The Cultural Alternative!

 

“I was losing so much money that in desperation I turned to Shakespeare,” so said Lilian Baylis when she was looking for ways to keep the Old Vic going – High Culture as a Way Out!

While I am not trying to found a ballet or drama company, I am trying to keep my sanity in a world (or at least the bits of it that form my construction of life) that appears to be going mad with a manic intensity.

Every day I make a vow that I will not listen to the Today Programme on Radio 4 (courtesy of my Internet Radio) and gnash my teeth in impotent fury at the latest idiocy of the so-called government of my country, and I will certainly not find out what the latest inanity, insanity or impertinence of the so-called POTUS might be.  Each day I fail, and each day I feel the same (or perhaps growing) fury about a series of situations that are (at least to me) patently the result of fatally flawed ideas and characters.

So, much like Lilian, I turn to (sometimes) Shakespeare, but more often art and music to keep myself sane.

Over the last week I have visited two art exhibitions (in mental self-defence) and done my 'homework' for an opera that I am going to next week.

Both the exhibitions are on at the Caixa Forum in Barcelona.  The first that I saw was “Toulouse-Lautrec and the spirit of Montmartre”[1] a large exhibition that has a range of material to consider.  It is not merely an exhibition of paintings and drawings, but, as befits the period, it has a range of posters, magazines, advertising pamphlets, shadow puppets and photographs.

The music, theatre, music hall, club scenes are all covered and for me the main interest was in finding out how many of the art movements, at least the more progressive (and transgressive) ones!

It is perhaps easy to take a person like Duchamp and then go looking for precursors, and find them in the febrile atmosphere of the fin de siècle demi monde of late nineteenth century France, especially the bohemian art centre of Montmartre.

This is an exhibition worth visiting - and searching for your own illuminations in the history of art!

The second exhibition was “Velasquez and the Golden Age”[2] which is built around the loan of seven Velasquez from the Prado in Madrid with each painting being set in the context of other works from a range of artists to give some sense of where the paintings of Velazquez could have taken some of their inspiration.

The themes are Art; Learning; Mythology; The Court; Landscape; Still Life and Religion.

This is an important exhibition.  It is not often that one gets the chance to see this number of Velazquez outside of Madrid and we must be grateful to the Prado that they have given the whole of their quota (no more than seven Velasquez to be loaned at any one time) to the Caixa Forum for this exhibition.

I have to admit that I have only been to see the paintings on a fairly quick trip that was more to get the catalogue and look through it to gain some background knowledge so that I can make a more leisurely trip later.  As the catalogue is only available in Catalan and Spanish, it is a labour of mild misery to read through it!  But, the catalogue “Velázquez Y El Siglo De Oro” is a large format publication and gives excellent reproductions of the paintings and of details of those paintings (all 59 of them) and that is the most important aspect!

This is a major exhibition and I will have to steel myself to hack my way through hordes of school children to get to see the paintings in the future.  I was lucky that I went to the exhibition the day after it had opened and, as the lady in the shop told me, “That is the first catalogue that I have sold!”  When the trips and visits schedule gets under way then quiet contemplation of Great Art is going to be impossible.

But that is a good thing.  For kids to see it.  I am more than prepared to wait for people to pass, if there is the slightest chance that the artistic attitude of the young can be formed by a school trip!

There are certainly paintings in the exhibition that will have an immediate appeal to the young and, with one painting in particular, I would love to hear it explained to junior school kids!  This is by the artist Alonso Cano, is in the section devoted to Religion and has the innocuous title of “San Bernardo y la Virgen”[3].  Look up the painting on line and think about how you would explain it.

This is an exhibition to revisit!

While you are here, you might like to consider visiting my poetry blog:

https://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com/2018/11/daily-run.html

where I have posted a new poem.

