Going Genre-less

[Note - I'm using the term 'genre' here as a means of defining a certain restriction/ unspoken delineation of what is and is not 'permitted' in works of art. I'm not arguing for the radical overhaul/overthrow of genre itself - working within a set of established conventions/ways of making meaning, and then transcending/ modifying them, perhaps to establish another set of meanings (etc) is a means of engaging with historical & cultural imperatives beyond the individual's imperfect tunnel-vision. Nonetheless, as in the essay which sparked these thoughts, I wanted to mount an attack on/ conduct a sceptical consideration of how artists might relate to genre at present - hence, I did not wish to adopt a reverent tone. In any case, what follows is not 'the finished article', but off-the-cuff/ a provocation/ provisional/ a thinking through. I should also note that this piece of writing, for me, is coloured by various things I've been thinking about in relation to musical free improvisation, & to questions of performance/theatre. It might do to bear this in mind, to realize that the piece is primarily concerned with fairly specific areas of contemporary practice, & probably does not apply very well to, say, the nineteenth century novel.]

A: Excerpts from 'Genre's for Fascists' by Sarah Fox - Blogpost at http://www.montevidayo.com

[...]
Norman O. Brown famously concludes Love’s Body: “Everything is metaphor; there is only poetry.

[...]
Poetic does seem a lot more accommodating than prosaic, or dramatic, or fictive, or _______. Poetry is elastic, not even remotely confined to literature. Because just about anything can be poetic: a tree’s shape, the texture of a placenta, quantum physics, justice, monsters, dreams, death. Might we entertain the proposition that poetry transcends genre and/or engulfs it? (Baudrillard: “theory could even be poetry.”) Is there, on the one hand, poetry-as-genre, and on the other a more Orphic, or gnostic, or even primordial poetic function originating in Cro-Magnon’s first metaphoric projections on cave walls—”oceanic feeling,” e.g.—that is, terminologically, a kind of universal principle?

[...]
Does silence have genre? Chance?
Yoko [Ono]’s ecstatic and vertiginous scream?

[...]
Genre is a product and problem of patriarchal economy. Genre = the DNA of the book, its certain paternity, distinction, the disavowal of chaos, “the author.” It’s where the money is (or isn’t). The vessel for both genre and authorship is the book. Which, among other things, is, in a very important sense, a “waste product.” The jouissance and potential “insignificance” for one traveling in the rectal cauldron meet a grave with a trapdoor—just a “little death,” and afterward no toxic trace on the planet (a planet tumored and asphyxiating from all our death drive hyper-reproductivity.) The book—embalmed by genre and the petrified death cries of the forest, metonymous for (reproducing) the person of the author herself—is a burial vault.

So when Joyelle asks us to think about what it really means to go genreless, to essentially speculate about the future of our enterprise, I find myself pondering questions like these: If forced to describe “what you write” without naming genre or any terminology related to the notion of genre, how would you do it? Is genre democratic? Manipulative? Are the constraints of genre part of your process? Are you addicted to genre? In what ways is your identity, your image, significant to the readers of your work? How come nobody but us gives a shit about our genre? Is permanence, and/or “legacy,” crucial to your creative investments? Do you know who you are without genre? Can there be books, or even authors, in a genreless culture?

Paradigm is our enemy. Everything is malleable. There’s only poetry."

B – Genre Violence

Spurred by the piece from which i've quoted at length above, i've been wondering how far the consideration of genre is the condition of possibility for much 'critical' thought about art – does placing artists within a community (real or constructed, canon-formation style, by critics, after the fact) becomes placing them in pigeon-holes, in boxes? The title i’ve chosen is maybe a stupid flippant pun – but in a real sense i think genre does do violence to the work of art, bending/ twisting/ distorting/ modifying it to fit some pre-conceived pattern, shaving off the edges so it will fit neatly & nicely within the designated area in which it is allowed to exist…

Yes it *is* important to consider *community* & the social context of the art in question- where how why it was produced - but doing this thru the trope of genre ends up being always so fucking taxonomic - the 'post-punk shoegaze free-bop avant-nu-metal-speed-thrash-core of the artist's style'... - the work never considered except in constant rel(eg)ation to what has gone before & is judged as the starting point, the eternal point of comparison, the gold standard. We're constantly referred back to a few cultural 'signposts', 'great works', 'top albums' fixed in aspic, often ignoring where they came from (see rock & roll and the white commodification of black music) or that they occurred in the flux and flow and warp and wave of a *continuing* culture (continuing, not necessarily via a process of 'development', but nonetheless thru reciprocal hauntings sharings borrowings etc)). These 'great works' are then judged as the 'starting point' for all future consideration (sometimes the critic tries to predict that the album (or book, or painting, or whatever) will become established as a future 'great work' - actively trying to 'assist' in the process of canon formation). Such reliance on/obsession with 'great works' takes place, it seems to me, mainly because critics cannot be bothered to actually talk about the work itself and its particular aesthetic/sensuous/intellectual qualities - cannot allow the pleasure it might give them (or cannot separate that from the spectacle/economic machine that attempts to shape and subsume it) – must always filter it through canons and genres and critical categories. (Not that 'art' should not be *critical* in a very real sense - but ‘critical’ as connoting a kind of active engagement and passionate concern with the world and the circumstances in which 'we' find ourselves & how we change them and work with and in them and (work our way) out of them - *not* ‘critical’ as connoting the formation of taxonomic categorical cross-referencing genre canons (which always purposely exclude the 'undesirable'/unsayable/unwanted/threatening - or include them only to neutralize them, mute them, strip them of their screaming core))…

This all conditions what is ‘allowed’ or not - what is permissible - 'extreme' things/actions/ways of being are in the end restrained because they too are placed within certain generic contexts - e.g. 'performance art', 'noise music', 'electro-acoustic free improvisation'. & the same with the constant live documentation of every gig/ performance/ reading/ happening on youtube or bootleg mp3s circulating the internet - everything is processed and squeezed through the electronic wires/ circuits/ thru the machine (which replaces/stands in for/merges with the body?). There is no single, important, *present* live act(ion) - everything is connected/ globalised/ simultaneous/ disposable.

