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.
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, May 20, 2007
Stowe's landscape gardens were designed to reflect the Whiggish views of Viscount Cobham, representing allegory as architecture. It coincidentally depicts a palimpsest of architectural and garden design, with the move from Baroque to Palladian and Augustan styles and from thence to Brown's Serpentine designs. I feel ambivalent on several scores, preferring the Gaudiesque playfulness of Hawksmoor or Wren to the classically correct Palladian style embraced by Burlington and Kent, whilst the continent preferred rococo. Palladianism was closely associated with the Whigs and Kent's designs follow that (although the relationship was fraught; Kent's Augustan style followed a Roman model that was redolent of Roman tyranny rather than Greek liberty, hence the subsequent Greek Revival and James Stuart), depicting figures revered in the Whig tradition like Locke, Socrates and Milton. Conversely, the Tory Gibbs preferred the Baroque style and built an early example of the gothic revival from ironstone that is common in this part of Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire. Gothic was justified as being suggestive of the country's Germanic heritage and commitment to liberty. As was common for early gothic revival buildings, it doesn't look as if Gibbs was entirely sure of what gothic was or how to construct it; the capitals here look more Egyptianate than Gothic. Equally, Brown's mimicry of natural landscapes is entirely dependent on the population of said landscape with various classical temples; I always feel I'd prefer the earlier formal style which admitted no division between nature and art. The grounds were at least home to a wide variety of nature outside of Brown's tamed vistas; lilies, rabbits, copper beeches, squirrels, horse chestnut, coots and geese. This period was also that of the faked ruin and Stowe does have these (along with a Chinese house), but The Temple of Friendship was perhaps more interesting in this regard; it was originally inhabited and decorated and was only perserved as a ruin after a fire. There's something particularly forlorn about its empty rooms, particularly given the surreal aspect given them by the retention of wooden doors and seats.
By contrast, Polesden Lacey is a more mannered affair, largely the creation of an ostentatious Edwardian heiress. The gardens combine formal planting with rock gardens and statues of griffins. The interior joins Edwardian ostentation (a saloon with the walls covered with gold gilt) with an antiquarian interest; Grinling Gibbons carving from an old Wren church, a picture gallery with a plaster ceiling in the style of a Seventeenth century long gallery. Each room is filled with Chinese or Imari vases, Maiolica plates, Ormolu clocks, Boulle and Chippendale furniture, Chinese lacquer and Persian rugs. Some Italian (though derived from Arabic) marquetry of walnut, bone and ivory was especially striking. The gallery is predminantly composed of Dutch (Velde seascapes, Ruisdael landscapes, a Van Der Neer frost fair) and Sienese altar paintings. It also included Corneille De Lyon miniatures and a Ter Borch painting showing an ambiguous scene wherein the characters seem to be playing out a moral fable (a brothel scene), something which typically tended to show low status characters but which here depicts recognisable middle and upper class figures. The gallery also contained a Roman sarcophagus, with elephants shown on its side.
Returning to Highgate, I found myself especially struck by the East Cemetery. When I last visited in Winter the grid plan this necropolis was laid out on was clearly evident and the place had a logical and orderly air to it. In summer, the trees had closen in and the paths beneath them seemed as hidden and secret as those in the West Cemetery. I look at gravestones shattered by ivy vines as thick as lianas, graves written in Arabic, Chinese and Hebrew, graves for obscure figures like magicians (the Human Hairpin) and forgotten inventors. Then there is Karl Marx, an anachronistic monument out of place in North London and out of time now that its kin have been pulled down in Eastern Europe. A single red flower rests on the mausoleum while a black cat flits quietly between the headstones. Within the West Cemetery foxgloves, roses and buttercups are flowering but the cover of the trees in full leaf only leaves the place more dark than on my previous visit in winter. It's difficult not to feel like Alexander Humboldt or Frederick Catherwood. I hadn't realised that this is one of the few places in London with a Giant Redwood. Monuments formerly surmounted by vases now witness them lying broken at their bases, crushed by bindweed.
Reading Museum is not especially noteworthy but it does have some interesting exhibits; green man capitals and animal voussoirs from Reading Abbey, black and white frets from Silchester, the Ogham stone, a Roman tombstone, an Iron age horse effigy and a head from a statue of the Egyptian God Serapis from a Silchester temple. At the time of visiting, the museum had an exhibition dedicated to Sir John Soane to coincide with the restoration of the Simeon Monument. Amongst other things it included various paintings by Joseph Gandy of the Bank of England. Reading Bach Choir also organised a set of peripatetic concerts, flitting from one Reading church to another. Beginning at St Giles (a high church interior filled with baroque monuments, paintings, Bavarian statues of st Mary, candles and Victorian mosaics of the saints) with Summer is Icumen in, then to St Mary's (a former evangelical chapel with a beautiful stained glass simple with a tree design) and Benjamin Britten before finishing at Reading Minister (high church adornments mingling with Saxon arches) and Tallis.
The exhibition of John White's drawings at the British Museum recalls Hakluyt's complex descriptions of native cultures. It begins by showing White's drawings of native cultures from Greece, Turkey and Uzbekistan as well as his Calibanesque imaginings of Pictish warriors. Many of his descriptions of Inuit and Algonquian Indians were to follow the same poses and tropes established by these depictions of savagery, most obviously in the scenes of violence shown with Frobisher's encounter with the Inuit while searching for the North West passage. Nonetheless, his drawings were also intended to assuage such fears of hostile savages and encourage would be emmigrants to Roanoke, and veer between the depiction of noble savages (stressing their agrarian expertise in the growing of maize, their ordered villages and craftsmanship in kayak construction) and objects of curiousity (the skinning of their dead and entombment in special huts, the dances around totem poles surmounted by human faces while draped with tobacco leaves and depictions of cannibalism). The drawings consequently emerge as a form of prospectus, reflecting the linkage between commerce and colonialism that was to set the pattern for the British Empire. White also meticulously recorded the flora and fauna of the places he visited; pineapples, flying fish, jellyfish, plantains, crabs, hoopoes and scorpions while the exhibition also contains some excellent Hilliard miniatures and an appearance from John Dee's scrying mirror (as well as a frontpage of a treatise on navigation showing Elizabeth at the helm of an exploring vessel, wherein Dee prepared the intellectual foundations for colonisation by using the term 'British Empire' for the first time).
Elsewhere in the V&A, an equally interesting exhibition on James 'Athenian' Stuart shows the drawings he and Revett made of buildings like the Temple of the Winds and the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, frequently showing both of them wearing Ottoman dress. As well as depicting the architecture Stuart also had an ethnographic care in depicting the people of Greece, their dress and habits. The background narrative of avoiding plague and brigands alike nearly obscure his architectural achievement but Stuart was the first person in centuries to design structures like censor tripods or doric temples, with the rest of the exhibition showcasing designs and artefacts from places like Kedleston, Shugborough and Nuneham Courtenay. Later, I noticed Rysbrack's original statues of Thor and Sunna on display; if anything I preferred the weathered and encrusted copies that are still at Stowe.
Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 is an uneasy compromise between realist and historical specificity on the one hand (in the vein of Solzhenitzyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) and an allegory that recalls La Peste, The Magic Mountain and The Trial (most obviously in the case of the two guards that come for Frau Zauberblit). As with the latter category of novel, Appelfeld deliberately isolates the events from their historical context, thereby implicity separating them from any meaning. The anomie and restlessness experienced by the inhabitants of Badenheim, whether manifested in a longing for the woods or for a Polish childhood, seems as generalised as the alienation experienced by Hans Castorp even if Appelfeld elsewhere identifies "a kind of neuroticism, a restlessness, a permanent alertness, a kind of insecurity" as an integral aspect of the Jewish consciousness. Equally, Appelfeld also elsewhere suggests that "a society without true roots is a society without a future...Without a deep belief, without a deep philosophy, mysticism, you cannot got through it." Nonetheless, the experience of collective memory in Badenheim 1939 is a deeply ambivalent one. For all of the scorn directed at self-loathing assimilated Jews who sneer at Buber and Herzl, the characters who embrace their Jewish identity most keenly in the novel are those that also embrace their journey to the Polish concentration camps. In a perervse sense the holocaust is envisaged as a form of pilgrimage, the longing for roots equating to a death drive in a way that perhaps recalls the exchange of European emnity for Arab emnity. The metonymic force of the novel is an undirected one that escapes the stark simplicity of the metaphor he employs of fish in the tank.
