RIP John Berger & Ottawoes

Tags

art, Canada, john berger, Ottawa, politics

RIP John Berger

 

Last week the esteemed writer and Marxist art critic, John Berger, died at the ripe old age of 95. Best known for his seminal book Ways of Seeing, and the four-part television series based on it (currently available free on U-Tube), Berger began his career as a painter, but abandoned this for writing, because “painting seemed to be irrelevant in a world so chaotic and conflicted”. Irrelevant or not, he certainly devoted much time to thinking about it once he had ceased to practice. Notable among his acute perceptions was the fact that photography has transformed the way art is viewed. Renaissance masterpieces were generally spiritual or religious in nature, designed to be viewed in a single location – most often a church of some sort – where they were installed as a central part of the overall structure. Icons were even believed to possess a numinousity of their own which merited extreme veneration. But now these images can be viewed in our homes, with our wallpaper, carpets and furniture as their background. They can also appear in books, as postcards, beer-mats, posters, and be imprinted on T-shirts or any other fabric. All of this radically alters the meaning and nature of the image itself. In referring to the National Gallery in London’s Virgin of the Rocks, by Leonardo Da Vinci, he observed that, in the gallery’s catalogue, the description of this painting ran to fourteen pages of dense scholarship about provenance and previous owners. None of this, he said, really concerns the picture. It is there to affirm the work’s authenticity – and mainly to disavow the authenticity of the same painting hanging in the Louvre, where the French insist that it is the English not they who have the copy. So art becomes about its value, about money rather than beauty or genius. The very hefty gilded frames that adorn these masterpieces suggest no less than this. Berger must have marvelled at recent auction sales, where both Lucien Freud and the still-living Peter Doig had works sell for close to 30 million. He noted that information also changes our perception, citing the familiar example of the cornfield with crows painted by Van Gogh an hour before he shot himself. Then he turned to Franz Hals vast portrait of the almoners’ directorate, observing that our view of these stark and sombre, white-frilled faces is dramatically changed by knowing that, before he embarked on the painting, the alms house had given grindingly poor old Hals three loads of peat to prevent him freezing to death over the winter. Berger wryly pointed out that the music played over images in art documentaries like his can transform our understanding of the work in often unhelpful or erroneous ways. Paintings, he said, are meant to be viewed in silence. He also criticized the zooming and panning in films, which distorts our comprehension of something made to be seen as a whole. Asking a group of school children to comment on Caravaggio’s portrait of Jesus with two argumentative men, he found that the girls all thought the figure of Christ was female, and the boys thought it was male – but, without being aware of the painter’s homosexuality, every kid recognized a gender ambiguity.

Ahead of his time in the very early seventies, Berger espoused a feminist view of the nude in art, assembling a panel of prominent women in his series to discuss their impressions of how the female form was presented in classical paintings. He himself saw the women in many, if not most of these major works as pliant, hairless and sexless, but always receptive to the male advance, noting adroitly that nudity here is a form of dress that is undressed. Sometimes even the flimsy garments are as revealing as a naked figure, falling suggestively in places, or clinging to prominent features. Berger was always quick to say that we ought not to take his word for anything – we ought to look and see for ourselves. And, as King David said, we have eyes but we do not see. As a way of seeing, Berger’s work is invaluable, and his was a life well lived – God speed, Johnny.

 

Ottawoes

 

Politicians have always been excruciatingly shallow and terminally hypocritical, but they usually conceal these traits better than is currently being done. Had Trump lost the election – which, according to the popular vote, he actually did – his name would by now be a byword for ridiculous failure. As it is, though, we have two candidates for leadership of Canada’s Conservative Party openly boasting that they are Trump-style politicos. The aptly-named Kelly Leach brays about her proposed draconian policies towards Muslim immigrants – policies which in fact would violate our Charter of Rights. The oafish loud-mouth Kevin O’Leary tells us how rich he is, and abuses contestants on his – yes! – reality-TV show. You can’t blame the multi-millionaire businessman for seeing a slight resemblance between himself and the Donald. But neither of these opportunistic reptiles seems to understand that there is a difference between Canada and the USA – the main difference being that they don’t have a hope in hell of getting elected leader. The prospect of them, however, makes me realize why I voted for Trudeau le Petit. Better sunny ways than bilious hubris.

