Personal Blogs

Group Biography? Are the stories it tells either valid contributions or good but deficient introductions to a knowledge of artistic movements? Reflecting on Sue Roe’s (2018) In Montparnasse.

Stimulated by reading Roe, S. (2018) In Montparnasse: The emergence of Surrealism in Paris from Duchamp to Dali London, Fig Tree/Penguin

Starting an Art-History qualification in your 60s, which I did last October, is a daunting process. You feel the need of props to very partial knowledge – particularly of the stuff covered by first degrees in the discipline. Hence I lapped up Sue Roe’s In Montmartre covering Parisian Modernism (mainly through Picasso and Matisse). When her third book of ‘group biography’ emerged this year, I thought that might help me in a similar way. I discovered I had missed Roe’s ‘group biography’ of the impressionists. I am reflecting now on why I don’t feel motivated to buy the latter, giving I enjoyed In Montparnasse but in a much more modified way.

I think the reason is that I feel more suspicious of the assumptions made that a ‘group biography’ can be written that illuminates beyond the barest introduction of an artistic movement. Biographies have distinct beginnings (birth and its genetic and social-psychological prequel) and ends (death and a sequel of after death interpretation) that are ideally suited to telling of one life. Since they appeared to be inextricably linked to stories of ‘individual genius, the pendulum turned against the idea of telling biographical stories of artists. It may be that the absence that this opened and the stress on the history of either or both artistic styles or themes opened a door for ‘group biography’. After all biographies are fun: they retell stories that have the value of being seen as ‘true’, however vaguely ‘unreal’. But nowhere is this concept of the ‘group biography’ really defined in a way that can be validated in reading. The two of Roe’s works I’ve read are ‘group’ biographies in as much as they focus, at least notionally, on one geographical place within Paris.

And these formal boundaries are helpful perhaps in limiting the range of our interest in such diverse personages as form our ‘groups’. But they don’t altogether work. Montparnasse is only partially the focus of the latter book, and much less so than Montmartre was in the earlier book. Dali’s life-story in particular (perhaps Gala Eluard/Dali too) strain the biographical limits set by the title, neither being defined by Montparnasse in same way as Picasso was by Montmartre.

So I found this book stimulating but was conscious of lots of gaps – not least in the ability to compare Roe’s descriptions of artworks with a visual reproduction thereof. The selected illustrations are sparse and tend not to be the ones she writes about with most interest as turning points. I found it too difficult to follow all of the artists with collections of reproductions by my side but found that invaluable with Max Ernst, about whom the Montparnasse book is, in my view, most interesting. However, I reflect that I perhaps found it more interesting because I followed up the reference to each picture – coming across works I hadn’t known that seem to me, as they do to Roe, really boundary-breaking. If not the greatest picture I felt this most strikingly about Ernst’s ‘Madonna Chastising the Infant Jesus in front of three witnesses’. Here a mix of a mock Madonna and a Pieta, told me much about the satiric take on both great Italian Art and the assumptions about the value of punishment in Catholicism. Christ seems to fall off of a capacious knee from the anticipated force of the Madonna’s oncoming spanking blow.

Otherwise I got too much rather racy story with all the limitations that involves. Given this is a group biography of artists in Montmartre who also saw the emergence and merging of Dada and surrealism, it is hard to justify telling the story of the short gay affair between Dali and Lorca (in Spain after all entirely) except for the frisson it allowed. If you are really to tell that story, you needed to do it by contextualising the role of ideas of gender and sexuality across the group, including the practiced homophobia of Breton into which Dali bought. It is all so much more complex – but that goes not only for individuals but also groups. Look to Whitney Chadwick’s (2017) book on ‘Women and Surrealism’ and you see the absences immediately especially of the feminist and lesbian-feminist and bisexual-feminist strand that gives the fuller picture, queered in a way that is less selective than Roe’s narrative[1].

Thus Chadwick tells us of Jacqueline Lambda Breton and her support of surrealism through a love-match (André Breton left behind) with Frida Kahlo. There is also the wonderful story of Claude Cahun and her anti-Nazi life-time female partner (the theme of a great novel this year by Rupert Thomson – a novel so good, it failed to even be glanced at by this year’s eccentric Booker judges) told by Chadwick. These stories get left to the specialist feminist art-historians, but Lorca’s does not (235ff). What is the effect? It is rather homophobic in itself in its rather witty denigration of Lorca’s feelings. Dali, referring to the end of their sexual encounters, tells Lorca to find, she says:

My own feeling is that we don’t need this except as yet another salacious story of oddity. Yet ‘oddities’ (well queerness in general) was abundant in Montparnasse had Roe looked seriously at Chadwick’s pioneering work on lesbian-feminism. It would have deepened and made less prurient I think the story underlying surrealism to include this stories, which, at least in part, touch on Montparnasse gatherings.

Of course biography is selective but in ‘group biography’ the effect of selectiveness is akin to a much wider bias in the account required of themselves by past ‘artistic movements’. What we need is a ‘queer art-history’ of surrealism – one that selectively undercuts joyful recreations of misogynistic stories about Breton, Eluard and Duchamp and that takes Breton’s interest in Marx and Freud seriously (and Dali’s almost fascistic rejection thereof). The role of Etienne de Beaumont might then be more than a colourful story of men who drag up.  

Roe’s version of why surrealism might be important to us now (254) is barely comprehensible, since it both seems to prefer the original surrealists to contemporary conceptual art and to rely on a far too vague rationalisation of what surrealism did – which is presumably to delve into the ‘unconscious’. We can’t use that term in the same way Dali and Breton did as Roe admits but contemporary artists now have the discoveries of neuropsychology to help them re-specify the ‘unconscious’ whilst enabling a re-evaluation of Freud (against those old-fashioned cognitive psychologists). They are not merely dependent as conceptual artists (art povera onwards) on the surrealist as pioneers - they have new contexts of thought and social being and should be treated as having such.

