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Labyrinths V: Farewell via Broks, Paul (2018) The Darker the Night, the Brighter the stars: A Neuropsychologist’s Odyssey. London, Allen Lane (Penguin)

Let’s start near the end of this rewarding book:

Broks seems to me a fine writer operating sequentially, but sometimes simultaneously in near lyric prose, in different domains of writing:

At its heart though is the ‘labyrinth’ holding in its core a mythical animal, who later transfigures into a ‘fat drunk’ who rhythmically intersperses the narrative with urgent, even sentient, questions of life, death, determination and choice. This is not a book for anyone with their mind made up, even though it is as atheist in its presumptions as Dawkins. Its grasp of uncertainty aligns not with the spiritual but scientific ones as propounded by Einstein attempting to summarise ’quantum theory’, which his thinking had made possible, reminding him:

What Einstein call paranoia, we should call psychosis: but only with the proviso that psychosis itself is understood as on a continuum of internal processes of cognition. This is how Broks blends day-dreams, fantasising, night-dreams and speculative thought and feeling with the everyday. Labyrinths challenge our assurance and comfort with a patterned world because they themselves are patterned but patterned in order to be unknowable – and sometimes, should we encounter a very rough Minotaur (as Picasso’s models nearly always did, for instance) potentially destructive or disabling (225).

When Broks looks at his own intellectual contribution it is to mourn the demise of a world for whose murder he fells at least, in part, responsible (185). One of the finest sections for me is his blending of narratives, including modern as well as older myths about the ‘rape of the moon’. There was new information here for me from the story of Armstrong, Aldrin and Mitchell, as well as fascinating transposition of these with ancient Persian views of the moon as mirror (195) and Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers (198). But for the sake of this blog series, I think you could do worse to get a flavour of this wonderful book than read the full-telling of the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, from genetic prequels to endless and multiple sequels, one of which is the foundation of Athenian thought on the basis of such labyrinthine temporal and spatial narrative meandering. At the end of which stands Butler’s question of questions in the genesis of a psychology and philosophy of identity, sameness, difference and uncertainty, the Paradox of the Ship of Theseus (221-229). It goes to show that all stories of multiple potential to meaning may come at least one which queries where the3 story has any coherence at all. After all, Theseus, Minos, Arachne and all may belong to stories in which that which variously transports as no identity with itself, having changed in the process – even if by the replacement of only one plank (or even one nail holding a plank to the mainframe).

Of course, for some there must be nothing new here and some tricks, such as the use of Shepard’s ‘Table-top Illusion’ to introduce gently the theme of discrepancy between a simple reality that we wish for and the illusions/psychosis on which normative perceptions depend (59). However, the discussion of Freud, for instance, is so incredibly fair, and places him and others in a continuum in which histories change the subjects of which they speak as they speak of them. If Freud was nonsense to a history told from the vantage-point of the cognitive revolution, it is far from that following the revaluation of the role of body and affect in later psychology. A beginning psychologist could learn a lot here about the caveats needed in reading the ‘history of psychology’ – the main one being that there can only be ‘histories’ of psychology, who speak  the police in different voices.

As for art, there are the wonderful (and labyrinthine) illustrations here of Garry Kennard. But, at the bottom, this book suggests, if it does not say, that imagining that we can study an art (say visual art) in isolation for other arts, and science, but not least neuro-science, is a fantasy we and the most conservative education system in the world (that in the UK) need to break. I loved this book and want to read it again – and perhaps again.

Linked to this review are:

1.       The exhibition The Green Man in and of the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh University collated and curated by Lucy Skaer and others.

2.       An art installation on Maritime Lane, Leith Adam Linklater: Mythopoeia by Andy Cummings .

3.       An introduction through Charlotte Higgins’s new book.

4.       An addendum: the way in to Anselm Kiefer - a labyrinth with no end has, of course, no way out.

5.       A second addendum - Paul Broks: the labyrinth in the Neuropsycholgist's Odyssey (this one).

Steve

Pat Barker (2018) The Silence of the Girls London, Hamish Hamilton.

I saw Pat Barker at the Edinburgh Literary Festival on the 26 August where she launched this remarkable book. To tell truth, I had become a rather tired fan of Barker’s work – loving her early novels which showed slices of marginalised lives in the North, and, to my particular delight, focusing on people across a range of age, gender and sexual preference. The Century’s Daughter (now re-named but not for me) remains a personal favourite and, of course, this favoured novelist could only be more loved when she turned to the same range of characters but especially to the discovery of male sexualities: contrasting the refined agonies of Owen and Sassoon with the harder journey of Billy Prior. After the Regeneration Trilogy, I read each novel as they came out but found myself finding those more worthy than exploratory or exciting – perhaps raising my interests in art-history more than in themselves. So I went to this event, the novel unread because still embargoed by the publisher with mixed feeling.

But here was Pat Barker returned to form. She seemed more assured than when I’d seen her before and able to put a blow or two towards some of her less observant reviewers: ‘Some of them say the novel is full of anachronisms – as if I didn’t know or had not intended this’. How did these reviewers read such episodes as this if they thought it to be (in their sniffy classical manner) merely an unintended anachronism – not what either Homer says or ’as it was’ in the ‘real’ Trojan Wars:

Asked also if her novel reflected the ‘Me Too’ movement, she said, ‘I hate the thought of going back to representing women as victims.’ In a novel as full of awareness of the need to recognise and enable female voices and with lots of women falling into victim-status, this was a rich comment.

Now having read the novel I have to applaud the treatment of female voices, from individuals and groups as truly fine. Her female groups use their choric knowledge of maleness and male sexuality as well as some very refined awareness of the strategies of voices operating under limited power to enjoy femaleness and femininity, in a way some readers (perhaps mainly men) will not recognise. But again she manages to do this whilst writing about men and masculinity itself as if she saw it from both outside and inside. And the First World War themes arise in the celebration of male smut and even male sexism, in the trench, battle (and near-football battle) songs.

For me, the delight of this novel that it, like all her novels, has a most refined approach to sexual preference that aligns itself to queer theory rather than to identity politics. It is important in this novel that Barker comes, unlike Agamemnon and some others – if not the meat-for-brains but loving comrade Ajax –to no conclusion that idealises the ‘homosexual’ relationship of Achilles and Patroclus. These men sleep together, know each other’s’ bodies better than they know those of female ‘bed-slaves’ but are never sexually labelled. What we see is a complex love relationship that, mediated by power, personality and other (perhaps some being mythical or visionary) differentials, is the most beautiful relationship of the book.

This is in part in in its co-construction between a third-person narrative which accesses even the voices in Achilles’ head and the complex interplay of distances in Briseis’ slave narrative. We see the relationship grow in this way, even in its reflection in the voice of someone whose loyalties must by necessity shift. But it is also in the prose that characterises the relationship descriptively – both from the men’s own (Chapters 27-28 are pivotal), and the narrator’s voice as they inhabit the liminal space between three domains of consciousness (each of limited facticity). It is the romantic novel queered (as a thing of double-selves and mirror-stages):

To an unsympathetic reader that might feel cloying, but I find it quite beautiful. Of course, you’ll find those contrasts of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ even in a Mill and Boon romance but here they queer the pitch, so that the passage is full of the ‘unsaid’ without it ever being clear that you know what should or could have been said in its place. I don’t sense ‘repressed homosexuality’, I sense something that neither participant has a name for but which belongs solidly to the intercourse of their whole lives:  though nevertheless to simplistic binary thinkers disturbing.

