I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
I saw the work of Vilhelm Hammershøi during my visit to Copenhagen a few years ago, but I can't say with any honesty that it made any great impression on me at the time. This is perhaps unsurprising; understated paintings in grey tones of spartan and austere subjects are comparatively easy to miss in the midst of other works; it's only when one sees the paintings together that one realises the obsessive theme driving them.
Hammershøi's loose brushwork and restricted palette immediately associate him with his contemporary Whistler, but seventeenth century Dutch painting was also a significant influence on him. As with Vermeer, Hammershøi is frequently found depicting figures in interiors, showing the play of light from nearby windows. Where the Western tradition is for the subject to stare out of a painting and challenge the viewer, Hammershøi follows Vermeer in denying this, having his figures (or figure; his wife was his persistent model) turned away from the viewer to give a hermetic aspect to the painting. In tandem with the grey, barely furnished interiors (photographs of the same rooms show them filled with furnishings and decoration), where the light from a window largely serves to suggest that life is somewhere else, this creates the melancholic air that pervades his work. Durer's figure of melancholy was turned away from the viewer as well. Hammershøi returns again and again to the same interiors, the same piano, the same pictures, the same bowls. But his work also rather resembles Escher or Piranesi, showing long corridors with successions of doors, looking out into interior courtyards through layers of interior windows, with doors that are slightly warped and distorted against the overall geometry of the work. There's a disjoint between the realistic, objective, settings and his imprecise impressionistic brushwork; what is being depicted is an objective correlative for his own state of mind.
The other component to Hammershøi's work is his landscapes, both rural and urban. Whether showing the Danish countryside, Copenhagen's royal palace or church spires, the British Museum or a London street, the scene is always devoid of people and depicted with grey wintry skies that seem somewhere between Whistler and Atkinson Grimshaw. I recall Copenhagen as a colourful city with painted buildings and red church towers surmounted with verdigris encrusted baroque spires. But I recall being fascinated by the same buildings, showing the same empty streets. I discover a certain fellow feeling for Hammershøi that I'm rather unaccustomed to.
The following week I return for two exhibitions near Trafalgar Square. I start with an Wyndham Lewis at the National Portrait Gallery. I recall Angela Carter complaining that all of Lawrence's women were just clothes without bodies, as opposed to his meticulous depiction of male physicality. Something similar can be said of Wyndham Lewis's paintings. The subjects of these portraits are puppet or simulacra. They have the quality of remaining just what they are, fixed in a particular epoch to furniture which is now dust (hence Froanna's liminal character in her Red Portrait as she fades ino the background). "The process and condition of life, without any exception, is a grotesque degradation." The stress on dehumanisation in his writing manifests itself in his painting by his focus on clothes rather than people. The portrait of Edith Sitwell shows her with her eyes shut, her face turned from the viewer, buried in a mass of clothes. Sitwell thought her hands to be her finest feature; here, Lewis hides them altogether (the same applies in his painting of Mrs Schiff, unlike Edwin Evans whose hand blends into his trousers). Hats and helmets abound throughout the paintings. Depicting TS Eliot, he gave the poet a "gioconda smile." Sketch after sketch shows the face left unworked till last. Eliot looks downwards, Pound closes his eyes. Like Modigliani or Picasso (albeit without their primitivism), Lewis saw the face as a mask, indistinguishable from the hat he always painted himself wearing.
Confronted with demands for a return to the classicism of Raphael, Lewis responded by suggesting Shakespeare as an exemplar, praising the famous woodcut of the playwright as serene and empty. Lewis develops various personae in his painting and writing like 'the enemy' as his satirical response to the literary and art world, or his embodiment of satire, the tyro. Lewis caught sight of his face in a cracked mirror and saw "the mask of a syphilitic Creole." Whatever was worth recording in life, he asserted, could be mapped in surface forms. On the whole, I find myself thinking tht Lewis is a rather more sympathetic as a painter than as a writer. His painting of Froanna is a particular masterpiece; red tones predominate excepting the blue of her eyes as she stares directly at the viewer, one of the very few subjects to do so in the entire exhibition.
I follow this with the nearby Divisionism exhibition at the National Gallery. Like Pointillism or Impressionism, Divisionism was a response to new scientific theories of light and colour, like colour wheels. Nonetheless, where French art often has an art for art's sake philosophy, with low-lifes or nudes (Longoni's pickpocket painting is the nearest to that here) featured to epater les bourgeoisie rather than for political ends. By contrast, Italian artists were unhappy with technique alone. Italian reunification has created considerable social upheaval, poverty and inequality that lent itself to a realist style of portrature that much of the rest of Europe had already explored. Equally, symbolism offered a more escapist response to the same conditions, one that especially appealed to Catholic artists. Often, divisionist artists would veer between these extremes. Nomellini paints grey scenes of striking workers at one point in his career, and then paints an extraordinary indigo blue symbolist work showing the sea, entitles Symphony of the Moon. Segantini's nature scenes remains sufficiently detailed to sit alongside Pre-Raphaelite painting, but his later symbolist works show a bizarre depictions of sins being punished in hell. His Return from the Woods is the most perfect fusion of the two strains shown in the exhibition; showing a peasant woman dragging wood in a snow scene, but withthe church spire at her destination is reminiscent of David Friedrich (the same applies to some of Grudicy's autumnal scenes; I'm struck by the spider's web drawn on the frame of one of them). Some of the realist paintings, such as those by Morbelli could have been painted fifty years earlier in terms of their technique, even if light falling through windows is a particular theme. Morbelli also painted melancholy quasi symbolist works of sunsets though. In other works, the divisionist technique, so effective in Segantini's Alpine scenes, imposes a stillness and imprecision that fits oddly with the social agenda of the paintings. Morbelli's luminscent painting of women working in the rice fields utterly fails to convey any sense of misery; it's much too tranquil and beautiful. Either these artists assumed that a method that was 'scientific must be allied to social progress, or the political posturing was actually an alibi for aestheticising the predicament of the working class. Much of the symbolist work is also quite socially engaged though but in a more reactionary fashion, as with Previati's paean to the virtues of the madonna. Volpedo's country scenes are reminiscent of Sisley but show christian processions. Many of the forms are religious, such as the tondo or the polytych. At the very least, religious symbolism is used to evoke a sense of secular national identity; Mazzini had argued that Italians must develop a "religious concept of their nation."
