Frink’s men

The works I know of by the British sculptor and printmaker Elisabeth Frink were her birds and animals, which always seems tough and scrawny, like the battered animal that eventually triumphs in Edwin Muir’s poem The Combat. Her horses, as well. But Woking’s Lightbox Gallery has a retrospective of her work (it runs through to Sunday 21st April) that marks the 20th anniversary of her death, and I realised that I’d pretty much missed the second half of her career. The most striking sculptures in the exhibition are her large male figures (the ones pictures are in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park); one of the rooms has four of them walking abreast across the gallery floor, which certainly catches the eye. a fifth figure is seated at the side, looking on. Why so striking? Partly just their scale, for they are larger than humans, perhaps seven-and-a-half feet tall rather than six, and also their mass; they are recognisably human but somehow more than human as well. Frink said she preferred sculpting the bodies of men to women because she found women’s bodies to be somehow formless – although she used this lack of form to her advantage in her commission for Salisbury Cathedral (Click on the image to enlarge).

Frink was a supporter of the charity Amnesty International, which works on behalf of prisoners of conscience, and her head and shoulders bust Goggle Head (below) uses mass in a more sinister way, concealing the face of a man behind goggles in a way that reminds me why aviator glasses are often used by people who wish to intimidate. The contrast with the quizzical and slightly vulnerable faces of the Walking sculptures at the top of this post is striking.

And the Lightbox - also the home to the Ingram Collection of modern British art – is free to enter, a welcome feature in these austere times. 

images from top to bottom: Top, from Martin Goodman’s blog So You Want To Be.A Writer; the Walking Madonna is from the blog Healing This Wounded Earth; Goggle Head is from the Tate. All are used with thanks.

Exciting the imagination

I don’t like the Royal Academy – it’s snooty, uptight, over-sponsored yet still expensive – but despite this I went this week to see their exhibition, Building the Revolution, about the art and buildings of the Russian revolutionary era, and in particular to see the scaled-down version of Tatlin’s Tower in the (sponsored) courtyard. The Tower, famously, was only an idea, and never built, but it was intended to be both a monument to the revolution and also a working building, the home of the Third International, the organisation to promote communism internationally. As a blog at RIBA notes, it would have

had four rotating elements inside (all rotating at different speeds) to house an information centre, meeting rooms, offices and a radio transmitter which all would have served as the headquarters of the Third International.

The scale version built for the Royal Academy is 10 metres high, a 1:40 scale model of a Tower that Tatlin imagined would be 400 metres high, taller than the Eiffel Tower, spanning the river Neva in St. Petersburg, as a picture at the RA conveyed. (The image here is from a 1999 CGI reconstruction by the Japanese artist Takehiko Nagakura.) In a Russia wracked by war and then civil war the chances of securing enough steel to build it were less than zero. The mechanics were complex too; the engineers who made a reconstruction for the Hayward in 1971 had to work them out from first principles, since there are few records of the original design. Indeed, had it been built, it’s likely that the mechanics of the building would have failed – the Russian constructivists quite often found that their ideas outstripped the limits of what was then technically possible.

In Tatlin’s lifetime, his Tower was realised only as a 15 foot high scale model, which was shown in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The picture of this model, and the one above, come from John Coulthart’s { feuilleton } blog. Even so, it fired the enthusiasm of his contemporaries: Viktor Shklovsky, the critic, reported on seeing Tatlin’s model, ‘The monument is made of iron, glass and revolution.’

Indeed, the design was inherently political. As Catherine Merridale writes:

The marvels of technology were one theme, but movement was another … as well as reflecting the dynamism of the dawning age, the building could double as a slow-moving calendar and clock, perhaps even as a means of measuring stars and space. In its restlessness and transparency, the building embodied the democratic challenge to authoritarian power that Tatlin so welcomed.

Tatlin’s unbuilt Monument has fascinated artists, critics, and maybe utopians ever since he designed it: I’m writing about it here more than 90 years after he conceived it, which I wouldn’t be had it actually been built. I was at an exhibition in Estonia earlier this year at which the artist Petko Dourmana had constructed an augmented reality piece in which the Tower was projected onto the cityscape of Tallinn. In some ways, such a virtual representation seems a fittingly democratic way to see Tatlin’s Monument. The purpose of the unbuilt building, after all, is to excite the imagination.

The picture at the top of this post was taken by Andrew Curry. It is published here under a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved.

Battle of Britain Day

My father in law, Denis Robinson, was a Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain, so its dates have a particular family resonance. I wanted to mark the 70th anniversary of the decisive day – on the 15th September – with Paul Nash’s famous painting, which seems to capture the intensity of the Luftwaffe’s last great assault, a day when, at one time, all of the RAF’s 176 serviceable planes were in the air. In real life, it’s a large canvas, with lots of detail; well worth visiting the Imperial War Museum to see.

