Fictional art does no credit to anyone. Friday, 10 October 2008
Something rather odd happens when you encounter a work of art nested inside a work of art. What I have in mind is a fictional creation inside a fiction ? rather than an allusion to an artwork that has an independent life of its own ? and Ive encountered two examples just recently. The first was in Alan Rickmans new production of Strindbergs Creditors at the Donmar Warehouse ? in which one of the characters is a troubled artist who has just abandoned oil paints for sculpture, convinced that this is the only medium in which he can produce the work of the future. The second was in Julian Jarrolds film version of Brideshead Revisited, in which Charles Ryder rather implausibly holds a private view of his new jungle paintings on an ocean liner steaming between New York and London.
And the first thing to say about all these imaginary artworks is that they didnt look terribly good. In Creditors, Adolphe triumphantly unveils a kind of Rodin-esque open-crotch shot ? a kneeling woman leaning back with her legs apart ? while the results of Charless painting expedition to the South American jungle are a set of sub-Sutherland oils depicting a swirl of lianas and palm leaves. And, in both cases, the quality of the art on show creates a slightly distracting intrusion. Are we supposed to think that Adolphe is a terrible artist, I wondered when his sculpture was revealed? And is it significant that Charles Ryder is riding high on the London art scene with paintings that we suspect would actually have been pictorial also-rans?
It isnt an easy problem to steer around, this. Its not theoretically inconceivable that an artwork created as a prop might turn out to be as good, or even better, than the work in which it is simply a bit of naturalistic furniture (indeed, this may actually have occurred, though I cant think of an example). But its pretty unlikely ? and the idea in itself seems to offend some unwritten rule of Russian-doll ordering, in which larger should never fit inside smaller.
Whats more, if the prop-art was too good, it might awkwardly draw attention away from the creation in which it sat ? exacerbating an effect which always occurs anyway. Just as a television screen depicted on a cinema screen will always maddeningly draw the eye to what is being shown on it, an artwork within an artwork exercises a kind of parasitic exploitation of our instincts to assess what is in front of us. Its there to add to the realism of the moment ? but part of the reality of artworks is that we almost always ask whether theyre any good or not. And, while you cant sit on a prop-chair in a film (if youre in the audience, that is), you can nevertheless look at a prop-sculpture or prop-painting, just as you would do if it was real.
Its this, I think, that sets up the uncomfortable frisson that occurs when were allowed to see the results of a fictional characters creativity rather than having it tactfully occluded. Our sense of perspective suddenly gets a knock, because something that is supposed to be little more than background in-fill looms forward in a strangely disconcerting way. We know we shouldnt be focusing on it as if it was in the foreground but we cant ? for a short while at least ? prevent ourselves from doing just that.
Its better, really, for the veil to stay in place or the canvas to be left with its back to us ? so that our imaginations can fill the blank with work that is precisely as good, or bad, as it needs to be.
Reductio ad absurdum
Sitting on the Tube the other day I noticed a new poster for the London production of Chicago. "Londons sexiest musical", read the copyline. And then, beneath that, in type of equal size, "Show-stopping smooth legs by Philips Epilators". It was, I guess, an example of what businesspeople like to call branding synergy, a logical exploitation of a show that markets itself largely on the promise of great gams in fishnets. But I did wonder what might happen if the practice spread to less tractable drama. Posters for the new production of Harold Pinters No Mans Land could reasonably carry an approving label for Johnny Walker Red Label. Purdey, the gunmakers, might boldly underwrite Ivanov, which begins and ends with the bang of a shotgun. But surely only the marriage guidance organisation Relate could find a marketing opportunity in Creditors ? an evening which, I suspect, will leave more than one married couple in need of outside intervention.
The new Saatchi gallery, just off Londons Kings Road has taken the admirable step of displaying its first exhibition without the usual protective ropes, trusting to the good manners of its visitors not to get too close. Curiously, it also features a piece that presents exactly the opposite problem ? an installation by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu in which life-sized figures of geriatric men in electric wheelchairs mill around a basement room. It must be a rare instance of a gallery having to fret about the art bumping into the spectators, rather than the other way round.
