I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Travelling up to the Midlands, I visit the ruins of Witley Court in Worcestershire. It's rare to come across the ruin of a home rather than of a castle or church, but this building is precisely that; a country house that burned down in the nineteen thirties leaving it as a shattered shell. Photos taken in the nineteen sixties show it as a rather romantic ruin, with trees growing up inside the walls in the absence of the ceiling. The ruins present a rather more prosaic aspect under the custodianship of English Heritage, with concrete supports having been brought in to support the towers. I visit on a rather cold, damp and overcast day that seems to contrast rather oddly with the mouldings above the windows on the Italianate facade or with the Carton Pierre decorations that still survives on the interior. Once one has passed up the stairs to that gaping hole previously occupied by the entrance door and underneath the ionic columns of the north portico, what remains of the 'interior' presents a rather different character. The house dated back to the Jacobean period and had subsequently undergone extensive modification over the years, with Nash making extensive changes only for it to be changed again in the Victorian period and made to look more like Osborne house. As one passes through the skeleton of the ruins, the view changes from the stained yellow facade to the dark red bricks of the earliest buildings. Victoriana gives way to Regency, which gives way in turn to the original Jacobean structure. Walking through it feels like an autopsy. From the garden, much of the house looks surprisingly intact, excepting the empty windows, as with a conservatory that survived the fire only to be stripped of its iron and steel later, leaving only stone arches behind. Much of the structure has been tidied and stabilised but one can still look through some gaping holes and see nothing but rubble overgrown with weeds. A few days earlier, I'd visited the ruins of Godstow Nunnery. Dissolved in the reformation, it seems to have become a part of the landscape, its walls overgrown with weeds. Witley Court still seems artificial.
One thing that did survive the fire was a parish church built by James Gibbs. It's a rather unexpected building, with the interior decorated with painted glass, gilded stucco mouldings, Rysbrack monuments and ceilings frescos; the result is vastly more ornate than the majority of English Baroque (something assisted by some Victorian high church modifications; Salviati mosaics and angel sculptures) but the predominant contrast of white and gold is still rather more austere than German or Italian rococo.
The following day I visit Walsall's new art gallery. A rather unimaginative cube designed in the 'Ikea nuclear bunker' style, it was intended to herald a regeneration the rather grim surroundings still seem to be waiting for. Formed as a result of the German-Ryan bequest (the circle around Jacob Epstein), the gallery does have the stamp of individual taste. Like Modigliani, Epstein was interested in ethnographic art and much of the collection is given up to Inuit eagle totems made of whalebone, a mask of Nefertiti, Cameroonian wood carvings of leopard, Roman and Peruvian busts, Maori greenstone, a Soanish wood carving of christ. This is completed by a taste in modern art that follows along similar lines; Modigliani caryatid drawings or Gauguin woodcuts. Finally, much of the collection is taken up with works by Epstein, Theo German, Lucien Freud and Sally Ryan. Esptein dominates with his early vorticist Study for Rock Drill, a fusion of man and machine that revolted him in the aftermath of the second world war. His later work becomes more akin to folk-art, as with his proto-Assyrian Study for the tomb of Oscar Wilde and the various bronze busts. It's a odd combination; naturalistic in a way that Hepworth or Moore were not, unfinished enough to be quite distinct from the classical tradition. I find myself more taken with his painting, especially an autumnal landscape; it becomes easy to understand the presence of landscapes by Monet, Constable and Corot in the collection. Some of the works from his circle are quite striking; Freud's portrait of Kitty Garmam is counterposed with a recent photograph of her in the same intense pose.
The collection is organised thematically rather by chronology or nation, a choice that gives it a rather wunderkammeresque air. Blake's engraving of Jacob's Letter is placed near to a work on the same theme by Burne-Jones. Blake's Death of the Virgin appears near to a work on the same theme by Rembrandt. The section on figure studies counterpoints Modigliani, Gauguin, Cezanne, and Roman statuary of grotestque drawings by Goya and Odilon Redon. The landscape section contrasts Monet, Renoir, Bonnard and Corot with Contstable, country scenes with townscapes from Meryon, Turner and Sickert. Portraits counterpoints Reynolds with Freud and Degas. Religion juxtaposes Blake, Epstein and Durer. Interspersed amongst these are various modern works; black and white woodland paintings by George Shaw, a Cloud Study by Matt and Ross after the nearby Constable painting. The gallery is holding a small exhbition of Blake paintings at the time of my visit, showing his responses to Young's Night Thoughts and Dante. Young appears to have relatively close to a fellow-spirit, with Blake echoing his criticism of an age more curious than devout (the painting shows two girls with compass and telescope, but in a depiction of Christ in his father's workshop, the young christ is also shown with compass in a fusion of reason and imagination; that particular work made an interesting contrast with Holman Hunt). Dante appears rather less so, with a sinister cast given to his depiction of the recording angel, which appears in the same character as Death in one of the other works. The central theme is angels, shown in some contexts as conventionally celestial, in some as sinister agents of a tyrant god and in some as creatures of energy and rage (as in The Good and Evil Angels).
posted by Richard 1:30 PM
Monday, November 3, 2008
When visiting Cambridge it's difficult not to see it as an alternate Oxford; rather smaller and greener, damp waters that resemble Venetian canals more than the Isis, a library with a tower rather than an underground railway, more redbrick than stone compensated for with more ornate college decorations, gothic rather than baroque; above all, even more lacking in the sense of being a 'real' place. I begin by visiting the round church. Rather smaller and homelier than its London counterpart, the combination of Minton tiles and Victorian stained glass with Romanesque arches rather leaves me rather more reminded, inevitably, of Iffley. The Saxon church of St Benet's is Saxon on the exterior with a mostly Victorian interior (save one round arch with beasts on either pillar). As in Oxford, many of the city churches were subject to the attentions of George Gilbert Scott, like Great St Mary's with its beautiful tracery. One thing that is rather different is the Corpus Christi clock; the Chronophage.
The principal object of my interest is the Fitzwilliam Museum. I begin by heading downstairs, past Assyrian wall reliefs, into the antiquities section; an excellent set of Fayum masks, Mummy caskets, an enormous statue of Ramses the Third, marble sarcophagi, a Romano-Egyptian zodiac (Roman mythology decorated with Horus figures), Palmyran statuary and Roman mosaics. From there I walk on to a gallery filled with pottery; Cizhou, Korean, Kakiemon, Imari, Delft, Mina'i, Maiolica, Meissen, Wedgewood all present concurrently, showing Iznik next to Victorian and Spanish lustreware. Upstairs, I'm able to see the final day of an exhibition of Vani funerary, from the golden graves of Colchis. Much of this is jewellery and decoration, but I'm most struck by a small copper statue of a satyr. Inevitably, I find the paintings most gripping; the Dutch and Flemish section boasts a Brueghel village scene, Ruisdael and Goyen landscapes, de Heem still lifes and an especially odd seascape of a ship broken in Arctic ice. I like Canaletto and Panini's architectural capriccios for much the same reasons I like the Berckheyde cityscapes or Neeff's church interiors, but I still seem immune to Italian renaissance art, a lurid Salvator Rosa Memento Mori, Titian's Tarquin and Lucrecia. In spite of the religious subject matter, it's difficult not to prefer the medieval paintings. The later sections are often rather mediocre until I come across a set of sunsets by Vernet; they almost seem like a combination of Dahl and Claude. In the twentieth century this is followed by a number of Renoir, Cezanne, Sisley, Pissarro and Monet landscapes and then by Lautrec and Degas portraits. I'm especially happy to come across The Bridesmaid by Millais, a painting that has always struck me as prefiguring the likes of Klimt. The British twentieth century is represented mostly by Singer Sergeant and Sickert. There's also an exhibition of Whistlet etchings, showing drawings of East London by the Thames, Venice and a rather more land locked Brussels.
The Byzantine exhibition at the Royal Academy left me rather underwhelmed; it seemed to reflect a theocratic civilisation, as much by omission (marble statues of Justinian or the other emperors, for example) as by the inclusion of countless icons. It seems odd that Byzantine art was disdained by the christian world in favour of the pagan art of Greece and Rome, whose comparative asceticism was presumably more appealing. Byzantine art was dismissed to the same barbarous past as gothic. Much of the exhibition is heavily weighted towards metalwork; silver censors, gold necklaces, chalices and so on. I find myself most impressed by an icon of Sergius and Bacchus, marble friezes from church interiors with peacock designs.
posted by Richard 1:12 PM
Sunday, September 21, 2008
I visited Bevis Marks Synagogue a few years ago as part of Open House weekend and in the meantime I had acquired a rather long list of otherwise closed places I wanted to visit this year. So, I started with GE Street's design for Law Courts on the Strand. One enters into a great hall that, unsurprisingly for Victorian architecture, is rather reminiscent of a cathedral (Street had left one pillar deliberately unfinished, a notion like a deliberate error being introduced into Turkish carpets), only much more empty and stark, lacking pews and only decorated with the occasional bust or painting. To each side stairways lead into a labyrinthine series of courtrooms and corridors, some of the lower ones rather resembling crypts. Only one room is at all ornate; unsurprisingly it is called the Painted Room. I follow this by walking along Fleet Street until I come to the Daily Express. While its vitrolite and glass exterior has a certain cold elegance to it, it's difficult not to see it as the progenitor of scores of more utilitarian modernist structures. The interior lobby is rather more what one expects of art nouveau though; all gilded in silver, with Indian styled reliefs, curved patterns on the floor and swirling spiral staircases.
I then walk to Westminster and visit Scott and Wyatt's foreign office. Scott had originally wanted to construct the building in gothic, but had been overruled by Palmerston. It's rather difficult not to imagine Scott scowling at having to design a classicist structure (albeit one where some of the corridors rather resemble St Pancras and the cupola of the grand staircase has a somewhat Byzantine feel). A lot of the rooms, such as Wyatt's Durbar Court or the Muse's Staircase, is wonderful, but much of it also looks as if it could have been designed at any point in a period covering around three hundred years. It seems to lack individuality. Finally on that day, I visit Holy Trinity in Kensington. This is another building I had walked past many times without seeing the interior. As it proves this is one of Bodley's later works, but with an especially ornate set of gold reredos and stained glass windows.
The following day begins with a more straightforward means of following my visit to Bevis Marks; by travelling to Lauderdale and New West End Synagogues. Both Victorian redbrick affairs, the former is a domed structure in Maida Vale, with a light green interior illuminated by bright stained glass decorated with natural patterns and dominated by dark wood furnishings. The latter is close by to the Orthodox cathedral and rather resembles it in many ways; although the ceiling is in plain white the design is essentially Moorish with the lower area decorated in marble and gold. Walking back, I briefly enter St Matthew's church, a Victorian gothic affair with Burne Jones style reliefs, side chapels with ceilings painted blue and a black and gold studded nave ceiling.
I then travel to Westminster and enter Westminster Hall. I'm rather reminded of the Tithe barn I'd seen at Great Coxwell; although this is more ornate the cultural continuity between these two different buildings seems enormous. Stone kings line up on the walls, wooden angels line the ceiling while the floor is annotated with notes concerning the trial of King Charles, Monarchs lying in state or the trial of Warren Hastings. The end of the hall leads to a long corridor that serves as an entrance to the Victorian Houses of Parliament; Minton tiling, statues of figures like Pitt, Fox and Clarendon, paintings of scenes from British history (a Jacobean ambassador visiting India, Elizabeth and Drake) mosaics of St Stephen. It's probably a lapse of taste but I can't help preferring Victorian gothic to its medieval counterpart. Finally, I visit the Inns of Court where I find the Temple Church open for the first time. As one would expect the interior is a mongrel of styles. The round section is entered by a Romanesque arch into an area dominated by Templar graves. Romanesque designs in the Triforium are followed by gothic arches and gargoyles below, including a figure whose face is being attacked by an animal. The font is also typically Romanesque, with various animals and mythological scenes shown on it. This section leads through to a gothic chancel, which still retains various Tudor and baroque monuments. Although the Victorian restoration has not survived, the bright blue modern stained glass is rather striking. Nearby, the Middle Temple Hall is also open; a dark hammer beamed ceiling above white walls and paintings of monarchs from Elizabeth to Anne. Much of the Elizabethan carving remains, with figures guarding the entrance ways.
