Skying

I wrote this for a forthcoming book on the Norwich School of Painters to be published by Norfolk Museums & Archaeology Services. It is too long and off topic. Instead, I am rewriting on the Norwich photographer Glen Jamieson's work Shortcut To A Picturesque (after John Crome the Elder). For more info about Glen click here. 

“It is a strange thing,” John Ruskin writes in volume 1 of Modern Painters (1843), his paeon to J.M.W. Turner, “how little in general people know about the sky.” So begins a short tract in Ruskin’s work called ‘Of the Truth of Skies’. Sky is the subject of one of three such Of Truth tracts, along with space and water. In ‘Of the Truth of Skies’ we, the reader, are vividly inside Ruskin’s thought process, scanning a micro-history of skies in society and art in order to feel the revolutionary shock of Turner’s “breaking, mingling, melting” skies described at the end of the piece. 

Before arriving at this thrilling apex Ruskin observes how so few fail to give skies due attention. “Who, among the chattering crowd,” he asks, “can tell me the forms and the precipices of the chain of tall white mountains that girded the horizon at noon yesterday?... Who saw the dance of the dead clouds when the sunlight left them last night, and the west wind blew them before it like withered leaves?” If it is noticed, drab generalisations are made: it has been wet; it has been windy; it has been warm (it is apparently not only lack of attention, but inadequate vocabulary too - something we shall return to). For Ruskin the sky “is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart, for soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust”. Every person is the poorer for missing this thing which, importantly, is free to anyone who cares to take pleasure from it. All that is needed is care and attention; spirituality will look after itself. Ruskin’s is an essentially Romantic attitude: accidents of light and shade - the effects of weather - can endow a known and familiar landscape - the commonplace - with significance. “God,” he writes, “is not in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the still, small voice.” 

But in this essay Ruskin is also concerned with another shibboleth of Romanticism, truth to nature. What in ‘Of the Truth of Skies’ does this mean? On the one hand the chattering crowd simply do not give enough attention to skies; on the other, the educated classes, who have the means to see Old Masters of landscape painting, have been duped with false pictures of skies. In works of the Old Masters:  

cloud is cloud, and blue is blue, and no kind of connection between them is ever hinted at. The sky is thought of as a clear, high, material dome, the clouds as separate bodies suspended beneath it; and in consequence, however delicate and exquisitely removed in tone their skies may be, you always look at them, not through them. 

Look at the sky. Really look at the sky, Ruskin implores. Even the pure blue of a serene sky is not a flat dead colour. It quivers in variety and fulness - in it you see or imagine short falling spots of deceiving light, dim shades, faint veiled vestiges of dark vapour. 

At and through. The distinction urges us to consider where sky begins and ends, not just vertically in a picture (or indeed in an actual landscape) between land and sky, but horizontally between the perceiver and the landscape. For Ruskin the genius of Turner is that with him we are inside it; Turner shows how the atmosphere affects our perception of landscape. Turner paints the air; his canvases have no surface, so that we might plunge into their depth. Turner, it is true, had a special investment in clouds: his sketchbooks are near to bursting with formations abstracted from ground. Walking through the galleries at Norwich Castle it is obvious that the Norwich School of Painters, along with other East Anglian roughly contemporaneous with Turner, too had a special investment in clouds. The paintings of John Sell Cotman, Old Crome, John Middleton, James Stark, and John Constable, among others, help us see the sky and its effects on land. They urge us to pay attention to skies; and affect the perceiver too. In John Middleton’s painting A Fine Day in February we can feel that crazy easterly blow’n a gale; the louring mettled cloud to the top right of the picture is wet - it runs down the canvas, almost wets the viewer. 

In the early nineteenth-century Romanticism challenged what a worthy subject for art could be. It no longer seemed necessary to visit Classical scenes: the world at one’s doorstep was rich enough. With it came an evidential increase in attention given to the weather, skies, and most noticeably, clouds, not just in art, but science too. Around this time the flat unassuming landscape of East Anglia became a place worthy of depiction. Old Crome’s largest painting of a gilded Mousehold Heath (1818-20), John Sell Cotman’s Boat House and Trees (1806-08) or Ploughed Field (1808)  each depict decidedly quotidian East Anglian scenes. John Constable was busy giving his name to the southern region of East Anglia, inventing ‘Constable Country’. “My limited and abstracted art,” he wrote, “is to be found under every hedge and in every lane”. Is this not an earlier, equally beautiful (secular) echo of Ruskin’s God in the still, small voice? Earlier still, in 1798, the Lyrical Ballads had been written, according to Coleridge, based on conversations between him and Wordsworth

on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sun-set diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. 

