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, 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
Saturday, June 21, 2003
Trafalgar Square is in many respects a rather drab affair, its austere neo-classical architecture being composed of shades of grey (comparing Nelson's Column to the Siegessaule in Berlin, for example, or even the Houses of Parliament visible in the distance). The National Gallery is not an especially striking building from the outside; the marble columns and damask hangings on the inside much more so.
Comparing this visit with my last one is rather interesting; I still enjoyed the paintings by Velazquez, Goya, Caravaggio and Friedrich but was more struck by Murillo (one self portrait in particular, with the nice touch of having his hand resting on the oval frame, bring the artist outside the art) and Hogarth (amidst otherwise interminable Reynolds paintings). Like George Eliot, I found the Dutch paintings particularly engrossing (for example, the ingenious Hoogstraten peepshow, a box with two peepholes whose inside is painted in the manner of a home; looking through the holes creates an illusion of three dimensions; a typically Dutch conceit as with Dou's framing of his paintings). Though Ruysdael or Hobbema's landscapes were excellent as was de Hooch's town scenes, the most interesting was Frans Hals, and his shunning of traditional poses for portraiture as well as almost impressionistic brushwork. I also found myself appreciating Van Dyk and Turner more than was hitherto the case, particularly the documentary aspect of Turner's paintings; the Great Western Railway and the Temeraire being towed to harbour by a modern steamboat, for example. The same applied to Claude and Canaletto, perhaps out of liking for the subjects as much as the portraits (Canaletto's paitnings of England are certainly very forgettable), though Claude's paintings of classical scenes with contemporary sailing ships rather than triremes seem rather odd.
In terms of modern paintings, I still find it difficult to appreciate Monet, preferring Manet and Renoir (perhaps because although their landscapes have similar qualities to those of Monet but a broader range, such as Manet's paintings of Parisian society). Still, I preferred Cezannes (particularly the use of angular and geometric brushstrokes on landscapes) and Van Gogh; I could have stared for hours at the handful of Van Gogh paintings on display.
That evening, I crossed the Millennium bridge to Tate Modern and the Globe Theatre. The new skyscraper being built along there looks a great deal better than I had thought it would, as does the bridge itself, but it's reassuring to see that St Pauls is still the dominant feature along there. It seems somewhat incongruous to visit an Elizabethan theatre next to the 1930s art gallery (frankly, I still expect it to have Nazi banners displayed on the chimney stack). The design of the theatre is certainly a much more intimate experiences than with modern theatres (with the actors cut off from the audience), in spite of the rather cramped conditions. Another odd thing is that they have clearly gone to great lengths to reproduce the original theatre (e.g. the marble effect on the wooden railings) but have neglected to season the wood, much of which is cracking. Finally, the three stage doors for props and scenery introduce a new dynamic into the performance in which, masque like, the choreography of actors moving around the stage becomes much more important.
However, the play, Marlowe's Edward the Second was nothing short of exemplary, enacted in Elizabethan costume and an all-male cast (Queen Isabelle had all the melodrama of a professional drag queen; the audience smirked when 'she' was advised to "be not so passionate"). The play (or masque perhaps in this context?) was perfectly choreographed in terms of changing scenes, assisted by an excellent musician's company (the drumming being reminiscent of that at the coronation re-enacted at the Proms last year). Edward the Second is a particularly difficult play to perform in modern times; originally it ran the boundary of the homosocial and homosexual (i.e. platonic and sexual love), but that type of careful coding is difficult to replicate today. The Globe solution was to make the play as explicit as Derek Jarman did, which resulted in a vein of black humour becoming apparent (or perhaps more Carry-On innuendo than the The Jew of Malta; the audience laughed at many references that would have been innocent to an Elizabethan audience and missed others, such as Edward's question to Gaveston whether he 'knows' Spencer; an ambiguous phrasing). Perhaps that's why today, it's rather more reminiscent of Antony and Cleopatra than Richard the Second. Later, I walked along the side of the Thames as the water lapped against the bank, the city lights danced in their reflections and St Pauls lit up the skyline. A good day.
As far as reading is concerned, I've finally read L'Etranger. The notion of failing to adhere to social conventions through pretence is sufficiently striking to explain the book's reputation, but not nearly as interesting as La Peste, or even Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels (since the moral indifference of the novel does remind me of Highsmith somewhat).
A couple of weeks later, arriving at the Albert Hall, I was struck by the new entrance hall, which surprised me by not being utterly malign. The abstract iridescent design in lieu of a fresco on the portico is actually rather pleasant, though the plain glass sheeting on the windows and doors seemed a bit out of keeping with its surroundings. Entering the Hall I was able to get a place at the very front of the arena just in front of the orchestra, which I meant I could see the musicians pulling faces whenever they fluffed something. Since the overture to Tannhauser is one of my favourite pieces I was possibly a little fussy about the performance, since the string section seemed a little too restrained and the horn section a a little too vigorous at places. I wasn't quite as familiar with the seven Berg songs and Brahms Symphony no.1 in C minor that followed on, the former quite gentle and lyrical, reminding me of Mendelssohn, the latter reminding me of Schubert and Beethoven. A second concert began the following week with Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor, a rather fine piece, and ended with Mahler's Titan Symphony No. 1 in D Major, which seemed somewhat piecemeal; good in places, sketchy in others. Two encores followed; Haydn, and a rather fine rendition of an overture from Lohengrin.Labels: Art, Drama, Literature, London, Music
posted by Richard 2:47 PM