A few weeks later, I travel to Hackney to visit Abney Park Cemetery. I rather like the Egyptian revival gates that Pugin so disapproved of, although the interior of the cemetery lacks any similar monuments and is mostly rather more restrained. The place is surprisingly bustling with people walking their dogs, assorted youths, vagrants and cruising men. As a nondenominational cemetery Abney Park was not set aside solely for cemetery use by Act of Parliament, and was not formally consecrated as burial land. Perhaps more so than any other it was entitled to be considered as a park as well as a cemetery; Abney Park was unique in being the first arboretum to be combined with a cemetery in Europe. I find myself amused by a squirrel frozen on the side of a tree trunk with a large nut in its mouth, presumably in the hope that it would not be observed. Falling leaves gently stray to the ground, like snow blowing in the wind. The most striking thing is the ruined chapel that sits at the very centre of the cemetery. The rose window at the front is a shattered hole partially covered by wooden boards, like a smashed eye. The front is covered in dead ivy above locked gates that allow one to see the derelict interior with another shattered oculus at the apex of a decaying arch, but not to gain access. I note that someone has written 'watch your skin peel' on the walls. Conversely, one can walk into the interior of the towers and see to the summit, past wooden boarding and cracks in the walls. The nearby grounds are a mixture of war memorials and statues in honour of the non-comformists who were the first to be interred here.
It's often been observed that counterfactuals are a politically confused genre. On the one hand, they tend to be predicated on a whiggish view of history, presenting alternative histories where the course of events has been deformed from how it should have progressed. On the other, they tend to assume that history is not so much born of deep social causes as hinging upon the actions of a few individuals. Philip Roth's The Plot Against America is very much a specimen of these contradictions; the narrative had history derailed by Roosevelt's defect at the hands of Charles Lindbergh, of progressive forces routed by reactionary opposition. At the same time, the narrative essentially hinges upon Walter Winchell's assassination, precipitating as it does the demise of the Lindbergh administration. While much of the narrative is told from the viewpoint of one Jewish family, Roth seems to struggle to achieve a consistent view of history; although much of the text depicts mass riots, other parts describe American fascism as an a temporary aberration, the result of a blackmail plot against Lindbergh's son. Conversely, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union manages to present a counterfactual that eschews any discussion of why this history differs from our own; Israel's settlers were massacred and the Soviet Union never existed and that is all there is to it. Chabon appears ambivalent at the prospect of a world without Israel; the novel is highly critical of Zionism but also depicts the Jewish homeland of Sitka in Alaska as a miserable backwater. There's no definitive sense of what the 'right' version of history might be; perhaps that's why the novel is rather more successful than Roth's at establishing the actions of his characters as meaningful and significant rather than historical ephemera.
Reading Hofmannstahl's short stories, I noticed that his characters frequently have epiphanic moments of revelation (where "I saw all of existence as one unity. The mental world did not seem to me to be opposed to the physical"), but which often prove to lead only to disaster. Finally, in The Lord Chandos Letter language itself denatures; "abstract words.. disintegrated in my mouth like rotten mushrooms." Hofmannstahl comes over as a thwarted platonist, raising the spectre of the infinite only to dismiss it. Something similar seems to apply to Andrei Biely's St Petersburg, a novel that is ostensibly concerned with the acts of terrorism in Tsarist Russia that were leading to the Russian revolution. The theme is misleading as the narrative tends to approach events symbolically rather than through the lens of historical realism. Instead of social tensions, events are depicted through a set of chiastic oppositions; reason and unreason, occidental and oriental (at times it reads more like Sax Rohmer than Conrad's The Secret Agent). St Petersburg is at once a real city with places that can be found on the map and also a Escheresque labyrinth made unreal by mists ("he wondered as in a dream about the relation of appearance to reality"); the geometry of the enlightenment reverts to the swamp that lies beneath it. Unsurprisingly, the mutability of language emerges as a recurrent theme; "my words get entangled... a modernist would call it the sensation of the abyss and search for an image."
I was surprised by Kangaroo; there's a markedly dialogic element in all of Lawrence's work but it seems markedly stronger here than elsewhere, with the novel almost forming a debate between Lawrence and Frieda, between differing aspects of Lawrence's personality. As Harriet waspishly puts it; "I've seen you fiddling away hard enough many times.. why, what do you do, all your life, but fiddle some tune or other?" At the heart of this debate is Lawrence's division between the normal self and their central absolute self, a state from which women like Harriet are barred; "in short, he was to be the Lord and Master and she was the humble slave.. she was to believe in his vision of a land beyond this charted world.. and she just couldn't." The novel deconstructs Somers' vision in several ways; by his arguments with Harriet, with Kangaroo and with himself. For example; "Him, a Lord and Master!.. he was the most forlorn and isolated creature in the world.. so isolated he was barely a man at all." And later; "the bulk of mankind haven't got any central selves. They're all bits." A central part of Lawrence's absolute self is the implicit theme of Lawrence's repressed homosexuality, a theme that is disturbed by Kangaroo conceiving of it simply as conventional love rather than as worship of Lawrence's dark god; "he half-wanted to commit himself to this whole affection with a friend, a comrade, a mate. And then, in the last issue, he didn't want it at all... all his life, he had cherished a beloved ideal of friendship - David and Jonathan... it took Lovat Somers some time to admit and accept this fact." Kangaroo responds in exactly the same terms; "the perfect love that men may have for one another" but Somers can no more respond to him in this way than he can to Harriet - he is too isolate; "I don't want to love anybody... Somers would never be pals with any man. It wasn't in his nature."
The same sort of issues manifest themselves in the novel's social concerns and its depiction of Australia; "some men must live by this unremitting inwardness.. they must not let the rush of the world's outwardness sweep them away." As far as the normal social self is concerned Australia is in many respects the model of Lawerence's vision; as far as his absolute self is concerned, quite the converse. The novel begins with Lawerence praising the inhibited, Whitmanesque character of Australian life; "like a full river of life... for the first time felt himself immersed a real democracy," only to promptly retract it; "and this was what Richard Lovat Somers could not stand... you admit the necessity for rule... the colonies make for outwardness. Everything is outward, like hollow stalks of corn" At this point and beyond, the novel leaves the point open; "Richard was wrong... you can get on for quite a long time without rule.. is it merely running down? Aah, questions!" Hence the novel ends with Somers unable to give himself to Australia or anything else; "you won't give in to women.. you wouldn't give in to Kangaroo. You won't give in to Labour or socialism." Lawrence talks of his worship of the dark god as taking men "nearer the magic of the animal world," a state that the inaptly named Kangaroo finds absurd. But in practice, Lawrence is revolted by the 'unthinking masses;' "the masses are always strictly non-mental... this is the state where they society, tribe, herd degenerates into mobs... the disintegration of the social mankind... a herding together like dumb cattle, a promiscuity like slovenly animals." All of a sudden, the magic of the animal world seems tenuous. Mobs are seen as weak souls lacking direction and discipline, hence Lawrence's attraction to Kangaroo's fascism (and the various anti-semitic comments in the book, not lease making the fascist leader a Jew); society can only exist as a hierarchy.
In common with figures like De Sade, Bacon was the type of artist who cannot exist without a contrary that defined him. In his case, this meant all that was theological, transcendent and metaphysical. Perhaps this is why his is an art of pastiche, taking Velasquez's painting of Pope Innocent and counterpointing it to the dying nurse in Eisenstein, or recycling imagery from Michaelangelo, Van Gogh landscapes, Physique Pictoral, war photography and counterpointing it to images of the crucifixion. Conversely, although his art frequently cited literary sources, such as Eliot, he disavowed narrative in favour of sensation; "Some paint comes across directly on to the nervous system, other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain." Throughout he is a materialist, obsessed with the sexual and the decomposing body alike but depicting it in the terms of religious iconography. The current exhibition at the Tate dwells on his paintings of man and animal alike, showing both in terms of their ravening maw; a form of Darwinian iconography. This is followed by the figures in his 'space frames,' constructs that recall prisons or zoo cages. In each case, the features of the face and any sense of individuality are effaced. The focus on the individual in isolation recalls Hopper and could well be interpreted as a commentary on a pre-Wolfenden society, but the screaming faces has more in common with horror film imagery than Hopper's poignancy. The images of entwined figures leave it impossible to tell if the two male figures are lovers or wrestlers, emblems of violence or death. In the same way, his crucifixion scenes clearly guesture towards Nazi concentration camps or simple charnel houses, but conjoin this with religious imagery. Flesh melts in the same way it seems to in Dali. I'm left feeling reminded of Helene Cixous's rather simplified observations about Western culture being characterised by a set of dichotomies between male and female, eros and thanatos, sacred and profane and so on. Bacon's work could easily be construed as a riposte that seeks to take these chiastic oppositions and blur them.
At the same time, the other Tate gallery is holding an exhibition dedicated to Rothko. The two artists could not be more dissimilar; more essentially programmatic, the other abstract to the point of constantly having to defend himself against accusations of simply being a decorative artist. Most of the paintings here do not even have titles. On the one hand, Rothko withdrew his paintings from appearing in the context of the Seagram building's restaurant, preferring instead the environment of the Rothko chapel. Pollock's epic canvases are horizontal, like cinema screens. Rothko's - such as Number 10, 1950, which once belonged to the architect Philip Johnson - are vertical, like skyscrapers. He was also particularly interested in the hanging of his paintings and of how the size of the canvas affected the space (arguing that a small work is dominated by the viewer, while a large canvas dominates the viewer). On the other, the octagonal design of this structure uses no conventional religious design and the paintings do not correspond to any religious symbolism. There is no content, only layers of closely related colours; greys and blacks, purples and maroons, browns and greys, blacks and blacks.
During the 1960s, Rothko's paintings become poised between the materiality of their surfaces and forms, and the emergence of an image, even if it is an image of nothingness, or an image denied: a blank black screen, or a simple near-horizontal division which we unavoidably see as a horizon, between grey and brown, or black and grey. Rothko believed that all serious art was about death and sought to pursue what he called the 'tragic.' Hence his paintings, appear with frame-like forms painted over bloody depths, as if the canvases were windows or portals. The Rothko chapel utilises doorways that lead nowhere, that evoke the closed doors at the corners of Michelangelo's New Sacristy at San Lorenzo in Florence; Michelangelo similarly used sealed doors and sealed windows for one reason: to suggest death.Labels: Architecture, Art, Literature, London
posted by Richard 11:14 AM
Sunday, August 31, 2008
I was interested to hear of an open day at Battersea Power Station this weekend and accordingly found myself walking from Vauxhall station through an industrial maze of walls in an largely forgotten part of London. The open day proves to be organised by a group proposing a redevelopment of the site. The plans entail building a largely glass ecodome next to the power station, surmounted by a chimney tower that acts as a flue for the heated air from the dome, thereby obviating the need for heating systems. Looking at the enormous glass structure dwarfing the power station, I find myself unkindly reminded of Speer's plans for the new Berlin, whereby the Great Hall dwarfed the nearby Reichstag (another derelict at the time). The plans seem very laudable, with proposals for water recycling, green roofs, sustainable power generation, although given the current economic and political climate I'm inclined to be cynical as to their prospects. Looking at the CGI realisations of the power station, it all seems rather kitsch with a glass roof covering the inner courtyards; the same rather bizarre postmodern quality Gilbert Scott's other power station at Bankside now has.
