design - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

I went back to rockville

Between me thinking about writing something about what home and belonging means and actually starting to do it, it’s become a far more topical subject than I expected, which seems to be how these things go these days.

The initial impulse to write it came from several unconnected things; some photos I took in Iceland over a decade ago; the lyrics to the R.E.M. song “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville;” a beautifully evocative description of a rundown railway station in a dusty, remote part of Austria-Hungary in the 1900s. That description felt especially poignant because Austria-Hungary is a country (and the Habsburg Empire an Empire) that no longer exists, but which must have felt permanent in its day and which people in the 1900s felt just as patriotic and loyal towards or as ambivalent about as people now do towards the constituent parts of the United Kingdom or/and the UK itself. But all of that has retreated into the distance a little because as I write this, up and down the country – even in this little corner of rural Scotland – people are engaged in a protest of sorts. Unusually for a protest, it takes the form of doing something which has always been entirely acceptable to do and which no one has ever tried to discourage the protesters from doing; hanging up flags.

The seal matrix of Bishop William de Lamberton from the 1290s, the oldest extant physical use of the Saltire in Scotland

The flags that have made it onto the news – especially from the recent, ironically-named “Unite the Kingdom” right-wing rally in London, are mostly St George’s cross, interspersed with Union flags, but in this village the flag fliers tend, naturally to display the Saltire (St Andrew’s cross, reputedly the oldest national flag in Europe – which if its semi-mythical origins are correct actually predates the Kingdom of Scotland itself by a couple of centuries) and the Union flag. But although flags are simple and very easy to identify in a design sense, they are also kind of a blunt instrument when it comes to signalling. Other people in this area have been displaying the Saltire and the medieval Scottish flag (the Royal Banner; a rampant red lion on a yellow ground) with no Union flag. I presume this is some kind of counter-protest but I may be wrong; to be sure I’d have to ask the flag fliers, and who wants to do that? Whatever else they are, National flags tend not to be especially inviting, particularly when displayed in their country of origin. Nearby I’ve also seen – in a more obvious counter-protest – people displaying Palestinian and Pride flags.

carved wooden ceiling boss of a unicorn carrying the Saltire from Linlithgow Palace, c.1617

It’s a regularly remarked-on (and ultimately meaningless) irony that the historical St George was a Turkish man of Palestinian descent, but less remarked on (though similarly meaningless in this context) that St Andrew, who the saltire represents, was born in what is modern day (Israel-occupied) Syria. Lions (though not red ones) are native to sub-Saharan Africa and India. And yet, for the people waving, wearing, hanging, painting or generally displaying the flags, these symbols of Syrian and Turkish-Palestinian saints and these African/Indian mammals (1 for Scotland, 3 for England, though confusingly the English ones were historically referred to as leopards, which scans less well for a football song lyric) are symbols, I presume, of home. And therefore the people displaying them for patriotic, political or intimidating purposes mostly don’t care what their origins are, which is fair enough. It’s my home too, but although I have no special feelings about the flags of Scotland or the UK, seeing them all over the place, rather than just on official buildings or big hotels is oddly alienating, just like seeing the stars and stripes on every other street on a trip to the USA was.

The flags of your nation, displayed in that nation, tell you two things; firstly, where you are – which you already know – and secondly, that somebody wants you to be very aware of where you are, which you still already know. Theoretically, people are displaying them for themselves and not for anybody else, but a flag by its nature is a signal and for most of the time, the person who flies it outside their home or paints it on the street or on some historical landmark, or puts a sticker on a bus shelter can’t see it, but anyone passing by can.

Because so many of the people involved in the current protests are xenophobic (not really derogatory; many of these people are explicitly saying they are protesting against “migrants”. “I belong here,” is not a protest; and anyway nobody is disputing it. “You don’t belong here” is mostly what the protest is about) there’s been a lot of discussion about what kind of symbols our flags are and what, beside dead saints, they represent. Obviously, flags themselves aren’t racist, or at least are only as racist as the people displaying them. There are possibly a few exceptions; most obviously, I feel like any Jewish or Romany person has the right to feel victimised if someone is displaying a black swastika in white circle on red ground; I wouldn’t think it was outlandishly sensitive if an African-American person felt offended by someone waving a Confederate flag at them. Still, it’s strange the extent to which seeing the flag of your country everywhere makes that country feel like a different place from the one you grew up in. But home is a strange thing anyway and ‘feeling at home’ in the comfortable sense of being where you are supposed to be, in the place that it feels natural to be, isn’t universal; clearly the protesters don’t feel it or they wouldn’t be protesting.

Philip Larkin in 1943 by Bruce Montgomery, looking like he should be on a Smiths album cover

The poet Philip Larkin – often seen as a definitively (I refuse to use the word ‘quintessentially’) English figure and sometimes derided as a ‘Little Englander,’ made some interesting observations about home that demonstrate how one-dimensional that (not unfair) assessment of him is. In The Importance of Elsewhere (1955), he argues (well, it’s a poem, not an argument; anyway, he says) that feeling lonely and out of place is a normal, appropriate and even a comforting response to being in alien surroundings (specifically Belfast) – “Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech,/Insisting so on difference, made me welcome.” The strangeness of the place itself “went/ To prove me separate, not unworkable.” On the other hand, feeling lonely and out of place in the place you come from and where you theoretically do belong does the opposite; and it possibly says unpleasant things about the place itself, too.

Larkin was right; for himself at least and therefore it’s not surprising to find that a slightly earlier poem (Places, Loved Ones, 1954) begins “No, I have never found / The place where I could say / This is my proper ground / Here I shall stay…..” A few years later, he obliquely questioned whether the idea of home is even desirable at all, since ‘belonging’ to anything can only ever be transitory – “Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go” (Home is so Sad, 1958). Eventually and unexpectedly, he did find that place where he could say this is, etc, etc – which turned out to be Hull. He celebrated the city in a 1961 poem called Here – the title surely a self-referential one, looking back to that fourth line of Places, Loved Ones. Here is one of Larkin’s very few poems of belonging, but inevitably he celebrates the town for what would normally be considered its negative traits; inaccessibility, neglect and, if not actual unfriendliness, then at least a distant kind of reserve; “Here is unfenced existence: / Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.” He really was the Morrissey of 20th century English poetry.

Coventry was where Larkin came from, but though he wrote about it several times, it was never in the sense of feeling at home there. But if “feeling at home” means some kind of existential peace and contentment, there’s no real reason why that you should have any particular connection with where you’re originally from, unless you happened to have an idyllic childhood. Equally, there’s no special reason why where you currently live should be where you feel at home, unless you are contented there like, presumably, the angry people with their flags and paint. But if they really love their country they certainly hide it well, not just because of their anger, but also how they treat the place and the mess they leave behind; they really do protest too much.

Morrissey with the American singer Phranc in 1992 by the great Kevin Cummins. Moz really is an unlikely right-winger

I’m loath to mention Morrissey again but a short side note seems relevant. Even though for all his apparently xenophobic Englishness, he doesn’t (in common with many xenophobic, wealthy ‘patriots’) love England enough to actually live there. Actually he rarely claims to love it at all; Morrissey is far more Larkin than Farage. The question of his (unusually complex but now undeniable) right-leaning politics goes back a long way, but when in 1992 he released the album Your Arsenal and alarm bells rang in the NME offices at the title of the song “The National Front Disco“, those NME scribes did him a disservice. He’s not foolish or racist enough to write a song glorifying the NF, though the song is definitely and maybe deliberately an uncomfortable one. In the lyrics he puts his finger (sympathetically or otherwise; it’s impossible to say) on the mentality of the kind of people currently waving placards telling foreigners to get out of “are country” (wish I was making that up). “There’s a country, you don’t live there / But one day you would like to / And if you show them what you’re made of / Then you might do.” That is really the essence of the march that happened last week in London and the smaller versions of it across the UK, including, dismayingly, one in Falkirk (one likes to think Scotland is above that kind of thing but realistically nowhere is, people being what they are).

‘Home’ is only on the most mundane level the place where you live, and the less mundane ideas of home are far more mysterious and often very personal. Without wishing to delve much into etymology, ‘home’ is a concept which even in its basic form as a noun (The place where a person or animal dwells, as the OED slightly creepily puts it) includes meanings that I don’t think I was aware of; “figurative. With reference to the grave or one’s state after death. Frequently with preceding adjective; ‘long home‘.” Apparently ‘long home’ was a common usage in Old English – and if you don’t belong in your grave then where do you belong? The long home is where the heart is; which makes me think of the last line of Wuthering Heights – surely one of the most beautiful endings to any deeply unpleasant novel:

I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, 1847

And then there’s home as in ‘too close to home,’ ‘coming home to roost,’ the Home Office, a point being ‘driven home,’ ‘home truths,’ ‘Home Rule,’ ‘make yourself at home’ (I have vague memories of a comedian or comedy character introducing their act by saying something like ‘Make yourself at home. Unless you’re in a hotel in which case make yourself in a hotel.‘ Vic Reeves? Alan Partridge? No idea).

Relatedly, belonging is a strange, unpredictable and entirely personal sensation. Larkin seems not to have felt he belonged anywhere until he found somewhere suitably impersonal and forbidding. Morrissey seems to thrive as an eternal outsider in Los Angeles, though it’s hard to think of anyone who seems more like an embodiment of Manchester. Belonging (I don’t say this self-pityingly, I’m comfortable with it) isn’t a feeling I’ve felt especially often and when I have it’s been at random times and sometimes in unexpected and unlikely places. Just recently, out walking in the area where I live and mostly grew up, I had one aspect of it; the exact kind of weather I obscurely feel most at home in; mild, grey, windless, with a low, quilted-looking heavy sky that didn’t quite threaten rain and let no ray of sunshine through. I like muggy weather and have never yet met anyone else who does. It’s kind of the other side of Larkin’s The Importance of Elsewhere – if not feeling at home ‘at home’ makes you unworkable (as he puts it), maybe the conditions that you feel the most at home in equally say something, possibly something unflattering, about you? Enjoying blue skies and sunshine (which I do too, although less) just seems more positive somehow.

Baudelaire looking effortlessly cool & French in 1862 by Félix Nadar

Clearly for the protesters, belonging is as much about people – a homogenous group of people – as it is about place. That’s the opposite of the vague kind of belonging that I sometimes identify with, the kind of thing expressed (very romantically) by Charles Baudelaire when he writes about ‘the flâneur’ in The Painter of Modern Life (1863). “To be absent from home and yet feel oneself everywhere at home; to view the world, to be at the heart of the world, and yet hidden from the world […] The spectator is a prince who rejoices everywhere in his incognito. … The lover of universal life enters into the crowd as into an immense reservoir of electrical energy. One might compare him, also, to a mirror, immense as that crowd; to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness which, with its every movement, conveys the multiplicity of life, and the grace in motion of every element of that life.” Well, I rarely feel as enthusiastic as that, and I generally don’t like being in a crowd with a specific purpose, even a benign one like the audience at a concert. But on the other hand, though I rarely feel at home anywhere, I never feel like my home has been stolen or invaded, and I don’t feel threatened because I see or hear people who are different from me. So that’s nice.

Xenophobia is kind of stranger than misanthropy, which is at least understandable, because people can be destructive and unpleasant like no other species. But although humanity has apparently infinite variety on the personal level, that variety, though it seems to terrify some people, is on every other level, extremely limited. However many names we choose to give this geographical (rather than political) area; the British Isles, the United Kingdom, Scotland, Wales, England, Ireland, Northern Europe – the population is, -whichever newcomers may arrive, and wherever they arrive from – pretty homogenous, because the human race is pretty homogenous. I was interested to hear my vague gut feeling given scientific validity by the archaeologist Dr Helen Geake (on the Time Team podcast of 9th September this year.) In response to a question about the diversity of the population of Anglo-Saxon England (following the discovery of a skeleton with African ancestry in an Anglo-Saxon cemetery) she said, “I’m not wanting to say ethnically diverse, partly because […] there’s so little genetic variability between humans that I don’t think we have anything like ethnicities or races or whatever. I just don’t think that makes any sense when you look at the science. I think it’s more of a diversity of appearance and origin.” When you consider the inter-species variation between, say a lion (since I mentioned them before) and a housecat, or a chihuahua and a Saint Bernard, it’s clear that the gradations between human beings are far more subtle. And when it comes to people you feel an affinity with, you’re as likely to feel at home (that expression seems stranger the more you consider it) with someone you met by chance recently (or even met virtually online), as with someone you’ve known since you were a child. Interestingly (there’s a euphemism!) I read just this morning that a “Race Science Institute – ie debunked Nazi bullshit – funded by one of the world’s richest men is currently trying to be influential in UK politics.

mouldy football pitch by the fjord, Neskaupstaður, eastern Iceland, around 4.30 am

Randomly – although it’s the thing that made me think about writing all this in the first place – I don’t think I’ve ever had that ‘at home’ feeling more strongly than I did when walking in the outskirts of a small town in Iceland at 4.30 am one July, during a night where the ‘midnight sun’ felt more like perpetual dusk. Why should that be? I have no idea. The conditions were right I suppose – not unlike the flat grey day mentioned earlier. Iceland is very beautiful but although this stretch of road ran alongside a fjord at some points, it mostly wasn’t something picturesque that you’d put on a postcard. It featured details as apparently uninspiring (but weirdly loveable to me) as a mouldering football pitch, a school or some kind of municipal building. At one point there was a boat on a platform, which did give more of that sense of ‘elsewhere’. What did ‘at home’ feel like? You know it when you feel it I suppose a kind of contentment that may partly have come from having had a few drinks plus 24 hours or so without sleep; but although comfortable it didn’t feel like exhaustion.

that mildewed football pitch in more detail

If I tried to express that feeling to some of the protesters, quite possibly they’d say something like “If you like it so much why don’t you go and live there” (British people have a long history of telling people if they don’t like the country they can just leave, and yet they rarely feel like they themselves should leave if they don’t like the country). It occurs to me now that when racists, xenophobes or (popular current euphemism) “concerned citizens” scream at people to go back where they came from, when they wrap themselves in the flags of their own country and wield their identity at people, what they are doing may partly be asserting how they feel about their home, but what they really want is for everyone they oppose to not feel at home. And when, at the best of times, ‘feeling at home’ is a fleeting and precarious emotion, that’s kind of a shitty thing to do.

gratuitous text and bloody violence – the commercialisation of 80s horror

This article (like several others) came out of a conversation with my friend Paul, and he writes better than I do about 80s horror (and many other things) at Into the Gyre

The 1980s was, famously, the decade when pop culture became corporate, encapsulated in the omnipresent corporate or corporate-style logo. Obviously both corporations and logos long pre-dated the 80s, but it was in that era that it became an all-encompassing ideal. In the 1960s, the first really modern teenagers* had written the names of their favourite bands on their school books or bags and twenty years later their children were doing much the same thing, only they were painstakingly copying logos from album sleeves or tape inlay cards.

