The TLS blog

Michael Jackson, man of 'the stagnant crowd', and two other men

Because the TLS lives now in the office where I worked for The Times before 1986 I sometimes see ghosts here of the Thatcher era, men and women who fought for ideas at time when ideas were last the at the heart of political life.

The conservative philosopher Roger Scruton is one of them. There is a new book about him by an admirer Mark Dooley which sets out eloquently Roger's positions on politics and art - and explains why there was no one I ever commissioned to write whose articles provoked more rage.

I don't suppose there will be a Scruton column on Michael Jackson (even as seen here in 1984 with the Reagans).  But if there were it would probably be on the following lines, as cited by Dooley, and would give its commissioner no end of grief.

"Pop music, which presents the idealised adolescent as the centre of a collective

ceremony, is an attempt to bend music to this new condition – the condition of

a stagnant crowd, standing always on the brink of adulthood, but never passing

across to it.  It shows youth as the goal and fulfilment of human life, rather than

a transitional phase which must be cast off once the business of social

reproduction calls.  For many young people, therefore, it constitutes an obstacle

to the acquisition of a musical culture.  It is the thing that insulates them from the

adult world, and all other uses of music – singing, formation dancing, playing an

instrument, listening – arouse their suspicion."

The second visitor in spirit is David Hart, the businesman, writer, political adviser and activist for Margaret Thatcher in the 1984 miners' strike. I like to remember him as he was then because for the last six years he has looked very different, falling slowly to a form of Motor Neurone Disease which leaves his mind as combative as ever while his muscles inexorably weaken.

Last week he wrote openly about his condition for the first time. I have watched him over these years with admiration and horror but I did not know this piece was coming and have only read it just now. It is writing from a great controversialist, wrought from a struggle by a spirit suddenly and sadly back in mind within these office walls.

 

Night (not) in the Parthenon Museum 2

The Elgin Marbles?

'Let's not go there', is the regular and very reasonable response.

I have tended to agree. The issue is one of those which make too many people unhappy.

Until yesterday I hadn't written about the Elgin Marbles since I stopped being Editor of The Times in 2002.

Perhaps I should have kept that silence.

But, I was irritated last night by BBC reports of the Parthenon Museum opening.

And I'm now irritating commenters to this blog too.

So a few brief points tonight in response to the commenters, none of them new, all of them explained at greater length in The Parthenon, the book by my famously even-handed colleague, Mary Beard.

Was I displaying the British national characteristic of 'condescension'? Was I saying that in removing parts of the Parthenon frieze from Athens, Elgin had done 'the bloody wogs' a favour?

It is some long time, Mr Middleton, since I've heard anyone use the term 'wogs', but let's let that pass. Removing the stones almost certainly saved many of them from being ground down for Turkish lime, being damaged in the Greek war for independence or rotted by industrial pollution. But that was no part of Elgin's motivation. Nor should it be any part of the argument now.
 
If, on the other hand, spreading Greek culture is a 'favour' to the Greeks (and this is a moot point) Elgin certainly intended that by his acts - alongside aggrandising himself and outdoing the French. The Elgin marbles, by being in London, certainly had a transforming effect on sensibility and taste. If the definition and influence of art objects are issues in this case (and they absolutely should be), the London marbles have their own very special identity and status. They had barely ever been seen or noted in Athens at all. Only after their arrival in London, Michael, were the marbles ever judged as Greek's 'best monuments'. 

Was the removal a crime? Surely looting antiquities is a crime?

If you do it now, Mr Giotis and Basil, then certainly. If you did it during a European war 200 years ago, probably not. Many acts now considered great crimes were legal when and where they were committed. Many noble acts were illegal. Many of Elgin's critics - at the time and later - can be seen now as looters outlooted. Not all the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum came from Elgin. Some were part of other collections whose legality or otherwise is equally unknown. The legality or otherwise of the Turkish permissions to Elgin does not now even constitute much of the Greek case that the marbles be given to the new Athens museum.

