‘LEONORA CARRINGTON: AVATARS + ALLIANCES’

Firstsite, Colchester

“The Surrealists explored liminal spaces between consciousness and dreaming, including mental illness. In contrast, Leonora experienced these first hand.” 

Leonora Carrington’s life was, in one sense, a succession of escapes. She escaped two prestigious English schools by getting herself expelled. Then in ’37 she escaped a privileged yet confining life among the moneyed English by taking up with Surrealist enfant terrible Max Ernst and relocating to France. Nazi occupation and Ernst’s arrest necessitated another escape, this time to Spain. Then in ’42, she escaped a combination of sexual assault, mental illness and institutionalisation by moving to Mexico.

Yet, and despite so many of the works here being from so late in her life, it was those early English years which tended to dominate her imagery. And small wonder. “Do you think anyone escapes their childhood?” she once asked. “I don’t think we do. That kind of feeling you have in childhood of being very mysterious.” (Quoted in the recent ’British Surrealism’ show.) And of course we don’t. Childhood is when the basement of our brains are built, everything after just added on.

Her life story is something like a character from an Angela Carter novel. While her father wanted her married off to high society, her mother, nanny and grandmother read her Celtic folk tales from a young age. And, however taken she was when she discovered continental Surrealism, they remained her primary influence.

Take for example ’Green Tea’ (1942, up top.) The figure on the left is generally agreed to be Carrington herself, swaddled in some kind of strait-jacket. She’s paired with the two tethered animals, the cow hide on her swaddling echoing their animal state. While she also seems paired with the larva-like creature in the underworld beneath her feet. Beyond one tethered dog, the only points the stillness in that picture is broken is in that underworld.

Yet the focus isn’t on the swaddled figure but on the landscape. A cloistered garden of a landscape, with each tree depicted individually in an iconic fashion. Perhaps, confined long enough, she’ll turn into another tree. But the landscape still dominates. And it’s imbued with its own kind of charm. This isn’t a protest work, a rejection of green-lawned England, its a portrait of that England more than of herself. This is where she was grown.

Carrington first met Leonor Fini in ‘37. The two soon became fast friends, often painting one another. And a key feature of both their work is the delicate style, made up of small deft strokes. It’s not as bold and in-your-face as is standard for Surrealism, more diffuse, more similar to illustration. There’s definitely a feedback loop here where this led to their art being sidelined - this women’s art looks just like illustrative art and vice versa, not really proper painting you know.

One thing the show does well is to meet this square-on, displaying illustrations (including from children’s fairy books) which influenced her. (Less happily, it doesn’t always credit the artists.)

An artist it does name is Dore. Which is to the good, but it then disregards the way in which her art differs. His engravings are classical in style, foregrounding knowledge of proportion and anatomy in a bid to make the strange sights look credible. It’s like the tag line to the original ’Superman’ film - “You’ll believe a man can fly.” Whereas Carrington deadpans, more in the way of fables and folk tales. Characters within her work rarely react to the strangeness, they stay stoic, often calmly meeting our gaze. Her approach is “man flies”.

The show goes on to say “subversion and transformation were key approaches… [they] channel her rejection of the attempt at being categorised, where hybrids of animals and humans inhabit a mix of imagined, real and ritualistic worlds.” Again this channels childhood, where we don’t feel the same sense of separation from animals, can even feel like we are between the human and animal worlds.

See for example the etching ’Badger Causing Table To Fly As Medium Falls In Trance’ (1987, above). The badger and medium are not only placed the same side of the table, her ankle-length dress and its fur are made up of the same two blocks of shading - downward strokes and cross-hatching. The badger is the medium’s familiar, joined to her if not part of her self. Other works look very much like the Surrealist ‘exquisite corpse’ game of chimera creatures, one (undated) is appealingly titled ’Alien Whale Sphinx Goose’.

