Souvenir shop for Damien Hirst’s skull, originally uploaded by dansette.
This one is for Marshall. My friend Kate took this picture of he Hirst souvenir shop outside of the White Cube gallery.
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Yearly Archives: 2007
Them Be the Bells of Bow, Yo.
There’s this song that’s still at number two here in the charts and it sums up everything I hate about British pop music right now. They play it all the time on BBC 6 and now it’s stuck in my head. Kate Nash’s Foundations– OK, so she’s cute– much cuter than Lily Allen whose tough-girl pose is really tedious. Even the guy in the video is cute. The sock fight– nauseatingly cute.
If you want to see the video, go here as none of the YouTube links work. (To watch the video on her oh-so-quirky-cute site you have to give up an email, name and phone number and even an address I think. INSANE. but let’s move on.)
Nash’s song is better than any I have heard from Allen but she’s basically an Allen clone. She’s taken Allen’s game and bettered it for the 20-something-new-mortgage-from-daddy demographic, whereas Lily Allen was aimed at teenage girls who don’t remember white reggae from the first time around in the 80′s. Nash’s demographic actually has some money to spend, so, even though she’s a MySpace success story, maybe the A&R people are honing their game.
On the web many sites claim Allen and Nash are Cockney and that’s just rubbish. Neither were born within the sound of Bows Bells, if we’re going to get purist about it. Nash is from Rickmansworth, a north west suburb of London. And Allen was born in West London to a film producer an actor. I would like to say that accent is put on for the American market, but their songs are hits here.
It can only mean that Brits want to see themselves in a certain way– a juxtaposition of worldly wit and (pastoral throwback?) innocence with a sprinkling of East End grit (More akin to Dick Van Dyke tap dancing than any pearly king). The fashion for faux Cockney accents is a sure sign that it no longer refers to a specific people and culture, but a fiction. Kind of like in the current popular imagination, pirates are no longer sailors who raped and robbed people but ragamuffin swashbucklers with sexy eye makeup.
But it does seem the best way to be a pop star in Britain these days is to pretend you are Cockney. (though this can work even if you are a duo from Detroit) 
It’s ironic. The East End, now totally gentrified, has become the bastion of the trendy, edgy and wealthy few who have pushed out the poor there so what remains is a mythology.
Something’s dead, gone, changed in London, even if there’s no real pointing to the Cockney mask per se, which Peter Watts refers to as “Mockey”. Hence the weird theme of nostalgia that crops up in so much white British hip hop. There are many examples but I’m thinking of Lady Sovereign’s “Those Were the Days.” where she’s wistful about her days growing up on the Chalkhill estate. Unlike the others I mention above, she actually did grow up on an estate, even if it was also in the west.
It becomes even more poignant when you realize she she’d be priced out of London if she weren’t a pop star.
And here Jamie T’s “Sheila” featuring the actor Bob Hoskins who is famous for playing Cockneys among other things. Here he is lipsynching the song with his scary white teeth. This is actually one of the worst videos I’ve seen in a really long time and it pretty much ruined the song for me.
And, though it’s not hip hop, I love Pulp’s nostalgic “Mile End” It’s old at this point, and recontexualized in Danny Boyle’s brilliant Trainspotting. I have no idea if what the song refers to was closer to reality than the faux-grit on the charts now. I have heard that it is about Jarvis Cocker’s first “home” in London, but I’m sure it too is creating a myth of a gritty London up for grabs, a London for anyone. (Not just a city of estate agents and property-ladder climbers, but anyone who could find a vacant corner, anyone who could live low rent — make art or music or write. Anyone who could tend to the city’s soul, but I digress.) In a lot of ways the city of this song, or the vision of London in Kureshi’s London Kills Me or even the parallel vision of Edinburgh in Trainspotting is more hopeful than this London I live in now that is doing so “well” if you believe the hype, a London that’s polished and primed, the richest city in the world, full of high street chains.
