Monday, 2 June 2008
A Wigging from Jezza
The terrible rain should have been catastrophic for ice cream sellers at the Hay Festival, but there were relieving reports that business didn't suffer from the utilitarian British tendency to match food groups to weather patterns: stews in winter, salads in summer, and all that lower-class malarkey. Only one bad report about local produce threatens to sour the experiences of most happy customers. "Top writer", Jeremy Clarkson, thought that the sheep's milk ice cream had a nutritional value equivalent to licking Arthur Scargill's hair. If Jeremy isn't too bothered about the distasteful parallels he's feeding his readers for breakfast, and if he insists on pinching critical foodie work from his chum, A.A. Gill, then here are a few ideas to keep him going in a new column: I'm told that Ray Buckton's toenail clippings were reminiscent of the bits of burnt lasagne that stick to the sides of unwashed earthenware, Bill Morris's old silver fillings were evocative of the flyaway bits of scrag-end shrapnel in anybody's grandmother's mutton casserole, and the ear wax that used to collect on the rubber-end of Rodney Bickerstaffe's pencils was as heavenly as honey drizzled over the thighs of a Botticelli angel. Not forgetting, of course, the caviar of collective human effort, those big green bogies found in the snout of any reasonably mature, provincial union official. These last sweetmeats are still absolutely delightful, and are the true origin of the phrase, 'a good nose'.
Sunday, 1 June 2008
Mad Love in Hay
When I got to Hay Castle State Room to see John Richardson's Mad Love: Explorations in Desire 1996-2005, there were only two copies of the accompanying limited edition booklets left for sale. Being 49 years old, I bought #49, and only later did I twig this weirdly self-obsessive numerical compliance to be contrary to spirit of the exhibition. Just to explain, I was a recidivous apologist for symmetry, and I suspect the cause lay in my early failures with junior school collage projects. Instead of what I took to be my own striking work dominating the centre of things, I was mostly relegated to the unwashed fringes, my grubby, grey-paper contributions curling up in contact with the heating pipes nearer the dusty parquet. Since then, I've needed just about everything in the visual arts to be immediately prone to interpretation, framed properly, squarely, and healthily.
My own education aside, the brutal truth is I've never felt easy with the 'difficult stuff', with enigmas, spiritual or artistic, and anything I've learned up to now has been got during a long struggle through what a Surrealist might call my undergrowth. My constricted development has made me inadequate in clearing and mapping my own path of desire. The art is helping a little here, and it's more seamless in its effect because I know a few things about the artist. John Richardson is a hopelessly sane and balanced man with a helplessly insane and radical view, and he's slowly knocked away at least a little of the gesso from the rigid proscenia I was always pleased to call my mind. A real headcase wouldn't be able to do that, because my mistrust would keep me at a distance. It's why I don't like Dali.
The Mad Love collages are the right thing for Hay Castle, chiefly because since the brief, infantile appearance of Christopher Dawson in the 1880s, and the (shall we say) ordered 'mindset' of the incumbent châtelaine, nothing really establishment in tone has happened there. From the present meetings of the SWP and visits from Arthur Scargill, to the small Sidney Nolan (accepted part-ex for a collection of Ruskin) that used to decorate Richard Booth's office, there's nearly always been a vague undertone of intellectual, anti-intellectual, or political rebellion. I think of John Richardson's collages as a a guide to his rebellious inclinations, but those thoughts might be with me as a substitute for the fact that I never saw him being carted off in a Black Maria during his previous life as an active Trotskyite.
It's easy to look at some Spanish text in an interwar collage and believe there's a sub-text, an ideology. Consequently, my feeling that collage is probably best as a political medium is tough to shake; also I have ridiculously Romantic notions about fighting Franco seventy years after the event, and deep past affinities with guitars and glasses of wine. Now, quite unfairly, I tend to ascribe political theories to just about any collages with a hint of a period feel. Maybe I shoudn't say so, but I have difficulty separating what's being shown here from what I believe to be the political experiences of the artist; that John Richardson has an honourable track-record in left-wing activism makes it even harder to suppress my probably unwarranted prejudices. If that's an easy get-out from wondering what any of the exhibition means, I'm sorry, but it's the only relevant question I find possible to think about. I need still more education on this.
Any questions I have about the poetry are easier to answer because the poet's provocation can be seen closer to the surface; more accurately, closer to the poet. Nevertheless, it's scarcely accessible to traditional literary criticism, and although it is open to cod-Freudian interpretation, it can only be read easily and pleasantly without it. Actually, just about anything is better without that psycho stuff. The artist's (but not the poet's) life goes on in a degree of order disproportionate to the technique of his art. The poems carry on in their own, nearly-ordered, almost-meaning life, dense in sexual images and practical conundrums, and unlike the collages, they can be felt more easily from a distance, in hindsight. The collages and the poems are good foils for each other. The collages are proper in public, and the poems are publicly improper. The written stuff looks vitally personal, although assessed in tandem with the apparently irrational images on the wall, it's the sort of thing that might have been written by John Wilmot, had he been able to subsume some of the more outré artistic elements of the Fourth Republic. In the style of Wilmot's supposed dying recantation, John Richardson might one day accede to the biggest ideas of the supernatural, although I wouldn't put the price of admission on it.