But the show misses one element of this. Yes, in her work the distinction between human, animal and spirit forms are slippery. But check out her lithograph ’Stag At Mourn’ (1974, above). No less than four of these figures are passing between physical form and symbols. Which surely reflects her interest in magic and alchemy. Those symbols may have meant something specific to her, or just found their way onto the plate. We’re never likely to know which, and it doesn’t matter much because the point is a broader one. Magic is the manipulation of symbols, with the intent to alter the physical world. It’s been said well enough before now how that links it to art, that the two may have at one time been interchangeable.

And her art often functions like symbols, an arrangement of elements where their combination is the thing to look out for. They’re usually discrete from one another but placed within the same pictorial space, prompting you to take them together. Take ’Night of the Eighth’ (1987, above). A highly symmetrical work, this immediately draws our attention to the place where that symmetry is broken. The silver-and-grey figure has an opposite number in purple, but that second figure has been shifted up in the composition. Its place is taken by another symbol, a loop. Or it may be the figure and symbol together make up the eight of the title. It ‘flies’ with birds, but they’re so stub-winged and chubby they could never soar like that. Suggesting that we’re seeing is some spirit form of flight.

Silver-and-grey holds its hand out in a shaping motion, and the outlined creature next to them looks the most morphing. You could say this figure represents the artist, just as you could for the medium earlier. But it’s more than that really. Reality isn’t depicted as something normally static, which a select band of magicians know the secrets to make it shift. Reality is in a continual state of flux, and we can learn how to ride the waves. As David Gascoyne, a fellow British Surrealist, put it: “the marvellous is within everyone’s reach.”

Overall this show does well on the indicia front, contextualising Carrington’s work. (See up top for an example.) Alas it does less well actually showing her work, which is sparse, not always well selected and padded out- at times with little more than ephemera. ’Green Tea’ is rather ridiculously represented by a print. (Disclaimer: it was free to get in.) Perhaps I’ll get to see a fuller show some day, maybe pairing her art with Fini’s. The title is right there, curators - ’Leonor and Leonora’!

In my more indulgent moments I like to think I’ve managed to give space to Surrealism’s more unorthodox currents, including Edward Burra, Paul Nash, Dorothea Tanning, Dora Maar, Wifredo Lam, Joseph Cornell, women and Surrealism, British Surrealism and Surrealism goes global. (Only in Surrealism would us Brits be the underdogs!) Though you can be sure there’s more out there to discover. It’s Surrealism, the only limit is your imagination.

‘SAPPHIRE AND STEEL’

“So this place is haunted. But the rent’s cheap.”

Like something lost in time ’Sapphire And Steel’ is back on the box, courtesy the good folks of Rewind TV. And though I’ve not seen it since it was first broadcast (1979 to 1982), David McCallum and Joanna Lumley wandering obliquely around empty rooms is something of which I have strong memories.

Each episode starts with as classic a portentous credit sequence as ’The Twilight Zone’ or ’The Outer Limits’. And like those the sober oration fits voice-over takes the place of “explain the premise”, so convincingly you might not notice at first that it actually sews more confusion. (It somehow knows what transuranics are, but not what an element is.)

There’s some kind of helmeted head which draws closer as the sequence goes on, but never quite near enough to be discerned. At the time I fondly imagined there was some elaborate and inventive back story they’d decided to reveal to us a little at a time.

Whereas of course it was all in the British spirit of made do and mend. Given the few sets the meagre budget allowed for each story, there was always going to be some sense of stasis. So why not play into it?

Creator PJ Hammond has said he wanted to reverse the standard orientation of time travel stories, where it's time which comes to the characters. Rob Young, in ’The Magic Box’ commented “each assignment takes place in one location, and rather than emotion or interpersonal drama, it is the space, the architecture of the set and its spatial relationship to time that the characters are most preoccupied with.”

And yes, time. The show opens with the homely image of a child doing his homework. It’s the tick-ticking of a surfeit of clocks which is foregrounded and defamiliarised, four shown in the first minute, before there’s even any dialogue or action. Time’s sometimes presented as besieged by hostile actors. Or at others time itself seems the problem, a recalcitrant force forever needing to be kept on the straight and narrow.

