I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Friday, December 25, 2009
The year did not so much end as collapse, amidst scenes of the entire transport infrastructure failing. Viewed from inside, the weather was rather beautiful with the snow gleaming as the skies cleared and the sun shone. Viewed from outside, the affair looked like something from an apocalyptic science fiction film, with the blizzard reducing buildings to barely discernible grey silhouettes. It was probably quite appropriate that the BBC chose this year to broadcast a remake of Day of the Triffids (with The Road being released shortly, realism and science fiction seem to be enjoying something of a rapprochement). Finally arriving in the Midlands, I find the place shrouded in fog. Lichfield Cathedral looms out of the whiteness like some strange creation from a David Friedrich. Later after the snows had gone, I went to visit Waverley Abbey in Surrey; ironically one of the film locations for 28 Days Later. It certainly has a rather bereft feel to it. On the one hand, there are the ruins of the abbey itself, representing a destroyed part of society. On the other, there are the crumbling defensive formations from the second world war. The riverbank is lined with concrete dragon's teeth, smothered in moss while large redbrick pillboxes face towards the ruins, themselves buried in ivy.
Back in London, I'd revisited Apsley House. The enormous statue of Napoleon by Canova, wonderful as it may be, leaves me rather reminded of Soviet statues of Lenin and Stalin (Napoleon was at least rather embarrassed by it). The same applies to the nearby statues of Wellington himself, of course. We later visit the the new Medieval and Renaissance galleries at the V&A; things like Della Robbia lunettes, the Casa Maffi ceiling, the Hertogenbosch choirscreen, Paul Pindar's house, a Donatello influenced sarcophagus, Limoges cloisonne reliquaries and a French salt cellar shaped like a boat and made from a nautilus shell. I wonder somewhat as to how long it will be before we see anything else like this being opened, given the inevitable funding cuts coming this year. Later on, I visit the British Museum's Moctezuma exhibition. Not quite as impressive as the Royal Academy's Aztects exhibition of a few years ago, it was particularly noteworthy for showing Spanish paintings of Moctezuma and of the events ensuing from the arrival of Cortes, as well as showcasing a number of Mexeca codices and European histories. The problem is that while the exhibition painted a suitably vivid picture of the Mexeca themselves, much of the detail about Moctezuma himself is rather speculative. It's difficult to discern why he went from being a ruthless general to a craven appeaser of the Spanish invaders and conjecture that he was murdered by the Spanish rather than meeting his end at the hands of his own people does little to help matters. Equally, the attitude towards the Mexeca themselves is an ambivalent one; the post-colonial narrative of a people destroyed by a foreign occupation sits poorly with the fact that the Mexeca were essentially undone by an uprising of the peoples they had themselves oppressed (albeit an uprising orchestrated by the Spanish, who had lacked sufficient numbers otherwise even when their use of horses and guns were taken into account). Beautiful objects like the obsidian mirrors, feathered serpents and feathered fans are offset of stone eagles used to contain human hearts, turquoise skull masks, ceramics with flayed skull designs protruding or by stone skulls. The most impressive exhibit is a stone sculpture dedicated to warfare; rather resembling a throne it stood at the centre of the Reading Room, towering over everything else around it. I also briefly visited the National Gallery, mostly to look at Botticelli's Mystic Nativity; I rather decide I prefer his portraiture, but am rather impressed by some of Crivelli's works. The embedding of physical objects into the paintings seems to challenge the distinction of arts and crafts.
The protagonist of Roberto Bolano's 2666 takes his name from the Italian painter Arcimboldo, with a somewhat crude parallel between the composites that form a common figure in his paintings to the composite formed by the parallel narratives in the novel. The interesting point is whether the novel does actually form a composite at all, given its interest in the impenetrability of meaning, as with Amalfitanio's drawing of disgrams that he himself does not understand; "something the voice in the dream called 'history broken down' or 'history taken apart and put back together,' although clearly the reassembled history became something else." Where a novel like The Savage Detective revolved around the quest of its protagonists, 2666 has no centre as such. It simply guestures towards a figure of meaning lost in the distance ("No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them."), veering between the idea of literature as a means of arresting death ("an old book is the past.. its author no longer exists") and the idea of writing as failing to transparently convey meaning. In this respect, it reminds me of the idea in Bayley's The Uses of Division that it is often the most flawed and imperfect works that have the greatest interest. Bolano seems to guesture in this direction when he makes Amalfitano think that a young pharmacist is; "afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works... they choose the perfect exercises of the great masters." Certainly, Bolano's conception of the novel is one of enormity and polyphony, as when he describes a writer's prose; "encapsulates all of Chile's styles, it also represented all of its political factions."
While much of the narratives are conducted in a mode familiar from realist fiction, the preoccupation with science fiction in the final narrative suggests a wider set of preoccupations, particularly given that the reading of Boris Ansky's writing that represents a point of turning for Reiter. The novel persistently hints at Platonic or Kabbalistic concepts of the fantastic; "the search for some 'mysterious numbers' hidden in a part of the vast landscape." Similarly, Amalfitano believes that "when a person was in Barcelona , the people living and present in Bueons Aires and Mexico City didn't exist." Reiter becomes obsessed with the illusory nature of appearances, wondering if he and his friend Hugo had been the same person; "he began to think about semblance... semblance was an occupying force of reality" The idea of doubles recurs throughout; Hans and Hugo, Boris and Hans, Hans and Benno; "the Swabian was a grotesque double of Archimboldi, his twin, the negative image." Certainly, many of the characters seem to think the same thoughts and dream the same dreams. Archimboldi ponders alternate realities where either everything is static or where even the inanimate have velocity, just as Espinoza ponders a condition "as if they were living in a world different from ours, where speed was different, a kind of speed that looked to Espinoza like slowness, although he knew it was only the slowness that kept whoever watched from losing his mind." The characters are more symbolic creations here than in The Savage Detective, as with comparisons to Sisyphus or to Reiter's erasure of his old identity when be becomes Archimboldi.
Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms is something of an odd anachronism. In contrast to The City and the Pillar, Giovanni's Room or even Maurice which all paint a gay identity we can still recognise today, the one shown by Capote harks back more to the sort of ideas found in the The Well of Loneliness. The ephebian protagonist Paul is mirrored on either side, in one instance by the tomboyish and obviously lesbian Idabel and on the other by the Wildean Randolph. Randolph embodies conventional gay stereotypes; an effeminate transvestite who pines for a brutal heterosexual lover. In choosing to love Randolph, Paul does suggest that gay love is possible and that gay men are not simply pitiable creatures doomed to look with longing on straight men, but the novel nonetheless works by subverting such stereotypes rather than reject them completely.
I recall it being observed that Ireland has Swift and Joyce while England had Eliot and Thackeray. The latter had a stable and autonomous society, the absence of which left the former needing a less realist style of narration. Something similar seems to apply to much Central European literature; the likes of Grabinski, Kafka and Schulz all sharing a penchant for the fantastic, with both Kafka and Schulz writing tales in which a character metamorphoses into an animal. Bakhtin's concept of carnival is perhaps useful here; Schulz's concept of fantasy is a rather materialist one ("the demiurge was in love with consummate, superb and complicated materials; we shall give priority to trash.") that is concerned about the alienation of the familiar rather than with the mythological of transcendental; "one's imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of familiar districts." Nonetheless, Schulz opposes this concept materialistic fantasy to certain quotidian concepts; "the spirit of the times, the mechanism of economics, had not escaped our city... pseudo-Americanism, grafted on the old crumbling core of the city." As with Bakhtin's idea of carnival, Schulz's fantasy is an inversion of, or escape from, the normal order, as with the barrel organs that Schulz describes as "belonging by right to that dreaming, inward-looking day." Similarly, Roth's What I Saw: Reports From Berlin reads like an extended version of the Futurist Manifesto retold as a series of feuilletons; "I am filled with awe at the omnipotence of human technology." But at the same time, his technophilia is given some rather odd slants, as when he describes the invention of the airplane as the fraternisation of man and the birds. In his final essay, Roth speaks of how Jews had depicted Germany as it really is in their art while German writers had stuck to parochial ideas of pastoral. The point is well made but Roth is not exactly immune from romantic concepts of nature and his descriptions of Berlin's pleasure industry is replete with references to 'infernal machines' and 'industrialised merriment.'
Twilight and New Moon seem a rather odd addition to Vampire mythology.
Although much has been made of the fact that their author is a Mormon, with an analogy being drawn between the 'vegetarian vampires' and American ideas of sexual abstinence, the novel seems more confused than that. A lot of the novel's concepts seem more new age than christian, as with the vegetarianism concept or Edward's comment that they try not to impact on the environment with their hunting. Instead of a view of vampires as damned, the novels alternate between a view of them as being as capable of moral redemption as humans. The story of Carlisle's background typifies this; his father is described as the epitome of religious intolerance but the evil he believes in is frequently depicted as being real enough. Edward suggests that the same god could have made them as made both the lion and the lamb, a rather odd concept that suggests a god of evil as much as good. Edward believes they are soulless and damned, while Carlisle believes they are capable of redemption; both seem to believe in god, while Bella does not. It's a rather confused sort of theology, not really helped by the novel's rather rapacious materialism, with scores of enthused descriptions of the Cullen's designer clothes and expensive cars.Labels: England, Literature, London, Weather
posted by Richard 3:39 AM
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Oxford is beautiful in the autumn. As the sun is alternately hidden and revealed behind the clouds, the stone switches from yellow to grey. Flowers remain on the stalk, ossified into place as leaves fall from the trees into the mud below. The church of St Michael in Begbroke is a rather small affair, rendered noteworthy by its Romanesque arches and its sixteenth century stained glass; I especially like a plate showing Saint Barbara with a Brueghelesque landscape behind her. I'm also rather struck by some rather militant looking angels as corbels on the windows outside. The nearby St Bartholomew in Yarnton is more impressive. A black cat looks at me suspiciously from its gravestone perch in the overgrown churchyard as I enter. Many of the tombs are from the baroque period, with ornate details of skulls and cherubs crumbling beneath the layers of lichen. Here too, the stained glass is especially impressive, with such strange details as Seraphs and All Seeing Eyes. A pair of baroque and medieval tombs for the same family also draw my attention.