 

Paul William Roberts       

David Altmejd

Tags

art, contemporary art, david altmejd, England, montreal, sculpture

When I saw the Van Gogh retrospective at London’s South Bank Gallery in 1969, with the works arranged chronologically – that last fearsome image of the path dividing three ways through a cornfield bothered by crows and stormy winds at the end – I walked out to sit on a bench overlooking the dreary grey Thames, and I cried for an hour. I had shared ten years’ of Vincent’s life, with its very tiny pleasures, its ineffable moments of divine awe, and, of course, its plunging periods of ever-deepening depression and despair, culminating with the suicide committed within hours of completing that last doom-laden painting. The retrospective had been an emotional roller-coaster ride through Vincent’s final ten years, and I felt I knew him better than anyone I knew. Thus, that final painting – like all great art – hit me in the heart like a bullet, and I experienced the same plummeting hopelessness as its painter must have been feeling. It took days to restore my centre of gravity; but I was only eighteen, and fully expected that a world of such powerful exhibitions lay ahead, much as I expected the next Beatles’ album would be yet another advance upon the previous one.

In the late sixties art – in every form – was exploding. In England, where we cared little for ‘New York faddism’ – Pollack, Rothko, Warhol, ‘flatness’: rubbish – but then we had the early David Hockney, Alan Davie, Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, Ben Nicolson, and so many others. With my meagre Saturday job wages, I subscribed to Studio International, so I knew – or thought I did – what was going on. I was even a member of the Tate Gallery, invited to openings etc. There was a big one too: Francis Bacon New Works, I think it was called. I’d only seen individual paintings before, besides magazine spreads, but it struck me even then that Bacon was a one-trick pony, essentially making the same painting over and over again. A few years later, when I was at Oxford, I met him on several occasions, and, besides finding him a drunken arsehole, realized his main interest was money – needed to pay off gargantuan gambling debts. It also struck me that his gallery had more of a say in what he painted than he did. Fame, 20^th century-style, appeared to have a very negative influence upon art and artists. It made me wonder how Vincent’s life and work might have changed had he become a star. Would that last painting have been postponed indefinitely? I think not.

Possibly due to reading classical literature at university, my interests in art drifted back in time. Possibly due to an interest in psychotropic drugs, I became increasingly drawn to artists attempting to portray dream-worlds, or hyper-realities, the preternatural. Oddly enough, this ended up in a fascination with ancient Egyptian art, where no individual artist is known by name, and the purpose is entirely symbolic – except during the reign of the so-called monotheistic pharaoh Akenaton. This latter work is often hard to see in the original. You have to bribe your way into the Theban tombs where some of the finest bas-reliefs exist. But bribing a warden in the Valley of the Kings is not the pecuniary apocalypse that bribing a suit on Capitol Hill might prove to be. You will, however, need to bring your own good, big flashlight. In its beam you will see the only depictions of everyday ancient Egyptian life in existence. Virtually everything I have seen of ancient Egypt has been a bullet to the heart – especially after reading Schwaller de Lubic’ monumental Temple of Man, the most indispensable book on Egypt – but the Akenaton works fire a special bullet of their own. Human love is shown with irreducible subtlety: a wife’s arm placed oh-so-delicately on her husband’s shoulders. The deep appreciation of life’s manifold pleasures is displayed in countless ways. A meal is displayed, revealing, in the graceful drooping of a dead goose’s neck, gratitude for the life that has given itself to sustain life. The joy in living, aware of its own brevity, is portrayed in a manner so moving that one is forced to paraphrase Wordsworth’s still, sad music of humanity.

The sheer potency of ancient Egyptian art and architecture enthralled, obsessed, and puzzled me, until I read Schwaller’s aforementioned book. It is much like wondering why walking down the aisle of Chartres Cathedral has such an uplifting effect on the heart or soul, and then discovering the precise Pythagorean mathematics involved in its design (the space between pillars makes them effectually a musical chord). Art and music are two things which elude scientific explanation. There is no reason why vibrations in the air reaching the tympanum, and thence ferried into the brain ought to create such vastly different effects: one, say, making you think of beer and pretzels; another creating thoughts too deep for words. Similarly, there is no explanation for why one painting or sculpture – regardless of technical skill – makes the heart glow, while others simply hang or stand there inert. Pythagoras actually has some of these answers – at least those relating to music and sculpture – but he deserves an essay to himself. However, what he knew and taught he learned in Egypt, as Schwaller – renowned mathematician and philosopher – noticed for himself during his 16-year study of one single Egyptian temple.

What, the reader rightly asks, does any of this have to do with David Altmejd? A lot, as it turns out – but patience is a virtue (not one of mine, I confess). After 50-odd years of seeing much great art, few great exhibitions, and being married to a painter so uncompromisingly attached to her vision that she’d rather sell nothing than change it, I had come to expect nothing from exhibitions by contemporary artists, less still that bullet-to-the-heart experience.

