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, August 31, 2008
I was interested to hear of an open day at Battersea Power Station this weekend and accordingly found myself walking from Vauxhall station through an industrial maze of walls in an largely forgotten part of London. The open day proves to be organised by a group proposing a redevelopment of the site. The plans entail building a largely glass ecodome next to the power station, surmounted by a chimney tower that acts as a flue for the heated air from the dome, thereby obviating the need for heating systems. Looking at the enormous glass structure dwarfing the power station, I find myself unkindly reminded of Speer's plans for the new Berlin, whereby the Great Hall dwarfed the nearby Reichstag (another derelict at the time). The plans seem very laudable, with proposals for water recycling, green roofs, sustainable power generation, although given the current economic and political climate I'm inclined to be cynical as to their prospects. Looking at the CGI realisations of the power station, it all seems rather kitsch with a glass roof covering the inner courtyards; the same rather bizarre postmodern quality Gilbert Scott's other power station at Bankside now has.
I have, of course, come for the ruin rather than the plans though. Here again, I'm reminded of Speer and his theory of ruin value. Gilbert Scott's buildings do have a certain streamlined elegance to them but are still hardly especially enthralling. Nonetheless, their scale does mean they are well suited to becoming a ruin; place them in another context and they become an exercise in kitsch (even as power stations they must have been a little bizarre). I find myself thinking of the recent observation from Jonathan Meades that the English prefer prettiness to the sublime, raw and dramatic. Given that the sublime was a quasi-religious concept that sought to awe and crush the individual ego (a tactic well employed in the construction of cathedrals), it's difficult to see a secular role for the sublime, but in ruins it can certainly still have such a purpose. Perhaps modernism, with its futurist aspirations, was always especially predisposed to ruin value. With all this in mind, I walk across a large wasteland overgrown with weeds to the site. With one of the towers partially sheathed in scaffolding, its broken windows, the skeletal walls with their holes and breakages, it does look like some image of a ruined cathedral. The interior is green and pleasant with birds flying past the still tiled walls. Metal girders still stand, but rusted and increasingly seeming more part of nature than a work of construction. Some of the station machinery still remains, such as two rusted cranes standing motionless nearby. In many respects, it seems a terrible pity to 'regenerate' this.
I walk back along the river to Battersea Park and across the Albert Bridge to the Chelsea Embankment with its redbrick and terracotta buildings. I wanted to see the Royal Chelsea Hospital and walk past an obelisk in the front lawn, past the golden statue of Charles the Second, through its colonnades and into its dining hall. From there, I journey onwards to the city and spend some time visiting some of Wren's churches; St Benet, St James Garlickhythe, St Michael Paternoster and the ruined St Mary Somerset.
The evening is occupied with a visit to the Globe theatre, where Timon of Athens is being performed. I had never visited the Globe as a 'groundling' before and accordingly decide to do so on this occasion, ending up with a space immediately before the stage. This does have the advantage of better enabling you to experience the play as something happening around you rather than a passive experience watched from afar (the conventional theatre layout is after all essentially the precursor to the television screen). Characters enter and exit from the front of the stage, walking through the audience. In this production, a net has been draped over the roof space, enabling some rather acrobatic actors to leap down and retreat back up their ropes to the ceiling again. Dressed in black as crows with the sound of drums in the background, the production acquires something of an Aeschylean quality, with the Furies ever overhead. The play itself does a great deal to reinforce my conviction that one of Shakespeare's central facets is the destruction of moral and metaphysical certainties in the reformation. In many respects, the play is quite carnivalesque, dealing with the world turned upside down and scatological humour, but carnival's inversions are temporary and ultimately reinforce the status quo, whereas there is little that is regenerative here; the world remains upside down. Tragedy in the customary Shakespearian sense is a requital for some form of sin, with the downfall serving as a form of atonement; again there is none of that here. Timon could be viewed as a voluptuary whose downfall is linked to his excesses (something played up in the presentation of the banquet as a debauched orgy here), but it's more probable that his sin would be excessive generosity (while the callousness of the Athenians is left unpunished when Alcibiades spares them). In other plays, the malcontent is linked to the figure of the overreacher, but here it is linked to the figure of the hermit. In several respects, the Timon of the second half is pursuing the conventional course of the christian saint in his renunciation of the world and rejection of Apemantus and his rather more practical calls for moderation. The play dresses Timon solely in a loin cloth at this point, effectively comparing him to christ. In other words, it amounts to a critique of aspects of christian (and perhaps specifically Catholic) morality.
Reading Hugo's Les Miserables, it occurs to me that this is a good illustation of the novel not so much as a bourgeois epic (though that might be the case) as a liberal epic. Much of the protracted exposition serves to allow Hugo to navigate between positions of different extremes, much of the odd juxtapositions in the plot allowing him to reconcile contradictory positions (as with the eventual reconcilation of Marius and his father or of Javert not arresting Valjean). His attitude towards religion is a good example, with the early sections establishing the bishop as a model of morality and piety, only to introduce the episode of unction being administered to a dying jacobin who resolutely clings to principles of fighting for rights and opposing tyranny and has no interest in the last rites; "the Bishop went home deeply absorbed in thought.. threw him into a strange reverie." Conversely, the Bishop had previously decried the Voltairean ideas of another character. As the text notes, Valjean is saved by two houses of god at two critical points in his life. Later, we find Hugo proclaiming that Voltaire would have defended christ and that "the religious idea is undergoing a crisis. We are unlearning certain things, and we do well, provided that while we unlearn one thing we are learning another." Later, Voltaire's work is "sacred" with Hugo blaming misinterpreation; introducing, as he often does a mid-position. The same applies to politics, where Hugo complains that communism starves the means of production, but denounces the inability to distribute wealth effectively or to bring light to the lower orders. On the one hand, the gamin is essentially a form of noble savage, on the other many of the denizens of the underworld, like Thenardier, appear simply as intrinsically evil (in this, Hugo bears a marked resemblance to Dickens). In one instance, Hugo is a utopian and treats such characters as venerable heroes, on the other he decries the destructive effects of their violent heroism, with the French revolution characterised as an act of god. Later, this heroism has become the heroism of monsters.
Reading Egil's Saga it's interesting to note the divergences between the christian guilt culture (Egil often appears bellicose and underhanded) and the pagan shame culture (he is lauded as a great warrior), perhaps explaining something of his status as an anomaly in the text; poet, warrior, sorcerer, healer. I also find myself wondering if Iceland was not to medieval Scandinavia what Australia and America later were to Europe; a place of exile cum penal colony.Labels: Literature, London, Ruins
posted by Richard 5:12 AM
Sunday, June 29, 2008
I saw the work of Vilhelm Hammershøi during my visit to Copenhagen a few years ago, but I can't say with any honesty that it made any great impression on me at the time. This is perhaps unsurprising; understated paintings in grey tones of spartan and austere subjects are comparatively easy to miss in the midst of other works; it's only when one sees the paintings together that one realises the obsessive theme driving them.
Hammershøi's loose brushwork and restricted palette immediately associate him with his contemporary Whistler, but seventeenth century Dutch painting was also a significant influence on him. As with Vermeer, Hammershøi is frequently found depicting figures in interiors, showing the play of light from nearby windows. Where the Western tradition is for the subject to stare out of a painting and challenge the viewer, Hammershøi follows Vermeer in denying this, having his figures (or figure; his wife was his persistent model) turned away from the viewer to give a hermetic aspect to the painting. In tandem with the grey, barely furnished interiors (photographs of the same rooms show them filled with furnishings and decoration), where the light from a window largely serves to suggest that life is somewhere else, this creates the melancholic air that pervades his work. Durer's figure of melancholy was turned away from the viewer as well. Hammershøi returns again and again to the same interiors, the same piano, the same pictures, the same bowls. But his work also rather resembles Escher or Piranesi, showing long corridors with successions of doors, looking out into interior courtyards through layers of interior windows, with doors that are slightly warped and distorted against the overall geometry of the work. There's a disjoint between the realistic, objective, settings and his imprecise impressionistic brushwork; what is being depicted is an objective correlative for his own state of mind.
The other component to Hammershøi's work is his landscapes, both rural and urban. Whether showing the Danish countryside, Copenhagen's royal palace or church spires, the British Museum or a London street, the scene is always devoid of people and depicted with grey wintry skies that seem somewhere between Whistler and Atkinson Grimshaw. I recall Copenhagen as a colourful city with painted buildings and red church towers surmounted with verdigris encrusted baroque spires. But I recall being fascinated by the same buildings, showing the same empty streets. I discover a certain fellow feeling for Hammershøi that I'm rather unaccustomed to.
The following week I return for two exhibitions near Trafalgar Square. I start with an Wyndham Lewis at the National Portrait Gallery. I recall Angela Carter complaining that all of Lawrence's women were just clothes without bodies, as opposed to his meticulous depiction of male physicality. Something similar can be said of Wyndham Lewis's paintings. The subjects of these portraits are puppet or simulacra. They have the quality of remaining just what they are, fixed in a particular epoch to furniture which is now dust (hence Froanna's liminal character in her Red Portrait as she fades ino the background). "The process and condition of life, without any exception, is a grotesque degradation." The stress on dehumanisation in his writing manifests itself in his painting by his focus on clothes rather than people. The portrait of Edith Sitwell shows her with her eyes shut, her face turned from the viewer, buried in a mass of clothes. Sitwell thought her hands to be her finest feature; here, Lewis hides them altogether (the same applies in his painting of Mrs Schiff, unlike Edwin Evans whose hand blends into his trousers). Hats and helmets abound throughout the paintings. Depicting TS Eliot, he gave the poet a "gioconda smile." Sketch after sketch shows the face left unworked till last. Eliot looks downwards, Pound closes his eyes. Like Modigliani or Picasso (albeit without their primitivism), Lewis saw the face as a mask, indistinguishable from the hat he always painted himself wearing.
Confronted with demands for a return to the classicism of Raphael, Lewis responded by suggesting Shakespeare as an exemplar, praising the famous woodcut of the playwright as serene and empty. Lewis develops various personae in his painting and writing like 'the enemy' as his satirical response to the literary and art world, or his embodiment of satire, the tyro. Lewis caught sight of his face in a cracked mirror and saw "the mask of a syphilitic Creole." Whatever was worth recording in life, he asserted, could be mapped in surface forms. On the whole, I find myself thinking tht Lewis is a rather more sympathetic as a painter than as a writer. His painting of Froanna is a particular masterpiece; red tones predominate excepting the blue of her eyes as she stares directly at the viewer, one of the very few subjects to do so in the entire exhibition.
