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, October 25, 2009
It's often easy to base artistic judgements against an illusory parallel with technological progress, so that modernist experimentation became the artistic standard par excellence of the twentieth century. Today we might well regard more atypical figures like Grossman or Shostakovich as being of equal or better merit to Schoenberg or Joyce. Similarly, the fact that the Pre-Raphaelites had reverted to a medievalistic conception of art as impressionism dawned in Europe or that Austen's novels were all written against the backdrop of early romanticism seems largely inconsequential. It was difficult not to think of things like this as I went round the National Gallery's exhibition of Spanish art. As with its earlier exhibition on Siennese art, the gallery seems keen to revive interest in minority subjects and this is a particularly acute example.
While medieval art routinely carved wooden sculptures for churches, the renaissance and reformation saw a trend towards carving statues from stone, leaving them unpainted in pure white, out of a mistaken notion that the Greeks and Romans had not painted their statues. In Spain though, the tradition of painting wooden sculpture continued unabated alongside increasingly realistic techniques of portrait painting. Paintings from the likes of Velasquez and Zurbaran deploy the same methods as Caravaggio and Veronese but retain all the hallmarks of artifice. Both painters add captions, writing and legends to their painters to destroy the impression of verisimilitude. Zurbaran tends to pose his things in stark white light against a dark black backdrop, as if the painting was a stage set. The sculptures seem eerily lifelike in comparison to Canova or Thorvaldsen, with eyelashes made out of hair, teeth from ivory and real clothing stiffened with glue used alongside glass eyes and tears. The sculptures would have had their clothing changed and be taken out for ceremonial processions; they were not simply static objects in galleries or museums. The rich detailing is often wonderful; the Virgin Mary by Montanes is a blaze of polychromatic colour. Equally though, the gory horror of some of the sculptures is frequently appalling; the severed neck of John the Baptist is rendered in anatomically correct detail while countless Christs are depicted in bathed in blood, their bodies pierced and lacerated. The images seen in glass cases below the altar in Catholic churches take centre stage here, like something from a casualty ward. Zurbaran's painting of St Serapion, who appears to be simply asleep comes as a relief from the horror. I leaving not doubting the artistic merit of the works but feeling glad their have been consigned as a historical relic and a matter of obscurity.
The logic behind the Royal Academy's exhibition on Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska and Gill is presumably that of artistic parallels between three contemporaries, but it is somewhat difficult to leave the exhibition convinced that the three have a great deal in common. Gill and Epstein shared a notion of 'direct carving' but Gill's work seems more difficult to place, better connected to Blake and Palmer than Brancusi or Duchamp. The sexual politics of his work seem especially difficult to fathom; Ecstasy must have been one of the explicit paeans to sexual pleasure for thousands of years in Europe, but it sits alongside several Madonnas and Child. His religion and sexuality seem to combine in various odd ways; a shrivelled Christ on the cross was paired with a Earth mother figure that recalls his fecund Madonnas. Male submissiveness is frequently counterpointed to female dominance; he seems to have been less a Catholic and more a Mariolater. Something of the same sensibility certainly seem to apply to Epstein as well, but Rock Drill with its emphasis on aggressive male masculinity is quite unlike Gill, not to mention its adoption of readymades. Equally, his sculpture of Venus recalls the influence of African and North American art. Nonetheless, it's Gaudier-Brzeska that seems the more mainstream figure of the period (albeit perhaps a rather less interesting one), with the increasingly abstract nature of his sculpture and the influence of Vorticism, as well as the same African and North American influences.
Before leaving London, I visit the Barbican's conservatory. It's an odd place, a small jungle rising above the concrete walkways and towers, not least because the Barbican's concrete labyrinth applies every bit as much to the interior of the conservatory. With the concrete decayed under dripping water it looks like nothing so much as an enactment of Ballard's Drowned World. Bromeliads and Bougainvillea are in flower while Zebra finches sing in the aviary and alarmingly large carp splash in the pools.
Reading Zola's The Masterpiece is perhaps the reflexive of his novels, given the presence of himself and his circle of friends as characters. On the one hand, Sandoz proclaims that "this is the idea: to study man as he really is. Not this metaphysical marionette they've made us believe he is but the physiological human being determined by his surroundings" only to then undermine it with a lyrical hymn to the earth. The novel essentially proceeds as a critique of romanticism, as with Claude's tendency to undermine the naturalism of his paintings; "the old streak of romanticism.. the generation we belong to was brought up on romanticism, it soaked into us and we can do nothing about it." Equally though, the novel critiques the idea of a scientific basis for art itself, as with Claude's mistaken scientific theory of colours; "with characteristic over-indulgence he began to exaggerate the scientific theory of colours.. that way, it was obvious, madness lay.".Labels: Art, Literature, London
posted by Richard 1:01 PM
Sunday, August 16, 2009
The Proms this year began for me with a medley of Handel pieces. Given my previous exasperation with Handel's tendency to construct an entire aria around a libretto consisting of only one or two lines, I was impressed that Carolyn Sampson's acting managed to prevent too much boredom from seeping into the rendition of Semele. Unfortunately, the period organ wasn't working quite properly for the Organ Symphony. The text by Congreve proved rather too lascivious for Georgian tastes but works rather well now. This was followed by a late night Prom of music by Philip Glass. I rather liked the Violin Concerto but rather less so his Toltec Symphony. The recurring silences and crescendi work well, but there's something about the Carollesque libretto that rather offends me; I'd rather the choir had stuck to simple breathing sounds. Later weeks see more Handel performances, with an aria from Alcinia comparing favourably with Haydn's Scena di Berenice; as the soprano notes it's Handel's work that seems the more romantic and unrestrained. This is followed with another evening prom, this time with a performance by the Michael Nyman band. I've often felt that baroque music and minimalism have much in common, and Nyman's work stands in testament to that. With a live performance though, I'm astonished as to how raw and overwhelming it feels, as if it were jazz or even rock. The recordings of the performance don't quite seem to capture it. The following Celan Songs clearly seem to Nyman's answer to Adams and Harmonielehre.
This is then followed by a somewhat odd Prom, showcasing the work of Iannis Xenakis; Nomos Gamma and Ais. The former sees the arena of the Royal Albert Hall rearranged into segments divided between the orchestra and the audience. The idea is that the music is as spatial as temporal, with the experienced work depending on the position of the listener in the arena (in my case, right next to the percussion; the programme notes record how Xenakis was influenced by the sounds of warfare and student unrest but I may have received a somewhat excessively skewed version of that). It's an interesting idea, which means that the piece really has to be experienced rather than being listened to through a recording. I think a little of how much modern art is situational in this manner, as with art installations that depend heavily on the context in which they are viewed. Conversely, much modern music really has to be listened to, with certain recordings regarded by their creators as final and definitive. I'm less enamoured with Ais; the singer's low notes are convincing but his high notes sound like a musical form of drag that introduces a bathetic element into what is otherwise an impressive performance. I'm afraid I'm much more taken with the performance of Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead.
Walking back the following week, I'm a little startled to see a green parrot eating at one of the feeders in Hyde Park and by how close it allows me to get. This time, I was going to see Beethoven's Fidelio. I hadn't known this before and can really only judge it by comparison with Wagner; Beethoven tends to prefer choral effects with several characters singing concurrently, as well as tending to repeat lines in the same way Handel does. It also seems to combine singspiel with drama (the former having been tampered with by Edward Said). The plot is also something of a hybrid, featuring a woman disguised as a man (since doing so allows her to accrue masculine virtues, which is presumably why the converse scenario is usually only used for comedy).
I come back later in the week for a tour of Somerset House. I've always thought the place was like a Piranesi drawing; all spiral staircases and strange moat-like gaps in the interior courtyard. The Nelson stairs prove to be modelled on a ships' prow as a sort of hybrid between a spiral staircase and a normal one. The moat proves to be a device to direct light down towards the lower offices while allowing access to the boiler rooms and coal stores. There's also the 'deadhouse,' a series of catholic tombstones (from Catherine of Braganza's retinue) moved from the Royal chapel when the palace was rebuilt. The tour ends at the location of the old watergate from before the embankment was constructed. The Courtauld institute has an exhibition on the Omega workshops, which proves quickly to be the Arts & Crafts movement shorn of its medievalism and with an interest in Matisse in its place. The works included range from rugs to wallpaper, screens and tables to clothes, including Gaudier-Brezska's marquetry and designs by Wyndham Lewis.
I then travel southward, finding the site of the Old Marshalsea prison next to St George the Martyr's churchyard. All that remains is an old wall in the overgrown park with its few remaining tombstones. Nearby is the Imperial War Museum, which I've wanted to visit on account of its art collection. The first world war section is dominated by Nevinson's mostly post-futurist works and works that continued in a Vorticist theme by Wyndham Lewis. Eric Ravilious accounts for some pieces depicting submarines and Epstein some bronze busts, but it's Nash's paintings of the Ypres salient and Menin road that are the clear highlight of the collection for me. Another annex houses Singer-Sergeant's Gassed; it's a touching work but the style and tinge of sentimentality make it seem quite foreign to the others, the product of a previous century. Something similar applies to Stanley Spencer's painting of the wounded at a dressing station; its implied christian themes seem obscenely inappropriate in such a context. The second world war section is perhaps less distinct, although many of the same names recur, with the addition of Bomberg's Bomb Store painting and Piper's depiction of a Bristol control room.
The following week leads me to visit Kensal Green Cemetery's open day, mostly so I can visit the chapel catacombs. The chapel itself is visibly crumbling away on the inside, with damp consuming the walls from within and the cornices having been eaten to nothing. The restored hydraulic catafalque (with swivel top for rotating coffins so that they are interred feet first) strikes a somewhat incongruous note as a result. The florescent lighting below seems both jarringly modern and quite appropriate, with it's harsh light casting sharp shadows. Light filters down through ceiling grilles as well, accounting for the odd presence of autumnal leaves below one's feet. There's enough light to dimly discern the rough shapes of the coffin behind rusted iron grilles but enough darkness to leave a certain sense of unease, particularly in cases where the outer wooden and velvet shells have corroded to nothing, leaving only lead boxes. Spelter (poor man's pewter) wreathes or mouldered velvet remain atop some coffins. I'd walked to the cemetery from Little Venice along the Grand Union canal. It occurs to me that Little Venice itself is misnamed; Little Amsterdam might have been a rather better soubriquet for its combination of Georgian houses and Victorian redbrick chapels. It's all too neat and mannered to compare to Venice's decayed Moorish gothic, which is not too say it's not rather beautiful. Venice also lacks the inevitable Ducks, Coots and Canada Geese. It also seems a counterfactual version of London as it might have been had the likes of the Walbrook and the Fleet not been entombed in concrete. The canal itself offers a form of social history, from the Georgian villas to the redbrick church of St Mary Magdalene through to pebble dash and modern wooden decking and metal balconies. Foremost amongst this historical panorama is Goldfinger's Trellick Tower. Approaching it beneath the concrete Westway, I see the tower reflected in the canal waters; a picturesque scene embodied in graffiti spattered concrete. A Moroccan garden has planted at the base of the tower; very beautiful if an example of a design aesthetic I can't see Goldfinger appreciating. Kensington Palace is an odd time capsule that combines tastes from William and Mary to Victoria. The Victorian rooms remain filled with domestic clutter, while Hannoverian inhabitants found the rather modest structure a little confining, with Kent adding elaborate trompe l'oeil effects to Wren's staircase and to the cupola room. Kent and Thornhill's painting sit alongside one another as do Kneller's portrait of Peter the Great with Van Dyck's painting of Charles the First.
Summer dwindles into autumn and Open House weekend comes once again. I start at St Mary Magdalene in Paddington. Like many of Street's churches it's rather dark on the interior, although I'm amused to see Saint Chad and Fridewide representing two of the cities I've lived in. I'm in time for a tour of the undercroft, a rather empty and dark space that was constructed using the same techniques as underground stations and looks like one; since burials had moved to the cemeteries by then there was no need for the church to have a crypt. The undercroft is solely for structural reasons relating to the steep ground the church was built on. Comper's chapel of Saint Sepulchre within the undercroft is quite spectacular though, with a blue and gold ceiling studded with stars and angels (albeit with much of the paint and plaster having flaked off) and a shrine to Saint Mary that features a tabernacle (a way of hiding the sacrament due to fear of riots against Anglo-Catholic churches such as this). Much of the carving is Flemish in source, apart from an oddly Botticelliesque representation of Saint Mary ascending to heaven. The chapel also possesses a rather bizarre 'doom' stained glass window showing the dead rising from their graves and demons with butterfly wings making off with sinners. After this, Hawksmoor's Christ Church seems preternatural in its ghostly whiteness and cavernous arches.
I walk onwards to Bishopsgate, where I finally succeeding in entering the old Turkish baths. Somewhat inevitably modelled on the Holy Sepulchre church in Jerusalem, I'm rather surprised as to how much space extends underground beneath this rather small and gaudy kiosk. I walk onwards again to St Helen's, a somewhat dowdy church in its structure but which retains scores of medieval monuments that predate the great fire. It's rather ramshackle design make it resemble any number of normal English country churches, making you recall how odd London's architecture is and how unlike the rest of the country. I rather like the monument to the Merchant Adventurer Martin Bond, showing him on campaign, seated in front of a tent and flanked by armed guards. I also rather like the church of Katherine Cree for similar reasons; a Jacobean church that survived the great fire, with a ceiling studded with heraldic crests and an odd gallimaufry of baroque memento mori and medieval alabaster monuments. My next church is St Mary Woolnoth; it's odd to see a church designed without any reference to ecclesiastical convention. The restrictions on the size of the land presumably forced Hawksmoor to build vertically rather than horizontally, with the rather small cubed interior dominated by the light pouring down from above. I briefly visit St Lawrence Jewry and St Mary-Le-Bow before finishing with Bodley's Holy Trinity in Kensington and Scott's chapel at King's College (a slightly Byzantine affair with wooden marquetry on the walls and painted red and gold pillars). The last thing I saw was the Apothecaries Hall, with its collection of Blue & white ceramic medicine jars (I like the one marked for absinthe), paintings of the armada and the glorious revolution. I also quite liked the society taking its emblem with Durer's mistaken depiction of a rhino as having a second horn on its back. The stained glass crests in the window include one of the Doctor who went on the 1953 Everest expedition.
Fourteen Byzantine Rulers by Psellus seems to inevitably invoke a comparison with Suetonius. It's certainly not a precise one; the events described in Suetonius occur over a longer timescale and with fewer rulers. Suetonius omits contemporary events (i.e. Hadrian's rule) while Psellus includes that of Michael Parapinaces. Suetonius was somewhat tabloid in style but wrote at a distance from the figures he depicts; Psellus repeatedly claims objectivity but was a pivotal figure in much of the narrative (indeed he was blamed by other historians for distracting Michael from the practical matter of government). Suetonius ends at the point the Roman Empire had reached its greatest extent, Psellus begins at that point. While the Byzantine court certainly appears riven with factions and plotting it should also be observed that few military coup d'etat's occur in the narrative, against the Suetonian depiction of what we would now refer to as a banana republic, with routine military takeovers, civil wars, as well as the reigns of Caligula and Nero that set a gold standard in debauchery that the Byzantines of this period appear to have been utterly unable to imitate.Some interesting distinctions from The Romans also appear; Psellus lauds the Greek practice of sharply dividing nobles and commoners, blaming the Roman habit for allowing barbarians to sit in the Senate. Psellus also utilises the Hellenic notion of fate, as a form of causality, even while noting such concepts to be denied in Christianity. Equally, he describes some forms of political violence as necessary in terms we might recognise from Machiavelli, while noting their abhorrence in christianity. More generally, Psellus does come over as a rather likeable figure in a way that is not the case for most Roman historians (Tacitus? Livy?), noting combinations of good and evil in his subjects in a way I hadn't expected from an early Christian writer.
As with most other ancient historians, Psellus tends to assume history to be the outcomes of individual decisions, typically those of Kings. By contrast, Gibbons approached many of the same subjects with a view of the wider ideological forces, if not a fully modern view of the interplay of economic and social factors. In particular, his description of Christianity's emphasis on individual virtue rather public valour, it's tendency towards generating sectarian conflict or the presence of Catharesque sects bent on acts of self-destruction also suggests Christianity as a contributing factor to the decline and fall of the Empire.
Saramago's Blindness is obviously reminiscent of Kafka; a series of events occur for which no explanation is provided but which nonetheless seem to represent some form of parable. As in Kafka, meaning is suggested but withheld; "it sounds like an allgeory, the eye that refuses to acknowledge its own absence." The description of a painting that seemed to fit the descriptions of all modes of art and which could not be identified due to the onset of the viewer's blindness is a case in point. Similarly, the leaving of a lock of hair on a doorhandle inverts a conventional symbol of death into one of life. Where many novels are narrated from a subjective first-person perspective, Blindness removes that perspective, relying instead on a clamour of voices lacking identity; "I am blind with your blindness." At points, it seems to represent an allegory of moral failure, as with the sighted Doctor's wife's declaration that "I shall never be free from this blindness... perhaps I'm the blindest of all" after sha killed a man. The blinding of the car thief seems to correlate with this, but the blinding of the Doctor and others is entirely devoid of pattern. The example of the prostitute;s concern for her parents points in an entirely different direction; " the existence of deep feelings... in the abundant cases of irregular conduct, especially in matters of public morality." Similarly, the church with the blinded statues of the saints is essentially suggest of universe lacking clear meanings and patterns, even as speeches proclaim all manner of divine causes for the blindness.
Nathaniel West's work has the same sort of focus on the material and the fantastic as Melville's; in The Dream Life of Balso Snell characters wonder around the interior of a body, telling stories that dwell on the grotesque; sexual arousal at hunchbacksor an accentuated senses of smell. One character notes that "I kill my body.. soon my body will be swollen and clumsy.. in my belly there is a tangled forest of arms and legs" when speaking of pregnancy. Sexual attraction is seen as a form of violence, with sex described as a sacrificial rite that leads to the penetration of Balso's body; "his body broke free... only to death can this release be likened." In Day of the Locust there's a similar emphasis, as with the cock fight or Homer watching lizards eat flies, but the depiction of Faye is equally congruent with the noir tradition of the femme fatale, with the novel emerging as a form of heterosexual Death in Venice. Glamour and disgust sit side by side. The introduction of the political creates what is especially odd about the novel, with one aspect of it being a critique of the American Dream, depicting wishes unfulfilled and the decline of the American Empire. It's like the idea of Meville writing a Steinbeckian novel, with it becoming difficult to be sure if the personal has been sublimated into the political or vice versa.Labels: Art, Literature, London
posted by Richard 10:57 AM
Sunday, May 3, 2009
The V&A's Baroque exhibition shows that the Baroque style is founded on a paradox; sensuous and illusory, mystical and carnal, sacred and secular. It's something I feel ambivalent about, repelled by the sentimental putti, corpulent flesh and religious fever as much as I'm attracted to its paganism and love of surface and artifice alike. As Sontag put it, it's the most camp form of style.
On the one hand, it follows empiricist scepticism and its criticism of the notion that reality can be perceived directly through the senses. To Descartes, the intellect is required as well, hence the role of allegory in Baroque painting. To Descartes and Berkeley the idea of god was required to underpin this perception of reality, further stressing the mystical aspect of Baroque art. Newton's work on optics led to a focus on illusion and perspective, most obviously so in Velasquez's paintings or in the painted ceilings common with Baroque architecture. Buildings like Versailles used mirrors to create illusory effects with space. Baroque art tends towards the dramatic, showing allegorical scenes with the figures in motion, frozen in time and commonly depicted through vertiginous perspectives. Mirror glass is built into the frame of a painting of the Holy family from Cuzco. Theatre and drama, fireworks and spectacle, were also important aspects of Baroque, and the exhibition records costumes and paintings of various pageants, as well as the influence of theatre sets and their faking of perspective on architecture. The mechanical advances that made it possible to devise elaborate stage machinery for court theatres created a vogue for 'machine plays', in which, as if by magic, stage sets were miraculously changed and perspectives receded into distant space, creating an illusion of reality that was enhanced by the skilful use of lighting. As the gods descended on clouds from the skies, the distinction between heaven and earth was blurred and dissolved, as it would similarly be blurred to the point of dissolution in the ceiling paintings of chapels and churches. As Foucault might have argued the centre of these pageants was the individual; the equestrian statue and heroic bust were both invented at this time. If the counter-reformation church proclaimed the power of religion, the princely courts of the 17th century proclaimed the religion of power. Absolute monarchs sought to use the Baroque to reinforce their status and authority, showing themselves as masters over nature. Philip IV of Spain, as the 'Planet King', had done just this, but his nephew and son-in-law, Louis XIV, developed the imagery in a much more systematic form as he sought to reimpose order.
Conversely, science had overturned ideas that scorned the phenomenal in favour of the ideal, leading to an increased focus on nature in decoration, as with the acanthus leaves and dolphins characteristic of Baroque art. Copernicus's heliocentric theory had shaken the foundations of traditional cosmology; Galileo with his telescope had revealed the immensity of space; scientific experiment and inquiry were making startling revelations about the workings of the human body and the natural world. It also led to a stress on the sensuous and material, in keeping with the counter-reformation use of lavish materials to impress the masses, either to win them back from Protestantism or to convert them in the new colonies. Gold and silver mined from South America are common enough in the exhibition, but Icelandic obsidian, ostrich eggs, rhinoceros horn, nautilus shell, ivory, amber, ruby glass also feature. The wunderkammer had become an exercise in artifice. Much of the exhibition focusses on Baroque's development as the first international style, from paintings of the Virgin of Guadaloupe to the Portuguese churches of Goa. Baroque was exported internationally, as with a sketch of a Baroque mansion designed for the Chinese Emperor by Jesuits, but it was also imported back in the form of Chinoiserie. Meissen and Delftware both form an important part of the exhibition, as do lacquerware and silk. A wooden screen from Dutch Batavia incorporates native designs as do Mexican depictions of the Virgin and Indian ivories of Jesus.
Afterwards, I briefly visit the Whitechapel Art Gallery. A tapestry of Guernica and a Cubist bust of Colin Powell are on display, but I'm more interested in a small exhibition covering Epstein's Rock Drill, Jacob Kramer's Day of Atonement, Gertler's Rabbi and the Ribbintzin, and Bomberg's Racehorses. The following day is taken up with a visit to Kew Gardens. A few things have changed since my last visit, such as the new Alpine conservatory and gardens or the Princess of Wales conservatory's British woodlands exhibition, including replica charcoal kilns. A bridge across one of the lakes allows you to see a coot diving to the bottom to bring up weeds for its chick. The Titan Arum and the Strelitzia are out in flower, and the grounds everywhere are carpeted with bluebells.
Mephisto by Klaus Mann makes an odd contrast to his father's works. Where Death in Venice places its sexual themes at the centre of the narrative while still leaving them unstated and implicit, Mephisto is quite explicit, dealing with sadomasochism and homosexuality alike (in doing so he also identifies some of the sexual aspects of Nazism that Sontag was to discuss in Fascinating Fascism). Where Doctor Faustus is equally indirect in its discussion of Nazism, Mephisto is an explicit attack. Mann's approach is to take the Faust mythos and re-purpose it. What is striking in this version is that Hofgen is both Faust and Mephistopheles, repeatedly described as a ruthless, if not evil, careerist unconcerned with others on the one hand but on the other, passive and at the mercy of events. Hofgen accordingly flits between the archetypes of Mephistopheles and Hamlet, an empty personality who only gains being through acting out the lives of others, while going from communism to fascism when it suits his career.Labels: Art, Literature
posted by Richard 12:58 PM
Monday, April 13, 2009
This Easter, I travelled back up to the Midlands with a visit to Stokesay Castle and Ludlow. I recall going to Stokesay as a child and I've long wanted to return. I recall it as a ramshackle affair, not entirely unlike Gormenghast, and the truth is surprisingly close to this, even if the scale now seems different to how it appeared to my younger counterpart. The building is a 13th century fortified manor that has largely survived unaltered. I enter through a half-timbered gatehouse, its beams decorated with images of sea-beasts and dragons, before passing through to an inner courtyard, home to a great hall and a stone tower. The hall with its cruck roof and large arched windows is rather reminiscent of a cathedral, save for the worn wood that makes up its stairs and buttresses. Walking upstairs to some of the rooms, I realised I can hear birds calling though the floor. Most of the building is bare and cavernous, save for some medieval tiles and a carved overmantel. The same goes for the tower, with its warning notices about rabid bats. The interior courtyard has been richly planted with flowers, while the drained moat is home to swathes of white daffodils. Swans can be seen gliding across a nearby lake. Nearby lies the manor's church (there was a village here once, of which little remains). Inscriptions from Exodus are written on the walls.
I then pass onwards to Ludlow, a town of white and black half-timbered houses. The church of St Laurence is effectively a minor cathedral; one enters through a hexagonal porch, in to a gloomy interior through which shards of light rain down from the upper windows. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I can see more detail; alternating bands of red and green on the ceiling between carved angels, baroque skull monuments, a gold lantern on the crossing, medieval tiles mixed with Minton, owl and griffin misericords and tree of Jesse stained glass windows. Later, I finish the day with Croft Castle. In contrast to the perpendicular gothic of Ludlow, the Castle is a variant of Regency Gothick. The church here is medieval, with a strange Georgian clock tower grafted onto it. The interior is dominated by an elaborate alabaster monument of a sleeping knight and angels. The lion at the Knight's feet has his tongue stuck out. Jacobean wall panelling survives on the interior alongside Georgian stucco and the Rococo concept of gothic. I'm surprised to see a Kokoschka portrait on the walls, alongside a painting of the castle by John Napper.
I also visit St Mary in Ingestre, a Wren design in the middle of the countryside; I'm struck by the Grinling Gibbons carvings, Burne Jones windows, marble tombs, golden skulls, Venetian tapestries. In neighbouring Derbyshire, I visit Kedleston Hall. Buoyed by funds from a recent film, much of the interior has been re-upholstered and re-hung, emphasising its resemblance to a particularly opulent mausoleum. In the case of the church, the claim is of course true, with iron railings fencing off funeral monuments for the Curzons, alongside a series of Tudor and Medieval monuments. The exterior is dominated by skulls, hourglasses and a faded romanesque typanum. I visit Melbourne's church on the way back; a Romanesque affair with thick columns and a medieval wall painting of the devil. Finally, I visit St Edburg and St John the Baptist in Oxfordshire; St Edburg has William Morris and Burne Jones stained glass, Baroque skull monuments and a single pane of surviving medieval glass. St John is a ruin, its redbrick skeleton hidden in wooded shadows near a lake. Broken tombstones are arranged on one of the altars.
A few weeks later, I travel westwards towards Bath. Again, this is somewhere I remember visiting as a child but other than some memories of the baths themselves, the rest of the city is now a blank to me. The place reminds me of Oxford, in terms of the period of the buildings and the colour of the stone, although Oxford's flatness is not replicated at Bath. To begin with the baths then. Once one has gone past the Georgian entrance, the baths are decidedly impressive; steam rises from the bubbling green waters, as water spills out from underneath the pavement into the pools and statues of Roman emperors or medieval effigies of King Bladud look down from above. The east and west baths are undercover and the dark glooms in those rooms closely approximates what it must have been like for a Roman visitor who, lacking any rational explanation of the spring, took the site as sacred. Coins glimmer beneath the surface of one of the pools. The accompanying exhibition contains some of the lead curses that would have been thrown into the waters, various Roman and Celtic gravestones, and various altars, including one that would have been used by a Haruspex. A couple of items stand out; a mask that worn have been worn by a Priest, the face of the Gorgon surviving from the temple pediment and a bronze bust of Sulis Minerva. This leaves me especially impressed; in its own way it's as beautiful as the bust of Nefertiti. From the baths, I wonder past the abbey and an obelisk dedicated to the Prince of Orange, past a set of gardens with a bronze angel dedicated to King Edward towards Adam's Pultney Bridge (the gardens are occupied by some alarmingly large seagulls, whose cries can be heard throughout the city). With shops lining either side of it, I can only assume it to be modelled on the Rialto Bridge. A swan is nesting underneath it. I continue northwards, past the Victorian church of St Michael Without (modelled on Salisbury cathedral, like so many Victorian churches), until I arrive at the Circus. This seems especially impressive to me, much more so than the nearby Royal Crescent. Enclosed like Stonehenge or the Colosseum on all sides, each building having odd acorn finials and decorated with Masonic symbols, it's an especially odd piece of Georgian architecture. I walk for a bit in the Victoria park, looking at the Victoria memorial, replica of a vase from Cicero's garden and the sphinxes and lions decorating the gates. I then return to the town centre, walking through some of the Victorian arcades and through a garden maze with a set of mosaics at its centre. I then enter the abbey. A particularly pure example of medieval fan vaulting, the walls are pale, with light streaming in through the large windows. Equally, there are relatively few large tombs inside, although the walls are lined with plaques. The exterior is especially ornate, with angels climbing a ladder on the front facade. Finally, I visit the Victoria Art Gallery. I have to admit that most of the artists named therein are utterly unknown to me, but it does have some interest works by Hodgkin, Sutherland, Sickert, Nash and Danby. I'm struck by a moonlight scene painted by Sebastien Pether; it reminds me of Dahl and Freidrich. There's also a good ceramics display; Delft, Lustreware and Eltonware.
The following weekend and I'm back in London, at Dulwich Picture Gallery for an exhibition on Sicket's Venetian paintings. It's something or an irony that for a city first painted in minute detail by Canaletto, its depictions were later to decidedly to incline to the impressionistic, as Monet, Turner, Whistler and Singer-Sargent depicted its mists and sunsets. Of these, it's Whistler that Sickert most clearly resembles, with night scenes of the Campanile and St Marks reducing them to blurs of light and with the influence of Degas apparent in the cropped 'close-ups' of the same buildings. Yet, Sicket is significantly more realistic than Whistler, and while his palette tends to more subdued colours, the buildings are not difficult to recognise; they merely look more grimy than is their usual wont. Equally, the influence of Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec is apparent in the depiction of the Venetian lowlife; the exhibition records an interest in the exoticism of Venetian women with their strange geisha-like hairdressings, but for the most part we could easily be in Camden or Montmartre.
Bolano's The Savage Detectives is in many respects utterly materialistic, concerned with the failure of the visceral realist movement, the trajectory of its leading lights from romantic roles as rebels and criminals in the vein of Rimbaud or Genet, to their dissolution into obscurity. It is also in many respects utterly metaphysical, concerned with a quest romance to discover the poetry of Cesárea, which is a set of arcane symbols that denote the limits of language's mimetic abilities. Amadeo Salvatierra admits that he has never understood her work, and he does not listen to or record Belano or Lima's discussion of its meaning. Similarly, although the narrative dwells on Belano and Lima, the writer who repeats her achievement is Madeno, who is never mentioned by any of the other narrators. Writing in Bolano is something to be written about but not to be shown; we never read any of Belano or Lima's poetry, only Cesarea and Madeno's ideograms. The insane writings of one narrator, Andres Ramirez, use Plato's cave metaphor to describe reality, glimpsing alternative visions of his present through dreams. Bolano's mode of etaphysical realism' operates by offering differing fractured routes to the same subject; Bolano saw the orderly, refined and harmonious in literature as coterminous with cruelty and fascism, the unstylised and untidy, with rebellion and truth, as in Planell's epiphanic moment;3 "in a brief moment of lucidity, I was sure that we'd all done crazy. But that moment of lucidity was displaced by a supersecond of superlucidity... a sign of our miraculous and pointless innocence," Events are accordingly described in a polyphonic manner by different narrators. Their narratives are frequently unreliable, some told by the insane, some told told be the mendacious or biased. Univocal statements are quickly dissolved. Belano and Lima themselves are witheld from the narrative, denied the opportunity to explain themselves. Meaning exists at a vanishing point, the novel guestures towards but does not show, as with the description in By Night in Chile of books as being equivalent to the shadows in Plato's cave. One other point to note is the role of sexuality; there's a marked machismo in Bolano's work here and in By Night in Chile, only challenged by the narrator's confession in the former novel that the women and gays he had demonised in his poetry had done nothing to him.
Reading Broch's The Sleepwalkers is an odd experience; the structure of the novel is decidedly experimental, with various narrative strands developed in isolation, some of which converge while others remain separate. Nonetheless, he lacks the interest in consciousness typical of that period; since he regards his characters as primitives, products of the social and ideological conditions of their age. They may act unpredictably, as rounded characters in Forster's phrase, but only because Broch is sceptical that such animals can have a controlling intelligence. If he sits at an odd angle to the modernist novel, much of this can be explained by the fact that many of his views would have sat well with the Victorians; the condemnation of the Renaissance architecture would have chimed with Ruskin's views ("the horror of this age is perhaps most palpable in the effect that its architecture has on one"), if not Broch's accompanying denunciation of Protestantism and of Kant in favour of Leibniz. Like the Victorians, Broch is essentially a medievalist, seeing medieval Catholicism as offering an organic structure into which every aspect of existence could be integrated; the fall into various sectarian cults opened the way for the remorseless fragmented logic of the modern rationalist and commercial society that Broch sees as being decadent and degenerate. It is in many ways one of the most reactionary of European novels; foreigners like Czechs are characterised as barbarians, women are split into virgins and whores, causal homophobia ("the horror that overcame him when he saw those men dancing cheek to cheek") and anti-semitism (the abstraction of Judaism and its basis in law stand in contrast to Broch's account of Catholicism) are rife. Sometimes Broch sounds rather like Carlyle, whose unpleasant views also went hand in hand with a denunciation of the cash nexus, as with Broch's complaints that the profit motive is the sole governing principle in modern like, so that respectable business men may also be murderers. The progression towards degeneracy in the novel is also a progression down the social spectrum. Nonetheless, the novel isn't quite that simple. The initial section is in many ways a pastiche of a Victorian novel; Pasenow's failure can either be viewed as not submitting to duty or of failing to break with convention altogether. As is said of Esch later in the novel; "he saw the play of good and evil. But his impetuosity often made him see an individual where he should see a system." This particularly applies to the character of the aesthete Bertrand. Broch describes aesthetes as serpents with the garden of eden, art for art's sake representing another branch of the disintegration of all values in place of medieval art's religious purpose. These are certainly the terms Pasenow always thinks of Bertrand in, as he disdains Bertrand's commercial work in contrast to his military career. Nonetheless, with his nomadic lifestyle, there's a case to be made that Bertrand is the romantic, not Pasenow. As Broch puts it; "we have no longer two mutually exclusive fields of reality... we find them co-existing within the same individual... we are ourselves split and riven" Similarly, when Bertran falls a victim to Esch's homophobia (as when Esch is taken aback that Martin and the Newspaper Editor defend Bertrand; "what business is it of ours anyway?"), there's a good case to be made that is the victim of Each's rage rather than a criminal receiving his punishment.
Reading Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy and Repetition, I'm struck by the way he repeatedly depicts women as powerful and aloof, only to insist on their degradation. In the midst of a text like Repetition, where are all the characters (consciously or unconsciously) are liars, it is only Gigi who is repeatedly denounced as such.Labels: Art, England, Literature
posted by Richard 2:52 PM
Saturday, November 22, 2008
I'm not often inclined to visit art installations, but Seizure by Roger Hiorns struck me as quite unusual. We're often taken with aspects of the chnaging seasons because of how they rewrite the world and change our vision of it; the land encased in snow, tree leaves becoming inflamed with burgundy and gold, the same trees bereft of those leaves and left skeletal. Something similar but rather more unnatural, is at work with Seizure; a derelict block of low-rise flats was filled with a heated solution of Copper Sulphate, drained, and then allowed to cool. The outcome of this process was to leave the walls, floor and ceiling encrusted with these crystals; a form of aleatoric art. On the outside, the houses are boarded up, paint peeling off their walls. Hiorns is interested in brutalist architecture, failed visions of a utopian future that carry 'the stain of life.' Entering inside, the crystals have covered almost everything, with mounds, troughs and puddles of copper sulphate solution forming a miniature terrain across the floor. In the darkness, the crystals covering the walls glitter. It all leaves me reminded of Ballard's The Crystal World.
Walking back, I notice Rodney Gordon's Faraday Memorial. I must have walked past this spot several times now without ever noticing it, which is odd as it is quite striking; a stainless steel exterior without windows that is identical on all four sides, only interrupted by a single door. The object houses a substation for the London Underground and is accordingly functional but does not obviously correlate to any established architectural norm. It must have looked quite futuristic when constructed in the sixties; but now its fate would seem to have become nondescript. Further to the south, I visit West Norwood cemetery on a frosty and cold day. It seems noteworthy for two particular reasons: firstly, its Greek orthodox section (mosaics are an especial feature here) and secondly, its terracotta tombs designed by Harold Peto for Doulton and Tate, with Venetian glass and elaborate corbels. Many of the tombs are rather ornate to the point of being rather kitsch in their demonstration of Victorian sentimentality. Nonetheless, much of the cemetery seems in rather poor repair; several of the tombs are broken, leaving the vaults beneath exposed. Equally, much of the place seems overgrown and wild; at one point I'm confronted by a fox who seems largely unconcerned by my presence. The entire remembrance garden is enclosed in scaffolding. Like Highgate, the Cemetery is on a hill from where the skyscrapers of the city can be seen glinting in the distance. Back in the city, the Guildhall has a small exhibition of GF Watt paintings from the closure of the Watts gallery for restoration. While much of Pre-Raphaelite art was meticulous in its presentation of detail, Watts tends to predate impressionist or even abstract modern art. Much of this stems from an idiosyncratic interpretation of Darwinism; like Pater, Watts was interested in flux and chaos and opposed religion to it as an idea of the transcendent rather than a dogma. As such, much of his work is allegorical but stemming from what is effectively a private mythology. Looking at some of the other paintings, I'm struck by the resemblance borne by one of Poynter's paintings of ancient Egypt to the Klenze paintings of Athens I saw in Munich.
I haven't visited Tate Modern's galleries since the collection was rehung according to artistic genre rather than theme, so I decided it would be worth completing the day by doing so. The first section is dedicated to abstract and expressionist art; I find myself especially impressed by the contrast between the likes of Rothko (a wonderful golden painting), Pollock and even Monet on the one hand, and a section dedicated to Viennese Actionism on the other, as with Hermann Nitsch's Poured Painting or Arnulf Rainer's Wine Crucifix where red paint like blood runs down the canvas. Lee Krasner's Gothic Landscape rather more resembles the Viennese paintings than the American ones. There was also an interesting contrast between Giacometti's statues with their Egyptian and African influences and David Smith's sculptures, welded farm art made from disused farm machinery. I'm also interested in the expressionist Brucke group and am somewhat surprised at having missed any of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff's paintings during my visits to Germany. The final room of interest contains Matissse's The Snail, Picasso's Goat's Skull, Bottle and Candle and Hepworth's Orpheus. The next collection of interest is surrealism. I can't deny that surrealism is by far and away the most interesting to me, presumably due to its close linkages with psychoanalysis and literature (although much of it is also concerned with painting as an equivalent to automatic writing, as with Miro or Calder's mobiles). The first room contains De Chirico's Uncertainty of the Poet before paintings by Magritte, Dali, Ernst, Tanguy and Tanning, but there are some unfamiliar works like Landscape from a Dream by Nash, Ibdes in Aragon by Masson, A Naturalist's Study by Roy, Variation on the Form of an Anchor by Hillier, Black Virtue by Matta or Fini's Little Hermit Sphinx. I pause for a while to watch Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon and proceed upstairs to the next collection.
The next collection is Futurism, Cubism and Vorticism, beginning with Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. Unsurprisingly, much of this collection is taken up with Picasso, Severini, Balla, Lewis and Braque, but there are some surprising inclusions from Vanessa Bell, Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson's A Star Shell and Fernand Leger. Much of this section is given up to more generally post-impressionist art; Mondrian's Sun, Church in Zeeland; Zoutelande Church Facade, Picasso's early Girl in a Chemise, Munch's The Sick Child, Matisse's Trivaux Pond as well as works by Cezanne and Bonnard. There's also a section on realist art; Meredith Frampton, Chagall and Derain. The final part is dedicated, rather oddly, to Soviet propaganda. Characterised by hero-worship and militarism it's not overly pleasant. The final collection is given up to abstract art and minimalism; Mondrian, Gabo, Brancusi, Helion, Malevich, and Kandinsky.
Travelling north, I go for a walk in the National Memorial Arboretum. I notice a nearby cottage with sheep and goats grazing in front of it as I walk alongside the river. There's a section I haven't seen before featuring replicas of various historical memorials; cairns, menhirs, roman gravestones, medieval memento mori, baroque cherubs, victorian angels and modern designs. The following day is taken up with a visit to Croxden Abbey, a ruin dissolved in the reformation. The building survives quite well; elaborate capitals remain on arches and tiles can still be seen on the floor. The line of the building is quite visible for the most part, such as the multiple side chapels on the main church building. I then make a return visit to Pugin's church at Cheadle, with its angels and seraphim on the altars, its encaustic floor tiles, and polychromatic tiles lining the walls. The day after that is mostly taken up with a visit to Ashby castle. The nearby church has an elaborate Elizabethan alabaster tomb from its founding family; part of it is still painted. The ruins themselves retain traces of the original ostentation, especially above the fireplaces. I recall the civil war tunnels from a childhood visit but am also impressed with the remains of the chapel, a set of iron gates barricading off the empty arches. Further down south, I visit Minster Lovell, another ruined mansion near Oxford, with a rather macabre 'Musgrave Ritual' story attached to it. The walls seem generally rather better preserved than those at Ashby, having been destroyed by entropy rather than by gunpowder; gargoyles and decorated arches survive. It's another rather dark day and the Windrush has flooded much of the ground.
