Monday 27 December 2010

.........JOYFULL AND TRIUMPHANT...................

.............and as a postscript to the last posting , there was a fascinating programme on over Christmas on Fra Fillipo Lippi's painting ' The Madonna In The Woods ' , a nativity scene now hanging in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin.


Originally painted for the private chapel of Cosimo di Medici within the Palazzo di Medici in Florence   (mentioned in the last posting as the original home of Ucello's triptych ) , the painting is most unusual insofar as the setting is not that of the traditional stable / manger , but puts the Madonna and Child within a dark forest, overseen by the Holy Trinity of The Father , The Son and The Holy Ghost .  Having survived in its original location for some three hundred years or so , it was bought - quite legitimately - by a Prussian wood trader and ended up in Berlin , a most apposite location given that the physche , the folk memory of the German people is most firmly located within the forests of Northern Europe ( Goring going so far as to re-invent himself in the style of a traditional German land-owner / hunter in leiderhosen and feathered hunting hat ) . Venerated by the Nazis and hidden away for the duration of the war ,the painting was appropriated  - arguably illegitimately - by the U.S. as part of  their war plunder and resided in Washington for three years , finally going on show and touring the country together with other paintings from the German collection before reason prevailed and the collection - and the painting - was finally repatriated back to Berlin. It hangs now in its own gallery , its original location over the alter in the chapel in the Palazzo di Medici occupied by a copy .

Again the question of real or copy , location or displacement occurs . Is it important ? , does it de-value the painting if it is removed from its original context ? Does reproduction devalue it ?

...........and the painting, the image , appears one further time over Christmas as ' Assassins Creed Brotherhood ' goes live , the picture living on in a virtual world as our hero desperately searches the Medici chapel for that hidden lever, the painting now acting as backdrop in a form ,  in a global existence that neither Cosimo di Medici or Fra Fillipo Lippi could ever have envisaged.

Some paintings do indeed live mysterious lives.

Saturday 18 December 2010

......O COME ALL YE FAITHFULL............

.......It's Christmas week, well at least it is here in the UK, and we managed to avoid the worst of the commercial excess by going off to France, which seems to have a much more civilised and austere approach to the festivities. The painting that I thought appropriate to discuss this week , however , is Italian , and seems to me in both its simplicity and its setting  to capture both the innocence and clarity of the nativity as seen through the eyes of a society untrammelled by the ravages of consumerism.



Fra Angelico's painting of the Nativity is a fresco adorning the walls of Cell 23 in the monastery of San Marco in Florence, at once both priceless and worthless, one of a complete series of frescoes adorning this most sublime and spiritual of buildings. Worthless as because it cannot be removed from its setting it exists outside of the art world, priceless because of where it is, painted by a master. The upper floor of the Monastery of San Marco, a retreat from the secular world, is adorned by the fresco series painted by Fra Angelico ; mounting the stairs, rounding the corner of the half landing, one approaches his masterpiece, The Annunciation , from below , as if rising to meet the Holiest of Holy scenes, Ground Zero for the fresco series to follow. The monks cells branch left and right then, off the central corridor, each cell a plain, simple room , a small window - and in each a single fresco to contemplate. The quiet, the peace , the simplicity of the setting all serve to enhance the spiritual nature of the singular image which now becomes the focus of the monk's world.



I think what appeals to me about frescoes , outside of their particular artistic content , is the fact that in most instances they remain in situ, still in the context for which they were painted - and still belonging to the people for whom they were painted, Thus one can still see Giotto's frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Massacio's frescoes at the Brancacci Chapel , Tiepolo's ceiling frescoes in Venice, particularly the one in the Church of Santa Maria dei Gesuati  where the painting is designed to be lit by the reflected light off the adjacent canal outside.
Compare these to Duccio's altarpiece in Sienna , much restored but with some component parts lost , some scattered all over the world, including a small panel that is now in the National in London, or Ucello's series of three paintings The Battle of San Romano , painted for the Medici Palace in Florence but again  now scattered - one, again , in the National, one in the Louvre and one in the Uffizi. The chances of seeing the three together again in their original context is zero, and to an extent the dynamic narrative of the series is now lost.

Frescoes still exist within their original context , belonging to the people, their public. Still in their place , still with their message to deliver, and this to me gives them a uniqueness , a sense of place as well as purpose.

Adeste fideles , laeti triumphates , Venita , venite in Bethlehem.

Sunday 12 December 2010

....ROCKETMAN...

Uh uh............time again for that annual bean-feast that is the BBC Sports Personality of the Year......Lets just dispense with the voting altogether this time -just give it to the Manx Rocket.

Who ? What ?


