A Hill of Beans

#09

According to Rick[i], “the problems of three little people” were not worth even so much as “a hill of beans in this crazy world.” If one bean on its own is worthless, imagine how much worthlessness you would get from a whole hill of them. And does the same logic extend from beans to blogs? Which would make the Blogosphere just another ‘Hill of Beans’, wouldn’t it? Admittedly it’s a uniquely modern hill of beans, unimaginable in Humphrey Bogart’s era, but arguably one perfectly suited to our times. On the plus side, we might consider that the Blogosphere at least offers a hill for all beans. A hill for Red Beans, Black Beans, White Beans, French Beans, Green Beans, Runner Beans, Half-baked Beans or simply Has-Beans. The list could go on – I’m reminded of Bob Dylan in the role of the Everyman character Alias, forced to recite the labels on tins of beans in a scene from Peckinpah’s ‘Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid’ [ii].

The sum of all beans – the sum of all blogs - could still amount to nothing at all, unless of course the hill thus formed also chanced to be the most perfect exemplar ever of ‘repressive tolerance’. From the top of the great hill that is the Blogosphere every silly blogger has the freedom to say whatever the hell they like - and everyone else has the freedom to totally ignore whatever is said. That’s not the entirety of what old Herbert Marcuse was on about in his essay on ‘Repressive Tolerance’[iii] back in the sixties but it’ll do for now. It’s no sort of novelty to suggest that freedom can be repressive. In the Blogosphere it’s not so much the ‘freedom’ that’s repressive; it’s the being ignored.

And ignored we may be, or possibly even should be, until it’s time for the decadal counting of the beans, currently upon us in the guise of ‘Census 2011’. It’s Sunday, 27^th March 2011 and we’ve received through our letterbox “A message to everyone – act now”. This comes from the Bean-Counter-in Chief herself, Jil Matheson, the National Statistician. We are encouraged to “Help tomorrow take shape…” The leaflet accompanying the Household Questionnaire depicts a weird, mauve-coloured, double-decker bus, apparently constructed from a modular system a bit like Lego. The heads and shoulders of twelve strangely isolated people have been photo-shopped into this bus. If we really are ‘Helping tomorrow take shape’ why has the bus been given octagonal wheels? How un-promising is that for the planning and funding of future services? Already it’s plain that the future bus is going nowhere, but who are we to argue? “Your census response is required by law” insists the leaflet. And despite the lack of circular wheels, the law invoked is not one of Newton’s Laws of Motion.

We, the beans, are required to be counted on 27 March 2011. There is a penalty of £1,000 for not taking part or for supplying false information. If we have more than six beans in our household we can get a Continuation Questionnaire…oh, and apparently we six are allowed up to three overnight visitors – between us. [Not each – don’t get over-wrought]. The Census requires our names and our relationships to each other, and how many rooms we occupy and what type of heating we have. And our religion (if any) and our nationality, ethnicity and our ability to speak English. Do we move about much and what qualifications do we have and are we working?

And what will all our answers reveal in 100 years from now when the promised confidentiality is lifted? Someone yet to be born will know who lived here on this day and how many bedrooms we shared. But they won’t know what we ate or drank or what books we were reading. They won’t know what we felt or said to each other or how we treated our overnight visitors – if any. Or why we had no visitors or what else we did with our Sunday. Did the sun shine and were there flowers on the table? Did anyone sing or shout or draw or paint or write? Were there arguments or tears, laughter or loneliness? And did we have beans on our toast or fire in our bellies or wings on our feet?

Count us as beans, Jil Matheson, if beans are all that we are. If it looks like a bean then it counts as a bean and the shape of things to come is likely to include lumbering, mauve-coloured, buses with predictably useless octagonal wheels.

Next week: Too much monkey business?

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[i] From ‘Casablanca’ [1942]

Rick Blaine: “…I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that.”

[ii] ‘Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid’.  Sam Peckinpah. [1973]

[iii] Herbert Marcuse ‘Repressive Tolerance’. Essay, 1965

Stranger than fiction

Long, long ago in the dear, dead, days of the GLC when Ken Livingstone was going head-to-head with the Thatchistas over public transport in London, the Law Lords were asked to rule on a case brought by Bromley Council. Bromley – an outer suburban borough with no tube stations - wanted to prevent money raised by local taxation being used to subsidise London’s bus and tube fares under Ken’s ‘Fares Fair’ policy. The urban myth then arose that one of the Law Lords – a man who had never in his entire life previously used public transport – felt impelled (in the interests of justice) to make a bus journey so that he could experience first-hand just what all the fuss was about. He therefore wandered out of the Palace of Westminster and strolled along the road until he came to a bus stop. After only a few minutes’ wait, along came a large red double-decker omnibus and his lordship duly stepped on board.
“Sloane Square, please, my good man,” he said to the bus driver. History does not record the driver’s reply but it was believed to have involved both sex and travel.