I loved this book and want to read it again – and perhaps again. This is Pat Barker back at her strongest.

Steve

A queer approach to sexual preference labelling in art-history: looking at case studies in British mid-twentieth century art: 2. Keith Vaughan

The aim of this group of blogs is to look critically at some of the publications relating to gay male artists in the mid-twentieth century. This is in part to begin trawling for a dissertation topic for my MA in Art History. My initial thoughts relate to focusing on one of these artists, although their contexts include each other, their treatment of male nudes in relation to the iconographic, contextual and stylistic features which propose such a subject for art (for some of the choices this will include photography as well as painting) and ‘queer theory’. This will look at the issue of labelling of course, particularly at the important terminology of ‘homosexuality’, which dominated the period. My hypothesis will probably be that such a term was, and remains, a means of marginalising, even to the point of negation, of such art. My probable choice of artist at this stage is probably Keith Vaughan, hence this blog is a start in a later reading project.

Frances Spalding’s (2005:3) biography of Minton is not a fair basis of comparison with Vaughan and that partly because her biography is apparently aiming for an ‘understanding of homosexuality’. Malcolm Yorke’s (1990) excellent biography of Vaughan makes no such claims and merely charts the artistic, social and sexual life of Vaughan (and the impact upon that life of contemporary constructions of homosexuality, including those which Vaughan intermittently internalised). It is less motivated by attempts to ‘understand’ on the basis of a limited case-study and a belief that the term ‘homosexual’ is ontologically valid. In short, here, the essence of what the ‘homosexual’ might be is neither defined nor imposed as a definition of a part of an assumed reality. Indeed I don’t think the term is validated. In this respect Vaughan’s book makes a much easier step towards a queer reading of mind-twentieth century reception of ‘scientific’ and medicalised discourse on homosexuality. Such a reading needs to explain the methods of his public art as well as his private erotica, such as The Leaping Figure here.

Vaughan himself, like Minton, felt ambivalence about ‘homosexuals’, which he projected as an ambivalence about other gay men (together with an ability to exploit and diminish those he came into sexual or social contact) and introjected as a, in his case, almost virulent self-hatred. Vaughan’s campaigning journals show a tendency to prefer a sexuality which crossed more than normative sexual practice boundaries, exploring the potential of sex as an onanistic science dependent on machines and inanimate objects. When people were involved, he chose even more obviously less powerful personalities as his partners whom he could belittle and hate (although often only privately in his journals as his partner, – as near as he ever got - Ramsay McClure, found to his cost). But he also romanticised and loved these same people in the moment, without any necessary recourse to ever seeing their personhood, often using their marginalised status (and often their poverty as in the case of his young Mexican lover) as the basis of such Romanticism. Eminent amongst these was Johnny Walsh (166f.). And herein lies a conundrum. Unlike Bacon, who seemed to feel no great visible responsibility to working (and criminal and indigent) class – I’m not sure the distinction was ever made in these haute bourgeois English artists – partners such as George Dyer, Vaughan also attempted to become paedagogos (for a time) to Walsh, whom he often characterised as a kouros.

These dynamic relationships of projection of the lesser and introjection of the ideal in the end allowed Vaughan to see himself as unlike other ‘homosexuals (not camp like Isherwood and Minton) but ‘special, unique (47).’

These contradictions do not exemplify, as it was sometimes thought at the time (by E.M. Forster for instance right into a privileged old age) homosexual love, they are (I would argue) distortions caused by the ways in which heteronormative values assumed the qualities of the ‘natural’ ideal of sexual life. Hence the liberation involved in ‘queer theory’ which looks at how that which lies outside the supposed and ideological norm (often practices in real life that are silent or silenced by ideology) survive nevertheless. Looked at from this perspective, Vaughan’s queerness looks very like that that of Picasso – both based on giving primacy of artistic solutions to problems experienced in the human sphere of activity, especially those of sexual love.

Vaughan theorised homosexuality obsessively (even to the extent of a totally forensically objective definition of the material ‘symptoms’ of love as a kind of necessary psychosis (234). I think he was correct to see ‘homosexuality’, as it was defined in the theory of the time as a category tied to constraining and marginalising social roles, the ‘other’ to heteronormativity. What he failed to see (unsurprisingly for the time when his sexual life may have led to long-term imprisonment or chemical castration) was its socially-constructed nature. He lived long enough to despise ‘Gay Lib’ for ‘flaunting itself in the face of the public (cited 254)’ (as if what is public were only heteronormative). He tended to use the distortions of Freudian theory (which he contacted mainly through secondary texts) to see even his own ‘homosexuality’ – if not his sexuality as a whole - as a form of immaturity, one that he had not achieved on the route to heteronormativity: ‘I have regressed even from the immaturity of homosexuality to an almost pre-natal infantilism (cited 237).’

Of course there is much to say here that I want to leave in silence (for now) because its importance for me at the moment is the way in which a queer approach to Vaughan’s art rescues the artist from the time-bound and limited thinker of the journals. That mass of contradictions (the Journals and Vaughan as a biography) matters and helps with the art but does not show his importance. For me this comes from his rethinking of the traditions embodied in the male nude trope – one that Vaughan saw has predictable from his homosexuality (197) but as essentially contributory to a  breakthrough in artistic technique (technique he taught at Slade as before (198) in terms of the primacy of painterly composition and pioneered in art in the practice of ‘assembly’ paintings (200) – as in the Ninth Assembly of Figures here, which he saw as classical in form if both classical and romantic in subject. He was devastated when he discovered that the basic invisibility of Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling male nudes (which he thought validated those fusions) could not be ‘seen’ from the chapel floor and therefore could not have (he felt then) created a tradition (230).

Yet tradition there was – one, though I’m still working on it, I would call a queer tradition that amalgamated various sources that were not equitable with homosexuality nor with any directly intended expression of male desire for ocular evidence of other male bodies (sexual or not): this tradition included the academic tradition of the male nude and the male nude considered as emblematic of idealised proportions of form and style. Both owed something to Winckelmann’s readings of the classical and Renaissance tradition (including Raphael and Michelangelo), to Neo-Classicism and the function of the Academies in Europe (including Britain, in the work of William Etty in the nineteenth-century) which also fed off Winckelmann, although now mixed with its apparent opposite, Goethean romanticism. However, the most formidable model, especially for the reformulation of a notion of what we might mean by the classical nude is Cezanne, Vaughan’s key model for his male nudes in public painting. Yorke (1990:40f) summarises thus how Vaughan felt he honoured the classical forms in Cezanne in his own painting, something with which I fully concur:

Structure was imposed on the teeming chaos of reality by eliminating unnecessary detail, simplifying trees to masses …, suppressing any individuality in bathers’ faces or bodies, and simultaneously making every part of the picture conform to an underlying geometrical structure, distorting forms to this end if necessary. (And more)

I too hope to say more of Cezanne’s male nudes when I write in earnest, since their reception has historically been mediated through a thick varnish of homophobia which refuses to see desire in them lest it taint an ideal Cezanne. Cezanne did not need to be ‘homosexual’ to reinvent the male nude as both classical form and romantic icon, I’ll argue. Moreover, we need to take this classicising even of the most romantic and desire-imbued forms seriously in Vaughan. If his public paintings became impervious to gay male desire in favour of some other sublimation (I think he possibly saw it in those Freudian terms), it is not just because this would ‘give him away’ in the deeply homophobic British twentieth-century up to the 1980s but because he felt there was a difference between the artist (even the queer artist’s) conception of the male nude in art to that serving purposes of sexual excitation (as explored by Lucie-Smith in different terms (1991:8). Indeed I think Vaughan drew male nudes in 3 different arenas and for 3 different functions, becoming more aestheticized as they moved away from extremely secreted pornography on the first level (Hastings 2017), semi-private eroticism in subjective inter-relationships (Vaughan 1966, Graham & Boyd 1991) and ‘fine art’. The latter had no obvious sexual organs, a number of means of erasure being followed very consciously.

