Culture

A confessional from a professional?

~ bowlingatvincent ~ 1 Comment

High up there in the pantheon of sporting clichés there sits at least one about hookers. Somewhere behind the 47 crap jokes casually linking this most trusting of er… positions with flighty women and gaslit alleys. Somewhere on that flipchart of inclusive or exclusive banter between “Ya’ve got to be mad to be a ‘goalie”/ “Who ett all the pies ?” and “Gavin Henson is a Homosexual!” people say – even non-hookers say – they’re a special breed.

They are too. Anyone who is prepared to dangle off of the shoulders of colleagues in this most exposed of manners – with both arms effectively relieved of their ability to mitigate against serious injury – gets a pint of after shave from me. There must be surely a link between the morphology of their imperfectly expressed cruciform in the scrum, the necessary courage shown by hookers at all levels of their trade and the apparently described pathology of the breed? Which seems to involve on the one hand wholeheartedness and on the other a generally undemonstrative fearless mania.

And why wouldn’t it? Rarely in life is the head and neck so literally on the block; it’s as if your two mates either side (the loosehead and tighthead props) have your very being – or the physical safety of it – in their custody. This is no Guardian-readers-on-confidence-building workshop exercise, this is offering yourself up at the moment of the infamous ‘Hit’, when two packs of opposing forwards clang together in an expression of calculated violence designed to find you out should any weakness reveal itself. You will not, therefore, be weak.

The Front Row Union then may only allow the brave and the faithful entry to their bloodsweatandtears-stained ante-rooms. This does not, however, debar from entry the bright or the evil; and it did not debar Brian Moore. In fact the two were surely made for each other.

Brian Moore. Of England – sixty odd times. Adopted. Abused. Self-confessed Tolkien nerd and qualified Nail Painter. (That would be as in fingernails, during a stint as proprietor and technician(?) at a Soho emporium run with a former wife. 1 of 3.) Moore the proud and probably slightly perverse bearer of the various bête noire-equivalents knocking around Six Nations rugby (though it was Five when he played.) Delighted to be so hated by the Welsh and the Scots and the French and well… everybody. Inspired even by that knowledge, almost satisfied by it – especially the realisation that if he were, for example Scottish and otherwise unchanged, the Scots would love him for his fiercely committed spirit.

And yet the key thing revealed by the man himself during his predictably jarringly honest visit to Nurse Kirsty’s knee for Desert Island Discs was this ‘almost’.

In an extraordinary but typically articulate self-skewering Moore constantly alluded to his inability to recognise, to be at peace with his achievements. Utterly without resort to idle pleasantries – how, we imagine, he must hate them! – the former England number 2 rumbled like some worryingly law-conversant boar through the excited parabola that is his personal history. Adoption into churchgoing family/abuse from within churchgoing milieu/sporting and academic success/then oodles of hard-won glory at an international level for England RUFC. Success he still finds hard to own.

Fascinatingly(?) Brian Moore refused to emerge from the dressing room to participate in celebrations and photocalls following England’s 1991 Grand Slam victory. He simply wouldn’t do it. Issues of self-worth were so darkly present that Moore failed to shift from his bench… because he didn’t feel he deserved that victory. Psychologists – cod, like me, or otherwise – have your field day.

On the way to his metaphorical Desert Island, Brian Moore revealed pretty profound stuff like this every other sentence. Not out of arrogance you sensed – although there may be some self-obsession implied? – but because he gives a straight and generous answer to a genuine question. This is how he understands the world; there’s surely something to be said for that? He was alarmingly open about his everything; from his ‘Pitbull’ness to his other darknesses, his lost times under the influence of all manner of substances, following his release from the strictures of his athletic discipline. (Basically he went mental in his beloved Soho.)

Moore’s choice of music inevitably reflected his scope as a bright, bullish, sensitive bloke. It combines what some might consider appreciation of the finer things with punkishness. So from Mozart to Green Day. From Ian Dury to Pietro Mascagni. And one from the much-admired soulbrothers-in-peachy devilry, The Stranglers – an attractive, near melancholic, rather beautiful song called “Always the Sun”. (Listen to that …and it figures?)

But Moore would want to be judged on that which he committed to; formerly the rugby/now the journalism and commentary. He knows how much his confrontational personality, his facility to wind-up the world at large has discoloured how he is received. Despite this awareness of the extensively ventilated voodoo doll- version Moore out there in the public mind, I don’t hear him complaining, ever. Serious – often- and lugubrious as well as loquacious in his muffling, bell-chiming fog of sincerity; but too manly for self-pity or show. So judge him fairly, please.

