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

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

100 Works of Art: (Audio) Szamár Madár, Venetian Snares

The 100 Works of Art series of drivel is a blog challenge thing which mostly involves me talking at incoherent length about things I like and how I relate to them. So far I’ve done twenty-five on paintings, sculptures, and photography, and one other one on music.

27. Szamár Madár, Venetian Snares

It’s not often that I can pinpoint a song which not only got me into a specific artist but an entire genre, but Szamár Madár redirected a lot of my feelings about instrumental and electronic music – previously focussed on repetitive examples of techno, trance, and psy-trance – into breakbeat, and by way of breakbeat also into DnB (Pendulum, hacktastic though they are, helped with that, and I won’t claim that the video to Showdown didn’t have a hand in that) and jungle, in a kind of backtracking through spheres of influence, and
then later primed me for dubstep.

Szamár Madár sounds like someone has taken a hammer to a soundtrack of someone’s unhappiness. It is splintered, fractured music, and is definitely the best track on what I have taken to referring to as “The Hungarian Album”, mostly because I find Rossz Csillag Alatt Született a little hard to pronounce. The rest of the album too is full of jagged edges and bleak grey squares and the flight of pigeons, but Szamár Madár‘s frantic rushing in sudden bursts of sound is the most electrifying of listens. If pressed I would say my favourite of Venetian Snares’ albums is not Rossz Csillag Alatt Született but either Winnipeg Is A Frozen Shithole or Detrimentalist, two vastly different sounding works – Winnipeg is a frantic mess of broken, aggressive sounds and layered pieces that sounds like someone having an angry breakdown in the middle of a wasps nest and borders on being more sonic assault than music (which is why I LOVE it), while Detrimentalist might almost be played in a club.

But the track I’m talking about now is, as an example from Rossz Csillag Alatt Született, is superficially classical in vein. That was what drew me to Venetian Snares in the first place. Back in the early noughties I was enormously into club mixes of classical music – a subgenre of which there were never enough skilful examples, and which I am still very much attracted to – and I had hoped initially that VS would be able to provide.

What happened instead was this weird snarl of strings and minor chord screeches came on like a violent scene in a modernist ballet and seized my listening mind by the throat. It is a series of small explosions – a painterly piece not in the sense that Debussy or Liszt might try to evoke a painting that represents a great scene, but painterly in the sense that it evokes something more like one of Francis Bacon’s frantic brush stroke chaoses resolving into an anguished face. Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto 1st Mov contributes to the classical sound, as it is one of the samples used in the track, but the construction, the choppiness, and the bursts of scampering movement sound very unlike the stately, nostalgic sound of Elgar’s uninterrupted compositions.

Szamár Madár started me down the road to my own weird creations, and demonstrates more fully than any other track I can think of the ways in which genre boundaries can be effectively smashed by sampling and a creative approach to what constitutes a song. It draws on soundtrack, ballet, and sonic art to create an adventurous, discordant, threatening and unsettling approach to sound which eventually also led me to Iannis Xenakis and other experimental composers and creators, and broadened my enjoyment of music considerably from its early constricted folk music roots.

Filed under: content: review, music/gigs, 100 works of art, breakbeat, classical, elgar, music, personal, review, reviews, Rossz Csillag Alatt Született, sampling, Szamár Madár, the hungarian album, venetian snares

100 Works of Art: (Audio) Let’s Go To Bed, The Cure

Having dispensed with visual art, the 100 Works of Art rambling about stuff I like has moved on to music. This is simultaneously more and less intimidating: it’s harder to talk bollocks about music and sound impressive because more people know what you’re on about at entry level and you have to step it up and get technical, which I assuredly cannot do about music.

26. Let’s Go To Bed, The Cure (1987)

My relationship with The Cure was brief but intense, like most things during sixth form college. Due to an accident of good timing I went from being a dedicated little bedroom goth to being the sudden proud owner of several very large posters, two video compilations of their music videos, one live video, and a couple of mix tapes of rare recordings for twenty quid from someone in the pub my friend worked at. This was the first and last time I ever managed to strike lucky on the “dodgy people in pubs” front.

