Altogether Elsewhere

Anger

2010-03-22T05:43:00.000-07:00

Anais Nin as Astarte: still from Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954)

Kenneth Anger in a Cocteauesque fantasy sequence. Still from Fireworks (1947)

At Sprüth Magers until March 27th.

STOP PRESS NEW POET LAUREATE SAME OLD CRAP

2010-01-04T12:04:00.000-08:00

The recent appointment of Carol Ann Duffy to the post of Poet Laureate had me gravely concerned. Although she was, I initially thought, a much better poet than her predecessor, Andrew Motion, the latter had added immeasurably to the gaiety of nations. I feared that she would be less talented in this regard. Luckily I was utterly wrong (thanks to Jake for pointing this out).

The Twelve Days of Christmas 2009

A seasonal verse by the new poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, commissioned exclusively for Radio Times.

1
ON THE FIRST DAY OF CHRISTMAS,
a buzzard on a branch.

In Afghanistan,
no partridge, pear tree;
but my true love sent to me
a card from home.
I sat alone,
crouched in yellow dust,
and traced the grins of my kids
with my thumb.
Somewhere down the line,
for another father, husband,
brother, son, a bullet
with his name on.

2
TWO TURTLE DOVES,
that Shakespeare loved –
turr turr, turr turr –
endangered now
by herbicide,
the chopping down
of where they hide –
turr turr, turr turr –
hawthorn thickets,
hedgerows, woodland.
Summer's music
fainter, farther…
the spreading drought
of the Sahara.

3
THREE FRENCH HENS –
un, deux, trois –
do not know
that French they are.

Three Welsh lambs –
un, dau, tri –
do not know
that Welsh they baa.

Newborn babies –
one, two, three –
only know
you human be.

Only know
you human be.

4
THE GRENADA DOVE IS CALLING.
The Condor calls from the USA.
The Wood Stork calls from its wetlands.
The Albatross calls from the sea,
on the fourth day of Christmas.

The Yellow-eared Parrot is calling.
The Kakapo calls from NZ.
The Blue-throated Macaw is calling.
The Little Tern calls from Japan, calls
my true love sent to me.

The Corncrake is calling; the Osprey.
The Baikal Teal calls from Korea.
The Cuckoo is calling from England,
four calling birds.

5
THE FIRST GOLD RING WAS GOLD INDEED –
bankers' profits fired in greed.

The second ring outshone the sun,
fuelled by carbon, doused by none.

Ring three was black gold, O for oil –
a serpent swallowing its tail.

The fourth ring was Celebrity;
Fool's Gold, winking on TV.

Ring five, religion's halo, slipped –
a blind for eyes or gag for lips.

With these five gold rings they you wed,
then slip them off when you are dead.

With these five go-o-o-old rings.

6
I BOUGHT A MAGIC GOOSE FROM A JOLLY FARMER.
This goose laid Barack Obama.

I bought a magic goose from a friendly fellow.
This goose laid Fabio Capello.

I bought a magic goose from a maiden (comely).
This goose laid Joanna Lumley.

I bought a magic goose from a busker (poor).
This goose laid Anish Kapoor.

I bought a magic goose from a bargain bin, it
was the goose laid Alan Bennett.

I bought a poisoned goose from a crook (sick, whiffing).
This foul goose laid Nick Griffin.

7
THE SWAN AT COCKERMOUTH –
of a broken heart, one half.

The Mersey Swans, flying
for Hillsborough, wings of justice.

Two, married and mute on the Thames,
watching The Wave.

A Swan for Adrian Mitchell
and a Swan for UA Fanthorpe,
swansongs for poetry.

The Queen's birds, paired
for life, beauty and truth.

8
ONE MILKED MONEY TO MEND HER MOAT.
Two milked voters to float her boat.
Three milked Parliament to flip her flat.
Four milked Government to snip her cat.
Five milked the dead for close-up tears.
Six milked the tax-payer for years and
years and years…
Seven milked the system to Botox
her brow.
Eight milked herself – the selfish cow.

9
BUT THE DEAD SOLDIER'S LADY DOES NOT DANCE.
But the lady in the Detention Centre
does not dance.
But the honour killing lady does not dance.
But the drowned policeman's lady
does not dance.
But the lady in the filthy hospital ward
does not dance.
But the lady in Wootton Bassett does not dance.
But the gangmaster's lady does not dance.
But the lady with the pit bull terrier
does not dance.
But another dead soldier's lady
does not dance.

10
LORDS DON'T LEAP.
They sleep.

11
WE PAID THE BLUDDY PIPER
fir 'Royal Bank;
twa pipers each
fir Fred and Phil,
fir Finlay, Fraser, Frank.
Too big tae fail!
The wee dog laughed!
The dish ran awa' wi' the spoon…
We paid the bluddy pipers,
but we dinnae call the tune.

12
DID THEY HEAR THE DRUMS IN COPENHAGEN,
banging their warning?
On the twelfth day in Copenhagen
was global warming stopped in its tracks
by Brown and Barack and Hu Jintao,
by Meles Zenawi and Al Sabban,
by Yvo de Boer and Hedegaard?
Did they strike a match
or strike a bargain,
the politicos in Copenhagen?
Did they twiddle their thumbs?
Or hear the drums
and hear the drums
and hear the drums?

Photograph of the Decade

2009-12-16T02:55:00.000-08:00

Since 2003 we have liberated over 100,000 Iraqi civilians from terrestrial existence.

The Political Economy of 'Hello, Dolly!'

2009-12-08T12:29:00.001-08:00

Tightly wrapped in gold lamé, Barbra Streisand descends the grand staircase of the Harmonia Gardens restaurant surrounded by a chorus of indescribably camp chefs and waiters. The latter weave between the tables, dancing and grinning as they serve the diners – one waiter shoots a live duck for the benefit of a customer – thus enacting a nightmare-parodic vision of the joy of labour on the front line of the service industry. But despite manifesting the high-gloss glamour of the culture industry that necessarily obscures the labour of its own production, Hello, Dolly! also argues (anachronistically) for the Keynesian economics of the New Deal.

Made in 1969, Hello, Dolly!, was the most expensive movie musical ever, costing around $20m (well over $100m in current terms). Its obscene excess sounded the death knell for Hollywood mega-musicals. The central character is Dolly Levi (played by Streisand), a matchmaker, widow and Mephistophelean granter of wishes. This character trait is illustrated by the business cards she hands to everyone she encounters, upon which her job description is magically transformed to meet the needs of each recipient (thus echoing the Smithian economics under which supply miraculously meets demands that come from… nowhere). As she sings in the film’s first number: 'If you want your ego bolstered, muscles toned or chair upholstered: Just leave everything to me.'

Levi has been employed as a matchmaker by the miserly 'half-a-millionaire' Horace Vandergelder (Walter Matthau), who owns an animal feed business in the sleepy upstate town of Yonkers. Vandergelder’s ideal woman shares his obsessive concern with the accumulation of capital and will function as a sex object and domestic slave: ‘It takes a woman, all powdered and pink, to joyously clean out the drain and the sink.’ Despite his obvious flaws, Levi soon realizes that she wishes to marry Vandergelder herself – for reasons that do not become clear until the film’s conclusion.

Vandergelder has also tasked Levi with guarding his niece Ermengarde, who hopes to marry the painter Ambrose Kemper – a match that Vandergelder considers unpropitious: “A living, Mr Kemper, is made by selling something that everybody needs at least once a year, and a million is made by producing something everybody needs every day. You artists, you painters, produce nothing that nobody needs, never.” This exchange reveals the film’s ambivalence vis-a-vis the place of art within capitalism. As an embodiment of capitalist spectacle, the film itself prostitutes what could – loosely – be called art to Mammon, but in dialogue such as this the act of artistic prostitution is indirectly criticized, favouring instead the bourgeois ideal of autonomous non-functional art.

Having identified Vandergelder as a potential partner, but finding him in need of some political education, Levi introduces her client to Irene Molloy, a New York milliner who dreams of escaping her life of servile drudgery (‘Either I marry Horace Vandergelder or I'm gonna burn this shop down, break out like a fire engine and find myself some excitement’). But Molloy turns out to be unsuitable when Vandergelder drops in on her shop only to discover two men there: a critical breach of his small-town bourgeois sexual etiquette. Fortunately Vandergelder does not detect the identity of these men, who are in fact his two clerks, Barnaby and Cornelius, whom Levi has induced to take a trip to the metropolis by playing on their suburban ennui. Having successfully discouraged Vandergelder from choosing Molloy, who represents Kracauer’s ‘little shop girl’ – the morally dubious female member of the new middle classes who supplies labour to the pleasure industries of modernity – Levi arranges for Vandergelder to meet another prospective bride – an heiress – at the Harmonia Gardens, an expensive downtown restaurant. The heiress represents the nouveaux riches of late 19th century New York – the Vanderbilts and Rockerfellers – to whose status Vandergelder might be expected to aspire. But Levi has again outpaced Vandergelder: the heiress is an actress friend of hers whom she has instructed to act as obnoxiously as possible (‘Anybody can have oysters in season. I want them out of season… Tell 'em to go out and dig for some’), thus discouraging Vandergelder from choosing a mate from this other, icier pole of the social spectrum. Levi herself arrives at the critical moment in which a disillusioned Vandergelder realizes ‘Any man who goes to a big city deserves what happens to him.’ It is at this point that she makes her entrance, singing of her own return like a self-advertising messiah.

Vandergelder’s evening at the Harmonia Gardens is still further complicated by Levi’s Odyssean cunning: she has arranged for his niece Ermengarde to dance with her artist lover Ambrose at the restaurant’s polka context. Levi suggests that if the painter wins the contest, the prize money will convince Vandergelder that there is a living in art (albeit terpsichorean rather than painterly) after all. The plan is a mixed success: Vandergelder concedes Ambrose’s skill as a dancer, but adds ‘no wonder his pictures are so awful. He must paint with his feet.’ In true farcical style, the restaurant scene is disrupted by the arrival of Vandergelder’s clerks Cornelius and Barnaby, who have brought the milliner and her assistant as their dates. Unable to afford the enormous dinner that they have consumed, they too must join the dancing competition, prostituting themselves in leisure as in work so that they can sup at the table of the culture industry. However, Levi’s complex plan is ruined by Vandergelder’s outraged reaction to these decadent metropolitan shenanigans, and the scene descends into slapstick violence. Naturally, there follows a separation between Vandergelder and Levy – during which Levi symbolically wears Vandergelder’s top hat in order to take on the masculine role and bid him ‘So Long, Dearie’ (‘you can snuggle up to your cash register – it’s a little lumpy, but it rings’), and the clerks Barnaby and Cornelius resign from the store and plan – under Levi’s tutelage – to set up their own rival establishment, thus freeing themselves from salaried bondage in accordance with the all-American myth of the 'self-made-man'.

The restaurant scene is one of several tableaux throughout the film embodying the capitalist phantasmagoria, a term used by Adorno to describe Wagner's opera: ‘the occultation of production by means of the outward appearance of the product’. The phrase's use is particularly apposite in this context because the Hollywood musical represents the true destiny of the Gesamtkunstwerk, revealing that the root of this utopian ideal of a unity of the arts lies in the false wholeness of the commodity. In the Harmonia Gardens scene the role of the artist is filled by Louis Armstrong, who plays the restaurant’s bandleader and duets with Streisand. His tokenistic performance (he is apparently the only black man in New York) reeks of Uncle Tomishness, and yet he still retains a magisterial aloofness from the proceedings. As bandleader/conductor his appearance on screen makes visible the work of the orchestra, usually concealed in musicals and opera (Wagner hid the orchestra pit under the stage at Bayreuth, thus making the illusion of 'music from nowhere' complete before the advent of film). Armstrong is not an actor and his presence marks a breach in the apparently seamless production, demonstrating, like the cracks in Wagner's operas, the impossibility of the Gesamtkunstwerk in an era of capitalist production: 'The disintegration into fragments sheds light on the fragmentariness of the whole.'

The formally necessary wedding that concludes the narrative can only take place after a dramatic reconciliation. Vandergelder, alone once more in his shop, finds himself unable to forget Levi. But Levi must await her dead husband’s approval of the match before she can agree to marriage. When she discovers that Vandergelder has employed a decorator to repaint his shutters, Levi recognizes the omen she has desired: “The paint's still good, but that fellow's just set up a business and needs a good start. You see, Dolly, I've always felt that money, pardon the expression, is like manure: it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around, encouraging young things to grow.” With these words Vandergelder relinquishes his obsession with the accumulation of capital. By repeating the essence of Levi’s Keynesian beliefs their union is secured.

Besides her commitment to the redistribution of wealth Levi promises an inversion of the forces of alienation, offering to convert money back into lived experience:

I have always been a woman who arranges things
For the pleasure and the profit it derives.
I have always been a woman who arranges things
Like furniture, and daffodils – and lives.

She does not deny the attraction of profit, but the fundamental motivation for her actions is the pleasure of ‘arranging things’ – she represents the empowered female bourgeois, whose understanding of the value of human relationships counteracts the atomising force of patriarchy. Patriarchy (Vandegelder) understands only the financial benefit of human relationships: ‘And so she’ll work until infinity: three cheers for femininity.’ Instead Levi proposes to de-alienate capital. Her Jewishness is also of crucial significance in this regard. Her character, standing outside the capitalist system and yet remaining a skilled manipulator of the same, could be read as a crude stereotype. But compare Levi’s role to that of Alberich in Das Rheingold: Wagner’s anti-Semitic caricature of the dwarf who denies love in exchange for gold is reversed in Levi, who offers to sell love back to the capitalist. This is, however, emphatically not an act of prostitution: she is not selling her love, but returning to the capitalist his own love of humanity. Her exclusion from this system, as woman and Jew, provides the Archimedean point from which she can 'arrange things'. Even in the film, however, her arrangements rarely go according to plan. Politically, the hokey Hollywood-liberal idea that love can redeem alienation is equally unlikely to succeed.

In 1938 when Thornton Wilder wrote the Merchant of Yonkers (the book upon which Hello, Dolly! is based), the economic argument underlying his narrative was urgently topical. In 1937 the so-called Conservative Coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans allied themselves against Roosevelt’s New Deal, thus putting an end to liberal reforms. Seen in this light, Levi is pure liberal wish fulfillment: she embodies the American left's hope for a united front, converting the bourgeois (embodied by Vandergelder) to the Keynesian fiscal policy of the New Deal, and reconciling him to the industrial action of his employees, their needs and their humanity. Furthermore, Vandergelder allows the artist to join his New Deal American family – his niece is finally permitted to marry her painter boyfriend.

What relevance, however, did all this have when the film was made in 1969? The Kennedy-Johnson era had come to an ignominious end the previous year in the face of mounting opposition to the war in Vietnam, and Streisand was closely associated with the anti-war movement. But more relevant to the film’s plot was the resurgence in 1966 of the Conservative Coalition that had derailed Roosevelt’s reforms in the '30s. This put an end to Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ programme, a set of social reforms (including the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid) that aimed to eradicate poverty and racial discrimination - policies that had been self-consciously modeled on Roosevelt’s New Deal. Both Streisand and director Gene Kelly were prominent supporters of the Democrats, and Kelly had been a vocal supporter of the unions and an opponent of McCarthyism in the 40s and 50s. The revival of Hello, Dolly! in 1969 was thus politically pertinent, if fatally belated. Worse still, it was compromised medium for a compromised message. On a formal level, its embrace of the spectacular (despite its disingenuous proposal to reclaim the spectacle for the proletariat – “What a knack there is to that acting like a born aristocrat”) replicates the political ambivalence of Keynesianism, and is similarly doomed to failure.