Moore is a complex and yes a dark, difficult guy. A proper hooker – with that hunting dog relentlessness and low-burning fire. Beyond indomitable – more alive and more interesting, despite his saddening ‘baggage’. An essential part of a particularly English rugby team, a successful one, for several years; drawn absolutely to the thick of it. Now in triumphant opposition to the platitudes and the rehearsed banalities of much sports-speak, instinctively and with some style telling us how it really is.

He writes now acutely and often brilliantly for the Daily Telegraph. He commentates, often as foil to the more circumspect Mr Eddie Butler, with whom, surprisingly, he generally disagrees. In all of this there appears to me not an ounce of what my lot would call ‘side’ – meaning pretence or calculation or feyness or… dishonesty. He picks and goes without pausing to preen I think. And I wonder if he dare give himself some credit for that?

Dumb questions.

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Don’t know about you but I hate feeling excluded from stuff; whether it be (literal) entry to something or exclusion through snobbery, for example. For now, if we stop to reflect on all manner of political discourse (please, do!) we may find pretty early some obstructive force, some veil through which we feel we may or should not peek.

On times this will feel just ‘right’, the presence of some justifiable and even necessary filter, through which we have to earn passage, through understanding. Because we need to feel confident of a certain level of intellectual competence in Subject A before we run with it, debate it, unconstruct it. So essentially we fore-arm ourselves, against asking dumb questions, often by turning sheepishly(?) away from those things we ‘don’t know enough about’. Though I am guilty of it, I hate that.

My suspicion is that much of this self-denial of the cerebral joust (that might on reflection be regarded as a life-enhancing or defining stimulus) is more coerced than personally screened. We are made to feel inadequate. Pressures emerge from all levels of the sky-scraping beast that morphs into (or rises from?) say, the body politic/the fiscal gherkin/the evolved system. Us normal folks are lost or spun or misled by something in the constricting ether; something on the one hand rather rundown and bad-breathlike and on the other awesomely pervasive; powerful.

My instinct is to fight that stuff; to defy and to undermine it. This may mean pushing out beyond the ledge of my core subject expertise – that would be er… sport maybe? – and blowing a raspberry at the notion of received wisdoms elsewhere. Received wisdom often perpetuates myth, right? Is often grounded in smugness; may need the faux-oxygen of privilege or the cover of opaqueness. Perhaps mystery itself may be an outlier in this matrix of conformist gunk? And perhaps, therefore we need an occasional, demystifying blast of… punk?

Punk was wonderful for its moral zeal-with-a-mohican. Punk said – if you were listening – stop preening and start speaking from the heart. Stop twiddling those solo’s and tell me something real. It was magnificently articulate and magnificently necessary in that respect. Punk began unpeeling the facades of the worlds of art/music/politics because it seared angrily through; it was a focused mischief blaring wildly out for betterstuff. It may not have paused too long in consideration of the need for nuanced arguments but maybe that counts for urgency rather than in some cool deficiency column. Great punk(s) had no respect, other than that which was earned. Great punks did not understand, so they demanded answers.

John Lydon may have been the only great punk. ‘Metal Box’ from Public Image Limited remains a staggeringly discomfiting but articulate noise, an appropriate racket from which to launch an onslaught against (capitalist(?) drudgery—witness the “shallow spread of ordered lawns”. Something is being punctured or exposed or better revealed; a kind of hypocrisy, a kind of normalcy; a sad, bad intellectual thinness. There is poetry in these dumb questions. These questions might not have been asked… if we’d have just… behaved.

So though I do despair at how we still fawn before the current gods – for ‘growth’/some careering stability/the normalcy of sheepishness – those rib-progglers, those UnCutters, those Occupiers give me hope.

Hirst; they think it’s all over- is it, now?

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Damien Hirst has continued his druggie/pardee/easy-teasy relationship with the unfortunate non-Damien Hirst World this week by – as is his want? – TAKING OVER.  He has gone smotheringly, ballistically wider and in your facier than his previous bigtime best, by commandeering space in 11 Gagosian galleries around the world simultaneously.  As always with the regal brit-popper, beneath this cultural blitzkrieg there is that subversive prickle within the detail – some of the works being provocatively titled, with hallucinogenic associations

Paintings being exhibited are entirely appropriate to the Hirst-obsession with WHAT THE MARKET WILL TAKE.  So this current ruse of (imagined?) flooding or testing our/THE MARKET’S capacity to engage is what it’s about.  As much as the paintings are.  Again.  Arguably.

