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Hey Wolverines, welcome back to a new semester. To hopefully inspire you to take an art history class, here are some of my favorite interesting facts from history that make those classes so enjoyable:

In Soviet prisons, it was once common to tattoo portraits of Lenin and Stalin over an inmate’s vital organs, in the hope that guards would not harm them in those areas out of respect for the two Communist leaders.

A lot of people associate Marie Antoinette with her iconic enormous hair. She famously filled it with various event-appropriate objects. Reportedly, she had a (what one can only assume was horrific) birth scene placed in it when her sister-in-law delivered her first child. She was fond of filling it with fresh fruit and vegetables from her garden, with suck up aristocrat women following suit. The highest measurement we have

for one of these hair styles is 6 ft, Marie would have to crouch down in her carriage to accommodate it. There are actually 3 reported deaths of court ladies whose hair was so high that it caught on a chandelier and they were in effect hanged. These hair pieces were made from wire, horse hair, cotton pads, fake hair, and the wearer’s own hair.

Louis XI of France, appropriately nicknamed the Star King, was a paranoid despot who very much believed in astrology. He was so unnerved by his astrologer’s accurate prediction of a court lady’s death that he ordered for the astrologer to be defenestrated (yeah, THAT word) from a top window of the palace. However, right before the astrologer was about to be told of his impending death, the king asked him to predict his (the astrologer’s) own death and when it would occur. The astrologer replied “I shall die just three days before Your Majesty.” Louis XI was so bothered by this that he canceled the defenestration (look it up, that word is a history fact on its own).

Napoleon wore a black handkerchief around his neck for every battle except for one, where his black handkerchief was accidentally thrown in the wash and he was forced to wear a white silk cravat. That battle was Waterloo.

Picasso’s first word was the Spanish word for ‘pencil.’

The first blog I posted here was called Beginnings in the Middle, about how for a theatre student, your semester sort of re-starts right in the middle.  Now, I am sad to say, it’s time for another beginning.  I am about to begin my final semester here at the University of Michigan.

For me and many of my peers, the beginning of this semester has meant many things.  First of all, this semester began as soon as the last one ended.  I began dramaturging Spring Awakening the day Beaux’ Stratagem closed.  I rushed back to school yesterday to continue my research, while all of the musical theatre students auditioned for the show, so we are all ready for our first rehearsal on Friday.  I’ve been receiving floods of audition announcements and calls for designers and crews the past few days.  The theatre department likes to get a running start.  So while I, like most of us, am not ready for classes to start up again, they sort of already have.  I borrowed seven books from the library today.  For the record, I love the stacks.  Today, I traversed both the North and South stacks.  Then, I went over to the Fish Bowl and found images that might help the cast and crew find useful, both historically and thematically.  Now I am diligently thumbing through my books, marking pertinent passages, and figuring out how to best communicate that to the actors.  Friday, I will get to start the actors’ journey through the text, guiding them as best as I can through history, themes, and culture.

Over break, I was busy too.  I compiled a glossary for Spring Awakening, which is actually one of my favorite parts of dramaturgy.  I read the script twice, the first time just for getting a grasp on the text and the second to go through and pinpoint any terms, places, or people that the actors may be unfamiliar with or needs further explanation.  I also spent much of my break reading plays for the 2012 National Playwrights’ Conference at the O’Neill.  They receive approximately 900 submissions a year and actually produce 7 or 8.  The first round of plays is read by a whole host of volunteers to weed through the plays that are not right for the conference.  I read twenty plays in all, fifteen of which I read over break.  There is nothing more exciting than a new play.  There is something really invigorating about seeing someone take risks, play with form, and genuinely surprise you as a reader.

Like most people, I didn’t get everything done over break that I had planned, but I at least got a start on editing my newest play as well.  My first play won a Hopwood, which I mention not to toot my own horn, but to encourage anyone who has anything they feel is worth reading to submit.  The Hopwood absolutely changed my life.  It gave me confidence to continue writing and money to pursue dramaturgy.  Fingers crossed that the second play fares as well, but it’s a tricky business and pretty impossible to predict.

I am going to sign off here, because I need to get ready for the big game tonight.  My brain is in dramaturgy mode, so I’m sure I will be analyzing the dramatic arc of the game, pulling out moments where I feel the stakes could be heightened, or critiquing gender dynamics at play between the football players and cheerleaders.  Go blue!

