All posts tagged diversity

This Is England by Matt Small @ Guildhall Art Gallery

In the small downstairs exhibition room at the Guildhall Art Gallery there hung till recently 27 portraits of the 2022 England football squad (and manager Gareth Southgate) by black artist Matt Small. Simplest way to introduce him and the artworks is the video:

Each portrait is extremely realistic in shape and anatomical features – so accurate in every respect that I thought they must surely be based on blown-up photographs. But then they are very freely coloured, in the manner of much modern painting, in the livid blotchy style which dates back maybe to Lucien Freud and, I suspect, has been taught at art colleges ever since.

Style

As with so much art it is one thing to see a flat image on a screen, as in this review, and quite a different thing to see the art work in the flesh. These works are not, as they appear here, flat and finished – they’re not even in one piece, they are three-dimensional assemblies or mini-sculptures.

Each portrait was painted onto some kind of plywood about half a centimetre thick, and then these were cut out to create silhouetted portraits and then glued or stuck onto the backdrops. And the backdrops aren’t just flat canvas or material. Each backing is made up of triangles of wood of different shapes and sizes, roughly sawn so they have splintered rough edges, roughly painted white so you can see the original wood colour at the edges, and assembled onto the basic base of each portrait so that the assembled triangles create a geometric pattern behind each head.

Apparently these white triangular tessalations are a kind of abstract geometric depiction of the English flag but I didn’t see that at all. Instead it struck me they look like the seams of a modern white leather football.

‘This Is England’ at Guildhall Art Gallery. Can you name all 11 players (manager Gareth Southgate being at the top left)?

If we’re being allegorical, it struck me that the way the roughly finished wooden shapes fit together so neatly symbolises the way the team, often from pretty poor backgrounds, suffering under various disadvantages (rough edges) nonetheless were arranged into patterns and shapes of tremendous beauty.

As to the faces themselves I’ve described how they have a photographic accuracy of shape, especially, for some reason, the eyes, which, in some of them, really do look like photographs until you get up close and see they’re painted like everything else.

The reproductions I’ve seen online don’t convey the impact of the actual paintings. Photos flatten colour and texture and so make them all look similar, they all look like they’ve got jet black hair and dark skin, they all look very samey, the white and the black men alike.

Phil Foden by Matt Small

In the flesh there’s much more variety. As you can see from this individual portrait of Matt Foden, the face is built up through a mosaic of surprisingly garish primary colours, including red, yellow, blue, turquoise and so on. Samey at a distance, the more you approach each individual work, the more vibrant its patchwork of vivid colouring becomes.

Second thing is the physical texture of the paintings. They’re not smooth and flat. Small has left in all the imperfections which come from splashing on pain, including brushmarks, swirls of pain, some kind of oxydising process which has produced discoloured blips and bubbles on virtually every patch.

Some people might regard these as imperfections but this is precisely the kind of record of a work’s production which has always thrilled me, ever since I saw my first Jasper John paintings 50 years ago, with their half-finished canvases and stencilled words saying ‘Fragile’, the sense that a modern painting merges into its surroundings, records and depicts the physical processes which produced it. I suppose they are signifiers of a kind of ‘authenticity’, denoting the hand-made, individual physical effort required to not only pain, but to saw out, assemble and glue together all the elements, as I mentioned above.

It’s a type of art which excites me as much as it did 50 years ago and so, on the crudest, physical, visceral level, I thrilled to the physical presence of these works, almost like being physically close to someone I’m really attracted to. Pretty much none of the physical nature of the works comes over in reproductions so you might be asking yourself what I’m on about. This is why it is still, despite everything, making the effort to try and see works of art in the flesh. It’s almost always a completely different experience from seeing any reproduction, especially on a flat 3-inch square screen of a modern smartphone.

Raheem Stirling by Matt Small

Message

Matt Small, the gallery and everyone involved is at pains to emphasise that the works as a whole have a polemical aim: this is to emphasise that the squad came from a diverse set of backgrounds, and that they not only made history (by making it further in the World Cup than any English team since 1966) and inspired the country through their teamwork and cohesion, but who also took a principled and inspiring stand on ‘equality, inclusivity and racial injustice’.

And this is all true: the team worked together not only on the pitch, supporting young wonder players like Jude Bellingham (aged 19!!!), Bukayo Saka (age 21) and Phil Foden (21) to score magnificent goals, but behaved with tremendous dignity and fluency off the pitch. Some of the after match interviews, young men pushed in front of a camera just minutes after giving their all on the biggest stage in the world, were models of politeness and articulacy.

Then individual stories like the return to form of Marcus Rashford who suffered such cruel abuse as a result of his outstanding efforts with charities to distribute over 21 million meals for children and families who might not otherwise eat – God, what an extraordinary inspiration to the whole country!

The show is accompanied by a few quotes. Gareth Southgate, measuring his words as always, says:

‘We are a team whose diversity and youth represent a modern country.”

But last word goes to Rashford, quoted as saying:

“Look what we can do when we come together.”

These portraits were created in the spring and put on display in the month before the tournament began – but little can Small or the gallery have imagined what genuinely inspiring, nation-uniting people these 27 players would turn out to be, making any English person with a soul burst with pride at these extraordinarily brilliant young men, their skill, their ambition, their commitment, and their embodiment of everything that is good about young, modern, inclusive England.

Related links

The display at the Guildhall Art Gallery has now closed.

Matt Small is represented by JG Contemporary who are planning to show some of the portraits in the National Football Museum in Manchester later this year, and selections may be displayed at other spaces later this year.

Meanwhile you can see other Matt Small artworks at the JG Contemporary Gallery in Chiswick, West London.

The National Theatre in London is going to present a new play about Gareth Southgate and the team, opening on 10 June.

Other Guildhall Art Gallery reviews

1 Comment
by Simon on February 24, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition
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Posted by Simon on February 24, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/02/24/this-is-england-matt-small-guildhall-art-gallery/

An Alternative History of Photography: Works from the Solander Collection @ the Photographers Gallery

The Solander Collection

OK, so what is the Solander Collection? In its own words:

Dedicated to the enjoyment and understanding of photographic art in all its forms, the Solander Collection has a special emphasis on international traditions, under-represented and forgotten artists, ethnic diversity, and women. The aim of the collection is to broaden the understanding of photography as inclusive and democratic.

Nearly all works are vintage (made within a few years of the negative) and include many rarities and ‘firsts’. It is a working collection, intended to be shared through exhibitions and publications. The collection is based in Oregon and California and is available to view by appointment, when it is not on public view. (About the Solander Collection)

It’s named after the Solander Box, the cloth-covered black box that museums use to store flat works in.

This exhibition

This exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery displays over 130 works from the Solander Collection. They’ve been selected to make visitors “look again at well-known works by major artists, alongside forgotten greats, regional champions and unknown artists”. Here are curators Graham Howe and Phillip Prodger explaining.

Keywords are:

“feminist photography…connections between things that don’t always get connected…more inclusive, more welcoming…never meant to be a chronology…pockets of thought, ways of seeing, ways of thinking of photography…you’re meant to feel how organic everything is and the connections that exist between different time periods…a wider view, a more diverse pluralistic approach to looking at photography…as rich and diverse and interesting as the people of the world…”

Does it match up?

Does this exhibition match up to these brave words about diversity and inclusiveness? Well, yes and no. On the No side:

Still chronological

Although the curators claim to be eschewing chronology, the exhibition is still very chronological in feel. It starts with works from the very dawn of photography in the 1840s, when people used photos as the basis for fine art and painted over prints, or used the camera lucida as an aid to drawing, or when subjects were chosen to match the subjects of fine art and sculpture, for example the striking male nude included here by Charles Nègre.

It starts with the usual early pioneers such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton and Eadweard Muybridge. And then moves slowly forward through the decades of the nineteenth century before arriving at the explosion of Modernism around the time of the Great War.

So this is all reassuringly chronological and follows the same timeline as umpteen other history of photography exhibitions I’ve been to. The very fact that the curators feel compelled to call the exhibition ‘An alternative history‘ indicates how far they are from throwing off the shackles of chronology and arranging works by some other method. Why not call it ‘Selection from the Solander Collection’ and arrange the pieces in a genuinely non-linear, themed, or free associative manner?

Still very American-centric

Of the 130 or so pieces I counted 24 by American photographers, or about a fifth. There are also a lot from Europe, obvz, and then only a handful each from China, Japan, a few each from some south American countries, and about a dozen in total from Africa. So it may be more geographically diverse than your standard history of photography, but not as diverse as the actual world, the real world out there beyond Galleryland. In the real world the top half dozen nations are currently ordered by population thus:

  1. China 1.5 billion
  2. India 1.4 billion
  3. Africa 1.3 billion
  4. America 335 million
  5. Indonesia 280 million
  6. Pakistan 240 million

So, to be strictly ‘representative’, there ought to be four times as many photos by Chinese, Indian or African photographers as Americans. Another statistic is that America makes up 4.25% of the total world population so to be utterly ‘representative’ exhibitions of global art like this ought to have that amount of representation – whereas, of course, it’s nothing like that. America, with the imperial reach of its technological and commercial supremacy, is still the single most represented country.

The fact that Americans think it is an impressive achievement to feature handfuls of photographers from other countries tells you just how deep-grained American parochialism and chauvinism is, and how slavish the obeisance of British art and culture gatekeepers to American culture is that they unquestioningly, enthusiastically go along with America’s ongoing dominance.

Obscure photographers?

Well, yes, up to a point but maybe a third of the 100 exhibits were by famous photographers – the Victorians ones I’ve mentioned above, plus ‘legends’ like Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Man Ray, Edward Weston, Rodchenko, and the fairly well known African studio photographer, Malick Sidibé.

On the Yes side:

More nationalities

Yes, there are works from Poland, Uzbekistan, Mali, Cameroon, as well as East Germany, Australian, Chile, Jamaica, Mexico, Singapore, Ukraine – nations you rarely see represented in any Anglo art exhibition. It does feel as if more nationalities are represented, albeit in nothing like the proportions they ought to be.

More obscure works

There are a number of anonymous works (particularly from the early period), odd or unexpected works like the studies using native peoples of John William Lindt; and, in the later part of the show, quite a few photos from what feel like obscure and overlooked photographers, from the under-represented countries mentioned above, Poland, Mali and so on.

The Western Gaze

More important/significant/telling is the curators’ inability to escape Anglocentric or Western notions of beauty or quality or the notion of ‘interest’ which they mention in the video. On my trips to Muslim countries, in my engagement with Chinese or Indian or Japanese art, I’ve realised that many other regions of the world have traditions and definitions and canons of ‘art’ utterly different, alien from, the Christian, white western ones I was brought up in.

Feminist curators and critics go on rather a lot about ‘the male gaze’. The phrase often appears on wall labels of numerous exhibitions. But I’m not sure I’ve read so much about ‘the Western gaze’, the way all western people bring very Western values and aesthetics and judgements to bear on all the art forms – music, sculpture, photography – we encounter outside our culture. Often it’s not even clear whether it is art, as we understand it; or some part of what we’d categorise as religious artifacts or cultural traditions or traditional practices.

The mindset whereby we want to take objects from their original location and categorise and label them and put them behind glass cases in antiseptic museums and galleries, that’s quite a Western way of thinking, specific to certain locations and times in Europe then America, and not necessarily fund in other cultures. (Rooms 1 to 5 at the British Museum, the long wood-panneled room on the right of the big central atrium, are devoted to describing the invention of the Western tradition of collecting, categorising and displaying precious artefacts. Visually, it’s the least sexy part of the British Museum but conceptually, maybe the most important: it’s an exploration of the origins of the entire concept of The Museum and The Collection.

In my opinion the curators of this exhibition have obviously made an effort, and have included works from a few more countries than you might expect; but they have come nowhere near throwing off the shackles of the Western Gaze and Western aesthetics, and so barely engaged with other ways of seeing.