In the latter category bodies are as he intended them following Cezanne’s example (and a reading of trans-historical painterly classicism) such as they example queer art but not art confined to categories like ‘homosexual’ or even ‘gay’ art. It was queer because it still included a formulation of desire in composition, and, at times, Vaughan believed, in ways that could not escape contradictions that exposed art to eruptions of personal desire and which made him see even his art, perhaps all great art, as an expression of ‘homosexuality’ rather than the queerness of desire, which is now visible as nearer to the truth. He wrote in his journals in the 1960s (Yorke 1991:197):

… pages of speculation about how the majority of the great painters of the male nude were homosexual: … how the previous night he, like the Virgin in Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s, had held a youth called Mike naked in his arms in the exact pose  of the Christ.

 We need to see, more clearly than Vaughan here, what queers the representation of the male nude, probably trans-historically, without silly identifications of gayness or homosexuality before those terms had meaning.

Looking at say the 1970 male nude below, I’d assert that Vaughan’s public art is better than Lucie-Smith (1991) asserts, blaming as he does the heteronormativity and homophobia of the times, and that it was not marred by repressed instincts (to fuller sexual expression) but dug deeper into what the male nude represented homosocial (rather than just homosexual) meanings. Hence his interests in male archetypes: Kouroi, Crucifixions, warriors and noble assemblies. His male figures sometimes emerge from an early set of his photographs from Pagham Beach and there are real similarities between our last mentioned illustration and this one from Pagham.

Pagham pictures included young men whom he related to very differently, including his beautiful (and heterosexual) brother, Dick (an unfortunate name sometimes). We need to see Vaughan though as artist not as repressed homosexual – queer theory allows that – and we then see that these male nudes are very complex icons, or at least that is what I’d like later to assert.

 All the best

Steve

Labyrinths III: Andy Cumming Adam Linklater: Mythopaedia Maritime Lane Collective, Leith; Edinburgh Art Festival 2018. Labyrinthine Artistry

For internet site visit: http://www.andycummingsite.com/about/

For excerpts of video see: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-2Ml1qbSdWp-JwuCuR50sw

For selected images see: https://www.pintaram.com/u/adamlinklateroccultartist

Images from the installation:

I visited Cumming’s exhibition on Wednesday 22 August and and then attended his presentation of the work the same evening. The work comprises an installation with a 27-minute video and a collection of works (including large colour photographs) attributed to Adam Linklater that also, largely appear in the film. Adam Linklater, Cummings tells us, is an ‘avatar’ of himself, the artist but also a kind of ‘double’, whose paranoia and psychosis Cummings admits he can get dangerously near to. On his website Cumming says:

“My work deals with many different themes from the origins of creativity with the understanding of inherent and embedded knowledge, to the study of human behaviour and the social sciences. I am also interested on the effect that the internet is having on our learning. Having unlimited access to knowledge on every possible subject is an amazing thing but it also opens us up to false and or conflicting information, adding to an ever increasing mistrust of our governments and the education we are taught at school. I find interest in many things but I also enjoy the process of allowing the chance mark inspire the form/idea. I tend to start my work with no particular theme but through the process of play and random markmaking a theme starts to come to fruition. I very much allow my tacit knowledge to take over whilst I make art.”

Andy Cumming 2017

Cumming’s insistence that ‘tacit knowledge’ constitutes an alternative identity that like the traditional doppleganger can ‘take over’ a more conscious self, goes a long way to explaining the origins of Adam (the first man) Linklater (a man of belated networks). His theory here sounds a lot like that of the Dadaists’ practice of automatic writing or creation – such practices try to go underneath the layers of convention that we call our conscious selves to something we call either ‘primitive’, ‘tacit’ or unconscious. At one point in video, the artist’s search for clues to Linklater’s quest for knowledge, and the control he believes inheres in that knowledge, is labelled firs I.D. (at one level identity) and later ‘id’ (the ‘It’ which is the name Freud actually gave to the unconscious).

The search Linklater, and Cummings – sometime with his girlfriend – after him, undergo, involves a descent to an underworld – such as we find in archetypes like Orpheus, Odysseus in Homer, Aeneas in Virgil, Satan in Milton. But underground caves also recall that fearful palace of art made by Daedalus, the Labyrinth.  One section of the video is named ‘labyrinth’ and shows Andy and girlfriend penetrating a cellar and finding within evidence of earlier occupation by Linklater.

Strangely, when I asked Cumming, at his presentation, why he did not talk about labyrinths, he prevaricated but later said that the labyrinth was a kind of emotional-cognitive space (my term) in which he experienced feelings of self-loss, and which prompted him to ‘disappear’ his Linklater avatar. Artists have to move on. That labyrinths are a symbol of the artist is clear in the Daedalus story. That master of art (techne in Greek) made marvellous monuments but they became prey to the uses to made of them by tyrants like Minos and dangerous for neophytes, like his son Icarus who died in the attempt to escape the labyrinth by getting too near a more pure Apollonian knowledge.

But Cummings work is an excellent translation of the labyrinth trope to the nature of what we naturally call ‘the web’ (a classic analogy to the labyrinth). It associates with Cumming’s use of maps and links later made upon them (as in Rosicrucian thinking), and to the ubiquitousness of mind-mapping as a means of charting mental operations in modern education. Hence many of the works are mind-maps, charts of the mind that allow for labyrinthine following of links and connections, some of which fall into a dead-end. Of these Cumming makes for rather interesting art. Ultimately these networks are also neural networks, which too can be labyrinthine and sometimes dangerous link hungry. For Cumming some of this relates to the aetiology of what he calls paranoia and which I’d prefer to call more widely psychosis – in which patterns and meanings get over-perceived, although not necessarily therefore becoming delusions (at least not always).

At the book festival I saw some similar connections made by very good contemporary poets in poems about descent to undergrounds. Those were Sean Borodale (clearly a very great poet in the making) and Ruth Padel.

 Linked to this review are:

1.       The exhibition The Green Man in and of the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh University collated and curated by Lucy Skaer and others.

2.       An art installation on Maritime Lane, Leith Adam Linklater: Mythopoeia by Andy Cummings (this).

3.       An introduction through Charlotte Higgins’s new book.

4.       An addendum: the way in to Anselm Kiefer - a labyrinth with no end has, of course, no way out.

5.       A second addendum - Paul Broks: the labyrinth in the Neuropsycholgist's Odyssey.

All the best

Steve

Labyrinths I: The truth within being Lost and Amazed (Charlotte Higgins Red Thread: On Mazes & Labyrinths London, Jonathan Cape).