Now there are headlines about interest rates closing out first time buyers from the “property ladder.” But all this talk of building new homes on brown sites is too little too late. We didn’t have no where to live, / we didn’t have nowhere to go / til someone said /I know this place off Burditt road…
This new hegemony of the estate agent has made me wistful for squats. Maybe I should work on my Cockney accent and write a pop song about it.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
It hurts me to post this, but here you go:
Eugene Hutz and and Sergey Ryabtsev backing up Madonna doing the traditional Romany song Lela Pala Tute to the tune of La Isla Bonita at the bogus Live Earth performance at Wembley Arena:
Hell has frozen over.
I am a fan of Gogol Bordello, and I admit to adoring Eugene Hutz more than a grown woman should. I saw them live before they got big, and it was the best live show I’d ever seen. The band created a rare and transcendent temporary autonomous zone that I will never forget. Hey, I guess Hakim Bey says they’re temporary for a reason.
But Eugene, why’d you have to go out like that, as Madonna’s organ-grinder monkey? Madonna is infamous for her parasitic relationship with authentic others, using them for her own mediocre ends– don’t you know this? If you start believing your own hype, you’re going to be the next lame Borat punchline.
On the Gogol Bordello fan sites major fights are erupting, and the whole band was not behind this decision to play with Madonna. There’s a camp of fans that’s saying it’s stupid to be upset about the Live Earth performance– more fame and exposure is good for the band, and there’s either good music or bad– the performance with Madonna changes nothing. I can only think that people voicing this argument grew up without understanding music as a subversive political force. Music isn’t just “good” or “bad.” In a time when voices of dissent are marginalized in the press and news media, often the most subversive information can be coded in a song or live performance. And music, poetry and fiction are the only mediums that can really capture the emotional ambiguity of struggle. I was radicalized by the Clash, way before I picked up a copy of Maximum Rock and Roll and learned that the Clash were sellouts. Gogol Bordello’s music was political– subversive. I thought Gogol Bordello’s “Underdog World Strike,” and “Gypsy Punk” were more than just poses, but maybe I was mistaken.
As the band became more popular over the last six years, the shows were packed with new people– many of them hostile, “world music mosh pit” idiots. This was the case at the oversold Astoria show where at certain points it was so crowded there, thanks to a write up in Time Out, that I was so crushed between people that my feet were not even touching the ground, and I was bruised for days afterward, and I was nowhere near the front. So my jealousy of the band, which I’d listened to since their first album in 1999, began. Why couldn’t I just love them in peace with this tribe of people who “got it”? Why did I have to share them with boneheads?
Why did Gogol Bordello cancel shows in Prague to do this favor for Madonna? Why did I have to hear Lela Pala Tute mungled with a Madonna song I hated as a teenager, a song that represented every empty thing about pop music I had come to loathe?
Eugene’s erotic power and magnetism is significant, and that he now has hoards of pissed off fans only testifies to the passion he and his band have inspired in so many. I leave you with this– Eugene singing Lela Pala Tute to Pavla Fleischer, director of The Pied Piper of Hutzovina. (The film is, according to Fleisher, a kind of lovesick ode to Eugene.) There’s intimacy in the way he sings to her. We are voyeurs. I know the look in his eyes– that singular boyish attention, and it’s the kind of thing that can make the heart into some fluttering creature that will betray itself. He surely knows this. Fleischer posts a long diatribe along with this youtube video, with the vehemence of a jilted lover. “But to think that [Madonna] also wants Eugene to sing Pala Tute to HER – that’s a bit too much of a territory invasion 
! Madonna, with all the respect I have for you, I was there first!! ” And this has gone beyond gossip for me. Pavla’s impulse to make a film based on a romantic obsession is creepy, and her possessiveness of Eugene’s iconic presence is a bit pathetic, but I see myself in her.
Eugene, come back. I’m wearing purple.
Tiger! Tiger! Burning Bright
Anger fuels the city, the smouldering coals of Blake’s satanic mills are alive and well. Since the attempted carbomb attack on the Tiger Tiger nightclub on Haymarket, I’ve had Blake’s quatrain drumming in my head,
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Though this coincidence with Blake may have been lost on the bombers, it was not lost on me. Some days, London is full of fearful symmetries and awful dichotomies. Yesterday was such a day.
