From left to right: ‘Sarah Lockett’s Roses’ (1997) by Ronald Lockett, made from cut tin, nails and enamel on wood. ‘Stars of Everything’ (2004) by Thornton Dial, made from paint cans, plastic cans, spray-paint cans, clothing, wood, steel, carpet, plastic straws, rope, oil, enamel, spray paint and Splash Zone compound on canvas on wood. ‘Oklahoma’ by Ronald Lockett (1995) made from found sheet metal, tin, wire, paint and nails on wood in ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ at the Royal Academy
1. The Souls Grown Deep Foundation
There are two important points to grasp about this exhibition. The main one is that ‘Souls Grown Deep’ isn’t a fancy name dreamed up by the curators but the name of an organisation in America. The Souls Grown Deep Foundation (SGDF) is based in Atlanta, Georgia. It:
advocates for the inclusion of Black artists from the South in the canon of American art history
fosters economic empowerment, racial and social justice, and educational advancement in the communities that gave rise to these artists
Founded by Atlanta collector William S. Arnett in 2010, Souls Grown Deep derives its name from a 1921 poem by Langston Hughes titled ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’. The poem is one of Hughes’s signature works which is worth printing in its entirety:
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Souls Grown Deep Foundation stewards the largest and more eminent collection of works by Black artists from the Southern US. It originally totalled some 1,300 works by more than 160 artists, two-thirds of them women.
Part of the foundation’s remit is publicise and promote these artists beyond America. To this end it energetically partners with galleries around the world and has placed more than 500 works from the collection in 32 museums globally. So this is an example of the foundation’s global outreach program. They came to an arrangement to display a selection of their works at the prestigious Royal Academy in London.
What exactly do we mean by ‘The Deep South’?
Map of the South featured in ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ at the Royal Academy
The artists live and work in this region, from communities in South Carolina to the Mississippi Delta, in isolated rural areas like Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and in urban centres like Atlanta, Memphis and Miami, all indicated on the map.
2. Outsider art
Obviously all the artists are Black Americans, that’s explained by point 1. But just as important is the idea that these artists, growing up in communities in the Deep South, come from outside the mainstream of American art schools and galleries. Some couldn’t afford art school, some were actively excluded on the basis of their colour, others didn’t know about the possibility or care.
So, with little access to formal art education, most of the works on display here were made by artists who developed their own artistic techniques and styles by learning from neighbours, friends and family. Both the foundation and individual artists make a big point of emphasising that these artists came from within very local traditions and communities. In this respect a bunch of photos at the entrance to the show capture the context and vibe of these works in their original settings.
Clockwise from top left: Ronald Lockett standing by ‘Sarah Lockett’s Rose’; Thornton Dial pointing at the camera; Doris Moseley and Mary Margaret Pettway working on a quilt; Purvis Young standing by a canvas; Lonnie Holley giving a thumbs up; Mary T Smith in the middle of a big yard show.
Some used skills they developed when working in industry, such as Thornton Dial and Joe Minter who were metalworkers. These skills were handed down – Dial trained his sons Thornton Dial Jr and Richard Dial and nurtured the talents of his younger cousin Ronald Lockett.
The women of Gee’s Bend, a remote settlement on the Alabama River, have handed down the skills of sewing and making quilts from generation to generation. Artist Loretta Pettway Bennett, featured here, recalls learning to sew by helping her mother and grandmother make quilts.
Raw materials
Coming from outside the mainstream art tradition, many of the artists here recycle and reuse materials available locally – like clay, driftwood, roots, soil, sawdust and all manner of cast-off items, old phones, bicycles, tools, shears, wire, trash and detritus. This gives almost all the works a rough and ready, hand-made appearance. For example this stunning work by Archie Byron (one of my favourites in the show) is made entirely from sawdust and glue!
Anatomy by Archie Byron
Or take these two sculptures, assembled from bits and pieces of bicycle (on the left) and an old tool box, spanner and wire (on the right).
Three-Way Bicycle by Charlie Lucas (c. 1985) made from bicycle wheels, metal machine parts and electrical wiring and Where is My Hammer? by Joe Minter (1996) made from welded found metal
The exhibition
The exhibition brings together 64 works by 34 artists from the mid-20th century to the present. There’s various media including assemblages, sculpture, paintings and drawings, reliefs, and video.
Artists
The artists include Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Joe Minter, Hawkins Bolden, Bessie Harvey, Charles Williams, Mary T. Smith, Purvis Young, Mose Tolliver, Nellie Mae Rowe, Mary Lee Bendolph, Marlene Bennett Jones, Martha Jane Pettway, Loretta Pettway, and Henry and Georgia Speller.
Room 1. Friendships and family ties
The first room is, arguably, the best and showcases work by artists connected by close familial relations and friendships. Lonnie Holley, who had been working as a gravedigger and cotton picker, began sculpting in 1979, when he carved grave markers for a young niece and nephew following their tragic deaths in a fire. Through a former girlfriend he met Thornton Dial, who had worked in farming and as a steelworker before he became an artist. Both artists worked with discarded and salvaged objects and organic materials, transforming them into impressive sculptures and assemblages rich in personal, social and political symbolism.
The most impressive pieces here are by Dial including the biggest piece in the show, the fabulous ‘Stars of Everything’ (see above). But it was the relatively small piece, ‘Keeping a Record of It (Harmful Music)’ by Lonnie Holley (1986) which the curators chose for the exhibition poster. Like all the assemblages here it is made from cannibalised waste and spare parts, in this case a salvaged phonograph top, a phonograph record and an animal skull.
Keeping a Record of It (Harmful Music) by Lonnie Holley (1986)
I don’t know what it’s saying, but it’s saying it very powerfully indeed, a brilliantly powerful, unnerving image.
Room 2. Personal stories, local sources
Working almost entirely without recognition from the wider art world, these southern Black artists drew inspiration from daily life and current events. The resulting works are intensely local in terms of materials, subject and audience, while also bringing out universal themes.
This room features the work of Sam Doyle, Henry Speller, Eldren M. Bailey, Georgia Speller, Jimmy Lee Sudduth. Lack of access to conventional art materials and tools often led artists to repurpose what
was around them. Sculptors including Bessie Harvey found artworks ready to be ‘drawn out’ from the twisted organic forms of roots and dead wood, a practice that became a distinct regional tradition.
Instinct drove visually impaired artist Hawkins Bolden as he searched the streets for items he could sense felt right for his ‘scarecrow’ sculptures, giving new life to materials that others would class as trash.
Installation view of ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ @ the Royal Academy
By and large the sculptures were much more interesting and effective than the paintings. Many of the ‘primitivist’ paintings were just too basic for my taste.
Paintings from room 2.
For example, I couldn’t get on with any of the big, puke-yellow paintings by Purvis Young. Apparently, his scenes are populated by wild horses, warriors, angels, pregnant women, boats and prison bars but I still don’t like them.
Paintings by Purvis Young
By contrast I found almost all the sculptures wonderfully effective. In part this is, I think, because I’ve seen much of this kind of thing before. Pablo Picasso made cubist sculptures before the First World War; Marcel Duchamps signed a urinal and put it in an art gallery in 1917; Dada artists created absurdist sculptures made from mash-up of street junk in the early 1920s. I know a bit more is going on here, but much of it reminded me of the Arte Povera movement of the 1970s which took industrial waste products and cast-offs and made them into abstract sculptures.
My point is simply that recycling street junk into imaginative or surreal sculptures is hardly new but, on the contrary, feels like a venerable and well explored strategy, which is why so many of the pieces here had an oddly familiar feel to them. I really, really liked this piece by Hawkins Bolden but that’s partly because it reminded me so strongly of Surrealist sculpture. Could be by Picasso or Max Ernst.
Untitled by Hawkins Bolden (1989) Pot, drainpipe, cans, muffin tin, rubber hoses, nails, wood and wire
Room 3. The yard show
As most of the artists did not have access to formal art spaces, often the only place they could display their work was in their own back yards. The ‘yard show’ is a deeply rooted Southern tradition where artists would arrange their sculptures, paintings, and assemblages on their property.
Joe Minter (b. 1943) is well known for creating a huge example, titled ‘African Village in America’, near Birmingham, Alabama and the show includes an impressive video showing a panoramic scan over this huge area full of ramshackle constructions.
Room 4. The quilt-makers of Gee’s Bend
Gee’s Bend, officially known as Boykin, is a remote settlement on a hair-pin bend of the Alabama River. The Bend’s residents are descendants of the enslaved people who worked on the cotton plantation established there in 1816 by Joseph Gee. After the American Civil War (1861 to 1865), many of the formerly enslaved people remained on the plantation working as sharecroppers, who were obliged to give part of their crop to the landowner, and many inhabitants today still bear the surnames of their ancestors’ enslavers. The community was able to remain intact due to Government loans provided during the Depression which enabled tenants to buy the land they farmed and protected them from forced evictions.
Installation view of Gee’s Bend quilts
This continuity allowed a unique tradition of quilt-making to survive and be passed down through generations of women. Most Gee’s Bend quilts are improvisational or ‘my way’ quilts. Quiltmakers start with basic forms then head off ‘their way’ with unexpected patterns, unusual colours and surprising rhythms. Not originally conceived of as formal artworks, quilts were both decorative and necessary objects, keeping families warm and making use of fabric scraps.
More Gee’s Bend quilts
I appreciate the enormous amount of time and energy which goes into creating patchwork quilts like this. I appreciate the communal nature of the work, and the deep local tradition which the wall label explains in some detail. But, to be blunt, I wasn’t that impressed by the quilts. Maybe it’s just not my medium or genre. I quite liked the couple which were made from corduroy, because the texture of the fabric was so tactile, and my favourite was the one made entirely from denim patches, maybe because it approached closest to being a painting. Maybe I just don’t ‘get’ quilts and embroidery and sewn artefacts. My loss.
It’s a relatively small display, but be warned that there’s an additional room devoted just to quilt. I couldn’t find it and had to be shown the way by one of the Royal Academy receptionists. In the Academicians’ Room on the first floor are displayed half a dozen more quilts from the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers and these ones are on sale. But be wared about the prices. The cheapest on is £25,000, the most expensive one £30,000.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize is not an open competition which anyone can apply to, like the BP Portrait Award or the Royal Academy Summer exhibition. The exact opposite: the curators choose just four finalists from what they consider to have been the best photographic exhibitions staged by individual photographers, in Europe, in the previous 12 months. To be precise, the stated aim of the prize is to ‘reward artists and their projects considered to have made the most significant contribution to photography over the previous 12 months.’
Therefore, if you visit the Photographers’ Gallery in the next few weeks you will find four rooms, each devoted to an in-depth display of work by just four international shortlisted artists. In alphabetical order these are Bieke Depoorter, Samuel Fosso, Arthur Jafa and Frida Orupabo. The winner of the prize was announced on 11 May and got a tidy sum of £30,000 (the other three entrants got £5,000 each). Who was the lucky winner? I’ll tell you at the end of this review.
I’m going to address the photographers in the order you actually encounter them in the gallery, rather than alphabetically.
1. Frida Orupabo
Frida Orupabo (born 1986) is a Norwegian of Nigerian heritage i.e. Black. She began posting photo collages on Instagram in the mid-2010s, cutting and pasting together images of Black bodies using historical and archive material; then in 2017 she took her approach into the real world (i.e. not just on a screen), creating the large collages you see here. All this led up to the exhibition which brought her to the curators’ attention, which was titled ‘I’ve seen a million pictures of my face and still have no idea’, which was held at the Photomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, February to May 2022.
Installation view of Frida Orupabo at the Photographers’ Gallery
I immediately liked the results – very big, frameless, freestanding works which are more like sculptures hanging on walls than traditional photos. As far as I could tell, none of them had titles. Orupabo’s being Black and being a woman i.e. pressing contemporary art’s two big buttons of race and gender, sends the curators into a tizzy of artspeak:
The sculptural collages and digital works of Frida Orupabo are multi-layered formations, exploring questions of race, sexuality and identity. Orupabo, a Norwegian Nigerian artist and sociologist, grounds her inquiry in her own experience of cultural belonging. Utilising visual material circulating online, spanning colonial-era photographs and ethnographic relics to contemporary imagery, Orupabo’s hand-wrought works re-arrange and re-make the archive. The resulting images take the shape of fragmented Black, mostly female-bodied, figures.
These figures, first dislocated, are reassembled layer by layer in a complex and poetic manoeuvre that simultaneously denounces one-dimensional depictions of Black lives. Her collaged cutouts hold our gaze and invite various readings of the stories and lives of the people depicted, many of whom are entirely absent from the archives. In this way Orupabo invites a consideration of how photography significantly contributes to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence.
Does photography ‘significantly contribute to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’? Isn’t that like saying books ‘significantly contribute to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’ or laws ‘significantly contribute to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’? Surely any technology can ‘significantly contribute to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’ if that’s how the people wielding it want to use it. Probably guns contributed quite a bit ‘to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’, probably quite a bit more than photography. In fact photographs of the atrocities carried out by the authorities in the Belgian Congo did as much to disgrace and discredit that authority, as the kind of photographs the curators have in mind, the kind used to measure and categorise the Indigenous peoples, did to define and control them. Photography is just a technology. I can be used for good or evil. Writing that ‘photography significantly contributes to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’ is just art school boilerplate, modish rhetoric, smart-sounding swank (definition: ‘behaviour, talk, or display intended to impress others).
Anyway, as so often, the curators’ obsession with the twin shibboleths of race and gender blind them to the specificity of the actual art in front of them. Two things struck me. One was the way the deliberate crudeness of the artefacts is intentional: heads are pasted onto bodies at anatomically impossible angles, a pair of legs are completely separated from a body. She is highlighting the utter dysjunctive effect of her collages, their complete artificiality, and that reminded me of Dada, of the deliberately unsmooth, jagged photocollages of George Grosz or John Heartfield from 100 years ago.
Installation view of Frida Orupabo at the Photographers’ Gallery
But something not at all hinted at in the curators’ commentary is the horror tropes. In the top photo you can see that the loosely female figures are, from left to right, 1) attended by two sort of flying rabbit demons; 2) sitting on a monster’s head; 3) is shaped like a mermaid; and 4) in the most striking image, is a human head cut and pasted onto the body of a bat. A whole lot of stuff is going on here, but what strikes me is the invocation of imagery of Gothic tales and horror stories; it’s the stuff of Goya nightmares. What? Why? In this respect she reminds me of the way Kara Walker’s silhouettes of Black people in ante-Bellum Deep South morph into nightmare, monster images.
Installation view of Frida Orupabo at the Photographers’ Gallery
Anyway, it was the sheer weirdness of these big collages which grabbed me, not their alleged commentary on colonialist this, that or the other, and so I’ll tell you straightaway that, for the uncanny unexpected weirdness of her images, Orupabo was my favourite of the four artists: I wanted her to win.
2. Bieke Depoorter
Bieke Depoorter was born in 1986 in Belgium. She was selected for this prize on the basis of a 2022 exhibition titled ‘A Chance Encounter’, staged at C/O Berlin from April to September 2022. The display here consists of two parts, titled ‘Michael’ and ‘Agata’. Apparently:
In ‘Agata’, a first meeting [with Agata Kay] in a Parisian strip-club in 2017 evolves with complex tension into an intricate, changing narrative. The project explores questions of collaboration, the limits of a creative friendship, performance, boundaries and authorship.
I couldn’t find ‘Agata’. Possibly it amounted to one framed photo of a pink room, and maybe a collage of movie posters on one wall, but these weren’t labelled so I wasn’t sure. Going back to reread the introductory wall label more carefully I realised that the subject of Depoorter’s photos, the stripper Agata, eventually asked Depoorter to suspend their relationship and asked that all record of the photos, conversations and letters involved in it be erased. Maybe the Agata project is the absence of any materials about the Agata project. OK. That has a pleasing 1970s conceptual art feel about it.
But the reason I wasn’t too sad about not finding ‘Agata’ is because it was completely dwarfed by the other project displayed here, ‘Michael’. This is an epic, dense, absorbing and deeply unsettling work.
in 2015 Depoorter met a middle-aged, confused man named Michael on the streets of Portland, Oregon, USA. They got talking and Michael took her to his apartment which turned out to be covered from floor to ceiling with scrapbook-style cut-outs from magazines, books, newspapers, school reports, journals and diaries and all manner of bric-abrac.
As a result of this encounter Michael gave Depoorter three suitcases containing a trove of his personal items, sketchbooks and essays which she, for unexplained reasons, accepted. Then, presumably, she departed Portland, for the wall label explains that, at some point later on, she tried to contact him again and failed. When she flew back to Portland to find him she discovered his flat rented to someone else and that Michael had vanished, leaving no trace.
At which point Depoorter commenced what appears to have been months if not years of effort to track him down, the start of an obsessive quest to find Michael and to understand his life. As far as the labels tell us, to this day she still hasn’t found him, but along the way she has created the two big things which this darkened room is filled with. One is the way all the walls are even more covered in detritus and scraps of every kind than Michael’s apartment was, the records and ephemera of her hunt which Depoorter has acquired over the past 6 or 7 years.
Installation view of Michael by Bieke Depoorter at the Photographers’ Gallery
Post-its festoon multiple layers of documents and diaries and journals and magazine photos and contact sheets. Arrows connect different pieces of evidence. It’s exactly like the room of the crazed serial killer which the cops eventually break into in all those American psycho movies. She calls it ‘The investigation room’ and what we see here is just a fragment of the materials she’s accumulated in her obsessive, endless search. She has supplemented Michael’s own collection of ephemera with her own. The two sets of detritus are intimately interwoven. But spooky though this is, it isn’t the main thing: the main thing is the film.
Installation view of ‘Michael’ by Bieke Depoorter at the Photographers’ Gallery
It’s a 31-minute-long film detailing Depoorter’s obsessive quest so far. There are no moving segments. It consists entirely of still photos, so it’s by way of being a slideshow of places she’s been to and people she’s interviewed as she delves deeper into Michael’s life and past, her words and those of the interviewees appearing as captions on the screen.
So, in the sequence I watched, Depoorter spoke to some people who were at high school with Michael, who described his intense upbringing by nice but weird Mormons. We see stills of Michael’s high school yearbook with jagged, uneven hand-written notes scrawled across it. It has lots of overtones of serial killer movie, except Michael is no killer, just an oddball Depoorter bumped into and became slowly obsessed with.
If all this sounds weird (and it definitely is) after just a few minutes I found the pace and determination of Depoorter’s narrative drawing me into the film. Michael may have been just an insignificant nobody and yet, in Depoorter’s powerful telling, the memories of childhood friends and schoolmates become weirdly compelling. I realised I was being drawn into Depoorter’s own obsession. It’s contagious!
The curators comment that this work interrogates:
the complex ethical relationship and boundaries…between the photographer and their subject [and] questions the role and responsibilities of the photographer, the possibility or impossibility of truth in representation and grapples with personal and professional boundaries.
No doubt. But something deeper and weirder was also at work here. I was quite relieved to break away from the film and step back out into the light airy gallery space.
3. Samuel Fosso
Samuel Fosso was born in 1962 in Kumba, Cameroon. He was selected for the prize on the basis his exhibition ‘Samuel Fosso’ at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, from November 2021 to March 2022.
Since the mid-1970s Fosso has dedicated his artistic practice to self-portraits and performative photography. In vulgar language, he dresses up and photographs himself. At the tender age of 13 he set up a Studio Photo Nationale in Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic. Alongside commercial work, Fosso began a series of self-portraits, and has carried on to the present day, hence a nickname he picked up along the way, ‘the man of a thousand faces’.
More recently Fosso has created a series titled ‘African Spirits’ in which he dressed up as – and recreated famous photographs featuring – Black celebrities such as (the ones on display here) radical activist Angela Davis, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Haile Selassie and Tommie Smith, one of the African Americans who gave the Black Power clenched fist salute from the podium of the 1968 Olympics.
Installation view of ‘African Spirits’ by Samuel Fosso at the Photographers’ Gallery. Can you name all 6 of these famous Black figures?
According to the curators:
Playing the role of key historical figures and social archetypes in front of the camera, Fosso embodies a powerful way of existing in the world, and a vivid demonstration of photography’s role in the construction of myths.
There’s also a pair of huge colour photos of himself dressed as soldiers from the First and Second World Wars, tribute to the many African and Black soldiers who fought in those wars (see my blog post, Congolese soldiers in the world wars).
Compared to the previous two displays, photocollage sculptures and a weirdly compelling documentary film, Fosso’s exhibits – classic framed photographs – seemed, well, kind of obvious, kind of quaint.
4. Arthur Jafa
Arthur Jafa was born in 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi, USA. He is an artist and filmmaker. What is an American doing in an exhibition supposedly restricted to exhibitions in Europe?
Well, one answer is that art curators can’t stop themselves promoting the Great Yoonited States of America: after all, Depoorter’s ‘Michael’ project is about an American and entirely set in America and half of Fosso’s African Spirits are American. And now we have an actual American photographer. Three out of the four displays are heavily or entirely American.
Why do British curators love American art?
What can you do against the endless tide of American art and artists being promoted by British art curators and adding to the vast sea of American culture which floods all our channels? If Britain’s art curators are so hell-bent on promoting American culture and American values at every opportunity, all I can do is register my feeble protest and point out that there are, in fact, other countries in the world apart from America. Quite a few, actually.
