Holger Hoock
Empires of the Imagination:f Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850
Profile Books, 2010
544 Pages
£30.00
ISBN 978-1861978592

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In a violent evening assault in 1776, an equestrian statue of George III built of lead and gold leaf was knocked down by a crowd of soon-to-be American soldiers and commoners who took exception to His Majesty’s rule. The severed and mutilitated head was carried off with processional festivities, while the remaining lead from the statue was reportedly melted into 42,088 bullets. As one bemused writer commented, George III’s “troops will probably have melted majesty fired at them”. To the modern reader, this story might well call to mind the equally savage treatment of Saddam Hussein’s likeness in Baghdad.

Holger Hoock’s Empires of the Imagination is a veritable treasure trove of such stories, which put recent events into perspective and reveal the equal amounts of passion and absurdity ideologically invested in art. Hoock’s latest comes at a propitious moment in history when an introspective mood prevails across the globe. While questioning the ethics of recent war, countries are also attempting to salvage and restore the antiquities of battle-scarred countries and to encourage an artistic witness to war. Hoock’s book charts similar developments in an 18th- and 19th-century Britain driven by military and colonial enterprise.

Following memorialised heroes, painters, diplomats, and art collectors, Hoock expounds an original understanding of Britain between 1750 and 1850 as the crucible in which the country emerged into artistically informed maturity. Most histories of the period see little state involvement in the promotion of art when compared to countries like France. Hoock’s originality lies in recognizing precisely the opposite—galvanised by war and empire, the state was in fact vitally involved in shaping the artistic character of the nation. By studying the “interplay between aesthetically performed politics and politically inflected art” through acts of artistic commemoration, creation, and collection, Hoock frames the state, war, and empire “as powerful agents and sites of cultural change”.

In the first half of his book, Hoock analyses heroic memorialisation in the sculptural and artistic responses to the American and French wars. The strength of his analysis lies in revealing the contingency and pragmatism from which heroic art materialises. Though purported to embody patriotic ideals, heroic monumentalisation is often the result of the vying power-plays and agendas of a moment in time. For instance, the British parliament’s only commission for a military monument during the American Revolutionary War, the one erected to Admiral Rodney, is found on close study to emerge from an attempt to salvage the political reputation of the House of Commons amidst a furore of criticism and embarrassment. Navigating politics and the market, American artists too displayed a canny pragmatism in the ambiguity or candour with which they displayed their loyalties on canvas.

Hoock’s analysis is of an astonishing breadth and this is never more in evidence than when he charts the shifts in the character of British heroism from the 18th to the 19th century. He writes of the reconciliation of neoclassical allegory with naturalism and reportage; examines the differencing of Scotsmen in depictions of battle; demonstrates how educational discipline and the hot debate over corporal punishment fed harder codes of masculinity; surveys the responses of churches and preachers to earthly heroism and military glory; and integrates the revival of chivalry with that of Gothic architecture and medieval romances. Like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, the various pieces of literary, social, educational, and religious history lock into place. Through this intricate assemblage, Hoock illuminates not just the subject of political art but how parallel cultural movements mutually shape each other.

The section on collecting takes us to the East and to stories about such icons as the Elgin marbles and the Taj Mahal. Here Hoock’s argument hinges on recognizing the varying levels of state involvement entirely apart from a consistent official policy. The state’s artistic investment emerges through a complex web of relationships between the government, diplomats who had antiquarian interests, other  diplomats who used antiques as bargaining chips, and local antiquarians and translators.

It is in this section that we begin to see the contours of modern collecting emerge from the informal mess of public-private partnerships. Men like Alexander Cunningham began to argue for a responsibility concerning Indian antiques for no other good than the “honour of the British government”. We also witness the subsequent emergence of government policy concerning the preservation of antiques and the gradual standardization of archaeological practice. It is the peculiar conditions of colonial India that catalyze the emergence of the in situ ideal of preservation. The following period of the 1830s to 1840s saw the state’s effusive investment in the arts. This period, by Hoock’s demonstration, became the natural summit of several decades of state interest in the arts inspired by war and empire.

For a book that frequently discusses art’s accessibility to the public, Hoock’s narrative architecture renders his book pleasurable to the academic and the amateur historian alike. It proves equally entertaining and encyclopaedic by virtue of good story-telling. Opening with his dramatically coloured account of the coronation of George III, Hoock whisks us through groups perched on scaffolding to get a good view of the procession, street-viewers munching meat pies and drinking wine, and the nobility listening to the bishop’s sonorous tones at Westminster Abbey. The stories continue to roll with engrossing momentum. That said, the laboured conclusions to each section might pall on the non-academic reader.

But Empires does not just set out to regale the reader with its anecdotes. Hoock’s relish of a good story is integral to his methodology, for the book is itself a carefully constructed edifice of many inter-linked narratives. It is from attentively following the turns of each that Hoock teases out his precise and original conclusions. By his deft discernment of pattern in detail, he proves himself master of his subject in this empire of political and artistic tales.

Deborah Rosario is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

Calvin Bedient
The Yeats Brothers and Modernism’s Love of Motion
University of Notre Dame Press, 2009
424 Pages
£43.50
ISBN 978-0231148160

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As Calvin Bedient makes plain in the introduction to The Yeats Brothers and Modernism’s Love of Motion, Jack Butler Yeats has been “absurdly eclipsed” by his more famous brother, William Butler. On the other hand, “the Irish will tell you that he is their greatest painter, as his brother is their greatest poet, and pretty much leave it at that”. A starting point for Bedient’s combined study of the Yeats siblings is the notion that both views, both “regional sentiment” and wider global indifference, have hampered the reception of Jack Yeats’s work. A joint reappraisal of the two brothers’ artistic outputs along more detailed, objective lines promises to rebalance the scales while highlighting a defining feature in the work of both Jack and William (one that moreover epitomizes international modernism as a whole in Bedient’s outline): the emphasis on “process, mutability, activity, motion, evolution”, key facets of the “‘ism’ of all that is traveling”.

In concentrating attention on this thesis, Bedient dispenses with the historical dimensions of the brothers’ relationship, so those hoping for a dual biography along the lines of Jan Hulker’s Vincent and Theo Van Gogh or Adam Sisman’s more recent The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge will have to look elsewhere. The contextual backdrop—recourse to correspondences, suggestions of shared cultural and artistic reference points, moments of interpersonal influence, and so forth—does not interest Bedient. Instead, most of The Yeats Brothers consists of a series of extended formal readings of J.B.’s paintings and W.B.’s poems, all of which are intended to underline what Bedient terms the brothers’ obsession with “sweet kinesis”. This shared formal tendency is apparently (and arbitrarily, so far as is demonstrated in this unwaveringly aesthetic, un-historicizing portrait) the sole connecting bridge between the two oeuvres.

As a basic interpretive paradigm for both Jack and William, specifically in the work of their later “modernist” periods, Bedient’s argument is a plausible and even sound one. J.B. Yeats’s vigorous, ebullient paintings—rough aggregates of van Gogh, Cezanne, and Jackson Pollock—are at the more radical end of the post-impressionist spectrum; with their violent brushstrokes and atomistic variegation, his post-1925 works suggest a more fluid, animated pointillism. Similarly, of course, W.B. Yeats’s verse is intensely preoccupied with spectacular evocations of physical movement; from Fergus’s “brazen cars”, through the quasi-futurism of “An Irish Airman Forsees His Death”, to famous instances of Yeatsian dynamic gesticulation like the opening of “Leda and the Swan” (”A sudden blow: the great wings beating still”) and the first lines of “The Second Coming”:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…ch of hands watching Fred and Ginger dance against a b

Bedient is right on the mark when, around two-thirds into The Yeats Brothers, he summarizes exactly what is so distinctive about such taut, vertiginous writing:

What is exemplary in Yeats is the dramatic economy, the directness and immediacy, of his evocations of action and change … Though commonly thought of as the most staid of the Modernists, the one who was most fixated on formality, the logical one to get into a verbal scuffle with Marinetti, the Futurist, when the latter read from his work in a salon, Yeats nonetheless felt and thought in terms of great power-shifts and vectors. Hart Crane is most like him in this regard, though hardly a match. There is nothing comparable in Eliot, Stevens, Pound or Rilke … Yeats is a poet of urgent utterance, of getting passion out – precisely cut and brilliantly flaunted. Motion, the moment, the absurd position of sitting on the tiny seat of the vast unicycle of an epoch and affecting to be masterful in relation to its dynamics and direction, made him a performer of momentary or impending imbalance.