Matt Frei's 'Berlin'

2009-12-07T03:53:00.000-08:00

Fittingly, for a city so defined and divided by its buildings, the central episode of Matt Frei's recent BBC three-parter on the history of Berlin focussed on the architecture of the city. The programme was undeniably interesting - we don't see much architecture on TV, and what little there is barely receives anything more than formal analysis and exclamations of wonder (I'm thinking of Andrew Graham Dixon and Waldemar Januszczak). Like the rest of the series, however, the episode attempted a clumsy even-handedness, transparently an act of bad faith since the script didn't depart much from the liberal-democratic doctrine of East Germany as a totalitarian state; compare, for example, Frei's apparently unironic excitement at the power of the American listening post on top of the Teufelsberg, and his condemnation of the Stasi's HQ. However, in other instances he did approach a fairer analysis, for example in his discussion of the demolition of the Berliner Schloß, a debate that formed the core of his narrative.

Above: The Berliner Schloß
Below: Palast der Republik

The Schloß was an 18th Baroque century palace that stood at the centre of Imperial Berlin. Severely damaged by Allied bombing, the ruins were demolished by the GDR government and replaced by a 'People's Palace' of glass and concrete. After reunification this huge complex in the city's historical centre posed a major problem to the local council. Eventually it was demolished in 2006-8, and controversial plans to replace it with an exact replica of the original Baroque palace have recently been ratified by the Bundestag. Frei interviewed residents of the former West and East Berlins, who naturally held divergent opinions of this turn of events. And this is where Frei's programme was most successful - in its focus on the lived experience of Berliners. In one particularly moving sequence a cleaning lady at the Ministry of Finance - formerly the Nazi Air Ministry - described her haunting experiences in the building. With tears in her eyes she added 'you can only clean so much away.'

Why Lisbon is a Good Thing

2009-10-30T15:52:00.000-07:00

Three years ago, on being awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the advancement of human rights, Jürgen Habermas delivered an acceptance speech of which the following is an excerpt:

Towards a United States of Europe

Why should we get excited about such a lacklustre topic as the future of Europe? My answer is: if we are not able to hold a Europe-wide referendum before the next European elections in 2009 on the shape Europe should take, the future of the Union will be decided in favour of neo-liberal orthodoxy. Avoiding this touchy issue for the sake of a convenient peace and muddling along the well-trodden path of compromise will give free reign to the dynamic of unbridled market forces. This would force us to watch as the European Union's current political power is dismantled in favour of a diffuse European free-trade zone. For the first time in the process of European unification, we face the danger of regressing to a level of integration below what has already been achieved. What irks me is the paralytic numbness that has set in after the failure of the constitutional referenda in France and the Netherlands. Not taking a decision in this context amounts to a decision with major consequences.

Three pressing problems are bundled together in the single issue of Europe's inability to act:

(1) The international economic situation has changed in the wake of globalisation. Today's conditions deprive the national state of the tax resources it needs to satisfy its population's demands for collective goods and public services, or even to maintain the status quo. Further challenges, such as demographic developments and increased immigration, only aggravate the situation. Here the only defence is offence: winning back political clout on a supra-national level. Without convergent tax rates and medium-term harmonisation of economic and social-policies, we are in effect relinquishing our hold over the European social model.

(2) The return to ruthless hegemonic power politics, the clash of the West and the Islamic world, the decay of state structures in other parts of the world, the long-term social consequences of colonialism and the immediate political consequences of failed de-colonisation – all of this points to a high-risk international situation. Only a European Union capable of acting on the world stage - and taking its place beside the USA, China, India and Japan - can press for an alternative to the ruling Washington consensus in the world's economic institutions. Only such a Europe can advance the long overdue reforms within the UN which are both blocked by and dependent on the USA.

(3) One cause for the rift in the West that has become apparent since the Iraq war is the clash of cultures that now divides America itself into two camps of almost equal size. This clash has also caused a shift in the hitherto valid normative standards of government policy. America's closest allies cannot remain indifferent here. It is precisely in critical cases of joint action that we must break free of our dependence on our superior partner. That is one more reason why the European Union needs its own armed forces. Until now Europeans have been subordinated to the dictates and regulations of the American high command in NATO deployments. The time has come for us to attain a position where even in a joint military deployment we still remain true to our own conceptions of human rights, the ban on torture and wartime criminal law.

For these reasons, I believe Europe must pluck up the courage to introduce reforms which will give it not only effective decision-making procedures, but also its own foreign minister, a directly-elected president and its own financial basis. These could be the subject of a referendum held concurrently with the next European parliamentary elections. The draft would be considered passed if it received the 'double majority' of votes of the states and the electorate. At the same time, the referendum would only bind the member states in which a majority had voted in favour. Europe would then move away from the convoy model where the tempo is set by the slowest member. Even in a Europe made up of core and periphery, countries preferring to remain on the periphery retain the option of rejoining the core at any time.

These ideas dovetail with those of the Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt, who has recently published a manifesto for the "United States of Europe."

*

The full version of this speech originally appeared in German in Der Standard on March 10 and March 11, 2006.

Jürgen Habermas, born in 1929, is one of Germany's foremost intellectual figures. A philosopher and sociologist, he is professor emeritus at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt and the leading representative of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. His works include "Legitimation Crisis", "Knowledge and Human Interests", "Theory of Communicative Action" and "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity".

from Sign and Sight, translated John Lambert.

The Ashmolean Museum Reopens

2009-10-29T14:49:00.000-07:00

Oxford University's Ashmolean Museum, the world's oldest public collection of art and archaeology, will reopen on Saturday 7th November after a closure of 10 months. In the course of the £61m redevelopment the chaotic collection of sheds and lean-tos which had accreted on the back of Cockerell's handsome 1845 building have been demolished to make way for a huge new extension by Rick Mather. The new galleries do not, the Prince of Wales will doubtless be saddened to hear, imitate the fine Greek revival style of Cockerell's building, but instead aim for that blameless Constructivist pastiche so beloved of contemporary architects, with just a hint of hi-tech. There are asymmetrical windows and jutting edifices of Portland stone - the staircase in the atrium (above) would be quite good, if it wasn't for the plate glass (there is an awful lot of glass), which allows the handrails to intrude fussily. In any case none of this is visible from the street, being neatly tucked away behind the old facade.

But the real achievement of the new building is that it has allowed the curators to display the archaeological collection both more comprehensively and more comprehensibly - this is a museum after museum studies, a museum for a post-colonial, ever more closely entwined, world. The official theme is Crossing Cultures, Crossing Times, and while it may feel didactic at times to shoe-horn artifacts from all periods and all locations into one all-encompassing theme, it is surely a vast improvement on the 19th century style of curation that came before, when each period and culture was allotted its own distinct and hermetically sealed pigeon-hole. In contrast, the Ashmolean is planned to give the visitor a sense of the connections between different cultures, established by trade, religions, and tourism, that have shaped the world for millennia.

Critics have already complained that this development represents a 'dumbing down' of the old Ashmolean. The Times's Kathy Brewis was particularly cutting. She insists that the new themed galleries are simply a 'gimmick', and complains:

I don’t want to “discover how civilisations developed as part of an interrelated world culture”. I want to look at something really peculiar with a sense of awe and wonder at its otherness. A trip to a museum should be like a walk in the country — a respite from daily working life, a chance for a different perspective, an opportunity to reflect and ponder. I stare at a screen all day. I move from desktop computer to BlackBerry to laptop, with a bit of television thrown in for extra eye strain. By the weekend I’ve had enough of interacting. I go to a museum for something different.

There are so many things wrong with this kind of griping. A person who doesn't want to discover how cultures interact is a dull dog indeed. Brewis says she wants to wonder at something's 'otherness' instead, but wonder is such a content-less experience. This supplication before the aura of the artwork and the authority of the past is so suspiciously sheeplike, and has been criticized as such for so long, that only the feeble-minded could want to engage with archaeology and art on such a banal level. Finally, she reveals her true awfulness by claiming that her life of staring at screens is such an overwhelmingly 'interactive' experience, that she requires a trip to a museum like a neurotic needs a trip to a sanatorium. If art should be simply a 'respite from daily working life', then Ms Brewis should, I suggest, take a trip to the local branch of Hallmark instead and admire the lovely cards.

People like Ms Brewis want to forget that this is a world in which what we do has an impact, and often a painful one, on the lives of others, whether they are in the next street or the next continent. The attempt to exhibit artifacts in a way that encourages the consciousness of this fact may have occasionally clumsy results, but it is not to be scorned simply because it challenges the cosy assumptions and leisure pursuits of the traditional museum going elite. This is not a 'dumbed-down' but a 'smartened-up' museum: one that, thanks to its association with the University of Oxford, exhibits a critical understanding of the world and the place of the museum within it.

Lloyds TSB vs The Chapmans

2009-09-06T08:23:00.000-07:00

Robber barons demand the eternal financial servitude of your first-born children...

...it's as plain as the pricks on their faces.

(Thanks to Issy for pointing out the debt owed by Lloyds' terrible 'For the Journey' ad campaign to the priapic works of Jake and Dinos Chapman)

Bad Poetry

2009-08-19T10:41:00.001-07:00

As a sort of sequel to my post on Andrew Motion, I reproduce here a poem by Wordsworth which plumbs far profounder depths than our ex-laureate could ever hope to sound. It's taken from The Stuffed Owl, an anthology of bad poetry collected by D.B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, to which they contribute wonderfully dry editorial comments. Of the author of this verse they say 'Wordsworth, in addition to being one of the greatest English poets, was also one of our most efficient Distributors of Stamps for Cumberland and Westmoreland, as was officially acknowledged at the time.'

The admonishment to the impatient reader in the nineth verse is particularly fine.

Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman

In the sweet shire of Cardigan,
Not far from pleasant Ivor-hall,
An old man dwells, a little man,
I’ve heard he once was tall.
Of years he has upon his back,
No doubt, a burthen weighty;
He says he is three score and ten,
But others say he’s eighty.

A long blue livery-coat has he,
That’s fair behind, and fair before;
Yet, meet him where you will, you see
At once that he is poor.
Full five and twenty years he lived
A running huntsman merry;
And, though he has but one eye left,
His cheek is like a cherry.

No man like him the horn could sound,
And no man was so full of glee;
To say the least, four counties round
Had heard of Simon Lee;
His master’s dead, and no one now
Dwells in the hall of Ivor;
Men, dogs, and horses, all are dead;
He is the sole survivor.

And he is lean and he is sick,
His dwindled body’s half awry,
His ancles they are swoln and thick;
His legs are thin and dry.
When he was young he little knew
Of husbandry or tillage;
And now he’s forced to work, though weak, –
The weakest in the village.

He all the country could outrun,
Could leave both man and horse behind;
And often, ere the race was done,
He reeled and was stone-blind.
And still there’s something in the world
At which his heart rejoices;
For when the chiming hounds are out,
He dearly loves their voices!

His hunting feats have him bereft
Of his right eye, as you may see:
And then, what limbs those feats have left
To poor old Simon Lee!
He has no son, he has no child,
His wife, an aged woman,
Lives with him, near the waterfall,
Upon the village common.

Old Ruth works out of doors with him,
And does what Simon cannot do;
For she, not over stout of limb,
Is stouter of the two.
And though you with your utmost skill
From labour could not wean them,
Alas! ’tis very little, all
Which they can do between them.

Beside their moss-grown hut of clay,
Not twenty paces from the door,
A scrap of land they have, but they
Are poorest of the poor.
This scrap of land he from the heath
Enclosed when he was stronger;
But what avails the land to them,
Which they can till no longer?

Few months of life he has in store,
As he to you will tell,
For still, the more he works, the more
His poor old ancles swell.
My gentle reader, I perceive
How patiently you’ve waited,
And I’m afraid that you expect
Some tale will be related.

O reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle reader! you would find
A tale in every thing.
What more I have to say is short,
I hope you’ll kindly take it;
It is no tale; but should you think,
Perhaps a tale you’ll make it.

One summer-day I chanced to see
This old man doing all he could
About the root of an old tree,
A stump of rotten wood.
The mattock totter’d in his hand;
So vain was his endeavour
That at the root of the old tree
He might have worked for ever.

‘You’re overtasked, good Simon Lee,
Give me your tool’ to him I said;
And at the word right gladly he
Received my proffer’d aid.
I struck, and with a single blow
The tangled root I sever’d,
At which the poor old man so long
And vainly had endeavour’d.

The tears into his eyes were brought,
And thanks and praises seemed to run
So fast out of his heart, I thought
They never would have done. –
I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning.
Alas! the gratitude of men
Has oftener left me mourning.

Towards a Camp Politics

2009-08-16T11:40:00.000-07:00

Peter Mandelson has been in the news a lot recently. He was just, you know, running the country a little bit. Until now I haven't had much affection for, nor interest in, Mandelson, what with his corruption and his fondness for appalling capitalists, but the last five days have revealed a surprisingly interesting and appealing character. The interest, it's true, has been generated more by reactions to Mandelson than by anything the Secretary of State actually did. First of all there was Decca Aitkenhead's (revoltingly brown-nosing, some might say) interview with him in the Guardian on Monday, in which he made several illuminating comments along these lines:

I've learned from experience that you can defeat people without killing them.

I noted with amusement that Mandelson had developed (or begun to demonstrate publicly - apparently he's always been like this behind closed doors) a fascinatingly ironic Machiavellian waspishness. In fact, an outrageous campness. Unsurprisingly, this really got up people's noses. Even supposedly sympathetic commentators such as Charlotte Raven were saying thing like this:

[Mandelson's] actions – in keeping with the flamboyance of his new political persona – have tended towards excess. Mandelson in his current incarnation is to politics as Strictly Come Dancing is to ballroom dancing. He has given it glamour and Saturday night appeal... Peter's revelation of its intrinsic campness has made politics look appealing and accessible to a nation of people who prefer appearing to do something beautifully than actually doing it at all. Mistrustful of effort and people who seem to be trying, we would rather this... Glorying in appearances, Mandelson has turned politics into a production.

This buys into the conventional equation of 'camp' with insubstantiality, with 'appearing to do something beautifully [rather] than actually doing it at all.' In fact it's part of a tradition of camp's interpretation by supposedly affectionate observers which began with Susan Sontag's 'Notes on Camp' of 1964. Sontag, who never came out as a lesbian, asserts that

the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural... It incarnates a victory of "style" over "content," "aesthetics" over "morality"

The word 'unnatural' is a sort of code word for the 'unnatural' act of sodomy. In fact Sontag makes the association of camp with homosexuality unabashedly clear, and pretends to celebrate 'homosexual culture' (camp). But in the guise of writing an affectionate analysis she sticks the knife in and twists:

every sensibility is self-serving to the group that promotes it... So is Camp taste, which definitely has something propagandistic about it... Homosexuals have pinned their integration into society on promoting the aesthetic sense. Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation

And by implication, neutralizes morality. So 'camp,' and by extension homosexuals, are superficial, insincere, immoral, and unnatural. And 'it goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized -- or at least apolitical.' Er, thanks, Susan, but with friends like you...

