On Yves Klein

Here, for Easter Sunday, a favourite image by a favourite artist. Look it up on Google.

It's called Le Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void) and is (of course) a brilliantly simple photomontage, by Shunk Kender, made in 1960, capturing the artist Yves Klein in mid-air one damp afternoon in October 1960. The location was Rue Gentil-Bernard in Fontenay-aux-Roses, a quiet suburb south of Paris. I like the earthbound cyclist on the right, entirely unaware of the Icarus moment taking place behind him. He would have seen the four assistants holding a tarpaulin sheet to capture the falling man, who have been airbrushed out of the final image.

I visited the place one correspondingly damp Easter Sunday afternoon about twenty years ago. Nothing much remains of the site, which is now occupied by an ugly modern church and a student hall of residence, although the railway line still runs along the end of the street and the station building remains intact. Oddly enough an identically-banded brick pillar to the one Klein is leaping from can be found still in place in the same street, about a quarter of a mile south. The place where he would theoretically have crashed to earth is now a zebra crossing, but (unlike the one in London's Abbey Road) not a world-class tourist attraction.

Klein included the image in his book Dimanche, apparently to prove that he had mastered the art of lunar travel and a snub to the boys at NASA. If serious conceptual art is your bag then Klein's the man.

He died young, aged 34, in 1962. He was a terrific innovator - as a painter, performance artist, provocateur and karate champion. The real deal.

Images © The Estate of Yves Klein

Richard Griffiths

He wasn't simply a great actor - he was also invariably the right actor, cast in roles that nobody else could get away with. He was especially good at eloquent queers - Hector in The History Boys and (of course) the immortal Uncle Monty in Withnail & I.

I saw him last on stage at the National Theatre in the role of Fitz, an irascible old ham who is in turn portraying W H Auden in Caliban's Day, the play-within-a-play in Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art. He was the best thing in it, and had reportedly taken the role on at the last moment, when Michael Gambon was indisposed. I remember this exchange between Griffiths as Fitz as Auden and Auden's biographer Humphrey Carpenter (Adrian Scarborough):

CARPENTER:    I'm not a rent boy. I was at Keble.

AUDEN:             That can't be helped.

It's not much of a line but Griffiths freighted it beautifully with lust and impatience and camp condescension - and he brought the house down. At the end of the play he delivered, beautifully and very movingly Auden's elegy In Memory of W. B. Yeats ('He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted'). 

His unusual shape was caused by an elaborate and untreatable hernia. It would be untrue to say that one didn't notice his extraordinary bulk, but his wonderful voice and toothy grin are what one chiefly remembers, and his incredibly light and elegant movements, more Ariel than Falstaff. He lumbered daintily. I learn from an obituary that his working-class parents were both deaf and mute, that he had to support them in many ways from the age of four. and that his childhood was very unhappy. Yet he seemed neither bitter nor scarred by what sounds like a dreadfully loveless upbringing, and is fondly remembered by everyone he worked with or who saw him perform.

Griffiths was only 65 when he died yesterday, which means he was (incredibly) under forty when he appeared as Withnail's fabulously strange Uncle Monty. I was unable to find a clip of him delivering my favourite line in the film: 'We live in a kingdom of rains, where the royalty comes in gangs'. So this will have to do: his scene-stealing first appearance in the film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQx4qiEmRQ4

If you've never seen Withnail & I you'll have to take my word for it that Bruce Robinson's script is the most brilliant for any British film since Kind Hearts and Coronets. Here (from memory) is another bit of Uncle Monty, recalling an undergraduate passion:

'I sometimes wonder where Norman is now. Probably wintering with his mother in Guildford. A cat, rain, Vim under the sink, and both bars on. But old now, old. There is no beauty without decay.'

If you have seen Withnail the chances are you've seen it many times. It's very good, very funny and very rude. Griffiths apparently didn't mind strangers yelling 'Monty you terrible cunt!' at him in public. It was a catch phrase of sorts. He will be much missed.

Auden extract © The Estate of W. H. Auden

On playful interventions

I know a lot about art, and I know what I don't like. What I particularly don't like is lazy, clumsy, cocksure public art. I've had it up to here with playful interventions.

You'll know what I mean. Some artist you've never heard of has made (or more likely caused to be made) some kind of thing (not, in all likelihood, a painting, but a public thing: performance, film, 10,000 dirty jamjars stuffed with condoms, street art.) Usually its intentions are expressed in this kind of slack prose:

Finial Response is a permanent public artwork in the bustling heart of Soho in London. It is an interactive and light-based piece that blurs the boundaries between architecture installation and art [.] It consists of 109 individually shaped black steel profiles sandwiching illuminated acrylic which responds to the movements of passers-by. Each profile shape echoes ornamental finials found around Westminster, connecting Soho’s decorated past with its new incarnation as a media hub.

