Photograph from the web

I don’t know the man. In fact never heard of him before, until I came across a description of his latest adventures.

But I consider myself a soul mate since he combines a zest for adventure with a hefty social consciousness, an eye for fashion and a sense of the ridiculous.  All traits I either have or aspire to….

Who am I talking about as a potential travel companion? Why, Steven Payne. The man who recently bounced across the Alps on a space hopper. Glad you never heard of him either.

We should have, though. He is a man on a mission, a former physics teacher trying to get attention for the problem of homelessness by doing weird trips that has him roughing it outside. Roughing, that is, with a tweet suit, a pith helmet, a waistcoat and an umbrella, to ensure that the stereotypic image of a traveling Englishman is not endangered.

The idea of this particular venture was born while sharing a meal with a homeless man. When he asked him how arduous life on the street is, the man answered,”It’s something that you thought could never happen to you, until it does. As if you, all of a sudden, had to cross the Alps on a space ball.”

The trip lasted 17 days, taking a partial route traversed by Hannibal before him, from Turin to Grenoble. Prepared with 5 balls, appropriately named and sorely needed, Payne made it despite altitude sickness (some peaks as high as 2000 meters/ almost 7000 feet) a heat stroke and a twisted knee. Hm, what would I have given to be there to photograph…. not that I have the stamina to hike that far and high, much less to balance on one of those contraptions.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-6183827/Meet-Steven-Payne-Englishman-bounced-Alps-space-hopper.html

You can follow his adventures on FB under Pilgrims Progress.

When I started to photograph some 10 years ago, I took quite a few images of homeless people here and abroad. I had not thought it through, had no education about what is acceptable, what is ethical, what is or should be taboo in street photography. I stopped doing it pretty soon thereafter, after helpful discussions in photo critique groups that I joined; even though my shots of people preserved their privacy – taken so that no faces were visible – I consider it now exploitative.

For photographs today, then, I picked round objects in honor of the space balls, particularly the ones named Napoleon Blownapart and Hanniball. Alas, not one of my round choices a good mode of transportation……

The Risiera de San Sabba was one of 4 Italian concentrations camps, the only one with its own crematorium. According to the Italian historian Elio Apih, “it was a microcosm of the forms and methods of Nazi policies and repression, where techniques of racial and political deportation and elimination were applied….” The camp was a hub for organizing Nazi military actions to round up partisans and Jews; it served as containment station for the Jews who were then deported to Auschwitz and other camps; it was also the place where political prisoners were killed.

Up to 5000 of them, is estimated by the latest historical research; a trial against the commanders in1976 was unable to establish exact figures. What was confirmed, though, was the fact that most of the killings were perpetrated by clubbing and beating to death. Hanging was second, and occasionally people got shot. The room where these atrocities were committed was immediately adjacent to the cells where prisoners were held, so that they were surrounded by the screams soon to be their own.

Screams were heard and tolerated by the Italian neighbors, who by this time were whipped up into a fascist frenzy by Mussolini, and had no problem with the German occupation, having been manipulated into nationalistic hatred against Bolshewiks and Slavic refugees/or Italian, Slovenian and Croat resistance fighters.

The building was originally a rice husking factory at the outskirts of Trieste. Himmler sent his forces to San Sabba in 1943 to start the killings. The factory housed the SS, some Ukranian collaborators,  and 17 micro-cells for those awaiting their death in place. Each cell, 1.20 meters long and 2 meters high held up to 6 prisoners, sometime for up to 6 months.

The Hall of Crosses, next to them, housed the Jews slated for transport. The upper floor were used for forced labor of the prisoners.

The inner courtyard now displays a large metal sculpture and a large metal plate on the ground, delineating the crematorium, the smoke path and the chimney. Ashes were thrown into the nearby sea.

The memorial site is extremely well designed with cement walls enclosing the sides not occupied by the original buildings, adding to the claustrophobic nature of the place. There are traveling exhibits about other horrors committed under fascism, and visitors are mainly school groups; not too many tourists to be seen.

There was a trial against two of the commanders of the Risiera camp in 1976. One of them received a life sentence, but never served since the German authorities were not obliged to hand him over due to some 1942 bilateral agreement…. (!) The museum was built and eventually opened in 1975 as a National Monument.