Reading The Arabian Nights, it's easy to see why romantic writers were so taken with it; most obvious is the sense of irrational exoticism that appealed to the likes of Walpole and Beckford but also the sense of threat from forces beyond human comprehension that pervades the tales and the gothic novel alike. In a more philosophical context, romanticism fitful relationship with the transcendent dovetails neatly with the fatalism of the tales, whereby everything happens by the will of the divine. The tales are framed with a device of Scheherazade using her narration as a means of influence but frequently contain stories where the hero's fate has little to do with self determination and where the malfeasant are often rewarded as much as the virtuous. The tales have been made Muslim, but not with complete success, and not to the extent of excluding all the jinn, ghouls and other popular superstitions that canonical Islam disdains. They are localised in the great cities of the Arab golden age, fascinated by commodities and coined money, fabrics, scents, confectionery, guilds and crafts, but uncomfortable in the countryside and terrified of the open sea. The prudery and solemnity of Arab merchant life, the stately procession from shop to mosque to bath and back again, is subject to violent disruption by a flash of black eyes from behind a lattice or the sudden appearance of a demon. Reading Herodotus's Histories, I was struck that whereas much of Greek historical writing tends to centre around the Hellenic world and a Persian other (with open admiration for Sparta in the case of writers like Xenophon), Herodotus is as much an anthropologist as a historian and is as interested in foreign cultures as he is in events. If anything, Persia receives more attention that Greece even if events are told from a Hellenic perspective (as with the Persian debate over whether to accept democracy or autocracy).
Reading Willa Cather's The Troll Garden and Selected Stories is to proceed down a path that initially seems well travelled. The stories concern unfulfilled lives dwindling in the backwaters of the American mid west. In many respects, they resemble Hardy with their convergence of heredity and environment to crush their characters, especially in a story like Eric Hermannson's Soul: "a face that bore the stamp of Nature's eternal injustice... Cheat nature? Bah! One generation may do it, perhaps two, but the third.." The early stories accordingly make much of the Norwegian ancestry of many of the characters as much as the hardship of their existence eking a living out of the soil. Nonetheless, Cather is not much of either a pessimist or a moralist; her Emma Bovary in The Bohemian Girl or her Trenchard in On the Divide are able to find happiness while other characters in Eric Hermannson's Soul blame the "evil spirit" of the local gospel sect for condemning people to misery rather than any sense of ineluctable metaphysics doing so.
In the stories that make up The Troll Garden itself, matters prove more complicated, with the mismatch between the individual and the environment manifesting itself in more complicated ways; While some characters like Merrick thrive away from the Midwest, others like Katharine are only tormented by the memories of other places they are returned to it. A story like The Garden Lodge offers a parable of profligacy and prudence as equivalent roads to suffering. Nonetheless, many of which are not fully explained; for a realist writer Cather often tends to leave matters unsaid, to leave a figure in the carpet. The Sculptor's Funeral and A Death in the Desert furnish good examples, with the relationship between the sculptor and the lawyer left undefined, as is the nature of Roux's disgrace or the absent figure of Adriance Hilgarde for whom his brother serves as a proxy in Katharine's love (a modern sensibility would presume, not unreasonably, a homosexual interpretation in each of these cases, although the stories benefit from this lacuna). Other stories are more ineffable still; the epicentre of The Marriage of Phaedra is located in the speechless canvas of a painting while Paul's Case and A Wagner Matinee both dwell on the ineffable longings created from exposure of music, ranging from desire for a road not taken to crime and death. In Eliot's phrasing, Cather has withheld an objective correlative for these stories.
Reading Heidegger's Being and Time, I find myself most troubled by his continual emphasis on the importance of authenticity. Much of the text can be described as a phenomenological argument with Kant, replacing Kant's metaphysics with a materialist outlook derived from romantic thinking, stripping out the cartesian emphasis on the soul or the transcendential and replacing it with an emphasis on the throwness of being and the inseparability of being from the world. With that said, Heidegger's terminology often seems more religiose than Kant's, particularly so with the emphasis on the fallen nature of existence. Although Heidegger is clear that he is not equating inauthenticity with sinfulness, it seems difficult to avoid the equation, leaving the impression of secular theology rather than existentialism. Certainly, the use of the term differs greatly from equivalent concepts in other existentialist thinking, seeming to conflate Nietzsche's ressentiment (a critique of slave morality) and what Sartre would term bad faith (a refusal to accept freedom or moral agency). Heidegger both characterises being as being governed by care of conscience, thereby guesturing towards a Sartrean notion of social commitment, and as being at risk of falling into being overwhelmed by the the mass of humanity, thereby echoing Nietzschean concepts (e.g. "in utilising public means of transport and in making use of public sources of information such as the newspaper, every other is like the next...the real dictatorship of the 'they' is unfolded"). It's characteristic of Heidegger to collapse distinctions between opposing tendencies and to treat them as parts of a broader dialectic. Nonetheless, it still leaves me wondering how theese theories could be put into practice; many of Heidegger's philosophical themes—the overcoming of nihilism, the importance of rootedness, the need for decisive action—found vulgar echoes in Nazi thought. Faced with choices between the mass democracy of America and the collectivism of the Soviet Union, it seems little surprising that he found the Nazi emphasis on hero worship conducive to this thought. As he put it in his rectoral address: "the relentlessness of that spiritual mission that forces the destiny of the German people into the shape of its history... Does this essence have genuine strength to shape our existence?" The spiritual mission of the German people (again, note the reconstitution of religious terminology) under Nazism distinguished itself from the subjugation of Dasein under the domination of technology in communism or democracy, a process he termed 'forgetfulness of being' (Seinsvergessenheitct) in The Question Concerning Technology. One can, of course, read Heidegger's text more sympathetically than the biographical emphasis would seem to warrant; his comments on technology have an obvious force regarding the industrial nature of the holocaust and his criticism of inauthenticity could conceivably be applied to Nazism amongst other mass movements. Nonetheless, he seems a markedly more difficult figure to rehabilitate than Nietzsche.
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass is one of the very few works of the modern era that could be labelled carnivalesque. In the Bakhtinian sense, the term denotes the anarchic and comic: fools become wise, kings become beggars; opposites are mingled. Throughout the novel, Grass establishes dichotomies only to overturn them: Oskar is identified first with Satan and then with Jesus, with Rasputin and Goethe as the twin poles of his reading matter. The narrator frequently refers to himself in the third person, further establishing a split within himself. Polyphony abounds, with the alternate narrators giving slightly different accounts of events to Oskar. It also dwells on the body and the material, as does Grass in his scatological descriptions of the infant christ's anatomy, in Oskar's deformity, in Oskar's refusal to believe in Jesus unless it can come alive and drum ("either he drums or is he is not a real jesus") or even in the horse's head filled with eels. The same applies to The Dog Years where one student of Heidegger buries "a real mount made of human bones under medieval allegories." With that said, Grass uses magical realism as a means of producing concrete synbols: the deformed dwarf, the black dog, worms, scarecrows (themselves emblematic of the Heideggerian distinction of being and emptiness at the same time they satirise Heidegger's endless metaphysical neologisms). Like Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik, The Tin Drum also a picaresque novel, episodic and peripatetic by nature. The comparison with Hasek is a rather apt one: that novel is perhaps the closest to the The Tin Drum in many respects, with the exception that the humour of the earlier novel is univocal in its targets. Oskar almost epitomises the object of Nazi eugenics: deformed, Polish and an artist. His anarchism can also easily be construed as a form of resistance to fascist ideology, as with his disruption of a Nazi rally and equal disgust with the socialists and communists. Vaclav Havel once observed that; "We are the seekers of truth who fear those who claim to have found it." Similarly, the dichotomies of the novel represent a rejection of ideas of the absolute notions of truth that typically form the bedrock of totalitarianism; where "there is politics there is violence." Oskar is presented as free to "harmonize chaos and intoxicate reason," where the dichotomy of hero and villain is itself rejected. Where Schweik constantly acts to undermine authority, Oskar is the willing servant of the Nazis for much of the novel and leaves a trail of blood and destruction in his wake (the author's recently disclosed SS membership is rather obviously suggestive here). His drumming seems the perfect allegory of a world where all values had already been inverted and insanity reigned. It does raise the question as to whether carnival is an entirely effective mode of opposing totalitarianism; it may not be enough to overturn all values when the oppressors have already done that.
The addition of a modern soundtrack by Michael Nyman does little to efface the comparison, but I couldn't help comparing Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera to Koyaanisqatsi; both eschew narrative in favour of disconnected images, both are concerned with the relation of man and technology, albeit the former glorifies it as the latter reviles it. In both cases, the absence of a controlling structure leaves the interpretation decidedly open ended. Reggio's cinematography of gleaming skyscrapers is quite beautiful, Vertov's vision of dehumanised man as a machine (with factory workers showed beaming in the midst of their drudgery) is rather horrifying. Inevitably, Vertov's depiction of everydaylife dwells on certain aspects; the interest in speed and technology (cars, planes, motorbikes, trains and trams all feature) recalls while Marinetti while the interest in the athletic physique recalls Reifenstahl. The scenes in the beerhall introduce the only permissible element of decadence amongst the rather interminable wholesomeness of the images of work and play. The composite of scenes from Moscow, Kiev and Odessa forges the idea of a single Soviet identity. What's most interesting about Vertov is the rather postmodern self-referentiality of the film - the framing of it within a cinema, the repeated shots of the lens or of the cameraman; this diary of a cameraman is a film about the making of a film.
posted by Richard 11:22 AM
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Travelling up to the Midlands, I visit the ruins of Witley Court in Worcestershire. It's rare to come across the ruin of a home rather than of a castle or church, but this building is precisely that; a country house that burned down in the nineteen thirties leaving it as a shattered shell. Photos taken in the nineteen sixties show it as a rather romantic ruin, with trees growing up inside the walls in the absence of the ceiling. The ruins present a rather more prosaic aspect under the custodianship of English Heritage, with concrete supports having been brought in to support the towers. I visit on a rather cold, damp and overcast day that seems to contrast rather oddly with the mouldings above the windows on the Italianate facade or with the Carton Pierre decorations that still survives on the interior. Once one has passed up the stairs to that gaping hole previously occupied by the entrance door and underneath the ionic columns of the north portico, what remains of the 'interior' presents a rather different character. The house dated back to the Jacobean period and had subsequently undergone extensive modification over the years, with Nash making extensive changes only for it to be changed again in the Victorian period and made to look more like Osborne house. As one passes through the skeleton of the ruins, the view changes from the stained yellow facade to the dark red bricks of the earliest buildings. Victoriana gives way to Regency, which gives way in turn to the original Jacobean structure. Walking through it feels like an autopsy. From the garden, much of the house looks surprisingly intact, excepting the empty windows, as with a conservatory that survived the fire only to be stripped of its iron and steel later, leaving only stone arches behind. Much of the structure has been tidied and stabilised but one can still look through some gaping holes and see nothing but rubble overgrown with weeds. A few days earlier, I'd visited the ruins of Godstow Nunnery. Dissolved in the reformation, it seems to have become a part of the landscape, its walls overgrown with weeds. Witley Court still seems artificial.
One thing that did survive the fire was a parish church built by James Gibbs. It's a rather unexpected building, with the interior decorated with painted glass, gilded stucco mouldings, Rysbrack monuments and ceilings frescos; the result is vastly more ornate than the majority of English Baroque (something assisted by some Victorian high church modifications; Salviati mosaics and angel sculptures) but the predominant contrast of white and gold is still rather more austere than German or Italian rococo.
The following day I visit Walsall's new art gallery. A rather unimaginative cube designed in the 'Ikea nuclear bunker' style, it was intended to herald a regeneration the rather grim surroundings still seem to be waiting for. Formed as a result of the German-Ryan bequest (the circle around Jacob Epstein), the gallery does have the stamp of individual taste. Like Modigliani, Epstein was interested in ethnographic art and much of the collection is given up to Inuit eagle totems made of whalebone, a mask of Nefertiti, Cameroonian wood carvings of leopard, Roman and Peruvian busts, Maori greenstone, a Soanish wood carving of christ. This is completed by a taste in modern art that follows along similar lines; Modigliani caryatid drawings or Gauguin woodcuts. Finally, much of the collection is taken up with works by Epstein, Theo German, Lucien Freud and Sally Ryan. Esptein dominates with his early vorticist Study for Rock Drill, a fusion of man and machine that revolted him in the aftermath of the second world war. His later work becomes more akin to folk-art, as with his proto-Assyrian Study for the tomb of Oscar Wilde and the various bronze busts. It's a odd combination; naturalistic in a way that Hepworth or Moore were not, unfinished enough to be quite distinct from the classical tradition. I find myself more taken with his painting, especially an autumnal landscape; it becomes easy to understand the presence of landscapes by Monet, Constable and Corot in the collection. Some of the works from his circle are quite striking; Freud's portrait of Kitty Garmam is counterposed with a recent photograph of her in the same intense pose.
The collection is organised thematically rather by chronology or nation, a choice that gives it a rather wunderkammeresque air. Blake's engraving of Jacob's Letter is placed near to a work on the same theme by Burne-Jones. Blake's Death of the Virgin appears near to a work on the same theme by Rembrandt. The section on figure studies counterpoints Modigliani, Gauguin, Cezanne, and Roman statuary of grotestque drawings by Goya and Odilon Redon. The landscape section contrasts Monet, Renoir, Bonnard and Corot with Contstable, country scenes with townscapes from Meryon, Turner and Sickert. Portraits counterpoints Reynolds with Freud and Degas. Religion juxtaposes Blake, Epstein and Durer. Interspersed amongst these are various modern works; black and white woodland paintings by George Shaw, a Cloud Study by Matt and Ross after the nearby Constable painting. The gallery is holding a small exhbition of Blake paintings at the time of my visit, showing his responses to Young's Night Thoughts and Dante. Young appears to have relatively close to a fellow-spirit, with Blake echoing his criticism of an age more curious than devout (the painting shows two girls with compass and telescope, but in a depiction of Christ in his father's workshop, the young christ is also shown with compass in a fusion of reason and imagination; that particular work made an interesting contrast with Holman Hunt). Dante appears rather less so, with a sinister cast given to his depiction of the recording angel, which appears in the same character as Death in one of the other works. The central theme is angels, shown in some contexts as conventionally celestial, in some as sinister agents of a tyrant god and in some as creatures of energy and rage (as in The Good and Evil Angels).
Returning back down south, I visit another small exhibition at Reading Museum, this time of Richard Dadd paintings. Many of the works are simply genre pieces. Some show his experiences with the army in the Middle East. Other illustrate historical scenes of medieval battles or incidents from Shakespeare's history plays. But I'm quite struck by two of them; one an allegory of deceit showing an old woman wearing the mask of younger woman. She holds a skull and the base of her seat shows the temptation of Eve. It could be a Watts painting. The other shows a tomb in a wooded scene, a statue of a blind woman at the centre, with a robed skeleton above, as an allegory of grief. Looking around, I pay particular attention to the capitals from Reading Abbey, one showing the green man, to various Victorian sculptures (by Tweed and Rodin) and one of Richard Gibbings which clearly shows the influence of Gill.
posted by Richard 1:30 PM
Monday, November 3, 2008
When visiting Cambridge it's difficult not to see it as an alternate Oxford; rather smaller and greener, damp waters that resemble Venetian canals more than the Isis, a library with a tower rather than an underground railway, more redbrick than stone compensated for with more ornate college decorations, gothic rather than baroque; above all, even more lacking in the sense of being a 'real' place. I begin by visiting the round church. Rather smaller and homelier than its London counterpart, the combination of Minton tiles and Victorian stained glass with Romanesque arches rather leaves me rather more reminded, inevitably, of Iffley. The Saxon church of St Benet's is Saxon on the exterior with a mostly Victorian interior (save one round arch with beasts on either pillar). As in Oxford, many of the city churches were subject to the attentions of George Gilbert Scott, like Great St Mary's with its beautiful tracery. One thing that is rather different is the Corpus Christi clock; the Chronophage.
The principal object of my interest is the Fitzwilliam Museum. I begin by heading downstairs, past Assyrian wall reliefs, into the antiquities section; an excellent set of Fayum masks, Mummy caskets, an enormous statue of Ramses the Third, marble sarcophagi, a Romano-Egyptian zodiac (Roman mythology decorated with Horus figures), Palmyran statuary and Roman mosaics. From there I walk on to a gallery filled with pottery; Cizhou, Korean, Kakiemon, Imari, Delft, Mina'i, Maiolica, Meissen, Wedgewood all present concurrently, showing Iznik next to Victorian and Spanish lustreware. Upstairs, I'm able to see the final day of an exhibition of Vani funerary, from the golden graves of Colchis. Much of this is jewellery and decoration, but I'm most struck by a small copper statue of a satyr. Inevitably, I find the paintings most gripping; the Dutch and Flemish section boasts a Brueghel village scene, Ruisdael and Goyen landscapes, de Heem still lifes and an especially odd seascape of a ship broken in Arctic ice. I like Canaletto and Panini's architectural capriccios for much the same reasons I like the Berckheyde cityscapes or Neeff's church interiors, but I still seem immune to Italian renaissance art, a lurid Salvator Rosa Memento Mori, Titian's Tarquin and Lucrecia. In spite of the religious subject matter, it's difficult not to prefer the medieval paintings. The later sections are often rather mediocre until I come across a set of sunsets by Vernet; they almost seem like a combination of Dahl and Claude. In the twentieth century this is followed by a number of Renoir, Cezanne, Sisley, Pissarro and Monet landscapes and then by Lautrec and Degas portraits. I'm especially happy to come across The Bridesmaid by Millais, a painting that has always struck me as prefiguring the likes of Klimt. The British twentieth century is represented mostly by Singer Sergeant and Sickert. There's also an exhibition of Whistlet etchings, showing drawings of East London by the Thames, Venice and a rather more land locked Brussels.
The Byzantine exhibition at the Royal Academy left me rather underwhelmed; it seemed to reflect a theocratic civilisation, as much by omission (marble statues of Justinian or the other emperors, for example) as by the inclusion of countless icons. It seems odd that Byzantine art was disdained by the christian world in favour of the pagan art of Greece and Rome, whose comparative asceticism was presumably more appealing. Byzantine art was dismissed to the same barbarous past as gothic. Much of the exhibition is heavily weighted towards metalwork; silver censors, gold necklaces, chalices and so on. I find myself most impressed by an icon of Sergius and Bacchus, marble friezes from church interiors with peacock designs.
The British Museum's exhibition on Babylon features many of the things I recall seeing years ago in Berlin, especially the wonderful blue glazed bricks and rliefs of lions and dragons from the Ishtar gate. Nonetheless, it quickly makes the point that we know more about the earlier Assyrian civilisation than we do of Baylon, with much of our knowledge of the latter coming from foreign sources; Herodotus, Strabo or the Bible. In many cases, these sources are hardly accurate; there is no evidence of any Hanging Gardens, the Tower of Babel was simply a large ziggurat, Bablyon did not fall during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar and continued as a major city until Alexander the Great. Nonetheless, the exhibition is rather good at tracing the reception of Babylon into Western culture; Rembrandt and John Martin's paintings of its fall, Blake and Durer's etching of Nebuchadnezzar, Brueghel and Kircher's drawings of the Tower of Babel, Evelyn de Morgan's pictures of the expelled Jews. Afterwards, I walk through the Asian galleries and particularly the wall reliefs of the Amaravati stupa. I'm struck especially the rather gruesome character of the Tibetan images; Chitipati skeletons or goddesses bearing skulls filled with blood. Some of the Chinese exhibits prove equally odd; Chu funerary busts of figures with antlers and snake like tongues.
posted by Richard 1:12 PM
Sunday, September 21, 2008
I visited Bevis Marks Synagogue a few years ago as part of Open House weekend and in the meantime I had acquired a rather long list of otherwise closed places I wanted to visit this year. So, I started with GE Street's design for Law Courts on the Strand. One enters into a great hall that, unsurprisingly for Victorian architecture, is rather reminiscent of a cathedral (Street had left one pillar deliberately unfinished, a notion like a deliberate error being introduced into Turkish carpets), only much more empty and stark, lacking pews and only decorated with the occasional bust or painting. To each side stairways lead into a labyrinthine series of courtrooms and corridors, some of the lower ones rather resembling crypts. Only one room is at all ornate; unsurprisingly it is called the Painted Room. I follow this by walking along Fleet Street until I come to the Daily Express. While its vitrolite and glass exterior has a certain cold elegance to it, it's difficult not to see it as the progenitor of scores of more utilitarian modernist structures. The interior lobby is rather more what one expects of art nouveau though; all gilded in silver, with Indian styled reliefs, curved patterns on the floor and swirling spiral staircases.
I then walk to Westminster and visit Scott and Wyatt's foreign office. Scott had originally wanted to construct the building in gothic, but had been overruled by Palmerston. It's rather difficult not to imagine Scott scowling at having to design a classicist structure (albeit one where some of the corridors rather resemble St Pancras and the cupola of the grand staircase has a somewhat Byzantine feel). A lot of the rooms, such as Wyatt's Durbar Court or the Muse's Staircase, is wonderful, but much of it also looks as if it could have been designed at any point in a period covering around three hundred years. It seems to lack individuality. Finally on that day, I visit Holy Trinity in Kensington. This is another building I had walked past many times without seeing the interior. As it proves this is one of Bodley's later works, but with an especially ornate set of gold reredos and stained glass windows.
The following day begins with a more straightforward means of following my visit to Bevis Marks; by travelling to Lauderdale and New West End Synagogues. Both Victorian redbrick affairs, the former is a domed structure in Maida Vale, with a light green interior illuminated by bright stained glass decorated with natural patterns and dominated by dark wood furnishings. The latter is close by to the Orthodox cathedral and rather resembles it in many ways; although the ceiling is in plain white the design is essentially Moorish with the lower area decorated in marble and gold. Walking back, I briefly enter St Matthew's church, a Victorian gothic affair with Burne Jones style reliefs, side chapels with ceilings painted blue and a black and gold studded nave ceiling.
I then travel to Westminster and enter Westminster Hall. I'm rather reminded of the Tithe barn I'd seen at Great Coxwell; although this is more ornate the cultural continuity between these two different buildings seems enormous. Stone kings line up on the walls, wooden angels line the ceiling while the floor is annotated with notes concerning the trial of King Charles, Monarchs lying in state or the trial of Warren Hastings. The end of the hall leads to a long corridor that serves as an entrance to the Victorian Houses of Parliament; Minton tiling, statues of figures like Pitt, Fox and Clarendon, paintings of scenes from British history (a Jacobean ambassador visiting India, Elizabeth and Drake) mosaics of St Stephen. It's probably a lapse of taste but I can't help preferring Victorian gothic to its medieval counterpart. Finally, I visit the Inns of Court where I find the Temple Church open for the first time. As one would expect the interior is a mongrel of styles. The round section is entered by a Romanesque arch into an area dominated by Templar graves. Romanesque designs in the Triforium are followed by gothic arches and gargoyles below, including a figure whose face is being attacked by an animal. The font is also typically Romanesque, with various animals and mythological scenes shown on it. This section leads through to a gothic chancel, which still retains various Tudor and baroque monuments. Although the Victorian restoration has not survived, the bright blue modern stained glass is rather striking. Nearby, the Middle Temple Hall is also open; a dark hammer beamed ceiling above white walls and paintings of monarchs from Elizabeth to Anne. Much of the Elizabethan carving remains, with figures guarding the entrance ways.
A few weeks later, I travel to Hackney to visit Abney Park Cemetery. I rather like the Egyptian revival gates that Pugin so disapproved of, although the interior of the cemetery lacks any similar monuments and is mostly rather more restrained. The place is surprisingly bustling with people walking their dogs, assorted youths, vagrants and cruising men. As a nondenominational cemetery Abney Park was not set aside solely for cemetery use by Act of Parliament, and was not formally consecrated as burial land. Perhaps more so than any other it was entitled to be considered as a park as well as a cemetery; Abney Park was unique in being the first arboretum to be combined with a cemetery in Europe. I find myself amused by a squirrel frozen on the side of a tree trunk with a large nut in its mouth, presumably in the hope that it would not be observed. Falling leaves gently stray to the ground, like snow blowing in the wind. The most striking thing is the ruined chapel that sits at the very centre of the cemetery. The rose window at the front is a shattered hole partially covered by wooden boards, like a smashed eye. The front is covered in dead ivy above locked gates that allow one to see the derelict interior with another shattered oculus at the apex of a decaying arch, but not to gain access. I note that someone has written 'watch your skin peel' on the walls. Conversely, one can walk into the interior of the towers and see to the summit, past wooden boarding and cracks in the walls. The nearby grounds are a mixture of war memorials and statues in honour of the non-comformists who were the first to be interred here.
It's often been observed that counterfactuals are a politically confused genre. On the one hand, they tend to be predicated on a whiggish view of history, presenting alternative histories where the course of events has been deformed from how it should have progressed. On the other, they tend to assume that history is not so much born of deep social causes as hinging upon the actions of a few individuals. Philip Roth's The Plot Against America is very much a specimen of these contradictions; the narrative had history derailed by Roosevelt's defect at the hands of Charles Lindbergh, of progressive forces routed by reactionary opposition. At the same time, the narrative essentially hinges upon Walter Winchell's assassination, precipitating as it does the demise of the Lindbergh administration. While much of the narrative is told from the viewpoint of one Jewish family, Roth seems to struggle to achieve a consistent view of history; although much of the text depicts mass riots, other parts describe American fascism as an a temporary aberration, the result of a blackmail plot against Lindbergh's son. Conversely, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union manages to present a counterfactual that eschews any discussion of why this history differs from our own; Israel's settlers were massacred and the Soviet Union never existed and that is all there is to it. Chabon appears ambivalent at the prospect of a world without Israel; the novel is highly critical of Zionism but also depicts the Jewish homeland of Sitka in Alaska as a miserable backwater. There's no definitive sense of what the 'right' version of history might be; perhaps that's why the novel is rather more successful than Roth's at establishing the actions of his characters as meaningful and significant rather than historical ephemera.
Reading Hofmannstahl's short stories, I noticed that his characters frequently have epiphanic moments of revelation (where "I saw all of existence as one unity. The mental world did not seem to me to be opposed to the physical"), but which often prove to lead only to disaster. Finally, in The Lord Chandos Letter language itself denatures; "abstract words.. disintegrated in my mouth like rotten mushrooms." Hofmannstahl comes over as a thwarted platonist, raising the spectre of the infinite only to dismiss it. Something similar seems to apply to Andrei Biely's St Petersburg, a novel that is ostensibly concerned with the acts of terrorism in Tsarist Russia that were leading to the Russian revolution. The theme is misleading as the narrative tends to approach events symbolically rather than through the lens of historical realism. Instead of social tensions, events are depicted through a set of chiastic oppositions; reason and unreason, occidental and oriental (at times it reads more like Sax Rohmer than Conrad's The Secret Agent). St Petersburg is at once a real city with places that can be found on the map and also a Escheresque labyrinth made unreal by mists ("he wondered as in a dream about the relation of appearance to reality"); the geometry of the enlightenment reverts to the swamp that lies beneath it. Unsurprisingly, the mutability of language emerges as a recurrent theme; "my words get entangled... a modernist would call it the sensation of the abyss and search for an image."
I was surprised by Kangaroo; there's a markedly dialogic element in all of Lawrence's work but it seems markedly stronger here than elsewhere, with the novel almost forming a debate between Lawrence and Frieda, between differing aspects of Lawrence's personality. As Harriet waspishly puts it; "I've seen you fiddling away hard enough many times.. why, what do you do, all your life, but fiddle some tune or other?" At the heart of this debate is Lawrence's division between the normal self and their central absolute self, a state from which women like Harriet are barred; "in short, he was to be the Lord and Master and she was the humble slave.. she was to believe in his vision of a land beyond this charted world.. and she just couldn't." The novel deconstructs Somers' vision in several ways; by his arguments with Harriet, with Kangaroo and with himself. For example; "Him, a Lord and Master!.. he was the most forlorn and isolated creature in the world.. so isolated he was barely a man at all." And later; "the bulk of mankind haven't got any central selves. They're all bits." A central part of Lawrence's absolute self is the implicit theme of Lawrence's repressed homosexuality, a theme that is disturbed by Kangaroo conceiving of it simply as conventional love rather than as worship of Lawrence's dark god; "he half-wanted to commit himself to this whole affection with a friend, a comrade, a mate. And then, in the last issue, he didn't want it at all... all his life, he had cherished a beloved ideal of friendship - David and Jonathan... it took Lovat Somers some time to admit and accept this fact." Kangaroo responds in exactly the same terms; "the perfect love that men may have for one another" but Somers can no more respond to him in this way than he can to Harriet - he is too isolate; "I don't want to love anybody... Somers would never be pals with any man. It wasn't in his nature."
The same sort of issues manifest themselves in the novel's social concerns and its depiction of Australia; "some men must live by this unremitting inwardness.. they must not let the rush of the world's outwardness sweep them away." As far as the normal social self is concerned Australia is in many respects the model of Lawerence's vision; as far as his absolute self is concerned, quite the converse. The novel begins with Lawerence praising the inhibited, Whitmanesque character of Australian life; "like a full river of life... for the first time felt himself immersed a real democracy," only to promptly retract it; "and this was what Richard Lovat Somers could not stand... you admit the necessity for rule... the colonies make for outwardness. Everything is outward, like hollow stalks of corn" At this point and beyond, the novel leaves the point open; "Richard was wrong... you can get on for quite a long time without rule.. is it merely running down? Aah, questions!" Hence the novel ends with Somers unable to give himself to Australia or anything else; "you won't give in to women.. you wouldn't give in to Kangaroo. You won't give in to Labour or socialism." Lawrence talks of his worship of the dark god as taking men "nearer the magic of the animal world," a state that the inaptly named Kangaroo finds absurd. But in practice, Lawrence is revolted by the 'unthinking masses;' "the masses are always strictly non-mental... this is the state where they society, tribe, herd degenerates into mobs... the disintegration of the social mankind... a herding together like dumb cattle, a promiscuity like slovenly animals." All of a sudden, the magic of the animal world seems tenuous. Mobs are seen as weak souls lacking direction and discipline, hence Lawrence's attraction to Kangaroo's fascism (and the various anti-semitic comments in the book, not lease making the fascist leader a Jew); society can only exist as a hierarchy.
In common with figures like De Sade, Bacon was the type of artist who cannot exist without a contrary that defined him. In his case, this meant all that was theological, transcendent and metaphysical. Perhaps this is why his is an art of pastiche, taking Velasquez's painting of Pope Innocent and counterpointing it to the dying nurse in Eisenstein, or recycling imagery from Michaelangelo, Van Gogh landscapes, Physique Pictoral, war photography and counterpointing it to images of the crucifixion. Conversely, although his art frequently cited literary sources, such as Eliot, he disavowed narrative in favour of sensation; "Some paint comes across directly on to the nervous system, other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain." Throughout he is a materialist, obsessed with the sexual and the decomposing body alike but depicting it in the terms of religious iconography. The current exhibition at the Tate dwells on his paintings of man and animal alike, showing both in terms of their ravening maw; a form of Darwinian iconography. This is followed by the figures in his 'space frames,' constructs that recall prisons or zoo cages. In each case, the features of the face and any sense of individuality are effaced. The focus on the individual in isolation recalls Hopper and could well be interpreted as a commentary on a pre-Wolfenden society, but the screaming faces has more in common with horror film imagery than Hopper's poignancy. The images of entwined figures leave it impossible to tell if the two male figures are lovers or wrestlers, emblems of violence or death. In the same way, his crucifixion scenes clearly guesture towards Nazi concentration camps or simple charnel houses, but conjoin this with religious imagery. Flesh melts in the same way it seems to in Dali. I'm left feeling reminded of Helene Cixous's rather simplified observations about Western culture being characterised by a set of dichotomies between male and female, eros and thanatos, sacred and profane and so on. Bacon's work could easily be construed as a riposte that seeks to take these chiastic oppositions and blur them.
At the same time, the other Tate gallery is holding an exhibition dedicated to Rothko. The two artists could not be more dissimilar; more essentially programmatic, the other abstract to the point of constantly having to defend himself against accusations of simply being a decorative artist. Most of the paintings here do not even have titles. On the one hand, Rothko withdrew his paintings from appearing in the context of the Seagram building's restaurant, preferring instead the environment of the Rothko chapel. Pollock's epic canvases are horizontal, like cinema screens. Rothko's - such as Number 10, 1950, which once belonged to the architect Philip Johnson - are vertical, like skyscrapers. He was also particularly interested in the hanging of his paintings and of how the size of the canvas affected the space (arguing that a small work is dominated by the viewer, while a large canvas dominates the viewer). On the other, the octagonal design of this structure uses no conventional religious design and the paintings do not correspond to any religious symbolism. There is no content, only layers of closely related colours; greys and blacks, purples and maroons, browns and greys, blacks and blacks.
During the 1960s, Rothko's paintings become poised between the materiality of their surfaces and forms, and the emergence of an image, even if it is an image of nothingness, or an image denied: a blank black screen, or a simple near-horizontal division which we unavoidably see as a horizon, between grey and brown, or black and grey. Rothko believed that all serious art was about death and sought to pursue what he called the 'tragic.' Hence his paintings, appear with frame-like forms painted over bloody depths, as if the canvases were windows or portals. The Rothko chapel utilises doorways that lead nowhere, that evoke the closed doors at the corners of Michelangelo's New Sacristy at San Lorenzo in Florence; Michelangelo similarly used sealed doors and sealed windows for one reason: to suggest death.Labels: Architecture, Art, Literature, London
posted by Richard 11:14 AM
Sunday, June 29, 2008
I saw the work of Vilhelm Hammershøi during my visit to Copenhagen a few years ago, but I can't say with any honesty that it made any great impression on me at the time. This is perhaps unsurprising; understated paintings in grey tones of spartan and austere subjects are comparatively easy to miss in the midst of other works; it's only when one sees the paintings together that one realises the obsessive theme driving them.
Hammershøi's loose brushwork and restricted palette immediately associate him with his contemporary Whistler, but seventeenth century Dutch painting was also a significant influence on him. As with Vermeer, Hammershøi is frequently found depicting figures in interiors, showing the play of light from nearby windows. Where the Western tradition is for the subject to stare out of a painting and challenge the viewer, Hammershøi follows Vermeer in denying this, having his figures (or figure; his wife was his persistent model) turned away from the viewer to give a hermetic aspect to the painting. In tandem with the grey, barely furnished interiors (photographs of the same rooms show them filled with furnishings and decoration), where the light from a window largely serves to suggest that life is somewhere else, this creates the melancholic air that pervades his work. Durer's figure of melancholy was turned away from the viewer as well. Hammershøi returns again and again to the same interiors, the same piano, the same pictures, the same bowls. But his work also rather resembles Escher or Piranesi, showing long corridors with successions of doors, looking out into interior courtyards through layers of interior windows, with doors that are slightly warped and distorted against the overall geometry of the work. There's a disjoint between the realistic, objective, settings and his imprecise impressionistic brushwork; what is being depicted is an objective correlative for his own state of mind.
The other component to Hammershøi's work is his landscapes, both rural and urban. Whether showing the Danish countryside, Copenhagen's royal palace or church spires, the British Museum or a London street, the scene is always devoid of people and depicted with grey wintry skies that seem somewhere between Whistler and Atkinson Grimshaw. I recall Copenhagen as a colourful city with painted buildings and red church towers surmounted with verdigris encrusted baroque spires. But I recall being fascinated by the same buildings, showing the same empty streets. I discover a certain fellow feeling for Hammershøi that I'm rather unaccustomed to.
The following week I return for two exhibitions near Trafalgar Square. I start with an Wyndham Lewis at the National Portrait Gallery. I recall Angela Carter complaining that all of Lawrence's women were just clothes without bodies, as opposed to his meticulous depiction of male physicality. Something similar can be said of Wyndham Lewis's paintings. The subjects of these portraits are puppet or simulacra. They have the quality of remaining just what they are, fixed in a particular epoch to furniture which is now dust (hence Froanna's liminal character in her Red Portrait as she fades ino the background). "The process and condition of life, without any exception, is a grotesque degradation." The stress on dehumanisation in his writing manifests itself in his painting by his focus on clothes rather than people. The portrait of Edith Sitwell shows her with her eyes shut, her face turned from the viewer, buried in a mass of clothes. Sitwell thought her hands to be her finest feature; here, Lewis hides them altogether (the same applies in his painting of Mrs Schiff, unlike Edwin Evans whose hand blends into his trousers). Hats and helmets abound throughout the paintings. Depicting TS Eliot, he gave the poet a "gioconda smile." Sketch after sketch shows the face left unworked till last. Eliot looks downwards, Pound closes his eyes. Like Modigliani or Picasso (albeit without their primitivism), Lewis saw the face as a mask, indistinguishable from the hat he always painted himself wearing.
Confronted with demands for a return to the classicism of Raphael, Lewis responded by suggesting Shakespeare as an exemplar, praising the famous woodcut of the playwright as serene and empty. Lewis develops various personae in his painting and writing like 'the enemy' as his satirical response to the literary and art world, or his embodiment of satire, the tyro. Lewis caught sight of his face in a cracked mirror and saw "the mask of a syphilitic Creole." Whatever was worth recording in life, he asserted, could be mapped in surface forms. On the whole, I find myself thinking tht Lewis is a rather more sympathetic as a painter than as a writer. His painting of Froanna is a particular masterpiece; red tones predominate excepting the blue of her eyes as she stares directly at the viewer, one of the very few subjects to do so in the entire exhibition.
I follow this with the nearby Divisionism exhibition at the National Gallery. Like Pointillism or Impressionism, Divisionism was a response to new scientific theories of light and colour, like colour wheels. Nonetheless, where French art often has an art for art's sake philosophy, with low-lifes or nudes (Longoni's pickpocket painting is the nearest to that here) featured to epater les bourgeoisie rather than for political ends. By contrast, Italian artists were unhappy with technique alone. Italian reunification has created considerable social upheaval, poverty and inequality that lent itself to a realist style of portrature that much of the rest of Europe had already explored. Equally, symbolism offered a more escapist response to the same conditions, one that especially appealed to Catholic artists. Often, divisionist artists would veer between these extremes. Nomellini paints grey scenes of striking workers at one point in his career, and then paints an extraordinary indigo blue symbolist work showing the sea, entitles Symphony of the Moon. Segantini's nature scenes remains sufficiently detailed to sit alongside Pre-Raphaelite painting, but his later symbolist works show a bizarre depictions of sins being punished in hell. His Return from the Woods is the most perfect fusion of the two strains shown in the exhibition; showing a peasant woman dragging wood in a snow scene, but withthe church spire at her destination is reminiscent of David Friedrich (the same applies to some of Grudicy's autumnal scenes; I'm struck by the spider's web drawn on the frame of one of them). Some of the realist paintings, such as those by Morbelli could have been painted fifty years earlier in terms of their technique, even if light falling through windows is a particular theme. Morbelli also painted melancholy quasi symbolist works of sunsets though. In other works, the divisionist technique, so effective in Segantini's Alpine scenes, imposes a stillness and imprecision that fits oddly with the social agenda of the paintings. Morbelli's luminscent painting of women working in the rice fields utterly fails to convey any sense of misery; it's much too tranquil and beautiful. Either these artists assumed that a method that was 'scientific must be allied to social progress, or the political posturing was actually an alibi for aestheticising the predicament of the working class. Much of the symbolist work is also quite socially engaged though but in a more reactionary fashion, as with Previati's paean to the virtues of the madonna. Volpedo's country scenes are reminiscent of Sisley but show christian processions. Many of the forms are religious, such as the tondo or the polytych. At the very least, religious symbolism is used to evoke a sense of secular national identity; Mazzini had argued that Italians must develop a "religious concept of their nation."
It wasn't until futurism that the techniques developed by divisionism could be applied to a specific programme, albeit one where the interest in light was often centered on electric lighting. The exhibition depicts a move from Boccioni's early pastoral landscapes to a picture of a seamstress (albeit one where the focus is on her cobalt blue dress) to his explicitly futurist painting of a dam being constructed. Other works by Balla and Carra show the futurist depiction of movement in still life or the energy of technology.
