Untitled #23

Moving House

2010-10-17T15:55:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm shortly to start blogging again, and just for a bit of a change of scenery have moved over to Wordpress.

Come and find me here

100days of Art: Day Fourteen: Pearls

2009-12-21T06:30:00.000-08:00

Well and truly in the festive spirit today, so I thought I’d give you a present. It’s not an artwork you can see or touch, but it’s an artwork that you can enjoy anywhere at any time and once you’ve got it, you’ve got it forever. You can even give it to someone else without losing it.

Lawrence Weiner was one of the first wave of Conceptual Artists who emerged in the late 1960s and early 70s, who, in the words of the critic Lucy Lippard “dematerialised the art object”. The idea behind art became paramount and the actual physical nature of it was deemed to be unimportant. Artists produced performances that were documented in photographs, issued statements and theoretical texts and made work from sound or light. On the occasions where there was a physical presence it was usually made form the most abject or mundane materials – sand, condensation, rubbish, food and air.

Weiner’s work takes the form of statements of ideas for artworks, whether or not the owner or the curator decides to carry out the instruction is unimportant – more often than not, they chose merely to exhibit the statement itself. A River Spanned (1969), for example is usually displayed as a small card with those works written on it, a bridge could be built or a line could be fired from one bank to the other, but in a way to actually carry out the instruction would limit the work – as a simple statement it’s full of possibility and dependent on the viewer, open to an almost infinite number of possible interpretations. It could be any river, the spanning could be achieved in many ways, the end result is a collaboration – the artist provides the idea and our imaginations fill in the gaps.

Some of Weiner’s work is more prescriptive such as One Aerosol Can of Enamel Sprayed to Conclusion Directly upon the Floor (1968). Although more specific than ‘A River spanned’ there is still much room for our imaginations to shape what final form the completed work might take, we might think of the sounds and smells that such an action would produce., we might think of the effect that different angles of holding the can might have, is the paint to be sprayed in one spot producing a pool of paint or are we going to coat the entire floor? What colour is the paint? What does the floor in question look like and what will the effect of the surface be on the end result? A simple instruction detailing a simple action draws attention to the complexity of the world in which that action might take place.

In theory I’ve now already given you two artworks (I’m a generous soul) but the one I really wanted to give you is one that has always stuck in my mind since I first saw it.

“Pearls Rolled Across A Floor”

I can hear the sound they'd make, I can see the pearls and the floor (in my mind it's dusty and wooden), I can imagine their different textures of the wood and pearls, I can even smell the wood and imagine the space that the situation might be taking place in, I can even imagine events that might lead up to this situation. It’s full of poetry and possibilities.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do, help yourself to the others as well, and feel free to pass them on.

Happy Christmas.

100days of Art: Day Thirteen - A Lot of 'Not Much'

2009-12-18T08:19:00.000-08:00

Richard Serra - Trip Hammer (1988)

It may sound like a contradiction in terms, but some Minimalist art is big, really big. It almost as if the artists want to emphasise that there’s not much there by making an awful lot of ‘not much’. Donald Judd’s series of free standing boxes for example are big enough for a few close friends to climb into, Robert Morris, Carl Andre and Tony Smith all made works that left little room for viewers in the gallery, but perhaps the master of minimalist overstatement is Richard Serra.

I’ve alluded in past blogs to the brain-scrambling theoretical debate about the nature of art that raged in the journals of the mid 1960s. It really is too arcane to go into in any great depth here but to simplify one of the central platforms of the minimalist project addressed the issue of Art’s relation to the real world. On one side were the critics and theorists who had supported the first wave of American Abstract Expressionists. Art should, they said, be an end in itself, it should have nothing to do with the real world, the ideal art was concerned only with itself, with colour and form. Such an approach, it was argued, made art a specialised sphere of activity and one that could lift the viewer into a timeless state of being away from the mundane concerns of the world.

Predictably such a dogmatic approach didn’t sit well with the stirrings of political unrest and burgeoning counter-culture of the 1960s, and soon opponents of this isolationist approach argued exactly the opposite, that art should anchor the viewer in their place and time, that it should make people aware of the world, not create a hermetic bubble into which they should escape. A new art was required, one which, in Claes Oldenburg’s words “does something other than sit on its ass in a museum”. A new wave of artists and approaches emerged that brought real life back into the gallery in the form of stuffed goats, comic book art and installations while performances and ‘happenings’ were staged and collaborative sculptures were built as part of protests taking art out into the real world.

For the Minimalists a key aspect of bringing the real world into the gallery involved a conscious rejection of the traditional materials and methods of art. Paint, bronze and marble were replaced by plastic, concrete, steel and aluminium, many of these materials being made, not by the artists themselves, but by industrial manufacturers working to the artists specifications. The artists studio was no longer an ivory tower of contemplation but a noisy factory full of dirt, steam and sparks.

Richard Serra could arguably be seen as the most ‘industrial’ of the Miminalists. From his early work that involved splashing the walls, floors and corners of the gallery with molten lead he progressed to installing increasingly large sheets, slabs and tubes of COR-TEN Steel that were held in place only by their weight and the effects of gravity and balance. As well as being unashamedly industrial, this choice of material connected with the rejection of a ‘timeless’ experience of art by being specifically designed to corrode over time, thus the physical nature of the work itself would change while it was displayed.

The viewers’ experience of the work was also intended to unfold over time, the simple shapes allowing them to comprehend the object in front of them as they walked around it, the absence of such unnecessary complications as intricate shapes or different colours allowing the viewer to explore the relationship between the space the work and themselves. It’s a difficult theoretical argument to get across without lapsing into the kind of talk that graces Private Eye’s Pseud’s Corner, but Serra’s work is, I think, the clearest illustration of this particular aspect of the debate.

Encountering Serra’s Trip Hammer is an unnerving experience. Two great slabs of rusting steel are arranged with no visible means of support in the corner of the gallery, one nine foot high monolith is balanced vertically on it’s smallest edge leading into the corner of the space, the second, slightly smaller slab balanced on top horizontally, its longest edges at 45 degree angles to the converging gallery walls. The familiarity of the material and simplicity of the precarious arrangement gives you a a very real understanding of the hard physical facts of the sculpture, its texture, temperature and most importantly its weight. You can easily imagine the whole thing toppling over and crashing through the wooden floors. Even if it wasn’t for the Health and Safety precautions of a gallery rope that now surrounds the work you really wouldn’t want to get too close. You do become acutely aware of the realities of your physical self in relation to the looming rusted metal in front of you.

Serra’s work has been criticised for it’s authoritarianism, its machismo and for creating a relationship between art and viewer akin to that between a ‘bully and victim’ and given that in 1988 two art handlers were seriously injured by a falling sculpture the ‘victim’ status of people encountering the work can sometimes be applied literally.

Of course there is something unashamedly macho about a form of art that requires foundries and heavy machinery rather than brushes and white gloves to create and install, and yes there is something authoritarian about an art that dominates a space and threatens to crush the viewer like an ant, but I think it needed to be. A seemingly impenetrable barrier had been set up between art and life and the strategies necessary to bring that barrier crashing down weren’t polite, weren’t tasteful and they weren’t quiet, they were noisy, tacky, flashy, flamboyant, exciting, frightening, dirty, rough, big and on occasions dangerous.

Just like life really.

100days of Art: Day Twelve: What's The Story?

2009-12-17T06:50:00.000-08:00

Edward Hopper - Automat (1927)

It's the ‘story’ bit of art history that really fires me up. Happily works of art are surrounded by stories. Stories of how they were made, of who made them, of who has owned them…I could go on (it would be a nice easy way of hitting my word count for the day), but the point is that art is like an anchor for a whole web of stories that spread out from it backwards and forwards in time, sometimes parallel, sometimes crossing over and sometimes directly contradicting each other.

Sometimes this web of stories can become so dense and knotted that it’s almost impossible to see through it. Over the years many friends have made the trip to Paris to see the Mona Lisa and their reaction invariably contains the words ‘disappointing’, ‘small’ and ‘brown’. I think the problem is that Leonardo’s painting is just too well known, it has so many stories floating around it, it’s weighed down with myths and legends, it’s been parodied and reproduced, it’s made cameo appearances in films and television series (any Doctor Who fan will be unable to look at it without imagining ‘This Is A Fake’ written on the back of it in Tom Baker’s handwriting) and it’s been printed on T-shirts, mouse mats and shopping bags, in fact, if you can stamp an image on it, the chances are that La Giaconda’s been on it at some point. Because of this fog of stories and ideas that gather around the painting our expectations of it are so high that even if it was a hundred metres tall and made of platinum we’d still find the experience of a face-to-face encounter sadly anticlimactic.

But it’s also the absence of a story that can fascinate us and draw us in, Brozino’s Allegory, intrigues precisely because although the story has been lost it so clearly dripping with narrative intent that we have to fill in the blanks.

This natural reaction to fill in the blanks has been used by modern and contemporary artist to great effect – the installations of Mike Nelson and Ilya Kabakov both play with narrative instinct, offering us enough clues to know there’s a story there, but not enough for us to be absolutely certain of the strange characters that once inhabited their strange ghostly spaces and stage sets or the encounters that took place there and it’s then that our own stories, our memories and experiences, come into play, meshing and tangling with the artwork’s as we try to make sense of what’s in front of us.

For me though, the master of the uncertain narrative in art is Edward Hopper. His paintings of modern life in rural and urban America in the first half of the 20th century drip with intrigue. Hopper’s world is one where every figure or building has a secret and where every gas station lies on a road that could lead to adventure or disaster. He gives us enough tantalising detail to draw us in, setting up situations like the first chapter of a book or first scene of a film and letting us run with it wherever our minds take us.

The cinematic quality of Hopper’s work is almost a cliché now but it bears repeating, so strong and familiar is his use of the visual grammar of starkly lit and almost deserted urban spaces that we associate with film noir that it’s the first thing that strikes us when we see his work. It should be noted however that the relationship between Hoppers work and the look of Hollywood films isn’t a one-way street. Hopper influenced as much as he was influenced – Alfred Hitchcock for example used Hopper’s 1925 painting House by the Railroad as the basis for the design of the Bate’s Motel in Psycho, and his paintings continue to make their presence felt in the world of cinema – Terence Malik, Ridley Scott and Sam Mendes have all acknowledged the debt they owe to Hopper.

Automat sets up one of these ‘first scenes’ brilliantly. It’s night, a girl sits alone in an automated fast food restaurant. She’s removed one of her gloves. Outside the street may or may not be deserted, we can’t tell since the reflection of the sterile and brightly lit interior has obliterated our view of the outside world. It’s difficult to tell whether her blank gaze rests on the table in front of her or the empty chair opposite. The restaurant itself seems deserted, and here the title of the work comes into play, by making it clear this is an automat, we know that there are no waiting staff present merely morgue-like rows of mass produced food in glass-fronted, coin-operated pigeonholes. Her only company seems to be the bowl of fruit that sits on the windowsill behind her.

This last detail reminds me of Manet’s Bar at the Folies Bergere – is there an implication that the girl, like Manet’s barmaid, is as much a commodity on display as the fruit bowl? Unlike Manet’s painting however, Hopper leaves us, the viewer, out of the equation, at the Folie begere, we’re clearly meant to identify with the top-hatted dandy we can see in the reflection to the left, but here in the Automat we seem to be absent rather than present – we have no reflection and the girl does not acknowledge us – we’re a ghost, a voyeur, like a film goer we can only watch, we can’t interact.

So what’s the story?

The great thing about Hopper’s work is that the gaps he leaves in the narratives are so flexible that no two people are likely to come up with the same story. Pete, my mum and I all stood in front of Automat when it was shown as part of Hopper’s retrospective at Tate Modern in 2003, and all of us came up with different stories – for me (morose as ever) the girl had been stood up by a blind date, for Pete she was a spy waiting for another agent to arrive so she could hand over the microfilm and for mum she was taking a break from a shopping trip, enjoying a moments quiet away from the busy city outside. Of course none of us were right, but none of us were wrong, we brought our own perspectives to the painting and as a result the encounter probably said more about us than it did about the painting.

So after all that what have learnt? I’m a miserable git, my mum’s a shopaholic and Pete’s a spy. Hmmmm. Must look into that. Might explain why he never lets me drive the car – worried I’d set of the ejector seat probably…

100days of Art: Day Eleven - And Now For Something Completely Different.

2009-12-16T05:43:00.000-08:00

Bronzino - An Allegory with Venus and Cupid. (c.1545)

Sometimes a piece of information comes your way that irrevocably changes the way you look at a work of art. Take for example Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers; stand behind some gallery visitors admiring it in the National Gallery and you’ll inevitably hear one of two things.

First that Van Gogh was a lunatic who cut off his own ear. People look for clues in the work and usually come the conclusion that you can somehow ‘see’ this madness in the painting; it’s fevered brush strokes and it’s obsessive yellowness seen somehow as a means of diagnosing the mental state of the artist. Of course this is a clumsy connection to draw – if thick impasto brushstrokes were a symptom of mental illness then Frank Auerbach would have been sectioned long ago.

The other thing that is commonly heard in front of the Sunflowers is discussion of the vast price that was paid for the work at auction – even though it was in fact a different version of the painting that set records in 1987.

Both these pieces of information, although not entirely accurate, affect the viewing of the painting by being part of the Van Gogh myth. The myth plays as much a part in the creating the meaning of the painting as do the historical facts of its manufacture.