Reading Berlin Alexanderplatz after watching Fassbinder's television adaptation is a strange experience. In many respects, the novel counts as a Schopenhauerian fable concerning the extinction of Franz's will (or a religious fable, given the presence of Death and his Angels), but the fable is very far from occupying much of the novel. Biblical allegories proliferate throughout the novel, but the ideology behind them often seems far from Biblical; for example, it would have been very easy to present Mieze as receiving the due punishment for a fallen woman but Doblin deliberately states that she does not deserve her fate. In formalist terms, the fabula and syuzhet have diverged; where novels like The Trial deliberately deny meaning, Berlin Alexanderplatz has a surplus of it. As Doblin puts it early on in the novel, it's as if we see events from behind a lens which switches from close-up to wide-angle and back again throughout. As such, the novel ranges from Franz's story to counterpointed exemplars of Berlin life (at one point Doblin notes that "we all have different natures and lives, in kind, in future and destiny we are all different"), related through monologue to excepts from the popular press and songs. In short, it's heteroglossic in the true sense of Bakhtin's term (as well as polyphonic, particularly in the scenes where Franz argues with the narrator), assimilating different media and registers into itself. Part of the purpose of this seems to be to critique Nietzsche's idea of the superman and suggest a concept of the interconnectedness of existence, with Doblin presenting himself as as anti-subjectivist. Throughout Franz appears unconcerned with others, wondering if he can sell the Volkische Beobachter to his Jewish friends before introducing to Mieze to her downfall in the form of Reinhold; "what do these people want anyway, first the fairies, who don't concern me, and now the reds?" This is something that often seems to recur in Franz's arguments with Berlin's Marxists; "you can't do anything alone." But the character voicing that sentiment also denies the idea of a higher being, which sits oddly in so metaphysical a novel; Marxism seems to emerge as one of many wills to power, that upset both Franz's existence and the narrator's ideas alike ("somebody had told him all about communism; to the effect that it's nothing at all and that a reasonable man believes only in Nietzsche"); for example, the novel's ending casts Death as winning over the Whore of Babylon. But Death is also the warmonger, and the foreshadowing of the war at the end casts a very ambiguous status on this victory.Labels: Literature, Oxford
posted by Richard 11:33 AM
Sunday, October 25, 2009
It's often easy to base artistic judgements against an illusory parallel with technological progress, so that modernist experimentation became the artistic standard par excellence of the twentieth century. Today we might well regard more atypical figures like Grossman or Shostakovich as being of equal or better merit to Schoenberg or Joyce. Similarly, the fact that the Pre-Raphaelites had reverted to a medievalistic conception of art as impressionism dawned in Europe or that Austen's novels were all written against the backdrop of early romanticism seems largely inconsequential. It was difficult not to think of things like this as I went round the National Gallery's exhibition of Spanish art. As with its earlier exhibition on Siennese art, the gallery seems keen to revive interest in minority subjects and this is a particularly acute example.
While medieval art routinely carved wooden sculptures for churches, the renaissance and reformation saw a trend towards carving statues from stone, leaving them unpainted in pure white, out of a mistaken notion that the Greeks and Romans had not painted their statues. In Spain though, the tradition of painting wooden sculpture continued unabated alongside increasingly realistic techniques of portrait painting. Paintings from the likes of Velasquez and Zurbaran deploy the same methods as Caravaggio and Veronese but retain all the hallmarks of artifice. Both painters add captions, writing and legends to their painters to destroy the impression of verisimilitude. Zurbaran tends to pose his things in stark white light against a dark black backdrop, as if the painting was a stage set. The sculptures seem eerily lifelike in comparison to Canova or Thorvaldsen, with eyelashes made out of hair, teeth from ivory and real clothing stiffened with glue used alongside glass eyes and tears. The sculptures would have had their clothing changed and be taken out for ceremonial processions; they were not simply static objects in galleries or museums. The rich detailing is often wonderful; the Virgin Mary by Montanes is a blaze of polychromatic colour. Equally though, the gory horror of some of the sculptures is frequently appalling; the severed neck of John the Baptist is rendered in anatomically correct detail while countless Christs are depicted in bathed in blood, their bodies pierced and lacerated. The images seen in glass cases below the altar in Catholic churches take centre stage here, like something from a casualty ward. Zurbaran's painting of St Serapion, who appears to be simply asleep comes as a relief from the horror. I leaving not doubting the artistic merit of the works but feeling glad their have been consigned as a historical relic and a matter of obscurity.
The logic behind the Royal Academy's exhibition on Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska and Gill is presumably that of artistic parallels between three contemporaries, but it is somewhat difficult to leave the exhibition convinced that the three have a great deal in common. Gill and Epstein shared a notion of 'direct carving' but Gill's work seems more difficult to place, better connected to Blake and Palmer than Brancusi or Duchamp. The sexual politics of his work seem especially difficult to fathom; Ecstasy must have been one of the explicit paeans to sexual pleasure for thousands of years in Europe, but it sits alongside several Madonnas and Child. His religion and sexuality seem to combine in various odd ways; a shrivelled Christ on the cross was paired with a Earth mother figure that recalls his fecund Madonnas. Male submissiveness is frequently counterpointed to female dominance; he seems to have been less a Catholic and more a Mariolater. Something of the same sensibility certainly seem to apply to Epstein as well, but Rock Drill with its emphasis on aggressive male masculinity is quite unlike Gill, not to mention its adoption of readymades. Equally, his sculpture of Venus recalls the influence of African and North American art. Nonetheless, it's Gaudier-Brzeska that seems the more mainstream figure of the period (albeit perhaps a rather less interesting one), with the increasingly abstract nature of his sculpture and the influence of Vorticism, as well as the same African and North American influences.
Before leaving London, I visit the Barbican's conservatory. It's an odd place, a small jungle rising above the concrete walkways and towers, not least because the Barbican's concrete labyrinth applies every bit as much to the interior of the conservatory. With the concrete decayed under dripping water it looks like nothing so much as an enactment of Ballard's Drowned World. Bromeliads and Bougainvillea are in flower while Zebra finches sing in the aviary and alarmingly large carp splash in the pools.
Reading Zola's The Masterpiece is perhaps the reflexive of his novels, given the presence of himself and his circle of friends as characters. On the one hand, Sandoz proclaims that "this is the idea: to study man as he really is. Not this metaphysical marionette they've made us believe he is but the physiological human being determined by his surroundings" only to then undermine it with a lyrical hymn to the earth. The novel essentially proceeds as a critique of romanticism, as with Claude's tendency to undermine the naturalism of his paintings; "the old streak of romanticism.. the generation we belong to was brought up on romanticism, it soaked into us and we can do nothing about it." Equally though, the novel critiques the idea of a scientific basis for art itself, as with Claude's mistaken scientific theory of colours; "with characteristic over-indulgence he began to exaggerate the scientific theory of colours.. that way, it was obvious, madness lay.".Labels: Art, Literature, London
posted by Richard 1:01 PM
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Travelling up to Staffordshire, I stop first at Dorchester and Chiselhampton. In the latter, I visit St Birinus, with a wonderful painted ceiling and rood screen as well as the Abbey. I also detour to Warwick in order to see St Mary's church. I'd been here before but on a rather rushed trip, so it's nice to be able to take time to look at the details; the bears and griffins that serve as the tomb statue footrests in the Beauchamp chapel, the doom painting or the gold weepers.
Arriving up north, the following day is taken up with visiting Birmingham. Once more, it occurs to me that this must once have been one of the most astonishing places on earth, to the nineteenth century as New York was to the present and Shanghai will be to this. The redbrick Venetian arches and Minton tiles on ordinary shops and houses are far more elaborate than anything in nineteenth century London. Inevitably, the modern reality is rather more prosaic with the inevitable rash of closed shops on the high streets, although the presence of various skyscrapers does remind me rather more of London than any other provincial city I've visited. There are quite a few things that I've not seen before; the interior of the former Midlands Bank (now a bookshop) is wonderful with its blue skylight and elaborate staircases. The Georgian buildings in St Paul's Square afford a view of a Birmingham I was largely unfamiliar with, save for St Philip's cathedral. The church of Saint Paul at the centre of the square has a marvellous painted window, one of the few I've seen (Kidlington, Shrewsbury and Witley Court being the other places). A walk through the Jewellery Quarter leads to the blue brick entrance to the Warstone Lane cemetery. The tombs are neatly maintained and the grass cut, in contrast to the wild and overgrown cemeteries in London, although the extent of vandalism seems severe. I notice several tombs that seem to be mass burials, while the blackening of the stones from pollution is also decidedly different to London. The same applies to the catacombs cut from the rock across the hilly territory. I walk onward to the adjoining Keyhill cemetery, where the tombs are more elaborate. While hardly as elaborate as London, the tombs are still very ornate here with the usual gothic spires and Roman urns accompanied by images of held hands and lilies. I finish at the church of St Martins, revisiting its alabaster tombs and William Morris stained glass. For the modern period, Paul Maxfield's bizarre trompe l'oeil murals in the Piccadilly Arcade are an odd addition to the city.
The final day in the Midlands is taken up with a walk in the Memorial Arboretum. The tree planting has come along quite markedly, with Celery Trees, Pecan tress and Japanese Cherry tree among the new applies. The Crab apples are fruiting. There are several new memorials; a Polish memorial and a RAF memorial in particular. I'm bemused to find a horse from a funfair carousel in the middle of the arboretum wood. Covered in butterflies and cobwebs, it's like a scene from Narnia. The more prosaic truth is that it's a memorial from the Guild of Showmen.
William Cobbett is often compared to Orwell and the controversies as to whether the latter counts as left or wing also apply to Cobbett. On the one hand, much of Rural Rides is concerned with rural poverty, rotten boroughs and unjustly authoritarian legislation. On the other, Cobbett's vision is one founded on a romantic conception of man's relation to the land and from that stems a quasi-feudalistic idea of politics. He values manual labour and has an atavistic aversion to anything outside that, hence repeated tirades against 'Jews and stock jobbers' (and oddly against Quakers) as well as his insistence that the population is declining when that was only true of the rural population. He disdains services and praises the King of Spain for banning them. He seems unconcerned with many vital causes of the time, stating that slaves had better conditions than English labourers. While having decried Pitt's war against the 'French people's liberties' he calls for war against the Bourbons. In some ways, he has as much in common with the far right as with the left. Nonetheless, from Cobbett, comes the stream of politics associated with Ebeneezer Howard, Pugin (Cobbett seems to dislike Dissenters and repeatedly praises Catholics) and William Morris, but Owen is a rather more representative figure of modern leftwing thought.
Reading The Jewish War by Josephus offers a counterpoint to two sets of more familiar narratives. Firstly that of the Bible; where Josephus mentions aspects of the Old Testament such as the city of Sodom, Christianity is not deemed worthy of discussion. Secondly, that of Roman history with one of the few examples of colonial subjects writing back. As both a General who had resisted the Romans and a collaborator, Josephus has a decidedly ambivalent perspective on events. On the one hand, he denounces Jews who had leagued themselves with the Syrians against their fellow Jews, just as Josephus had done ("small wonder we have found foreigners treacherous when we have utterly betrayed our own nation"). He also records the mass suicide of one group of Jewish rebels rather than live as slaves. On the other, religious fatalism is used to suggest submission; "God.. is ranged on the Roman side, for without his help so vast an empire could never have been built up." Arguments in favour of Roman rule build on their respect for the Jewish temple, only for the text to repeatedly record acts of desecration. In part, Josephus seems to admire the Romans, repeatedly contrasting Roman discipline (give or take the occasional coup d'etat) with Jewish civil war and disunity ("wasn't it civil strife amongst our ancestors... put beneath the Roman heel those who did not deserve to be free"); Jewish military training is modelled on the Romans.Labels: Literature, Midlands
posted by Richard 12:36 PM
Sunday, August 16, 2009
The Proms this year began for me with a medley of Handel pieces. Given my previous exasperation with Handel's tendency to construct an entire aria around a libretto consisting of only one or two lines, I was impressed that Carolyn Sampson's acting managed to prevent too much boredom from seeping into the rendition of Semele. Unfortunately, the period organ wasn't working quite properly for the Organ Symphony. The text by Congreve proved rather too lascivious for Georgian tastes but works rather well now. This was followed by a late night Prom of music by Philip Glass. I rather liked the Violin Concerto but rather less so his Toltec Symphony. The recurring silences and crescendi work well, but there's something about the Carollesque libretto that rather offends me; I'd rather the choir had stuck to simple breathing sounds. Later weeks see more Handel performances, with an aria from Alcinia comparing favourably with Haydn's Scena di Berenice; as the soprano notes it's Handel's work that seems the more romantic and unrestrained. This is followed with another evening prom, this time with a performance by the Michael Nyman band. I've often felt that baroque music and minimalism have much in common, and Nyman's work stands in testament to that. With a live performance though, I'm astonished as to how raw and overwhelming it feels, as if it were jazz or even rock. The recordings of the performance don't quite seem to capture it. The following Celan Songs clearly seem to Nyman's answer to Adams and Harmonielehre.
