like being asked about a favourite child, ‘Which one do I like more?’ The six pieces in the show are like my children so I can’t say that one was harder than the other. But the work is not masochistic, it’s not about pain, even if other people think that it is.” He likens some performance art to the equivalent of lying on one nail, but thinks of his own as more even, like a bed of nails.
Hsieh’s work can also be seen as a prophecy of the non-stop nature of life, how it is almost impossible to disappear, or to not be seen or traced by technology. It speaks to the hyper connectivity of modern life and the digital world, and of our constant proximity to others. In 1983, for his fourth one-year project, he was tied by an eight-foot rope to fellow artist Linda Montano.
<https://tinyurl.com/5t4ez9rh>
At the core of early performance art is its impermanence and ephemerality, but Hsieh was fastidious in documenting what he made. There were daily photographs of Cage Piece and tapes of recorded conversations with Montana as they were tied together. One vitrine at Dia Beacon houses a pile of the time-clock chads and 8,760 photographs of Hsieh – one for each hourly punch – span the walls. In the reconstructed wooden cage, the original toothpaste and brush sit on a sink. Seeing his life’s work in one place is stark and moving.
Hsieh concluded his final 13-year performance (Thirteen Year Plan) – of making art and not showing it publicly – in Greenwich Village on New Year’s Eve 1999, the day he turned 49. He released a statement that resembled a ransom collage (and is on display in Dia) that states: “I kept myself alive. I passed the Dec 31, 1999.”
He is frequently asked why he stopped his artistic practice, or if he has made any art in the interim. He makes a differentiation. “I never finished or retired, I just don’t do it any more. I only ever wanted to do what I wanted to do … and I did that. I’ve been in New York for over 50 years and I’m very comfortable living here, but I still don’t call it home. I think of it more as a community, but if people enjoy the work I made here, and I die here, I accept that.” _Sinéad Gleeson _GuardianUK

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/3cspy4wm> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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YOKO ONO’S ART IS ALL ABOUT NOT GETTING WHAT YOU WANT by Alex Greenberger
<https://tinyurl.com/bdhzh4s8>
What exactly did the first viewers of Yoko Ono’s Strip Tease for Three (1966) expect to see? Some likely anticipated clothes shed and breasts bared. What they got instead was the exact opposite: a performance with minimal human intervention whatsoever. The extra space in the title—“strip tease,” not “striptease”—should have been the giveaway: Ono was goading her viewers with the prospect of titillation before denying them excitement.
Strip Tease for Three existed in two versions, one lasting five minutes, the other going on for about 15. The instructions for both call for three chairs to be set on a stage; neither asks that anyone to sit in them. By the end of both versions, the chairs remain empty, expectantly awaiting a slinky danseuse who never arrives.
The only thing stripped during these performances, Ono later clarified, was “the mind,” since “something hidden in humans” had been revealed through the piece. Showing everything by displaying nothing whatsoever? It sounds like a cruel joke, but it’s the animating paradox behind Ono’s work, which is now the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
This eye-opening show, which first appeared at Tate Modern in 2024, has a checklist that numbers well over 200 objects, most of which are word scores and ephemera related to Ono’s performances. Few of them offer much for visual admiration. There are some canvases, but they are generally unpainted; one is exhibited on the floor, where it can be trod upon. There are performances staged live but they are so minimal as to be easily missed, with one taking the form of a group of people who have a conversation in a set area of one gallery and do little more. There is even a striptease—or, rather, a strip tease—in the form of Ono’s film Freedom (1970), wherein she wrestles with her bra for a minute or so. The film ends before she ever comes close to unclasping it.
I take it that works such as these might baffle even the most open-minded viewers. As I rode the elevator down from the museum’s fourth floor after seeing the exhibition, I noticed some visitors snickering at the sound of a toilet flushing emanating from a hidden speaker. This bit of potty humor is Ono’s Toilet Piece (1961)—the piece was unlabeled when I went, though it now has wall text—but I don’t think these visitors laughed because they found her joke funny. My guess is they smirked out of confusion, feeling as though they didn’t get it.
I’d argue that not getting it is the point, since Ono’s work is all about not getting what you want. Take her piece Smoke Painting (1961), a set of handwritten instructions for a performance that can be enacted by its viewer. Presented here in Japanese, the text calls for its performer to create a painting—but not with paint. Instead, the piece involves igniting a canvas or any finished painting with a cigarette. “The painting ends when the whole canvas or painting is gone,” the text concludes. That means the resultant artwork is only complete when the object itself is burnt to a crisp.
The show, titled “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind” presents a different version of this artist from the one we know today. It’s not as though Ono’s art from the 1960s and early ’70s is hard to find: there was a great Museum of Modern Art show about this period of her oeuvre about a decade ago, and David Sheff’s 2025 biography of the artist does not gloss over her Fluxus days. (Thankfully, the days when Ono was reductively labeled John Lennon’s girlfriend, then misogynistically—and falsely—tarred as the woman who broke up the Beatles, seem to be in the rear-view mirror.) But when Ono’s art is shown to the public, it is her recent output, which often features legible statements about the evilness of war and the value of peace that don’t necessarily require a lot of thought, that gets more attention from visitors.