Why do we rarely or never hear about them? Because America is easy, that’s why. American art comes pre-packaged with 1) fluent, articulate artists who are great in interviews 2) innumerable American critics who bubble over with rhetoric about race and gender and 3) political and cultural ‘issues’ which we all already know too much about about because they flood our TV, radio, movies, documentaries, newsfeeds, twitter and all the other American-run social media.
When an American artist gives an interview saying they’re addressing issues of #metoo or Black Lives Matter,everybody immediately knows what they’re talking about and nods in concerned sympathy because we’ve already seen and heard and read hundreds and hundreds of news items and newspaper stories and magazine features and documentaries interviews and tweets about just these ‘issues’.
American art is like McDonalds art. It’s smooth, pre-packaged, ready to consume, processed, pre-masticated, baby food. Just add water and you’re good to go. Compare and contrast the problems you’d encounter with the language barrier and with explaining all the little-known historical and cultural references if you tried to stage an exhibition of contemporary, say, Indonesian or Peruvian art. But another African American artist yakking about slavery or the institutional racism of American society – piece of cake, child’s play, no brainer, no mental effort required, just the appropriate amount of liberal sympathy.
Arthur Jafa
Anyway, Jafa is here despite not being European because his exhibition, ‘Live Evil’, was shown at Arles in the South of France i.e. a European venue, from April to November 2022.
There’s a video of an extended interview with Jafa. He’s very angry about racism, in America, Europe, everywhere. In the bit I watched he quoted Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. In a modern art gallery you’re never far away from the 1960s. My eyes glazed over because I have heard scores of Black artists complaining about racism in America and read hundreds of articles about racism in America. Black Lives Matter posters hang in the windows of concerned students round where I live.
The stories of Uyghurs Muslims locked up and tortured in Xinjiang, of the people dying and displaced in Yemen or Syria, of the 920,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar living in the world’s largest refugee camp in Bangladesh, now as I write and you read? Are these packing the walls of the Barbican, Tate Modern, the Royal Academy, the Photographers’ Gallery? No. Silence. Nada. Their stories will never be told. They might as well not exist. But another American artist doing another show about how racist America is? Take your pick.
One last obvious point about the ubiquity of American artists: America is rich. It has the wealth to support a huge class of artists who, if they play their cards right, can become very wealthy, successful, appear in all the right magazines, and generally enjoy a great lifestyle. Makes me feel a bit sick when artists from the richest country in the world complain about their suffering and oppression. Go and live in Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, Afghanistan for a month then fly back to your air-conditioned studio in LA and tell me about the suffering of ‘your people’.
Anyway, according to the curators, Jafa’s work is another ‘extended meditation on the issues of race and the Black experience’. Just like Frida Orupabo’s display, then. I’d swear there are other ethnicities in the world apart from Black and White. There are quite a lot of Indians and not a few Chinese, for a start. But not in Curatorworld. Black, Black and more Black, preferably American Black, is the only experience, the only voice, the only art we are going to be shown. I’m not saying ‘the Black experience’ is not a thing to investigate. I’m just saying that maybe it’s not the only story in the entire world to be aware of, to listen to.
Anyway, to quote the curators:
Drawing from a rich collection of images, film footage and music, Arthur Jafa uncompromisingly articulates Black experience, providing us with an exercise in visual literacy, confronting us with a new Black aesthetic which avoids fixed hierarchies and linear storytelling
There are just six works in Jafa’s display, six very large photos. First, maybe a word of explanation about the tile. ‘Live Evil’ is the name of a Miles Davis album, released in 1971, a live recording of a concert performed in December 1970 in Washington DC. After the epoch-making ‘Bitches Brew’ of 1969, Miles was working with a large group of almost entirely electric instruments, producing a strange voodoo swamp sound, mashing up heavy funk grooves with Jimi Hendrix guitar, and his own trumpet heavily electronically distorted. During this period Miles cultivated a dark and brooding image. He revelled in the nickname ‘the Prince of Darkness’, in fact he released an album titled ‘The Prince of Darkness’ in 1971, same years as ‘Live Evil’. Anyway, ‘Live Evil’, which sounds like this:
Miles Davis (1926 to 1991) was without doubt one of the great musical artists, composers and performers of the twentieth century. In the show he is featured in a diptych (‘any object with two flat plates which form a pair’) alongside the godfather of the Delta Blues, acoustic guitarist and singer Robert Johnson (1911 to 1938), which looks like this:
Johnson died young leaving only 20 or so recordings behind which have, nonetheless, become legendary and inspired all the blues guitarists of the 1940s and since. Dying young, Johnson left a legend or urban myth about himself which is that, in order to play so amazingly, he had sold his soul to the Devil. This legend was fostered by tracks with titles like ‘Me and the Devil Blues’ or ‘Hellhound on my trail’:
So what does Jafa’s juxtaposition of these two Black musical icons tell us? Well for a start, they both made smoking look cool. To consider their music, although only about 40 years separate the photos (1930 to 1970) they seem musically and technologically galaxies apart. Then again, maybe they’re linked by the common thread of their devilish reputations, hellhounds and princes of darkness. Finally, maybe it’s simpler than that: Robert and Miles were both outstanding musicians, embodiments of Black excellence.
Across the room is another, bigger and more dramatic juxtaposition:
On the face of it, this is a straight contrast between an image of innocence and one of scary threat. Yet some other visitors I got talking to explained to me that they’re both images of identity masquerade: apparently, the earliest iterations of Mickey were based on white entertainers who’d blacked up as minstrels; while the figure on the right is actually a white actor who has blacked up using scary voodoo imagery (I assume this photo was shot on a film set but I can’t find out which one. Do you know?). They’re both lies, or deceptions, or multi-layered images of Blackness. Is that it?
tackles the complexity of African-American cultural identity, as defined by an existential paradox that places the Black subject ‘in essential intimacy with death’, as Saidiya Hartman explains in Jafa’s documentary ‘Dreams are Colder than Death’ (2013).
The endlessness of American pop culture
I liked the clarity of these dyptychs and also the fact that they were much deeper than they first appeared to be. The trouble, though, with popular culture, especially American popular culture, is that it is endless. Like the Bible, you can find a passage or quotes to prove anything you want to. I can cut and paste Homer Simpson next to Superman and straightaway I’m making important statements about masculinity, or something. Given such a vast sea of pop ephemera it would be hard to splice together two random elements and not find yourself raising interesting cultural or semiotic issues.
American culture combines technological wizardry with super-refined commercial strategising. Look at the Marvel Comic Universe movies, which are spectacular viewing, rank as the highest-grossing film series of all time, having netted over $29.1 billion, and have a mental age of around 9.
And American artists are trapped within this culture, condemned to try and imbue meretricious trash with meaning – and Black American artists are doubly trapped, trapped in a sea of Americana from which they (apparently, if someone like Jafa is to be believed) feel profoundly alienated. So I understand Jafa when he says that Black American artists are they trying to create narratives of Blackness which will help them navigate the bottomless dumpster of American pop culture, and the complex matrix of racist laws, assumptions and culture. I assimilate this kind of message because I’ve heard it hundreds, maybe thousands of times. It comes pre-packaged and ready to consume.
Anyway, the puzzling thing about the Arthur Jafa display is that the use of these two sly juxtapositions is not his only trick – only two of the six items use it; the other four items are single images and far more varied, not to say troubling.
One is a treated image of the Black singer of a rock band (HR of Bad Brains) jumping about onstage, which left me cold, having spent too much of my teenage year paying attention to images of rock performers to be impressed by one more.
But in a completely different tone from everything else, one entire wall is taken up with an enormous photo of what appears to be a room somewhere in Rwanda, empty of people, but filled with washing lines (?) from which hang the clothes and rags of people hacked to pieces in the terrible genocide.
Installation view of Arthur Jafa at the Photographers’ Gallery
Is this part of ‘the Black experience’? Or the African experience? Or the human experience? It was certainly part of this generation of Rwandans’ experience. Does it directly impact anyone who wasn’t there? If so, why more so than the Armenian genocide or the Holocaust or – the most disastrous civil war in history, the Taiping Rebellion in China in which at least 20 million perished (which I’ve just been reading about at the new exhibition at the British Museum)? Or the Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1962, in which anything up to 50 million Chinese starved to death? Or, during my lifetime, the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Kampuchea in which up to 2 million people, a quarter of the population, were murdered or starved to death, 1975 to 1978?
I carry the images and histories of all these atrocities in my head, which not only gives me a very dim view of human nature, but also appears to be where I differ from someone like Jafa, because I don’t categorise these atrocities by the skin colour of the victims. They’re all human to me, each one an individual who suffered more than I can imagine, died in misery and terror, mounting up to a vast weight of guilt on the conscience of mankind. The collected atrocities of mankind don’t respect colour or ethnicity, which is why I find the foregrounding or privileging of some massacres or genocides over others morally repugnant.
Anyway, back to Jafa. The last piece in his display is a partial sculpture, a kind of bas-relief hanging on the wall of the whip-scarred back of a Black slave, a very potent image of man’s grotesque inhumanity to man or the atrocities of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
I get it, the Black slave trade was a very, very bad thing and generations of white exploiters captured, bought, transported and treated their African slaves with unbearable savagery and brutality. But I happen to have just finished reading Robert Hughes’s epic history of transportation to Australia, The Fatal Shore, and it is packed to overflowing with the unspeakably sadistic treatment meted out to the transported white convicts, especially in the penal colonies of Port Moresby and Norfolk Island. For even slight misdemeanours like looking at an overseer the wrong way, a convict could get three hundred lashes till bystanders could see their spine and ribs through the remains of their butchered back and the bystanders had to pick gobbets of raw human flesh off their clothes. Hughes repeats descriptions of British or Irish convicts who were whipped to death. So this, for me, is the image of a whipped human.
Most of human history is an abattoir. To limit notions of suffering and injustice to just one ethnicity or to one group or one class seems to me historically and morally questionable. It’s a form of boasting – my grievance is bigger than your grievance. It’s very much part of the grievance and victim culture which America has perfected and exported to the rest of the developed world.
But billions have suffered abominably, in every continent, at the hands of all races. The génocidaires in Rwanda weren’t white. The killers in Cambodia weren’t white. The people who implemented the Great Leap forward weren’t white. The murderers of 1.5 million Armenians weren’t white. The administrators of the gulags weren’t Western imperialists.
If these seem disproportionately enormous ideas for a photography exhibition that’s because Jafa is aiming to trigger big ideas about history. It’s just that I happen to be, maybe, more knowledgeable about the history of atrocity than the average gallery goer and so my frame of reference is wider, maybe, than he intends. Maybe it’s just me. I’ve read more widely about atrocities throughout history than is good for anyone, and so this powerful object triggers a wider, deeper historical response than he was, maybe, expecting.
I’m reading Emma Sky’s book about Iraq. She mentions General David Petraeus raising Thucydides’s Melian Dialogue in conversation. This was written about the siege of Melos in 416 BC, part of the wider the Peloponnesian War. When the Athenians finally took the city of Melos they executed the entire male population and enslaved all the women and children. My year of reading Roman history and literature drummed into me that slavery was a universal institution throughout the ancient world, that the civilisations of ancient Athens, Rome and Egypt entirely depended on it and that the huge slave population was subjected to terrible, awful lives of unending labour and liable to whipping, cutting, maiming and torture for the slightest infraction.
That’s what I know, that’s what an image like this triggers; not the suffering of one particular group, but the universal horror of human history.
Anyway, back from these vast horizons to a small room in Soho containing half a dozen artworks by Arthur Jafa. The conclusion from this small display seems to be that Jafa has at least two modes of operation, one consisting of the canny juxtaposition of images from popular culture, an astute form of curating and darkling satire; the other mode, flat-out horrific memorials of ‘the Black experience’.
This latter is, as you can imagine, catnip to modern white curators, driven by the bottomless resource of white bourgeois guilt:
By placing one resonant cultural artefact next to another Jafa references and questions the universal and specific articulations of Black experience. Eschewing a linear narrative, Jafa organises his material through formal and affective associations, linking his images through visual resemblance or thematic resonance. In this way Jafa aspires to an art that harnesses ‘the power, beauty, and alienation of black music.’
That’s from the press release. On the introductory wall label the curators say:
Embracing slippage and dissonance Jafa creates art that is as fluid and multidimensional as Blackness itself.
‘…as fluid and multidimensional as Blackness itself.’ What I took from the four exhibits on show here is that ‘Blackness’ as an artistic, critical and curatorial concept is indeed so fluid and multidimensional that artists, critics and curators can say almost anything about it and sound convincing. It lends power and a sense of urgency and relevance to even the most anodyne exhibition. It adds the spice of the ‘radical’ to a medium which all curators are uneasily aware is overwhelmingly white and bourgeois. Along with Gender it is a power word and, more than that, a kind of ideological matrix or discursive machine, which will continue to generate works and words, art and discourse, with ever-proliferating effect, for the foreseeable future.
From one perspective, ‘the Black experience’ as an art category is not so much the product of Black people’s actual experiences (which I imagine are very varied and complex) as it is of the liberal guilt of the White art establishment.
Who won?
Who do you think should have won the prize? It was won by Samuel Fosso, ‘the man of a thousand faces’. Why? Shoair Mavlian, the (White, obvz) Director of The Photographers’ Gallery and Chair of the Jury said that Fosso’s:
‘sustained exploration of self-portraiture uses a traditional, studio-based approach steeped in history, while at the same time his work remains relevant and addresses contemporary political issues of today with humour and authenticity. His work has created an extraordinary platform for Black voices and artists throughout his career.’
It’s a difficult choice but I think I liked Frida Orupabo’s weird, Gothic photomontages more than Fosso’s dressing up; and, although I’ve just given him a hard time, actually the clarity and design of Arthur Jafa’s diptychs have stayed with me days later, but then that’s American art for you, as slick and efficient as a Spielberg movie.
Modern Couples was a enormous exhibition held at the Barbican in the winter of 2018/19, which examined the role played by couples, women, lesbians, gay men and transgender people in the avant-garde art and literary movements of the early twentieth century.
Beginning by describing the working relations of no fewer than 40 (mostly heterosexual) artistic couples, the exhibition went on to examine a variety of other forms of artistic collaboration – between same-sex partners, between trios of artists, ménages à trois, and among larger groupings and movements, such as the Surrealists. The exhibition was a polemical one designed to show that:
not only was the core of the Modernist movement based around radical new ideas about love, sex and eroticism, but also that:
Modernism was the result of an unprecedented number and variety of types of artistic collaboration
With over 80 named artists and some 600 objects and artworks on show, the exhibition was an overwhelming bombardment of information and took a lot of time and several visits to really absorb.
Key words of contemporary artspeak
Above all, it was a very wordy exhibition, with over 40 lengthy wall labels, totalling some 100 paragraphs of densely factual text, plus extensive quotations from the writings, letters, diaries and so on of the numerous artists and authors featured.
As I read through these labels I became more and more aware of the repetition of key words and phrases and the recurrence of key themes and ideas. Eventually I began to wonder what it would be like it I cut and pasted together all the phrases which used one or more of these keywords; to see what picture would emerge from this textual collage.
A collage of quotes
So: this blog post is intended as a collage of the keywords (and, therefore, the key themes) from the exhibition. After all, collage – cutting up and re-arranging words and images – was a distinctive invention of the Modern movement.
I’m not sure what conclusions to draw. On a purely logical level, the repetition of a small set of closely related terminology to do with love, sex, desire and gender suggests the narrowness of the concepts underpinning the exhibition and the tremendous limitedness of the curators’ concepts and vocabulary.
But, on another level, the repetitions may have a sort of incantatory quality: like the holy words and phrases repeated by Christians and other religions at their weekly services, annual festivals, rites of passage, baptisms, christenings and deaths. In Christianity these would be keywords like God, love, Father, Son, sin, forgiveness, love, atonement, saviour, saint. In the jargon of modern artists and curators the keywords are bourgeois, challenge, desire, erotic, gender, practice, queer, sex, subvert, same-sex desire, transgressive and unconventional. If religion concerns things of the spirit, modern art is all about the body.
Repetition and faith
Repetition performs a number of functions for a believer: it grounds them in their beliefs; the reassuring litany of familiar words and ideas binds you to the community of the faithful; repetition drums home key terms and concepts with a brainwashing function which eventually makes independent thought impossible. To the initiate, the litany is a quick introduction to the value system of the ideology.
In much same way, the following keywords are central elements in the modern secular religion of critical theory, touching on notions of identity politics, LGBTQ+ activism, feminist theory, and a kind of watered-down Marxism – the key elements which dominate modern art jargon.
Their purpose is not to explain anything but to create a sense of identity and community among believers, to identify the enemy, rally the faithful, and endlessly repeat the key dogmas which the true believer must hold in order to be saved.
A short satirical work assembled from notes compiled by Gustave Flaubert during the 1870s, lampooning the clichés endemic to French society under the Second French Empire.
For his own amusement Flaubert assembled notes towards ‘a dictionary of automatic thoughts and platitudes’, where a platitude is defined as:
A remark or statement, especially one with a moral content, that has been used too often to be interesting or thoughtful… A trite, meaningless, or prosaic statement, often used as a thought-terminating cliché… The statement may be true, but its meaning has been lost due to its excessive use.
Note how a key aspect of a platitude is that it has lost its meaning due to repetition. That’s my point about these artspeak ideas. They may seem radical and shake your world the first time you read them, when you’re 17 or so. But just in this exhibition the same ideas are repeated 10, 15, 20 times, which makes them start to lose their power. And if you visit 10 exhibitions which feature the same basic ideas, rephrased 10 or so time, you’ll have read the same ideas about art ‘subverting bourgeois norms’ 100 times. And if you’ve visited hundreds of art exhibitions then you’ll have seen this same handful of ideas expressed in all possible permutations, thousands of times.
Over time repetition makes them go from exciting and mind-opening, to familiar and comfortable, and then on to threadbare empty. Incessant repetition turns them into platitudes and clichés.
So I am both a) lampooning the clichés of contemporary artspeak, using the texts available at this particular show and b) showing how endless, brainless repetition of the same handful of ideas and phrases eventually empties them of all meaning.
The list of keywords
In what follows I give three elements:
the keyword
the attitude any self-respecting, progressive follower of intellectual fashion should adopt towards it (in italics) – that’s the bit which is most a homage to Flaubert’s dictionary of platitudes and stock attitudes
then quotes from the wall labels at the Modern Couples exhibition, which illustrate how the keyword is used by curators
N.B. I’ve punctuated the list with illustrations of images from the exhibition.
Bourgeois
Bourgeois morality. Bourgeois conformity. Bourgeois conception of marriage. Awful. Stifling. Must be combated and overthrown.
‘Toyen and Štyrský believed in the political nature of eroticism, convinced that desire could transform human consciousness, fight bourgeois conformity, assault the hypocritical status quo, while opening up a liberated space unfiltered by aesthetic and moral constraints.’ (Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann)
‘In Hausmann’s eyes, Höch needed to free herself from the bonds of bourgeois morality and as he wrote to her, ‘kill the father in yourself’.’ (Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann)
‘Inspired in part by their friend and collaborator Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1921 assertion that henceforth “the streets shall be our brushes, the squares our palettes“, bourgeois representation was to be eliminated and photography and design were to be valued equally with painting and sculpture.’ (Varvara Stepanova and Alexander Rodchenko)
‘[Mayakovsky, Osip and Lilya Brik’s] unconventional relationship placed friendship, love and creativity at the centre of a way of life that paid no heed to the bourgeois conception of marriage.’ (Lilya Brik, Osip Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky)
Alexander Rodchenko, Lilya Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky
Challenge
All good art ‘challenges’ bourgeois conformity, popular conceptions, gender stereotypes and everything else bad.
‘Within the same photographs, polarities such as poetry and violence; submission and agency; and male and female are challenged.’ (Lee Miller and Man Ray)
‘Throughout the 1920s, Cahun and Moore pursued a project of theatrical camera play that yielded hundreds of photographic images, mostly featuring Cahun in a variety of roles that challenged the established repertoire of gender stereotypes.’ (Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore)
‘Stieglitz interpreted O’Keeffe’s early paintings as embodying female sexuality and O’Keeffe, perhaps in an attempt to counter such an interpretation, began painting New York City, challenging the popular perception of urban motifs being essentially masculine territory.’ (Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz)
Georgia O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz (1918)
Desire
This is polite curatorspeak for sexual attraction, lust, sex, sex drive, libido, carnality, lasciviousness, all of which are banned. ‘Desire’ is the very broad term which covers all of this. Heterosexual ‘desire’ is deprecated. The best form of ‘desire’ is same-sex desire, preferably female. Purer, more refined.
‘Toyen and Štyrský believed in the political nature of eroticism, convinced that desire could transform human consciousness, fight bourgeois conformity, assault the hypocritical status quo, while opening up a liberated space unfiltered by aesthetic and moral constraints.’ (Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann)
‘The exhibition begins on the Lower Level where all the principal themes that gave rise to Modernism and underpin Modern Couples are introduced: desire, agency, transgression, liberation, activism, collaboration and the urgent pulse of experiment.’ (Introduction)
‘In her confident embrace of female same-sex relationships, Sackville-West engendered desire in Woolf that then permeated her writing…’ (Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf)
‘The relationship [with Vita] gave rise to Woolf’s Orlando (1929), a transformation of desire into writing.’ (Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf)
‘Zürn shared Bellmer’s fascination with mapping desires and fears onto the female body. Eyes, limbs and breasts, often entangled with hybrid animal forms are recurrent motifs in her work.’ (Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer)
‘For Bellmer, Zürn was a living incarnation of his Poupée and so he played out his desires on her body in a number of works that are powerful but undeniably shocking.’ (Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer)
‘Klimt was one of Austria’s most acclaimed artists, who put the female form centre-stage, celebrated desire and the human psyche and created luxurious canvases, murals and mosaics.’ (Emilie Flöge and Gustav Klimt)
‘Male homosexuality was illegal in the United States when the American photographer George Platt Lynes was active from the mid-1930s until his death, and yet he trailblazed defiantly homoerotic works that celebrate male desire.’ (George Platt Lynes, Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler)
George Platt Lynes, Stoneblossom (c. 1941) by PaJaMa. Collection Jack Shear
Erotic
Just as same-sex desire is the best form of desire, so the optimum form of eroticism is homoeroticism. Both are based on the universal if unspoken disapproval shared by women and gay art curators of heterosexual male sexuality.