As I child I recall seeing a particular statue during a visit to Osbourne House on the Isle of Wight; a black basalt statue of Antinous. I couldn't place my interest in it exactly at the time, presuming it to be due to the exotic Egyptinate character of the statue. I now presume that my interest was mostly taken by the frank sexualisation in the semi-nude depiction of Hadrian's lover. No wonder Winckelman had been so enthused at the imagery that showed Antinous as being somewhere between Athena and Apollo. The story of the doomed youth is one of the central myths of gay history, alongside that of Edward the Second. It's the prospect of seeing Antinous that attracts me to the Hadrian exhibition at the British Museum. The depictions of him are many, from the Egyptianate statue of him as Osiris (with whom he had shared a death day), Ephebian depictions of him as Bacchus (another arisen deity) with vine leaves in his long hair or versions of him as a Greek fertility god. In some of these he conforms to the Roman ideal of the beautiful youth (shown here with the inclusion of the Warren cup), in others his sexuality is more aggressively that of an adult male. I find myself wryly amused at the prospect of his cult competing with christianity; if only it had won. Otherwise, the material at hand is rather more conventional; accounts of Hadrian's brutal suppression of Jewish rebellion, retrenchment and consolidation of the empire's borders after Trajan's overly ambitious expansion, the amnesty on public debts, construction of the Scottish wall (admittedly a turf bank for much of its length that could have served little defensive purpose, instead presumably it served as a means of channelling and controlling the border), anf finishing with the construction of buildings like the Pantheon, his Mausoleum and the architectural fantasisa of his Tivoli villa. The images of Hadrian himself seem surprisingly individual, with his beard setting him out (cited as evidence of his love of all things Greek or a means of covering his blemishes, depending on your preferences) as well as a dimple in his ear that may be evidence of heart disease. Giant busts and statues alternately show him as emperor, priest, warrior and deity. Some of the reliefs from Tivoli, showing Parthenon style depictions of naked figures alongside detailed carvings of vines, birds and squirrels also stand out, but I'm especially drawn to two beautiful peacocks that formerly were in place on the walls of Hadrian's mausoleum.
The great court of the Museum currently has a striking work by Zhang Wang inside it; following the Chinese inclusion of weathered stones in gardens, Wang has taken the image of such stones and encased it in silvery metal, which looks as if it were frozen mercury. This questioning of the relationship between nature and art is counterpointed by some temporary gardens outside, where a genuine stone can be found amidst the dogwood, wisteria, lacquer tree, willow, bamboo and peony. An exhibition of Chinese nature painting inside continues this theme. I'm struck by the role of literary allusion in the paintings and ceramics shown; many of the flowers and animals are chosen for their symbolic connotations (like the lotus) others by homophones suggested by their names (bamboo sounding like congratulations, narcissi sounding like immortality) or for compounds formed from the combination of different items. A few weeks later I'm revisiting Silchester and an archaeological dig is on. A small garden has been created illustrating the sort of plants found in a Roman garden and illustrating their symbolic functions. There are some overlaps with the Chinese symbolism, as with peony being used in protective amulets.
Walking around the city, I visit the interior of St Mary Alderdmary, an exercise in hyperreal gothic by Wren. The effect is quite odd; the fan vaulting is decorated with floral patterns that seem to belong rather more to the baroque period. The effect of the interior being coated in white plaster is rather sepulchral, giving it the effect of an alabaster tomb and contrasting oddly with the colourful Victorian tiling on the floor. While I'm there the organ starts playing Bach's Toccata and Fugue. I move onto Wren's St Stephen Walbrook. The interior here is more like a playfully decorated version of the pantheon; unlike Hawksmoor whose eccentric designs seem to match the English character, Wren would have been a much greater architect in a catholic country, where his designs could have made with red marble rather than Portland stone and his interiors gilded and painted. One detail I am struck with is a totentanz on one of the pillars, showing a bride dancing with a skeletal death. This evening, I go to Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppaea at the Proms. Even if Monteverdi is best known for his ecclesiastical music, this amorality tale does rather confirm the reputation of renaissance Venice as indifferent to religion at best. The plot begins with Cupid asserting her primacy over Virtue and thereafter protecting Poppaea as she schemes her way to becoming Nero's wife, displacing the rather more virtuous Octavia. Poppaea's mother attempts to dissuade her from this course, but only on the grounds of practicality, advising her to go for someone less ambitious instead. Similarly, Octavia's nurse attempts to persuade her to take a lover as a form of revenge. Seneca is depicted as the moral centre of the play but also as a tedious windbag. The only character to receive any punishment is the wronged Octavia, while the assassin Otto is allowed happiness with Drusilla. The staging attempted to draw attention to later events (Poppaea' death at Nero's hands) by having him come close to slapping her as well as introducing an unscripted (and historically inaccurate) scene where Nero drowns Lucan. Since the drama is essentially concerned with Poppae's triumph, I wasn't especially sure I appreciated these interpolations, even if the original audience would have been well aware of Poppaea's eventual fate and that she would have achieved her ambition by remaining faithful to Otto. The Skakespearian approach to casting works bettwe, with both Nero and Poppaea played by women (Nero would originally have been played by a castrato) and various female parts like the nurse played by men (the nurse here bears a disturbing resemblance to Margaret Thatcher).
Later at the Proms, I listen to Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty. The full version is rarely performed in ballet (the story being slight, Tchaikovsky had padded it with various dances). I find myself surprised at the idea of Tchaikovsky writing an opera under the influence of Rameau, although the idea of parallels to Wagner and Brunnhilde's sleep is more natural. In later works, Rimsky-Korsakov's Kaschkey the Immortal inverts this, with the hero's kiss to an evil witch killing her and releasing the princess. I follow this with Dvorak's Slavonic Dances and Janacek's Osud. The latter is quite odd, reminding me of the role of neuroticism in Schnitzler or the sense of impending fate in Kafka (Mann also leapt to mind, prompted by the spa setting). The first two acts describe a conductor's love affair and its end in madness and death. His opera is only written to comprise two acts and the third has his describing the above events it to music students at its premiere, thereby forming the third act.
The following weekend, I go to a Taraf de Haidouks concert in Cheltenham. Much of their music is intended to take orchestral settings of gypsy music by the likes of Bartok and Albeniz and to place in back into its original context, playing it as dance music on the violin, accordion, bass and cymbalum. The result is rather like rock music and it's difficult not to think that where nineteenth century Europe preferred to take folk music and to apply it to orchestral works, twentieth century America preferred to allow black artists to pioneer jazz and blues. The irony of re-appropriating Bartok is born out by the venue, a rather gaudy regency affair. The audience look as if they go there often to attend classical concerts; standing for this one they occasionally manage to sway a bit (aside from one rather energetic elderly lady). It's also worth mentioning the supporting act, the London Bulgarian Choir, who performed a capella folk songes dressed in traditional costumes.
Cheltenham itself, with its rows of regency buildings, seems rather tepid to me. I'm more struck by my visit earlier in the day to Tewkesbury Abbey. It reminds me of Southwell, another place where the isolated location seems to have helped the building survive with comparatively little destruction or alteration. The exterior is rather ungainly; a squat central tower is flanked by various side chapels and fronted with a facade composed of two towers dwarfed by a central window, recessed back as if it were a romanesque arch. The interior is dark, supported by round pillars (each with a face as a corbel facing its counterpart opposite) above a gothic ceiling painted green and white. The effect is rather like a forest. After the rood screen the effect becomes more markedly gothic, with Victorian Minton tiling below matched by white, blue and red patterns above. England's oldest fan vaulting in some of the chantry chapels, some of it still painted. One of them has an effigy of its knight suspended above it, others show statues of mouldering corpses, others show fights with the devil. I'm also quite struck by the lady chapel, with a Byzantine mosaic and icon of St Benedict.
The following day is taken up with a brief visit to Glasgow. I find the Victorian buildings in red sandstone mixed with baroque church spires, Marcochetti statues, greek revival art galleries, elaborate corbel figures and art deco building fronts quite wonderful. I'm equally delighted with the police boxes I keep on seeing on street corners. The back of Prince's Square behind the City Chambers is labyrinth of arches that reminds me of Piranesi. In front, I'm struck by the column surmounted by Walter Scott. London has no statue of Shakespeare, let alone dedicating Trafalgar Squate to him. I walk out to the cathedral and walk around the graveyard. The monuments are eroded and weathered, decorated with skulls and morality symbols. The symbols seem wraithlike when corroded in this manner. On one of them Minton tiling has been badly blackened by industrial pollution. Several more modern tombs are caged in with rusted iron, the interior overgrown with weeds. I walk over to the Victorian necropolis. The presence of the tombs on this hill reminds me of Prague, as does the presence of an old town next to a new one on a grid layout. Presumably Mackintosh would figure as the Glaswegian Gaudi. Paths spiral around the hill, as one passes celtic crosses, Egyptian tombs, funerary urns, all encrusted with rust and weeds as they crumble to dust. The style of the monuments seems rather diverse, from Moorish gothic to Romanesque chapels. Returning, I enter the cathedral. Its stone is quite black with the roof covered in a rich, dark wood. The modern stained glass is a lovely blue. The interior seems as labyrinthine as the necropolis with a crypt where Saint Kentigern's tomb had rested. Medieval German stained glass creates phovist patterns on the floor of a side chapel. Here alone the walls are painted in white and I notice a roof boss in the shape of a skull. Elsewhere, the sacristy's floor is lined with Minton tiles. I look at the funerary memorials in the cathedral. Unlike even those in Tewkesbury they are brightly painted, somewhere between gothic and Tudor in their design.
Lautreamont's Maldoror follows in the path of Baudelaire and Nerval in delighting in contradictions, even as Lautreamont condemns it in his poems. Similarly, the poems are explicit in rejecting the romanticism of Byron, even as Maldoror follows in the path of Manfred, Goethe and Maturin (although he also speaks of tragedy, such as that of Mervyn, as moral, exciting pity and terror). Where, Maldoror denounces god the poems state that "I reject evil... man never fell from a state of grace." Maldoror itself is far from monologic. At one point, Satan is Maldoror's great rival, elsewhere god is essentially identical to satan ("I created you so I have the right to do whatever I like to you... I am making you suffer for my pleasure") at another the archangel speaks of Maldoror in the same terms as Lucifer himself, a fallen angel they would welcome back as one of their own. Since the text accepts the binary logic of christianity throughout, it is split between salvation and damnation as mutually exclusive choices, even as the narrator rejects god as an evil tyrant; "this god who is insensible to your prayers.. this shapeless and bloodthirsty idol... I should like to love and adore you but you are too powerful and there is fear in my prayers." Since man is made in god's image it follows that man is as corrupt and vicious as his creator ("the creator who ought never to have bred such vermin"), making murder a moral act. Applying Blake's dictum that one should soon smother a child in its cradle than nurse unacted desires, Maldoror emerges as a Sadeian rebel in the same way Blake envisaged Milton's Satan. But at the same time the narrative voice can still shift to utter conventional homilectics; "that torch of unjustifiable pride that is leading you to your damnation."
Roderick Hudson reminded me of an observation I'd heard that while homosexuality forms an obvious subtext in many novels by gay authors, the sense can permeate other works (the example cited was a rereading of 1984 as story of gay love and persecution). Here, there are grounds to suspect a subtext; Cecilia introduces Roderick as "a pretty boy" while in Venice Roderick and Rownland watch "a brown breasted gondolier making superb muscular movements." The core of the novel can as easily be read as concerning Rowland's unrequited love for Roderick as it can for Mary. In spite of the depiction of Mary, women essentially figure throughout as sexual threats that destroys men of talent as much as Rowland's interference; "a buxom, bold faced, high-coloured creature... she used to beat him and he had taken to drinking." Then later; "he had married a horrible wife.. it was said she used to beat poor Savage." Similarly, Christina is "as cold and false and heartless as she is beautiful... her disrelish of a man who lacked the virile will."Labels: Architecture, Art, England, Glasgow, History, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 8:14 AM
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Orientalism is an exhibition at the Tate dedicated to European painting of the Middle East, one of the latest in a quite long series of exhibitions at various London institutions dealing with the Middle East. The first room announces that the theme is rather predictably inspired by Edward Said, although it admits that Said has become a controversial figure. This seems a pity, as much of the exhibition does go a long way to undermining Said's case. It shows paintings by people who had effectively gone native, were motivated by mysticism or who were opposed to imperialism or who were simply motivated by a love of the exotic. Although Said's case that the West depicted the Orient as a decadent, barbaric other (as in Byron's poetry) is validated to some extent (as with the many pictures of the harem or slave market, although it's interesting to note that a French painting is the only one to explicitly sexualise the slaves, to the apparent disapproval of a British Empire that was banning such practices), he fails to perceive that as nineteenth century civilisation grew increasingly grey and industrialised, its writers and artists increasingly sought refuge in their own medieval past or in other places unpolluted by modernity. Ruskin sought this in Venice, the likes of Wilkie and Holman Hunt in the Orient. With the ruins of Rome already excavated and familiar, novelty dictated that the ruins of Egypt and Jordan were the next to be discovered. Equally, if the West was decadent, much of the appeal was that Westerners wanted to lose their inhibitions. Figures like Lewis and Leighton often came to show Western figures in Oriental settings.
The exhibition begins with portraiture; the daughter of English merchants who had grown up in Turkey shown in Western dress, the painter John Frederick Lewis depicting himself as a carpet seller in the bazaar, figures like Holman Hunt and Wortley Montagu in Eastern clothing. The depiction of Islam by Lewis is especially sympathetic, with his paintings showing himself at prayer in the Mosque. I'm interested in Wilkie's portrait of the Ottoman Sultan, shown in mostly Westernised dress. It seems to be forgotten that cultural interchange worked both ways, with foreigners dressing as Arabs and vice versa; again, Said's account assumes that orientalism can only be an imperialist ploy rather than a form of cultural exchange; the most clearly imperial portrait here, of Napoleon in Egypt, is notable for the stark contrast between the Eastern setting and the Western attire of the dictator. Something similar is at work in the painting of European explorers, dressed in Roman togas, rediscovering the ruins of Petra with their Arab guides. The nearest there is to a validation of Said's theories is an Augustus John painting of TE Lawrence in Bedouin clothes, although Lawrence was a poor sort of imperialist at best.
The later paintings move onto the subject of religion. During the course of the nineteenth century, wealthy westerners financed the establishment of Jewish homes and collective farms in Jerusalem, which accordingly grew more and more Judaicised. Figures like Holman Hunt grew increasingly interested in Judaism, leading to support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland. His painting of The Scapegoat combines both Christian and Jewish themes, although much of his painting of Jersualem and its churches is more straightforwardly christian. It has to be said that the most interesting paintings (and some of the most numerous) in the exhibition are of architecture and landscapes though. For instance, Lord Leighton's paintings of Algiers and Damascus, Frederick Lewis depicting the bazaars of Cairo, Edward Lear's view of Constantinople from a cypress filled cemetery or the pyramids from a tree lined avenue, Holman Hunt showing the pyramids reflected in the Nile (he didn't care for them much and managed to make them look like Silbury Hill) David Robert's depiction of the ruins of Petra, Baalbec, Philae and Karnak. Judging from this, it's very clear that both Lear and Roberts are very much underrated as artists.
As an exhibition, there's more cultural and historical interest than artistic here. None of the paintings are poor but few are masterpieces. To take a few that stood out, there's Stanley Spencer's paintings of mosques in Sarajevo, Bomberg's modernist painting of Jerusalem, Dadd's strange concatenation of Bedouin tribes and Roman soldiers into a strangely symmetrical painting an allegory whose meaning is forever lost. Before, I leave I take the opportunity to have a look at The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon. It fills an entire wall of the gallery and is easily the finest masterpiece that I saw that day. It's a pity I'll probably never see it again.
Like Said's Magnum Opus, John Berger's Ways of Seeing is an interesting text, if not one I can bring myself to entirely agree with. The second section discusses the history of the nude, with its tendency to depict women as passive objects of the male gaze. It's difficult not to sympathise with much of this argument (especially that non-Western traditions have not focussed exclusively on the passive image of a woman), but it still seems rather limited. The nude in the likes of Cranach or Titian heralds the vanquishing of the medieval prohibition of sexuality, a reawakening of the sensual and physical (it's interesting to note that there's absolutely no discussion of the role of religion in Western art in Berger). A figure like the Rokeby Venus, as Camille Paglia might argue, surely has its own power and is difficult to solely characterise as passive. More generally, Berger's argument seems to have been undone by the passage of time and the increased sexualisation of the male body; Germaine Greer is surely right to argue that women, as much as heterosexual men, have a right to this form of visual pleasure.
The third section is probably the one I most agree with. Berger argues that the physicality of oil painting was ideal both for the depiction of material objects, whether still lives or other forms of property (e.g. land in Constable or animals in Stubbs) and for the establishment of the oil painting as a form of property in its own right. Berger counterposes this to the ethereal figures in Blake's engravings. Berger does deal with an aspect of the Western tradition I have little liking of here, but it seems a little strained all the same; I can't say I would swap the physicality of a Vermeer with its pleasure in the physical world for a medieval triptych especially gladly. Equally, given the prominence of the romantic depiction of nature from Rosa and Ruisdael to Holman Hunt and David Friedrich, the argument that nature is not present except as property seems frankly ludicrous.
The final section deals with the transition from oil painting to colour photography in advertising, from the wealth and status of the elite to the promotion of wealth and status to the lower echelons. The argument is a familiar one, revolving around the role of advertising in manufacturing false wants by associating certain products with sexuality or status. I tend to suspect that this argument requires one to accept the Marxist idea of false consciousness (as Popper pointed out a mechanism that simply dismisses any obstacle to Marx's account of social history as being an aberration); Berger certainly speaks of advertising as a form of force rather than a form of consent.
By contrast, Susan Sontag's On Photography is considerably more appealing to me. Noting that a photograph is essentially an accidental and serendipitous combination of how light interacts with chemicals, Sontag sees it as a way of seizing aspects of the world than a composed artform. Sontag accordingly disdains the rigid compositions of Weston in favour of Atget's more disorderly 'captures.' Where Berger's approach is Marxist, Sontag sees photography's overthrow of the distinction between high and low art as being essentially akin to surrealism. The only problem is one of period. Digital photography is rather less accidental than the film cameras Sontag was writing about. Techniques like high dynamic range photography or photoshop manipulation mean that photography becomes rather more akin to painting, which Sontag had seen as imitating photography. Of course, there's also a movement towards using older cameras, even pinhole ones, although the element of 'historical slumming' to this often seems a counterpart to more modern ways of aestheticising photographs, even to the extent of photoshopping marks and flaws onto the image.
Donald Richie's Japan Journals rather reminded me of Forster's accounts of Italy, Ozpotek's Turkey or the North Africa of Bowles, Burroughs and Orton. It's an odd sub-genre whereby the Western gay male looks for sexual liberation in a culture that lacks Western moral inhibitions or the mechanised and staid nature of Western society. In a lot of cases, the culture in question was a patriarchal one where homosexuality could be hidden within broader homosocial social structures. It's also a partly obsolescent sub-genre given that moral inhibitions are now more likely to be considerably stronger in Tangiers than in London. Perhaps, this is as well given the connotations of imperialism and economic exploitation in it alongside the escape from Western mores. "You seem to have deserted Japan in favour of the Third World," a friend tells him as his attentions turn from the Japanese to immigrant workers. "It was not I that deserted Japan," he writes, "but Japan that deserted the Third World . . . It was the Third World in Japan that so appealed to lubricious me, and now that Japan is more First World than even the USA, the appeal is no longer there. That makes me that figure of fun, the garden-variety colonial imperialistic predator." As Japan westernises, Richie begins peevish complaints against the ignorance of sexual indifference of Japanese youth, with friends departing for less affluent Thailand.
In this context, Japan is an odd example, having gone from being a traditional patriarchal society to a modern Westernised society where Richie documents the rise of women's rights. While Japan lacked the traditional opprobrium directed against homosexuality in the West, it nonetheless remains more conservative than a modern Western society. Richie is suspicious of the elevation of sexual preference to a component of social identity but there is something rather tragic in an existence of cruising and losing his lovers to marriage (Mishima's widow and children living in permanent denial as to his homosexuality). On the one hand, Richie documents the role of the transvestite performer in Japanese theatre, festivals undertaken by mostly nude men, fishermen who worked nude, carpenter's dancing women's dances and on the other he documents Yukio Mishima's hyper-masculinised identity and his identification with western classicism and the figure of Saint Sebastian in preference to Japanese models. Richie notes that "a dandy, far from being the individual eccentric he is often though to be, is really a strict conformist.. the dandy is no rebel, and no true reformer or renegade was ever a dandy. Maybe that is why society is no tolerant of dandies." However, Richie elsewhere notes that the bricolage Mishima constructed his identity from is that of the Western rebel, as with Brando. The version of homosexuality preferred in Japan is an unthreatening one that hardly seemed to fit Mishima's identity, leading to him becoming more conformist and conservative than Japanese society itself (Richie notes that Mishima's suicide says nothing about contemporary Japan). Mishima is reminiscent of nothing so much as a Tom of Finland cartoon. Richie's position in Japan is that of gaijin but notes that Japanese society would otherwise be far more oppressive than that of the society he had fled. Richie repeatedly decries the conformity of Japanese society, its absence of intellectuals or individuals. Nonetheless, his attitudes to sexuality belong to the age of Proust and Forster who only seemed capable of finding stronger heterosexual men arousing.
Reading Soseki's I am a Cat it occurs to me that Soseki is veering between two extremes. On the one hand, his feline protagonist serves to dismiss all humans as vicious and depraved. On the other, his principal human character serves to dismiss westernising tendencies in Japan. The two are linked by being increasingly marginalised voices (the cat describes his master as being superior to his fellows by being weka minded, just as he is described as a runt in comparison to all the other cats he knows) but they only intersect at certain points. For example, Sneaze is told that "the ways of our ancestors are much wiser and more effective than the ways of Europe.. the craving for satisfaction remains unrealised, the quest for the ideal eternally unrealised." This advice comes from a character dismissed as nearly insane and dangerous and Sneaze is ridiculed for his adoption of this viewpoint. Sneaze eventually seems to agree with his cat by dismissing all of his friends as lunatic, irrespective of their philosophical views. Nonetheless, this does not stop Soseki ending the novel with the theme of suicide as a harbinger of increased westernisation; "this overweening consciousness of self never lets up.. word such as serenity and self composure have become no more than so many meaningless strokes of a writing brush."
Viridiana surprised me as a film. Having seen An Andalusian Dog, The Golden Age and The Exterminating Angel before I was expecting something more self consciously surreal. Although the symmetry of its structure and some of its allegorical references are clear enough, it's still essentially cast in a realist vein. I found myself frequenting comparing it The Exterminating Angel where the bourgeoisie are trapped at their dinner party as an act of metaphysical revenge in the class war. Here, the film ends with Viridiana playing cards with the wealthy land owner, her project to house the poor having miserably failed. The dinner party here as the paupers invade the house is almost a parody of its counterpart in The Exterminating Angel.
I've often thought that authors like Sterne, Voltaire and Diderot are the nearest approximation to the modern playfulness of authors like Perec, Nabokov and Calvino. Reading Diderot's Rameau's Nephew reminded me rather of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees or The Beggar's Opera; in satirising modern vices they also implicitly undermine modern ideas of virtue. Diderot's habit is persistently to make a statement and then undermine, as with his disingenuous endorsement of Rameau; "the famous musician who has delivered us from the plainsong of Lully, who has written so many unintelligible visions.. not a word of which he or anyone else has understood." The narrator frequently denounces his interlocutor, but only to receive the response that he is the rule not the exception; "there's nothing degrading in doing the same as everyone else. I didn't invent them and I should be incompetent if I didn't conform... a thief happy to be among wealthy thieves." Instead the emphasis shifts from personal to public vice; "what a bloody awful economy, some men with bursting stomachs others clamour with hunger."Labels: Art, Film, Japan, Literature, London
posted by Richard 12:56 PM
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Departing for London one morning, I found myself waiting for a train on a rural train station platform. It was a misty morning and I could see my breath curl into white patterns suspended in the air. The grey shadow of the church spire in the distance seemed to be floating aloft in the air, the mist divorcing it from the ground. Train lines disappear into the mist as they proceed beneath a bridge crossing the tracks. As I arrive in London, the mists gradually dissipate and the warmth of London's climate leads to a pleasant summer-like day in the middle of February. Crocuses and Daffodils are starting to come into flower.
I begin by walking through Islington to the Estorick Collection. I pass the church of St Mary, with its baroque tower, classical portico and strange modernist baroque interior with its Egyptianate columns. Further along lies the Union Chapel, an eruption of redbrick gothic amidst rows of dun coloured Georgian terraces. The collection itself lies on a rather nondescript square adjacent to an old Tudor tower. The contents remind me of the Guggenheim in Venice, with its Chiricos, Severinis and Boccionis. More prototypical futurist works are represented by Boccioni's Modern Idol, Russolo's Music, Carra's Leaving the Theatre and Severini's The Boulevard and Cubist Still Life. Some of the most interesting exhibits are the more conventional, as with the neo-impressionist Balla's Portrait of Carlo Fontana as opposed to his futurist Hand of the Violinist with its Bergsonesque interpretation of time. I have to admit that the further the painters deviated from futurism tenets, the more I warmed to them, especially Campigli's Etruscan influenced works, Modigliani's African-influenced portraits, Chirico's metaphysical Revolt of the Sage and Guttuso's Marxist polemic Death of a Hero.
Travelling southwards, I pass by St John the Evangelist, a Georgian Waterloo church before proceeding to Southwark. I look in Pugin's Catholic cathedral with its gleaming white arches contrasting with its mundane exterior, the ruins of Christchurch and the peace garden at the Imperial War Museum with its iron mandala, circula dharma pattern, earth, air, water and fire sculptures and language pillar with inscriptions in Tibetan, English, Chinese and Hindi. There's also a collection of the thirty four trees that colonised Britain after the ice age; Whitebeam and Pussy Willow, for example. Squirrels chase one another in the park. The day concludes with a trip to the Coliseum's performance of The Mikado. I don't particularly care for Gilbert and Sullivan but I suppose it was an pleasant enough diversion. The stage was distorted with slanted floors leading to trompe l'oeil rooms further back. Everything, from a giant gramophone to a pot plant is in bleached white. The singers appear dressed as if at a European spa in the nineteen thirties, making lines like "we are gentleman of Japan" sound rather odd, but in spite of the idea that this is Gilbert's best researched and most realistic opera, the engagement with Japanese culture is superficial, restricted to one song. Stripped of the costume, the opera works rather better in a European context; the satire directed against Pooh-bar applies well to Britain's rather nepotistic political culture. The result looks more like Jeeves and Wooster, with Richard Stuart's Ko-Ko rather resembling Terry Thomas. The lyrics to I've Got a Little List had been customised for the occasion, referring to the Archbishop of Canterbury and our dear leader, Prudence Brown.
Returning the following week, I briefly visit Butterfield's All Saints on Margaret Street, with its red and black bricks, tapering spire and an opulent interior with its tiles, mosaics and gilding. I also pass by the Georgian church of St George, Immaculate Conception on Farm Street and the Americana represented by the Grosvenor Chapel. Tracing my route back, I arrive at Piccadilly. There's something a little forced about the From Russia exhibition at the Royal Academy, with its attempt to yoke a disparate set of paintings loaned from the Hermitage and Tretyakov galleries into a cohesive whole. The just so story used to achieve this is one of the influence of French art on Russian painting. The exhibition begins with discussing how both French and Russian art in the late nineteenth century turned away from mythical subjects towards naturalism (just at the same point as the Pre-Raphaelites retreated from the industrial age into legend and myth), as with Repin's oddly Renoiresque Manifesto of October 17th, 1905. The likes of Camille Corot influenced landscape painting, as with Isaak Levitan (Chekhov's favourite artist) hauntingly empty After the Rain. The Russian pastoralism is rather more ideological than simply picturesque though as with Repin's Leo Tolstoy Barefoot, showing the Count dressed as a pesant or Nesterov's mystical landscape showing the murdered Tsarevich Demetrius (a painting disturbingly reminiscent of Holman Hunt's painting of the infant christ). This is then followed by showing French works purchased by Russian collectors; the pastoral theme being reciprocated with Monet's The Pond at Montgeron, Haystack at Giverny and Poppy Field and Cezanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire (at least one of the later Russian paintings could almost be taken for a Cezanne reproduction), Gauguin's Vairaumati Tei Oa (Her Name is Vairaumati) and Landscape with Peacocks.
From this point, the narrative becomes more diffuse, with the introduction of works like Manet's In the Bar, Renoir's In the Garden. Tatlin visited Picasso, Alexandra Exter worked with Leger, Chagall settled in Paris - giving new protein to French painting. And with the arrival of Diaghilev, Leon Bakst and the Ballets Russes, Paris became enamoured of all things Russian. The 1910 Jack of Diamonds show had exhibited Ivan Mashkov's Self Portrait with Pyotr Konchalovsky, a parody of Cezanne's Girl at the Piano, replacing the two girls with the artists as strongmen, playing Spanish popular tunes rather than Wagner. Simultaneously, the French started to go east, literally in the case of Matisse who was stunned by the candlelit icons in Orthodox churches. The most prominent works of the exhibition include Picasso's The Dryad and Farm Woman (Bust) (I can never really like Picasso after his Cubist phase and tend to prefer a nearby Braque painting; Picasso seems too intent on dehumanising, on decomposing individuals into objects) and Matisse's The Dance and The Red Room (Harmony in Red). The former almost has the quality of a graphic design to it in its simplicity, although the latter seemed the more engaging to me with its innocuous domestic setting conflicting with the riotous patterning and an inset view of the green wilds that's rather reminiscent of Velasquez. Fauvism was to become a critical influence on Russian neo-primitivism, with Vlaminck's Stream, Rousseau's The Muse Inspiring the Poet and Derain also represented (though I find myself preferring his later De Chiricoesque The Old Town Cognes) alongside Van Gogh's Portait of Dr Felix Rey.
The Russian response to this is interesting, taking French ideas and incorporating them into the context of orthodox iconography and folk art. While Picasso drew inspiration from Oceanic and African art, Goncharova and a number of her contemporaries formed a group who looked to folk art, peasant carvings and street signs. Picasso's massive Farm Woman, resembling a Moai or totem, speaks to Natalia Goncharov's Pillars of Salt, taking the Biblical scene and applying it to the context of folk Baba images. From the Union of Youth group, David Burlyuk's Portrait of Vasily Kamensky is essentially a secularised icon, with painters like Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin having originally been trained as icon painters (an icon of the Madonna is indeed included as his response to the first world war, alongside his Matisse influenced The Bath of the Horse). Chagall's work also dwells on subjects both Russian and Jewish, as in The Red Jew. Nonetheless, some of the most interesting work is more directly influenced, as with Altman's Cubist Portrait of Anna Akhmatova (alhtough something about the colouring and the use of modern techniques in a conventional manner reminded me of Lempicka). Alexandra Exter's Still Life, Filonov's crystalline painting of war and Nadezhda Udaltsova's City at Night are a distinctly Russian synthesis of Cubism and Futurism. Much more individual and unusual are Kandinsky's Winter and Composition VIII, followed by Malevich and his Suprematist trinity of Black Cross, Black Circle and Black Square, as well as other works that could easily sit alongside the likes of Mondrian.
Predictably, there are also some more odd and awkward works. Bakst's conventional Portrait of Sergei Diaghilev with his nanny introduces a room filled with works like Vrubel's symbolist Six Winged Seraph, landscapes by Diaghilev's set painter Roerich and Boris Grigoriev's portrait of the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold showing him as both clown and impresario. A couple of Cezannesque paintings like Fish Seller are included by Tatlin, before showing one of his constructivist sculptures, Corner Counter Relief with its echoes of Duchamp, and a model of his proposed tower with its grim forecast of art becoming subservient to the state.
I completed my visit to modern painting exhibitions with Tate Britain's exhibition on the Camden Town Group. Passing first by Westminster Cathedral, I felt that it would be ideal if the building is never finished; it's present state of sepulchral gloom being far preferable to the prospect of it glittering with gold mosaic. I hadn't really noticed the Eric Gill Stations of the Cross before. The Camden Town Group represented a kind of kitchen sink avant gardism (I'm not using the term lightly; Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman did both paint their kitchens). Once one removes social realism, the group fractures into a different styles, with the older Sickert influenced by Whistler and Degas in the midst of a group that favoured Van Gogh (transparently so in Gilman's painting of a Norwegian canal bridge), Cezanne and Gauguin, albeit at time when Kokoschka and Beckmann might have been better models. It's a particularly literary form of painting that rather looks like a visual representation of Hangover Square or Keep the Aspidistra Flying (if not The Forsyte Saga and Anna of the Five Towns. Their social realism often has something rather anitquated about it, as with Robert Bevan's paintings of the London horse cabs in contrast to Ginner's juxtaposition of flower girls in Piccadilly with the taxis and buses rushing past. Sickert's Gallery of the Old Mogul and Drummond's In the Cinema engage with cinema but the music hall and the circus were nonetheless the preferred venues for the group, along with Drummond's painting of Brompton Oratory. Much of the London landscapes focus on the pastoral aspects of London, as with Gore's The Fig Tree. Although Ginner and Gilman did several paintings of industrial Leeds or showing factories at work, Spencer Gore was more interested in places like the new garden cities or Brighton, and the group as a whole (save Sickert) did many paintings of locations like Romney Marsh, Richmond, Devon and even rural Sweden. These paintings seem to take them closest to the spirit of chosen modeles like Gauguin and Cezanne, as with Bevan's Dunn's Cottage or Ginner's cloisonnist Clayhidon. It's difficult not to conclude that their excursions amongst the lowlife are a form of tourism felt to accompany the mantle of bohemianism. Relatives tried to persuade them to lead proper English lives. Their reports on the city are slightly apologetic.
Vast swathes of the paintings being exhibited fell into the category of showing solitary figures, usually female, in down at heel surroundings as exemplars of ennui, with Gilman's Marxism in particular feeding into this (although Gore's parallel portraits of his wife and his servant seems more born from snobbery, in contrast's portraits of his landlady). Gilman's Meditation, The Coral Necklace and Girl with a Teacup, to name but three, are all variations of a theme handled by Sickert in rather more novelistic terms, often showing what look like frozen moments in a wider narrative, as in Off to the Pub, The Little Tea Party or Ennui with its use of stuffed animals to symbolise the relationship being shown. This is particularly so with Sickert's Camden Town Murder series, with this title ambiguously competing with others like What Shall We Do for the Rent?. On these paintings it's difficult to tell whether the passive clay-like flesh of the women is already dead (something here reminded me of Lucien Freud), whether it is showing two lovers or client and prostitute, whether the poses are of despair or of threat. They rather remind me of Hitchcock's Frenzy. It's also worth comparing this to Manet's Petit Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe or Olympia Where Manet is erotic, Sicket is seedy, using dark midtones that revolted Gilman, the "frigid Anglican" as Lewis called him. Nudes had to be removed from the easels of the studio at 19 Fitzroy Street, where Spencer Gore's cleaning woman dispensed tea on Saturday afternoons, so that the sensibilities of Gore's uncle, the Bishop of Oxford, would not be affronted. Sickert is also distanced from the rest of the group by his sense of enthralled melancholia with pictures like Noctes Ambrosianae and The New Bedford; only Ginner comes close to replicating it in his painting of The Circus. Ginner in fact emerges as the strongest of the group overall besides Sickert, with paintings like Evening, Dieppe. I depart, walk past the Buxton Memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens, enter the tube station and disappear.
Had PG Wodehouse been inclined to wrote medieval morality plays, the result might well have been quite similar to Waugh's Vile Bodies. Occupying an awkward vantage point somewhere between The Radetzky March and The Good Soldier Schwejk, the centre of the novel is Father Rothschild and his observation that "these young people have got hold of the other end of the stick and for all we know it may be the right one. They say 'If a thing's not worth doing very well, it's not be worth doing at all.'" Waugh veers between a denunciation of the Bright Young Things born of sexual disgust (the vile bodies of the title) and of the moribund and decrepit society that is about to destroy itself in the first world war, "we shall all be walking into the jaws of destruction again, protesting our pacific intentions." Some parts of the novel also remind me of the parts of Howard's End where Helen goes for a ride in a motor car; "the real cars that become masters of men, who exist solely for their own propulsion through space, for whom their drivers, clinging precariously to the steering wheel, are as important as his stenographer to a stockbroker. These are in perpetual flux, a vortex of combining and disintegrating units." The same thing happens with Nina's sickness as she looks down from the plane, a representation of the machine age that rather recalls Celine. Zorba the Greek was apparently written under the influence of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Buddhism and it would certainly appear to uneasily veer between these respective extremes, between Nietzsche's idea of the superman ("in other more primitive and creative ages, Zorba would have been the head of the tribe... I think of god as being exactly like me" with Zorba's anecdote of telling god to get out of his way) as counterpointed to Schopenhauer's idea of seeking a point of stillness ("life is trouble.. I listened to Zorba's words and realised that they showed me a sure, attractive and very human path to tread. It was again the spirit of the Mara..."). The novel flits between these two extremes and others, as with the christian Saint Bacchus becoming entangled with Dionysus or the paradox that the fulfilment of the narrator's Buddhism is to kill the Buddha; "and ordered the Buddha within me to dissolve."
I don't generally read a great deal of contemporary fiction but have recently decided to try a little. While revered by the mainstream press Ian McEwan tends to be reviled by many weblogs for a combination of perceived artistic (his novels broadly use the techniques of the realist novel and while Gabriel Josipovici's description of his writing as being little different to Defoe or Dickens is a rather trite complaint, it could certainly sit easily alongside Forster and James) and political conservatism. On Chesil Beach certainly contains several passages that suggest a degree of scepticism as to political radicalism; Florence's mother describes the Soviet Union as little different to Nazi Germany. As Florence believes it to be essentially benevolent it is a little inconsistent for her to describe Edward's membership of CND as being akin to a medieval millenarian cult (particularly when she too belongs to it). However, whether any of this really translates to support for conservative ideas is an extrapolation the novel fails to justify, particularly when McEwan comments that he has not disavowed any of the views he once held as a member of CND. My own reservations about McEwan are rather different. As the above descriptions attest, the novel is concerned with events in the years that Larkin described sexual intercourse as having invented in ("This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine ...This was still the era when to be young was a social encumbrance.") At one point McEwan's omniscient narrator declares that "Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself." This seems true of one of the characters, Edward, who travels in the course of the novel from English middle class awkwardness to becoming a sixties dropout. However, Florence's "visceral dread" of sex is deliberately left unexplained and can certainly not be laid at the hand of history. Similarly, her suggestion that their relationship be platonic, with her tolerating him having sex with other women hardly seems to be ahead of its time in the way McEwan seems to believe it to be; quite the contrary. The idea that Edward's life would have been much better if he had accepted also seems somewhat unwarranted, given that the novel itself holds out little more than a post in her father's firm for choosing that road. McEwan generally seems to prefer the aberrant and unexplained too much to be able to work fully within the constraints of the realist novel, where the struggles of Julien Sorrel or Dorothea Brooke is entirely in keeping with the spirit of their age. By contrast, one if left wondering why McEwan chose a historical setting at all and least of all one that can barely be within the bounds of his own memory.
The other writer I have recently read for the first time is Martin Amis with London Fields. Following some rather disappointing comments he has recently made, the Guardian did feel it had to praise him for his political engagement, quoting Ryszard Kapuscinski:"Twenty years ago, I was in Africa, and this is what I saw: I went from revolution to coup d'Etat, from one war to another; I witnessed, in effect, history in the making, real history, contemporary history, our history. But I was also surprised: I never saw a writer. I never met a poet or a philosopher—even a sociologist. Where were they? Such important events, and not a single writer anywhere?
Then I would return to Europe and I would find them. They would be at home, writing their little domestic stories: the boy, the girl, the laughing, the intimacy, the marriage, the divorce—in short, the same story we've been reading over and over again for a thousand years. You know, the other day I was reading about the novels that won the annual French prizes. It was incredible. None of these books had anything to do with our world, our reality—nothing. There was one about an unwanted child, and another about a boy, a girl, the laughing, the intimacy... so much of our literature is so very traditional, even when seen as being avant-garde. And if avant-garde, it is only avant-garde because of its style—as if assembled in a workshop. It is never avant-garde for its subject; it is never caught actually looking out at the world. The writer is always looking over his shoulder, noting the position of his predecessor. Contemporary literature is a very private affair."
It's a valid point but London Fields is characterised by a sense of English life as an irrelevance, a place from where history has fled ("Bellow says that America is the only place to be, because it contains the 'real modern action'"). I recall him later comparing England to Switzerland, making me think of Greene's comment about centuries of peace and prosperity creating nothing more than the cuckoo clock. The England depicted by Amis has the vestigial trace of social importance, whether it is the economics of Thatcher's Britain ("no-one seemed to have thought through the implications of a world where everyone cheated") to the vague threat of nuclear devastation. In terms of style too, Amis is far from McEwan's realism. His characters appear as automata with names that reflect allegorical or ironic descriptions ("in fiction people become coherent and intelligible - and they aren't like that... people are chaotic quiddities"), his prose style draws attention to the narration rather than establishing it as a transparent window on events. Amis is preoccupied with the idea of the unreliability of narration, with lies being woven by most of the characters in their speech and writing ("the truth doesn't matter anymore and is not wanted"). The novel reassigns the role of author to the character of Nicola, describing her as a puppermaster, using this to thwart the generic constraints of the detective novel at every turn ("she outwrote me"). In short, it's a very English compromise between realism and post-modernism.Labels: Art, Literature, London
posted by Richard 10:43 AM
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Eastern Promise continues Cronenberg's move away from science fiction towards realism, with the incidents of the film set against the Thames Flood Barrier, St Luke's Old Street and Brompton Cemetery. Nonetheless, the effect of this is essentially to contrast with the events depicted, using London's scenery in effectively the same way the likes of 28 Weeks Later did. Characters in Shivers and eXistenZ undergo horrific transformations and those in Crash the characters embrace their own deformation. Similarly, the tattoos of the Russian mafia serve the same purpose, with the characters driven to enter that world against their better judgement. The Russian characters see London as a form of decadent infection, in spite of the sumptuous surroundings of the Russian restaurant that is the film's principal setting and their contrast to the more prosaic world of the English characters.
