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 15, 2008
Orientalism is an exhibition at the Tate dedicated to European painting of the Middle East, one of the latest in a quite long series of exhibitions at various London institutions dealing with the Middle East. The first room announces that the theme is rather predictably inspired by Edward Said, although it admits that Said has become a controversial figure. This seems a pity, as much of the exhibition does go a long way to undermining Said's case. It shows paintings by people who had effectively gone native, were motivated by mysticism or who were opposed to imperialism or who were simply motivated by a love of the exotic. Although Said's case that the West depicted the Orient as a decadent, barbaric other (as in Byron's poetry) is validated to some extent (as with the many pictures of the harem or slave market, although it's interesting to note that a French painting is the only one to explicitly sexualise the slaves, to the apparent disapproval of a British Empire that was banning such practices), he fails to perceive that as nineteenth century civilisation grew increasingly grey and industrialised, its writers and artists increasingly sought refuge in their own medieval past or in other places unpolluted by modernity. Ruskin sought this in Venice, the likes of Wilkie and Holman Hunt in the Orient. With the ruins of Rome already excavated and familiar, novelty dictated that the ruins of Egypt and Jordan were the next to be discovered. Equally, if the West was decadent, much of the appeal was that Westerners wanted to lose their inhibitions. Figures like Lewis and Leighton often came to show Western figures in Oriental settings.
The exhibition begins with portraiture; the daughter of English merchants who had grown up in Turkey shown in Western dress, the painter John Frederick Lewis depicting himself as a carpet seller in the bazaar, figures like Holman Hunt and Wortley Montagu in Eastern clothing. The depiction of Islam by Lewis is especially sympathetic, with his paintings showing himself at prayer in the Mosque. I'm interested in Wilkie's portrait of the Ottoman Sultan, shown in mostly Westernised dress. It seems to be forgotten that cultural interchange worked both ways, with foreigners dressing as Arabs and vice versa; again, Said's account assumes that orientalism can only be an imperialist ploy rather than a form of cultural exchange; the most clearly imperial portrait here, of Napoleon in Egypt, is notable for the stark contrast between the Eastern setting and the Western attire of the dictator. Something similar is at work in the painting of European explorers, dressed in Roman togas, rediscovering the ruins of Petra with their Arab guides. The nearest there is to a validation of Said's theories is an Augustus John painting of TE Lawrence in Bedouin clothes, although Lawrence was a poor sort of imperialist at best.
The later paintings move onto the subject of religion. During the course of the nineteenth century, wealthy westerners financed the establishment of Jewish homes and collective farms in Jerusalem, which accordingly grew more and more Judaicised. Figures like Holman Hunt grew increasingly interested in Judaism, leading to support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland. His painting of The Scapegoat combines both Christian and Jewish themes, although much of his painting of Jersualem and its churches is more straightforwardly christian. It has to be said that the most interesting paintings (and some of the most numerous) in the exhibition are of architecture and landscapes though. For instance, Lord Leighton's paintings of Algiers and Damascus, Frederick Lewis depicting the bazaars of Cairo, Edward Lear's view of Constantinople from a cypress filled cemetery or the pyramids from a tree lined avenue, Holman Hunt showing the pyramids reflected in the Nile (he didn't care for them much and managed to make them look like Silbury Hill) David Robert's depiction of the ruins of Petra, Baalbec, Philae and Karnak. Judging from this, it's very clear that both Lear and Roberts are very much underrated as artists.
As an exhibition, there's more cultural and historical interest than artistic here. None of the paintings are poor but few are masterpieces. To take a few that stood out, there's Stanley Spencer's paintings of mosques in Sarajevo, Bomberg's modernist painting of Jerusalem, Dadd's strange concatenation of Bedouin tribes and Roman soldiers into a strangely symmetrical painting an allegory whose meaning is forever lost. Before, I leave I take the opportunity to have a look at The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon. It fills an entire wall of the gallery and is easily the finest masterpiece that I saw that day. It's a pity I'll probably never see it again.
Like Said's Magnum Opus, John Berger's Ways of Seeing is an interesting text, if not one I can bring myself to entirely agree with. The second section discusses the history of the nude, with its tendency to depict women as passive objects of the male gaze. It's difficult not to sympathise with much of this argument (especially that non-Western traditions have not focussed exclusively on the passive image of a woman), but it still seems rather limited. The nude in the likes of Cranach or Titian heralds the vanquishing of the medieval prohibition of sexuality, a reawakening of the sensual and physical (it's interesting to note that there's absolutely no discussion of the role of religion in Western art in Berger). A figure like the Rokeby Venus, as Camille Paglia might argue, surely has its own power and is difficult to solely characterise as passive. More generally, Berger's argument seems to have been undone by the passage of time and the increased sexualisation of the male body; Germaine Greer is surely right to argue that women, as much as heterosexual men, have a right to this form of visual pleasure.
The third section is probably the one I most agree with. Berger argues that the physicality of oil painting was ideal both for the depiction of material objects, whether still lives or other forms of property (e.g. land in Constable or animals in Stubbs) and for the establishment of the oil painting as a form of property in its own right. Berger counterposes this to the ethereal figures in Blake's engravings. Berger does deal with an aspect of the Western tradition I have little liking of here, but it seems a little strained all the same; I can't say I would swap the physicality of a Vermeer with its pleasure in the physical world for a medieval triptych especially gladly. Equally, given the prominence of the romantic depiction of nature from Rosa and Ruisdael to Holman Hunt and David Friedrich, the argument that nature is not present except as property seems frankly ludicrous.
The final section deals with the transition from oil painting to colour photography in advertising, from the wealth and status of the elite to the promotion of wealth and status to the lower echelons. The argument is a familiar one, revolving around the role of advertising in manufacturing false wants by associating certain products with sexuality or status. I tend to suspect that this argument requires one to accept the Marxist idea of false consciousness (as Popper pointed out a mechanism that simply dismisses any obstacle to Marx's account of social history as being an aberration); Berger certainly speaks of advertising as a form of force rather than a form of consent.
By contrast, Susan Sontag's On Photography is considerably more appealing to me. Noting that a photograph is essentially an accidental and serendipitous combination of how light interacts with chemicals, Sontag sees it as a way of seizing aspects of the world than a composed artform. Sontag accordingly disdains the rigid compositions of Weston in favour of Atget's more disorderly 'captures.' Where Berger's approach is Marxist, Sontag sees photography's overthrow of the distinction between high and low art as being essentially akin to surrealism. The only problem is one of period. Digital photography is rather less accidental than the film cameras Sontag was writing about. Techniques like high dynamic range photography or photoshop manipulation mean that photography becomes rather more akin to painting, which Sontag had seen as imitating photography. Of course, there's also a movement towards using older cameras, even pinhole ones, although the element of 'historical slumming' to this often seems a counterpart to more modern ways of aestheticising photographs, even to the extent of photoshopping marks and flaws onto the image.
Donald Richie's Japan Journals rather reminded me of Forster's accounts of Italy, Ozpotek's Turkey or the North Africa of Bowles, Burroughs and Orton. It's an odd sub-genre whereby the Western gay male looks for sexual liberation in a culture that lacks Western moral inhibitions or the mechanised and staid nature of Western society. In a lot of cases, the culture in question was a patriarchal one where homosexuality could be hidden within broader homosocial social structures. It's also a partly obsolescent sub-genre given that moral inhibitions are now more likely to be considerably stronger in Tangiers than in London. Perhaps, this is as well given the connotations of imperialism and economic exploitation in it alongside the escape from Western mores. "You seem to have deserted Japan in favour of the Third World," a friend tells him as his attentions turn from the Japanese to immigrant workers. "It was not I that deserted Japan," he writes, "but Japan that deserted the Third World . . . It was the Third World in Japan that so appealed to lubricious me, and now that Japan is more First World than even the USA, the appeal is no longer there. That makes me that figure of fun, the garden-variety colonial imperialistic predator." As Japan westernises, Richie begins peevish complaints against the ignorance of sexual indifference of Japanese youth, with friends departing for less affluent Thailand.
In this context, Japan is an odd example, having gone from being a traditional patriarchal society to a modern Westernised society where Richie documents the rise of women's rights. While Japan lacked the traditional opprobrium directed against homosexuality in the West, it nonetheless remains more conservative than a modern Western society. Richie is suspicious of the elevation of sexual preference to a component of social identity but there is something rather tragic in an existence of cruising and losing his lovers to marriage (Mishima's widow and children living in permanent denial as to his homosexuality). On the one hand, Richie documents the role of the transvestite performer in Japanese theatre, festivals undertaken by mostly nude men, fishermen who worked nude, carpenter's dancing women's dances and on the other he documents Yukio Mishima's hyper-masculinised identity and his identification with western classicism and the figure of Saint Sebastian in preference to Japanese models. Richie notes that "a dandy, far from being the individual eccentric he is often though to be, is really a strict conformist.. the dandy is no rebel, and no true reformer or renegade was ever a dandy. Maybe that is why society is no tolerant of dandies." However, Richie elsewhere notes that the bricolage Mishima constructed his identity from is that of the Western rebel, as with Brando. The version of homosexuality preferred in Japan is an unthreatening one that hardly seemed to fit Mishima's identity, leading to him becoming more conformist and conservative than Japanese society itself (Richie notes that Mishima's suicide says nothing about contemporary Japan). Mishima is reminiscent of nothing so much as a Tom of Finland cartoon. Richie's position in Japan is that of gaijin but notes that Japanese society would otherwise be far more oppressive than that of the society he had fled. Richie repeatedly decries the conformity of Japanese society, its absence of intellectuals or individuals. Nonetheless, his attitudes to sexuality belong to the age of Proust and Forster who only seemed capable of finding stronger heterosexual men arousing.
Reading Soseki's I am a Cat it occurs to me that Soseki is veering between two extremes. On the one hand, his feline protagonist serves to dismiss all humans as vicious and depraved. On the other, his principal human character serves to dismiss westernising tendencies in Japan. The two are linked by being increasingly marginalised voices (the cat describes his master as being superior to his fellows by being weka minded, just as he is described as a runt in comparison to all the other cats he knows) but they only intersect at certain points. For example, Sneaze is told that "the ways of our ancestors are much wiser and more effective than the ways of Europe.. the craving for satisfaction remains unrealised, the quest for the ideal eternally unrealised." This advice comes from a character dismissed as nearly insane and dangerous and Sneaze is ridiculed for his adoption of this viewpoint. Sneaze eventually seems to agree with his cat by dismissing all of his friends as lunatic, irrespective of their philosophical views. Nonetheless, this does not stop Soseki ending the novel with the theme of suicide as a harbinger of increased westernisation; "this overweening consciousness of self never lets up.. word such as serenity and self composure have become no more than so many meaningless strokes of a writing brush."