There is a fine tradition of taking themes and tracing them in literature and art both diachronically and synchronically. In the latter case we often evoke Baxandall’s ‘period eye’ to look at how a trope, such as the hortus conclusus, is looked at within the distinct limits of a historical period. Schama in Landscape and Memory deals with both synchronic and diachronic overview of three great tropes in looking, for instance at the trope of the forest in Germanic art – looking at its how its meanings change from the breakup of the Roman Empire to its colonisation as a myth of the Arian Germanic by Hitler and the remnant effect of that in the more contemporary art of Anselm Kiefer.

There is some suspicion of such approaches from some older art-historical traditions, such as Panofsky’s supposedly scientific iconological methodologies. Such approaches, based on a fear of subjective interpretation, create paradigmatic stages of interpretative procedure to keep subjectivity in check. Art history, even where it is not based on iconographical reading, has still maintained this distrust of the subjective of which strict ‘period eye’ approaches are the most typical. These insist that that there is a small range of meanings in any one period for any one trope – and hence reserve interpretation for academic elites.

Not so Charlotte Higgins, who allows meanings to cross periods – to change, mutate but also co-exist as in some transhistorical palimpsest. Moreover, these readings allow ‘moderns’ to see ancient art through their own eyes such that whatever a trop means will be layered by history diachronically and networked synchronically and diachronically to associate meanings and even the domain of other tropes – for instance the relation of labyrinths to tropes such as webs, weaving and woods. Her most fascinating reading ties Freud’s love of Michelangelo’s Moses to the riddle involved in how knots appear in Moses’ beard as a reflex of emotion, thought and the birth of psychological machinery for evaluation (56ff.)

I have a great liking for this approach which embraces subjective interpretation (as sometimes does Schama) such that those versions of the trope that emerge in developmental self-stories such as those Higgins tells – of her experience in Crete as both a child and adult and through her correspondence with a Greek teacher and auto-didact she met as a child as a guide in Heraklion museum and concerning Knossos. But the star is her exposure of why ‘Troy Town’ emerges as an English place name – at Saffron Walden for instance - (83ff.) or the labyrinth is used by scientists to describe the ear (107) or became the source for the most memorable pieces of land art – Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (104).

Labyrinths are not just mazes but also palaces, woods and transcendental spaces (and sometimes all of these in, say, Homer, Virgil, Dante and Milton) – they are external and internal, underground and over-ground, physical or mental, umbrageous or just interminably obscure or puzzles that merely need clarity of insight to see them clearly. They are associated with spiders and snakes, evil and divine (if inscrutable) good and with complex fictional or social narratives and networked webs. They are all of these we see in Eliot’s Middlemarch – as descriptions of Rome’s geography or Casaubon’s mind. They are that and more in Borges’ model of fiction, and in any riddling narrative such as James’ The Turn of the Screw.

They are at their most social in the myths that emerge from historical archaeology – especially the early exploration of Minoan culture by Arthur Evans – but from thence in the weaving of fictions or transcendent myths, such as the Laocoon and the art that sprung from it – in Michelangelo and Titian. Through Minotauromachie (179), we emerge into the wonderful art of Picasso. However, one of the most fascinating revelations to me was their use in Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres (65).

I loved this book. I read it while on holiday in Edinburgh and the Festival has produced many experiences of which I want to write with Higgin’s discoveries (in something less and yet more than the limited meaning implied by that word in academic research) in mind.

They are:

1.       The exhibition The Green Man in and of the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh University collated and curated by Lucy Skaer and others.

2.       An art installation on Maritime Lane, Leith Adam Linklater: Mythopoeia by Andy Cummings.

3.       This introduction.

4.       An addendum: the way in to Anselm Kiefer - a labyrinth with no end has, of course, no way out.

5.       A second addendum - Paul Broks: the labyrinth in the Neuropsycholgist's Odyssey.

All the best

Steve

Emil Nolde: Colour is Life National Gallery of Modern Art in Scotland, Edinburgh

I prepared myself for this exhibition by reading an introductory art-text (one with lots of background, plenty of large-scale reproductions) on German expressionism. Why, I ask myself? I think it is to clear myself from any interest in Nolde himself – who remained constant to the ideology of National Socialism and the kind of ‘heimat’ structure of feeling that based itself on virulent anti-Semitism even up to the very end of the Nazi period and the absorption of his own ‘heimat’ into Denmark. This even though Hitler himself appears to have seen Nolde as the prime example of ‘degenerate art’ (a category that could include multiple ideologies and not only those of natural enemies of Nazism).

When you see this exhibition, you must look away (whilst remembering why, in disgust, you do so) from the central painting of his Christian epic, Martyrdom (1921), in which the lower-half of Christ is sandwiched between the most anti-Semitic caricatures you can possibly have ever seen – so much so that the Gallery’s introductory film, avoids showing the bottom half of Martyrdom II. But this apart, the fear of Nolde’s almost certainly sincere Nazism seems much less important than the potential meanings of most of his other art, such as the more mature take on South-Sea island resistance to colonisation that makes Gauguin seem the more racist because the latter is more unable to see the ‘other’ as anything but his possession. There is too Nolde’s very fine and absolutely horrifying anti-war work in the First World War, especially Battlefield (1913).

He great paintings have a kind of restlessness and dynamism, produced by energetic impasto brushwork and the fusion (especially at their supposed boundaries) of colours) such that they speak energy and make Matisse seem tame (perhaps over-civilized). The greatest of all of these are the seascapes, especially the ecstatically sublime and destructive The Sea B (1930).

Standing in front of this painting inevitably releases a kind of feeling of danger and instability (the very opposite of the homely stability associated with heimat and nationalist self-satisfaction). Indeed, the other great picture in my view is that very early one inspired by Ensor, Still Life of Masks (1911). Here the use of very thick red impasto for the lips of the masks (Nolde’s lips fascinate throughout – there is a dissertation there somewhere) allow the background pale blues to shine through in a more frightening view of the post-Nietzsche ‘void’ than anything even in his Nolde’s highly paranoiac Christian paintings. Where there is not restlessness and fear of dissolution, I sense there is only the void in this great painter.

One might not want to think of that looking at his equally great flower and garden paintings (especially Large Poppies (Red, Red, Red) (1942) which are almost a discussion on the meanings of ‘red’ that it will take Rothko to challenge in quality. Of course, this exhibition will be remembered for featuring the great ‘unpainted paintings’ of the 1930s and 40s. I feel there was not enough time in my day to take these as seriously as they should be taken (even an apparently simple single example such as Skater).

His society paintings are as good as Kirchner, perhaps (I think) better and his Cabaret set take us into and beyond the world of Sally Bowles.

This must be seen. No reproduction does Nolde justice – what we see is paint in action (paint as embodied motion) but only in these originals.

All the best

Steve

Victoria Crowe
This exhibition is described in the following website: https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/victoria-crowe-beyond-likeness.

I visited on 16th August whilst at the Edinburgh Festival. It wasn’t an exhibition I intended to go to – being so busy and already overloaded with events. But since my tickets for the Emil Nolde exhibition were for next week and I wanted to meet the requirement of a A843-A844 Bridging Course exercise before the end of this week, I called in here.

And was I grateful. I didn’t know Victoria Crowe’s work previously, but I found it moving and exciting. So, here’s my exhibition experience.

