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gremoria411 · 9 months

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Alright, since I did a post on all the Gundam Units running around in the One Year War, and since I also just finished my big long post on Gundam: Code Fairy, I should probably do one on the Pale Rider series, shouldn’t I?

Being that they’re also very popular, and thus show up in a lot of places. I should note that I’m working off second-hand information for most of these, since I haven’t played the Missing Link Games.

I’m also going to talk about the original pale rider first, then I’ll deal with the others in (in-universe) chronological order in a second post:

The Original RX-80 PR Pale Rider (later retconned into being the 4th unit in the Pale Rider plan). First appeared in the Mobile Suit Gundam Side Story: Missing Link videogame. It’s first known deployment was against the Slave Wraith Team, an Earth Federation MS team made up of condemned criminals, often used as an internal disciplinary unit (read: taking out traitors and political enemies of the group’s controller, Grave) after they were judged too much of a liability (betrayed). It was later heavily damaged in battle against Zeon’s Marchosias Corps (basically a bunch of pilots that Zeon doesn’t fully trust due to possible ties with the Earth Federation, but who are too good for Zeon not to use) and captured (along with its pilot) at a Baoa Qu, at the end of the war. What happens to it next depends, since the Videogame and Manga diverge here. In the videogame it is eventually refitted into the AMX-18 Todesritter by Neo Zeon (in UC 0090, around the time of Char’s Rebellion), which I’ll get to later. Whilst in the manga it’s customised into the Pale Rider (VG) in UC 0080, then used by Vincent Gleissner, former member of Marchosias, and fought against the Pale Rider Dullhan, which I’ll also get to later. The Pale Rider (VG) is stated to be repaired using Gelgoog parts, but really the only notable difference is it’s weaponry. Notably, the name Pale Rider is implied to be something of a sick joke - in normal mobile suits the Pilot controls their actions as if they were riding a horse, with the Pale Rider, it’s the other way around.

So there it is, the unit that started it all. While I do understand it’s popularity I confess I’m unable to really appreciate the design. Why is this? Well…. The original Pale Rider design could be described as taking a bunch of existing cool elements from the Gundam Sidestories and mashing them all together. While not a bad method of designing a suit (especially one that you want to feel threatening, or a culmination of that which came before it), it does mean that the design is going to have a certain stitched-together quality to it.

First off, the mobile suit itself takes several design cues from the GM Sniper II (some of the chest and most of the legs and skirt armour) stated to be one of the best suits in the war, and it equipped with a HADES system, a derivative of the (strictly-limited) EXAM system used by the Blue Destiny Units, from which it also appears to derive its head design and general colourscheme.

(I’ll talk about it another time, but the EXAM system is essentially a super mode, where the suits limiters are released, but it places incredible stress on the pilot, since they’re essentially being used as a biological cpu. It is limited to three minutes, otherwise the suit is put under too much stress).

Armament wise, it has multiple weapon loadouts, all of which use weaponry cribbed from other machines. The ground type armaments uses the same 180mm Cannon as the Gundam Ground Type, and is also equipped with a Spike Shield used by the GM Striker. Whilst the Space use version uses the exact same armaments as the Gundam G05 - Giant Gatling Gun, Hyper Beam Rifle, Shield and this is also where the Pale Rider gets it’s beam guns which are built-into it’s arms.

When customised for use by Vincent Gleissner, it’s equipped with the Beam Machine Gun from the Gelgoog Jäger (essentially the best beam weapon available at that time) in addition to its Beam spot guns in the arms, to replace it’s destroyed beam guns. It gets twin beam naginata’s from the standard Gelgoog, and has twin missile pods added to the legs (I assume they’re standard Zeon equipment, but the only other suit we see them on is the EXAM Efreet).

This isn’t meant to call out the Pale Rider as a “Bad Design” or anything. I think it does a good job of blending its influences together. It’s just that I generally find myself preferring it’s component units over it (particularly the G04 and G05).

I’ll talk about the other Rider units in a follow-up post.