 [1] Chadwick, W. (2017) The Militant Muse: Love, War and the Women of Surrealism London, Thames & Hudson.

Wrestling with an Angel – Reflecting on Kauffman, J-P. (2003) [trans. Clancy, P.] Wrestling with the Angel: The mystery of Delacroix’s Mural London, Harvill Press.

Kauffman’s book is categorised as Art History and I went to it to widen my interest in the motif or icon of Jacob’s wrestle with the Angel. I found a book that certainly illuminates the creative process and justifies seeing it as a ‘trial’ in the life of an artist, but it matters more as an account of how and why artistic motifs attain their interest. Andrew Motion, reviewing the book in 2003, identified the wrestle, as interpreted by Kauffman’s mix of autobiography, research and reflection, with a dual self. One, by some form of emotional attachment, unites body and ideal ego whilst the other sees a struggle between them[1]. Although I would not claim that there is any necessity for spiritual ambiguity in any other reflective viewer of art in their attention to the struggle Kauffman finds in himself, there is I think much that is worth attention.

My own interest in the motif came from coming across a particular 13^th Century (in the ‘Trebizon Empire’) Byzantine fresco (a lunette in the outward wall of the inner walls of the North Porch of Aghia Sophia) to which I was attracted by a book by Anthony Eastmond[2]. Eastmond argues that the tripartite icons of this lunette – including Jacob’s dream of the ladder, the wrestle with the Angel and Moses at the Burning Bush are all pre-figurative Old-Testament types in Byzantine thought of the Theokotos (that which bears God – the Virgin Mary).

I found lots of evidence for this but nothing to explain the particular composition of the lunette, particularly of the centrality in which the Angel’s head, face and halo is placed. Had the lunette been complete, it is likely that that face would be immediately under a representation of God the Father. I read a lot which showed that the classical features of that face are more to be expected in the thirteenth century when another return to classical Greek and Roman models was facilitated, particularly under the Comnenian rulers restored at Trebizond.

The beauty of the Angel’s face cannot be explained alone though by classical modelling. That scultural head belies a body that transfigures into the very landscape the figure slips behind, such that Jacob’s knee is pressing upon the representation of mountain (the porphyry rock of Christ and the Comneni) and river (the green which represents the flow of life). Yet our Angel if celestial and of earth is also viscerally embodied as he fights flesh to flesh, his hand seeking the thigh on which he will wound Jacob.

The hand seeking Jacob’s thigh has visibly pulled up the celestial blue dress of Jacob, enabling the show of classical folds in cloth that stress irregularity within regularity, another mark of classicism.

If the angel is or figures Christ, which some readings of the Greek Pentateuch allow (I won’t bore you with the evidence), then this might explain how love in the body is seen as double: as an agon (struggle against mere embodiment) and active seeking of closer attachment (that uses and shows itself in the contact of bodies).

But all of this is not offered as anything but speculation. What I wanted to illustrate is that Kauffmann will never be alone in finding mystery in the motif. He too explores the mix of antagonistic body and the erotic, something he explores by comparing Delacroix’s use of the motif with that of Rembrandt (121f.).

Yet whatever else comes from that comparison, and Kauffman brings out much, neither picture is composed in the same way as the lunette (as a compositional arrangement of iconic figures) nor as each other – Delacroix’s picture is, as Kauffman discovers as if a discovery, is really a picturing of trees that dwarf the human, even when it struggles with the divine, whilst Rembrandt’s central mix of bodies emphasise touch as tenderness when the world seems most antagonistic.

In Gauguin, struggle is the stuff of mere animal joy – a point I can’t fail to see when I compare the dancing cow with the beast of 4-legs made by the wrestlers. We needn’t see this as reductive. In Gauguin flesh takes wings. I sense something of this in more symbolist treatments of the motif, especially Odilon Redon.

I think I’d like to explore all this – but will I? I doubt it. To write here is merely to mark the joy just looking and reflecting allows – it’s a relief from the academic and shouldn’t be offered as anything other than playful struggle with the materials of art. But sometimes play feels so much more serious than art-history.

I see something of this in Kauffmann too – despite his greater scholarly depth than anything here – a need to play outside the prisons that confine us. In one of my favourite versions, that of Salvator Rosa, that prison is the inexorability of time and mutability itself

Art, Life, and Relationships, and Meaning & Form: Reflecting on the play between words & conjunctions – on Rauschenberg as ‘made up’ by relationships and thoughts about them.

This is a somewhat playful reflection that stems from an unfulfilled desire to comprehend something about the art of Rauschenberg and the means we use to arrive at our understandings. It is playful because I sense that, in the end, all the understandings I have thus far about Rauschenberg reveal more about my own motivations and drive to know.

I became fascinated by the idea of Rauschenberg from an essay by the openly gay critic, Johnathan Katz, about the ways in which his ‘intimate partnership’ (in which ‘intimate’ almost here takes the meaning of ‘relatively secreted’) with Jasper Johns. [1] The essay (pioneering for the date of its original publication) uses the facts of the 6-year long relationship between the painters to link their work to some of the necessities of self-expression of ‘relationships’ that were still often marginal to social norms, covert (because illegal and/or considered socially shameful) and nevertheless urgent to be acknowledged. This leads to ‘coded’ patterns in Katz’s view that run through the work but in both cases, in his view, lose their urgency of self-revelation in both artists after their social divorce.

