Saints Alive

Today we visited the Wallace Collection, which is overpoweringly rococo and needs to make more of a fuss about the incredibly rare horse armour it casually keeps shoved at the back, and the National Gallery, and Selfridges (which needs to be smaller and contain fewer loud people) and Primark (which needs to just not).

One thing I wasn’t aware of, and I don’t know how many people were, is that the National Gallery seems to be doing an artist in residence thing and has been doing one for some time. I found that out today because we stumbled across an exhibition of Michael Landy‘s work in response to the collection, “Saints Alive”.

It was a very playful response, a series of Monty Python-esque mechanical, interactive statues which distilled the saints down into their distinguishing characteristics, although in the accompanying video detailing the process of bringing about the collection, the surprisingly personable artist cited Jean Tinguely‘s kinetic art as his other inspiration. The brainstorming designs created along the route to a giant model of (among other things) a headless St Francis of Assisi  with a funfair grabber trying to remove his innards and failing are also on display, and are what lured us in: they contain several disembodied torsos of St Sebastian, heavily peppered with additional arrows. During the queuing time (which was just long enough to discourage a couple of people in front of us) I amused myself by trying to identify all the artists who had painted the torsos that were visible through the door.

Sebastian, however, is not featured among the saints in the exhibition. Those are St Catherine of Alexandria, represented by a giant torture wheel (which can be turned by the visitors to allow them to read all of the inscriptions); St Apollonia, who yanks out her own teeth with pliers when the visitor stands on a pedal; St Francis features twice, once in headless fairground form and once as a violent self-harmer, beating himself in the face with a crucifix when a visitor puts money in his collection tray; St Jerome, who is headless and graced with an abdomen made of wheels, beats himself on the chest with a stone in response to the press of a pedal; St Thomas the Doubter jabs the disembodied torso of Jesus so violently with his disembodied hand that Christ (who is mounted on a spring) was Out of Order when we got in around 6pm. Hopefully he will be back to bouncing about soon. The installation called “multi-saint” is a confusing mass of saintly influences, including St Lawrence’s griddle, St Lucy’s eyes, St Peter Martyr’s head, and St Michael’s feet. The midriff contains several wheels, one of which was apparently St Catherine’s: it is less concrete and more randomly violent than the others.

I would say that on its own the exhibition was good fun, entertaining and mildly blasphemous stuff: obviously as the curator of Fuck Yeah, St Sebastian I am no stranger to interest in the saints and to a less than holy perspective on them. I found it light-hearted, charming, and unchallenging, but I think the inclusion of a video introducing the artist (who cuddled a dog throughout his pieces to camera) and the process of responding to the collection was what made queuing truly worthwhile. Understanding what brings someone to a particular conclusion and the methods they use is something which for obvious reasons doesn’t come up much in the little plaques by artwork in the gallery.

Filed under: content: real life, art, art in london, galleries, michael landy, national gallery, saints alive, wallace collection

The Profane and the Divine: Art In London

Still a little sporadic in my updating, and my current excuse is that I still have a guest staying with me and making sure she is entertained at all times means no time for blogs, Dr Jones.

Today we visited the National Portrait Gallery, which I have not been in very often, and I had a high old time finding out what various British historical figures (Walsingham, Drake*, Sarah Siddons, Blake, Dalton, Castlereagh, Johnson, Boswell, etc, etc.) actually looked like, or how they were willing to let people see them, which is not always the same thing. We pondered the interactive stations which allow you to examine the collection in context, putting paintings in a timeline and relevant to each other, giving you an opportunity to look at the archive documents related to this painter during this period of his life or that sitter and so on. It’s a bit like falling down a WikiHole, but with art and in the middle of a gallery.

As a consequence of which the Australian now knows a lot more about the abolition of slavery in the British Empire than she previously did, and I feel a lot more informed on the subjects of: Lord Castlereagh, the 1801 Act of Union which involved lopping off what little executive power the parliament in Dublin had at the time, and how delighted the artist Thomas Lawrence was by basically everything in Vienna. I read a nine-page letter by the latter in which he was effusive about his patrons and about the high society of Vienna and frankly nauseating in his sucking-up. I can’t imagine receiving a letter like that from someone I liked.

Later I had to explain to the Australian who Nye Bevan was (there was a bust of him in the gallery for the first half of the 20th century), and used the phrase “father of the NHS”, to which she replied:

“I imagine he’s doing a lot of turning in his grave at the moment.”
“That… that observation has been made a few times, yes.”

The latter half of the 20th century yielded, at least in the portraits, an unremitting stream of “no I don’t like it”, except for the large portrait of Thatcher which produced the same leap sideways of revulsion that images of the architect of my childhood starvation always has. On the other hand, being able to contrast a self-portrait of Lucian Freud with the photograph we’d seen in the earlier gallery was an interesting experience.

Before we went to the National, though, there was a much smaller gallery and the actual purpose of our visit.

