Brief Retrospective of Selma the Sculptor? -- Hokusai's Great Wave and Job

by Selma K. Dritz

Reviewed by Richard Kade
USA

ubiq_icon@hotmail.com

Selma Dritz, a voracious reader of Leonardo for the past decade or more, passed away quietly in the earliest hours of the morning of 3 September 2008.

Obituaries, from the San Francisco Chronicle [1] and New York Times to those in medical journals throughout the US and UK [2], noted that much of Dr. Dritz's youth was consumed by the study of music including performances as piano soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Fredrick Stock. Although she concertized and taught as a teen-ager, it was merely a means to finance study at the University of Illinois School of Medicine so as to help her fellow humans on a greater scale.

Her greatest fame came in her chosen field of epidemiology in the early 1980s where her pioneering research in what would eventually be called HIV, as well as AIDS, led to her calls to action, at first as a lecturer at medical symposia and author [3] before widening her audience -- on the airwaves of local San Francisco television, radio and, eventually, on CBS's 60 Minutes and various PBS affiliates. (When HBO made Randy Shilts' book, And the Band Played On, into a movie, the "role" of Dr. Dritz was played by Lily Tomlin.)

Unknown to most however was that, after retirement in 1984, Dritz threw herself with as much energy into her original passion, her love and study of the arts, most notably painting and (after a brief fling with machine knitting) sculpture. From Peking to Paris, Sydney to Cairo, Milan to Saint Petersburg, Juneau to Jerusalem and Madras to Reykjavik, the last quarter century of her life was an unending quest to learn and find every available means of artistic expression.

Most of her sculptures attest to that longing for aesthetic outlet. Among her earlier works was a 1989 rendering in white marble of Hokusai's Great Wave, on permanent display at the Salt Lake City offices of Tempest Reporting, Inc. Amply familiar with the citation in Benoît Mandelbrot's writing, Dritz studied the original print at the Hakone Museum in Japan and, as a result, chose the aesthetic over the mathematic by smoothing the edges of the contour rather than attempting a fractal approach. Here, the very nature of the task came down to form following function in much the same way Ravel -- or even Bach -- had to grapple with the reality of actuating the abstract [4] when transcribing from keyboard to orchestral or vice-versa.

Other of her works include a depiction of Moses based upon the print by Davis Meltzer. This was sculpted, usually, while listening on her iPod to Schoenberg's Moses und Aron.

Amongst her final works was probably her most personal, an interpretation of the suffering of Job which, for the most part, was inspired not by graphic representation but, rather, by William Safire's work, The First Dissident which seeks to disabuse all misapprehension based the cliché of "the patience of Job." Most creation (from poetry, gastronomy and origami, to such other extremes as biochemistry, nano-technology and even folding photons) is mere exploitation of the ultimate tool. Michelangelo reminds us, "The sculptor works far more with his mind than with his hands. "

In many ways Job was a culmination of so much more than the task at hand. Dritz repeatedly mused in e-mail, sometimes in nearly threnodic tones, about the nature of real artistry ... the motivating idea falling victim again and again to the inevitable axiom where one starts out "as a god but ends up a slave ..."[5] She likened the process to that of waiting for the retro-virus to grow in the culture dish for the next rounds of trials ... all the while knowing that so many have to suffer.

By the time this piece is posted, Job will probably have been sold at the March 2009 silent auction of DIFFA -- the Design Industries' Foundation Fighting AIDS [6] in New York City.

Notes

[1] Perlman, David, "Selma Dritz -- doctor tracked AIDS early", San Francisco Chronicle, 2008; B3 (Sep 8). Text of article posted at: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/08/BAIF12OUBE.DTL

[2] Roehr, Bob, "Selma Dritz -- Epidemiologist who charted ..." BMJ, 2008; 337:a2192 (Oct 22) Text of article posted at: www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/337/oct22_3/a2192

[3] Dritz, SK, "Medical Aspects of Homosexuality", N. Engl J Med, 1980; 302:463-464 (Feb 21)

[4] Pezzi, Diana C., [Letter to Editor] in reference to "Let's Talk" and "Voice of Experience" US News & World Report, 2003; 134:19 pg. BC-2 (Jun 2)

[5] Esterly, David, Grinling Gibbons and the Art of Carving. (London: V&A Publications, 1998) p. 204

[6] diffa.org