White's The Vivisector is cast in the same vein as Mann's <>Doktor Faustus and Bernhard's Correction in exploring the idea of the artist as a Faust figure (in depicting the embalmed remains of a vivisected dog it even touches of similar themes to Correction where stuffed animals are emblematic of the blurred distinction between nature and art). The difference is that White also considers the artist as being akin to god ("Yes, I believe in him... othrwise how would men come by their cruelty - and their brilliance?"), who is often described as the divine vivisector, the same term White uses for Duffield. Elsehwere in the novel, the relevation of god's purpose is through a wasp siting rather than by seeing eternity in a grain of sand. Art is a priestly function, of revelation ("the endlessly changing coloured slides in his magic lantern of a mind... were focussing into what might be called a vision.. these paintings are my revelations") but also of cruelty and dissection. In short, the faustianism is inverted, with christ and the devil being one and the same. This combination accountsfor the duality of Duffield as a character; he is often not consciously cruel to the people in his life. He is, for instance, horrified by Hero's drowning kittens and sending her adopted child back to his poor parents, something that is deliberately counterpointed to the actions and attitudes of his own parents (who are nonetheless seeking to treat the child as a work of art, to be moulded or disfigured). Such describes the novel's central fabula, but it is one complicated by class and repressed homosexuality. Caldicott and Cutbush represent the third sex, with the suggestion that the dislocation caused by their sexuality enables them to experience revelation. His liminal position between classes further displaces him from any sense of belonging.
Reading a selection of Emily Dickinson's poems, I felt quite strongly that she reminded me of Hopkins in her approach to language, to sexuality and to religion. The principal difference seemed to be although her work can be viewed as having the concepts of instress and inscape implicit within it, her work has a rather more modernist approach to the role of literature and language. Her poems present a spectrum of views on this from the disavowal of art in I would not paint a picture and Drama's vitallest expression is the common day to its elevation above nature in I reckon - when I count at all.
The Lives of Others is an anomaly, starting from the premise that East Germany was hospitable to art in a way that was not true for a unified Germany that lacked anything to believe in or to rebel against. It's a premise that creates the drama while obviating historical accuracy. In practice, a Stasi agent would not have been assigned sole responsibility for such an operation and would not have been able to collude with his victims; in describing Wiesler as a good man the film does blur the distinction between perpetrator and victim. In a certain sense, there is even a sublimated homosocial love story between Wisler and Dreyman.
Although art if assigned a redemptive quality in the film (as with Wiesler's reading of Brecht's poetry, as his sterile life is counterpointed to Dreyman's), its role is an ambiguous one. For example, the metaphor of acting permeates the script; the Stasi are seen as directors while the ketman practiced by the Easy Germans is characterised as acting. The main character uses this metaphor to persuade Christa to both be true to her husband and to betray him. As a consequence, few ideas presented in the film are seen as clear and stable; the communist bigwigs do not believe in communist ideology even as they enforce and abuse it (Margot Honnecker, gives Dreyman a book by Solzhenitsyn strictly prohibited to ordinary people), and even as Dreyman remains faithful to the cause. Fiction is repeatedly metamorphosed into the reality that originally produced it; the surveillance transcripts refer to an imaginary play and are then turned into a novel, undermining the role of art in bearing witness.Labels: Architecture, Art, England, Literature, London
posted by Richard 12:40 PM
Sunday, November 12, 2006
"High the vanes of Shrewsbury gleam
Islanded in Severn stream;
The bridges from the steepled crest
Cross the water east and west." (AE Housman)
Shrewsbury is one of the best preserved towns in England, with streets lined with half-timbered buildings (one of them stayed in by Henry prior to the Battle of Bosworth Field), a castle on a hill and a profusion of churches from a number of a variety of different periods. Outside the town and besides the Severn lie the remains of the old Benedictine monastery (including a rather eeriely isolated refectory pulpit standing outside) and the present Abbey. The red sandstone exterior left me rather reminded of Hereford. The interior remains largely gothic, with the remains of St Winfrid's shrine having an orthodox icon of the saint by them (it's not really my sort of reading but I did always rather like the alternative story of Winifrid's arrival in Shrewsbury from A Morbid Taste for Bones), Tudor and Norman tombs, Norman remains, a font made from an upended Roman column as a font and Victorian reredos depicting Winifrid.
Within the town lies the church of St Mary the Virgin, with the third largest spire in England (half of it from the original sandstone, the rest much later). This is one of the most impressive churches that I've seen; the windows are filled with 13th to 16th century stained glass from Belgium and Germany, purchased at the same time as the Lady Chapel of Lichfield Cathedral. The 'Tree of Jesse' window showing Edward the Third is 14th century, Saxon tomb slabs, the floor is covered with Minton tiles, while the wooden ceiling is filled with elaborate angel carvings. Nearby is the more modest St Alkmund, a Victorian church with a painted East window and St Chad, a baroque round tower church with a circular nave. Outside, yellow and red leaves had fallen and covered the ground around the large tombs. Over the road is a park with a classical war memorial containing a statue of the angel Gabriel. Past a statue of Darwin outside the library, lie the remains of the castle, as red as the Abbey. A tower built by Thomas Telford when an earlier part of the structure collapsed stands overlooking the river. Down in the town, the museum houses a number of interesting exhibits from the Roman city of Virconium (Wroxeter), including soldier's gravestones (originally garishly painted) and Samian wear.
Elsewhere, St Michael's in Lichfield is set in one of the largest graveyard in the country. Though it lacks the elaborate tombs in the London Victorian cemetery, one of the larger tombs had it's own clock and gas supply to light it up. St Mary and St Hardulph, or Breedon on the Hill, is siutated atop a hill above the surrounding plain. Originally, the site of a Monastery, the largely Norman church is notable for its extensive Saxon carvings; an angel like the one at Lichfield, Vine scroll above the altar and Anglian beasts. Seventeenth century slates tombstones line up in the windswept churchyard, each decorating with elaborate neo-classical etchings that have survived well. A Tudor family memorial depicts the deceased at prayer as well as showing a skeletal corpse beneath. A wooden pew surives that served as the box for the local gentry during services. Nearby is St Michael and St Mary at Melbourne, a Norman cathedral in miniature, with thick columns and round arches supporting a gallery that runs the length of the church. A wonderful medieval mural of the devil survives on one of the walls, near to columns where Saxon carvings of animals remain, including a Sheela-na-gig, a pagan fertility symbol. Further on is St Mary at Tutbury, a rather more restrained affair which does nonetheless have an extraordinary Norman arch in alabaster (another shows scenes of boar hunting). Finally, I had been to Repton before, but was interested to note the same slate tombstones outside and the statue of St Wystan bearing a metal sword above the door.
Autumn is my favourite time of year, with the world transfigured with green thoughts to shades of bronze, gold and burgundy and where the fallen leaves are suddenly siezed and thrown through the air by the unseen force of the wind. I think what I increasingly like about looking at buildings and the natural world is a sense of transfiguration, something similar to Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie translates as 'making strange.' I think of how buildings take on different characters in different lights, of how the fog I can currently see from the window makes the innocuous and familiar sinister and hidden, of how autumn leaves transform the living into something artificial. Autumn has come late this year and it still feels more like October than November. Travelling into London to the Velasquez exhibition at the National Gallery, the sun is bright and the air still seems gentle. The exhibition itself shows Velasquez as a consummate realist, concerned with the mundane in his genre paintings (in spite of the number of religious or mythical subjects), while also continually suggesting, as with Foucault's analysis of Las Meninas, the limits of representation, as with the two kitchen scenes shown here where christ is seen as being somewhere else beyond everyday concerns. The same applies to The Rokeby Venus, where the mirror image only shows a dim reflection of Venus and one that is at the wrong angle (although most of the portraits show the subject facing the viewer, Velasquez also has his sibyl turned away and hidden). Two other small exhibitions were being held, of Cezanne and Dutch winter scenes. The former seems striking for Cezanne's almost cubist approach to nature painting while the highlight of the latter was Jan Beerstraten's The Castle of Muiden in Winter and Avercamp's Scene on the Ice Near Town. Elsewhere within the gallery, I walked through the Sainsbury wing, responding to the colours, but as ever, finding it hard to respond to the subject matter of works like The Wilton Diptych, until we come to the lascivious mythological painting of Florentine artists like Botticelli, Di Cosimo (though a Crivelli altarpiece with real jewels and gold embedded in it was rather striking), Cranach's Greek allegory of Cupid Complaning to Venus and Venetian portrait painters like Bellini's portrait of The Doge Leonardo Loredan. Van Eyck's The Arnolfini Portrait also stands out for me and I next visit the Dutch section, with its Vane De Velde maritime paintings, De Hootch allegories (although he always seems more amused at vice than outraged) or Ruisdael landscapes. Other striking works included Moroni's aristocratic portraits set in the midst of ruins and Rosa's proto-romantic scenes.
Like several other Icelandic sagas, Njal's Saga depicts the conversion of Iceland to Christianity. Njal is himself shown as an unearthly figure gifted with second sight and whose death has all the hallmarks of a saint's martyrdom. Zola's Therese Raquin shows less of a conflict between physiological and environmental considerations than that seen in his later works, cleaving to a theory of the body as the wellspring of all action (Therese and Laurent do not act consciously but are instead two people, driven by their physiogonomy), something that looks back to the medieval humours and forward to Ballard's instinct driven idea of consciousness rather than inahbiting a conventional idea of character. The results can be somewhat uncomfortable; Therese's actions are attributed to her African blood. Nonetheless, Zola is far from being consistent in this regard; Therese speaks of having her upbringing made her into a hypocrite and liar, while Laurent's suffering is seen to induce a change in his body and character, making him more nervous and feminine. While Laurent is held to act only out of fleshy desire, Therese is supposed to take pleasure in knowing why she acts. Their very guilt seems to product of consciousness rather than the instincts of the flesh, while such tropes as the ghost and their eventual suicide seem to suggest the structure of a moral fable.
