AI WEIWEI AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY

 

The name itself sounds like a cry of anguish...Ay! Way! Way! He has every reason for anguish but he's not crying, at least not in public. In public he exhibits two perspectives: on one hand, a calm defiance of the monolithic, arthritic, despotic regime hidden behind his country's mask of modern progress. And on the other, a display of meticulously crafted objets d'art, mixing the materials of venerable ancient Chinese artefacts with irreverent attitudes of surrealism and conceptualism - shades of Duchamp, Magritte, Carl Andre and all.

The most valuable and moving piece in the exhibition, for me, is not an art object but a video: an effective and affecting piece of investigative journalism. It was filmed in the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and documents the discovery, due to stubborn and painstaking examination of the ruins by Ai Weiwei and others, that the instant collapse of several schools in which hundreds of children died, was due to local authorities' corruption leading to lax building regulations and shoddy construction. Weiwei's response to the scandal was to buy tons of the mangled rebar, the "'useless bones of all those schools that collapsed". In his studio, workers pounded hundreds of the twisted metal bars straight and kept hammering even when he was imprisoned by the government for several months

After his release Wewei created, with 38 tons of those rusted rods, a respectful and defiant memorial to those lost children, titled Straight, of which he has said:
The tragic reality of today is reflected in the true plight of our spiritual existence. We are spineless and cannot stand straight.

The problem I had when looking at this...installation...yes, that was exactly the problem. It had become an 'Installation' because of where it is shown: in a prestigious art institution. So the whole point of the memorial- its history, its meaning - has become merely a caption for an art object and its viewers are the people who go to art exhibitions. Does this make sense? Not to me. What would make sense would be if Straight was laid out in a public place in Sechuan where the children died, for example, or in front of government buildings in Beijing. But of course the Chinese authorities would never permit this. So the next best locations for exhibiting it would be...Well, you can see what I'm getting at.

I like Ai Wewei, I respect his integrity, his courage, patience and humour, his defiant stoicism in the face of the mental and physical hardships, injustice and repression he (and thousands of his unseen, unsung compatriots) have suffered, are suffering. I just wish he was as bold, unconventional and resourceful in his choice of venues for the display of his protest-works as he is in protesting.

Peering down into the several mini-tableaux which reproduce, half life-size, the actual cell in which Wewei was detained, along with the Chinese guards who watched his every moment, I couldn't help wondering, again, if this was the relevant place to show them. In the art gallery context they were reduced to rather ironic toy-scapes, even when you had read the explanation.

As for Ai Wewei's objets d'art in the exhibition, I must admit to being underwhelmed. The joke in this one is that the object lifting its legs at tradition is made from a traditional Qing Dynasty table. Get it?

 

Below, I think it's the caption which is the conceptual artwork rather than the cute paint-streaked vases. Those private collectors, did they buy because their vase was a Weiwei or because it was Han Dynasty or Neolithic? And did the price reflect one or the other? And
who is taking the mickey of whom?

 

The bicycle chandelier is rather beautiful, in the way that a twenty layer birthday cake made of sugar cobwebs would be beautiful but even the Chinese bicycle symbolism doesn't save it from being instantly forgotten (by me) once I've seen/eaten it.

Before I end this grumpy review, I want to apologise for it to Ai Wewei even though he surely won't be reading it. I'm truly glad that the Royal Academy is exhibiting his work, he deserves encouragement and support from every quarter, public and private. I sincerely wish him well and I hope that his country's leaders will come to their senses, in his lifetime, and recognize what he, and all the other exceptional individuals they have been tormenting and repressing, could do for China if they would only be given the freedom which is every human's right.

AND STILL MORE

Vaguely chronological, a few examples chosen out of a lot of work from different periods of youthfulness. During and after the Art Students' League, thick marker pen drawings and also thin line ones in pen or brush seem to predominate, the latter mostly made during a period when I was privileged to be one of Jack Tworkov's students at his studio in lower Manhattan (next door to his friend and fellow abstract-expressionist Willem de Kooning. Jack was an insightful, inspirational teacher, never imposing his own style but encouraging me to discover and develop my own path.