I follow this with the nearby Divisionism exhibition at the National Gallery. Like Pointillism or Impressionism, Divisionism was a response to new scientific theories of light and colour, like colour wheels. Nonetheless, where French art often has an art for art's sake philosophy, with low-lifes or nudes (Longoni's pickpocket painting is the nearest to that here) featured to epater les bourgeoisie rather than for political ends. By contrast, Italian artists were unhappy with technique alone. Italian reunification has created considerable social upheaval, poverty and inequality that lent itself to a realist style of portrature that much of the rest of Europe had already explored. Equally, symbolism offered a more escapist response to the same conditions, one that especially appealed to Catholic artists. Often, divisionist artists would veer between these extremes. Nomellini paints grey scenes of striking workers at one point in his career, and then paints an extraordinary indigo blue symbolist work showing the sea, entitles Symphony of the Moon. Segantini's nature scenes remains sufficiently detailed to sit alongside Pre-Raphaelite painting, but his later symbolist works show a bizarre depictions of sins being punished in hell. His Return from the Woods is the most perfect fusion of the two strains shown in the exhibition; showing a peasant woman dragging wood in a snow scene, but withthe church spire at her destination is reminiscent of David Friedrich (the same applies to some of Grudicy's autumnal scenes; I'm struck by the spider's web drawn on the frame of one of them). Some of the realist paintings, such as those by Morbelli could have been painted fifty years earlier in terms of their technique, even if light falling through windows is a particular theme. Morbelli also painted melancholy quasi symbolist works of sunsets though. In other works, the divisionist technique, so effective in Segantini's Alpine scenes, imposes a stillness and imprecision that fits oddly with the social agenda of the paintings. Morbelli's luminscent painting of women working in the rice fields utterly fails to convey any sense of misery; it's much too tranquil and beautiful. Either these artists assumed that a method that was 'scientific must be allied to social progress, or the political posturing was actually an alibi for aestheticising the predicament of the working class. Much of the symbolist work is also quite socially engaged though but in a more reactionary fashion, as with Previati's paean to the virtues of the madonna. Volpedo's country scenes are reminiscent of Sisley but show christian processions. Many of the forms are religious, such as the tondo or the polytych. At the very least, religious symbolism is used to evoke a sense of secular national identity; Mazzini had argued that Italians must develop a "religious concept of their nation."
It wasn't until futurism that the techniques developed by divisionism could be applied to a specific programme, albeit one where the interest in light was often centered on electric lighting. The exhibition depicts a move from Boccioni's early pastoral landscapes to a picture of a seamstress (albeit one where the focus is on her cobalt blue dress) to his explicitly futurist painting of a dam being constructed. Other works by Balla and Carra show the futurist depiction of movement in still life or the energy of technology.
As I child I recall seeing a particular statue during a visit to Osbourne House on the Isle of Wight; a black basalt statue of Antinous. I couldn't place my interest in it exactly at the time, presuming it to be due to the exotic Egyptinate character of the statue. I now presume that my interest was mostly taken by the frank sexualisation in the semi-nude depiction of Hadrian's lover. No wonder Winckelman had been so enthused at the imagery that showed Antinous as being somewhere between Athena and Apollo. The story of the doomed youth is one of the central myths of gay history, alongside that of Edward the Second. It's the prospect of seeing Antinous that attracts me to the Hadrian exhibition at the British Museum. The depictions of him are many, from the Egyptianate statue of him as Osiris (with whom he had shared a death day), Ephebian depictions of him as Bacchus (another arisen deity) with vine leaves in his long hair or versions of him as a Greek fertility god. In some of these he conforms to the Roman ideal of the beautiful youth (shown here with the inclusion of the Warren cup), in others his sexuality is more aggressively that of an adult male. I find myself wryly amused at the prospect of his cult competing with christianity; if only it had won. Otherwise, the material at hand is rather more conventional; accounts of Hadrian's brutal suppression of Jewish rebellion, retrenchment and consolidation of the empire's borders after Trajan's overly ambitious expansion, the amnesty on public debts, construction of the Scottish wall (admittedly a turf bank for much of its length that could have served little defensive purpose, instead presumably it served as a means of channelling and controlling the border), anf finishing with the construction of buildings like the Pantheon, his Mausoleum and the architectural fantasisa of his Tivoli villa. The images of Hadrian himself seem surprisingly individual, with his beard setting him out (cited as evidence of his love of all things Greek or a means of covering his blemishes, depending on your preferences) as well as a dimple in his ear that may be evidence of heart disease. Giant busts and statues alternately show him as emperor, priest, warrior and deity. Some of the reliefs from Tivoli, showing Parthenon style depictions of naked figures alongside detailed carvings of vines, birds and squirrels also stand out, but I'm especially drawn to two beautiful peacocks that formerly were in place on the walls of Hadrian's mausoleum.
The great court of the Museum currently has a striking work by Zhang Wang inside it; following the Chinese inclusion of weathered stones in gardens, Wang has taken the image of such stones and encased it in silvery metal, which looks as if it were frozen mercury. This questioning of the relationship between nature and art is counterpointed by some temporary gardens outside, where a genuine stone can be found amidst the dogwood, wisteria, lacquer tree, willow, bamboo and peony. An exhibition of Chinese nature painting inside continues this theme. I'm struck by the role of literary allusion in the paintings and ceramics shown; many of the flowers and animals are chosen for their symbolic connotations (like the lotus) others by homophones suggested by their names (bamboo sounding like congratulations, narcissi sounding like immortality) or for compounds formed from the combination of different items. A few weeks later I'm revisiting Silchester and an archaeological dig is on. A small garden has been created illustrating the sort of plants found in a Roman garden and illustrating their symbolic functions. There are some overlaps with the Chinese symbolism, as with peony being used in protective amulets.
Walking around the city, I visit the interior of St Mary Alderdmary, an exercise in hyperreal gothic by Wren. The effect is quite odd; the fan vaulting is decorated with floral patterns that seem to belong rather more to the baroque period. The effect of the interior being coated in white plaster is rather sepulchral, giving it the effect of an alabaster tomb and contrasting oddly with the colourful Victorian tiling on the floor. While I'm there the organ starts playing Bach's Toccata and Fugue. I move onto Wren's St Stephen Walbrook. The interior here is more like a playfully decorated version of the pantheon; unlike Hawksmoor whose eccentric designs seem to match the English character, Wren would have been a much greater architect in a catholic country, where his designs could have made with red marble rather than Portland stone and his interiors gilded and painted. One detail I am struck with is a totentanz on one of the pillars, showing a bride dancing with a skeletal death. This evening, I go to Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppaea at the Proms. Even if Monteverdi is best known for his ecclesiastical music, this amorality tale does rather confirm the reputation of renaissance Venice as indifferent to religion at best. The plot begins with Cupid asserting her primacy over Virtue and thereafter protecting Poppaea as she schemes her way to becoming Nero's wife, displacing the rather more virtuous Octavia. Poppaea's mother attempts to dissuade her from this course, but only on the grounds of practicality, advising her to go for someone less ambitious instead. Similarly, Octavia's nurse attempts to persuade her to take a lover as a form of revenge. Seneca is depicted as the moral centre of the play but also as a tedious windbag. The only character to receive any punishment is the wronged Octavia, while the assassin Otto is allowed happiness with Drusilla. The staging attempted to draw attention to later events (Poppaea' death at Nero's hands) by having him come close to slapping her as well as introducing an unscripted (and historically inaccurate) scene where Nero drowns Lucan. Since the drama is essentially concerned with Poppae's triumph, I wasn't especially sure I appreciated these interpolations, even if the original audience would have been well aware of Poppaea's eventual fate and that she would have achieved her ambition by remaining faithful to Otto. The Skakespearian approach to casting works bettwe, with both Nero and Poppaea played by women (Nero would originally have been played by a castrato) and various female parts like the nurse played by men (the nurse here bears a disturbing resemblance to Margaret Thatcher).
Later at the Proms, I listen to Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty. The full version is rarely performed in ballet (the story being slight, Tchaikovsky had padded it with various dances). I find myself surprised at the idea of Tchaikovsky writing an opera under the influence of Rameau, although the idea of parallels to Wagner and Brunnhilde's sleep is more natural. In later works, Rimsky-Korsakov's Kaschkey the Immortal inverts this, with the hero's kiss to an evil witch killing her and releasing the princess. I follow this with Dvorak's Slavonic Dances and Janacek's Osud. The latter is quite odd, reminding me of the role of neuroticism in Schnitzler or the sense of impending fate in Kafka (Mann also leapt to mind, prompted by the spa setting). The first two acts describe a conductor's love affair and its end in madness and death. His opera is only written to comprise two acts and the third has his describing the above events it to music students at its premiere, thereby forming the third act.
The following weekend, I go to a Taraf de Haidouks concert in Cheltenham. Much of their music is intended to take orchestral settings of gypsy music by the likes of Bartok and Albeniz and to place in back into its original context, playing it as dance music on the violin, accordion, bass and cymbalum. The result is rather like rock music and it's difficult not to think that where nineteenth century Europe preferred to take folk music and to apply it to orchestral works, twentieth century America preferred to allow black artists to pioneer jazz and blues. The irony of re-appropriating Bartok is born out by the venue, a rather gaudy regency affair. The audience look as if they go there often to attend classical concerts; standing for this one they occasionally manage to sway a bit (aside from one rather energetic elderly lady). It's also worth mentioning the supporting act, the London Bulgarian Choir, who performed a capella folk songes dressed in traditional costumes.
Cheltenham itself, with its rows of regency buildings, seems rather tepid to me. I'm more struck by my visit earlier in the day to Tewkesbury Abbey. It reminds me of Southwell, another place where the isolated location seems to have helped the building survive with comparatively little destruction or alteration. The exterior is rather ungainly; a squat central tower is flanked by various side chapels and fronted with a facade composed of two towers dwarfed by a central window, recessed back as if it were a romanesque arch. The interior is dark, supported by round pillars (each with a face as a corbel facing its counterpart opposite) above a gothic ceiling painted green and white. The effect is rather like a forest. After the rood screen the effect becomes more markedly gothic, with Victorian Minton tiling below matched by white, blue and red patterns above. England's oldest fan vaulting in some of the chantry chapels, some of it still painted. One of them has an effigy of its knight suspended above it, others show statues of mouldering corpses, others show fights with the devil. I'm also quite struck by the lady chapel, with a Byzantine mosaic and icon of St Benedict.
The following day is taken up with a brief visit to Glasgow. I find the Victorian buildings in red sandstone mixed with baroque church spires, Marcochetti statues, greek revival art galleries, elaborate corbel figures and art deco building fronts quite wonderful. I'm equally delighted with the police boxes I keep on seeing on street corners. The back of Prince's Square behind the City Chambers is labyrinth of arches that reminds me of Piranesi. In front, I'm struck by the column surmounted by Walter Scott. London has no statue of Shakespeare, let alone dedicating Trafalgar Squate to him. I walk out to the cathedral and walk around the graveyard. The monuments are eroded and weathered, decorated with skulls and morality symbols. The symbols seem wraithlike when corroded in this manner. On one of them Minton tiling has been badly blackened by industrial pollution. Several more modern tombs are caged in with rusted iron, the interior overgrown with weeds. I walk over to the Victorian necropolis. The presence of the tombs on this hill reminds me of Prague, as does the presence of an old town next to a new one on a grid layout. Presumably Mackintosh would figure as the Glaswegian Gaudi. Paths spiral around the hill, as one passes celtic crosses, Egyptian tombs, funerary urns, all encrusted with rust and weeds as they crumble to dust. The style of the monuments seems rather diverse, from Moorish gothic to Romanesque chapels. Returning, I enter the cathedral. Its stone is quite black with the roof covered in a rich, dark wood. The modern stained glass is a lovely blue. The interior seems as labyrinthine as the necropolis with a crypt where Saint Kentigern's tomb had rested. Medieval German stained glass creates phovist patterns on the floor of a side chapel. Here alone the walls are painted in white and I notice a roof boss in the shape of a skull. Elsewhere, the sacristy's floor is lined with Minton tiles. I look at the funerary memorials in the cathedral. Unlike even those in Tewkesbury they are brightly painted, somewhere between gothic and Tudor in their design.