The application of the term 'camp' to Mandelson is loaded with these suggestions of style over substance, aesthetics over morality, disengagement. But in fact Mandelson could hardly be accused of ineffectuality. And the search for morality or substantiality in politicians is, frankly, idiotic. Politicians don't need to be saintly, nor 'substantial' (whatever that means). They need to be good at politics, at getting people to do what they want (without killing them), at running the country. Mandelson is certainly expert when it comes to the first two, unlike Brown and the rest of the cabinet: we will probably never find out (no matter what all the right wing pundits and supposedly liberal sneerers say) about the last. Just beware of people who seek authenticity in politics. Helmut Plessner warned in his 1924 book The Limits of Community:

The community [which] understands itself to include emotional values of the highest degree... bespeaks the violence of an immediately vital and ultimate unveiling.[...] The emotional connection to all arises... from the consciousness that there must not be any secrets withheld from each other at all.

Plessner then asks:

Should and may a human being... make the value of sincerity exclusively into a guiding principle?... Is there not value in indirectness?

Indirectness and inauthenticity permit distance, individual freedom, dignity. Enforced immediacy, on the other hand, presents a nightmare vision of a country run by the kind of people who appear on the Jeremy Kyle show. Oh, wait a bit....

Beck does 'Banana'

2009-07-31T09:22:00.001-07:00

Beck is posting a cover of every song on the Velvet Underground's first album on his website. But my favourite thing on there at the moment are the acoustic versions of tracks from Modern Guilt, especially Chem Trails, the best song on the album despite its absurd subject matter.

Modern Guilt Acoustic "Chem Trails" from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

'Das Kapital' the Movie

2009-07-30T13:49:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I wrote a post mocking the Chinese government's staging of a musical based on Das Kapital. Well.... last Friday I saw Alexander Kluge present an 80 minute excerpt from his 10 hour film based on Marx's magnum opus, and it was surprisingly engaging. And funny, too. Kluge is one of the 1970s generation of German directors whose work was grouped under the rubric Das neue Kino (others were Herzog and Fassbinder), but he's also a writer and sociologist, a student of Jürgen Habermas and therefore inheritor of the Frankfurt School tradition. Who better, then, to film Marx's thousand-page text? But wait, there's more: he developed his project from the notes left by Sergei Eisenstein for an adaptation of the book. And Eisenstein, who was reading Ulysses at the time, wanted to film Das Kapital as a Joycean tapestry of interwoven interior monologues.

Mind fuck.

Anyway, the full ten hours are available on DVD here.

Poetry in Motion?

2009-07-30T08:07:00.000-07:00

The answer to that question has to be 'no.' But there is certainly a comic genius lurking somewhere beneath that brittle shell of idiocy. Or as Andrew put it himself: "My poems are the product of a side of my mind which is conscious, alert, educated and manipulative, and a side which is murky as a primaeval swamp." Well.... quite. Don't just take his word for it though - let the art speak for itself. And now is as good a time as ever to celebrate the ex-laureate with an anthology: he has after all recently been replaced by someone who can actually write. You'll agree that this is a damn shame after reading these gems. Sing, Calliope, and Erato, pluck thy lyre...

from An Elegy on the death of HM QUEEN ELIZABETH, THE QUEEN MOTHER.

Think of the buried body laid
inside its final earthly shade,
in darkness like a solid cloud
where weight and nothing coincide,

in silence which will never break
unless real angels really speak,

while we who wait our turn live on
re-calculating what has gone -

time-tested dignity and pride
and finished work personified.

from Picture This: A Celebration On The One Hundredth Birthday Of HM Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother

My dream of your birthday
is more like a wedding -
the August sky
confused with confetti,
no, not with confetti,
with photograph falls
where the steady gaze
of the century's eyes
captures your ages
unguarded or posed.

And finally, for William's 21st birthday Motion wrote what he quaintly calls a Rap Poem with two sides: 'side A' and "side B.' This is 'side A':

Better stand back
Here's an age attack,
But the second in line
Is dealing with it fine.

It's a threshold, a gateway,
A landmark birthday;
It's a turning of the page,
A coming of age.

It's a day to celebrate,
A destiny, a fate;
It's a taking to the wing,
A future thing.

Better stand back
Here's an age attack,
But the second in line
Is dealing with it fine.

It's a sign of what's to come,
A start, and then some;
It's a difference growing,
A younger sort of knowing.

It's a childhood gone,
A step towards the crown;
It's a trigger of change,
A stretching of the range.

Better stand back
Here's an age attack,
But the second in line
Is dealing with it fine.

John Foxx

2009-07-08T10:08:00.000-07:00

Founder member of Ultravox (he was replaced by Midge Ure and terrible songs), John Foxx designed the wonderfully typisch covers for his solo work in the early 80s:

More Müller

2009-06-23T12:14:00.001-07:00

I was in Berlin again last week, watching a fifteen minute film about Nazi architecture (by Walter Hege). The national film archive is the only place that seems to have a copy. Appropriately enough, the archive is located in one of the largest surviving National Socialist building complexes: Fehrbelliner Platz.

Fehrbelliner Platz in 1946

While I was in town I went to visit another electrical substation by Hans Heinrich Müller - this one on Kopehagener Strasse in Prenzlauer Berg, which is a sort of haven for trendy young families. A bit like a German version of Stoke Newington, there are children in three-wheeled prams everywhere.

The plan of the Umspannwerk on Kopenhagener Strasse is similar to Bramante's schema for the Tempietto in Rome: a circular (in this case, ovoid) building in a rectangular courtyard. Bramante of course had intended a circular courtyard, too: Müller, on the other hand, capitalizes on the strange spaces created in between the central building and the court. His use of the Gothic arch only adds to the menacing effect.

'Bad British Architecture'

2009-06-22T11:10:00.000-07:00

Entertaining blog inveighing against bad architecture in the style of Chris Morris:

It looks like a shit-brown, postmodern Brunswick Centre with a big glass pyramid fucked into it. As far as I could tell, the building is mostly made out of mastic. Imagine talking to the architect. What would be your first question? 'Oh, yes, I know that building. It's really... you know... contemporary.'

St Martins Garrison Church, Delhi

2009-05-14T11:52:00.000-07:00

A. G. Shoosmith assisted Lutyens in building New Delhi, personally overseeing the construction of the Viceroy's House. He designed only two buildings himself in his entire career, both in Delhi. One of these is the garrison church of St Martin (1928-30), which is in that wonderfully stern English classical-modernist mode exemplified by Charles Holden.

J.G. Ballard: the Last Modernist

2009-04-19T16:07:00.000-07:00

J.G. Ballard, England's greatest post-war writer, died today. His comparison (in his 1969 novel The Atrocity Exhibition) of the balconies of a concrete apartment block to the reappearing vestigial gills of a dying cancerous film star will always remain with me. The same novel also included a chapter titled 'Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.'

Mr Ballard, we salute you.

(Read an online version of Ballard's piece 'The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race' here)

David Byrne at the Royal Festival Hall

2009-04-14T13:59:00.000-07:00

For me the best part of the show was Byrne's live rendition of 'Help Me Somebody', one of the tracks from his 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Neither Byrne nor Eno sang on the album, opting instead to use a variety of found vocals, many from revivalist preachers. His attempt to recreate this live (for the first time?) was awe-inspiring. Unfortunately, despite his relaxed stance vis-a-vis camera phones, no-one has posted any footage of 'Help Me Somebody' so here's some of 'The Great Curve' instead.

Satan's Brew

2009-04-11T17:36:00.000-07:00

"Few people can open their hearts to something great." So confides Walter Kranz (Kurt Raab), washed-up megalomaniac novelist, to his only disciple (Anna Schygulla) in Fassbinder's 1976 film Satansbraten ('Satan's Brew'). Except the 'something great' which Kranz thinks he has finally come up with after a long period of writers' block is actually just the work of Stefan George - romantic poet, homosexual aesthete, and a favourite of the Nazis. In one of the film's most amusing scenes (this is an unusally pure comedy by Fassbinder's standards) Kranz, dressed in eighteenth century costume, is declaiming George's poetry to a circle of young admirers when he is interrupted by his wife, who turns on the lights to reveal the absurdity of his pretence - his wig, frock coat, and Boy George-style grease paint. It transpires that the admirers are paid by the hour.

This satire of the Germanic prostration before Kultur, the fascism underlying money-based relationships, and the dictatorship of the artist (Kranz is a sort of unaffectionate selfportrait of Fassbinder) adds up to what should be a deeply depressing film - however, it is paced like a Howard Hawks screwball comedy, and is riddled with the darkest humour. In the end the humourousness is part of the horror - but by then it's too late, we've fallen for the joke.

Hans Heinrich Müller

2009-04-05T13:49:00.000-07:00

One of the most tantalising memories of my trip to Berlin in February is of a building, red brick and circular, glimpsed in the distance between two (apparently) recent highrises. I was outside the ex-Reich Air Ministry at the time, standing in a foot of snow and had one arm in a sling, so I couldn't muster the energy to get closer to this enigmatic building. I now regret my laziness.

The circular structure was Hans Heinrich Müller's electrical substation from 1928; in fact, the whole building was constructed by Müller, but it has recently been refaced and converted into luxury flats. The intervening years had seen the building's near destruction by Allied bombers, its reconstruction by the Soviets, and its subsequent use as a legendary techno club, ewerk, in the 80s and 90s.

Müller's bizarre brick architecture anticipates Frank Lloyd Wright's NY Guggenheim, but with a Piranesian schlock horror twist. He built several other electricity substations in Berlin, transforming this most mundane of facilities into an industrial fantasia which seems to have something in common with Mary Shelley's industrial-gothic of a hundred years earlier. Although it could be called expressionist, it has a more historicizing and more functional bent than the Glasarchitektur of Bruno Taut. These houses for electricity reflect the prestige and mystification that surrounded this relatively new technology in the 1920s.

The conversion of the power station into yuppie flats reflects something else entirely, which Owen Hatherley has discussed on his blog: the cooption of history as a marketing tool for estate agents. Or as Hatherley put it, 'Via heritage, art history becomes the destruction of history in the service of capital.' In the case of ewerk, as the developers are pleased to call the structure, the history that is subsumed into marketing is not only that of modernism, but also of 80s counterculture. It is salutary that the site faces the old Reich Air Ministry, which now houses the German Finance Ministry: Berlin is of course a city of historical contradictions and unhappy rehabilitations, manifested in reinforced concrete and brick.

Whitechapel Gallery Reopens

2009-04-04T17:27:00.000-07:00

The Whitechapel Gallery reopens to the public today, after two years of refurbishment and partial closure. It has absorbed the old Whitechapel public library, which now becomes a new gallery filled with an apologetically 'radical' installation by Goshka Macuga, as if this could compensate for the loss of an historic institution which had served generations of local and immigrant readers. The library has been moved to an 'Idea Store' (designed by David Adjaye in ghastly playful post-hi-tech mode) down the road, while the monster of art-led gentrification gobbles up amenities which might actually serve the community in any meaningful sense. Since the tide of gentrification has now turned, the new Whitechapel could soon take on the admonitory form of a monumental white elephant, marking the point where the flood of heavily levereged capital began to ebb.

The Whitechapel's headline act is a retrospective of Isa Genzken's multimedia work. Some of this is alright in a fairly inoffensive way, although critiques of minimalist sculpture (using wood veneer rather than macho steel) are long past their sell-by date. Other, more recent works, are more questionable, especially the installations incorporating manikins. Several of these refer to 9/11: one piece consists of twin transparent towers, inside which are photographs of the World Trade Center on fire. This might be intended as a joke, in which case it is in extraordinarily bad taste. On the other hand, it might be intended as a Statement, in which case it is just bonkers.

Iza Genzken Memorial Tower (Ground Zero) 2008

The converted building is a complex aggregate of spaces, with no less than nine exhibitions running concurrently. The result is fragmentary and confusing. However one of the smaller upstairs galleries does contain a more thoughtful and coherently curated exhibition of works by the 'Whitechapel Boys' - the group of local Jewish artists (including Bomberg and Epstein) and writers who met in the library here, and whose work was partly responsible for introducing modernism to England. It helps that this is the most sympathetic space in the building, with an enclosed reading room at one end. However, what exactly people are meant to read here remains a mystery - there is a sparse collection of art books on the shelves, and rows of desks to read them at, but on the whole this seems a sad memorial to the library which once occupied these rooms.

David Bomberg Racehorses

Rodchenko and Popova

2009-03-30T12:30:00.000-07:00

Alexander Rodchenko has been having a good year. First the Hayward had a major show of his photographs; then the Estorick collection had a lot of his graphic works in their photomontage exhibition; and he is currently ensconced in the Tate with Lyubov Popova. The inevitable, and unfortunate, consequence is that I'm feeling a little bit sick of his stuff. I'm Rodchenko-d out. Someone should call Dyna-Rod.

Gripes aside, there has not actually been that much crossover between the three shows: there are a few of his photographs at the Tate, a few of the same designs that were seen at the Estorick, but in general, this is a different, fuller, more comprehensive Rodchenko. And let's not forget Popova: it's about time that the female Constructivists were given their due. Perhaps, considering the amount of Rodchenko we've seen over the last year, a Popova/Stepanova (the other great female Constructivist) pairing might have been in order.

Popova Painterly Architectonic 1918

Popova Space Force Construction 1921

Nevertheless, this is an interesting show. We are given a chronological tour of the pair's development, from fine artists to multi-media designers. The transformation is undeniably exciting, but sometimes the interstitial developments are inadequately contextualized. Yes, there is a room comparing the two to Kandinsky, but there is no Kandinsky for comparison. Why not? The Tate has a perfectly serviceable one. Again, there are coy references to the factural revolution in Popova's paintings, but little explanation of faktura as a political and critical idea. A lot of the work feels sketchy, breathless, pro tem: but that's how it was. The revolution wasn't going to wait for beautifully crafted chiaroscuro; and in any case, that sort of thing was bourgeois self-indulgence. However, there is no excuse for the curation to feel similarly perfunctory, which sometimes, regrettably, it does. We are shown the results of the move to Productivism (influenced by Brik): the applied arts, such as Popova's fabrics, theatre designs, advertisements, take on a Constructivist geometry. But we don't hear much about Brik's ideas. Perhaps I'm asking for too much theory - perhaps I should just sit back and enjoy contemplating the paintings. But Constructivism was so theory-driven, it seems one-sided (and something of a betrayal) to give these works such adulatory fine art treatment. More troublingly, we are given little information about the afterlife of the Constructivists under Stalinist philistinism. This was dealt with more effectively by the Hayward show, which included Rodchenko's problematic White Sea Canal photographs, and did not shy away from explicitly discussing his unapologetic propagandism for Stalin.

Recreation of Rodchenko's Worker's Club, Tate Modern 2009

The final room is an engaging recreation of Rodchenko's Workers Club, a room originally built for the Soviet Pavilion at the 1925 International Exhibition of Decorative Arts and Modern Industry in Paris. The workers are provided with groundbreakingly modern furniture, of breathtaking discomfort - the chairs are so narrow, I can hardly imagine a Mayakovsky, or any worker of Stakhanovite physique, squeezing his broad shoulders into one. However, we are here, finally, provided with some reading matter, with which the gallery goer, if she is sufficiently interested (and narrow-shouldered), may enlighten herself regarding the works on show. Otherwise, I can't help thinking that many will come away from the show thinking that Constructivism was predominantly a powerhouse for pattern designs and avant-garde frocks.