I have, of course, come for the ruin rather than the plans though. Here again, I'm reminded of Speer and his theory of ruin value. Gilbert Scott's buildings do have a certain streamlined elegance to them but are still hardly especially enthralling. Nonetheless, their scale does mean they are well suited to becoming a ruin; place them in another context and they become an exercise in kitsch (even as power stations they must have been a little bizarre). I find myself thinking of the recent observation from Jonathan Meades that the English prefer prettiness to the sublime, raw and dramatic. Given that the sublime was a quasi-religious concept that sought to awe and crush the individual ego (a tactic well employed in the construction of cathedrals), it's difficult to see a secular role for the sublime, but in ruins it can certainly still have such a purpose. Perhaps modernism, with its futurist aspirations, was always especially predisposed to ruin value. With all this in mind, I walk across a large wasteland overgrown with weeds to the site. With one of the towers partially sheathed in scaffolding, its broken windows, the skeletal walls with their holes and breakages, it does look like some image of a ruined cathedral. The interior is green and pleasant with birds flying past the still tiled walls. Metal girders still stand, but rusted and increasingly seeming more part of nature than a work of construction. Some of the station machinery still remains, such as two rusted cranes standing motionless nearby. In many respects, it seems a terrible pity to 'regenerate' this.
I walk back along the river to Battersea Park and across the Albert Bridge to the Chelsea Embankment with its redbrick and terracotta buildings. I wanted to see the Royal Chelsea Hospital and walk past an obelisk in the front lawn, past the golden statue of Charles the Second, through its colonnades and into its dining hall. From there, I journey onwards to the city and spend some time visiting some of Wren's churches; St Benet, St James Garlickhythe, St Michael Paternoster and the ruined St Mary Somerset.
The evening is occupied with a visit to the Globe theatre, where Timon of Athens is being performed. I had never visited the Globe as a 'groundling' before and accordingly decide to do so on this occasion, ending up with a space immediately before the stage. This does have the advantage of better enabling you to experience the play as something happening around you rather than a passive experience watched from afar (the conventional theatre layout is after all essentially the precursor to the television screen). Characters enter and exit from the front of the stage, walking through the audience. In this production, a net has been draped over the roof space, enabling some rather acrobatic actors to leap down and retreat back up their ropes to the ceiling again. Dressed in black as crows with the sound of drums in the background, the production acquires something of an Aeschylean quality, with the Furies ever overhead. The play itself does a great deal to reinforce my conviction that one of Shakespeare's central facets is the destruction of moral and metaphysical certainties in the reformation. In many respects, the play is quite carnivalesque, dealing with the world turned upside down and scatological humour, but carnival's inversions are temporary and ultimately reinforce the status quo, whereas there is little that is regenerative here; the world remains upside down. Tragedy in the customary Shakespearian sense is a requital for some form of sin, with the downfall serving as a form of atonement; again there is none of that here. Timon could be viewed as a voluptuary whose downfall is linked to his excesses (something played up in the presentation of the banquet as a debauched orgy here), but it's more probable that his sin would be excessive generosity (while the callousness of the Athenians is left unpunished when Alcibiades spares them). In other plays, the malcontent is linked to the figure of the overreacher, but here it is linked to the figure of the hermit. In several respects, the Timon of the second half is pursuing the conventional course of the christian saint in his renunciation of the world and rejection of Apemantus and his rather more practical calls for moderation. The play dresses Timon solely in a loin cloth at this point, effectively comparing him to christ. In other words, it amounts to a critique of aspects of christian (and perhaps specifically Catholic) morality.
Reading Hugo's Les Miserables, it occurs to me that this is a good illustation of the novel not so much as a bourgeois epic (though that might be the case) as a liberal epic. Much of the protracted exposition serves to allow Hugo to navigate between positions of different extremes, much of the odd juxtapositions in the plot allowing him to reconcile contradictory positions (as with the eventual reconcilation of Marius and his father or of Javert not arresting Valjean). His attitude towards religion is a good example, with the early sections establishing the bishop as a model of morality and piety, only to introduce the episode of unction being administered to a dying jacobin who resolutely clings to principles of fighting for rights and opposing tyranny and has no interest in the last rites; "the Bishop went home deeply absorbed in thought.. threw him into a strange reverie." Conversely, the Bishop had previously decried the Voltairean ideas of another character. As the text notes, Valjean is saved by two houses of god at two critical points in his life. Later, we find Hugo proclaiming that Voltaire would have defended christ and that "the religious idea is undergoing a crisis. We are unlearning certain things, and we do well, provided that while we unlearn one thing we are learning another." Later, Voltaire's work is "sacred" with Hugo blaming misinterpreation; introducing, as he often does a mid-position. The same applies to politics, where Hugo complains that communism starves the means of production, but denounces the inability to distribute wealth effectively or to bring light to the lower orders. On the one hand, the gamin is essentially a form of noble savage, on the other many of the denizens of the underworld, like Thenardier, appear simply as intrinsically evil (in this, Hugo bears a marked resemblance to Dickens). In one instance, Hugo is a utopian and treats such characters as venerable heroes, on the other he decries the destructive effects of their violent heroism, with the French revolution characterised as an act of god. Later, this heroism has become the heroism of monsters.
Reading Egil's Saga it's interesting to note the divergences between the christian guilt culture (Egil often appears bellicose and underhanded) and the pagan shame culture (he is lauded as a great warrior), perhaps explaining something of his status as an anomaly in the text; poet, warrior, sorcerer, healer. I also find myself wondering if Iceland was not to medieval Scandinavia what Australia and America later were to Europe; a place of exile cum penal colony.Labels: Literature, London, Ruins
posted by Richard 5:12 AM
Monday, August 18, 2008
My previous visit to Germany saw me travel from Berlin down to Leipzig in the East. This time I reversed the pattern by beginning in Munich, returning to Saxony and visiting Dresden before journeying back to Berlin. Munich is rather different to either of the cities I had visited previously, being both more visibly prosperous and more visibly conformist, a state that consistently tends to elect the same conservative political party. Bavaria is an excellent case in point for a critique of democracy; ruled by a monarchy that was essentially indifferent to political or military expansion, war with Prussia and France was demanded by the state's Parliament prior to it becoming the spiritual home of Nazism. The image of a city modelled on the ideals of the greek revival and the architecture of the enlightenment becoming a fascist marching ground is one of the most appalling notions in Western history.
I begin by walking along a street opposite the old Botanical garden. A rather crude brutalist statue of Neptune stands in the centre, in contrast to the mock Egyptian gateway. I walk past towards the Frauenkirche. Like much in Germany, this has been reconstructed having been destroyed in the war. The haphazard evolution of the building gives its exterior an odd aspect, as with the Bynzantine domes atop the redbrick towers. The exterior walls are lined with tombstones lifted from the graveyard while the interior is rather more empty, an exercise in streamlined gothic. A display shows the cathedral before the second world war as being full of baroque clutter before showing it as a devastated ruin. I see a lot of similar displays during my visit, raising the same sort of questions Sebald raised in The Natural History of Destruction. Exceptions include an elaborate grandfather clock, wooden statues of the saints and a large mannerist monument to the emperor Ludwig; it rather resembles the Hapsburg tombs I saw in the Kaisergruft in Vienna. I walk onwards to the Marienplatz. Like the townhall in Vienna, it's a pleasingly florid example of Flemish gothic, its surface pullulating with dragons, knights and lions. As often with the gothic revival, the nearby old town hall fails to be sufficiently medieval or adequately gothic in comparison. The square in front of it is littered with devotional statues of the Virgin, putti and, rather oddly, a pufferfish. By contrast, the nearby Heiliggeistkirche and PeterKirche are archetypal baroque. As I enter the latter, the light is streaming through the upper windows and forming coruscating paths down to the floor. Its spire, so broad from the front and so narrow from the side, reminds me of Hawksmoor's Christchurch.
Walking on again, I walk past the Hofgarten near the royal palace to the Englischer garten, a odd combination of wild wood with garden. A stream from the river Isar proceeds through the garden at pressure leading many to surf in its waters. As it grows calmer swans and ducks try to swim upstream. Follies abound from Klenze's classicist Monopteros (unlike English neo-classical architecture it's beautifully painted in pinks and greens) to a chinoiserie pagoda used by a beer hall. Walking back to the centre, I enter the Theatinerkirche. A nauseating mustard glass yellow on the outside, the inside is covered in stucco detail but is unpainted and left in white; the resulting view of the dome in the interior rather reminds me of Wren. Some of the surrounding buildings present a different picture, with frozen stone dramatising the dialectic of romanticism and the enlightenment as with the Klenze's gothic Felderhalle with its statues of lions and Bavarian generals (one could be forgiven for viewing its connection with the beer hall putsch as predestined). The structure commemorates Bavarian military victories, one of many such monuments. Further down the street, past the university buildings with their wide fountains and before the classicist Siegestor is the Ludwigkirche. The building is under repair, with the roof being recovered with glazed tiles, so the ceiling is covered with nets that block my view of the sky blue gothic vault. With its patterned walls and giant altar painting, it reminds me quite a lot of English architecture of the same period, though Bavaria's penchant for rundbogenstil meant a romanesque revival rather than a gothic one, just as the Nazarene painters were essentially Raphaelites.
The following day is taken up with visits to the various galleries in Munich. The Alte Pinakothek was badly damaged during the war and its surface remains a morass of scar tissue. The interior feels both cavernous and empty, lacking the decoration one would normally have expected of such a building. The collection is initially rather disappointing, with some rather generic Italian renaissance paintings; for instance an austere Botticelli from the period when Savonarola's influence was at its height. I'm struck by a version of the annunciation where Gabriel has peacock wings (later, I find myself smirking at similar paintings showing the wings as rainbow coloured and resembling gay pride flags). I feel most interested when we come to Canaletto's veduta paintings or a vanitas painting by Salvator Rosa . As is often the case, my spirits are restored when I come to the Dutch section; deserted church interiors by Saenredam, de Velde seascapes, Ruisdael landscapes, der Heyden paintings of palaces, portraits from Hals and Rembrandt. There's even a set of landscapes showing Brazil as if it were Utrecht (there's later a Burgkmair painting of St John on Patmos, complete with monkeys and palm trees). Unlike the Italians, the Dutch were more alive to the sensuous joy of things. I'm struck at how flower still lives combined different plants that could never have been in bloom simultaneously as a fantasia. Even moral allegories like Jan Steen's The Love Sick Girl combine their fables with still-lives showing this love of surface.
The same holds true for the Flemish section (as with Brueghel's Harbour with christ preaching where christ is simply one figure in a crowd and not nearly as central as the two housewives in the centre staring back out at the viewer), even if there is far too much Rubens, although one of his cartoonish paintings of the last judgement is quite striking. I'm particularly struck with a painter I hadn't heard of, Cornelis Van Dalem, and a painting entitled Landscape with Farmstead showing a preoccupation with ruins in the form of a derelict church and a dilapidated famrstead. Like Ruisdael's painting of the Jewish cemetery, it shows an early form of romanticism. The Spanish section is less interesting, notable only for a Velasquz court portrait and El Greco's The Disrobing of Christ while Claude's landscapes are the only things to leap out in the French section.