Lautreamont's Maldoror follows in the path of Baudelaire and Nerval in delighting in contradictions, even as Lautreamont condemns it in his poems. Similarly, the poems are explicit in rejecting the romanticism of Byron, even as Maldoror follows in the path of Manfred, Goethe and Maturin (although he also speaks of tragedy, such as that of Mervyn, as moral, exciting pity and terror). Where, Maldoror denounces god the poems state that "I reject evil... man never fell from a state of grace." Maldoror itself is far from monologic. At one point, Satan is Maldoror's great rival, elsewhere god is essentially identical to satan ("I created you so I have the right to do whatever I like to you... I am making you suffer for my pleasure") at another the archangel speaks of Maldoror in the same terms as Lucifer himself, a fallen angel they would welcome back as one of their own. Since the text accepts the binary logic of christianity throughout, it is split between salvation and damnation as mutually exclusive choices, even as the narrator rejects god as an evil tyrant; "this god who is insensible to your prayers.. this shapeless and bloodthirsty idol... I should like to love and adore you but you are too powerful and there is fear in my prayers." Since man is made in god's image it follows that man is as corrupt and vicious as his creator ("the creator who ought never to have bred such vermin"), making murder a moral act. Applying Blake's dictum that one should soon smother a child in its cradle than nurse unacted desires, Maldoror emerges as a Sadeian rebel in the same way Blake envisaged Milton's Satan. But at the same time the narrative voice can still shift to utter conventional homilectics; "that torch of unjustifiable pride that is leading you to your damnation."
Roderick Hudson reminded me of an observation I'd heard that while homosexuality forms an obvious subtext in many novels by gay authors, the sense can permeate other works (the example cited was a rereading of 1984 as story of gay love and persecution). Here, there are grounds to suspect a subtext; Cecilia introduces Roderick as "a pretty boy" while in Venice Roderick and Rownland watch "a brown breasted gondolier making superb muscular movements." The core of the novel can as easily be read as concerning Rowland's unrequited love for Roderick as it can for Mary. In spite of the depiction of Mary, women essentially figure throughout as sexual threats that destroys men of talent as much as Rowland's interference; "a buxom, bold faced, high-coloured creature... she used to beat him and he had taken to drinking." Then later; "he had married a horrible wife.. it was said she used to beat poor Savage." Similarly, Christina is "as cold and false and heartless as she is beautiful... her disrelish of a man who lacked the virile will."Labels: Architecture, Art, England, Glasgow, History, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 8:14 AM
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Orientalism is an exhibition at the Tate dedicated to European painting of the Middle East, one of the latest in a quite long series of exhibitions at various London institutions dealing with the Middle East. The first room announces that the theme is rather predictably inspired by Edward Said, although it admits that Said has become a controversial figure. This seems a pity, as much of the exhibition does go a long way to undermining Said's case. It shows paintings by people who had effectively gone native, were motivated by mysticism or who were opposed to imperialism or who were simply motivated by a love of the exotic. Although Said's case that the West depicted the Orient as a decadent, barbaric other (as in Byron's poetry) is validated to some extent (as with the many pictures of the harem or slave market, although it's interesting to note that a French painting is the only one to explicitly sexualise the slaves, to the apparent disapproval of a British Empire that was banning such practices), he fails to perceive that as nineteenth century civilisation grew increasingly grey and industrialised, its writers and artists increasingly sought refuge in their own medieval past or in other places unpolluted by modernity. Ruskin sought this in Venice, the likes of Wilkie and Holman Hunt in the Orient. With the ruins of Rome already excavated and familiar, novelty dictated that the ruins of Egypt and Jordan were the next to be discovered. Equally, if the West was decadent, much of the appeal was that Westerners wanted to lose their inhibitions. Figures like Lewis and Leighton often came to show Western figures in Oriental settings.
The exhibition begins with portraiture; the daughter of English merchants who had grown up in Turkey shown in Western dress, the painter John Frederick Lewis depicting himself as a carpet seller in the bazaar, figures like Holman Hunt and Wortley Montagu in Eastern clothing. The depiction of Islam by Lewis is especially sympathetic, with his paintings showing himself at prayer in the Mosque. I'm interested in Wilkie's portrait of the Ottoman Sultan, shown in mostly Westernised dress. It seems to be forgotten that cultural interchange worked both ways, with foreigners dressing as Arabs and vice versa; again, Said's account assumes that orientalism can only be an imperialist ploy rather than a form of cultural exchange; the most clearly imperial portrait here, of Napoleon in Egypt, is notable for the stark contrast between the Eastern setting and the Western attire of the dictator. Something similar is at work in the painting of European explorers, dressed in Roman togas, rediscovering the ruins of Petra with their Arab guides. The nearest there is to a validation of Said's theories is an Augustus John painting of TE Lawrence in Bedouin clothes, although Lawrence was a poor sort of imperialist at best.
The later paintings move onto the subject of religion. During the course of the nineteenth century, wealthy westerners financed the establishment of Jewish homes and collective farms in Jerusalem, which accordingly grew more and more Judaicised. Figures like Holman Hunt grew increasingly interested in Judaism, leading to support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland. His painting of The Scapegoat combines both Christian and Jewish themes, although much of his painting of Jersualem and its churches is more straightforwardly christian. It has to be said that the most interesting paintings (and some of the most numerous) in the exhibition are of architecture and landscapes though. For instance, Lord Leighton's paintings of Algiers and Damascus, Frederick Lewis depicting the bazaars of Cairo, Edward Lear's view of Constantinople from a cypress filled cemetery or the pyramids from a tree lined avenue, Holman Hunt showing the pyramids reflected in the Nile (he didn't care for them much and managed to make them look like Silbury Hill) David Robert's depiction of the ruins of Petra, Baalbec, Philae and Karnak. Judging from this, it's very clear that both Lear and Roberts are very much underrated as artists.
As an exhibition, there's more cultural and historical interest than artistic here. None of the paintings are poor but few are masterpieces. To take a few that stood out, there's Stanley Spencer's paintings of mosques in Sarajevo, Bomberg's modernist painting of Jerusalem, Dadd's strange concatenation of Bedouin tribes and Roman soldiers into a strangely symmetrical painting an allegory whose meaning is forever lost. Before, I leave I take the opportunity to have a look at The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon. It fills an entire wall of the gallery and is easily the finest masterpiece that I saw that day. It's a pity I'll probably never see it again.
Like Said's Magnum Opus, John Berger's Ways of Seeing is an interesting text, if not one I can bring myself to entirely agree with. The second section discusses the history of the nude, with its tendency to depict women as passive objects of the male gaze. It's difficult not to sympathise with much of this argument (especially that non-Western traditions have not focussed exclusively on the passive image of a woman), but it still seems rather limited. The nude in the likes of Cranach or Titian heralds the vanquishing of the medieval prohibition of sexuality, a reawakening of the sensual and physical (it's interesting to note that there's absolutely no discussion of the role of religion in Western art in Berger). A figure like the Rokeby Venus, as Camille Paglia might argue, surely has its own power and is difficult to solely characterise as passive. More generally, Berger's argument seems to have been undone by the passage of time and the increased sexualisation of the male body; Germaine Greer is surely right to argue that women, as much as heterosexual men, have a right to this form of visual pleasure.
The third section is probably the one I most agree with. Berger argues that the physicality of oil painting was ideal both for the depiction of material objects, whether still lives or other forms of property (e.g. land in Constable or animals in Stubbs) and for the establishment of the oil painting as a form of property in its own right. Berger counterposes this to the ethereal figures in Blake's engravings. Berger does deal with an aspect of the Western tradition I have little liking of here, but it seems a little strained all the same; I can't say I would swap the physicality of a Vermeer with its pleasure in the physical world for a medieval triptych especially gladly. Equally, given the prominence of the romantic depiction of nature from Rosa and Ruisdael to Holman Hunt and David Friedrich, the argument that nature is not present except as property seems frankly ludicrous.
The final section deals with the transition from oil painting to colour photography in advertising, from the wealth and status of the elite to the promotion of wealth and status to the lower echelons. The argument is a familiar one, revolving around the role of advertising in manufacturing false wants by associating certain products with sexuality or status. I tend to suspect that this argument requires one to accept the Marxist idea of false consciousness (as Popper pointed out a mechanism that simply dismisses any obstacle to Marx's account of social history as being an aberration); Berger certainly speaks of advertising as a form of force rather than a form of consent.
By contrast, Susan Sontag's On Photography is considerably more appealing to me. Noting that a photograph is essentially an accidental and serendipitous combination of how light interacts with chemicals, Sontag sees it as a way of seizing aspects of the world than a composed artform. Sontag accordingly disdains the rigid compositions of Weston in favour of Atget's more disorderly 'captures.' Where Berger's approach is Marxist, Sontag sees photography's overthrow of the distinction between high and low art as being essentially akin to surrealism. The only problem is one of period. Digital photography is rather less accidental than the film cameras Sontag was writing about. Techniques like high dynamic range photography or photoshop manipulation mean that photography becomes rather more akin to painting, which Sontag had seen as imitating photography. Of course, there's also a movement towards using older cameras, even pinhole ones, although the element of 'historical slumming' to this often seems a counterpart to more modern ways of aestheticising photographs, even to the extent of photoshopping marks and flaws onto the image.
Donald Richie's Japan Journals rather reminded me of Forster's accounts of Italy, Ozpotek's Turkey or the North Africa of Bowles, Burroughs and Orton. It's an odd sub-genre whereby the Western gay male looks for sexual liberation in a culture that lacks Western moral inhibitions or the mechanised and staid nature of Western society. In a lot of cases, the culture in question was a patriarchal one where homosexuality could be hidden within broader homosocial social structures. It's also a partly obsolescent sub-genre given that moral inhibitions are now more likely to be considerably stronger in Tangiers than in London. Perhaps, this is as well given the connotations of imperialism and economic exploitation in it alongside the escape from Western mores. "You seem to have deserted Japan in favour of the Third World," a friend tells him as his attentions turn from the Japanese to immigrant workers. "It was not I that deserted Japan," he writes, "but Japan that deserted the Third World . . . It was the Third World in Japan that so appealed to lubricious me, and now that Japan is more First World than even the USA, the appeal is no longer there. That makes me that figure of fun, the garden-variety colonial imperialistic predator." As Japan westernises, Richie begins peevish complaints against the ignorance of sexual indifference of Japanese youth, with friends departing for less affluent Thailand.