Mayakovsky by Rodchenko

This is despite the fact that the curator, Margarita Tupitsyn, has written incisively on the subject of Soviet photography and other related topics. One is therefore left with the impression that the revolutionary in art cannot be adequately displayed under current conditions; the Tate is not the place for visions of the future, even if that future is now ninety years old.

'Das Kapital' the Musical

2009-03-23T04:57:00.000-07:00

'"We will bring [Marx's] economic theories to life in a trendy, interesting and educational play, which will be fun to watch," director He Nian told the state-run China Daily.'

Full story here.

Albert Kahn in Japan

2009-03-22T16:49:00.000-07:00

Part of BBC 4's series of documentaries on Albert Kahn's turn-of-the-century film and photo archive, which features many early autochromes, Japan in Colour is available to watch until 28 March. The images he took of No and Kabuki performers are particularly impressive.

However, looking through the images available on the web, what really struck me were his autochromes from the First World War. Having just finished reading Ernst Jünger's graphic memoir of the Western Front, Storm of Steel, I could not help but think of this complicated, unpleasant man, and especially his essay on 'War and Photography.'

'Day in and day out, optical lenses were pointed at the combat zones alongside the mouths of rifles and cannons. As instruments of a technological consciousness, they preserved the image of those ravaged landscapes which the world of peace has long since reappropriated... For the attentive observer, a collection of such optical documents opens the way for a valuation of war not only as a succession of battles, but, in its essence, as labour as well.'

Jünger did not think much of that 'world of peace,' - he famously remarked that he 'hated democracy like the plague' - but he is right, at least, in recognizing the value of the photographic archive of the Great War: 'Insofar as life tends to forget very quickly the difficulties it has endured, pictures that make the misery of war present are especially valuable.'

Owen Hatherley on Tower Bridge

2009-03-21T10:11:00.000-07:00

I say eye-sore, Hatherley says 'built emblem of what happened to British capitalism in the closing decades of the 19th century.'

His post on Tower Bridge here.

Birgit Nilsson sings the Liebestod

2009-03-18T16:22:00.000-07:00

In this clip Birgit Nilsson - one of the great Wagnerian sopranos - sings the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde.

Adorno wrote that

'No unprejudiced person who listens to the rapturous 'motif of the resolve to die' in Tristan for the first time, will be able to escape the impression of frivolous gaiety... In order to vindicate death from outside the individuality that it sets out to annihilate, the metaphysico-psychological scheme of Tristan is compelled to equate death with pleasure. But as a positive fact, however, the image of pleasure lapses into the everyday. It becomes the elan of the individual who wills it thus, who in that very act of will participates in life, thereby proclaiming his complicity with it. And with this the Wagnerian metaphysics of death pays its tribute to the unattainability of joy which ever since Beethoven has remained valid for all great music.'

At least he admits its status as 'great music.' Note that reception, in any case, precedes analysis: at the end you can see that one of the cellists has been moved to tears by the performance.

Adorno continues: 'There is an inexorable logic in the way the tragic decision turns into the gesture 'What price the world?', and the rapturous Liebestod into a soloist's hit song... The disintegration into fragments sheds light on the fragmentariness of the whole.'

That much is incontrovertible. What does the Liebestod, wrenched from the preceding five hours of music, tell us besides a story of the commodity status of the artwork?

Alice Neel

2009-03-16T14:10:00.000-07:00

It makes me feel terribly ignorant to confess that I have just discovered the work of Alice Neel (1900-1984). Suddenly a lot of contemporary painting makes more sense - Elizabeth Peyton and Marlene Dumas are especially indebted to her. Her earlier portraits also have something in common with Lucian Freud's early paintings. But what I like the most is her later stuff, especially (despite its title) Loneliness, which reminds me of Matisse's The Piano Lesson.

Loneliness (1970)

Hartley (1965)

Windows (1965)

Margaret Evans Pregnant (1978)

The De Vegh Twins (1975)

Chicago, Israel

2009-03-12T15:11:00.000-07:00

Excellent urbanism/architectural blog Pruned has a post about Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin's photos of Chicago, a fake town built by the US armed forces in an Israeli desert. The town, closely modeled on Arab settlements, is used for training exercises.

Hosang Park edition at Jen Bekman

2009-03-12T13:43:00.000-07:00

Hosang Park, whose work I mentioned previously, has two editions available at Jen Bekman. Prices start at $50.

Chris Mottalini

2009-03-11T15:06:00.000-07:00

In a 2007 series titled After You Left, They Took it Apart, Chris Mottalini documented a number of derelict houses by modernist architect Paul Rudolph shortly before they were demolished (via Conscientious).

Rudolph, who studied under Gropius in Chicago, built the Art and Architecture building at Yale and the Lippo building in Hong Kong. His own students included Richard Rogers and Norman Foster.

Against Time

2009-02-27T04:23:00.000-08:00

The Royal Observatory, Greenwich

How can we make sense of terror? Conventional analysis seeks explanation in biography, in geopolitical history, and in religion, for acts the moral magnitude of which is beyond the realm of most people's imagining. Such explanations have an important social function, as Todd Herzog notes in his essay on 'Crime Stories.' 'To avoid living in a continuous state of crisis, we need to control our anxiety that anyone is a potential criminal threat by clearly distinguishing between the criminal and the noncriminal. This is the crucial task that tales of crime - from scientific criminological works to popular journalistic accounts to fictional texts - seek to accomplish.'* But what if the inherent irrationality of such acts defies the narrative straightjacket of social science, or of the psychological novel? Joseph Conrad's imagination fails when he attempts to make narrative sense of a terrorist attack in his novel The Secret Agent (1907):

'The attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory : a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that is is impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought, for perverse unreason has its own logical processes. But that outrage could not be laid hold of mentally in any sort of way, so that one remained faced by the fact of a man blown to pieces for nothing even most remotely resembling an idea, anarchistic or other. As to the outer wall of the Observatory, it did not show as much as the faintest crack.'

The incident in Conrad's story was based on the case of Martial Bourdin, a 26 year-old French anarchist who blew himself up outside the Greenwich Observatory on February 15th 1894. According to contemporary reports the sound of an explosion was heard by scientists working in the Observatory, who rushed outside to find the remains of the dying anarchist liberally spread about the park. Following a police investigation the club of which Bourdin had been a member - the Club Autonomie of Windmill Street in Soho - was closed down, and its members deported. The bombing was part of a wave of continental anarchist violence in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, mainly focused on France and Russia. The Chamber of Deputies in Paris had been blown up in December 1893. However, this was the first attack of its kind in England, and no explanation was ever found as to why Bourdin had selected such an unlikely target.

I would suggest that the failure of criminological and novelistic interpretations of this case is inherent in the very nature of such narrativizing epistemological tools. Herzog: 'The traditional case history - like the psychological novel - fails to explain the cause of criminality precisely because its emphasis on the individual fails to look beyond the borders of individuality, fails to look precisely at this border that goes into crisis in modernity.' One point at which the individual experienced crisis in industrial modernity was the regulation of time. The rhythm of the factory line, recently introduced, disintegrated more traditional temporal experiences, and work and leisure were partitioned into regulated units. The railways, too, demanded a more universal understanding of time, rather than the relativity of pre-existing 'local' time. This movement towards a universally regulated time was significantly furthered by the International Meridian Conference, held in Washington in 1884. Most major Western nations attended this meeting at which it was agreed that Greenwich Observatory would be recognized as the prime meridian from which all times should be calculated. The transformation of this site into the lynchpin of universal time made the Observatory a prime target for a radical anarchy which would, by destroying the escapement which limited the flow of time to a steady trickle, allow time to flood out from Greenwich into a smooth unregulated expanse.

Of course Bourdin only succeeded in blowing himself to pieces, but in doing so he escaped from time, if not from narratives, however unsatisfactory. Whilst my interpretation of Bourdin's act against time may have been too speculative for Conrad, one of the peculiarities of his reading is his failure to understand Bourdin's act in what seems its most obvious sense: as a protest against British naval hegemony. As a sailor, one might have thought this would have been a natural explanation for Conrad - which leads me to suspect that he repressed it in favour of hand-wringing protestations of incomprehension. The integrity of the psychological novel took precedence over a knowledge natural to Conrad's own experience.

__________________
*T. Herzog 'Crime Stories: Criminal, Society, and the Modernist Case History', in Representations 80 (Fall 2002) pp. 34-61

My Ten Least Favourite Buildings in London (part I)

2009-02-22T07:01:00.000-08:00

1. Tower Bridge

Designed by Horace Jones, the official architect of the City of London, and engineered by Sir John Wolfe-Barry, Tower Bridge was begun in 1886 and completed eight years later. It represents everything I dislike about Victorian historicism. Why does a steel bridge need enormous mock gothic piers? And why did those piers have to be so willfully squat and ugly? When the greatest architectural achievements of this country were being engineered in steel (Brunel's Saltash Bridge was opened in 1859), the erection of this kitsch monstrosity as a gateway to London seems sad indeed.

Brunel's Royal Albert Bridge at Saltash

2. St Pancras Station

Another example of the disunion of historicism and steel engineering, St Pancras has a fine shed designed by William Henry Barlow, which was the largest steel span structure of the time (finished 1868). Unfortunately it is fronted by the former Midland Grand Hotel, designed by George Gilbert Scott in hysterical Gothic revival style. Words can hardly express how much I abominate this building. The curve of the facade towards the west is particularly horrid.

Recently the station has been made even worse by the addition of a long champagne bar in the shed and what might be the worst public sculpture in this country - quite a feat, considering how much of the stuff there is about these days. The former hotel, sensibly abandoned for many years, is now a luxury hotel once more, complete with million-pound penthouse apartments. Given the state of the economy, and the insalubrious nature of Kings Cross (despite its so-called renaissance of recent years), one wonders how many of these will sell.

3. The British Library, Kings Cross

I don't hate all postmodern architecture: towards some of it I feel merely ambivalent. However, the same could not be said for the new British Library. The largest British public building of the twentieth century, it was designed by Professor Sir Colin St. John Wilson, begun in 1962 and opened more than 30 years later in 1998.

The long low brick sheds, no doubt intended to fit in with Scott's brick monstrosity next door (see above), are a perfect example of what you might call Sainsbury's Postmodern: vernacular brick architecture, intended to be self-effacing in comparison to the excesses of 60s concrete brutalism (funnily enough, Wilson designed the rather better brutalist Law Library in Oxford). To me it looks simply like Barratt housing on a massive scale. The interiors are also ugly and dysfunctional: the lobby, with its mezzanines and escalators, is like a mall, and the reading rooms are cavernous and yet curiously underwhelming. They also receive very little natural light, and have terribly noisy acoustics.

Oxford Law Library (image by Iqbal Amaan, flickr)

To complete this sorry tale of woe, the building is replete with bad public sculpture: the bronze figure in the courtyard is by Eduardo Paolozzi, that tireless churner-out of tat. It is based on an image by William Blake. Who I also loathe.

4. The Great Court, British Museum

Norman Foster's glazing of the Great Court reduced what could have been an impressive space to a cafeteria. At the same time, the facades of the four ranges of the museum were over-restored in the wrong type of stone. They now appear to be made out of sugar. To be fair, the courtyard had been unused for 150 years (the British Library had been using it for book stacks), and Foster's project restored it to public use. But I don't particularly admire Foster's experiments in suspended roofs - his Stansted Airport is also unpleasant (like being inside an over-engineered milk carton). Geometric glazing seems to be a style that he will apply to anything, regardless of place or function (see: the Reichstag, the Swiss RE building, and London City Hall). Why couldn't the court have been left unglazed?

5. St George Wharf, Battersea

More postmodernism, of the very worst sort. What, one asks oneself, are these luxury apartments (by the developers St George) trying to achieve, beyond delivering an enormous 'fuck you' to London (and especially Chelsea across the river: presumably they are occupied by yuppies who couldn't afford Cheyne Walk)? To an extent the weird eclecticism of the development mirrors Terry Farrell's adjacent SIS Building (AKA the MI6 Building), but whilst that building is certainly ugly, it is ugly in a programmatic way. These are simply tat, and as such I would ignore them, if only they weren't so enormous and inescapable.

Farrell's SIS Building

Vis-a-vis Terry Farrell, I'm not entirely sure what I think of his buildings. There are a series of them along the Thames, including the squat toad crouching over Charing Cross station (Embankment Place, 1990) which is truly grim. However, he does seem to be doing something with a coherent aesthetic behind it. And his ventilation shafts for the Blackwall Tunnel (1962) are quite attractive.

Farrell's ducts for the Blackwall Tunnel

Hotels at Sea, from BLDGBLG

2009-02-21T09:49:00.001-08:00

BLDGBLG has an amusing (in a geeky sort of way) post about a project to convert decommissioned oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico into luxury hotels, a la Dubai. Incidentally, there have been plenty of (absurdly insubstantial) articles recently written about the immanent collapse of Dubai's economy. I would just like to add here, a propos de rien, that I will be the first to spit on its sandy, gaudy grave should that happen.

My Ten Favourite Buildings in London (part II)

2009-02-21T07:41:00.000-08:00

6. Stone Buildings, Lincoln's Inn

(image by Gillian Darley)

Built by Sir Robert Taylor in 1774-80, this long building is a subtle yet beautifully proportioned example of Georgian secular architecture. The south end of the range, which faces the Chancery Lane gate of Lincoln's Inn, has attached columns making a point de vue for those passing the gate. The view of the main west front across the lawn is the closest one gets to the collegiate atmosphere of Oxford in London. Lincoln's Inn was the only inn of court to survive the Blitz relatively unscathed.

View from Chancery Lane gate

7. St Mary le Strand

(image by Xavier de Jauréguiberry, flickr)

James Gibbs' church (begun 1714) stands in an island on the Strand between the narrow facade of Somerset House and the broad curving front of Bush House. The facade, which creates such a striking impression when silhouetted by the afternoon sun, is the first example of a tower superimposed on a classical portico: an absolutely revolutionary solution to the problem of building a church in the idiom of a pagan temple. This idea was enormously influential, especially in America. Gibbs himself used it again on St Martins in the Fields (up the road on Trafalgar Square).

rear view of St Mary le Strand (image by arthistory390, flickr)

The situation of the building - in the middle of a wide thoroughfare - allowed Gibbs to indulge his talent for designing in the round, which he later exploited to great effect in the Radcliffe Camera, Oxford. The church is rather like a beautiful reliquary blown up to massive proportions.

Radcliffe Camera, Oxford (image by SBA73, flickr)

8. St Stephen Walbrook

(image by colinmel, flickr)

Rather unprepossessing from the outside, this church (begun 1672) was Wren's dry run for St Pauls. It is built to a centralized quincunx plan, which Wren had intended for the cathedral itself, and which was vetoed by the dean and chapter of the cathedral, who felt that a non-longitudinal church would be inappropriately pagan. This beautiful domed space demonstrates what we missed out on.