At about the time that what passes for the England football team were either slinking home from their World Cup fiasco or disappearing off to their house in the Bahama's / wherever, exhausted after playing 90 x 4 minutes of totally ineffective football , the real men were riding out through France , upwards of 150 km per day , often in temperatures approaching 40c. Sprained wrists , cuts , grazes bruises , cracked or broken collar bones were about par for the course. David Millar rode on with cracked ribs ..." It's not too bad on the flat, but the ends of the ribs tend to grind together when I'm climbing ". Climbing ? I get sickness and vertigo just driving up the climbs. And amongst all this effort and carnage,  the Manx Man rocks up in Paris with another 5 stage wins under his belt. Way to go!!

Go on - Mark Cavendish , Sports Personality of the Year. You know it makes sense.

Saturday 11 December 2010

HANDLE WITH CARE...

The last blog I posted dealt with the reality - or otherwise - of  'replicas' and whether the experience of viewing them is compromised by the awareness that what you are viewing is not the 'original'. The artifact I want to discuss this week is undeniably real, undeniably 'original' - in so far as there will never be a copy made of it - but an original  'what'  is more open to question...and is it real or is it a fake?

An artifact moreover that the art world chooses to ignore almost totally, on the grounds that if it's a fake it would overturn pretty much all current beliefs and understanding of artistic development in Europe prior to the Renaissance... a 'fake' causing trouble ? ..........and if it's real it causes even more trouble...........   hhhhmmmmm........ so lets see...


The Turin Shroud has been kept in a protective casket in Turin since around 1550; it purports to be the winding cloth - or ' shroud ' - of a male who was crucified some 2000 years or so ago. However, its claim to be a genuine artifact has assumed to be largely discredited since the findings of carbon dating tests undertaken in 2001 appear to indicate that it dates from circa 1260/1390. A fake . Case closed. End of investigation, end of interest - just a cheap medieval counterfeit.

I think what I find frustrating here is that those people who go for the ' fake ' option seem to think 'thats it , sorted ' . Unfortunately it isn't. Lets have a look at a reasonable analogy - faking a fossil . A genuine fossil is the realisation of a natural process ; dinosaur approaches river, falls in or is caught by flash flood, dies , is buried under mud or silt ; flesh decays, and over eons the skeleton is preserved in strata that is slowly compressed into rock , to reappear during future erosion of the land form. A natural process, no third party or other agent involved. To produce a fake fossil, however....ah...you have to have a full and total understanding of the structure of the ' fossil animal ', a full understanding of what would be preserved, a full and clear understanding of the context in which it is found - i.e. the right rocks from the right geological period - and above all the technique to be able to physically produce at the very least a passable facsimile in the right material context.  A lot more complicated that just falling over and dying in the river.

Let's return to the Shroud . Housed as we have said in Turin Cathedral since around 1550 , a fairly well established historical provenance for the previous 150 years or so dates it back to around 1390 - the end of the ' carbon dating ' window. So if we assume its a fake, then the questions that arise are How ? By Who ? Why ?  How........given that the artifact dated to this point is almost exactly contemporary with the work of Giotto. it bears no resemblance whatsoever to any known form of pictorial representation from this period ;
furthermore, the process and technology through which the image is primarily recognised, that of the photographic negative , did not even exist for another 450 years or so....so why would someone go to all the trouble of producing an image that is this obscure ? Detailed analysis of the image shows no trace of any pigment either lying on the surface of the material or within the individual strands of the weave , and at this moment no one is still quite sure how the image is formed ; the nearest anyone can get to it is ' some form of scorching '. Further , increasing doubts over the veracity of the carbon dating issues suggest that even the dating of the ' fake ' may be questionable.

The Shroud and its' history, its ' physicality ' , is more than adequately documented on the internet - http://www.shroud.com/ - so what interests me here I suppose is the question of authenticity............... either ' real ' or 'fake ' , both alternatives require verification to justify their status - the ' fake ' option raising as many questions as the ' real ' option, and it is not sufficiant to just accept ' fake ' as the default position without acknowledging the inherent questions that lie therein . It seems to me that the burden of proof here lies with both options ; the artifact, however continues to exist as an enigma and it may well be  that its very power lies in its continuing unresolved state -  ' the inherent power of the Mystery '.

" Once you eliminate the impossible , whatever remains , no matter how improbable , must be the truth "  Sherlock Holmes

Saturday 4 December 2010

IS THIS THE REAL THING, OR JUST A FANTASY?

I commented a few weeks ago on the status of Francis Bacon's studio and was it still his 'real' studio now that it had been re-located in its' entirety from Kensington to Dublin? All the contents, the artifacts and debris are undoubtedly original, so I suppose it's the re-location that calls the uniqueness into question. On a somewhat larger scale, are the Temples at Abu Simbel still 'real', having being re-located and re-constructed some 500ft higher up above their original location on an artificial hill in the late 1980's, to avoid being flooded by the construction of a dam and the creation of Lake Nasser ?