<https://tinyurl.com/mr2ebmw9>
Perhaps that’s because this more explicitly protest-minded art goes down easy—a little too easy, if you ask me. PEACE is POWER, a 2017 installation included in the exhibition, features the titular phrase printed in 24 languages across a set of windows. It’s one of the few works here that might look good social. The rest of her oeuvre, generally, is spiky and disagreeable, but her recent art is by and large not that, which may explain why this show features only a handful pieces produced after 1971, the year she made her MoMA debut in the form of an unsanctioned piece called Museum of Modern (F)art.
<https://tinyurl.com/35sj67br>
Might those early works count as a form of protest, too? The first few galleries of the expansive exhibition raise the question. The oldest work here is Lighting Piece (1955), whose word score consists of a single sentence: “Light a match and watch till it goes out.” The piece was first performed publicly in 1961, in a New York concert event called AOS – To David Tudor. That name, as Tate curator Juliet Bingham writes in the show’s well-rounded catalog, refers to the “‘blue chaos’ of war,” something Ono knew a good deal about, as a Japanese émigré who witnessed the aftermath of the US’s firebombing of her home country firsthand. Early works like Lighting Piece suggest that ruination is a constant.
What to do in the face of all that destruction? Find new ways of relating to each other and the world, Ono suggests. Painting to Shake Hands (1961), a suspended white canvas with a slit in it, seems to invite just that. Viewers on either side can stick their arms through and shake hands. But there is no way to make eye contact while doing so, with the titular painting acting as an obstruction to total communion.
<https://tinyurl.com/mswataxa>
Ono’s early work has a heart of darkness that is hard to square with the warmth of her later art. In its first version, Ono’s famed Cut Piece (1964) asked viewers to use a pair of scissors to snip away at the clothing of the performer, who was allowed to decide for themselves when the performance was over. Initially, that performer was Ono herself, who sat there until she had been shorn of nearly everything she wore. In photos of that performance, Ono looks stoic, refusing to fully give in to the leery eyes of her viewers.
Cut Piece was a demonstration, in a way: the ultimate statement of noncompliance from an artist who has rarely acceded to those in power. The show—which does include more explicit forms of protest, such as her and Lennon’s famed WAR IS OVER! IF YOU WANT IT poster from 1969—proves that her aesthetic of refusal continued on afterward.
<https://tinyurl.com/rfwp2d4k>
The show features Half-a-Room (1967), an installation formed from split-apart objects such as a basket, a kettle, and even a painting. Because only one half of each object is presented here, none of these items are particularly useful. The impossibility of wholeness is echoed in Mend Piece (1966), in which viewers are invited to glue pieces of broken ceramic back together. I tried my best to adjoin two shards that I thought belonged to the same cup, but they wouldn’t fuse.
<https://tinyurl.com/yryf4ksk>
Should you find Mend Piece puzzling, try Helmets (Pieces of Sky), from 2001. Upside-down military helmets hold piles of jigsaw pieces featuring clouds that are free for the taking. The work holds out hope that one day, everyone who holds a piece will come together and assemble the puzzle collaboratively. But how would anyone even identify all those individuals? The task would be painstaking to plan and even harder to execute, though that all seems intentional. Helmets is all fun and games until you realize it’s a puzzle that can never be solved. _ARTnews

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EDUARD WIDMER, THE SULTAN AHMED MOSQUE (AKA THE BLUE MOSQUE), ISTANBUL,
<https://tinyurl.com/2ydfkxja>
Ceiling of mosque in Qom, Iran
<https://tinyurl.com/2r2zenf6>
Tomb of Hafez, Shiraz, Iran
<https://tinyurl.com/ykukt7er>
Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, Esfahan, Iran
<https://tinyurl.com/2mvc9s9b>
Inlaid flowers across the 17,000 square m. marble courtyard of the Sheikh Zayed Mosque, Abu Dhabi
<https://tinyurl.com/4z677dy6>
Calligraphy from the Bibi Khanum Mosque in Samarkand
<https://tinyurl.com/3tspvfzn>
Ceiling of mosque in Erbil, Iraq
<https://tinyurl.com/564w38zz>
Ceiling of mosque in Cairo
<https://tinyurl.com/nwepbsth>
Henry Ossawa Tanner, Interior of Mosque, Cairo, 1888.
<https://tinyurl.com/4nefhfp6>
Imam Shah mosque, Isfahan
<https://tinyurl.com/3wxrrksr>
Nasir-ol-Molk mosque, in Shiraz.
<https://tinyurl.com/mryfkuj3>
‘Tree of Life’ Jali, Sidi Saiyyid mosque in the city of Ahmedabad, ca, 1572 CE
<https://tinyurl.com/ysnfsy8d>
Door of the Mosque of Barquq, Cairo.
<https://tinyurl.com/mvnubfsn>
Dome of Seyyed Mosque in Isfahan. Iran
<https://tinyurl.com/3eckpuk7>
Jameh Mosque of Yazd in Yazd, Iran
<https://tinyurl.com/4kpmxbuc>
Columns, carpets and light from stained glass in Sasir al-Mulk Mosque in Shiraz
<https://tinyurl.com/yrvk2b2a>
Mosque in Isfahan, photo by James Longley
<https://tinyurl.com/3javz7mm>
Wazir Khan Mosque, Lahore, Pakistan
<https://tinyurl.com/2mhhdyxx>
I don't know which mosque this gorgeousness if from.
<https://tinyurl.com/3n46mj6e>
The Dome of the Shah Mosque, Isfahan, Iran
<https://tinyurl.com/3f3ckhsy> _RabihAlameddine