In this context, Japan is an odd example, having gone from being a traditional patriarchal society to a modern Westernised society where Richie documents the rise of women's rights. While Japan lacked the traditional opprobrium directed against homosexuality in the West, it nonetheless remains more conservative than a modern Western society. Richie is suspicious of the elevation of sexual preference to a component of social identity but there is something rather tragic in an existence of cruising and losing his lovers to marriage (Mishima's widow and children living in permanent denial as to his homosexuality). On the one hand, Richie documents the role of the transvestite performer in Japanese theatre, festivals undertaken by mostly nude men, fishermen who worked nude, carpenter's dancing women's dances and on the other he documents Yukio Mishima's hyper-masculinised identity and his identification with western classicism and the figure of Saint Sebastian in preference to Japanese models. Richie notes that "a dandy, far from being the individual eccentric he is often though to be, is really a strict conformist.. the dandy is no rebel, and no true reformer or renegade was ever a dandy. Maybe that is why society is no tolerant of dandies." However, Richie elsewhere notes that the bricolage Mishima constructed his identity from is that of the Western rebel, as with Brando. The version of homosexuality preferred in Japan is an unthreatening one that hardly seemed to fit Mishima's identity, leading to him becoming more conformist and conservative than Japanese society itself (Richie notes that Mishima's suicide says nothing about contemporary Japan). Mishima is reminiscent of nothing so much as a Tom of Finland cartoon. Richie's position in Japan is that of gaijin but notes that Japanese society would otherwise be far more oppressive than that of the society he had fled. Richie repeatedly decries the conformity of Japanese society, its absence of intellectuals or individuals. Nonetheless, his attitudes to sexuality belong to the age of Proust and Forster who only seemed capable of finding stronger heterosexual men arousing.
Reading Soseki's I am a Cat it occurs to me that Soseki is veering between two extremes. On the one hand, his feline protagonist serves to dismiss all humans as vicious and depraved. On the other, his principal human character serves to dismiss westernising tendencies in Japan. The two are linked by being increasingly marginalised voices (the cat describes his master as being superior to his fellows by being weka minded, just as he is described as a runt in comparison to all the other cats he knows) but they only intersect at certain points. For example, Sneaze is told that "the ways of our ancestors are much wiser and more effective than the ways of Europe.. the craving for satisfaction remains unrealised, the quest for the ideal eternally unrealised." This advice comes from a character dismissed as nearly insane and dangerous and Sneaze is ridiculed for his adoption of this viewpoint. Sneaze eventually seems to agree with his cat by dismissing all of his friends as lunatic, irrespective of their philosophical views. Nonetheless, this does not stop Soseki ending the novel with the theme of suicide as a harbinger of increased westernisation; "this overweening consciousness of self never lets up.. word such as serenity and self composure have become no more than so many meaningless strokes of a writing brush."
Viridiana surprised me as a film. Having seen An Andalusian Dog, The Golden Age and The Exterminating Angel before I was expecting something more self consciously surreal. Although the symmetry of its structure and some of its allegorical references are clear enough, it's still essentially cast in a realist vein. I found myself frequenting comparing it The Exterminating Angel where the bourgeoisie are trapped at their dinner party as an act of metaphysical revenge in the class war. Here, the film ends with Viridiana playing cards with the wealthy land owner, her project to house the poor having miserably failed. The dinner party here as the paupers invade the house is almost a parody of its counterpart in The Exterminating Angel.
I've often thought that authors like Sterne, Voltaire and Diderot are the nearest approximation to the modern playfulness of authors like Perec, Nabokov and Calvino. Reading Diderot's Rameau's Nephew reminded me rather of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees or The Beggar's Opera; in satirising modern vices they also implicitly undermine modern ideas of virtue. Diderot's habit is persistently to make a statement and then undermine, as with his disingenuous endorsement of Rameau; "the famous musician who has delivered us from the plainsong of Lully, who has written so many unintelligible visions.. not a word of which he or anyone else has understood." The narrator frequently denounces his interlocutor, but only to receive the response that he is the rule not the exception; "there's nothing degrading in doing the same as everyone else. I didn't invent them and I should be incompetent if I didn't conform... a thief happy to be among wealthy thieves." Instead the emphasis shifts from personal to public vice; "what a bloody awful economy, some men with bursting stomachs others clamour with hunger."Labels: Art, Film, Japan, Literature, London
posted by Richard 12:56 PM
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Reading Plato's The Republic it's difficult not to come to the same conclusions previously reached by Popper in The Open Society:"Now it is interesting that for Plato, and for most Platonists, an altruistic individualism (as for instance that of Dickens) cannot exist. According to Plato, the only alternative to collectivism is egoism; he simply identifies all altruism with collectivism, and all individualism with egoism.
Plato's identification of individualism with egoism furnishes him with a powerful weapon for his defence of collectivism as well as for his attack upon individualism. In defending collectivism, he can appeal to our humanitarian feeling of unselfishness; in his attack, he can brand all individualists as selfish, as incapable of devotion to anything but themselves.
Inherent in Plato's programme there is a certain approach towards politics which, I believe, is most dangerous. Its analysis is of great practical importance from the point of view of rational social engineering. The Platonic approach I have in mind can be described as that of Utopian engineering, as opposed to another kind of social engineering which I consider as the only rational one, and which may be described by the name of piecemeal engineering... And there can be no tolerance between these different Utopian religions...Thus the Utopian must win over, or else crush, his Utopianist competitors. But he has to do more...For the way to the Utopian goal is long. Thus the rationality of his political action demands constancy of aim for a long time ahead; and this can only be achieved if he not merely crushes competing Utopian religions, but also as far as possible stamps out all memory of them.
Plato's theory of justice indicates very clearly that Plato saw the fundamental problem of politics in the question: Who shall rule the state? It is my conviction that by expressing the problem of politics in the form 'Who should rule?' or 'Whose will should be supreme?', etc., Plato created a lasting confusion in political philosophy... While piecemeal reform lends itself to democracy, Utopian reform lends itself to dictatorship. The Utopian attempt to realize an ideal state, using a blueprint of society as a whole, is one which demands a strong centralized rule of a few, and which therefore is likely to lead to a dictatorship."
I tend to regard Plato in the same manner as I do Paul or Augustine; a dreadful mistake. Through christianity, Plato produced a philosophical tradition that disdained empirical experimentation and observation in favour of a focus on the causes of causes (i.e. the forms), disdained the body as a prison and which distinguished itself in opposition to sophistry's concern with descriptions of the world that meet our needs rather than conceptions of absolute truth. Socrates repeatedly scorns those who deal in paradox, viewing their arguments as being concerned with power rather than with truth, but is far from reluctant to marshal sophistical violence in his own arguments. Plato distinguishes between misleading rhetoric and dialectic as a means of reaching truth, but the text is riddled with rhetorical devices, such as the metaphor of the cave or ship of state. It's difficult not to sympathise with the empirical view that dialectic doesn’t say anything about reality, only about the relations between words. Although cast as a dialogue, once the initial discussions with Thrasymachus and Glaucon have been dismissed, the text essentially becomes a monologue. Voices of dissent are simply silenced in favour of a repeated murmur of affirmation. The Platonic dialogue is ostensibly concerned with gaining consensus between parties, in contrast to the agonistic methods used by the sophists, which were not concerned with truth as an object; nonetheless Plato himself is quite concerned with suppressing other voices ("you think my questions were deliberately framed to distort your argument?... you know perfectly well that it's easier to ask questions than to answer them"). For example, the dismissal of myth is related to others citation of it to disprove his arguments on divine morality - Plato's prime means of argument is declaration by fiat. By contrast, Thrsaymachus has little wish to coerce others into his point of view; "and how am I to persuade you? If you don't believe what I have just said, what more can I do?" Equally, that single monologic voice in The Republic is far from consistent; war is honourable in Plato's own republic, deplorable in a tyranny. Art is of use as an instrument of propaganda or education in one instance ("we must.. require their stories and morals to have the opposite moral"), a dangerous and misleading conceit to be suppressed elsewhere ("we banished poetry from our state").
Part of this relates to Plato's insistence on what Popper calls methodological essentialism; the view that it is the task of pure knowledge or ‘science’ to discover and to describe the true nature of things, i.e. their hidden reality or essence. It was Plato’s peculiar belief that the essence of sensible things can be found in other and more real things — in their primogenitors or Forms. In this sense, Plato can perhaps be better described as a theologian than a philosopher or scientist, in that he can always dismiss the results of empirical investigation as not according with his idea of higher forms that can only be discerned through his own processes of ratiocination; "If anyone tries to learn anything about the world of sense, whether by gaping upwards or blinking downwards, I don't reckon that he really learns - there is no knowledge to be had of such things." Not only is Plato left as Philosopher King, he is also effectively anointed as prophet. Knowledge becomes something that can only be accessed by the few; "those whom the public call sophists.. in fact nothing but the conventional views held and expressed by the majority of the people they meet; and this they call a science." Plato uses the observation of an animal as an example; through study one could gain knowledge of its habits and behaviour but one would not know whether it is good or bad; phenomena are immaterial, mystical access to the noumenal is all. As a result, the only form of politics that is possible is dictatorship; "philosophy is impossible amongst the common people."
Plato's theology is equally self defining, relying principally on a reported account of what life is like in the underworld; a description that bears more resemblance to the Bible than to Homer. Similarly, Plato simply censors the corpus of myths available to him as inconvenient to his conception of god; "misrepresenting the nature of the gods and heroes, like a portrait painter whose paintings bear no resemblance to their originals." Equally, Plato's political ideology can also be described as having more in common with the doctrine of original sin or the christian idea of temptation and fall than with the political theory of Locke or Hobbes; "like a foreign seed sown in alien soil under whose influence it commonly degenerates into the local growth... his passion tyrannises him... unable to control the animal part of us" The result is effectively a form of theocracy; "wipe the slate of human society and human habits clean." Although Plato admits that societies are formed of individuals, he sees individual character as being formed by society; in short, there is only the state.
While I am on the topic of my particular dislikes, we can move on from Plato and enter the modern world of American literature. The likes of Mailer and Bellow are clearly skilled artists but that does little to prevent me from finding them utterly unlikeable for casual sexism and homophobia. If Dickens and Eliot as the leading voices of the British Empire expressed a concern for poverty and morality after god, Mailer and Bellow as the leading voices of the American Empire expressed little other than a rather neurotic fear of the feminine in a post-traditional society. Herzog is in many ways a great novel, dealing with the fate of a representative of the Jewish tradition when cast into a modern bourgeois civilisation ("a proud lazy civilisation that worships its own boorishness"), at once an outside and a product of that society; nonetheless the objective correlative chosen to denote this seem inadequate and rather paltry. The resulting effect is rather novel but not especially edifying. One the one hand, Herzog writes of "how life could be lived by renewing universal connexions, overturning the last of the Romantic errors of the uniqueness of the self." At the same time as rejecting the Western tradition, Herzog castigates Nietzsche for having a christian worldview predicated on seeing civilisation as having reached a point of crisis; "are all the traditions used up, the beliefs done for.. is this the full crisis of dissolution?.. the more individuality seems lost.. individuals are destroyed.. this is a doomed time". But equally Herzog decries modern society as coercive and collectivist; "his recent misfortunes might be seen as a collective project.. down in the mire of post-humanistic, post-Cartesian dissolution, next door to the void." It seems clear that the contradictions are deliberate and intending to render Herzog as an exemplar; "modern character is inconstant, divided, vacillating, lacking the stone-like certitude of archaic man." Herzog is able to delude himself into thinking that his work is the solution to the emptiness of modern life and that his opponents are endangering a great endeavour; but even even if he is a symptom of this rather than a cure it does little to make us feel any empathy for a project Bellow does appear to share with his protagonist.
