Not Your Superwoman
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Time Out
2 days ago
- Time Out
Not Your Superwoman
The Bush Theatre under the reign of outgoing artistic director Lynette Linton has rarely been about celebrity names – on the whole she's tended to deal with them seperately in her busy freelance career. But with her time in west London coming to an end, she can afford to allow herself something a little fancy. Not Your Superwoman is a new play by Emma Dennis-Edwards – created by her and Linton – and it will star Letitia Wright – aka Black Panther herself – as Erica, daughter to Golda Rosheuvel's Joyce. In the aftermath of the death of Joyce's mother, the two find themselves paralysed about what to do with their lives next.
Spectator
4 days ago
- Spectator
What we get wrong about modernism
In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera writes, witheringly: 'we must reckon with the modernism of fixed rules, the modernism of the university – establishment modernism, so to speak.' He is addressing the novels of Hermann Broch, which, he argues, don't fit the standardised mould. 'This establishment modernism, for instance, insists on the destruction of the novel form. In Broch's perspective, the possibilities of the novel form are far from being exhausted. Establishment modernism would have the novel do away with the artifice of character, which it claims is finally nothing but a mask pointlessly hiding the author's face. In Broch's characters, the author's self is undetectable.' Several comfortable, undisputed, widely accepted ideas about modernism are contradicted by the practice of leading modernists. Kundera is also sceptical about modernism's alleged clean break with the literature of the past. He is right. T.S. Eliot, too, has a more complicated view of the modern writer's relationship to the past: 'what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.' What does this imply? You can only modify the literature of the past if you issue out of the literature of the past – if you develop an aspect latent in the literature of the past. Another instance: fragmentation of form. Joyce's Ulysses has an intricate plan of Homeric parallels. These are spelled out in the Linati schema – along with an organ, an art, a colour, a theme for each episode – released by Joyce to help his readers appreciate the novel's complex structure. The most fragmented section is Molly Bloom's (virtually) unpunctuated soliloquy, but its formlessness is dictated by a Homeric parallel – Penelope unravelling her tapestry every night, to postpone making a choice between her suitors, a decision to be taken once her tapestry is complete. The first world war is commonly assumed to be the midwife of modernism – a four-year cataclysm that is bound to have had a significant effect on literature. Malcolm Bradbury's introduction to Catch-22: 'War shattered older notions of art, of form and representation; it had transformed older notions of reality, the rules of perception, the structures of artistic expression. It fragmented, hardened, modernised the voice of modern fiction…' Funny how the hundred years' war, say, had so little effect on art. Bradbury, of course, can anticipate the obvious objection – inconvenient chronology – and he does so, raising his voice: 'It is true that the real avant-garde revolt of the modern had begun earlier in the century… Thus the avant-garde experiments of modern painting, writing, architecture and philosophy, and the powerful movements and campaigns that developed them (cubism, expressionism, futurism and so on), mostly came before the war. They upset the classic orders of the arts, broke the frame of realism, rendered art neo-mechanical, fragmentary and abstract. But it took the war itself to ensure the inevitability of their revolt (my italics).' Good to know the first world war was multitasking – not just killing millions and redrawing the borders of Europe, but making a contribution to the arts in its spare time. Two points. Picasso's 'Les demoiselles d'Avignon' was painted in 1907. This is Ezra Pound writing to Harriet Monroe about Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock': 'He has actually trained himself and modernised himself on his own… It is such a comfort to meet a man and not to have to tell him to wash his face, wipe his feet, and remember the date (1914) on the calendar.' The war, then, is definitively late to the party. About 'Prufrock', E.M. Forster had this to say in 1928: 'Here was a protest, and a feeble one, and the more congenial for being feeble. For what, in that world of gigantic horror, was tolerable except for the slighter gestures of dissent? He who measured himself against the war, who drew himself to his full height, as it were, and said to Armadillo-Armageddon 'Avaunt!' collapsed at once into a pinch of dust. But he who could turn aside to complain of ladies and drawing rooms preserved a tiny drop of our self-respect, he carried on the human heritage.' The first world war comprehensively snubbed. Academics, from George Steiner to Helen Gardner, have a weakness for the ramped rhetoric of thought, for bigging things up. Gardner's reading of Prufrock's 'overwhelming question': 'The question that Mr Prufrock dare not ask is only superficially the kind of question which one 'pops'. There is another question all the time, which every other question depends on.' Which is? She doesn't tell us: 'we are aware of the 'sense of the abyss'. There is an 'overwhelming question', which is not being asked; which one dare not ask, for perhaps there is no answer or only such an answer as it would be better not to know…' A question so polyamorphous that, as Eric Morecambe used to say, 'There's no answer to that.'