Two blanched-blonde chavs in pink track suits sit behind me on the bus. Their OG mannerisms borrowed from MTV, they listen to tinny hip hop mp3s on their mobiles and call me ginjah (or ginger) pointing to my red dreads with disgust. (It wasn’t until I moved here that I realized many Brits find red hair and freckles ugly and are unashamedly vocal about it– no doubt this is some leftover anti-Irish sentiment. For my American friends who don’t know what I’m talking about, see Catherine Tate’s hilariously illustrative “Ginger Oppression” skit.) The girls hissed at me as I left the bus, white girl respect your race. How is it they don’t realize their entire pose is a borrowed perversion of African American performative resistance?
Alighting in Picadilly, I find vandals got to Madame Pompadour– a dripping pink grimace sprayed over her.
Camilla and Kate convince me to go with them to check out the Damien Hirst show at the White Cube. Outside, people queue in the rain to see the skull, and across the street the gift shop sells tee shirts and posters sprinkled with (ethically sourced?) fairy dust. The guards wear what look like band tee shirts: a screen printed diamond with “hirst” in gothic letters across it. They don’t stop a child climbing on the bisected shark, and I like to think this is not out of laziness but instead knowing that this is ultimately what the thing was for– a morbid, toothy jungle gym. After all, isn’t Hirst the boy who pulled the wings off butterflies and showed you his dissections in the school yard? Now he’s just grown up and has a load of cash.
Walking between the shark sections did make me shudder with a zero at the bone feeling, and the black sheep impeccably stilled in its case terrified me, but all this emotional impact was lessened by the exceedingly bad paintings hung about the place: paint-by-numbers photorealism of his wife’s cesarean, and the garish pathology panels– hair and razor blades affixed to ink jet washes in inchoate art school fashion.
In one alcove a woman stands before the butterfly paintings– wings from tropical butterflies plastered to canvas. She wonders aloud, “where does he get them from?” Isn’t it obvious the whole show is snickering in the face of lifestyle politics and ethical sources– (White Cube’s press releases be damned)? In the other room, the climbing boy stands in front of the black sheep and asks, “Mummy, does he kill the animals himself?” And the mother, so confident in “culturing” her child by letting him climb on the vitrines, is stumped. After a pause she replies, “They are dead, darling.” In other words, don’t worry how they got that way.
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb, make thee?
Later we went to see a screening of Sadie Bennings brilliant German Song and I got homesick. At least in America one is allowed a fertile innocence. But in London, that seems impossible. It was Gay Pride in Soho yesterday, and even with a bomb scare and torrential rain, people came out in carnival beads and metallic latex to drink in the streets with a joyless determination. Blitz spirit, innit? The special bomb units ran through the crowd, and one bumped into me, turned and apologized before running on. I thought– this would never happen in America– a massive street party right after a bomb scare? A policeman under duress saying sorry? For a moment, I was happy to be in such a proud, wildly civil place. I had no idea of the flaming SUV crashed in the airport in Glasgow.
What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
Train Spotting on National Gallery Grand Tour
I had just emerged from swanky dim sum in the subterranean aquarium of Yauatcha with my friend Liza when I was startled to find that we we in front of a large-scale reproduction of Holbein’s The Ambassadors. The anamorphic skull at the base of the painting confronted passers by– a distorted momento mori at their feet.
When I was studying art in school, I had a bit of a crush on this painting. It made me feel warm and fuzzy, and not just because the men in it were dashing, but their range of possessions fascinated me, and the skull, which my mind could see by turning the painting widdershins inside itself– it was magical. Seeing it on Berwick before me, I was wooed all over again.
Rubens on Ganton
Next, we stumbled upon Samon and Delilah on Ganton street– Ruben’s dimpled and generous flesh at eye level– and I knew something was up. I was in Soho– a place full of ad agencies, fashionable clothing stores and porno dens. Samson saited with sex on Delilah’s generous lap– this was really out of place here in the bastion of mechanized sex and silicone, air brushing and size zero dresses.
After returning home and doing some Googling I realized this wasn’t just a fluke, it was an actual show. The National Gallery has hung replicas of several paintings from their collection throughout the streets of Soho and Covent Garden, with surreal and fantastic results. I made a list of all the paintings I wanted to see, drew myself a map and headed back into Soho.
