An Accident of History

#12

The papers last weekend were running stories speculating on possible changes to the Act of Settlement, removing the primacy given to male children. Changes to this Act (dating from 1701) would be of limited, possibly only esoteric, interest were it not for the impending marriage of William Wales to Catherine Middleton. If the first child born to their marriage is a girl, her claim to the throne would be overtaken by any subsequent younger brother. The Act would have to be amended (not just here but in all Commonwealth countries) if we – or rather ‘They’ – decided to modernise the order of succession to follow strict primogeniture regardless of gender.

Well, hurrah for that, or them, you might say – always assuming you give a monkey’s … which hopefully you don’t, except out of a purely whimsical interest in the quirkiness of history. And while they’re about it, they could also remove the religious test – designed to prevent a Catholic succeeding to the throne or any prospective heir from marrying one. And it’s not just Catholics; anyone not in communion with the Anglican church is barred. That, I guess, takes care of everyone who wouldn’t write “C of E” on their paperwork at Accident & Emergency. Removing the ban on Catholics would probably also require dis-establishment of the Church of England and I struggle to remember any reasons why either you or I should be troubled by that.

Hereditary monarchy is a strange anachronism. Its main function these days seems to be to set the Gold Standard for ‘A’ list celebrity status, with all the consequent fawning and trashing and keyhole-peeping that being a ‘celeb’ entails. The hereditary principle simply does not work as a mechanism for finding the right person for the job. No one would want to consult a medical doctor who had done nothing more than inherit the title of ‘doctor’. Yet that’s exactly how we choose our Head of State. The Act of Settlement is a tacit admission that the hereditary principle is flawed but instead of dispensing with the whole idea, our ancestors tried to manipulate the details to ensure a more congenial outcome.

Under the Act, succession to the British throne is restricted to the heirs of the Electress Sophia of Hanover (1630 – 1714) as determined by male-preference primogeniture, religion and legitimate birth. It’s particularly strange that males are given precedence in the royal succession considering our long history of spectacularly ineffectual males on, behind and around the throne. Were it not for inheritance through the female line, the House of Windsor would never have become ensconced in its various castles and palaces in the first place. Nor indeed would any of the previous ruling houses of Tudor, Stuart, Hanover and Saxe-Coburg & Gotha.

No one would accuse Edward III (King from 1327 to 1377) of being an ‘ineffectual male’. On the contrary, this grisly old goat went rather too far in the opposite direction. He and his Queen (Phillippa of Hainault, if you insist,) upset the medieval applecart by producing several too many sons and thus giving rise to the Wars of the Roses. One hundred years later, in 1485, Henry Tudor (claiming the Lancastrian line via his mother, Margaret Beaufort) put an end to both Richard III (of York) and said Wars at the battle of Bosworth Field. An astute and meticulous man, Henry VII quickly married the late Richard’s niece, Elizabeth of York, thereby re-uniting the Houses of York and Lancaster. He was careful to maintain, however, that his claim to the throne was valid, independent of the marriage. Showing considerable prescience, he subsequently arranged for his daughter, Margaret, to marry James IV, King of Scotland. It was because of this alliance that a century later, when Queen Elizabeth I died childless in 1603, Margaret Tudor’s great-grandson, James Stuart (James VI of Scotland) – gaily headed south to become James I of England.

