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I'm not a particularly tidy person - not that I'm grossly untidy, but one would never describe me as neat. For instance I am happy to leave seed trays lying about where I will see them everyday in the wrong place - but be drawn to the delightful form. Their inexact geometry, the shifting shadows in shades of black, the variety of stains from drained rain. And then, because they happened to be under the creeper, this glorious gift of fallen leaves: Nature turned and dying, contained once more in the receptacle of birth.
Another, but this time formally conceived creative chaos is the beautiful Serpentine pavilion this year designed by Frank Gehry. There are articles about it here, here and here, and here - and lots of others if you Google. Meaning to go all summer, we finally got there today, and given the dreadful rainy season just past we could not have chosen a better day. Everything was at its best in the sunshine - except that my camera batteries and the spares too were flat! No photos.
Such a wondrous space! Wood, glass, and space. Simply a corridor, a straight path with wide wooden step benches on each side. Inviting benches of comfortable pale planks, four tiers mostly, with space to sit alone but within a community. Toddlers love them, climbing and running, with people joyously looking on rather than frowning with irritation (me included, old curmudgeon that I normally am!). Folks of all ages, with lively or well-behaved dogs, with books, with friends, with lovers, ... this is what we should have in every town centre! There was a smile on the face of everyone who approached the structure, looking up at the angled glass panels and beams above that covered us like large random leaves of a great canopy, leaving room between them for us to see the trees beyond. Oh what a space to feel part of something rather than craving to be apart.
I have been thinking about memories a lot recently, especially as talking about my childhood and my mother's is the best way to keep her cheerful. I was even thinking about writing a kind of memoir based on our discussions when along came The Guardian newspaper's delightful series: How to write. Each day for the past seven there has been a beautifully produced booklet covering different categories of writing, including memoirs. Not only are these booklets readable and intelligent, but they have wondrous collage illustrations by Martin O'Neill.
As a former editor I am acutely aware of the old saying: that we are frustrated incompetent writers. I do enjoy writing, and produce reviews from time to time for a couple of magazines, but have always been doubtful about tackling anything longer - not because of any false modesty, but because I know how difficult it is for a writer to gauge their own work. Also, I like to have a good reason or purpose for writing.
Now, however, perhaps I have a valid reason other than potential publication to put down my history - as a kind of catharsis for myself as well as a therapy for my mother. I was mulling this over the other day when along came a podcast to add to the mix. The Guardian (again - obviously the centre of my universe!) has an excellent series of book club podcasts, and this was Salman Rushdie talking about Midnight's Children. The whole podcast was interesting - and these are of a decent length with much discursive material from the authors themselves - but one item in particular jumped out at me.
Talking of memoir and Proustian memory, Rushdie described how he has a vivid recollection of a collection of incidents, atmosphere, and conversations of the time that India was at war with China. But he was told by his parents that he could not have remembered any of this as he was away at boarding school at the time. He could not believe this even after he verified the dates. He had been told of everything which he then somehow absorbed as his own memory. Not only his own, but vivid too.
I found this exciting. The importance of story as memory, and memory as story in how we handle events in our lives is a fascinating topic I find. This coupled with the influence of visual narrative and its devices such as in film and television are areas which I have been exploring perforce in trying to cope with the emotional moods of my mother. Which in turn, along with the effect of those moods on me has resulted in a rollercoaster output of designs for potential work.
The peacock feathers above I found when looking for something else. I had forgotten that I still had them. They are from a group which used to stand in a tall vase. I can see them clearly, up the white stairs near the roof, outside Cleo's room where she painted my portrait one summer when I was four. She caught me stroking them and gave me some for myself. Delighted, I knew that my mother would not let me keep them, so I had to hide them. Snapped near the 'eye' they could be slipped into tissue paper and kept flat on my tummy under my pants. After that it was easy to conceal them inside books. And here they are again, only three left, and two gone a strangely glorious metallic red colour. They are falling apart, so I scanned them and threw the originals away.
Summer having been a washout, I have high hopes for a bright Autumn. (Well, I have my fingers crossed anyway.) After worrying that there would be no tomatoes to talk of, the Italians have come through large and very tasty after all - as have the marrows.
Yesterday was the sunniest day we have had for months (or so it seemed), so we set off early for Kew Gardens. First we made for the walkway in the trees, so that it would still be quiet.