The German section comes last. Even in spite of their religiosity, I can't help liking Michael's Pacher's paintings trompe l'oeil alter paintings that simulate gothic niches or his paintings of a devil with face on its backside. Like Bosch, it mostly seems like a work of surrealism at this point in time, no different to Brueghel's painting of the land of Cockaigne where pigs run around with knives carving them up in the process. I'm more taken with a Durer self portrait, done in a style designed to consciously recall christ paintings and representing for me Burckhardt's discovery of the individual, just as a nearby Altdorfer painting is the first landscape with a definite topography, that of Regensburg.
I pass onwards to the nearby Neues Pinakothek. The early rooms here are dedicated to international art (a Canova sculpture of Paris, Adonis by Thorvaldsen a Fuseli painting of Satan and Death). A rather gaudy Goya stands out clearly from an excessive number of Gainsboroughs. The German section is of the most interest to me as it again dramatises a dialogue of classicism and romanticism; Dahl's The Day After a Stormy Night, architectural fantasies of ancient Athens from Klenze, Blechen's The Construction of the Devil's Bridge, Friedrich's The Arbour. I feel more ambivalent about the Nazarenes; their use of colour is something I certainly respond to but their subjects are often anodyne at best. By contrast, the entire room given to Rottman's paintings of Greece is fascinating. Bavaria had helped Greek independence in return for giving its dynasty the Greek throne (for a short while) and Rottman was one of the first Europeans to paint the ruins of Corinth and Athens. Delacroix, Gericault and Daumier represent French work in the same period. The modern section is surprisingly comprehensive, covering Monet, Cezanne, Manet, Lautrec, Sisley, Pissarro, Degas, Renoir and especially Guaguin and Van Gogh. The final rooms turn to the more unusual; Klimt, Schiele, Von Stuck and Munch.
Finally, I visit the Lensbachhaus. I haven't been enormously impressed by Lensbach's rather stodgily realistic paintings but there's undeniably something rather striking about his former villa. The courtyard is an Italian renaissance fantasia of sea horse fountains and statues while the undamaged sections of the interior are equally richly decorated. This takes up where the Neue Pinakothek had stopped, with Von Stuck's Salome (paintings of Salome often recur in various galleries and I later see a fountain dedicated to the Strauss opera) and the likes of Corinth's Self-Portrait with Skeleton (presumably an echo of Bocklin?), but most of the house is given up to the various members of the Blue Rider group. Kandinsky represents a clear core to the group but although I'm unfamiliar with the other names, I'm quite impressed with Munter's folk art, Jawlensky's & Macke's landscapes and Marc's animal paintings. The Lensbachhaus is close to Konigsplatz and opposite the Propylaen, a classicist monument By Klenze to Otto's brief reign as King of Greece. It faces a black obelisk on the other side of the platz that serves as a Napoleonic war memorial. Inbetween are Klenze's equally Grecian Glyptotek and Staatliche Antikensammlungen. I only later learn that this was the central Nazi administrative area; Troost's fuhrerbau where Chamberlain was handed his piece of paper stands nearby. It's a music school now, wreathed in ivy. I walk back into Munich and visit the Michaelkirche. As austere as the Theatinerkirche, it does have a funerary monument by Thorvaldsen, much in the style of the Caniova tombs I'd seen in Venice. By contrast, the Asamkirche, is florid with rococo detail. I'm especially taken with a sun image in the ceiling and by a skeleton attacking a cherub with a scythe.
The following day is taken up with a visit to the Munich Residence. Combining late reniassiance and North Italian baroque designs with later work from Klenze, the building takes you through grotto halls decorated with shells, a courtyard with a statue of Perseus, an antiquarium with walls painted with roman decorations and walls lined with busts of Roman emperors (I especially like trompe l'oeil paitnings that show the already long hall extending even further into infinity), a chapel with ceiling blazing with blue and gold and walls lined with marble and frescos, state rooms lined with tapestries that have retained most of their colour, a long gallery lined with portraits, porcelain cabinets, a miniatures cabinet, baroque galleries whose mirror lined walls create the impressions of an infinitely recursive space. There are various collections in the Residence; a grisly display of skulls and bones in a reliquary, an exhibition of various orientalist tapestries and above all an exhibition of 'white gold' porcelain, covering the collection of Chinese and Arita Imari through to Meissen wares. There's also a brief exhibition on a lost palmhouse constructed atop part of the residence and containing various follies. Finally, there's the Staatliches Museum Agyptischer Kunst containing an impressive red marble statue of Antinous as Osiris, a translation of the Greek geographer Artemidorus in papyrus, several sphinxes and gold jewellery from Meroitic tombs.
In the afternoon, I return to Konigsplatz and to the Glyptotek. Like the Pinakothek, the interior is stark and bare creating an uncanny feeling of emptiness, something exacerbated by each room having a plaque showing its orginally highly ornamented interiors. The collection here varies from pediment cornices and palmettes to kouroi, tombstones, sarcophagi and votive reliefs. The most famous statue, the Barberini faun, is given a room largely to itself. I'm most struck with a representation of the head of Medusa, a statue of Diomedes and a bust of Antinous. The centre of the collection is statuary from the Temple of Aegina showing sphinxes and Trojan warriors. Opposite, the Staatliche Antikensammlungen is largely dedicated to Greek depictions of women, especially in terms of how the Amazons were depicted (mostly in vases but also statuary) as an orientalised other, mounted warriors shown in the same terms of Scythians or Thracians, just as the Maenads were shown as worshippers of an asiatic cult. The permanent collection is somewhat sidelined, but it does have an excellent collection of glass wares and a beautiful gold crown of leaves.
The following day is taken up with a rather preditactable visit to Schloss Neuschwanstein. It's one of those uncomfortable moments that remind you that you are a tourist and not just a visitor, as you join the crowds thronging their way to this remote castle. The landscape here is certainly beautiful with the old castle of Hohenschwangau overlooking a swan lake circumbscribed by mountains. The new castle lies halfway up one of these mountains and is reachable through a surprisingly gentle path that twists and turns on its way up. I'm interested in part in the rather tragic story of King Ludwig (partly a case study as to the medievalist ideals of Ruskin or Wagner being put into practice, partly the archetypal story of the persecuted gay aesthete) and in another part in the medievalist architecture. Created by a theatrical set designer rather than an architect, Neuschwanstein combines Ludwig's preferred romanesque arches with a design that is gothic overall, a fantasia on a middle ages that never existed. The interior is characterised by a horror of emptiness, with every surface painted, patterned and decorated. Wagner's operas form the basis for a series of frescos throughout the various rooms, with the swans from Lohengrin forming a leitmotif throughout (although the lion forms the basis of the Bavarian crest and mythical creatures like dragons appear to guard stairwells) in tapestries, frescos and porcelain. The throne room is an odd combination of Romanesque and Byzantine, depicting historical monarchs and christian allegories alike on its walls. By contrast, the furniture in later rooms is pure gothic, with encrustations of wooden crockets abounding. The Singer's Hall rather perversely reminds me of Wren's Greenwich Hospital where the main hall also culminates in a wall sized fresco, here of Klingsor's magic garden.
This essentially concludes my visit to Munich and from here a long train journey follows to Dresden. The countryside gradually changes from fir trees and hills to something that more closely resembles England (I do wonder whether Germany actually has an agricultural sector; all I can see being grown is Sweetcorn) I feel rather ambivalent about this city. Standing on the Bruhl Terrace and looking at both the Neustadt and Altstadt, it's easy to understand the glib label of it being the Florence of the North, even if all the spires and towers had long since been blackened by pollution and rather resembles Edinburgh more than Italy. The building is predominantly baroque with some older structures such as the medieval Residence. Bisected like Prague between old and new towns, with the the Bruhl terrace serving the same purpose as London's embankment, the city is in many ways of maze of sighing bridges and walkways beneath buildings (the terrace was built after the removal of the city fortifications and the casemates remained hidden beneath them; like those in Prague they now contain original versions of statues replaced with copies outside, such as one of the Duke of Moritzburg and the skeletal figure of Death). It soon becomes clear that none of the buildings I can see escaped the firestorm and they are all efforts in conservation and reconstruction; many like the Dreikonigskirche, the Frauenkirche and the Kreuzkirche have left parts of their altars as they were after the firestorm. Some, like the Kreuzkirche appear undamaged on the outside but without any restoration on the interior (although the Kreuzkirche does have a striking renaissance totentanz relief). Others like the Frauenkirche are hyperreal constructs, entirely new buildings that simulate their predecessor. In this case, the interior is filled with paint that replicates marble patterns and has a pastel quality that I suspect is toned down from what it would would have been. I'm equally unclear if trompe l'oeil paint is a restoration or a substitute for certain architectural features. Perhaps because I have never seen a new baroque church before (nor ever will again), I'm struck at how kitsch it is; it seems to need the patinia of age. I also find myself preferring the blackened towers to the gleaming cream of the new Frauenkirche. Equally, much of the city was never reconstructed after the Seond World War and instead saw the building of various Soviet building blocks (many of which have become hotels now). A rather grim statue of a female worker stands in front of the town hall and the Kulturpalast in the city centre is a depressing rectangle with Soviet murals on its facade. It rather resembles the late and unlamented Palast Der Republik in Berlin. Nor are many of the gleaming glass and steel buildings that have been errected since the Wende much of an improvement, although I do get the impression of greater prosperity than I had recalled seeing in my earlier visit to Leipzig. While I do see derelict villas in the suburbs that were never rebuilt after the war, I also see several that either have been or are being reconstructed.
Inevitably, I begin at the Zwinger Palace, with its satyr caryatids, reliefs of Perseus and St George and carillion chimes. The Porcelain museum here is rather better than its Munich counterpart, explaining the symbolic significance of much of the imagery (washing a white elephant meaning to wash away the delusions of the world). Augustus the Strong described himself as having a 'maladie du porcellaine' even bartering his troops for porcelain; the museum includes rooms containing white porcelain representations of animals, from rhinos ane elephants to peacocks, an attempt to model the world in porcelain. Much of the afternoon is taken with Dresden Gemaldegallerie. The Italian section is notable for Messina's semi-pornographic depiction of Saint Sebastian, some Venetian nightscenes by Canaletto and a number of Belotto paintings of Dresden itself, showing the original Kreuzkirche and its demolition. Once again though, it's the Ditch and Flemish section that interests me; a Valckenborch painting of the Tower of Babel similar to the Brueghel, Brill and Savery's paintings of ruins, Rembrandt's portraits of his wife, a Vermeer painting of a girl reading a lette (the orginal had a representation of Cupid to make the meaning clear, which Vermeer removed) and Ruisdael landscapes. The German section has a number of Cranach and Holbein portraits and a ruin painting by Klengel. I also visit the Green Cabinet in the Dresden Residence; a series of rooms holding a royal wunderkammer, that ranges from amber and gold to mother of pearl, coral, nautilus shells, ostrich eggs and coconuts. There are a few other structures that seem noteworthy; a gilded gold statue of Augustus in the Neustadt, a Japanese palace with mandarins as caryatids and a police headquarters decorated with bat and owl gargoyles.