Bearing in mind that I am legally blind (about 7% vision in one eye), I do have to be dragged to most exhibitions these days, although I will happily stand before a single work for an hour, since the ‘good’ eye’s 7% seems to triple its abilities when confronted by a masterpiece. Thus it was with weary trepidation that I shuffled my way into Montreal’s Museum of Contemporary Art last week on my wife’s arm. She had already seen the David Altmejd exhibit once, insisting that I must see it myself. I usually trust her judgement, but I must admit that her description of it convinced me I would loathe it. My sole consolation was that the Museum closed in less than two hours – and time-limited torment, as Dante may have observed in Hell, is a blessing.

90 minutes later, my heart aglow, I was thinking they’d have to drag me out in chains if they expected me to leave this most exquisite of living dreams.

I have no intention of describing this exhibition, for any attempt to do so would fall miserably short by being forced to break up a whole into the parts it is greater than. No photograph can do it justice either. It is, quite simply, by far the greatest exhibition by a contemporary artist that I have ever seen in 50 years. It is overwhelming, a work of the highest genius, able to stand beside the ten supreme masterpieces of all time. I would urge anyone who cares about art, wherever you are, to drop whatever it is you’re doing and fly to Montreal before September 10^th, since it seems unlikely that the exhibition in its current magisterial form will ever be seen anywhere else again.

What I will say about some of the individual sculptures is that, whether through instinct or intent, they embody Egypto-Pythagorean dimensions, and not a few resonate with the same timeless potency of temple art. Indeed, the whole exhibit deserves a permanent temple of its own, for an aura of sanctity pervades the work, from its guarded angels to its muted rainbow threads. In a piece made entirely from thin gold chains, we even find the Pythagorean Egg. The pineal gland, identified by both ancient Egyptians and Vedic Indians as the physical seat of metaphysical enlightenment, appears in a number of isolated heads. But nothing in the initial rooms prepares you for the magnum opus which is to come. My poor eye was dazzled, and I shake even now, a week later, recalling a splendour of such beauty and complexity that the reactions of other people – not your usual art crowd of aesthetes by the sound of them – lent their own unique beauty to the awesome spectacle surrounding us. I thought of Proust, who could spend ten pages on Elstrir’s seemingly boring paintings, and wondered what he would make of this: it would either have killed him, or added another ten volumes to the memoir. I thought of Salvador Dali, who I once interviewed – childish, pompous, vain – whose reaction would have been envy expressed as scorn. I thought of Picasso, who I also met a few times, during the retrospective of his playful 3-dimensional works at the Tate Gallery: he would have loved this, and kissed Altmejd’s feet in respect. James Joyce – eyes as bad as mine —  would have loved it too: “Finnegans’ Wake in three dimensions,” one can almost hear him cry. By standing on the shoulders of giants, you see further than they can. David Altmejd has chosen his giants with care and discernment. He sees further than anyone else has yet managed to do. All one is left to wonder is who will be able to stand upon his mighty shoulders. Beyond all doubt, this is the greatest artist of the 21^st century. I wish I could pay for you all to see this indescribably moving, ineffably beautiful, supreme masterwork.

What Happened to Great Fimmakers?

Tags

art, Bergman, culture, David Lynch, Fellini, film, Hollywood, United States

When I was in my late teens – we’re talking fifty years ago here – there was an enormous interest in what was then known as avant-garde cinema. This essentially – though not exclusively – meant films that were not in English; and it particularly meant the works of two directors: the Swedish Ingmar Bergman, and the Italian Federico Fellini. In a manner that was somehow analogous to the progression, increasing sophistication and complexity of successive Beatles’ albums, each new film by these directors pushed the envelope of what film could do and was about. These were not films you could see only once. By now I have watched many of them over twenty or thirty times, finding, each time – the way one does with a Shakespeare play – an entirely new work of art, which speaks to you at the level of a heightened comprehension coming, presumably, with age and experience. I find this to be rarely true of anything in contemporary cinema. David Lynch is a notable exception, with works like Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive being easily comparable to the masterpieces of Bergman and Fellini. There are a few other directors – Russians, Koreans, Vietnamese – whose names and films will be largely meaningless in North America, since they are hardly ever screened in any form – unless they happen to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film; and even then they will mostly be available as DVD.