This was our first view of the structure, and it looks just like a wondrous sculpture set amongst chestnut trees. It was a lovely day for taking photographs, and for looking at them too - there is a display of the winners of the International Garden Photographer of the Year competition conveniently near the Pavilion Restaurant (where we had a coffee). My favourite was a night-time view of Little Sparta, the garden of the late Ian Hamilton Finlay.A stroll over to the Sackler crossing brought us to a host of wildfowl. There is a remarkable collection of birds around Kew, including a flock of parakeets, peacocks (looking rather scruffy at this time of year poor things), guinea fowl, Egyptian geese, as well as coots,
mallard ducks, swans, and Canada geese, etc. Kew is not normally where we go to look at flowers, but a meadow planting in front of the Palm House looked stunning in the sunshine.
We have a lot to be thankful to the Victorians for, and yesterday we felt as though apart from the car journey there and back, we might have experienced the simple but thoroughly satisfying pleasure of a Victorian Sunday outing.
Chatting with chooks
This week I read about a wonderful piece of art: performance / conceptual art. If I were still in jumping-in-car mode I would have seen it already: All the people in the world by James Yarker is in Birmingham at present. It is theatre piece, conceptual art, entertaining, informative, and all round wondrous experience it seems. Just reading about the idea of it lifted my spirits considerably, getting the old brain cells sparking away. And all through moving about piles of rice.
We are but a grain of rice, and the piles represent categories of people: for instance more people applied to go on the UK X-factor TV programme than applied to become teachers. Of course content like that does not lift my spirits, but the whole manifestation of the communication of such statistics is so much more worthwhile than sound-bite headlines. And of course the piles of rice as visual evidence have so much more power to bypass the 'whatever' filters.
In this week when we are all splashed by the fat cats' belly flops and when bling is king, this story made me feel good about contemporary art.
design in progress
Robert Rauschenberg: Combines is the catalogue of an exhibition I did not manage to get to last year. The photographs are excellent and plentiful, showing various views of the three dimensional pieces. The essays informative and thoughtprovoking, providing an rewarding experience. Short of walking amongst the work again and again while attending a series of lectures, it could not be bettered.
Glowing from this book's offerings, I then acquired Jasper Johns Gray, again a catalogue of an exhibition. This time I knew I had no hope of getting to see the show in Chicago, but the book gave me, and continues to give me a thrilling experience.
Building on the thinking about Rauschenberg's work, the Johns book clarified further what I was seeing. Although the photographs and the graphics in this second book are excellent - and again like the first this is a delight for an old bibliophile like me to handle (cloth covers!) - this time I somehow missed seeing the actual paintings more than I had done with the combines. Strange, but there it is.
Again the essays and notes filled my mind with answers and more questions. I went back and forth between the two books, savouring the input and feeding off the buzz. The party only got better with the third book.
I did manage to see the Cy Twombly exhibition. It makes so much difference when looking at the catalogue, not only to see the reproduction, but to remember the experience of the work itself. In the exhibition itself I thought about the three artists and in oversimplified generalisation I labelled Rauschenberg the practical, Johns the intellectual, and Twombly the romantic. Of course they are not mutually exclusively so, but in relation to each other that's how they fit in my own categorisation of them.
They are artists whose work and whose thinking draws me tremendously, and I derive great pleasure and inspiration from looking at and reading about it and them. Intellectually I am attracted to the Modernists, but I know that I would fall far short of their ideals. Viscerally I feel that as an art student I would have been more at home on the outside edges of the fringes of the crowd around these three. What a fantasy!
322 x 248mm 1936 'Wax' relief print
inscribed 'For Jules with appreciation'
The catalogue entry for this print reads:
The 'Rust Cotton Picker', a type of mechanized cotton harvester, had been developed in the late 1920s by the Rust Brothers of Memphis, Tennessee, and by 1936 was being introduced in the Southern States to a furore of opposition. ... Designed to make cotton picking more efficient and profitable for the plantation owners, the Rust Cotton Picker threatened to make redundant a large part of the rural labour force, which was poor and black. Shackelford shows a Rust Cotton Picker being operated by two faceless workers, while a redundant black man looks on , ineffectually cradling a handful of cotton.
