The news that Belgium is banning the burqa (one Belgian MP referred to the garment as ‘a mobile prison’) makes me feel uncomfortable, even though I think the burqa is dreadful and the women who choose it – rather than having it forced upon them – are all bonkers.
The trouble is I don’t like banning – and in this country, the government’s recent decision to fund its new health policy by increasing tax levied on those addicted to smoking has highlighted once again the hypocrisy of its many bans on other addictive substances. Rather than banning, I wish that we could try persuading people of the drawbacks of using addictive drugs or of wearing the ridiculous get-ups that burqas and niqabs are.
Drug users, of course, will always be with us – in every population there is a percentage of genuinely addictive personalities who cannot be saved by anyone but themselves. The state’s role should be to give them the information that will allow them to make their own decisions, without adding to their problems by turning them into criminals as well as addicts.
Burqa wearers, by contrast, are unlikely to be acting from a desperate addictive need. With them, therefore, it should be possible to use reason to change their behaviour – and if that is unsuccessful, we might consider sectioning those who insist on continuing to wear the frightful things – using, in other words, the mental health act as an instrument rather than the criminal code. That would at least demonstrate that we are acting from compassion, thus making it harder for Islamists to complain that our behaviour is a form of persecution, when all we want is to take care of misguided souls (and, in this context, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography contains a really interesting account of how she went through various attitudes before recognising the foolishness of wearing the burqa).
To complicate matters, while I’m not happy with Belgium’s outright banning, I also don’t like Amnesty’s position, as expressed by their representative, John Dalhuisen, on ABC Radio National’s wonderful PM programme (presented by that national treasure, Mark Colvin – sign up to the group his fans have founded for him here: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/group.php?gid=15095471746&ref=this). They – Amnesty, not Colvin’s fans - seem to be arguing for the right of Muslim women to wear the burqa in Belgium – ‘we believe that individuals should be able to exercise free choice’, to quote Dalhuisen. I would be much more sympathetic to this position if I’d ever heard an Amnesty representative arguing for the rights of women to go about uncovered in Saudi Arabia, where the hijab is enforced by law. Is there a double standard at work here: Amnesty expects one thing of the west and something less exigent of the rest?
Friday, 30 April 2010
Five Bells
It is a long time since I last visited Sydney Opera House. The predominance of purple in its interior is disturbingly dated. Even John Olsen’s mural on the theme of Kenneth Slessor’s Five Bells is suffused with the colour - very 1970s. But the poem on which the mural is based – written after the death by drowning of Slessor’s friend, Joe Lynch, an illustrator who jumped off the Neutral Bay to Mosman ferry when drunk on the way to a party one evening – is timeless (although preoccupied by time) and beautiful:
Five Bells by Kenneth Slessor
Time that is moved by little fidget wheels
Is not my time, the flood that does not flow.
Between the double and the single bell
Of a ship's hour, between a round of bells
From the dark warship riding there below,
I have lived many lives, and this one life
Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.
Deep and dissolving verticals of light
Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells
Coldly rung out in a machine's voice. Night and water
Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats
In the air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.
Why do I think of you, dead man, why thieve
These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought
Anchored in Time? You have gone from earth,
Gone even from the meaning of a name;
Yet something's there, yet something forms its lips
And hits and cries against the ports of space,
Beating their sides to make its fury heard.
Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face
In agonies of speech on speechless panes?
Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name!
But I hear nothing, nothing...only bells,
Five bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time.
Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life,
There's not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait -
Nothing except the memory of some bones
Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud;
And unimportant things you might have done,
Or once I thought you did; but you forgot,
And all have now forgotten - looks and words
And slops of beer; your coat with buttons off,
Your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales
Of Irish kings and English perfidy,
And dirtier perfidy of publicans
Groaning to God from Darlinghurst.
Five bells.
Then I saw the road, I heard the thunder
Tumble, and felt the talons of the rain
The night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark,
So dark you bore no body, had no face,
But a sheer voice that rattled out of air
(As now you'd cry if I could break the glass),
A voice that spoke beside me in the bush,
Loud for a breath or bitten off by wind,
Of Milton, melons, and the Rights of Man,
And blowing flutes, and how Tahitian girls
Are brown and angry-tongued, and Sydney girls
Are white and angry-tongued, or so you'd found.
