In 1969 Kenneth Tynan wrote to Beckett asking for a contribution to his hit stage revue, Oh! Calcutta!, which made headlines because of the extensive use of full-frontal nudity.
Beckett replied with the stage directions for what must be one of the shortest plays ever written. Some versions barely last a minute. Longer ones stretch it out to two minutes. Here are the directions:
Curtain. 1. Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish. Hold for about five seconds. 2. Faint brief cry and immediately inspiration and slow increase of light together reaching maximum together in about ten seconds. Silence and hold about five seconds. 3. Expiration and slow decrease of light together reaching minimum together (light as in 1.) in about ten seconds and immediately cry as before. Silence and hold for about five seconds.
Rubbish No verticals, all scattered and lying. Cry Instant of recorded vagitus. Important that two cries be identical, switching on and off strictly synchronized light and breath. Breath Amplified recording. Maximum light Not bright. If 0 = dark and 10 = bright, light should move from about 3 to 6 and back.
That’s the full text in its entirety. In other words, the stage lighting comes up on a pile of rubbish for a few seconds, there is the distant sound of the cry of a newborn baby followed by a big breath in accompanied by the light growing, followed by a big breath out as the light fades, a repeat of the cry of a newborn baby, then fade to black.
There are quite a few versions on YouTube and one of the funny things about them, taken as a group, is how few of them adhere strictly to Beckett’s directions, but feel the need to add and elaborate and embroider the bleak simplicity of the original.
Absurdist joke
On one level it’s clearly a sort of joke, in the same sort of absurdist spirit as John Cage’s 4’33” or Marcel Duchamp’s urinal – a reduction of theatre to almost its minimal possible components in order to see what the bare bones look like, to see what the most reduced idea of a theatrical piece can be. And yet at the same time be a work which is interesting in its own right – just like John Cage’s 4’33” or Marcel Duchamp’s urinal.
The unsustainability of a nihilistic attitude
At the same time it’s also a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the nihilistic attitude (I hesitate to use the word ‘philosophy’ because although Beckett likes to refer to canonical philosophers and difficult philosophical ideas in his works, he is not a philosopher and doesn’t propound a philosophy) expressed in the famous line from Waiting For Godot:
They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.
In other words, we are born into a heap of rubbish, cry at our entrance, our entire existence can be summarised as a couple of breaths, and then there is the second cry of our death. Here’s another version, clearly inspired by Philip Glass and Godfrey Reggio’s film Koyaanisqatsi.
But as I remarked of that line in my review of Waiting ForGodot, this nihilistic worldview is simply not true and everyone knows it’s not true. Lots of people live long, complex and fulfilling lives. People play computer games and chess, make discoveries, run theatres, write plays, go to art festivals and galleries and football matches, go scuba diving and skiing, build houses and cars, drive across America, join the army, join the navy, go to school, go to church, have children, grandchildren and quite a bit more.
It takes a special kind of imagination to see human life as simply a matter of two cries of pain and a handful of breaths set against a pile of rubbish, and a special kind of mindset to think this could possibly be true. It takes quite a bit of education to be quite this self-deluded.
Of course as a simplified allegory of human existence, as a symbol of a particular worldview, then fine. Paint what you like, draw what you like, write what you like. But as a depiction of the so-called ‘human condition’, it is profoundly untrue.
The unstoppable human instinct to tinker
And this is exactly the point driven home when you watch the half dozen or so short productions of Breath on YouTube – not one of them does it straight, just films Beckett’s simple directions; almost all of them feel compelled to add and embroider and elaborate in all kinds of ways, whether it’s bringing in the music of Philip Glass or a load of slides about the Nazis and the Holocaust.
Now there is where you have the real human spirit or experience – the endless urge to tell stories, tell anecdotes and jokes, harrow with horror, set to music, hum, sing, dance, plunge into grief, gossip about work colleagues, keep a diary, share instagram photos.
The multiplicity of productions which betray Beckett’s simple spartan and crystal clear stage directions, they’re the ones which tell you about ‘the human spirit’, the spirit which can’t stop itself adding, embroidering, inventing, yakking on, adding a new bit, what about some music, hey let’s project some slides, shall we add wheels, how about a flashing light on top and a siren. Humans: incorrigibly gabby.
In fact this betrayal of Beckett’s vision occurred right at the start, when the creator of Oh Calcutta, Kenneth Tynan, gratefully received Beckett’s contribution but thought, ‘Well, that’s a bit boring, let’s adapt it to suit the vibe of our bravely nude stage show’ and added a number of naked men and women to the production. As Beckett’s biographer, Deirdre Blair put it:
‘In one of his few displays of public anger, Beckett called Tynan a “liar” and a “cheat”, prompting Tynan to send a formal notice through his lawyers that he was not responsible for the travesty, which he claimed was due to others … Beckett decided the incident wasn’t worth the argument and dropped it.’
When you think about it it’s a delicious irony, because lovely naked young men and nubile young women, powerful symbols of fertility and sex and the Life Force are pretty much the exact opposite of the nihilistic and bleak ‘philosophy’ the piece supposedly exemplifies.
Drop it, Sam. Walk away. It’s just people, Sam, doing what they do, adding bells and whistles and go-faster stripes. I know you intended it as a searing indictment of the human condition, but the producer wanted boobs and bums.
Beckett as writer not ‘philosopher’
I am interested in Beckett, I am reading my way through his complete works, because I think he is an extraordinary writer – he conceives of language and the scenarios language can conjure and the tension between what can barely be called its ‘subject’ and the wrecked tatters of language it is conveyed in, with extraordinary originality. He repeatedly takes language to entirely new places, creating a kind of powerful and original dynamic interplay between form and content which is unparalleled.
But I don’t think his subject matter is true, good grief, what an idea. It is merely the subject matter he needs to create in order to develop the linguistic effects he is interested in. The white boxes which the narrative finds its protagonists stuck inside in the so-called ‘skullscapes’ or the people crawling through the mud in How It Is are objective correlatives or symbols or scenarios or setups which justify the extreme linguistic experimentation, the phenomenally strange and eerie way he handles the language.
The producers of the Beckett On Film project asked artist Damian Hirst to film it but even though part of an attempt to produce canonical versions, Hirst’s version simply omits the baby’s cry, the vagitus at beginning and end. It’s almost as if the text’s brevity and simplicity taunts producers to over-ride it.
The triumph of stage directions
And, quite obviously, this micro-drama also represents the triumph of stage directions over content. It’s easy to find critics and commentators lauding Beckett as among the greatest prose explorers of the 20th century, and I would whole-heartedly agree. But not so many people make the just-as-obvious point, that he was one of the greatest writers of stage directions.
All of the plays contain very, very detailed stage instructions specifying every aspect of the set, of props, what the characters are wearing, the kind of lighting, exactly how they move, how they speak or whisper or pause.
There’s the story of the hapless Americans who had the bright idea of staging Endgame but setting it in a disused New York subway station. Oops. It is comic and instructive to read the outraged response this prompted from Beckett himself, who tried to get the production stopped and, when that failed, got his lawyers to ensure that the following note was inserted into the programmes for the production:
Any production of Endgame which ignores my stage directions is completely unacceptable to me. My play requires an empty room and two small windows. The American Repertory Theater production which dismisses my directions is a complete parody of the play as conceived by me. Anybody who cares for the work couldn’t fail to be disgusted by this.
(quoted in the Wikipedia article)
What I’m driving at is that many of the later plays can be seen as the triumph of stage directions over prose content. Thus the short work Come And Go really consists of the tightly choreographed movements of the three women. The two Acts Without Words cease to have any dialogue at all, and are what they say on the tin, mimes. Similarly, Quad consists of the wordless movement of four humans dressed in shrouds through a complex series of positions on a stage set conceived as a mathematical quadrant, not really resembling anything we associate with the word ‘play’.
Even some of Beckett’s most famous works can be seen as the triumph of mise-en-scène over content. The only thing most people know or remember about Happy Days is that it’s about a woman trapped up to her waist in a mound of sand trying to look on the bright side of the situation.
Similarly, it’s not really necessary to understand any the text spoken in Not I to be dazzled by the beautiful simplicity of having the stage (or camera) focused entirely and only on a disconcerting close-up of the yammering mouth.
And Krapp’s Last Tape can be summed up as a knackered old man listening in anguish to tape recordings of his much younger, more confident self.
Prose there might have to be, language might be required, to make plays go, to allow a production to go ahead. I’m just suggesting that the stage setups and the fantastically detailed stage directions Beckett supplied to all his dramatic works is at least as, and sometimes maybe more, important than the supposed semantic content of the texts, their so-called ‘philosophy’ and so on. The setup and the actions are the play.
So, to repeat, a minute-long work in which we simply hear the cry of a newborn baby set against a rubbish dump, is brilliantly minimalistic, reduces Beckett’s so-called philosophy of life to one piercing image – but is also a kind of epitome of his theatrical practice.
The law of unintended adaptations
Last point. I suppose there is a cheeky connection between Beckett’s minimalism and the way so many of the interpreters on YouTube and elsewhere have felt free to embroider it. Maybe Beckett’s work survives and his reputation endures precisely because, contrary to his emphatic and repeated directions, the very minimalism, especially of the later plays, allows directors and producers a surprising amount of creative freedom.
More, as I hinted earlier, it’s almost as if the super-precise stage directions are tempting producers to ignore this or that aspect of them, and to improve on Beckett’s vision – to make it contemporary, make it diverse, bring it up to date, make it relevant to the age of social media, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and so on.
There’s some kind of perverse law of human nature at play, almost as if the more precise Beckett’s directions became, the more free later generations of producers have felt to bugger about with them,
An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.
Having written a series of prose and theatrical works in French in the early 1950s (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable and Waiting For Godot) All That Fall was the first work Samuel Beckett had written in English for ten years. It was written specifically for radio. It was commissioned by the BBC, written in English and completed in September 1956.
Maintaining his close relationship with French, the text was published in that language, in a translation by Robert Pinget revised by Beckett himself, as Tous ceux qui tombent. (Beckett was later to return the favour by translating Pinget’s 1960 radio play, La Manivelle as The Old Tune).
All That Fall was first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme, 13 January 1957 and featured Mary O’Farrell as Maddy Rooney with J. G. Devlin as her husband, Dan. Soon-to-be Beckett regulars, Patrick Magee and Jack MacGowran also had small parts. The producer was Donald McWhinnie. You can hear the entire production on YouTube.
Personally, I don’t like it. I think the sound affects sound amateurish. Above all the long …. pauses… make it seem slow to the point of halting, to me. They destroy any forward momentum. They give you plenty of time to stop and think and ponder the possibility that this is, well, a very boring play.