‘More than any of his contemporaries, the French sculptor Auguste Rodin knowingly placed eroticism at the centre of his work.’ (Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin)
‘The, inanimate, naked figure sprawled on a bed of twigs and only visible through a peephole was cast from her body, the result of a long artistic and erotic dialogue between the two artists.’ (Maria Martins and Marcel Duchamp)
‘Saint Sebastian became one of [Lorca and Dali’s] coded signs, the preferred mascot for their different aesthetics. The saint’s historical association with male homoeroticism and sado-masochism may also have been on their minds.’ (Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí)
‘Male homosexuality was illegal in the United States when the American photographer George Platt Lynes was active from the mid-1930s until his death, and yet he trailblazed defiantly homoerotic works that celebrate male desire.’ (George Platt Lynes, Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler)
‘Homophobic views were rife in post-war America when PaJaMa – an acronym for the collective formed by Paul Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret French in 1937 – began taking their homoerotically charged photographs.’ (PaJaMa: Paul Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret French)
‘Erotically charged photographs of these dolls were celebrated in Surrealist circles and remain extraordinary relics of a “mad love”.’ (Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer)
‘Together [Lee Miller and Man Ray] made the darkroom and studio a place of shared photographic and erotic experiment.’ (Lee Miller and Man Ray)
‘Gender’ is possibly the central concept of modern art theory. What all modern art is about. What all contemporary art curators are obsessed with. The best art subverts, interrogates, undermines etc bourgeois gender stereotypes, expectations etc.
‘Gender indeterminacy, sexual empowerment and the fight for safe spaces of becoming were part of the avant-garde currency.’ (Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener)
‘Capturing Picasso with his eyes closed and wearing only his bathing trunks while holding a bull’s skull, Maar makes Picasso’s famous machismo her subject. In a turnaround of gender expectations, Picasso becomes Maar’s muse.’ (Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso)
‘In 1934 [Toyen and Jindrich Štyrský] founded the Czech Surrealist Group that was known for rejecting notions of gender entirely.’ (Toyen and Jindřich Štyrský)
‘[Toyen]’s use of phallic imagery is a rare example of a female artist humorously commenting on the standard erotic language of the time and subverting gender expectations.’ (Toyen and Jindřich Štyrský)
‘Born Maria Cerminova, Toyen chose an ungendered pseudonym, which she claimed, came from the French word for citizen “citoyen”.’ (Toyen and Jindřich Štyrský)
‘With new inspiration Hannah Höch continued to comment on the battle of the sexes, gender and the ‘new woman’ as an engine of social renewal.’ (Til Brugman and Hannah Höch)
‘Throughout the 1920s, Cahun and Moore pursued a project of theatrical camera play that yielded hundreds of photographic images, mostly featuring Cahun in a variety of roles that challenged the established repertoire of gender stereotypes.’ (Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore)
Suzanne Malherbe/Marcel Moore (1928) by Claude Cahun. Courtesy of Jersey Heritage Collections
Practice
Blanket term for what any artist actually does.
‘The photograms have solely been attributed to László, yet a double portrait of both artists is evidence enough of their collaborative practice.’ (Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy)
‘[Sonia]’s practice soon impregnated all aspects of life, experimenting with domestic interiors, dress, theatre designs and textiles in parallel with the chromatic fireworks found in Robert’s painting.’ (Sonia Delaunay and Robert Delaunay)
‘Taeuber-Arp’s puppets for King Stag show the importance of performance and dance within her practice.’ (Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp)
‘[Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov] were prolific and versatile, engaging in a Russian form of expressionist practice known as Neo-Primitivism.’ (Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov)
‘The American photographer Margrethe Mather was instrumental in the development of her fellow countryman Edward Weston’s practice as a photographer.’ (Margrethe Mather and Edward Weston)
Hugely important concept. Far larger than the art world, ‘queer’ is a central part of the campaign throughout the humanities and beyond to overthrow traditional bourgeois notions of gender stereotyping and heterosexual convention. See ‘Queer Studies’.
‘Many of their images were taken on the beaches of Fire Island, Nantucket and Provincetown, offering a record of a long standing LGBTQ community in the United States, as Fire Island especially, was – and still is – a sanctuary for queer freedom.’ (PaJaMa: Paul Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret French)
‘With Orlando [Virginia Woolf] craftily weaved together one of the most important queer texts of the 20th century.’ (Chloe liked Olivia)
‘These lively, cultural spaces attracted a variety of creative queer women such as the female modern dandy, the Symbolist inspired femme-fatale and the androgyne.’ (Chloe liked Olivia)
Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West
Sex
Generally disapproved-of word because mostly (but not always) associated with male sexuality, toxic masculinity, heteronormativity, gender stereotyping, gender conventions, bourgeois conformity and everything bad. Meaning men, basically. Thus Rodin’s ‘sexual prowess’ and Klimt’s ‘sexual exploits’ are disapproved of.
Broadly speaking, men have the rather disgusting ‘sex‘ while women, gay men and lesbians have the far more spiritual and superior ‘desire‘.
‘Dating from when Claudel and Roding first met, Je suis belle (1882) pairs two previously existing works and expresses the older artist’s feelings of sexual prowess with characteristic bravura.’ (Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin)
‘Duchamp made sexual union the focus of much of his conceptually oriented work.’ (Maria Martins and Marcel Duchamp)
‘The Erotic Objects became sexually charged keepsakes for Duchamp.’ (Maria Martins and Marcel Duchamp)
‘With “Chloe liked Olivia” Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own made a thinly veiled reference to female like-with-like sexuality for those looking out for it.’ (Chloe liked Olivia)
‘She was close to the Dadaists and Surrealists and was known for her sexually liberated relationships with artists and writers, including Louis Aragon, Aldous Huxley and Ezra Pound.’ (Nancy Cunard and Henry Crowder)
‘The extent of Dali and Lorca’s sexual relationship is unclear, although Dalí made a pointed reference to it in his later autobiography.’ (Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí)
‘This adventurous ménage à trois escaped the intolerance of American society for Paris and Villefranche-sur-Mer where they met a diverse artistic and largely sexually liberated community. (George Platt Lynes, Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler)
‘Klimt was well known for his sexual exploits and illegitimate children, but his relationship with Flöge was respectful and mutually enabling.’ (Emilie Flöge and Gustav Klimt)
The Bride by Gustav Klimt (1918)
‘The decidedly cool and precise evocation of the hawk in the story reflects Westcott’s own struggles with aging and sexual frustration.’ (George Platt Lynes, Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler)
‘The three first met at the Art Students League of New York, where Paul and Jared were lovers. Jared married Margaret in 1937, after which he sustained a sexual relationship with both partners.’ (PaJaMa: Paul Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret French)
‘Hausmann also upheld that a sexual liberation would enable a life unconstrained by monogamy and so was happy to maintain a relationship with Höch while still married to his wife.’ (Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann)
Subvert
The key central aim of all modern and contemporary art is to ‘subvert’ bourgeois convention and gender stereotyping and all bad things. Can be used interchangeably with ‘challenge.’
‘They also subverted the Greek myth of Narcissus (the tale of a young man who falls in love with his own reflection) to celebrate queer desire and refute historical ideas of feminine vanity.’ (Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore)
‘[Toyen]’s use of phallic imagery is a rare example of a female artist humorously commenting on the standard erotic language of the time and subverting gender expectations.’ (Toyen and Jindřich Štyrský)
Drawing 18 from the cycle ’21’ by Toyen (1938) Subverting gender expectations?
Same-sex desire
The best kind of desire because it doesn’t involve horrible heterosexual men.
‘In her confident embrace of female same-sex relationships, Sackville-West engendered desire in Woolf that then permeated her writing.’ (Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf)
‘Woolf’s activism and advocacy for same-sex love echoed what was happening on Paris’s more tolerant Left Bank.’ (Chloe liked Olivia)
Transgressive
The main aim of modern artists is to ‘transgress’ all the terrible conventions of bourgeois / conventional / racist / sexist / homophobic society by producing fabulously transgressive art. Use with the verbs ‘challenge’ and ‘subvert’.
‘Perceived as transgressive in the racist context of the 1920s and 1930s, the relationship [of Nancy Cunard and Henry Crowder] was a source of profound enrichment for both of their careers and opened Cunard’s eyes to the segregation in the United States as well as introducing her to Black American culture.’ (Nancy Cunard and Henry Crowder)
‘It was their shared belief in the transgressive and poetic potential of erotic imagery that had the biggest impact on surrealism.’ (Lee Miller and Man Ray)
‘By all accounts, Zurn and Bellmer were magnetically drawn to each other and the intense and transgressive nature of their relationship is starkly evident in their respective works.’ (Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer)
One of many iterations of ‘the Doll’ by Hans Bellmer
Unconventional
The modern artist is desperately unconventional. He, she and they aim to transgress and subvert and challenge as many artistic and social conventions as possible in order to attain a peak of unconventionality. Conventions are for ‘normies’. Bourgeois conventions were made to be transgressed, challenged and subverted by artists who dared to be unconventional.
‘Mather made several portraits of Weston and others, employing unconventional cropping. In a number of intimate nude portraits of Mather, Weston did the same.’ (Margrethe Mather and Edward Weston)
‘Their unconventional relationship placed friendship, love and creativity at the centre of a way of life that paid no heed to the bourgeois conception of marriage.’ (Lilya Brik, Osip Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky)
‘From 1910 onwards, the year of their marriage, Sonia and Robert Delaunay sought to break loose from conventional approaches to painting’ (Sonia Delaunay and Robert Delaunay)
‘Most notable, was their adoption of face painting as a means of upsetting established conventions and celebrating what they considered the multi-dimensional and magical qualities of modernity.’ (Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov)
Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, Moscow, 1913
This is a great exhibition. You should definitely go. Fun, spooky, scarey, immersive, yet strangely liberating and uplifting. Completely different from the hard study required at something like the Tate Modern Cezanne blockbuster where you have to pay attention, read and study. Here you walk about and through and under and experience your own sensations, moods and thoughts.
Mike Nelson
British artist Mike Nelson specialises in big installations, room-sized installations, huge installations, assembled from industrial junk and derelict objects, knackered old tyres, abandoned doors, auctioned-off industrial equipment, bric-a-brac salvaged from junkyards, abandoned buildings, car boot sales and much more.
All this stuff and more is assembled into strange and eerie combinations and installations, some you look at, but some you can actually enter and wander through, all of them designed to tease and nag at the corner of your mind, with their eerie sense of abandoned building sites, derelict workshops, underground bars, rough plywood hoardings, half-plastered rooms.
I reviewed an installation of some of these works at Tate Britain back in 2019. There I go into some detail about the autobiographical reasons why I like modern art made from industrial junk, namely the number of labouring jobs I did when I was a teenager and young man, and so how powerfully evocative I find old industrial machinery, equipment, tools and especially tyres – car tyres, lorry tyres, their smell and feel and the black rubber marks they leave on your skin and clothes were a big part of my boyhood.
Anyway. Let’s consider some of the key works in this exhibition:
I, Imposter (2011)
A really big room filled with wide apart shelves crammed with all kinds of bulky non-descript industrial products, miscellaneous furniture and fixtures, with big palettes and wooden sheets leaning up against the wall. Atmosphere of a derelict warehouse. BUT the key fact: all illuminated by a low level but intense scarlet light. Not daylight or fluorescent light, but blood-red, deep dread, womb-red luminence. Abandoned, eerie, spooky. Straightaway taking you to another place, into the realm of horror movies or intense science fiction.
Installation view of I, IMPOSTOR by Mike Nelson (2011) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author
The Deliverance and the Patience (2001)
Next we move onto a big gallery space in which has been created out of wood a maze of narrow corridors, unpainted, with damaged, derelict half-built walls – a zigzag of short passages with wooden doors of different styles, presumably picked up from skips across London, leading into claustrophobically small, low-ceiling walls, some of which have further doors leading you on into the maze, others don’t so you exit the way you entered. The process of navigating this space is surprisingly unsettling and, at one point, I felt a surge of the panic I get when trapped in really small, confined spaces, like the real panic I experienced when I once went potholing with my son (and a guide).
Typical corridor scene inside The Deliverance and The Patience by Mike Nelson (2001) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author
Anyway, each of the ‘rooms’ – barely more than cubicles – are like tiny stage sets: one is a cramped bar with a photo-mirror of Elvis on the wall; another has old oil paintings of sailing ships and some model ships on the bar along with ‘Do not spit’ signs in English and Chines. Another is a sort of travel agents’, with a narrow counter and ancient posters of old-style air stewardesses standing in front of passenger jets. Another contains a small green baize table on which is a miniature roulette wheel, some tarot cards, and on the wall behind a communist-era Chinese poster of young model communist striding into the brave future.
The pokey little ‘travel agency’ inside The Deliverance and The Patience by Mike Nelson (2001) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author
As far as I can tell these don’t ‘mean’ anything. They are meant to be experiences, of eeriness and spookiness. A world of other times and lives which have all been abandoned. Wreckage. Remains. Detritus. As in a thousand and one science fiction movies where the entire human race is whisked away leaving meals half eaten and cigarettes still smouldering, for the dazed survivors to blunder amidst.
The ‘gambling den’ inside The Deliverance and The Patience by Mike Nelson (2001) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author
Triple Bluff Canyon (2004)
If all this cramped interiority is getting a bit claustrophobic, you then go up the steps to the upper galleries, which are dominated by one huge installation titled ‘Triple Bluff Canyon’.
Installation view of Triple Bluff Canyon (the woodshed) by Mike Nelson (2004) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
First off this is a wonderful work, combining everything I love in modern art: big, imaginative, made of industrial detritus, a profound comment on modern society at the same time as being funny, a kind of art joke. And, reading the wall label, you realise there’s more to it than meets the eye, in fact three distinct elements:
First off, it’s a homage to an American artist named Robert Smithson who, in 1970, half buried a woodshack in 20 tonnes of earth. Nelson has recreated the basic idea, but replaced earth with sand, maybe in reference to the Gulf War and the West’s general inability to stop meddling in Arab countries.
Second, the tyres. From what I could make out, these are part of a separate series of works which are simply collections of wrecked, damaged and abandoned tyres which can be found alongside motorways and highways around the world. Each little collection is simply titled after the road where Nelson found them. And so these tyres are titled ‘M25’.
Third, you see the white rectangle on the right of the photo, well that’s actually a doorway into a corridor which curves round into the woodshed itself which has been turned, by being half-buried, into a grim, spooky bunker. First of all the corridor is only 10 yards or so long but curves quite steeply, so that I was lucky to enjoy quite a cinematic moment; because I’d got as far as the door into the bunker when I heard footsteps behind me. A woman with very loud heels had entered the curved corridor and was walking very slowly, with a very loud clack of each footstep, behind me, following me, but because of the steep curve I couldn’t see her. Rather than push the door and go into the bunker I waited and it turned into a surprisingly tense, eerie couple of seconds as I waited for my mysterious pursuer to appear.
The Uncanny
I’ve been rereading Freud. Freud wrote an essay on The Uncanny. My understanding is that we experience ‘the uncanny’ when something we perceive reminds us of, evokes and stirs, childhood feelings and emotions which themselves are concealing deeper ‘truths’ or drives or instinctive wishes, which we have successfully repressed. The uncanny is the dread we feel in situations in which our childish fantasies and fears appear more real and true than our adult knowledge and perspective.
This description applies 100% to the feeling I had after getting lost in half a dozen cramped, subterranean rooms in The Deliverance and the Patience, and then his uncanny moment inside ‘Triple Bluff Canyon’
Eventually she came into sight and wasn’t actually the science fiction-cyborg-horror monster my unconscious was momentarily panicking about, but a regular gallery goer – so I held the door into the bunker open and we both went inside. Into another womb-like cave, entirely lit by blood-red lighting.
Installation view of I, IMPOSTOR (the darkroom) by Mike Nelson (2011) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
The wall label tells us that this interior is a separate work from Triple Bluff. This is ‘I, IMPOSTOR (the darkroom)’ which makes explicit reference to its nature as a mock-up of a photographer’s darkroom. Except it doesn’t feel like that at all. It feels like a cave, an underground bunker. The equipment on the bench doesn’t look like a professional photographer’s but is another collection of junk and detritus, and what’s the big boiler dominating the far end of the room? It feels like a room in a hobbit house late at night. More doors lead onto a half-wrecked room which is open to the sand pouring in from the main installation, again with a strong feeling of dereliction and abandonment, as in thousands of science fiction movies.
View from inside the sand bunker looking out – I, IMPOSTOR (the darkroom) by Mike Nelson (2011) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author
Absence
When I was a literature student ‘absence’ was an important concept in critical theory. I think I read about it in the work of French philosopher Pierre Macherey. Put very simply, what is absent from a work can sometimes tell you more than what is present. But you don’t have to dig that deeply to realise that what all these installations have in common is the absence of people.
This is emphasised by the way so many of them are types of locations which ought to be populated, such as the bars and gambling den and travel agents of ‘The Deliverance and the Patience’, the hobbit-bunker of I, IMPOSTOR, or the eerily empty red warehouse at the start. That’s why I’ve mentioned several times the powerfully eerie sense of abandonment and loss that pervades the exhibition.
Moving along the upper floor we come to another large room containing five items from the series Nelson calls ‘Asset Strippers’. I’ll quote my review of Asset Strippers’ when I saw it at Tate Britain.
There are old weaving machines, heavy-duty metal cabinets, two huge old-fashioned weighing scales, the threshing wheels of a tractor attachment, the huge rubber tracks from a mechanical digger. Nelson has collected knitting machines from textile factories like the ones he grew up around in the East Midlands, woodwork stripped from a former army barracks, graffitied steel awnings once used to secure a condemned housing estate, doors from an NHS hospital, and much, much more. It is a rag and bone yard, a paradise of defunct paraphernalia artfully arranged so that each piece creates a space around itself, defines its space, creates a psychic zone of defunct power.
Installation view of ‘Asset Strippers’ by Mike Nelson (2011) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
In my review of the Tate Britain display I tackle Nelson’s intended aim of commenting on the destruction of British industrial manufacturing and the trope of cliché that tells us we live in a post-industrial society. For some reason, at some point, I was struck by the word ‘strippers’. I know the title refers to the kinds of financial companies which buy up businesses not to run them at a profit but to gut them of all their assets and sell on the shell, and Nelson is implying this modus operandi can be applied widely across British society in the neo-liberal era i.e. the last 40 years.
But this time round I was struck by the word ‘strippers’. As in strippers in a strip club. And for a while I enjoyed perceiving each of these carefully assembled artefacts as Dada joke reworkings of the human figure, using abandoned industrial machinery.
The exhibition then takes you back down to the ground level where there are two more enormous works:
Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Munster
Apparently this is one of a series of such works which are designed to parody the notion of an artist’s studio as ‘a place for authentic production’. As a thing what’s noticeable is the heavy industrial vibe of the big wooden hoardings but most of all of the threatening thick-wire mesh matrix. Only when you look closely do you realise that the grey balls suspended throughout it are in fact grey clay models of human heads. As far as I could tell, all the ones I saw looked like the heads of Black people and all of them are hung upside down. Why?
Installation view of Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Munster – A Thematic Instalment Observing the Calendrical Celebration of its Inception: Introduction; towards a linear understanding of notoriety, power and their interconnectednessl future objecs (misspelt); mysterious island by Mike Nelson (2014) Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy of the artist and the Hayward Gallery
The Amnesiacs
Up the ramp behind this is a similar work, also using big industrial wood framing but much finer wire mesh to create what look like a series of rabbit hutches. These contain objects created from the standard sources to illustrate a fictional gang Nelson has created and which he calls The Amnesiacs. This little conceit combines a wistful yearning of ‘cool’ imagery from American culture (biker gangs from ‘The Wild Ones’ onwards) with Nelson’s characteristic feel for dereliction and decay.
Installation view of The Amnesiacs by Mike Nelson (1996-ongoing) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author
I particularly liked the ‘motorbike’ which is actually constructed, in a semi-Dalì kind of way, from two old tyres, two walking sticks for the front wheel prongs, antlers for handlebars, three yellow rubber rings supporting the antlers, which themselves rest on an orange helmet standing in for the petrol tank, with the main body of the ‘bike’ being a packing case covered in a fleece. The way that Nelson has recreated an everyday object out of readymade material adds support to my idea that the asset strippers might in fact be sly, Dada-joke sculptures of the human body…
Thoughts
Spooky, surreal, claustrophobic, anxiety-provoking, wonderfully imaginative, beautiful, thoughtful, silly, funny, surreal and a bit disturbing. it only took me 45 minutes or so to go round the entire exhibition but it was a very intense 45 minutes, and I staggered out of the gallery feeling like I’d watched half a dozen different movies and read or read a bunch of upsetting and disturbing science fiction short stories. Go experience it for yourself.