When I first came to America, in the seventies, I recall being astounded that most people with whom I spoke about cinema had no knowledge of Bergman or Fellini, less still seen their films. For a time, it seemed as if Woody Allen was the only filmmaker who recognized the genius of these men, and his clever, astute parodies of their work reveal the depth of his understanding. Allen is someone who has never made a bad film; yet he has also never made a great one. The reader may have noticed that he is, in addition, one of the very few American directors whose credit always reads Written and Directed by Woody Allen. This implies that he also gets what they call in Hollywood ‘final cut’ – in other words, he gets to decide what the finished and edited version of his own film will look like. As a writer – although I have worked, and often happily, with editors – I cannot imagine the final manuscript of a book being anything other than one of which I approve. David Lynch always has final cut of his movies – with the one exception of Dune, an unmitigated box-office disaster – and has said that allowing anyone else to determine what a finished work should be is like a painter allowing some total stranger to daub whatever he or she feels like onto a finished canvas. Being a painter himself, Lynch knows whereof he speaks. Yet this system, of denying a filmmaker the right to make his own film, is what prevails in Hollywood, which is little more than a gigantically expensive machine for churning out the kind of entertainment most people want. The budget for Big films today is equivalent to an investment in some kind of sizable industry. Advertising budgets often exceed production costs – frequently a sign of desperation over what test-screenings have proclaimed to be a likely dud. There is even a list of actors and directors organized in order of their box-office and DVD potential. One assumes that a downward movement on this list is as catastrophic an event in Beverly Hills as a bad credit-rating or school report. But when someone has emptied studio coffers of hundreds of millions of dollars into a project, I suppose you cannot be too careful.

I have my own experiences of Hollywood – which I shall save for posthumously-published memoirs, in order to avoid the litigation that seems an even larger business there than movie-making – and one experience, common enough to be safely mentioned, is that producers, who wield all the power, are incapable of reading film scripts. This is odd, since by far the least expensive way of making a bad film into a good one is at the script stage. If you cannot read a script, however, imagining it as a movie in your mind, you will have trouble conveying to the writer what further work needs to be done to the 120 stapled pages lying on your uncluttered desk. What a producer requires of the writer and/or director is a ten-minute summary of the project, ideally on the lines of what is termed ‘high-concept’ – something easily grasped by an imbecile, such as ‘my mother is a car’. Another popular query is ‘what does the poster look like?’ In other words, how facile will the marketing campaign be? I cannot imagine Bergman or Fellini subjected to such treatment, just as I cannot picture the New York literary agent presented with a manuscript of James Joyce’s Finnegans’ Wake…and then reading it, wondering who would be the optimum publisher for such an unusual work.

At least most literary agents can read, and also have some respect for writers. In Hollywood, the writer is very far down the food chain, often regarded by producers as an irritant, somehow necessary, yet soon to be replaced, like other irritants – actors, directors, etc. – by computers. Often, a script will be passed on to other annoying writers; and, as a last resort, to that most annoying of all writers: the one who wrote a very successful film. This writer will be paid a fabulous sum just to add some pizzazz to the dialogue, or maybe to concoct a few new scenes. Such writers frequently decline to have their name included in the credits – possibly from shame at tampering with a colleague’s work, or from embarrassment over being associated with a venture that nothing can save. The money was good, though. And the producer, who has no idea whether the script is good, bad, or even a little better than it was, feels he has done everything in his power to make this blueprint for a film a masterpiece, now turns his attention to attracting major stars and top-notch directors for the project. Since many agencies handle actors, directors, and producers – even the occasional writer – the ‘package’ is not infrequently put together under one roof. It is not difficult to envisage the pressure, abuse, and rampant mediocrity that such an arrangement is heir to.

It is, thus, no coincidence to find that the few auteurs – a word for which, curiously, there is no English equivalent, and meaning ‘writer-director-and-final-cutters – in American cinema find their financing and autonomy abroad. David Lynch, for example, mainly in France and Italy. Jim Jarmusch – whose Dead Man ranks as a masterpiece – apparently all over the place, from Latvia to Japan. I have no idea where the great Russian director, Tarkovsky, gets his funding, but I am certain it is not in Hollywood. A place where final-cut is rarer than a good film is not a place where cinema is regarded as an art form. It is that simple. A place where the tribulations faced by Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock are infamous is not a place where film is regarded as an art form. A place where Aldous Huxley – then the preeminent English novelist of his day – has to be interviewed regarding his suitability to adapt a Jane Austen novel is not….etc. A place where a producer insists that his writer give Romeo and Juliet a ‘happy ending’ is not…etc.

