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Modernism as ellipsis: Saramago and the cultural turn in Lusophone literature
To the University last night, to see a show by Mandy Romero, a man whose unconvincing demonstration of being a woman would be helped if he learned to walk like a woman rather than stooping forward with the clumping walk of a stevedore.
It was called Stevenage. I was attracted to the fact that someone else is fascinated by New Towns, by town planning, centralism, the "we know what's best" attitude of planners who would conduct others into New Towns then go home to live in polished tiled Victorian houses with cremeware vases of imported tulips on the windowsill.
We went into the theatre and wandered around a big black box, looking at what looked like original scale models of the first New Town in England.
Mandy, wandering about in cerise high heels and a mini-dress, delivered a dense but very interesting text, interspersed with extracts from 70s "naughty" films, starring the show's protatoginst Barry Evans -- Church Rave and The Girls amongst them -- and bits of John Clare's arresting poetry, on slides.
Both Evans and Clare had turned the act of escape into art, prompted by certain places in present day Leicestershire and Hertfordshire. With her slightly garbled, wet-mouthed diction, I wish she could have slowed down to let us drink in Walter Benjamin's lines (from memory), "Memory is not the method by which to discover the past. It is the medium in which it is contained, like interred bodies."
Today, as Roger Hill, he led an "artists' workshop". We had to talk to our partners, trying to elict the words "I'd never thought about that until now". An impossible task, but its very impossibility was the point. We walked about in the space and were asked to practice a movement which would convey in five seconds a pivotal moment of our past. Everyone was too embarrassed to do it with much gusto.
It ended. Roger gathered up his things, looking behind him, ostensibly for his belongings. "Well I'm going for lunch," he said. "Would you like any company?" I said. I extended the offer to a former MA colleague of mine. She didn't know how to say no. "Well...I've got lots of emails." We went for the kind of poor food that counts for lunch in modern England, tuna "mayo" sandwich and chips, and talked in a way that didn't really get beyond self-affirming re-statements of common political ground. I was hoping to get on to sex more.
In the evening, I met Neil and Keith. Keith produced a most interesting book he'd found, written by Dickens' wife, of the recipes she'd recorded from their many nights of entertaining. Neil wants me to take part in a night of readings of Dickens' writings, from the latter's various lives as a journalist, novelist, and recorder of American mores.
It will be an evening for twenty-five invited people in the Cathedral's sumptuous Bishop's Dining Room, with a supper using Kate Dickens's recipes. For some reason I will never fathom, Neil, a gay man, is a practising Catholic. It provides a theological cloak for his occasional misogyny, but he mentally brackets out the child abuse and the homophobia.
Went round to see Kirsty and the girls, the latter of whom proudly presented me with a filled up double sided page of sponsors for Sport Relief, in which they are going to run for three miles in a three-legged race. Lots of wine, all of us talking at the TV, trying to persuade some gullible woman not marry a selfish ignorant man who ignored all of her wishes for the wedding. But it makes me uneasy to join in with the way that popular television invites us to look down at the practices of people who are presented as more stupid than us. Even when they are.
9 comments
Right.
Jonathan says I’m a bit forthright (thanks Jonathan, call a manually powered earth moving tool a f*cking spade I always say), so here goes.
I know every individual has her/his/it’s own personal idiosyncrasies, but for f*ck’s sake the evening of “intellectual entertainment” you just described sounds as enjoyable as having my piles treated with a reverse augering, red hot, pneumatic powered drill.
And then the “Artists” workshop.
Artist?
What f*cking artist?
A model of a town?
Interactive debate about sweet f*ck all?
I agree with Ben Elton when he described an artisan’s reaction to being asked to “interact’ with a performer on stage.
“Do I ask you to come down to my work to polish my Lathe?
“I’ve paid my f*cking money”
“I’m tired from having done real work all day”
*F*cking entertain me you c*nt”
A breath of sweet reason in a pseuds-polluted world.
