GLASS ON THE BEACH 2: KOYAANISQATSI

For Part One click here.

...and indeed the next night Philip Glass did return, this time to perform live his score to Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 “non-narrative, non-linear audio-visual tone poem” film ’Koyaanisqatsi’.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, this time around the night was a sell-out, for this shortly became the equivalent of a ‘hit’ in Glass’ circles.

It’s the popular face of minimalism precisely because it isn’t really minimalist at all. From the off, a deep baritone voice appears and indicates that things are now going to be different. If ’Music in 12 Parts’ had an accompanying film it would home in, magnify to a microcosmic view, perhaps show cells dividing and multiplying. ’Koyaanisqatsi’,  significantly, starts with a commanding view over a landscape. It owes just as much to the conventions of symphonic movements, containing not just dynamics but even bombast and swoop. The music is divided into sections where themes even develop - all anathema to any pure-of-heart minimalist!

I must confess I used to hold a beef about all that. I once considered Glass the Neil Gaiman of minimalism, parading its unique features whilst simultaneously watering them down for public consumption. Nowadays, even if I still prefer Reich or Bryars, I prefer to appreciate what I’m getting rather than worry about it not being something else. And sometimes the hit is simply the thing everyone likes because it works so well.

Glass sums this up himself by describing the piece as ‘post-minimalist’. An eternally minimalist Glass would have laboured forever under Reich’s shadow. As things stand, he decided to go beyond minimalism – and created something characterful in its own right. Famously the film’s title is a Hopi Indian word meaning “life out of balance.” Yet the work itself is very in balance!

It’s interesting to note the parallel move away from pure minimalism and into film scores, soon followed by plays and operas. (Though from his early days, Glass was inspired by film and visual art as much as by music. There’s an anecdote of him visiting Paris but taking more to Godard’s movies than Boulez’s music.) So perhaps the extent of the collaborative nature of the production is unsurprising, with the film not put to the music or vice versa, but emerging through cross-fertilisation between the two creators. With film soundtracks, or even pop videos, you always feel one element is dominant. The music is being put to the visuals or (more rarely) the other way around. Not here.

Instead we’re shown a different perspective in quite a literal sense. The film shows things from every perspective apart from the ones we’re used to, great distances or extreme close ups, fast or slow motion. One shot, lasting more than three minutes, shows nothing but planes taxi-ing on a runway. (It’s an interesting effect that we don’t separate these different perspectives much in our minds, but accept them for what they're not - our normal perspective on the world.)

Reggio has said “"it is up [to] the viewer to take for himself/herself what it is that [the film] means." But this is a rather disingenuous description of a work clearly quite polemical in intent. A less-cited translation of the title word, though one the film itself spells out, is “a state of life which calls for another way of being.”

Early sections show life on Earth pre-existing us. We’re then shown technology before we are any people, as if we have become in some way ancillary to it. The first human figure we see is dwarfed by a giant mining truck. The later city scenes show us crowds as if we are rats in a maze of our own making. One scene shows revolving doors, seen from above and placed at the top of the screen, disgorging human figures like the production lines we’ve witnessed earlier. The film has a semi-pallendromic structure, finishing where it begins, as if advocating a return to nature.

There’s perhaps two key images. In one, a voluminous full moon falls behind a skyscraper. In another, as one of the semi-pallendromic scenes, a space rocket takes off – but burns up, and falls back to earth. We attempt to ignore the nature we live off, but do so at our peril.  In fact I have sometimes wondered if it’s only the absence of words which stops the film tipping into hippy techno-fear.

However, an interesting aspect of the work is the way technology is presented not as evil or destructive so much as bewitching. This is especially noticeable with Glass’ score, which does not reflect the usual militaristic clichés of ‘environmental destruction’ or the sugary laments of ‘urban decay’ - but is as compelling for the nature scenes as the cityscapes. Perhaps a more generous reading could be made; where what’s being argued is that our relationship with technology cannot be one of simple utility, that the technology we create must reflect us and be emblematic of our relations with the world we live in.

You can see the whole film on Google Video (below), avoiding the stop-start irritation of YouTube clips. Though of course a fullsize cinema screen with a live ensemble is  not just the optimal but the intended way to see this. I’ll leave the choice to you...

Coming Soon! Something...honest injun!.. a little more recent.

GLASS ON THE BEACH 1: MUSIC IN 12 PARTS

This one has to start with a double apology! This performance happened at Brighton Dome, actually several streets away from the beach. But the title allows me to pun on Glass’s later ’Einstein on the Beach’. And this is being published even later than the previous Eno post! For it was during the Brighton Festival, way back in May, that the man himself appeared in Brighton to perform his ‘classic’ minimalist work.

Though I love the music, I’ve often thought minimalism to be a misleading term. While it is reductive, it doesn’t follow that it is sparse or austere – in fact, it’s quite the opposite. As Festival curator Brian Eno has said of Glass, “this was actually the most detailed music I’d ever heard. It was all intricately exotic harmonies.”

Okay, four hours of music making only minute and at times imperceptible changes isn’t everybody’s idea of a great night out – at least judging by the number of empty seats. However the duration isn’t there for any self-important or bombastic reasons, like it might be in a symphony. Listening to symphonies is like watching epic films, they rely upon us accessing our memories to discern an overall structure behind the immediate notes. When a musical phrase recurs it’s like a subplot reappearing in a film, it would be meaningless if we did not slot it into place.