'Blurs the boundaries' my aunt fanny. Soho has been dedicated for decades to doing just that, using such time-honoured strategies as booze, sex, drugs and patisseries - we don't need any well-intentioned intervention to add to that mix because there are no boundaries left to blur. Finial Response is, we are later assured ' a constantly changing artwork that will engage and delight for many years to come.'

Finial Response (Image © Google images)

This is optimistic. Last time I looked it wasn't working, or perhaps not switched on. It is in any case a one-look-and-you've-got-it object. Who'd want to see the damn thing on their way to and from work every day?

Typically an artist involved in this sort of thing is aiming through such 'playful interventions' to (in another threadbare phrase) 'challenge the viewer's preconceptions'.  This is how they tend to put it:

Through playful interventions these artists create a ‘non place’, a meeting ground between the fictional and what actually exists. There is a notion that we are being presented with a glimpse or fragment of reality, veiled only by the finest gauze of illusion. Viewers are invited to cultivate and engage with their own narratives, therefore entering into a dialogue within this dichotomy. 

It's typical of the meaningless guff that surrounds and seeks to justify humdrum sophomoric site-specific 'gestures' and (in this case) is written to accompany an exhibition in a recently-established space in what I remember as an elegant Victorian waterworks, a few minutes' walk from my parents' house. These neat public buildings used to be surrounded by carefully-tended gardens and a small car-park accommodating a fleet of neatly-liveried vehicles, the modest plant serving local residents quietly and efficiently. It was adjacent to a home for young people with learning difficulties (now closed) and a Methodist chapel (now derelict).

I don't for a moment agree with the prevailing view, now virtually a given, that modern art can only earn its place in the world by challenging our beliefs, rather than illuminating, instructing, enriching our lives and adding to our knowledge of ourselves and others. I particularly loathe the word 'playful', which becomes, in the hands of witless, artless prankster-practitioners, no more than a synonym for trivial. In fact, replace the former word with the latter whenever you see it in an artist's statement or exhibition catalogue and a simple truth is revealed. I loathe even more the kind of art and artist that aim to 'challenge our preconceptions'.

As it happens I have plenty of preconceptions, most of which are hard-won, the result of thoughtful reflection and a lifetime's reading and listening and looking and thinking. I'm annoyed - and who would't be - when these preconceptions of mine are regarded as mere prejudices to be overcome by the diligent application of conceptual art as a kind of ethical poultice. It would take a spectacularly persuasive artwork (and I can't even begin to imagine what form it would take) to challenge my existing preconceptions about slavery, for instance, or to convince me that Jimmy Savile was a Good Egg, or that Terry Pratchett is a better writer than V. S. Pritchett, or that the satanic abuse of children might be (despite our misgivings) a cultural cloud with a silver lining, or that I've up to now been quite wrong about the Holocaust (which  I strongly believe was a Bad Thing) and misinformed about global warming. Picture an artwork that dared to challenge the widely-held preconception that Allah is the only true god and Mohamed is his prophet. Then picture the reaction. It wouldn't be playful.

Of course all art is an intervention, and an incongruity, although that has nothing to do with destabilising the viewer's expectations (whatever they are) or subverting the status quo (whatever that is, or was). Art is incongruous because it has no utility, and it is the non-utile nature of art that is the real challenge - inviting if not always eliciting a range of responses from the philistine ('A child of five could do it') to the informed ('That's awful').

Why, one wonders, do so many artists suppose in any case that the sort of people who come to look at their work (or 'intervention') arrive with a set of unreflecting prejudices which, thanks to the eloquent powers of their creation will be destabilised or even overturned? Anyone with deeply-held prejudices is never going to be won over by any post-Duchampian sub-Dada footling. Proper racists, for instance, don't spout their nasty bullshit simply in order to shock and provoke and to challenge the rest of society's (anti-racist) preconceptions. They spout their nasty bullshit because it's what they believe in, perhaps all they believe in, and they have nothing else to say. It wouldn't occur to them that what they say is shocking, because they see it as a self-evident truth. Artists, bless them, routinely confuse preconceptions (which are unstable and therefore negotiable) with convictions (which are irrational and unyielding). You can't challenge convictions with reason because convictions are seldom based on reason. And preconceptions, let's agree, are not necessarily shallow or thoughtless or wrong, and may be bang on the money. But that's not to forgive the pompous self-belief of the artist who believes his work somehow incarnates a coherent assault on the established and self-deluding order, whatever that order might be. 

Since Duchamp's urinal the stakes have got higher, the noises more cacophonous, but the bar has been lowered - and what we have to settle for now is Dame Tracey's unmade bed, which is shocking only in its banality and feebleness. Wouldn't you in any case swap her entire gurning portfolio for just one piece by Yves Klein? Better to have both than neither, say the cultural relativists. Balls, I reply.

