Showing posts with label John Berger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Berger. Show all posts
Thursday, September 3, 2015
CHARLES TOMLINSON, 1927-2015
1.
Regarding Ian Brinton's post of the news of Charles Tomlinson's death : First read Tomlinson around '67, at the State Library of Victoria actually, the Dome reading room. Introduced by criticism I came across as the foremost British connection to / interpretation of William Carlos Williams... not insignificant in an age when there was no free flow, so to speak, across the Atlantic or between Australia & the US for that matter... I vividly recall Q & A with Al Alvarez , an extension lecture at the Univ of Melbourne, would have been in 1968 sometime, --Bill Beard heard Alvarez was in town so we attended-- Alvarez fielded a question/comment about WCW with a terse "William Carlos Williams has always been a blind spot for me!" OK as a personal response, but Alvarez was talking in Melbourne with the authority still vested in British opinion... There was laughter & applause from a section of the lecture theatre wch Bill identified as the English department claqueurs! Now that's half a century ago, and tangential to response to Tomlinson... Hearing this news I initially searched the Web for Tacita Dean's film of The Orchard, then realized I'd muddled Tomlinson with Michael Hamburger! --yet when I reread C T I'll be interested to see how the Englishness plays off with the poet's pro Americanism & internationalism...
Sad news as e/one says... but hopefully a good innings... RIP
2.
So here we are, renewing acquaintance with Charles Tomlinson, in particular & what's often my own concern : the status of the English home or base, the English locality, from perspective of cosmopolitan.
Notes as I read Tomlinson's Oxfords & Carcanets at the Shop, pen in hand.
Tomlinson vs John Berger in The Garden? : "this crass reading forgets that imagination / Outgrows itself, outgrows aim / And origin; forgets that art / Does not offer the sweat of parturition / As proof of its sincerity."
The almighty 'what if' : "Had you stayed on / Twenty years ago, had I gone" , apparently resolved in "we / Were right to choose the differing parsimonies / Of the places we belonged to." Echo of Celan, via Billeter advocacy & translation, Melbourne '70s, "our own particular narrowness".
Tomlinson's take on Hopkins, Hardy --which I found myself reading as if about GMH! but is suitably Hardyesque, "You were a poet who put on the manners of ghosts." ('he was a man who remembered such things…')Memorable passage : "Even in paradise, what you would wish for, / Would be to lie out in the changing weathers here, / And feel them flush through the earth and through you, / Side by side with those you had known, who never quite knew you, / Dreaming a limbo away of loam, of bone, / One Stygian current buoying up gravestone on gravestone."
I rise to the figure of Ivor Gurney invoked in the poem for Donald Davie's 70th birthday, To a Yorkshireman in Devon, --Gurney one of my own, enigmatic & unfinished despite Carcanet's great project to retrieve everything from the notebooks & manuscripts… "And yet, is it, Donald, utterly absurd / Like Edward Thomas to accept a war / Convinced it was Eden you were fighting for? -- / That Eden Gurney found on midnight walks / Glimmering along boughs, up nettle stalks, / Through constellations that the Romans knew / Standing on that same damp of Cotswold dew / On sentry go." etc The literary task of the poem is to marry the American & British poetry of mid-century Modernist acclaim. Tomlinson describes the "approbation of your level gaze, / Though not so partial that you cannot praise / Writers whose premisses dispute your own, / Oppen and Olson, Niedecker and Dorn", and then "Gurney himself whom we rejoice to see / With Bunting at our island's apogee."
Good memory of visiting the exhibition of Charles Tomlinson's prints at Cambridge during the inaugural poetry festival of 1975. Reminded now by Timothy Clark's The Poet as Painter chapter in his monograph on Tomlinson, published in '99 in Writers & Their Work. Cezanne's 'objectivity' via Rilke adds another dimension to the discussion of Objectivist poetry with which Tomlinson early interacted (Oppen, Zukofsky, Niedecker et al).
Thursday, December 4, 2008
THREE FUNERALS AND A BIRTHDAY
1
An Open Letter to Corinne Cantrill, in the aftermath of her 80th Birthday Celebration, at La Mama Theatre, Carlton, November 9th, 2008
Dear Corinne,
We came to praise you --and do. The strains of the traditional "Happy Birthday" & "For she's a jolly good fellow" and the cheers raised in your honour as you hovered over the cake, still ring in our ears... I anticipated bumping into so many people associated with you (--and in this instance, 'you' includes Arthur &, of course, Ivor, as well as your magazine, Cantrill's Filmnotes, & your events & programmes principally at La Mama & your former home in Brunswick Road) --and I did meet a few of these erstwhile supporters, like Michael Lee, John Flaus, Jude Telford (who was also representing the late Bernie O'Regan), and didnt I hear Solrun Hoaas's name spoken as we took our seats?
You said that one of the reasons for closing your magazine, apart from loss of AFC funding, was the burden of recording the seemingly endless succession of deaths of friends & colleagues. Yet, I must say, given relatively long & stable life, doesnt one become a memorialist, a custodian of at least the memories of our friends' works & lives? But the magazine wasnt, to my mind, burdened by that aspect. It brimmed with filmmakers' contributions & critical commentary; it brought all the news a little mag, profuse with colour & b & w reproductions, could hold. Of course, the deaths of friends is always sad, but death itself is the tragic penumbra of all human life & endeavour and the definitive element of the wonderful cycle we express & project ourselves within... So when you then disparaged your work as a filmmaker because, you said, of its inconsequentiality in this doomed world --the end of life as we know it, global warning, climate change, environmental destruction, et al --I have to disagree.
You wouldnt have seen me shaking my head in the audience but hear me now. Calamity is what it is but surely cant be a conceptual surprise; it's the proverbial wake-up call and only ever unseats illusion. One year, five, ten? --you predicted the time-frame for this end of the world. Who knows? Whoever did? People drop off the perch anytime, anywhen --and the perch itself drops off some time (the natural process or a cataclysm). Not knowing when was always the situation. That's what highlights the beauty of our art & craft, since nothing produced lasts forever. Whatever the degree of human responsibility for climate change (--and lately I've been rereading Welsh poet & environmentalist, John Barnie, on this theme, in his book No Hiding Place : Essays on the new nature and poetry (University of Wales Press, 1996), which confirms me in a kind of cheerful fatalism, encouraging my amused wonderment at the miraculous place of human life within the deepest workings of geological time), I'd have to ask you Corinne, when was your film work ever political in that literal sense? How & when did you conceive of your extensive colour-separation experiments, for example, or your major landscape works ("film-form/land-form" as you called them), as politically effective statements? Or, to put it another way, what was your political conception of these consummately visual experiences, perceptional analyses if you like, often meditative in the way they induced a state of mind akin to wide-awake dreaming? How could your films have been 'all for nothing' when the something your statement supposes has more to do with social-political documentary than anything seen in your work?
Perhaps you were teasing us into consideration of the art & politics question (which never goes away & perhaps shouldnt for the clarification that attending to it always brings)? I've been there myself recently, responding to comments by John Berger, extracted from his essay, The Hour of Poetry, by Robyn Rowland for the on-line magazine, Zest, she edits for the Australian Poetry Centre. Hard to decipher exactly what Berger was calling for in his 1982 piece : an art of witness & testimony yet somehow not guaranteed by individuality, which is how I understood his valorisation of 'totality' and relegation of the 'sentimental' in his quip, "sentimentality always pleads for an exemption, for something which is divisible". For Berger it seems it isnt the individual & the complex of eccentricity realized as such but "poetry that makes language care because it renders everything intimate." It's as though poetry, per se, is intimate (and other forms not?), when the fact surely is that the art is made intimate by the poet's particularity & insistence on peculiarity (that is, detail & angle) whereby poem, in this case, rises to the ineffable, if that be the statement of the whole (--i cant bear to use the term 'totality' after Berger's political tar-&-feathering!), but only & always through the only-ness of an individual accent, and not the general. We're talking about that partiality which is voice and has to be to break through what every poet under the sun hears as hubub ( Berger's undifferentiated 'language') before experiencing the poem's rising up into song, as though the striving voice in each poem recognizes the chorus to which it belongs! The personal is always the pitch of it, never the general!