At 15 Bateman Street in Soho, until the 14th of June, Pertwee Anderson & Gold are collaborating with the Museum of Curiosity on an exhibition called Memento Mori. I was sent a link to their site by a friend who is well-informed about my morbid taste in art, and we took it upon ourselves to pay a visit.

There were some marvels, like photographs of morbidity rendered in three dimensions, and a concept called painting which was peculiarly destructive and under other circumstances might have annoyed me – but under these seemed entirely right. My favourite pieces, excluding the obvious appeal of the Chapman skull, were probably a black, sparkling skull in the apparent process of detonating; a gold skull whose teeth had been replaced by dangling beaded tendrils, and the magnificent stuffed peacock in the window. The Australian professed a great love for Saira Hunjan’s work (the attendant at the gallery informed us it had been snapped up at the opening night), and a skull covered in a distressing carpet of varying sizes of pearl, until it looked as if it had some sort of very expensive illness.

As the cheapest work of art (a design for a carton of “death cigarettes”) would have set me back £50, I neglected to become a patron of the arts today. I did buy a postcard of Wilfred Owen from the National Portrait Gallery, however, so I’m going to claim that I have kept my hand in and am still supporting the frivolous and beautiful. For more on the Memento Mori exhibition and biographies of the artists, go here.

 

Filed under: content: real life, art, art in london, arts, galleries, history, london, memento mori, museum of curiosity, national portrait gallery, pertwee anderson & gold, tourism

The City and the City and the Church and the Church

Today I sat through Fast & Furious 6 for someone else, and now I am posting her photos from our trip into East central London as if they were mine, because I demand compensation for not falling asleep at any point while experiencing a selection of clichés stapled together with car chases.

Yesterday we walked around the London Museum, the Guildhall Art Gallery, and the Barbican Centre, but in between absorbing so much culture that my feet started to bleed (that’s how education works, right?) we also popped into a variety of churches: St Mary le Bow, for example, where there is currently a small exhibition of paintings, and – because the sky decided to piss water onto us – St Lawrence on Jewry, just by the Guildhall Buildings. It was entirely deserted when we went in, and we were only disturbed briefly by a cleaning lady in inspecting a certain amount of bling and passing our judgement on the saints.

This was our favourite:

 

St Mary Magdalene

We reserved our opprobrium for St Paul (“bit heavy on the homophobia”) and the Arch-Angel Michael (“boring hero dude”), and our praise for Mary Magdalene, who featured for some reason in a dream I had recently: where an imprisoned woman was giving someone a stern lecture about how Jesus loved and protected lepers and sex workers and that anyone who said prostitutes “deserved it” (the context was, unsurprisingly considering I’ve gone shitnuts for Hannibal on NBC at the moment, a serial killer who focussed as many do, on women who provide sexual relief in exchange for money) had no business calling themselves a Christian. Not a bad little lecture from my subconscious!

St Lawrence on Jewry

The church is in terms of architecture quite a modest little building, neither the gothic splendour of the cathedrals I love nor the sturdy little stone boxes I had to sing hymns in as a kid, but there are some lovely stained glass windows and some nice wood carvings and the organ pipes are BLINGY AS FUCK.

Stay tuned for further adventures in a city I have been living in for eleven years, in which I reduce centuries of art and culture and technological progress to phrases like “blingy as fuck”.

Filed under: content: real life, churches, city of london, culture, london, st lawrence on jewry, tourism

Irn Man and the land north of the border

I have been on a brief holiday. Contrary to my usual criterion for holidays, I deliberately visited a city I knew full well to be made out of rain, hills, wind, and friendly people, all of which are anathema to me. I am more in the field of hot weather, cloudless skies, flat places, and people who fail to acknowledge my existence unless I am drowning or threatening them with a gun.

No you do really want to know what I did on my holidays, and if you don’t, bear in mind that the only news I have outside of this is that I went to Vauxhall City Farm last week and touched a pig.

I wasn’t joking.

Because both myself and the certifiable lunatic who wanted to go on holiday to “Scotland” in the first place (I wrestled her down from “Scotland” to merely “Edinburgh”: she is from Australia and doesn’t understand that inhaling lungfuls of midges and getting hypothermia are Scottish Summer Activities) are somewhat deficient in drive, we did not end up doing most of the things we vainly insisted we were going to. My friends in Edinburgh, who are all terrible people who should be ashamed of themselves, did not help with our loosely-held determination to experience culture and the zoo:

• “We’re just going to walk to this bar…”
• “It’s not far…”
• “I thought we could probably get a little bit drunk.”
• “Oh, don’t bother going inside the castle, it’s expensive.”
• “THERE’S THIS PLACE THAT DOES A REALLY NICE [insert food here]“.