The figure in the carpet is often cited as a characteristic of Jamesian fiction. The Europeans exemplifies this through the way it depicts its characters in relation to their environment (America and Europe) but elides description of those environments. Felix resembles a Turgenev protagonist while Eugenia resembles Flaubert's most famous heroine. But both Turgenev and Flaubert depict their characters as part of a complex web of social relationships, while James only briefly limns such matters in. Whereas earlier novelists like Dickens and Eliot had assigned a deterministic element to a character's environment, no such element exists for James whose characters are rather more unpredictable, with the lackadaisical Felix settling down while Gertrude discovers herself out of kilter with her home.Labels: Architecture, England, History, Literature, Weather
posted by Richard 7:39 AM
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Bevis Marks Synagogue is the oldest site of Jewish worship in Britain, dating back to Cromwell and the reformation. I was a little surprised to be asked to wear a Kippah skull cap, not having had any such request in Prague's synagogues, though I rather concluded that I liked it. The interior, in wood, white plaster and gold leaf is similar to Wren's churches, just as some of the Prague synagogues took on the guise of Baroque churches. I was also able to gain access to several Wren churches; St Botolph (elaborate Victorian stained glass with stuccoed angels in line across the ceiling), St Bride's (rather Catholic, with the eye streaming light from the altar beneath a barrel vault, suprisingly homoerotic photographic depictions of the crucifixion on the walls) and St Dunstan in the West (a gothic building, now filled with Orthodox icons). St Bride's crypts were open and were especially intriguing, showing both the foundations of succeeding churches and cleared gravestones. Finally, St Sophia, the Greek Orthodox Cathedral, represents what Westminster Cathedral may one day come to look like, with the mosaics created by the same artist, Boris Anrep. I had been to Brompton Cemetery before but hadn't realised that it is laid out in the plan of a basilica, albeit one with whose plans were incomplete with several chapels and bell towers never having been completed and the catacombs left largely unused. Unlike Highgate or Kensal Green, Bunhill Fields cemetery is only just outside the city of London and represents an outcast's cemetery as much as the Jewish cemetery in Prague (which is what it most reminds me of). Containing the graves of Blake, Defoe and Bunyan as well as assorted Cromwells and Wesleys, the tombstones are packed in thickly and are mostly unostentatious, bar the weathered skull motifs found on many of the graves. I walk to St Giles Cripplegate before travelling to the Tower of London. The tower is a rather hyperreal construct, a process that began as early as the restoration when the Crown Jewels were put on display there (originally so that the king's majesty could be touched, until one of the crowns was damaged) and wooden heads of past kings were put on display to legitimise the monarchy once more (Elizabeth had a special place alongside relics of the Armada and later the Jacobite rebellion). Another curiousity was a Venetian winged lion taken from Corfu, on display inside the White Tower. The white tower itself was only painted and gabled later, while much of the tower is a Victorian reconstruction of the original. Nontheless, what does tend to be interesting about the tower is the Chapel of St John the Evangelist or the graffiti scrawled on the walls by the likes of Arundel or by an astronomer sent to the tower by Bess of Hardwick on suspicion of sorcery. Before I leave I notice a seagull making of with meat intended for the ravens, three of whom indignantly fly in pursuit.
I go for a walk in Greenwich, beginning with St Alfege, whose interior rather reminds me of the churches in Denmark; white plaster and dark wood. Greenwich reminds me a little of Oxford; a place outside of civil society throughout history and whose confrontation with modernity has left it as a fly in amber. I go for a walk around the Naval College Chapel and the Cutty Sark before walking the Greenwich foot tunnel to east London. Here, I return to St Anne's Limehouse and am able to see the interior. Damage due to damp was all too visible, with the elaborate blue plaster horribly disfigured and decayed. The following day is witness to a St George's Cathedral. The building was shorn of its spire the second world war and is consequently rather drab and forgettable. leaving a marked sense of incongruity when one walks through to the beautiful interior. I then walked around the park that was formerly the grounds of the Bethelem Royal Hospital and are now adjacent to the Imperial War Museum (former site of Bedlam); within it grows the 34 native trees that colonised Britain after the ice age. Today, the grass has shrivelled and the tree's leaves are curling and withering in the heat. London silver vaults reminded me of Highgate's Egyptian avenue of funerary vaults; one descends downwards through a series of maze-like passages and stairwells. Upon arrival, corridors stretch off into the distance with doors on either side. Each shop is effectively a walk-in safe, with each of them selling the same kinds of candelabra and assorted ephemera. Visiting Convent Garden, I noticed the church there now has its own orthodox icon, showing the madonna, flanked by st paul and st genesius, the patron saint of actors.
The Holbein exhibition at the Tate represents the point at which art became full human and secular. Although Holbein did produce religious works they could most charitably be described as inferior imitations of renaissance painting. With most devotional work proscribed in Britain, his painting of Erasmus shows the scholar in the guise typically reserved for saints while other works are created as roundels in imitation of classical coins. Holbein pioneered painting where the subject looks directly at the viewer, so that his works acquire a peculiarly intimate quality (the subjects loom large, taking up the entire canvas). Merchants sought pictures that were true to life to send to far-fling contacts and family, thereby displacing classical and religious paintings. Elsewhere, the Tate had a painting of Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, Moorish Ambassador to Queen Elizabeth I and the peculiarly surreal painting of The Cholmondeley Ladies. The later section of Blake was also especially interesting, showing Blake's work in the context of artists between the wars who responded to his vision of a New Albion, such as Nash's paintings of the Mansions of the Dead and the Flight of the Magnolia as well as Robin Ironside's Daliesque paintings. Other interesting works include John Singer-Sergeant's paintings of the Middle-East and Whistler's surprisingly traditional Crepuscule in Flesh Colour and Green: Valparaiso , Piper's paintings of Bath destroyed by the Luftwaffe's Baedaeker's raids and Rossetti's The Annunciation. That evening I watched fireworks exploding over London, tracing patterns in the sky with sparklers and watching Millbank Tower silhouetted and Battersea Power Station being lit up by the lights.
Caesar's The Conquest of Gaul exhibits many of the same ambivalent attitudes to civilisation shown by Tacitus; the relatively civilised Gauls prove easy to conquer while the barbaric hunters of the German tribes cannot be vanquished. In a similar fashion, Thucydides records during The Pelopennesian War that the habit of dressing lavishly had been abandoned in Athens as being decadent in favour of Spartan simplicity.
Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop ends with its two protagonists fleeing from the burning shop, a moment Carter saw as being akin to the expulsion from Eden (though the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was perhaps the more obvious metaphor). However, the novel has two such Eirenic moments elsewhere (once in Melanie's garden at home and once with Finn in the pleasure gardens) with the surfeit of symbolism consequently overwhelming precise interpretations (particularly given the question of whether Uncle Philip represents the devil or a totalitarian god in the narrative). Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight affords a similar problem. Szerb was heavily influenced by Lukacs and the idea of the problematic individual, and the novel accordingly presents a disjunction between society and the bohemian aspirations of the novel's characters. Conversely, Szerb was also heavily influenced by Karl Kerenyi, a Jungian scholar of Greek myth Lukacs drove into exile. The character's bohemian rebellion is accordingly expressed as thanatophilia, through doors to the underworld and an Etruscan Eurydice leading Orpheus back down to Hades for their union to take place. The two narratives barely interlock and instead proceed in parallel with one another, the notion of Marxist alienation being aborted in favour of a view of society as despiritualised.
One of the advantages of the layout of the Globe Theatre is that it affords far more possibilities than a normal confined stage arrangement. The last production of Titus Andronicus saw the action spill out of the stage and around the rest of the theatre. Confetti is hurled from the galleries down to the conquering heroes and Emperors of Rome. Bassinius is thrown into a pit into the arena, where scaffolding is errected and moved for hangings and speeches. The actors move amongst the crowds in the arena, all of which seems apposite for a play that is often concerned with bread and circuses. The play itself is an anomaly; its bleak rejection of worldly affairs has more in common with King Lear and Timon of Athens than with the other early works. Like much of Marlowe's work, it seems well characterised by Artaud's ideas; "The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood.