I recalled this anecdote last Wednesday evening as I waited for the 319 bus at the stop in (of all places) Sloane Square. I easily resisted the temptation to say, “Streatham, please, my dear old thing,” when the bus came. My advantage over the anecdotal peer of the realm was confined to knowing the route of the 319. It does, in fact, wend its way down the Kings Road, across Battersea Bridge and onward to SW16 via Clapham Junction. Fact versus fiction; now hold that thought while I elaborate...

I was in the square because I had just been to a performance of ‘The Heretic’ at the Royal Court Theatre. This is a really good play by Richard Bean. Juliet Stevenson plays Dr Diane Cassell, a climate scientist teaching at a northern university. Johnny Flynn plays Ben, one of her students and James Fleet is the Professor – Diane’s venal boss and erstwhile lover. Diane is a climate-change sceptic. Her expertise is changes in sea-level and as far as she can ascertain there haven’t been any in recent years – well none that can be linked to climate-change that is. And please note, ‘Climate-change’ is that thing we used to call Global Warming. Terminology matters, you can’t be too careful. Diane explains that changes in sea-level are difficult to monitor because the land against which the sea is measured may also be rising or falling. Her research over many years has centred on a single tree in The Maldives. Measured against this tree, she finds no evidence that sea-level is rising. Ben is impelled to ask her if she believes that anthropic climate change is occurring at all. Diane replies, “I’m a scientist. I don’t ‘believe’ in anything.” She explains that she is an empiricist. She wants conclusions that are supported by evidence. She insists on the primacy of evidence.

So that was my Wednesday evening; happily enjoying a fictional drama whose theme was the critical importance of facts. On Saturday, I went to ‘British Art Show, 7’ at the Hayward Gallery – speculatively subtitled In the Days of the Comet. The theme of this show turned out to be fiction with a capital F. It is a show of proper, invented, fiction; the Fiction of imagined histories and separate realities. In your less guarded moments you probably expect Art to be creative and Science to be factual. But science does not proceed without imagination. That’s exactly what a scientific hypothesis is; it’s an invention, a suggestion, one possible explanation. It is a proposition to be tested against facts, against reality.

‘Art’ too is a proposition about reality. Art is a created and (hopefully) creative response but unlike science it is not subject to the test of falsifiability. Refutability examines whether a theory is scientific, not whether it is true. A statement is scientific only if, were it false, then its falsehood could be demonstrated. Nothing on show In The Days of the Comet could be refuted, therefore some or indeed all of it may be true and some or all of it may be false. None of it is therefore fact and, logically, I guess, fiction is the only refuge where it can find a home. There was a time, of course, when ‘scientia’ meant knowledge and there could be no worthwhile distinction between ‘art’ and ‘science’. Leonardo practised knowledge. He didn’t confine himself to ‘Art’. But I digress…

When you enter the Comet Show, you are first pulled towards a large glass enclosure offered by Charles Avery. I found this thing puzzling and unrevealing. I was reluctant to engage with the wilful obscurity of both its construction and its content. Much more accessible was Avery’s huge and beautifully drawn representation of the arrivals quay in the harbour of his imagined island. In this work the clarity of the drawing was appropriately opposed to the unreality it depicted.

The poster item for the whole show is Roger Hiorns’ metal park bench with occasional flame and naked man. A notice on the wall reads,

“PLEASE DO NOT SIT ON THE BENCH. IT IS AN ARTWORK.”

Oh no it isn’t, it’s a park bench – any fool can see that. The main reason for not sitting on it is that the seat catches fire at random intervals. According to the A-Z Exhibitions Guide ‘Hiorns introduces objects subjected to prayer.’ Enough said, I feel. The same Guide says that ‘ Maaike Schoorel’s atmospheric figurative paintings give up their secrets slowly.’ They do this by being ‘…barely legible…’ And that much is true. I can confirm that they are barely legible. The question I have to ask is whether the image ultimately perceived is worth the effort required to obtain it?

By now I was wanting to tell some of the artists in this show that I felt patronised by the hyperbolic write-ups that accompany their simple-minded pieces. Karla Black is a case in point; downstairs she offers a mound of loose materials which, despite the claim of “…sculptures poised between fragility and robustness…” remains very obviously a pile of soil. Upstairs, her largely pink piece ‘There can be no Arguments’ is far more successful. Made from polythene, plaster powder, powder paint and thread, every aspect of this hanging communicates fragility.