Minimalism uses duration in precisely the opposite way, creating an arch so vast you end up failing to notice it it, instead living in the moment. We might recognise a recurring phrase, but we don’t pin it to a previous point and note that is now coming back in fifteen minutes later. Instead phases recur with a peculiar familiarity, like in a half-remembered dream. Eno’s concept of surrender is vital here!

It’s a bit like finding strangely shaped pebbles washed up on the beach. (I told you we’d get to the beach!) In theory you know of the huge and slow geological processes that shaped and formed them. But you don’t really process this vast knowledge. Instead your eye darts from one enticing pebble to the next. Or, in another analogy, minimalism is like the ‘swept bag’ scene in ’American Beauty.’ At first it seems that there is nothing to see. But focus in and the scene becomes compelling.

It’s precisely this lack of variation, and the necessary focusing in on smaller and smaller details, that makes it mesmerising. You lose all perception of the passage of time, and the music instead takes place in an eternal present. (Perhaps for this reason the performance was no ‘challenge’ or endurance test at all. Listening to all four hours of it was like going to one of those enchanted places in fairy tales, which moved at a different time to the real world.)

Consequently, the ordering doesn’t matter very much at all. In this way it’s almost like an instillation piece. You could imagine twelve rooms where twelve separate ensembles played and replayed their own piece, with the audience wandering between them at will.

It’s perhaps significant that I’ve chiefly written here about this piece as an example of minimalism. It’s quite a formal piece, which demonstrates what minimalism does superbly well but does little else. Reich’s ’Different Trains’ or Bryars’ ’Sinking of the Titanic’ are equally emblematic of minimalism, but also have their own character – they’d lend themselves much more to be written about in particular. It’s a bit like the difference between a great punk song, like Black Flag’s ‘Rise Above’, and a great song that’s of the punk genre, like the Dead Kennedy’s ‘Holiday in Cambodia.’ (I am saying this partly to be the first person to compare ‘Music in 12 Parts’ to ‘Rise Above.’)

The programme quoted K. Robert Schwertz’s description of “a summation of all [Glass’s] minimalist techniques to date.” Glass himself has described this piece as “the end of minimalism" for him; "I had worked for eight or nine years inventing a system, and now I'd written through it and come out the other end.” In short, the piece is simultaneously an epitome of something and something the composer had to go beyond.

...and in fact Glass reappeared the next night with a later, ‘post-minimalist’ piece. No promises, but I shall try to match his timescale...

BRIAN ENO – RESTORING THE BALANCE

Grevious and prostrate apologies for the untimeliness of this posting. Going back to events in May is a new level of lateness, even for me. Whenever I had time to work on this blog, there always seemed something more time-specific just about to slip over the horizon, so this piece kept getting shunted back and back. But it’s not every day that Brian Eno guest-curates the Brighton Festival. (It can only happen once a year, for one thing.) So just go with it, okay?

Though his Illustrated Talk took place last, it was the event I was looking forward to the most – so shall give it first place here. Much of Eno’s art is conceptual, which is to say the most important aspect of it is the idea within it. (Or, in a more poetic analogy, the crucial part of the fruit is the seed.) Some people seem to see this as a criticism, for reasons I’ve never fully understood. If the man was a bongo player, the event I’d look forward to the most would be his evening of bongo playing. As things stand, it was his talk.

He made for a great communicator and a witty raconteur, which made it enjoyable to hear him break free of the sound-bite constraints of TV. He would probably make the world’s finest drinking buddy! (He even managed to sound affable to the berk who thought it appropriate to ask a question about his own marital difficulties, surely no easy task!) Without merely repeating what he said (much of which I agreed with), here’s a few random observations... (Direct quotes come from this contemporaneous Guardian interview.)

His definition of art as “anything you don’t have to do” was reminiscent of Scott McCloud’s infamous passage in ’Understanding Comics’ (above). He gave the example of a screwdriver, where the ‘useful’ screw head is married to an ‘aesthetic’ handle. This suggests aesthetics and function are linked but only at the hip - two separate entities conjoined. I’m not sure this easy separation exists, I regard function and aesthetics more as things intertwined. (This is probably even true in the case of a screwdriver, where the handle has to fit the human hand.)

Marc Bolan regarded pop songs as like little spells, Alan Moore has seen writing as an act of magic... I don’t think its necessary to take these comparisons literally to see art as something which has a social impact. (It’s perhaps notable that Eno was dismisssive of didactic art, seeing it as merely propagandist.)

I was more in accord with his view of the arts as an ecology rather than a hierarchy. Pop songs do not exist beneath operas or symphonies, but in some overall symbiosis with them. Some might regard them as ticks beside mighty elephants, but the elephant needs those tiny ticks. This strikes me as unarguable, but also rather redundant - reminiscent of a General fighting the last war instead of the current one.

Art is no longer trapped in a hierarchy but reduced to a commodity, something which is measured by units shipped or bums placed on seats. Even visual art, one of the last reserves of high art, became part of celebrity culture with the arrival of Brit Art. To get to grips with where art stands today, we need a critique of contemporary capitalism - not Victorian classification systems.