It wasn't until futurism that the techniques developed by divisionism could be applied to a specific programme, albeit one where the interest in light was often centered on electric lighting. The exhibition depicts a move from Boccioni's early pastoral landscapes to a picture of a seamstress (albeit one where the focus is on her cobalt blue dress) to his explicitly futurist painting of a dam being constructed. Other works by Balla and Carra show the futurist depiction of movement in still life or the energy of technology.
As I child I recall seeing a particular statue during a visit to Osbourne House on the Isle of Wight; a black basalt statue of Antinous. I couldn't place my interest in it exactly at the time, presuming it to be due to the exotic Egyptinate character of the statue. I now presume that my interest was mostly taken by the frank sexualisation in the semi-nude depiction of Hadrian's lover. No wonder Winckelman had been so enthused at the imagery that showed Antinous as being somewhere between Athena and Apollo. The story of the doomed youth is one of the central myths of gay history, alongside that of Edward the Second. It's the prospect of seeing Antinous that attracts me to the Hadrian exhibition at the British Museum. The depictions of him are many, from the Egyptianate statue of him as Osiris (with whom he had shared a death day), Ephebian depictions of him as Bacchus (another arisen deity) with vine leaves in his long hair or versions of him as a Greek fertility god. In some of these he conforms to the Roman ideal of the beautiful youth (shown here with the inclusion of the Warren cup), in others his sexuality is more aggressively that of an adult male. I find myself wryly amused at the prospect of his cult competing with christianity; if only it had won. Otherwise, the material at hand is rather more conventional; accounts of Hadrian's brutal suppression of Jewish rebellion, retrenchment and consolidation of the empire's borders after Trajan's overly ambitious expansion, the amnesty on public debts, construction of the Scottish wall (admittedly a turf bank for much of its length that could have served little defensive purpose, instead presumably it served as a means of channelling and controlling the border), anf finishing with the construction of buildings like the Pantheon, his Mausoleum and the architectural fantasisa of his Tivoli villa. The images of Hadrian himself seem surprisingly individual, with his beard setting him out (cited as evidence of his love of all things Greek or a means of covering his blemishes, depending on your preferences) as well as a dimple in his ear that may be evidence of heart disease. Giant busts and statues alternately show him as emperor, priest, warrior and deity. Some of the reliefs from Tivoli, showing Parthenon style depictions of naked figures alongside detailed carvings of vines, birds and squirrels also stand out, but I'm especially drawn to two beautiful peacocks that formerly were in place on the walls of Hadrian's mausoleum.
The great court of the Museum currently has a striking work by Zhang Wang inside it; following the Chinese inclusion of weathered stones in gardens, Wang has taken the image of such stones and encased it in silvery metal, which looks as if it were frozen mercury. This questioning of the relationship between nature and art is counterpointed by some temporary gardens outside, where a genuine stone can be found amidst the dogwood, wisteria, lacquer tree, willow, bamboo and peony. An exhibition of Chinese nature painting inside continues this theme. I'm struck by the role of literary allusion in the paintings and ceramics shown; many of the flowers and animals are chosen for their symbolic connotations (like the lotus) others by homophones suggested by their names (bamboo sounding like congratulations, narcissi sounding like immortality) or for compounds formed from the combination of different items. A few weeks later I'm revisiting Silchester and an archaeological dig is on. A small garden has been created illustrating the sort of plants found in a Roman garden and illustrating their symbolic functions. There are some overlaps with the Chinese symbolism, as with peony being used in protective amulets.
Walking around the city, I visit the interior of St Mary Alderdmary, an exercise in hyperreal gothic by Wren. The effect is quite odd; the fan vaulting is decorated with floral patterns that seem to belong rather more to the baroque period. The effect of the interior being coated in white plaster is rather sepulchral, giving it the effect of an alabaster tomb and contrasting oddly with the colourful Victorian tiling on the floor. While I'm there the organ starts playing Bach's Toccata and Fugue. I move onto Wren's St Stephen Walbrook. The interior here is more like a playfully decorated version of the pantheon; unlike Hawksmoor whose eccentric designs seem to match the English character, Wren would have been a much greater architect in a catholic country, where his designs could have made with red marble rather than Portland stone and his interiors gilded and painted. One detail I am struck with is a totentanz on one of the pillars, showing a bride dancing with a skeletal death. This evening, I go to Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppaea at the Proms. Even if Monteverdi is best known for his ecclesiastical music, this amorality tale does rather confirm the reputation of renaissance Venice as indifferent to religion at best. The plot begins with Cupid asserting her primacy over Virtue and thereafter protecting Poppaea as she schemes her way to becoming Nero's wife, displacing the rather more virtuous Octavia. Poppaea's mother attempts to dissuade her from this course, but only on the grounds of practicality, advising her to go for someone less ambitious instead. Similarly, Octavia's nurse attempts to persuade her to take a lover as a form of revenge. Seneca is depicted as the moral centre of the play but also as a tedious windbag. The only character to receive any punishment is the wronged Octavia, while the assassin Otto is allowed happiness with Drusilla. The staging attempted to draw attention to later events (Poppaea' death at Nero's hands) by having him come close to slapping her as well as introducing an unscripted (and historically inaccurate) scene where Nero drowns Lucan. Since the drama is essentially concerned with Poppae's triumph, I wasn't especially sure I appreciated these interpolations, even if the original audience would have been well aware of Poppaea's eventual fate and that she would have achieved her ambition by remaining faithful to Otto. The Skakespearian approach to casting works bettwe, with both Nero and Poppaea played by women (Nero would originally have been played by a castrato) and various female parts like the nurse played by men (the nurse here bears a disturbing resemblance to Margaret Thatcher).
Later at the Proms, I listen to Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty. The full version is rarely performed in ballet (the story being slight, Tchaikovsky had padded it with various dances). I find myself surprised at the idea of Tchaikovsky writing an opera under the influence of Rameau, although the idea of parallels to Wagner and Brunnhilde's sleep is more natural. In later works, Rimsky-Korsakov's Kaschkey the Immortal inverts this, with the hero's kiss to an evil witch killing her and releasing the princess. I follow this with Dvorak's Slavonic Dances and Janacek's Osud. The latter is quite odd, reminding me of the role of neuroticism in Schnitzler or the sense of impending fate in Kafka (Mann also leapt to mind, prompted by the spa setting). The first two acts describe a conductor's love affair and its end in madness and death. His opera is only written to comprise two acts and the third has his describing the above events it to music students at its premiere, thereby forming the third act.