This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid." As in Artaud's manifesto, the play uses symbolism to work with the emotions and to remove the audience from the quotidian, to attack their senses through violence and to use the grotesque (a late Bakhtinian concept that has lost its vital connection with renewal; much of the play can really only be directed as carnivalesque farce or burlesque. Hence Bloom's comment that the play should really be directed by Mel Brooks). Whereas later works, like A Midsummer Night's Dream carefully balance the claims of the wild greenwood and civilised Athens, Titus Andronicus lacks any such symmetry. The play opens with Titus mercilessly ordering the death of Tamora's son in spite of her entreaties and slaying his own, creating a question mark from the outset as to whether Rome is more civilised than the barbarous Goths (throughout, I found myself reminded of Cavafy's Waiting for the Barbarians). Later, the ascending of Tamora to becoming Rome's Empress further blurs that distinction, as much as the use of a Goth army by Lucius to liberate Rome from a despotic ruler. Walking back along the Embankment, I notice that all the trees have had blue and white fairy lights layed over their boughs, vesting the place with an oddly ethereal feel. Two men lovingly kiss underneath the leaves.
Coetzee's Slow Man marks an understated sequel of sorts to Elizabeth Costello, continuing in the same anti-novelistic tradition. Coetzee places the central elements of the novel in the background, whether it is narrative (events are understated, abandoning resolution in favour of the indeterminacy of life) or consciousness (the central character being essentially hollow, experiencing a series of reactions towards Marijana, none of which can be fully characterised as emotion or feeling). As a fable, Slow Man is non-existent, its protagonist gaining no
redemption, resolution or closure, simply a dying fall.Labels: Architecture, Art, Drama, History, Literature, London
posted by Richard 7:37 AM
Monday, August 28, 2006
In many respects, Copenhagen resembles Amsterdam with its docks reclaimed from the sea, its gabled merchant's houses and its canals. Unlike Holland though, Denmark has no history of republicanism and was an absolute monarchy for much of recent history. The city is accordingly filled with towering baroque churches with copper spires, moated palaces, domes and towers. Statues of mythical creatures rear out of every corner. Copper statues fill all the parks, from the monsters in front of the Radhus to the Greek statues in the Botanical Gardens. Beginning in fron the Radhus's gothic towers, the lure singers statue and the three gothic gargoyles by its balustrade, I walked past Tivoli, the last pleasure gardens in Europe, down the main shopping street to the Vor Frue Kirke, the city cathedral. The interior is white and spartan, showing a distinct neo-classical influence; the only ornament is from Thorvaldsen's statues of the saints, which line either side the nave. Although the tone is in keeping with Lutheran theology, the results nonetheless seem odd for a Protestant church. The rest of the building was designed by C.F. Hansen, who also created neo-classical designs for the law courts and palace chapel. Nearby is the Sankt Petri Kirke, the oldest preserved church in the city centre of Copenhagen. Nearby to that is the Rundetaarn is part of the Trinitatis Kirke with its white interior and occasional gold ornament, the gothic interior being relieved by baroque ornamentation. The tower served as an observatory and affords a view as far as Sweden. A whitewashed spiral walk leads up the summit and a wrought-iron lattice railings. Near to this is the Sankt Nikolaj Kirker, now a rather poor art gallery. I feel rather ambivalent to this; I have little to no sympathy for religious belief but am concerned as to the implications of its welcome retreat for the beautiful buildings it has created. Few notable pieces of architecture reflect anything other than commercial ostentation, aristocratic conceit and religios progaganda, none of these boding especially well.
I had been to exhibitions with many of the works from Dahlerup's Glyptotek, but was still impressed with seeing them in place, the red hippopotamus from the gardens of Sallust in the winter gardens. Foremost amongst the exhibits was a bust of Ptolemy, cut from the same black basalt as earlier statues (as well as more impressives statues, such as one of Anubis) but showing a face in the Grecian rather than Egyptian style. One Egyptian stelae shows Octavian making offerings to the Egyptian gods as if he were Amenhotep. This was followed by a set of Roman busts from differing periods and places, the Hellenistic, Republican (a more realistic style prior to idealised Julian statuary), Palmyran, Flavian and Severan. Notable figures included Antinous and a rather ephebian Dionysus (who assumed a more promiment role over time as attitudes became more fatalistic and mystery religions worshipping him or Demeter spread). Some busts retained the ceramic eyes originally placed in their sockets, given them a hauntingly natural sensation in contrast to the glacial and ephereal nature of most unpainted Greek statuary (one surviving bust of Caligula has a painted version alongside). Conversely, Greek statuary has tended to prefer bronze, with less of it surviving as a consequence, with one replica of Heracles also being striking for retaining its white and black ceramic eyes against the verdigris of the copper. Many of the museums in Copenhagen seem to have an unusually large Etruscan section, showing the brilliant colouring on the tomb frescos and statues (one Sphinx in particular), the black pottery and copper tools like mirrors. Where the exhibition also showed Fayum mummies, early rectangular Egyptian coffins, later mummy cases and carved Roman sarcophaguses, the Etruscans created funerary caskets in the shape of houses or even as seated statues (bearing Persephone's pomegranate in one hand) of the deceased placed before banqueting tables in their rock tombs as part of an ancestor cult. More generally, the museum also had ceramic walls tiles from Babylon, depicting lions and mythological beasts.
The Glyptotek also showcases sections on Danish art and French sculpture. Rodin's sculptures, such as The Kiss, depict scenes from Dante, with most of the French sculpture being either religious (the reaper seizing a young girl) or classical (Perses slaying Medusa). The Danisch sculptures are not dissimilar but Frend's works tend to concentrate on Norse myth, showing Odin and the Valkyries. Many of the paintings show the idealised influence of Constable (such as Lundbye's paintings, though some of his paintings of dolmen are more interesting), as a defeated and impoverished nation (after Nelson's naval bombardment and a disastrous alliance with Napoleon leading to the loss of Norway to Sweden) sought refuge in escapism and in paintings of Mediterranean scenes, such as the Temple of the Winds and the ruined Coliseum, painted by Rørbye. The paintings of Dahl (his nighttime pictures of Vesuvius) and Købke (winter landscapes) particularly stood out from this. The Glyptotek is in many a normal gallery today but its central palmhouse and an extension modelled on the statue of Halicarnassus, note that its history is not typical. Created by the Carlsberg brewing magnate, Carl Jacobsen, who had also created some kitsch and grandiolquent (rather Stalinist) architecture at the factory in Frederiskberg; four elephants guarding the gates and tiled paintings of the founders while the nearby worker's housing was rather more dour.
The National Museum also includes many ancient exhibits, such as a giant black basalt scarab, Jewish ossuaries, Christian Syrian mummies, a Phoenician/Aridian sarcophagus where the features were Grecian despite otherwise resembling an Egyptian mummy and Roman silver cups depicting scenes from the Iliad and Odyssey in exquisite detail. Elsewhere, the ethnographic section included Peruvian mummies, Javanese shadow theatres, and Aztec jade mummies. For the most part, the museum dwelt on Danish history though, such as wooden church sculptures, ivory goblets with spheres inside spheres from the royal kunstkammer, the Trundholm sun chariot, rune calendars and spells written onto wooden lengths in runes, golden altars, drinking horns, gold reliquaries, paintings reflected in a central cylinder to become visible, nautilus shells, eighteenth century chinoiserie tapestry and red lacquered panels. Much of the interest in runes seems to have originated with Ole Worm, an antiquarian equivalent to Stukeley or Dee, who was also interested in taxidermy, fossils (determining that certain horns came from narwhals and not unicorns) and helped established the botanical gardens in Copenhagen. Finally, there is a room dedicated to rune stones, contained several showing Swastikas and Triskeli as well as Futhark inscriptions (though it has to be said that it would seem preferrable for these stones to remain outside).
The Slotsholmen area is home to one of the older royal palaces and the current Parliament, separated from the rest of the city by canals. Just outside it, the Holmen's Kirke is decorated in the baroque style, but with the carving in unvarnished wood. This was the naval church and a wooden ship model remains suspended from the ceiling. The church lacks a tower, instead forming a cross with equal lengths on all sides. Within the area, lies the Thorvaldsen Museum. Like the Soane Museum, Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum cast court, the museum serves as a mausoleum to the sculptor, including many of his sculptures, casts, collections and personal effects as a form of grave good. While the museum does feature his church sculptures, most of his work is classical and explicitly erotic, if not homoerotic. There are three versions of Ganymede (one showing him with the eagle), Adonis, Jason, Apollo and Mars. The building itself appears designed on its interior to ape Nero's palace while the exterior has a frieze showing Thorvaldsen's works being put in place (the tone of hagiography is often rather marked with busts and statues of Thorvaldsen being found throughout the museum). The upper floor displays Egyptian canopic jars, Greek red & black vases, Roman busts as well as a Brueghel that seemed more reminiscent of Bosch's hell paintings. Overall, Thorvaldsen's preference is for neo-Italianate painting in the Renaissance style. Nonetheless, the museum also has more Romantic depictions of Danish landscapes, such as more Dahl nightscenes.