With a catalogue spanning about as many years as I’ve been alive, if not more, and a slew of extremely catchy pop-goth chart songs as well as the more gloriously dreary grey-hued extrusions of Pornography, it’s difficult to pick a Cure song. Aside from being Cure Songs, majestic in their ridiculous storytelling and Fat Bob’s whining voice, they have personal connections: Friday I’m In Love from long before I tried my hand at backcombing my hair, bleating from a shitty clock-radio while I read children’s fantasy novels in my bedroom, or the later terrible half-choreographed goth two-step at B-Movie to Love Cats every month. There was the ongoing relationship between the whole of the KissMeKissMeKissMe album and the lurid, lustrous, purple Poppy Z Brite novels and atrocious short stories about vampires I read while listening to it and scrawling notes in pink biro. I have been every teenage cliché and many of them while listening to Fat Bob’s fab band.

Let’s Go To Bed is at its heart a tug-o-war. It is an uptempo song with slightly sinister and melancholy lyrics – a combination you’re going to see a lot of in this section because it is possibly my favourite kind of song (“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things”, quoth Tom Waits, and I could not agree more) – and the tug-o-war is as much between the imagist nonsense of the verses and the straightforwards, unpoetic stubbornness of the subtly changing choruses as between the “I” and the “you” of the song.

But I don’t care if you don’t
And I don’t feel if you don’t
And I don’t want it if you don’t
And I won’t say it
If you won’t say it first

The chorus is an ugly dare, and in a world of songs about how love would go so right, or where love has gone wrong and I’m sorry, baby (or how we’re going to hump it all night, because emotional fulfilment is no longer the euphemistic core of lyrics that it once was),  it’s almost off-puttingly realistic. Certainly I’ve been in more than one relationship where it seemed there was precisely this kind of brinkmanship going on: I’m going to bite my fucking tongue and not say it until you do. I’ve used it as the basis of characterisation in numerous stories, because that ugly dare is an excellent source of tension as one or more characters struggle to force the other/s to spill their guts while reining back their own compulsive need to confess BUT I DIGRESS.

The music reinforces the sense of push-and-pull, with a very quick movement (technical terms: I do not know them) up and down the scale in what sounds like two-steps: the bass has the same two-part step, which really does put me in mind of some sort of dance where one partner tries to yank the other in one direction, and is immediately yanked backwards themselves. It’s a neat trick, and one which for me holds the song together through the drawn out breaths of the verses with their more photographic and less emotional lyricism.

Filed under: content: review, music/gigs, 100 blog things, 100 works of art, 80s, bands, goth, let's go to bed, music, personal, pop music, review, reviews, the cure

The Science of Ignorance

Having finished the first quarter of my 100 posts about the arts, I’m taking a brief break to return to the glorious and wide-reaching bosom of science. There are a couple of catalysts working in step here: the first is that I, like a number of people, have been enjoying and occasionally yelling at current BBC series Wonders of Life (with Brian Cox doing outrageous things like “basic science on a mountain”, travelling to places I’m never going to get to visit, getting octopuses to punch him in the face, and cuddling impossibly cute lion cubs). The next is that in addition to enjoying the prime-time pop-science show I also have an oft-joked-of propensity for draining the programming on BBC4 of “everything that isn’t steam trains”, and an embarrassingly large pile of pop-neuroscience/linguistics books which have taken up residence in my bathroom along with some stuff on epidemiology because I have run out of bookshelves again and there are exposed pipes in the bathroom which work as bookshelves and how many books do you have to buy before you acknowledge that you have a problem?