Der Rosenkavalier is an oddity; a satire of marriage a'la mode that seems more in keeping with the age of Congreve or Hogarth and, along with, Orlando one of the last examples of the sort of comedy of gender confusion exemplified by Shakespeare's comedies. Hofmannsthal's surreal or gothic flourishes (as with the fake masked devils used to torment Lerchenau) also seem odd placed alongside the bawdy humour.Labels: Literature, Music, Philosophy
posted by Richard 6:10 AM
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Reading Zola's The Belly of Paris, I was struck with the contrast it makes with the later Germinal; the latter an impassioned call for revolution and social justice, the former treating the matter in terms that are rather more cynical, seeing such matters as the affair of naive idealists (as Claude describes Florent; "You're an artist in your own way. You dream about politics") and hypocrites (Gavard being, as Claude describes it, "fat, but the sort that pretends to be thin. That sort is common."); in other words, not that far away from Conrad's The Secret Agent. For all of the injustice meted out towards Florent, the novel presents a relatively poor case for revolution, with most of the stallholders prospering. For all of his talk of the fat and thin, Claude seems at best apolitical; "You titillate yourself with ideas of about truth and justice. Your ideas, like my paintings, frighten bourgeois people... politics did not bother him at all." At worst, Claude seems enthralled by the modern age, celebrating the market's iron cathedral displacing the nearby church; "The iron will kill the stone.. only one original building has been built that has not been copied from somewhere else and that is Les Halles." With the emphasis on walking around the Parisian arcades, Zola and Claude at one with Baudelaire and Benjamin. Equally, the novel also seems ambivalent as to whether Florent's rebellion is simply a matter of an inherent predisposition; "He could easily have become a decent citizen agan, he had nothing but good examples in front of him. But no, it's in his blood!" While animal metaphors abound in Zola's novels, it is unusual here for all being physically present in the market and the protrayal of characters like Cadine tends towards showing Paris as a place 'red in tooth and claw' populated by people who are barely distinguished from animals ("as free as birds and quite without shame"). Much of Florent's revolt is a physical one (as with Claude's notion of the fat and the thin rather than the rich and the poor), a sense of nausea at the market's stench; "he had experienced smells as terrible as these but never from his belly." By contrast, Lisa is "a steady and sensible Macquart, reasonable and logical in her craving for well being... even at the age of six" just as Quenu declares of Florent that "had been bound to come to a bad end, you could tell from his face." Nonetheless, Zola is far from consistent also stating that Florent under different circumstances would simply have been schooltecher in a provincial town; "a man as gentle as a child."
Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin is a quite remarkable text and one that reminds me greatly of the Helene Cixous's gender theories (as well as sharing an interpretation of As You Like it with Woolf's Orlando). The novel blurs gender boundaries and advances a form of sexual politics that would seem advanced even by today's standards; "The reality is that neither of these two sexes is mine... many men are more female than I." I was interested in d'Albert declaration that "I am a man of the Homeric age. The world I inhabit is not my own and I understand nothing of the society around me. Chris did not come for my sake. I am as pagan as Alcibiades." d'Albert decries the modern tendency to view women as equals, a view that is challenged by Rosalind's winning of duels against other men, but which seems nonetheless to continue to inhabit the novel, which does contain a counter-reading whereby d'Albert subdues Rosalind's Third Sex identity and is freed from the horror of desiring a member of his own sex.
Balzac's Cousin Bette has the same sort of duality you can find in a lot of his novels (something advertised by the author from the outset with his note that "Moliere always presents both sides of every human problem"); on the one hand, he is a Catholic conservative, deploring immorality and excess. On the other, he chooses to invest much of that enmity in the Napoleonic old-guard in the novel (although he does seem to admire Crevel for sticking to his Voltarian principles on his death bed), seen as the destroyers of the ancien regime (and far more the objects of Balzac's hatred here than the bourgeoisie Lukacs thought him so adept at critiquing with his aristocratic sympathies, even in the midst of statements that dissolve individual responsibility in favour of social critique; "in Paris, life is too rushed for vicious people to do evil because they choose to"). The result is that the destructive actions of Bette to destroy Hulot acquire an almost laudable aspect, with the same later applying to Victorin's destruction of Valerie. As in The Chouans, if Balzac is offered a choice between the gildings of civilisation and savage barbarism ("a close observation of the young woman would have observed the fierce side of the peasantry.. the savage has feelings only, the civilised man has feelings and ideas"), he invariably chooses the latter even as he condemns it, with Hulot proving far more driven by feelings than Bette. In the character of Bette, savagery at least proves itself to have a profound work ethic and a strong sense of thrift lacking in the dissolute aristocrats; Bette is in essence Balzac's avenging angel. This can partly be attributed to Balzac's ideas on gender. Although in theory, he lauds characters like the Baroness for their piety, even her own daughter sees her as essentially passive, a trait that leads to her destruction. Balzac sees virtue in essentially masculine terms and lauds it irrespective of which gender it is found in (conversely he seems to see characters like Wenceslas and Hulot as essentially feminine and weak, with Balzac sniffily noting that the Poles wear jewellery like women having acquire tastes for "oriental splendour"). This leads to odd conjunctions like "this energetic woman and that weak man." As such, at one point the author opines that the ideal woman should combine virtue with masculine energy, a trait he finds in the courtesan Josepha (and implicitly in Bette) but not in the Baroness; "if you'd had a little of our savvy, you'd have stopped him gallivanting; for you'd have know how to be what we have been; all kinds of women to a man... but governments are so prudish, they are led by men who are led by us."
Lukacs drew a connection between the conservatism of Balzac and that of Scott in their join condemnation of the bourgeoisie. Certainly Old Mortality sees him vesting much sympathy with rebellion and revolt against the established order ("that excites the vassals of persons of rank to to rebel against the very house that holds and feeds them"), but his approach is as dialogic as Balzac's ("who shall warrant me that these people, rendered wild with persecution, would not be in the hour of victory, as cruel and intolerant as those by whom they are now hunted down?"), with characters like Evandale portrayed with as much sympathy as Morton (hence Morton's comparison of Balfour's spirital pride to pride in things material; "Morton could not help, in his heart, contrasting Claverhouse with Balfour of Burley"). Scott's sympathies inherently lie with the dialogic and tolerant instead of the monologic and the dogmatic; like Eliot later, his novels are in many respects an appeal to empathy. The model character is the old woman whose covenanter sons have been slain in battle and who still shelters Lord Evandale and saves his life ("and was a fanatic woman capable of such generosity?").
Visiting Oxford, I began by walking along the canal to the Church of St Barnabas, a building based on the cathedral I visited last year at Torcello. The church would appear to be well on the way to decaying to the same state as its Venetian counterpart, with the pebble dash crumbling from walls encroached upon by weeds. I pass by towards the Ashmolean. Much of the museum has been closed for refurbishment and a temporary exhibition is in progress. This does rather recapture the spirit of Tradescant's wunderkammer; the Alfred jewel rests alongside Etruscan canopic jars, a robe given to TE Lawrence by King Faisal, a lovely early twentieth century Japanese waterfall vase and Guy Fawkes' lantern. The gallery houses a diminished collection of Gertler and Courbet landscapes, Palmer and Spencer neo-platonic scenes, a Vernet night scene, an early Kandinsky landscape, Uccello and Cosimo forest scenes. Wondering around Holywell cemetery afterwards, I noticed that although the tombstones were all mass-produced, with several specimens of the same type often in evidence, they were nonetheless different to those in London cemeteries of the same period; industrial production but on a local scale. It also feels more like a country churchyard, with bluebells in flower and the stones of a much modest scale than their London counterparts. I also visit Exeter Chapel, Gilbert Scott's remodelling of Sainte-Chapelle, an astonishing confection of stained glass, mosaic and tiling. More impressive though is Saint Mary's in Iffley; as at Kilpeck, its carvings of Mer-Men, Centuars, Green Men and Sphinxes seem essentially pagan to me, something reinforced with Piper's stained glass window of sheep, owls and other birds.Labels: Literature, Oxford
posted by Richard 1:48 AM
Sunday, March 16, 2008
John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World can be unkindly described as a panegyric to the glories of the October Revolution and the "great dynamo" Lenin. The text ends with the Bolsheviks and Peasants reaching an ecstatic accord that would lead anyone to think that the best part of the next decade was not to be consumed with a particularly bloody civil war followed by the horrors of farm collectivisation. Nonetheless, although an avowed communist Reed's journalism is sufficiently objective to tell more than one story. Having been minded against Lenin and the Bolsheviks beforehand, Reed's book emphatically reinforced this, leaving an impression of the Petrograd provisional government as analogous to the Weimar Republic. Karensky's government had sought to establish a coalition of all parties, with socialists in the majority and to advance a new tolerance, exemplified by permitting Lenin to return to Petrograd from Zurich. The action of the Bolsheviks on coming to power was to curtail press freedoms ("Three weeks ago the Bolsheviki were the most ardent defenders of press freedoms") and to suppress rival socialist parties for instance by placing their leaders under house arrest ("you sit here and talk about gibing land to the peasants , and you commit an act of tyrants and usurpers against the peasant's chosen representatives"). Other parties repeatedly called for a coalition ("Our party has refused to enter the Council of People's Commissars because we do not wish for ever to separate ourselves from the part of the revolutionary army which left the congress...we do not recognise the legality of this congress since the departure of the Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries there is not a legal quorum") only for Lenin to demand they support the Bolshevik programme. Strikes resulted, with transport and communications shutting down. Since no-one would serve in the Ministries after the coup d'etat, the public administration shut down.
The same territory is covered in literary terms by Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. The novel is in many ways an archetypal account of the individual against society, of Eros against civilisation, with the caveat that its acceptance of sin is rather reminiscent of Greene. Zhivago's tastes are catholic running from Darwin to Schelling and the novel similarly contains multitudes in the manner of his compatriot Bakhtin (although the novel is weighted against the Bolsheviks characters like Strelnikov ("You couldn't understand it. You grew up quite differently... dirt, hunger, overcrowding, the degradation of the worker") or Liberius's aunt voice opposed opinions; "they are on the side of the common people, that's their strength"). Much of the opposing discourse in the novel is essentially derived from a mystical worldview; "This freedom came from the feeling that all human lives were interrelated, a certainty that they flowed into each other -- a happy feeling that all events took place not only on the earth, in which the dead are buried, but also in some other region which some called the kingdom of God, others history, and still others by some other name... man is made up of two parts, God and work. Each succeeding stage in the development of the human spirit [such as] the theology of the Old Testament" As such, the novel's discussion of the stages of history is theological but uses Marxist terminology to express it, even to the extent of describing Bolshevik discourse as religious; "Yury could not bear the political mysticism of the Soviet intelligentsia" Zhivago's Uncle Kolya, a kind of fellow traveller of Christianity, enunciates one of the book's major themes: "What you don't understand is that . . . history as we know it now began with Christ, and that Christ's Gospel is its foundation. Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies . . . The two basic ideals of modern man - without them he is unthinkable -[are] the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice." The early sections of the novel are accordingly often expressed in Tolstoyan terms. For Nikolai, Christ is at the font of truly human history precisely because he emphatically underscores its requisite principles: love of one’s neighbour, the supreme form of vital energy (the "immortal communion between mortals"), the idea of free personality (only individuals seek and are persuaded by the truth), and the idea of life as sacrifice, ultimately to life itself. Art, speculates Yury, is not a category, but a vital principle, a force, a truth realized in its concrete instances. Art is not so much form as a hidden, secret part of content which is always essentially the same. It is "a statement about life so all-embracing that it can't be split up into separate words." Further, "Art always serves beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organic life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence." Art has its ultimate root in organic life. We are back at our fundamental theme of life, "one, immense, ever-changing, ever the same, concretely renewing itself. Art is a mode of life's vital resurrection." The great object lesson is Pushkin, who opened the windows and let concrete reality, with its life and motion, storm into the lines of his poetry, "driving out the vaguer parts of speech." This was more than aesthetic service. Pushkin reaffirmed the sanctity of everyday, 'bourgeois' existence -- housewives, quiet lives, and big bowls of cabbage soup. With form and content indissoluble, the works of Pushkin (and later Chekhov) become irresistible powers of unarmed truth, "like apples picked green, ripening of themselves, mellowing gradually and growing richer in meaning." They concretely realize the unchanging aim of art: "homecoming, return to one's family, to oneself, to true existence."