This is then followed by a somewhat odd Prom, showcasing the work of Iannis Xenakis; Nomos Gamma and Ais. The former sees the arena of the Royal Albert Hall rearranged into segments divided between the orchestra and the audience. The idea is that the music is as spatial as temporal, with the experienced work depending on the position of the listener in the arena (in my case, right next to the percussion; the programme notes record how Xenakis was influenced by the sounds of warfare and student unrest but I may have received a somewhat excessively skewed version of that). It's an interesting idea, which means that the piece really has to be experienced rather than being listened to through a recording. I think a little of how much modern art is situational in this manner, as with art installations that depend heavily on the context in which they are viewed. Conversely, much modern music really has to be listened to, with certain recordings regarded by their creators as final and definitive. I'm less enamoured with Ais; the singer's low notes are convincing but his high notes sound like a musical form of drag that introduces a bathetic element into what is otherwise an impressive performance. I'm afraid I'm much more taken with the performance of Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead.
Walking back the following week, I'm a little startled to see a green parrot eating at one of the feeders in Hyde Park and by how close it allows me to get. This time, I was going to see Beethoven's Fidelio. I hadn't known this before and can really only judge it by comparison with Wagner; Beethoven tends to prefer choral effects with several characters singing concurrently, as well as tending to repeat lines in the same way Handel does. It also seems to combine singspiel with drama (the former having been tampered with by Edward Said). The plot is also something of a hybrid, featuring a woman disguised as a man (since doing so allows her to accrue masculine virtues, which is presumably why the converse scenario is usually only used for comedy).
I come back later in the week for a tour of Somerset House. I've always thought the place was like a Piranesi drawing; all spiral staircases and strange moat-like gaps in the interior courtyard. The Nelson stairs prove to be modelled on a ships' prow as a sort of hybrid between a spiral staircase and a normal one. The moat proves to be a device to direct light down towards the lower offices while allowing access to the boiler rooms and coal stores. There's also the 'deadhouse,' a series of catholic tombstones (from Catherine of Braganza's retinue) moved from the Royal chapel when the palace was rebuilt. The tour ends at the location of the old watergate from before the embankment was constructed. The Courtauld institute has an exhibition on the Omega workshops, which proves quickly to be the Arts & Crafts movement shorn of its medievalism and with an interest in Matisse in its place. The works included range from rugs to wallpaper, screens and tables to clothes, including Gaudier-Brezska's marquetry and designs by Wyndham Lewis.
I then travel southward, finding the site of the Old Marshalsea prison next to St George the Martyr's churchyard. All that remains is an old wall in the overgrown park with its few remaining tombstones. Nearby is the Imperial War Museum, which I've wanted to visit on account of its art collection. The first world war section is dominated by Nevinson's mostly post-futurist works and works that continued in a Vorticist theme by Wyndham Lewis. Eric Ravilious accounts for some pieces depicting submarines and Epstein some bronze busts, but it's Nash's paintings of the Ypres salient and Menin road that are the clear highlight of the collection for me. Another annex houses Singer-Sergeant's Gassed; it's a touching work but the style and tinge of sentimentality make it seem quite foreign to the others, the product of a previous century. Something similar applies to Stanley Spencer's painting of the wounded at a dressing station; its implied christian themes seem obscenely inappropriate in such a context. The second world war section is perhaps less distinct, although many of the same names recur, with the addition of Bomberg's Bomb Store painting and Piper's depiction of a Bristol control room.
The following week leads me to visit Kensal Green Cemetery's open day, mostly so I can visit the chapel catacombs. The chapel itself is visibly crumbling away on the inside, with damp consuming the walls from within and the cornices having been eaten to nothing. The restored hydraulic catafalque (with swivel top for rotating coffins so that they are interred feet first) strikes a somewhat incongruous note as a result. The florescent lighting below seems both jarringly modern and quite appropriate, with it's harsh light casting sharp shadows. Light filters down through ceiling grilles as well, accounting for the odd presence of autumnal leaves below one's feet. There's enough light to dimly discern the rough shapes of the coffin behind rusted iron grilles but enough darkness to leave a certain sense of unease, particularly in cases where the outer wooden and velvet shells have corroded to nothing, leaving only lead boxes. Spelter (poor man's pewter) wreathes or mouldered velvet remain atop some coffins. I'd walked to the cemetery from Little Venice along the Grand Union canal. It occurs to me that Little Venice itself is misnamed; Little Amsterdam might have been a rather better soubriquet for its combination of Georgian houses and Victorian redbrick chapels. It's all too neat and mannered to compare to Venice's decayed Moorish gothic, which is not too say it's not rather beautiful. Venice also lacks the inevitable Ducks, Coots and Canada Geese. It also seems a counterfactual version of London as it might have been had the likes of the Walbrook and the Fleet not been entombed in concrete. The canal itself offers a form of social history, from the Georgian villas to the redbrick church of St Mary Magdalene through to pebble dash and modern wooden decking and metal balconies. Foremost amongst this historical panorama is Goldfinger's Trellick Tower. Approaching it beneath the concrete Westway, I see the tower reflected in the canal waters; a picturesque scene embodied in graffiti spattered concrete. A Moroccan garden has planted at the base of the tower; very beautiful if an example of a design aesthetic I can't see Goldfinger appreciating. Kensington Palace is an odd time capsule that combines tastes from William and Mary to Victoria. The Victorian rooms remain filled with domestic clutter, while Hannoverian inhabitants found the rather modest structure a little confining, with Kent adding elaborate trompe l'oeil effects to Wren's staircase and to the cupola room. Kent and Thornhill's painting sit alongside one another as do Kneller's portrait of Peter the Great with Van Dyck's painting of Charles the First.
Summer dwindles into autumn and Open House weekend comes once again. I start at St Mary Magdalene in Paddington. Like many of Street's churches it's rather dark on the interior, although I'm amused to see Saint Chad and Fridewide representing two of the cities I've lived in. I'm in time for a tour of the undercroft, a rather empty and dark space that was constructed using the same techniques as underground stations and looks like one; since burials had moved to the cemeteries by then there was no need for the church to have a crypt. The undercroft is solely for structural reasons relating to the steep ground the church was built on. Comper's chapel of Saint Sepulchre within the undercroft is quite spectacular though, with a blue and gold ceiling studded with stars and angels (albeit with much of the paint and plaster having flaked off) and a shrine to Saint Mary that features a tabernacle (a way of hiding the sacrament due to fear of riots against Anglo-Catholic churches such as this). Much of the carving is Flemish in source, apart from an oddly Botticelliesque representation of Saint Mary ascending to heaven. The chapel also possesses a rather bizarre 'doom' stained glass window showing the dead rising from their graves and demons with butterfly wings making off with sinners. After this, Hawksmoor's Christ Church seems preternatural in its ghostly whiteness and cavernous arches.
I walk onwards to Bishopsgate, where I finally succeeding in entering the old Turkish baths. Somewhat inevitably modelled on the Holy Sepulchre church in Jerusalem, I'm rather surprised as to how much space extends underground beneath this rather small and gaudy kiosk. I walk onwards again to St Helen's, a somewhat dowdy church in its structure but which retains scores of medieval monuments that predate the great fire. It's rather ramshackle design make it resemble any number of normal English country churches, making you recall how odd London's architecture is and how unlike the rest of the country. I rather like the monument to the Merchant Adventurer Martin Bond, showing him on campaign, seated in front of a tent and flanked by armed guards. I also rather like the church of Katherine Cree for similar reasons; a Jacobean church that survived the great fire, with a ceiling studded with heraldic crests and an odd gallimaufry of baroque memento mori and medieval alabaster monuments. My next church is St Mary Woolnoth; it's odd to see a church designed without any reference to ecclesiastical convention. The restrictions on the size of the land presumably forced Hawksmoor to build vertically rather than horizontally, with the rather small cubed interior dominated by the light pouring down from above. I briefly visit St Lawrence Jewry and St Mary-Le-Bow before finishing with Bodley's Holy Trinity in Kensington and Scott's chapel at King's College (a slightly Byzantine affair with wooden marquetry on the walls and painted red and gold pillars). The last thing I saw was the Apothecaries Hall, with its collection of Blue & white ceramic medicine jars (I like the one marked for absinthe), paintings of the armada and the glorious revolution. I also quite liked the society taking its emblem with Durer's mistaken depiction of a rhino as having a second horn on its back. The stained glass crests in the window include one of the Doctor who went on the 1953 Everest expedition.
Fourteen Byzantine Rulers by Psellus seems to inevitably invoke a comparison with Suetonius. It's certainly not a precise one; the events described in Suetonius occur over a longer timescale and with fewer rulers. Suetonius omits contemporary events (i.e. Hadrian's rule) while Psellus includes that of Michael Parapinaces. Suetonius was somewhat tabloid in style but wrote at a distance from the figures he depicts; Psellus repeatedly claims objectivity but was a pivotal figure in much of the narrative (indeed he was blamed by other historians for distracting Michael from the practical matter of government). Suetonius ends at the point the Roman Empire had reached its greatest extent, Psellus begins at that point. While the Byzantine court certainly appears riven with factions and plotting it should also be observed that few military coup d'etat's occur in the narrative, against the Suetonian depiction of what we would now refer to as a banana republic, with routine military takeovers, civil wars, as well as the reigns of Caligula and Nero that set a gold standard in debauchery that the Byzantines of this period appear to have been utterly unable to imitate.Some interesting distinctions from The Romans also appear; Psellus lauds the Greek practice of sharply dividing nobles and commoners, blaming the Roman habit for allowing barbarians to sit in the Senate. Psellus also utilises the Hellenic notion of fate, as a form of causality, even while noting such concepts to be denied in Christianity. Equally, he describes some forms of political violence as necessary in terms we might recognise from Machiavelli, while noting their abhorrence in christianity. More generally, Psellus does come over as a rather likeable figure in a way that is not the case for most Roman historians (Tacitus? Livy?), noting combinations of good and evil in his subjects in a way I hadn't expected from an early Christian writer.