The following weekend, I go to a Taraf de Haidouks concert in Cheltenham. Much of their music is intended to take orchestral settings of gypsy music by the likes of Bartok and Albeniz and to place in back into its original context, playing it as dance music on the violin, accordion, bass and cymbalum. The result is rather like rock music and it's difficult not to think that where nineteenth century Europe preferred to take folk music and to apply it to orchestral works, twentieth century America preferred to allow black artists to pioneer jazz and blues. The irony of re-appropriating Bartok is born out by the venue, a rather gaudy regency affair. The audience look as if they go there often to attend classical concerts; standing for this one they occasionally manage to sway a bit (aside from one rather energetic elderly lady). It's also worth mentioning the supporting act, the London Bulgarian Choir, who performed a capella folk songes dressed in traditional costumes.
Cheltenham itself, with its rows of regency buildings, seems rather tepid to me. I'm more struck by my visit earlier in the day to Tewkesbury Abbey. It reminds me of Southwell, another place where the isolated location seems to have helped the building survive with comparatively little destruction or alteration. The exterior is rather ungainly; a squat central tower is flanked by various side chapels and fronted with a facade composed of two towers dwarfed by a central window, recessed back as if it were a romanesque arch. The interior is dark, supported by round pillars (each with a face as a corbel facing its counterpart opposite) above a gothic ceiling painted green and white. The effect is rather like a forest. After the rood screen the effect becomes more markedly gothic, with Victorian Minton tiling below matched by white, blue and red patterns above. England's oldest fan vaulting in some of the chantry chapels, some of it still painted. One of them has an effigy of its knight suspended above it, others show statues of mouldering corpses, others show fights with the devil. I'm also quite struck by the lady chapel, with a Byzantine mosaic and icon of St Benedict.
The following day is taken up with a brief visit to Glasgow. I find the Victorian buildings in red sandstone mixed with baroque church spires, Marcochetti statues, greek revival art galleries, elaborate corbel figures and art deco building fronts quite wonderful. I'm equally delighted with the police boxes I keep on seeing on street corners. The back of Prince's Square behind the City Chambers is labyrinth of arches that reminds me of Piranesi. In front, I'm struck by the column surmounted by Walter Scott. London has no statue of Shakespeare, let alone dedicating Trafalgar Squate to him. I walk out to the cathedral and walk around the graveyard. The monuments are eroded and weathered, decorated with skulls and morality symbols. The symbols seem wraithlike when corroded in this manner. On one of them Minton tiling has been badly blackened by industrial pollution. Several more modern tombs are caged in with rusted iron, the interior overgrown with weeds. I walk over to the Victorian necropolis. The presence of the tombs on this hill reminds me of Prague, as does the presence of an old town next to a new one on a grid layout. Presumably Mackintosh would figure as the Glaswegian Gaudi. Paths spiral around the hill, as one passes celtic crosses, Egyptian tombs, funerary urns, all encrusted with rust and weeds as they crumble to dust. The style of the monuments seems rather diverse, from Moorish gothic to Romanesque chapels. Returning, I enter the cathedral. Its stone is quite black with the roof covered in a rich, dark wood. The modern stained glass is a lovely blue. The interior seems as labyrinthine as the necropolis with a crypt where Saint Kentigern's tomb had rested. Medieval German stained glass creates phovist patterns on the floor of a side chapel. Here alone the walls are painted in white and I notice a roof boss in the shape of a skull. Elsewhere, the sacristy's floor is lined with Minton tiles. I look at the funerary memorials in the cathedral. Unlike even those in Tewkesbury they are brightly painted, somewhere between gothic and Tudor in their design.
Lautreamont's Maldoror follows in the path of Baudelaire and Nerval in delighting in contradictions, even as Lautreamont condemns it in his poems. Similarly, the poems are explicit in rejecting the romanticism of Byron, even as Maldoror follows in the path of Manfred, Goethe and Maturin (although he also speaks of tragedy, such as that of Mervyn, as moral, exciting pity and terror). Where, Maldoror denounces god the poems state that "I reject evil... man never fell from a state of grace." Maldoror itself is far from monologic. At one point, Satan is Maldoror's great rival, elsewhere god is essentially identical to satan ("I created you so I have the right to do whatever I like to you... I am making you suffer for my pleasure") at another the archangel speaks of Maldoror in the same terms as Lucifer himself, a fallen angel they would welcome back as one of their own. Since the text accepts the binary logic of christianity throughout, it is split between salvation and damnation as mutually exclusive choices, even as the narrator rejects god as an evil tyrant; "this god who is insensible to your prayers.. this shapeless and bloodthirsty idol... I should like to love and adore you but you are too powerful and there is fear in my prayers." Since man is made in god's image it follows that man is as corrupt and vicious as his creator ("the creator who ought never to have bred such vermin"), making murder a moral act. Applying Blake's dictum that one should soon smother a child in its cradle than nurse unacted desires, Maldoror emerges as a Sadeian rebel in the same way Blake envisaged Milton's Satan. But at the same time the narrative voice can still shift to utter conventional homilectics; "that torch of unjustifiable pride that is leading you to your damnation."