Despite the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, many monuments erected under deposed dictator Saddam Hussein remain.  The continued public display of these remnants of Iraqi Ba’athism is a testament to the continued debate within Iraq as to how Saddam’s legacy will be evaluated in a historical context.  The focal importance of the monument is remembrance; it seeks to answer the question as to how a leader can confront their eventual absence.  For a shrewd but malicious ruler like Saddam Hussein, the need to confront this absence was one that materialized particularly bluntly during and after Iraq’s sanguinary war with Iran in the 1980s.  Like ancient monument works of the Near East’s past, Saddam’s commissioned statues personify victory in the body of the leader.  This emphasis on a singular cause for a nation’s collective victory was made, possibly most curiously in the case of modern Iraq, in the triumphant arch called the Swords of Qādisīyah. In this monument, the physical body of the ruler is placed in tandem with the historical heritage of Iraq and implicitly takes responsibility for the achievements of the nation.

The Swords of Qādisīyah was opened to the public on August 8, 1989, though plans for the large construction began in 1985 when Iran and Iraq were still deeply embroiled in war. The monument was meant to be a victory arch for Saddam, in the tradition of ancient Roman arches, in spite of the reality that the war was, firstly, not over, and secondly, not exactly an Iraqi victory.  The monument consists of two large arms, emerging out of the earth, each holding a sword, crossing them in the center.  The archway marks an entrance into Baghdad’s parade-ground and was part of a much broader monument and urban planning project designed by Saddam in an attempt to mirror Haussmann’s renovation of Paris in the hopes of placing Baghdad in league with world centers like New York and London.  At the arms’ bases, nets filled with the helmets of killed Iranian soldiers place the monument in specific reference to the ongoing war.  However, the element of the Swords of Qādisīyah that places it in the realm of leader-centered propaganda is the fact that the arms are actual replicas of Saddam’s own, made from casts that preserved every detail, right down to his thumbprint and the small hairs on his forearms.

Saddam’s choice to only display his arms is unusual; it reveals a confidence in the cultural permeation of his image in Iraqi society.  Previous artistic commissions on Saddam’s part assure us that the absence of his very recognizable face is not due to any humility, or a humble attempt to distance himself from an Iraqi achievement; his Stalin-like visage was plastered nearly everywhere, from a giant plywood cutout of himself standing over the ancient Babylonian gate of Ishtar to everyday postage stamps.  So the question is, why would Saddam go to such detailed lengths to interject his presence into a monument like the Swords of Qādisīyah, yet leave his mark so ambiguously?  Though Saddam’s arms are bearing swords, they work to create a paradoxical duality that both implies action and violence, yet also places that action outside of the realm of reality.  While the swords act as a reminder of violence, particularly in conjunction with the Iranian helmets and the inseparable association of the monument with the Iran-Iraq War, they are still swords, an archaic form of weaponry that would probably not last long in modern warfare.  The choice to use swords over, say, machine guns, was meant to invoke the defeat of the Persian Sassanian Empire at the Battle of Qādisīyah in 637, effectively beginning the Islamicization of Iran.  From the very beginning of the Iran-Iraq War, it was constantly pitched by the Ba’athists as Saddam’s Qādisīyah, invoking another defeat of Iran while asserting Iraq’s religious heritage.

This religious aspect is puzzling on several accounts.  Firstly, the Iraqi Ba’athist regime was officially secular.  Saddam modeled his vision for Iraq, and himself, around previous authoritarian regimes, particularly the Soviet Union under Stalin.  The ideals of pan-Arab nationalism sought to eliminate the tribalism and sectarianism that divided Iraq, uniting Iraqis in a common identity instead of Kurd versus Arab, Sunni versus Shi’a.  The cult of personality surrounding Saddam replaced the right to diversified religion; Saddam was Sunni so this was the preferred sect, but it was merely another component of the personality cult.  In a sense, he was ipso facto being deified; Saddam’s religion took importance simply because it was his religion.  Similar to ancient beliefs, the state religion was dictated, and manipulated, by the ruler.  Similarly, Saddam’s juxtaposition of the very relevant, contemporary form of his arms with swords that allude to Medieval Iraq, doubly charged considering their holy status, act to breach the divide between the political implications of the present war and their predestined outcome.  Saddam, however, is actively utilizing symbols of Islam to draw a parallel between an ancient religious heritage and a modern political struggle.