Let’s start with the shows sub-title: ‘Beyond Likeness’. Portraits, I had thought, usually involve contexts outside the ‘likeness’ of their subject to a sitter at some specifiable point in space and time: they are tied to dynastic, national, family, professional & company affiliations – they capture a social role often and are representative of that role and its institutional icons. Otherwise, thought I, why a ‘National Portrait’ Gallery. Undeniably over-simple that thought and I have had to rethink this after this exhibition.

Crowe’s portraits tell not only of people in a social role – although they are that. There is a range of intellectuals, artists (of various kinds) and politicians to name just a few but the portraits of them deliberately go beyond that role. There is something so personal and relational – as if the person in the portrait were in the process of not only characteristic activity but of actively making a relationship between themselves, the viewer and the sometimes abstract and sometimes very material entities which made up the boundary between their internal and external self.

Sometimes, a device is used to do that, as in the use of an inner-frame to contain images of an inner and past life of the poet Katherine Raine. The frame is a ‘real one’ – it belongs to a mirror gifted to the sitter by the artist Winifred Nicolson. In it words (from Raine’s poetry) and semi-liminal related (and sometimes non-relating) images occupy the space making it feel over-constraining. These then are pictures of ideas and emotions and have agency in the communication of thought and feeling that both links viewer and sitter – showing what is like and what is unlike.

The most moving instances of that are those private pictures of her son, Ben, becoming an undergraduate and those following his loss – liminal self-portraits of a mother in a mirror frame – in the margin of a painting dominated by a lily of mourning. This feels too terrible to describe. Note though how the curation of the exhibition reserves the private life of Crowe’s family to a space at the end of the exhibition – a space in which pictures of Ben, Gemma and Michael can be seen as we congregate in a narrow corridor holding these pictures – both mounted vertically and in a showcase and thus seen on a horizontal plane. These pictures crowd in on one – represented by the log-jam of visitors at this endpoint.

They force the extremely personal to confront the extremely public – love as emotional space struggling to exist in a very public place.

I thought I’d concentrate though on one picture which has public and personal meaning for me but which were less painful in their message – a pictures of the great psychologist and socio-political icon, R.D. Laing.

Laing was a controversial figure since his dissection of the some of the psycho-social effects showed these to be sometimes as toxic as ideology and denial of painful emotion makes them seem cosy and of a unitary goodness. Let others see what they can in the portrait of Ronnie. Crowe spoke of their interaction as extremely socially uncomfortable in the first stages (some of which appear in photographs on show) until fuelled by excess drink and a deeper level of communication. In the portrait, the depths of Laing’s meaning to Crowe emerge in part from objects that surround him – a Byzantine icon and a metronome but also in the bottom left hand corner the cover of Laing’s The Politics of Experience in which the frame of a head holds icons of both conflict and insight. But that Laing was closely guarded himself seems communicated in his closed square and in the woven defences that surround him and somewhat enclose, occlude (in darkness) and hide him – even the thickly woven wood in the window-frame to his left. The studies shown in the exhibition concentrated on Crowe’s attempt to get right the very closely woven and thick cardigan in which colours are trapped by a dominant repetive motif of black squares. The cardigan covers a roll-top jumper. I tend not to see this picture of a man struggling to keep warm as insignificant to the emotional relationships in this painting.

But go and see it and decide for yourselves. There is much much more.

All the best
Steve

The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (exhibition): Tacita Dean: Woman with a Red Hat

To have no screen between the part he play’d

And him he play’d it for, …

(The Tempest cited Dean (2018) – and placed in the mouth of The Actor as part of his script)

Art is what makes life more interesting than art

(Dean (2018) – and placed in the mouth of The Actor as part of his script)

Having missed three major exhibitions of Dean’s work in London this year, I thought a self-consciously focused and small exhibition of her work during my Festival visit would be no substitute. I cannot know if that is correct, but I do know that this exhibition needs no comparison with any other and that Dean’s work repays massively any interest you take in it. The Fruitmarket’s exhibition is superbly and sensitively curated and need take second place to no other because of this.

At its heart is a 50-minute film piece called ‘Event for a Stage’, from which the two quotations above derive. They are sufficiently indicative that Dean’s reputation is based on deep reflection of the materials, media and modes of contemporary art and their reflection in pre-contemporary aesthetic thought. Of the latter there is the late play on by Shakespeare. ‘Lie there, my art’ is another quotation from the same play containing themes pregnant of the role of rest from self-consciousness, fiction and a search for the authentic behind artifice engraved on the still When I First Raised the Tempest (2016). The neglected Romantic playwright and marionettes’ script-writer, Heinrich von Kleist, is another.

As Dean makes clear, you can only value art when it explores the paradoxes that make it both like and unlike, perhaps even essentially so, life. Art is both itself, its prescription and its ‘post-scription’. Her stills The Russian Ending (2001) toy with this idea, in making problematic the role of text and image in photogravure. Text both prescribes and critically comments as an afterthought, and it is difficult here to know which act it represents as you read it and with necessity integrate that reading into your visual experience – capturing how meaning is planned and determined in the art in the first place or revised in the second. The still of Sheffield really haunted me for that reason – almost because it dares the visuals it marks to be feel different than that which they appear to be for us and to radically resist such revision.

Many pieces are about the process of making art and meaning in life. Some are about looking for an artist to give one meaning – a lovely short film in which the only script is Ben Wishaw calling on ‘Anne’ (the playwright-poet-classicist Anne Carson) who is framed in an entirely different space to recognise and validate him. She doesn’t and can’t. He is locked in an entirely different framework of script.

But if ‘art’ in effect is to make ‘life more interesting than art’, then art needs to be constantly challenged to include and work with and against its own limitations. Shakespeare knew he was playing games by asking actors to talk about the ‘parts’ they play. He couldn’t have, but Dean can, play the same game with the varying meanings of ‘screen’ in the Shakespeare quotation above. A screen is one of the membranes ‘Event for a Stage’ sets between actors and audiences, actors and their own lives. Dean emphasises that ‘screen’ remediates her ‘event for a stage’ by splicing it from at least three different live events in which the same actor plats the same part but in different wigs (including no wig), make-up and clothing. The contact with being mediated is all we have. If mediation screens us from the things that hurt in life, is also, like all membranes, bears the fragile limit of its own ability to protect or ‘screen’ us from harm. At one point – another pun – screen is described as a ‘film of protection’.

One point where this impinges is in the constant duplicating of the role of audiences. We are the audience not only of an actor but an audience and our role as audience is itself exposed to rupture. We watch the audience assemble as we assembled. We see them seen as they feel themselves to be unseen (and un-see-able behind a film of protection). How will they / we react to the actor leaving the theatre – refusing his role, or even not knowing what it is.

And thus, the artist.

This is just my unrestrained, uncontrolled thoughts. See it for yourself. Have your own.

All the be

Steve

Dean, T. (2018) Tacita Dean: Woman with a Red Hat Edinburgh, The Fruitmarket Gallery.

Publication contains the script of ‘Event for a Stage’ as well as samples from the major stills and film work in the exhibition.

Classifying or ‘classing’ the metaphors of a Painter’s Relationship to their Canvas: Reflecting on Düchting, H. (2002) Paul Klee: Painting Music Munich, Prestel Verlag.       