Designs for centrally-planned churches often caused problems with ecclesiastical patrons: Michelangelo's original plan for St Peter's was changed for similar reasons. This controversy has persisted up to the present day. The altar at St Stephen's, which originally stood against the east wall, was replaced in 1972 by Henry Moore's interesting cylindrical sculpture (using marble from the same quarries in Carrara used by Michelangelo). This new altar occupies the centre of the church, despite protracted legal action taken by opponents of the scheme in the 1970s.

9. Admiralty Screen, Whitehall

(image by stevecadman, flickr)

One of Robert Adam's first buildings (c. 1760), this long, low screen is a wonderfully simple row of Tuscan columns with two attractive sea horses on the gate posts.

10. Somerset House

Somerset House, Strand facade (image by Jamie Barras, flickr)

I have personal reasons for feeling attached to Somerset House, but it would be hard to argue that this, one of the greatest surviving Georgian buildings in London, is not a uniquely beautiful structure. The river facade, although extended to somewhat detrimental effect by Smirke and Pennethorne in the 19th century, is one of the few attractive buildings along the river (why does the Thames generally attract such monsters to its waters?). When it was built by Sir William Chambers (1776 onwards), as a home for various government offices, the river had not yet been embanked, and so at high tide the water rose right up to the cyclopean voussoirs of the basement, allowing boats to pass in and out of the building. The Strand facade, though elegant, is constrained and narrow: however, this allows for a great effect of expansion as one moves through the colonnade into the courtyard. The Strand range originally housed the Royal Societies: it is now the home of the Courtauld Institute and gallery.

Somerset House: the river facade before the Embankment

Capital Punishment

2009-02-14T14:12:00.000-08:00

The privatization of the the American penal system finally produces its logical result: last week, two American judges, 'Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers.' One 17 year old girl was imprisoned 'for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school.' Full article in the New York Times.

Hosang Park

2009-02-14T13:37:00.000-08:00

Hosang Park takes aerial photographs of parks in Korea. I discovered his work on BLDGBLOG, where Nicola Twilley has written an interesting post on the urban park in Park's images.

For me, these images are part of a long tradition beginning with Alvin Langdon Coburn's pioneering photograph from the Metropolitan Tower in New York:

Alvin Langdon Coburn, The Octopus 1912

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy took some similar pictures from Berlin's Fehrnsehturm (TV tower) in the 1920s.

You might say these types of photograph are an example of what Moholy-Nagy called the 'new vision' - after all, the aerial view is permitted by those staples of modernity, the sky scraper and aviation. It alienates the observer from the city, and reduces the field of view to a two dimensional topography: in order to make the city graspable, into a tangible, thingified (reified) thing - a commodity - the human must first be abstracted and distanced (see Michel de Certeau's intriguing essay on 'Walking in the City' from The Practice of Everyday Life). By focusing their attention on parks, these photographers seem to be specifically interested in revealing the rational production of leisure in the modern metropolis: the artificiality and barrenness of these supposed urban oases becomes clear when they are viewed from the heights of neighbouring buildings.

My Ten Favourite Buildings in London (part I)

2009-02-14T09:39:00.000-08:00

Listing things is a fairly futile exercise, and thus perfectly suited to blogging. These buildings are in no particular order, and there is a bias to buildings around Holborn (since I work there). A list of my least favourites will follow.

1. Christ Church, Spitalfields

(Image by hulmerist, flickr)

Hawksmoor is one of my favourite architects, and I could have chosen any one of his six London churches (or his west towers for Westminster Abbey) for this list. But Christ Church (built 1714-29) is a particularly clear example of what I like about his style: the reduction of classicizing tropes to their underlying geometric forms. Furthermore, it was one of the first buildings in London with which I fell in love, before I knew anything about architecture.

2. National Theatre

There is not much good modernist architecture in this city. We were too conservative to begin with, then commissioned some truly awful buildings, and very quickly gave it up as a bad job. One great exception is the National Theatre by Denis Lasdun. Although the building has often been cited as an example of 'brutalism', I find the Béton brut (or exposed concrete), which bears the imprint of the wooden moulds into which the concrete was poured, to be a sensuous and sensitive material. There are far more brutal things to be found on the South Bank: Jeffrey Archer, for example.

3. The Law Society Building, Chancery Lane

(photo by H.E.L.E.N., from flickr)

Nineteenth-century architects have often been criticized for their senseless revivals of historical styles. Neo-classicism, Gothic revival, Renaissance revival: all came and went in the mad dash to discover a style appropriate to the age. Scholars who allied themselves with high modernism tended to condemn all historicist architects for failing to appreciate the true character of industrial capitalism, and for perverting modern building techniques in order to recreate traditional decorative effects. Only those buildings that were felt to prefigure the approach of modernist architects were excused. However, more recently there has been a reappraisal of the period's rapid turnover of styles, especially in the works of Barry Bergdoll: Bergdoll, and scholars who share his more charitable perspective, have interpreted the confusion of period styles as a reflection of the vast range of new building types (railway stations, factories), and of new building technologies (concrete and steel), available to architects of the nineteenth century.

(photo by simon_white, flickr)

I can't claim that I have chosen the Law Society building for such sophisticated reasons. I simply happen to like the long facade with its collection of several different flavours of classicism. The Ionic porch of the main building was constructed by Vulliamy in 1831, and is a fairly blameless piece of Georgian revival, but I am especially keen on the rather unusual corner segment (which houses the Six Clerks restaurant), built by Charles Holden in 1902. It is an apparently centralized structure with a high, bare attic storey - for some reason I absolutely love these. It takes a Soanian approach to reductive geometric forms, and has neo-mannerist touches derived from Michelangelo (see, for example, the tiny statues perched under the large arches). I follow Pevsner in my appreciation of this building: no doubt he found Holden's formal approach congenial to his modernist perspective.

In the early 1930s Holden went on to design several modernist-inflected tube stations, such as Arnos Grove (above), and Senate House library.

4. St John's Chapel, Tower of London

(image from www.bleuejaunte.net)

One of the earliest surviving buildings in London, the White Tower was begun in 1078 by William the Conqueror. It houses the tiny chapel of St John, which apparently hosts occasional choral recitals, and is the only extant Norman ecclesiastical building in the city. The simplicity and solidity of the architecture is very impressive.

5. Dulwich Picture Gallery

(image by Eric Hardy, flickr)

Sir John Soane's finest building in London is another example of the sort of abstract poetry of reductive geometric forms that I love in architecture. The first purpose-built public gallery in the world (opened 1811), it incorporates the mausoleum of the collection's founders, Sir Francis Bourgeois, Noel Desanfans and his wife, Margaret Desanfans. The building is a curious mixture, like all of Soane's work, of function and caprice. This is evident in the choice of materials: the walls are honest brick, while the mausoleum has imitation porphyry columns (they are painted wood). The use of light is also fascinating: whereas the galleries are cleverly designed to allow maximum overhead natural light throughout, the mausoleum uses amber glass to create an appropriately funereal atmosphere.

The Mausoleum, Dulwich Picture Gallery (photo Luxmoore)

Our Skeptic Isle

2009-02-01T13:53:00.000-08:00

'Half of Britons do not Believe in Evolution'

Good God.

Jerry Spagnoli

2009-02-01T03:08:00.001-08:00

I know that looking at photos on the web is a semi-pointless exercise. With that in mind, I recommend that you click on the first image in order to see a larger version. The name of the street, the echo of the road sign in the corporate logo, the graffiti - so many other things reward a closer look. I realise that it's not a huge advance on Lee Friedlander's stuff, but still, what's wrong with perfect composition (well, OK, a lot politically, but this is just the internet so let's ignore that particular question)?

Jerry Spagnoli's website also features many of his Daguerrotypes of NYC.

The Sicness Unto Death: Problematizing (Post)grammatical Writing

2008-12-06T10:40:00.000-08:00

Question: what do you get if you cross a post-structuralist with a mafioso? Answer: an offer you can't understand.

Many things annoy me about academic writing, one being the use of parentheses instead of inverted commas to demonstrate critical reflexivity. For example:

"Prepared for consumption: (dis)orders of eating and embodiment"

"[Ad]dressing Methodologies"

"chaos can be (un)folded in many ways"

The result is invariably nonsense or redundancy. For example, the statement "chaos can be (un)folded in many ways" I take to mean that chaos can be both folded and unfolded in many ways. But really, you can only unfold something in the reverse direction to the way it was originally folded. And anyway, how does one fold chaos? I have the feeling the answer has something to do with Gilles Deleuze, but I don't really want to know.

Perhaps the most annoying academic tic is the insertion of [sic] after the use of a masculine pronoun in a quotation to demonstrate the disagreement of the author with the quoted author's use of generic masculine pronouns. But [sic] is not a tool for demonstrating snide moral superiority, and although the use of the masculine pronoun may be sexist, it is not a grammatical or factual inaccuracy.

And don't even get me started on 'problematize'.

No friends of Dorothy

2008-11-10T02:35:00.000-08:00

So, a good week for America, unless you happen to be gay: Californians, Arizonans and Floridans all approved bans on civil unions in referenda. In fact, President-Elect Obama opposes same-sex marriages himself. And in case you think the UK is any less benighted, a recent Guardian survey found that 45% of Britons disapprove of same-sex unions, 40% think the age of consent should be higher for gay sex, and 24% think gay sex should be made illegal.

UPDATE

From the White House website: "President Obama supports full civil unions that give same-sex couples legal rights and privileges equal to those of married couples."

Objectivités: La photographie à Düsseldorf

2008-11-09T16:31:00.000-08:00

In Paris last weekend I saw "Objectivités: La photographie à Düsseldorf", an exhibition of German photography at the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (until 4th January).

The idea of the exhibition was to show a more extensive range of photography from Düsseldorf than the usual Becher crowd. This meant including Gerhardt Richter and Sigmar Polke, among others. Inevitably the Becher school's work looked much the best in this motley company, and it seemed a shame not to have taken the opportunity to show a wider selection of images by the Bechers, Struth, Ruff et al, rather than a profusion of lesser works. Nevertheless, the Bechers were well represented. I particularly enjoyed seeing their Water Towers again, which have a sort alien rational beauty.

Bernd and Hilla Becher

Having said that, some of the less well-known works were a revelation. I am thinking in particular of Ursula Shulz-Dornburg's images of bus shelters in Armenia, Soviet era structures in an incredible variety of bizarre forms. Petra Wunderlich's photographs of quarries were also interesting, prefiguring Ed Burtynsky's similar images by a couple of decades. The way cuboid blocks emerge from the living rock face seems to suggest an autogeneration of forms, or the natural origin of artistic style.

Ursula Shulz-Dornburg

Petra Wunderlich

A photographer who I thought came off particularly badly in the show was the ubiquitous Andreas Gursky. His early works looked rather forlorn and conceptually un-rigorous in the room dedicated to the Bechers and their students. As the exhibition progressed chronologically to a post-Becher phase of large-scale images and digital manipulation, things in general tended to the banal and overblown. The three large scale Gurskys on show here were not his best. His image of stained glass windows Kathedrale I was particularly awful. I suppose, just as the visible joins of early photomontage are supposed to show the fragmentary nature of modern society, it might be argued that Gursky's smooth montage of photographic elements are a corollary of 'late capitalist' culture's virtual unity, achieved on a level of hypereality. Or perhaps not. In any case, I thought the inclusion of that sentimental old fraud Wim Wenders filming the windows of the cathedral was an unintentionally amusing self-critical touch. The artist's double, the whimsical illusionist.

Andreas Gursky Kathedrale I

Imagined Architectures

2008-11-08T15:05:00.000-08:00

Filip Dujardin

Usually I can't stand highly manipulated images, but I really like Filip Dujardin's photographs of 'remixed buildings' from around Ghent. There is a good piece about him on BLDGBLOG (in itself a fascinating resource on architecture).

Filip Dujardin

Filip Dujardin

Another photographer who makes similarly cannibalized images of buildings, in this case favelas, is Dionisio Gonzales. I am not quite as convinced by his work; there is a touch of David Lachapelle to his permanently blue skies and oversaturated colours.

Dionisio Gonzales

William Eggleston at the Whitney

2008-11-08T07:44:00.000-08:00

William Eggleston has a big new retrospective at the Whitney in New York. The show will be traveling to Munich in February next year - hopefully I'll be able to see it when I'm over there for my upcoming trip to Berlin.

Here is an interview regarding the exhibition from Time:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

And here is a clip from Eggleston's '73 video, Stranded in Canton:

Tristan und Isolde: Meier and Viola

2008-11-06T16:06:00.000-08:00

I was in Paris at the weekend, mainly to see Tristan und Isolde with the amazing Waltraud Meier. The surtitles were in French, but we managed to struggle through with half-heard German, our appalling French, and a slightly off-kilter knowledge of the plot. Her voice, and the great orchestra, were enough to keep us busy for the 5 hours of the performance.

Here is Meier singing the Liebestod in a Munich production (thanks to Per-Erik Skramstad for the better footage. His Wagner blog is here).

I have seen several stagings of Tristan on DVD, and although this was possibly the least silly one so far (one in which blood spurts from Isolde's brow is particularly memorable), it was still extremely silly. This was all thanks to the absurdly portentous video artist Bill Viola, who made a special film to accompany the opera. Apart from being distracting, the film featured such laughable images as a bearded man in a nappy being bathed in water from an amphora; a woman lighting devotional candles; a couple dressed in white pyjamas jumping into the sea; and a man levitating in showers of water. The last image was striking, but really more suitable for a music video (perhaps one by Chris Cunningham). You can see a clip here.

Particularly idiotic was the shaky night-vision footage of a couple running through a wood, Blair Witch style. After this, I half expected Tristan to come back as a zombie in the final act.

Despite these reservations, nothing could detract from the pleasure of seeing and hearing Meier perform.

City Churches, Part 4

2008-06-11T13:59:00.000-07:00

16. St Edmund the King

Wren church with a very handsome, Italianate facade (with two curved pieces joining the aisle facades to the tower): this is unfortunately impossible to photograph satisfactorily, due to the constrained site. The interior is not particularly interesting. The church has been converted into a 'spiritual' book shop, which is I suppose much better than a bar or restaurant. There is a slightly creepy fresco of Christ in the half dome above the altar.

17. St Michael Cornhill

The church is by Wren, but has had many additions: the tower is attractive, Gothick, and possibly by Hawksmoor; the inappropriate Tuscan window tracery, and the ridiculously ornate Gothick portal, are both by George Gilbert Scott, that irrepressible improver of churches. The interior is gaudily painted and full of stuff, some of which is interesting - including a large and somewhat grotesque 17th century pelican feeding its young with its own blood, and numerous 19th century bench ends, in the Wren style. Other pieces are less attractive: the reredos is 19th century Italian Gothic in polychrome marble (surely Scott?), and the stained glass is vile.

The ceiling of the church is attractively vaulted, and the vestibule at the base of the tower is a very handsome space. Both of the times I have visited the church an organist has been going at it full-tilt, which was entertaining but added to the slightly overwhelming sensory experience.

18. St Peter-upon-Cornhill

Almost adjacent to St Michael, and nearly invisible from the street, St Peter is used as a seminary or something similar, and so is closed to the public. There is a small churchyard down an alley behind the church, which serves as a beer garden for a nearby pub.

19. St Mary Woolnoth

The only church of Nicholas Hawksmoor's in the city, the exterior of St Mary Woolnoth is very different to those by Wren. The facade has chanelled stonework extending to above the main portal, and then another superimposed storey of chanelled stonework, which repeats the arch of the door. These two lower storeys are bounded by two enormous chanelled pillars. Above this rises a brief attic storey, then a taller storey of two bays with twinned corinthian pillars, giving the impression of two towers which have merged. From this rises two truncated towers with balustrades. The whole facade is much wider than it is deep.