I had planned to burble in my tirelessly charming fashion about the fascinating tendency of areas of study to bleed into each other anyway, but then I came across some delightful person claiming that learning about neurochemicals and the source of emotions and the evolutionary function of romantic love was somehow degrading to the concept of love and had to go and head butt a wall for a while. Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan have already dealt with the accusation of science being unromantic with more eloquence and poetry than I could hope to, but the idea of this ostrich-solution to the world still distresses me: you cannot use deliberate ignorance to maintain a state of supposedly preferable untrue happiness and claim that this is somehow makes the truth stop existing.

It has been one of the things which always appealed the most to me about the harder sciences: that regardless of the political applications of knowledge or the dead ends that we encounter on the way to knowledge, there is a singular truth, a set of universal laws which can be determined from rigorous and rigorously adapted methods of observation. Humans are deeply inconsistent: our ideals of morality have changed profoundly over the short time we have had morals at all. Our stories fluctuate in order to encompass the values of the society telling them and the problems of the time period.

Our notions of love and the expression of love alter not only through the passage of societal time but through the phases of an individual’s life: the neurochemicals and pathways which engineer this holy state of being do not. Energy tends towards entropy, organisms best adapted to survive their conditions are selected for over those which cannot adapt, the process of nuclear fusion attends to the same rules as always, the universe like a vast and impossibly complex four-dimensional machine jitters through its motions regardless of whether you or I are kind or cruel, clever or stupid, obstinately ignorant or fevered seekers of truths. Eppur si muove – or to give it a more prosaic iteration, the damn thing moves anyway. The laws of the universe continue, and it is up to us to understand them or not understand them: ignoring them will not make them go away.

And certainly angrily not only refusing to learn but declaring that anyone who wants to share the joy of their knowledge is deliberately trying to spoil your happiness is arrogant in the extreme, and fearful for no reason. Knowing how love occurs still doesn’t tell us why we fall in love with this person and not that person, at this time and not that one. That will take centuries to discover, and even when we understand it, it won’t stop that emotion from having the same effect on your receptors as it always did. What an amazing thing the human brain is, that it can generate pleasure and terror within itself over absent things and abstract concepts. What an incredible engine.

and here is a slightly distorted picture of Professor Brian Cox looking at an Aye-aye

And now back to something I love: documentaries, particularly ones involving wildlife.

That Nice Professor Cox is back on the telly, talking now about how the chemical process known as “life” works, and how it evolves, and what makes it kind of bloody amazing: following on from such televisual treats as Whoa Space Is Pretty Awesome Hey and its sequel No There’s Even More To Space Than That Seriously Look At This. There have been complaints about the presence of the ubiquitous and effervescent professor, even more so after Sir David Attenborough suggested that he might make a nice replacement for himself. Some of these complaints have more credibility than others: the disappointment that the BBC has not decided to employ more female scientists as presenters, for example, to follow on from a slightly better record with history programs (cf. Dr Janina Ramirez on the Hundred Years War, Dr Lucy Worsley on a number of subjects including the Regency, and the inexplicably-maligned Professor Mary Beard on Rome), or a general problem with academic/documentary programming tending to feature an almost unbroken sea of white faces. The less credible arguments include “but he’s not a biologist” (he’s a broadcaster with a good understanding of the GCSE-level science the program is disseminating, and more importantly has the charm and enthusiasm to pull off what he does): with a degree in geology and zoology Attenborough might not have been the obvious choice to usher in colour programming at the BBC, but he oversaw at BBC2 a time of considerable progress and quality.

There are stylistic matters within the program’s presentation that will appeal to some and not to others: I’m fond of the conceit of overlaying basic information on top of some of the footage but then I’m the kind of pervert who likes footnotes. The basic experiments conducted may draw contempt from people like my boyfriend, who scoffed “oh yeah, we did this in school”, but as one of no doubt many people whose school felt it wasn’t necessary to do any practical science or indeed to teach anything in lessons whatsoever a lot of the time, I didn’t, and I find practical demonstrations delightful and informative and above all accessible.