*you could say the 50s teenagers were the first, but they were pioneers; the 60s generation was the first to grow up with the expectation of being teenagers, with all that entailed in terms of pop music and rebellious teenage behaviour

As a young horror fan in the mid-to-late 1980s, one of the things that made the notorious video nasties of the previous generation seem so alluringly grimy and disreputable was their lack of slickness. 1980s horror franchises – in themselves a symptom of the decade of accelerated capitalism – even ones with their roots in the 70s independent cinema boom like Halloween – had logos, they had mascots like Freddy and Jason and Pinhead, they had rock songs on the soundtrack – they were corporate and, to young teenagers at least, they were cool. There was no way to make a grotty, un-theatrical, special effects-free film like I Spit on Your Grave seem cool. There was an attempt to make a franchise out of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but Leatherface wasn’t iconic in quite the way that Jason was, let alone an almost cartoon character like Freddy Krueger. Murderous, inbred yokels in rural Texas might well be scary but they weren’t easily assimilated into glossy hair metal videos.

the flamboyant 60s/70s Fellowship of the Ring vs its more businesslike 80s update

The publishing world was no different. In the fantasy realm, the hippyish typefaces and sometimes grotesque psychedelic imagery of the great 60s and 70s paperbacks were replaced with foil letters in block type and tastefully elevated landscapes. Tasteful is of course a relative term and within a decade, that utterly 80s look – a publishing counterpart to magnolia painted walls and a beige Laura Ashley aesthetic which married an almost clinical sense of restraint, as if embarrassed by the childishness of elves, wizards and dragons, but combined it with bold, business card-style, metallic sans-serif lettering – would seem just as trashy in its way as the more florid 70s fashions had at the time.

70s horror classics redesigned for the 80s

But, unlike fantasy fiction, where the biggest name in the 80s remained the late J.R.R. Tolkien, the horror genre had star writers who transcended the genre and became part of the pop cultural zeitgeist, Most of the current ‘big names’ in 80s fantasy, like Terry Brooks and Stephen R Donaldson, were writers whose key works belonged firmly to the post-Tolkien 1970s and never escaped a (very big) fantasy audience. Horror was different. Like the fantasy genre, its biggest names – Stephen King (everywhere) and James Herbert (especially in the UK, though his books sold millions worldwide) – had had their first successes in the first half of the 1970s, but as the 70s evolved into the 80s, both their work itself and the way it was packaged began to align with the spirit of the age. The fanbase for horror broadened until the big horror novels became the big airport novels and big supermarket novels and the basis for successful Hollywood movies. The books became bigger and more cinematic (but I talked about that here so won’t again) and their design more stylish, until they resembled the movie posters of the time; but with one major difference. There were of course iconic directors in the 80s, but even the biggest of them – Steven Spielberg, say, or Martin Scorcese – naturally didn’t dominate the posters for their films the way that Stephen King or James Herbert did on their books. In that respect, the authors were more like the star actors of the day, but where Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger were only one element, albeit a dominant one, in their star vehicles, with the books you knew that whatever you got would the real, unadulterated thing, unless you happened to be a fan of Virginia (“VC”) Andrews, but she was a special case back then.

The first, strangely romantic adventure-looking Shining (with Warren Beatty-esque hero) and the classic 80s Stephen King logo edition

The extent to which the star authors, rather than the books themselves, were the selling point, can be seen in their evolving covers. After a decade of disparate designs and variable artwork, often not especially horror-centric, publishers like New English Library, Futura and Star began treating books by horror authors as franchises, each with their own logo and aesthetic. Stephen King and James Herbert, to stick with the big two, demonstrate contrasting, but very 80s horror alternatives. James Herbert – who, with a background in advertising and art direction, took a direct interest in how his novels were packaged – went with the 80s version of classy as epitomised by mid-priced boxes of chocolates; a restrained palette dominated by either black or white, with lettering in gold or silver foil. They were eye-catching, moody and, to a teenager, adult looking.

New English Library offering James Herbert as a box of Black Magic chocolates and Stephen King as a hair metal album

Stephen King’s UK publishers (including Herbert’s publisher N.E.L. – but frustratingly, including several others; keeping one truly consistent image annoyingly out of reach) clearly realised that the selling point – the brand, in the parlance of the times etc – was King himself. To that end, the actual cover illustrations and even the prominence of the titles of the books took up less and less space, while the author’s name was treated to something like the logo of a metal band, and was big enough to be spotted across a crowded newsagent or bookshop. Sometimes the author’s name was in foil, sometimes it was embossed, but for at least a few years the covers of his main series of novels – as with James Herbert’s – had the uniformity of a corporate identity.

Stephen King’s Greatest Hits

Where the genre’s biggest stars and their publishers led, others followed; all of the big names of 80s horror tended to follow either the King or the Herbert approach; after wildly variable and sometimes lamentable 70s editions, Ramsey Campbell’s books took on the sleek, Herbertian image. American blockbuster authors like Dean R Koontznd Peter Straub’s books tended to follow the King blueprint.

80s gore (Richard Laymon & Shaun Hutson) vs 80s slickness (Shaun Hutson & Ramsey Campbell)

Gore authors had a kind of niche of their own. The early books of the UK’s most notorious horror author of the era, Shaun Hutson, played down the author’s name in favour of a gaudy movie poster look with the titles in a distinctive ‘slug trail’ font – and his US counterpart Richard Laymon’s works were very similarly packaged (the covers above both look like they could be the work of Danny Flynn, mentioned here, though I haven’t checked). As the sales of both authors increased during the boom years of the 80s, their packaging became – like their work – relatively more sophisticated. In the UK, Sphere mimicked the classy Herbert look for Hutson’s later 80s novels like Assassin and Victims, with the author’s name (embossed, in foil) becoming more of a focal point, while Laymon’s name became almost as logo-like as Stephen King’s. Laymon was far from alone in this. The brand-like identity of Stephen King, and the sheer volume of his sales, meant that the classic ‘logo’ look of his books was highly influential, to put it mildly. The range of King-influenced cover art ranges from the definitely ‘post-King’ 80s covers of authors like John Farris and Rex Miller, to the frankly imitative NEL covers for Stephen Laws, whose 80s books bring to mind the theoretical “Moron in a hurry” cited in court in cases of trademark infringement; not that said moron would have a bad time if they accidentally bought a Stephen Laws novel – but they would know they weren’t reading Stephen King.

the other Stephen of 80s horror

In almost all respects, Clive Barker was the outsider in the world of 80s horror – most definitely of it, but not defined by it. His debut novel The Damnation Game was initially packaged as typical mid-80s horror stodge but graduated, as his reputation grew, to Stephen King style packaging, even as Sphere Books simultaneously took the bold step of publishing his Books of Blood short story collections with Barker’s own fantastical (and in come cases gory) paintings on the covers, immediately putting the author in a dangerous-looking category of his own. Clive Barker’s books looked both more graphic and more outlandish than the usual blockbuster horror authors. From then until the end of the horror boom his work coexisted in the two camps of mainstream and (for want of a better world) alternative horror. The packaging of the 1989 first edition of his short novel Cabal (filmed as Nightbreed) is pure, commercial 80s design; it looks more like a movie poster than the actual Nightbreed movie poster and is complete with logo-like title and gold foil for the author’s name. But around the same time, his dark fantasy masterpiece Weaveworld featured a more imaginative, sophisticated style, taking its lead from the Books of Blood. Weaveworld had a more formal design sense that was flexible enough to be applied to the rest of Barker’s oeuvre, so that when the horror bubble burst and everything 80s suddenly looked as cringingly tacky and dated as mullets and shoulder pads, Barker’s brand alone among his horror peers easily made the transition into the new decade.

Clive Barker as standard 80s horror author, blockbuster 80s horror author (x 2) weirdo 80s horror author and weird-but-classy fantasy author

From 1990 until at least until the turn of the millennium, Stephen King’s publishers experimented with everything from tasteful minimalism to gaudy dayglo colours, the only constant being the prominence of the author’s name on the covers. That sense of immediate brand recognition dissolved around the time of The Dark Half has never been quite as strong since, and an 80s Stephen King collection still has a satisfyingly coherent look that isn’t matched by later editions. James Herbert mostly stuck with the ‘classy’ look of his late 80s books but with a sense of diminishing returns as the titles and cover images became less confrontational and the whole look less fashionable. In the 90s, much of what had been packaged as full-blooded horror tended to be given more of a fashionable ‘urban thriller’ look, just as in cinema, the Freddy and Jason franchises limped to an ignoble (if temporary) end, Hannibal Lecter emerged as a supposedly less cheesy horror villain and nobody wanted hair metal on their soundtracks anymore. It was a new age.

Slugs (1982) vs Slugs (2016) – eventually even the ultimate 80s trash schlock horror novel would be given the ‘tasteful’ treatment (which to be fair does look kind of cool)

the book even of my secret soul (about books, again)

I love books. I want books. Post-Christmas I’m in the enviable position of having – not money, but in a way even better, virtual money that can only be spent on books. What I don’t have though, is a lot of space for books. So, periodically pruning the library (too grand a word) or book collection (worse?) or “my books” (better) is a painful necessity. But what to prune, and why? So far, every single time I’ve put together a box of books and dispersed it to charity shops I’ve almost immediately ‘needed’ one of the books I purged. On a few occasions (see here) I’ve bought back books (not the same actual copy though; I’m not that bad, yet) that I got rid of. And I’ll probably do it again, but I’m trying not to.

Why is it painful to get rid of books? Pompously, because the books you own are a reflection of yourself; of skins shed and personalities outgrown and discarded, and in a way a direct line back to your (possibly alarming) former selves with their sometimes alien tastes and enthusiasms.* Less pompously, because in general, I want more books, not fewer. I can’t think of an occasion when I got rid of a book simply because I didn’t like or just didn’t want it, though I’m sure it’s happened. And so, for decades I still owned (and may still have somewhere) the little red Gideons Bible that was given out to pupils when starting high school (do they still do that?). Its bookplate (ex-libris? Both terms seem very archaic) hints strongly at the typical kind of 12 year old boy that it was given to: Name: William Pinfold Form: human. Similarly, I may still have the books given to me in the street by Hare Krishna followers, which seems not to happen now but was a frequent enough thing in the early 90s that I can still remember without checking** that they were credited to and/or consisted of teachings by “His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami.” They often had nice, pleasingly psychedelic cover paintings but were invariably disappointing to try to read because, even when they had amazing titles like Easy Journey to Other Planets, they were all about Krishna consciousness – who knew?. But these are books that would be impossible to replace (in a personal sense; easy enough to get hold of different copies of them). More complicatedly – and just annoyingly, with space at a premium, I have multiple copies of some favourite books and will probably buy even more copies of them, if I come across them with covers that I like but don’t have and if they are cheap.

*case in point; I had forgotten how much I liked Camille Paglia in the days before libertarianism was an essentially standard right-wing-asshole viewpoint and when her provocative/confrontational ideas didn’t yet include being disingenuously frivolous about child abuse

** I’m only human though; I spelled his name wrong until looking out a picture of the book, Possibly absorbing his teachings might have helped?

So yes, I have quite a lot of books; but although ‘book collectors’ exist, I don’t qualify as one. Collecting is deliberate and with presumably, a specific end point in view; a collection. Collecting things is fun up to a point, but ultimately a thankless and frustrating task without the required personality type. It (fleetingly) irritates me when an author I like has written four or five books and the publisher changes the cover design or size after the first few, so the mismatched chaos of a complete collection is not for me. Not to mention that there are writers – Michael Moorcock, in print since the 1950s and as far as I know still writing, is the obvious example for me – who have, over the course of decades, written a ridiculous number of books, which have appeared under countless imprints in myriad editions and countries and therefore offer an opportunity for an epic and soul-crushingly futile quest for the true completist. I am not that completist.

who wouldn’t want a beautiful Aubrey Beardsley ex-libris in all their books? But who would want to actually paste them into all their books?

On the other hand, following the old stately home-library tradition of having a personalised ex-libris/bookplate/sticker thing, with its individualistic iconography always seems like a nice idea – even if it’s essentially just a picturesque way of writing your name in a book, which I would never do. It’s nice see a decorative ex-libris in an old book, but although the thought of having one’s own books personalised in that way is nice, the reality of actually sticking them in the books – fun for maybe the first ten or twenty, but after that too tedious to consider, is not so appealing. So, not a collector; but even not a true bibliophile either, at least in the sense that sometimes is written about. I do love books, but not all or any books, I don’t contemplate, like a wine taster, the smell of old books. There are of course books with distinctive odours, some pleasant (to me) like the dry and somehow slightly spicy smell (probably best to not think too much about) of old calf-bound volumes from the 18th century and earlier, others less so, like the peculiarly vomit-like bouquet of new children’s books. And though browsing through shelves and rooms of books can be and usually is an entirely pleasant pastime, after the excitement has faded there can be something a little depressing about looking through piles of chilly, mildewy, corrugated and fat-with-damp paperbacks in the bigger, more drafty and warehouse-like charity shops or auction rooms.

the uninspiring cover that inspired me to read beyond my taste, strangely

Still; books are artifacts in themselves and not just valuable for their contents. Though judging books by their covers is frowned on, that’s kind of what the covers are for. I’ve written about this stuff in several places before so won’t go on about it here, but there’s never been a time that I’ve read as hungrily or as indiscriminately as when I was a child, and until I found authors that were trustworthy – I will try to get onto the second part of that Robert Westall feature some time this year – covers were the thing that drew me in. I loved fantasy, history and sci-fi, so covers were what made books leap off the shelves of the local library or school library. And there were somehow never enough books to read, so that when, aged 12 – 14 or so, our English teacher required pupils to take books out of the school library every week, it was a perfect opportunity to branch out. After a fairly short time the kind of books I automatically wanted to read had been exhausted and it was necessary to try something else. It’s a strange thing, reading not-for-you books, kind of like trying on other people’s clothes, but I gave it a go, as I have a few times since then*. The book that stands out in my memory – or at least its cover does – is Desmond Bagley’s Bahama Crisis (1980). Being a newcomer to men’s thrillers (still an alien world mostly) I think I was expecting, without much excitement, James Bond (never a fan)-style action, but as I very hazily remember the book was mostly a soapy kind of story about the difficulties of running a hotel in the Bahamas.(??) I didn’t mind it, but although records tell me** that I got more Desmond Bagleys out of the library – I had to get something – none of them, or their titles or even their covers stick in my mind at all.

