About a teacher

I’ve been very lucky with teachers. Chris Brooks, who taught me about Blake and Dickens. Campbell MacKay, who taught me about Beckett and Stoppard. John O’Brien, who taught me that bizarre song, ‘The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling’. (He also taught me about the Congress of Vienna and the Spanish Civil War, but it’s the song that stuck.)

All long gone, of course. And a few days ago, another joined them when I learned that Professor Peter Thomson of the University of Exeter had died. He was a devotee of Brecht and Shakespeare, a mischievous iconoclast and a very kind man. I’ve read several heartfelt tributes already, from people who knew him far more deeply than I did, and there will be many more.

The thing is, he shouldn’t by rights have been my teacher, because he was in the drama department and I was doing single honours English. But I was lucky enough in my final year to get a place on an interdisciplinary course that he ran, although “interdisciplinary” barely covers the weird, wriggly beast. It was called The Secret Lives of the Victorians and combined elements of art, history, politics and psychoanalysis, with a dose of drama thrown in for fun. We looked at some of the odder figures of 19th-century Britain, such as the secularist-turned-Theosophist Annie Besant and the Bedlam artist Richard Dadd, and pondered the sexuality of the Marquess of Queensberry. The Pre-Raphaelites also featured heavily. I have vague memories of dressing up as Oscar Wilde and doing a ventriloquist act with a Margaret Thatcher (Victorian values!) squeaky dog toy. Peter had a healthy contempt for the Gradgrindian metrics of academic assessment and at the end he gave everyone exactly the same mark.

His course reinforced my instinct that context, especially social and historical context, is vital to understanding and fully appreciating any media and in retrospect had a big impact on much of my later work (especially the Radiohead book) and, more recently, my own teaching. I’d been in touch with Peter occasionally over the years, but now I really wish I’d told him how important his teaching was to me. So, next best thing, I’m telling you instead. But without the squeaky Margaret Thatcher.

Richard Dadd, Come Unto These Yellow Sands (1842)

About Dada

Yesterday I had a spare half-hour in class after prepositions and obligations and stuff and asked the students whether we are entering a post-literate age and, if so, who or what is to blame and a charming 18-year-old Slovakian suggested that the whole thing started not with smartphones and ChatGPT but with Dada because that’s when all the typographical rules fell apart and I didn’t buy it for a moment but it was magnificent and sometimes I bloody love my job.

About Magritte (or not)

In case it still needs explaining, the whole point of René Magritte’s 1929 painting La Trahison des images is that the apparently inaccurate caption in fact tells the truth. It is not a pipe. It is merely a picture of a pipe. 

Unfortunately, like most jokes, it loses its effectiveness when repeated. I haven’t yet seen the newish Belgian TV show This is Not a Murder Mystery (which includes Magritte himself as a character) but it does appear to be a murder mystery, so it’s all wrong before its starts. (Of course, they could argue that the murders aren’t real, because it’s fiction, or maybe we find out who the killer is from the beginning, Colombo-style, so there’s no mystery, but I’m not hopeful.)

And there’s no get-out clause for the Belgian football team, which has put a tweaked variant of Magritte’s zinger on their shirts, which definitely are shirts, not pictures of shirts, so that’s just wrong. Although the fact they’ve tucked the words inside the garments, so they can’t be seen during the game itself, suggests they’re well aware of the cock-up and are a bit embarrassed about the whole thing.

PS: And in vaguely similar territory, another social media platform is encouraging me to purchase this natty garment, which apparently offers one the sensation of getting shot without the mess and inconvenience and possible death stuff of, er, actually getting shot.

About the return of pictures

Probably the most exciting thing I did this past week was (very belatedly) to change the default browser on my laptop from Safari to Chrome. Not exactly a life-changing experience but now I think I know why I haven’t been able to post any pictures or videos here for the past year or so. And to commemorate that milestone of mundanity, here’s the prettiest picture I’ve encountered in recent months. It’s by Cosimo Tura (1430-1495) and it’s at the National Gallery, where they call it A Muse (Calliope?) which makes it sound like something arch and self-referential that Duchamp might have thought up. Which is probably why I like it so much.

About Zola (three things)

A couple of years ago I bought a cheap copy of Emile Zola’s The Masterpiece (L’Oeuvre), prompted by a Cezanne exhibition at Tate Modern. (Zola and Cezanne’s friendship ended because of what the latter perceived to be his negative depiction in the novel.)  And, inevitably, it slipped under a pile of other books and I’ve only just read it.

