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.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Gloucester struck me as one of those places that are too small to hide their contradictions. Firms of stockbrokers occupy buildings next to pound shops. Much of the town feels down at heel, with the inevitable display of decaying seventies shopping centres and boarded up windows, while the other half seems to thrive quite nicely with the influx of tourists, as a statue of Nerva announces the town's historical credentials. Even the sights to be visited are essentially divided between former docks and a cathedral that was once a Monastery. As a place, the layers of the past are evident, the contour of the present and future rather more difficult to discern.
Inevitably, it's the cathedral I'm most interested in. Whilst looking at the cathedral lantern, I notice something on the grass; shattered plaster adjoined to what seems to be the decapitated head of a pheasant. My initial suspicion was satanic rites, although the disappointing truth proved to be vandalism of the Motectum art installation by Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva, wherein casts of angels are painted and mounted with the heads of ducks and chickens. It's an interesting concepts; angels are almost invariably depicted with the features of humans and the wings of birds (i.e. peacock wings in medieval painting) and this concept neatly inverts that. The results rather remind me of Ernst.
The interior of the main cathedral nave is quite similar to Tewkesbury, with round Romanesque arches and thick pillars. By contrast, the quite and cloisters erupt into a frenzy of gothic, whose organic rather then geometric character reminds me of Geiger or Gaudi. The stained glass in the cloisters filters the air with polychromatic phovic clouds, creating a rather surreal effect. I mistake some of the glass for Burne Jones, with Christopher Whall being the actual artist; with the usual Minton tiling much evident, the Victorian presence at Gloucester is quite obvious, as with one of the side chapels decorated by Gambier Parry. Stained glass by Thomas Denny represents a small concession to modernity. The ambulatory design again recalls Tewkesbury, with the tombs of Osric of Mercia and Edward the Second. It's difficult not to feel sorry for Edward, exiled to a provincial tomb and denied Westminster.
Outside, I step through one of the cathedral close arches and find myself confronted with a gothic monument to a bishop burnt by Queen Mary and the church of St Mary de Lode. The inside of this feels rather empty, with the space formerly filled by box pews never really having been given a new task. It's the oldest church in the city (Roman mosaic is still visible in its foundations) the parish church at the time the cathedral was still a monastery, and the sanctuary still clearly shows its Norman design. I walk to the ruins of Greyfriars, dissolved in the reformation to leave only a set of skeletal arches. Blue irises flower in the churhyard alongside a modern set of carvings of the green man and the devil. I finally come to the docks, which remind me a little of East London or even parts of Copenhagen; the latter is more representative in that the buildings have been repurposed rather than demolished (there's even a small Mariner's chapel still), although you don't have to go too far along the canal to see derelict Victorian warehouses, with the paint peeling off the riverside columns and ghost signs imprinted on the brick. The buildings closer to the centre have inevitably become shopping centres or apartments.
The following day is taken by with a visit to Osterley Park, via Charles Holden's strangely monumental tube station with its constructivist tower. The park itself is rather beautiful, with pochards and mandarins swimming on the lake as swans and coots tend to their young. Lupins grow in gardens dotted with the customary follies. The house itself is a product of architectural nostalgia, a deliberate Tudor revival of a building constructed by Sir Thomas Gresham. The exterior combines Tudor ogee cupolas on redbrick towers with a Corinthian portico decorated by Sphinxes. By contrast, the Adam interior is uncompromisingly classicist, the Eating Room is decorated with pastoral scenes of Roman ruins, the staircase is decorated with a Ruebens fresco showing the glorification of the Duke of Buckingham, the Drawing Room ceiling is modelled on a Palmyran temple, via West Wycombe, while a Dressing Room feigns the appearance of Etruria. A tapestry room is perhaps rather more traditional; I'm amused by the incongruous presence of a badger. Guardi paintings of Venice hang on walls throughout; I'm quite struck by two Mother of Pearl Chinese ships, one with a dragon figurehead, the other with a phoenix (representing the Chinese Emperor and Empress respectively). The Chinese Emperor also features in a Gilray print showing a British emissary grovelling before him. The Prince of Wales and Sheridan also come in for attack, as does the King, shown as an Oriental potentate being resisted by the Duke of Wellington.
The following week is taken up with a return visit to Salisbury. I begin with the Church of St Thomas, which I'd missed on my previous visit; the interior is dominated by the largest surviving doom painting, although it also boasts a wooden Tudor memorial panel and a chapel painted with medieval murals and whose ceiling is decorated with wooden angels but which is otherwise filled with Georgian furniture. The nearby Poultry Cross is also surprisingly ornate, with a set of carved angels around the central column. The city museum also proves unexpectedly interesting with exhibits like stuffed Great Bustards, clay pipes decorated with images of the Great Exhibition, snuff boxes in the shape of coffins and funerary monuments dedicated to the memory of the rotten borough of Old Sarum, a Turner painting of Stonehenge, a set of Rex Whistler paintings of Wilton Hall, a giant puppet and hobby horse used for Tailor's Guild processions, a Roman mosaic, beaker people skeletons and Auroch horns. There's also a section dedicated to Pitt Rivers, including the usual wunderkammeresque items like a Dugong tooth, obsidian axes, Tibetan saddles and a skull measuring device. I had noticed several streams running through the city, but apparently it originally had several open water channels, like modern Freiburg, that were eventually closed for sanitary reasons. Inevitably, the cathedral is more familiar, but I note a few things like the modern font where water reaches a flat mirror-like surface before pouring off through four rivulets, a Sudanese Madonna and the Long Division sound installation, where fragments of slate with texts engraved are scattered throughout the cloister gardens as hidden speakers intone the words. Long Division begins as the clock chimes the hour and there follows a sequence of sixty hushed exchanges, timed to the divisions of the clock. The whispering phrases gather in intensity second by second, falling silent again at the start of each new minute.
In terms of reading, I had just finished reading Zweig's Beware of Pity. It's a book I have ambivalent feelings about; its focus on the idea of the feminine as a form of trap, a lure from masculine virtues, is one that disquiets me. Like Zola's Nana it sees the decadent forces that sap a state's fibre as being essentially female and bound in either case to lead to collapse. It's not difficult to read disability as a proxy for gender, a critique of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, where the elements conventionally identified with civilisation become feminine snares opposed to martial world of the regiment; "it's precisely on men like Kekesfalva, who have in the past been so energetic and ruthless that giving way to their feelings has such a grave effect." Nonetheless, the book is more subtle that this. If pity is often seen as a feminine virtue, Zweig draws a distinction between its soft, sentimental aspects and the harder aspects of self-sacrifice. The distinction means that the narrator is at once victim and criminal, hard and weak. Such distinctions are also essential to Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, where the opening sections are witness to a diatribe on the progressive decline of Western civilisation that goes a long way to explaining Eliot's interest in the novel. The depiction of Felix's Jewish roots in particular, shares Simone Weill's preoccupation with deracinement, the alienation of modernity. The Nightwood is essentially a state of moral reflexivity. Nonetheless, the depiction of the inverts that epitomise this condition is more dualistic than this would suggest; "What is this love we have for the invert... the girl lost, what is she but the Prince found?.. when a long lie comes up it is a beauty."
Italian Hours by Henry James offers a perspective on Italy that is quite familiar from Ruskin, one dwelling on the same history and architecture that the Futurists were later to demand the destruction of. James occasionally describes himself as a flaneur, a term Baudelaire had conceived of for an industrial city like Paris or London, but in many ways, James defines his observations against the present; "Venetian life, in the large old sense, has come to an end and the essential present character of the most melancholy of cities resides in its being the most beautiful of tombs... no young Sienese eye ever rests upon anything youthful... everything has passed its meridian." James writes that "the greater part of the life about you goes on in the streets" but in practice he tends not to dwell on streetlife as a subject; indeed, it is significant mostly by its absence. The only obvious exception is the documenting of a riot in Rome. There are other respects in which the Jamesian perspective is an odd one. Most obviously, although James gives up much of his descriptions to the subject of ecclesiastical architecture he doesn't have any great feeling for religion itself, as with the following description of a young priest; "though I wasn't enamoured of the carnival myself, his seemed a grim preference and his foreswearing of the world a terrible game." James repeatedly notes that Catholicism is a diminished force in Italy; "where you go in Italy you receive such intimations as this of the shrunked proportions of Catholicism and every church I have glanced it... has given me an almost pitying sense." James effectively sees the churches less as a part of any living religious life but as a set of melancholy deserted temples; ruins before the fact. When James does go out on the streets the results are often similar, as he laments the demise of picturesque traditional dress and complains of tourists who are there for exactly the same reasons that he is; "the place has passed so completely in the winter months into the hands of the barbarians... its most ardent life is that of the tourists." Where he does encounter modernity he does not greatly care for it; "of interesting architecture, fruit of the old idleness... Leghorn is singularly destitute."
Chekhov's short stories offer several variations on themes of rural virtue. Without a title depicts a simple story of the appeals of urban vice opposed to rural asceticism, while The Head Gardener's Tale satirises the very idea of pastoral virtue andThe Robbers shows the precise converse, a story of the appeal of rural vice against the tedium of bourgeois and urban virtue. Equally, one of the things that leaps out from Ginsberg's poetry is the internalised homophobia. Like Burroughs, Ginsberg lauds the queer lifestyle as a form of rebellion even as he uses terms like faries and fag.Labels: England, Literature, London
posted by Richard 10:20 AM
Sunday, May 3, 2009
The V&A's Baroque exhibition shows that the Baroque style is founded on a paradox; sensuous and illusory, mystical and carnal, sacred and secular. It's something I feel ambivalent about, repelled by the sentimental putti, corpulent flesh and religious fever as much as I'm attracted to its paganism and love of surface and artifice alike. As Sontag put it, it's the most camp form of style.
On the one hand, it follows empiricist scepticism and its criticism of the notion that reality can be perceived directly through the senses. To Descartes, the intellect is required as well, hence the role of allegory in Baroque painting. To Descartes and Berkeley the idea of god was required to underpin this perception of reality, further stressing the mystical aspect of Baroque art. Newton's work on optics led to a focus on illusion and perspective, most obviously so in Velasquez's paintings or in the painted ceilings common with Baroque architecture. Buildings like Versailles used mirrors to create illusory effects with space. Baroque art tends towards the dramatic, showing allegorical scenes with the figures in motion, frozen in time and commonly depicted through vertiginous perspectives. Mirror glass is built into the frame of a painting of the Holy family from Cuzco. Theatre and drama, fireworks and spectacle, were also important aspects of Baroque, and the exhibition records costumes and paintings of various pageants, as well as the influence of theatre sets and their faking of perspective on architecture. The mechanical advances that made it possible to devise elaborate stage machinery for court theatres created a vogue for 'machine plays', in which, as if by magic, stage sets were miraculously changed and perspectives receded into distant space, creating an illusion of reality that was enhanced by the skilful use of lighting. As the gods descended on clouds from the skies, the distinction between heaven and earth was blurred and dissolved, as it would similarly be blurred to the point of dissolution in the ceiling paintings of chapels and churches. As Foucault might have argued the centre of these pageants was the individual; the equestrian statue and heroic bust were both invented at this time. If the counter-reformation church proclaimed the power of religion, the princely courts of the 17th century proclaimed the religion of power. Absolute monarchs sought to use the Baroque to reinforce their status and authority, showing themselves as masters over nature. Philip IV of Spain, as the 'Planet King', had done just this, but his nephew and son-in-law, Louis XIV, developed the imagery in a much more systematic form as he sought to reimpose order.
Conversely, science had overturned ideas that scorned the phenomenal in favour of the ideal, leading to an increased focus on nature in decoration, as with the acanthus leaves and dolphins characteristic of Baroque art. Copernicus's heliocentric theory had shaken the foundations of traditional cosmology; Galileo with his telescope had revealed the immensity of space; scientific experiment and inquiry were making startling revelations about the workings of the human body and the natural world. It also led to a stress on the sensuous and material, in keeping with the counter-reformation use of lavish materials to impress the masses, either to win them back from Protestantism or to convert them in the new colonies. Gold and silver mined from South America are common enough in the exhibition, but Icelandic obsidian, ostrich eggs, rhinoceros horn, nautilus shell, ivory, amber, ruby glass also feature. The wunderkammer had become an exercise in artifice. Much of the exhibition focusses on Baroque's development as the first international style, from paintings of the Virgin of Guadaloupe to the Portuguese churches of Goa. Baroque was exported internationally, as with a sketch of a Baroque mansion designed for the Chinese Emperor by Jesuits, but it was also imported back in the form of Chinoiserie. Meissen and Delftware both form an important part of the exhibition, as do lacquerware and silk. A wooden screen from Dutch Batavia incorporates native designs as do Mexican depictions of the Virgin and Indian ivories of Jesus.
Afterwards, I briefly visit the Whitechapel Art Gallery. A tapestry of Guernica and a Cubist bust of Colin Powell are on display, but I'm more interested in a small exhibition covering Epstein's Rock Drill, Jacob Kramer's Day of Atonement, Gertler's Rabbi and the Ribbintzin, and Bomberg's Racehorses. The following day is taken up with a visit to Kew Gardens. A few things have changed since my last visit, such as the new Alpine conservatory and gardens or the Princess of Wales conservatory's British woodlands exhibition, including replica charcoal kilns. A bridge across one of the lakes allows you to see a coot diving to the bottom to bring up weeds for its chick. The Titan Arum and the Strelitzia are out in flower, and the grounds everywhere are carpeted with bluebells.
Mephisto by Klaus Mann makes an odd contrast to his father's works. Where Death in Venice places its sexual themes at the centre of the narrative while still leaving them unstated and implicit, Mephisto is quite explicit, dealing with sadomasochism and homosexuality alike (in doing so he also identifies some of the sexual aspects of Nazism that Sontag was to discuss in Fascinating Fascism). Where Doctor Faustus is equally indirect in its discussion of Nazism, Mephisto is an explicit attack. Mann's approach is to take the Faust mythos and re-purpose it. What is striking in this version is that Hofgen is both Faust and Mephistopheles, repeatedly described as a ruthless, if not evil, careerist unconcerned with others on the one hand but on the other, passive and at the mercy of events. Hofgen accordingly flits between the archetypes of Mephistopheles and Hamlet, an empty personality who only gains being through acting out the lives of others, while going from communism to fascism when it suits his career.Labels: Art, Literature
posted by Richard 12:58 PM
Monday, April 13, 2009
This Easter, I travelled back up to the Midlands with a visit to Stokesay Castle and Ludlow. I recall going to Stokesay as a child and I've long wanted to return. I recall it as a ramshackle affair, not entirely unlike Gormenghast, and the truth is surprisingly close to this, even if the scale now seems different to how it appeared to my younger counterpart. The building is a 13th century fortified manor that has largely survived unaltered. I enter through a half-timbered gatehouse, its beams decorated with images of sea-beasts and dragons, before passing through to an inner courtyard, home to a great hall and a stone tower. The hall with its cruck roof and large arched windows is rather reminiscent of a cathedral, save for the worn wood that makes up its stairs and buttresses. Walking upstairs to some of the rooms, I realised I can hear birds calling though the floor. Most of the building is bare and cavernous, save for some medieval tiles and a carved overmantel. The same goes for the tower, with its warning notices about rabid bats. The interior courtyard has been richly planted with flowers, while the drained moat is home to swathes of white daffodils. Swans can be seen gliding across a nearby lake. Nearby lies the manor's church (there was a village here once, of which little remains). Inscriptions from Exodus are written on the walls.
I then pass onwards to Ludlow, a town of white and black half-timbered houses. The church of St Laurence is effectively a minor cathedral; one enters through a hexagonal porch, in to a gloomy interior through which shards of light rain down from the upper windows. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I can see more detail; alternating bands of red and green on the ceiling between carved angels, baroque skull monuments, a gold lantern on the crossing, medieval tiles mixed with Minton, owl and griffin misericords and tree of Jesse stained glass windows. Later, I finish the day with Croft Castle. In contrast to the perpendicular gothic of Ludlow, the Castle is a variant of Regency Gothick. The church here is medieval, with a strange Georgian clock tower grafted onto it. The interior is dominated by an elaborate alabaster monument of a sleeping knight and angels. The lion at the Knight's feet has his tongue stuck out. Jacobean wall panelling survives on the interior alongside Georgian stucco and the Rococo concept of gothic. I'm surprised to see a Kokoschka portrait on the walls, alongside a painting of the castle by John Napper.
I also visit St Mary in Ingestre, a Wren design in the middle of the countryside; I'm struck by the Grinling Gibbons carvings, Burne Jones windows, marble tombs, golden skulls, Venetian tapestries. In neighbouring Derbyshire, I visit Kedleston Hall. Buoyed by funds from a recent film, much of the interior has been re-upholstered and re-hung, emphasising its resemblance to a particularly opulent mausoleum. In the case of the church, the claim is of course true, with iron railings fencing off funeral monuments for the Curzons, alongside a series of Tudor and Medieval monuments. The exterior is dominated by skulls, hourglasses and a faded romanesque typanum. I visit Melbourne's church on the way back; a Romanesque affair with thick columns and a medieval wall painting of the devil. Finally, I visit St Edburg and St John the Baptist in Oxfordshire; St Edburg has William Morris and Burne Jones stained glass, Baroque skull monuments and a single pane of surviving medieval glass. St John is a ruin, its redbrick skeleton hidden in wooded shadows near a lake. Broken tombstones are arranged on one of the altars.
A few weeks later, I travel westwards towards Bath. Again, this is somewhere I remember visiting as a child but other than some memories of the baths themselves, the rest of the city is now a blank to me. The place reminds me of Oxford, in terms of the period of the buildings and the colour of the stone, although Oxford's flatness is not replicated at Bath. To begin with the baths then. Once one has gone past the Georgian entrance, the baths are decidedly impressive; steam rises from the bubbling green waters, as water spills out from underneath the pavement into the pools and statues of Roman emperors or medieval effigies of King Bladud look down from above. The east and west baths are undercover and the dark glooms in those rooms closely approximates what it must have been like for a Roman visitor who, lacking any rational explanation of the spring, took the site as sacred. Coins glimmer beneath the surface of one of the pools. The accompanying exhibition contains some of the lead curses that would have been thrown into the waters, various Roman and Celtic gravestones, and various altars, including one that would have been used by a Haruspex. A couple of items stand out; a mask that worn have been worn by a Priest, the face of the Gorgon surviving from the temple pediment and a bronze bust of Sulis Minerva. This leaves me especially impressed; in its own way it's as beautiful as the bust of Nefertiti. From the baths, I wonder past the abbey and an obelisk dedicated to the Prince of Orange, past a set of gardens with a bronze angel dedicated to King Edward towards Adam's Pultney Bridge (the gardens are occupied by some alarmingly large seagulls, whose cries can be heard throughout the city). With shops lining either side of it, I can only assume it to be modelled on the Rialto Bridge. A swan is nesting underneath it. I continue northwards, past the Victorian church of St Michael Without (modelled on Salisbury cathedral, like so many Victorian churches), until I arrive at the Circus. This seems especially impressive to me, much more so than the nearby Royal Crescent. Enclosed like Stonehenge or the Colosseum on all sides, each building having odd acorn finials and decorated with Masonic symbols, it's an especially odd piece of Georgian architecture. I walk for a bit in the Victoria park, looking at the Victoria memorial, replica of a vase from Cicero's garden and the sphinxes and lions decorating the gates. I then return to the town centre, walking through some of the Victorian arcades and through a garden maze with a set of mosaics at its centre. I then enter the abbey. A particularly pure example of medieval fan vaulting, the walls are pale, with light streaming in through the large windows. Equally, there are relatively few large tombs inside, although the walls are lined with plaques. The exterior is especially ornate, with angels climbing a ladder on the front facade. Finally, I visit the Victoria Art Gallery. I have to admit that most of the artists named therein are utterly unknown to me, but it does have some interest works by Hodgkin, Sutherland, Sickert, Nash and Danby. I'm struck by a moonlight scene painted by Sebastien Pether; it reminds me of Dahl and Freidrich. There's also a good ceramics display; Delft, Lustreware and Eltonware.
The following weekend and I'm back in London, at Dulwich Picture Gallery for an exhibition on Sicket's Venetian paintings. It's something or an irony that for a city first painted in minute detail by Canaletto, its depictions were later to decidedly to incline to the impressionistic, as Monet, Turner, Whistler and Singer-Sargent depicted its mists and sunsets. Of these, it's Whistler that Sickert most clearly resembles, with night scenes of the Campanile and St Marks reducing them to blurs of light and with the influence of Degas apparent in the cropped 'close-ups' of the same buildings. Yet, Sicket is significantly more realistic than Whistler, and while his palette tends to more subdued colours, the buildings are not difficult to recognise; they merely look more grimy than is their usual wont. Equally, the influence of Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec is apparent in the depiction of the Venetian lowlife; the exhibition records an interest in the exoticism of Venetian women with their strange geisha-like hairdressings, but for the most part we could easily be in Camden or Montmartre.
Bolano's The Savage Detectives is in many respects utterly materialistic, concerned with the failure of the visceral realist movement, the trajectory of its leading lights from romantic roles as rebels and criminals in the vein of Rimbaud or Genet, to their dissolution into obscurity. It is also in many respects utterly metaphysical, concerned with a quest romance to discover the poetry of Cesárea, which is a set of arcane symbols that denote the limits of language's mimetic abilities. Amadeo Salvatierra admits that he has never understood her work, and he does not listen to or record Belano or Lima's discussion of its meaning. Similarly, although the narrative dwells on Belano and Lima, the writer who repeats her achievement is Madeno, who is never mentioned by any of the other narrators. Writing in Bolano is something to be written about but not to be shown; we never read any of Belano or Lima's poetry, only Cesarea and Madeno's ideograms. The insane writings of one narrator, Andres Ramirez, use Plato's cave metaphor to describe reality, glimpsing alternative visions of his present through dreams. Bolano's mode of etaphysical realism' operates by offering differing fractured routes to the same subject; Bolano saw the orderly, refined and harmonious in literature as coterminous with cruelty and fascism, the unstylised and untidy, with rebellion and truth, as in Planell's epiphanic moment;3 "in a brief moment of lucidity, I was sure that we'd all done crazy. But that moment of lucidity was displaced by a supersecond of superlucidity... a sign of our miraculous and pointless innocence," Events are accordingly described in a polyphonic manner by different narrators. Their narratives are frequently unreliable, some told by the insane, some told told be the mendacious or biased. Univocal statements are quickly dissolved. Belano and Lima themselves are witheld from the narrative, denied the opportunity to explain themselves. Meaning exists at a vanishing point, the novel guestures towards but does not show, as with the description in By Night in Chile of books as being equivalent to the shadows in Plato's cave. One other point to note is the role of sexuality; there's a marked machismo in Bolano's work here and in By Night in Chile, only challenged by the narrator's confession in the former novel that the women and gays he had demonised in his poetry had done nothing to him.
Reading Broch's The Sleepwalkers is an odd experience; the structure of the novel is decidedly experimental, with various narrative strands developed in isolation, some of which converge while others remain separate. Nonetheless, he lacks the interest in consciousness typical of that period; since he regards his characters as primitives, products of the social and ideological conditions of their age. They may act unpredictably, as rounded characters in Forster's phrase, but only because Broch is sceptical that such animals can have a controlling intelligence. If he sits at an odd angle to the modernist novel, much of this can be explained by the fact that many of his views would have sat well with the Victorians; the condemnation of the Renaissance architecture would have chimed with Ruskin's views ("the horror of this age is perhaps most palpable in the effect that its architecture has on one"), if not Broch's accompanying denunciation of Protestantism and of Kant in favour of Leibniz. Like the Victorians, Broch is essentially a medievalist, seeing medieval Catholicism as offering an organic structure into which every aspect of existence could be integrated; the fall into various sectarian cults opened the way for the remorseless fragmented logic of the modern rationalist and commercial society that Broch sees as being decadent and degenerate. It is in many ways one of the most reactionary of European novels; foreigners like Czechs are characterised as barbarians, women are split into virgins and whores, causal homophobia ("the horror that overcame him when he saw those men dancing cheek to cheek") and anti-semitism (the abstraction of Judaism and its basis in law stand in contrast to Broch's account of Catholicism) are rife. Sometimes Broch sounds rather like Carlyle, whose unpleasant views also went hand in hand with a denunciation of the cash nexus, as with Broch's complaints that the profit motive is the sole governing principle in modern like, so that respectable business men may also be murderers. The progression towards degeneracy in the novel is also a progression down the social spectrum. Nonetheless, the novel isn't quite that simple. The initial section is in many ways a pastiche of a Victorian novel; Pasenow's failure can either be viewed as not submitting to duty or of failing to break with convention altogether. As is said of Esch later in the novel; "he saw the play of good and evil. But his impetuosity often made him see an individual where he should see a system." This particularly applies to the character of the aesthete Bertrand. Broch describes aesthetes as serpents with the garden of eden, art for art's sake representing another branch of the disintegration of all values in place of medieval art's religious purpose. These are certainly the terms Pasenow always thinks of Bertrand in, as he disdains Bertrand's commercial work in contrast to his military career. Nonetheless, with his nomadic lifestyle, there's a case to be made that Bertrand is the romantic, not Pasenow. As Broch puts it; "we have no longer two mutually exclusive fields of reality... we find them co-existing within the same individual... we are ourselves split and riven" Similarly, when Bertran falls a victim to Esch's homophobia (as when Esch is taken aback that Martin and the Newspaper Editor defend Bertrand; "what business is it of ours anyway?"), there's a good case to be made that is the victim of Each's rage rather than a criminal receiving his punishment.
