Review: Pride and Prejudice.
So, I’m in the Rio cinema in Dalston – possibly the most multi-cultural place in the world - and everyone here is white and middle class. Outside, the cars on Kingsland Road throb past with their neon glow and the kebab shops light up the street and yet, in here, all you can hear is the sound of horses hooves on cobbles and silver spoons clinking on china. The thought occurs: why would anyone want to make a film like this now? Isn’t it about as relevant as Quinlan Terry’s houses or Viscount Linley’s furniture? Well, I happen to have a soft spot for Quinlan Terry, but still, the whole idea of period drama is rather worrying: a curious fixation on a world of restrictive manners and social segregation. Is this what we should be thinking about in 2005?
Then there is the film itself. The whole thing is bathed in a honeyed autumnal glow. It begins with the sun rising over a misty swathe of English countryside and gets progressively more picturesque after that. This film is as stylistically intense as Sin City. The quality of light in it was so seductive that after it I felt like hiring a lighting crew to follow me around. What’s it all about? Well, basically, there’s the Bennet family who are farm people, a bit coarse but basically good sorts. They have five daughters and no son or heir, so the house and farm are due to be given over to a male cousin, who is, as Jane Austen put it, a bit of a knob. The father is an amiably sardonic farmer. The mother is a petty bourgeois social climber obsessed with marrying off her daughters to the highest bidders. The eldest daughter Jane is beautiful, honest and shy. The second eldest Elizabeth is beautiful, honest and sharp. Into this scenario rides Mr D’Arcy, an impossibly wealthy bachelor, and his friend, the only slightly less wealthy Mr Bigley. The Bennets and the two bachelors meet at the village disco – sorry, local dance - where Mr Bigley promptly falls in love with Jane, and Mr D’arcy and Elizabeth begin their tortuous and acerbic on-off courtship.
Most of the action – if that is the right word – takes place within a succession of house interiors where the manners are adjusted subtly according to location. The Bennet’s house is filmed in a succession of painterly scenes, somewhere between Breugel, Pieter de Hooch and the sort of sentimental pictures of young children chasing chickens that the Victorians used to hang in their nurseries. Pigs waddle in and out of shot, mud squelches underfoot and there is a rich choreography of honest farm folk and quacking wild fowl. The house, a mix of Queen Anne and Georgian with classical embellishment is lovingly pictured in all its flaking and scuffed glory: a sign presumably of both the Bennet’s near impoverishment and of our heroine Elizabeth’s straightforward honesty. Beginning with the girlish honesty of Jane and Elizabeth’s conversations at home, social interaction becomes ever more elliptical and strained as they move through a succession of ever grander residences. Basically, the posher the house the more mean spirited the people living in it. Except for D’Arcy who has the grandest house but also the best taste. In one scene, Elizabeth wanders through his copious hallways, her eyes lingering over the suggestive physicality of a series of Grecian statues. She is clearly the only other person in the film capable of appreciating such beauty.
Away from the claustrophobic civility of the interiors, Elizabeth’s enthusiasm for walking is seen as evidence of her free spirit. The countryside is depicted as free and natural – a naturalness, of course, that is mediated through the whole biscuit tin and tea towel world of the English picturesque tradition. When the camera is not focusing on the all round loveliness of the English landscape, it is focusing on the all round loveliness of Kiera Knightly. Her character is, of course, the moral heart of the story, showing that honesty and depth will win out over frippery and snobbishness. But, appropriately, her face is always perfectly made up, her ‘kohled’ eyes and flawless skin as ‘natural’ as the perfect countryside behind her.
Always a sucker for shots of rolling hills accompanied by swirling classical music, and entranced by Knightley’s triumphant goodness, I was utterly seduced by it all. Coming out, Kingsland Road was something of a shock. But, you know, in a good way.
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Monday, June 20, 2005
More Black, Vicar?
Exhibition Review: Royal Academy Summer Exhibition
For two months of the summer, the Royal Academy is full, rammed to the rafters, with contemporary paintings: some by famous artists, many by Royal Academicians, hundreds of others sent in by amateur artists. The number on display is vast – there are 1333 works here - and in some rooms no wall space is left visible. This is the Summer Exhibition, arts equivalent of Wimbledon or Glyndbourne: very middle-class, very English and very popular.
What’s it like? Exhausting, mainly. After a while, the paintings of houses and hillsides and cats, and more cats, and coy nudes and impasto cityscapes and hazy Venetian canals meld into one vaguely hallucinatory experience that, coupled with the constant background hum of Posh People’s Voices, causes a strangely genteel form of sensory overload. By the half-way point - room 4, lot number 666 (which isn’t a picture of the devil but the Garden Pond, Mistley) - I was starting to suffer from burn-out. An afternoon in the Summer Exhibition feels like taking a tour of a thousand Islington front rooms via Cork Street whilst leafing through Modern Painters and a few copies of Country Life for good measure. It dawned on me, as I progressed, just how many artists there are in this country. I wonder if everyone is secretly off at the weekends, easel in hand, gauche in pocket, to the Lake District, or the Fens, or sketching their husband looking pensive in the front room.
