'Tis the season for list-making so
without further ado, films and TV shows which I rated this year. (In
top tens, but no particular order beyond that...)
'Dance of Reality'
(The return of Jodorowsky, yay!)
'Macbeth'
'The Lobster'
'The Martian'
Three films I firmly intended to see
yet failed were 'Ex Machina', 'It
Follows' and 'Bridge of Spies'.
...which means I only blogged about two
of my favourite films! Then again, that's better than I did for TV
shows...
TV SHOWS
'Gotham'
'Wolf Hall'
'The Walking Dead' (season
5)
'This is England '90'
'Witnesses'
'Fargo' (season 2)
'Homeland' (season 5)
'London Spy'
'The Last Kingdom'
'The Bridge' (season 3)
The TV shows of 2015 which somehow
passed me by despite best intentions were 'Humans'
and '1864'.
(Reader, please note we are a
terrestrial establishment here at Lucid Frenzy towers, and know not
of your 'Jessica Jones' or 'Game of
Thrones'. Nor, before anyone asks, did we deliberately
write a list just to keep 'Doctor Who' off it.)
Some random witterings follow...
I may be the only member of the viewing
public to compare 'London Spy' to 'Alien'.As I've said before “an effective component of the Company's
ruthless inhumanity is the way they lie unseen, existing only as
offstage orders”. (All lost in the sequels, alas.) And here we see
a similar thing, only with officialdom. Danny (played by Ben Wishaw)
is occasionally able to identify the strings being pulled, but never
trace them back to those tugging them. It's like we live our lives as
the audience of a stage illusionist, perpetually falling victim to
misdirection and applauding the wrong things.
(SPOILERS in this para) At first the
worry was it was so atmospheric with so
little concrete happening, that it was painting itself into a moodily
lit corner. As it turned out, it played the thing about right. (Even
if the very last scene tried to wrest some feelgood out of a fire
that should really have burnt everything down.) What seemed the style
eventually became the theme. Alex's invention was akin to creating
light in a world of shadows, so of course the shadow-dwellers must
amass to save their habitat. Plus the gay element wound up the 'Daily Mail'. Really, what was
there not to like?
As said, I haven't made any attempt to
list things in a rank order. But 'Fargo' I'm
fairly sure I'd place on the bottom rung. Though jumping back to the
Seventies, it duplicates roles from the previous series. So Lou
Solvenson (Patrick Wilson) can take the 'good cop' badge from his
daughter Molly, while Mike Milligan (Bokeem Woodbine) displaces Lorne
Malvo as the urbane antagonist. But the triangulation breaks down
with Ed and Peggy Blumquist (Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst), who
fluctuate between being Hickcockian innocents swept up in the storm
and reprising Lester's petty scheming. (The early-offed used
typewriter salesman seems introduced partly as a Lester equivalent,
as if to undermine his similarities to Ed and Peggy.)
And so it moves further away from the
original Cohen brothers film, where the provincial hicks may have
been kooky (with their “oh ya” accents and all) but ultimately
prove themselves smarter and stronger than the more worldly
criminals. Here, rather than being spread around the town, human
decency is confined to the cop characters and their family circle.
And by moving away from the Cohens they move towards Tarantino –
snappy dialogue, non-linear storytelling puzzles (sometimes as an end
in their own right), foregrounded cinematic devices (such as
split-screening) and above all an assumed audience reaction of hip
irreverence. Perhaps everything will end up Tarantinoeque in the end,
including Shakespeare adaptations and the forthcoming remake of
'Camberwick Green'.
(More SPOILERS here) Apart from Lou,
the character who really shines is the Indian hatched man Hanzee
(Zahn McClarnon), largely because he's so taciturn and direct when
everyone else is verbosely circumlocutory. (Imagine if Gary Cooper
had been on the redskins' side.) But it does mean that, when he tires
of everyone and tries to bump them all off, you kind of know how he
feels.
Yet for all that its a better example
of the style than anything Tarantino himself has come up with lately.
It's often genuinely inventive, and the characters are striking if
cartoony. Above all, despite its greater length, it doesn't have the
same loghorric meander. And, being set in such a bywater, it avoids
the 'theme park Seventies' which now seems so ubiquitous. Don't
expect endless sideburns and hessian wallpaper here.
'The Last Kingdom'
did at times seem undecided whether it wanted to be a tale of
derring-do akin to 'The Musketeers', following the
adventures a he-man hero who gets his shirt off a lot, or something
as morally muddied as the Dark Ages probably were. And sometimes it
was able to make a creatively ambiguous virtue out of its indecision,
with Uhtred (Alexander Dreyman) performing some great deed them
offsetting us by hacking down a thieving servant.
While having a neither-Saxon-nor-Dane
protagonist was effective, if they wanted things as dark as the age
they needed to play the supporting cast up more. More moments like
the clash-of-values scene where Saxon first parleys with Dane.
Perhaps the introduction of Alfred (David Dawson) needed to wait
until Uhtred meets him, but from there more could have been done with
him. The way he can go from pure-hearted ascetic to monarch capable
of cold ruthlessness, while its clear that in his mind both come from
his Christian faith, is fascinating and has something of the ring of
truth.
But above all its Guthrum (Thomas W
Gabrielsson) who needed more development. Perhaps the adventure
aspect demands one crazy warrior Dane for Uthred to fight. (When he
defeats one before the finale, another conveniently appears.) But
Gurthrum is needed as the head to the swiping hand, the Dane with a
brain amid berserkers. We're shown how they don't win their battles
through greater savagery but more superior tactics, and how the
Saxons have to emulate them to defeat them. But still, scenes between
them can feel like a meeting of the Secret Society of Super Villains.
(Denmark probably won't be taking this series as a swap for 'The
Bridge'.)
And a consequence is that characters
don't really develop in any way. As the plot
rattles on they repeatedly spark off against one another, and even
change sides, without ever changing inside. It's hinted Guthrum's
last-minute conversion to Christianity is politically motivated,
which in history it almost certainly was, but this receives almost no
narrative attention – it happens in the background as Uhtred rides
boldly off. Similarly, Uhtred's frequently telegraphed headstrong
nature goes nowhere in plot terms.