Roderick Hudson reminded me of an observation I'd heard that while homosexuality forms an obvious subtext in many novels by gay authors, the sense can permeate other works (the example cited was a rereading of 1984 as story of gay love and persecution). Here, there are grounds to suspect a subtext; Cecilia introduces Roderick as "a pretty boy" while in Venice Roderick and Rownland watch "a brown breasted gondolier making superb muscular movements." The core of the novel can as easily be read as concerning Rowland's unrequited love for Roderick as it can for Mary. In spite of the depiction of Mary, women essentially figure throughout as sexual threats that destroys men of talent as much as Rowland's interference; "a buxom, bold faced, high-coloured creature... she used to beat him and he had taken to drinking." Then later; "he had married a horrible wife.. it was said she used to beat poor Savage." Similarly, Christina is "as cold and false and heartless as she is beautiful... her disrelish of a man who lacked the virile will."Labels: Architecture, Art, England, Glasgow, History, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 8:14 AM
Sunday, 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
Sunday, November 12, 2006
"High the vanes of Shrewsbury gleam
Islanded in Severn stream;
The bridges from the steepled crest
Cross the water east and west." (AE Housman)
Shrewsbury is one of the best preserved towns in England, with streets lined with half-timbered buildings (one of them stayed in by Henry prior to the Battle of Bosworth Field), a castle on a hill and a profusion of churches from a number of a variety of different periods. Outside the town and besides the Severn lie the remains of the old Benedictine monastery (including a rather eeriely isolated refectory pulpit standing outside) and the present Abbey. The red sandstone exterior left me rather reminded of Hereford. The interior remains largely gothic, with the remains of St Winfrid's shrine having an orthodox icon of the saint by them (it's not really my sort of reading but I did always rather like the alternative story of Winifrid's arrival in Shrewsbury from A Morbid Taste for Bones), Tudor and Norman tombs, Norman remains, a font made from an upended Roman column as a font and Victorian reredos depicting Winifrid.
Within the town lies the church of St Mary the Virgin, with the third largest spire in England (half of it from the original sandstone, the rest much later). This is one of the most impressive churches that I've seen; the windows are filled with 13th to 16th century stained glass from Belgium and Germany, purchased at the same time as the Lady Chapel of Lichfield Cathedral. The 'Tree of Jesse' window showing Edward the Third is 14th century, Saxon tomb slabs, the floor is covered with Minton tiles, while the wooden ceiling is filled with elaborate angel carvings. Nearby is the more modest St Alkmund, a Victorian church with a painted East window and St Chad, a baroque round tower church with a circular nave. Outside, yellow and red leaves had fallen and covered the ground around the large tombs. Over the road is a park with a classical war memorial containing a statue of the angel Gabriel. Past a statue of Darwin outside the library, lie the remains of the castle, as red as the Abbey. A tower built by Thomas Telford when an earlier part of the structure collapsed stands overlooking the river. Down in the town, the museum houses a number of interesting exhibits from the Roman city of Virconium (Wroxeter), including soldier's gravestones (originally garishly painted) and Samian wear.
Elsewhere, St Michael's in Lichfield is set in one of the largest graveyard in the country. Though it lacks the elaborate tombs in the London Victorian cemetery, one of the larger tombs had it's own clock and gas supply to light it up. St Mary and St Hardulph, or Breedon on the Hill, is siutated atop a hill above the surrounding plain. Originally, the site of a Monastery, the largely Norman church is notable for its extensive Saxon carvings; an angel like the one at Lichfield, Vine scroll above the altar and Anglian beasts. Seventeenth century slates tombstones line up in the windswept churchyard, each decorating with elaborate neo-classical etchings that have survived well. A Tudor family memorial depicts the deceased at prayer as well as showing a skeletal corpse beneath. A wooden pew surives that served as the box for the local gentry during services. Nearby is St Michael and St Mary at Melbourne, a Norman cathedral in miniature, with thick columns and round arches supporting a gallery that runs the length of the church. A wonderful medieval mural of the devil survives on one of the walls, near to columns where Saxon carvings of animals remain, including a Sheela-na-gig, a pagan fertility symbol. Further on is St Mary at Tutbury, a rather more restrained affair which does nonetheless have an extraordinary Norman arch in alabaster (another shows scenes of boar hunting). Finally, I had been to Repton before, but was interested to note the same slate tombstones outside and the statue of St Wystan bearing a metal sword above the door.
Autumn is my favourite time of year, with the world transfigured with green thoughts to shades of bronze, gold and burgundy and where the fallen leaves are suddenly siezed and thrown through the air by the unseen force of the wind. I think what I increasingly like about looking at buildings and the natural world is a sense of transfiguration, something similar to Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie translates as 'making strange.' I think of how buildings take on different characters in different lights, of how the fog I can currently see from the window makes the innocuous and familiar sinister and hidden, of how autumn leaves transform the living into something artificial. Autumn has come late this year and it still feels more like October than November. Travelling into London to the Velasquez exhibition at the National Gallery, the sun is bright and the air still seems gentle. The exhibition itself shows Velasquez as a consummate realist, concerned with the mundane in his genre paintings (in spite of the number of religious or mythical subjects), while also continually suggesting, as with Foucault's analysis of Las Meninas, the limits of representation, as with the two kitchen scenes shown here where christ is seen as being somewhere else beyond everyday concerns. The same applies to The Rokeby Venus, where the mirror image only shows a dim reflection of Venus and one that is at the wrong angle (although most of the portraits show the subject facing the viewer, Velasquez also has his sibyl turned away and hidden). Two other small exhibitions were being held, of Cezanne and Dutch winter scenes. The former seems striking for Cezanne's almost cubist approach to nature painting while the highlight of the latter was Jan Beerstraten's The Castle of Muiden in Winter and Avercamp's Scene on the Ice Near Town. Elsewhere within the gallery, I walked through the Sainsbury wing, responding to the colours, but as ever, finding it hard to respond to the subject matter of works like The Wilton Diptych, until we come to the lascivious mythological painting of Florentine artists like Botticelli, Di Cosimo (though a Crivelli altarpiece with real jewels and gold embedded in it was rather striking), Cranach's Greek allegory of Cupid Complaning to Venus and Venetian portrait painters like Bellini's portrait of The Doge Leonardo Loredan. Van Eyck's The Arnolfini Portrait also stands out for me and I next visit the Dutch section, with its Vane De Velde maritime paintings, De Hootch allegories (although he always seems more amused at vice than outraged) or Ruisdael landscapes. Other striking works included Moroni's aristocratic portraits set in the midst of ruins and Rosa's proto-romantic scenes.
Like several other Icelandic sagas, Njal's Saga depicts the conversion of Iceland to Christianity. Njal is himself shown as an unearthly figure gifted with second sight and whose death has all the hallmarks of a saint's martyrdom. Zola's Therese Raquin shows less of a conflict between physiological and environmental considerations than that seen in his later works, cleaving to a theory of the body as the wellspring of all action (Therese and Laurent do not act consciously but are instead two people, driven by their physiogonomy), something that looks back to the medieval humours and forward to Ballard's instinct driven idea of consciousness rather than inahbiting a conventional idea of character. The results can be somewhat uncomfortable; Therese's actions are attributed to her African blood. Nonetheless, Zola is far from being consistent in this regard; Therese speaks of having her upbringing made her into a hypocrite and liar, while Laurent's suffering is seen to induce a change in his body and character, making him more nervous and feminine. While Laurent is held to act only out of fleshy desire, Therese is supposed to take pleasure in knowing why she acts. Their very guilt seems to product of consciousness rather than the instincts of the flesh, while such tropes as the ghost and their eventual suicide seem to suggest the structure of a moral fable.