Part of me understands why one would not want to spoil a holiday in such a beautiful area with the darkness that surrounds you when entering the memorial.

Part of me wants to make it obligatory so that we understand the nature of  (creeping) fascism and the horrors that ensue.

Trieste has a long and checkered history, a unique blend of ethnicities, cultures, religions and political systems. For centuries it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During the 1930s it became a fascist bastion, fueled by the influx of slavic refugees who provided an easy target for nationalism. Immediately after World War Two, Trieste, on the border with Yugoslavia, was recognised as a free state under international law, though it remained under military occupation until 1954, when it was returned to Italy. For Churchill it was the southern outpost of the “Iron Curtain” dividing the West from the communist East.

The architecture of the city mirrors this past. The main square, Piazza dell’ Unita, has three sides occupied by splendid Habsburg buildings; the fourth is the sea. A plaque commemorates the spot where Mussolini announced his policy of racial laws against the Jews. The Catholic Church of Saint Antonio shares space on the Grand Canal with the Serbian Orthodox Church; the synagogue is two minutes away.

If you think of the lay-out as concentric half-circles, this is the core of the historical wealth of the town, with shipping insurance buildings, town hall, stock exchange and so on, flanked by yacht and industrial harbors. The next ring up consists of small alleys (formerly the ghetto) leading to streets with imposing houses of the (upper middle class.)

Eventually you get to the real, non-touristy quarters where much of the population lives, and then the peripheral apartment blocks for the working class.

It is a city of riches, which those who fight for Trieste’s independence on the basis of a 1947 United Nations Security Council charter (which recognised Trieste and its surroundings – including parts of what is now Croatia and Slovenia – as a free state, with both Italian and Slovenian as official languages, subject to the appointment of an internationally recognised governor,) don’t want to share with Italy. They get laughed off by both the law and their fellow Triesteans, who have a rather optimistic outlook on life and easy going mentality.

And when you walk so much you find the best little osterias sans touristes…..

I can never remember if it’s today or tomorrow that a young friend of mine celebrates his birthday. To err on the side of being early, I dedicate this sampling of Trieste’s people to him today. He is brave and cheerful enough to wear red scarves hand-knit by yours truly, wickedly smart, provides the best book recommendations, and occasionally saves my son from being eaten by leopards and giraffes (don’t ask.)

The women of Trieste transport the kiddos

Deal with mopey teenagers

Do the shopping

Love color

Navigate the uneven streets in high heels

Stick by their guys

And walk the dogs

The men hang out

P

OK, they walk the dogs, too

And e v e r y o n e wears these shades….

Happy birthday, Conor! I hope one of these days we’ll travel en famille.

Scores of people come to this ancient seaport town each year to pay homage to James Joyce, who wrote his Ulysses   here. The city accommodates them by putting up plaques at about every corner, bridge, staircase, churchyard ever touched by his foot, seemingly not a millimeter of Trieste not once traversed by the master.

My first-day pilgrimage, though, honored a different man – one who is a serious contender on my who to take to a deserted island list. (Remind me to do a week of blogs about the rest of them.) Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the founder of art history and art criticism as we know it, known as the father of modern archeology, is buried here.

The man’s life reads like a Russian novel. Born into extreme poverty in Prussia, his father a cobbler, he dug his way out by his wits. Scholarly excellence landed him at a number of universities, studying first theology, then medicine, but ultimately falling in love with ancient languages and developing a passion for Greek art. He devised a system of learning new languages in what is claimed 6 weeks, eventually able to converse in 12 of them. He was appointed to ever more prestigious posts as researcher/librarian/envoy for German aristocrats and then various Italian cardinals who opened their ancient art collections to him and enabled him to participate at the digs of Pompeii and Hercanuleum. As papal antiquarian and later secretary to Cardinal Albani he had found a space that allowed for his intellectual acumen to blossom. And, one might add, his homosexuality to be silently tolerated.

Say what you want about dead, old, white men, or the idealization of the Greek male body, Winckelmann wrote the first defining book of how to approach art, both in terms of systematizing epochs of creative output, and also how to read an individual work of art. His 1764 History of the Art of Antiquity was recognized to be revolutionary, and had an influence on many great minds of his time: Kant, Herder, Goethe and Lessing, the painters Mengs and Oeser among them. It lays out a scientific methodology to approach both art and archeology.