Some, unmapped, thrust themselves upon me. Others came with an Easter-egg hunt satisfaction– their gold frames an eye-catching give away. Some, like the Rousseau that I most wanted to find, eluded me.
Madame Pompadour at her Tambour Frame, Drouais.
She would die a month before this painting was completed. Blamed for the Seven Years War and called the “Godmother of Rococo,” here she sits beside a queue of taxis, outside the Picadilly station, working at her needlepoint with her little black dog.
Caravaggio’s Salome Receiving the Head of John the Baptist.
Someone curating this has a sense of humor. Painted while Caravaggio was on the run for killing a man– he used prostitutes and criminals as models, so in many ways this painting is at home in Walker’s Court, a narrow alley of sex shops. I would have liked to see Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes here, but all the same, the choice of Salome is inspired. Much has been written about beheadings in art history as metaphors for castration, but I will leave that up to the Freudians.
Despite generic chain store take over and general sleaziness of much of London streets, many corners remain elegant, and this show seems to prove this. As I was walking I saw many perfect naked spaces that wanted an image.
An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, Jospeh Wright of Derby.
I found this one by surprise, meandering off Wardour. Wright uses chiaroscuro, usually a technique used by artists like Caravaggio to relay a spiritual dichotomy of dark and light. Here the dichotomy is presumably in the service of science– enlightenment or ignorance. Only the picture’s moral ambiguity saves it from being pedantic.
The cruelty of the spectacle was heightened for me– on the sidewalk before the reproduction lay a disemboweled bird, and a few feet away a nutter followed what looked to be its mate, speaking to it as if it were an acquaintance, and periodically reaching out for it. Why the bird didn’t fly away is troubling to contemplate. Of all the reproductions, this was the only one that has suffered a vandal– somone had keyed the surface beneath the gentleman on the far left. I wondered if it was the same man that was tormenting the birds there, performing his own cruel experiment beneath the candle lit scene.
The show, sponsored by Hewlett Packard, is supposedly graffiti proof. The blogosphere has called it a “challenge to Banksy” and “two fingers up to Banksy.” But in many ways, the National Gallery has learned a trick or two from Banksy. Musuems in London are free, so this lesson is not so much about accessibility but recontextualization. Does the art elevate the street? Or, more happily, does the street change the art, humanizing it so that the paintings become mirrors for myriad Londoners. Ironically, the public display makes the work more intimate, private.
Grotesque Old Woman, attributed to Quentin Massys, Foubert’s Place.
I saved the Grotesque Old Woman, one of my favourite paintings in the National Gallery, for last. Sure, the intention is mysogynist, but she is such a fabulous creature– more memorable than the hundreds of portraits of beauties hung about her in the museum. But here she is alone on a brick wall, above some plumbing, holding her own. I stood there saying my silent hello, as a old man on a ciggie break sitting on the bench beneath the painting became increasingly annoyed at my presence. From what I could tell he had no idea what was behind him– a typical, incurious Londoner– sitting in front of what could be a suitable beau for him! He soon had enough of my hovering and wheeled his rolling suitcase away, cursing under his breath.
The treasure hunt aspect of the Grand Tour made me confront my shifting topography of Soho, the place I frequent most in London. I’ve gotten lost in the most familiar of streets there. Soho is infinite and mazelike, a meeting place of shifting landmarks and furtive delights. It seems fitting to me that the National Gallery has secreted away these surprises here.
Me, Kew Gardens
Me, Kew Gardens, originally uploaded by velvetdahlia.
Kew Gardens is one of my favourite places in London. Even when there’s a storm brewing. Maybe especially when there’s a storm brewing.
A Plague of Jolly Rogers
Or, What Damien Hirst’s £50 million skull means to me.
I must confess to never really being compelled by Hirst’s morbid insincerity. When I first saw his suspended calf and sheep, “Away from the Flock” and “Child Divided” in Art Forum in the early 90s, I was repulsed. At the time, I was involved in animal rights quite seriously, but also there was something about his glib approach to suffering that put me off. Now that I live in England, I understand them in a new way, as a comment on an English pastoralism that’s now clouded with the nightmare of foot-and-mouth and mad cow disease. Both catastrophes saw the countryside marked with massive burial pits for livestock.
