George Shaw

I don’t often write about art, partly because I’m totally absent any knowledge of the technical side of painting or photography, and have only a very rudimentary knowledge of art history. So the potential for making either a stonking great howler, or a waffling baffling cloud of guff, is huge. At the same time (perhaps because of that lack of knowledge), I’ve always found at a base level, writing about a visual art (or music) a very difficult thing to do simply in the sense that it is like undertaking complex algebraic equations or speaking fluently a language I’ve never studied. How do you describe a picture, or a sound, in words?

A few weeks ago I went to see two exhibitions of works by George Shaw at the BALTIC, and the images in the larger show have lingered with me in the weeks since I saw them.

It happened that I had not heard of Shaw until days before the exhibitions concluded, and thus I found myself going to see the show on the final afternoon of its final day. This was a Sunday, and an exceptionally Sunday Sunday at that: the entire day was overcast skies and endless drizzle. (But then Newcastle never feels quite right in blazing sun). In retrospect, there seems something fitting about the weather, particularly as the smaller of the exhibitions was “Payne’s Grey”, a series of watercolours, painted in the Payne’s grey of the title. Payne’s grey is, for Shaw, the colour of wet pavement; “the colour of rain.”

The larger of the shows, “The Sly and Unseen Day”, shared much of the same subject matter of Payne’s Grey. It comprised a collection of around fifty paintings Shaw has produced, since 1996, of his childhood estate in Coventry. Shaw based the paintings upon thousands of photographs he has taken over the years on wanderings round the estate’s streets. Indeed, up on the walls of the BALTIC, Shaw’s pictures could have passed for photographs, the gloss of the paint adding a photographic sheen to the detail of the images. The paint used was Humbrol enamel, which the catalogue informs me is more used for the painting of model planes and trains, and unlike the monochrome images of Payne’s Grey, the images of The Sly and Unseen Day included vibrant greens, reds, blues and orange. The pictures were – are - beautiful.

Paintings of his childhood estate, but then paintings of what, precisely? Sean O’Hagan, in an interview with George Shaw published in the Observer, called it Shawland: “that neglected suburban hinterland where nothing – and everything – happens daily.” Which is true - the estate is one of post-war terraces, 1960s new builds, parks, garage lots, and suburban forests. But specifically, the features depicted could be found anywhere: they are the things that we see while we are looking for something else, the mundane furniture of modern life: a bus stop, the shuttered windows and doors of a derelict youth club, daubed in graffiti that is neither visual visually appealing, nor witty enough (nor poignant enough) to capture our attention; brick walls, broken goalposts, railings, fences.

One of the things that had attracted me to the show was a reference to Philip Larkin in the Observer interview. (Larkin is cited more than once in the accompanying catalogue, along with Tony Hancock, Morrissey, and The Likely Lads – how’s that for a supergroup?) Like Shaw, Larkin is a child of Coventry and, indeed, that Observer interview began (a natural starting point, perhaps) by quoting I Remember, I Remember, a poem in which Larkin reminiscences of a childhood in Coventry not so much misspent as unspent. The poem concludes that his uneventful childhood is perhaps not so much “the place’s fault”, for, alas: “Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.”

Alan Bennett once claimed that the paintings of Edward Hopper could often pass as illustrations for Larkin’s poems. (Conversely, whenever I read a poem such as Reasons for Attendance, I think of Hopper.) The same could be said for some of the paintings that were on show here, particularly in respect of those Larkin poems where he beautifully, precisely, transformatively, captures (practically dissecting) a moment or a sight so mundane that it might normally pass by ignored: the sun’s light on a frosty afternoon in late February; the “tense, musty, unignorable silence” of an empty Church; the deathly significance of the sight and siren of an ambulance on a suburban street. Or even, perhaps most simply of all, pigeons, on “shallow slates”, “shifting together/ Backing a thin rain from the west/ Blown across each sunk head and settled feather./ … black as their shadows, sleeping so.”

A few years ago, perhaps spurred on by that Bennett claim, I found myself looking at Hopper’s paintings quite a fair bit. One thing I found (and the thing I loved) is that after a while, when I finally looked up from the image on the page or the screen, I realised that he’d started to frame my world: I was now looking at a series of real-life Hopper images. Geoff Dyer talks about this in his extended essay on photography, The Ongoing Moment. “To see his pictures is to begin to inhabit them,” he writes. “You see them everywhere even when you are not looking at them.”