A few thoughts from the first couple of chapters:

1. Back in the days when Dan Brown was A Thing, I was far from the only one to point and laugh at his gauche telling-not-showing schtick, displayed most notoriously in the first bloody line of The Da Vinci Code when he told you that a character was a renowned curator by introducing him as “Renowned curator Jacques Saunière” (and then killing him). Does Zola do any better? Well, of course he does. After the first sentence introduces the central character, Claude, we get:

He was an artist and liked to ramble around Paris till the small hours, but wandering about the Halles on that hot July evening he had lost all sense of time.

(Il s'était oublié à rôder dans les Halles, par cette nuit brûlante de juillet, en artiste flâneur, amoureux du Paris nocturne...)

So you get the information, but there’s a reason, a context for your getting the information. Even if it relies on the stereotype of the artist wandering around the city at night, up to no good. Which may, in Claude’s case, be accurate...

2. Claude meets a distressed young woman and lets her stay the night in his studio. She is nervous about the situation, and he is annoyed by her nervousness, the fact that she thinks he might want to take advantage of her, but then:

In the hothouse heat of the sunlit room, the girl had thrown back the sheet and, exhausted after a night without sleep, was now slumbering peacefully, bathed in sunlight, and so lost to consciousness that not a sign of a tremor disturbed her naked innocence. During her sleepless tossing the shoulder-straps of her chemise had come unfastened and the one on her left shoulder had slipped off completely, leaving her bosom bare. Her flesh was faintly golden and silk-like in its texture, her firm little breasts, tipped with palest rose-colour, thrust upwards with all the freshness of spring. Her sleepy head lay back upon the pillow, her right arm folded under it, thus displaying her bosom in a line of trusting, delicious abandon, clothed only in the dark mantle of her loose black hair.

Good heavens, that’s pretty racy stuff for the 1880s. But what does Claude do? He begins to draw her still-sleeping form, and carries on after she wakes, gruffly overriding her objections. All sorts of modern concerns about consent and agency and surreptitious image-making come into play. But he doesn’t touch her little breasts, only draws them, so that’s OK (or at least Claude himself thinks that’s OK, but Zola stays out of it).

3. Claude and his chums are at the vanguard of something that may turn out to be Impressionism, but with the names changed, and he wants to present a sense of authenticity, as distinct from “the run-of-the-mill, made-to-measure École des Beaux-Arts stuff”. But, in his mind at least, the logical end of this is the triumph of the mundane, familiar image that Warhol might have envisaged:

The day was not far off when one solitary, original carrot might be pregnant with revolution!

And later, he comes close to precognition of Duchamp:

...a naked woman’s body with neither head nor shoulders, a mutilated trunk, a vague, corpselike shape, the dead flesh of the beauty of his dreams.

Tell you what, it’s better than Dan Brown, isn’t it?

About the Louvre

On Radio 4 this evening, a newsreader helpfully glossed an item about the redesign of the Louvre with the information that the Louvre is a museum in Paris that houses Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

Now, I get that the BBC is desperate to broaden its reach to the younglings and as a result we might need to broaden our assumptions about canons of knowledge and what is or isn’t known, but if someone doesn’t know what or where the Louvre is, why might they care that President Macron is chucking some money about it. And why does this passion for inclusivity only apply to Radio 4? Does Radio 1 explain every few minutes who Chappell Roan or Sabrina Carpenter might be? No, because the people who listen to Radio 1 are expected to know. 

Why are expectations so low at R4?

About Warhol

Tracey Emin, quoted in Dylan Jones’s newish oral history of the Velvet Underground:

When I was at school, I used to imagine that I would go to New York by boat and when I walked down the gangplank Andy Warhol would be there waiting for me.

The thing is, I still believe that...

PS: From the same book, and in a similar vein, Jones himself gets in on the act:

...I even went through a phase of rolling up my drainpipe jeans – skinhead style – worn with pink socks and black Dr. Marten shoes, in the vain hope of trying to advertise the fact that I owned records by people who lived in New York.

About Poppy Baynham

There have been hundreds of (two, actually) complaints about an art work by one Poppy Baynham in a gallery in Hay-on-Wye which includes a black triangle with pink wool on top and those of you who recall (however vaguely) my past posts about Gustave Courbet and Deborah de Robertis and Egon Schiele and Leena McCall will realise that, yes, he’s talking about ladyparts again or, more specifically, images of ladyparts, with a side order of the hairy bits in images of ladyparts and the questions of whether said hair makes said images more or less dangerous.