This question came to mind when we visited the Tutankhamun exhibition last week, currently located at the Trafford Centre, Manchester until the end of February next. 'Tutankhamun - his Tomb and His Treasures' is , I have to say at the outset, an outstanding exhibition. Taking you briefly, via specially shot film clips, through a brief history of his life together with the story of the discovery of the tomb in the 1920's, the exhibition opens up into a full size replica of the anti-chamber, the tomb chamber and the treasury. The exhibition then goes on to show full-size replicas of all the shrine-rooms, the sarcophagus, the mummy cases, the headpiece, and a full exposition of the entire tomb contents. Amazing.


I suppose however, the key word here is 'replica'. There is nothing 'original' here, nothing 'real'; all the artifacts and exhibits on show being beautifully crafted replicas, the entire exhibition is founded on the complete reproduction of the tomb and its contents. Given the fact that it is most unlikely that the original pieces will ever tour again and the only way to see the authentic, unique items would be to go to Cairo and join the scrum in Cairo museum, I personally don't have a problem with this; I have visited both Cairo and the Valley of The Kings and from a visual / educational / accessibility point of view, this exhibition in Manchester is still outstanding. It allows for a full viewing experience and a closeness to appreciate the amazing detail that is just not available elsewhere other than through photographs, all supported by informed background information. Up to date display techniques enhance settings, resulting in a very hands-on experience... the full-size reproduction of the three Tomb rooms together with all the contents in-situ I found particularly interesting and again this part of the exhibition cannot be found anywhere else.

 
Given the vast explosion in cheap flights and tourist traffic over the past thirty years or so, this question of accessibility to unique historical installations and artifacts resulting in increasing deterioration and damage has become an major curatorial concern; high quality replicas are now seen as a way to resolve this access problem. Michelangelo's statue of David has long been removed from its original location out in the open air and been replaced with a replica; I would never have been able to see the outstanding cave paintings at Lascaux if the authorities had not committed to constructing a perfect underground replica adjacent to the original caves - likewise the cave paintings at Altamira. 'Replicas' should not however be confused with 'Reproductions'; the essence of an artifact lies in its singularity, its uniqueness, and whilst this is compromised by the production of a replica, the replica itself - in the context of this discussion - is still unique, produced to the most exacting standards both materially and artistically. The quality of the replicas at the exhibition in Manchester bear witness to this, being produced by Egyptian craftsmen using the same techniques and materials as the 'originals' to provide a stunning display. The 'uniqueness' of the item still implies a journey to view.


'Reproductions', however good they are, increasingly devalue the item to the point of visual wallpaper, stripping the unique artifact of its ritualistic, shamanistic quality and reducing it to the level of applied decoration - viz. Van Gough's Sunflowers and Raphael's Cherubs - allegedly the most reproduced works ever. The replicas currently on show in Trafford Park I felt did not compromise the viewing experience; no, they cannot replicate the experience of seeing the ( now empty ) tomb in the Valley of the Kings , but they can replicate - very closely - the experience of viewing the treasures now housed in the Cairo Museum, and
can indeed enhance the experience through state of the art display techniques. A show not to be missed.

http://www.tutenkhamunmanchester.com/

I LOVE THE SOUND OF BREAKING GLASS

Soooooo.....................the students are becoming political activists again at last , even if they are motivated by self-interest and the rising cost of tuition fees .

Given that my time at college was spent against a backdrop of CND marches, the Hornsey Affair and student sit-ins , the Grosvenor Square rally and the Paris riots of '68 , all to a soundtrack of  ' Street Fighting Man ' and ' Won't Get Fooled Again ' by the Stones and the Who respectively, it all seems fairly mild by comparison . Where were the student riots protesting against Afghanistan , Iran , the Banking System ?.............and why is it all sound-tracked to the bland anodyne product that seems to be taking over the world via the Simon Cowell Corporation ?.........what happened to creativity , individualism , freedom of expression ?.......maybe each generation gets the music - and the politics - it deserves.............. 

.....BAD MOON RISING...
 ........and the situation across the Atlantic doesn't seem to be any better. ...........for the country that saw out the tail-end of the sixties to the protests against Viet-Nam and a sound track of  Neil Young's ' Ohio ' and Buffalo Springfield's ' For What It's Worth ' ,  what's left of the radical / intellectual left seems to be paralysed like a rabbit in the headlights of the on-coming juggernaut that is Sarah Palin..."  We must stand by our allies North Korea at this time of conflict " .....whhaaaat  ?.....the thought of her running for President in 2012 quite frankly scares the shit out of me.........the Mayan calendar shows the world ending in December 2012, about a month or so into the Palin Presidency . What if they knew something we don't - yet ?..........Christ, get me out of here .