Having seen one of the film's characters having his throat slit in Brompton cemetery, I found myself there a few days later. The weather was impossibly mild for November, with the yellowed leaves slowly falling to the ground and forming a carpet on the central avenue. I found myself looking at some details I'd missed before; Minton tiling forming a headstone above a floor of unraveling white and black diamond tiles, the lily and ivy decorating one of the tombs designed by Burne-Jones. A large chunk had fallen off the imposing bulk of the Hannah Peters Mausoleum. Squirrels frantically scamper about, trying to bury nuts and seeds, usually in the flower pots left by the graves. I walk to the Embankment, where I watch a pair a ducks trying to sleep on the Thames; periodically one would realised that they were about to be beached on Cleopatra's Needle, swim upstream and settle down again, so beginning the process anew.
I then walk to the National gallery, for its Renaissance Siena exhibition. Sienese art has been described as overshadowed by that of Florence, with the former written out of art history by the Florentine Vasari and by Florence's conquest of Siena. In this revisionary account, Sienese art is visionary and mystical, with Mariolatry (the Virgin was the city's patron) as its principal subject, in contrast to the naturalistic art of Florence, with it s depiction of the male form and of fighting in particular. I can't help but wonder if a better word to describe Siena's art might not be 'medieval' if we think of the Renaissance as the displacement of religion and the discovery of the individual. Certainly, Siena retained many gothic influences, such as painting onto gold (and then using sgraffito to expose it as part of clothing or the beams of heaven's rays) and was often slavish in its imitation of figures like Donatello, while the city itself was a rather enfeebled city state, wracked by internal strife, debt and threat of invasion. Some of the most powerful works here are by Raphael (The Dream of a Knight) and the Cortonese Lucca Signorelli rather than by any Sienese painter.
The exhibition opens with some classic examples of Siena's Marian art; in San di Pietro's The Virgin Recommends Siena to Pope Calixtus, which shows the Virgin towering over a dwarfed and distorted city. Others showing her leading the ship of state or protecting the city from earthquakes. Paintings by Pietro and Francesco di Giorgio firmly continue the gothic tradition of iconography. Renaissance influences only figure with the idealised landscape shown in Benvenuto di Giovanni's Virgin and Child or Giorgio's sculpture of Male Nude with a Snake. However, later works show a different and more interesting side; cassone chest paintings show scenes of seduction and classical scenes (like the Roman capture of Zenobia or the meeting of Antony and Cleopatra from the workshop of Neroccio de Landi). For a female art, much of it proves surprisingly homoerotic, as with Signorelli's Two Nude Youths or portraits by Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (nicknamed Sodoma due to being openly homosexual, keeping a bizarre menagerie of animals and claiming tax relief because it was so expensive to keep all his boys and pets.) Particularly striking are the interior scenes, where the tone is profane rather than sacred; carved wooden pilasters, frescos of classical scenes and maiolica flooring. Most impressive are the paintings by Domenico Beccafumi, with soft brushwork and an ethereal rendering of colour. Paintings of virtuous historical figures often seem quite odd; did the Tanaquil Livy denounced really seem a virtuous figure? Nor do the ruined backdrops seem to serve any particular allegorical purpose. His two most striking works are a malevolent Cupid with Venus and a bizarre depiction of the feast of Lupercalia.
Journeying to Westonbirt Arboretum, a bright sunny day is transformed into mist. The arboretum has a complete collection of Japanese Maple cultivars, whose leaves were bright burgundy, ochre, pink and bronze. Evergreen yews, pine and firs forms a backdrop to this. Several of the planted trees are new to me; Sapphire Berry (a bright azure berry), Katsura (gives off the scent of caramel), Spindle Tree (with its bright red berries), Wingnut (named for its sycamore-like seeds), Persian Ironwood (named after the explorer who rediscovered Mount Ararat, turned gold and red in autumn), Alue Atlas Weeping Cedar (with a curtain like fall of branches) and Paper Birch (whose bark turns pink-orange as the lenticels fall off). Other plants were more familiar, from Giant Redwood to Monkey Puzzle and an ancient lime coppice. I was equally impressed by the lichens growing on the tree trunks, from hairlike encrustations to something that looked like bright orange rust. One dead tree had its base covered with bracket fungi.
Reading Arthur Hugh Clough's poems, I'm struck by the idea of a Victorian poet working in a largely discursive mode, with Dryden and Wordsworth as his principal influences for their use of the language of everyday speech. His work is not only heteroglossic but it is also dialogic, with much of it being taken up by counterpointed discussions on the death of god. Amours de Voyage has two narrators with opposed perspectives of the protagonist, with much of the narrative opposing is attitudes to christianity, Rome's pagan past and the revolutions of 1848. Similarly, Dipsychus utilises the format of Goethe's Faust, only to assign the role of the tempter to christianity.
Reading Mishima's The Golden Pavilion, I'm reminded of the concept of occidentalism. A conference held in Kyoto in 1942 was devoted to the subject of how "how to overcome the modern." Modernity was associated with the West, and particularly with Western imperialism. Westernization, one of the scholars said, was like a disease that had infected the Japanese spirit. The "modern thing," said another, was a "European thing." Others believed that "Americanism" was the enemy, and that Japan should make common cause with the Europeans to defend old civilizations against the New World. There was much talk about unhealthy specialization in knowledge, which had fragmented the wholeness of Oriental spiritual culture. Science was to blame. So were capitalism, the absorption into Japanese society of modern technology, and notions of individual freedom and democracy. These had to be "overcome." All agreed that culture - that is, traditional Japanese culture - was spiritual and profound, whereas modern Western civilization was shallow, rootless, and destructive of creative power. The West, particularly the United States, was coldly mechanical, a machine civilization without spirit or soul, a place where people mixed to produce mongrel races.
Mishima's novel exhibits many of the symptoms identified here. Mizoguchi looks at the lights of the city, the same lights Tanizaki had denounced as an unwelcome manifestation of modernity in his Praise of Shadows (Tanizaki had also praised the glimmer of gold in the dark, as with the temple here), and dubs it "the mundane world... people are being driven about under that night by evil thoughts... please let the evil that is in my heart increase.. so that it may correspond in every particular with the light before the eyes." As this quotation suggests, Mizoguchi's response to modernity is bifurcated between embracing it as a form of nihilism (itself a profoundly un-Japanese idea; "burdened with a special individuality or sense of mission" which the novel opposes to the intoxication offered by the temple) and rejecting it outright (though even the form of asceticism offered by religion in the novel represents a form of alienation); " youth like myself came to entertain two opposing forms of power wishes... my dream of being a tyrant or great artist." The conclusion of the novel, the arson of the Golden Temple, unifies these themes in a form of immolation just as Mizoguchi's observation produces an ecstatic state that is directed inward; "I was drenched up to the neck in the existence that was myself.. my inner being and the outer world slowly changed places" Mishima's particular brand of masculinist homosexuality further contributes to this nihilism, with women the repeated object of dehumanisation and violence; "the same masculine evil thoughts as the others... the smell of a young man's sweat-moistened skin that they gave off... there was an intrepid beauty about him like that of a lovely woman."
Much the same applies in The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, a sort of Japanese Lord of the Flies, where Ryuji's fall is largely predicated on his acceptance of marriage and the feminine world. Mishima's masculinist homosexuality seems not unlike that of William Burroughs, seen as somewhere opposed to effeminancy and the perception of matriarchy and developing a cult of violence in response to it. Women and death are seen as coterminous ("her sweat and perfume fragrance reaching him on the breeze seemed to clamour for his death... are you going to give up the life that impelled you towards the pinnacle of manliness?"). With that in mind, the nihilist children are both in revolt against a Westernised society and a product of its degeneration, of modern society's alienation.
Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward can be best described as a variant on the trope used by both Twain and Irving of a sleeper awakening to find himself in another time (the idea being also essentially the analogue of that depicted by Huxley in Brave New World). It depicts a decidedly bourgeois form of utopianism, by which social equality has been achieved through a process of evolution rather than through any need for a communist revolution (anarchism and communism are portrayed as essentially invidious to the cause of social progress). Bellamy seems to regard evolution in Lamarckian terms, as a form of progress ("in accordance with the principles of evolution... the next phase on the social and industrial development of humanity") achieved through sexual selection ("the principle of sexual selection, with its tendency to preserve and transmit the better types of race and let the inferior types drop out, has unhindered operation") rather than through natural selection and the survival of the fittest (Bellamy closes by denouncing how nineteenth century society created "a brutal struggle for existence"). In spite of the determinist tone taken here, Bellamy is nonetheless closer to Edward Taylor than Marx though (and closer still to Comte). Where the likes of Owen saw human nature essentially as a tabula rasa and therefore capable of being adjusted to new social conditions, Bellamy frequently uses the term 'human nature' to denote a fixed state, which Doctor Leete denies having altered since West's time. Bellamy nonetheless decries the idea that "the only stable elements in human nature, on which a social system could be founded, were its worst propensities." Accordingly, Bellamy can often be quite conservative, viewing women as having a distinct and separate nature from men (""the distinct individuality of the sexes"), in spite of discarding the idea of women as either household drudges or gilded ornaments. Equally, the notion of the majority of society being employed by an 'industrial army' seems a harshly masculine mode of social organisation, if not unpleasantly reminiscent of the national socialist brand of utopianism (particularly as issues like race are almost entirely elided from the novel, the presence of a black servant in the nineteenth century notwithstanding).
Dostoevsky's The Double reminds me most of Kafka's Metamorphosis in so far as uncanny events unfold without an obvious sense of explication. Where the double is most often invoked as an example of man's divided nature between good and evil or between expression and repression (as in The Confessions of a Justified Sinner or Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), Dostoevsky instead frustrates the morality tale aspects of the narrative by placing the emphasis on Golyadkin's status as a superfluous man, his desire for self-annihilation, his inability to preserve himself. The relationship between self and double is an almost sado-masochistic one, leaving the reader uncertain as to whether they have witnessed a morality tale or not. Tolstoy's The Cossacks and Hadji Murat deal with a rather more conventional form of other, with the former novel defining a liminal space between three of set of groups; Russian, Cossack and Chechen. As with The Double one expects some form of fable concerning the moral progress of another superfluous man through his contact with nature and removal from the frivolities of Muscovite life. For Tolstoy, the Caucasus serves almost the same sort of function that Italy did for EM Forster or DH Lawrence. In practice though, Tolstoy's fatalism often tends to preclude the sort of teleological development associated with characters in European novels. Something similar applies to Hadji Murat whose hero dies a death that is essentially futile and entirely contrary to the status the narrative has accorded him.
On a quite different note, I recently watched the film Thirty Days of Night, one of the more memorable contributions to the vampire genre of recent years. The vampires depicted in it are different from the suave model of Christopher Lee and instead resemble Shreck's Count Orlok, looking both mundane and alien at the same time. Another film I saw not all that long ago is Sunshine, a film that follows similar generic principles to earlier science fiction films like Event Horizon (science arrogantly assuming the prerogative of the divine and so on) but does have some interesting variations on that theme. The character of Pinbacker sees the sun as a god and views any attempts to reignite it as desecration, although when the character of Capa does precisely that he is for instant staring into the face of god. The film seemed unsure as to whether it should be mystical or materialist.
posted by Richard 2:37 PM
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Autumn has arrived once more and brought mists with it, turning the blue skies and gold leaves into blackened shapes against a pale and watery sky. By the time I've arrived in Leeds though the mists have dispelled and the sun emerged. The city is beautifully Victorian, with iron markets and glass arcades decorated with allegorical figures and reliefs with oranges and leaves. Belle epoque style statues bear streetlamps alongside the statue of the Black Prince in front of the Post Office. Cuthbert Broderick's Town Hall towers over the city, in contrast to his rather hidden Corn Exchange. Crests bear images of owls everywhere and gold owls sit atop the Civic Hall's spires. Unususally, the only obvious sign of gothic seems to mostly lie with the older buildings. The art gallery is home to a small but interesting collection, ranging from various Victorian paintings (Leighton's Return of Persephone and Lady Godiva, Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott, Holman-Hunt's characteristically crude Shadow of Death) to a set of Courbet and Sisley landscapes. More unsually, is a nocturnal street scene by Atkinson Grimshaw and a macabre painting of a dead bird by him. A set of Sickert paintings of pubs and music halls vie for space with Stanley Spencer on the staircase. Upstairs is the modern collection, Vannessa Bell portraits, Mark Gertler landscapes (and an intriguing self-portrait that references the marriage of Arnolfini, Dutch still lifes and Japanese prints) a Wyndham Lewis painting (rather reminiscent of Metropolis). Paintings by Nash, Sutherland, Hitchens and Piper remind me of my recent visit to the Tate. I have some tea in a tiled hall that reminds me of a Turkish Bath or the Cafe Imperial in Vienna.
Walking in the evening along a street filled with fallen leaves and the streetlamps casting halos in the fog, I'm reminded of Atkinson Grimshaw's paintings. I arrive at the Grand Opera House, for a performance of Reinhard Keiser's The Fortunes of King Croesus. The building, decorated in Pompeian red and with an enormous chandelier, is presumably similar in period to the Coliseum in London. The opera has been lavishly set, with the stage littered with aircraft wreckage following the enactment of an aerial battle. Lydia and Persia become the Battle of Britain and the Nazis. On the one hand, uniformity, on the other a Sardis that looks like Venetian carnevale, with eightennth century, Egyptian and Roman custumes. The staging does point to a weakness in the narrative; Cyrus serves as an agent of hubris, bringing down Lydian arrogance and decadence but it is rather difficult for a modern audience not to see it as a simple contrast of freedom and tyranny (with Cyrus depicted as a cross between Goering and Napoleon). The stoicism of Solon does not look markedly different to the cynical hedonism of Elcius and a good deal less enjoyable, particularly given that contrived denouement renders all paths equal and identical with few leading to unfortunate consequences. Although nout unlike Handel, earlier influences like Monteverdi are also clear, with the music rather more concise and less repeated than Handel. Also of particular interest is that the part of Atis was performed by a male soprano, Michael Maniaci, giving a rather unexpected insight as to how these operas might originally have been performed by castrati.
I read Natsume Soseki's The Three Cornered World on the way up to Leeds. I've written before about the role of the oriental and occidental in Tanizaki's work and the same issues apply here, in a book that frequently references both Chinese poetry and Western painting (especially Millais' Ophelia). Soseki begins by criticising the tendency of Western novels to concern themselves with the ephemeral rather than the transcendent ("escaping from the wearying round of steamers, trains, moral duties and etiquette," although Soseki later praises Turner for showing how a steam train could be beautiful). As in Hardy, the train serves as a metaphor for modernity, epitomising society's tendency to laud individuality whilst simultaneously crushing it to heel. Within this context, he sees people, and especially the old or the menial, as less than human and simply part of the harmony of the landscape (even suggesting using the bodies of criminals to fertilise orchids out of a sense of disgust comparable to Timon of Athens - an oddly Western model). However, Soseki finds it difficult to see this in the context of other figures, who he compares to Ophelia (he has earlier dismissed Hamlet as profoundly un-Japanese). He seeks to find a via media, noting the serenity on her face (although it is ambiguous as to how much serenity many of the suicides that litter the novel find), something he finds again in the compassion on O-Nami's face as her lover is sent to die in Manchuria. He criticises Western literature for not being objective and instead resembling a detective story, but the entire novel is told from his subjective viewpoint and is all geared around mysterious figures and this final revelation on her face, something that enables him to finally paint her. Although he sees the artist as standing outside society, he is nonetheless compelled to inhabit it; "I was being dragged back more and more into the world of reality."
Cormac McCarthy's The Road is in many respects a straightforward inversion of the pioneer theme in American literautre (or even the Western film) from Twain to Kerouac, with two male figures travel across the American landscape (women are as largely absent here as they are in Fenimore Cooper). Like Huckleberry Finn much of the novel is concerned with the opposition of childhood innocence to rather more cynical adult experience. However, it also belongs to something I tend to perceive more as a European genre, the apocalyptic novel, although the absence of cities is striking here and seems distinct from the European tradition. Equally, the novel is quite detached from details like the cause of the apocalypse (a nuclear winter, we presume) or the names of the protagonists.Labels: Art, Leeds, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 12:22 PM
Sunday, October 14, 2007
As autumn descends and the ivy turns to a vivid burgundy and the tree leaves turns to burnished bronze or arterial crimson, I visited London and the Millais exhibition at the Tate. The choice of subject seems apt for the season, with several paintings like Mariana and Autumn Leaves allegorising the life of man through the seasons.
The Pre-Raphaelite movement is a classic example of the reactionary tendency in English culture, along with the Gothic Revival and Palladian architecture. English painting sought to return to medieval models, depicting nature with obsessive precision, at a time when European art was beginning to forge movements like impressionism and expressionism. Equally, the brotherhood was founded in the year of The Communist Manifesto but although Millais seems to have made many satirical (somewhat Hogarthian) drawings of contemporary society, none of them were transferred to canvas. Unlike Ford Madox Brown's The Last of England, Millais retreats to a mythical past. Like much of Victorian culture, the Pre-Raphaelites can perhaps be best understood as a means of withdrawing from an industrialised society to a romanticised past, looting models freely from different periods (the subjects displayed at the Millais exhibition range from Pizarro's conquest of the Incas to Renaissance Florence and Medieval England). It lacks any sense of expressing the collective consciousness of its age and seems instead to point to a lacuna. The sense of a void becomes painful in several of his later society portraits and grotesquely sentimental paintings of children; one can only be surprised that Little Nell evaded him as a subjects. Whereas contemporaries like Burne Jones and Watts devised stained glass and frescos for churches, Millais sold his pictures for soap adverts and painted portraits of the haute bourgeoisie.
However, with all of that said, much remains to be said in defence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Millais' sympathy for outsiders dominates his early paintings; Jacobite rebels, exiled Huguenots, heretics and vagrants. His women are alternately depicted as passive victims of the men that abandon them, but also have to be shown in terms of their stoic fortitude. Much of his work, such as The Bridesmaid, seems to look forward to the likes of Moreau, Klimt and Albert Moore. The iallusive quality of his later works, freed of explicit depictions of historical or literary scenes seem to parallel Bocklin and David Friedrich. The Pre-Raphaelite stress on literary allusions, with references to Tennyson, Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge, comes close to a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk.
The initial rooms of the exhibition concentrate on showing the development of the early Millais to his Pre-Raphaelite work. His first major work is Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru, a picture that veers uneasily between historical epic and the later depictions of the victims of Catholic oppression, a Massacre of the Innocents The early Pre-Raphaelite works also quickly draw attention to the idea of the excluded and outcast; doomed love in Isabella, Ophelia, Mariana and The Death of Romeo and Juliet. A drawing showing the disinterrment of Queen Mathilda by Huguenot fanatics was presumably too sympathetic and Catholicism and was never painted. The (infamous) painting of Christ in the House of his Parents seems oddly realistic in comparison to the other works, as does The Order of Release, wherein the soldier's wife stands tall while her son and husband are huddled against her, inverting the model used in A Huguenot on St Bartholomew's Day. In a similar vein is The Proscribed Royalist where a somewhat effeminate cavalier is hidden by a puritan lover and in Peace Concluded where a wounded soldier returned from the Crimea is held by his wife. The sexual politics of Millais' painting are endlessly confusing; his depictions of women with persecuted men require them to be strong and resilient (although the atttitude in The Black Brunswicker is simply one of female helplessness even as the strong soldier shown is certain to die) but he is as likely to show them abandoned and betrayed, as in Waiting. One painting, The Escape of a Heretic is entirely different; showing a female heretic being rescued by a lover from the clutches of the Inquisition. Again, his drawings show what his paintings can't' The Bridge of Sighs depicts a fallen woman contemplating suicide.
The later works show Millais moving to looser brush strokes in a style more reminiscent of Titian or Velasquez, depicting subjects without explicit comment and with only the suggestion of context. Backgrounds are frequently blackened out to show the subject. Works like Spring and The Vale of Rest having a nonetheless rather crudely symbolised theme of mortality. Where historical subjects are shown, the results are often depressingly remniscent of much forgettable genre painting (Reynolds and Van Dyck emerge as influences at this point), although a painting like Esther continues the theme of female fortitude and courage. The most interesting works from this time onwards, are his Scottish landscapes which in their depicition of solitary figures in wintry scenes leaves me strongly reminded of Caspar David Friedrich, for instance in Dew Drenched Furze and Glen Birnam.
Leaving the exhibition, I spend a little time looking at the permanent collection, from Rossetti's The Annunciation and The Beloved, Holman Hunt's Claudio and Isabella and The Awakening Conscience , Hughes' The Eve of St Agnes , Whistler's Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge and Moore's The Toilette and A Sleeping Girl. It does seem to me that Millais has at least some claim to be a via media between Hunt and Hughes on the one hand and Whistler and Moore on the other, while his woman are surely not simply objects in the way they always seem to be for Rossetti. I also find myself looking at more unusual works like John Brett's seascapes, Watts' Hope, Sargent's Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose and Tuke's August Blue, but I'm most struck by Richard Dadd's paintings; although not dissimilar to the Pre-Rapahelites in style and fitting in with Victorian conventions of fairy paintings, his work does nonetheless seem more like Bosch.
I then decide to look at the modern section. Some of the individual works are quite startling here; Sickert's Brighton Pierrots, Heron's Azalea Garden: May 1956, Hitchens' Woodland, Vertical and Horizontal, Hepworth's Curved Form (Trevalgan), Vanesssa Bell's Studland Beach and Gertler's Merry-Go-Round. I find myself particularly drawn to the room dedicated to John Piper's works, from his Britten set paintings (Death in Venice) to his work as a war artist (All Saints Chapel, Bath) to his Betjeman-like recordings of historic buildings (Holkham, Norfolk, Yarnton Monument) - although rather conventional subjects depicted in uncomprosingly modern terms. Another room dwells on war art, with results that seem quite surrealist - whether by intent or simply through elapsed time is difficult to say; Armstrong's Coggeshall Church, Essex looks like a dissection rather than a ruin while Nash's Bomber in the Corn and The Messerschmidt in Windsor Great Park almost look like totems. Sutherland's Devastation, 1941 series is perhaps the most conventional depiction of destruction and decay, although his Horned Forms contrives to turn the organic into something threatening and unnatural. Finally, a small exhibition is dedicated to Hockney's selection of Turner's paintings. I hadn't realised that Turner is in many respects an architectural painter, with Lichfield Cathedral, St George's Bloomsbury and Durham Cathedral all amongst his English subjects, while some of his Venetian work is dedicated to Canaletto's architectural fantasias. Hockney also has a collection on one of the stair wells; paintings of English woodland from different times of the year. I then walk from Tate Britain to Tate Modern, mostly to see the giant metal spider on display outside the gallery. Although given an artistic subtext it mostly reminds me of the metal sculpture of the invading Martians at Woking.
Reading Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars I was particularly reminded of Umberto Eco's observations about the medieval quest for the prelapsarian language that had existed before the Tower of Babel. The dictionary seems equally preoccupied with the loss of language's capacity to represent certitude in the midst of a series of mirrored dichotomies; dream and reality, good and evil, male and female (as with the male and female editions of the text), life and death, all of which are blurred in the course of the text. Where Eco is interested in semiotic playfulness almost as an end in its own right, Pavic seems to envisage differance in mystical terms, as a means of representing man's fallen state (perhaps Habermas was right to call Derrida a Jewish mystic). He then complicates these chiastic divisions by enfolding them into a tripartite structure; Christian, Islamic and Jewish, with each dictionary having mirrored entries (either the same entry told from a fundamentally different viewpoint or the convergence of three different but related characters), the division between which is also blurred (with the idea of each religion being an aspect of the other two). The text also foregrounds the issue of interpretation, with every character who comes close to understanding the history of the Khazars being punished Icarus-like.Labels: Art, Literature, London, Victorian
posted by Richard 3:22 AM
Sunday, September 9, 2007
"Since first the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the First of these great powers only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruin; the Third, which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction . . . I would endeavour to... record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat like passing bells, against the Stones of Venice." - Ruskin, The Stones of Venice
Venice is a place that is difficult to summarise in conventional terms. A place of so many different styles seems best described as a set of fragments; the light shimmering on the fade waters of the lagoon, images of the Virgin Mary (even included in glass and metal shrines in the canals), the crumbling white I...strian marble, cracking plaster revealing rotted brick, the gondalas like Turkish slippers riding the waves, the chiming of the bells, red Veronese and white Istrian diamond patterns in the tiling, the seaweed and mussels clinging to the canal walls, the splashing of the waves, the minaret like campaniles, wells in each square, seagulls resting on wooden buoys, images of dragons, sphinxes and winged lions adornining squares, the precarious roof gardens, the capricious (if not Escheresque) medieval streets where serendipity is of rather more use than conventional navigation. Grandiosity and decay sit side by side. As a city it is an anomaly; a place of refuge that became the seat of empire, the product of the accretion of Roman, Byzantine styles. In its present form it is less of a subject in its own right than an object for the gaze of others. The city whose churches are adorned by works from Titian, Vivarini and Veronese became a place depicted instead by foreigners like James, Whistler, Mann, Monet and Turner. It is trapped like a fly in amber, forever preserved more or less as it was at the fall of the Republic, when its history ended.
The one exception to this is the Lido. Until recent times this was simply a sandbank that did little to disturb the oppressive flatness of the lagoon; Byron would ride his horses here; the nearby island of Saint Lazarus, which housed the city's Armenian community and a rather Central European church spire, is rather older. The church of San Nicolo is easily the oldest structure on the island, the scene of Venice's marriage to the sea. It's a somewhat understated church with a brick exterior and painted pink campanile. The local cemetery (incongruously, this is also where the city's Jewish cemetery can be found) is nearby, whose large mausoleums have potted plants and welcome mats for visitors to enter and use the small chapel. Watering cans are on sale to water the flowers planted on the graves. Lizards flit across the stones in the late afternoon sun. Today, these stand alongside an old flack tower errected during the second world war; the Lido is indeed the only part of Venice to include fascist architecture, such as rather drab casinos and cinemas. It's main street also features an art deco hotel, albeit not the one Von Aschenbach stayed at, its exterior covered in beautifully painted stucco sculptures of the muses. There's an art exhibition on at the time I visit and a car painted in red with the hammer and sickle is parked outside. A large black Buddha statue rests further down the main street. A cat bathing in the afternoon sunlight looks suitably unimpressed.
By contrast, the view that greets one at the Piazza San Marco is essentially the same as that depicted by Canaletto, with the conflicting styles of the gothic and Byzantine cathedral next to Sansovino's classical Loghetta and Biblioteca. The iconography is equally conflicted, with St Theodore's column representing the city's links with Byzantium next to the winged lion of the stolen Saint Mark, representing the city's independence. I begin with the Doge's Palace and following Ruskin's recommendations, examine the decoration on the capitals outside; kings, moors, birds, beasts, knights and allegories. Entering inside, the inner courtyard (itself a rather Arabic concept) is lined with colonnades and is overlooked by a clock on a facade filled with Sansovino sculptures that backs onto the Basilica. The Palazzo is entered through a gold and white stucco staircase leading to rooms filled with maps, globes and images of the winged lion. The walls are decorated with paintings by Titian, Carpaccio, Bellini, Bassano, Tiepolo and Veronese. Inevitably, the central Council Chambers is the most impressive, with its paintings of all the Doges (save the black space where Faliero should be), and Tintoretto's Paradise fresco. Coming across Bosch's Triptych of Heaven and Hell, I finding myself once more responding to them rather more readily than the Titian and Veronese paintings, perhaps due to perverse surrealism being their dominant mode rather than the crude allegories of god blessing Venice elsewhere in the palace. Later rooms show other aspects; magistrates in eighteenth century portraiture, the prison cells and bridge of sighs.
Inevitably, this is followed with a visit to the dark and cave-like Basilica of Sant Mark, with the half light glittering across the gold and marble mosaics. Images pullulate across every surface and leave the eye disorientated. The treasury still houses works taken from Alexandria (as well as the corpse of Saint Mark), including the inevitable holy relics, the bone encased in previous metals that simulate the limbs that once contained them as well as a reliquary in the shape of a domed church. As with the Piazzo itself, the originally simple Basilica design has been added to, with gothic spires, painting by Veneziano and later artists as well as statuary on the outside and the more incongrous Tetrarchs statue of Dioceletian. This is followed by the Correr Museum, where I am most struck by a Chinese statue of Marco Polo. Bewhiskered and with round eyes, the statue is covered in gold and in all other respects Buddha like. The interior dates from the Napoleonic era and seems to have been designed in imitation of Nero's palace. The first exhibit is a set of Canova reliefs of Homeric scenes, followed by his statues of Priam, Daedalus and Icarus. The museum also houses an eighteenth century library, complete with Murano chandelier as well as various items like globes, maiolica, cassone, maps and Sevres porcelain. The highlight of the museum is its art gallery though, beginning with the Byzantine work of Paolo Veneziano, proceeding onwards to the more gothic work of Stefano Veneziano and Bartholomeo Vivarini and from thence to the Renaissance and the Bellini family, as well as exhibiting some works by Damaskinos and El Greco. As ever, I find the religious subject matter of all these periods decidedly hostile; it is possible to enjoy them as abstract pattern and colour but as little else. Conversely, a painting like Carpaccio's The Courtesans or Brueghel's Adoration of the Magi are quite different, both displacing the christian in favour of the human. The collection also has a painting in the school of Bosch, The Temptations of St Anthony, which I also enjoy; it seems fitting company for the paintings by Dali and Ernst that I saw a few days later. Finally, the museum also houses a smaller Ancient History section, containing busts of the Roman Emperors, Hellenic statues of the defeated Galatians, Assyrian reliefs and Egpytian statues (as well as a somewhat homoerotic statue of Dionysus and a satyr).
The following days are dedicated to exploring the city; from Castello to the Dorsoduro, San Polo and Cannaregio. The church of San Giuliano in San Marco is an especially elaborate baroque church, with Veronese paintings and a nearby wall relief of St George (who seems especially popular here in spite of not being its patron saint) and an iron dragon as a street sign (rather reminding me of Barcelona). I also note some rather odd calendars on sale in some of the squares. I walk to Santa Maria Dei Miracoli in Canaregio, one of the particular highlight of my visit. The outside is firmly encased in every hue of marble on a comparatively small Renaissance building tucked beside a canal. The interior shares this, with the wooden barrel roof also being studded with paintings in addition to the Pietro painting of the Madonna that the church grew around (most churches in Venice seem to have been founded through some vision of the Virgin or a bird leading out to a reed bed, something that reminds me of the founding of Tenochtitlan more than anything else). For a complete contrast, the gothic Santo Stefano in Castello represents another highlight of my visit. The same red and white diamond patterning seen on the outside of the Palazzo Ducale can be seen on the interior walls here, next to leaf frescos painted atop the arches and a studded ship's keel roof. The pillars are covered in red cloth, something I note in several of the churches. The arches have to be supported by corss beams, presumably due to the lack of firm foundations. The interior is filled with elaborate gothic, classical (one of the equestrian monuments being especially striking hung on a church wall) funerary monuments, including some by Canova and Lombardo, as well as paintings by Vivarini and Tintoretto. San Francesco della Vigna is a pleasant church with a pink and white campanile, offset by an elaborate facade designed by Palladio.
The church of Santa Maria dei Giglio has an especially elaborate Baroque facade, showing maps of the city. Its sacristy is not dissimilar to that at Saint Marks, setting silver reliquaries in the dubious company of a painting by Rubens, while the rest of the church places Tintoretto in the equally strange company of a Creto-Byzantine Madonna icon. The same holds true for the rather understated Santa Maria Del Formosa, which sets a Byzantine icon alongside a Vivarini triptych. Ruskin disliked this church for a baroque gargoyle at the base of its rather pleasant campanile (on grounds I can rather understand) but also for decorative facade by Codussi designed to honour the Venetian nobility rather than god (on which point, I am considerably less in sympathy with Ruskin). Santa Maria Della Salute is rather more famous than any of these, but its Baroque dome seems a more familiar design than many of the city's other churches (in spite of the Byzantine references). It too has a Byzantine icon taken from Crete, from the time it lay within the Venetian empire. Titian's painting of Saint Sebastian in the church is especially striking; it is the first of many in a city routinely decimated by plague and which had come used to invoking him as a patron. The city's interest in Saint Sebastian is nowhere better exemplified than in the church of San Sebastiano. Sebastian appears in a painting by Veronese in a church whose walls are lined with works by him, even covering the organ. Any part of the wall not containing a painting is home to a trompe l'oeil effect. There is even a stone sculpture of him outside, in the place normally reserved for the Virgin Mary.
Another highlight was Santi Giovanni e Paolo. It's funerary monuments are very bit as ornate as those of Santo Stefano, such as the Mocenigo tombs, supported by griffin sculptures while others are emblazoned with double headed eagles. Otherwise, the interior is more plain, in bare stone and redbrick, save for the red painted arches and cross beams. This time it is Bellini who depicts Sebastian in a triptych. Other paintings include Giovane and a Vivarini triptych. The ornate sacristy is filled with Veronese paintings and rather recalls the Doge's Palace. Similar in style is Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. The main nave here is largely empty, filled only elaborate funerary monuments. Most of these are in conventional styles, including one to Titian, which leaves Canova's pyramid all the more striking. It looks as if it should be Pere LaChaise or Highgate, with veiled figures and angels entering the tomb. Next to it is something equally odd, with Moorish bearers and skeletons. The church has been described as a pantheon, given the numbers of the great and the good buried here (though Monteverdi only merited a floor plaque). There is than an elaborate wood and gold choir and beyond that is something altogether more elaborate; here the brick walls are painted and are hung with works by Titian. The sacristy is dark, covered with wooden panels, and here Veneziano, Vivarini and a Bellini triptych can be found, alongside a wooden clock by Lombardo. The Gesuati in Cannaregio is more rococo than classicist, with the walls covered in floral patterns of green and white marble, even down to representing a set of curtains around the pulpit and gold on the ceiling. The weight was enough to cause subsidence and the chapels around Titain's painting of Saint Lawrence's martyrdom are riven with cracks and damp. Its namesake in the Dorsoduro, is a more plain baroque church, with paintings by Tiepolo and Tintoretto and the unusual presence of the earlier church it replaced alongside. The Carmini is perhaps not the best building in the city, but it is quite unusual; paintings depicting the history of the Carmelite order hang on either side of the nave under the ceiling, with dark wood and gold statues beneath. The pillars are again wrapped in red cloth. The windows have red curtains, giving the place a rather gloomy effect. The Scuola Grande di San Rocco, a lay fraternity, has a rather spartan, churchlike, hall on its groundfloor, while its dark wood panelled upper floor has more of the feeling of a sacristy, lined with Tintoretto paintings of the New Testament. A collection of Maiolica and Iznik ceramics is on display in an annex. Similarly, the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni is devoted to Carpaccio, showing narrative cycles based on the lvies of St George, Tryphone and Jerome on the ground floor. The upper floor is also more elaborate, though there is something rather bathetic about its painting of fraternity members in Biblical scenes (not unlike a painting of god, the Doge, Dogessa and the guild of poulterers or St Christopher fording the Venetian lagoon).
The church of Madonna Dell Orto is another of the city's highlights, with an exterior that most closely approximates Northern Gothic. Inside, it is perhaps rather more understated, with painting on the interior of the arches and paintings by Tintoretto, with a set of rather apocalyptic themes of the day of judgement and the golden calf. Nearby is Santa Alvise, with a rather bizarre set of paintings showing the theft of the body of Saint Mark (whose corpse, needless to add, is perfectly preserved). The interior feels more like an art gallery than a church, with an ingenious trompe l'oeil ceiling by Bastiani that seems to extend the church several storeys upward. More striking is a cycle of Carpaccio paintings, alongside works by Tiepolo and Giovane. The church of San Geremia, is a rather bland affair, with some gothic paintings of Lucia (whose stolen corpse the church contains) and Geremia. The church of San Giobbe is also rather uninteresting, save for one chapel containing a glazed terracotta ceiling in beautiful blues and greens, Lombardo carvigs and a Vivarini triptych in the sacristy. San Giovanni Elemosinario, also built to house a pilfered saint's corpse, contains a Pordenone painting of Saint Sebastian, alongside various Titian paintings. The building is largely hidden in the Rialto market (certainly when compared to the nearby San Giacomo di Rialto, with its large, if entirely inaccurate, clock) and is mostly rather austere, save for a sudden lurch into baroque splendour in one of the side chapels. San Giacomo dall'Orio is a rather more spartan church, with only the capitals and ceiling woodwork gilded below its ship's keel roof. A Byzantine style cross by Veneziano hangs in the centre of the nave (several of the columns and font are looted from Byzantium). The church is mostly home to Giovane paintings (especially in its sacristy). Of lesser note, is San Giobbe, a simple building with a wooden rood and some Tiepolo paintings.
San Giorgio dei Greci is hidden in a small courtyard, whose iron railings are overgrown with ivy. The wellhead, walls and exterior mosaics are decorated with representations of George and the Dragon, and the interior with its walls of iconic paintings by Damaskinos, also features him. Finally, there is San Zaccaria, a building with one of the most impressive facades and one of the one of the most drab monochrome interiors in the city, the walls of paintings by the likes of Bellini and Vivarini notwithstanding. There is also San Giovanni in Bragora, the church where Vivalid was baptised, with its lovely Vivarini triptych and San Martino with another saint's corpse and trompe l'oeil ceiling. Across from the main island lies La Giudecca, with its Palladian churches, Santissimo Redentore and San Giorgio Maggiore. In spite of paintings by Tintoretto, Bassano and Vivarini, I find myself sympathising with Ruskin's preference for gothic over classicism; there's something rather puritannical about Palladio's designs. The first example of classicist architecture in Venice is the Arsenale though, with its clock towers and lion statues (stolen from the Peloponnese).
For all of the corrosion of the city's walls through brine laden winds and subsidence, nature is something largely banished from Venice. Its narrow streets accommodate few trees or grass. One of the few exceptions to this is the more easterly districts. The Giardini area is filled with public gardens, divided by a boulevade dedicated to Garibaldi. A statue of the man himself stands at the entrance, atop a large rock down which water spills. Ferns and moss have grown over the rock and terrepins sunbathe at its base or swim alongside carp in the waters below. The gardens are otherwise filled with statuary; a bust of Richard Wagner, a rostral column and assorted statues in a Roman style. The pine trees continue to San Elena, where birds sing as the sun sets. The small church at the end of the island has a rather unpleasant modern campanile but also a beautiful set of cloisters, filled with plants.
Nature is more of an emphatic presence at the outer island of Torcello. Once the first settlement on the lagoon, it is now all but deserted. Ruskin opened The Stones of Venice with an account of the fall of previous maritime empires like Venice and Tyre, in comparison to a Britain that still ruled the scenes. By contrast, Torcello reminds me more of Jeffries's After London and a recent account of what London would like after having been deserted by humanity for hundreds of years; the last thing to collapse would be Canary Wharf, standing above what have reverted to swampland. In Torcello, the trees, reeds and broom grow thickly over what would once have been a settlement. Egrets and herons can be seen flying. The tower of its erstwhile cathedral looms large over the island and can be seen for miles around. As you draw closer you come into a piazza that must once have been equivalent to San Marco. Today, the cobbles are broken up with weeds and parts of the building lie in ruins. The quiet of the lagoon seems unearthly. Statues and ornaments stand silent witness around the square. The cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta itself is home to a dramatic gold mosaic of the day of judgement on one wall (complete with skeletons, demons and ouls burning in hell) and the Virgin at the other. As Ruskin notes, together for the bright and airy character of the church, it was an obvious expression for a people in need of reassurance and hope after the Hun incursions. Plain romanesque arches are supported by elaborate corinthian columns, the walls are decorated with images of peacocks with the floor glitters with a rainbow of marble patterns. A museum stands on the the opposite side of the piazza, including early mosaics, a gold iconostasis and various reliefs. It also includes a history of objects found in the lagoon; Roman lamps, a bust of Hermes, Etruscan metalware, Egyptian statues and other votive objects.