Ostensibly, the titular two are detectives. They show up at a time crime and scan the place for clues, in order to hunt out the guilty party. But logic and deduction play little actual part. Stories are strung together by free association, magical thinking and handwavey references to ley-lines and the like. (Often involving out-and-out urban myths, such as ’Ring-A-Ring-O’Roses’ being about the Great Plague.) Dialogue is almost akin to an Absurdist drama, words turned over and over in the search for meaning in them.

Given this set-up, essentially placing strangers in strangeness, it was going to be either great or terrible. Sometimes it was both. But mostly that first one. In fact, the fact that it makes no actual sense whatsoever becomes its greatest asset.How come? Some pointers…

It seems it was originally pitched for children’s TV but found itself promoted up the schedules to early evening. Which paid off, I remember my Dad would watch it avidly. But it remained based on a child perspective, rooted in childhood fears.

And time, to a child, something you have tasted so little of, seems strange and heady stuff. It is, a Steel puts it, “immense”. You still live very much in a kind of eternal present, against which the influence of the past can seem an inexorable, foreign force. Alan Moore told a story of, as a child, standing watching the clock’s hour hand till he saw it move, something he found giddying.

Added to which, one character says of a Victorian photo “that thing could be a thousand years old”. As a child much more about you seems like antiques than to an adult. And those things don’t seem cosy so much as otherly, ever-present and unparseable. The past seemed more than a foreign country, it was like a different reality altogether, but one always inexplicably breaking into the now.

Which meant you were forever coming across objects and situations which should have been familiar if not homely, shown in such a way as to make them sinister. The world was, in a word, uncanny.

But that undersells it. As we saw when we looked at Rob Young’s ‘The Magic Box’, this was an era where many shows took these paths, following the same prompts of cultural milieu and budgetary necessity. But ’Sapphire And Steel’ was pure neat distilled uncanny! It headered that particular nail then kept hitting it. It feels simultaneously eccentric beyond eccentric and completely built to fit a brief. Which only makes it feel more eccentric.

…which may go to some way to explaining its relatively short life - only six Assignments (as they called them). The general reason given is that it became increasingly difficult to synch the two stars’ schedules, and no doubt that was a factor. But also this was a show fully formed from the get-go, doing just what it needed to be doing. There was nowhere for it to go to. It was the height of an approach, and so inevitably also the end of it. It burnt twice as bright and half as long.

So in the often-asked question, was this ITV’s answer to ’Dr Who’, its actually better to ask the question the other way around. If you look at Who history, like we have, the uncanny was an angle it more seemed to hit upon and then find lucrative. Interestingly, New Who often seemed to borrow more heavily from this show than it did Old Who. (Particularly under Moffatt, though Davies’ ’The Giggle’ (2023) has almost exactly the same central concept as Assignment Four.)

The seeming similarities often turn into differences, just like reassuringly familiar objects did within the show. Steel manages to be brusque and irascible simultaneously, like he’s above these petty humans but also they’re annoying him. Sapphire is more gracious, at times sympathetic, but often in order to be manipulative. They communicate telepathically, beyond human hearing. They relate to humans, they relate to them not.

And the Doctor often had a similarly double nature. Tom Baker’s trademark grin and eye-glint could be taken as warm and humanistic, but also chillingly alien. Hartnell was a stern patrician but also a kindly grandfather. A double nature essentially split into two with their good cop/ bad cop act.

But overall, with ’Who’ it was the companion character who cemented the notion that at least one of these newly-arrived strangers was a person just like you. In ’Fire Of Pompeii’ the Doctor confesses “sometimes I need someone” to keep him grounded in human affairs. A character as absent from this show as is the leads’ lack of concern for human affairs. The solutions they find can be not at all humanistic, with the humans unlucky enough to be in the vicinity just getting instrumentalised.