This may on the one hand be a perfectly acceptable creative response, honourably reflecting Hirsts’s entirely legitimate and punkily energised worldview; (that) the Art Market is obscene/absurd/necrophiliac and it must be defrocked, demystified and disembowelled in a creative and entertaining way.  Or it may be another lazy spin of another formula designed at the Hirst Ruse Emporium, centreing again on his own importance; or does it challenge that too?

Hirst knows that the scale of the project and of his celebrity tanks these paintings in formaldehyde.  Indeed if a shocking generalisation were to crop up here it might be that Hirst’s ouevre is relentlessy concerned with his knowingness.  But in my view it would still be foolish to underestimate either his integrity or his concern with the making of worthwhile art.  Thus my own sloganeering is more in sympathy than in irony.

Interestingly, Adrian Searle in today’s Guardian seems clear that there is no discernible benefit to looking at these paintings as individuals – suggesting I think that this offers little reward, or no individual unique viewing experience, even though they are hugely different in dimension and subtly different in colour(s).  I disagree.  (If you are unaware of the nature of the paintings, now might be the time for me to tell you that they are all ‘spot paintings’ – arrangements of coloured dots along an imaginary grid system.  ‘Traditionally’, they are the kind of (arguably) abstract or conceptual painting that might demand a degree of contemplation from the viewer.)

I think the artist may argue that it is a travesty to suggest these paintings are in any way ALL THE SAME.  I think, however, that he seeks to lever out that very response, at whatever level, from his punter.  Hirst is standing again on the chest of the Market, crow-barring open its ribcage for fleeing or inveigling opinions – offensive or otherwise – to worm a way in or out.  The paintings – all made by assistants, I believe – are both a challenge as an understood group AND as individuals AND as a relevance (or otherwise.)  They are not to be dismissed without due consideration because that is a purpose of all art; to demand or engineer consideration.

So look at these paintings.   Allow yourself to feel them.  Is there anything there for you?  If so, what?  Have fun trying to work that out!  If nothing alights, firstly look some more then consider whether they make a contribution – uplifting/degrading or bland or quietly humming? – to an individual moment, or to an easy or a teasy conversation you might have… after too much wine, or some drugs maybe, at a noisy metropolitan party.

Saatchi and me…

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Is the currently invigorating air of free-market/un-market revolution swirling and beeping its way into the contemporary art scene, I wonder?  Is it even being blackberried by its very own, from within its very own hub, rather than from without, by militant techno-geeks or the Urban Poor?   What, in fact, is occurring bro’?

If Charles Saatchi (himself) is sending out the incendiary messages – whilst presumably firing up on latte and danger-muffin in some metropolitan caff – then maybe, on this occasion, the New Disillusioned are superfluous.  The art scene may implode without recourse to occupation/immolation from uncutters or black blockers or almostinnocentbystanders.com.

Those of you who missed the minority interest hoohaa not kicking but maybe shuffling off last week following Saatchi’s Guardian article please sign on here; for another thoroughly modern story is being (un?)told.  Here is the alleged figuration thing … the facts as recognised or… performed.

The boy Saatchi – actually too super-annuated to be coolly associated with rebellion, despite his impressive record for supporting Wacky New Stuff – has really launched one, really gone off on one against his fellow contemporary art enthusiasts.  (And frankly – good on ‘im!)  The essence of what he says is that being a buyer amongst the current crop is “comprehensively and indisputably vulgar”.

He goes on

It is the sport of the Euro-trashy, hedgefundy Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art-dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard.

He goes on again

Do any of these people actually enjoy looking at art? … Do they simply enjoy having easily recognised big-brand-name pictures, bought ostentatiously in auction rooms at eye-catching prices, to decorate their several homes, floating and otherwise, in an instant demonstration of drop-dead coolth and wealth?

It is, therefore a pretty spiky appraisal of those he rubs shoulders with.  Surprisingly, I have no direct contact with either Mr Saatchi or the average oiligarch, so please take any remarks I contribute with a substantial pinch of something that may or may not be actual salt or a symbol of salt.

However, Charles and I are alike in that we do have a certain general respect for contemporary artists, whilst knowing that this goes against the grain of popular understanding.  He has I think genuinely supported – arguably ‘made’ – substantial British artists such as Hirst and Emin through a belief that they say something real and important about now as well as because of their capacity to excite coverage.  He (no doubt having read my authoritative material on the subject) fully understands the difficulty many folks have with Modern Art; namely that they just don’t get it because it either doesn’t look like what it’s supposed to or ‘any fool could do it’.