Marcel Duchamp's urinal

As craft declines and intelligence is ousted by sincerity the shouting match becomes a free-for-all. In the past year we've seen a number of playful interventions which failed, emphatically failed, to make their mark. Remember Wlodzimierz Umaniec? Almost certainly not. He's the gormless arse who defaced a Rothko with black ink in the Tate Modern last year, attempting to promote his feeble one-man Yellowist movement. He got two years in jail and a few minutes of Warholian fame, on which I expect the disorganised pillock imagines he can build. We can expect more of this as times get harsher, as action replaces reflection, loquacity trumps eloquence and noisy self-reflexive sarcastic artlessness drives out the quietly thoughtful, the serious, the unironic.

Yeah right whatever

Oddly it's those game old pranksters Gilbert & George who continue to deliver the odd beneficial shock, with their ambiguously fascistic homoerotica and their right-wing pronunciamentos, although I suspect they only do it to annoy, because they know it teases.

Gilbert (right) and George (right)

But what, these days, would really shock? What would a serious artistic equivalent be to a moment once memorably described by Woody Allen, a moment 'when you kiss your grandmother goodnight and she puts her tongue in your mouth'?

Snow

As Britain grinds to a halt during an unseasonal cold spell, here's a dazzling seven-minute film directed and edited by Geoffrey Jones, shot in the harsh winter of 1962/3. Jones was working for British Transport Films, and travelled around with his cameraman (Wolfgang Suschitzky, perhaps best known today for shooting Get Carter), filming whatever he saw and then spent a year editing the footage. The result is sensationally good. Martin Scorsese is a big fan, apparently.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl4pJwcE7JI

On cliché

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nam blandit iaculis mattis. Integer suscipit eros ut velit volutpat sed ullamcorper est euismod. 

And so on. Recognise it?

Lorem Ipsum is still used a lot in the printing and typesetting industry. It's been the industry's standard dummy text since the 1500s, when an unknown printer scrambled a galley of type to produce a sample book and more than five hundred years later it's still with us. I suppose most of us came across it first in a Letraset format (remember Letraset?), which used passages of Lorem Ipsum in its catalogues and sample sheets from the 1960s until quite recently. Later on desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker used versions, and you can come across it in all kinds of contexts.

As Latin it's quite meaningless - designed to deflect the eye from any lexical significance and make the reader appreciate the arrangement of the text. It's the typesetter's equivalent of Finnegans Wake and, as it happens, an early example of a cliché. 

The word (as I expect you know but I didn't) 'cliché'' derives originally from typesetting, and referred to a printing plate cast from moveable type (also known as a stereotype, another expression that's gone down in the world). It may have onomatopoeic origins, coming from the sound made when the molten stereotyping metal is poured onto the matrix to make a printing plate, which presumably involved some kind of clicking noise (as in French cliquer). Setting type one letter at a time was a slow and painstaking process and so, if a phrase was likely to recur, the type would not be broken up but kept for future use. The term cliché soon came to refer to any ready-made, high frequency phrase likely to be repeated without variation (as might, for instance, be used repeatedly in contracts and other legal documents). In its original usage, cliché had no negative associations but now, and usually as a plural noun or as an adjective, it has come to mean hackneyed, derivative, unoriginal and as such, a Bad Thing. But perhaps that's because we're exposed to so many forms of the written and spoken word, and to so much in the way of films and television and gormless journalism in all media that we're bound sooner or later to come across something  that (with a feeling that might be called déjà lu) seems to us to be clichéd.

Children have no concept of cliché and seem, in fact, to thrive on the repetitive and familiar. At what age does this change? And what exactly is our adult objection to a writer who employs cliché? Perhaps it's a sense that she is wasting our valuable time, that verbal cliché is usually accompanied by plenty of dullness in plot, character and the other things that make for good writing. Evelyn Waugh once paid Christopher Isherwood the most wonderful compliment when he wrote in a review that 'Mr Isherwood is not a writer who struggles to avoid cliché because a cliché would never occur to him'.  

I recently came across a phrase used by anthropologists that seems to me to be more useful than 'stereotype' or 'cliché'. The term is 'a perfect specific' and applies to any unambiguous signifier (verbal or visual) that an audience will agree stands legitimately and neutrally for something in particular. Examples might be the Chancellor's battered despatch box on Budget day, or the flashing blue light of an emergency vehicle, or the white smoking emerging from a stovepipe chimney to announce the appointment (if that's the right word), or the Mona Lisa as a perfect specific not only or high art but of enigmatic genius, ineffability and (depending on your point of view) a certain naffness. Of course the appeal of a perfect specific is in many cases is not to a sophisticated audience, but that's neither here nor there. My point is that 'perfect specifics' are useful, legible signs that need little or no mediation between the source and reception. They do their job in a quiet and effective and unfussy way. We need more of these, surely? Society builds a consensus around them.