Only a few years earlier, in 1954, the BBC had broadcast another ‘play for voices’ on the radio, Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, with Richard Burton as the First Voice. Quite obviously Milkwood is an incomparably better experience, not just because it is so warm and soft and comforting, but because – it seems to me – it makes better use of the potential for dynamic interaction of voices on the radio. Whereas the original broadcast of All That Fall just seems shoddy and amateurish.
Take the passage where the men struggle to get fat old Maddy Rooney into Mr Slocum’s tax and then, a few minutes later, get her back out again. Presumably these are meant to be presented as realistic struggles and, once she’s out, the characters all heave a big and audible sigh of relief – suggesting that the whole palavah is meant to be funny. But for me none of these aspects come over very well in this radio production. It feels lame and amateurish and dated.
The interesting thing, in terms of Beckett’s career, is the way All That Fall represented a return to writing in English (after writing a run of masterpieces in French) and that you can see how doing this – writing in English – encouraged Beckett to revert to his Irish roots – to an Irish setting with realistic Irish names, with characteristic Irish country elements such as the rural taxi, the isolated railway station, references to the horse races and so on (the play was originally titled Lovely Day for the Races).
All this clutter, in my opinion, vitiates Project Beckett – takes us back into the far less interesting and pseudo-realistic world of his pre-war novel Murphy. It feels like a long step backwards from the extraordinary new imaginative and linguistic vistas which he had opened up in the extraordinary prose piece The Unnamable and repackaged in more easily accessible, dramatic format in Waiting For Godot.
To me, it’s no surprise that, after this experiment and the recidivism it prompted, Beckett reverted, immediately afterwards, to writing in French again, and produced the hugely more impressive, much more abstract and non-Irish masterpiece, Endgame.
Credit
All That Fall by Samuel Beckett was first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 13 January 1957 and published by Faber and Faber later the same year.
Related links
On YouTube you can find the original BBC recording with Mary O’Farrell as Maddy Rooney, J. G. Devlin as Dan Rooney and future Beckett regulars Patrick Magee as Mr Slocum and Jack MacGowran as Tommy.
An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.
Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.
(Molloy, page 27)
Molloy is the first of a trilogy of novels which continued with Malone Dies and The Unnamable, and quickly came to be referred to as The Beckett Trilogy. That’s how it’s titled in the old Picador paperback edition I bought in the late 1970s.
Beckett wrote Molloy in French and it was first published by Paris-based Les Éditions de Minuit in 1951. The English translation, published in 1955, is by Beckett and Patrick Bowles.
Molloy is in two parts of equal length. This review is of part one, the long, first-person narrative by Molloy himself.
Beckett’s prose mannerisms
Let’s look at the continuities of style and approach Molloy shares with More Pricks than Kicks, Murphy and The First Love tetralogy of short stories:
Wall of solid prose The book is divided into two halves. The first half of about eighty pages has no paragraph breaks at all. It is like a wall of prose, and sometimes feels like an avalanche of concrete. It is physically difficult to read. It is challenging to know where to stop for a break, and how to mark your place so you find exactly the same place to resume at.
It has a first-person narrator who is fantastically vague about every aspect of his life:
I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got here. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I’d never have got there alone. There’s this man who comes every week. Perhaps I got here thanks to him. He says not.
I don’t work for money. For what then? I don’t know. The truth is I don’t know much…
Forgotten To say the narrator is forgetful is an understatement. His main activity is not being able to remember anything.
Her name? I’ve forgotten it again
I’ve forgotten how to spell too, and half the words.
I’ve forgotten the half of it. Ah yes, I too needed her, it seemed. She needed me to help her get rid of her dog, and I needed her. I’ve forgotten for what.
I don’t know The phrase ‘I don’t know’ is a real mannerism or tic, cropping up numerous times on every page.
Yet I don’t work for money. For what then? I don’t know. The truth is I don’t know much. For example my mother’s death. Was she already dead when I came? Or did she only die later? I mean enough to bury. I don’t know.
She never called me son, fortunately, I couldn’t have borne it, but Dan, I don’t know why, my name is not Dan.
They let me keep my hat on, I don’t know why.
And the thing in ruins, I don’t know what it is, what it was, nor whether it is not less a question of ruins than the indestructible chaos of timeless things, if that is the right expression.
This is doubly true of the phrase I don’t know why. You just add it to the end of a common-or-garden sentence to make a Beckett phrase. ‘I’m in this room. I don’t know why.’
Dear bicycle, I shall not call you bike, you were green, like so many of your generation. I don’t know why
She never called me son, fortunately, I couldn’t have borne it, but Dan, I don’t know why
They let me keep my hat on, I don’t know why.
It was she dug the hole, under a tree. You always bury your dog under a tree, I don’t know why.
It is the poetics of Alzheimer’s Disease, of dementia, a permanent fog of unknowing. Possibly some readers find some of this funny, but it reminds me all too much of my Dad losing his mind, and that wasn’t funny at all.
And when the narrator describes visiting his gaga old mother and devising a method of communicating with her which amounts to giving her a number of taps on the skull, up to five taps, each number meaning a different thing, despite the fact she’d ceased to be able to count beyond two… I can see that it might be designed to have a certain dark humour, but it reminded me of my mother’s state at the end of her life.
She knew it was me, by my smell. Her shrunken, hairy old face lit up, she was happy to smell me. She jabbered away with a rattle of dentures and most of the time didn’t realize what she was saying.
Perhaps Nearly as much of a mannerism is the recurrent use of ‘perhaps’:
Perhaps they haven’t buried her yet.
All I need now is a son. Perhaps I have one somewhere.
I’ll manage this time, then perhaps once more, then perhaps a last time, then nothing more.
Perhaps I’m inventing a little, perhaps embellishing…
But perhaps I’m remembering things…
For the wagons and carts which a little before dawn went thundering by, on their way to market with fruit, eggs,
butter and perhaps cheese, in one of these perhaps he would have been found, overcome by fatigue or discouragement, perhaps even dead.
And she did not try and hold me back but she went and sat down on her dog’s grave, perhaps, which was mine too in a way…
Or The two tics above are accompanied by a less frequent but just as tell-tale mannerism, which is to make a declarative statement then tack ‘or’ and an alternative clause at the end – ‘or nearly x’, ‘or about y’. The narrator describes something, then immediately says ‘or’ it was something else. Much virtue on your ‘or’. It creates a permanent sense of uncertainty and indeterminacy.
All that left me cold, or nearly.
But deep down I didn’t give a fiddler’s curse about being without, when they were all gone they would be all gone, I wouldn’t be any the worse off, or hardly any.
It’s part of the way that more or less every declarative sentence i.e. one that appears to be conveying a piece of information, is immediately contradicted or queried or undermined by uncertainty.
A and C I never saw again. But perhaps I shall see them again. But shall I be able to recognise them? And am I sure I never saw them again? And what do I mean by seeing and seeing again?
The English language is continually crumbling away and collapsing in his hands.
They Some undefined group – ‘they’ – have done a lot of this to the narrator, like the ‘they’ that kicked the narrator out of his cosy home in the four short stories.
What I’d like now is to speak of the things that are left, say my good-byes, finish dying. They don’t want that. Yes,
there is more than one, apparently.
Highfalutin In fact, one big noticeable change from Beckett’s previous prose fictions is that he has now dropped the Joycean fascination with out-of-the-way vocabulary which clotted Pricks and Murphy and to some extent Watt. There are some arcane words, but only a handful, instead of the riot of incanabula you find in the earlier books.
that would have allowed me, before parading in public certain habits such as the finger in the nose, the scratching of the balls, digital emunction and the peripatetic piss, to refer them to the first rules of a reasoned theory.
But not knowing exactly what I was doing or avoiding, I did it and avoided it all unsuspecting that one day, much later, I would have to go back over all these acts and omissions, dimmed and mellowed by age, and drag them into the eudemonistic slop.
And when I see my hands, on the sheet, which they love to floccillate already, they are not mine, less than ever mine, I have no arms
Presumably this was one major result of Beckett’s decision to start writing his texts in French and then translating them back into English: a) French doesn’t have so many words as English b) and nothing like so many weird and functabulous words c) and therefore sentences which could have been conceived around an arcane English word, can’t be reconceived around one when he translates back from the simpler French, otherwise he’d have to have rewritten the book. Instead the vocabulary is much more limited and plain.
Crudity There is, however, just as much interest in bodily functions described in vulgar words as in all his previous works. He enjoys shocking the bourgeois reader with his potty language:
My mother’s death. Was she already dead when I came? Or did she only die later? I mean enough to bury. I don’t know. Perhaps they haven’t buried her yet. In any case I have her room. I sleep in her bed. I piss and shit in her pot.
For if they accused me of having made a balls of it…
What a story, God send I don’t make a balls of it.
I give you my word, I cannot piss, my word of honour, as a gentleman.
I shall have occasion to do so later perhaps. When I seek refuge there, beat to the world, all shame drunk, my prick in my rectum, who knows.
Unfortunately it is not of them I have to speak, but of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct. First taste of the shit.
How difficult it is to speak of the moon and not lose one’s head, the witless moon. It must be her arse she shows us always.
For as long as I had remained at the seaside my weak points, while admittedly increasing in weakness, as was
only to be expected, only increased imperceptibly, in weakness I mean. So that I would have hesitated to exclaim, with my finger up my arse-hole for example, Jesus-Christ, it’s much worse than yesterday, I can hardly believe it is the same hole.
Or this pretty dithyramb about farting. People talk about Beckett’s bravery in facing the nihilism of the universe or the emptiness of existence. They shouldn’t forget about the farting.
I wrapped myself in swathes of newspaper, and did not shed them until the earth awoke, for good, in April. The Times Literary Supplement was admirably adapted to this purpose, of a never failing toughness and impermeability. Even farts made no impression on it. I can’t help it, gas escapes from my fundament on the least pretext, it’s hard not to mention it now and then, however great my distaste. One day I counted them. Three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours, or an average of over sixteen farts an hour. After all it’s not excessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes. It’s nothing. Not even one fart every four minutes. It’s unbelievable. Damn it, I hardly fart at all, I should never have mentioned it.
Summary of Beckett’s prose mannerisms
So you could argue that, on one level, the text is assembled from these seven or eight mannerisms (plus others I’ve probably missed), and which are deployed over and over and over again.
About thirty pages in the narrator appears to say that he is dead, so maybe this is a literary vision of what death is like:
But it is only since I have ceased to live that I think of these things and the other things. It is in the tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life…
And again:
And I too am at an end, when I am there, my eyes close, my sufferings cease and I end, I wither as the living can not.
But later he appears to imply that neither of the terms living or dead are adequate to describe his situation. So, characteristically, maybe he is dead and maybe he isn’t. It hardly matters. The situation, the attitude and the prose mannerisms are so like the ones displayed in More Pricks and Murphy and First Love, The Expelled, The Calmative and The End (except for the omission of the highfalutin terms) that any ‘factual’ claims the text makes seem secondary to the consistency of the same old same old prose style.