But pretty soon he had moved onto the core of his talk – his valuation of surrender. He claimed we currently had the balance struck wrong between control and surrender, something he was keen to rectify. “I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens... I want to rethink surrender as an active verb.” He illustrated this with an anecdote about being the only atheist in a gospel choir, and the others expecting him to “come out”. His point was, of course, that in one sense the others were right. The choir did allow him to access something bigger than himself, even if that ‘something’ was just the choir itself. He also said of an a cappella group he’d set up, “when it’s going really well, we don’t know what we’re singing or who’s singing what.” Though often presented as the preserve of individual genius, art is at root a collectivising force – a way of getting you out of yourself.

This not only drew together most of Eno’s other concepts, but to my mind made his concerns more contemporary. The push to control is clearly a feature of propertarian societies; when we buy into a piece of art we require a return on our investment, rather than having to embark upon a process. This is perhaps underlined by our two key uses for the verb ‘get’, as in “only when I got all their CDs did I get what they were singing about.”

Many react against such notions, with hostility so vehement that it becomes interesting in itself. Some claim to find the whole idea de-individualising, as if the individual could ever have any meaning without reference to the collective. Generally, however, I find this reaction comes from wanna-be creators; people who are clasping their one or two (normally quite average) ideas, hoarding them like a lottery ticket which they hope will one day win.

However, its not just that those with more ideas are more happy to surrender them. The process of surrender, by offering up ideas like dishes at a potlatch dinner, creates new combinations which generates more ideas – sharing makes more.

Of course as soon as art becomes unpredetermined it becomes ‘unbottleable’, and some start to worry about audience tolerance. (Both the Guardian interview and an audience question broached this subject.) But Eno clearly intends the concept to apply to the audience as well as the artists – the audience needs to surrender too.

Think of the ritual of clapping live performances, and its unstated but different rules for different people. Some see it as a reflex response, like returning a greeting. Others, such as myself, will only clap when moved to do so. (Sometimes causing irritation among the first type, who see only illmanneredness in unresponsiveness.) In the second, of course, the audience is actually surrendering. This difference is underlined by looking at the apparantly similar words ‘audience’ and ‘crowd’. While both can be used as verbs, ‘audience’ is passive and permissive (‘to give audience’) while ‘crowd’ is active (‘to gather together’).

This concept was chiefly in action for Pure Scenius, a neologism coined as the plural form of genius. Eno was joined by Karl Hyde of Underworld, all three of the Necks, plus Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins for a six-hour improvisation. (Split into three sittings of which, alas, I could only afford to attend the last of.) Eno cheerily parodied his own egghead persona, presenting the gig as a lecture and even attempting to set homework!

The conceit was that all the recent years of music had been forgotten, swept away in some great meta hard disc crash which had left nothing but doo-wop to work with. (Of course a metaphor for the necessity for artists to picture a blank slate.) As you might imagine from such a line-up, the gig was actually a storming one - far too varied and inventive to attempt to capture in a short description... try this short snippet instead.



It could of course be argued that ‘scenius’ is just a more polysllabic term for the more regular ‘group’. Indeed, the weaker numbers tended to be those most connected to one of Eno’s concepts, and the stronger ones where the esemble just let rip beyond any conceptualisation. Perhaps we shouldn’t get too hung up on the concept of surrender, lest it get in the way of actually doing it!

I probably wouldn’t have gone to Tales of the Afterlives if not for the Eno connection, fearing New Ageyness. Thankfully, such fears were groundless. The best science fiction doesn’t concern itself with trying to second-guess the future, but acts as a prism to shine a different light on the present. This series of vignettes by David Eagleman did a similar thing for the afterlives. Please note the plural form there.The more scenarios we get, the more they combine into a stimulant for speculation. You don’t respond by wondering which one might be the closest to the truth, but trying to think up something so clever and novel. (The inverse of when fundamentalists label the Bible as ’the book’ or it’s message as ’the word.’)

This was underlined by the simple but effective staging, in which all the readers were on stage at once, picked out in turn by a spotlight. Though their workings may have been mutually exclusive, this arrangement encouraged you to keep all their hypotheses in your head at one time. The readers entered and left by a backlit door, as if the stage was some ante-chamber to the afterlife, from which they’d emerged to tell us about it.

The one New Agey element was, ironically, Eno’s own musical accompaniment. While of course this was only intended as backing music, it did feel generically ‘spiritual,’ with all the connotations of the afterlife the piece was unconcerned with. (It also seemed to klunk on and off at various points. Perhaps conceptual artists don’t make for great DJs!)

Eno spoke often and proudly of his Seventy Seven Million Paintings art instillation, put on in the Fabrica gallery. Yet for me it fitted far too readily the venue’s previous life as a Church, it was quite reminiscent of watching the play of light over strained glass windows. With all the shape-shifting confined inside neat geometrical shapes, it seemed rather tame and ordered. Perhaps I was spoilt by recently seeing Gustav Metzger’s Liquid Crystal Environment, which felt much more like a systematic derangement of the senses. (See my ravings about it here.)

The Speaker Flower Sound Instillation, not featured in the Festival guide, did come across as a somewhat impromptu addition – and was all the better for it. It worked largely from the space, which actually was mostly space – a large, empty and rather ramshackle building.

This setting probably enhanced the acoustics. (Just as well, with the sound provided by somewhat lo-fi ghetto blasters.) Certainly, the echoey voices in the video clip below sound almost as aesthetic as the music! But more importantly, the empty space made for a contemplative setting. This was not a parcel, pre-packed for delivery, but more a space to think. You felt minded to linger, soaking it all in, rather than walk round and leave once you’d ‘done’ it all – a feeling a ‘proper’ gallery would inevitably inhibit. Conceptual art should perhaps always look unfinished, like a rough sketch rather than a blueprint poised for mass production, an invite not a schedule.