I've had only three significant teachers in my art-life and they were very fine painters as well as brilliant teachers: Jack Tworkov, Henry Hensche and Pierre Bressoud, the Beaux Arts professor. I can't find any photos of Bressoud but my memory of him, permanent Gauloise on lip and black beret on head, appears (pp.16-17) in My Life Unfolds.
  

Professeur Bressoud et moi, Paris.

 

Colour study from model at Tworkov studio.

 

 

 

 

 

 

MORE OLD MISTRESS DRAWINGS

Old Masters can't have all the attention and who says I won't be up there with the great old mistresses (single or double entendre) when I'm no longer here?
But let's go back to youth. I know I was sixteen when I did the drawing below because it's of my baby brother in the first year of his life.

 NdA  Sleeping baby brother. Ink. 45cm x 61cm (18" x 24")

I was in Rio de Janeiro, under protest, when I drew the next self-portrait. I had wanted to stay in Paris and continue lessons with my adored Professeur but my father said no, I must go with the family to Brazil, I was too young to be alone in Paris. There was a big argument. I lost.

NdA  Young self in mirror. Charcoal. 15cm x 22cm (6" x 8.5")

 After Brazil there was New York and I enrolled in the legendary Art Students' League, the most unorthodox art school in town. A roster of well-known artists were part-time tutors and there was a whole menu of other classes which you could attend if you wanted to. It was a free-wheeling, stimulating, heady atmosphere and my first experience of belonging in a community of people who took art very seriously and wanted to make it their life's work. I was thrilled, fired up, not least because of the competitive challenge. I wanted to show off, prove I was better, bolder than the other, mostly male students, some much older than I was. They gave me a nickname (Nippy) and I got lots of attention.There was no formal teaching as such - nothing like my Paris teacher's admonitions, vigilance and discussions. The tutor would come in once in a while, say a few words, suggest an exercise, but mostly we were left to our own devices. The art-mood of the period was towards expressionism, stylisation, abstraction and I was certainly influenced by this trend but what I'd absorbed in Paris about intense observation of the model never left me. Below are a few of the many life-drawings I did at the time.

NdA  Fierce female.  Charcoal. 35cm x 42cm (14" x 16.5")

NdA  Intense head. Charcoal. 48cm x 59cm (19" x 23")

NdA  Three-quarter profile. Charcoal. 47cm x 60cm (18.5" x 24")

NdA  Big nude.Charcoal. 47cm x 60cm (18.5" x 24")

NdA  Nude with stool. Charcoal. 43cm x 58cm (17" x 23")

 

NdA  Thin nude. Charcoal. 48cm x 60cm (19" x 23.5")

 NdA  Small nude on black. Ink & pencil. 13cm x 21cm (5" x 8")
 

 Much more to come.

TIME PASSED...TIME PAST

I don't know why it's become so hard to write a blog post or to write anything at all, even a letter. You could say I'm blocked - writer's block, artist's block, blogger's block. Do blockers (those who are talented at blocking other people) ever suffer from blocks? Rhetorical questions aside, putting one word in front of another in some vaguely interesting manner has become a chore to be avoided by any means and there are always plenty of avoidance means at hand. Yet I still have a sense of duty (how vain!) to turn up and remind anyone who happens to be passing by that I'm still here. Or maybe to remind myself that I'm still here.

So: I've been looking through portfolios of my old..very old..drawings and will pin some of them up on this blank wall. It's both annoying and challenging to re-visit these youthful works and conclude that many are better than anything I've done in recent times. I don't believe the theory that artists' best work is created in their youth and anyway I can't speak for anyone else. But I want to look into possible reasons why some  - I've picked out around 100 drawings - of my early works seem to achieve something (I'm not going to try and define that something) which I'm not achieving now.

I can easily teleport myself back to those years (17-18-19 years old) and remember clearly what I felt when I was drawing then. I believed in Art, I was romantically in love with Art, it was my mission. I wasn't hesitant or doubtful but confident in my ability to take on anything Art could throw at me. The first five large drawings below were done from sculptures in the Louvre where my tutor, an école des Beaux Arts professor, would meet me every day and teach me to draw in the classical manner, with plumb line and pencil held out at arm's length to measure proportions: "Aplomb! Proportion!" he would repeat like a mantra. I can still hear it now. Each drawing took weeks and he was wonderfully severe but after a while, when he saw that I was making real progress, we became friends. He said we were now equals and that I could draw "like a man". Yes, this was before feminist consciousness-raising but my joy at this verdict was boundless.