It isn’t what the prose says that matters – it’s what it does and this is create a kind of quite novel and distinctive kind of poetry of decreptitude.
A flow of prose
It is not quite stream of consciousness but nearly – one apparent subject leads on to another, seamlessly, in a great mud flow of prose.
This is one of the things which makes it so hard to read – that it isn’t really ‘about’ anything, about particular events or objects or people in ‘the real world’ but flows on continuously, introducing new subjects, people and perspectives, few of them ever named or identified, just abstract de Chirico figures in a barren colourless environment, who bob up for a while – like the men he names A and C – and disappear just as inconsequentially.
Some passages have a real surrealist vibe and could be describing a Max Ernst landscape:
For what possible end to these wastes where true light never was, nor any upright thing, nor any true foundation, but only these leaning things, forever lapsing and crumbling away, beneath a sky without memory of morning or hope of night.
A short example of how the intensity of his worldview, his bleak landscape, can become visionary and beautiful.
Facts as colours
There is one effect I’d like to try and define. For in the endless river of ‘perhaps, or something else, what do you call it, I can’t remember, I don’t know, well that’s one way of putting it’-type prose, just occasionally things like actual ‘facts’ surface for a moment. Nuggets of what, in another text, would be ‘information’ about the narrator or some of the other ‘characters.
For example, the narrator, remembering watching two men set off for a walk into the country, casually mentions that he is on an ‘island’.
Or suddenly mentions that he was on his crutches, hobbling, because of his bad leg (p.14).
Or that he has no teeth.
All I could see was her taut yellow nape which every now and then I set my teeth in, forgetting I had none, such is the power of instinct.
In a normal narrative, these facts might have had ‘significance’ i.e. they would have gone towards building up a picture of the narrator and maybe developing a psychological profile. But there is no psychology in Beckett, or rather there is just the one big Alzheimer Psychology – the inside of a mind which can’t remember anything or make head or tail of anything and isn’t sure whether it’s alive or dead.
Thus these ‘facts’ are not ‘facts’ in the conventional sense. They are more like sudden streaks of paint, a daub of blue here, a splat of red there, which suddenly crystallise certain ‘areas’ of the text, but don’t ‘mean’ anything, certainly don’t carry the literal meaning they would bear in a traditional novel.
Maybe it’s a kind of prose abstract expressionism. Take Blue Poles painted by Jackson Pollock in 1952, the year after Molloy was published.
Blue Poles by Jackson Pollock (1952)
The right-angled splash of red at the top left, what does that ‘tell’ you? Nothing. It just kind of crystallises an area of the canvas, it brings that particular area into focus. The red splash need not have gone there, but it did, and once it did, it adds another layer to an already complex composition, and it feels like a kind of finishing touch, a cherry on the icing that brings that particular area into… focus.
I’m suggesting that the ‘facts’ in Beckett’s text do something similar. On one level – because language can never escape its primary purpose of conveying meaning – on one level we learn that the narrator has a gammy leg and uses crutches. Fine. But when you actually read these nuggets embedded in the vast flow of text, moments like this don’t come over as they would in a normal novel, it’s more as if they’re moments of clarity around which the huge fog of the rest of the text arranges itself, highlights like the tip of an iceberg appearing in an Atlantic of uncertainty – or sudden splashes of red which somehow bring that area of the canvas into focus. They’re part of a design rather than pieces of information.
Words convey meanings. You can take many of the hundreds of ‘facts’ contained in the text and spin these into a meta-narrative, a literary critical interpretation. Or take my view, that the words and even their ‘meanings’ are more like colours deployed on a canvas to create an overall design or effect.
Take the ‘fact’ that the narrator appears to attempt to commit suicide at one point.
I took the vegetable knife from my pocket and set about opening my wrist. But pain soon got the better of me. First I cried out, then I gave up, closed the knife and put it back in my pocket. I wasn’t particularly disappointed, in my heart of hearts I had not hoped for anything better. So much for that.
In a ‘normal’ narrative this would be a big deal. Maybe in Molloy it is, but it doesn’t feel like it and doesn’t shed any particular light on what preceded or what follows it. It’s the apparent inconsequentiality of ‘incidents’ like this which suggests to me that they are more part of an abstract pattern or design than a catalogue of important ‘facts’ which need to be analysed and assembled into a psychological profile.
Other mannerisms
Sex
I like Leslie Fiedler’s description of Beckett ‘twitting the bourgeoisie’ a) because it seems accurate b) because it conveys something of the spotty schoolboy element in Beckett. ‘Miss, Miss, Sam said a naughty word, Miss’. And indeed he enjoys writing arse, prick, piss, shit, and one four occasions, cunt. Ooh. I feel so twitted.
Now the obvious way to twit the bourgeoisie from the era of Madame Bovary or Les Fleurs du Mal (both French books which were banned for immorality in the 1850s) onwards, was to be explicit about sex. But here Sam double-twits the bourgeoisie by writing about sex but in an entirely banal, unglamorous, factual and rather sordid way.
Thus, half-way through the first half of the book, Molloy remembers an affair with a woman whose name, characteristically, he can’t remember (‘She went by the peaceful name of Ruth I think, but I can’t say for certain. Perhaps the name was Edith.’) They have sex, fine, but the point is the entirely blunt, factual, downbeat way the narrator describes it.
She had a hole between her legs, oh not the bunghole I had always imagined, but a slit, and in this I put, or rather she put, my so-called virile member, not without difficulty, and I toiled and moiled until I discharged or gave up trying or was begged by her to stop. A mug’s game in my opinion and tiring on top of that, in the long run. But I lent myself to it with a good enough grace, knowing it was love, for she had told me so. She bent over the couch, because of her rheumatism, and in I went from behind. It was the only position she could bear, because of her lumbago. It seemed all right to me, for I had seen dogs, and I was astonished when she confided that you could go about it differently. I wonder what she meant exactly. Perhaps after all she put me in her rectum. A matter of complete indifference to me, I needn’t tell you. But is it true love, in the rectum? That’s what bothers me sometimes. Have I never known true love, after all? She too was an eminently flat woman and she moved with short stiff steps, leaning on an ebony stick. Perhaps she was a man, yet another of them. But in that case surely our testicles would have collided, while we writhed.
So you there you have Beckettian sex. Frank and factual but treated with the same indifference and puzzlement as everything else in a Beckett narrator’s life. But, you are also aware of the deliberate crudity, designed to offend.
I would have preferred it seems to me an orifice less arid and roomy, that would have given me a higher opinion
of love it seems to me. However. Twixt finger and thumb ’tis heaven in comparison. But love is no doubt above such base contingencies. And not when you are comfortable, but when your frantic member casts about for a rubbing-place, and the unction of a little mucous membrane, and meeting with none does not beat in retreat, but retains its tumefaction, it is then no doubt that true love comes to pass, and wings away, high above the tight fit and the loose.
By the way, Molloy says he met Ruth or Edith or whoever in a rubbish dump, which literary critics might point out as an anticipation of the setting of the entire play Happy Days but which can equally be seen as an indication of the narrowness of Beckett’s range of settings.
Flexible style
As the text progresses it becomes more varied. Beckett deploys different registers of English. Not wildly so, this isn’t Joyce, but he creates a narrating voice which can slip easily into older locutions, invoking older English prose styles or syntax. For example in the sex passage, above, ‘Twixt finger and thumb ’tis heaven in comparison’ feels like a quotation or is certainly cast in the style of 18th century English to achieve that effect.
What I do know for certain is that I never sought to repeat the experience, having I suppose the intuition that it had
been unique and perfect, of its kind, achieved and inimitable, and that it behoved me to preserve its memory, pure of all pastiche, in my heart, even if it meant my resorting from time to time to the alleged joys of so-called self-abuse.
It’s easy to be distracted by the mention of self abuse in this sentence from its other elements, particularly ‘it behoved me’. My point is that his tone of voice is flexible enough to allow 18th century pastiche and more formal registers to weave in and out of the pricks and arses, or the more dully limited passages where he forgets this or that. In other words, when you really come to study it, Beckett achieves a surprisingly flexible and varied style.
So I was able to continue on my way, saying, I am going towards the sun, that is to say in theory towards the East, or perhaps the South-East, for I am no longer with Lousse, but out in the heart again of the pre-established harmony, which makes so sweet a music, which is so sweet a music, for one who has an ear for music.
Or:
But I preferred to abide by my simple feeling and its voice that said, Molloy, your region is vast, you have never left it and you never shall. And wheresoever you wander, within its distant limits, things will always be the same, precisely.
‘Wheresoever you wander’ sounds like Romantic poetry. ‘Saving your presence’ is a 17th century phrase:
But I am human, I fancy, and my progress suffered, from this state of affairs, and from the slow and painful progress it had always been, whatever may have been said to the contrary, was changed, saving your presence, to a veritable calvary, with no limit to its stations and no hope of crucifixion…
Or:
I apologise for having to revert to this lewd orifice, ’tis my muse will have it so.
By contrast, the first part of the following passage seems to be a parody of Communist Party rhetoric, which then, in its last clauses, carries out a characteristic Beckettian tactic of deflating into a common or garden image.
It is indeed a deplorable sight, a deplorable example, for the people, who so need to be encouraged, in their bitter toil, and to have before their eyes manifestations of strength only, of courage and of joy… without which they might collapse, at the end of the day, and roll on the ground.
Clichés
How would you describe those homely common-or-garden phrases which your old ladies or stupid people use, clichés, chatty rags and tatters of speech? Beckett likes including them, as if to undermine, throw away, banalise the endless meandering.
And though it is no part of my tottering intentions to treat here in full, as they deserve, these brief moments of the immemorial expiation, I shall nevertheless deal with them briefly, out of the goodness of my heart, so that my story, so clear till now, may not end in darkness,
And this is perhaps the moment to observe, better late than never, that when I speak of my progress being slowed down, consequent on the defection of my good leg, I express only an infinitesimal part of the truth
The idea of strangulation in particular, however tempting, I always overcame, after a short struggle. And between you and me there was never anything wrong with my respiratory tracts.
You can’t have everything, I’ve noticed…
Humour
Some of it clearly is intended to be funny, and is funny. Especially if you say it out loud in an Irish accent.
Oh well, I may as well confess it now, yes, I once rubbed up against [a woman]. I don’t mean my mother, I did more than rub up against her. And if you don’t mind we’ll leave my mother out of all this.
Maybe it’s an optical illusion created by growing familiarity with the text and its mannerisms, but as I became more familiar with the tone and voice, it seemed to me that, as it went on, there were more funny moments. Or turns of phrase which are humorous, especially if said aloud.
…for I knew I was bound to be stopped by the first policeman and asked what I was doing, a question to which I have never been able to find the correct reply.
Molloy contains a celebrated sequence where the narrator debates with himself how to keep the 16 ‘sucking stones’ he has found on the seashore distributed equally between his four pockets. (He sucks stones to keep off hunger and thirst.)