Reading Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy and Repetition, I'm struck by the way he repeatedly depicts women as powerful and aloof, only to insist on their degradation. In the midst of a text like Repetition, where are all the characters (consciously or unconsciously) are liars, it is only Gigi who is repeatedly denounced as such.Labels: Art, England, Literature
posted by Richard 2:52 PM
Sunday, March 8, 2009
For as long as I can remember, walking around the City of London at the weekend has been a disquieting experience. It's streets have invariably been deserted, its shops closed as if some great cataclysm had overtaken the city's inhabitants. At present, this sensation of the deserted city is exacerbated by the fact that many of the shops have not just shot for the weekend but have shut for good. The prospect of London as a skyscraper graveyard opens up before us.
One of the particular aspects of London that always unsettles me is its grafting of raw and cavernous concrete structures onto a medieval streetplan. The result is often claustrophobic and overwhelming at the same time. Nowhere is this more true than at the Barbican. Conceived of as an attempt to impose order on the unruly chaos of the London streets, the complex seems folded in on itself, hostile to stragers and resistant to their attempts to penetrate it. Pleasant gardens with fountains sit alongside concrete pillars encased in scaffolding. The reason for my visit is an exhibition about Le Corbusier; not my favourite architect by any means but one I still feel I should learn more about, if only in the interests of giving him a fair hearing before condemning him. Much of the initial exhibits reveal a puritanical classicist that is little removed from my prejudices, interested only in reducing items to their basic form rather than delighting in them. Initially a disciple of arts & crafts, his work was intended to adapt man to the machine age, hence his tendencies for 'garden city skyscrapers' and his willingness to co-operate with regimes from Moscow to Vichy and New York. Like Wren or Haussmann, his designs would have demolished and reconstructed almost entire cities. His painting, influenced by Leger and Picasso seems rather more of interest than his architecture. The later work perhaps seems of more interest, when his interest in 'type objects' gave way to an interest in found textures and the poetry of objects. The result was an emphasis on biomorphic, which at least softened the designs at Ronchamp and Chandigarh. The most interesting structure for me is easily the Philips Pavilion, constructed jointly with Xenakis and Varese. The exhibition shows the Daliesque video projected onto the pavilion walls, as it was lit up in different colours - the result must have been rather like a sixties happening. The building itself seems more reminiscent of Gaudi or Calatrava, in its use of hanging techniques that have only really become widely available through computer modelling. To me, it looks like a geometrical ribcage.
Later, I walk around the nearby areas of the city; the lost graveyards of St John Zacharay and St Anne & St Agnes, the Wax Chandler's unicorns, the ruins of London wall, the barber's herbal garden, the ruins of St Alphage, St Albans and the Pewterer's dragons. I'm pleased to note that St Giles Cripplegate is open; a rather austere post-war interior, interrupted by some surviving Baroque and Tudor monuments, as well as busts of Cromwell, Bunyan and Milton. I look at the heraldic crests on the walls for the Salters, Brewers, Cutlers, Wax Chandlers, the Stock Exchange, Chartered Institutes and so on. I wonder through Postman's Park, the Holborn Viaduct, the Prudential Assurance, St Luke's and find the interiors of St Mary-at-Hill and St Mary Pattens open.
I return the following week to go to Hampstead, a part of London that retains the winding roads of a village but also its appearance. One exception to this is 2 Willow Road, the former home of Erno Goldfinger. Goldfiner makes an interesting contrast to Le Corbusier, whose style of 'white box' architecture (typified in the mot too distant Isokon building) Goldfinger rather disdained, preferring instead a tradition of 'structural rationalism.' 2 Willow Road has many of the hallmarks of modernist design; much of the wall space is window and the base level is supported by concrete pillars. However, the building is designed in the same brick as the nearby Georgian houses, whose order and proportion Goldfinger professed to admire. For me at least, the result is rather nondescript combining some of the blander aspects of Georgian construction with the puritanical aspects of modernism. The interior is a little different though, not because of any difference in the design but in terms of it containing Goldfinger's art collection. For a house lacking any form of decoration it seems odd that the inside seems so cluttered, with very little space remaining on the walls, window sills and shelves. I'm struck by a Delaunay drawing of the Eiffel tower, a cubist interpretation that makes it look like a gothic cathedral, a large pebble painted by Ernst to transform nature into artifice, a wooden sculpture from Moore combining the soft curves of the wood with geometry of stringed lines, a Duchamp rotorelief, several Riley paintings, Man Ray photos, kinetic sculptures that use magnetism to attach rings to a surface but leaving them mobile, and corrugated triangles used to form a canvas that allow a work to be seen with different shapes or colours depending on whether one stands to the left or to the right. Ethnographic items line the window sills; African masks, Iranian pottery, skulls and so on.
I walk across the heath to meet a different view of classicism; Adam's Kenwood House. The grounds are dotted with sculpture; Hepworth's Monolith Empyrean and Moore's Two Piece Reclining Figure. As ever, I prefer the former, with its resemblance to a petrified figure. From the exterior, the fundamental design of Kenwood House is essentially conservative, a classical design used for thousands of facades. However, Adams has enlivened it with decorated reliefs in stucco; the delight in surface decoration seems very un-English when compared to the earlier Palladian styles or more austere approaches to classicism. This is particularly evident when one comes to the Library; the ceiling is decorated with frescos and the walls painted with blues, pinks and coated in gold. It comes perilously close to rococo, even with mirrors on the wall facing the window. A bust of Zeus-Ammon stands in residence. Other rooms have similar examples, as with a chinoiserie fireplace. Like Willow Road though, much of the interest derives from the art collection, much much of the emphasis being on Dutch art: a Cuyp painting of Dordrecht harbour, Van De Velde seascapes, a De Witte painting of a church interior, Ruisdael landscapes, a Rembrandt self portrait and Vermeer's Guitar Player. There's also an extensive collection of English art, with the set of sixteenth century paintings of the family especially striking, accompanied by assorted Gainsboroughs and Reynolds. Although some of Reynolds paintings of famous actresses in a variety of dramatic poses are rather diverting (for instance, one painting shows Emma Hamilton in one of her 'attitudes') I'm more taken with some of Guardi's Venetian scenes.
This is mirrored afterwards by a visit to South London and Nunhead Cemetery. In many ways the least interesting of the Victorian cemeteries I've visited, it lacks the famous or notorious internments of its Northern counterparts and mostly lacks their architectural flair too. One exception is a tomb modelled on the Lycian Payavan tomb from the British Museum; originally accompanied with two weeping statues destroyed in the war, it would fit better into Pere Lachaise. Nearby is a terracotta tomb equipped with romanesque designs that remind me of the Watts Chapel, although it would seem more likely to be by Henry Peto, given the resemblance to his Doulton and Tate tombs at West Norwood. Finally, there's an obelisk to the Scottish martyrs, political radicals exiled to Australia by Pitt. A cherry tree is in full blossom in one corner of the graveyard, framing a view of St Paul's, while a pair of green parrots chatter in the trees. At the centre of the cemetery lies the ruined Anglican chapel, an unusual octagonal structure whose interior was gutted by fire in the seventies. It seems to lack the faded grandeur of its counterpart at Abney Park though, the stabilisation and restoration work robbing it of decay's poetry.
The following week is taken with visit to some Oxfordshire villages. The church of St Mary at Kidlington is a typically English bricolage of styles; Baroque memento mori wall monuments, medieval stained glass, medieval tiles, Victorian stained glass, green man corbels. The nearby church at Hampton Poyle has an odd column showing medieval knights with linked hands forming a circle around the circumference of the column, several stone tomb effigies, a carved stone block with a hole for heart burials and Minton tiling. Finally, I go to the ruined village of Hampton Gay. Unlike Minster Lovell, the Jacobean manor here is a ruin in the true sense of the term. It is neither preserved nor maintained. Thick ivy vines prise mortar and stone apart, smothering the walls in a sea of dark green. Sheep wander through the door and out the other side. The church is small, with a somewhat misshapen wall monument and a carved wooden heraldic shield below the barrel organ.
At one point in Betjeman's Trains and Buttered Toast, Betjeman complains that Pugin and Morris were escapists and fantasists, their work being essentially analogous to stage scenery. It's a charge that could also be levelled at Betjeman himself, with his tendency to idealise picturesque country cottages whose lack of decent sanitation or heating he wasn't obliged to endure himself. It's a little tiring to continually read references to 'the slave state' as code for the welfare state, complainst about artistic types ruining rural towns, or to come across jokes about birch rods being the most suitable item to be included in a church children's corner. In his radio talks during the war, he advances christianity as an counter-balance to such progress myths as fascism or marxism (progressive committees and civil servants frequently seem placed in the same category as the Nazis as part of modern barbarism). For better or ill, his work is almost entirely insulated from the currents of modernity, preferring instead to dwell in a Burkean reverie upon the age of chivalry and wondering in his lecture on wartime reading whether the nation was not simply trying to escape into the past (never mind that these reveries had been denialist fantasies for Morris as much as Pugin in the context of a rapaciously commercial and industrial nation; much the same applies to today's idylls of smalltown Americana). In his lectures on Edwardian literature, Gissing is the only name to survive amidst a great mass of forgotten poetasters (Joyce is briefly referenced but the likes of Eliot and Woolf are entirely elided). Essays on such luminaries as Henry Newbolt, briefly reference Yeats in passing. I can't help but feel awkward in reading Betjeman. I don't share his Tory sympathies or his Anglican affiliation but I do mourn the apparent passing of English liberalism. His nostalgic conservatism could be aptly characterised as the English disease, the daydreams of a nation ill at ease with its present and with a glorious future firmly behind it. At the same time, it's difficult to feel that his complaints about modernist architecture weren't justified.
Mishima's Spring Snow is a novel that offers up a commentary on its own events in the form of the theories and reading of Honda, with their critique of Western ideas of free will and Meiji bourgeois decadence alike; "Europeans believe that a man like Napoleon can impose his will on history. We Japanese think the same of men like your grandfather... you have one characteristic that sets you apart: you have no trace of willpower." Honda limns a world where the age of glorious warfare ended with the Meiji restoration leading instead to an era of the wars of emotion are fought where Kiyoaki lives "in a world of feeling." Nonetheless, the novel seems to have an ambivalent attitude to such commentary. The depiction of Kiyoaki as infected with the effete degeneracy of ineffectual aristocrats like Ayakura, shows him as effeminate, emotionally unstable and lacking a true self (only wanting Satoko when it is forbidden having previously wanted to punish her for loving him). But equally, once his love for Satoko is declared, Linuma sees "a hidden determination that had never shown itself before." Similarly, his grandmother sees him as a true grandson of his warrior grandfather his disgrace; "how remarkable that this grandson, who seemed so effete at first glance, should have revived the spirit of that age." As such, Kiyoaki emerges as both heartless rake and lovelorn fool, just as women such as Satoko feature in the novel as both Kiyoaki's victim and glamourous but dangerous threats to the homosocial order ("a woman will destroy the friendship of men").Labels: Architecture, England, Literature, London
posted by Richard 2:29 PM
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Unlike Bernd Eichinger's earlier Downfall, which depicted events around one central figure over a relatively short period of time and an extremely confined space, The Baader-Meinhof Complex takes place over the course of the 'red decade' from the 1967 killing of Benno Ohnesorg by the West Berlin police (recently re-evaluated as inflammatory act by the Stasi) to the RAF's plane hijacking and kidnapping spree that later became known as the 'German autumn' of 1977. The events proceed across the entirety of West Germany, with excursions to Jordan and Iraq, and include a large cast of the gang's central figures. Like Downfall, The Baader-Meinhof Complex works by presenting events as reportage, intercutting the narrative with scenes with contemporary television footage (rather oddly showing the crushing of the Prague spring alongside student riots in Paris). One of its particular strengths is its observation that this particular revolution was remorselessly televised, with the protagonists repeatedly captured on film throughout and spending much of their time watching the reporting of their actions on television.
Inevitably, this opens the question of whether the film glamourises the terrorists, making them heroes in an action movie filled with glamorous locations. If one compares the film posters to the wanted posters that could be found on nearly every street in West Germany, then it is difficult not to notice that the modern actors are rather better looking compared to many of the bespectacled faces on the original. Nonetheless, if the characters are shown driving fast (stolen) cars, wearing leather jackets and raybans, much of this is simply because the characterisation of the originals as rebels without a cause is not entirely unreasonable; Baader did model himself in figures like Marlon Brando. Baader always wanted to be a leader, but as a young man he had little success inspiring others to follow him. When he was a teenager, he was sent to a new boarding school near Munich. In a attempt to draw interest Baader began periodically coughing into a handkerchief, while dropping hints that he had some incurable lung ailment. The other students noticed that his handkerchief never showed blood. Most students saw his sad attempts to generate interest exactly for what they were, and they ignored him. Later Baader would adopt a swaggering style. In new situations he often talked aggressively, trying to establish early that he was the toughest in the room. His act never really worked with some of the crowds he mixed with, like the Rockers — who saw through Baader immediately. But within the burgeoning student movement he found that his tough-man routine was accepted unquestioningly. Baader’s life as a terrorist was as much the story of a dedicated violent poseur as the story of a Marxist Revolutionary.
The film is thus rather acute when it comes to depicting the gang as intellectually vacuous, their actions borne out of sociopathic delinquency rather than conviction. Confronted by an Italian third making of with their stolen car, Baader is outraged, just after he has incited Mahler to steal a woman's wallet. Ensslin's hysterical rants about the immorality of standing by in inaction is counterpointed by the wailing of her ignored children. The policy to only attack representatives of the state and not workers does not last long, from the security guard in the department store they burn down, a librarian they shoot or the typesetters at Springer publishing.
Conversely, the film is not as good at pinpointing the group's ideological underpinnings. If Baader was simply a thug, Ensslin and, to a lesser extent Meinhof, were ideologues. One would not be aware from the film that the gang were used as an instrument by the Stasi, from whom they received funding. German universities were awash in what would now seem to be radical Marxist thought, filtered through Fanon, and parsed by Marcuse, Horkheimer, and the other titans of the Frankfurt school. Students learned that German society, like all western society, was in the throws of late Capitalism, eventually to be replaced by true Democratic Socialism. While it does acknowledge the RAF's connections with Palestinian terror organizations in both Jordan and Iraq, it does not have Ulrike Meinhof's character recite the diatribe she wrote justifying what she called the Munich "aktion" - the 1972 murder of Israel's Olympic wrestling team. It also does not feature the earlier new-left bombing of a Jewish Community Centre in West Berlin on November 9th 1969, the anniversary of Kristallnacht. This left-wing anti-semitism culminated in the Entebbe hijacking in 1976, in which two German members of the Revolutionary Cells — another terrorist group to emerge out of the West German student movement — and two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked an Air France jet, flew it to Entebbe and separated the Jewish passengers and the non-Jewish passengers before Israeli commandos stormed the aircraft. The cells had also planned to assassinate Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. This from a student movement that began as a rebellion against the 'Auschwitz generation.' Horst Mahler, the actual founder of the gang is now a neo-Nazi.
In some respects, the converse also applies. The film is strong when it comes to depicting police brutality during the visit of the Iranian Shah to West Berlin or the police state tactics used by the authorities to locate the gang. Less is made of the continued presence of Nazi party members in the administration at the time. The Wanted poster itself had originally acted to glamourise the gang, showing that half of the gang as female. German society was still characterised by the tripartite ideal of Kinder, Kuche, Kirche (Children, Kitchen, Church), where it was still technically illegal to co-habit with a man who was not your husband, where all abortion was outlawed, and where men were legally recognized as the head of the household. To men and women alike, the posters made the gang appear both liberating and chic. Even the police seemed to be tacitly accepting the Baader-Meinhof Gang’s premise of gender equality by equally spacing the women and men throughout the poster; few would have noticed had the poster lined all the of the men along the top rows and the women along the bottom, indicating men’s traditional dominant role and women’s traditional auxiliary role. If anything, police chief Horst Herold is used as a means of authorial commentary, (inbetween plying his colleagues with lobster soup), regularly stating that the group are protesting against political problems which objectively exist and which must be addressed in order to resolve the conflict - in practice, it took the fall of the Berlin wall to dissipate the violence. The result may simply be that film is not as well equipped to deal with subjects of this kind as the novel is.
Not entirely unrelated themes emerged in the rather more traditional setting of the Old Vic, with a performance of Joe Sutton's Complicit. The interior of the building had been extensively remodelled to replace the conventional stage with a circular dais at the centre of the theatre. The result is rather like the Globe, allowing for a rather more intimate performance where the actors are not quarantined from the audience. With only a few props and three actors (David Suchet's performance being particularly good), the play is a rather intense piece although a little unsatisfying: it feels like a vehicle to explore political ideas around torture rather than a character piece.
The Tate's Rodchenko and Popova exhibition leaves me feeling a little depressed; ane arlier exhibition last year had captured Rodchenko's decline into a propagandist on a par with Leni Reifenstahl. This exhibition covers an earlier period and demonstrates how great the fall was. The early work of both artists is easily comparable to that of artists in Western Europe. The texture on many of Popova's works recalls Kandinsky, while her use of wood as a canvas and wood dust to add texture to the paint anticipates Duchamp's readymades. Rodchenko's focus on the geometrical recalls Mondrian, Braque and Malevich, while a painting of two layers of black anticipates Rothko's version of abstract expressionism. Nonetheless, their social context created difficulties their Western counterparts lacked. Like the Futurists, the Russian constructivists embraced the machine age, dwelling on the dynamic and geometric. The discarding of representational models seemed to chime with the Bolshevik policy to discard the traditional elements of society. In practice though, the attempt to reconcile avant garde art with politics was an uncomfortable one. Assigning a utilitarian purpose to artforms lacking representational content proved difficult at best, with attempts to replace subjective artistic creation with objective construction of forms doing little other than to obfuscate the problem with terminology. A point of crisis comes as Rodchenko paints three solid blocks of red, yellow and blue and declares it the end for painting. Hereafter, art must be aligned to industry, and a turn to architecture, textiles, set design and advertising (under Lenin's new economic policy) follows. This isn't entirely unusual in art; the Arts & Crafts movement was closely related to the Pre-Raphaelites. Figures like Lautrec, Millais and Mucha produced adverts. The difference between high and low art is certainly an arbitrary one, as examples like Chinese ceramics show. Nonetheless, it's difficult not to be relieved that Millais didn't base a career on his Pears soap work and it's equally hard not to be dismayed at seeing Rodchenko and Popova throw themselves into often rather bad posters for Red October biscuits and rubber boots. This seem particularly so when one considers that their design work was not greatly more purposeful than their artwork; Popova might have thought seeing a peasant woman wearing one of her designs the highpoint of her career but in practice the peasant's need for clothes was not overly dependent on Popova's designs. While the suppression of constructivism in favour of socialist realism was certainly done by Stalin's fiat, it also seems surprising that it was not done earlier; as an artistic project it was simply rendered superfluous by the the same October Revolution it had embraced. Before leaving I revisit the Soviet School room - a collection of Soviet propaganda posters. None are overly constructivist in style but they do represent a better view of what popular style in the Soviet Union was than the work of Rodchenko and Popova.
Zola's Germinal and The Belly of Paris both betray a visceral hatred of the Second French Empire, to the point of siding with the assorted communists who wished to see it annihilated. By contrast, the novel that depicts that annihilation, The Debacle takes a surprisingly moderate. The novel is balanced between the views of two characters, Jean and Maurice. The latter is depicted as intelligent and unstable, accordingly sides with the commune. The former is portrayed as stolid but dependable, and accordingly sides with the government. The relationship between the two is oddly homoerotic, with them kissing; "no woman's arm had held him as close and warm as this." Dead soliders are frequently depicted locking in dying embraces of hatred or love. When Jean kills his friend the act is described as being akin to the removal of an infected organ. At the same time, the novel dwells on the possibility of the creation of a 'new France' by Jean, even after he has said that "it was destruction for destruction's sake so as to bury the ancient, rotten, society beneath the ashes of the earth in the hope that a new society might spring up." The novel endless debates these points, beginning and ending with the observation that "Is not life a state of war every second? Is not the very condition of nature a continuous struggle?... war if life and it cannot exist without death." The evolution analogy is explicit with the soldiers compared to wild beasts or to black ants on the march. While here, as in Germinal, Zola advances the idea of a new dawn (typified in Jean and Maurice's love; " in the midst of the savage egotism around him... this total self abnegation"), the novel stresses the "self centered rage of the individual" and a relapse into savagery. Unlike in Stendhal, there is no sense of glory in the fighting and no sense of a guiding hand, with Napoleon being depicted as weak and powerless.
I often have reservations about reading much postwar American literature, much of which seems imbued with a sense of machismo and a fear of emasculation by women. Where nineteenth century American literature foregrounded pioneer mythologies of the lone hero, its later counterparts centre on the irrelevance of such figures cast into the enfolding social structures of a commercial, bourgeois, society. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates is perhaps less bad than examples like Hemingway and Bellow, but it still seems present. The plot rather reminds me of Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying: but whereas Orwell is sceptical of romantics seeking to shun mundane existences of work and family, Yates leaves little doubt that he subscribes to them. As such, when Frank seems to avoid a bohemian life in Paris in favour of public relations, his animosity to April's sponsorship of these ideas manifests itself as misogyny, citing Freud's ideas of penis-envy or characterising abortion as a 'denial of womanhood,' later admitting that his masculinity had felt threatened. Shep Campbell imagines April after years of being the breadwinner as having become like a man. Frank denounces a woman who criticises his affairs with a secretary as a 'latent lesbian.' When it comes to the final tragedy, the voice of the chorus represented by John Givings denounces Frank as a coward but rather than praising April he also denounces her as a tough shrew who gave Frank a hard time. Frank is allowed to step outside prescribed social structures, April is not, meaning that she must be punished.
The authorship of A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates is often disputed, with the text attributed to Defoe rather than the eponymous Charles Johnson. Like Defoe, the text presents moral fables that undermine that basic premise with an emphasis on the contingent nature of vice ("in the beginning he was very averse to this sort of life.. yet afterwards he changed his principles"). AS in Defoe 'sudden changes of conduct' are far from uncommon. In many cases, crews of attacked vessels are forced into service on the pirate ships, making difficult to determine whether their service was voluntary or not. The author notes at one point that the only difference between a sailor on a pirate ship and a government man of war is circumstance; &quo; who might have passed in the world for a hero had he been employed in a good cause". As in Defoe, poverty is often cited as a key motivation for vice. However, in a vein that is less characteristic of Defoe, the author often cites little cause for a life of piracy other than piracy: "it is surprising that men of a good understanding should engage ina course of life that so debases human nature and sets them on a level with the wild beasts of the forest." If Defoe is often Lockean, this is rather more Hobbesian; "nature seems to have designed him for a pirate from childhood". In some of the tales, the pirates simply end up dispersing back into society, in others they revert to their old ways even when offered repentance.
It's been a while since I looked round the permanent collections at the V&A and there were more things that I recognised than on my previous visit: the statue of Perseus from Munich in the Cast Court or the three silver lions from Rosenborg Castle in the silver galleries, for example. But there were many other exhibits I didn't recall; three ivory dragons fighting over a crystal globe in the Chinese section, an articulated metal snake in the same area, Celadon pottery from Korea, Chinese funerary art such as ancestor painting or ceramic horses and camels. In the Islamic section there's the large Iznik tile frieze, the Ardabil Carpet, Rock crystal ewers and marble window screens. In the European section, I'm quite struck by Leighton's frescos and a ceiling in the vein of the Great Exhbition that is only visible through a small window, as it has only since been blocked up with the construction of a smaller roof beneath to block out the light. The section on the Great Exhibition itself is quite striking, noting that similar buildings were planned for New York and Munich. The contents of the exhibition included a German style tankard with a byzantine mosaic and gothic planters by Pugin. The Victorian section also includes furniture from Webb, Voysey, Burges (especially ornate cabinets and glassware) and Wyburd through to Mackintosh and art nouveau. The origins of the Gothic revival are traced in Beckford's Holbein furniture and in the Walpole collection. An entire fake Monk's cell is included from a house designed in imitation of Strawberry Hill. Imperial influences also abound - Japanese influences on Godwin's furniture or porcelain clocks, Islamic influences on Owen Jones and Morgan's ceramics. The section of stained glass proceeds directly from the medieval period to Rossetti, Burne Jones and Piper. The sculpture section contrasts Canova with Thorvaldsen, the paintings section comprising Blake, Martin, Roberts, Rossetti, Alma Tadema and Turner. Last but not least is a small picture of a church reflected in a pond taken by the Victorian photographer Benjamin Brecknell Turner.
Food cooked: Sicilian spaghetti, Peking duck, Balti pasanda, Chicken and papaya soup, Salmagundi, Turkish chicken with walnuts, Calderette of rice with allioli, Flamenco eggs, Steak with anchovy sauce, Duck liver pilaf, Scallop and potato soup, Steak with anchovy sauce, Chocolate cake, Morroccan chicken with pears and honey, Lychee curry, Paprika Hendl, Spaghetti Carbonara, Prok Stroganoff, Portuguese Jugged Duck and Orange, Chicken with Tamarind and Turmeric, Vietnamese seafood with lime and coconut, Apple and Coconut cake, Poacher's pie, Greek prawns with feta and peppers.Labels: Cooking, Drama, Film, Germany, Literature
posted by Richard 4:07 AM
Saturday, November 22, 2008
I'm not often inclined to visit art installations, but Seizure by Roger Hiorns struck me as quite unusual. We're often taken with aspects of the chnaging seasons because of how they rewrite the world and change our vision of it; the land encased in snow, tree leaves becoming inflamed with burgundy and gold, the same trees bereft of those leaves and left skeletal. Something similar but rather more unnatural, is at work with Seizure; a derelict block of low-rise flats was filled with a heated solution of Copper Sulphate, drained, and then allowed to cool. The outcome of this process was to leave the walls, floor and ceiling encrusted with these crystals; a form of aleatoric art. On the outside, the houses are boarded up, paint peeling off their walls. Hiorns is interested in brutalist architecture, failed visions of a utopian future that carry 'the stain of life.' Entering inside, the crystals have covered almost everything, with mounds, troughs and puddles of copper sulphate solution forming a miniature terrain across the floor. In the darkness, the crystals covering the walls glitter. It all leaves me reminded of Ballard's The Crystal World.