The Botanical Gardens contain a variety of terrains, from Greek mountains, coniferous forests, herbaceous borders, bamboo glades and a lake complete with lilypads and a Monetesque bridge. Fat black and white ducks nestle nearby while a snake slides through the grass. The gardens are exhibiting poisonous plants, such as Belladona and Snowberry. Classical copper statues dot the grounds, such as a discuss thrower. At the centre is a glass Palmhouse, containing cycads, lillies and citrus trees. Some butterflies flit through the air in one of the houses. Nearby to it is the Rosenborg Slot, surrounded by a moat this was the palace of Christian the Fourth and was in use from the sixteenth to eighteenth century. The interior is accordingly varied, featuring the contents of the King's Kunstkammer; a winter room whose walls are studded with Flemish pastoral and winter scenes, a marble room decorated with silver-lined mirrors, amber (Northern gold) caskets and chandeliers, ivory ship models, serrated paintings that display either the king or queen depending on where it is viewed from, black lacquered chionoiserie panels, a room were the walls are entirely covered in mirrors and gold Thorvaldsen statues. Finally, the upper floor houses a throne room, with a decorated stucco ceiling, narwhal throne, Flemish tapestries, silver lions and silver clocks and mirrors. Passages lead off to glass and porcelain cabinets, modelled on Charlottenberg in Berlin. The treasury in the basement houses the Gallehus horns (depicting a horned god), planet and eclipse machines, rock crystal goblets, an altar set with a skull at the base of the chalice and the crown jewels.Nearby is the Hirschprung Museum, featuring nineteenth century 'Golden Age' art. As with the Thorvaldsen museum, this covers material like Eckersberg's portraits, Lundbye's pastoral landscapes, Købke's melancholy paintings of Frederiksberg through to later works like Ejnar Nielsen The Blind Girl (a Klimt like affair, showing a figure in black encircled by a gold river), Harald Slott-Møller's Pre-Raphaelite Spring while other works like Theodor Philipsen View of the Road to Kastrup and works by Johannes Larsen's were more impressionist. The grounds outside the rather funereal building are pleasantly rural, filled with lakes. A tree stump has been carved in the image of a turtle while a heron pauses at the water's edge. Fungi grow from tree trunks. Walking back towards the waterfront, one comes to the Marmorkirken, a baroque green and gold dome. Otherwise known as Frederik’s Church, its grey marble interior is largely baroque, occasionally relieved by bright blue stained glass and gold mosaics. Next to its stands the three gold domes of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. Walking past it to Nyhavn, leads onto the island of Christianhavn and the Vor Frelser's Kirke. Constructed as an unmissable testament to absolute monarchy (or totalitarianism as we might call it now), its black and gold spire has a spiral wrapped round that was modelled on the interior of a snail (designed by Laurids de Thurah, who also conceived the nearby Charlottenberg Palace near Nyhavn). Walking round the spiral exterior was rather like becoming a figure from Escher's Ascending and Descending or perhaps Tatlin's Tower, Brueghel's Tower of Babel or a funfair helter skelter. The interior is white with a ceiling studded with gold stars, angels lining along the altar rails, a giant wooden barqoue organ supported by two elephants and a gold crown handing above the font.Otherwise, the area is reminiscent of nothing so much as London's Docklands (though the further island of Nyholm retains its position as a naval base and the same crane seen in nineteenth century churches), as warehouses are concerted into offices, save for small pockets like Christiania.
Venturing further afield, I came to Roskilde and its cathedral. Formely the capital of Denmark before being outstripped by mercantile Copenhagen, Roskilde is perhaps best described as being analogous to somewhere like Winchester. Built from red brick and plastered white on the inside, beautiful pre-reformation floral patterns lost in Copenhagen's churches remain here, often depicting local devils (Tutivillus the "patron demon of scribes" or of calligraphy). More modern paintings of figures like Harald Blutooth now join these. The Danish royal family are interred here, often with later extensions to accommodate them; Christian the First's chapel features Renaissance marble tombs in the style of ancient temples. Frederik the Fifth's chapel is neo-classical, filled with black coffins with gold clawed feet and guarded by Sphinxes. Christian the Fourth's chapel is more gothic, with a blue ceiling studded with gold stars where frescos of Biblical scenes line the walls. Finally, a tomb for the wife of Tsar Alexander and mother of the last Tsar is filled with Russian icons - it may now be returned to Russia, the Tsarina having escaped on a British destroyer. Ancient gravestones line the floors. Near to the entrance, there is an astronomical clock, with the roar of the dragon and St George striking the hour. Otherwise, the interior is flawlessly pure, save for gold altars, royal pews and organs. Finally, I visited the Viking ship museum by the fjord. Tiny fish and jellyfish dart through the water while swans glide overhead. Arriving back in Copenhagen, I went to the Helligånds Kirke for an organ recital by Gillian Weir. The church is, once more, white plaster, with dark wood panelling and gilt. It was the only church to still retain stained glass windows. Gold angels appeared on a frized at the back of the church before the baroque painted altar. The recital included Liszt, Durufle, Mushel, Jongen and Slonimsky.
The final day began with a visit to Malmö. Southern Sweden has been Danish for longer than it has been Swedish, and the new landbridge has once more joined the two cities. The city itself is lined by a canal, parks and graveyards (rather less ornate than British equivalents, often featuring natural motifs and still retaining iron railings). Within the city are many half-timbered buildings, a Dutch-style townhall while a Moorish synagogue stands outside the city. A windmill stands outside the moat of the castle. The cathedral is Germanic in style, built by German merchants who has travelled to the Øresund region to exploit the herring trade (the equivalent of the English wool trade), though one of the chapels retains wall painting very similar to that at Roskilde, showing George and the Dragon. The interior is extremely plain, with only a few baroque ornaments. The castle, a former prison, now houses a design exhibition. This covers a range of design periods; Italian and Flemish Renaissance painting (including a Bosch-like Dutch painting of Orpheus in the Underworld), Delft and Maiolica vases, vases in the classical style, with gold Egyptian handles and black ceramic, mirrors with black and white Wedgewood figures, large Art Nouveau vases dominated by dragons and peacocks as well as Art Nouveau stained glass with spider's webs and peacocks. Most striking was the peasant art, with woven tapestries and painted wood. A historical exhbition contained another rune stone, showing Christ painted in gold and red. The castle's rooms had been restored to something like their original state, including paintings of James and Mary Stuart (whose husband was imprisoned in the castle).
Returning to Copenhagen, I visited Kastellet, a citadel similar to that built at Malmö though still in use as a military base. The Little Mermaid statue rests in the waters here, between this and the industrial and naval complexes at Nyholm, as well as a statue of the Norse Goddess Gefion. Another oddity is the church of St Albans, an English church built to serve the British embassy (the Swedish embassy seems to have taken over an old church). I was left ambivalent over the Scandinavian social model; high costs mean that wages can be kept high across the board rather than being driven down as in the Anglo-American model. While this funds an exceptional welfare state and public services, the number of vagrants suggests that it can make it difficult for many to make ends meet. Conversely, working hours seemed much less than in England, suggesting a much greater focus on quality of life than on economic growth.Labels: Architecture, Art, Copenhagen, History
posted by Richard 7:36 AM
Wednesday, June 7, 2006
Anthony Giddens sees modernity as a condition whereby pre-modern (traditional) culture have given way to modern (post-traditional) culture; identity becomes more reflexive and self-consciously constructed. Roles are negotiated rather than assigned by convention. Anthony Trollope is consciously writing in The Way We Live Now as an opponent of modernity, counterpointing the morals and dignity of an increasingly impecunious aristocracy with the corruption of the self-made men of the rising mercantile classes; "his position is a sign of the degeneracy of the age". However, the novel also questions conventional ideas of identity; the stereotypically Jewish aspects of the portrayal of Melmotte's venality is balanced by the portrayal of Mr Breghert as he is wronged by members of the upper classes unwilling to accept that times have changed for social acceptance of Jews. Similarly, Marie Melmotte proceeds from being a hapless victim to revenging herself on her father and taking on property. Equally, the fact that Melmotte is brought down the avarice of the aristocracy and the dissipation of figures like Sir Felix, serves to deconstructs the opposition at the heart of the novel between old fashioned order and middle class rapacity. The novel acknowledges some of this in its discussions of how Melmotte himself is viewed; "as the great man was praised so too was he abused... the working classes were in favour of Melmotte... from their belief he was being ill-used.. that occult sympathy for crime, when the crime committed is injurious to the upper classes... it came to be said of him that he was more sinned against than sinning."
Similar concerns appear throughout Zola's The Kill, where Haussman's rebuilding of Paris serves throughout as a metaphor for the disorientation and the Durkheimite anomie of modernity. As such, Paris is seen as artificial and inauthentic, no longer the organic product of social evolution; "a strange feeling of illicit desire at the sight of this landscape that had become unrecognisable, so worldly and artificial." The preoccupation with the artificial and contrived point clearly to Zola's affiliation with Huysmans. As traditional roles fall into desuetude, so too do traditional ethics of abstinence; "the main preoccupation of society was with knowing how to enjoy itself." Sin becomes a form of consumption, of refinement. Similarly, sexual roles also become fluid once they are no longer constrained by traditional norms; "the sign of his boyish debauchery, this effeminisation of his whole being... he seemed born and bred for perverted sensual pleasure. Renee enjoyed her domination." Renee assumes the masculine role, Maxime the feminine. The paradox in many Zola novels is that while the central fable of his novels is concerning with condemning the immorality of modern, post-traditional society, the syuzhet draws much of its sensational interest from depicting them. As such, The Kill is loosely based on a moral fable, with Renee being betrayed by Saccard and Maxime. However, Saccard's indifference to her adultery goes a long way towards aborting that moral framework, with the cash nexus replacing normal social relations.