Sometimes though, these snippets of information can be so far removed and apparently irrelevant to the work yet still change the way you see an artwork forever.

I’d always been intrigued by Bronzino’s An Allegory with Venus and Cupid, amongst all the nudes in the National Gallery, this strange depiction of Venus and Cupid in a lover’s embrace seemed a bawdy and shocking painting and it’s worth considering what headlines might be produced if a contemporary artist created a work depicting a similar subject. Even at the time of it’s acquisition by the National in 1860, Charles Eastlake, the then director of the gallery, took steps to make it ‘safe’ for public viewing by having certain details hidden by the addition of strategically placed branches of myrtle and by deleting, by overpainting, Venus’s tongue, which contemporary viewers can see slipping into her sons mouth. There was even much discussion about how the painting should be titled, An Allegory with Venus and Cupid finally being chosen as a neutral designation that would avoid drawing too much attention to the incestuous scene.

But more than that, what continues to fascinate about Brozino’s canvas is the sheer lack of information that exists about it. All that’s known is that it was commissioned as a gift for King Francis I of France, most probably by Cosimo I de Medici. Beyond that we know practically nothing and consequently the symbolic meaning of the painting and its strange cast of characters is something that art historians will enthusiastically disagree with each other about from now until doomsday.

The haggard, screaming figure to the left of Cupid, for example, has variously been identified as Despair, Jealousy or even in some account a personification of the ravages of syphilis. The female child to Venus’s right, who attempts to hide her scaled and feathered body behind the boy throwing rose petals and offering a dripping honeycomb to the lovers, may be Pleasure or Fraud. Everything in the painting is loaded with symbolism and meaning, the fact that Venus is grabbing one of Cupid’s arrows, the Golden Apple that she holds and the masks of comedy and tragedy that lie abandoned at her feet.

It’s a great puzzle of a painting, and one that more than likely will never be solved. But there’s one piece of information about the painting that has nothing to do with its life in 16th century Florence or France, that has nothing to do with the riddle of its symbolism or the negotiations that Eastlake and his team of restorers went through to avoid its display bring about the moral collapse of Victorian gallery visitors.

When I stand in front of this painting the first thing I notice now is Cupid’s right foot in the bottom left hand corner of the picture, seemingly about to trample on a dove. Take a close look – have you seen that foot before somewhere? Do you find yourself humming the opening bars of Sousa’s Liberty Bell? Perhaps you start thinking of dead parrots and transvestite lumberjacks.

It’s the foot that squishes down in Terry Gilliam’s opening animation sequence for Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Of course it’s got nothing to do with the meaning of the work in any rigorously academic way, but it does add to my enjoyment of the painting. It’s cheeky little detail in an already cheeky image; a subversive little footnote (sorry) to an already subversive painting and one that goes to show that the story of an artwork doesn’t end once it’s hung in a gallery.

100days of Art: Day Ten - Collapsing the Distance

2009-12-14T10:07:00.000-08:00

Edouard Manet - Olympia (1863)

Looking with 21st Century eyes, it’s difficult to believe that the paintings of Eduard Manet once provoked such an outcry. To contemporary eyes Olympia looks hardly radical or provocative; a reclining nude painted in a realistic fashion. The walls of national collections of Western art the world over are crowded with such paintings. Even at the Salon des Refuses in 1865, at which Olympia was exhibited, the female nude was a perfectly acceptable subject and in previous years works like Alexandre Cabanel’s Birth of Venus had been exhibited without an eyebrow being raised.

Yet when Olympia was first exhibited in Paris, the popular press raged and stormed in a way that would make today’s tabloid hysteria over a priapic golfer seem measured by comparison. The painting, and by implication the artist, was, according to the journalists, both incompetent and immoral. The fury was not just limited to writers and critics, the exhibition visitors were also so enraged that the organisers were forced to put guards on the painting to stop it being torn to shreds.

As far as Manet’s incompetence was concerned, the writers drew attention to the apparent slapdash application of paint; great splodgy sweeps of paint appeared to have been smeared onto the canvas. The brush strokes were visible on the surface rather than being disguised by the repetitive and meticulous painting and under-painting of heavily diluted paint that was prescribed by the state-sponsored Art Academies and studios in which all painters learnt their crafts.

The case for ‘immorality’ is slightly more complex. Unlike Cabenel’s Venus, Olympia wasn’t a mythological fantasy, she was a contemporary woman, but not just a contemporary woman. Her shoes, bangle and choker identified her to the critics as a prostitute probably from the Batignolles suburb of Paris – a well known destination for gentleman of the middle classes looking for entertainment. In fact the model was Victorine Meurent a close friend of Manet’s who went on to become a painter herself, but it’s clear that the critics’ interpretation was what Manet had intended. For the establishment of late 19th Century Paris such a woman was not a suitable subject for a large scale work of art, which were normally reserved for noble themes from mythology, history or the Bible.

The offence of the subject matter was compounded by the fact that the clear source for the composition of Olympia was Titian’s Venus of Urbino. The nude was posed in a similar way and the picture space was divided by a screen. Manet’s alterations to the orginal subject piled offence upon offence in the eyes of the critics, the dog that lies curled up at Venus’s feet, representing loyalty, was replaced by black cat, recognized as a symbol of licentiousness, back arched and hackles raised, staring beadily at the viewer. While Venus’s left hand rests, almost beckoning, on her groin, Olympia's is taut, protective and entirely in control.

It is, I think, this assertion of Olympia’s self determination and control of the depicted situation which caused most problems for the critics. The classical and academic nudes that were a staple of the Salon never made direct eye-contact with the viewers, they stared into the middle distance or looked up coyly through their eyelashes offering their bodies as art objects to be admired in a morally uplifting way. Any suggestion that the enjoyment that might be gained by the frock-coated and top-hatted men who attended the Salon and perused the nudes of Cabanel might have been more sexual than spiritual were easily dismissed by appeals to the noble subject matter at hand. But a modern woman, a prostitute at that, staring directly at the viewer with a questioning expression on her face allowed no room for such ethical dodging. It’s entirely possible that the men who expressed their outrage at Olympia may well have been leaving the Salon to attend an assignation with one of the many barmaids or laundresses of Batignolles a comfortable distance from the high society of Paris and their homes. Olympia collapsed that distance.

Manet had painted a modern woman in a modern way. He’d brought real life into the unreal world of the art gallery, showing up the hypocrisy of the great and good of Paris’s fashionable set and ruling classes in the process. He paved the way for the Impressionists who followed hot on his heels and all of those modern artists who came in their wake. It’s perhaps a bit of stretch to call him the father of Modern Art, there are too many other precedents to take into account, but the father of Modern Art as Outrage? I’m prepared to give him that one.

100days of Art: Day Nine - Zips.

2009-12-11T04:26:00.000-08:00

Barnett Newman - Onement I (1948)

I’d loved Barnett Newman’s paintings since my adolescence, the simplicity and effrontery of painting a stripe of one colour flanked by another and calling it art appealed to the same bloody-minded bit of teenage rebellion in me that worshipped Joy Division, it was sparse and stripped down, making noise by what was left out rather than what was put in.

I’d studied his paintings in reproduction, but apart from three relatively small canvases in the Tate collection, I’d never seen any of his work in the flesh until a major retrospective at Tate Modern in 2002.

The exhibition was arranged chronologically, as you passed from room to room, you passed through the years of the artist’s work, starting at the beginning and ending at the end. This might seem obvious, but since the sixties other ways of arranging exhibitions, or ‘hangs’, have come into fashion. Sometimes a hang may be arranged by subject or medium it all depends on the story that the curators want to tell. In group shows or retrospectives of art movements, these thematic hangs can set up new and exciting relationships between artworks, it’s something we take for granted, but a good hang can breathe new life in to a work that has almost faded into the background because of its familiarity.

For an abstract artist though I tend to think the chronological hang works best, particularly for those of the first half of the twentieth century for whom abstract art was a matter of stretching the possibilities of painting. Abstract art is now so ubiquitous in homes, boardrooms, shopping malls and restaurants that it’s hard to imagine a time when it simply wasn’t considered a possibility. Viewing these artists’ works in chronological order helps us reconstruct some idea of just how revolutionary their project was.

For the European pioneers of Abstract Art there’s an excitement in seeing their works slowly creep towards a complete rejection of images from the real world. For example, viewing Piet Mondrian’s series of paintings of trees from the 1910s (Red Tree, Grey Tree,Tree,Apple Tree) is an exciting experience, you see an artist reaching and grasping for the abstract yet still tied by the conventions and culture of his time to the image of a tree. It’s like watching a piece of elastic being stretched and stretched and stretched, you’re just waiting for that connection between painting and the real world to snap.

For the American abstract painters of the 1940s and 50s, the situation is slightly different, the ‘Abstract Expressionists’ as they’re awkwardly named, all developed a ‘signature style’ that anyone with even a passing interest in Modern Art is familiar with. If we see splashes we know it’s a Pollock, if we see monolithic blurry rectangles we know it’s a Rothko and if we see stripes, or ‘zips’ as he called them, it’s a Newman.

The excitement and tension in an exhibition of these artists is seeing their work creeping towards the discovery of this signature style. The first few rooms of the Newman exhibition were filled with intricate organic doodles that recall the ‘automatic drawing’ experiments of the Surrealist Andre Masson. Occasional zips made cameo appearances, but only as background elements. These were followed by a tantalising series of monochrome works in ink where a series of ‘almost’ zips made their first starring roles – sometimes they didn’t quite make their way all the way down the page, sometimes they were subtly angled, like the blade of a stiletto stabbing its way through a mess of ink. Finally in the third room the first true zip made its appearance, in Onement I, a great untidy streak of orange cut across a loosely painted background of maroon.

It’s hard to get across how exciting I found this experience, even as I write now the rational, cynical part of my mind is saying “It’s just a stripe for God’s sake” but it was like seeing a film all the way through for the first time that you’d only previously seen the last five minutes of. You know the hero will defuse the bomb; you just don’t know how he going to do it and as the story unfolds you’re bouncing up and down in your seat screaming “The disarming code’s tattooed on the dog’s ear!” or in this case “Paint a bloody stripe!”

So are Newman’s zips ’just stripes’. On the face of it does seem rather simple. There’s a story that the artist Franz Kline found himself in conversation with an American collector who had just returned from one of Newman’s shows. The work was, the collector complained, empty and repetitive, there was he asserted ‘nothing to see’. Kline asked him to describe the canvases on show, their dimensions, their colours, whether the zips were horizontal or vertical, what colour they were, were they painting over the background colour or next to them, were they darker or lighter than the backgrounds. After a lengthy inquisition during which the collector was made to detail the many variations on the theme, Kline remarked “Well I don’t know, it all sounds darned complicated to me.”

I think that’s what I love about Newman’s work , it’s the single-minded pursuit of a simple idea and exploring its many variations, taking something as simple as a stripe and pushing it as far as it can go. It has something in common with minimalist music, take Sigur Ros’s Samskeyti which repeats a simple piano arpeggio over and over lulling you into familiarity, slowly introducing and building up different background atmospherics that subtly change the nature of the melody, then when you’re least expecting it, the arpeggio leaps up an octave and it’s a surprising and sublime experience hearing it for the first time. Newman’s painting work like that for me – familiarity with a theme making its variations so surprising.

Anyone can make the simple look complicated, what’s really difficult is making the complicated look simple.

100days of Art: Day Eight - Mistakes and Expectations

2009-12-10T09:03:00.000-08:00

Marc Quinn - Stuart Penn (2000)

Art Historians make mistakes. It goes with the territory, paintings like The Massacre of the Innocents get attributed to the wrong artist, new evidence comes to light and completely turns received wisdom about a sculpture on its head; it all part and parcel of dealing with a subject that attempts to knit together a coherent story out of a mass of uncertainties, contradictions and, on occasions, downright lies. (The dates that Kasmir Malevich inscribed on his Black Square paintings being an example of the latter – though to be fair he was as mad as a bag of badgers in a spin dryer.)

Since the discipline took lessons from the likes of Foucault and Barthes and developed doubt into a valid ideological position, negotiating the potholes and chicanes of art history is slightly easier – in the first year of study, the student art historian learns the magic word ‘problematic’, a useful means of tying up the flailing loose ends of a tricky paper. You can even use it as a verb, “This is of course problematicised by…” It’s a cop out really, but a necessary one, without it you’d never finish an essay.

Sometimes the repercussions of these mistakes only affect the rarefied circle of art history itself, tiny ripples in a small pond, a few papers may have to be re-written, some textbooks and monographs may fall out of favour and conferences will be arranged. Other times these ripples can have wider implications changing the direction that art and culture take and influencing the nature of public taste.

For centuries, art historians and theorists held up Classical Sculptures as exemplars or quality and ideal beauty; painters copied figures from them, sculptors worked hard to reproduce their style in their own work and the young men of wealthy families were sent off on Grand Tours to view them to distract them from deflowering the chambermaids for a few months. If the philosophers and politicians of Athens and Rome favoured such sculpture, so should younger societies aiming for a return to the artistic glories of those once great civilisations. Almost subliminally the notion that the very best sculpture was carved from white marble sank into the Western cultural consciousness. And even by the time that Modernists, like Barbara Hepworth were making abstract sculpture, white marble was still seen as a prestige material.