Saatchi has put a considerable wedge behind the argument that c’mon, you just really have to look – engage – a bit more and other things become apparent.  For art is no longer (just) about how masterfully you can draw or paint.  It may now be the case that is essential to enter the construct that is the painting/photo/video/performance in order to make judgement upon it.  This might admittedly be more ‘difficult’ than was historically the case but THAT IS PROGRESS.  You, the viewer, have been having it too easy and you may now have to a) gawp for longer and b) even earn the right to make a decision about the artist’s talent and authenticity.

Okay I’m offering a lot given my unfamiliarity with Charles’s everything but these are surely logical extensions, or possibly prefixes, to where he ends up – i.e. IN DEFENCE OF THE REAL ARTIST – who may, surprisingly, be alive now, making art through signs or symbols or soundscapes rather than with lines we immediately recognise.

It may be argued that a leap of faith is necessary to accept some contemporary art as ‘real’, as ‘true’.  That’s maybe fair.  However it has always been the case that critical faculties must be exercised in order to appreciate.  Allow the artists to work.  Do not mistake lack of figuration for lack of quality or integrity.  Contemporary artists are making a massive and honourable contribution to our cultural lives – to our lives.   That’s not a quote from Charles Saatchi but I tell you what I think it could be.  And that’s why the presence of so many wealthy airheads on the floors of major gallery openings offends him.

Saatchiandme.co desperately oppose both the cheap assumption that contemporary art is mainly crap and the notion that it’s okay for the inevitable art market to be populated by phonies.  We are together on the barricade – his a Sheraton Bureau, mine a shopping trolley – lobbing respectively cut glass and potato peelings at the barbarian hordes.  Shouting “Love Not Money!”

So… in this cultural riot… are you with us?

Come on and hold me tight

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There’s a line in a Bunnymen song where Ian McCulloch, the lanky singer with the anarcho-adroitly teased barnet drops into smoulderingly deep and meaningful mode.

What he actually sings is “Come on and hold me tight / I can’t sleep at night”– so it’s not the single most original dollop of poetic insight in the history of popular music. It is, however both memorable and in a defiantly heart-on-sleeve kindofaway affecting. (Footnote/Falsenote; I used that word to describe Amy Winehouse in a blog some time ago, suggesting I am slightly unmoved by her voice. This just isn’t the same.)

It’s ludicrous to compare the two and I don’t; I do or did however feel the infectious charge of the Bunnymen carrying me off to a place where sustenance itself is pared down – or inflated? – only to a kind of crystalline belief. McCulloch tossed that mane of his with a quietly scouse (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) luminosity, lassooing in the process some hazy profundities.

All of which sounds like a recipe for fakery and pomp that might surely have brought derision or a phlegm-soaked drowning in the late seventies. But when the guitars chimed and the coke was snorted, an electrically relevant and contemporary world was projected to the far wall – one that we recognised, one that lifted us.

I loved McCulloch for his utter sureness, his inviolable belief that it was okay, ‘natural’ – cool even – to express himself as a man in dour straits in search of poetry. I still feel his colours as a necessary and transformative energy; an antidote to cynicism, to meanness. When depressing realities threaten to intrude – hey, let’s be honest, look around! – this is how I fight them. Is it mad to confess that the more sport, the more political debate I see consumed by conservatism or bullishness, the more I revert to the defiant colours of this song?

It felt great to be an Echo and the Bunnymen fan. If I never did the hair thing, being too punky, the amorphous Oxfam overcoat plus badge – entirely workable for a Gang of Four/Joy Division Overlap Scenario – spoke volumes re the necessary anti-fashion non-statement department. Oh the joy of being so obviously outwardly joyless whilst singing with lungbursting force inside. Together we were preciously aware of our individual power.

After all

Where’s the sense in stealing / Without the grace to be it?


Family Fortunes?

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My dad was a great bloke whose default position for people/things that offended him, politically or morally, was to intone only mildly passionately that they should be stood up against the wall and shot. Given that he was a generous lump – six feet, fifteen stone – that may make him a sound like some rather intimidating Northern Philistine, coming as he did from Macclesfield. But though he certainly possessed that particular ability to glory in dumb-honest normalcy – a trait I am kindof proud to continue – he was Top Five when it came to harmlessness, straightness, generosity. There was not an ounce of violence within him.

I mention this because I can’t help but think of this entirely hollow threat to shoot some sharply defined perpetrator in relation to Conrad Murray, Michael Jackson’s aide/doctor/pharmacist; (you decide).