For those are interested in political activism / rock music in the sixties and early seventies, I can highly recommend ' There's A Riot Going On ' by Peter Doggett.............for the rest of you, I wouldn't bother making any long term plans just yet.

Sunday 28 November 2010

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT...





A nice sketch, just a scratchy pen and ink drawing with watercolour, no technical aids, not even any under drawing as far as I can see and reproduced here pretty much life size. An illustration, one of a series recording the day to day life of a boy scout troop... an age of innocence long gone.




And no, they are not by me. Those of you who follow this blog on a regular basis might by now have picked up the occasional references to Jonathan @ Artistic Type and may have realised - by dint of the fact that we both share the same surname - that we are related; he is my son. The sketches on this post are however by another member of the family and I have only just realised, when I was writing this post that my father, whose sketches they are, was only 15 when he did them. I had assumed he was at least 18 or 19. In a perfect world he would have loved to have gone on probably to train as a commercial artist, as you did in those days - we are talking of the mid 1930's here. Life however is not that perfect; his parents couldn't afford to send him off to be apprenticed to a studio so he started life as a wages clerk. Conscripted into the RAF he spent the war in a spitfire squadron; postwar he went on to qualify as an accountant and ended up as a financial director.

He never lost his appreciation of art though, and it was through him that I came to appreciate Rembrandt, who was his favorite artist. I never really had the chance to talk to him about these sketches and how he did them, and he would no doubt be highly amused to know that after all this time some of them are now seeing the light of day for the first time, out in the public domain. The sketches are from an exercise book that he kept as a log-book over a period of some six months or so in 1934 -35 and I suppose it's a minor miracle that they survived at all. The sketches are shown here as they appear on the pages - click in the images to increase their size.

They are here now anyway; enjoy them... and just to show that the artistic skills of the family are in safe hands, the final sketch is by Jonathan's daughter Edie Mae, age 4 - my granddaughter. Hey, Dad, its ok - the kids are alright...

Saturday 27 November 2010

1, 2, 3... AS EASY AS... A, B, C...

In a world and media dominated by electronic communication, the ability to write clearly and concisely is still of prime importance - the ability to communicate without being misunderstood is paramount. I want to discuss this week two specific areas of written communication that, if done properly, pass by unnoticed, un-celebrated (as they should), but if done badly drive me up the fucking wall. Both unheralded, there is an undeniable art to both skills - the Art of compiling an Index, and the Art of writing an Instruction Manual.

The Index first, then. A good, well written index is a godsend - instant access to the piece of information you want, its location identified. Happy Days... and not just with books; the success of a good search engine depends on both you and the engine agreeing on the singularity of the 'Key' word or phrase that allows you to focus your search - a hierarchy of importance is established... Main category, Sub category. So if you and the Index disagree - confusion and frustration reign.

Lets look at a good example here; Jamie Oliver - I like him as a chef/cook whose great skill is to de-mystify the cooking process - "There, it's easy". I cook his recipes, like his books - so lets see... ' Happy Days with the Naked Chef '... a nice book and there is a recipe in there that we like: 'Sicilian Roasted Brill with Lemon, Anchovies, Capers and Rosemary' - a nice fish dish, key components Brill or Halibut with Sicilian Lemons. I go to the index, go to 'Fish' (main category), then brill or halibut as its sub category... uh uh... nothing under Fish ; ok, lets try Lemons... again, nothing. Dammit, I know it's in this book somewhere - I think... I try everything, and eventually the recipe turns up under 'Rosemary...' Whaaat? This is not good. This seriously pisses me off. Who is going to look under  'Rosemary' for a fish recipe? I then find it under 'Sicilian Lemons' etc - but not 'Fish' and the rest of the Indexing isn't brilliant, either. A major failure of the ability to follow a logical procedure - a communication breakdown.

Lets look then at Instruction Manuals - a fundamental part of modern society. We buy an electric blanket, we get a six page instruction booklet  - and I just thought that you had to plug it in. I buy a new camera (I remember when they were just point and click) and it arrives complete with a 40-odd page manual AND an instruction disc to download onto my laptop - which I will do as soon as I can find the page in the laptop manual that tells me how to download the disc and where to store the information. Ok, I know I am getting old and this is second nature to most of you - so lets look at a specific example again.

I get a new mobile phone; I'm not too fussed about seeing it as the hub of my entire universe, I just want to be able to make calls with it, and preferably hands-free when I am driving. So lets see. It comes with not one but TWO instruction books, the first a 'quick introduction' booklet, the second an all-singing all-dancing 64 page book. 64 pages?  So, hands-free... hhmmm... the words 'hands-free' appear precisely twice as far as I can see, once on page 4 as a safety announcement for when driving - excellent - and once in the Index, referring you to page 19. I turn to page 19 - and look in vain - the phrase 'hands free' does not appear on p19, nor does anything appertaining to it... there is nothing in the manual that explains how I can use it hands-free.