As in life: some doors open, some do not. You nly find out when you try them.
SURREALISM. Noun: Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, or otherwise, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral considerations.
(First Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924)
Surrealism is not a new or better means of expression, not even a metaphysic of poetry; it is a means of total liberation of the mind.
(Surrealist declaration, January 1925)
Introduction to surrealism
Surrealism is ‘a philosophical and artistic approach which violently rejects the notion of the Rational Mind and all its works’. For Surrealists, the True Mind, true human nature – ‘the true function of thought’ – is profoundly irrational.
The Surrealists thought the Rational Mind formed the basis of ‘bourgeois’ society, with its moral and sexual repressiveness, its worship of work and money, its fetishisation of capitalist greed, which had led both to the stifling conformity of Western society and to a series of petty wars over colonies which had themselves led up to the unprecedented calamity of the First World War.
In the Surrealists’ opinion, this entire mindset had proved to be a ghastly mistake. The Surrealists thought that we had to reject it lock, stock and barrel by returning to the pure roots of human nature in the fundamentally irrational nature of the human mind, liberating thought from all censorship and superficial, petty morality, seeking to capture ‘the true function of thought’ and creativity through the exploration of the fortuitous and the uncontrolled, the random and the unexpected, through dreams and coincidences.
The first Surrealist magazine was titled La Révolution surréaliste (1924 to 1929) not because it espoused a communist political line, but because it proposed that Surrealist writing and art would, by its radical dysjunctions and unexpectednesses, reveal to readers and viewers the true nature of unbounded thought and lead to a great social transformation.
Cadeau by Man Ray
Massive show, massive space
This is a huge exhibition containing nearly 350 objects, an overwhelming number, a flood of objects and information in the related wall captions.
Also, the exhibition space itself is big and capacious. Roomy. This allows for the display of lots of large objects, namely furniture, lots and lots of chairs and several striking sofas, mannekins wearing dresses, some enormous sculptures and so on. Not so many tables because tables tend to be enormous, but three or four petite coffee tables or tea tables.
Gae Aulenti by Tour (1993) Manufactured by FontanaArte, Glass; bicycle wheels. Vitra Design Museum
Of course this is because this is an exhibition about design rather than art or sculpture as such. The exhibition is about how the design of objects was impacted by the Surrealist approach and ‘look’ and style and fashion. Hence the need for more than paintings and photos (though there are plenty of these); of designed products.
Chronological
Surrealism was, for its first five years or so, from 1924 to 1929, a writers’ movement, led by the self-appointed pope or bully of Surrealism, André Breton. Only in 1929 when the Catalan Wunderkind Salvador Dalí joined it, did the visual arts come to play a more important role and, eventually, dominate the movement and people’s ideas about it.
The show, like almost all exhibitions, is chronological in structure covering nearly a century of Surrealism from the earliest automatic writing to its most recent manifestation in using artificial intelligence to create artworks.
Thus we start with Surrealism’s first writings and manifestos, and then the outburst of Surreal artworks in the 1930s led by Dalí but with scores of other visual artists, and there were so many of them – Hans Arp, Hans Bellmer, Brassaï, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, Wifredo Lam, René Magritte, André Masson, Joan Miró, Meret Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy and many more.
The strangeness of objects
The exhibition is divided into themes and begins with the importance of everyday objects. Surrealism took the revolutionary approach of investing the most everyday of everyday objects with an aura of mystery and strangeness.
.It starts with an examination of Surrealism’s beginnings from the 1920s and considers the crucial role that Everyday objects and interiors were embraced by the movement’s early protagonists, as artists sought to capture the aura or mysterious side of ordinary household objects. Cubism had looked at everyday objects – café table, newspaper, bottle of wine – from multiple angles. Surrealism looked at them from a sur-real angle, attributing them volumes of meaning never dreamed of by ordinary people, setting them in weird juxtapositions to jar us out of our everyday doze and jerk us into awareness of the strangeness of being alive and moving through this world of images and symbols.
What could be more normal and everyday than an apple, a businessman and a cloudy sky? Or, in the way René Magritte deploys them, more disturbing?
The Son of Man by René Magritte (1946)
These ideas took a while to be developed and fully expressed. It was only the ‘Second Surrealist Manifesto’ of 1929 that introduced the notion of ‘the Surreal object’ – using art or writing to reveal ‘the remarkable symbolic life of quite ordinary, mundane objects’. This inspired artists including Dalí, Magritte, Meret Oppenheim and Man Ray to experiment with an entirely new form of sculpture, by creating absurd objects from found materials and items, revealing the bizarre potential of the everyday.
Object by Meret Oppenheim (1936)
This is the point of Marcel Duchamp’s famous ‘readymades’, objects he noticed amid the bric-a-brac of ordinary life and carefully selected to be placed within a gallery setting, in an exhibition in a gallery, where they acquired completely new resonances, the cheapest of mass-manufactured objects acquiring a holy aura, its entirely practical aspects magically converted into profound and mysterious statements about shape and dynamism and meaning.
Bottle Rack (Porte-Bouteilles) by Marcel Duchamp (1914/1959)
He was to some extent mocking the idea of ‘art’ and ‘the gallery’; but he was also discovering the numinous in the quotidien which was to inspire artists ever since. But this gesture also, as the curators pithily point out, prioritised concept over craft and conceptual art has been with us ever since.
Paintings
There are cases containing manifestos and magazines, key works by Breton such as Amour fou.
There are early paintings by Dalí, Le Corbusier (who was a painter before he became an architect), the mysterious desertscapes of Yves Tanguy, a couple of weird paintings by the English artist, Leonora Carrington who came on the scene a bit later, in the 1940s.
There are lots of photos, maybe a hundred photos, performing its two functions, as documentary record and as artwork.
Among the documents are scads of photos of the founders and early protagonists, Breton and his Parisian colleagues, then the artists. There’s records of the famous 1936 Surrealism exhibition in London, of the Surrealist pavilion (the Dream of Venus’) Dalí created for the World Fair in 1939, and so on. There’s Max Ernst at home in his apartment surrounded by African and Oceanic masks and artefacts (a lovely photo by Hermann Landshoff). And so on.
In the section about ‘sex and desire’ (every art exhibition has to have a section about sex and desire) there’s a suite of photos of Surrealists cross-dressing or being deliberately androgynous, for example photos of Marcel Duchamp dressing as his female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, in 1921, and Claude Cahun’s calculatedly androgynous photographic self-portraits, from 1928.
There are photos of works of art, such as the still-disturbing fetishistic mannekins created by Hans Bellmer, or the room full of a mile of string created by Marcel Duchamp for a 1942 exhibition in New York.
And there are photos which are works of art, such as pretty much anything by the genius Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890 in New York but who changed his name and moved to Paris where he spent most of his career).
There are four or five films. There are early black and white silent Surrealist films, such as Entre’Acte by Rene Clair (1924), winningly described by the director as ‘visual babblings’.
Oddly, they didn’t have clips from the most super-famous experimental movies by Bunuel, Luis Buñuel’s ‘subversive’ early films Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or.
Later in the show there’s a few art films from a generation later:
But dominating one wall, not least because it has a loud musical soundtrack, is a screen showing Destino, a short Surrealist animated film which was an unlikely collaboration between Dalí and Walt Disney. It tells the love story of Chronos – the personification of time – and a shapeshifting woman. In fact the movie was never completed because war work took precedence, and the project was only revived in the 1990s when Disney animators competed it according to the original sketches and scenario.
The significance of the film is its indication of Dalí’s success and name recognition in the USA by the 1940s, and the way in which what, on the face of it, are a sequence of nonsensical absurd events, have been assimilated enough for a mainstream producer like Walt Disney to agree to it.
Partly this is down to the instant recognition of a relatively small number of surreal images associated with Dalí. The short 7-minute animation is a collection of greatest hits such as the desert landscape setting, melting clocks, ants appearing out of cracks, human faces or bodies moving into trompe l’oeil settings to cleverly morph into something else.
Also in America during the war, Dalí designed shop windows for the Bonwit Teller department story. Frederick Kiesler designed a new gallery for rich art collector Peggy Guggenheim in a Surrealist style with curving walls. Emerging designers like Ray Eames and Isamu Noguchi used the zoomorphic curves found in Surrealism to design more moulded products, such as chairs (Eames) and a chess table and baby monitor (Noguchi).
Was it during the war, when so many European artists were exiled in America, that Surrealism’s pre-war radicalism was neutralised and converted into one more among many styles and fashions?
Sculpture
There are some sculptures, especially from the early period, but not many and this is because of the focus of the exhibition which is not on art, per se, but on design. Therefore, instead of abstract art sculptures, what the rooms are full of is designed furniture.
Classic Surrealist furniture
If the 1930s was the decade when there was an explosion of Surrealist art and the movement broke through into the general consciousness via a series of well-publicised exhibitions (and carefully staged scandals and press events, such as Dalí attending the opening of the London exhibition wearing a deep-sea diver’s outfit) it was in the 1940s that designers began to incorporate elements of the style into their work.
The Surrealists themselves had led the way. If they started out by invoking the weirdness of everyday objects and thoroughly explored this in paintings, sculptures and photos throughout the 1930s, some had applied their deliberately, provocatively bizarre way of seeing to create bizarre household objects, tables, chairs, lamps.
The most florid early examples come from the joint venture between Dalí and the English collector and patron, Edward James. James had Dalí create an entirely Surrealist interior for his home at Monkton House, West Dean in Sussex, notably the famous sofa designed in a cartoon imitation of the lips of Hollywood actress Mae West.
Also on display is the famous lobster telephone, alongside less well-known objects such as the standard lamp made out of brass casts of a stack of champagne glasses (which ‘subverts’ the Victorian notion of a standard lamp); and, most obviously humorous, a carpet with human footprints cut out of it. These, we are told, were the footprints of his wife, the dancer Tilly Losch. When Tilly danced right out of his life, James commissioned a new carpet with the footprints of his dog in it, the dog making, he dryly remarked, ‘a more faithful friend’.
Other rich people commissioned Surrealist interiors:
Swiss architect Le Corbusier was commissioned by eccentric millionaire Carlos de Beistegui to design his Paris apartment in a style which combined fantastical elements with clean cut modern lines
clean Le Corbusier-designed furniture was included in Dali’s house in Portlligat, Spain
aristocrats Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles commissioned Man Ray to shoot a Surrealist film at their modernist pad on the Riviera
By the late 1930s the new surreal style of interior design had been given a name, Fantasy Modernism.
This suite of objects amount to some of the greatest hits of first wave surrealism but they weren’t alone. Meret Oppenheim produced equally imaginative and talismanic sets of surreal objects such as the fur cup and saucer mentioned above, and her birds-leg tables.
Occasional table (1939) by Meret Oppenheim
Modern Surrealist furniture
Once you turn the corner into the post-war period, you encounter two big rooms full of more contemporary interpretations of surrealist furniture, by designers from the 1960s, 70s, 80s and through on to the present day. These include lamps, chandeliers, some tables, but above all a lot of weird, wacky, and humorous chairs.
Hand Chair by Pedro Friedeberg (about 1962; this version 1965) Vitra Design Museum
I find it very revealing that this chair started life as a throwaway, joking remark of Friedeberg’s to a carpenter. He thought it would be funny to try and make a chair shaped on a human hand. For me this little anecdote is symptomatic of the way Surrealism stopped being subversive and became a type of visual joke, more like a branch of comedy than an art movement.
There’s:
a chair made out of burned carbon i.e. has been burned to a crisp – Smoke Thonet chair number 209 by Maarten Baas (2019)
Capitello chair by Studio65, a chair shaped like the capital of a classical column only made of comfy styrofoam instead of marble
Ruth Francken’s Man Chair (1971), shaped like a man’s body, the legs the shape of real legs, the arms effigies of two real arms
a chair made out of two thick jagged slabs of grass held together by thick steel springs
La Momma, a feminist piece by Gaetano Pesce (1973), the ball and chain referencing the oppression of women in a patriarchal society
There’s a chair by Sara Lucas, characteristically lowering the tone (not necessarily a bad thing) with its two boobs made of lots of cigarettes glued together. What I noticed was a) that’s a really basic, anonymous, institutional chair, the kind you get at a school or college, and b) the cigarettes are really nicely arranged, not just bodged together but arranged in a neat concentric circles which bring out what a visually pleasing thing a cigarette is, with its nice alternation between white tube and sandy brown filter; the brown matching the wood brown of the chair seat and back i.e. it’s a funny gag, ha ha, but it’s also a nice ensemble to look at, aesthetically.
Picking up on the sofa theme set by Mae West, there’s a bang up-to-date piece, wherein a classic Chesterfield sofa, covered in trademark buttons, has been ‘released’, set free, and ‘melted’ out of shape and over the floor, in the manner of Dali’s melting watches – Pools and Poof! by Robert Stadler (2019).
There are several chandeliers, including this striking piece by Ingo Maurer. It immediately made me think of Cornelia Parker‘s famous exploding works, and made me wonder which came first.
Porca Miseria by Ingo Maurer (2019 edition of 1994 design) Vitra Design Museum
And dominating one of the rooms, a life-sized model of a horse, cast in black plastic and with an everyday lamp coming out of its head.
Horse Lamp by Front Design (2006), manufactured by Moooi BV, Breda /Niederlande, Plastic; metal. Vitra Design Museum
When you learn that this comes in a suite of animal furniture including a rabbit lamp and a pig table, you realise the original impulse has become washed out into a kind of homely humour. It’s become about as ‘radical’ as Ikea.
Fashion
One of the most high profile aspects of design is fashion, which holds shows around the world on an annual basis at which dress and clothes designers compete feverishly to outdo each other with new and outlandish ways to ornament the (tall, skinny) female body.
The world of Surrealism overlapped the vast ocean of fashion design, events and, above all, magazines, from the start of the 1930s when, as I’ve described, the visual side of the movement took over from the purely literary.
Thus several surrealist artists also worked as fashion photographers, including Lee Miller and Man Ray. Some, like Dalí and de Chirico, created covers for fashion magazines such as Vogue (some are included here). The exhibition includes fashion photographs and vintage copies of fashion magazines to highlight these connections
Dalí’s collaboration with the French fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli (who set up her haute couture house in 1927) resulted in several ground-breaking designs. Their first collaborative piece, the Telephone Dial Powder Compact of 1935, became very popular and was copied and bootlegged for the mass market.
Over in a side room is a dais with five shop-window mannekins sporting classic surrealist designs. One applies Schiaparelli’s signature pink to a minidress contoured to look like the chest and stomach of a very buff man. Another is a modern reworking of iconic Skeleton Dress. There’s a dress by contemporary designer Mary Katrantzou which, when you look closely, uses elements of a typewriter.
Typewriter’ Printed Silk Dress by Mary Katrantzou (2018) Courtesy of Mary Katrantzou
Alongside other designs by Maria Grazia Chuiri, Christian Dior, Iris van Herpen and emerging Afro-surrealist inspired fashion designer Yasmina Atta.
These are funny conceits well executed but I couldn’t help thinking they’ve reduced Surrealism to a gag, a gif, a meme, a one-liner. ‘Did you see the typewriter dress?’ ‘Yes, Wasn’t it funny?’
Generally, by the time something reaches the world of fashion its disruptive energy has, by definition. been neutered, for example punk. Nothing is disturbed. Everything remains in place, but with lolz for a million Zoolander clones.
From communism to consumerism
At around this point in the exhibition, where I encountered the absorption of the Surrealist impulse into the world of international jet-setting fashion, I began to have my doubts.
Breton wanted Surrealism to trigger a genuine revolution in society and perception. He thought bourgeois society could be smashed apart by ripping a great tear through reality and letting out deeper realities. He talked about ‘convulsive beauty’, he wanted a kind of stricken, epileptic aesthetic.
Breton and many other Surrealists became card-carrying communists during the wartorn 1930s. Their movement was a protest against a bourgeois industrial society which had reached the end of its useful life and needed to be torn down to create a free-er, fairer world.
Ironic, then to see the entire movement, the impetus for revolutionary change, utterly absorbed, neutralised, defanged, neutered and then absorbed into the world of the international haute bourgeoisie in the form of high fashion. For me high fashion is the acme of consumer capitalism with its relentless drive for novelty and new product to keep the profits rolling in.
Fashion is not only a forward post of consumer capitalism but at the cutting edge of unnecessary consumption, the epitome of built-in obsolescence whereby you simply have to buy this season’s must-have items and junk last year’s hideously out of date clothes, handbags etc. Epitome of the compulsive need to keep up, to buy the new thing, which we now know, without any ambiguity, is using up the earth’s finite resources and destroying the planet.
Nothing I say, do or write can dent the huge power of the destructive urge to buy buy buy ever-new stuff, but I despise it and, in a way, fear it, this hysterical need to use up all the planet’s resources in the neurotic pursuit of novelty. What will our grandchildren make of the urge to fly round the world from fashion show to fashion show, seeking endless novelty, encouraging the throwing away and junking of what we have, burning up the planet at an ever-increasing rate.
Is Surrealism dated?
Putting aside my antipathy to the world of fashion, by the end of the exhibition the plethora of objects had raised another, pretty basic question, which is: Does any of this shock and surprise any more, cause the kind of frisson of fear, unnerve the viewer, let the unconscious erupt from the conscious mind with shocking force etc, as the Breton’s manifestos hoped it would?
The short answer is, of course: No. No, it doesn’t. Surely Surrealism has been completely assimilated into our bourgeois, neo-liberal, consumer capitalist society. The famous icons, the lobster phone, the Mae West sofa, every painting by Dali, these have been around for nearly 90 years, and you see images of them in any number of art books or postcards in what my kids call bougie (pronounced ‘boozhee’) shops.
Take the series of plates by Piero Fornasetti which run variations on a wonderfully blank, idealised portrait of the Victorian opera singer Lina Cavalieri. I suppose if you were actually eating off one of these, then it might give you a frisson to scrape away at the mashed potato and slowly reveal an eye looking at you. But as an image and idea I feel I’ve seen this hundreds of times and, indeed, almost 400 variations exist, of which seven are on display in an appealing little set hanging on the wall.
Wall plates no. 116 from the series Tema e Variazioni by Piero Fornasetti (after 1950) Fornasetti Archive
In other words, surely most Surrealist art, these days, instead of conveying ‘the shock of the new’ is the precise opposite – reassuring and familiar. We smile or laugh when we see the lobster phone and go ‘oh yes’ with a pleasant feeling of recognition.
Art changes nothing. All art is swiftly assimilated into bourgeois society and loses the ability to shock or even make the viewer think. The simple act of being displayed in a gallery neutralises art, makes it into a mental commodity, to be discussed in highbrow conversations or namedropped to make you seem swanky. Or into an actual commodity, which can be safely hung on the walls of any investment banker or corporate lawyer, or bought by Arab or Russian billionaires and salted away in a vault in Switzerland as part of their diversified investment portfolio.
Thus, for example, the exhibition includes black and white photos recording the Surrealist display Dali created for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Apparently you entered the suite of bizarrely decorated rooms by walking between models of a woman’s open legs and through a wall-sized vulva into a ‘womb’ containing a predictable congeries of Freudian imagery, complete with numerous scantily clad models arranged in alcoves or sprawling on a bed amid unlikely ‘Surreal’ bric a brac. Looking at these photos now, they seem like a standard chorus girl show with added lobsters.
A lot of the exhibition, in other words, feels warm and nostalgic, pretty much the opposite of what Breton et al originally had in mind.
Up-to-date exhibits
The curators promise, and the exhibition title indicates, a review from the 1920s up to the present day i.e. covering just about a century of Surrealism, and nearly a third of the objects on show are from the past 50 years.
Thus there are a lot of works from more recent times, the 80s, 90s, noughties, generally by artists I’d never heard of. This is particularly true of the big items of furniture, mostly chairs, which dominate the last few rooms or sections of the show, including:
Gae Aulenti’s Tour (1993), a table made from a glass top supported by four bicycle wheels set in chrome forks
Sella (1957), by brothers Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, which is composed of a bicycle saddle mounted on a post fixed into a hemispherical base, blurring the boundary between furniture and art
video of how contemporary designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec use an intuitive, automatic drawing process to discover new imagery and forms
sketch furniture which is created using motion capture cameras to capture the movements of a designer’s hand in the air, save this as a digital file and then use 3D printing technology to print out the object the designer originally sketched out in the air; there’s a video of the process and an actual life-sized chair designed and created using this approach
Or simpler things, Surrealist objects like this absurdist hairbrush spouting hair, worthy of Magritte.
Beauty Hairbrush by BLESS (2019 edition of 1999 design) Vitra Design Museum
Maybe I’m being unfair, maybe I lack taste or sympathy, but I found most of the works in the second half of the show, from the 1960s onwards, far less engaging than the material from the first, classic, era. Take three examples from towards the end of the exhibition.
Björk
The famous musician, composer, performer, singer, songwriter etc Björk, is represented by videos of three fairly recent tracks. Visitors pop on swish earphones and listen to the track while you watch the video. They are:
Well, they’re very well made indeed, both the music and the videos – deliberately different, eschewing visual and musical clichés, consciously innovative and imaginative. And yet…and yet…Björk Guðmundsdóttir, born in 1965, has been Björking for 40 years now (her first single was in 1983). She has become a byword in the pop/fashion/music video businesses for her wildly inventive outfits and compellingly original videos etc. Her oeuvre demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of being a lifelong innovator in pop music. But whatever you think of her exactly, she doesn’t tear the veil of bourgeois convention from the world because thousands of pop and rock musicians and video makers have been doing similar or comparable things for decades.