Pushkin performs the same function as Christ. They have the same office and duty: to express the highest native talent, the talent for life, thereby resurrecting a truly human way of life. In some form or other, Christ's passion must be authentically re-enacted again and again. We repeatedly must be called back to everyday life and its requisite forms. There will always be a Pushkin, a Yury, or a Hamlet, whom chance has allotted "the role of judge of his own time and servant of the future," the high destiny of "a life devoted and pre-ordained to a heroic task." In Pasternak's cosmos, Christ and man are equals, each serving the same master, life itself. This brings us to a final ingredient of Pasternak's cosmic harmony, without which we cannot fully understand the interrelations of life, death, form, and art. This is eros, love. With love, Pasternak's women emphatically enter the cosmic picture. The theme of eros and women is explicitly sounded in the eccentric Sima's conversations with Lara, with her original reformation of Nikolai's speculative theses on religion and history. Mary replaces Christ as the inaugurator of modern, truly human history. Hence the role of Mary Magdalene; "what equal terms between God and life, God and the individual, God and a woman!" Yury's sacrifice is accordingly allegorised as the crucifixion of Christ with Lara as Mary Magdalene.
Above all else, Pasternak is deeply repelled by social and political 'blueprintism,' the wilful foisting of rigid, unyielding forms on humanly communal life, and by individuals denying their original, native personalities in favour of imitating someone or something else. He is repelled by all those who are unwilling to attend to life's aboriginal ways and who give up on their individually unique lives in favour of grand poses, public or private. He is repelled by those who treat life as a substance to be moulded (an attitude which only reveals their profound misunderstanding of life), and by all who delight in marching to deadly, 'world-important' causes, the abstract issues of ironfisted, uncreative wills. Life cannot be treated with such impunity without disastrous consequences and without sinning against the very goodness of existence.
I follow Pasternak with reading Tolstoy's Resurrection (on balance, I prefer Pasternak). Tolstoy is in a way defeated by his own artistry; the novel is in many respects an attempt to evangelise in favour of a certain set of moral viewpoints. The novel, not unreasonably, sees the political and judicial system of Russia as being essentially repressive but Tolstoy is still careful to represent the views of those lawyers and politicians and to explain them in dialogic terms, as with the hurt of his brother in law at Nekhlyadov's accusations. Equally, the peasantry are depicted as having become callous, with one especially chilling statement of how the peasantry would do unto the aristocracy as had been done unto them foretelling the fate of Russia in the next century. The novel invokes many criticisms of institutions but as Tolstoy sees man as corrupt he discounts them altogether (and the prospect of their reformation with it) as being incapable of reforming others. Tolstoy's theological predelictions sit alongside his political ones rather uneasily, perhaps because the peasants are seen by Nekhlyadov as a means to his redemption rather than an end in their own right (hence the novel aborts the logical course of his reformation by having Maslova marry another peasant instead). In other words, the novel both offers a moral fable and critiques it simultaneously.
Reading Custine's Journey for Our Time affords some insight into the Russian novel; Custine depicts a society dominated by what Milosz termed Ketman, in which the art of feigning was of paramount importance in a society where both spiritual and temporal power remained absolute. Attempts to open Russia to the West, as with the building of Saint Petersburg, had simply generated an alienating environment distant from Russian traditions. As such, the arrival of a middle class in an increasingly wealthy country meant the creation of the superfluous men endemic throughout Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Tolstoy; figures with the same material comforts as their European counterparts but whose existence remained feudal in other respects. Gogol's work is full of the sense of a world upturned, where the impressions of the senses prove deceiving and the individual is powerless to discern the true way ("how strangely, how insrutably fate plays with us... oh, do not trust this Nevsky Prospekt... all is deception, all is a dream, all is not what it seems"). A story like Nevsky Prospekt or a play like The Government Inspector sees differing characters taking very different routes, only to arrive at the same destination and undermine any sense of a possible moral fable; in some sense Diary of a Madman is a satire on the inability of the superfluous man to find any place or position in reward for their strivings. The sense of the indeterminate even extends to the inanimate acquiring being; stories like The Nose remind me of Kafka and Metamorphosis; in both stories characters are transfigured for reasons that are not withheld from the reader so as to disorient. As a final note, I suspect in all this that our modern society is increasingly like that of nineteenth century Russia (Generation X being our modern account of the superfluous man) but it is worth citing an opposing view from Nikita Khrushchev:" This belief in the greatness of the Russian soul, Khrushcheva argues, is simply smoke and mirrors used to excuse the country's backwardness. Russians prefer to fall back on this dreamy myth rather than take responsibility for their own lives. Rational individualism has never taken hold with Russians, and it is instead external forces such as fate and the state that provide meaning to their lives. Living in an idealized, poetic world -- "a childish Russian paradise" - they are unable and unwilling to engage in practical activity.
The Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, Khrushcheva writes, offers a way out of this backward state through the example of his own life and his characters. As a member of a wealthy family, he went into exile after the Revolution. His past and country destroyed, Nabokov was forced to rely on himself and create his own meaning for his life. For Khrushcheva, Nabokov represents "the next step after Chekhov in Russian literature, its Westernization and rationalization." Wallowing in a dreamy, poetic world, blaming fate for their problems, the characters of Russian literature, from Dostoevsky to Chekhov, are defined by their pensiveness and suffering. Nabokov, however, placed his heroes in "normal" life. "[He] forced them to live as people live from day to day ... refusing to perceive suffering as a sign of great spiritual depth." Khrushcheva contrasts Western and Russian attitudes to happiness. "In the West, happiness ... is not the passive patience of Russian literature, but Western perseverance. Happiness in an evolutionary striving forward, and you have to gain it and create it yourself."
I tend to think Khrushcheva's ignores the scores of superluous figures washed up on the shores of history in Nabokov's work (and certainly the distorting mirrors of Pale Fire have more than a little in common with Gogol) (or, failing that, characters like those depicted by Stendhal that can find no purchase on history).
Alexander Rodchenko's work was recently on display at the Southbank. The grimly puritannical concrete setting is ideal for Rodchenko. In one instance, his photos of the Shukov tower and the Narkomfin building are vertiginous, showing them towering up overhead. In the other, his photos of people show them as pullulating masses, typically shot looking down on them above, like a beekeeper opening a hive. Rodchenko seems reluctant to recognise individuals, only the revolutionary masses. This is taken to its worst extreme in his photos of the building of the White Sea Baltic Canal, showing political prisoners being worked to death in its construction; Rodchenko's response to this was to adjust the photographs to show the workers smiling. Much of the photos have a disturbing resemblance to Nazi images; Leni Von Riefenstahl (another photographer who only saw masses not people) could have taken the propaganda photos of the Red Army. The images of children might as well be of the Hitler Youth (even the communists complained that one picture looking up at a youth's face dehumanised him, although they also complained that the youth should be looking forward not upwards to symbolise revolutionary progress). At the Dynamo Water Stadium, Rodchenko twisted the camera so that divers leaping from the board appeared to be soaring upwards rather than plummeting down. Riefenstahl employed the same technique in her film of the Berlin Olympics. Stalin and Hitler found common ground in exhibitions of what we now call 'body fascism' (Tom of Finland without the erotics) and Rodchenko's work is also at one with Arno Breker and Riefenstahl here. More generally, his works seems torn between competing ideas; the idea of philosophy as part of everyday life, the quotidian, instead of the bourgeois nature of painting, as opposed to his idea of ostranenie, of making things strange (which might have been unconcerned with ideology in Shklovsky's original formulation but which seems mostly manipulative here). Rodchenko here used many of the same techniques Eisenstein used in film, with a photo like The Stairs clearly recalling The Battleship Potemkin. Some of his more interesting photos effect that very well, superimposing images through double exposure to create effects that could have come from Man Ray. Similarly, his later photos of circuses suggest a fascination with the exotic rather than with the previous hordes of picture of collectivised farms and lightbulb factories.
Following the Russian theme, I've also been to see Matthew Bourne's version of The Nutcracker. The ballet opens in the Dickensian setting of an orphanage, albeit one apparently designed by a cubist with tangential angles on all the walls and furniture, presumably to denote how their height would seem to a child. The second half rather resembles a Pierre et Gi'les photograph, with everything in saturated technicolor. Also interesting to note that it's as homoerotic as Pierre et Gilles, with the Nutcracker and soldiers dancing stripped to the waist and much of the dancing unabashedly sexual. I'm especially taken by a scene in the orphanage of one of the boys wanting a toy doll instead of the football he gets...
I follow this with a visit to a Cranach exhibition. Much of the earlier work is rather predictably devotional, but like Holbein his work represents a point where the christian vocabulary of medieval art is broken. Much of work shifts from religious subjects to portraiture, such as his painting of the Holy Kinship which shows religious figures but is actually painting Saxon aristocrats or the inclusion of the Bishop of Olomouc in a painting of the beheading of John the Baptist (with the shift from allegory to realism figured in the dog lapping up John's blood). Religious figures like St Helena are also depicted as Saxon nobles. Many of his paintings come to leave out the background altogether, leaving the individual in isolation against a void of blackness. Rather than visions of the beatific, Cranach is preoccupied with the grotesque; for example one of the more interesting details are drawings of The Temptation of Saint Anthony with a Boschian horde of demons. He also paints pictures showing elderly women with young men and vice versa; a carnivalesque form of laughter and grotesquerie. Equally, many of his religious subjects emerge as opportunities for the prurient and licentious; Lot being seduced by his daughters, David and Bathsheba and so on. A painting of Bocca della Verite shows an adultress getting away with her sin. Classical subjects often allow Cranach to show such scenes without any edifying pretext, such as the Judgement of Paris with its three nude goddesses or Venus and Cupid. As I mentioned before, Cranach treats Adam and Eve in exactly the same manner as Apollo and Diana, Adam and Eve in the same manner as the Golden Age. Much of his work can also be described as proto-romantic, with its forest scenes and gothic castles; Saint Jerome is a common subject (as with his painting of Cardinal Albrecht as Jerome).