More old drawings to come, next time.

NdA Charcoal. Roman bas-relief, Louvre. 42cm x 47cm  (16.5" x 18.5")
(The male bits in the facing warrior were missing. Not my doing!)

NdA Charcoal. Roman portrait, Louvre. 48cm x 63cm (19" x 25")

NdA Charcoal. Roman head, Louvre. 48cm x 62cm (19" x23.5")

 

NdA Charcoal. Old Roman Senator, Louvre. 48cm x 63cm (19" x 25")

NdA  Charcoal. Roman bas-relief. 48cm x 62cm (19" x 23.5")

NdA Charcoal. 48cm x 63cm   After El Greco "The Holy Trinity" 

 


NdA Young self, Paris.  32.5cm x 43.5cm Charcoal and wash on oiled paper.

HOME FROM HOLIDAY

Holidays are for people who want to get away from where they are or from what they do when they're not on holiday. Since I don't usually want to get away or to stop whatever I'm doing, holidays are not really my thing. But this was a late celebration of my sister's significant birthday a couple of months ago so we met up in a place she knows and loves and where I've never been.

Vezelay, in Burgundy, a tiny village with a troubled medieval history, the whole of which was enacted by the townsfolk themselves, in period costume, in a full son et lumiere performance (visually impressive but verbally too long to endure). The village consists of one steep uphill street with a scattering of atmospheric shops and restaurants, a small but perfectly designed museum which houses the Zervos collection of modern art, and at the top of the slope, the legendary St. Marie Madeleine Romanesque abbey, unbelievably serene in spite of its violent buried past. The Vezelay hillside is planted with heavy dusty pink stone walls and ochre red roofs like some kind of indestructible vegetation.

 Wonky table for eating baguettes on the terrace outside our hotel room.

  Birdsong and the crunch of footsteps on a back road (all roads are back roads).

 

Medieval insects? Anyone know what species they are and what they are doing on that tree trunk?

 A victim of medieval torture, imprisoned in a tree?

 Ma boutique? Who knew

Enchanted Soul - wondrous bookshop and gallery. Looks kitschy outside but isn't inside. Brilliant exhibitions of calligraphic art from around the world.

Settings change, tourists stay the same.

Coffee break.

Doorway of Sylvie's house near Vezelay.

Lunch at Sylvie's table, Swiss (or Dutch) doll presiding.

 

Below, Sylvie von Segebade-Marty at her house near Vezelay. I met her at the Paris Salon du Livre last March, she came to my stand, bought the Trans-Siberian book and we spoke for about ten minutes, became friends for life. She is an extraordinary person. Thanks to Sylvie we met another extraordinary person: Pierre Etienne Breguet, and re-connected with yet another extraordinary person, Jean-Claude Bel, whom my sister had met on one of her previous visits. Vezelay is the kind of place where such connections happen. I trust we'll stay connected with them all.

Blinking in the birthday sun, reflected in the hotel room window, c'est moi on 7th August 2015, Vezelay.


One more thing to pack into this post: before I went on holiday I made a photobook from pics of some of my books and boxes, a partial catalogue. It arrived when I got back home and I am very pleased with it. Here you can flip through it online (best on full screen).

TERMINATIONS

Sudden nagging urge to write some poems, interfering with the dozens of really necessary things I must do before going away in a couple of days. Anyway, here goes. The image is from My Life Unfolds (and today is not my birthday...it's on 7th August.) Back soon.

TERMINATIONS

Those 2 souls
I terminated...

We can argue about souls
you'll say fantasy
I'll say fact

But those 2 souls I terminated
before knowing who they were
before letting them surprise me

Those 2 souls I terminated long ago
by that act
it's a fact

They'd be here today
for my birthday.

OWNERSHIP

OWNERSHIP

A neighbour's cat
Often comes to see me
We are in love this cat and I
He reads my mind
I read his eyes
He is demanding
Moody, jealous
That's fine
He's not mine

I give him undivided attention
Careful caresses, food.
His owner cleans his litter
Takes him to the vet
He sleeps in her bed.
That's absolutely fine
I'm so happy
He's not mine.