Pink, white, gold and silver are used in Matthew Darbyshire’s installation An Exhibition for Modern Living. There is nothing out of place in this carefully wrought piece and walking into it is a joy. Less joyful are the overly-dark boxes you have to enter to enjoy the video pieces produced by other artists. Am I alone in thinking that Video Artists are blissfully unaware of the word ‘turgid’? Who do they think is going to lurk in airless gloom for an indefinite period watching some repetitive crap that may or may not eventually turn out to have some minor point of interest? In this regard I single-out Nathaniel Mellors as an offender. By contrast, Elizabeth Price’s User Group Disco is almost bearable and Christian Marclay’s The Clock is a triumph. Painstakingly researched and brilliantly edited this remarkable timepiece serves also to illustrate ‘the law of unintended consequences’. The re-edited fragments of movies used by Marclay become a challenging new movie in their own right and are fascinating to watch.

Upstairs again and Sarah Lucas has recycled her old nylon tights into stuffed and knotted forms that resemble mummified intestines. It’s the plinths that are interesting here; scratch-keyed concrete blocks perched on smooth bases made from mdf. And then I came to the unassuming highlight of this fictional show: The Lost Works of Johan Riding by Olivia Plender. Turns out it’s poor old Johan who’s lost, not his works. The invented history of this fictional film-maker comes alive thanks to invented research and we can enjoy the triumph of fiction presented as fact. We can only imagine the feeling of sheer release experienced by the researcher who embarks upon the task of writing their thesis using entirely imaginary sources and contrived references. So, well done them and maybe I’m an artist too. After all, I make it all up as I go along, don’t I? Does that make me an artist or do I remain the humble piss artist I’ve always been. It probably depends on whether sea-level is rising or the land is falling.

You decide.

Next week: Unexpected despot in bagging area.

As Easy as Able, Baker, Charlie

#07

   I am developing a severe aversion to rolling news. Not just for its content – although the very news itself is generally bad enough – but for the overall mind-numbing effect it produces. In the 1995 film ‘Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud’ (Director, Claude Sautet) a computer-literate young woman is employed by an irascible old man (sic) to assist with the drafting of his memoirs. His attitude to the word-processing capabilities of the PC is unwaveringly hostile; “Such perfect memory,” he complains, “so little worth remembering.” In its own way, Twenty-Four Hour Rolling News is not dissimilar, providing as it does a constant deluge of incomprehensible information. After watching for a few minutes, I begin to feel that it is possible to know everything but understand absolutely nothing. Such a perfect storm of facts, so little real knowledge.

   The problem is that the information is made additionally confusing by the disconnected manner in which it is presented. There is no narrative. It’s like receiving football results without awareness that the teams are competing for places in a league. Or, imagine trying to read a dozen novels simultaneously while only being permitted to read a single line at a time from each story in turn. That’s just about what you get with rolling news.

   Further barriers to comprehension are thrown-up by the format in which the “News” is presented. There is almost always a double act. A middle-aged man in a suit sits behind a hi-tec desk, alongside a visibly younger woman. He is spruced but she has perfect make-up and solid hair. He is there to be avuncular. She generally looks startled. They then proceed to bat news items to and fro like so many tennis balls. While one of them is speaking, the other is preparing a facial expression they imagine will be appropriate to the next item on their script.

   The background is an added distraction. Sometimes there will be a collage of enlarged fragments cropped from topical images. At other times we see a busy newsroom with multiple computer screens and subordinate ‘news-gatherers’ intent on sustaining the flow. Along the bottom of the screen there runs a strap line of continuous text offering what is called “Breaking News”. This conveyor belt changes all the time – the term they use is Up-dating. The content of this text is frequently at odds with the topic under discussion by the talking heads above. “Here’s some more information…splatter, splatter, splatter”. Is it all equally significant, or equally meaningless? And how the hell would we know anyway?  

   The format adopted by early morning (using the pre-fix ‘Breakfast’) news programmes is superficially different but amounts to the same thing. Here, they retain the older male / younger female double-act but place them in a casual ‘Living Room’ setting, permanently flooded by morning sunlight – even before sunrise. Presumably this is intended to idealise rather than mirror the rooms where the audience is located. Cheerful colour schemes and orange-juice predominate. Unreal. The presenters perch uneasily on the edge of their cushions – never allowed to lean back and shut their eyes, as the rest of us long to do at that time of day. In its patronising manner, this armchair environment is further confirmation of the Fall of Public Man*.  We are asked to identify with events only through the lens of our private realm. Politicians jostle for space on TV’s Breakfast sofa, desperate to be seen not as statesmen and women but as the authentic ‘folks next door’. The setting is illusionary and therefore so too is any feeling of understanding. Complexity is stifled by sound-bites. Simplicity is the objective of the staccato headlines, coming at you with all the clarity and charm of a burst from a machine-gun.