Two new angles: one, that Ms Baynham is quite upfront that she’s actively seeking all this attention, and any comments received will be used in her final-year dissertation. (Will they then Become Art? Another day, maybe.)

The other is that in this blog’s new, pic-free state, I don’t need to agonise over whether any particular picture I use might be pandering to and/or subverting the male gaze. 

About Bacchus

(For some reason I suddenly find myself unable to post pictures here. It may be a signal from the digital deities that I need to upgrade my computer, or migrate from Blogger or knock the whole archaic blogging thing on the head just as I’m staggering towards my 20th anniversary but for the moment at least I’ll take as a cue to rely on text alone, an OuLiPo-like constraint that may or may not enhance my creativity. And just to demonstrate how constrained that creativity is, the post is almost certainly going to be shorter than this mundane preamble.)

Performative outrage aplenty at the images of a female tourist simulating coitus with Giambologna’s statue of Bacchus. Except that I can’t help but think that if you’re going to dry-hump a deity, who better to do it with than the god of fertility and madness?

[IMAGINE SUITABLY DIONYSIAN PIC HERE]

PS: Previous collisions of fleshy and carved naughtiness, but in Cambodia.

PPS: And in Olympic news, apparently it’s wrong to mock Christian images but it turns out to have been nothing more than a bunch of Greek gods after all, so that’s OK.

About crabs

Was teaching a group of Hong Kong teens last week. They’d just visited the National Gallery and I asked them to identify the picture they enjoyed the most and explain why.

One girl picked Van Gogh’s Two Crabs. She described it well enough, with emphasis on the colours. But why did you like this one in particular, I asked.

She beamed. “They’re delicious!”

About the election, if only briefly

I was going to say something profound about the political events of the past few weeks but Rafael Behr got in there ahead of me: 

To an extent, Sunak’s failure was seeded in the unstable electoral coalition that Johnson assembled in 2019 with the promise to “get Brexit done”. Implementing an agenda in government that might satisfy the divergent interests of a culturally and geographically incoherent voting bloc – the ex-Labour working-class north and the traditional Tory southern shires – was an impossible feat of political alchemy.

And Cold War Steve makes art from schadenfreude:

About pumpkins etc

Far from new, stolen from Facebook, but it belongs here, I think.

And while we’re here, this can come out to play as well.

And then...

(And all the time I’m simultaneously worrying about and luxuriating in the exclusivity of all of these. Are they funny in spite of the fact that a lot of people won’t get the gag, or because of the fact? And somehow this ties into the most depressing article I’ve read this week, Elle Griffin on how nobody buys books any more.)

About missing the point

Two examples of people who appear to be in the wrong job. A pub landlord who offers discounts to customers who order by app from their tables, thus discouraging the horrific prospect of bar staff actually having to engage with punters:

I’ve found that not having to be constantly serving people is way better for my mental health. Bar work can be really mentally tiring. This takes the stress away rather than having to constantly interact with different people for eight hours straight. 

And Adrian Chiles who, last time I looked, was still purporting to be someone who writes for a living, complaining about apostrophes and then

But, oh Lord, the agonising, circuitous routes around words you’d have to find to construct a bloody sentence.

Which sounds to me like a pretty good definition of Chiles’s chosen, and in his case, well-remunerated trade.

I don’t want to disturb anyone with an image of Chiles, so I’ll just leave this here, wondering whether in a year’s time we’ll have the faintest idea to what it refers:

About Courbet (yet again)

And so we come back to Courbet’s 1866 picture The Origin of the World (see here) and more specifically the passions it arouses in Luxembourg’s finest provocateuse Deborah de Robertis (see here) who has adorned the painting (or more specifically the glass protecting it) with a #MeToo tag “because women are the origin of the world”. Which is a bit like complaining about Van Gogh’s Sunflowers because it’s called Sunflowers but, hey, it all adds to the sum of human joy, doesn’t it?

Except that then the French culture minister Rachida Dati weighs in with an intriguing contribution: “An artwork is not a poster to colour in with the day’s message.” Which may or may not be true but at least it suggests that Ms Dati has thought about the subject. And I remember that not so long ago my own country’s government gave the equivalent role to the ludicrous Nadine Dorries and not for the first time a bit of me wishes I were French.