The Island of Murano is rather less interesting, with most of its palaces having been torn down. One of the most interesting buildings is the lighthouse, with an Eric Gill style sculpture of the Madonna at its base. The church of San Pietro Martire is a modest white and red affair, with frescos between the arches and a collection of paintings by Bellini and Veronese. More striking is Santa Maria e Donato, with its mosaic flooring with depictions of eagles and rabbits (nastily depicting the triumph of christianity over the pagan), alleged dragon bones hung behind the altar and a mosaic of the Madonna in the apse. Saint's bones are once more stored under the altar, as at Saint Fosca at Torcello.
More fascinating is the Bocklin like island of San Michele. The product of the Napoleonic era, it feels more like Pere LaChaise than the rest of Venice. The grid layout seems alien to a city whose streets are so chaotic. As often in Latin countries, many graves are simply in shelves, with photos on the outside of each box and an electric light illuminating a fake candle. Where there are conventional graves, the cemetery takes on the aspect of a flower garden, with the plants growing profusely. Ornate tombs line the walls of the cemetery, at corners and intersections and in cloisters; everywhere white marble and orange brick prevails beneath the shade of cypresses. The orthodox and protestant tombs are in their quarantined areas and both have become decidedly more ramshackle. A larger tomb in the orthodox sections has mosaics ion the outside, but the graves of Stravinsky and Brodsky are somewhat nondescript. So too proves the case with Pound in the dilapidated Protestant cemetery where the presence of Highgate style angels seems decidedly odd.
Venice's art galleries are split between medieval and renaissance paintings on the one hand and the modernist collection in the Guggenheim on the other. The Guggenheim begins with a futurist collection reminiscent of the Estorick collection; Boccioni, Balla and Severini. Peggy Guggenhiem's own collection bifurcates between broadly abstract or expressionist works, like Braque, Kandinsky, Delaunay and Picasso (as well as a large Pollock collection) and surrealism, including Brauner, Delvaux, Dali, Ernst, Chirico and Magritte. Although I enjoy most of the collection, it's the surrealist paintings I enjoy the most. There's also a good sculpture collection; Giacometti and Brancusi. At the other extreme, is the Ca' d'Oro and Accademia. Ca' d'Oro is a palazzo on the ground canal. Entering inside through a gothic gate, one walks through a verdant courtyard into the ground floor portego. Statues of satyrs and gods are scattered around and the waves of the lagoon lap against the steps. The floor is mosaic, decorated with stones from North Africa and Greece. The collection is most famed for a Mantegna painting of (unsurprisingly) Saint Sebastian, as well as Carpaccio Annunciation and a striking Andrea Bartolo coronation of the Virgin. Again though, I'm most impressed by Titian's profane Venus at the Looking Glass. There's also a collection of Flemish works; a Van Eyck crucifixion, Van de Velde seascapes and a Van Scorel painting of the Tower of Babel that distinctly resembled the more famous Brueghel. Finally, there is the Accademia. Again, it begins with Veneto-Byzantine artists like Veneziano and Vivarini, containing some rather grandiose depictions of the Book of Revelations and the coronation of the Virgin, though Carpaccio's Crucifixion and Apotheosis of the Martyrs on Mount Ararat and his Ursula cycle is probably the most dramatic. Inevitably, Saint Sebastian is again much in evidence, with two paintings of him by Bellini. The gallery then progresses onwards to the Renaissance, with Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, though I am again most struck by Lotto's Portrait of a Young Man in his Study. The collection again progressed forward, showing Claude-like paintings of ruins by Giuseppe Zais, a series of architectural fantasias by Marieschi, Gaspari and Battaglioli. There's also the handful of Canaletto pictures to remain within Venice.
posted by Richard 5:01 AM
Friday, July 20, 2007
The first Proms concert of this year opened with Part's Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten and Rakhmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (both rather backward-looking works that set a conservative pattern to the night) before finishing with Gliere's Symphony No.3 'Ilya Murometz.' I didn't know Gliere's work before and was somewhat surprised to find him to be a contemporary of Stravinsky rather than of Borodin. The symphony was based on narrative, in the style of the likes of Rimsky Korsakov, and its derivation from folk tales was clear in the way events seemed discontinuous, happening without apparent logical sequence or sense of causality, often for magical reasons. I was mostly reminded of Wagner; scenes of Ilya listening to bird song in the forest recalling Siegfried understanding the language of the birds after killing Fafnir in the forest. It also has to qualify as the loudest symphony I can recall, working up to a crescendo early on and maintaining it for much of what followed.
Following this, I was overjoyed to complete my viewing of the Ring Cycle with Gotterdammerung. I did find myself that given the cycle's odd compositional history it can be best described as two narratives. Firstly, there is the narrative of the downfall of the gods brought down by the curse of the ring as they give way to mankind. Secondly, there is a narrative about the destructive nature of desire, with the story of Siegfried and Brunnhilde being rather reminiscent of that of Samson and Delilah. The two seem to rather cancel one another out, with the destruction of Valhalla having little to do with the coming of the great hero but rather with Brunnhilde. What is admirable in Brunnhilde is her masculine qualities as a warrior, what is contemptible in Siegfried is his emasculation by Hagen and Gutrune; particularly given that the weak and decadent Gunther is permitted to atone for his crimes through a heroic death whereas Gutrune is simply insignificant and fades out of sight. Equally, although the opera hinges on the restoration of the corrupting ring to the Rhinemaidens they are nonetheless depicted as frivolous and vicious (and hence the means of a suitably humiliating death for Hagen). Following this, I was struck by Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn a rather odd combination of A Shropshire Lad and The Brothers Grimm with lieder telling of the transience of youth and mortality in wartime but fringed with themes like the Totentanz.
Following this I went to a Baroque concert (Handel, Purcell, Telemann) jointly performed by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra (giving the Fireworks Music a rather stereophonic feel, with all of the instruments doubled). It's always odd seeing an archestra playing without a conductor; although romantic music is supposed to be more spontaneous and free it seems a paradox that it actually requires the discipline of a conductor to wield its larger number of players together in contrast to more ordered (or playful?) Baroque music. Haitink's performance of Wagner (Parsifal, Tristan und Isolde and Lohengrin) and Debussy (Nocturnes and Six Epigraphes Antiques) was surprisingly effective, drawing strong parallels between the two composers. Both seemed steepted in the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk. In the case of Wagner this largely meant welding music and lyric poetry in the contest of dramatic performance while for Debussy, it meant playing with symbolist motifs from painting (as in Whistler's Nocturnes) and literature, thereby introducing a form of music whose impessionistic style belied a frequently concrete approach. One of the paradoxes of twentieth century music is that although much of it was concerned with formal experimentation (Schoenberg) much of it was also concerned with reviving earlier musical traditions, such as that of folk music. Works like Kodaly's Dances of Galanta and Enescu's Romanian Rhapsody fit into the latter category while Ligeti's Atmospheres fits into the former, its performance showing each tonal layer individually, like a conventional work dissasembled and suspended in time. Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is the msot impressive work of this Prom though, managing to combine both strains.
Nicholas Nickleby cleaves closely the idea of the novel established by Fielding, whereby misadventure and financial hardship forces a young man out into a world where he is exposed to all manner of temptations. Nontheless, Dickens elaborates rather more polyphonic plot strands, taking his hero to the country rather than moving him from rural morality to urban decadence, depicting instead the perils faced by his sister in the city and the corruption and downfall of his uncle. Rather than suggesting that youth is corrupted by the city, Dickens instead suggests that vice is born of desperation ("ignorance was punished and never taught"), something that considerably complicates the moral fable at the heart of the novel. Although a Dickens novel tends to function by drawing together the different individuals that makes up its hetergenous plot strands, it nonetheless has the effect of depicting an atomised society ("this wilderness of London") rather than a community.
Sentimental Education seems to invert every convention of the nineteenth century novel, as with the absence of a clear telelogical structure (directed either at marriage or tragedy) or with the manner in which the hero is depicted in terms more suitable for female characters such as Madame Bovary (the only other comparison that comes to mind is Turgenev's superfluous man). Deslauriers is perhaps a more obvious candidate for the role of hero, resembling rather more a Stendhalian protagonist (indeed the reference to how "Frederic's physical appearance.. had almost exerted a feminine charm on him" suggests a homerotic relationship between the two male protagonists that threatens to eclipse female characters like Madame Arnoux). The absence of a teleological structure for depicting the characters is depicted by the absence of any such structure in Flaubert's view of history, which is as present here as in Eliot, Stendhal, Balzac or Zola but is far more disconnected from the central narrative. While the depiction of Dambreuse is not that far removed from that of Merdle or Melmotte (the poverty of Madame Arnoux and Rosanette is also no that far from Dickens), Flaubert is equally cynical as to the alternatives, as with his observation that Senecal is filled with love towards the mases in their aggregate state and is merciless towards individuals; "a sort of Athenian Sparta in which the individual would only exist to serve the state... anything which he considered hostile to it he attacked with the logic of a mathematician and the faith of an inquisitor." Frederic is at once an aristocratic snob ("he felt utterly nauseated by the vulgarity of their faces, the stupidity of their talk...the knowledge that he was worth more than these men lessened the fatigure of looking at them.") and is fired with revolutionary ideals ("I think the people are sublime"). Deslauriers similarly notes that "he had preached fraternity to the conservatives and respect for the law to the socialists." Sentimental Education is the great novel of the middle ground, with all viewpoints contested and all found wanting Frederic and not steering a straight enough course, and Desluariers being too rigid, with the same applying to the aesthetic debates of Pellerin and Senecal.
Laughter in the Dark compares itself to Anna Karenina but seems in many ways an intertextual satire at Tolstoy's expense, with its depiction of the heroine as both vapid and ruthless and destructive of a hero who represents rather mediocre rebuttal to the likes of Vronsky. The gender roles are instead inverted, with Albinus playing the part of a frustrated Emma Bovary, reduced itself to a frustrated and failed artist. Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev oscillates between a sense of communism as an entirely failed project (as with Koestler or Solzhenitsyn) and of it as something betrayed and corrupted. During the course of the novel Rublev finds himself pinioned by inescapable logic; political action (where factories can conquer hovels and the "the old suffering of toil is extinguished forever.") can only be attained through unity as vested in the party. Individual conscience is a bourgeois luxury but if the party has betrayed the revolution then conscience must stand aside from that unity; "in that iron circle Rublev's thoughts never ceased to travel." Others argue that terror cannot form the basis of a state only its property relations and use this to distance the Soviet Union from fascist states, particularly given that the economic progress of the Union is forging a new type of consciousness (the novel incessantly compares Russia to the West, as when Xenia realises that poverty in Paris has a sort of abundance when compared to Moscow.) Koestler wrote that continued belief in communism could only be attributable to a personal mythology; it seems unclear whether this was true for Serge or not. Svevo's Confessions of Zeno reminds me stronly of its Austro-Hungarian counterparts The Castle and The Good Soldier Schweik, all depicting events as being born of unpredictable chance rather than of agency, with freedom something only intermittently possible. Throughout it remains unclear whether events occur due to accident (the marriage to Augusta, the recovery of Zeno's fortunes where Guido had squandered money on the same stocks) or by Zeno's own design (his longstanding antipathy to Guido). As Guido puts it in response to Zeno's disavowal of his caution; "curious that the cautious person should feel obliged to defend the scatterbrain." The novel is set against a backdrop of psychoanalysis (utilised as a framework for self-understanding whilst simultaneously dismissed), a framework that presupposes an underlying unity to events that the episodic narrative seems to deny, in spite of the suggestion of unconscious motivations towards Guido and Ada throughout. The novel ends with the modern man leads an unnatural existence and his life is poisoned to the root, but although this is ostensibly applied to Zeno it seems a better label for his erstwhile rival Guido (himself perhaps more resembling the hero of Svevo's tragic A Life), with his artistic temperament and inability to comprehend business. Like Schweik, it is unambiguous throughout as to whether Zeno is saved from Guidos' fate by cunning and guile or simply by his foolishness being protected by serendipity. Having asserted competence and strength throughout it such a way as to persuade the reader that he is neither, the suggestion hangs that those statements should have been taken at face value (in the same manner Zeno refutes arguments from the psychoanalyst with Schopenhauerian non sequiturs; life may be a disease but it can only be cured by death or obtains a medical certificate as proof of his sanity thereby convincing all that he is mad).
Benjamin's Berlin Childhood Around 1900 shows Benjamin looking back in the style of his own Angel of History. At one point he notes that "one forms an image of a person's character according to his place of residence and the neighbourhood he inhabits." It's a statement characteristic of the nineteenth century (described elsewhere as a hollow shell) that could have been shared by Marx or Eliot, but Benjamin only partly accedes to it. One the one hand, his Berlin is a place where there are only surfaces, with subject and object essentially coterminous.; "I was enveloped in the world of matter" The metaphor is that of the painter disappearing into his own picture. On the other hand, the Berlin he depicts is a liminal place shown through imagistic fragments (repeatedly characterised as part of a labyrinth one gets losts within) rather than a linear narrative and where the places are often as liminal as his arcades (for instance, the text begins with a descriptions of Berlin's loggias on the grounds of their uninhabitability to one who no longer had a fixed abode). Although the young Benjamin and his elder counterpart share a passion for collecting but refuse to arrange their acquisitions in a neat order. Equally, the places in questions are defamiliarised; the Victory Column is compared to a setting for Dante's Inferno while the Zoological Garden seems more ancient than Rome. Magic and myth are repeatedly invoked, contrary to an otherwise materialist strain.
Ballard's Kingdom Come frequently re-iterates a surrealist manifesto; "nothing is true and nothing is untrue." The novel is true to this statement of intent and aims to disorientate the reader, forcing them to participate in the elective insanity that follows. As Ballard puts it, the snakes are only pretending to be asleep and the ladders lead nowhere. Characters in Ballard novels rarely follow clear patterns, but instead shift their perspectives across ideological divides and back again; like many of his protagonists, Pearson plays the role of seeking to investigate and stop the violence but also incites it. Equally, characters like Falconer and Fairfax seek to turn the tide back but the methods they use only provoke the violence they are trying to assuage. As a consequence, the role played by the Metro Centre in the novel is ambiguous. On the one hand we are told that "it's an incubator. People go in there and they wake up and see their lives are empty. So they look for a new dream." But equally, it is also defined as an entire philosophy rather than simply a reaction to vacuity; "all his emotional needs, his sense of self, were satisfied by this huge retail space." Equally, one the one hand the novel uses the familiar Ballardian formula of a new type of human being created and the equally familiar trope that they are reverting to something primeval ("a primeval species with an unbelieavsble need for violence") expressed over the centuries in religion and the politics of fascism rather than becoming something new. Finally, on the one hand, we are told that "the great dream of the Enlightenment, that reason and rational self-interest would one day triumph led directly to today's consumerism" but those are also characterised as a brake against the delirium of consumerism that unfolds in the course of the novel.
Mann's Confessions of Fleix Krull presents a narrative that initially appears cast in the vein of a a moral fable, dealing with the exploits of a confidence man, only for this to be aborted in favour of a narrative about his love affair with a Portuguese mother and daughter. The initial narrative draws a Platonic parallel between art and deceit, with Felix inspired by seeing actors and by being a model for painting. It also draws a parallel between this indeterminacy in Felix's identity (the real Felix is something that does not exist) lends itself to a suggestion of homosexuality (itself something criminal at the time), with him being sexually admired by Herr Sturzli and Stanko.""Dali's masterpiece and, I believe, the greatest painting of the 20th century is The Persistence of Memory, a tiny painting not much larger than the postcard version, containing the age of Freud, Kafka and Einstein in its image of soft watches, an embryo and a beach of fused sand. The ghost of Freud presides over the uterine fantasies that set the stage for the adult traumas to come, while insects incarnate the self-loathing of Kafka's Metamorphosis and its hero turned into a beetle. The soft watches belong to a realm where clock time is no longer valid and relativity rules in Einstein's self-warping continuum." - JG Ballard"
Dali is something of an anomaly, an artist who moved seamlessly between avant-garde and popular culture, between the influence of Vermeer and Velasquez in one instance and between Breton and Magritte on the other. Many of his techniques were either familiar from classical painting or from film (many of the car crash scenes in Un Chien Andalou make the influence on JG Ballard manifest), but grafted onto a rather writerly personal mythology that was reminiscent of Blake (eyes, ants, eggs, soft watches, ruins, plains and so on). Time, space and motion feature prominently in his work rather than depicting images as static and frozen moments. At the same time, objects melt into one another and cease to be stable elements in their right. Equally, his experiments in film do dissolve linear narrative into a "heap of images." Film was seen as a variant of automatic writing.
Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or present an equally heady combination of Freudianism and Marxism, showing the revolt of the protagonists and their desire against an ossified social order. In Un Chien Andalou, a character is held back by being tied to pianos, priests and rotting donkeys (though the protagonists are still left buried and the film repeatedly blurs the distinction of Thanatos and Eros as it does with all other contraries, including gender itself). In L'Age D'Or, a character throws priests and burning giraffes out of the mansion while the Majorcan Bishops are left to starve to death. However, his Marxism at that time forbids him from regarding the bourgeoisie as rebels, showing them as heartless and indifferent to the suffering of others (as with the shooting of the gamekeeper's son or the fire in the kitchen), thereby forming the nucleus of Pasolini's Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom.
The Bramah Museum records the distinction between tea and coffree elaborate by Kakuzo Okakura; the former, aristosratic and calming, its origins lying in ceremony. Conversely, the latter was bourgeois and stimulating, its orgins somewhat disreputable. The museum records the assimilation of Chinese and African beverages (though Ethiopia regarded coffee as a food source) into European culture, showing beautifully designed teapots in the style of bamboo and recording the origin of willow pattern as a fairytale of doomed lovers. I especially liked an anti-coffee house satirical pamphlet set to the tune of The Roast Beef of Old England, entitled The Grumbling of Old England. The Rose Cougou and Lemon served in the shop was rather pleasant too.
Walking around The Mall and St James' Park, I found myself rather indifferent to much of the architecture, which seemed rather dour and pedestrian with the only architect of note being William Kent. I noticed a blue-billed Ruddy Duck swimming in the park near to a black swan before visiting the Wellington Arch. I was struck by how it and Marble Arch formed yet another vision of how London might have been with their removal from their original location and the existence of earlier designs by Adam and Soane (not to mention a more grandiose design from Decimus Burton than was realised). Having walked back to Paddington, I visited the church of St James. Although rather nondescript on the exterior, Street's interior combines pink marble with a black ceiling lined with gold angels. Elaborate tiling and mosaics line the aisles while a modern window replacing one destroyed in the Blitz shows scenes from the station and the war. Visting Kensington, I walked round the round Pond and Palace, the statyes of William and Victoria, before coming to Scott's St Mary Abbot's, with its tall and spire and bending entrance through a set of cloisters through the churchyard. The interior is rather more minimal with marble floors and mosaiscs. I walk to see the Queen's Tower at Imperial College, which I've seen in the distance before but never from closeby.
The Courtauld Institute was a striking omission from the list of London galleries I had visited, so I accordingly decided to rectify this. Walking along one of London's bridges, I was met with one of Gormley's sculptures, joining the one I had seen on the roof of the Shell Mex house and on the rood of Freemason Hall (looking like potetential suicides in both cases). The collection conspicuously bears the mark of having been formed through a relatively small set of bequests, accounting for the presence of Mamluke metalwork, ivory caskets, eighteenth century silverware, Maioloica and painted Italian cassone. The initial collection was formed by a Victorian more interested in the Florentine than Pre-Raphaelite, containing triptychs that demonstrated the transition from Byzantine perspectives to a more naturalistic style. Particularly striking is Bellini's Assassination of St Peter Martyr, where the cut tree stumps bleed in sympathy with the murdered saint. The gallery was running an exhibition revolving around Cranach's Adam and Eve. For all of his connections with Luther, there's something pagan about Cranach, with his paintings of Apollo and Diana and Cupid complaining to Venus sharing the same poses as his christian painting, both interpreting classical myth as christian allegory and violating the Biblical symbolism at the same time. Something similar applies to his twin fascinations with depicting hunting scenes in tandem with a prelapsarian vision of man living in harmony with nature.
The following periods are rather barren for the gallery, save for Claude's Landscape with an Imaginary View of Tivoli, Pieter Brueghel painting of Landscape with flight into Egypt and Eworth's bizarrely allegorical Portrait of Sir John Luttrell. The strength of the collection emrges again when it comes to modern French painting, with a large collection of works by Manet, Renoir, Degas, Pissaro and Sisley. Some of the wotks surprise; early oil paintings in an impressionist style by Seurat, as well as a pointillist painting depicting his mistress in a comic parody of traditional portraiture (a theme also repeated in Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe where an unidealised nude sits alongside formally dressed men, while still resting in a classical pose as if she had casually strayed into the scene by accident) or Monet's still lives. A large number of landscapes by Cezanne show his depiction of natural subjects in geometric terms, while Monet's landscapes show his abandonment of chiaroscuro. Van Gogh's famous Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear is also present, showing a contrast behind the gaunt figure in the foreground and a colourful Japanese print hanging on the wall behind him (something similiar emerges in Lautrec's painting of Jane Avril, showing the glamorous and expensively dressed Moulin Rouge dancer in dark and subdued tones). Two of the Gauguin paintings are especially striking; Nevermore depicting a Tahitian nude in the same vein as an artist like Ingres while suggesting connotations of the fall in her facial expression, the presence of two whispering women in the background and the reference to Poe in a raven. Te Reriora or The Dream also draws a counterpoint between the foreground of the painting (a woman nursing a child while a man leaves behind her) and its background (frescos of lovers painted onto the walls of her house). Gauguin's depiction of 'noble savages' does seem to invest a rather 'writerly' quality into his work that makes it particularly fascinating for me.
This section was completed by one of Rousseau's naive Toll-Gate paintings and a Modigliano nude, showing again a classicised subject shown in terms derived from Oceanic sculpture. The gallery has recently increased its collection to include a number of works by Kandinsky, Sickert (a painting at an underground station), Pechstein, Vlaminck and Derain. There's also a brief British section, showing Frank Dobson's sculpture, Ben Nicholson's Mondrian-influenced Painting 1937, an Eric Gill engraving of a latin motto and a Graham Sutherland painting. The final section of interest formed the bequest of Roger Fry, ranging from Chinese bronzes and pottery to African masks. This section includes works by Vanessa Bell (praised by Woolf as a social satirist in painting), Duncan Grant and Fry himself, as well as the various pieces of crafts that came out of the Omega workshops.
Visiting Hampstead, I began at St John at Hampstead, a Georgian church whose interior opulence is only matched by its exterior dowdiness. The graveyard is more ornate, filled with older tombs decorated with skulls as well as with Victorian angels and celtic crosses. As with most London graveyards, it has an odd assortment of denizens, including Constable, Harrison and a relative of the last Tsar. Hampstead Cemetery is if anything rather more mannered than the tangled briars of St John's, having remained rather more faithful to the idea of the garden cemetery than Highgate. Comparatively unostentatious graves are laid out in neat rows interspersed with arboretum-like plantings of trees and shrubs (including a large palm treet at one point). Crickets chirped away in the background. One or two grandiose tombs do intrude; one in the shape of a church organ or the art deco Bianchi tomb with its Blakesque angel. Following this, I visited Fenton House with its collection of marquetry furniture, stumpwork, Kangxi Porcelain, Song paintings, snuff bottles and painted Chinese mirrors. The house has a quite good collection of paintings, including Duncan Grant, Sickert (paintings of Figaro and London music halls), Charles Ginner (a painting of Hampstead High Street at night that rather resembled Atkinson Grimshaw) and a rather poor GF Watts painting of waves turning into horses.
Visiting Wollaton Hall, I was struck by the classical and historical figures in circular niches along the walls (as at Ham House and Hampton Court) and the gargoyles underneath the windows. The overall effect is rather more ornate than Smythson's other building, Hardwick Hall. The interior is equally impressive, with its hammer-headed celing in the Great Hall, James Thornhill murals on the stairwells, the organ and single-handed clock. The interior included glass Blaschka models of aquatic life (octupi, squids etc) and geological displays of desert roses and haematite. Travelling onwards to Southwell Minster, I was impressed by the Norman exterior with its Rhenish caps and the remains of the ruined Bishop's Palace alongside. The interior balances different periods; Flemish and Victorian stained glass by Kempe, Norman arches at one end and early English gothic at the other. Wall plaster remains of a Roman bath house hang on the wall showing a male figure. Medieval misericord carvings of green men are displayed in the pulpitum. Green men carvings also predominate in the Chapter House, itself resembling a forest canopy. A Saxon tympanum rests in one of the transepts while an alter dedicated to fallen Polish soldiers has a triptych as its centrepiece - a Monet-like painting of lilies on the outside, depictions of barbed wire and a dead soldier on the outside.Labels: Art, Literature, London, Music
posted by Richard 9:39 AM
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
Monday, April 9, 2007
Returning to Hardwick Hall, I was struck by the forest-like character of the interior, with the main hall being decorated on all sides by painted plaster and tapestry hunting scenes showing wild stags, elephants and boars. Stags horns decorate the walls while a Hilliard school painting of Elizabeth produced at the hall shows her dress filled with sea monsters and birds; I am fire and air; my other elements I give to baser life. Outside, the entrance is dominated by the family crest of two stags, something that reminds me more of Schoenbrunn than England. The entrance hall doorway is flanked by two lionheads where hands holding torches force their way through the jaws. Nearby is the church of St John the Baptist, Ault Hucknall, where Thomas Hobbes is buried. The interior includes an elaborate Norman doorway (showing events from Genesis) in contrast to a simpler Saxon design, alabaster tombs, Green men heads on the rafters and a Norman depiction of George and the dragon outside. On the way back, I visit St Peter's in Elford, noted for its medieval alabaster monuments but substantially reworked in the Victorian period with carved wooden angels and Minton tiling. I also look at Holy Angels in Hoar Cross, a strange isolated cathedral on a hilltop. The exterior is covered with dragon gargoyles and statues of the saints while the plain red sandstone interior is lined with elaborate stations of the cross and black and white tiling. Light thinly permeates through Kempe's stained glass while the dark interior is illuminated by reflections from the gold rood screens. I also visited Letocetum, the remains of a Roman market and mansio near Watling Street, and a museum showing Samain ware, funerary urns and mosaics.
The following day I travelled to Birmingham, and to the Museum and Art Gallery there. I begin by walking round to Pugin's cathedral, with its plain white interior and gold pillars, Flemish stations of the cross, medieval pulipt and statue of St Chad. I then visit St Philip's cathedral, this time an exercise in baroque by Thomas Archer. Much of the older gravestones remain, while the bright interior is darkened somewhat by a set of oppressive blood red Burne Jones stained glass windows. There is also the newly restored town hall and Chamberlain memorial. Finally, there is St Martin's church, a Victorian reconstruction of a medieval church. The exterior almost crawls with gargoyles, while the interior is as stark as that of Holy Angels, save for the wooden angels lining the ceiling. Again, the stained glass is by Burne Jones.
Burne Jones also proves a prominent subject at the art gallery. A grand piano decorated by Burne Jones with a pattern of golden flowers forms the centrepiece of an exhibition dedicated to him. Other exhibits include a golden chest decorated with a picture of the Garden of Hesperides, as well as the paintings. I tend to think of Burne Jones as being a little too ennervated, denuded of drama and while I can't say I've changed my mind on the basis of what I've seen, the variety of works from famous paintings like Pygmalion and the Image, Phyllis and Demophoon (an unusual depiction of male sexuality) and King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid to more obscure works like Star of Bethlehem and The Merciful Knight was impressive. The collection has a substantial number of pre-Raphaelite works, such as Simeon Solomon's ephebian Bacchus and Frederick Sandys's Medea, shown against a gold background in the manner of an Orthodox icon. Although the collection has some good Rossetti paintings, most of it is taken up with Ford Madox Brown (represented by Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus and The Finding in the Saviour of the Temple, both showing a combination of mythical subjects, artifical tableaux and saturated colours that are more appropriate to his allegorical paintings like The Scapegoat), William Holman Hunt (the most succesful works here, combining social realism with the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic in paintings like The Last of England and An English Autumn Afternoon) and Arthur Hughes (the beautifully detailed Long Enagagement, where the ivy is perhaps more succesfully shown than the characters). Other striking exhbits included some minor Watts paintings,. Fitzgerald's Bosch like fairy paintings of the death of Cock Robin, a William Burges marble table, De Morgan Lustre ware, Ruskin pottery and a marquetry table by Pugin as well as some Victorian landscapes like Leader's February Fill Dyke.
The rest of the collection is also quite strong, containing Botticelli's The Descent of the Holy Ghost and Bellini's The Madonna and Child, woodcuts by Ernest Heckel and Gauguin, Degas's A Roman Beggar Woman and Pisarro's The Boieldieu Bridge, as well as a museum containing an Egyptian statue of Isis, Peruvian moche pots, Ninevehan ivories, Pakistani shields and helmets and Pagua New Guinean funerary sculpture. The museum also houses a number of Egyptian mummies I recall being terrified by as a child, and a set of Buddhas, including the Sultanganj Buddha. There's also an exhibition of Islamic Khatam marquetry. Returning to the South of England, I called in at Nuneham Courtenay and the chapel there designed by James 'Athenian' Stuart, featuring beautiful marble statues and wrought iron across the windows.
Revisiting Winchester, I found that the cathedral in particular had a great deal that I hadn't seen on my last visit. Combining Norman, Gothic and Victorian architecture with an interior that mixes Medieval and Tudor, it's one of the most eclectic and fascinating cathedrals (Victorian mosaics sit alongside English baroque). I hadn't been to the Morley library before, which I recognised as the setting for a television adaptation of an MR James story from last christmas. Mostly though the wooden bookcases and globes reminded me of the library at Strahov Monastery in Prague. The cathedral also has a collection of medieval bibles, showing the brilliant illuminations for chapters like the Song of Songs. The Triforium Gallery also proved interesting, containing a set of painted wooden states of King James and King Charles (peppered with gunshot either due to the puritans or to extreme measures taken against pigeons) and a set of medieval mortuary chests. I also visited the crupt and found myself rather impressed by Anthony Gormley's statue in the flooded cavern. I found myself particularly impressed with the medieval tiling and fifteenth century murals in the Lady Chapel, where devils are shown plaguing men, as well as by the well preserved chantry chapels and twelfth century wall and ceiling paintings in the Holy Sepulchre Chapel (the depiction of Christ on the ceiling being one of the most Byzantine things I can recall in an English cathedral). Some of the side chapels have Burne Jones stained glass. Finally, I noted Scott's designs for the Wilberforce tomb; some angels hold the sun and the moon, while another, recalling earlier tomb designs, holds a skull. I also went to the city museum, and was struck by a perfectly preserved Roman mosaic, showing a star at the centre and a swastika pattern bordering it to represent the heavens.
Visiting London, I began by finding the church of St James the Less, a polychromatic redbrick affair by GE Street. The gothic exterior with its three spires on the tower is striking enough, though the interior contains frescos by GF Watts and red and white brick. Walking onwards, I arrive at the Tate for its Hogarth exhibition. Hogarth is the most writerly of painters, fitting into the narrative of Defoe and Fielding rather better than that of Kneller. As a painter, Hogath veers between attempting something in the manner of Kneller or Caneletto, only to return to something more in the mode of Gilray. Hogarth's satire seems partly motivated by moralism, castigating the sins of the decadent sity of London and partly by a more carnivalesque spirit (most clear in his painting of Falstaff as a subject) which opposes the raucous spirit of the city to foreign cosmopolitanism and native gentility alike. The most revealing examples of this lie with his society portraits. Hogarth is unable to show a group of companions without including a clergyman about to topple over from the chair he stands on. When showing a family in a rural idyll, he cannot but include some peasants having sex atop a haystack in the background. His engraving of an Italian musician shows him enraged by the sounds emanating from the streets outside his window, spiting Hogarth's principal object of cultural hatred. Many of his paintings include cats and dogs (something he has in common with earlier Dutch painting and later Victorian works like Hunt's The Awakening Conscience) introducing a note of anarchy into the most courtly scenes; a cat looking intently at a caged bird or a monkey dressed in a wig and about to give a singing recital. As such, there's a certain ambivalence in his satrical works; The Four Stages of Cruelty traces a path from childhood cruelty to animals to criminality but notes society's cruelty in its dissection of the hanged man's corpse. Crime is seen as something socially sanctioned, with Gin Lane and Beer Street showing the same vices in London poor and London rich alike; the same ideas about crime and capitalism that Brecht saw in Gay are also present in Hogarth. Before leaving, I visit the Museum of Garden History, mostly to see the Tradescant and Bligh tombs, but I was also struck by 'The Lamb of Tartary,' an example of a plant from central Asia, which Hans Sloane believed to grow sheep as its fruit. In fact it's a rhizome; a species of fern.
Dulwich park is as pleasant as Battersea, with Hepworth's Double Form overlooking the lake while Pochard and Mandarin ducks swim across. In the nearby picture gallery, I found myself especially impressed with the Canaletto exhibition. Canaletto emerges as an architectural fantasist as much as Piranesi or Whistler, rearrnaging or even inventing building and landscape alike. The effect of this is amplified by the distance in time; London is shown with Westminster Abbey and Hall towering over all with a lacunae where the modern Houses of Parliament would be. A wooden obelisk owned by the waterworks stands where Cleopatra's Needle is now. Somerset House is designed by Ingio Jones, not William Chambers. Several paintings show the interior of the vanished Ranelagh rotunda. In one picture, the distance between St Paul's and the Monument is extended far off into the distance. Particularly fascinating is the attitude to ruins. His pictures of English landscapes show buildings designed in the neo-classical style by Robert Adam alongside Capability Brown's replacement of formal gardens with proto-romantic parkland. The remains of Warwick Castle show it being reinvented in the gothick style with arched windows being added with brightly painted white panes. Of greatest interest are his fantasies, showing ruined classical architecture like the Colosseum and the alongside its modern, Palladian counterparts in pristine form. The romanticism is muted, with the depiction of the ruins tending to pastoral rather than the sort of work that came from Friedrich later. Nonetheless, Canaletto does bestride the classical and the romantic as much as he foreshadows the postmodern character of Victorian architecture with its pastiching of Classical, Gothic, Egyptian and even Byzantine architecture.
Visiting Ashdown House, I was again struck by the contrast between the genteel Dutch influenced architecture and the tragic aspect of its narrative, of a family forced into exile, first from Bohemia and then from England. The house towers over the landscape, which is neatly bissected by tree avenues and formal gardens but the prospect is nonetheless a lonely one of empty downland populated by sheep and sarsen stones. The inner stairwell only complicates the iconography of the place, filled with family paintings of the Winter Queen and Prince Rupert, and with classical busts of Hermes, Apollo and Athena. Travelling back via Donnington Castle, I arrive at Basildon Park. Again the genteel Palladian architecture belies a narrative based on colonial greed and I find myself more drawn to the broken classical statues at the back of the house.
I've written before about the implication of Romanticism in Knut Hamsun's Nazism and this is something that occurs to me once more as I read Growth of the Soil. To some degree, "Growth of the Soil" is a Norwegian anticipation of the phrase "Blut und Boden" (blood and soil) by the German author Walther Darre, often used by Hitler to assert that "pure-blooded" Germans have the exclusive right to occupy "German" soil. French fascists in World War II would also embrace the mythology of the soil; The Nazi collaborator Marshal Pétain said, "La terre ne ment pas!" ("The soil does not lie!") Isak is portrayed as having a spiritual kinship with nature that insulates his from the moral decadence that comes from the cities; "The land saved him. If he had lived down in the village, maybe the great world would have affected even him... here in the wilds he was sheltered from al immoderation." Similarly, Elesus is described as "blemished.. warped" by his time in town. The soil is seen as central to the national life, a concept of gemeinschaft. The one point this becomes explicit is less than edifying; "he's the modern type, a man of our time; he believes enough all the age has taught him; all the Jew and Yankee have taught him." Conversely, Inger's killing of her child as well as that of Barbro are acts fitting for a state of nature, reflecting a certain suspicion of the feminine.
Reading Tsypkin's Summer in Baden-Baden, I was surprised to note how many features of Western literature that would have been unavailable to Tsypkin were mirrored in it. The prose style flows on with little interruption from sentence or paragraph, recalling both Woolf and Bernhard, as it blurs the distinction between narrator and character, between past and present. There's an escapist element to this, with the Jewish Tsypkin speaking of days when Russian Jews would travel to Germany. Tsypkin places himself in the cosmopolitan tradition of Turgenev at a time when such cosmopolitanism was impossible. The novel even resembles a Turgenev novel, showing its protagonist defeated by the land he has travelled to. But the protagonist is Dostoevsky not Turgenev and the land is Germany, not Russia. Towards the end, Tsypkin writes "why was I so strangely enticed and attracted by the life of this man who despised me and my kind?" Tsypkin is attracted to Dostoevsky's sensitivity to oppression and suffering but repulsed by his nationalism and fanaticism, representing a dialogue about Tsypkin's own ambivalent relationship to a motherland he had sought to leave.
Writing about Calvino, David Mitchell pondered why writers that write about writing are accused of creative onanism while no such charge is laid against painters who paint their own portraits. For all of the eloquence of the case for the defence, Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller seems entirely open to that particular charge. Calvino's novel is hermetic, an endogeous system that admits of no external reference point, pointing to a wordlessness beyond language only to subsequently withhold it; "for what it reveals and even more for what it hides... the silent language to which all the words we believe we read refer." As books cannot contain totality, the only way to point to the unwritable is by writing the books of all possible authors. Equally, if there is no meaning beyond language, then all meanings become possible; "the former are convinced that amongst the false books flooding the market they can track down the few that bear a truth... the latter believe that only counterfeiting, mystification, intentional falsehood can represent absolute value." The novel accordingly simultaneously foregrounds the idea of an author behind the text while dispersing it ("I am an author who can be faked"), emphasises the idea of reading as a form of abandonment based on trust, only to deliberately challenge it through the repeated abortion of the narratives, to the chagrin of the characters ("behind the written page is the void").
After London by Richard Jeffries is oddly reminiscent of JG Ballard's depictions of heroes setting out into the heart of entropy (in this context, the fetid ruins of a drowned London) but in its context is perhaps more notable for its depiction of a fedual world that challenges the romanticisation of the medieval period in the works of Walter Scott and the Pre-Raphaelites (or indeed Morris and News from Nowhere) by describing that world as essentially totalitarian, nasty and brutish. Jeffries seems to a large extent to take an egalitarian view, showing his noble forced to learn from the lower orders only to resile from that by allowing his nobility and learning to ultimately win through.
Balzac's The Chouans presents an early stage in his career, which had more in common with Scott and Fenimore Cooper than Dickens or Zola. Although depicting its characters through the lens of historical and social change, it nonetheless also seeks to displace them from history by dislocating the narrative into a setting at a remove from historical events. Balzac instead emphasises that the Bretons are savages, the product of nature rather than civilisation. The novel is also interesting for decentering its focus from the aristocratic hero, an equivalent to Darnay or Blakeney, to its heroine, Mademoiselle Marie de Verneuil. Marie is one of the most striking characterisations of women in Victorian fiction, holding her opponents prisoner with a gun, wielding a dagger and commanding the Republican soldiers. Whereas many Victorian novels dichotomise the angel and whore, Balzac avoids this, although he still makes her a creature of emotion rather than reason; "Angel and demon you said and you were right... there is this to be said for women, that they never consider the rights or wrongs of their most reprehensible actions; they are governed by feeling."
Hoffmann's The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr presents a familiar exercise in Romantic aesthetics; the narrative consists of a series of fragments designed to be able to intuit a transcendental whole. The text repeatedly references the idea of doubles; "I then fell into a state that, dividing my self in a curious way from my self, yet seemed to be my real self... his own self walking beside him.. I and my doppelganger... a dreadful doppelganger once looked up at me from another lake." In that vein, the narrative also repeatedly draws chiastic oppositions between paired characters; Murr and Kreisler, Kreisler and Hector, Hector and Cyprian, Severino and Abraham and so on. Mirrors reccur throughout the text, while other oddities from electric shocks to Severino's invisible girl continually draw attention to the noumenal. Nonetheless, the narrative also emphasises what is hidden, decentering the aesthetics of the sublime in favour of a focus on the unconscious and dreadful that were to be the hallmarks of the gothic genre. This tends to introduce a polyponic aspect to the text, as with Ponto's telling and re-telling of the story of Walter and Formosus from a different angle. The narratives of Kreisler and Murr are themselves most obviously counterparted in a parodic and carnvilesque fashion, the relationship between the two resembling that of Jacques and his master (although it could also be said that Murr serves to parody the Romantic ideal of the artist in much the same way as Swift used the Yahoos).