A crime against humanity, Panos? That's a type of crime that chosen, I suppose, because it can be prosecuted, according to recent diktat, without regard for borders or time. The marbles are extraordinary representations of humanity but let's not carried away.

How do I defend the aesthetic benefit of keeping heads and bodies separate?

If this were an ordinary debate between museums, Mr Giotis again and Dan Asta, there would be every opportunity, through long-term loans, of uniting a number of statues. If there were a plan to put together all the parts of the Parthenon in their original Acropolis places, there would be an aesthetic case for attempting that. Simply to reconstitute parts of the frieze and move it to a different museum closer to where it once was has much less clear an aesthetic benefit, arguably none at all. A powerful part of the Parthenon aesthetic is the very division that Greek politicians so deplore. But we should not blame politicians for failing to appreciate that. It is hardly their role.

Surely the Parthenon should have been left alone in the first place?

Dream on. Elgin did not pillage a neat museum to a particular idea of Greek national identity, the sort of site that visitors see now. All that gleaming whiteness came later.The removal of the marbles by Elgin was one tiny incident in constant changes - militarisation, church building, lime-manufacturing, connoisseurship  and other activities of the Acropolis - over 2000 years.
    
Is this a 'never ending nightmare' for Greeks?

It is not  for me to dispute anyone else's nightmares, Michael. But politicians can induce nightmares out of many alleged affronts and fears. If you don't like your dreams, you should look to who is causing them and benefiting from them. If the new museum increases Greek nightmares, that is much to be regretted. Whether it will enrage visitors and intensify pressure on the British Museum, I honestly rather doubt it.

Not from (or to) the new Parthenon museum

High on tonight's BBC news is the opening of the Parthenon museum in Athens and the 'increased pressure' that this places on Britain to 'return' the Elgin Marbles.

The new museum, which I visited in a construction-site hard-hat with its diplomatic director two years ago, is, as was always planned, a political taunt to the British.

At that time, as I posted here, the plan was to present the Greek part of the Parthenon frieze beside copies of the British parts covered in the grey gauze of mourning.

That absurdity has been now abandoned.

But the central ambition remains - to use the world's most expensive gallery of copies to campaign for the originals to be restored to their homeland.

The BBC takes the bait and delivers the Greek message, a an aggressive taunt, one a long way removed from the subtler language deployed by scholars in recent years.

There are defiant words from a British Museum spokesman too, something along the lines that the frieze originally looked outwards to the world beyond Greece and that it continues to do that best from its London home of the past two centuries. The BM's director, well briefed no doubt on the likely events, is wisely absent.

Today's news bulletins report that the BM has offered a loan of the frieze as long as its British ownership is recognised - with portentous comment from the BBC man that no Greek politician could ever accept such terms and no query as to why not.
 
My colleague, Mary Beard, has already posted from the festivities. She is a most judicious authority on the issues involved. But let me put them simply.

There is no case for accepting the Greek demands except that the Greek national will to own the marbles is greater than ours.

There is no overall aesthetic case: the marbles are never going to be put back on an even partially complete 5th century Parthenon.

There is no academic case: the marbles can be studied in London  - and have been exhaustively.

There is no case relating to the significance of the  marbles themselves. Their power and influence over thinkers and artists has been exercised wholly in London.
From London they changed the way that representation of the human body was perceived. In Athens, from the moment they were made to the time they were removed, they were virtually invisible, not even looking outwards to the sea', in the BM spokesman's words tonight, but hidden from all but the most determined and crick-necked observers.

There is no legal case: let us not return to the Napoleonic war between England and France, in which the Greek province of the Ottoman empire was such a very small part. Even the Greek government does not lecture us on 'firmans' any more.

Nor should anyone rest the argument on the fact, well attested by Professor Beard in her blog, that the removal of the Elgin marbles to London preserved them from two further centuries of Greek pollution and neglect. That is hardly relevant now.