Tilda Swinton
Over by the fashion mannekins are some photos of famous and award-winning actress Tilda Swinton wearing some bizarre / surreal jewellery.
Same as with Björk, Tilda, born in 1960, feels over familiar. She has been doing her brave androgynous schtick since she first appeared in Derek Jarman’s films in the mid-1980s i.e for nearly 40 years. Far from disturbing me, tearing the veil from my mad unconscious urges, Tim Walker’s photos of Swinton looked like standard Sunday supplement fashion shoot any time in the past 30 years, just with a particularly ‘arty’ kink.
Sarah Lucas
I went to the original Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts back in 1997 and it was a genuinely transformative experience, to see so much vibrantly exciting and innovative artworks, all by a young generation of artists reflecting the ‘modern’ world, all in one place. But it’s been some time now since Damian Hirst’s sharks in a glass tank stopped being subversive or world-shattering and became a kind of joke, common enough knowledge to be used in popular cartoons.
Sarah Lucas never reached Hirst-like levels of fame and notoriety, because she kept (I think) her visual metaphors to a much more modest scale and her works reek of laddish, pub culture, and schoolboy (or girl) jokes. Hence her cheap and cheerful work, Cigarette Tits.
Cigarette Tits by Sarah Lucas (1999)
Compare and contrast with Lucas’s fried eggs t-shirt which has become a popular postcard in the kind of bougie shops I mentioned earlier.
When has an art movement run its course?
This all raises the question: when do you recognise that – or admit that – a style has run its course, is worn out, has become pedestrian – has, in fact, become a cliché?
It’s a more relevant question for Surrealism than maybe any other art movement in history because Surrealism set out to be more shockingly subversive than any other art movement in history (with the possible exception, I suppose, of its parent, Dada).
So where are you, what are you to make of it, when the most deliberately bourgeois-bating, consciously ‘subversive’ art movement of the 20th century has long since arrived on the front of colour supplements, inspires high fashion dresses, is reduced to jokes and cartoons, has been done to death in TV, movies, comedy, in every channel of output, only to feature in calm and sedate and scholarly exhibitions like this one?
The curator’s view
Kathryn Johnson, the exhibition’s main curator, optimistically claims that:
“If you think Surrealism fizzled out in the 1960s, think again. This exhibition shows that it is still alive and well and that it never really went away. The early Surrealists were survivors of the First World War and the 1918 influenza pandemic, and their art was in part a reaction to those horrors. Today, in the context of dizzying technological change, war and another global pandemic, Surrealism’s spirit feels more alive than ever in contemporary design.”
Hmm. Are we in the midst of dizzying technological change? I mean, isn’t your laptop this year, or your smartphone, pretty much like the one you had one or five years ago? Maybe you can do a few more tricks on it, but isn’t it basically the same? And did the COVID-19 pandemic produce shattering changes in social structure and values? Not really. I don’t think so. And has the war in Ukraine turned Britain upside down, decimated a generation of young men, traumatised the western world? No, not really, not at all.
Like all curators, Johnson is paid to make the most powerful possible case for her show, and you can see how she’s roping in these adventitious historical events to try and do so, but…she doesn’t persuade me.
Did Surrealism have any impact on twentieth century design?
For the entire time I was at the gallery I was beguiled by the objects on display and spent all my mental energy reading the main wall labels, and then the many captions for each of the individual pieces. A labour of love or a fool’s errand, depending on your point of view.
It was only on the Tube home that something really struck me. The curators claim that Surrealism had a major impact on 20th century design but I’m not sure they prove it in this exhibition. They have gathered nearly 350 Surrealist exhibits, hundreds of which demonstrate how striking and powerful individual Surrealist objects, furniture, photos, films and so on can be. No doubt about it.
But whether Surrealist principles, the Surrealist aesthetic, actually impacted the broad range of 20th century design, that’s a lot less clear and the more I thought about it the less plausible it seemed.
Sure there were striking Surrealist chairs and lamps and chandeliers and some ‘Surreal dresses’, but…these are all one-offs. No-one is going to buy the melted Chesterfield sofa or the chair made out of two jagged slabs of glass, or the lamp sticking out of a horse (well, one or two wealthy people might).
My point is that pretty much all the designed objects in the show are one-offs, inspiring, amusing luxury artefacts or art objects, but…could any of them be mass produced and sold in significant numbers? Not really (the one notable exception is the Fornasetti plates, which have been mass produced).
The fad for adding Surreal elements to interior design was christened ‘Fantasy Modernism’ in the late 1930s, but how many homes did it every apply to? The curators name four. Not a large number, is it?
Compare and contrast with the impact of Art Nouveau or Art Deco. A glance at articles about them show that they mainly existed as styles of design: of lovely stained glass and furniture for cafes and restaurants for Art Nouveau; as an entire look in the 1930s which affected everything from blocks of flats to ocean liners.
Or take the impact of the Bauhaus. Without a shadow of a doubt the Bauhaus aesthetic of stripping away Victorian decoration to reveal the clean, geometric functional lines of everything from teapots to high rise buildings massively influenced mid-20th century design of everything, having a world-changing impact on, for example, the design of buildings all around the world for 50 years or so, from the 1930s to the 1980s. Nobody can doubt the profound impact the Bauhaus’s design principles had on all aspects of twentieth century design.
But Surrealism’s impact on design? Look around you. Is anything you can see in your house – interior design, table, chairs, sofa, workbench, laptop, sink, kettle, cups, or outside, the design of cars or bikes or buildings – does anything anywhere around you betray the slightest impact of the Surrealist impulse to yoke together the bizarre and the weird and the absurd? I don’t really think so.
Sure, there are a lot of Surreal works of art. Certainly a contemporary photographer or fashion designer can invoke or reference some aspects of the visual language worked out by Surrealist painters and photographers all those years ago. Movies can have Surreal dream sequences etc. But design? Mass market, mass produced, widely available objects which everyone could have in their house, mass produced styles of car design or architecture? No. Not at all.
Is the entire concept of design the opposite of Surrealism?
There’s a related point: designing anything and then converting the design into an actual object, especially an object produced through industrial manufacturing, obviously takes a lot of time, effort, precision of design and co-ordination of the manufacturing process.
Surrealism was committed to automatic writing, bizarre juxtapositions, spontaneous eruptions of the unconscious, savage breaks in reality. How could the weird, dissociative effects aimed at by Surrealism be reconciled with the careful calculation required of designing anything?
I wonder whether, by bombarding the visitor with 350 examples of Surrealist art works, photos, magazine covers, sculptures, paintings and so on, the curators somehow dodge the central point at issue. ‘Objects of Desire: Surrealism and Design 1924 to Today’ is a magnificent assembly of Surrealist works in all formats, and includes a lot of interesting, intriguing and amusing pieces from its origins right up to the present day. But does it make its case for the widespread influence of the Surrealist way of thinking on 20th century design. I was left wondering…
Top ten exhibits
The curators made a handy selection of top ten items. I might as well share it with you.
1. Lobster telephone by Salvador Dalí
One of the exhibition’s most iconic works and a key moment in Surrealism’s transition from art to design. Dalí designed it for the collector Edward James, and in the show it is positioned next to a Mae West sofa to bring to mind an image of James’ wild interiors. It is a fully functioning telephone, designed to give the impression that its user is kissing the lobster when speaking into the receiver. Dalí saw both lobsters and telephones as erotic objects, and his first designs for this object were titled the ‘Aphrodisiac Telephone.’
The cartoon animation collaboration with Walt Disney described above.
3. Porte-Bouteilles by Duchamp
A 1964 re-edition of Duchamp’s 1914 original Porte-Bouteilles or bottle rack. A ready-made sculpture, the original was bought at a department store in Paris. Duchamp didn’t think to keep it, and it was only when the piece became famous later on that he got an identical rack from the same store and remade it. Placing this mass-produced, industrial object in an artistic context was a hugely important gesture. It emphasised concept over craft, one of several gestures by Duchamp which in effect created ‘conceptual art’ which has been hugely influential ever since.
Bottle rack by Marcel Duchamp
4. Look 6 Haute Couture by Schiaparelli
Maison Schiaparelli’s shocking pink dress features a trompe-l’œil pattern embroidered by glass tubes, following the contours of a muscular (male?) body. This silhouette is echoed across Maison Schiaparelli’s Spring Summer 21 collection, and is modelled on Elsa Schiaparelli’s 1930s wooden mannequins – a pair called Pascal and Pascaline – that she showed in her shop window in Paris.
Look 6 Haute Couture by Schiaparelli (Spring/Summer 2021) Courtesy of Schiaparelli
5. Hay by Najla El Zein
Created by contemporary designer and sculptor El Zein, this is a piece of porcelain with hay inserted into the holes it to give the impression that it is growing out of the stone. Part of a series called ‘Sensorial Brushes’, this work plays with the transition between familiar and unfamiliar. El Zein’s imaginative use of materials, and the call to her audience to experience the world differently, places her firmly within the Surrealist canon.
Méret Oppenheim designed a fur-covered bracelet for Elsa Schiaparelli and reportedly wore the prototype when meeting up with fellow artists Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar at a Parisian café. They played with the idea that anything might be covered in fur, and Oppenheim soon afterwards created her widely celebrated Surrealist work ‘Luncheon in Fur / Object’ – a fur covered cup and saucer (see above) which ‘disrupts expectations’ by combining the domestic with the uncanny.
Fur bracelet by Meret Oppenheim
7. Cadeau by Man Ray
One of the first works you see in the show is called ‘Cadeau’ or ‘Gift’ by Man Ray. The story goes that Man Ray was on his way to one of the first Surrealist exhibitions in 1921 and needed to make a piece on the hoof to show. He went into an ironmonger and bought a flat iron and some nails, before proceeding to stick the nails to the flat iron with glue. Not only does it make the iron completely dysfunctional, it also has this aggressive, proto-punk edge. Instead of being a domestic tool for pressing clothes neatly, it becomes a weapon that could rip your clothes.
Cadeau by Man Ray
8. Sketch Chair by Front Studio
This ‘Sketch Chair’ is designed by literally sketching in mid-air with hand gestures. These gestures are captured using motion capture technology, then translated into 3D printed works. The 3D form captures the spontaneity and messiness of human movement in a functional piece of furniture.
It connects with Picasso’s light drawings, photographed by Gjon Mili, from 1949, shown in a photograph beside the Sketch Chair.
9. Photographs by Tim Walker
Tim Walker is known for using Surrealist imagery in his fashion photography. Both photographs in the exhibition featuring Tilda Swinton as a model are from a shoot for W magazine titled ‘Stranger than Paradise’. Walker and Swinton went to Mexico, to the architectural folly La Pazas, created by Edward James – the man who commissioned the lobster telephone and Mae West Lips sofa from Dalí.
They used the folly as a set for a fashion shoot inspired by Surrealist artists, referencing works by painters like Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini. In the exhibition the photos are placed next to original paintings by Carrington (‘The old maids’, ‘The house opposite’) and Fini. Walker’s photography also features jewellery by Vicki Beamon, namely jewel-encrusted lips reminiscent of Dalí imagery.
Working in the spirit of the rapidly expanding Afrosurrealist movement, Yasmina Atta’s Kosmos in Blue – from her graduate collection – derives from the confluence of different cultures, including the designer’s Nigerian heritage and her interest in Japanese manga and Gundam girls.
The piece on display here is a set of embellished leather wings that move intermittently. The foam harness attaching the wings to the wearer’s body has an intentionally DIY-feel, as it was made in Atta’s studio over COVID lockdown when her access to materials was limited. She wanted the final product to reflect this experience of constriction, and as a result the wings represent a more personal and ready-made brand of couture.
Cornelia Parker (CBE, RA) is a very well-known and successful figure in British art. Born in 1956, she’s become famous for her ‘immersive’ i.e. BIG works. Above all she is a conceptual artist. What is conceptual art? According to the Tate website:
Conceptual art is art for which the idea (or concept) behind the work is more important than the finished art object. It emerged as an art movement in the 1960s and the term usually refers to art made from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.
In some exhibitions you react to the painting or sculpture immediately, as an object in space which fills your visual cortex with sensations and impressions. You don’t necessarily have to read the wall labels. With conceptual art it is almost always vital to read the wall label in order to understand what you’re looking at. Sure, you could still respond naively and sensuously to the work’s appearance but you would be missing out on 99% of its meaning and intention.
The wonderful wall labels
This major retrospective of Parker’s career brings together almost 100 works, spanning the last 35 years. So that’s quite a lot of reading you have to do in order to understand almost every one of these pieces.
But a major feature of the exhibition is that the wall labels are written by Parker herself. Most wall labels at exhibitions are written by curators who, in our day and age, are obsessed with the same handful of issues around gender and ethnicity and lose no opportunity to bash the visitor over the head with reminders of Britain’s shameful, imperial, racist, slave-trading past etc etc.
So it is a major appeal of this exhibition that, instead of every single piece explained solely in terms of race or gender – as it would be if Tate curators had written them – Parker’s own wall labels are fantastically interesting, insightful, thought-provoking insights into her way of thinking and seeing the world. Instead of the world of art being reduced to a handful of worn-out ideas, Parker’s wall labels are as entertainingly varied as her subject matter, full of stories, anecdotes, bright ideas, explanations of technique, aims, collaborations.
They give you a really privileged insight into her worldview and into her decades’-long ability to be interested, curious, take everyday objects and have funny and creative ideas about how to transform them. After spending an hour and a half working through her thought processes for the different pieces, some of her creative spirit begins to rub off on you, you begin to see the everyday world the way she does, full of opportunities for disruptive and fun interventions. In this respect, this exhibition is one of the most genuinely inspiring I’ve ever been to.
Types of work
The exhibition includes immersive installations, sculptures, photographs, embroidery and drawings, as well as four large-scale, room-sized installations, and two rooms showing her art films. At the simplest, physical level, the pieces can be divided into two categories: Small and Large. Examples of the small will serve as an introduction to the large.
Introductory
In the downstairs atrium of Tate Britain stands a single sculpture, preparing you for the exhibition ahead.
It is, of course, a life-size cast of Rodin’s sculpture, The Kiss, wrapped up in a mile of string. A vague symbolic gesture towards ‘the ties that bind’ people in relationships, maybe. In the nearby wall label Parker describes this as a ‘punk gesture’, which I found very significant. It’s the only time she mentions punk but she was just 20 when it hit, maybe at art school by then, so its attitude of really offensive, in-your-face irreverence must have taken her art school by storm. The point is, various later wall labels repeatedly say that she is interested in destruction and violence – but not violence against persons, against things. Her art does violence to inanimate objects in all kinds of inventive, creative and often very funny ways.
But there is, as so often, a further twist to the tail. Wrapping The Kiss in string is a relatively tame thing to do compared with Dada, Surrealist, Duchamp provocations from 100 years ago. It becomes more interesting when you learn that some opponents of conceptual art within the art world, fellow young irreverent artists, vandalised the original version of The Distance by cutting up the string into short sections, thus ‘liberating’ the sculpture.
And best of all, that Parker was undaunted and promptly gathered up all the cut-up pieces of string and tied them back together around a mysterious object at the centre, ‘a secret weapon’, which is unnamed and unknown.
Parker realised that when an engraver engraves words into silver, for example into a cup like the Wimbledon champion’s cups, tiny fragments or curls of silver are generated. This piece is a pile of the shavings thus created. Parker contacted a silversmith, who agreed to her proposal, and it took several months to accumulate enough shavings for her to create the little mound, with sprinkled outliers, which we see on display here. As she points out, each sliver represents a letter, is the trace of a letter, is the inverse of writing, of language. They are absences made solid. This idea really resonated with me as I admired this carefully created little mound and its sprinkled outliers.
In the case next to it is an old dictionary. Under careful supervision, Parker arranged for a shotgun loaded with dice to be fired into the back of the book. The die penetrated to different depths into the text and jammed most of the pages together. As it happens the post-shooting dictionary automatically fell open at a page about ‘luck’. Hence the title, The luck of the draw. The roll of the dice.
Apparently it’s part of a series titled ‘Avoided Objects’, so-called ‘object poems’ which ‘explore the fractured, unmade and unclassified’. The series explores ‘the denied and repressed’, which sounds a bit hackneyed and stale until she goes on to specify what that means in practice – the backs, underbellies or tarnished surfaces of things, which is much more interesting. Hence shooting this dictionary ‘in the back’.
‘Embryo Firearms’ (1995)
While in Hartford Connecticut, Parker asked to visit the factory where the famous Colt 45 handgun is made. She was surprised to discover the process began with blank featureless gun-shaped casts, before any working parts were added. She asked if she could have one and the Americans, obliging as ever, gave her two and gave them a nice smooth industrial polish. Adding the word ’embryo’ to firearm juxtaposes the birth of the gun with the general idea of the birth of a human being, alongside a tool which might potentially bring it to an end.
‘Embryo money’ (1996)
Fascinated by money, Parker asked permission to visit the Royal Mint in Pontyclun, Wales. She asked for some samples of coins before they were ‘struck’ i.e. had the monarch’s face, writing, value, corrugated edges and everything else added – just the blank dummy coins. Embryo money, before it has accrued any of the power which so dominates all our lives.
See what I mean by ‘conceptual’. You could relate to these just as intriguing objects, but the stories behind them – the anecdotes of Parker’s expeditions to interesting and unusual places to see industrial processes in action – add immeasurably to the enjoyment.
‘Exhaled cocaine’ (1996)
Parker developed a relationship with His Majesty’s Customs and Excise. She visited and got to know them at their Cardiff headquarters over a period of several months. One of the many, many types of contraband objects they confiscate are drugs. Parker persuaded them to let her have a seizure of cocaine after it had been incinerated. A million pounds worth of cocaine turned to ash, which is on display here, as a sad little pile.
In her wall label, Parker adds the coda, which you’d never have got from a curator, that she really loves the way Customs and Exercise destroy things in such a theatrical way, steamrollering fake Rolex watches or alcohol. ‘Like me, they are often symbolically killing things off.’ This kind of casual, candid opinion is a lovely insight into her way of thinking.
Inhaled cliffs’ (1996)
A personal favourite was ‘Inhaled cliffs’. She asked Customs about methods people use to smuggle stuff into the country, especially drugs, and discovered that some drugs can be used to ‘starch’ sheets, so a set of innocuous looking sheets turn out to be drenched in heroin, cocaine or other illicit substances which can be extracted once they’re safely in the country. This notion inspired ‘Inhaled cliffs’ in which Parker starched sheets with chalk from the white cliffs of Dover, ‘smuggling’ those great symbols of England into bed with her. She is tickled by the notion of ‘sleeping between cliffs’.
I’m focusing a bit much on these objects in cases. There were conventional things attached to the wall, prints, flat objects treated in various ways. Photographs, for example. On her way to her studio past Pentonville Prison she noticed workmen plastering cracks in the perimeter wall, creating vivid white abstract shapes. They then started to whitewash the wall as a whole so, before these irregular, crack-shaped gestures disappeared, she quickly took photos with her phone and developed a set of 12 prints which are hung here, titled ‘Prison Wall Abstract’.
Or the ‘Pornographic drawings’ (1996). As part of her ongoing conversations with HM Customs she asked for examples of contraband and they gave her (along with the bag of cocaine ashes) chopped up lengths of pornographic film. Parker dissolved the fragments in solvent to create her own ink. She used this ink to create Rorschach blots i.e. poured them on one side of a piece of folded paper, pressed the other side down on the inked side and reopened it to have a symmetrical image. For some reason, all the ones she made (or chose to display) came out ‘to be particularly explicit’.
It dawns on me that these works are beyond ‘conceptual’ in the sense that they might better be described as anecdotal. Often there isn’t a grand concept, project or goal behind them – there is happenstance and accident. Seeing an opportunity to do something interesting and seizing it.
The other obvious thing is that she’s about transforming objects from one state to another. She starts with ‘found objects’ – gun moulds, unstamped coins, porn movies, cocaine and so on – and, in the examples I’ve given, doesn’t even transform them herself, but recognises their artistic potential.
Medium
Using this technique of remodelling the existing and everyday, is a middle-sized work titled ‘Black Path (Bunhill Fields)’ from 2013. Parker describes playing hopscotch on pavements with her daughter. This led her to pay attention to pavements and to notice the antiquity of the old stone paving in Bunhill Fields near Old Street. She got permission to pour liquid rubber into the cracks in a path through Bunhill Fields. When the rubber dried she used the mould to make a metal cast, memorialising the captured cracks in bronze. She then suspended the mould on pins so that the cracks in the pavement hover a few inches above the floor, making it seem more spectral and ghostly. (It’s an accidental quirk that my photo of it features so many people’s feet.)
The interest in destruction I’ve mentioned earlier really comes to the fore in the three most famous room-sized installations in the exhibition. These are by way of being her greatest hits. They are:
Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988 to 89)
Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991)
Perpetual canon (2004)
Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991)
I’ll quote her wall label in its entirety:
We watch explosions daily, in action films, documentaries and on the news in never-ending reports of conflict. I wanted to create a real explosion, not a representation. I chose the garden shed because it’s the place where you store things you can’t quite throw away. The shed was blown up at the Army School of Ammunition. We used Semtex, a plastic explosive popular with terrorists. I pressed the plunger that blew the shed skywards. The soldiers helped me comb the field afterwards, picking up the blackened, mangled objects. In the gallery, as I suspended the objects one by one, they began to lose their aura of death and appeared reanimated. The light inside created huge shadows on the wall. The shed looked as if it was re-exploding or perhaps coming back together again. The first part of the title is a scientific term for all the matter in the universe that can’t be seen or measured. The second part describes a diagram in which a machine’s parts are laid out and labelled to show how it works.