The narrowing effect of photography

Then again, when it comes to photography, this may be because the technology and the form themselves such Western creations. Cameras, film and all the rest of the paraphernalia were invented, developed and improved in the advanced industrial nations of Europe and America (and Japan), and exported to other countries.

Maybe photography itself is an imperialist form, colonising the minds of everyone who uses it, co-opting them into modes of observation, alienation, categorisation and detached gazing, which are intrinsically Western.

Maybe to pick up a camera (or a phone with a camera in it i.e. pretty much every smartphone in the world) is to adopt an entirely Western technology and take on Western blinkers. Maybe, on this reading, it’s impossible for photography to be truly ‘diverse’ because, even though the person taking the photograph may be from Jakarta or Kinshasa or Shanghai, or an aborigine or native American, as soon as they pick up a camera they are infected, taken over, co-opted, colonised by the Western controlling, objective, alienating way of seeing. Just a thought…

Commentaries

Arguably, the single most important thing about this exhibition is the commentaries. The Solander Collection maintains a network of contributors in countries around the world, photographers but also critics and writers, and well over half (not all) of the photos in the exhibition are accompanied by fairly long wall labels, four or five thick paragraphs long, short essays –giving detailed information about how each photo was made, the photographer, the subject matter and so on.

if you read all of these commentaries it makes progressing around the two rooms which host the exhibition quite a slow business.

Selected works

So what did I like or what stood out for me? I’ll make a personal selection i.e. create my own networks of connections through the very varied corpus or body of work they’ve selected. To give it some structure I’ll base it on topic or subject matter.

African studio photography

Several African studio photographers are represented including the famous Malick Sidibé from Mali. Apparently the golden age of studio photography in West Africa was during the 1960s and early 70s i.e. the decade following independence from colonial rule.

Studio photographers used the conventions inherited from the West (the very idea of a studio; deeper than that, the very idea of a photograph) but gave it a style and swing, matching the newfound confidence of young urban types dressing according to new Africanised forms of fashion.

I’ve selected a pic by the less well-known Michel Kameni (1935 to 2020) from Cameroon. Apparently his photos are that bit less flamboyant than Sidibé’s, which you can see in the exhibition where examples of each guy’s work are place side by side. This example uses technical tricks to create a mirror image of the same woman, momentarily appearing as her own twin. Thus it is more mysterious and strange than Sidibé’s generally cool and confident but straightforward portraiture. What is the woman looking at us thinking? She’s a kind of African Mona Lisa.

Double Portrait by Michel Kameni (1966) © Studio Kameni

Constructed photography

Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813 to 1875) spent much of his own life in poverty and set out to document the lives of the poorest in society. But that’s not the most interesting thing here. The interesting thing is that this photo was constructed. Not just staged – as the girl in the foreground standing on a suspiciously clean street sweeping broom is – no, the entire backdrop, a waybill publicising an 1871 rally in Trafalgar Square against the match industry – was added to the photo of the girl. Or the photo of the girl was superimposed onto the background. Fascinating that right from the start photographs were subject to artificial intervention.

Match Girl, 1871 by Oscar Gustave Rejlander

Documentary photography

Meaning recording the lives and practices of ordinary people. Or as the Tate website puts it:

a style of photography that provides a straightforward and accurate representation of people, places, objects and events, and is often used in reportage.

This is an apparently simple documentary photograph taken by Emilio Amero (1901 to 1976) recording a moment in a wedding celebration in Mexico. But this is a carefully curated photograph so it has depths which become clearer the longer you look.

Obviously, the woman is beautiful with a beguiling spiritual beauty which becomes more entrancing the more you look. But her dress is wonderful too, particularly the concatenation of metal necklace, pendant and ear-rings. And the bracelets on her right wrist. How beautiful she looks! And then – this is all happening in the street, far different from an English wedding in a crabbed and constricted English church. This is happening outside and, you realise, there seem to be loads of people in the background, some milling about but a row of figures on the left sitting down. Are all of these people here just for her wedding? How wonderful and sociable! How communal and shared and happy it looks. Which makes the look of concentration and seriousness on the young bride’s face all the more sweet, touching, foreboding, intense and magical.

A Bride Dances by Emilio Amero (about 1937) © Estate of the Artist

Ethnographic photography

John William Lindt (1845 to 1926) was an interesting character (Wikipedia article). Born in Germany he travelled to Australia where he built a reputation as ‘a landscape and ethnographic photographer, early photojournalist, and portraitist’. This is one of 31 photos Lindt took of Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung people in a book titled ‘Australian Aboriginals’ in 1874. There are all kinds of things going on in this charged image. Most obvious is the clash or tension between the staged background and props and the vivid presence of the woman and child. And cross-threading against that, the similarity to the great Christian image of the madonna and child which he’s posed them in.

The early photographers saw the technology as a way to copy, re-enact, reproduce the poses and subject matter of the fine arts, of the Old Masters of the European visual tradition. One of the most interesting things about photography is how long it took for its practitioners to realise it could represent the world in ways not limited to fine art precedents, it could depict the world as it is, and then the development by Modernist practitioners of realising photography was susceptible to techniques which broke with reality altogether to create forms unique to the technology, such as photomontage, solarisation and so on.

Young Woman with Sleeping Child, Clarence Valley (1870 to 1873) by John William Lindt

Feminist photography

The whole point of ‘feminist photography’ is it has many strands and many meanings. Here are two quotes which indicate what they have in common, namely the quest to overthrow gendered stereotypes and expectations.

Feminist photographers turned a medium used traditionally to reinforce gender norms into a powerful tool of transformation and emancipation, reimagining not only the possibilities of photographic self-expression, but also the kinds of subjects and environments thought to be deserving of aesthetic representation.
(Beyond the Male Gaze: Photography and Feminist Theory)

Photography became an important tool of second-wave feminism to critique the established visual conventions through which gender, sexual, racial, and class identities have been constructed.
(Women and photography)

This pair of photos by German photographer Annegret Soltau (b.1946) were made in 1975 and have no written commentary, leaving us free to interpret or make up our own meanings. I’d have thought the place to start is the way the myriad fine threads covering her face in the left-hand picture have been snapped in the one on the right. But it’s not as if this has been caused by her, for example, opening her eyes to symbolise awakening from her heteronormative slumber or opening her mouth to break the silence and express her truth etc. It’s less predictable than that. Something has snapped, but what has caused it, and what it means remain suggestive but mysterious.

Self by Annegret Soltau (1975). Diptych of gelatin silver prints © Annegret Soltau, courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery

Glum photography

Not exactly a happy couple, but the main thing about this photograph is that it was hand coloured, which explains the bright but somehow aged and faded tone of the pink shawl and yellow blouse. In one way this image links to the studio photos of the Africans, Malick Sidibé and Michel Kameni, displayed on the wall opposite – but it also links to the painted photo of the maharajah with tiger (see below) raising interesting questions about tradition and continuity.

Portrait of a Couple 1970s by Ram Chand. Hand-coloured gelatin silver print © Ram Chand, courtesy Christophe Prebois

Happy photography

‘Laugh, and the world laughs with you.’ Hard not to find these girls’ innocent mirth infectious. People from sometime in the 1970s and yet you feel an immediate deep contact with them, they could be a couple of girls giggling in gallery right next to me. Photography can do that, make unnerving links with people you know are long dead in places and cultures which have long ago vanished. If you’re feeling robust this can be wonderfully life-enhancing, expanding your sense of humanity. If you’re feeling tragic, it can give you a bad case of Weltshchmerz and loss. Où sont the giggling girls of yesteryear?

Two girls in Kingston, Jamaica by Unknown, possibly Ernesto Bavastro (1870s to 1880s)

Historic photography

This is the first known photograph of a Chinese police unit, which began serving in Hong Kong shortly after its establishment as a British colony in 1841. The tut-tutting wall label reminds us that colonial police forces like this were strictly hierarchical, with British officers in charge, then Indians who could serve as sergeants or inspectors, then local, in this case Chinese people who could serve as constables or sergeants but weren’t allowed to rise higher.

This wasn’t a one-off by the photographer, Lai Fong (1839 to 1890). Lai “created a body of work that laid the foundation for the art of photography in China”. The wall label optimistically declares the Lai “offered a window into the pictorial traditions, history and social structures of the late Qing dynasty” but it’s not obvious that there’s anything particularly Chinese about this photo: the staging of the men and the draped curtains to either side strongly suggest the European, semi-classical visual conventions. This is what I meant, above, when I said that, possibly, photography is an intrinsically imperialist form. If Lai indeed did lay the foundations for photography in China he appeared to do so by importing entirely Western visual conventions.

A Group of Hong Kong Native Police, 1870s, by Lai Fong

Humorous photography

This piece by Austrian artist Valie Export (b.1940) is the biggest thing in the show and more or less the only one which made me laugh. I suppose it’s straight satire, 1970s satire on the identification of women with housework, using the cut-up collage techniques which people like George Grosz pioneered in the 1920s. Obviously it’s taking the mickey out of a thousand renaissance paintings which show a Madonna holding the Christ child, satirically replacing the baby with a hoover, symbol of 1970s women’s greatest care/oppression.

Expectation (1976) unique photomontage by Valie Export © Valie Export 2022

It is an example of photomontage which wasn’t that represented in the show. I can imagine a section of it could have been devoted to this technique, alongside works by Grosz or John Heartfield or other photomontageurs from other traditions making political/satirical points.

Or, at the same time or alternatively, it’s also possibly an example of ‘sculptural photography’ because the silhouetted 70s woman and hoover aren’t laid flat on the surface of the painting but are attached so as to be raised and physically distinct from the backdrop. Which is why the thing requires not a flat frame but more like a glass case to cater for the depth of the effect created.

Anyway, the classical painting in the background is Botticelli’s ‘Madonna of the Pomegranate’ (1487).

Modernist photography

Double exposure became a standard Modernist device. Mark Neven DuMont (1892 to 1959) was born in Germany but emigrated to England. His friend, the avant-garde painter and provocateur George Grosz, was a leading exponent of photomontage so the curators reckon that’s where DuMont got the idea to experiment with it himself. The wall label tells us that photomontage – using two or more camera negatives to create a composite image – is as old as photography; but the striking make-up of the female model and the geometric shape of the palm tree give it a very modernist, Art Deco feel.

Patricia by Mark Neven DuMont (1930s)

If modernist visual forms (sculpture, painting, drawing as well as photography) have one thing in common it’s a love of sharp lines and geometric shapes. In contrast with gauzy impressionism, gloomy symbolism or scratchy expressionism, modernism loves slick lines and sharp angles. Almost everything in this photograph by the Brazilian photographer German Lorca (1922 to 2021) is precise and geometric: from the tiny regular squares of the paving to the straight seams of the concrete wall behind the two figures; the neatly pressed seams of the two men’s suits to the super-precise outline of the shadows behind them thrown by the hot tropical sun. It’s part of the hyper-modern effect that we don’t see the men’s face, which are turned away or hidden behind a newspaper, thus increasing the sense that this sidewalk drama is not about people but about the lines and energies of the modern city.

Looking for a job by German Lorca (1948)

Motion photography

Eadweard Muybridge (1830 to 1904) is the famous pioneer of ‘motion photography’ which caught the imagination of artists and scientists around the (developed) world. In his studio he set up series of cameras in the same position or staggered along the course of the action he wanted to record, and then fired them off at intervals, experimenting with doing it closer or further apart.

The result was his famous sets of photos showing successive stages in dramatic actions. Once he’d nailed the technique he went mad and, between 1884 and 1886, produced 781 new sequences! The art of fencing is peculiarly suited to this process because it involves dramatic gestures and physical postures while the body itself doesn’t actually change position very much.