& even in live action, when we are in the room performing or watching others (usually men, displaying all the macho qualities of 'radical' political sympathies/imagery (poster boys Che Guevara, Peter Brotzmann, Jesus Christ with their beards / Malcolm X with his machine gun ('By Any Means Necessary')/ Archie Shepp with his saxophone) - even then, even when we convince ourselves that this is the necessary 'underground', the 'resistance', the space which might allow some glimpse of utopia (tho' probably we don't think that slinking down the stairs to buy another pint of beer at the bar), we are held in check. But just what are we afraid of? Of offending people? Offending social norms? But does anyone every really think why those norms are in place to begin with anyway? Is there some sense of guilt in making art? That it must be done 'the right way', the established way (with reference to some previous canonical hero/ martyr), otherwise we're not taking it seriously? Is anyone really worried about failure? Doesn't failure provide the conditions of possibility for new forms, glimpses of possibilities/ utopias/ visions flecked thru dreams ravings starkness? Which only exist as the tiniest flashes in our own body circuits? Which exist only because they cannot be constrained / because they spurt out almost accidentally, tho' willed / like breath or howling

What then is (in) this flash, this glimpse, these flashes & glimpses - what is *not* genre? What is not marketed/marketable - what is itself only itself in that moment nothing else other than itself there present at that one place at that one time in that one room or one place with that one person or that particular combination of persons occupying that space - what is *singular*, irreducible - singular in being itself & no other (& not pretending (simu/lation, di/lution)), yet *plural* too in its sharing/ confrontation/ occupation of multiple possibilities/ impossibilities. I guess this is a way of asking, or answering the question sarah fox poses: “Do you know how you are without your genre?” Do you know how (who/why) you are – without that protection, stripping it away. Which is also the point mattin makes in his essay, ‘going fragile’:

“This is an unreliable moment, to which no stable definition can be applied. It is subject to all the particularities brought to this moment. The more sensitive you are to them, the more you can work with (or against) them. You are breaking away from previous restrictions that you have become attached to, creating a unique social space, a space that cannot be transported elsewhere. Now you are building different forms of collaboration, scrapping previous modes of generating relations.”

In other words...this is the moment/ before we find out / the remit and discover / what's possible

Nobody has actually been there: Some Thoughts on Paintings by Per Hilldoranza

Today I’d like to consider some paintings by the Dutch architect Ben Huygen, working under the alias ‘Per Hilldoranza’ (images of the paintings are available at his website). Huygen has co-designed, with Jasper Jaegers, the so-called ‘cactus building’ planned for Rotterdam port (see image above) – a nineteen-floor tower containing 98 residential units, arranged in a staggered floor design that allows each unit a two-level outdoor space with enough available sunlight for foliage to flourish. Such architectural work (which one might place within a recent trend for ‘biomimcry’ – a kind of sustainable design explicitly echoing natural forms, systems and processes) indicates a pre-occupation with the relation between the natural and the artificial, the solid and the fluid, shape and function, which, while of course not precisely translated from the buildings to the paintings, may still provide a way into them, or at least help us to see some affinities between the work in both disciplines.

As Huygen says of a more modest house design in Kinderdijk (a village just outside Rotterdam): “We like self-evident buildings. After all, we are not standing there to explain them; they should tell their own stories.” (‘Dwell’ magazine, May 2006, p.210) Thus, his painting, poised between abstraction and representation, definitely ‘tells its stories’ (strong suggestions of figures, buildings and natural features are common), but without tapping into a complex set of gestural, colouristic, or figural iconography (of, let’s say, the kind outlined in Michael Baxandall’s ‘Painting and Experience in Fourteenth-Century Italy’). For one thing, such a detailed system of aesthetic symbolism is simply not accessible to the modern artist – with the broadening of themes and influences, and the countless reproductions, imitations, and mediations resulting from the explosion of the *image* in the information age, the artist has to find their own, *individual* specificity, to create their own myth, their own set of images and symbols which may flow freely from and between several different systems of thought (for instance, African tribal art, Oriental philosophy, or the vestiges of Romanticism). This art may be full of suggestion and allusion, but it is never fixed or tied within a more general system of belief; it is aware of tradition, but unable to fit with any great clarity into a specific artistic lineage or chronology. The artist must always work alone, an individual working through the echoes of the past and the contradictions of the present in order, perhaps, to provide some glimpse of the future.



On his website, Huygen’s list of current themes (or topics of thought) includes ‘the moon’ and ‘infinity’. Bearing this in mind, we might consider the series of four paintings entitled ‘nobody has actually been there’. Perhaps the most immediately striking aspect here is the use of thick, white bands of paint (laid on with a sculptural touch, to suggest the overall smoothness of stone, but also, like stone, with rough bands and cracks making small incisions on the surface) that dominate the upper half of the canvas. It’s hard not to view these as abstracted nightscapes, the areas of white like the moon transformed through vision, stretching and bulging out over blue-black bands and vertical shadows which suggest the night sky and the sky-scraping skyline of a city below. This is by no means straightforward, however, for the white band and its relation to the darker areas underneath it exist in a different relation in each of the paintings. Thus, in the first of the series, the white area looks like part of a larger shape, cut off by the edge of the canvas – vaguely suggestive of a dog’s bone, a drip trickling away from the main area of a puddle, or a curving river – which might be part of, or connected to, any of the white areas in the subsequent paintings, as in a kind of jigsaw puzzle. Though the compositions are definite entities in themselves, stark and almost monolithic, one is still left with the sense that they are only fragments, details from a much larger work. This is largely due to the placing of shapes within the frame: for example, a rounded shape appears cut off by the frame’s straight edge, before it has the chance to complete its curve. Such use of the frame is perhaps influenced by photography, though the ‘zoomed-in’, microscopic effect by no means diminishes the work’s sense of (large) scale – the powerful imposition it makes on the viewer, demanding attention, drawing one into its encompassing space. Nonetheless, of the four paintings, it is only the third that expands out the viewpoint, so that the white shape is not cut off at the edges, and we see it entire – a highly suggestive shape reminiscent at once of pastry rolled flat by a rolling pin and trailing flour behind it, an amoeba, or a cartoon angel. Once more, this shape is placed over, or within, a dark ‘background’; and, even here, its placement makes it seem as if it might be flying off towards the edge of the canvas, as if it has only just been captured in time. Here then, the white night object has become a flying thing, once again suggestive of something other than itself –the moon’s reflection, the shape stretched mid-ripple on water – but it is not that other thing precisely, not a ‘representation’ of the moon as such. Rather, the moon hovers behind this shape, this whiteness as symbol, as idea, perhaps in some sense relating to the ‘collective memory’ included in Huygen’s list of themes; both something as specifically tied to a historical period and to a set of religious concepts (crosses, church architecture) and as ‘general’ and ‘timeless’ as the moon (though of course, in itself, the moon is related to more ancient forms of religious belief) re-awaken something, functioning as imprecise symbols – symbols which long ago lost their specific, ritual or iconographical function, but which still trigger off something a species memory, and provide the possibility for the creation of a new set of images to refresh and expand on the old. As Werner Herzog puts it, “we are surrounded by images that are worn out, and I believe that unless we discover new images, we will die.” This has to do with possibility, with the entering into and creation of a space of dreaming and contemplation, a space that must in some ways be removed from direct involvement with the scientific ‘fact’ of the world (and the remnant of religious ‘truth’), that must attempt to remove itself from pre-defined ontological systems, to move into a more ecstatic realm where the relations between things and the meaning with which they are imbued become looser, more subject to change, more subject to new inscriptions that will remove the harmful legacies of past beliefs.