But all I heard was words that didn't join
So Milton became melons, melons girls,
And fifty mouths, it seemed, were out that night,
And in each tree an Ear was bending down,
Or something that had just run, gone behind the grass,
When blank and bone-white, like a maniac's thought,
The naphtha-flash of lightning slit the sky,
Knifing the dark with deathly photographs.
There's not so many with so poor a purse
Or fierce a need, must fare by night like that,
Five miles in darkness on a country track,
But when you do, that's what you think.
Five bells.
In Melbourne, your appetite had gone,
Your angers too; they had been leeched away
By the soft archery of summer rains
And the sponge-paws of wetness, the slow damp
That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind,
And showed your bones, that had been sharp with rage,
The sodden ectasies of rectitude.
I thought of what you'd written in faint ink,
Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind
With other things you left, all without use,
All without meaning now, except a sign
That someone had been living who now was dead:
"At Labassa. Room 6 x 8
On top of the tower; because of this, very dark
And cold in winter. Everything has been stowed
Into this room - 500 books all shapes
And colours, dealt across the floor
And over sills and on the laps of chairs;
Guns, photoes of many differant things
And differant curioes that I obtained..."
In Sydney, by the spent aquarium-flare
Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper,
We argued about blowing up the world,
But you were living backward, so each night
You crept a moment closer to the breast,
And they were living, all of them, those frames
And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth,
And most your father, the old man gone blind,
With fingers always round a fiddle's neck,
That graveyard mason whose fair monuments
And tablets cut with dreams of piety
Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men
Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment
At cargoes they had never thought to bear,
These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.
Where have you gone? The tide is over you,
The turn of midnight water's over you,
As Time is over you, and mystery,
And memory, the flood that does not flow.
You have no suburb, like those easier dead
In private berths of dissolution laid -
The tide goes over, the waves ride over you
And let their shadows down like shining hair,
But they are Water; and the sea-pinks bend
Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed;
And you are only part of an Idea.
I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in,
The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack,
And the short agony, the longer dream,
The Nothing that was neither long nor short;
But I was bound, and could not go that way,
But I was blind, and could not feel your hand.
If I could find an answer, could only find
Your meaning, or could say why you were here
Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath
Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice?
I looked out my window in the dark
At waves with diamond quills and combs of light
That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand
In the moon's drench, that straight enormous glaze,
And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys
Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each,
And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard
Was a boat's whistle, and the scraping squeal
Of seabirds' voices far away, and bells,
Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out.
Five bells.
Five Bells by Kenneth Slessor
Time that is moved by little fidget wheels
Is not my time, the flood that does not flow.
Between the double and the single bell
Of a ship's hour, between a round of bells
From the dark warship riding there below,
I have lived many lives, and this one life
Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.
Deep and dissolving verticals of light
Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells
Coldly rung out in a machine's voice. Night and water
Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats
In the air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.
Why do I think of you, dead man, why thieve
These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought
Anchored in Time? You have gone from earth,
Gone even from the meaning of a name;
Yet something's there, yet something forms its lips
And hits and cries against the ports of space,
Beating their sides to make its fury heard.
Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face
In agonies of speech on speechless panes?
Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name!
But I hear nothing, nothing...only bells,
Five bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time.
Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life,
There's not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait -
Nothing except the memory of some bones
Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud;
And unimportant things you might have done,
Or once I thought you did; but you forgot,
And all have now forgotten - looks and words
And slops of beer; your coat with buttons off,
Your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales
Of Irish kings and English perfidy,
And dirtier perfidy of publicans
Groaning to God from Darlinghurst.
Five bells.
Then I saw the road, I heard the thunder
Tumble, and felt the talons of the rain
The night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark,
So dark you bore no body, had no face,
But a sheer voice that rattled out of air
(As now you'd cry if I could break the glass),
A voice that spoke beside me in the bush,
Loud for a breath or bitten off by wind,
Of Milton, melons, and the Rights of Man,
And blowing flutes, and how Tahitian girls
Are brown and angry-tongued, and Sydney girls
Are white and angry-tongued, or so you'd found.