This is a bold, eloquent précis of the elder Yeats’s poetic. “Precisely cut and brilliantly flaunted” is well judged, with its compacted emphasis on sculpted form and galvanizing instinct, and the comparison drawn between Yeats and his modernist coevals is helpful. Pound, in particular, jumps out as a countervailing figure in the list, one for whom the pursuit of a monumental stillness was a lifelong pursuit (for all his peripatetic-adventurer motifs and radical talk of pentameter-breaking). Elsewhere in the study, glances at Nietzsche and Bergson provide a useful philosophical underpinning for the discussion.

Unfortunately, I quote the above passage at length because this rather oddly located peroration is about as pithy as The Yeats Brothers gets. Those who may have detected a hint of purple in Bedient’s prose toward the end of the extract may be disappointed to learn that this flamboyant, exaggerated method of engaging with form—a sort of bizarre Pynchonian belle-lettrism—is by far the most representative critical tone in the study as a whole. When the subject is W.B. Yeats, Bedient half gets away with it, because there is at least a semblance of substance lurking below the layers of verbosity. His readings of the Crazy Jane poems in the chapter on “Performance” are astute and subtle in their examination of Yeatsian personae, and the highlighting of Yeats’s utopian regard for the lost permanence of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy (in the chapter titled “Immanence”) introduces a much-needed element of antithesis into an otherwise extravagantly univocal and repetitive elongation of the central premise: that a dedication to riffs on motion was the guiding principle for both brothers.

Sadly, however, Bedient’s analyses are regularly undermined by a prolix vagueness that is, by turns, eccentrically bewildering and downright opaque. It is the work of Jack Yeats (perhaps because it does not offer logocentric textual grounding) that inspires the most fanciful flights:

Here, characteristically, the brushwork flies to be ahead of and beside itself, to escape copying and to get to what is unimitatively original and formless, in excess of a passive precise location. It broaches, rather than dwells in, the very ‘now’ of the now. At the same time, of course, the paint would be nothing more than paint, indeed nothing less than paint – that beloved, obsessive, sticky, smelly, real substance.

In similar fashion Jack Yeats’s art is described as “a spectacle both of nothing becoming something and of something becoming nothing, so that everything is almost something and almost nothing”, while elsewhere Bedient deploys the confusing analogy “a dandelion’s cemetery-nursery of parachutes”. Perhaps most bafflingly of all, at one point we are told that Jack was “a democrat, but not a slut, of color”. William, too, does not escape the effects of Bedient’s verbiage, through close readings that tend toward the clumsy side of idiosyncratic (”The only other colon in the poem has the mere yeoman’s duty of introducing Lady Gregory’s dialogues”) and the needlessly pornographic (”What was summoned in the shape of Cuchulain gives [Yeats] a hard-on precisely because it is an obscure and menacing power”). Occasionally Bedient is just plain wrong on the most elementary of technical levels, as when he claims that, phonetically, “salmon” is to “falls” what “mackerel” is to “crowd”.

Stylistic queries aside, at bottom The Yeats Brothers is hampered by its hugely broad, ultimately self-defeating premise. The equation of the brothers’ modernism with motion is accurate, but hardly, as is perhaps intended, revisionary or groundbreaking. Bedient’s study is an awkward amalgam of, on the one hand, late 20th-century critical theory in its more abstruse manifestations (Deleuze, Lacan, Lyotard—all apparently “anticipated” by Jack Yeats), and on the other, those quirky formalist readings: all in all a slightly limited frame of reference. With no historical backdrop, Bedient is reduced to offering a facile pseudo-political dichotomy as a foil for his rarefied, hypertrophied aestheticism: “liberal” flux battles “conservative” stasis, with the intimation that both the Yeatses and modernism as a whole are being polemically “rescued” by way of association with the former.

The more Bedient warms to his view of the works themselves as “weapons in a war against the quasi-official reign of forms in the received world”, and the more he portrays the brothers as resisting objectivity and the fixity of definition, the more his discussion deteriorates into amorphous insensibility. If Jack Yeats’s paintings suggest that “the control of infinity … is only a rhythm of inflexions and heightenings among multiples and storms of entanglement”, and if W.B. Yeats’s poetry is a “soft-cloth-flexible run of verbless syntactical fragments joined only by semicolons”, if for both “matter runs amok” as “it always has”, then after a while, as The Yeats Brothers seems to demonstrate, any sort of constructive, authoritative critical response to the works and their creators becomes nigh-on impossible.

Alex Niven is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. He is writing a thesis on Basil Bunting, modernist poetry, and music.

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After three years and £61 million, the temple-sized doors of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology reopened on Saturday. Five days earlier, when clouds of dust still engulfed the back entrance gates, the Oxonian Review previewed the renovation of “one of the world’s leading museums”. The first impression was one of shining glass and steel, fresh paint, and last-minute bustle. Everywhere, designers, curators, conservationists, and technicians talked intently over coffee tables and added the final amphora or bass viol to the display cabinets.

Designed by architect Rick Mather, the new building contains six storeys of 39 galleries hidden behind Charles Cockerell’s original structure, whose pillared façade of 1845 still fronts Beaumont Street. At a cost of £3,572 per square metre, and with enough square metres to double the Ashmolean’s previous capacity, Mather’s complex is intended to elevate the world’s first university museum from the status of “dear old friend” to internationally recognised “cultural jewel”.

On these statistics alone, an historian of the future might judge that museums are to us what churches were to our medieval forebears: a society’s monuments and, simultaneously, its public centres for education, spiritual improvement, and a higher form of entertainment than bear-pits or night clubs. It appears museums are just as keen to attract pilgrims: the Ashmolean’s target is a 25% increase, to half a million visitors per year. Not having eternal salvation at their disposal, however, the Ashmolean’s curators have resorted to a renovated building, design strategy, and a restaurant to improve their “access” ratings.

Like many a cathedral, the Ashmolean’s new building is an artwork for artworks. Hemmed in on all sides—by the Taylorian, Sackler Library and the Classics Faculty— its internal architecture has been constructed to exploit space and light.  On each floor, gallery windows open onto a skylight-lined atrium, which cuts right down to the lower ground floor. Together with the chalky Wiltshire white walls, this layout creates a sense of cool, inviting depths. The open views and abundant glass work on a symbolic level, too, suggesting the interrelations between the cultures and periods on display. Cutting dramatically across this scene, six steel “bridges” literally and figuratively link the distinct collections.

Museums—here again, like churches—are in the business of selectively preserving and presenting the past. In redeploying the Ashmolean’s innumerable relics, designers have produced a new “strategy” for this old project, which they’ve dubbed “Crossing Cultures, Crossing Time”.  Rather than grouping artefacts by country or period, the Ashmolean’s curators have arranged its wares according to themes which prompt visitors to trace connections between the many cultures represented in the museum. The second floor exhibition, for example, juxtaposes European, Chinese, Japanese and Russian art from the Renaissance to 1900.