Perhaps this is merely what I wish to ‘read into’ the canvasses, what their particular combination of suggestiveness and abstraction brings out in me – perhaps this is why I want to see the flecks of white paint streaking and trickling down from the main body of the white shape, descending from the moon to the earth, from the realm of the non-human to the realm of the human, as ‘moonshine’: both as the moon’s reflected rays beaming, bearing down light, and as a kind of liquid emission – like the bath of light in ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’, or “the wine which through the eyes is drunk, flow[ing] nightly from the moon in torrents” in Albert Giraud’s ‘Pierrot Lunaire.’ It’s as if someone wished to capture some substance of the moon and to bring it to earth, like a jewel, a precious thing; and this desire – to reach upwards, and to bring back downwards the fruits of one’s exploration – seems manifested in the spindly ladder scratched into the paint in the second of Huygen’s series (an echo, perhaps deliberate, of William Blake’s engraving ‘I Want! I Want!’). At the same time, this wish is just that – an unfulfilled wish– rather than a reality. The child in Blake’s engraving has only just begun his ascent, poised on the first few rungs of the ladder, and, though there is a square shape, resembling a door, which might allow entry into Huygen’s ‘moon’, there is no human presence to use the available ladder and enter that door: both ladder and door simply sit there, inert, inactive, immobile. In any case, the ‘door’ really appears as such only in the first painting, the ladder only in the second; one has to read across the paintings to connect them, to force a stronger symbolism than that which actually exists. Huygen is not simply presenting a dreamer’s naïve desire. It is precisely because it is something outside the normal sphere of human activity and control, an object of aspiration which remains frustratingly just out of reach, that the moon can appear as so powerful a symbolic presence; because of this inaccessibility that it can remain an object onto which dreams can be projected and inscribed. And this gives a transitory, fragile quality to any such dreams – and to any such interpretations of the paintings. ‘nobody has actually been there’ might jokingly refer to conspiracy theories which suggest that the moon landings were faked; it might also literally describe the painting, the creation of a ‘landscape’, or an imagined space, to which no one can in reality go, because it does not exist, except as an imagined image. Thus, there is at once both a desire for the impossible, for that which is just out of reach – a desire to continually push the boundaries, the limits of what one is allowed to do and dream – and a realisation that this might render one simply a passive, inert dreamer. Perhaps this is the difference between painting and architecture: a building, because of its scale, its presence within a public, lived environment, is a visible contribution to the world, while a painting hangs in a corner of a room, away from prying eyes, a mere speck in that same environment. And yet, because of this, it allows greater space for experimentation and for the working-through of symbolic resonance than on a building project.



Of course, both in painting and in architecture, the artist has to work with the materials available to them – with the illusion of physical space (in painting), and with actual physical space (in architecture); with the grain of texture, with the malleability of shape, and with the varied tints of colour. If Huygen’s ‘Cactus Building’ presents itself at once as ‘alien’ and ‘natural’ (a plant swelled to monstrous size, but also a skyscraper – something monstrous in itself – made to appear more natural, more curvaceous, more flowing, bending in sympathy with nature’s hatred of rigidity), so his paintings work through theses and antitheses, contradictions, complications and intersections.
Textures and colours used may simultaneously suggest the roughness of dust and the sharp clarity of flecks of light; earth and sky, solidity and fluidity, thickness and translucency. The attempt is to give something essentially solid, a mass of immobile material, the illusion of shimmering, of movement. At the same time, Huygen’s admiration for the simplicity of form found in medieval church architecture ensures the presence of firm and clear shapes and motifs – not for him the floridity and display of statuary in the great cathedrals, but the simplicity of a roadside cross. A cross, a suggestion of skyline, of silhouette, of shadow; a night sky, a door, a window: such motifs are not used for a specific symbolic function – as with the treatment of the moon in ‘nobody has actually been there’, a whole maze of symbolism is present, but not to the forefront; rather, it lurks beneath the surface (after all, the moon itself may be only part of a wider symbolic field initiated by the paintings’ use of whiteness). There is undoubtedly much more to say about these works, but perhaps this short piece has given some inkling as to their fascinations.