The figure in the carpet is often cited as a characteristic of Jamesian fiction. The Europeans exemplifies this through the way it depicts its characters in relation to their environment (America and Europe) but elides description of those environments. Felix resembles a Turgenev protagonist while Eugenia resembles Flaubert's most famous heroine. But both Turgenev and Flaubert depict their characters as part of a complex web of social relationships, while James only briefly limns such matters in. Whereas earlier novelists like Dickens and Eliot had assigned a deterministic element to a character's environment, no such element exists for James whose characters are rather more unpredictable, with the lackadaisical Felix settling down while Gertrude discovers herself out of kilter with her home.Labels: Architecture, England, History, Literature, Weather
posted by Richard 7:39 AM
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Bevis Marks Synagogue is the oldest site of Jewish worship in Britain, dating back to Cromwell and the reformation. I was a little surprised to be asked to wear a Kippah skull cap, not having had any such request in Prague's synagogues, though I rather concluded that I liked it. The interior, in wood, white plaster and gold leaf is similar to Wren's churches, just as some of the Prague synagogues took on the guise of Baroque churches. I was also able to gain access to several Wren churches; St Botolph (elaborate Victorian stained glass with stuccoed angels in line across the ceiling), St Bride's (rather Catholic, with the eye streaming light from the altar beneath a barrel vault, suprisingly homoerotic photographic depictions of the crucifixion on the walls) and St Dunstan in the West (a gothic building, now filled with Orthodox icons). St Bride's crypts were open and were especially intriguing, showing both the foundations of succeeding churches and cleared gravestones. Finally, St Sophia, the Greek Orthodox Cathedral, represents what Westminster Cathedral may one day come to look like, with the mosaics created by the same artist, Boris Anrep. I had been to Brompton Cemetery before but hadn't realised that it is laid out in the plan of a basilica, albeit one with whose plans were incomplete with several chapels and bell towers never having been completed and the catacombs left largely unused. Unlike Highgate or Kensal Green, Bunhill Fields cemetery is only just outside the city of London and represents an outcast's cemetery as much as the Jewish cemetery in Prague (which is what it most reminds me of). Containing the graves of Blake, Defoe and Bunyan as well as assorted Cromwells and Wesleys, the tombstones are packed in thickly and are mostly unostentatious, bar the weathered skull motifs found on many of the graves. I walk to St Giles Cripplegate before travelling to the Tower of London. The tower is a rather hyperreal construct, a process that began as early as the restoration when the Crown Jewels were put on display there (originally so that the king's majesty could be touched, until one of the crowns was damaged) and wooden heads of past kings were put on display to legitimise the monarchy once more (Elizabeth had a special place alongside relics of the Armada and later the Jacobite rebellion). Another curiousity was a Venetian winged lion taken from Corfu, on display inside the White Tower. The white tower itself was only painted and gabled later, while much of the tower is a Victorian reconstruction of the original. Nontheless, what does tend to be interesting about the tower is the Chapel of St John the Evangelist or the graffiti scrawled on the walls by the likes of Arundel or by an astronomer sent to the tower by Bess of Hardwick on suspicion of sorcery. Before I leave I notice a seagull making of with meat intended for the ravens, three of whom indignantly fly in pursuit.
I go for a walk in Greenwich, beginning with St Alfege, whose interior rather reminds me of the churches in Denmark; white plaster and dark wood. Greenwich reminds me a little of Oxford; a place outside of civil society throughout history and whose confrontation with modernity has left it as a fly in amber. I go for a walk around the Naval College Chapel and the Cutty Sark before walking the Greenwich foot tunnel to east London. Here, I return to St Anne's Limehouse and am able to see the interior. Damage due to damp was all too visible, with the elaborate blue plaster horribly disfigured and decayed. The following day is witness to a St George's Cathedral. The building was shorn of its spire the second world war and is consequently rather drab and forgettable. leaving a marked sense of incongruity when one walks through to the beautiful interior. I then walked around the park that was formerly the grounds of the Bethelem Royal Hospital and are now adjacent to the Imperial War Museum (former site of Bedlam); within it grows the 34 native trees that colonised Britain after the ice age. Today, the grass has shrivelled and the tree's leaves are curling and withering in the heat. London silver vaults reminded me of Highgate's Egyptian avenue of funerary vaults; one descends downwards through a series of maze-like passages and stairwells. Upon arrival, corridors stretch off into the distance with doors on either side. Each shop is effectively a walk-in safe, with each of them selling the same kinds of candelabra and assorted ephemera. Visiting Convent Garden, I noticed the church there now has its own orthodox icon, showing the madonna, flanked by st paul and st genesius, the patron saint of actors.
The Holbein exhibition at the Tate represents the point at which art became full human and secular. Although Holbein did produce religious works they could most charitably be described as inferior imitations of renaissance painting. With most devotional work proscribed in Britain, his painting of Erasmus shows the scholar in the guise typically reserved for saints while other works are created as roundels in imitation of classical coins. Holbein pioneered painting where the subject looks directly at the viewer, so that his works acquire a peculiarly intimate quality (the subjects loom large, taking up the entire canvas). Merchants sought pictures that were true to life to send to far-fling contacts and family, thereby displacing classical and religious paintings. Elsewhere, the Tate had a painting of Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, Moorish Ambassador to Queen Elizabeth I and the peculiarly surreal painting of The Cholmondeley Ladies. The later section of Blake was also especially interesting, showing Blake's work in the context of artists between the wars who responded to his vision of a New Albion, such as Nash's paintings of the Mansions of the Dead and the Flight of the Magnolia as well as Robin Ironside's Daliesque paintings. Other interesting works include John Singer-Sergeant's paintings of the Middle-East and Whistler's surprisingly traditional Crepuscule in Flesh Colour and Green: Valparaiso , Piper's paintings of Bath destroyed by the Luftwaffe's Baedaeker's raids and Rossetti's The Annunciation. That evening I watched fireworks exploding over London, tracing patterns in the sky with sparklers and watching Millbank Tower silhouetted and Battersea Power Station being lit up by the lights.