Shackelford used her idiosyncratic 'wax' relief technique to make this print. This involved pouring wax into a baking tin and then scoring it with a tool after it had hardened. The wax matrix would be refrigerated in its tin to prevent it from becoming soft. The print, with its reserved white lines, shows and affinity with the work of the Provincetown printmakers, particularly Marguerite Zorach and Blanche Lazzell. (work of both of these was in the show)
The catalogue also tells us that in 1941 she published a book entitled Electric Eel Calling, an illustrated account of a scientific expedition she had made to study this marine creature at Santa Maria de Belem do Para in Brazil.
and goes on to say:
She used unconventional techniques in her printmaking, such as the wax print and the paraffin print. An example of the latter is Mother and Child, made in 1929. Unusual media were also evident in her drawings: as well as working in graphite, she also produced a series of 'soot drawings' later in her career.
The Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, Massachusetts, holds a number of her prints and drawings in its collection. If only I were still living in New England I would already be in my car heading down there! Indeed in scrolling down the list of their collection I see another elusive artist - a painter whose work I was very drawn to years ago: Judith Rothschild. And in looking at their book selection, I am attracted by yet another, ... but this is enough enthusiasm for one morning.
1,2,3, fly! (recently completed)
The former is an impressive collection of sculpture and models and other artifacts from the BM and other museums, displayed in the space that was created for the exhibition of the Terracotta Army from China - in the dome of the former British Library Reading Room. I was contemplating how exciting a field archaeology is now because of computing power, global exchange of information, and interest whipped up through television and film. All this contemporary technology put to use, being developed, so that we can find out more in depth and in detail about the past. Wonderful stuff.
I was admiring a model of Hadrian's villa complex with photographs projected on the wall nearby when I overheard the comment "of course this is much more beautiful as a ruin. The Pantheon does not have the same appeal to me." Ruins are romantic and are definitely in the past, I suppose. This set me thinking of the fascinating exhibition of photographs I saw earlier in the year. It was a look at Soviet avant guard architecture in the post revolutionary period - then photographs by Richard Pare of some of those same buildings at the turn of this last century. The latter were the contemporary ruins. Not delightfully crumbled Roman remains, but rusted, derelict neglect made so attractive in large glossy contemporary photography - perhaps more tellingly poignant, however, because the glory days and the fall from glory are within living memory.
As I looked at some exquisite carved columns from Hadrian's time, now distressed in a fetching way, I thought about the pride in their making. I thought about the positive look to the future that was involved in the great building plans both at the time of Hadrian and of the new Soviet era. How excited they must have been, looking forward. And I thought about how much we seem to want to focus our attention back rather than forward these days.
Upstairs in the print room I had a wondrous treat in store. Such a wealth is contained in the British Museum print department, and not nearly as widely known about as the other collections for which the institution is justly famous. It is true that I was disappointed to see lots of people at the show - normally it is very quiet when we visit - but the quality of the pieces on show in the American prints exhibition overcame that.
I so often feel that I was born out of my time - I am drawn so much to the art of the first half of the 20th century. I feel at home in its midst, it inspires me tremendously. Of course there are contemporary exceptions, but as a whole it's Modernism and its close isms that does it for me.
I was interested to read that Edward Hopper had learned from Martin Lewis to make etchings. And then to see that same EH drama in the latter's work, such as in Little Penthouse set off questions about who influenced whom and how. Then I read Hopper's statement that 'After I took up etching, my painting seemed to crystallise.' I love the idea of taking up a slightly different medium in order to clarify one's expression.
The exhibition started with influences coming from Europe, but quickly Americans wanted to speak of their own present. So many beautiful, moving, thought-provoking images made to communicate. Surely the print form is deliberately chosen in order to disperse one's thoughts to as many others ...? Explorations in new expressions, political comment, delight in daily life, all these were there. I particularly liked the immediacy of Shelby Shackelford's Rust Cotton Picker comes to the South (1936). As it said in the accompanying description: Her unique wax relief technique involved pouring wax into a baking tin and then scoring it with a tool after it had hardened.
How excited these printmakers seem also with their message and their methods, and it feels the right time for me to find that enthusiasm contagious.
I'm not a particularly tidy person - not that I'm grossly untidy, but one would never describe me as neat. For instance I am happy to leave seed trays lying about where I will see them everyday in the wrong place - but be drawn to the delightful form. Their inexact geometry, the shifting shadows in shades of black, the variety of stains from drained rain. And then, because they happened to be under the creeper, this glorious gift of fallen leaves: Nature turned and dying, contained once more in the receptacle of birth.