2008 10 12 14:52:28
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If only they'd listened to me...
Artists and writers justifiably hate it when critics review the work they wished theyd seen, rather than the one they actually did. Its understandable, really. Just imagine it. You spend months carefully crafting a table and then you open the paper to find that someone is moaning that the seat is too high for comfort and there are no arm rests. "Its not meant to be a chair!" you would shriek, "Its supposed to be a bloody table!" And one of the things that aggravates the artists irritation, rubbing salt into the paper cut, is the sense that critics are betraying themselves at such moments ? revealing their envy for the act of creation.
As I say, I can understand the reflexive wince, but it may be worth noting that the instinct imaginatively to perfect and make good the work youve actually been presented with isnt unique to working critics. Indeed, its probably inseparable from any kind of intelligent encounter with works of art. Its just bound to happen from time to time, that you will look at a painting or read a book and think "oh ... if only" ? that phrase summoning up a ghostly counterpart of the thing in front of you, one which has been subtly tweaked to meet your own bespoke requirements. Its happened to me three times recently ? and each time its been accompanied by an odd little pang of grief for the twin that never was.
The first instance occurred when I was looking at the National Gallerys exhibition of candidates for the next plinth sculpture in Trafalgar Square. I thought Anthony Gormleys maquette looked particularly promising ? an oddly suggestive model of the empty plinth surrounded by safety nets cantilevered out on all four sides. What I liked about it was the ambiguity of these devices. You couldnt tell whether they were to prevent people from climbing up or something from falling down, and that seemed to me to charge the empty space above it in a very interesting way. And then ? a little sheepishly ? I discovered that Gormley planned to spoil this insinuating work by letting members of the public prance around on top. As we discovered this week Gormley won out, and Im sure the result will add to the gaiety of the nation. But I still mourn a little for my version of the piece.
A slightly different thing happened when I visited Folkestone for its first Triennial and came across Mark Wallingers piece Folk Stones. This consists of a large square of pebbles set into the clifftop lawns, the salient point being that there are 19,240 of them, each sequentially numbered in white paint ? and that this number matches the number of British dead on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. This has local resonance, since many of those troops would have passed through Folkestone on their way to the Front, and Wallingers field of bedded stones startlingly brings that number home to you ? converting it from abstraction to reality. But looking at it I found myself niggled by an unhelpful thought. Wouldnt this make a terrific modern war memorial, with names cut into each stone rather than numbers written on in white marker pen? Theres something about the interplay between similarity and distinctiveness that pebbles have that would be perfect for formal commemoration, which all too often loses a sense of individuality in a mere list. Since Wallinger didnt do it, though, it would be tricky now for anyone else to take up the idea.
Thats at the heart of what you feel at such moments, I think. That the work as it is stands in the way of something youd like to get to. I felt it particularly strongly watching Michael Frayns play Afterlife at the National recently, about the Austrian director Max Reinhardt, who was forced to flee by the Nazis. What Frayn is interested in are the cross currents between Reinhardts biography and Everyman, the medieval mystery play he staged every year at the Salzburg Festival. What I found myself interested in were the cross currents between Reinhardt and another master of mass spectacle, Adolf Hitler. And I felt a growing yearning for the play that wasnt there.
Rather than chain himself to the lurching rhythms of Everymans rhyming couplets I wanted Frayn to get his characters arguing ? about art, and emotion, and the theatre of politics, and whether epic spectacle has something intrinsically fascistic at its heart. Afterlife deserves all the credit for suggesting the idea but then, most unfairly, it also gets all the blame for ensuring that Frayn will never write it. It must be maddening ? though thered surely be something unnervingly passive about an audience that never arrived at the table and insisted on sitting on top of it.
?independent.co.uk
2008 06 27 12:34:58
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This is no job for a grown-up. Friday, 23 May 2008
?In the wilder extremes of Whomania, I?ve felt like the one person whose brain doesn?t respond to an alien hypnosis beam?