The following day is taken up with a trip to Moritzburg and a walk around the Baroque castle. Situated in the middle of a lake, it's a peaceful walk around the lakeside woods and reed beds. A number of geese vociferously demand bread. As one might expect from an inflated hunting lodge, the interior has few walls without stag antlers and with many paintings following suit. Much of the walls are decorated with an embossed leather that has not weathered well, lending a rather sad aspect to the interior belied by the vivid orange of the exterior. I'm rather taken with the idea of a palace having a 'Hideous Hall' decorated with mythological scenes. Walking back through the grounds to Faisanderie, a pink lodge surmounted with a mandarin that nods in the wind. In conventional baroque form, the Faisanderie exists in a stright line from one wall of the castle, although the stream that leads down this path suffers from its fountain being damaged and is simply a low pool filled with reed and lilies where dragonflies go back and forth. The final folly I see is a lighthouse, painted to represent the lines of pink bricks on plaster. The building leans out onto another tranquil lake and again seems to resemble a pagoda as much as a conventional lighthouse. Returning to Dresden, the evening is spent at an organ concert in the Frauenkirche; Vierne, Durufle, Franck and Messiaen.
Changing trains again, this time a shorter journey back to Berlin. My original visit to Berlin had been the subject of a depressing journey to Leipzig through derelect factories and abandoned villas. Some of this remains but rather less so; I'm unclear if the difference is my own memory, the elapsed time or greater prosperity in Dresden than Leipzig. Berlin itself remains an anomaly. As a capital is seems rather empty, with the punks loitering around graffiti covered streets reminding one of London in the seventies. In many respects, it's a pleasant, elegant city of green spaces and wide boulevards. The S-Bahn system is now one of the most modern and impressive in Europe and far preferable to the London Underground. On the other hand, much of the city remains an odd mixture of grey housing blocks from the Soviet era, often placed directly alongside gleaming corporate buildings, neither of which engage me much. Alexanderplatz, with its cheerless combination of dun coloured communist kitsch and skyscrapers is especially unengaging. On the other hand, the reconstruction of the city has been rather more thorough than that in London (I eagerly await the plans to demolish the Barbican and Southbank), with a few concrete towers now being all that remains of the Palast Der Republik while construction is underway nearby to rebuild Schinkel's Bauakademie.
The initial days are clouded with dark skies and rain, so I retreat to the Gemaldegallerie. The pattern of my responses is essentially familiar by now, with a mixed response to the medieval works becoming more affirmative to the later works. The medieval German section does have a Cranach work that I haven't encountered before, The Fountain of Youth. I wonder if this isn't an allegory of the resurrection but the painting seems equally 'readable' as a hymn to the joys of youth and the flesh. As often I find myself most drawn to the portraits against the legions of anonymous saints; Holbein's The Merchant Georg Gisze or Fiorentino's Portrait of a Young Man. I also find myself warming to Brugehel's The Dutch Proverbs (vernacular rather than sacred wisdom) and Bosch's St John of Patmos a painting whose realism is interrupted by the appearance of a strange creature opposite a raven. Later Dutch paintings that stand out for me include Vermeer's The Glass of Wine and several Ruisdael landscapes, as well as a more unusual view of the Damplatz in Amsterdam. The Italian section includes a number of more pagan Botticelli paintings than I had seen earlier in the visit, a painting of Venus by Titian, a capriccio from Canaletto showing a ruined baldachin and an interesting veduta scene from Martini. The Spanish section is immediately notable for a pair of Caravaggios, including Amor as Victor. I also briefly visit the Hamburger Bahnhof; a former train station turned modern art gallery, with a small collection of Rauschenberg collages and Warhols.
This is then followed by a visit to the Bodesmuseum. Shut during my last visit, I found myself impressed by the interior; the Radcliffe Camera style dome houses an equestrian statue of one of the Prussian monarchs while a central hall is cast in the form of a basilica, housing Maiolica works from various Italian churches. The exhibition is perhaps less interesting; much of the medieval sculpture seems clumsy and cartoonish, although two saints depicted in clothes coated with gold leaf and elaborate top hats strikes an odd and pleasant contrast. The same applies to a loaned kunstkammer with an elaborate gold statue around whose feet crawl jewelled beetles and a variety of ivory and amber capriccios. The best section is dedicated to the Byzantine; beautifully decorated sarcophagi and the apse mosaic from a Ravenna church. A nearby section is dedicated to Coptic textiles and funerary work. The Altes Museum was also shut during my last visit; organised around a central rotunda Schinkel had clearly designed to remind one of the Pantheon, the lower section is dedicated to Greek and Roman exhibits that are new to me. Highlights here include a bronse statue of Antinous as Bacchus, a praying boy statue formerly owned by Frederick the Great and a bowl depicting a satyr orgy that made the Warren Cup seem restrained. The upper floor is the Egyptian section I had seen in its former home in Charlottenberg, so I recall exhibits like the Bust of Nefertiti and the Fayum mummy paintings (though I'm not sure I recall the Meroitic section or the sheer number of Mummy masks). I also revisit the Altes Nationalgallerie, part of which had previously been shut; such as the Canova and Thorvaldsen sculptures.
The skies briefly clear the following day and I walk down Unter Den Linden from the Brandenburg gate to Alexanderplatz. I recall buildings like Humboldt University and the State Library but I also decide to detour and see Gendarmenmarkt, with its symmetrical cathedrals and opera house. I then stop at the Schinkel Museum, a redbrick gothic church that could have passed for a gothic revival structure from the typically classicist architect. The interior is rather eerie for its absence of pulpit and pew; instead various marble statues are scattered about, from artists like Thorvaldsen, Schadow and Christian Daniel Rauch. The nearby Neue Wache with its austere classicism and tomb-like interior is entirely different again, especially in the environs of the Schlossbrucke with its elaborate statues and wrought iron seahorses. Reaching Alexanderplatz, one finds oneself underneath the towering bulk of the Fernsehrturm, easily Berlin's tallest structure, which dwarfs the Nikolaikirche and the Marienkirche underneath it. The interior of the latter provides quite interesting; gleaming white gothic sheltering elaborate tomb monuments. The Weltzeituhr is easily the best thing in Alexanderplatz; I certainly find myself unimpressed with the continued presence of the statues of Marx, Engels and Leibknecht, which should have all been exiled to a historical theme park long ago.
A visit to the Neue Synagogue proves a mixed experience; although the exterior has been beautifully reconstructed the interior has not, thwarting my expectation of something similar to the synagogues I had seen in Prague. The exhibition inside documents the guilding of the synagogue as a part of the reform movement, its place in the history of Jewish life in Berlin, the murder of that community and the dereliction of the building. There's something similar with the Kaiser Willhelm Memorial Church, now twinned with Coventry Cathedral. The ruin is shut during my visit although I can see some rather fine mosaics and marble statues through the windows. The modern church, containing the Stalingrad Madonna, is open and although a rather ugly box from the exterior is awash with blue light inside. Amongst other destinations during my trip, I visit the Oberbaumbrucke (mostly a desire stemming from having seen Lola Rennt) and the Saint Matthias Churchyard (which is nowhere near the church of that name, which resides in the Kulturforum). Containing the graves of the Brothers Grimm and Von Stauffenberg, many of the monuments are rather generic and could as easily be found in London, but I am struck by a tomb that contains a white marble statue of the deceased, only just visible in the gloom of the interior, various monuments in verdigris encrusted copper and an art deco statue wreathed in ivy. I also note that grave of Napoleon Seyfarth and his lover, their grave marked with two arrows emblazoning their homosexuality. Another grave has a rainbow flag on it.
There were various good restaurants during my visit, including Jewish, Persian, Czech, Cambodian, Uzbek (boar ghoulash) and Russian as well as German meals like blood and liver sausage with one litre tankards of dark beer.
posted by Richard 12:25 PM
Sunday, June 29, 2008
I saw the work of Vilhelm Hammershøi during my visit to Copenhagen a few years ago, but I can't say with any honesty that it made any great impression on me at the time. This is perhaps unsurprising; understated paintings in grey tones of spartan and austere subjects are comparatively easy to miss in the midst of other works; it's only when one sees the paintings together that one realises the obsessive theme driving them.
Hammershøi's loose brushwork and restricted palette immediately associate him with his contemporary Whistler, but seventeenth century Dutch painting was also a significant influence on him. As with Vermeer, Hammershøi is frequently found depicting figures in interiors, showing the play of light from nearby windows. Where the Western tradition is for the subject to stare out of a painting and challenge the viewer, Hammershøi follows Vermeer in denying this, having his figures (or figure; his wife was his persistent model) turned away from the viewer to give a hermetic aspect to the painting. In tandem with the grey, barely furnished interiors (photographs of the same rooms show them filled with furnishings and decoration), where the light from a window largely serves to suggest that life is somewhere else, this creates the melancholic air that pervades his work. Durer's figure of melancholy was turned away from the viewer as well. Hammershøi returns again and again to the same interiors, the same piano, the same pictures, the same bowls. But his work also rather resembles Escher or Piranesi, showing long corridors with successions of doors, looking out into interior courtyards through layers of interior windows, with doors that are slightly warped and distorted against the overall geometry of the work. There's a disjoint between the realistic, objective, settings and his imprecise impressionistic brushwork; what is being depicted is an objective correlative for his own state of mind.
The other component to Hammershøi's work is his landscapes, both rural and urban. Whether showing the Danish countryside, Copenhagen's royal palace or church spires, the British Museum or a London street, the scene is always devoid of people and depicted with grey wintry skies that seem somewhere between Whistler and Atkinson Grimshaw. I recall Copenhagen as a colourful city with painted buildings and red church towers surmounted with verdigris encrusted baroque spires. But I recall being fascinated by the same buildings, showing the same empty streets. I discover a certain fellow feeling for Hammershøi that I'm rather unaccustomed to.
The following week I return for two exhibitions near Trafalgar Square. I start with an Wyndham Lewis at the National Portrait Gallery. I recall Angela Carter complaining that all of Lawrence's women were just clothes without bodies, as opposed to his meticulous depiction of male physicality. Something similar can be said of Wyndham Lewis's paintings. The subjects of these portraits are puppet or simulacra. They have the quality of remaining just what they are, fixed in a particular epoch to furniture which is now dust (hence Froanna's liminal character in her Red Portrait as she fades ino the background). "The process and condition of life, without any exception, is a grotesque degradation." The stress on dehumanisation in his writing manifests itself in his painting by his focus on clothes rather than people. The portrait of Edith Sitwell shows her with her eyes shut, her face turned from the viewer, buried in a mass of clothes. Sitwell thought her hands to be her finest feature; here, Lewis hides them altogether (the same applies in his painting of Mrs Schiff, unlike Edwin Evans whose hand blends into his trousers). Hats and helmets abound throughout the paintings. Depicting TS Eliot, he gave the poet a "gioconda smile." Sketch after sketch shows the face left unworked till last. Eliot looks downwards, Pound closes his eyes. Like Modigliani or Picasso (albeit without their primitivism), Lewis saw the face as a mask, indistinguishable from the hat he always painted himself wearing.
Confronted with demands for a return to the classicism of Raphael, Lewis responded by suggesting Shakespeare as an exemplar, praising the famous woodcut of the playwright as serene and empty. Lewis develops various personae in his painting and writing like 'the enemy' as his satirical response to the literary and art world, or his embodiment of satire, the tyro. Lewis caught sight of his face in a cracked mirror and saw "the mask of a syphilitic Creole." Whatever was worth recording in life, he asserted, could be mapped in surface forms. On the whole, I find myself thinking tht Lewis is a rather more sympathetic as a painter than as a writer. His painting of Froanna is a particular masterpiece; red tones predominate excepting the blue of her eyes as she stares directly at the viewer, one of the very few subjects to do so in the entire exhibition.