Viridiana surprised me as a film. Having seen An Andalusian Dog, The Golden Age and The Exterminating Angel before I was expecting something more self consciously surreal. Although the symmetry of its structure and some of its allegorical references are clear enough, it's still essentially cast in a realist vein. I found myself frequenting comparing it The Exterminating Angel where the bourgeoisie are trapped at their dinner party as an act of metaphysical revenge in the class war. Here, the film ends with Viridiana playing cards with the wealthy land owner, her project to house the poor having miserably failed. The dinner party here as the paupers invade the house is almost a parody of its counterpart in The Exterminating Angel.
I've often thought that authors like Sterne, Voltaire and Diderot are the nearest approximation to the modern playfulness of authors like Perec, Nabokov and Calvino. Reading Diderot's Rameau's Nephew reminded me rather of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees or The Beggar's Opera; in satirising modern vices they also implicitly undermine modern ideas of virtue. Diderot's habit is persistently to make a statement and then undermine, as with his disingenuous endorsement of Rameau; "the famous musician who has delivered us from the plainsong of Lully, who has written so many unintelligible visions.. not a word of which he or anyone else has understood." The narrator frequently denounces his interlocutor, but only to receive the response that he is the rule not the exception; "there's nothing degrading in doing the same as everyone else. I didn't invent them and I should be incompetent if I didn't conform... a thief happy to be among wealthy thieves." Instead the emphasis shifts from personal to public vice; "what a bloody awful economy, some men with bursting stomachs others clamour with hunger."Labels: Art, Film, Japan, Literature, London
posted by Richard 12:56 PM
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Departing for London one morning, I found myself waiting for a train on a rural train station platform. It was a misty morning and I could see my breath curl into white patterns suspended in the air. The grey shadow of the church spire in the distance seemed to be floating aloft in the air, the mist divorcing it from the ground. Train lines disappear into the mist as they proceed beneath a bridge crossing the tracks. As I arrive in London, the mists gradually dissipate and the warmth of London's climate leads to a pleasant summer-like day in the middle of February. Crocuses and Daffodils are starting to come into flower.
I begin by walking through Islington to the Estorick Collection. I pass the church of St Mary, with its baroque tower, classical portico and strange modernist baroque interior with its Egyptianate columns. Further along lies the Union Chapel, an eruption of redbrick gothic amidst rows of dun coloured Georgian terraces. The collection itself lies on a rather nondescript square adjacent to an old Tudor tower. The contents remind me of the Guggenheim in Venice, with its Chiricos, Severinis and Boccionis. More prototypical futurist works are represented by Boccioni's Modern Idol, Russolo's Music, Carra's Leaving the Theatre and Severini's The Boulevard and Cubist Still Life. Some of the most interesting exhibits are the more conventional, as with the neo-impressionist Balla's Portrait of Carlo Fontana as opposed to his futurist Hand of the Violinist with its Bergsonesque interpretation of time. I have to admit that the further the painters deviated from futurism tenets, the more I warmed to them, especially Campigli's Etruscan influenced works, Modigliani's African-influenced portraits, Chirico's metaphysical Revolt of the Sage and Guttuso's Marxist polemic Death of a Hero.
Travelling southwards, I pass by St John the Evangelist, a Georgian Waterloo church before proceeding to Southwark. I look in Pugin's Catholic cathedral with its gleaming white arches contrasting with its mundane exterior, the ruins of Christchurch and the peace garden at the Imperial War Museum with its iron mandala, circula dharma pattern, earth, air, water and fire sculptures and language pillar with inscriptions in Tibetan, English, Chinese and Hindi. There's also a collection of the thirty four trees that colonised Britain after the ice age; Whitebeam and Pussy Willow, for example. Squirrels chase one another in the park. The day concludes with a trip to the Coliseum's performance of The Mikado. I don't particularly care for Gilbert and Sullivan but I suppose it was an pleasant enough diversion. The stage was distorted with slanted floors leading to trompe l'oeil rooms further back. Everything, from a giant gramophone to a pot plant is in bleached white. The singers appear dressed as if at a European spa in the nineteen thirties, making lines like "we are gentleman of Japan" sound rather odd, but in spite of the idea that this is Gilbert's best researched and most realistic opera, the engagement with Japanese culture is superficial, restricted to one song. Stripped of the costume, the opera works rather better in a European context; the satire directed against Pooh-bar applies well to Britain's rather nepotistic political culture. The result looks more like Jeeves and Wooster, with Richard Stuart's Ko-Ko rather resembling Terry Thomas. The lyrics to I've Got a Little List had been customised for the occasion, referring to the Archbishop of Canterbury and our dear leader, Prudence Brown.
Returning the following week, I briefly visit Butterfield's All Saints on Margaret Street, with its red and black bricks, tapering spire and an opulent interior with its tiles, mosaics and gilding. I also pass by the Georgian church of St George, Immaculate Conception on Farm Street and the Americana represented by the Grosvenor Chapel. Tracing my route back, I arrive at Piccadilly. There's something a little forced about the From Russia exhibition at the Royal Academy, with its attempt to yoke a disparate set of paintings loaned from the Hermitage and Tretyakov galleries into a cohesive whole. The just so story used to achieve this is one of the influence of French art on Russian painting. The exhibition begins with discussing how both French and Russian art in the late nineteenth century turned away from mythical subjects towards naturalism (just at the same point as the Pre-Raphaelites retreated from the industrial age into legend and myth), as with Repin's oddly Renoiresque Manifesto of October 17th, 1905. The likes of Camille Corot influenced landscape painting, as with Isaak Levitan (Chekhov's favourite artist) hauntingly empty After the Rain. The Russian pastoralism is rather more ideological than simply picturesque though as with Repin's Leo Tolstoy Barefoot, showing the Count dressed as a pesant or Nesterov's mystical landscape showing the murdered Tsarevich Demetrius (a painting disturbingly reminiscent of Holman Hunt's painting of the infant christ). This is then followed by showing French works purchased by Russian collectors; the pastoral theme being reciprocated with Monet's The Pond at Montgeron, Haystack at Giverny and Poppy Field and Cezanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire (at least one of the later Russian paintings could almost be taken for a Cezanne reproduction), Gauguin's Vairaumati Tei Oa (Her Name is Vairaumati) and Landscape with Peacocks.
From this point, the narrative becomes more diffuse, with the introduction of works like Manet's In the Bar, Renoir's In the Garden. Tatlin visited Picasso, Alexandra Exter worked with Leger, Chagall settled in Paris - giving new protein to French painting. And with the arrival of Diaghilev, Leon Bakst and the Ballets Russes, Paris became enamoured of all things Russian. The 1910 Jack of Diamonds show had exhibited Ivan Mashkov's Self Portrait with Pyotr Konchalovsky, a parody of Cezanne's Girl at the Piano, replacing the two girls with the artists as strongmen, playing Spanish popular tunes rather than Wagner. Simultaneously, the French started to go east, literally in the case of Matisse who was stunned by the candlelit icons in Orthodox churches. The most prominent works of the exhibition include Picasso's The Dryad and Farm Woman (Bust) (I can never really like Picasso after his Cubist phase and tend to prefer a nearby Braque painting; Picasso seems too intent on dehumanising, on decomposing individuals into objects) and Matisse's The Dance and The Red Room (Harmony in Red). The former almost has the quality of a graphic design to it in its simplicity, although the latter seemed the more engaging to me with its innocuous domestic setting conflicting with the riotous patterning and an inset view of the green wilds that's rather reminiscent of Velasquez. Fauvism was to become a critical influence on Russian neo-primitivism, with Vlaminck's Stream, Rousseau's The Muse Inspiring the Poet and Derain also represented (though I find myself preferring his later De Chiricoesque The Old Town Cognes) alongside Van Gogh's Portait of Dr Felix Rey.
The Russian response to this is interesting, taking French ideas and incorporating them into the context of orthodox iconography and folk art. While Picasso drew inspiration from Oceanic and African art, Goncharova and a number of her contemporaries formed a group who looked to folk art, peasant carvings and street signs. Picasso's massive Farm Woman, resembling a Moai or totem, speaks to Natalia Goncharov's Pillars of Salt, taking the Biblical scene and applying it to the context of folk Baba images. From the Union of Youth group, David Burlyuk's Portrait of Vasily Kamensky is essentially a secularised icon, with painters like Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin having originally been trained as icon painters (an icon of the Madonna is indeed included as his response to the first world war, alongside his Matisse influenced The Bath of the Horse). Chagall's work also dwells on subjects both Russian and Jewish, as in The Red Jew. Nonetheless, some of the most interesting work is more directly influenced, as with Altman's Cubist Portrait of Anna Akhmatova (alhtough something about the colouring and the use of modern techniques in a conventional manner reminded me of Lempicka). Alexandra Exter's Still Life, Filonov's crystalline painting of war and Nadezhda Udaltsova's City at Night are a distinctly Russian synthesis of Cubism and Futurism. Much more individual and unusual are Kandinsky's Winter and Composition VIII, followed by Malevich and his Suprematist trinity of Black Cross, Black Circle and Black Square, as well as other works that could easily sit alongside the likes of Mondrian.
Predictably, there are also some more odd and awkward works. Bakst's conventional Portrait of Sergei Diaghilev with his nanny introduces a room filled with works like Vrubel's symbolist Six Winged Seraph, landscapes by Diaghilev's set painter Roerich and Boris Grigoriev's portrait of the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold showing him as both clown and impresario. A couple of Cezannesque paintings like Fish Seller are included by Tatlin, before showing one of his constructivist sculptures, Corner Counter Relief with its echoes of Duchamp, and a model of his proposed tower with its grim forecast of art becoming subservient to the state.