But all I heard was words that didn't join
So Milton became melons, melons girls,
And fifty mouths, it seemed, were out that night,
And in each tree an Ear was bending down,
Or something that had just run, gone behind the grass,
When blank and bone-white, like a maniac's thought,
The naphtha-flash of lightning slit the sky,
Knifing the dark with deathly photographs.
There's not so many with so poor a purse
Or fierce a need, must fare by night like that,
Five miles in darkness on a country track,
But when you do, that's what you think.
Five bells.
In Melbourne, your appetite had gone,
Your angers too; they had been leeched away
By the soft archery of summer rains
And the sponge-paws of wetness, the slow damp
That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind,
And showed your bones, that had been sharp with rage,
The sodden ectasies of rectitude.
I thought of what you'd written in faint ink,
Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind
With other things you left, all without use,
All without meaning now, except a sign
That someone had been living who now was dead:
"At Labassa. Room 6 x 8
On top of the tower; because of this, very dark
And cold in winter. Everything has been stowed
Into this room - 500 books all shapes
And colours, dealt across the floor
And over sills and on the laps of chairs;
Guns, photoes of many differant things
And differant curioes that I obtained..."
In Sydney, by the spent aquarium-flare
Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper,
We argued about blowing up the world,
But you were living backward, so each night
You crept a moment closer to the breast,
And they were living, all of them, those frames
And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth,
And most your father, the old man gone blind,
With fingers always round a fiddle's neck,
That graveyard mason whose fair monuments
And tablets cut with dreams of piety
Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men
Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment
At cargoes they had never thought to bear,
These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.
Where have you gone? The tide is over you,
The turn of midnight water's over you,
As Time is over you, and mystery,
And memory, the flood that does not flow.
You have no suburb, like those easier dead
In private berths of dissolution laid -
The tide goes over, the waves ride over you
And let their shadows down like shining hair,
But they are Water; and the sea-pinks bend
Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed;
And you are only part of an Idea.
I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in,
The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack,
And the short agony, the longer dream,
The Nothing that was neither long nor short;
But I was bound, and could not go that way,
But I was blind, and could not feel your hand.
If I could find an answer, could only find
Your meaning, or could say why you were here
Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath
Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice?
I looked out my window in the dark
At waves with diamond quills and combs of light
That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand
In the moon's drench, that straight enormous glaze,
And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys
Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each,
And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard
Was a boat's whistle, and the scraping squeal
Of seabirds' voices far away, and bells,
Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out.
Five bells.
Thursday, 29 April 2010
Spare us
From the BBC Radio 4 Schedule for Friday:
'Book of the Week part 5: Michael Chabon confronts his feelings towards his daughter's emerging sexuality.'
Why must he do it in public? How will it make his daughter feel?
'Book of the Week part 5: Michael Chabon confronts his feelings towards his daughter's emerging sexuality.'
Why must he do it in public? How will it make his daughter feel?
Lachlan Macquarie, Governor of New South Wales 1810 to 1821
Is the answer to the quiz question last Friday. He was born on an island off Mull and his grave is on Mull, in a small bluestone mausoleum, which is the only National Trust of Australia site in Europe, as far as I know. The mausoleum is encircled by a stone wall and surrounded by country that is reminiscent of parts of New South Wales. In it Macquarie, his daughter who died at only three months old, his wife and his son, who died aged 31, are all buried together.
Macquarie did a great deal for New South Wales and Australia more generally–he devised Sydney’s street plan and it is thanks to him that we have the lovely buildings of Francis Greenway; he encouraged exploration and inland settlement, establishing many of our finest towns; and he was the first person officially to use the name Australia.
Extracts from his diary as he travelled up the Nepean and Hawkesbury Rivers late in 1810 are available here:
http://www.hawkesburyhistory.org.au/articles/macquarie_town.html
They are interesting partly because they have a real immediacy to them, giving the reader a sense of what it was like to be there, seeing that landscape in all its newly discovered freshness, but also because they reveal Macquarie as a decent, adventurous man who clearly liked and was interested by this new place - and they also give the lie to Jan Morris’s silly comment that he was pompous (although possibly his advice to the hapless settlers about cleanliness in the final entry reveals a lack of insight into the difficulties they may have been facing.)