Walking back, I notice Rodney Gordon's Faraday Memorial. I must have walked past this spot several times now without ever noticing it, which is odd as it is quite striking; a stainless steel exterior without windows that is identical on all four sides, only interrupted by a single door. The object houses a substation for the London Underground and is accordingly functional but does not obviously correlate to any established architectural norm. It must have looked quite futuristic when constructed in the sixties; but now its fate would seem to have become nondescript. Further to the south, I visit West Norwood cemetery on a frosty and cold day. It seems noteworthy for two particular reasons: firstly, its Greek orthodox section (mosaics are an especial feature here) and secondly, its terracotta tombs designed by Harold Peto for Doulton and Tate, with Venetian glass and elaborate corbels. Many of the tombs are rather ornate to the point of being rather kitsch in their demonstration of Victorian sentimentality. Nonetheless, much of the cemetery seems in rather poor repair; several of the tombs are broken, leaving the vaults beneath exposed. Equally, much of the place seems overgrown and wild; at one point I'm confronted by a fox who seems largely unconcerned by my presence. The entire remembrance garden is enclosed in scaffolding. Like Highgate, the Cemetery is on a hill from where the skyscrapers of the city can be seen glinting in the distance. Back in the city, the Guildhall has a small exhibition of GF Watt paintings from the closure of the Watts gallery for restoration. While much of Pre-Raphaelite art was meticulous in its presentation of detail, Watts tends to predate impressionist or even abstract modern art. Much of this stems from an idiosyncratic interpretation of Darwinism; like Pater, Watts was interested in flux and chaos and opposed religion to it as an idea of the transcendent rather than a dogma. As such, much of his work is allegorical but stemming from what is effectively a private mythology. Looking at some of the other paintings, I'm struck by the resemblance borne by one of Poynter's paintings of ancient Egypt to the Klenze paintings of Athens I saw in Munich.
I haven't visited Tate Modern's galleries since the collection was rehung according to artistic genre rather than theme, so I decided it would be worth completing the day by doing so. The first section is dedicated to abstract and expressionist art; I find myself especially impressed by the contrast between the likes of Rothko (a wonderful golden painting), Pollock and even Monet on the one hand, and a section dedicated to Viennese Actionism on the other, as with Hermann Nitsch's Poured Painting or Arnulf Rainer's Wine Crucifix where red paint like blood runs down the canvas. Lee Krasner's Gothic Landscape rather more resembles the Viennese paintings than the American ones. There was also an interesting contrast between Giacometti's statues with their Egyptian and African influences and David Smith's sculptures, welded farm art made from disused farm machinery. I'm also interested in the expressionist Brucke group and am somewhat surprised at having missed any of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff's paintings during my visits to Germany. The final room of interest contains Matissse's The Snail, Picasso's Goat's Skull, Bottle and Candle and Hepworth's Orpheus. The next collection of interest is surrealism. I can't deny that surrealism is by far and away the most interesting to me, presumably due to its close linkages with psychoanalysis and literature (although much of it is also concerned with painting as an equivalent to automatic writing, as with Miro or Calder's mobiles). The first room contains De Chirico's Uncertainty of the Poet before paintings by Magritte, Dali, Ernst, Tanguy and Tanning, but there are some unfamiliar works like Landscape from a Dream by Nash, Ibdes in Aragon by Masson, A Naturalist's Study by Roy, Variation on the Form of an Anchor by Hillier, Black Virtue by Matta or Fini's Little Hermit Sphinx. I pause for a while to watch Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon and proceed upstairs to the next collection.
The next collection is Futurism, Cubism and Vorticism, beginning with Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. Unsurprisingly, much of this collection is taken up with Picasso, Severini, Balla, Lewis and Braque, but there are some surprising inclusions from Vanessa Bell, Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson's A Star Shell and Fernand Leger. Much of this section is given up to more generally post-impressionist art; Mondrian's Sun, Church in Zeeland; Zoutelande Church Facade, Picasso's early Girl in a Chemise, Munch's The Sick Child, Matisse's Trivaux Pond as well as works by Cezanne and Bonnard. There's also a section on realist art; Meredith Frampton, Chagall and Derain. The final part is dedicated, rather oddly, to Soviet propaganda. Characterised by hero-worship and militarism it's not overly pleasant. The final collection is given up to abstract art and minimalism; Mondrian, Gabo, Brancusi, Helion, Malevich, and Kandinsky.
Travelling north, I go for a walk in the National Memorial Arboretum. I notice a nearby cottage with sheep and goats grazing in front of it as I walk alongside the river. There's a section I haven't seen before featuring replicas of various historical memorials; cairns, menhirs, roman gravestones, medieval memento mori, baroque cherubs, victorian angels and modern designs. The following day is taken up with a visit to Croxden Abbey, a ruin dissolved in the reformation. The building survives quite well; elaborate capitals remain on arches and tiles can still be seen on the floor. The line of the building is quite visible for the most part, such as the multiple side chapels on the main church building. I then make a return visit to Pugin's church at Cheadle, with its angels and seraphim on the altars, its encaustic floor tiles, and polychromatic tiles lining the walls. The day after that is mostly taken up with a visit to Ashby castle. The nearby church has an elaborate Elizabethan alabaster tomb from its founding family; part of it is still painted. The ruins themselves retain traces of the original ostentation, especially above the fireplaces. I recall the civil war tunnels from a childhood visit but am also impressed with the remains of the chapel, a set of iron gates barricading off the empty arches. Further down south, I visit Minster Lovell, another ruined mansion near Oxford, with a rather macabre 'Musgrave Ritual' story attached to it. The walls seem generally rather better preserved than those at Ashby, having been destroyed by entropy rather than by gunpowder; gargoyles and decorated arches survive. It's another rather dark day and the Windrush has flooded much of the ground.
Reading The Arabian Nights, it's easy to see why romantic writers were so taken with it; most obvious is the sense of irrational exoticism that appealed to the likes of Walpole and Beckford but also the sense of threat from forces beyond human comprehension that pervades the tales and the gothic novel alike. In a more philosophical context, romanticism fitful relationship with the transcendent dovetails neatly with the fatalism of the tales, whereby everything happens by the will of the divine. The tales are framed with a device of Scheherazade using her narration as a means of influence but frequently contain stories where the hero's fate has little to do with self determination and where the malfeasant are often rewarded as much as the virtuous. The tales have been made Muslim, but not with complete success, and not to the extent of excluding all the jinn, ghouls and other popular superstitions that canonical Islam disdains. They are localised in the great cities of the Arab golden age, fascinated by commodities and coined money, fabrics, scents, confectionery, guilds and crafts, but uncomfortable in the countryside and terrified of the open sea. The prudery and solemnity of Arab merchant life, the stately procession from shop to mosque to bath and back again, is subject to violent disruption by a flash of black eyes from behind a lattice or the sudden appearance of a demon. Reading Herodotus's Histories, I was struck that whereas much of Greek historical writing tends to centre around the Hellenic world and a Persian other (with open admiration for Sparta in the case of writers like Xenophon), Herodotus is as much an anthropologist as a historian and is as interested in foreign cultures as he is in events. If anything, Persia receives more attention that Greece even if events are told from a Hellenic perspective (as with the Persian debate over whether to accept democracy or autocracy).
Reading Willa Cather's The Troll Garden and Selected Stories is to proceed down a path that initially seems well travelled. The stories concern unfulfilled lives dwindling in the backwaters of the American mid west. In many respects, they resemble Hardy with their convergence of heredity and environment to crush their characters, especially in a story like Eric Hermannson's Soul: "a face that bore the stamp of Nature's eternal injustice... Cheat nature? Bah! One generation may do it, perhaps two, but the third.." The early stories accordingly make much of the Norwegian ancestry of many of the characters as much as the hardship of their existence eking a living out of the soil. Nonetheless, Cather is not much of either a pessimist or a moralist; her Emma Bovary in The Bohemian Girl or her Trenchard in On the Divide are able to find happiness while other characters in Eric Hermannson's Soul blame the "evil spirit" of the local gospel sect for condemning people to misery rather than any sense of ineluctable metaphysics doing so.
In the stories that make up The Troll Garden itself, matters prove more complicated, with the mismatch between the individual and the environment manifesting itself in more complicated ways; While some characters like Merrick thrive away from the Midwest, others like Katharine are only tormented by the memories of other places they are returned to it. A story like The Garden Lodge offers a parable of profligacy and prudence as equivalent roads to suffering. Nonetheless, many of which are not fully explained; for a realist writer Cather often tends to leave matters unsaid, to leave a figure in the carpet. The Sculptor's Funeral and A Death in the Desert furnish good examples, with the relationship between the sculptor and the lawyer left undefined, as is the nature of Roux's disgrace or the absent figure of Adriance Hilgarde for whom his brother serves as a proxy in Katharine's love (a modern sensibility would presume, not unreasonably, a homosexual interpretation in each of these cases, although the stories benefit from this lacuna). Other stories are more ineffable still; the epicentre of The Marriage of Phaedra is located in the speechless canvas of a painting while Paul's Case and A Wagner Matinee both dwell on the ineffable longings created from exposure of music, ranging from desire for a road not taken to crime and death. In Eliot's phrasing, Cather has withheld an objective correlative for these stories.
Reading Heidegger's Being and Time, I find myself most troubled by his continual emphasis on the importance of authenticity. Much of the text can be described as a phenomenological argument with Kant, replacing Kant's metaphysics with a materialist outlook derived from romantic thinking, stripping out the cartesian emphasis on the soul or the transcendential and replacing it with an emphasis on the throwness of being and the inseparability of being from the world. With that said, Heidegger's terminology often seems more religiose than Kant's, particularly so with the emphasis on the fallen nature of existence. Although Heidegger is clear that he is not equating inauthenticity with sinfulness, it seems difficult to avoid the equation, leaving the impression of secular theology rather than existentialism. Certainly, the use of the term differs greatly from equivalent concepts in other existentialist thinking, seeming to conflate Nietzsche's ressentiment (a critique of slave morality) and what Sartre would term bad faith (a refusal to accept freedom or moral agency). Heidegger both characterises being as being governed by care of conscience, thereby guesturing towards a Sartrean notion of social commitment, and as being at risk of falling into being overwhelmed by the the mass of humanity, thereby echoing Nietzschean concepts (e.g. "in utilising public means of transport and in making use of public sources of information such as the newspaper, every other is like the next...the real dictatorship of the 'they' is unfolded"). It's characteristic of Heidegger to collapse distinctions between opposing tendencies and to treat them as parts of a broader dialectic. Nonetheless, it still leaves me wondering how theese theories could be put into practice; many of Heidegger's philosophical themes—the overcoming of nihilism, the importance of rootedness, the need for decisive action—found vulgar echoes in Nazi thought. Faced with choices between the mass democracy of America and the collectivism of the Soviet Union, it seems little surprising that he found the Nazi emphasis on hero worship conducive to this thought. As he put it in his rectoral address: "the relentlessness of that spiritual mission that forces the destiny of the German people into the shape of its history... Does this essence have genuine strength to shape our existence?" The spiritual mission of the German people (again, note the reconstitution of religious terminology) under Nazism distinguished itself from the subjugation of Dasein under the domination of technology in communism or democracy, a process he termed 'forgetfulness of being' (Seinsvergessenheitct) in The Question Concerning Technology. One can, of course, read Heidegger's text more sympathetically than the biographical emphasis would seem to warrant; his comments on technology have an obvious force regarding the industrial nature of the holocaust and his criticism of inauthenticity could conceivably be applied to Nazism amongst other mass movements. Nonetheless, he seems a markedly more difficult figure to rehabilitate than Nietzsche.
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass is one of the very few works of the modern era that could be labelled carnivalesque. In the Bakhtinian sense, the term denotes the anarchic and comic: fools become wise, kings become beggars; opposites are mingled. Throughout the novel, Grass establishes dichotomies only to overturn them: Oskar is identified first with Satan and then with Jesus, with Rasputin and Goethe as the twin poles of his reading matter. The narrator frequently refers to himself in the third person, further establishing a split within himself. Polyphony abounds, with the alternate narrators giving slightly different accounts of events to Oskar. It also dwells on the body and the material, as does Grass in his scatological descriptions of the infant christ's anatomy, in Oskar's deformity, in Oskar's refusal to believe in Jesus unless it can come alive and drum ("either he drums or is he is not a real jesus") or even in the horse's head filled with eels. The same applies to The Dog Years where one student of Heidegger buries "a real mount made of human bones under medieval allegories." With that said, Grass uses magical realism as a means of producing concrete synbols: the deformed dwarf, the black dog, worms, scarecrows (themselves emblematic of the Heideggerian distinction of being and emptiness at the same time they satirise Heidegger's endless metaphysical neologisms). Like Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik, The Tin Drum also a picaresque novel, episodic and peripatetic by nature. The comparison with Hasek is a rather apt one: that novel is perhaps the closest to the The Tin Drum in many respects, with the exception that the humour of the earlier novel is univocal in its targets. Oskar almost epitomises the object of Nazi eugenics: deformed, Polish and an artist. His anarchism can also easily be construed as a form of resistance to fascist ideology, as with his disruption of a Nazi rally and equal disgust with the socialists and communists. Vaclav Havel once observed that; "We are the seekers of truth who fear those who claim to have found it." Similarly, the dichotomies of the novel represent a rejection of ideas of the absolute notions of truth that typically form the bedrock of totalitarianism; where "there is politics there is violence." Oskar is presented as free to "harmonize chaos and intoxicate reason," where the dichotomy of hero and villain is itself rejected. Where Schweik constantly acts to undermine authority, Oskar is the willing servant of the Nazis for much of the novel and leaves a trail of blood and destruction in his wake (the author's recently disclosed SS membership is rather obviously suggestive here). His drumming seems the perfect allegory of a world where all values had already been inverted and insanity reigned. It does raise the question as to whether carnival is an entirely effective mode of opposing totalitarianism; it may not be enough to overturn all values when the oppressors have already done that.
The addition of a modern soundtrack by Michael Nyman does little to efface the comparison, but I couldn't help comparing Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera to Koyaanisqatsi; both eschew narrative in favour of disconnected images, both are concerned with the relation of man and technology, albeit the former glorifies it as the latter reviles it. In both cases, the absence of a controlling structure leaves the interpretation decidedly open ended. Reggio's cinematography of gleaming skyscrapers is quite beautiful, Vertov's vision of dehumanised man as a machine (with factory workers showed beaming in the midst of their drudgery) is rather horrifying. Inevitably, Vertov's depiction of everydaylife dwells on certain aspects; the interest in speed and technology (cars, planes, motorbikes, trains and trams all feature) recalls while Marinetti while the interest in the athletic physique recalls Reifenstahl. The scenes in the beerhall introduce the only permissible element of decadence amongst the rather interminable wholesomeness of the images of work and play. The composite of scenes from Moscow, Kiev and Odessa forges the idea of a single Soviet identity. What's most interesting about Vertov is the rather postmodern self-referentiality of the film - the framing of it within a cinema, the repeated shots of the lens or of the cameraman; this diary of a cameraman is a film about the making of a film.
posted by Richard 11:22 AM
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).
Returning back down south, I visit another small exhibition at Reading Museum, this time of Richard Dadd paintings. Many of the works are simply genre pieces. Some show his experiences with the army in the Middle East. Other illustrate historical scenes of medieval battles or incidents from Shakespeare's history plays. But I'm quite struck by two of them; one an allegory of deceit showing an old woman wearing the mask of younger woman. She holds a skull and the base of her seat shows the temptation of Eve. It could be a Watts painting. The other shows a tomb in a wooded scene, a statue of a blind woman at the centre, with a robed skeleton above, as an allegory of grief. Looking around, I pay particular attention to the capitals from Reading Abbey, one showing the green man, to various Victorian sculptures (by Tweed and Rodin) and one of Richard Gibbings which clearly shows the influence of Gill.
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.
The British Museum's exhibition on Babylon features many of the things I recall seeing years ago in Berlin, especially the wonderful blue glazed bricks and rliefs of lions and dragons from the Ishtar gate. Nonetheless, it quickly makes the point that we know more about the earlier Assyrian civilisation than we do of Baylon, with much of our knowledge of the latter coming from foreign sources; Herodotus, Strabo or the Bible. In many cases, these sources are hardly accurate; there is no evidence of any Hanging Gardens, the Tower of Babel was simply a large ziggurat, Bablyon did not fall during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar and continued as a major city until Alexander the Great. Nonetheless, the exhibition is rather good at tracing the reception of Babylon into Western culture; Rembrandt and John Martin's paintings of its fall, Blake and Durer's etching of Nebuchadnezzar, Brueghel and Kircher's drawings of the Tower of Babel, Evelyn de Morgan's pictures of the expelled Jews. Afterwards, I walk through the Asian galleries and particularly the wall reliefs of the Amaravati stupa. I'm struck especially the rather gruesome character of the Tibetan images; Chitipati skeletons or goddesses bearing skulls filled with blood. Some of the Chinese exhibits prove equally odd; Chu funerary busts of figures with antlers and snake like tongues.
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 6:10 AM
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Reading Zola's The Belly of Paris, I was struck with the contrast it makes with the later Germinal; the latter an impassioned call for revolution and social justice, the former treating the matter in terms that are rather more cynical, seeing such matters as the affair of naive idealists (as Claude describes Florent; "You're an artist in your own way. You dream about politics") and hypocrites (Gavard being, as Claude describes it, "fat, but the sort that pretends to be thin. That sort is common."); in other words, not that far away from Conrad's The Secret Agent. For all of the injustice meted out towards Florent, the novel presents a relatively poor case for revolution, with most of the stallholders prospering. For all of his talk of the fat and thin, Claude seems at best apolitical; "You titillate yourself with ideas of about truth and justice. Your ideas, like my paintings, frighten bourgeois people... politics did not bother him at all." At worst, Claude seems enthralled by the modern age, celebrating the market's iron cathedral displacing the nearby church; "The iron will kill the stone.. only one original building has been built that has not been copied from somewhere else and that is Les Halles." With the emphasis on walking around the Parisian arcades, Zola and Claude at one with Baudelaire and Benjamin. Equally, the novel also seems ambivalent as to whether Florent's rebellion is simply a matter of an inherent predisposition; "He could easily have become a decent citizen agan, he had nothing but good examples in front of him. But no, it's in his blood!" While animal metaphors abound in Zola's novels, it is unusual here for all being physically present in the market and the protrayal of characters like Cadine tends towards showing Paris as a place 'red in tooth and claw' populated by people who are barely distinguished from animals ("as free as birds and quite without shame"). Much of Florent's revolt is a physical one (as with Claude's notion of the fat and the thin rather than the rich and the poor), a sense of nausea at the market's stench; "he had experienced smells as terrible as these but never from his belly." By contrast, Lisa is "a steady and sensible Macquart, reasonable and logical in her craving for well being... even at the age of six" just as Quenu declares of Florent that "had been bound to come to a bad end, you could tell from his face." Nonetheless, Zola is far from consistent also stating that Florent under different circumstances would simply have been schooltecher in a provincial town; "a man as gentle as a child."
Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin is a quite remarkable text and one that reminds me greatly of the Helene Cixous's gender theories (as well as sharing an interpretation of As You Like it with Woolf's Orlando). The novel blurs gender boundaries and advances a form of sexual politics that would seem advanced even by today's standards; "The reality is that neither of these two sexes is mine... many men are more female than I." I was interested in d'Albert declaration that "I am a man of the Homeric age. The world I inhabit is not my own and I understand nothing of the society around me. Chris did not come for my sake. I am as pagan as Alcibiades." d'Albert decries the modern tendency to view women as equals, a view that is challenged by Rosalind's winning of duels against other men, but which seems nonetheless to continue to inhabit the novel, which does contain a counter-reading whereby d'Albert subdues Rosalind's Third Sex identity and is freed from the horror of desiring a member of his own sex.
Balzac's Cousin Bette has the same sort of duality you can find in a lot of his novels (something advertised by the author from the outset with his note that "Moliere always presents both sides of every human problem"); on the one hand, he is a Catholic conservative, deploring immorality and excess. On the other, he chooses to invest much of that enmity in the Napoleonic old-guard in the novel (although he does seem to admire Crevel for sticking to his Voltarian principles on his death bed), seen as the destroyers of the ancien regime (and far more the objects of Balzac's hatred here than the bourgeoisie Lukacs thought him so adept at critiquing with his aristocratic sympathies, even in the midst of statements that dissolve individual responsibility in favour of social critique; "in Paris, life is too rushed for vicious people to do evil because they choose to"). The result is that the destructive actions of Bette to destroy Hulot acquire an almost laudable aspect, with the same later applying to Victorin's destruction of Valerie. As in The Chouans, if Balzac is offered a choice between the gildings of civilisation and savage barbarism ("a close observation of the young woman would have observed the fierce side of the peasantry.. the savage has feelings only, the civilised man has feelings and ideas"), he invariably chooses the latter even as he condemns it, with Hulot proving far more driven by feelings than Bette. In the character of Bette, savagery at least proves itself to have a profound work ethic and a strong sense of thrift lacking in the dissolute aristocrats; Bette is in essence Balzac's avenging angel. This can partly be attributed to Balzac's ideas on gender. Although in theory, he lauds characters like the Baroness for their piety, even her own daughter sees her as essentially passive, a trait that leads to her destruction. Balzac sees virtue in essentially masculine terms and lauds it irrespective of which gender it is found in (conversely he seems to see characters like Wenceslas and Hulot as essentially feminine and weak, with Balzac sniffily noting that the Poles wear jewellery like women having acquire tastes for "oriental splendour"). This leads to odd conjunctions like "this energetic woman and that weak man." As such, at one point the author opines that the ideal woman should combine virtue with masculine energy, a trait he finds in the courtesan Josepha (and implicitly in Bette) but not in the Baroness; "if you'd had a little of our savvy, you'd have stopped him gallivanting; for you'd have know how to be what we have been; all kinds of women to a man... but governments are so prudish, they are led by men who are led by us."
Lukacs drew a connection between the conservatism of Balzac and that of Scott in their join condemnation of the bourgeoisie. Certainly Old Mortality sees him vesting much sympathy with rebellion and revolt against the established order ("that excites the vassals of persons of rank to to rebel against the very house that holds and feeds them"), but his approach is as dialogic as Balzac's ("who shall warrant me that these people, rendered wild with persecution, would not be in the hour of victory, as cruel and intolerant as those by whom they are now hunted down?"), with characters like Evandale portrayed with as much sympathy as Morton (hence Morton's comparison of Balfour's spirital pride to pride in things material; "Morton could not help, in his heart, contrasting Claverhouse with Balfour of Burley"). Scott's sympathies inherently lie with the dialogic and tolerant instead of the monologic and the dogmatic; like Eliot later, his novels are in many respects an appeal to empathy. The model character is the old woman whose covenanter sons have been slain in battle and who still shelters Lord Evandale and saves his life ("and was a fanatic woman capable of such generosity?").
Visiting Oxford, I began by walking along the canal to the Church of St Barnabas, a building based on the cathedral I visited last year at Torcello. The church would appear to be well on the way to decaying to the same state as its Venetian counterpart, with the pebble dash crumbling from walls encroached upon by weeds. I pass by towards the Ashmolean. Much of the museum has been closed for refurbishment and a temporary exhibition is in progress. This does rather recapture the spirit of Tradescant's wunderkammer; the Alfred jewel rests alongside Etruscan canopic jars, a robe given to TE Lawrence by King Faisal, a lovely early twentieth century Japanese waterfall vase and Guy Fawkes' lantern. The gallery houses a diminished collection of Gertler and Courbet landscapes, Palmer and Spencer neo-platonic scenes, a Vernet night scene, an early Kandinsky landscape, Uccello and Cosimo forest scenes. Wondering around Holywell cemetery afterwards, I noticed that although the tombstones were all mass-produced, with several specimens of the same type often in evidence, they were nonetheless different to those in London cemeteries of the same period; industrial production but on a local scale. It also feels more like a country churchyard, with bluebells in flower and the stones of a much modest scale than their London counterparts. I also visit Exeter Chapel, Gilbert Scott's remodelling of Sainte-Chapelle, an astonishing confection of stained glass, mosaic and tiling. More impressive though is Saint Mary's in Iffley; as at Kilpeck, its carvings of Mer-Men, Centuars, Green Men and Sphinxes seem essentially pagan to me, something reinforced with Piper's stained glass window of sheep, owls and other birds.Labels: Literature, Oxford
posted by Richard 1:48 AM
Sunday, March 16, 2008
John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World can be unkindly described as a panegyric to the glories of the October Revolution and the "great dynamo" Lenin. The text ends with the Bolsheviks and Peasants reaching an ecstatic accord that would lead anyone to think that the best part of the next decade was not to be consumed with a particularly bloody civil war followed by the horrors of farm collectivisation. Nonetheless, although an avowed communist Reed's journalism is sufficiently objective to tell more than one story. Having been minded against Lenin and the Bolsheviks beforehand, Reed's book emphatically reinforced this, leaving an impression of the Petrograd provisional government as analogous to the Weimar Republic. Karensky's government had sought to establish a coalition of all parties, with socialists in the majority and to advance a new tolerance, exemplified by permitting Lenin to return to Petrograd from Zurich. The action of the Bolsheviks on coming to power was to curtail press freedoms ("Three weeks ago the Bolsheviki were the most ardent defenders of press freedoms") and to suppress rival socialist parties for instance by placing their leaders under house arrest ("you sit here and talk about gibing land to the peasants , and you commit an act of tyrants and usurpers against the peasant's chosen representatives"). Other parties repeatedly called for a coalition ("Our party has refused to enter the Council of People's Commissars because we do not wish for ever to separate ourselves from the part of the revolutionary army which left the congress...we do not recognise the legality of this congress since the departure of the Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries there is not a legal quorum") only for Lenin to demand they support the Bolshevik programme. Strikes resulted, with transport and communications shutting down. Since no-one would serve in the Ministries after the coup d'etat, the public administration shut down.