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[1] https://caixaforum.es/barcelona/fichaexposicion?entryId=544677

[2] https://caixaforum.es/barcelona/fichaexposicion?entryId=644601

[3] https://www.museodelprado.es/coleccion/obra-de-arte/san-bernardo-y-la-virgen/25b83887-3b11-4a99-a9b1-3b3050733d6a

Playing The Game

 

The fact that I am tapping the keys to my laptop early in the morning is a tribute to my determination to lay off my compulsive reading of The Guardian as soon as I had eaten my muesli.  The unrelentingly awful news contained in its pages, that seems to bring to mind the worst excesses of the 1930s, and the feeling that I could do nothing about what was happening, was certainly beginning to get me down.

I now give the Guardian headlines a rapid scan on my phone and do the quick crossword and then leave the gruesome details for later in the day.  I still listen to the Today programme on Radio 4 - there are limits about how far I am prepared to go to set myself free from negativity – but there is something more transitory about hearing the news rather than reading it, and that makes it easier to take.  At least for me.

There is always the problem of 45.  I, like so many others, have never (and will never) come to terms with the reality of the present POTUS.  You see, try as I might I cannot get the news out of my mind, no matter how early in the morning I get up!

I have been struggling to find an image to sum up my understanding of how characters like 45 and the ex-third-rate Foreign Secretary actually see the world.  I know that both of them are incapable of seeing anything without the opaque filter of their own egos, but I do wonder about characterising their views of the political reality around them.

I suppose the easiest way for me to consider them and their activity is to find a game that can act as a metaphor for their respective approaches.

To start with 45.  I think that he sees the world as a game of Jenga, but his concept of the rules is not to see how many pieces he can pull out without destroying the construction, but rather to find the piece that will bring the whole structure down to ruin – and then reveal that he actually owns a much better, gold plated, Trump-stamped version of the game that will make everyone (i.e. himself) much better off.  And, after all, it’s only a game – and a game that lacks the seriousness of, for example, golf.

Johnson, (I refuse to call him by his Christian name because that gives a faux chumminess to his selfish egotism) is the leading instigator of coulrophobia in British life.  Dangling from a zip line while waving a toy Union Flag, tousling his carefully unruly hair, roguishly spouting Latin to liven up his calculated throwaway phrases, he assiduously works to polish his upper-class-twit-of-the-people image to mask his embarrassingly naked ambition.

His game is a more sophisticated one than 45’s, it’s the game of tea leaves.  You wait until the dregs are left in the cup, swirl them around and invert the cup then gaze at the pattern that is left and interpret it as a sign of the future.  Johnson is a master of pareidolia, apophenia, patternicity and agenticity – all of those are words that define the ability to perceive patterns where none, perhaps, exist.  Johnson wittingly or unwittingly (both work for him) situations and then he defines the resultant chaos through the refining lens of his own ego.

And, of course, Johnson has perfected the “delete all and insert” approach to life.  The term comes from my experience in General Body meetings in university where in student debates someone would propose an amendment of the “delete all and insert” type which converted the original motion into its opposite!  Johnson is very good at that because he lacks historical perspective – at least as far as his own ethical narrative is concerned.  So, to play his game, all you have to do if the last set of tea leaves were not satisfactory is drink another cup of tea and get a new set.

 Johnson is a ‘crisis manager’ not, in any sense that he is able to calm the situation or even manage it competently, no, his type of ‘crisis manager’ is the type that makes the most of a self-made crisis to advance his career.

Johnson is working to emulate his role model, 45, so that he can walk down Oxford Street and shoot someone and get away with it.  Given the way that he is regarded by the so-called base of the Lower Than Vermin Party, Oxford Street might be a no-no, but the High Street in one of the more rural shire villages might be a possibility.

It is now time for my swim where I can wash away the import of the previous thoughts, at least for an hour or so.

And then back to my work on Elsheimer, who is proving to be a much more elusive character for my research than I would have thought possible for a painter who is, undoubtedly, famous.  But that makes it all the more interesting and I have ordered books!

When 45 and Johnson have been consigned to the ignoble waste heap of grotesques, the paintings of Elsheimer will still, in their jewel-like intensity, be providing delight.  And that is an article of faith that I keep hold of whenever I listen to the news!