There is only one argument worth considering - that those of us who love Greece should agree to give the Greeks something they say they badly want, that their politicians have defined themselves by wanting, and that it is in the British power to give.

It is always pleasant to please a friend. But encouraging politicians in cheap tricks of nationalism is not a good idea. Encouraging other countries to define themselves with bits of absent gold and marble is not a good idea either.

There is nothing sadder about the party in Athens today and the past decades of Greek agitation than that a country we admire should have come to arrange its priorities in so absurd a way.

If Greek politicians had educated (or were to decide to educate) their citizens and their visitors to see  the marbles for what they are - as ancient art, as tools of scholarship, as catalysts of humanism and hellensim - the copies in the new museum could be replaced on loan, probably a revolving and extended loan, by the originals.

Instead, there is to be an amplified and  continuing error, a museum of synthetic national symbolism, self-defeating in its vaunted aims.

At the beginning of the week, I wondered if it wouldn't be fun to be in Athens right now. I'm glad I stayed at home.

Charles Dance's island

The part of Robinson Crusoe, as scripted by the American poet, Elizabeth Bishop, is no easy part for even the most responsive actor to play.

In her monologue of old age, Crusoe in England, Bishop created a  hero who is as imprisoned in the hallucinatory recollections of his 'cloud-dump' island as he ever was on the island itself.

Always a writer of distorted visions, this is her masterpiece of shifting sights, memories and dissatisfaction.

The tone is querulous: "none of the books has ever got it right", says the aged survivor who was so long lost at sea.

This Crusoe had been desperate in his vicious volcanic exile among hissing hills and turtles:  "'Pity should begin at home.' So the more / pity I felt, the more I felt at home."

He is no less trapped and desperate in his English retirement.

He had some sorts of good times on the island: "Friday was nice.
Friday was nice, and we were friends.
If only he had been a woman!
I wanted to propagate my kind,
and so did he, I think, poor boy."

And many sorts of bad times: "But then I'd dream of things
like slitting a baby's throat, mistaking it
for a baby goat. I'd have
nightmares of other islands
stretching away from mine, infinities
of islands, islands spawning islands,
like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs
of islands ..."

Crusoe in England was performed at the British Library last night by Charles Dance - drily, thoughtfully, threateningly as though the audience, most of all, should never know the next act of his mind and eye. This was a cruelly lucid Crusoe, played as part of the latest Josephine Hart Poetry Hour, a project now in its fifth year of commitment to the need for poetry to be heard on stage from great actors as well as read on pages.

This was one of the most ambitious and successful proofs of that truth.

Pressed rat, Warthog and the hapax

What does a deroga tree have in common with a gopher tree?

Once upon a time - in student days before Wikipedia -that was a challenging question.

This morning it drifted back into my mind while I was trying to avoid the Reith lectures on the car radio. I have enjoyed reading Michael Sandels in the New Republic and am fascinated to learn that this Harvard philosopher was the model for Mr Burns in The Simpsons. But lectures on the immorality of markets in traffic at 9 am? No thanks.

The poem on another part of the radio was one I hadn't heard for decades. It is called Pressed Rat and Warthog and it is spoken (and co-written, I discover) by the jazz drummer, Ginger Baker, on a record made by the once very famous rock band, Cream.

It is a sad piece about two animal characters - part Wind in the Willows, part dirty Scottish canal life - who are forced to leave their shop by an immoral marketeer of recessions in the past.

The pair have to abandon their beloved career 'selling atonal apples and amplified heat and Pressed Rat's collection of dog legs and feet'.

'The bad captain madman', had ordered their fate.
He laughed and stomped off with a nautical gait.
The gate turned into a deroga tree
And his pegleg got woodworm and broke into three.'

All this is accompanied by mournful, trumpets, some relentlessy, nostalgic drumming by Baker, and a brief burst of the guitar-playing that made Eric Clapton the God of those days.