Brian Cox and a coconut/robber crab

One of the features of this series – which brings us back to the opening of this post – that has endeared it to me besides Brian’s infectious enthusiasm and pleasant voice is the angle of approach on biology. It is fascinating to hear and see the processes of nature and various ecosystems as well as individual parts of different animals factored into the wider universal laws and given a place within explanations which encompass stellar furnaces and molecular structure: it conveys a sense of joined-up learning which is absent from a very discipline/subject-oriented education, where each lesson is an island.

As soon as you start learning across different disciplines it becomes evident in a way it never was before that everything is in some way relevant to something else: the process of galaxy collisions millions of years ago and millions of light-years away helps to pinpoint the precise point in history in which a terrible plague was presaged by the coming of a new star in the heavens; evolution driven by chemistry and the test of the environment on gene expression helps to explain human behaviour and the propensity for war-making; understanding the chemical nature of love in the brain may one day lead to debates over whether it is ethical to induce empathy in psychopaths and a wave  of alternate history fiction about famous tyrants infected with great affection instead, for Literature students to analyse and reframe.

Everything we know and everything we invent, everything we imagine and predict, every lie we tell and every deity we envision has its roots in the real and observable universe, which quite frequently turns out to be weirder than we could have guessed. To shut yourself off from the incredible source of inspiration and excitement that is the inkling of an understanding of this vast and infinitely complex universe (both the one we are part of and the one that is part of us) is to do yourself an injury and limit your abilities for no reward.

Filed under: content: essay, biology, brian cox, broadcasting, chemistry, communication, documentaries, education, learning, love, polemic, professor brian cox, review, reviews, science, tv, wonders of life, zoology

100 Works of Art: (Visual) St Sebastian, Dosso Dossi

This is the last post in the (Visual) section of the 100 Works of Art … kerfuffle of blog posts. I’ll move onto music in a bit, which might make more sense. Anyway, these posts are to do with personal relation to works of art rather than Terribly Clever Analyses, so if you’re looking for something you can copy-and-paste for that art elective you didn’t want to take, try Wikipedia instead.

25. St Sebastian, Dosso Dossi (“first half of the 16th century”)

If you’ve been following these posts at all you may now be groaning “Not another bloody Sebastian”. Surely there can’t be anything left to be said about St Sebastian, patron saint of athletes, the Victorian “Uranian Love Movement“, and big damn perverts? I’ve gone on about his habitual acceptance of death with expressions ranging from the exasperated to the (borderline sexually) ecstatic, and his position in the artistic canon as an apparent recipient of the desire to draw naked men swooning as well as the desire to paint pictures of men who look like they’ve had a tryst with a hedgehog and come off the worse for it. However as a quick scroll through the archives of Fuck Yeah, St Sebastian will demonstrate, there are as many different variations on the martyrdom of the saint as there are artists willing to depict it, and this one immediately caught my eye when it showed up at FYSS.

St Sebastian, Dosso Dossi

One of the contemporary criticisms of another favourite of mine, Caravaggio, was that his art was very clearly posed in a studio and little attempt was made to hide this – or little enough for the tastes of those used to Mannerism. Dosso Dossi takes this further and paints what to me looks like a posed studio production of St Sebastian which acknowledges that it is in a studio. I am enormously fond of art that acknowledges its own artifice, and it seems a very post-modern attitude to be taking in the early 16th century! Possibly I am misinterpreting, but I like my interpretation. The idea that there is a scroll hung from the wall depicting the boring, unnecessary backdrop which will be sketched in later from the artist’s memory, the set-dressing, and the arrows that seem to draw no blood. It is not a perfect depiction of the artifice, for the branches and their fruit are real enough and the ropes that hold Sebastian in place are quite clearly doing their job, but the ambiguity and the possibility of being shown the strings behind the show are already compelling.