Sadly, despite his achievements here, Macquarie returned to Britain under something of a cloud. He died there three years later, still defending himself against the attacks of an English judge called Bigge, who had taken the side of free settlers to Australia who did not like Macquarie’s enlightened attitude to emancipated convicts in Australia – they were scandalised by Macquarie’s inviting such people to tea at Government House and appointing ex-convicts to government positions (among them the aforementioned Francis Greenway, who had been transported as a forger and who Macquarie brilliantly appointed colonial architect. The Clifton Club in Bristol is one of Greenway’s pre-transportation works.)
Perhaps Macquarie was the first victim of the Australian fondness for cutting down tall poppies. He was certainly an amiable family man – according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography he even agreed to have the family’s favourite cow shipped all the way from Sydney to Mull (I’m not sure this was necessarily kind to the cow, of course.)
Here is the inscription on his tomb on the Isle of Mull, which, quite fairly, I think, given that he was probably the first figure of authority to have a vision of the colony beyond its origins as a prison, describes him as ‘the father of Australia’:
HERE IN THE HOPE OF A GLORIOUS RESURRECTION
LIE THE REMAINS OF THE LATE
MAJOR GENERAL LACHLAN MACQUARIE
OF JARVISFIELD
WHO WAS BORN 31ST JANUARY, 1761
AND DIED AT LONDON ON THE 1ST OF JULY, 1824
THE PRIVATE VIRTUES AND AMIABLE DISPOSITION
WITH WHICH HE WAS ENDOWED
RENDERED HIM AT ONCE A MOST BELOVED HUSBAND,
FATHER AND MASTER, AND A MOST ENDEARING FRIEND.
HE ENTERED THE ARMY AT THE AGE OF FIFTEEN
AND THROUGHOUT THE PERIOD OF 47 YEARS
SPENT IN THE PUBLIC SERVICE
WAS UNIFORMLY CHARACTERIZED
BY ANIMATED ZEAL FOR HIS PROFESSION, ACTIVE BENEVOLENCE,
AND GENEROSITY WHICH KNEW NO BOUNDS.
HE WAS APPOINTED GOVERNOR OF NEW SOUTH WALES A.D. 1809
AND FOR TWELVE YEARS FULFILLED THE DUTIES OF THAT STATION
WITH EMINENT ABILITY AND SUCCESS.
HIS SERVICES IN THAT CAPACITY
HAVE JUSTLY ATTACHED A LASTING HONOUR TO HIS NAME.
THE WISDOM, LIBERALITY, AND BENEVOLENCE
OF ALL THE MEASURES OF HIS ADMINISTRATION,
HIS RESPECT FOR THE ORDINANCES OF RELIGION
AND THE READY ASSISTANCE WHICH HE GAVE
TO EVERY CHARITABLE INSTITUTION,
THE UNWEARIED ASSIDUITY WITH WHICH HE SOUGHT TO PROMOTE
THE WELFARE OF ALL CLASSES OF THE COMMUNITY,
THE RAPID IMPROVEMENT OF THE COLONY UNDER HIS AUSPICES,
AND THE HIGH ESTIMATION IN WHICH BOTH HIS CHARACTER
AND GOVERNMENT WERE HELD
RENDERED HIM TRULY DESERVING THE APPELLATION
BY WHICH HE HAS BEEN DISTINGUISHED
THE FATHER OF AUSTRALIA.
I hope any Australians travelling in that part of the world will pay a visit to Macquarie. There is something rather lonely about the little building he lies in in that distant place.
Macquarie did a great deal for New South Wales and Australia more generally–he devised Sydney’s street plan and it is thanks to him that we have the lovely buildings of Francis Greenway; he encouraged exploration and inland settlement, establishing many of our finest towns; and he was the first person officially to use the name Australia.
Extracts from his diary as he travelled up the Nepean and Hawkesbury Rivers late in 1810 are available here:
http://www.hawkesburyhistory.org.au/articles/macquarie_town.html
They are interesting partly because they have a real immediacy to them, giving the reader a sense of what it was like to be there, seeing that landscape in all its newly discovered freshness, but also because they reveal Macquarie as a decent, adventurous man who clearly liked and was interested by this new place - and they also give the lie to Jan Morris’s silly comment that he was pompous (although possibly his advice to the hapless settlers about cleanliness in the final entry reveals a lack of insight into the difficulties they may have been facing.)