#gundam #ramblings #Pale Rider #Gundam Pale Rider #Gundam Rider Units #Gundam Side Story Missing Link

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curationstationdc · 4 years

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Woodcuts in suburbia: melancholy, nostalgia, and resistance

I associate woodcuts with a particular aesthetic: they loom from their perch on the bookshelf in the den, next to a collection of Hans Christian Andersen tales, whose worn buckram binding is effusing that sapid antique book aroma which pairs so well with coffee and cake. In the corner of the room, above a worn black leather chair designated for tv-watching and reading, a pathos dangles from its pot, fed by gentle streams of light emanating from the canopy of shade sheltering the backyard garden. On weekends and special occasions, the clinking of cake forks against china is punctuated only by an occasional “delicious!” — direct and accurate. This orchestration produces a distinctly Germanic affect, and one that I associate with the elderly; the particular family room I’m recalling belonged to my next-door neighbors growing up, former members of the Danish anti-Nazi resistance who had emigrated in the early 1960s. While I can’t be sure there was any deeper meaning behind their affinity for the humble woodcut, I do recall the medium’s prominence in their home. For me, something as benign as a flock of geese is represented with a degree of melancholy in these prints' impenetrable black shadows — an inevitability in this generation’s Weltanschauung, that everything beautiful carries with it a degree of pain, a nostalgia for the idea of a more civil world.

These beloved octogenarians were my first choice of role models, and I insisted on seeing them almost every day for the first 8 or 9 years of my life. They were old-school Democrats (or at least, that’s how their values system translated into American) in a largely Republican suburb of a mid-sized Upper Midwestern city. I can still place myself their 1950′s minimal traditional home: running my hands along their walnut furniture with polished nickel handles, greeted by a different antique clock in every room, tick-tocking at various registers, my slippered feet shuffling along a dull, greenish-blue carpet so typical of that era. Nothing in that home was remotely as paired down as today’s sanitized mid-century throwback, and the old neighborhood still retained a smidgen of character unlike contemporary expressions of manifest destiny. Lovingly tended beds of roses, pansies, and bleeding hearts flourished under the shade of maples, walnuts, and red oak.

A young family admires their new home. Between 1950 and 1970, America’s suburban population nearly doubled to 74 million Camerique Archive / Archive Photos / Getty Images

For my neighbors, woodcuts seemed to be a culturally relevant way of displaying eerie alternative landscapes: a flock of geese, a school of fish, a sunset laden with a certain degree of subconsciously expressed Weltschmerz. For me, these woodcuts were inextricably linked to their stories of brazen defiance in the face of terror, which they seldom shared, always with a degree of pain and even embarrassment. Their democratic ideals to which they so proudly clung were the real source of their identity; it was from them that I learned it was OK to be gay, that everyone deserved a home and access to healthcare, that one lives like a society like a neighbor rather than just an individual. But it wasn’t until years after their deaths that I detected any degree of paradox in their suburban American existence, was able to chuckle at their nostalgia for the old country as expressed in their grocery cart (tubs of frozen Coolwhip to be served generously with home-baked apple cake, slices of summer sausage or cucumbers served on squares of cocktail rye, a far cry from the bakeries and delicatessens of northern Europe.)

A woman and a boy visiting a man in hospital. Woodcut by Käthe Kollwitz, 1929. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY

While I may associate woodcuts with the interior design choices of an immigrant family in the middle of the last century, its origins predate my concept of history. Woodcutting is thought to be the earliest print technique, originating in 9th-century China, arriving in Europe sometime in the 14th century. Woodcut has been a staple medium for prominent Northern European artists like Dürer since the 16th century. To produce a print, artists carve their image into a block of wood, along the grain, removing the parts that will not carry ink. The surface is then rolled over with a brayer and the image transferred to a sheet of paper through a press. The result in works like Käthe Kollwitz’s Selbstbildness von vorn (1922-1923), pictured above, is nothing short of haunting — well-suited to the violently introspective tone of German Expressionism. If you’re curious about the process, here’s a short demonstration:

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Phil Sanders, Director of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, demonstrates the pressure + ink relief process

Woodcutting became a popular tool of activists in the 1910′s, when thinkers like Ernst Barlach were beginning to use reductionist, anti-naturalist figures to express their dejection at the rise of an alien world. In the case of Barlach, his art was often placed alongside politically charged writing in order to provoke emotional reactions to the realities of uprootedness, inequality, and disaffection in industrialized, urban Europe. It is Barlach’s rather proletariat answer to the questions of modernity, inspired in part by a kind of political realism emerging in Russia, that inspired German artist Käthe Kollwitz to take up the humble woodcut.