The appealing thing about 'The
Bridge' is that of Nordic import TV in general - it has
the courage to work as a novel. Rather than set everything up in the
first episode, then provide eight hours of running round before
hurriedly wrapping everything up for the finale, it takes its own
time to evolve. Key characters won't appear until several episodes
in. 'The Killing' even ended.
(Unlike that American remake...)
Of course its the box-set/catch-up
technology which has enabled this. (You couldn't
miss an episode of 'The Bridge', any more than you
could skip a couple of chapters in a novel.) But that technology
exists everywhere. Perhaps what really delivers is combining it with
the old-style remit of public service TV. (Tak to Sveriges Television
of Sweden and Danmarks Radio!) Inevitably enough, Nordic Noir frequently questions the social democratic model of Scandinavia, much like the BBC of old would bite the hand
that fed it more readily than commercial media.
The surprising thing to hear was that
Saga's new parter Henrik (Thure Lindhart) was only written in when
Kim Bodnia (who had played Martin) declined the offer to re-appear.
Because the whole thing ends up hanging on him. Like Hathaway in
'Lewis', even as you can see how he's written to
fill a hole he becomes a character in his own right. Cleverly coded
on first appearance to come across as a creep (like many, I first
assumed he was a perp) he gets Saga in a way even
Martin couldn't. The point where he tells her “this is what you
want, right? To talk about the investigation not all the problems in
your life”... well, I must have had something in my eye.
'Witnesses',
conversely, proved you don't have to be Nordic to be noir. You can
even be French, provided you set things on the north coast in order
to capture the statutory washed out look. In an eerie case of
synchronicity, there was even the same staged crime scene of the
model nuclear family.
Five seasons in and 'Homeland'
is not just doing
that faux moral ambiguity thing it does, its become the
byword for it. I used to try to think of a snappy name to employ, but
“the Homeland syndrome” works well enough. Yet even as it gives
the name to one rule it breaks another. It's now jumped more sharks
than there can be in the Pacific. (Quinn falling in with a bunch of
jihadis while in a city the size of Berlin. What are the odds, eh?)
Yet alongside the absurd contrivances it can still serve up riveting
plot twists. And as a child of the Cold War, to me its almost
nostalgist to see the Russians back as the bad guys and Berlin as
some kind of front line.
'Walking Dead'
rather than setting itself in one locale like earlier seasons,
smartly divided itself between the poles of Terminus and Alexandria.
And having been through Terminus changes their reaction to Alexandria
completely. The phrase “you're the butcher or you're the cattle”
resounds through what follows.
'This Is England' -
apart from showing how spookily distant 1990 now is, while none of us
want things to run past their shelf-life, there's scope for one more
season there, surely. And I enjoyed 'Wolf Hall' so
much I even thought I should read the books. (I didn't, admittedly.
But I thought about it.)
Perhaps what's most striking overall
about this list is the absence of comedy. 'Fargo'
could be called a black comedy, while 'This is England'
has humorous elements, but that's about all. Was there simply little
to laugh about in 2015? Excepting of course that video of Donald Trump and the eagle...
Fans of these Isle of Wight photos will be disappointed to hear this is the last of them. Then again, as those fans were pretty few and far between perhaps that won't matter much. As ever, full set over on Flickr.
'LULU: A MUDER BALLAD' BY THE TIGER LILLIES Brighton
Dome, Monday 30th Nov
The “anarchic Brechitan street-opera
trio” the Tiger Lillies last appeared in these parts the Festival
before last, with their take on Coleridge's epic poem 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner'.
Now they're back with another theatrical song-show. Lulu was the
protagonist of two expressionist playswritten by Frank Wedekind
between 1895 and 1904.
And many times since. As singer and
main man Martin Jacques states in the programme “today the figure
of Lulu is one of the most widely known characters in fiction... in
many ways Hamlet is perhaps Lulu's closest equivalent, widely
recognised but nevertheless mysterious, the inspiration for countless
re-interpretations, but without a stable or agreed core meaning.”
In other words, neither are fixed
texts. Each iteration of them doesn't re-recite the canon, nor do
changes negate what went before – it just adds on another layer.
Except of course the Prince's story is about having the power to
choose and being paralysed by it. While Lulu's is about being given
no choice at all. Though a figure on stage she never sings or speaks.
All is narrated by Jacques in the character of malevolent lowlife
Shig, her primary pimp and ostensible 'father'.
She first appears pushing flowers at
the unaccepting musicians. If it's reminiscent of flower sellers on
the street, there's also something childlike and innocent about her
movements. For much of the running time she's held between two
projection screens situated behind the band, imprisoned and shown off
like a fish in a tank. She'll dance to one side, then back again. At
one point the struts of a bannister are projected, which come to look
like prison bars. Oddly, I was most reminded of Mark Fisher's quote about Carroll's Alice – this story is
Lulu's, but she has no place in it. She's essentially a sexualised
possession, a flesh sex toy passed from one 'lover' to the next.
In the programme Jacques continues “it
was hard writing the songs for 'Lulu'... you have
to breathe the putrid air.” And it shows. For one thing, the Tiger
Lillies aren't just renowned for their black humour, they celebrate a
tradition which commonly found dark humour in stories of sexual
abuse. That kind of salaciousness is not confined to cabaret of
course, it also appears in blues or rock music, or for that matter
tabloid newspapers. But cabaret is more associated with a 'decadent'
era where such things went on, or at least happened more openly.Which
gave proceedings the unsettling sense of walking a tightrope. I'm a
Tiger Lillies fan largely because I share Jacques' black sense of
humour. And even I found myself willing them not to screw up and slip
into rape gags.
They don't. And yet when they don't,
harsh as it sounds for damning them for doing the right thing, they
lose something of themselves. That black humour has always been the
killer app of the band, the carefree irreverence to offence of songs
like 'Hammering in the Nails'. They're not without
this, they just hold it in check in places. They have to
hold it in check in places. Yet it still feels like they're
performing with one arm tied behind their back.
And without the humour we're left with
just the black. To use Jacques' analogy, theres a whole lot of putrid
air to breathe. It's like hearing the low notes of the piano hammered
over and again for seventy-five minutes. Moreover, the sheer
arbitrariness of the story adds to this sense of inevitability. You
could swap the order of her 'lovers', or cut some out completely, and
lose little. For she's but a flower petal on the wind.