Spectator
4 days ago
- Spectator
The greatest photography exhibition of all time
I am sitting on a neat little park bench in a tiny medieval town in rural Luxembourg, and I am enjoying a peculiar sensation for which the English language has no precise word. It is the beautiful yet bittersweet silence induced by an encounter with undeniably great art. Something so profound, moving and true, it leaves you speechless, maybe even a little breathless. I've experienced this feeling just a few times in my life. When I saw the Stanze of Raphael in the Vatican Museums. When I read the last pages of Joyce's Ulysses – 'yes I said yes I will Yes'. When I listened to the second side of Joy Division's Closer, with its exquisitely mournful electro-chamber music. And now I am experiencing it again. Because I have just been to see what has regularly been referred to as 'the greatest photographic exhibition of all time'. It is called The Family of Man. That's the apt and enduring title: utopian, hopeful, full of postwar idealism. Once upon a time, the exhibition was everywhere. First unveiled in 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it toured the world, from the Soviet Union to Africa, Japan to Australia, and swiftly became the most-viewed photography show in history. It's thought that more than ten million people saw it in those early years. Its genesis was simple enough. The head of photography at MoMA was a Luxembourger named Edward Steichen, a celebrated photographer in his own right. Along with a couple of assistants, Steichen resolved to track down the finest photographs of humanity in all its variety, and stitch them into one remarkable exhibition. The small team contacted agencies, news bureaux, photographers and friends from every corner of the world. In the end they had two million images. The next job was to whittle them down. This happened in a cluttered office above a strip club in downtown Manhattan. It is said the strippers took pity on the overworked photo curators, and often invited them downstairs for free shows and spaghetti. Eventually, the two million became 100,000. Then 10,000. Then 1,000. Finally, they got it down to 503. These became The Family of Man: 503 pictures of mankind, taken by hundreds of different photographers from 68 countries at the glittering peak of the photographic age, when magazines like Life sold in their millions and photographers were global stars. Steichen arranged the photos thematically: births, weddings, kisses, soldiers, children, grief. The message was unspoken, yet clear and bold. This is humanity. We are the same. And for a few brief, glorious years, the exhibition soared. Diplomats supposedly wept. Unesco praised it to the skies. Even the Cold War, momentarily, thawed. Then came the backlash. The first loud note of disapproval was sounded by the French critic Roland Barthes. Writing in 1957, just two years after The Family of Man debuted, he accused it of peddling a dangerous myth. By grouping human experience into universal themes, Barthes argued, the exhibition stripped suffering of political context. Instead of utopian idealism, he saw a saccharine fantasy of unity, flattering to American liberalism and blind to structures of power. In the 1960s and 1970s, Barthes's critique became a chorus. Photographers felt belittled by the thematic curation, with their names not appearing alongside their work. Feminists decried its masculine gaze. Susan Sontag was the harshest of all. The Family of Man was now accused of being 'colonial', 'paternalistic', 'sentimental', 'ideologically naive'. It was too American, too white, too unwilling to confront exploitation or empire. And so the exhibition became deeply unfashionable. Worse, it became unfundable. It disappeared from cultural memory and from the approved curricula. Except it didn't – not quite. Like an ageing and weary Odysseus, it came home. Steichen had asked back in the 1960s that the exhibition be installed permanently in his native Luxembourg. Perhaps adding to the sense of The Family of Man being unloved and unwanted, it took decades for his wish to be fulfilled. The chosen town was Clervaux, which had been largely flattened in the Battle of the Bulge. In 1994, 21 years after Steichen's death aged 93, the show was finally rehung, in full, in the rooms and corridors of the restored Château de Clervaux. It is still there. And this is where we meet a strange and wonderful alchemy. In this odd, dysfunctional setting, the exhibition is arguably more powerful than ever. Most photography exhibitions march you through boxy oblongs. This one does not. The Château de Clervaux is a labyrinth and the black-and-white photos – they are all monochrome – spring up in every nook and recess: unframed, unprotected, intimate, somehow naked. Some even fall from the medieval ceilings. There are alcoves where wedding photographs laugh and surprise. Stone staircases lead you, quite suddenly, from a room of ring-a-rosing children into a bunker of death and war. A vaulted chamber throbs with vivid images of joyous youth. Then you turn a whitewashed corner and you're confronted by Robert Capa's photograph of a Spanish Civil War soldier, mid-collapse. Another turn, and a newborn emerges shockingly from the womb. A late, serene room shows an elderly Dutch couple: silently alone yet together. The names of the photographers are still barely visible. Some are giants: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Bill Brandt, Brassaï. Others remain anonymous. It hardly matters. The sequencing is all, and it is symphonic, Mozartian, perfect. These really are 503 of the greatest photos in history, arranged by a curator who knew exactly what he was doing. As for the criticisms, they now seem childish or bitter. In an age when every art exhibition must come with hectoring labels and declamations – Look at all the inequality! Spot the symbols of slavery! – Steichen's show does not tell. A pianist riffs in a smoky dance hall. A mother fiercely kisses her child. A family stands in a kitchen: grubby and real, fragile and loving. One of the primary accusations against The Family of Man was that it is simplistic. And perhaps it is. But so is human life. We all live and love and laugh and leave. All of us follow the same simple pattern. And that is what Steichen and his chosen photographers captured. That is what you can still see on the calm, whitewashed walls of the Château de Clervaux, Luxembourg. This is the still, sad music of humanity turned into 503 immortal photos. And the entrance fee is six euros.