I remember the late John Anderson, to whom I introduced you Corinne as I did your work to him, confessing his confusion as to whether he could achieve more as an environmental activist than a poet. His poetry, he implied, was written to raise awareness of the sacred beauty & ecological importance of, say, the eucalypts; but, he anguished, could his time & energy be better spent physically preventing their destruction? I didnt understand the mutual exclusivity within his question. What prevents the poet from also being an activist? But neither did I accept the implication that art, whatever its literal subject, was subordinate to political action.
In 1979-80, I broadcast a series of Melbourne letters for ABC radio's Books & Writing programme. On one of these I announced "the end of the world, the new world" (which sounds a bit Orson Welles-ish now)... I remember being misunderstood, as though I were nihilistically clamouring for the end or giving up the good fight. Tom Shapcott & I think Dorothy Green, wrote to encourage me away from what they assumed was my defeatism & depression in the face of that time's political crisis. I probably contributed to the misconception because my sense then of the condition of the poet, let alone of the world, was undeveloped --like many of my friends & colleagues, I spoke out of the tension between the aesthetics garnered by an avant-gardist & the politics my left-wingism proposed; though acquainted with it, I hadnt yet recovered the religious or philosophical perspective I enjoy now. At that time --and it's thirty years ago already!-- I felt that because of the threat of nuclear war (recall Carl Sagan & the acceptance by both the American & Soviet sides of his 'nuclear winter' thesis?), the condition of the world we lived & made art in had changed : the ability to think the unthinkable, that is the end of the world, had created a new condition. Whatever happened, we now lived in a new world. I have come to think, though, that this was always so : crisis is the fact of it, masked for many years sometimes, and then painfully revealed again for what it is. For the apocalypse was always adjacent. No life without a death might be the moral to assuage personal grief but speaks also for the vast non-human time described by geologists of this earth & astronomers & physicists of the universe. It's all there, isnt it, in the ancient Chinese, from Arthur Waley's translation : "Yung-men said to Meng Ch'ang-chun (d 279 BC), 'Does it not grieve you to think that a hundred years hence this terrace will be cast down?' Ch'ang-chun wept."
Though I doubt your maths, Corinne, regarding the time-line of the beginning of the end (one year, five, ten, before we suffocate on the stench of the dead krill, rising from the dead oceans to the centre of the Australian desert), how is this supposed to invalidate art & artist? The noble krill notwithstanding, when wasnt the apocalypse upon us? Poet, novelist, artist, filmmaker as historian, witness, chronicler, singer of what-is, protester of what shouldnt-be : such roles are well known. But let's not neglect or disqualify the art of the art, of the poem, of the film. Dont sacrifice it to the anxiety to which activism responds. Dont lose heart! Believe with Wallace Stevens in "the heavens full of colours and the constellations of sound", whatever the semantic content! Believe in your life, believe in your life's work. Believe like your teacher, Harry Hooton, in this great adventure of life!
Happy birthday, and may there be many more!
All best wishes, Kris Hemensley
(11-17th, November,'08)
2
+
Mark Zenner passed away today after illness. A great reader of literature (poetry & prose), and a keen eye on contemporary cinema. He made short films and was a contributor to Senses of Cinema. We mourn him.
R.I.P. 3rd September, '08
[According to Bill Mousoulis, Mark Zenner had serious health problems in recent years. He was hospitalized in February, '08, recovered, then returned to hospital in August. He was being looked after by Sam Pupillo assisted by Daron Davies. As Bill says, "He was quite a character, fierce & unique."
At Collected Works Bookshop, I thought of him as the Russian-American, because of his accent and his literary taste. He valued Nabokov as much as Robert Lowell. He was erudite, opinionated & passionate. He coughed, smoked, spat contempt, chuckled with deep literary pleasure. He loved the art of cinema and hated the industry. His voluminous essay on Bresson is published on-line in Senses of Cinema; footage from unfinished films of his own (including a moth being eaten by ants) have been incorporated in films of Bill Mousoulis. We hope for a fuller biography of this enigmatic man in due course.]
3
+
We mourn Don Grant, a friend of this bookshop, a Scot & great enthusiast for Scottish poetry,Gaelic music & poetry, who was an artist & printmaker, a friend of artists & lover of the arts, passed away October 21st,'08 in Tatura, Victoria.
R.I.P.
[from an e-mail to Clinton Cook, October 23rd, '08 : "As I'd already shared with Julia [Harman] a couple of weeks or so ago, my anxiety for him whenever he climbed the creaking metal ladder to reach the highest shelf of the Scottish section of the bookshop. Happily never an accident. [In her email of 30th September, Julia wrote, "I can imagine Don searching in the heights for hidden treasures! I vaguely remember him climbing the ladder to the top of his own bookshelves when he knew there was something which would be of particular interest to me!"] He'd be looking for Iain Crichton Smith or Sorley Maclean, one or other of the Gaelic poets, of whom we spoke, especially after I'd begun revisiting Britain, late '80s, through the '90s. He presented me once with tapes, he'd made from his own collection of records, of such Scottish poets as Hugh McDiarmid, Sorley Maclean, Norman McCaig, & Irish poets Austin Clarke, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, & also the wonderful pipes of Seumus MacNeill & John MacFadyen. He may have first met Retta & I at Collected Works Bookshop via Julia, though intrepid bookman that he was, may also have simply discovered us on his city rounds. We were always aware of Julia's regard for him &, of course, of his championing of her as artist, printmaker let alone friend. John Ryrie was another mutual acquaintance for whom Don had great regard. After our boy Tim had visited Berlin, in the mid '90s, once with the Powder Monkeys, once solo, Don gave us a map-book of Berlin to pass on for what he assumed would be Tim's further visits. Retta & I remember him as a softly spoken gentleman, a lover of poetry, music, art, who brought his own stillness into the increasingly busy & noisy city world. Retta & I hope you can give him a great send off. Best wishes, condolences, Kris."]
4
+
Jacob Rosenberg has died. His funeral today, 31st October,'08, at Springvale. Poet, story-teller, memoirist; accomplished in Yiddish & English.
*
"Arm in arm we walk, but we walk apart
Will the horizon ever let us be?
Can we expel the ruins of our heart?"
(from My Father's Silence)
[The article on Jacob Rosenberg by Jason Steiger and the obituary by Jacob's editor & dear friend, Alex Skovron, both published in recent weeks in The Age newspaper, comprehensively describe his life & work. Having only recently viewed him on television appearing in a documentary about the international project to translate a particular Holocaust survivor's chronicle, written in Yiddish, of which he was one of the willing translators, it was a surprise then to hear of his death. I only have a few personal memories... The new & self-publishing author trying to flog us his wares back in the late 80s, early 90s, when the Shop was on the first floor of Flinders Way Arcade. He was persistent in the initial placement and the follow-up! Late 90s I remember discussing with him a new & younger poet's contention that poetry didnt or didnt have to mean anything (Wallace Stevens would have concurred), but what got up his nose was her example of Paul Celan. No meaning in Celan? Jacob was horrified. There are a thousand articles on Celan's Death Fugue alone! he said, shaking his head in exasperation. I reviewed his collection, Behind the Moon (Five Islands Press), in ABR, #237 (Dec.01/Jan.02), and quote here the opening & concluding lines. "Seamless with his two previous collections, Behind the Moon is Jacob Rosenberg's potted autobiography of a survivor of Lodz and Auschwitz, delivered from the hell, of which he writes with the kindness of an angel, into the heaven that Melbourne must then logically be. To be the poet of reality and not self-delusion is his commission. The trouble he contends with is that his present is posthumous, for the contemporary world could never be charged with such reality. Heaven doesn't exist. (....) Simplicity, concision, so as not to offend the subject with anything remotely resembling ornament : Rosenberg's poetry of the place and the condition 'where language died for very fear of words'."