Sadly, despite his achievements here, Macquarie returned to Britain under something of a cloud. He died there three years later, still defending himself against the attacks of an English judge called Bigge, who had taken the side of free settlers to Australia who did not like Macquarie’s enlightened attitude to emancipated convicts in Australia – they were scandalised by Macquarie’s inviting such people to tea at Government House and appointing ex-convicts to government positions (among them the aforementioned Francis Greenway, who had been transported as a forger and who Macquarie brilliantly appointed colonial architect. The Clifton Club in Bristol is one of Greenway’s pre-transportation works.)
Perhaps Macquarie was the first victim of the Australian fondness for cutting down tall poppies. He was certainly an amiable family man – according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography he even agreed to have the family’s favourite cow shipped all the way from Sydney to Mull (I’m not sure this was necessarily kind to the cow, of course.)
Here is the inscription on his tomb on the Isle of Mull, which, quite fairly, I think, given that he was probably the first figure of authority to have a vision of the colony beyond its origins as a prison, describes him as ‘the father of Australia’:
HERE IN THE HOPE OF A GLORIOUS RESURRECTION
LIE THE REMAINS OF THE LATE
MAJOR GENERAL LACHLAN MACQUARIE
OF JARVISFIELD
WHO WAS BORN 31ST JANUARY, 1761
AND DIED AT LONDON ON THE 1ST OF JULY, 1824
THE PRIVATE VIRTUES AND AMIABLE DISPOSITION
WITH WHICH HE WAS ENDOWED
RENDERED HIM AT ONCE A MOST BELOVED HUSBAND,
FATHER AND MASTER, AND A MOST ENDEARING FRIEND.
HE ENTERED THE ARMY AT THE AGE OF FIFTEEN
AND THROUGHOUT THE PERIOD OF 47 YEARS
SPENT IN THE PUBLIC SERVICE
WAS UNIFORMLY CHARACTERIZED
BY ANIMATED ZEAL FOR HIS PROFESSION, ACTIVE BENEVOLENCE,
AND GENEROSITY WHICH KNEW NO BOUNDS.
HE WAS APPOINTED GOVERNOR OF NEW SOUTH WALES A.D. 1809
AND FOR TWELVE YEARS FULFILLED THE DUTIES OF THAT STATION
WITH EMINENT ABILITY AND SUCCESS.
HIS SERVICES IN THAT CAPACITY
HAVE JUSTLY ATTACHED A LASTING HONOUR TO HIS NAME.
THE WISDOM, LIBERALITY, AND BENEVOLENCE
OF ALL THE MEASURES OF HIS ADMINISTRATION,
HIS RESPECT FOR THE ORDINANCES OF RELIGION
AND THE READY ASSISTANCE WHICH HE GAVE
TO EVERY CHARITABLE INSTITUTION,
THE UNWEARIED ASSIDUITY WITH WHICH HE SOUGHT TO PROMOTE
THE WELFARE OF ALL CLASSES OF THE COMMUNITY,
THE RAPID IMPROVEMENT OF THE COLONY UNDER HIS AUSPICES,
AND THE HIGH ESTIMATION IN WHICH BOTH HIS CHARACTER
AND GOVERNMENT WERE HELD
RENDERED HIM TRULY DESERVING THE APPELLATION
BY WHICH HE HAS BEEN DISTINGUISHED
THE FATHER OF AUSTRALIA.
I hope any Australians travelling in that part of the world will pay a visit to Macquarie. There is something rather lonely about the little building he lies in in that distant place.
Tuesday, 27 April 2010
Shakespeare
When I went to the theatre on Monday, it was the Bell Shakespeare's King Lear that I was there to see (and John Bell in the role of Lear was stupendous - the theatre critic John McCallum said of one of Bell's earlier performances, 'One day you'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you saw John Bell act,' and that was how I felt after watching him on Monday afternoon, [now all I need is grandchildren]).