Steve McQueen’s ‘Hunger’ and the Aestheticisation of Politics

Critical positions on artist Steve McQueen’s feature-film debut ‘Hunger’, a depiction of the 1981 hunger strike and resultant death of Irish Republican activist Bobby Sands, seem split between praise and blame. There are those who praise it for its ‘even-handedness’, and those who praise it for re-claiming Sands and his colleagues as victims of oppression; there are those who condemn it for uncritically making hero-martyrs out of its subjects, and those who condemn it for its ambivalence and refusal of genuine political engagement. I have only seen the film once, and should perhaps view it again, but I feel that I paid it enough close attention and subsequent thought to take my own stance, which comes closest to the last of the positions I outlined above. The ambivalence I’m going to take issue with in relation to ‘Hunger’ is evident in a work of McQueen’s made a few years earlier: the postage stamps on which are imprinted images of British soldiers killed in Iraq. At first, one might suspect this to be a political commentary on the conflict, a counting of the cost, the unnecessary lives lost. However, one considers the environment in which this takes places, things become quickly more worrying; the work’s refusal to take a definite stance on the deaths, its desire ‘simply’ to register them, to commemorate them in some way, makes it dangerously complicit with the ugly militarism that has arisen in the past few years in Britain, since the occupation of Iraq. I’m thinking about the increasing Islamophobia, the patriotism, the talk of ‘our brave boys’, the sense that one cannot condemn the troops (as described by Richard Seymour over at the ‘Lenin’s Tomb’ blog), the fact that details of British soldiers’ deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan appear daily on the news, while the ‘foreigners’ whose country they are occupying, and supposedly ‘liberating’, are rendered faceless, nameless, non-existent, except as terrorists or authority figures like Karzai (with regards to this, one might consider the final chapter of Judith Butler’s ‘Precarious Life’, in which the de-humanisation/ ‘defacing’ process of non US/UK subjects is related to Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophical conception of the face as the area of relation with the Other). Given this, for McQueen to desire to remain ambivalent on a topic which has aroused the ire of even the softest of celebrities, and seems to be defended only by the US and UK governments, and by Richard Madeley, seems an act of direct evasion, not an honest acknowledgement of artistic powerlessness (which I don’t think, in any case, is an honest thing in the first place); the desire is to keep art in its own separate box, in some ways ‘commenting’ or ‘reflecting on’ society, but never risking direct engagement, refusing to acknowledge the way in which art is complicit with the society from which it emerges, refusing to acknowledge the unavoidable entanglements of the political situation around us with the most intimate and personal details of our very lives. If McQueen was setting out to make an ‘abstract’, or ‘fictional’ film about the body – an ‘art film’, with political resonances (the sort hinted at by the quotation on the film’s advertising poster, which describes the body as the last resort of protest) – he could have done so with much aplomb. As a craftsman, he has a superb visual sense, though the glacial pacing can sometimes seem like a mannerism designed to suggest profundity, rather than profundity in itself. (I’m thinking specifically of the very lengthy shot in which a static camera observes a guard cleaning the corridor of the piss which the prisoners have thrown into it, moving from one end to the other in a process that lasts for several minutes and whose depiction seems to serve little purpose within the context of the film). The trouble is that what might fit in a gallery space, as installation or video art, needs expansion if it is to enter the more public world of cinema, a transition McQueen unfortunately fails to make in several important respects. What worries me, then, about ‘Hunger’ is the aestheticisation of a political situation (though not totally, of course, for the film contains unavoidable political elements); treating an event, a series of events, with a political context, with political and personal consequences, as a museum piece, as an exercise in shot composition and the striking of poses. We might argue that there is precedence for this – Pasolini’s ‘Salo’, where the sadistic-sexual cruelties taking place are presented with ‘cold detachment’ – but ‘Salo’ is making a specific political statement about facism, is bringing things perilously close to the edge of a desperate, twisted pornography – and it knows it is doing this, it has the conscience of an art aware of where it is placed and what it is doing, an art aware of its own potential complicity in what it presents and condemns. McQueen suggests something similar when he describes how he broke down and had to leave the set when filming multiple takes of the naked prisoners running a gauntlet of batoned riot police – a scene that was shot with the actors receiving real blows, a scene that contained violence that blurred the line between ‘real’ and ‘staged’. But this is just one scene, and this guilt doesn’t really translate into the film itself. Consequently McQueen’s motivations seem vaguer than Pasolini’s; he admits to being captivated by the notion of Sands’ death when younger – much in the same way as Richard Hamilton (in ‘The Citizen’) portrays a Christ-like, beautiful Sands standing by the light-washed window, next to his shit-smeared wall, the excremental patterns turned into something rather beautiful by their transformation into paint, on canvas. But Hamilton’s image is deliberately stark, deliberately an entity in itself – a provocation from an artist well aware of the impact of the poster’s larger-than-life yet transitory mythologising, of ‘pop art’; aware too, of the provocation created by the religious aspects of his work (like a politicised Francis Bacon). It is a painting, it is one object; McQueen’s film, by contrast, occurs in time, as a collection of separate tableaux, as a sequence of events, as a narrative. And yet it often wants to deny this, wanting instead to be in some sense an object of contemplation, almost of religious devotion. The comparison several reviewers have made in this regard is Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion of the Christ’, but, whereas Gibson’s film ‘justifies’ itself through the Catholic mystical/religious/Passion tradition which motivates it, which forms its sometimes-unspoken backdrop, McQueen has no such widespread, centuries-old tradition behind ‘Hunger.’ As he himself admits in an interview with The Guardian, Sands’ hunger strike and death is yet another event that was pushed under the carpet in the post-Thatcher age –a forgotten, festering sore out of sight, out of mind. McQueen’s laudable aim to uncover that sore, to examine it, to probe it, ends up betraying itself through a near-depoliticised contemplation of that sore for itself, as an object of beauty, as an aesthetic experiment: in the final act of the film – the hunger strike itself – Fassbender strikes beautiful, naked poses, crouches in the centre of the frame in a perfect composition, lies jaundice-faced on his pillow with a look of deathly ecstasy on his face, like a starved hermit, a starved saint, the light catching him from the window, flashbacks to his childhood adding a ‘poetic touch’ (and, interestingly, providing another link to Gibson’s Passion’). If ‘Hunger’ presents Sands as a martyr, it does so in a manner that is essentially visual and shallow; there is no Christian motivation behind the work – if anything, his desire for martyrdom is criticised during the central conversation scene with the priest – and the quasi-religious poses and images thus come across as dangerously one-dimensional and decorative, unrelated to any real political sense. Sands ends up coming across (and this is probably unintentional) as, essentially, a hollow man: in the film’s first act he is hard to distinguish from the other prisoners who spend the film’s first act alternately mumbling in monosyllables and screaming like madmen. There is very little sense that he, or any of the others, are intelligent or committed beings – they seem almost to have come from another planet, not to exist at all in relation to the outside world. It isn’t really until the long conversation scene, half-way through the film, that we get any sense of where they are coming from or what they are trying to do; indeed, the moment when they all trash the furniture in their cells because the guards, in response to their demands, have provided them with ‘civilian clothes’ that are actually just another, mocking uniform, makes them appear like angry little children throwing particularly violent tantrums. True enough, they are depicted as brutalised and de-humanised by beatings and forced washings – but simply to depict a human being as the object of violence does little to give a sense of their specificity, which is elided into the de-politicised ‘universality’ of pain and suffering. The second act – the conversation between Sands and the priest – is the only moment in the film when politics, when the context of the degradation within these prison walls, is really allowed to take centre stage – and even here it almost takes a back-seat to the ‘record-breaking’ technical trick of being shot in one, seventeen-minute take –and to a moment of rather cheap psychologising, in which Sands describes an incident from his childhood involving the mercy-killing of a foal. This psychologising recurs in the third act – the quasi-iconographical process of starvation and death – as fever dreams take centre stage, and Sands watches his childhood self as a long-distance runner, looking back into the light-filled landscape from where’s he come, and then deciding with firm conviction to run into the darkness of the forest ahead. Furthermore, once the ‘hunger’ portion of the film begins, we get the impression that all Sands was able to do was lie in bed, unable to speak or move. While the sense of isolation – which prison deliberately engenders, by shutting people away from society – is effectively conveyed, it is also exaggerated to a profoundly un-realistic level (despite claims made on behalf of the film’s ‘unflinching realism’). The strikers were never reduced to just skeletons in cells, smoking, being afflicted by sores, masturbating, being beaten, grimacing; the guards, and the British government, may have attempted to break their will in this way, but they remained aware of what they were doing, where they stood politically – their actions were never reduced to a mere existential pose. Despite the beatings and the humiliation: "The prisoners looked out for each other. There was bingo and quizzes, shouted through the gaps in the doors. They taught each other Gaelic, gave history lectures, sang songs, recited stories. Bobby Sands relayed the whole of Leon Uris's novel Trinity. It took him eight