Düchting’s work is a scholarly examination of the varied uses of references to music as a metaphor for art in both the act of painting and in reading painting. It should be clearer perhaps in themed monographs on individual artists how and why we are using music to describe painting: whether it is as process or product for instance. In most cases, music is used as means of ekphrasis - a description of a paintings effect and affect in relation to some ideal viewer. For instance Düchting’s discussion of the wonderful and huge work (Ad Parnassum 1932 100 x 125 cm) by Klee discusses the picture in terms of the images it models from landscape and architecture before summarising why the expressive means of music (and here specifically ‘polyphonic harmony’) might also describe these.[1]

There is ambiguity here of course. Are we talking about Klee adopting a ‘technique’ of painting process as musical learners adopted Fux or are we talking about a metaphor for what a painting as product achieves in the eyes of ideal beholders, which we might equate here – if rather sloppily – with the intention of the painter. I think this is deliberately unclear. An effect on the viewer is not, after all, a technique, although the artist’s painting techniques may contribute to this effect. The ambiguity remains to stop us asking the question: are not the descriptions of painting in musical terms not merely vehicles of an otherwise indescribable tenor (to use the constituent terms of metaphor) rather than descriptive of anything technical action or perceptible entity. In effect painting by Klee is no more ‘music’ in its form or content than is a Gainsborough portrait.

Let’s see the painting in a possibly unreliable form – colours reproduction is not usually wonderful or reliable.[3]

Nowhere does the sense of multiple voices actually describe what we see here for me as a viewer – other than, for me at least, the suggestion of the reproduction of a complex set for Verdi’s Egyptian opera. Indeed the theatrical ‘metaphor’ (and it is no more than that helps me more, almost organising the picture into the ‘overlapping and intersecting planes’ mention in the quotation above. This metaphor makes sense of the architectural and landscape elements that haunt this picture, including the ‘warm circle’ nominated by Klee that many prefer to see as an evening sun. There is a pyramid and an arch. Note in the latter that the arch is not only created by the black line outline but the malformation of the otherwise more regular ‘grid of dense dots of contrasting colours’ that was Klee’s version of Seurat’s ‘divisionism’ to make the shape of a supporting arch structure, including the fact that they underscore the black curve, losing their grid-like potential partially, and in doing so suggesting depth of field.[4]

Whilst most commentary identifies the triangle in the top section with Mount Parnassus, prompted by the title, there is for me the need to see this as a shape suggestive of more overt human intervention, as a construction not a ‘found’ reality represented, even if but as an idealised fantasy. Düchting admits that Klee’s ‘graphical elements … do not lend themselves to an unambiguous interpretation’.[5] I feel moreover that this is their strength, in that they resist final ekphrasis in any one narrative, as much as one from music as well as mine of ‘theatre’.

What remains then is a set of shapes, some of which have regular geometry and many of which are quantifiably ‘measurable’ as well as qualitatively interpretable[6]. In a sense that is, for me why music works as a metaphor since it too uses measurable intervals in intersection, especially in polyphony (and opera is a good example). Yet the ‘measure’ that is music is also qualitatively ambiguous.

This is the case I believe even when Klee uses musical notation, such as a clef or fermata. One absorbed into the painting, they become visually very ambiguous.[7]

Now I have gone to a lot of trouble here to show how and why I think music is used to describe Klee’s painting. Of course Düchting also, frankly, does not rely on musical descriptive terms, and like myself, invokes architecture and landscape (I think I’d take them further than Düchting does). But in art-historical tradition it is fine to use such metaphors. This is in part a reflection of the terms that new movements in art struggle to find to describe their innovations. Both Klee and Kandinsky used music as a means to describe how and why they turned to abstraction, even in developing their art in its more figural avatars.

Yet what if we were to take another human endeavour to describe painting. When we make our choice we become immediately aware of socialised repertoires of acceptable fields of metaphor – notably those covered by bourgeois professional types associate with notions of high art. Kandinsky used music to describe his 1922 White Zigzags.

Now when I used this painting in a Masters course to describe how Kandinsky’s triangles assert energy and motion and are associated with rhythm, I compared them to more hidden background abstractions in Tom McGuinness’ The Hewer (1994), which I presented in a schematic thus:

My aim was to suggest (just that in so short an essay) how Bauhaus features in painting technique – the use of triangles in particular picked up in Kandinsky – had been potentially imported from the Bauhaus from people who influenced McGuinness in the working-class movements where, in part, he learned painting, especially Jos Thain who experienced the Bauhaus.

My aim was (it was only a 3000 word essay – but I never let that stop me) to show that McGuinness used underground working contexts as a potential metaphor for painting, not least the experienced of opposed and tensile forces against which the miner works being comparable to an artist’s relationship to canvas and paint.

Of course, it was a hopeless ambitious desire that I perhaps should have been punished more for – this is after all a 3000 word essay. If I analyse myself, I sense that I was resistant to being assessed this way in an MA Year 1 of 2 final project. Yet what concerned me was the commentary on my desire to draw metaphoric comparisons between mining work and painting. It is not that mining is not considered as art, least of all ‘high art’, but that somehow presenting it even as a possibility is considered ‘farfetched’. My feedback included this:

Now I don’t dispute that my argument was too sparse, and hence less successful, but I do question whether it is good enough to say the ‘analogy’ is ‘somewhat farfetched’. In effect, what I try to say (far too implicitly) here was that all such metaphors, even in the form of ‘analogy’ had I in fact proposed this, are ‘somewhat farfetched’. They try to describe the indescribable.

My suspicion about art-history is that its class origins as a discipline make it more receptive to metaphors from music, architecture and landscape formations than to mining. I may well be wrong, but I have a very strong feeling.

By the way, if anyone is interested in why I see ‘underscape’ as a domain of the abstract – not really explained in this essay, I’m happy to talk. In fact it would be great to write to talk to anyone interested in the subject and not just the task of essay-writing.

Steve

 [1] Düchting (2002:76ff.)

Gay Art? Disentangling ‘being queer’ from LGBTQ+ identities in queer art history’.

 Are there valid connections to be made between the concepts of ‘homosexuality’ and ‘art’? To what extent do queer theory and performative approaches to identity challenge the formulation of these categories?

A discussion point: How useful is this table?

Saslow, J.M. (1999) Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts New York, Viking, Penguin Group.

Reed, C. (2011) Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Barlow, C. (Ed.) (2017) Queer British Art 1861-1967 London, Tate Publishing.

Table 1: A table from Reed showing relationships of art to different concepts of homosexuality (2011:8)

Reed’s (2011) book attempts to plot different concepts of homosexuality found in its historians with modes of art that have varying relationships to these concepts. His views (with examples of the art he uses in the book) are summarised in the Table, together with a very personal set of terms to name his categories in each case. What remains clear is that homosexuality, though varying in terms of conceptualisation, is recognisable as an entity within each concept. Reed performs here a sleight of hand that is precisely involved in rescuing the tern ‘homosexual’ from any fundamental deconstruction such as that attempted by Sedgwick Kosofsky in The Epistemology of the Closet. In her formulation, the retention of this term by necessity imports the dualism in which the terms heterosexual and homosexual define each other. More importantly it fixes the latter term as ‘the other’ in terms of some kind of priority, of quality or quantity to the former. Hence to be ‘a homosexual’ is to be a quantitative minority or possess a less normative sexual identity. This blog is written in order to ask myself and anyone else who will comment whether we need accept or not that the term ‘homosexual’ is a valid term and whether it necessitates the sequelae that follow on from it according to Kosofsky Sedgwick.