The same territory is covered in literary terms by Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. The novel is in many ways an archetypal account of the individual against society, of Eros against civilisation, with the caveat that its acceptance of sin is rather reminiscent of Greene. Zhivago's tastes are catholic running from Darwin to Schelling and the novel similarly contains multitudes in the manner of his compatriot Bakhtin (although the novel is weighted against the Bolsheviks characters like Strelnikov ("You couldn't understand it. You grew up quite differently... dirt, hunger, overcrowding, the degradation of the worker") or Liberius's aunt voice opposed opinions; "they are on the side of the common people, that's their strength"). Much of the opposing discourse in the novel is essentially derived from a mystical worldview; "This freedom came from the feeling that all human lives were interrelated, a certainty that they flowed into each other -- a happy feeling that all events took place not only on the earth, in which the dead are buried, but also in some other region which some called the kingdom of God, others history, and still others by some other name... man is made up of two parts, God and work. Each succeeding stage in the development of the human spirit [such as] the theology of the Old Testament" As such, the novel's discussion of the stages of history is theological but uses Marxist terminology to express it, even to the extent of describing Bolshevik discourse as religious; "Yury could not bear the political mysticism of the Soviet intelligentsia" Zhivago's Uncle Kolya, a kind of fellow traveller of Christianity, enunciates one of the book's major themes: "What you don't understand is that . . . history as we know it now began with Christ, and that Christ's Gospel is its foundation. Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies . . . The two basic ideals of modern man - without them he is unthinkable -[are] the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice." The early sections of the novel are accordingly often expressed in Tolstoyan terms. For Nikolai, Christ is at the font of truly human history precisely because he emphatically underscores its requisite principles: love of one’s neighbour, the supreme form of vital energy (the "immortal communion between mortals"), the idea of free personality (only individuals seek and are persuaded by the truth), and the idea of life as sacrifice, ultimately to life itself. Art, speculates Yury, is not a category, but a vital principle, a force, a truth realized in its concrete instances. Art is not so much form as a hidden, secret part of content which is always essentially the same. It is "a statement about life so all-embracing that it can't be split up into separate words." Further, "Art always serves beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organic life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence." Art has its ultimate root in organic life. We are back at our fundamental theme of life, "one, immense, ever-changing, ever the same, concretely renewing itself. Art is a mode of life's vital resurrection." The great object lesson is Pushkin, who opened the windows and let concrete reality, with its life and motion, storm into the lines of his poetry, "driving out the vaguer parts of speech." This was more than aesthetic service. Pushkin reaffirmed the sanctity of everyday, 'bourgeois' existence -- housewives, quiet lives, and big bowls of cabbage soup. With form and content indissoluble, the works of Pushkin (and later Chekhov) become irresistible powers of unarmed truth, "like apples picked green, ripening of themselves, mellowing gradually and growing richer in meaning." They concretely realize the unchanging aim of art: "homecoming, return to one's family, to oneself, to true existence."
Pushkin performs the same function as Christ. They have the same office and duty: to express the highest native talent, the talent for life, thereby resurrecting a truly human way of life. In some form or other, Christ's passion must be authentically re-enacted again and again. We repeatedly must be called back to everyday life and its requisite forms. There will always be a Pushkin, a Yury, or a Hamlet, whom chance has allotted "the role of judge of his own time and servant of the future," the high destiny of "a life devoted and pre-ordained to a heroic task." In Pasternak's cosmos, Christ and man are equals, each serving the same master, life itself. This brings us to a final ingredient of Pasternak's cosmic harmony, without which we cannot fully understand the interrelations of life, death, form, and art. This is eros, love. With love, Pasternak's women emphatically enter the cosmic picture. The theme of eros and women is explicitly sounded in the eccentric Sima's conversations with Lara, with her original reformation of Nikolai's speculative theses on religion and history. Mary replaces Christ as the inaugurator of modern, truly human history. Hence the role of Mary Magdalene; "what equal terms between God and life, God and the individual, God and a woman!" Yury's sacrifice is accordingly allegorised as the crucifixion of Christ with Lara as Mary Magdalene.
Above all else, Pasternak is deeply repelled by social and political 'blueprintism,' the wilful foisting of rigid, unyielding forms on humanly communal life, and by individuals denying their original, native personalities in favour of imitating someone or something else. He is repelled by all those who are unwilling to attend to life's aboriginal ways and who give up on their individually unique lives in favour of grand poses, public or private. He is repelled by those who treat life as a substance to be moulded (an attitude which only reveals their profound misunderstanding of life), and by all who delight in marching to deadly, 'world-important' causes, the abstract issues of ironfisted, uncreative wills. Life cannot be treated with such impunity without disastrous consequences and without sinning against the very goodness of existence.
I follow Pasternak with reading Tolstoy's Resurrection (on balance, I prefer Pasternak). Tolstoy is in a way defeated by his own artistry; the novel is in many respects an attempt to evangelise in favour of a certain set of moral viewpoints. The novel, not unreasonably, sees the political and judicial system of Russia as being essentially repressive but Tolstoy is still careful to represent the views of those lawyers and politicians and to explain them in dialogic terms, as with the hurt of his brother in law at Nekhlyadov's accusations. Equally, the peasantry are depicted as having become callous, with one especially chilling statement of how the peasantry would do unto the aristocracy as had been done unto them foretelling the fate of Russia in the next century. The novel invokes many criticisms of institutions but as Tolstoy sees man as corrupt he discounts them altogether (and the prospect of their reformation with it) as being incapable of reforming others. Tolstoy's theological predelictions sit alongside his political ones rather uneasily, perhaps because the peasants are seen by Nekhlyadov as a means to his redemption rather than an end in their own right (hence the novel aborts the logical course of his reformation by having Maslova marry another peasant instead). In other words, the novel both offers a moral fable and critiques it simultaneously.
Reading Custine's Journey for Our Time affords some insight into the Russian novel; Custine depicts a society dominated by what Milosz termed Ketman, in which the art of feigning was of paramount importance in a society where both spiritual and temporal power remained absolute. Attempts to open Russia to the West, as with the building of Saint Petersburg, had simply generated an alienating environment distant from Russian traditions. As such, the arrival of a middle class in an increasingly wealthy country meant the creation of the superfluous men endemic throughout Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Tolstoy; figures with the same material comforts as their European counterparts but whose existence remained feudal in other respects. Gogol's work is full of the sense of a world upturned, where the impressions of the senses prove deceiving and the individual is powerless to discern the true way ("how strangely, how insrutably fate plays with us... oh, do not trust this Nevsky Prospekt... all is deception, all is a dream, all is not what it seems"). A story like Nevsky Prospekt or a play like The Government Inspector sees differing characters taking very different routes, only to arrive at the same destination and undermine any sense of a possible moral fable; in some sense Diary of a Madman is a satire on the inability of the superfluous man to find any place or position in reward for their strivings. The sense of the indeterminate even extends to the inanimate acquiring being; stories like The Nose remind me of Kafka and Metamorphosis; in both stories characters are transfigured for reasons that are not withheld from the reader so as to disorient. As a final note, I suspect in all this that our modern society is increasingly like that of nineteenth century Russia (Generation X being our modern account of the superfluous man) but it is worth citing an opposing view from Nikita Khrushchev:" This belief in the greatness of the Russian soul, Khrushcheva argues, is simply smoke and mirrors used to excuse the country's backwardness. Russians prefer to fall back on this dreamy myth rather than take responsibility for their own lives. Rational individualism has never taken hold with Russians, and it is instead external forces such as fate and the state that provide meaning to their lives. Living in an idealized, poetic world -- "a childish Russian paradise" - they are unable and unwilling to engage in practical activity.
The Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, Khrushcheva writes, offers a way out of this backward state through the example of his own life and his characters. As a member of a wealthy family, he went into exile after the Revolution. His past and country destroyed, Nabokov was forced to rely on himself and create his own meaning for his life. For Khrushcheva, Nabokov represents "the next step after Chekhov in Russian literature, its Westernization and rationalization." Wallowing in a dreamy, poetic world, blaming fate for their problems, the characters of Russian literature, from Dostoevsky to Chekhov, are defined by their pensiveness and suffering. Nabokov, however, placed his heroes in "normal" life. "[He] forced them to live as people live from day to day ... refusing to perceive suffering as a sign of great spiritual depth." Khrushcheva contrasts Western and Russian attitudes to happiness. "In the West, happiness ... is not the passive patience of Russian literature, but Western perseverance. Happiness in an evolutionary striving forward, and you have to gain it and create it yourself."
I tend to think Khrushcheva's ignores the scores of superluous figures washed up on the shores of history in Nabokov's work (and certainly the distorting mirrors of Pale Fire have more than a little in common with Gogol) (or, failing that, characters like those depicted by Stendhal that can find no purchase on history).
Alexander Rodchenko's work was recently on display at the Southbank. The grimly puritannical concrete setting is ideal for Rodchenko. In one instance, his photos of the Shukov tower and the Narkomfin building are vertiginous, showing them towering up overhead. In the other, his photos of people show them as pullulating masses, typically shot looking down on them above, like a beekeeper opening a hive. Rodchenko seems reluctant to recognise individuals, only the revolutionary masses. This is taken to its worst extreme in his photos of the building of the White Sea Baltic Canal, showing political prisoners being worked to death in its construction; Rodchenko's response to this was to adjust the photographs to show the workers smiling. Much of the photos have a disturbing resemblance to Nazi images; Leni Von Riefenstahl (another photographer who only saw masses not people) could have taken the propaganda photos of the Red Army. The images of children might as well be of the Hitler Youth (even the communists complained that one picture looking up at a youth's face dehumanised him, although they also complained that the youth should be looking forward not upwards to symbolise revolutionary progress). At the Dynamo Water Stadium, Rodchenko twisted the camera so that divers leaping from the board appeared to be soaring upwards rather than plummeting down. Riefenstahl employed the same technique in her film of the Berlin Olympics. Stalin and Hitler found common ground in exhibitions of what we now call 'body fascism' (Tom of Finland without the erotics) and Rodchenko's work is also at one with Arno Breker and Riefenstahl here. More generally, his works seems torn between competing ideas; the idea of philosophy as part of everyday life, the quotidian, instead of the bourgeois nature of painting, as opposed to his idea of ostranenie, of making things strange (which might have been unconcerned with ideology in Shklovsky's original formulation but which seems mostly manipulative here). Rodchenko here used many of the same techniques Eisenstein used in film, with a photo like The Stairs clearly recalling The Battleship Potemkin. Some of his more interesting photos effect that very well, superimposing images through double exposure to create effects that could have come from Man Ray. Similarly, his later photos of circuses suggest a fascination with the exotic rather than with the previous hordes of picture of collectivised farms and lightbulb factories.
Following the Russian theme, I've also been to see Matthew Bourne's version of The Nutcracker. The ballet opens in the Dickensian setting of an orphanage, albeit one apparently designed by a cubist with tangential angles on all the walls and furniture, presumably to denote how their height would seem to a child. The second half rather resembles a Pierre et Gi'les photograph, with everything in saturated technicolor. Also interesting to note that it's as homoerotic as Pierre et Gilles, with the Nutcracker and soldiers dancing stripped to the waist and much of the dancing unabashedly sexual. I'm especially taken by a scene in the orphanage of one of the boys wanting a toy doll instead of the football he gets...
I follow this with a visit to a Cranach exhibition. Much of the earlier work is rather predictably devotional, but like Holbein his work represents a point where the christian vocabulary of medieval art is broken. Much of work shifts from religious subjects to portraiture, such as his painting of the Holy Kinship which shows religious figures but is actually painting Saxon aristocrats or the inclusion of the Bishop of Olomouc in a painting of the beheading of John the Baptist (with the shift from allegory to realism figured in the dog lapping up John's blood). Religious figures like St Helena are also depicted as Saxon nobles. Many of his paintings come to leave out the background altogether, leaving the individual in isolation against a void of blackness. Rather than visions of the beatific, Cranach is preoccupied with the grotesque; for example one of the more interesting details are drawings of The Temptation of Saint Anthony with a Boschian horde of demons. He also paints pictures showing elderly women with young men and vice versa; a carnivalesque form of laughter and grotesquerie. Equally, many of his religious subjects emerge as opportunities for the prurient and licentious; Lot being seduced by his daughters, David and Bathsheba and so on. A painting of Bocca della Verite shows an adultress getting away with her sin. Classical subjects often allow Cranach to show such scenes without any edifying pretext, such as the Judgement of Paris with its three nude goddesses or Venus and Cupid. As I mentioned before, Cranach treats Adam and Eve in exactly the same manner as Apollo and Diana, Adam and Eve in the same manner as the Golden Age. Much of his work can also be described as proto-romantic, with its forest scenes and gothic castles; Saint Jerome is a common subject (as with his painting of Cardinal Albrecht as Jerome).
With the arrival of Easter, I travel up to the Midlands, calling in at Upton House. The building itself is rather nondescript, with the usual interminable Meissen cermaics and Stubbs paintings. However, it does happen to possess an excellent painting collection. The Long Gallery contains a striking Saenredam painting of Utrecht cathedral, showing it as largely empty, a bleached vision of Protestant purity that I find surprisingly striking, possibly because of the ghostly addition of figures by a less skilled painter who subsequently tried to erase them. This work stands alongside Dutch winter and harbour scenes in the style of Brueghel and an early Canaletto. A later picture room is given up to two Hogarth paintings of times of the day; both are badly in need of cleaning which rather inhibits their appeal. This room is also home to Romney's Romantic painting of a rather ephebian William Beckford against a set of ruined tombs in a forest. Finally, there is a picture gallery proper, featuring Ruisdael landscapes, Steen's allegorical paintings, a Holbein miniature of a young man, a Jan Lievens painting mistaken in the past for a Rembrandt. A biblical scene by Tintoretto rather resembles one of Canaletto's later architectural capriccios while an El Greco's painting of christ contrasts with the Saenredam painting for its use of a bold but restricted palette of the primary colours. The faces in it are long and drawn, resembling Byzantine icons. The highlight of the collection is undoubtedly a Bosch triptych of the nativity. The ruined stable is an archetype in painting of this period but the bizarre gifts brought by the kings are far more characteristic of Bosch, as are the grisaille demons clustered on the inverse panels around a circle of light. Grisaille is also used strikingly in a Brueghel painting of the death of the virgin. As ones eyes grow accustomed to the darkness one gradually sees more and more figures in a room that had previously looked empty; an interesting trompe l'oeil that inverts the normal role of light in Western art. The rest of the works are medieval paintings and alterpieces, often by anonymous masters. I am quite struck by a Memling painting of a young man though. The only other things of interest in the house are a silver art deco bathroom that looks disturbingly like the set of a nineteen seventies BBC science fiction programme and a painting on the stairs of the adventurer William Augustus Bowles as an Indian chief, who had sought refuge with the Creek Indians and fought with them to attempt to expel the Spanish from Florida. It's still too early in the year to appreciate the gardens, but a long lawn drops down through a set of terraces to a long pond. I also visit the church at Ewelme, an astonishing place with medieval stone corbels and Victorian wooden angels lining the roof (one of the corbels depicts Edward the Third, of whom there is more anon), high wooden rood screens and an equally high gothic font cover, a gold altar by Ninian Comper featuring Sebastian, George and Michael, a floor covered in medieval tiles, walls decorated with a medieval IHS monogram in gothic black and red letters, as well as several alabaster tombs decorated with brasses, painted shields and angels.
In the Midlands itself, I visit the church of St Peter's at Wootton Wawen. The building's tower dates back to the Saxon period and the structure is a rather chaotic accretion of all that has passed since. Corbels of Edward and Philippa flank a window of Victorian stained glass, dating from Gilbert Scott's restoration. Alabaster tombs sit alongside Victorian hatchments and Baroque monuments, including an exceptional monument with a winged skull. The roof remains wooden, like that of a tithe barn. Nearby is the house of Coughton Court, a building owned by the Throckmorton family. Having been implicated in plots against Elizabeth and the gunpowder plot, the family were displaced from English life and the building seems to reflect it. The exterior remains Tudor, with an ornate gatehouse with half timbered buildings behind and parterre gardens. The interior reflects a family with social pretensions but little finance, with each room being decorated in an anodyne style that could have existed at any point from the 17th to 19th centuries. Some wooden sixteenth century panelling and furniture remains and I am struck by the family mascot, an elephant, appearing above the dining room doors, as well as by a good collection of tapestries. However, the majority of the painting are mediocre portraits of little merit (save one arresting 16th century English memento mori portrait) and the family seem to have been more interested in seditious Catholic relics like the Pretender's gloves than in anything else. The building is warrened with priest holes (recusancy seems to have been endemic in this part of Warwickshire, with a similar story applying at Baddesley Clinton and most of the village at Wootton Wawen remaining Catholic), while the nineteenth century saw the construction of an especially grim Catholic chapel alongside the Anglican church adjacent to the house.
Finally, I also travel to Kilpeck in Herefordshire, which more than lives up to its promise. The pinkish red Romanesque church rather reminds me of the Watts chapel in Surrey, which was presumably based on it. Like the Watts chapel, Kilpeck's door is decorated with a tympanum showing the green man, the tree of life., basilisks and manticores. The roof is lined with corbels of bears, sheela-na-gigs, musicians, dancers and fish. In such a deserted setting, which was especially windswept at the time of my visit, it seems a little like coming across Angkor Wat. Walking through the graveyard, I look at the Castle ruins. The Norman moat has begun to fill again with the rain, while there is the incongruous setting of flowering primrose in snow. The few remaining castle walls seem to have little time left, with a large crack splitting one of them and ivy growing over the other. Both have been fenced off. Behind the ruins and past the bare tree branches and their burden of mistletoe, like the black mountains. As I return, I look at the harvest moon, its red hue shrouded by the night clouds.Labels: Literature, Russia
posted by Richard 11:40 AM
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Departing for London one morning, I found myself waiting for a train on a rural train station platform. It was a misty morning and I could see my breath curl into white patterns suspended in the air. The grey shadow of the church spire in the distance seemed to be floating aloft in the air, the mist divorcing it from the ground. Train lines disappear into the mist as they proceed beneath a bridge crossing the tracks. As I arrive in London, the mists gradually dissipate and the warmth of London's climate leads to a pleasant summer-like day in the middle of February. Crocuses and Daffodils are starting to come into flower.
I begin by walking through Islington to the Estorick Collection. I pass the church of St Mary, with its baroque tower, classical portico and strange modernist baroque interior with its Egyptianate columns. Further along lies the Union Chapel, an eruption of redbrick gothic amidst rows of dun coloured Georgian terraces. The collection itself lies on a rather nondescript square adjacent to an old Tudor tower. The contents remind me of the Guggenheim in Venice, with its Chiricos, Severinis and Boccionis. More prototypical futurist works are represented by Boccioni's Modern Idol, Russolo's Music, Carra's Leaving the Theatre and Severini's The Boulevard and Cubist Still Life. Some of the most interesting exhibits are the more conventional, as with the neo-impressionist Balla's Portrait of Carlo Fontana as opposed to his futurist Hand of the Violinist with its Bergsonesque interpretation of time. I have to admit that the further the painters deviated from futurism tenets, the more I warmed to them, especially Campigli's Etruscan influenced works, Modigliani's African-influenced portraits, Chirico's metaphysical Revolt of the Sage and Guttuso's Marxist polemic Death of a Hero.
Travelling southwards, I pass by St John the Evangelist, a Georgian Waterloo church before proceeding to Southwark. I look in Pugin's Catholic cathedral with its gleaming white arches contrasting with its mundane exterior, the ruins of Christchurch and the peace garden at the Imperial War Museum with its iron mandala, circula dharma pattern, earth, air, water and fire sculptures and language pillar with inscriptions in Tibetan, English, Chinese and Hindi. There's also a collection of the thirty four trees that colonised Britain after the ice age; Whitebeam and Pussy Willow, for example. Squirrels chase one another in the park. The day concludes with a trip to the Coliseum's performance of The Mikado. I don't particularly care for Gilbert and Sullivan but I suppose it was an pleasant enough diversion. The stage was distorted with slanted floors leading to trompe l'oeil rooms further back. Everything, from a giant gramophone to a pot plant is in bleached white. The singers appear dressed as if at a European spa in the nineteen thirties, making lines like "we are gentleman of Japan" sound rather odd, but in spite of the idea that this is Gilbert's best researched and most realistic opera, the engagement with Japanese culture is superficial, restricted to one song. Stripped of the costume, the opera works rather better in a European context; the satire directed against Pooh-bar applies well to Britain's rather nepotistic political culture. The result looks more like Jeeves and Wooster, with Richard Stuart's Ko-Ko rather resembling Terry Thomas. The lyrics to I've Got a Little List had been customised for the occasion, referring to the Archbishop of Canterbury and our dear leader, Prudence Brown.
Returning the following week, I briefly visit Butterfield's All Saints on Margaret Street, with its red and black bricks, tapering spire and an opulent interior with its tiles, mosaics and gilding. I also pass by the Georgian church of St George, Immaculate Conception on Farm Street and the Americana represented by the Grosvenor Chapel. Tracing my route back, I arrive at Piccadilly. There's something a little forced about the From Russia exhibition at the Royal Academy, with its attempt to yoke a disparate set of paintings loaned from the Hermitage and Tretyakov galleries into a cohesive whole. The just so story used to achieve this is one of the influence of French art on Russian painting. The exhibition begins with discussing how both French and Russian art in the late nineteenth century turned away from mythical subjects towards naturalism (just at the same point as the Pre-Raphaelites retreated from the industrial age into legend and myth), as with Repin's oddly Renoiresque Manifesto of October 17th, 1905. The likes of Camille Corot influenced landscape painting, as with Isaak Levitan (Chekhov's favourite artist) hauntingly empty After the Rain. The Russian pastoralism is rather more ideological than simply picturesque though as with Repin's Leo Tolstoy Barefoot, showing the Count dressed as a pesant or Nesterov's mystical landscape showing the murdered Tsarevich Demetrius (a painting disturbingly reminiscent of Holman Hunt's painting of the infant christ). This is then followed by showing French works purchased by Russian collectors; the pastoral theme being reciprocated with Monet's The Pond at Montgeron, Haystack at Giverny and Poppy Field and Cezanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire (at least one of the later Russian paintings could almost be taken for a Cezanne reproduction), Gauguin's Vairaumati Tei Oa (Her Name is Vairaumati) and Landscape with Peacocks.
From this point, the narrative becomes more diffuse, with the introduction of works like Manet's In the Bar, Renoir's In the Garden. Tatlin visited Picasso, Alexandra Exter worked with Leger, Chagall settled in Paris - giving new protein to French painting. And with the arrival of Diaghilev, Leon Bakst and the Ballets Russes, Paris became enamoured of all things Russian. The 1910 Jack of Diamonds show had exhibited Ivan Mashkov's Self Portrait with Pyotr Konchalovsky, a parody of Cezanne's Girl at the Piano, replacing the two girls with the artists as strongmen, playing Spanish popular tunes rather than Wagner. Simultaneously, the French started to go east, literally in the case of Matisse who was stunned by the candlelit icons in Orthodox churches. The most prominent works of the exhibition include Picasso's The Dryad and Farm Woman (Bust) (I can never really like Picasso after his Cubist phase and tend to prefer a nearby Braque painting; Picasso seems too intent on dehumanising, on decomposing individuals into objects) and Matisse's The Dance and The Red Room (Harmony in Red). The former almost has the quality of a graphic design to it in its simplicity, although the latter seemed the more engaging to me with its innocuous domestic setting conflicting with the riotous patterning and an inset view of the green wilds that's rather reminiscent of Velasquez. Fauvism was to become a critical influence on Russian neo-primitivism, with Vlaminck's Stream, Rousseau's The Muse Inspiring the Poet and Derain also represented (though I find myself preferring his later De Chiricoesque The Old Town Cognes) alongside Van Gogh's Portait of Dr Felix Rey.
The Russian response to this is interesting, taking French ideas and incorporating them into the context of orthodox iconography and folk art. While Picasso drew inspiration from Oceanic and African art, Goncharova and a number of her contemporaries formed a group who looked to folk art, peasant carvings and street signs. Picasso's massive Farm Woman, resembling a Moai or totem, speaks to Natalia Goncharov's Pillars of Salt, taking the Biblical scene and applying it to the context of folk Baba images. From the Union of Youth group, David Burlyuk's Portrait of Vasily Kamensky is essentially a secularised icon, with painters like Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin having originally been trained as icon painters (an icon of the Madonna is indeed included as his response to the first world war, alongside his Matisse influenced The Bath of the Horse). Chagall's work also dwells on subjects both Russian and Jewish, as in The Red Jew. Nonetheless, some of the most interesting work is more directly influenced, as with Altman's Cubist Portrait of Anna Akhmatova (alhtough something about the colouring and the use of modern techniques in a conventional manner reminded me of Lempicka). Alexandra Exter's Still Life, Filonov's crystalline painting of war and Nadezhda Udaltsova's City at Night are a distinctly Russian synthesis of Cubism and Futurism. Much more individual and unusual are Kandinsky's Winter and Composition VIII, followed by Malevich and his Suprematist trinity of Black Cross, Black Circle and Black Square, as well as other works that could easily sit alongside the likes of Mondrian.
Predictably, there are also some more odd and awkward works. Bakst's conventional Portrait of Sergei Diaghilev with his nanny introduces a room filled with works like Vrubel's symbolist Six Winged Seraph, landscapes by Diaghilev's set painter Roerich and Boris Grigoriev's portrait of the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold showing him as both clown and impresario. A couple of Cezannesque paintings like Fish Seller are included by Tatlin, before showing one of his constructivist sculptures, Corner Counter Relief with its echoes of Duchamp, and a model of his proposed tower with its grim forecast of art becoming subservient to the state.