As with most other ancient historians, Psellus tends to assume history to be the outcomes of individual decisions, typically those of Kings. By contrast, Gibbons approached many of the same subjects with a view of the wider ideological forces, if not a fully modern view of the interplay of economic and social factors. In particular, his description of Christianity's emphasis on individual virtue rather public valour, it's tendency towards generating sectarian conflict or the presence of Catharesque sects bent on acts of self-destruction also suggests Christianity as a contributing factor to the decline and fall of the Empire.
Saramago's Blindness is obviously reminiscent of Kafka; a series of events occur for which no explanation is provided but which nonetheless seem to represent some form of parable. As in Kafka, meaning is suggested but withheld; "it sounds like an allgeory, the eye that refuses to acknowledge its own absence." The description of a painting that seemed to fit the descriptions of all modes of art and which could not be identified due to the onset of the viewer's blindness is a case in point. Similarly, the leaving of a lock of hair on a doorhandle inverts a conventional symbol of death into one of life. Where many novels are narrated from a subjective first-person perspective, Blindness removes that perspective, relying instead on a clamour of voices lacking identity; "I am blind with your blindness." At points, it seems to represent an allegory of moral failure, as with the sighted Doctor's wife's declaration that "I shall never be free from this blindness... perhaps I'm the blindest of all" after sha killed a man. The blinding of the car thief seems to correlate with this, but the blinding of the Doctor and others is entirely devoid of pattern. The example of the prostitute;s concern for her parents points in an entirely different direction; " the existence of deep feelings... in the abundant cases of irregular conduct, especially in matters of public morality." Similarly, the church with the blinded statues of the saints is essentially suggest of universe lacking clear meanings and patterns, even as speeches proclaim all manner of divine causes for the blindness.
Nathaniel West's work has the same sort of focus on the material and the fantastic as Melville's; in The Dream Life of Balso Snell characters wonder around the interior of a body, telling stories that dwell on the grotesque; sexual arousal at hunchbacksor an accentuated senses of smell. One character notes that "I kill my body.. soon my body will be swollen and clumsy.. in my belly there is a tangled forest of arms and legs" when speaking of pregnancy. Sexual attraction is seen as a form of violence, with sex described as a sacrificial rite that leads to the penetration of Balso's body; "his body broke free... only to death can this release be likened." In Day of the Locust there's a similar emphasis, as with the cock fight or Homer watching lizards eat flies, but the depiction of Faye is equally congruent with the noir tradition of the femme fatale, with the novel emerging as a form of heterosexual Death in Venice. Glamour and disgust sit side by side. The introduction of the political creates what is especially odd about the novel, with one aspect of it being a critique of the American Dream, depicting wishes unfulfilled and the decline of the American Empire. It's like the idea of Meville writing a Steinbeckian novel, with it becoming difficult to be sure if the personal has been sublimated into the political or vice versa.Labels: Art, Literature, London
posted by Richard 10:57 AM
Saturday, July 25, 2009
I the end, I saw very little of Manchester. It rained as I arrived and it rained as I departed, which rather curtailed most of my plans. The one thing I did see was the main Art Gallery, a Greek revival building by Charles Barry. The main hall is especially impressive, with the stairs winding around a square courtyard lined with copies of the Elgin marbles in relief. Quite a contrast to Waterhouse's nearby gothic town hall.
The seventeenth seventh collection is small but impressive. Ruisdael's A Storm off the Dutch Coast is the only seascape I've seen from him, while there's a matching Van De Velde landscape. The usual assortment of Dutch art is present and correct; an iceskating scene from Arent Arentz, still life from Willem Kalf and an interior from Quirin Gerritz van Brekelenkam. For English art of the same period, John Souch's Sir Thomas Aston at the Deathbed of his Wife is particularly powerful; it's the way that it combines modern portraiture with something that looks like a medieval allegory. It rather reminds me of Holbein's The Ambassadors. As the galleries move forward in time, the rather dreary Gainsborough and Reynolds paintings make their inevitable appearance, although a Stubbs painting of a Cheetah and Stag at least has novelty value compared to his usual fare. More impressive is Belotto's The Fortress of Konigstein: Courtyard with the Brunnenhaus, Claude's Adoration of the Golden Calf and several Turner paintings. There's also a series of Blake paintings of poets; Homer, Chaucer, Milton and Spenser, accompanying Palmer's The Bright Cloud. This particular gallery featured various Wedgwood and Flaxman designs.
Nonetheless, the collections have an unsurprising emphasis on the Victorians. Minton tiles and Burges cabinets compliment Holman Hunt's Hireling Shepherd, Madox Brown's Manfred on the Jungfrau, Stages of Cruelty and Work, Rossetti's The Bower Meadow and Astarte Syriaca, Watts' The Good Samaritan Hughes' Ophelia, Leighton's Captive Andromache and The Last Watch of Hero and Millais' Autumn Leaves. Mengin, an artist I wasn't especially familiar with, dominates the collection with a rather funereal Sappho. There's a large amount of minor Victorian art, such as Wagner's Chariot Race or Frederick Lewis' The Coffee Bearer, Dicksee's The Funeral of a Viking or Butler's Balaclava which is often surprisingly impressive, Etty's rather inevitable nudes notwithstanding.
One particular highlight is the work of Adolphe Valette, who was also unknown to me but surely deserves a place alongside Atkinson Grimshaw in documenting the sepulchral aspects of the industrial north, although his work perhaps resembles some of Whistler's Nocturnes or Monet's paintings of London smog rather more. Paintings like India House or Rooftops surely deserve as much recognition as those of the more famed Pre-Raphaelites. Lowry, a pupil of Valette's certainly thought so and the slightly cartoonish quality to Valette's figures is something you can see in Lowry as well. The gallery also has a good modern collection; Augustus John's painting of Yeats, Piassaro's A Village Street, Louveciennes, Ginner's Flask Walk, Hampstead (quite reminiscent of Valette and Lowry actually), Sickert's ripper paintings, Spencer Gore's paintings of Richmond. I'm especially taken with Mervyn Peake's The Glass Blowers. I hadn't realised Peake painted; asked to do war paintings this somewhat carvnivalesque painting was the result of a trip to a factory making cathode ray tubes for radar. Fry cabinets, Clarice Cliff crockery, Leach pottery and a Hepworth dove sculpture decorate the room alongside Modigliani, Bacon's Portrait of Henrietta Moraes on a Blue Couch, Ernst's La Ville Petrifiee and Hockney's Peter C. I hadn't heard of Evelyn Dunbar, but her 1944 Pastoral is especially striking.
Back in London, the visit to Manchester had made me interested in going to see the Royal Academy's JW Waterhouse exhibition, thereby allowing me to see the loaned copy of Hylas and the Nymphs. The exhibition flags Waterhouse as the 'Modern Pre-Raphaelite,' noting the anachronism of his interest in history and myth in an age of abstraction. The fact that this is the first Waterhouse retrospective alone notes how quickly and completely he was erased from art history. Certainly, much of his work is obscurantist; it seems difficult to imagine that either Emperor Honorius or Saint Eulalia were much more well known figures at the time then they are now. His mystical interests connected with the likes of Yeats and the symbolists, but much of his work remains firmly founded in literature and history. On the other hand, if he shared his subject matter with Millais and Rossetti, his technique was quite different, composed of loose brushstrokes rather than points of detail; his famous Lady of Shalott is quite different from Millais' Ophelia. The other charge frequently laid against Waterhouse is his habit of depicting women as devilish seducers; Circe and Medea are representative figures in this respect. The description is essentially true, although one does wonder whether the traditional depiction of women as models of virtue is preferable. Waterhouse is certainly free of the more moralistic tendencies of earlier Victorian art, tending to show women as powerful rather than weak and passive. Contrast Hylas and the Nymphs to any number of Victorian depictions of fallen women.
Venturing south of the river, I find an entirely opposing exhibition at the Tate, dedicated to futurism. Perversely, it can easily be argued that much of this has dated much more badly than Waterhouse; while the 'Modern Pre-Raphaelite' never intended to be a'la mode, the futurist depictions of steam trains and cruise liners as the epitome of modernity look decidedly quaint now. In many respects, Futurism is a by-road in art history. Marinetti's literary interests idolised the machine age, speed and electricity, which acted to tether much futurist art to a representational model, as much as Waterhouse was to myth and history. The inclusion of a more emphatically abstract artist, like Frantisek Kupka, is quite stark. Where the Cubist decomposition of perspective tended to dwell on the still life, futurism sought the same effect against a cinematographic conception of time; much Futurist painting accordingly resembles a flick-book in one frame. It was this addition of time to Cubist conceptions of space that proved influential, although the exhibition documents how this influence was a heavily contested one. In particular, French figures saw space in Cubist terms of simultaneity rather than a cinematographic one. French figures like Delaunay developed their art in a similar direction but denied an influence. Russian Cubo-Futurists, like Popova and Malevich, disliked the reactionary tendencies in Marinetti's thought, while Wyndham Lewis preferred to establish Vorticism than use the Futurist term. Only one French, Del Marle, and one English artist, Nevinson, were prepared to label themselves Futurists. In this respect, the first world war proved the tipping point; Severini and Balla propagandised in favour of Italian entry while Nevinson and Epstein were to withdraw from the idiom altogether after what could be termed excessive exposure to the realities of Marinetti's manifesto.
The British Museum's Garden and Cosmos exhibition presents a form of art unfamiliar to Westerners in many respects. The axonometric views, in which street plans are viewed on an identical plane to frontal views tend to value pattern over perspective. No Western distinction between decorative and fine art is observed here, with repetitions of design being played out on a large panorama rather than any close-ups. The same figures recur throughout the paintings, partly in order to illustrate a narrative, partly due to a tendency to regard time and space as samsara or illusions. In the Nath creed favoured at the time in Jodhpur, the body becomes emblematic of the universe and vice versa. Several of the paintings take the form of yantras. The results look more like Blake than most Western painters, although the idea of reality as simply a nothingness of shimmering gold or some of the more Boschlike sequences are equally unfamiliar in that context. The court paintings are quite odd as well; the emphasis on pleasure, though concubines or tournaments contrasts oddly to the likes of Velasquez or Holbein.
Reading Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End it's difficult not to be struck by his contrarian view of Englishness; the 'last Englishman' in the novel is of Dutch extraction while one of his comrades is an Oporto Protestant and his brother marries a Frenchwoman. The Welsh, it should be noted, are apparently rather less capable of attaining Englishness. Moreover, Tietjens is also defined by his Francophilia ("you're a Franco maniac") as much as his Englishness; "one could have fought with a clean heart for a civilisation; if you like for the eighteenth century against the twentieth, since that was fighting for France meant." By contrast, England (and, by extension, Prussia; "our cabinet won't hate them [the Prussians] as they hate the French for being frugal and strong in logic) represents the twentieth century and a form of barbarism. Tietjens' antiquarianism and traditionalism in many respects represents a form of subversion, just as the characters in the novel take it to be.
Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is in many respects a picaresque novel in the tradition of Cervantes. However, where the picaresque novel tends to focus on the carnivalesque and materialistic, Potocki is equally concerned with the transcendent and metaphysical. Indulgence in sexual pleasure usually acts as a prelude to disquisitions on sin or guilt, with the polyphonic nature of the narrative emphasising sin in some tales and assigning no consequences in others (as with Alphonse's views that Rebecca prefers "the concrete joys of this mortal life to idle speculation about an idle world"). With its ghosts and robbers, the narrative is connected to the gothic as much as the picaresque, with the gothic emphasis on horror acting to undercut the transcendent as much as some of the picaresque elements. The polyphonic aspect of the narrative allows it to express various heretical ideas alongside orthodoxies ("the stories begin in a simple enough way and you think you can predict the end... inextricable confusion is the result"), as with Emina's denunciations of Catholic persecutions and their Muslim victims. Potocki seems to see the transcendent in Kantian terms, as something that can be intuited but not grasped; "a religion that is still thought of as the same ends up by offering different things for men to put their faith in." Throughout the narrative, deceit and illusion emerge as persistent themes, emphasising the disjunction between the phenomenal and the noumenal. The intellect can only dimly grasp matters; "we are blind men who can feel some walls and know the end of several roads... imbeciles are a living proof of the power of god." The story of Hervas or the geometer's father in particular stresses scepticism of reason; "beware of human wisdom." Conversely, unexpected congruences emerge, as with Alphonse's observation that the eucharist is shared between christianity and mithraism or Ondina's switching between christianity and islam. The result is that the geography of the novel becomes a liminal space, in which different religions and none merge.Labels: Art Manchester
posted by Richard 5:24 AM
Saturday, July 11, 2009
During a tour of the Collegium Maius in Kraków, our guide periodically observes that it all went wrong for Poland after the partition of 1791 following a disastrous experiment in democracy during which no-one could agree on anything. Whilst this is doubtless not without a hefty degree of justification, the rather laconic fatalism is somewhat unnerving for a Westerner whose country has always cherished delusions of being in control of its own destiny. From a state that controlled much of Central Europe, Poland went to being divided between Russia, Poland and Austria; even now historical Polish territories like the city of Lvov lie within countries like Ukraine. As a city, Kraków retains the sense of being a mausoleum to better times, with little modern architecture being evident. Weathered plaster crumbles off the walls of buildings, leaving the brickwork beneath exposed. All of which, of course, endear the place to me.
I arrive at the main train station, where the rather grim underground subway connecting the platforms contrasts with the Hapsburg era white and yellow plaster of the main building aboveground. I walk down a covered iron walkway that leads into the city and am somewhat surprised to see a small square being patrolled by a robot. A small thing with treads and a CCTV camera, it resembles the sort of vision of the future last seen sometime circa the nineteen seventies or eighties. It turns out to be owned by one of the private security firms that are legion within the city. I can only assume that a rightwing politician probably decided that state police forces were inefficient when compared to the bracing vigour of the free market. There seems to be a similar approach to public transport, with most trains and trams running late and cars choking up roads and motorways. The latter state looks unpleasantly reminiscent of Britain rather than the usual European efficiency. Much of the city looks like a large market, although most of the larger names in evidence come from other European countries.
The city is heavily reminiscent of Prague and Budapest, with all three being dominated by a castle on a hill by the side of a river with a new town beneath where medieval churches and synagogues. One interesting difference is the Planty, a set of gardens ringing the city on the location of the former city walls. I begin by simply walking around the centre of the city, beginning with the market square. The largest medieval square in Europe, it's dominated by the opposing figures of St Mary's Church and the Town Hall tower. The church is a redbrick exercise in asymmetrical gothic with an exterior covered with monuments, it rather looks like a cross between the Tyn Church in Prague and the Frauenkirche in Munich. The dark interior is quite exceptional though, with the ceiling a dark blue burnished with gold stars and the ceiling covered in patterned red and friezes by Jan Matejko; the heavens above and hell below, I presume. Athough the Veit Stoss altar reflects the Mariolatry implicit in the name of the building, much of the interior decoration tends towards the grisly; tombs decorated with skulls and a painting of Saint Sebastian. Behind it lies the church of Saint Barbara, whose medieval facade is contradicted by a baroque interior. Across the square lies the cloth hall, the Sukiennice. The current use for this building is mostly selling tourist merchandise, with exterior arcades given up to cafes. The opposing side of the square sees Igor Mitoraj's Eros Bendato sculpture placed at the foot of the town hall tower, making a rather odd contrast with the sleepy lion sculptures at the base of its steps. The other thing on the square is the rather squat church of St Adalbert, a small domed building, with a blue and gold art nouveau interior.
I then walk down the main street, towards the church of Saint Peter and Paul, modelled on the Gesu church in Rome and consequently in a somewhat austere Baroque style that contrasts with the rather more florid legions of gold angels in the neighbouring church of St Andrew. The crypt has a rather bizarre tomb with a number of carved griffin sculptures at its base. Opposed churches for the Dominicans and Franciscans occupy nearby streets. The former is a relatively simple affair, with a white interior and blue ceiling, accompanied by a set of cloisters. The latter is quite dowdy from the outside, but the gloomy interior is decorated in brilliant art nouveau by Mehoffer and Wyspianski, with the windows and walls decorated with iris patterns. Further along, the Bernardine church is a dark affair with extensive decay inside, although I'm quite taken with an elaborate dance of death painting cycle. The Collegium Maius is also located in the old town; rather resembling certain Cambridge colleges, the interior courtyard is flanked on each side with a set of cloisters. Ammonites have been built into redbrick walls and a grotesque serves as a fountain alongside various medieval crests. The exhibits include the old Jagiellonian University library, a medieval globe (which puts North America in the wrong place) and a set of paintings where depictions of clock towers had real clocks inserted.
The following day is given up the Polish equivalent of the Hrad, the Wawel. The castle straddles the medieval and renaissance periods, with redbrick towers contrasting with colonnaded courtyards. Many of the rooms have elaborate wooden ceilings decorated with gold flowers, Cordovan leather and friezes by Hans Durer. Many of the ceiling frescos were completed in the early twentieth century; a model shows Wyspianski's earlier scheme for restoring the Wawel, with the inclusion of a large dome at the opposite end to the palace and cathedral. Some of Augustus the Strong's porcelain collection is included, as well as a Bosch painting. The Cathedral is a bizarre jumble of architectural styles; a medieval gothic building with several domed classical structures and renaissance accoutrements. The interior is much the same, red marble monuments in side chapels sit alongside gothic tombs to saints and kings alike in the nave. Some of the painted chapels show a Byzantine influence in their wall decoration (at one point Poland did share a border with Turkey after all). The crypts remind me of the Hapsburg tombs in Vienna, with iron and stone coffins. The poet Mickiewicz and the patriot Kosciuszko are interned here, although the Polish pantheon is located in the nearby St Catherine's church, where the crypt contains the tombs of Czeslaw Milosz, Szymanowski and Stanislaw Wyspianski. The base of the castle contains a small cave, named after the dragon that features in the city's founding legend. A metal dragon sculpture has been erected, which breathes fire every five minutes or so. Kitsch but not unamusing. Finally, the Wawel has an oriental exhibition, centered around the Ottoman booty gained after the battle of Vienna; Persian and Turkish carpets, Iznik plates, Chinese & Japanese porcelain and Chinese bronzes.
The following day is taken with visiting Kazimierz, formerly a separate city and site of the Jewish ghetto. I begin at the Remuh synagogue and cemetery. The cemetery stones are some of the oldest in Poland and are decorated with images of lions and stags; broken stones are assembled to form a 'wailing wall.' Nearby, the new cemetery also contains sets of monuments to Nazi victims made from fragments of smashed gravestones; those still standing vary in terms of resembling older Yiddish gravestones or a style more in keeping with that found in the Polish cemeteries. Many of the headstones have stones placed on them, although much of the cemetery si rather overgrown with long grass and ferns burying many of the graves. Of the other synagogues, the Progressive Synagogue strongly reminds me of the Spanish Synagogue in Prague, with Moorish designs throughout, while the Izaaka synagogue tends towards the baroque, with Yiddish script still visible on the walls in spite of whitewashing. The High synagogue is perhaps rather more nondescript but is notable for an exhibition showing collections of old photos of Jewish life in Poland. Most of the people shown in them would have ended up in the concentration camps. Finally, the Stara Synagogue is a beautiful gothic structure with a wrought iron Bimah at its centre. The annual Jewish cultural festival was in progress during my visit, so the streets were full of school parties, rather resembling Israeli versions of St Trinians. I also visit the Botanical gardens in Krakow; Acanthus, Ferns and Astilbes are clearly much favoured by the staff, although it also has large, if oddly shaped, conservatories. Finally, I visit one of the conventional cemeteries, the Racławice cemetery. I'm struck by the number of both lit candles and metal crosses, neither being common features in Britain. Some of the symbolism is also somewhat unusual; a butterfly for instance, but the grid layout and combination of gothic and classical designs does make the place look like Highgate. There's even a large Sphinx on one tomb.
Kraków's museums and galleries are centred on a building that looks as if it was built during the Stalin era but wasn't. It contains a set of Młoda Polska paintings from the nineteenth century to the present day. Some of the highlights include Wojciech Weiss's Melancholik, Leon Chwistek's futurist City and Lodz, Szancenbach's Lake - Sunset, Zbigniew Pronaszko's nudes, Czajkowski's Orchard in Winter, Stanisław Kamocki, Henryk Szczygli ński and Jan Stanisławski's landscapes and Jacek Malczewski's strange symbolist paintings. I couldn't make up my mind whether I liked Tadeusz Makowski's odd toy scenes or not. There was also an exhibition of Weegee photos, ranging from New York's architecture to drag queens, murder victims and carbonised bodies burnt in fires. The Stanislaw Wsypianski house also houses a number of interesting collections; several paintings of the Kosciuszko mound, modernist-gothic furniture for his theatrical sets and stained glass designs and views of St Mary's and the Wawel. There's also a collection of Ignacy Krieger's photographs, showing black and white photographs of Kraków. On a similar note, the Mehoffer house showcases his art nouveau stained glass designs, paintings of his wife and garden, paintings of the market square and of the Vistula, as well as a bizarre drawing of a lady encountering a skeletal death in the form of a gardener. One rooms includes a Japanese collection of Hiroshige woodcuts. In the garden, a black and white cat sits amidst the roses, secure in the knowledge of its perfect camouflage. The Manggha collection expands on the Japanese theme, containing Felix Jasienski's collection of oriental art. At the time of visiting it was showcasing a set of Noh masks and showing Japanese influences on Julian Falat's paintings, mostly landscapes. The next most prominent museum is the Czartoryski museum; this is next to last remaining section of the city wall and the Barbican, adjoined to it via a sighing bridge; a bronze cast of Hermes by Thorvaldsen stands outside. The interior houses a set of enamel and porcelain designs from Limoges, Italian majolica, Meissen, paintings by Da Vinci (Lady with an Ermine) and a Rembrandt landscape. The antiquities collection contains a number of Etruscan funerary statues, mummified cats (plus a fake mummified mongoose) and a set of Fayum portraits. Finally, there is the archaeological museum; containing a number of mummy cases and Peruvian artefacts (some of them erotic) but especially a stone totem pole showing a slavic pagan deity, Swiatowit. Each side has a face, making it look like a four-face god with the peculiarity that it also seems to be wearing a top-hat.
