web analytics

Tag: Peter Sellars

Matthew Barney in Manchester

In April 2003 I was approached by a friend of mine who is now on the editorial board of The Herald of Europe (“Вестник Европы”), to do a few translations for their forthcoming first English issue, from Russian into English. I translated a lot of texts, but then it took them a year and a half to actually publish the journal. By September 2004 the majority of texts became outdated, except one, and that was a review of Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle by Alexander Parschikov (it is now available online at The Herald‘s website, slightly edited for publication and, alas, uncredited, like all translations). It was a very deep review, as you would consider any review that references Samuel Beckett in the very first paragraph. Back then it was the first time ever that I read the name of Barney, and my natural curiosity was helped by detailed descriptions of all five films.

This, for instance, is what you could see in The Cremaster 1:

One of the protagonists finds herself under a table that is covered with a white cloth. She wears a skimpy light silk dress and dances slowly around the hollow table-leg, lying on her back. Then she makes a hole in the tablecloth with her hairpin, and surreptitiously steals some grapes, which magically roll through her body and pour onto the floor through a hole in the high heel of her mule. When they reach the floor, the grapes link together like necklaces and form regular, symmetrical, mirror-image patterns. The figures they form look like female genitalia, and replicating this, the chains of girls in the football stadium arrange themselves into identical biomorphic shapes. The film has no beginning and no resolution: the balloons will never land, the protagonist will go on building new figures out of the grapes, stretching slowly like a mollusc as she looks for a lipstick; the air hostesses will not break their silence, and the smiles of the girls in the stadium are frozen for eternity. Perhaps, the protagonist, hidden from these sculpture-like air hostesses, expresses their subconscious desires, their biological rhythms and their suppressed eroticism.

The reviewer concluded that

…Barney takes his characters from the Pantheon of digital images that represent nothing but their own electronic essence. In his works we find an epic uniformity, a never-ending movement towards some objective. Nothing is clearly defined or attainable; rather there are opal lights reflecting on surfaces, high-molecular materials, and artificial or natural extensions of the human body. This leaves only one question. Where do these extensions take us?

The Manchester audience, especially that part of it which is better versed in Barney’s art than either me or Richard Fair, probably already knows a very detailed and long-winded answer because Matthew Barney’s genius has now marked Manchester with its presence. All in all, Manchester has done incredibly well for its first International Festival. We had Chopin’s music at the Museum of Science and Industry; Carlos Acosta is performing both classical and modern ballet numbers at The Lowry; jazz musicians entertained everyone who would drop in to the Festival Pavilion; we had a maverick Peter Sellars uttering age-old paradigms at the Guardian Debate; and eventually we had Guardian of the Veil, complete with urinating women and an impotent bull. And all this is against the backdrop of Barbra Streisand at the M.E.N. Arena on Tuesday and the forthcoming final performance of The Tempest at the Royal Exchange Theatre.

On Thursday night Deansgate was swarming with people in all sorts of evening frocks going to see Il Tempo del Postino. I haven’t been to the performance, but the headline “What if an exhibition was not about occupying space but about occupying time? Can contemporary art be interpreted outside of a traditional gallery environment?” doesn’t strike me as novel. André Malraux famously called on creating a “museum without walls”, which in simple terms means a museum in your head where you can wander at your leisure. Which means, in turn, that you’re occupying time while contemplating and interpreting art outside any kind of physical space.

And yet it looks like the show has gone the extra mile because Richard Fair says in his review:

I knew before the piece – Guardian of the Veil by Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler – that I was in for something different. Something challenging. Apart from what was going on stage, all around the auditorium were actors dressed in IRA-type uniform brandishing ukuleles. Let me tell you, if that was the chosen weapon of the paramilitary group in the seventies the troubles would have ended a long time ago.

Back to the question then: do art and politics mix? Should art and politics mix? Or should we simply wander from an excited bull to a guy with a dog strapped to his head, simply recognising that their nature as images and wandering off, without ever finding an idea behind an image?

Sometimes I feel that contemporary art is a mere, yet constant, wandering-off.

Read more:

Richard Fair, Manchester International Festival: Day 16 (BBC Manchester Blog).
Manchester International Festival: Il Tempo del Postino (Mancubist.co.uk).

Thanks for reading and visiting! You can connect with me on Google+ @ https://plus.google.com/108262661313082363581/posts/. Julia x

The Politics of Art: After the Debate

As I said in the previous post, I tend to dislike generic questions. With regards to this debate, as a lady in the audience pointed out, both we and speakers seemed to have confounded the verbs. Whilst the name of the debate was ‘do art and politics mix?‘, the debate itself would better go under the question ‘should art and politics mix?‘ The nuance is pivotal: although the connection between art and politics is irrefutable, the problem that often perplexes us has to do with the limits of this connection, rather than with the very fact of such.