Hans Christian Anderson's stories depict a world where, as a character in The Ice Maiden puts it, "antiquated ways are discarded" so that mermaids and telegraph wires co-exist (memorably, the eyes of the ice maiden are described as being like the barrels of a shotgun) and the conventions of folk tales (of the kind described by Vladimir Propp) become contested and dispersed. A tale like The Tinderbox recognisably belongs to the same world as that of the Brothers Grimm; a hero is offered the chance of fame and fortune and is ruthless in his will to power, in contrast to the moral fable of Big Claus and Little Claus or The Ugly Duckling. However, in later stories this is sublimated, either into a thanatophilic concept of virtue being rewarded in the afterlife (as in The Little Mermaid, The Marsh King's Daughter or The Story of a Mother) or where aspiration and virtue alike are thwarted (as in The Shadow). Contingent upon this is a world that is far less centered around the protagonists, where everything from animals to inanimate objects have become anthropomorphised, as cats and storks become participants and commenters within the narrative. The fate of creatures like The Snowman or The Fir Tree is more suggestive of Kafka's Metamorphosis than the Brothers Grimm. Equally, if the stories frequently see female sexuality as threatening (particularly with the Ice Maiden or Snow Queen) then they also displace the role of the hero in favour of female characters, like Gerda in The Snow Queen or The Marsh King's Daughter.
Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor is one of the most interesting dystopian novels I can think of. Whereas the majority of apocalyptic science fiction, from Wyndham to Atwood, revolves around the causal factors (technological, ecological, political, economic etc) for whatever has changed society from its familiar state, Lessing elides this; "for 'it' is a force, a power... 'it' can be, has been, pestilence, war, the alteration of climate, tyranny." The novel is deliberately dislocated from any specific sense of time or place and instead concentrates on the consequences of social breakdown from feral packs of children to tribal migration. Nonetheless, Lessing undermines the dystopian aspects of the novel in a number of ways. Firstly, dystopian fiction, whether 1984, Day of the Triffids or The Handmaids Tale tends to emphasise individual agency in the face of events. By contrast, Lessing repeatedly stresses that governments are powerless in the face of change while her characters take no actions to change matters. Offered the choice of moving to safer areas in the countryside, they do nothing. Submission is the order of the day (Lessing's interest in Sufism comes through strongly in how she handles time, viewing all phenomena as manifestations of a single reality, or Wujud i.e. being). She also expresses little sorrow for the loss of 'the age of affluence,' implying that the experiments in communalism that emerge represent an improvement on the society that had marginalised people like June Ryan; "all property worries gone; all sexual taboos gone... free, at least from what was left of 'civilisation' and its burdens." By repeatedly 'cutting' to descriptions of Emily's childhood, Lessing also appears to characterise the family in Laingian terms as a source of neurosis whose loss is not necessarily to be mourned.
From Zola's view of the novel as a scientific experiment to Wolfe's 'new journalism,' the novel has attempted to purge itself of all assocations with artifice and imagination, preferring instead to present itself as something objective and factual. If inherent in the idea of realism, it nonetheless represents a problematic conception, if only because if the act of observing something can change a subject, how much more can the act of narrating change it. The most notable example of which being Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, a 'non-fiction novel' relating the murder of four people on a Kansas farm in 1959. Bearing this in mind, the idea of creating a film depicting the writing of the book is an oddly postmodern one (a representation of a representation), particularly since the sparse and austere cinematography appears to be trying to emulate the novel's journalistic style.
Wimpole Hall, designed by Sir John Soane and James Gibbs, appears at first a model of neo-classical symmetry and proportion. However, the interior easily belies this, as corridors snake in on themselves leading to dead-ends. His main contribution is a drawing room with a large domed ceiling, not unlike some of his works at Lincoln's Inn. The main contribution from Gibbs was a Wedgewoodesque book room. The highlight of the interior was a small collection of Gillray prints, mostly lambasting the Prince Regent and the Broad Bottomed Ministry (as well as some more unusual ones with hunting as their target). I was also struck by a Grandfather clock, where a ship rocked on the waves in time with the ticks and tocks.
An interior chapel is painted with a trompe l'oeil effect (something of a theme; there's also a painted playing table, complete with painted cards). The grounds are home to a small church (with a large wing filled with marble monuments of the house owners) and a set of gothic ruins in the distance. The gardens have been restored to their original formal patterns (reversing Capability Brown's vandalism), though landscaped pleasure grounds filled with a wide range of trees and shrubs remain (including the national collection of walnuts). The sky was a brilliant shade of turquoise inbetween dark rain clouds, while the flatness of the Cambridgeshire landscape reminded me strongly of a Trent Valley that had never been industrialised.
Perched high above the Thames, Cliveden feels as if it should be a gothic castle. Instead, the Italianate building and formal gardens look as if they should be nestled within the gentle slopes of a valley. I'd forgotten the sheer amount of Roman and Italian sculpture in the grounds, such as the Borghese balustrade with its dragons and eagles as well as more modern conceits like the turtles on one of the fountains. The Wisteria was flowering alongside the Acer in the Chinese water garden (it felt as if cherry blossom should have been correct for the pagoda, but the Wisteria made a more than acceptable substitute). Ducklings splashed about in the waters around the Botticelli fountain. Further along the Thames and one comes to Windsor. The castle here towers well above the Thames (the site was chosen by William the Conqueror on defensive grounds) though the presence of the town nestling beneath it softens the scene somewhat. I find a meadow by the river, go paddling in the water and watch the swans glide by. Rather inevitably, the town itself has a rather kitsch feel to it, largely due to the continuous citing of often rather trivial historical associations; HG Wells working as a draper or Nell Gwyn and Shakespeare staying in local taverns. You do have to go back quite a long way before anything actually happened at Windsor. Even much of the castle has a rather Ruritanian feel to it, presumably due to the changes made by George the Fourth. The castle has been redesigned and redesigned so often that its medieval appearance is illusory and hyperreal. The town does at least have a more concrete feel to it, with a Guildhall designed by Wren and the nearby church St John the Baptist, home to an anonymous Renaissance painting of the last supper and beautiful altar mosaics and corbels, designed by the same artist that worked on Westminster Abbey.
Further down the Thames again and one comes to Richmond. When the likes of Hampton Court and Ham House were built here, courtiers would sail to the city on barges establishing its role as a rural suburb early on. Ham House was originally designed in the Jacobean period and much like its rival at Hampton was extended during the restoration. The house reached its apotheosis at this point, described by Evelyn as comparable to the finest villas in Italy and furnished like a palace. Nonetheless, its owner fell from favour at court, penury beckoned and the house was left to stagnate for centuries. Visiting in 1770, Walpole described it as dreary, ancient and decayed, a place barricaded away from the rest of the world and liable to defeat even his passion for the antique. Today, the house seems rather less formidable, in spite of the busts of Roman Emperors filling niche after niche in the redbrick walls at the front of the house. Nonetheless, the house looks out from a long avenue towards the Thames, as parakeets fly overhead. The restored gardens provide a glimpse of what Evelyn meant, with a wilderness area populated by statues of Hermes, hornbeam hedges and secluded gardens, formal gardens planted with lavender and box and overlooked by Bacchus and kitchen gardens (there is also a still chamber for the preparation of perfumes, conserves and cordials). One room contained detailed plans for rebuilding Inigo Jones' Westminster Palace, the subject of much speculation in Defoe's Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain and a good example of the many unfulfilled projects of what London could have been.
Like Hampton, the planting of myrtle, lemon, oleander and almond trees is of the period (tulips and pineapples are incorprated into statues and gates throughout the gardens). Conversely, the interior tends to illustrate the decayed grandeur of the place. A great hall hung with paintings by Lely and Kneller leads to a grand staircase, with an elaborate wooden balustrade. The North Drawing Room above is hung with Flemish tapestries (still retaining much of their original colour; a later room has Spitalfields tapestries copying Watteau designs), white marble chimneypieces and ionic columns and ivory cabinets. This leads to a long gallery, where dark black wood is gilded with gold, and Van Dyck paintings of the Royal family line the walls. A strange self-portrait hangs above the door, showing him with a sunflower, symbolic of art and nature, sovereign and subject. Marquetry and Japanned furniture, often with blue and white Kangxi porcelain line the walls. A closet leads to a collection of miniatures of subjects like Elizabeth, Lucretia's suicide and a love in flames (he who does not burn will die). Finally, an elaborate four-poster bed forms the centrepiece of the Queen's bedchamber, decorated with Van De Velde paintings.