*reading not-for-me books, not trying on other peoples’ clothes ** there’s a list in an old school jotter which I never threw away

It’s hard to imagine, as the world has become ever-more commercially driven, but it feels like publishers nowadays underestimate the seductive power of a good cover design (though what constitutes a good one is obviously subjective). There are several authors I liked as a young adult – Milan Kundera, Ian McEwan and Truman Capote spring to mind, but so (who would have thought it?) does Jean-Paul Sartre – who I might well never have read at all if I didn’t find the covers of their books so alluring. In retrospect the late 80s/early 90s seems like a golden age of book design to me, and don’t think it’s entirely because of the age I was when I first saw them. I was still only in my early 20s a few years later when book jackets became dominated by neon, acid colours and deliberately jarring designs and those left me cold at the time and look dated now. The covers I associate with that ‘golden age’ are entirely typical of the look that much literary fiction was going for at the time.

Milan Kundera’s books are actually about 50% better when read with these covers

Have there ever been cooler looking books than the 80s Faber & Faber or “King Penguin” (whatever happened to King Penguins?) Milan Kunderas? Or Russell Mills‘ genius covers for Picador’s Ian McEwans? Is it just a coincidence that they have a lot in common Dave McKean’s graphic novel designs of the time like Violent Cases and Arkham Asylum or Bill Sienkiewicz’s Stray Toasters? And though Penguin Modern Classics still look good now have they ever looked better than the pale green spines and black and white photo covers of that period?

assorted Ian McEwans, graphic novels & Penguin Modern Classics

Of course covers can mislead too; much as Peruvian painter Boris Vallejo is some kind of genius, one quickly learned that his covers were no guarantee of quality. Everything about John Norman’s Gor series – the sub-Tolkien/Robert E Howard setting, the Vallejo (and Vallejo imitators – of whom there were many) artwork, the swords and sorcery and gratuitous violence and sex – were guaranteed to appeal to the male, teenage fantasy fan; and yet the books were bizarrely dull to read. Actually, to be fair to Norman, the sex in the Gor books is hardly gratuitous, since it’s basically the whole point of the series; but the endless, tedious essays about masculine power and the bondage fantasies that pepper his books; without the thrill of the quest or even an alleviating sense of humour, is definitely an acquired taste. It was good to read, years later, Micheal Moorcock – along with Tolkien my favourite fantasy author – writing about how boring and tacky the Gor books were. I didn’t think it could just be me. Of course, Moorcock attacked Tolkien too, but though his essay Epic Pooh is not only a good read, but also hard to argue with at times (Moorcock’s main point is that Tolkien is conservative in his worldview and reproduces the class outlook and prejudices of his generation in his fiction) somehow Tolkien’s books resist the criticism effortlessly, if you’re a fan. I think it’s because for Tolkien, the background and history and world-building (as I believe they say nowadays) was the main point of interest, whereas for most subsequent heroic fantasy authors, all that is just the window dressing, so that Middle Earth feels real and believable in a way that most fantasy “realms” don’t. I don’t think there’s any point in Lord of the Rings where the reader has a question that they feel Tolkien couldn’t answer satisfactorily. That said, I imagine sex-related questions would have made him uncomfortable, whereas John Norman might not be able to tell you the detailed history and folklore of Counter-Earth as Tolkien could with Middle Earth, but he could definitely tell you which ropes, gag or whips are favoured by which tribes.

So; looking through my books there are many different versions of myself; because you read books that reflect your interests but often you also get those interests from books themselves. From the age of 8 or so, the Fighting Fantasy role-playing game book series cut across many of my interests. But even then, those books appealed to the child-me in the first place because I loved history and mythology and legends and Asterix the Gaul. But I’ve written more about children’s books and related subjects here and here and here and here and probably elsewhere too, so will try not to repeat myself. It’s easy to think of books that had a big influence on my interests as a child – the version of me that wanted to be an archaeologist wasn’t just thanks to Indiana Jones; before I ever saw Raiders of the Lost Ark I was already fascinated by the Aztecs and Incas because of Tintin and the Romans via Asterix – but also those things plus Ancient Egypt, Ancient China, the Normans, medieval history and knights etc via a big book called The History of the World that I got at a Primary School “Bring & Buy Sale” when I must have been 8 or so. That book had – still has in fact – painted illustrations that I remember vividly; ancient Sumerians, Julius Caesar being stabbed to death in the forum, ancient Greek ladies in strange clothes that exposed their breasts; mysteriously exciting even to an 8 year old, Genghis Khan on his horse, Viking raiders etc, etc. The me who loved space stuff was partly thanks to excitement about the space shuttle program (admittedly that cooled off after the Challenger disaster) and Star Wars, but also 2000 AD comic and the very badly-bound but beautiful reprints of old Dan Dare comics that Paper Tiger published in the early 80s)

But all this is getting away from the point, which is that book ownership is not just about reading. Books like the Bible or Easy Journey to Other Planets are not being kept to read, any more than E.W. Hildick’s Deadline for McGurk, a towering masterpiece as a kid but probably unreadable as an adult, or the different variants of The Fellowship of the Ring or JG Ballard’s Crash that take up valuable shelf space. Getting rid of them would feel wrong, at least unless there was a good cause or if more worthy books come along and the space must reluctantly be yielded to them. That’s the not-so-great thing about having book tokens to spend; the need to consider, plan and use them wisely. I probably won’t.

Book lover’s regrets – should have bought it but didn’t! Perhaps the greatest book cover of all time

ghost cities of cyberspace

Tell me now, I beg you, where
Flora is, that fair Roman;
Archippa, and Thaïs rare,
Who the fairer of the twain?
Echo too, whose voice each plain,
River, lake and valley bore;
Lovely these as springtime lane,
But where are they, the snows of yore?¹

François Villon, Ballade des dames du temps jadis(1461)¹

My uncle died two years ago now, but his Instagram account is still there. How many dead people live on in their abandoned social media accounts? The future never seems to arrive, never really exists, but history never ends. For over a quarter of a century, social media has mirrored and shaped lives, always evolving, but leaving behind its detritus just like every other phase of civilisation. Where are the people we were sociable with on the forgotten single-community (bands, hobbies, comedy, whatever) forums and message boards of the 90s and 2000s², or the friends we made on MySpace in 2005? Some live on, ageing at an only slightly faster rate than their profile pictures (Dorian Gray would now age privately at home, his picture migrating untouched from MySpace to Facebook to Twitter to Instagram to TikTok etc), but others seem lost, vanished, dead? But still partially living on in archaic digital forms, like those sunlit American families in the home movies of the 50s and 60s.

*Club Kids 1992 – Keda, Kabuki Starshine, and Sacred Boy, Copyright Michael Fazakerley*

Twenty-five years is a long, generation-spanning time, but, just as abstract expressionist art essentially still lives on, in almost unaltered forms but no longer radical – long past the lifetimes of Rothko, Jackson Pollock and de Kooning, so the (just) pre-internet countercultural modernity of the late 80s and early 90s survives. The shock-monster-gender-fluid-glam-trash of Michael Alig and the Club Kids (captured brilliantly in the 1998 ‘shockumentary’ Party Monster and in James St James’s luridly fantastic memoir Disco Bloodbath and, less brilliantly, in the somewhat unsatisfactory 2003 movie Party Monster) was still prevalent back in the Myspace era³ and lives on and still feels current on Instagram and Tiktok and reality TV and in whatever is left of the top 40. Increasingly bulimic pop culture eats reconstituted chunks of itself and just as the 60s haunted the early 90s, bringing genuine creativity (Andrew Weatherall, to pick a name at random) and feeble dayglo pastiche (Candy Flip, to deliberately target a heinous offender), a weird and distorted (if you were there) amalgam of the 1980s and 90s haunts the 2020s, informing both the shallow dreck that proliferates everywhere and some of the genuine creativity of today.

‘I’m ready now,’ Piper Hill said, eyes closed, seated on the carpet in a loose approximation of the lotus position. ‘Touch the spread with your left hand.’ Eight slender leads trailed from the sockets behind Piper’s ears to the instrument that lay across her tanned thighs.

entering cyberspace in William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) Grafton Books, p.105.

Cyberspace, like any landscape which people have inhabited, has its lost cultures and ruins, which become ever more remote and unknowable with the passing of the years. But like Macchu Picchu or the Broch of Gurness, they retain a sense that it all meant something significant once. The not-quite barren wastelands of Geocities and Xanga, the ruined palace of MySpace – a Rosetta stone partly effaced with dead links and half forgotten languages; photobucket, imageshack, tripod, what do these mean if you’re 15? Would the old, useable interface of MySpace seem as charmingly quaint and remote to the “youth of today” as the penpal columns in the pages of ’80s music magazines do?

Looking for friends all over the world, Metal Forces magazine, 1987

Funny to think, but there was a time when Lycos, Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves were peers of Google, and when Bebo rivalled Facebook and Twitter, both now seemingly in senile phases of their development. Until very recently Facebook (Meta) and Twitter were brands that were seemingly unassailable, but empires do fall, albeit more slowly than bubbles burst.⁴And meanwhile, the users of social networks age and die and give way to generations who don’t remember them, but look on their works, just as the Incas and the Iron Age Orcadians are remembered for their monuments, if nothing else. Depressing, when you think about it; probably won’t write about history next time.

It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. JD Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye, Penguin, 1958, p.220

Geocities; this is what the future used to look like

¹ translated by Lewis Wharton in The Poems of François Villon, JM Dent & Sons, 1935, p54. Not reading French – I seem to go on about that a lot – this is my favourite translation I’ve come across, although apparently it’s a pretty free one, judging by the literal – but still quite nice – one here

² the continuing success of Reddit suggests that people never really grew discontented with the interface of the Kiss online fanclub c. 2005 (etc etc)

³It’s weird to note that the Club Kids would be considered – even without the murder etc – just as outrageous today as in the late 80s, even though their aesthetic was itself put together from a mix of Bowie, gore movies, Japanese pop culture etc etc. But then – as I think I recently noted somewhere – there are people who still find the word fuck outrageous, after something like a millennium.

⁴Online and mainstream culture, even after this quarter century, remain mysteriously separate. Online news unfolds as it happens, but meanwhile in the daytime world, mainstream culture hangs on to husks even older than Geocities; publicly owned TV news shows don’t look to what’s happening now, but pore over the front pages of newspapers – yesterday’s news… today! – simultaneously being redundant and ensuring that newspaper owners’ views get publicity beyond their dwindling readership and therefore giving them an artificial sense of relevance. Which is really just about money, just as Google and Facebook are; the crumbling aristocracy of print media, its tendrils still entwined with the establishment, versus the new money, steadily buying its way in.

a true state – cut and paste and the art of collage (Edinburgh, summer 2019)

2019 has, in many ways, not been a good year so far. But this summer, the National Galleries of Scotland had (well, has; they are still on) three particularly outstanding exhibitions that brought a bit of light and intelligence to a period of more-than-usual stupidity. At the National Gallery itself, there was the excellent, eye opening and brain-frying Bridget Riley exhibition (closes 22nd September), at the National Portrait Gallery the superb Self Evidence (closes 20th October) in which Francesca Woodman’s tiny, intimate, self-enclosed photographs vibrate balefully in their little corner, overshadowing (for me) the also (but in an entirely different way) intimate and at times frankly challenging monumental works of Robert Mapplethorpe* and, to a lesser extent, the brilliant but (I guess appropriately) don’t-quite-fit-in Diane Arbus portraits of the lives of people marginalised and made invisible by mainstream culture.

*though the Mapplethorpe pictures were the ones that moved me the least, they did provide the priceless spectacle of parents hurrying their curious kids past the notorious 1978 Self Portrait With Whip. They had been warned!

But for me, the highlight of the National Galleries’ summer programme is Cut and Paste: 400 years of Collage at Modern Two (closes 27th October).

Thanks to its inclusive definition of collage (which covers photomontage, traditional collage, plus bits of decoupage, pressed plant samples and even quilting) as well as its historical scope, the exhibition manages to be both focused and wide-ranging, and also (I found) surprisingly moving. What collage does, or at least amplifies – perhaps paradoxically given its use of found/ready-made materials – is that aspect of art that disappears most quickly in reproduction; the hand of the artist. This is art not only as a reflection/projection of culture but one that includes material culture itself.* There is, sometimes regardless of the picture/object, a poignant quality that comes from the materials used, in a way that doesn’t happen with paint, unless you are the kind of conservator who can isolate pigments used to specific periods (I’m not, unfortunately).

*I don’t think this is just pretentious bullshit; but you never know

Pablo Picasso, Bottle and Glass on a Table (1912)

I’m getting ahead of myself here, but a seminal collage that makes an appearance in the exhibition, Pablo Picasso’s Bottle and Glass on a Table (1912) is a classic/typical Picasso cubist/spatial experiment, but the use of newspaper – a very specific, dateable piece of ephemera (from Le Journal, 3 December 1912) – gives the work, instantly and inherently, a dimension largely absent in conventional painting. The feeling that the collage is both artwork and artefact; literally as well as figuratively multi-layered, makes a case for collage as a distinct and special art form, a feeling echoed by the Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi (represented by some outstanding works in the exibition), for whom the form offered clarification, where formal art training raised problems and questions: “Unlike the world of school where the universe was systematised in a certain order, the reassembly of this disparate material reflected a true state, both autobiographic and dynamic.” (quoted in the exhibition catalogue, p. 126)

So anyway; the exhibition is arranged chronologically, in the usual Modern Two layout; in various rooms, up the stairs, through the corridors etc, always I think a layout that makes for an engaging, surprising way of looking at art. Partly deliberately (there were too many people in the first room), I went around the exhibition in reverse chronological order and in retrospect that seems like a good decision. This meant that the exhibition opened with the Chapman Brothers’ The Disasters of Everyday Life (2017), a spectacular-looking wall-like object consisting of 80 of Goya’s horrific etchings, The Disasters of War, with of course added bits and pieces, sometimes powerful, sometimes deliberately absurd, I think (though I’d have to go through again the other way) it serves better as a kind of abstract for what is to follow than it would as a conclusion, where peering at a lot of small images might have seemed a bit anticlimactic.
I’m not going to mention every picture in the show, though I can’t think of anything that doesn’t deserve a mention. The first thing to have a major impact for me was Lucy Williams’ 2015 Crescent House, as much a piece of model making as a collage, a strange, small scale (just under a metre long) recreation of a bit of postwar architecture, but simplified and made more colourful, giving it a feeling of harmony almost like a kind of 3D Mondrian.

Crescent House captures something of the intended optimism of the postwar new town planning that’s most often associated now with neglect and urban decay. I don’t know if it’s a generational thing (Williams is around my age), but for me there was something powerfully bittersweet about the feeling of an abandoned, never-quite-attained future, heightened by the realness of the work as an object.