It is not dry scholarship, though. If you read his 1755 Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks  you’ll find someone thinking through such cultural and technical factors as climate, freedom, and craftsmanship in explaining the art of a people all in a schmoozing writing style that feels like having a personal conversation. That probably helped to make him so influential in renewing Northern Europeans’ interest in the ancient Greeks.

Which, as we know, had some dire consequence independent of the gains for the world of art history. His enchanted proclamation of the linkage between ancient Hellas and Germany found eventually a willing ear in the philhellenic Führer of the third Reich: just look at the Olympics and then his propaganda surrounding the art of war, all wittingly embraced by all too many Germans steeped in classical education. Eliza Butler wrote a scathing analysis of the implications already in 1935, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany.  https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Greece-over-Germany-Eighteenth/dp/1107697646 

On his way back from Vienna to Rome in 1768, the guy met his premature end in Trieste, being murdered by a chance acquaintance he took to his bed, who coveted some coins he saw which turned out to be medals that Empress Maria Theresia had just bestowed on the writer. He was buried at a local church, but his bones were mixed up with others. Eventually they erected a cenotaph at the local Museo d’Antichitá. http://www.museostoriaeartetrieste.it

The neoclassicist sarcophagus is crowned with a melancholic figure holding a medallion with Winckelmann’s portrait. Underneath is a relief that shows him in a toga, shining a torch on representations of:  painting, sculpture, architecture, history, critique, philosophy and, sitting, archeology.

Can’t but grin, when you look at it. Unless you are a Reed Professor teaching Hume 110 and thinking about the current crop of students who want nothing to do with all of this any longer.

Outside is a lovely, quiet courtyard, seemingly untouched by the masses pursuing James Joyce, or any other masses, for that matter.

Ever heard of the Austrian Friedrich Stowasser? Yes, you have. You just know him under the name Hundertwasser, the short form of his chosen pseudonym Friedenreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser (full of peace rainy day darkly colored hundred water.)

Yesterday offered views of an apartment house he built and a museum dedicated to him in a building of his own design (Kunsthaus Wien).

It is  sort of funny that I was reminded of an exclamation mark when looking at the output of a man who abhorred straight lines.

Also notable that an artist, who fought standardization at every step, created a major oeuvre without changing much through the years, having found a certain schtick and sticking with it until the end. (Judging this by what I saw at the museum, I am not familiar with his painting in depth.)

The straight exclamation mark-impression was triggered by the ways attention is demanded by every design trick in the book, beyond the absence of right angles. Look here!!! Here is color!! Here is surprise! Here is daring!! Here is norm breaking!! All delivered with messianic zeal, once you read the artist statements. Let’s show photos of all the famous company I kept! Let’s be flamboyant!!!!!!

My reaction was perhaps strengthened by the contrast effect provided by an exhibition of images by Finnish photographer Elina Brotherus across the upper two floors of the Hundertwasser house.

https://www.kunsthauswien.com/en/exhibitions/elina-brotherus/. 

Her art, on the whole, elicited associations to a colon: that threshold that invites you into something new and noteworthy. Brotherus, not particularly known in the US, is represented in major collections across European Museums and rightfully so. Her’s is quiet, piercing work, focused on self and landscape, depicting emotion with clarity and courage, confronting the viewer with deep personal revelations.

The mid-career exhibit also shows trajectory rather than stagnation – the recent years demonstrate less a focus on self and more an engagement with the world, through means of appropriation, choice of topics and collaborators and infusion of wit, rather than that nordic darkness so pressing in the early years.

A remarkable exhibit in content as well as form. My only quibble was the choice of image used to introduce the show: a reenactment of Kaspar David Friedrich’s “Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer” which allows you to see only the back of a person. It seemed motivated by the recognition factor of another famous piece of art and not all point to the strength of Botherus’ overall engagement with the viewer: looking straight at us in almost every photograph, face to face.  (I realized, by the way, when sorting through my photographs of the day – which were not only permitted but invited by exhibit instructions – that I had not taken a single one of her looking at me even though those comprise the majority of the show. It felt like the intimacy of her gaze demanding empathy had elicited just that – not to be disrupted by intrusive documentation. Maybe that explains the curatorial decision making.)

Another thought provoking day in Vienna. Another photographer among the multitudes ….