Fencing by Eadweard Muybridge (1887) collotype

Naked photography

Lots of women artists and photographers in the 1970s and 80s thought it was a radical and subversive act to take their clothes off and stage happenings or interventions or performances featuring themselves naked, and record themselves for posterity. No doubt this was a radical, subversive and so on gesture in Russian-controlled communist Poland back in 1980. Forty-three years later it looks like a naked young woman in heels confronting a woman cop. What’s not to love?

It is a little disappointing, then, to learn that this scene never took place, but that the piece is in fact a photomontage, combining a shot Ewa Partum (b.1945) took of herself nude in the studio, superimposed on a straightforward snap of a cop in the street.

Döppelgängers always fascinate us and so we are taken by the dualistic oppositions suggested here, between the naked and the clothed, between authority and submission, between the ‘authenticity’ of the artistic naked woman with nothing to hide and the overdress authority figure encumbered with all the rigmarole of legal and physical repression (radio, handcuffs, baton, gun?)

(I appreciate this photo could also come under ‘feminist photography’ or ‘political photography’. But I’m enjoying making up frivolous headings and my own connections.)

Self and policewoman by Ewa Partum (1980)

Nature photography

Possibly my favourite photo of the 130 on display. I myself have taken lots of photos of trees, flowers, plants, lichen on stones and so on, but trees are special. I think trees are talking to us but so slowly, so very slowly, that we can’t slow down enough to hear what they’re saying. And so we chop them down and burn them, over vast areas, and will end up burning the entire planet in the process. Tant pis.

Meanwhile, this is just one of many studies the American photographer Paul Strand (1890 to 1976) took of driftwood, showing a profound feel for the shapes and twists and knots and gnarls which are created by this most beautiful of life forms. Although hyper-naturalistic in feel, capturing every fibre of the gnarled old wood, Strand’s studies like this at the same time suggest flowing zoomorphic forms and, if you’ve smoked a little dope, are gateways almost into another world, enabling the viewer to immerse themselves in the non-human world around us. Entirely naturalistic they are also like meditative states of mind.

Driftwood, Gaspé, Quebec, 1928 by Paul Strand © Paul Strand Archive/ Aperture Foundation

Painted photography

Believe it or not this is a photo, taken about 1890 by an unknown photographer. It looks like a painting because the entire surface has been covered with a thick layer of pigment, so it is a painting: a photo-painting. Apparently this kind of embellishment or overwriting of a factual photographic base with an extravagantly idealised and Romantic backdrop and details was very common. It has a floridness we don’t associate with the European tradition and feels genuinely ‘other’.

This image links to the portrait of a couple from the 1970s shown above. Was this a distinctively Indian approach to photography? Did other cultures do the same kind of thing? Does it persist to this day? Be interesting to know more.

Maharaja with Tiger, possibly Duleep Singh, after a hunt (about 1890) vintage gelatin silver print with hand painting. Maker unknown (India)

Soviet photography

In the heyday of the 1920s and early 1930s Soviet artists made some of the boldest, most radical art of the century in the name of the new society they were building. Alexander Rodchenko (1891 to 1956) specialised in taking photos from experimental and unconventional angles. This was called rakurs in Russian. The most powerful, impactful of these is looking up at the subject from below. This conveys a string sense of dynamism and energy which, when combined or attached to an image of a youth, conveyed just the sense of forward-looking, visionary, striding-into-the-future energy which Stalin and his commissars wanted. As the commentator points out, it also makes the figure look monumental, a photographic equivalent of all those huge statues of working men and women striding boldly into the brave Soviet future which used to litter communist cityscapes.

Pioneer girl (1930) by Alexander Rodchenko

Street photography

Harold Cazneaux (1878 to 1953) became known for naturalistic studies of children, often taken outdoors. During and after the war there was an explosion of technical experimentation associated with modernism, plus a great surge in popular magazines which relied on evermore photos. Thus this photo was taken for a spread in The Home magazine. It’s what you could call soft modernism or popular modernism, in the sense that a) the focus is on the children’s faces, not the ostensible subject (the Punch and Judy show); b) it’s taken from a relatively low angle, a characteristic modernist trait, but not actually down on the ground. So it’s assimilated enough modernist tricks to be considered ‘modern’ and not rattle any cages.

Punch and Judy (1930) by Harold Cazneaux

The promotional video

Related links

More Photographers’ Gallery reviews

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by Simon on February 10, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Exhibition, Photography
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on February 10, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/02/10/an-alternative-history-of-photography-works-from-the-solander-collection-the-photographers-gallery/

Diversity, or how progressive rhetoric about diversity and the greater representation of women, blacks and Asians masks the ongoing influence of traditional networks of private school and Oxbridge

Polemic – a strong verbal or written attack on someone or something

The British cultural élite is very concerned about ‘diversity’, which means pre-eminently more women and more ethnic minorities.

I’m making the simple point that it does not, on the whole, mean more poor and disadvantaged people, God no.

It still tends to means more ‘people like us’, more people who grew up in well-connected, upper-middle-class homes, went to élite private schools – but now more of them are women, black or Asian.

Same élite education, though. And the same confident, patronising, we-know-best, élite attitudes.

This isn’t an evidence-based analysis, it doesn’t take a serious look at the no doubt increasing diversity in broadcasting and the media.

It’s just a list, and what’s more it is cherry-picked and biased to make my point.

But then this is a polemic, knowingly biased and slanted in order to make a polemical point.

The point I’m making is that the higher ranks of Britain’s media talk a great talk about diversity and inclusion, but in reality the commanding heights of British culture continue to be managed and run by the same kind of upper-middle-class, southern, private-school-educated élite as it always has.

I am fleshing out the points made by John Gray in his numerous essays about the shortcomings of Britain’s progressive classes, as summarised in my last blog post.

It’s symptomatic that Channel 4 has for a very long time prided itself on being progressive, diverse and woke, and yet the three main presenters on its flagship news programme, Channel 4 News – Jon Snow, Matt Frei and Cathy Newman – all went to very expensive private schools, and the latter two both went to Oxford.

I’m not making an in-depth sociological analysis. I’m just rather awed that the annual school fees at Matt Frei and Cathy Newman’s private schools (£41,600 and £40,700 respectively) are far more than the average British annual wage (currently just over £30,000 for the full-time employed).

I’m awed that the children of the very well-off still run so much, or feature so prominently, especially in the arts and broadcasting, despite all the distracting rhetoric they put out about ‘diversity’ and ‘feminism’ and ‘inclusion’.

BBC TODAY PROGRAMME
Mishal Husain – Cobham Hall (boarding fees: £31,500), Cambridge
Martha Kearney – George Watson’s Ladies College (day fees: £13,170), Oxford
Nick Robinson – Cheadle Hulme School (day pupil fees: £12,300), Oxford
Sarah Sands – Kent College, Pembury (boarding fees: £11,500) Goldsmiths, University of London
Justin Webb – Sidcot School (boarding fees: £27,540), London School of Economics,

BBC RADIO WORLD AT ONE
Sarah Anne Louise Montague, Lady Brooke – Blanchelande College (annual fees: £10,800), University of Bristol
Mark Mardell – Epsom College private school (boarding fees: £38,568), University of Kent
Ed Stourton – Ampleforth College (boarding fees: £36,486 per year), Cambridge
Faisal Islam – Manchester Grammar School (annual fees: £13,000), Trinity College Cambridge
Claire Marshall – Blundell’s School (annual fees: £13,000 ), Balliol College, Oxford

BBC ANDREW MARR SHOW
Andrew Marr – Loretto School (annual fees: £36,000), Trinity Hall Cambridge

BBC WOMAN’S HOUR
Emma Barnett – Manchester High School for Girls (annual fees: £12,200) University of Nottingham
Jane Garvey – Merchant Taylors’ Girls’ School, Crosby (annual fees: £11,000), University of Birmingham

THE WORLD TONIGHT
Ritula Shah – Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Girls (annual fees: £19,500), University of Warwick

BBC NEWS PRESENTERS
Samira Ahmed – Wimbledon High School (annual fees: £20,000), St Edmund Hall, Oxford
Anita Anand – Bancroft’s School (annual fees: £19,000), King’s College London
Jo Coburn – Politics Live – North London Collegiate School (annual fees: £21,000), Oxford
Stephanie Flanders – former BBC economics editor – St Paul’s Girls’ School (£26,500), Balliol College, Oxford
Fi Glover – St Swithun’s School (annual fees: £34,500), University of Kent
Will Gompertz, BBC arts editor – Bedford School (annual fees: £33,000). Married to the daughter of the Provost of Eton
Roger Harrabin, BBC Environment Analyst – King Henry VIII School (annual fees: £12,000), St Catharine’s College, Cambridge
James Landale, BBC’s diplomatic correspondent – Eton College (fees: £42,600), University of Bristol.
Paddy O’Connell, presenter of Broadcasting House – Gresham’s School (boarding fees: £36,000), University of Aberdeen
Hugh Pym, Health Editor BBC News – Marlborough College (annual fees: £38,000), Christ Church, Oxford
Sophie Raworth – 6 O’Clock News presenter: Putney High, and St Paul’s Girls’ schools (£26,500), Manchester University
Alice Roberts – presenter of Coast – The Red Maids’ School (annual fees: £15,000), University of Wales
David Shukman, science editor of BBC News – Eton (fees: £42,600), Durham University
Norman Smith, BBC Assistant Political Editor – Oundle School (annual fees: £38,000), St Peter’s College, Oxford
Vicki Young, BBC News Chief Political Correspondent – Truro High School for Girls (annual fees: £14,000), New Hall, Cambridge

JOURNALISTS
Katy Balls, The Spectator magazine – 
Louise Callaghan Sunday Times Journalist of the Year – UWC Atlantic College (annual fees: £33,000), School of Oriental and African Studies
Melanie Phillips, The Times and BBC – Putney High School (annual fees: £20,000), St Anne’s College, Oxford
Helen Lewis – Deputy Editor of the New Statesman & feminist author – St Mary’s School, Worcester (annual fees: £18,000), St Peter’s College, Oxford
Rachel Sylvester – South Hampstead High School (annual fees: £20,000) Somerville College, Oxford. I just listened to Sylvester on Radio 4 saying the laddish culture at Number 10 is really putting off women voters. According to the Office of National Statistics there are about 23,500,000 women voters in this country. This is what a public school and Oxford education does – gives you the confidence that, like Rachel Sylvester a) you know exactly what tens of millions of people are thinking and b) they are all in complete agreement with your own woke feminist thoughts.

Apparently Lewis is the author of a ‘light-hearted’ Helen’s Law which states that the comments in an online magazine or newspaper under an article about feminism, justify feminism. I would suggest a light-hearted Simon’s Law, which states that the posh, white woman lecturing you about your male ‘privilege’ almost certainly went to an expensive private school and Oxford.

That’s what qualifies her to lecture you about your ‘privilege’. Somehow Helen Lewis has managed to turn progressive values on their head so that, although she had a privileged education at an exclusive private school, then three years at the elite University of Oxford, which gifted her top jobs in London’s political and literary world… you are the one who is supposed to apologise to her for your privilege.

See what this ruling class has done? Reinforced its position at the commanding heights of academia, media and the arts, while at the same time making everyone else feel guilty for merely being white or male or working class.

This is not a discourse of equality. It is a discourse of power and control.