Lacock in Wiltshire was once the home of an abbey that offered a home to the unmarried daughters of wealthy families, and to a village that grew wealthy through the wool trade. The Abbey was dissolved in the reformation while the nineteenth century cotton imports had a similar effect on the village. The combination of these factors with the relative isolation of Lacock led to them becoming a form of time capsule. The village remains full of half-timbered buildings, while the church of St Cyriac still houses a Lady Chapel where paint remains on the ceiling alongside especially elaborate gargoyle carvings. The church has a window above the chancel arch, indicative of the customary 'wool gothic' style of Cotswolds churches. The walls are still whitewashed, presumably indicative of no Victorian changes. The exterior of the church is equally elaborate, while the size of the tombs testifies to the wealth of the community. The abbey has rather less of a sense of continuity with that period, save for its cloisters. After the reformation, it was converted into a country house and an octagonal tower added to the side. The interior is dominated by a circular table, supported by three satyrs, while much of the house is dominated by images of the scorpion from that owner's crest. Later owners provided good examples of early gothic revival. The great hall comes with a barreled ceiling studded with crests, a rose window and wall niches filled with extraordinary terracotta figures representing death and the scapegoat. Later owners experimented with camera inventions and translation of cuneiform and populated the house with the likes of geological specimens and stuffed pangolins. The grounds are more classical, ranging from a stone sphinx to a botanical garden.
Nearby lies Great Chalfield house, a fifteenth century manor house complete with a moat. The church of All saints lies within the moat and includes a beautiful painted pre-raphaelite organ and wooden rood screens. Swallows nesting in the rafters looked down curiously on the visitors. The grounds bear witness of plants overspilling the paths and forcing their way through the cracks between the lichen covered paving stones (looking rather like Mariana's moated grange), a welcome correction to the meticulous restoration of the house itself. The great hall on the interior is much as one would expect, save for mask-like faces looking down from the galleries with empty eye-sockets (designed for the lord to spy on servants). Red paint remains on the rafters of the hall, while perhaps the most impressive aspect of the rest of the house are the oriel windows.
Having been to Highgate Cemetery earlier this year, I returned to London today for more of the Victorian way of death. The 'mighty seven' cemeteries represent a form of ritual, as much as photographs, death masks and portraits of the recently deceased produced by the Victorians, as well as jewellery that utilized a locket of the dead person's hair, extravagant funerals and the wearing of black crepe. After a stroll round the Kyoto gardens in Holland Park, were I watched the peacocks lazily strut about and a wagtail flit from one stone pagoda to another, I began at Brompton Cemetery. More like a landscaped garden than Highgate, ferns have nonetheless grown thickly across much of the grounds while squirrels scamper across the tombstones. The layout is also more formal than Highgate (based on the structure of a cathedral), with a central avenue leading to a chapel modelled on St Peter's Basilica, which is flanked by long colonnades. The tombs are also more impressive than the majority of those in Highgate, with Neo-classical, Gothic and Egyptian mausoleums lining the central avenue. The most impressive tomb is that of James McDonald (Chairman of Anglo-American Oil), a gothic affair complete with Pre-Raphaelite angels and stained glass windows. Conversely, the names of the dead are rather less noteworthy than either Highgate or Kensal Green; Emmeline Pankhurst being the most well known. The cemetery is also a rather blatantly obvious cruising ground; albeit by coincidence rather than by design, there's something rather reassuring (and oddly apposite) about desire persisting in the midst of death.
I then travelled north to visit Kensal Green, the first of the Victorian 'mighty seven' cemeteries to be constructed and perhaps the most impressive. While the trees were still leafless when I went to Highgate, Kensal had a perversely bucolic aspect in the sunshine with buttercups and daisies flowering while a Green Woodpecker perched on top of one of the graves. Kensal Green would certainly have been rural when it was built, but today the cemetery is dominated by the rusting skeletons of two gasometers and the louring presence of Erno Goldfinger's brutalist Trellick Tower. Kensal is by no means as formally laid out as Brompton, though it does have a set of Greek Revival Chapels (complete with catacombs and hydraulic catafalque) and a central avenue. The tombs along this are especially striking. On one side is the tomb of William Casement (four male statues supporting a stone canopy, in the manner of the Erechtheum), Andrew Ducrow (an Egyptian tomb decorated with scarabs and guarded by two sphinxes), Edmund Molyneux (Italian Gothic in red Peterhead granite) and Henry Edward Kendall (a Gothic cross decorated with Minton tiling). On the other side is Mary Gibson (a Corinthian canopy surmounted by four Pre-Raphaelite angels reaching towards the sky), and the quack doctor John St John Lang (a classical statue standing within a circular canopy) who died of the affliction his medicine purported to cure and William Mulready (a gothic statue lying in state in a classical canopy).
Kensal also has the advantage of the reputations of those interred there, from many writers and artists (Thackerary, Hood, Collins, Trollope, Waterhouse and Grossmith), engineers and scientists (Brunel and Babbage), disgraced royals and fascinating figures like Dr James Barry (a successful army doctor and duellist who was only unmasked as a woman after her death) and the Duke of Portland (an eccentric recluse who had built underground ballrooms and mazes under his estate, and was claimed to have faked his death as part of the Druce affair).
Beginning with Shadwell and Hawksmoor's church of St George in the East before travelling to Limehouse and St Anne's church. I'm always stuck by Hawksmoor's buildings; they make few concessions to architectural tradition and often feel as if they should be stage scenery; viewed from the front they are striking and impressive while viewed from the side they seem two-dimensional. St Anne's also happens to have an unexplained pyramid in its graveyard (drawings in the British Library suggest Hawksmoor may have planned pyramids on the turrets, while Christ Church in Spitalfields does rather resemble a pyramid from the front), possibly a Masonic reference. Walking around these areas, it was difficult not to be struck by how they are changing. High property prices elsewhere in London seem to be driving new property development, with cranes and tall blocks of luxury flats leaping up all around. This gentrification sits alongside the still all too visible poverty of East London and makes for an uncomfortable contrast. Walking back to the Limehouse station, I passed an old public library with a statue of Clement Atlee (Limehouse was his constituency). The architect of the welfare state was decaying badly and was missing his hand; a fitting comment on what was happening around him.
Travelling back into the centre of London took me to another Hawksmoor church, St Mary Woolnoth, a bizarre structure that barely looks like a church at all, lacking as it does a tower or a spire. I then walked around some of the other buildings in the area, like Wren's gothic church of St Mary Aldermary and his more baroque St Stephen Walbrook, before changing location again to the other side of the Thames and Lambeth. The gates of Lambeth Palace adjoin onto the former church of St Mary-at-Lambeth, now home to the Museum of Garden History. The sight of a Victorian graveyard, filled with the typically ornate Victorian funerary monuments and planted with sisal, poppies, roses, foxgloves and acanthus, was an odd indeed.
Passing by, I returned to north of the Thames, returning back to the city and The Museum of London. The first exhibition here was dedicated to Pre-Roman settlements in what was to become London. I was struck by the note that since the Thames is notoriously prone to flooding, entire sections of land could suddenly be left underwater. An excerpt from Pepys' diary captures this well; "digging his late Docke, he did 12-foot under ground find perfect trees over-Covered with earth, nut-trees, with the branches and the very nuts upon them, some of whose nuts he showed us, their shells black with age and their Kernell, upon opening decayed; but their shell perfectly hard as ever. And an Ewe-tree he showed us (upon which he says the very Ivy was taken up whole about it), which upon cutting with an adze, we found to be rather harder than the living tree usually is." Manmade objects seem to have survived well too, with the Walbrook having developed as a religious site, with votive offerings thrown into it to appease the gods (I was struck by a panel paralleling this to Bedivere throwing Excalbir back into the lake); a practice that seems to have continued well into the Roman period. This section showed a number of such offerings, typically carved from evergreen woods.
The Roman section was mainly noteworthy for displaying the statues from the Mithraeum found near St Paul's. As one would expect, several depictions of Mithras and the demon dull abound, along with statues of Minerva and Egyptian deities (apparently the Eastern cults proved more popular in this part of the Empire than the Roman ones). This also included the recently discovered sarcophagus from Spitalfields, decorated with shells throughout. The rest of the exhibition seemed somewhat lacklustre, though I was rather taken by a Victorian automaton called 'Psycho,' who was able to play cards and perform mathematical calculations. Due to the removal of internal workings (or hidden actors, depending on the extent of one's cynicism) the explanation for these feats has been lost.Labels: Architecture, England, Film, History, London, ScienceFiction, Victorian
posted by Richard 7:29 AM
Sunday, October 9, 2005
Autumn is my favourite time of year. The weather is hesitant and uncertain, with blackened clouds and rain interrupted with bright sunshine and deep blue skies. Silver birch remains green, Stag's Horn (Sumac) turns bronze while Ivy turns crimson red. I'd recently seen an old tree stump with lavender growing around it and bracket fungi growing out of it. Tonight, I noticed something odd growing in the nearby borders. Parting the foliage I found an odd looking toadstool, red with white blotches. As far as I can tell it's fly agaric (Amanita muscaria), a type of mushroom noted for its hallucigenic properties amongst the Siberians, American Indians and the Japanese. I don't think I'd ever seen one before.