When I was younger – from about 3 to 19 – I was quite heavily into amateur dramatics, and considered the business of hanging around theatres to be possibly one of the best things in the world that didn’t involve animals or, later, alcohol. Part of the joy of that was the creation of entire worlds out of very meagre beginnings: all the venues I performed in were broke and often tiny, and I don’t believe I ever had many props to contend with, and very little in the way of scene changes (a lot of costume changes, particularly in the Mystery Plays, where I had to zoom out of a serpent’s costume and into a ridiculous golden contraption that was supposed to turn me into Salomé because we were somewhat short on cast); the similarity between the willing substitution of string and hanging apples with a landscape, and the invention of castles on a stage with cardboard crenellations, is such that my interpretation of this painting is one which strikes a happy chord.

In addition to all this, this is a rare Sebastian: the indignant Sebastian. He seems sincerely peeved at being peppered with arrow shafts and like he finds the whole thing an imposition on his important work of being naked in public, baring a very fine green velvet drape which has defied the laws of physics to cover his penis. The deep shadows and contrasting light in this work also bring up the sense of the visceral and physical Sebastian, at odds with depictions like those by Gustav Moreau, but here more theatrical and less weighty than the more well-known Gerrit van Honthorst, who takes up almost the entire frame of his painting. The inclusion of fruit, too, brings a sense of balance: it is the swell of new life and fertility directly behind the beginning of Sebastian’s holy death.

Filed under: content: essay, content: review, 100 blog things, 100 works of art, 16th century art, art, dosso dossi, italian art, renaissance, renaissance art, review, reviews, saints, st sebastian, theatre

100 Works of Art: (Visual) Balancing Girl, Jamie McKelvie

The 100 Works of Art series of posts is about personal relation to specific works of art. This is the penultimate post in the (Visual) section and then I will move on to talking about music. The first post in the series is about Black Virtue by Matta.

24. Balancing Girl, Jamie McKelvie (2010)

Like the subject of the last post in this series, the artist here is a friend of mine, someone I’ve known since about 2004 and, like Gillian Blekkenhorst & Shy Custis, watched develop and improve and evolve his art style over the course of the years. In all of these cases I suppose you could say that part of what makes me attached to these specific works of art is not just the art itself but the whole story of progression and how practice and study pays off in more and more impressive skills. It is also easy to see a link, aesthetically, between the clean lines and muted shadows of McKelvie’s work and one of the earlier featured artists, Matthew Woodson and that’s because my taste should be quite predictable by now!

Balancing Girl, Jamie McKelvie, 2010

There are a number of immediately attention-grabbing things about this picture: the incongruous pose is only one of them. There is the incredible detail, the contrasts – the relative brightness of the girl’s hoodie against the pale town – and the recognisibility, for me at least, of the houses. They are familiar in their architecture, and there’s always something very comforting about that.

The composition really appeals to me too: she’s set against the sky, like she might take flight at any moment. As soon as her nervousness about being on a telegraph pole disappears, you think, she’ll soar away into the cloudless blue with her shoelaces trailing and her hood flapping in the wind. You’re not looking at her from the ground, but rather from an upstairs window: maybe the opposite row of houses to the one you can see. Perhaps she climbed up there: perhaps she just found herself up there after a bout of unexpected flying. The shadows give the impression of a particular time of day – coupled with the colour of the sky it feels like an early summer morning. Has she been up there half the night? She looks too surprised for that.

Warm familiarity and a hint of mystery, the cleanness and marriage of the mundane and the unusual make this picture stand out among the many, many works of Jamie’s I’ve seen, and evidently a lot of people agreed with me as the print run disappeared quite fast.

Filed under: content: essay, content: review, 100 blog things, 100 works of art, art, comic art, comics, jamie mckelvie, marvel artists, prints, review, reviews

100 Works of Art: (Visual) The Sluggard, Frederic, Lord Leighton

The 100 Works of Art series is a string of babbles about art in relationship to my experience of it rather than any kind of sensible or essay-worthy approach. Sorry! Why not start with the first post?

