pearl binder

pearl binder

Artists' International Association (AIA) 
The association's aim was to promote the 'Unity of Artists for Peace, Democracy and Cultural Development'. It also aimed to promote wider access to art through travelling exhibitions and public art projects. The Artists International Association was a response to the social and political conflicts of the 1930s. It embraced all aspects of practice and held a series of group exhibitions. The AIA supported the left-wing Republican side in the Spanish Civil War through exhibitions and other fund-raising activities. The Association was also involved in the settling of artists displaced by the Nazi regime in Germany. Many of those linked with the Association were also pacifists.

An association of left-wing British artists founded in London in 1932 with the aim of achieving ‘the unity of artists against Fascism and war and the suppression of culture’. Originally it was called Artists International, but it added the word ‘Association’ to its name when it was reconstituted in 1935. It continued until 1971, but abandoned its political objectives in 1953, thereafter existing as an exhibiting society. Initially there were 32 members, mainly commercial artists and designers, although they also included the German-born Marxist art historian Francis Klingender (1907–55), who described his work as ‘theoretical and historical studies designed to elucidate the role of art as one of the great value-forming agencies in the social structure and social change’. The first chairman was the industrial designer Misha Black (1910–77), who later played an important role in the Festival of Britain. At the outset the position of the group was avowedly Marxist and its activities included producing pamphlets, posters, and other propaganda material (making use of facilities at the Central School of Art, where one of the founder members, James Fitton (1899–1982), taught lithography). Modern art, with its ‘negation of content’, was viewed with some suspicion as a sign of bourgeois decadence, but after the Association was reconstituted in 1935 it became much less doctrinaire and attracted support from artists working in a wide range of styles. Its exhibition ‘Artists against Fascism and War’ (1935), for example, included work by Robert Medley, Henry Moore, and Paul Nash, and by the end of the Second World War the Association had more than a thousand members. In addition to holding exhibitions, the AIA published a journal (sporadically and under different titles and formats, beginning as Artists International Bulletin, 1934–5) and also a book of essays entitled 5 on Revolutionary Art (1935). This was edited by the sculptor Betty Rea and the five contributors were Eric Gill, the ethnomusicologist A. L. Lloyd, Klingender, Herbert Read who gamely made the case, unpopular in the AIA, for the avant-garde against realism, and the writer Alick West.

http://spitalfieldslife.com/2010/05/01/pearl-binder-artist-writer/

pearly king

Nacre appears iridescent because the thickness of the aragonite platelets is close to the wavelength of visible light. This results in constructive and destructive interference of different wavelengths of light, resulting in different colors of light being reflected at different viewing angles.

The layers of nacre smooth the shell surface and help defend the soft tissues against parasites and damaging debris by entombing them in successive layers of nacre, forming either a blister pearl attached to the interior of the shell, or a free pearl within the mantle tissues. The process is called encystation and it continues as long as the mollusk lives.

I fainted with pain, and the horror of that dim milk-white panic is as ineffaceable as the scar my flesh still bears
Herbert Read / The Innocent Eye

aristotle/ history of animals - the soft parts / milk

5. The soft parts are either entirely so, or so long as they are in a natural condition, as blood, serum, fat, tallow, marrow, semen, gall, milk [in those animals that give milk], flesh, and other analogous parts of the body. In another manner also the excretions of the body belong to this class, as phlegm, and the excrements of the abdomen and bladder; the hard and dry parts are sinew, skin, vein, hair, bone, cartilage, nail, horn, for that part bears the same name, and on the whole is called horn, and the other parts of the body which are analogous to these.

the immortal horses

Homer, Iliad 17. 426 ff :
"But the horses of Aiakides [Akhilleus] standing apart from the battle wept, as they had done since they heard how their charioteer[Patroklos] had fallen in the dust at the hands of murderous Hektor. In truth Automedon, the powerful son of Diores, hit them over and over again with the stroke of the flying lash, or talked to them, sometimes entreating them, sometimes threatening. They were unwilling to go back to the wide passage of Helle and the ships, or back into the fighting after the Akhaians, but still as stands a grave monument which is set over the mounded tomb or a dead man or lady, they stood there holding motionless in tis place the fair-wrought chariot, leaning their heads along the ground, and warm tears were running earthward from underneath the lids of the mourning horses who longed for their charioteer, while their bright manes were made dirty as they streamed down either side of the yoke from under the yoke pad.
As he watched the mourning horses the son of Kronos [Zeus] pities them, and stirred his head and spoke to his own spirit : `Poor wretches, why then did we ever give you to the lord Peleus, a mortal man, and you yourselves are immortal and ageless? Only so that among unhappy men you also might be grieved? Since among all creatures that breathe on earth and crawl on it there is not anywhere a thing more dismal than man is. At least the son of Priam, Hektor, shall not mount behind you in the carefully wrought chariot. I will not let him. Is it not enough for him that he has the armour and glories in wearing it? But now I will put vigour into your knees and your spirits so that you bring back Automedon out of the fighting safe to the hollow ships . . .'
So spoke Zeus, and breathed great vigour into the horses, and they shaking the dust from their manes to the ground lightly carried the running chariot among Akhaians and Trojans."