Yes, this is another example of an Index being badly written, in this case leading you to the wrong page... or indeed any page. I do however have a greater issue with Instruction manuals. They need to be very clearly written,  that is a given;  they all however make an assumption as to the amount of pre-knowledge that the recipient already has - and in my case this can be quite a lot less than you, or someone else reading the manual brings to the table. Lets return to the camera instructions: they start off being fairly straightforward, as in I can follow them, but soon segue into a series of acronyms and commands that loose me completely... AE mode, AF mode, A/S/M... and no key to help me out. Where do I go from here ?

We have a television and a dvd player/recorder; the combined total number of pages of the instructions weighs in at a hefty 232.... 232 pages is medium size novel; all I want to do is switch on the t.v., find a programme and be able to record it. And don't even start me on miniaturisation... failing vision and arthritic fingers are not just the preserve of the old.

It seems to me, apart from a communication problem, we have a problem of access here. We live in a technologically based society. Technology advances seemingly on a monthly basis, the amount of information available globally doubles every five years or so, all allegedly helping to advance society. Yet unless instructions are written clearly and can communicate rather than confuse, we run the risk of increasingly dis-enfranchising large swathes of society, certainly the older ones amongst us. Technological advances = increasing complexity. .But let's please start with simplifying the access.

The mobile phone and hands free - after much searching, on page 29 I came across 'Enabling a bluetooth device' ...Ahh... I was looking for the wrong key words... ok... I follow the instructions. Exactly. Twice. The mobile phone responds with 'device not recognised'.

What do I do now ?.......................and it's not just me............................

What always frustrates you about technology in general ?........
" Instruction booklets. I cannot believe how abstruse and unintelligible they are. They drive me up the wall "
  Bill Oddie, The Observer, November 2010

Wednesday 24 November 2010

REMEMBER - WHAT THE DORMOUSE SAID...

I think what is nice about running a small design practise is that it allows you the freedom to be creative, to work for those one-off clients who allow you to indulge yourself, who don't want the corporate branded look but something with a degree more individuality, more flair. One of the projects I have most enjoyed recently was working on the hotel for Velvet, on Canal Street in Manchester - 19 bedrooms, all different, for a client who wanted that little extra . If you haven't seen it on the RCA Interiors website, have a look at the hotel gallery at http://www.velvetmanchester.com/


The couple of sketches shown here, firstly as a line drawing and then fully coloured , are for another one-off scheme set in the Gay Village in Manchester - this time a tea-room. The brief from the client was simply to be over the top , be as camp as we like, with possibly a background reference to the Mad-Hatters Tea Party in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.....' Eat me.......Drink me '...........a nice brief and a quick sketch, good fun.....whether it will be built like this I don't know, but we can hope.


The tea-room is to be set on the ground floor of Richmond House on Bloom Street , of particular interest to me as I know the building well and have identified it as ' The House for a Book-Lover ' , to be developed as an idealised scheme on my upcoming M.A. course. A literary tea room fits in rather neatly with a book-lover's house......

...and remember what the dormouse said....' Feed your head, Feed your head '....

Saturday 20 November 2010

HOW COME...


Those of you who have been following these blogs on a regular basis will have picked up a common theme over the last two or three postings - carnivals, traveling fairs and end-of-the-pier shows. I couldn't let that thread go without posting a blog on one of my favorite musicians of all time - that traveling gypsy, the late, great, Ronnie Lane. Having achieved prominence with firstly the Small Faces and then the Faces, at the point where Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood were off buying their fast cars and living the fast life, Ronnie Lane bought a land rover and a sheep farm on the Welsh Borders and set off to follow his dream.



Lacking any sort of business acumen (now why does that appeal?) he set off in pure troubadour fashion to realise his vision of an essentially English, pastoral music. Packing everything into a motley collection of old vans and caravans, the ' Passing Show', essentially a large touring circus featuring jugglers, fire eaters, dancing girls and the musicians, set off to tour the countryside, pitching up with little advance publicity on town commons and cricket grounds to bring their particular music to whoever turned up - often no more than a dozen or so. Lack of finance, local bureaucracy and a group of vehicles increasingly impossible to keep on the road soon brought the tour and the idea to a halt, and he was forced to retreat to the college circuit and the occasional television spot. Diagnosed with M.S. in 1977 he still managed to tour, occasionally supported by Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend, but having moved to Austin in the mid-eighties (still losing money from charity gigs held in his support and with no royalties forthcoming from the Small Faces catalogue) he eventually re-located to Arizona and succumbed to pneumonia in 1997.