days." None of this appears in the film; there's no real sense of solidarity. Instead, one prisoner tries to masturbate under his blanket without waking his cellmate: a private, fumbling act, carried out in secrecy and shame. We’re informed over the end credits that Sands was elected as MP during his strike, but this does not appear in the film itself (perhaps the scene where he is visited by a bearded man is meant to show him being conveyed the news, but we are not allowed to hear what is being said, as it is put through a sound filter that renders it inaudible, implying that Sands is by this stage too far gone to understand what is happening). From the moment the ‘conversation scene’ ends, Sands becomes a mute figure, beautifully suffering, beautifully emaciated; and what are we to make of the moment, earlier in the film, when he rolls onto his back on the floor of his cell after a savage beating, and opens his bloodied mouth in a dazed grin? So far, my comments have been almost exclusively confined to the film’s treatment of Sands, and of the other prisoners. However, the first few scenes actually depict one of the prison guards, and it is this presentation of ‘the other side of the coin’ that might lead one to praise the ‘even-handed’ approach: ‘no agit-prop here’! We see the guard setting out his clothes on his bed (a shot echoed later on, when the prisoners get their ‘civilian clothes’ back), and washing his hands with great deliberation. We notice that his knuckles are bloody and bruised, as if he had been in fight, or punched a brick wall. Having made his preparations, we cut to the moment he leaves his house; as his wife watches from behind the curtain, he checks under the car for bombs. Once he arrives at the prison, he doesn’t associate with the other officers, who jostle around in a background hubbub of noise, smoke and conversation: one of them tells a vulgar joke to which the others respond with raucous laughter. We see the guard we have been following in the toilets, once more washing his hands, this time shaking in front of the mirror. Now he stands smoking by the prison wall, snow coming down around him. Once more we register his bloodied knuckles, this time in close-up, as a snow-flake lands on the sores and melts there. After some subsequent scenes in which we are introduced to the prisoners and their environment (the cells with their excremental patterns on the wall), we see the guard again, this time participating in the forced washing of one of the prisoners on a ‘no wash’ and ‘blanket’ strike. Now we see why his knuckles are bruised, as he punches the resisting prisoner in the face, and participates in a savage washing ritual, as if soaking an animal, three men holding him down, the guard lunging in with a broom. Now a repeat of the snow/smoking shot – and now we realise why the guard trembled. A much longer prisoner sequence ensues, but, later on, we once more see the guard, this time in civilian clothes, as he goes to visit his senile mother in a nursing home. He tentatively greets her, trying to engage her in conversation, but she just sits in her chair and stares vacantly into the middle-distance; it is unclear whether she has even registered his presence. “These are daisies,” he says of the flowers he’s brought her, and then a gunman walks in and casually shoots him in the back of the head. He falls into his mother’s lap, blood spattering both their faces. She still sits immobile, staring ahead of her, unaware of what has happened. This latter is a scene of tremendous, shocking impact, due in large part to its unexpectedness – we associate the prison corridors with violence, but not the apparently peaceful surroundings of the nursing home – and represents the film’s first acknowledgment of the outside world, in relation to the world of the prison – the fact that the violence did not take place in a separated cage, but was connected with, spilled out into, had its origin, in people’s daily lives. Yet this, the film's first couple of scenes, and a brief shot inside a riot van, are the only times we move out of the prison; and one might argue that this leads to a fundamental imbalance, whereby a prison guard is shown as having a life outside the prison, but the protestors are not shown to have any real connection to the outside world. The violence committed by the regime remains within safe confines; the prisoners do not seem to be ‘ordinary’ civilians, and thus their brutalisation has an impact quite different to the prison guard’s murder. In addition to this guard, we are also allowed a small ‘personal glimpse’ at a riot cop, who participates in the vicious running-of-the-gauntlet scene that is another of the film’s harrowing set-pieces. Appearing nervous in the van taking him to the prison, he lets out a yell of mingled exhilaration, panic and despair during the beating of the prisoners, and is subsequently shown crying and shaking in a screen split between the beating and this subsequent reaction. One critic suggests that a man would have to be “pretty sadistic anyway” to take a job like this, and thus implies that this ‘personal moment’ is sentimental hogwash in the guise of ‘even-handedness’. To counter that, one might remark on the scornful, grinning look the bald bouncer-type riot cop gives to his young colleague, seemingly conveying the unspoken message that ‘this is the rite of violent macho initiation, don’t be a sissy and flinch from it.’ And one might also consider the motivations behind prison guards and riot cops (who leftists too often simply demonise as evil murderers – ‘the pigs’, ‘les flics’). Being a prison guard was a steady job – and the compulsion, the necessity to earn money frequently overrides moral imperatives, no matter how strong the pangs of conscience and guilt become. Any tendencies towards sympathy and compassion were soon rooted out through peer pressure and group brutality: "If a screw was fair, he'd get abuse from his own people. They had orderlies who brought the food round and one who was sympathetic squeezed a half-ounce of tobacco through the door. The screws caught him and gave him a beating. Another orderly was told to do his 'party piece', and got on the table and urinated into the tea urn." That this set up a sometimes irreconcilable dilemma within individuals makes the depiction of distraught guards and cops an entirely plausible one: “During the Long Kesh years, 50 prison service employees committed suicide. The pressure, recalls one warder, led to ‘irrational behaviour and heavy drinking. You could smell it on their breath.’ ” Of course, it’s likely that there were guards and cops who *were* sadistic, who took part in the violence for the thuggish thrill of it, perhaps bolstered by some vague ideological notions, more likely exhilarated by the atmosphere of group machismo and the dehumanization of their ‘enemies’. But we can’t condemn McQueen for showing the emotional suffering endured by the perpetrators of violence; that acknowledgement doesn’t mean we have to ‘excuse their actions’, just as it’s hard to say for definite whether any act within a liberation struggle such as that in Ireland, or that in Algeria (as depicted by Pontecorvo), is ‘purely right’ or ‘purely wrong’. And yet …and yet, we don’t get any real sense of this sort of complex entanglement, this messy world of context and motivation and the connection of politics to real hurt and suffering – too often in ‘Hunger’, what takes place appears to take place in a sort of bubble, a glass case in which the subjects are put under aestheticised observation, sometimes visceral, but more often distanced through too-studied composition, too beautifully ‘perfect’ images, filtered through the sensibility of a visual artist rather than that of a political film-maker. Once more, this is the problematic aestheticisation of a political situation rather than – what it perhaps wishes to be – ‘the stripping it away of the situation to its human core, in a non-partisan way.’ Though I’ve mentioned it several times, I haven’t spent much time on what is really the film’s central scene (both in terms of chronology and importance): the one-take conversation in which most of the political content/information is included. Here, Sands discusses his decision to go on strike, contrary to the instructions of the IRA leadership, with a priest sympathetic to the republican cause but not to this measure, which he sees as suicide and a misguided attempt at martyrdom. This long stretch of dialogue, unafraid to risk accusations of ‘wordiness’ (films now have become so visually flashy that they can seem almost exclusively to privilege the image over the word, to an extent perhaps even greater than in the days of the silents), contains hints of what might have been done in ‘Hunger’ – what *was* done in Ken Loach’s ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’ or ‘Land and Freedom.’ I’m not arguing that McQueen should have made a Loach historical picture, a film in which debate takes centre stage. Perhaps he didn’t wish to become ‘bogged down’ in talking, wanted to concentrate all of that into one (albeit protracted) scene: the rest of the film takes place not silently, but, very often, wordlessly. But I still find this wordlessness inadequate – and a few snatches of Maggie Thatcher’s voice, played out over moody shots of prison corridors doesn’t satisfy my desire for more context to be provided. Of course, one might argue that the viewer has to bring their knowledge of the historical background to the film, to avoid laziness, not to expect the facts to be laded to them on a plate – but what is included really does bring into sharp perspective how much was left out. The rather trite, romanticized childhood flashback discussed earlier is far less effective in ‘explaining’ Bobby Sands – or at least, giving *some* more insight into his motivations – than would have been a scene in which he talked to his family, to those in the outside world; or in which they talked about him – it comes across as an arty fabrication that looks good but says little. In the end, I guess I just don’t really see what is to be gained by shooting some powerful, violent scenes, and including some political detail, only to deaden it all with glacial, observational pacing: depersonalization pretending to ‘objectivity’ and ‘realism’ when in fact it is extreme ‘arty’ stylization. Too often the film seems *unreal*, uncontextualised – the artist saying, ‘don’t look at me, I don’t know or do anything politically, not *really*’, while throwing in a few political details and violent set-pieces to stir the pot. Overall, there is an endless shying away, a chill and an evasion here, and, much as I don’t want to simplistically condemn ‘Hunger’, shouting at it to be committed or at least more aware of context, I find it hard to avoid doing so. Links to Articles Referenced Above ‘McQueen and Country’ - McQueen interviewed by Sean O’Hagan in The Guardian, 12th October 2008 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/oct/12/2) ‘The Legacy of the Hunger Strikes’ - Piece by by Melanie McFaydean in The Guardian, 4th March 2006 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/mar/04/northernireland.northernireland)