James was the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, by Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. Mary was executed by her cousin Elizabeth I and Darnley was murdered. As dysfunctional families go, the Tudors and Stuarts take some beating. But, lack of a happy home not withstanding, James was also the James of the King James Bible – so well done him! James married off his own daughter Elizabeth to Frederick V, the Elector Palantine – which would lead eventually to Sophia, of whom more later. James Stuart was also the father of Charles I who rather over-did ‘The Divine Right of Kings’ and got himself beheaded by parliament in 1649. The Cromwellian ‘Protectorate’ did not long survive Oliver’s death in 1658 and in 1660 the Stuart monarchy was restored in the person of Charles II. This next Charles presided over the Great Plague and the Great Fire but produced no legitimate heir. When he died in 1685 he was succeeded (briefly) by his younger brother, James – numerically James II. Alert to James’ Catholic leanings, and fearing the establishment of a Catholic dynasty when James managed to father a legitimate son, the English rallied to James’ daughter Mary and her robustly Protestant husband, William of Orange. In 1688, in a series of events rather inaccurately known to history as ‘the Glorious Revolution’, William landed at Torbay in Devon and James II fled abroad. He and later his son (The Old Pretender) and grandson, Bonnie Prince Charlie, (The Young etc. ) maintained a claim to the throne until 1788, although the last meaningful Jacobite rebellion had ended in blood and gore at Culloden in 1746.

William’s claim to the throne came through two women; his mother, Charles I’s daughter Mary and his wife, also (and rather unimaginatively) named Mary. William III, still to this day variously revered and reviled by sectarians in Ireland as King Billy, reigned jointly with his wife (who was also, obviously, his first cousin) until Mary’s death in1694. William continued as king until he too died (as a result of falling off his horse) in 1702; whereupon Mary Stuart’s sister Anne became queen. Queen Anne gave birth to fourteen children, none of whom survived into adulthood. She also suffered at least four miscarriages and died (of exhaustion and broken heart, I should imagine) in 1714 at the age of 49.

We now revert, as did the authors of the Act of Settlement, to James I’s decision to arrange for his daughter Elizabeth to marry the Elector Frederick. Elizabeth’s daughter Sophia was duly married to the Elector of Hanover. Thus when the unfortunate Queen Anne died the succession passed to the House of Hanover in the non-English-speaking person of Sophia’s son, George I. Georges II and III naturally followed with a little local ‘madness’ and a period of Regency along the way. George IV had issues but died without issue and was succeeded by his brother, William IV. On William’s demise in 1837, the crown passed to his young niece, Victoria. She promptly threw herself upon her cousin the diligent and devoted Albert of Saxe Coburg and Gotha with whom she had innumerable children. The Royal family were then stuck with Albert’s resoundingly Germanic surname until 1917 when – at the height of the First World War – Victoria’s grandson, George V, poked his cousin (Kaiser Bill) in the eye by dumping the family name and re-inventing the British branch of the family firm as The House of Windsor. So there! And after all that quite how they justify the precedence given to male heirs is a right royal mystery to me. It is almost as big a mystery as why we, The People, still tolerate the power, wealth and privilege enjoyed by the slow-motion historical accident that is our beloved Royal Family.

Next week: Banged-Up in the Tower.

"Where to guv'nor?"

#11

Received a letter this week from Ed. Yes, that Ed - Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party. It was a personal letter, well at least a letter addressed to me in person – if that counts as the same thing. I would have been impressed had I not guessed that Ed has a computer-programme to do all the addressing and mailing for him. He just gets some eager, young, intern to input the electoral roll into one end of the Party’s PC and out the other come a zillion letters all individually addressed to everyone named on the register. So, maybe we’ve all had one of Ed’s letters informing us that Ed wants to know what we think? Blimey! But hang about - shouldn’t that be the other way round? Shouldn’t it be us wanting to know what Ed thinks?

And he must think something, surely? His mind can’t be a blank sheet waiting to be written all over, can it? Only last summer he fought a long campaign to win the leadership of the Party and I bet they were rather hoping he already had a few ideas of his own. Or can it be that Ed’s ‘Big Idea’ was simply this: “Elect me as leader and I’ll drop Dave a line; see what Dave thinks we should do….”? Well that’s all very flattering – or rather it would be if I could believe a word of it. But look again at his letter…

“Dear Dave,

What are your priorities to move Britain forward?…Your ideas are invaluable – thank you for your time and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Yours sincerely,

Ed.”