I’ve just come across this sequence being performed by Jack MacGowran on YouTube, and it seems to me the two important things about this are that a) Jack was Irish and so delivered the English text with a noticeable Irish certain lilt from which it hugely benefits, and b) MacGowran was a character actor i.e. used to playing parts which are a bit cartoony, almost caricatures of the humble and downtrodden, for example his performance as the everso ‘umble servant, Petya, in the movie version of Dr Zhivago. Beckett liked MacGowran’s performances of his works. He wrote the solo monologue Eh Joe specifically for MacGowran. Here he is bringing Molloy to life.
Maybe you just have to imagine Molloy as a derelict, half-senile, Irish tramp and then the highfalutin’ words and occasionally ornate phraseology become that of a gentleman beggar, down on his luck.
Maybe. It would be nice to think so. An easy solution to the problems of the text. But I don’t think it solves everything – meaning there are sentences and passages I don’t think fit even the most flexible notion of the erudite tramp, passages which speak with a different voice altogether:
There are things from time to time, in spite of everything, that impose themselves on the understanding with the force of axioms, for unknown reasons.
Kafka’s presence
Kafka’s very short story, A Messenger from the Emperor, is only 388 words long in Ian Johnston’s translation but it is a great example of the way Kafka takes a factual premise and turns it into a kind of surreal vision which piles up obstacles which make every effort to escape or progress more and more impossible in order to convey to readers a claustrophobic sense of the hysteria and panic Kafka felt, according to his letters and diaries, almost all the time.
Beckett does something similar, takes a common or garden object or incident and then quickly extrapolates it beyond all normal limits. Thus, upon escaping from Ruth’s house and hiding out down a dark alley, as day breaks, the narrator suddenly starts talking about the threat from ‘them’, and before we know it, has amplified this trope into a state of Kafkaesque paranoia.
They wake up, hale and hearty, their tongues hanging out for order, beauty and justice baying for their due. Yes, from eight or nine till noon is the dangerous time. But towards noon things quiet down, the most implacable are sated, they go home, it might have been better but they’ve done a good job, there have been a few survivors, but they’ll give no more trouble, each man counts his rats. It may begin again in the early afternoon, after the banquet, the celebrations, the congratulations, the orations, but it’s nothing compared to the morning, mere fun. Coming up to four or five of course there is the night-shift, the watchmen, beginning to bestir themselves. But already the day is over, the shadows lengthen, the walls multiply, you hug the walls, bowed down like a good boy, oozing with obsequiousness, having nothing to hide, hiding from mere terror, looking neither right nor left, hiding but not provocatively, ready to come out, to smile, to listen, to crawl, nauseating but not pestilent, less rat than toad. Then the true night, perilous too, but sweet to him who knows it, who can open to it like the flower to the sun, who himself is night, day and night. No there is not much to be said for the night either, but compared to the day there is much to be said for it, and notably compared to the morning there is everything to be said for it. For the night purge is in the hands of technicians, for the most part. They do nothing else, the bulk of the population have no part in it, preferring their warm beds, all things considered.
Does this scary vision of a city monitored by watchmen and technicians, whose work leaves only ‘a few survivors’ and frightens the narrator into ‘hiding from mere terror’, does this mean anything? Or is it colour? Or can the text be seen as a collage of snippets like this – the sex descriptions with Ruth, the hymn to his bicycle, the description of sucking stones or knocking on his mother’s skull – are they not intended in any way to be a continuous narrative (despite appearing on one seamless chunk of prose) but more like picture-scenes cut out and pasted onto a vast canvas, not following each other in sequence, but placed just so, to counterpoise each other. Perhaps.
At moments like this the text ceases to be a hymn to collapse and decay and becomes something more feverish and excitable:
Oh they weren’t notions like yours, they were notions like mine, all spasm, sweat and trembling, without an atom of common sense or lucidity.
Sequence of incidents
It can’t be called a plot but ‘notable incidents’ occur in this order:
the narrator is in his mother’s room and has scattered memories of her
he sees two men leave the town and walk into the country, who he names A and C, one walking an orange pomeranian dog (p.10)
he’s stopped by a policeman
he gets on his bicycle which he loves (p.17)
maybe his father’s name was Dan, he communicates with his mother by rapping on her skull (pp.18-19)
he’s stopped by a policeman who takes him to the station (p.20)
under questioning he remembers his name is Molloy (p.23)
the police release him and next thing he knows he’s walking along a canal (p.26)
he ponders how much he farts (p.29)
he’s back inside the town and obsessed with asking someone whether it is the town he was born in, he can’t tell (p.30)
he’s cycling along when he runs over and kills the pet dog, Teddy, of a lady referred to as Mrs Loy or Sophie or Lousse (p.31)
she owns a parrot who can only say ‘Fuck the son of a bitch’ (p.36)
he wakes to find himself imprisoned in a locked room, stripped and his beard shaved off (p.37)
a complex obsessively detailed description of the moon moving across the barred window (p.38)
the valet brings him new clothes and he pushes over all the furniture in the room with his crutches (p.41)
they return his clothes but without some of his belongings which he enumerates (p.43)
the door is open now so he goes downstairs and out into the garden where he sees Loose scattering seeds on the grave of her dead dog (p.44)
Lousse seduces him into staying with her, he can do anything he wants but she likes to watch him (p.46)
he remembers living with and having regular sex with Edith (p.53)
Edith dies while taking a bath in a warm tub which overflows, flooding the lodger below (p.54)
one warm airless night he walks out on Lousse, taking his crutches (p.55)
he stays in a shelter but is kicked out, then on the steps of a boarding house (p.56)
then in the filthy alcove of a back alley where he makes a very half-hearted attempt to slit his wrist with a blunt vegetable knife (p.57)
he describes in minute detail a silver toy he stole from Lousse (p.59)
he cycles clear of the town and gives the Kafkaesque description of the terror of ‘them’ (p.62)
he crawls into a hole and doesn’t know what happened to him for months or years afterwards (p.63)
suddenly he’s describing the period he spent by the seaside, living on a beach and a detailed account of his method of sucking stones and trying to keep track of 16 stones divided between four pockets; this goes on for a very long time (p.64)
sometimes women come to gawp at him, the strange old joxer on the beach
eventually he decides to return to his town, though it requires crossing a great marsh which is being drained in a major public work (p.70)
he tells us his stiff leg started growing shorter (p.71) an extended description of how difficult that makes walking, and his attempts to compensate
a review of his physical frailties including his big knees, weak legs, silly toes, asthma and arsehole (p.74)
he repeats several times that he’s reached an astonishing old age (p.76)
he is suddenly in a forest where he encounters a charcoal burner (p.77)
when the charcoal burner tries to keep him there by grabbing his sleeve, Molloy hits him over the head with a crutch then kicks him in the ribs (p.78)
wandering in the forest, with one of his typical nonsense discussions of how the best way to go in a straight line is plan to walk in a circle (cf the discussions about which direction the moon was heading relative to the window bars, and the very long discussion of how to keep his 16 sucking stones distributed equally between his four pockets) (p.79)
out of nowhere comes some kind of ‘solemn warning’ in Latin
a meditation what exactly he means when he says ‘I said’, he is obeying the convention of fiction whereas what really happens is more like a feeling bubbling up from inside his body (p.81)
he wonders how to get out of the forest and considers crawling, when he hears a gong (p.82)
it is deep mid-winter, perhaps, or maybe autumn, when he commences to crawl out of the forest, sometimes on his belly, sometimes on his back (p.83)
he reaches the edge of the forest and tumbles into a ditch from where he sees a huge plain extending into the distance and faraway the turrets of a town, is it the town of his birth, where his mother lives, who he still wants to visit – the main motor of the narrative? he doesn’t know, but at that moment hears a voice saying: ‘Don’t fret, Molloy, we’re coming.’
So there’s a variety of locations, namely the unnamed town of his birth, the house of Lousse where he is prisoner for some time, the seaside where he sucks stones and is gawped at by visiting women, and the forest where he kicks the old charcoal burner.
Above all, the text is drenched in negativity, phrases describing failing, collapsing, dying or decaying, the end, end of all etc.
And once again I am, I will not say alone, no, that’s not like me, but, how shall I say, I don’t know, restored to myself, no, I never left myself, free, yes, I don’t know what that means, but it’s the word I mean to use, free to do what, to do nothing, to know, but what, the laws of the mind perhaps, of my mind, that for example water rises in proportion as it drowns you and that you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.
Biographical snippets
Biographical or factual snippets about the narrator do occasionally surface amid the mud. His name is Molloy. He has a mother he called Mag. She called him Dan, though it’s not his name, maybe his father’s name was Dan. His legs are infirm so he needs crutches. Despite this he loves cycling. He’s cycling on his way to visit his ailing mother when he runs over the pet dog, Teddy, of a lady named Mrs Loy, or Sophie or Lousse, who takes him in. He has a beard.
Literary significance
I can see that it is a masterful experiment in prose content and prose style. Presumably it was radical for the time, just after the war. And yet, certainly in the visual arts, it was an era of year zero painting depicting devastated worlds, post-nuclear worlds. I’m not saying this is that, but Molloy’s extended minimalism falls in with that mood. There are no colours. Everything is grey, the grey of a brain-damaged Alzheimer’s patient unable to make any sense of the constantly shifting pattern of memories and half memories.
And many, many passages just seem like inconsequential gibberish.
The Aegean, ‘thirsting for heat and light, him I killed, he killed himself, early on, in me. The pale gloom of rainy days was better fitted to my taste, no, that’s not it, to my humour, no, that’s not it either, I had neither taste nor humour, I lost them early on. Perhaps what I mean is that the pale gloom, etc., hid me better, without its being on that account particularly pleasing to me. (p.29)
Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe up. Maybe down. Maybe nothing. More varied and strange mixing learned references and crudity and Alzheimer’s tramp with something larger than that, a strange voided narrative voice, perhaps without it maybe moving forward, forward, me, not me, speechless talking. It has a strange and brooding and puzzling and confusing magnificence.
Credit
Molloy by Samuel Beckett was published in French in 1950. The English translation by Patrick Bowles was published in 1955. Page references are to the Picador paperback edition of the Beckett Trilogy – Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable.
An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.
This is an absolutely brilliant, transformative piece of work, hugely staged and thrillingly experienced. It consists of a massive installation and three videos by contemporary artist Mark Leckey. Here’s the promotional video to gt a quick feel:
The big exhibition space on the east side of Tate’s central atrium has had all its partitions removed to create one enormous gallery space. In this space they have recreated a lift-size model of an enormous concrete motorway bridge. To be precise, a recreation of a section of the M53 flyover close to Leckey’s childhood home on the Wirral where he used to play with his boyhood friends.
The bridge goes over our heads at a diagonal, supported by enormous concrete piers. Off to the left is the concrete slope between the hard shoulder which ramps up to the underside of the bridge. It is an enormous brooding presence and absolutely brilliant, cavernous and terrifying.
