jenseits oder art brut

A bit nonplussed with myself for not having taken the opportunity to venture out on this vector sooner, I took advantage of the fine weather to return to Heidelberg, visiting after a rather long absence. Though I only had the vague agenda of going in search of this artefact that I’d learned about recently (but more on that later), I didn’t really have a plan and familiar with the old town, just wanted to enjoy the day.
Beginning on the opposite bank in the Neuenheim district, I ascended the Heiligenberg (the Saints’ Mountain) and marched down the northern slope along the scenic and duly reflective Philosophenweg and enjoyed the views of the town below as I approached the Neckar and the crossed at the Old Bridge.
I was mistaken about where the autobiographical jacket of Agnes Richter was displayed, along with the rest of the curated collection of psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn (DE/EN) but did locate the facilities that housed the former asylum and saw in the venerable campus museum—the University of Heidelberg founded in 1386—how the institution appeared during Nazi times and had a peek inside the ornate lecture hall, die Alte Aula.
Admission to the University Museum also included a tour of the Student Prison (der Studentenkarzer)—a pastiche of the various incarnations that the jail had taken from the days of the university’s founding until the outbreak of World War I, which afforded those with affiliation to the university a special and separate jurisdiction from regular townsfolk and generally lighter punishment for youthful indiscretions.
A sentence rather became a badge of honour and right-of-passage with the rise of fraternal organisations. Having already seen a lot, I sort of lost track of my quest and thought it would need to wait for another day but I recalled where the school of medicine was located and decided to look there.
I wasn’t sure how the gallery had escaped my notice beforehand—given all the opportunities that I had to explore Heidelberg in the past but a rather overwhelming and solemn experience awaited me.
Taking interest in the art that his patients produced not only as a psychologically heuristic tool but also for their aesthetic value, Prinzhorn began curating his collection in the 1920s and took special care that their art was documented and conserved—even through the ravages of World War II and euthanasia campaigns that murdered many of the artists.
Overcome by the expressive styles—something that I can’t quite name, informed surely from distress and disassociation but at the same time insightful, I found the exhibit fascinating and altogether something that I was not quite prepared for.
Embedded within the walls of the gallery space were several offices occupied by psychologists and one saw people come and go amid the paintings.  Moved by these testimonials that offered a glimpse into the mental state of the artists, I had nearly forgotten about Agnes Richter’s jacket and inquired with one of the staff members (who also handpick among the thousands of objects in the collection which works of art to display on a rotating basis) and was told it could only be viewed as part of a guided tour, which I’d arrived too late for.
I wasn’t disappointed, filled with so many other impressions to filter through, and resolved to visit again—since the exhibit regularly changes—when H could join me. Being a psychotherapist, I think it is something that H would be interested in seeing as well.

6x6

never just a car: a supercut of automotive movie cameos

blue state: an exhibit in Los Angles structured around colour examines the many ways of casting shade

india pale ale: find out what which beer you’re partial to says about you, via the ever-brilliant Nag on the Lake

le béton brût: with greyscale Lego bricks, a man and his son create miniature Brutalists architecture, via Present /&/ Correct

paleo-futures: 1926 interview with Nikola Tesla predicting our fraught relationship with our gadgets

midsweden 365: secret tunnels excavated in the granite mountains near the town of Gällö repurposed as a underground, year-round skiing range

residence hall

Under construction since the summer of 2016, the architects behind Urban Rigger—we learn via Plain Magazine—present an innovative concept to address the shortage of affordable student housing by creating floating dormitories along disused docklands in Copenhagen.
The potential for expanding sustainable dwelling places parallel to abandoned water transport infrastructure that line the world’s rivers and canals with extant but outmoded infrastructure is tremendous and would relieve a lot of pressure in places where space is already at a premium. Units, which would have applications for sheltering refugees as well, moored and unmoored as needed, are housed in upgraded shipping containers and include an array of amenities and harness power passively through solar panels and the passing current and tides.  Be sure to visit the links above for a whole gallery of the floating dorm and a video documentary.

diglossia

Writing for the Atlantic, Sarah Zhang takes a second look (I am realizing paying attention to the re-runs and the re-cap is important) at a John Hopkins study called “The Devil’s in the G-Tails,” which demonstrated a remarkably low recall on how to properly write a standard lower-carriage g and questioned why there’s such a disconnect between handwriting (to the extent we can be bothered anymore) and print.
The double-storey g originated in the scriptorium and was transcommunicated to the foundry and remained, even though for correspondence and note-taking, the single-storey minuscule took off. Briefly in the 1950s the variants (allographs) were used by the International Phonetic Association to mark a distinction between the hard- and soft-g sounds but that convention was since abandoned. It’s something to be sure to consider what’s in the serifs and ligatures of our refined fonts and how those fiddly bits are fossils of the past and the developmental history of penmanship and printing.

cetacea

We enjoyed reflecting on this article from the Smithsonian Magazine that suggests that science and society is growing more receptive to the sensibilities of those that talk to the animals through the lens of the Inuit, Iñupiat and other aboriginal people who respected and revered their quarry and mainstay, the whale. Rather than dismissing their connection as superstition or as something totally inaccessible and inscrutable, researchers and ethnographers are taking the lore and traditions of northern people more seriously, realizing and appreciating that this “whale cult” forms a quite different paradigm than the common narrative of Western culture’s article of faith that mankind was given dominion over Nature.

froggy goes a-courting

Though taxologically distinguished from their amphibian cousins by behaviour rather than any agreed upon definition, most toads live their adult lives in dry woodlands and only return to the ponds where they hatched (a practise in the animal kingdom called natal site fidelity or philopatry) to spawn the next generation.
Their annual march down the valley goes directly through our yard but they encounter a big last-mile problem with a single lane road (read about a possible technological way to help mitigate such competition here). They’ve been managing the passage fairly well on their own but one does see a few flattened casualties but we helped out as many as we could to cross the street.

a separate peace

While Russia may have donned the public-facing mantle for meddling and media manipulation, one is puts out of mind the Trump regime’s other cosy relationships at one’s peril.
While debate rages on about the extent that Russia undermined the US presidential election or whether democratic institutions can be under siege from multiple fronts or not—some seem to have adopted the contrarian narrative that it can’t be both Russia and sophistry—other political strongmen in the Middle East have leveraged Trump’s compromising business-ties to achieve desired, measurable outcomes at the expense of alienating other regional partners and players for the appeasement and enrichment of the few whose tensions will pull the world into a fresh conflagration—not that the embers from before are not still glowing.

six-foot, seven-foot, eight-foot bunch!

A group of post-graduate students in Iceland have conferred a banana a passport so they can study not only the scope and complexity of the process and infrastructure that brought the single piece of fruit from its place of origin in Ecuador but also the reductive nature of food labelling and how no product or produce is from just one place, passing seamlessly from palette to plate.
Following the fortnight-long journey of a banana of nearly nine thousand kilometres whose handled by thirty-three individuals on each day of the travel—without deference to the growers or consumers, really, illustrates the impact of upholding global trade networks, bearing in mind that more finished- rather than harvested-goods can encircle the planet several, on ocean-going vessels (the fact that the seas are brought into this petty land-lubbing ordeal is also overlooked) times before reaching the purchaser. The same group has also examined the travels of Iceland’s chief exports—cod and aluminium