Londonist tells me that University of the Arts London is getting the Kubrick archive. Two things about that. I’d never heard of UotAL; apparently the Camberwell, St Martin’s and Chelsea art colleges and the London colleges of Communication and Fashion are all part of the same institution. Who knew? And also the Londonist article pointed me to this great article by Jon Ronson about visiting the Kubrick archive.
There’s a new film of Tristram Shandy which is showing at the London Film Festival. They’ve given it the title A Cock and Bull Story, from the last lines of the book:
‘L—d! said my mother, what is all this story about? –
A COCK and a BULL, said Yorick – and one of the best of its kind I ever heard’
All the comments you read about it make reference to the fact that it’s regarded as ‘unfilmable’. You can see what they mean, but I can’t help thinking that, of all the early novelists, Sterne is the one who would have just loved making films. The book is full of great dialogue and slightly extraordinary characters, slapstick, set pieces, and technical innovation. The man who wrote a novel that includes a marbled page and those little squiggly lines to indicate the shape of his narrative would have loved playing with all the possibilities of film.
Whether or not the new film does a good job of it is another matter. I’m slightly underwhelmed to see all the usual britcom suspects in the cast – Steve Coogan, David Walliams, Stephen Fry, Ronni Ancona, Rob Brydon – because it suggests a film being played for fairly broad comedy. And I’d almost always rather see an actor doing comedy than a comedian acting. Still, it could be fab.
I’m feeling a bit pot/kettle for having been rude to Lynne Truss for whinging about things, because this, for the third post in a row, is going to be a whinge.
This time: those blurbs in art galleries. Specifically the ones that tell you what to think, and how you should be reacting. I don’t mind this kind of thing:
Although the inspiration for Embankment came from the single box she found in her mother’s house, Whiteread selected a number of differently-shaped boxes to construct the installation for the Turbine Hall. She filled them with plaster, peeled away the exteriors and was left with perfect casts, each recording and preserving all the bumps and indentations on the inside. They are ghosts of interior spaces or, if you like, positive impressions of negatives spaces. Yet Whiteread wanted to retain their quality as containers, so she had them refabricated in a translucent polymer which reveals a sense of an interior. And rather than make precious objects of them, she constructed thousands.
[some stuff about the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark which I can’t be bothered to type] Whiteread has spoken of wanting to make the Turbine Hall into a kind of warehouse, and this is an intriguing response to a space which was once industrial but is now a museum. For what is a museum, after all, but a storage depot for art?
There’s a certain amount of editorialising there, but it’s mainly concerned with the thought processes and techniques of the artist, which is quite interesting information which the audience can take or leave. But this, from later in the same leaflet, is the kind of thing that really bugs me:
Dwarfed by these towering structures as we wind our way through them, we become acutely aware of our own physical presence. But there is also a spirit of absence here, a ghostly echo of all the abandoned empty spaces that surrounds us day after day.
Thanks, Mr Tate-Curator, but I can decide for myself how aware I am of my own physical presence.
One particular problem with this kind of blurbing is that it invites the audience to disagree. This is from the leaflet for the Universal Experiences exhibition at the Hayward:
This 28-metre-long light table displays hundreds of colour transparencies of tourist destinations visited and photographed by the artists. The pictures evoke fantasies of escapism and are reminiscent of the illustrations in tourist brochures and travel magazines. Combined in this sculptural travelogue these images allude to the increase in global tourism at the end of the 20th century and re-invest their endlessly photographed subjects with a sense of the extraordinary.
To which my reaction is – no they don’t. Re-invest with a sense of the extraordinary, that is. If anything, they banalify the places shown by lumping together such a large number of generic-looking photos. Now the curators at the Hayward might argue that it’s a good thing that I’m being drawn into engaging with the work. Except that I find myself constantly put into a hostile, confrontational frame of mind; and I don’t believe that irritated and argumentative is the best spirit to get the most out of a work of art.
Perhaps all I’m doing is revealing my own character flaws again.
If I’d already written a book whinging about how no-one knows how to punctuate properly anymore, and was just starting to do the publicity rounds for a new book whinging about how no-one has proper manners anymore, I’d start to worry about the karmic payback for all that negativity. I used to enjoy Lynne Truss’s journalism in the Times; it seems a pity that she’s turning herself into a one-woman Daily Mail editorial.
Actually, though, I have more sympathy for her new cause than the old one. Whether or not I’d be convinced by her argument, whatever it is, I can at least see that courtesy is important. The way people treat each other in all the mundane exchanges of everyday has a real impact on the enjoyability of life. I really don’t care whether the greengrocer knows how to use an apostrophe, but I do care whether or not he’s rude to me.
I’m really getting sick of bands who mispell their own name, or the names of their albums and songs, for some kind of cool-value. You know the kind of thing – Reprazent, M!ssundaztood , sk8er boi, Outkast, A Skillz and Krafty Kuts, Bushwacka, Klashnekoff. It’s cheesy and just so twencen. But the habit has reached a new low with one of the bands on X Factor, who are called Addictiv Ladies. For fuck’s sake, you’re not even trying. If ‘Addictive Ladies’ is too mainstream for you, how about ‘Adiktiv Laydeez’ or ‘Adicktiv Lay Ds’? Just dropping the ‘e’ seems so … half-hearted.