Of course, if one thinks hard enough about something, one can find meaning. This doesn’t make the something art. While I’m usually up for the carnavalesque sensibility conceptual art often offers, I definitely won’t be queuing for tickets to see For the Love of God.
And who’s skull is it anyway? Some poor 18th century sod whose remains ended up in a London taxidermy shop. Apparently Hirst funded the making of the skull himself, which cost over 26 million to make– assuring the public that the diamonds are “conflict free.” In the most facile sense, the skull is a comment on the “you can’t take it with you” cliche. Ultimately, we’re all meat to Hirst, but a few of us have deep pockets, and this is his universe. When I see pictures of him, I just think “slick, cruel dork.” It makes sense that at this time in history someone so culturally impotent would be rich and famous. I’m sure some people think he’s laughing all the way to the morgue, but the only thing I resent is that his deteriorating body of work will continue to be foisted on us, and eventually it will be his own deteriorated body which will become spectacle. Mark my words– there are probably some obscene conditions in his will: his head in a vitrine, set upon by maggots and flies. Instead of A Thousand Years it could be called Fifteen Minutes.
Perhaps in For the Love of God, Hirst finally admits he’s not only mortal, he’s an art-history faddist stumbling after the zeitgeist. I ask you, how many skulls have you seen this week– on cereal boxes and kid’s sneakers, in the windows of H&M and New Look, on movie posters and chapstick and candy? You can’t walk a foot down the high street without being confronted by a skull on something, usually pink and intended for consumption by a 13 year old girl. Pirates are everywhere, and perhaps it’s fitting that Hirst would choose the most played of images to break the bank. He is a pirate, after all.
He’s not the first to decorate a skull– skull oracles, Aztec skull mosaics– Hirst has acknowledged their influence on the current work. But there is also Hirst’s contemporary, Steven Gregory, to consider. Gregory has been creating bejeweled skulls for some time now. Hirst actually wrote an essay for Gregory’s Skullduggery show catalog, and owns many of Gregory’s skulls.
And this is not the first time Hirst has merely taken someone else’s genuine product and turned it into a high-priced stunt. Stuckism, an anti-conceptual art movement, has argued that Hirst stole the idea for his shark vitrine from Eddie Saunders, “fish artist” and electrician who displayed a very similar shark in his Shoreditch shop window years before Hirst paid someone to catch a shark for him. Unlike Hirst, Saunders caught the fish himself. Stuckism’s photos of both works side by side make quite a convincing argument.
The Guardian quotes Hirst as being satisfied with the final object: “To me it seems gentle, quite soft,” he said of the skull. “I would hope that anybody looking at it would get a bit of hope, and be uplifted. We need to line the world with beautiful things that give you hope.”– proof of either his profound disingenuousness or his own numbskulled delusion.
Track Suit City
When I first came to London 8 years ago, the street fashion excited me. Already the 80′s revival was making a quirky come-back, and the cyberdog candy-borg look was in full swing on the streets of Camden.
Now, London street fashion seems nowhere. Maybe I am just older and more jaded? Or perhaps we can blame it all on the demise of rave culture, or the banning of mushrooms as a harbinger of grim new times. Or blame sky-rocketing rents which drive out anyone who lives a life that allows them to express themselves. Who knows.
Just to make sure it wasn’t my own pessimism, I sought out some London Street Fashion blogs. First I found London Street Fashion, and it just confirmed my dismal conclusions. I understand how much work a project like this must be for the documenter, but that won’t stop me from being critical.
Most outfits featured on London Street Fashion are a combination of grey or brown or black or khaki. All oversized, ripped, drooping, hooded. Camo overload! Basically ugly as hell. The editors clearly have a bent against things femme or colorful. Depressingly, this does seem represent what a lot of people are wearing in London. I won’t use a screen capture because in the site’s words, “they don’t play.” But take a look at the grey-hoodie misery. From looking at this site alone, one might falsely assume that everyone dressed in London is under the age of 25 and thin. I’m assuming this is not an active site, because I believe the “Sloane Square Coming Soon” has been up for a year. The “neighborhood” format limits sightings to trendy, expensive neighborhoods and shopping districts, as if the site has also fallen prey to the post code snobbery so prevalent in the capital. I suppose they are going for a Fruits, Shibuya-style focus, but in London people don’t get dressed up to go shopping, so what’s the point?