Although the likes of Tennyson, Scott and Rossetti had made the medieval a familiar figure in English literature and art, the same cannot be said on the whole for French literature. An exception is Huysman's The Cathedral, which establishes an uncertain analogy between the symbolism of medieval art and that of the likes of Mallarme, uniting both against a materialist world of appearances; "the whole cycle of mysticism... the essence of the Middle Ages... the Middle Ages knowing that everything is a sign and a figure, that the only value of things invisible is that they correspond to things invisible... men were not, as we, the dupes of appearance." Nontheless, the text objectifies this symbolism, preferring to offer a disquisition on symbolism than to simply represent the objective correlative itself. In part, this seems due to a dissociation of sensibility that Huysmans blames the church for; "the instinctive aversion for art, the tupe of ideas, the terror of words, peculiar to Catholics." Durtal consequently bemoans the irrelevance of the church to all modern artistic developments, castigating newer churches as empty and being without soul and a product of anomie he himself suffers from ("the American abominations of the day... a Parisian who likes his city so little he seeks out the most deserted nooks to live in... but when he has a chance of improving on this scheme of existence... he shies and kicks"). Consequently, the novel depicts Durtal progressing from black mass to monastery to cathedral to monastery without rest, unable to form his own system of symbolism behind appearances, unable to complete his text.Labels: Art, Birmingham, London, Victorian
posted by Richard 11:30 AM
Monday, January 1, 2007
Worcester cathedral was built with a mix of stones; something grey, sometimes red sandstone. Although placed in the heart of the city, the Cathedral Close still has a rather self contained feel to it, as one passed through Edgar's Tower and enters a complex of ruins where halls and other monastic buildings once stood. A watergate remains, something that only serves to emphasise the self contained character of the cathedral. The most interesting aspect of the interior is undoubtedly the Norman crypt begun by Bishop Wulfstan in a style reminiscent of Repton. Similarly, the tombs are especially striking, such as the Beauchamp tomb with its black swans or the ornate gothic tomb for Prince Arthur. The rest of the cathedral shows the evidence of Gilbert Scott's restoration, such as the painted ceiling. A graveyard is placed in the centre of the cloisters (monks who has tended the garden would once have been buried there) while figures from English history are depicted on stained glass in the arches. The town itself is a mixture of Queen Anne (such as the Guildhall and Hospital with its heraldic white swans), Georgian and Victorian buildings. The majority of the church towers are in red sandstone, excepting one where a grey baroque tower had been built onto an earlier gothic foundation. Another exception is the slender grey spire of St Andrew's, which rises far above the other buildings and rivals the cathedral. A Victorian structure, the building is nonetheless a ruin; nothing remains except the tower.
The Priory Church in Great Malvern rather resembles a cathedral as well, though there is something more colourful about its external appearance, with its patchwork red, yellow and grey stones. The stained glass is also a patchwork of fragments dating back to the time of Richard the Third. Victorian minton tiling sits alongside the original medieval designs it was based on. There's also some new windows stained in a more impressionistic style. The round arches on the interior date back to the Saxon period, sitting alongside baroque monuments and a chantry chapel containing medieval stone tombs.
The church of St Mary the Virgin in Ingestre, has the distinction of being the sole Wren church outside London. Although the stone is duller than the city churches, the building that stands next to Ingestre's Carolean hall is recognisably of the same design (particularly to St Mary Somerset). The interior is decorated with plaster carvings, Gibbons woodwork and Burne-Jones stained glass, showing blood dripping from a pelican onto Adam and Eve, who bear crimson halos and wings. Unusually, the marble monuments have been painted and gilded. Nearby in Hoar Cross, Holy Angels is GF Bodley's miniature cathedral standing stop a hill and surveying the valley beneath. Yews line the walk to the door, while winged gargoyles look down the roof, statues stare ahead from their niches and lonely stone angels on the graves stare at the sky. The church of St Paul in nearby Burton on Trent where it sits adjacent to the town hall, is also by Bodley and shows a similar style. More unusual is the church of St Modwen in the marketplace there. It's tower is blackened but is still in a recognisably baroque style. The interior is also quite unusual, with plain stone columns and round arches lining the nave, while the altar and sanctuary are 'high baroque.' Filled with dead leaves when I visited, the churchyard looks out over the then flooded river Trent and is filled with elaborate tombs. Finally, the church of St John the Baptist in Croxall presented an especially melancholy prospect. It stands high on a hill, above the river Trent next to the local hall. Like St Modwen, the churchyard was filled with elaborate eighteenth and nineteenth century tombs and framed with fallen leaves and bare tree branches. But the tombs here have fallen into desuetude; a celtic cross tips over as it sinks into the earth while the walls of box tombs crumble. The church is also in a poor condition; the windows are broken and the crudely repaired walls patched with brick seem less than steady.
Visiting Kensal Green Cemetery last spring, the central avenue was hidden in shade beneath the trees that lined it. In winter, the leaves had fallen and the grandiose tombs felt oddly naked and bereft. The decay of the tombs was also far more evident; since my last visit a section of the outer wall had collapsed and the resulting breach made it feel far more ramshackle than before. Since I wasn't as distracted by the novelty of the architecture this time, I also noticed far more that most of the modern graves were from other countries; Ethiopia, Yugoslavia or Greece. It seems oddly appropriate given the pagan symbolism of much of the funerary architecture, from Egyptian to Roman and Greek. I wondered if this reflects the increasingly multi-ethnic character of London or whether it was simply that people from these countries were more likely to be drawn to the same traditions that its Victorian creators were. Many of the more modern tombs also seem to display a sentimental and trivial approach to death, with cuddly toys left on the them, that were at odds with the cold stone that surrounds them. I also notice a jay perched on a nearby tomb, a pigeon nestles on a quatrefoil above a tomb door and a squirrel disappears through a tomb wall. Afterwards, I move on to walk around Camden market, somewhere else with Victorian roots that has given way to a more multi-ethnic London. Or at least so that might seem; despite the oriental food stalls and melting pot atmosphere, the predominant aspect is of white counter-culture; gothic clothes, new age and punk. The following weekend was occupied with Mapledurham church with its diamond patterned redbrick and flint by Butterfield (the house's original chantry chapel with alabaster tombs remains alongside the gothic revival building). Later, I visit St John's Gate, a hyperreal Victorian interpretation of a medieval Priory, even down to its reinvention of the Knights Hospitalier as a chivalric order in keeping with the Victorian emphasis on medieval tradition. I also returned to Limehouse churchyard, which was covered in a carpet of purple crocuses and daffodils.
Hockney as an artist always seems to me to be oddly hollow, someone who flits through different styles and media while the essential subjects remain the same, both in terms of the people being depicted and how they are depicted. Self-portrait with Blue Guitar shows him drawing naturalistically while all the objects around are shown in abstract terms that reference Picasso. Picasso recurs in his photographic collages, simultaneously showing the same subjects from different angles and at slightly different times. Conversely, his portraits combine modernist techniques (the collages recalling Cubism, his portrait of Divine recalling Matisse) with a surprising traditionalism; the portraits of his mother and lover against deep blue patterned backgrounds is heavily reminiscent of the Holbein paintings I had seen earlier, while a picture of the artist at work deliberately echoes Velasquez and Las Meninas. For all of this, there's a fundamental similarity to his work. His My Parents shows his mother staring out of the canvas at the viewer while his father sits at right angles to her. They are separated by a table where a vase of flowers stands (a favourite prop). Similarly, his portrait of Fred and Marcia Weisman shows her staring at the viewer while he stands at right angles to her, separated by one of the art objects they collected. The painting of Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott shows Geldzahler sat looking at the viewer while Scott, wearing a coat as if about to leave, stands at right angles to him (a glass table with a vase full of flowers rests in the foreground). Although his painting of Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool is the most famous work, a later one finds Schlesinger sat alone, slightly at right angles to the viewer but still staring back, the pose used on Divine. Later, I walk around the National Portrait Gallery - I still think it an institution more marked for its commitment to historical narrative than to artistic excellence but I was struck by Roger Fry's portrait of Edward Carpenter, showing him in a spartan interior and his reflection only half visible in a mirror, leaving his figure to nonetheless dominates the room.
The BBC adaptation of Dracula was surprisingly original. It bends the novel to fit the conventions of the horror film (as with the deaths of Harker and Holmwood), but foregrounds the theme of occultism (rather reminding me of Huysman's The Damned) and the more obvious theme of syphilis, as opposed to Coppola's Faustian interpretation of the role of plague in Herzog's film. It did occur to me that the renewed 'threat' of immigration from Eastern Europe has given the novel a new resonance; this is after all the year Romania joined the European Union. Volver is a welcome return to the the camp humour and magical realism of Almodovar's earlier films, especially What Have I Done to Deserve this? (whose plot it resembles), combining this with the Hitchcockian plotting of Mala educacion. Children of Men falls uneasily between the apocalyptic and political genres, failing to formulate a consistent political critique on the one hand while failing to abstract those concerns into the the nihilism demanded by the former genre. Every part of the film refers to minor extrapolations of what can be seen in daily news broadcasts; low fertility rates, ethnic violence, immigration, state authoritarianism, terrorism etc.
Lawrence's Mornings in Mexico finds him once more enraptured by male beauty during Indian dances while only noticing the women's clothing; "the men are naked to the waist.. they are handsome, and absorbed with a deep rhythmic absorption." In describing the Indian culture, he celebrates themes of unity in a manner that is reminiscent of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ("creation is a great flood, for ever flowing. in lovely and terrible waves. In everything the shimmer of creation and never the finality of the created") but as with Pirsig, the narrator figures as an outsider throughout (something emphasised by the absence of Frieda from the domestic setting), even finding himself uncomfortable with the presence of tourist crowds at the Hopi snakedance. Last Words by William Burroughs, reminded me of TS Eliot's complaint that Blake had concocted his philosophy from bits and bobs left around the house. Throughout, Burroughs reads an assortment of mystical and conspiracy theory writings designed to gull the credulous. He dotes on his cats and his collection of guns (reminding me of Self's waspish comment that Burroughs hated women and loved guns).
Turgenev's Home of the Gentry presents a fable of a rootless man like Rudin ("you're a thinking man - and yet you lie around... you're all well-heeled layabouts.. this ecstasy of boredom is the ruin of the Russian people"), which is complicated by a rival fable of rural virtue and urban corruption. The Russian admiration of the peasantry complicates a novel that could easily have become a narrative of individual damnation like Madame Bovary and instead gains a sense of the diminishing effect of the environment that has more in common with The Return of the Native or Ethan Frome. For example, Mikhalevich exhorts Lavretsky to work on the land and to concern himself with the welfare of his peasants, a fate that ultimately only manifests itself as a form of punishment. Russia destroys its own children and those that linger too long, such as Lemm's death in impecunious exile, feeling like "a fish out of water". Although Lavretsky and Panshin differ on issues of westernisation and slavophilia, neither worldview is material to their respective fates in the narrative which effectively share the same end; "we're sick because we've only become half-European; we must cure ourselves with more of what has made us sick." The realist context of the novel with its complex of patterning of economic, social and political strands is thus at odds with a metaphysical theme that sees life in Schopenhauerian terms; "he had actually ceased to think about personal happiness... he had become tranquil"
Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs is unusual in American fiction for its emphasis on community and place (the very name being reminiscent of Middlemarch (the statement at the end of Marsh Rosemary being akin to that at the end of Middlemarch) or Cranford). Men figure throughout as objects of ridicule or of cruelty (Captain Littlepage and the pompous Minister that visits Joanna on the one hand, or Joanna's betrayer himself on the other) in contrast to the supportive community of women symbolised by Mrs Todd and her mother; "Mrs Blackett was of those who do not live to themselves, and who have long since passed the line that divides mere self-concern from a valued share in whatever society can give or take" (although events like Mrs Todd knocking the Minister down do challenge ideas about gender, Jewett is essentially a traditionalist on this score, blaming William for lack of ambition in a way no female character would be treated). Nonetheless, the location of Dunnet next to the sea introduces themes that recall Melville more than Austen. Both men and women yearn for the sea ("a far-off look that sought the horizon... inherited by girls and boys alike") and the novel foregrounds themes of individual isolation repeatedly, as with Joanna again ("doomed from the first to fall into melancholy... 'twas her poor lot") or the neighbours that never see one another from one year to the next ("for three generations the people had not spoken to each other even in times of sickness or death or birth"). Joanna's role is given to a male character in The King of Folly Island, where it is his daughter once more that stands for the feminine social virtues. Fishermen are portrayed as being at one with nature ("you felt almost as if a landmark pine should suddenly address you") more than with humanity, while the community is made up of women, but in stories like The White Heron this is reversed and it is women who are seen as being at one with nature (as with Mrs Todd's herbal medicines being opposed to the Doctor's remedies).
Whereas the realist novel typically works by assuming an empirical worldview, contrasting the individual consciousness against the social setting, Jacques the Fatalist operates in the conditional tense, continually disrupting linear narrative with a series of what if 'butterfly effect' discursions and interruptions. This feeds into the dialogic character of the novel, where the narrator simply notes of the debates between Jacques and his master; "and they were both right... has not everyone his own character, according to which he either exaggerates or attenuates everything?" The repeated interjections from the narrator also emphasise the fictionality of events and their arbitrary character. Diderot accepts Hume's critique of the reliability of the evidence of the common senses but is less certain when it comes to Hume's critique of causality. Throughout, Diderot uses ambiguous language ("what is written up above.. is it we who controls Destiny or Destiny which controls us?") to describes Jacques's fatalism, leaving it unclear whether a mechanistic materialism (adopting Spinoza's ideas over Hume's; "good brings bad after it and bad brings good") or a sense of religious destiny is being described (for instance, the idea of providence leading Jacques's brother into the Lisbon earthquake accords with a religious satire along the same lines as Voltaire's Candide).
Prevost's Manon Lescaut is like the works of Defoe and Fielding, episodic in nature rather than operating a linear narrative; events proceed through coincidence and accident rather than by causality. The characters of the novel accordingly vary with the circumstance; Manon being devoted and fickle by turns. Although the narrative is cast in the form of a fable, there is no redemption or repentance anymore than there is damnation ("a craven little soul, so devoid of feeling, that he could not see the humiliation of it... or else a christian... I was neither one thing or the other"), with Des Grieux even arguing that his love for Manon is akin to religious devotion or that it is unexceptional when one considers "that a mistress is nothing to be ashamed of nowadays." Prevost also suggests that Des Grieux's crimes are not of his own making; "knowing neither the mad lust for money.. nor the fantastic notions of hnour that had turned my father into an enemy." The novel is fundamentally a sentimental one, valuing natural emotion over the unnatural morals of his father, something that further serves to distort the moral fable at the novel's core.
De Nerval's writing is deeply embued with German metaphysics but nonetheless represents a point where the death of god leaves sublimity undermined by melancholy (Nerval's Aurelia, his Beatrice, is imagined as Durer's Angel of Melancholy). Whereas earlier Romantic aesthetics emphasised the ability to intuit the noumenal through the phenomenal in brief epiphanies, Nerval foregrounds the question of the potentially subjective and misleading character of such spots of time, both through his emphasis on the difficulty of distinguishing the real from the metaphysical and through the foregrounding of his insanity and experience of the asylum. For example, in The King of Bedlam, Spifame's imaginings of himself as the king lead to his being placed in the asylum only for him to end up leading a parallel existence to the monarch as he lives in luxury and has most of dictats implemented; "Spifame could recognise himself in a mirror or dream, he could take stock of himself even as he changed roles and personalities." Sanity and reason exist in a strangely liminal relationship rather than as opposites in Nerval; his characters remain aware of themselves even as they lose themselves. Similarly, in The Tale of Caliph Hakim, the sultan emerges first as the double of himself, sane even while mistaken for a lunatic, only to realise that he has a double he had been unaware of. The ruin strewn landscape of Sylvie (set in a landscape associated with Rousseau) similar emerges as a place of mistaken identities where neither the phenomenal nor the noumenal can be taken for certain; "but how could I be sure I was not merely the victim of one more illusion.. such are the chimeras that beguile and misguide us." Travelling to the Orient, Nerval found it too quotidian ("the Orient is no longer the land of marvels") and prefers his friends's opera set designs, travelling to Paris, Nerval found it a land of fantasy in contrast to British realism. His masterpiece, Aurelia, continues this: "the overflow of dream into real life... Spirit from the external world suddenly takes on the bodily shape of an ordinary woman." although at one point after a vision of the afterlife, Nerval proclaims that there is a god, he elsewhere proclaims that there is no god ("the virgin is dead and all prayers are useless... there is no god, god is no more!") and that he is god ("I myself was god, trapped in some sorry incarnation"), with the additional complication of his frequently esoteric view of religion, which has more in common with the druze than with christianity. Nerval is plagued throughout by his own double, as well as the question of whether his beloved exists as spirit or simply as a lost love, whether is insanity is precisely that or simply a form of vision. Throughout, Aurelia, opposites are overturned and nothing is left stable; everything is swallowed by the black sun.
Baudelaire's poetry reminded me of Arnold's line about "alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night." Where Arnold's response to the death of god is comparatively straightforward, Baudelaire's is considerably more complex. Since his work is essentially symbolic, the symbol always seems to lack something stable to represent so that his Hymn to Beauty asks "did you come from the depths of heaven or up from the pit?" (just as Horreur Sympathetique speaks of how "your shafts of light are the reflection of hell") suggesting that clear knowledge of the noumenal is beyond the poet. The result is that his poetry is over-signified, being replete with meaning. At times, his stance seems to be akin to that of Arnold, of a poet caught in a world without the divine (the line about "my soul tossed.. on a monstrous, shoreless sea" in The Seven Old Men having more than a passing resemblance to Dover Beach), at other times his mythology remains essentially christian ("a damned man without a lamp" in Abel and Cain) and at others he resembles Blake, feeling sympathy for the devil (in The Irremediable there is "an angel, unwary traveller tempted by the love of the misshapen... as if it were reproaching god" while in The Rebel there is "a furious angel... but the damned rebel always answers "I won't!" Finally, Abel and Cain speaks pf throwing god down upon the earth). Baudelaire's poetry owkrs by overthrowing oppositions between good and evil, beauty and ugliness, company and isolation as he writes in Crowds that "the poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able at will to be himself and someone else."
Zola's The Earth bears a surprising resemblance to Hardy's novels (Nenesse is described as being proud of his roots as if he were a tree, centering the issues of place and displacement in exactly the same way Hardy does); both situate their characters within a rural environment that is being displaced by modern industry and commerce, both present their characters in quasi-Darwinian terms of their connection to nature, and both present them in terms of their struggle for existence. Zola's propensity for biological explanations of human behaviour is dominant here, with characters repeatedly described as animals (Buteau is "like soem great carnivorous beast") while only Lequeu is seen in more environmental terms in so far as his education has left him deracinated ("a country boy who through education had become imbued with a hatred for his class. he used to brutalise his pupils who he called savages" - a hatred it should be said that Zola shares as all of the educated characters despise the peasantry). Although the novel is replete with references to the oppression of the peasantry, there is something distant too it in so far as the peasants are described as being too lazy to take any effective action. The novel accordingly lacks the political engagement in Germinal and events effectively play out their own logic without reference to the overall social context in the way that Zola's urban novels tend to. Modern innovations are frequently seen as immaterial in the country so that Hourdequin's agricultural improvements simply breakdown and avail him little in spite of his predictions that the French soil is dying of exhaustion without them. Further intimations of decline, such as talk of declining faith and the villager's indifference to the absence of a priest equally prove themselves as irrelevances as the customary pattern of things reasserts itself for reasons of nothing more than social convention.
White's A Fringe of Leaves presents an especially interesting dialectic between civilisation and nature. The protagonist and her dual identities of Ellen Guyas and Mrs Roxburgh represents both of these aspects, rendering the disjunction between individual consciousness and the environment in the novel rather inconsistent. On the one hand, the novel depicts women as vulnerable and dependent on men; the murder of Garnet Roxburgh's and Chance's wives, while it is the modern Eve (the title being an implied reference to Genesis), Ellen, who best survives the expulsion from Eden, as her civilised husband is killed. The novel seems to constantly refer to Pygmalion; Ellen is both rescued from her wild early life by her husband but later comes to depend on that part of her nature after the shipwreck.
Niedzviecki's Hello, I'm Special presents an argument I have much sympathy with; that in a culture where individuality and rebellion are continually lauded as socially desirable, rebellion and individuality cease to be meaningful. Partly, Niedzviecki's concerns stem from a feeling that modern culture lacks a means to engender consent, but the argument seems confused on this score; the rebels he presents living on isolated islands are surely part of the same culture of rugged individualism in the United States that goes back to Thoreau and which has its trite expression in the films and music Niedzviecki denounces, rather than being a genuine expression of something the mainstream is faking. Equally, Niedzviecki notes that religious traditionalism may be more rebellious than commonly accepted ideas of rebellion, although his arguments invariably proves sufficiently elastic than almost anything can be regarded as a manifestation of 'individualistic conformity,' even when he himself notes that modern society is both homogenous and conformist.
Food cooked: Tiramisu, Baron of Hare, Vietnamese chicken with coconut, Singapore Laksa, Chinese chicken glazed with Orange and Apple, Singapore curry, Keralan Crab Curry, Thai hot and sour duck, Javanese curry and Nasi Goreng, Pork with parsnips, pears and maple syrup, Duck Vindaloo, Vietnamese curry, Tapas (Egg stuffed with Manchego and Sardine, Flamenco eggs, crab with flaked almonds), Mustard Spiced Indian chicken, Indonesian pork with soy sauce and nasi kunung, Moroccan chicken with lemon and olives, Pearl Barley rissotto with crab, Pork Stroganoff, Romanian Duck Jubilee, Louisiana Jambalaya, Chicken Mole, Poulet al'estragon, Kefta Mkaouara, Vietnamese chicken with sweet potato curry, Thai green curry, Red Thai Curry, Italian chicken stuffed with pear and chestnut, Spaghetti with Salmon and cream, Morroccan chicken with lemon and honey, Lamb tagine with ras el hanout, Vietname duck with nuts and dates.Labels: Art, England, Food, Horror, Individuality, Literature, London, Victorian
posted by Richard 7:40 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
Sunday, July 30, 2006
I began by walking through Battersea Park, a beautiful place next to the ruined towers of the power station. The park has been richly planted with cycads, banana trees, tree-ferns, pampus grass and bamboo, which provide a suitably defamiliarised setting for Hepworth and Moore sculptures. A heron looked out over one of the lakes while coots nest next to the shorelines (and an odd pochard duck, with a brown head and deep red eyes). Apparently, the park is having a duck race tomorrow. In time, I arrive at the peace pagoda, a wonderful contrast of white Portland stone, gold Buddha statues and dark Canadian fir. Crossing back into North London via the Albert bridge, I pass by Chelsea Old Church (and Hans Sloane's tomb) and Crosby Hall before walking up to the Albert Hall. Today's Prom consists of Wagner's Meistersingers, Barber's lyrical Knoxville and Prokofiev's music for Alexander Nevsky. As a piece, it seemed to me to illustrate some of the problems with Soviet realism; though this is clearly a composer of the same period as Weill and Bartok much of the tone is nonetheless familiar with Borodin and Mussorgsky.
Following a walk to watch the Pelicans in St James Park (descendents of a gift bequeathed by the Russian Ambassador to Charles the Second) around the Jewel Tower and a visit to the top of Westminster Cathedral's bell tower (which did rather confirm many of my prejudices about London, with the most beautiful buildings obscured by modern office buildings; Nelson's Column was barely visible, for example), I arrived at Cadogan Hall. Formerly a church (though its tower rather resembles a minaret), it combines gothic and celtic revival designs (especially in the stained glass) with art-deco sensibilities. The interior is beautifully light and airy and I settled down in the pews for a performance of two of Bach's Brandenberg Concertos and some pieces by Mozart showing the influence of such 'ancient music.' The concert, performed by the Academy of Ancient Music, was extremely pleasant before leading up to an evening performance of Janacek's Taras Bulba, Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements (derived from his wartime film music) and some Sibelius (not to my taste though Pohjola's Daughter had its moments). The following day saw more travels in London, from Temple to The Strand, before arrving at the Albert Hall for an organ recital. Mozart and Back again figured prominently, with the former represented by his Fantasy in F minor for mechanical organ. This is something of a curiosity, being written for a mechanical instrument that renders it impossible to be played as it was written (reminding me somewhat of Nyman's sonata for six fingered hands from Gattaca); this version had been adapted. Another oddity was a quietly beautiful Shostakovtch piece from The Gadfly. A Bach chorale prelude was the foremost representative of liturgical organ music, while many of the other pieces typified its use in Romantic music, such as Glazunov's Fantasy. However, the performance was very dominated by Liszt's Fantasia and Fugue on 'Ad nos, ad salutarem undam,' combining both traditions in a piece that was originally written for an instrument that was a cross between a piano and organ.
One of the advantages of the Proms is the closeness that one has to the orchestra and conductor. When the conductor happens to be John Adams, one is left with the distinct feeling that this is what it must have been like to stand next to Wagner or Stravinsky when they conducted their own works; the comparison is perhaps a little precipitate and somewhat awe-struck, but it was nonetheless rather difficult to keep out of mind. Like Barber's Knoxville, My Father Knew Charles Ives is a homage to smalltown America, pastiching the Ivesian style in its first part before proceeding to something closer to what we think of as minimalism. Pastiche also features in Harmonielehre, which draws on the romanticism of Mahler and Schoenberg, but draws it within the ambit of minimalism. Where the former normally has crescendos and glissandos while the latter only gradually and subtly varies its notes, Harmonielehre builds itself up to peak and simply remains there. The frenzied music simply holding itself at what should have been a point of climax reminded me oddly of the insistent thudding and Dionysiac quality of dance music. Finally, Adams' setting of Whitman's The Wound Dresser was especially beautiful, a poem that perfectly illustrates the gap between the homosexual and the homosocial.
The Kandinsky exhibition at the Tate proved unusual; while much modern art is centred on Western Europe, he is the only Russian representative of note. At first, the patterns in his work appear essentially chaotic, like a surrealist Rorschach test but stochastic is probably the better term as it becomes clear what the patterns represent (angels of judgement, icons, halos, crosses etc). Influenced by muscians like Wagner and Schoenberg, by ethnographic study of peasant art, like Blake, Kandinsky has constructed a private symbolic language in his work, introducing religious symbolism into an otherwise abstract form in an attempt to perceive the inscape of things (many of his paintings suggesting patterns like butterflies, birds or even musical notation). However, unlike abstract art, his work retains depth of field and perspective. Kandinsky's opposite is the protestant, reductionist style of Modigliani, whose portraits, like those of Lempicka, are conventional in how they depict their subjects (though influenced by Cubism, he never fragmented his figures, merely distorted them). Unlike her, his work has a mask-like, impersonal, ritualistic quality to it, like the Benin bronzes. As in Byzantine art, the eyes are striking, often with the 'windows to the soul' blanked out, missing their pupils. Equally, they often retain a disturbing intensity, as the viewer is directly stared at.
Shostakovitch's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk makes subtle changes to the original novella that leave one wondering if Stalin's verdict of 'muddle, not music' might not have been correct. To accommodate the ill-defined idea of Soviet realism, Shostakovitch satirises and dehumanises all the characters into contemptible vermin except the heroine, Katya. But he fails to turn Katya into a rebel against bourgeois society, fails to overturn her betrayal by her working-class lover, and his tendency to satirise authority figures cannot have endeared him to the totalitarian regime. Had Katya been beated and oppressed, she could have become a tragic heroine in the way Shostakovitch appears to have intended but without that the lack of sympathy for the other characters simply leaves the text unabalanced between tragedy and satire, a combination that works for the music but not the text. The opera was preceded by a screening of Kozintzev's film of Hamlet (where the music was written by Shostakovitch to a screenplay by Pasternak), its black and white eloquently emphasising the melancholy of the play to the same sort of effect as Kurosawa's Throne of Blood. Kozintzev fills the play with fire and water imagery, placing scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses on the castle walls. In tragedy, fate is normally an ineluctable entity; Oedipus and Orestes have already had their destiny cast for them; it only remains for them to fulfil it. For Shakespeare, living in an age whose metaphysical certainties had been upturned by state decree, no such conviction is possible. His characters instead defy augury, dramatising their consciousness and examining their own roles. Hamlet is the overreacher, the machiavel, the fool and the wronged hero, failing to become, as Eliot had it, a clear objective correlative for the events of the play.
Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther presents an interesting dialectic between Romantic ideas of nature and rationalist ideas. Werther speaks of "my resolve to keep to Nature alone in future. Only Nature has inexhaustible riches, and only Nature creates a great artist." Nonetheless he also later reverts to a less idealised conception of nature when he writes; "Nature, which has brought forth nothing that does not destroy both its neighbour and itself." Werther's fall is characterised by his loss of feeling for nature (though the editor speaks of Werther's 'natural powers' being confounded) but it equally suggests that Nature has a dual role within the novel. When debating with Albert he defends the Romantic individual against the contempt of the mundane masses, only to be told; "a man wholly under the influence of his passions has lost his ability to think rationally,"before Albert states that suicide is simply a display of weakness where fortitude was called for.
Rather perversely, La Dame Aux Camelias reminded me of Anne Bronte's The Tenant of the Wildfell Hall, not in terms of any novel attitude towards gender but in terms of its belief that the sinner is inevitably brought back to the path of salvation, with Marguerite repeatedly being described as saint-like before her eventual martyrdom; "to any woman whose education has not imparted knowledge of goodness, god opens up two paths to it; these are suffering and love." Nonetheless, the novel denies the possibility of redemption within Marguerite's life; she dies as surely as a sinner condemned to the fires of hell.
Thucydides's The Pelopennesian War presents some interesting challenges to conventional views of the ancient world. Firstly, that for all of the antipathy towards Persia, the Spartans were as willing to ally themselves with Persia as they had been to ally themselves with Athens at Marathon. Secondly, that it was largely Athenian imperialism rather than Spartan militarism that led to the war.
In the case of a figure like Pythagoras it is comparatively easy to distinguish his theorems from the religious credo that were formulated to prove. In the case of Plato, whose thought uses the principles of logic in the service of a view that sees philosophy as an essentially ascetic and religious function (a means of purging onself of the corruptions of the body), the matter is not so easy. I tend to regard Plato in the same manner as I do Paul or Augustine; as a dreadful mistake. Through christianity, Plato produced a philosphical tradition that disdained empirical experimentation and observation in favour of a focus on the causes of causes (i.e. the forms), disdained the body as a prison and which distinguished itself in opposition to sophistry's concern with descriptions of the world that meet our needs rather than conceptions of absolute truth. Socrates repeatedly scorns those who deal in paradox, viewing their arguments as being concerned with power rather than with truth, but is far from reluctant to marshall sophistical violence in his own arguments.
For example, within Euthyphyro, Socrates deconstructs good and evil into unknowable categories in order to lay blame on Euthyphyro for having laid a case against his own father for the death of a slave (an argument that leaves him open to the modern accusation that he is indifferent to the fate of anyone who was not a citizen. Conversely, in the Phaedo the claims of duty to the law and the state are absolute and transcend those of kin and friendship (equally, the product of a view that placed such emphasis on the role of the philosopher-king and none on the autonomous subject). Nonetheless, Plato regards philosophy as a process rather than a doctrine, suggesting in Phaedrus, that reading philosophy is a poor second to doing it; one can reject a conclusion, but it is much harder to reject a process of imaginative expansion.
Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation is essentially predicated on the argument that "Western man may be said to have been undergoing a massive sensory anesthesia.. with modern art functining as a form of shock therapy for both confounding and closing our senses." Rejecting the idea of naturalism, Sontag sees art as a means of conveying sensation rather than of imparting information. Her Notes on Camp advocate stylised art as a means of obectifying content. Conversely, criticism should not concern itself with content and hermeneutics but with form and the erotics of art. In practice, what this aesthetic translates into varied considerably; the objectified films of Bresson and Goddard with their lack of concern for personality on the one hand and the more convulsive work of Artaud on the other. The difficulty with her work is that she had essentially minsinterpreted the spirit of her age, which was better described in Debord's The Society of the Spectacle as not suffering from sensory deprivation but from a veritable surfeit of images; "the ever more triumphant values of consumer capitalism promote--indeed, impose--the cultural mixes and insolence and defense of pleasure that I was advocating for quite different reasons," as she wrote in a later preface.
Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake posits a world where genetic engineering is used to root out the most aggressive aspects of human nature, creating a new species and leading to the extinction of the old. Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island follows a similar path, though Houellebecq disdain's Atwood's 'ecologism,' seeing nature as a far more resilient force than human civilisation. Instead, he is concerned with what could be called the engineering of the psyche. Houellebecq cites Peirce in identifying personality and memory, identifying language as the conduit of memory, leaving open the issue of how language can be unbiased and objective (much of the text shows the cloned ancestors of the contemporary characters writing commentaries on their predecessors and attempting to cross-reference them to establish the truth; often failing totally to understand the inherently alien emotions being expressed). His ancestor is later to cite Godel in opposition to the rather mechanistic view of the self being developed. This immediately leads to the difficulty of establishing the unbiased conditons; the central character of Daniel begins the text by complaining of being mistaken for a humanist or a progressive (he later calls himself a rightwing anarchist, although in practice, much of what he achieves throughout the text is precisely that, the sort of progress familiar from Comte and positivism). Accordingly, Daniel spends much of the text advancing a cause that will lead to the extinction of desire in the interests of gaining a form of Buddhist serenity, whiel still fiercely pursuing both love and desire. Equally, Daniel follows his discourse on Peirce by noting that much of his memory, such as why he married his first wife, has simply been erased.
The Elohminite movement depicted in the novel itself rests upon a number of internal contradictions, particularly in the way it depends on a consumer society that turns youth into a commodity that can be indefinitely preserved only for this expectation to be inevitably disappointed. Its force depends entirely on what it opposes, just as Daniel's career depends on the sensibilities it deliberately provokes and outrages; "if the fluidification of forms of behaviour required by a developed economy was incompatible with a normative catalogue of restrained conduct, it was perfectly suited to a celebration of the will and ego". The consequence of this ambiguity is that the new species of neohumans find themselves leaving the calm of their habitations and exploring a post-nuclear wasteland inhabited by savage humans for whom the collapse of civilisation has been total and complete. The neohumans are both revolted by these creatures (the culture of the mind being impossible in a society locked into struggles for existence) while remaining unsatisfied by their own lack of will and consequent stagnation. As a species they achieve nothing and their lack of suffering effectively leaves them as an evolutionary dead-end.
Orwell's novels often depict the fall of a cause and the hero that propounded it, as in Burmese Days and 1984. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Orwell appears to be attempting, like Forster in Howard's End, to write a modern Victorian novel which values ideals of discipline and humility rather than individuality or non-comformism; "Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning anymore except failure and success." Gordon's defeat is as total as Winston's (especially given his comments about how it is women that force men to live by the money-code) but it would strain the novel to read it in the same terms as 1984 (as much as it would read to read The Taming of the Shrew as a parable of abuse or Shylock as a tragic victim). The same depiction of the udnerworld that animates Hamsun's Hunger simply manifests itself as petulance here. It also casts an odd light on Orwell's socialism, with him describing it as youthful fixation when "one can't see the hook for the stodgy bait." The character of Ravelston, is depicted as using a vaguely defined socialism as a lifestyle (where Gordon describes socialism as Huxley's Brave New World), something he can afford but others cannot; when matters are pressed his "class instinct" simply revert.
Mark Twain's Roughing It is a revisionist account of the American Dream, covering all aspects of the mythology of westwards migration (Indians, outlaws and gold mining, for example) through to his travels to Hawaii. However, in spite of rejecting his own misspent youth and the romanticisation of the West (instead depicting it as uncomfortable, lawless, unstable and dangerous) he remains far from immune on that score; "we are descended from desert lounging Arabs and countless ages of growth towards civilisation have failed to root out of us the nomadic instinct. We all confess to a gratified thrill at the prospect of camping out." Equally, his account of one outlaw finds him admiring his "splendid courage" and "peerless bravery." Nonetheless, Twain's astringent brand of realism is not without its attendant problems, particularly in his depiction of the Indians; "if perchance I had been over-estimating the Red-Man, while viewing him through the moonshine of romance... left him treacherous, filthy and repulsive." Twain has no time for the idea of the noble savage but is perhaps not entirely prejudiced in this regard. His account of the Mormons often treats them in the same terms, depicting them as "ignorant, simple, of an inferior order of intellect," and perfidious in their attempts to disguise the massacre of a hundred and twenty people as the work of Indians. Conversely, he praises the disenfranchised Chinese community for their industry and diligence. Nonetheless, his travels in the wake of Captain Cook form the greatest source of interest on this score. Describing the native transition from paganism and scarifice to christianity, Twain writes "the missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and makes them permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and blissful a place Heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there." Twain appears to be somewhat affected by romantic primitivism after all, in spite of an acute awareness of the previous practice of human sacrifice and his statement that "the benefit conferred upon this people by the missionaries is so prominent, so palpable," in recognition of their ending tyranny, sacrifice and war (while noting that the native population had plummeted since the introduction of christianity). Finally, Twain makes an especially interesting comment about Captain Cook; "plain unvarnished history takes the romance out of Captain Cook's assassination and renders a deliberate verdict of justifiable homicide." Cook is seen as both treacherous and ruthless in his dealings with the natives.Labels: Art, Flora, History, Literature, London, Music, Philosophy, Theory
posted by Richard 7:33 AM
Sunday, June 25, 2006
The Great Exhibition of 1851 was the expression of a society at the zenith of its prosperity and power. Paxton's Crystal Palace was a huge iron goliath with over a million feet of glass, containing such industrial exhibits as the jacquar loom, courts depicting the history of art and architecture from ancient Egypt through the Renaissance as well as exhibits from imperial territories like India and Austrialia. Major concerts were held in the Palace's huge arched Centre Transept, which also contained the world's largest organ. The central transept also housed a circus and was the scene of daring feats by world famous acts such as the tightrope walker Blondin. The Crystal Palace itself was almost outshone by the park in which it stood, which contained a magnificent series of fountains (the water pumped through a set of towers designed by Brunel) and the park's original trees.
Today, it is a rather different matter. What Mayhew described as the glass hive burned down in the thirties; all that remains are a set of empty terraces, the sort of enigma that would leave archaeologists with endless speculation. Some architecture has within it the potential for decay and ruin; the ruins of the gothic St Dunstan in the East wear their decay as if they had never been anything else, while the baroque ruins of Christchurch Greyfriars are decidedly ill at ease with their decline. The terraces of the Crystal Palace clearly fall into the former category, with headless statues gracing the steps and Sphinxes guarding the entrance way to nothingness. Based on the designs of ruined Egyptian temples, the Sphinxes seem entirely at home with their place amidst overgrown oak trees. Behind the trees, a BBC transmitter now lords it over the empty spaces of the park. A nearby lake provides a home for lillies, a family of coots with their shrill young and a heron.
One part of the exhibition was sufficiently at a distance to be spared destruction; the nearby dinosaur park, an exhibition of prehistoric reptiles and mammals, and examples of geology, spanning 350 million years of Britain’s evolution (all rather reminiscent of Conan Doyle's lost world). The park was conceived by Richard Owen as part of the same project that led to the founding of the Natural History Museum. Amongst eminent Victorians, Owen was especially striking. Having identified a giant fossil bird from New Zealand (the Moa) from a tiny fragment of fossilized bone alone and inventing the term 'dinosaur,' he nonetheless became notorious for opposing the theory of evolution. Famously, he hosted an extravagant party in the belly of a reconstructed Iguanodon at the park. Recently, the park has been restored and is now planted with tree ferns and monkey puzzle trees, along with azaleas and Australian bottlebrush, making it a minor botanical garden. Water birds nest inbetween the paws of the dinosaurs and another heron guards the shore line. Infant swans and coots cluster by the side of the water in the expectation of bread. A cormorant preens itself and stretches its wings in the centre of the lake. The dinosaurs themselves are easily as impressive as the skeletons in the central hall of the Natural History Museum, albeit subject to certain inaccuracies (the placing of the Iguanodon's thumb spike on its nose, placing of Megalosaurus on four legs or the turning of Dicynodon into a tortoise-like animal); though it should be remembered that such problems persist to this day (e.g. the discovery of feathered dinosaurs in China).
Ruskin was apparently often in the habit of journeying out from his home in Herne Hill to visit Dulwich Picture Gallery in order to reconfirm his prejudices against Baroque art and leave feeling "encouragingly disgusted." It's difficult not to sympathise with opprobrium against a period characterised by the trivialities of Watteau and Fragonard, Italian propaganda of the Counter-Reformation or the stately but arid paintings of Gainsborough and Kneller. A post-romantic sensibility is inevitably likely to struggle somewhat with this period. Nonetheless, the gallery does contain rather more than Ruskin gave it credit for, especially its collection of Dutch paintings. From a period when Holland had formed a society that was the prototype of everything Europe was to become (liberal democratic, mercantile and tolerant), its paintings were intended for private consumption rather than for ecclesiastical display, opening a space that allowed for a new form of art. Aelbert Cuyp's pastoral scenes were to be greatly influential on artists like Constable but were also to lead to a more proto-romantic sensibility in artists like Ruisdael (the same applyig De Velde's maritime paintings, intended to show the trading status of the Dutch nation). Still-life and landscape became more prominent as genres, historical and allegorial paintings, less so. Rembrandt's paintings denoted a move towards a focus on the individual and the interior life. A particularly Gerrit Dou painting shows a marked move from allegory to realism. The gallery also has a number of striking pictures in other sections; a Canaletto painting of Venice, Claude's equally proto-romantic Arcadian scenes or Reni's Caravaggioesque St Sebastian.