I completed my visit to modern painting exhibitions with Tate Britain's exhibition on the Camden Town Group. Passing first by Westminster Cathedral, I felt that it would be ideal if the building is never finished; it's present state of sepulchral gloom being far preferable to the prospect of it glittering with gold mosaic. I hadn't really noticed the Eric Gill Stations of the Cross before. The Camden Town Group represented a kind of kitchen sink avant gardism (I'm not using the term lightly; Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman did both paint their kitchens). Once one removes social realism, the group fractures into a different styles, with the older Sickert influenced by Whistler and Degas in the midst of a group that favoured Van Gogh (transparently so in Gilman's painting of a Norwegian canal bridge), Cezanne and Gauguin, albeit at time when Kokoschka and Beckmann might have been better models. It's a particularly literary form of painting that rather looks like a visual representation of Hangover Square or Keep the Aspidistra Flying (if not The Forsyte Saga and Anna of the Five Towns. Their social realism often has something rather anitquated about it, as with Robert Bevan's paintings of the London horse cabs in contrast to Ginner's juxtaposition of flower girls in Piccadilly with the taxis and buses rushing past. Sickert's Gallery of the Old Mogul and Drummond's In the Cinema engage with cinema but the music hall and the circus were nonetheless the preferred venues for the group, along with Drummond's painting of Brompton Oratory. Much of the London landscapes focus on the pastoral aspects of London, as with Gore's The Fig Tree. Although Ginner and Gilman did several paintings of industrial Leeds or showing factories at work, Spencer Gore was more interested in places like the new garden cities or Brighton, and the group as a whole (save Sickert) did many paintings of locations like Romney Marsh, Richmond, Devon and even rural Sweden. These paintings seem to take them closest to the spirit of chosen modeles like Gauguin and Cezanne, as with Bevan's Dunn's Cottage or Ginner's cloisonnist Clayhidon. It's difficult not to conclude that their excursions amongst the lowlife are a form of tourism felt to accompany the mantle of bohemianism. Relatives tried to persuade them to lead proper English lives. Their reports on the city are slightly apologetic.
Vast swathes of the paintings being exhibited fell into the category of showing solitary figures, usually female, in down at heel surroundings as exemplars of ennui, with Gilman's Marxism in particular feeding into this (although Gore's parallel portraits of his wife and his servant seems more born from snobbery, in contrast's portraits of his landlady). Gilman's Meditation, The Coral Necklace and Girl with a Teacup, to name but three, are all variations of a theme handled by Sickert in rather more novelistic terms, often showing what look like frozen moments in a wider narrative, as in Off to the Pub, The Little Tea Party or Ennui with its use of stuffed animals to symbolise the relationship being shown. This is particularly so with Sickert's Camden Town Murder series, with this title ambiguously competing with others like What Shall We Do for the Rent?. On these paintings it's difficult to tell whether the passive clay-like flesh of the women is already dead (something here reminded me of Lucien Freud), whether it is showing two lovers or client and prostitute, whether the poses are of despair or of threat. They rather remind me of Hitchcock's Frenzy. It's also worth comparing this to Manet's Petit Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe or Olympia Where Manet is erotic, Sicket is seedy, using dark midtones that revolted Gilman, the "frigid Anglican" as Lewis called him. Nudes had to be removed from the easels of the studio at 19 Fitzroy Street, where Spencer Gore's cleaning woman dispensed tea on Saturday afternoons, so that the sensibilities of Gore's uncle, the Bishop of Oxford, would not be affronted. Sickert is also distanced from the rest of the group by his sense of enthralled melancholia with pictures like Noctes Ambrosianae and The New Bedford; only Ginner comes close to replicating it in his painting of The Circus. Ginner in fact emerges as the strongest of the group overall besides Sickert, with paintings like Evening, Dieppe. I depart, walk past the Buxton Memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens, enter the tube station and disappear.
Had PG Wodehouse been inclined to wrote medieval morality plays, the result might well have been quite similar to Waugh's Vile Bodies. Occupying an awkward vantage point somewhere between The Radetzky March and The Good Soldier Schwejk, the centre of the novel is Father Rothschild and his observation that "these young people have got hold of the other end of the stick and for all we know it may be the right one. They say 'If a thing's not worth doing very well, it's not be worth doing at all.'" Waugh veers between a denunciation of the Bright Young Things born of sexual disgust (the vile bodies of the title) and of the moribund and decrepit society that is about to destroy itself in the first world war, "we shall all be walking into the jaws of destruction again, protesting our pacific intentions." Some parts of the novel also remind me of the parts of Howard's End where Helen goes for a ride in a motor car; "the real cars that become masters of men, who exist solely for their own propulsion through space, for whom their drivers, clinging precariously to the steering wheel, are as important as his stenographer to a stockbroker. These are in perpetual flux, a vortex of combining and disintegrating units." The same thing happens with Nina's sickness as she looks down from the plane, a representation of the machine age that rather recalls Celine. Zorba the Greek was apparently written under the influence of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Buddhism and it would certainly appear to uneasily veer between these respective extremes, between Nietzsche's idea of the superman ("in other more primitive and creative ages, Zorba would have been the head of the tribe... I think of god as being exactly like me" with Zorba's anecdote of telling god to get out of his way) as counterpointed to Schopenhauer's idea of seeking a point of stillness ("life is trouble.. I listened to Zorba's words and realised that they showed me a sure, attractive and very human path to tread. It was again the spirit of the Mara..."). The novel flits between these two extremes and others, as with the christian Saint Bacchus becoming entangled with Dionysus or the paradox that the fulfilment of the narrator's Buddhism is to kill the Buddha; "and ordered the Buddha within me to dissolve."
I don't generally read a great deal of contemporary fiction but have recently decided to try a little. While revered by the mainstream press Ian McEwan tends to be reviled by many weblogs for a combination of perceived artistic (his novels broadly use the techniques of the realist novel and while Gabriel Josipovici's description of his writing as being little different to Defoe or Dickens is a rather trite complaint, it could certainly sit easily alongside Forster and James) and political conservatism. On Chesil Beach certainly contains several passages that suggest a degree of scepticism as to political radicalism; Florence's mother describes the Soviet Union as little different to Nazi Germany. As Florence believes it to be essentially benevolent it is a little inconsistent for her to describe Edward's membership of CND as being akin to a medieval millenarian cult (particularly when she too belongs to it). However, whether any of this really translates to support for conservative ideas is an extrapolation the novel fails to justify, particularly when McEwan comments that he has not disavowed any of the views he once held as a member of CND. My own reservations about McEwan are rather different. As the above descriptions attest, the novel is concerned with events in the years that Larkin described sexual intercourse as having invented in ("This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine ...This was still the era when to be young was a social encumbrance.") At one point McEwan's omniscient narrator declares that "Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself." This seems true of one of the characters, Edward, who travels in the course of the novel from English middle class awkwardness to becoming a sixties dropout. However, Florence's "visceral dread" of sex is deliberately left unexplained and can certainly not be laid at the hand of history. Similarly, her suggestion that their relationship be platonic, with her tolerating him having sex with other women hardly seems to be ahead of its time in the way McEwan seems to believe it to be; quite the contrary. The idea that Edward's life would have been much better if he had accepted also seems somewhat unwarranted, given that the novel itself holds out little more than a post in her father's firm for choosing that road. McEwan generally seems to prefer the aberrant and unexplained too much to be able to work fully within the constraints of the realist novel, where the struggles of Julien Sorrel or Dorothea Brooke is entirely in keeping with the spirit of their age. By contrast, one if left wondering why McEwan chose a historical setting at all and least of all one that can barely be within the bounds of his own memory.
The other writer I have recently read for the first time is Martin Amis with London Fields. Following some rather disappointing comments he has recently made, the Guardian did feel it had to praise him for his political engagement, quoting Ryszard Kapuscinski:"Twenty years ago, I was in Africa, and this is what I saw: I went from revolution to coup d'Etat, from one war to another; I witnessed, in effect, history in the making, real history, contemporary history, our history. But I was also surprised: I never saw a writer. I never met a poet or a philosopher—even a sociologist. Where were they? Such important events, and not a single writer anywhere?
Then I would return to Europe and I would find them. They would be at home, writing their little domestic stories: the boy, the girl, the laughing, the intimacy, the marriage, the divorce—in short, the same story we've been reading over and over again for a thousand years. You know, the other day I was reading about the novels that won the annual French prizes. It was incredible. None of these books had anything to do with our world, our reality—nothing. There was one about an unwanted child, and another about a boy, a girl, the laughing, the intimacy... so much of our literature is so very traditional, even when seen as being avant-garde. And if avant-garde, it is only avant-garde because of its style—as if assembled in a workshop. It is never avant-garde for its subject; it is never caught actually looking out at the world. The writer is always looking over his shoulder, noting the position of his predecessor. Contemporary literature is a very private affair."
It's a valid point but London Fields is characterised by a sense of English life as an irrelevance, a place from where history has fled ("Bellow says that America is the only place to be, because it contains the 'real modern action'"). I recall him later comparing England to Switzerland, making me think of Greene's comment about centuries of peace and prosperity creating nothing more than the cuckoo clock. The England depicted by Amis has the vestigial trace of social importance, whether it is the economics of Thatcher's Britain ("no-one seemed to have thought through the implications of a world where everyone cheated") to the vague threat of nuclear devastation. In terms of style too, Amis is far from McEwan's realism. His characters appear as automata with names that reflect allegorical or ironic descriptions ("in fiction people become coherent and intelligible - and they aren't like that... people are chaotic quiddities"), his prose style draws attention to the narration rather than establishing it as a transparent window on events. Amis is preoccupied with the idea of the unreliability of narration, with lies being woven by most of the characters in their speech and writing ("the truth doesn't matter anymore and is not wanted"). The novel reassigns the role of author to the character of Nicola, describing her as a puppermaster, using this to thwart the generic constraints of the detective novel at every turn ("she outwrote me"). In short, it's a very English compromise between realism and post-modernism.Labels: Art, Literature, London
posted by Richard 10:43 AM
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
DH Lawrence once complained of how we only know of the Etruscan way of death, not their way of life. The tombs survived long after the cities had been destroyed. Visiting the British Museum exhibition dedicated to the First Emperor, the centrepiece of which being specimens of the Terracotta Army, it's rather difficult not to be reminded of this observation. Even so, the comparison cannot be taken too far; Lawrence romantically portrayed the Etruscans as gentle artists overwhelmed by Roman imperialism whereas the Qin dynasty was depicted in Sima Qian's history as one of despotism and conquest. Much of the exhibition accordingly dwells on the militaristic aspects of the Qin dynasty, from their origins as horse breeders to the Zhou dynasty to its overthrow of the Zhou through the development of superior military strategy, such as the use of cavalry. The exhibition includes mass produced examples of crossbows, spears, swords and the bells used to sound the retreat. A brass rubbing shows Jing Qe's assassination attempt (the basis for the recent wuxia film - another example of contemporary Chinese pro-totalitarian and pro-reunification ideologies) The exhibition does tend to rehabilitate the First Emperor in so far glosses over earlier aspects of Chinese culture; the Zhou dynasty had after all produced Confucius, Lao Tsu and Mencius, creating a period for philosophy that had equalled Athens.
