Tag: exhibitions

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Culture

‘Undercover Surrealism’ at the Hayward

Going to them one after the other, it’s hard not to see the Undercover Surrealism exhibition at the Hayward as some kind of riposte to the Modernism exhibition at the V&A.

The Hayward exhibition (full title: Undercover Surrealism – Picasso, Miró, Masson and the vision of George Bataille) is about a magazine called Documents which Bataille ran from 1929-30. Bataille was most closely associated with the Surrealists – he had a falling out with the ‘official’ surrealists and was never really a surrealist himself, but that was the circle he moved in. Documents was notable for juxtaposing articles about high culture, popular culture and ethnography. So you get coverage of Stravinsky, Duke Ellington, Picasso, Dali, Buñuel, Hollywood, trashy novels, African masks, Ethiopian iconography, and the development of the horse imagery from Roman coins into the coins of the Dark Ages. To be honest I was unexcited by the prospect of an exhibition devoted to a magazine, but the curators have done a good job of tracking down plenty of the objects that were covered; so there are Miros, Picassos, Giacomettis, as well as African masks, Dark Age coins; all sorts of stuff. Including some music and film, which was a good move. Apart from the intrinsic interest of most of the exhibits, it did a good job of evoking a particular artistic moment. You can see some of the work here.

Documents existed bang in the middle of the period covered by the V&A Modernism exhibition, but while Corbusier and the Bauhaus were building their airy white machines for rational hygienic living, the Surrealists were more interested in violence, sex, fetish, blood, transgression and distortion. Here’s a typical bit of Bataille:

The slaughterhouse is linked to religion in so far as the temples of bygone eras (not to mention those of the Hindus in our own day) served two purposes: they were used both for prayer and for killing. The result (and this judgement is confirmed by the chaotic aspect of present-day slaughterhouses) was certainly a disturbing convergence of the mysteries of myth and the ominous grandeur typical of those places in which blood flows. In America, curiously enough, W. B. Seabrook has expressed an intense regret; observing that the orgiastic life has survived, but that the sacrificial blood is not part of the cocktail mix, he finds present custom insipid. In our time, nevertheless, the slaughterhouse is cursed and quarantined like a plague-ridden ship. Now, the victims of this curse are neither butchers nor beasts, but those same good folk who countenance, by now, only their own unseemliness, an unseemliness commensurate with an unhealthy need of cleanliness, with irascible meanness, and boredom. The curse (terrifying only to those who utter it) leads them to vegetate as far as possible from the slaughterhouse, to exile themselves, out of propriety, to a flabby world in which nothing fearful remains and in which, subject to the ineradicable obsession of shame, they are reduced to eating cheese.

That’s one of the entries from the Critical Dictionary that was a feature of Documents. Somehow I don’t think Bataille would have agreed that less is more. Even the ethnographic stuff feels rather fetishised – even though it is a serious and intelligent effort of early ethnography, there are enough hints through the exhibition to suggest that Bataille’s interest in black people was basically sexual. Mind you, he seems to have found most things sexual. The surrealists, of course, were also a key part of de Sade’s reinvention as an important literary figure; it was that moment when Freud was seen as validating everyone’s sexual quirks, and the quirkier the better.

It’s tempting to see the two things – Corbusier on the one hand and Dali on the other – as somehow two sides of the same coin, or each as necessitating the other. Or at the least as products of the same forces; of the Great War, and a moment of cultural and historical instabiity when everything was up in the air and no-one quite knew where the world was going. As Yeats put it in 1920: The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Perhaps it’s unwise to insist too much on the historicity of it, though. There are probably always some people who are minimalists by temperament and others who are surrealists.

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Culture

‘Modernism: Designing a New World’ at the V&A

I went to see the Modernism: Designing a New World exhibition at the V&A, which was good. It was largely what you’d expect – white houses, angular furniture and posters with large sans serif headers printed at an angle – although there were some treats and surprises, like a Tatra T-87 saloon car.