Best of all were the mono guitars, which allowed for audience interaction. You could add or remove pebbles from baskets, altering the pitch of the fret-boards. Though there were three guitars, alas attendees didn’t try to create something in synch. Clearly, we all needed to surrender that little bit more...

(Photos I took of this installation here.)




Coming Soon! (if somewhat shamelessly...) more completely out-of-date stuff!

BEFORE I SLEEP

A highly subjective account of a site-responsive promenade performance by DreamThinkSpeak in the old Co-op Building, Brighton

“We struggle to change life so that those who come after us might be happy, but those who come after us will say as usual it was better before, life now is worse than it used to be.” 

- Chekhov

“The question is whether in creating new things that we want, we also destroy things that we need.” 
- Performance programme

A first has occurred. This is the first time Lucid Frenzy has reported on something late deliberately. When the performance company DreamThinkSpeak took over the empty old Co-op building on Brighton’s London road for a “site-responsive promenade performance”, it was initially for the Brighton Festival in May. But popular demand extended this not once but twice, and it finally finished on July 4th. Moreover, as you emerge from the events a notice requests you not to spill the “secrets” of what you’ve seen. (In fact even the programme contains no images from the performance itself.) So this piece couldn’t have been written until after the much-delayed final night! (If anyone points out this means it could have been posted any time from July 5th I will become all tetchy...)

You may be wondering what a “site-responsive promenade performance” is all about, or guessing that it’s probably a way of saying “high-concept but vacuous piece of arty crap.” Normally I would share such healthy cynicism. Yet trust me, for once it is misplaced...

The old Co-op was transformed and mutated into a fresh environment, in a hybrid of performance and installation piece. Rather than take your seats and watch a set sequence of events get underway, you were admitted in small groups at staggered intervals. At points you would obligingly follow set paths, at others find your own route. There’d be times when you’d interact with proceedings you encountered, and others where you’d merely observe them.

The piece’s twin bases were in Chekhov’s ’Cherry Orchard’ and the Co-op building itself. But you didn’t really need much foreknowledge of either. As Dominic Maxwell wrote in 'The Times', it “honours Chekhov, builds on Chekhov, but needs no knowledge of Chekhov.”

Analogy corner: It was like a remix of Chekhov’s play, the way linear pop songs get spliced and rearranged, little phrases magnified by recurrance until they start to take on a whole new meaning. Alternately, it was like one of Dali’s works where he’d reprise and mutate myths from more classical paintings. Figures, scenes and images would constantly recur in new forms and arrangements; sometimes life-size, sometimes as models or rooms in dolls’ houses, sometimes video projections. Most recurrent, apart from the titular orchard, were the aristocratic couple awaiting service at their table and the elderly servant bringing a tray to them - a simple image of the ordered old world unaware of what was in store for it.

Plays commonly have a three-act structure; the performance countered with a three-floor structure.  (‘The Cherry Orchard’ actually has four acts, but let’s not allow that to spoil a good analogy!) You first enter through the basement, a subterranean realm which represents our past and the character’s present. They often stop at our approach, gazing in surprise and irritation at our ill-mannered intrusion. They reply indignantly in (presumably) Russian, making communication impossible. We see them only through patinas; behind sheets of semi-frosted glass, by looking down at models or peering through slots, or through water-lines. (The recurring motif of the diving costume comes in here, suggesting the past is another world to ours just as the underwater environment is.)

But when we enter the ground floor we burst into a brightly lit department store, where an array of salespeople appear to greet us. The juxtaposition is like crossing a dimension, with the new dimension of course the present. While the past had spoken a foreign language each of the salespeople patters in a different language. (Even though you are aware they are acting, you feel the familiar awkwardness of being abroad and trapped within your own tongue.) Of course the babble of languages represents globalisation. (Some pedants might object that, far from multiplying languages, globalisation is reducing them to a Newspeak of a debased American English. But are we that kind of men?)

The past was progressed through by a linear path, lit by oil-lamps or candles. But in the present a shadowy maze of corridors break off from a bright central room, many of them merely leading back to the same room. You become almost apprehensive, trying to find your way away from the sales floor but forever being returned to it. Rather than escape routes, these sub-rooms and corridors feel something like the Freudian id, mere repressed reflections of the main arena. One darkened room was full of massed mannequins, another dead orchard.

As fresh parties of punters arrive on the sales floor behind us, and the sales staff recite the same babble-greetings, we become aware the actors are doing the same thing over and over. Theoretically we know this to be true of every theatre performance. We even talk to friends who saw the same show on different nights, expecting their experience to be identical.  But during the show we switch the information off to enjoy the moment. Here that awareness is an essential part of the piece. The effect is quite purgatorial, as if there’s no escape or release.

Now the past is over, experience no longer occurs in groups. As soon as we entered the sales floor, with it’s maze of offshoots, I immediately lost the people I had been admitted with. The general audience now becomes visible, milling around. But this very addition reduces you to an individual within a crowd, just as you are when out shopping.