Scholars have argued the Romantics could be said to have invented the idea of ‘the weather’ as we know it today (try reading Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind (1819) or The Cloud (1820) in front of some of the wilder Norwich School paintings). Early nineteenth century East Anglian paintings are marked by striking attention to the region’s weather and its effects. 

Visitors to the region cannot help but notice its remarkable skies. Its art, culture and mythology bursts with it, which is no coincidence: East Anglia is the flattest and, superficially, the most undifferentiated region in the country. In a landscape as apparently undifferentiated everything, including, significantly, weather, is keenly felt. In Graham Swift’s introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of the East Anglian classic Waterland (1983) he recalls how initially he had been drawn to the region because it seemed as unobtrusive setting as possible. The Fens, he believed, was the ideal non-setting, the ideal flat, bare platform for his human drama. Yet, quickly this background became a foreground; Histories and qualities of the landscape rent powerful metaphors. And, indeed, out there in the undifferentiated East Anglian landscape the smallest actions - human or nonhuman - occurred with monumental drama. East Anglia is where the ordinary becomes extraordinary: the sparkle of light is unmissable; weather is felt more keenly. Clouds become actors in the vertiginously flat. 

In the early nineteenth-century meteorology, the science of atmospheres, was still in its infancy. In 1804 the first professional meteorologist Luke Howard published his study and classification of atmospheric conditions called On the Modification of Clouds. Before this there had been attempts at finding an ordinal language to describe cloud formations, most notably the philosopher and architect Robert Hooke’s A Method for Making a History of the Weather (1662), which appeared in Thomas Sprat’s The History of the Royal Society, published in 1667.* “But for the Faces of the Sky,” Hooke writes, “there are so many, that many of them want proper Names; and therefore it will be convenient to agree upon some determinate ones, by which the most usual may be in brief exprest.” “Let Hairy signify a Sky that hath many small, thin, and high Exhalations, which resemble locks of hair,” he proclaims. “Thick, a Sky more whitened by a greater Company of Vapours: these do usually make the Luminaries look bearded or hairy, and are oftentimes the Cause of the appearance of Rings and Haloes about the Sun as well as the Moon.” Hooke’s desire for a standardised classificatory system sought to demystify the sky, or heavens, thought to be home of the deities. And yet he is not quite able to abandon his own animistic impulse. 

Howard’s cloud studies proposed four basic cloud-types, which he designated with Latin terminology -  all of which remain in use today in the classification of cloud forms. These are cumulus (heaped cloud), stratus (layered cloud), cirrus (long-hair cloud) and nimbus (raincloud), and various combinations. Howard writes: 

If clouds were the mere result of the condensation of vapour in the masses of the atmosphere which they occupy, if their variations were produced by movements in the atmosphere alone, then indeed might the study of them be deemed an useless pursuit of shadows, an attempt to describe forms which, being the sport of winds, must be ever varying, and therefore not to be defined. However... the is case is not so with clouds. They are subject to certain distinct modifications, produced by the general causes which affect all the variations of the atmosphere; they are commonly as good visible indicators of the operation of these causes, as is the countenance of the state of a person’s mind or body. 

As a person’s face reflects their moods, clouds reflect the state of the atmosphere. The atmosphere alone is invisible; clouds, however, by their presence or absence, are a constant indicator of the state of the weather. In 1785 the English artist Alexander Cozens published A New Method for Assisting the Invention in the Composition of Landscape, which included schematic and fictional illustrated pictures of skies for landscape artists to incorporate into works. His cloud etchings show specific formations illustrated by precise written descriptions. 

The nineteenth-century French painter Edgar Degas once said that if he wanted to draw a cloud he only had to crumple his pocket handkerchief and hold it up to the light. The significance of the Norwich School painting, and in general East Anglian painting, lies in a realism based on direct observation. “Painting is a science,” Constable told an audience in 1836, “and should be pursued as an enquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, should not landscape painting be considered a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?” Unlike Cozens, Constable did “a good deal of skying”, as he called it - painting skies for their own sake in order to catch “their noble clouds & effects light & dark & colour” (he admired the work of Dutch painter Jacob van Ruisdael: The Shore at Egmond-aan-Zee (1675) records stunning cloud formations). Working quickly from direct observations in the environment enabled the painter to catch the transience of landscape. In the name of science, Howard provides narrow classificatory types that enable cloud formations to be known. Paintings of the Norwich School proceed from a similar empirical basis of observation - indeed a meteorologist might learn from them - yet their investment, their intended use, is different. The modern science of meteorology is based on Howard’s singular taxonomy, not the paintings of the Norwich School, or Constable. But clouds do not give away their secrets so easily; Weather still eludes us. 