I decided to record the debate on a rather simple digital recorder, and I’m glad that I did. The panel consisted of Ruth Mackenzie (Chair and the Festival Director), Peter Sellars, Jonathan Harris, Heather Ackroyd, and David Aaronovitch. First, Jonathan Harris attempted to illustrate that great works of art, although originating in a certain political context, nevertheless go beyond this context and may ultimately lose any connection with it. This brought to my mind a Chinese aphorism about poetry that I quoted previously in the blog: that poetry, when conveying a feeling through a “thing”, should be precise about the “thing” and reticent about the feeling, so that through the experience of the thing the feeling could be captured.

Heather Ackroyd spoke, first, about etymology and definitions of politics, and state, and art (not always convincingly, in my opinion), and then moved on to give various examples of modern art reacting to and challenging political regimes. David Aaronovitch, who came next, honestly admitted that, while listening to Jonathan and Heather, he forgot to think of what to say for himself. In the light of which he started by taking an issue with Heather and continued and ended up speaking more about politics than any kind of art. And then came Peter Sellars and, thankfully, saved the debate by getting back to where it all started: the crossroads of art and politics.

It is here that I can utter that I’m very happy to have recorded the debate because Peter’s talk is a great example of public talk. Someone may say this is no wonder that a famous theatre director should also be a good speaker, but, as we all know, talents for art and for speech don’t always complement each other.

It was Sellars who touched on the question I raised at the end of my previous post. Art and politics always mix, but to what end? A few people told me I was a dreamer, which I accept because it is true. I’ve always believed in peace, so for me the goal of both art and politics is to promote peace by the means of peace. Again, previously on this blog I quoted Picasso who said that ‘painting is the instrument of war‘. This phrase, however, shouldn’t be construed as Picasso’s advocating the war: Guernica is one of the most powerful anti-war statements in the world’s art. Rather Picasso was acknowledging the fact that art could be and was being used to wage and propagate wars. Yet he was also arguing that, since an artist is a political being, whose biggest political act consists of the ability to take interest in another human being, then painting, as art in general, was the instrument of bringing peace.

This theme of an artist’s empathy lies at the heart of Sellars’s talk. To accord a human status to a human being is a great political act, and art therefore teaches people the skill of inclusiveness, the ability to ‘get outside of your head‘ and to put yourself in other people’s shoes. It is also art, not the media, that provides a new level of information, as ‘uninformed democracy is worse than a tyranny‘. The lack of information and empathy leads to violence which is ‘the collapse of communication‘, the ultimate manifestation of the lack of knowledge and understanding. This is the theme that rises in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant: at certain point during the film you realise that the tragedy that is about to happen has to do not only with the “dangerous minds”, but with the conflict between craving for inclusion and alienation. In Sellars’s words, today’s violence originates from one’s desire to ignore and another’s desire to be acknowledged, whereby the latter plants a bomb in the former’s car.

War is the consequence of this lack of communication and violence, and the purpose of art is to teach us see both reasons and consequences of violence. There is only one way to prevent wars, and that is through deepening people’s listening and looking capacities. At the same time, art continues to be a category beyond all categories, a land that doesn’t exist, and it’s this non-existence that draws us to art. In this, art is akin to culture, and culture, in the words of J.-P. Sartre, neither saves, nor justifies anyone; but it is a man’s creation, a critical mirror in which he can see and recognise himself (The Words).

Ultimately, man always wants to possess something he doesn’t have, and that is Beauty. The myth of Pygmalion is about the fundamental craving for the Beautiful, it is about the desire to have that which is unattainable and yet so close. The pleasure of finding and experiencing the Beautiful is what we should read in the well-known ‘beauty saves the world‘. It is not Beauty as such that saves the world, it is our full and open experience of it that does. Sellars utters this at the end of his talk: ‘world is going to be transformed through pleasure, not through accusation‘.

I suppose it is easy to see, whose side I am on, which I personally acknowledged to Peter. I uploaded his speech, and I still apologise for some technical imperfections and coughing sounds – there is little you can do at the live event of this kind. But I feel that we need speakers like Peter Sellars who encourages the new generation of artists to complexify things exactly when politicians are simplifying them. He calls on the artists’ sophistication, humility and empathy, to bring deeper understanding and pleasure to people. Listen to his talk, think about it, pass it on. For my part, this was one of the occasions when I was thrilled and proud to be living in Manchester.

error: Sorry, no copying !!