CHANNEL FOUR NEWS
Jon Snow – St Edward’s School in Oxford (boarding fees: £39,500), University of Liverpool
Cathy Newman – Charterhouse (boarding fees: £40,695), Oxford
Matt Frei – Westminster School (boarding fees: £41,600), Oxford
Gary Gibbon – The John Lyon School, Harrow (fees: £19,500), Balliol College, Oxford
Head of Channel 4, Alex Mahon – St Margaret’s School, Edinburgh (annual fees: £20,000), Imperial College London

ITV
Sir Peter Lytton Bazalgette, Chairman of ITV – Dulwich College (annual fees: £44,400), Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge
Dame Carolyn Julia McCall, Chief Executive of ITV – Catholic girls’ boarding school in Derbyshire, University of Kent
Jeremy Kyle – Reading Blue Coat School (fees: £17,500), University of Surrey
Mary Nightingale – St Margaret’s School, Exeter (fees: £8,500), University of London
The Honourable Robert Peston (son of Lord Peston) – Highgate Wood Secondary School, Oxford
Susannah Reid – Croydon High School (fees: £17,000 per annum), St Paul’s Girls’ School (£26,500), University of Bristol
Ben Shepherd – Chigwell School (boarding fees: £33,000), University of Birmingham

TV PRESENTERS
David Baddiel – The Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School in Elstree (annual fees: £21,000), King’s College Cambridge
Clare Balding OBE – Thatcham (annual fees: £39,000), Newnham College, Cambridge
Joan Bakewell – Stockport High School for Girls (fees: £12,000), Newnham College, Cambridge
Brian Cox – Hulme Grammar School (fees: £11,500), University of Manchester
Anne Robinson – Farnborough Hill Convent school (£15,500)
Hardeep Singh Kohli – St Aloysius’ College, Glasgow (annual fees: £13,500), University of Glasgow
Claudia Winkleman – City of London School for Girls (fees: £25,000), New Hall Cambridge
Lucy Worsley OBE history presenter – Abbey School, Reading, New College, Oxford

COMEDIANS
Hugh Dennis – University College School, London (annual fees: £21,000), St John’s College, Cambridge
Dawn French – St Dunstan’s Abbey School (private), Central School of Speech and Drama
Stephen Fry – Uppingham School, Rutland (annual boarding fees: £39,000), Queens’ College, Cambridge
Hugh Laurie – Eton College (annual fees: £42,600), Selwyn College Cambridge
David Mitchell – Abingdon School (fees: £40,000), Peterhouse College Cambridge
Steve Punt – Whitgift School (annual boarding fees: £40,000), St Catharine’s College, Cambridge
Jennifer Saunders – St Paul’s Girls’ School (fees: £26,500), the Central School of Speech and Drama

ACTORS
Phoebe Waller-Bridge – St Augustine’s Priory (fees: £16,400), DLD College London (boarding fees: £18,000), RADA
Benedict Cumberbatch – Harrow School (fees: £42,000), London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art
Judi Dench – the Mount School, a Quaker independent secondary school in York (annual fees: £15,500)
Tom Hiddleston – The Dragon School Oxford, Eton College (annual fees: £42,600), Pembroke College, Cambridge
Damien Lewis – Ashdown House Prep School, Eton College (annual fees: £42,600), Guildhall School of Music & Drama
Rosamund Pike – Badminton School in Bristol (annual fees: £17,000), Wadham College, Oxford
Toby Stephens – Seaford College (annual fees: £34,400), London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art
Stephen Mangan – Haileybury and Imperial Service College (annual fees: £36,200) Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

CELEBRITY VICARS
The Reverend Richard Coles – Wellingborough School (annual fees £16,500), King’s College London
The Reverend Giles Fraser – Uppingham (annual fees: £39,000), Newcastle University

WRITERS
Will Self – University College School, London (annual fees: £21,000), Exeter College, Oxford

LABOUR PARTY
John McDonnell – St Joseph’s College, Ipswich (boarding fees: £35,000), Brunel University
Seamus Milne – former Labour Party Director of Strategy and Communications – Winchester College (annual fees: £41,000), Balliol College Oxford

LIBERAL PARTY
Ed Davey – Nottingham High School (fees: £16,000) (in the year above Labour Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls), Jesus College, Oxford

GREEN PARTY
Jonathan Bartley – Dulwich College (annual fees: £44,400), London School of Economics
Caroline Lucas – Malvern Girls’ College (annual fees: £37,000), University of Exeter

THE WOMEN’S EQUALITY PARTY
Catherine Mayer co-founder of the WEP – Manchester High School for Girls (fees: £12,000), University of Sussex
Sandi Toksvig co-founder of the WEP – Tormead independent School (fees: £16,000), Girton College, Cambridge

DIGITAL
Martha Lane Fox – Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho, CBE
– co-founder of LastMinute.com
– on the boards of Twitter, Donmar Warehouse and Chanel
– trustee of The Queens Commonwealth Trust
– previously on the board of Channel 4
– youngest female member of House of Lords 2013
– Chancellor of the Open University 2014
– 2019 named the most influential woman in Britain’s digital sector from the past quarter of a century
Martha Fox is a member of an English landed gentry family seated at Bramham Park.
Education: Westminster School (annual fees: £42,000), Magdalen College, Oxford

For feminists, Martha Lane Fox is a pioneer and a symbol of Women in Tech and public life. For me, she is a classic example of The Establishment, and how it supports and helps its own, using its complex nexus of power and influence – regardless of her gender.

Brent Hoberman CBE – British entrepreneur and co-founder with Martha Lane Fox of Lastminute.com in 1998.
Education: Eton College (annual fees: £42,600), New College Oxford

Three conclusions

1. Oxbridge I say ‘Oxbridge’ but of the 84 figures here who all went to public school, only half, 41, went to Oxbridge.

This post is the opposite of a serious statistical survey, but it suggests that the relentless criticism of Oxford and Cambridge about their lack of diversity (often from eminent figures in politics or the media who themselves went to Oxbridge) is missing the point.

The problem starts way before university, it starts in the network of expensive private preparatory and secondary schools which inculcate in their pupils a superior attitude of confidence and capability, which plug their pupils into extensive networks of power and influence, and prepare them for the Oxbridge entrance exams with a thoroughness and insider knowledge which very few state schools can match.

For example, Clare Balding applied to read law at Christ’s College, Cambridge, but failed her interview. Give up and go to another university? No, because Clare then realised she didn’t want to do law after all, and so her family and school supported her to re-apply to Cambridge – this time to Newnham College – where she did successfully gain admission, second time around.

Which was nice for her, but how many families in the UK can afford to send their children to a £40,000-per-year school? And how many schools in the UK are geared up to support their 6th formers through not one but two full-scale applications to Oxbridge?

In her career at the BBC, Balding has become one of the UK’s best-known lesbian personalities, so on one level it’s easy for her and her supporters to paint her as a rebel, a disruptor of the patriarchy, a role model for LGBT+ people blah blah, and no doubt she is.

But she has also benefited from huge advantages of money, class and power that you and I can’t imagine.

So hammering the lack of ‘diversity’ at Oxford and Cambridge is, in my opinion, blaming the symptom, not the underlying cause.

2. Networks It’s not just about the private schools, it’s also about the extensive family networks with which the professional upper-middle-classes support each other, and which the élite schools confirm and extend.

Tristram Hunt is a textbook example of John Gray’s contention that the Labour Party has for decades been haemorrhaging its working class support, especially in the North of England (read any analysis of the 2019 election results) while at the same time it has slowly turned into the preserve of the pontificating, privileged, southern, private-school-educated, professional class.

Tristram Julian William Hunt, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum
Well-connected family: son of Julian Hunt (,leader of the Labour Party group on Cambridge City Council and awarded a life peerage as Baron Hunt of Chesterton); grandson of Roland Hunt, a British diplomat; cousin of Virginia Bottomley (former Tory cabinet minister, now Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone)
Private education: University College School, Hampstead (annual fees: £21,000), Trinity College Cambridge
Committed progressive: Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central from 2010 to 2017
Social influence: Hunt is a lecturer in modern British History at Queen Mary University of London, has written several history books, presented history programmes on television, is a regular writer for The Guardian and The Observer

Miranda Hart is a good example of a media star (actor, writer, comedian) who is held up by feminists as a role model for women, despite having benefited from extensive family connections and an extremely expensive private education that you and I could only dream of.

Miranda Hart, actor
Well connected family: Her father was commanding officer of HMS Coventry when it was sunk by the Argentinians in the 1982 Falklands conflict. Hart is from an aristocratic background. Hart’s patrilineal great-great-great-great-grandfather was Sir Percival Hart Dyke, 5th Baronet (1767–1846). Her distant cousin, the 10th and present baronet, Sir David Hart Dyke, lives in Canada. One of her first cousins is plant hunter Tom Hart Dyke, creator of the World of Gardens at Lullingstone Castle. Her maternal grandfather was Sir William Luce (1907–1977), Commander-in-Chief and Governor of Aden (1956–60). Her mother’s only sibling is the Lord Luce, a former Conservative minister, later Commander-in-Chief of Gibraltar (1997–2000). Richard’s son, the journalist and author Edward Luce, is one of Miranda Hart’s first cousins. Her great-uncle, the brother of her maternal grandfather, was Admiral Sir David Luce, who served as First Sea Lord. The father of David and William, Miranda Hart’s great-grandfather, was Rear Admiral John Luce. John’s brother, her great-great-uncle, was Major General Sir Richard Harman Luce, who served as Member of Parliament for Derby (1924–29). Her other maternal great-grandfather (through William’s wife Margaret Napier) was Vice Admiral Sir Trevylyan Napier, who was the Commander-in-Chief, America and West Indies Station (1919–20). His wife, Miranda’s great-grandmother, was Mary Elizabeth Culme-Seymour, daughter of Sir Michael Culme-Seymour, 3rd Baronet, Vice-Admiral of the United Kingdom (1901–20). Hart is a fourth cousin, twice removed, of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Private education: Downe House, near Thatcham (annual fees: £39,000), where she was a friend of the sports presenter Clare Balding, who was head girl. University of the West of England, Bristol
Influence ‘Miranda Hart is one of the UK’s best-loved comedians’

Role model? In the sense that she has benefited throughout her life and career from a well-connected, affluent family, and from attending £39,000-per-year schools, yes, she is a perfect feminist role model.

3. Progressive politics is the modern reincarnation of Victorian class superiority So focusing on ‘diversity’, on the ‘representation’ of women and ethnic minorities, while not intrinsically wrong, allows the larger injustice of the fact that 5% of the population benefit from a fantastic education, dazzling facilities and life-enhancing social connections which the other 95% of the population does not enjoy, to just carry on.

Cathy Newman loses no opportunity to flaunt her ‘feminist beliefs’, has authored books about ‘rebel’ women lol, but her secondary school education alone cost at least £250,000 and plugged her into networks of power and influence that you and I can only dream about.

Yet she feels confident to lecture you and me – who never had a fraction of her advantages – about our male privilege and patriarchy and sexism because… that’s what expensive private schools do. They give their pupils the confidence to lord it over the rest of us, convincing them that their values are impeccably, unquestionably correct.

Private school-educated progressives are the modern reincarnation of the Victorian missionaries and Imperial administrators which the private schools were originally set up to churn out by the thousand.

But instead of being sent to farflung colonies to lord it over the natives, today’s loftily superior woke missionaries go on to run the British media and the arts and our political parties and lord it over us.

The instinct to lecture their fellow countrymen (and it is mostly women lecturing men they lecture) from a lofty position of moral rectitude remains exactly the same as it was with their Victorian forebears.

150 years ago the public school elite looked down on the majority of their fellow Brits for being illiterate, uneducated, unchristian, plebs – so unlike their own superior, spiritual souls.

Now their modern reincarnations look down on the majority of their fellow Brits for being racist, sexist, xenophobic, gammon-faced, Brexit-voting chavs – so unlike their own feminist, diverse, woke and politically enlightened selves.

Different age, different issues and different insults.

But the same basic attitude of superior, snobbish elitism. The same conviction of their own utter rectitude. The same patronising disdain for the majority of the actual population of the country they live in.