When finally reached, the final, upper floor must almost by definition be the future. It would be almost glib to call it post-modern, it feels almost post-apocalyptic. For the first time there are no human actors, just an array of video screens in empty rooms. There’s no longer language barriers because there’s no longer language. Some attendees complained of the comparative emptiness of the top floor, yet this barren-ness hits as hard as the babbling busyness before, and has its own meaning. One vast room is filled with Max Richter’s mournful score (riffing of Berber’s ’Adagio For Strings)’, while you focus on what’s not there - a life-size but cut-down cherry orchard filling a room. As the programme notes, “the overriding sense is that we are witnessing a world in collapse rather than renewal.” Even when you run into other punters it doesn’t seem to matter much, it feels just as deserted. Earlier we ran into ghosts of the past. Now it’s as if we’ve become them.

The videos at first look cyclic, but aren’t. In one the servant wanders a forest, proffering a cup and saucer with no-one to take it from him, a function now nothing but an empty gesture. The camera pulls back from this tangled forest to reveal he’s alone on an island. This moment seemed to sum up the whole environment, in both theme and tone. The servant is the most-seen figure, a man marooned by time, adhering to old ways where all that is left is absence. The image is humorous but (particularly given the cumulative effect) strangely moving.

Yet the performance actually ends with an unexpected image - a cherry tree back in bloom, an arresting sight in the middle of an apparently derelict urban building. It’s types of time which have been vying all along. The old, cyclic time of the cherry orchard is replaced first by the linear time of the industrial world, then the multi-tasking tangled time of modernity (characterised by the overlapping sales soundbites), then the seeming death of time (the mournful musical refrain looping almost in parody of cyclic time).
 

In analysing something, you inadvertently break it into its component parts. Yet it’s often only when those parts are put together that its purpose becomes discernable. Here, alas, we have talked of the “promenade performance” before moving onto the “site-responsive”. But it’s crucial to the piece that the building was not some architectural canvas, on which to hang their works. To quote again from the programme, “we strive to design scenes that respond to and sit within the host site, as if they have always belonged there.”  While wandering, the quicker you stop trying to figure what’s a prop and what’s an actual part of the environment, the more the two blend into one and the faster you feel like you’re getting it.

This site-responsive effect was enhanced for me by two factors. First, if somewhat prosaic-sounding, I used to shop in the Co-op! (While the director mentions buying his fridge there, I picked up some saucepans. But now they handle’s broken on one and I can’t take it back.) After I’d seen the show I’d sometimes pass by on London Road, and see it’s activity through the windows. Transforming such an everyday space into something so numinous is part of the magical effect.

But its also a reminder that the closure of the Co-op, most likely to be replaced by an arcade of branded stores topped by yuppie ‘apartments’, is itself a chopping-down of a world just as the cherry orchard was. Yuppification is a huge problem in Brighton, as career-chasers elect to move to somewhere ‘artistic’ and price all the artists out. Perhaps the way the performance extended through word-of-mouth (and certainly many people were talking about it), suggests it did trigger some local sense that the Co-op should have a wake.

Yet for me such department stores always had something numinous about them. Back in my Seventies youth they were still common, and Saturdays would see my family shop in them. The performance brought back how monumental they seemed to my child mind, how I’d sneak away to explore them alone, vast arenas full of sofas, cathedrals to beds, a gargantuan contrast to the small bungalow we called home.

It could be argued that the sheer scale and ambition of the piece set itself a bar which was then hard to reach. And it’s true some parts were more memorable, and more pertinent to the overall themes, than were others. Yet this scale was important in its own right, in immersing you in its atmosphere. Cinema-goers sometimes comment that they “felt inside” a particularly involving film. Yet with this piece you were inside it, rather than merely looking in. You were completely immersed in another world for a good couple of hours. And, while different film viewers might notice or respond to different elements in their own ways, here audience members could at times quite literally go different ways. When you walked out afterwards it took time to readjust.

Given its site-specific nature, it seems unlikely this piece will ever be repeated. However the company will hopefully be up to bold new explorations. If their future adventures can equal this, they will certainly be worth seeing. Coming to a disused shopping centre near you..?

The shop window photos are mine. The reflections symbolise the performance’s interaction with its environment, and are nothing to do with my witless inability to take the shots without them. More here.

- The Guardian interviews the director.

Coming Soon! Stuff that’s still more hopelessly late...

SAFE FROM HARM? HENRY MOORE AT THE TATE

At Tate Britain until 8^th August

Corporate Sculpture?

Think of the celebrated scene in ’Fight Club’ where initiates are commanded to “destroy one piece of corporate sculpture.” And of course all we need is those two words to conjure up visions of such ghastly artifacts – big and ostentatious as the buildings they masthead for. Their semi-abstraction is both ostentation and figleaf. They’re supposed to represent the ‘modernity’ of lumbering institutions well past their sell-by-date, while their ‘abstraction’ masks what would otherwise have to be a grasping hand or slamming fist. You watch that film sequence with only one question - why stop at one?

Perhaps more than any other Modernist artist, Henry Moore is seen as the midwife of corporate sculpture. Even the largely derided Impressionists are dismissed as kitsch wrapping paper, while Moore is seen as a worse thing. Much as the punk generation said of the Rolling Stones, he’s seen as tame masquerading as wild. His few innovative gestures have long since lost their currency, his sculptures are now safe as a rock and ideal for entry lobbies everywhere.