With the suggestion Lulu may not have
been murdered by Jack but a copycat killer, perhaps planning to pass
the blame, its clear that if Lulu stands for our innocence Jack
stands for our corruptibility and hypocrisy. They're both part of us.
Notably, Jack's the only character to have a song addressed directly
to him.
Yet I also overheard a fair few people
emerging afterwards to say they found the message obvious. (“Is
anyone here likely to think its okay to sell a young woman into
prostitution?” and so on.) Which suggests the links between then
and now aren’t being made, as if sexual exploitation is considered
only a subject for history books. Perhaps a better way to challenge
misogyny isn’t to meet it head-on but glove-puppet it and expose it
from within. I’ve never heard Lady Sings It Better but the approach seems interesting – take
the most misogynistic lyrics you can get hold of, and have a group of
women belt them back at you. It also counters the
ludicrous-yet-prevalent notion that 'political correctness' is about
being too namby-pamby to use those illicitly thrilling bad words.
Ultimately, Jacque's schema works not
wisely but too well. In his insistence on the harsh male-dominated
world Lulu finds herself in, in his foregrounding of her silence
within it he perpetuates that silence. At one point she's compared to
a sponge and, rather than a character, she's no more than the
accumulation of what a patriarchal world will do to a woman if given
the chance.
I confess I'm not sure what I'd suggest
to improve proceedings. Perhaps Lulu discovers a voice and gets a
song of her own, only briefly before she is killed. Scenes such as
when Shunning gives her a gun and orders to shoot herself, and she
instead sticks a hole in him, could have been made little moments of
proto-feminist triumph. Some hint somewhere she doesn't have to be a
total victim or hapless innocent. But perhaps the whole project was
intrinsically flawed. After 'Rime of the Ancient
Mariner' was such a full-blown success, I wondered if this
might have been an earlier prototype of a full-length show, now
brought back out from the desk drawer. And while when I checked I
found it's first appearance was 2013, a year after 'Mariner',
that still feels the way it is.
CALVIN JOHNSON
Brighton Railway Club, Mon
23rd Nov
Most gigs, you'll see at some point all
the equipment shunted off stage and the house lights go up.
Yet there aren't too many where that's your signal the main act's
about to come on. But then there's nights when you know to expect the
unexpected.
With the lo-fi DIY indie-punk of Beat
Happening, the deconstructed dance music of Dub Narcotic and the
founding of the influential K records Calvin Johnson has done much to
break the punk mould. If he didn't ship records, he made waves. The
stereotype of angry white kids swearing against the system never
quite withstood him. Kurt Cobain tattooed himself with the K logo,
while Courtney Love namechecked him on 'Olympia'.
(Well, depending on which version you listen to.)
Tonight, alone and entirely
unamplified, he diffidently strums an acoustic guitar like his eyes
might have flicked over a chord book for the first time while
backstage. His baritone voice, the sound of deadpan, is delivered
from a Easter Island impassive face above a tight black sweater. It
has less the air of a punk event than something which might have
happened in a Greenwich Village folk club in 1963. But probably
didn't.
And it was the absolute absence of
anything remotely resembling punk music which came to be the most
punk thing about it. It worked as a projection of the artist's
personality, to which the actual music and words were mere means to
that end. (I'm really not sure that would come over so well on
record.) He exudes a childlike 'Being There'
persona, while displaying a master comedian's gift for timing,
including mutiple meaningful...
...pauses. Entirely unaccompanied, he
recites the nonsense dance lyrics of a Dub Narcotic number like
they're metaphysical poetry. Returing to the neologism I coined for Goat it's bironic – simultaneously
a self-parody and in deadly earnest. You laugh out loud and are
entranced at one and the same time. The bizarre choice of venue, a
place down a residential cul-de-sac which no-one present seemed to
previously know existed, made for the perfect setting.
It perhaps veered too far towards
straight songs at times, at which points my attention did start to
wonder. I wondered if the best numbers had been written for some
different setting, and were now sparking off on the incongruity. As
he encores with a cover of 'Diamonds Are Forever'
you find yourself thinking “this song is actually really stupid”
and “this song is actually a classic” at one and the same time.
Which is probably the whole night in microcosm.
From Manchester. But there was punk
rock floor-sittin' apleanty at Brighton too...
...and from back in the day, D Narcotic
go...
Mentioned in dispatches!
After having previously written about both Jeffrey Lewis and the Cravats, there's not really much I could add. But tehre's
some YouTube clips just to confirm the things happened. The Lewis
clip is not only from elsewhere, but features one of his cartoon
lectures he didn't even perform down here. (He said it might be hard
for people to see given the venue.) While the Cravats clip is
from Brighton but doesn't have much in the way of sound quality. But
then that's what makes it punk innit, y'get me bro?
Mutations is the self-styled sequel to
Wire's Drill festival from this time last year, put on by
co-curators One Inch Badge and promising “a creative mass of genre hybrids and
expression, delivering some of the most inspiring, creative and
interesting music the world has to offer”.
Of all the acts, the festival was
chiefly sold to me by Om - a band I've long been
keen to see live. If their name alone isn't enough to suggest their
trance-out sound, imagine Pink Floyd's 'Set The Controls For
the Heart of the Sun' - there's the same relentlessly
steady pace, the same sense of measured expansiveness. Or, as they
sprang from the rhythm section of doom band Sleep, imagine doom
without... well, without the doominess. Ever wondered what doom would
sound like with just the transcendence, with none of the oblivion?
Wonder no more.
Perhaps the most significant thing
about Om is the way they can actually play so little yet conjure up
such a vast sense of space – like each instrument is a flickering
flame in a huge cavern. If the bass is the bedrock of their sound,
its chief accompaniment is not the drums but the recited vocals.
(Assisted no doubt by bassist and founder member Al Cisneros also
being the vocalist.) Amil Amos' drums, liberated from their usual
back-up role, throw almost dub-like rolls around the Cisneros that
open up the sound.
The third member, Robert Lowe, has the
commendable restraint to contribute either tambourine or nothing at
all for long periods. At times he takes to a keyboard, a teeny-tiny
thing still capable of providing a rich organ sound. At others he
contributes vocals which could only be compared to choirs of angels.