The latter point is I think very doubtful, particularly in the case of Rauschenberg, whose art is surely the product of multiple and often contradictory motivations and meanings. Indeed I think that may go for how the idea of ‘relationships’ were determined for him, even those between art and his life-choices, his formal innovations and the meanings which both synthesise and fragment within them. Yet I love Katz’s boldness. For here critique is also a political agenda which forces the meaning of gay relationship to the fore and queers conventional relationships between words and signs.

However, we need to be less married to secrecy as the drive to research in art with a gay theme and look to the more public issues that socially non-validated (and invalidated)  relationships bring to the  surface. For that (I dread to hear myself say it) we may still need good art history and, alongside it, better knowledge and use of that knowledge with regard to biography. As I read – I need to read more but I moved on to Bonnard now – I sense that locating the issue with Johns and the validation of couples is too easy and too tied to easy romantic paradigms. Better to step back to Rauschenberg’s first serious gay relationship and that which broke his marriage and family (severing him from his son, Christopher) was that with Cy Twombly. And we’ll see that this too was a relationship in which drive to art was synthesised with sexual and emotional and social reconfiguration in Rauschenberg’s life.

Good art historians cope with this. Krĉma (2016:14f.) shows how and why Rauschenerg’s art sometimes drives us to allegoric and/or symbolic clusters of meaning between the signs so apparently randomly arrayed in his art and other times fragments this meaning[2]. He ties this in particular to readings related to male sexuality but again rather tiredly ends up by relating this to the coupledom with Jasper Johns. Of course the preceding relationship with Cy Twombly never really added up to coupledom and that is why I think writers tend to focus on the former over the latter because the latter is less an already given pattern of social meaning.

However, my own feeling is that Rauschenberg’s dialogues with art and patterns of meaning precisely to figurate emotional and physical drives that aren’t easily patterned. I suspect that is why his major work will remain the 34 illustrations, gifted posthumously to MoMA, he did for Dante’s Inferno, since these query a large and influential authoritative source of allegoric practice that yearned (despite the implicit multiplicity of allegoric modes – saying something by narrating another thing) to unity. Here he could identify with the soul/sole of the foot-sore ‘sodomites’ in Canto XIV running forever over burning sand and mark his own appearance in the illustrations with an imprint (blood-red) of the sole of his own bare foot).

So the best reading I came across does read relationships more complexly in a way that shows that all relationships are ‘queer’ (meaning not easily codable in non-sentimental ways) such as father-son relationships and those in love and in art  and between love and art. And that is because he queers the relationship between reading form and meanings. This ‘best reading’ is in Chapter3 of Thomas Crow’s wonderful book on the origins and history of Pop Art.[3] It is of the wonderful sculptural art-object (Untitled c.1954), usually known as ‘The Man in a White Suit’ (Crow 2014 56ff, 68ff). 

Crow makes the point that Rauschenberg’s allegoric borrowings accrue meaning bi-temporally across his career. He sees this work as, with others, elaborating – as part of his disassociated armoury, the story of the Fall of Icarus, a story of art, love, hubris and fall. To me too it rings of the motif of the ‘gentleman-caller’ from Tennessee Williams (1944) The Glass-Menagerie, a story of ill-patterned and unfit codes of heterosexual and non-heterosexual desire. I won’t elaborate this here but happy to if asked.

As part of the images semi-associated with the theme are remnants of marks that became borrowed for this work under the rubric of ‘LOVE’ (see the detail) on 68f. that diagonally juxtaposes on either side of a found image of male despair, markings from a note to Rauschenberg from son Christopher (‘I hope you still like me Bob cause I love you. Please wright me Back love love Christopher’) and some typical scribble marks of Cy Twombly with their suggestive phallocentrism.

The reading is really rich and needs to be taken in the context given to it by Thomas Crow (a great art historian) and I can’t summarise its richness of content and analysis here (it goes over many pages in Crow’s chapter) but I do recommend it. It brings the art work into some kind of arena in which it can begin to be understood partly and appreciated more fully. It is the only thing I’ve read that has dome more than just intrigue me.

But of course, it has set off more interests. I’m looking at Cy Twombly but still working to know if and how if so one ‘understands’ the squiggles and free-flow drawings, the mix of textuality and visual form and the meaning of his classicism s link to photographic appropriation. But Bonnard calls. Now here is a really interesting painter, where there is much debate about what it is we see and feel when he paints!

All the best

Steve

Making Choices or having them made for you: Reviewing Anuradha Roy (2018) All the Lives We Never Lived London, Quercus, Maclehose Press

This novel deals almost entirely with the issue of ‘life-choices’ (in the glib contemporary language of half-thought). It queries whether we, any of us, ever make choices and the consequence of so doing – particularly of those roads not taken as well as ‘lives never lived’. But it is neither glib nor simple-minded about choice and its determination to follow through the effects of how a particular choice gets made – contingent upon accidents (the effect of being late from school on one particular day) determinations from the past, culture, effects like gender and, of course social power (not least that exerted by money) and so on – to its ends however mixed.

In this novel people who identify with the choices they make, even at the expense of chances to revise such choices and reliance on the fictions we tell ourselves about our intentions (to reconnect with one’s son for instance), are tragic figures who get bound into – imprisoned indeed - in these choices. To emphasise this Roy combines factional and fictional lives. The two central choosers respectively being Walter Spies and Gay are both imprisoned - both embrace that choice in almost existential self-determination. In both cases however, their fate is determined more by the power of how they are constructed by others and the power of those people’s fictionalising. The analysis of how Spies as a gay man became constructed and then punished as either a German spy (not possible) or a paedophile (a story still peddled on Wikipedia) is extremely moving but also subtle.