I completed my visit to modern painting exhibitions with Tate Britain's exhibition on the Camden Town Group. Passing first by Westminster Cathedral, I felt that it would be ideal if the building is never finished; it's present state of sepulchral gloom being far preferable to the prospect of it glittering with gold mosaic. I hadn't really noticed the Eric Gill Stations of the Cross before. The Camden Town Group represented a kind of kitchen sink avant gardism (I'm not using the term lightly; Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman did both paint their kitchens). Once one removes social realism, the group fractures into a different styles, with the older Sickert influenced by Whistler and Degas in the midst of a group that favoured Van Gogh (transparently so in Gilman's painting of a Norwegian canal bridge), Cezanne and Gauguin, albeit at time when Kokoschka and Beckmann might have been better models. It's a particularly literary form of painting that rather looks like a visual representation of Hangover Square or Keep the Aspidistra Flying (if not The Forsyte Saga and Anna of the Five Towns. Their social realism often has something rather anitquated about it, as with Robert Bevan's paintings of the London horse cabs in contrast to Ginner's juxtaposition of flower girls in Piccadilly with the taxis and buses rushing past. Sickert's Gallery of the Old Mogul and Drummond's In the Cinema engage with cinema but the music hall and the circus were nonetheless the preferred venues for the group, along with Drummond's painting of Brompton Oratory. Much of the London landscapes focus on the pastoral aspects of London, as with Gore's The Fig Tree. Although Ginner and Gilman did several paintings of industrial Leeds or showing factories at work, Spencer Gore was more interested in places like the new garden cities or Brighton, and the group as a whole (save Sickert) did many paintings of locations like Romney Marsh, Richmond, Devon and even rural Sweden. These paintings seem to take them closest to the spirit of chosen modeles like Gauguin and Cezanne, as with Bevan's Dunn's Cottage or Ginner's cloisonnist Clayhidon. It's difficult not to conclude that their excursions amongst the lowlife are a form of tourism felt to accompany the mantle of bohemianism. Relatives tried to persuade them to lead proper English lives. Their reports on the city are slightly apologetic.
Vast swathes of the paintings being exhibited fell into the category of showing solitary figures, usually female, in down at heel surroundings as exemplars of ennui, with Gilman's Marxism in particular feeding into this (although Gore's parallel portraits of his wife and his servant seems more born from snobbery, in contrast's portraits of his landlady). Gilman's Meditation, The Coral Necklace and Girl with a Teacup, to name but three, are all variations of a theme handled by Sickert in rather more novelistic terms, often showing what look like frozen moments in a wider narrative, as in Off to the Pub, The Little Tea Party or Ennui with its use of stuffed animals to symbolise the relationship being shown. This is particularly so with Sickert's Camden Town Murder series, with this title ambiguously competing with others like What Shall We Do for the Rent?. On these paintings it's difficult to tell whether the passive clay-like flesh of the women is already dead (something here reminded me of Lucien Freud), whether it is showing two lovers or client and prostitute, whether the poses are of despair or of threat. They rather remind me of Hitchcock's Frenzy. It's also worth comparing this to Manet's Petit Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe or Olympia Where Manet is erotic, Sicket is seedy, using dark midtones that revolted Gilman, the "frigid Anglican" as Lewis called him. Nudes had to be removed from the easels of the studio at 19 Fitzroy Street, where Spencer Gore's cleaning woman dispensed tea on Saturday afternoons, so that the sensibilities of Gore's uncle, the Bishop of Oxford, would not be affronted. Sickert is also distanced from the rest of the group by his sense of enthralled melancholia with pictures like Noctes Ambrosianae and The New Bedford; only Ginner comes close to replicating it in his painting of The Circus. Ginner in fact emerges as the strongest of the group overall besides Sickert, with paintings like Evening, Dieppe. I depart, walk past the Buxton Memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens, enter the tube station and disappear.
Had PG Wodehouse been inclined to wrote medieval morality plays, the result might well have been quite similar to Waugh's Vile Bodies. Occupying an awkward vantage point somewhere between The Radetzky March and The Good Soldier Schwejk, the centre of the novel is Father Rothschild and his observation that "these young people have got hold of the other end of the stick and for all we know it may be the right one. They say 'If a thing's not worth doing very well, it's not be worth doing at all.'" Waugh veers between a denunciation of the Bright Young Things born of sexual disgust (the vile bodies of the title) and of the moribund and decrepit society that is about to destroy itself in the first world war, "we shall all be walking into the jaws of destruction again, protesting our pacific intentions." Some parts of the novel also remind me of the parts of Howard's End where Helen goes for a ride in a motor car; "the real cars that become masters of men, who exist solely for their own propulsion through space, for whom their drivers, clinging precariously to the steering wheel, are as important as his stenographer to a stockbroker. These are in perpetual flux, a vortex of combining and disintegrating units." The same thing happens with Nina's sickness as she looks down from the plane, a representation of the machine age that rather recalls Celine. Zorba the Greek was apparently written under the influence of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Buddhism and it would certainly appear to uneasily veer between these respective extremes, between Nietzsche's idea of the superman ("in other more primitive and creative ages, Zorba would have been the head of the tribe... I think of god as being exactly like me" with Zorba's anecdote of telling god to get out of his way) as counterpointed to Schopenhauer's idea of seeking a point of stillness ("life is trouble.. I listened to Zorba's words and realised that they showed me a sure, attractive and very human path to tread. It was again the spirit of the Mara..."). The novel flits between these two extremes and others, as with the christian Saint Bacchus becoming entangled with Dionysus or the paradox that the fulfilment of the narrator's Buddhism is to kill the Buddha; "and ordered the Buddha within me to dissolve."
I don't generally read a great deal of contemporary fiction but have recently decided to try a little. While revered by the mainstream press Ian McEwan tends to be reviled by many weblogs for a combination of perceived artistic (his novels broadly use the techniques of the realist novel and while Gabriel Josipovici's description of his writing as being little different to Defoe or Dickens is a rather trite complaint, it could certainly sit easily alongside Forster and James) and political conservatism. On Chesil Beach certainly contains several passages that suggest a degree of scepticism as to political radicalism; Florence's mother describes the Soviet Union as little different to Nazi Germany. As Florence believes it to be essentially benevolent it is a little inconsistent for her to describe Edward's membership of CND as being akin to a medieval millenarian cult (particularly when she too belongs to it). However, whether any of this really translates to support for conservative ideas is an extrapolation the novel fails to justify, particularly when McEwan comments that he has not disavowed any of the views he once held as a member of CND. My own reservations about McEwan are rather different. As the above descriptions attest, the novel is concerned with events in the years that Larkin described sexual intercourse as having invented in ("This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine ...This was still the era when to be young was a social encumbrance.") At one point McEwan's omniscient narrator declares that "Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself." This seems true of one of the characters, Edward, who travels in the course of the novel from English middle class awkwardness to becoming a sixties dropout. However, Florence's "visceral dread" of sex is deliberately left unexplained and can certainly not be laid at the hand of history. Similarly, her suggestion that their relationship be platonic, with her tolerating him having sex with other women hardly seems to be ahead of its time in the way McEwan seems to believe it to be; quite the contrary. The idea that Edward's life would have been much better if he had accepted also seems somewhat unwarranted, given that the novel itself holds out little more than a post in her father's firm for choosing that road. McEwan generally seems to prefer the aberrant and unexplained too much to be able to work fully within the constraints of the realist novel, where the struggles of Julien Sorrel or Dorothea Brooke is entirely in keeping with the spirit of their age. By contrast, one if left wondering why McEwan chose a historical setting at all and least of all one that can barely be within the bounds of his own memory.
The other writer I have recently read for the first time is Martin Amis with London Fields. Following some rather disappointing comments he has recently made, the Guardian did feel it had to praise him for his political engagement, quoting Ryszard Kapuscinski:"Twenty years ago, I was in Africa, and this is what I saw: I went from revolution to coup d'Etat, from one war to another; I witnessed, in effect, history in the making, real history, contemporary history, our history. But I was also surprised: I never saw a writer. I never met a poet or a philosopher—even a sociologist. Where were they? Such important events, and not a single writer anywhere?
Then I would return to Europe and I would find them. They would be at home, writing their little domestic stories: the boy, the girl, the laughing, the intimacy, the marriage, the divorce—in short, the same story we've been reading over and over again for a thousand years. You know, the other day I was reading about the novels that won the annual French prizes. It was incredible. None of these books had anything to do with our world, our reality—nothing. There was one about an unwanted child, and another about a boy, a girl, the laughing, the intimacy... so much of our literature is so very traditional, even when seen as being avant-garde. And if avant-garde, it is only avant-garde because of its style—as if assembled in a workshop. It is never avant-garde for its subject; it is never caught actually looking out at the world. The writer is always looking over his shoulder, noting the position of his predecessor. Contemporary literature is a very private affair."
It's a valid point but London Fields is characterised by a sense of English life as an irrelevance, a place from where history has fled ("Bellow says that America is the only place to be, because it contains the 'real modern action'"). I recall him later comparing England to Switzerland, making me think of Greene's comment about centuries of peace and prosperity creating nothing more than the cuckoo clock. The England depicted by Amis has the vestigial trace of social importance, whether it is the economics of Thatcher's Britain ("no-one seemed to have thought through the implications of a world where everyone cheated") to the vague threat of nuclear devastation. In terms of style too, Amis is far from McEwan's realism. His characters appear as automata with names that reflect allegorical or ironic descriptions ("in fiction people become coherent and intelligible - and they aren't like that... people are chaotic quiddities"), his prose style draws attention to the narration rather than establishing it as a transparent window on events. Amis is preoccupied with the idea of the unreliability of narration, with lies being woven by most of the characters in their speech and writing ("the truth doesn't matter anymore and is not wanted"). The novel reassigns the role of author to the character of Nicola, describing her as a puppermaster, using this to thwart the generic constraints of the detective novel at every turn ("she outwrote me"). In short, it's a very English compromise between realism and post-modernism.Labels: Art, Literature, London
posted by Richard 10:43 AM
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Brookwood cemetery is not, it has to be said, quite as interesting as its earlier counterparts at Highgate and Kensal Green. It lacks the elaborate monuments found in its counterparts and since it is much larger and wilder it is often a surprise to come across a solitary monument that it larger than a normal tombstone. Its feels like an inferior imitation of its predecessors, a form of down at heel grandeur. The tombs often seem to be in a worse state than those in London itself, while the very conceit behind its existence, that of cadavers being brought to it out of London by train, also confers a rather shabby feel with mass production being applied to undertaking. It is wilder, with robins resting on gravestones while squirrels and rabbits scamper nearby. The grounds are planted with giant redwood and rhododendron, giving it the air of a park rather than of English countryside. Nor did it help that at the time of my visit it had been raining heavily, with everything cold and damp. Moss had displaced grass in many parts.
Many of the monuments are also rather out of kilter for an English cemetery. Near to the main entrance is the Zoroastrian cemetery, where depictions of flame replace crosses. The tombs here are some of the finest in the cemetery, with Victorian grandiosity being welded to Parsee sensibility; ceramic depictions of Persian figures adorn tombs whose arches are filled with elaborate tracery. The fravahar emblazons many tombs and hands hold tinder. Nearby are islamic tombs (including some for members of the Ottoman nobility) with headstones apparently designed as a miniature Taj Mahal or covered with golden domes. There's a funeral in the ismaili cemetery; I can hear chanting and see smoke rising. I'm also struck by a solitary Japanese grave; a square patch of gravel with a grass tumulus at the centre surmounted by a single post. Some of the European tombs are quite different as well; much of the area is occupied by a World War Two cemetery, with headstones and monuments in gleaming white stone. A circular monument to soldiers killed in Norway rather reminds me of the National Memorial Arboretum. Several nations are represented in this section; Czechs, Poles, Americans and Turks.
The cemetery is bisected by a road, and this half of the cemetery is home to more traditional English tombs. Many of these such as the domed columbarium or the near collapsed Bent Memorial are in an extremely poor state of repair, though the finest monument I saw there, the Drake Monument, has recently had its roof restored. The building is in Italian gothic, with red marble contrasting with the brick. A mosaic frieze around it has formerly spelt out a homiletic; I find a few blue and gold tiles neatly placed on the balustrade beside it. Other monument in this section include several celtic crosses designed as quite faithful replicas of Irish counterparts, the pink granite Hughes Mausoleum with its Egyptianate lotus columns, a wooden lychgate to a small churchyard within the cemetery and a tomb that consists of a gothic arch design. More oddly, this section of the cemetery is also home to a series of arts &' crafts buildings that form an Eastern Orthodox Brotherhood dedicated to guarding the bones of St Edward the Martyr. The cemetery also houses the remains of Rebecca West, John Singer Sergeant and Charles Bradlaugh, who must make odd company for a saint.
Surrealism is often described as a Freudian movement, following Breton's use of Freudian techniques in a neurological hospital during world war one. Yet reading Aragon's Paris Peasant I find myself concluding that his brand of surrealism is better described as Jungian, an attempt to weld mythic archetypes of the collective unconscious ("not a retreat into solitude but rather a retreat into a world of similarly adventurous spirits.. the town's collective unconscious") onto an empirical reality. This is why Aragon is concerned with psychogeography, seeing it as the basis for this collective unconscious. At the same time, for all his insistence on the concrete Aragon also dismisses logic in favour of the imagination, reintroducing the idea of solipsism instead of a collective dream. One of the things that had struck me about Thomas Bernhard's Correction was the opposition of nature and artifice in it, as with the stuffed animals created by one of the characters and by Roithammer's plan to build a conical building in the middle of forest. In his autobiography, Gathering Evidence, Bernhard does emerge as something of a romantic in his attitude to nature, going for long walks in the woods and only beginning to recover from his illness when exposed to the mountain views at the sanatorium. He decries his school on the grounds that it turns "his whole nature into something that is the antithesis of all that is natural," before saying that his work in a shop allows him to lead "and intense, natural and useful existence." Nonetheless, Bernhard seems ambivalent about this romanticism, feeling that his grandfather's withdrawal into solitude had marked him as an eccentric, while his time working in business is surely the antithesis of all that romanticism had stood for; the importance of being useful to him is simply utilitarian. But even here, his is far from consistent, writing that he never had any intent of wasting his time in the shop and seeking instead to resume his musical career.
Reading Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos it occurred to me that one of the feature of modern society is the way it has produced few social novels in spite of its social upheavals and growing inequality. Exceptions like Wolfe seem few and far between when compared to the body of literature the late nineteenth and early twentieth century produced under similar social conditions. Modern society appears solely concerned with the individual rather than with society at large and our literatuyre would appear to reflect this. While American literature previously produced socially committed authors like Dos Passos, Dreiser, Lewis, Crane and Anderson, history has tended to remember the likes of Hemingway and to produce writers like Mailer to walk in his footsteps. Perhaps this is why the writer most noted for being influenced by Dos Passos is Sartre.
Food cooked: Valencian paella, Chorizo and chestnut stew, Bouillabaisse, Hungarian lamb with pickel sauce, Sri Lankan banana curry, Swedish sausage and potato, Chicken fricassee, French chocolate cake, Swedish salmon casserole, Harissa spiced chicken, Moroccan chicken with preserved lemons, Irish mustard chicken, Keralan sea bass and coconut curry, Roast Pork with Prunes, Lemon Tart, Czech Salmon with lemon and caraway, Chinese tea smoked duck, Italian chicken with chestnut and pistachio, Kleftico, Kabuli chicken, French cherry batter pudding, Lamb with pickle sauce, Tarragonan fish stew, Indian chicken with almond sauce, Hradschin fish, Balti chicken, Yassa chicken, Borscht, Himmel und erde, Italian pork cooked in milk, Drunken chicken with tequila, coconut soup, Balti chicken with tamarind, Catalan chicken with prawns, Mughal chicken, Pheasant with sauerkraut and wine, Chicken with almonds and grapes, Pork with chestnuts and wine, Meatballs with apple and cider, Roast Duck, Lepeshki.Labels: Cooking, England, Food, Literature
posted by Richard 9:40 AM
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
When visiting Coventry it's rather difficult not to feel like English visitors to Rome in the eighteenth century, struck by the contrast between the ruined grandeur of the old and the premature decrepitude of the modern. Coventry is in many respects a metonym for many towns in the Midlands; a medieval city with gothic cathedrals, ruined monasteries, half-timbered houses and an early Twentieth century town hall in keeping with the Tudor style of the surrounding buildings. In parts, it reminds me of Lichfield, with the churches and cathedral spires being cast in the same sandstone. It's also now home to dulled concrete and tarnished metal buildings that lack any form of ornamentation or continuity with the previous structures. Where gothic accrues patina over time, modernism simply becomes a decaying vision of the future. It has the feel of a place where civilisation collapsed. The most obvious expession of this is the difference between the city's two cathedrals. I've heard people speak of the bombing of Coventry (conventration, as it was later to be known), of how the entire sky burned for miles around as a medieval city was reduced to cinders. As a ruin, St Michael's cathedral with its tall spire and blasted arches, retains a great deal of melancholy dignity. It reminds like a David Friedrich painting, as I look at the remaining pieces of stained glass in the window arches and a funerary monument still handing on the wall with a skull and crossbones beneath it. A bronze effigy of the first Bishop of Coventry bears the reversed figure of a swastika on its mitre. Figures of squirrels can still be seen in the apse tracery alongside real ones chasing each one through the ruins and onto the grass outside. With the trees being out of leaf, both they and the cathedral look like skeletons of their former self, with the hope of the old stones putting forth some form of new leaf in spring. In practice, this spring never came. Nearby is Basil Spence's new cathedral. Harshly modernist, it lacks spires, arches or buttresses and makes few concessions to ornamentation, save for a form of fan vaulting on the ceiling. John Piper's stained glass and Graham Sutherland's altar tapestry are both striking but seem imprisoned in darkened gloom. Outside a sign on one of the chapels warns visitors to beware falling masonry from the old cathedral. It's difficult to resist imagining a future where the new cathedral has to be demolished while the ruins of the old still stand; though whether christianity remains in England by then is probably a moot point.
Nearby lie the ruins of Greyfriars, a church demolished during the reformation. A later church, Christchurch, was build around the surviving spire, only for it to fall again and once more leave the spire intact. The remains of the pre-Dissolution Priory have a good museum adjoined, showing displays of medieval tiling and some extraordinarily well preserved medieval painting from the book of revelations. A nearby park houses some Victorian churches and a somewhat unexpected monument to the inventor of the bicycle. Less striking is the church of St John the Baptist, a squat affair whose tower seems fortress-like; it served as a prison during the Civil War. Most impressive of all is Holy Trinity, the de facto cathedral of the city. The church is notable for its Victorian stained glass (as well as some rather garish modern stained glass), Minton tiling and beautiful bossed ceilings. George Eliot once worshipped here and it almost leads to appreciate her continued reverence for aspects of christianity, but the church's most famous feature does nonetheless leave me room for pause; a doom painting of the last judgement, showing souls rising from the grave and the damned being lead to the mouth of hell as Jesus looks on. The artistry is cruder than that of Bosh and has an almost cartoonlike quality to it (certainly in comparison to the similar mosaic I saw at Torcello a few months ago). It's a disturbing subject that summarises christianity at it worst, for all of the undeniable force inherent in the work. A modern gothic replica of the earlier Coventry cross stands nearby. The Herbert art gallery is mostly shut, save for Hepworth's Figure (Walnut) and Cormac Faulkner's sound installation, I am an Instrument, which plays different sounds depending on one's position as one ascends a staircase; a sort of combination of Eno's ambient music and Cage's aleatoric music. Oh, and for some Peruvian stick insects, for reasons I couldn't quite discern.
If I have been dismissive of the modern here (as is often my habit), I should mention the National Memorial Arboretum. England really has little tradition of collective memory. In the past churches and cathedrals would have been the primary vessel for mourning for the lost in wars, with some exceptions like the Crimean monument in Waterloo Place. After the First World War, crosses began to appear in village greens leading to monuments like Lutyens' cenotaph. By contrast, America, with its former secular tradition does have national monuments to the fallen in Washington, and the new Memorial at Alrewas is in that vein. Carved from portland stone, it is comprised of two hemispheres on a raised tumulus; it rather resembles Stonehenge or Silbury Hill and has been designed so that London will steam through a gap in the walls on one day of the year and hit a bronze wreath on a central dais. Nearby is a gilded obelisk and bronze statues of soldiers, again in the American vein. It's a surprisingly pagan structure.
The following day is to Lichfield Cathedral for a candlelight concert, which begins with Handel's Messiah, followed by Corelli's Christmas Concerto and John Tavener's settings of The Lamb and The Tyger. These are particularly effective, with the nursery rhyme quality of The Lamb made sinister and sepulchral and The Tyger made dissonant and chaotic. I feel awkward when it comes to carols and demur from singing. The Victorian rood screen behind the choir is lit up during the performance, but there is darkness behind, only broken by the moonlight shining through the stained glass and making web-like patterns on the gothic arches.
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy can probably be best described as a fallen summa theologica, an attempt to account for the lack of metaphysical certainty in a post-reformation world ("the superstition of our age, our religious madness"), cataloguing the myriad schisms undergone by the church and the number of fanatics that have founded new cults as "they drive out one superstition with another... how many silly souls have imposters deluded!". It incessantly probes the boundaries of the immaterial and the naturalistic, cataloguing anecdotes in an encyclopaedic manner (a painter who tortured a man in order to depict it, a Swiftian tale of medical treatment by applying bellows to the fundament). The summa encompasses both the christian and the pagan, leading Burton into some rather heterodox observations. For instance, his dismissal of asceticism; "a company of cynics... that contemn the world, contemn themselves... yet in that contempt are more proud than any man living whatsoever," his dismissal of the virtuous nature of poverty "there are those that approve of a mean estate but on condition that they never want themselves," or his appeal for understanding of suicides; "we ought not to be so rash and rigorous in our censures as some are." Whilst still avowing religious orthodoxy, the dialogic approach Burton adopts castigates other religions and christian sects as well as questioning some of the basic tenets of christianity; "why does he suffer so much mischief and evil to be done, if he is able to help, why doth he not assist good or resist bad?" Burton also decouples religion and morality, arguing that "the nature of injury" is sufficient to keep men obedient to the law. Finally, he also questions the validity of a universal religion, suggesting the need for infinite religions for infinute circumstances.
Reading Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, I was struck by the extent that is in many respects a conservative, christian text. Whereas, figures like Godwin broadly argued that dramatic changes to the social context would have equally dramatic ramifications for human behaviour, Wollstonecraft is much more meliorist in her demands for social change, concedes to a large extent the fixed character of human nature (and therefore that women are inferior to men in some respects) and couches her arguments in terms of christian virtue, arguing that the current condition of women only fits them for the seraglio. Her radicalism essentially consists of the fact that her account of virtue is either neutral of gender (as with her argument that chastity is surely a virtue for men as well as women, although "women are more chaste than men") or swayed in favour of the masculine (reason in particular is seen as something women have been deprived of; "women at present are by ignorance rendered foolish or vicious"). These ambiguities are perhaps best typified by her description of 'nature.' In the one instance, she admits of some natural differences between the genders, on the other she sees modern women as needing to "bring women back to nature," as with her denunciation of Rousseau's women as "unnatural."
Reading Woolf's The Years, I found myself thinking of her statement in Character in Fiction that "on or about December 10 1910 human nature changed... The first signs of it are recorded in the books of Samuel Butler, in The Way of All Flesh in particular; the plays of Bernard Shaw continue to record it. In life one can see the change, if I may use a homely illustration, in the character of one's cook. The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing room, now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat... All human relations have shifted - those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910." Although I tended to mentally connect the well known quote in the first sentence with Freud, Woolf was more preoccupied at the time by social relations than by consciousness, in the vein of Lytton Strachey, who once wrote in a letter to Woolf that "Is it prejudice, do you think, that makes us hate the Victorians, or is it the truth of the case? They seem to me to be a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites; but perhaps really there is a baroque charm about them which will be discovered by our great-great-grandchildren as we have discovered the charm of Donne, who seemed intolerable to the 18th century. Only I don't believe it." It's an odd concept, since much of The Years is spent documenting the awkwardness of the characters in dealing with servants, feeling that one must prove oneself superior to them or be cheated; Woolf is nothing if not an arch snob. The Years is ostensibly concerned with documenting the damage wrought by the repressive character of Victorian society, citing the demise of Parnell as an example, but equally much of the narrative of the novel seem to work in exactly the opposite direction, describing a loss of collective identity as social roles become more reflexive ("What's I?.. two sparks of life in two separate bodies.. what is this moment and what are we"), this time citing the Suffragettes as an example ("all their clothes are the same, she thought; all their lives are the same.. and which is right?.. which is wrong?"). The change to human nature seems something both liberating and traumatic for Woolf ("the old platitude about solitude in a crowd was true").
Whilst the fiction of Wyndham Lewis is perhaps one of the most philosophically fluent in English literature, with clear demonstrations of influence from Bergson, Frazier and Nietzsche, he also belongs to the rank of writers like Celine, Hamsun and Pound who remain tainted to some degree of their connections with Nazism; Lewis could be broadly described as anti-humanist, a stance that led him to contribute to Mosley’s publications as well as to his (later recanted) admiration of Hitler. Lewis believed that man could only rise above the beasts by classical detachment and control, and he followed Goethe in distinguishing between 'natures' (the natural men who achieved this; "the educated man like the true social revolutionary, does not accept life in this way. He is in revolt.") and the vast majority of people who were inevitably puppets or automata ("my puppets... the creaking men machines"). Dehumanisation is in other words a central characteristic of his aesthetics. This type of bastardised Nietzscheanism is very much in evidence throughout The Wild Body, a collection of stories set amongst the "primitive" peoples of Brittany. Whereas Balzac had lent something of the noble savage to the Bretons, Lewis has no truck with any romanticisation of the primitive, repeatedly describing his characters as animals (even characterising the art of novelist as being akin to that of an entomologist). The characters are accordingly frequently observed in forms of struggle for power with each other, as with Beau Sejour where a Polish cuckoo displaces a French couple from their home (this does rather lend his fiction a certain tedious masculinism that resembles Norman Mailer, alongside his frequent snide references to jews and homosexuals).