TRANS-SIBERIAN BOOK:THE MOVIE

Dick Jones has posted on his Blaise Cendrars FaceBook page a report of our 6th July launch of Trans-Siberian Prosody and Little Jeanne from France at the London Review Bookshop.

I've uploaded my original video, the one that was projected onto the screen at the bookshop, to my FaceBook page (file too big to post here). The soundtrack is only a test recordings of Dick's reading and lacks Doug McGowan's music but it is the complete sequence of images I stitched together as a movie.

We were very glad to have Bill Garnett filming the live event. His version, which I've now also uploaded to FaceBook, focuses mainly on Dick reading and Doug playing, only occasionally turning the camera towards what is happening on the screen. This intimate view of the 'performers', if not a complete record of the 'performance' itself, gives a great sense of the ambiance and character of the evening.

REHEARSING AND LAUNCHING THE TRANS-SIBERIAN

Chez moi on the 5th of July, Dick Jones, Doug McGowan and I rehearsed together for the first time the presentation we gave the next evening at the London Review Bookshop in Bloomsbury. Both occasions went off amazingly well, considering the somewhat unpredictable elements of the audio-visual programme which consisted of the following three components:

A live reading by Dick of Cendrars' entire poem.
Accompanied by Doug on guitar, playing his own composition based on the poem.
Both of the above synchronised to a slideshow of all my illustrations of the poem, plus some added visuals.

 The main difficulty when I was preparing the video was to time the sequence of images to coincide as closely as possible with the spoken words and the music. With the software I was using, much careful tweaking was needed to establish the duration of each image and the transitions flowing one image into the next, but eventually everything came together really well and we were amply rewarded for all our efforts by the audience's enthusiastic appreciation. Doug was able to improvise and subtly adapt his playing to any changes and Dick's reading was always with feeling, con brio, neither over-done or under-stated.

If there is a record for posterity of this event it is entirely due to the kindness of Bill Garnett who volunteered to film it and was there, everywhere, with his camera and camcorder. The photo below is by Bill and more of his wonderful pictures of guests milling about in the bookshop before the performance are on his Pomegranate page on FaceBook. If possible, I'll post his video of our 30 minute performance when I receive it but it will be a very big file so I'll have to find out where best to upload it.

OVERDOING AND DISTRACTIONS AND TRANSLATIONS

Organising a launch/presentation in London of Trans-Siberian Prosody and Little Jeanne from France is taking up more time, energy and thought than warranted but, since doing too much is in my DNA, I can't grumble. In my family history nearly everyone has always done much more than is actually necessary which, subsequently, becomes good reason for moaning that (by comparison) others do nothing. This syndrome could be illustrated with innumerable anecdotes from my life but I won't bother since that would be overdoing it.

One of the side-effects of having Overdonitis is that the psyche, trapped in an endless cycle of to-do lists, goals, and real or imagined responsibilities, frequently escapes into enjoyable temporary distractions, especially if they have nothing to do with the 'serious' matter in hand. I am very fond of such distractions and welcome them, the less like work and the more like play the better, the more unexpected the better.

Thus it was that I suddenly decided to take part in Dave Bonta's experiment on Via Negativa of translating poetry from the Other Americas. I'm far from being qualified to translate anything, even from languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian)which I happen to speak due to circumstance, and translating poetry, of all things, requires special skills that I don't have. But I do have an ear, and emotional connections with Brazil and Paraguay. Anyway since I'm only doing this for fun, why not have a go? It's also allowing me to discover marvellous poets I'd never read before, like Brazilians Oswald de Andrade and Cecilia Meireles. I've recorded myself reading in Portuguese the poem Despedida by Meireles which Dave has posted. Translations thus far are also on FaceBook.

Thank you Dave for being such a stimulator and encourager of so many people, myself included, to experiment, connect and collaborate.

Later on I might make some short videothings to go with poems' translations...as long as it's fun. If it starts to become work, I'll stop. That's the important thing to remember if you have Overdonitis: when fun becomes a goal and a responsibility, stop! And find another distraction.

 From Inertia in the Augustine Adventures.