In which tuna and Branwell import meaning into abstracted art

The Villager reviews Cornelia Parker's Brontëan Abstracts, now on exhibition at the D'Amelio Terras Gallery in New York (just until next February 9):

In the picture: Cornelia Parker, “Brontëan Abstract (Charlotte Bronte’s blue pincushion),” 2006 (Source, Courtesy D’Amelio Terras)

Whether it’s the pincushion of Charlotte Brontë or sheet music from the past, relics and reliquaries are fashionable this season. Some shows mine artifacts like Travis Somerville at Caren Golden Fine Art, while some create an imagined, or parallel past. Some recreate significant objects using unusual materials (like pipe cleaners). And some inhabit the present more successfully than others.
The doodlings and habitat of genius is the current subject of British artist Cornelia Parker. Parker is associated with Britart and its shock tactics and is known for dramatic installations. Her circular arrays such as “Thirty Pieces of Silver” (using silverware) implode and resurrect familiar tropes. She has said that she is interested in “killing things off and then resurrecting them, so that one set of references is negated as a new one takes its place.” In a three-person exhibition at D’Amelio Terras, Parker presents a news series of works called “Brontëan Abstracts.”
Focusing on the Brontë sisters, Parker uses an electron microscope to alter our perceptions. A pincushion magnified at least a dozen times, is recast as a bright blue field dotted with explosions of white. It’s so active, that at first I thought it was an aerial view of splashing swimmers in a pool. In another photograph redolent with the passage of time, dusty rose blotter paper boasts blobs of black ink, becoming a gorgeous exercise in non-objective aesthetics. By zeroing in so clearly on the minute, Cornelia has found a unique way to view actual things, and in doing so, she has found a new way to import meaning into abstracted art. (Jeffrey Ciphers Wright)

Douglas A. Martin, author of Branwell: A novel of the Brontë Brother (2006) is interviewed in Bookslut. One question is related to his previous novel:

You write fiction and poetry but blur the line between the two. Your novel, Branwell, is incredibly poetic. Your poetry often has a clear narrative thread. Do the practices of writing fiction and poetry feel very different to you? How do they inform each other?

I’m glad you see Branwell in that light. There’s a poem in the manuscript with which I first knew I could really just write a story if I wanted to. Fittingly, perhaps, the poem is called “Simulation.” In the story version of the same intrigue, another character comes into the frame, from the lyric to the situation’s real world navigation. The story is called “Threshold” and specifically, structurally deals with the connotations of this one word and the one or two or three bodies it comes into contact with, there.
Poems for me used to be impulses, impressions, angers, interventions into my own life, monologues in search of a listener, even; this idea plays into some of the collection’s titlings. These were urgencies that had somehow gone beyond just what I needed to put in the diary I no longer keep in any real, recognizable way.
Once I’d started writing pieces specifically for performance, those pieces started to grow, basically to become stories, though I had always been aware of when I read how I was not only doing a “set,” I was creating a feeling of different stories based on the order I’d read my poems in. “I” always becomes a through thread when you are standing in front of a group of people saying it. In some ways, my work moved from following a thought to following an action or a series of actions. Subjects became less shadowy for me.
I’m supposed to not “just say things” in my poetry, and I’m supposed to “just say things” in my fiction, but there is a dialect between the two for me. Poetry for me has always had a performative dimension. I started writing novels really because I was tired of trying to whip up audiences back in Georgia. The novels I have written, at least in the composing of them, have never seemed to need an audience to justify them in the way that poetry does for me. There’s a little more faith that they might somehow see the light of day outside of my hands. But I also see the novel as its own poetic structure, really, and I don’t think about writing poems anymore, even though I feel myself drifting away from any driving concern to explore the novel, how fine of a line I can walk there. In some ways I’ve gone in my thinking from my earliest notions of what can be a poem more towards now what can just be a book. How small can a book be? I think about conceits more than anything and how language will or won’t fall around that. Poems captured moments, and I still think of moments in my prose like that; narrative sequences manipulate the importance we attach to them. (Lena Dunham)

The Sydney Morning Herald food critic seems to be reading Wuthering Heights (or maybe he has eaten something in a bad state) because this is how he describes a "vitello tonnato" terrine at the Restaurant Arras:

The Italian classic is deconstructed, inverted and given British spunk. An eye of raw yellowfin tuna runs through the centre of the full-flavoured, gelatinous veal shank terrine. The mayo is presented as a ring of finely chopped hardboiled egg, capers and preserved lemon dressed with olive oil. It's as handsome as Heathcliff striding across the moors. (Simon Thomsen)

Normblog interviews author Susanne Gervay. When asked about her favourite writers, she says (among others):

My heart beats a little more quickly when I see my romance collection - Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, all the Jane Austen novels, especially my favourite, Pride and Prejudice. My teenage years were filled with these books. I must have read each one 10 times, seeking insights into romantic relationships as they deal with life's adversities and successes. Of course, I was in love with Mr Rochester, Heathcliff and Mr Darcy, with their varying but heroic natures. I was the heroine: courageous Jane Eyre, passionate Catherine Earnshaw and feisty Elizabeth Bennet, respectively.

Moviefone has produced one more list of best-of-movies. This time is the 25 best Romance Movies (St Valentine's around the corner, you know). Wuthering Heights 1939 is number 3:

A rich girl (Merle Oberon) rejects her stable boy/true love (Laurence Olivier) but soon realizes her mistake, it's not until she's on her deathbed that the two lovers reconnect. Haunting has never been so romantic.

And summarizing has never been so misleading, may we add.

The Brontë Parsonage Blog posts about Dudley Green's upcoming biography of Patrick Brontë: Patrick Brontë, father of genius (with a foreword by the Archbishop of Canterbury). Libby Sternberg (the author of the unpublished but highly recommendable To Love Faithfully and Well..., previously known as Through Nightmare when BrontëBlog posted about it) is interviewed on Favorite PASTimes:

What are you working on now that you’d like us to know about?
For several years now, I’ve been laboring on a true “book of my heart,” a novel set in 1934, in California, a story inspired by Jane Eyre. It’s been read by several editors and is still being read by some now. I feel so strongly about this story that I have posted it in its entirety on my web site, so if you’re a Jane Eyre fan, check it out and let me know what you think!

The BarbellionBlog (devoted to post the complete works of W.N.P. Barbellion (1889-1919), nom the plume of Bruce Frederick Cummings) posts his entry on Emily Brontë.

Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Books, Brontëites, Emily Brontë, Jane Eyre, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights