Atlas Film Studios in Morocco is the largest film studio in the world by land area, spanning over 322,000 square feet. Morocco has a thriving movie industry, and Atlas Film Studios is at its center. Atlas connects to my earliest memory of a book. The Titan holding up the world on his shoulders was on the cover of a Finnish encyclopedia called, Pikku Jattilainen (The Little Giant).
The circle of my five-year-old world was small. At this point, I knew three quarters of it. To the north behind our house was a community center with an outdoor stage that put on a production of Hansel and Gretel. Across the road on the south side was a house with a coffee grinder, clearly visible through the kitchen window. Downhill to the road east lay the city – just a bicycle ride to the Helsinki Police Department for my father.
The road westward was ripe for discovery. Its opportunity arose with a distraction. Today, my mother was hosting a hen party. Walking quickly, for what seemed like forever, took me to a crossroads. By the time the saw tooth evergreens turned brooding against the horizon, I knew it was journey’s end. Returning somewhat winded, mother set out a milky chicory coffee, steamy with a side of “korppu” (coffee bread rusk). Rotating the crisp around the rim of the cup as it melted made the day feel complete. Background chatter and laughter supplied its soundtrack.
Martin Scorsese’s Kundun(1997) was substantially produced and filmed at Atlas Corporation Studios in Ouarzazate, Morocco
Shooting for Martin Scorsese’s Kundun began at Atlas Corporation Studios on August 26, 1996, finishing on December 20. The Atlas Mountains and desert landscape to stood in for Tibet. Other Moroccan locations were used, but Atlas Studios was the main base.
The problem of making images of what we see and don’t see, what we believe and don’t believe manifests at critical points in history. As events unfold and are recorded, their divisions and distinctions are made clear.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Conversion of Saint Paul (c. 1601), oil on cypress wood (later transferred to canvas). Originally painted for the Cerasi Chapel in Rome but rejected by the patron’s heirs, the work is now in the Palazzo Odescalchi
The Cerasi Chapel in Rome rejected this 1601 first version of Caravaggio’s Conversion of St. Paul. Crowded, theatrical, and filled with supernatural action, it’s dramatically different from the later more well-known painting. Here, Caravaggio paints a visible Christ in the heavens accompanied by an angel. Saul has just fallen from his horse. Soldiers, a rearing horse, and swirling movement fill the composition as a brilliant light pours downward from the divine apparition.
The question remains, “Why did the patronage heirs of the Cerasi Chapel reject the first effort by Caravaggio?” It has been suggested to have been too complicated and unconventional. Significantly, the artist here had painted the miracle as a public spectacle rather than a private spiritual experience. Caravaggio’s early ambition had been to advance the monumental in Renaissance art with his own brand of naturalism. His first version renders the heavenly figures corporeal. In the second version they are invisible. Now with Saul’s physical blinding, the viewer is “blinded” to his heavenly vision, as were Saul’s companions.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Conversion of Saint Paul (c. 1601), oil on canvas, 230 × 175 cm (approximately 90½ × 69 in), the Cerasi Chapel, Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome
Caravaggio’s second treatment is, in fact, more truthful to Luke’s Book of Acts account. Chapter 9:3-4 “And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” Verse 7: “And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man.”
Caravaggio was part of an emergent Baroque art that arose directly from the conflict between the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. While the Catholic Church employed art as a weapon to fight Protestantism, Protestants introduced a new iconoclasm that stripped church interiors of icons, saints, and martyrs, for a secular art, emphasizing landscapes, portraits, and genre scenes. Dutch Baroque and Rembrandt typified this shift.
Image storms, or “Beeldenstorms,” as they were called, swept through Protestant regions, crowds destroying centuries of Catholic art, statues, and stained glass. It is no mystery why Vermeer’s preference was everyday domestic scenes with realistic portraits, landscapes, and still lifes.
Fra Bartolomeo, Portrait of Girolamo Savonarola, 1498, oil on wood, 47 x 31 cm, Museo di Marco, Florence
The Renaissance and Catholic world had already endured its own “Bonfire of the Vanities” about a century before Caravaggio. A huge pyramid in the Piazza della Signoria was set on fire at the direction of Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola. Not just paintings and drawings, but musical instruments, books and manuscripts, jewelry and fine clothing, just about anything associated with beauty, ergo vanity, went up in flames.
The Christian world, however, had essentially “settled” the issue of image depiction by the 8th century at the second council of Nicaea (year 787), in great part courtesy John of Damascus, one of the last great Church Fathers of the Eastern Christian tradition. Monk and theologian, he had summarized in “The Fount of Knowledge” that because God truly became human in Jesus Christ, the invisible God took on a visible human nature. Therefore, Christ can legitimately be depicted in images. The Incarnation affirmed at Nicaea made sacred art theologically defensible. Subsequently, how this has played out through the course of art history speaks for itself in its manifold movements.
Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 1993, University of Chicago Press. Cover image: Henri Fantin-Latour, Self-Portrait, Louvre Museum, Orsay Museum Collection
The publication of the Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind (1993), had been a response to a 1990 exhibition at the Louvre of the same name, the first of a series of shows titled Parti-pris or Taking Sides. Its curators had welcomed the gaze of Derrida on this first exhibition about blind men and visionaries. His reflection, they felt, went “to the heart of the phenomena of vision, from blindness to evidence.” Acknowledging perhaps some difficulty for the neophyte, they continued, “…that at end of the journey each one will have found their own light: what one learns here, in the literal as well as the figurative sense, are the ways of opening eyes.”
Steve Rockwell, Memoirs of the Blind (Antoine Coypel), 2018, acylic on dArt International paper, 21” x 16”. Grid transcription enlargement of Antoine Coypel‘s Study of the Blind, Louvre Museum as reproduced on page seven in Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind
In his Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida observes that blindness is an interruption of Nature, but also an affliction of the will, the will to see [voir] and the will to know [savoir]. He references Christ’s condemnation of the Pharisees, men of letters whose blindness persisted from a wilful refusal to look inside themselves. Derrida cites Isaiah’s prophecy, where Christ said “…you will indeed look, but never perceive …they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes…”
Steve Rockwell, Meditations on Space (Galerie Lahumière, Paris), 1996, acrylic on panel painting, 32” x 32”
A kind of blindness occurred during the ninth stop of the Meditations on Space, my “odyssey” through art galleries in Europe and North America. It was my first stop in Paris, October 3, 1995. As I described it, ” Galerie Lahumiere was in the process of opening up for the day when the lights blew. Patrice Blanc found the fuse box and told me that the bulk of galleries in the area were at FIAC, the annual Parisian contemporary arts fair. He didn’t think many gallery principals would be available because of the show. He gave me a book on abstract art.” Actually, it had been a triple blinding: gallery illumination, out of sight gallery principals in the area, and visual figuration within art itself.
My Meditations on Space paintings are the result of a thought experiment on the limits of sight, the edges of what we see within and without. Anyone can do this. In a completely dark room wave your hands before your face as you open and shut your eyes. That visible pattern of tiny points of light that you see is not interrupted or disturbed, suggesting that what you see is entirely within you. Your sight has a wall, a retinal screen within your eye, against which images are projected gradually with the illumination of the room. My surprise was the realization of not ever being able to see absolute black. The scintilla are always there, less visible against something white, but always present.
A pleasant way to enjoy a sunny afternoon in New York City is to explore a hidden treasure located just across from Central Park and steps from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Despite having visited New York City numerous times, I had never taken the opportunity to experience the Frick Collection museum. While strolling through the city with the lovely Theodora Chizoman Anurukem, an elementary school teacher, we paused on a bench near Central Park. Nearby, we saw a banner promoting the Frick museum, which led us to discover that we were conveniently situated right across the street. To our surprise, there were a large number of visitors for a museum of its scale. Notably, the museum enforces a policy that prohibits entry for children under the age of ten, which effectively excludes families with young children from attending.
Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543), Sir Thomas More, 1527, oil on oak panel, 29-1/2 x 23-3/4 inches
The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, Manhattan, NY which opened its doors to the public in 1935, boasts one of the most distinguished collections of European paintings globally. Located within the Henry Clay Frick House, built in 1913, the establishment includes a garden and a central fountain situated in the middle of the residence. Its collection showcases artwork ranging from the early Renaissance to Impressionist period, arranged without a specific logical or chronological sequence.
Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), Mistress and the Maid, 1664-67, oil on canvas, 35-1/2 x 31 inches
The collection features two notable paintings by J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) and one by John Constable (1776-1837). It is particularly impressive that Frick was able to obtain three works by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), especially considering that the artist only painted 34 works in his lifetime that are acknowledged as genuine. Like many collectors, Frick focused on depth, often obtaining multiple works from the same artist. His collection includes five pieces by James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), four of which are large-scale full length body portraits, two portraits by Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) (1490-1576), four by George Romney (1734-1802), and three by Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (1606-1669), including one self-portrait. Additionally, it features two iconic portraits by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543), three paintings by El Greco (1541-1614), four by Francisco de Goya (1746-1828), five portraits by Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), and eight by Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641).
El Greco (1541-1614), St. Jerome, 1590-1600, oil on canvas, 43-1/2 x 37-1/2 inches
The collection is further enriched with five landscape paintings by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), as well as works by Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828), Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Anton Mauve (1838-1888), Claude Monet (1840-1926), and Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599-1660). Beyond paintings, it also includes carpets, porcelain, sculptures, and period furniture.
Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (1606-1669), Self-portrait, 1658, oil on canvas, 52-5/8 x 40-7/8 inches
Henry Clay Frick (December 19, 1849 – December 2, 1919) was a prominent American industrialist, financier, and art patron, known for establishing the H. C. Frick & Company coke manufacturing firm and later serving as chairman of Carnegie Steel Company. In the later part of his career, he played a crucial role in the creation of U.S. Steel, which emerged as the largest steel producer in the world.
Gerard David (1460-1523), The Deposition, 1495-1500, oil on canvas, 56-1/8 x 44-1/4 inches
Frick wed Adelaide Howard Childs from Pittsburgh on December 15, 1881, and together they had four children, two of whom passed away in infancy.
On July 23, 1892, Frick survived a harrowing assassination attempt, during which he was shot twice at close range and stabbed four times in the leg while attempting to subdue his assailant. Frick miraculous survived.
Gerald Kelly (1879-1972), Portrait of Henry Clay Frick, 1924, Oil on canvas, 29-1/4 x 24-1/4 inches
In 1912, Frick and Adelaide while on vacation in Europe had planned to return to New York aboard the RMS Titanic’s maiden voyage, accompanied by J. P. Morgan. However, they canceled their journey after Adelaide sustained a sprained ankle in Italy, thereby narrowly avoiding the disaster that befell the ship.
Frick died of a heart attack on December 2, 1919, at the age of 69. He was buried in Pittsburgh’s Homewood Cemetery.
A scene suggestive of the Abd el-Rassul family discovery of the royal cache years before officially revealing it in 1881, and their sale of artifacts and mummies through antiquities dealers
I was introduced to Ramesses I, the founder of Egypt’s 19th Dynasty, in his then Wellington Street West residence in Toronto in the late 1990’s by Bill Jamieson. It is difficult to describe my sense of excitement, as the identity of the mummy was just in the process of being confirmed. Egyptologist Gayle Gibson had made evaluations. There had been discussions with the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta for a possible sale. After scans, anatomical analyses, and comparisons with royal mummies Jamieson’s Egyptian collection went to Atlanta in 1999. Then in 2003, Ramesses I received a ceremonial state welcome and was placed on display in Egypt’s Luxor Museum, barely two miles from where Ramesses I ruled just over 3,200 years ago.
William Jamieson, Treasure Trader. Promotional photo for his 2012 reality television series on (History Canada) Television. Eight half-hour episodes premiered after his unexpected death from heart attack in 2011
Socially, it had been the shrunken heads that broke the ice. Jamieson’s purchase of the Niagara Falls Museum collection, however, was the big story. The timing mattered. He came across as a grand curiosity-cabinet figure at a time when museums were beginning to reconsider the ethics of collecting. Essentially, he had been a Toronto contractor whose loft became a museum, and who now holds a place in history for discovering a lost Egyptian pharaoh.
William Jamieson acquired not only the Egyptian collection from the old Niagara Falls Museum but also many of its other ethnographic and natural history objects—including a number of shrunken heads (tsantsas)
Jamieson’s loft was his business headquarters, his client list including the Royal Ontario Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Christie’s, and Sotheby’s. Objects came and went as he bought, researched, authenticated, and sold. His 6,000-square-foot home with 14-foot ceilings held thousands of objects; Egyptian mummies, one of the world’s largest private collection of shrunken heads (about a dozen), South America, Africa, and Oceania tribal art, electric chairs and Medieval torture devices, coffins, anatomical specimens, and curiosities from around the world. His Halloween parties became legendary. A sweeping curved staircase cut through the loft’s three floors making the panorama equal parts Madame Tussauds and Twilight Zone. Visiting guests reportedly included Tim Burton, Steve Tyler, and Mick Jagger.
To many, the definitive cinematic Ramesses is Yul Brynner in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments
Historically, Ramesses I ruled a mere two years, leaving little dramatic material for filmmakers. The reign of his grandson, Ramesses II (“Ramesses the Great”), on the other hand, stretched 66 years, with a trail of monumental temples. While traditionally identified as the pharaoh of the Exodus story, scholarship renders this less than definitive. Ramesses I came to the throne around 1292 BC, as Egypt reached the height of New Kingdom power, placing him at the beginning of the last great flowering of Bronze Age civilization, before its collapse a century later.
In broad strokes, civilizations have been defined by their metals; from stone to bronze and iron. The best ages were “golden ages.” The story of the “Bronze Age Collapse,” as told by Eric Cline, tells of collapsing empires through the rupture of supply chains, and a forced innovation. While more difficult, blacksmiths had turned to iron making, setting the stage for the emergence of classical Greece. Bronze Age kingdoms had come to an abrupt end; Minoans, Mycenaeans, Trojans, Hittites, and Babylonians – gone.
Cassels Donation, Grängesberg, Sweden, the local movie theater through the 1950’s
By 1952-53, My father’s employment had drifted from SKF ball bearings to mining iron in Grängesberg, Sweden. British financier, Sir Ernest Cassel, had cast a distinct shadow over the town in the form of his 1900 “donation.” For a while, it became a local theater, where I went to see films, such as Luis Bunel’s 1954 Robinson Crusoe. The Cassels building was designed by architect Agi Lindegren, the facade with its neoclassical columns inspired by the Bank of England building in London.
By coincidence, the Bank of England was founded during the lifetime of Daniel Defoe, the writer of Robinson Crusoe. Prussian-born Ernest Cassel had arrived “penniless” in Liverpool in 1869 with a penchant for mining, infrastructure and heavy industry. His portfolio soon extended to Sweden, the US, South America, South Africa, and Egypt, where he was among the financiers of the Aswan Dam. His daughter Amilia Mary Maud Cassel married Wilfrid Ashley, giving birth to Edwina in 1901, who married Lord Lois Mountbatten in 1922.
By 1957, with our transit to Canada, the metal of the moment became gold near the town of South Porcupine, Ontario. I enrolled at Golden Avenue Public School, its naming a blatant re-gilding of Yellow Brick Road. The mining buzz at the time, however, was uranium, and the wizards of ounce here were, Joseph Hirshhorn and prospector Franc Joubin. Elliot Lake had been birthed on a drafting table of an engineering firm in Toronto, triggered by a 1953 uranium discovery that built the “Uranium Capital of the World.” Forget the Cassels “theater,” this was a whole community, meticulously planned. We lived here at the peak of its boom, and then its “bust.”
The photo was taken by Sandra MacDonald of myself with a used mining drill bit in my left hand at the Granary Lake shoreline September, 1995
Franc Joubin had convinced Hirshhorn to finance a proper drilling, not just a surface test. When confirmed, they put together a secret “Backdoor Staking Bee.” Claims totalling 1,400 over 56,000 acres were made in a “Big Z” pattern, a uranium belt running through the Blind River, Elliot Lake region. The photo of myself holding the used mining drill on the Granary Lake shoreline is almost precisely in the center of that Z, the lake situated halfway between Blind River and Elliot Lake. I was on the verge here of a “staking expedition” of my own.
Just a few weeks after photo was taken, I was at the Bruno Bischofberger Gallery in Zürich, Switzerland, the first stop of 175 “meditations” on gallery spaces in Europe and North America. On September 20, 1995, I bought Peter Halley’s Collected Essays 1981-87 for twenty francs from Evelyn at the counter. I still “mine” it for information from time to time. After Paris, New York, and Toronto, the final stop of my “odyssey” was the Zero One Gallery in Los Angeles on January 23, 1997. There, I spoke with artist Kyle Lind, who unwittingly supplied a punctuation to my meditations. To my question regarding zero and one, he had said, “The space between the zero and one is the creative act.”
Steve Rockwell photo of artist Kyle Lind at the Zero One gallery in Los Angeles in 1997. Lind’s friendship and collaboration with Timothy Leary would have made him a “lotus eater” in the sense that Odysseus might have understoodSteve Rockwell, It’s Not an Odyssey, 2019, acrylic on dArt International paper, 21 x 16 inches
The 1996-97 Meditations on Space book work had set the stage for a new venture. When I launched the premier edition of dArt International in January 1998, I had the advertiser support of the company, IMS (Inquiry Management Systems), also creating a “data mining” ad campaign for my fledgling dArt. Over a chopped-up and scattered copy of Artforum magazine, I laid out the fragmented sentence, “A data management company that collects, cleans, processes, distributes and exploits data on behalf of its clients.”
Steve Rockwell, inside back page ad from Premier Edition of dArt International magazine (1998). Slogan: “A data management company that collects, cleans, processes, distributes and exploits data on behalf of its clients.”
Before moving to Toronto and enrolling at Ontario College of Art in 1965, I had been editor of Urcapel, the Elliot Lake secondary School year book. On the Year Book Staff as Advertising Editor had been George Farkouh, who came to be Mayor of Elliot Lake from 1988 to 2006. After a period of impending ghost town status, he is credited with saving Elliot Lake as its uranium mines were being shut down. The town faced absolute economic collapse, the province even suggesting its abandonment. He staged, instead, a “Retired Living” Miracle, the city buying up hundreds of vacant, high-quality mining homes and turning them into “Elliot Lake Retirement Living.” This masterclass transition blueprint is still being studied globally.
Urcapel Editor, Jouko Salomaa (left), with Elliot Lake Mayor George Farkouh seated second from left
Since the early 1960s, Joseph Hirshhorn had agressively assembled one of the world’s finest collections of modern art. Much of the fortune that had made this possible came from mining ventures, especially the “big Z” uranium discoveries in the Elliot Lake region with geologist Franc Joubin. The Smithsonian Institution had long sought a national museum devoted to modern art. Its secretary S. Dillon Ripley saw Hirshhorn’s collection as a possible fulfillment. With the personal intervention of Lyndon. B. Johnson more than 6,000 of the paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints collected by Hirshhorn became the foundation of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.