I follow this with the nearby Divisionism exhibition at the National Gallery. Like Pointillism or Impressionism, Divisionism was a response to new scientific theories of light and colour, like colour wheels. Nonetheless, where French art often has an art for art's sake philosophy, with low-lifes or nudes (Longoni's pickpocket painting is the nearest to that here) featured to epater les bourgeoisie rather than for political ends. By contrast, Italian artists were unhappy with technique alone. Italian reunification has created considerable social upheaval, poverty and inequality that lent itself to a realist style of portrature that much of the rest of Europe had already explored. Equally, symbolism offered a more escapist response to the same conditions, one that especially appealed to Catholic artists. Often, divisionist artists would veer between these extremes. Nomellini paints grey scenes of striking workers at one point in his career, and then paints an extraordinary indigo blue symbolist work showing the sea, entitles Symphony of the Moon. Segantini's nature scenes remains sufficiently detailed to sit alongside Pre-Raphaelite painting, but his later symbolist works show a bizarre depictions of sins being punished in hell. His Return from the Woods is the most perfect fusion of the two strains shown in the exhibition; showing a peasant woman dragging wood in a snow scene, but withthe church spire at her destination is reminiscent of David Friedrich (the same applies to some of Grudicy's autumnal scenes; I'm struck by the spider's web drawn on the frame of one of them). Some of the realist paintings, such as those by Morbelli could have been painted fifty years earlier in terms of their technique, even if light falling through windows is a particular theme. Morbelli also painted melancholy quasi symbolist works of sunsets though. In other works, the divisionist technique, so effective in Segantini's Alpine scenes, imposes a stillness and imprecision that fits oddly with the social agenda of the paintings. Morbelli's luminscent painting of women working in the rice fields utterly fails to convey any sense of misery; it's much too tranquil and beautiful. Either these artists assumed that a method that was 'scientific must be allied to social progress, or the political posturing was actually an alibi for aestheticising the predicament of the working class. Much of the symbolist work is also quite socially engaged though but in a more reactionary fashion, as with Previati's paean to the virtues of the madonna. Volpedo's country scenes are reminiscent of Sisley but show christian processions. Many of the forms are religious, such as the tondo or the polytych. At the very least, religious symbolism is used to evoke a sense of secular national identity; Mazzini had argued that Italians must develop a "religious concept of their nation."
It wasn't until futurism that the techniques developed by divisionism could be applied to a specific programme, albeit one where the interest in light was often centered on electric lighting. The exhibition depicts a move from Boccioni's early pastoral landscapes to a picture of a seamstress (albeit one where the focus is on her cobalt blue dress) to his explicitly futurist painting of a dam being constructed. Other works by Balla and Carra show the futurist depiction of movement in still life or the energy of technology.
As I child I recall seeing a particular statue during a visit to Osbourne House on the Isle of Wight; a black basalt statue of Antinous. I couldn't place my interest in it exactly at the time, presuming it to be due to the exotic Egyptinate character of the statue. I now presume that my interest was mostly taken by the frank sexualisation in the semi-nude depiction of Hadrian's lover. No wonder Winckelman had been so enthused at the imagery that showed Antinous as being somewhere between Athena and Apollo. The story of the doomed youth is one of the central myths of gay history, alongside that of Edward the Second. It's the prospect of seeing Antinous that attracts me to the Hadrian exhibition at the British Museum. The depictions of him are many, from the Egyptianate statue of him as Osiris (with whom he had shared a death day), Ephebian depictions of him as Bacchus (another arisen deity) with vine leaves in his long hair or versions of him as a Greek fertility god. In some of these he conforms to the Roman ideal of the beautiful youth (shown here with the inclusion of the Warren cup), in others his sexuality is more aggressively that of an adult male. I find myself wryly amused at the prospect of his cult competing with christianity; if only it had won. Otherwise, the material at hand is rather more conventional; accounts of Hadrian's brutal suppression of Jewish rebellion, retrenchment and consolidation of the empire's borders after Trajan's overly ambitious expansion, the amnesty on public debts, construction of the Scottish wall (admittedly a turf bank for much of its length that could have served little defensive purpose, instead presumably it served as a means of channelling and controlling the border), anf finishing with the construction of buildings like the Pantheon, his Mausoleum and the architectural fantasisa of his Tivoli villa. The images of Hadrian himself seem surprisingly individual, with his beard setting him out (cited as evidence of his love of all things Greek or a means of covering his blemishes, depending on your preferences) as well as a dimple in his ear that may be evidence of heart disease. Giant busts and statues alternately show him as emperor, priest, warrior and deity. Some of the reliefs from Tivoli, showing Parthenon style depictions of naked figures alongside detailed carvings of vines, birds and squirrels also stand out, but I'm especially drawn to two beautiful peacocks that formerly were in place on the walls of Hadrian's mausoleum.
The great court of the Museum currently has a striking work by Zhang Wang inside it; following the Chinese inclusion of weathered stones in gardens, Wang has taken the image of such stones and encased it in silvery metal, which looks as if it were frozen mercury. This questioning of the relationship between nature and art is counterpointed by some temporary gardens outside, where a genuine stone can be found amidst the dogwood, wisteria, lacquer tree, willow, bamboo and peony. An exhibition of Chinese nature painting inside continues this theme. I'm struck by the role of literary allusion in the paintings and ceramics shown; many of the flowers and animals are chosen for their symbolic connotations (like the lotus) others by homophones suggested by their names (bamboo sounding like congratulations, narcissi sounding like immortality) or for compounds formed from the combination of different items. A few weeks later I'm revisiting Silchester and an archaeological dig is on. A small garden has been created illustrating the sort of plants found in a Roman garden and illustrating their symbolic functions. There are some overlaps with the Chinese symbolism, as with peony being used in protective amulets.
Walking around the city, I visit the interior of St Mary Alderdmary, an exercise in hyperreal gothic by Wren. The effect is quite odd; the fan vaulting is decorated with floral patterns that seem to belong rather more to the baroque period. The effect of the interior being coated in white plaster is rather sepulchral, giving it the effect of an alabaster tomb and contrasting oddly with the colourful Victorian tiling on the floor. While I'm there the organ starts playing Bach's Toccata and Fugue. I move onto Wren's St Stephen Walbrook. The interior here is more like a playfully decorated version of the pantheon; unlike Hawksmoor whose eccentric designs seem to match the English character, Wren would have been a much greater architect in a catholic country, where his designs could have made with red marble rather than Portland stone and his interiors gilded and painted. One detail I am struck with is a totentanz on one of the pillars, showing a bride dancing with a skeletal death. This evening, I go to Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppaea at the Proms. Even if Monteverdi is best known for his ecclesiastical music, this amorality tale does rather confirm the reputation of renaissance Venice as indifferent to religion at best. The plot begins with Cupid asserting her primacy over Virtue and thereafter protecting Poppaea as she schemes her way to becoming Nero's wife, displacing the rather more virtuous Octavia. Poppaea's mother attempts to dissuade her from this course, but only on the grounds of practicality, advising her to go for someone less ambitious instead. Similarly, Octavia's nurse attempts to persuade her to take a lover as a form of revenge. Seneca is depicted as the moral centre of the play but also as a tedious windbag. The only character to receive any punishment is the wronged Octavia, while the assassin Otto is allowed happiness with Drusilla. The staging attempted to draw attention to later events (Poppaea' death at Nero's hands) by having him come close to slapping her as well as introducing an unscripted (and historically inaccurate) scene where Nero drowns Lucan. Since the drama is essentially concerned with Poppae's triumph, I wasn't especially sure I appreciated these interpolations, even if the original audience would have been well aware of Poppaea's eventual fate and that she would have achieved her ambition by remaining faithful to Otto. The Skakespearian approach to casting works bettwe, with both Nero and Poppaea played by women (Nero would originally have been played by a castrato) and various female parts like the nurse played by men (the nurse here bears a disturbing resemblance to Margaret Thatcher).
Later at the Proms, I listen to Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty. The full version is rarely performed in ballet (the story being slight, Tchaikovsky had padded it with various dances). I find myself surprised at the idea of Tchaikovsky writing an opera under the influence of Rameau, although the idea of parallels to Wagner and Brunnhilde's sleep is more natural. In later works, Rimsky-Korsakov's Kaschkey the Immortal inverts this, with the hero's kiss to an evil witch killing her and releasing the princess. I follow this with Dvorak's Slavonic Dances and Janacek's Osud. The latter is quite odd, reminding me of the role of neuroticism in Schnitzler or the sense of impending fate in Kafka (Mann also leapt to mind, prompted by the spa setting). The first two acts describe a conductor's love affair and its end in madness and death. His opera is only written to comprise two acts and the third has his describing the above events it to music students at its premiere, thereby forming the third act.
The following weekend, I go to a Taraf de Haidouks concert in Cheltenham. Much of their music is intended to take orchestral settings of gypsy music by the likes of Bartok and Albeniz and to place in back into its original context, playing it as dance music on the violin, accordion, bass and cymbalum. The result is rather like rock music and it's difficult not to think that where nineteenth century Europe preferred to take folk music and to apply it to orchestral works, twentieth century America preferred to allow black artists to pioneer jazz and blues. The irony of re-appropriating Bartok is born out by the venue, a rather gaudy regency affair. The audience look as if they go there often to attend classical concerts; standing for this one they occasionally manage to sway a bit (aside from one rather energetic elderly lady). It's also worth mentioning the supporting act, the London Bulgarian Choir, who performed a capella folk songes dressed in traditional costumes.
Cheltenham itself, with its rows of regency buildings, seems rather tepid to me. I'm more struck by my visit earlier in the day to Tewkesbury Abbey. It reminds me of Southwell, another place where the isolated location seems to have helped the building survive with comparatively little destruction or alteration. The exterior is rather ungainly; a squat central tower is flanked by various side chapels and fronted with a facade composed of two towers dwarfed by a central window, recessed back as if it were a romanesque arch. The interior is dark, supported by round pillars (each with a face as a corbel facing its counterpart opposite) above a gothic ceiling painted green and white. The effect is rather like a forest. After the rood screen the effect becomes more markedly gothic, with Victorian Minton tiling below matched by white, blue and red patterns above. England's oldest fan vaulting in some of the chantry chapels, some of it still painted. One of them has an effigy of its knight suspended above it, others show statues of mouldering corpses, others show fights with the devil. I'm also quite struck by the lady chapel, with a Byzantine mosaic and icon of St Benedict.
The following day is taken up with a brief visit to Glasgow. I find the Victorian buildings in red sandstone mixed with baroque church spires, Marcochetti statues, greek revival art galleries, elaborate corbel figures and art deco building fronts quite wonderful. I'm equally delighted with the police boxes I keep on seeing on street corners. The back of Prince's Square behind the City Chambers is labyrinth of arches that reminds me of Piranesi. In front, I'm struck by the column surmounted by Walter Scott. London has no statue of Shakespeare, let alone dedicating Trafalgar Squate to him. I walk out to the cathedral and walk around the graveyard. The monuments are eroded and weathered, decorated with skulls and morality symbols. The symbols seem wraithlike when corroded in this manner. On one of them Minton tiling has been badly blackened by industrial pollution. Several more modern tombs are caged in with rusted iron, the interior overgrown with weeds. I walk over to the Victorian necropolis. The presence of the tombs on this hill reminds me of Prague, as does the presence of an old town next to a new one on a grid layout. Presumably Mackintosh would figure as the Glaswegian Gaudi. Paths spiral around the hill, as one passes celtic crosses, Egyptian tombs, funerary urns, all encrusted with rust and weeds as they crumble to dust. The style of the monuments seems rather diverse, from Moorish gothic to Romanesque chapels. Returning, I enter the cathedral. Its stone is quite black with the roof covered in a rich, dark wood. The modern stained glass is a lovely blue. The interior seems as labyrinthine as the necropolis with a crypt where Saint Kentigern's tomb had rested. Medieval German stained glass creates phovist patterns on the floor of a side chapel. Here alone the walls are painted in white and I notice a roof boss in the shape of a skull. Elsewhere, the sacristy's floor is lined with Minton tiles. I look at the funerary memorials in the cathedral. Unlike even those in Tewkesbury they are brightly painted, somewhere between gothic and Tudor in their design.