The north side of the church is, in my opinion, one of the greatest passages in English architecture, worthy of Borromini: three very large blind windows, surrounded by deeply chanelled frames, enclose an arrangement of two columns set pointing toward each other, supporting an entablature which curves inwards towards the church. This is almost impossible for me to explain in words, but it gives an impression of movement which is unusual in English architecture.

The interior of the church is almost equally impressive: it is centrally planned, with the higher central space supported by four groups of three giant corinthian columns. This is of course the church which inspired Eliot:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

It is the most striking church I have seen so far; it is not perhaps as beautiful as St Mary-at-Hill, but it is more monumental, and seems to be conceived more as a sculptural whole.

20. St Margaret Lothbury

Another Wren church, not particularly interesting from the exterior (especially when compared to St Mary Woolnoth, or to the Mansion House, which is just round the corner). However, the interior is unusually richly decorated. The woodwork is especially good - it seems to have been assembled from other churches all over London. The screen, one of the two surviving Wren screens, comes from All Hallows Dowgate, and has very fancy intertwining openwork balusters, and an enormous carved eagle hanging from the pediment. The reredos is also impressive.

City Churches, Part 3

2008-06-11T01:58:00.000-07:00

11. St Magnus-the-Martyr

The church, built by Wren 1670-87, has been vigorously messed about: the aisles originally extended to enclose the tower, but they were cut back to allow a footpath to pass through its base when London Bridge was rebuilt in the 19th century. The effect on the tower is not unpleasant: the result is a tower/porch with cyclopean voussoirs. The church interior is filled with junk and reeks of incense - we are on Anglo-Catholic territory I suspect. Lots of pseudo-Byzantine icons and shrines. The ionic columns in the aisles inspired Eliot:

O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

(The original Billingsgate market once stood adjacent to the church, hence the 'fishmen')

12. St Mary-at-Hill

Another Wren church, this one virtually invisible from the road. The entrance is through a small alleyway to the side. The interior is very striking, not least because of the contrast with the unprepossessing exterior. St Mary is centrally planned, a 'quincunx': that is, a square domed centre resting on four free standing columns. This type of church is Byzantine in origin and must have been very unusual in England at the time of Wren, although it had become more popular in Italy during the Renaissance (presumably where he derived the idea). The effect is serene, light-filled, and beautiful. The plasterwork is very impressive, as is the woodwork - a perfect demonstration of the sufficiency of purely architectural decoration (no need for papist icons here). My favourite so far.

Quincunx

13. St Margaret Pattens

Wren, again. One of his tallest spires, in medieval style, with four smaller spirelets around the base. The name of the church possibly derives from the Worshipful Company of Pattenmakers, of which this is the livery church. Pattens were wooden overshoes (clogs, in other words), worn to avoid muddying the feet.

The church is built to a very simple oblong plan. Much of the original woodwork is preserved, including two enclosed pews at the back for the churchwardens.

14. St Clement Eastcheap

A very simple church by Wren. The interior is rectangular and fairly plain. The font cover has a sort of carved cockatoo living in it.

15. St Mary Abchurch

Frescoed dome on squinches

Grinling Gibbons Reredos

Another centrally-planned church by Wren, this time with a large dome on squinches. The dome is painted with a rather silly fresco, but the architectural effect is impressive. The furnishings are mostly original, including a handsome reredos by Grinling Gibbons, with delicate garlands of fruit and flowers, and a heron feeding its children with its own blood in the centre. This is the only reredos that can be attributed with any certainty to Gibbons himself: two signed invoices for the 'olter pees' survive (it seems that even Gibbons had trouble getting paid). There is a small church yard outside.

The Joy of Bad Painting

2008-05-31T03:58:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the greatest danger of looking at too much art too closely and for too long is that one begins to abandon all value judgements in favour of the idea that all art has equivalent historical value. This allows one (hopefully) to reach a fuller appreciation of history; but at the same time, it can lead to dangerously prolonged exposure to bad art. And the worst, I fear, has come to pass. I have developed an unhealthy fondness for academic painting. And I mean the worst kind of academic kitsch: namely, the works of Jean-Léon Gérôme.

Gérôme's paintings now seem to us to be the most shameless examples of racist Orientalism. Perhaps that's why I like them - they wear their historical subconscious on their sleeve, so to speak. They have a quaint naivety. You don't have to parse The Snake Charmer too closely to work out what's going on: isn't the East funny, they wear funny costumes, and they go in for pederasty (disgusting! But let's have a look at a boy's bum whilst we're at it).

The Snake Charmer (1889)

There seems to be a tendency to equate the Arab with the animal. The snake charmer's boy is wrapped in an immensely phallic snake, which could crush him at any moment; the handsome young man in the Pelt Merchant of Cairo, on the other hand, is wrapped in tiger skin, suggesting his voracious and dangerous animal sexuality. Unlike the snake charmer's boy, he faces us with a somewhat vacant, but not unwelcoming, gaze. A similarly disinterested gaze can be found on the face of Manet's Olympia; it is the gaze of the prostitute eyeing her (or his) customer. This man is selling his own skin, not that of the dead cat draped over him (and from beneath which he beckons); Egypt was, after all, a notoriously popular destination for sex tourists (it was where Flaubert first tried sodomy, as he testified with some satisfaction in his letters).

Pelt Merchant of Cairo (1869)

Gérôme's sensationalism encompasses lurid depictions of violence as well as rampant eroticism. These images are so crudely brutal that only the most pious snob would not react with delighted laughter. Pollice Verso ('Thumbs Down'), shows the climax of a gladiatorial combat, and was the immediate source of this gesture's re-entry into popular culture. It also looks rather like the cover of a Conan the Barbarian paperback.

Pollice Verso (1872)

The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer has a schlock horror aspect that is only matched in contemporary culture by Tarantino, or perhaps Monty Python. The human torches in the background are a particularly nice touch - it looks like the lions will be having barbecue tonight.

The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer (1883)

Gore and soft porn aside, Gérôme's most bizarre work is his visually punning painting Optician (or 'O petit chien'), which seems to anticipate Francis Picabia's similar Dadaist jokes by decades. The frame incorporates ready-made elements like spectacles and binoculars which would not be out of place in a Duchamp.

Optician (1902)

Dali was in fact quite fond of this painting by Gérôme, but it would be hard to argue that he had much real influence on the avant garde movements of the twentieth century, beyond the fact that he embodied to an almost comical degree an academic tendency against which most advanced painters reacted vehemently. His most lasting legacy has been in the realm of fantasy art, where painters such as Frank Frazetta have used his enslaved virgins, muscled homoerotic heros, and enormous monsters as a rich source of imagery.

Frank Frazetta, Conan Chained (1967)

Equestrian Statues

2008-05-14T16:37:00.000-07:00

Statue of Field Marshal Haig

' "There still does not seem any substantial agreement yet on the subject of the Haig statue," said Widmerpool.... "Surely they can find someone to carve a horse that looks like a horse...I can't see why they can't make a model of a real horse' said Barbara. 'Couldn't they do it in plaster of Paris. Don't you think?"

This last question, and addressed in a fairly low voice to myself, could still make me feel, for reasons quite subjective in origin, that there might be something to be said for this unconventional method of solving what had almost become the chief enigma of contemporary aesthetic.'

This passage from Powell makes me think of the problem of the 'Angel of the South'. Perhaps if we were to follow this line of reasoning, we would get Gormley to produce Wallinger's concept.

Except Gormley should, I think, be discouraged from swathing anything else in plaster, ever again.

Powell/Mishima: Writing the 20th Century

2008-05-13T14:23:00.000-07:00

Yukio Mishima

Anthony Powell

Having just finished listening to Radio 4's extremely condensed adaptation of Anthony Powell's twelve-novel sequence "A Dance to the Music of Time", I have begun re-reading the books in order to find out what had been left out by the producers. Something that struck me almost immediately on beginning the first novel "A Question of Upbringing", were the similarities between Powell's work and the four novel sequence by Yukio Mishima known as "The Sea of Fertility".

Mishima's series begins with the school days of his narrator Shigekuni Honda, and his relationship with his close friend Kiyoaki Matsugae, a young aristocrat. It is set in the idyllic world of the Taisho period, shortly after the Russo-Japanese war, and one could say it describes the last days of 'old Japan'.

Powell's novel also begins with the school days of his central character Nicholas Jenkins, and describes the fairly circumscribed world of the upper classes after the first war. One could say that it concerns the last days of 'old England'. It also introduces Kenneth Widmerpool, who becomes in some strange way the central character of the series (despised though he is): he features in every subsequent volume, constantly returning, uninvited, to Jenkins' life. Mishima's central character Matsugae, on the other hand, dies at the end of the first novel - however, he is reincarnated in the second novel. This cycle of death and re-birth recurs in each novel (nuts, isn't it?) - until the final novel, and the denouement of the series....

Both sequences are narrated by someone who may or may not be an alter-ego of the author - nothing very unusual there. But both narrators have very distinct voyeuristic tendencies. In the "Dance", this fact is only alluded to, but voyeurism bubbles under the surface and becomes a driving force of the many plots and sub-plots. Mishima, on the other hand, is less reticent: his character Shigekuni Honda becomes an eminent Judge, and develops a penchant for watching young couples fucking in parks.

Furthermore, both sequences centre on the Second World War - both of Nicholas Jenkins' closest friends die in the fighting, forcing him to completely reconsider his role in society. The third novel of Mishima's sequence, "The Temple of Dawn", describes life in Tokyo before and after the atom bomb - but without mentioning this central event. Nevertheless, one is given the impression that Japan and the Japanese have been altered, damaged irreparably, by an event which cannot be discussed by any of the characters.

Finally, both sequences end in the 60s/70s, when the world of the narrator is turned upside down by the arrival of a new society. In "Dance", this new society is personified by Scorpio Murtlock, a sort of svengali figure and occultist, whereas in "Sea of Fertility" it is Tōru Yasunaga, a disturbed and sadistic young man, whose arrival signals the demise of the narrator's world. The endings of both sequences have a sort of demented atmosphere of cruelty and mental decay: in Mishima's case, this is perhaps understandable. He had gone quite mad, organizing a fascist militia and attempting a military coup the day after completing the last installment of his series. When the coup failed he publicly disemboweled himself.

Powell, on the other, received a CBE and died in 2000, aged 94.

The books, naturally, are marked more by their differences than their similarities, which may, in the end, be ascribable simply to their authors' chosen subject matter: the twentieth century. One could perhaps include Anthony Burgess' "Earthly Powers" in this mini-genre of twentieth century chronicles, although he has a distinctly different approach. Perhaps the strongest link between the three is their debt to Proust.

How to make a killing on Chinese art: lie

2008-05-08T04:30:00.000-07:00

"Sotheby’s auction house called it the “most important collection of contemporary Chinese art to ever come to market” — some 200 works by some of China’s hottest names.

And when the first half of the trove, called the Estella Collection, went on the block in April in Hong Kong, it brought in $18 million and set some record prices for artists, like $6 million for a canvas by the Chinese painter Zhang Xiaogang.

But the sale of the works has stirred indignation among many of the artists and their dealers and some curators.

Those artists and curators say that as the collection was being formed, they were duped into thinking that a rich Westerner was putting together a permanent collection and would eventually donate some of the works to leading museums.

Instead, they say, the buyers were a group of investors who quickly cashed in by selling the works last August to the Manhattan dealer William Acquavella, who is in turn selling them through Sotheby’s."

David Barbosa for the New York Times (full article here)

Goodbye

2008-05-04T12:55:00.000-07:00

Albert Hoffman, accidental discover of lysergic acid diethylamide, and Tristram Cary, British pioneer of electronic music, both died last week. Hoffman was 102: who says drugs are bad for you?

Mormon Pants

2008-04-26T02:37:00.000-07:00

Loosely related to my previous post on underwear (is this turning into a knickers-themed blog?), Nathalie sent me this article on Mormon underwear.

The Semiotics of Underwear

2008-04-25T11:53:00.000-07:00

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a monstrously padded imitation penis appended to the front of one's hose - a codpiece - was de riguer. The codpiece developed from a simple flap of material used to cover the genitals into a piece of fetishistic display the symbolic significance of which is fairly obvious. The Tudors saw themselves as, and wanted to be seen as, the biggest swinging dicks in Europe. The trend peaked with Henry VIII, whose absurdly well-endowed suit of armour can be marvelled at in the Tower; codpieces detumesced, as one might expect, in the reign of Elizabeth I.

Suit of armour belonging to Henry VIII, C16, Tower of London

These days wearing a big fake willy on the front of one's trousers might seem a somewhat foolish idea; instead, men like to show everyone their underwear. The practice of lowering the trousers to reveal the drawers, known as 'sagging', is allegedly derived from the clothing habits of prisoners, who, in order to discourage suicide attempts, are not provided with belts. It has also been suggested (possibly falsely) that amongst the prison community showing one's underwear is a sign that one is sexually available. Interestingly, 'sagging' has a similar effect to that of traditional constrictive modes of female costume. Like the pencil skirt, foot-binding and stiletto heels, 'sagging' impedes locomotion, and its affectors must pause constantly in their perambulations to re-adjust the trousers - if they wish to prevent full exposure.

The practice has its counterpart in female costume, too, in the form of the visible thong. However, the visible thong is to my mind less perplexing than 'sagging': the back of the thong forms an arrow pointing towards the anus, suggesting that, to borrow Duchamp's pun, 'L.H.O.O.Q.' (try saying it in French: it's a lot cruder than most translators would have it). Incidentally, the black triangle of the thong points downwards in much the same way as the Mona Lisa's beard. The concept of the visible thong is slightly complicated by the fact that thongs were ostensibly invented to prevent the very phenomenon of visible underwear, or 'V.P.L.' (visible panty line), which is generally held to be a heinous fashion faux pas. The visible thong, on the other hand, is celebrated; I believe that the phenomenon may have something to do with the recent relaxing of the taboo on heterosexual anal intercourse. At the very least it suggests a sort of easy-access availability.

Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. (1919)

Whatever 'sagging' might mean - a demonstration of dangerous masculinity via the co-option of a display of vulnerability enforced on men by the oppressive establishment (in the form of the penal system), a feminization of men's costume, or just a case of sprezzatura taken to its logical extreme - it seems that we are living, to quote Godard, in the age of the arse.

City Churches, Part 2

2008-04-05T08:56:00.000-07:00

6. St Katharine Cree

Apparently the peculiar name is an abbreviation of 'creechurch', or 'Christchurch' - this refers to the fact that St Katharine's originally belonged to the Priory of the Holy Trinity (now gone). Pevsner says that St Katharine's is 'the most important church in London between Jones and Wren - a building of 1628-31, a rare period for churches.' The tower is older, dating from 1504. The building is indeed handsome - a central nave with two aisles, separated by arches on Corinthian columns which create an almost Brunelleschian effect. The ceilings are subtly rib-vaulted - which introduces an oddly Northern-European Gothic note to the otherwise Italianate structure.