In Jeremy Page’s novel Salt (2007), set in the mercurial littorals of coastal North Norfolk, the narrator’s grandmother, Goose, has scores of names for clouds. They make up a vast eccentric, evolving vocabulary. They transfix her, hold her in occultish awe. Most days she picks her way through the gullies and creeks to a tuft on Morston Marsh and, with her back to the land, she communes with the great sky. The marsh is her newsroom; The clouds rolling in off the North Sea are a scrolling newsfeed. What they tell - their news, their prophecies - is unreliable, as likely to distort and transform as any of Goose’s yarns. “Ain’t them fat as turkeys! Right char-ac-ters. Mind, got to be patient with clouds, they ain’t going to give it away first look”. Some, according to Goose, are more trustworthy than others: “Al-toe-stratus, plain bad tempered - cover the rest like a carpet. Real bastard that one, ain’t got nothin to say an’ bent on spoilin’.” There are cap clouds, scared of wind; those baked gold as a piecrust; those like bumble bees, too fat to fly; Mackerel sky, high and thin. She even has names for clouds no one has ever seen: trawler clouds, Viking clouds, and gannets. Goose pays attention to individual speed, height, internal movement, brightness, shape, and texture, but some simply never give up their secrets. For example, how did it come to be that the father of Goose’s child was found naked, apart from his boots, buried up to his neck in mud on Morston Marsh, apparently having fallen from the sky. Or why on the afternoon of the 31 January 1953 Goose failed to read off portentous clouds signs of the worst storm and coastal flood in living memory suffered not just by North Norfolk, but East Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Lincolnshire, Zeeland in the Netherlands, and West Flanders in Belgium.  

What Ruskin describes when he implores us to really look at the sky - its quivering vitality and fulness, short falling spots of deceiving light, dim shades, faint veiled vestiges of dark vapour - is the instability of perception. Direct-observation painting acknowledges a need to be in the landscape, to attend to the temporality of things. Turner found a visual language that denied the viewer’s immediate and unitary apprehension of an image, placing temporality at the very centre of the viewing experience. “[H]is painting of the late 1830s and 1840s,” art historian Jonathan Crary writes, “signals the irrevocable loss of a fixed source of light, the dissolution of a cone of light rays, and the collapse of the distance separating an observer from the site of optical experience”. Turner’s late work announces a new status of the artist-observer, distinct from the scientific-observer. Painters from East Anglian, their dynamic representations of the ever-changing sky, pointed the way forward to new ways of perceptions. 

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* Sprat’s History details the history, design and progress of the institution, as well as its experiments and disambiguations, including, among other things, inquiries into whether mined diamonds and precious stones grow again after three or four years, whether in Ethiopia there are tortoises so big that men may ride upon them, how to make wine, the history of making gunpowder, and so on.

Peculiar English

Catalogue text for SNAP 2013, Art at the Aldeburgh Festival: 8 – 30 June 2013. For full lineup click here. 

‘You see - I’m gradually realising that I’m English - & as a composer I suppose I feel I want more roots than other people.’ - Benjamin Britten, 1940.

The lineup at the first Aldeburgh Festival looks remarkably establishment today: An exhibition of Constable watercolours; Tyrone Guthrie; William Plomer; E.M. Forster; and then Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, Sir Kenneth Clark. For a generation of art students in the sixties Clark, with all his transhistorical notions of civilisation, would embody a kind of English country seat connoisseurship, antithetical to growing Marxist-inflected ideas on art and culture. On the continent Theodor Adorno’s bellicose vision of the new music urged a generation of radical composers to start again. Freedom was on the agenda. Freedom from all familiar sounds. Freedom from all relics of convention. Schoenberg was the man of the hour. To look back beyond the ruins of WW2 was rear-guard. In his Philosophy of Modern Music (1949) Adorno sent up Britten for his ‘triumphant meagerness’ and preservation of the antiquated. [1]

In opposition to the security of the known and acceptable, Adorno set out a lonely path for the composer. [2] His powerful narrative of origin banished Britten to the margins of the avant-garde. And yet, contrary to Adorno’s placeless modern, Britten had found his home. His was a self-conscious Englishness, an engagement with the culture of place, that included reading Crabbe, looking at Constable, and listening to the wind in the reeds. It was a peculiar kind of Englishness. On reflection, Britten quashes any reflex accusations of little-Englandism, with its connotations of ruralism, conservatism and provincialism. He’d hung out with Paul Bowles in Brooklyn. Absorbed the particular culture of the Second Viennese School. He was pacifist, and as the older generation of East Anglians say ‘per-cooliar’. i.e. he was queer. Artists at SNAP this year have picked through the hinterland of Britten’s music and biography. The results affirm and contradict.