Denis is best-known amongst Battle of Britain historians for the photograph he took of his own plane, nose down in a field outside Wareham, after he’d crash-landed it after being hit by a German plane. Given that the great fear of all pilots was that the plane would catch fire, and explode, I’ve always admired his presence of mind in taking the photograph. Afterwards he walked to a local pub where he was given brandy. The BBC recently interviewed him about his experiences in the Battle of Britain (scroll down for the audio).

‘The Battle of Britain’, by Paul Nash’ hangs in the collection of the Imperial War Museum, and I have used their image of it with thanks.

Breaking the rules

One of the rules of the Guggenheim in Bilbao is ‘no photography’, at least anywhere inside. I can understand rules about not photographing paintings – flash damages pigment colour – but the design of the Guggenheim, with its curves and spaces, creates interesting angles that people want to photograph.

The result is a kind of guerilla photography, in which visitors drift into spaces, look around them, click furtively, then move away before one of the officious women attendants sees you and reminds you about the rule. (They are all women, apparently engaged in some strange social experiment about the nature of public authority inspired, perhaps, by Prisoner Cell Block H.)

The picture at the top? An illicit photograph, taken by me, of a pattern on a wall thrown by a skylight. And published here under a Creative Commons licence.

The Matter of Time

What hits you first about ‘The Matter of Time’, Richard Serra’s permanent installation at the Guggenheim, is its breathtaking scale. There are eight pieces, all rolled from sheet steel, each around four metres high and dozens of metres long. What hits you second is its sheer playfulness; there’s not a vertical line in the place, its all angled curves, and we are so used to vertilinear world that this is immediately disorienting. Some of the pieces invite you in; others invite you to pass through them, and I can’t remember the last time I saw so many kids having so much fun in an art gallery.

The other aspect of the work is that, at least in part, Serra seems to have conceived it as a sculptor’s rebuke to Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim’s design, and the sculptural claims made about his building. (This may be personal; according to Robert Hughes, there’s “considerable animosity” between the two men.) As you listen to Serra on the gallery’s audio guide, he explains that architects who describe their curved exteriors as sculptural are merely using the form as ornament, because the curvilinear shapes sit on a rectilinear frame. It is, he says dismissively, ‘surface as scene-making’.

The image at the top of this post is a public domain picture from wikimedia.org, and is used with thanks.

Technique as resistance

Spare a thought for Aleksandr Rodchenko, who spent a decade or more as a leading light in the Constructivist school of painting. But he then decided that being a constructivist and a painter was incompatible; art needed to have a material base. He turned instead to photography, design,montage, even advertising. But what to do with all of those paintings? According to the current exhibition at the Tate:

When I look at the numbers of paintings I have painted, I sometimes wonder what I shall do with them. It would be a shame to burn them, there is over ten years of work in them. But they are as useless as a church. They serve no purpose whatsoever. [1927, Novyi LEF No. 6]

There are parallels between Rodchenko and Shostakovich. Both were leading innovators in the post-revolutionary period; both fell foul of Stalin’s ‘Soviet Realism’ period, and had to make amends for their previous ‘formalism’ during the ’30s; but both escaped the camps and outlived the Great Leader.

What’s also interesting is that although at first sight their more ‘realist-friendly’ work appears to be a retraction, it is not exactly as it seems. In Shostakovich’s case the 5th Symphony was a tuneful contrast to the more challenging 4th (criticised in Pravda, apparently on Stalin’s direct authority). Rodchenko, for his part, ended up photographing the forced labourers building the White Sea canal.

Both have been criticised for this (it’s customary for Rodchenko to be accused of ‘propaganda’, usually by people who haven’t lived through having friends and relatives sent to camps or killed in well-organised state terror). In The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross explains that the 5th is full of musical clues: quotations from and references to the 4th which would pass by the untrained listener, references to a previous setting of a Pushkin poem about the legacy of the artist, and “an apparent allusion to Mussorgsky’s Boris Gudunov, the ultimate pageant of Russian suffering.”

For his part, Rodchenko’s canal pictures, at least to this viewer, do emphasise scale,  but they are also framed to emphasise distance and indicate power relationships within the shot. At the very least, they make the picture ambiguous, as in the example below. Both men used their mastery of technique as a form of resistance, inscribing clues – for those who could read them – for later generations.

The photograph of the Rodchenko painting, ‘Suprematist Composition’, 1918, at the top of this post comes from Rodchenko pages on Art Experts Inc. There’s a huge Shostakovich resource here.

Steam and speed

I came across a quote in the Blaenavon World Heritage Centre which captured a passenger’s first experience of train travel:

Everything is near, everything is immediate – time, distance, and delay are abolished.