The aesthetic of Crescent House – though that is far lighter in tone – makes me think of the late 70s work of Linder (Sterling), another exhibition highlight. Although similar in its reference points to the pop art collages of Richard Hamilton a couple of decades before (sadly his iconic 1956 collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing is not in the exhibition, though they do have a nice work by him, Desk from 1964), the feel of Linder’s work is far darker (it makes me think of the confrontational industrial work of Throbbing Gristle and COUM Transmissions around the same period) and the satire more pointed. Works like her Pretty Girl series(1977) exemplify a particular approach to collage. Using the detritus of everyday life; magazines, posters, advertising, it became a way of embodying in the art a criticism of the culture that it’s a reaction to as well as a product of. It’s a feminist criticism of the objectification of women that uses already depersonalised women (part of the problem) and merges them with actual ‘objects of desire’ from a patriarchal culture that above all else believes in commodification for its own benefit.

Craig W. Lowe, Bedroom Cupboard door covered with stickers, 1987-1997

Thanks to the exhibition’s open-minded and inclusive approach, there are some unexpected revelations (but aren’t all revelations unexpected? I mean, that’s obvious). While Craig W. Lowe’s bedroom cupboard door covered in stickers c. 1987-1997) may appeal most as nostalgia, the inclusion of Jamie Reid‘s original Sex Pistols Never Mind The Bollocks cover collage (1977; copyrighted image so I’d better not share) opens realms of not-previously-considered information (at least to me) about one’s record collection. Firstly, the collage is black and white, and secondly, it isn’t just a picture or a ‘file’, it’s an actual thing. Like, presumably all album cover art (and book cover art etc) before the digital age, the NMTB cover in all its yellow and pink (or pink and green) glory, taken for granted forever, is not a picture, it’s a photograph of a picture. In its final form it’s been overlaid with colours, but that object there on the wall in Edinburgh is the thing itself. A strange feeling, like looking at the inscription on a ten pound note and considering that it is a representation of something, rather than ten actual pounds.

The Sex Pistols cover primes the viewer (at least the viewer going through the exhibition backwards) for the various bits of Peter Blake’s Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover that are on show – and, great though they are (and I like Sgt Pepper quite a bit more than I like Never Mind The Bollocks), without that priming, the Beatles items wouldn’t have the same impact; perhaps because the cover itself is clearly a photograph of objects and cut-outs and seeing them is very cool but not really revelatory, the whole is too familiar and iconic to give the frisson of a moment captured. In fact, Blake’s superb, possibly slightly twee The Toy Shop (1962) is a far more vivid time capsule; clearly pointing to Sgt Pepper, its a conglomeration of bits and bobs familiar to children of the 60s – but also to children of later generations as belonging to the same family as the bits & bobs of their own youth (in my case, comics, football stickers, sweets, TV tie-in toys (He-Man et al), but also the odd antiquated throwbacks that still existed, like bows and arrows and balsa wood or polystyrene gliders which came with a weighted plastic propeller so they flew when thrown – do they still make those?). It’s hard to imagine that there will be a generation that can’t relate to The Toy Shop at all, however virtual entertainment becomes, kids will always like stickers.

But Blake’s pop art nostalgia – powerful though that is – is one of the few purely positive and joyous post-war works in the show. More typical are the mischievous collage book covers made by Joe Orton and his partner and eventual murderer Kenneth Halliwell. These were put on library books and returned to the library – an act that eventually cost them a six month prison sentence – and they exemplify the sense of the significant, perhaps subversive and illogical accident that drew the surrealists to collage a few generations earlier.

Kenneth Halliwell & Joe Orton – collage on library book cover (c.1960-2)

For the surrealists, collage was almost a manifestation of the galvanising quotation from Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) where a boy could be described as being “as beautiful as a chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” This aspect of surrealism is brilliantly captured in Max Ernst’s gothic ‘collage novels’ (one of the most exciting inclusions in the show is an unpublished picture from his 1934 collage novel Une semaine de bonté) as well as in beautiful works by Toyen and some of the collaborative exquisite corpse collages made by André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba and Yves Tanguy, where each artist could only see their own part of the work until it was complete. Again, what I hadn’t really anticipated was the difference it makes seeing these items in real life – for example, I had seen and liked (and own a postcard of) Roland Penrose’s untitled 1937 postcard collage, but seeing it, life size, and looking at the actual real postcards stuck to it, was a weirdly moving experience. But why? It’s something about the immediacy and associations of familiar things, the thought perhaps of Roland Penrose actually going into a newsagent and buying the postcards one day in 1937. Why that should be more moving than an artist using paint I don’t know, except that, like the scrapbooks owned by Tristan Tzara (very exciting to see) and the paper cutouts by Matisse (which until now I’ve never been a fan of) it brings the whole process of making art into an immediate, almost tangible one.

The work of the Dadaists (Hannah Höch was the main reason I wanted to see the show) is less self-consciously unconscious (well, that makes no sense) than the surrealist works, but the element of satire and sometimes bitter humour – especially in John Heartfield’s iconic anti-Nazi photomontages – make them the spiritual ancestors of the works of artists like Carolee Schneemann and Nancy Spero in the 1960s as well as Linder and even Terry Gilliam in the 70s. Highlights for me were the selection of works by Kurt Schwitters, whose own version of Dada, Merz, even had a collage-like genesis, the word itself apparently derived from a fragment of text relating to a banking firm (Kommerz und Privatbank). The fact that the word Merz also has echoes in the words schwerz (pain) and ausmerzen (to weed out or discard) adds to the sense that this was a movement (if you can call one person a movement) for which collage wasn’t an entertaining diversion, but a central idea. The cumulation of meanings and associations in works like Merz 229: Heet Water (1921) makes these small works with their train tickets, textiles, playing cards – pretty much anything that could be cut up and stuck down – powerfully evocative, as well as decorative in themselves.

John Heartfield – Adolf the Superman – swallows gold and spouts junk (1932)

Kurt Schwitters – Merz 229: Heet Water (1921)

The section on the birth of modernist collage features a group of Picasso works including the the aforementioned Bottle and Glass on a Table, which form year zero of modernist collage, alongside works by peers including Braque (who may actually be the first modernist collage-maker) and Juan Gris (whose The Sunblind, 1914 is a highlight) and then the ripples spreading outwards from that explosive group of works, including the Russian constructivists and suprematists, the Italian Futurists and even the Bloomsbury group in the UK; I was very impressed to come across a painting by Vanessa Bell (Portrait of Molly MacCarthy, 1914-5) that didn’t immediately wilt into insignificance when surrounded by the big names of European modernism.

It seems obvious to say that collage is comparatively egalitarian insofar as you don’t need to be able to draw or paint to do it – and it’s true that works by generally non-visual artists like Breton and Joe Orton have a similar energy and atmosphere as those by more conventional artists, but it’s also noticeable that, pre-modernism, although the idea of collage existed and there was sometimes that same element of playfulness, the work is more notable for its skill and ingenuity – especially in the Victorian photomontages – than for any disruptive or ironic qualities. But collage being what it is, it’s here that the sense mentioned earlier of the collage as actual material culture comes into play again, sometimes – especially for me in the small character pieces by George Smart from the early 19th century – powerfully so. Somehow, these little watercolour paintings adorned with carefully cut out and arranged pieces of paper and fabric (irresistibly reminiscent to me of the ‘fuzzy felt’ sets I played with as a child) bring us closer to the artist than just paint on canvas would do.

This is perhaps art history as human interest and association rather than as aesthetics (this is especially true in the case of the Victorian scraps and scrapbooks, perhaps because the ready-made nature of the scraps themselves makes the objects feel less like the works of an artist and more like a hobby; nothing wrong with that, but as the sort of things you see in auctions and junk shops they have the aura of being ephemera, rather than using ephemera to make something else; a false distinction perhaps), but for me this exhibition brings those two aspects of art – the human/historical and the aesthetic/technical together in a deep and very satisfying way.

I have no real criticisms of the exhibition; it is thought provoking, beautiful to look at and put together with care and imagination. It might have been nice to have had something by some of the other artists most strongly associated with collage, like Romare Bearden and Wangechi Mutu; but if an exhibition leaves you wanting more that can’t be a bad thing.

***POSTSCRIPT***

Since I mentioned the anyone-can-do-it aspect of collage, I might as well mention that I went through a phase, especially in my student days of making collages, and while they are nothing special, they do have a kind of diary-esque subtext which has only really become apparent over time. Since it’s my website and no-one can stop me, here are a couple of examples, plus a more recent one.

A continuous chain of little inventions; art in Edinburgh summer 2018

Probably as much as I love any art movement, I love German Expressionism; most of all the artists of Die Brücke (I wrote at length about them here) and their (initially) optimistic quest to forge a new, forward-looking art which was distinctively German, drawing on native traditions (woodcuts, landscape etc), but also attempted to peel away the layers of staleness built up by decades, or even centuries of academicism, to reveal living art beneath. The art of Paula Modersohn-Becker, too, who was doing something similar in Worpeswede, is important to me too, but I also love the more anguished, personal kind of Expressionism that was reflected in the famous Expressionism of German silent cinema (see also Kirchner’s later works, and – not “German Expressionism” per se, but still German and expressionistic, early Dix and Grosz, Max Beckmann, Käthe Kollwitz).

So, even though Emil Nolde (1867-1956) is perhaps my least favourite of the major German Expressionist painters, and even though I had lots of qualms about it (see here), I was excited to see the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s exhibition Colour Is Life. And it really is good.

In comparison with the much younger artists of Die Brücke, which he joined for a year in 1906* Nolde’s art is just as vivid, but less vibrant (if that makes sense); his colours tend towards the bilious and acidic and his style, though ‘free’, often seems – even in landscapes – more frenzied and less harmonious than the works of the rest of the group. His deeply felt religious paintings, especially – and there is a really remarkable group of them in the exhibition – have an intense, anguished, alienated quality that is more like Munch atmospherically than it is his German contemporaries. It’s among his figurative (but not religious) works that my favourite painting of the exhibition, an enigmatic and slightly double portrait (that I can’t find online), which is smoother in surface texture than the religious pictures and imbued with an oddly menacing atmosphere.

*at which point Nolde was 39 and the group’s founders were in their early to mid twenties

I’m glad to say that although I felt like the information at the exhibition tended to downplay his vociferous Nazism a little, it at least acknowledged it – and although it is nowhere explicit in his art, there are some uncomfortably anti-Semitic-caricature-like faces in his paintings of people, including in some of the religious works. But whether I would think that if I didn’t know he was (extremely) anti-Semitic, I can’t say. Interestingly, for an exhibition called Colour Is Life, by far the most powerful works to me were Nolde’s woodcuts (including arguably his most famous work, The Prophet of 1912), where his compositions are remarkable for their economy and stark intensity.

Interestingly (perhaps not coincidentally?) the majority of Nolde’s most impressive work seems to have been done by the mid-1920s, but there is also a selection of his ‘unpainted pictures’ in the exhibition. These are little watercolours, incredibly vivid in their colours, which were made in secret during the period when his work was condemned/forbidden by the Nazi government which Nolde had, however, not only welcomed, but effectively campaigned for since the early 30s. Incidentally, around the time that Nolde was signing the Aufrufs der Kulturscha (1934) which supported Hitler as Fuhrer and joining the National Socialist Association of Northern Schleswig, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, one of the founders of Die Brücke, was writing “Here we have been hearing terrible rumours about torture of the Jews, but it’s all surely untrue…There is a war in the air. In the museums, the hard-won cultural achievements of the last 20 years are being destroyed, and yet the reason why we founded the Brücke was to encourage truly German art, made in Germany. And now it is supposed to be un-German. Dear God. It does upset me.”*

Head of a South Seas Islands woman (1914)

This was more than just the symptom of a generation gap between different artists; it’s at the heart of why Nolde’s art is, despite surface similarities, so different from that of the artists of Die Brücke; Expressionism is (obviously) about expressing; and yes, Kirchner and co expressed their anxieties, but their vision – at least at the time the group was at its most cohesive – was an optimistic one, accepting other influences as much as it rejected the status quo. To the 21st century, the way they were influenced by the art of other cultures, to simplify and brighten their own work can be uncomfortable; it has something of the ‘noble savage’ myth about it and their assumptions about the freedom and ‘naturalness’ of the tribal cultures whose work they studied in ethnographic museums were made from a viewpoint that now seems colonial and ignorant. But – the point of their own work is that it uses these forms and elements to describe something that is whole, natural and above all universal – the ‘otherness’ of the figures Nolde drew and painted on his trip to the South Seas (and even of his incredibly bold landscapes) just before WW1 is inescapable. His drawings of the people he encountered aren’t caricatures; they are brilliantly observed, but they are themselves ‘ethnographic’ in a way that Kirchner and co’s art strove not to be; Nolde is seeing and recording, not absorbing.

* Kirchner, quoted in Kirchner Museum Davos Biography Ernst Ludwig Kirchner by EW Kornfield, & CE Stauffer (1992)

Still; the Nazi government didn’t care about this distinction, and the exhibition text tells us that Nolde had more paintings shown in the condemnatory Entartete Kunst (‘degenerate art’) exhibition than any other artist, which would be a cause for some schadenfreude if not for the fact that, after petitioning the government (he was on civil if not familiar terms with charming people like Goebbels and Baldur von Schirach) he was informed in late 1941 that any work he undertook should be presented before government officials before any kind of public showing, which is of course harsh and limiting by any normal standards, but surprisingly mild compared to what they were doing to other artists. But, as Nolde must surely have realised, for all their cultural protectionism and promotion of what they considered to be artistically wholesome and correct ideas, the Nazis really weren’t interested in art as art at all.

Julie Wolfthorn – Witch of the Woods (1899)

For some not very pleasant perspective, since I can; Nolde was prevented from making a living from his art for a few years, and had works confiscated (which he did eventually get back however), meanwhile his contemporary, Julie Wolfthorn (only three years older than he was), whose figurative, traditional, slightly folkloric art has at least an equal right to be seen as definitively German (or, far more right, to the anti-modernist authorities of the time), was, as a Jew, too dangerous to exist, and was murdered in 1942, at the age of 78, by the regime which Nolde did his best to be accepted by.

So yes, a beautifully curated and mounted exhibition; but one which leaves a slightly bitter taste.

So, that’s what I paid to see (and it is absolutely worth the price of admission), but in fact the bitterness faded quickly; aside from owning a Kirchner painting that is for me everything that Nolde’s work isn’t, the National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two) hosts a permanent (and free) exhibition Surrealism and the Marvellous, which was already great, but has been enhanced hugely by the acquisition of Toyen’s superbly enigmatic The Message of the Forest (1939) and Leonora Carrington’s diminutive but haunting (and at the same time kind of funny) 1939 portrait of Max Ernst, Bird Superior (1939).