Readers will be divided I believe (between themselves and perhaps intrapersonally) by the scene in which Spies lies down with the narrator-hero as a very young boy, in which half-formed and inarticulate ideas of threat mingle with issues of belief and trust that are so endemic to an engaged reading of fiction.

The ‘non-fictional’ characters could not really have been believable in fiction one feels sometimes – Walter Spies (with that enigmatic second name), Margaret Mead, Beryl de Zoete, Arthur Wailey were all exceptional people – cushioned by power and a bourgeois background, they were brought up to believe in their right to choices that eventually narrows into stoic defiance of the conventional world as they age. I find Roy’s complex readings of that quite convincing. That is because these existential choices are often treated with irony – moments when the reader is asked to see that choice as somewhat tarnished by a lie, as when Walter takes a young very beautiful Indian young man on as an assistant in his research and sometimes has to ask him to stay overnight to complete his tasks. This is all so wittily done through the eyes of a 7 year old.

Gayatri is a wonderful character not least that she is examined through the eyes of, and thoughts about her son, whom she never quite tells the truth about. A key moment is her refusal of a frank offer from Spies to pay for his passage to her from India to Bali. Her refusal is given reasons but the book is as much about ‘the reasons we never gave’. For after all, with her son, Gayatri may never have become the autonomous young woman she was. But are there other reasons she refuses being bound to Walter in the matter of her son. They aren’t articulated but then so much isn’t in this novel – whose emergent complexity is that between what we can say and to whom and when. Sometimes we cannot say things even to ourselves, lest we contradict the most important things we want to believe about ourselves. Gayatri is a staunch articulator of faith in Spies being altogether a harmless person.

And Gay is deliberately tragically wrong about Indian politics, which can’t be mediated around her feelings about her husband, however inadequate we are shown this man of surface contradiction to be. Our narrator hero too is more than half-fiction. From the beginning he is constructed as Dostoevsky’s ‘idiot’, Myshkin and throughout referred to by this name. He is inevitably linked to Spies – in his interests in plants and insects, his blindness to a world of the mass-movement of peoples in wars and ‘Partitions’ – and, as in no other novel I have read, I have felt in this one both the longing to depoliticise the ways we see the world in the face of a too abstracted politics and the exposure of this longing, once it becomes a choice, exposed to the fact that to its maintenance as a ‘life-style’ choice is tragic. It is the choice of someone who stoically goes down with ship, encaged but singing, as Spies does. Beautiful though and maybe in the world of the tragic metaphysic of humanism that is enough.

In my view this is a monumental novel. No doubt though to be displaced from where it belongs on the Booker shortlist by some intelligent cognitively-led literary ragbag blockbuster from the States. But I hope not!

Steve

Fables for the age: The ambition of Tim Winton’s (2018) The Shepherd’s Hut London, Picador.

I read every word of Tim Winton as it falls (in the UK) from the press. This novel reads like a fable addressed to the largest domain of meaning to which the novel can aspire. In form it is a bildungsroman in the voice, and perhaps the imagined pen, of Jaxie Clackton, and is set in a world in which authenticity and authority of identity has lost its meaning just as are Goethe’s Young Werther, or Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Like both it utilises myth – here Ned Kelly. Like both characters the august meanings of names like ‘mother’ and ‘father’ have lost their meaning through failures to enact the role, either from active violence (as in Jaxie’s father) or failure of courage and autonomy (in his mother). This is not a context in which three central metaphysical questions can be answered: ‘Where was I?’, ‘Who was I?’ and ‘What was I?’ These questions can be posed and may even be answered, although deliberative not with cognitive but with a more embodied clarity, until near the novel’s end (264).

Jaxie ends the novel still seeking romantic validation of himself though his love for a girl who first showed love and sexual experience to him. For most readers, however, I suspect that this ongoing quest has little or no reality next to what he achieves though his relationship in the novel with the old man, who talks copiously to himself to distract from severe tinnitus, named Fintan. With him the slow process of trust-building, lest he might too be an abusive father (‘a pedo’), happens when he sets up home with him in a ‘shepherd’s hut’ through the most complex turns of circumstances in the narrative. ‘Father’ Fintan is a God-forsaken Irish priest, who is still searching for that event, that action, in which God might appear to him beyond the beautiful illusions offered by the air over a dried salt-lake. These remain mirages but become the metaphors that that help form the central moment of self-seeing in the novel. And the senses engaged are multiple – most noticeably ‘smell’ and its meaning.

What Fintan and Jaxie find (and eventually see) in the most pregnant and significant exchange of glances is the meaning of ‘sacrifice’ but it would spoil things for readers to say how or why in any detail, since this novel, like most symbolic allegories lives on many self-sufficient levels of meaning:

This novel reminds me most of Dirt Music but it is so much more haunting – as a story and not just in key passages of the most miraculous writing and contrasting generic shifts. The haunting presence of Australian history is felt through the shifting meanings, tied to mirage and ‘illusory’ visions of all kinds of the landscape around a salt-lake, a source of preservation for mere meat at one level (he goes there to seek a means of keeping his ‘kill’ of wildlife better) and at another the meanings given it by its native inhabitants in white Australian pre-history and the history of exploitation in mining thereafter. Modern Australia has no ‘dreamings’ like these – perhaps the latter are just the product of cannabis which plays its part in the history, as a sad version of how and why illusion must be sought whilst in the void of contemporary meaning where there is no God or substitute thereof. Yet the novel itself bears the weight of a second coming and a resurrection: where ‘you are in your beginning, and here am I near my end. (135)’

Meanwhile the ways in which that search for, and simultaneously conceal, meaning (in and out of books and Fintan is a reader) is conveyed – in the inquisitive looks of a ‘curious fella’ (128) that both throw at each other - are just as remarkably realised (and yet full of the everyday) in writing as it is possible to make them.