But is this dismissal simplistic and historically reductive? Bryan Robertson has curated this exhibition, and enlisted a back-up BBC4 documentary (‘Henry Moore: Carving a Reputation’, shown on 20^th March), to argue just that. Using the gallery walls to quote no-one less than himself, he claims Moore’s work to be “grim, and on occasion tragic. There is no easy reassurance to it.” Perhaps Moore is really akin to Francis Bacon, another artist to have recently received a Tate retrospective (reviewed by me here) – not soft and reassuring but edgy and experimental. (Disclaimer: This comparison is not Robertson’s but mine.)

Virtually the first sentence used by this show is as follows: “After the Great War, ‘primitive’ art offered universality, permanence and integrity as a welcome alternative to the brutality of modern civilisation.” It’s of course an irony that the roots of Modernism are always in the ancient. But few were quite as influenced by the primitive as Moore. Looking through the introductory ‘World Culture’ room, you could readily believe it to have been his only influence. And, though his art modified as it went along, Moore seems peculiarly aloof from the fads and factions of Modernism. You can see the thumbprints of the Surrealists, plasticating his Thirties figures into Dalian twists and distortions, but little else. Similarly he has no interest in psychological or biographical readings of his works, which he gave only the simplest of titles. The primitive was his furrow, and he pretty much kept ploughing it.   

Moreover, Moore’s tight fist of fixations arrived early. The mother-and-child combinations, the reclining figures, both were there before the end of the Twenties. But it’s with the next decade that the killer app of his art kicks in – his simultaneous move to larger forms and landscape sculpture. This is also associated with a move away from already-stylised representation into “sensuous undulating surfaces.” As his work moved beyond human scale, it did the same for human form.

As sculptures, his mother-and-child works never look like separate figures. You’re always aware that they’re of the same block, and you think of them as still somehow conjoined. Similarly, his reclining figures never quite look raised from the landscape, and seem to be already blurring back into it, shoulders morphing into hillslopes. His trademark holes, the gaps through which the actual landscape is spied, seem as important as the stone. In fact Moore collected stones and pebbles, whose forms suggested works to him.  

In one of the film clips that accompany the exhibition, someone comments that you accept the works as simultaneously blocks of stone and figures. The material isn’t polished into some blank-slate state of neutrality, like in Classical sculpture, but remains present. That seems key to Moore, and quite possibly Modernism in general. As Bacon said, “the image is the paint and vice versa.”    Behind Moore would seem to lie the ancient fantasy of the autochthonian, that we were born from the ground. (We learn Moore’s father was a miner, which may be one for the psychologists.)   

His early work gains its effect not by merely duplicating the forms of ancient art, but also it’s eeriness, its savage eye shorn of sentimentality. There’s none of art’s sense as a separator of the human from the natural, nor any easy divisions between life and death, joy and sorrow, or even inside and outside. (Check out works such as 1953’s ‘Internal/External Form’ for his interest in layers and innards.) Instead such things are in some ambiguous, shifting symbiosis.

...none of which sounds much like the stuff of corporate lobbies. And in fact Moore was insistent his art should be shown amid nature. In another film clip, of an earlier Tate show, he rejects the idea of his work shown outside the front of building, as part of the urban environment, but takes to the idea they could go in a garden.   

And yet at times Robertston doth protest too much. Moore is frankly not an existential artist like Bacon, intent of freeze-framing on the impossible escape from form. (Itself a modern idea.) To suggest this Robertson has to fixate upon a minority of his works, such as 1953’s ‘Mother and Child’, where the two figures become snapping, fractious forms. Robertson writes of how “heads twist and look away, bodies are kept at arm’s reach and the gaze of mother and infant is rarely met” – an electrifying description but one which turns the exception into the rule.   

Giving Shelter?   

The centre of the exhibition is given to Moore’s wartime ‘shelter’ drawings, figures huddled in Tube stations to escape the London bombings. As I’ve already suggested the Earth itself as Moore’s rosebud, it may be no surprise that these drawings are my favourites of his works. (Alternately, you may want to argue I am more primed to appreciate illustration than sculpture.) The figures aren’t delineated through outlines but built up by amassed contour strokes, thick and still, filling the frame with claustrophobic effect. (The trademarked holes are not in evidence.)

What’s notable is that, though drawings of such an immediate event, they have almost no contemporary context to them – no iconic London Underground signs, no tracks, no trains. The very elements the Futurists focused on, as part of the new world they saw emerging, are here expunged.    

Moore described the scenes as “hell” but (ironically for the arch-Primitivist) they’re actually suggestive of something more Classical – the shade-populated underworld of ancient Greece. Figures which seem some pale echo of life line the walls of what might as well be caverns. While his sculptures exist as forms, with no need of faces, 1941’s ‘Woman Seated in the Underground’ parades her absence of a face, as if she had been dehumanised.   

(Ironically, though none deny conditions in the Shelters became sordid, many at the time saw them as an eruption of people power. The authorities were not keen on the stations being occupied, but feared to act against it. One woman in the films asserts she “made a lot of friends”, and that they were “one big happy family.”)      

There’s an accompanying series on Miners I was previously unfamiliar with. Though stylistically similar, its’ notable that these do use contextual elements – we see miner’s lamps, picks, beams – even tracks! Both series might make for an interesting comparison to the other great British modernist sculptor – Barbara Hepworth, with her NHS series. (One example here.)

I occasionally toy with the theory that Modernism was inextricably bound with War, the extremity of the World Wars burning away the old world, driving art to more radical reactions, creating an urgency where art and politics could not be separate. If it’s true Moore’s initial impetus to ancient art came from the First War (as Robertson attests), it’s perhaps significant that the Second War brought out of him his finest series...   