Looking at the best of the modernist buildings, like the Villa Savoye and thinking of all those lumpen, red-brick, pitched-roofed houses that the British construction industry threw up over the course of the C20th, you can’t help feeling that our suburbs might be less ugly if we’d embraced modernism a bit more. Of course no style or philosophy is a substitute for a good architect. An industry that cares so little about aesthetics and design would only produce equally lumpen, graceless buildings in white-rendered concrete.

Incidentally, note that many of the most successful modernist dwellings seemed to be (like the Villa Savoye), stand-alone houses set in the country, where the trees provide a soft green background to the starkness of the design and the sweeping picture windows can look out over beautiful views. The large scale housing projects – and there were plenty of those in the exhibition as well – struggle to have the same impact. With rows of separate buildings, the effect can be rather a lot of visual clutter; perhaps because Modernism eschews decoration, so the aesthetic effects are achieved with structural elements – i.e. the shapes of the buildings. Or something. I haven’t really thought that through yet.

One of the odd things about the exhibition was that it was a constant stream of utopian, reformist ideals, but in the back of your mind was that the period it dealt with was bookended by the Great War and the Russian Revolution at one end and World War Two at the other, with the Depression and the growth of Fascism in the meantime. And yet somehow, all these idealists who were trying to change the world by giving the working man an efficient living space with Licht, Luft und Sonne seem to fit quite well into that kind of background. The wish to change the world by throwing out everything old and rebuilding it from scratch, to draw a line under ten centuries of European history and say “we can do better than that” has its echoes in the politics. Of course revolutionary Russia was one of the centres of early Modernist design.

And while I’m sure they wanted nothing but to make people’s lives better, the rhetoric – of the house as a ‘machine for living’, of progress, efficiency, mass-production – can be rather dehumanising. It reeks of top-down planning. And then there’s all the stuff about ‘hygienic’ living, with its celebration of cleanliness and the body. There’s a section about it in the exhibition, including some film of the ‘Sokol Slets’ – massed displays of gymnastics in Czechoslovakia which look like something Reni Liefenstahl would have dreamt up after eating too much cheese.


‘Performance of 16 800 women at the 1938 Sokol Slet. Strahov Stadium, Prague.’

Despite all the dubious parallels I’m drawing, it’s worth pointing out that both Hitler and Stalin disliked Modernism. Their idea of a good building was one smothered in heavy-handed political symbolism. And although some of the architects and designers were quite political (mostly leftists of various kinds, but some of the Italian Futurists were Fascist sympathisers, apparently), I’m not suggesting that any of that is terribly relevant to the actual buildings. I’m just drawing connections because I think it’s interesting.

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Culture Other

‘Gothic Nightmares’ at the Tate

I went to Tate Britain at the weekend to see Gothic Nightmares – Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination (which finished yesterday). It was mainly an exhibition of Henry Fuseli, with a few pictures by his imitators and contemporaries, including William Blake. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a large exhibition devoted to such a bad painter. This one, the snappily-titled Percival Delivering Belisane from the Enchantment of Urma, from 1783, gives you the idea; contorted, rather inaccurately drawn figures, overwrought, melodramatic treatment, and obscure medieval subject matter (another of his paintings has the title Wolfram Introducing Bertrand of Navarre to the Place where he had Confined his Wife with the Skeleton of her Lover).

It’s not just that the subject matter and mood aren’t to my taste; the actual painting is clumsy. To be fair, he did do some that were both technically better and more sophisticated than that. The Shepherd’s Dream, for example. But even at the time, his reputation was based on his imagination and sensationalism rather than technical excellence, and while I can believe that the work was exciting at the time, it looks pretty tame now.

I found the most interesting thing was the context it provided for Blake’s work. The painting above may not look particularly Blake-y, but the exhibition made the connection obvious. For that matter, we know that Blake was a great admirer of Fuseli’s work. I preferred Blake’s pictures, on the whole. He wasn’t a great painter, any more than Fuseli, but he had a couple of things going for him, I think. The first is sincerity. Fuseli, you feel, relished the strange and sensational in the same way people relish a horror movie; Blake was a full-on visionary who believed in some kind of truth to his paintings and prints of angels and spirits. The fact that Blake’s work is much more stylised is also a help. Fuseli’s work is fundamentally representaional and narrative, and if the subject matter doesn’t do much for you, there isn’t much left. Blake’s work is just more visually interesting, on the whole. I was particularly struck by a couple of densely painted works in tempera I haven’t seen before. This is one of them, The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan:

Make of that what you will.