R. I. P.]
4th December, 2008
________________________________________________________________
An Open Letter to Corinne Cantrill, in the aftermath of her 80th Birthday Celebration, at La Mama Theatre, Carlton, November 9th, 2008
Dear Corinne,
We came to praise you --and do. The strains of the traditional "Happy Birthday" & "For she's a jolly good fellow" and the cheers raised in your honour as you hovered over the cake, still ring in our ears... I anticipated bumping into so many people associated with you (--and in this instance, 'you' includes Arthur &, of course, Ivor, as well as your magazine, Cantrill's Filmnotes, & your events & programmes principally at La Mama & your former home in Brunswick Road) --and I did meet a few of these erstwhile supporters, like Michael Lee, John Flaus, Jude Telford (who was also representing the late Bernie O'Regan), and didnt I hear Solrun Hoaas's name spoken as we took our seats?
You said that one of the reasons for closing your magazine, apart from loss of AFC funding, was the burden of recording the seemingly endless succession of deaths of friends & colleagues. Yet, I must say, given relatively long & stable life, doesnt one become a memorialist, a custodian of at least the memories of our friends' works & lives? But the magazine wasnt, to my mind, burdened by that aspect. It brimmed with filmmakers' contributions & critical commentary; it brought all the news a little mag, profuse with colour & b & w reproductions, could hold. Of course, the deaths of friends is always sad, but death itself is the tragic penumbra of all human life & endeavour and the definitive element of the wonderful cycle we express & project ourselves within... So when you then disparaged your work as a filmmaker because, you said, of its inconsequentiality in this doomed world --the end of life as we know it, global warning, climate change, environmental destruction, et al --I have to disagree.
You wouldnt have seen me shaking my head in the audience but hear me now. Calamity is what it is but surely cant be a conceptual surprise; it's the proverbial wake-up call and only ever unseats illusion. One year, five, ten? --you predicted the time-frame for this end of the world. Who knows? Whoever did? People drop off the perch anytime, anywhen --and the perch itself drops off some time (the natural process or a cataclysm). Not knowing when was always the situation. That's what highlights the beauty of our art & craft, since nothing produced lasts forever. Whatever the degree of human responsibility for climate change (--and lately I've been rereading Welsh poet & environmentalist, John Barnie, on this theme, in his book No Hiding Place : Essays on the new nature and poetry (University of Wales Press, 1996), which confirms me in a kind of cheerful fatalism, encouraging my amused wonderment at the miraculous place of human life within the deepest workings of geological time), I'd have to ask you Corinne, when was your film work ever political in that literal sense? How & when did you conceive of your extensive colour-separation experiments, for example, or your major landscape works ("film-form/land-form" as you called them), as politically effective statements? Or, to put it another way, what was your political conception of these consummately visual experiences, perceptional analyses if you like, often meditative in the way they induced a state of mind akin to wide-awake dreaming? How could your films have been 'all for nothing' when the something your statement supposes has more to do with social-political documentary than anything seen in your work?
Perhaps you were teasing us into consideration of the art & politics question (which never goes away & perhaps shouldnt for the clarification that attending to it always brings)? I've been there myself recently, responding to comments by John Berger, extracted from his essay, The Hour of Poetry, by Robyn Rowland for the on-line magazine, Zest, she edits for the Australian Poetry Centre. Hard to decipher exactly what Berger was calling for in his 1982 piece : an art of witness & testimony yet somehow not guaranteed by individuality, which is how I understood his valorisation of 'totality' and relegation of the 'sentimental' in his quip, "sentimentality always pleads for an exemption, for something which is divisible". For Berger it seems it isnt the individual & the complex of eccentricity realized as such but "poetry that makes language care because it renders everything intimate." It's as though poetry, per se, is intimate (and other forms not?), when the fact surely is that the art is made intimate by the poet's particularity & insistence on peculiarity (that is, detail & angle) whereby poem, in this case, rises to the ineffable, if that be the statement of the whole (--i cant bear to use the term 'totality' after Berger's political tar-&-feathering!), but only & always through the only-ness of an individual accent, and not the general. We're talking about that partiality which is voice and has to be to break through what every poet under the sun hears as hubub ( Berger's undifferentiated 'language') before experiencing the poem's rising up into song, as though the striving voice in each poem recognizes the chorus to which it belongs! The personal is always the pitch of it, never the general!
I remember the late John Anderson, to whom I introduced you Corinne as I did your work to him, confessing his confusion as to whether he could achieve more as an environmental activist than a poet. His poetry, he implied, was written to raise awareness of the sacred beauty & ecological importance of, say, the eucalypts; but, he anguished, could his time & energy be better spent physically preventing their destruction? I didnt understand the mutual exclusivity within his question. What prevents the poet from also being an activist? But neither did I accept the implication that art, whatever its literal subject, was subordinate to political action.
In 1979-80, I broadcast a series of Melbourne letters for ABC radio's Books & Writing programme. On one of these I announced "the end of the world, the new world" (which sounds a bit Orson Welles-ish now)... I remember being misunderstood, as though I were nihilistically clamouring for the end or giving up the good fight. Tom Shapcott & I think Dorothy Green, wrote to encourage me away from what they assumed was my defeatism & depression in the face of that time's political crisis. I probably contributed to the misconception because my sense then of the condition of the poet, let alone of the world, was undeveloped --like many of my friends & colleagues, I spoke out of the tension between the aesthetics garnered by an avant-gardist & the politics my left-wingism proposed; though acquainted with it, I hadnt yet recovered the religious or philosophical perspective I enjoy now. At that time --and it's thirty years ago already!-- I felt that because of the threat of nuclear war (recall Carl Sagan & the acceptance by both the American & Soviet sides of his 'nuclear winter' thesis?), the condition of the world we lived & made art in had changed : the ability to think the unthinkable, that is the end of the world, had created a new condition. Whatever happened, we now lived in a new world. I have come to think, though, that this was always so : crisis is the fact of it, masked for many years sometimes, and then painfully revealed again for what it is. For the apocalypse was always adjacent. No life without a death might be the moral to assuage personal grief but speaks also for the vast non-human time described by geologists of this earth & astronomers & physicists of the universe. It's all there, isnt it, in the ancient Chinese, from Arthur Waley's translation : "Yung-men said to Meng Ch'ang-chun (d 279 BC), 'Does it not grieve you to think that a hundred years hence this terrace will be cast down?' Ch'ang-chun wept."
Though I doubt your maths, Corinne, regarding the time-line of the beginning of the end (one year, five, ten, before we suffocate on the stench of the dead krill, rising from the dead oceans to the centre of the Australian desert), how is this supposed to invalidate art & artist? The noble krill notwithstanding, when wasnt the apocalypse upon us? Poet, novelist, artist, filmmaker as historian, witness, chronicler, singer of what-is, protester of what shouldnt-be : such roles are well known. But let's not neglect or disqualify the art of the art, of the poem, of the film. Dont sacrifice it to the anxiety to which activism responds. Dont lose heart! Believe with Wallace Stevens in "the heavens full of colours and the constellations of sound", whatever the semantic content! Believe in your life, believe in your life's work. Believe like your teacher, Harry Hooton, in this great adventure of life!
Happy birthday, and may there be many more!
All best wishes, Kris Hemensley
(11-17th, November,'08)
2
+
Mark Zenner passed away today after illness. A great reader of literature (poetry & prose), and a keen eye on contemporary cinema. He made short films and was a contributor to Senses of Cinema. We mourn him.
R.I.P. 3rd September, '08
[According to Bill Mousoulis, Mark Zenner had serious health problems in recent years. He was hospitalized in February, '08, recovered, then returned to hospital in August. He was being looked after by Sam Pupillo assisted by Daron Davies. As Bill says, "He was quite a character, fierce & unique."
