web analytics

Happy New Year!

And so, I’ve been in Llandudno since December 28th, and at this very moment I’m sitting at my hotel’s lounge, occasionally looking at Great Orme and the lights along the Promenade, but mostly typing and sending greeting letters and messages to my Russian friends. I spent a wonderful weekend, strolling up and down the streets in Llandudno, but for some reason I found easier this time to jot down my impressions in Russian first. Whereas with my trip to Carmarthen in June I first wrote my memories in English and then in Russian, this time Llandudno Diaries are first appearing in my Russian LiveJournal.So, the turn of the year is the time to look back and to see if one has kept up with their yesteryear’s resolutions. Last year I said I’d be looking to find more ways to express my creativity – and indeed I learnt to make slide shows and eventually accompanied the latest of them with my own narration. I wanted to keep writing great content – and this apparently has happened, as by the end of 2007 I have had my blog written about, shortlisted at the Manchester Blog Awards, and now included in the Open Directory Project. I wanted to travel, and I’ll say a few words on the subject later on, but in general this has been achieved, as well. I wanted to keep on meeting interesting and talented people and to continue to know those whom I already knew. This has happened, too, and I can particularly single out one such person who is fascinating enough to be lurking here and there on this blog, when it is appropriate. I’ve been following this person’s work for a number of years, this year I had the chance to attend a meeting with them, and what doesn’t stop amazing me is the amount of new things this person can tell every time they give an interview. I can only say that I’m looking forward to more in 2008.

One thing that I never did was visiting Moscow. Needless to say, this becomes my 2008 resolution #1. It must really be astonishing – and quite frustrating, too – that every time I say to myself “I must go to Moscow” something creeps up and I have to postpone the visit. I think the surest way to get me back to my native shores is by buying myself a ticket, as that way I’ll feel obliged to just drop everything and go.

So, in 2008 I resolve to continue with both blogs, hopefully by making the content more wide-ranging, since now I can produce short slide shows and animated stories. I’m planning to travel more. I don’t mention that I’m planning to write more, as this is what I’ve always been doing.

I’m looking forward to more inspiring meetings, trips, events. I hope that the inspiration I get from other people’s work, from nature etc. will be the inspiration for you. Which is where I want to thank once again all of you who have been leaving comments and emailing me to thank me for blogging and to encourage me to keep on with my enterprise. And I would like to thank everyone who wrote about and linked to me this year, this was a joy, a surprise, and always an honour to me.

Two things I can note about 2007. First concerns the travels: it’s all been about Wales. In June I went to South Wales; in December I went to North Wales. I don’t know what it tells (if it’s supposed to tell anything), but so it goes. The second thing concerns music. On a couple of my profiles elsewhere I noted my huge interest in music, since I love singing. 2007 has been entirely Italian in this respect. It started with me making great friends with an Italian colleague who began to send me YouTube links to such artists as Mia Martini, Mina Mazzini, Lucio Battisti. It continued with me going on my own for some time, when I discovered Patti Pravo. And it culminated in my making friends via LiveJournal with a few Russian aficionados of Italian music of the 1960-70s. I’m yet to see where it all takes me in 2008, but the start has been compelling enough to carry on in this direction.

As my circle of friends and acquaintances has grown considerably this year, I shall not repeat the last year’s personalised greetings. Instead I shall wish all of you, my friends, readers and occasional visitors, a very Happy New Year! Let all of you know that you are very dear to me for all your talent, wisdom, creativity, sense of humour and the simple fact that you are!

I should not forget to list the Top Ten posts in Los Cuadernos de Julia, as seen from Google Anaylitcs profile:

Barbra Streisand in Manchester

Lonely Shepherd (James Last and Georghe Zamfir)

Sonnet no. 3 (Edna St Vincent Millay)

My Fair Cabbage

If I Could Tell You (W. H. Auden)

Histoire de Melody Nelson (Serge Gainsbourg)

O Felici Occhi Miei, Arcadelt, and the Lute-Player

Women and Beauty in Art

Love Me (Michel Polnareff)

Matthew Barney in Manchester

I should note that this is the stats for the entire year, and they don’t entirely correspond to the most recent interest.

Last but not least, to carry on with the last year’s tradition of uploading some Russian New Year postcards, here is something many of you will no doubt cherish. This postcard comes from my family archive, it says Happy New Year in Russian (which is “s nOvym gOdom”) and – wait for this – is 100 years old!

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).

error: Sorry, no copying !!