Through the combination of several such exhibitions, the renovated Ashmolean aims to present a single, coherent narrative of the evolution of civilisation from prehistory to the present day. According to its curators, the museum is ideally suited for such a task because its modest scale allows a wide range of artefacts to be presented within a relatively small compass. This bid for coherence raises complicated questions and produces some inevitable gaps: South American and modern African cultures, for example, are thinly represented.

To the many groups involved in the Ashmolean’s redesign, however, this holistic narrative is only part of a much broader didactic goal: to show how a comparative approach can be used to demonstrate the intrinsic value of cultural variety and to advance a diverse conception of human progress. The new Ashmolean thus enlists beauty and history in no less a task than a new salvation of souls, if one more subtle than sermons, through the effacement of prejudice and the propagation of tolerance.

To give their artefacts—if not immortality—at least a longer shelf life, the museum’s designers have taken great care in presentation. This has evident benefits: display cabinets fitted with state-of-the-art environmental controls allow fragile textiles, such as an embroidered hanging from the Ottoman Empire, to be shown for the first time; and in-cabinet lighting reveals artefacts’ intricate details, including what is perhaps the Ashmolean’s most prized possession, the crystal, enamel, and gold Alfred Jewel, whose Anglo-Saxon inscription reads “Alfred ordered me to be made”.  In the European porcelain room, a series of enormous glass cabinets has been used to glittering effect to display a collection of 1,100 pieces of crockery, as required by the terms of a bequest. Reflections from the glass and the faint daylight which filters through a cabinet-window create a luminous, ghostly atmosphere, appropriate to the strange detached existence of these dinner party veterans. Wiring and other support mechanisms are discreetly hidden in the walls; beauty must not be marred by practicalities.

These technological advances bring the inevitable paradox of rejuvenating a museum into view: its collection’s previous context—from room furnishings to display labels—must in some measure be abandoned to make way for the new. It is thus a relief to find that the Cockerell building’s familiar old ambiance remains largely unchanged. A few cabinets have been replaced, furniture re-upholstered, and walls repainted or re-papered. The floors in both old and new buildings have been freshly covered with European oak parquet, and Portland stone, a material also found in Brasenose College and other Oxford University buildings, appears in both structures. Touches like these provide a simple but tangible continuity between the two buildings and underline the value of both traditional and modern design materials. The rooms in the Cockerell are, however, a little barer and less comfortingly musty than visitors will remember. Where before an aura of haphazard curiosities collected by explorers and antiquarians lingered in the air, today this will not do; “access” requires that displays free from clutter and comprehensible to the most casual visitor. One is left feeling that the spirit of the new museum has subtlely but incongruously encroached on the old.

If the days of discoveries in dusty corners are over, it is nonetheless reassuring to see that some of the Ashmolean’s most intriguing relics have benefited from relocation to a modern setting. Guy Fawkes’ lantern, for instance, is now in the Mather building’s England Gallery, newly accompanied by the “Fifth of November” rhyme in full: “By God’s Providence he was catched/ With a dark lantern and burning match…” Legions of lekythoi which once stood in scattered cabinets among the other Greek vases now form a single display on the staircase down to the “Ancient World” section, with an information panel which quotes Aristophanes. It is also charming to find, in the Japanese section, a full-scale model of a tea-room, constructed in situ by master builders with authentic materials. (An inaugural tea ceremony was held there on 4 November by a Japanese tea-master flew over specially for the occasion).

In this renovated setting, it quickly becomes clear that 21st-century museum-goers demand more for free entry than our downtrodden progenitors. Exhibitions aside (and in addition to the boutique gift shop and subterranean tea-rooms), a modern museum would not be complete without an overpriced gourmet restaurant. Cue the Ashmolean Dining Room, touted as “Oxford’s first rooftop restaurant”, with views over St. John’s College and toward the Randolph Hotel. The air of pricelessness which lingers upon the treasures in the exhibition rooms is almost as tangible here.  Even the menu card, in the venerable spirit of Oxford benefaction dinners, includes eighty varieties of wine. In the evenings, the room’s large goose-feather lampshades will be seen glimmering onto the atrium’s cascading staircase; a tantalising reminder that beauty and history also have their price.

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Emma Park is reading for a DPhil in Classics at University College, Oxford. She is an editor of ORbits.

Akshat Rathi is reading for an MSc in Organic Chemistry at Exeter College, Oxford. He is the assistant editor at the Oxonian Review.

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Alex Danchev
On Art and War and Terror
Edinburgh University Press, 2009
256 Pages
£60.00
ISBN 978-0748639151

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A book which costs £60 and is neither a reference work nor a textbook can hardly be intended for mass consumption. Its inside flaps, marred neither by blurb nor authorial picture, suggests a lofty disdain for self-advertisement. Rather, On Art and War and Terror belongs to that strange symbiotic economy of academics, university presses, and libraries.

As an object, Danchev’s latest exudes ivory-tower luxury. Although pleasantly slim for its kind, the book’s thick, glossy pages ensure that it will not be picked up lightly. On the front cover is a photograph of a beach in ochre and grey, where waves swirl around broken groynes: the epitome of aestheticised desolation. The title’s grandiose polysyndeton reverberates like the opening of a sermon.

The back cover presents Danchev’s equally grave “manifesto”, borrowed from a cultural authority: “the imaginative transformation of human life is the means by which we can most truly grasp and comprehend it.” Danchev’s book is a collection of essays which, by examining the theme of war in artworks from poetry to photography to film, aims to “piggy-back” upon their “moral benefits”. Its epigraph, taken from Montaigne, situates the author in a long tradition of great essayists and ethical thinkers.

As was admiringly observed by Professor Robert Eaglestone in his Times Higher Education review, On Art and War and Terror exemplifies the current fashion for “interdisciplinarity”, which in this case appears to mean the ceaseless search for new perspectives on much-studied material for the purpose of lengthening one’s publications list. Unsurprisingly, eight of Danchev’s ten essays derive from articles already in print.  Nonetheless, his work may be a stimulating anthology of artistic treatments of war for the lay reader; and for the student, a rare exemplar of well-formed academic prose.

Whether On Art and War and Terror is anything more is another matter. It is hardly original to claim that the imaginative experience provided by art is morally valuable. More importantly, Danchev often fails to provide a theoretical foundation for his claim that where historical knowledge fails, art can explain. This is because he sees his essays not as arguments but as “demonstrations”. But the view that art increases our moral appreciation of violence is debatable; some would argue that it keeps us at a safe aesthetic distance. If Danchev intends to be a moralist and not simply a historian or critic, the reader will perhaps be on his guard. An ethical authority based on art is only as good as its last interpretation.

Emma Park is reading for a DPhil in Classics at University College, Oxford. She is an editor of ORbits.

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Faheem Amin graduated from the University of Kashmir with degrees in English literature, philosophy, and sociology. He currently works as a senior officer at The Economic Times.

Roger Scruton
Beauty
Oxford University Press, 2009
176 pages
£10.99
ISBN 978-0199559527

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“A thing of beauty is a joy forever”, begins John Keats’s Endymion. Like all platitudes, this raises more questions than it answers: does beauty remain the same over time? Are all things of beauty equal? And what, exactly, is “a thing of beauty”? Elsewhere, Keats tells us that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. But, like his other dictum, this claim may be more beautiful than true. In dealing with a concept at once so grand and so personal as beauty, perhaps a certain amount of slippage is inevitable.

Roger Scruton sets out to answer the questions raised by our tired clichés, arguing that beauty is a single quality, that its value is universal, and that it remains important to this day. Beauty, though, is no more satisfying than much of the reasoning it seeks to displace. Scruton seems unclear whether he is writing a meditation on the experience of beauty (along the lines of his England: An Elegy), a work of analytic aesthetics (as he did in the now-standard Aesthetics of Music and Aesthetics of Architecture), or (as in a recent public debate arguing that “Britain has become indifferent to beauty”) a work of cranky cultural criticism. Beauty fulfills the first aim admirably, is far too short to bear the academic weight of the second, and gives too much space to the third. In the end, the book is a frustrating mix of the personal and the academic, the profound and the petty.