However, the exhibition does also contain examples of bells used for ceremonial purposes (lacking a clapper they had to be struck from the outside), various engraved bronze vessels, gold bowls, jade pendants and bi discs. Pottery tiles from the royal palaces show patterns of dragons, phoenixes, bi discs and sun flowers. It also dwells on some of the more functional aspects of Qin rule; the standardisation of weights, measures, coinage and of the language itself. Early coin designs were in the shapes of knives or spades. Yuan Yao's hanging scroll of the mythical city of Penglai (resting place of the immortals sought out by the Emperor and one influence for his necropolis) and Yuan Jiang's Ebung Palace are easily the most accomplished artworks in the exhibition. Both depict fantastical palaces set amidst the mountains and the exhibition also includes imperial inscriptions carved into the rock on the summits of various mountains. The Imperial tomb was itself designed to become one with the natural world, with the interior designed as a microcosm of his kingdom and the central pyramid having since become forested, thereby conferring the status of mountain spirit on the deceased. The principle is in most respects the opposite of the Western idea of architecture as a product of artifice, something to stand against nature.
This brings us to the statues themselves. Although mass-produced, each statue had to be completed by hand, adding details like moustaches and paintings, giving each of them a surprisingly individual aspect. A replica is included of how ones of the statues would have originally looked; like Roman sculpture it would have been painted and equipped with genuine weaponry. On some of the statues, paint has peeled away from the clay beneath creating an effect disturbingly like the decomposition of flesh from bone. The detail varies considerably in other respects, such as the wearing of hats or plain topknots. However, although the exhibition presents archers, generals cavalrymen and their horses and infantrymen, as well as a coach driver and four horses (the paint survives well here, with the the horses dappled and patterns decorating the coach) it also includes stable hands, civil servants, wrestlers, acrobats and musicians. Bronze geese and swans accompany them, as well as the bones of genuine horses and the tombs of real people; again, the difference between art and nature seems elided as with the intent to overcome the difference of life and death.
Afterwards, I have a look at the newly reopened Saint Pancras. It's oddly situated between something gleamingly futuristic and its original Victorian industrial gothic. The platforms shine with metal and glass beneath Scott's Venetian gothic brickwork and Barlow's painted blue girders. The presence of a largely deserted champagne bar serves as an apposite testament to fading of the city's years of plenty. It's also pleasant to see the statue of Betjeman with its quotation from Cornish Cliffs at the base; even if he wasn't a first class poet, it's too rare to see statues of writers.
During the evening, I go to a Radio3 arts recording at Broadcasting House, where Toby Litt performed a pair of Oulipo style pieces. The first 'Flatlish' was a piece written without ascenders or descenders, the second 'Japanglish' using the Japanese linguistic structure of alternating vowels and consonants ('y' being allowed as a vowel here), which included phrases like 'unopened ocelot' and 'aromatic ape;' taramasalata was the longest word Litt had found. The following day is rather modest in its ambitions; I go for a walk at Silchester before visiting Butterfield's church of St Mary at Beech Hill. The interior is like a chessboard with red, white and black bricks placed in alternating patterns and offset with Kempe stained glass and Minton tiles of fleur de lys and eagles.
Reading The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, I'm struck by some puzzling contradictions. Douglass notes that "the religion of the south mere covering for the most horrid crimes... of all slaveholders with whom I have met, religious slaveholders are the worst." I'm reminded of Robert Ingersoll's more cynical quotation "the slave ship sped from coast to coast, fanned by the winds and the holy ghost." Douglass also asks "does a righteous god govern the universe? and for what does he hold the thunders in his arm if not to smite the oppressor?" Yet religiosity is also something embraced by the slaves, presumably either for its message of equality and justice (in the next life, if not this one). It's an interesting question as to whether religion was genuinely liberating in this context or whether this is another example of the instances documented by Douglass of slaves embracing the ideologies that imprisoned them.
posted by Richard 8:51 AM
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Eastern Promise continues Cronenberg's move away from science fiction towards realism, with the incidents of the film set against the Thames Flood Barrier, St Luke's Old Street and Brompton Cemetery. Nonetheless, the effect of this is essentially to contrast with the events depicted, using London's scenery in effectively the same way the likes of 28 Weeks Later did. Characters in Shivers and eXistenZ undergo horrific transformations and those in Crash the characters embrace their own deformation. Similarly, the tattoos of the Russian mafia serve the same purpose, with the characters driven to enter that world against their better judgement. The Russian characters see London as a form of decadent infection, in spite of the sumptuous surroundings of the Russian restaurant that is the film's principal setting and their contrast to the more prosaic world of the English characters.
Having seen one of the film's characters having his throat slit in Brompton cemetery, I found myself there a few days later. The weather was impossibly mild for November, with the yellowed leaves slowly falling to the ground and forming a carpet on the central avenue. I found myself looking at some details I'd missed before; Minton tiling forming a headstone above a floor of unraveling white and black diamond tiles, the lily and ivy decorating one of the tombs designed by Burne-Jones. A large chunk had fallen off the imposing bulk of the Hannah Peters Mausoleum. Squirrels frantically scamper about, trying to bury nuts and seeds, usually in the flower pots left by the graves. I walk to the Embankment, where I watch a pair a ducks trying to sleep on the Thames; periodically one would realised that they were about to be beached on Cleopatra's Needle, swim upstream and settle down again, so beginning the process anew.
I then walk to the National gallery, for its Renaissance Siena exhibition. Sienese art has been described as overshadowed by that of Florence, with the former written out of art history by the Florentine Vasari and by Florence's conquest of Siena. In this revisionary account, Sienese art is visionary and mystical, with Mariolatry (the Virgin was the city's patron) as its principal subject, in contrast to the naturalistic art of Florence, with it s depiction of the male form and of fighting in particular. I can't help but wonder if a better word to describe Siena's art might not be 'medieval' if we think of the Renaissance as the displacement of religion and the discovery of the individual. Certainly, Siena retained many gothic influences, such as painting onto gold (and then using sgraffito to expose it as part of clothing or the beams of heaven's rays) and was often slavish in its imitation of figures like Donatello, while the city itself was a rather enfeebled city state, wracked by internal strife, debt and threat of invasion. Some of the most powerful works here are by Raphael (The Dream of a Knight) and the Cortonese Lucca Signorelli rather than by any Sienese painter.
The exhibition opens with some classic examples of Siena's Marian art; in San di Pietro's The Virgin Recommends Siena to Pope Calixtus, which shows the Virgin towering over a dwarfed and distorted city. Others showing her leading the ship of state or protecting the city from earthquakes. Paintings by Pietro and Francesco di Giorgio firmly continue the gothic tradition of iconography. Renaissance influences only figure with the idealised landscape shown in Benvenuto di Giovanni's Virgin and Child or Giorgio's sculpture of Male Nude with a Snake. However, later works show a different and more interesting side; cassone chest paintings show scenes of seduction and classical scenes (like the Roman capture of Zenobia or the meeting of Antony and Cleopatra from the workshop of Neroccio de Landi). For a female art, much of it proves surprisingly homoerotic, as with Signorelli's Two Nude Youths or portraits by Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (nicknamed Sodoma due to being openly homosexual, keeping a bizarre menagerie of animals and claiming tax relief because it was so expensive to keep all his boys and pets.) Particularly striking are the interior scenes, where the tone is profane rather than sacred; carved wooden pilasters, frescos of classical scenes and maiolica flooring. Most impressive are the paintings by Domenico Beccafumi, with soft brushwork and an ethereal rendering of colour. Paintings of virtuous historical figures often seem quite odd; did the Tanaquil Livy denounced really seem a virtuous figure? Nor do the ruined backdrops seem to serve any particular allegorical purpose. His two most striking works are a malevolent Cupid with Venus and a bizarre depiction of the feast of Lupercalia.
Journeying to Westonbirt Arboretum, a bright sunny day is transformed into mist. The arboretum has a complete collection of Japanese Maple cultivars, whose leaves were bright burgundy, ochre, pink and bronze. Evergreen yews, pine and firs forms a backdrop to this. Several of the planted trees are new to me; Sapphire Berry (a bright azure berry), Katsura (gives off the scent of caramel), Spindle Tree (with its bright red berries), Wingnut (named for its sycamore-like seeds), Persian Ironwood (named after the explorer who rediscovered Mount Ararat, turned gold and red in autumn), Alue Atlas Weeping Cedar (with a curtain like fall of branches) and Paper Birch (whose bark turns pink-orange as the lenticels fall off). Other plants were more familiar, from Giant Redwood to Monkey Puzzle and an ancient lime coppice. I was equally impressed by the lichens growing on the tree trunks, from hairlike encrustations to something that looked like bright orange rust. One dead tree had its base covered with bracket fungi.
Reading Arthur Hugh Clough's poems, I'm struck by the idea of a Victorian poet working in a largely discursive mode, with Dryden and Wordsworth as his principal influences for their use of the language of everyday speech. His work is not only heteroglossic but it is also dialogic, with much of it being taken up by counterpointed discussions on the death of god. Amours de Voyage has two narrators with opposed perspectives of the protagonist, with much of the narrative opposing is attitudes to christianity, Rome's pagan past and the revolutions of 1848. Similarly, Dipsychus utilises the format of Goethe's Faust, only to assign the role of the tempter to christianity.
Reading Mishima's The Golden Pavilion, I'm reminded of the concept of occidentalism. A conference held in Kyoto in 1942 was devoted to the subject of how "how to overcome the modern." Modernity was associated with the West, and particularly with Western imperialism. Westernization, one of the scholars said, was like a disease that had infected the Japanese spirit. The "modern thing," said another, was a "European thing." Others believed that "Americanism" was the enemy, and that Japan should make common cause with the Europeans to defend old civilizations against the New World. There was much talk about unhealthy specialization in knowledge, which had fragmented the wholeness of Oriental spiritual culture. Science was to blame. So were capitalism, the absorption into Japanese society of modern technology, and notions of individual freedom and democracy. These had to be "overcome." All agreed that culture - that is, traditional Japanese culture - was spiritual and profound, whereas modern Western civilization was shallow, rootless, and destructive of creative power. The West, particularly the United States, was coldly mechanical, a machine civilization without spirit or soul, a place where people mixed to produce mongrel races.