Otherwise, what is most of interest about the gallery is its status as a combined art collection and mausoleum (a form of modern Pantheon, like that of Canova, or a return to the style of cemetery originally found on the Via Appia before they were banished to necropolises outside Rome). The paintings in the gallery are effectively a form of grave good, no different to works found in Egyptian or Viking tombs. The gallery was the work of Sir John Soane and reflect an interest in funerary architecture that is also on display with his own tomb in St Pancras Cemetery and reflects his typically pagan style, placing Roman funerary urns on the outside of the mausoluem. Unhindered by practical considerations, funerary building was to prove an ideal area for architects to experiment with novel forms. Although a classicist in style (regarding himself as a latter-day Etruscan tomb-builder and brininging an Egyptian Sarcophagus of Seti into his house at Lincoln's Inn Fields as well as a monk's tomb, based on gothic arches from Westminster), Soane's ideas for a funerary architecture based in gardens and parks (the Elysian necropolis) were to form the basis of the rather more gothic Victorian garden cemeteries. Previously, churchyard burial had been considered as low status in comparison to the monuments found within churches and abbeys, a shift that was encouraged by the Napoleonic wars creating a need for large martial, public monuments.
Of all the Victorian cemeteries, Brookwood comes closest to having reverted to nature. The stretches of its heathes are filled with heathers and ferns interspersed with sequoia and cedar. This wild aspect is particularly odd as it was also the most modern, with the cemetery's railway bringing in coffins from London. In 1854, Brookwood was the largest cemetery in the world, and is accordingly filled with the customary Victorian angels and funeral urns. But it is also became home to other religions, from Swedish Evangelicals to Muslims. The Zoroastrian section is by far the most impressive though,with stone torches, Persian tiling and ornate tombs that are worthy of Highgate.
I've also recently been to Chelsea Physic Garden, which was founded in 1673, as the Apothecaries' Garden, chosen for its the proximity to the Thames and for a warm microclimate that allowed the survival of many non-native plants - such as the largest outdoor fruiting olive tree in Britain, pomegranates and bananas. The area was already famed for gardens and orchards owned by the likes of Thomas More and was used as a means of growing and studying medicinal plants (though the garden also now has plants like cotton, woad and madder), evolving in time into what we would now recognise as a botanical garden (the cedar of Lebanon was first cultivated in Britain here and its heated glasshouse was the first in Europe). The garden presents its specimins through a number of taxonomies; species (the fernery), geography (North America and Madeira), type (monocotyledons or dycotyledons), usage (Belladona for optics, Valerian for sleep, Digitalis for heart convulsions, Castor Oil Plant for skin conditions as well as curiosities like Mandrake and Mandragora), history (traditional kitchen gardens and exhbitions on the work of Joseph Banks on species like Australian Bottlebrush; Banks also brought back volcanic lava from Iceland for the central fountain) and a garden of world medicine, discussing Maori, Indian and Zulu uses of plants. This last section does have a certain romanticisation of the primitive to it, particularly given that research found that the tribal use of Madagascan periwinkle to treat diabetes was wholly ineffective though the plant did have a marked effect in laying waste to white blood cells. Whereas most gardens rely on sight as the main sense to appreciate them with, flowers are less common here but a thick scent pervades the air as bees, butterflies, and dragonflies flash cut through it. A wollemi pine is on display within one of the greenhouses.
A city like Amsterdam functions as a whole, lacking the grandiose monuments of other cities but rather creating its effect through an accretion of small details. London is quite the reverse, a grey and dirty concrete city, which is nonetheless relieved by the presence of small spots of beauty. One such is St Pancras Cemetery. This was once the churchyard of a village outside London, but urban expansion drew it increasingly within the cemtery. Then came the Midlands railway, arriving by St Pancras Chambers and cut through the graveyard. The then young architect Thomas Hardy was appointed to clear it and instead of stacking the headstones in a corner or cementing them into footpaths, he gathered them round the base of a tree. The Hardy Tree remains as a testament to the dead in the cemetery, as the railway goes through its second expansion. It also retains its mythic aspect, reminding one of that other ash tree, Ygdrasil, with the headstones bearing a grisly resemblance to roots. The cemetery now is more like a park, albeit filled with the more impressive monuments remaining. Foremost amongst these is the Soane Mausoleum, a classical structure that seems to reach back to the times when St Pancras was the site of a pagan compitum rather than a place dedicated to a christian martyr. Elsewhere, the cemetery contains the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft (and it was by this that Shelley first saw Mary Godwin) and the a sundial as a memorial to Angela Burdett-Coutts (in memory of the important people who had been buried near the church, and whose graves had been disturbed by the encroachments of the Midland Railway). The church itself is largely Victorian but does contain a beautiful Blomfield reredo.
From there, I went to the city, to the church of St Giles at Cripplegate (sitting on a moated island within the impenetrable fortress of the Barbican) and to St Botolph's Bishopgate. The churchyard there is especially noteworthy for containing one of the last Victorian Turkish Baths (though why something most likely to have been used by gay men should have been there rather puzzles me). From thence, I left the city and travelled to Westminster and to the cathedral there. This is perhaps a rather odd area, housing the Anglican Abbey, the Methodist Central Hall as well as the Roman Catholic Cathedral. Modelled on the Haghia Sophia so as not to compete with the Abbey, the Cathedral's Byzantine design compares oddly to Pugin's ambition to re-anglicise Catholicism by emphasising its gothic heritage, as with his church at Cheadle (particularly given the way the Cathedral dwells on English saints like Alban, Bede, Edmund, Cuthbert, Winifrid and, rather less convincingly, George, as well as martrys persecuted during and after the reformation, such as Thomas More). Much of the interior is simply blackened brick (still awaiting its mosaics; in this sense it is as incomplete as the Sagrada Familia) but with the lower areas given up to rich marbles and vividly colourful mosaics. Many of these follow Byzantine conventions but one of Boris Antrep depicted them in the style of his native Russia, against pink rather than gold. Work still contines; as I was there a mosaic was laid out on the floor waiting to be put in place in one of the side chapels. Finally, I walked to the Inigo Jones Banqueting House. To some extent this was a disappointment; the exterior had actually been redesigned by Soane whilke the introduction of murals onto the ceiling by Rubens also substantiually changes the building, preventing it from being used for masques.
The half-timbered gateway to the church of St Bartholomew the Great shows the saint wielding the knife with which he is thought to have been flayed (not inappropriately so; the feast day in his name was commemorated by Vlad Dracul impaling thirty thousand Transylvanians). Through the gate, there is an odd sight; the remains of the medieval church, a Victorian tower and heind it the modern Barbican tower. The interior is largely Norman and its blackened stones and dark transepts provide a strange contrast to the gleaming portland stone of the English baroque more commonly associated with London churches (even Southwark Cathedral's stone is a light honey colour that seems to glow in the light). Only a set of painted monument statues relieve the darkness.
Walking past the Old Bailey and the dark tower of St Sepulchre-Without-Newgate, to Postman's Park. St Botolph Aldergate, completed in 1791, has a late-Georgian exterior. The church is most noted for its churchyard, Postman's Park. Filled with tree ferns and a pleasant fountain, this is nonetheless as important a representation of the Victorian interest in death as Highgate or Kensal Green. Established by the Pre-Raphaelite painter GF Watts, one park walls is lined with tiles that serve as monuments to various people that were deemed to have died heroically, typically saving others from either fire or water. As an example of heroes and hero-worship it encapsulates both a Victorian instinct for egalitarianism and for sentimentality. Onwards again, to the ruins of Christchurch Greyfriars. Like St Dunstan in the East, this church was destroyed in the blitz. Where St Dunstan's gothic ruins are now filled with lush and exotic growths, Christchurch's more stately baroque remains are now home to rose gardens. Walking back past St Nicholas Abbey with its boat-shaped weathervane, St Dunstans in the West, the Daily Telegraph building and Charing Cross, I arrived at the Coliseum for a performance of Nixon in China by John Adams.
As a musical style, minimalism has tended to conflate Eastern influences with more popular Western styles, like Jazz, so it is an appropriate vehicle for an opera dealing with the rapprochement of West and East. Following the Second World War, the United States had refused to recognise China, instead conferring legitimacy on the exiled government in Taiwan. Nixon's state visit enabled the US to drive a wedge between Russia and China, and inaugurated a policy of detente that has led to China's re-emergence as an economic power, to the point where it has become quite easy to envisage it overtaking the US itself. The opera recognises this, depicting Map as seeing the demise of all he had worked for before him and alternately lauding how 'the pople are the heroes now' before condemning the collective violence of the Cultural Revolution. Act four in particular, where the Nixons attend The Red Detachment of Women, an opera written by Madame Mao, shows the Nixons responding to the downtrodded heroine but repulsed by the violence used to liberate the proletariat and the ideological conformity behind it. The Nixon's poor background is stressed against Madame Mao's elitism, while the opera repestedly seeks to both counterpoint and undermine right/left distinctions (Nixon and Mao agree that it is only the right that can act). Since both Nixon and Mao were adept manipulators of public opinion the opera seeks to portray the private persona, frequently embodied in Pat Nixon and Chiang Ch’ing.
Thomas Mann journeyed from bourgeois conservative to liberalism and his novels trace a not dissimilar path from from the social realism of Buddenbrooks to the symbolism of The Magic Mountain. Like Joyce in Ulysses, Mann has the real world of a sanatorium in the Alps shadowed by the mythic, with his protagonist entering the underworld in the same manner as Orpheus, Dante, Aeneas and Odysseus. Nonetheless, the novel often slips between realism and symbolism (most obviously with the depiction of a seance where Hans meets his dead cousin Joachim, meeting the dead literally rather than figuratively). The sanatorium represents something akin to Wagner's Venusberg or Spenser's Bower of Bliss, with the death instinct displacing love. However, the symbolism is uncertain; firstly symbols like the lindenbaum form an unclear objective correlative (not unlike Kafka in this respect, the tree of life is a symbol of death, resurrection, life the transcending of time into an epiphany). The mountain itself is revealed as a Freudian symbol by Dr Krokowski; "whoever recognises a symptom of organic disease as an effect of the conscious soul-life of forbidden and hystericised emotions recognises the creative force of the psychical within the material - a force which one is inclined to claim as a second source of magic phenomena." Krokowski sees disease as a physical manifestation of the psychic, forming the magic as much as references to Nietzsche's Zauberberg. Ilness, in Sontagian terms is clearly a metaphor but although she saw the novel as storehouse of the early-twentieth century metaphorical thinking, the nature of that metaphor remains elusive (tubercolisis clearly represents more than romantic wasting) but the wider implications In Memories, Dreams and Reflections , Jung saw mountains as symbolic of life, writing that "this is it, my world, the real world, the secret, where there are no teachers, no schools, no unanswerable questions, where one can be without having to ask anything." The inversion of the mountain and the underworld, life and death suggests how unstable symbols within the novel can be. Although the novel is essentially a bildungsroman, the development of Hans Castorp essentially takes place bu touching the ineffable through dreams and music.
The uncertainty of the symbolism also applies to the role of the characters in a manner that is profoundly dialogic, characteristic of the novel's polyphony. For example, some of the Berghof's denizens, such as Joachim, do not conform to the pattern of the symbolism and instead follow the course one would expect in a realist novel; Joachim feels trapped and imprisoned, not seduced by the Berghof, with his death being due to his escape from it. The oppositions between the differing characters can be read as being both Apollonian and Dionysian, German Culture and French Civilisation. Mann had previously emphatically endorsed Culture and the Apollonian only to later recant, but nonetheless Joachim's military honour and steadfast obedience remain the virtues of the Germany that Mann had turned his back on ("War is necessary. Without war the world would soon go to rot"). Similar difficulties pertain to the others; Settembrini is identified with reason and humanism, the form of positivism ridiculed by Nietzsche and exposed by Naptha as being both transcendental and aristocratic. In the other instance, Naptha is identified with nihilism and romanticism, accordingly somewhat closer to Mann's thought but nonetheless identified with the death instinct. Castorp's dreams suggest both are a destructive force whose positions frequently cease to be stable opposites and converge. Their duel proves the point but the via media of the earthy and sensual advocate of the Dionysian and Eastern gay science condemned by Settembrini and Naptha alike, Peeperkorn proves an equally dead-end with his suicide. Since the novel repeatedly imbricates life, love and death as concepts, each philosophy (with philosophy after all being concerned with being rather than its converse) within the novel fails to offer a coherent and convincing account that could divert it from its thanatophilia.
Mann's Doctor Faustus raises similar issues to Bernhard's Correction in its depiction of a genius throught the mediating narration of an observer; "the highly subjectivising contrast I feel between the nature of the artist and the ordinary man.... Adrian reacted witheringly to such romantic tripe" or "all the ideas and points of view made vocal around him were present in himself." Zeitblom implicitly draws anaologies between Adrian's descent into the irrational and that of Nazi Germany (where mythical fiction must replace debate and consensus) but the parallel is never clear, with Zeitblom also defending Adrian's liturgical music against the charge of barbarism. Adrian grows to look increasingly christlike, spiritualised through suffering; "with it is an inversion of the temptation idea; in such a way that Faust rejects as temptation the thought of being saved." The scene with the devil raises the question of how literally to take the idea of damnation or whether to see it as a metaphor for artistic creation or for the author's homosexuality and Adrian's love for Rudi; "barbarism even has more grasp of theology than has a culture fallen away from cult, which even in religious has seen only culture, only the humane, never excexx, paradox, the mystic passion."
Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul is both a bildungsroman and an account of the history and architecture of his native city. Where a Western writer would typically have sought to interrelate these two themes, Pamuk alternates between them, reflecting his own preoccupation with the idea of the divided self. Pamuk writes of his childhood imagining of another Orhan living in the same city, of seeing his myriad other selves reflected in the mirror, of his father's other life in another flat and of his dual perception of his city as its inhabitatant and under his own westernised eyes so that he comes to see it as a foreigner. The New Life depicts the idea of the transcendent as something disruptive and traumatic that causes people to fall away from their path in life and to encounter death. Pamuk writes that the novel is an unfamilar form, that rather being like Chekhov, writing of the pain and dignity of being alive "instead, like a writer from the East let me take the opportunity to tell a cautionary tale. In short, I had desired to set myself apart from others." Reality is dispersed and fractured, with characters taking on new identities from the dead and establishing new ones as doubles of the deceased; "I used to be someone else once and that someone used to desire to become me." As such, the novel casts its attempts to discern patterns and symbols (few of the characters use anything other than pseudonyms while the line between accident and design is continually unclear) into a cohesive whole through a series of characters, like Doctor Fine's attempts to preserve collective memory in certain objects (" if that were true flea markets would be bathed in spiritual enlightenment" ) like watches. Like the angel, Fine deplores the printing press against the written word but sees the cult as both un-Turkish and un-Islamic and therefore Western. The novel constantly aspires to allegory but is always frustrated.
In the style of Lucretius, Ovid's Metamorphoses concludes with a speech given by Pythagoras; "our souls are immortal and are ever received into new homes... everything is in a state of flux and comes into being as a transient appearance. " The Pythagoreans were known for their theory of Metempsychosis, the transference of souls between man and animal and between man and woman, just as Ovid depicts characters being transmogrified between species and gender. Distinguishing between the material and immaterial, many of Ovid's characters, like Aeneas, Caesar and Heracles, have their mortality burnt away, leaving their divinity. The poet himself concludes by saying that his poetry will perform a similar service for himself; "with my better part, I shall soar, undying." It's easy to see why Ovid was often read as a christian allegorist (or even Pound's "Say that I consider the writings of Confucius and Ovid's Metamorphoses the only safe guides in religion"). This dialectic between the material and immaterial is nonetheless rather problematic for Ovid, leaving the relation between the two rather uncertain; in some cases the deaths that lead to change are those of maligned innocents, in others they are punishments for crimes. The story of Arachne summarises this ambiguity, with Athena weaving a pattern of mortals guilty of hubris and Arachne depicting mortals wronged by the gods.
Daniel Defoe's A tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain is effectively the product of homo economicus; "we saw no idle hands here, but every man busie on the main affair of life, that is to say, getting money." The tour details the trade, commerce and condition of each part of the country (or in the case of Scotland, discussing its lack of trade, industry and discipline), often pausing to look at other matters but largely refusing to "meddle with the antique." Nonetheless, Defoe devotes much of his description of London in particular to lamenting the uncontrolled sprawl of the city, predicting economic collapse (occasionally citing the South Sea Bubble), decrying the mediocrity of the city's church architecture and calling for Whitehall Palace to be rebuilt in such a form as to rival Versailles.
With the return of the Proms, I once more found myself walking across Kensington Gardens to the Royal Albert Hall for the third part of the Ring cycle, Siegfried. In some senses, this continues the anti-capitalist romanticisation of the feudal past that underpins much of the ring; the love of gold destroys Mime while Siegfried is the authentic noble savage, untainted by society. Conversely, there is also something alarmingly feral about his status as ubermensch warrior, with his slaying of Fafnir being precipitate at best. This throws an interesting light upon the 'sleeping beauty' sequence with Brunnhilde, where he is emasculated by his sense of fear in her presence and she is feminised by the destruction of her armour; both experience love as weakness rather than as a civilisation of their wildness.
Jarrold and Dore's London: A Pilgrimage is structured much in the manner of a Dickens or Thackeray novel covering both the highs and lows of London society. Jarrold is quite striking when he describes life in nineteenth century London as a constant struggle for survival with each and every man fixed on commerce as his sole aim. Nonetheless, even after describing the rookeries around Westminster, his account lovingly lingers on society dinners and events before concluding with an somewhat inapposite peroration on the excellence of British charity and philanthrophy.Labels: Art, Flora, History, Literature, London, Music, Victorian
posted by Richard 7:31 AM
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Eliot had it right; April truly is the cruellest month, bearing the promise of light and warmth only to dash such hopes. Between overcast skies and bright sunlight, little middle ground has been offered this year. Arriving in Tamworth, I walked over the river Tame to the base of the hill surmounted by the town's castle. This wooded area is home to a statue of Aethelfleda, the daughter of Alfred the Great and ruler of Mercia, who rebuilt the town after the Danes destroyed it. Walking past the somewhat fanciful recreation of the castle's battlements and into the town, the first thing I met is the marketplace where a statue of Robert Peel stands in front of the town hall. Beyond this lies St Editha's Church, named after a saint that interceded with the Norman Lord Marmion to preserve the town's convent. Norman arches remain clearly visible in the fabric of a thirteenth century church filled with stained glass by Ford Maddox Brown while the dark wood ceiling is beautifully studded with gold patterns.
Shugborough was essentially built on the proceeds of piracy, with a British admiral capturing a Spanish ship and its gold cargo. Given that, some of the rooms accordingly show a taste for the exotic. One room is filled with Chinese porcelain, mirror paintings and cabinets in what Chippendale believed to be a Chinese style. Others are painted with pictures of ruins, mostly Roman but intermingled with the occasional gothic spire or pyramid, in contrast to the elaborately plastered Vassalli ceilings. I was also rather taken with the library, where the door is lined with fake books to conceal its presence. The grounds are similarly dotted with ruins and fake follies. One, a quaint imitation of The Temple of the Winds, is incongruously complete with stained glass and gothic gargoyles. Sudbury Hall is more of an oddity. Built in the Carolean period, the Dutch cupola on its hipped roof is the only contemporary aspect of its architecture. The rest is more Jacobean in style, with red and grey bricks arranged in quincunx patterns. The interior is much the same, boasting a wooden staircase, wooden carvings and a long gallery, filled with paintings by Wright and Kneller, whose ceiling is plastered in a more Carolean style, seeming to be alive with grasshoppers, boars and other animals. The grounds were changed to suit later tastes, and formal gardens were replaced with a lake and natural vistas.
Elsewhere, Calke Abbey lives up to its reputation rather poorly. Often described as a time capsule, there is no doubting the historical authenticity of the house contents but there is considerable doubt as to their interest. Put unkindly, the house is largely filled with the sort of objects no-one would wish to retain and which only remain because they could not be auctioned. The exterior of the building is unimaginatively neo-classical while the interior demonstrates that its owner's principal interests were less concerned with aesthetics and more concerned with destruction; room after room is filled with stuffed animals. The most interesting room houses case after case of fossils, geological curios, even an alligator skull. However, for the most part of the cold and decaying rooms seem to have little former grandeur to have The nearby medieval church is perhaps more interesting, as are the gardens (planted with period vegetables, even down to clay jars to force rhubarb), cavernous ice house and heated peach house (incongruously painted in blue).
The entrance to the Barber Institute is every bit as idiosyncratic as that of the Vienna secession, with traditional herringbone brickwork matching the jagged art-deco patterns on the doors. The heraldic crests on either side form an equally traditional contrast to the fluid modern lines of the rest of the building, while Birmingham University clock lours overhead. The inside is similarly modern, all gleaming marble and wood. The initial rooms present excellent works by Rossetti, Whistler, Gauguin, Derain and Magritte interspersed with such objects as Chinese cloisonne drinking cups, German unicorn models, Shiva statues and such objects as the head of Amenhotep. Later galleries present excellent displays of Medieval and Renaissance art but the highlight was an exhibition of art by the Norwegian painter JC Dahl. Dahl would seem to have had a predilection for moonlight scenes, drawing on the work of Vernet, Wright (the exhibition included a Wright painting of a lighthouse at night) and David Friedrich (including a painting of Pomeranian spires seen from the sea), Dahl draws such scenes as Kronborg Castle, Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples, the isle of Stege and Dresden, all exquisite works of Romanticism that parallel painters like Arkhip Kuindhzi or Atkinson Grimshaw.
Walking alongside the Birmingham-Fazeley canal, with its crumbling brickwork, weeds pressing through the cracks and decaying seventies buildings all around, was a rather disquieting experience. Nowhere more was this the case than underneath one of the railway arches, with the cavernous space beneath reminding me of the sort of thing Piranesi might have drawn. Emerging once more into the light I was confronted with St Chad's Cathedral, the first Roman-Catholic Cathedral to have been built in England since the reformation. With its two thin towers flanking its front facade, it's oddly reminiscent of Lichfield Cathedral, while the Baltic-German style chosen by Pugin seemed to take well to being transplanted into English redbrick.
Zola's Germinal presents Zola's most direct confrontation of Marx and Darwin. On the one hand, Etienne asks "Was Darwin right then, was this world nothing but a struggle in which the strong devoured the weak..?" The novel accordingly questions whether Darwin is merely providing a scientific basis for inequality, and whether strength rests with capital or "if one class had to be devoured, surely the people, vigorous and young, must devour the effete and luxury loving bourgeoisie?" The novel is decidedly dialogic in its approach to this; capital does defeat the miner's strike but the ending, as implied in the novel's title, leaves open the possibility of future changes; "before the century was out there would have to be another revolution, and this time it would have to be another revolution". However, it is clear that the balance is decidedly tipped in favour of capital, something the novel balances with its satirical depiction of the owner's ignorance of the miner's condition as set against their own unconscious assumption of what is a comparatively luxurious lifestyle. Nonetheless, Zola is even-handed enough to clearly report the owner's own problems; "since the factories have been closed down one by one... in view of decreasing demand we are obliged to lower our prices. That's what the worker's simply refuse to understand." Equally, one aspect of the novel is that Zola's interest in Darwin leads him to repeatedly characterise the miner's as animals; "the placid features of the Montsou miners had lengthened into something resembling beasts." Similarly, the novel leaves open the question of environmental and heredity influences. On the one hand the miner's suffer from "unnatural postures, the stifling darkness in which they were blanched like plants in a cellar." On the other; "the crushing mould of habit pressed him a little more each day into the likeness of an automaton." Such ambiguities coalesce in the figure of Etienne and the hereditary taint he carries with him, leading to the question of whether his actions are influenced by this (as with Rassenur's observation that Etienne is leading the workers out of self-aggrandissement or Maheude's realisation that the zealotry of the Priest sounds identical to that of Etienne).
Reading Balzac's A Harlot High and Low continues many of the ambiguities from Lost Illusions. Gradually sloughing off the form of a moral fable inherited from the earlier novel as the two protagonists kill themselves, the novel broadens its canvas to consider the status of crime and society in a decidedly Brechtian manner. Although, the novel is ostensibly cast in the same mould as Crime and Punishment or Bleak House and does not hesitate to repeatedly characterise Vautrin in terms that Lombroso would have been proud of, it still contests the moral and social viewpoints implied by the nascent crime genre. Nucingen's deception is partially justified on the grounds of his own rapacity; "they offered robbers the opportunity of stripping one of the richest capitalists in France... the shark." Prostitution and theft are characterised as forms of protest against society, the latter calling property and heredity into doubt. Accordingly, Vautrin's Vidocqesque transition into head of the Surete, hailed as Corentin's equal encapsulates this critique. A further aspect of the novel is its handling of sexuality, with Vautrin's relationship with Chardon and Rastignac being seen by Proust as sexual; certainly Vautrin characterises Chardon as feminine and in need of his protection.
Gabriel Josipovici's Moo Pak presents itself as a palimpsest of the events that occurred throughout the history of Moor Park; Swift's teaching of Stella, becoming a lunatic asylum, a code-breaking centre and an institute for the study of animal language. However, unlike the intricately woven Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald, the intricate sestina promised by the author does not figure, with only Swift and animal language emerging as themes alongside disquisitions on cultural decline. Josipovici sees tradition and the individual talent as being at odds, with this cultural dislocation leading to artists turning inwards. While artists like Shakespeare depicted the overthrowing of kings to symbolise this erosion, the Romantics were only able to produce fragments. So too is Moo Pak, a novel the narrator confesses to never having written, looking instead to figures like Swift and their bridging of the romantic and the classical, depicting an individual on quest romance in a fallen world, but still looking at the world around, the bodily distortions in Gulliver's Travels being cognate with Bosch's distortions in painting.Labels: Art, England, Literature
posted by Richard 7:27 AM
Monday, March 6, 2006
Arriving in Oxford at midday, I set off to the former site of Oxford's castle and, in more recent times, its prison. The site has a grisly history; Empress Mathilda was besieged here by King Stephen in the eleventh century while its grounds proved to be filled with the corpses of executed criminals (several of whose bodies were then used for medical experiments). One tower still stands and I stumbled across it by accident in a suburban street; it was not unlike stumbling across the Burnett's secret garden.
Following this, I set off for the Christ Church Picture Gallery. Oddly, I'd never been there before and although the collection is comparatively small it was quite eclectic ranging from Russian Orthodox icons (made from metal and ceramics rather than the more high status ones that are better known) to Rysbrack sculptures, Renaissance painting and Medieval triptychs and paintings. Particular highlights were Salvator Rosa's proto-romantic (a stoic by inclination, his works show a Baroque aesthetic depicting nature in similar terms to David Friedrich) and Jacopo Bassano, a Venetian whose showed a similar use of chiascuro to Caravaggio and similar brushwork to El Greco. As ever, the colours and pigments in the medieval paintings were wonderful, though I was especially drawn to a crucifixion scene by the Master of Delft. The crowds were drawn in the same manner as Brueghel but the rich pigments, gold in particular, seemed more typical of earlier painters.
The gallery featured an exhibition of the drawings of Thomas Graham Jackson, architect of the Examination Schools and the Bridge of Sighs (and ghost-story writer), showing detailed watercolours of Italy and France and designs for Oxford (including what looked like an attempt to build a tower similar to Magdalen in Christ Church). The Bridge of Sighs proved to owe more to Mostar than Venice. Following this we went for a walk around Christ Church. I had been in the great hall before but had quite forgotten the small Alice in Wonderland figures in the stained glass. Conversely, the cathedral was something else I had missed. Highlights included the Morris and Burne Jones stained glass, an enamelled window showing Jonah underneath a fruit tree staring at a far-off city (the colours fading in the background to impart a sense of perspective), the carved wooden dragons in the choir stands and the combination of fan-vaulted gothic with later, more classicist architectural styles in the transepts.
As the evening drew on, I went to a friend's photo exhibition. The rather beautiful photos were of the Isis and the Thames, showing Willows trailing through the water, young moorhens, frozen leaves in Oxford's Botanical Gardens and boats by Magdalen bridge. As the photos were all themed around water and rivers, the evening included a recital of poetry with related themes. I especially liked Willow Poem by William Carlos Williams (who I was aware of) and The Swan by Mary Oliver (who I was not aware of).
Having mentioned the Victorian preoccupation with spiritualism with regard to Highgate, I began wondering why it was that this seemed so poorly reflected in Victorian literature. It emerges to some extent in gothic writing from Wilde to Stoker but otherwise one is left with E F Benson's demonic slugs and Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger stories. So, I was surprised to come across The Damned by JK Huysmans, a novel where such concerns are altogether more central. As a novel it reminds me of the debate as to whether realism could be described as an acute aesthetic technique for depicting both the individual consciousness and its social context or simply a way of seeing such matters that was specific to a certain class and background. The most obvious parallel is between Jane Austen (portraying the details of English provincial life in a manner typical of early realism) and Mary Shelley (portraying a range of locations in a markedly fantastic manner). Of the two, Shelley was probably the one who depicted the spirit of her age more accurately, confronting the ideals of her anarchist and feminist parents with the monsters produced by the French revolution. Much the same could be said when contrasting Huysmans with many of his naturalist contemporaries; "there was always a fundamental intellectual difference between you and other realists... you execrate the age in which you live while they adore it... sooner or later you were bound to flee the Americanisation of art." Contrasting himself with Zola and the grimly utilitarian character of his age Huysmans depicts the same sense of withdrawal to be found in Madame Bovary or Oblomov; "it's just as positivism reaches its very zenith that mysticism re-emerges."
Equally, the novel questions many of the claims made by realism, citing its obsession with crime and sensation as being little different from that of Gilles. By contrast, Huysmans leaves the novel almost as a commonplace book, lacking the artificially plotted character of much realist fiction. The novel openly foregrounds such concerns in a decidedly post-modern fashion, taking a writer working on a biography of Gilles de Rais as its protagonist and comparing de Rais with Des Esseintes. The identification with the protagonist is marked in the extreme, more resembling Isherwood than contemporary writers.
Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is perhaps best known for the author's didactic moralising against drink and dissipation but I was nonetheless impressed with how the novel depicts both an unhappy marriage and the consequences of adultery from the perspective of the other parties. Neither of these are unknown in Victorian fiction but nor are they widespread. I was also reading a seminar on How Novels Think at The Valve, I was struck by this; "where such a novel as Jane Eyre allowed the family to eclipse civil society as the symbolic means of resolving social contradictions, Dracula turns the tables and allows a radically inclusive society to render the family obsolete, ending the regime of the liberal individual." The interesting thing about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is that women are both marginalised and the guardians of the family and civil society. Bronte frequently critiques conventional assumptions about the role of women; "would you use the same argument with regard to a girl?... you would have her to be tenderly and delicately nurtured," supported by her having her heroine step outside social convention and support herself; "his idea of a wife is a thing to love one devotedly, and amuse him and minister to his comfort in every possible way." Nonetheless, the role played by Helen throughout is otherwise a conventional female one, nurturing and standing for morality and the family in contrast to the dissipation of her husband.
Reading Sir Thomas Browne's Urne Burial, I was struck by the tension between Browne's faith in christ and the resurrection on the one hand and by his antiquarian interest in such pagan habits as cremation and mummification on the other; Baconian scepticism and mysticism in one text.
Starting by visiting Great Coxwell Tithe Barn, a twelfth century structure much beloved by William Morris, who characterised it 'as beautiful as a cathedral, yet with no ostentation of the builder's art.' It's easy to see why Morris liked it so much; made from the local pinkish-grey stone, it's far larger than I had envisaged, while the elaborate purlin roof beams in the cavernous interior do indeed give it the air of a cathedral. On the other hand, Morris's tendency to romanticise the middle ages does lead him to ignoring the fact that the barn was effectively serving as an ecclesiastical tax office. The nearby church of St Giles is of a similar period, with assorted monsters still louring from the tower. The church sits at the summit of a hill and looks out over most of the Vale of the White Horse.
Arriving at Buscot Park, I began by walking around the grounds, designed in the 1930s in a formal Italianate style by Harold Peto. I have to admit that his style struck me as rather austere and uncongenial, excepting some more imaginative follies like a pair of Egyptian statues guarding the entrance to a sunken garden. The house itself was rather more impressive; the entrance hall was flanked by porphyry columns and contained black and gold furniture designed in an Egyptian style (this seemed something of a theme and was apparently fashionable after Nelson had won the Battle of the Nile, with alabaster canopic jars dotted round the rooms, as well as the first example of a Wedgewood canopic jar that I've seen or am likely to), with the rest of the design being more influenced by Boulle marquetry. The green room next to it contained a range of Dutch paintings, including one Rembrandt (and a surprisingly tolerable Rubens), Qing vases and Dutch designed cabinets decorated with red-stained tortoiseshell. This led to a red dining room, which contained two landscapes paintings by William Lambert that were very evidently drawing upon Claude's work.
Next was something more impressive; four large Burne-Jones paintings depicting the story of sleeping beauty, set into a gold frieze lining the room and with additional smaller panels continuing the narrative inbetween the paintings. Everything else in the room fitted with the gold colouration, excepting some turquoise Kangxi vases. Later rooms continued the Pre-Raphaelite theme by including a Rossetti painting of Pandora's box, GF Watts' paintings of Pygmalion and The Judgement of Paris and a Ford Madox Brown painting of the resurrection, which was Pre-Raphaelite in the original sense of the term, down to the saint's halos. Most striking was Lord Leighton's painting of Daedalus and Icarus, one of the very few depictions of male figures in Pre-Raphaelite painting (following my previous observations of his painting of Klytemnestra). A painting in the style of Salvator Rosa showed a set of proto-romantic ruins (albeit of classical structures). A staircase area, showed how considerable the wealth of the family must have been, judging by the paintings of family members by JW Waterhouse and of the grounds by Eric Ravilious. Maiolica pottery was kept nearby in cases while the family also apparently felt in need of an instrument linked to the house weathervane to tell them the wind direction. Finally, a sitting room contained a number of sculptures, from one of Napoleon to depictions of Michaelangelo's David, Antinous and Bacchus (another motif throughout the house and gardens, with a certain theme beginning to spring to mind as a result).
"It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise... It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore, let Art always remind us of them; therefore let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things." - George Eliot
Visiting the current Jacob Van Ruisdael exhibition at the Royal Academy, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. Seventeenth century Dutch painting tends to be noted for two mutually contradictory themes; firstly, the detailed realism of its depiction of lower and middle class subjects and secondly the allusive and symbolic quality of the painting. It's an awkward arrangement, given that there is no meaningful way to discern a distinction between the portrayal of an object (skulls and bones or broken tree stumps, for example) and any symbolic significance to it as memento mori. The argument runs that the Netherlands was primarily an empirical and descriptive culture, whose fascination with maps and microscopes had more bearing than the moralising of emblem books; nonetheless, the influence of Calvinism created fertile conditions for musings on predestination. Equally, the argument runs that the realism of Dutch painting was often tailored to the tastes of equally increasingly wealthy middle-class consumers; the marble floors that are widespread in Vermeer's paintings were only aspirational in practice, humorous depictions of peasants smoking tobacco went out of fashion once smoking became fashionable for urban consumers.
To some extent, much of Ruisdael's work does furnish material for this debate. One painting in particular, The Jewish Cemetery, is clearly used to offer an allegorical fable; a cemetery is set in a wild forest, next to a set of ruins and a broken tree stump (similarly, his picture of the prosperous town of Egmond shows the road to it dominated by a dead elm tree). Above, the clouds part to offer the possibility of an after-life; such was at least Goethe's interpretation, who assumed the ruins to be of cathedrals. In fact, they are of a ruined castle while the graves are those of the Jewish cemetery (which was near the Oude Kirk in what is now Amsterdam's red light district), which upsets the christian interpretation somewhat. Similar issues occur for The Reconstruction of the Manor Kostverloren; the name meant 'Money down the drain,' owing to the fact that the Manor's position in marsh land left in permanent need of repair, so that the repainting of the ruined walls and nearby bathers have led the painting to be interpreted as an allegory of the folly of human vanity.
Conversely, the realism of Ruisdael's paintings can be questioned. Ruisdael's work was highly influential on later painters like Gainsborough and Constable and he often shares with them an idealised and rather Arcadian portrayal of the countryside (though this is difficult to read; windmills may look picturesque to a modern viewer but they were simply agricultural and industrials tools at the time). However, Ruisdael does show aspects of work in the country, like the bleaching and laying out to dry of cloth in the fields or peasants at work in the fields (albeit he avoids anything too degraded, such as a dairy, preferring haymaking scenes). Equally, although he did paint scenes of town-life, they tends to be panoramas of Amsterdam's spires and windmills rather than showing domestic life.
One of the more interesting aspects to his work lies with how realism can be questioned in other ways; in spite of the influence on Gainsborough and Constable, much of his work looks more like the work of a nineteenth century romantic painter. For example, a painting of Bentheim castle has Ruisdael placing it high up on cragged hills to emphasis what would later have been called the sublime aspects of the work. In reality, the castle occupied no such vantage point. Ruins form an important theme for Ruisdael, as with those in The Jewish Cemetery and depictions of Egmond Castle ruins alone, another theme that would become a standard romantic trope. Most striking is a ruined castle high up above a river in valley filled with pine trees; the scene is set in Norway, a country Ruisdael had never visited and which seems to have served as an strange otherplace for him. The aforementioned painting of The Reconstruction of the Manor Kostverloren is perhaps unique in his work for resolving many of these contradictions; the scene is a wild wood, dominated by a ruined castle. But the scene also shows bathers in the castle moat and builders working on the reconstruction; to some extent it does show how the allegorical themes of Dutch painting (transience, sinfulness and mortality) dovetail well with incipient Romantic themes of decay.
Leaving the exhibition, I went for now seems a customary walk around London, starting at (the rather disconcertingly two-dimensional) Christchurch in Spitalfields (the shardlike exterior is more than usually worth looking at: walking to the side of this it all becomes quite two-dimensional, like a cut-out), to the Gherkin building and St Botolph's church and down to The Monument. Here I finally found the ruins of St Dunstan in the East. One of Wren's churches built after the great fire, the roof was bombed in the blitz and the building remains a ruin. As this was one of Wren's attempts at gothic, decay seems to become it, with the walls and spire still standing while the interior was been turned into a garden; water trickles from a fountain while blue pansies flower where the pulpit would have been; a haven of peace and serenity. While I tend to think of a building like Lichfield Cathedral as a good example of gothic (due to the darkness of the stone), I have to admit that the white Portland stone works well here; the delicate vaulting almost looks like bleached bones. It is, however, rather odd to look through the empty gothic arches and see banana trees and magnolias.
The BBC recently broadcast an interesting documentary about Vivaldi's relationship with the Ospedale della Pietà, a Catholic orphanage intended to house the girls begotten by the various dalliances of the Venetian aristocracy. Vivaldi taught many of them to play the violin and oversaw their productions, where even the bass parts may have been sung by women. The documentary was followed by a performance of Vivaldi's Gloria in the Pietà (albeit a slightly later and larger building than the one Vivaldi would have been familiar with), following from the recreation of Handel's Water Music they did a couple of years ago on a barge on the Thames. Unlike an English choir, the singers were dispersed throughout various upper galleries and largely hidden behind metal screens (the effect alternately being that of a prison or a confessional). It rather reminded me of an organ performance I went to in one of Prague's churches, where since the organists was hidden from view there was no visual focus to associate the sound with; the sound seemed to come from everywhere.
To Catch A Thief turned out to be much glamorous and exotic than most of Hitchcock's fare (and consequently less dark) but was refreshingly free of the cod-Fredianism Hitchcock was somewhat prone to. Instead, Cary Grant's Rafflesian anti-hero is shameless about his kleptomania. By contrast, The Titfield Thunderbolt, is an Ealing comedy about a English country village struggling to defend its railway in the face of the rise of the automobile and the bus. The idea of the harbinger of the industrial revolution as a symbol of English pastoralism seems more than a little odd to me but I did especially like a scene where the villagers gloomily realise that the railway is making a profit and is consequently at risk of nationalisation...
When I reviewed Edmund Crispin's The Moving Toyshop a while ago, I recall noting how Oxford as a place seems antagonistic to realism, with crime and fantasy its dominant literary modes (the latter paradoxically being the more realist of the two). Similarly, Philip Pullman once spoke of how the river's mists have a solvent effect on reality. The latest book to fit this thesis is Guillermo Martinez's The Oxford Murders, a piece of crime fiction whereby all the murders are made to conform to a mathematical series. Hindered by Wittgenstein's finite rule paradox and Gödel's incompleteness theorem, predicting the series is essential to solving the crimes. The mathematical conceit is welcome in so far as it places the novel more in the tradition of literary puzzles preferred by Doyle and Chesterton than to Christie's social conservatism, but it does leave the book with a somewhat abstract and inconsequential aspect that seems a little unpalatable when the novel comes to depict some of the deaths.