There is no decent biography of him apart from the occasional article in music magazines, and his 'official web-site' has the slightly forlorn air of a garden that hasn't been tended too well for the last eighteen months or so, but he left an excellent body of work and seems to be remembered with great affection by those in the music business who care.



His time was never long enough.

Ronnie Lane 1946-1997 R.I.P.

Thursday 11 November 2010

OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR...

November 11th - Armistice Day... not quite the day perhaps to be thinking of end-of-the-pier shows and the English music hall. This is, however, precisely how the film 'Oh What a Lovely War' is presented, an interpretation of the Great War as it turns from carnival to tragedy, the greatest loss of life in a single conflict that this country has ever experienced. Rarely shown on T.V. it has only been made available on DVD for the last three years or so... although, much to my surprise, there are now a number of clips on YouTube.



The producer Joan Littlewood's left wing credentials were never in doubt; a member in the 1930's of the communist party and an associate of Ewan MColl, she was central to the establishment of the Theatre Workshop in the late forties ( the foundation of modern theatre in the UK) and apart from her collaboration with Cedric Price on the 'Fun Palace' in the early sixties, went on to produce stage productions of 'A Taste of Honey' and - more importantly here - 'Oh What a Lovely War', filmed in the late sixties with Richard Attenborough as director.

I have no idea what today's - or even yesterday's - generation would make of the film, in a culture where war and ersatz violence seem to be the mainstay of the burgeoning gaming industry; a charming period piece? I can only see it in social context... I was at art college in the late 60's, and the film seems to me to capture perfectly the zeitgeist of the times; the swinging sixties, the explosion of pop-art (particularly via its exponent of 'Englishness' - Peter Blake) the growth of satire and an irreverence for authority, all set against the rise of the CND movement, the rumblings of Vietnam from across the water, and the continuing cold-war stand-off between the US and Russia. The music hall / end of the pier settings for the initial jubilation certainly act as a counterpoint to the final scenes, increasing the feeling of waste and despair as the cameras pan back and back to reveal the increasing enormity and futility of it all. I have never really seen any other film like it; very much of its time, yet managing to show its subject matter in an absurdist light that few other anti-war films manage to achieve. An almost exact contemporary though , is the following clip of Country Joe and ' Fixin to Die Rag '-  filmed within a few months of the release of ' Oh What a lovely war ', certainly in the same year - 1969. The immediacy of Vietnam is again dealt with with the same joyous sense of absurdity - the bouncing ball says it all. Music Hall as protest.



The last word should remain with the film however -  it finally leaves us with one of the most enduring images, signs, symbols of the 20th century; not a sign of peace but - more importantly - a sign of remembrance... " for those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it "


Saturday 6 November 2010

THE PASSING SHOW...


One of the more memorable things to me about the film 'The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassuss' was the collision of cultures, the idea of this wonderfully baroque horse-drawn carnival show pitching up in contemporary London, a world of cyber-technology and instant messaging, a world slowly drowning in an ocean of information. Would the show find an audience? Would people relate to it? Could it even happen in this day and age other than on film?





The couple of characters in the pictures above, along with their traveling side-show, walked slowly into our little town in South West France the day before the circus that is 'Le Tour' rolled through (more of that later), much as I imagine mummers or traveling players would appear in towns and hamlets throughout Europe in days gone by. Pitching up in front of the Hotel De Ville they soon attracted an audience, ranging in age from the young to the very old, all of whom welcomed them enthusiastically. Their good-natured banter with the crowd slowly evolved into a 'performance' on the lines of an old-time medicine show, the doctor proceeding to extol at great lengths the strength and potency of the potions he was selling. The crowd quite happily engaged with this, one young lady being selected to act as the 'foil' for the doctor and his servant, and they all seemed both familiar with the story and aware of what their roles and responses should be. The whole event had a timeless charm to it, nothing forced, certainly nothing artificial about it, and you felt that it could have occurred here at any time over the last two hundred years or so. How the medicine show arrived with us, unheralded, and how and where they disappeared on to, I have no idea and I really don't want to know; I would much rather just think of them slowly traveling through the little towns and hamlets amongst the foothills of the Pyrenees, selling their potions as they go.


It did cross my mind what sort of response they would have got on the U.K. - the side-show either set fire to or upended in the nearest car-park, I suppose, or am i just being cynical? The nearest thing that we would have, i would think, in terms of populist street theatre, would be the traditional 'Punch and Judy' show, although even that would seem much diminished in its present form. The graphic novel 'The Comical Tragedy or the Tragical Comedy of Mr Punch' by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean seems to me to capture exactly that melancholic, slightly scary air of damp, end-of-the-season seasides towns where both the colour and the life seem to be draining away, accompanied by the cries of the gulls. Visually stunning, both surreal and realistic with its sense of subdued violence.