(Quite possibly from some choir-of-angels effect. But whatever the
effect is, its effective.) Sometimes I'd watch him waiting, waiting.
Then sing a couple of phrases and sit back again. The calm restraint
was enticing in and of itself.
And rather than building the set up to
a finale they have the quiet confidence to instead slow it down.
Tracks extend in length and get simpler, for one extended section
only bass and vocals. Though they're more hypnotically regular than
drone, they perfectly epitomise something I said of drone music some time ago:
“While drone is sometimes
dismissed as bliss-out and escapist, it doesn’t have to refer out
to anything else in the universe because it already encompasses the
universe. It doesn’t merely encompass the sound of the big and the
small, it denies the distinction between those sounds. 'As above, so
below' is an important concept in drone. Blake’s conception of
'infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour' is just
up drone’s street.”
Before the set, we were talking about
how much of a Marmite band they were – how liable to induce a
polarised reaction. For me, its not too strong a word to describe
them as magnificent. Then at the end I looked round after an hour of
being mesmerised, to find half the room had decamped to venues
elsewhere. Each to their own...
Next up on my must-see list was Josh T
Pearson. His career to date
consists of shrinking from a trio to a solo player, then recently
expanding back up to a duo. And in the process sounding the least
expansive yet. But I'm getting ahead of myself...
His first band, Lift to Experience, a
trio of Texans who played Texan-sized music - psychedelia multiplied
by post-rock turned up to eleven. Released in 2001, their one album
almost fits with Godspeed's ambiguous apocalypse. Except in their case it was never
clear whether the Biblical imagery was the only thing which captured
their mighty, expansive sound or vice versa. Whichever, they were
best summed up by the lyric “And I can hardly wait to hear that
great trumpet sound/ Pouring down out across the land”.
His next record didn't appear until a
decade later, a solo album of what Wikipedia calls “epic acoustic
ballads”. Songs seemed sung with the weary reflection of someone
much older, surrounded by regret and discarded beer cans. This time
the defining lyric was 'Woman, When I've Raised Hell'.
The brooding quality of wisdom reached too late. As if Lennon had
jumped from 'Sgt. Pepper' to 'Plastic Ono
Band' with nothing in-between.
The Church venue makes for the perfect
setting for such songs. Pearson has a five-finger strum technique
which sounds as much classical as country, combined with an ability
to make his own voice sound like a choir.This can create a huge
range, both sonically and dynamically, with things rising to a
crescendo then falling to a mumble. It hardly seems possible to be
coming from one man and his guitar.
Then midway through he introduces his
new performing partner Calvin LeBaron and the tongue-in-cheek name
the Two Witnesses. They sing actual old-time Pentecostal hymns, or
new songs in the style of them. (Plus a cover of the Velvets'
'Jesus', never a bad thing.) Reflecting this
cleaner, new direct new music he has a cleaner appearance – now
shorn of beard and with a white-hat cowboy look. In their unadorned
simplicity, those hymns must be about about the hardest of styles to
emulate. There's nothing really to them apart from their
effectiveness, they just remind you what a great songbook the hymn
book really is. But, against the odds, Pearson comes through. Only
the final number, playing up the gay element of singing about “his
love”, was pastichy.
From the sublime to the ridiculous...
only you know, the good kind of ridiculous...
Anecdotally, I got the impression most
people's must-see was Lightning Bolt. And they may
well have been higher up my list had I not seen them before. They
comprise noise-guitar and still-more-noisy drums. If there was such a
music genre as 'dayglo cartoony noise', that would be Lightning Bolt.
Himself a cartoonist, drummer Brian Chippendale almost takes on the
persona of a cartoon character onstage – masked and using a
distortion mike throughout, even when speaking to the audience. Much
like the great Melt-Banana, amid the sonic onslaught is not just
melodies but catchy bubblegum pop tunes.
The surrealist George Bataille once
claimed...honest, this is going somewhere... once claimed that the
drive to make art was rooted into the infantile instinct to despoil
pristine surfaces. That's why the child doesn't stop colouring when
they get to the edge of the piece of paper. Similarly, Lightning Bolt
seem to stem from the child's love of making noise. Rather than the
nihilism so associated with the genre there's something joyous and
uplifting about the whole thing, even as its rough and abrasive.
Certainly, you can rely on a Lightning Bolt set to put a great grin
on your face.
Metz had the
unenviable task of following Lightning Bolt and pulled it off, but having blogged about them before I wouldn't have much to add.
Blanck Mass is the
solo project of Benjamin John Power, one half of the inimitable Fuck
Buttons. And the solo set ranked alongside the double act. Perhaps
sounding similar to the parent project, but then sounding like Fuck
Buttons is hardly a downside. There's the sudden drops you'd expect
from dance music. But as often Power would overlay one section above
another, sometimes then pulling it away to re-expose the beat
beneath, like dance music's answer to 'Sister Ray'.
Ultimately, I can only repeat what I said after seeing Fuck Buttons: “For a band who can go
some way out there and fear no abrasion of the ears, it's intriguing
how they can also set a crowd a-dancing.”
Dan Friel mixed
throbbing discordant electronica with rinky-dink Casio tunes. Not
alternating between them or juxtaposing them, but melding them
together. It was a musical chimera, like the body of a tiger given
the head of a purring house-cat. All provided by what looked like the
most boffinish piece of home-made kit, leads and wires bedecked with
fairy lights. The sheer impossibility of it dazzled your ears.
Despite the dodgy name, Montreal's
Ought are a force to be reckoned with –
propulsive post-punk with perhaps a dash of the Strokes. In a similar
trick to the Fall of Flipper, the ever-insistent music is overlain by
a singer sneering with arch disdain. It's like wanting to diss the
whole world at once, with a band was the best way of blagging a
public address system. It's the type of punk which isn't angry at its
audience – just disappointed.
To combine dream pop with shoegaze
guitar might seem an obvious idea. But perhaps doing it requires
quite different skill sets – the melodic sense and self-discipline
of songwriting versus the tight band dynamics that allow a bunch of
people to take off together without getting lost. My Bloody
Valentine, for example, might have often sounded like their tracks
had pop songs inside them. But they stayed inside, like the gooey
centre of a chocolate.