…which takes us to the biggest difference between the shows. The Doctor’s a traveller, an adventurer, a maverick. Sapphire and Steel are cops. Time cops, that’s still cops. They turn up in the first episode in place of the called-for police. They’re soon to be found burning books. In fact, it's more than that. That big, booming voice-over signifies they don’t work for an authority, they work for Authority. Just like there are Archangels, they are Archcops.

And equally the villains are just villains. Unlike ’Who’, there’s little to suggest they represent psychological states, that mental conflicts are being externalised. It’s more Lovecraftian, they’re things from without and should they succeed in getting in then our whole reality will come crashing down.

The Doctor says come with me, travel in my box to think outside the box. They tell people to stay just where they are, not to experiment with time, or show much curiosity about anything come to that. Leave that stuff to the pros. It's hard-wired conservative.

’Who’ often posed order as the problem. There was a moribund, ossified state of affairs, whose frozen grip on life needs to be broken. Multiple stories end with people hopelessly raging at one another as to what should happen now, with the Doctor delightedly saying “my work here is done.” Here the problem is disorder, things not in their proper allotted place. From the opening narration, it was about ironing out “irregularities”.

And so the stories rely on connections which can seem arbitrary, if not active bizarre. A Thirties-themed party is linked to the megalomania of the host in seeking to defy time. Or upping things further, we have time travel powered by vivisection, just to underline the sheer badness of it all. Each time accompanied by Steel’s stern “I try to tell you but you never listen” speech.

The difference are striking. But, beyond the obvious point that the uncanny doesn’t automatically cleave to one politics or another, its harder to know what to do with them. Hammond wrote all assignments but one. (And that, the whodunnit, was the weakest.) But surely more than authorial intent is at work.

Though the show has sometimes been called Thatcherite, its conservatism seems more small-c. Let’s look at it in a way that’s most likely a post-hoc rationalisation, but by now time’s been disrupted anyway. Its a truism the past no longer leaves our lives in the way it used to. New TV shows aren’t just in ratings competitions with a finite number of other new TV shows, but with most of what’s already been recorded. We have become rather like the future humans encountered in the third Assignment, cosplayers rather than adventurous time travellers, saturating ourselves in other eras and still not understanding them. Because to us they’ve been reduced to an aesthetic, vicarious experience.

As Mark Fisher once said: “In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost.” He has also commented on the fact the show finishes on a freeze-frame, in a sense fittingly for the last hurrah of a type of programme. (NB Spoilers spelt out in that link.)

In 1982, the date of the final assignment, people spent much more of their time in their time than we do today. But time was already eroding, and Sapphire and Steel’s missions to keep the past at bay already had an increased urgency, as the first video recorders were rolled out. It now seems an assignment they were doomed to lose.

And this was a war on two fronts. The future of broadcasting encroached simultaneously, with its focus groups and market testing. Audiences were to get what they wanted, which of course meant something they already knew, and certainly nothing they might need to get acclimatised to. So insidious, so all-prevalent would this new ideology be that it was us, once the radicals, who were thrown on the defensive and with it into a kind of conservatism. We wanted to hold onto what we were fast losing, and still do. It’s us who have become the ghosts.

Steel would glower that they were always called out too late, and perhaps they were. Time now assails us, from both sides, and not as single spies but battalions. Perhaps he and Sapphire out there still, valiantly fighting a war long since lost. Looked at like that, no wonder he was in such a bad mood all the time.

Coming soon! Time for something completely different...

THE DANGER OF MIDNIGHT REVELS (LUCID FRENZY PLAYLIST)

Our latest Spotify playlist starts much the way modern music did, with Howlin’ Wolf's wail setting the bar. From there Jeffrey Lewis raises kvetching to an artform (not for the first time), the Jam predict a final conflagration (okay, perhaps a lucky guess), Tom Waits finds the frontier and is probably not coming back, Otomo Yoshihide unleashes his special big… er… band, the twelve-strong Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp take inspiration from African ensembles, the Balfa Brothers serve up some tasty Cajun cooking, and Chumbawamba remember to say thank you (though possibly sarcastically). Plus, as the saying goes, more…

The illo is of a fancy dress party held at the legendary Bauhaus.