Well, he’s clearly asking for it, no mistake. So here goes; a reply straight from the Bus Lane:-

Dear Ed,

Thanks for yours of the ult. inst. I see you are having a policy review. This implies you do actually already have some policies. I mean, logically you must have, otherwise what’s to review? So what are your policies, Ed? Are they anything like the speech bubbles on the back of your letter? “Protecting jobs during the recession…More support for parents bringing up kids.” Sorry Ed, I don’t want to nit-pick but these are mere sentiments; they don’t actually qualify as ‘policies’. To count as policies, you’d have to say how you are going to protect jobs and what support you want to make available to which parents and for doing what. Can you do that? Apparently not, judging by the evidence available to date.

Evidently you want us to look favourably on you as a listening, caring, in-touch kind of guy - just like Cameron and Cleggy do. What actually comes across is that you are a skilled, professional, politician. Politics is what you are good at; it’s what you do. It’s probably all you have ever done. Reading your letter, I worry that you see yourself as something akin to a political taxi-driver. Since University, you’ve been busy doing the Westminster equivalent of ‘The Knowledge’. It’s as if we are all invited to hail Ed’s taxi-cab and be taken wherever we want to go. Or will it become a case of “Trust Honest Ed”? He’s the boy who knows all the highways and byways - and by now, no doubt, some of the back-doubles too.

Sorry Ed, but I don’t want a ride in a taxi. I want to travel on a bus because a bus tells me where it’s going before we start. I want the route number and the destination displayed up there on the front, in black and white, for all to see. And if I can work out which bus-stop I’m waiting at, then I’ll also know how far your bus has to go before it reaches its destination. I want to be able to anticipate the places we’ll pass through on our journey. I want to be able to hazard a guess at how long it might take for us to get there from here.

That’s the way our party-based democracy works, Ed. You build and paint your bus and tell us where you want to go and how you plan to get there. We decide if we want to take a ride on your bus or someone else’s. So please don’t pretend you’re a cab, available by negotiation for private hire. You owe it to us to have sorted out where you wanted to go and how you reckon to get there before you ran for the leadership, not afterwards. If you don’t know those things, why are you in politics? If you find you’re more interested in the process of politics and less concerned with the destination, then you’re not my kind of politician. I don’t want to take a taxi, no matter how astute the driver or how much he enjoys the business of driving. I want a bus and preferably a big red one. Please tell me what you think the Labour Party is about. I need to know if you’re really as clueless as your letter implies.

Yours sincerely,

Dave.

Next week: Royal Flush: Down the tubes with the House of Windsor.

Shoe-Gazing through these new bi-focals

#10

   Our children re-connect us differently to the world. I didn’t know, for instance, that ‘shoe-gazing’ was a category of music until Conrad, younger of our two sons, explained – a little impatiently I thought - that it describes a prolonged guitar solo. The soloist stares downward – presumably deep in concentration – his gaze appearing to be focused on his shoes. I enjoy finding terms like that; words or phrases that concisely define or describe an activity. As labels go, ‘Shoe-gazing’ is at least as accurate as ‘Cubism’ ever was, or indeed ‘Impressionism’. Most of our many ‘isms’ were originally intended as critical dismissals – insults even. In time, these become adopted – sometimes gladly – by those at whom they were previously thrown. Take the label ‘Stuckists’[1] which was at first applied dismissively to a group of figurative painters. Tracey Emin is credited with screeching at them, “Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!” And the epithet, as it were, ‘stuck’. And, of course, Tracey should know. She boasts of having a First Class degree in Fine Art and someone’s published a book showing 1000 of her totally dreadful drawings. So, good for her and yah boo sucks (or should that be ‘Stucks’?) to the rest.