Widowspeak, however,
seem capable of combining both. Singer Molly Hamilton would stand
front of stage, intoning breathless sugary vocals, a little Stina
Nordenstam only less little-girl and affected. Only for the band to
then huddle together to create intricately interlaced guitar lines.
It was like being read a bedtime story, then having your dreams take
flight. Genuinely ethereal.
Arcimago started out
with an intriguing question – what if Goblin had been an
electronica act? )And ironically the performer was Italian, Ugo
Negroni.) After all, doesn't electronica sound non-human yet
possessive? Alas, as it went along it swapped strange electronica for
more regular beats. Nice while it lasted...
Nature Channel
served up some spiky garage rock fit to put hairs on your chest, then
announced they'd not be gigging for the next six months. As soon as
you come across a band... Wild Cat Strike (that's
them above) provided Americana so languid steel guitar came in. Which
they'd then splice with outbreaks of wall-of-sound guitar. While
Saintsenaca popped over from Ohio for some of your
actual from-America Americana. Some other stuff too. And of course I
couldn't see everything.
Generally the festival seemed
well-planned, acts starting on time and venue sizes working coping
with the punters without leaving latecomers stuck outside. (If any of
that did happen, I didn't see it.) And it was great to be rushing
between venues when the rest of town was going mad for the Black
Friday consumerfest, despite the fact it wasn't even Friday. There
was, however, a strange swapping over between what would be the most
intuitive Saturday and Sunday nights. While Saturday night finished
up with everyone in a church in Hove listening to acoustic music,
Sunday culminated with the double bombardment of Metz and Lightning
Bolt. Followed by a club night going on till one. (Which by that
point I was feeling too middle-aged to attend.)
Which was compounded by Christopher
Owens' Saturday set not being headliner material at all. It's not so
much that I didn't take to it, though I threw in the towel after two
numbers. It's that most people didn't even stay as long as me, upping
and leaving as soon as Josh T Pearson finished. All this most likely
stemmed from the festival being planned slightly too late, when all
the regular venues already had their Saturday nights booked out. But
it would be worth considering should One Inch Badge decide on a
follow-up...
The inevitable vidclips, a few from the
festival itself but mostly from thenabouts. You'll figure it out...
(You
guessed it, another art exhibition reviewed after its over)
Among
the Carvers
If
you bothered to read the critics, you'll know this show was given a
poor press. Some of that thunder can be dismissed as simple art
snobbery. Hepworth, as we’ll see, progressed from high-minded
Modernism to the best form of populism. In other words, she let the
rabble in. Jonathan Jones’ review falls into that category, even if he shies
from saying so outright. (But then he's... oh,just see for yourself. It's not a parody. It just reads like
one.)
But
the most common diss is to claim a disservice is being done to her.
Which suggests the real target is curator and now outgoing Tate
Director Penelope Curtis. Who, true enough, at times staged some high-concept and quite spectacularly ill-advised shows.
And this is but one example of her preference for sculpture, which
seems to have have irked those who don’t share it. Yet she was also
Director, for example, for the highly successful British Folk Art show. The real reason
for the knives is almost certainly down to some London arts scene
version of office politics, which the rest of us can safely
disregard. Nevertheless, just for once let's take the critics as a
starting point.
For,
while not necessarily co-ordinated, the attacks take on a remarkably
similar form. Laura Cumming indulges in one of the typical laments: “her
works are heavily alarmed or locked away in glass cases so that you
can’t touch them, as Hepworth strongly urged… [while] the more
austere her work, the more sterile it looks in the subterranean
galleries at Tate Britain. The groupings of pristine abstract forms…
look especially stark and unnatural in the artificial lighting.”
And this from critics who said not a word when Joseph Cornell's interactive assemblages were kept behind glass!
Beneath
those vitrines the first room shows the 'direct carving' movement of
the Tens and Twenties. Practitioners included Eric Gill, Jacob
Epstein, Henri Gauider-Brezeska and Hepworth's first husband John
Skeaping. Which is fine company. Certainly its enough to get the
critics fulminating. Alistair Sooke writes in the Telegraph:“By (rightly) making the
point that Hepworth and Moore weren’t the only artists innovating
during this period... the show reconsiders her early contribution as
less pioneering, and more in keeping with a trend. At a stroke, her
artistic courage is undermined.”
Sorry,
what? It's acknowledged that this was a movement,
but we shouldn't be allowed to say so? You can of course stuff any
artist with pioneering courage by disregarding their context or their
contemporaries. Picasso would have sole credit for Cubism if we
eliminate Braque, Dali for Surrealism if you drop Ernst and so on.
But the point is we can talk about Braque and still see Picasso as an
important artist. Sooke is in essence suggesting Hepworth's artistic
reputation can only be maintained by denial. In short, he's the one
doing the undermining, even if its cloaked by gallantry. Besides
which, artists developing through movements, through reflecting
current circumstances and influencing one another, even if its not
always formalised or made up into a manifesto... this is news to some
people?
Analogously,
in the vidclip below, Sooke praises the show for minimising the
comparisons between Hepworth and Henry Moore. Yet, both Yorkshire
born, they met young at the Leeds School of Art and, to quote Wikipedia, “established a friendly rivalry that
lasted professionally for many years”.
Let's
move on to the thing itself. Sculpture, and direct carving in
particular, was then seen as “lower in status” than painting, as
more of a craft rather than an art. ('Art sculptors' often worked
only on the maquette, or template model, leaving the creation of the
actual sculpture to assistants.) And much of this movement seems to
be about a contrary luxuriating in the low status, in being an artist
willing to get your fingers dirty.
But
the desire to get your hands on the materials also shows an interest
in the materials themselves. They're not considered incidental to the
subject, like the proverbial blank canvas, but inexorably tied up
with it. Notably the subjects are often animals, and the titles
simply descriptive. The human subjects are often similarly impassive,
defined by what they are doing – see for example Hepworth's
'Musician' (1929/30, below). Things are simply
what they are. As the show says, there is often some of the “hieratic
and stately” quality of ancient Egyptian and Mexican carvings.