At Collected Works Bookshop, I thought of him as the Russian-American, because of his accent and his literary taste. He valued Nabokov as much as Robert Lowell. He was erudite, opinionated & passionate. He coughed, smoked, spat contempt, chuckled with deep literary pleasure. He loved the art of cinema and hated the industry. His voluminous essay on Bresson is published on-line in Senses of Cinema; footage from unfinished films of his own (including a moth being eaten by ants) have been incorporated in films of Bill Mousoulis. We hope for a fuller biography of this enigmatic man in due course.]
3
+
We mourn Don Grant, a friend of this bookshop, a Scot & great enthusiast for Scottish poetry,Gaelic music & poetry, who was an artist & printmaker, a friend of artists & lover of the arts, passed away October 21st,'08 in Tatura, Victoria.
R.I.P.
[from an e-mail to Clinton Cook, October 23rd, '08 : "As I'd already shared with Julia [Harman] a couple of weeks or so ago, my anxiety for him whenever he climbed the creaking metal ladder to reach the highest shelf of the Scottish section of the bookshop. Happily never an accident. [In her email of 30th September, Julia wrote, "I can imagine Don searching in the heights for hidden treasures! I vaguely remember him climbing the ladder to the top of his own bookshelves when he knew there was something which would be of particular interest to me!"] He'd be looking for Iain Crichton Smith or Sorley Maclean, one or other of the Gaelic poets, of whom we spoke, especially after I'd begun revisiting Britain, late '80s, through the '90s. He presented me once with tapes, he'd made from his own collection of records, of such Scottish poets as Hugh McDiarmid, Sorley Maclean, Norman McCaig, & Irish poets Austin Clarke, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, & also the wonderful pipes of Seumus MacNeill & John MacFadyen. He may have first met Retta & I at Collected Works Bookshop via Julia, though intrepid bookman that he was, may also have simply discovered us on his city rounds. We were always aware of Julia's regard for him &, of course, of his championing of her as artist, printmaker let alone friend. John Ryrie was another mutual acquaintance for whom Don had great regard. After our boy Tim had visited Berlin, in the mid '90s, once with the Powder Monkeys, once solo, Don gave us a map-book of Berlin to pass on for what he assumed would be Tim's further visits. Retta & I remember him as a softly spoken gentleman, a lover of poetry, music, art, who brought his own stillness into the increasingly busy & noisy city world. Retta & I hope you can give him a great send off. Best wishes, condolences, Kris."]
4
+
Jacob Rosenberg has died. His funeral today, 31st October,'08, at Springvale. Poet, story-teller, memoirist; accomplished in Yiddish & English.
*
"Arm in arm we walk, but we walk apart
Will the horizon ever let us be?
Can we expel the ruins of our heart?"
(from My Father's Silence)
[The article on Jacob Rosenberg by Jason Steiger and the obituary by Jacob's editor & dear friend, Alex Skovron, both published in recent weeks in The Age newspaper, comprehensively describe his life & work. Having only recently viewed him on television appearing in a documentary about the international project to translate a particular Holocaust survivor's chronicle, written in Yiddish, of which he was one of the willing translators, it was a surprise then to hear of his death. I only have a few personal memories... The new & self-publishing author trying to flog us his wares back in the late 80s, early 90s, when the Shop was on the first floor of Flinders Way Arcade. He was persistent in the initial placement and the follow-up! Late 90s I remember discussing with him a new & younger poet's contention that poetry didnt or didnt have to mean anything (Wallace Stevens would have concurred), but what got up his nose was her example of Paul Celan. No meaning in Celan? Jacob was horrified. There are a thousand articles on Celan's Death Fugue alone! he said, shaking his head in exasperation. I reviewed his collection, Behind the Moon (Five Islands Press), in ABR, #237 (Dec.01/Jan.02), and quote here the opening & concluding lines. "Seamless with his two previous collections, Behind the Moon is Jacob Rosenberg's potted autobiography of a survivor of Lodz and Auschwitz, delivered from the hell, of which he writes with the kindness of an angel, into the heaven that Melbourne must then logically be. To be the poet of reality and not self-delusion is his commission. The trouble he contends with is that his present is posthumous, for the contemporary world could never be charged with such reality. Heaven doesn't exist. (....) Simplicity, concision, so as not to offend the subject with anything remotely resembling ornament : Rosenberg's poetry of the place and the condition 'where language died for very fear of words'."
R. I. P.]
4th December, 2008
________________________________________________________________
Saturday, March 22, 2008
MODERN BRITAIN, 1900-1960
"MODERN BRITAIN, 1900-1960; Masterworks from the Australian & New Zealand Collections"; November 15,2007 to February 24,2008, at the National Gallery of Victoria (International), Melbourne; or "THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD"
1
Would you like to write it then, Wallace? Oh, you've already written it. Hmmm. "I was of three minds", yeah, yeah. To have the three combine or coalesce; or, simply, one to concentrate. But there's another blackbird -- there! "Who can pick up the weight of Britain, / Who can move the German load / Or say to the French here is France again? // It is nothing, no great thing, nor man / Of ten brilliancies of battered gold / And fortunate stone. It moves its parade / Of motions in the mind and heart, // A gorgeous fortitude. Medium man / In February hears the imagination's hymns / And sees its images, its motions / And multitude of motions // And feels the imagination's mercies, / In a season more than sun and south wind, / Something returning from a deeper quarter, / A glacier running through delirium, // Making this heavy rock a place, / Which is not of our lives composed . . . / Lightly and lightly, O my land, / Move lightly through the air again." [Imago, 1948] Hmmm. An echo in my head of F. M.Ford's thought about the historical composition of the English which, in America's case after the 2nd World War, is the tale of a similar roosting. Thus New York's supplanting of Europe, yeah, yeah,one of those consoling ideas of youth which seemed then the keenest thought and not at all without a grain of truth. But the years pass and the New World's moment also passes; all that's subsumed as the International Style, grown in America, imported by everyone else, dulls as well. And all along one's been wondering what happened to Britain, to Germany, to France, what happened to Europe, what happened to the sovereignties of the rest of the world?
2
It was much anticipated to say the least. Several months out and the enthusiasm was building among friends including a bevy of local painters. For years Alan Pose & I have consulted the house copy of Anne Kirker & Peter Tomory's British Painting, 1800-1990, in Australian & New Zealand Public Collections (Beagle Press, 1997). We've imagined the show that could be mounted upon the foundation of our own Melbourne (NGV) collection; welcomed the little tasters along the way, always hoping for the bigger splash!
In that indispensable book's introduction, Anne Kirker writes, "In addition to providing a comprehensive listing of British paintings currently held in public collections in Australia & New Zealand, it could serve as an entry into a number of research topics, such as tracing the reception of British art in Australia..." (p9)
Anne Kirker was also the curator of the National Art Gallery of New Zealand's survey show, The First Fifty Years : British Art of the Twentieth Century(Wellington, 1981), admitting "an essentially modernist approach" but hoping "at the same time to make clear the overall diversity and richness of British art during the last fifty years of this century." The catalogue for the New Zealand show reproduces several of the pictures also found in the Melbourne show, the most striking of which is Gertler's classically sculptural yet palpably modern half-nude, The Straw Hat (1924).
And where is Anne Kirker now? Writing finely honed poems in Brisbane...
3
Spencer Gore's glorious The Icknield Way (housed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales) graces the book's cover --no wonder my wondering at the familiarity of its reproduction in The Australian, illustrating Andrew Stephens review --we've been looking at it (without studying it) for a decade! And then seeing it in the flesh at the show -- not as vast as I'd imagined but big enough! Big enough as anthem for the discussion, the best of several supported by the show, concerning landscape in itself and as the subject in the pincer of the polemics featuring the pictorially identifiable, topographically verifiable on one hand and abstraction's sport with line & colour on the other.