Murray would have been a candidate for the blindfold stagger, one might imagine. Hugely rich (by our standards), almost certainly conceited, professionally lazy, negligent. Arguably a parasite, arguably one of many attached to the shockingly lost pop superstar. Murray, according to reports that I haven’t bothered to check (because I am happier skimming the surface of this depressing episode) drew about 100 grand a month for his attention to Mr Jackson; this for the privilege of pretty much 24 hour drug provision. Issues thereafter become foggy, due to the very real questions around medical need as opposed to recreational use of said drugs. If there is or was an opposition.

My dad would, in his weirdly un-hip way, have loved some of Jackson’s music and even his dancing, despite the chasm of divergent realities separating MJ from Keith Winston Walton (who also died criminally young). This is perhaps one of Jackson’s triumphs – his ability to entrap much of the planet in his moonwalking, hip-twitching genius. Post 78’s Pater could no more sing or dance than imagine a blackberry but there was something Jackson had that was, for a time genuinely thrilling – revolutionary even – as well as hummable. The appallingly high-profile denudation of this gift troubled most of us at some level; it made some of us embarrassed, some angry, some sad to see the unassailable King Of Pop contort and crumble into the later model. But whose fault was it?

Murray put himself in the firing line through a combination of greed and slackness rather than evil in my view. The screaming, high-fiving, JUSTICE placard-wielding fans and family members who cheered and celebrated his conviction, enacting their champagne emotions just like they imagine real celebrities might, were depressingly appropriate players in the malodorous panto. It was America at its shrillest. No matter, no sense that Jackson drifted on some ark cobbled together in a crazy mountain kingdom and then smashed his way down hanging valleys to a limpid, medically-regulated pool, collecting kids, hangers-on and increasingly harrowing constructions of self on the awful journey. No matter that all this love for him melted away the closer you got. Murray was therefore and without question – on some merit, in fact -a burnished receptacle for blame.

Jackson’s family life -the stuff that would ordinarily be called ‘home life’ – has been heavily documented. It might be uncharitable to suggest that his family remains exhibit A in the case against singling out Murray but… where else do we need to go? It seems to be true that nobody cared enough for Michael to either guide, counsel or over-rule him. And the consequence was fatal indulgence, compounded by poor service from his private Drugs-on Wheels service. Could it be true that nobody cared? Is that what the evidence suggests? Who do we blame?

I blame lack of attention, lack of love, lack of intelligence, lack of moral fibre. I blame celebrities, I blame hangers-on and I blame American Culture (coming over here). And my dad says that they should all be stood up against the wall… and shot.

Cream

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I imagine that in the Relatively Profound Dinner-Table Chat Olympics (being hosted all over, currently) there is an argument for the following 3 top players collaring the airtime and the awards; redundancy; waste; indulgence. Depressing perhaps, given that they are playing a similar, limited game. But talk about art might surely invoke discussion XXXVII(b) on the redundancy of painting as easily as debate over jobs lost say… in the theatre. Talk about opportunity leads to talk about waste and talk about everything from MP’S expenses to conceptual art draws us into a vortex of indulgences. Followed by something with cream.

I am happy to report that I

a) never get invited to dinner parties and

b) have always been able to deny the encroachment of virtually any kind of cynicism because of a ludicrous faith in the creativity/sincerity of people – often individually but sometimes as a group, ‘type’, band or mob.

If caught at some dizzying glacial precipice I really would throw myself off in the confidence that songs featuring Jerry Dammers/Elvis Costello/John Lydon/Tom Waits/Howard Devoto/Radiohead really would carry me off somewhere safe and then somewhere special. If about to be battered in a Catalunyan alley I really would confidently explete a surreal but beautiful cloak of words in the manner of that greatest of locals Joan Miro, turning the brute anger of the assailing docker into beery but easy fraternity. These crazy things I believe in.

Don’t get me wrong, I do not I promise you generally fawn before art or artists – how could I/we, since John Lydon magnificently forbade it? (Metal Box etc etc.) On the contrary, I am loaded with judgemental phlegm for the fakers and the impostors; and if I don’t believe you… duck. However I have learnt (and am learning) that it is essential to really attend when art coughs and stands up before me. Especially when that art lacks figurative clues.

Most recently I/we combined a long weekend in Cornwall with an admittedly rather tourist-paced visit to Tate St Ives and the Barbara Hepworth museum. (I recommend both). It would be disingenuous of me, however, to exclude mention of the fact that the stated aim of the visit was actually to come back from the British Surfing Association Championships at Newquay with a physically and emotionally undamaged son – he came 6th, spluttering slightly on regurgitation from monstrous surf, so this principal aim was achieved. And therefore my 2 hours in the Tate were a bonus and a fairly cerebral treat.