Anyway, on the way home I was thinking about how extraordinary Shakespeare was (always one for the original thought, me) and reminding myself that I must read more about him. I remembered that, despite Spike Milligan's definitive analysis of the question (something along the lines of, 'I don't think the plays are the work of William Shakespeare - just of a man of the same name') there'd been an article in one of the weekend papers looking at the age-old topic of the playwright's identity.
When I got home, I dug the paper out and read the article carefully. It quotes Mark Rylance, an English actor and the first Artistic Director of the Globe Theatre, who supports the idea that Shakespeare was not just one person. Fair enough, I thought, except that he does not base his view on history or evidence. The reason he gives for his belief is that 'he finds the idea of the single genius at work very damaging to the confidence of younger playwrights.'
Blistering barnacles - it's this sort of thing that brings out the Captain Haddock in my personality (an aspect of my character that I usually like to conceal). What is this nonsense? In another article in the same paper, someone describes a Kurt Vonnegut story called Harrison Bergeron. It is set in a society where everyone is equal - the intelligent are forced to wear things on their heads that let out high pitched sounds every few seconds "to stop them 'taking unfair advantage of their brains' and dancers are weighted by birdshot or scrap-iron calibrated to the size of their talent.'" Vonnegut's satirical vision seems to be the world Rylance aspires to, a world where being awed and inspired by the magnificence of another human being's achievement must be avoided because it might be detrimental to lesser mortals' self esteem.
Thundering typhoons, what sort of lily-livered landlubbers are we breeding? Shakespeare shouldn't be '...damaging to the confidence of younger playwrights'; his example should just make them all try harder. Next you'll be telling me that Herge was not one individual but a committee of Walloons.
Anyway, on the way home I was thinking about how extraordinary Shakespeare was (always one for the original thought, me) and reminding myself that I must read more about him. I remembered that, despite Spike Milligan's definitive analysis of the question (something along the lines of, 'I don't think the plays are the work of William Shakespeare - just of a man of the same name') there'd been an article in one of the weekend papers looking at the age-old topic of the playwright's identity.
When I got home, I dug the paper out and read the article carefully. It quotes Mark Rylance, an English actor and the first Artistic Director of the Globe Theatre, who supports the idea that Shakespeare was not just one person. Fair enough, I thought, except that he does not base his view on history or evidence. The reason he gives for his belief is that 'he finds the idea of the single genius at work very damaging to the confidence of younger playwrights.'
Blistering barnacles - it's this sort of thing that brings out the Captain Haddock in my personality (an aspect of my character that I usually like to conceal). What is this nonsense? In another article in the same paper, someone describes a Kurt Vonnegut story called Harrison Bergeron. It is set in a society where everyone is equal - the intelligent are forced to wear things on their heads that let out high pitched sounds every few seconds "to stop them 'taking unfair advantage of their brains' and dancers are weighted by birdshot or scrap-iron calibrated to the size of their talent.'" Vonnegut's satirical vision seems to be the world Rylance aspires to, a world where being awed and inspired by the magnificence of another human being's achievement must be avoided because it might be detrimental to lesser mortals' self esteem.
Thundering typhoons, what sort of lily-livered landlubbers are we breeding? Shakespeare shouldn't be '...damaging to the confidence of younger playwrights'; his example should just make them all try harder. Next you'll be telling me that Herge was not one individual but a committee of Walloons.
Delusion
I went to King Street, Newtown the other day - a street close to Sydney University and therefore pretty much devoted to the young. Instead of feeling middle aged and out of place, I imagined I was one of them. Again yesterday at a theatre matinee (was it sacrilegious to go to the theatre on the Anzac Day holiday?) I put on my glasses and looked at the crowd of total wrecks in the foyer and imagined I wasn't anything to do with them.
Of course, it's the need for glasses that allows me to continue in my belief that I am still quite youthful. If I don't wear them, the world takes on the same hazy quality it had during my teenage years, which I spent smoking too much of the wrong types of things (although is there a right type of thing to smoke?) And when I look in the bathroom mirror without them, I could be any age - or, indeed anyone (although not yet anything - I can still distinguish a vaguely humanoid shape from a cupboard.)