Related blog postsRachel Sylvester

 

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Posted by Simon on February 28, 2020

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The Diversity of Life by E.O. Wilson (1992)

It is a failing of our species that we ignore and even despise the creatures whose lives sustain our own. (p.294)

Edward Osborne Wilson was born in 1929 and pursued a long career in biology, specialising in myrmecology, the study of ants, about which he came to be considered the world’s leading expert, and about which he published a massive textbook as well as countless research papers.

As well as his specialist scientific writing, Wilson has also published a series of (sometimes controversial) books about human nature, on collaborative species of animal (which led him to conceive the controversial theory of sociobiology), and about ecology and the environment.

(They’re controversial because he considers humans as just another complex life form, whose behaviour is dictated almost entirely by genetics and environment, discounting our ability to learn or change: beliefs which are opposed by liberals and progressives who believe humans can be transformed by education and culture.)

The Diversity of Life was an attempt to give an encyclopedic overview of life on earth – the myriads of life forms which create the dazzlingly complicated webs of life at all levels and in all parts of our planet – and then to inform the reader about the doleful devastation mankind is wreaking everywhere – and ends with some positive suggestions about how to try & save the environment, and the staggering diversity of life forms, before it’s too late.

The book is almost 30 years old but still so packed with information that maybe giving a synopsis of each chapter would be useful.

Part one – Violent nature, resilient life

1. Storm over the Amazon An impressionistic memoir of Wilson camping in the rainforest amid a tropical storm, which leads to musings about the phenomenal diversity of life forms in such places, and beyond, in all parts of the earth, from the Antarctic Ocean to deep sea, thermal vents.

2. Krakatau A vivid description of the eruption of Krakatoa leads into an account of how the sterile smoking stump of island left after the explosion was swiftly repopulated with all kinds of life forms within weeks of the catastrophe and now, 130 years later, is a completely repopulated tropical rainforest. Life survives and endures.

3. The Great Extinctions If the biggest volcanic explosion in recorded history can’t eliminate life, what can? Wilson explains the five big extinction events which the fossil record tells us about, when vast numbers of species were exterminated:

  • Ordovician 440 million years ago
  • Devonian 365 million years ago
  • Permian 245 million years ago
  • Triassic 210 million years ago
  • Cretaceous 66 million years ago

The last of these being the one which – supposedly – wiped out the dinosaurs, although Wilson points out that current knowledge suggests that dinosaur numbers were actually dropping off for millions of years before the actual ‘event’, whatever that was (most scientists think a massive meteor hit earth, a theory originally proposed by Luis Alvarez in 1980).

Anyway, the key thing is that the fossil record suggests that it took between five and 20 million years after each of these catastrophic events for the diversity of life to return to something like its pre-disaster levels.

Part two – Biodiversity rising

4. The Fundamental Unit A journey into evolutionary theory which quickly shows that many of its core concepts are deeply problematic and debated. Wilson clings to the notion of the species as the fundamental unit, because it makes sense of all biology –

A species is a population whose members are able to interbreed freely under natural conditions (p.36)

but concedes that other biologists give precedence to other concepts or levels of evolution, for example the population, the deme, or focus on genetics.

Which one you pick depends on your focus and priorities. The ‘species’ is a tricky concept to define, with the result that many biologists reach for subspecies (pp.58-61).

And that’s before you examine the record chronologically i.e. consider lineages of animals which we know stretch back for millions of years: at what point did one species slip into another? It depends. It depends what aspects you choose to focus on – DNA, or mating rituals, or wing length or diet or location.

The message is that the concepts of biology are precise and well-defined, but the real world is far more messy and complicated than, maybe, any human concepts can really fully capture.

5. New Species Wilson details all the processes by which new species have come about, introducing the concept of ‘intrinsic isolating mechanisms’, but going on to explain that these are endless. Almost any element in an environment, an organisms’s design or DNA might be an ‘isolating mechanism’, in the right circumstances. In other words, life forms are proliferating, mutating and changing constantly, all around us.

The possibility for error has no limit, and so intrinsic isolating mechanisms are endless in their variety. (p.51)

6. The forces of evolution Introduces us to a range of processes, operating at levels from genetics to entire populations, which drive evolutionary change, including:

  • genetic mutation
  • haploidy and diploidy (with an explanation of the cause of sickle-cell anaemia)
  • dominant and recessive genes
  • genotype (an individual’s collection of genes) and phenotype (the set of observable characteristics of an individual resulting from the interaction of its genotype with the environment)
  • allometry (rates of growth of different parts of an organism)
  • microevolution (at the genetic level) and macroevolution (at the level of environment and population)
  • the theory of punctuated equilibrium proposed by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould (that evolution happens in burst followed by long periods of no-change)
  • species selection

7. Adaptive radiation An explanation of the concepts of adaptive radiation and evolutionary convergence, taking in Hawaiian honeycreepers, Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos Islands, the cichlid fish of Lake Victoria, the astonishing diversity of shark species, and the Great American Interchange which followed when the rise of the Panama Isthmus joined previously separated North and South America 2.5 million years ago.

Ecological release = population increase that occurs when a species is freed from limiting factors in its environment.

Ecological constraint = constriction in the presence of a competitor.

8. The unexplored biosphere Describes our astonishing ignorance of how many species there are in the world. Wilson gives the total number of named species as 1.4 million, 751,000 of them insects, but the chapter goes on to explain our complete ignorance of the life forms in the ocean depths, or in the rainforest canopies, and the vast black hole of our ignorance of bacteria.

There could be anything between 10 million and 100 million species on earth – nobody knows.

He explains the hierarchy of toxonomy of living things: kingdom, phylum or division, class, order, family, genus, species.

Equitability = the distribution of diversity in a given location.

9. The creation of ecosystems Keystone species hold a system together e.g. sea otters on the California coast (which ate sea urchins thus preventing the sea urchins eating the kelp, so giving rise to forests of kelp which supported numerous life forms including whales who gave birth close to the forests of kelp) or elephants in the savannah (who, by pushing over trees, create diverse habitats).

Elasticity.

The predator paradox – in many systems it’s been shown that removing the top predator decreases diversity).

Character displacement. Symbiosis. The opposite of extinction is species packing.

The latitudinal diversity gradient i.e. there is more diversity in tropical rainforests – 30% of bird species, probably over half of all species, live in the rainforests – various theories why this should be (heat from the sun = energy + prolonged rain).

10. Biodiversity reaches the peak The reasons why biodiversity has steadily increased since the Cambrian explosion 550 million years ago, including the four main steps in life on earth:

  1. the origin of life from prebiotic organic molecules 3.9 billion years ago
  2. eukaryotic organisms 1.8 billion years ago
  3. the Cambrian explosion 540 to 500 million years ago
  4. the evolution of the human mind from 1 million to 100,000 years ago.

Why there is more diversity, the smaller the creatures/scale – because, at their scale, there are so many more niches to make a living in.

Part three – The human impact

It’s simple. We are destroying the world’s ecosystems, exterminating untold numbers of species before we can even identify them and any practical benefits they may have.

11. The life and death of species ‘Almost all the species that have ever lived are extinct, and yet more are alive today than at any time in the past (p.204)

How long do species survive? From 1 to 10 million years, depending on size and type. Then again, it’s likely that orchids which make up 8% of all known flowering plants, might speciate, thrive and die out far faster in the innumerable microsites which suit them in mountainous tropics.

The area effect = the rise of biodiversity according to island size (ten times the size, double the number of species). Large body size means smaller population and greater risk of extinction. The metapopulation concept of species existence.

12. Biodiversity threatened Extinctions by their very nature are rarely observed. Wilson devotes some pages to the thesis that wherever prehistoric man spread – in North America 8,000 years ago, in Australia 30,000 years ago, in the Pacific islands between 2,000 and 500 years ago – they exterminated all the large animals.

Obviously, since then Western settlers and colonists have been finishing off the job, and he gives depressing figures about numbers of bird, frog, tree and other species which have been exterminated in the past few hundred years by Western man, by colonists.

And now we are in a new era when exponentially growing populations of Third World countries are ravaging their own landscapes. He gives a list of 18 ‘hotspots’ (New Caledonia, Borneo, Ecuador) where half or more of the original rainforests has been heart-breakingly destroyed.

13. Unmined riches The idea that mankind should place a cash value on rainforests and other areas of diversity (coral reefs) in order to pay locals not to destroy them. Wilson gives the standard list of useful medicines and drugs we have discovered in remote and unexpected plants, wondering how many other useful, maybe life-saving substances are being trashed and destroyed before we ever have the chance to discover them.

But why  should this be? He explains that the millions of existing species have evolved through uncountable trillions of chemical interactions at all levels, in uncountably vast types of locations and settings – and so have been in effect a vast biochemical laboratory of life, infinitely huger, more complex, and going on for billions of years longer than our own feeble human laboratory efforts.

He gives practical examples of natural diversity and human narrowness:

  • the crops we grow are a handful – 20 or so – of the tens of thousands known, many of which are more productive, but just culturally alien
  • same with animals – we still farm the ten of so animals which Bronze Age man domesticated 10,000 years ago when there is a world of more productive animals e.g. the giant Amazon river turtle, the green iguana, which both produce far more meat per hectare and cost than beef cattle
  • why do we still fish wild in the seas, devastating entire ecosystems, when we could produce more fish more efficiently in controlled farms?
  • the absolutely vital importance of maintaining wild stocks and varieties of species we grow for food:
    • when in the 1970s the grassy-stunt virus devastated rice crops it was only the lucky chance that a remote Indian rice species contained genes which granted immunity to the virus and so could be cross-bred with commercial varieties which saved the world’s rice
    • it was only because wild varieties of coffee still grew in Ethiopia that genes could be isolated from them and cross-bred into commercial coffee crops in Latin America which saved them from devastation by ‘coffee rust’
  • wipe out the rainforests and other hotspots of diversity, and there go your fallback species

14. Resolution As ‘the human juggernaut’ staggers on, destroying all in its path, what is to be done? Wilson suggests a list:

  1. Survey the world’s flora and fauna – an epic task, particularly as there are maybe only 1,500 scientists in the whole world qualified to do it
  2. Create biological wealth – via ‘chemical prospecting’ i.e. looking for chemicals produced by organisms which might have practical applications (he gives a list of such discoveries)
  3. Promote sustainable development – for example strip logging to replace slash and burn, with numerous examples
  4. Wilson critiques the arguments for
    • cryogenically freezing species
    • seed banks
    • zoos
  5. They can only save a tiny fraction of species, and then only a handful of samples – but the key factor is that all organisms can only exist in fantastically complicated ecosystems, which no freezing or zoosor seed banks can preserve. There is no alternative to complete preservation of existing wilderness

15. The environmental ethic A final summing up. We are living through the sixth great extinction. Between a tenth and a quarter of all the world’s species will be wiped out in the next 50 years.

Having dispensed with the ad hoc and limited attempts at salvage outlined above, Wilson concludes that the only viable way to maintain even a fraction of the world’s biodiversity is to identify the world’s biodiversity ‘hot spots’ and preserve the entire ecosystems.

Each ecosystem has intrinsic value (p.148)

In the last few pages he makes the ‘deepest’ plea for conservation based on what he calls biophilia – this is that there is all kinds of evidence that humans need nature: we were produced over 2 million years of evolution and are descended from animals which themselves have encoded in the genes for their brains and nervous systems all kinds of interactions with the environment, with sun and moon, and rain and heat, and water and food, with rustling grasses and sheltering trees.

The most basic reason for making heroic efforts to preserve biodiversity is that at a really fundamental level, we need it to carry on feeling human.

On planet, one experiment (p.170)

Conclusion

Obviously, I know human beings are destroying the planet and exterminating other species at an unprecedented rate. Everyone who can read a newspaper or watch TV should know that by now, so the message of his book was over-familiar and sad.