Scruton’s approach is a hybrid between the classic tradition of aesthetics that tries to formulate the individual experience of beauty and twentieth-century analytical philosophy’s scrutiny of what the word “beautiful” means. In pursuing the first, phenomenological method, Scruton draws widely on authors from Plato to Alain de Botton, though what he writes is fueled more than anything by personal experience. The other, more rigorous approach leads him to identify a series of “platitudes about beauty” in the first pages of the book, to which he occasionally returns to support his observations. This mediation between common perceptions and their linguistic formulations is a typical method of analytical aesthetics, but here, in tandem with a more personal, idiosyncratic account, reducing beauty to its least controversial elements yields little fruit. In comparison with Scruton’s rich descriptions of beauty’s manifold effects, the more analytic passages feel sterile.

Scruton is committed to the view that beauty is one thing—the same in all times and places—and that the difference between spheres in which we encounter it is a difference of degree and not of kind. This makes for an illuminating account of “everyday beauty”, the modest ways humans seek to order their environment in pleasing ways. For Scruton, the way a house may fit in with its surroundings is no less important than the qualities that make a great work of architecture stand out. This notion of a continuum between “minimal beauty” and the great works of art is Scruton’s most original contribution, and grounds the argument that beauty is an essential part of human life, something that lingers long after a symphony has ended or we have turned away from a landscape. Beauty in all its forms helps us to feel at home in the world.

This is a powerful argument, and salutary in a world where beauty, conceived monolithically as the quality found in art, is often thought to be an effete indulgence. By arguing that a Rembrandt painting and a properly-set dinner table manifest the same quality, Scruton takes beauty out of the museum and places it in daily life. This does not preclude a hierarchy within beautiful objects (he has no problem judging certain works of art the “highest form of beauty”), but it gives a new dignity to lesser species of beauty that seek to fit in and suggests that the greatest artistic beauty can be the experience of ekstasis, standing out.

Yet this unitary concept of beauty also leads Scruton to be quite narrow-minded about what does and does not count. In his final chapter, Scruton examines “The Flight from Beauty”, which he sees as pervasive in contemporary society and particularly pernicious in modern art: “More recent art cultivates a posture of transgression, matching the ugliness of the things it portrays with an ugliness of its own. Beauty is downgraded as something too sweet, too escapist and too far from realities to deserve our undeceived attention.”

This rings of the denunciations that have accompanied changes in art throughout history, from Aristophanes’ satire of Euripides in the Frogs to polemics against Impressionism and the even more vehement debates surrounding Modernism. Undeniably, art today admits of more chaos than it has in the past; but, as Scruton recognizes, dissonance has always been a part of art. Indeed, many of the most powerful works dance on the edge of ugliness (think of Greek tragedy or Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron). Great art can—and sometimes should—unsettle us.

This mixing of pleasurable and unpleasurable impressions is often called “the sublime” in contrast to “the beautiful”, though Scruton might describe it as a kind of beauty that stands out radically. Contemporary art often resists the viewer; its beauty must be won from confrontation. But in an age that has seen man’s powers of destruction increase thousandfold, and finds itself regularly saturated with images of violence and suffering, an untroubled sense of harmony, like that we find in the Botticelli portrait on Scruton’s cover, may indeed feel illusory. Beauty seems not to be at home in the world, today more radically than ever. Our age, as the French theorist Lyotard argued, is more oriented toward the sublime than the beautiful.

Scruton deplores this sublime tendency in contemporary art. But in doing so, he assumes too narrow a concept of what beauty is. Many of the most successful works of the past half-century—think Anselm Kiefer’s brutalist sculptures or Harold Pinter’s violent, inscrutable dramas—achieve a sublime effect through confrontation with ugliness, a flight from beauty that leads back to the beautiful. Instead of detachment and clarity, these pieces offer an intense engagement that is no less a way of making the world our own. This can be jarring and even off-putting at first, but so have been most new means of creating beauty throughout history.

As Scruton argues, the best works of art always make us feel at home in the world. But today they do so by recognizing and incorporating the world’s ugliness, making what is beautiful stand out more wondrous and more strange.

Joshua Billings is a doctoral student in Classics at Merton College, Oxford, writing his dissertation on Greek tragedy and German philosophy. He is a senior editor of the Oxonian Review.

The Russian Linesman: Frontiers, Borders and Thresholds
Curated by Mark Wallinger
The Hayward, Southbank Centre, London
18 February 2009 to 4 May 2009

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Like many a successful contemporary artist, Mark Wallinger is a controversial figure, adored by some as the epitome of avant-garde experimentalism, reviled by others as the acme of postmodern vacuity. In 2007 Wallinger won the Turner Prize for a piece called “State Britain”, which replicated materials originally assembled by Brian Haw during his long-running protest against the war in Iraq. Though the Turner Prize jury praised Wallinger’s installation for its “visceral intensity and historic importance”, many dismissed it as an instance of conceptual minimalism gone badly wrong, lamenting the fact that a vague gesture of social commentary could prove enough to propel a mere mock-up to iconic status.

Wallinger delights in confounding his audience through the sheer daring quirkiness of his endeavours, which take a mischievous joy in toying with the boundary between what is art and what is not. Wallinger’s Sleeper (2005), for instance, is a film about ten nights the artist spent wandering through Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie in a bear suit.

Over the last two decades, Wallinger has become one of the most emblematic figures of British art. In 1999 his “Ecce Homo”—a life-sized representation of Christ with his hands tied behind his back—became the first piece of art to be installed on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth. Earlier this month, he won the commission to produce the Ebbsfleet Landmark, solidifying his place at the very top of the national artistic league tables. Walllinger’s proposed design, which has been dubbed the southern answer to Anthony Gormley’s “Angel of the North”, will take the form of a white horse 33 times larger than life.

“The Russian Linesman”, which opened in London on 17 February, confirms Wallinger’s place at the very heart of the nation’s artistic scene and marks the artist’s début as a curator.

To enter the exhibition involves navigating the brutalist architectural lines of The Hayward, a grey, dirty-looking block at the heart of London’s Southbank Centre. The show begins with a (literal) lift. Upon reaching the gallery level, the visitor alights under a sound hub that effuses the soft, mellifluous Irish tones of James Joyce’s voice, reading from Finnegans Wake (1939). The highbrow welcome—adumbrating a kind of baptism by Art into the world of Mark Wallinger—teeters ambivalently between curatorial reverence and curatorial hubris.

The build-up to the gallery, which involves crossing multiple dividing lines between the outside world and the inner precinct of the art space, accords with the exhibition’s subtitle: “Frontiers, Borders and Thresholds”. The arrival by lift also sets up an anticipatory visual rhyme with one of Wallinger’s best-known works, Time and Relative Dimensions in Space or TARDIS (2001), a version of the time-and-space-travel machine featured in the BBC’s Doctor Who that sits in an adjacent room.

This internal echo reflects the exhibition’s ambition to take the visitor on a journey through vast swathes of time and space. For what Wallinger has assembled in “The Russian Linesman” is a wildly heterogeneous collection of artwork and artefacts spanning many centuries and many countries. These include a 2000-year old Roman herm, photographs of Mars’s Twin Peaks, via Albert Dürer’s work on perspective, and 19th-century items relating to stereoscopic photography and comparative anatomy. Wallinger’s selection of contemporary pieces features Thomas Demand’s Poll (2001), a wall-sized photograph that replicates the room where the 2001 Florida election recount took place, as well as footage of the tight-rope set up by Philippe Petit between the Twin Towers in 1974 (a stunt revisited by James Marsh in Man on Wire, which took the Oscar for best documentary at this year’s Academy Awards). Wallinger’s exhibition pulls in many different directions. “Only connect” is the show’s unvoiced injunction to its visitors. But so disparate a collection of objects makes it impossible to retrieve any significant message or unified meaning from the display.