There is something akin to that with Shaw. Stepping outside the gallery on that drizzling Sunday it’s as though my eyes had been more calibrated to noticing the mundane furniture that makes up the vast majority of our environment, and I’ve appreciated seeing it. This has continued to be the case in the weeks since. It’s like a veneer has been stripped away. After The Sly and Unseen Day, the sly and unseen day no longer.

Watching The Supreme Court

A piece I wrote on the UK Supreme Court, the lack of media interest and the promise the Court brings, is now up at Culture Wars. At its heart is really this question,

"Could it – should it - really be that by the end of the first full working day of our new highest Court, the most substantive piece of coverage on TV or radio had been a three-minute item on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme, a third of which focused on an exchange between Baroness Hale, Lord Browne and Geoffrey Robertson QC about the Court’s new microphones not working?"

In the piece, I mention the UK Supreme Court Blog. To say again - for any attuned and interested member of the public, it really is an awesome resource.

The Execution of Gary Glitter

Perhaps it is a cause for celebration that in Britain, the death penalty is so long gone an institution that television producers feel comfortable using it as a gimmick through which to peddle stylized celebrity death fantasy trash. This is what The Execution of Gary Glitter was. “Since 1969 the death penalty was abolished in the UK…” a caption at the start informed us. “Since then polls consistently show a majority of British citizens wish to see it restored… In this drama their wish has been granted.”

And so we are in an "imaginary" Britain, in which after the Soham school girls murders there had been public clamour for the restoring the death penalty, an organised, popular campaign for its restoration, a fractious Parliamentary debate and ultimately the passing of a law allowing death for the most heinous crimes. Parliament also enacted a law giving British Courts jurisdiction to adjudicate upon crimes committed by Britons overseas. Thus Glitter is arrested, tried for child rape committed in Asia, and sentenced to death.

In the publicity, the film was described as one intended to reignite the death penalty debate. But Charlie Brooker - whose Twitter commentary made enduring the film worthwhile - nailed it perfectly: “Well this is certainly thought-provoking stuff, raising questions about absolutely everything except the death penalty.” Even by the end, what it was about remained pretty unclear. Controversy, definitely, and with it publicity; advertising revenue, probably.

This was a film not about the death penalty, not about the execution of child murderers or rapists, but about the mock execution of Paul “Gary Glitter” Gladd. Whether this had been the original spur for the documentary, and it was simply marketed as a film designed to spark death penalty debate after producers got cold feet, I don’t know. The film does remind one somewhat of the time those people bought OJ Simpson’s sports memorabilia from him at auction, only to burn it all outside the auction house. Amusingly, the film was transmitted the day before Index On Censorship publish a report into reform of libel laws. One of the big questions immediately arising after the broadcast is that along the lines of, How on earth did this get through the legal department?

On their website, Channel 4 advertised the film with the tagline "Not so good to be back..." Within the film itself there were similar examples of ostentatiously perverse levity: a news reporter advising that amassing outside Glitter's prison there two groups of protestors, wearing t-shirts that said either “GARY GLITTER MUST HANG” or “SAVE THE LEADER”. There was also a Glitter soundtrack, ‘I Love You Love Me Love’ backing a series of faux vox-pops of member of the public’s views on the death penalty after Glitter is sentenced. There is also a weird subplot about a remix of Glitter’s testimony being remixed into one of his songs, which Glitter hears towards the end, just before he is to be hanged.

The film was, to put it lightly, bizarre. In stronger terms it was sick, although a better word would perhaps be syphilitic. The weirdest moment (and one of the most bizarre conceits perhaps ever broadcast) occurred when Gary Bushell described vividly his (seemingly genuine) elation at hearing the (imaginary) news of the (imaginary) result of the (imaginary) vote of the (imaginary) Parliamentary debate as to whether to restore the (imaginary) Death Penalty. Coming a close second, from the same scene, was Miranda Sawyer describing how she had reported on his (imaginary) trial, and how well he had scrubbed up. “He was the Leader of the Gang”, she said.

Perhaps what made this all so bizarre was that the film had been described as ‘docu-drama’, with Bushell along with Anne Widdecome and Miranda Sawyer being brought on as talking heads. You didn’t expect them to be actors. Though I hope we will never have cause to find out just how ‘in-character’ Bushell was when he said, “The liberal parasites had been thrown off and… at last justice was going to be done.” Cockroaches, shurely, Gary?