I’ve seen photos of this many times. Seeing it in the flesh I realised several things:
it is a mobile – a very complex mobile, but in principle the same kind of thing my son makes to hang his origami figures from his ceiling
it has a cubic, rectangular shape i.e. it is the opposite of chaotically exploding outwards; it is very contained
this is achieved by hanging multiple objects from the same string, not just one
as people walk slowly respectfully round it the eddies of air they stir
and placing a single light bulb at the centre of it means not only that is casts shadows on the wall, but as the string move gently, so a) your perspective through the multiple layers of debris shifts and changes b) the shadows they cast on the wall subtly change
I was invited to make a work for a circular space with a beautiful domed ceiling. I first thought of filling it with sound. This evolved into the idea of a mute marching band, frozen breathlessly in limbo. Perpetual Canon is a musical term that means repeating a phrase over and over again. The old instruments had experienced thousands of breaths circulating through them in their lifetime. They had their last breath squeezed out of them when they were squashed flat. Suspended pointing upwards around a central light bulb, their shadows march around the walls. This shadow performance replaces the cacophonous sound of their flattened hosts. Viewers and their shadows stand in for the absent players.
The ghosts of music past. I was really taken by the idea that the shadows of us, the visitors, stand in for the long-dead players of these instruments.
Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988 to 1989)
Tate own this piece. In Tate’s words:
‘Thirty Pieces of Silver’ comprises over a thousand flattened silver objects, including plates, spoons, candlesticks, trophies, cigarette cases, teapots and trombones. All the objects were ceremoniously crushed by a steamroller at Cornelia Parker’s request. She then arranged the transformed silver artefacts into thirty disc-shaped groups, which are suspended about a foot from the floor by hundreds of fine wires. Each ‘disc’ is approximately ninety centimetres in diameter and they are always hung in orderly rows, although their overall configuration is adapted each time to the space in which the work is displayed. The title refers to the biblical story of how the apostle Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus in return for thirty pieces of silver.
And in Parker’s own words:
Drawn to broken things, I decided it was time to give in to my destructive urges on an epic scale. I collected as much silver plate as I could from car-boot sales, markets and auctions. Friends even donated their wedding presents. All these objects, with their various histories, shared the same fate: they were all robbed of their third dimension on the same day, on the same dusty road, by a steamroller. I took the fragments and assembled them into thirty separate pools. Every piece was suspended to hover a few inches above the ground, resurrecting the objects and replacing their lost volume. Inspired by my childhood love of the cartoon ‘deaths’ of Roadrunner or Tom and Jerry, I thought I was abandoning the traditional seriousness of sculptural technique. But perhaps there was another unconscious reason for my need to squash things. My home in east London was due to be demolished to make way for the M11 link road. The sense of anxiety lingers even now.
The biggest thing in the show is a big long room entirely lined with red paper with holes in, titled ‘War Room’, from 2015. As usual, you need to read the wall label to understand what this is about.
I was invited to make a piece of work about the First World War. I had always wanted to go to the poppy factory in Richmond, London. Artificial poppies have been made there since 1922. They are sold to raise for money for ex-military personnel and their families. When I visited the factory, I saw this machine that had rolls of red paper with perforations where the poppies had been punched out. The fact that the poppies are absent is poignant, because obviously a lot of people didn’t come back from the First World War, and other wars since. In this room there’s something like 300,000 holes, and there’s many more lives lost than that. I decided to make War Room like a tent, suspending the material like fabric. It’s based on the magnificent tent which Henry VIII had made for a peace summit with the French king in 1520, known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. About a year later they were at war again.
The story, the anecdote, is, as usual, interesting but the resulting work less so.. You walk in, you walk round, you walk out. Meh. A slightly shimmery effect is created by having two layers of hole-y red paper hanging everywhere but…this is a minimal effect.
‘Magna Carta (An Embroidery)’ (2015)
One work dominates the penultimate room. It is an enormous, thirteen-metre long, hand-sewn embroidery of the Wikipedia page about Magna Carta.
It is a collaborative work which involved over 200 volunteers including public figures, human rights lawyers, politicians and prisoners. On the wall is a list of the worthies who signed up to be involved, an entertaining list of the usual suspects: media-friendly left-of-centre politicians (Tom Watson, 55), actors, psychotherapists (Susie Orbach, 75), academics (Germaine Greer, 83), other high profile artists (Antony Gormley, 72), writers (Jeanette Winterson, 63, Philip Pullman, 75) and so on.
What struck me was how old all these people are. Our generation is declining, now, Cornelia. We’ve trashed the planet, wrecked the economy and degraded the political system for our children: best to withdraw tactfully and not keep on shouting and marching and trying to dominate everything. We’ve had our time. Over to a younger generation and hope they can do better.
The videos
There are two rooms featuring 7 or 8 art videos running consecutively. The best thing in the first room is a new six-minute video titled ‘FLAG 2022’ and made specially for this exhibition. Very entertainingly this shows the creation of a Union Jack by seamstresses in a factory only run backwards – so we see the British flag being systematically unsown and unstitched. It’s accompanied by a straight orchestral rendition of the hymn Jerusalem. Shame. It would have been funnier if Jerusalem had been played backwards, too – but maybe that would be a bit too 1960s, too much like the old avant-garde.
The second film room is about America. Oh dear. That far away country of which we hear so little, which is so rarely in the news, whose cultural products we so rarely get to see. This room contains:
One film which Parker shot at the annual Halloween Parade in New York, that city we so rarely hear about. Personally, I’d have though New York has enough artists of its own to do this kind of thing.
Another film showing supporters of Donald Trump milling about in New York outside Trump Tower sometime during his election campaign. I don’t know whether you’ve heard of Donald Trump? He was quite big in America, apparently.
Frankly, these films are a let-down. It’s disappointing to see Parker genuflecting to God’s Own Country – as if New York or America need the slightest bit more coverage or publicity than the saturation exposure they already enjoy in the British media, TV, radio, films, academia, all across the internet and the toxic marshes of social media. There are other countries in the world, you know.
I’d like to have shared FLAG or any of the others in t his review, but I can’t find any of them on the internet.
Politics
From here onwards – in the second half of the exhibition – politics emerges as an increasingly dominant theme.
As well as the flag movie, the British film room includes a film made in the empty chamber of the House of Commons in 2018 using a camera attached to a drone, titled ‘Left Right and Centre’. Not only did they make this film, but they made a film about the making of the film, in which I caught Parker telling us how damn difficult it was to make because of health and safety, fire risk assessment etc. When artists start to think they are heroes…
I thought the result was very underwhelming. The drone hovered over the table you see in front of the Speaker of the House’s chair, set between the two front benches, which usually has the Mace on it – except in this film it had been covered with copies of England’s daily papers, which fluttered in the downdraft of the drone’s little rotors.
As with Donald Trump, I am sick to death of Parliament, the succession of incompetent politicians we have had leading our nation for the past 12 years, and the corrupt newspapers which lie and distort in order to keep the ruling party in power. Watching a 10-minute film on the wretched subject of contemporary British politics went a long way to destroying the happy, creative, open impression inspired by the first half of the exhibition.
In 2017 Parker was the first woman to be appointed official artist for the General Election. In this role, she observed the election campaign leading up to the 8 June vote, meeting with politicians, campaigners and voters and producing artworks in response. She made several films during this period including the aforementioned drone movie, and one titled ‘Election Abstract 2018’, a documentation of Parker’s observations during the campaign, posted on her Instagram account.
None of this, to my mind, is as funny or inventive as flattening a load of silverware with a steamroller, or displaying a little pile of incinerated cocaine, or soaking sheets in white cliff chalk, or taking a mould of Bunhill pavement. It just looks and sounds like the news, with little or no inventiveness and no particular insight. British politicians are idiots. Our newspapers are studies in bias and lies. So what’s new?
My heart sank even further when I read that another of her films is titled ‘Chomskian Abstract 2007’ and is an interview with the American social critic and philosopher Noam Chomsky, apparently about ‘the entwined relationship between ecological disaster and capitalism’.
Oh dear God. It’s not that Chomsky’s wrong or that hyper-capitalism driven on by American corporations and banks is not destroying the planet; it’s just that he is such a bleeding obvious choice for Great Man of the Left to interview. And so very, very, very old (born in 1928, Noam Chomsky turns 93 this year).
Is this the best Parker can do in the field of ‘radical’ or oppositional politics – interview a 93-year-old? It’s like waking up one morning and deciding you need to make a film about the environment and, after careful consideration, deciding you’d like to interview David Attenborough (aged 96) on the subject. Topics, and interviewees, don’t come more crashingly obvious than this.
Each year thousands and thousands of students in Britain graduate from international studies, politics or environmental courses. It would have been so much more interesting to interview the young, the future generation, and get their point of view rather than the done-to-death, decrepit old.
And he’s another Yank for God’s sake. What is it with the British cultural establishment and their cringing obeisance to American culture, artists, film-makers, politicians and intellectuals. Of the 200 contributors to the Magna Carta embroidery, in their summary of the show the curators single out just two – Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (who stitched ‘user’s manual’ into the embroidery) and Edward Snowden (who stitched the word ‘Liberty’).
Notice anything about them? Yes, they’re both American. Americans just seem carry more weight with Britain’s art establishment. They have a little more human value than mere Brits like you and me. More pizzazz, more glamour.
Lastly, what has Chomsky actually changed in his 50-odd years of railing against the American government and global capitalism? Nothing. Come to that, what good does getting 200 media-friendly worthies to contribute bits to a 13-metre-long embroidery achieve? Nothing. It’s a feel-good exercise for everyone involved and maybe it makes some of the gallery visitors feel warm and fuzzy and virtuous, too. Which is nice, but…
But meanwhile, out in the real world, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are destroying the economy, ruining Britain’s standing in the financial world, and declaring war on the poor, the unwell, the vulnerable, even trashing support among their own middle-class, mortgage-paying supporters, in a zombie march of ideologues divorced from reality.
Flying a drone round the House of Commons or stitching a room-length embroidery are not only feeble responses to the world we live in but, worse, I found them imaginatively limiting and cramped. If you’re going to tackle the terrible world of contemporary politics, at least do it with some style and imagination. Old newspaper photos of Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn didn’t take me anywhere new – unlike the pile of silver shavings or a cast of Bunhill pavement or most of the pieces in the first half of the show, which opened magic doors in my mind.
Maybe Parker should stick to what she does best – blowing things up. Guy Fawkes Night is coming. Just a thought…
Related links
Cornelia Parker continues at Tate Britain until 16 October 2022
… but the clouds… is a short play by Samuel Beckett written expressly for television. It was written in English (worth mentioning because Beckett wrote many of his works in French first, then translated them into English) from October to November 1976, first televised on BBC 2 on 17 April 1977, and published by Faber and Faber later the same year.
By this stage in his career, Beckett’s stage directions for his plays had become super-schematic, so much so that they beg the question whether the works can really be referred to as plays at all, in any conventional sense. This one consists of about a page and a half of detailed stage instructions followed by barely three and a half of action and dialogue, of which the actual dialogue takes up less than half the space. It is a play – if it is a play at all – almost entirely of silent movements.
The stage instructions list six elements to the piece and it is symptomatic that the one and only human actor in the piece is placed on the same technical level as camera setups and a disembodied voice:
M – Near shot from behind of man sitting on invisible stool bowed over invisible table. Light grey robe and skullcap. Dark ground. Same shot throughout.
M1 – M in set. Hat and greatcoat dark, robe and skullcap light.
W – Close-up of woman’s face reduced as far as possible to eyes and mouth. Same shot throughout.
S – Long shot of set empty or with M1. Same shot throughout.
V – M’s voice.
The production notes describe the set.
Set: circular, about 5 m. diameter, surrounded by deep shadow.
And, typically for Beckett, he provides a simple but very precise diagram.
Diagram of the camera angle and stage positions for ‘…but the clouds…’
The four cardinal points of the circle are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 and given names, thus:
West, roads.
North, sanctum.
East, closet.
Standing position.
With number 5 indicating the position of the camera i.e. the point of view.
The play stipulates four ‘changes’ which require the performer to turn or walk into the shadow in each direction, or emerge from the shadow. And the lighting? As so often with Beckett, the lighting restricts itself to the bare minimum effect you can achieve on a stage, which is the basic movement from black to light, via gloom and shadow. No colours. Indicated in the production notes thus:
Lighting: a gradual lightening from dark periphery to maximum light at centre.
This focus on the most minimal use of light and shadow echoes the lighting in Footfall, where the light was brightest at feet level, in order to emphasise the pacing feet, and then tapered off as it rose upwards, so that the body and face of the pacing actor are in shadow or darkness.
Beckett’s obsessive precision doesn’t let up with the end of the initial stage set-up. The three and a half pages of the actual shooting script consist of precisely 60 detailed instructions for changes of lighting or shot. Less than half the text is actual speech. Over half of these directions are one-line shot directions for the cameras.
Here’s the first eight. Note how actual speech – V, representing the voice of the bowed man, M – are only 3 of the 8 lines:
Dark. 5 seconds.
Fade up to M. 5 seconds.
V: When I thought of her it was always night. I came in –
Dissolve to S. empty. 5 seconds. M1 in at and greatcoat emerges from west shadow, advances five steps and stands facing east shadow. 2 seconds.
V: No
Dissolve to M. 2 seconds.
V: No, that is not right. When she appeared it was always night. I came in –
Dissolve to S. empty. 5 seconds. M1 in hat and greatcoat emerges from west shadow, advances five steps and stands facing east shadow. 5 seconds.
Twenty-eight words of speech to 64 of stage directions. Most of the speech is this minimal. The sequence of relatively short, one-sentence stage directions is interspersed at intervals with longer descriptions of the four big ‘changes’. Here’s the first ‘change’, direction number 25:
Dissolve to S. empty. 2 seconds. M 1 in robe and skullcap emerges from north shadow, advances five steps and stands facing camera. 2 seconds. He turns left and advances five steps to disappear in east shadow. 2 seconds. He emerges in hat and greatcoat from east shadow, advances five steps and stands facing West shadow. 2 seconds. He advances five steps to disappear in west shadow. 2 seconds.
In fact, I counted the whole text and if we include the 60 numbers and various other numbers (the ‘2’ in ‘2 seconds’ etc) as words, then the entire piece contains 1,093 words, of which 448 (40%) are spoken and 645 (60%) stage directions.
The spoken text
Going a step further, I extracted all the spoken words to see what kind of sense they make when extracted from the carapace of stage directions. Doing this makes it easier to spot the repeated phrases, the dogged repetition of certain key words or phrases which is one of Beckett’s core techniques.
I have highlighted repeated phrases in bold and highlighted the use of numbers in red text.
3. V: When I thought of her it was always night. I came in –
5. V: No
7. V: No, that is not right. When she appeared it was always night. I came in –
9. V: Right. Came in, having walked the roads since break of day, brought night home, stood listening, finally went to closet
11. V: Shed my hat and greatcoat, assumed robe and skull, reappeared –
13. V: Reappeared and stood as before, only facing the other way, exhibiting the other outline, finally turned and vanished
15. V: Vanished within my little sanctum and crouched, where none could see me, in the dark.
17. V: Let us now make sure we have got it right.
19. V: Right.
21. V: Then crouching there, in my little sanctum, in the dark, where none could see me, I began to beg, of her, to appear, to me. Such had long been my use and wont. No sound, a begging of the mind, to her, to appear, to me. Deep down into the dead of night, until I wearied, and ceased. Or of course until –
24. V: For had she never once appeared, all that time, would I have, could I have, gone on begging, all that time ? Not just vanished within my little sanctum and busied myself with something else, or with nothing, busied myself with nothing? Until the time came, with break of day, to issue forth again, shed robe and skull, resume my hat and greatcoat, and issue forth again, to walk the roads.
26. V: Right.
28. V: Let us now distinguish three cases. One:she appeared and –
31. V: In the same breath was gone…. Two:she appeared and –
33. V: Lingered… With those unseeing eyes I so begged when alive to look at me.
35. V: Three:she appeared and –
37. V: After a moment
38. W’s lips move, uttering inaudibly: ‘…clouds…but the clouds…of the sky…‘ V murmuring, synchronous with lips: ‘…but the clouds…‘
39. V: Right.
41. V: Let us now run through it again.
47. V: Look at me.
49. W’s lips move, uttering inaudibly: ‘…clouds…but the clouds…of the sky…‘ V murmuring, synchronous with lips: ‘…but the clouds…‘
50. V: Speak to me.
52. V: Right. There was of course a fourth case, or case nought, as I pleased to call it, by far the commonest, in the proportion say of nine hundred and ninety-nine to one, or nine hundred and ninety-eight to two, when I begged in vain, deep down into the dead of night, until I wearied, and ceased, and busied myself with something else, more … rewarding, such as … such as … cube roots, for example, or with nothing, busied myself with nothing, that MINE, until the time came, with break of day, to issue forthagain, void my little sanctum, shed robe and skull, resume my hat and greatcoat, and issue forth again, to walk the roads… The back roads.
54. V: Right.
57. V: ‘…but the clouds of the sky…when the horizon fades…or a bird’s sleepy cry…among the deepening shades…’
The Gontarski production
So what do all these detailed instructions look like in practice? This is a production directed by Stanley E. Gontarski, the noted Beckett scholar.
Several points arise.
1. One is that the Gontarski production uses music, quite prominent modern music, and musical sound affects such as the single penetrating note when the image of the woman appears. None of this is justified by the directions.
2. The second point is that the precision of the circular set and the precise imagining of the man moving from one cardinal point to another are completely lost in an actual TV or film production, because we are all used to basic movie or TV technique, namely the camera’s point of view jumping all over the place, from one angle to another, from long shot, aerial shot, slow-mo, close-ups and what-have-you. Doing this, using multiple camera angles, leaves us with little or no sense of the man moving carefully from one point of the compass to another, as Beckett has so carefully indicated in the stage directions. He just seems to be moving in and out of darkness in a rather random way.
In this respect, the directions are very much conceived as stage directions, based on the notion of a fixed and unmoving audience point of view – and do not translate very well into the much more flexible medium of television/film.
3. A third point is that the meanings Beckett attributes to the four points of the compass in his stage directions:
West, roads.
North, sanctum.
East, closet.
Standing position.
Only come out with great subtlety if at all. Nobody watching the piece would know that when the main figure goes to the shadowy position off to the left of the set, this is ‘1. West, roads’. The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett suggests that these later plays are ‘post-literary’ in the sense that simply reading them is not enough, you have to see them in production to grasp the meaning. But I think this is incorrect in two respects. One: anyone who’s ever made any film or TV can tell you that a shooting script is just as ‘post-literary’, in the same sense, that it’s just a set of instructions for creating a final programme or movie.
But, secondly, these late playlets do in fact demand to be read, precisely so that you can enjoy the precision and mathematical numeration of their layout. Rather than being ‘post-literary’, they are in fact a new kind of literary, a new genre, a super-precise, over-enumerated, computer readout style of playwriting, which Beckett took to an extreme, and which has a mechanistic flavour and pleasure distinct to itself.
4. Lastly, an actual visualisation like this brings out what is easy to overlook when reading the text, which is the sudden appearance of those images of the woman:
W – Close-up of woman’s face reduced as far as possible to eyes and mouth. Same shot throughout.
When you read the text, the importance of the woman is easy to overlook because she has no physical presence and doesn’t do anything or say anything. But in the produced film – well, in this one at any rate – the woman has a striking, almost dominating, presence and really brings out the male narrator’s abject submission to her, or the memory of her.
5. And her visual dominance rises to a climax at the two times when we see her face mouthing the words and the male voice speaking them:
‘ …clouds…but the clouds…of the sky…but the clouds…’
These are genuinely spooky. The superimposition of one person’s mouth mouthing words while another person’s voice actually articulates them is genuinely creepy, like a sci-fi nightmare, a tale of possession and dispossession.
Themes and interpretations
W.B. Yeats
The title of the piece and those short phrases which the woman mouths and the narrator speaks, are all from the end of a poem, The Tower, by the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats:
Now shall I make my soul,
Compelling it to study
In a learned school
Till the wreck of body,
Slow decay of blood,
Testy delirium
Or dull decrepitude,
Or what worse evil come –
The death of friends, or death
Of every brilliant eye
That made a catch in the breath –
Seem but the clouds of the sky
When the horizon fades;
Or a bird’s sleepy cry
Among the deepening shades.
The poem expresses an attitude of detachment associated with Eastern philosophy. The poet will deliberately mould his soul in such a way as to be a tower amid the human chaos, so utterly schooled in a philosophy of detachment that every aspect of human life, all its trials and tribulations, will seem but the clouds in the sky, faraway and transient.
With this in mind we can see how the play enacts a dynamic tension, between a man who is trying to attain this level of detachment, to rise above himself and his own petty concerns – but who is quite clearly still in thrall to the image and memory of the woman who, we deduce, he has loved and lost. He is trying to escape from the world – but repeatedly dragged down into it by his own passions and longing.
It is, therefore, despite all the alienating and mechanical modernist trappings, a love story; or a story of lost love, of a man haunted by his lost love and making up all manner of mechanical and mathematical protocols to try and smother and control his hurt.
Endlessly trying to complete a narrative
In countless plays and prose texts since The Unnamable, Beckett protagonists have struggled to complete a narrative – in order to achieve completion and closure, in order to get it right, so as to define and understand something, so as to be able to move on.