About Yoko Ono

 And Ms Ono also appears, in a roundabout way, to have invented the simulacrum before Baudrillard did.

(Both images stolen from Andy Miller on BlueSky)

About art and men

In Tasmania, a man is claiming that his exclusion from the Ladies Lounge, an exhibit at the Museum of Old and New Art, constitutes gender discrimination. The museum’s lawyer contends that his being turned away is integral to what the art is about: “Part of the experience is being denied something that is desired.” 

So Lau’s exclusion from the show is art, as is Lau himself and patriarchy and the court case and the women doing the conga to a Robert Palmer tune, no, follow the link, I’m not making it up. The only question must be, if that’s all art, what isn’t?

About things

Back in the glory days of blogging, sometimes I be so overstocked with ideas that I’d regularly put up portmanteau posts, of unrelated stuff that I didn’t have time to discuss at length, but I just wanted to nail down before they were gone. I don’t remember doing it for years and I’m not sure whether that’s because I’m just getting more jaded and/or less curious, or simply because there’s less interesting stuff going on.

But everything seems to be happening today (or maybe I’ve just roused myself from a long creative slumber). First, David Shrigley creates a new, very expensive edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four from pulped copies of The Da Vinci Code (which reminds me of the time I tried and failed to do a chapter-by-chapter blog about the bloody thing.) On the Today programme (go to 2:53 or so), Amol Rajan attempted to shoehorn in TS Eliot and the idea of placing an artist within a tradition, to which Shrigley offered the deadpan response, “I wouldn’t know, I went to art school.” 

Then what looks to be a very poorly thought-out survey that claims to reveal that half of Britons can’t name a black British historical figure but neither offers any criteria for a “right” answer (Who is black? Who is historically significant? Does Stormzy count?) nor provides any context as to the respondents’ knowledge of history in general. Awkward.

This is followed by the news that the Beatles are finally releasing ‘Now and Then’ and touting it as their last song, despite the fact that it’s just another Lennon demo that’s been played around with by the others over the past few decades, as distinct from ‘Carnival of Light’, a genuine Beatles work from 1967 that remains under lock and key and will probably get the retrospective nod as their last last song to mark, I don’t know, Ringo’s 100th birthday.

And finally this, an interview with Ken Russell, apparently in an Oxford student magazine in 1966, and now I’m wondering why someone can’t just take this treatment and make the bloody film...

PS: And a response to the news that shadow chancellor (a job title that sounds like something out of Star Wars) Rachel Reeves may or may not have plagiarised chunks of her new book:

About postcards

(At the Royal Academy shop.)

We’re now so deep into a digital version of reality that consumers need advice on how to use postcards.

About good art

This, by one Jash Dholani, has been provoking much derision on Twitter over the past few days.

The easiest and most obvious response is to find examples that contradict Dholani’s reductive categorisation (the first, for example, would allow any number of Hallmark Christmas romcoms to make a better claim to being “good art” than, say, the oeuvres of David Lynch or Luis Buñuel, which is almost too silly to contemplate) but, inevitably, I’m going to zoom in on Dholani’s view of canonicity, or the “Hall of Fame” as he puts it. The assumption that great art is made with a eye to becoming part of the canon really misses the point of why anyone would want to create anything; and in any case, it’s not the artist who decides. That’s the job of the gatekeepers, the academics, critics and ultimately the consumers of art.

And the same applies to those who might want to “destroy the canon”, although I remain skeptical as to whether that will ever happen. Instead, the canon has always been and will always be in a state of flux. It happened as far back as the first century BC, when Virgil’s work began to acquire more renown than that of Ennius (who he?); and carries on today as the likes of Alexander Pope and Walter Scott are pushed out of the nest by... well, choose your own names, but Toni Morrison springs to mind. Dholani’s own Twitter handle is oldbooksguy, which would suggest he sees the canon as some sort of refuge for the Dead White Males, but its composition never stands still, even if change comes so slowly it’s practically imperceptible. And the new admissions (which Dholani classifies as “good art”) are the ones prompting that incremental change, which he presumably sees as a bad thing.

Ah, hang on. I know what Dholani’s chart reminds me of. It’s J Evans Pritchard all over again.

Not about Warhol

“In the future, everyone will be Nadine Dorries for 15 minutes.”