Caesar's The Conquest of Gaul exhibits many of the same ambivalent attitudes to civilisation shown by Tacitus; the relatively civilised Gauls prove easy to conquer while the barbaric hunters of the German tribes cannot be vanquished. In a similar fashion, Thucydides records during The Pelopennesian War that the habit of dressing lavishly had been abandoned in Athens as being decadent in favour of Spartan simplicity.
Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop ends with its two protagonists fleeing from the burning shop, a moment Carter saw as being akin to the expulsion from Eden (though the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was perhaps the more obvious metaphor). However, the novel has two such Eirenic moments elsewhere (once in Melanie's garden at home and once with Finn in the pleasure gardens) with the surfeit of symbolism consequently overwhelming precise interpretations (particularly given the question of whether Uncle Philip represents the devil or a totalitarian god in the narrative). Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight affords a similar problem. Szerb was heavily influenced by Lukacs and the idea of the problematic individual, and the novel accordingly presents a disjunction between society and the bohemian aspirations of the novel's characters. Conversely, Szerb was also heavily influenced by Karl Kerenyi, a Jungian scholar of Greek myth Lukacs drove into exile. The character's bohemian rebellion is accordingly expressed as thanatophilia, through doors to the underworld and an Etruscan Eurydice leading Orpheus back down to Hades for their union to take place. The two narratives barely interlock and instead proceed in parallel with one another, the notion of Marxist alienation being aborted in favour of a view of society as despiritualised.
One of the advantages of the layout of the Globe Theatre is that it affords far more possibilities than a normal confined stage arrangement. The last production of Titus Andronicus saw the action spill out of the stage and around the rest of the theatre. Confetti is hurled from the galleries down to the conquering heroes and Emperors of Rome. Bassinius is thrown into a pit into the arena, where scaffolding is errected and moved for hangings and speeches. The actors move amongst the crowds in the arena, all of which seems apposite for a play that is often concerned with bread and circuses. The play itself is an anomaly; its bleak rejection of worldly affairs has more in common with King Lear and Timon of Athens than with the other early works. Like much of Marlowe's work, it seems well characterised by Artaud's ideas; "The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood.
This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid." As in Artaud's manifesto, the play uses symbolism to work with the emotions and to remove the audience from the quotidian, to attack their senses through violence and to use the grotesque (a late Bakhtinian concept that has lost its vital connection with renewal; much of the play can really only be directed as carnivalesque farce or burlesque. Hence Bloom's comment that the play should really be directed by Mel Brooks). Whereas later works, like A Midsummer Night's Dream carefully balance the claims of the wild greenwood and civilised Athens, Titus Andronicus lacks any such symmetry. The play opens with Titus mercilessly ordering the death of Tamora's son in spite of her entreaties and slaying his own, creating a question mark from the outset as to whether Rome is more civilised than the barbarous Goths (throughout, I found myself reminded of Cavafy's Waiting for the Barbarians). Later, the ascending of Tamora to becoming Rome's Empress further blurs that distinction, as much as the use of a Goth army by Lucius to liberate Rome from a despotic ruler. Walking back along the Embankment, I notice that all the trees have had blue and white fairy lights layed over their boughs, vesting the place with an oddly ethereal feel. Two men lovingly kiss underneath the leaves.
Coetzee's Slow Man marks an understated sequel of sorts to Elizabeth Costello, continuing in the same anti-novelistic tradition. Coetzee places the central elements of the novel in the background, whether it is narrative (events are understated, abandoning resolution in favour of the indeterminacy of life) or consciousness (the central character being essentially hollow, experiencing a series of reactions towards Marijana, none of which can be fully characterised as emotion or feeling). As a fable, Slow Man is non-existent, its protagonist gaining no
redemption, resolution or closure, simply a dying fall.Labels: Architecture, Art, Drama, History, Literature, London
posted by Richard 7:37 AM
Monday, August 28, 2006
In many respects, Copenhagen resembles Amsterdam with its docks reclaimed from the sea, its gabled merchant's houses and its canals. Unlike Holland though, Denmark has no history of republicanism and was an absolute monarchy for much of recent history. The city is accordingly filled with towering baroque churches with copper spires, moated palaces, domes and towers. Statues of mythical creatures rear out of every corner. Copper statues fill all the parks, from the monsters in front of the Radhus to the Greek statues in the Botanical Gardens. Beginning in fron the Radhus's gothic towers, the lure singers statue and the three gothic gargoyles by its balustrade, I walked past Tivoli, the last pleasure gardens in Europe, down the main shopping street to the Vor Frue Kirke, the city cathedral. The interior is white and spartan, showing a distinct neo-classical influence; the only ornament is from Thorvaldsen's statues of the saints, which line either side the nave. Although the tone is in keeping with Lutheran theology, the results nonetheless seem odd for a Protestant church. The rest of the building was designed by C.F. Hansen, who also created neo-classical designs for the law courts and palace chapel. Nearby is the Sankt Petri Kirke, the oldest preserved church in the city centre of Copenhagen. Nearby to that is the Rundetaarn is part of the Trinitatis Kirke with its white interior and occasional gold ornament, the gothic interior being relieved by baroque ornamentation. The tower served as an observatory and affords a view as far as Sweden. A whitewashed spiral walk leads up the summit and a wrought-iron lattice railings. Near to this is the Sankt Nikolaj Kirker, now a rather poor art gallery. I feel rather ambivalent to this; I have little to no sympathy for religious belief but am concerned as to the implications of its welcome retreat for the beautiful buildings it has created. Few notable pieces of architecture reflect anything other than commercial ostentation, aristocratic conceit and religios progaganda, none of these boding especially well.
