Silverlake Blvd.

L. S. Lowry @ Tate Britain

Britain at play, 1943

 

By some mistake I thought this show was closing before I arrived. A good thing I double-checked on my next-to-last day!

 

I'm pretty sure I have never seen a single work by Lowry, and probably can't in the U.S. This particular selection of works has been energetically criticized (c.f. Schwartz in the NYRB), but it was all welcome news to me. 

 

Room after room of the same horizontal bands of dirty snow, terra-cotta, putty, and the most unassertive, retiring kinds of black and bittersweet imaginable.

 

The elements create contrasts, a play of forces, a play of expectations. The geometry of the buildings is in contrast to the squiggly cyphers of figures. The geometry is never true, never crisply geometric. And the figures are not always cyphers—some seem recorded from life. The scenes are light, but the light is perfectly diffused, without direction.

 

And then there is the contrast between the quietly harmonious pictures and the subject matter. Which is what? LSL spoke of having a vision in Pendlebury in 1916:

I saw the Acme Mill, a great square red block with the little cottages running in rows right up to it—and suddenly I knew what I had to paint.

 

LSL was trying to capture a specific and unique landscape. He was moved by it. And he was canny enough to realize that pursuing a scene that other painters neglected could help him establish his artistic identity—and maybe even help his career.

 

But of course most viewers don’t recognize Station Road, Pendlebury, in the Greater Manchester borough of Salford. We see factories, the workers, and the worker’s homes and streets and parks. The specific places become generic types of places: factory, factory town, industrial slum, …. It is a familiar type of place.

 

Narrowly, it’s the world of the people whose labor makes the things of the modernity. More generally, it’s how the modern world physically produces, sustains and expands itself. Empirically, its what we have made of the world: The way we live now. Morally, it’s the human and environmental cost of that world. 

 

It is quiet and cumulative rather than explosive and revelatory. Musical, really. He is a Morandi, a Giacometti. 

 

Elsewhere around town

London's hottest new Mexican restaurant has carefully preserved the historic streetfront facade of its space in Leicester Square ...

 

Last weekend was London Open House, and out of the 800+ buildings open to the public, we opted to pay a visit to Ernő Goldfinger's 1939 house in Hampstead. An interesting excursion, which--surprise!--also included a big Sunday lunch at a nice pub up the hill ...

 

My last day in town I had the luxury of a long lunch with an old friend who lives--as Goldfinger did--in the only modernist box on the street. ...

Crisis of Brilliance @ Dulwich Picture Gallery

 

It was the next-to-last day of the exhibit, and there were lines, and the galleries were packed to bursting. Not optimal conditions, but it was fascinating and moving. Even the frankly bad work--and there was quite a bit--was bad in a fascinating way. It was a "crisis" all right: the crisis of continental modernism and then the crisis of the Great War made and unmade these Edwardian students at the Slade in different ways. 

 

Bomberg is the main question. In the Hold (1914)--above-- hung at the entrance. At first glance it’s marvelous and exhilarating. But after a while it starts to fall apart into bitty, anecdotal episodes. But then, in the end, you feel the coherence of the whole, and enjoy his nuanced colors. Almost all his work prompts this Yes-No-OK response.

 

Gertler comes across very strong here. He painted in a range of styles. He did a portrait of Carrington (1912) and The Fruit Sorters (1914), but then also did juvenile kitsch like The Creation of Eve (1915).

 

There was a lot of Stanley Spencer--probably more than I've ever seen before. They had his first oil painting (Two girls and a beehive, 1910), and it’s already uniquely distinctive. Completely matter-of-fact, completely ordinary, but also completely visionary. Spencer could draw better than any of them—e.g. the chalk self-portrait (1912). His distortions and clumsynesses are deliberate. And even though he was lost in dreams, he also had the most sensitive touch when handling landscapes, foliage and nature in general—The Nativity (1912), Cookham (1914). And as if that weren't enough ... he also had a sense of humor that has aged better than the others. The Unveiling Cookham War Memorial (1922)--below--is a synthesis of Gerald Manley Hopkins and Evelyn Waugh.

 

 

Then I recuperated by admiring the greenery of Dulwich Village ...

Herne Hill

The two blocks around the Half Moon pub were still mostly vacant after the bizarre flood last August. But keep calm & carry on: the Oxfam used book store now runs out of a stall at the Sunday Farmers Market.

The curbside, self-serve free book exchange on Dulwich Road.

In Silver Lake, all roads lead to Effie Street; in Herne Hill, all roads lead to The Prince Regent.

Spaces of Television @ the University of Reading - The talks

 

 

I spent a lot of time at the conference last week writing down the names of TV shows I had never heard of before, in order to try and locate them later. Example Number 1 would be The Liver Birds (1969-1978!) which was one of dozens of Liverpool-related shows and movies that Julia Hallam discussed as part of an extraodinarily ambitious project to collect every important moving-image document of the Port of the Empire. Not only does her team have an archive of 1700+ elements, but they've geo-coded them all, so they can be accessed via a city map. The website is forthcoming. Every community in in the world should be doing this!

