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

Reading with purpose?

I have just finished reading ‘I object’ [Thames & Hudson] a book described as ‘Ian Hislop’s search for dissent’ to accompany the exhibition of the same name in the British Museum curated by him.

I read it as a guilty pleasure because it appeals and pampers the inner-dilettante in me.  It is a ‘lazy’ book with gobbets of easily digested information on a bewilderingly wide range of well-illustrated objects with Ian Hislop’s comments in speech bubbles scattered throughout the text.  A text, I assume was written by Ian Hislop’s co-author Tom Hockenhull.

I would describe it as a relatively small format right-on coffee table book, something to dip into rather than read through in the way that I did.  There are attempts in the book to pull together the disparate objects and the selection is divided into three rough sections, but there is no real over-arching theme or premise other than the concept of ‘Protest’ to link them all and to give them direction.

Having said that, the selection is good fun, and it does allow a sort of narrative that uses a whole range of odd objects to make points, and it also gives some objects an airing that they don’t perhaps deserve, but they are certainly worth considering in the context that has been created.

I have to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I delighted in the variety of objects from dishes to doors, from clogs to cartoons, from statues to stamps and from the unexpected illumination that such diversity gives.  It has the eclecticism that an institution after my own heart, The Open University, would appreciate – and it also has academic footnotes, a bibliography, a full list of illustrations’ details and an index to make the book academic enough to read with an easy conscience as a graduate of said institution!

What the book also does is encourage thought about a whole range of approaches that would take this exhibition further: a range of graffiti, but not the Banksy type, the scrawled, the hasty the amateur, the ad hoc; barricades considered as installations; hand lettered posters and placards, with letters that don’t fit, unplanned, raw; images of destruction, the smashing of windows, the throwing of paint; defacing posters, coins, adverts, road signs – there are ideas aplenty to develop!

And, true to what I’ve written I have thought of making an object of my own as my response to reading the book.  It will take a small purchase on-line and the re-use of something I have had since I was a child and a shop in town, but I think it will work. 

This is something that I will post when it is complete!  And perhaps I’ll send a copy of it to Ian Hislop and Tom Hocknhull as a sort of thank-you for producing this stimulating experience!