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 o 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.

The list of works which might have been great

One of the films which Michael Powell tried to develop, after Peeping Tom made him notorious to the point of being unemployable, was a film that I would have loved to have seen: a version of The Tempest starring James Mason as Prospero and the young Helen Mirren as Miranda (’such creatures’). Since reading about it, I’ve had half an eye for similar unmade possible masterpieces, but with little success.

On holiday, I stumbled across another one. According to Jenny Uglow’s wonderful biography, the Newcastle wood engraver Thomas Bewick, he of British Birds fame, turned down the chance to cut a set of engravings to Robert Burns’ new poem Tam O’Shanter because he was too busy.

The unmade might-have-been masterpieces in your notebook?

Cycling and painting

If you have seen my futures blog, the next wave, you may know that I am a fan of cycling and cycle racing. So imagine my surprise when reading an obituary of a painter I didn’t know of, Simon Black, to see it illustrated by a wonderful picture of a local race meeting.

There’s a description at the gallery that represents his work of how the picture came about:

“This was commissioned by a collector of mine with a particular interest in cycle racing. The subject was a gift to me in terms of its inherent dynamism and indeed its bizarre qualities. After observing and photographing a race, my desire was to encapsulate a number of different facets of the activity in the painting. I enjoyed the details, costumes and colours of the cyclists and set them against an expansive perspective leading to the horizon to accentuate the drama and dynamics of the event. The composition and size of the canvas was particularly inspired by Uccello’s Battle of San Romano (National Gallery).”

Worth clicking through to the Uccello picture to see what he means by this, by the way.

Picasso’s paradox

A quote from Picasso:

“Art is a lie that tells the truth”.