But they never can. The circle is never complete, the story is never told. My favourite example is the radio play Cascando in which the Voice endlessly restarts and tries to complete one single anecdote about a man who wakes, goes down to the sea, and launches a dinghy… but the Voice can never quite complete the tale or get it right, despite trying, over and over.
Presumably this is easily enough identified as an allegory on ‘the human condition’ – permanently trying to complete, finish and understand our lives and what we’ve done, forever condemned not to be able to.
And so this short play appears to be another iteration of the same basic idea, with the man saying:
39. V: Right.
41. V: Let us now run through it again.
Unaware or not acknowledging that he’s going to have to keep ‘running through it again’, forever.
The Faber Companion To Samuel Beckett makes the canny point that the narrator is split in two, into M and M1, because he is directing himself. It is M who is directing his puppet self, ‘M in set’, to try and achieve the ‘right’ result.
This insight sheds light on many of Beckett’s texts, which are routinely divided between a kind of doing protagonist and a consciousness protagonist, between the self doing and the self commenting on the self doing. This insight suggests that all these texts are, in a sense plays in which the observing, commenting self is endlessly directing the actor self, rehearsing the scene or sequence over and over again till he gets it right. But he can never get it right, only fail again, fail better.
The meaning of numbers
As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, reading the obscure autobiographical fragment, Heard in the Dark 2, was a revelation because in it Beckett says of the boy protagonist that:
Simple sums you find a help in times of trouble…Even still in the timeless dark you find figures a comfort…
This, for me, is the key which opens Beckett’s entire worldview, and explains the deeper meaning of his mechanical way of conceiving of the human body, human nature and, above all, the mechanical, rote movements of human bodies, as described in his numerous prose texts, plays and mimes.
Yes, they fall in with the avant-garde tradition dating from Dada of viewing human beings as robots, automata, and this aspect of his work has a strong anti-humanist intention.
But Heard In The Dark 2 reveals that the obsession with numbers also has a very personal psychological meaning for Beckett. It is comforting. It is reassuring. It was a help in times of trouble to the boy and young man, and it is a similar ‘help’ in all his adult fictions.
This piece is no exception and it comes as no surprise when the narrating Man says that, when his desperate pleas to the woman meet with failure – then he must busy himself with other things, with something:
more…rewarding, such as…such as…cube roots, for example…
It is no surprise that he categorises the woman’s appearances into four types. It is no surprise that he has worked out the relative proportions in which these cases arise.
This obsession with numbers (and also with enumerating every possible permutation of basic human movements, such as infest the experimental novel Watt), this obsession underpins everything Beckett wrote and especially the plays, which, as I pointed out at the start of this review, became by the mid-1970s, increasingly obsessed with numbers:
in their apparatus (the stage directions)
in their onstage actions (the actor’s precisely specified movements)
in the text, the actual words spoken
The three levels are enacted in this text, thus:
The superprecise description of the set and the precise numbering of the 60 stage directions.
The superprecise description of the four pieces of onstage activity, the so-called ‘changes’ between one part and the next.
The numerical content of what M actually says, namely the enumeration of the four ‘cases’ and then his assessment of the proportion of these ‘cases’, nine hundred and ninety-nine to one, or nine hundred and ninety-eight to two…’, the cube roots and so on.
What is the consoling nature of numbers? Well, numbers give the appearance of meaning, even when there is none. They belong to a world of reassuringly objective truth and consistency. In this short piece the psychological reassurance they provide is linked to the voice’s repeated description of himself seeking out his ‘inner sanctum’, ‘where none can see him”, where he can crouch and hide away, busying himself with…the consoling power of numbers.
Let’s look at the ‘four cases’ M mentions more closely. M enumerates four possibilities:
the woman appears and instantly leaves
she appears and lingers
she appears and speaks Yeats’s words
she does not appear at all whereupon the narrator busies himself with consolatory activities such as cube roots
In this respect, numbers are like a replacement for religion, which Beckett appears to have long since abandoned. They are a lucid, rational, objective system which can be used to give logic, order and meaning to what are, otherwise, the utterly meaningless actions and the hopelessly unfulfillable hopes of the human animal.
Trudging
Beckett characters walk a lot. Well, ‘trudge’ might be a better word. Trudge endlessly across bleak landscapes as in Fizzle8, or like Pozzo and Lucky endlessly circling round their little world in Godot, or the 120 lost souls shuffling around their rubber cylinder in The Lost Ones.
Walking is a basic element of the profoundest, deepest allegorical fictions in literature, from Dante walking through hell and purgatory to Pilgrim walking through the allegorical landscape of Pilgrim‘s Progress.
In Beckett, however, walking is deliberately reduced, humiliated, to trudging, round in a circle, or shuffling forward bent painfully over like the old man in Enough.
Here the male figure, when all else fails, has no other recourse except to take his hat and coat, issue forth again and take to the roads, a phrase repeated four times, to walk the roads, the back roads, trudging and traipsing without hope or consolation…
An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.
Never but dream the days and nights made of dreams of other nights better days. He will live again the space of a step it will be day and night again over him the endlessness.
Beckett’s writings as antidote to the modern world
Sometime around 1802, that’s to say 220 years ago, William Wordsworth wrote:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
And nowadays, via smartphones and social media, probably the majority of the population has invited the world right inside their brains, addicting many people to the mini-dopamine hits created by an unending stream of updates on every aspect of an over-wired world, from their friends’ latest makeup secrets to attempted coups in America. Surveys show that people check their smartphones every 12 minutes and spend two and a half hours a day staring at their tiny screens.
Beckett is an antidote to all this. In a world where everything is reduced to easily assimilable, shorter and shorter bite-sized snippets designed to provoke the crudest emotions of mirth or outrage, Beckett’s texts are messages from another planet, one right on the edge of known experience or comprehension. The mere fact that each reader struggles to make sense of many of Beckett’s works, or to make their own sense of it, is a blessèd relief.
Beckett’s nihilism has a place but isn’t the whole story
I can see that the ostensible ‘content’ of much of Beckett often circles around ideas of physical decrepitude, mental collapse, describes human relations which have decayed into the grave and beyond, allegorical figures crawling through mud for years or trapped inside tiny white spaces.
Blank planes sheer white calm eye light of reason all gone from mind.
Head through calm eye all light white calm all gone from mind.
Face to calm eye touch close all calm all white all gone from mind.
And many people respond to his insistent imagery of collapse, decay and futility very strongly – in a positive way if it helps express their own sense of futility, or very negatively if they find his unceasing emphasis on collapse, decay and futility too negative and depressing to handle.
But for me literature is first and foremost about words and how they are deployed. As a middle-aged man whose family has been through various stresses and traumas, I understand where his content is coming from, I can appreciate its grimness, I witnessed at first hand the physical and mental decline and gruelling deaths of my parents, I sometimes feel in myself the symptoms of decay he writes about – all of that is very vividly captured in text after text.
But I also know the world is huge and contains an enormous range of happy and joyful human experiences as well, which are never covered in his writings and that a healthy mental attitude has space for both. My father’s dementia was real and upsetting but it didn’t negate the joy and happiness of playing with my baby son.
Beckett’s subject matter has its place in what you could call a total overview of the human condition, but it is not the be-all and end-all of the human condition. It is one take (a very powerful, haunting take) on one aspect of human existence.
Beckett’s language as a liberation from sense
I’m struggling to express the idea that you can fully and deeply read his works, especially the prose works, without being depressed by them. The opposite. Although the ostensible subject matter may be about mental collapse and decay, the language it is written in and the elaborate structures he creates with his stylised language, can be fantastically liberating.
One way of thinking about it is that Beckett writes at an angle away from ordinary life as most of us live it, in a style of language which is just over the horizon of how any of us think or create sentences, read or write or talk, ourselves – and so it consistently shows us other ways, other possibilities of mental life.
If we take these two elements, style and content – the title of this piece, Lessness, clearly indicates its continuity with Beckett’s interest in collapse, inanition, sparsity and the minimal. In fact it is an attempt to translate the French word Sans which is the title of the original French version of the piece. Possibly Lessness is less good than Sans. At first sight it seems a bit obvious, like a bit of a cliché, another predictable iteration of Beckett’s core theme.
But the actual text is anything but a cliché. The text is something as weird and different now as it was 50 years ago. Here’s the first sentence:
Ruins true refuge long last towards which so many false time out of mind.
It feels like the words are themselves the ruins of longer sentences which once made sense. Maybe it can be parsed as: the ruins are the true refuge towards which, at long last, the speaker or voice or sentence is heading towards after so many false starts, which have been going on time our of mind.
This trope, the endless attempts to start again and try to end an account, to complete a narrative, can’t go on, must go on, features in numerous Beckett texts and is (for me) best expressed in the brilliant radio play Cascando. The central idea is familiar – but if you open your mind to the flow of the words they, for me, open up new mental vistas:
Ruins true refuge long last towards which so many false time out of mind. All sides endlessness earth sky as one no sound no stir. Grey face two pale blue little body heart beating only upright. Blacked out fallen open four walls over backwards true refuge issueless.
Carl Andre’s Equivalents
It’s another example of the central Beckett technique of repetition: ‘Develop a set of key words or phrases. Repeat with variations.’ The technique is cognate with musical composition but words are not music. The technique is closer to minimalist art.
When I was a boy, in 1976, there was a firestorm of criticism in the philistine press at the fact that the Tate Gallery had paid £2,300 for an artwork by minimalist artist Carl Andre titled Equivalent VIII. The eight equivalents consist of 120 firebricks arranged in different simple geometric shapes. Personally I think they’re, well I won’t say ‘genius’, but I like the simplicity of the idea, I like what it says about how you can ring the changes with very simple elements, using the same elements over and over to create an eerie, abstract kind of beauty. I like its crispness and asperity.
The Equivalents series by Carl Andre
Their whiteness is important. The rejection of any colour. Their shape and arrangement set up dynamics in your mind. Repetition of the same basic components, but with teasing and beguiling variations.
Repetition with variation
The visual effect of the Carl Andre is comparable to the verbal effect of Lessness, which is dense with repeated words and phrases, positioned and repositioned so you can admire the angles, enjoy the patterning. Thus the word ‘ruin’ appears 26 times, ‘grey’ 52, ‘earth’ 22, ‘sky’ 30. The phrase ‘gone from mind’ occurs 17 times, the phrase ‘little body’ 22 times.
Scattered ruins same grey as the sand ash grey true refuge. Four square all light sheer white blank planes all gone from mind. Never was but grey air timeless no sound figment the passing light. No sound no stir ash grey sky mirrored earth mirrored sky. Never but this changelessness dream the passing hour.
There does appear to be a human in the text: We are told he will curse God, he has a little body, cracked face, two holes for eyes, looking up at the sky, it will rain, it will rain again.
On him will rain again as in the blessed days of blue the passing cloud
So, if we’re searching for literal meaning, maybe it’s a typical Beckett tramp in a typical Beckett ditch exposed to the typically harsh elements. Although he’s also said to be in sand. Is he on a beach?
He will stir in the sand there will be stir in the sky the air the sand.
In the sand no hold one step more in the endlessness he will make it.
One step in the ruins in the sand on his back in the endlessness he will make it.
While we’re trying to get our head round the variations, Beckett –as is his habit – throws in a few swearwords to épater le bourgeoisie (although nothing as rude as the words we came across in How It Is):
Little body little block genitals overrun arse a single block grey crack overrun.
For those who seek symbolism in literature it appears as if the human figure is the only upright object among the ruins but is also on his back in the sand (22 instances) and ash (18). Contradiction. Paradox. Mirror images.
And insofar as the text describes, or at least references, the notion of a ‘refuge’, it can be manipulated into being ‘about’ man the refugee – a very fashionable concern of our times – endlessly seeking a refuge which is in fact in ruins, haven denied, no home, the endless rain, sand and ash. It has just enough semantic content to snare our minds, but is abstract enough to take almost any concern or idea we wish to project onto it.
Patterns and structures
As it happens, in a neat coincidence (if it is a coincidence) just as Andre’s sculpture Equivalent VIII consists of 120 bricks, so Becket’s prose work Lessness consists of 120 sentences. In fact, digging a little deeper, you discover the entire piece is the creation of a fantastically structuring imagination.
For some printed editions include a dotted line half way through to emphasise that the second 60 repeat the first 60 but in a different order. Because Beckett wrote each sentence on a separate piece of paper and drew them from a hat at random. He then wrote the numbers 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 on other sheets of paper and drew these at random to determine how many sentences would appear in each paragraph.
The sentences are structured around 6 families of images. In some print editions Beckett gives a guide to them with his usual mathematical precision:
Group A: collapse of refuge, key word ‘refuge’
Group B: outer world, key words ‘earth sky’
Group C: body exposed, key words ‘little body’
Group D: refuge forgotten, key phrase ‘all gone from mind’
Group E: past and future denied, key word ‘never’
Group F: past and future affirmed, key phrase ‘he will’
As Beckett put it, the text weaves through the family of images in, first, one random (dis)order (60 sentences) and then in another. It is a tale of two disorders, each containing, paradoxically, precisely the same 769 words although, to paraphrase Eric Morecambe, not necessarily in the same order.
Aleatory art
In the 1950s John Cage pioneered an aleatory process of composition whereby some elements of the composition are defined but their order, their length, the notes themselves and their pitch, were determined by ‘random’ inputs created by throwing dice or other randomising procedures. In fact Marcel Duchamps and Dadaists had experimented with this approach during the Great War. So Beckett was coming late to a well-established avant-garde practice.
The Beckett Companion (from which the section above is copied) states that this is the only time Beckett experimented with such a strictly aleatory approach, and I think you can see why: that a random approach is never entirely random. After all the author defined the themes, chose the words which express them, invented the number 120 and that it would consist of the same 60 sentences repeated – all this is chosen, is created, before the aleatory element which is, in the overall context, a relatively minor part of the process. The cherry on the cake.
BBC radio production
Interestingly, Lessness was given a full-blown radio production and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 7 May 1971. The six ‘image families’ were distributed among six different actors, namely Donal Donnelly, Leonard Fenton, Denys Hawthorne, Patrick Magee, Harold Pinter and Nicol Williamson, directed by Martin Esslin.
The fact this could be done shows there’s more to Lessness than meets the eye. That it exists (as one of the commentaries says) at a place where prose and drama meet. It’s another tangent, or angle from ‘normal’ prose, at which the text operates and which, to repeat my opening point, makes it a kind of antidote to the obvious and the immediate which is what we mostly meet with in contemporary culture.
I’ve searched high and low on the internet for a version of that 1971 BBC production but can’t find it. If anyone has the link I’d love to hear from you.
Lessness: Randomness, Consciousness and Meaning elaborates on the maths of Lessness, including the fact that the published version is just one of the 1.9 x 10176 possible arrangements of its 120 sentences
Samuel Beckett’s works
An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.
I’ll give the game away right at the start by stating that I think Ballard is much more obviously and convincingly a prose poet than he is a social ‘prophet’.
The argument
Ballard is routinely and predictably described as a ‘prophet’, by reviewers, critics, fans and academics. The Atrocity Exhibition is described on the back as:
One of the most prophetic, enigmatic and original works of fiction of the late-twentieth century.
The Atrocity Exhibition is Ballard’s most concentrated book – a prophetic masterpiece. (Introduction by V. Vale & Andrea Juno)
But was he, though? There are several reasons for thinking not:
1. A prophet of what, exactly?
Ballard’s work divides pretty neatly into two types: there’s the science fiction which includes his early disaster novels and most of his short stories, many of which are wildly speculative and set in catastrophic futures – and then the later novels, from around 1970 onwards, which are increasingly rooted in the reality of the present day with its motorways, high rise buildings, advertising billboards and gated communities in the South of France., although weird futures continue to crop up in his short stories…
When people say ‘prophetic’ they’re generally talking about the latter works. And what do they mean? They mean that Ballard described in searing, super-vivid prose the feeling of being overloaded by media stimuli, the alienating experience of inhabiting bleak modern concrete urban environments, the terror which sometimes comes over you when you find yourself trapped in an eight-lane highway packed with sleek metal boxes hurtling past at inhuman speeds.
He captured and conveyed that sense of nervous breakdown in a series of mind-blowing semi-experimental novels from 1970 to 75, being The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, Concrete Island and High Rise. Each of these deals very intensely with nervous breakdown, physical and moral collapse which derives directly from the inhumane modern built environment.
And yet… forty years later, society hasn’t broken down, has it? People now accept modern architecture and the great sweep of motorway flyovers carving through their cities. It can still be painted as a dehumanising environment by artists and film-makers. But most people, most of the time, are not having nervous breakdowns and reverting to the primeval savagery depicted in High Rise.
And many of the specific aspects of his urban fiction feel very dated now.
Take the images of Vietnam which thread through The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash. Vietnam was the first TV war and in all probability the last, as every Western government saw what giving unfettered access to reporters and TV journalists did i.e. eroded domestic support. In my reviews of the career of Don McCullin I note that he several times says how disappointed he was not to be allowed to accompany the Falkland Islands task force: the government had learned its lesson; only tame journalists whose access could be controlled and monitored were allowed along.
The British have been involved in a number of conflicts since – Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Iraq twice, Afghanistan – but they have been completely controlled and packaged by governments and willing broadcasters. The really bad craziness which spilled into the living rooms of the average suburbanite, and was an important component in the hysterical mood of those novels, is long, long gone.
TV itself has also been utterly internalised and neutralised. In his experimental books, television is new enough to prompt paragraphs of media studies-style shock and astonishment at the bizarreness of the medium itself interrupting footage of burning villages to bring us commercials about bath cleaner.
But both ends of this spectrum have been blunted. We rarely if ever see the kind of war scenes Ballard is invoking; and everybody has learned to tune out the ads. The advent of the internet means that you can binge watch entire series of dramas or soaps without ever seeing an ad. there are a lot of aspects to this, but one is that the average punter is much more in control, instead of being bombarded with shocking images like the subjects of some extreme social experiment, which is how people appear in those novels.
Similarly, huge roadside billboards were relatively new in the 1960s but, again, old hat by now. Even the TV-style moving ads on the Tube are easy to blank out and ignore.
In other words, a lot of the elements Ballard described with such fantastically super-charged prose poetry from 1966 to 1973 are now almost over-familiar and bereft of threat. Ask my kids if they feel the saturated mediascape is giving them a nervous breakdown and (if you can get them to lift their eyes from the latest Netflix binge-watch) they’ll laugh in your face.
But his fans – and others who plough the same kind of furrow, either as media studies-type academics or contemporary writers – persist in focusing on these aspects of his work.
In his introduction to the 2014 edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, the novelist Hari Kunzru doggedly repeats this idea, that Ballard’s books are mind-expanding, shock revelations which still ‘disturb’ and ‘interrogate’ and ‘undermine’ reality or modern society and all the other tired, familiar art house, would-be ‘radical’, art-curator terminology.
Kunzru slots Ballard into the same, tired old lineage, the same dusty avant-garde genealogy which reaches back to the French bourgeoisie-shockers, via Dada and the Surrealists, to the Beats in the 1950s, the Situationists in the 1960s, and so tiredly on.
But how can something be avant-garde if it’s 50 years behind the times?
I keep reading political commentators saying Labour lost the 2019 election because they were still talking the language of the 1960s, or even of the Victorian era – trapped in the delusion that there is one, homogeneous, cloth-capped, Northern working class which will always give them their vote, come what may. Wrong. The world has changed.
I can’t help feeling the same about the so-called avant-garde tradition. Nowadays talk of Dada and the Situationists feels like the treasured possession of old and out-of-date intellectuals, solemnly showing you a box of faded newspaper cuttings from the mid-1960s as if they bear any relation to the situation and experiences of the present day.
‘Look at the taboo-busting way his characters arrange prostitutes in the posture of car crash victims’, the ageing college lecturer tells us, everso proud of his yoof credentials.
The reality is that the future hasn’t shocked, disturbed, unsettled or traumatised the human spirit anywhere near as much as the solemn talk of transgressive avant-gardes would have us believe. The Archers is still running, as is Coronation Street. They still wave flags at the Last Night of the Proms. Top of the bill at this year’s Glastonbury? Paul McCartney and Diana Ross.
The future is now and people are loving it, streaming their favourite shows, chatting away to Alexa, listening to any music from anywhere at the click of a button, ordering up tasty Deliveroo meals, ordering an Uber to go home after a great night out, and generally living it up.
Compared to the wholesale way the vast majority of the population owns and revels in our technological present, Kunzru proudly telling us how excited Michael Moorcock was in 1966 when he found that the front room of Ballard’s flat was covered in a collage of pages cut out from Chemistry News seems ridiculous. Yes, granddad. We’ve seen your collection of 1960s literary magazines before, granddad. Yes, they’re very interesting, granddad. But now it’s time for your medication and your nap.
2. Two specific ways Ballard was not prophetic
Prophetic means: ‘accurately predicting what will happen in the future’. I’m now looking at the other strand in Ballard’s work, the overtly science fiction strand. Rereading these stories, mostly about dystopian futures, kept making me thing two obvious points.
1. Population boom In all of Ballard’s futures, the population has vanished. In the Ultimate City the population of the world has collapsed, in Low-Flying Aircraft humanity is dying out, in Cage of Sand whole areas of the world have been abandoned, in Chronopolis the big cities have been abandoned. Abandoned cities and terminal beaches, those are the familar zones of Ballard’s imaginarium.