And what’s the f*cking point of a reading for f*ck’s sake.
CHRIST ON A F*CKING CROSS
Most of us learned to read without moving our f*cking lips at Primary school.
Do they need help?
You’ve got some lovely girls; always willing to help others.
Sorry about the rant, I’m just pissed off after a day at school when our younger students went completely feral.
So forthright you balk at the word “fuck".
I hardly see that I need to defend my artistic choices against anyone who likes the kind of lurid sunset beach scenes which look like rejected Hawkwind album covers, but just to try to try to illuminate a little corner of your benighted world…
I did enjoy it. Why would I spend money on it otherwise? 7 quid is a far bigger cost to me than it is to you.
Romero is the latest in a long line of people, from Guy Debord to Iain Sinclair, who have been fascinated by what Debord called psychogeography, or “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.”
You do this too - you have an emotional, minutely varied response to your sense of place. Everyone’s doing it, even if they don’t always articulate it or turn it into art.
Iain Sinclair retraced the route that John Clare (one of the greatest English poets of the C19th - not that he will occupy much space on your shelves I dare say) took when he escaped from the mental asylum in which was incarcerated. The show made good use of his material to connect it with the utopian visions that New Town planners offered people who wanted to “escape” from London.
As a performer myself, I wanted to take part in the workshop to learn from someone more experienced than me, about turning this kind of intense reaction to place into art.
For a teacher, you can be very closed minded sometimes. I’m not suprised you spent most of your life obeying orders and now you’re spending it giving them. Art’s not like that. Yes, it’s a bit of a wanky term, but “interactive” is what we do.
Only time I’ve really been to Stevenage has been going to and from Knebworth - seems a very hostile place to me… both architecturally and people wise. The 60s and 70s weren’t the best times for building communities in Britain… again both architecturally and people wise
Well according to Romero, it’s followed the familiar pattern of these New Towns - disrepair and rising crime through poor architecture, loss of employment (Kodak and Bowater Scott moved out in the same week in the late 70s, leaving a million feet of empty industrial space and hundreds of families without a breadwinner), and a breaking up of the social bonds that the first cohort of residents experienced.
I’m quite happy here, in my polished tiled Victorian terrace, in a city which received its market charter in 1139.
That’s a bad dress on Mandy. Or is that supposed to be ironic? I can never tell.
“…rejected Hawkwind album covers…” = LOL!
We have a bunch of gay Republicans here in the U.S. They belong to the same political party who would deny them all of their rights and hide them under a rock, were it possible. It’s like identifying with your tormentors.
Actually I’ve still got posters by Rodger Dean from Yes and Osibisa on the walls, but no Hawkwind, rejects or not.
I’m not trying to attack you looby, nor your artistic integrity, but there’s a whole pile of stuff out there that calls itself “Art” but really isn’t.
Isn’t it the purpose of Art to communicate?
Whether it’s ideas or emotions, some level of communication is required, and quite often the message is being lost in the medium.
Your quite correct about my bookshelves.
Not one volume of poetry on them.
Wait.
I’m incorrect.
I’ve got two.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses
and
Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes.
And yes, I know I’m a bit opinionated and heirarchical, but I think I’m quite open minded, seeing I was brought up in a Scottish Presbetryan household. (That’s why the asterisks in the f*ck etc. I can still feel the pain and taste the soap from all those years ago)
You’re right about the acres of pretentious bilge spoken about art. But this particular art work *did* speak to me, for the reasons I’ve given.
I think it was old Aristotle who said the purpose of art was not to distance and alienate or rarify things, but to intensify and illuminate life. I think he was right but I guess everyones idea of ‘illumination’ differs.
Re: popular television, your criticism is also true of ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding’. It completely incences me; it’s a form of patronising sanctimonious supposedly ironic middle class voyeurism. It really makes my blood boil. F ucking boil even. Of course there’s always the ‘OFF’ button, but, well, sometimes I like to rant.
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