Sharing of looks alone can reveal and conceal meaning. Once a meaning is recovered (as it is in the novel), we know it may not last. However, what we do know is that Jaxie holds onto Fintan’s books. Hence the fabulous nature of this novel. A metaphysic of deep and central meanings is merely hinted by exchanges of looks, smells, touch (but rarely touch) and sound – remains elusive except that the reader help build it too (as in all of the best writing?

Over to you!

‘Whatsay?’ You’ll find this quotation at lots of lovely places.

All the best

Steve

Rough translation: reviewing Leila Aboulela (2018) Elsewhere Home London, Telegram

In ‘Pages of Fruit’, the last story in this collection, Aboulela’s narrator goes to the Edinburgh International Book Festival to meet an author of whom she is an avid reader and fan-letter writer. The result is disappointment: ‘You’ve never read a single word I’ve written.’ (203).

This examination of the relations of power and relative empathy of reader and writer – not always to the advantage of the ‘writer’, in as much as this is an adopted persona or role – is very central to this most sensitive of writers about the role of written text in the interactions between people. Reading is an activity in which her characters engage very fully and which become part of their development. Although the same can be said of Austen and Flaubert, in both reading is the source of error – a way of over-interpreting the world writing represents in favour of a more sober reality to which readers become subjected – of a power beyond the reader to which the latter cannot aspire. Not so Aboulela, whose fiction has championed sensitive reading as an access portal to the world sometimes more reliable than that won by writers. This is the theme of her wonderful early novel, The Translator, in which the control of idiom is very much in the hands of a reader who inhabits text, sometimes more fully than an author. Seeking validation to stay with the writer she translates, her narrator …:

The world of the reader in ‘Pages of Fruit’ too is a fuller world than its bearer acknowledges and richer in meanings than the ‘writer’ is capable of appreciating: “‘This is the Authors Tent’, you said moving away not to join a group or to be claimed by someone else.” (203)

I am reading Aboulela’s current short story collection as a self-preparation of myself to visit the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Although I don’t intend to copy the  enthusiasm of the character above and to press into the ‘Authors  Tent’ uninvited, I wonder if Aboulela had witnessed the scene she recounts at Edinburgh and the view of authors as self-enclosed units it betrays in that persona at its worst as one contemptuous of the readers who make the authorship possible: like the children who presented later to this author, now a children’s writer, ‘all over the place, pretty noisy, shoving their books under your nose, elbowing each other out of the way.’ (211) This can be a pretty accurate description even of we adult readers in the book-signing queues at Edinburgh but Aboulela’s delight in that perception shines through.

But Aboulela holds readers in honour nevertheless, as do all true great contemporary writers (one thinks immediately of Ali Smith). The relationship between reader and writer in Aboulela is very like that between lovers or partners or married couples – full of dissonance and difference at the very moment they interact and co-develop either towards a fuller relationship or to complete co-severance. This theme is at its most beautiful in Lyrics Alley, a favourite novel but lies throughout these lovely stories, even the early ones like ‘Coloured Lights’. But my favourite amongst her stories is that most deep of examinations of what it means to be able to read: ‘Farida’s Eyes:’

As Ali Smith also demonstrates in her great novels, readers are the stuff of authorship and it truly belongs only in those moments when common humanity ‘reads ’ each other for better or worse, whatever the difference of languages, contextual reference, or translating interpretation, hence her empathy for short or partially sighted readers – people whose inner lives we find it difficult to understand and harder to write or author, like ‘The Ostrich’ who memorises Andalusian Islamic poetry, in this volume, or the kebab-shop  boy’s inner life (132) which we no more penetrate than we would think of intruding upon him when he is ‘sitting on the loo’ (132) or Hamid’s blindness (‘he couldn’t see her properly because he didn’t have his glasses on’) to his convert Scottish wife’s desire to read Islamic texts in Arabic (114).

The most beautiful moments of cross-reading error in this volume concern the dilemma of migration, in which there are variant ways to misunderstand not only comparative cultures but also changes in these cultures over time. Locked in response to a racism they are not meant to notice (93), some of Aboulela’s Egyptian migrants fail to see the value of their lost culture or even more interestingly that that lost culture changes more quickly than their view of it frozen in whatever form it takes in resistance to racism. Look at that beautifully sensitive reading for instance of class as a barrier to reading in, ‘The Aromatherapist’s Husband’.

Thank you Leila Aboulela. I promise not to intrude into the Authors Tent in August though.

Steve

Le Mystere Picasso: Un Film de Henri-Georges Clouzot (1958) Restored version (2018) with subtitles in English Arrow Academy Films Ltd.

I bought this DVD in London, in the National Gallery I think, on my visit this year but have only just got around to viewing it. Sometimes a film is what it says it is – a ‘mystery displayed’. This film not only shows different versions of creative process in action as it were but critically interrogates them – mainly through (especially in the reading of the film by Maya Picasso, his daughter (also on this disc)) the intervention of Picasso himself. The film used a transparent paper on which Picasso (unseen during the drawing) drew from behind the paper and thus drawing in verso. Each simple picture grows, develops, transforms – going through different stages of semi-completion until Picasso decides on a finished version. Sometimes as you watch, you feel he is moving into error only to be surprised by what is produced – not the same but somehow developed from what went before not only in style and form but meaning.

Before the end Picasso emerges from behind the screen to say that the process is superficial and the film changes into a different mode – Cinemascope – and shows the growth of painted canvases as Picasso ‘does them at home’ in his own words. The same process of development occurs – this time using paint, collage, line and colour as each phase transforms another – icons develop and mutate like the ones of the dying bull – cubist method is tried and displaced and colour enters – sometimes guided by drawn lines and other times devouring such defined forms in a major painterly decision. Now it’s a picture – says Picasso.