While the Damstardt School left the ruins behind with the war, in Paris the pioneer of musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer, scavenged bombsites for music-making material: ‘At... Cavaillé-Coll and Pleyel... I find parts of an organ destroyed in the bombing... My originality will not be to play them like an organist but to hit them with a mallet, detune them perhaps. The war has already taken this on.’[3] With his colleague Pierre Henry, Schaeffer pioneered musique concrète - electroacoustic ‘music’ produced by recording and electronically rearranging objects ‘as found’. It was in ‘54 that Henry performed in the Jubilee Hall, Aldeburgh, at Britten’s invitation. This event has inspired Benedict Drew’s moving-image/sound installation matériel (2013). Drew learnt of Henry’s concert from a friend in the pub who had hosted him in London in 2000, however summarily dismissed it as a skeptical half-truth. After searching Festival archives it emerged that, indeed, in ’54 a musique concrète concert took place in front of a bemused audience. For SNAP, Drew has seized upon Henry’s otherworldly objects and electronics. What if Henry had actually concocted a time machine? ‘It’s important that we veer into complete fiction,’ Drew explains. ‘A sound reverb describes place exceptionally well. If different quality reverbs are brought together then you are joining and bending two places, bringing two places and two times.’ [4]

Coventry Cathedral is Britain’s emblematic post-war reconstruction work - a structure designed by Basil Spence to occupy the bombed-out ruins of the former cathedral. Here, in ‘63, Britten’s War Requiem premiered at the reopening. Although composed in the aftermath of WW2, the words of Requiem combine Wilfred Owen’s WW1 trench poetry with Latin of the Mass for the Dead. It’s as if Britten - Britten the pacifist - wrote Requiem to commemorate all the dead in all wars in all places. Painter Maggi Hambling vividly recalls the sensation of hearing it for the first time soon after its premier: ‘The piece’s dynamic combination of strangeness, horror, lament, fear, strife, tenderness, chilling authority and grandeur was unlike anything I had previously experienced.’ [5] For SNAP Hambling has painted a series of imagined war-wrought landscapes and unidentified victims in response to Requiem. The paintings are hung clustered in the Dovecot - a small space Hambling has transformed to approximate a bare concrete room at Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. Intermittently Requiem sounds. Singer Ian Bostridge has observed how Requiem addresses whichever conflict or crisis stirs at the time of its performance. [6] In their anonymity, Hambling’s landscapes and paintings do the same - these are memorials for all the dead, and all those that will die as long as war continues.

‘If wind and water could write music,’ the violinist Yehudi Menuhin once said, ‘it would sound like Ben’s.’ Besides an off-site radio broadcast of Britten’s ‘The Spacious Firmament on High’ from Noye’s Fludde, for SNAP this year Cerith Wyn Evans has made a white neon sign that reads ‘340.29 m/s’. The title of this work, 340.29m/s (The Speed of Sound [approx.] at Sea Level), anchors the apparently arbitrary figure. Located in the main concert hall, it’s a poignant reminder of the specific physical conditions that give music to place. Hung on the main concert hall exterior is Juergen Teller’s large-scale photographic work William Eggleston Listening to Tchaikovsky, Memphis, Tennesse2010, which shows the deific American photographer rapt in listening. Over the past year sound artist Chris Watson has retraced the ‘composing walks’ Britten took in and around Snape after lunch everyday. This commission by Aldeburgh Music reconstructs the soundscape - particularly birdsong - Britten would have heard. Some of Watson’s sound recordings of birds have been incorporated into the artist Abigail Lane’s sound installation. Gathered in the willow tree on the Hepworth Lawn is a 51-piece bird ‘vocal’ ensemble - the so-called British Bird Orchestra. It includes, among others, the cuckoo, nightjar and curlew, performing a repertoire of Britten’s interpretations of English and Welsh traditional music, including Underneath the Abject Willow, from which it takes its name. Sharing the Hepworth Lawn is Mark Fuller’s similarly surreal sculptural installation and performance Milk and Music (Sally in our Alley). Of all the art on display at SNAP, Fuller’s has the strongest affinity with Neo-Romantic concerns - the collapse of past and present, familiarity and strangeness, an evocation of weird old England. For the duration of the exhibition a meter-tall ball of milk cartons, encircled by a string strung with mackerel tins, is installed. On the opening afternoon elements of this installation will be activated by a ritual performance devised by Fuller with Sarah Lucas set to Britten’s interpretation of country dance song Sally in our Alley. The Neo-Romantic impulse, to paraphrase the critic Michael Bracewell, engages with ‘mystery and invisible presence’. [7] Exactly to whom or what Fuller’s and Lucas’ strange ritual is directed remains uncertain.