I had been to exhibitions with many of the works from Dahlerup's Glyptotek, but was still impressed with seeing them in place, the red hippopotamus from the gardens of Sallust in the winter gardens. Foremost amongst the exhibits was a bust of Ptolemy, cut from the same black basalt as earlier statues (as well as more impressives statues, such as one of Anubis) but showing a face in the Grecian rather than Egyptian style. One Egyptian stelae shows Octavian making offerings to the Egyptian gods as if he were Amenhotep. This was followed by a set of Roman busts from differing periods and places, the Hellenistic, Republican (a more realistic style prior to idealised Julian statuary), Palmyran, Flavian and Severan. Notable figures included Antinous and a rather ephebian Dionysus (who assumed a more promiment role over time as attitudes became more fatalistic and mystery religions worshipping him or Demeter spread). Some busts retained the ceramic eyes originally placed in their sockets, given them a hauntingly natural sensation in contrast to the glacial and ephereal nature of most unpainted Greek statuary (one surviving bust of Caligula has a painted version alongside). Conversely, Greek statuary has tended to prefer bronze, with less of it surviving as a consequence, with one replica of Heracles also being striking for retaining its white and black ceramic eyes against the verdigris of the copper. Many of the museums in Copenhagen seem to have an unusually large Etruscan section, showing the brilliant colouring on the tomb frescos and statues (one Sphinx in particular), the black pottery and copper tools like mirrors. Where the exhibition also showed Fayum mummies, early rectangular Egyptian coffins, later mummy cases and carved Roman sarcophaguses, the Etruscans created funerary caskets in the shape of houses or even as seated statues (bearing Persephone's pomegranate in one hand) of the deceased placed before banqueting tables in their rock tombs as part of an ancestor cult. More generally, the museum also had ceramic walls tiles from Babylon, depicting lions and mythological beasts.
The Glyptotek also showcases sections on Danish art and French sculpture. Rodin's sculptures, such as The Kiss, depict scenes from Dante, with most of the French sculpture being either religious (the reaper seizing a young girl) or classical (Perses slaying Medusa). The Danisch sculptures are not dissimilar but Frend's works tend to concentrate on Norse myth, showing Odin and the Valkyries. Many of the paintings show the idealised influence of Constable (such as Lundbye's paintings, though some of his paintings of dolmen are more interesting), as a defeated and impoverished nation (after Nelson's naval bombardment and a disastrous alliance with Napoleon leading to the loss of Norway to Sweden) sought refuge in escapism and in paintings of Mediterranean scenes, such as the Temple of the Winds and the ruined Coliseum, painted by Rørbye. The paintings of Dahl (his nighttime pictures of Vesuvius) and Købke (winter landscapes) particularly stood out from this. The Glyptotek is in many a normal gallery today but its central palmhouse and an extension modelled on the statue of Halicarnassus, note that its history is not typical. Created by the Carlsberg brewing magnate, Carl Jacobsen, who had also created some kitsch and grandiolquent (rather Stalinist) architecture at the factory in Frederiskberg; four elephants guarding the gates and tiled paintings of the founders while the nearby worker's housing was rather more dour.
The National Museum also includes many ancient exhibits, such as a giant black basalt scarab, Jewish ossuaries, Christian Syrian mummies, a Phoenician/Aridian sarcophagus where the features were Grecian despite otherwise resembling an Egyptian mummy and Roman silver cups depicting scenes from the Iliad and Odyssey in exquisite detail. Elsewhere, the ethnographic section included Peruvian mummies, Javanese shadow theatres, and Aztec jade mummies. For the most part, the museum dwelt on Danish history though, such as wooden church sculptures, ivory goblets with spheres inside spheres from the royal kunstkammer, the Trundholm sun chariot, rune calendars and spells written onto wooden lengths in runes, golden altars, drinking horns, gold reliquaries, paintings reflected in a central cylinder to become visible, nautilus shells, eighteenth century chinoiserie tapestry and red lacquered panels. Much of the interest in runes seems to have originated with Ole Worm, an antiquarian equivalent to Stukeley or Dee, who was also interested in taxidermy, fossils (determining that certain horns came from narwhals and not unicorns) and helped established the botanical gardens in Copenhagen. Finally, there is a room dedicated to rune stones, contained several showing Swastikas and Triskeli as well as Futhark inscriptions (though it has to be said that it would seem preferrable for these stones to remain outside).
The Slotsholmen area is home to one of the older royal palaces and the current Parliament, separated from the rest of the city by canals. Just outside it, the Holmen's Kirke is decorated in the baroque style, but with the carving in unvarnished wood. This was the naval church and a wooden ship model remains suspended from the ceiling. The church lacks a tower, instead forming a cross with equal lengths on all sides. Within the area, lies the Thorvaldsen Museum. Like the Soane Museum, Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum cast court, the museum serves as a mausoleum to the sculptor, including many of his sculptures, casts, collections and personal effects as a form of grave good. While the museum does feature his church sculptures, most of his work is classical and explicitly erotic, if not homoerotic. There are three versions of Ganymede (one showing him with the eagle), Adonis, Jason, Apollo and Mars. The building itself appears designed on its interior to ape Nero's palace while the exterior has a frieze showing Thorvaldsen's works being put in place (the tone of hagiography is often rather marked with busts and statues of Thorvaldsen being found throughout the museum). The upper floor displays Egyptian canopic jars, Greek red & black vases, Roman busts as well as a Brueghel that seemed more reminiscent of Bosch's hell paintings. Overall, Thorvaldsen's preference is for neo-Italianate painting in the Renaissance style. Nonetheless, the museum also has more Romantic depictions of Danish landscapes, such as more Dahl nightscenes.