One concern I have is that using the term retrospectively and using it to colour the future, probably oversimplifies the situation in both cases. When used of the past it is used to stereotype somewhat, as we often see in the case of minbor figures like Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray in the eighteenth century, even by Schama but of more concern, even  in Saslow. In both cases Walpole as both odd and possessing an understanding of himself inferior to ours. The issues when we deal with other cultures may even be greater.

Reed’s table does introduce a column based on performative theory (after Judith Butler) definitions but applies it only to post-modernism in effect or to instances where theatrical metaphor was already a part of the art concerned, as in Japanese Tokugawa prints, with their interest in the different between appearance and meaning – which they often exploited by using calligraphy to textualise pictures just as pictures visualised calligraphic patterns.

I’d like to be able to insist that ‘queer’ alternatives exist whenever conventions in a picture are multiple, mixed and sometimes contradictory – when viewers have to make choices to find a repertoire of meanings. If queer and performance theory stress that identity is a choice, Reed feels that this almost nullifies the voice of a group who existed trans-historically, whenever they happened to be named and who, in the name of justice and truth, need identifying in earlier avatars (classical, medieval and Renaissance).

My own prejudice at the moment is that ‘hunting the homosexual’ is a thankless sport, and like all hunting is, in the end, cruel. I wince when I read the descriptions of the Aesthetic movement in Saslow for instance just as I do those of Horace Walpole. We objectify short-sighted views here, making Pater and Wilde laughable (and sad) clowns. It also confines gay art-history to the closet or the ghetto. Queer perspectives have a lot to say about heterosexual image-making – Bonnard and Caillebotte for instance, as well as more obviously the more performative Picasso. They are not the same as LGBT+ identities because they are only chosen over a deeper determining structure – but one that is less known than anyone thinks (and maybe interactional between determinations). But we can still choose to accept or reject the appearance of the current cultural forms of those identities. Chinese, Japanese and Indian art was particularly good at this before the colonialists took a hand it appears.

Unfinished thoughts.

Steve

Steve’s 2018 Booker Longlist Readings

3.      Robertson, Robin. The Long Take or A Way to Lose More Slowly London, Picador Poetry.

This year I’ve decided not to set out to read all of the longlist but just those of which I had not acquired some prejudice (I’m not going to justify it as other than that).

The Long Take is, in the current Booker journalistic commentary, given the status of an unusual choice for the Booker judges but it seems to me entirely mainstream formally and excellent within that category. Until I read another 2018 Booker novel that so moves and surprises me, it is my hope that this novel, using poetry as a key mode of communication, wins the Booker.

If it is innovative, it is innovative in some other way than that of form, since there are many works which we can compare with it, such as Kevin Powers’ (or Owen Sheers’) works about the Vietnam and Iraq experience respectively. This gives us more distance from an actual and yet terrible war anf from the catastrophic onslaught of organised capital on the stuff of North American life (the Bunker Hill Urban Renewal Plan 236f.) and the terrible thinness of the American dream and the stories that sustain it.

Of course it matters that it is in poetry. You need quote very little to say that this mode communicates so well something that is achingly beautiful and has a stronger pull on the emotions because of that. Don Paterson (2018:77) examining just some of the effects of language arranged as poetry (and Paterson is Robertson’s editor for this novel p. 237) says (speaking of A passage from T.S. Eliot):

What are some of the effects we might call those of poetry in Robinson? There are as many passages to choose as pages, and some take the superficial form of prose.

Here meaning and sound make such a beautiful contract to sustain each other in tension, that has something to do with the ambiguity of ‘running feet’ as a description too of effects of metricality and rhythm, that merge with the pattern of repeated words and assonance (especially on the ending of active verbs. Still and ‘running’ repeat at both ends of this passage, together with the assonance of the present participle. I lose some of the value of the passage through not knowing all the cinematic references here but none of the feeling of patterned tension of something that flows (sometimes floods relentlessly and apocalyptically floods or burns) on and yet desires to hang on in stasis. And these beautiful effects are of the substance of what this novel does with time, as it negotiates a war veteran’s involuntary returns of memory (seeringly painful and beautiful) with his attempts to move on in his relationships, his working life or career and identifications with others. Stuck in a ‘homeless’ mode, and continually returning to write about it and the war veterans, and others, that experience it, Walker (a good name) barely recognises that ‘moving on’ is possible even when life experience gives him positive evidence of that capacity. Staying still or moving back are the other alternatives and neither seem socially or psychologically possible.

So we read verse to allow us to savour how pace and speed register on the consciousness, whether that be mode of transport or of implacable unstoppable history which both adds and takes away, creates (although often only still and running ‘parking lots and roads’) and catacysmically destroys. Here are pieces on this in major and, as here, in minor key:

Try reading that last line fast. It can’t be done. Sound mimics meaning, even in how we, like Walker, begin ‘trying to read’. And the use of 'station' to mean still point passed too fast. Lovely!

The major key example on p.223 is a prose-poem but I won’t quote because ‘it contains spoilers’ (or at least I think it does). The whole follows a period of US history of about 7 years but these are years of great shifts in history (from immediate post-World-War-2) demobilisation to Korea, from the New Deal pre-War to the dream of competitive individualism and the breakup of a social contract, from an American home to an American powerhouse fuelled by unmotivated  but rapid change against which we might all be losers (and still not ‘lose more slowly’ (the novel’s subtitle is quoted here). Walker tries to ‘lose more slowly’ by attempting a redemption from painful memory: a Wal;er counting the steps he ‘walked’ but he doesn’t ‘save’ much, while visiting Bunker Hill;

Keep reading those lines. See in particular how the rhythm and assonance in the last line compounds meaning and affect. This is a novel of great genius. A writer’s read perhaps (although I count myself only a reader) but a really rewarding one.

Steve

Fred Uhlman: A reunion with the Hatton Gallery

Little Yid – never come back
Or we’ll break your bloody neck

(Uhlman 1971 from Reunion)[1]

The point about Uhlman’s Reunion is that there is no ‘coming back’, thus no reunion – not really!

In Reunion a German Jewish middle-class boy like Fred Uhlman, Hans, confronts his ideal in a form that was to be consecrated and made ‘classical’ by the Nazis. Konradin von Hohenfel's qualities, ‘proud bearing, his manners, his elegance, his good looks – and who could be altogether insensitive to them’ (14), constitute an ideal of German identity with which Hans feels he can identify, and, in doing so, leave behind his self-awareness of being Jewish, as he and Konradin, ‘walked up and down for an hour, like two young lovers, still nervous, still afraid of each other … full of hope and richness for us both’(19).

Separated by an anti-Semitism that turned into a state policy and a re-reading of history and ethnicities, Hans and Konradin part despite themselves, each feeling they are acting for the best. The only reunion allowed, given that we learn Konradin later becomes a follower of National Socialism is that we learn he died executed for his role in a failed plan to assassinate Hitler. That is the only reunion is cognitive and emotional – internal – and experienced only in art like the poem by Hölderlin that the ’boy’ lovers learn to recite to each other.

Ah me, where can I seek

In winter the flowers

And where sunshine

And shadow of the earth?

