Duende

[John_4185]

The 'deadpan' thread led to comments regarding the sanitization of death in the USA, and earlier threads mention passionate, melodramatic, evocative pictures. Such subjects evoke in me a feeling that is exacerbated by the profound angst of this very holiday season.

Thoughts of such came together for me this morning in the word Duende which I don't think has been mentioned here yet.

Duende is a mystery in the philosophical and theological sense that drives creative expression in the arts. It is a state of mind humbled by our animal mortality and touched by the very something else that lifts humankind from the ordinary. It is the celebration of ambiguous human nature: joy, humor, tragedy, heaven and hell on earth, resignation, mortality.

Rather than making more words of the subject, I'll stop here and hope that readers will point to works they believe evince Duende.

[John Kasaian]

I thought Duende was a South American dictator! ;-)

[Robert A. Zeichner]

No, I think you are thinking of El Exigente.

[Donald Brewster]

For those of a literary bent, Federico Garcia Lorca wrote a famous essay in 1930 on Duende that is probably available somewhere on the internet. I still have my 30 year old photocopy and try to drag it out and read it every couple of years. Not sure it influences my work, but an excellent read for anyone working in the arts. Duende is really the heightened awareness of death. ''There are neither maps nor exercises to help us find the duende . . . . "

[tim atherton]

http://www.musicpsyche.org/Lorca-Duende.htm

?

[William Mortensen]

"It is a state of mind humbled by our animal mortality..."

One thing that has often struck me is the number of "fine art" photographers who have photographed dead animals. From Weston's dead pelican to Sommers' dead coyotes to Caponigro's "Pan Rising," there seems to be quite a tradition.

(Weston is the only one I can think of who photographed a dead human body, one he found in Death Valley, if I remember right. He later commented he wished he could find more.)

I usually take these as somewhat-safely-removed metaphors for universal mortality, and it's a strange, gruesome beauty. Caponigro's seems one of the more metaphysically optimistic, Sommers seems to see the waste of life, while Lola Alvarez Bravo sees the beauty in a dead seabird. (The only online copy I could find is at: www.razonypalabra.org.mx/anteriores/n7/cine.htm but doesn't do the image justice.)

I wonder how many of us have made an image in this vein, and what our individual intentions were...

[Joseph O'Neil]

Is there such a thing as anti-Duende? Seriously.

By profession, i am a funeral director. have been all my life i guess, growing up above the family business and now living next door to it (much the same thing as you see in the HBO series 'Six Feet Under", although there are days I think my family is more screwed up than the one you see on TV

when I get a brief releif of time out of here (our business means on call 24/7, 365 days a year. one reason when i travel I go 2-3,000 miles at a time - harder to call me back , the last thing I want to see is anything dead. anything at all. I go the polar opposite, I try to fill my humble images with as much life as possible.

that doesn't mean I do not take pictures of anyone over the age of 20 - quite the opposite - an 80 year old can have more life in them than some surly teenagers. But that's another topic.

Even wintertime can mean life - the promise of spring yet to come. I understand to a degree the concept of Duende, and it just repluses me. Perhaps I see it too damned much in real life, my photography is a break away.

Each to thier own I guess.

joe

[tim atherton]

"Is there such a thing as anti-Duende? Seriously...

...Even wintertime can mean life - the promise of spring yet to come. I understand to a degree the concept of Duende, and it just repluses me. Perhaps I see it too damned much in real life, my photography is a break away. "

I'd never come across the Lorca essay, which is fascinating and certainly expands the vague understanding I had of duende. Just skimming throught it right now, but he says:

"Any man - any artist, as Nietzsche would say - climbs the stairway in the tower of his perfection at the cost of a struggle with a duende - not with an angel, as some have maintained, or with his muse. This fundamental distinction must be kept in mind if the root of a work of art is to be grasped" and goes on from there.

But perhaps your work might come from that point of struggle (or tension) - between duende and life? It sounds possible from what you say.

[Steve J Murray]

First entry on a google search of duende gives a quote from Spainish poet Federico Garcia Lorca:

". . .Thus duende is a power and not a behavior, it is a struggle and not a concept. I have heard an old master guitarist say: ‘Duende is not in the throat; duende surges up from the soles of the feet.’ Which means it is not a matter of ability, but of real live form; of blood; of ancient culture; of creative action. . . ."

Sounds something akin to "soul" as referred to in the great blues musicians.

Art must have soul/duende, of course. To let the "creative" take over means you have to let these forces channel through you, bypassing your personal ego. Perhaps this is the dark, dangerous quality of duende.

[Struan Gray]

Messiaen. Quartet for the end of time.