But it was lovely to read again several passages whose imaginative brio had haunted me ever since I first read this book back in 1994:

  • the opening rich and impressionistic description of the rainforest
  • a gripping couple of pages at the start of chapter five where he describes what it would be like to set off at walking pace from the centre of the earth outwards, across the burning core, then into the cooler mantle and so on, suddenly emerging through topsoil into the air and walking through the extraordinary concentration of billions of life forms in a few minutes – we are that thin a layer on the surface of this spinning, hurtling planet
  • the couple of pages about sharks, whose weird diversity still astonishes
  • the brisk, no-nonsense account of how ‘native’ peoples or First Peoples were no tender-hearted environmentalists but hunted to death all the large megafauna wherever they spread
  • the dazzling description of all the organisms which are found in just one pinch of topsoil

As to the message, that we must try and preserve the diversity of life and respect the delicate ecosystems on which our existence ultimately depends – well, that seems to have been soundly ignored more or less everywhere, over the past thirty years since the book was published.

Credit

The Diversity of Life by Edward O. Wilson was published by the Harvard University Press in 1992. All references are to the 1994 Penguin paperback edition.

Related links

Reviews of other science books

Chemistry

Cosmology

Environment

Genetics

Human evolution

Maths

Origins of Life

Particle physics

Psychology

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by Simon on January 9, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Biology, Books, Environment, Evolution, Science
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Posted by Simon on January 9, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/01/09/the-diversity-of-life-e-o-wilson/

LGBT+: Diversity in Manga @ Japan House

Downstairs at the Japan House in High Street Kensington are the exhibition spaces. The staircase takes you down into a central atrium. On one side is the entrance to the medium-sized lecture theatre-cum cinema, where they hold events, talks and screen movies. Opposite this is the entrance to the fairly large exhibition room, currently devoted to a show about manga artist Urasawi Naoki.

And between them is a glass-fronted room which is the ‘library’. The word library evokes images of size, of big, wood-lined rooms filled from floor to ceiling with ancient tomes, and the idea of encyclopedic knowledge, of lots of books and information.

However, the library at Japan House is the extreme opposite. It amounts to just one wall of exquisitely selected books chosen to highlight the best of Japanese culture, selected by noted book curator Haba Yoshitaka.

Haba Yoshitaka

The curator of the Library at Japan House, Haba Yoshitaka, is a leading expert in the emerging field of ‘book direction’. The aim is to create innovative ways in which we interact with books. He recently gave a talk on his philosophy of book direction:

As conventional bookstores and libraries experience declining numbers, Haba aims instead to bring books to people and make them relevant and accessible to their daily lives. From the Japan House Library to specialized book areas in hospitals, nurseries and even Kyoto City Zoo, Haba has curated a wide range of book direction services for libraries at locations inside and outside Japan.

The Japan House ‘library’ is not, then, your average ‘library’.

Haba’s selection fills just one wall. Opposite it is a wall which plays host to changing exhibitions of books. It is currently showing a display of manga books addressing issues of gender and diversity.

LGBT+: Diversity in Manga

The display was organised to coincide with ‘Pride In London’ last month (June). It brings together about 50 manga from different eras, and from different genres, each of them depicting diverse representations of gender and sexuality expression. It’s designed to explore ‘the impact of Japanese manga culture on the understanding and perceptions of gender and sexual diversity in Japan’.

The LGBT+: Diversity in Manga display at Japan House

Japan is still a very conservative society. Manga, with its enormous appeal and huge range of audiences, has been a potent force in spreading awareness of modern ideas of gender diversity and alternative sexualities, especially among younger people.

The display picks out half a dozen key works and themes.

Women as men; men as women

Cross-dressing has been around as long as manga, with the great pioneer of the form, Tezuku Osamu, writing a story titled Princess Knight about a cross-dressing female knight, said to have been inspired by the theatrical troupe made up entirely of women among whom he spent his boyhood.

Many other cross-dressing characters have appeared in manga, including Oscar, a beautiful lady who dresses as a man to lead the Royal Guard in The Rose of Versailles, a strip set during the French Revolution; and the cross-dressing male university student Koibuchi Kuranosuke who appears in Higashimura Akiko’s Princess Jellyfish, a romantic comedy about a group of women who live in an apartment block.

The Year 24 Flower Group

The name refers to a group of female manga artists who were born around 1949 (Shōwa Year 24 in the Japanese calendar) and are said to have laid the foundations for contemporary shōjo manga (comics for girls). The movement included Moto Hagio, Yumiko Ōshima, and Keiko Takemiya.

Their works used complicated layouts and styles of expression which hadn’t been seen in girls’ comics before, and they also tackled subject matter previously not covered in girls’ comics such as science fiction and fantasy.

They emphasised characterisation and depicted romantic attachments between young men which eventually developed into the specialised manga genre known today as BL or Boys Love (shōnen-ai). (Hagio Moto herself, one of the ‘founding mothers’ of shojo manga (manga aimed at girls) was at Japan House a few months ago, discussing her role in these innovations. Irritating to have missed it.)

Boys Love

BL is a genre which depicts romantic and sexual relationships between men. The wall label discusses the various Japanese terms which have applied to these kinds of stories, implying subtle gradations in and distinctions, both within and beyond the genre.

Crossing boundaries

Many manga artists started out creating self-published dōjinshi works. One such is Yoshinaga Fumi whose manga Ōoku which applies gender-bending to early modern Edo-period Japan, creating a female shogun who is served by a harem of men known as the Ōoku. 

Gay art legend Tagame Gengoroh wrote the runaway best-seller My Brother’s Husband, on display here and at the British Museum’s manga exhibition. He also was in London earlier in the year to discuss his work. The blurring of sexual identities helps to blur boundaries between genres, as well, with plotlines becoming capable of greater latitude and variety.

A more recent addition is the strip What Did You Eat Yesterday? which chronicles a gay couple’s day-to-day life through the meals they share together. Sometimes it reads like a recipe book. Its quiet domesticity is another way of raising awareness and opening doors about same-sex couples.

Kumota Haruko

Another example of an artist who started out creating self-publishing dōjinshi is Kumota Haruko. She has published an award-winning series titled Descending Stories: Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinku. Ragoku is a form of storytelling theatre.

The series features two ragoku performers, the attractively mature Yakumo, and the cheerful and talented Sukeroku. Their same-sex relationship is never overtly stated. Instead the reader is left to infer it both from their day to day interactions, and from the subtle hints included in the traditional stories they tell. The display includes original artwork from the series.

Takemiya Keiko

Takemiya Keiko’s ground-breaking manga Kaze to Ki no Uta (The Poem of Wind and Trees) was first published in 1976 and explores relationships between young men at a boarding school in France. It caused a scandal at the time due to its depiction of sex between men, but was quickly championed by enlightened critics. Nowadays it is seen as the seminal work of Boys Love manga.

Why France? I wondered. Was it more associated, in the 1970s, with decadence and sensuality? In this country, Britain, probably, yes, it always has been seen as more licentious and ‘immoral’. Seems a distant and remote location for a manga artist to choose, though.

Summary

Not quite worth making a pilgrimage for on its own account, unless you are particularly interested in LGBT+ manga, this is nonetheless a small, but perfectly formed and exquisite display, and the Japan House is well worth a visit if you’ve never been before.

Related links

Upcoming events at Japan House

Other reviews of Japanese art or history

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by Simon on July 28, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Japan
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Posted by Simon on July 28, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/28/lgbt-diversity-in-manga-japan-house/

Only Human by Martin Parr @ the National Portrait Gallery

Born in 1952 in Epsom, Martin Parr has become one of Britain’s most celebrated and successful photographers. He has achieved this by:

  1. being extremely prolific, having taken thousands of tip-top photographs which he has packaged into numerous books and projects and exhibitions (he has published more than one hundred books, exhibited internationally, was President of the highly respected Magnum photo agency from 2013–17, and recently established the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, dedicated to collecting and exhibiting work by British and Irish photographers)
  2. being an extremely good talker – the exhibition features an eight-minute-long video interview in which Parr confidently, affably and articulately explains his work (can’t find this on YouTube but if you search you’ll find plenty of examples of him being interviewed and chatting away like a favourite uncle)
  3. having established a style, a niche, a unique selling point and brand, namely large, colour photos of ordinary British people in crushingly ordinary, unposed situations, captured in a blunt, unvarnished, warts-and-all style
Lord Mayor’s Show, City of London, 2013. © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Lord Mayor’s Show, City of London, 2013 © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

Massive colour prints

In fact, leafing through the many books on sale in the shop, you realise that his early work, for example shooting chapelgoers in Yorkshire, consisted of relatively small, black-and-white prints. It’s only in the past ten years or so that switching to digital cameras has allowed Parr to make much bigger images, with digital clarity and colour.

And it is hosts of these massive, colour prints of hundreds of images of the great British public, caught in casual moments, going about a wide range of odd, quirky and endearing activities, or just being ugly, fat, old, and scruffy – which make up the show.

Nice, France, 2015. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery

Humorous presentation

The exhibition fills the 14 or so rooms of the National Portrait Gallery’s main downstairs gallery space but the first thing to note is how Parr and the curators have made every effort to jazz it up in a humorous if rather downbeat way typical of the man and his love-hate relationship with the fabulous crapness of ordinary, everyday British culture. Thus:

Parr has always been interested in dancing, all kinds of dancing, and the big room devoted to shots of dancers – from punk to Goth, from gay pride to traditional Scottish dancing, to ballroom dancing to mosh pits at a metal concert – the room in which all these are hung is dominated by a slow-turning mirror ball projecting spangly facets on the walls and across the photos.

In the room devoted to beach life one entire wall is completely covered with a vast panorama of a beach absolutely packed with sunbathers in Argentina.

Installation view of the huge photo of Grandé Beach, Mar Del Plata, Argentina, 2014. Note the jokey deckchairs in front.

The Martin Parr café

Half way through the exhibition, the Portrait Gallery has turned a whole room into the Martin Parr café, not a stylish French joint with expresso machine, but a down at heel, fly-blown transport caff, with formica tables and those glass cases by the till which display a range of knackered looking Brandenburg cakes.

You really can buy tea and cakes here (two teas and two pieces of cake for a tenner), or a pint of the ‘Only Human’ craft beer which has been created for the show, read a copy of the exhibition catalogue left on each table, or stare at the cheap TV in the corner which is showing a video of the Pet Shop Boys busking at various locations around London (which Parr himself directed), or just sit and chat.

Buy now while stocks last

The gallery shop has similarly had a complete makeover to look like a cluttered, low-budget emporium festooned with big yellow and red placards proclaiming ‘Pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap’, and ‘Special offer’, ‘Special sale price’, and they have deliberately created the tackiest merchandise they can imagine, including Martin Parr sandals, deckchairs, tea towels, as well as the usual fridge magnets, lapel badges and loads of books by this most prolific of photographers.

Parraphernalia

The first room, before you’ve even handed over your ticket, is jokily titled Parraphernalia:

As Parr’s fame has grown, interest in the commercialisation of his images, name and likeness has grown exponentially. Parr approaches these opportunities with the same creativity he applies to his photography. Early in his career, Parr experimented with alternative methods for presenting his photographs, such as transferring pictures onto ceramic plates and other everyday objects.

Thus you’ll find a wall festooned with t-shirts, pyjamas, tote bags, mugs, posters, plates and so on each covered with a characteristic Parr image.

Stone Cross Parade, St George’s Day, West Bromwich, the Black Country, England, 2017. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery

Fotoescultura

Then there’s a room of fotoescultura. What is fotoescultura? I hear you ask. Well:

In 2009, Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide introduced Parr to Bruno Eslava, an eighty-four year old Mexican folk artist, who was one of the last remaining practitioners of the art of fotoescultura (photo sculpture). Hand-carved in wood, and incorporating a photograph transferred onto shaped tin, fotoesculturas are traditionally used to showcase prized portrait photographs in the home, frequently, but not always, of deceased loved ones. Parr commissioned Eslava to produce a series of these playful and affectionate objects to draw attention to the disappearing art of fotoescultura in Mexico.