Of course, it conjures immediately Turner’s famous painting, and it happens that I went to look at Rain Steam and Speed in the National Gallery a few months ago. Reproductions, by their nature, emphasise the rain and the steam. The picture itself has much detail of the world that is about to disappear under the onslaught of speed; the boat on the river, the figures below, in the fields, the hare on the bridge trying to escape the train. (There’s a charming animation of this by Kathryn Miller from the hare’s perspective at the National Gallery site).

It’s hard to see this detail and not to be reminded of Auden’s poem Musee des Beaux Arts:

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

But there’s an important inversion. In Auden, and in the Breughel painting which inspired it, the ploughman (and the passengers on the ship, a couple of lines later), can get on with their lives even as Icarus falls out of the sky. In Turner’s painting, there is no turning back from the age of speed. Everyone’s life will be affected, sooner or later, as distance and delay are abolished.

The reproduction of Rain Steam and Speed is from The National Gallery.

The videographer Jim Clark has made a ‘virtual video’ of Auden reading Musee des Beaux Arts, which can be found here.

Burrowing on the underground

I’ve always liked artists who play with texts and typography – as Tom Phillips did in his monumental A Humument. The picture at the top of the post is of a ‘found fragment’ by the artist Ian Kiaer, one of the hundred works commissioned by London Underground last year to mark its centenary of commissioning original posters from artists.

In case the text is hard to read on the image, it runs like this:

Meanwhile brought back     to the subterranean action of    economic facts, the “old mole” revolution   hollows out chambers in decomposed soil repugnant to the delicate   nose of the utopians.

Swimming against the stream

Terry Fontaine, Against The Flow

One of the reasons I started this blog was because I kept coming across scraps of paper with quotes I’d scribbled on them, and I thought it might be a good way to be able to find them more easily. I’ve just come across a few more:

“We must always swim against the current towards the source of the river, because even if you never reach the source, you will at least train your muscles.” (Zbigniew Herbert)

“The matter for the artist is not to describe what he sees but what he feels” (Baudelaire)

“It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee house for the voice of a kingdom” (Jonathan  Swift)

The painting at the top of thos post is by the representative abstract expressionist artist Terry Fontaine. More on his website.

Robert Capa’s ‘Falling Soldier’

The photograph is one of the classics, and not just of war photography; the apparent death of an unknown and unnamed Republican soldier during the Spanish civil war. Geoff Dyer, probably Britain’s finest cultural essayist, returns to the picture in a longer essay prompted by several simultaneous exhibitions on war photography in London:

Robert Capa’s 1936 photograph The Falling Soldier shows the moment of a republican soldier’s death in the Spanish civil war. Or so it was claimed and widely believed. Then doubts began to circulate. Perhaps the picture was posed, fake. Capa’s biographer, Richard Whelan, has gnawed away at this issue for decades. The explanation put forward by him in the catalogue accompanying an exhibition at the Barbican is that, during an informal truce, a group of soldiers simulated a bit of a battle charge for the benefit of the camera. Fearing a genuine attack was being mounted, enemy troops opened fire. The trigger was pulled, the camera clicked simultaneously – and a man died. Make-believe became tragically real.

Whelan’s explanation is unlikely to be improved on, but it is worth considering something that David Simon, in his book Homicide, learned from ballistics experts: that “no bullet short of an artillery shell is capable of knocking a human being off his feet”. This is not to say that people don’t fall down when shot. They do, but only as “a learned response. People who have been shot believe they are supposed to fall immediately to the ground, so they do.”

This adds an unexpected twist to the moment of simulation, but there is a larger irony too: the more one learns about the circumstances in which Capa made his famous photograph, the less those circumstances matter. Even if it is now established that this is what happened, it is too late. Over the years, the photograph has come adrift from those circumstances, floated clear of what it depicts. One of the standard ideas about photography is that it is strong as evidence, weak in meaning. The Falling Soldier shows this formulation in reverse: it has become more and more questionable as evidence, but its meaning has continued to deepen. Somehow the image is able to accommodate all the different accounts of its making, accounts that have themselves assumed the quality of after-the-fact interpretation. Ultimately, the only proof it offers is of something that has long been accepted – that photographs can be as mysterious as works of art.

[Update: There's a long post at Ethical Martini on the Falling Soldier photograph and its history and controversies.]

Elsewhere Dyer reminds us that the ‘shake’ on Capa’s famous D-Day pictures wasn’t camera shake but a mistake in the lab, but this only enhanced Capa’s reputation. [Update 2: More on this at PICTURAPixel]. But then, Capa said he preferred “a strong image that is technically bad than vice versa”.

The copy of the picture above is taken from the Dasein, Red Elephant blog, which has a post exploring the photo’s provenance.