I say cerebral because the current exhibition – The Indiscipline of Painting / International abstraction from the 1960’s to now – provides a healthy challenge; (it)

reveals how painting’s modernist histories, languages and positions have continued to provide ongoing dialogues with contemporary practitioners, even as painting’s decline and death has been routinely and erroneously declared.

(Tate guide.)

You the viewer are invited to make the links; it’s pretty necessary to engage with material outside of the paintings – or through them. Accessibility and mere beauty are not paramount. New ‘disciplines’ – referencing/equivalence/the exposition of new meanings – fight their way out of the sack, or stutter and print from the digital age.

In the brief entree to the exhibition, quoted above, the word ‘problematic’ is quite rightly used to describe the state of abstract painting now. We could argue long and hard about when the first abstract paintings emerged – Turner(!), Kandinsky, Kupka, Picabia? – but we can be clear that the probing and stretching continues, decades on. The selections at Tate St Ives, by British painter Daniel Sturgis, effectively span the last fifty years and include works by 49 western artists, including Andy Warhol, Bridget Riley, Frank Stella and Gerhard Richter.

In Gallery 1 the search for new meanings – this kinetic charge to expand upon the known- is immediately and disparately evident. Michael Craig-Martin’s “Mirror Painting,” in which a mirror bisects the work, morphing red lines into black and vice-versa, cutely, sharply (and literally?) asks us ‘Where is the real?’ Imi Knoebel more confrontationally dumps or places stuff, in a clear challenge or rejection of what… artfulness? We might need to pause and reflect on deeper possibilities to get into “Black square on a buffet”. It is speaking a very different language.  We may have to work to learn it.

David Diao references 3 traceable but obscure sources; sources he knows the ‘average viewer’ might never uncover… without help from the curator. Gerhard Richter’s “2 Greys Juxtaposed” seems both an homage and an exercise in classical diptych painting about the possibilities of abstract space and depth without texture. (Does that make it dated?) Martin Barre’s “Spray Paint on Canvas” is exactly that; marks leaving a canvas, leaving us with a trace, a gesture.

These are very different responses to questions about legitimacy – about what is truest now/how that is expressed. If there is a theme of transitionality (or is that just a feeling?), if there is a conflict over avoiding ‘self-expression’ and finding or alluding to something ego-less and necessarily greater then so be it; let the broad church explode with ideas, with divergent truths. We are all abstract artists making choices and if, as the commentary suggests

                 The way paintings are made holds meanings

a central question then, might be this; if abstraction is utterly logical and necessary, how do we make it work now?

Gallery 2 is an extraordinary space. (I heroically limited myself to just a very few minutes transfixed by the epic views of epic surf and Lowryesque
dudes on screaming boards.) There is a Frank Stella here – competing for attention – colourfully and bewilderingly titled “Hyena Stomp”. My distracted notes describe it as a ‘ruptured, kaleidoscopic time-tunnel’ and that, 2 days later, seems fair. Andre Cadere’s “Round bar of Wood” is a painted stave or ornamental stick, an equivalent that has escaped canvas entirely, whilst Blinky Palermo’s “Untitled” consists of a canvas wrapped in green/blue cloth-horizons, moodily. Is there a hierarchy, you might ask, in all this breadth? (Why would there be?) (You judge).

The strength of the show is the scope of the show. There is an academic brief here, sure, but the art chatters so colourfully about individual as well as multi-layered or even universal issues that maybe my earlier dinner party allusion was spookily helpful.  And on the guest list… Tim Head; ask him exactly whom/what he is referencing in “Continuous Electronic Surveillance”. Tell him there’s something strangely attractive about it that you don’t understand.

Likewise perhaps you could slide briefly – apologetically – into Dan Walsh’s personal space to mutter charmingly that you found the colour, the pattern, the aboriginal geometry of “Auditorium” beautiful.  He might stifle a splutter but he might knock back his cocktail re-energised. And perhaps you could disarmingly slap Francis Baudevin on the shoulder whilst asking how on earth we, the average viewer could know that the flat but three dimensional triangles in the pictogram of 2011 protest issues around CO2 emissions?  Does the artist need to… I mean, how obtuse is that?

Except on reflection the triangles look like volcanoes… and the title is… oh… an Icelandic volcano. That volcano. So perhaps it does make a kind of sense?  Ah.

Let sleeping gods lie?