Unlike me, my fellow audience members yesterday all seemed to have resigned themselves quite well to maturity. Most of the women - and the crowd was mostly female - had chopped off their hair and allowed themselves to grow quite stout. If that's what it takes to acknowledge you are ageing, I will never do it. And if I start to spread vastly, I intend to buy a whalebone corset. I shall not go wobbling into that good night - or only wobbling drunkenly in the mode of the man who wrote the original of that line (I may be wrong but it was Dylan Thomas, I think?)
Of course, it's the need for glasses that allows me to continue in my belief that I am still quite youthful. If I don't wear them, the world takes on the same hazy quality it had during my teenage years, which I spent smoking too much of the wrong types of things (although is there a right type of thing to smoke?) And when I look in the bathroom mirror without them, I could be any age - or, indeed anyone (although not yet anything - I can still distinguish a vaguely humanoid shape from a cupboard.)
Unlike me, my fellow audience members yesterday all seemed to have resigned themselves quite well to maturity. Most of the women - and the crowd was mostly female - had chopped off their hair and allowed themselves to grow quite stout. If that's what it takes to acknowledge you are ageing, I will never do it. And if I start to spread vastly, I intend to buy a whalebone corset. I shall not go wobbling into that good night - or only wobbling drunkenly in the mode of the man who wrote the original of that line (I may be wrong but it was Dylan Thomas, I think?)
Monday, 26 April 2010
The Cult of Obscurity
Why has art become an extension of the cryptic crossword? Try as I might, I’ve never come up with a reasonable answer to this question. Most of the time, therefore, I try to ignore it. Sometimes though – for instance, when visiting the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney this week – ignoring it becomes impossible. Instead, I find myself staring in bewilderment at ‘artworks’, thinking: ‘Why?’, and ‘When did it happen?’; and ‘Is there any chance it will ever change?’
Mind you, I should have known better. It was such a lovely day. What stopped me from lying down on the grass in the Domain and staring up at the sky for an hour and a half? I don’t know – living too long in German speaking countries, where the idea of the Kulturausflug is respected rather than ridiculed, may have had something to do with it.
Anyway, for whatever reason – probably just curiosity - I entered the gallery, paid 10 of my hard-earned dollars and went down into the basement to see the Archibald portrait prize exhibition, the Wynne landscape prize exhibition and the Sulman prize exhibition. As usual, the Archibald portraits were all pretty dreadful – although many of the painters are clearly technically very able, it makes no difference: the art of portrait painting has been lost somewhere along the way – and most of the landscapes lacked any real presence. The finalists for the Sulman, which is a prize for subject or ‘genre’ painting (is that a very jargony word, or has it always been a way of describing a painting?), were also a pretty uninspiring lot.
All the same, even within that rather pitiful company, the winner seemed unusually undeserving. It is called Paintings, prints & wall hangings and is a ‘large-scale, multi-canvas, text painting [that] precisely replicates a newspaper column and is derived from actual published classified advertisements of paintings for sale, which [the artist] has been collecting for some time now’. That is, it looks like an enormous page of classified advertisements. The label beside it explains that ‘It is a conceptual painting, which wryly addresses issues surrounding cultural meaning and the commodification of art.’ According to the artist, ‘The painting contains a distinct paradox - it is banal, an elevation of the everyday. However, by presenting it in a gallery context it becomes quite radical, absurd and humorous in the manner of Duchamp’s work.’
If you have to explain that you are being humorous, I think you may be in trouble, but clearly the judges didn’t agree.
I went upstairs, passing a baby grand piano that someone had decided to fill with straw, and came face to face with a canvas thickly crusted with layers of paint in various shades of greyish brown. A propellor had been screwed into the middle of it. This was Anselm Kiefer’s ‘Glaube, Hoffnung and Liebe’. The label said this:
‘There are two powerful strands to Kiefer’s work since the early 1980s, a philosophical investigation into the problems of representing transcendence and experimentation with materials and images to create hybrid forms between paintings and sculpture that confound traditional representations of space. Kiefer describes both these enquiries as journeys into the unknown. The idea of the journey is a metaphor that he often includes in images and in material processes. In Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe, the journey is potentially a flight that would take us from the material plane into the heavens, and yet the propellor is made of lead and will never fly. The words in the title are inscribed on all three blades; they are St Paul’s cardinal virtues; faith, hope and love. Perhaps Kiefer is implying that neither technology nor the exercise of virtue can achieve literal transcendence, and yet he is constantly asking the question, ‘Why not?’