What a great learning experience this film is!

This version also contains Haesaerts 1949 Visit to Picasso, which illuminates the relationship of iconography, meaning and style by some stunning filming (but not as excitingly as Clouzot with Picasso was to do) and a home movie by Man Ray of a holiday with the Picassos and Paul Eluard near Antibes. No evidence of Man Ray’s mastery survives – although there are some surreal versions of what it is like to be on holiday.

One feels as though this disc allows one access – repeatable if you own a copy – to something that is indeed ‘mysterious’ but also deeply educative – even to those like me who do not aspire to paint themselves but to learn how to see again and how seeing, feeling, shape and meaning come together and can by rearrangement be metamorphosed.

Tosh very much alive: Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow

You only have to the 14^th August to see this fateful exhibition. It is fateful because during its run, the Glasgow School of Art on Sauciehall Street burned down and is currently being demolished following the result of heavy damage.

Yet the School of Art remains the star of this great show. There are two films on continuous loop showing many of the artist’s great architectural achievements but the one on The School of Art is particularly moving. The method in these films is to make a comprehensive selection of views of each architectural piece – interiors and exteriors – using drones for previously inaccessible features and aerial overviews. That the building we are shown so comprehensively no longer existed when I saw this film moved me considerably – but not all those feelings expressed loss since the record of the school, as a result of this show, lasts forever and in this show could be compared with other ways in which the architecture has been recorded and these records preserved – such as original ground-plans and exterior elevations – even perspective drawings. It makes the material that learners in art-history require to know how to read the evidence that represents a ‘building’ more fully. The show is full of strong and good case studies, including some minor reconstruction with original decoration and furnishings reproduced (it made me run straight afterwards to view the Mackintosh house in the Hunterian Gallery at Glasgow University) rather than wait for the time I’d allotted on my visit to Rembrandt’s wonderful ‘Entombment’ (still worth a longer and more curious gaze than I had then time to give it).

But the examination of glorious buildings (interior & exterior) is only a little of what is on show here. The subtitle of the exhibition: ‘Making the Glasgow Style’, pays ample attention to the artistic forebears in Aestheticism, collaborators of Tosh, not least Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, his wife, whose May Queen (1900) remains one other star of this glittering show. This work seems pregnant with a deeply ‘womanly’ understanding of the meanings, perils and pleasures of using female figures in display – stronger than Klimt with whom in the 8^th Vienna Secession Show she could have been compared – since more explicitly able to use abstract form in a manner critical of such figuration (in my view at least) and the subjection of woman to male gaze in Klimt’s versions. Jessie M. King makes a strong appearance not least because she was the peer of Tosh in book and illustrative design.

Detail of 'The May Queen' (1900) Available at: https://farm1.staticflickr.com/899/41066545742_68d41c6e51_b.jpg

The catalogue is cheap (£9.99) and a worthy representation of the richness of thematic, architectural, biographical, pedagogic and style issues, as well as paying (this is Scotland after all, remember) due attention to issues of social inequality (p.6). One feature that struck me especially was the careful attention to the precise cultural links and exchanges of persons, work-practices and ‘styles’ with Japan shortly after the Meiji restoration in 1868 and how these help us to view the aesthetic innovations of the Glasgow movement including Tosh. Seeing these helped me to see that the normal dismissal of the flattened designs of the Glasgow style as merely decorative and formal is a huge misrepresentation. There seem to be links not only with imagery but with the use of text as both collaborative, and in in itself one of, the images it works with as in Japanese woodblock portraits of both men and women. Iconography from the East (much of each admittedly correctly labelled as ‘Orientalism’) sometimes works harder than a superficial look suggests (see for instance the play between female figure and the enigmas of the design into which she becomes another rather than merely ‘other’ in Part Seen, Part Imagined 1986 (p. 28 of catalogue).

Do not delay. This exhibition is a prize. Plan to spend a long time. If you can’t go, go on the website and buy one of the modest but very beautiful catalogues. If like me, you are going into, A844 next year with the Open University (subject to success in A843) then this helps with so much that seems promised in this course in terms of examinations of ‘the image’ and of architecture and how to read it.

Steve

Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities (click to see in new window)

Lewis Mumford The City in History (click to see in new window)

Schama Landscape & Memory (click to see in new window)

Conway & Roenisch Understanding Architecture (click to see in new window)   

Elkins & Naef (Eds.) What is an Image? (click to see in new window)

Moxey, K. (2013) Visual Time: The Image in History (click to see in new window)

Boswell & Evans (eds.) Representing the Nation (click to see in new window)

Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities (click to see in new window)

Lewis Mumford The City in History (click to see in new window)

Schama Landscape & Memory (click to see in new window)

Conway & Roenisch Understanding Architecture (click to see in new window)   

Elkins & Naef (Eds.) What is an Image? (click to see in new window)

Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities (click to see in new window)

Lewis Mumford The City in History (click to see in new window)

Elkins & Naef (Eds.) What is an Image? (click to see in new window)

Moxey, K. (2013) Visual Time: The Image in History (click to see in new window)

Boswell & Evans (eds.) Representing the Nation (click to see in new window)

1. Describe which module resonated with you the most and why. What are some of the issues, ideas, or themes that particularly interested you, and how did they change or complicate your understanding of photography? Please connect your argument to specific artists and images addressed in your selected module.

I’m choosing Module 6 because it is in some ways a summation of my experience of the whole collection. Elcott (2015:318) summarises a world where innovative images are those which expose a world that has already turned into a simulacrum of itself –presented to us as a sea of photographic images, it must be treated and known as a photographic object in itself rather than a means to know a world beyond it, the ‘veridical trace of reality’. Elcott underlines this by seeing photographs as autonomous from the world as a ‘world of its own’.