On my final day in Kraków, I travel to the salt-mine at Wieliczka. This is the sort of trip that makes it clear that one is a tourist rather than a traveller due to the industrial system used to process the volume of visitors; it's also the sort of trip that makes it clear that the difference between Catholic kitsch and Disneyfied schmaltz (via Tolkein's Balrog) is a slender one. The mines contain rock salt carvings of kings, dwarves and biblical figures, as well as more recent figures like Goethe (who visited due to his interest in geology) and statues that reflect a more socialist realist style. Some of the chambers have been flooded while the wooden struts used to construct some of the larger chambers give them the same sort of feeling as a church. The actual chambers range from long corridors to ballrooms, chapels and a cafe. Much of my interest in the place is as an inverted Magic Mountain; certainly either the dryness of the air or the temperature seem to have a beneficial effect on my asthma. Finally, before leaving I spend some time in a park near Blonia; a promenade walkway has busts of famous Polish figures on either side (Curie, Herbert, Kosciuszko) leading to a hedged circle with other busts (Chopin, Mickiewicz).
Arriving in Wrocław the following day (having managed to avoid being run over by a police truck driving down the train station platform), it occurs to me that this more than most places deserves the title of the Venice of the North. The Oder river is relatively shallow here and the islands cluster in the centre of it, on which many of the city's churches and cathedrals are built. The main part of the town would originally have been walled off from the mainland by a defensive moat. Looking at a plan of the medieval city it's clear that it must have essentially been afloat. Its subsequent identity has been equally indeterminate, switching from being Polish to Bohemian to Prussian and back again, its name changing from Breslau to Wrocław at the same time that a new population arrived from Lvov. Buildings by Langhans, architect of the Brandenburg gate, sit alongside the medieval structures. Even its religious identity was somewhat indeterminate, with a Protestant majority having previously tolerated a Catholic minority and competed between them to build churches; the presence of a Jewish minority only further complicated matters.
I start my visit with the Cathedral Island, home to the some of the tallest spires in the city. The cathedral, with its twin Baltic spires is the most impressive, and like its counterpart in Kraków, baroque chapels have been added on either side. Behind it, the city's Botanical gardens have been built. A bust of Linnaeus features at its centre, alongside pools filled with frogs, alpine gardens and an arboretum. The green iron Tumski bridge connects the Cathedral Island to the Sand Island, and the squat and dark church of Saint Mary of the Sand, its interior a combination of striped redbrick, white plaster and red stained glass. The University mathematical tower in yellow & white and the Osslinski library in red and white look out over the river; it's a scene that rather reminds me of Saint Petersburg. The town hall in the market square is an untidy medieval building, its surface pullulating with gargoyles in addition to an astronomical clock. The town square reminds me of Copenhagen's Nyhavn as much as Kraków, due to the bright painting of each house, many of which are identified with animal signs (e.g. the house of the golden deer). The square next to the cathedral houses the cathedral of St Mary Magdalene. Destroyed during the war and largely reconstructed, it still lacks the original baroque spires gracing each tower, as well as having gone from Protestant to Catholic. I'm rather taken with the slender bridge that adjoins the two towers. The interior chapels are filled with renaissance and classical tombstones and monuments, as well as dragon sculpture beneath the pulpit. On the opposed side of the main square is the church of Saint Elizabeth, another redbrick gothic structure surmounted by a squat metal cupola on its tower. I'm quite drawn to a renaissance tomb with a depiction of a sea monster on it. Outside, I spot one of the city's features; a small bronze dwarf sculpture sitting next to an accompanying house. Several of these are dotted round the city; a somewhat amusing, if rather twee, idea.
Much of the heart of the city was destroyed by the Russians, as Breslau only capitulated at the same time as Berlin. Grim 'blokowisko' housing proliferates alongside the older structures. Some of the most interest does reside with the newer structures though; for example, the train station combines a long glass and iron barrel roof with a gothic revival exterior. Various modernist department stores are also contained within the city, some of which were the first in Poland to have elevators. Similarly, the Grunwaldzki bridge was one of the largest iron bridges in Germany and is now the largest in Poland (it rather resembles Budapest's chain bridge). More strikingly, a market hall combines a redbrick facade with a cavernous concrete interior. This culminates in the concrete Centennial Hall, a gigantic concrete dome built as Wrocław's belated answer to the Eiffel tower or the Crystal Palace. With that said, the use of concrete does bring the slightly more unfortunate example of the Royal Festival Hall to mind; the building is presently in a rather bad state and was undergoing extensive restoration work. Upon arrival one walks though a series of concrete pillars (some currently entirely immersed in ivy) and past a tall metal spike, rather reminiscent of Skylon. A lake is in front of the hall, which is surrounded by a concrete pergola. A semi-derelict kindergarten by Le Corbusier sits rather forgotten in the grounds. Beyond this, a Japanese garden was created to go with the hall; Acers surrounded a pool, spanned by wooden bridges. In the centre of the city, the most modern landmark can be found in one of the parks; the Racławice panorama, a nineteen sixties concrete structure built to house Styka and Kossak's panoramic representation of the battle where Kosciuszko lead an army of peasants armed with scythes to defeat the Russians. Much of the foreground before the picture has been designed to create the illusion of perspective; trees and landscape designed to patch the picture. It's a slightly kitsch effect but an undeniably effective one. Behind the panorama building rests an iron statue to the dead of Katyn, featuring a woman weeping for the dead while the figure of death is suspended above. The materials and treatment are quite contemporary but the theme is very classical.
The National Museum in Wrocław has a somewhat odd collection of art that includes a painting of a bearded lady and a clock painting where the eyes tock back and forth. Much of the medieval art is string on portraiture but weak on narrative scenes. It also tends towards the infernal, with paintings showing a rather canine beast from the book of revelations, a hellmouth, a winged devil with a man's body and a bull's head, and a set of the damned being menaced by skeletons and some rather catlike demons. Praying figures of the painting patrons often feature in the lower sections of scenes, making the paintings a form of indulgence. A set of wooden votive figures are missing their hands, creating the inadvertent impression of a scene from Titus Andronicus. A temporary sculpture exhibition shows Behrens' The Kiss of the Sphinx. The collections also includes many of the Piast tombs removed from various city churches. The later sections include several Matejko paintings and a work attributed to Bellotto, showing an entry into Rome, Józef Chełmońsk's symbolist paintings and Maz Wislicenus' landscapes. I'm slightly bemused by one painting that shows the same figure replicated several times; I can't tell whether it was deliberate or not. The building itself is rather Dutch in style covered in icy and facing a Nazi era city council building. A bronze statue of Durer stands outside.
On my final day in Wrocław, I travel outside the city to the Jewish cemetery. Even now, this is far outside the city boundaries, sited near a rather eccentric nineteenth century water tower. Most of the tombs are in a bad state of decay, with ivy overgrowing everything; it certainly qualifies as one of the most decayed cemeteries I've seen. This is particularly unfortunate, as the tombs are quite unusual. This is a nineteenth century cemetery and accordingly many of the tombs are Egyptianate or classical, but some of the Sephardic tombs were created in an Arabesque style.
posted by Richard 5:58 AM
Monday, May 25, 2009
Gloucester struck me as one of those places that are too small to hide their contradictions. Firms of stockbrokers occupy buildings next to pound shops. Much of the town feels down at heel, with the inevitable display of decaying seventies shopping centres and boarded up windows, while the other half seems to thrive quite nicely with the influx of tourists, as a statue of Nerva announces the town's historical credentials. Even the sights to be visited are essentially divided between former docks and a cathedral that was once a Monastery. As a place, the layers of the past are evident, the contour of the present and future rather more difficult to discern.
Inevitably, it's the cathedral I'm most interested in. Whilst looking at the cathedral lantern, I notice something on the grass; shattered plaster adjoined to what seems to be the decapitated head of a pheasant. My initial suspicion was satanic rites, although the disappointing truth proved to be vandalism of the Motectum art installation by Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva, wherein casts of angels are painted and mounted with the heads of ducks and chickens. It's an interesting concepts; angels are almost invariably depicted with the features of humans and the wings of birds (i.e. peacock wings in medieval painting) and this concept neatly inverts that. The results rather remind me of Ernst.
The interior of the main cathedral nave is quite similar to Tewkesbury, with round Romanesque arches and thick pillars. By contrast, the quite and cloisters erupt into a frenzy of gothic, whose organic rather then geometric character reminds me of Geiger or Gaudi. The stained glass in the cloisters filters the air with polychromatic phovic clouds, creating a rather surreal effect. I mistake some of the glass for Burne Jones, with Christopher Whall being the actual artist; with the usual Minton tiling much evident, the Victorian presence at Gloucester is quite obvious, as with one of the side chapels decorated by Gambier Parry. Stained glass by Thomas Denny represents a small concession to modernity. The ambulatory design again recalls Tewkesbury, with the tombs of Osric of Mercia and Edward the Second. It's difficult not to feel sorry for Edward, exiled to a provincial tomb and denied Westminster.
Outside, I step through one of the cathedral close arches and find myself confronted with a gothic monument to a bishop burnt by Queen Mary and the church of St Mary de Lode. The inside of this feels rather empty, with the space formerly filled by box pews never really having been given a new task. It's the oldest church in the city (Roman mosaic is still visible in its foundations) the parish church at the time the cathedral was still a monastery, and the sanctuary still clearly shows its Norman design. I walk to the ruins of Greyfriars, dissolved in the reformation to leave only a set of skeletal arches. Blue irises flower in the churhyard alongside a modern set of carvings of the green man and the devil. I finally come to the docks, which remind me a little of East London or even parts of Copenhagen; the latter is more representative in that the buildings have been repurposed rather than demolished (there's even a small Mariner's chapel still), although you don't have to go too far along the canal to see derelict Victorian warehouses, with the paint peeling off the riverside columns and ghost signs imprinted on the brick. The buildings closer to the centre have inevitably become shopping centres or apartments.
The following day is taken by with a visit to Osterley Park, via Charles Holden's strangely monumental tube station with its constructivist tower. The park itself is rather beautiful, with pochards and mandarins swimming on the lake as swans and coots tend to their young. Lupins grow in gardens dotted with the customary follies. The house itself is a product of architectural nostalgia, a deliberate Tudor revival of a building constructed by Sir Thomas Gresham. The exterior combines Tudor ogee cupolas on redbrick towers with a Corinthian portico decorated by Sphinxes. By contrast, the Adam interior is uncompromisingly classicist, the Eating Room is decorated with pastoral scenes of Roman ruins, the staircase is decorated with a Ruebens fresco showing the glorification of the Duke of Buckingham, the Drawing Room ceiling is modelled on a Palmyran temple, via West Wycombe, while a Dressing Room feigns the appearance of Etruria. A tapestry room is perhaps rather more traditional; I'm amused by the incongruous presence of a badger. Guardi paintings of Venice hang on walls throughout; I'm quite struck by two Mother of Pearl Chinese ships, one with a dragon figurehead, the other with a phoenix (representing the Chinese Emperor and Empress respectively). The Chinese Emperor also features in a Gilray print showing a British emissary grovelling before him. The Prince of Wales and Sheridan also come in for attack, as does the King, shown as an Oriental potentate being resisted by the Duke of Wellington.