Lautreamont's Maldoror follows in the path of Baudelaire and Nerval in delighting in contradictions, even as Lautreamont condemns it in his poems. Similarly, the poems are explicit in rejecting the romanticism of Byron, even as Maldoror follows in the path of Manfred, Goethe and Maturin (although he also speaks of tragedy, such as that of Mervyn, as moral, exciting pity and terror). Where, Maldoror denounces god the poems state that "I reject evil... man never fell from a state of grace." Maldoror itself is far from monologic. At one point, Satan is Maldoror's great rival, elsewhere god is essentially identical to satan ("I created you so I have the right to do whatever I like to you... I am making you suffer for my pleasure") at another the archangel speaks of Maldoror in the same terms as Lucifer himself, a fallen angel they would welcome back as one of their own. Since the text accepts the binary logic of christianity throughout, it is split between salvation and damnation as mutually exclusive choices, even as the narrator rejects god as an evil tyrant; "this god who is insensible to your prayers.. this shapeless and bloodthirsty idol... I should like to love and adore you but you are too powerful and there is fear in my prayers." Since man is made in god's image it follows that man is as corrupt and vicious as his creator ("the creator who ought never to have bred such vermin"), making murder a moral act. Applying Blake's dictum that one should soon smother a child in its cradle than nurse unacted desires, Maldoror emerges as a Sadeian rebel in the same way Blake envisaged Milton's Satan. But at the same time the narrative voice can still shift to utter conventional homilectics; "that torch of unjustifiable pride that is leading you to your damnation."
Roderick Hudson reminded me of an observation I'd heard that while homosexuality forms an obvious subtext in many novels by gay authors, the sense can permeate other works (the example cited was a rereading of 1984 as story of gay love and persecution). Here, there are grounds to suspect a subtext; Cecilia introduces Roderick as "a pretty boy" while in Venice Roderick and Rownland watch "a brown breasted gondolier making superb muscular movements." The core of the novel can as easily be read as concerning Rowland's unrequited love for Roderick as it can for Mary. In spite of the depiction of Mary, women essentially figure throughout as sexual threats that destroys men of talent as much as Rowland's interference; "a buxom, bold faced, high-coloured creature... she used to beat him and he had taken to drinking." Then later; "he had married a horrible wife.. it was said she used to beat poor Savage." Similarly, Christina is "as cold and false and heartless as she is beautiful... her disrelish of a man who lacked the virile will."Labels: Architecture, Art, England, Glasgow, History, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 8:14 AM
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Orientalism is an exhibition at the Tate dedicated to European painting of the Middle East, one of the latest in a quite long series of exhibitions at various London institutions dealing with the Middle East. The first room announces that the theme is rather predictably inspired by Edward Said, although it admits that Said has become a controversial figure. This seems a pity, as much of the exhibition does go a long way to undermining Said's case. It shows paintings by people who had effectively gone native, were motivated by mysticism or who were opposed to imperialism or who were simply motivated by a love of the exotic. Although Said's case that the West depicted the Orient as a decadent, barbaric other (as in Byron's poetry) is validated to some extent (as with the many pictures of the harem or slave market, although it's interesting to note that a French painting is the only one to explicitly sexualise the slaves, to the apparent disapproval of a British Empire that was banning such practices), he fails to perceive that as nineteenth century civilisation grew increasingly grey and industrialised, its writers and artists increasingly sought refuge in their own medieval past or in other places unpolluted by modernity. Ruskin sought this in Venice, the likes of Wilkie and Holman Hunt in the Orient. With the ruins of Rome already excavated and familiar, novelty dictated that the ruins of Egypt and Jordan were the next to be discovered. Equally, if the West was decadent, much of the appeal was that Westerners wanted to lose their inhibitions. Figures like Lewis and Leighton often came to show Western figures in Oriental settings.
The exhibition begins with portraiture; the daughter of English merchants who had grown up in Turkey shown in Western dress, the painter John Frederick Lewis depicting himself as a carpet seller in the bazaar, figures like Holman Hunt and Wortley Montagu in Eastern clothing. The depiction of Islam by Lewis is especially sympathetic, with his paintings showing himself at prayer in the Mosque. I'm interested in Wilkie's portrait of the Ottoman Sultan, shown in mostly Westernised dress. It seems to be forgotten that cultural interchange worked both ways, with foreigners dressing as Arabs and vice versa; again, Said's account assumes that orientalism can only be an imperialist ploy rather than a form of cultural exchange; the most clearly imperial portrait here, of Napoleon in Egypt, is notable for the stark contrast between the Eastern setting and the Western attire of the dictator. Something similar is at work in the painting of European explorers, dressed in Roman togas, rediscovering the ruins of Petra with their Arab guides. The nearest there is to a validation of Said's theories is an Augustus John painting of TE Lawrence in Bedouin clothes, although Lawrence was a poor sort of imperialist at best.
The later paintings move onto the subject of religion. During the course of the nineteenth century, wealthy westerners financed the establishment of Jewish homes and collective farms in Jerusalem, which accordingly grew more and more Judaicised. Figures like Holman Hunt grew increasingly interested in Judaism, leading to support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland. His painting of The Scapegoat combines both Christian and Jewish themes, although much of his painting of Jersualem and its churches is more straightforwardly christian. It has to be said that the most interesting paintings (and some of the most numerous) in the exhibition are of architecture and landscapes though. For instance, Lord Leighton's paintings of Algiers and Damascus, Frederick Lewis depicting the bazaars of Cairo, Edward Lear's view of Constantinople from a cypress filled cemetery or the pyramids from a tree lined avenue, Holman Hunt showing the pyramids reflected in the Nile (he didn't care for them much and managed to make them look like Silbury Hill) David Robert's depiction of the ruins of Petra, Baalbec, Philae and Karnak. Judging from this, it's very clear that both Lear and Roberts are very much underrated as artists.
As an exhibition, there's more cultural and historical interest than artistic here. None of the paintings are poor but few are masterpieces. To take a few that stood out, there's Stanley Spencer's paintings of mosques in Sarajevo, Bomberg's modernist painting of Jerusalem, Dadd's strange concatenation of Bedouin tribes and Roman soldiers into a strangely symmetrical painting an allegory whose meaning is forever lost. Before, I leave I take the opportunity to have a look at The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon. It fills an entire wall of the gallery and is easily the finest masterpiece that I saw that day. It's a pity I'll probably never see it again.
Like Said's Magnum Opus, John Berger's Ways of Seeing is an interesting text, if not one I can bring myself to entirely agree with. The second section discusses the history of the nude, with its tendency to depict women as passive objects of the male gaze. It's difficult not to sympathise with much of this argument (especially that non-Western traditions have not focussed exclusively on the passive image of a woman), but it still seems rather limited. The nude in the likes of Cranach or Titian heralds the vanquishing of the medieval prohibition of sexuality, a reawakening of the sensual and physical (it's interesting to note that there's absolutely no discussion of the role of religion in Western art in Berger). A figure like the Rokeby Venus, as Camille Paglia might argue, surely has its own power and is difficult to solely characterise as passive. More generally, Berger's argument seems to have been undone by the passage of time and the increased sexualisation of the male body; Germaine Greer is surely right to argue that women, as much as heterosexual men, have a right to this form of visual pleasure.
The third section is probably the one I most agree with. Berger argues that the physicality of oil painting was ideal both for the depiction of material objects, whether still lives or other forms of property (e.g. land in Constable or animals in Stubbs) and for the establishment of the oil painting as a form of property in its own right. Berger counterposes this to the ethereal figures in Blake's engravings. Berger does deal with an aspect of the Western tradition I have little liking of here, but it seems a little strained all the same; I can't say I would swap the physicality of a Vermeer with its pleasure in the physical world for a medieval triptych especially gladly. Equally, given the prominence of the romantic depiction of nature from Rosa and Ruisdael to Holman Hunt and David Friedrich, the argument that nature is not present except as property seems frankly ludicrous.
The final section deals with the transition from oil painting to colour photography in advertising, from the wealth and status of the elite to the promotion of wealth and status to the lower echelons. The argument is a familiar one, revolving around the role of advertising in manufacturing false wants by associating certain products with sexuality or status. I tend to suspect that this argument requires one to accept the Marxist idea of false consciousness (as Popper pointed out a mechanism that simply dismisses any obstacle to Marx's account of social history as being an aberration); Berger certainly speaks of advertising as a form of force rather than a form of consent.
By contrast, Susan Sontag's On Photography is considerably more appealing to me. Noting that a photograph is essentially an accidental and serendipitous combination of how light interacts with chemicals, Sontag sees it as a way of seizing aspects of the world than a composed artform. Sontag accordingly disdains the rigid compositions of Weston in favour of Atget's more disorderly 'captures.' Where Berger's approach is Marxist, Sontag sees photography's overthrow of the distinction between high and low art as being essentially akin to surrealism. The only problem is one of period. Digital photography is rather less accidental than the film cameras Sontag was writing about. Techniques like high dynamic range photography or photoshop manipulation mean that photography becomes rather more akin to painting, which Sontag had seen as imitating photography. Of course, there's also a movement towards using older cameras, even pinhole ones, although the element of 'historical slumming' to this often seems a counterpart to more modern ways of aestheticising photographs, even to the extent of photoshopping marks and flaws onto the image.
Donald Richie's Japan Journals rather reminded me of Forster's accounts of Italy, Ozpotek's Turkey or the North Africa of Bowles, Burroughs and Orton. It's an odd sub-genre whereby the Western gay male looks for sexual liberation in a culture that lacks Western moral inhibitions or the mechanised and staid nature of Western society. In a lot of cases, the culture in question was a patriarchal one where homosexuality could be hidden within broader homosocial social structures. It's also a partly obsolescent sub-genre given that moral inhibitions are now more likely to be considerably stronger in Tangiers than in London. Perhaps, this is as well given the connotations of imperialism and economic exploitation in it alongside the escape from Western mores. "You seem to have deserted Japan in favour of the Third World," a friend tells him as his attentions turn from the Japanese to immigrant workers. "It was not I that deserted Japan," he writes, "but Japan that deserted the Third World . . . It was the Third World in Japan that so appealed to lubricious me, and now that Japan is more First World than even the USA, the appeal is no longer there. That makes me that figure of fun, the garden-variety colonial imperialistic predator." As Japan westernises, Richie begins peevish complaints against the ignorance of sexual indifference of Japanese youth, with friends departing for less affluent Thailand.