And finally, the carnival and the fairground have always seemed to me to have something of the night about them - Ray Bradburys 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' perfectly captures that sense of un-ease, that age-old forces are at work here...

Sunday 31 October 2010

GHOST WATCHING

Darkness, screams, a ghoulish train conductor and the tale of sisters who went missing on a night train in Eastern Europe at the turn of the last century - an evening of stunning theatrical entertainment was promised...

...well it wasn't in the evening and the event lasted little more than ten minutes, but it was one of the most impressive pieces of theatre that I had experienced for a long long time. I had read a review early in the year of a show entitled 'Dystopian Wonders' appearing at the Lowry Theatre, Salford, last May - which I'd missed. Dammit, it sounded wonderful - "a morbid show-woman and a sinister preacher invite you to their bizarre exhibition of curious nameless bodies" ...an installation? An event? A walk-through theatrical experience? And who was Maria Carnesky, the show-woman who had produced it? The theatrical experience that breaks away from the confines of the proscenium arch convention has always interested me, from the radical street-theatre of post-revolution Russia and the dynamics of the Bauhaus experiments to the Happenings in New York in the Sixties and contemporary art installations. So when we found out that Carnesky's Ghost train had now found a permanent home in Blackpool opposite the South Pier we headed off to find it.


Housed in a single story building with a quasi Victorian fairground side-show front, the conductor invites you to "Pay your money and step right in - not for the faint-hearted, dear!". We walk through the curtain into a station waiting room somewhere in the Balkans in 1910 - faded missing women posters adorn the walls, along with destination boards to exotic cities. The clock-face on the wall swings open and a figure emerges (the missing girls mother?) to relate the back story to the adventure. Screams are heard, doors bang open and the old woman appears, to take you by the hand and guide you into the waiting train, stroking your hand and staring at you intently. This is no ordinary ghost train ride...



The ride then takes you into another world, the train running on a continuous loop through the darkness; actresses - the missing women - appear and re-appear in different guises, different stages of distress, different tableaux appearing as the story unfolds. Unnerved, you escape from the train at its destination, walking to the exit past the ghosts as they take their good-byes around you. As an experience I found it exhilarating, a most enjoyable piece of (promenade?) theatre. Peopled by, presumably, drama students, it seemed to me a most effective way of reconciling a fairly intense dramatic experience with real life setting. And where else would you expect to find a Ghost train other than within a fairground?



Real life versus T.V. reality shows - I hate them, vain attempts to elevate the relatively mundane experience of the everyday to the level of high drama. But what if it works the other way around... what if high drama appears under the guise of an everyday straightforward investigation? What if the concept is inverted? I can still remember the furor 'Ghost Watch' caused when aired on BBC 1 on October 31st, 1992. A nice friendly Saturday night show on ghost watching hosted by Michael Parkinson and Sarah Greene - what could possibly go wrong? Filmed weeks earlier, the narrative was presented as a live transmission, scaring the wits out of over 12 million viewers and resulting in 30,000 phone-calls to the BBC within an hour and the programme subsequently being banned from being re-shown, meriting its own entry on Wikipedia. Reality T.V.? maybe the public can't cope with too much realism after all... maybe the ghosts are still in the machines...

For more information on Carneskys Ghost Train visit http://www.carneskysghosttrain.com/ - they have just re-jigged the web-site. Personally I preferred the earlier version done in the black/white jerky format of a silent movie, but then I'm not a web designer so what do I know ? You should also visit http://www.carnesky.com/ for more information on the wonderful Maria Carnesky and her productions. If you want to watch 'Ghost Watch' it's available on a DVD under the imprint of the BFI -British Film Institute, an indication perhaps of how highly it is regarded ...and don't say that you haven't been warned.

Saturday 23 October 2010

ON REFLECTION...

Late on in 2008 I went down to London to see the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain. Having only recently come to appreciate his work, it was a unique opportunity to see a large number of his paintings together at one time and to get a glimmer of his working process - a feel for his artistic development over a period of time. The exhibition was extremely impressive and one left with a feeling of emotional exhaustion - very powerful works.



One room in particular remains in my mind, being a room hung with dark sombre portraits. 'Man in Blue IV ' shown here was one of them, together with another three or four similar canvases; large ( some 2000mm x 1400mm ), brooding, austere, the canvas sucked you in as you approached, the dark field of background colour enveloping you in its cloak. Except that it didn't, because as you approached you suddenly became aware that the canvas was framed and glazed and your eyes, your focal point suddenly shifted to picking up the reflection of the gallery, the group of three or four people looking at the painting with you, the lighting in the room, the crowds moving through the gallery behind you. It immediately became impossible to appreciate the painting in its state as a independent artifact; it now became a background, a component in a constructed image of the gallery experience. The second and third images posted here, whilst not of the same painting, demonstrates this effect quite clearly.