22. The Sluggard, Frederic, Lord Leighton (1885)

This post is standing in for another: I love this statue, but 22 on my list was originally reserved for an equally-loved work, a photograph (a medium which is underrepresented on this list) by Bettina Rheims. Unfortunately this work, a picture of St John in the Wilderness, is absolutely impossible to find online, and I don’t possess the book I found it in (INRI, Bettina Rheims) to scan it. Without the picture the assessment is meaningless, and I can’t share the art with you. Sad especially because the photograph was a haunting glance between worlds and a key moment in the development of an adolescent persona, but not too sad because really, who doesn’t want to hear me rambling excitedly about semi-erotic statues of mostly naked men?

The Sluggard, Frederic, Lord Leighton, 1885

I first stumbled over this on my first trip to the Tate Britain, which would have been some time in late 2000, with school. I can confidently suppose I wasn’t in the best shape to appreciate art at the time as I had a beast of a hangover and couldn’t make the floor stop moving up and down, but such handicaps are as naught in the face of elegant bronze buttocks and I remember this having an arresting affect. I doubt it terminated my nausea, but it did sear itself on my retinas indelibly enough that my all-too-infrequent returns to the Millbank site have been characterised by going in search of it every time.

It is at this point that I would like to point out that the catalogue copy for this statue on the Tate’s website claims: “The fig leaf that hides the penis was a convention intended to neutralise any sexual appeal while the sculpture was on public display.” FAILURE THERE, LEIGHTON.

In fact this statue’s inclusion into the roster of works in this blog series helped to solidify the unifying feature of the other statues I’ve included, and it is a bit embarrassing. I’ve talked about the memento mori nature of works like The Dying Slave and St Sebastian, and the conversely life-celebrating and Epicurean sentiments of the Barberini Faun, but there’s a unifying element in the statuary which is aesthetic rather than conceptual. It’s not the style, as while Giorgetti, Michelangelo, and the unknown sculptor of the faun are all Mediterranean they’re all from differing eras, and all work in a different medium to Lord Leighton and his bronze: the latter is described as “[...] modern in the way it seizes on a momentary and languid pose, and yet artificial in the way the muscles are emphasised and all personal individuality suppressed.”, which is somewhat in keeping with even the named St Sebastian.

I shan’t besmirch my pseudo-academic burbling about art to use the exact words the discovery was made with while talking to friend, irritant, and art historian Liza Gustin, but an approximation would begin with the word languid up there. There is a similar angling of the torso and uneven lifting of the arms across the board, even in our reclining and expiring Sebastian.

The Sluggard, in common with the other statue that caught my attention on that first trip (Sir Hamo Thornycroft’s Teucer, which I don’t think demonstrates as nice lines), strikes me as a brilliantly self-indulgent study of the male form and musculature under the pretext of capturing a moment. It does a sterling job of moment-capturing – the very lifelike lazy bugger it depicts might as well have had liquid bronze poured over him on the moment of stretching – but there’s a fantastic blend of the anatomical precision and sensualised if not sexualised form. The fig leaf is an act of misdirection as it supposes that the only potential for the sexualisation of the statue lies in his penis, as opposed to the liquid grace and well-displayed human form.

Then again perhaps that’s entirely the point of it.

Filed under: content: essay, content: review, 100 blog things, 100 works of art, art, bronze, bronze statue, frederic leighton, lord leighton, review, reviews, statue, tate britain, the sluggard, Victorian art

100 Works of Art: (Visual) Self Portrait with Whip, Robert Mapplethorpe

The 100 Blog Things series is a series of personal-relation posts about art and not professional or academic reviews of artwork and therefore it is entirely pointless trying to C&P this for your essays, I’m terribly sorry. Posts are tagged with “100 works of art” for your convenience and mine.

21. Self portrait with whip, Robert Mapplethorpe (1978)

There have been rather few photographs featured in this series so far, which is a shame as at one point in my life it was undoubtedly my favourite visual medium. I’ve already blogged about Monet’s Irises and their role in my earlier life; Mapplethorpe’s provocative self-portrait is another which has played a key, if minor and much less schmaltzy, role in my adolescence.