4
The Age & The Australian, chalk & cheese as usual. Robert Nelson's article headlined, "Taking modernist out of the modern"; Andrew Stephens, "Landscape of Tumult".
Keywords & phrases in Nelson : "moderation of its modernists"; "something too suspicious in the British psyche, something too sceptical and pragmatic, to bring off the formalist convictions and conceptual confidence of radical modernism"; "soft modernism"; "decorative appeal"; "lacklustre and messy, failed modernism" (this in relation to Tunnard, Nash, Power, Cant, Piper, Hitchens, Vaughan, Epstein; lemons & pears aside, Nash & Hitchens, Tunnard & Piper, 'lacklustre & messy' ?); "fatally brown and dull" (of Spencer's "allegorical work of the '30s"); "heroic modernism" (its general absence, that is)...
Keywords & phrases in Stephens : "a complete surprise" (of Reynolds large paintings); "romantic British landscape convention"; "such a wealth of great British art...in Australasian galleries" (unaware of the Kirker-Tomory register?); "a whole rhapsody of themes that might have formed smaller, discrete shows in themselves : brilliant landscapes, voluptuous nudes, fascinating portraiture, still-lives, war-artists' work, post-war modernity"; "vibrant riot of colour"; "luxuriantly vivid works" (of M Smith, Bomberg, Sutherland, Holmes, Passmore); "the threat imposed on the classic landscape of the imagination" (re the neo-romantics); "a captivating vista that melds social, political and art history with the broader canvas upon which it all happens : the land beneath our feet"...
5
(30/31-12-07)
I'm sorry Robert Nelson, you probably read it when it was published --Robert Hughes, that is, in Time magazine, 1987 --but only read by yours truly today as Cathy O'Brien & I pick through our spoils from Bendigo's illustrious Book Now second-hander. Hughes article, English Art in the 20thCentury, is collected in his book, Nothing, If Not Critical (Harvill, 1991), bought --I must get this in --before walking through Rosalind Park in mid-summer Northern Victorian dry heat and ascending to the Bendigo Art Gallery to see The Long Weekend : Australian Artists in France, 1918-1939, the lovely book-end of a sort to Modern Britain, which is the actual destination of this note.
6
A wall-text at The Long Weekend exhibition seems to me utterly apropos a conversation Modern Britain inspires and to another aroused by Nelson's review's curiously ideological sideswipes; words to the affect that most of the Aussie Parisiennes resisted the modernist styles of that time & place, were happy to be there and to continue in their own sweet ways. And that is the point : jettison the notion of progress for the arrogance it is and in our time at least regard all modes as legitimate & contemporaneous, retaining one's discriminations for works in themselves. Stylistic or modal differences might be considered genre, something literature & film are able to accommodate (although we're aware of the time it sometimes takes for work to be recognized for those qualities appreciated beyond the genre). A moot point is whether the liveliness of a work emanates from style or subject, but it wouldnt be much of a work if these were so evidently separable. Style in art within the general sense of progress has been synonymous with historical time, but once progress as punitive paradigm dissolves, when style is particular and not the inevitable or logical generality, something else obtains.
7
The human warmth or palpability of Bessie Davidson's apartment interiors --their authenticity I'd like to say, their, as-it-were, habitable reality --in The Long Weekend exhibition were, to my eye, easily distinguishable from the exact line & application, technically perfect painting of Hilda Rex Nicholas, Stella Bowen & others. She was (they all were) modern but not modernist... In Davidson there's impressionism, Cezanne, perhaps something of Braque & co's generic encapsulation, density, congested enclosure, but most of all she's a la her own personable mode --aeons from Robert Nelson's vaunted "heroic" and none the worse, contra formalist-progressivist thinking, for it. [P.S. 10-03-08. Looking at Vuillard's Mme Bonnard With Her Dog (1907) at the NGV, reminded of the qualities I responded to in Bessie Davidson. The illusion of depth in the panelled construction; figure on chair, dog in foreground, curtained door behind, and another room behind these. The soft warmth of the colours translates into the words I've used before, human, palpable. Maybe too the post-impressionist warmth I see in Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman...]
8
For the record, Robert Hughes wrote this : "It would be hard to think of a more overdue subject for an exhibition than 'British Art in the 20thCentury' , the panorama of 310 works by some seventy artists at The Royal Academy in London. Our fin de siecle is the natural time for summing up, and the subject of modern British has never been tried in depth by an American museum. No matter what quibbles and demurrals one may have about the choice of this work or that name, no one with half an eye could spend a couple of hours in Burlington House and By leave without asking why the cumulative achievements of British painters and sculptors --as distinct from the popularity of a few individuals, such as Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and David Hockney -- have been so scanted by the official and mainly American annals of modernism. (....) So why do so many of the lesser known things in this show [Hughes mentions Sickert, M Smith, the Vorticists, Spencer, Bomberg, Epstein, P Nash, Freud, Kossoff, Auerbach, Kitaj, Hodgkin] now strike us as not just a footnote to, but an essential part of, the visual culture of the past 80 years : neither "provincial" nor "minor" but singular and grand? What muffled this recognition? Partly, the English themselves : a nation always mingy in valuing its own artists."
Hughes traces the origin of said mingyness to Roger Fry & Bloomsbury (Clive Bell et al)'s valorisation of everything French and the denigration of everything English. Thank God Provincial England & the Colonies saved me from most of that; even when New York was at its most attractive I hadnt realized that the assumed price of the new was the heads of the artists I'd grown up with!
9
Off the record, John Piper explains : "For twenty years the Paris Post-Impressionists had been making clear and definitive statements. They could not be ignored. By 1938 the looming war made the clear but closed world of abstract art untenable for me. It made the whole pattern and structure of thousands of English sites more precious as they became more likely to disappear. Anyway, what I had learned was now part of me, and an integral and prominent part at that. The abstract practice taught me a lot that I would not have learned without it, and all the time I had hold, through the collages, of a lifeline to natural appearances -- and so to early Palmer, to Turner, early and late (topographical and less purely topographical) and to our whole Romantic tradition in which it has always been possible for meaningful details to shine like beacons in the damp, misty evanescence of our beautiful island light and weather." Richard Ingrams comments, "What Piper could never shed was his nationality and upbringing, as he was half-expected to do by the extremists of the Modern art movement, whose aim was to reproduce a supposedly international style. He has therefore been dismissed in some quarters as provincial, a slur that could be, and probably has been, levelled at most great English artists --Blake, Samuel Palmer, Constable --who never went far beyond their native England.(....)Being an English or British painter meant resigning oneself to the probable lack of any international recognition." p22, Piper's Places (Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1983).
This introduces the cultural dimension, melding political & emotional, and precisely what informs the "nativism" I often air.
Here's Peter Fuller on Piper and the other themes I'm constantly meditating : "Piper has always been a painter of English landscape (....) through a conspicuously English sensibility. But if he sought a continuity with romantic traditions in English culture, it was a replenished continuity. His painting affirms that though life in the twentieth century necessarily involves a changed vision, and changed values, it need not, or perhaps ought not, to involve some absolute, philistine rupture with the achievements of our cultural past, nor yet with art's capacity to give pleasure through decoration." (from Images of God, p96, 1985.) Rereading Peter Fuller recently I feel the enormous loss his tragically early death was for British criticism...