This was sleaze, and it was ineptly produced sleaze at that. Sure, the film was extremely well shot – and it’s remiss not to praise Hilton McRea’s performance as Glitter - but the thing reeked of ham. There were bits such as the following: Glitter, on death row, asks his QC (his lone lawyer – no one – not one - else seen in the legal team: could they not have afforded one other person?): "There’s gotta be some kind of appeal… Europe… Human Rights?". Comes the reply, "…there was a piece of paper, called the European Convention on Human Rights. But that’s all it was... just a piece of paper."

It seems simply extraordinary for the writers of a film aimed at bringing about death penalty debate to have so little insight into the actual issue at hand. Before the program, I had reread some pieces on the death penalty, just as a kind of refresher for the death penalty debate (if ‘debate’ is the right word) in case one cropped up. Though it turns out I needn’t have bothered, the time spent wasn't completely lost. For instance, I reread a powerful account Christopher Hitchens wrote after attending the execution of Samuel Lee McDonald, a convicted killer. It included the following: "I feel … degraded and somewhat unmanned by the small part I played, as a complicit spectator, in the dank and dingy little ritual that was enacted in that prison cell in Missouri … It was a creepy, furtive, and shameful affair.” A creepy, furtive, and shameful affair: yes, that about sums it up.

The one good that can come from this entire debacle is that it poses an excuse to link to and speak up about charities such as Reprieve, for the lawyers, volunteers and clients of which the death penalty is not simply a talking point, nor a subject fit for the fulfilment of sad, troubling and lonely fantasies on a Monday night.

Nothing To Be Frightened Of

Further to the post below, I've been reading Julian Barnes' Nothing to Be Frightened Of , which is (because quoting the blurb simply makes things much easier), "among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his philosopher brother, a meditation on morality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and a homage to the French writer Jules Renard." "Sorry, what is it called? 'Something To Be Frightened Of'?", queried the man in Borders after I asked in which category I might find it.

Mainly the book's about death. Its becoming increasingly apparent that it's perhaps not a very good choice of book to read in November, especially this cold, wet and dark November (which may be why it was published in May). It levies you with somewhat weighted thoughts. But at the same time it has me nodding my head vigorously - it articulates many things I've longed for someone to articulate (or, at least, articulate in a particular way). The format for the book is interesting, in many respects reading like a collection of blog posts. This passage in particular stood out as a thought for the day:

"A question, and a paradox. Our history has seen the gradual if bumpy rise of individualism: from the animal herd, from the slave society, from the mass of uneducated units bossed by priest and king, to looser groups in which the individual has greater rights and freedoms - the right to pursue happiness, private thought, self-fulfilment, self-indulgence. At the same time, as we throw off the rules of priest and king, as science helps us understand the truer terms and conditions on which we live, as our individualism expresses itself in grosser and more selfish ways (what is freedom for if not for that?), we also discover that this individuality, or illusion of individuality, is less than we imagined. We discover, to our surprise, that as Dawkins memorably puts it, we are 'survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.' The paradox is that individualism - the triumph of free-thinking artists and scientists - has led us to a state of self-awareness in which we can now view ourselves as units of genetic obedience."

Blame

Also, anyone looking at the blog will notice how terribly inconsistent and inept the formatting is. This is obv. due to the tools I'm working with (i.e. blogspot). Things will no doubt improve.

Writings

Alongside the review of 'Stalking' listed below, there are a few other pieces I've done for the website Culture Wars, including a piece on Philip Larkin, a review of Will Self & Ralph Steadman's Psychogeography, a review of Clive Stafford Smith's book Bad Men and a review of Anna Polikovskaya's (posthumously published) A Russian Diary. I've had something of a hiatus over the past few months (to put it lightly), but I'm getting back into it. Forthcoming is a piece on the UK Supreme Court. In the pipeline: a review of the Jonathan Meades Collection DVD set, and something on Julian Barnes' Nothing to be Frightened Of.

& ALBIE SACHS ON HUMOUR

Also, something I came across yesterday, Justice Albie Sachs writing about the importance of humour in a free society, from a Judgement of the Constitutional Court of South Africa in a case concerning trademark infringement (a satirical bunch of activists had parodied the Carling Black Label brand on some t-shirts they had produced. The brand sued.):

"A society that takes itself too seriously risks bottling up its tensions and treating every example of irreverence as a threat to its existence. Humour is one of the great solvents of democracy. It permits the ambiguities and contradictions of public life to be articulated in non-violent forms. It promotes diversity. It enables a multitude of discontents to be expressed in a myriad of spontaneous ways. It is an elixir of constitutional health."