Mishima's novel exhibits many of the symptoms identified here. Mizoguchi looks at the lights of the city, the same lights Tanizaki had denounced as an unwelcome manifestation of modernity in his Praise of Shadows (Tanizaki had also praised the glimmer of gold in the dark, as with the temple here), and dubs it "the mundane world... people are being driven about under that night by evil thoughts... please let the evil that is in my heart increase.. so that it may correspond in every particular with the light before the eyes." As this quotation suggests, Mizoguchi's response to modernity is bifurcated between embracing it as a form of nihilism (itself a profoundly un-Japanese idea; "burdened with a special individuality or sense of mission" which the novel opposes to the intoxication offered by the temple) and rejecting it outright (though even the form of asceticism offered by religion in the novel represents a form of alienation); " youth like myself came to entertain two opposing forms of power wishes... my dream of being a tyrant or great artist." The conclusion of the novel, the arson of the Golden Temple, unifies these themes in a form of immolation just as Mizoguchi's observation produces an ecstatic state that is directed inward; "I was drenched up to the neck in the existence that was myself.. my inner being and the outer world slowly changed places" Mishima's particular brand of masculinist homosexuality further contributes to this nihilism, with women the repeated object of dehumanisation and violence; "the same masculine evil thoughts as the others... the smell of a young man's sweat-moistened skin that they gave off... there was an intrepid beauty about him like that of a lovely woman."
Much the same applies in The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, a sort of Japanese Lord of the Flies, where Ryuji's fall is largely predicated on his acceptance of marriage and the feminine world. Mishima's masculinist homosexuality seems not unlike that of William Burroughs, seen as somewhere opposed to effeminancy and the perception of matriarchy and developing a cult of violence in response to it. Women and death are seen as coterminous ("her sweat and perfume fragrance reaching him on the breeze seemed to clamour for his death... are you going to give up the life that impelled you towards the pinnacle of manliness?"). With that in mind, the nihilist children are both in revolt against a Westernised society and a product of its degeneration, of modern society's alienation.
Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward can be best described as a variant on the trope used by both Twain and Irving of a sleeper awakening to find himself in another time (the idea being also essentially the analogue of that depicted by Huxley in Brave New World). It depicts a decidedly bourgeois form of utopianism, by which social equality has been achieved through a process of evolution rather than through any need for a communist revolution (anarchism and communism are portrayed as essentially invidious to the cause of social progress). Bellamy seems to regard evolution in Lamarckian terms, as a form of progress ("in accordance with the principles of evolution... the next phase on the social and industrial development of humanity") achieved through sexual selection ("the principle of sexual selection, with its tendency to preserve and transmit the better types of race and let the inferior types drop out, has unhindered operation") rather than through natural selection and the survival of the fittest (Bellamy closes by denouncing how nineteenth century society created "a brutal struggle for existence"). In spite of the determinist tone taken here, Bellamy is nonetheless closer to Edward Taylor than Marx though (and closer still to Comte). Where the likes of Owen saw human nature essentially as a tabula rasa and therefore capable of being adjusted to new social conditions, Bellamy frequently uses the term 'human nature' to denote a fixed state, which Doctor Leete denies having altered since West's time. Bellamy nonetheless decries the idea that "the only stable elements in human nature, on which a social system could be founded, were its worst propensities." Accordingly, Bellamy can often be quite conservative, viewing women as having a distinct and separate nature from men (""the distinct individuality of the sexes"), in spite of discarding the idea of women as either household drudges or gilded ornaments. Equally, the notion of the majority of society being employed by an 'industrial army' seems a harshly masculine mode of social organisation, if not unpleasantly reminiscent of the national socialist brand of utopianism (particularly as issues like race are almost entirely elided from the novel, the presence of a black servant in the nineteenth century notwithstanding).
Dostoevsky's The Double reminds me most of Kafka's Metamorphosis in so far as uncanny events unfold without an obvious sense of explication. Where the double is most often invoked as an example of man's divided nature between good and evil or between expression and repression (as in The Confessions of a Justified Sinner or Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), Dostoevsky instead frustrates the morality tale aspects of the narrative by placing the emphasis on Golyadkin's status as a superfluous man, his desire for self-annihilation, his inability to preserve himself. The relationship between self and double is an almost sado-masochistic one, leaving the reader uncertain as to whether they have witnessed a morality tale or not. Tolstoy's The Cossacks and Hadji Murat deal with a rather more conventional form of other, with the former novel defining a liminal space between three of set of groups; Russian, Cossack and Chechen. As with The Double one expects some form of fable concerning the moral progress of another superfluous man through his contact with nature and removal from the frivolities of Muscovite life. For Tolstoy, the Caucasus serves almost the same sort of function that Italy did for EM Forster or DH Lawrence. In practice though, Tolstoy's fatalism often tends to preclude the sort of teleological development associated with characters in European novels. Something similar applies to Hadji Murat whose hero dies a death that is essentially futile and entirely contrary to the status the narrative has accorded him.
On a quite different note, I recently watched the film Thirty Days of Night, one of the more memorable contributions to the vampire genre of recent years. The vampires depicted in it are different from the suave model of Christopher Lee and instead resemble Shreck's Count Orlok, looking both mundane and alien at the same time. Another film I saw not all that long ago is Sunshine, a film that follows similar generic principles to earlier science fiction films like Event Horizon (science arrogantly assuming the prerogative of the divine and so on) but does have some interesting variations on that theme. The character of Pinbacker sees the sun as a god and views any attempts to reignite it as desecration, although when the character of Capa does precisely that he is for instant staring into the face of god. The film seemed unsure as to whether it should be mystical or materialist.
posted by Richard 2:37 PM
Sunday, October 14, 2007
As autumn descends and the ivy turns to a vivid burgundy and the tree leaves turns to burnished bronze or arterial crimson, I visited London and the Millais exhibition at the Tate. The choice of subject seems apt for the season, with several paintings like Mariana and Autumn Leaves allegorising the life of man through the seasons.
The Pre-Raphaelite movement is a classic example of the reactionary tendency in English culture, along with the Gothic Revival and Palladian architecture. English painting sought to return to medieval models, depicting nature with obsessive precision, at a time when European art was beginning to forge movements like impressionism and expressionism. Equally, the brotherhood was founded in the year of The Communist Manifesto but although Millais seems to have made many satirical (somewhat Hogarthian) drawings of contemporary society, none of them were transferred to canvas. Unlike Ford Madox Brown's The Last of England, Millais retreats to a mythical past. Like much of Victorian culture, the Pre-Raphaelites can perhaps be best understood as a means of withdrawing from an industrialised society to a romanticised past, looting models freely from different periods (the subjects displayed at the Millais exhibition range from Pizarro's conquest of the Incas to Renaissance Florence and Medieval England). It lacks any sense of expressing the collective consciousness of its age and seems instead to point to a lacuna. The sense of a void becomes painful in several of his later society portraits and grotesquely sentimental paintings of children; one can only be surprised that Little Nell evaded him as a subjects. Whereas contemporaries like Burne Jones and Watts devised stained glass and frescos for churches, Millais sold his pictures for soap adverts and painted portraits of the haute bourgeoisie.
However, with all of that said, much remains to be said in defence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Millais' sympathy for outsiders dominates his early paintings; Jacobite rebels, exiled Huguenots, heretics and vagrants. His women are alternately depicted as passive victims of the men that abandon them, but also have to be shown in terms of their stoic fortitude. Much of his work, such as The Bridesmaid, seems to look forward to the likes of Moreau, Klimt and Albert Moore. The iallusive quality of his later works, freed of explicit depictions of historical or literary scenes seem to parallel Bocklin and David Friedrich. The Pre-Raphaelite stress on literary allusions, with references to Tennyson, Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge, comes close to a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk.
The initial rooms of the exhibition concentrate on showing the development of the early Millais to his Pre-Raphaelite work. His first major work is Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru, a picture that veers uneasily between historical epic and the later depictions of the victims of Catholic oppression, a Massacre of the Innocents The early Pre-Raphaelite works also quickly draw attention to the idea of the excluded and outcast; doomed love in Isabella, Ophelia, Mariana and The Death of Romeo and Juliet. A drawing showing the disinterrment of Queen Mathilda by Huguenot fanatics was presumably too sympathetic and Catholicism and was never painted. The (infamous) painting of Christ in the House of his Parents seems oddly realistic in comparison to the other works, as does The Order of Release, wherein the soldier's wife stands tall while her son and husband are huddled against her, inverting the model used in A Huguenot on St Bartholomew's Day. In a similar vein is The Proscribed Royalist where a somewhat effeminate cavalier is hidden by a puritan lover and in Peace Concluded where a wounded soldier returned from the Crimea is held by his wife. The sexual politics of Millais' painting are endlessly confusing; his depictions of women with persecuted men require them to be strong and resilient (although the atttitude in The Black Brunswicker is simply one of female helplessness even as the strong soldier shown is certain to die) but he is as likely to show them abandoned and betrayed, as in Waiting. One painting, The Escape of a Heretic is entirely different; showing a female heretic being rescued by a lover from the clutches of the Inquisition. Again, his drawings show what his paintings can't' The Bridge of Sighs depicts a fallen woman contemplating suicide.
The later works show Millais moving to looser brush strokes in a style more reminiscent of Titian or Velasquez, depicting subjects without explicit comment and with only the suggestion of context. Backgrounds are frequently blackened out to show the subject. Works like Spring and The Vale of Rest having a nonetheless rather crudely symbolised theme of mortality. Where historical subjects are shown, the results are often depressingly remniscent of much forgettable genre painting (Reynolds and Van Dyck emerge as influences at this point), although a painting like Esther continues the theme of female fortitude and courage. The most interesting works from this time onwards, are his Scottish landscapes which in their depicition of solitary figures in wintry scenes leaves me strongly reminded of Caspar David Friedrich, for instance in Dew Drenched Furze and Glen Birnam.
Leaving the exhibition, I spend a little time looking at the permanent collection, from Rossetti's The Annunciation and The Beloved, Holman Hunt's Claudio and Isabella and The Awakening Conscience , Hughes' The Eve of St Agnes , Whistler's Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge and Moore's The Toilette and A Sleeping Girl. It does seem to me that Millais has at least some claim to be a via media between Hunt and Hughes on the one hand and Whistler and Moore on the other, while his woman are surely not simply objects in the way they always seem to be for Rossetti. I also find myself looking at more unusual works like John Brett's seascapes, Watts' Hope, Sargent's Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose and Tuke's August Blue, but I'm most struck by Richard Dadd's paintings; although not dissimilar to the Pre-Rapahelites in style and fitting in with Victorian conventions of fairy paintings, his work does nonetheless seem more like Bosch.