A few years ago, for a small fee, I sold a book of Eluard's poems with drawings by Picasso, and as it passed though my hands I felt virtually nothing emotional, even less than I felt about the stone-cold banknotes that came back instead. Now I feel better, a little liberated. Thanks, John: I'll never understand precisely what it is you understand about Breton, Eluard and Ernst, but that's part of your point, isn't it? At least some of the canopy is visible, now, and I'm left with only one problem: I'm happy I can interpret the reasons for my own thoughts, but with you, I just can't guess. Which is the alter-ego, the man or the artist? Ask that, and I might as well ask for a large portion of Freud cod.
My own education aside, the brutal truth is I've never felt easy with the 'difficult stuff', with enigmas, spiritual or artistic, and anything I've learned up to now has been got during a long struggle through what a Surrealist might call my undergrowth. My constricted development has made me inadequate in clearing and mapping my own path of desire. The art is helping a little here, and it's more seamless in its effect because I know a few things about the artist. John Richardson is a hopelessly sane and balanced man with a helplessly insane and radical view, and he's slowly knocked away at least a little of the gesso from the rigid proscenia I was always pleased to call my mind. A real headcase wouldn't be able to do that, because my mistrust would keep me at a distance. It's why I don't like Dali.
The Mad Love collages are the right thing for Hay Castle, chiefly because since the brief, infantile appearance of Christopher Dawson in the 1880s, and the (shall we say) ordered 'mindset' of the incumbent châtelaine, nothing really establishment in tone has happened there. From the present meetings of the SWP and visits from Arthur Scargill, to the small Sidney Nolan (accepted part-ex for a collection of Ruskin) that used to decorate Richard Booth's office, there's nearly always been a vague undertone of intellectual, anti-intellectual, or political rebellion. I think of John Richardson's collages as a a guide to his rebellious inclinations, but those thoughts might be with me as a substitute for the fact that I never saw him being carted off in a Black Maria during his previous life as an active Trotskyite.
It's easy to look at some Spanish text in an interwar collage and believe there's a sub-text, an ideology. Consequently, my feeling that collage is probably best as a political medium is tough to shake; also I have ridiculously Romantic notions about fighting Franco seventy years after the event, and deep past affinities with guitars and glasses of wine. Now, quite unfairly, I tend to ascribe political theories to just about any collages with a hint of a period feel. Maybe I shoudn't say so, but I have difficulty separating what's being shown here from what I believe to be the political experiences of the artist; that John Richardson has an honourable track-record in left-wing activism makes it even harder to suppress my probably unwarranted prejudices. If that's an easy get-out from wondering what any of the exhibition means, I'm sorry, but it's the only relevant question I find possible to think about. I need still more education on this.
Any questions I have about the poetry are easier to answer because the poet's provocation can be seen closer to the surface; more accurately, closer to the poet. Nevertheless, it's scarcely accessible to traditional literary criticism, and although it is open to cod-Freudian interpretation, it can only be read easily and pleasantly without it. Actually, just about anything is better without that psycho stuff. The artist's (but not the poet's) life goes on in a degree of order disproportionate to the technique of his art. The poems carry on in their own, nearly-ordered, almost-meaning life, dense in sexual images and practical conundrums, and unlike the collages, they can be felt more easily from a distance, in hindsight. The collages and the poems are good foils for each other. The collages are proper in public, and the poems are publicly improper. The written stuff looks vitally personal, although assessed in tandem with the apparently irrational images on the wall, it's the sort of thing that might have been written by John Wilmot, had he been able to subsume some of the more outré artistic elements of the Fourth Republic. In the style of Wilmot's supposed dying recantation, John Richardson might one day accede to the biggest ideas of the supernatural, although I wouldn't put the price of admission on it.
A few years ago, for a small fee, I sold a book of Eluard's poems with drawings by Picasso, and as it passed though my hands I felt virtually nothing emotional, even less than I felt about the stone-cold banknotes that came back instead. Now I feel better, a little liberated. Thanks, John: I'll never understand precisely what it is you understand about Breton, Eluard and Ernst, but that's part of your point, isn't it? At least some of the canopy is visible, now, and I'm left with only one problem: I'm happy I can interpret the reasons for my own thoughts, but with you, I just can't guess. Which is the alter-ego, the man or the artist? Ask that, and I might as well ask for a large portion of Freud cod.
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