Also vexing about Saddam’s use of the Battle of Qādisīyah is the fact that it is inextricably connected with the martyrdom of Shi’a holy figure Husain, believed to be the grandson of Muhammad, in Karbala in 680.  Shi’a Islam is the official religion of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and has been since their revolution in 1979, one year prior to the onset of the Iran-Iraq War.  In addition to this seemingly obvious conflict, Saddam’s track record with the Shi’ite population within Iraq was not one that would encourage their support.  Catalyzed by the execution, or martyrdom to Shi’as, of Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr in 1980 (“If my little finger were Ba’athist, I would cut it off”), Saddam’s paranoid repression of Shi’as gained a new degree of cruelty. His infamous massacres of the Shi’ite regions, particularly in Basra, of Southern Iraq in 1991 were part of the rational for U.S. invasion. Yet, the monument, and most of all the ceremony that opened the Swords of Qādisīyah to the public, is expressly Shi’ite.  On August 8, 1989, Saddam Hussein inaugurated in the new monument with a televised ceremony, where he triumphantly rode through the archway on a white stallion.  To anyone an Iraq, a culture immersed in Islamic imagery similar to the permeation of Christian iconography in the West, the combination of the bared swords and the white horse would unmistakably be invoking the martyrdom of Husein, who was supposedly killed while riding a white stallion. This is a very popular image in Iraq, where Shi’ite pilgrimages to Karbala mark one of the most important rituals in Islam.  Once again, Saddam consolidated both the victory over the Persian Empire in the 7^th Century and what Saddam perceived to be a victory against Iran in the 1980s into his singular, corporeal form.

So why would Saddam, a figure so centered on the calculated persecution and dismemberment of the Shi’a sect, willingly and openly support a propaganda campaign that seemingly strengthens and mobilizes that sect?  The answer may lie in a strange form of unification, wherein the subtext of all religious imagery under Saddam was national unity over that sectarianism.  Kanan Makiya posits that, despite his repeated assurances of his religious sincerity, Saddam Hussein was merely a political actor manipulating a heritage to secure victory.  Makiya writes that “National unity prevailed in the face of foreign aggression; this is the Ba’athist line on the war.”  Saddam saw himself as a political theorist, one who successfully, and to the chagrin of Iran, avoided the Lebanon-like miasmic disintegration into sectarian violence that had been expected during the long war with Iran.  Saddam’s triumphal ceremony that opened the Swords of Qādisīyah was, inherently, a performance similar to those in the ancient Near East where a select group was chosen for inclusion, while others were excluded.  However, it must be looked at in the broader ‘performance’ of Saddam’s presidency.  Makiya contends that Saddam was a historical ‘actor’ in so far as he shifted ideology depending on audience; the performance of his presidency excluded the Shi’a population while his Swords of Qādisīyah ceremony integrated their religion to his own benefit.  On the divide between the public audience and the state-directed performer in ancient Egypt, art historian John Baines writes that there is an unmistakable dichotomy between the sacred space of the state and the passive audience.  According to Baines, “the iconography [of performance] constitutes both spectacle and exclusion.”  Saddam resides in the supernatural realm, defined by victory and religious heroes of Iraq’s past, and the audience is, for the most part, watching through a television screen, listening on a radio, etc. The audience takes no part in the ceremony, much like the underlying meaning that Iraqis took little to no part in the war.  An inclusion exists to the extent that elements of the audience are superficially integrated, but the overlying message is one of dominance and singularity.

Fortnight Literary Press is sponsored both by the Undergraduate English Department and Arts at Michigan – a humble student-run publication from which collections of literary and visual art occasionally emerge on a canvas of pulped trees and bound with staples. From the submissions, selection, assembly, to the distribution – it has our handprints all over it. In the beginning of December, we released our first issue of the semester after weeks of careful deliberation (ie. discussion and a democratic voting session). The petite journal is available in both an online format as well as in print: a couple hundred, glossy faced hard copies were distributed by our members to lecture halls, cafés, and libraries prior to finals.

As one of the editors, I encourage any of you to submit snippets of your thoughts in whichever format is most natural to you to the journal. We’re quite open-minded here, and will try our utmost to accommodate any work of art in the limitations of 10”x10” paper or in its online incarnation. Thus, we are unique in that we’ve thrown that submissions guidelines approach out the proverbial window and emphatically ask everyone to delve into that subterranean parts of their minds and emerge with something they’d like to share with the community, in whichever manner that they choose. Submit anonymously (or not), submit your creative writing assignments, submit what you’ve been itching to articulate to the world. Who knows, perhaps you might be the next Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson, or Colum McCaan?

Our website as well as our archive of issues is located here.

For one of my classes, we were split up into groups and given fictional theatre companies.  We were to each take a role in the company and complete some tasks that position holds.  I was lucky enough to become the artistic director of the Susan Glaspell Theatre, a regional theatre in Greenwich Village that focuses on the development of new works.  Two years ago, I had this crazy dream that I might want to be an artistic director “when I grow up.”  As those two years have passed, I have scaled down my goals, made them more central to what I consider to be my speciality: the literary department.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I would kill for a job in a literary office in a theatre next year.  I would absolutely murder for it.  But this assignment, this absolutely crazy idea of making myself the artistic director of a theatre brought back those feelings, those ambitions.