Something rather remarkable happened this week, though its possible that it passed unnoticed by those of you without a professional interest in the matter. For the first time in around the past 140 issues, the Radio Times appeared without any mention of Doctor Who on its cover. No illustration of a Sontaran in Sontaran evening dress. No little red flash promising you an opportunity to meet Doctor Whos daughter. No copyline implying that an ornament of the Royal Shakespeare Company has finally achieved career apotheosis with a walk-on part. It was so uncanny I had to check twice, but it was really true. It was a Doctor Who-free zone ? which Id come to assume was as unlikely a thing as a first-class stamp without the Queens head on it.
It helped, of course, that Doctor Who isnt actually on this weekend ? having been bumped out of the schedules by the Eurovision Song Contest ? but Im pretty sure that such details havent stopped them in the past... and I was naturally tempted to interpret the absence as evidence of a larger cultural shift. Just as Kremlinologists used to detect shake-ups in the Politburo hierarchy by checking out who was sitting where on the May Day reviewing stand, could this vacancy be a sign that the hegemonic power of Doctor Who is, at last, beginning to fade?
That eerie Radio Times cover coincided this week with the news that Russell T Davies is to give up acting as the programmes executive producer, though he will be in charge of four specials that are planned for next year. Davies is to be replaced by the writer Steven Moffat, author of the sitcom Coupling and the recent series Jekyll, which showed that he could give fantastical storylines a nice edge of adult wit. This seemed to me to be a good news/bad news deal. On the one hand, one of Britains most interesting television writers has at last been liberated from the task of thinking up silly nonsense for a teatime audience and could be welcomed back to the real world. On the other hand, this had only been achieved by the cultural equivalent of a hostage swap. There are writers one would be quite happy to see chained below decks in the Doctor Who galley, so that their energies are entirely consumed in a broadly harmless manner, but Moffat ? who can write for grown-ups ? is not one of them. He didnt see it this way himself, of course, announcing that it was the "best and toughest job in television".
Id beg to differ ? and its one of the reasons that Im so glad that Davies has finally sprung himself from literary incarceration, even if hes only on provisional parole for the moment. Because although it is undoubtedly quite tricky to come up with a really memorable bit of Gothic for the Doctor Who series (Moffats episode "Blink" comes to mind as an example, as it happens), its also true that most episodes of Doctor Who are forgivingly predictable in their plot and psychological dynamics. In the wilder extremes of Whomania over the past couple of years Ive occasionally felt like the one person on the planet whose brain isnt wired to respond to an alien hypnosis beam ? a lucky break obviously not shared by the editor of the Radio Times, BBC commissioning editors and, I might as well confess, my own children. Cant everybody see that its OK for immature audiences but hardly justifies the black hole gravitational pull it seems to exert over genuinely talented writers? Does nobody else feel like giving Christopher Eccleston a heroic conduct medal for getting out so quickly, before the franchise had a chance to scar him permanently? And am I the only person who yearns to see David Tennant released into a less two-dimensional role? (People like to pretend its three-dimensional characterisation, but its actually just like one of those novelty postcards which flicker as you turn them from side to side).
Of course, its a good thing that children have decent writers writing for them and possibly a good thing, too, that families have something they can all watch together (though I thought we were all supposed to be outside, playing a fat-burning game of park football). But, pace Moffat, the really tough job on British television remains writing decent drama for grown-ups ? popular series that dont invent other worlds to escape to, but address the one we actually find ourselves living in. There arent that many writers who can take on the tricky post-watershed topics of how human beings ? not Daleks or Oods or Cybermen ? relate to each other. Davies is one, and its good to have him back on Earth.
2008 05 24 18:30:13
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The dead shouldn't have the last word
One of the great deficiencies of the dead is that they never change their minds. One of their advantages is that theres very little they can do about it when someone changes it for them. Indeed, they can even be enlisted to back up their own overruling.