Arriving at the Watt's Gallery in Surrey, I noticed an odd looking red church on a nearby hillside and decided to walk back to have a look. Initially obscured from view by the churchyard's Irish Yew trees, the building proved to be the Watts Chapel, designed by Mary Watts in memory of her husband. Mary Watts was an exceptional artist in her own right, a painter and potter who worked with Celtic and art nouveau styles.
The structure of the rather squat chapel is cruciform (though essentially a rotunda intersected by the stations of the cross) and surmounted by a somewhat incongruous campanile. The exterior is ringed with a band covered in Celtic ribbonwork patterns made from terracotta and supported by three corbels on each section of the wall. The band's imagery is somewhat pantheistic, drawn from Egyptian and Sanskrit sources as much as The Book of Kells. Built from local red clay, Mary Watts had apparently hoped it would 'tone down' as it aged over time, but my suspicion is that the colour is only slightly less vivid than it was after it had been built. Surrounding it, much of the gravestones are made from the same clay and combine Burne Jones style angels with Celtic patterns. As you might expect, the overall effect is bizarre, more resembling a Byzantine or Italian church than something to be found in England; Romanesque design (the dome, Greek cross and lozenge shaped windows) with Celtic imagery. The interior, complete with white and marmalade guard cat (lying in wait for visitors and demanding to be stroked), is different again. The style is late pre-raphaelite or art-nouveau, showing gesso angelic figures and the tree of life, save for the altar where one of Watt's symbolist paintings hangs.
In truth, Watts himself is not one of my favourite Pre-Raphaelite painters. His work lacks the colour and vividness of Rossetti or Leighton (not to mention their rather decadent glamour) and, while anticipating the impressionists, lacks the dreamlike aspect of Monet's paintings. Looking at the works in the gallery he seemed to me to resemble William Blake more than most of his contemporaries, with all of his paintings being loaded with symbolism borrowed from christian and classical sources as well as an essentially private mythology. Like Blake, much of his work has a very direct aspect of social criticism (ranging from sympathy for 'fallen women,' anger at poverty and inequality and even concern about animal cruelty). In many cases, even his portraits seem to burst into the allegorical, with one such portrait having been changed from an original depiction of a neiad. The back of the gallery houses ajunk roomsculpture collection, littered with casts of his large public sculptures (like Physical Energy in Kensington Gardens) and one odd Egyptian sculpture that Watts had designed to look as if it had been ruined and devastated. Finally, the gallery has a small room dedicated to other Victorian painters like Arthur Hughes and Albert Moore.
The Edvard Munch exhibition at the Royal Academy. The range of personae on display is often surprising. Where Frida Kahlo always represented herself in broadly similar terms, it is often difficult to credit that Munch's paintings are of the same man. Partly, this is due to the fact that the paintings span his entire life, but equally he changes from naturalistic depictions where the flesh is whole to ones where the skin seems scarred (equally, his paintings often seem like acts of self-mutilation, showing his murdered or dissected corpse, his decapitated head, his skull and eyeball; Munch left his paintings out in the rain to be warped and distorted, inverting Dorian Gray's picture) to ones where his face has been all but erased completely. Equally, Munch's features displace those of any number of mythical and historical personae; John the Baptist, Marat, Orpheus. Women figures in any number of roles; whore, virgin, muse. Munch often simply allows paint to slide down the canvas, creating a particularly disturbingly liquid effect when he is painting blood, or even hair in the case of The Vampire; but again the range of painting styles were many and varied over his career. The early paintings are characterised by their sense of bohemianism; as if Wilde were being painted by Leighton. The later styles are clearly more symbolist, but unlike Kahlo there is no sense of an hermetic personal mythology. I was especially struck by one painting, Murder where the entirety of the painting swirled around a central point in the distance; it reminded me of how camera angles zoom in onto a central figure, especially in Hitchcock's films.
Der Edukators (or Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei as it was originally titled) rather left me feeling that matters had been resolved rather too neatly. Much of the film revolves around contested ideas; in one instance, a group of activists who break into the villas of the wealthy, rearranging the furniture and leaving notes saying that the owners have too much money. In the other, the owners of one of the villas that they are keeping prisoner after things go wrong. For much of the film, it isn't clear whether his statements of former activism and sympathy for their ideals are genuine or whether he isn't simply manipulating them; the ending does seem to answer this question a little too equivocally for my taste, though it was rather noticeable that their prisoner's claim that it is simply natural for some to lead and others to follow receives rather more credence than might be expected from the way in which he almost over from them.
A pleasant day was spent with a walk around the Roman ruins at Silchester, leading to the incongruous discovery of a field in the middle of the old city housing some young llamas. I visited St Mary's Church and looked at the pre-reformation wall paintings (mostly floral). I also managed to spot a sparrowhawk almost floating over the walls.
A History of Violence sees David Cronenberg shedding the elements of science fiction in his films in favour of a more ostensibly naturalistic genre, the thriller, where a married man in Midwest America is confronted with his past with the mob. However, it seemed rather clear that this was a false distinction, with Cronenberg using the trappings of normalcy to disturb in precisely the same manner that the surrealism of his previous films did. What particularly achieves this effect is that the film seemed to suggest that violence isn't something that is repressed and periodically erupts but is rather something that forms an intrinsic part of normality, blurring moral distinctions between the Midwest family and the gangsters.
When I've reviewed Juan Goytisolo's novels on past occasions, I've tended to describe them in relation to the ideas of the Russian formalists Mikhail Bakhtin. In his essay collection, Cinema Eden, he himself raises Bakhtin in the first sentence of the first essay, characterising the Arab world as one where discourses are intermingled, between the sacred, the profane and the satirical; "this happy blend of licence and piety." Throughout, he adheres to this precept, mingling fantasy and reality in a piece imagining Gaudi living as a hermit in Cappadocia. Nonetheless, Goytisolo seems to introduce a further ambiguity, noting that many of these traditional elements of Arbaic culture help people "not to deny modernity but to co-exist with it," but elsewhere suggests that such arrangements are threatened by progress and Islamism alike and that they are better described as "a new form of shelter against the rootlessness and alienation created by modernity." It's difficult not to wonder at the extent to which these discourses really are entangled; the homosocial love of mystics or the soldier and the charcoal burner depends on homosexuality as a practice while leaving it castigated as an identity. The qualities he sees in the inhabitants of Cairo's city of the dead contrast to the antiseptic values of the West but also seem to come close to endorsing a form of social Darwinism in a society where life is nasty, brutish and short.
Reading the Laxdaela Saga, I found myself reminded of Ruth Benedict's distinction between shame and guilt cultures in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. In guilt cultures personal morality is specific to the individual and their relationship to god, whereas in shame cultures morality is a social concept relating to community opinion (for instance, Hrafnkel The Priest of Frey sees its protagonist expelled from his lands for having been so foolish as to spare Hrafnkel's life earlier). The saga depicts Iceland's transition from one to another. Iceland as a society lacked executive government, meting out punishment through exile, ostracism and private compensation; something that became more complex with the introduction of christianity. One consequence of this is that the saga depicts character with unusual complexity (the concept of the individual being essentially inapplicable for the majority of other medieval texts where personality is seen in relation to religious and social categories). Gudrun is depicted against both a christian scheme of private sin and repentance and a pagan scheme of moral attrition and atonement where guilt is shared and negotiated (not unlike Aeschylus and The Oresteia).
Engel's The Condition of the Working Class in England struck me as vacillating between a number of opposed concepts; between a desire to both prevent ("it is high time too, for the English middle-class to make some concessions to the working men who no longer plead but threaten; for in a short time it may be too late") and to spark a revolution to end the class structure ("the revolution must come; it is already too late to bring about a peaceful solution"), between an idealised account of earlier more pastoral social structures (speaking of its 'idyllic simplicity;' "leading a righteous and peaceful life in all piety and probity; and their material position was far better than that of their successors.") and a view that their destruction was an advance towards the creation of communist society ("in a well-ordered society such things could only be a source of rejoicing; in a war of all against all, individuals seize the benefits for themselves."), even celebrating the creation of an internal proletariat and the deadening of national characteristics in the English working class. To a large extent, Engels is both awed and horrified by London, observing that "I know nothing more imposing than the view which the Thames offers...all this is so vast, so impressive that a man cannot collect himself, but is lost in the marvel of England's greatness," before detailing the sacrifices required to achieve it.
Barnaby Rudge is one of only two historical novels written by Dickens and it's interesting to observe how the constraints of a genre typified by Scott conflict with the more gothic and sensational elements that are more characteristic of Dickens. On the one hand, the historical genre demands a detailed observation of social and individual change. On the other, the gothic and sensational elements demand a more Manichean ap