But what was a deroga tree?

The answer - eventually given to me by an enthusiastic teacher trying to make classical issues relevant to his pupils - was that it was a hapax.

What was a hapax?

A hapax was a word that only ever appeared once - in a language or a body of writing.

So it was often very difficult to say what any hapax meant.

The gopher tree, which appears only once in the bible, is also a hapax.

The oldest Greek has many hapaxes, names for forgotten farming instruments and sexual instruments that early scholars thought were more suitably translated as sea creatures. Classics and critical theory can take the hapax a long way. I wrote a piece about this once which, by the magic of search engines, I have just been able to read again.

The deroga tree seems to be a joke spelling of derogatory. Captain Madman's walking gait turns into a wooden gate and then into an adjective and then back into a woodwormy, wooden leg.

In the days before Wikipedia it was not so easy to discover a fact like that. How many books on trees did you need to read in order to be sure that a deroga or a gopher did not exist except as members of that exclusive linguistic hapax band?

Venice Biennale 4: the Soft Machine response

What do Biennalers do when they hate what's in front of them?

Criticise? Protest? Walk out? Not even walk in?

I'm phrasing the question like that because I see that the bass guitarist Hugh Hopper has just died. His band, Soft Machine, was the first act that I ever saw booed, shouted, pelted and abused offstage.

That was at the Chelmsford Corn Exchange in around 1967, a scene about as far from Venice 2009 as anyone could imagine, a nasty incident when an audience expecting Gino Washington's Ram Jam Band had to watch instead the most 'avant garde art-rock act' of their time.

It is not an incident that figures in Hopper's obituary. Probably it happened all the time. But it made a big impact on me. I went on to collect Soft Machine albums for years.

At a Biennale the biggest way to show offence is to walk through quickly with a smile and a yawn. The Swiss pavilion offers good examples. So does the Scottish, where grey slabs of stone, plastic autumn leaves and a few rooms of metal furniture do not even earn the smile.

Alternatively you can shout - at the presence of Berlusconi or at assorted images of artists' priapic parts.

The veteran journalist, Anthony Haden-Guest, whom I hadn't seen for many years till the Daily Beast's Biennale party, gives the Beast the best and fullest account so far of what's been going on, including a range of answers to the questions above.

I have not seen all of the Danish pavilion that he talks about, only the dead man
outside in the swimming pool (see previous post). There is an excellent Art Beast account of this too.

What am I applauding? What would get from me the Gino Washington rather than the Soft Machine response of Chelmsford forty years ago?

If clapping were an option in the artworld, which it seem not to be, top of my list would be Fiona Tan in the pavilion of the Dutch.

If I can find an expert appreciation of her I'll post it here before I give up the world of blogging Venice and return to books and a bit more sanity.

Venice Biennale 3: Swimming from the Chandelier

What is the theme of this Venice Biennale?
 
People who ought to know that better than I do are asking me.
 
The official theme is 'Making Worlds', the idea (I hesitate whether to put quote marks round the word) that artists do not make objects, they make worlds.
 
I cannot argue with that. I cannot see any meaning in it either. 'Making Worlds' is Biennale language, demanding admiration but resisting argument. That is certainly a theme of a kind.
 
This is also supposed to the 'retro' Biennale. The Italians are celebrating their Futurists. Among the 90 artists selected by curator, Daniel Birnbaum, there are the old and even the dead, a choice that seems to have surprised regular attenders.
 
Birnbaum is an enthusiast for the idea (no quote marks needed here) that the old looks different after consideration of the new, that 'Cezanne is another artist after Picasso, that Picasso retroactively made Cezanne into what he is'. Fine.

And 'isn't Gordon Matta-Clark a little bit of a different artist after Rirkrit Tiravanija?' I'm sure he is.
 
Birnbaum says that he is is not in thrall to youth. 'Not every artist who is new or doing something fresh or interesting is 27 years old' he says. 'Art is not like ice hockey'. Excellent.
 