And this got me thinking - at what point, certainly with contemporary art, does a canvas become glazed, and who decides? It certainly can't have been Bacon's intent, when painting the canvas, to have it viewed in these circumstances - the surface texture, the visceral effect of paint on canvas is now subsumed to a reflective surface that highlights the environment in which the canvas is hanging at any given time. Is it a curatorial issue, a decision by the owners to provide a degree of protection? And why is it deemed necessary? The Rothko 'Four Seasons' suite hanging in the Tate Modern has never - god forbid - seemed to require this treatment and a brief consideration of how their power would instantly be totally compromised by glazing would suggest that it is a fundamental issue when it comes to determining how a canvas should be viewed; an issue moreover that I have to my knowledge not seen discussed elsewhere. Comments please?



Nevertheless, an excellent exhibition and one that lead me on to read 'Francis Bacon's Studio' by Margarita Cappock - a fascinating exploration of Bacon's studio as it was left after his death. Both forensic and archaeological in its depth and scope, it was occasioned by the purchase of the studio by Dublin City Gallery and its subsequent dismantling, removal from South Kensington and reconstruction in Dublin, where it is now on permanent display. Leaving aside the more esoteric question of ' is it now still the real studio?', another curatorial debate, as an investigation and analysis of his working methods it reveals far more about Bacon than perhaps he would ever have wished. It remains silent, however, on the enigma of the glazing...

Tuesday 19 October 2010

THE FUTURE STARTS HERE...


The images above are of a scheme that we produced some 2 years or so ago at RCA Interiors for a site in the Northern Quarter, Manchester. It had strong links to both the musical and bar culture of the city. The current owner had approached us with a view to converting the upper floors of the site, currently empty and in poor state of repair, into a boutique hotel of some 30-odd rooms together with a re-vamped bar and club on the ground and basement floors. The idea was then to thematically structure the design around the Manchester music scene.

Having spent a good 12 months developing the project, opening up the centre of the long thin site with a full height glazed atrium and finally achieving the nod of approval from the City Planning department, the client then decided to pull the plug on the whole project on the grounds that it wasn't what he wanted at all and we were wasting his time; refusing, needlessly to say, to pay us. Immensely frustrated, the plans, sketch, model and ideas went back into the cupboard to rest alongside other lost opportunities, and there they would have stayed...

At around this time, completely independently, I had started to consider applying for an M.A. course at University. I had completed a B.A. course in Art History - mainly on Renaissance Art - some 12 years previously and realised that I was missing the mental stimulus and the buzz of ideas. Or, I was thinking, maybe I should apply for an M.A. at the old Poly, in the Art Department - brush up my artistic skills? Hhhhmmm...

Then, via Jonathan at Artistic Type, I was introduced to the dynamic of the 'Design and Art Direction' M.A. course at Manchester Metropolitan University - a course that seemed to combine both the rigours of intellectual discourse and thought processes with the hands-on approach to creative development. A number of thoughts and ideas then began to coalesce ...what if? ...could I? ...maybe if?

The upshot was an application and subsequent acceptance onto the course, starting in September 2011.

So where do the pictures posted above fit in? My submission for the M.A. is essentially to re-visit 4 or so sites that I have worked on in Central Manchester over the years. Outside of the real-world parameters dictated by practicality, commerciality and the wherewithal or otherwise of clients, an alternative past and future would then be constructed for these sites, investigated through the dynamic of architectural presentation but with the opportunity to overlay texts, narrative, artworks and illustration to create the experience of an alternative reality.

A House for an Art Lover, A House for a Book Lover... the site in the Northern Quarter? A House for a Music Lover...

The future starts here...

Monday 18 October 2010

...ITS ALL IN THE MARKERS...

...and before anyone says anything,yes I know that the markers shown on the web site header are the old stubby Magic Markers; I still have a box of them lying around, and whilst they must be at least 10-12 years old most of them are still working - unlike most of the Letraset / Tria markers I have, which seem to have a working life of about 3 days... maybe the cap is badly designed or something, but they dry up very quickly. Magic Markers for me, every time please.

Rant over.

So welcome to the blog site, a rolling review of my thoughts and ideas on stuff I have seen, stuff I am going to see, and maybe some stuff that doesn't even exist yet apart from in my head. At this moment I am still actively involved with RCA Interiors, but will be concentrating more and more on developing my ideas on a purely visual basis - visuals of the past, the present and the future... a work in progress... enjoy.

Oh, and the first thing I must do is to credit Jonathan at Artistic Type for designing and setting up the web-site. Without whom...