The following week is taken up with a return visit to Salisbury. I begin with the Church of St Thomas, which I'd missed on my previous visit; the interior is dominated by the largest surviving doom painting, although it also boasts a wooden Tudor memorial panel and a chapel painted with medieval murals and whose ceiling is decorated with wooden angels but which is otherwise filled with Georgian furniture. The nearby Poultry Cross is also surprisingly ornate, with a set of carved angels around the central column. The city museum also proves unexpectedly interesting with exhibits like stuffed Great Bustards, clay pipes decorated with images of the Great Exhibition, snuff boxes in the shape of coffins and funerary monuments dedicated to the memory of the rotten borough of Old Sarum, a Turner painting of Stonehenge, a set of Rex Whistler paintings of Wilton Hall, a giant puppet and hobby horse used for Tailor's Guild processions, a Roman mosaic, beaker people skeletons and Auroch horns. There's also a section dedicated to Pitt Rivers, including the usual wunderkammeresque items like a Dugong tooth, obsidian axes, Tibetan saddles and a skull measuring device. I had noticed several streams running through the city, but apparently it originally had several open water channels, like modern Freiburg, that were eventually closed for sanitary reasons. Inevitably, the cathedral is more familiar, but I note a few things like the modern font where water reaches a flat mirror-like surface before pouring off through four rivulets, a Sudanese Madonna and the Long Division sound installation, where fragments of slate with texts engraved are scattered throughout the cloister gardens as hidden speakers intone the words. Long Division begins as the clock chimes the hour and there follows a sequence of sixty hushed exchanges, timed to the divisions of the clock. The whispering phrases gather in intensity second by second, falling silent again at the start of each new minute.
In terms of reading, I had just finished reading Zweig's Beware of Pity. It's a book I have ambivalent feelings about; its focus on the idea of the feminine as a form of trap, a lure from masculine virtues, is one that disquiets me. Like Zola's Nana it sees the decadent forces that sap a state's fibre as being essentially female and bound in either case to lead to collapse. It's not difficult to read disability as a proxy for gender, a critique of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, where the elements conventionally identified with civilisation become feminine snares opposed to martial world of the regiment; "it's precisely on men like Kekesfalva, who have in the past been so energetic and ruthless that giving way to their feelings has such a grave effect." Nonetheless, the book is more subtle that this. If pity is often seen as a feminine virtue, Zweig draws a distinction between its soft, sentimental aspects and the harder aspects of self-sacrifice. The distinction means that the narrator is at once victim and criminal, hard and weak. Such distinctions are also essential to Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, where the opening sections are witness to a diatribe on the progressive decline of Western civilisation that goes a long way to explaining Eliot's interest in the novel. The depiction of Felix's Jewish roots in particular, shares Simone Weill's preoccupation with deracinement, the alienation of modernity. The Nightwood is essentially a state of moral reflexivity. Nonetheless, the depiction of the inverts that epitomise this condition is more dualistic than this would suggest; "What is this love we have for the invert... the girl lost, what is she but the Prince found?.. when a long lie comes up it is a beauty."
Italian Hours by Henry James offers a perspective on Italy that is quite familiar from Ruskin, one dwelling on the same history and architecture that the Futurists were later to demand the destruction of. James occasionally describes himself as a flaneur, a term Baudelaire had conceived of for an industrial city like Paris or London, but in many ways, James defines his observations against the present; "Venetian life, in the large old sense, has come to an end and the essential present character of the most melancholy of cities resides in its being the most beautiful of tombs... no young Sienese eye ever rests upon anything youthful... everything has passed its meridian." James writes that "the greater part of the life about you goes on in the streets" but in practice he tends not to dwell on streetlife as a subject; indeed, it is significant mostly by its absence. The only obvious exception is the documenting of a riot in Rome. There are other respects in which the Jamesian perspective is an odd one. Most obviously, although James gives up much of his descriptions to the subject of ecclesiastical architecture he doesn't have any great feeling for religion itself, as with the following description of a young priest; "though I wasn't enamoured of the carnival myself, his seemed a grim preference and his foreswearing of the world a terrible game." James repeatedly notes that Catholicism is a diminished force in Italy; "where you go in Italy you receive such intimations as this of the shrunked proportions of Catholicism and every church I have glanced it... has given me an almost pitying sense." James effectively sees the churches less as a part of any living religious life but as a set of melancholy deserted temples; ruins before the fact. When James does go out on the streets the results are often similar, as he laments the demise of picturesque traditional dress and complains of tourists who are there for exactly the same reasons that he is; "the place has passed so completely in the winter months into the hands of the barbarians... its most ardent life is that of the tourists." Where he does encounter modernity he does not greatly care for it; "of interesting architecture, fruit of the old idleness... Leghorn is singularly destitute."
Chekhov's short stories offer several variations on themes of rural virtue. Without a title depicts a simple story of the appeals of urban vice opposed to rural asceticism, while The Head Gardener's Tale satirises the very idea of pastoral virtue andThe Robbers shows the precise converse, a story of the appeal of rural vice against the tedium of bourgeois and urban virtue. Equally, one of the things that leaps out from Ginsberg's poetry is the internalised homophobia. Like Burroughs, Ginsberg lauds the queer lifestyle as a form of rebellion even as he uses terms like faries and fag.Labels: England, Literature, London
posted by Richard 10:20 AM
Sunday, May 3, 2009
The V&A's Baroque exhibition shows that the Baroque style is founded on a paradox; sensuous and illusory, mystical and carnal, sacred and secular. It's something I feel ambivalent about, repelled by the sentimental putti, corpulent flesh and religious fever as much as I'm attracted to its paganism and love of surface and artifice alike. As Sontag put it, it's the most camp form of style.
On the one hand, it follows empiricist scepticism and its criticism of the notion that reality can be perceived directly through the senses. To Descartes, the intellect is required as well, hence the role of allegory in Baroque painting. To Descartes and Berkeley the idea of god was required to underpin this perception of reality, further stressing the mystical aspect of Baroque art. Newton's work on optics led to a focus on illusion and perspective, most obviously so in Velasquez's paintings or in the painted ceilings common with Baroque architecture. Buildings like Versailles used mirrors to create illusory effects with space. Baroque art tends towards the dramatic, showing allegorical scenes with the figures in motion, frozen in time and commonly depicted through vertiginous perspectives. Mirror glass is built into the frame of a painting of the Holy family from Cuzco. Theatre and drama, fireworks and spectacle, were also important aspects of Baroque, and the exhibition records costumes and paintings of various pageants, as well as the influence of theatre sets and their faking of perspective on architecture. The mechanical advances that made it possible to devise elaborate stage machinery for court theatres created a vogue for 'machine plays', in which, as if by magic, stage sets were miraculously changed and perspectives receded into distant space, creating an illusion of reality that was enhanced by the skilful use of lighting. As the gods descended on clouds from the skies, the distinction between heaven and earth was blurred and dissolved, as it would similarly be blurred to the point of dissolution in the ceiling paintings of chapels and churches. As Foucault might have argued the centre of these pageants was the individual; the equestrian statue and heroic bust were both invented at this time. If the counter-reformation church proclaimed the power of religion, the princely courts of the 17th century proclaimed the religion of power. Absolute monarchs sought to use the Baroque to reinforce their status and authority, showing themselves as masters over nature. Philip IV of Spain, as the 'Planet King', had done just this, but his nephew and son-in-law, Louis XIV, developed the imagery in a much more systematic form as he sought to reimpose order.
Conversely, science had overturned ideas that scorned the phenomenal in favour of the ideal, leading to an increased focus on nature in decoration, as with the acanthus leaves and dolphins characteristic of Baroque art. Copernicus's heliocentric theory had shaken the foundations of traditional cosmology; Galileo with his telescope had revealed the immensity of space; scientific experiment and inquiry were making startling revelations about the workings of the human body and the natural world. It also led to a stress on the sensuous and material, in keeping with the counter-reformation use of lavish materials to impress the masses, either to win them back from Protestantism or to convert them in the new colonies. Gold and silver mined from South America are common enough in the exhibition, but Icelandic obsidian, ostrich eggs, rhinoceros horn, nautilus shell, ivory, amber, ruby glass also feature. The wunderkammer had become an exercise in artifice. Much of the exhibition focusses on Baroque's development as the first international style, from paintings of the Virgin of Guadaloupe to the Portuguese churches of Goa. Baroque was exported internationally, as with a sketch of a Baroque mansion designed for the Chinese Emperor by Jesuits, but it was also imported back in the form of Chinoiserie. Meissen and Delftware both form an important part of the exhibition, as do lacquerware and silk. A wooden screen from Dutch Batavia incorporates native designs as do Mexican depictions of the Virgin and Indian ivories of Jesus.
Afterwards, I briefly visit the Whitechapel Art Gallery. A tapestry of Guernica and a Cubist bust of Colin Powell are on display, but I'm more interested in a small exhibition covering Epstein's Rock Drill, Jacob Kramer's Day of Atonement, Gertler's Rabbi and the Ribbintzin, and Bomberg's Racehorses. The following day is taken up with a visit to Kew Gardens. A few things have changed since my last visit, such as the new Alpine conservatory and gardens or the Princess of Wales conservatory's British woodlands exhibition, including replica charcoal kilns. A bridge across one of the lakes allows you to see a coot diving to the bottom to bring up weeds for its chick. The Titan Arum and the Strelitzia are out in flower, and the grounds everywhere are carpeted with bluebells.
Mephisto by Klaus Mann makes an odd contrast to his father's works. Where Death in Venice places its sexual themes at the centre of the narrative while still leaving them unstated and implicit, Mephisto is quite explicit, dealing with sadomasochism and homosexuality alike (in doing so he also identifies some of the sexual aspects of Nazism that Sontag was to discuss in Fascinating Fascism). Where Doctor Faustus is equally indirect in its discussion of Nazism, Mephisto is an explicit attack. Mann's approach is to take the Faust mythos and re-purpose it. What is striking in this version is that Hofgen is both Faust and Mephistopheles, repeatedly described as a ruthless, if not evil, careerist unconcerned with others on the one hand but on the other, passive and at the mercy of events. Hofgen accordingly flits between the archetypes of Mephistopheles and Hamlet, an empty personality who only gains being through acting out the lives of others, while going from communism to fascism when it suits his career.Labels: Art, Literature
posted by Richard 12:58 PM
Monday, April 13, 2009
This Easter, I travelled back up to the Midlands with a visit to Stokesay Castle and Ludlow. I recall going to Stokesay as a child and I've long wanted to return. I recall it as a ramshackle affair, not entirely unlike Gormenghast, and the truth is surprisingly close to this, even if the scale now seems different to how it appeared to my younger counterpart. The building is a 13th century fortified manor that has largely survived unaltered. I enter through a half-timbered gatehouse, its beams decorated with images of sea-beasts and dragons, before passing through to an inner courtyard, home to a great hall and a stone tower. The hall with its cruck roof and large arched windows is rather reminiscent of a cathedral, save for the worn wood that makes up its stairs and buttresses. Walking upstairs to some of the rooms, I realised I can hear birds calling though the floor. Most of the building is bare and cavernous, save for some medieval tiles and a carved overmantel. The same goes for the tower, with its warning notices about rabid bats. The interior courtyard has been richly planted with flowers, while the drained moat is home to swathes of white daffodils. Swans can be seen gliding across a nearby lake. Nearby lies the manor's church (there was a village here once, of which little remains). Inscriptions from Exodus are written on the walls.