But it’s simple. The world hasn’t emptied. the human population hasn’t plummeted. the exact opposite has happened. In 1970 when the Atrocity Exhibition was published the global population was 3.7 billion. Fifty years later it has doubled to 7.5 billion and counting.
Insofar as Ballard’s imaginary futures depict a world emptied of humans it is not only not prophetic, it is diametrically wrong. A truly avant-garde prose would be trying to grapple, not with what it is to live in abandoned cities occupied by a handful of dazed inhabitants – but what it’s like to live in mega-cities like Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai. Something more like William Gibson’s well-named ‘Sprawl’ trilogy.
2. Posh characters To the end of his writing carer Ballard described posh, middle or upper-middle-class characters, typified by the large number of educated, open-minded doctors who litter his stories. In a way the typical thing about High Rise is not that the characters end up descending to the depths of bestial depravity, but that they are all such pukka, posh English chaps and chapesses.
This is indicated throughout by his rather haphazard way with names so that lots of the characters have very run-of-the-mill and very English names (Talbot, Vaughan, Clifton and Ransom spring to mind).
I’m not criticising him for describing an almost 100% white middle class milieu, not at all. I’m just pointing out that it is the other, large element of his writing which was diametrically wrong. Society hasn’t carried on consisting of pukka white chaps and chapesses. The exact opposite has happened. Britain has been inundated with immigrants (and I don’t mean just ones with different colour skins, but nearly a million Poles, for example). Our society, and most Western societies have become chaotically multicultural and multilingual and show every sign of continuing in this direction.
I am not criticising Ballard for writing about the social class and kind of people he knew best, not at all. I’m just saying that those of his private and academic fans who try to hold him up as a prophet, a predictor of the future, have to take account of the fact that two of the central imaginative pillars of his fiction didn’t only not come true, but the diametric opposite took place.
3. An argument against deifying writers
Anyway, in my opinion the deifying or worshipping of writers is to be resisted. It is a primitive psychological tendency, it is a way of abdicating our own responsibility to think for ourselves.
Writers should be credited as writers, but not necessarily as thinkers. As thinkers, writers are often very charismatic, but almost always wrong. Morally wrong, yes, though that’s open to endless debate. But more often plain, factually wrong.
Dickens thought that universal free education would eradicate poverty. Wrong. Morris thought a Marxist revolution would liberate the working classes. Wrong. Dostoyevsky though Russia must turn its back on the decadent West to assert its Slavic identity. Wrong. Tolstoy thought we should relinquish all our belongings and live like peasants. Wrong. Gorky thought Lenin was the saviour of the poor. Wrong. Pound thought Mussolini would be a patron of the arts like a Renaissance prince. Kipling thought the British Empire was vital to raise the lesser breeds in our countless colonies. Wrong. Eliot thought Britain would be better off as a religious and ethnically homogeneous kingdom, preferably with few if any Jews. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
In my opinion:
Beware of taking any writer as a moral or political inspiration
Judge writers by the quality of their writing, not by their beliefs or pontificating – their beliefs will soon become out of date or controversial or come to seem ludicrous: but their writing, if it genuinely contributes to the life of the language, will live
As Oscar Wilde said, there’s no such thing as moral or immoral writing, there is only good or bad writing.
Ballard the prose poet
So for me, the thing to do is leave these political and ‘moral’ squabbles behind and focus on what Ballard undoubtedly is, which is a creator of some of the most astonishing prose poetry ever written.
What links every element of his career – the disaster novels, the sci-fi stories and the urban nightmare series – is his extraordinary ability to make the English language sit up and beg, dance to his tune, perform extreme sports, coasteer and freebase.
Somewhere Ezra Pound says you ultimately judge a poet by the integrity of his lines, and there are hundreds of breath-taking lines in Ballard, lines no-one else could have written and which take you into wonderful, liberating new realms of language and imagination.
All day he had been building his bizarre antenna on the roof of the apartment block, staring into the sky as if trying to force a corridor to the sun.
Meanwhile the quasars burned dimly from the dark peaks of the universe, sections of his brain reborn in the island galaxies.
Bonfires of Jackie’s face burn among the reservoirs of Staines and Shepperton. With luck he finds a job on one of the municipal disposal teams, warms his hands at a brazier of enigmatic eyes. At night he sleeps beneath an unlit bonfire of breasts.
An airliner rose from the runway four hundred yards to our left, wired by its nervous engines to the dark air.
Catherine peered into my face, as if squinting through the window of a diving helmet.
The nodes of glass scattered on the ground glinted like pieces of discredited coinage.
Laing remembered the stale air in his apartment, tepid with the smell of his own body. By comparison, the brilliant light reflected off the chromium trim of the hundreds of cars filled the air with knives.
The previous night, as he prepared to leave, settling his sons and testing the locks on the doors, Helen had suddenly embraced him, as if wanting him to stay. The muscles of her thin face had moved through an irregular sequence of tremors, like tumblers trying to fall into place.
He resented speaking to Charlotte or to anyone else, as if words introduced the wrong set of meanings into everything.
On page after page Ballard is capable of writing sentences which zing with linguistic verve but also push, exercise and stretch your imagination. Maybe he was a ‘prophet’, you can make a case for or against. but without doubt he was one of the most poetic writers of English prose who ever lived, so plain and factual in appearance, and yet so glitteringly brilliant.
This is a fabulous exhibition, packed with wonderful paintings, photos, films, drawings, posters and all kinds of memorabilia connected with a dozen or so avant-garde and trend-setting nightclubs around the world from the 1880s to the 1960s, And as well as all the lovely works and ideas and stories, it raises a number of questions, which I’ll address at the end of this review…
First the clubs and their stories. The Barbican exhibition space is laid out not as ‘rooms’ but as successive alcoves or spaces running off the first floor gallery, from which you look down onto the ground floor which can be divided up into various areas, or opened up to make one through-space (as they did for the Lee Krasner exhibition).
There are eight of these room-sized alcoves upstairs, and in this exhibition each one tells the story of one or two famous nightclubs which became a focus for artists, or was designed and decorated by artists, in various countries from the 1880s onwards…
Paris
The Chat Noir nightclub was the most famous of the new generation of nightclubs which opened in the Montmartre region of Paris in the 1880s. The darkened interior combined Gothic, Neo-Classical and Japanese features, in fact it contained so many artworks some people nicknamed it the Louvre of Montmartre.
In 1885 a shadow theatre was installed on the Chat Noir’s third floor in a room hung with drawings by Edgar Degas, Monet and Toulouse-Lautrec. Here artist Henri Riviere and collaborators staged what ended up being a series of 40 increasingly elaborate shadow plays. The exhibition features photos and drawings of the Chat Noir, along with some fabulous posters, and a big display case of some of the elaborately designed zinc silhouettes used in the plays, explaining how they were made, what characters they represent, along with some of the books, kind of novelisations of the plays they staged, including music and illustrations
The shadow theatre’s owner Rodolphe Salis took it on an international tour in the 1890s, inspiring a generation if avant-garde artists.
Meanwhile, the strange and dramatic dances of Loïe Fuller staged at the Folies Bergère in the 1890s were trail-blazing experiments in costume, light and movement. Fuller held long sticks attached to swathes of fabric to enormously increase the swirling effects of her dances. She was a real innovator who set up a laboratory to experiment with spectacular effects.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec captured her performances in a series of delicately hand-coloured lithographs, she inspired early film-makers like Edison and Lumiere brothers, and the alcove devoted to her also has a set of huge and very evocative posters by the great poster-maker of the era, Jules Chéret.
Folies Bergers by Jules Chéret
Vienna
The Cabaret Fledermaus was opened in Vienna in 1907 by the Wiener Werkstätte. It is a total art work in which every element – chairs, tables, light hanging, stairs and the brightly coloured tiled walls – each tile featuring a unique fantastical motif – were designed to create an overwhelming effect. Joseph Hoffmann designed the overall concept and commissioned the Wiener Keramik workshop to produce the tiles. The club hosted satirical plays, poetry readings, avant-garde dance and a variety of musical events, including a performance of The Speckled Egg by the 21-year-old Oskar Kokoschka, a puppet show based on an Indian folk tale – the exhibition includes the fragile, original hand-made puppets.
Postcard showing the Interior view of the bar at the Cabaret Fledermaus (1907) Collection of Leonard A. Lauder
London
Not to be left behind, some London artists banded together to set up The Cave of the Golden Calf in 1912, an underground haunt in Soho set up by Frida Uhl Strindberg. It was located in ‘a dingy basement below a cloth merchant’s warehouse just off Regent Street, where her artist friends Spencer Gore, Jacob Epstein, Wyndham Lewis, and Eric Gill contributed to the futurist and Russian ballet-inspired art that covered the club’s interiors. It was also, apparently, possibly the first ‘gay bar’ in the modern sense and was certainly conceived by its creator, as an avant-garde and artistic venture.
This section included designs for the interior by British artists Spencer Gore and Eric Gill, as well as Wyndham Lewis’s highly stylised programmes for the eclectic performance evenings. I came across Wyndham Lewis at school and have never stopped loving his savage angular art, either satirising English society or brutally conveying the reality of the Great War, which he saw from the front as a bombardier. For me his programme designs were the best thing in this section.
Zurich during the war is famous as the birthplace of the Cabaret Voltaire (1916), which in its short existence (February to July 1916) hosted far-out Dada events and happenings in a deliberately absurdist environment. The exhibition includes samples of absurdist sound poetry and fantastical masks that deconstruct body and language, as used in the anarchic performances of original Dadaists Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings and Marcel Janco. Later Jean Arp recalled ‘pandemonium in an overcrowded, flamboyant room’ with works by Picasso or Arp hanging on the wall while Hennings sang anti-war songs there were puppet shows, improvised dances, African drums, and booming ‘poetry without words’ was yelled through a megaphone by people wearing silly costumes. This is a 1960s reconstruction:
Rome
The curators select two clubs from the post-war period in Rome which demonstrated the hold of the dynamic new art movement of Futurism in Italy in the 1920s.
In 1921 Futurist artist Giacomo Balla was commissioned by Ugo Paladini to create a Futurist nightclub and the result was Bal Tic Tac, which used Futurist angular design to create a wonderfully colour-saturated designs for the club’s interior. The exterior of the building was sensible neo-classical, the interior deliberately undermined this with brightly coloured interlacing shapes meant to capture the movement of dancers. It was one of the first places in Rome to promote the new American jazz music. A sign on the door read, ‘If you don’t drink champagne – go away!’
Also in the same room is a display devoted to drawings and furnishings for Fortunato Depero’s spectacular inferno-inspired Cabaret del Diavolo (1922) which occupied three floors representing heaven, purgatory and hell. Depero’s flamboyant tapestry writhes with dancing demons, expressing the club’s motto ‘Tutti all’inferno!!! (Everyone to hell!!!)’.
After Paris in the Belle Epoque, probably the most famous era of nightclubs was in Weimar Germany between the wars, the exhibition doesn’t disappoint, with a selection of paintings and drawings of decadent German nightclubs by the likes of George Grosz, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann, Grosz – as usual – for me at any rate, emerging as the star among the men.
But, living in the era when we do, the exhibition goes out of its way to promote the work of ‘often overlooked female artists’, such as Jeanne Mammen and Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler.
Jeanne Mammen is really good. Her drawings and paintings are recognisably from the same time and place as the guys, but feel a little softer, more rounded, her figures are a little more like humans and less like the porcine animals of Grosz or Dix. Also her use of colour, particularly watercolour, the colours washing or dribbling or spilling over to create colour and life and action and depth. She depicted almost only women, many set in overtly lesbian nightclubs, in fact some of the wonderful pictures here were illustrations to a 1931 book titled A Guide To Depraved Berlin.
She Represents by Jenna Mammen (1928) published in Simplicissimus magazine Volume 32, Number 47
One of the most purely beautiful paintings in the exhibition is Karl Hofer’s iconic portrait of a couple of Tiller Girls, the Tiller Girls being dancers who did high-precision, high-kicking routines.
Interestingly, a social theorist write in the same year this was painted, 1927, that the uncanny precision and interchangeability of the girls mirrored the large-scale mechanical methods of manufacturing which were then coming in and capturing people’s imaginations: ‘the hands of the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls’.
Strasbourg
Meanwhile in Strasbourg, Theo van Doesburg, Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp worked together to create the L’Aubette (1926–28), conceived as the ultimate ‘deconstruction of architecture’, a highly modernist, strict, functional design, with bold geometric abstraction as its guiding principle. The vast building housed a cinema-ballroom, bar, tearoom, billiards room, restaurant and more, each designed as immersive environments.
The Ciné-bal at Café L’Aubette, Strasbourg, designed by Theo van Doesburg (1926 to 1928) Image: Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut
Harlem
During World War One a Great Migration began of African-Americans from the Deep South to escape segregation, poverty and violent racism. They came north, to northern cities like Chicago and New York, and brought with them new music and sounds, specifically jazz. In New York many settled in the uptown Harlem district which underwent a great artistic flowering of music, poetry, dance, art and more, which eventually became known as the Harlem Renaissance.
The exhibition includes a fascinating street map of Harlem (by E. Simms Campbell) which shows all the different nightclubs and the types of jazz to be found there. The most evocative thing here is the movie made around Duke Ellington’s jazz suite, Symphony In Black, which was intended to convey a panorama of African-American life.
All the static artefacts struggle to compete with the evocativeness of a) the music and b) some of the scenes from the movie. But what comes close is the fabulous silhouette art of Aaron Douglas who is represented by paintings and prints and illustrations to a book of blues lyrics by Langston Hughes. Vivid, beautifully crisp and rhythmic, it’s no wonder the curators chose one of his images as the exhibition poster.
I’d like to know a lot more about Douglas, every one of the half dozen or so images on show here are excellent. They also made me realise the black and white silhouette art of Kara Walker, the contemporary Afro-American artists, is not as original as I thought it was.
So far all these settings and stories and artists have been European and American, part of a familiar narrative of Euro-American modernism which most of us are pretty familiar with. But this huge exhibition has a few surprises in store. First, the non-Western subjects.
Mexico City
Two and a half thousand miles south of New York City is Mexico City. Here, in the aftermath of the prolonged Mexican Revolution, in the early 1920s, a radical new art movement emerged named Estridentismo which sought to overthrow established bourgeois modes and create a new poetry which combined the folk fiction of the peasants with the reality of urban life in the big cities. How to unite rural peasants and urban workers – it was Lenin’s problem, Mao’s problem, Guevara’s problem, and the founders of the movement – Ramón Alva de la Canal, Manuel Maples Arce and Germán Cueto – discussed this and much more at the Café de Nadie (Nobody’s Café) in Mexico City.
One of them came up with the characteristically inane motto: ‘Chopin to the electric chair!’ (characteristic for the post-war era of anti-bourgeois rhetoric)
Well, the twentieth century was to send many poets, painters, composers and musicians to the gulag, to the death camp and the execution cell, so in a roundabout way they got their wish.
Later in the 1920s, some of the group plus new members set up the ¡30-30! group (named after a popular rifle cartridge) with a socialist agenda of bringing art to the masses, and they organised lots of exhibitions and events in 1928 to 30. In January 1929 they staged an ambitious interactive exhibition-cum-event in a large carpa or low-cost tent used for travelling circuses. The Carpa Amaro event featured many woodprints, a deliberately cheap, affordable form.
The exhibition includes photos of these young firebrands, alongside a case of handmade masks made by German Cueto, and then a wall of thirty or so of the woodcuts which featured in the carpa exhibition by artists such as Gabriel Fernandez Ledesma and Fermin Revueltas Sanchez, ranging in subject matter from revolutionary leaders to suckling pigs via many portraits of working people.
Viva el 30-30 by Fernando Leal (1928)
Nigeria
Then, to my surprise, there is a whole section about Nigeria, specifically about the highly influential Mbari Artists and Writers Club, founded in the early 1960s in Nigeria.
The exhibition focuses on two of the club’s key locations, in Ibadan and Osogbo, describing how they were founded as laboratories for postcolonial artistic experimentation, providing a platform for a dazzling range of activities – including open-air dance and theatre performances, featuring ground breaking Yoruba operas by Duro Ladipo and Fela Kuti’s Afro-jazz; poetry and literature readings; experimental art workshops; and pioneering exhibitions by African and international artists such as Colette Omogbai, Twins Seven-Seven, Ibrahim El-Salahi and Uche Okeke.
There were some striking paintings here, I appreciated the swirling designs of Twins Seven-Seven but was drawn to the three works by Ibrahim (later discovering these are talismanic pieces of post-colonial African art).
There was a very interesting film playing, Art In A Changing Society made back in 1964 by Francis Speed and Ulli Beier, which was a TV documentary-style introduction to the art and architecture, design and dance and music of post-colonial Nigeria but which I cannot, alas, find on the internet.
Tehran
Lastly, and most unexpected of all, we come to Tehran in 1966 where the club Rasht 29 emerged as a creative space for avant-garde painters, poets, musicians and filmmakers to meet and discuss. There were spontaneous performances and works by artists like Parviz Tanavoli and Faramarz Pilaram hung in the lounge while a soundtrack including Led Zeppelin and the Beatles played constantly.
Best of the works here were the three or four works by Parviz Tanalovi, who incorporated industrial leftovers and detritus into picture sculptures i.e picture sized and shaped objects, which hang on a wall, but which come out of the picture frame into three dimensions. Apparently many of his works incorporate a grille which looks to me like the symbol of a prison but apparently refers to the traditional design of a saqqakhaneh, the ‘sacred commemorative water fountains’ which gave their name to the artistic movement they all belonged to Saqqakhaneh.
As you can see, it’s a lot to take in. I find it hard to keep in mind all of the aspects of Modernism across Europe and the States – bringing in new non-Western countries is a brave and admirable move – it is good to learn about Ibrahim El-Salahi and Parviz Tanalovi, in particular.
But it begs quite a few questions:
1. Why do we get to see so very little non-Western art in all our major art galleries. Mexico, Nigeria, Iran – these are all major countries with huge populations and long cultural heritages. Yet you only rarely hear anything about them.
2. Do they really fit into this exhibition? Not only was the Western stuff unified by coming from a common European artistic heritage, but it was unified in date as well, showing the flow of thought from the late-nineteenth century through the Great War and into the inter-war period: it covers the period roughly described as Modernism. Whereas the Nigeria and Tehran stuff suddenly leaps into the 1960s, a completely different period with a completely different vibe.
So not only do I know next to nothing about Nigerian or Persian traditional art, but I am not told anything about Nigerian or Iranian art of the 1900s, 20s, 30s, 40s or 50s to help put the sudden focus in the clubs of the 1960s in focus.
2. Recreating the nightclub vibe
There is one massive aspect of the show I haven’t mentioned yet – which is that, having processed through the historical exhibition and display up on the balcony, the visitor then goes back down to the ground floor and discovers that, in the central gallery space, the curators have recreated some of the art clubs which we’ve been reading about. Specifically, there is:
Chat Noir a white room with 7 or 8 of the big metal stencils fromt he Chat Noir hanging from the ceiling and slowly rotating in the mild breeze and throwing shadows on the wall, all to the contemporaneous music of Debussy and Satie – a very calm, peaceful, meditative room
Cabaret Fledermaus a striking reconstruction of the Viennese nightclub in which the walls and bar are studded with brightly coloured tiles
Recreation of the Cabaret Fledermaus, Vienna, 1907
L’Aubette a reconstruction of L’Aubette, the semi-industrial, architectural complex in Strasbourg, complete with cinema projection running a series of contemporary films, including Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin and Metropolis
Recreation of the cinema-ballroom L’Aubette by Theo van Doesburg, Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Mbari Clubs and a nice space set off from the corridor by a barrier or wall made out of sculpted patterns in a Nigerian style, inside which was playing a video of Nigerian youths dancing
You can see that a great deal or time, trouble and expense has gone into recreating each of these ‘zones’. But.. The most obvious thing about most nightclubs is, or was, that they were traditionally subterranean, smoky, often very noisy and very cramped and packed environments, in which people are drinking too much and laughing and joking and often having to shout over the very loud music, and laughing and going off to the bogs or stopping for a snog on the stars or chatting up the barmaid or barman, and asking someone for a light. They are/were places of intense hectic human interaction.
It was an ambitious, maybe quixotic notion, to try and recreate all that human bustle, noise, sweat and booziness in… the uniquely silent, white, perfectly scrubbed and essentially sterile environment of the modern art gallery. Nothing could really have been more dead than the Mbari Clubs little zone, completely empty when I walked in, admired the Yoruba wall paintings, and walked out again. Or the loving recreation of the Cabaret Fledermaus, beautiful coloured tiles and all, and utterly empty and utterly silent when I walked through it.
Conclusions
This is a fascinating insight into an enduringly interesting subject, a subject which has inspired all manner of artists across numerous countries and periods.
In fact, maybe you could think of The Nightclub as being an entire genre, a very twentieth century genre, as The Nude or The Landscape were for previous centuries.
And I admire the way the curators have made it so multinational, showing the same impulse at work across multiple cultures and continents.
Like previous Barbican shows it is so packed as to be overwhelming, bringing together over 350 works rarely seen in the UK, including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, films and archival material.
And yet I was really perplexed by the recreations. The young woman who took my ticket explained that they have been having music evenings, with live bands playing. Maybe that helps, maybe that lifts it a bit. But it was eerie walking through perfect recreations of places which were meant to be temples to human interaction in all its smelly, sweaty, boozy, smoke-ridden, music-drowned glory but were now empty and silent – turned, quite literally, into museum pieces.
Books & Boots 