Hence we have to read photographs in the light of their own manufacture, through all of the processes by which they are ‘made’. As Slifkin (2015:192) makes clear, this was always so in that view-finding, focusing and editing a photograph has always been the source of both the photograph as art, in Ansel Adams, or as a documentary manipulation of reality, in Atget. However, contemporary photographers utilise more radical manipulations, ‘created daily by the mass media’ including collage or ‘cut-and-paste, or through fragmentation and selection from the normative processes of taking an image (as in camera-less images in which objects are exposed directly to light-sensitive photographic film (as in Heinecken’s Are You Rea, 1964-8) or even when found .jpeg images are enlarged beyond their ability to show or access the illusion of an apparently undistorted world (as in Ruff’s jpeg msh01,2004).

Horvitz’s images begin from a photograph of a man role-playing (posing) as ‘depressed’ but by inviting normative internet processes through which images get re-used, and otherwise metamorphosed by context or more actively ‘edited’ in scale, colouration, orientation or admixture of other imagery, for instance, so that it does not just circulate but, as Horvitz calls it ‘propagates’. Such strategies expose the ‘deception’ or ‘artfulness’ (in its negative sense of duplicity) at the base of all photography – perhaps even the family snap, where various means are given to ‘make’ a photograph pleasing to others or self.

More intriguing still are Kruithof’s inkjet prints of empty, other than for the remnant of photo-mounting stickers, of photographs of pages of an old photograph album.  Mounted under layers of coloured glass everyday phenomena such as the reflection of viewers on their surface emphasise that images are open to contextual accidents that might determine their interpretation differently each time they are seen. Moreover, bearing the flash-bursts that expose they are photographs themselves, the associations of albums with past events such as travelling abroad or on holiday, allows these burst, which eliminate space to represent absences or gaps in memory that photograph albums always to some extent inspire and more so, in the context of their use by someone with an early dementia.

Proliferation when used to emphasise the role of art as the source of a world experienced iun endless reproductive copies can make art itself that comments on what art might, in fact, be, as in Gaenssler’s Bauhaus Staircase,2015. Here a ‘real’ staircase emulating Bauhaus design leads to a fragmented set of reproduced collages using a reproduction of an ‘original’ Bauhaus staircase in Dessau cut-and-paste with reproduced paintings of the staircase with figures by Schlemmer and Lichenstein respectively. What ‘price’ real? Indeed what is arts’s relationship to both the worlds of photography and assumptions of what is the ‘real world’. We are in already in therefore the existential phenomenological crisis of all moments of decision – what is this world on which I am intervening? Fascinating!

2. Select a photograph or a series of photographs made by an artist (someone that you don't personally know): ideally these will be prints you can view at a local museum or gallery, but if this isn’t possible you can choose a reproduction from a newspaper, magazine, or other publication. Indicate which module(s) the photograph(s) relate to. Explain why and how your choice of photograph(s) reflects key ideas from the module(s) you selected. Be sure to describe your image(s), why you selected them, and cite your sources, including the name of the person who took the photograph, date, and where you found the image.

I have selected Portrait V, 2015 © John Stezaker. Courtesy York Art Gallery and The Approach, London. Photo FXP Photography. Available at: https://www.yorkartgallery.org.uk/exhibition/paul-nash-and-the-uncanny-landscape/ (Accessed 15/06/2018). Viewed by myself first at York in 2017.

Stezaker’s work swims in ‘the ceaseless flow…that has been a consequence of mechanical reproduction, mass media and popular culture.’ (Bracewell 2010:8) However, just as Kurt Schwitters employed objects he found in his rambles and incorporated into collage, architectural or sculptural work, Stezaker (cited Stezaker et.al. 2013:110) insists the objects come to him by accident, ‘as if they had been lying in wait for me.’

Stezaker’s images are rescued from ephemeral genres: film-stills from popular-cinema and post-cards, which bear no monetary (or any other) value to any potential ‘owner’ of them in the present-day. He identifies them as ‘orphans’ (ibid.) in want of someone whose role it is especially to see and develop value within them. From acquisition and over long periods these images are developed using collage that plays with similitudes and differences between the genre and content of each image source, such that they both are manipulated to nearly-match but yet, in seeking continuity between their boundaries, merely emphasise ‘distances’ between them. This is achieved in Portrait-V by the misalignment of the female’s shoulder and absent head with substitute figures that mimic absent shapes expected by the viewer. The shoulders and neck become the lines of the steep river bank edge. The head is perceptible in the arch of the bridge through which shows foliage above a chalk bank (for hair) and the bridge coping (as hat) perhaps. Yet the images have different borders, emphasised by trees stretching upwards on the side-frames of the postcard and which emphasises that no cutting of the image has been allowed to facilitate the illusion of the woman’s pictured head. Other obvious intended discrepancies (half of the thumb on the picture’s left is occluded) emphasise edges that deliberately don’t ‘marry’ as Stezacker puts it of another image (ibid:108).

This promotes the viewer’s self-identification:

·        As agent in making the whole picture legible, where it is, and:

·        With disturbed reflections about their collusion in this act of meaning-making.

Stezacker explains these effects as ‘hesitations or reflective confrontations of this implied beholder’ (ibid). Thus, I remember recognising the implication here that this female head is represented by absence, by pictured empty space between the bridge’s sides.