The show’s title, “The Russian Linesman”, refers to the Azerbaijani official (mistakenly referred to as being Russian in contemporary press reports) who determined the outcome of the 1966 football World Cup by calling an ambiguous goal for England against Germany (the man later stated that his decision might have had something to do with Stalingrad).

Although the emblematic sporting moment does not feature explicitly, much of the material Wallinger has chosen to showcase charts similarly political terrain. National boundaries are a leitmotif. There are photographs of the Green Mile in Nicosia (the capital of divided Cyprus), of the 49th Parallel (an equatorial line doubling as a political border) and of perennially contested Jerusalem. There is YouTube footage of the daily flag-lowering ceremony conducted on the Indian-Pakistani border. The Mark Wallinger flag, Oxymoron (which is part of the exhibition though it flies outside from the Jubilee flagpole) superimposes the green, white and orange hues of the Irish Tricolour onto the pattern of the Union Jack. These images are evocative, but not complex. The message is (too) simple: there are boundaries in the world, and these often mean trouble.

Politics mixes freely with related concerns. Death—that most universal, fundamental, dreaded of thresholds—is a prominent theme. One of the most striking displays comprises a series of blown-up digital photographs of 19th-century life masks. Appearing in ghostly, strangely voluptuous black and white are the faces of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake and Keats. These life masks—plaster casts taken of a living subject’s face, and different, in this crucial respect, from the memorial death masks which enjoyed such a vogue in Victorian times—were made by painful means (with the subject having, for instance, to breathe in through straws) for scientific purposes.

Photographed long after their subjects’ death, the life masks force an intellectual double-take. Do these faces appear to us from the land of the living or from the land of the dead? These Romantic poets, whose writings invest so much in the idea of artistic immortality, are caught in “a suspended state between life, death and sleep”. In their 21st-century reincarnation, the masks bear witness to Wallinger’s fascination with the idea of the copy, the replica, the simulacrum—with the countless ways that art returns to earlier exempla and more or less “ready-made” materials for inspiration. The boundary in play here (as in much postmodernist art) is that between what we take to be original and what is, in fact, second-hand.

This interest comes across powerfully in the anonymous sculpture of the Dying Gaul. Struggling at life’s final threshold, the image of the wounded warrior acts as yet another reminder of the significance of boundaries (between nations at war, between life and death), but it also focuses attention on the issue of artistic lineage. For the sculpture we see is no original, but rather the plaster cast of a Roman marble, which is itself a copy of an earlier Greek bronze. Further emphasizing the exhibit’s point about artistic descent and repetition, the next room features the cast (which is in fact also the cast of a cast) of a flayed corpse arranged in the posture of the dying Gaul for use by generations of Royal Academy students. Art copies art as much as it imitates life: such is one of the statements that “The Russian Linesman” repeatedly makes.

By choosing a typically vague, postmodernist catch-all like “lines and borders” for its theme, “The Russian Linesman” sets itself a trap into which it duly falls. The exhibition’s lack of unity undermines its artistic pretensions: ultimately, it is simply a rather interesting collection of museum curios. Are lines enough of a cohesive concept to make the assembled pieces merit description as conceptual art?

And, in any case, are lines and borders truly what this exhibition is about? In the end, “The Russian Linesman” is less about borders and thresholds, or death, or politics, or perception, than it is about Mark Wallinger. Although individual pieces have intrinsic interest, the show’s value resides principally in the self-portraiture we infer: in its delineation of Wallinger’s own concerns and lines of descent.

Does it succeed? Alas, it never comes close to achieving its potential either as an artistic enquiry or as an autobiographical account. It is surely worth viewing, if only as the reflection of an inquisitive, ludic, politically engaged mind. But it is neither particularly deep nor engagingly new. For many people, for many things, “rather interesting” is good enough. Not so, perhaps, for an exhibition curated by one of the most eminent artists in the country.

Scarlett Baron received her DPhil from Christ Church, Oxford. The Interviews editor for the Oxonian Review, she is currently a Prize Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford.

The superlative art exhibition, From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings (1870-1925), from Moscow and St Petersburg, represents an ambitious, if oddball, collection of important pieces from Russia’s four major museums—the Pushkin and the Tretyakov in Moscow, and the Hermitage and the Russian Museum in St Petersburg. Several British cabinet ministers, and various envoys straddling Russian and British negotiating tables, entered into the diplomatic fracas that almost aborted the exhibition. Diplomacy having prevailed, with no love from Russia lost, fifty French impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces are now convened at the Royal Academy of Arts, featuring French Masters as the obvious, sublime attractions. The exhibition is important in its significance not least for chronicling art his—and the cultural relief of Russian art collecting more generally. Shchukin and Morozov, the spiritual and benefactor fathers of the From Russia collection, had made generous bequests to the Pushkin before the Russian revolution. However, a number of bold, pioneering pieces that had been discerningly collected by the pair—pieces forming spectacular parts of From Russia—disappeared from public view in 1948 when Stalin shut the Pushkin Museum. He held the collections in contempt as ‘…a breeding ground of formalist views and obsequiousness before decadent bourgeois culture.’^[1] Today, From Russia is celebrated stomping ground.

I. Exhibitionist Politics

Controversy surrounded the From Russia exhibition because the Russian authorities claimed that Britain had failed to guarantee the safe return of the exhibits. The ensuing diplomatic breakdown came rapidly. In December 2007, a matter of weeks before the paintings were to be exhibited, Roskultura, the Russian State culture agency, announced the cancellation of the exhibition, for reasons rooted in principles of property law and holding good title. A number of French works featured had been seized by Lenin in 1917; the ownership of those works has since been disputed. Roskultura anticipated that claims by the descendants of original owners would lie against the contested title of several works, opening the Russian collection to the vulnerability that those claims might gain ground while the works are in this jurisdiction.

There is no respite from the relentless reminder of history: the brinkmanship of tested Russo-Anglo relations has worked its way to the fore. A diplomatic chill has ensued between Russia and the UK in recent months, the focus and astringency of which has been sharpened to a point by disagreement over recent proposed extradition proceedings. Those jurisdictional disagreements relate to inquiries and proposed criminal charges in connection with the former KGB agent, Alexander Litvinenko, a Cold War-inspired plot involving his murder by poisoning. Few diplomats, though, however seasoned, could have foreseen the encroaching of this political spat into the usually tranquil environs of the art world. It is stark that Russo-Anglo tensions have bled into the preserve of the art exhibition. More than stark, it represents a new kind of Cold War paradigm whereby relations between the two countries are being mediated over the oils and canvasses of several Grand Masters. Among these are the apolitical Picasso, the restrained Matisse, and the demented Van Gogh, none of whom had inclination or appetite for power perspectives.

In the 1960s and 1970s, it was roughly enough to stockpile commensurable numbers of nuclear weapons, threatening the Damocles Sword of world annihilation. That crude, Lego block-building politics has been replaced by a more insidious, creeping kind that lacks the transparency of brute force and the immediacy of threat that its predecessor displayed. This is not to foretell the Domesday of internationally convened art exhibitions. On the contrary, the final diplomatic word is that the Russian authorities are keen to press on with a UK hosting of From Russia.^[2] Instead, the thought is that this new phase of international relations marks the ascendancy of the diplomat. He must now step forward from the shadows and into the breach, to take up the mantle of clear-sighted responsibility from which certain world leaders have seemingly abdicated. That we do not know who these overlooked bureaucrats-turned-technocrats-cum-diplomats are, or how they operate and whose ears they bend, is revealing of new insecurities emerging in our international relations.