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Most of us have some understanding or some knowledge of the work and the life of Vincent van Gogh. Its essence has been reduced to a kind of coffee-table-friendly caricature of the tragic but inevitable demise of a tortured artist. Whether we as individuals see in him beast or brilliant and radical thinker and actor upon urgent truths, he remains a force; perhaps because though he may have been fauve, he was magnificently the antithesis of faux. What Simon Schama has rather beautifully called his ability to paint “the fullness of our hearts” has set Vincent the wonderstruck loner apart. I have taken no significant poll of the population but feel none is necessary for the following cornball assertion – that he is loved more by more people than almost any artist that ever lived. And this does mean something.

Now, suddenly – or it feels sudden – there is another twist, perhaps, to the story. It seems possible that van Gogh’s predictably(?) messy suicide(?) may need relieving of some of its interrogation marks. Or more likely, that newer questions might be inserted into the parable. But forgive my cynicism if I am reluctant to move from the admittedly highly coloured current understanding; that Vincent may have either accidentally or deliberately shot himself, in either an acutely disturbed moment or a moment of sensationally crystalline tragedy, compounded by poor or inadequate treatment. I simply wonder how, at this distance, safe new truths can replace the existing.

Van Gogh: The Life is an understandably epic look at the life and death of the painter of sunflowers. Authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith have allegedly spent ten years researching the book and have reportedly unearthed ‘thousands’ of previously untranslated letters. (Learning this, I did I confess ask myself how even given Van Gogh’s propensity to write almost daily letters, quite that many could lie undiscovered?) But perhaps there I am being cynical. May I balance that notion with the confession that I am one of those who is so drawn to the man’s fires that in my dreams I have swum and then crawled from West Wales to the Cincinnati Art Museum in order to kneel before “Undergrowth with Two Figures” and weep, cathartically. Suspicion and closed-heartedness are not, I promise my chief attributes.

However, the claim the author’s make that the art historian John Rewald, who after visiting Auvers in 1930 concluded that one of two youths is likely to have accidentally shot Vincent has some degree of plausibility. Vincent and the boys were drinking companions – or possibly adversaries. The boys had a dodgy gun; that kind of thing. But can we be sure? At all? Perhaps this theory is more appropriate than actually true; yet another level of curdling tragi-farce. There is the suggestion that Vincent may have willingly taken the rap (to his grave) rather than risk letting a comparative (or at least younger) innocent suffer any punishment. There is quite a lot, I think, of informed speculation.

Yet it may be that my own view of Vincent van Gogh is so full of the unprovable that these further contentions are veritable pillars of the narrative in comparison. I can’t prove that I was moved to tears at the sight of Cypress Trees in a chest-heavingly resonant moment aged about twenty. I can’t prove that there is something invincible in Wheatfield with Crows of 1890. My dreams of a pilgrimage to Cincinatti could be about… baseball. I just doubt it.

I am happy to acknowledge this extraordinary man in many ways – in the following way; by expressing my concern that our feelings are befuddled and interfered with unnecessarily in this matter. Vincent was at once rooted and true and radical to the point of volcanic. Better to stand before the work and be drawn in; by the greatest and most generous and – why not? – the most popular artist who ever graced the earth.

Birds of Prey Swoop Down on Our Shadows

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Doing a lot of necessary thinking about purpose. What constitutes …and which branch to clasp hold of as the river in spate bristles past. Whether there is any hierarchy in action/engagement/habit/belief. Whether anything’s worth anything. And when material ‘health’ is a clear absurdity, does everything become an opportunity for real expression? Is this expression a fraud, an indulgence, or a necessity ordinary life – measured in terms of buoyancy – denies us? Heavystuff, springing from maybe too much time and too much reading and a rumble towards life-change.

But how crazy-real-philosophic is this? Earlier, Russia v Italy in the Rugby World Cup, now becoming – like some absurdist shipping forecast – a kindof spiky Catalunyan idyll. Courtesy Joan Miro – Selected Writings and Interviews (Margit Rowell). Making empty hours full.

How wonderful to feel lifted by colours of such vastly different origins this day. A heartening reminder that perhaps there are no hierarchies, no high art /low sport ‘realities’ to be hastily despatched to safely demarcated brain-zones for judgement. It’s been perfectly agreeable and possible to drift from sport to art – as indeed this blog habitually does. Why deny or fail to appreciate the diverse beauties of spin passes and inspired art? Can I be the first(?) to argue for equanimity between the two, as gestures from the soul?.

(Answer – I could, but I might be talking bollocks).