The depiction of these petty ubermensch is offset by the importance of laughter in Lewis and the influence of Bergson's ideas on the subject. Bergson argues that the source of humour is the "mechanical encrusted upon the living" According to Bergson "the comic does not exist outside of what is strictly human." He thinks that humour involve an incongruous relationship between human intelligence and habitual or mechanical behaviours. As such, humour serves as a social corrective, helping people recognize behaviours that are inhospitable to human flourishing. As Lewis puts it; "the root of the comic is sought in the sensations resulting from the observations of a thing behaving like a person." However, in Lewis it is never entirely clear whether he is seeking to deride the "mechanical encrusted upon the living" or to degrade the living to the condition of the mechanical; as with the influence of Frazier, it can look remarkably like scapegoating. For example, he writes that "violence is the essence of laughter.. it is merely the failure or inversion of force." Some of this ambiguity especially occurs in the first story of the collection, A Soldier of Humour where he describes laughter as the foundation of his philosophy as sex was for Freud; "I am a large blonde clown... I am aware that I am a barbarian... I realise the uncivilised nature of this laughter." In what follows, humour is used to degrade the soldier's mock opponent in the story but the idea of such a thing being uncivilised is one of the few hints of humanity that occur in the stories. Whereas Celine and Hamsun's affiliation from Nazism grew to a large extent from their romanticism, their opposition to the dehumanised machine like existence of modern society and preference for gesellschaft rather than gemeinschaft, Lewis is rather more of an anomaly, embracing that dehumanisation instead.
Much later in his career, The Childermass demonstrates many of the same characteristics as The Wild Body. The novel combines two generic sources; one the Platonic dialogue (Lewis adhering to Platonic concepts in defiance of Bergson's process philosophy) and the other Dante's Divine Comedy. The novel counterpoints the classical and christian through the format of the dialogue. On the one hand is the puppetlike representative of the authoritarian deity, known as the Bailiff. On the other are Hyperides and Alectryon, who broadly represent the rebellion of the ubermensch against god (with Lewis balancing his interest in Nietzsche against his interest in Catholicism); "persons possessed of conspicuous undemocratic abilities... must become outcaste in the midst of the modernist class-conscious orthodoxy... these exceptional persons would be considered as too noble.". The latter is described as wearing; "a Bangkok Swastika temple design imposed upon a rough brooch.. his face has no feminine imperfections... some romantic postulant of a much tired order in a militant epoch." By this point Lewis had become interested in Hitler as creating a Pan-European racial and cultural brotherhood, the Blutsgefuhl of the northern Europeans. After the First War, Lewis believed the individual self to be under attack from various sources, liberalism, and communism amongst them, and particularly from a Jewish conspiracy. Nonetheless, the novel also complicates things with the Bailiff's reaction to Alectryon; "have you no pure Anglo-Saxon.. I refuse to be dressed down by a dirty Dago." Nonetheless, the 'dressing down' that follows is essentially another instance of scapegoating. Alectryon's dialogue does indeed seem quite compatible with Nazi rhetoric; "homosexuality is a branch of the feminist revolution." By as is often the case, the Bailiff's rhetoric is quite similar; "the weak will not be encouraged to go on living and suppressing the strong." The text closes with the dissolution of the Court and Pullman's bullying of Satters into the endless ritual of meaningless activity, leaving the verdict of the debate open (although the original text closed on the roar of acclamation given to Alectryon).
It's a commonplace that the American novel tends to dwell on the individual in isolation, the pioneer and the rebel, whereas the European novel dwells on the individual as an unavoidably social animal. Melville simultaneously resides within both categories, siting his works away from society onboard ship whilst using that ship as a microcosm for society at large. In the case of Redburn there is also the presence of a more conventional social narrative, both in the details of Reburn's fall from the middle classes (Redburn's outsider status is conferred through his middle class status, in contrast to characters like Finn and Bumpo) and in its depiction of Liverpool society. The novel does also critique the notion of romanticising the outsider though, describing sailors as bearing the same relation to society as wheels to a coach (quot;deemed the refuse of the earth and the romantic view of them is principally held through romances" as well as uncoving inconsistencies in Larry's dismissal of society in favour of primitive islands when he reaches London). As often in his work the encounter with foreign cultures is used as a critique of American society; Reburn's initial prejudices (as with the anti-semitic description of the Jewish pawnbroker) are challenged by being treated"as if I were an African in Alabama," his horror at the treatment of Indian sailors (whose shipwrights had surpassed those of Europe) as if they were nothing more than sheep, and by his realisation that the thriving city of Liverpool once feared the economic damage from the curtailing of the slave trade; "I could never look at their swarthy limbs and manacles without being involuntarily reminded of four African slaves in the marketplace." Melville's attitudes are ambivalent; on the one hand he celebrates the extinction of national prejudice in American society (questioning whether Turks might not get to heaven before christians) while noticing that black Americans can behave more freely in Liverpool than in New York. There is also the question of the homosocial aspects of the novel, with the emergence of homosexuality as a marker of difference; although never stated this would seem to lie at the basis of Harry Bolton's escape ("feminine as a girl's... a delicate exotic.")
Antonioni's Blowup is something of an anomaly; ostensibly it inhabits the form of a detective film but lacks the assumptions that typically underlie this form of being able to precisely determine the truth behind events. Instead Antonioni's assumptions are neorealist, a reluctance to make moral judgements ("we have examined those moral attitudes very carefully, we have dissected them and analyzed them to the point of exhaustion. We have been capable of all this, but we have not been capable of finding new ones.") and an avoidance of neatly plotted stories in favor of disconnected episodic structures. Paul Bowles complained to Antonioni that a speech in which is character provided the key to the events was cut, leading to the riposte; "If I leave the speech in, everyone will know what the film is about, but if I take the speech out, everyone will say it is about this, it is about that, it is about the other. It will be controversial." Instead, Paul Castle's statement that he has no intent when he starts a painting, and that meaning only comes later becomes the key to the film. The film repeatedly denies the viewer access to the meaning behind events, forcing us to rely on the photographer's perception of what she saw behind the lens, mistaken or otherwise. Art, whether photography or cinema, is described as a contrivance not a transparent window on the world, as with the mime act and the director's erasure of his own character at the end. With that said, the film does allow its opacity to become slightly more transparent at points; it frequently invites the viewer to make judgements, as with its depiction of the misogynistic and lackadaisical protagonist, whose decadent existence lacks all convictions (as with the scene with him allowing a political placard to fall unhindered out of his car) and who inhabits a society whose Dionysianism seems mostly the product of boredom. Equally, the film does not leave the issue of whether a murder has taken place to chance; the photographer does find a body where his photographs had suggested it would be.Labels: England, Film, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 9:25 AM
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
DH Lawrence once complained of how we only know of the Etruscan way of death, not their way of life. The tombs survived long after the cities had been destroyed. Visiting the British Museum exhibition dedicated to the First Emperor, the centrepiece of which being specimens of the Terracotta Army, it's rather difficult not to be reminded of this observation. Even so, the comparison cannot be taken too far; Lawrence romantically portrayed the Etruscans as gentle artists overwhelmed by Roman imperialism whereas the Qin dynasty was depicted in Sima Qian's history as one of despotism and conquest. Much of the exhibition accordingly dwells on the militaristic aspects of the Qin dynasty, from their origins as horse breeders to the Zhou dynasty to its overthrow of the Zhou through the development of superior military strategy, such as the use of cavalry. The exhibition includes mass produced examples of crossbows, spears, swords and the bells used to sound the retreat. A brass rubbing shows Jing Qe's assassination attempt (the basis for the recent wuxia film - another example of contemporary Chinese pro-totalitarian and pro-reunification ideologies) The exhibition does tend to rehabilitate the First Emperor in so far glosses over earlier aspects of Chinese culture; the Zhou dynasty had after all produced Confucius, Lao Tsu and Mencius, creating a period for philosophy that had equalled Athens.
However, the exhibition does also contain examples of bells used for ceremonial purposes (lacking a clapper they had to be struck from the outside), various engraved bronze vessels, gold bowls, jade pendants and bi discs. Pottery tiles from the royal palaces show patterns of dragons, phoenixes, bi discs and sun flowers. It also dwells on some of the more functional aspects of Qin rule; the standardisation of weights, measures, coinage and of the language itself. Early coin designs were in the shapes of knives or spades. Yuan Yao's hanging scroll of the mythical city of Penglai (resting place of the immortals sought out by the Emperor and one influence for his necropolis) and Yuan Jiang's Ebung Palace are easily the most accomplished artworks in the exhibition. Both depict fantastical palaces set amidst the mountains and the exhibition also includes imperial inscriptions carved into the rock on the summits of various mountains. The Imperial tomb was itself designed to become one with the natural world, with the interior designed as a microcosm of his kingdom and the central pyramid having since become forested, thereby conferring the status of mountain spirit on the deceased. The principle is in most respects the opposite of the Western idea of architecture as a product of artifice, something to stand against nature.
This brings us to the statues themselves. Although mass-produced, each statue had to be completed by hand, adding details like moustaches and paintings, giving each of them a surprisingly individual aspect. A replica is included of how ones of the statues would have originally looked; like Roman sculpture it would have been painted and equipped with genuine weaponry. On some of the statues, paint has peeled away from the clay beneath creating an effect disturbingly like the decomposition of flesh from bone. The detail varies considerably in other respects, such as the wearing of hats or plain topknots. However, although the exhibition presents archers, generals cavalrymen and their horses and infantrymen, as well as a coach driver and four horses (the paint survives well here, with the the horses dappled and patterns decorating the coach) it also includes stable hands, civil servants, wrestlers, acrobats and musicians. Bronze geese and swans accompany them, as well as the bones of genuine horses and the tombs of real people; again, the difference between art and nature seems elided as with the intent to overcome the difference of life and death.
Afterwards, I have a look at the newly reopened Saint Pancras. It's oddly situated between something gleamingly futuristic and its original Victorian industrial gothic. The platforms shine with metal and glass beneath Scott's Venetian gothic brickwork and Barlow's painted blue girders. The presence of a largely deserted champagne bar serves as an apposite testament to fading of the city's years of plenty. It's also pleasant to see the statue of Betjeman with its quotation from Cornish Cliffs at the base; even if he wasn't a first class poet, it's too rare to see statues of writers.
During the evening, I go to a Radio3 arts recording at Broadcasting House, where Toby Litt performed a pair of Oulipo style pieces. The first 'Flatlish' was a piece written without ascenders or descenders, the second 'Japanglish' using the Japanese linguistic structure of alternating vowels and consonants ('y' being allowed as a vowel here), which included phrases like 'unopened ocelot' and 'aromatic ape;' taramasalata was the longest word Litt had found. The following day is rather modest in its ambitions; I go for a walk at Silchester before visiting Butterfield's church of St Mary at Beech Hill. The interior is like a chessboard with red, white and black bricks placed in alternating patterns and offset with Kempe stained glass and Minton tiles of fleur de lys and eagles.
Reading The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, I'm struck by some puzzling contradictions. Douglass notes that "the religion of the south mere covering for the most horrid crimes... of all slaveholders with whom I have met, religious slaveholders are the worst." I'm reminded of Robert Ingersoll's more cynical quotation "the slave ship sped from coast to coast, fanned by the winds and the holy ghost." Douglass also asks "does a righteous god govern the universe? and for what does he hold the thunders in his arm if not to smite the oppressor?" Yet religiosity is also something embraced by the slaves, presumably either for its message of equality and justice (in the next life, if not this one). It's an interesting question as to whether religion was genuinely liberating in this context or whether this is another example of the instances documented by Douglass of slaves embracing the ideologies that imprisoned them.
posted by Richard 8:51 AM
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Eastern Promise continues Cronenberg's move away from science fiction towards realism, with the incidents of the film set against the Thames Flood Barrier, St Luke's Old Street and Brompton Cemetery. Nonetheless, the effect of this is essentially to contrast with the events depicted, using London's scenery in effectively the same way the likes of 28 Weeks Later did. Characters in Shivers and eXistenZ undergo horrific transformations and those in Crash the characters embrace their own deformation. Similarly, the tattoos of the Russian mafia serve the same purpose, with the characters driven to enter that world against their better judgement. The Russian characters see London as a form of decadent infection, in spite of the sumptuous surroundings of the Russian restaurant that is the film's principal setting and their contrast to the more prosaic world of the English characters.
Having seen one of the film's characters having his throat slit in Brompton cemetery, I found myself there a few days later. The weather was impossibly mild for November, with the yellowed leaves slowly falling to the ground and forming a carpet on the central avenue. I found myself looking at some details I'd missed before; Minton tiling forming a headstone above a floor of unraveling white and black diamond tiles, the lily and ivy decorating one of the tombs designed by Burne-Jones. A large chunk had fallen off the imposing bulk of the Hannah Peters Mausoleum. Squirrels frantically scamper about, trying to bury nuts and seeds, usually in the flower pots left by the graves. I walk to the Embankment, where I watch a pair a ducks trying to sleep on the Thames; periodically one would realised that they were about to be beached on Cleopatra's Needle, swim upstream and settle down again, so beginning the process anew.
I then walk to the National gallery, for its Renaissance Siena exhibition. Sienese art has been described as overshadowed by that of Florence, with the former written out of art history by the Florentine Vasari and by Florence's conquest of Siena. In this revisionary account, Sienese art is visionary and mystical, with Mariolatry (the Virgin was the city's patron) as its principal subject, in contrast to the naturalistic art of Florence, with it s depiction of the male form and of fighting in particular. I can't help but wonder if a better word to describe Siena's art might not be 'medieval' if we think of the Renaissance as the displacement of religion and the discovery of the individual. Certainly, Siena retained many gothic influences, such as painting onto gold (and then using sgraffito to expose it as part of clothing or the beams of heaven's rays) and was often slavish in its imitation of figures like Donatello, while the city itself was a rather enfeebled city state, wracked by internal strife, debt and threat of invasion. Some of the most powerful works here are by Raphael (The Dream of a Knight) and the Cortonese Lucca Signorelli rather than by any Sienese painter.
The exhibition opens with some classic examples of Siena's Marian art; in San di Pietro's The Virgin Recommends Siena to Pope Calixtus, which shows the Virgin towering over a dwarfed and distorted city. Others showing her leading the ship of state or protecting the city from earthquakes. Paintings by Pietro and Francesco di Giorgio firmly continue the gothic tradition of iconography. Renaissance influences only figure with the idealised landscape shown in Benvenuto di Giovanni's Virgin and Child or Giorgio's sculpture of Male Nude with a Snake. However, later works show a different and more interesting side; cassone chest paintings show scenes of seduction and classical scenes (like the Roman capture of Zenobia or the meeting of Antony and Cleopatra from the workshop of Neroccio de Landi). For a female art, much of it proves surprisingly homoerotic, as with Signorelli's Two Nude Youths or portraits by Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (nicknamed Sodoma due to being openly homosexual, keeping a bizarre menagerie of animals and claiming tax relief because it was so expensive to keep all his boys and pets.) Particularly striking are the interior scenes, where the tone is profane rather than sacred; carved wooden pilasters, frescos of classical scenes and maiolica flooring. Most impressive are the paintings by Domenico Beccafumi, with soft brushwork and an ethereal rendering of colour. Paintings of virtuous historical figures often seem quite odd; did the Tanaquil Livy denounced really seem a virtuous figure? Nor do the ruined backdrops seem to serve any particular allegorical purpose. His two most striking works are a malevolent Cupid with Venus and a bizarre depiction of the feast of Lupercalia.
Journeying to Westonbirt Arboretum, a bright sunny day is transformed into mist. The arboretum has a complete collection of Japanese Maple cultivars, whose leaves were bright burgundy, ochre, pink and bronze. Evergreen yews, pine and firs forms a backdrop to this. Several of the planted trees are new to me; Sapphire Berry (a bright azure berry), Katsura (gives off the scent of caramel), Spindle Tree (with its bright red berries), Wingnut (named for its sycamore-like seeds), Persian Ironwood (named after the explorer who rediscovered Mount Ararat, turned gold and red in autumn), Alue Atlas Weeping Cedar (with a curtain like fall of branches) and Paper Birch (whose bark turns pink-orange as the lenticels fall off). Other plants were more familiar, from Giant Redwood to Monkey Puzzle and an ancient lime coppice. I was equally impressed by the lichens growing on the tree trunks, from hairlike encrustations to something that looked like bright orange rust. One dead tree had its base covered with bracket fungi.
Reading Arthur Hugh Clough's poems, I'm struck by the idea of a Victorian poet working in a largely discursive mode, with Dryden and Wordsworth as his principal influences for their use of the language of everyday speech. His work is not only heteroglossic but it is also dialogic, with much of it being taken up by counterpointed discussions on the death of god. Amours de Voyage has two narrators with opposed perspectives of the protagonist, with much of the narrative opposing is attitudes to christianity, Rome's pagan past and the revolutions of 1848. Similarly, Dipsychus utilises the format of Goethe's Faust, only to assign the role of the tempter to christianity.
Reading Mishima's The Golden Pavilion, I'm reminded of the concept of occidentalism. A conference held in Kyoto in 1942 was devoted to the subject of how "how to overcome the modern." Modernity was associated with the West, and particularly with Western imperialism. Westernization, one of the scholars said, was like a disease that had infected the Japanese spirit. The "modern thing," said another, was a "European thing." Others believed that "Americanism" was the enemy, and that Japan should make common cause with the Europeans to defend old civilizations against the New World. There was much talk about unhealthy specialization in knowledge, which had fragmented the wholeness of Oriental spiritual culture. Science was to blame. So were capitalism, the absorption into Japanese society of modern technology, and notions of individual freedom and democracy. These had to be "overcome." All agreed that culture - that is, traditional Japanese culture - was spiritual and profound, whereas modern Western civilization was shallow, rootless, and destructive of creative power. The West, particularly the United States, was coldly mechanical, a machine civilization without spirit or soul, a place where people mixed to produce mongrel races.
Mishima's novel exhibits many of the symptoms identified here. Mizoguchi looks at the lights of the city, the same lights Tanizaki had denounced as an unwelcome manifestation of modernity in his Praise of Shadows (Tanizaki had also praised the glimmer of gold in the dark, as with the temple here), and dubs it "the mundane world... people are being driven about under that night by evil thoughts... please let the evil that is in my heart increase.. so that it may correspond in every particular with the light before the eyes." As this quotation suggests, Mizoguchi's response to modernity is bifurcated between embracing it as a form of nihilism (itself a profoundly un-Japanese idea; "burdened with a special individuality or sense of mission" which the novel opposes to the intoxication offered by the temple) and rejecting it outright (though even the form of asceticism offered by religion in the novel represents a form of alienation); " youth like myself came to entertain two opposing forms of power wishes... my dream of being a tyrant or great artist." The conclusion of the novel, the arson of the Golden Temple, unifies these themes in a form of immolation just as Mizoguchi's observation produces an ecstatic state that is directed inward; "I was drenched up to the neck in the existence that was myself.. my inner being and the outer world slowly changed places" Mishima's particular brand of masculinist homosexuality further contributes to this nihilism, with women the repeated object of dehumanisation and violence; "the same masculine evil thoughts as the others... the smell of a young man's sweat-moistened skin that they gave off... there was an intrepid beauty about him like that of a lovely woman."
Much the same applies in The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, a sort of Japanese Lord of the Flies, where Ryuji's fall is largely predicated on his acceptance of marriage and the feminine world. Mishima's masculinist homosexuality seems not unlike that of William Burroughs, seen as somewhere opposed to effeminancy and the perception of matriarchy and developing a cult of violence in response to it. Women and death are seen as coterminous ("her sweat and perfume fragrance reaching him on the breeze seemed to clamour for his death... are you going to give up the life that impelled you towards the pinnacle of manliness?"). With that in mind, the nihilist children are both in revolt against a Westernised society and a product of its degeneration, of modern society's alienation.
Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward can be best described as a variant on the trope used by both Twain and Irving of a sleeper awakening to find himself in another time (the idea being also essentially the analogue of that depicted by Huxley in Brave New World). It depicts a decidedly bourgeois form of utopianism, by which social equality has been achieved through a process of evolution rather than through any need for a communist revolution (anarchism and communism are portrayed as essentially invidious to the cause of social progress). Bellamy seems to regard evolution in Lamarckian terms, as a form of progress ("in accordance with the principles of evolution... the next phase on the social and industrial development of humanity") achieved through sexual selection ("the principle of sexual selection, with its tendency to preserve and transmit the better types of race and let the inferior types drop out, has unhindered operation") rather than through natural selection and the survival of the fittest (Bellamy closes by denouncing how nineteenth century society created "a brutal struggle for existence"). In spite of the determinist tone taken here, Bellamy is nonetheless closer to Edward Taylor than Marx though (and closer still to Comte). Where the likes of Owen saw human nature essentially as a tabula rasa and therefore capable of being adjusted to new social conditions, Bellamy frequently uses the term 'human nature' to denote a fixed state, which Doctor Leete denies having altered since West's time. Bellamy nonetheless decries the idea that "the only stable elements in human nature, on which a social system could be founded, were its worst propensities." Accordingly, Bellamy can often be quite conservative, viewing women as having a distinct and separate nature from men (""the distinct individuality of the sexes"), in spite of discarding the idea of women as either household drudges or gilded ornaments. Equally, the notion of the majority of society being employed by an 'industrial army' seems a harshly masculine mode of social organisation, if not unpleasantly reminiscent of the national socialist brand of utopianism (particularly as issues like race are almost entirely elided from the novel, the presence of a black servant in the nineteenth century notwithstanding).
Dostoevsky's The Double reminds me most of Kafka's Metamorphosis in so far as uncanny events unfold without an obvious sense of explication. Where the double is most often invoked as an example of man's divided nature between good and evil or between expression and repression (as in The Confessions of a Justified Sinner or Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), Dostoevsky instead frustrates the morality tale aspects of the narrative by placing the emphasis on Golyadkin's status as a superfluous man, his desire for self-annihilation, his inability to preserve himself. The relationship between self and double is an almost sado-masochistic one, leaving the reader uncertain as to whether they have witnessed a morality tale or not. Tolstoy's The Cossacks and Hadji Murat deal with a rather more conventional form of other, with the former novel defining a liminal space between three of set of groups; Russian, Cossack and Chechen. As with The Double one expects some form of fable concerning the moral progress of another superfluous man through his contact with nature and removal from the frivolities of Muscovite life. For Tolstoy, the Caucasus serves almost the same sort of function that Italy did for EM Forster or DH Lawrence. In practice though, Tolstoy's fatalism often tends to preclude the sort of teleological development associated with characters in European novels. Something similar applies to Hadji Murat whose hero dies a death that is essentially futile and entirely contrary to the status the narrative has accorded him.
On a quite different note, I recently watched the film Thirty Days of Night, one of the more memorable contributions to the vampire genre of recent years. The vampires depicted in it are different from the suave model of Christopher Lee and instead resemble Shreck's Count Orlok, looking both mundane and alien at the same time. Another film I saw not all that long ago is Sunshine, a film that follows similar generic principles to earlier science fiction films like Event Horizon (science arrogantly assuming the prerogative of the divine and so on) but does have some interesting variations on that theme. The character of Pinbacker sees the sun as a god and views any attempts to reignite it as desecration, although when the character of Capa does precisely that he is for instant staring into the face of god. The film seemed unsure as to whether it should be mystical or materialist.
posted by Richard 2:37 PM
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Autumn has arrived once more and brought mists with it, turning the blue skies and gold leaves into blackened shapes against a pale and watery sky. By the time I've arrived in Leeds though the mists have dispelled and the sun emerged. The city is beautifully Victorian, with iron markets and glass arcades decorated with allegorical figures and reliefs with oranges and leaves. Belle epoque style statues bear streetlamps alongside the statue of the Black Prince in front of the Post Office. Cuthbert Broderick's Town Hall towers over the city, in contrast to his rather hidden Corn Exchange. Crests bear images of owls everywhere and gold owls sit atop the Civic Hall's spires. Unususally, the only obvious sign of gothic seems to mostly lie with the older buildings. The art gallery is home to a small but interesting collection, ranging from various Victorian paintings (Leighton's Return of Persephone and Lady Godiva, Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott, Holman-Hunt's characteristically crude Shadow of Death) to a set of Courbet and Sisley landscapes. More unsually, is a nocturnal street scene by Atkinson Grimshaw and a macabre painting of a dead bird by him. A set of Sickert paintings of pubs and music halls vie for space with Stanley Spencer on the staircase. Upstairs is the modern collection, Vannessa Bell portraits, Mark Gertler landscapes (and an intriguing self-portrait that references the marriage of Arnolfini, Dutch still lifes and Japanese prints) a Wyndham Lewis painting (rather reminiscent of Metropolis). Paintings by Nash, Sutherland, Hitchens and Piper remind me of my recent visit to the Tate. I have some tea in a tiled hall that reminds me of a Turkish Bath or the Cafe Imperial in Vienna.