   And they make it tabloid-easy for us to know how to respond to the news. There is a calculated pause for a second or two at the end of each item. By this, whichever presenter has just finished speaking indicates “over to you, folks.” His or her expression suggests which of the limited selection of possible next moves we should, logically, now endorse. Clearly, we will want to demand the sacking of that bad guy, mobilise support for this victim, get the cops to round up those crooks, insist that they should parachute supplies of food/water/medicine to these suffering people and bomb to pieces those other heartless bastards…

   An endless procession of experts is required to condense their many years of accumulated wisdom and knowledge into glib, thirty-second, summaries. Having heard it, we have all surely become instant experts ourselves. Refinancing Irish Debt? Cracked that one. Predicting the movement of tectonic plates? Done that. Early warning of tsunamis? No problem. We have been equipped with an answer to everything. Preventing meltdown in the core of a nuclear reactor? We saw that coming years ago. Didn’t they watch ‘The China Syndrome’? Oh but hang-on, this is Japan. Its antipodes are not going to be China, they’re more likely to be somewhere like…Ireland! Bullseye! Now that should put their debt crisis in the shade…

   And then there’s all the current talk of a No Fly Zone being established over Libya. We are all up to speed on that one by now, aren’t we? NATO – if they ever agree – could get one going in a matter of weeks. Suddenly we are all holding forth about SAMs and surgical strikes. If you ask me, the much-bloated Egyptian air-force (beloved of their late, unlamented, President) could get a no fly zone off the ground (“Off the ground”? – are you sure?) by about next Christmas – always provided Gaddafi hasn’t run-out of Libyans by then. Alternatively, of course, there’s the Israeli air-force just around the corner – and top guns in the region by far. The Israelis could probably be running a pretty tight ‘no fly zone’ over Benghazi by tea-time tomorrow – if you want them to. The consequences of that may be unthinkable, but then thinking isn’t what rolling news is all about, is it? No, let’s keep it simple. As simple as A, B, C; Able, Baker, Charlie in NATO-speak…

So that’s sorted. Roger, over and, err, doubt?

* Richard Sennett ‘The Fall of Public Man’ 1974

Next week: Sic Transit Gloria.

Life in the Bus Lane #6

Sculpture is a doing word.

Well, okay, no, technically, it isn’t. Sculpt would be the ‘doing word’, i.e. the verb. Sculpture is a noun and in my dictionary defined as “the art of carving, esp. in stone”. Both words - sculpt and sculpture - are derived not from the person (the sculptor) but from the act; the Latin verb being sculpere – to carve.

I’ve been driven to consider the meaning of the word because on Friday evening we went to The Royal Academy to look at their Modern British Sculpture exhibition, (22 Jan – 7 April 2011). This they describe as “…the first exhibition for thirty years to examine British sculpture of the twentieth century…The exhibition takes a fresh approach, replacing the traditional survey with a provocative set of juxtapositions…” So far that’s true enough, and I was duly provoked. In this, it seems, I’m not alone. Most of the press reviews have questioned who and what was left out of this exhibition (Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread and others). They may have a point but I found that I wanted to question some of the stuff that was included.

Leaving aside, as we should, the customary awfulness of a piece by Damien Hirst (Let’s Eat Out Today. 1990/91) – [How does he get away with it?] – there were better executed but hardly more engaging efforts by Jeff Koons (One Ball. 1985) and by Julian Opie ( W. 1988). The Koons piece had a basketball floating in a glass case containing distilled water. The Opie was an empty cabinet made from glass and stainless steel. How much of any of these works was actually by the hands of Hirst or Koons or Opie is, to be polite, ‘unclear’. “Carving” certainly did not feature in their production but the real deficit lies in the sparsity of creative intelligence behind them. Like so many of the most recent works shown in this exhibition they were blindingly obvious, or downright bland or simply daft. At least when R. Mutt produced his famous urinal* he knew he was taking the piss.

It was an effort to make it all the way through to the end of this exhibition. Symbolically, perhaps, the show seemed to arrive at its own dead-end anyway. The final piece was a long grey chamber, wedge-shaped in plan so as to create a false-perspective. Within this box-like structure, the floor was strewn with rags or discarded clothes and a blinding light shone from the far end towards an expanded-metal grille covering the wide end. The grille cast a lattice of shadows on the gallery wall. That was it. I was too indifferent to note the name of the artist or the title of the work. If there was a caption which offered any explanation of this nonsense, I couldn’t be arsed to look for it. ‘Tedious. 1999.’ would have sufficed.