In this context, Japan is an odd example, having gone from being a traditional patriarchal society to a modern Westernised society where Richie documents the rise of women's rights. While Japan lacked the traditional opprobrium directed against homosexuality in the West, it nonetheless remains more conservative than a modern Western society. Richie is suspicious of the elevation of sexual preference to a component of social identity but there is something rather tragic in an existence of cruising and losing his lovers to marriage (Mishima's widow and children living in permanent denial as to his homosexuality). On the one hand, Richie documents the role of the transvestite performer in Japanese theatre, festivals undertaken by mostly nude men, fishermen who worked nude, carpenter's dancing women's dances and on the other he documents Yukio Mishima's hyper-masculinised identity and his identification with western classicism and the figure of Saint Sebastian in preference to Japanese models. Richie notes that "a dandy, far from being the individual eccentric he is often though to be, is really a strict conformist.. the dandy is no rebel, and no true reformer or renegade was ever a dandy. Maybe that is why society is no tolerant of dandies." However, Richie elsewhere notes that the bricolage Mishima constructed his identity from is that of the Western rebel, as with Brando. The version of homosexuality preferred in Japan is an unthreatening one that hardly seemed to fit Mishima's identity, leading to him becoming more conformist and conservative than Japanese society itself (Richie notes that Mishima's suicide says nothing about contemporary Japan). Mishima is reminiscent of nothing so much as a Tom of Finland cartoon. Richie's position in Japan is that of gaijin but notes that Japanese society would otherwise be far more oppressive than that of the society he had fled. Richie repeatedly decries the conformity of Japanese society, its absence of intellectuals or individuals. Nonetheless, his attitudes to sexuality belong to the age of Proust and Forster who only seemed capable of finding stronger heterosexual men arousing.
Reading Soseki's I am a Cat it occurs to me that Soseki is veering between two extremes. On the one hand, his feline protagonist serves to dismiss all humans as vicious and depraved. On the other, his principal human character serves to dismiss westernising tendencies in Japan. The two are linked by being increasingly marginalised voices (the cat describes his master as being superior to his fellows by being weka minded, just as he is described as a runt in comparison to all the other cats he knows) but they only intersect at certain points. For example, Sneaze is told that "the ways of our ancestors are much wiser and more effective than the ways of Europe.. the craving for satisfaction remains unrealised, the quest for the ideal eternally unrealised." This advice comes from a character dismissed as nearly insane and dangerous and Sneaze is ridiculed for his adoption of this viewpoint. Sneaze eventually seems to agree with his cat by dismissing all of his friends as lunatic, irrespective of their philosophical views. Nonetheless, this does not stop Soseki ending the novel with the theme of suicide as a harbinger of increased westernisation; "this overweening consciousness of self never lets up.. word such as serenity and self composure have become no more than so many meaningless strokes of a writing brush."
Viridiana surprised me as a film. Having seen An Andalusian Dog, The Golden Age and The Exterminating Angel before I was expecting something more self consciously surreal. Although the symmetry of its structure and some of its allegorical references are clear enough, it's still essentially cast in a realist vein. I found myself frequenting comparing it The Exterminating Angel where the bourgeoisie are trapped at their dinner party as an act of metaphysical revenge in the class war. Here, the film ends with Viridiana playing cards with the wealthy land owner, her project to house the poor having miserably failed. The dinner party here as the paupers invade the house is almost a parody of its counterpart in The Exterminating Angel.
I've often thought that authors like Sterne, Voltaire and Diderot are the nearest approximation to the modern playfulness of authors like Perec, Nabokov and Calvino. Reading Diderot's Rameau's Nephew reminded me rather of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees or The Beggar's Opera; in satirising modern vices they also implicitly undermine modern ideas of virtue. Diderot's habit is persistently to make a statement and then undermine, as with his disingenuous endorsement of Rameau; "the famous musician who has delivered us from the plainsong of Lully, who has written so many unintelligible visions.. not a word of which he or anyone else has understood." The narrator frequently denounces his interlocutor, but only to receive the response that he is the rule not the exception; "there's nothing degrading in doing the same as everyone else. I didn't invent them and I should be incompetent if I didn't conform... a thief happy to be among wealthy thieves." Instead the emphasis shifts from personal to public vice; "what a bloody awful economy, some men with bursting stomachs others clamour with hunger."Labels: Art, Film, Japan, Literature, London
posted by Richard 12:56 PM
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Reading Plato's The Republic it's difficult not to come to the same conclusions previously reached by Popper in The Open Society:"Now it is interesting that for Plato, and for most Platonists, an altruistic individualism (as for instance that of Dickens) cannot exist. According to Plato, the only alternative to collectivism is egoism; he simply identifies all altruism with collectivism, and all individualism with egoism.
Plato's identification of individualism with egoism furnishes him with a powerful weapon for his defence of collectivism as well as for his attack upon individualism. In defending collectivism, he can appeal to our humanitarian feeling of unselfishness; in his attack, he can brand all individualists as selfish, as incapable of devotion to anything but themselves.
Inherent in Plato's programme there is a certain approach towards politics which, I believe, is most dangerous. Its analysis is of great practical importance from the point of view of rational social engineering. The Platonic approach I have in mind can be described as that of Utopian engineering, as opposed to another kind of social engineering which I consider as the only rational one, and which may be described by the name of piecemeal engineering... And there can be no tolerance between these different Utopian religions...Thus the Utopian must win over, or else crush, his Utopianist competitors. But he has to do more...For the way to the Utopian goal is long. Thus the rationality of his political action demands constancy of aim for a long time ahead; and this can only be achieved if he not merely crushes competing Utopian religions, but also as far as possible stamps out all memory of them.
Plato's theory of justice indicates very clearly that Plato saw the fundamental problem of politics in the question: Who shall rule the state? It is my conviction that by expressing the problem of politics in the form 'Who should rule?' or 'Whose will should be supreme?', etc., Plato created a lasting confusion in political philosophy... While piecemeal reform lends itself to democracy, Utopian reform lends itself to dictatorship. The Utopian attempt to realize an ideal state, using a blueprint of society as a whole, is one which demands a strong centralized rule of a few, and which therefore is likely to lead to a dictatorship."
I tend to regard Plato in the same manner as I do Paul or Augustine; a dreadful mistake. Through christianity, Plato produced a philosophical tradition that disdained empirical experimentation and observation in favour of a focus on the causes of causes (i.e. the forms), disdained the body as a prison and which distinguished itself in opposition to sophistry's concern with descriptions of the world that meet our needs rather than conceptions of absolute truth. Socrates repeatedly scorns those who deal in paradox, viewing their arguments as being concerned with power rather than with truth, but is far from reluctant to marshal sophistical violence in his own arguments. Plato distinguishes between misleading rhetoric and dialectic as a means of reaching truth, but the text is riddled with rhetorical devices, such as the metaphor of the cave or ship of state. It's difficult not to sympathise with the empirical view that dialectic doesn’t say anything about reality, only about the relations between words. Although cast as a dialogue, once the initial discussions with Thrasymachus and Glaucon have been dismissed, the text essentially becomes a monologue. Voices of dissent are simply silenced in favour of a repeated murmur of affirmation. The Platonic dialogue is ostensibly concerned with gaining consensus between parties, in contrast to the agonistic methods used by the sophists, which were not concerned with truth as an object; nonetheless Plato himself is quite concerned with suppressing other voices ("you think my questions were deliberately framed to distort your argument?... you know perfectly well that it's easier to ask questions than to answer them"). For example, the dismissal of myth is related to others citation of it to disprove his arguments on divine morality - Plato's prime means of argument is declaration by fiat. By contrast, Thrsaymachus has little wish to coerce others into his point of view; "and how am I to persuade you? If you don't believe what I have just said, what more can I do?" Equally, that single monologic voice in The Republic is far from consistent; war is honourable in Plato's own republic, deplorable in a tyranny. Art is of use as an instrument of propaganda or education in one instance ("we must.. require their stories and morals to have the opposite moral"), a dangerous and misleading conceit to be suppressed elsewhere ("we banished poetry from our state").
Part of this relates to Plato's insistence on what Popper calls methodological essentialism; the view that it is the task of pure knowledge or ‘science’ to discover and to describe the true nature of things, i.e. their hidden reality or essence. It was Plato’s peculiar belief that the essence of sensible things can be found in other and more real things — in their primogenitors or Forms. In this sense, Plato can perhaps be better described as a theologian than a philosopher or scientist, in that he can always dismiss the results of empirical investigation as not according with his idea of higher forms that can only be discerned through his own processes of ratiocination; "If anyone tries to learn anything about the world of sense, whether by gaping upwards or blinking downwards, I don't reckon that he really learns - there is no knowledge to be had of such things." Not only is Plato left as Philosopher King, he is also effectively anointed as prophet. Knowledge becomes something that can only be accessed by the few; "those whom the public call sophists.. in fact nothing but the conventional views held and expressed by the majority of the people they meet; and this they call a science." Plato uses the observation of an animal as an example; through study one could gain knowledge of its habits and behaviour but one would not know whether it is good or bad; phenomena are immaterial, mystical access to the noumenal is all. As a result, the only form of politics that is possible is dictatorship; "philosophy is impossible amongst the common people."
Plato's theology is equally self defining, relying principally on a reported account of what life is like in the underworld; a description that bears more resemblance to the Bible than to Homer. Similarly, Plato simply censors the corpus of myths available to him as inconvenient to his conception of god; "misrepresenting the nature of the gods and heroes, like a portrait painter whose paintings bear no resemblance to their originals." Equally, Plato's political ideology can also be described as having more in common with the doctrine of original sin or the christian idea of temptation and fall than with the political theory of Locke or Hobbes; "like a foreign seed sown in alien soil under whose influence it commonly degenerates into the local growth... his passion tyrannises him... unable to control the animal part of us" The result is effectively a form of theocracy; "wipe the slate of human society and human habits clean." Although Plato admits that societies are formed of individuals, he sees individual character as being formed by society; in short, there is only the state.
While I am on the topic of my particular dislikes, we can move on from Plato and enter the modern world of American literature. The likes of Mailer and Bellow are clearly skilled artists but that does little to prevent me from finding them utterly unlikeable for casual sexism and homophobia. If Dickens and Eliot as the leading voices of the British Empire expressed a concern for poverty and morality after god, Mailer and Bellow as the leading voices of the American Empire expressed little other than a rather neurotic fear of the feminine in a post-traditional society. Herzog is in many ways a great novel, dealing with the fate of a representative of the Jewish tradition when cast into a modern bourgeois civilisation ("a proud lazy civilisation that worships its own boorishness"), at once an outside and a product of that society; nonetheless the objective correlative chosen to denote this seem inadequate and rather paltry. The resulting effect is rather novel but not especially edifying. One the one hand, Herzog writes of "how life could be lived by renewing universal connexions, overturning the last of the Romantic errors of the uniqueness of the self." At the same time as rejecting the Western tradition, Herzog castigates Nietzsche for having a christian worldview predicated on seeing civilisation as having reached a point of crisis; "are all the traditions used up, the beliefs done for.. is this the full crisis of dissolution?.. the more individuality seems lost.. individuals are destroyed.. this is a doomed time". But equally Herzog decries modern society as coercive and collectivist; "his recent misfortunes might be seen as a collective project.. down in the mire of post-humanistic, post-Cartesian dissolution, next door to the void." It seems clear that the contradictions are deliberate and intending to render Herzog as an exemplar; "modern character is inconstant, divided, vacillating, lacking the stone-like certitude of archaic man." Herzog is able to delude himself into thinking that his work is the solution to the emptiness of modern life and that his opponents are endangering a great endeavour; but even even if he is a symptom of this rather than a cure it does little to make us feel any empathy for a project Bellow does appear to share with his protagonist.
Der Rosenkavalier is an oddity; a satire of marriage a'la mode that seems more in keeping with the age of Congreve or Hogarth and, along with, Orlando one of the last examples of the sort of comedy of gender confusion exemplified by Shakespeare's comedies. Hofmannsthal's surreal or gothic flourishes (as with the fake masked devils used to torment Lerchenau) also seem odd placed alongside the bawdy humour.Labels: Literature, Music, Philosophy
posted by Richard