[REC]3: Genesis (Paco Plaza, 2012)
In 1973 Bobby RIggs, then 55, challenged the female tennis player Billie Jean King, then 29, to a match. His argument was that a woman would always be inferior to a man when it came to a test of physical strength, skill and endurance. He was hugely wrong, and Billie Jean King won in straight sets: 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. We can all agree to laugh at Bobby Riggs now, but he wasn't necessarily stupid (I guess), he was just operating under the control of a very preordained way of thinking. Something that encourages us to draw our conclusions before even hearing the question. And we all do this to greater or lesser extents.
We tend to hit the age of, oh, let's say 30 to 35, and allow our opinions to set, like concrete. Take me for example. I don't like the band U2, and if they release a new song I'll automatically take against it. But this is limiting for me, because I'm closing potential avenues off to myself. And U2 don't care in the slightest.
There's a lot to be said for taking these set ways of thinking, trashing them, and starting all over again. So the story goes: railroad tracks acquired their sizing (the distance between the rails) from roman horse-drawn carriages. Although there's no absolute agreement on precisely how far apart railroad tracks should be, the initial designs and ongoing structures did indeed receive their scaling from the distance between the wheels of a roman chariot. That's how wide a thing that carries people is, you see. And now we're at a point where it would be pretty dandy to change all this and have wider trains for all the extra god damn people we have accumulated. But, of course, we can't do this, because we set the parameters a long time ago, and that's just how it is now. Had some forward-thinking maverick made the tracks wider, things would be very different today.
It's easy to laugh at that maverick. Or to lambast your friend who used to hate U2, but has now acquired a taste for them. There's a natural, unspoken tendency to fear change, to treat it with mistrust. But really there's a great deal of power in having that ability. In 1875, the well-known Parisienne model, Victorine Meurent, started taking painting lessons. Everyone laughed at her. A model had no business trying to become a painter. But Meurent had the last laugh. She exhibited in 6 Salon exhibitions, frequently appearing alongside the artists who had both used her as a muse, and laughed at her aspirations. As you may know, Meurent modelled for a number of different artists, but is probably best remembered for the Manet paintings she was in. Whether it was the influence of Meurent or not, those Manet paintings have a very modern interrogative conversation regarding looking and being looked at, which to us now is all very familiar, but remains far more confrontational than what had come before, and, to be honest, more than a great deal of that which followed. In 1906, Meurent left Paris and lived in a large house with a woman named Marie Dufour for the rest of her life. Meurent died in 1927, Dufour in 1930. And later in the century the neighbours recall the burning of Dufour and Meurent's belongings. Amongst them was a violin and its case, the objects she was carrying when she first drew Manet's eye.
Did this all end up going somewhere other than where you were expecting? Good.
We tend to hit the age of, oh, let's say 30 to 35, and allow our opinions to set, like concrete. Take me for example. I don't like the band U2, and if they release a new song I'll automatically take against it. But this is limiting for me, because I'm closing potential avenues off to myself. And U2 don't care in the slightest.
There's a lot to be said for taking these set ways of thinking, trashing them, and starting all over again. So the story goes: railroad tracks acquired their sizing (the distance between the rails) from roman horse-drawn carriages. Although there's no absolute agreement on precisely how far apart railroad tracks should be, the initial designs and ongoing structures did indeed receive their scaling from the distance between the wheels of a roman chariot. That's how wide a thing that carries people is, you see. And now we're at a point where it would be pretty dandy to change all this and have wider trains for all the extra god damn people we have accumulated. But, of course, we can't do this, because we set the parameters a long time ago, and that's just how it is now. Had some forward-thinking maverick made the tracks wider, things would be very different today.
It's easy to laugh at that maverick. Or to lambast your friend who used to hate U2, but has now acquired a taste for them. There's a natural, unspoken tendency to fear change, to treat it with mistrust. But really there's a great deal of power in having that ability. In 1875, the well-known Parisienne model, Victorine Meurent, started taking painting lessons. Everyone laughed at her. A model had no business trying to become a painter. But Meurent had the last laugh. She exhibited in 6 Salon exhibitions, frequently appearing alongside the artists who had both used her as a muse, and laughed at her aspirations. As you may know, Meurent modelled for a number of different artists, but is probably best remembered for the Manet paintings she was in. Whether it was the influence of Meurent or not, those Manet paintings have a very modern interrogative conversation regarding looking and being looked at, which to us now is all very familiar, but remains far more confrontational than what had come before, and, to be honest, more than a great deal of that which followed. In 1906, Meurent left Paris and lived in a large house with a woman named Marie Dufour for the rest of her life. Meurent died in 1927, Dufour in 1930. And later in the century the neighbours recall the burning of Dufour and Meurent's belongings. Amongst them was a violin and its case, the objects she was carrying when she first drew Manet's eye.
Did this all end up going somewhere other than where you were expecting? Good.