Some Exhibitions in London, November 2009. (Kapoor/Kiefer/Jodorowksy/ Montandon)

Anish Kapoor at The Royal Academy (26 September-11 December 2009)

Art galleries now are always white, the huge smooth spaces of their well-lit walls and shiny floors as much a part of any exhibition as the artworks themselves. This is made explicit in the Anish Kapoor show at the Royal Academy – most notably, in the two exhibits (Shooting Into the Corner (2008-2009)/ Svayambh (2007)) involving large quantities of red wax being smeared over venerable wooden door-frames, splattered on the whiteness of those walls in a pile of meaty red waste. Of course, one must always stand behind the white line to view such an ‘unrestrained’ mess. This leaves an odd, dissatisfying disjuncture: the freedom to subvert is managed, something to provide a hook for the show, to draw people in, without in reality moving any of the boundaries between spectator, artist and work which all too often are internalised and taken as read. Anish Kapoor is allowed to fire a cannon of red wax into a corner; anyone else would be taken by the scruff of the neck and marched out for crimes against art (or art galleries).Something similar happens in a room full of variously shaped and curved mirrors which Kapoor calls Non-Objects. To my mind this seems nothing more than an arty version of what one might find in a Victorian fairground, actually stripped of the sense of wonder present in the fair because of its sterile context, because viewers tip-toe round the mirrors wanting to burst out laughing as their shape is stretched so as to become hugely fat or thin or short or tall, but facing disapproving glances whenever anyone goes too far. (This place has, after all, the atmosphere of a secular church, and, like the church, is governed by a system of elitism, money and privilege by which the ordinary spectator is supposed to be awed, a participant only as a passive receptacle for the presentation of that which is ‘above’ their normal experience (though, of course, packaged into its own set of experiences – what one should do and feel in an art gallery).)

The show does have a certain immediate appeal – a protruding white ‘belly’ which appears at first to be an illusion does something to break the white flatness of a gallery wall (as if the building itself has become pregnant, a disquieting notion which bellows the work’s smooth gracefulness of shape), and what looks to be a painting of a giant yellow on yellow sun turns out to be a false wall with a large central hole (the opposite of a belly, perhaps). (When I Am Pregnant (1992)/ Yellow (1999). But such illusions reveal little beyond themselves: they are neat tricks with no secrets to yield, no truths to deliver, no paradoxes beyond the slight thrill of being tricked or confused: trompe l’oeil in the age of minimalism. The same with the hall of mirrors; the same with the sculptures made of colour and grouped under the title '1,000 Names', which hint at something vaguely religious and ritualistic (inspired by Kapoor’s visits to India) but lack the courage to make this explicit (and certainly without the courage to do anything political). Similarly, large sculptures such as ‘Slug’ (2009 – winding marble coils surrounding a shiny red vulva – do impress by their scale (taking up entire galleries), yet evoke no more wonder or fear than a single shot from a Jodorowsky film or even from Hollywood fare such as ‘Alien.’ Placed as it is in the front courtyard of the RA, neatly tucked in from the shiny lights and large scale of a street of shops, ‘Tall Tree and the Eye’ (2009), a sculpture consisting of connected glass balls, resembles nothing more than a giant modern Christmas tree. If, as Werner Herzog claims, we are in desperate need of new images to ensure the survival of our civilisation, they will not be found tidied away in a world of privileged white space and precious, tethered, quasi-subversion. Wander from the spindly broken pots and containers of the ‘excreted cement’ sculptures ‘Greyman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked’ (2008-2009) onto a building site; wander from the sticky red mess fired from a cannon every 20 minutes, during gallery opening hours, to the sticky red mess at the end of machine gun bullets every minute, around the world. Seen in this light, Kapoor’s work seems to do far less than it could, or should.



Anselm Kiefer: 'Karfunkelfee' and 'The Fertile Crescent' at The White Cube(s) (16 October-14 November 2009)

Perhaps my beef with the Kapoor exhibition is as much with the gallery setting as with what is presented within it. Let’s put that to the test: not far from the Royal Academy, in an Old Mason’s Yard (not that you would recognise it as shut) can be found the ‘White Cube’ gallery. This is perhaps the ultimate example of the trend to whiteness – the name of the gallery paying testament to its aesthetic (away with the black, the dirty, the broken, if it’s not contained within a large ‘steel and glass frame’). The immaculate cube certainly provides a spacious arena for Anselm Kiefer’s ‘Karfunkelfee’, four huge triptychs depicting gothic forests, and a smaller painting tucked away in the ‘lower ground floor lobby’ (at the other White Cube, in Hoxton Square, a companion show entitled ‘The Fertile Crescent’ depicts the ruins of Indian brick factories). Yet Kiefer’s work evades the tendency to alluring, polished and unfeeling minimalism exemplified by the sepulchral whiteness of modern galleries; indeed, the seriousness with which he treats his simplified subject matter comes close to caricature. This has its dangers: his work strives for portentousness in a manner not helped by the sort of critical comments hurled his way whenever he unveils his latest piece. The wounds of history, the aftermath of Fascism and the Holocaust, the cruelty of nature with the broken and slender promise of hope as a flower springing from the wasteland: such heavy symbolism threatens to drag down Kiefer’s canvases just as much as the thick encrusted impasto of his paint. But such interpretations, while perhaps true of the less successful work produced throughout the artist’s career, do not do justice to the best of his oeuvre.