The first motorway was opened in 1958 and these huge concrete monsters have been part of the British landscape for over 60 years. Why is so little written or painted or arted about them, and about the poisonous mega-roads and planet-strangling super-traffic they carry.
The room is almost pitch black. I nearly bumped into one of the enormous fake concrete motorway piers. But just about made them out because they – and the handful of concrete ‘benches’ scattered about are illuminated by the flashing, fleering images from two enormous video screens on the far wall, and from a suite of six or so smaller screens off to the right.
Onto these are projected three art videos or films:
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999)
Dream English Kid, 1964 – 1999 AD (2015)
Under Under In (2019)
I used to work in TV. In the late 1980s I produced and directed a dozen or so videos for commercial clients, before going on to produce live and prerecorded programmes for Channel 4, ITV and BBC1 So I’ve spent a lot of time in edit suites, with editors and directors, editing, discussing, cutting and mixing material. This means I have quite high standards and so find a lot of experimental art videos unwatchably amateurish.
To my own surprise, however, I ended up staying to watch all three videos in their entirety and being riveted, transfixed, transported. Yes yes yes, I wanted to shout, this is actual modern life in its shittyness, in its squalor, with working class lads making the most of the appalling built environments, the failing schools, the windswept concrete shopping centres and the high-rise slums designed for them by avant-garde architects and progressive town planners, by getting off their faces on booze and pills and dancing themselves stupid on the dance floors of thousands of provincial dance halls and clubs.
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore is a compilation of found footage from dance floors chronicling Britain’s underground club scene from the 1970s to the 1990s, from the era of mullets and Northern Soul through to the ecstasy-fuelled raves of the 1990s.
God it takes me back to having that kind of haircut in the 1970s and crappy church halls discos where lads in Doc Martens ended up fighting each other, through the pogoing and gobbing of the punk era, with the straights going to crappy mirror-ball discos, and then on into the suddenly hard core, techno, trance and rave scene of the late 80s which burst out of nowhere with its amazing sound systems, lasers and powerful psychotropic drugs.
So much for the social history, but what makes Leckey’s films a cut above others in the same style is the use of sound. He has a phenomenal grasp of the importance of sound, sound effects and sound editing. Having sat in those darkened edit suites for years and years and years I can vouch for the drastic affect sound editing and mixing has on the pictures in TV or film. Take a sequence of a beautiful girl smiling: then superimpose on it the sounds of – someone having an orgasm, a woman screaming, or a little girl saying a nursery rhyme. Identical image, radically different impacts.
The picture cutting is brilliant and worth commenting on in its own right; but what lifts Leckey’s films into brilliant is the extremely sophisticated and creative use of sound effects; mashups of music, deep ominous booms, clips of speech, electronic or industrial sounds.
So it’s the sound effects which, in my opinion, make these more than films, but into a fully immersive experience. The space under the mocked-up motorway is pitch black, cavernous and echoing. That’s why it’s worth traveling to Tate Britain to have the full huge, disorientating, slightly scary and sense-bombardment experience. Watching it on a computer or phone screen is too small and contained. You need to be overwhelmed by it. Possessed.
Dream English Kid, 1964 to 1999 AD
In 1979, Leckey went to Eric’s, the Liverpool nightclub, to see a gig by Joy Division. Recently, the artist located amateur footage of the event on YouTube. He realised that many, maybe most, of what we think of as treasured personal memories can now be found online, and that was the inspiration to assemble a film.
So Dream English Kid 1964 – 1999 AD uses archival material from television shows, advertisements and music, to recreate a record of all the significant events in his life from the 1970s until the 1990s.
God, it’s wonderful a) as straightforward nostalgia – I didn’t grow up in Liverpool or a slum, but I remember the look and feel of shitty England in the 1970s, and the sequence which shows all the horrible packed food – Nesquik, Marmite, Smash, Kelloggs Frosties – brought back the look and taste of all the crap our parents stuffed us with;
b) again because of the sophistication of the picture editing, but more than that, of the sound: it creates a really haunting beguiling, shocking, in your face soundscape, alternating soft silent moments, with raucous live gig sound, urchins in the street, lads, and other much more haunting, weird and unsettling sound effects. It is as if History itself is struggling to break through the bounds of petty human existence. As if some deeper force is struggling to break free from our everyday concerns about haircuts and boyfriends and pop songs, and tell us the big all-important thing, which we’re all too busy to listen to.
Under Under In (2019)
The last of the three film is Under Under In 2019 is noticeably different in feel. It’s because the other two are mostly made up of old film and video footage cannily edited together, while this one is all contemporary, shot on digital camera.
It is all shot under the actual motorway bridge whose model we are standing under and it features half a dozen or so young gang members, dressed in up-to-the-minute street fashion (I assume) – Adidas hoodies zipped up over their faces, trainers, rap hand gestures. For the first ten minutes or so they’re just hanging under the bridge, pushing each other, giggling, and what looks like getting high by car oil products (I think).
But as I’ve highlighted above, the real impact derives not from the visuals – but from the amazing soundscape Leckey has crafted, in which whatever conversation the lads are having is cut and fragmented and distorted and mangled into spare phonemes and loose grunts and blips and frags of speech, echoing, dismantled, lost under the roaring motorway bridge.
Apparently the film in some way addresses a supernatural encounter Leckey believes he had under the bridge as a child.
Many of my works have their wellspring in things and experiences from my childhood and youth that still haunt me.
What this means is that one of the larking-about kids seems to see something, a creature tucked in the angle of the bridge, hands reach out, small hands, large hand, white images, intercut sound track, it’s impossible to make out what’s happening but a little kid’s voice repeats, ‘Where you been?’ in a strong Scouse accent.
I’ve made it sound much more comprehensible than it is, the images are quickly intercut, treated, amplified distorted shown from above, the camera swoops down, the same gestures are repeated in juddering cuts or vanish.
It’s all shown on the six smaller screens I mentioned above. You have to stand throughout the entire screening but after a while I realised that behind us, up in the cramped space where the ramp meets the bridge of the model, was another screen onto which were projected images of the pumped-up lads crouching in a row, pushing each other joshing and interacting, which complemented the main action on the six screens. Which cut out at some moments, leaving us in puzzling darkness. Haunting & spooky.
Suddenly something more or less understandable emerges out of the blizzard of fragments and rave-era jump cuts. This is a completely computer-generated diagram of the flyover bridge, and then the point of view descends, under road level to reveal… another view o the same thing, an older type of wooden bridge… and keeps on going down to reveal an older structure yet over the same ravine… and down again and again until we come to a layer of standing stones, dolmen like Stonehenge is built from, and the camera stops descending but moves forward, between the stones, into some dark ominous mysterious chamber.
Leckey has written and spoken about his interest in older visions of Albion, in older imagery connected with faeries and magic inhabiting the countryside, and this sequence obviously comes out of that interest. But it’s one thing to say something, and quite another to come up with a visual and audio presentation of it which is so huge and overwhelming that it makes the viewers’ hair stand up on end.
The film below doesn’t feature in the installation, but it gives you a good sense of the mashup of ancient magic, incantation, a visionary way of reconceiving the shitty, concrete slabverse of our poisonous, toxic streets and motorways and flyover cities, choked with fumes, killing us all, and the aggressively visionary cutups of imagery from all available sources which Leckey uses. And the weird spellbinding obsession with the motorway flyover as a metaphor for our entire ruinous civilisation, which I found preposterous, ungainly, and yet weirdly compelling
The National Gallery uses room 1 to focus on particular works. (To get there go into the main Trafalgar Square entrance of the gallery, then turn immediate left up the steps, and left again at the landing). These exhibitions, small and thoughtful, are always free.
At the moment they’re displaying one of the world’s best-known animal paintings, Edwin Landseer’s The Monarch of the Glen, alongside fourteen other paintings and drawings, to set the picture in the context of Landseer’s own technical and psychological development, showing how he developed his distinctive approach to the representation of the stag as hero.
The double doors take up most on one wall so there are in effect three walls in the room:
the left-hand wall indicates some of the intellectual and artistic preparation
straight ahead is the monarch himself, magnificent, flanked by two other Landseer oil paintings of stags
the right-hand wall is devoted to the lion sculptures in Trafalgar Square
1. Preparation
Landseer (1802 to 1873) was one of the most famous and successful artists of his time. Immense painterly talent, charm and good looks helped Landseer achieve early success and he was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1850. I didn’t know that, even this young, he was struggling with alcoholism and mental illness.
Landseer had a deep knowledge of earlier painters, such as Rubens, and experimented with large scale complex compositions in the style of the Old Master.
The half dozen drawings and paintings here include a copy of the head of Christ on the Cross, taken from a painting by Rubens. In 1840 Landseer had had a breakdown, and, for his recovery, his doctors suggested a change of scene, so he went on the tour of Europe. He made this very evocative copy on a visit to Antwerp. We know that Rubens compositions lay behind some of Landseer’s earliest representations of horses and dogs, but the head of Christ powerfully introduces the idea of nobility and sacrifice. More, the Rubens Christ suggests a vision of a lone animal struggling against a hostile universe.
Unexpectedly, there’s a drawing by George Stubbs, with a story behind it. Stubbs (1724 to 1806) was of course the great painter of horses. In the 1750s he made hundreds of detailed anatomical drawings of horses for his revolutionary book, The Anatomy of Horses, published in 1766. Amazingly, Landseer acquired the entire collection in around 1817 (i.e. still a boy) and they provided crucial inspiration for the young Landseer’s own studies of animal anatomy.
Next to it is a detailed (and rather gruesome) study by Landseer of the flayed leg of a dog. This kind of detailed study of the weaving of muscle and tendon over bone was and is still referred to as an écorché. This is just one of countless écorchés which Landseer made the better to understand the anatomy of the animals he wanted to pain.
Nearby a pencil study of a dead stag combines some of these themes, Landseer’s staggering draughtmanship, based on detailed study of anatomy, underpinned by profound pathos at the fate of a noble animal cruelly, tragically struck down.
The Monarch of the Glen is hung on the wall facing the visitor, flanked by two other paintings featuring stags. It is by far Landseer’s most famous painting and one of the most famous paintings of an animal in the world.
It was undertaken for the Parliamentary Fine Arts Commission as one of three paintings showing ‘the chase’ i.e. hunting deer. It was originally commissioned to hang above panelling in the dining room of the House of Lords. What a grand location, a constant reminder to the Lords of their nobility and the striking scenery of one of the constituent parts of Great Britain! However, in a typically British fashion, when the time came to pay, the House of Commons refused to grant the £150 promised for the commission, and so the painting went on public sale in the National Gallery and was sold to a private owner. Since then it has passed through about ten sets of hands before the Scottish National Gallery successfully ran a public campaign to buy it for £4 million from the British multinational alcoholic beverages company, Diageo.