Walking in the evening along a street filled with fallen leaves and the streetlamps casting halos in the fog, I'm reminded of Atkinson Grimshaw's paintings. I arrive at the Grand Opera House, for a performance of Reinhard Keiser's The Fortunes of King Croesus. The building, decorated in Pompeian red and with an enormous chandelier, is presumably similar in period to the Coliseum in London. The opera has been lavishly set, with the stage littered with aircraft wreckage following the enactment of an aerial battle. Lydia and Persia become the Battle of Britain and the Nazis. On the one hand, uniformity, on the other a Sardis that looks like Venetian carnevale, with eightennth century, Egyptian and Roman custumes. The staging does point to a weakness in the narrative; Cyrus serves as an agent of hubris, bringing down Lydian arrogance and decadence but it is rather difficult for a modern audience not to see it as a simple contrast of freedom and tyranny (with Cyrus depicted as a cross between Goering and Napoleon). The stoicism of Solon does not look markedly different to the cynical hedonism of Elcius and a good deal less enjoyable, particularly given that contrived denouement renders all paths equal and identical with few leading to unfortunate consequences. Although nout unlike Handel, earlier influences like Monteverdi are also clear, with the music rather more concise and less repeated than Handel. Also of particular interest is that the part of Atis was performed by a male soprano, Michael Maniaci, giving a rather unexpected insight as to how these operas might originally have been performed by castrati.
I read Natsume Soseki's The Three Cornered World on the way up to Leeds. I've written before about the role of the oriental and occidental in Tanizaki's work and the same issues apply here, in a book that frequently references both Chinese poetry and Western painting (especially Millais' Ophelia). Soseki begins by criticising the tendency of Western novels to concern themselves with the ephemeral rather than the transcendent ("escaping from the wearying round of steamers, trains, moral duties and etiquette," although Soseki later praises Turner for showing how a steam train could be beautiful). As in Hardy, the train serves as a metaphor for modernity, epitomising society's tendency to laud individuality whilst simultaneously crushing it to heel. Within this context, he sees people, and especially the old or the menial, as less than human and simply part of the harmony of the landscape (even suggesting using the bodies of criminals to fertilise orchids out of a sense of disgust comparable to Timon of Athens - an oddly Western model). However, Soseki finds it difficult to see this in the context of other figures, who he compares to Ophelia (he has earlier dismissed Hamlet as profoundly un-Japanese). He seeks to find a via media, noting the serenity on her face (although it is ambiguous as to how much serenity many of the suicides that litter the novel find), something he finds again in the compassion on O-Nami's face as her lover is sent to die in Manchuria. He criticises Western literature for not being objective and instead resembling a detective story, but the entire novel is told from his subjective viewpoint and is all geared around mysterious figures and this final revelation on her face, something that enables him to finally paint her. Although he sees the artist as standing outside society, he is nonetheless compelled to inhabit it; "I was being dragged back more and more into the world of reality."
Cormac McCarthy's The Road is in many respects a straightforward inversion of the pioneer theme in American literautre (or even the Western film) from Twain to Kerouac, with two male figures travel across the American landscape (women are as largely absent here as they are in Fenimore Cooper). Like Huckleberry Finn much of the novel is concerned with the opposition of childhood innocence to rather more cynical adult experience. However, it also belongs to something I tend to perceive more as a European genre, the apocalyptic novel, although the absence of cities is striking here and seems distinct from the European tradition. Equally, the novel is quite detached from details like the cause of the apocalypse (a nuclear winter, we presume) or the names of the protagonists.Labels: Art, Leeds, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 12:22 PM
Sunday, October 14, 2007
As autumn descends and the ivy turns to a vivid burgundy and the tree leaves turns to burnished bronze or arterial crimson, I visited London and the Millais exhibition at the Tate. The choice of subject seems apt for the season, with several paintings like Mariana and Autumn Leaves allegorising the life of man through the seasons.
The Pre-Raphaelite movement is a classic example of the reactionary tendency in English culture, along with the Gothic Revival and Palladian architecture. English painting sought to return to medieval models, depicting nature with obsessive precision, at a time when European art was beginning to forge movements like impressionism and expressionism. Equally, the brotherhood was founded in the year of The Communist Manifesto but although Millais seems to have made many satirical (somewhat Hogarthian) drawings of contemporary society, none of them were transferred to canvas. Unlike Ford Madox Brown's The Last of England, Millais retreats to a mythical past. Like much of Victorian culture, the Pre-Raphaelites can perhaps be best understood as a means of withdrawing from an industrialised society to a romanticised past, looting models freely from different periods (the subjects displayed at the Millais exhibition range from Pizarro's conquest of the Incas to Renaissance Florence and Medieval England). It lacks any sense of expressing the collective consciousness of its age and seems instead to point to a lacuna. The sense of a void becomes painful in several of his later society portraits and grotesquely sentimental paintings of children; one can only be surprised that Little Nell evaded him as a subjects. Whereas contemporaries like Burne Jones and Watts devised stained glass and frescos for churches, Millais sold his pictures for soap adverts and painted portraits of the haute bourgeoisie.
However, with all of that said, much remains to be said in defence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Millais' sympathy for outsiders dominates his early paintings; Jacobite rebels, exiled Huguenots, heretics and vagrants. His women are alternately depicted as passive victims of the men that abandon them, but also have to be shown in terms of their stoic fortitude. Much of his work, such as The Bridesmaid, seems to look forward to the likes of Moreau, Klimt and Albert Moore. The iallusive quality of his later works, freed of explicit depictions of historical or literary scenes seem to parallel Bocklin and David Friedrich. The Pre-Raphaelite stress on literary allusions, with references to Tennyson, Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge, comes close to a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk.
The initial rooms of the exhibition concentrate on showing the development of the early Millais to his Pre-Raphaelite work. His first major work is Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru, a picture that veers uneasily between historical epic and the later depictions of the victims of Catholic oppression, a Massacre of the Innocents The early Pre-Raphaelite works also quickly draw attention to the idea of the excluded and outcast; doomed love in Isabella, Ophelia, Mariana and The Death of Romeo and Juliet. A drawing showing the disinterrment of Queen Mathilda by Huguenot fanatics was presumably too sympathetic and Catholicism and was never painted. The (infamous) painting of Christ in the House of his Parents seems oddly realistic in comparison to the other works, as does The Order of Release, wherein the soldier's wife stands tall while her son and husband are huddled against her, inverting the model used in A Huguenot on St Bartholomew's Day. In a similar vein is The Proscribed Royalist where a somewhat effeminate cavalier is hidden by a puritan lover and in Peace Concluded where a wounded soldier returned from the Crimea is held by his wife. The sexual politics of Millais' painting are endlessly confusing; his depictions of women with persecuted men require them to be strong and resilient (although the atttitude in The Black Brunswicker is simply one of female helplessness even as the strong soldier shown is certain to die) but he is as likely to show them abandoned and betrayed, as in Waiting. One painting, The Escape of a Heretic is entirely different; showing a female heretic being rescued by a lover from the clutches of the Inquisition. Again, his drawings show what his paintings can't' The Bridge of Sighs depicts a fallen woman contemplating suicide.
The later works show Millais moving to looser brush strokes in a style more reminiscent of Titian or Velasquez, depicting subjects without explicit comment and with only the suggestion of context. Backgrounds are frequently blackened out to show the subject. Works like Spring and The Vale of Rest having a nonetheless rather crudely symbolised theme of mortality. Where historical subjects are shown, the results are often depressingly remniscent of much forgettable genre painting (Reynolds and Van Dyck emerge as influences at this point), although a painting like Esther continues the theme of female fortitude and courage. The most interesting works from this time onwards, are his Scottish landscapes which in their depicition of solitary figures in wintry scenes leaves me strongly reminded of Caspar David Friedrich, for instance in Dew Drenched Furze and Glen Birnam.
Leaving the exhibition, I spend a little time looking at the permanent collection, from Rossetti's The Annunciation and The Beloved, Holman Hunt's Claudio and Isabella and The Awakening Conscience , Hughes' The Eve of St Agnes , Whistler's Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge and Moore's The Toilette and A Sleeping Girl. It does seem to me that Millais has at least some claim to be a via media between Hunt and Hughes on the one hand and Whistler and Moore on the other, while his woman are surely not simply objects in the way they always seem to be for Rossetti. I also find myself looking at more unusual works like John Brett's seascapes, Watts' Hope, Sargent's Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose and Tuke's August Blue, but I'm most struck by Richard Dadd's paintings; although not dissimilar to the Pre-Rapahelites in style and fitting in with Victorian conventions of fairy paintings, his work does nonetheless seem more like Bosch.
I then decide to look at the modern section. Some of the individual works are quite startling here; Sickert's Brighton Pierrots, Heron's Azalea Garden: May 1956, Hitchens' Woodland, Vertical and Horizontal, Hepworth's Curved Form (Trevalgan), Vanesssa Bell's Studland Beach and Gertler's Merry-Go-Round. I find myself particularly drawn to the room dedicated to John Piper's works, from his Britten set paintings (Death in Venice) to his work as a war artist (All Saints Chapel, Bath) to his Betjeman-like recordings of historic buildings (Holkham, Norfolk, Yarnton Monument) - although rather conventional subjects depicted in uncomprosingly modern terms. Another room dwells on war art, with results that seem quite surrealist - whether by intent or simply through elapsed time is difficult to say; Armstrong's Coggeshall Church, Essex looks like a dissection rather than a ruin while Nash's Bomber in the Corn and The Messerschmidt in Windsor Great Park almost look like totems. Sutherland's Devastation, 1941 series is perhaps the most conventional depiction of destruction and decay, although his Horned Forms contrives to turn the organic into something threatening and unnatural. Finally, a small exhibition is dedicated to Hockney's selection of Turner's paintings. I hadn't realised that Turner is in many respects an architectural painter, with Lichfield Cathedral, St George's Bloomsbury and Durham Cathedral all amongst his English subjects, while some of his Venetian work is dedicated to Canaletto's architectural fantasias. Hockney also has a collection on one of the stair wells; paintings of English woodland from different times of the year. I then walk from Tate Britain to Tate Modern, mostly to see the giant metal spider on display outside the gallery. Although given an artistic subtext it mostly reminds me of the metal sculpture of the invading Martians at Woking.
Reading Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars I was particularly reminded of Umberto Eco's observations about the medieval quest for the prelapsarian language that had existed before the Tower of Babel. The dictionary seems equally preoccupied with the loss of language's capacity to represent certitude in the midst of a series of mirrored dichotomies; dream and reality, good and evil, male and female (as with the male and female editions of the text), life and death, all of which are blurred in the course of the text. Where Eco is interested in semiotic playfulness almost as an end in its own right, Pavic seems to envisage differance in mystical terms, as a means of representing man's fallen state (perhaps Habermas was right to call Derrida a Jewish mystic). He then complicates these chiastic divisions by enfolding them into a tripartite structure; Christian, Islamic and Jewish, with each dictionary having mirrored entries (either the same entry told from a fundamentally different viewpoint or the convergence of three different but related characters), the division between which is also blurred (with the idea of each religion being an aspect of the other two). The text also foregrounds the issue of interpretation, with every character who comes close to understanding the history of the Khazars being punished Icarus-like.Labels: Art, Literature, London, Victorian
posted by Richard 3:22 AM
Sunday, September 9, 2007
"Since first the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the First of these great powers only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruin; the Third, which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction . . . I would endeavour to... record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat like passing bells, against the Stones of Venice." - Ruskin, The Stones of Venice
Venice is a place that is difficult to summarise in conventional terms. A place of so many different styles seems best described as a set of fragments; the light shimmering on the fade waters of the lagoon, images of the Virgin Mary (even included in glass and metal shrines in the canals), the crumbling white I...strian marble, cracking plaster revealing rotted brick, the gondalas like Turkish slippers riding the waves, the chiming of the bells, red Veronese and white Istrian diamond patterns in the tiling, the seaweed and mussels clinging to the canal walls, the splashing of the waves, the minaret like campaniles, wells in each square, seagulls resting on wooden buoys, images of dragons, sphinxes and winged lions adornining squares, the precarious roof gardens, the capricious (if not Escheresque) medieval streets where serendipity is of rather more use than conventional navigation. Grandiosity and decay sit side by side. As a city it is an anomaly; a place of refuge that became the seat of empire, the product of the accretion of Roman, Byzantine styles. In its present form it is less of a subject in its own right than an object for the gaze of others. The city whose churches are adorned by works from Titian, Vivarini and Veronese became a place depicted instead by foreigners like James, Whistler, Mann, Monet and Turner. It is trapped like a fly in amber, forever preserved more or less as it was at the fall of the Republic, when its history ended.
The one exception to this is the Lido. Until recent times this was simply a sandbank that did little to disturb the oppressive flatness of the lagoon; Byron would ride his horses here; the nearby island of Saint Lazarus, which housed the city's Armenian community and a rather Central European church spire, is rather older. The church of San Nicolo is easily the oldest structure on the island, the scene of Venice's marriage to the sea. It's a somewhat understated church with a brick exterior and painted pink campanile. The local cemetery (incongruously, this is also where the city's Jewish cemetery can be found) is nearby, whose large mausoleums have potted plants and welcome mats for visitors to enter and use the small chapel. Watering cans are on sale to water the flowers planted on the graves. Lizards flit across the stones in the late afternoon sun. Today, these stand alongside an old flack tower errected during the second world war; the Lido is indeed the only part of Venice to include fascist architecture, such as rather drab casinos and cinemas. It's main street also features an art deco hotel, albeit not the one Von Aschenbach stayed at, its exterior covered in beautifully painted stucco sculptures of the muses. There's an art exhibition on at the time I visit and a car painted in red with the hammer and sickle is parked outside. A large black Buddha statue rests further down the main street. A cat bathing in the afternoon sunlight looks suitably unimpressed.
By contrast, the view that greets one at the Piazza San Marco is essentially the same as that depicted by Canaletto, with the conflicting styles of the gothic and Byzantine cathedral next to Sansovino's classical Loghetta and Biblioteca. The iconography is equally conflicted, with St Theodore's column representing the city's links with Byzantium next to the winged lion of the stolen Saint Mark, representing the city's independence. I begin with the Doge's Palace and following Ruskin's recommendations, examine the decoration on the capitals outside; kings, moors, birds, beasts, knights and allegories. Entering inside, the inner courtyard (itself a rather Arabic concept) is lined with colonnades and is overlooked by a clock on a facade filled with Sansovino sculptures that backs onto the Basilica. The Palazzo is entered through a gold and white stucco staircase leading to rooms filled with maps, globes and images of the winged lion. The walls are decorated with paintings by Titian, Carpaccio, Bellini, Bassano, Tiepolo and Veronese. Inevitably, the central Council Chambers is the most impressive, with its paintings of all the Doges (save the black space where Faliero should be), and Tintoretto's Paradise fresco. Coming across Bosch's Triptych of Heaven and Hell, I finding myself once more responding to them rather more readily than the Titian and Veronese paintings, perhaps due to perverse surrealism being their dominant mode rather than the crude allegories of god blessing Venice elsewhere in the palace. Later rooms show other aspects; magistrates in eighteenth century portraiture, the prison cells and bridge of sighs.
Inevitably, this is followed with a visit to the dark and cave-like Basilica of Sant Mark, with the half light glittering across the gold and marble mosaics. Images pullulate across every surface and leave the eye disorientated. The treasury still houses works taken from Alexandria (as well as the corpse of Saint Mark), including the inevitable holy relics, the bone encased in previous metals that simulate the limbs that once contained them as well as a reliquary in the shape of a domed church. As with the Piazzo itself, the originally simple Basilica design has been added to, with gothic spires, painting by Veneziano and later artists as well as statuary on the outside and the more incongrous Tetrarchs statue of Dioceletian. This is followed by the Correr Museum, where I am most struck by a Chinese statue of Marco Polo. Bewhiskered and with round eyes, the statue is covered in gold and in all other respects Buddha like. The interior dates from the Napoleonic era and seems to have been designed in imitation of Nero's palace. The first exhibit is a set of Canova reliefs of Homeric scenes, followed by his statues of Priam, Daedalus and Icarus. The museum also houses an eighteenth century library, complete with Murano chandelier as well as various items like globes, maiolica, cassone, maps and Sevres porcelain. The highlight of the museum is its art gallery though, beginning with the Byzantine work of Paolo Veneziano, proceeding onwards to the more gothic work of Stefano Veneziano and Bartholomeo Vivarini and from thence to the Renaissance and the Bellini family, as well as exhibiting some works by Damaskinos and El Greco. As ever, I find the religious subject matter of all these periods decidedly hostile; it is possible to enjoy them as abstract pattern and colour but as little else. Conversely, a painting like Carpaccio's The Courtesans or Brueghel's Adoration of the Magi are quite different, both displacing the christian in favour of the human. The collection also has a painting in the school of Bosch, The Temptations of St Anthony, which I also enjoy; it seems fitting company for the paintings by Dali and Ernst that I saw a few days later. Finally, the museum also houses a smaller Ancient History section, containing busts of the Roman Emperors, Hellenic statues of the defeated Galatians, Assyrian reliefs and Egpytian statues (as well as a somewhat homoerotic statue of Dionysus and a satyr).
The following days are dedicated to exploring the city; from Castello to the Dorsoduro, San Polo and Cannaregio. The church of San Giuliano in San Marco is an especially elaborate baroque church, with Veronese paintings and a nearby wall relief of St George (who seems especially popular here in spite of not being its patron saint) and an iron dragon as a street sign (rather reminding me of Barcelona). I also note some rather odd calendars on sale in some of the squares. I walk to Santa Maria Dei Miracoli in Canaregio, one of the particular highlight of my visit. The outside is firmly encased in every hue of marble on a comparatively small Renaissance building tucked beside a canal. The interior shares this, with the wooden barrel roof also being studded with paintings in addition to the Pietro painting of the Madonna that the church grew around (most churches in Venice seem to have been founded through some vision of the Virgin or a bird leading out to a reed bed, something that reminds me of the founding of Tenochtitlan more than anything else). For a complete contrast, the gothic Santo Stefano in Castello represents another highlight of my visit. The same red and white diamond patterning seen on the outside of the Palazzo Ducale can be seen on the interior walls here, next to leaf frescos painted atop the arches and a studded ship's keel roof. The pillars are covered in red cloth, something I note in several of the churches. The arches have to be supported by corss beams, presumably due to the lack of firm foundations. The interior is filled with elaborate gothic, classical (one of the equestrian monuments being especially striking hung on a church wall) funerary monuments, including some by Canova and Lombardo, as well as paintings by Vivarini and Tintoretto. San Francesco della Vigna is a pleasant church with a pink and white campanile, offset by an elaborate facade designed by Palladio.
The church of Santa Maria dei Giglio has an especially elaborate Baroque facade, showing maps of the city. Its sacristy is not dissimilar to that at Saint Marks, setting silver reliquaries in the dubious company of a painting by Rubens, while the rest of the church places Tintoretto in the equally strange company of a Creto-Byzantine Madonna icon. The same holds true for the rather understated Santa Maria Del Formosa, which sets a Byzantine icon alongside a Vivarini triptych. Ruskin disliked this church for a baroque gargoyle at the base of its rather pleasant campanile (on grounds I can rather understand) but also for decorative facade by Codussi designed to honour the Venetian nobility rather than god (on which point, I am considerably less in sympathy with Ruskin). Santa Maria Della Salute is rather more famous than any of these, but its Baroque dome seems a more familiar design than many of the city's other churches (in spite of the Byzantine references). It too has a Byzantine icon taken from Crete, from the time it lay within the Venetian empire. Titian's painting of Saint Sebastian in the church is especially striking; it is the first of many in a city routinely decimated by plague and which had come used to invoking him as a patron. The city's interest in Saint Sebastian is nowhere better exemplified than in the church of San Sebastiano. Sebastian appears in a painting by Veronese in a church whose walls are lined with works by him, even covering the organ. Any part of the wall not containing a painting is home to a trompe l'oeil effect. There is even a stone sculpture of him outside, in the place normally reserved for the Virgin Mary.
Another highlight was Santi Giovanni e Paolo. It's funerary monuments are very bit as ornate as those of Santo Stefano, such as the Mocenigo tombs, supported by griffin sculptures while others are emblazoned with double headed eagles. Otherwise, the interior is more plain, in bare stone and redbrick, save for the red painted arches and cross beams. This time it is Bellini who depicts Sebastian in a triptych. Other paintings include Giovane and a Vivarini triptych. The ornate sacristy is filled with Veronese paintings and rather recalls the Doge's Palace. Similar in style is Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. The main nave here is largely empty, filled only elaborate funerary monuments. Most of these are in conventional styles, including one to Titian, which leaves Canova's pyramid all the more striking. It looks as if it should be Pere LaChaise or Highgate, with veiled figures and angels entering the tomb. Next to it is something equally odd, with Moorish bearers and skeletons. The church has been described as a pantheon, given the numbers of the great and the good buried here (though Monteverdi only merited a floor plaque). There is than an elaborate wood and gold choir and beyond that is something altogether more elaborate; here the brick walls are painted and are hung with works by Titian. The sacristy is dark, covered with wooden panels, and here Veneziano, Vivarini and a Bellini triptych can be found, alongside a wooden clock by Lombardo. The Gesuati in Cannaregio is more rococo than classicist, with the walls covered in floral patterns of green and white marble, even down to representing a set of curtains around the pulpit and gold on the ceiling. The weight was enough to cause subsidence and the chapels around Titain's painting of Saint Lawrence's martyrdom are riven with cracks and damp. Its namesake in the Dorsoduro, is a more plain baroque church, with paintings by Tiepolo and Tintoretto and the unusual presence of the earlier church it replaced alongside. The Carmini is perhaps not the best building in the city, but it is quite unusual; paintings depicting the history of the Carmelite order hang on either side of the nave under the ceiling, with dark wood and gold statues beneath. The pillars are again wrapped in red cloth. The windows have red curtains, giving the place a rather gloomy effect. The Scuola Grande di San Rocco, a lay fraternity, has a rather spartan, churchlike, hall on its groundfloor, while its dark wood panelled upper floor has more of the feeling of a sacristy, lined with Tintoretto paintings of the New Testament. A collection of Maiolica and Iznik ceramics is on display in an annex. Similarly, the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni is devoted to Carpaccio, showing narrative cycles based on the lvies of St George, Tryphone and Jerome on the ground floor. The upper floor is also more elaborate, though there is something rather bathetic about its painting of fraternity members in Biblical scenes (not unlike a painting of god, the Doge, Dogessa and the guild of poulterers or St Christopher fording the Venetian lagoon).
The church of Madonna Dell Orto is another of the city's highlights, with an exterior that most closely approximates Northern Gothic. Inside, it is perhaps rather more understated, with painting on the interior of the arches and paintings by Tintoretto, with a set of rather apocalyptic themes of the day of judgement and the golden calf. Nearby is Santa Alvise, with a rather bizarre set of paintings showing the theft of the body of Saint Mark (whose corpse, needless to add, is perfectly preserved). The interior feels more like an art gallery than a church, with an ingenious trompe l'oeil ceiling by Bastiani that seems to extend the church several storeys upward. More striking is a cycle of Carpaccio paintings, alongside works by Tiepolo and Giovane. The church of San Geremia, is a rather bland affair, with some gothic paintings of Lucia (whose stolen corpse the church contains) and Geremia. The church of San Giobbe is also rather uninteresting, save for one chapel containing a glazed terracotta ceiling in beautiful blues and greens, Lombardo carvigs and a Vivarini triptych in the sacristy. San Giovanni Elemosinario, also built to house a pilfered saint's corpse, contains a Pordenone painting of Saint Sebastian, alongside various Titian paintings. The building is largely hidden in the Rialto market (certainly when compared to the nearby San Giacomo di Rialto, with its large, if entirely inaccurate, clock) and is mostly rather austere, save for a sudden lurch into baroque splendour in one of the side chapels. San Giacomo dall'Orio is a rather more spartan church, with only the capitals and ceiling woodwork gilded below its ship's keel roof. A Byzantine style cross by Veneziano hangs in the centre of the nave (several of the columns and font are looted from Byzantium). The church is mostly home to Giovane paintings (especially in its sacristy). Of lesser note, is San Giobbe, a simple building with a wooden rood and some Tiepolo paintings.
San Giorgio dei Greci is hidden in a small courtyard, whose iron railings are overgrown with ivy. The wellhead, walls and exterior mosaics are decorated with representations of George and the Dragon, and the interior with its walls of iconic paintings by Damaskinos, also features him. Finally, there is San Zaccaria, a building with one of the most impressive facades and one of the one of the most drab monochrome interiors in the city, the walls of paintings by the likes of Bellini and Vivarini notwithstanding. There is also San Giovanni in Bragora, the church where Vivalid was baptised, with its lovely Vivarini triptych and San Martino with another saint's corpse and trompe l'oeil ceiling. Across from the main island lies La Giudecca, with its Palladian churches, Santissimo Redentore and San Giorgio Maggiore. In spite of paintings by Tintoretto, Bassano and Vivarini, I find myself sympathising with Ruskin's preference for gothic over classicism; there's something rather puritannical about Palladio's designs. The first example of classicist architecture in Venice is the Arsenale though, with its clock towers and lion statues (stolen from the Peloponnese).
For all of the corrosion of the city's walls through brine laden winds and subsidence, nature is something largely banished from Venice. Its narrow streets accommodate few trees or grass. One of the few exceptions to this is the more easterly districts. The Giardini area is filled with public gardens, divided by a boulevade dedicated to Garibaldi. A statue of the man himself stands at the entrance, atop a large rock down which water spills. Ferns and moss have grown over the rock and terrepins sunbathe at its base or swim alongside carp in the waters below. The gardens are otherwise filled with statuary; a bust of Richard Wagner, a rostral column and assorted statues in a Roman style. The pine trees continue to San Elena, where birds sing as the sun sets. The small church at the end of the island has a rather unpleasant modern campanile but also a beautiful set of cloisters, filled with plants.