And Retro, it should be added, is also comforting in troubled economic times. Old artists have, at least, proved their value once.
 
Amongst the more than a thousand objects there is perhaps one other strong comfort for this year's Venice visitors.

With no bathing facilities for the Biennale unless we want to risk the canals, there are refreshing images of men in water everywhere, on video, in installations and on paper.
 
True, the very popular bather outside the Danish pavilion is definitely dead. Only his shoes and socks are by the poolside. He himself is floating face downwards  to the bottom of the deep end and his watch and pack of Marlboro.
 
But the swimming man in Jan Fabre's set of massive stage states next to Trimalchio's Feast (see first post) is stronger, a muscled black man rather than an hedonist Dane, floating on a peacock green sea under a matching chandelier. He seems probably to be alive, unlike the owner of the giant head which an archaelogist is excavating with a spade a few yards away. He still has all his limbs, unlike the urinating corpses in the delicate frieze of images which surround the walls.
 
If I had to pick a Biennale theme at the moment, it would be Fabre's swimmer. 
 

Venice Biennale 2: Is that funny or not?

It is not easy for a newcomer to see the jokes at the Venice Biennale.
 
Take that gondola floating in the canal by the Arsenale, the one sliced in half below the waterline and covered in white paper, the one whose gondolier is waving a red paper fish at the end of a rod. Is it a piece of art or a satire upon the world's biggest art-fest or even both?
 
Or the pile of books by the Biennale shop door? Surely the editor of the TLS should be on securer ground here. Is a wall of the self-help best-seller It's Not How Good You Are But How Good You Want To Be a witty comment on artistic pretension, a practical guide to exhibitors or a better way than art books of making money for the shop?
 
Aleksandra Mir's A Million Free Postcards From Venice (see previous post) is an excellent joke. I hope the Private-Viewers of the past three days, who've stuffed their free bags with pictures of big game and icebergs stamped as a gift from Venice, have left a few behind for the paying punters.

Richard Wentworth's hanging mobile of dictionaries pierced by wires also produced a few appreciative smiles. Stand underneath it, like a baby in a cot beneath a set of pink rabbits, and you can read the titles, Finnish by A.H.Whitney, Learn Teluga in 30 Days, Collins Italian Dictionary, A Dictionary of Current American Usage. Each one is strung out below a dark iron frame and secured by a steel knot.
 
Apart from art catalogues (about which more maybe later) there are not so many books at the Biennale that a TLS editor can pass quickly by a show like that one.

Wentworth, one of the leading British exhibitors, has an additional claim on fame. He is said to have once lent a bicycle to Yoko Ono who included it in a sculpture of her own and never paid him for a new one.

Since John Lennon's widow has been awarded a Golden Lion life-time achievement award at the 2009 Biennale, there will be the perfect opportunity here to ask her again.  

Venice Biennale 1: a little light Russian video sex

Next week the world's biggest art party will be open to the public. For holidaying visitors to Venice it will be their first chance to see what  thousands of museum curators, critics and gallery owners are glorying in right now, modest metal tables from Scotland, hardly-moving movies from Holland, massive Japanese breasts, Korean views of condensation and glow-in-the-dark mushrooms (from the USA, I think), everything that makes up the Venice Biennale.

This is my first time here. Even for a veteran of political conventions, literary fairs and other press-fests, the mass of bombast and bullshit in search of beauty takes some serious personal adjustment. Over the next week I may come to make some sense of it.

For the moment, the three-day 'private-view' is almost over.  All the highest-rolling Biennalistas are moving on - to their business home in Basel where they hope to buy and sell to each other rather than to whoop it up at each other's expense. Next week, for the professionals, it will be back to the doom-laden trade of finding the big customers of 2009.  For this Biennale amateur there is merely the task in the next few days of trying to understand something of all this.