The
wide variety of materials on display suggest an interest in different
forms of wood and stone, as if they were your real subject. Hepworth herself said at the time "carving to me is more interesting than
modelling, because there is an unlimited variety of materials from
which to draw inspiration. Each material demands a particular
treatment and there are an infinite number of subjects in life each
to be re-created in a particular material. In fact, it would be
possible to carve the same subject in a different stone each time,
throughout life, without a repetition of form.”
The
show talks of her “allowing the natural form of the wood to shine
through her carving”. And indeed, in a work like 'Torso'
(1932, below) the base of the sculpture remains a rough wood block.
But there's also a paradox where the material cannot be too dominant.
The two have to blend together. Whereas the patterned lapiz-lazuli of Skeaping's' Buffalo' (1930) becomes obtrusive and distracting.
As
might be suggested by the method, the success of the art often comes
from reduction – from chiselling away until you're left with the
essence of a thing. Epstein's' Doves' (1914/15) are sweeping blocks of stone with the
merest hint of dove about them, an assured triumph. While Skeaping's 'Fish'(1929/30) gives his subject an almost cartoony circle for an eye.
(And keep that eye in mind.)
Nevertheless,
there is something of a Year Zero approach to direct carving. As
ever, you go back to basics when you feel you've taken a wrong turn.
And once you've realigned yourself, you head off again in a fresh
direction. The musical comparison might be the blues boom of Sixties
Britain, which allowed bands to head off into psychedelia, hard rock
and other frontiers.
Conjoined
With Nicholson
Next
up is Nicholson. By '31 Hepworth had separated from Skeaping and was
sharing both her studio and life with Ben Nicholson. At which point
you might start to wonder if the more feminist-minded critics start
to have a point. Victoria Sadler, for example, complains“the effect is to
undermine Barbara completely by defining her by who she was in a
relationship with rather than on her own terms”.
It
might sound counter-intuitive, but actually the answer is no. In
fact, if paradoxically, this focus on her husbands is arguably too
kind to Hepworth. It takes the emphasis away from Naum Gabo, which
was using both stringed and pierced forms before her. (This fixation
with linear innovation within Modernism always seems to me to be
something of a trap. Yet it is the language these retrospectives
often deal in, with the neat chronologies they throw up on the
walls.)
But
most important was Nicholson's take on Modernism. It then often felt
like a continental import to Britain; like olives or camembert
cheese, a product which simply didn't grow here. So British Modernism
tended to be merely imitative of continental innovations. Whereas, to again quote Wikipedia, Nicholson's “gift... was the ability to
incorporate… European trends into a new style that was recognizably
his own.”
Tate
Brit's previous ’Picasso and Modern British Art’ was anchored to one of Penelope
Curtis' more hopeless conceits, and for the most part to get anything
out of it you needed to blinker the intended through-line from your
sight. But Nicholson was one of the few British artists able to
ingest Picasso without becoming a mere disciple, and so emerge from
it unscathed. Works such as 'Au Chat Botte' (1932) display a Horlicks-drinking,
raincoat-wearing English take on Modernism – almost numinously
drab. And, not unassociatedly, Wikipedia also mentions “he believed
that abstract art should be enjoyed by the general public”, rather
than be uber-fashionable continental chic for elite metropolitans.
(As with the fish eye, watch out for that one.)
Plus,
unlike Skeaping Nicholson was not a sculptor but a painter – making
it unlikely Hepworth would simply absorb his influence directly. Hepworth herself said of their relationship"as painter and
sculptor each was the other's best critic." A comment perhaps
embodied by her 'Two Heads' (1932, above). While
Moore was ceaselessly carving Mother and Child figures, Hepworth
fuses together two adults. Its hard not to see the figures as
Nicholson and herself. Similar profiles of the male head seem to have
been recurring figures for Nicholson. While the incised, cartoony eye
recalls the round fish eye of earlier. And, while the male head does
dominate, its presented as a joining of minds as much as bodies.
The
Limits of Abstraction
As
the Thirties progressed, Modernism came more and more to have its
head. And it decided that head was square. Or pure oval. Possibly
triangular. Certainly anything but head-shaped. The show does
describe the appeal of this tendency to 'pure form' very well, as “an
idealist belief in the universal language of abstraction as the
appropriate response to the rise of a right-wing totalitarianism in
Europe”. In short, Esperanto for the eyes. And the rise of fascism
threw up opportunity alongside motive, as continental artists
increasingly needed to flee persecution. They'd figuratively, and
sometimes literally, turn up on Hepworth and Nicholson's doorstep.
The
problem is that aesthetically this was an ill wind which almost
beached Modernism. Nicholson, by the time of his white-on-white reliefs, is a good example of an artist who
had painted himself into the corner of pure form and lost everything
that was once interesting about him.
But the ill wind swayed Hepworth herself. 'Three Forms'
(1935, above) is an example of a less effective, less resonant work
of art which at least we get to blame on the Nazis. If the direct
carving works seemed merely formative, merely the start of something,
'Three Forms' seems its end. I confess I'd like to
draw three cartoony faces on it in the manner of 'Two
Heads'. In a sadder universe Hepworth might well have ended
down that cul-de-sac, with only perfect spheres for company.
”The
Sea Is Never Far”
Happily
for our world, she not only sprang back but into her mature phase.
Reports seem to vary as to when she moved to the town with which
she’s most associated – St. Ives on the Cornish coast. Wikipedia
suggests either 1939or 1949, while her dedicated website weighs in on the second. Perhaps she settled there
gradually. Whichever, it was Hepworth the St. Ives artist who endured
over the abstract internationalist. And this seems the place where
her mature phase as an artist begins. Earlier on, it is likely this
show lied not and she was merely one among many, perhaps even a
disciple to Epstein and others. No longer.
The
sea might seem the least sculptural subject of all. Imagine the
pointlessness of a bronze of rolling waves. Yet Hepworth used this to
her advantage. The BFI film 'Figures in a Landscape', shown as part of the
exhibition has a fruity voice-over by Cecil Day-Lewis which
frequently tips over into self-parody. But when he says “the sea is
never far, it shapes the rocks, hollowing those caves” he makes a
valid point - the sea itself acts as a sculptor. And more important
still, she sought to capture the sea without slavishly duplicating
its surface features. And a feature of this work is the way it never
quite resolves into either abstract form or naturalism – its, to
coin a phrase, 'just abstract enough'.