Applying an object such as this lead propeller to a representation of landscape contradicts the logic of spatial representation. Where in the space of the painting do we locate the object? Is it lying on the rock shelf or hurtling through space? In fact, it is not in the space of the painting at all, but hovers as if in a separate dimension or representational register. Yet the two kinds of space are magically integrated so that we don’t see one or the other but both at once, something akin to the strange behaviour of quantum physics.’
Are they saying that although Kiefer can’t paint like the old masters, he could build the Hadron Collider, if he felt like it?
I scurried away to Tom Roberts’s ‘Holiday Sketch at Coogee’ and Streeton’s ‘Railway Station, Redfern’, both beautiful pictures that need no dreary essays to hold their little canvas hands.
Mind you, I should have known better. It was such a lovely day. What stopped me from lying down on the grass in the Domain and staring up at the sky for an hour and a half? I don’t know – living too long in German speaking countries, where the idea of the Kulturausflug is respected rather than ridiculed, may have had something to do with it.
Anyway, for whatever reason – probably just curiosity - I entered the gallery, paid 10 of my hard-earned dollars and went down into the basement to see the Archibald portrait prize exhibition, the Wynne landscape prize exhibition and the Sulman prize exhibition. As usual, the Archibald portraits were all pretty dreadful – although many of the painters are clearly technically very able, it makes no difference: the art of portrait painting has been lost somewhere along the way – and most of the landscapes lacked any real presence. The finalists for the Sulman, which is a prize for subject or ‘genre’ painting (is that a very jargony word, or has it always been a way of describing a painting?), were also a pretty uninspiring lot.
All the same, even within that rather pitiful company, the winner seemed unusually undeserving. It is called Paintings, prints & wall hangings and is a ‘large-scale, multi-canvas, text painting [that] precisely replicates a newspaper column and is derived from actual published classified advertisements of paintings for sale, which [the artist] has been collecting for some time now’. That is, it looks like an enormous page of classified advertisements. The label beside it explains that ‘It is a conceptual painting, which wryly addresses issues surrounding cultural meaning and the commodification of art.’ According to the artist, ‘The painting contains a distinct paradox - it is banal, an elevation of the everyday. However, by presenting it in a gallery context it becomes quite radical, absurd and humorous in the manner of Duchamp’s work.’
If you have to explain that you are being humorous, I think you may be in trouble, but clearly the judges didn’t agree.
I went upstairs, passing a baby grand piano that someone had decided to fill with straw, and came face to face with a canvas thickly crusted with layers of paint in various shades of greyish brown. A propellor had been screwed into the middle of it. This was Anselm Kiefer’s ‘Glaube, Hoffnung and Liebe’. The label said this:
‘There are two powerful strands to Kiefer’s work since the early 1980s, a philosophical investigation into the problems of representing transcendence and experimentation with materials and images to create hybrid forms between paintings and sculpture that confound traditional representations of space. Kiefer describes both these enquiries as journeys into the unknown. The idea of the journey is a metaphor that he often includes in images and in material processes. In Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe, the journey is potentially a flight that would take us from the material plane into the heavens, and yet the propellor is made of lead and will never fly. The words in the title are inscribed on all three blades; they are St Paul’s cardinal virtues; faith, hope and love. Perhaps Kiefer is implying that neither technology nor the exercise of virtue can achieve literal transcendence, and yet he is constantly asking the question, ‘Why not?’
Applying an object such as this lead propeller to a representation of landscape contradicts the logic of spatial representation. Where in the space of the painting do we locate the object? Is it lying on the rock shelf or hurtling through space? In fact, it is not in the space of the painting at all, but hovers as if in a separate dimension or representational register. Yet the two kinds of space are magically integrated so that we don’t see one or the other but both at once, something akin to the strange behaviour of quantum physics.’
Are they saying that although Kiefer can’t paint like the old masters, he could build the Hadron Collider, if he felt like it?
I scurried away to Tom Roberts’s ‘Holiday Sketch at Coogee’ and Streeton’s ‘Railway Station, Redfern’, both beautiful pictures that need no dreary essays to hold their little canvas hands.
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