Thursday, March 31, 2016

The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490--1510)



On the wall beside Geoffrey's model is a print-out of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (1955), a poem that, as Ginsberg would be the first to admit (if he were still alive), is indebted to Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass (1855) supplied Farmer with the title of his dOCUMENTA 13 processual installation.

More noticeable is a large reproduction of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510), a ten-foot-long oil-on-oak triptych whose title was introduced to many of us in the late-1960s through this rather sensuous ad from Clairol:



One can spend a lot of time reading Bosch's painting. Something that occurred to me this time was that nothing bad happens in the central panel, that everything bad happens at the far right of the diptych, and at night.


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