Howlin' Wolf: Moanin’ At Midnight
Jeffrey Lewis & The Voltage: Except For The Fact That It Isn't
The Jam: Funeral Pyre
Tom Waits: Cold Cold Ground
The Angels Of Light: Dawn
Prince Jammy: Chapter Of Money
Vivian Goldman: Private Armies
African Head Charge: Stebeni’s Theme
Daevid Allen: All I Want Is Out Of Here
Talking Heads: Making Flippy Floppy (live)
Goat: Chukua Pesa
Mabe Fratti: Kravitz
Deerhoof: Milking
Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp: Beginning
The Balfa Brothers: Lacassine Special
Chumbawamba: That’s How Grateful We Are

"Well we know the reason for the turning of the season
But the winter takes us in the end"

‘A COMPLETE UNKNOWN’

(Another in a series of not-proper reviews of films)

“I’ve always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.”
- Cocteau

’A Complete Unknown’ works well, if taken just as a film. It rips along, tells its story well. I’ve no idea if early Sixties Greenwich Village was anything like the way its shown, but it feels like a real place captured. From the little I know about the main characters (Dylan, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Stand-In Suze), they were pretty much as depicted here. 

But of course its not just a film. Its a dramatisation. ’A Complete Unknown’ is completely known to us, that is what attracts us. And therein lies the problem.

Dylan essentially mythologised himself, not only in his music. In interviews and general behaviour, he was a character played by the method actor Robert Zimmerman. Or more accurately, a series of characters. He built an elaborate mythology, but that’s long since condensed down to a single legend - the Judas incident, the Bob-goes-electric saga at Newport. This has become as much What Dylan Is About as any song he ever wrote.

It’s been raked over enough what degree of truth there is in this. (Go here or here if you hadn’t already.) But the point isn’t that what actually happened wasn’t much like its shown here. The point is that this is what people want to believe happened. They believe it the way other people believe Boris Johnson saved us from Covid.

And to be believed myths need to be re-recited. Just like Church-goers can’t only attend once and tick salvation off the to-do list, believers need to be fed more documentaries and dramatisations like this. The first draft of history, that didn’t work out quite the way it should, so now we need a reconstruction to correct.

I’m not a great fan of biopics, and this may be partly why. The advantage of fiction is… well, it's fictional nature. You can devise and arrange incidents and symbols as you choose, to convey what you’re conveying. Your imagination can go free range. Conforming to actual events pens it in. But also, real lives are never so neat as to compress into the required running time. So biopics tend to reach for the myth just because it's more manageable, while at the same time feigning authenticity.

Let’s remember Dylan gave his approval. Someone who never approves of anything much. It’s true that when Baez calls him “kind of an asshole” and “completely full of shit”, the film more-or-less backs her up. Yet his assholeness is considered necessary. You can either please other people or be yourself. Its an either/or choice, like the acoustic and electric guitars which get repeatedly held out for him.

In perhaps the most telling exchange, he contradicts Stand-In Suze about the Bette Davis film they just watched. “She didn’t ‘find herself’, like a lost shoe. She made herself into something different, what she wanted to be in that moment.”

Later, walking away from… well, you know what, an infuriated Lomax yells at him: “Do you even remember folk music, Bob?” He snaps back “no, what’s that?” It’s not just a put-down. It means, I am no longer the person you think you are talking to. I have moved on to my next me. Your call cannot be redirected.

Significantly, he never seems to have his own place. He crashes on Seeger’s couch, he stays in Stand-In Suze’s apartment, bangs on the door of Joan Baez’s hotel room… the nearest we get is his own motel room at Newport. Literally on the move.