It
often reminds us of the way nature can give us geometry, in its
stones and seashells. The trademark holes in her work she called
“caves” and “hollows”. The bold colours of a work like
'Sculpture in Colour (Deep Blue and Red)' (1940,
above), recall the way an exposed interior of a stone or piece of
wood can be be a strikingly brighter colour, before the sun wears it
down. (She said herself “except in two instances I have always used
colour with concave forms. When applied to convex forms I have felt
that the colour appeared to be 'applied' instead of becoming inherent
in the formal idea. I have been very influenced by the natural colour
and luminosity in stones and woods.”) Even her radiating spoke
strings, perhaps the least naturalistic element of her work, still
suggest the ribbing patterns on seashells.
And
perhaps she was almost poised for this. The cartoony features of
earlier never return. But they always acted as a cross between a
counter-weight and an anchor rope – pulling her art back from
toppling irrevocably into the neat geometry of pure form.
And
more than we notice any of this we sense it, so we
don't react to these works as something abstract, austere or removed
from our lives. Yet its just as important that these suggestions
never become more than that. We find we can relate to the work
without ascribing a fixed meaning to it. 'Pelagos'
(1946, above) is described by the Tate's website as potentially resembling “a shell,
a wave or the roll of a hill”. When Hepworth spoke of it resembling
“the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the
hills” the important word is “tension”.
Let's
do the very thing Alistair Sooke told us not to, and compare Hepworth
with Henry Moore. Rather than diminishing her or making her his
understudy, this brings out everything that's singular about her. As
is well known, both Moore and Hepworth disliked galleries and
preferred their work to be shown in situ. But from that point, they
may well differ. As said over his own exhibition,Moore's work has an
autocthonian dimension. While Hepworth's muse may well have been the
sea. To this day Moore has a sculpture park set in the Yorkshire
countryside, and Hepworth on the Cornish coast. As Herbert Read said
in 'Modern Sculpture' “She has gone directly to
nature, to crystals and shells, to rocks and the form-weaving sea”.
Further,
while there are some reclining figures, mostly early on in this show,
there's nothing to Moore's degree. Its like two painters, one working
in landscape and the other portrait. (Or at least square format.) And
Hepworth uses this to group her figures. Of course all artists
benefit from having their work accumulated, that's why everyone wants
a solo exhibition as soon as they can get one. To get an idea what an
artist is doing, you need some dots to connect. But there's something
more with Hepworth. Her works don't accumulate so much as gang
together.
There
are sometimes several forms on one base as in 'Group
(Concourse)' (1951, above), like semi-abstraction's answer
to a crowd scene. The mere act of placing forms together is almost
enough to make them more figurative. Try imagining one of the forms
in 'Forms in Echelon' (1938, also above) taken in
isolation, and the effect would be quite different. As the show says
“she liked to display her sculptures as if in conversation with
each other, so that they become more of a group than an example of
individual figures”. And this changed relationship between them
changes their relation to us. They don't belong on some high Olympian
plinth, but set in surroundings. They need to have a place in the
world.
For
all that Moore was willing to plasticate or even break apart the
human form, Hepworth had a greater tendency to abstraction. This
could be down to the way the 'pure' human form is assumed to be male.
Give it any female attributes and in the popular imagination it
becomes 'womankind' rather than 'humankind'. For example Moore's 'Family Group' (1949), part of Tate Britain's permanent
display, identifies the mother primarily by her skirt and longer
hair, and the father simply by the absence of these. Formally
speaking, they're not that different to the identifying figures we
find on loo doors. There is admittedly no firm evidence for this
theory, and it may merely be projecting more contemporary thoughts
back in time. But for Hepworth semi-abstraction might have been a
route out of a man's world.
Art
For A Modern World, A Modern World For Art
Ironically
the two great post-war British sculptors are also known for each
creating an important set of drawings. You could perhaps play compare
and contrast endlessly between Hepworth’s Hospital and Moore’s
Shelter series. For example, both are built up through shading and
contour lines. Yet Moore's wartime shelter drawings looked back to
the underworld of Greek mythology, it's faceless figures shades.
Whereas in 'Concentration of Hands II' (1948,
above) the surgeons are masked but in the way a superhero might be
masked, so they can stand for a concept. The composition means the
picture's emphasis falls not on their faces but their working hands,
the masks just de-emphasises them further.
But
this time the differences aren’t so much the differences between
the two artists. Though separated by only five or six years,
everything had changed in the meantime - they effectively belong to
different eras. The NHS was bright and newly born when Hepworth drew
it. As the Doctors work on the human body, so does post-war politics
on the body politic and the sculptor on her block. (A comparison made
directly in some of the other drawings, such as 'Fenestration of the Ear', 1948). Like the NHS, Hepworth sees art as
playing a public role.
In
these days of blockbuster shows and Tate expansionism its difficult
to reconstruct just how much Modernism was initially shunned by a
distrustful British public. Taking up internationalism meant quite
literally to abandon nationalism – to turn against any possibility
of a sizeable domestic audience. And yet, both Moore and Hepworth
broke this bind to become popular artists. The show presents Hepworth
as quite single-minded in her career, careful in how both her work
and her own image were presented. (For example arranging her studio
to be more photogenic. Film of her also excluded her assistants,
fitting the 'single-handed genius' notion many then had of artists.)
But while she might have helped herself along, that hardly seems the
whole story.
Neither
did Hepworth or Moore blunt their edge out of careerism. Firstly
while their work can be talked about it doesn’t require
explaining in the way, say, Cubism might. And people
generally sense that it’s okay to look at a piece and simply say
whether they like it or not. The public has a way in. But further, in
a rare case of the ‘avant garde’ actually behaving the way its
supposed to, it would be truer to say Britain finally caught up with
them. There was a widespread post-war feeling that merely defeating
fascism wasn’t enough - people didn’t want to go back to the way
things were. Benevolent public institutions seemed our antidote to
the ego of wartime dictators. This was to be the era of the Common
Man.