I then pass onwards to Ludlow, a town of white and black half-timbered houses. The church of St Laurence is effectively a minor cathedral; one enters through a hexagonal porch, in to a gloomy interior through which shards of light rain down from the upper windows. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I can see more detail; alternating bands of red and green on the ceiling between carved angels, baroque skull monuments, a gold lantern on the crossing, medieval tiles mixed with Minton, owl and griffin misericords and tree of Jesse stained glass windows. Later, I finish the day with Croft Castle. In contrast to the perpendicular gothic of Ludlow, the Castle is a variant of Regency Gothick. The church here is medieval, with a strange Georgian clock tower grafted onto it. The interior is dominated by an elaborate alabaster monument of a sleeping knight and angels. The lion at the Knight's feet has his tongue stuck out. Jacobean wall panelling survives on the interior alongside Georgian stucco and the Rococo concept of gothic. I'm surprised to see a Kokoschka portrait on the walls, alongside a painting of the castle by John Napper.
I also visit St Mary in Ingestre, a Wren design in the middle of the countryside; I'm struck by the Grinling Gibbons carvings, Burne Jones windows, marble tombs, golden skulls, Venetian tapestries. In neighbouring Derbyshire, I visit Kedleston Hall. Buoyed by funds from a recent film, much of the interior has been re-upholstered and re-hung, emphasising its resemblance to a particularly opulent mausoleum. In the case of the church, the claim is of course true, with iron railings fencing off funeral monuments for the Curzons, alongside a series of Tudor and Medieval monuments. The exterior is dominated by skulls, hourglasses and a faded romanesque typanum. I visit Melbourne's church on the way back; a Romanesque affair with thick columns and a medieval wall painting of the devil. Finally, I visit St Edburg and St John the Baptist in Oxfordshire; St Edburg has William Morris and Burne Jones stained glass, Baroque skull monuments and a single pane of surviving medieval glass. St John is a ruin, its redbrick skeleton hidden in wooded shadows near a lake. Broken tombstones are arranged on one of the altars.
A few weeks later, I travel westwards towards Bath. Again, this is somewhere I remember visiting as a child but other than some memories of the baths themselves, the rest of the city is now a blank to me. The place reminds me of Oxford, in terms of the period of the buildings and the colour of the stone, although Oxford's flatness is not replicated at Bath. To begin with the baths then. Once one has gone past the Georgian entrance, the baths are decidedly impressive; steam rises from the bubbling green waters, as water spills out from underneath the pavement into the pools and statues of Roman emperors or medieval effigies of King Bladud look down from above. The east and west baths are undercover and the dark glooms in those rooms closely approximates what it must have been like for a Roman visitor who, lacking any rational explanation of the spring, took the site as sacred. Coins glimmer beneath the surface of one of the pools. The accompanying exhibition contains some of the lead curses that would have been thrown into the waters, various Roman and Celtic gravestones, and various altars, including one that would have been used by a Haruspex. A couple of items stand out; a mask that worn have been worn by a Priest, the face of the Gorgon surviving from the temple pediment and a bronze bust of Sulis Minerva. This leaves me especially impressed; in its own way it's as beautiful as the bust of Nefertiti. From the baths, I wonder past the abbey and an obelisk dedicated to the Prince of Orange, past a set of gardens with a bronze angel dedicated to King Edward towards Adam's Pultney Bridge (the gardens are occupied by some alarmingly large seagulls, whose cries can be heard throughout the city). With shops lining either side of it, I can only assume it to be modelled on the Rialto Bridge. A swan is nesting underneath it. I continue northwards, past the Victorian church of St Michael Without (modelled on Salisbury cathedral, like so many Victorian churches), until I arrive at the Circus. This seems especially impressive to me, much more so than the nearby Royal Crescent. Enclosed like Stonehenge or the Colosseum on all sides, each building having odd acorn finials and decorated with Masonic symbols, it's an especially odd piece of Georgian architecture. I walk for a bit in the Victoria park, looking at the Victoria memorial, replica of a vase from Cicero's garden and the sphinxes and lions decorating the gates. I then return to the town centre, walking through some of the Victorian arcades and through a garden maze with a set of mosaics at its centre. I then enter the abbey. A particularly pure example of medieval fan vaulting, the walls are pale, with light streaming in through the large windows. Equally, there are relatively few large tombs inside, although the walls are lined with plaques. The exterior is especially ornate, with angels climbing a ladder on the front facade. Finally, I visit the Victoria Art Gallery. I have to admit that most of the artists named therein are utterly unknown to me, but it does have some interest works by Hodgkin, Sutherland, Sickert, Nash and Danby. I'm struck by a moonlight scene painted by Sebastien Pether; it reminds me of Dahl and Freidrich. There's also a good ceramics display; Delft, Lustreware and Eltonware.
The following weekend and I'm back in London, at Dulwich Picture Gallery for an exhibition on Sicket's Venetian paintings. It's something or an irony that for a city first painted in minute detail by Canaletto, its depictions were later to decidedly to incline to the impressionistic, as Monet, Turner, Whistler and Singer-Sargent depicted its mists and sunsets. Of these, it's Whistler that Sickert most clearly resembles, with night scenes of the Campanile and St Marks reducing them to blurs of light and with the influence of Degas apparent in the cropped 'close-ups' of the same buildings. Yet, Sicket is significantly more realistic than Whistler, and while his palette tends to more subdued colours, the buildings are not difficult to recognise; they merely look more grimy than is their usual wont. Equally, the influence of Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec is apparent in the depiction of the Venetian lowlife; the exhibition records an interest in the exoticism of Venetian women with their strange geisha-like hairdressings, but for the most part we could easily be in Camden or Montmartre.
Bolano's The Savage Detectives is in many respects utterly materialistic, concerned with the failure of the visceral realist movement, the trajectory of its leading lights from romantic roles as rebels and criminals in the vein of Rimbaud or Genet, to their dissolution into obscurity. It is also in many respects utterly metaphysical, concerned with a quest romance to discover the poetry of Cesárea, which is a set of arcane symbols that denote the limits of language's mimetic abilities. Amadeo Salvatierra admits that he has never understood her work, and he does not listen to or record Belano or Lima's discussion of its meaning. Similarly, although the narrative dwells on Belano and Lima, the writer who repeats her achievement is Madeno, who is never mentioned by any of the other narrators. Writing in Bolano is something to be written about but not to be shown; we never read any of Belano or Lima's poetry, only Cesarea and Madeno's ideograms. The insane writings of one narrator, Andres Ramirez, use Plato's cave metaphor to describe reality, glimpsing alternative visions of his present through dreams. Bolano's mode of etaphysical realism' operates by offering differing fractured routes to the same subject; Bolano saw the orderly, refined and harmonious in literature as coterminous with cruelty and fascism, the unstylised and untidy, with rebellion and truth, as in Planell's epiphanic moment;3 "in a brief moment of lucidity, I was sure that we'd all done crazy. But that moment of lucidity was displaced by a supersecond of superlucidity... a sign of our miraculous and pointless innocence," Events are accordingly described in a polyphonic manner by different narrators. Their narratives are frequently unreliable, some told by the insane, some told told be the mendacious or biased. Univocal statements are quickly dissolved. Belano and Lima themselves are witheld from the narrative, denied the opportunity to explain themselves. Meaning exists at a vanishing point, the novel guestures towards but does not show, as with the description in By Night in Chile of books as being equivalent to the shadows in Plato's cave. One other point to note is the role of sexuality; there's a marked machismo in Bolano's work here and in By Night in Chile, only challenged by the narrator's confession in the former novel that the women and gays he had demonised in his poetry had done nothing to him.
Reading Broch's The Sleepwalkers is an odd experience; the structure of the novel is decidedly experimental, with various narrative strands developed in isolation, some of which converge while others remain separate. Nonetheless, he lacks the interest in consciousness typical of that period; since he regards his characters as primitives, products of the social and ideological conditions of their age. They may act unpredictably, as rounded characters in Forster's phrase, but only because Broch is sceptical that such animals can have a controlling intelligence. If he sits at an odd angle to the modernist novel, much of this can be explained by the fact that many of his views would have sat well with the Victorians; the condemnation of the Renaissance architecture would have chimed with Ruskin's views ("the horror of this age is perhaps most palpable in the effect that its architecture has on one"), if not Broch's accompanying denunciation of Protestantism and of Kant in favour of Leibniz. Like the Victorians, Broch is essentially a medievalist, seeing medieval Catholicism as offering an organic structure into which every aspect of existence could be integrated; the fall into various sectarian cults opened the way for the remorseless fragmented logic of the modern rationalist and commercial society that Broch sees as being decadent and degenerate. It is in many ways one of the most reactionary of European novels; foreigners like Czechs are characterised as barbarians, women are split into virgins and whores, causal homophobia ("the horror that overcame him when he saw those men dancing cheek to cheek") and anti-semitism (the abstraction of Judaism and its basis in law stand in contrast to Broch's account of Catholicism) are rife. Sometimes Broch sounds rather like Carlyle, whose unpleasant views also went hand in hand with a denunciation of the cash nexus, as with Broch's complaints that the profit motive is the sole governing principle in modern like, so that respectable business men may also be murderers. The progression towards degeneracy in the novel is also a progression down the social spectrum. Nonetheless, the novel isn't quite that simple. The initial section is in many ways a pastiche of a Victorian novel; Pasenow's failure can either be viewed as not submitting to duty or of failing to break with convention altogether. As is said of Esch later in the novel; "he saw the play of good and evil. But his impetuosity often made him see an individual where he should see a system." This particularly applies to the character of the aesthete Bertrand. Broch describes aesthetes as serpents with the garden of eden, art for art's sake representing another branch of the disintegration of all values in place of medieval art's religious purpose. These are certainly the terms Pasenow always thinks of Bertrand in, as he disdains Bertrand's commercial work in contrast to his military career. Nonetheless, with his nomadic lifestyle, there's a case to be made that Bertrand is the romantic, not Pasenow. As Broch puts it; "we have no longer two mutually exclusive fields of reality... we find them co-existing within the same individual... we are ourselves split and riven" Similarly, when Bertran falls a victim to Esch's homophobia (as when Esch is taken aback that Martin and the Newspaper Editor defend Bertrand; "what business is it of ours anyway?"), there's a good case to be made that is the victim of Each's rage rather than a criminal receiving his punishment.
Reading Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy and Repetition, I'm struck by the way he repeatedly depicts women as powerful and aloof, only to insist on their degradation. In the midst of a text like Repetition, where are all the characters (consciously or unconsciously) are liars, it is only Gigi who is repeatedly denounced as such.Labels: Art, England, Literature
posted by Richard 2:52 PM