So, instead of being examined, the myth is fed. The offered acoustic vs. electric guitar becomes something like the blue and red pill in ’The Matrix’, uncritical conformity versus you becoming you. It’s simultaneously a straight choice and an evolutionary path. Electric trumps acoustic, right? It’s more modern, and anyway its louder and stuff.

Electric Dylan fans tend to believe that when he gave up protest music he actually made better protest music. He went from the particular to the general, not tackling wrongs one-on-one but as a bunch. And by then there were too many wrongs to do things any other way. The film essentially sides with this, though it places most of it in the mouths of his associates. It’s silly stuff, better alluded to than spelt out. It is, to drag up a term from my day, Rockist.

Rockism comes down to the notion that all other music forms are fake, tainted by commercialism, confined by genre rules, while Rock is real - free, unmediated expression. As that doesn’t sound like the sort of thing likely to be brought to you by corporate conglomerates, in place of arguing for it they fetishise aspects of Rock. Chief among which is the electric guitar. In other words, it bestows the same talismanic significance as Folk purists do to the acoustic. (The other signifier he dons are a permanently affixed pair of sunglasses. Which arguably mean something slightly different. While the electric guitar’s an avowal, they’re a deflection of scrutiny.)

And this explains the standard stopping of the story here. Because it conveniently ignores an obvious fact - within the next few years he did the same thing again, this time burning his bridges to his Rock fans, and for pretty much the same reasons.

’I’m Not There’ (2007) was a much less literal take, featuring multiple Dylans all running round at once, with no interest in one another. Which was much more effective because it was explicitly about the Dylan myth, examining rather than regurgitating it. I said at the time, “the film actually feels like a Dylan song rather than some prosaic account of events surrounding its recording. It feels like one of his sprawling mid-Sixties electric numbers, packed with hallucinogenic images and allusions.”

It would be neat to now say this film is like one of the more literal acoustic songs, the ones it claimed got so gazzumped. Perhaps one of the more auto-biographical ones like ’Ballad In Plain D’. But to the degree that’s true, its like one of those songs played by somebody else.

Let’s remember that, when Blues guys went electric, they saw no big deal in it. Some had already played electric at Newport. Others, realising the money came from white folk purists, had by then switched back. (For which I don’t blame them.) Whereas Dylan did see the deal, had the same values as Lomax. They were just arguing about which way up they went. His credo of change prefigured the Beatles and Bowie. Its taken that he didn’t just change into a Rock star, because Rock music is held to embody change.

But 1965, that was a white ago now. How on earth can this still be held to, sixty years down the road? This is the general problem with Rock now, it hasn't done much a-changin' lately. Elements which had once been attached to some purpose are being kept around out of habit. Dylan’s was a time of greater social conformity, a jobs-for-life culture where your future lay between tramlines ahead of you. You deciding on you derailed the tram. Now we live with a volatile jobs marked which involves regularly reinventing yourself just to stay fed and housed. Tom Peters gave the following life coaching:

“Starting today you are a brand. You're every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop. To start thinking like your own favourite brand manager, ask yourself the same question the brand managers ask themselves: What is it that my product or service does that makes it different?”

Another way of saying this is – there are multiple yous, but in none of them do you get to actually be you. Its no longer enough to sell your labour, now you need to sell your self into the bargain. Of course its true that Dylan rebranded himself not to get hired but precisely to get fired, to burn his bridges to one set of fans so that another could be built. But this isn’t the distinction you might think. How will we learn this lesson, us non-geniuses, us regular beings? Thinking “my brand isn’t Pepsi but Bob Dylan” doesn’t help you, it just rephrases the problem.

The film ends with Joan Baez left standing as Dylan motorbikes off. She never abandoned either the Folk world or the notion of music associating itself to movements for social change. Perhaps its time we switched this story round. In a world which has since filled itself with Bob Dylans, be a Joan Baez. She wasn’t such as asshole.