It was intended to be hung above head height. In other words we are looking up, while the stag is painted serenely looking over our heads into an imagined distance.
Knowing what we now do about Landseer’s mental problems and having Rubens’ Christ fresh in our minds we at least understand Landseer’s intention, if it is in practice difficult to put into words, of conveying the idea of nobility, the idea of a kind of superior spirituality which retains its dignity even in a hostile world.
The commentary points out how Landseer gives tints of light to the tips of the stag’s antlers. This subtly conveys the idea of a band of sunlight breaking through clouds to reflect on the antlers, which we cannot see but which the stag can. It sees the view our backs to. It sees – and knows something which we cannot.
There’s a lot more to be said, about the fantastic painting of the deer’s skin and pelt and fur, the way Landseer captures its variations and shimmer – and of course about the violet colouring of the distant crags, a bringing to perfection of the romantic vision of the Scottish Highlands which was to become iconic.
It comes, then, as an amusing surprise to discover that Landseer painted the entire picture in his studio in St John’s Wood where he kept an extensive menagerie, including deer. And he had, of course, been undertaking regular trips to Scotland, sketching and painting, since 1824,
3. Lions
In 1858 Landseer accepted a prestigious commission to create four sculptures of lions to flank Nelson’s column, directly outside the National Gallery, in Trafalgar Square, completing William Railton’s original design for the monument. Landseer’s appointment proved controversial because he was not a sculptor, however his widespread fame as a painter of animals outweighed reservations.
Landseer prepared by, among other things, spending several years doing detailed drawings of the lions at London Zoo. This all contains four drawings and oil sketches, plus a portrait of Landseer working on the actual sculptures in his studio. This is one of two large oil sketches that Landseer made at the London Zoological Gardens which wonderfully captures the menace and power of a pacing lion.
There are several more sketches and the painting of him working on one of the clay sculptures which were then cast in bronze, done by John Ballantyne.
it was not immediately obvious why four pictures of lions were in an exhibition devoted to the Monarch of the Glen, except that they are further proof of Landseer’s stunning skill at painting animals and the even simpler fact that the results are there for all visitors to go and visit, after they’ve exited the gallery into the square outside.
Curators talk
I really praise the National Gallery for not only hosting extended talks or lectures or discussions about their exhibitions, but for going to the trouble of filming them and posting them on YouTube.
If you have the time, this is a really good way to enter the world of the art or exhibition being discussed.
Here are Susan Foister, curator of Landseer’s The Monarch of the Glen, and Daniel F. Herrmann, National Gallery curator, discussing the Landseer display.
Haven’t been to the Design Museum since it moved from its old location at Shad Thames and opened in its fancy new building at Holland Park at the end of 2016.
The Design Museum is the world’s leading museum devoted to architecture and design. Its work encompasses all elements of design, including fashion, product and graphic design. Since it opened its doors in 1989 the museum has displayed everything from an AK-47 to high heels designed by Christian Louboutin. It has staged over 100 exhibitions, welcomed over five million visitors and showcased the work of some of the world’s most celebrated designers and architects.
On 24 November 2016, The Design Museum relocated to Kensington, West London. Leading architectural designer John Pawson has converted the interior of a 1960s modernist building to create a new home for the Design Museum giving it three times more space in which to show a wider range of exhibitions and significantly extend its learning programme.
Both the exterior and interior of the new building are spectacular.
The museum is currently hosting two exhibitions, one about sculptor-turned-couturier Azzedine Alaïa, and the one I came to see, Hope to Nope.
Hope to Nope
The rise of graphic design
The idea is that the ten years since the global financial crash of 2008 have been especially politically volatile. At the same time, the rise of social media has changed the way graphic political messages are made and disseminated. Traditional media have been joined by social media, with its hashtags and memes – all of which means that the influence and impact of graphic design have never been greater.
This exhibition explores the numerous ways graphic messages have challenged, altered and influenced key political moments.
Have they, though? ‘Challenged, altered and influenced key political moments’?
Or are they just creative images, slogans and memes – millions of them, easy to make for anyone with a smart phone and a bit of flair – which are as enjoyable as TV ads or pop songs, but change nothing? I went along to find out.
Big and varied
This big exhibition cherry picks from many of the political protest movements of the past ten years all sorts of ephemera – placards, banners, posters, t-shirts, installations and art works – alongside film footage of political rallies, and a section devoted to the rise of social media.
Politically neutral
The curators are careful to say that the exhibition takes no particular political line and doesn’t necessarily support any of these causes, but I didn’t really accept that. One of the two ‘media partners’ is the Guardian newspaper and the exhibition is really a sort of three-dimensional Guardian. Among many others issues and events, it features:
a display case about the anti-capitalist Occupy movement
a wall-sized photo of the women’s marches in Washington, London and elsewhere
a big quilt, a protest video and other artefacts from the Black Lives Matter movement
opposition to Vladimir Putin, especially to his anti-gay policies
opposition to Tory Austerity and Brexit in Britain
opposition to Jacob Zuma’s corrupt regime in South Africa
opposition to the North Korean dictatorship of Kim Jong-un
opposition to the authoritarian Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
You get the picture. Lots of opposition movements.
Oh, and Donald Trump. Did I mention Donald Trump? It very very powerfully comes across that a lot of American artists, feminists, academics, writers and activists don’t like Donald Trump one little bit.
Banner from International Women’s Day. Photo by Steve Rapport
In other words, no surprises – all the usual movements are here and all the usual hate figures from the front pages of the Guardian and other bien-pensant publications.
Structure of the show
The exhibition is rather loosely divided into three parts: Power, Protest and Personality.
1. Personality
This is the clearest (and smallest) section – highlighting the way politics around the world has come to be dominated by strong personalities who provoke strong and divisive reactions v Trump, Putin, Erdogan and so on.
In this section we find Theresa May being pilloried in a set of very funny cartoons by Chris Riddell (of the Guardian). Jeremy Corbyn has a section to himself, which features a suite of satirical front covers from Private Eye, the glossy cover shoot he did for GQ magazine, samples from the Corbyn comic books which (apparently) proliferated when he was elected leader, and a striking Corbyn t-shirt – plain white with the Nike swoosh on it and the word Corbyn where ‘Nike’ should be. (Apparently, the designer and manufacturer had an injunction taken out against them and had to scrap the design, making this a valuable rarity.)
Corbyn t-shirt with Nike swoosh. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
But the award for the Political Personality Who Dominates Our Age and Who You Love To Hate goes to… Go on, guess. Well, he owns a tower and is called Donald.
There’s a wall-sized display of more than 50 news magazines (including The Economist, TIME and Der Spiegel) chosen because they all feature cartoons, lampoons, caricatures, spoof and doctored portraits of The Donald, from the moment he was selected as the Republican candidate to when he became President.
What does this prove, exactly? Mainly that there has been no let-up in the scathing satire and criticism Trump has been subjected to by the left-liberal press since he first entered the presidential race. And with what result? Did satirical cartoons and scathing articles prevent him becoming Republican candidate, or prevent him being elected president? Have they gotten him impeached and kicked out?
Nope. Fail. As about a million other commentators have pointed out, all this ridicule by the East Coast – or foreign, intellectual – élite only confirms the belief of his grass-roots supporters that Donald is their man, an outsider, someone who will stand up for their values, values they see being ridiculed on a daily basis across almost all the mainstream media. ‘We’ may hate him but ‘they’ just carry on loving him to bits.
Wall of magazine covers lampooning Donald Trump. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
2. Protest
The section on Protest is dominated by a wall-sized screen onto which are projected a few minutes of news footage from each of five countries showing protesters in action – marching, chanting, fighting with the police.
Hope to Nope film installation by Paul Plowman. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
This turns out to be an installation by Paul Plowman. In front of the big screen is a set of smaller screens on stands showing alternative images of protests, interspersed with the hashtags which were used in each of the different protests featured. The countries and events being:
Catalonia – street protests for independence
South Africa – street protests, speeches etc against President Jacob Zuma
Grenfell Tower in London – an angry crowd shouting ‘justice justice’
Turkey – street protests against Erdogan
The Women’s March in Washington
Nearby are posters mocking Vladimir Putin, a suite of posters from North Korea exemplifying the state-sponsored poster art of that country, some photographs showing a protester in China, a panel about the ‘Umbrella protests’ in Hong Kong in 2014, some examples of wall art and graffiti made by Iranian artists to protest what they see as the corrupt nature of the Iranian government.
One of the most striking things in the show is a two-metre-high replica of the inflatable duck from the 2016 protests held against Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff.
And there’s material from the 2015 Je Suis Charlie movement and the ‘Peace for Paris’ marches.
But I kept being drawn back to the enormous Plowman video installation, not least because it is very loud, with sounds of people chanting and yelling, the roar of police sirens etc.
I also liked the way the hashtags zoomed past on the smaller screens of the installation, hundreds of them. Maybe their sheer number is meant to shock and awe the viewer into realising how Mighty the opposition is, how many of ‘us’ there are, how global ‘the movement’ is.
But to me it powerfully conveyed the opposite, the sheer ephemerality of many of these movements, each with their fleeting moments on TV, and a few days trending on twitter, before being forgotten.
And when you see a load of hashtags all together, following in quick succession, you can’t help noticing how facile they are.
And so on, round and round like a hamster in a wheel.
Anti-capitalism
Also in the Protest section we learn that capitalism is a bad thing. We know this because of all the people who’ve used their Macs and Ipads (designed in America, built in China, delivered to your door by Amazon) to design graphics, cartoons and memes slagging off evil international corporations.
And also because of all the anti-capitalist protesters who use multinational corporations like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube to protest, organise and lobby against the way the world is run by multinational corporations.
The most notable example was the 2011 Occupy movement, active here in London, in New York and elsewhere. Display cases show their numerous anti-capitalist leaflets, booklets, posters and slogans, t-shirts and badges. And did they overthrow capitalism? Even a teeny tiny bit?
Display case of Occupy items. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
We also learn that some of these massive corporations tell fibs v videlicet a vast poster reminding us of the way Volkswagen comprehensively lied about the diesel output of its cars.
It’s next to art work criticising BP, which will be forever associated – by the kind of protesters this exhibition celebrates – with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
the art work is a sort of neck frill, not unlike the ones Elizabethan courtiers used to wear, made of green crepe paper designed to look like the BP logo. From the accompanying photo the idea is that you paint your face BP green, slip on the crepe BP logo, and go join a crowd protesting against wicked oil companies. Maybe you drive there, or organise a coach…
Protest web statistics
I work in website analytics. Until recently I worked as a Digital Insights Manager for a British government agency. This experience has taught me that you really can prove anything with statistics. Another way of putting that is how remarkably easy it is to bamboozle people who don’t use figures very often or aren’t at home with figures.
As a result I don’t really believe any statistics about anything I hear from anyone, not just governments, anyone.