These take up a wall covered with little ledges on which perch odd-shaped wood carvings with various photos of Parr himself on them.

Installation view of fotoesculturas at Only Human by Martin Parr. Photo by the author

Oneness

And right next to these was a big screen showing the recent set of idents for BBC 1. I had no idea that Parr was involved in making these – although if you read the credit roll at the end you realise the whole thing was researched, produced and directed by quite a huge cast of TV professionals. Presumably he came up with the basic idea and researched the organisations.

In 2016, BBC Creative commissioned Parr to create a series of idents for BBC One – short films between programmes that identify the broadcaster – on the subject of British ‘oneness’. He subsequently travelled throughout England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales photographing volunteer organisations and sport and hobby clubs, which he felt exemplified this quality. Parr’s evolving portrait of modern Britain shows people united by shared interests and passions, and reflects the diversity of communities living in the UK today.

For each subject, both a 30-second film and a still photograph were made. The films were all produced in the same format: participants start by being engaged in their activity seemingly unaware of the camera, pause briefly to face the camera, then return to the activity as if nothing ever happened.

You can watch them on Parr’s website.

Full list of rooms and themes

The rooms are divided by theme, namely:

  • Parraphernalia (bric a brac covered with Parr images)
  • Fotoesculturas & Autoportraits (fotoesculturas explained above; autoportraits are self portraits in the styles of other cultures, from Turkey, Thailand, the Soviet Union etc)
  • Oneness (the BBC One idents)
  • Celebrity (photos of famous people e.g. Vivienne Westwood, Grayson Perry)
  • Grand Slam (he likes photographing the crowds at tennis tournaments)
  • Everybody Dance Now (people dancing, from Goth mosh pits to Scottish Ceilidhs)
  • Beside the Seaside (he’s visited every major seaside resort in the UK photographing the fat and pasty British at play)
  • Ordinary Portraits
  • British Abroad (pasty-faced ex-pats in Africa)
  • A Day at the Races (pasty-faced, tackily-dressed Brits at the races)
  • Interview (eight-minute video interview)
  • Café (complete with Martin Parr beer)
  • Britain in the time of Brexit (for which he went to Leave-voting areas and photographed tattooed chavs and their pit bull terriers)
  • The Establishment (quaint ceremonies of the City of London, Oxbridge students, Her Majesty the Queen)

The Queen visiting the Livery Hall of the Drapers’ Livery Company for their 650th Anniversary, the City of London, London, England, 2014. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery

Identity

Regular readers of this blog will know that, although I welcome the weird and wonderful in art (and music and literature) – in fact, on the whole, I am more disposed to 20th and 21st century art than to classical (Renaissance to Victorian) art – nonetheless I am powerfully allergic to a lot of modern art curation, commentary and scholarly artspeak.

This is because I find it so limiting. Whereas the world is big and wide and weird, full of seven and a half billion squabbling, squealing, shagging, dying, fighting, working human beings – artspeak tends to reduce all artworks to the same three or four monotonously similar ‘issues’, namely:

  • gender (meaning all women are oppressed)
  • diversity (meaning all blacks and Muslims are oppressed)
  • same-sex desire (the polite, ladylike way of saying gay and lesbian sex: of course, all lesbians and gays and trans people are oppressed)
  • imperialism and colonialism (all colonial peoples and imperial subjects were oppressed)
  • and – sigh – identity (all the old, traditional categories of identity are being interrogated, questioned and transgressed)

It’s rare than any exhibition of a modern artist manages not to get trapped and wrapped, cribbed, cabined and confined, prepackaged and predigested, into one or other of these tidy, limiting and deadly dull categories.

Many modern artists go along with this handful of ‘ideas’ for the simple reason that they were educated at the same art schools as the art curators, and that this simple bundle of ideas appears to be all they were taught about the world.

About accounting, agriculture, applied mathematics, aquatic sciences, astronomy & planetary science, biochemistry, biology, business & commercial law, business management, chemistry, communication technologies, computing & IT, and a hundred and one other weird and wonderful subjects which the inhabitants of this crowded planet spend their time practicing and studying, they appear to know nothing.

No. Gender, diversity and identity appear to be the only ideas modern art is capable of ‘addressing’ and ‘interrogating’.

Unfortunately, Parr plays right into the hands of curators like this. Because he has spent so many years travelling round Britain photographing people in classic ‘British’ activities (pottering in allotments, dancing, at the beach, at sports tournaments or drinking at street parties), many of them with Union Jacks hanging in the background or round their necks – Parr’s entire oeuvre can, without so much as flexing a brain cell, be described as ‘an investigation into British identity in the age of Brexit’ or ‘an analysis of British identity in the era of multiculturalism’.

And the tired visitor consumes these exhausted truisms and clichés without missing a beat, without breaking a sweat, without the flicker of an idea troubling their minds. For example, see how this photo of bhangra dancers ‘raises questions of British identity.’

Bhangra dancers, Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2017, commissioned by BBC One. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery

The introduction and wall labels certainly don’t hold back:

This exhibition of new work, made in the UK and around the world, is a collection of individual portraits and Parr’s picture of our times. It is about Britishness and Brexit, belonging and self, globalism and consumption, and raises complex questions around both national and self-identity.

The portraits used were drawn from Parr’s Autoportraits series, also on view in this gallery. By transforming these pictures into shrine-like objects, Parr pokes fun at his own identity. At the
same time, he raises questions about the nature of photography, identity and memory.

Parr’s Autoportraits reflect his long-standing interest in travel and tourism, and highlight a rarely acknowledged niche in professional photography. As Parr moves from one absurd situation to the next, his pictures echo the ideals and aesthetics of the countries through which he moves, while inviting questions. If all photographs are illusions, can any portrait convey a sense of true identity?

Parr shows that our identities are revealed in part by how we spend our leisure time – the sports we watch, the players or teams we support, the way we celebrate victories or commiserate defeat.

These pictures might be called ‘environmental portraits’, images in which the identities of person and place intertwine. Do the clothes we wear, the groups we join, the careers we choose, or the hobbies we enthusiastically pursue, express our personality? Or is the converse true – does our participation in such things shape and define us?

The way we play, celebrate and enjoy our leisure time can reveal a lot about our identities. Questions of social status often sneak into the frame. Whether a glorious opportunity to put on your top hat and tails, or simply an excuse to have a flutter on the horses, this ‘sport of kings’ brings together people from many different walks of life.

The 2016 referendum vote to leave the European Union is not only one of the biggest socio-political events of our time, it is also a curious manifestation of British identity. Politicians on both sides of the debate used the referendum to debate immigration and its impact on British society and culture. At times, this degenerated into a nationalistic argument for resisting change, rejecting the European way of doing things and returning to a more purely ‘British’ culture, however that might be defined.

But for me, somehow, the more this ‘issue’ of identity is mentioned, the more meaningless it becomes. Repeating a word over and over again doesn’t give it depth. As various philosophers and writers have pointed out, repetition tends to have the opposite effect and empty a word or phrase of all meaning.

The commentary claims that Parr’s photographs are ‘about Britishness and Brexit, belonging and self, globalism and consumption, and raise complex questions around both national and self-identity.’

But do they? Do they really? Is a photo of some ordinary people standing at random on a beach ‘raising complex questions around both national and self-identity?’

Porthcurno, Cornwall, England, 2017. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery

Or a photo of Grayson Perry, or Vivienne Westwood, or five black women sitting on the pavement at the Notting Hill carnival, or two blokes who work in a chain factory, or a couple of fisherman on a Cornish quayside, or toned and gorgeous men dancing at a gay nightclub, or a bunch of students at an Oxford party, or a photo of the Lady Mayoress of London, or of a bloke bending down to roll a bowls ball.

The Perry Family – daughter Florence, Philippa and Grayson, London, England, 2012. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery

Does this photo ‘raise complex questions around both national and self-identity?’

I just didn’t think see it. So there’s a lot of black people at the Notting Hill carnival, so Indians like dancing to bhangra music, so posh people go to private schools, so Parliament and the City of London still have loads of quaint ceremonies where people dress up in silly costumes.

And so Parr takes wonderfully off-kilter, unflattering and informal photos of all these things. But I don’t think his photos raise any questions at all. They just record things.

Take his photos of the British at the seaside, an extremely threadbare, hoary old cliché of a subject which has been covered by socially -minded photographers since at least the 1930s. Parr’s photos record the fact that British seaside resorts are often seedy, depressing places, the sea is freezing cold, it’s windy and sometimes rainy, and to compensate for the general air of failure, people wear silly hats, buy candy floss, and eat revolting Mr Whippy ice creams.

None of this raises any ‘complex questions’ at all. It seems to me to state the bleedin’ obvious.

Same goes for the last room in the show which ‘addresses’ ‘the Establishment’ and ‘interrogates’ notions of ‘privilege’ by taking photos of Oxford students, public school children and the Queen.

In all seriousness, can you think of a more tired and predictable, boring and clapped-out, old subject? Kids who go to private school are privileged? Oxford is full of braying public school toffs? As any kind of sociological ‘analysis’ or even journalistic statement, isn’t this the acme of obviousness?

Magdelene Ball, Cambridge, England, 2015. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery

In other words, although curators and critics and Parr himself try to inject ‘questions’ and ‘issues’ into his photos, I think they’re barking up the wrong tree.

Photographic beauty

And by doing so they also divert attention from any appreciation of the formal qualities of his photographs, Parr’s skill at capturing candid moments, his uncanny ability to create a composition out of nothing, the strange balances and symmetries which emerge in ordinary workaday life without anyone trying. The oddity of the everyday, the odd beauty of the everyday, the everyday beauty of oddness.

Preparing lobster pots, Newlyn Harbour, Cornwall, England, 2018. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery

I don’t think Parr’s work has anything to do with ‘issues of Britishness’ and ‘questions of identity’. This kind of talk may be the kind of thing which gets publishers and art galleries excited, and lead to photo projects, commissions and exhibitions. In other words, which makes money.

But the actual pictures are about something else entirely. What makes (most of) them special is not their ‘incisive sociological analysis’ but their wonderfully skilful visual qualities. Their photographic qualities. The works here demonstrate Parr’s astonishing ability to capture, again and again, a particular kind of everyday surrealism. They are something to do with the banality of life which he pushes so far into Banality that they come back out the other end as the genuinely weird and strange.

He manages a consistent capturing of the routine oddity of loads of stuff which is going on around us, but which we rarely notice.

The British are ugly

Lastly, and most obvious of all – Parr shows how ugly, scruffy, pimply, fat, tattooed, tasteless and badly dressed the British are. This is probably the most striking and consistent aspect of Parr’s photos: the repeated evidence showing what a sorry sight we Brits present to the world.

It’s not just the parade of tattooed, Union Jack-draped chavs in the ‘Brexit’ room. Just as ugly are the posh geeks he photographed at Oxford or the grinning berks and their spotty partners he snapped at the Highland dances. By far the most blindingly obvious feature of Parr’s photographic oeuvre is how staggeringly ugly, badly dressed and graceless the British mostly are.

His subjects’ sheer lumpen plainness is emphasised by Parr’s:

  • deliberate use of raw, unflattering colour
  • the lack of any filters or post-production softening of the images
  • and the everyday activities and settings he seeks out

And the consistently raw bluntness of his photos makes you realise how highly posed, polished and post-produced to plastic perfection almost are all the other images we see around us are – from adverts to film stills, posters and billboards, and the thousands of shiny images of smiling perfection we consume on the internet every day.