With the arrival of Easter, I travel up to the Midlands, calling in at Upton House. The building itself is rather nondescript, with the usual interminable Meissen cermaics and Stubbs paintings. However, it does happen to possess an excellent painting collection. The Long Gallery contains a striking Saenredam painting of Utrecht cathedral, showing it as largely empty, a bleached vision of Protestant purity that I find surprisingly striking, possibly because of the ghostly addition of figures by a less skilled painter who subsequently tried to erase them. This work stands alongside Dutch winter and harbour scenes in the style of Brueghel and an early Canaletto. A later picture room is given up to two Hogarth paintings of times of the day; both are badly in need of cleaning which rather inhibits their appeal. This room is also home to Romney's Romantic painting of a rather ephebian William Beckford against a set of ruined tombs in a forest. Finally, there is a picture gallery proper, featuring Ruisdael landscapes, Steen's allegorical paintings, a Holbein miniature of a young man, a Jan Lievens painting mistaken in the past for a Rembrandt. A biblical scene by Tintoretto rather resembles one of Canaletto's later architectural capriccios while an El Greco's painting of christ contrasts with the Saenredam painting for its use of a bold but restricted palette of the primary colours. The faces in it are long and drawn, resembling Byzantine icons. The highlight of the collection is undoubtedly a Bosch triptych of the nativity. The ruined stable is an archetype in painting of this period but the bizarre gifts brought by the kings are far more characteristic of Bosch, as are the grisaille demons clustered on the inverse panels around a circle of light. Grisaille is also used strikingly in a Brueghel painting of the death of the virgin. As ones eyes grow accustomed to the darkness one gradually sees more and more figures in a room that had previously looked empty; an interesting trompe l'oeil that inverts the normal role of light in Western art. The rest of the works are medieval paintings and alterpieces, often by anonymous masters. I am quite struck by a Memling painting of a young man though. The only other things of interest in the house are a silver art deco bathroom that looks disturbingly like the set of a nineteen seventies BBC science fiction programme and a painting on the stairs of the adventurer William Augustus Bowles as an Indian chief, who had sought refuge with the Creek Indians and fought with them to attempt to expel the Spanish from Florida. It's still too early in the year to appreciate the gardens, but a long lawn drops down through a set of terraces to a long pond. I also visit the church at Ewelme, an astonishing place with medieval stone corbels and Victorian wooden angels lining the roof (one of the corbels depicts Edward the Third, of whom there is more anon), high wooden rood screens and an equally high gothic font cover, a gold altar by Ninian Comper featuring Sebastian, George and Michael, a floor covered in medieval tiles, walls decorated with a medieval IHS monogram in gothic black and red letters, as well as several alabaster tombs decorated with brasses, painted shields and angels.
In the Midlands itself, I visit the church of St Peter's at Wootton Wawen. The building's tower dates back to the Saxon period and the structure is a rather chaotic accretion of all that has passed since. Corbels of Edward and Philippa flank a window of Victorian stained glass, dating from Gilbert Scott's restoration. Alabaster tombs sit alongside Victorian hatchments and Baroque monuments, including an exceptional monument with a winged skull. The roof remains wooden, like that of a tithe barn. Nearby is the house of Coughton Court, a building owned by the Throckmorton family. Having been implicated in plots against Elizabeth and the gunpowder plot, the family were displaced from English life and the building seems to reflect it. The exterior remains Tudor, with an ornate gatehouse with half timbered buildings behind and parterre gardens. The interior reflects a family with social pretensions but little finance, with each room being decorated in an anodyne style that could have existed at any point from the 17th to 19th centuries. Some wooden sixteenth century panelling and furniture remains and I am struck by the family mascot, an elephant, appearing above the dining room doors, as well as by a good collection of tapestries. However, the majority of the painting are mediocre portraits of little merit (save one arresting 16th century English memento mori portrait) and the family seem to have been more interested in seditious Catholic relics like the Pretender's gloves than in anything else. The building is warrened with priest holes (recusancy seems to have been endemic in this part of Warwickshire, with a similar story applying at Baddesley Clinton and most of the village at Wootton Wawen remaining Catholic), while the nineteenth century saw the construction of an especially grim Catholic chapel alongside the Anglican church adjacent to the house.
Finally, I also travel to Kilpeck in Herefordshire, which more than lives up to its promise. The pinkish red Romanesque church rather reminds me of the Watts chapel in Surrey, which was presumably based on it. Like the Watts chapel, Kilpeck's door is decorated with a tympanum showing the green man, the tree of life., basilisks and manticores. The roof is lined with corbels of bears, sheela-na-gigs, musicians, dancers and fish. In such a deserted setting, which was especially windswept at the time of my visit, it seems a little like coming across Angkor Wat. Walking through the graveyard, I look at the Castle ruins. The Norman moat has begun to fill again with the rain, while there is the incongruous setting of flowering primrose in snow. The few remaining castle walls seem to have little time left, with a large crack splitting one of them and ivy growing over the other. Both have been fenced off. Behind the ruins and past the bare tree branches and their burden of mistletoe, like the black mountains. As I return, I look at the harvest moon, its red hue shrouded by the night clouds.Labels: Literature, Russia
posted by Richard 11:40 AM
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Departing for London one morning, I found myself waiting for a train on a rural train station platform. It was a misty morning and I could see my breath curl into white patterns suspended in the air. The grey shadow of the church spire in the distance seemed to be floating aloft in the air, the mist divorcing it from the ground. Train lines disappear into the mist as they proceed beneath a bridge crossing the tracks. As I arrive in London, the mists gradually dissipate and the warmth of London's climate leads to a pleasant summer-like day in the middle of February. Crocuses and Daffodils are starting to come into flower.
I begin by walking through Islington to the Estorick Collection. I pass the church of St Mary, with its baroque tower, classical portico and strange modernist baroque interior with its Egyptianate columns. Further along lies the Union Chapel, an eruption of redbrick gothic amidst rows of dun coloured Georgian terraces. The collection itself lies on a rather nondescript square adjacent to an old Tudor tower. The contents remind me of the Guggenheim in Venice, with its Chiricos, Severinis and Boccionis. More prototypical futurist works are represented by Boccioni's Modern Idol, Russolo's Music, Carra's Leaving the Theatre and Severini's The Boulevard and Cubist Still Life. Some of the most interesting exhibits are the more conventional, as with the neo-impressionist Balla's Portrait of Carlo Fontana as opposed to his futurist Hand of the Violinist with its Bergsonesque interpretation of time. I have to admit that the further the painters deviated from futurism tenets, the more I warmed to them, especially Campigli's Etruscan influenced works, Modigliani's African-influenced portraits, Chirico's metaphysical Revolt of the Sage and Guttuso's Marxist polemic Death of a Hero.
Travelling southwards, I pass by St John the Evangelist, a Georgian Waterloo church before proceeding to Southwark. I look in Pugin's Catholic cathedral with its gleaming white arches contrasting with its mundane exterior, the ruins of Christchurch and the peace garden at the Imperial War Museum with its iron mandala, circula dharma pattern, earth, air, water and fire sculptures and language pillar with inscriptions in Tibetan, English, Chinese and Hindi. There's also a collection of the thirty four trees that colonised Britain after the ice age; Whitebeam and Pussy Willow, for example. Squirrels chase one another in the park. The day concludes with a trip to the Coliseum's performance of The Mikado. I don't particularly care for Gilbert and Sullivan but I suppose it was an pleasant enough diversion. The stage was distorted with slanted floors leading to trompe l'oeil rooms further back. Everything, from a giant gramophone to a pot plant is in bleached white. The singers appear dressed as if at a European spa in the nineteen thirties, making lines like "we are gentleman of Japan" sound rather odd, but in spite of the idea that this is Gilbert's best researched and most realistic opera, the engagement with Japanese culture is superficial, restricted to one song. Stripped of the costume, the opera works rather better in a European context; the satire directed against Pooh-bar applies well to Britain's rather nepotistic political culture. The result looks more like Jeeves and Wooster, with Richard Stuart's Ko-Ko rather resembling Terry Thomas. The lyrics to I've Got a Little List had been customised for the occasion, referring to the Archbishop of Canterbury and our dear leader, Prudence Brown.
Returning the following week, I briefly visit Butterfield's All Saints on Margaret Street, with its red and black bricks, tapering spire and an opulent interior with its tiles, mosaics and gilding. I also pass by the Georgian church of St George, Immaculate Conception on Farm Street and the Americana represented by the Grosvenor Chapel. Tracing my route back, I arrive at Piccadilly. There's something a little forced about the From Russia exhibition at the Royal Academy, with its attempt to yoke a disparate set of paintings loaned from the Hermitage and Tretyakov galleries into a cohesive whole. The just so story used to achieve this is one of the influence of French art on Russian painting. The exhibition begins with discussing how both French and Russian art in the late nineteenth century turned away from mythical subjects towards naturalism (just at the same point as the Pre-Raphaelites retreated from the industrial age into legend and myth), as with Repin's oddly Renoiresque Manifesto of October 17th, 1905. The likes of Camille Corot influenced landscape painting, as with Isaak Levitan (Chekhov's favourite artist) hauntingly empty After the Rain. The Russian pastoralism is rather more ideological than simply picturesque though as with Repin's Leo Tolstoy Barefoot, showing the Count dressed as a pesant or Nesterov's mystical landscape showing the murdered Tsarevich Demetrius (a painting disturbingly reminiscent of Holman Hunt's painting of the infant christ). This is then followed by showing French works purchased by Russian collectors; the pastoral theme being reciprocated with Monet's The Pond at Montgeron, Haystack at Giverny and Poppy Field and Cezanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire (at least one of the later Russian paintings could almost be taken for a Cezanne reproduction), Gauguin's Vairaumati Tei Oa (Her Name is Vairaumati) and Landscape with Peacocks.
From this point, the narrative becomes more diffuse, with the introduction of works like Manet's In the Bar, Renoir's In the Garden. Tatlin visited Picasso, Alexandra Exter worked with Leger, Chagall settled in Paris - giving new protein to French painting. And with the arrival of Diaghilev, Leon Bakst and the Ballets Russes, Paris became enamoured of all things Russian. The 1910 Jack of Diamonds show had exhibited Ivan Mashkov's Self Portrait with Pyotr Konchalovsky, a parody of Cezanne's Girl at the Piano, replacing the two girls with the artists as strongmen, playing Spanish popular tunes rather than Wagner. Simultaneously, the French started to go east, literally in the case of Matisse who was stunned by the candlelit icons in Orthodox churches. The most prominent works of the exhibition include Picasso's The Dryad and Farm Woman (Bust) (I can never really like Picasso after his Cubist phase and tend to prefer a nearby Braque painting; Picasso seems too intent on dehumanising, on decomposing individuals into objects) and Matisse's The Dance and The Red Room (Harmony in Red). The former almost has the quality of a graphic design to it in its simplicity, although the latter seemed the more engaging to me with its innocuous domestic setting conflicting with the riotous patterning and an inset view of the green wilds that's rather reminiscent of Velasquez. Fauvism was to become a critical influence on Russian neo-primitivism, with Vlaminck's Stream, Rousseau's The Muse Inspiring the Poet and Derain also represented (though I find myself preferring his later De Chiricoesque The Old Town Cognes) alongside Van Gogh's Portait of Dr Felix Rey.
