Essays
visual arts
the road to isenheim
John Berger’s Portraits has been on my bedside table for many months. It’s a book that invites browsing, as each chapter deals with a particular artist. At the start of quarantine in April 2020, I opened it more or less at random to the Mathias Grünewald chapter, and suddenly Berger was speaking to me as though he were sharing our pandemic predicament. Colmar's Isenheim altarpiece, commissioned by the hospice at Isenheim by the Antonite order, is the subject of the essay. The hospice was for victims of the plague.
Where is today’s Isenheim altarpiece?’ How are the afflicted to come to terms with the suffering of the 21st century’s first plague? What has our culture created that might offer solace and provide refuge?
Gallery view, ‘Ode to Graphics’ at Latvia’s Mark Rothko Center
on native soil: an ode to graphics, mark rothko center
In February, before lockdown and seemingly aeons ago, I travelled to Latvia for the opening of a retrospective exhibit of my father's, the printmaker Romas Viesulas, in Daugavpils, very close to the village where he was born. The Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre invited me to do a guided tour of the exhibit on opening day. It was a great honor to see my dad's work exhibited along side Mark Rothko's, who is also a native of this part of the world, in a former Russian Imperial barracks that has been poetically repurposed into a palace of culture. Here is an article which is a transcript of the tour I gave, for anyone interested in learning more about my dad's life and work. Thrilled to see it featured in Latvia's premier arts publication Arterritory, and many thanks to Tatjana Černova for her help in making this happen!
US Pavilion at the 35th Biennale di Venezia in 1970, where my father printmaker Romas Viesulas represented the United States
siege mentality, biennale di venezia: 1969/ 2019
Visual essay considering the Venice Biennale, fifty years on, reflections on art and activism, then and now, 1969 and 2019. Wrong Wrong Magazine, 27 August 2019.
Issue 8 of Pressing Matters
Pressing matters: papa was a-rollin’ stones
What was it like growing up in the home of a lithographer? Read on! My reminiscences of a childhood in a house which doubled as a gallery and a studio. Anyone with a love of ink needs to get their hands on a copy of Pressing Matters, a magazine made by printmakers for printmakers. In the 20 September 2019 Issue.
Printmaker Romas Viesulas in his studio in Rome, 1972
ambassador of statelessness
Lives obscured by ideology or the often cruel and indifferent march of history, may yet be sources of inspiration. Considering the artistic legacy of printmaker Romas Viesulas. Lithuanian Heritage, January 2020.
political economy
Banknotes are a civic manifesto
should i buy Crypto?
I get this question a lot. It has been years since I worked on Wall Street, but that does not stop people asking me for investment advice. The short answer is, ‘I don’t know’, but I do believe we need more trust and less technology in our money.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. – Hamlet
what do investment bankers do all day?
“How does it all work?” A philosopher asks a financier about a career in the financial markets. It must all seem so abstract to people who do not ‘have skin in the game’, as we say in my industry. Though to call it an industry seems a misnomer, since rarely, if ever, is anything actually manufactured or produced. There is much talk of products and of course of value and returns. What exactly goes on in the financial markets? And what does it take to get involved? So began our conversation last summer, and so it continues.
Photo credit: Carl Wycoff
fire break
What if our societies were to implement an annual ‘firebreak’? Two or more weeks per year, we call a ‘time out’...Downtime to attend to our immune systems, a preventive buffer to guard against other pandemics, and give the planet and ourselves a breather. A coordinated slowdown, to practice for an orderly transition toward a slow-growth or even no-growth economic paradigm...a downtime for our leaders -and all of us- to brainstorm solutions toward more imaginative politics and economics.
Will robots serve us or make us slaves?
Kid robot: artificial intelligence and the future of our kids
Robots will replace us. We’re facing an uncertain future of Artificial Intelligence which at best, will render whole swathes of humanity redundant. At worst, AI will subsume our consciousness and make homo sapiens extinct, much as we in turn have consigned earlier species to the dustbin of history. How are we to protect ourselves, and moreover protect our children, from this seemingly ineluctable threat?