So far, I seem to be at loose among free-flowing Bellini-drinkers and feverishly fierce competitors for who gets the most desirable free canvas bag. FYI to next week's visitors: if you find the one that says 'it's so easy to fuck up but I'm too fucking old now to care' you have got the one that most people want.  I have already failed that test for myself, ending up with only a much lesser collection to carry my books through the rest of the summer,  totemic-energy-dragons, lobsters and designer-carrots.

 But there is a lot of other free stuff to be had, some of it exhibits themselves, like a million holiday postcards from different places around the world, all stamped VENEZIA - elephant packs from Venice, ice flows from Venice, Westminsters from Venice. One of the themes this year is that everywhere in the world is more or less the same place.

The private-viewers very much like the free stuff.  Throughout the official and unofficial sites that dot the city there are free iced coffees (from the Illy company that sees its product as essential to fine art), free art books each one of a weight that could kill a man, not to mention again the city's peach-and-prosecco cocktails upon which any art lover can become an instant connoisseur. Of course, if you want to drink a free Bellini on Roman Abramovic's yacht, you may be unlucky. That is an invite of even greater rarity than a 'too fucking old to care bag'. But anyone less fussy is fine.

I have just been to a splendid Russian event. In a brick warehouse in the Arsenale there were tall women in gladiator shoes and killer stilettoes taking canapes and peach drinks from black-suited waiters while watching a giant circular screen on which actors, with only a mildly more malevolent gaze, were doing much the same. It was wonderful, the 'world premiere' of a video installation with the title - unusually comforting for a classicist at the Biennale - of Trimalchio's Feast.

This was nothing too excessive, quite a gentle introduction to the big event. Neither in the audience nor on screen was there anything hard-core, nothing even like the sort of exoticism that excited Petronius, the original Roman author of the Feast in the age of Nero: I neither saw, nor was offered, any hot dinner dish from which live birds flew. There were only eery scenes of seaside decadence, understated sadism with golf clubs and a narrative of what might happen if a tsunami hit the the wrong rich holiday makers at the wrong time.

The audience seemed to like it alot, not just because of the piles of free badges declaring 'Unconditional Love', nor even because the alternative video show was of an interrogator repeatedly banging a young woman's head into a barrel of water. Trimalchio's Feast, with its Gatsby echoes, glossy sex and flying saucers, seems to me an excellent way to have started my Biennale.

The video makers are offering their own free bags here too. A New Zealander who thought (wrongly, I suspect) that this one was the true 'best bag', leant heavily over a table of drinks to see if he could get his prize, bringing upon himself only a hard stare from one of the women in black behind the bar.

'Could I buy one?', he then asked desperately, uttering words more alien here than almost any he could  have chosen.

'Sorry, I don't know', she replied not very sweetly.

'I'm just the artist'.

Exit stout visitor, without gift but still fit to fight another day. 

(More blogging from Venice will follow here later, perhaps something more serious, certainly with pictures when a little technical difficulty of the not very high-end-art kind has been overcome.)

A love story of Guantanamo

I wrote last week about which Shakespeare plays might appeal to Guantanamo Bay detainees who can now read them in Arabic in the camp library.

But which plays would it do them good to read? That is the question posed by TLS reader, Michael Jenning of Van Nuys California.

He is not concerned that inmates find comforting scenes of wrongful imprisonment (Measure for Measure) or sleep deprivation (Taming of the Shrew) - more that they should see in Shakespeare the error of their own worst ways.

So it's Romeo and Juliet, whose hero and heroine are shown here on 'their first anniversary'.

"Given the tendencies of many of the inmates at Guantanamo, it's likely they'd be aggravated by a family whose daughter's affections have been captured by a member of a group of which they don't approve.

 It might make them long for the days of cutting the throats of wayward daughters, or tossing acid in their faces, or stoning them to death."

Or alternatively, they might see the benefit in that benign peace-bringer who makes everything alright in Verona in the end. That's the beauty of Shakespeare.You can never be sure.