Recognising that I colluding in building an image of the stereotype of the ‘airhead’ woman – even when the originals are dated, was a shock to me. It caused me to hesitate and reflect on myself emotionally and cognitively since, although the materials are dated, the collusive reconstruction is contemporary and personal and does not match my self-perception as a gay-male committed to female empowerment. This ability to include the viewer in the deceptive manipulations of self-and-other presentation is described by Stezacker (ibid.) as his images’ in-built third-person: a ‘double’ or mirror-image of the viewer (ibid.).

Bracewell (2010:8) argues that Stezacker’s images emphasise relationships between visual projection (the active imposition from within of meanings and visible signs outwards upon the perceived object) and occlusion (which looks under barriers to vision for the ‘hidden’). Hadar (2013:127f.) further identifies disturbances in self-reflection in the viewer’s inability to escape collusion in meanings they might otherwise disavow as potential within themselves.

This hints that Stezaker reinvents some of the authorial role of the photographer. Hence, Stezaker isn’t, as some photographers in Module-6 are, just emphasising formally the artifice that goes into making meaning in the world but seeing in that process a deeper concern with the nature of the subjective world we all uncomfortably inhabit. Portrait-V queries ‘vision’ itself by absenting the returned gaze of the portrayed, indeed replacing it with a potential mirror of emptiness: Stezacker says, ‘the mask is a meeting with death in the midst of the life. It is also an inscription of interior space onto the exterior, the space of the face, whilst at the same time, it hides those clues of facial expression from which we recognize the interior life of another. (Stezaker et.al 2013:101)’

Bracewell, M. (2010) ‘The Space Between’ in Stezaker, J. Tabula Rasa London, Ridinghouse in association with ‘The Approach’ Gallery, London.

Elcott, N.M. (2015) “From Darkroom to Laptop.” In Photography at MoMA: 1960–Now. The Museum of Modern Art, 2015, 316-319. Available from: https://www.coursera.org/learn/photography/supplement/sKBEX/6-10-required-readings-additional-resources (Accessed 15/06/2018)

Hadar, I. (2013) ‘Arresting Resistance’ in Landau (ed.) John Stezaker: One on One London, Ridinghouse in association with Tel Aviv Museum of Art. 120-115 (note pages in sequence run from back to front in this text)

Slifkin, R. (2015) “Reality Testing.” In Photography at MoMA: 1960–Now. The Museum of Modern Art, 2015, 192-195. Available from: https://www.coursera.org/learn/photography/supplement/sKBEX/6-10-required-readings-additional-resources (Accessed 15/06/2018)

Stezaker, J., Gallois, C. & Herrmann, D.F. (2013) ‘The Third Meaning’ in Landau (ed.) John Stezaker: One on One London, Ridinghouse in association with Tel Aviv Museum of Art. 114 – 95 (note pages in sequence run from back to front in this text)

How can multiple photographs construct a narrative that shapes our understanding of the subject matter?

Images that are juxtaposed and/or sequenced invite narrative interpretation and may suppress some of the issues connected to their relative emplacement. This can be observed even in the most ‘amateur’ arrangements, where both common ideas about the ‘subject of the photographs (perhaps ‘myself’) are conflated with selection of episodes from the life and/or images that comment upon that life, as in the example from ‘unknown photographer’ in MoMA gifted by P. Cohen.

The elements that vary the story and its emphases are also seen (more consciously intended perhaps) in art photography such as Albers storyboard on Oscar Schlemmer. The setting may range from a page or sheet of paper to a wall (Tillmans) to a book and so on. These too change meanings. Is an ‘album’ neutral? The variants include (episode refers to one photograph):

·        Relative size of the episodes;

·        Placing of episodes – top, bottom, left, right, centre, marginal, orientation of photographs (none of the examples use slanting), alignment vertically and horizontally, size of relative spaces between episodes,

·        Commonalities in episodes (Walid Raad)

·        Role of writing/text on or around images (or on back of cp. Japanese photographic postcards during Meiji period), role of multimodal images – cartoons. Including captions in museum pieces (Fletcher photographs of museum photos in Vietnam placed in USA museums). The test-case of ‘removed’ text (Willis Thomas Unbranded)

·        Number of subjects in episode. Are these animal, human, mechanical pieces, tools etc. or mixed?

·        Identifiability of background in episode – especially if no figures.

·        Disjunctions between image technique (as in Harry Callahan’s Eleanor)

·        Use of colouration – homogenous or not for a set of episodes (Mae Weems).

·        Role of fictional or roleplay elements in creation of characters (Cindy Sherman) or setting (Demand Room)

How do choices concerning the presentation of a photograph or series of photographs influence its meaning?

We could look at all of the above. What happens in each is made up complex interactions between contexts at different levels of the understanding of that word. This includes interactions between space, boundaries and other modalities of representation, including architectural ones but also the occult meanings of alignment against disorder in arrangement. All of these relationships carry unstable codes of meaning. Their instability means that the meaning received from the images in contexts may be planned but not necessarily determinative on what the images mean to the viewer. Will Sherman’s female types mean the same across all audiences irrespective of gender, ethnicity, class etc.?

The obviousness of the use of artifice (more obvious in Callahan than Demand - since in the latter we may have to search or accidentally alight on cues of such manipulations whereas double exposures in the former are obvious artifice).

The influence on meanings (I’d insist on the plural here) is not only unstable, it is also a means of linking narrative images to the aims of art in form and content, especially where our responses requires us to tap into multi-modal contexts (the meaning of advertisements, film stills, headline banners or script). I don’t feel you can be dogmatic here about effects except in that it inspires exchanges about meaning in its audiences.

One important effect however is, perhaps because of the above, to challenge stereotypical narratives about the lives of the socially marginalised or disempowered. This week they have been about ethnicity, ‘race’ and gender but sexual orientation, class and different embodiments are also implied.