Yet recent scientific investigations of sculptures such as the Parthenon Marbles have revealed traces of pigment and there’s now a consensus that they were extremely brightly painted and adorned with all manner of jewellery and accessories. So it seems that a few hundred years in the development of ideas of what is beautiful, sophisticated and above all tasteful were in a large part based on a whopping great art historical mistake.

We still feel the influence of this mistake today. Take a look at Antonio Canova’s Cupid and Psyche and imagine how different about it you might feel if it was more like Jeff Koons’s Michael Jackson and Bubbles. Even though I know that there’s a great big misunderstanding lurking at the heart of Canova’s aesthetic decisions, I can’t help thinking it would look hideous if it was a gaudy as the Koons. The association of white marble with grace and beauty remains so deeply ingrained that even a few colourful revelations can’t shift it.

Marc Quinn made great use of this association in a series of sculptures he made in 2000. Take a look at Stuart Penn above, it seems at first glance like any other classically influenced sculpture, and when the series were exhibited in the sculpture rooms at the Victoria and Albert museum, they seemed right at home amongst the 16th to 18th century figures, if anything a casual viewer might have been led to believe they were in fact older than Canovas and Bolognas by virtue of the missing limbs.

It’s the missing limbs here that are key. Quinn’s models for the series were sitters who had either been born missing limbs or had lost them due to accident or disease. So used are we to seeing classical sculpture fragmented and damaged that an absent arm or leg is part of our expectations of work like this. We edit out the vacant limbs of the Venus De Milo to look at her beauty, and that’s exactly how we react to Stuart Penn. Among the stone pantheon of gods, athletes and heroes we look past his physiological differences and see his beauty.

Quinn’s marbles are overwhelmingly positive and uplifting. It’s a stunningly clever trick to mobilise the centuries-old prejudices of history and taste to both defeat and draw attention to those of the present and to subtly use our expectations of art to challenge our perceptions of real people.

So here’s raising a glass to the mistakes of art history (no matter how problematic they are).

100days of Art: Day Seven - Clutter and Cardigans

2009-12-09T04:24:00.000-08:00

Cornelia Parker - Pornographic Drawings (1996)

De-cluttering before moving house with me can be a painful business. Left to his own devices Pete will quite happily clear a drawer in 30 seconds flat leaving nothing but a couple of paperclips and a teaspoon. The ‘left to his own devices’ here is key because if I’m within a mile-radius of him as he goes to throw away a long-dead lighter, some sixth-sense kicks in and I’ll be at his shoulder before his hand’s out of the drawer.

“You can’t throw that away.”

“But it’s a dead lighter.”

“Yes, but look, we bought that in Amsterdam..”

“But it’s a dead lighter.”

“Yes, but we bought it that night we got lost in the rain ‘cos all the canals looked the same.”

“But. It’s. A. Dead. Lighter.”

This continues for some time until I get distracted by something shiny and Pete throws the lighter away anyway.

Objects have memories.

Or rather, to be uncharacteristically rational about it, we attach our memories to objects. Relics of our past become mnemonics for whole events, a dead disposable lighter starts a domino-topple of remembered sensations that leads to a hazy giggly night negotiating canals in the rain.

Such associations and leaps of logic seem hard-wired into us, we don’t even need to have direct personal experience of the object to be affected by a real or imagined history that it might have somehow woven into its fabric. In his book Supersense Psychologist Bruce Hood describes a neat trick that he uses in his lectures to show that even the most rational skeptic can find themselves in the grip of supernatural belief. Holding up a tatty cardigan, Bruce asks the audience how many would, for a fee of £20 be willing to wear the moth-eaten garment. A few of the audience raise their hands. When however Bruce reveals that the cardigan once belonged to the serial killer Fred West, the potential volunteers invariable lower their hands. The cardigan didn’t belong to Fred West of course, but Bruce’s little prank illustrates the way in which we almost subconsciously imbue objects and materials with meaning beyond their intrinsic properties. In the case of the ‘killer’s cardigan’ it’s an example of what James Frazer defined in The Golden Bough as ‘contagious magic’, by contact with evil, the cardigan itself has become contaminated with evil.

Cornelia Parker works with found objects and through display, transformation or destruction she amplifies, distorts or reverses their contagious memories and meanings, anchoring a web of ambiguous ideas to physical properties. Sometimes these works are minimal, abject objects displayed in vitrines whose significances only become apparent when we look at the label to find out what they’re made of – a pair of dusty earplug are made from fluff gathered from the Whispering Gallery of St Pauls Cathedral, a pile of black plastic fingernail clippings entitled ‘The Negative of Sound” turns out to be the cast off lacquer cut at Abbey Road Studio from the grooves of master disc for a vinyl record, a stain on a handkerchief is the tarnish gathered from the inside of one of Henry VIII’s gauntlets and so on. Other works are monumental, for Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View the artist filled a garden shed with household objects and toys before getting the British army to blow it up, the resulting debris now hangs orbiting a light bulb casting shadows on the walls of the gallery space, the moment of the explosion frozen in time.

Pornographic Drawings is a favourite of mine, at first glance it seems to be a collection of Rorschach Ink Blot tests, we peer at them looking for images in the abstract splodges, recreating their very purpose. The title leads us to search for erotic imagery and in two it doesn’t take much of a stretch to find phallic and vulval forms. The other two are more perplexing, there’s suggestions of eroticism certainly but but nowhere as obvious as the first two or have we just got one-track minds?

Already the work is questioning the status of the images and our process of looking at them, psychoanalysed by the blobs in front of you, you can’t help wondering if you’re missing something. Given that two of them seem so explicit, are we failing to notice erotic content in the others that the artist has seen, is pornography in the eye of the beholder?

The situation become both clearer and more confused when we discover the materials used to make the images. Working with Customs and Excise, Parker took shredded video tape form confiscated pornographic videos and created an ink from the Ferric Oxide that gave the tape its magnetic and therefore recording properties. The ink was made from the very physical matter of pornography, the images were therefore erotic both by virtue of what we might see in them, but also by virtue of their material. Of course you could argue that the original film images are long gone, if we were to slide the drawings across the head of a VCR we wouldn’t see ‘adult entertainment’ (and we’d probably get chucked out of the Tate) but the point is that’s it’s our memory that’s at work here. Once we know the origin of the ink, we can’t forget it and our view of the images is irrevocably changed. Somewhere in our minds that contagious magic is at work, as if the very molecules of Ferric Oxide are ‘contaminated’ with the images they once carried, in the same way that the work’s title and our knowledge of the use of Rorschach blots contaminated our first encounter.

It’s a cliché that good art should change the way you look at the world. For me Cornelia Parkers’s work does exactly that. After visiting one of her shows the most ordinary of objects become fascinating artefacts bursting with meaning, memories and stories.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I can hear Pete rummaging in a drawer, he might be about to throw away one of those stories.

100days of Art: Day Six - Silent Running

2009-12-08T04:17:00.000-08:00

Olafur Eliasson - The Weather Project (2003)

“How are you doing?”

I opened my eyes to see Pete standing above me , packing away his camera.

“Fantastic thanks. “ I said. “You get any good shots?”

“Well I’ve taken tonnes, should have a couple of good ones. Did you see that lot?”

He pointed towards a group of teenagers who were lying flat on their backs in a circle, legs splayed and feet touching. They cheered at the star they’d created on the mirrored sky above them.

Around us children ran in circles, squealing with joy as their parents sat quietly smiling and watching their offspring’s delighted confusion. Club goers, commuters, tourists and Southwark locals sat in groups chatting quietly in the intense yellow light or stood gazing through the mist at the vast disc of light that seemed to hover above us.

Olafur Eliasson’s installation The Weather Project had really caught the public’s attention and imagination, over the weeks that followed it’s unveiling, friends who worked in the area talked of lunchtime trips to Tate Modern during the week ‘to get a bit of sun’ It was a work that somehow created a community of its own around itself by creating an odd little bubble of unreality in which encounters could take place. As vast and technically breathtaking (as an example of electrics and engineering) as it was, it transformed and dominated the Turbine Hall not by occupying and subordinating it – as Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas had a year previously, but by changing the nature and environmental qualities of the space.

Using as familiar a subject as a sunset, I think, also explained the works popularity. It’s a subject we’re all familiar with from holiday snaps and children’s TV art programmes (I seem to remember that the late great Tony Hart would teach us how to make at least one sunset per series of Take Hart.) In the real world it something we’ve all experienced and it appeals to something primal inside us; the end of the day, the dying of the Sun God, the sublime – however you want to frame it. As a retreat from the grey, damp and dismal London weather, it felt like a grand Romantic gesture – a technological updating of works like Frederic Edwin Church’s Cotapaxi that had hung in Tate Britain a few months earlier as part of a show celebrating 19th Century American landscape painters.

But for all the play and fun it brought out in the visitors, there was a perhaps a more Apocalyptic aspect to the work. The monotone lamps obliterating every colour in the room apart from the all pervading sickly yellow gave the space a distinctly alien feel, for all its technical wizardry it felt old and dying, a natural phenomena taken from somewhere else and frozen in a gallery as a museum piece. To my mind, drenched in science fiction as well as art history, I couldn’t help thinking of the 1972 film Silent Running, where the last remaining plant specimens of a dying earth are jettisoned into space. Viewed in the context of Climate Change could The Weather Project be a glimpse into a future where the only place we could experience a sunset would be in a museum, or maybe a society where the only weather we would have would be artifical? I imagined that the people around me would soon leave to walk down gleaming white corridors of a 2001 style space station or some colony base on an inhospitable world to sterile living quarters where they’d dine on protein pills and filtered water. To my mind the work now seemed like a meeting between John Martin and J.G.Ballard.

Perhaps I was being too pessimistic, perhaps if anything The Weather Project suggested that humans will always respond to natural beauty and that we’ll always find a way to take it with us whether it’s a photograph or a vast installation. Perhaps my imaginary future folk had created this as a reminder of home, not as a memorial to it.

“Hello. Planet Earth calling.”

I shook myself out of my geeky reverie.

“Sorry – miles away.”

“Come on, lets go.”

We wrapped our coats tight around us and walked out into the driving autumn rain on the darkening South Bank.

“Of course” said Pete “It could have done with some robots..”

100days of Art: Day Five - More Valuable than a Golden Hare

2009-12-07T06:45:00.000-08:00

Kit Williams - One of Six To Eight (from Masquerade (1979))

When I started this 100days lark, I sat down at the kitchen table and made a list of artists. The first 70 or so were easy, names of Old Masters, great Modernists and more recent media friendly conceptualists and Turner Prize nominees sped from my pen. The last thirty required a bit more thought, retreating over my list searching for obvious omissions and names already written that would spark connections to other artists I’d missed. I had, for example written Max Ernst fairly early on in the list, but had forgotten his one-time paramour and fellow Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, similarly I’d listed Man Ray but somehow forgotten Lee Miller (and I can already hear Pete loudly berating me for this omission when he reads this on his return from work – Lee’s his one and only ‘Diva’) By this game of ‘artist association’ this list was soon full, now all that remained was the tricky bit of writing about them.

On Saturday morning though, as we were girding our loins and fortifying ourselves with caffeine and nicotine in advance of a quest into the great outdoors to hunt a Christmas Tree, we watched a BBC4 documentary – The Man Behind The Masquerade. Suddenly I realised that I’d managed to miss an artist off the list who meant so much to me, an artist who had probably influenced me more than any other.

There’s a snobbery about ‘illustrators’ as opposed to ‘artists’. While ‘artists’ make challenging works that question the world and its institutions, ‘illustrators’ merely make visual aids for storytelling. Yet it’s the work of illustrators like Shepard and Teniel, Sendak and Pienkowski who define our first encounters with images and whose work fires our childhood imaginations. These images teach us to look before we can read, without us even noticing, they change our worlds as much as any ‘Great Art’ can. To put them in a 'lesser' category because we experience them on pages in our own home rather than the walls of the hallowed spaces of the public gallery or the warehouses and lofts of Hoxton seems to me to completely underestimate the influence they have on our visual education.

Kit Williams’ Masquerade, published in 1979 told the story of Jack Hare, charged by the sun to deliver a lover’s gift of a fabulous jewel to the moon, somewhere along the journey the jewel is lost and the reader was invited to search the 15 paintings in the book for clues to its whereabouts, the artist having buried a non-fictional jewel somewhere in the UK.

Looking at the paintings again now, thirty years later, the art historian bits of my brain go into overdrive, noting that they seem to represent a kind of eccentrically English and pastoral Surrealism. The strange dreamlike collections of junk shop ephemera – seashells, puppets, cake stands and magnifying glasses – that appear in some of the paintings remind me of the works of Edward Wadsworth. The figures of pale boys, willowy girls and rosy cheeked, bulbous-nosed old men and their awkward poses seem descended from the figures in Stanley Spencer’s views of Biblical tales played out in the cobbled streets of Cookham. Going back further in time, I can’t help comparing the precise and detailed representations of flora and fauna to the flowers that dot every bit of spare space in Botticelli’s Primavera or to the nature studies of Albrecht Durer (his famous hare of course).

From technical point of view they’re brilliant paintings, sadly I’ve never seen any of Kit’s work face-to-face, but even in reproduction they glow with life and dazzle with detail, the translucent-skinned, contorted figures are forced, bursting by strange perspectives from the surface of the canvas, sometimes overlapped by and sometimes overlapping the trompe-l’oiel frames lettered with their cryptic riddles and hidden acrostics.