The church has been somewhat messed around with. The east window has hideous orange Victorian glass. The west window has been entirely bricked up and is blocked by a massive organ, and drab little prefab bungalows have been built in the aisles to house the church offices. Luckily these do not block the aisle windows, which are of an unusual design. Perhaps the strangest feature of the church are the statue and banner dedicated to St Charles the Martyr - in other words, King Charles I.

7. St Botolph Aldgate

George Dance the Elder, 1741-4. Unfortunately the church was closed - I was looking forward to the ceiling, which was altered in 1889 by John Francis Bentley, architect of Westminster Cathedral. Pevsner: 'due to him is the remarkably original ceiling in a kind of free Arts and Crafts Gothic'.

8. St Olave Hart Street

This 15th century church, a rare survivor of the Great Fire, was a favourite of Samuel Pepys' (the diarist and his wife are buried here). Unfortunately it was also closed on the day I visited - possibly due to building work (the stones in the graveyard were all sheathed with protective plywood boxes). The interior was gutted in the Blitz. The graveyard has a gate with skulls and bones - which inspired Dickens to rename the church 'St Ghastly-Grim'. What a wag.

9. All Hallows Barking

Founded in the 7th century by Barking Abbey in Essex, this is the oldest church in the city. The tower dates from c.1660. The building was very seriously damaged during the war, and the ceilings were reconstructed in exposed concrete by Seely and Paget - an interesting and not unsuccessful technique. Unfortunately much else in the church is new, and in that primitivist, self-effacing style that the C of E goes in for these days - the Sutherland-esque hangings were particularly noxious. There is a fairly provincial museum in the crypt, where one can see Roman pavements and a tombstone, and parts of an Anglo Saxon cross. The real treasure of the church is an elaborate font cover by Grinling Gibbons.

10. St Dunstan in the East

Wren built the tower in around 1697, and the Germans bombed the rest of the church flat in 1941. The tower, which Wren made in a Gothic style to match the church, has a fantastic spire on four flying buttresses. The shell of the building was preserved and is now a very beautiful public gardens. Pevsner consistently advised that the bombed churches should be left in their ruined state as war memorials, and it can be said that the strategy works marvellously here.

City Churches, Part 1

2008-04-04T14:33:00.000-07:00

Since today was so fine, I thought I would finally have a look at some of the city churches - like many people, I suppose, I have travelled to Italy to look at architecture, whilst ignoring the buildings in London. There are 38 churches in the city of London, which must be the densest concentration of ecclesiastical architecture in the world (apparently there were 150 before the fire and the Blitz).

In the end, I saw nearly twenty of them in five hours. Some of them were fantastic. Here are the first five:

1. All Hallows, London Wall

By George Dance the Younger, 1765-7. As Pevsner describes it, the church has a 'simple exterior but exquisite interior, the chief inspiration of Dance's pupil, Soane'. The church is a simple aisle-less cube with a tunnel-vaulted nave and coffered niche for an apse. The stucco work on the ceiling and coffering are really beautiful.

2. St Botolph without Bishopsgate

Rebuilt in 1725-9, possibly by James Gold. The Victorians buggered up the interior in the 1820s, which is now rather gaudy. The stucco work is fine, however, and features alternating coronets and mitres. The church may be naff, but it is very well kept (perhaps this is part of the problem - it looks almost too new).

3. St Ethelburga Bishopsgate

This very old church (late 14th century) survived the fire of London and the Blitz, only to be blown to pieces by the IRA in 1993. At the time, there was great reluctance on the part of the diocese to rebuild, but public demand eventually led to the almost complete recreation which stands now. It has been designated a 'centre for reconciliation and peace', and has an absurd beduin tent in the churchyard - patronised by the Prince of Wales, of course.

4. St Helen Bishopsgate

St Helen's is really astonishing, not least because of its striking situation in a little open space beneath the Swiss Re building.
The church is in two halves, effectively having two naves: this is because the building originally consisted of the south nave only, and the north nave, which was a Benedictine nunnery's church, was erected lean-to fashion in c.1205.
The interior is consequentially very broad and light, and contains many exceptionally fine monuments and furnishings. There are three Elizabethan tombs with effigies, a boldly austere Nicholas Stone tomb chest in black marble, and some beautiful woodwork. When I was in the church a lady was practicing her singing - something baroque, I think. It was quite lovely.

5. St Andrew Undercroft

The church is closed to visitors, as it is in use as a bible study centre by St Helen's. This seems most inconsiderate to me - can't people read the bible at home?

For opening times and directions, see here.

Les Grands Ensembles

2008-03-14T16:14:00.001-07:00

Pierre Huyghe Les Grands Ensembles (2001)

I first saw Pierre Huyghe's video piece Les Grands Ensembles at the ICA in 2001. It seems a long time ago, but the work (which shows two low-rise tower blocks in a foggy wasteland communicating with each other via a pyrotechnic display of flashing lights) has remained with me. I can't work out exactly why - the video is obviously entrancing, but is it merely superficially interesting? One wonders if the piece was created before or after September 11th (perhaps I am only wondering this after Sarah Wilson's bizarre lecture on premonitary art this morning). You can see a version of the video on UBUWEB.

Quarries in Modern Art

2008-03-03T14:21:00.004-08:00

Last month I noted that Edward Burtynsky's photographs of quarries in Carrara and Portugal resembled Vorticist paintings. In my ignorance, I missed the considerably more substantial influence of quarries on modern art. In fact quarries have been there right from the beginning:

Paul Cezanne La Carriere Bibemus (1895)

Paul Cezanne Le Mont Sainte-Victoire vu de la carriere Bibemus (1897)

Cezanne spent a great deal of time painting in Provence, especially around the Bibemus quarries (from which he could see his beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire). Sarah Wilson suggested in a lecture this morning (I am grotesquely simplifying her argument here) that perhaps Braque picked up on this fixation when he followed Cezanne to the Midi, and thus cubism was born.

Georges Braque Le Viaduc à L’Estaque (1908)

The possible significance of quarries to these artists is beyond me this evening, but perhaps I wouldn't be far wrong if I suggested something about the importance of the unearthing of pure cuboid forms from the organic landscape, and the equation of excavation and the search for form.

Rosenthal Names His Assassins

2008-02-26T01:39:00.000-08:00

Well, he doesn't actually name them (apart from Charles Saumarez-Smith. It looks like Jonathan Jones was right). The Art Newspaper has the story here.

JG Ballard

2008-02-14T01:55:00.001-08:00

JG Ballard, probably England's greatest living writer, has published an autobiography, Miracles of Life. Having listened to a couple of excerpts on Radio 4, it seems a painfully honest book - not least because Ballard has announced that he is in the advanced stages of cancer.

Vanessa Beechcroft: 'not just fetishization of the blacks'

2008-02-05T13:37:00.000-08:00

Vanessa Beechcroft VB55 (Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2005)

Vanessa Beechcroft, the artist best known for getting lots of models to hang around naked in art galleries, usually makes me sympathize with Andrea Dworkin. And I hate Dworkin. Now she's gone one step further down the road of incredible inanity: she's adopting Sudanese babies as an artwork. According to New York Magazine, which was reviewing a documentary of her work shown at Sundance last month:

"Upon her arrival in the Sudan, Beecroft hurries to set up a photo shoot, hiding the cameras from the orphanage's sisters, calling the babies “these poor creatures.” Which baby should she photograph? “Either one or the other,” she says, “it doesn’t matter.”

Repeatedly, Beecroft claims that she “loves this culture” — but, in the film’s most disturbing scene, sisters from the orphanage try to stop her from stripping the children nude inside their abbey for an elaborate photo shoot. Beecroft refuses, complains, starts shooting again, and eventually loses a physical confrontation with one of the sisters, who takes the children away from her, furious that Beecroft is stripping children naked inside a church. “Christ, these people,” Beecroft moans, as she barricades herself inside, pushing a pew up against the door to keep the sisters out of their own abbey."

Wow.

Warhol Photographs

2008-02-04T12:59:00.000-08:00

Untitled (1976-1986)

Timothy Taylor is currently showing a selection of 'unknown' photographs taken by Andy Warhol in the last decade of his life. They were probably printed by Christopher Makos, although the otherwise very helpful gallery manager wasn't sure about this. As eny fule kno, Warhol only picked up the camera himself in the 70s, but he compensated for his tardiness by photographing nearly everything he saw. His camera became the replacement for his beloved tape recorder, which had been his constant companion in the 60s/70s as a sort of mechanical intermediary with which he could filter, process and ultimately hold at bay the world.

These pictures may seem somewhat ephemeral, but photography was central to Warhol's practice - his 'paintings' were, after all, the result of a photographic silk screen process. I am personally more keen on the photographs which he stitched together in multiples, which have more content and seem closer, in their use of serial repetition, to his major works. However, these images are still extremely interesting, as they give you the Warhol perspective on everyday life, and also on a peculiar moment in Western culture - the birth of 'late Capitalism'. Speaking of capitalism, Warhol is still a rising market: does anyone fancy buying me the beer bottles? They were still unsold when I was at the gallery on Saturday, and they only cost $12,000. It's my birthday soon...

Air France Concorde (1976-1986)

Burtynsky: Quarries

2008-02-04T12:00:00.000-08:00

China Quarries #8, Xiamen, Fujian Province (2004)

Flowers Central had some of Edward Burtynsky's Quarries series on display last month. Most of these were from the marble quarries at Carrara, the source of Michelangelo's stone; one photograph was from Xiamen, the island in south China where I once lived. I used to drive through this area on my way to teach English in the hinterland of Fujian province, but never saw the sculptures being carved there - all we would see was an enormous, apparently petrified landscape, as the rock dust from the quarries had spread out to coat the entire countryside and everything in it with a grey blanket. We would have to close the windows to stop the car filling with the dust. Unsurprisingly, none of the stone workers in the picture are wearing protective masks.

Iberia Quarries # 3, Bencatel, Portugal(2006)

The other pictures have a more formal beauty, such as this one from Portugal, which looks rather like a Vorticist painting. Others show blocks in the process of being carved out from the land: this creates a strange impression of a monumental ancient building recently discovered, perhaps a kind of inverted ziggurat (like something out of an HP Lovecraft story):

Iberia Quarries # 1, Borba, Portugal(2006)

Burtynsky described the gestation of the project: "I remember looking at buildings made of stone and thinking, 'there has to be an interesting landscape somewhere out there, because these stones had to have been taken out of the quarry one block at a time.' I had never seen a dimensional quarry, but I envisioned an inverted cubed architecture on the side of a hill. I went in search of it and when I had it on my ground glass, I knew that I had arrived."

The Mystery of the Diamond Skull

2008-01-31T13:15:00.001-08:00

Damien Hirst's sculpture For the Love of God was sold last year by White Cube for £50m to a mysterious consortium of anonymous collectors, according to Hirst's business manager. However, rumours have been circulating for some time that this 'group of investors' were none other than Hirst and Jay Jopling, who had staged the whole exercise in order to massage the price of Hirst's products (I mean, his art works). Hirst and Jopling firmly denied this at the time, but the Art Newspaper now claims to have conclusive proof; the skull, which is to go on a world tour this year (beginning with a show at the Hermitage Museum), has been fully insured by White Cube. As the Art Newspaper helpfully explains:

"Under UK law only a party with “an insurable interest” in a work of art can arrange an insurance policy for it. A person generally has an “insurable interest” in something when loss or damage to it would cause that person to suffer a financial loss.

According to a senior source in the insurance industry in London, White Cube’s name appears on the insurance policy for For the Love of God. The insurance has been arranged through the brokers Willis with Hiscox as the lead underwriters and seven other Lloyd’s syndicates also underwriting the deal. The skull has been insured for £50m."

Of course, dealers have long been in the habit of artificially sustaining prices by anonymously bidding at auction, but if the Art Newspaper is correct Hirst has turned what used to be a shady back-room process into an Event. Andy Warhol once said, 'making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art'; he would have thought Hirst a very good artist indeed - perhaps even a genius.

Norman Rosenthal leaves RA because of Charles Saumarez-Smith

2008-01-31T07:22:00.000-08:00

Well, that's what Jonathan Jones thinks. He adds in characteristically pugnacious style that "Saumarez Smith's record suggests an effete, middlebrow sensibility." Well... maybe. I do agree, however, with Jones when he speculates that Rosenthal's successor will be unlikely to have the wherewithal to continue his mission of modernising the RA. Let's not forget his amazing record, which included shows like the Aztecs, and of course, Sensation.

Katy Grannan

2008-01-31T03:22:00.004-08:00

I really love these striking images by Katy Grannan, showing people in the sort of hysterical moment that exists on the cusp of happiness and disintegration. Apparently Grannan seeks out subjects in the most peculiar situations - you can read a little more about her on gallerist James Danziger's blog, and see some more of her pictures here. Bizarrely, they instantly reminded me of Calvin Klein Jeans' latest campaign, which has been all over the buses in London recently:

I found these adverts intriguing in a sort of horrifying way. Why advertise jeans with pictures of people feigning mental illness? I can only conclude (with relief) that I'm not the target demographic for this product.

Tod Papageorge at Michael Hoppen

2008-01-25T14:30:00.000-08:00

Tod Papageorge Central Park (1981)

Michael Hoppen Gallery is hosting Tod Papageorge's first solo show in the UK in March.

Papageorge is an important figure for several reasons -one of the giants of the American photography scene (but not especially well known for his own work), he was associated with Szarkowki, Meyerowitz and Winogrand, and has directed the uniquely fertile photography programme at Yale for many years. But this has all been discussed far more engagingly by Alec Soth, who had a bit of a fixation with him when he was still writing his fascinating blog.

Li Zhensheng

2008-01-25T13:22:00.001-08:00

This photograph, taken by Chinese photographer Li Zhensheng, shows the ritual humiliation of a CCP official during the cultural revolution. The official in question was Rhen Zhongyi, who went on to become a pivotal figure in the capitalist development of Guangzhou province. Li's life and photographs are discussed in more detail on Colin Pantall's interesting blog.

Another year, another art fair

2008-01-24T12:20:00.001-08:00

Returning to college has radically limited the amount of time I have to spend writing about art - considering the fact that I'm studying art history, this is perhaps somewhat ironic.

I went to London Art Fair at the weekend and discovered a world of cretinacy, mental troglodytism and lathe-turned moronity. The general impression of a trade fair for an industry utterly useless to the advancement of civilization was not relieved by the designer bathroom salesrooms which line the venue - they were closed on Sunday, but I suppose they must occupy Islington's Business Design Centre when it not hosting 'real art'. At least bathrooms are useful, which is more than I can say for this stuff, which was neither useful, nor interesting, nor attractive:

I didn't make a note of the artist, but you don't really want to know, do you? I can imagine David Furnish buying this for Elton for his birthday.

The fair's one saving grace was the decision by the organisers to invite students from Goldsmiths to curate a couple of exhibition areas, including one devoted to photography, which included the work of Nick Waplington (who currently has a very cheap edition available through the Whitechapel), Corinne Day, and Jason Oddy, whose pictures of 'Seats of Power' I particularly liked. It is hard to find more information about Oddy, but you can see some examples of his work in an old issue of seesaw magazine.

Jason Oddy Untitled Livadia Sanatorium, Yalta, Ukraine (1999)

Anti-Frieze

2007-10-28T04:46:00.000-07:00

I sometimes wonder 'what is the point in art fairs?'. I know gallerists need a holiday sometimes, but wouldn't they prefer to have a break from art too?