Anyway, there are lots of paintings called things like: Storm Passing, Gulls Flying or Seated Model From Behind, and some excruciating puns such as The Man Who Drew Too Much. Various famous and redoubtable characters are included such as Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Gillian Ayres and the late Eduardo Paolozzi. There is a vaguely homo-erotic painting of a blue sailor painted by a Holly Johnson. Could it really be the Holly Johnson? Surely not. Anyway, it had sold one copy, hopefully not to Holly Johnson. Old RA veteran Anthony Green, who I remember from childhood trips to this exhibition, has his usual 117 pieces in and, I was greatly relieved to see, is still including saucy shots of his missus in them. If people aren’t out on the hillside capturing birds in flight they generally tend to be in the studio being vaguely salacious so, typically, David Mach contributes an enormous sculpture of a naked woman made entirely from Dominoes. And it’s called Dominatrix. No, really.
There is a smattering of more contemporary artists including Gavin Turk, Tracy Emin, and Mark Quinn. There are photos by Sam Taylor Wood and Andreas Gursky. Michael Craig Marin contributes a tricksy computer animation. And, I was just wondering whether Julian Opie would pop up, when lo and behold, he did. There is also a special room devoted to Ed Ruscha, who’s conceptually clarity and focus came as a startling shock in the context.
Finally, and with some sense of relief I found the architecture room. Home turf I thought. Mind you, even the curators seem to have given up by this point, professing ignorance of the contents of the room and of architecture in general. Traditionally, this room gives architecture something of a bad name with practices chucking in a couple of curling competition boards they had hanging around the office. There are also lots of antiseptic white models of urban plazas or perspex office blocks and the odd little sketch of a house in the country. At least you are safe from pictures of cats in here.
Worst thing in the room has to be Michael Manser’s proposals for Heathrow Terminal 5 which looks as horrible as you might imagine Heathrow Terminal 5 could look. There are some nice drawings by the late Ralf Erskine which speak very much of their own period. Other highlights include a huge model of Will Alsop’s ‘Chips’ building, which has plastic fish in it, and some very nice drawings by CJ Lim of a landmark proposal for the 2012 Paris Olympics.
Overall, the Summer Exhibition leaves you reeling with the sheer monstrous amount of it all, unable to make much sense of individual works. Like most classic English days out it seems to exist partly as an excuse to drink tea and eat a lot of cake immediately afterwards. I certainly needed to sit down. Possibly, at my own easel. Now, if I can just catch the quality of that passing Cumulo Nimbus…more black, MORE BLACK!!…..
For two months of the summer, the Royal Academy is full, rammed to the rafters, with contemporary paintings: some by famous artists, many by Royal Academicians, hundreds of others sent in by amateur artists. The number on display is vast – there are 1333 works here - and in some rooms no wall space is left visible. This is the Summer Exhibition, arts equivalent of Wimbledon or Glyndbourne: very middle-class, very English and very popular.
What’s it like? Exhausting, mainly. After a while, the paintings of houses and hillsides and cats, and more cats, and coy nudes and impasto cityscapes and hazy Venetian canals meld into one vaguely hallucinatory experience that, coupled with the constant background hum of Posh People’s Voices, causes a strangely genteel form of sensory overload. By the half-way point - room 4, lot number 666 (which isn’t a picture of the devil but the Garden Pond, Mistley) - I was starting to suffer from burn-out. An afternoon in the Summer Exhibition feels like taking a tour of a thousand Islington front rooms via Cork Street whilst leafing through Modern Painters and a few copies of Country Life for good measure. It dawned on me, as I progressed, just how many artists there are in this country. I wonder if everyone is secretly off at the weekends, easel in hand, gauche in pocket, to the Lake District, or the Fens, or sketching their husband looking pensive in the front room.
Anyway, there are lots of paintings called things like: Storm Passing, Gulls Flying or Seated Model From Behind, and some excruciating puns such as The Man Who Drew Too Much. Various famous and redoubtable characters are included such as Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Gillian Ayres and the late Eduardo Paolozzi. There is a vaguely homo-erotic painting of a blue sailor painted by a Holly Johnson. Could it really be the Holly Johnson? Surely not. Anyway, it had sold one copy, hopefully not to Holly Johnson. Old RA veteran Anthony Green, who I remember from childhood trips to this exhibition, has his usual 117 pieces in and, I was greatly relieved to see, is still including saucy shots of his missus in them. If people aren’t out on the hillside capturing birds in flight they generally tend to be in the studio being vaguely salacious so, typically, David Mach contributes an enormous sculpture of a naked woman made entirely from Dominoes. And it’s called Dominatrix. No, really.