The point should first be made, however, that while the world of hosting art exhibitions can hardly be described as transparent or morally scrupulous, neither is it, in any meaningful or serious way, distinctively characterised as political. That is, if the term ‘political’ refers to something more sophisticated than the flexing of simple power dynamics and exerting of influence—which corporate enterprises, banks, and charities do routi—there was previously nothing to distinguish the art of exhibitions as identifiably political. Of course art exhibitions cannot be lumped into an exhaustive category. There are the more audacious, richly endowed, bolder exhibitions that eclipse the almost monastic feel of other smaller, less focal exhibitions. But, in the intentioned sense of brokering power, conveners of exhibitions would have to undergo a change in orientation to become magnates of real-world political power. Thanks to the heightened, internationally unfolding drama preceding the Russo-Anglo exhibition, there is now some parity between the position in which the curators of the From Russia exhibition find themselves, and that routinely faced by museums and libraries alike. This is a subtle but serious change. It is one that does not auger well as a precedent for the transfer and storage of art exhibits during periods of sustained friction between countries that have not resolved their differences at a time when exhibitions are planned or in progress.

Implausibly, the claim made by both British and Russian governments is that problems over this year’s From Russia exhibition were not related to the political fallout from the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. The 2006 poisoning of Litvinenko by polonium-210 in a restaurant in Soho, London had led to a testy period of strained relations between the two countries. Further strain came with Russia’s announcement that it was to refuse the British authorities’ request for extradition of the prime suspect, Andrei Lugovoi, for questioning and to face possible criminal charges. The rationale given at the time by Russia was that UK prosecuting and extradition authorities had not cooperated with Putin’s personal request for the UK to extradite the Russian émigré, Boris Berezovsky, who had secured a safe haven in this country. Since the diplomatic dispute between Russia and the UK, Roskultura had agreed to export the works, providing that a new law was implemented to guarantee their ‘safety’—in other words, their immunity from claims to ownership and better title. This was conditional on the British Culture Secretary, James Purnell (a Balliol College alumnus) having undertaken in December 2007 to secure comprehensive legislation by early January 2008.^[3] Unlike many western countries, Britain previously lacked legislation expressly designed to protect seizures from national collections from bids to better title. This statutory oversight had not before registered as an important legislative gap, until Russia drew attention to the several descendants of previous owners of certain works who had expressed an interest in contesting title.^[4]

The Royal Academy of Arts confirmed its hosting of the exhibition in an online statement on 9th January, 2008.^[5]

II. Highlights of the Exhibition

The full complement of exhibits on display at From Russia are too numerous and wondrous to be richly pursued here, such that only a selection of items featured in the Diaghilev and the World of Art Movement win space here. (Advance previews of the works described are available online, at the site of the Royal Academy of Arts) The distribution of the works is revealing of how the Russian art scene variously stagnated and progressed. From Russia begins with gentle landscapes that reproduce and seek to capture similar depictions in contemporary European, particularly French, art. The landscapes start with Corot and Theodore Rousseau, featuring a portrait of Tolstoy with bare foot, dressed as a peasant, and an imposing, urgent large canvass of the 1905 October revolution. Next is the thorough-going treatment of Monet and Manet—look out for Manet’s In the Bar—bleeding into works by Cezanne, Gaugin, Matisse, Picasso, and Von Gogh.

The exhibition is carved up into four sections—French and Russian Realists; The great collectors, Shchukin and Morozov; Diaghilev and the World of Art movement, and Modernism. Of these, the Realists and Modernists claim the hype, and deservedly so, since they are the most ambitious show-cases—the ordering of the Modernism display offers new insights into the chronology and sources of influence among Modernist artists. If not as technically brilliant, easily the most esoteric works on display are among the serious collection of Sergei Diaghilev. Spearheading the World of Art movement (the Russian for ‘World of Art’ is Мир иску́сства), Diaghilev was instrumental to promoting the ascendancy of several students of the World of Art movement. Importantly, this section of the exhibition includes works by Alexander Benois and Leon Bakst, two of the founding students of the World of Art movement in 1898, in Saint-Petersburg. Boris Kustodiev, Nochiolas Roerich, Alexander Golovin and Valentin Serov have pieces featured, taking as their subjects the great figures of Russian cultural life, including Vsevolod Meyerhold, the talented Russian theatrical producer, director, and actor; Feodor Chaliapin, the acclaimed Russian opera performer; and the actress, Anna Akhmatova.

Léon Bakst’s Portrait of Sergei Diaghilev with His Nanny (1906, oil on canvas, 161 x 116cm), part of the section on Diaghilev and the World of Art movement, is a joy to behold. Diaghilev, his hands shoved deeply into ample pockets, a dart of escaped bright yellow cufflink showing, is in the foreground. His body is shown side on, while his face turns expectantly and regally to onlookers. The proportions of the piece are curious. Even given the perspective, Diaghilev is a broad man whose torso alone swallows a quarter of the canvas, Diaghilev’s head seems technically too small, and his suit looks ill-cut. His stance is one of defiance: a heavy floor-to-ceiling black curtain drapes behind him, sectioning off a third of the background scene. A small painting hangs on the right of the wall behind Diaghilev, showing a dull landscape, dwarfed by the unbearable black drape. To the left, seated, is a wretched harridan stubbornly clothed in what appear to be from the same heavy black material as the drape, in a hat and dress. She is unceremoniously described as ‘His Nanny,’ but one wonders whether Diaghilev is not boastful and unremittingly proud of her, as though Nanny were herself a feast for the eyes. The use of evanescent lilacs that streak through the curtains and admit what looks like a setting winter sun, and the presence of a swirl in the bottom right-hand corner of the scene, lend the painting a surreal air. Diaghilev could almost morph into the atrophying old maid behind him, given the silvery greys and densities of black that they share. This process may already be set in play: Diaghilev wears a badger-like grey streak in his hair, which forms a distinctive detail demarking him from the black drape.

Dancing Peasant Woman (1913, oil on canvas, 210 x 125cm), by Philipp Malyavin, is a bold, striking display of femininity and peasantry. Malyavin was enormously influenced by the giddiness of the peasant dances and culture; his fascination permeates the canvas. The sexuality and provocation of this piece is knowingly explicit. A luxuriously long canvas concedes at least two-thirds of its length to a full, floridly emblazoned skirt worn by ‘Dancing Peasant Woman.’ The use of oils on the canvas is minutely studied and its intricacy pays dividends. Small geometric blocks divide portions of colour and light, which, without the identifying features of a human face and hands, we might mistake for a satellite map of clustered favellas and fields yet to be discovered. The come-hither eyes of the black Dancing Peasant Woman encapsulate the heat and giddiness of females dancing for men on other continents; the span of her right hand, flung open behind her head, hints at intimacy and temptation. The woman’s nipped waist, emphasised by her gathered skirts and the curvature of her back and breasts, lends a careless injection of movement to the fluidity of the oils that compete for space and separation.

Portrait of Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940) (1916, oil on canvas, 247 x 168cm), by Boris Grigoriev, is exquisitely executed. Meyerhold established the Moscow Art Theatre with Stanislavski, breaking new ground in theatrical production and performance: this piece succeeds in capturing Meyerhold’s rejection of the traditional confines method acting. Grigoriev’s Portrait captures the flair and dedication that typified Meyerhold’s bold, shocking theatre. The image on the left hand side of the canvas shows Meyerhold in dinner jacket tails and white gloves while performing, was used on Russian stamps in the year 2000. The Portrait captures the imagination in a number of ways: the two impressions of Meyerhold it depicts are dramatically juxtaposed to convey the drama and mysticism on which Meyerhold founded a career. Set against a luxuriant black drop, one impression of Meyerhold as performer, in which he wears tails, seems to both frame and cramp the canvas. His arms and hands push at the contours of the canvas, as they would if he were performing the deliberately melodramatic, awkward symbolism with which his name is synonymous. In the remaining room the canvas permits, to the right, as though emerging from the other Meyerhold’s armpit, a brilliantly dressed, fantastical version of Meyerhold emerges. This Meyerhold has sharp, incisive eyes, shrewdly cast askance, a bow and arrow in his clutches, adorned in gorgeous pink and orange patterned silks. He does not bear comparison with images of a sixty-five year-old resigned, humiliated Meyerhold, taken at the time when he was held by the authorities during their mistreatment of him.