What might be best would be, at least initially, to approach the canvasses with less of a worthy desire to make them mean humanistically and politically worthy things, to approach them with regards to the physical handling of material, to the sensuous experience of standing before them. It’s hard to miss the way in which they have been wrestled onto the canvas, a tactile struggle shared with Pollock and Auebach, the thick encrustations of their texture mimicking ‘nature’ (cracked earth, broken surfaces of ice and snow, wasteland, desert, human desolation of rubbish dumps and building sites) in what is more re-enactment and re-living than simple mimesis. This might give an appearance or atmosphere of desolation, yet there is also something approaching exuberance in the violent struggle with paint, the slashes and slabs and stabs. In a recent interview with The Independent Kiefer has this to say: “Children take all as given, and it is for this reason that ruins are beautiful – to me, extremely beautiful. I think the most beautiful movie in the world is the one when planes were sent after the war over Germany to film the ruins – these are for me the most beautiful pictures. It's wonderful because the vertical becomes the horizontal, you know? On one side, something is hidden because it's buried and on the other something is exposed – you see the forms. I love this.” Ruins, then (such as the ones in ‘The Fertile Crescent’), are not just symbols of transience, are not just about the horror of buildings which have outlived their original function, about the terrifying absence of the human: they have an aesthetic delight in themselves, if anything enhanced by the deep-seated fears which they also evoke. Similarly, for all their spiky forbidding, the brambles placed in front of the Karfunkelfee paintings seem meticulously arranged, carefully-smudged and smeared photos coiled round them, even a real snake carefully hidden in shadowed thicket; a semi-recreation, bringing the outside into a space where it becomes aestheticised – in the process losing the full force of its ‘sublime’ impact, nagged by fears which are more submerged, which creep around in less obvious ways than in the German Romantic art which is always present in the background of Kiefer’s works.

As the reviews for the show all note, this pieces offer nothing really new – not that that is the point of what Kiefer does. One senses that he wants each and every painting that he creates to be always-already a monument, to embody history. Odd, then, that this never occurs in a public space – by which I mean a REAL public space, not just a swish. immaculately polished gallery off Jermyn Street with its bespoke shoes and expensive tailors. How would a Kiefer compete with the flashing billboards a few miles away, the buzz of traffic and shoppers and shops? Perhaps the answer is that, though Kiefer is attempting to deal with historical traumas which effect us all, he is not doing so in an obvious or zeitgeisty way – this is not ‘Schindler’s List’ or ‘Saving Private Ryan’ or some film dealing with more recent horrors. One might note, in particular, the absence of figures –something heightened, in this show, by the presence of empty shirts, smocks, hoods, the hint of a path, a large book whose pages, curled as if aged paper, turn out to be made of rusted, weathered lead (echoing Kiefer’s earlier work, ‘High Priestess’). The work is in a sense an escape – to the ‘exotic’ strangeness of what Kiefer saw in India, to the German Romantic dark forest – but it is also an escape to dreams and nightmares which embody the fears suppressed and ignored in the busy, flashing world outside. Rather than taking that world on directly, Kiefer moves his reference points backwards (dealing with Germany’s 1940s legacy of guilt, drawing from older Germanic traditions, painting ruins, those symbols of the past), at the same time as trying to move them out of obvious temporal reference – to unchanging natural scenes, empty of human cultivation – to more primal fears.

We see this in the way that, as with Francis Bacon, echoes of western painting’s religious heritage sound in a human context: in the case of ‘Karfunkelfee’, the triptych form, with large, empty and decaying objects – a large smock, a small metal plane, a book made of lead – taking the place of Christ, the supreme figure of human suffering. This actually subverts a desire for catharsis, to be purged of plague desires and horrors (Grunwald). Only ghosts remain – and maybe not even ghosts, for memories lose their grip as those who held them die. Thus, the hooded smock in the centre of one of the triptychs is the shroud of the corpse that has disappeared, not because, like Christ, it has been resurrected, but because the body has rotted away; the smaller smocks tangled in the bramble below, almost mockingly, recall perhaps massacres of children, lamb’s wool caught in the thicket, and it’s arguably MORE disturbing to discover them this way, than to present explicit horror, than to depict an actual human corpse. For the fear of death is not so much that one will die, but that NOTHING OF ONE WILL BE LEFT: no memory, no trace, no poetic or artistic monument (Kiefer’s desire for monumentality, mentioned above, is nevertheless a desire for a different kind of monumentality to the norm; his monuments are monuments to the decay that follows great destruction, not the survivors of the glory that precedes it). In ‘Narziss and Goldmund’, Hesse writes that "perhaps...fear of death is the root of all our image-making"; Kiefer takes on this notion, but takes it further, ensures that in his works this fear is, at least partially, realized. No anonymous model will be immortalised as a statue in a "quiet dark cloister church, smiling with the same lovely mouth, as beautiful, young, and full of pain", for Kiefer's work has no human model. And that’s why his work still has such resonance – it’s not about doing something new, about some new trend – and it’s not just about an individual fear or an individual’s fear of death – it’s about a fear that, despite the apparent absence of the human, encompasses the whole human race, empathetically and collectively – that (especially given the recent fears of catastrophic environmental damage) not just one man or woman will disappear without trace, but that this will be the fate of all people, that the world will become uninhabitable and uninhabited by homo sapiens. Perhaps at some stage spaces such as the White Cube will be covered in brambles for real, Kiefer’s paint mingling with the dust and dirt with which it has so far only been lightly and consciously sprinkled.