Things we did succeed in doing:

• Cocktails, at Bramble (corner of Queens Street aaaaaaand one of the other streets. I’m good at directions), and at the Rose Leaf. These are a certain distance apart which, for some reason, we walked in a significant amount of rain. On the plus side the cocktails at both were enough to make the middle bit less traumatic. I forget what I had, but one of them was purple and one of the others had rose and chilli in it…
• Getting to Illegal Jacks on Lothian Road in time to meet some friends for lunch, where we mostly talked about food, statistics, and Lego.
• Walking alllll the way up to the castle and then deciding that, owing to having a head like a struck bell, we weren’t bothering with going in…
• … in favour of stumbling down the Royal Mile to the National Museum and prodding some DYNAMIC TAXIDERMY.
• There were also some, you know, some remains. Of pre-Roman peoples. Possibly. And some kind of suggestion that civilisation existed before the aforementioned Romans came and introduced the peoples of this fine archipelago to things like (the signs assured us): central heating, straight roads, and cats.
• Cringing with embarrassment on passing some hideously posh English tourists haw-haaawing about Trainspotting and making me want to fling myself down the remainder of the steps in an attempt to distance myself from my eternally-embarrassing countrymen.
• Falling asleep in front of hotel TV while inhaling Pizza Hut because holidays are also holidays from eating like a responsible adult (see also: consuming close to own bodyweight in tablet and then crying hysterically). Accidentally inventing the hotel room cocktail of “rose and elderflower presse and raspberry vodka”.
• Taking in most of the National Portrait Gallery, which is astonishingly beautiful, and much nicer than the National Portrait Gallery for England. It also has fun things you can do, and Billy Connolly singing things, and currently has Annie Lennox singing things, and really, the one in London does not have anyone singing anything at all and it also doesn’t have phrenological plaster casts of people described as “female idiot” (or portraits of [insert female hate figure here and chortle to yourself at your own wit]), so frankly: advantage Edinburgh.
• Attending very briefly a trilingual (English, Polish, and Latin) Catholic Mass, from which my heathen companion (whose experience of organised religion is almost non-existent) almost ran screaming and foaming. Apparently mass bears a rather closer resemblance to impending death, which I suppose is appropriate considering most religions exist to help humanity to deal with the reality of our inevitable mortality. I intend to spend the rest of the Heathen Australian’s visit casually informing her you’re going to die at the least appropriate junctures.
• Most important: causing accidental noisy delight in some passing young men as we struggled to break into a plastic bag full of soor plooms on a bench in St Andrew’s Square. The yelp of awwwch, soor plooms was an unexpected response, to be honest. Being nominally “from” London (I’ve lived here since 2001) I tend to assume that the response of anyone not from London to my actual existence in their home is liable to be somewhere between contempt and violence…
• Speaking of contempt, we ended our stay with a truly contemptible meal at some pub which served food made of lies. I have erased the name of the place from my memory, but stand ye warned: it was on Rose Street, and it had root vegetables farmed in the Paleolithic Era and a rabbit pie made of of the kind of rabbit that goes “cluck” and lays eggs.

My review of Edinburgh is that it is a fine, fascinating waterlogged mountain to which I will no doubt return: my review of the intervening landscape between the capital of England and the capital of Scotland is that there is far too much of it and that most of it is entirely unnecessary.

Filed under: content: real life, writing, humour, holidays, travel, travelogue, travel writing, edinburgh, scotland, vacation

30 Things I’ve Learnt In 30 Years

Shamelessly ripping off Ian Martin’s 60 thoughts about turning sixty:

1. Adulthood does not preclude laughing at puerile jokes about bums.
2. If you need to find your friends in a crowded place, shout “BUTTSEX” as loudly as humanly possible. The people not staring at you like you’re mad and in fact desperately trying to pretend they have neither seen nor heard you are the ones you’re looking for. Sooner or later they will relent, and you will be able to find them by listening for the answering cry of “BUTTSEX”.
3. As a woman, turning thirty is a blessing, because you are now officially dead. I believe this is also true of gay men (last time I checked in with a colleague about this he informed me that you were Gay Dead by twenty-four): it means you are now officially On The Shelf and can be as laid-back and disinterested in the struggle to Look Foxy as you like, and also gives you carte blanche to sneer at anyone still trying.
4. If you eat it at breakfast time, it’s breakfast.
5. “Breakfast” is a time defined as “the first meal you eat after waking up”.
6. The best thing to do on falling down a flight of stairs is to laugh, and then assess whether or not you can stand up. Laughing helps soothe the pain, stops you from looking like a sourpuss, and means people are more likely to help you up.
7. There is no point in pretending to like something for the sake of engendering acceptance: people need variety amongst their friends, and if that’s having one friend who doesn’t give a damn about purple, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Virginia Woolf, or Cherry Coke, that’s somewhat better than having one friend who thinks slavery wasn’t such an awful idea.
8. You also don’t have to argue the intellectual merits of something when you like it because it’s mindless guff that hits your buttons. I’ve had a lot of conversations which run along the lines of “BUT HOW CAN YOU LIKE THAT” recently, but I can assure you none of them were especially sincere.
9. Being your job is entirely optional.
10. Sticking raw dry spaghetti into Nutella makes a pretty nice snack.
11. The time to be angry about politics is roughly 15–25. You’ve got ten years of righteous fury in you. The problem is that this mostly doesn’t coincide with ever having the power to do anything about what’s making you angry.
12. All the anger left over after your mid-twenties turns into bitterness and sadness and makes it impossible to do anything even if you do have the power to do anything.
13. Learn about methodology and trial design, read about medicines you’re about to take for more reputable sources than the lady with the silver and purple jewellery who talks about “energy”, and do not refuse vaccines.
14. Magazines are designed to sell magazines, newspapers are designed to sell newspapers. There is no one single source of information which is infallible, especially your mum.
15. Don’t sleep with someone because you think you ought to.
16. Don’t sleep with someone because they think you ought to, either.
17. If you make a lot of something and plan to put it in the fridge or freezer and eat it all week, make a lot of something else as well so that you can alternate it, otherwise you will be sick of it by the third day.
18. For fuck’s sake, learn to drive. I didn’t and now I can’t go and raid Hay-on-Wye’s innumerable book shops with a massive van and it vexes me.
19. Don’t throw out books.
20. After a certain point in drinking, when you start to feel nauseous, it’s a good idea to stop and drink something that’s not alcoholic. You don’t have to go home, but you should probably avoid drinking anything else because otherwise it’s going to turn into one of those nights you don’t entirely remember where all the bits you do remember involve throwing up or having fights with people.
21. Whoever you vote for will disappoint you: it’s better to feel disappointed in your representatives than a kind of blind cold fury that makes you start ranting on public transport about how much better you’d feel if we could “go properly Cromwellian” or “bung their heads on spikes on Traitor’s Gate”.
22. Become known for your quirky likes and people are more likely to buy you things than if you have entirely unknown or usual likes, because the minute they see X they will associate it with you. The downside of this is that you will continue to get forty emails about bee conservation every single day of your life from people you barely talk to any more until you die.
23. So that business about taking an apple in your bag with you in case you are hungry: your mother was right. Not in the sense that you will ever while not actually in an altered state seriously consider eating that apple, but your level of disgust at that apple helps you gauge how hungry you are and whether you can make it home to eat food or whether you are going to throw money at someone to give you food or if it’s worth going to prison for capturing and consuming a small child because you are sure as hell not eating an apple that’s been in your bag for five months.
24. Famous people are basically the same as other people but more used to dealing with large numbers of people, up to a point. They will also disappoint you if you put them on a pedestal.
25. Sooner or later you will get pickpocketed so it’s a good idea not to keep anything enormously sentimentally valuable on you.
26. Learning is a lot more fun when you’re doing it for your own pleasure, but the way that gets the most out of you is when you’re doing it for your own pleasure and being graded on the results and there are twenty-odd other people to compare yourself against and compete with and decided that you have to be better than or else.
27. There isn’t actually a law against sleeping on the toilet and sometimes it’s better than dealing with the last minute rush to work.
28. If you have to sign your email or phone number up in order to get free stuff, make sure the free stuff is worth the bother of the endless marketing emails/phone calls from every company ever.
29. Always take a book, especially if you’re going to Accident & Emergency.
30. Writing a 30-point list is hard.

Filed under: content: real life, humour, life advice, lists, thirty

A Window in North London

I sat on the top deck of an unfamiliar bus, and I looked into the late stages of dusk, which were almost dark enough to be just night.

I said I would be “back by bats”, but this was a slightly optimistic promise. Bats being dusk, birds being dawn (as I expounded over a solitary cider before): there are four times of the day. Bats, birds, dark, and not dark. I sat on the bus and I plugged away through unfamiliar songs sung with familiar voices, or quoth the less poetic: a new album by a band I already liked. Comfort in the same old things.

In the dark the windows are like rectangular eyes. It’s not a new observation: houses look like faces, windows let you see inside. On the top deck of a bus there’s always the chance you’ll see something dramatic or strange inside a room where the curtains aren’t drawn: on the way back from Camden, one afternoon, a girl of maybe ten or so wedged up against the glass, behind the curtain, reading something with a lurid cover and her hand pressed over her mouth at an uncomfortable angle (snap). From a train, some years ago, the memorable sight of a teenage foursome disintegrating into a naked crying girl, a comforting naked girl, and two naked teenage boys looking nervous on the other side of the room (snap).

This time, somewhere between Seven Sisters and Wood Green: a woman and a girl, by a window that has no curtains, with their backs to the road in some kind of grim discussion with a woman standing at the door. The room walls are bare. The bus moves on but the image is stuck: so many people live their life in one room, and once I thought I would too.

White walls, white ceiling, no art, no hangings, no nothing. You sit and you sit and you sit and you sit, and you have nothing to do but think and eat carefully-spaced-out and measured meals. The room becomes claustrophobic, so you go out. But you don’t have any money and you don’t have anywhere to go, so you walk around your immediate neighbourhood until you’re tired, and you sit on a bench until you’re cold, and then you sit and you sit and you sit, then you sleep. And you sleep.