Some in the class saw the assignment as an end of the year blow off thing, and if we’re being honest, it had all the potential to be just that.  But, thank God, my group didn’t see it that way.  We went crazy.  We began to imagine a history for our theatre.  There is a next door space called “The Susie” that is a coffeeshop in the daytime and a bar at night.  We planned an entire fictional season of works that don’t exist.  Something inside of me will not let go of this damn fictional theatre.  I want it to be my life.  I think I’m going to save my mission statement and letter to patrons to my computer, as a sort of time capsule.  If I reopen them in twenty years and my life isn’t what I had planned at 21, I’m going to start over until I get it right.  I need this to be my life.  I want to make a difference and do exciting, relevant theatre.

Here’s our mission statement:

The Susan Glaspell Theatre has dedicated the last fifty years to producing new plays that speak to the contemporary moment.  The Glaspell has a split mission: we both produce some of the most vital and well-known American voices in our regular season and encourage playwrights at the beginnings of their careers with our one-month staged reading series, The Birdcage.  The Susan Glaspell aims to be a haven for its writers, lovingly known as Canaries, who are both developing and mounting new work.  The Glaspell strives to engage with society as it is today, and, as a result, present theatre breaks boundaries, creates new styles, and challenges its audiences.  Throughout its history, the Glaspell has proven itself one of the most daring and socially engaged theatres in New York City, and it will continue to provide audiences relevant, exciting, youthful theatre for years to come.

I know it may seem crazy, and it probably is, but this project has inspired me to finish up next semester and head out into the real world.  No matter how scary it may be, I have this crazy made-up dream as my light at the end of the tunnel, and I’ll do whatever it takes to get there.

Throughout different time periods and spanning continents, artists have devised techniques through which they may convey specific spiritual messages with the purpose of instructing the faithful.  This is often accomplished through a reliance on commonly understood symbols that allude to religious stories or sacraments.  By pictorially recreating sacred scenes the artist has the ability to manipulate the emphasis of the parable in a way that is congruent with contemporary ideals important to their respective religion.  Two works demonstrating this are Rogier van der Weyden’s Alter of the Seven Sacraments and an early 3^rd/late 2^nd Century stupa called Scenes from the Life of Buddha.  Though they are from vastly different eras and sections of the world, both works clearly use iconography already fixated in their cultures to instruct and pass on holy messages.

Rogier van der Weyden’s Alter of the Seven Sacraments is a complex image that uses several methods in relating the sacraments and the Passion to the Church’s laity.  The work, a triptych, superimposes the scene of Christ’s crucifixion onto the everyday scenes of Christian worship.  The physical presence of Jesus on the cross, surrounded by worshippers seemingly unaware of this, accomplishes two things.  Firstly, it acts as “reportage,” or the illusion that the work comes from a firsthand account of the crucifixion.  It also modernizes it, making it more relatable.  The holy figures are in Flemish clothing and are in the center of a clearly European church.   The viewer’s eye is even directed toward the center figure of Christ above any other image; the figures gesture in his direction and the pillars along the cathedral are parallel to the cross.  The panel containing the Passion is considerably more filled with natural light from the church’s windows then the adjoining panels, which look bleak in comparison.  Van der Weyden also took great pains to demonstrate linear perspective and the illusion of space; the floor is elaborately tiled and the ceiling’s overlapping arches rescind into the backdrop without the common appearance of flatness displayed in many contemporary works.  Including these embellishes, though they have nothing to do with the story of Christ, adds to the believability of the painting.  It gives the impression that the artist was present at Calvary and is not simply giving a vague or broad idea of what might have happened.  Also crucial in the placing of the crucifixion in the center of the cathedral is its relation to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.  Though the exact date of the triptych is unknown, it was most likely painted before 1450, only about 70 years before the Protestant Reformation and the clash between transubstantiation and consubstantiation.  In the van der Weyden, a priest can be seen in the act of presenting the Eucharist behind the central figures.  This could be an indication as to why the surrounding figures of the church take no notice of the crucifixion; it says to the viewer that though Christ cannot be seen during transubstantiation, he is still very much physically there.