The full Judgements of the Court are here, with the relevant passage being at paragraph 109. (page 64).

Geoffrey Robertson on the Human Rights Act

I have been listening to a speech given by Geoffrey Robertson QC to an Australian audience on the history of Human Rights. There's a great bit towards the end where he comes to defending the UK's Human Rights Act. It's exactly the type of argument that should be being made by supporters of the HRA:

"The latest reports in the last few weeks assessing ten years of the charter show that the greatest beneficiaries are ... ordinary people, law abiding citizens treated unfairly by public servants, by bloody minded bureaucrats, in ways that are never noticed by the press, never mentioned in Parliament. Charter rights - it was the great breakthrough of the Universal Declaration - are based on human dignity. The right not to be ill treated; the right to privacy for yourself, and home, and family and children. And it's been in hospitals, in the old peoples' homes and schools that a whole host of demeaning, humiliating practices have been stopped. They havn't even had to come to court in most cases because doctors, nurses, community groups, aware of what the Human Rights Act is saying, aware of the need for greater respect for human dignity, are bringing them to the attention of public servants who are realising the errors of their ways.

Let me just give you a few of the examples of how the Human Rights Act, how the Charter, has helped. A married couple, married for 60 years - Local council, typical bureaucratic... puts them in separate care homes. Well, mention the Human Rights Act and the council changed its policy. Children of a woman in hospital found that she was, because of short staffing, had to eat her breakfast while sitting on the toilet. They complained under the Human Rights Act and this practice was changed. Mental patients asking to be discharged routinely required to wait six months. No reason, just a bureaucratic rule. The Human Rights Act ended it. There were special handling regulations for people using wheelchairs were less restrictive and had to be re-written to comply with the act.

So what it has done is require the state, public servants whether they're local authorities or local councils or government departments, to ask of every practice that is inflicted upon the old, the disabled, the mentally ill, the young. Does what I do effect people to the minimum in terms of infringing their human rights when human rights means people's basic entitlement to dignity?"

A video of the whole speech, and that segment, can be found here. An mp3 is available on iTunes.

Annals of Lookalikes: Kagan and Mitchell

David Mitchell, Comedian and Writer & Elena Kagan, Solicitor General of the United States and prospective Obama Supreme Court Justice.

Surely not.

Writers Rooms: Clive James

Eamonn McCabe's Writers Rooms is a guilty pleasure. This week is Clive James. A few months ago, the subject of James' A Point of View radio-talk was McCabe's Writers Room series. The chaos of the room he described in his talk bears no relation to the room we see, which he nevertheless insists on describing as a mess despite all evidence to the contrary. The room is here; the talk here.

Clive James is an essayist, poet, novelist, television presenter. I'm not a big fan of his television programmes (always too ingratiating to people too naff), I've never read his novels (and I can't forsee doing so) and the less said about his poetry the better. But his essays are something on an inspiration to me. In 2006, I borrowed from Middlesbrough Library Services his best-of collection, Reliable Essays, for which I would have incurred an absolutely horrendous overdue fine had I not managed to happen upon a Book Amnesty Week on the day I sheepishly returned the book. In the two years since, I've been accumulating from second-hand shops and internet marketplaces the seven collections from which the best-of was nabbed (finding, as you do, that the best were not necessarily in the best-of): The Metropolitan Critic (1974), At the Pillars of Hecules (1979), From the Land of Shadows (1982), Snakecharmers in Texas (1988), The Dreaming Swimmer (1992), Even As We Speak (2001), The Meaning of Recognition (2005). I've listed for no other reason than to evidence his knack for naming his books. His next anthology, Revolt of the Pendulum, will be published next month. I'm hoping to review it.

In the mean time, I recommend you go to Amazon, where you can very cheaply buy a copy of Reliable Essays, which his superlative mammoth review of 'The Collected George Orwell' for the New Yorker and a collection of his essays on Larkin from over the years.

Or at least go to his website, where you can find a mass of things that he has produced along with bits and pieces from others that he's put on show.

Review of Stalking by Bran Nicol

"...reading Bran Nicol's description of 'desired intimate stalking' (that is, stalking someone desired as an intimate) is a rather uncomfortable experience. One begins to feel like one of the Soviet Union officials whose task it was to read 1984...."

Posted at Culture Wars, a review of Stalking by Bran Nicol.