The only way out was to return back through the sequence, revisiting the rooms in reverse order. This was surprisingly cheering, and I began to wonder if that wasn’t what the two curators** had intended. Had they stumbled upon what Baldrick would have announced as “A cunning plan”? Were Curtis and Wilson saying to us, “Here was a journey, the progress made was varied and frequently illusory but the journey may have been necessary nonetheless…Perhaps we should take this opportunity to re-evaluate the activity of sculpture…before it disappears from public view up its own fundamental orifice…?”

So I turned around and went back and felt better for doing so. My mood began to lift with Rebecca Warren’s Helmut Crumb. 1999 and then came the brilliantly-lit white rocks of Richard Long’s Chalk Line 1984. A dangling piece by Urs Fischer (Untitled 2000) caught my eye. The creative simplicity of this blew away the excesses of the Damien Hirst effort. Fischer had sliced in two, vertically, a pear and an apple. He had then clamped together one half of each of the fruit, using a cross-head screw, and suspended the resulting apple/pear fusion on a length of nylon fishing-line.

I don’t get Anthony Caro. When coming through and when going back I really tried to ponder the bright orangey-red metalwork of his ‘Early One Morning’. On both occasions it looked like a piece of over-designed farm-machinery intended for the brave-new-world of post-war Britain. I think I got the point of the installation originated by Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton, An Exhibit. 1957. But what I found most satisfying and – dare I say ‘sculptural’? – about this piece were the small, rectangular, blocks of cast acrylic which secured the multiple hanging planes. These fixings were exquisitely designed. The same item could be used vertically or horizontally. They were intended to be unobtrusive but the manner in which they reflected and refracted the colours of the hanging surfaces fully integrated them within the entirety of the piece.

It is the process of making that led me to begin by claiming sculpture to be a doing word. The sculptor’s intended representation has to be formed and the manner of its formation is inseparable from the meaning of the work. In one of the final rooms I had seen Rasheed Araeen’s First Structure 1966 close by Tony Cragg’s Stack 1975. Cragg’s piece was intricate, interesting and fully engaged. Araeen’s was a vacant cube of which my abiding memory is of the desperately poor quality of the welds where the pieces of metal had been joined together. Sculpture isn’t a craft activity, but it certainly involves skills in both thought and execution. If a rough finish is shown that must be deliberate and part of the meaning of the piece as a whole. Nowhere was this requirement more in evidence than in the first room of the exhibition; the room bearing the title ‘Theft by Finding’.

Here were displayed carved objects from the British Museum alongside early twentieth century pieces by Eric Gill, Charles Sargeant Jagger and others. Everything in this room seemed carved to perfection. All the free-standing objects can be enjoyed from all sides. Often the backs are as interesting as the fronts. That’s probably what it means to be three-dimensional. None of them exhibited the poverty of execution to be seen later in works such as Sarah Lucas’ Portable Smoking Area 1996. It is salutary to consider how well the Museum pieces compare alongside some of the great works of modern sculpture included in this exhibition – Jacob Epstein’s Adam 1938-9. Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure 1951. and Barbara Hepworth’s Single Form (Memorial) 1961-2. If they’d let me pick something for my desert island, it would have been Fragment of a Running Leopard… and that, it seems, was made at Halicarnassus (now the city of Bodrum on the Aegean coast of Turkey) in about 350BC.

So there we were; back to the beginning of the exhibition if not back to the beginning of time. And it begins – the exhibition that is – with a full-scale model of Edwin Lutyens Cenotaph 1919/20. This simple, elegant, structure was designed to be a plinth to be situated beneath an empty tomb. Its tapering corners are said to be angled in such a way that their projecting lines would intersect at a point one thousand feet above. One of the advantages of living in London is that you can leave this model, walk out of the RA, stroll down Piccadilly, turn into Haymarket and on into

Trafalgar Square

. At the top of Whitehall, we caught a 159 bus and moments later we were passing the Cenotaph itself.

I have always known of this monument since my childhood but I don’t believe I’d ever really looked at it before. The replica in the exhibition seemed huge – literally Monumental – because it was housed within a gallery space. Viewing the real Cenotaph from the top-deck of the 159 you see how surprisingly small it is. The scale becomes human, as it should. And its monumentality belongs to that imagined meeting point one thousand feet in the air…

*Marcel Duchamp Fountain. 1917

**Dr Penelope Curtis, Director of Tate Britain, and Keith Wilson, Sculptor.

Next week: “Calm down dear.”