The pieces displayed as part of the From Russia exhibition are as transitional and radical as the politics from which they emerge: revelatory, revolutionary, and rebelling against repression. They are also whimsical, celebratory, bold, proud, and speak to a Russia that still celebrates its sovereignty by giving other countries the Cold shoulder. There now appears to be a settlement of comity between the Russian and UK authorities. The last word on the extraordinary diplomatic proceedings to have marked the hesitancy and eventual opening of the From Russia exhibition must surely go to Mikhail Shvydkoy, the head of Russia’s Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography. Speaking on the vexed topic of the extradition proceedings and legislative issues preceding From Russia, the upbeat and sprightly note struck hardly betrays the angst and seam of high tension that has characterised the curatorial: ‘I hope that this exhibition will be pure happiness both for the British audience…’^[6]

Notes

1. ‘Forget saving it for the nation—great art must be freed from the vaults,’ The Guardian, 22nd January, 2008: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2246685,00.html
2. ‘Russian art show gets green light,’ BBC News, 31st December, 2007: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7165155.stm
3. Purnell signed the Commencement Order for Part 6 of the Protection of Cultural Objects on Loan of the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007. The statutory provision brings into force legislation effecting so-called ‘immunity from seizure’ powers (having come into force at 00.01am on 31st December 2007).
4. The legislation was probably not necessary, given that two of the individual descendants had earlier clarified their position, stating that they had no intention to contest the claim to legal ownership of certain works, asserting instead a right to financial compensation. Nothing would, of course, have precluded those individuals from revising their position, such as to launch a bid to recover the works: ‘Russian collectors’ heirs want compensation for lost art,’ The Guardian, 22nd January, 2008: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2244873,00.html
5. ‘Russian Government Gives Final Approval for Royal Academy Exhibition’: http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/from-russia/statement
6. ‘Russian masterpieces brighten UK art scene’: Russia Today, 23rd January, 2008: http://www.russiatoday.ru/news/news/19976

Abigail Bright is a BCL candidate at Balliol College, Oxford.

Konstanty JM Czartoryski is a finalist at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University.

Barbican Gallery of Art, London
Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now
12 October 2007 – 21 January 2008
Exhibition Book
£29.95
ISBN 978-1858944166

…

…

In parody of a Parisian strip-joint, the Barbican Art Gallery in London lures its bewitched clientele to its latest exhibit with whimsical promises and flirtatious provocation.  The exhibit’s polished marketing is brazen and wantonly unashamed: the co-curator Martin Kemp invites us to ‘become a participant in the history and display of sexually explicit art’.  Those enraptured by such tawdry snake oil are likely to be sadly disappointed.  With hopes raised to lofty heights, patrons will leave with the glum faces of Pigalle punters exiting seedy dives.  Thirsts unquenched, imaginations dampened, expectations sullied, they will puzzle at the hype surrounding Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now.  The exhibition is, to put it bluntly, both uninspired and stagnant.

It is not, I hasten to add, the works themselves that make for disappointment, for there are, without doubt, some very plump pickings.  It is rather the mish-mash of juxtaposing the big beasts of fine art with wholly unrelated scraps of Persian, Indian and Chinese petty porn of the sort usually associated with a Berlin tourist-tat sex museum-cum-store.  It is the cobbling together of kinky Tyrrhenian pottery and other tacky curiosities with the lush flamboyance of Boucher Rococo and the haunting symbolism and blurry dubiety of Francis Bacon.  It is the woeful failure to discriminate between erotica, art, and pornography.  It is also the lack of attention to the conditioning factors of space and époque, and a disregard for the way in which art is a mirror to the very society in which it was created.  An exhibition should not be a mere catalogue or haphazard and arbitrary bundling together of some famous names with oodles of fuzzy padding and waffle in between. Reminiscent of the Barbican’s sanitisation and institutionalisation of Punk art in the previous exhibition Panic Attack, the Gallery’s current exhibit seems to sterilise sexuality by divorcing it from its iconic subversive and rebellious characteristics as a critique or veneration of society.

Upon entering the exhibition, one is confronted with a colossal plaster mould of the bronze fig leaf specially designed to cover up the titanesque member of Michelangelo’s David to render the statue appropriately modest for Queen Victoria’s viewing in 1857.  Though faintly amusing, this piece sets the tone for an exhibition marred by trinkets and oddities.  I advise art enthusiasts to stray from the prescribed path and head straight to the more juicy delights.  Eyebrow-raising works include Boucher’s Leda, blissfully oblivious to her impending penetration by a swan’s stiff and streamline beak, and Titian’s exquisite Venus of Urbino, rumpled after play and dreaming lustfully following the departure of her lover.  Picasso’s surprising contribution—(La Douleur, a blue-period painting of a wraithlike woman bent over the reclining young artist, ostensibly performing fellatio)—contrasts with some of his cubist eroticism and vagina dentata symbolism.  Egon Schiele’s figures are as expected: gaunt, bony, bursting with pressure and pent-up force.  Tracy Emin’s neon lights give a flicker of satisfaction to those who haven’t seen them before and who appreciate the fleeting beauty of an idea.  Jeff Koon’s saccharine and syrupy glossed images of him and his former wife intimately entwined amid pinky, pearly butterflies aptly demonstrate the hyper-reality of sex as portrayed in the media.  Meanwhile, Robert Mapplethorpe’s controversial fetish photos depict the ritualistic element in the transgression of taboo with almost De Sadean verve.

Much lionised is Warhol’s Blow Job–the silvery and ethereal facial expressions of a man receiving thirty-five minutes of fellatio captured on camera.  In a drive to make art impersonal and mechanistic, Warhol’s 1960s ‘underground films’ involved running a second-hand 16mm Bolex until the cartridge ran out of film.  The viewer is therefore trapped in a wishy-washy realm where the boundaries between reality and hyper-reality are smudged and dislocated.  The atmosphere is strained and skittish as we wonder whether the pleasure is simulated or real, whether he will climax (the tape could of course run out), or whether he has perhaps already climaxed.  The doubt is pervasive and gnawing.  Pangs of uncertainty are sweeping and absolute.

At this point, I propose a trip to the less frequented but very fertile pastures of Tokyo.  For it is there, in that post-modern paradise–a floating world of signs, simulation and pastiche–that seduction, art, and consumption converge in a glorious threesome.  Exuberant porno-kitsch is the name of the game, wrapped and packaged in slick glossy planes, gentle pastel and fleshy tones, but underscored with sensations of rupture, alienation, and anxiety.  In my mind it is here that modern art of a sexual nature is most revealing and potent.  Desire and art melt into one and thus reflect the ambivalence of contemporary advanced-capitalist societies: simultaneous seduction and repulsion, playful innocence colliding with brute lust, disquiet, and triumphalism.

The epicentre of such atonal and harmonic consummation is Takashi Murakami’s artists’ collective Kaikai Ki Ki.  Homing in on the puerile obsessions of rampant consumer culture, the collective spews out super-flat graphics of a character style derived from anime and manga.  The art of Kaikai Ki Ki is like Neo-Warhol: low culture is raided, repackaged, and sold to the highest bidder in the high-art market.  The subversive side of sex is then injected into the concoction so as to appeal and repel, reveal, and over-reveal.