The Russian response to this is interesting, taking French ideas and incorporating them into the context of orthodox iconography and folk art. While Picasso drew inspiration from Oceanic and African art, Goncharova and a number of her contemporaries formed a group who looked to folk art, peasant carvings and street signs. Picasso's massive Farm Woman, resembling a Moai or totem, speaks to Natalia Goncharov's Pillars of Salt, taking the Biblical scene and applying it to the context of folk Baba images. From the Union of Youth group, David Burlyuk's Portrait of Vasily Kamensky is essentially a secularised icon, with painters like Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin having originally been trained as icon painters (an icon of the Madonna is indeed included as his response to the first world war, alongside his Matisse influenced The Bath of the Horse). Chagall's work also dwells on subjects both Russian and Jewish, as in The Red Jew. Nonetheless, some of the most interesting work is more directly influenced, as with Altman's Cubist Portrait of Anna Akhmatova (alhtough something about the colouring and the use of modern techniques in a conventional manner reminded me of Lempicka). Alexandra Exter's Still Life, Filonov's crystalline painting of war and Nadezhda Udaltsova's City at Night are a distinctly Russian synthesis of Cubism and Futurism. Much more individual and unusual are Kandinsky's Winter and Composition VIII, followed by Malevich and his Suprematist trinity of Black Cross, Black Circle and Black Square, as well as other works that could easily sit alongside the likes of Mondrian.
Predictably, there are also some more odd and awkward works. Bakst's conventional Portrait of Sergei Diaghilev with his nanny introduces a room filled with works like Vrubel's symbolist Six Winged Seraph, landscapes by Diaghilev's set painter Roerich and Boris Grigoriev's portrait of the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold showing him as both clown and impresario. A couple of Cezannesque paintings like Fish Seller are included by Tatlin, before showing one of his constructivist sculptures, Corner Counter Relief with its echoes of Duchamp, and a model of his proposed tower with its grim forecast of art becoming subservient to the state.
I completed my visit to modern painting exhibitions with Tate Britain's exhibition on the Camden Town Group. Passing first by Westminster Cathedral, I felt that it would be ideal if the building is never finished; it's present state of sepulchral gloom being far preferable to the prospect of it glittering with gold mosaic. I hadn't really noticed the Eric Gill Stations of the Cross before. The Camden Town Group represented a kind of kitchen sink avant gardism (I'm not using the term lightly; Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman did both paint their kitchens). Once one removes social realism, the group fractures into a different styles, with the older Sickert influenced by Whistler and Degas in the midst of a group that favoured Van Gogh (transparently so in Gilman's painting of a Norwegian canal bridge), Cezanne and Gauguin, albeit at time when Kokoschka and Beckmann might have been better models. It's a particularly literary form of painting that rather looks like a visual representation of Hangover Square or Keep the Aspidistra Flying (if not The Forsyte Saga and Anna of the Five Towns. Their social realism often has something rather anitquated about it, as with Robert Bevan's paintings of the London horse cabs in contrast to Ginner's juxtaposition of flower girls in Piccadilly with the taxis and buses rushing past. Sickert's Gallery of the Old Mogul and Drummond's In the Cinema engage with cinema but the music hall and the circus were nonetheless the preferred venues for the group, along with Drummond's painting of Brompton Oratory. Much of the London landscapes focus on the pastoral aspects of London, as with Gore's The Fig Tree. Although Ginner and Gilman did several paintings of industrial Leeds or showing factories at work, Spencer Gore was more interested in places like the new garden cities or Brighton, and the group as a whole (save Sickert) did many paintings of locations like Romney Marsh, Richmond, Devon and even rural Sweden. These paintings seem to take them closest to the spirit of chosen modeles like Gauguin and Cezanne, as with Bevan's Dunn's Cottage or Ginner's cloisonnist Clayhidon. It's difficult not to conclude that their excursions amongst the lowlife are a form of tourism felt to accompany the mantle of bohemianism. Relatives tried to persuade them to lead proper English lives. Their reports on the city are slightly apologetic.
Vast swathes of the paintings being exhibited fell into the category of showing solitary figures, usually female, in down at heel surroundings as exemplars of ennui, with Gilman's Marxism in particular feeding into this (although Gore's parallel portraits of his wife and his servant seems more born from snobbery, in contrast's portraits of his landlady). Gilman's Meditation, The Coral Necklace and Girl with a Teacup, to name but three, are all variations of a theme handled by Sickert in rather more novelistic terms, often showing what look like frozen moments in a wider narrative, as in Off to the Pub, The Little Tea Party or Ennui with its use of stuffed animals to symbolise the relationship being shown. This is particularly so with Sickert's Camden Town Murder series, with this title ambiguously competing with others like What Shall We Do for the Rent?. On these paintings it's difficult to tell whether the passive clay-like flesh of the women is already dead (something here reminded me of Lucien Freud), whether it is showing two lovers or client and prostitute, whether the poses are of despair or of threat. They rather remind me of Hitchcock's Frenzy. It's also worth comparing this to Manet's Petit Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe or Olympia Where Manet is erotic, Sicket is seedy, using dark midtones that revolted Gilman, the "frigid Anglican" as Lewis called him. Nudes had to be removed from the easels of the studio at 19 Fitzroy Street, where Spencer Gore's cleaning woman dispensed tea on Saturday afternoons, so that the sensibilities of Gore's uncle, the Bishop of Oxford, would not be affronted. Sickert is also distanced from the rest of the group by his sense of enthralled melancholia with pictures like Noctes Ambrosianae and The New Bedford; only Ginner comes close to replicating it in his painting of The Circus. Ginner in fact emerges as the strongest of the group overall besides Sickert, with paintings like Evening, Dieppe. I depart, walk past the Buxton Memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens, enter the tube station and disappear.
Had PG Wodehouse been inclined to wrote medieval morality plays, the result might well have been quite similar to Waugh's Vile Bodies. Occupying an awkward vantage point somewhere between The Radetzky March and The Good Soldier Schwejk, the centre of the novel is Father Rothschild and his observation that "these young people have got hold of the other end of the stick and for all we know it may be the right one. They say 'If a thing's not worth doing very well, it's not be worth doing at all.'" Waugh veers between a denunciation of the Bright Young Things born of sexual disgust (the vile bodies of the title) and of the moribund and decrepit society that is about to destroy itself in the first world war, "we shall all be walking into the jaws of destruction again, protesting our pacific intentions." Some parts of the novel also remind me of the parts of Howard's End where Helen goes for a ride in a motor car; "the real cars that become masters of men, who exist solely for their own propulsion through space, for whom their drivers, clinging precariously to the steering wheel, are as important as his stenographer to a stockbroker. These are in perpetual flux, a vortex of combining and disintegrating units." The same thing happens with Nina's sickness as she looks down from the plane, a representation of the machine age that rather recalls Celine. Zorba the Greek was apparently written under the influence of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Buddhism and it would certainly appear to uneasily veer between these respective extremes, between Nietzsche's idea of the superman ("in other more primitive and creative ages, Zorba would have been the head of the tribe... I think of god as being exactly like me" with Zorba's anecdote of telling god to get out of his way) as counterpointed to Schopenhauer's idea of seeking a point of stillness ("life is trouble.. I listened to Zorba's words and realised that they showed me a sure, attractive and very human path to tread. It was again the spirit of the Mara..."). The novel flits between these two extremes and others, as with the christian Saint Bacchus becoming entangled with Dionysus or the paradox that the fulfilment of the narrator's Buddhism is to kill the Buddha; "and ordered the Buddha within me to dissolve."
I don't generally read a great deal of contemporary fiction but have recently decided to try a little. While revered by the mainstream press Ian McEwan tends to be reviled by many weblogs for a combination of perceived artistic (his novels broadly use the techniques of the realist novel and while Gabriel Josipovici's description of his writing as being little different to Defoe or Dickens is a rather trite complaint, it could certainly sit easily alongside Forster and James) and political conservatism. On Chesil Beach certainly contains several passages that suggest a degree of scepticism as to political radicalism; Florence's mother describes the Soviet Union as little different to Nazi Germany. As Florence believes it to be essentially benevolent it is a little inconsistent for her to describe Edward's membership of CND as being akin to a medieval millenarian cult (particularly when she too belongs to it). However, whether any of this really translates to support for conservative ideas is an extrapolation the novel fails to justify, particularly when McEwan comments that he has not disavowed any of the views he once held as a member of CND. My own reservations about McEwan are rather different. As the above descriptions attest, the novel is concerned with events in the years that Larkin described sexual intercourse as having invented in ("This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine ...This was still the era when to be young was a social encumbrance.") At one point McEwan's omniscient narrator declares that "Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself." This seems true of one of the characters, Edward, who travels in the course of the novel from English middle class awkwardness to becoming a sixties dropout. However, Florence's "visceral dread" of sex is deliberately left unexplained and can certainly not be laid at the hand of history. Similarly, her suggestion that their relationship be platonic, with her tolerating him having sex with other women hardly seems to be ahead of its time in the way McEwan seems to believe it to be; quite the contrary. The idea that Edward's life would have been much better if he had accepted also seems somewhat unwarranted, given that the novel itself holds out little more than a post in her father's firm for choosing that road. McEwan generally seems to prefer the aberrant and unexplained too much to be able to work fully within the constraints of the realist novel, where the struggles of Julien Sorrel or Dorothea Brooke is entirely in keeping with the spirit of their age. By contrast, one if left wondering why McEwan chose a historical setting at all and least of all one that can barely be within the bounds of his own memory.
The other writer I have recently read for the first time is Martin Amis with London Fields. Following some rather disappointing comments he has recently made, the Guardian did feel it had to praise him for his political engagement, quoting Ryszard Kapuscinski:"Twenty years ago, I was in Africa, and this is what I saw: I went from revolution to coup d'Etat, from one war to another; I witnessed, in effect, history in the making, real history, contemporary history, our history. But I was also surprised: I never saw a writer. I never met a poet or a philosopher—even a sociologist. Where were they? Such important events, and not a single writer anywhere?
Then I would return to Europe and I would find them. They would be at home, writing their little domestic stories: the boy, the girl, the laughing, the intimacy, the marriage, the divorce—in short, the same story we've been reading over and over again for a thousand years. You know, the other day I was reading about the novels that won the annual French prizes. It was incredible. None of these books had anything to do with our world, our reality—nothing. There was one about an unwanted child, and another about a boy, a girl, the laughing, the intimacy... so much of our literature is so very traditional, even when seen as being avant-garde. And if avant-garde, it is only avant-garde because of its style—as if assembled in a workshop. It is never avant-garde for its subject; it is never caught actually looking out at the world. The writer is always looking over his shoulder, noting the position of his predecessor. Contemporary literature is a very private affair."
It's a valid point but London Fields is characterised by a sense of English life as an irrelevance, a place from where history has fled ("Bellow says that America is the only place to be, because it contains the 'real modern action'"). I recall him later comparing England to Switzerland, making me think of Greene's comment about centuries of peace and prosperity creating nothing more than the cuckoo clock. The England depicted by Amis has the vestigial trace of social importance, whether it is the economics of Thatcher's Britain ("no-one seemed to have thought through the implications of a world where everyone cheated") to the vague threat of nuclear devastation. In terms of style too, Amis is far from McEwan's realism. His characters appear as automata with names that reflect allegorical or ironic descriptions ("in fiction people become coherent and intelligible - and they aren't like that... people are chaotic quiddities"), his prose style draws attention to the narration rather than establishing it as a transparent window on events. Amis is preoccupied with the idea of the unreliability of narration, with lies being woven by most of the characters in their speech and writing ("the truth doesn't matter anymore and is not wanted"). The novel reassigns the role of author to the character of Nicola, describing her as a puppermaster, using this to thwart the generic constraints of the detective novel at every turn ("she outwrote me"). In short, it's a very English compromise between realism and post-modernism.Labels: Art, Literature, London
posted by Richard 10:43 AM
Saturday, January 12, 2008