Scale Becomes Comfort

 ...and certainly the post-war years lead to a Moore as his detractors tend to think of him. Before you’ve even looked around the later rooms, you’re already reading how he was commissioned to work with the New Towns movement and your heart is starting to sink.    Certainly the ‘Elm Figures’ show his art as its most reassuring. On occasion, this reassurance is tragic, but not in the way it used to be.

He’s quoted as saying “trunks of trees to me are very human”, a quote which rebounds. It’s single-edged precisely where Moore used to double - once the human form was simultaneously very landscape. But these are people writ large, blown up to tree size to dominate the landscape, like Tolkien’s Ents striding in like the Cavalry to save the day. Okay, so they don’t belong in corporate lobbies. But for urban gardens or country estates they’d be (if you’ll forgive the term) a natural.

This feeling is accentuated by the way they’re displayed, with four large figures given their own room to sit astride and occupy - which may well be deliberate. The website calls these figures “highlights of the show.” Yet it’s notable that the bulk of the exhibition is focused on the early years, by a factor of five rooms to two. The previously mentioned ’Carving a Reputation’ BBC documentary goes further, suggesting Moore became the ‘prisoner’ of his mentor – the art critic Kenneth Clark. (Not to be confused with the current Lord Chancellor, who ends his name with an ‘e.’) It suggests that a desire to impress Clark drove Moore back into the arms of Classicism.

Of course it would be inadequate to dismiss Moore’s whole career for its later years. The decline in his work followed almost exactly the trajectory of the more celebrated Bacon – becoming bigger in scale, more grandiose and imposing, more empty. And of course Modernism was overall a failure, in all the tasks it set itself.

But the decline had a catalyst in Moore’s case, his almost insistent fixation upon the primitive becoming first his asset then his curse. While his primitivism was arresting and surprisingly convincing, it could be said to remove one of Modernism’s keystones – the (ahem!) modern bit. The Shelter drawings, though Moore’s triumph, also display his lack of interest in the contemporary. It might also be true this fixation led to Moore’s narrow stylistic range. Compared to a polymath like Picasso, it was perhaps inevitable that Moore would face a sharp decline. 

Exhibition Guide here

THOUGHT FOR TODAY

“In the city there's a thousand men in uniforms

And I've heard they now have the right to kill a man”

-       The Jam, ’In the City

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-10723274

CRACKS, LEVELS AND MARMITE - SOME LAST THOUGHTS ON STEVEN MOFFAT’S DOCTOR WHO (2)

I and he and you and she and we are all together in proclaiming Steven Moffat’s approach to ’Doctor Who’ as fresh and new. Remote Amazonian tribes made their first contact with Western Civilisation to say they found the ‘fairy tale’ approach more fitting for the show. Japanese soliders have been found on remote Pacific islands, insisting the War was still ongoing and that the irascible, fallible detective was more Doctorish than the lonely God with the magic wand.

And yet there’s a paradox. Everyone has simultaneously written about the Marmite reaction to the season. Andrew Rilstone felt he couldn’t write any further about it without an American equivalent to this term. (Which incidentally means “love/hate reaction.”)) How can this be squared?

It might sound banal to say “it depends on the way you look at it.” But what counts is the level at which you look at it. This series looks at its best as a series, viewed overall, or from moment to moment, in micro-close up. Moffat’s overview and sense of direction was in many ways exemplary. The Doctor should be alien and fallible, super-smart yet socially awkward, not noble and tragic. He should bump into the furniture then work things out, not point magic wands at them. Individual lines were often richly quotable yet simultaneously sounding fresh and spontaneous, never composed or devised. Take when the Doctor cries “I escaped! I love it when I do that!” It’s something which you could perfectly imagine him saying, not just a snappy line for his actor to read out.

But the series was at its’ weakest in medium view, at episode-by-episode level. And this remains true even if you factor in Moffat’s own episodes. He wowed us all with his original trilogy way back when he started – ‘The Empty Child’, ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’ and ‘Blink’. But it was his last Davies-era script, ’Silence in the Library’ which set the tone for what was to follow. Abigail Nussbaum has commented that Moffat does structures in the place of plots. Yet this hit trilogy was all perfectly coherent, and of an even tone. It was his later storylines, while often great on a moment-by-moment basis, which broke into bits as soon as you tried to frame them as episodes. They had a tendency to lurch between incident, from one tone to another, a mere sum of parts except for that “sum” part. It was like Moffat was too clever to be coherent, his brain too active to merely follow any through-line, forever thinking up tangents and enticing side-alleys to explore.

The Vortex Manipulator and predestination paradoxes seem to rather sum this up. ’Blink’ contained a predestination paradox too, but only one which was saved for the very end - when Sally Sparrow hands the Doctor the transcript. The final episode here, ’The Big Bang,’ contained very little other than predestination paradoxes. It was like the whole thing was made of several different cloths and needed such a zapping thread to stitch it all together. One thing doesn’t follow logically or seamlessly to the other, but just lurch into it? There’s your answer, sitting on the Doctor’s wrist. (Perhaps for that reason the final episode was the least coherent. ’Beast Below’ was probably the most.)