Leonora Carrington – Bird Superior (Portrait of Max Ernst), 1939

I could spend (and I think have spent) hours in this room; even longer now, as the archive adjoining it is hosting Club Dada: Berlin and Beyond, a really exciting collection of books, pamphlets, photos etc (and a small Max Ernst painting) that focuses mainly on Berlin Dada but also has some great items from the original Zurich group. Much as one wants to pore over these artefacts, I don’t even mind too much that the books etc are in glass cases since my German is minimal and I can’t read French at all.

Raqib Shaw – The Adoration (after Jan Gossaert), 2015/6 © the artist

Over in Modern One, I nearly didn’t look at the (also free) exhibition Raqib Shaw: Reinventing the Old Masters, partly because part of me doesn’t really want them to be reinvented, and because I didn’t know Shaw’s work, and also because it was up the stairs and I’d been walking around for hours. But I’m glad I did; what a fantastic show! I can’t imagine anyone not being impressed by Shaw’s work, even if it’s not their cup of tea. The paintings (too simple a description; his huge panels are painted in shimmering enamels, but embellished with a kind of cloisonné effect, incorporating jewels, glitter, all kinds of things) are brilliantly drawn and dazzling in their richness and detail (and a bit over the top, which is part of the charm). Although the compositions of the pictures in this exhibition are inspired by ‘old master’ paintings (one of which is one of my all-time favourite pictures, Lucas Cranach’s enigmatic Allegory of Melancholy (1528), displayed alongside Shaw’s painting), the familiarity only makes the extravagant fantasy of Shaw’s works all the more dreamlike and affecting.

Jan Gossart – The Adoration of the Kings (1510/15)

I think we (no, I don’t know who I mean by ‘we’) are used to seeing and accepting things like Biblical scenes or Greek myths presented through the filter of the Italian (or Northern) renaissance, and this is similar but different. With the old masters we (them again) see familiar (or what were once familiar) scenes presented in a kind of fancy dress of anachronistic costumes/settings etc which were initially intended to heighten the relatable-to realism of the works, but which now add another layer of meaning and cultural baggage. With Shaw’s work, the ghosts of both the original meaning and the original treatment are seen as if through the eyes of someone from another, much more effervescent dimension. The dislocating, hallucinatory blend of familiar (and it isn’t just the source material that’s familiar; Shaw’s use of dazzling, opulent colours and ornate textures is, despite the fantastical elements, quintessentially Indian, to my western eyes anyway) and strange is exhilarating and strangely poignant.* To take my favourite picture; neither Cranach’s or Shaw’s Allegory of Melancholy is sombre exactly; but despite the centuries and world views that separate them, the same delicately wistful atmosphere pervades both pictures. It’s an impressive exhibition.

So, the moral of this is; go to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh if you get the chance. Oh, and the National Gallery of non-modern art too – aside from having an incredible permanent collection, they currently have a Rembrandt – who doesn’t like Rembrandt? – exhibition and have put a fantastic Jenny Saville painting (Aleppo) among the old masters in a way that works amazingly well and was gathering crowds of (especially young) people when I was there.

*Perhaps an obscure (and certainly a geeky) comparison; looking at Raqib Shaw’s pictures reminded me of reading Brendan McCarthy & Pete Milligan’s similarly post modern/immersive/multicultural/hallucinogenic comic strip Rogan Gosh in the 2000AD spinoff Revolver.

Brendan McCarthy & Peter Milligan, Rogan Gosh (1990)

11 June 1936: The International Surrealist Exhibition

Sheila Legge, ‘the Surrealist Phantom’, photograph by Claude Cahun

Thursday, June 11^th, 1936. Ominous, disturbingly relatable context; one week earlier, Mussolini had authorised his troops to kill the prisoners they had taken in the war that followed Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. Shortly thereafter, Haile Selassie, Emperor in exile, would appeal to the League of Nations against the Fascists, but of the 57 member states, only a handful imposed sanctions against Italy. One of those was the Republic of Spain, which within a month would itself be shattered by civil war. Earlier that spring, Hitler had goose-stepped his troops into the Rhineland in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles. Even in London itself, the alarm caused by the organised marches of Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists, would, by the end of the year, result in the Public Order Act, banning the wearing of political uniforms in any public place.

On that Thursday though*, in Trafalgar Square on a hot, clammy morning, (June 1936 was notable for unsettled and unseasonal weather) a young woman with a head apparently made of flowers stood among the pigeons. A dreamlike, haunting, alarming and perhaps ridiculous figure for dreamlike, haunting, alarming but definitely ridiculous** times. Underneath the flowers and wedding dress was a human being, the artist and poet Sheila Legge, but on that day, in combination with that costume and a few accessories (a raw pork chop and/or just a prosthetic leg, depending which account you believe) she became ‘the surrealist phantom’*** and drew crowds to the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries.

* sadly, it was also the day that Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian committed suicide

**For the next few years, while the tension in UK and Europe inexorably rose, there was also a more than normal amount of reported paranormal activity, with both the International Institute for Psychical Research and its rival the Society for Psychical Research logging record numbers of hauntings and reports of poltergeist activity. Also, it’s worth remembering that in the 30s, Hitler had a ‘Charlie Chaplin moustache’, rather than the other way around

*** or rather, a surrealist phantom; also present, though not exhibiting in the show, was Claude Cahun, one of the most enigmatic figures of 20th century art, apparently taking photographs, one of which is presumably the image of Sheila Legge used above

The incongruity of the flower-headed apparition was an embodiment of the intention of the surrealist movement as initially laid out in 1924 by its founder, André Breton, who was master of ceremonies at the opening of the London exhibition:

“I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.”

Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), translated by Richard Seaver & Helen R Lane in Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor paperbacks, 972, p.14)

Yves Tanguy – I Am Waiting For You (1934)

For all of its apparent frivolity too, the flower-headed phantom was calculated to provoke a reaction beyond being simply an advertisement for an exhibition. Its irrational beauty, Arcimboldo-meets-Dalí, was manifestation as manifesto, remembering Breton’s railing against

“the hate of the marvellous which rages in certain men, this absurdity beneath which they try to bury it. Let us not mince words: the marvellous is always beautiful, anything marvellous is beautiful, in fact only the marvellous is beautiful”(ibid.)

The exhibition offered the public many different kinds of marvellous; there were over 400 exhibits – paintings, sculptures and‘surrealist objects’ as well as an array of ‘ethnographic’ items from diverse cultures around the world and ‘natural objects interpreted’. Around 60 artists were represented, including most of the ‘big names’ of European surrealism, alongside a range of less well-known, home grown British artists. It showed, too, that surrealism was always a broader church than its critics tended to give it credit for. In the exhibition, surrealism was less a style or set of styles (many of the artists represented were not necessarily surrealists per se) and more a way of seeing, or a way of being. This was embodied in artworks as diverse as Giorgio de Chirico’s ominous dreamscapes, Hans/Jean Arp’s evocative wood reliefs, Constantin Brâncuși’s Vorticist-influenced sculptures and a generous selection of Picassos, from cubist masterpieces to his latest works, alongside surrealist paintings that were already taking on an iconic aspect, by the group’s most prominent members and associates, including Dali, Max Ernst, Magritte, Miro and Klee.

Radically, the exhibition also included works by eleven female artists* – not a huge amount percentage-wise, but an extremely significant proportion by the standards of the time; and among that ten were some of the most important artists (of any gender) of the era.

* Eileen Agar, Jacqueline B., Leonor Fini, Dora Maar, Maruja Mallo, Meret Oppenheim, Grace Pailthorpe (hailed by Breton as ‘the best and most truly surrealist’ of British artists), Toyen, Sophie Taueber-Arp, Margaret Nash, Gala Dali, Sheila Legge

The exhibition was hugely successful, with over 25, 000 visitors attending during its month-long run, and it fulfilled what surrealism could be, both to its adherents and to its critics. It was profound, it was disturbing; it was also at times very silly. Notoriously, Dalí gave an inaudible speech while wearing a deep sea diving suit from which he had to be rescued, while Breton and Paul Éluard delivered more comprehensible lectures, volume-wise at least. In the original manifesto, Breton had written, “We really live by our fantasies when we give free rein to them” but that was in 1924; if surrealism had started out in part as an offshoot of Dada, a reaction to the horrors of World War One and a rejection of the rationalist values of the 19^th century that had led to it, the atmosphere of the 30s was (and was felt at the time to be) distinctively pre-war.

Pablo Picasso – Seated Woman in a Red Hat (1934)

Constantin Brâncuși – The Chimera (1918)

The official Surrealist Group of 1936 (that is, the main group among the many surrealist streams of 1936, as Breton’s regular fallings out with those close to him led to a series of splinter groups) was, explicitly, a political organisation. Some key original members, such as the ‘prophet of surrealism’ himself, Robert Desnos (of whom Breton said “Desnos speaks Surrealist at will”) were opposed to the aligning of the group with a left-wing political cause. Desnos’ fate – arrested by the Gestapo, sent to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald before finally dying in Terezin concentration camp of typhoid in 1945, however, showed that for those without the financial means of Breton and Dalí, politics could not be easily avoided. But more than that, the nature of surrealism itself was entirely incompatible with the totalitarianism that was marching across Europe:

“Among all the many misfortunes to which we are heir, it is only fair to admit that we are allowed the greatest degree of freedom of thought. It is up to us not to misuse it. To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery…is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be…” Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) p.4-5.

Reuben Mednikoff – The Stairway To Paradise (1936)

Dalí – perhaps not surprisingly, given his aristocratic background – was less comfortable than Breton was with the politics of the far left, but although often portrayed as a simple narcissist (wrong; he was not simple), he was very aware of the psychology underlying the ideological dogma that was overtaking Europe, arguing in 1935 that the moral hunger left by the weakening of state religion had led a people “systematically cretinized by machinism” and suffering from “ideological disorder” towards Hitler and his vision of the Third Reich. (actually what he said is far more Dalí-esque and funny; Hitler’s followers…

“seek in vain to bite into the senile and triumphant softness of the plump, atavistic, tender, militaristic, and territorial back of any Hitlerian nursemaid. [This]irrational hunger…is placed before a cultural dining table on which are found only . . . cold and insubstantial leftovers.” The Conquest of the Irrational, 1935)

the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition; Dali in diving suit

As was clear from the existence of the British Union of Fascists, Britain in 1936 was far from immune from ‘ideological disorder’ – but despite the fact that the BUF was entrenched enough in society to be running an annual summer camp at Bognor Regis(!), the ideology was not all on the right. Breton, although vehemently Marxist, was not entirely comfortable with the polarising climate of the era, as his speech, The Political Position of Today’s Art given to the “Leftist Front” in Prague in 1935 makes clear:

E.L.T. Mesens – Mask to be used for insulting Aesthetes (collage, 1929)

“These banners that have suddenly begun to flap over Europe, setting a common or social front, a single front or a red front over against a national front, the last battle formation of capitalism, are of a sort to imbue me more and more deeply with the idea that we live in an era in which man belongs to himself less than ever… [The Surrealists] find themselves in the face of a dilemma: either they must give up interpreting and expressing the world in the ways in which each of them finds the secret of within himself and himself alone – it is his very chance of enduring that is at stake – or they must give up collaborating on the practical plan of action for changing the world” April 1, 1935 Manifestoes of Surrealism, p.213

The same year however, perhaps more comfortable on his home turf in Paris, when speaking to the Congress of Writers, Breton made it clear that he intended to have his cake and eat it;

“Transform the world,” Marx said; “change life,” Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us.”

René Magritte – The Difficult Crossing (1926), shown in London

Considered leftist radicals by the right and as decadently bourgeois by the left, surrealism was caught between two ideologies that both managed to miss the entire point of the movement. This was not a ‘centrist’ organisation; it was radical, egalitarian and concerned above all with freedom, especially freedom of thought. Breton had written, “Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable.” (Manifesto of Surrealism p.9), but it was this ambiguity that troubled most of the opponents of Surrealism. The iconic Belgian surrealist René Magritte, who was represented by no less than 14 works in the exhibition, shared Breton’s sentiments;

“People who grasp for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image. No doubt they sense this mystery, but they wish to get rid of it. They are afraid. By asking ‘what does this mean?’ they express a wish that everything be understandable. But if one does not reject the mystery, one has quite a different response. One asks other things.” (Magritte, Suzi Gablik, Thames & Hudson 1970, p.11)

Leonor Fini with her painting ‘Game of Legs’ which was exhibited at the London show

In fact, for all his aristocratic bearing (a quirk of personality rather than a representation of his actual background), Breton, with his touchstones of Marx, Freud and Rimbaud, was less elitist than the pro-Stalin communist intelligentsia of the British art world could be. The main criticism of upper class critics like Anthony Blunt (who, significantly, was covertly working as a spy for Stalin’s USSR at the time) was that Surrealism had no clear message and would therefore be difficult for the proletariat to understand, championing instead ‘Socialist Realism’ as the preferred avant-garde art movement of the Communist Party.

This basic, patronising idea – ‘ordinary people won’t understand it’ – leaving aside the fact that it ignores Breton & Magritte’s deliberate ambivalence towards ‘understanding’ – was still at the heart of critical attitudes to surrealism as recently as Charles Harrison’s excellent English art and Modernism 1900-1939 (Yale University Press 1981). The division between the Surrealists (I really should decide when that word should and shouldn’t be capitalised) and the communist Artists’ International Association (AIA) is characterised by Harrison (p. 314-5) by the idea that the surrealists were reluctant to let go of the uniqueness of the artist and the artist’s vision. This idea presupposes that the ‘proletariat’ is a kind of homogeneous mob which doesn’t share the individual uniqueness of artists, which is obviously wrong. Breton, who was ultimately concerned with that uniqueness, never seems to have subscribed to the idea of the working class as an unthinking and simple-minded mass. Indeed, his lifelong aim was to make an artist or poet of everyone.

But the idea of surrealism as part controversialist nonsense, part artistic elitism persisted. Even Herbert Read – one of the pre-eminent art critics of the period, modernist and a Marxist – despite being involved in the staging of the exhibition itself – tended to evaluate surrealism negatively in the revolutionary scheme of things, compared to pure abstraction, saying :

[Surrealism is]“a negative art… a destructive art; it follows that it has only a temporary role” whereas abstract art “has a positive function. It keeps inviolate, until such time as society will once more be ready to make use of them, the universal qualities of art” Five On Revolutionary Art (1935, Artists’ International Association)

But in fact, Dalí in his 1929 Declaration had already pre-empted this criticism; “Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision” and arguably the idea of a rarefied ‘pure art’ which is somehow divisible from human nature and human experience is one of those shackles.