My home town

Evan Davies, prompted by some educational pundit on Radio 4's Today programme the other day, asked peevishly: "Since when did schools get strap lines instead of mottos?" I suppose it all started about the same time that free market management newspeak came to dominate public discourse and public services were sold off to private companies. Change and decay in all around I see.

My school motto was FORTI NIHIL DIFFICILE and although I never knew what it meant at the time I suppose it translates as To the brave nothing is difficult. Or perhaps 'It's easy when you know how'.

The Borough Council in the town where I grew up and went to school had its own motto: PER MARE PER ECCLESIAM (By the sea, by the church), a literal topographical description of the original settlement and, perhaps, a nod to the dominant forces in the community. I remember the smart blue and cream liveried buses in my home town, each of which carried this coat of arms complete with the Latin motto:

Southend Borough Council

These days what's left of the local administration operates under an illiterately punctuated tadpole logo, and without, of course, the Latin tag:

I shan't bang on about this but it's quite horrible, what's happened to my old town, although hardly unique. The elegant Edwardian and Victorian centre, with its shady iron arcades and handsome technical college, was swept away and replaced in the 1980s by the vast and lumpen Hammerson Development, a shopping centre that was never popular and is now semi-derelict. The heart of the town was ripped out, the High Street pedestrianised. The corporation bus services were privatised, to be run by the ghastly Stagecoach. Now I learn that there are plans to close and demolish the only good modern building in Southend, the fine Central Library in Victoria Avenue (below). It's one of the best brutalist buildings in Essex - and perhaps the best brutalist library in the country. It was designed by the borough architect R. Horswell, completed in 1974 and features a wall clad in ceramic tiles, an abstract design by the little-known Fritz Steller.

Between 1969 and 1975, Steller produced some of the most dramatic and innovative postwar architectural ceramics seen in Britain, including ten enormous stoneware panels decorating Huddersfield's Queensgate Market (see below). His work is seriously undervalued and much of what little remains is under threat. I can't find an image of his work in Southend, but it's worth a look if you're passing. The only reference I can find to his work on the internet is here: http://www.monoculartimes.co.uk/huddersfieldgem/texts/steller.shtml

Fritz Steller: Huddersfield panels

I spent long hours in the Central Library reference section as a teenager. The building was spacious, airy and calm, and there was a small theatre and a sculpture court, a cafeteria and an exhibition hall. It was a popular place to study and an asset to the community. The very expensive replacement will be something called The Forum, housed in the plug-ugly university at the other end of the town - you know the kind of thing: some brightly clad shed with no books. I hope the old library (which I shall always think of as the new library) is saved. It would make a brilliant gallery/studio space, or what these days is called an arts hub, less than an hour from Liverpool Street (and two hours from Barcelona via the local airport). In fact it's halfway to being just that already, because in recent years the building has been host to the Focal Point Gallery - the most serious (some might say only) cultural achievement in the town's collective memory. It's very hip indeed, an the website is worth a look: http://www.focalpoint.org.uk

Central Library

One artist who has exhibited at Focal Point happens to be a friend of ours - Milly Thompson. She designed the poster below as a part of an imaginary campaign to save the building. Is there a real campaign? 
 

Image © Milly Thompson / Focal Point Gallery

There's another good piece of 1970s town planning a few hundred yards to the north - the Civic Centre, complete with a fountain sculpture based on the two figures in the Borough Council's coat of arms. I have no idea who the artist was, and the thing is usually covered in slimy green mould, but it's a reminder of the town when it had some kind of identity which occasionally presented itself through real architecture. 

Birthday boys

Today  is the birthday of Slavoj Žižek, the prolific Slovenian sociologist, philosopher, film-maker and cultural critic, who was born in 1949 and seems to publish a weighty volume at least once a fortnight. My theory is that his name is actually Slovene for Ljubljana University Department of Philosophy, a collective enterprise. My wish is that they'd all take a two-year sabbatical to allow us to catch up.

Today is also the birthday of Vivian Stanshall, whose life overlaps with mine in some unsettling ways. We went to the same school (although not at the same time), from which he was expelled, reportedly for shaving his eyebrows off one lunchtime and therefore, in some way, breaking the rules. I now live in the same steep North London street where he spent his final ramshackle years (at number 23), and where he died in bed in a blaze caused by a cigarette. On my birthday, as it happens.

He shares this violent incendiary end with Dame Barbara Hepworth and the French music-hall star Julien Carette, who featured in Renoir films including La Règle du Jeu, La Bête Humaine and La Grande Illusion. But I am rambling.

Stanshall was an erratic genius much admired by chaps of my age but perhaps less well known today than he should be. He had a beautiful voice. Here are some scenes from his wildly original film Sir Henry at Rawlinson End:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa4gPaQjC1M