There is a smattering of more contemporary artists including Gavin Turk, Tracy Emin, and Mark Quinn. There are photos by Sam Taylor Wood and Andreas Gursky. Michael Craig Marin contributes a tricksy computer animation. And, I was just wondering whether Julian Opie would pop up, when lo and behold, he did. There is also a special room devoted to Ed Ruscha, who’s conceptually clarity and focus came as a startling shock in the context.
Finally, and with some sense of relief I found the architecture room. Home turf I thought. Mind you, even the curators seem to have given up by this point, professing ignorance of the contents of the room and of architecture in general. Traditionally, this room gives architecture something of a bad name with practices chucking in a couple of curling competition boards they had hanging around the office. There are also lots of antiseptic white models of urban plazas or perspex office blocks and the odd little sketch of a house in the country. At least you are safe from pictures of cats in here.
Worst thing in the room has to be Michael Manser’s proposals for Heathrow Terminal 5 which looks as horrible as you might imagine Heathrow Terminal 5 could look. There are some nice drawings by the late Ralf Erskine which speak very much of their own period. Other highlights include a huge model of Will Alsop’s ‘Chips’ building, which has plastic fish in it, and some very nice drawings by CJ Lim of a landmark proposal for the 2012 Paris Olympics.
Overall, the Summer Exhibition leaves you reeling with the sheer monstrous amount of it all, unable to make much sense of individual works. Like most classic English days out it seems to exist partly as an excuse to drink tea and eat a lot of cake immediately afterwards. I certainly needed to sit down. Possibly, at my own easel. Now, if I can just catch the quality of that passing Cumulo Nimbus…more black, MORE BLACK!!…..
Friday, February 18, 2005
Oh Dear, I Don't Fancy Yours Much
Exhibition review: Beauty, Victoria Albert Museum.
“Beauty is a way of editing the world”, writes Stephen Bayley in the introduction to this exhibition at the V+A. Yes, but who would want to edit the world?
I’ve always had a soft spot for Stephen Bayley ever since he suggested that Nicholas Serota had no right being the director of The Tate because he drove a Volvo. It was camp nonsense, but it was funny camp nonsense. This exhibition, however, suggests that Bayley may not have had his tongue anywhere near his cheek when he said it.
Ostensibly, ‘Beauty’ is not really an exhibition at all. It’s actually a trail through the V+A’s permanent collection curated by Bayley. You pick up a catalogue at the front desk and follow the pink arrows around the V+A to objects that he has picked out as representing ideals of beauty. Following this trail to the letter, and ignoring everything else on the way, results in an excitingly random crash course in art history. The most obvious enjoyment of the show, however, is to challenge Bayley’s choice of objects and, thus, get to the nub of his own agenda. Such an approach pricks some holes in his wafer-thin notion of beauty and the usefulness of such a term to start with. For, surely, it is ultimately taste - not beauty - that is being celebrated here and, in particular, Bayley’s own hyper-urbane, ‘darling-one-simply-must-have-the-right-corkscrew’ kind of taste.
So off, and skipping some items, we go. Item 1 is Canova’s Sleeping Nymph which, Bayley informs us, has a ‘cold beauty’ that is ‘intensely erotic’. Which is another way of saying that Steven Bayley himself finds cold beauty intensely erotic. Personally, I find Sarah HYoarding from Girl’s Aloud intensely erotic but I’m not sure it constitutes a manifesto. Moving on, we get to admire a genuinely magnificent Chinese Imperial throne and a Samurai sword but ignore a splendid Fisherman’s Celebration Robe, enjoy a Japanese tea ceremony set, take in Michelangelo’s David, by-pass Metalwork in the Netherlands entirely, stop off to admire Donatello and arrive, oddly, at a photo of Brigitte Bardot by David Bailey. The suggestion that a sword, a tea set and Brigitte Bardot all contain some illusive yet transferable quality is unnerving to say the least.
Moving on, we find, unsurprisingly, that Bayley has little time for Victorian Silverware and thus misses out a truly magnificent eight-armed silver plated fruit bowl dispenser and picks some elegant glassware instead. After this, there are a couple of Arts and Crafts items and we are off into ‘The Modern Era’. Swatch watches, leather trousers and Katherine Hamnett’s ‘Stay Alive in ‘85’ t-shirt don’t make the grade but Olivetti’s typewriter somewhat boringly does. I completely missed Dieter Ram’s Braun radio, so I chose the Inter 6 Transistor Folding Portable Radio – which folds into a ‘space bracelet’ which, you have to admit, is pretty cool – instead.