This is relevant because the exhibition features a timeline dating the advent and rise of various social media platforms over the past ten years (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, all the usual suspects). They are the big red, blue and green circles you can see in the photo below.
Beneath these – under each of the black, red and blue smart phone icons – is an array of Fascinating Facts and Stunning Stats designed – I think – to show you just how Important and Relevant and Urgent contemporary protest is. Certainly how social media helps spread its messages at lightning speed to huge numbers of people.
Timeline of social media and protest statistics. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
Thus we are told that:
in 2011 450,000 accounts sent 1.8 million tweets containing #OccupyWallStreet
in 2012, in the week before he quit, tweets calling for the resignation of Egyptian president rose from 2,300 a day to 230,000 a day
in 2013 #OccupyGezi relating to the Taksim Square protest in Turkey was mentioned 160,000 times on Twitter
in 2013 #BlackLivesMatter jumped from 10,000 to 93,000 tweets after the Ferguson verdict not to charge a white police officer who shot dead a black teenager in the U.S.
in 2016 1 billion tweets were sent relating to the U.S. presidential election
in 2017 11.5 million tweets were sent containing #WomensMarch during global reaction to President Trump’s inauguration
For a start none of these figures are put in any kind of context. Yes 11.5 million is a big number, but a basic fact of the internet and social media is that it is awash with big numbers. What other topics were trending that day or week or year, to help us put these numbers in context? How did it compare with that day’s stats about Ed Sheeran or Beyoncé?
Numbers alone don’t mean anything. Numbers only mean something in a context and it’s humans who create that context.
32.
Is that how old I am or the temperature outside, the number of teams that started the Word Cup in Russia or the number of refugees who drowned in a boat off Libya?
At work, I create the context which makes the figures I present about my web service look really impressive, even though I know that putting them in a different context, with a different narrative, would show them up to be very poor.
Not forgetting that there are quite a few ways to give my numbers a context which would just be confusing, or would make them disappear by making them look like lots of other numbers, and so make any pattern at all difficult or impossible to discern. I could make them do whatever my boss wanted them to do.
Statistics are always created, and for a purpose.
Same here, in this exhibition. The curators have selected a handful of statistics to show how quick and massive social media responses were to key moments of ‘protest’. No doubt they were.
But what that means v how you should interpret the numbers, how they stack up next to other events on the same day, or to similar events happening at the same period or to the tweets and Facebook likes from the opposing point of view…. that context, those other points of view, a fuller picture… are not here.
The Hope icon for Barack Obama’s election campaign. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
Results
Oh and as one of my bosses said when I showed him a particularly dramatic graph I had concocted v ‘Fancy figures don’t pay our wages. What about results?’ Practical results which people outside your social media bubble might notice.
Did those 1.8 million tweets bring about the downfall of capitalism? Did #OccupyGezi topple Erdogan? Did those 1 billion tweets sent during the U.S. presidential election stop Trump becoming President?
10 out of 10 for impressive stats. 0 out of 10 for impact.
Global interconnectedness gives a misleading impression of the scale of political protest
I’m dwelling on the issue of numbers because democracy is a numbers game. To win power you have to build coalitions, often with people you don’t really like or share values with.
My view on the current situation is that the internet and social media have certainly made everything more global (and this exhibition is a good example), but that this is not necessarily the blessing it appears.
It now means that women protesting against rape in India can hook up with Reclaim the Night campaigners in America, or that anti-capitalist protesters all across Europe and the States can link up and co-ordinate their protests and publications. Fine.
All this activity (not to mention the relentless support of papers like the Guardian and the New York Times and their liberal avatars around the world, and artworks and installations and exhibitions like this one) gives the impression that it’s all coming together, that we have the numbers, that truth and justice are on our side so we must win, that we’re soooooo close to the tipping point, one more march, one more protest, and we will get our way and…
Capitalism will be toppled. The patriarchy will be overthrown. Trump will be impeached. Catalonia will win its independence. Turkey will become a liberal democracy. Putin will resign and name a gay video artist as his successor.
But I wonder whether it’s the very internationalism of the movement which condemns it to failure v because, although sizeable communities of protesters, objectors and activists can now hook up across regions, countries and continents, reassuring and encouraging each other – within their own individual countries they remain definitely in the minority. Within their own individual countries there simply aren’t enough of them to make the changes they want to see.
After all, despite the deluge of opposition across social media, mainstream media, despite all the street protests, t-shirts and badges, and all the TV comedians relentlessly mocking the other side v Trump won the US election, Brexit won the referendum, Putin was re-elected, Erdogan has just won re-election, Viktor Orbán has just won re-election, The Five Star Movement are in power in Italy, and so on…
Fancy t-shirts, stylish badges, clever hashtags aren’t enough, nowhere nearly enough, to begin to effect real social and political change.
Forlorn poster, t-shirt and other items promoting the Remain campaign. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
I had thought this was the message of the so-called Arab Spring. Bien-pensant liberals in the West thought ‘Hooray, Libya is going to turn into Switzerland, Syria is going to turn into Sweden, the whole Middle East is going to be transformed into socially progressive democracies’.
All the revolutionaries in Egypt, Syria, Libya and so on were excited by the online networks they were able to create among themselves, and the support they could give via the internet to fellow revolutionaries in the other countries, and the support they got from all well-meaning folk in the West.
All of which DELUDED them into thinking they were in a majority in their own country. But it was social media smoke and mirrors. The majority of the populations of Syria, Egypt, Libya and so on are NOT video artists and LGBTQ+ activists; they are illiterate peasants and vast numbers of under-employed urban youths who don’t have Facebook accounts, don’t particularly want political change or, if there is change, want to see strong nationalist leaders emerge who will give them jobs, keep their country together, and defend their cultural values.
It’s odd that the one of the biggest artefacts here more or less acknowledges this obvious fact. It reads:
SLOGANS IN NICE TYPEFACES WON’T SAVE THE HUMAN RACES
Slogans in nice typefaces won’t save the human races. Photo by Benjamin Westoby
To paraphrase: no amount of fancy design, diligent video journalism, snappy hashtags, witty placards and spirited street fighting will overthrow a regime. Only securing the support of (admittedly not necessarily the majority) but still a sizeable minority of the population, will lead to real and cultural political change.
Riots which escalate into the seizure of the presidential palace and the TV stations are often little more than coup d’etats which, as we have seen hundreds of times in the developing world over the past fifty years, generally end up with military dictatorships worse than the one you were trying to overthrow (as in Egypt), or with anarchy (as in Libya) or with prolonged civil war (as in Syria).
The net result of all these attempts to overthrow the wicked dictator is not a wonderful rainbow nation where everyone respects each other’s gender choices, but hundreds of thousands of people fleeing for their lives and drowning in the Mediterranean.
The role of graphics in political protest
Which brings us to the role of graphics in all this political protest. The curators assert at various points that the political activism of the past ten years has seen a particular upsurge in the use of graphics in political protest.
The exhibition aims to capture, depict, examine and display the political graphic design of a turbulent decade.
Alongside traditional posters and banners, the exhibition charts the rise of digital media and social networking, which have given graphic iconography an extraordinary new reach.
Graphic design in the form of internet memes, posters and protest placards is being used by the marginalised and powerful alike to shape political messages like never before.
This is a fascinating, entertaining and often unintentionally funny exhibition but I couldn’t decide whether its central claim was true or not.
On the anti side, the huge photos of the various Women’s Marches and the footage of protest rallies in Barcelona, South Africa, Turkey and so on seemed to feature people holding exactly the kind of home-made banners and placards which I can remember protesters holding from any time in the last 40 years.
I couldn’t see any evidence of a ‘graphics revolution’ in a hand-made placard reading ‘This Pussy Grabs Back’.
Wall-sized installation celebrating the Women’s March in Washington DC
On the other hand, it stands to reason that hundreds of millions of people (generally, we can guess, university-educated, middle-class people) now have access to personal computers which contain an unprecedented array of programs for writing, designing, colouring, typefacing, laying out, and printing all sorts of images, placards, posters, magazines, handouts and so on.
So without a doubt there is more protest material being created, and without a doubt more of it can be distributed over social media than ever before for the self-evident reason that social media didn’t really exist ten years ago. So I suppose it must be true that the internet/social media have given ‘graphic iconography an extraordinary new reach’.
But has it changed the look and impact of graphic elements in political protest?
This might be an impossible question to really answer. The world is a big place, so much is going on, and so many people are creating, publishing, printing and manufacturing so much stuff all the time that it would be pretty challenging to decide if much of it is new.
We made t-shirts and fanzines in the punk era of my youth, back in the 1970s. The Greenham Common women and any number of protesters against Ronald Reagan and Mrs Thatcher managed to make badges, t-shirts, posters and placards and banners and to print off magazines and broadsheets back in the 1980s, without any help from computers or the internet.
Occupy Wall Street t-shirt. Photo by Jason Lester
The speed and spread of visual content online is new, because the whole online infrastructure is relatively new and has expanded at a phenomenal rate. But the nature of that content, and in particular its graphic elements – snappy slogans, faces of hate figures humorously defaced, stirring images of suffering women or children, badges with a little slogan on them — is the graphic content of much of this protest material really new?
A morality tale
Two relatively small display cases placed at opposite ends of the exhibition were, I think, intimately linked and also, I think, tell a neat morality tale.
On the first wall by the entrance door there’s an interesting little display telling us that Hillary Clinton’s team brought in design consultant Michael Bierut from design agency Pentagram to develop a core campaign logo. His proposal was for a logo based round the first letter of her name – H – which would be infinitely ‘refreshable’, and easy for campaign team designers and supporters alike to reversion and use.
Fascinatingly, we get to see the notebook in which he jotted down his early ideas. You can’t help wondering how much he was paid for this great stroke of ‘genius’.
Notebook of Michael Bierut showing his notes on the idea of ‘H’. Photo by the author
Fittingly enough, right at the other end of the exhibition space we come across another display case showing this work of art.
Donald Trump campaign Make America Great Again baseball cap. Photo by the author
Recognise it? Yes, because it is very recognisable. It is in fact, possibly, of all the 300 or so objects on display here, the most successful and recognisable design icon in the exhibition – the red workers’ baseball cap which Donald Trump wore throughout most of his campaign.
And you know the most interesting thing about it? The curators don’t know who designed it. Almost all the other 300 objects, artefacts, t-shirts, badges, cartoons, pamphlets, videos, infographics and so on are carefully attributed to named designers or organisations.
Not the Trump cap. Nobody knows who came up with it. It’s a standard factory-produced cap, and (as the curators point out) even the Times Roman font used for the slogan text is as bog-standard, traditional and reassuring as it gets.
The everyday look of the cap struck a chord with Trump supporters from early in his campaign, helping to position him as an everyday guy, an ordinary Joe, a working class guy made good.