Paul Nash – Harbour and Room (1932-6), one of several outstanding works by British artists at the show

Despite the negativity of parts of the leftist establishment, Breton was keen to stress in his Prague address that fascism was the enemy of all progressive art;

“Hitler and his acolytes are, unfortunately, very well aware that it was necessary not only to persecute Marxists, but to forbid all avant-garde art in order to stifle leftist thought even for a short time” Manifestoes of Surrealism, p.233

Wilhelm Freddie with one of the artworks seized by customs on their way to the exhibition

Ironically, despite the controversy surrounding surrealism there was very little opposition to the London exhibition from the ‘establishment’ as such, aside from the seizure of some works by the Danish artist Wilhelm Freddie on pornography charges. And although the AIA were not especially supportive of surrealism in general (as Harrison points out, “many of the aspirations of the AIA members were kept alive by a roseate vision of the conditions of art – and life – in Stalinist Russia” English Art and Modernism, p.313), the differences between factions could be put aside when occasion demanded it. In November 1936, the Surrealists and the AIA together challenged the government’s position on the Spanish civil war in their Declaration on Spain by explicitly siding against the fascists. The two groups joined forces again in 1938 to exhibit Picasso’s Guernica in protest at events in Spain, significantly showing the painting not just in the New Burlington Galleries, but also in the Whitechapel Gallery in the heart of the working class East End. (Matthew Gale, Dada and Surrealism, Phaidon 1997, p.346-9)

Although largely male-dominated, the fact that the Surrealist group’s aims were to create a revolution in the mind/spirit before, or simultaneous with, a social revolution meant that whereas for groups like the Communist Party, equality of the sexes was something to think about after the revolution had been won (an attitude christened ‘brocialism’ by Sarah Ditum in an excellent recent article for The New European – issue #97, May 31 2018, p.19-21) ideas of gender and sex at both a conscious and subconscious level were central to the group’s work. This inevitably resulted in much objectification and a preoccupation with woman-as-muse, but Breton’s championing of female artists was rarely paternalistic, even if it was as otherworldly as all of his writing;

“The cry for freedom received an absolutely noble and authentic answer in the work of Toyen, work as luminous as her own heart yet streaked through by dark forebodings.” Surrealism and Painting, translated by Simon Watson Taylor, MacDonald & Co, 1972, p.210

The Czech artist Toyen (born Marie Čermínová) was represented in the London exhibition by two oil paintings and was definitive of the kind of artist drawn to the surrealist cause. Politically an anti-Stalinist communist, her work defies easy analysis, as did Toyen herself. Sometimes characterised by those who knew her as transgender, sometimes as an androgynous lesbian, sometimes as an almost femme-fatale-like heterosexual temptress (she could, pretentiously no doubt, be labelled sur-gender) her name, seemingly chosen for its non-gender specific quality – and the few photographs of her that exist, tend to encourage the mythologising of her rather than clarifying her true nature. And that is surely the point; had she wanted to be easily pigeonholed, she could have left something unambiguous behind.

Cecil Collins – Angel Images and Negative Spectres in Conflict (1933)

Browsing the catalogue of the Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, with its mixture of high art (oil paintings, sculpture), photographs, found objects and disconcerting titles is to look into the troubled heart and dreams of a profoundly troubled time. The general perception of surrealism may be of something self consciously ‘weird’ but even that shows that if surrealism is anything, it is profoundly human. The fact that the work of an artist as idiosyncratic as Toyen could be seen by 25,000 people in London at a time when totalitarianism closed down independent thought across Europe and beyond, demonstrates that, despite the disapproval of the champions of socialist realism, surrealism was as revolutionary – and as successful – an art movement as there has ever been. After all, if a revolution doesn’t allow people to express their essential person-hood then why bother to fight fascism at all?

These are things I read before writing this:

Karla Tonine Huebner – Eroticism, Identity and Cultural Context: Toyen and the Prague Avant-Garde (2008). I can’t recommend this highly enough, incredibly enlightening and fascinating and you can read it all here

Andre Breton – Manifestoes of Surrealism (translated by Richard Seaver & Helen R Lane, Ann Arbor paperbacks, 1972) Essential surrealist reading and fun, a lot of the time. I can never decide how much I like Breton, but when he’s good, he’s good

Matthew Gale – Dada and Surrealism (Phaidon, 1997) I think the best short overview of the two schools and their connections that I’ve read; he covers a lot of ground

Sarane Alexandrian – Surrealist Art (Thames & Hudson, 1970) A very personal look at the main surrealist movement by someone who was there for a lot of it. Alexandrian thinks quite deeply, but at the same time is absolutely Breton’s man, so some of the most interesting surrealists outside of the orbit of Paris don’t get much space

Jennifer Mundy (ed.) – Surrealism – Desire Unbound (Tate Publishing, 2001) One of the absolute best books on surrealism I’ve read; fantastic essays, brilliantly illustrated.

Arthur Cravan, Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma, Hacques Vaché – 4 Dada Suicides (trans. Terry Hale, Paul Lenti, Iain White, Atlas Anti-Classics, 2005) Has very little to do with the actual article above but it’s such an amazing book & does give some authentic background to the earliest days of surrealism

all of the pictures in this article (apart from the photo of Sheila Legge) were shown in the exhibition – as far as I can tell; the names of works in the catalogue aren’t always very reliable

The Dead Cannot Contradict: R.I.P. M.E.S. 1957 – 2018

There have been a lot of obituaries for the great Mark E. Smith in the last week. This will not be one of the better ones, but it is my one. In my experience, the bands you love in your teens are, although they have a special place in your memory, mostly not the same bands you listen to for the rest of your life (to date). But unlike most of my favourite artists from those long years between 16 and 20 or thereabouts, I never went off The Fall, I just didn’t listen to them very often. But whenever I did, they seemed just as strange and clever and funny and unique as they had the first time I heard them.

The Fall are legendarily supposed to be a hard band to like, or to get into, but I never found it to be so. The hard-to-like quality obviously has something to do with their spiky, unpredictable sound (and Mark E. Smith’s indomitable/hectoring voice) but is perhaps also due to the fact that – for the most part – their music doesn’t appeal to the emotions, it is not (hopefully) about you; nobody (as far as I know) wallows in The Fall, the way as an adolescent I wallowed in The Cure or The Smiths or the Cranes or whoever it might be. The first Fall song I heard was a snippet of then-current single ‘Telephone Thing‘ (a funky, catchy wah-wah-led pop song with a phone-tapping theme, which namechecks EastEnders actress Gretchen Franklin – i.e. as typically atypical as any Fall single) on The Chart Show, which was enough to make me buy its parent album, Extricate. As a reader of the music weeklies (Melody Maker was my favourite, but I often bought NME and Sounds as well) I was of course aware of The Fall, and specifically Mark E. Smith, at that point – as he was to remain – a figure who polarised the magazines’ writers, while – unlike say Morrissey or Robert Smith – having the (admittedly sometimes grudging) respect, seemingly, of all of them.

Extricate is in itself a classic Fall album, but it was intriguing in all kinds of ways. I liked. firstly, the tunes, but also the the mix of the un-selfconscious artiness of the abstract cover painting/assemblage by contemporary artist Anthony Frost, with the barbed humour of the lyrics (the album contains the classic ‘British People In Hot Weather‘as well as the aforementioned ‘Telephone Thing‘ and (I have the cassette version) ‘Arms Control Poseur‘). But one of the great things about coming to this – or I think any – Fall album as an introduction to the band, is that it hints at so much more than it contains. This, the reviews said, was an unusually accessible/conventional Fall album and indeed, Mark E. Smith’s sleevenote reinforced that impression:

There is no central track, as I’ve/we’ve tried to give out The Fall as it should be and not as it is perceived. Therefore, the first half of the disc reflects on things witnessed and/or sensed, while the second half is NOW. This means there’s a thin dish-up of stories and characters etc, but that format’s well flogged and pushed of recent, so hopefully EXTRICATE’s simplicity will confound all bores, imitators and anxiety mongers./ EXTRICATE! All the best from M.E.S.

This was odd. Mark E. Smith reminded me of nothing so much as Alex from A Clockwork Orange; sophisticated, articulate, menacing but not unfriendly. A few years later, when I began to read Wyndham Lewis I was reminded irresistibly of Mark E. Smith. And indeed the whole of The Fall’s early work is extremely Vorticist/BLAST-like. I didn’t know though until quite recently that Mark E. Smith was a fellow Wyndham Lewis fan (though I think MES often agreed with Lewis where I don’t) – it seems so obvious now. And the reference to stories and characters was intriguing; if this was The Fall gone normal then what did they sound like before?? I think the next album I bought might have been the essential compilation of early material Palace Of Swords Reversed; here were ‘Marquis Cha-Cha‘, a story about a Lord Haw Haw character stranded in South America which opens

“He can never go home
Stranded in South America, nothing to go home for
Just another Brit in the bar
Hernandez Fiendish comes over to me
Offers a job as broadcaster…”

who else was writing songs like that? Or ‘Leave The Capitol‘ (“exit this Roman shell!“) or, even more peculiarly, ‘Wings‘:

“Day by day
The moon gains on me
Purchased pair of flabby wings
I took to doing some hovering”

And that’s just the lyrics; another thing about The Fall that made an impression on me early on was that, although MES was incredibly fussy and perfectionist about the band’s music, he wasn’t snobbish in the usual way; no tune, if it was catchy, was too silly for Mark E. Smith. Think of the speedy but somehow miniature-sounding rock guitar on ‘Underground Medicine‘ or loping, bouncy beat to ‘Gramme Friday‘ or the oddly jaunty, countryish ‘Fit And Working Again‘. or the kazoo on ‘The North Will Rise Again‘– this was ‘angular’ (the definitive descriptive term for late 70s/early 80s UK indie rock) if you like, but it was not standard ‘post-punk’ music, nor was it (as it could easily have been) twee in that beloved ramshackle UK indie/C86 kind of way. Perhaps because Mark E. Smith was not (99% of the time) a melodic singer, the band could play anything behind him and it sounded right. When, at the beginning of one of my favourite songs, ‘Slates‘, MES shouts ‘this is the definitive rant‘ he’s nailing part of the charm of his work. As long as the rant was in place, no tune was too small, too jingly or too silly to make something worthwhile out of.

After Palace Of Swords Reversed I bought anything I could get my hands on. Luckily there was a lot of it, and it was mostly pretty affordable, especially the stuff from the band’s then slightly maligned, now justly celebrated mid-80s period of relative commercial success. In itself, that success was odd and underlined just how unique the band, and specifically Smith’s vision, was. I loved that Mark E. Smith saw nothing elitist or strange about working with a ballet company, or in writing for the theatre and working with ‘serious’ artists and yet the people I knew who derided Morrissey as being “poncy” never seemed to think that about MES. The fact that he refused to separate the ‘high’ arts from his work with The Fall was so powerful. Everyone knows, for example, that Brian May is an astrophysicist, but imagine if astrophysics had somehow been indivisible from his work with Queen; they would have been far a more peculiar and far less successful, but also (with no offence intended to the band or its members) probably more interesting band.

Although most of my favourite Fall albums are the early ones (especially Dragnet, Grotesque (After The Gramme) and Hex Enduction Hour) those 80s albums with the Mark and Brix-led lineup(s), especially The Wonderful and Frightening World Of The Fall are pretty unassailable and perhaps the least overtly commercial ‘commercial’ period of any band I can think of. The band stayed good though, and although I am not a Fall completist (a vocation rather than a hobby) I’ve found that any Fall record one picks up will have something great on it; and there aren’t many bands with a 40 year career you can say that about.

A few random but significant (to me) Mark E. Smith/Fall things:

my favourite Fall release of them all is Slates (1981); typically awkward, it is a brilliantly ungainly 6-track 10″ which Mark E. Smith was proud of as it was too long to qualify for the singles chart but too short for the album chart; not that it was likely to trouble either one. Plus, it opens with MES shouting “Pink press threat!
I must be impressionable; I think I got into Albert Camus because The Fall were named after one of his books.
I don’t remember which music paper it was in, but Mark E. Smith was a guest reviewer in one of the weeklies c.1992 and gave Morrissey’s Your Arsenal a surprisingly positive(ish) review. One phrase that stuck in my memory (perhaps incorrectly) and seems definitively MES-ish to me is “the guitar player has too much equipment”
When I first read (in the late 90s?) Christopher Isherwood’s autobiographical novel Lions And Shadows (1938) the idea of ‘The Other Town’, the sinister unseen parallel reality accessed through various apparently ordinary gates and doorways in Cambridge reminded me irresistibly of the band, especially the bizarre, creepy but also funny narrative songs like the (actually quite Lovecraftian) ‘Impression Of J. Temperance’ :

“A never seen dog breeder
This is the tale of his replica
Name was J. Temperance
Only two did not hate him
Because peasants fear local indifference
Pet shop and the vet, Cameron…”

when I finally listened to the classic German band Can it was because the Fall song ‘I Am Damo Suzuki‘ made me curious about them
one of the key things about The Fall’s music is its palate-cleansing quality; their music makes almost any other comparable popular music sound sentimental in comparison. And yet on the rare occasions (‘Bill Is Dead‘, ‘Edinburgh Man‘) when MES is sentimental the songs are among his best.
‘Edinburgh Man‘ was probably the first song I heard by a band I liked that was about a place I knew
I have been a Fall fan for half of my life, but I’ve only met maybe 4 or 5 other people who like them (though I realise they are quite popular)
I never particularly wanted to meet Mark E. Smith, but I’m very sad that he’s dead.

PS – the title for this piece is from an enigmatic line in the – obviously – highly peculiar song New Face In Hell:
The dead cannot contradict/Sometimes the living cannot

the vanishing everything of everywhere – elegies and illusions

“Time, time, time, see what’s become of me…” When The Bangles covered Simon & Garfunkel’s A Hazy Shade of Winter in 1987, the song was 21 years and one month old, and now (January 2018) The Bangles’ version (from the underrated – according to me – movie of Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero) is 30 years and one month old; time flies, another year draws to an end etc etc etc. It took until the early 1990s for 60s nostalgia to really take hold and, true to form 30 years on from the 1980s, 80s nostalgia is everywhere; in music, in fashion and (especially) in film and television. Even the tired, terrifying old tropes of the cold war are back; excellent stuff.

It’s approximately 90 years since HP Lovecraft wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown.” (in the essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1926-7)), and it’s got to be something like 25 years or so since I first read those words (in the HP Lovecraft Omnibus Vol 2, Dagon and other Macabre Tales, Grafton Books, 1985, p.423 ). So what about it?