Over and over, for a whole lifetime. One room or another. I couldn’t stop myself thinking: how many potentially wonderful voices are drowned out by sitting, and sitting? How many artists and scientists and nurses and soldiers and comedians and revolutionaries sit, and sit, and sit, and never become more than a sad stain on a lonely carpet somewhere beyond a window in any given city in the world? How much are we missing out on as a culture, as a species? What life-changing thoughts are stored away and never given form because it’s cold or it’s dark and there’s one room with four white walls and overdue rent, everyone tucked away in lonely little pigeonholes, starving slowly to death?

Filed under: content: real life, content: snippets, i don't know how to tag this one

The difference between impassive and apathetic

As I mentioned when I wrote my fish post, sometimes when I check what search terms have brought people to this blog I find certain phrases coming up a lot. Often they’re useful directions  - people looking for a specific Francis Bacon painting which I wrote about, or trying to find reviews of the sadly-neglected A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia. But sometimes they’re things I haven’t quite answered myself, and I know how frustrating it is when Google won’t pony up the goods you need and you end up on some blog that’s making it harder to find your answers by clogging up the search results with posts that contain all the individual words of your query but nothing helpful.

“the difference between impassive and apathetic”

And variations thereon have shown up enough times that I feel honour-bound to address the question. Also, I like splitting hairs about the connotations of individual words and that’s how I managed to get a disproportionately high rank in language skills despite communicating like a monkey with a head injury most of the time.

 

• impassive.

 

An impassive entity is one which isn’t swayed by external entreaties, and may appear to be unmoved emotionally. While this would be traditionally applied to people, it can be stretched without much effort to cover cliff faces, animals, and anything else that takes brief anthropomorphising well. The key to impassivity is that while the impassive entity may perfectly capable of stirring his or her self should they so wish, responding with passion and ire and activity, they are not demonstrating any in response to external pressures. They are, very much like our cliff face, stony and unmoved, perhaps constitutionally or perhaps merely because of the shitness of someone’s suit. The point is, your impassive fellow is not giving up any of their “feels” where you can see them; they have a good poker face. (There is the secondary definition of “impervious to suffering”, including the infliction of their own).

• apathetic.

Now your apathetic entity, who is probably either a teenager or having a bad case of responding like one, is someone who just doesn’t care. They’re not walling up some potentially girthy emotional response behind self-control, they’re devoid of fucks to give. Not only are they unmotivated to feel, they’re unmotivated to act. They have no preference, and cannot be swayed by pathos (appeals to the emotions) because their emotions just don’t want to know. It’s less a case that they have a good poker face and more the case that they don’t give a tinker’s cuss if they win or lose: they’re not concealing anything, there is simply nothing to conceal. In fact, the apathetic entity is entirely likely to make no efforts to hide their absence of monkeys given. Apathethic is closer to indifferent than impassive is.

impassive means y’all don’t know how someone feels, apathy means y’all probably do know that they ain’t give a fuck. 

(For the none of you whom I’m sure actually care about this, the reason these two very similar terms co-exist in English is that they have their roots in different languages. Impassive, as I’m sure is obvious, derives from the Latin passivus, while apatheia passes through Latin but begins with Greek).

Filed under: content: essay, adjectives, dictionary, english language, grammar, lexicon, words, writing

100 Works of Art: (Aural) Crow on the Cradle, Sydney Carter

The 100 Works of Art blog series is to do with personal interaction with beloved works of art rather than impartial reviews or focussing solely on the relatable and universal qualities of the work. Because this is a blog, not a book. The first 25 are to do with visual art, and begin with Matta’s Black Virtue; the next 25 will be about aural art and begin with The Cure’s Let’s Go To Bed.

29. Crow on the Cradle, Sydney Carter & Jackson Browne

I grew up on a mixture of folk music and a little of the blues. My mother had what my peers characterised as “terrible” taste in music, and I adopted it: as I’ve got older her taste in music has become genuinely terrible (there was a point where it was all whale noise and Gregorian chant and then as I got into plainchant she managed to undercut me again and asked if I’d get her a James Blunt CD) and I’ve decided to ignore the judgement of a collection of Celine Dion-reared rejects from my childhood and embrace the inner folkie. A lot of the songs I listened to as a child were standard-issue folk music about girls with this or that coloured hair or one particularly brilliant song about an enormous pie - the title of which I’ve never been able to remember, to my great loss. But a lot of the songs, too, were protest songs: other contenders for this slot included Country Joe & The Fish’s Fish Cheer/I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag, a selection of Donovan songs including Universal Soldier, and the Fureys & Davey Arthur’s version of The Green Fields of France. Not surprisingly for someone who was taken to an anti-nuclear weapons protest at six weeks old, I grew up listening to various earnest people – both with and without beards and dungarees – requesting with various metaphors and degrees of urgency that the world consider maybe not nuking itself into oblivion.