I then decide to look at the modern section. Some of the individual works are quite startling here; Sickert's Brighton Pierrots, Heron's Azalea Garden: May 1956, Hitchens' Woodland, Vertical and Horizontal, Hepworth's Curved Form (Trevalgan), Vanesssa Bell's Studland Beach and Gertler's Merry-Go-Round. I find myself particularly drawn to the room dedicated to John Piper's works, from his Britten set paintings (Death in Venice) to his work as a war artist (All Saints Chapel, Bath) to his Betjeman-like recordings of historic buildings (Holkham, Norfolk, Yarnton Monument) - although rather conventional subjects depicted in uncomprosingly modern terms. Another room dwells on war art, with results that seem quite surrealist - whether by intent or simply through elapsed time is difficult to say; Armstrong's Coggeshall Church, Essex looks like a dissection rather than a ruin while Nash's Bomber in the Corn and The Messerschmidt in Windsor Great Park almost look like totems. Sutherland's Devastation, 1941 series is perhaps the most conventional depiction of destruction and decay, although his Horned Forms contrives to turn the organic into something threatening and unnatural. Finally, a small exhibition is dedicated to Hockney's selection of Turner's paintings. I hadn't realised that Turner is in many respects an architectural painter, with Lichfield Cathedral, St George's Bloomsbury and Durham Cathedral all amongst his English subjects, while some of his Venetian work is dedicated to Canaletto's architectural fantasias. Hockney also has a collection on one of the stair wells; paintings of English woodland from different times of the year. I then walk from Tate Britain to Tate Modern, mostly to see the giant metal spider on display outside the gallery. Although given an artistic subtext it mostly reminds me of the metal sculpture of the invading Martians at Woking.
Reading Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars I was particularly reminded of Umberto Eco's observations about the medieval quest for the prelapsarian language that had existed before the Tower of Babel. The dictionary seems equally preoccupied with the loss of language's capacity to represent certitude in the midst of a series of mirrored dichotomies; dream and reality, good and evil, male and female (as with the male and female editions of the text), life and death, all of which are blurred in the course of the text. Where Eco is interested in semiotic playfulness almost as an end in its own right, Pavic seems to envisage differance in mystical terms, as a means of representing man's fallen state (perhaps Habermas was right to call Derrida a Jewish mystic). He then complicates these chiastic divisions by enfolding them into a tripartite structure; Christian, Islamic and Jewish, with each dictionary having mirrored entries (either the same entry told from a fundamentally different viewpoint or the convergence of three different but related characters), the division between which is also blurred (with the idea of each religion being an aspect of the other two). The text also foregrounds the issue of interpretation, with every character who comes close to understanding the history of the Khazars being punished Icarus-like.Labels: Art, Literature, London, Victorian
posted by Richard 3:22 AM
Friday, July 20, 2007
The first Proms concert of this year opened with Part's Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten and Rakhmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (both rather backward-looking works that set a conservative pattern to the night) before finishing with Gliere's Symphony No.3 'Ilya Murometz.' I didn't know Gliere's work before and was somewhat surprised to find him to be a contemporary of Stravinsky rather than of Borodin. The symphony was based on narrative, in the style of the likes of Rimsky Korsakov, and its derivation from folk tales was clear in the way events seemed discontinuous, happening without apparent logical sequence or sense of causality, often for magical reasons. I was mostly reminded of Wagner; scenes of Ilya listening to bird song in the forest recalling Siegfried understanding the language of the birds after killing Fafnir in the forest. It also has to qualify as the loudest symphony I can recall, working up to a crescendo early on and maintaining it for much of what followed.
Following this, I was overjoyed to complete my viewing of the Ring Cycle with Gotterdammerung. I did find myself that given the cycle's odd compositional history it can be best described as two narratives. Firstly, there is the narrative of the downfall of the gods brought down by the curse of the ring as they give way to mankind. Secondly, there is a narrative about the destructive nature of desire, with the story of Siegfried and Brunnhilde being rather reminiscent of that of Samson and Delilah. The two seem to rather cancel one another out, with the destruction of Valhalla having little to do with the coming of the great hero but rather with Brunnhilde. What is admirable in Brunnhilde is her masculine qualities as a warrior, what is contemptible in Siegfried is his emasculation by Hagen and Gutrune; particularly given that the weak and decadent Gunther is permitted to atone for his crimes through a heroic death whereas Gutrune is simply insignificant and fades out of sight. Equally, although the opera hinges on the restoration of the corrupting ring to the Rhinemaidens they are nonetheless depicted as frivolous and vicious (and hence the means of a suitably humiliating death for Hagen). Following this, I was struck by Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn a rather odd combination of A Shropshire Lad and The Brothers Grimm with lieder telling of the transience of youth and mortality in wartime but fringed with themes like the Totentanz.
Following this I went to a Baroque concert (Handel, Purcell, Telemann) jointly performed by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra (giving the Fireworks Music a rather stereophonic feel, with all of the instruments doubled). It's always odd seeing an archestra playing without a conductor; although romantic music is supposed to be more spontaneous and free it seems a paradox that it actually requires the discipline of a conductor to wield its larger number of players together in contrast to more ordered (or playful?) Baroque music. Haitink's performance of Wagner (Parsifal, Tristan und Isolde and Lohengrin) and Debussy (Nocturnes and Six Epigraphes Antiques) was surprisingly effective, drawing strong parallels between the two composers. Both seemed steepted in the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk. In the case of Wagner this largely meant welding music and lyric poetry in the contest of dramatic performance while for Debussy, it meant playing with symbolist motifs from painting (as in Whistler's Nocturnes) and literature, thereby introducing a form of music whose impessionistic style belied a frequently concrete approach. One of the paradoxes of twentieth century music is that although much of it was concerned with formal experimentation (Schoenberg) much of it was also concerned with reviving earlier musical traditions, such as that of folk music. Works like Kodaly's Dances of Galanta and Enescu's Romanian Rhapsody fit into the latter category while Ligeti's Atmospheres fits into the former, its performance showing each tonal layer individually, like a conventional work dissasembled and suspended in time. Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is the msot impressive work of this Prom though, managing to combine both strains.
Nicholas Nickleby cleaves closely the idea of the novel established by Fielding, whereby misadventure and financial hardship forces a young man out into a world where he is exposed to all manner of temptations. Nontheless, Dickens elaborates rather more polyphonic plot strands, taking his hero to the country rather than moving him from rural morality to urban decadence, depicting instead the perils faced by his sister in the city and the corruption and downfall of his uncle. Rather than suggesting that youth is corrupted by the city, Dickens instead suggests that vice is born of desperation ("ignorance was punished and never taught"), something that considerably complicates the moral fable at the heart of the novel. Although a Dickens novel tends to function by drawing together the different individuals that makes up its hetergenous plot strands, it nonetheless has the effect of depicting an atomised society ("this wilderness of London") rather than a community.
Sentimental Education seems to invert every convention of the nineteenth century novel, as with the absence of a clear telelogical structure (directed either at marriage or tragedy) or with the manner in which the hero is depicted in terms more suitable for female characters such as Madame Bovary (the only other comparison that comes to mind is Turgenev's superfluous man). Deslauriers is perhaps a more obvious candidate for the role of hero, resembling rather more a Stendhalian protagonist (indeed the reference to how "Frederic's physical appearance.. had almost exerted a feminine charm on him" suggests a homerotic relationship between the two male protagonists that threatens to eclipse female characters like Madame Arnoux). The absence of a teleological structure for depicting the characters is depicted by the absence of any such structure in Flaubert's view of history, which is as present here as in Eliot, Stendhal, Balzac or Zola but is far more disconnected from the central narrative. While the depiction of Dambreuse is not that far removed from that of Merdle or Melmotte (the poverty of Madame Arnoux and Rosanette is also no that far from Dickens), Flaubert is equally cynical as to the alternatives, as with his observation that Senecal is filled with love towards the mases in their aggregate state and is merciless towards individuals; "a sort of Athenian Sparta in which the individual would only exist to serve the state... anything which he considered hostile to it he attacked with the logic of a mathematician and the faith of an inquisitor." Frederic is at once an aristocratic snob ("he felt utterly nauseated by the vulgarity of their faces, the stupidity of their talk...the knowledge that he was worth more than these men lessened the fatigure of looking at them.") and is fired with revolutionary ideals ("I think the people are sublime"). Deslauriers similarly notes that "he had preached fraternity to the conservatives and respect for the law to the socialists." Sentimental Education is the great novel of the middle ground, with all viewpoints contested and all found wanting Frederic and not steering a straight enough course, and Desluariers being too rigid, with the same applying to the aesthetic debates of Pellerin and Senecal.
Laughter in the Dark compares itself to Anna Karenina but seems in many ways an intertextual satire at Tolstoy's expense, with its depiction of the heroine as both vapid and ruthless and destructive of a hero who represents rather mediocre rebuttal to the likes of Vronsky. The gender roles are instead inverted, with Albinus playing the part of a frustrated Emma Bovary, reduced itself to a frustrated and failed artist. Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev oscillates between a sense of communism as an entirely failed project (as with Koestler or Solzhenitsyn) and of it as something betrayed and corrupted. During the course of the novel Rublev finds himself pinioned by inescapable logic; political action (where factories can conquer hovels and the "the old suffering of toil is extinguished forever.") can only be attained through unity as vested in the party. Individual conscience is a bourgeois luxury but if the party has betrayed the revolution then conscience must stand aside from that unity; "in that iron circle Rublev's thoughts never ceased to travel." Others argue that terror cannot form the basis of a state only its property relations and use this to distance the Soviet Union from fascist states, particularly given that the economic progress of the Union is forging a new type of consciousness (the novel incessantly compares Russia to the West, as when Xenia realises that poverty in Paris has a sort of abundance when compared to Moscow.) Koestler wrote that continued belief in communism could only be attributable to a personal mythology; it seems unclear whether this was true for Serge or not. Svevo's Confessions of Zeno reminds me stronly of its Austro-Hungarian counterparts The Castle and The Good Soldier Schweik, all depicting events as being born of unpredictable chance rather than of agency, with freedom something only intermittently possible. Throughout it remains unclear whether events occur due to accident (the marriage to Augusta, the recovery of Zeno's fortunes where Guido had squandered money on the same stocks) or by Zeno's own design (his longstanding antipathy to Guido). As Guido puts it in response to Zeno's disavowal of his caution; "curious that the cautious person should feel obliged to defend the scatterbrain." The novel is set against a backdrop of psychoanalysis (utilised as a framework for self-understanding whilst simultaneously dismissed), a framework that presupposes an underlying unity to events that the episodic narrative seems to deny, in spite of the suggestion of unconscious motivations towards Guido and Ada throughout. The novel ends with the modern man leads an unnatural existence and his life is poisoned to the root, but although this is ostensibly applied to Zeno it seems a better label for his erstwhile rival Guido (himself perhaps more resembling the hero of Svevo's tragic A Life), with his artistic temperament and inability to comprehend business. Like Schweik, it is unambiguous throughout as to whether Zeno is saved from Guidos' fate by cunning and guile or simply by his foolishness being protected by serendipity. Having asserted competence and strength throughout it such a way as to persuade the reader that he is neither, the suggestion hangs that those statements should have been taken at face value (in the same manner Zeno refutes arguments from the psychoanalyst with Schopenhauerian non sequiturs; life may be a disease but it can only be cured by death or obtains a medical certificate as proof of his sanity thereby convincing all that he is mad).