So it’s perhaps not surprising that it was in episode view that the Marmite reaction was most pronounced. Mike Taylor commented “Gavin Burrows’ reviews seem to like all the episodes I don’t and vice versa.” On Beyond the Sofa, despairing of ’The Lodger’, Neil Perryman merely posted a picture of kittens rather than reviewing it. Andrew Rilstone took two posts to expend his enthusiasm. My review would have been one word – “filler”. (Or, if more copy was required, “ever-more-desperate filler.”)

Of course there’s nothing new or unusual about fans disagreeing about episodes. (Some people even affect to like ’Earthshock’, from what I hear.) In fact, it’s all part of the fun. But what’s odd is that, after everyone agreeing on how Moffat brought a new vision to the show, how familiar the episode line-up actually was. How recognisable is this?

- A Daleks-are-back story
- A historical guest-star (thinking here of Churchill in the Dalek story, not Van Gogh, for reasons I gave at the time)
- A lightweight romp inserted half-way through (Or at least that’s what I think ’Vampires in Venice’ was supposed to be)
- A pastiche of ’Old Who’ (which feels like a tradition but actually only dates to ’The Sontaran Stratagem’.)
- A comedy of manners story where a couple get together despite the impediment of excessive nerdiness
- A heavily foreshadowed closing two-parter, where the fabric of the universe is in peril, unless the Doctor does some life-risking stuff very, very quickly which very nearly does for him
...in addition, the Celebrity Guest Writer now seems an extra tradition. After Richard Curtis, next season brings Neil Gaiman.

(Even ’Amy’s Choice’, one of the biggest audience-dividers, wasn’t a million miles from the previous companion-focused ‘Turn Left’.)

...a line-up which often induced in me no more than weary resignation. It seems a shame the opportunity wasn’t taken to break the mould, and toss some of those clichés down some handy Crack in Time. In all honesty, the only non-Moffat story I could claim to enjoy was ’Amy’s Choice.’

This slightly generic feel was reinforced by a lack of decent villains. In fact there were very few new villains at all. (Space Vampires hardly count as “new” here, nor giant chickens as “decent”.) Unless you count the Smilers (which we don’t), all we really had was the Dream Lord - a great adversary but only ever a one-off.

I am also less than keen on the way monsters have been psychologised, and with it individualised. It’s significant that the one new villain worth speaking of turned out to be but the projection of a character’s mind. The Daleks once represented the totalitarian drive, enmity for the unlike, the Cybermen conformity. But the best new enemy here, the Dream Lord, was pure personal antithesis. If we no longer have monsters which reflect us, instead of merely me and you, does that not suggest we have become more like monsters?

During his spirited defence of ’The Lodger’, Andrew Rilstone patiently explains that the Doctor’s “real mission, the real subject of the story, is to appear normal while living with Craig... That is why anyone who focuses unduly on the nature of the top-of-the-stairs thing has probably misunderstood the episode.” This almost uncannily duplicates something I wrote in response to Iamus after the first episode. Guys, I get what’s going on. I just think we’re swapping something grand for something petty.

As the documentary-maker Adam Curtis said in an interview with ‘The Register’; “What people suffer from is being trapped within themselves - in a world of individualism everyone is trapped within their own feelings, trapped within their own imaginations. Our job as public service broadcasters is to take people beyond the limits of their own self... What is sitting there potentially is a vast world that will take people out of themselves.” Alas that potential remains unrealised.

Possibly what has changed most is the stylistic variety. Davies made a point of saying Moffat was the one writer he wouldn’t script-edit, rather suggesting that he did edit all the others. And certainly under him everything seemed to bear his imprint, to belong under one vision. The results may have varied in quality, but we agreed on what the measure was. People preferred ’Family Of Blood’ to ’Fear Her,’ ‘Dalek’ to ’Boom Town.”

But comparing ’Amy’s Choice’ to ’Vampires in Venice’ is like comparing chalk to cheese. Or for that matter, two episodes from ’Old Who’, which often didn’t feel like episodes from the same series at all, merely neighbours on a schedule. Wildly differing reactions therefore ensue. (Quite possibly including posted pictures of kittens.)

But then what of the celebrated Moffat vision? Of course it did not exist at that point, on that level, on that scale. It informs what the Doctor is doing right now, what he is saying and how he is saying it. And it is riddled right across what you must nowadays call the ‘story arc’ - the Crack, Amy’s marriage and so on. (Though even here Moffat’s rewritten rulebook was unevenly applied – think of the sonic screwdriver reverting to a magic wand in’The Hungry Earth’.)

Between those, writers were free to do as they felt. And with rare exceptions, what they felt like doing was more of the same. If only those differing reactions had led to a clutch of unique experiments, each boldly going where no episode had gone before. Had each episode dazzled with it’s own unique glow, our attention would hardly have been upon the through-line. ’Vincent and the Doctor’ was perhaps the sole exception. Despite it’s deep-rooted and numerous faults, all of which I spelt out at the time, it was at least trying to do something else.

The Crack, the predestination paradoxes, ultimately all these were not the icing upon the season but symptoms of it’s inner fault-lines. Viewed through the right magnification, so much was done so well it seems like carping to point all this out. But the problem is a deeper one than there just being some sub-par episodes. Look into those episodes and it simply does not cohere, it was like being handed a bag of ideas, a collection of scenes instead of a script. Moffat’s own scenes were at least interesting in their own right. Less so for most of the other authors...

Coming Soon! Stuff that’s not about ’Doctor Who’

Coming Shortly After That! More stuff about ’Doctor Who’