Regular readers of this blog will be more than a little aware by now that I am morbid as fuck despite all my best efforts, and this began early, with a love of the aforementioned Green Fields of France and a collection of songs which were, bluntly put, guitar-led dirges about dead people. Crow on the Cradle is no different in that respect, and along with Universal Soldier and an untitled song about dead soldiers in the Vietnam War which I listened to so often that I wore out the C90 cassette it was on, got considerable use as a lullaby for me.

It is a little like a lullaby. There is something late evening, inevitable, and gentle about the version I am most familiar with. It puts me in mind of the festivals I spent all my childhood summers at: the sun low in the sky, the flies rising, a hubbub of voices and the smell of wood fires, music everywhere in the background, and hot, dry earth under bare feet. In that respect it is comforting, although you do have to wonder about finding a song warning of nuclear holocaust “comforting”. 

As with many a folk song, the lyrics work as a poem, and the whole thing is designed to be memorable and easily-recited. It’s a kind of troubadour tradition: make the information simple to pass on and vivid enough to stick in people’s minds. In the case of Crow on the Cradle it’s achieved with snatches of nursery rhymes and nursery-rhyme-esque phrase: hush-a-bye little one, never you weep; with rings on her fingers, and bells on her toes; in each case subverted by a fairly chilling closing part to the pattern: for we’ve got a toy that can put you to sleep; or and a bomber above her wherever she goes. As the fact that I’ve had a French nursery rhyme about wearing clogs stuck in my head for a week can very much attest, nursery rhymes are tenacious once crammed into the brain and arise as soon as a similar phrase is heard. So it is that this is a thing that I leave up to you immediately recalls the rest of the song, and while “Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross” is not the most oft-recited of nursery rhymes, it has been supplanted in my mind all the same by and a bomber above her wherever she goes.

Each verse in itself becomes bleaker and more morbid as it progresses, from cow’s in the corn to carry a gun (and the ominous omen of death in the crow on the cradle of the title and refrain), but overall they also become more and more ominous and threatening, like the returning passes of a bomber. Well-paced in this regard, it is the centre verse which repeats on itself, speeding up the onset of the fearful and the morbid (somebody’s baby is born for a fight / somebody’s baby is not coming back), setting up the remaining two verses with their violence and oppression at the start: your mother and father will sweat and they’ll save, to build you a coffin and dig you a grave. In these remaining verses the blame is attributed: the beginnings speak of the baby in the cradle and the doom overhanging it, while these tell the listener whose fault it is. The generation of the songwriter, apparently, is to blame. 

The song closes with an insistent demand for action delivered by the threat that must be eliminated itself, the eponymous crow on the cradle, repeating: this is a thing that I leave up to you. Even now the assigning of responsibility is palpable and in the context of the rest of the song the refusal to act seems like it comes at a chilling cost. It is not hard to imagine the crow as a mushroom cloud.

In light of all this, even more so, it is strange to find the song comforting, but I’ve always also found a certain level of comfort in nihilism and the idea of accepting the degree of powerlessness an individual has in the face of a very powerful force (in this case, mankind’s apparent yen for self-destruction).

Filed under: content: real life, content: review, music/gigs, 100 blog posts, 100 blog things, 100 works of art, crow on the cradle, folk music, jackson browne, lyrics, music, no nukes, nuclear disarmament, personal, protest songs, review, reviews, sydney carter

100 Works of Art: (Aural) Best Sunday Dress, Hole

The 100 Works of Art blog series is to do with personal interaction with beloved works of art rather than impartial reviews or focussing solely on the relatable and universal qualities of the work. Because this is a blog, not a book. The first 25 are to do with visual art, and begin with Matta’s Black Virtue; the next 25 will be about aural art and begin with The Cure’s Let’s Go To Bed.

28. Best Sunday Dress, Hole

For most of the turbulent and eventful year that was the first in the Gregorian calendar to begin with a 2 and carry three digits after it, the oft-lyriced-about 2000, this was my favourite song. It’s a B-side, which I can promise you is unusual for me these days, but in the height of my pre-torrents, pre-YouTube music fever collecting B-sides of bands I liked was an art form in itself, and involved petitioning virtual strangers on message boards to send me bad cassette tapes, and trips to various market stalls to acquire bootleg CDs. I had a weekly income of £22 from my Saturday job, which I was technically trying to save, and couldn’t exactly spunk money left, right, and centre on hunting down rare releases – especially when even finding what they were was such a hassle.

Reader, you will be glad to hear that I have since realised that it is not necessary to be a completist to appreciate someone’s oeuvre, and as such Hole more or less mark the point at which I never again put so much effort into investing my interest in a single band. I don’t regret it in the slightest, however: even a few years later, when I’d moved on and was mostly listening to techno, and a copy of America’s Sweetheart came into the offices of the student rag I worked for, I still snapped it up. Nobody’s Daughter, even more recently, still met with a doggedly loyal reception. Connections forged in the emotional overreaction that is adolescence tend to hold more firmly than those found later.

So why this particular song, of all songs? I didn’t come to it first – that honour goes to the title track of third studio album Celebrity Skin – and it probably isn’t the most lyrically or musically accomplished of all the band’s work (most people agree that Live Through This contains almost all the strong contenders for that title); what resonated at the time was, perhaps rather shamefully, the tragedy inherent in both the simple chord structure and the lyrics.