10
23-01-08
Could be, of course, that Robert Hughes isnt quotable, writing too far outside of the local academics' pale. And in the Australian context, Giles Auty is definitely persona non grata if one remembers his stroppy vacation here in the '90s. Ironically, some of his art criticism echoed one's own responses to the broad swathe of awfulness apparently authorised by postmodernism's this that & the other. However, in the prestigious Peter Nahum catalogue for its British survey show of 1988, there's Auty making the very same points as Hughes. He refers to the 'Tate Gallery Affair' of 1954, when John Rothenstein struck Douglas Cooper, during the Diaghileff exhibition at Forbes House, in what Peter Nahum considered a justified & symbolic defence of what Auty calls "the continuing worth of home-produced art and traditions in the face of that long line of francophiles and advocates of international modernism who saw fit to belittle the domestic product." He reasons that "the dominance of mainstream modernism endured only 20 years from the mid-Fifties to the mid-Seventies and subsequent post-modern practice has merely re-established the pluralism of the pre-war . Significantly, two of the major British painters of this century, Stanley Spencer and Lucian Freud, have not been modernists in a formal sense. Such strands and cross-currents in art are an irritant to the neat patterns of progress modern art-historians prefer to project. The influence of Picasso dominated the lifes of certain British artists while affecting others not at all. Is this evidence of insularity or individualism? The Slade School under Tonks, reputedly the least sympathetic or flexible of teachers, gave rise to a galaxy of talents unrivalled by any other school, anywhere. The paradoxes of modern art have long outlived Roger Fry's sweeping generalisations. " (Cross-Section : British Art in the Twentieth Century; Peter Nahum, 1988)
11
(25-01-08)
One man seems to know his subject, the other is winging it! One (Stephens) reports on what he elicits from the curators and what's there to be seen; the other (Nelson) seems intent on pushing along his rather squeeky old barrow, and cant have seen the same exhibition, since his optic is historically & aesthetically clouded by the unreconstructed cliche regarding the merit of both British art & the efficacy of the formalist rationale. However, I'm the first to agree with Alan Pose (who initially suggested I must have read a different piece by Nelson to the one he'd seen!) that the reviews must be praised for having stimulated a discussion we've enjoyed several times a week for the last couple of months. Indeed, this recent period could be called Modern Britain, comprising the wonderful show (visited two, three, four, five times & more by people I know --Ken Parker, for example, six times!), the reviews, and the discussion about pictures, painters, Modernism, Formalism, internationalism, the local...
12
21-03-08
In a discussion about cultural reference, which soon focussed upon "Englishness", on the Leafe Press (UK) blog recently, its editor, Alan Baker, suggested to me that distance from home might deepen one's regard for many features the native happily assumes --and I suppose I do bang on a bit about hedgerows, lanes, woods, fields, clumps, The Lark Rising, Neo-Romanticism, St Ives, Keeping Up Appearances & Old Thumper ale! But legacy is certainly a large aspect of the impact of the Modern Britain show for me. I'm home from home, returned to the swathe of British art I knew from Southampton Art Gallery through my teens and to particular artists I've followed since my commuting between Melbourne & the UK began in earnest in 1987, by which time my involvement with the international avant-garde had practically dissolved. And so might legacy be the issue for colleagues who're not all expatriates either. British painting for them, despite its public subordination to European & American art, is evidently something they continue to reckon with. One might deduce then that despite the USA, the EEC & ASEAN, the British reference continues for a formidable quotient of Australian society. It might also be that what is identified in such a large body of art work, and as successfully eclectic a show as I've seen (--and suddenly my heart's pounding at the thought of a post-1960 show which would pose the question, What happened after our blockbuster's cut-off date? that is to say, what happened to painting as the profound practice Modern Britain presented? and what happened with the bourgeoning & noticeably British abstraction and to the figure & landscape streams? The NGV's Hodgkins & Sydney's huge Hockney plein-air already offer answers but with so many chapters of the story to fill-in let's not leave it too long --2010, 2015 at the latest?!), that the Modern Britain exhibition constitutes a sufficiently strong statement of regional art to demonstrate the folly of the claim for distinctions & value judgements informed by a determinist formalism & historical progressivism's set of mutual exclusivities.
That painting, per se, neednt be a perfunctory means to a dubious end, might be this show's greatest inspiration. Painting is mightier than the video-installation, believe me! It is the newer form must establish itself; painting & drawing have nothing to justify in terms of technology. The primeval means are a strength; it is the sophisticated means whose results at this time are so primitive.
The surrender of definition & judgement before the supposed volume of contemporary work was always disingenuous, actually indicating a failure of critical & perceptual nerve. Periodic bets on the state of the art are essential, especially when the flux in which the tradition is always to be found is as frenetic as it is today.
After this show, I can imagine a curatorial enthusiasm for the Australian (even Australasian) representations & speculations along the same lines as Modern Britain... There's no time to lose!
13
Modern Britain, 1900-1960 is not so much a historical journey as a historical hop-scotch. How the British interacted with Europe and, post-WW2, with America, and European art similarly engaged, is the example of regional art anywhere & everywhere, especially today in the global society (think of contemporary art from Asia). There are no backwaters --later times are always likely to redeem the seeming relics & oddities. Backwaters mostly reflect stagnant criticism.
Modern Britain felt contemporary, that is to say feasible as practice in terms of means & visions. The point about the Dutch Master (still-life or portrait), the Velasquez, El Greco, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso; the point about Constable, Turner, of pre-Raphaelitism, whatever, is that influence is dynamic. The original is also dynamised by its extension and vice-versa. Echoes & variations cant help but retrieve & replenish. Influence is life.
My favourites? The Johns, brother & sister, and the marvellous threesome of John, Lees & Innes; the Camden Road cameo; Passmore, Gore, Sutherland; Frances Hodgkins, exotic yet graceful; Paul Nash's magnificent wall of topographically coherent yet visionary landscapes, ditto Hitchens whose detail's all wash as though line; the architectonic & sumptuous Reynolds; the room of Spencers, ditto the Bratbys; the half-walls of Tunnards, Bawdens; the unforgetable war memorial; ah, all these & then gems here & there, Peploe, Piper, Ravillious,Smith, Jones, Bomberg, Moore, Nicholson, Wood, Wallis, Gertler,Buhler...
The most glaring omission was Lanyon, and to think the NGV actually owns Mullion Bay -- and John Nash by the sea instead of one of his glorious landscapes. The biggest joke : John Berger's 50s wall-text castigating John Bratby's kitchen sink for its rampant consumerism (wouldnt you love to have hit him with a ration-book?)! Almost as funny, the Jekyll & Hyde juxtaposition of hygenic Bowen & toxic Passmore portraits. The last word : assuredly the wall-text quoting a '30s Paul Nash, to the effect that the problem facing artists was how to be modern and British as well. But no doubt at all, Modern Britain, 1900-1960 provided a convergence of the instinctual & learned solutions.
--fin, 22-03-08Kris Hemensley
1
Would you like to write it then, Wallace? Oh, you've already written it. Hmmm. "I was of three minds", yeah, yeah. To have the three combine or coalesce; or, simply, one to concentrate. But there's another blackbird -- there! "Who can pick up the weight of Britain, / Who can move the German load / Or say to the French here is France again? // It is nothing, no great thing, nor man / Of ten brilliancies of battered gold / And fortunate stone. It moves its parade / Of motions in the mind and heart, // A gorgeous fortitude. Medium man / In February hears the imagination's hymns / And sees its images, its motions / And multitude of motions // And feels the imagination's mercies, / In a season more than sun and south wind, / Something returning from a deeper quarter, / A glacier running through delirium, // Making this heavy rock a place, / Which is not of our lives composed . . . / Lightly and lightly, O my land, / Move lightly through the air again." [Imago, 1948] Hmmm. An echo in my head of F. M.Ford's thought about the historical composition of the English which, in America's case after the 2nd World War, is the tale of a similar roosting. Thus New York's supplanting of Europe, yeah, yeah,one of those consoling ideas of youth which seemed then the keenest thought and not at all without a grain of truth. But the years pass and the New World's moment also passes; all that's subsumed as the International Style, grown in America, imported by everyone else, dulls as well. And all along one's been wondering what happened to Britain, to Germany, to France, what happened to Europe, what happened to the sovereignties of the rest of the world?