 

My panel was in the Bob Kayley theater, which turned out to be a rather beautiful Black Box experimental theater, with seating on three sides. If I had known about the space I would have prepared dance moves. Rooms against chronicles: houses on Edwardian TV generated some gasps and laughs, as hoped. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

 

 

My talk was followed by Daniel Ashton's sharp and droll analysis of the Jane Austen TV series-inspired tourism industry. He made a beautiful argument about the National Trust's role in transforming "heritage properties into heritage props."

 

 

I confess I secretly sighed when Sarah Cardwell announced that her talk would be about aspect ratios--I get more than enough on this topic from film archivists--but she made this topic fascinating and significant. It was a master class in attentive viewing, comparing three screen versions of Persuasion, unpacking the dramatic implications of the 4:3 format of the 1971 TV series in contrast to the 2007 and 2012 wide-screen versions.

 

Plus there was Billy Smart's discussion of the spatial dramaturgy of Within These Walls--a women's prison TV drama series that deserves a place beside the dictionary definition of "Camp." And Leah Panos on an arcane anti-naturalistic TV musical about The Troubles, and Richard Kilborn and Lothar Mikos doing a hilarious dialogue on German adaptations of British TV comedies like The Office....

It's frustrating that concerning the panel discussion on the early days of Color Screen Offset effects I can't even find still images of the BBC's 1976 Chester Mystery Cycle, which was a crazy beautiful mix of medieval illumination and disco era SFX--featuring Tom Courtney as Jesus!

 

Spaces of Television @ the University of Reading - The scene

The campus was green and calm. Classes didn't start till the next week.

 

 

Accomodations in one of the dorms were on the monastic side, but all I really missed was a wireless connection. On the other hand there was a nice kitchen down the hall. And across from the laundromat was a pub! (Unfortunately not yet open)

 

 

U of R is home to the Samuel Beckett archive, and they have decorated the Palmer building with production stills and quotes. A deliciously incongruous incentive for the recycling effort.

 

The cab displayed a Notice to All Passengers: “These additional charges will be levied with immediate effect: Fouling of vehicle exterior: £10 / Fouling of vehicle interior: £40” 

Prometheus Bound @ the Getty Villa

 

The CalArts Center for New Performance, directed by Travis Preston, not only chose to present the play by Aeschylus with the least potential audience appeal, but also to present it in full, without editing or updating or sweeting of any kind. And by the application of thought and imagination to the challenges presented by Joel Agee’s translation, they really triumphed. The evening was otherworldly, baffling, but engrossing and ultimately moving.

 

Aeschylus doesn’t make it easy. No human beings appear in the play. The protagonist is on stage, chained to a rock, immobilized, throughout. The “action” consists entirely of extended backstory narratives recited by Prometheus and his visitors. And these speeches are labyrinths of exotic personal and place names and erudite “Daughter-of-Inachus” circumlocutions which apparently baffled even contemporary Athenians.

 

Moreover, the subject matter is nothing less than Fate, Justice and Freedom—with an accent on the misery these things can cause. The closest literary parallel is the drama of Job in the Bible. Later works modeled on it also tend towards superhuman high-mindedness, with an accept on rebellion: Milton’s Samson Agonistes and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.

 

And the tone is black. Dark, dark, dark, dark.

 

But what became clear last night is that there are different shades of black. And the performance teased out these nuances, creating eddies of horror and hope, which propelled the scenes along.

 

The situation and the characters are utterly alien, but the attitudes were not. Each of the visitors to Prometheus brings out something different.

 

The prologue, in which Force (Adam Haas Hunter) taunts Hephaistos (Tony Sancho) as he chains Prometheus to the rock, literally sets the stage for the debate on power and justice, rebellion and obedience.

 

Okeanos’s (Joseph Kamal) well-intentioned but stupid patronizing exasperates Prometheus (Ron Cephas Jones), who struggles to remain polite. But the smug officiousness of Hermes (Michael Blackman) prompts Prometheus to completely unhinged scorn.

 

The most significant visitor is Io, another innocent victim of Zeus. Mirjana Jokovic found a way to make this weird, unhappy character sympathetic.

 

The Chorus is a problem for every modern production of Greek drama. The usual solution is to reduce it to a handful of characters that interact, or stand aloof and comment. This production took the novel approach of not seeing any problem, and presented a Chorus that old-timers in Athens would have recognized: a dozen young women who chanted and sang their speeches in unison, and also danced, fought, and climbed up and down the giant metal wheel that provided Prometheus’s rock. Agee didn’t give them any words that were especially memorable, but the effect was beautiful and strange.

 

Agee’s translation often echoed earlier English versions—Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s and even Buckley’s weird Victorian macaronic collage.

 

The dryer narrative speeches were animated by the delicate drones and shimmerings of Vinny Golia and Chris Lopes. They avoided archaic clichés without being irrelevantly modern. Their music was entirely unobtrusive, but the performance wouldn’t have worked without it.

 

Likewise Efren Delgadillo’s giant mechanical wheel, provided a beautiful place for the actors to perform, without overstressing associations with Classical art or with Christ on the cross.

 

As always, it was nice just to sit outside at the Villa—especially after a gruesomely hot and humid day. Having a really nice dinner in the upstairs dining room didn’t hurt, either.