Compared to all those digitally-enhanced images, Parr has for some time now made his name by producing glaringly unvarnished, untouched-up, unimproved images, showing the British reflections of themselves in all their ghastly, grisly grottiness.

New Model Army playing the Spa Pavilion at the Whitby Goth Weekend, 2014. Picture credit © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos / Rocket Gallery

But this is a genuinely transgressive thought – something which the polite and respectable curators – who prefer to expatiate at length on the socially acceptable themes of identity and gender and race – dare not mention.

This is the truth that dare not speak its name and which Martin Parr’s photographs ram home time after time. We Brits look awful.

Video

Video review of the exhibition by Visiting London Guide.

Related links

More National Portrait Gallery reviews

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by Simon on May 12, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Exhibition, Photography
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on May 12, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/05/12/only-human-martin-parr-national-portrait-gallery/

Women and ethnic minorities in the art world

I’ve recently read a number of feminist critiques of the art world accusing it of being an all-male patriarchy which women can’t enter, of having a glass ceiling which prevents women from reaching the top, and of systematically underplaying or denying the achievement of women artists.

While I’m not really qualified to tackle all these issues in their entirety, the books did make me start paying closer attention to the gender of the artists featured in the London art exhibitions I visit, to the gender of the exhibition curators, and to the gender of the people running the main London art galleries which I frequent – with the following results:

Recent art exhibitions and their curators

  1. Oceania – Peter Brunt, Nicholas Thomas
  2. Heath Robinson’s War Effort – Geoffrey Beare
  3. Peter Pan and Other Lost Children – Geoffrey Beare
  4. Liberty / Diaspora by Omar Victor Diop – Curatorial Project Manager: Karin Bareman, Curatorial Assistant: Leanne Petersen ♀
  5. Learn the Rules Like a Pro, So You Can Break Them Like an Artist! – Cliff Lauson and Tarini Malik ♀
  6. Edward Burne-Jones – Alison Smith ♀
  7. Space Shifters – Dr Cliff Lauson
  8. Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde – Jane Alison ♀
  9. Frida Kahlo – Making Herself Up – Claire Wilcox and Circe Henestrosa ♀
  10. Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Barrels and The Mastaba – Melissa Blanchflower ♀
  11. Aftermath: Art in the wake of World War One – Emma Chambers and Rachel Rose Smith ♀
  12. Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy – Achim Borchardt-Hume and Nancy Ireson ♀
  13. Vanessa Winship: And Time Folds – Alona Pardo ♀
  14. Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing – Alona Pardo and Jilke Golbach ♀
  15. I Am Now You – Mother by Marcia Michael – Renée Mussai ♀
  16. Devotion: A Portrait of Loretta by Franklyn Rodgers – Mark Sealy, Renée Mussai ♀
  17. Shirley Baker –
  18. Alex Prager: Silver Lake Drive – Nathalie Herschdorfer ♀
  19. Tish Murtha: Works 1976–1991 – Val Williams, Gordon MacDonald, Karen McQuaid ♀
  20. Monet and Architecture – Rosalind McKever ♀
  21. Print! Tearing It Up – Paul Gorman, Claire Catterall ♀
  22. World Illustration Awards 2018 – committee
  23. Killed Negatives – Nayia Yiakoumaki ♀
  24. ISelf Collection: Bumped Bodies – Emily Butler ♀
  25. The London Open 2018 – Emily Butler ♀
  26. Ed Ruscha: Course of Empire – Christopher Riopelle
  27. Thomas Cole: Eden to Empire – Tim Barringer, Christopher Riopelle and Rosalind McKever ♀
  28. Quentin Blake: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun – Olivia Ahmad ♀
  29. Tomma Abts – Lizzie Carey-Thomas (assistant curator Natalia Grabowska) ♀
  30. Enid Marx – Alan Powers, Olivia Ahmad ♀
  31. Edward Bawden – James Russell
  32. Under Cover – Karen McQuaid ♀
  33. Lee Bul – Stephanie Rosenthal (Eimear Martin, Bindi Vora) ♀
  34. Adapt to Survive – Dr Cliff Lauson
  35. AOP50 – Zelda Cheatle ♀
  36. Andreas Gursky – Ralph Rugoff
  37. Age of Terror – Sanna Moore ♀
  38. Neo-Romantic Book Illustration in Britain 1943-55 – Geoffrey Beare
  39. Charmed lives in Greece – Evita Arapoglou, Ian Collins, Sir Michael Llewellyn-Smith ♀
  40. Post-Soviet Visions – Ekow Eshun
  41. Made in North Korea – Olivia Ahmad, Nicholas Bonner ♀
  42. Ocean Liners: Speed and Style – Ghislaine Wood ♀
  43. All Too Human – Elena Crippa (Laura Castagnini, Zuzana Flaskova) ♀
  44. Lucinda Rogers – Olivia Ahmed ♀
  45. David Milne: Modern Painting – Ian Dejardin, Sarah Milroy ♀
  46. Living with gods – Jill Cook ♀
  47. Illuminating India – Shasti Lowton ♀
  48. Rhythm and Reaction – Catherine Tackley ♀
  49. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov – Juliet Bingham, Katy Wan ♀
  50. Women with Vision: Elisabeth Frink, Sandra Blow, Sonia Lawson – Nathalie Levi ♀
  51. Women of the Royal West of England Academy – Nathalie Levi ♀
  52. Cornelia Parker: One day this glass will break – Antonia Shaw ♀
  53. Opera: Passion, Power and Politics – Kate Bailey ♀
  54. Scythians – St John Simpson
  55. War Paint – Emma Mawdsley ♀
  56. Modigliani – Nancy Ireson, Simonetta Fraquelli, Emma Lewis, Marian Couijn ♀
  57. Soutine – Barnaby Wright, Karen Serres ♀
  58. Cézanne Portraits – John Elderfield, Mary Morton, Xavier Rey
  59. Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites – Susan Foister, Alison Smith ♀
  60. Burrell Degas – Julien Domercq
  61. Lake Keitele: Akseli Gallen-Kallela – Anne Robbins ♀
  62. Monochrome – Lelia Packer, Jennifer Sliwka ♀
  63. Rachel Whiteread – Ann Gallagher, Linsey Young, Helen Delaney & Hattie Spires ♀
  64. Dali/Duchamp – Dawn Ades, William Jeffett, with Sarah Lea and Desiree de Chair ♀
  65. Jasper Johns – Roberta Bernstein & Edith Devaney ♀
  66. Impressionists in London – Caroline Corbeau-Parsons & Elizabeth Jacklin ♀
  67. Matisse in the studio – Ann Dumas & Ellen McBreen ♀
  68. Jean Arp – Frances Guy & Eric Robertson ♀
  69. Tracey Emin / Turner – Tracey Emin ♀
  70. Tove Jansson – Sointu Fritze ♀
  71. Basquiat – Dieter Buchhart & Eleanor Nairne ♀

Artists by gender and race

71 shows
43 about specific artists (i.e. not about general themes)
52 named artists, of whom –
22 (42% of 52) were women
Black or Asian artists 4 (6%)

Curators by gender and race

71 shows
110 curators and assistant curators
81 women curators (74% of 110)
29 men curators (26%)
5 Black or Asian curators (5%)

London gallery directors by gender

  1. Army Museum Director – Janice Murray ♀
  2. Autograph ABP – Dr Mark Sealy MBE 
  3. Barbican Director of Arts –  Louise Jeffreys ♀
  4. British Museum – Hartwig Fischer 
  5. Calvert22 – Nonna Materkova ♀
  6. Courtauld Gallery Director – Deborah Swallow ♀
  7. Dulwich Picture Gallery Sackler Director –  Jennifer Scott ♀
  8. Guildhall Art Gallery & London’s Roman Amphitheatre – Sonia Solicari ♀
  9. Hayward Gallery Chief curator – Ralph Rugoff 
  10. Heath Robinson Museum Manager – Lucy Smith ♀
  11. House of Illustration – Colin McKenzie 
  12. Imperial War Museum – Diane Lees ♀
  13. National Army Museum – Janice Murray ♀
  14. National Gallery – Gabriele Finaldi 
  15. National Portrait Gallery –  Nicholas Cullinan 
  16. The Photographers’ Gallery – Brett Rogers ♀
  17. Royal Academy of Arts President – Christopher Le Brun 
  18. Saatchi Gallery – Rebecca Wilson ♀
  19. Serpentine Gallery Co-Directors – Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Yana Peel ♀
  20. Tate Britain Director –  Alex Farquharson 
  21. Tate Modern Director – Frances Morris ♀
  22. Victoria and Albert Museum Director –  Tristram Hunt 
  23. Whitechapel Gallery – Iwona Blazwick ♀

Bristol & Margate gallery directors by gender

Recently I was in Bristol and visited the main art gallery and the Royal West of England Academy:

Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery Director – Laura Pye ♀
Royal West of England Academy Director – Alison Bevan ♀

And popped down to Turner Contemporary in Margate:

Turner Contemporary, Margate Director – Victoria Pomery ♀

Grand total of gallery directors

27 galleries/museums
27 directors
17 women directors (63% of 27)
10 men directors (37%)
1 Black or Asian director (Mark Sealy) (4%)

Conclusions

I accept that the selection of exhibitions I happen to have gone to is subjective (although it does tend to reflect the major exhibitions at the major London galleries).

The gender of curators similarly reflects my subjective choices of venue – but it has in fact remained pretty steady at around 75% women, even as I’ve doubled the number of exhibitions visited over the past couple of months.

The genders of the heads of the main public London galleries are objective facts.

Anyway, from all this very shaky data, I provisionally conclude that:

  1. Of exhibitions devoted to named artists (not about themes or groups) about 40% are about female artists.
  2. About two-thirds of the London & Bristol art galleries I’ve visited are headed by women.
  3. Significantly more art exhibitions are curated by women than by men (about 75%).
  4. It is common to hear talk about ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’ in the art world, but not a single major London gallery is run by someone of black or Asian ethnicity, and none of the major art exhibitions I’ve visited were curated by blacks or Asians.

Visitors Also, hardly any visitors to exhibitions are black or Asian. At the Monochrome exhibition, there were no non-white visitors, but no fewer than five of the ‘security assistants’ were black. There were no black or Asian people in the one-room Lake Keitele show. There were no black or Asian visitors at the Degas, though all the women serving in the shop were Asian. Of the 170 people I counted in the Cézanne exhibition, there was one black man, and two Chinese or Japanese. In the Modigliani show, no black people – and so on…

From all of which I conclude that if there is an ‘absence’ or repression going on here, it is not – pace Whitney Chadwick and other feminist art critics – of women, who are in fact over-represented as heads of galleries and as exhibition curators: it is of people of colour, who are almost completely absent from this (admittedly very subjective) slice of the art world, whether as artists, administrators, curators or visitors.

Only the Basquiat show was about a black artist (and it attracted a noticeably large number of black visitors) but even this was curated (astonishingly) by two white people.

All of which confirms my ongoing sense that art is a predominantly white, bourgeois pastime.

Age And old. Every exhibition I go to is packed with grey-haired old men and women. It would be interesting to have some kind of objective figures for sex and age of gallery-goers (I wonder if Tate, the National and so on publish annual visitor figures, broken down into categories).

When I began to try and count age at the Cézanne show I very quickly gave up because it is, in practice, impossible to guess the age of every single person you look at, and the easiest visual clue – just counting grey-haired people – seemed ludicrous.

So I know that these stats are flawed in all kinds of ways — but, on the other hand, some kind of attempt at establishing facts is better than nothing, better than relying on purely personal, subjective opinions.

Now I’ve started, I’ll update the figures with each new exhibition I visit. I might as well try to record it as accurately as I can and see what patterns or trends emerge…

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by Simon on December 13, 2017  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 13, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/12/13/women-ethnic-minorities-art-world/

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