Benjamin's Berlin Childhood Around 1900 shows Benjamin looking back in the style of his own Angel of History. At one point he notes that "one forms an image of a person's character according to his place of residence and the neighbourhood he inhabits." It's a statement characteristic of the nineteenth century (described elsewhere as a hollow shell) that could have been shared by Marx or Eliot, but Benjamin only partly accedes to it. One the one hand, his Berlin is a place where there are only surfaces, with subject and object essentially coterminous.; "I was enveloped in the world of matter" The metaphor is that of the painter disappearing into his own picture. On the other hand, the Berlin he depicts is a liminal place shown through imagistic fragments (repeatedly characterised as part of a labyrinth one gets losts within) rather than a linear narrative and where the places are often as liminal as his arcades (for instance, the text begins with a descriptions of Berlin's loggias on the grounds of their uninhabitability to one who no longer had a fixed abode). Although the young Benjamin and his elder counterpart share a passion for collecting but refuse to arrange their acquisitions in a neat order. Equally, the places in questions are defamiliarised; the Victory Column is compared to a setting for Dante's Inferno while the Zoological Garden seems more ancient than Rome. Magic and myth are repeatedly invoked, contrary to an otherwise materialist strain.
Ballard's Kingdom Come frequently re-iterates a surrealist manifesto; "nothing is true and nothing is untrue." The novel is true to this statement of intent and aims to disorientate the reader, forcing them to participate in the elective insanity that follows. As Ballard puts it, the snakes are only pretending to be asleep and the ladders lead nowhere. Characters in Ballard novels rarely follow clear patterns, but instead shift their perspectives across ideological divides and back again; like many of his protagonists, Pearson plays the role of seeking to investigate and stop the violence but also incites it. Equally, characters like Falconer and Fairfax seek to turn the tide back but the methods they use only provoke the violence they are trying to assuage. As a consequence, the role played by the Metro Centre in the novel is ambiguous. On the one hand we are told that "it's an incubator. People go in there and they wake up and see their lives are empty. So they look for a new dream." But equally, it is also defined as an entire philosophy rather than simply a reaction to vacuity; "all his emotional needs, his sense of self, were satisfied by this huge retail space." Equally, one the one hand the novel uses the familiar Ballardian formula of a new type of human being created and the equally familiar trope that they are reverting to something primeval ("a primeval species with an unbelieavsble need for violence") expressed over the centuries in religion and the politics of fascism rather than becoming something new. Finally, on the one hand, we are told that "the great dream of the Enlightenment, that reason and rational self-interest would one day triumph led directly to today's consumerism" but those are also characterised as a brake against the delirium of consumerism that unfolds in the course of the novel.
Mann's Confessions of Fleix Krull presents a narrative that initially appears cast in the vein of a a moral fable, dealing with the exploits of a confidence man, only for this to be aborted in favour of a narrative about his love affair with a Portuguese mother and daughter. The initial narrative draws a Platonic parallel between art and deceit, with Felix inspired by seeing actors and by being a model for painting. It also draws a parallel between this indeterminacy in Felix's identity (the real Felix is something that does not exist) lends itself to a suggestion of homosexuality (itself something criminal at the time), with him being sexually admired by Herr Sturzli and Stanko.""Dali's masterpiece and, I believe, the greatest painting of the 20th century is The Persistence of Memory, a tiny painting not much larger than the postcard version, containing the age of Freud, Kafka and Einstein in its image of soft watches, an embryo and a beach of fused sand. The ghost of Freud presides over the uterine fantasies that set the stage for the adult traumas to come, while insects incarnate the self-loathing of Kafka's Metamorphosis and its hero turned into a beetle. The soft watches belong to a realm where clock time is no longer valid and relativity rules in Einstein's self-warping continuum." - JG Ballard"
Dali is something of an anomaly, an artist who moved seamlessly between avant-garde and popular culture, between the influence of Vermeer and Velasquez in one instance and between Breton and Magritte on the other. Many of his techniques were either familiar from classical painting or from film (many of the car crash scenes in Un Chien Andalou make the influence on JG Ballard manifest), but grafted onto a rather writerly personal mythology that was reminiscent of Blake (eyes, ants, eggs, soft watches, ruins, plains and so on). Time, space and motion feature prominently in his work rather than depicting images as static and frozen moments. At the same time, objects melt into one another and cease to be stable elements in their right. Equally, his experiments in film do dissolve linear narrative into a "heap of images." Film was seen as a variant of automatic writing.
Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or present an equally heady combination of Freudianism and Marxism, showing the revolt of the protagonists and their desire against an ossified social order. In Un Chien Andalou, a character is held back by being tied to pianos, priests and rotting donkeys (though the protagonists are still left buried and the film repeatedly blurs the distinction of Thanatos and Eros as it does with all other contraries, including gender itself). In L'Age D'Or, a character throws priests and burning giraffes out of the mansion while the Majorcan Bishops are left to starve to death. However, his Marxism at that time forbids him from regarding the bourgeoisie as rebels, showing them as heartless and indifferent to the suffering of others (as with the shooting of the gamekeeper's son or the fire in the kitchen), thereby forming the nucleus of Pasolini's Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom.
The Bramah Museum records the distinction between tea and coffree elaborate by Kakuzo Okakura; the former, aristosratic and calming, its origins lying in ceremony. Conversely, the latter was bourgeois and stimulating, its orgins somewhat disreputable. The museum records the assimilation of Chinese and African beverages (though Ethiopia regarded coffee as a food source) into European culture, showing beautifully designed teapots in the style of bamboo and recording the origin of willow pattern as a fairytale of doomed lovers. I especially liked an anti-coffee house satirical pamphlet set to the tune of The Roast Beef of Old England, entitled The Grumbling of Old England. The Rose Cougou and Lemon served in the shop was rather pleasant too.
Walking around The Mall and St James' Park, I found myself rather indifferent to much of the architecture, which seemed rather dour and pedestrian with the only architect of note being William Kent. I noticed a blue-billed Ruddy Duck swimming in the park near to a black swan before visiting the Wellington Arch. I was struck by how it and Marble Arch formed yet another vision of how London might have been with their removal from their original location and the existence of earlier designs by Adam and Soane (not to mention a more grandiose design from Decimus Burton than was realised). Having walked back to Paddington, I visited the church of St James. Although rather nondescript on the exterior, Street's interior combines pink marble with a black ceiling lined with gold angels. Elaborate tiling and mosaics line the aisles while a modern window replacing one destroyed in the Blitz shows scenes from the station and the war. Visting Kensington, I walked round the round Pond and Palace, the statyes of William and Victoria, before coming to Scott's St Mary Abbot's, with its tall and spire and bending entrance through a set of cloisters through the churchyard. The interior is rather more minimal with marble floors and mosaiscs. I walk to see the Queen's Tower at Imperial College, which I've seen in the distance before but never from closeby.
The Courtauld Institute was a striking omission from the list of London galleries I had visited, so I accordingly decided to rectify this. Walking along one of London's bridges, I was met with one of Gormley's sculptures, joining the one I had seen on the roof of the Shell Mex house and on the rood of Freemason Hall (looking like potetential suicides in both cases). The collection conspicuously bears the mark of having been formed through a relatively small set of bequests, accounting for the presence of Mamluke metalwork, ivory caskets, eighteenth century silverware, Maioloica and painted Italian cassone. The initial collection was formed by a Victorian more interested in the Florentine than Pre-Raphaelite, containing triptychs that demonstrated the transition from Byzantine perspectives to a more naturalistic style. Particularly striking is Bellini's Assassination of St Peter Martyr, where the cut tree stumps bleed in sympathy with the murdered saint. The gallery was running an exhibition revolving around Cranach's Adam and Eve. For all of his connections with Luther, there's something pagan about Cranach, with his paintings of Apollo and Diana and Cupid complaining to Venus sharing the same poses as his christian painting, both interpreting classical myth as christian allegory and violating the Biblical symbolism at the same time. Something similar applies to his twin fascinations with depicting hunting scenes in tandem with a prelapsarian vision of man living in harmony with nature.
The following periods are rather barren for the gallery, save for Claude's Landscape with an Imaginary View of Tivoli, Pieter Brueghel painting of Landscape with flight into Egypt and Eworth's bizarrely allegorical Portrait of Sir John Luttrell. The strength of the collection emrges again when it comes to modern French painting, with a large collection of works by Manet, Renoir, Degas, Pissaro and Sisley. Some of the wotks surprise; early oil paintings in an impressionist style by Seurat, as well as a pointillist painting depicting his mistress in a comic parody of traditional portraiture (a theme also repeated in Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe where an unidealised nude sits alongside formally dressed men, while still resting in a classical pose as if she had casually strayed into the scene by accident) or Monet's still lives. A large number of landscapes by Cezanne show his depiction of natural subjects in geometric terms, while Monet's landscapes show his abandonment of chiaroscuro. Van Gogh's famous Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear is also present, showing a contrast behind the gaunt figure in the foreground and a colourful Japanese print hanging on the wall behind him (something similiar emerges in Lautrec's painting of Jane Avril, showing the glamorous and expensively dressed Moulin Rouge dancer in dark and subdued tones). Two of the Gauguin paintings are especially striking; Nevermore depicting a Tahitian nude in the same vein as an artist like Ingres while suggesting connotations of the fall in her facial expression, the presence of two whispering women in the background and the reference to Poe in a raven. Te Reriora or The Dream also draws a counterpoint between the foreground of the painting (a woman nursing a child while a man leaves behind her) and its background (frescos of lovers painted onto the walls of her house). Gauguin's depiction of 'noble savages' does seem to invest a rather 'writerly' quality into his work that makes it particularly fascinating for me.