Luc Tuymans Bouhouche (2007)

Frieze art fair - it's enormous, and full of mediocrity. Most of the works on show this year were bad paintings, and most of the bad paintings were poor imitations of Luc Tuymans. There was even one real Tuymans, but it was not a very memorable one (David Zwirner sold it for $500,000). There was also a lot of bad Chinese painting, usually in the Communist Pop idiom that is so enduringly popular with non-Chinese buyers.

There were some islands of beauty in this sea of wasted oil; I was particularly pleased to see photographs by Ed Ruscha, whose seminal series Swimming Pools and Thirty-four Parking Lots in Los Angeles were being shown by Spruth Magers. Ruscha invented serial conceptual photography, and he really makes it work - Swimming Pools is particularly impressive: after looking at the grid for a while the amorphous blue pools become abstract forms which seem to float against the yellowing background of LA back yards.

Ed Ruscha Nine Swimming Pools (1968)

The Dusseldorfers were well represented - nearly every picture from Candida Hofer's recent show at Ben Brown was available at Frieze, and it seemed that nearly every gallery had one of Thomas Ruff's pixellated porno images. I'm not terribly keen on these, but Mai 36 Gallery also had two older Ruffs, which were on the carpet, leaning against the wall. They looked tiny and forlorn, but they were really much better than his more recent work. Lisson had an entrancing Paradise photo by Thomas Struth, along with some great images by Richard Wentworth, which were rather annoyingly displayed on an gimicky aluminium shelf. Anthony Reynolds had a nice picture of some glacee cherries on a pavement in New Orleans by Paul Graham.

Paul Graham from the series 'A Shimmer of Possibilty' (2006)

There were some fairly idiotic ideas - Galerie Almine Rech had commissioned Hedi Slimane to curate their stand, which was full of black and silver artworks, and consequentially looked like a Dior Homme boutique. Gavin Brown transformed their unit into a kind of art flea market, complete with loud rock music and ageing hipsters with their unbearable children.

Every year Frieze commissions a few artists to create pieces specifically for the fair, and this year's big name was Richard Prince, who put a souped-up yellow Dodge on a rotating plinth accompanied by a young lady wearing Doc Martens. When I saw it the young lady was missing, which possibly improved the piece - anyway, I really enjoyed it, depite the rather obvious message of 'art fair as trade fair'. It may have been the most beautiful work in the show - and I think the credit for that should go to the engineers at Dodge.

Richard Prince Untitled (2007)

Candida Hofer

2007-10-01T05:56:00.000-07:00

Candida Hofer, one of the 'Dusseldorf School' of photographers who were taught by the Bechers in the late 1970s, has been showing some recent works at Ben Brown. I had not seen her pictures in the flesh before, and as with all current large scale photography you really must see it somewhere other than on a computer screen or magazine page for it to have the intended effect. And these pictures are very effective: I don't think I have ever seen Gothic space captured more convincingly.

Candida Hofer 'Mosteiro dos Jerónimos Lisboa II' (2005)

Like many of the Neue Neue Sachlichkeit photographers, she constantly returns to the subject of vacant achitectural spaces with repetitive motifs: theatres and their empty boxes; churches and their columns; libraries and the spines of books, and so on. It may be that there is little else to her work than this decorative repetition, as some have suggested. Her images certainly feel less purposeful than those of some of her contemporaries working in a similar style, an impression which is hardly dispelled by her unfortunate artists' statement. However, standing in front of the photograph of the Church in Lisbon, I find myself forgetting about these questions.

Francis Bacon: Under the Influence

2007-09-25T17:01:00.000-07:00

Francis Bacon gets very drunk on the South Bank Show and talks about art (thanks Elly).

Fotofest 2008

2007-09-25T04:37:00.000-07:00

The Fotofest Biennial, which takes place next spring in Houston, is to have a Chinese theme.
Last year Fotofest Beijing showed some of my favourite Chinese photographers, so it seems likely that they will have some interesting (and extremely high quality) work on display. Here are a few highlights from the Beijing show:

Zhu Hao

Han Lei

Shum Dustin

Luo Dan

Stephen Shore Interview

2007-09-25T03:48:00.000-07:00

Joerg Colberg interviews Stephen Shore on Conscientious.

The (Lost) Art of Art History

2007-09-24T08:16:00.001-07:00

"Although Johann Joachim Winckelmann is often called "the father of modern art history," that paternal claim belongs by now to another generation. For the German-educated refugees who escaped to London and the United States before World War II and effectively created the discipline of art history for the English-speaking world, Winckelmann, a German resident in Italy in the eighteenth century, was certainly a symbolic father for their own displacement and their own passions. Like Winckelmann, the bibliophile banker Aby Warburg, the onetime lawyer Erwin Panofsky, and the art historians Fritz Saxl, Ernst Gombrich, and Richard Krautheimer all believed that the study of art was an activity for everyone, an enterprise to be communicated to a greater public with the utmost clarity, enthusiasm, and wit. And this they (and many others) did, both in their native German and in their adopted language, to memorable effect.

That generation of mid-twentieth-century refugees was a generation of intellectual giants, and like most giants they were also tyrants. It is not entirely surprising that their much-put-upon successors have followed their lead with less than perfect docility. Superbly educated in a plethora of languages ancient and modern, those elders of the twentieth-century diaspora had learned how to use language as a means of persuasion. Their epigones, less confidently erudite, often use words to shield their own insecurity, bandying about terms like "ekphrasis" when "description" will do, creating such lumbering Greco-Latin sports as "contextualize," or transferring Platonic abstractions such as "the good" uncomfortably to English (...)

No useful connection, paternal or philosophical, can link the piercing clarity of Winckelmann's ideas to academic art history's current penchant for simplistic thought clad in pompous language. As Winckelmann himself observed of such "debased taste" in another era: "Its prime attribute was the pestilence that in our time is called pedantry. [Poets] strove to appear more the scholar than the poet and to establish themselves with archaic and foreign words and expressions...to appear possessed rather than inspired and to be understood after sweat and tears rather than to please." There is much to be said, therefore, for having History of the Art of Antiquity in English, as limpid and persuasive in Harry Francis Mallgrave's translation as Winckelmann is in his own German. Two and a half centuries on, his writing is still a breath of fresh Enlightenment air."

Read the rest of the review of a new translation of Winckelmann's History of the Art of Antiquity here.

Acanthus

2007-09-22T11:46:00.001-07:00

An acanthus is growing in the garden. The leaves of this plant, which is a kind of thistle indigenous to the Mediterranean, were used in a stylised form by Greek masons on the capitals of Corinthian columns. To my surprise I recently discovered that they also appear in some Gothic architecture: in England they can be seen on the capitals of piers in Canterbury cathedral. This is just one example of the many crossovers between Classical and Gothic architecture; however, instead of acanthus leaves British architects generally tended to use more local plants, such as the buttercups, hops and hawthorn which appear on the beautifully naturalistic capitals of Southwell cathedral.

A classical Corinthian capital

Capital and base from Canterbury cathedral

A capital from Southwell cathedral

The question is, do these varying types of floral ornament reveal anything about the cultures which carved them? Perhaps the truth is that 'applied art' is not an expressive medium in the sense that we Post-Romantics generally understand the phrase. As Gombrich puts it in Meditations on a Hobby Horse, "copying nature was not his (the Gothic mason's) aim (...) but rather the re-employment of a stock of forms, the characters of a pictographic system, derived from classical antiquity." But Gombrich also gives a wonderful hypothetical example of how any medium can become expressive:

"Let us think of a correspondent who writes regular letters overseas at the present postage rate of sixpence. One day, in a receptive state of mind, he is struck by the prosy purple colour of the sixpenny stamp and, being in a playful mood, he casts around for other combinations that would express his feelings more adequately. Needless to say, the recipient might never notice this deviation from the norm if he were not told of the birth of a new art form. But once the stage is set, our players could start the game. Their medium consists of ten denominations of stamps - 1/2d., orange; 1d., blue; 1 1/2d., green; 2d., brown; 2 1/2d., red; 3d., purple; 4d., light blue; 4 1/2d., light red; 5d., light brown; 6d., light purple. Both financial prudence and a sense of form impose the rule of affixing the right amount. Even within this limiting rule, however, there are no less than six choices of uniform colours (...) which might reflect quite a variety of moods - 'reflect', that is, for the partner who would appreciate the message of three brown stamps as about the drabbest that could be selected. Given such a partner, he would surely and rightly expect a splendid piece of news when he saw the envelope decorated with a maximum of variety (...) Only a reckless fit of fury, however, would break through the rules altogether and affix three red stamps at the gratuitous expense of 1 1/2d.''

This brings to mind the mail art created by various members of the Fluxus group. More interestingly, it points out that no communicative system can be effective unless the audience is au fait with the code.

Some of the more interesting recent photography plays on this sense of a lost communicative code - I am thinking here especially of Friedlander, and perhaps also of Eggleston. Looking at their pictures one gets the uncanny feeling that something is being precisely communicated by the angle of a lamp post, or by the semaphoric juxtaposition of coloured soft furnishings, but that we, unpossessed of the code, will remain unenlightened. I think that this is the truest sense in which photography is 'intrinsically surrealistic', as Susan Sontag puts it. Note also the corinthian capital on the lamppost in the photograph below:

Lee Friedlander Chicago (1966)

Bacon Retrospective

2007-09-22T11:43:00.000-07:00

The Tate is planning a Francis Bacon retrospective for October 2008. It will be his first major British retrospective since 1985.

Zhang Yan

2007-09-21T06:26:00.001-07:00

Zhang Yan's photographs capture the dusty colours of Chinese cities, and the solitary spaces within them.

There is a recent (if fairly uninformative) interview with him here.

from the series Beijing

Photographer, Interrupted

2007-09-21T01:06:00.000-07:00

Keith Arnatt is probably best known for his performances of the late 1960s, which he documented in photographic series: for example, his most reproduced work, The Artist Submerged (1969), is a grid of images showing the artist sinking into the earth – a resurrection in reverse. This seems a direct homage to Sol LeWitt, both in form and content; LeWitt was one of the pioneers of serially displayed conceptual photography, and had in the previous year documented his interment of a metal box with unnamed contents in the piece The Buried Cube.

Sol LeWitt The Buried Cube (1968)

Keith Arnatt The Artist Submerged(1969)

Vestiges of LeWitt’s stylistic influence can still be felt in Arnatt’s later work, as he moved away from performance-based photography in the 1970s. I’m a Real Photographer, an exhibition at The Photographer’s Gallery last month, focused on this more obscure (but currently more fashionable) period of his career. Arnatt retained the serial presentation but became increasingly concerned with the photograph as an object in itself, a development which culminates in Pictures from a Rubbish Tip (1988-89), a series of beautiful large format photographs of chicken bones, polythene and other detritus, which form queasy still-life compositions. These images are best contemplated on a purely visual level; the concept behind them seems to be a rather flimsy aside about our profligate culture, and the ambiguous beauty created by our wastefulness. Edward Burtynsky also does this, but on a much grander scale.

Keith Arnatt Pictures From a Rubbish Tip (1988-89)

Also particularly good was a series of Cardboard Boxes, which had a formal purity well suited to exploration in the serial format. As with most of Arnatt’s work, there is a humorous dimension to this series – the boxes, modular, stacked in various different combinations, resemble nothing so much as minimalist conceptual sculpture. This comic element does sometimes descend into flippancy - the series of dog turds is particularly silly, and this prevents one from thinking of Arnatt as anything more than an interesting footnote - but in this piece it seems well judged. However, the impact of the work was seriously compromised by the decision to show only four images from the series. One would think that a primary reason for creating serial pieces is, as in the Bechers’ works, to create a repetitive rhythm of images which encourage us to view the things portrayed on a formal or taxonomic level. I am slightly ambivalent about the popularity of the serial format – too often it is resorted to in the absence of individually arresting images – but it seems perverse to display a series which has been conceived of as a whole in such a reduced state.

This clumsy, buffet-style curating (‘a little bit of everything’) was the downfall of the show; many of the works were shown in similarly edited forms, which may have been necessitated by space considerations, but would it not have been better to show one or two series in their entirety? Of course it would then have been impossible to bill the show as a retrospective of 'undiscovered' works by an otherwise well-known artist. Perhaps when The Photographers’ Gallery moves to larger premises on Ramillies Street there will be room for a more inclusive approach.

How Andy puts his Warhol on

2007-09-20T07:57:00.000-07:00

Stephen Shore's The Velvet Years show at the Sprueth Magers Gallery last month gave an interesting glimpse of two artists finding their mature personae - an insight into what Warhol called "How Andy puts his Warhol on".

Stephen Shore Andy Warhol (1965)

These relatively unguarded shots were taken before the Warhol mask froze, a transformation which is usually attributed to his near-death experience at the hands of Valerie Solanis. Shore (who was 17 when he took the pictures) explains in an interview that he was closer to Warhol than most of the Factory crowd, perhaps because "he didn't want anything from me. I wasn't one of his actors and there was really no need for him to be manipulative with me", and this intimacy seems to have contributed to the unusual candour of the images.

The pictures themselves, besides being interesting as a contribution to the taxonomy of the Factory, sometimes prefigure the severe compositional style of Shore's later work.

Stephen Shore Andy Warhol, Marie Menken (1965)

Stephen Shore Holden Street, North Adams, Massachusetts, 7/13/1974

"A New Low": Jonathan Jones Reviewed

2007-09-20T01:42:00.000-07:00

In yesterday's Guardian Jonathan Jones gave Gary Hume's new show one of the worst reviews I have ever seen, describing the painter as "a tiny artist trapped in the empty wastes of his own style". Although it is refreshing to see such a critical review of contemporary art in the Guardian, which is often fairly toothless (I am thinking especially of Adrian Searle), the tone does border on vitriolic. Is this degree of censure really necessary for someone who was always essentially a decorative artist? Aren't there many more pompous and more successful artists who deserve the same treatment?

To be fair, Jones is not generally given to blind adulation of established artists. He goes on to ask "after all, what is British art now? Some pretentious public sculpture that connives with popular delusions of omniscience. " I imagine that he is referring here to Anthony Gormley, of whom Jones once memorably said that "(he) can wank on a piece of paper and get it exhibited at the British Museum", a reference to his appalling exhibition of drawings in 2002.

In today's Guardian Jones reviews Matthew Barney's new exhibition at the Serpentine. Jones wrote one of the better broadsheet reviews of the Cremaster films, but seems not to be quite so impressed by Barney's more recent work. Anyway, I can't wait to see this exhibition.

Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 9 (2005)

The Invisible Artist

2007-09-19T04:03:00.000-07:00

Last night Modern Art Oxford hosted a conversation between Stella Vine, who is currently showing her paintings at the gallery, and Germaine Greer, who wrote the introductory essay for the catalogue. Or at least that was how the evening was advertised - but Stella Vine did not show up. Germaine Greer was left to entertain herself, a task for which she is amply qualified. I left some time before the end, just as she was explaining why female artists have historically tended to go mad (apparently they are unable to square the traditional female role of 'muse' with that of 'creator').

Vine was not at the opening of the show either, which leads me to wonder: is Stella Vine the J T Leroy of the art world? Does she exist, or is the concept 'Stella Vine' a kind of elaborate (and very lucrative) practical joke?

Stella Vine, In it for the Money (2005)