2
It was much anticipated to say the least. Several months out and the enthusiasm was building among friends including a bevy of local painters. For years Alan Pose & I have consulted the house copy of Anne Kirker & Peter Tomory's British Painting, 1800-1990, in Australian & New Zealand Public Collections (Beagle Press, 1997). We've imagined the show that could be mounted upon the foundation of our own Melbourne (NGV) collection; welcomed the little tasters along the way, always hoping for the bigger splash!
In that indispensable book's introduction, Anne Kirker writes, "In addition to providing a comprehensive listing of British paintings currently held in public collections in Australia & New Zealand, it could serve as an entry into a number of research topics, such as tracing the reception of British art in Australia..." (p9)
Anne Kirker was also the curator of the National Art Gallery of New Zealand's survey show, The First Fifty Years : British Art of the Twentieth Century(Wellington, 1981), admitting "an essentially modernist approach" but hoping "at the same time to make clear the overall diversity and richness of British art during the last fifty years of this century." The catalogue for the New Zealand show reproduces several of the pictures also found in the Melbourne show, the most striking of which is Gertler's classically sculptural yet palpably modern half-nude, The Straw Hat (1924).
And where is Anne Kirker now? Writing finely honed poems in Brisbane...
3
Spencer Gore's glorious The Icknield Way (housed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales) graces the book's cover --no wonder my wondering at the familiarity of its reproduction in The Australian, illustrating Andrew Stephens review --we've been looking at it (without studying it) for a decade! And then seeing it in the flesh at the show -- not as vast as I'd imagined but big enough! Big enough as anthem for the discussion, the best of several supported by the show, concerning landscape in itself and as the subject in the pincer of the polemics featuring the pictorially identifiable, topographically verifiable on one hand and abstraction's sport with line & colour on the other.
4
The Age & The Australian, chalk & cheese as usual. Robert Nelson's article headlined, "Taking modernist out of the modern"; Andrew Stephens, "Landscape of Tumult".
Keywords & phrases in Nelson : "moderation of its modernists"; "something too suspicious in the British psyche, something too sceptical and pragmatic, to bring off the formalist convictions and conceptual confidence of radical modernism"; "soft modernism"; "decorative appeal"; "lacklustre and messy, failed modernism" (this in relation to Tunnard, Nash, Power, Cant, Piper, Hitchens, Vaughan, Epstein; lemons & pears aside, Nash & Hitchens, Tunnard & Piper, 'lacklustre & messy' ?); "fatally brown and dull" (of Spencer's "allegorical work of the '30s"); "heroic modernism" (its general absence, that is)...
Keywords & phrases in Stephens : "a complete surprise" (of Reynolds large paintings); "romantic British landscape convention"; "such a wealth of great British art...in Australasian galleries" (unaware of the Kirker-Tomory register?); "a whole rhapsody of themes that might have formed smaller, discrete shows in themselves : brilliant landscapes, voluptuous nudes, fascinating portraiture, still-lives, war-artists' work, post-war modernity"; "vibrant riot of colour"; "luxuriantly vivid works" (of M Smith, Bomberg, Sutherland, Holmes, Passmore); "the threat imposed on the classic landscape of the imagination" (re the neo-romantics); "a captivating vista that melds social, political and art history with the broader canvas upon which it all happens : the land beneath our feet"...
5
(30/31-12-07)
I'm sorry Robert Nelson, you probably read it when it was published --Robert Hughes, that is, in Time magazine, 1987 --but only read by yours truly today as Cathy O'Brien & I pick through our spoils from Bendigo's illustrious Book Now second-hander. Hughes article, English Art in the 20thCentury, is collected in his book, Nothing, If Not Critical (Harvill, 1991), bought --I must get this in --before walking through Rosalind Park in mid-summer Northern Victorian dry heat and ascending to the Bendigo Art Gallery to see The Long Weekend : Australian Artists in France, 1918-1939, the lovely book-end of a sort to Modern Britain, which is the actual destination of this note.
6
A wall-text at The Long Weekend exhibition seems to me utterly apropos a conversation Modern Britain inspires and to another aroused by Nelson's review's curiously ideological sideswipes; words to the affect that most of the Aussie Parisiennes resisted the modernist styles of that time & place, were happy to be there and to continue in their own sweet ways. And that is the point : jettison the notion of progress for the arrogance it is and in our time at least regard all modes as legitimate & contemporaneous, retaining one's discriminations for works in themselves. Stylistic or modal differences might be considered genre, something literature & film are able to accommodate (although we're aware of the time it sometimes takes for work to be recognized for those qualities appreciated beyond the genre). A moot point is whether the liveliness of a work emanates from style or subject, but it wouldnt be much of a work if these were so evidently separable. Style in art within the general sense of progress has been synonymous with historical time, but once progress as punitive paradigm dissolves, when style is particular and not the inevitable or logical generality, something else obtains.
7
The human warmth or palpability of Bessie Davidson's apartment interiors --their authenticity I'd like to say, their, as-it-were, habitable reality --in The Long Weekend exhibition were, to my eye, easily distinguishable from the exact line & application, technically perfect painting of Hilda Rex Nicholas, Stella Bowen & others. She was (they all were) modern but not modernist... In Davidson there's impressionism, Cezanne, perhaps something of Braque & co's generic encapsulation, density, congested enclosure, but most of all she's a la her own personable mode --aeons from Robert Nelson's vaunted "heroic" and none the worse, contra formalist-progressivist thinking, for it. [P.S. 10-03-08. Looking at Vuillard's Mme Bonnard With Her Dog (1907) at the NGV, reminded of the qualities I responded to in Bessie Davidson. The illusion of depth in the panelled construction; figure on chair, dog in foreground, curtained door behind, and another room behind these. The soft warmth of the colours translates into the words I've used before, human, palpable. Maybe too the post-impressionist warmth I see in Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman...]
8
For the record, Robert Hughes wrote this : "It would be hard to think of a more overdue subject for an exhibition than 'British Art in the 20thCentury' , the panorama of 310 works by some seventy artists at The Royal Academy in London. Our fin de siecle is the natural time for summing up, and the subject of modern British has never been tried in depth by an American museum. No matter what quibbles and demurrals one may have about the choice of this work or that name, no one with half an eye could spend a couple of hours in Burlington House and By leave without asking why the cumulative achievements of British painters and sculptors --as distinct from the popularity of a few individuals, such as Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and David Hockney -- have been so scanted by the official and mainly American annals of modernism. (....) So why do so many of the lesser known things in this show [Hughes mentions Sickert, M Smith, the Vorticists, Spencer, Bomberg, Epstein, P Nash, Freud, Kossoff, Auerbach, Kitaj, Hodgkin] now strike us as not just a footnote to, but an essential part of, the visual culture of the past 80 years : neither "provincial" nor "minor" but singular and grand? What muffled this recognition? Partly, the English themselves : a nation always mingy in valuing its own artists."
Hughes traces the origin of said mingyness to Roger Fry & Bloomsbury (Clive Bell et al)'s valorisation of everything French and the denigration of everything English. Thank God Provincial England & the Colonies saved me from most of that; even when New York was at its most attractive I hadnt realized that the assumed price of the new was the heads of the artists I'd grown up with!
9
Off the record, John Piper explains : "For twenty years the Paris Post-Impressionists had been making clear and definitive statements. They could not be ignored. By 1938 the looming war made the clear but closed world of abstract art untenable for me. It made the whole pattern and structure of thousands of English sites more precious as they became more likely to disappear. Anyway, what I had learned was now part of me, and an integral and prominent part at that. The abstract practice taught me a lot that I would not have learned without it, and all the time I had hold, through the collages, of a lifeline to natural appearances -- and so to early Palmer, to Turner, early and late (topographical and less purely topographical) and to our whole Romantic tradition in which it has always been possible for meaningful details to shine like beacons in the damp, misty evanescence of our beautiful island light and weather." Richard Ingrams comments, "What Piper could never shed was his nationality and upbringing, as he was half-expected to do by the extremists of the Modern art movement, whose aim was to reproduce a supposedly international style. He has therefore been dismissed in some quarters as provincial, a slur that could be, and probably has been, levelled at most great English artists --Blake, Samuel Palmer, Constable --who never went far beyond their native England.(....)Being an English or British painter meant resigning oneself to the probable lack of any international recognition." p22, Piper's Places (Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1983).