This section was completed by one of Rousseau's naive Toll-Gate paintings and a Modigliano nude, showing again a classicised subject shown in terms derived from Oceanic sculpture. The gallery has recently increased its collection to include a number of works by Kandinsky, Sickert (a painting at an underground station), Pechstein, Vlaminck and Derain. There's also a brief British section, showing Frank Dobson's sculpture, Ben Nicholson's Mondrian-influenced Painting 1937, an Eric Gill engraving of a latin motto and a Graham Sutherland painting. The final section of interest formed the bequest of Roger Fry, ranging from Chinese bronzes and pottery to African masks. This section includes works by Vanessa Bell (praised by Woolf as a social satirist in painting), Duncan Grant and Fry himself, as well as the various pieces of crafts that came out of the Omega workshops.
Visiting Hampstead, I began at St John at Hampstead, a Georgian church whose interior opulence is only matched by its exterior dowdiness. The graveyard is more ornate, filled with older tombs decorated with skulls as well as with Victorian angels and celtic crosses. As with most London graveyards, it has an odd assortment of denizens, including Constable, Harrison and a relative of the last Tsar. Hampstead Cemetery is if anything rather more mannered than the tangled briars of St John's, having remained rather more faithful to the idea of the garden cemetery than Highgate. Comparatively unostentatious graves are laid out in neat rows interspersed with arboretum-like plantings of trees and shrubs (including a large palm treet at one point). Crickets chirped away in the background. One or two grandiose tombs do intrude; one in the shape of a church organ or the art deco Bianchi tomb with its Blakesque angel. Following this, I visited Fenton House with its collection of marquetry furniture, stumpwork, Kangxi Porcelain, Song paintings, snuff bottles and painted Chinese mirrors. The house has a quite good collection of paintings, including Duncan Grant, Sickert (paintings of Figaro and London music halls), Charles Ginner (a painting of Hampstead High Street at night that rather resembled Atkinson Grimshaw) and a rather poor GF Watts painting of waves turning into horses.
Visiting Wollaton Hall, I was struck by the classical and historical figures in circular niches along the walls (as at Ham House and Hampton Court) and the gargoyles underneath the windows. The overall effect is rather more ornate than Smythson's other building, Hardwick Hall. The interior is equally impressive, with its hammer-headed celing in the Great Hall, James Thornhill murals on the stairwells, the organ and single-handed clock. The interior included glass Blaschka models of aquatic life (octupi, squids etc) and geological displays of desert roses and haematite. Travelling onwards to Southwell Minster, I was impressed by the Norman exterior with its Rhenish caps and the remains of the ruined Bishop's Palace alongside. The interior balances different periods; Flemish and Victorian stained glass by Kempe, Norman arches at one end and early English gothic at the other. Wall plaster remains of a Roman bath house hang on the wall showing a male figure. Medieval misericord carvings of green men are displayed in the pulpitum. Green men carvings also predominate in the Chapter House, itself resembling a forest canopy. A Saxon tympanum rests in one of the transepts while an alter dedicated to fallen Polish soldiers has a triptych as its centrepiece - a Monet-like painting of lilies on the outside, depictions of barbed wire and a dead soldier on the outside.Labels: Art, Literature, London, Music
posted by Richard 9:39 AM
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Stowe's landscape gardens were designed to reflect the Whiggish views of Viscount Cobham, representing allegory as architecture. It coincidentally depicts a palimpsest of architectural and garden design, with the move from Baroque to Palladian and Augustan styles and from thence to Brown's Serpentine designs. I feel ambivalent on several scores, preferring the Gaudiesque playfulness of Hawksmoor or Wren to the classically correct Palladian style embraced by Burlington and Kent, whilst the continent preferred rococo. Palladianism was closely associated with the Whigs and Kent's designs follow that (although the relationship was fraught; Kent's Augustan style followed a Roman model that was redolent of Roman tyranny rather than Greek liberty, hence the subsequent Greek Revival and James Stuart), depicting figures revered in the Whig tradition like Locke, Socrates and Milton. Conversely, the Tory Gibbs preferred the Baroque style and built an early example of the gothic revival from ironstone that is common in this part of Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire. Gothic was justified as being suggestive of the country's Germanic heritage and commitment to liberty. As was common for early gothic revival buildings, it doesn't look as if Gibbs was entirely sure of what gothic was or how to construct it; the capitals here look more Egyptianate than Gothic. Equally, Brown's mimicry of natural landscapes is entirely dependent on the population of said landscape with various classical temples; I always feel I'd prefer the earlier formal style which admitted no division between nature and art. The grounds were at least home to a wide variety of nature outside of Brown's tamed vistas; lilies, rabbits, copper beeches, squirrels, horse chestnut, coots and geese. This period was also that of the faked ruin and Stowe does have these (along with a Chinese house), but The Temple of Friendship was perhaps more interesting in this regard; it was originally inhabited and decorated and was only perserved as a ruin after a fire. There's something particularly forlorn about its empty rooms, particularly given the surreal aspect given them by the retention of wooden doors and seats.
By contrast, Polesden Lacey is a more mannered affair, largely the creation of an ostentatious Edwardian heiress. The gardens combine formal planting with rock gardens and statues of griffins. The interior joins Edwardian ostentation (a saloon with the walls covered with gold gilt) with an antiquarian interest; Grinling Gibbons carving from an old Wren church, a picture gallery with a plaster ceiling in the style of a Seventeenth century long gallery. Each room is filled with Chinese or Imari vases, Maiolica plates, Ormolu clocks, Boulle and Chippendale furniture, Chinese lacquer and Persian rugs. Some Italian (though derived from Arabic) marquetry of walnut, bone and ivory was especially striking. The gallery is predminantly composed of Dutch (Velde seascapes, Ruisdael landscapes, a Van Der Neer frost fair) and Sienese altar paintings. It also included Corneille De Lyon miniatures and a Ter Borch painting showing an ambiguous scene wherein the characters seem to be playing out a moral fable (a brothel scene), something which typically tended to show low status characters but which here depicts recognisable middle and upper class figures. The gallery also contained a Roman sarcophagus, with elephants shown on its side.
Returning to Highgate, I found myself especially struck by the East Cemetery. When I last visited in Winter the grid plan this necropolis was laid out on was clearly evident and the place had a logical and orderly air to it. In summer, the trees had closen in and the paths beneath them seemed as hidden and secret as those in the West Cemetery. I look at gravestones shattered by ivy vines as thick as lianas, graves written in Arabic, Chinese and Hebrew, graves for obscure figures like magicians (the Human Hairpin) and forgotten inventors. Then there is Karl Marx, an anachronistic monument out of place in North London and out of time now that its kin have been pulled down in Eastern Europe. A single red flower rests on the mausoleum while a black cat flits quietly between the headstones. Within the West Cemetery foxgloves, roses and buttercups are flowering but the cover of the trees in full leaf only leaves the place more dark than on my previous visit in winter. It's difficult not to feel like Alexander Humboldt or Frederick Catherwood. I hadn't realised that this is one of the few places in London with a Giant Redwood. Monuments formerly surmounted by vases now witness them lying broken at their bases, crushed by bindweed.
Reading Museum is not especially noteworthy but it does have some interesting exhibits; green man capitals and animal voussoirs from Reading Abbey, black and white frets from Silchester, the Ogham stone, a Roman tombstone, an Iron age horse effigy and a head from a statue of the Egyptian God Serapis from a Silchester temple. At the time of visiting, the museum had an exhibition dedicated to Sir John Soane to coincide with the restoration of the Simeon Monument. Amongst other things it included various paintings by Joseph Gandy of the Bank of England. Reading Bach Choir also organised a set of peripatetic concerts, flitting from one Reading church to another. Beginning at St Giles (a high church interior filled with baroque monuments, paintings, Bavarian statues of st Mary, candles and Victorian mosaics of the saints) with Summer is Icumen in, then to St Mary's (a former evangelical chapel with a beautiful stained glass simple with a tree design) and Benjamin Britten before finishing at Reading Minister (high church adornments mingling with Saxon arches) and Tallis.
The exhibition of John White's drawings at the British Museum recalls Hakluyt's complex descriptions of native cultures. It begins by showing White's drawings of native cultures from Greece, Turkey and Uzbekistan as well as his Calibanesque imaginings of Pictish warriors. Many of his descriptions of Inuit and Algonquian Indians were to follow the same poses and tropes established by these depictions of savagery, most obviously in the scenes of violence shown with Frobisher's encounter with the Inuit while searching for the North West passage. Nonetheless, his drawings were also intended to assuage such fears of hostile savages and encourage would be emmigrants to Roanoke, and veer between the depiction of noble savages (stressing their agrarian expertise in the growing of maize, their ordered villages and craftsmanship in kayak construction) and objects of curiousity (the skinning of their dead and entombment in special huts, the dances around totem poles surmounted by human faces while draped with tobacco leaves and depictions of cannibalism). The drawings consequently emerge as a form of prospectus, reflecting the linkage between commerce and colonialism that was to set the pattern for the British Empire. White also meticulously recorded the flora and fauna of the places he visited; pineapples, flying fish, jellyfish, plantains, crabs, hoopoes and scorpions while the exhibition also contains some excellent Hilliard miniatures and an appearance from John Dee's scrying mirror (as well as a frontpage of a treatise on navigation showing Elizabeth at the helm of an exploring vessel, wherein Dee prepared the intellectual foundations for colonisation by using the term 'British Empire' for the first time).
Elsewhere in the V&A, an equally interesting exhibition on James 'Athenian' Stuart shows the drawings he and Revett made of buildings like the Temple of the Winds and the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, frequently showing both of them wearing Ottoman dress. As well as depicting the architecture Stuart also had an ethnographic care in depicting the people of Greece, their dress and habits. The background narrative of avoiding plague and brigands alike nearly obscure his architectural achievement but Stuart was the first person in centuries to design structures like censor tripods or doric temples, with the rest of the exhibition showcasing designs and artefacts from places like Kedleston, Shugborough and Nuneham Courtenay. Later, I noticed Rysbrack's original statues of Thor and Sunna on display; if anything I preferred the weathered and encrusted copies that are still at Stowe.
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