Lovecraft might well be right about fear; but more pertinent to my intro is that possibly the oldest emotion preserved in literature – at least (major, major caveat, based on my ignorance) in the literature of Europe – is nostalgia, and the feeling that things were better in the past. (see also here for an excellent & thoughtful look at nostalgia) The literature of the ancient Greeks makes clear that the age of heroes already lay in the distant past. The pride and arrogance of Imperial Rome was tempered – formally, at least – by the belief that it was a pale imitation of the Republic which the Empire supplanted. The earliest literature in (old) English makes it clear that the inhabitants of what was one day to become England were a) not entirely sure of what had come before, but b) knew that it was in many ways ‘better’ and certainly more impressive than the present day of the 8th century:

“The work of the Giants, the stonesmiths,/ mouldereth…
And the wielders and wrights?/Earthgrip holds them – gone, long gone”

The Ruin, (Translated by Michael Alexander, The Earliest English Poems, Penguin Classics (3rd edition, 1991, p. 2)

Even closer to home (for me), the earliest literature of Scotland, the Goddodin of the poet Aneirin, does something similar. The poem dates from somewhere from the 7th to 10th century and is written in the ancient British language now called Old Welsh (which it is of course, but it is also, geographically, old English and old Scots, since it seems to have been spoken in a far wider area than modern Wales). The Goddodin is a series of elegies mourning the loss of the warriors of the eponymous ancient kingdom (which spread roughly over what are now the modern Scottish regions of Lothian and Borders) in battle, and with them the heroic culture of their era.*

*a perennial theme that crops up in a very similar form in the Fortinbras subplot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, preserved at one remove from the earliest known version of the story, Saxo Grammaticus’ elemental/mythological 13th century version from his Gesta Danorum. But even this is assumed to be derived from an earlier, lost source, probably Icelandic.

To say that nostalgia as opposed to fear may be mankind’s oldest emotion is problematic. Logically it’s difficult (chicken/egg innit), but also, for all of its obvious dominant ingredients – sadness/regret and happiness – a large component of nostalgia can be fear, and, specifically, Lovecraft’s ‘fear of the unknown’ (in this case the always unknowable future). That’s problematic for many reasons. In the examples of nostalgia noted above, the glamour (not intended to have its old, magical meaning, but actually that’s probably even more appropriate) attached to the past is partly because it can’t come again. If the people of “now” were as noble, heroic etc as the people of “then”, then somehow the past and the ancestors – a vital component of the values of most non-Christian and pre-Christian cultures – are devalued and not receiving their due reverence.

Although it seems almost incomprehensible to someone of my generation, there seems to be a similar, ‘don’t disrespect the ancestors’ unease nowadays in some circles that’s manifested in an unwillingness to condemn wholesale the expansion/existence of the British Empire. And really, it’s not very complicated – it is entirely possible to be impressed by and/or grateful for the innovations of the Victorian era – flushing toilets, railways and whatnot – while also seeing the culture and times for what they were; repressive, oppressive, misogynistic, racist, ignorant. It shouldn’t be difficult, because it’s happened before. Christianity made it easy for previous ages to condemn the pagan empires of Rome, Greece, Egypt and co (and indeed the ancient Arabic civilisations) without abandoning the inventions and innovations of those same ‘decadent’ civilisations. Indeed, even at the height of Christian belief in Europe, interest in the cultures of the pagan empires remained high, even if Christian scholars felt the need to inflict a version of their own value system onto their researches. There’s no reason that people now shouldn’t be able to do the same with the ages we have left behind, or are hopefully in the process of leaving behind. Yes, good things come from bad cultures or societies, but not because of the bad, but just because (most) human beings are extraordinary.

In 2017 there seemed to be – as I suppose there always must be – an ever-increasing number of warring nostalgias and counter-nostalgias, the latest being for the Russian Revolution in 1917 – a violent event, with vast and oppressive consequences and therefore definitely negative, but like most revolutions, born of aspirations and ideals which are hard to dismiss. In fact, Dickens’ famous opening to A Tale Of Two Cities seems uncannily prophetic, because Dickens – as he explicitly realised – could see that human nature and human actions remain fairly constant:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only”

I think it’s probably true that it’s always the best of times, for somebody, in some respect. It’s certainly always the worst of times for other people; which sounds complacent or at least fatalistic, but only if one doesn’t try in some way to improve things. This kind of impersonal nostalgia – for ‘better’ times – is, necessarily selective. (in fact, all nostalgia is, because perception is selective – hmm, it seems like this just started copying the thing about realism I wrote recently, but bear with me) and relies to a large degree on ignorance and/or self-deception in order to be nostalgia at all.

History isn’t really a subject, history is everything; people, peoples, cultures, societies, but, necessarily “history” as it’s taught, or absorbed through popular culture, filters and simplifies. That’s important, because when people in Britain talk nostalgically about ‘Victorian values’ you can (usually) assume that they don’t intend any reference to the exploitation and subjugation of untold millions of people, child prostitution and child labour, the life expectancy of the average Victorian person etc. And, as always, history is more complex than its popular image. The Victorian era may be symbolised for British people by the building of railways or the expansion of the Empire, or by Jack the Ripper, or Queen Victoria being unamused, or by the establishment’s treatment of Oscar Wilde; but it was also the era that produced and shaped Jack the Ripper, Queen Victoria and of course, Wilde himself, as well as the whole decadent movement. Interestingly, Sigmund Freud was only two years younger than Wilde; an apparently value-free but perhaps significant observation.

This kind of complexity is what makes history more interesting than it’s sometimes given credit for. The Scottish Enlightenment was a wonderful, positive, outward-looking movement, but it coexisted in Scotland with a joyless, moralising and oppressive Calvinist culture. Time and nostalgia have a way of homogenising peoples and cultures. The popular idea of ancient Rome is probably one of conquest, grandeur and decadence, but what is the popular idea, if there is one, of ‘an ancient Roman’? Someone, probably a man, probably from Italy, in a toga or armour; quite likely an emperor, a soldier or a gladiator, rather than say, a merchant, clerk or farmer. But even within this fairly narrow image, a complex figure like the emperor Elagabalus (who was Syrian, teenage, possibly transgender) defeats the obvious school textbook perceptions of ‘Roman-ness’ (as, perhaps, it did for the Romans themselves). Even in our own time, the fact that older generations from the 60s/70s to the present could lament the passing of times when ‘men were men & women were women’ etc is – to say the least – extremely disingenuous. Presumably what they mean is a time when non-‘manly’ men could be openly discriminated against and/or abused and women could be expected to be quiet and submissive.

Similarly, throughout my life I have heard people – and not only right-wing people – talk about the economic success that Hitler brought to Germany. But you don’t have to be the chairperson of a financial think-tank to see that a programme of accelerated militarism that requires war in order to function isn’t really a viable economic model for anyone who doesn’t espouse the ideology of Nazism or at least some kind of Imperial expansionism. But people seemingly want to believe that if it wasn’t for all those pesky Nazi faults Hitler could have been a great leader. He couldn’t, though, because he was a real person, his beliefs were inseparable from everything he did and he really did exist and do the things he did and therefore wasn’t a great leader.

As I’ve said too many times already, history is complex, but nostalgia is too. It’s impossible to express in a single word other than itself, though interestingly, its original Greek meaning (‘homecoming pain’) is actually more specific than the word itself has come to be in English. Possibly because of this hard-to-express quality, most European languages tend to use variations of the word ‘nostalgia’ rather than having a word of their own with the same meaning. But despite that complexity, it tends to have a simplifying quality.

The reason for that simplifying is because, for many people, nostalgia equals safety. Political reactionaries always look to the past for examples of stability and they’ll always find them – but that stability is an illusion, caused by the fact that the past itself is stable, but only in the one sense of being unchangeable. And until the invention of the time machine it will remain unchangeable – but even so, through endless re-interpretations, re-evaluations and new points of view, the picture we have of it fluctuates almost daily. I think it’s fair to assume that (as Dickens implied) every ‘golden age’ masks a dark age but the temptation to look at the past fondly is hard to resist. It often seems otherwise, but people are, by and large fairly positive and want to look back with fondness, even if it’s a melancholy fondness. And the result of that is a softening and distancing of the darker aspects of history. A quote from the great Scottish singer/songwriter Alex Harvey strips away the soft-focus effect that the distorting lens of nostalgia puts on the past:

“Nobody ever won a war. A hundred thousand dead at Waterloo. No glory in that. Nobody needs that.” (quoted in Charles Shaar Murray’s Shots From The Hip, Penguin Books, 1991, p.71)

Numbers aside, that seems indisputably true; but evidently it isn’t, because people are entirely capable of being nostalgic about almost any negative event. ‘The Blitz Spirit’ is remembered fondly in Britain, because the few people still alive who remember it survived it, and because it happened decades ago and bombs are no longer raining down on the UK. Cinema and television is full of nostalgia for even the darkest times, largely because people are supposed to be entertained by these things and structures, stories and likeable characters are imposed on the past to make it controllable and enjoyable. And that’s just as true for the harrowing ‘war is hell’ type of film as it was for The Dirty Dozen and just as true of the revisionist ‘elegiac’ Western as for the old John Wayne kind. The revisionist Westerns tend to focus on the dying days of the ‘old West’ in grimly realistic detail, but while barely acknowledging the genocide and horror that is the real historical backdrop of the period. In a way, that’s fair enough – those stories are not about that subject – but when there are not only no (or very few) films about that subject, and it is barely even acknowledged by ‘official’ narratives of taught history, it’s a stark and telling omission.

It’s my personal feeling that nothing truly good is produced by adversity, or at least that if it is, that doesn’t offset what may have been lost. Which isn’t to deny that people are amazing, resourceful, resilient and inspiring; they are. If every golden age masks a dark age, it’s probably true too that every dark age is shot through with some elements of positivity, although I won’t scrutinise that statement too closely. Countries which were colonised by the British Empire (or indeed any empire) manage to grow and assert their independence and define their own cultures, which is good; but we can never know what or who was lost when their histories were derailed.

I love blues music (and indeed the whole phenomenon of western popular music which mostly grew from it), but again; we can never know what would have been, or what would exist now, had those creative energies not been re-directed by a couple of hundred years of slavery and exploitation. Individuals are capable of achieving almost superhuman feats of bravery and resourcefulness when facing adversity; escaping from abusers and kidnappers, rescuing people from disasters etc. But no-one in their right mind would – I hope – recommend that young people undergo these kinds of ordeals in order to fully achieve their potential.

I don’t think it’s particularly useful for individuals (although governments and institutions are a very different thing) to feel guilty about the deeds of the people of the past (or to be proud of the achievements of the past, really), but I also see no need to pretend that – for example – because India has a big railway network, the British Empire did something positive by oppressing the country’s people and culture and stealing its resources. Countries that weren’t colonised by the UK or Belgium or France or Russia have railways too. Nothing good came of the British in India. India survived anyway, just as people survive catastrophes everywhere and achieve amazing things in doing so. But you don’t celebrate an earthquake because people survive it and thrive afterwards.

So much for impersonal nostalgia – the personal kind is in many ways very similar, if less destructive. I’ve always been a nostalgic person; both for things I don’t remember, or that were long before ‘my time’ (you name it; silent movies, the 1960s, the Weimar Republic, Hong Kong cinema of the 70s, the Northern Renaissance, the Scottish Enlightenment, 80s teen movies) and, more naturally perhaps, for things within own experience. One of the things that initially made me write this was a reference in Anthony DeCurtis’ biography Lou Reed – A Life (John Murray, 2017)* about Reed’s 70s partner/muse Rachel, a fascinating figure who seems to have vanished into history. In Googling her I discovered various sites about vanishing/vanished aspects of New York and, because old photographs are endlessly fascinating, somehow segued from that to the vanished Jewish East End of London and the vanished and vanishing everything of everywhere. But if the Jewish East London of the 1960s and the underbelly of 70s New York are irretrievable, then so is one’s own childhood, not that one wants to retrieve it, exactly.

* It’s an excellent book, but one which illustrates some of my points; Lou Reed spent most of his adult life complaining about his conservative 1950s childhood, but DeCurtis himself has a more rose-tinted view of the period, saying “In stark contrast to the identity politics of today, assimilation was the order of the day…and none of Reed’s friends, Jewish or not, recall incidents of anti-Semitism or bias” (p.14) – fair enough you would think, except that just 22 pages later he also says, ‘Richard Mishkin was a fraternity brother of Allan Hyman’s in Sigma Alpha Mu, a so-called Jewish fraternity because at the time Jews were not permitted in many other fraternities.” (p.36)

Most of the polaroids etc that make up the ever-browsable (later note; but sadly diminished) Internet K-hole appear to be American, but any child of the 80s will recognise the texture and aura of the era we grew up in. When George Orwell wrote (I think in The Lion and the Unicorn, but I might be wrong; I’ll check) – “What have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person” he was putting his finger on one of the strange paradoxes of culture, heritage and nostalgia. The memories I have of the 1980s are made up of a distorted, child’s-eye view of events and culture which is truly mine, plus things I know now that I didn’t know then, plus other peoples’ memories, TV and films. The most potent sources of nostalgia seem to be – as the makers of shows like Stranger Things and Dark, and films like Super 8 and (too many to list) are very aware – the things you didn’t notice that you had noticed, the most ephemeral details; jingles from adverts, fonts, packaging, slang.

It’s an interesting point. The fleetingness with which you experience things has nothing to do with their power as memories. I have no idea what the first horror film I saw was, but I do know that a scene on some TV show where skinheads (or possibly a single skinhead) glued a man’s hands to the wall of a lift/elevator scared me as a child and stayed with me for a long time. Maybe that was because I used to see skinheads around on the streets (you had to watch the colour of the laces in their Doc Martens to see if they were ‘bad’ skinheads or not – though they were probably kids too, I now realise). I also know now (but didn’t then) that these were the second wave of skinheads, which is why I also saw Oi! written on various walls around the town; at the time I don’t think I ever made the connection. Again, when one thinks of the impact of very small occurrences it shows how impossible a really objective view of history is. I no longer bear any high school grudges, but without really thinking about it, there are many small and/or random sneers and insults from my youth that have stayed with me in vivid detail, along with the people and places involved. Similarly (but nicer) I will eternally feel grateful to two beautiful black girls in Camden in (I think) 1990 or 91 who made remarks to me which, even at the time were ‘not politically correct’ but which pleased me immensely; it is among the very few teenage memories that boosted rather than eroded my confidence. A tiny thing, barely even an ‘incident’, but a big deal to a painfully shy adolescent. What to make of such a minor, slightly embarrassing episode? I can still vividly remember – although it was not a rarity – my whole face burning when I blushed. People often remarked on the redness of my blushes and I remember – not even slightly nostalgically – being compared to a tomato, being told I looked like I would ‘burst’ etc at high school. And thinking about it, there’s no real conclusions to draw from that memory except that real nostalgia, unlike the nostalgia industry (“it was the 70s: Buckaroo!“, to quote Alan Partridge) is particular, not general. The Camden episode includes references to youth, gender, race etc, but it has nothing important to do with any those factors and I doubt if the two girls remembered it even days later. These are not the kinds of incidents which are worthy of a biographer’s attention; but they define my youth every bit as much as the music I listened to, the sweets I remember that no longer exist, or the clothes I wore.