Nature is more of an emphatic presence at the outer island of Torcello. Once the first settlement on the lagoon, it is now all but deserted. Ruskin opened The Stones of Venice with an account of the fall of previous maritime empires like Venice and Tyre, in comparison to a Britain that still ruled the scenes. By contrast, Torcello reminds me more of Jeffries's After London and a recent account of what London would like after having been deserted by humanity for hundreds of years; the last thing to collapse would be Canary Wharf, standing above what have reverted to swampland. In Torcello, the trees, reeds and broom grow thickly over what would once have been a settlement. Egrets and herons can be seen flying. The tower of its erstwhile cathedral looms large over the island and can be seen for miles around. As you draw closer you come into a piazza that must once have been equivalent to San Marco. Today, the cobbles are broken up with weeds and parts of the building lie in ruins. The quiet of the lagoon seems unearthly. Statues and ornaments stand silent witness around the square. The cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta itself is home to a dramatic gold mosaic of the day of judgement on one wall (complete with skeletons, demons and ouls burning in hell) and the Virgin at the other. As Ruskin notes, together for the bright and airy character of the church, it was an obvious expression for a people in need of reassurance and hope after the Hun incursions. Plain romanesque arches are supported by elaborate corinthian columns, the walls are decorated with images of peacocks with the floor glitters with a rainbow of marble patterns. A museum stands on the the opposite side of the piazza, including early mosaics, a gold iconostasis and various reliefs. It also includes a history of objects found in the lagoon; Roman lamps, a bust of Hermes, Etruscan metalware, Egyptian statues and other votive objects.
The Island of Murano is rather less interesting, with most of its palaces having been torn down. One of the most interesting buildings is the lighthouse, with an Eric Gill style sculpture of the Madonna at its base. The church of San Pietro Martire is a modest white and red affair, with frescos between the arches and a collection of paintings by Bellini and Veronese. More striking is Santa Maria e Donato, with its mosaic flooring with depictions of eagles and rabbits (nastily depicting the triumph of christianity over the pagan), alleged dragon bones hung behind the altar and a mosaic of the Madonna in the apse. Saint's bones are once more stored under the altar, as at Saint Fosca at Torcello.
More fascinating is the Bocklin like island of San Michele. The product of the Napoleonic era, it feels more like Pere LaChaise than the rest of Venice. The grid layout seems alien to a city whose streets are so chaotic. As often in Latin countries, many graves are simply in shelves, with photos on the outside of each box and an electric light illuminating a fake candle. Where there are conventional graves, the cemetery takes on the aspect of a flower garden, with the plants growing profusely. Ornate tombs line the walls of the cemetery, at corners and intersections and in cloisters; everywhere white marble and orange brick prevails beneath the shade of cypresses. The orthodox and protestant tombs are in their quarantined areas and both have become decidedly more ramshackle. A larger tomb in the orthodox sections has mosaics ion the outside, but the graves of Stravinsky and Brodsky are somewhat nondescript. So too proves the case with Pound in the dilapidated Protestant cemetery where the presence of Highgate style angels seems decidedly odd.
Venice's art galleries are split between medieval and renaissance paintings on the one hand and the modernist collection in the Guggenheim on the other. The Guggenheim begins with a futurist collection reminiscent of the Estorick collection; Boccioni, Balla and Severini. Peggy Guggenhiem's own collection bifurcates between broadly abstract or expressionist works, like Braque, Kandinsky, Delaunay and Picasso (as well as a large Pollock collection) and surrealism, including Brauner, Delvaux, Dali, Ernst, Chirico and Magritte. Although I enjoy most of the collection, it's the surrealist paintings I enjoy the most. There's also a good sculpture collection; Giacometti and Brancusi. At the other extreme, is the Ca' d'Oro and Accademia. Ca' d'Oro is a palazzo on the ground canal. Entering inside through a gothic gate, one walks through a verdant courtyard into the ground floor portego. Statues of satyrs and gods are scattered around and the waves of the lagoon lap against the steps. The floor is mosaic, decorated with stones from North Africa and Greece. The collection is most famed for a Mantegna painting of (unsurprisingly) Saint Sebastian, as well as Carpaccio Annunciation and a striking Andrea Bartolo coronation of the Virgin. Again though, I'm most impressed by Titian's profane Venus at the Looking Glass. There's also a collection of Flemish works; a Van Eyck crucifixion, Van de Velde seascapes and a Van Scorel painting of the Tower of Babel that distinctly resembled the more famous Brueghel. Finally, there is the Accademia. Again, it begins with Veneto-Byzantine artists like Veneziano and Vivarini, containing some rather grandiose depictions of the Book of Revelations and the coronation of the Virgin, though Carpaccio's Crucifixion and Apotheosis of the Martyrs on Mount Ararat and his Ursula cycle is probably the most dramatic. Inevitably, Saint Sebastian is again much in evidence, with two paintings of him by Bellini. The gallery then progresses onwards to the Renaissance, with Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, though I am again most struck by Lotto's Portrait of a Young Man in his Study. The collection again progressed forward, showing Claude-like paintings of ruins by Giuseppe Zais, a series of architectural fantasias by Marieschi, Gaspari and Battaglioli. There's also the handful of Canaletto pictures to remain within Venice.
posted by Richard 5:01 AM
Friday, July 20, 2007
The first Proms concert of this year opened with Part's Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten and Rakhmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (both rather backward-looking works that set a conservative pattern to the night) before finishing with Gliere's Symphony No.3 'Ilya Murometz.' I didn't know Gliere's work before and was somewhat surprised to find him to be a contemporary of Stravinsky rather than of Borodin. The symphony was based on narrative, in the style of the likes of Rimsky Korsakov, and its derivation from folk tales was clear in the way events seemed discontinuous, happening without apparent logical sequence or sense of causality, often for magical reasons. I was mostly reminded of Wagner; scenes of Ilya listening to bird song in the forest recalling Siegfried understanding the language of the birds after killing Fafnir in the forest. It also has to qualify as the loudest symphony I can recall, working up to a crescendo early on and maintaining it for much of what followed.
Following this, I was overjoyed to complete my viewing of the Ring Cycle with Gotterdammerung. I did find myself that given the cycle's odd compositional history it can be best described as two narratives. Firstly, there is the narrative of the downfall of the gods brought down by the curse of the ring as they give way to mankind. Secondly, there is a narrative about the destructive nature of desire, with the story of Siegfried and Brunnhilde being rather reminiscent of that of Samson and Delilah. The two seem to rather cancel one another out, with the destruction of Valhalla having little to do with the coming of the great hero but rather with Brunnhilde. What is admirable in Brunnhilde is her masculine qualities as a warrior, what is contemptible in Siegfried is his emasculation by Hagen and Gutrune; particularly given that the weak and decadent Gunther is permitted to atone for his crimes through a heroic death whereas Gutrune is simply insignificant and fades out of sight. Equally, although the opera hinges on the restoration of the corrupting ring to the Rhinemaidens they are nonetheless depicted as frivolous and vicious (and hence the means of a suitably humiliating death for Hagen). Following this, I was struck by Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn a rather odd combination of A Shropshire Lad and The Brothers Grimm with lieder telling of the transience of youth and mortality in wartime but fringed with themes like the Totentanz.
Following this I went to a Baroque concert (Handel, Purcell, Telemann) jointly performed by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra (giving the Fireworks Music a rather stereophonic feel, with all of the instruments doubled). It's always odd seeing an archestra playing without a conductor; although romantic music is supposed to be more spontaneous and free it seems a paradox that it actually requires the discipline of a conductor to wield its larger number of players together in contrast to more ordered (or playful?) Baroque music. Haitink's performance of Wagner (Parsifal, Tristan und Isolde and Lohengrin) and Debussy (Nocturnes and Six Epigraphes Antiques) was surprisingly effective, drawing strong parallels between the two composers. Both seemed steepted in the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk. In the case of Wagner this largely meant welding music and lyric poetry in the contest of dramatic performance while for Debussy, it meant playing with symbolist motifs from painting (as in Whistler's Nocturnes) and literature, thereby introducing a form of music whose impessionistic style belied a frequently concrete approach. One of the paradoxes of twentieth century music is that although much of it was concerned with formal experimentation (Schoenberg) much of it was also concerned with reviving earlier musical traditions, such as that of folk music. Works like Kodaly's Dances of Galanta and Enescu's Romanian Rhapsody fit into the latter category while Ligeti's Atmospheres fits into the former, its performance showing each tonal layer individually, like a conventional work dissasembled and suspended in time. Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is the msot impressive work of this Prom though, managing to combine both strains.
Nicholas Nickleby cleaves closely the idea of the novel established by Fielding, whereby misadventure and financial hardship forces a young man out into a world where he is exposed to all manner of temptations. Nontheless, Dickens elaborates rather more polyphonic plot strands, taking his hero to the country rather than moving him from rural morality to urban decadence, depicting instead the perils faced by his sister in the city and the corruption and downfall of his uncle. Rather than suggesting that youth is corrupted by the city, Dickens instead suggests that vice is born of desperation ("ignorance was punished and never taught"), something that considerably complicates the moral fable at the heart of the novel. Although a Dickens novel tends to function by drawing together the different individuals that makes up its hetergenous plot strands, it nonetheless has the effect of depicting an atomised society ("this wilderness of London") rather than a community.
Sentimental Education seems to invert every convention of the nineteenth century novel, as with the absence of a clear telelogical structure (directed either at marriage or tragedy) or with the manner in which the hero is depicted in terms more suitable for female characters such as Madame Bovary (the only other comparison that comes to mind is Turgenev's superfluous man). Deslauriers is perhaps a more obvious candidate for the role of hero, resembling rather more a Stendhalian protagonist (indeed the reference to how "Frederic's physical appearance.. had almost exerted a feminine charm on him" suggests a homerotic relationship between the two male protagonists that threatens to eclipse female characters like Madame Arnoux). The absence of a teleological structure for depicting the characters is depicted by the absence of any such structure in Flaubert's view of history, which is as present here as in Eliot, Stendhal, Balzac or Zola but is far more disconnected from the central narrative. While the depiction of Dambreuse is not that far removed from that of Merdle or Melmotte (the poverty of Madame Arnoux and Rosanette is also no that far from Dickens), Flaubert is equally cynical as to the alternatives, as with his observation that Senecal is filled with love towards the mases in their aggregate state and is merciless towards individuals; "a sort of Athenian Sparta in which the individual would only exist to serve the state... anything which he considered hostile to it he attacked with the logic of a mathematician and the faith of an inquisitor." Frederic is at once an aristocratic snob ("he felt utterly nauseated by the vulgarity of their faces, the stupidity of their talk...the knowledge that he was worth more than these men lessened the fatigure of looking at them.") and is fired with revolutionary ideals ("I think the people are sublime"). Deslauriers similarly notes that "he had preached fraternity to the conservatives and respect for the law to the socialists." Sentimental Education is the great novel of the middle ground, with all viewpoints contested and all found wanting Frederic and not steering a straight enough course, and Desluariers being too rigid, with the same applying to the aesthetic debates of Pellerin and Senecal.
Laughter in the Dark compares itself to Anna Karenina but seems in many ways an intertextual satire at Tolstoy's expense, with its depiction of the heroine as both vapid and ruthless and destructive of a hero who represents rather mediocre rebuttal to the likes of Vronsky. The gender roles are instead inverted, with Albinus playing the part of a frustrated Emma Bovary, reduced itself to a frustrated and failed artist. Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev oscillates between a sense of communism as an entirely failed project (as with Koestler or Solzhenitsyn) and of it as something betrayed and corrupted. During the course of the novel Rublev finds himself pinioned by inescapable logic; political action (where factories can conquer hovels and the "the old suffering of toil is extinguished forever.") can only be attained through unity as vested in the party. Individual conscience is a bourgeois luxury but if the party has betrayed the revolution then conscience must stand aside from that unity; "in that iron circle Rublev's thoughts never ceased to travel." Others argue that terror cannot form the basis of a state only its property relations and use this to distance the Soviet Union from fascist states, particularly given that the economic progress of the Union is forging a new type of consciousness (the novel incessantly compares Russia to the West, as when Xenia realises that poverty in Paris has a sort of abundance when compared to Moscow.) Koestler wrote that continued belief in communism could only be attributable to a personal mythology; it seems unclear whether this was true for Serge or not. Svevo's Confessions of Zeno reminds me stronly of its Austro-Hungarian counterparts The Castle and The Good Soldier Schweik, all depicting events as being born of unpredictable chance rather than of agency, with freedom something only intermittently possible. Throughout it remains unclear whether events occur due to accident (the marriage to Augusta, the recovery of Zeno's fortunes where Guido had squandered money on the same stocks) or by Zeno's own design (his longstanding antipathy to Guido). As Guido puts it in response to Zeno's disavowal of his caution; "curious that the cautious person should feel obliged to defend the scatterbrain." The novel is set against a backdrop of psychoanalysis (utilised as a framework for self-understanding whilst simultaneously dismissed), a framework that presupposes an underlying unity to events that the episodic narrative seems to deny, in spite of the suggestion of unconscious motivations towards Guido and Ada throughout. The novel ends with the modern man leads an unnatural existence and his life is poisoned to the root, but although this is ostensibly applied to Zeno it seems a better label for his erstwhile rival Guido (himself perhaps more resembling the hero of Svevo's tragic A Life), with his artistic temperament and inability to comprehend business. Like Schweik, it is unambiguous throughout as to whether Zeno is saved from Guidos' fate by cunning and guile or simply by his foolishness being protected by serendipity. Having asserted competence and strength throughout it such a way as to persuade the reader that he is neither, the suggestion hangs that those statements should have been taken at face value (in the same manner Zeno refutes arguments from the psychoanalyst with Schopenhauerian non sequiturs; life may be a disease but it can only be cured by death or obtains a medical certificate as proof of his sanity thereby convincing all that he is mad).
Benjamin's Berlin Childhood Around 1900 shows Benjamin looking back in the style of his own Angel of History. At one point he notes that "one forms an image of a person's character according to his place of residence and the neighbourhood he inhabits." It's a statement characteristic of the nineteenth century (described elsewhere as a hollow shell) that could have been shared by Marx or Eliot, but Benjamin only partly accedes to it. One the one hand, his Berlin is a place where there are only surfaces, with subject and object essentially coterminous.; "I was enveloped in the world of matter" The metaphor is that of the painter disappearing into his own picture. On the other hand, the Berlin he depicts is a liminal place shown through imagistic fragments (repeatedly characterised as part of a labyrinth one gets losts within) rather than a linear narrative and where the places are often as liminal as his arcades (for instance, the text begins with a descriptions of Berlin's loggias on the grounds of their uninhabitability to one who no longer had a fixed abode). Although the young Benjamin and his elder counterpart share a passion for collecting but refuse to arrange their acquisitions in a neat order. Equally, the places in questions are defamiliarised; the Victory Column is compared to a setting for Dante's Inferno while the Zoological Garden seems more ancient than Rome. Magic and myth are repeatedly invoked, contrary to an otherwise materialist strain.
Ballard's Kingdom Come frequently re-iterates a surrealist manifesto; "nothing is true and nothing is untrue." The novel is true to this statement of intent and aims to disorientate the reader, forcing them to participate in the elective insanity that follows. As Ballard puts it, the snakes are only pretending to be asleep and the ladders lead nowhere. Characters in Ballard novels rarely follow clear patterns, but instead shift their perspectives across ideological divides and back again; like many of his protagonists, Pearson plays the role of seeking to investigate and stop the violence but also incites it. Equally, characters like Falconer and Fairfax seek to turn the tide back but the methods they use only provoke the violence they are trying to assuage. As a consequence, the role played by the Metro Centre in the novel is ambiguous. On the one hand we are told that "it's an incubator. People go in there and they wake up and see their lives are empty. So they look for a new dream." But equally, it is also defined as an entire philosophy rather than simply a reaction to vacuity; "all his emotional needs, his sense of self, were satisfied by this huge retail space." Equally, one the one hand the novel uses the familiar Ballardian formula of a new type of human being created and the equally familiar trope that they are reverting to something primeval ("a primeval species with an unbelieavsble need for violence") expressed over the centuries in religion and the politics of fascism rather than becoming something new. Finally, on the one hand, we are told that "the great dream of the Enlightenment, that reason and rational self-interest would one day triumph led directly to today's consumerism" but those are also characterised as a brake against the delirium of consumerism that unfolds in the course of the novel.
Mann's Confessions of Fleix Krull presents a narrative that initially appears cast in the vein of a a moral fable, dealing with the exploits of a confidence man, only for this to be aborted in favour of a narrative about his love affair with a Portuguese mother and daughter. The initial narrative draws a Platonic parallel between art and deceit, with Felix inspired by seeing actors and by being a model for painting. It also draws a parallel between this indeterminacy in Felix's identity (the real Felix is something that does not exist) lends itself to a suggestion of homosexuality (itself something criminal at the time), with him being sexually admired by Herr Sturzli and Stanko.""Dali's masterpiece and, I believe, the greatest painting of the 20th century is The Persistence of Memory, a tiny painting not much larger than the postcard version, containing the age of Freud, Kafka and Einstein in its image of soft watches, an embryo and a beach of fused sand. The ghost of Freud presides over the uterine fantasies that set the stage for the adult traumas to come, while insects incarnate the self-loathing of Kafka's Metamorphosis and its hero turned into a beetle. The soft watches belong to a realm where clock time is no longer valid and relativity rules in Einstein's self-warping continuum." - JG Ballard"
Dali is something of an anomaly, an artist who moved seamlessly between avant-garde and popular culture, between the influence of Vermeer and Velasquez in one instance and between Breton and Magritte on the other. Many of his techniques were either familiar from classical painting or from film (many of the car crash scenes in Un Chien Andalou make the influence on JG Ballard manifest), but grafted onto a rather writerly personal mythology that was reminiscent of Blake (eyes, ants, eggs, soft watches, ruins, plains and so on). Time, space and motion feature prominently in his work rather than depicting images as static and frozen moments. At the same time, objects melt into one another and cease to be stable elements in their right. Equally, his experiments in film do dissolve linear narrative into a "heap of images." Film was seen as a variant of automatic writing.
Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or present an equally heady combination of Freudianism and Marxism, showing the revolt of the protagonists and their desire against an ossified social order. In Un Chien Andalou, a character is held back by being tied to pianos, priests and rotting donkeys (though the protagonists are still left buried and the film repeatedly blurs the distinction of Thanatos and Eros as it does with all other contraries, including gender itself). In L'Age D'Or, a character throws priests and burning giraffes out of the mansion while the Majorcan Bishops are left to starve to death. However, his Marxism at that time forbids him from regarding the bourgeoisie as rebels, showing them as heartless and indifferent to the suffering of others (as with the shooting of the gamekeeper's son or the fire in the kitchen), thereby forming the nucleus of Pasolini's Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom.
The Bramah Museum records the distinction between tea and coffree elaborate by Kakuzo Okakura; the former, aristosratic and calming, its origins lying in ceremony. Conversely, the latter was bourgeois and stimulating, its orgins somewhat disreputable. The museum records the assimilation of Chinese and African beverages (though Ethiopia regarded coffee as a food source) into European culture, showing beautifully designed teapots in the style of bamboo and recording the origin of willow pattern as a fairytale of doomed lovers. I especially liked an anti-coffee house satirical pamphlet set to the tune of The Roast Beef of Old England, entitled The Grumbling of Old England. The Rose Cougou and Lemon served in the shop was rather pleasant too.
Walking around The Mall and St James' Park, I found myself rather indifferent to much of the architecture, which seemed rather dour and pedestrian with the only architect of note being William Kent. I noticed a blue-billed Ruddy Duck swimming in the park near to a black swan before visiting the Wellington Arch. I was struck by how it and Marble Arch formed yet another vision of how London might have been with their removal from their original location and the existence of earlier designs by Adam and Soane (not to mention a more grandiose design from Decimus Burton than was realised). Having walked back to Paddington, I visited the church of St James. Although rather nondescript on the exterior, Street's interior combines pink marble with a black ceiling lined with gold angels. Elaborate tiling and mosaics line the aisles while a modern window replacing one destroyed in the Blitz shows scenes from the station and the war. Visting Kensington, I walked round the round Pond and Palace, the statyes of William and Victoria, before coming to Scott's St Mary Abbot's, with its tall and spire and bending entrance through a set of cloisters through the churchyard. The interior is rather more minimal with marble floors and mosaiscs. I walk to see the Queen's Tower at Imperial College, which I've seen in the distance before but never from closeby.
The Courtauld Institute was a striking omission from the list of London galleries I had visited, so I accordingly decided to rectify this. Walking along one of London's bridges, I was met with one of Gormley's sculptures, joining the one I had seen on the roof of the Shell Mex house and on the rood of Freemason Hall (looking like potetential suicides in both cases). The collection conspicuously bears the mark of having been formed through a relatively small set of bequests, accounting for the presence of Mamluke metalwork, ivory caskets, eighteenth century silverware, Maioloica and painted Italian cassone. The initial collection was formed by a Victorian more interested in the Florentine than Pre-Raphaelite, containing triptychs that demonstrated the transition from Byzantine perspectives to a more naturalistic style. Particularly striking is Bellini's Assassination of St Peter Martyr, where the cut tree stumps bleed in sympathy with the murdered saint. The gallery was running an exhibition revolving around Cranach's Adam and Eve. For all of his connections with Luther, there's something pagan about Cranach, with his paintings of Apollo and Diana and Cupid complaining to Venus sharing the same poses as his christian painting, both interpreting classical myth as christian allegory and violating the Biblical symbolism at the same time. Something similar applies to his twin fascinations with depicting hunting scenes in tandem with a prelapsarian vision of man living in harmony with nature.
The following periods are rather barren for the gallery, save for Claude's Landscape with an Imaginary View of Tivoli, Pieter Brueghel painting of Landscape with flight into Egypt and Eworth's bizarrely allegorical Portrait of Sir John Luttrell. The strength of the collection emrges again when it comes to modern French painting, with a large collection of works by Manet, Renoir, Degas, Pissaro and Sisley. Some of the wotks surprise; early oil paintings in an impressionist style by Seurat, as well as a pointillist painting depicting his mistress in a comic parody of traditional portraiture (a theme also repeated in Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe where an unidealised nude sits alongside formally dressed men, while still resting in a classical pose as if she had casually strayed into the scene by accident) or Monet's still lives. A large number of landscapes by Cezanne show his depiction of natural subjects in geometric terms, while Monet's landscapes show his abandonment of chiaroscuro. Van Gogh's famous Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear is also present, showing a contrast behind the gaunt figure in the foreground and a colourful Japanese print hanging on the wall behind him (something similiar emerges in Lautrec's painting of Jane Avril, showing the glamorous and expensively dressed Moulin Rouge dancer in dark and subdued tones). Two of the Gauguin paintings are especially striking; Nevermore depicting a Tahitian nude in the same vein as an artist like Ingres while suggesting connotations of the fall in her facial expression, the presence of two whispering women in the background and the reference to Poe in a raven. Te Reriora or The Dream also draws a counterpoint between the foreground of the painting (a woman nursing a child while a man leaves behind her) and its background (frescos of lovers painted onto the walls of her house). Gauguin's depiction of 'noble savages' does seem to invest a rather 'writerly' quality into his work that makes it particularly fascinating for me.
This section was completed by one of Rousseau's naive Toll-Gate paintings and a Modigliano nude, showing again a classicised subject shown in terms derived from Oceanic sculpture. The gallery has recently increased its collection to include a number of works by Kandinsky, Sickert (a painting at an underground station), Pechstein, Vlaminck and Derain. There's also a brief British section, showing Frank Dobson's sculpture, Ben Nicholson's Mondrian-influenced Painting 1937, an Eric Gill engraving of a latin motto and a Graham Sutherland painting. The final section of interest formed the bequest of Roger Fry, ranging from Chinese bronzes and pottery to African masks. This section includes works by Vanessa Bell (praised by Woolf as a social satirist in painting), Duncan Grant and Fry himself, as well as the various pieces of crafts that came out of the Omega workshops.
Visiting Hampstead, I began at St John at Hampstead, a Georgian church whose interior opulence is only matched by its exterior dowdiness. The graveyard is more ornate, filled with older tombs decorated with skulls as well as with Victorian angels and celtic crosses. As with most London graveyards, it has an odd assortment of denizens, including Constable, Harrison and a relative of the last Tsar. Hampstead Cemetery is if anything rather more mannered than the tangled briars of St John's, having remained rather more faithful to the idea of the garden cemetery than Highgate. Comparatively unostentatious graves are laid out in neat rows interspersed with arboretum-like plantings of trees and shrubs (including a large palm treet at one point). Crickets chirped away in the background. One or two grandiose tombs do intrude; one in the shape of a church organ or the art deco Bianchi tomb with its Blakesque angel. Following this, I visited Fenton House with its collection of marquetry furniture, stumpwork, Kangxi Porcelain, Song paintings, snuff bottles and painted Chinese mirrors. The house has a quite good collection of paintings, including Duncan Grant, Sickert (paintings of Figaro and London music halls), Charles Ginner (a painting of Hampstead High Street at night that rather resembled Atkinson Grimshaw) and a rather poor GF Watts painting of waves turning into horses.
Visiting Wollaton Hall, I was struck by the classical and historical figures in circular niches along the walls (as at Ham House and Hampton Court) and the gargoyles underneath the windows. The overall effect is rather more ornate than Smythson's other building, Hardwick Hall. The interior is equally impressive, with its hammer-headed celing in the Great Hall, James Thornhill murals on the stairwells, the organ and single-handed clock. The interior included glass Blaschka models of aquatic life (octupi, squids etc) and geological displays of desert roses and haematite. Travelling onwards to Southwell Minster, I was impressed by the Norman exterior with its Rhenish caps and the remains of the ruined Bishop's Palace alongside. The interior balances different periods; Flemish and Victorian stained glass by Kempe, Norman arches at one end and early English gothic at the other. Wall plaster remains of a Roman bath house hang on the wall showing a male figure. Medieval misericord carvings of green men are displayed in the pulpitum. Green men carvings also predominate in the Chapter House, itself resembling a forest canopy. A Saxon tympanum rests in one of the transepts while an alter dedicated to fallen Polish soldiers has a triptych as its centrepiece - a Monet-like painting of lilies on the outside, depictions of barbed wire and a dead soldier on the outside.Labels: Art, Literature, London, Music
posted by Richard 9:39 AM