Ernst Barlach, from an East German stamp, 1970. Would he have been pleased with his legacy?

I remember receiving a story on the couch in my neighbors’ den — I was about 10 or 11 — regarding the final days of the war: a fellow member of the resistance had suggested replacing the Dannebrog with the flag of the Danish Communist Party, the DKP, an idea that had shaken my neighbor to his core. For him, resistance had been an act of preservation, a defense of the right to be distinctly Danish, and all that it entailed, in an increasingly international world. How the inability to return to a Denmark before the crimes of Nazism must have felt, I can only attempt to imagine. To this day, I am astounded by my neighbors’ apparent lack of burnout in light of what they sacrificed, their resilience in living out their ideals and inherited melancholia with me under an umbrella on the patio. It seemed that, for them, past and present far outweighed considerations for the future.

My copy of Korsbæk Tidende (Korsbæk Official Journal), an educational accompaniment to the popular Danish 1970′s and 1980′s tv-series “Matador” about a fictionalized Danish town between 1929 and 1947. I inherited this collection of real newspaper clips that informed events on the show from my neighbor — I assume he loved the show.

To an extent, I have inherited their idealism, an obsession with a bleak past used to check the present, an index of unwavering values to be accessed at any time. It is only through a sense of history that I’m able to make sense of the communicative power of images today, how calculated distortions of reality made ubiquitous through mass production can make us more empathetic, braver in the face of a not-so-distant future. It's a future that cannot be understood with the tools we have been given, that will almost upend our perceptions and unsettle us, a future that demands our bravery. More than ever my beloved neighbors ever could have fathomed, the possibility that our sacrifices will be bastardized in the name of another cause is unparalleled in the digital age. And even more than they experienced, we have the incredible opportunity, and challenge, to transplant our ideologies across ecosystems, upending heir original contexts.

Simultaneous calls for universalism and individual freedom, the appeals of difference and homogeneity, the cogent argument of moral relativism against the call for a shared global narrative will, no doubt, continue to shake us in an era of unprecedented displacement and global climate change. Among other things, these challenges call for an art that, like the pervasive woodcut, infiltrates our purviews, and is attuned to the affect of contemporary life. It should carry with is a melancholic nostalgia, demand our empathy, blemish our idealized beauty.

If I limit myself to woodcuts, I'm reminded of the works of William Kentridge, Beatriz Milhazes, Leonard Baskin, Alison Saar, Irving Amen, Tony Bevan, Katsutoshi Yuasa, Assadour Bezdikian, Elizabeth Catlett, Lou Barlow, Leon Gilmour — I'm sure I'm missing countless others.

Retrospective Exhibitions on Käthe Kollwitz

Käthe Kollwitz, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1992; Käthe Kollwitz: In Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of the Artist’s Birth, Galerie St. Etienne, New York City, 1992; Berner Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland, 1946; Retrospective in honor of her 50th birthday at Paul Cassirer galleries, Berlin, 1917

Selected Bibliographies on Käthe Kollwitz

Knesebeck, Alexandra von dem. Käthe Kollwitz: Werkverzeichnis der Graphik. Band I & II. Bern: Kornfeld, 2002.

Prelinger, Elizabeth, ed. Käthe Kollwitz. Exh. cat. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1992.

Rix, Brenda D., and Jay A. Clarke. Käthe Kollwitz: The Art of Compassion. Exh. cat. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2003.

Selected Bibliographies on Ernst Barlach

Laur, Elisabeth. Ernst Barlach: Sämtliche Werke, Werkverzeichnis I. Die Druckgraphik. Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 2001.

Paret, Peter. An Artist Against the Third Reich: Ernst Barlach, 1933–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Selected Bibliographies on Ernst Ludwig Kirnchner

Dube, Annemarie, and Wolf-Dieter Dube. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Das graphische Werk. 2 vols. Munich: Prestel, 1980.

Gercken, Günther, and Magdalena M. Moeller. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Farbige Druckgraphik. Exh. cat. Berlin: Brücke-Museum, 2008.

Krämer, Felix, ed. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Retrospective. Exh. cat. Frankfurt: Städel Museum, 2010.

Lloyd, Jill, and Magdalena M. Moeller, eds. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1880–1938. Exh. cat. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2003.

Wye, Deborah. Kirchner and the Berlin Street. Exh. cat. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008.

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