At 17 and 18 I was a fairly stereotypical Sixth Form Goth, and as for much of my adult life, preoccupied with death – this time with all the fire and fervour of youth – and with the tragedy of suicide and all that jazz. My Nirvana phase was squarely behind me, and I’d moved on to scanning the lyrics of Hole songs for Courtney’s obvious and ongoing agony regarding the death of her husband. The song is pretty much rife with references which either are or can be pressed into service as references to the departed:

Pale blue eyes so young
Pale blue eyes so far away
Watch me with his sorrow
Forgive me all his pain

And at the time I was still in thrall to the key-change as an emotional intensifier, having ridden through the first burst of puberty on the back of the Top 40, so the line at which this occurs (roughly around shone like a diamond) also cemented itself into my head as one with great meaning, although now, looking back at the song with an additional 13 years of life in the way, it’s this which seems the most poignant:

and I’ve come here all undressed
all the posion and pain and I take what is mine

possibly because these two lines to me represent adequately what has happened to Courtney in the eye of the beholder. She’s been repeatedly stripped of any right to mourn via rumours and accusations about her involvement or her emotional response (what is the correct response to your tempestuous and troubled love of your life shooting himself in the head while AWOL? Is there one? How do you respond to something so huge and so painful?), and exposed before all the world in the press as someone to be scrutinised at her time of greatest sorrow (much, indeed, as Yoko Ono was). A woman of strong, divisive personality and very powerful emotions, she would never have contented herself with a regal tear and the mannerly withdrawal required of widows: she was a rock star before she met him and she was determined to continue being one after he left. In the second line the poison and pain are as much the vitriol heaped on a grieving woman as they are the heroin and loss; I take what is mine could equally apply to retrieving the image of her dead husband from the media who declared him their property (I suspect she minded the fans slightly less) as to the acceptance of abuse (I take what is mine, I take what is intended for me, ie, poison and pain) from various quarters.

For what is a very, very sad song the sound is defiant. It’s not the sadness that curls in on itself and weeps quietly, but a kind of explosive sadness, a supernova of mourning or a howl of ongoing misery that acknowledges everything that’s fed into it as it pushes all of it outwards. Messier, and less acceptable than the accepted mode of widowhood, but then when I was 17 and 18 I was messier and less acceptable than the accepted mode of adolescence, trying to rescue my entire sense of self from five years in a lock-up and doing very poorly at it. It spoke to me, the way Courtney Love’s music spoke to several generations of unhappy and angry teenage girls and in fact continues to do so. The fans of it are still subject to the same derision and spite as its maker is, but that comes with the territory of being someone with too many uncontained feelings who refuses to beautify them for the comfort of others.

Filed under: content: real life, content: review, music/gigs, 100 blog posts, 100 works of art, best sunday dress, death, grunge, hole, lyrics, mourning, music, personal, review, riot grrl, songs, widowhood

Sight, the least reliable of the senses.

I have no idea what evidence the statement in the title of this post actually has, but it was proudly included in the introduction to the Light Show at the Hayward Gallery. To be honest, given the bright sun outside (in which my friends and I had been lounging, sprawled on a small astroturf island on the sea of the South Bank Centre in the peculiarly British habit of sunbathing violently the moment there is a single clear day), it might have been more sensible to call this the Artificial Light Which Isn’t As Alluring As Outside Is Right Now show, but we had tickets and the Hayward is often good for the weird and the interactive. It is also probably a car park with delusions of being an art gallery, and I refuse to rescind my belief that it and the rest of the South Bank Shambles are some of the ugliest buildings ever created, but that’s not relevant to the content.

Leo Villareal’s Cylinder II kept us entertained for a while, resembling both a cloud of glittering abyssal beasts with their bioluminescence winking in the water, and in shadows a kind of “phase-shifting sea urchin”; Ceal Floyer’s Throw, while uninteresting as an installation, did at least keep the theatre lighting student/practitioner among us happy identifying the gobo in use. The first piece – but not the last – to induce the kind of hypnotic rapture that art which changes must bring about was Cerith Wyn Evans S=U=P=E=R=S=T=R=U=C=T=U=R=E. In this, three columns, floor to ceiling, of perfectly clear glass tubes containing tiny filaments lit up and darkened again in slow “breaths”, at their brightest radiating a lot of heat as well as light. The three columns light up entirely, but do so in different orders. We might have taken in the pattern of their fading and dimming but instead we hung over the wire separating us from hot light bulbs and discussed in four-year-old terms the effects of light and heat on the emotions.