However, I then found Style Scout, which reflects the London style I actually admire– the demure, the whimsical and subtly wacky. I recognized a shop girl from Carnaby Street featured there, in her signature pink lipstick and pearls.
And then I came across Savvy London and was rather gleeful. Clearly this (also American) blogger is excited by personal style, regardless of the subject’s age or body type. Risk is admired, and each entry carries a delightfully brief narrative.
But on the whole, London is not very inspiring, street-fashion-wise. I was more impressed with Glaswegian style– girls with Biba-black eyes and vintage tweeds, huge rhinestone brooches– men in fitted trousers and elaborate scarves. There are a few flashes of style I see on the street, mainly in the Sikh community here in Southhall– with the mixing of prints, textures and traditions. Or the art school girls mixing it up in Hackney, or a stray man on the tube wearing some Saville Row masterpiece– but on the whole people are stuck wearing the disposable crap from Primark, etc., and nobody’s trying anything new or different. Second hand shopping and even flea markets are, well, sorry-ass. In the words of Tricia Royal, it’s loathian thrifting here in London.
I’ve come to accept that most of London fashion is decidedly top down– Liberty’s anachronistic styling and new designers like Social Suicide Suits may get the blood going, but it’s out of reach of most Londoners. Let’s face it, by the time most of us have paid rent there’s little left for even modest indulgences, much less playful risks. On the whole, the city seems dispirited, and fashion is a barometer of this (One can trace the takeover of San Francisco by dot-commers, as well as the dot-bomb through street fashion, but I digress).
I am of course looking at it all from the bottom up. I live in W7, a nowheresville post code ghetto of immigrants and laborers, not trust fund art students and socialites. London’s working poor have a strong tradition of defiant style, but as I see it, the look on the street at present is nowhere.
Helsinki, with its playful absurdities, puts London to shame.
Something is Rotten in Holland
The saga of the Hotel Mariakapel, and my friend Edith Abeyta’s “residency” there continues. Edie was invited to live at the Hotel Mariakapel and produce a piece which would go in the gallery there. The piece was to involve beer Bob Tower had brewed, as well as hand-made product tie-ins which were aesthetically raw and seductive as well as subversive– acting as a send up of mega-branding. Well, that’s what should have been.
The housing itself was slated to be demolished from the inside, so Bob and Edie had to leave while other digs were arranged by the University of Utrecht as an emergency measure. During this time the people who ran the residency, who knew the construction would take place but where dishonest about the extent and timing of it, insisted they stay in the demolished building with no door or shower. There are other hostile aspects of this that I won’t go into but the project has been hijacked by these people running the residency, who stand to make a great deal of (taxpayers’) money if the show goes ahead, and yet it was impossible for Edie to work there given the circumstances and other hostilities that went down.
The Hotel was informed by Edie and her collaborator at the University of Utrecht that there would be no show, as there was no way for Edith continue to work on the premises (and given a long list of other unprofessional and hostile happenings which derailed the project). The person in charge of the residency flew back from South America and had a meeting with the big wigs funding the project who decided on their own that there will be a show, regardless of Edie’s wishes. They are taking Edie’s work, the beer Bob brewed, and student documentation of her working and putting it in the gallery as her “show”.
At one point these same people wanted Heineken to provide funding so they could make even more money, but this proves they are profoundly clueless about the content and message of the piece. The Heineken sponsorship was vetoed but now they have basically sabotaged her work and are using it for their own ends so they can make a bunch of money.
This is truly insane and I am outraged and sick at heart about it all. I will be posting updates as they come.
…just don’t mention the war…
Two weeks in Bavaria was definitely not part of the original plan, but things have conspired against us. Through the generosity of our friend Nicky, we have a place to crash in Munich and he’s been showing us around, driving to many Bavarian breweries where I’ve been sampling all the dunkles I can find.