Alejandro Jodorowksy and Pascale Montandon at The Horse Hospital (7-28 November 2009)

The series of watercolour and ink drawings by Alejandro Jodorowsky, in collaboration with his partner Pascale Montandon, are refreshingly located in a less grand setting. Down a side street, one comes across the words ‘Horse Hospital’ painted in white letters on a brick wall, and, a few meters further on, one has to press a buzzer to be admitted into the gallery space. The prices listed next to each work in the catalogue make more explicit that in the RA or White Cube the ridiculous money that goes into the art world, perhaps leading one to be automatically less disposed to like the work – even though it is by Jodorowsky. Starved of finances to make a new film for many years (1989’s ‘Santa Sangre’ is his last notable work), Jodorowsky might, one suspects, have turned his ideas into visual arts out of frustration. At the same time, they allow him a certain freedom, to paint things he couldn’t depict in the medium of film – or at least, not without considerable expense, effort and technological know-how. Thus, painted in a naïve style somewhat reminiscent of children’s book illustrations, we see figures with prominent genitals giving birth, having sex, raping and being raped, being mutilated, dancing, standing, singing; we are presented with bodily space transgressions and penetrations (arms going through bodies, one body sprouting many heads, a rabbi with sprouting extra fingers, headless corpses holding their smiling faces in their laps, green voyeur smiling dogs, plants with thick red lips). Despite all this, and despite what it shares with films like ‘The Holy Mountain’ and ‘El Topo’ – a preponderance of arcane mystical and religious symbolism, a fusion of extreme sex and violence, a love of images which are bizarre, arresting and taboo-breaking – these works are, if anything, less excessive than the films. Without the tie to real humans (actors), physical sets, location shooting, and without the combination of sound, music, speech and image, they are more safely removed into framed, almost whimsical fantasy, lacking the disturbance, the derangement which was always at the heart of what Jodorowksy did as a director. I’d take them over Anish Kapoor, though.

Richard Long at Tate Britain

Richard Long ‘Heaven & Earth’
Tate Britain, 3 June – 6 September 2009

Upon entering the exhibition space, one faces a massive, pristine, white-painted gallery wall, smeared with swirls of what turns out to be clay. It’s like a Pollock splash-painting but with patterns which are easier to follow, employing more obviously regular, recurring forms, though spread over such a space that there is a sense of teeming excess similar to Pollock. Entitled ‘From Beginning to End’, this is actually one of Long’s more ‘traditional works’, in that it was created specifically for a gallery space. As is well known, he’s an artist best known for ‘land art’, in which he takes long treks through rugged and mostly deserted terrain, re-arranging rocks and leaves, sticks and stones, into structures and patterns, taking all his material from what is to hand, knowing that it will be taken back again, that the art-works will collapse back into the landscape. Sometimes, the walks themselves constitute the ‘art-work,’ recorded through maps and photographs: Long describes his art as “the essence of my experience, not a representation of it.”

Which must have made curating the exhibition an odd business: Long’s interest in ephemerality goes against the very function of a museum or gallery: to preserve, to keep in a fixed, unchanging state (‘no touching’, ‘keep your distance’). Many of the rooms therefore feature Long’s textual records of his experiences, printed on the walls, in large bold font. For instance: “the mountainside in torrents/ summit shrine in cloud.” All that remains of pieces like this, then, is an idea, a trace – indeed, a ‘representation’ or record, exactly that which Long claims to be avoiding. Perhaps he would claim that these records – the photographs, the maps, the words – are not the actual art-works themselves, and, in that case, one might wonder at the fact that they take up half the exhibition space. On the other hand, it’s hard to see what else one could do to preserve a work of this perishable nature, and a trace is better than nothing at all.

There are some gallery-specific works as well, I hasten to add: the aforementioned ‘From Beginning to End’, and a few more large-scale pieces, taking up whole walls and building up patterns of mud and clay over dark painted backgrounds. The two pieces which give the exhibition its title face each other on opposite walls: based around characters from the ancient Chinese ‘I Ching’ (Book of Changes) which are suspended between writing and pictorial depiction, they are made from River Avon mud, thus constituting an attempt to fuse the local with other localities – to find cross-national similarities between natural phenomena and (perhaps less so) human reaction to them.

Such ideas are fascinating, but there’s something a little uncomfortable about the way in which the work is forced to change by being forced indoors. Long himself is on the defensive, claiming that he wishes to restore the experience of tactility, of physical experience, which is lost in those ‘works’ which are only preserved through photographs and words – an attempt, perhaps, to move away from contexts which are necessarily focussed solely on the individual and their experience. The problem is that the works lose their transience: it’s a completely different thing to come across Long’s patterned arrangements of stone when they have to be treated with respectful distance, and it seems somewhat odd to stress tactility when one isn’t actually allowed to touch the works.

I suppose that’s not really Long’s fault: after all, his major work hasn’t been gallery-based (though the fact that he’s regarded as an important artist is precisely because of the non-ephemeral records of his work: photographs, texts, gallery retrospectives). Richard Cork wrote in 1981 that “Long cuts himself off from all avoidable contact with other people – and from the urban centres where they congregate – so that he can regain at least a semblance of the relationship man used to have with the earth.” In a sense this is a radical nostalgia, but in another sense Long remains merely an adventurous hiker, perhaps one with greater stamina and will-power than most, but a hiker nonetheless.

The hermeticism is potentially interesting, but Cork’s idealised conception of the artist actually distorts the much-trumpeted ‘relationship with the earth.’ OK, the shaman who, as Theodore Roszak suggests, may have been the original artist (prophet, poet, musician, leader), was in some way ‘apart’ from the rest of the community: an ordained figure, entering into higher communication with spiritual forces denied to the ‘layman’ – but at the same time his prophecies and trances related to the community. I’m not suggesting that the artist should be our social prophet – I’m not sure that art (always? ever?) has that power– but Long’s isolation does seem to me a historical distortion.

This is not merely because he has had the ‘primitive’, return-to-origins tag forced upon him. On the contrary, he employs it in his own writings: “human mark-making with what is to hand”; “instinctive spontaneous primitive mark-making.” In this kind of discourse he also suggests an accidental nature to his work, access to something that manifests itself without having been consciously formulated or planned. One might view his re-arrangements of natural objects as improvisatory art-works, whose making is of the same transience as the ‘finished’ piece – which is never finished, because it will be eroded or blown away or snow-covered, eventually destroyed, indistinguishable from the landscape out of which it was temporarily made to stand out as some kind of marker.

Yet this is essentially a mystification of human impulses as something we can, if not understand, at least access on some pre-social level. Even if we do believe that such impulses lay behind the earliest forms of art – which may have been arrangements of natural objects just like Long’s – to believe that a twentieth-century man can tap into the same kind of relation is to ignore the entire history of socio-historical development since. We may soon be forced into a new kind of relation with the earth, driven to abandon our life-style dependence on the large-scale exploitation of natural resources by danger of global catastrophe, but it will not be one where we are simply free to wander the “road less-travelled” and take photographs of our exploits to hang in pristine galleries. In that sense, fascinating though this exhibition is, Long’s entire aesthetic appears suspect.

(The first half of this review was originally published in the arts supplement of 'The Cambridge Student', May Week Edition)