Yet on the BBC documentary, an art critic from the Times, cast doubt on whether or not Williams’s work could be considered 'Art'. She suggested that art should be new and different and that it should “reflect and talk about its time” and to her mind Williams work achieved neither. I’m always suspicious of those who say “Art should be this or that” as to me it seems to be imposing limits on something that by its nature should be a realm of infinite possibilities. But that prejudice aside, it seemed to me that she inhabits a completely different world to Williams. The private viewings and fashionable opening nights of Cork Street, Bankside and Shoreditch are a long way from the rural Gloucestershire circle of neighbours, collectors, admirers, and models (often the same people) to which Williams exiled himself 30 years ago, stung by the unwanted media attention that Masquerade attracted. But distance and difference do not make a world any less part of its time. Just because artwork speaks of and to a different world it does not follow that it does not speak at all.

Williams’s exile was used by the critic as further evidence of doubt as to the ‘Art’ status of his paintings. It was evidence, she suggested of a ‘lack of balls’, a failing that no true artists should have, as they dutifully hold up their works to scrutiny by critics such as herself. To me this seems again to be mistaking ‘my world’ for ‘the whole world’ and it seemed like a circular argument; ‘Art is only Art if I get the chance to judge it as Art’. A kind of self-justifying corruption of a Zen motto “If someone paints a painting in a forest and there’s no-one there to see it is it still a painting?”

Perhaps I’m being a little unfair to her, it is perhaps a critic's job to make such dogmatic pronouncements, it’s how they make names for themselves and has been since people have been writing about art, but still I was pleased when Turner Prize winner Keith Tyson, and the V&A curator Stephen Calloway (who has the greatest facial hair in the art world) spoke of the work, its craftsmanship and eccentricity with passion, and warmth. I expect the opinions of people who make art and who devote their lives to caring for it mean so much more to Kit than those who fill column inches attempting to define what it should be.

Of course none of the above mattered to the mind of the ten year old treasure hunter who dragged his father out on wet weekends to find the oak tree covered with dog roses on the Hogsback in Surrey where the golden hare was definitely hidden. (It wasn’t, my solution was wrong by about 60 miles*) but it started me looking at paintings in a different way, I stopped just ‘seeing’ them and started really ‘looking’ at them, decoding their secret messages searching for hidden meanings. The Masquerade paintings changed the way I thought about images and started my love affair with art in all its forms.

I may not have found the Golden Hare, but Masquerade gave me something far more valuable. Thanks Kit, I wouldn’t be who I am without your paintings.

(*If you want to know what the right solution was look here)

100days of Art:Day Four - Sometimes a Lance is Just a Lance (but in this case it probably isn't)

2009-12-04T07:45:00.000-08:00

Sandro Botticelli - Venus and Mars (c.1483)

Frank Zappa once posed the question ‘Does humour belong in music?” Given that the album in question contained the song Penguin in Bondage, it’s pretty clear that in the mind of the late lamented pointy-bearded musical loon/genius and Czech cultural attaché the answer was a resounding ‘yes’.

Although music was Frank’s target, the question can and should be applied across the arts and that great big ‘yes’ goes across the board, the canon of ‘great paintings’ included.

For example I find Ingres’s Angelica Saved by Ruggerio absolutely hilarious, largely due to the expression on Angelica’s face which seems to have fallen backward through time from a Beryl Cook painting, I can never decide whether she’s thinking “About time too.”, “Oh no not you again.” or “Watch what you’re doing with that bloody lance.” The great thing is that the more detailed analysis you apply the funnier it gets – I once spent a joyful half hour in front of it with a well-respected lecturer in Art History and Gender Studies whose psychoanalytic interpretation had tears of laughter streaming down my face and brought gasps of shock from a coach party from the Batley Guild of Disapproving Women who were tutting around us like a flock of tweed starlings. ( I wont go into the details but the shape of the rock that Angelica’s chained to had a starring role.)

So, if art is so funny, why do galleries echo with hushed whispers rather than gales of bawdy laughter? Simply because it’s the way the gallery space encourages us to behave. Carefully spaced and meticulously lit, hanging in neat rows or arranged on plinths, painting and sculptures are presented to us as sacrosanct objects and we respond in quiet reverence.

This is all well and good, I like a nice empty gallery, I like being able to sit quietly and lose myself in a work of art cloistered away from the noise of the city. (Anyone who’s been in a gallery with me will have noticed me grinding my teeth if someone’s mobile phone starts to ring).

But displaying work in this way also has the effect of separating the work from the life it once had. It’s true that much of the work we see in, say, the National Gallery was once displayed in chapels and churches, even if lit by candlelight rather than halogen, but just as much was hung in sitting rooms, theatres, public offices, clubs, bedrooms and all manner of improbable locations. In their original settings these paintings and sculptures would have been surrounded by political arguments, bawdy singing, declarations of love and lust, drunken fights and laughter.

Take Sandro Bottticelli’s Venus and Mars. Hanging in its white-walled cell in the Sainsbury Wing of the National it seems like a contemplative illustration of a scene from classical mythology – a post-coital moment in the tempestuous and illicit affair between the gods of love and war. (At the time Venus was married to her sort-of uncle/brother Vulcan – classical mythology is more preposterous and convoluted than any soap opera, if you ever have the inclination read The Iliad, it’s like Dynasty on crack with togas). Venus gazes towards her sleeping lover with a cool look, resigned and a touch disdainful at his lack of stamina. A gang of attendant satyrs play exuberantly with Mars’s weapons and armour, one blowing a conch-trumpet in his ear in a futile attempt to raise him for another round of lovemaking.

On the face of it it’s a nice simple allegory. Love conquers war. But when we realise what the painting actually was it becomes so much more. Although there are no surviving documents about the painting’s commission, the size and subject matter point to it either being part of a painted bed-head or the front of a cassone – a richly decorated ‘wedding chest’ that would be given to newly married couples to furnish their bedroom as part of the bride’s dowry. The presence of the wasps buzzing around Mars’s head suggest that this may well have been a commission for the Vespucci family – close financial and political allies of the Medici family who held Florence in the grip of their influence at the time.

Marriage in Florence was an incredibly political business, cementing diplomatic allegiances and business deals, and these noble families, jostling for control of trade and influence, frequently used the commissioning of both religious and secular art as means of displaying their power. It’s not too much of a stretch to read a political message into Venus and Mars, to me there’s a suggestion that the power in the relationship lies firmly with Venus, and by implication the brides family – the wasps serving as a reminder to the groom that even when he’s asleep, they’ll be there, hovering close by, ready to deliver a sting should he step out of line.

So much for the political message, but I think there’s a sexual message here too. Earlier and later works on the same theme (such as Poussin’s and a mural from Pompeii) show Cupid and cherubs playing with Mars’s weapons of war, symbols of profane, possibly illicit, but still human love. Botticelli on the other hand uses satyrs, traditionally representing boisterous and bestial untamed lust, two waving the lance around with gleeful abandon while another sneaks underneath him reaching for his sword. Sometimes Freudian analysis can be all too easily applied and while I certainly subscribe to the view that sometimes a lance is just a lance, I can’t help thinking that in this instance it probably isn’t.

Take this painting off the wall of the National Gallery and stick in the bedroom of a newly wed couple and the high-minded noble message of ‘Love conquers all’ gets a nudge nudge wink wink coda.

‘Love Conquers all (but sex never shuts up).”

It’s a beautifully painted, graceful, elegant and erotic incitement to pleasure, a seaside postcard of a painting with a subtle political sting in its tail. Go and stand in front of it and laugh – I’m sure the people it was painted for did.

(Tomorrow - back to the 21st Century and sunbathing.)

100days of Art:Day Three - Shock and Horror!

2009-12-03T09:02:00.000-08:00

Peter Paul Rubens - The Massacre of the Innocents (c.1611-12)

Shock horror! It’s a painting. A painting of people. Painted to look like people rather than collections of squares.

The first two days of this blog might have given you the impression that realistic paintings and sculptures were not my thing, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I get as excited and animated about Duccio, Mantegna and Manet as I do about Mondrian, Duchamp and Emin. I’m an equal opportunities art geek.

But like most geeks I specialise. When you’ve got 32,000 odd years of art history to play with (arbitrarily calling the Chauvet cave paintings 'the beginning'), you've got to be a bit selective otherwise your head would explode - the bits of my brain that deal with where my keys are or what day it is are already compromised by being filled with odd facts about Cubism. As a consequence there are great big holes in my knowledge of art history, defined in part by the curricula I studied but probably more by my own personal tastes and enthusiasms.

One of these gaping chasms is labelled 17th Century Flemish Painting, and this is largely a result of personal prejudice. With a few exceptions I’ve never found it easy on the eye; the figures have always seemed inelegant to me – doughy lumpy great hunks of flesh arranged in twisted, tortuous poses staring watery-eyed from gloomy brown rooms, a million miles away from the gracefully arranged waifish and androgynous soldiers, saints and satyrs that populate the Italian Gothic and Renaissance paintings that make me go weak at the knees.

So when Nick suggested that I write a blog about Peter Paul Rubens’s The Massacre of the Innocents, he really couldn’t have chosen a weaker spot if he tried. But if this Hundred Days project is about self improvement then he’s done me a favour by forcing me kicking and screaming out of my comfort zone. In the past twenty four hours my knowledge of Rubens has increased from, well, bugger all, to quite a bit more than bugger-all. Result.

So now, having already spent nearly three hundred words avoiding writing about the painting, where do I start?

Well, ‘horrific’ is as good as place as any I suppose. Giotto or Breughel’s paintings of the Biblical story of Herod’s paranoid slaughter of the children of Bethlehem are the type of imagery that Pope Gregory had in mind when he defended the making of religious paintings as “The Bible for the illiterate”, they act as visual shorthand, merely illustrating the key points of the story. Rubens on the other hand goes all out to provoke a emotional response from the viewer, to involve us in the atrocity in front of us. He does this by forcing us on a journey through the painting..(and here you’ll have to excuse me as I deviate from my usual approach of anecdotes and whimsy into the slightly more dry and dusty area of formal analysis).

Take a look at the composition – where does your eye settle when you first look at the painting?

Mine heads straight to the great red splodge of drapery in the centre, then up to the top right hand corner, to the baby being violently swiped through the air by the inexplicably nude Roman soldier. Everything in the painting directs our attention to that point – the great mass of limbs that make up the confusing group of figures in the foreground tangle around a diagonal line that cuts through the painting. The leg of the armoured Roman soldier at the back and the arms of the woman in the red skirt form two sides of a triangle sitting on this diagonal like a great bloody arrowhead directing our eye upwards. The fact that the Roman soldier on the left is the only figure not jumbled up in the rest of the chaotic blur of flesh also pulls our eyes to that side of the canvas as does the sharp contrast of the figure against the dark patch of background that occupies the right side of the painting – a formal technique known as chiaroscuro that Rubens learnt from the works of Caravaggio while studying in Italy.

Even if we didn’t know the title of the painting and the story which it shows, we already know that something is desperately wrong here, but in case we’re in any doubt, Rubens pulls another formal trick out of the bag to make sure we grasp the full horror. Now our eye is led downwards along the blue sash that curls around the soldier’s torso, sketching the trajectory of the child’s body through the air, past the outstretched hands of the woman to the right, ending in a shattering collision with a stone plinth where a smear of blood leads us to a pile of already greying corpses of previous victims.

Now our eye recoils to the left and for the first time we notice the arms and legs of other dead children poking out from underneath the skirts of their mothers in the main group of figures and then back to that great big lake of crimson drapery now standing in for a vast pool of blood whose depiction would have been a step too far even for the 17th century commissioners of religious painting for whom the visceral was meat and drink.

I've only scratched the surface of course. There's a lot else I could talk about, like the fact that many of the figures were based on the sketches Rubens made of Classical and Rennaisance sculptures during his Italian journeys, that until 2001 the painting was thought to be by Jan van der Hoeke, one of Rubens's workshop apprentices, or that after its reattributation it was one of the most expensive Old Master paintings sold at auction (a whopping 45.9 million quid), but this is a blog, not an academic paper. Hopefully my little guided tour of the painting is enough to show that it’s a technically brilliant, grimly effective and troubling piece of Baroque, as grotesque and shocking as anything that the Chapman Brothers have produced and a long way from the popular view of Rubens as a painter of rosy cheeked, statuesque and jolly nudes. It’s certainly changed my view of an artist about whom I knew very little and as an exercise it stirred a few grey cells that have lain dormant since the last time I sat an exam and it's inspired me to want to find out more about the artist and the painting.

So thanks Nick for forcing me out of my comfort zone, (and thanks to my fellow Hundred-Dayers Daniel and Erika for their tweets of support today).

(Tomorrow I’m going to retreat well and truly back to my comfort zone and away from all this blood and guts to an Italian painting that never fails to make me chuckle.)

100days of Art:Day Two: The Joy Of Bricks

2009-12-01T17:02:00.000-08:00

Carl Andre - Equivalent VII (1966)

When I was eight, my mum took me to the National Gallery, stood me in front of Paolo Ucello’s Battle of San Romano and asked me what I thought. Apparently I stood there for a second before announcing that it looked like painting by numbers. The memory is long lost to me now, but I can imagine the stifled sniggers of other gallery goers and my mum’s embarrassment at having raised a mini-philistine (to be fair to her ,in reality, she probably sniggered too.)