When Dmitri Nabokov announced the other day that he planned to publish his fathers final manuscript, in direct contravention of his fathers request that it should be burned, he told the German magazine Der Spiegel: "Im a loyal son and thought long and seriously about it. Then my father appeared before me and said with an ironic grin: Youre stuck in a right old mess. Just go ahead and publish". So, after 30 years of tantalising seclusion in a Swiss bank vault, the extant fragments of The Original of Laura will finally be made public. Mr Nabokov Sr. wasnt available to confirm the accuracy of his sons account.
There are Nabokov loyalists who profess to be appalled by this ? though I have a suspicion that they will master their affront sufficiently to read the book when it comes out. Personally I think Dmitri has done the right thing ? and even if Nabokovs rough draft would have been a smaller loss than two notorious victims of successful literary incineration ? Jane Austens letters and Byrons memoirs ? it is better to have it than not. Dmitris argument ? that his father would probably have thought otherwise had he had enough time to cheer up ? might be specious but it will do in the absence of anything better. But all this is too flippant, some will say. If we disregard the wishes of our predecessors then we have no right to expect that our own requests will be honoured. And when it comes to property theres obviously some weight to that argument. Last wills and testaments matter because their absence would create a wilderness of competing claims.
When it comes to ideas, though, following the instructions of the dead can be far more dangerous ? and obedience itself is likely to create a chaos of contending interpretations. And the greater the gap between the issuing of the instruction and our continuing attempts to carry them out, the bigger the problem gets. Some will regard Dmitri as a betrayer of his fathers intentions. I take him as an exemplary hero of scriptural exegesis ? wisely recognising that the ultimatum was issued under very specific circumstances and that posterity has some claim to reconsider the matter.
His decision made me think of exegetists currently engaged in a far more critical and important re-evaluation ? the Muslim scholars who, in various places and to various degrees, are beginning to suggest that simplistically literal readings of seventh-century writings might not match every detail of contemporary life and that its important to maintain the distinction between the hadith (or sayings and deeds of the prophet) and the divinely dictated word of God.
Its not a distinction I recognise myself, but its a start in emancipating contemporary Muslims from prohibitions that have long outlived their usefulness ? and, like Dmitri, it argues that sometimes heirs have responsibilities other than unthinking obedience. To say otherwise is to abdicate from one of the most important human duties there is ? which is occasionally to change ones own mind in the face of changed circumstances. The dead can offer us wisdom, guidance and instruction ? but when they give us orders we should respectfully ignore them.
Amy ? a very model of restraint
Driving through Camden late on Thursday night, I witnessed what I thought at first was a mob assault. A crowd had gathered on the pavement to harry someone who was virtually invisible at the centre of the pack. It looked like a crow being attacked by starlings.
And then, as I drew alongside, I saw the flashes and realised that the crow was Amy Winehouse, enjoying a quiet night out with the British press. And having seen this, it struck me as extraordinarily forebearing on her part not to hit someone every time she goes out. If all paparazzi pictures were accompanied by another one ? taken from far enough back to show how feral the throng is ? I think wed be a bit more sympathetic about the horror of celebrity.
* The proceedings of the Old Bailey, a huge assembly of trial transcripts just released online, is going to be an absolute treasure-house for the historically-minded browser.
Id leave it for a week or two, because the site is currently so crammed with digital tourists that you can barely move for the crush. But even one random stab at this resource turned up something engrossing in an account of the trial of James Stockdale, hanged for murder in 1753 after his pistol accidentally discharged during a robbery.
In the trial transcript, you discover that he and his accomplice were identified because a witness recognised a wen on the leg of one of the getaway horses theyd hired ? much as a modern bystander might clock a broken tail light on a speeding Ford Mondeo. The speed of retribution is appalling ? the crime was committed on 18 June and Stockdale hung on 23 July ? but theres no denying the appeal of CSI: Newgate.
t.sutcliffe@independent.co.uk"
2008 04 29 10:51:33
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