But I must admit I’m weary of sitting around with people who are eating pig knuckles and roasted baby animals. It’s meat, meat meat at every meal. Sometimes meat is the lightest option available on the menu, as the vegetarian stuff is full of butter and cheese. I’ve been living on salty pretzels and beer and now my extremities are swollen from water retention.
Edie is back in the Netherlands, trying to get some work done on the Something’s Brewing piece at the University of Utrecht. Bob and I will be joining her in less than a week. Apparently on her way to Utrecht via train someone threw themselves in front of the tracks. As she was in the first car right behind the driver, she saw the driver go into shock. This must happen a lot, as when M and I were traveling to Vienna someone threw themselves on the tracks and I felt it go “bump”. When this whole piece of Edie’s comes off, in whatever form it takes, it will be an heroic piece of art making, no lie.
Earlier in the week, we trudged up the mountain to Neuschwanstein, the castle which inspired Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” castle in the heart of Disneyland. I’d already been there and I preferred it last time as the winter fog softened its plastic-looking, 19th century edges. There were so many tourists, I bailed on the tour. While everyone else went inside I waited and watched the stream of humans going in and out, many of them American or Japanese tourists in bright, casual clothes that made them look like children– engaging in a second-hand fantasy. All aberrations removed from the fairy tale in favor of the most mundane of happy endings.
Stern conformity still hangs heavy over Munich, despite locals’ insistence that “the past is history” and that Bavaria is part of a tolerant, modern EU state. The uneasy pact with the past is all too present. And this brutal history is all too similar to what it is happening in my own country. In school, history always seemed to stop at the Nazi invasion of Poland– the summer would come before we ever got Korea or Viet Nam.
One person my age I’ve met here said she was too young to remember the war, so why talk about it all the time? But how can I not think about it when my own government cynically uses the holocaust and the “good war” as a metaphor for their bloody and bankrupt foreign policy?
At the start of our visit to Bavaria, were in the little house in Rieder, in the countryside, with my friend Nicky. After the war, this house sheltered men coming home from the front, wanderers lost in the chaos after surrender. We cooked on the wood burning stove and watched a cat stalking through the grass. Everything was green and lush outside. Cows luxuriated in the fields, their bells ringing. Poppies nodded in the wind and I still thought of war. It was impossible to be there and not feel the surreality of peace. I wonder about the ambiguity of this place, so near Dachau– idyllic and terrible at the same time. Nicky is full of stories from the woman, his mother-in-law, who grew up in the country house. She said that after the war you would see all these children running around wearing red trousers. Their mothers had cut up the Nazi flags. Got to use them for something.
Before Edie left, we went to the Haus der Kunst and I was amazed by the architecture– the old glass building was rebuilt in a heavy neoclassical style by Paul Ludwig Troost, according to Hitlers vision (himself a mediocre painter). The iron doors and massive columns support the roof’s clean, soulless planes. Some buildings give themselves away, and insist on the past even through present reinvention– the Haus der Kunst is such a place. Ivy has tried to grow over the surface, leaving dead veins to mark the cold stone– which resembles more a giant mausoleum rather than an art museum. The pictures of the Degenerate Art Show, hung in a corridor by the toiletten, revealed the Nazi’s mythopoesis of hatred. Perhaps one of my fascinations with WWII is that it always seems so shockingly allegorical.
The Haus der Kunst was currently showing Georg Petel’s Baroque sculptures of crucifixions and meaty Saint Sebastians. I peeked at the catalogue and the stuff seemed Mannerist in its purposeful distortions and risks. I would assume he was working from corpses as the tortured bodies of his sculptures were obsessively rendered. I’ve had enough in-your-face-meat to last me for a while, so I skipped out on that and instead sat watching the Gilbert & George video, a preview of their upcoming show which is now at the Tate. It was in English, and as I listened to them finishing each other’s sentences, I was surprised at their sincerity. Why had I thought they would be ironic and distant, speaking in riddles? Gilbert is Italian but has been with George in Spitalfields for 40 years now. They are Londoners, and I understand their work now, more than before, because now I am a Londoner, too. Unlike Munich, London makes room for the passionate eccentric, the willful iconoclast. How I miss it.
