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DOROTHY SCHWARTZ Congress Street Gallery Please click images above for full view.
This exhibit is the culmination of a lifelong fascination with Charles Darwin brought sharply into focus during a three-month residency at Cambridge University where the artist's husband, the composer, Elliott Schwartz, was a visiting fellow.
Dorothy Schwartz' research included visits to Darwin's house, laboratory and greenhouse in Kent as well as extensive use of the Cambridge University Library. The Broadwood piano, still in place at the house, which Darwin's wife played for him every day, was the impetus for the soundwork composition that accompanies this exhibit. Dorothy Schwartz studied with Leonard Baskin at Smith College. She recently retired after two decades as executive director of the Maine Humanities Council. Elliott Schwartz is Professor Emeritus of Bowdoin College.
Excerpted Maine Sunday Telegram review by Philip Isaacson, June 21, 2009
MY DARWIN--Dorothy Schwartz
Narration and aesthetics go hand in hand in the current show at the June Fitzpatrick MECA. It is an uncommon event in that it joins biographic suggestions about a celebrated figure with certain visual responses to his work. The celebrated figure is Charles Darwin. The artist is Dorothy Schwartz, and the responses float, in part, from the details of Darwin's life and, in part, from personal excursions taken by the artist.
Paying homage to a notable person without fictionalizing or simply replicating the artifacts of his career is a delicate adventure, and Schwartz has acquitted herself handsomely. The buoyancy of the show stems from her perceptions of who Darwin was and what he accomplished, and the assurance with which she has expressed them. It is both advocacy and personal admiration.
It requires considerable discipline to stop and read an artist's statement before plunging into an exhibition, but in this show, which, by the way, is called "From So Simple a Beginning: My Darwin," doing so will amplify the benefit of the event. Schwartz's Darwin is unlikely to be your Darwin. In my case, her beautifully executed pen-and-ink drawings and her colored ink work on canvas evoked dim recollections of the one-celled wonders of Biology 101.
Paramecia and other parazoans don't usually achieve art gallery status. While these aren't what Schwartz drew--her microscopic revelations would have been unknown to Darwin--she assures us that they and all living things fall within Darwin's embrace. Thus informed, this beautifully installed exhibition acquires substantive as well as aesthetic weight.
I note "Soundwork," composed by the noted Elliott Schwartz for the occasion. It can be heard in the background as you move around the gallery. Mr. Schwartz has provided an explanation of the composition and its relationship to Darwin's life and work. It is a pleasure to read.
...from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Long before the 2009 bicentennial celebrations of Charles Darwin's birth, and the recent battles over teaching so-called "intelligent design" in America's schools, Darwin has been on my mind. He inhabited my earliest etchings of fossils, spiders, and monkeys, and he still haunts my imagination. Two years ago, I set out to embody his ideas symbolically in a new series of prints and drawings, little suspecting that the world would soon see evolution in action through the reality of a rapidly changing virus.
My pursuit of Darwin led me on travels to the Museum of Natural History in New York, the Cambridge University Library, and Darwin's house, laboratory, and garden in Kent, England. There, I looked at manuscripts and specimens he brought home from his voyage around the world, and I read more about how he developed his theory on the origins of life. I was in awe of his acute powers of observation and intrigued by the fact that after he returned from his five-year journey, he married, settled down to the rural existence of a Victorian squire, raised eight children, and never left England again.
It was at his home, Down House, in his laboratory and greenhouse, and on the Sandwalk (the thinking path he had built on the grounds of his property) that he developed his revolutionary ideas. He delighted in the company of his large family--his wife, Emma, who read novels aloud and played the piano for him every day, his children, and grandchildren. While Darwin's daily schedule was carefully regulated and placid on the surface, he was not without anxiety, perhaps because he fully understood how controversial his ideas would be when they were more widely known by the public. It wasn't until his great work on evolution was about to be scooped by Alfred Russel Wallace, another naturalist working independently, that Darwin completed and published "On the Origin of Species" in 1859. This was twenty-two years after he first jotted down a tree-like diagram in his private notebook, in which he proposed a common source of life for all creatures, including humans, with the words "I think" scrawled at the top of the page.
The drawings and prints in this exhibition reflect our links to each other and to endlessly evolving forms--many of which, like genes, bacteria, viruses, and the newly-discovered domain of life, called "archaea," were unknown to Darwin. Still, his theory holds as true today for microbes as for other forms of life. The exhibition is comprised of recent monotypes, prints, and drawings. The fine-line pen drawings on primed canvas are an adaptation of penschilderij, a technique originated by 17th century Dutch artists.
Elliott Schwartz essay: "SOUNDWORK FOR THE SAND WALK"
The idea of a worm reacting to sounds led me to imagine a worm actually making sounds; that fantasy, in turn, brought back memories of a 1950s pop song I had heard as a teenager which was premised on the same fantasy--"the sound that's made by worms." (In fact, that's a line from the lyrics.) This '50s recording was quite experimental, for its time, in the use of speed changes, reverb and tape manipulation. As I began to assemble materials for my Darwin-piece, I thought it might be nice to use a fragment of that old tune.
The primary idea behind my composition is that of generating a musical process and seeing what happens to it: not necessarily "evolution" in the scientific sense, but something resembling musical "development"--organic growth and gradual change. My piece begins with a perky little electronic motive (created on an ARP synthesizer at Bowdoin some 30 years ago). It is quite repetitive at first, almost minimalist, but gradually a few other layers of sounds from my own memory bank (literally, from my tape collection) are added to the mix, altering the course of the soundscape. When a fairly dense texture is reached, I return to the original electronic tune--and add a completely different set of sound-memories, leading to another altered fabric. The very last of these alterations produces the most complex texture of all, and segues into a snatch of the 1950s worm music--only to fade away to my original little tune.
On another level entirely, rising from background to foreground and then fading again, one can occasionally hear fragments of nineteenth century piano music (passages from the Scenes from Childhood by Robert Schumann), perhaps as played by Emma Darwin in the drawing room of Down House 150 years ago. I chose the Schumann because it's very likely Mrs Darwin would have played this suite--it's very domestic, perfect for a parlor piano--and because the individual movement titles seemed so fitting. "Of strange lands and peoples"..."Dreaming"..."The Poet Speaks."
My sound sources (apart from the first, all brief fragments) are:
Congress Street Gallery
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