Homer, Iliad 19. 392 ff :
"Automedon and Alkimos, in charge of the horses, yoked them, and put the fair breast straps about them, and forced the bits home between their jaws, and pulled the reins back against the compacted chariot seat, and one, Automedon, took up the shining whip caught close in his hand and vaulted up to the chariot, while behind him Akhilleus helmed for battle took his stance shining in all his armour like the sun when he crosses above us, and cried in a terrible voice on the horses of his father : `Xanthos, Balios, Bay and Dapple, famed sons of Podarge, take care to bring in another way your charioteer back to the company of the Danaans, when we give over fighting, not leave him to lie fallen there, as you did Patroklos.’
Then from beneath the yoke the gleam-footed horse answered him, Xanthos, and as he spoke he bowed his head, so that all the mane fell away from the pad and swept the ground by the cross-yoke; the goddess of the white arms, Hera, had put a voice in him : `We shall still keep you safe for this time, o hard Akhilleus. And yet the day of your death is near, but it is not we who are to blame, but a great god and powerful Destiny. For it was not because we were slow, because wee were careless, but it was that high god, the child of lovely-haired Leto [Apollon], who killed him among the champions and gave the glory to Hektor. But for us, we two could run with the blast of the West Wind (Zephryos) who they say is the lightest of all things; yet still for you there is destiny to be killed in force by a god and a mortal.’
When he had spoken so the Erinyes stopped the voice in him, but deeply disturbed, Akhilleus of the swift feet answered him : `Xanthos, why do you prophesy my death? This is not for you. I myself know well it is destined for me to die here far from my beloved father and mother.'"

Pietra paesina/ l’orée du songe—the shore of dreaming

Meanwhile the tree of life goes on putting out branches. A multitude of new inscriptions is added to the writing in stones. Images of fishes swim among dendrites of manganese as though among clumps of moss. A sea lily sways on its stem in the heart of a piece of slate. A phantom shrimp can no longer feel the air with its broken antennae. The scrolls and laces of ferns are imprinted in coal. Ammonites of all sizes, from a lentil to a millwheel, flaunt their cosmic spirals everywhere. A fossil trunk, turned jasper and opal like a frozen fire, clothes itself in scarlet, purple, violet. Dinosaurs' bones change their petit-point tapestries into ivory, gleaming pink or blue like sugared almonds.

caillois/ the writing of stones

warner on caillois Roger Caillois among the Nonhumans












Their sole desire was to become solid -- as solid and perdurable as the rocks about them. They therefore practiced the rites of petrifaction. When the hated breath at last left the human body, that body was carried to special caves, and there laid in troughs filled with the petrous water that dripped from roof and walls. There it remained until the body turned white and hard, until the eyes were glazed under their vitreous lids, and the hair of the head became like crisp snail-shells, the beard like a few jagged icicles. But this process was merely a long purgatory, for when the body was finally petrified it was removed from its watery trough and carried like a recumbent statue to the halls of the dead -- caves in which the alabaster bodies were stacked, one above the other in dense rows, to wait for their final beatitude, crystallisation. When the body, no longer recognisably human, but rather a pillar of salt, took on the mathematical precision and perfect structure of crystal, then it was judged to have attained its final immortality.

herbert read / the green child /

Knight, Death, and the Devil, 1513–14 Albrecht Dürer

Dürer's Knight, Death, and the Devil is one of three large prints of 1513–14 known as his Meisterstiche (master engravings). The other two are Melancholia I and Saint Jerome in His Study. Though not a trilogy in the strict sense, the prints are closely interrelated and complementary, corresponding to the three kinds of virtue in medieval scholasticism—theological, intellectual, and moral. Called simply the Reuter (Rider) by Dürer, Knight, Death, and the Devil embodies the state of moral virtue. The artist may have based his depiction of the "Christian Knight" on an address from Erasmus's Instructions for the Christian Soldier (Enchiridion militis Christiani), published in 1504: "In order that you may not be deterred from the path of virtue because it seems rough and dreary … and because you must constantly fight three unfair enemies—the flesh, the devil, and the world—this third rule shall be proposed to you: all of those spooks and phantoms which come upon you as if you were in the very gorges of Hades must be deemed for naught after the example of Virgil's Aeneas … Look not behind thee." Riding steadfastly through a dark Nordic gorge, Dürer's knight rides past Death on a Pale Horse, who holds out an hourglass as a reminder of life's brevity, and is followed closely behind by a pig-snouted Devil. As the embodiment of moral virtue, the rider—modeled on the tradition of heroic equestrian portraits with which Dürer was familiar from Italy—is undistracted and true to his mission. A haunting expression of the vita activa, or active life, the print is a testament to the way in which Dürer's thought and technique coalesced brilliantly in the "master engravings."


into the cloudy future an infinite ray in which there could always be seen, like a silver knight on a white steed, this unreal figure which was myself, riding to quixotic combats, attaining a blinding and indefinable glory … herbert read