So,
living in a newly invented world, they needed a newly invented art to
go with it. And alongside this reimagined nation, the
internationalism of the Abstract Modernism era returns – only in a
more optimistic, less defensive way. Hepworth submitting designs for
the rebuilt Waterloo bridge and exhibiting in the 1951 Festival of
Britain, celebrating post-war reconstruction, must be seen in this
context. As Fiona McCarthy says,she was “eager to take an active
part in Britain's postwar reconstruction - by making public sculpture
for new schools, for civic centres, taking art out of the studio.”
The
show displays 'The Quarrel With Realism', Le
Corbusier's article from 1941 from the magazine 'Circle'.
(Co-edited by Nicholson and with Hepworth was heavily involved.)
“What will become of painting and sculpture? It would seem that
these two major arts should accompany architecture. There is room for
them there.” While Hepworth herself said in 1946 “one of the
functions of sculpture is to fulfil the demands and conditions of a
given site. Present conditions restrict this idea so that the
sculptor works mainly in his studio and eventually, if he is
fortunate, a suitable place is found for the sculpture by somebody
who has the money to buy it. This means that the creation of large
sculptures is restricted; but is partly compensated for by the growth
among all kinds of people of a love for sculpture.... This kind of
appreciation will help to develop the sense of form (nearly atrophied
in Western civilization) until it becomes a part of our life in the
way that poetry, music and painting have been and are increasingly
part of our life.”
And
the new taste for public projects proved both a context and a market
for large, site-specific sculptor. Once a hospital might have hung in
it's lobby a broad oil of its generous benefactor, for the rest of us
to walk respectfully beneath. The creation of institutions such as
the NHS allowed for sculpture to celebrate the doctor or surgeon, or
perhaps just the idealised human form.
Perhaps
the crescending example of this is her largest work, the 6.4 metre
tall 'Single Form' outside the UN Secretariat Building in New York. It
was built to commemorate the former Secretary General (and personal
friend of hers) Dag Hammarskjöld, but of course is not at all a
personal portrait. Speaking at its unveiling in 1964 she commented “the United
Nations is our conscience. If it succeeds, it is our success. If it
fails, it is our failure." (Moore similarly created a work for
the UNESCO building in Paris in 1958.)
That
much of the public art of this era, donated to public bodies or
spaces, is now being sold to private hands or (yes really) carted off by banksencapsulates perfectly the difference between
their era and ours. Everything not bolted down is now to be flogged
off and everything bolted down to be unbolted on order for it to be
flogged off. (It is of course worse when day centres close or one of the world’s richest countries leaves people to die of destitution. But that’s not a defence, just a way of
reframing the same critique. Since when was that made the choice we
had to make?)
As
part of her plan to take art out the gallery and studio Hepworth made
collage cut-outs of her sculptures, against both natural and
architectural environments. (Some of which have only recently been rediscovered.) Being more
abstract than Moore, her work perhaps fitted the urban environment
better. But perhaps what's most surprising is how adaptable they are.
The
snappily titled 'Photo-collage with Helicoids in Sphere in
the Entrance Hall of Flats Designed by Alfred and Emily Roth and
Marcel Brewat, Zurich' (1939, above), which was used for
the poster image (up top) sees one of her works plinthed in a sleek
Modernist pad, the sort of thing we saw Jacob Shulman photographing in 'Constructing Worlds'. A modernist work in a modernist environment - of
course it fits! But when you see 'Photo-Collage with
Helicoids in Sphere in the Garden of Redleaf, Penshurst'
(1938, also above) it also fits - so well it takes you a moment to
realise they're the same work. Similarly the later 'Theme on
Electronics (Orpheus)' is shown at Mullard Electronics
Centre in 1957. Yet there's also a photo of it from the previous
year, in her garden. Hepworth's motive may well have been commercial,
enhancing sale potential by expanding reach. But we're less
interested in intent than effect. This ambidextorousness of her work
is in itself a feature of her popularising of Modernism.
One
Last Twist
In
the mid-Fifties Hepworth made a series of works using the tropical
hardwood Guarea. They're considerably larger works given a room of
their own, recalling the Elm Figures of the Moore retrospective. And
like the Moores they seem grand and ostentatious rather than potent.
They look tasteful, like heirloom furniture. At the time I called the Moores “reassuring”. By that
point he was washed up. But with Hepworth there's almost literally
another twist.
The
following room is given over to the bronzes she exhibited at the 1965
Kroller-Muller Museum in the Netherlands. Much effort is put into
recreating the once-outdoor pavilion indoors, even down to
wallpapering the back wall with a forest scene. This is pointlessly
gimmicky, but it doesn't matter much when the new material gives
Hepworth such fresh life.
After
the perfect geometry of earlier, surfaces are now roughly textured.
If you encountered their mottled copper greens while walking
outdoors, you'd be hard pressed to figure how naturally weathered
they were. Spoke strings vanish while holes multiply and almost take
over. Hepworth stretches and twists the material, in a way simply not
possible with wood or stone. 'Oval Form (Trezian)'
(1961/3, above) looks almost like an enlarged twist of tagliatelli.
Other works seem to evoke geometric symmetry only to bend their way
out of it, such as 'Curved Form (Trevalgan)'
(1956, below). It's a long way from the direct carving days. The
works don't necessarily look like they were made,
it seems entirely possible they might have grown that way. Perhaps
they were once purer forms, but were hurled into Hepworth's elemental
sea and emerged looking like they do. They were compared at the time
to the younger generation of sculptors associated with the term Geometry of Fear, such as Eduardo Paolozzi or William Turnbull.
Fiona McCarthy writesof the tendency of critics to place
Hepworth in Moore's shadow. “When his triumphant 1948 exhibition at
the Venice Biennale was followed by Hepworth's lower-key showing two
years later, the international critics assumed she was his pupil.”
And in some ways this continues. Though we may be less negative about
women artists these days, perhaps Hepworth has been running with that
handicap since then. Moore's most recent Tate retrospective was five
years before this, without critics savaging it in the same way.
Yet
however great an artist Moore was, Hepworth was almost certainly
better. If the task of an artist is to capture their era, Hepworth
took that task on more successfully. Yet paradoxically her art is
also more fluid, less tied to a fixed meaning or set of meanings. And
she carried on creating innovative works after Moore's effective
career was over. She was Britain's best post-war sculptor.