   But hey, calm down dear, music hath charms so strum on. On Thursday evening, Charlie (older son) was listening (via t’Internet) to a band from New Jersey called The Gaslight Anthem. I was puzzled – not an unusual occurrence - assuming that would be the name of a song. I mean, ‘Anthem’? That’s a clue, surely? But no; that is the name of the band and very ‘Jersey’ they are too. They sing about disappointment in its many forms; especially where urban wastelands, highways and cars are involved. All very Bruce Springsteen, appropriately enough considering. Like they say, “New Jersey? Good place to be from.”

   The Gaslight song involved some particularly fraught encounter in, or on, the backseat of a burned-out car. (It’ll be called ‘Backseat’ if you want to pursue your interest further). The next song he selected was ‘Old White Lincoln’. Again it involved a car, not the assassinated Civil War President who was, indeed, old, white and Lincoln. The lyric offered homage, of a kind, to one of those vastly indulgent cars that lurched along America’s streets and highways from the late ‘50s onwards. I’m still a sucker for the insistent beat and celebratory lyrics you get with pop songs about cars and driving down endless highways. For me, Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Cadillac Ranch’ is the unsurpassed classic of the genre. Okay, I know we should feel guilty about all that gas being guzzled and all those resources wasted, blah, blah, de blah. But the warm glow is still there, only now it’s illicit. Is it being so incorrect that  helps keep it warm? And it’s another reminder of being ‘stuck’, albeit where we are now stuck is the Bus Lane.

   But, if you are not aware of being ‘stuck’ are you therefore necessarily, ‘un-stuck’? And, what does it mean to be ‘un-stuck’? Could things be about to go wrong, as in, “to come unstuck”? I certainly hope not because Conrad (yes, him again) is very much a not-stuck type of person and, incidentally, a promising not-stuck painter in oils too. This week he and his band - BLACK MANILA - have launched their first record. Yes, it’s one of those proper old-style recordings on vinyl! I’ve got a copy, right here on the desk next to me; can’t play it of course because we no longer have a turntable. There’s progress for you. The two songs on the disc are Reno Rush and Happiness. Of Reno Rush I know nothing but I am confident that ‘Happiness’ will not be any sort of homage to Ken Dodd. Nor do I expect it to revisit that scene in ‘There’s a Girl in My Soup’[2] where Goldie Hawn and Peter Sellers arrive at a hotel in the South of France. The porter, assuming them to be honeymooners, shows them to their suite and bows out saying, in his best, most carefully rehearsed, English, “May you ‘ave ‘ap-penis orl your alife.”

   Check out these latest sounds (as they say) on t’Internet, pop-pickers. Try the band’s own location http://blackmanila.bandcamp.com/ . Archivists may wish to know that ‘Black Manila’ were formerly ‘Black Manila Beach Parade’ and before that ‘WolfGangInBerlin’. The ‘InBerlin’ suffix being added, I presume, to avoid any confusion with the late Wolfgang Amadeus etc. Oh, and before that even they were 'Stazi-Static', I kid you not. I cannot fathom the origins of Black Manila as a name or, more recently, how the ‘Beach Parade’ came to be dropped. The word ‘Manila’ always makes me think first of envelopes and then of a 1950’s comic telling the adventures of a team of US Navy frogmen based in Manila, capital of the Philippines. Manila Menfish the heroes were called. Anyone out there still remember them? 

   Some weeks ago I tried hinting to Conrad that Menfish sounded like a great name for a band. I was rightly ignored. I mean, what the hell do I know about stuff? “And don’t go challenging Darwinism with your counter-evolutionary daydreams, Dad. Get back on the bus. You’ll be wanting us to listen to Neil Young next!”

Ah Neil, now you're talking; the master shoe-gazer par excellence...

Next week: Falling down stairs – it’s a bi-focal thing.

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[1] The Stuckists Manifesto, 1999. “…Art that has to be in a gallery to be art isn’t art…painting pictures is what matters…” Try www.stuckism.com

[2] ‘There’s a Girl in my Soup.’ Roy Boulting. 1970

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.”