The exhibition is classically Hayward in the sense that a lot of the pieces require going into a small room and looking at something, or interacting in another way with it: the first one that did so in a fun way was Anthony McCall’s You and I, Horizontal, which in having patterns of smoke swirling through what the exhibition guide calls a “solid-light” installation, led to the three of us lying on the floor underneath the beams of light and watching the patterns move as if “we’re lying at the bottom of a pond”, (as Maud explained to the stranger who joined us: soon several people were lying on the floor). After a while we discovered if we stuck our legs up into the beams, they looked as if they were being pulled apart by a cold and penetrating blackness. Possibly not “art” in any real sense of making us think about ~society~ or ~death~ or ~big questions~, but it was fun.

A lot of the works also required the viewer to be in a specific place in relation to them in order to understand them: Jim Campbell’s Exploded View (Commuters), for example, looks like an endearing forest of randomly off-or-on berry-like bulbs of light hanging from the ceiling, until you stand behind it and realise the patterns of extinguished light are not random but outline the shadowy forms of passing humanoid shapes, some near, some far, moving fast. This is deeply unsettling, and gives the room a sense of being inhabited by unseen presences. Other works in this vein like that by Brigitte Kowanz, whose dangling fluorescent tubes only elicited a scoff of “Stairway to Heaven again”, were less successful.

An unintentionally fine performance addition to James Turrell’s ambiguous and not especially impressive installation Wedgework V occurred while we were viewing it. The three of us sat and discussed, quietly, how the lines of the room caused shifts in perception, and then what would make the business more interesting (“giant black reflectionless tentacles rounding the corner”, “a viscous dark fluid dripping from the ceiling”); the small baby behind us expressed his dissatisfaction with the weird colour scheme in a more voluable and, I suspect, honest fashion. And then someone along the row from us uttered the immortal phrase How am I supposed to experience the art with that going on, which kept us all going for some time: we made fun of him until he left, and for a little while afterwards. After all, the experience of others in a group viewing is a factor in the overall understanding of an installation piece.

Sometimes, the reactions of the audience to a piece lead to expectations which cannot be met: Conrad Shawcross’s Slow Arc inside a Cube is a fascinating piece both in the mechanism of how it works, the end result of geometric patterns moving and “changing shape” across the walls of the small room, and in the artist’s source of inspiration (for once), Dorothy Hodgkin’s description of examining diffraction pattern of X-rays bounced off insulin atoms as “decoding the shape of a tree from the shadows cast by its leaves”, which actually makes sense as an inspiration for this work. Unfortunately while queuing for the disappointing Turrell installation I overheard one of the people in front of me claiming he’d been unable to remain in the room for long because it made him feel nauseous, and was subsequently so scornful of his queasiness that I wasn’t able to appreciate the work in isolation of that.

The remaining work on the ground floor of the exhibition which ignited any emotion was Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Chromosaturation: we enjoyed examining the effects of the different colours of light (blue, red, green) on each other’s faces and hands, comparing notes on which made us look more mottled and which more smooth, and on our minds (blue bored me, red energised me, and green made me feel content). The way the light seemed to “pile up” and become more intensely coloured when we’d left it and looked back on it was also impressive.

Upstairs contained works that were both a good deal less interesting and one which was the highlight of the entire exhibition. The greatest confusion was probably caused by Ivan Navarro’s Reality Show (Silver), where none of us could work out what the point was supposed to be, and even inside found the effects described by the notes weren’t as clearly-defined as expected. Personally I mostly found that I didn’t like standing over a yawning abyss, even illusory, and got out again very quickly.

I shall pass with reasonable grace over my intense dislike of Jenny Holzer, as we had to pass through a room containing her work to get to (and back to, for a second visit) the high water mark of the exhibition, Olafur Eliasson’s Model for a timeless garden.

A brief description of it to a friend on my return home: a black room with a black foam bench at roughly chest height, several metres long, full of a variety of sprinklers throwing out water in different patterns*, light by strobe lights.  * Some of the flow of these interfered with each other, but I didn’t include that in my description. The effect of the strobe light on the falling water was utterly mesmerising, because it turned what is usually a continuous motion into a series of still images, ever-changing, often slightly-repeating, but never truly-identical. That these images were three-dimensional and clear but highly-reflective gave the impression of a garden of beautiful abstract sculptures in ice or brilliant crystal (some like flowers, some like impossible hanging diamond rain, some like huge glass spiders whose bodies disintegrate on a loop) somehow animated by Harryhausen-esque stop-motion. It felt a little as if Swarovski had been commissioned to create a horror movie, or Yves Tanguy to advertise an ice-maker. We cast around for a while, trying to work out what about it was so soothing, considering how otherworldly and alien and profoundly unnatural-but-organic it all felt. I’ve had to fall back on saying that it was beautiful, but it wasn’t beautiful in the manner of a glacier so much as beautiful in the manner of highly cultivated orchids or bizarre and delicate hanging sculptures knocked by the breeze: utterly without function, and only there to dazzle.

On a side-note, the strobe lighting completely threw off my depth perception so I’m sorry to the several people I bumped into!

Filed under: content: review, Anthony McCall, art, Cerith Wyn Evans, exhibition, gallery, hayward gallery, Jim Campbell, light show, london, modern art, olafur eliasson, review, reviews