The wall stand

Speechless and cold, in the wind

Icy flags tinkle.

It is a song of fundamental alienation and it hurts. It hurt Uhlman, as it hurt the more masked Kurt Schwitters whom he met while interned in the Isle of Man,  in particular to become labelled an ‘enemy alien’ and be interned on his escape from certain death under the Nazis to the UK. It is also a wonderful description of the expressive mood of Uhlman’s late Welsh landscapes, which are to me, one of the stars of the show now at the Hatton Gallery.

It describes too the genre he almost invented earlier in his career of graveyard scenes, in which life stands in an alien deserted imaginary landscape where houses, churches and love are abstractions formed into unpopulated and unvisited tombs. Both of these types can be seen in the lovely exhibition catalogue curated by the Burgh and Hampstead Museum[2].

Perhaps though another true high-spot, is Schwitters’ portrait of Uhlman in the internment camp which the latter bought from Schwitters for £5 so that the Schwitters could develop his surreal and dada work such as fantastic sculptures built out of waste porridge. This portrait has to be seen – it is almost the typical Romantic scene of the young but imprisoned artist and poet, a man whose charisma is painted as a radiation of the deep romantic reds in the young face into splashes of re-pink in the walls of his confinement. A man relaxed and accepting but also yearning – asking for something from his viewer. You can see the image by clicking on the item on the page linked here. The beauty of seeing it in the present exhibition is that you may slip just yards from its locus to the room in Hatton holding the Merz Barn Wall – that ultimate symbol of exile and the lost.

I think the reason we need this exhibition, apart from the fact that it is a joy, is that it reminds us of the fickle and constructed nature of the discipline we call ‘art history’ – not only in the variability of the value judgements it makes And Uhlman is still low in that scale but in the groupings and comparisons it makes – including those descriptive of schools, movements, groups and styles. Looking at Uhlman and reading about him see constant revisions of such labels such that the labels become contradictory and confused – primitive (used sometimes to ally him to Lowry, sometimes to the African art of which he was a key collector, expressionist (he hated the German expressionists especially Kirschner but helped to save Kokoschka from the Nazis and it seems he used colour in a ‘distorted’ expressionist – or at least Nabi - manner), landscape, Romantic (Caspar David Friedrich invoked by him and others) etc.  I think the hopeful young man in Schwitters' portrait already conceals the disordered and wasted man of the later. He was after all, like the character Elsas in his fiction ‘Resurrection’, a painter and poet never destined for home but a continuing  condition of being ‘Speechless and cold, in the wind’.

What we need to see too are the drawings that marked the bravery of his politics (to the left of centre but anti-Communist), geared to the plight of the exile or refugee. We need more like him. Hatton was a special place for Uhlman we learn in the catalogue. Perhaps here there is a sort of reunion if not really. You can see the Harold Pinter Film of that novella at the Hatton next Wednesday, 8^th August 1.30pm.

Steve

Queering the Male Nude: Reading Pierre Bonnard’s Dressing Table and Mirror (image Houston Museum of Fine Arts: https://www.mfah.org/art/detail/1545.)

There has been an explosion of interest in the idea of male interiors recently[1]. This blog takes its tone from ‘queer theory’ but we need to be clear that this theory is not about the discovery of homosexual themes – hence the decision to take Bonnard as its theme, a man who showed little or no interest in any other male body than his own (but in that some significant interest). The point of queer theory is that despises the act of dividing the world epistemologically into zones of knowledge known as heterosexual and homosexual, even gay and straight, but abandons duality in the analysis of sexualities and exposes us to the latter’s complexity[2]. This is something I tried to do with Titian in a less obvious way by using the neologism ‘homosomatism’ (opens link on a new page).

Perhaps one (or even Linda Nochlin) could be forgiven for thinking that to see a Bonnard interior view, especially his late bathroom scenes, is to see the female body objectified, but that seems an incredibly narrow way of looking at Bonnard’s art, whose career in painting nudes might be effectively evoked in the queering gaze of his drawings of Marthe, his wife-to-be, of the illustrations of Verlaine’s Parallèlement or of equivalent parallel sexualities in the poetry of Mallarmé[3].

In Man and Woman (1867), some critics find the presence of a full-frontal male nude problematic. Some sense that this nude, recognisably a self-portrait is divided - with the lower half-body shaded in  manner suggesting the dual nature of a faun or satyr (half-man, half-goat) (3 again). Such figures do appear in early Bonnard, although often in infantilised versions. There is also certainly distortion in this nude that might be read as perceptual and perspectival. However an elongated male upper leg is also present in Bourgeois Afternoon in the prone but clothed Terrasse senior.

In man and Woman, the long right upper-leg (to our left) may be a perceptual trick. It seems dynamically to thrust the knee into the picture-plane, and (at the same-time, to frame the frank portrayal of Bonnard’s penis. Cahn (2016:34f.) argues that such distortions are schematic in Bonnard’s ‘unlimited universe of painting which gave license to all kinds of distortion … preserving the spontaneity of his visual impressions enhanced by the inventions of his mind.’[4] The forced prominence of the semi-flaccid ‘male sex’ here is such an enhanced visual impression. The horizontal split in the male body with a lower but focally prominent bottom half is mimed in the vertical split between left and right of the picture reinforced by the frame of the mirror / screen.

And here again light contrasts with dark. With the left lighter and less ‘ashamed’ and shaded than the right, emphasising vulnerable young innocence against a more controlling and intentional agency. Similarly the upper and lower sections of the right panel have their own bifurcation of a similar kind. We could equate this enhanced (but definitely distorted) vision with contrasts like innocence and experience, female and male and thoughtless past with a post-experiential (and perhaps coital) present.

Such readings seem less fanciful in the light of Bonnard’s reading of Bergson (cited Hyman 1998:96), where memory and perception are two sides of the same process: in one we sense and lay down memory and in the other we utilise older remembered paradigms to structure the meaning of what we see. Indeed the word ‘doubles’ in the following quotation might further reinforce my sense of the fragmenting dualities of Man and woman, where memory:

I would go as far to see even the haunted doubling of Bonnard’s foot in the shape of the cast-down bed-linen behind his foot as a sign of such haunting doubles.

However this painting is early and less subtle than Bonnard was to become as he reflected on stored images of gender bifurcation and the sense of a masculinity that needed the feminine not only to prosecute its own desire but to represent it. This is why I see the ‘Dressing Table and Mirror’ 1913 as one of the most mature of his queerings of male sexuality. 

Here male embodiment is a doubly-framed object within paradigms that are conventionally read as feminine, from the domestication of animals (dog here not kittens) and airiness of blowing lace and dressing-table furniture, including beautifully doubled blooms, framing and forming one of Bonnard’s most beautiful partial nude self-portraits. In my view, Bonnard’s art deconstruct gender dualities in pictures such as these, in which he does not flinch from becoming himself the object of desire, surrounded by a vulnerability he is prepared to own.

Indeed, Bonnard’s photographs of Marthe nude are really only meaningful if we see them next to Martha’s photographs of Bonnard nude (Cogeval & Kahn 2016:190).

I am aware that this is a more suggestive hint at point-making than a fully teased-out argument. But then this is a blog. It certainly is an idea relating to the concept of ‘male interiors’ and ‘male interiority’ I’d like sometime to develop.

Steve