Yes, there are indie films and festivals for them, whose reviews and prizes do much to assist their transit to DVD form. Rarely are they screened by the major cinema chains. Many are good, but, I suggest, few, if any, are great. The independent cinemas that do screen them will also soon be out of business, since distributors are now insisting on a change to digital projectors, which means a cost outlay of some $200,000 for high-quality equipment – far beyond the reach of most, if not all, small cinema owners. It also means that we shall not be able to watch many films as they were supposed to be viewed, on celluloid film. You might well wonder why someone who is legally blind would give a damn about films. I do, in fact, own a digital projector, which, with its ten-foot screen, enables the 5% of vision I have in one eye to derive some pleasure from DVDs – usually, I confess, of films I saw when I could see. Subtitles are, however, impossible; and dubbed versions vary horrifically in quality.

My concern here is more with films that I do not see, rather than with those I do, or did. The extremities of violence and imbecility afflicting big box-office attractions clearly knows no bounds. The old maxim of no one ever going broke underestimating the stupidity of the public has always proved itself true. Yet filmmakers in other countries than the U.S.A. have managed a degree of restraint with the depths they are willing to plumb. As a result, Europeans, for example, have developed a far more sophisticated taste in movies than Americans. The Cannes Festival, for instance, generally awards its top prize to a film that is, by any standards, good, at the very least.

The 17^th century essayist, Francis Bacon, wrote an essay on theatre, regarding it as a means of educating the common man through entertaining him. Shakespeare’s plays – with a few exceptions, such as, surprisingly, Hamlet – were extremely popular. It is no exaggeration to say that one could acquire a reasonable, if not profound, education simply by studying Shakespeare’s works alone. The same cannot be said of the thousands of films ever produced by Hollywood.

The issue is intrinsically related to the difference between the esoteric and the allegorical. In the West, we understand allegory, which is generally fairly obvious, possibly thanks to the New Testament. When Jesus talks of a man and his vineyard, we know he is not offering agricultural advice. The esoteric is not so straightforward, proffering a wisdom or insight beyond any easy summation; indeed, often beyond the grasp of words at all, yet, nonetheless, comprehended directly by the heart or soul. This is why Shakespeare’s plays always seem new and different with every performance or reading. This is why Grimm’s Fairy Tales seem to reveal ever-deeper depths when read from seven to seventy. It is also why David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive constantly unveils levels of deep and spiritual mystery previously unnoticed; and why Bergman’s Persona or Hour of the Wolf continually present the viewer with nuances and complexities unnoticed in any number of earlier viewings. Such works do not tell us what to think, but rather that we should think. They are mindful entertainment, as opposed to the mindless variety, through which Hollywood performs society an immense disservice; indeed, one amounting to a crime against humanity.

David Lynch, who was, to me, the great hope for American cinema, seems to have abandoned traditional filmmaking altogether, initially concentrating on productions for his old website–which now seems to be entirely given over to the sale of music CD’s that he appears to be making. Inland Empire, which still baffles me, although I know it contains riches somewhere, was shot with $300 non-HD digital cameras, with no formal screenplay. Presumably Laura Dern comes a little more pricey than that. But, Mr. Lynch, I think you have proved conclusively that a film does need a script – but I may be missing the point.

The avant-garde in film probably began with things like Le Chien Andalou, a collaboration between Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, and containing what I always considered the most terrifying sequence in any film – a razor blade slicing into a human eyeball – even before I personally witnessed it during the five operations on my own eyes (yes, friends, you cannot have anaesthesia during such operations – a fact they omit to tell you the first time – which means you actually see the scalpel coming down). The esoteric developed more slowly and later, however, reaching its apogee with Bergman, whose only film in English is The Serpent’s Egg, is still the most profound statement on the Nazi Holocaust ever made. A little like Lynch, Bergman stopped making films later in life, preferring to direct for the stage and opera instead. He had done all he could do with film. I sincerely hope that David Lynch does not abandon us in such a fashion quite yet. If he does, it has still been an exhilarating ride. Even Dune is not as bad as he imagines it is – although one wonders where the Director’s Cut has got to.

 

A FILM I REMEMBER AS REMARKABLE YET HAVE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO FIND IN DVD:

Herostratus : written and directed by Don Levy. It was a contemporary update on the legend of Herostratus, who burned down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in order to gain fame. Ironically, the Judges decreed that his name be struck from all records, as if he had never existed. He is only remembered because Alexander the Great invaded on that same day. This director also made another film called The Experiencer, which I never managed to see. I believe that Levy taught film at the London Royal College of Art, or somewhere equally prestigious. Any information on him and his films would be most gratefully received.

 

With love, as always, Paul William Roberts.