The Altar of the Seven Sacraments extensively makes use of common religious iconography that would be familiar to even the most infrequent of church-goers.  Van der Weyden includes typical imagery, like angels presenting the sacraments and the arma christi, the “weapons of Christ.”  Accompanying scenes of each sacrament is an angel displaying a banner about the holy act.  This is directly instructional to the viewer, whereas the central figures in the crucifixion are more useful as evidence of the corporeal nature of transubstantiation.  From left to right, the colors of the angels’ robes darken; at birth the robes are white, symbolizing innocence or beginning, but slowly turn to darker shades as the sacraments progress with life.  The Last Rites are, of course, black.  Characteristic of the Catholic Church, this acts as a memento mori; it reminds the viewer of the inevitability of their death but it also instructs them on how best they might live in order to attain eternal life with God.  Also meant to advise the faithful on how best to live in a manner pleasing to God are the arma christi.  In “The Wound in Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion: Gendered Experience and Response,” Flora Lewis writes that the arma christi “epitomize the desire to encompass and anatomize the Passion.”  Present in the Altar of the Seven Sacraments are the cross, the nails driven into Christ, the wounds of Christ, the crown of thorns, and arguably the pillars which Jesus was tied to while being flagellated.  As “weapons,” the arma christi act as principles with which followers of Christ can defeat Satan in the struggle over their sponsa, or soul.  These are particularly pertinent to the Altar of the Seven Sacraments because they, like transubstantiation, emphasize the physical nature of the Christian doctrine.  The arma christi evoke the brutality of the torture and subsequent execution of Christ while reminding the viewer of their fate in the afterlife if they do not follow Christian teaching, made all the more relevant by the juxtaposing of the life-cycle representing angels.  The Altar of the Seven Sacraments uses various symbols pervasive throughout European Christian society to underscore the importance of literal Church doctrine, like transubstantiation, and the need to follow Christian teaching, as seen in the arma christi.

Similar to the Altar of the Seven Sacraments, Buddhist art also used familiar imagery to galvanize the faithful.  The late 2^nd/early 3^rd Century stupa from either Pakistan or Afghanistan, Scenes from the Life of Buddha, shows the same sacrosanct duo as the van der Weyden: familiar iconography coupled with the purpose of instruction.

Though the Buddhist work does not have the advantage of color like the van der Weyden and was created in a time and place foreign to linear perspective, it does find methods through which religious stories and their accompanying lessons can be passed.  Like the arma christi, the Buddhist stupa has various symbols that denote religious life as well as allusions to the central religious figure, in this case Buddha.  One of these symbols is the urna, or forehead mole which marks a level of spiritual insight, like a third eye.  Another physical characteristic of the Buddha is the ushnisha, or the bump on the top of his head that is often mistaken for hair.  It is meant to resemble an adage to the brain, a sign of Buddha’s unique amount of knowledge.  Like the representations of Christ’s torture and execution, these images are very bodily and connected with the religious figure.  They serve to remind the faithful, along with the Buddha’s inward gaze and the empty space between him and the demons tempting him, that spiritual enlightenment comes from within.

Important in this stupa are Buddha’s gestures.  According to Vidya Dehejia, early Buddhist art places a strong emphasis on action versus inaction.  Buddha is making calm gestures while seated but the demons surrounding him thrust violent gestures toward him.  Buddha signals to the Earth Goddess that he is about to attain enlightenment by making the bhumisparsha mudra, or “earth touching gesture.”  His arms are lowered in contrast to the raised arms of the demons.  The same can be said of the facial expressions in the stupa; the demons’ faces are twisted into rictuses of anger with eyes all pointed directly at Buddha.  Buddha, however, is stoic and faces the viewer, possibly a reminder of what the Buddhist should concentrate on.  Also notable is the difference between Buddha’s possessions and those of the demons and how each makes use of them.  Buddha scarcely has any items, only a simple robe lacking any ornament.  His items are based on necessity.  The demons on his peripheral have more elaborate clothing and some have headdresses; they also brandish weapons and ride horses.  To a follower of Buddhism, the combination of violence and material possessions could be seen as directly in line with Buddhist teaching.  Though more subtle then the van der Weyden, Scenes from the Life of Buddha instructs its audience through centrality and unity; it puts the religious prophet at the center of the teaching and encompasses symbols and gestures that reflect their teachings.

Spirituality in art finds methods through which to pass on a message because its strength lies in its need to serve a purpose.  For the religious, a work of art can be spiritually inspiring as well as instructional.  Culturally pervasive iconography indicates to the viewer the purpose of the work and the artist has the ability to interpret how it is presented in any way they wish.  Symbols in works demonstrate an acknowledged and established understanding of doctrine which gives unity to the art pertaining to that religion.  Understanding symbols along with the artist’s interpretation is crucial in understanding the work of art.