I rather liked last year's BBC remake of The Quatermass Experiment, largely for its eschewal of special effects and actions in favour of drama and dialogue. Accordingly, I was interested in a similar remake of A for Andromeda (in spite of not having realised before that it was written by the somewhat crankish Fred Hoyle). On the whole, I was pleasantly surprised by how easily it kept pace with the intervening decades (albeit with some rewriting), with the idea of self-aware computers chime with recent discussions of the singularity. Similarly, the growing of synthetic organisms was followed this week with the announcement of human organs being manufactured.
The most striking aspects is that where science fiction often depicts alien intelligence as having an utter reliance on logic that will leave them wide open to any strategy involving improvisation or instinct. By contrast here, it is made clear here that a superior intelligence will necessarily displace a lesser, with only the anomaly of Andromeda's humanity preventing it on this occasion. In that sense, it reminded me of HG Wells's The War of the Worlds; "We men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us... And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years."Labels: Art, England, Film, Literature, Oxford, ScienceFiction
posted by Richard 7:23 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 approach. As such, the narrative lacks a generic centre, perhaps due to its centre being the blank slate of Barnaby himself. In terms of social observation, Dickens frequently notes how much smaller London was at the time of the riots; "Nature was not so far removed, or hard to get at, as in these days... which turned into squalid courts." Social criticism is as present here as in any of contemporary social novels, as with the depiction of Sir John Chester's dissipated character. However, he also condemns Sim Tappertit for his opposition to the state of urban society; "the degrading checks imposed upon them were unquestionably attributed to the innovating spirit of the times, and how they united therefore to resist change." Accordingly, the social dimension of the novel is a complex one. Equally, the gothic and sensational elements complicate this further; George Gordon and Barnaby's father are both depicted in almost demonic terms to begin with ("prowled and skulked the metropolis at night... a spectre at their licentious feasts, something in the midst of their revelry and riot haunted and chilled him."), with the rioters also compared to devils. Innocence in the novel is no protection, either for Barnaby himself or for Miggs, the parody of his more virtuous heroines. The result is that Dickens is ambivalent in his attitude to the riots; "composed for the most part of the very scum and refuse of London, whose growth was fostered by bad criminal laws, bad prison regulations and the worst conceivable police... stimulated by their own headlong passions, by poverty, by ignorance" The riots emerge as both something unnatural and something manufactured by society, where the commons can revenge themselves on their oppressors.
Keith Robert's Pavane struck me as being quite odd; like many counterfactuals (such as Bring the Jubilee or even His Dark Materials; Pullman's vision of Geneva becoming the centre of christendom being the inverse of Robert's vision of Rome as remaining dominant in England) it is essentially whiggish, presenting a version of history where a vision of progress based on science and technology has gone awry and a vision of superstition and feudalism triumphed. It's an odd vision that ignores the fact that capitalist economies began to thrive through the renaissance more than the reformation. Conversely, its a fantasy, crafting a land still where faeries and old gods still hold sway; the peculiarity is that such a vision fails to lend itself to the same kind of pastoralism to be found in Tolkein.Labels: Architecture, Art, England, Film, Literature, Weather
posted by Richard 7:07 AM
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
I hadn't walked through Hyde Park for a few years and I'd forgotten how pleasant it is (though perhaps a little too much like a provincial country estate when compared to either the formal gardens in Amsterdam's Vondelpark or the wild areas it shares with Berlin's Tiergarten). The Serpentine is the most impressive part of the park; at one point the lake was crossed with posts with a solitary seagull perched on each of these. Nearby, a coot was building its nest in shallow waters. I left the park at Apsley House and the Wellington Arch (although the park is filed with war memorials, the arch is rather awkwardly militaristic for London) before walking back to Kensington, passing by the Brompton Oratory (an intriguing building in that the light-filled interior could be one of the Catholic churches in Europe rather than their quasi-anglicanised brethren here).
The Victoria and Albert Museum was holding an exhibition on Arts & Crafts, a counterpart to a previous exhibition on Art Deco. Arts & Crafts had an oddly double character; it emerged as a response to industrialisation, asserting the role of rural crafts, but was primarily purchased by the new industrial haute-bourgeoisie (Wightwick Manor, an arts & crafts mansion was also one of the first to have electric lighting and plumbing). By eschewing mass-production the artefacts of the arts and crafts movement would inevitably be high-value items, affordable only for the elites. The English section comprised furniture by Pugin, paintings by Burne-Jones, clocks and furniture by Voysey, ceramics by De Morgan, Morris tapestries and Baillie-Scott's stained glass. The inclusion of works by Beardsley made it clear how the romantic interest in nature held by the arts & crafts movement could lead to both aestheticism and art nouveau. By contrast, arts & crafts in America seemed much more to resemble something that had passed directly on to art deco without the intermediate stage of art nouveau; the materials and subjects were still natural but their treatment stylised and geometric (the only comparable works in the English section were by Mackintosh).
Although figures like Greene & Greene and Lloyd Wright were reacting to the rise of skyscrapers, the American houses appear to have been significantly larger than the English cottages dreamt by Morris (presumably the more deracinated character of America made idealisation of peasant life markedly more difficult; such traits are absent even in works like Walden). Although Viennese design was significantly more stylised (as with Klimt and Hoffmann's designs) and German more comfortable with industrialisation, the majority of European design seems to have been more in sympathy with England. Perhaps unsurprisingly so; Morris's socialist utopianism fed into Gauguin's praise of pre-industrial life in Tahiti. Van Gogh's artist's community in Arles, the Yellow House, emulated Morris's Red House, his famous ladder-backed armchair picture showing an arts & crafts design. Scandinavian design drew on rural traditions (as at Skansen) and myth (as with the snakes on Lars Kinsarvik's furniture), since both Norway and Finland were asserting new national identities. Similarly in Japan, Mingei arose as a response to the Westernisation later decried by Tanizaki, seeking beauty that was born rather than made, part of the traditional Buddhist belief in oneness with nature. I then went to the Poynter (blue Delft tiling), Gamble (white and gold ceramics, rather like the Cafe Imperial in Prague) and Morris rooms (green olive branch wallpaper, lined with gold friezes) for lunch.
The Proms began for me this year with Purcell's The Fairy Queen. This is one of the very few concerts that has made good use of the Albert Hall; at one point flutes could be heard from the upper gallery in imitation of bird song, at another the echo of a trumpet. The following day started at Covent Garden, walking around the market and the pleasant churchyard at St James, before proceeding back to Kensington for a performance of Die Walkure. Last year, Kim Begley dominated Das Rheingold as Loge; this year Bryn Terfel's Wotan and Lisa Gasteen's impish Brunnhilde (who bore a disturbing resemblance to Joan Sims) stood out. It's interesting that where Das Rheingold portrays women as either fickle and frivolous or as helpless, Die Walkure largely performs a volte-face on this, something that is as much emphasised as off-set by the idea that love and marriage as a punishment for Brunnhilde. This is largely because, following Schopenhauer, love and passion are only ever forms of affliction for Wagner; it is difficult for him to retreat to images of the loving wife and he must replace the virgin and the whore dichotomy with the shrew and the warrior. As I left, the London lighting gave the twilight an oddly attenuated quality I've not seen elsewhere, the clouds turned orange against the darkening blue of the sky. Watching Gotterdammerung later, it occurred to me how much Wagner sees love as something emasculating. For Brunnhilde, it is the end of her existence as a warrior maiden while for Siegfried it is that which leads him to first feel fear.
I came across Nightmare in Venice later, a compilation by the much-fabled ensemble Red Priest, who can best be described as playing early and baroque music in the manner of Stravinsky and with the attitude of Siouxsie and the Banshees. Dwelling on the strange and fantastic aspects of the baroque style (perhaps rather implausibly so on occasions), they perform Vivaldi, Purcell and Corelli (with an unscripted detour through Danse Macabre at one point).
Heading into London for the next Proms, I had a chance to see the tight security on the transport system at the moment; I have to say it's both rather reassuring and extremely disturbing to see armed police walking about in the sunlight, not to mention bag searches and scans slowly becoming endemic. Since the number of people queuing for the Proms was noticeably less than usual I went for a look at the science museum and got to stroll past Babbage's difference engine and Stephenson's Rocket. Westminster Abbey reminded me of nothing so much as the John Soane Museum; filled with statues and ephemera where much of the tombs and paintings appear to have survived the restoration unscathed. It is certainly the only abbey I have seen to have glass chandeliers (complementing the fan vaulting rather well). Like Dorchester, Winchester and Lichfield it had a pair of Sergei Fedorov icons. By contrast, the interior of St Paul's was as pure as the spire of his churches, quite unlike the Catholic churches it imitated. As is often the case, the Victorian mosaics on the ceiling have the effect of making it seem more orthodox than Catholic. Towards the beginning of the Prom I was going to a violinist from the American orchestra that was performing leaned over to the front rows of prommers and announced that she wanted to say hello as she rather felt like we were all attending the same dinner party. It's certainly true that there's something very pleasantly democratic and egalitarian about the proms; the prommers that are prepared to stand get the best possible views of the performance after all (even if there are plenty of others with expensive seats). These Proms also had a baroque flavour, with Rameau's Les Paladins and Dardanus and Handel's Water Music. Rameau proved to be quite effervescent in his choice of instrumentation and harmonies, though Handel's elegant simplicity seemed more beautiful than Rameau's more Italianate approach. It was interesting to note that the difficulties for a small orchestra to fill the Albert Hall with sound must have been similar to that of making oneself heard from the Royal barge.
The next Prom began with Berg's Lulu Suite followed by Mahler's Fourth Symphony. Seemingly an odd combination this worked rather well; Berg alternates between dissonance and lyricism while Mahler's philosophy that the symphony must contain everything leads him to alternate between the comic and the plaintive. This was followed by a performance of plainchant and organ music, comprising both medieval and modern works by Arvo Part. The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir entered from each side of the hall, men on one side, women on the other and gradually walked to the stage, one verse at a time. It was interesting to see how modern minimalism seemed to complement plainsong (and odd given that I had always tended to think of minimalism as an Eastern concept, based on Wabi-Sabi or equivalent concepts), with each syllable being held and repeated over time. The first piece was by an composer I hadn't heard of before called, Sofia Gubaidulina, called The Light of the End. This seemed to move like the tides of the sea, building up and dissipating over and over again, something stressed by the piece's heavy reliance on a rather aleatoric percussion style. Overall, the logic of the piece seemed primarily driven by religious symbolism rather than conventional musical structures. By contrast, there's very little to say about Beethoven's Ninth Symphony; this piece was the one most admired by my favourite composer, Wagner and the ode to joy does have the same exhilarating quality to it that is shared by Tannhauser's Overture or Die Walkure's Fire Music. The final prom surprised me a little; Strauss's Thus Sprach Zarathustra seemed rather mannered when placed next to The Flying Dutchman overture or Beethoven's third piano concerto.
The Magic Flute was rather more odd than I'd supposed. Like many enlightenment narratives, it takes the form of a fairy tale, only to oppose the structure of the moral fable with an enlightenment narrative based on ideas of reason. To a large extent, it's rather noticeable that the narrative tends towards misogyny, privileging reason as a male virtue and slighting emotion as a female weakness. However, it's refreshing to note that the narrative itself overturns this, noting the inability of Monostratos to control himself, the weakness of Papagueno and Pamina's success in taking the ordeal of fire and water (particularly radical given Masonic barriers to women joining the order). In this there is at least the germ of an alternative reading that would see the Queen of the Night as a prototype for Brunnhilde and Sarastro as a tyrant, and the beginning of the romantic rehabilitation of the fairy tale.
I went to Clandon Park recently, an rather sparse (if not even rather ugly) house in Sussex, the exterior only enlivened by a Dutch sunken garden parterre garden and a maori house (surrounded by tree ferns, many carved to form statues). The interior was quite striking though; I walked into a gleaming white marble hall, lined with statuary by Rysbrack, Corinthian Columns and spanning two floors. I was especially taken with the lamps attached to the wall by arms, as in Cocteau's La Belle et la Bette. More odd were some paintings of an Ostrich and Cassowary. Later rooms had wooden furniture mounted on eagles in the style of William Kent and chinoiserie dressing tables by Chippendale (designed to resemble a pagoda). One room had an exhibition dedicated to Maori tribes, including whalebones clubs and jade tiki statues. The paintings were mostly undistinguished (Kneller, Lely and so on, the occasional Reynolds), apart from a caricature of George the Third by Gillray and a painting of the House of Commons speaker by Thornhill and Hogarth. Nearby was the St Peter and St Paul church, a twelfth century building that still had a medieval wooden triptych of three saints. Further away, Hatchlands house was more promising on the exterior (a Dutch design with glass cupola on one wing, a formal garden created by Jekyll and some classical follies in the grounds) but suffered from a cramped and was overly ornate Italianate interior by Robert Adams.
Following an encounter with a Saxon beech maze, shaped in the form of a sea creature, I went to Oxford. Bails lay in fields while poppies and cornflowers grew in hedgerows. I went up the tower of the University church, looking out over at the Radcliffe Camera, the sundial in Brasenose quad and the other spires. The green of the woods could be seen in the distance. The History of Science Museum had a fascinating collection of astrolabes (often Islamic, for use in praying to Mecca) and armillary spheres as well as compasses in ivory cases. Travelling back, I went to Dorchester Abbey. A simple building set in a pleasantly leafy area by the Isis, the interior is more impressive, the white walls being interrupted with 14th century paintings and a 12th century font. The stained glass in the North window is remarkably intricate, with stone patterns in the shape of branches (the tree of Jesse, showing how Chirst was descended from King David's ancestor Jesse). The requiem chapel has an orthodox icon, presumably St Birinus, of the same type I had seen in Lichfield and Winchester. The walls here also had medieval paintings on them, which seemed to have been repainted, presumably in the Victorian period. Reading The Secret History by Procopius, I was struck by the role played by women in it; Theodora and Antonina do not appear more important to events than Livia or Cleopatra but their role is described in so much more detail.
Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters struck me as being oddly European. Where Some Prefer Nettles attached clear symbolic connotations to Tokyo and Osaka, here they are simply places. The weather and accents differ but there is no fundamental schism. Much like Buddenbrooks, The Makioka Sisters traces the decline of a Japanese House before World War Two. One sister, Yukiko, is traditionally Japanese; too withdrawn and retiring to cope in brash, modern Japan. She is counterpointed to Taelo, the most Westernised sister; independent and often ruthless in pursuit of what she wants. Both are counterpointed to the White Russian, Katherina, whose forwardness if greater than Taeko's with a correspondingly greater success. Though both Taeko and Yukiko are counterpointed, both are ill-suited for Japan at that time and fail accordingly (rather than turning into a fable of Taeko's progressive moral degenerations).
Normally in a narrative, an action leads to consequences, with this process being repeated over and over again in any variety of combinations until it reaches a conclusion. Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-La-Morte is an odd attempt to counterfeit this in a form that is more poetic than novelistic. Instead of motivation and action as being paramount, the narrative is driven by a set of competing metaphors such as the crying swan or the martyrs depicted in the Cathedral and the city itself; hence the Sebald-like use of photographs of Bruges throughout the text; "every town is a state of mind, a mood which, after only a short stay, communicates itself." Like all metaphors, both reveal and conceal their object; "by trying to fuse the two women into one he had only lessened the resemblance...day by day the dissimilarities were increasing." The novel is infected with a Schopenhauerian sense of mysticism, with the convent the only truly still point in the city, in contrast to Hugues's willing. As such, the stillness of the city is both a sign of nirvana and of decay. Accordingly, the two layers of narrative and metaphor are not quite contingent, with Jane's ignorance of these contiguities is what kills her "not having comprehended the mystery."
Casanova's The Story of my Life is a fascinating counterpart to more mannered documents like Rousseau's Confessions. Casanova repeatedly avows a faith in christianity, but in practice only rejects converting to Islam in Constantinople on practical grounds. He is surprisingly tolerant of homosexuality (perhaps since he was a sexual dissident himself, comparing the disguised nun he is romancing to Antinous, as well as the episode with Bellino). Equally, he professes to be a great admirer of Voltaire but tells him that there is no substitute for religion as a basis for social order. The tension appears attributable to his attachment to the Hobbesian idea of the passions as the basis for human character; "the fate of every man inclined to games of chance, unless he is able to master his passions," leaving him permanently attempting to balance duty and desire and failing.
The Travels of Ibn Batuttah differ from christian travel narratives in a number of respects. The Islamic world at this point was extensive, stretching from Spain to Mughal India; for the same reason it acted as a form of iron curtain for European merchants who were forced to explore alternative routes. Where Europeans were forced to confront other cultures, Batuttah's travels largely remain within the Islamic world. Of course, this still allows him to come into contact with the Jewish and Christ ain peoples within it, but his attitudes towards it seem somewhat ambivalent. he records the various restrictions placed on non-Muslim populaces (restrictions on trade, specific forms of taxation) and notes how unwillingly such humiliations were suffered. Equally, he notes that Muslim travellers to a Christian Monastery were generously received treating Muslims honourably and exacting no tolls, but approvingly records the destruction of a Greek Church; "I shall be the first to be stricken with madness in the service of god... and god gave the lie to the assertion of the Greeks." This in spite of his admiration of the Church of Sophia in Constantinople. For Battutah other cultures are always infidels; a Jew is denounced for sitting closely to Koranic readers, Hindus and Chinese (and indeed Rafidis) are treated in the same way. He is fascinated by Hindu Sadhus but makes no comparison between their creed and Islam in the way Polo does with Christianity. He is amazed by Chinese civilisation, its pottery and paper money but responds to it by saying "China, for all its magnificence, did not please me. I was depressed by prevalence of infidelity and whenever I left my lodging I saw many offensive things." As with any travel narrative of that period, it is not without its diverting idiosyncrasies; dog-faced men, flying leeches and monkeys with kings. Although the same applies to The Travels of Sir John Mandeville it shows a different worldview. Although much of it is taken up with exhortations for christendom to regain its piety in order to reconquer the holy land, it nonetheless treats other faiths (though showing little lack of awareness that the relative tolerance extended by the Islamic world to Jews and christians would not have been found within Europe) as being worthy of reflection; "it seemed to me a great cause for shame that the Saracens, who have neither a correct faith nor a perfect law, should in this way reprove us for our failings, keeping their false law better than we that of Jesus Christ." The same applies when Mandeville witnesses sutee; "they suffer so much pain and mortification of their bodies for love of that idol that hardly would any christian man suffer the half." Equally, Mandeville's reaction to the lands he describes is torn between wonderment and disgust at their decadence.
Reading Grimm's Fairy Tales, I found myself a little taken aback by a few things. Firstly, that although a number of the tales were a simply moral fable of virtue rewarded and malice punished (typically rather horribly) many of them are simply odes to raw will, rewarding poor protagonists with wealth irrespective of their crimes. Perhaps, this loss of clear patterning was what Gabriel Josipovici meant when he said that the tales "were transformed from tales told by speakers who were deeply convinced that they were true (whatever meaning one assigns to the term) into tales told by writers (Wilhelm Grimm, in effect)." Certainly, the attempt to forge a German nation out of independent states and to reject French conceptions of civilisation after Napoleon in favour of folk art and a Volksgeist. Germany was after all then a cluster of many rural kingdoms and tiny city-states. They possessed forty universities, no modern factories or far-flung colonies, but were united by a language and growing literature. Germany existed as an idea that hoped to become a nation so her poets and philosophers thought societies were shaped and driven by ideas - Christian, feudal, imperial and democratic ideas. Secondly, I hadn't expected to find a story like The Blue Lamp, featuring contrivances like jinis. Listening outside just now, I realised that the familiar sound of pigeons cooing was mingled with the stranger cries of seagulls. The other thing that struck me was how the tale of the princess kissing a frog does invert the normal gender roles of the prince rescuing the princess; more striking was The Nixie in the Pond where the wife must rescue her husband from a water-nymph.
Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm, like The Village, is one of those films that is very difficult to assess in neutral and objective terms, leaving only the messy uncertainty of value judgements. It draws upon films like Sleepy Hollow in showing the reason of the enlightenment giving way to magic (albeit with slightly firmer historical ground; set in the time of the Napoleonic occupation of Germany, Kultur was indeed being advanced against le mission civilatrice).
The problem tends to be that Gilliam's imagination is fundamentally baroque rather than gothic (unlike Jordan's The Company of Wolves), and the number of comic grotesques as characters (even the two brothers come out like characters from Dickens) combined with flourishes like one of the children being turned into a ginger breadman sit rather uneasily with the imagery of the wolf filled forest coming to life or the ruined tower surrounded by tombs. One of the most striking scenes in the film shows a French general addressing a room full of dinner guests, only for the angle to shift and reveal that there are only a handful of guests with the rest being reflections in mirrors. Just as the evil queen is defeated by smashing the mirror containing her reflection the entire film has the sense that these things are but a playful conceit and will vanish like the illusions they are. Partly this is also due to the way the film insists upon the fictive status of what is happening; Briar Rose, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, Rapunzel and Little Redcape are all clear sources as are a range of other works like Poe's Masque of the Red Death and Anderson's The Snow Queen.
I also went to see the latest film of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, based on the Dahl book I always used to love as a child. Roald Dahl's story can be best described as a sadistic fable; a story whose moral content is rather offset by the vicious glee with which cruel punishments are meted out to malefactors. Certainly, the moral content is rather restricted if we think of stories like his Tales of the Unexpected, where a wife kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and then disposes of the evidence by cooking it for the investigating police officers. Mostly, his stories are revenge fantasies, where suffering children are set free as the adults that oppressed them suffer especially vicious ends. Children always need the dark materials of fairy tales as a means of displacing feelings of anger, resentment, and powerlessness. Willy Wonka is more unusual in that it is the children that are mostly made to suffer for their crimes. I rather liked the introduction of a staple for Tim Burton films, the idea of a troubled hero haunted by memories of his father (see also Batman and Sleepy Hollow); the notion of a young Willy Wonka defying his father and naughtily eating sweets goes a long way to subduing the somewhat puritanical moralism on display elsewhere (the other children visiting the factory do rather resemble a list of the seven deadly sins). Returning home this evening, the clouds were particularly dark shades of grey and blue but the sun was still shying brightly and the stone of the nearby Polish church was glowing in the light against the blackening sky.
posted by Richard 7:03 AM
Friday, May 13, 2005
Autumn and spring are my two favourite seasons and the most changeable. Summer and winter present largely unchanging extremes of weather that are both equally unwelcome in their own way. As the sun struggled to make its first appearance of the year yesterday I decided to visit Winchester, beginning with the Cathedral. Surrounded by a large park where the first cherry blossoms were emerging, snowdrop drifts were beginning to be displaced by crocuses and with gardens where medlar trees grow alongside the ruins of the Chapter House, the Cathedral combines the rather squat Norman architecture with the more fluid lines of the later Gothic perpendicular style. Inside, the north and south transepts particularly show the alien Norman influence, with roughly carved arches being supported by pillars stolen from Roman buildings (it is thought that the Normans were not sufficiently sophisticated to have produced them themselves). Overall, the Cathedral's interior is rather austere, with much of its decoration having been stripped out at either the time of the Reformation or the Commonwealth. Most of the present decoration, including various memorials and Kempe's stained glass is Victorian. Some murals have since been restored and several chantry chapels commemorating past Bishops remain wedged between arches, including one for a catholic Cardinal.
More oddly, niches on the retro-choir screen have been filled with a set of icons in the style of the Russian orthodox painter, Andrei Rublev (although two of the saints depicted, Birinus and Swithun, came from Dorchester and Winchester respectively). The Cathedral also has some more macabre oddities; such as a set of mortuary chests in the Presbytery for the Kings of Wessex; Alfred, Cnut, Egbert and the later William Rufus (apparently this was somewhat unwise, since the internment of his bones was followed with the tower falling down). I was then taken on a tour of the tower, proceeding up an extremely narrow spiral staircase, past the bell chamber and sound lantern to the tower. The view of Winchester was rather impressive, showing how the layout of the city was still recognisably medieval.
Following this I walked along Winchester's high street, past a statue of Alfred and the Victorian guildhall, to The Great Hall. The only surviving part of the original castle (destroyed by Cromwell; later plans for Wren to build Charles the Second a Versailles style palace nearby were rudely interrupted by the King's death), the Hall is most famed for the object displayed on the wall; a 13th century round table, painted in the Tudor period to depict the Arthur and twenty four of his knights. Immediately outside is Queen Eleanor's Garden, a recreation of the type of herbaria the castle would have had in the thirteenth century, including a fountain surmounted by a bronze falcon and a tunnel arbour. The plants are specific to the period; camomile lawn, bay hedges, Solomon's seal, iris, hyssop, hollyhock, lavender and so on. Finally, I walked up St Catherine's hill, former site of an iron-age hill fort, plague pits and the present site of a MizMaze. The hill offered a particularly good view of Winchester College and the Itchen flood plain.
Later, I went to visit Lichfield Cathedral. While Winchester's tower is rather squat and unobtrusive, Lichfield's three spires rise far above the town and across the expanse of Stowe pool. Where Winchester's white stones gleam in the sunlight, Lichfield's red sandstone has been blackened and weathered over the centuries. Rather appropriate really, given that the town's name is derived from 'field of the dead.' Accordingly, although the Cathedral is actually more recent than Winchester it gives every appearance of being significantly older. The structure is gothic, modified by George Gilbert Scott, with stained glass by Kempe (I've always particularly admired the window showing the reconstruction of the Cathedral after the Civil War) sitting alongside sixteenth century stained glass in the Lady Chapel. I was somewhat surprised to note another icon, this time of Saint Chad in that chapel, presumably having been created by the same artist (Chad's skull was displayed in an adjacent chapel). Accordingly, much of the Cathedral is essentially high-gothic, though there are some survivals from earlier period; murals whitewashed in the civil war can be seen in the Chapter House where the Lichfield Gospels reside.
Charlecote Park is a largely Tudor house by the river Avon with some later additions; a reconstructed box garden on the front lawn competes with a Capability Brown designed landscape with cedar trees while Jacob sheep graze. The interior is largely notable for its collection of objects from Fonthill abbey; Indian ebony chairs, beds and Chinese Lacquer cabinets mostly. The family seem to have had a taste for the exotic; more than a few paintings of satyrs grace the walls. As is often for these houses, the Tudor collides with other periods; walls covered in damask and furnished with marquetry furniture, a Great Hall whose window is filled with an eighteenth century alabaster fount complete with doves. Returning, I called at St Mary's Church in Warwick. Rather oddly, the tower of the church ends in a follow gateway where pedestrians can pass under. Much of the rest of the church was redesigned in the eighteenth century and represents a peculiar attempt to build a neo-classical church; urns grace the summit of the walls rather than gargoyles while the windows are gently curved rather than being filled with quatrefoils.
Following this, I returned to Kedleston. I'd been there many years ago and it had struck me as extremely austere and cold. To some extent, this impression still persists. Placed in Derbyshire with its attendant poor weather, the structure is defiantly neo-classical. Its front imitates Constantine's arch, the entire building being based on a Palladio design. The entrance hall replicates the atrium of a Roman villa, while the saloon is modelled on the pantheon. Much of this was designed as a temple of the arts rather than a house and I quickly found the impressions of my earlier self being confirmed. More interesting was the church, whose wall was mounted with a sundial and skulls to reflects man's mortality (with an execrable pun on 'sun dial' and 'soon die all'). More interesting was the exhibition of Kedleston acquisitions from his time as Indian viceroy, including Indian ivory and silverwork, Tibetan bronzes and Chinese lacquerwork. The interior has two wooden lids in the floor; lifted up they reveal stone faces of a medieval Lord and Lady Kedleston.
I went to Silchester recently, spending a few hours there and walking around the walls. Not an especially sunny day though, as with Avebury, the ruins do acquire an oddly forbidding aspect when the sunlight falls away. Formerly an important Iron-age and Roman town, little now remains besides the walls and an amphitheatre. I hadn't visited at this time of year before, and I noticed that bluebells were beginning to come into flower in the woods while the meadow was covered with dandelions. One afternoon later that week saw a heavy April shower. When it stopped raining, the sky was still swathed in dark clouds but the sun was very bright. In consequence, one of the most vivid rainbows I've ever seen plunged down from the storm clouds to light up the ground.
Later, I went to visit Mottisfont Abbey. This has actually been a house since the reformation but a cellarium and various surviving arches date back to the medieval period. Stylistically, the house is as much a patchwork as The Vyne, with the redbrick front retaining some Tudor features but the back and flanking wings being in a more downcast eighteenth century style. I particularly liked the parterre garden in front of the house, planted with blue hyacinths and white tulips, with bluebells and wisteria growing nearby. Rooks cawed in the nearby trees. Oddly, a modern mosaic appears in a niche between walls nearby, showing a orthodox icon (in reality the socialite that owned the house) The rest of the grounds also have several tulips displays in black, purple and white with red stripes. Plane trees line the grounds, many of them with mistletoe growing from their branches. The inside is a more nondescript eighteenth century affair, enlivened by some striking trompe l'oeil from the thirties, recasting the drawing room as a gothic palace like Walpole's Strawberry Hill. The illusion is rather well conceived, even down to a paint pot and brush drawn onto one shelf. Elsewhere, the house had a surprisingly good collection of modern art, ranging from Degas and Vuillard to Lowry (some dark but surprisingly naturalistic landscapes) and the Bloomsbury group (a particularly fine country scene from Duncan Grant with an obvious debt to Cezanne).
The following day, I returned to West Wycombe, where I was finally able to climb the hill (earlier the site of an iron age fort) and then the tower of Saint Lawrence's Church. The church itself proved surprisingly ornate inside (modelled on the Temple of Palmyra), with Corinthian columns drawing the eye up to the frescos on the ceiling. The yellow Palladian buildings at Wycombe finally seemed to take on the proper Italianate aspect in the sunlight (though I suspect Palladio was not given to using flint as a building material). The grounds seemed mostly covered in an odd combination of yew and willow while some caged parrots competed with nearby rooks. I also went to Grey's Court. This is a Jacobean house, with a rather nondescript eighteenth century interior; more interesting were the grounds with orchards and knot gardens surrounding the ruins of the original manor. The grounds are strewn with follies like a Chinese bridge and a modern miz-maze with an astrolabe at its centre. Nearby was beech woodland, where the sunlight set the leaves aflame as it fell down on the bluebells below.
Arriving in London, I briefly visited Tate Modern, dwelling on Klein and Rothko's brooding canvases, Braque and Kandinsky's cubism and the surrealism of Magritte. Having since visited the Trade Fair Palace in Prague, I'm inclined to take an increasingly dim view of Tate Modern; it's thematic arrangements of paintings increasingly seems to disguise a rather thin collection. Passing on, I walked past the Houses of Parliament to Tate Britain, for its exhibition of paintings by Turner, Whistler and Monet. "All art," wrote Walter Pater, "aspires to the condition of music," a hypothesis reinforced by Whistler's appropriation of musical terminology to mark his rejection of realism in favour of aestheticism. The exhibition accordingly presents a problem for the writer in its rejection of the concrete, leaving only the subjective and inchoate. The essential difficult lies in seeing Turner placed alongside two artists that refined his impressionism (arguably he would have gained more by being placed alongside his own contemporaries), the serenity of Whistler's nocturnes on the one hand and the convulsive explosions of colour proffered by Monet. Where Turner's serial paintings of the destruction of the Houses of Parliament all appear essentially similar, Monet's serial paintings of the same landscape always seem different.
I went to see The Downfall, a film that chronicles the fall of Berlin, counterpointing the fate of the pulverised city's inhabitants with the parties and dinners in Hitler's bunker. The Downfall has been the cause of much comment that connects it to 'normalisierung' novels like Crabwalk by Gunther Grass or other works like The Natural History of Destruction by WG Sebald. These are attempts to reconsider the second world war, noting the atrocities committed by the British, such as the bombing of Dresden (the type of subject where the British have never truly admitted culpability) and the suffering of German civilians.
To a large extent, such comments seem incorrect. While not depicting a caricature, the essential gist of the portrayal of Hitler is to show him as a deluded maniac, often barely seeming human. Blind obedience and fanaticism figure strongly as a lethal combination. Where the comments have more force is the portrayal of the military and those around Hitler. Although it is certainly known that a gulf over military strategy existed between the German government and its military (probably for the Wehrmacht and Navy, certainly not for the SS officers in the film), the portrayal of them as simply loyal and diligent in obeying orders seems to go unnecessarily far in exculpating them. Wilhelm Mohnke, seen pleading to arrest the needless slaughter of troops had no such compunctions concerning the British troops he massacred at Dunkirk. Dr Ernst-Günter Schenck appears a humanitarian throughout, but such compassion was never lavished on the concentration camp victims he experimented on. Traudl Junge is seen as innocent of politics, though in reality Nazism had shaped much of her life. The tendency is to see the German people as victims of Hitler rather than as agents (although Goerring becomes the unlikely spokesmen for the view that the German people had at least colluded in their fate and a coda at the end sees the actual Traudl Junge speaking of how she had come to realise that she should have been more alive to what the Third Reich had been doing rather than denying her culpability). Nonetheless, it still seems difficult not to feel that Claus von Stauffenberg deserved to be described as a victim more than many of the film's characters.
My view of the film is as such ambivalent to say the least; the film does derive much of its disturbing and powerful effect from a refusal to deal in moral absolutes in one of the very few places where they can hardly be said to seem unwarranted. As I left, a girl seated behind me was crying. "The madness" she said through the tears, "The madness."
Francoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse presents an interesting cocktail of what could (uncharitably) be called champagne existentialism. The narrator is an uncertain centre who confesses that in a month she would have been differing opinions on subjects, a device that allows Sagan to critique existentialism. Given a choice between being-in-itself and being-for-oneself, no decision can be made. One choice would destroy the hedonism upon which the lives of Cecile and her father depend. The other would destroy what would save them from that hedonism. Her own nausea cannot be overcome.
Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty left me with certain doubts as to whether the social novel is as meaningful a vehicle now as it was for the Victorians. The social novel carried with it a number of assumptions that sit poorly with modern ideas. For instance, ideas on social homogeneity (uniting 'the two nations') that don't coincide with more modern ideas on individualism or multi-culturalism, or on the social basis for character that began to seem difficult after Freud. My general conclusion is that to a large extent, the description of it as a social novel is entirely accurate. The main character certainly does allude to Trollope's The Way We Live Now and there are certain comparisons; the novel depicts a broad swathe of nineteen eighties society and depicts the transition of conservatism from being a party of the landed gentry to being a party of upstart magnates. However, novels like The Spoils of Poynton or The Picture of Dorian Gray seem more apposite comparisons (though it is difficult to see the novel as a moral fable; the crude moralisations of upper class conservatives are typically treated with disdain. Self's Dorian might accordingly be a better parallel). Where a Victorian social novel would have shown how different parts of society were inextricably joined, Hollinghurst deliberately emphasises the divisions of an increasingly atomised society, as the main character's homosexuality clashes with both his middle-class background and the upper-class milieu he has become accustomed to. Where a Victorian social novel would have had events like the stock market crash serve as a central deus ex machina, such things are often little more than background here.
Some time ago I came across a book called Herland in a secondhand bookshop. I had not heard of it previously, but was familiar with the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman from her short story The Yellow Wallpaper. Reading it yesterday, it proved to be a utopian fantasy in the vein of News from Nowhere or Erewhon, founded on both feminist and socialist principles. In common with many other nineteenth century utopian novels, it seems more than a little disturbing today, combining incompatible adaptations of both Marxism and Darwinism (I suspect 'Galtonism' might be a better term in the latter case, if less recognisable).
On the one hand, the novel suggests that through "the most prolonged and careful selection and exclusion" cats could be bred that did not threaten birds and that criminal tendencies in the population could be bred out by simply not permitting anyone with such propensities to breed. Much of the novel attributes the superiority of Herland civilisation simply to the absence of any males in the society, thereby eliminating tendencies towards aggression and struggle. In this sense, Herland is little different from the fantasy depicted in The Time Machine, where the classes have evolved into differing species. After all, Wells found Fabian socialism eminently compatible with advocacy of select breeding; "I believe, that now and always the conscious selection of the best for reproduction will be impossible; that to propose it is to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what individuality implies. The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies."
However, it simultaneously dismisses genetics in favour of a view weighted heavily towards the blank slate. During a discussion of the genetic diversity shown by the Herlander in spite of being parthenogenetic, two characters discuss the matter; "But acquired traits are not transmissible... Weissman has proved that... If that is so then our improvement must be solely due to mutation or to education." In fact, education is what is stressed throughout; "however children differed at birth, the real growth lay later - through education." It is in short, the same view of nature that was to be inverted in the twentieth century's dystopias; "You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable." (George Orwell, 1984). But Herland also implies that the reactions of the three protagonists to Herland is a deeply ingrained one that proves not to be susceptible to any amount of re-education. Gilman's notions of human nature appear confused at best; the Herlanders react with horror and revulsion to what they hear of male civilisation but also find the prospect of visiting it enthralling and show blindnesses to its worst aspects. The Herlanders reject male society on the one hand, but are enthused at the prospect of abandoning parthenogenetic reproduction.
Melville's White-Jacket is in many respects a political allegory, drawing repeated parallels between shipboard life and social unrest elsewhere; "were it not for these regulations a man of war's crew would be nothing but a mob, more ungovernable than.. George Gordon... bowing to naval discipline afloat, yet ashore, he was a stickler for the rights of man and the liberties of the world." The navy are persistently held to account by the standards of the Declaration of Independence; "it is no limited monarchy where the commons have the right to petition... vesting in him the authority to scourge, comform(ing) in spirit to the territorial laws of Russia, which is ruled by an autocrat... for him our revolution was in vain; to him our Declaration of Independence was a lie." Meville notes its rigid social hierarchies and its treatment of sailors in the same manner as slaves are treated on the plantations. However, it seems awkward to place it in the category of realist fiction. It restricts itself to a narrow setting away from society, as much as the novels of William Golding. By contrast, Twain's Life on the Mississippi depicts the entire social strata along the river from the boats to the towns. Pioneer myths are dismantled by reference to the economic cycles that changed Westward expansion, while the genuine myths of the Indians are treated with scorn. Conversely, Melville's text is alive with metaphorical references to myth and history. Some of these are political (to Jews in Rome or the Saxons under William the Conqueror), other mythological (the sailors compared to Bacchanals), but all serve to point beyond the immediacies of the social fabric. Equally, the symbolic resurrection of the narrator with the demise of his hated white jacket seems to point to the metaphysical concerns of Coleridge's albatross or the similar death and resurrection in Moby Dick. The text points beyond itself but seems uncertain as to what.
A friend said a while back that she had been reading Golding's Lord of the Flies and had thought that the groups in it had seemed far too reasonable and well organised; to a modern reader, the descent into violence is less surprising than the order that preceded it. I made the point that it the time of writing, society and the education system were considerably more hierarchised and deferential, so I wouldn't be surprised that the groups initially seemed quite ordered. Similarly, I might not find the chaos and death unpredictable but this book was written in a somewhat more genteel age that lacked the benefit of having heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment. On the other hand, it is difficult to deny that Lord of the Flies may have dated somewhat. So, while reading two of Golding's other novels, The Spire and Pincher Martin, I was interested to see whether they would fare better. On the whole, I think they do.
It's often the case that an author's most famous work isn't their most interesting or even their best, and this certainly appears the case with Golding. Reading Pincher Martin I was struck by how little an equivalent to Meville's vision of the world outside impinges on what is a remarkably endogenous system. Pincher Martin is a form of inverted Robinson Crusoe, as much as Lord of the Flies is an inverted version of Ballantyne's Coral Island or The Swiss Family Robinson. Where the latter is humanistic and pragmatic, the former is anti-humanistic and even nihilistic. Golding sees human will in the same terms of Schopenhauer, as a form of violence and even rebellion against god. The extinction of the self in submission is his preference. Similarly, in The Spire, the construction of a spire on a cathedral lacking substantial foundations (the spire sounds like Salisbury, the details on collapsing towers and weak foundations sound like Winchester) proves a form of violent arrogance that corresponds to a psychomachia within Dean Jocelyn. Murders and deaths follow the construction.
I also went to a performance of Handel's Alexander's Feast. This was rather odd work is ostensibly an ode to the christian patron saint of music, Cecilia, but this does sit rather awkwardly alongside its main narrative of music's ability to inspire both love and destruction (recasting the firing of Persepolis in the same terms as the fall of the Troy). The concert was in a nearby church, replete with suitable Victorian high church gothic accoutrements, which made for an excellent setting. On the whole the performance was rather good, with the soprano especially standing out.
Reading Xenophon's The Persian Expedition and Arrian's The Campaigns of Alexander, it occurred to me that much of Edward Said's theories of Orientalism was as applicable to the opposition of Greek and Persian as it was to the opposition of Christian and Islamic. Said argued that imperialism had its scholarly corollary in Orientalism; "But this has often happened with the "orient", that semi-mythical construct which since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in the late 18th century has been made and remade countless times... Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilise, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort." It's a Foucauldean view, by which the construction of discourse determines power relations, though allowing some humanistic conception of how discourse can also challenge such monolithic views. Similarly, it has been argued that the period between Homer and Sophocles witnessed the invention of the barbarian, a response to conflicts with Persia. For example, in The Persian Expedition Xenoph