Of course these days when I look at the painting, I’m thinking of far higher things – of the techniques and commissioning practices of Medieval Tuscan panel painting, of the politics of 15th century Florence and Siena, of all ranges of viewing positions and theoretical mumbo jumbo, and yet right at the back of my head somewhere, nagging away is the voice of an eight year old boy saying “painting-by-numbers”

The things is though, now when I look at it I can see what I meant, there’s a consistency and precision to the great big flat patches of colour that make up the figures and landscape that do almost suggest to the facetious and fanciful part of my mind that Ucello and his workshop apprentices were slaving away matching paint to numbers:

“Oi! Paolo – what colour’s number 7?”

“Ultramarine Giorgio – and make sure you stay inside the lines”.

With hindsight I don’t think my eight year old self was denigrating the painting, in fact I think it was a compliment, I knew how hard it was to stay inside the lines. (Come to think of it I still do, as the sometimes wobbly outlining in my own work will attest.)

Years later when I was beginning my studies of art history, and was crowing at the high grade that my first essay had achieved, Mum sent me a postcard of that painting with the story of my first attempt at art criticism written on the back. I think the maternal intention here was twofold – first to remind me never to get too big for my boots, and second, and more relevant to today’s little artblurt, to remind me not to forget one of my first encounters with a work of art.

So what’s all this got to do with a pile of bricks – or more specifically Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII? Stay with me – all will become clear…

There are some pieces of work which I wish I could somehow induce a state of temporary amnesia about so I could relive the innocence and excitement of that first encounter, especially those encounters that occurred when I was a child One of those works is Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII (more commonly known as 'the pile of bricks').

Andre was one of a loose group of artists, writers and curators that emerged in the USA in the 1960s, who have come to be classed together by art historians as the Minimalists. The art was simple, but to make up for it the theory wasn’t – a lengthy and heated correspondence was entered into, battle lines were formed and a debate raged back and forth in the pages of high minded art journals. Now I love the game of Minimalist art theory – it’s the kind of navel gazing mental gymnastics I was talking about yesterday. A few years back I was at a session on Minimalism at a summer school and the tutor was asking us all to talk about a particular work to show how much we knew. When it came to my turn I was asked to talk about Equivalent VIII and I was overjoyed. I babbled garrulously about form and function, about objects and phenomenology, about modernism and postmodernism until, when I finally stopped to draw breath, the tutor said “Good grief Howard, if you can talk so much about so very little you’re already an art historian”.

This was all very well and good, and I got a kick out of the gold star from teacher – even if it was a fairly double-edged compliment. But something nagged at me, I remembered loving Minimalism from a quite early age before I knew any of that theory or history and no amount of Artforum articles could explain what it was that attracted me to that kind of work in the first place. I wrestled with this problem for a while – this is the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night, well that and a few other odd little things (Chaos theory, why my aubergines have stopped growing, the next episode of Doctor Who) that prompt Pete to say “For God’s sake stop it – I can hear you thinking. Some of us need to get some sleep.”

Then one day I hit on the solution – to head to the Minimalism room at the Tate Modern on a Saturday afternoon and watch children react to the art.

It wasn’t particularly busy in the gallery that day, but I stationed myself near the bricks and waited. Soon a boy, of about a similar age to me in front of the Ucello all those years previously walked in accompanied by a frazzled and cynical looking Dad. The boy made a beeline for the bricks and studied them with the intense seriousness that only and eight year old can muster.

“See Toby,” huffed the dad “Told you there was a load of old rubbish in here – look at that. A pile of bricks!”(Okay I’m not sure if the boy was called Toby, but it just fits)

“I like that.” said Toby seriously.

“Don’t be daft” replied dad “You could have done that.”

“And that’s why I like it.”

Game, set and match Toby.

Exit wannabe art historian stage left stifling giggles.

It’s a cute anecdote, but the point is this - Toby got it! Without recourse to piles of textbooks, without hours spent in seminars, without a working knowledge of the ideological debates around art in the sixties, this eight year old had instinctively recognised something so central to Carl Andre’s project ‘art that anyone could make’.

Art is a wonderful thing and of course a head full of knowledge and experience can make us appreciate it all the more, but sometimes we just need to chuck the books out of the window and look at work like we did when we were children, sometimes our childlike instincts can prove to be just as insightful as our jaded adult eyes and minds.

It’s me being fanciful again, but I’d love to think that in a couple of decades time somewhere a yawning art history student will turn over a postcard of a pile of bricks to read..”Do you remember when you were eight and I took you to Tate Modern…”

(Note: Tomorrow I'm going to be writing about Rubens's The Massacre of The Innocents at the suggestion of my dear friend Nick Kirby - if anyone else has any ideas for artworks that they'd like me to compose an unfocussed ramble on, please feel free to comment below or drop me a tweet.)

100days of Art:Day One - Bittersweets

2009-12-01T06:34:00.000-08:00

Felix Gonzales Torres Untitled (Rossmore II) 1991

(I’d originally intended to start my Hundred Days project by writing about another work of art entirely, but since it’s World Aids Day, this seemed far more appropriate)

I’ve got a confession – I love Conceptual Art, and without getting into the tricky business of definitions (one draft of this blog has already been consigned to the recycle bin after becoming utterly bloated with art theory), I mean real Conceptual Art, not just ‘stuff that’s a bit weird and isn’t a proper painting’. I mean work that’s so minimal and physically inconsequential that you have to do a series of mental gymnastics to understand why it’s there. To me, true conceptual art works like a good crossword, it takes time, it stretches parts of your brain that other activities don’t as you wrestle to understand why, for example, a glass of water is an oak tree. Of course, you don’t necessarily come out of the encounter with a definite answer – more often you come out with a lot of indefinite questions, and, perhaps, more often in a state of utter befuddlement. But that’s good, I like being befuddled.

In those terms Conceptual Art, for me at least, is quite a cerebral activity, quite cool and detached, it’s art for the head and for the intellect, a mental workout if you like.

So imagine my surprise when I burst into tears in front of a pile of sweets in The Serpentine Gallery on a warm July day in 2000.

Perhaps I should point out that me turning into a blubbering mess in front of works of art and architecture isn’t a particularly rare occurrence, my long suffering partner has frequently had to nonchalantly walk off and take photographs or read a wall text while I howl at, say, a Barnet Newman painting, the view from the forum in Pompeii or the Temple of Karnak. It’s not something I’m ashamed of, in a way I find it comforting that after all these years of studying art some things still have the capacity to bypass my analytical detachment, catch me off guard and deliver a great big emotional gut-punch.

But where was I? Oh yes, in front of a pile of sweets blubbing.

These ‘candy spills’ were a staple of the Cuban artist, Felix Gonzalez-Torres's practice, at the beginning of the exhibition a quantity of sweets would be arranged, the artist specifying the colour of the sweets, their arrangement (either as a ’pavement’ laid out on the gallery floor or as a pile in the corner) and the total weight of sweets to be displayed. Once installed, the gallery visitors were free to help themselves to the sweets so that over the course of the exhibition the pile or pavement would slowly disappear, eroded by the visitors.

At first the whole idea made me chuckle, it seemed fun and mischievous. We were being given carte blanche by the artist to break two of the cardinal rules of the gallery – 'no eating' and 'don’t touch the artworks'. Children visiting the exhibition gleefully filled their pockets and adults, a little more reticent at breaking the standard patterns of correct behaviour, turned into children, giggling as they wandered the exhibition happily munching on lime sherbets and chocolate caramels. It felt warm and generous, coupled with the ‘paper stacks’ (piles of prints by the artist that we were invited to help ourselves to), here was an exhibition which allowed us not only sugary treats but something to take home with us at the end, all we need was a balloon and a slice of cake and it would have been like a conceptual art birthday party.

The other works in the exhibition were equally playful, a silver platform stood empty in the middle of one room, at random times during the day a go-go dancer in silver hotpants would perform on it listening to a walkman, in another two more walkmans (walkmen?) hung on the wall in a room festooned with strings of light bulbs – the wall text informed us that couples were invited to plug themselves into the walkmans and waltz around the room under the lights (this being an exhibition in England, no-one did of course, but we all got the joke).

As I stood in front of Untitled (Rossmore II), mouth fizzing with sherbet, I turned to the gallery guide to read up on the work and learnt a piece of information that started the torrent. The weight of the sweets in front of me at the start of the exhibition had been the weight of the artists’ lover, Ross on the day that he had been diagnosed with AIDS. Like Ross, the pile of sweets was destined to lose weight, to diminish and eventually disappear. Suddenly this playroom of dancing and sweet-scoffing became a place of loss, the go-go platform and unused walkmen hanging in the dancing room became memento moris, as much symbols of absence as they had been sites of potential entertainment and play. I tried to compose myself, but the tears started streaming down my face.

As I stood there, desperately trying not to completely lose my composure and slip into all-out howling, a small boy approached the sweet pile. “You can eat the sweets you know.” said a gallery attendant.

”Really?” said the boy, his eyes widening.

“Yep, help yourself.”

He grabbed a handful and scuttled back to his parents “Mum, Dad. You can eat the sweets!” he yelled joyfully.

I looked up at the gallery attendant who was now grinning as broadly as the boy with his handful of lime sherbets and it hit me. The work was about loss, about the cruelty and stupidity of AIDS, about the death of a partner and the gaping hole that it leaves in people’s lives, but it was also about those tiny moments of shared joy in any relationship, how loss and such moments act on each other to make us feel both more keenly. When Pete’s away from home, it’s not just his presence I miss, it’s the tiny moments – his daft jokes, his inability to remember to take a lighter with him when he goes for a bath, his ‘coffee symphony’ (a ritual involving making as much noise as is humanly possible with teaspoons, coffee jar and sugar bowl just so I know that he is making coffee, the implication being that it’ll be my turn next).

But more than that – the work was about carrying on, in another location the sweets would be replenished, in an hour or so, the go-go dancer would be back and in another place couples would waltz to a private soundtrack under the lights. Loss is always with us, it’s part of life, it’s part of being human, but so are the little moments, the ones that remind of those we love and those we've lost and we can keep replaying them over and over again.

We left the gallery and walked across Hyde Park to Kensington where we dropped my mum off at her hotel and then headed for the tube. On the platform, as part of a public art project the gallery were running associated with the exhibition was another of Gonzalez-Torrez’s works, a billboard size print of a photograph of an empty bed – the bed that he and Ross shared.

As the tourists bustled around us I grabbed Pete’s hand and held on, lost in the moment.

Like A Bad Tempered Badger

2009-11-30T04:06:00.000-08:00

Um yess - okay so this has been gathering dust of late, the blame can be placed on, well me, coupled with the acquisition of a Playstation 3 and ongoing family dramas, neither of which have exactly helped with my good intentions of maintaining this blog. The arrival of winter hasn't helped either - as usual as soon as the clocks turned back my get up and go got up and went leaving me with the desire to do nothing but hide under a duvet growling at the world like a bad tempered badger.

But tomorrow is the 1st December and thus the beginning of a little thing called 100 Days to Make a better person which, thanks to the tweets of the marvellous Josie Long I found myself signing up to and making the rash promise to write at least 300 words about a work of art every day for 100 days. Well I'm determined to do it, although I have in the meantime decided to broaden the scope of my pledge a tad. Originally I'd intended to stick to writing about visual art, but on reflection I think it's probably going to give me more of a chance of actually suceeding in this task if I broaden my definition of art to include books, music, film, tv - whatever happens to be floating my boat at the time.

So there we go - 30,000 words of my meandering rambles to come - isn't the internet lucky.

Sci-fi Sex Cloud

2009-11-05T15:38:00.000-08:00

Nope nowt to do with the Torchwood episode "Day One" but inspired by Phillipa Warr's rather lovely Art's In The Right Place blog, a word cloud based on an extended essay that I wrote as part of my degree coursework:

(Image created by Wordle.net)

The essay was titled The Doctor Dances: The Queering of Television Science Fiction in Doctor Who and The X-Files. Reading it back four years after the event it does strikes me as a little naive in places and perhaps a little too keen to chuck in theories and theorists that I knew would go down well with my tutor. Having said that. I can't help grinning at myself devoting a few hundred words in an academic paper to John Barrowman's naked backside. Aaaah happy days.

Five Things That Made Me Smile

2009-11-04T15:19:00.000-08:00

Oh it was all going so well, three blogs in three days and then I hit the buffers.

In my defence I've been a tad busy mucking about with paint, catching up on backed up housework and even chucking the odd job application out into the ether. I did start writing a piece inspired by a Bruce Hood lecture I went to last week, but I kept tying myself up in conceptual knots trying to work out quite where I was going with it. In the end decided that the most useful strategy was to read Bruce's book and hope that the internal contradictions I was juggling would resolve themselves. Well I'm about a quarter of the way through the book, so watch this space.

Of course coming up with lengthy creative excuses for not writing anything since last week pretty much defeats the object of doing this in the first place, which was to discipline myself to write something, anything every day, so since I have nothing earth-shattering interesting or insightful to say today, here's a list of five things that have enriched my life over the last few days.

1) Remembering Easyworld - lovely little band from Eastbourne who released a couple of albums in the early 2000's and then disappeared. Real teenage bedsit heartbreak stuff. Their albums sit unnoticed for months at an end then I get one of their tracks on a shuffle play and off I go playing 'em to death and singing along, scaring the neighbours. Here's Til The Day.

2) Discovering Bristol looks incredibly beautiful at night - especially if you're listening to Jim Moray's Nightvisiting while walking through the floating harbour as the light starts to fade.(And if you're visiting the links you'd probably be under the impression that I'm addicted to slightly fey boys with pianos and you'd probably be right.)