This introduces the cultural dimension, melding political & emotional, and precisely what informs the "nativism" I often air.
Here's Peter Fuller on Piper and the other themes I'm constantly meditating : "Piper has always been a painter of English landscape (....) through a conspicuously English sensibility. But if he sought a continuity with romantic traditions in English culture, it was a replenished continuity. His painting affirms that though life in the twentieth century necessarily involves a changed vision, and changed values, it need not, or perhaps ought not, to involve some absolute, philistine rupture with the achievements of our cultural past, nor yet with art's capacity to give pleasure through decoration." (from Images of God, p96, 1985.) Rereading Peter Fuller recently I feel the enormous loss his tragically early death was for British criticism...
10
23-01-08
Could be, of course, that Robert Hughes isnt quotable, writing too far outside of the local academics' pale. And in the Australian context, Giles Auty is definitely persona non grata if one remembers his stroppy vacation here in the '90s. Ironically, some of his art criticism echoed one's own responses to the broad swathe of awfulness apparently authorised by postmodernism's this that & the other. However, in the prestigious Peter Nahum catalogue for its British survey show of 1988, there's Auty making the very same points as Hughes. He refers to the 'Tate Gallery Affair' of 1954, when John Rothenstein struck Douglas Cooper, during the Diaghileff exhibition at Forbes House, in what Peter Nahum considered a justified & symbolic defence of what Auty calls "the continuing worth of home-produced art and traditions in the face of that long line of francophiles and advocates of international modernism who saw fit to belittle the domestic product." He reasons that "the dominance of mainstream modernism endured only 20 years from the mid-Fifties to the mid-Seventies and subsequent post-modern practice has merely re-established the pluralism of the pre-war . Significantly, two of the major British painters of this century, Stanley Spencer and Lucian Freud, have not been modernists in a formal sense. Such strands and cross-currents in art are an irritant to the neat patterns of progress modern art-historians prefer to project. The influence of Picasso dominated the lifes of certain British artists while affecting others not at all. Is this evidence of insularity or individualism? The Slade School under Tonks, reputedly the least sympathetic or flexible of teachers, gave rise to a galaxy of talents unrivalled by any other school, anywhere. The paradoxes of modern art have long outlived Roger Fry's sweeping generalisations. " (Cross-Section : British Art in the Twentieth Century; Peter Nahum, 1988)
11
(25-01-08)
One man seems to know his subject, the other is winging it! One (Stephens) reports on what he elicits from the curators and what's there to be seen; the other (Nelson) seems intent on pushing along his rather squeeky old barrow, and cant have seen the same exhibition, since his optic is historically & aesthetically clouded by the unreconstructed cliche regarding the merit of both British art & the efficacy of the formalist rationale. However, I'm the first to agree with Alan Pose (who initially suggested I must have read a different piece by Nelson to the one he'd seen!) that the reviews must be praised for having stimulated a discussion we've enjoyed several times a week for the last couple of months. Indeed, this recent period could be called Modern Britain, comprising the wonderful show (visited two, three, four, five times & more by people I know --Ken Parker, for example, six times!), the reviews, and the discussion about pictures, painters, Modernism, Formalism, internationalism, the local...
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21-03-08
In a discussion about cultural reference, which soon focussed upon "Englishness", on the Leafe Press (UK) blog recently, its editor, Alan Baker, suggested to me that distance from home might deepen one's regard for many features the native happily assumes --and I suppose I do bang on a bit about hedgerows, lanes, woods, fields, clumps, The Lark Rising, Neo-Romanticism, St Ives, Keeping Up Appearances & Old Thumper ale! But legacy is certainly a large aspect of the impact of the Modern Britain show for me. I'm home from home, returned to the swathe of British art I knew from Southampton Art Gallery through my teens and to particular artists I've followed since my commuting between Melbourne & the UK began in earnest in 1987, by which time my involvement with the international avant-garde had practically dissolved. And so might legacy be the issue for colleagues who're not all expatriates either. British painting for them, despite its public subordination to European & American art, is evidently something they continue to reckon with. One might deduce then that despite the USA, the EEC & ASEAN, the British reference continues for a formidable quotient of Australian society. It might also be that what is identified in such a large body of art work, and as successfully eclectic a show as I've seen (--and suddenly my heart's pounding at the thought of a post-1960 show which would pose the question, What happened after our blockbuster's cut-off date? that is to say, what happened to painting as the profound practice Modern Britain presented? and what happened with the bourgeoning & noticeably British abstraction and to the figure & landscape streams? The NGV's Hodgkins & Sydney's huge Hockney plein-air already offer answers but with so many chapters of the story to fill-in let's not leave it too long --2010, 2015 at the latest?!), that the Modern Britain exhibition constitutes a sufficiently strong statement of regional art to demonstrate the folly of the claim for distinctions & value judgements informed by a determinist formalism & historical progressivism's set of mutual exclusivities.
That painting, per se, neednt be a perfunctory means to a dubious end, might be this show's greatest inspiration. Painting is mightier than the video-installation, believe me! It is the newer form must establish itself; painting & drawing have nothing to justify in terms of technology. The primeval means are a strength; it is the sophisticated means whose results at this time are so primitive.
The surrender of definition & judgement before the supposed volume of contemporary work was always disingenuous, actually indicating a failure of critical & perceptual nerve. Periodic bets on the state of the art are essential, especially when the flux in which the tradition is always to be found is as frenetic as it is today.
After this show, I can imagine a curatorial enthusiasm for the Australian (even Australasian) representations & speculations along the same lines as Modern Britain... There's no time to lose!
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Modern Britain, 1900-1960 is not so much a historical journey as a historical hop-scotch. How the British interacted with Europe and, post-WW2, with America, and European art similarly engaged, is the example of regional art anywhere & everywhere, especially today in the global society (think of contemporary art from Asia). There are no backwaters --later times are always likely to redeem the seeming relics & oddities. Backwaters mostly reflect stagnant criticism.
Modern Britain felt contemporary, that is to say feasible as practice in terms of means & visions. The point about the Dutch Master (still-life or portrait), the Velasquez, El Greco, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso; the point about Constable, Turner, of pre-Raphaelitism, whatever, is that influence is dynamic. The original is also dynamised by its extension and vice-versa. Echoes & variations cant help but retrieve & replenish. Influence is life.
My favourites? The Johns, brother & sister, and the marvellous threesome of John, Lees & Innes; the Camden Road cameo; Passmore, Gore, Sutherland; Frances Hodgkins, exotic yet graceful; Paul Nash's magnificent wall of topographically coherent yet visionary landscapes, ditto Hitchens whose detail's all wash as though line; the architectonic & sumptuous Reynolds; the room of Spencers, ditto the Bratbys; the half-walls of Tunnards, Bawdens; the unforgetable war memorial; ah, all these & then gems here & there, Peploe, Piper, Ravillious,Smith, Jones, Bomberg, Moore, Nicholson, Wood, Wallis, Gertler,Buhler...
The most glaring omission was Lanyon, and to think the NGV actually owns Mullion Bay -- and John Nash by the sea instead of one of his glorious landscapes. The biggest joke : John Berger's 50s wall-text castigating John Bratby's kitchen sink for its rampant consumerism (wouldnt you love to have hit him with a ration-book?)! Almost as funny, the Jekyll & Hyde juxtaposition of hygenic Bowen & toxic Passmore portraits. The last word : assuredly the wall-text quoting a '30s Paul Nash, to the effect that the problem facing artists was how to be modern and British as well. But no doubt at all, Modern Britain, 1900-1960 provided a convergence of the instinctual & learned solutions.
--fin, 22-03-08Kris Hemensley
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