Again Miro, that believer in the wondrous and the possibly divinely energising has stuck me on the spiritual ski-lift to Montjuic. Because he was absurdly poor most of his working life; because he knew his purpose was to make a poetic response to experience. And he did it, for decades. Call me an old tart, but I find that inspiring.

Womad; that allegedly difficult follow-up

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My previous blog was mid-stumble around the essences and indeed challenges of a Womad Festival experience. In it, I have tried to say something about both the fascination and the concern I have regarding how the music was – and is – performed and received.

For example I personally found Baaba Maal’s Saturday night headlining gig relatively dull. But I freely accept that this was in part due to choosing to waft around the perimeter of the crowd where the degree of engagement from all parties was decidedly lower than say ten yards from centrestage. Also, Baaba Maal chose to play what I imagine he hoped was a thought-provoking, dignified, suitably atmospheric set. There was a fair lump of acoustic strumming and relatively little dancing action from his generally flamboyant cohorts. I absolutely respect the choices he made but feel that relatively few punters really connected.

Earlier I had wandered into the leafy space that was and always is the location for the BBC 3 Stage. It’s intimate in the sense that it’s pretty much wrapped in trees and therefore the natural capacity is maybe 300. Most folks are sitting down in the balmy heat. In truth I had found myself there slightly against my instincts, being sure that some middle-aged Moroccan geezer with tricksier young’uns called the MoRoccan Rollers was likely to be a let-down, given the dodgy name and all. But Hassan Erraji was delightful; the band playing in a decidedly joyous groove that insinuated its way through the gathering. We all found ourselves smiling: some danced. It was consistently, appropriately, effortlessly gorgeous and understood: one of the quiet gems that Womad, year on year, does place quietly in your palm with a knowing wink and perhaps a “ssshh”.

Did Hassan know something special or expertly/knowingly deliver something special? Does he keep on doing that? What was really the making of that experience?

I ask these obtuse questions

  1. As a music lover (honest)
  2. As one, therefore, who actively wants to like that which presents itself
  3. As one who believes in goodness and heart shining through
  4. As one who will not tolerate indulgences.

AnDa Union – a Mongolian/Chinese troupe of singers, dancers and players had just started as I approached left of stage about 1-ish Saturday pm. From the first moment there was something extraordinary and yes moving about what held me/I hope us. It was majestic without the ostentation, it was swirling warmly like an exotic spice. Principally it was the sound of what I am prepared in my ignorance to describe as Chinese cello’s, beautifully milked by hands – apparently softly cupped hands – drawing bows easily across horsehair strings. In a truly memorable minute or ten, an immaculate female vocalist, arms outstretched expressively, absolutely nailed some unknown classic. I like to use and enjoy using the word sensational. These moments were sensational.

Donso I found by accident, during one of many wanders around the circuit of 5 principal stages. They had something, something understandably associated in the programme with Malian techno-traditionalists(!) They brought us an old/new, fluid, unforced French/African groove. They were maybe under-supported I felt – or rather their gently shimmering colours were fit for and worthy of a higher, dancier billing. (But nobody knows them).

The events I have singled out were truly diverse in nature; I did not go seeking a particular niche or for re-affirmation of some musical loyalty. I just went with faculties generally switched on, prepared to do enough de-construction of my discoveries to more fully appreciate those I chose (somehow) to believe in, and dance to. And maybe, as a friend said in another, loftier intellectual context, to ask questions – always to ask questions. I hope to have a relaxed view of any need for conclusions.

Come the Sunday night it felt like what the festival had slightly lacked for me was some good old-fashioned NRG. Dub Pistols were an honourable exception to this, so I guess I’m referring to bill-toppers; and I confess to being unhelpful in the generality of this assertion. The phrase this is how it felt – which I now intend to apply – suggesting a fair degree of bias/insight/unreliable but well-meaning judgement that I do not expect to fully vindicate nor intend to, is maybe not as loose as it may sound. This is how it felt.

It felt amazing and exciting, perhaps for the first time exciting, when Gogol Bordello launched into the first twenty minutes of their set. They were on it bigtime. Spunky, brassy, cool, noisy, raw and even from some distance – I checked – awesome and affecting. As soon as that magnificent tide turned in their set, I drove the family home to Wales.

But a last rider. Many things were great, as always, with Womad. However, apart from those briefly noted above, and in the previous blog, it may be that the real jewel (for me!) was being intimately exposed to the film animations of David Shrigley and William Kentridge. That these were shown in shipping containers by-passed unawares by many may, on reflection, be a matter of regret. I for one will be following up on this discovery.