Money origami by Yosuke Hasegawa
monopoly money: teaching financial literacy
We found an old Monopoly set in the attic of the summer house. My daughters were very keen to learn how to play. So I dusted off my memory of the rules, tried to recollect the Franc/ Dollar exchange rate (this set is from circa 1970), and we got down to business. Financial literacy is freedom.
parenting
Work by Lithuanian street artist Ernest Zacharevic in Penang
life at your own risk
One of the things I love about living in Portugal is that the Health & Safety Police have not yet made inroads on the territory. Swimming in the Atlantic, walking along sea cliffs in Alentejo, bathing in the mountain streams of Burgo are all at your own risk.
Wildlife illustrator Jane Kim
analog animals
Last summer we stumbled upon an unlikely relic, the Tado Ivanausko Zoologijos museum in Kaunas Lithuania. Here is a splendidly preserved time capsule of a natural history museum. It seemed like the entire animal kingdom in taxidermy, hidden away in a cabinet of curiosities that felt like it had not been opened since the Iron Curtain fell. We were practically the only people in the place. It was thrilling.
life lessons: Aniki-Bóbó (Manoel de Oliveira)
Rain, rain, rain. What better way to pass a rainy weekend than to catch up on unseen classics? It was high time to become acquainted with the films of Manoel de Oliveira, native of Porto, and the oldest active film director in the world, whose career spanned the silent era and the digital age. Aniki-Bóbó was his first feature length film, from 1942. And what a charm it is.
dream house
Rather poetically, an exhibit at the Museum of Childhood in London has coincided with our house hunting in Porto. For a nomadic family like ours, the idea of settling down can feel like a momentous event… open houses has been like stepping onto the pages of Alice in Wonderland. The spaciousness of empty houses gives rise to optical illusions. Empty spaces say “Fill Me!”, and we do. With objects, ideas and even encounters to come. That’s what a dream house is all about.
From Andrew Zuckerman’s book ‘Creature’
where the wild things are
When was the last time – or indeed, the first time – that you went some place really wild with your kids? Not just off-road, but truly wild. Where there are no roads. A place that you might encounter an unfamiliar face. Perhaps the closest we’ve come to visiting a place that could be genuinely described as wild was Patagonia.
The artist Roni Horn’s ‘Water Double’ sculptures
water, water everywhere
What young parent has not found themselves wondering what their child will be when they grow up? (Some of us may still be wondering ourselves, “what do I want to be when I grow up?”). Coding classes, Chinese lessons, Business Skills for youngsters… We’re all trying to second guess the professions of the future. And what parent can entirely resist the temptation to project our own ambitions on our kids? It was about the time we we stood before the blue majesty of the Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina, that we wondered, “is there such a thing as professional hydrologist?”.
From Hugh Holland’s series on California Skateboarders
falling up
Casa da Musica is a major cultural landmark in our new home of Porto. It is also an improvised skatepark. Skaters and other tricksters come from all over to carve the splendid undulations in which this hard edged concrete crystal palace sits. That’s one of the things I love about this town. A ‘live and let live’ attitude (or even ‘live and let thrive’), that sees skate punks side by side with classical musicians. All over town, renovations are geared to keeping an interwoven social fabric, so that urban renewal in the heart of town does its utmost to keep old folks and students living side by side, with artisans and even – why not? a yuppie or two.
parenting by default vs parenting by design
We are obsessed with our kids. Society’s move from ancestor worship to descendant worship has made us uninterested in culture, more primitive in our outlook, worse citizens, and ultimately… boring. That seems the Parenting Paradigm as presented by the English media. Readers of Pirouette know that it need not be this way.
what’s in your lunchbox?
I miss my lunchbox. In my early school years I went through several. My favourite was probably the Evel Knievel daredevil edition, in death-defying red-white-and-blue. What a great invention, with its embossed drawings and bright colours. In the more stressful moments of the financial crisis, as penny-pinching exercise I took to preparing a ‘lunchbox’ to work. As I travel even more now, and try to keep fitness-fueled for a big run soon, I still end up carrying my own food with me. No lunchbox these days, but maybe I can find one at a flea market or at auction somewhere?