The Botanical Gardens contain a variety of terrains, from Greek mountains, coniferous forests, herbaceous borders, bamboo glades and a lake complete with lilypads and a Monetesque bridge. Fat black and white ducks nestle nearby while a snake slides through the grass. The gardens are exhibiting poisonous plants, such as Belladona and Snowberry. Classical copper statues dot the grounds, such as a discuss thrower. At the centre is a glass Palmhouse, containing cycads, lillies and citrus trees. Some butterflies flit through the air in one of the houses. Nearby to it is the Rosenborg Slot, surrounded by a moat this was the palace of Christian the Fourth and was in use from the sixteenth to eighteenth century. The interior is accordingly varied, featuring the contents of the King's Kunstkammer; a winter room whose walls are studded with Flemish pastoral and winter scenes, a marble room decorated with silver-lined mirrors, amber (Northern gold) caskets and chandeliers, ivory ship models, serrated paintings that display either the king or queen depending on where it is viewed from, black lacquered chionoiserie panels, a room were the walls are entirely covered in mirrors and gold Thorvaldsen statues. Finally, the upper floor houses a throne room, with a decorated stucco ceiling, narwhal throne, Flemish tapestries, silver lions and silver clocks and mirrors. Passages lead off to glass and porcelain cabinets, modelled on Charlottenberg in Berlin. The treasury in the basement houses the Gallehus horns (depicting a horned god), planet and eclipse machines, rock crystal goblets, an altar set with a skull at the base of the chalice and the crown jewels.Nearby is the Hirschprung Museum, featuring nineteenth century 'Golden Age' art. As with the Thorvaldsen museum, this covers material like Eckersberg's portraits, Lundbye's pastoral landscapes, Købke's melancholy paintings of Frederiksberg through to later works like Ejnar Nielsen The Blind Girl (a Klimt like affair, showing a figure in black encircled by a gold river), Harald Slott-Møller's Pre-Raphaelite Spring while other works like Theodor Philipsen View of the Road to Kastrup and works by Johannes Larsen's were more impressionist. The grounds outside the rather funereal building are pleasantly rural, filled with lakes. A tree stump has been carved in the image of a turtle while a heron pauses at the water's edge. Fungi grow from tree trunks. Walking back towards the waterfront, one comes to the Marmorkirken, a baroque green and gold dome. Otherwise known as Frederik’s Church, its grey marble interior is largely baroque, occasionally relieved by bright blue stained glass and gold mosaics. Next to its stands the three gold domes of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. Walking past it to Nyhavn, leads onto the island of Christianhavn and the Vor Frelser's Kirke. Constructed as an unmissable testament to absolute monarchy (or totalitarianism as we might call it now), its black and gold spire has a spiral wrapped round that was modelled on the interior of a snail (designed by Laurids de Thurah, who also conceived the nearby Charlottenberg Palace near Nyhavn). Walking round the spiral exterior was rather like becoming a figure from Escher's Ascending and Descending or perhaps Tatlin's Tower, Brueghel's Tower of Babel or a funfair helter skelter. The interior is white with a ceiling studded with gold stars, angels lining along the altar rails, a giant wooden barqoue organ supported by two elephants and a gold crown handing above the font.Otherwise, the area is reminiscent of nothing so much as London's Docklands (though the further island of Nyholm retains its position as a naval base and the same crane seen in nineteenth century churches), as warehouses are concerted into offices, save for small pockets like Christiania.
Venturing further afield, I came to Roskilde and its cathedral. Formely the capital of Denmark before being outstripped by mercantile Copenhagen, Roskilde is perhaps best described as being analogous to somewhere like Winchester. Built from red brick and plastered white on the inside, beautiful pre-reformation floral patterns lost in Copenhagen's churches remain here, often depicting local devils (Tutivillus the "patron demon of scribes" or of calligraphy). More modern paintings of figures like Harald Blutooth now join these. The Danish royal family are interred here, often with later extensions to accommodate them; Christian the First's chapel features Renaissance marble tombs in the style of ancient temples. Frederik the Fifth's chapel is neo-classical, filled with black coffins with gold clawed feet and guarded by Sphinxes. Christian the Fourth's chapel is more gothic, with a blue ceiling studded with gold stars where frescos of Biblical scenes line the walls. Finally, a tomb for the wife of Tsar Alexander and mother of the last Tsar is filled with Russian icons - it may now be returned to Russia, the Tsarina having escaped on a British destroyer. Ancient gravestones line the floors. Near to the entrance, there is an astronomical clock, with the roar of the dragon and St George striking the hour. Otherwise, the interior is flawlessly pure, save for gold altars, royal pews and organs. Finally, I visited the Viking ship museum by the fjord. Tiny fish and jellyfish dart through the water while swans glide overhead. Arriving back in Copenhagen, I went to the Helligånds Kirke for an organ recital by Gillian Weir. The church is, once more, white plaster, with dark wood panelling and gilt. It was the only church to still retain stained glass windows. Gold angels appeared on a frized at the back of the church before the baroque painted altar. The recital included Liszt, Durufle, Mushel, Jongen and Slonimsky.
The final day began with a visit to Malmö. Southern Sweden has been Danish for longer than it has been Swedish, and the new landbridge has once more joined the two cities. The city itself is lined by a canal, parks and graveyards (rather less ornate than British equivalents, often featuring natural motifs and still retaining iron railings). Within the city are many half-timbered buildings, a Dutch-style townhall while a Moorish synagogue stands outside the city. A windmill stands outside the moat of the castle. The cathedral is Germanic in style, built by German merchants who has travelled to the Øresund region to exploit the herring trade (the equivalent of the English wool trade), though one of the chapels retains wall painting very similar to that at Roskilde, showing George and the Dragon. The interior is extremely plain, with only a few baroque ornaments. The castle, a former prison, now houses a design exhibition. This covers a range of design periods; Italian and Flemish Renaissance painting (including a Bosch-like Dutch painting of Orpheus in the Underworld), Delft and Maiolica vases, vases in the classical style, with gold Egyptian handles and black ceramic, mirrors with black and white Wedgewood figures, large Art Nouveau vases dominated by dragons and peacocks as well as Art Nouveau stained glass with spider's webs and peacocks. Most striking was the peasant art, with woven tapestries and painted wood. A historical exhbition contained another rune stone, showing Christ painted in gold and red. The castle's rooms had been restored to something like their original state, including paintings of James and Mary Stuart (whose husband was imprisoned in the castle).
Returning to Copenhagen, I visited Kastellet, a citadel similar to that built at Malmö though still in use as a military base. The Little Mermaid statue rests in the waters here, between this and the industrial and naval complexes at Nyholm, as well as a statue of the Norse Goddess Gefion. Another oddity is the church of St Albans, an English church built to serve the British embassy (the Swedish embassy seems to have taken over an old church). I was left ambivalent over the Scandinavian social model; high costs mean that wages can be kept high across the board rather than being driven down as in the Anglo-American model. While this funds an exceptional welfare state and public services, the number of vagrants suggests that it can make it difficult for many to make ends meet. Conversely, working hours seemed much less than in England, suggesting a much greater focus on quality of life than on economic growth.Labels: Architecture, Art, Copenhagen, History
posted by Richard 7:36 AM
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 i