Unlike the social media stats which I read and forgot straightaway, possibly the most fascinating fact in the whole exhibition is that between June 2015 and October 2016 the Trump campaign spent more on producing and distributing these caps than on polling.
The moral of this little story would appear to be that expensive, fancy, East Coast design fails, whereas anonymous, everyday, easy-to-make, easy-to-recognise, easy-to-understand artefact and logo, succeeds.
Underlining my belief that, to win power in a democracy, you have to reach out to the greatest number of the electorate, with the widest possible appeal – not just to people who went to college like you, think like you, and have a refined taste in sophisticated graphics like you.
Curators
Hope to Nope is co-curated by the Design Museum and GraphicDesign&’s Lucienne Roberts and David Shaw, with Rebecca Wright. It is really imaginatively laid out, very interesting throughout, with very informative wall labels, some genuinely hilarious pictures, objects and installations, as well as some fascinating new infographics commissioned specially for the show.
It is an excellent, informative and thought-provoking exhibition. But it won’t change anything.
A video
Watch co-curator Lucienne Roberts being interviewed about the exhibition.
To my embarrassment I’ve never been to the Photographer’s Gallery before. It turns out to be a tall, narrow building on a corner of Ramillies Street (number 16 to 18, to be precise) just behind Oxford Street East. It’s a bit of an Aladdin’s Cave, with exhibition spaces on the 5th, 4th and 3rd floors, as well as downstairs in the basement, next to the excellent shop full of photography books and equipment.
Since all the exhibitions are FREE, if you arrive before noon, and the ground floor has a comfy café with wifi and cakes, this is quite a cool place to meet up with friends or just take some time out.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize exhibition 2018
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation is a Frankfurt-based non-profit organisation which focuses on collecting, exhibiting and promoting contemporary photography. Deutsche Börse began to build up its collection of contemporary photography in 1999 and it now holds more than 1,700 works by over 120 international artists.
Together with The Photographers’ Gallery in London, the foundation awards the renowned Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize each year, when a long list of entrants is boiled down to a short list of four. This year they were:
Mathieu Asselin
Rafal Milach
Batia Suter
Luke Willis Thompson
The work which got them onto the short list has been on display at the Photographers’ Gallery since 23 February. On 17 May the winner was announced and it was Luke Willis Thompson, who picked up the first prize of £30,000.
So what is his work and the work of the other three photographers like? I’m glad you asked.
First the competition criteria. The prize ‘rewards a living photographer, of any nationality, for a specific body of work in an exhibition or publication format in Europe felt to have significantly contributed to the medium of photography.’ The press release states that ‘All of the projects share a deep concern with the representation of knowledge through images, where facts can be manipulated and meanings can shift.’
I was to be surprised at just how knowledge- and information-based the work of all the finalists was.
Mathieu Asselin
The room devoted to Mathieu Asselin is a ‘photographic interrogation of global biotech giant, Monsanto’. It was originally conceived and published not as a display but as a photobook, and the exhibition contains a number of documents, legal forms, invoices and testimonies, among much else that Asselin has assembled to document what he sees as the nefarious activities of this huge biotech corporation.
The book and display have the overarching title Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation and have been five years in the making. The book – and the excerpt of works here – are the result of a meticulous investigation supported by archival documentation, court files, personal letters, company memorabilia and photographs.
This photo shows David Baker whose brother Terry died at the age of 16 from a brain tumour and lung cancer, caused by exposure to PCB, a chemical manufactured at the nearby Monsanto Chemical works. A variety of toxic chemicals are present in the soil and water of Anniston at far higher than legal levels. In Asselin’s account Terry is just one of Monsanto’s victims.
Monsanto is known as a leading manufacturer of insecticides DDT, PCBs, Agent Orange and of genetically engineered seeds. Another photo shows one of the many farmers who Monsanto have pursued through the courts, accusing them of abusing the company’s property rights by harvesting crops contaminated by, or originally sown from, seed genetically engineered by Monsanto.
Twenty years ago I did the research for a television documentary which tried to bring out the grotesqueness of a possible future in which Monsanto and a handful of other biochem companies could develop genetically engineered food crops:
which only respond to Monsanto-produced fertilisers, insecticides and so on – so that if you buy the seed they have a monopoly of all the other products you need to buy to grow them
and in which these companies own the intellectual copyright of the resulting grain crop, which you are not allowed to resow without paying them a licensing fee. Environmental activists were trying to get this practice banned before it could take off in the EU and the documentary followed their efforts.
So I’m familiar with the issues; none of this was really new to me.
The ‘Asselin room’ includes a variety of photographs, but also just as many legal, environmental and similar types of documents, blow-ups of newspaper articles and of Monsanto promotional images, as well as examples of the company’s attempts to change their negative public image through children’s TV shows and marketing campaigns.
Installation view of the Mathieu Asselin room at the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018 exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery
I came, I saw, I read, I took it all in and it seemed a lot more like photo-journalism than a photography display, as such.
Rafal Milach – Refusal
Milach is Polish and his work explores issues and ideas around abandoned aspects of the former communist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics. He is particularly interested in the way governments and states distort and control information. To quote:
Rafal Milach’s project focuses on the applied sociotechnical systems of governmental control and the ideological manipulations of belief and consciousness. Focusing on post-Soviet countries such as Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Poland, Milach traces the mechanisms of propaganda and their visual representation in architecture, urban projects and objects.
I found the most arresting items in his room to be:
1. A brilliantly stark photo of a viewing tower in Georgia. This was commissioned for the Black Sea village of Anaklia by the then-President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, in 2012, as an ostentatious way of showing the world how new and modern Georgia would become under his pioneering administration. It was a form of architectural propaganda.
Then, when Saakashvili fled the country after a coup in 2013, the tower was abandoned half-built, leaving it unused and useless, standing in an eerie, unpeopled wasteland.
2. A nearby monitor is showing a ‘rap’ video in which a Belarussian woman, Xenia Degelko, is singing to an enraptured crowd. The point is that this is a government-sponsored video created by the Belarus authorities and using ‘youth culture’ tropes to promote a patriotic, pro-government message. It is, thus, an example of Milach’s overarching theme of government manipulation, and what he sees as the need for refusal of this manipulation.
Not a photograph, though, is it?
3. Another wall displays a line of print-sized images. These are photos of hand-made objects used in the chess schools based in government buildings across Azerbaijan. Each one is an optical illusion designed to help young Azerbaijanis’ spatial imagination and abstract thinking skills. Seen through the slightly paranoid lens of Milach’s project, they are included here as yet more examples of way that governments can manipulate young minds.
Installation view of the Rafal Milach room at the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018 exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery
Batia Suter – Parallel Encyclopedia #2
My teenage daughter’s bedroom wall is covered with photos of herself and her mates, posters of their favourite bands and tickets to gigs, images torn out of magazines and so on – images which speak to her, which say something, which click.
Batia Suter does the same thing. She collects books, often second-hand ones, full of images, and selects the ones which light her candle. Then she blows them up into large (two or three feet across) prints and then – this is the best bit – hangs them on the walls of galleries, thus creating, in the words of the commentary:
an encyclopaedic collection of visual taxonomies that expose the shifting and relative meanings of printed images depending on their context
Unlike the rather minimalist hangings of the previous two rooms, Suter’s work is definitely ‘immersive’ covering all four walls from floor to ceiling.
Installation view of the Batia Suter room at the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018 exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery
The way the images are unframed helps them to meld together. And neighbouring images bring out new aspects and details you hadn’t noticed in the individual works on their own. For example, it all looks very organic until you see the big pic of a vacuum cleaner and the even more incongruous close up of a printed circuit!
Her work is an exploration of how visual formats affect and manipulate meaning, depending on where and how they are placed. Apparently she has amassed a collection of over 1,000 publications to use as source material. What a simple, elegant and beautiful idea!
Luke Willis Thompson – autoportrait
As you enter the 5th floor room there’s a very loud noise of machinery which I thought must be some kind of building works going on next door. But on crossing the gallery and walking into the pitch black alcove behind it you find a really old-fashioned 35mm film projector at work. It’s this that’s making all the racket.
Film projector for Luke Willis Thompson’s work, autoportrait
And what is it projecting?
A silent black and white film showing a bust or portrait framing of a young black American woman, Diamond Reynolds.
In July 2016, Reynolds broadcast, via Facebook Live, the moments immediately after the fatal shooting of her partner Philando Castile, by a police officer during a traffic-stop in Minnesota. Reynolds’ video circulated widely online and clocked up over six million views.
In November 2016, Thompson established a conversation with Reynolds and her lawyer, and invited Reynolds to work with him on an aesthetic response to her video broadcast. Acting as a ‘sister-image’ the artwork would break with the well-known image of Reynolds, until then only known as a distraught woman caught in a moment of violence, and then distributed far and wide as a shocking news story. As the gallery guide puts it:
Shot on 35mm, black and white film and presented in the gallery as a single screen work, autoportait continues to reopen questions of the agency of Reynolds’ recording within, outside of, and beyond the conditions of predetermined racial power structures.
In other words it makes you compare and contrast her image in the self-filmed distraught moments after the shooting v and how that image was swept up in social media and then into a firestorm of angry comment about police racism in America – with this silent, calm and meditative image? Which is the real Diamond? Who owns her image, and her behaviour? How is anyone’s ‘personality’ caught and distorted by film?
I’d like to link off to the video on YouTube but it doesn’t seem to be on there. Here’s a promotional still. Diamond is recorded, successively wearing a couple of different outfits, in all of them looking screen left, downwards, silent and expressionless. Quite obviously portrayed in a soulful, introspective mode. Which is the real Diamond? Can we ever know? Are we, the viewers, participants in yet another distortion or only partial presentation of her personality? Discuss.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018
To my surprise, this is the work which won the £30,000 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018.
There’s no doubt that it’s a sensitive and moving work in itself; that it’s a thoughtful response to the way the young woman’s image was ‘kidnapped’ by the circulation of the tragic video footage on Facebook, and that this is a careful effort by her, and Thompson as intermediary, to reclaim her image in a way controlled by her, to portray herself as more than the weeping victim of a moment of police violence.
But it’s not at all a photograph, is it, and certainly not a ‘body of photographic work’.
I wonder what established photographers make of the fact that one of the most prestigious prizes in photography was won by a film, that two of the other entries (Monsanto and Refusal) were essentially book projects which contained a lot of video, TV and text-based content as well as photos – and that the fourth entry (Batia Suter’s) didn’t include a single original photograph but was instead a collage of previously-existing images.
Also, the imperial dominance of American culture and values is a bugbear and bête noire of mine, so I was disappointed that, although the competition specifically mentions ‘Europe’ among the entrance criteria, two of the entries (Monsanto, autoportrait) are about entirely American subject matter.
The videos
Three of the entrants have a video about them on YouTube. They play consecutively, one after the other.
Books & Boots 