3) Reading Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book - Ideal reading for winter bedtimes - I've been rationing myself to a chapter a day - have a feeling I will probably bawl my eyes out at the end.

4) News that Waters of Mars - is less than two weeks away. Can't wait.

5) Wednesday night's Horizon - Love all that complicated physics stuff, even though I understand less than 1% of it. I just enjoy the mental workout. Particularly warmed to the physicist who commented that for all the info we've got there might as well be pink elephants at the centre of Black Holes. Also it had the very wonderful Michio Kaku on it and he always makes me smile.

So there we go, waifish boys singing, cities in the dusk, childrens' ghost stories, Doctor Who and quantum physics - I'm a man of simple pleasures. You'd never have guessed I used to be a goth would you?

An Apology To Veronica Read

2009-10-29T08:43:00.000-07:00

When we lived in London, a yearly ritual was for us to take my mother to the Tate. These visits invariably followed a set itinerary, we’d weave our way through the exhibits I'd get excited by the various new contemporary works on show and rambling about art history while my mum would make non-committal umming noises. Eventually one of two things would happen, either my mum’s patience with “this sort of nonsense” would run out, sending Pete scurrying to hide behind a Damien Hirst to avoid being associated with the fierce exchange of views that would then ensue, or she would amaze us both by suddenly getting incredible enthusiastic about something that both Pete and I would have thought fell firmly into her ‘this sort of nonsense category.

In 2002 one such piece to inspire a cessation of hostilities was The 4 Seasons of Veronica Read by Turkish installation artist Kutlug Ataman. Four screens hung in the obligatory darkened space, across which a series of face to camera interviews were conducted with the eponymous Veronica, a collector and expert cultivator of Amaryllis plants, which charted her life across a year. What fascinated us was the way in which Veronica’s emotional and physical state seemed to be inextricably linked to the seasons and to the wellbeing of her plants. In Spring she was gleeful and bursting with enthusiasm showing off her plants with the pride of a new mother. In Winter she was more sombre and guarded, seemingly uncomfortable with the whole process and when an infestation of mites devastated her plants she seemed to disintegrate in front of us.

At the time it struck me as a document of a particularly English piece of eccentricity, of becoming so involved in a passion that it takes over your life. Having said that I must confess I’ve always been affected by the seasons, never quite to the extent of those who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, but there is a fundamental shift that takes place in my nature when the clocks go back or forward. It’s manifested in the books I read, the music I listen to, the food I want to eat. From March to September I’m a Mad March hare guzzling Woodehouse, Waugh and Harry Potter, my Ipod sparkles with The Byrds, The Stone Roses and three minute pop songs, I munch mountains of fruit and crave the bustle of the South Bank or Bristol’s Floating Harbour. Come the winter and I transform into an altogether more serious animal, my bedside table groans under the weight of worthy tomes of non-fiction, horror and crime novels, my musical tastes become glacial and minimal, Coil, the Aphex Twin, Nyman and Glass soundtrack my ventures into the outside world where routes are planned to avoid as many people as is humanly possible.

Don’t get me wrong I don’t get miserable or maudlin – a touch more grumpy and prone to ranting perhaps, but I actually generally like winter. I love the crunch of frost under my feet, the interesting shapes of skeletal trees. I even love fog. I just get..well, different I suppose. The tricky bit though has always been the transition from one state to another – a few weeks of borderline multiple personality disorder that my beloved other half has to weather with good humour, never quite knowing whether he’s going to come home to a garrulous chatterbox full of gossip and babble or a misanthropic reptile curled up on the sofa spitting venom at News 24.

But now, for the first time in my life I’ve got a garden, and I’m beginning to understand Veronica Read. Previously my horticultural record has not been good, houseplants would wither before my eyes in shops if I even entertained the notion of buying them. Over the years I’ve left a trail of dead yukkas, cheeseplants and kitchen herbs in my wake. I even once managed to murder a cactus. But now on Windmill Hill I have a vegetable patch – and it not only has living things in it, it has edible things in it and I’ve become obsessed. Gardener’s Question Time is no longer something that burbles quietly away unnoticed in the background like a spoken word Orb album, I actually listen to what’s being said and take notes. Every day brings a new little triumph, or defeat whose impact on my state of mind is far greater than I ever could have imagined. Yesterday I discovered that the slugs has decimated a couple of my dwarf bean plants and I was in a foul mood for the rest of the day – this wasn’t particularly helped by the fact that the shops, in their wisdom, have now put all their gardening merchandise away for the winter to make way for aisles and aisles of Christmas tat (Do garden pests take the winter off? Can I kill slugs with tinsel?) Today though, the sight of my first purple floret of sprouting broccoli poking it’s way through the leaves put such a spring in my step that I’ve been incredibly productive today.

So Veronica, my apologies for branding you as eccentric all those years ago, my green-fingered passions may only just be beginning, and I’ll never reach your levels of expertise (I doubt very much that I’ll ever cultivate anything that will win a gold medal) but now I understand. Oh and to my long suffering other half – if you want to know whether you’re going to be greeted by Jekyll or Hyde when you come home, check the garden before you step through the door.

On AA Gill, Baboons and Criticism.

2009-10-27T15:51:00.000-07:00

Everybody’s a critic. We can’t help it, we do it every day, sometimes publicly, sometimes in the privacy of our own homes or brains. Just in the last week via Twitter I voiced my less than flattering opinion of the new sci-fi series Defying Gravity and recommended the School of Seven Bells track Half Asleep to a friend. At no point in either of these did I recount the tale of beating a ring tailed lemur to death. When I once threw a Patricia Cornwell novel across the room after two chapters it was because I found the prose style infantile and the plot stupid, whether or not I’d once poisoned a pygmy marmoset was neither here nor there. When I walked out of a Sisters of Mercy gig at The Forum in Kentish Town it was because it appeared that the sound was being mixed by a man with his head in a bucket of porridge and socks, the possibility that I’d once strangled a howler monkey had no bearing on the matter.

This may seem strange to some, particularly AA Gill, but the reason for these omissions was in part that I have never knowingly wilfully maimed a primate but more importantly that they would have had nothing to do with my opinion of the cultural artefacts being subjected to my critical judgement.

Now I’m not going to get into the moral ins and outs of shooting a baboon, I’ve never been overly sentimental about animals, after all I eat and wear the things on a regular basis and once buried a mole that I’d found in the garden (already dead I hasten to add) up to its waist in one of my mum’s houseplant pots as a joke at a family gathering (She got her revenge by serving it to me as starter between two bits of bread). Oh and don’t get me started on the various molluscs and arthropods that regularly lay siege to my vegetable patch. Still, for the record, the notion of killing anything purely for sport strikes me as an act of testosterone-fuelled cockishness and killing something ‘to feel what it’s like to kill someone’ seems not only doubly cockish but also both zoologically and philosophically flawed at almost any level you care to view it.

Cockishness aside though, surely the point of a restaurant review is to review the restaurant – its food, the ambience, the service, the décor, the wine. I’m not averse to a bit of context that helps flesh out the review whether it’s Sue Perkins’s playmate Giles Coren explaining why he rarely orders pudding or Peter Griffin look-alike Charles Campion (he’s the one who huffs like a hypertensive bison if his pudding is 30 seconds late during his guest judging spots on Masterchef) giving us bit background on a chef and the logistics of his latest venture. These opening paragraphs can give us a sense of the reviewer’s tastes and let us work out whether they’re likely to match our own and that’s great, that’s relevant, that’s useful, that’s good criticism.

So to give Gill the benefit of the doubt (although God knows why – I actually read Sap Rising and thus feel I owe him no favours), is there a relevance to the baboon hunting reminiscences that take up more that half of the review? Are London’s finest eateries now largely patronised by strange hybrids of Hemingway and Johnny Cash? Probably not. Well not unless the demographics of Tower Hamlets and the great and good of Shoreditch have significantly changed since I was last there.

Perhaps as suggested by some commentators, Gill is holding up a mirror to the hypocrisy of those who are happy to munch their way through “some frogs, a pig, a cow and a chicken” but would really rather not connect the artfully prepared fillet in front of them with the realities of the life and death of the animal it came from. Now I’m of the Fearnley-Wittingstall school when it comes to knowing about where your food comes from. I once spent a summer in my teens working on a rare breeds farm getting hands on experience of the piggy life-cycle from artificial insemination to slaughter (the former admittedly more hands-on than the latter) and I’m perfectly aware that the pork steaks I’ve just guzzled were once snuffling around and rolling in the mud. That’s not to say that I’m claiming a moral superiority by virtue of witnessing the former life and demise of a very tasty sausage, nor do I think for a second that I enjoyed my supper any more than the other half, who, at least to my knowledge, has never given hand relief to a boar. But there is an important issue here, that if more people gave some time to researching the realities of food production and used the economic laws of supply and demand to change the behaviour of our food retailers, animal welfare would improve and consequently the quality of our food, which, oh I don’t know, might have some, you know, health benefits or something.

I’m getting a nice view up here on this soapbox (largely of the shiny and sweating tops of the heads of Daily Mail readers mooing ‘Nanny state’ and ‘Political Correctness’ – careful there, you’ll have a coronary due to arterial bottleneck of accumulated fats from those ‘Connective Tissue and Hormone Nuggets’ that nasty meddling liberals like me don’t think you should eat.) but to return to the matter in hand if Gill is showing us the fine diner’s nature red in tooth and claw, the argument falls at the first hurdle by his own admission, baboons aren’t good to eat, he wasn’t about to tuck in to Confit of Baboon with an Agave coulis and fondant yams.

So….what was the bloody point? And what’s my point? I suppose really that to my mind, aside from the various moral and ethical issues that I’ve lightly grazed and sidestepped, it was a lousy piece of criticism, half a review whose word count was bolstered by a few paragraphs of swaggering, preening braggadocio diluted with pointless wittering about hats. There’s a place for Gonzo journalism, there’s a place for shock journalism. but a restaurant review really isn’t it.

Oh and by the way I swatted a fly while writing this and then stared at its twitching oozing corpse. Aren’t I clever?

On Grant Morrison's 'The Invisibles'

2009-10-27T06:01:00.000-07:00

(One from the archives – a bit of a cheat. Easy this blogging lark – give me a couple of weeks and I’ll be sticking up old shopping lists…

Back in 2008 a dear friend celebrated her 50th birthday and was looking for something new to challenge her. Knowing that she had an interest in things of a sci-fi nature, and that she’d never read any graphic novels I decided to chuck her in at the deep end and sent her the first volume of Grant Morisson’s ‘The Invisibles’. By way of an introduction to the books, and to the form of graphic novels generally I wrote the following.

Reading it back a year later it strikes me as a touch pompous, and it should be clear to the reader that I was still only just emerging into the sunlight after a few years spent locked in rooms with noting but academic books. Hopefully though, amidst all the references to Brecht, gratuitous uses of the word ‘text’ and the possibly slightly inaccurate details of this history of Graphic Novels, it still conveys something of my enthusiasm for The Invisibles. Enjoy.)

Wake Up!

I'm on a train to London and I'm yawning.

I’m yawning because of Grant Morrison. Last night I finished my fifth reading in as many years of The Invisibles, and I’ll admit that I thought I’d cracked it – I knew what BARBELiTH was, I knew who (or what) the Archons were and most importantly I’d finally managed to visualise the mental map of the conceptual universe that King Mob, Lord Fanny, Boy, Ragged Robin and Jack Frost inhabit. (It was two interlocking circles like a Venn Diagram with another circle enclosing them – imagine that in four dimensions and you’re close.) Such thoughts do not lend themsleves to a restful night's sleep.

But then came what King Mob might describe as the ontological shock – the moment of clarity, an instinctive feeling that you’ve made some sort of breakthrough, a breakthrough that becomes more and more preposterous as you struggle to frame it in the insufficient resources of language.

So far so metaphysical – I’m getting ahead of myself, but that’s what the Invisibles does, it gets into your mind like an itch. You can be sitting doing a crossword over a coffee and suddenly it dawns on you “Hang on a sec….that means that Tom O’Bedlam is really…”.

It’s a neat trick, don’t expect easy answers or plot resolutions with Grant Morrison – he has too much respect for his readers than to spoon-feed them, the majority of first time readers will often find themselves scratching their heads in confusion at the end of a chapter only to have a “road to Damascus” moment when you should be doing something else. If Grant Morrison is the Author/God of The Invisibles universe, his message to his creation is (to borrow from Robert Anton Wilson) “Think for yourself Schmuck”.

At the heart of The Invisibles, then, as with many comic books and graphic novels since the publication in 80’s of V for Vendetta, Watchmen and the success and increasing subversion of the medium by magazines such as 2000AD and Deadline, is the desire of the writers and artists to “activate” the reader, to change them from a passive receiver to an active participant in the narrative.

The eighties Graphic Novel Renaissance has been characterised principally in terms of writers such as Moore, Morrison, Pat Mills and Neil Gaiman deconstructing the mythic figure of the Superhero. Gone were the clean-cut defenders of Truth, Justice and the American way to be replaced with scarred, ambiguously moralled, sexually dysfunctional, tortured vigilantes. Consider Moore’s Killing Joke which culminates with the Joker and Batman sharing a joke and agreeing that all things considered the two had more in common than they’d like to admit, the hero and villain as two sides of the same scarred coin.