Murakami’s hyper-sexed statues My Lonesome Cowboy and Hiropon–together a sort of post-modern Adam and Eve–perhaps best illustrate the subversive sexuality typically present in the work of Kaiki Ki Ki.  ‘Adam’, complete with supersonic hair, spurts forth a lasso of ejaculate that levitates over his head defying gravity and the laws of physics.  ‘Eve’, ever insipid and doe-eyed, is lactating and beams from beneath a cascading hula-hoop of breast milk.  The proliferation of mushrooms around their feet alludes to both decadence and decay as well as to the toxic fallout of Hiroshima.  Given that Eve has been stripped of her genitalia (her swollen mound is featureless) and that Adam’s unique talent is masturbation, we are induced to contemplate a society where people have become atomised and disconnected from one another, where the terror of AIDS looms dark, but where narcissism reigns high abetted by the forces of materialism, choice, and consumption.

Equally intriguing is the elusive Takahiro Fujiwara, a compatriot of Murakami and company, but fiercely independent.  His vibrating Beans interactive installation invites the viewer to ‘become a participant in the history and display of sexually explicit art’ in a way the Barbican can only dream of. The tantalisingly bright and delicious colours connote innocence and infant play while the forms resemble dildos, adult toys and sex aids.  Viewers are then presented with the somewhat unnerving choice of either publicly displaying the pleasures of the flesh by interacting with the machines, or alternatively assuming the role of voyeur by remaining glued to the shadows and watching others enjoy themselves from afar.

The Barbican prides itself on being the ‘the largest multi-arts centre in Europe’, and yes it does have a long and illustrious past. But prestige and size are not everything as the exhibition makes startlingly clear. Esteem is fluidly fickle, and so cautious immobility and aversion to risk can rapidly blemish a hard-won reputation. Squirreled away in the City of London, crammed between Newgate prison and the grey formality of the financial district, the Barbican is decidedly un-sexy.  Nor do the confusing 1970s ‘brutalist’ structures of clumsily linked raw-concrete foyers do much to arouse.  The Barbican is a hulking great pachyderm to the Tokyo art scene’s bold brashness and coquettish agility. Sadly this antithesis of form is mirrored by an equally stark contrast in terms of imagination and creativity. The Barbican has taken controversial subject matter and managed incredibly, to turn it into something stuffy and sterile through a mixture of pedestrian prudence and sheer unwillingness to adopt a stance.

Louis Haynes is a Paris-based image and brand strategist.  He is currently reading for an MPhil in Modern Chinese Studies at Balliol College, Oxford.  His current research is on turbo capitalism in Far East Asia.

]]> http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/porno-kitsch-from-barbican-to-neo-warhol-kaikai-ki-ki/feed/ 0 http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/high-art-lite-in-the-darkest-hour/ http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/high-art-lite-in-the-darkest-hour/#comments Thu, 01 Mar 2007 12:00:30 +0000 Daniel Hemel http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/?p=615 Emily Spears-Meers

Damien Hirst
In the darkest hour there may be light:
Works from Damien Hirst’s murderme collection
Serpentine Gallery, London
25 November 2006 – 28 January 2007

Although Damien Hirst and his every breath get miles of press in the British tabloid and other newspapers, critical appreciation of the work of Hirst and his generation has been scarce. This is particularly evident among post-YBA (Young British Artists), and artists in the other notable art worlds. New York, LA and Berlin—cities whose markets are sufficiently inflated to merit swathes of attention from not only their own but also foreign press—have dismissed British art in general with a slight sniff of disdain.

Eric C. Banks, writing in Artforum in January 2002, put his finger on the problem: ‘The notorious difficulty of writing about many of the Young British Artists has always been the Hobson’s choice of approaching them with sombre detachment and overshooting the runway or, alternatively, treating them on their own terms and never really going anywhere at all.’ This circularity has extended to next generation artists, British or otherwise, who seem loath to reference or engage in dialogue with their predecessors—not to mention with the surge of cash that has flooded the London art world, for better or for worse, since their coming.

From across the calming waters of the Atlantic Ocean, Thomas Crow, the British art historian now ensconced in the Getty’s cracked ivory towers, has made some lone, valiant attempts to tackle this conundrum. These have mostly taken the form of a Marxian analysis that foregrounds the evidence of social history within the work. In the case of Hirst alone, he has offered an awed take on his recent Mexican intervention.  In general, however, the non-YBA British art world largely hangs its head in horror at the thought of acknowledging the bastard breed.

In the darkest hour there may be light therefore offered an opportunity to take a deep breath and be drawn in. It included a number of seminal works from the YBA-era, alongside their 1980s New York predecessors Jeff Koons, Richard Prince and Haim Steinbach, as well as some predictably dismal tat from Banksy and his younger, and by the looks of it slightly lost, generation of British artists.

To quickly address the curating: since Hirst managed to catalyse the coming into being of the Young British Art world in the early 1990s, he has played a significant role in subsidising it, not to mention keeping Koons and a few secondary market dealers happy. His ‘murderme’ collection contains some fantastic work but, like most collections it contains some pretty dreadful efforts as well (such as Banksy: a more literal image-maker would be hard to find but, frankly, who would want to look?). The show was therefore a bit of a mess, not only in terms of quality but also with respect to its display. Items looked shoved into place with scant attention to size, scale, theme or attribute—but such sloppiness could have been exaggerated and thereby made more convincing, more satisfyingly, by making it less clear how exactly it is that Hirst differentiates between his obsessive collection of curiosities and art. Why not go for it and really clutter the Serpentine Gallery?

This style of curation is due, in part, to Hirst the phenomenon, as more than one newspaper reviewer pointed out: given his massive pulling power, the Serpentine needs the artist’s patronage more than he needs their floor space, and he can therefore curate as he sees fit. In fact, Hirst’s work in general, with its gleeful mass production and mass concatenation (think a thousand flies, a thousand spin paintings, a thousand years) could often do with a good edit. But perhaps  that is somehow the point: he, like Warhol, has the ability and the brazen gumption to churn out as much as he wants—although perhaps he isn’t as much of a whore as Andy: he never solicited portraits of the great dictators as the ultimate Pop vixen did of Farah Dibah and the Shah.

Hirst’s closest contemporaries, Angus Fairhurst and Sarah Lucas, with whom he collaborated most recently on the 2004 Tate show ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’, both come up trumps at the Serpentine—and another look at their work sheds a clearer light on the terms under which a critical engagement with the YBAs might be negotiated. Lucas’s Percival (2006) is a bronze replica of a tchotchke of a horse-drawn cart carrying a massive cement gherkin. Blown up to ten times its size, coloured in so that it looks exactly like its ceramic forebear, and plonked on the lawn in front of the gallery, Percy manages to be both hilarious and hardcore. Such a combination is present in all of Lucas’s best work; inside, her Sunday Sport collages, cigarette sculptures, and banged-up car with crude wanking arm mechanism offer a mini-retrospective of the artist.

Fairhurst’s gorillas also stand out. Pietà (1996), his photographic self-portrait, quotes the famous Michaelangelo painting in the Vatican (inter alia from the art historical canon). In this version, however, the artist, who takes on the role of Christ, is cradled by an empty gorilla suit, deftly conjuring pathos through a visual joke. Likewise his life-size sculpture of a bronze gorilla, A Couple of Differences Between Thinking and Feeling II (2003), who looks in front of him seemingly dumbfounded at his left arm, which appears to have dropped off.

Both Fairhurst and Lucas know how to deliver an uneasy punchline; Gavin Turk’s soiled sleeping bag minus tramp, installed unceremoniously on the Serpentine’s floor, also fits in this category. It is these artists’ adept manipulation of the joke that ought to prompt a critical appreciation of the poor little YBA paragons. The gags are subversive—it is high art lite—and as we all know, you make your victim laugh before you deliver the sucker punch… all the way to the bank if need be.

Emily Spears Meers is a writer, translator and equestrienne, and an MPhil student in international relations at Balliol College, Oxford.