My particular 80s nostalgia has less to do with “the 80s” in the sense it that it appears in TV shows and films as it does a litany of gloomy-sounding things: the urban decay of 60s and 70s council estates, indoor markets, army stores, arcades, brutalist churches that harmonised with those reinforced concrete towers that the fire brigade used for practise. This is a kind of eeriness as nostalgia; reflected in my liking for empty streets and art that represents empty streets: Algernon Newton, Maurice Utrillo, Takanori Oguiss , the photography of Masataka Nakano and taken to its extreme, Giorgio de Chirico, where the emptiness isn’t truly vacant so much as it is pregnant , reminding me always of – nostalgia again – the ruined city of Charn in CS Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew (by far my favourite Narnia book) – which made a huge impression on me as a child. Charn may even be where my liking for such things as ‘urbex’ photography, like that of Andre Govia, and of course, The Ruin, quoted way back in the first paragraph, comes from.

“The passing of time and all of its crimes, is making me sad again” – sadly, one of those crimes is that when I first heard that line (from Rubber Ring by The Smiths) in 1989 or thereabouts, Morrissey seemed to be on the side of the downtrodden and marginalised, whereas now he seems to be one of that increasing number of people who pretends that the mainstream of British culture is itself somehow being marginalised; which is not only patently ridiculous but impossible – and nostalgic, of course.

There’s a whole culture industry with its own cultural shorthand that has been constructed to bolster the standardised view of any given period. Nowadays, there’s whole genre of TV shows where any decade can be summed up by some B-list cultural commentator or celebrity (often not old enough to remember what they are “remembering”) saying “He/she/it were mad, weren’t they?” about some figurehead of the era. Not so great of course, when that figurehead turns out to be Jimmy Savile or Rolf Harris, at which point even nostalgia, like history, has to be revised.

The beauty of all nostalgia is that it’s selective. The 70s that Morrissey seems to feel nostalgic about (in the true, mixed feelings sense; witness the whole of Viva Hate, which I love) wasn’t ‘better’ than nowadays, but the writer of its songs was young then; he isn’t now. There are younger people who are also nostalgic about the 70s, or the 80s, because they see the partial versions of those era(s) preserved by those who were there then, or who pretend to have been. The people who mourn the loss of the blitz spirit are really no different from me wishing I’d seen the Beatles. The people who are nostalgic for the Empire will (hopefully) never have to deal with being in charge of a mass of powerless, subject people whose resources they are stealing (or be the subject of the same), but they can enjoy the things that Empire brought to all of our lives. The ‘glory’ of Empire, like the mythical ages of Greece and Rome, and the giants that the Anglo-Saxon poet pondered over, only exists now as the faded, distorted memory of a faded, distorted memory. Like the 70s, like the 80s, like the 2010s, like yesterday, they are wonderful and terrible because they can never come again.

Happy New Year!

A note on the text above: throughout this article (and many others) I refer to ‘people’ and ‘humankind’ in what is intended to be an inclusive kind of way, referring to people of all races, genders or indeed lack of gender. I probably also refer to gender in a binary sense, partly due to context, partly no doubt through laziness. However, I do have a tendency to not use the term ‘cis’, unless absolutely necessary – for me personally, the word ‘women’ includes trans women and the word men includes trans men. I don’t intend any offence by this, but I also don’t really mind if anyone is offended. I think it’s a shame that something as basic (if not simple) as a person’s gender should be a matter of opinion, but so it seems to be. My own view is that the contents of someone’s underwear is none of my business unless they explicitly make it so.

Review of the Year – the paradox of realism

2017, like most years but somehow more so, was filled with unpleasant things, events and people. For me though, one of the more pleasant features of the year was that I made the effort to visit art galleries more often than previously, in particular to see the superb exhibitions held by the National Galleries of Scotland; after missing Modern Scottish Women in 2016, I was determined to see Beyond Caravaggio at the National Gallery and especially True to Life – British Realist Painting in the 1920s and 1930s at the National Gallery of Modern Art. Both of these exhibitions were excellent, but I am writing mainly about the latter. As curator Patrick Elliott was clearly aware (see also the essay What Sort Of Truth? British Painting Between The Wars by Sacha Llewellyn in the excellent exhibition catalogue), ‘realism’ is not a simple thing to define, and indeed it seems strange that (for example) the peculiar and highly artificial painting of Maxwell Armfield and the shockingly immediate work of David Jagger should be considered the same kind of art.

‘Pacific Portrait’ (1929) by Maxwell Armfield (left) and ‘The Conscientious Objector’ (1917) by David Jagger (right)

If ‘Realist’ at first seems a pretty simple and unambiguous description, the fact that many of the artists (Dod Procter, Meredith Frampton, Gluck, Glyn Philpott) and paintings discussed in the exhibition catalogue also appear, equally convincingly, in Edward Lucie-Smith’s book Art Deco Painting (Phaidon, 1990) demonstrates just what a subjective term it really is. What the word seems to denote in the context of this exhibition is something like ‘representational rather than abstract’, which admittedly is an extremely unwieldy and far too wide term.

In the period in which the art of the exhibition was produced (the title says the 1920s and 1930s, but a few earlier and later works were included, so roughly from the years of World War One up to the first half of World War Two), the word realism tended to have mainly negative connotations; for which see Billy Bunter author Frank Richards’ famous 1940 reply to George Orwell’s article Boys’ Weeklies; “They go grubbing in the sewers for their realism, and refuse to believe in the grass and flowers above ground – which nevertheless, are equally real!” This was and still is an aspect of a wider conception of realism that Orwell himself attacked occasionally in its more extreme political forms. Today, ‘realpolitik’ is used as a term of criticism, but in fact almost all political or social ‘realism’, even when respectable, is basically an excuse for people or governments not to act compassionately when it becomes unprofitable to do so. People who term themselves realists rather than optimists or pessimists tend (in my experience) to lean more towards the latter, but with an added smug quality as befits someone who is never surprised when bad things happen. While the artists of True To Life presumably held beliefs and opinions on a wide range of issues, these are by and large absent from their work as collected here. This is not the 1920s of the General Strike or the 30s of the Depression and The Road To Wigan Pier, let alone the 20s and 30s of Lenin, Mussolini and HItler, or perhaps more to the point, of Picasso, Matisse, or Dadaists and Surrealists.

Edward McKnight Kauffer – poster for the London Underground (1930)

Nevertheless, from the delicate figure studies of Dod Procter to James Cowie’s pastoral portraits, it is a window onto certain aspects of British art and life between the wars. Also, the painters’ rejection of the vocabulary of avant garde modernism should be seen in the context of the time; while abstract or semi-abstract art had been at the cutting edge of modernism in the years just prior to and during World War One, not only had the innovators of that era moved on (why not look at my article about Wyndham Lewis in the 20s here?), but the angular, dynamic language of modernism had infiltrated mainstream culture to the point that institutions as staid as the Royal Mail were using designers like John Armstrong and Pat Keely to give the Post Office a modern identity, while Edward McKnight Kauffer and others did similar work for the London Underground and, outside of the UK, fascist Italy, Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union all utilised versions of modernist design to establish new national identities. In that sense, the idiosyncratic, apparently old-fashioned and above all individualistic styles adopted by British artists outside of the more radical movements can be seen as, if not revolutionary, then at least stubbornly dedicated to their own visions.

Although it may seem paradoxical or incompatible, the ‘realism’ of these artists is founded to some extent on escapism and idealism; but maybe that is truer of realism in a wider sense than at first seems to be the case. The definitive artistic form of realism (if we think of everyday life as ‘real’ – but I don’t really want to get into philosophical questions here as I’d like to finish this article at some point) nowadays is probably something like instagram, or on a slightly grander level, the documentary film, but the very nature of documenting reality – whether in film, photographs, painting or in writing – is necessarily selective, and in being so, tends towards some kind of commentary (and/or judgement) on its subject. One of the nice things about the True To Life exhibition was that both the grime-and-hardship/warts-and-all and the grass-and-flowers aspects of realism were represented – albeit mostly in a perhaps fairly superficial way. There was very little evidence of the documentary as protest – perhaps because, by the end of WW1, photography had become the obvious tool for this kind of work. That said, social commentary of a sort was present in Thomas Nash & Stanley Spencer’s idiosyncratic recasting of some of the Renaissance’s favourite religious scenes such as the Crucifixion & the Last Judgement in ‘modern dress’ and modern settings (and slightly generic ‘modernist’ styles). This use of realism was not uninventive, but was in essence just another way of looking back at the ‘old masters’; revisiting the groundbreaking realism pioneered in the 14th century. More interesting, (to me) was John Luke’s strange 1929 modern-dress version of one of the baroque era’s favourite Old Testament scenes, Judith and Holofernes, in which the story of the beheading of an Assyrian general is made even more unsettling by having a strangely surreal Agatha Christie/Enid Blyton aura.

Much as in Edward Lucie-Smith’s Art Deco Painting, the unifying factor in the exhibition’s disparate works was less a matter of style/school or subject than it was atmosphere; the paintings, as different as they are, belong definitively to the period between the wars, in much the same way as the very different works of Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Isherwood did (according to me, here).

If the term ‘realist’ in painting suggests the artist as eye (kind of an analog to (again) Christopher Isherwood’s fictionalised realism; “I am a camera”), the eye of the artist/writer is necessarily as individual as the brain it is connected to. For example, one might assume that realism and idealism were opposites, but there is a strong classicising element among some of the artists in the exhibition – but even then, individual artists seem to have reached a kind of classical serenity and monumentality via different routes.

Meredith Frampton – Sir Charles Grant Robertson (1941)

One of the stars of the exhibition for me was the portrait painter (George Vernon) Meredith Frampton (1894-1984). Frampton’s art was in some ways the most ‘realistic’ art in the exhibition, in the sense of being (by far) the most illusionistic and quasi-photographic. In a way, portraits like the stunning Sir Charles Grant Robertson (1941) are less ‘realist’ than than they are ‘corporealist’ – their accumulation of painstakingly rendered detail being in some ways closer to taxidermy than to the realism of a snapshot. In their almost eerie stillness, his portrayals of professional men surrounded by the accoutrements of their work, (another excellent example is Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1938, below) seem – despite the maximalist inclusiveness of the painting – closer to the carefully composed minimalism of a photographer like Lilo Raymond than to a more or less contemporary realist (or ‘objectivist’) painting like Otto Dix’s theoretically similar portrait of urologist Dr Hans Koch (1921). And yet, for all of their modern realism, both artists looked to the past; for Dix – who had experimented with Expressionist styles earlier in his career, the aim of the modern realist painter was to tackle the breadth and the often-unrecorded detail of modern life with the – to him – unimprovable techniques of the old masters. For Frampton, the source of his style is less the realistic tradition of the Northern Renaissance than it is the monumental, but still ‘realistic’ neoclassicism of Ingres.

Meredith Frampton – Sr Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1938) and Otto Dix – Dr Hans Koch (1921)

The more usual classical influence on British art of the period was the modernist route via Picasso and cubism; in the case of painters like the ex-Vorticists William Roberts and Edward Wadsworth (also Edward Burra, whose expressionistic 1930 painting The Snack Bar was included in the exhibition), the angularity of Vorticism became a kind of stylistic shorthand that marked out their otherwise fairly conventional/traditional art as ‘modern’. Several other artists in the exhibition, such as Gladys Hynes and James Walker Tucker seem to have used modernist stylistic traits in the same way; to heighten the clarity and monumental qualities of their work; a kind of ‘realism’ as simplified solidity and a classicism that couldn’t be easily written off as old fashioned.

Gerald Leslie Brockhurst – By the Hills (1939)

For society portrait painters like Gerald Leslie Brockhurst and Sir Herbert James Gunn, realism – if explicitly not ‘gritty’ realism – was a necessary part of their trade. The glamour and drama of portraits like Brockhurst’s By the Hills (1939) is what made the artist in demand for fashionable sitters, but their effect – despite relying on a similar sense of heightened photo-realism for their success – is almost the opposite of Frampton’s still life approach. This kind of art was, despite its use of traditional techniques (and even, in the case of By The Hills, a Renaissance-influenced landscape in the background) resolutely of its ‘modern’ age, referencing Hollywood and the world of contemporary fashion, but not really any of the ideas that had affected the visual arts since the mid 1800s.

The same is true of the slightly creepy empty street scenes of Algernon Newton; despite their passing resemblance to the post-impressionist work of Maurice Utrillo, these brilliantly realised townscapes are depictions of the modern world, but not interpretations of it. While the artist captures the melancholy charm of the slightly shabby suburbs he painted, their spirit is more like restrained romanticism, rather than being invested with the revolutionary sense of psychogeography that the proto-surrealist works of Giorgio de Chirico had pioneered two decades earlier. That said, because of the role of artist – not just as a ‘camera’, but also as processor and interpreter of experience – his paintings are something more than a documentary photograph of an empty street.

Algernon Newton – The Outskirts of Cheltenham (1932)

Pietro Novelli – ‘Cain Killing Abel’ (1625)

In fact, what True To Life highlights, is the extent to which the vast majority of art, until fairly recently, had as its aim something that could be called realism; the National Gallery’s Beyond Caravaggio exhibition likewise showed Caravaggio and the artists of the late 16th/early 17th century trying to make their art – both in religious/mythical and modern genre paintings – more immediate & vivid through a kind of dramatic heightened realism. Impressionism broke away from the staid, schematised world of academic painting to capture something closer to the experience of both the artist and viewer, Expressionists tried to infuse their works with the feeling of events as experienced, Futurists tried to capture the violence of the 20th century where traditional techniques tended to distance it… And in that sense, much of the work labelled ‘realist’ in this exhibition works for us now in a way that it possibly didn’t at the time; to a modern audience the work in True to Life is almost all imbued with a between-the-wars ‘period’ quality that seems to capture the zeitgeist of that troubled era, even while sidestepping most of the troubles themselves.

It is with that last point that the artists – without doubting the depth of feeling they put into their work – mainly succeeded in recording (limited aspects of the) reality of their era in a relatively superficial way. As an example, Clifford Rowe’s The Fried Fish Shop (1936) depicts what the interior and clientele of a fried fish shop of the 30s presumably looked like; as such it has sociological and historical value, as well as being a fine, faintly modernist painting. On the other hand, a slightly earlier and in some ways comparable painting like the Vorticist-inspired Rain On Princes Street (1913) by Stanley Cursiter (it’s quite surprising that none of Cursiter’s fashionable work of the 20s & 30s was included in the exhibition), despite its fractured, faceted and in that sense ‘unrealistic’ modernist appearance, not only captures in its stylised way a glimpse of late Edwardian metropolitan life, but also the feeling – still the same over a hundred years later – of being on Edinburgh’s Princes Street on a busy, rainy day. So in the end I suppose which painting deserves to be called ‘realist’ is as subjective as reality itself.