Certainly the ‘super-heroes’ in The Invisibles conform to this non-conformist redrawing of the ‘masked adventurer – a transvestite shaman, a fetish clad ruthless assassin, a psychic witch with a hidden past (or possibly future) and a ‘chosen one’ who just wants to indulge in booze, pills. a touch of anti-establishment arson and let Armageddon take care of itself. Unlike the ‘Golden Age’ DC and Marvel comic heroes it’s hard to imagine King Mob pausing mid adventure to advise kids to stay in school, to spike to teachers lounge coffee with peyote or to cover it in Situationist slogans possibly, but to stay in it, never.

This redrawing of the super-hero as a less-than-super human has been so successful that it has made its way into the mainstream, Batman Begins, X-Men and Spiderman mined this seam of damaged heroes to both critical and commercial acclaim.

It would be easy on first view to dismiss The Invisibles as another in the long line of “dark and gritty” comic books that now fill the bulging shelves of “Androids’ Dungeons” throughout the world, but there is more to it than that. The other aspect of the medium that has been explored in the post-Watchmen world is the subversion of narrative structure.

These days reading a graphic novel is not simply a matter of following a nice simple line of frames from left to right and down the page. These days frames dissolve, collapse and overlap. Often you find noticing symmetries, discontinuities and apparent non-sequiturs whose significances either may not be revealed for some chapters or, more abstractly, may act as what Berthold Brecht termed ‘distanciation’ – a pause or gap in the narrative to ‘shock the viewer into remembering that he is reading a text, for Brecht (as, it seems likely, for Morisson) such techniques were a political strategy, drawing his audiences attentions to similarities between what was going on on-stage and in the ‘real’ world. Gaiman and Moore use these devices extensively in their work, but it is Morrison whose work takes the structural warping of the graphic narrative further than anyone else.

In his earlier DC series Animal Man, Morrison broke new ground in comic booksby allowing is central character to slowly discover his own fictional status gradually coming to the realisation that the events in his life were guided by one GodAuthor for the entertainment of the GodReader, breaking the fourth wall, the hero turns shocked to the reader, looking out of the page in shock – “My God – it’s all for you!”

Of course direct address to the reader is nothing new – in Watchmen, Moore uses a number of devices to involve the reader – Rorschach’s journal, Hollis Mason’s autobiography and the interviews with Adrian Veidt, Sally Jupiter and Dan Drieberg that form the thematic epilogues of each chapter. Here, though, the address is to a fictional reader – one who inhabits the world of the alternate 1980’s New York.

Morisson’s reader however is not positioned as being of the Invisibles world, although frequently the characters seem aware that they are fictional in some reality or other, they also create new realities within their own, fictional, multidimensional worlds at whose borders the conflicts arise which raises the possibility that they may be creating our reality.

So, how does the reader approach The Invisibles? Simple answer…. “slowly”. Over years of lending Graphic Novels to friends, some of whom have been converted, some who haven’t, it’s occurred to me that there is an art to reading comic books. Pitched somewhere between literature and cinema, comic books require a different engagement to both. Frequently people make the mistake of paying scant attention to the pictures and charging through the words. This is natural of course, since it’s the way we’ve learnt to read since we discarded picture books in our childhood – we ‘read’ words but we ‘look at’ pictures.

Yet if we consider a frame of a comic strip as a accomplishing the same as a scene in a film or a paragraph in a book, moving along the plot through action or dialogue or action within the fictional world and providing a context within which these events take place, we can lose a great deal of the information that is necessary to understanding the narrative. The way we learn to read, focuses, naturally enough, on the words, pictures are somehow downgraded as we learn; our first books are nothing but pictures and as we graduate through the age-bands of children’s books, young adult books and finally adult fiction pictures disappear from our reading, bar perhaps a flashy illustration on the cover.

We are essentially trained to ignore the image in favour of the word, which to a 21st century Western eye holds the ultimate authority.

It is perhaps unsurprising then that the first encounter for the novice reader of graphic novels can often be an unsatisfying one – largely because he or she is putting all their energies into reading the dialogue, the thought bubbles, the sound effects and paying scant attention to the images. In the early days of comic strips this wasn’t a bad approach really – early cartoon illustrations do little beyond illustrate the dialogue which in turn makes sure that the reader doesn’t miss anything.

In the post-Watchmen world however, life isn’t so straightforward, these authors expect you to work, to examine the background of individual frames and indeed to look at the relationship of the frames to each other – often in Watchmen a similar arrangement of frames on the page is frequently used to draw parallels between the actions and motivations of different characters at different times.

The way that time unfolds in The Invisibles also throws narrative conventions on their heads. Again in the pre-Watchmen era following the sequence of events unfolding in a graphic narrative was a straightforward business – you were confident that whatever happened in the bottom right of a page happened after the events depicted in the top left. These days causality isn’t necessarily a matter of one event following another – flashbacks, flashforwards and, for want of a better term, flash-sideways’s are layered on top of each other and this is especially true of The Invisibles. We’re often introduced to characters out of order, events that seem to occur simultaneously at one point of reading are later revealed to be taking place hundreds of years in the past or future making keeping a diary of the events and adding in the dates later a quite helpful (albeit admittedly geeky) strategy for unravelling what’s going on - I must confess on my third reading I actually ended up with an XL spreadsheet in an attempt to map the timelines. Also worth bearing in mind is that fact that, since time travel becomes a central theme of the piece, events may happen in one order to one character, but in a completely different one for another (Keep a particular eye on Ragged Robin…)

So there we go – some rather garbled thoughts on how to read The Invisibles. The one fundamental rule is take your time – a rule of thumb that I try to use is to spend as much time on a frame as I would a piece of prose describing the events depicted. Keep an eye on signs, odd bits of graffiti, look carefully at characters in a frame outside the main action – most of the time they’re just window dressing but on occasions they may be playing their own part in what’s going on – although you might not realise until several editions later.

But above all enjoy it – The Invisibles will frustrate you, intrigue you and bamboozle. It’ll send you racing for Wikipedia to fill out gaps in your knowledge; it’ll make you laugh, cry and gasp. Most of all, it’ll make you think.

Welcome to The Invisible Kingdom – all that’s left to decide is “Which Side Are You On?”

Bristol, Blogs and Blurting.

2009-10-26T03:57:00.000-07:00

So the Italian Diary (like many previous attempts at blogging) bit the dust pretty quickly. Unfortunately, shortly after we returned from our holiday, life saw fit to deliver a series of great big kicks to the danglies and somehow neither my heart nor head were in the right place to revisit memories of a great holiday. I could I suppose have blogged about the ongoing saga of the universe weeing on our cornflakes, but my default setting in such circumstances is to go into hibernation rather than share my misery with the world.

But, as is often the way, good stuff came out of the aforementioned cackstorm - a new life in Bristol, the discovery of the joys of gardening (and the realisation that not all plants turn up their roots and expire when they see me coming) and, after twelve months of creative torpor, a sudden tsunami of ideas and, more importantly, the energy and motivation to shape the gush into your actual concrete things.

So, to the subject of Blogging. Please excuse this lapse into navel gazing - I've always thought that amateurs writing about writing is indicative of someone with very little to say. Professional writers have every right to hold forth on the ins and out of their craft; I've greedily guzzled some great books on writing, Russell T. Davies's The Writer's Tale being a recent (and inspiring) favourite and of course my favourite author, William Burroughs, writes about little else, well he writes about weird sex, weird drugs, sentient diseases, ancient gods and enormous talking insects, but at its heart all his work is about writing. In the blogosphere I greedily consume the fascinating and insightful musings of Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman, Paul Cornell and others, but really, I ask myself, who is interested in me whining "Writing's sooooo hard"?

So why am I about to ramble away on that very subject? I suppose to an extent it's a part of my attempt to motivate myself, to put the various excuses I use to avoid this writing lark down on paper (well, screen) to see just how daft they are. Of course it's also a matter of practice, to get myself into the habit of writing and it seemed that a good starting point to exorcise my inky demons. So please excuse this exercise in self indulgence, it won't happen again.

I'll start from the inside and work out. Like many creative types I walk a fine line between total extrovert egomania and a crippling shyness. My early ventures into the public exposure of my creative side were all as part of bands, and somehow that collective approach to creativity suited me well - partly as a result of the shared responsibility of putting on a group performance - if it was a disaster, it couldn't be all my fault, and partly through not wanting to let others down - after all when there's five of you, one of you can't suddenly mumble "Noooo I don't want to do it" and lock yourself in the bathroom - well, at least not until you've got a couple of successful albums under your belt anyway. Flash forward a decade an a half or so, to putting on my first solo exhibition of paintings a couple of years ago and it was a very different story, a terrifying experience of exposing myself, feeling like a fraud and, following the financial failure of the show, finding my confidence shattered to the extent that I didn't pick up a paintbrush again until three weeks ago. With the benefit of rational hindsight perhaps an exhibition of homoerotic Pop Art with implicitly kinky undertones wasn't exactly going to be a blockbusting sell-out in a small rural village in North Somerset - but trying telling that to the little 'suffering artist' inside whimpering "Nobody loves me!" Of course in this age of the web, social media and instant feedback that potential for having your fragile little creative self bruised and battered is magnified and accelerated to an alarming extent - a cursory glance of YouTube, fills me with admiration for the skill and resilience of teenagers, now equipped with the same levels of technology that produced Dark Side of the Moon on their bedroom PC, who upload their first songs complete with home-made videos to be instantly greeted by a torrent of "LMFAO. Epic FAIL!!!!1111!!" comments and similarly articulate criticism, yet are able to shrug it off and soldier on to produce better and better work. It really puts my wafer thin skin into perspective.

The next hurdle/neurosis/excuse is the issue of doubting that I have anything interesting to say. I'm full of envy for those who have found themselves a niche on their blogs, those who comment wryly, wittily, intelligently and with fierce passion on life, culture, politics and the media, people like, to name two recent and welcome discoveries, Anton Vowl and Army of Dave whose blogs have, in the last couple of weeks, become as much part of my morning ritual as an espresso and a fag. Part of the problem for me, you see, is lack of focus, my mind flits from subject to subject like a hummingbird with Attention Deficit Disorder, bouncing from high-brow to low-brow, from the fantastical to the mundane and back again. For example, a peek at the headings of my mental agenda this morning would have revealed Aubergine Plant (Why is it dying?), Life on board 19th Century Whaling Ships, Dexter Season 2, Goat's Cheese (Calories in.), Daily Mail (Idiocy of), Junk Mail, Robert Rauschenburg's White Paintings, The Unthanks, and Socks. And that was before I'd had my toast. Of course access to the Internet doesn't help, once, in the days when my magpie curiosity could only be satisfied by whatever books happened to be on the shelf, such subjects would have knocked around for a bit, questions would have remained unanswered and finally a level of prioritisation would have occurred and something useful might have come out of that strange little torrent of brainspasms, but now that I can pretty much get a half decent answer to any question my fevered mind can come up with in the click of a mouse, my cranium is full of an overly rich sloshy thoughtsoup of opinions, facts and figures before my bodily functions are fully conscious.

So what the hell do I write about? In the past I've tried writing about: 1) Giving up Smoking - I didn't. 2) Reviewing every episode of Doctor Who in order - got halfway into the first episode and realised that as an idea it was both mad and dull (not to mention the potential for attracting hate mail for saying how unrelentingly grim and uninteresting I find a certain poll winning Peter Davison story) and 3) The sadly unfinished travelogue below. So going on past experience the focussed one-subject commentary is clearly beyond me. Perhaps I just have to accept that I haven't got the mental discipline to stick to one subject and accept that this blog will just be a series of random blurts offering nothing more useful or meaningful than a window into my strange little world. Who knows? - perhaps there are people out there who have equal interest in goat related dairy produce and bleak Northumbrian minimalist folk music (actually that particular combination doesn't sound that unlikely now that I come to type it).

So there we are - excuses out of the way and I'm back in the saddle. From now on my navel shall remain unexamined and I shall turn my attention to the big topics like aubergine horticulture, tv serial killers, art, life and many subjects in between. I was going to pen a couple of paragraphs about displacement activities, but I've suddenly noticed that the sock drawer needs sorting out and the throws on the lounge sofa won't straighten themselves out, oh and I really do need to find out who apart from Rod Steiger was in the film of The Illustrated Man.

Italian Diary 2008: Day One

2008-10-03T04:23:00.000-07:00

I don’t know what time it is (my alarm clock battery seems to have run out) but I’ve been staring at the ceiling through the dark for what seems like hours. I’ve skimmed the guidebooks, I’ve been through the lists a hundred times in my head, there really is nothing more I can do. We’re going on holiday and there’s no stopping us now.

It’s been nearly ten years since our last proper holiday and by proper holiday I mean going somewhere that requires a passport for longer than a week, I don’t mean the two damp weeks we spent wandering grumpily round Northumberland wondering what we were doing there, nor the weekend trip to Venice where I went down with a stomach virus the second we arrived at the hotel leaving P to escort my Mum and our friend Nicky around every handbag and shoe shop in town.

But ahead of us are ten days of adventure in Italy, three days in Florence, three in Siena and three in Naples (taking in Pompeii and the Amalfi Coast) and I’m nervous. Nervous because I’m not sure I remember how to have a holiday. Are we going to arrive in Florence and hate it? Are we going to have enough money? Is the world going to be sucked into a black hole on Wednesday? (OK this last one wasn’t a major worry to be honest, partially because I knew it wouldn’t, but also I was secure in the knowledge that if it did at least I’d have a decent coffee in my hands when the universe turned inside out or gained another six dimensions or whatever.)