I was loaned a book by my fantastic GCSE Art Teacher, who shall remain nameless because mine was an extremely small school and I don’t need her finding this blog and remembering me; I subsequently had the book confiscated by the principal. In this instance it was a book of Mapplethorpe portraits which had been in the classroom for a donkey’s age but which no one else had expressed much interest in; the first time the loan/confiscation cycle occurred it was a fantastic book called The Black Arts by Richard Cavendish. That was taken off me because using the book for my intended purpose of psychological warfare and winding up my deeply superstitious and usually violent classmates was deemed irresponsible and digging up the flowerbeds to bury “eggs bearing the names of power” was vandalism.

In the instance of the Mapplethorpe book: someone who wasn’t the art teacher saw what I was painstakingly copying onto flourescent orange card, and decided that this image was inappropriate fare for a 15-year-old:

no larger image available

At 15 I had just encountered the devastating triple whammy of Queer As Folk on the TV (the original Russell T Davies series, not the later American production), Velvet Goldmine on video, and a seduction scene between wheelchair-bound Philip Quast and semi-naked John Barrowman (who else) on stage in The Fix; to be followed by a serendipitous viewing of My Own Private Idaho a little later. I was swimming in a sea of hitherto unviewed earthly delights, adrift in a desperately homophobic school which held such things in such utter contempt and revulsion that my by-now intensely antagonistic teenage self was head-over-heels in love with pictures like this.

Artistically it’s a delightful image: Mapplethorpe is mirroring not only the traditional poses of the Devil he wishes to evoke with his curved back and the whip forming a tail, but also with his raised elbow and bent knee he gives the appearance of church gargoyles, clinging to the masonry of any number of holy exteriors. His expression is intense, and while the white sheet is reflected in the polished wooden floorboards, his body’s shadow is far more enduring.

In religious art, which I’ve blogged about quite a lot, there is a tendency for the supposed purity of “perfect” human forms to represent either perfect persons or high-held ideals. In much of mainstream Western art for centuries the figures were either clothed or shown in a kind of holy nudity: either alone and untouched, or dying tragically. Sexualisation was of course deeply proscribed. In 20th century art, in the wake of the deliberate shock of the Dada-ists and the continued provocation of each successive movement, old taboos on depicting sexuality came under fire along with most other social and artistic structures. Or rather, more noticeably under fire.

In celebration of sexual pleasure art courted with definitions of pornography: was it intended to titillate, or merely to venerate, or to depict without judgement in either direction? Various artists have taken this further and embraced the “porn aesthetic” for non-pornographic work, rendering it sexualised by association and raising interesting questions about the nature of contextual titillation. This still skirts the matter of celebrated sexual pleasure almost as much as the business of virginal nudity does; meanwhile there is Mapplethorpe, expression intense, pose demonic, placidly demonstrating the presence of a whip in his arse.

He’s twisted around to look the viewer in the eye. Whether it’s a challenge or a come-on or wary acknowledgement is, delightfully, unreadable from his face. It is a deeply profane act, underscored by the fact that he is neither clothed nor naked, neither in light nor in shadow; his pose is demonic but his position his human. For me that is one of the most appealing features of this picture, a whole lifetime since I cared quite so deeply about antagonising my peers with depictions of “deviant” sexuality: it is ultimately a human act of enjoyment which has the capacity to infuriate those who do not enjoy it, without offering any harm or insult to anyone. The whip isn’t a sacred object to anyone: he isn’t weeing on scripture or masturbating with a crucifix, or sitting fully-clothed and denouncing someone else’s faiths as filth and destruction. In practical, measurable terms, Robert Mapplethorpe looking us in the eye and giving himself a bullwhip butt-tail is free of malice.

The idea of unashamed, gratuitous self-indulgence as a form of art is by no means new, nor was it at the time. But just as our Barberini Faun represents a rarity, so does Mapplethorpe’s ambiguous self-portrait: there is not a surfeit of depictions of non-holy, non-demonic pleasure in the canon of Western art and this, I think, I would like to change along with the social attitudes which forbade it in the past.