The other appealing thing was the Gillray cartoons that used imagery drawn from the paintings. Gillray is always good value, of course. Check out the portrayal of Charles Fox in The Covent Garden Night Mare on this page.

Having been rather negative about the exhibition, I do think it was interesting and I’m glad I went. It shed some light on a particularly moment of British artistic history, which is a good thing for Tate Britain to be doing; I just didn’t rate most of the work very highly.

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Culture

MLT

I went to the British Museum with my sister because, having been on a Nile cruise recently, she’s keen on all things Egyptological. It turns out that the process of preparing a body for mummification is a lot like making dry-cured bacon.

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Culture

Rousseau at the Tate

Back to Rousseau. The painter, not Jean-Jacques. I’m afraid the exhibition, Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris is nearly over, so this won’t be much use to anyone who was trying to decide whether to see it.

Rousseau was a bit of an oddity. He was self-taught and, according to the exhibition blurb, he aspired to joining the academic, classical tradition. Instead, his work was very much admired by a younger generation of artists, like Picasso, whose work Rousseau apparently didn’t like much. Which makes it hard to know what to make of him. If he was literally trying to produce paintings that looked like academic works, then he failed. On the other hand, his similarity to the Modernists is striking – his work has a limited sense of depth, a strong sense of colour and design, and is highly stylised.

But of course, these things are also characteristic of folk art; they seem, in fact, to be typical of self-taught artists generally. This is a self-portrait by Rousseau:

this is an anonymous panel from the American Folk Art Museum:

So was Rousseau absorbed into the canon, rather than relegated to folk art status, just because he happened to be in the right place at the right time? Well, there may be an element of that, but he does have some distinctive things in his favour. His compositions and use of colour are gorgeous, for a start. The most famous thing about him is the choice of subject matter, of course, in the jungle paintings. There was a lot of good contextual stuff in the exhibition, much of which you can see on that website, to show that the jungle paintings weren’t quite as random as you might think. There were World’s Fairs held in Paris in 1878, 1889 and 1900, and sensational portrayals of Africa were in the air in the French equivalents of Rider Haggard. There’s a startlingly dodgy statue in the exhibition (not by Rousseau) of a nubile woman being abducted by a gorilla, for example. For that matter, the Cubist interest in African art is an only slightly more enlightened version of the same thing.

Kowing where he got his ideas from doesn’t make the paintings any less peculiar, of course. In The Hungry Lion Throws itself on the Antelope, it isn’t the central struggle that is most remarkable, it’s all the other animals lurking in the jungle – an eagle, an owly thing, a leopard and a weird gorilla-bear creature, several of them with strips of bloody flesh hanging from their mouths.

Anyway. It’s a big subject and I’m not about to do it justice here. Interesting though. I’d recommend the exhibition if you’re in London in the next 11 days.

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Culture

‘China: The Three Emperors, 1662-1795’ at the RA

The Royal Academy’s own website doesn’t seem to be working at the moment (Tibetan hackers?), but Goldman Sachs, the corporate sponsor of the show, have a Flash slideshow you can see here which gives an idea of what it’s like.

I found it a bit dull. The exhibition is huge and the quality of the items is obvious, but it seems a bit same-y; and (because it’s all court art?), it’s all rather formal and grand. I also found it surprisingly un-surprising, somehow. I don’t know much about C18th China (anything, really) so I would have expected it to be more interesting just out of novelty value, but somehow it all seemed rather familiar. Perhaps I just haven’t got the enough knowledge to see the subtleties, or perhaps it actually is all a bit repetitive. It might have been a good idea to get the audioguide. These very big exhibitions are always a bit off-putting anyway; if it was a quarter the size, it might have focussed my mind a bit.