There are no items picked from Marquetry 1650-1700 and we zip through South Asia without a bye or leave. In the Elizabethan paintings section, Bayley highlights a picture entitled Young Man in Roses, which sounds a bit like how he must have felt when they asked him to curate this show. Finally, we end up in the vast room containing Raphael’s cartoons.
Along the way we learn little about beauty but quite a lot about the contents of Stephen Bayley’s head. Many of his selections confirm a pretty orthodox idea of both beauty and value, but the desire to mark out and hold things up as worthy is the compelling psychosis underpinning the show. In his notes, Bayley provides us with some pretty nebulous background as to what beauty might be. “Beauty is much easier to detect than to define”, he says. “Philosopher’s” have apparently “pondered” it. Well, that’s a help. When people are on thin ice they normally reach for the description ‘timeless’ and Bayley grabs for it here. Generally, it’s probably safe to assume that anything dismissed as superficial isn’t, and anything that claims eternal value is hiding its own insecurities. The concept of beauty here then is, perhaps ultimately, more about a fear of ugliness, or of bad taste, than it is a value in its own right.
“Beauty is a way of editing the world”, writes Stephen Bayley in the introduction to this exhibition at the V+A. Yes, but who would want to edit the world?
I’ve always had a soft spot for Stephen Bayley ever since he suggested that Nicholas Serota had no right being the director of The Tate because he drove a Volvo. It was camp nonsense, but it was funny camp nonsense. This exhibition, however, suggests that Bayley may not have had his tongue anywhere near his cheek when he said it.
Ostensibly, ‘Beauty’ is not really an exhibition at all. It’s actually a trail through the V+A’s permanent collection curated by Bayley. You pick up a catalogue at the front desk and follow the pink arrows around the V+A to objects that he has picked out as representing ideals of beauty. Following this trail to the letter, and ignoring everything else on the way, results in an excitingly random crash course in art history. The most obvious enjoyment of the show, however, is to challenge Bayley’s choice of objects and, thus, get to the nub of his own agenda. Such an approach pricks some holes in his wafer-thin notion of beauty and the usefulness of such a term to start with. For, surely, it is ultimately taste - not beauty - that is being celebrated here and, in particular, Bayley’s own hyper-urbane, ‘darling-one-simply-must-have-the-right-corkscrew’ kind of taste.
So off, and skipping some items, we go. Item 1 is Canova’s Sleeping Nymph which, Bayley informs us, has a ‘cold beauty’ that is ‘intensely erotic’. Which is another way of saying that Steven Bayley himself finds cold beauty intensely erotic. Personally, I find Sarah HYoarding from Girl’s Aloud intensely erotic but I’m not sure it constitutes a manifesto. Moving on, we get to admire a genuinely magnificent Chinese Imperial throne and a Samurai sword but ignore a splendid Fisherman’s Celebration Robe, enjoy a Japanese tea ceremony set, take in Michelangelo’s David, by-pass Metalwork in the Netherlands entirely, stop off to admire Donatello and arrive, oddly, at a photo of Brigitte Bardot by David Bailey. The suggestion that a sword, a tea set and Brigitte Bardot all contain some illusive yet transferable quality is unnerving to say the least.
Moving on, we find, unsurprisingly, that Bayley has little time for Victorian Silverware and thus misses out a truly magnificent eight-armed silver plated fruit bowl dispenser and picks some elegant glassware instead. After this, there are a couple of Arts and Crafts items and we are off into ‘The Modern Era’. Swatch watches, leather trousers and Katherine Hamnett’s ‘Stay Alive in ‘85’ t-shirt don’t make the grade but Olivetti’s typewriter somewhat boringly does. I completely missed Dieter Ram’s Braun radio, so I chose the Inter 6 Transistor Folding Portable Radio – which folds into a ‘space bracelet’ which, you have to admit, is pretty cool – instead.
There are no items picked from Marquetry 1650-1700 and we zip through South Asia without a bye or leave. In the Elizabethan paintings section, Bayley highlights a picture entitled Young Man in Roses, which sounds a bit like how he must have felt when they asked him to curate this show. Finally, we end up in the vast room containing Raphael’s cartoons.
Along the way we learn little about beauty but quite a lot about the contents of Stephen Bayley’s head. Many of his selections confirm a pretty orthodox idea of both beauty and value, but the desire to mark out and hold things up as worthy is the compelling psychosis underpinning the show. In his notes, Bayley provides us with some pretty nebulous background as to what beauty might be. “Beauty is much easier to detect than to define”, he says. “Philosopher’s” have apparently “pondered” it. Well, that’s a help. When people are on thin ice they normally reach for the description ‘timeless’ and Bayley grabs for it here. Generally, it’s probably safe to assume that anything dismissed as superficial isn’t, and anything that claims eternal value is hiding its own insecurities. The concept of beauty here then is, perhaps ultimately, more about a fear of ugliness, or of bad taste, than it is a value in its own right.
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