At least the army of fan artists eagerly cranking out images of sexual excess are, in their own small way, contributing to that.

Filed under: content: essay, content: review, 100 blog things, 100 works of art, art, art history, black and white, mapplethorpe, nsfw, photo, photography, review, reviews, robert mapplethorpe, self-pleasure, sexual revolution, whip

100 Works of Art: (Visual) Barberini Faun/Drunken Satyr

The 100 Blog Things challenge series involving art (visual, audio, literary, and film) is less to do with generally-received wisdom about the featured works and more how I feel about them. See the first post for details.

20. Barberini Faun/Drunken Satyr, Unknown sculptor (date unknown: either late third/early second century BCE)

The name of this piece comes from a prior owner of it, rather than the unknown sculptor, and perhaps fittingly I cannot remember how it first came to my attention. It may have been an art documentary – I watch a lot of them – but all I know is that when it came to my attention it held it.

When it comes to sculpture I have a huge boner, as the kids say, for idealised realism. Or, in even less minced words: pretty people who look like they could actually exist. Naturally this is the worst possible preference to have, whether you expand it to non-human sculpture or not, as art that looks like the thing it depicts is considered to be the refuge of the intellectually moribund. As I am more than willing to own up to being of inferior intelligence this isn’t a problem for me, but it is well for everyone else to remember: if you like things, someone, somewhere, is judging you – often by an absurd set of criteria – for the things you like.

Restored from a broken piece found in the moat of the Castel Sant’Angelo and then salivated over by arch-nutter and white-obsessed weirdo J J Winckelmann, restored and generally brought to its current condition by a series of 17/18th century sculptors in Rome, there is plenty of idealised realism to enjoy in it. I am amused, firstly, that the gnarled throne the faun is sprawled over is perfectly-shaped to show off his body: amused because it’s precisely the kind of awful trick I pull when I’m drawing things and want to explain the utterly illogical pose I’ve put something in, but here there is no need as his sprawl is more-or-less natural, even if it is more dignified than most drunks. In reflection of this similarity I once did a fuck-terrible study of this.

The statue doesn’t have the weight and delicacy of a Bernini piece, but then few do. It’s not a work, either, of passionate recording of a known figure, keeping intact both their dignity and their flaws in a fine balance. It’s a mythical creature, with the ridiculous blend of geometric perfection (the curves of musculature in his chest and stomach!) and human perfection (his leg, his face). His weight is realistic, his pose natural, and his expression wholly relatable.

Images of excess without some degree of moralising judgement attached seem (in my ill-educated experience) to be rare in Western art. There is heavenly ecstasy as in Bernini’s St Teresa and there is the over-documented swoon of St Sebastian (who I’m sorry I shall be writing about for a third time before the end of this series), but depictions of gluttony or tipsiness without immediate reference to the lurking spectre of punishment would go against the party line of the Church. This statue, either Hellenistic or Roman, pre-dates the ideas of continence and abjuration of desire that occupy Christianity in its middle ages. Although Stoicism and moderation were well thought-of, Epicureanism was also a cultural force at the time this statue is estimated to have been made, preaching the path of greatest pleasure as the path of the greatest good.

Another angle

Having a beautiful statue in celebration of drunkenness seems to me like an act of the kind of exquisite self-indulgence that Oscar Wilde and his ilk would very definitely approve of, and the debauched, decadent sprawl of a drunk satyr on a bed of skins would, I am sure, make a much more marvellous centrepiece in a bar than a museum – even if it’s almost certain he’d end up with a lap full of drunks every night, I can’t see this fellow complaining. I just wonder what sort of gaudy, glorious colours he was originally painted in.

Filed under: content: essay, content: review, 100 blog things, 100 works of art, art, art history, classical statues, greek statue, hellenistic, marble, review, reviews, roman statue, satyr, sculpture, statue