Have we got all the tickets/passports/documents we need? Will our online check in work? How am I supposed to sleep with all this going on in my head?

Of course the inner ‘sensible’ bit of me is reminding me that we’re only going to Italy, not attempting to cross the Andes by frog, that we’re both seasoned travellers and that I once left home for a two month tour of Europe with a measly £250 in my pocket and survived.

But still the paranoid litany continues….What if something goes wrong with the hotel bookings? What if the flight’s delayed? Is P going to strangle me after the umpteenth fascinating monologue about Medieval art?

For god’s sake get a grip.

I get up and have a cigarette, and then head back to bed checking P’s alarm clock as I pass. 4.10. Oh great, twenty minute before we’re due to get up. Might as well have a bath then….

We dress in silence, bar grinning and shouting “Holiday!” occasionally – both focussed on getting ready and by 5am we sitting, coffees in hand, twiddling our thumbs (which is tricky when you’re holding a coffee). The plan is that we leave the house at 5.30, but itchy feet get the better of us and once P has checked and rechecked every lock and power point, we leave, 15 minutes ahead of schedule. What would my father (dogmatic itinerary adherent par excellence) say….?

It’s a bright morning and we roll down the hill to the station – our trolley bags making a racket as they bump across the non-slip paving stones. We offer a silent apology to the locals who’ve been woken by the noise.

The station’s quiet – a few people bumbling around eyes half open, difficult to tell who’s just on their way home after a night out and who’s starting work for the day, this being Brighton though the two possibilities are by no means mutually exclusive.

We catch the train and watch the South Downs slide past, P leafs through the Florence guidebook and I snigger at the bawdy tales in The Decameron trying to get my head into the culture of medieval Tuscany, but in reality just giggling at the rude jokes.

We arrive at Gatwick and head to the South Terminal and the mysterious ‘bag drop’. Now I’m as techno-friendly as the next person but the whole business of travelling without a ticket still freaks me out. Somehow the lack of one of those multipart tickets with red carbon bearing arcane numbers and symbols brings out the inner luddite in me and I feel like some superstitious yokel from the middle ages muttering “No boardin’ paaasssss – bain’t natural.”

Still we overcome my belief that such check-ins can only be the work of witchcraft and once we’ve realised that the place we need to go has cunningly been disguised with large red “Bag Drop Here” signs, we say goodbye to the luggage and head off in search of breakfast. (Perhaps it was my imagination, but I’m sure I felt P flinch as the bag containing his camera equipment disappeared on the conveyer belt. Actually I consider myself lucky that I wasn’t shoved into the bag so the camera gear could have my seat..)

Our search for breakfast leads us to the rather optimistically named Gatwick Village – a collection of Starbucks, Burger Kings and amusement arcades that once probably looked quite shiny but now are dulled by the accumulated grime of a decade in a airport. Optimistically we plump for continental breakfast at Café Gerrard where we are well and truly ripped off, paying thirteen quid for two cups of something pretending to be coffee and a limp Danish that’s been warmed up in the microwave.

Seething quite badly due to this, but console ourselves with the knowledge that we’re going to be drinking decent coffee for the next ten days…

Our flight is called and we get through passport control and security checks fine, despite my continuing worries that the home printed bit of A4 paper that I’m waving can’t possibly be as good as a real ticket.

We settle into our seats and enjoy an uneventful flight, P drinks in views of the Alps while I slip into the semi-asleep state that I can only enter on planes or trains (you know the one where you’re just conscious enough to avoid lolling and dribbling on the passenger next to you.)

We arrive in Pisa and having got through customs wander out to find the bus to the hire car pickup place. We locate the bus, get on and are then treated to a journey of about two hundred metres. Everyone on the bus giggles at the apparent insanity of this trip, raising eyebrows as if to say “these crazy foreigners eh?’ and we pour out to pick up the cars.

We head to the Thrifty desk feeling smug that ours has the smallest queue (i.e. no one), but pride comes before a fall and all and our smugness is given a cold shower when the guy behind the desk asks for sixty five euros for local taxes and to cover the fact that we’ll be dropping the car off at the office in Naples. A bit put out by this, but not an insurmountable problem.

The guy behind desk then says “Oh your credit card won’t work.” I frown and say that there’s easily enough credit to cover the 65. “Oh no, “ he says “For the five hundred.” Um what? “The five hundred euro deposit.” I splutter and grab the booking confirmation and there it is – right at the bottom in letters the size of Higgs Boson . Bugger.

A quick financial meeting ensues at the end of which we decide to abandon the car – we could stump up the 500, but it would pretty much clear out our budget for the rest of the trip. P absolutely furious as his dreams of sitting on top of a mountain catching the sunrise over Tuscany vanish in a puff of small print.

We take the ludicrous bus journey back to the terminal, P silently seethes as I make optimistic noises

“Well it’s a bit more of an adventure now isn’t it?”

“Grrrr.”

“We’ll save money on petrol.”

“Grrrrr”

“We won’t have to pay for parking.”

“Grrrrrrrrrr.”

Ok better leave him to it….Happily the high dudgeon is short lived as we quickly locate a bus to Florence and board. P groans occasionally as especially photogenic areas of Tuscany pass us by while I try and locate the hotel in the guidebook. I’m a little worried that it seems to be off the map. Still it’s my job to be the optimistic one so I keep schtum.

After the rural landscape of Tuscany, the prospect of navigating our way across town with luggage in tow seems a bit much, but once we’re deposited at Santa Maria Novella station we can’t actually work out where the taxis are so gamely we step into the bustling streets to find our bed for the night.

I keep my head down as we walk through the town, partially keeping an eagle eye on the map and partly ensuring that I don’t see anything that will make me forget the job in hand. Also, if truth be told, staggering through the streets, partially uncertain of direction and lugging bags isn’t what I want my first impressions of Florence to be.

After walking for 15 minutes or so we hit the banks of the Arno – locals and tourists mix happily, dodging the cars by the Ponte Vecchio and hawkers selling miniature copies of Michelangelo’s David.

We head west along the river, heads still down, although we can’t help noticing the Florentines sitting on a weir in the middle of the river basking in the sweltering afternoon sun.

With tired feet we finally reach the Grand Hotel Mediterranean. Despite my earlier concerns it’s right on the edge of the City centre, about a ten minute walk – no problem. The staff are efficient (if not exactly brimming with warmth) the place is clean, cool and well organised – a little characterless and something of a tourist factory, but it’ll do very nicely - first gold star to P in his role as Hotel Booker.

We unpack and shower off the airport grime that’s accumulated on us in a bathroom the size of our living room at home and head off, refreshed, if a little weary to begin the holiday proper.

Our first port of call is the Piazza Della Signoria – the old medieval town square filled with Renaissance sculptures including Michelangelo’s David. On our way P comments that he hopes I won’t have an attack of the vapours, referring to the scene from Room with a View where Lucy Honeychurch witnesses a stabbing in the Piazza. I glare at him saying that I’d much rather he viewed me as Rupert Graves than Helena Bonham-Carter. I flop my fringe and consider buying a cricket jumper.

We wind through the rabbit warren of streets in what feels like the right direction. I should point out that our standard practice for orientation when we arrive in a new city has always been to wander out into the middle of it and get deliberately lost - the logic being that if you get lost in a city and then find your way the geography sinks in a lot quicker plus the added bonus of getting to see sights off the standard tourist routes.

Now, this has served us well in cities that are organised around a central feature such La Ramblas in Barcelona; where it can get, let’s say ‘entertaining’, is somewhere like Amsterdam where the organising principle is concentric rings of canals that all look exactly the same. In that case, we ended up spending a few very giggly hours in the rain attempting to find our hotel – although I will admit there may have been other factors in Amsterdam that led to our grasp of geography being somewhat compromised.

Happily Florence has the Arno running right through the middle and the Duomo and tower of the Palazza Vecchio are visible from practically every point in the city, so navigation for the newcomer is a cinch.

Making a beeline for the tower we make a dog-leg down a quiet side street and there ahead of us is a magnificent…, well, arse basically. The arse belongs to Hercules, well, a sculpture of Hercules and Cacus by Bandinelli that stands at the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio, flanking the gate in a pair with a reproduction of David.

The 16^th century sculptor and theorist Benvenuto Cellini disparagingly referred to the sculpture as resembling a ‘sack full of melons’ and, comparing it to both David and Cellini’s own Perseus with the head of Medusa that stands in the loggia opposite, it’s clear that Bandinella had a very different image of ideal masculinity to those who came after him. While David and Perseus are slim, boyish and, let’s be honest, as fey as anything, Hercules stands stock still, legs apart, muscles bulging. Of course the difference is as much a matter of politics as it is one of aesthetics. David was commissioned by the Republic to celebrate booting the Medici’s out of town in 1494, it makes sense that they’d want to display the model of what was perceived as the ideal, Grecian male body with its implicit historical connections to an ideal Platonic Republican society.

Then in 1512 the boot was on the other foot as the Medici seized power again. A few years later Hercules and Cacus was commissioned to celebrate their victory to be placed directly opposite David - a reminder to the population of who had the greatest might; a magnificently arrogant piece of political posturing in the name of art so typical of the Medici.

That all said though I prefer David and Perseus. Oh, and my researches are yet to reveal quite why Hercules appears to be shoving Cacus’s head into his groin – perhaps it’s all too easily read as political allegory, but a little foolhardy none the less, give that the mythological Cacus was able to breath fire. Ouch.

We walk across the square to the Loggia dei Lanzi, where a few more tonnes of marble await our attentions, some Roman and some Renaissance but all working through themes of very beautiful nude people beating/raping/murdering each other. Great stuff and it’s a treat to get into the shade for a while.

P announces his intention to undertake a photographic project consisting of numerous shots of bronze and marble penises. I can’t help sniggering, but it’s really not as prurient as it might sound, in fact I’m sure there’s a coffee table book or and academic paper in there somewhere – Florence, The Medici’s and the Renaissance Cock 1280-1560: A Critical Investigation maybe, I’ve read stranger. Of course from the point of view of practicalities, there are rather a lot of them around, so he won’t be short of subject matter. I leave him in the company of his camera and Patroclus’s groin and meander through the sculptures.

I settle on a marble bench next to a sculpture or a pre-rape Sabine woman (she actually had some clothes on) and bask in the early evening sun. I grin at the square – it’s just hit me – we’re on holiday. I grin at the square some more. I’m still grinning when P approaches. I grin at him.

“We’re on holiday.” I inform him through a grin.

“Yes we are.” He concurs and grins at me.

We grin like idiots at each other, sculptures, pigeons and random strangers – happily most reciprocate rather than backing away in fear (well the people anyway, I’m not sure if pigeons are physiologically capable of grinning.)

Having established that we are indeed on holiday we both realise how hungry we are and we head north in search of the first of many pizzas.

The streets and pizzas are starting to fill up for it’s about six o’clock, the beginning of the passeggiata – the Tuscan evening promenade, the ‘hour of looking good’ and the locals are coming out in their finery to gossip, drink or just swagger about looking fantastic.

The thing about the Florentines is that they’re all so elegant. Yes they’re well dressed, but it’s more than their clothes, it’s the way they wear them, they’d wear Primark in the same way they’d wear Armani and that’s what makes them look good. Perhaps swagger isn’t the right word as that would seem to imply a level of arrogance and that isn’t what comes across at all. There’s something about the Florentine grammar of body language and fashion that seems to say “Yes I know I look good, I can’t help it – I live here.” It’s as much about a shared pride in their surroundings as it is about an individual pride in themselves. Psychobabble aside, they’re like peacocks and they’re beautiful, damn them.

We meander through the throng feeling distinctly unglamorous. And following a recommendation in the Rough Guide we descend on the Pizzeria Nutti for supper. We eat our pizzas and swig our wine watching the streetlife pass us by.

We finish up and head off in search of Ice Cream. The shops are all lighting up now and suddenly Florence looks like a modern city, the broader streets now thronging with people window shopping in the cool evening breeze.

North African street traders appear to flog counterfeit handbags, spreading their wares out on sheets so they can be scooped up for a quick getaway. Quite why this is necessary at first seems unclear – the few policemen we see wandering about seem to be focussing largely on the Florentine habit of swaggering and looking good and don’t pay the traders the slightest bit of notice.

We later discover that the reason the police we saw were so unconcerned was that they were the wrong type of police. Evidently there are (depending what you read) between five and seven different police forces, each with their own remit – so I guess these weren’t the fashion police, which, given our dishevelled state, was probably a good thing.

We buy ice-creams and slowly walk back down to the Arno. As we walk along the bank and out of the city centre quiet descends interrupted only by the splosh of oars as canoeists glide past us on the river. P digs out the camera.

“So what do you think of Florence then?”

“I love Florence” he says to the viewfinder.

“Mmmmh it is rather splendid isn’t it?”

I leave him to it and stretch out on the river wall and skim the guidebook for ideas for the following day.

“So what are we doing tomorrow then?” P asks his camera.

“Haven’t a clue. How marvellous is that?”

“Aha, we’ll be on holiday then.”

Another round of grinning ensues.

“Well spotted. Come on, I’m knackered”

When all possible shots of the canoeists have been exhausted, we head back to the Hotel where we retire and fall asleep almost instantly