In many ways Sarah Lucas shares an exclusive commune with Britten. For ten years she has lived and worked in the isolated cottage that Britten and Pears retreated to in the latter part of their lives. For half that time she has shared it with Julian Simmons. As Pears was a kind of muse for Britten, so too was Chapel House in Horham. Here he composed much of Owen Wingrave and Death in Venice. As Simmons is a kind of muse for Lucas, so too today is Chapel House in Horham. At SNAP Lucas and Simmons share derelict building number 1. Lucas’ work, Eros and Priapus, are two enlarged concrete-cast penises erected on defunct farming machinery. A sourceless, omniscient electronic sound issues from nowhere, oscillating between noise and music, enveloping penises and audience. This is Simmons’ NUMBERSTREAM 100 - a soundwork composed of digitally-processed fragments of Britten music. The two elements merge enigmatically.

In his sculpture Parable Simon Liddiment celebrates Britten’s ‘international Englishness’. Liddiment is fascinated by the legacy of public-facing pre and post- war communication art and design. For him Basil Wright and Harry Watt’s Night Mail (1936), on which Britten and Auden collaborated for the GPO film unit, represents a utilitarian optimism, a meeting of brilliant minds to design Britain. In the late 1950s Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert developed British road signage according to UN protocol. Their typeface, ‘Transport’, still in use today, is a vehicle for communication of simple meaning with maximum legibility. Parable is a 5 meter free-standing composition of roadsigns. The symbols refer to typical rural subjects - cattle and level crossings. It’s Night Mail that inspired May Cornet’s retrieval and incorporation of past work into new work at SNAP. After watching Night Mail Cornet returned to a detail in an earlier triptych painting called Without You I'm Nothing: ‘There he was, this official-looking figure in a green uniform, wearing a hat, with an outstretched arm.’ The unintentional detail transformed into a post-man. Then Cornet read Auden's description of the envelopes:

'Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue’ [8]

Details surrounding the postman on the canvas became his parcels and packets. For SNAP, Cornet has carved these forms into stone and painted one face with Humbrol enamel. They stand in a line atop a meter-high plinth in the Pond Gallery, ready to be sorted.

For Britten’s centenary the blue heritage plaque, the kind stuck on sites of historical significance, has been subtly shifted: ‘Britten Lives Here’. A shift of tense implies that memory is not final, that it’s constantly undergoing retroactive revisions. And if Britten still lives through the music and landscape new experiences are constantly being produced that will be incorporated into his memory. Several works at SNAP explore this apparent temporal paradox between the past and present. Emily Richardson has produced two works that explore the unbuilt memorial to Britten proposed by the architect H. T. 'Jim' Cadbury-Brown for Aldeburgh beach. Long before Hambling’s scallop, Cadbury-Brown proposed an aeolian memorial constructed from a column of wood drilled with two holes. A good westerly gale would sound the two holes which were keyed to Peter Grimes. In the developmental phase Cadbury-Brown strapped two organ pipes to a car and drove it up and down the Aldeburgh-Thorpeness road to determine the correct hole sizes. For SNAP Richardson has re-enacted the experiment, documenting it on film and recording the sound made by the pipes strapped to the car. The moving image work is on display at Snape Maltings, while sound recordings are installed in Aldeburgh Lookout Tower, close to the original proposed memorial site. The work of Roger Eno, Cally Spooner and Ryan Gander each conjure Britten into presence in different ways. Both Eno and Gander use communications technology as a medium to summon the ghost in the machine, to make the physically inanimate animate. Eno’s sound installation Musical Box uses Snape’s red BT phonebooth. Pick up the call specially recorded BT answerphone messages redirects to archival sound recordings of Britten speaking, and fragments of Purcell. Besides a series of paintings installed in the foyer (a series of paint palettes for discarded portraits of Britten), Gander uses the modern medium of Twitter to bring to life Britten’s conducting baton. The baton, we learn, has its own life-world, its own fond and sometimes bitter recollections of Britten. As an artist Cally Spooner insists on live performance as an antidote to what she perceives as the ‘meddling and deadening’ of liveness in mass culture. Spooner has trawled Britten’s writing for encapsulated truths about the nature of live performance. For the duration of SNAP these will be printed on receipts and bookmarks - ephemeral forms that diffuse his insights into the infrastructure of the festival.

How music translates into a visual object fascinates SNAP artist Scott King. For SNAP, King has produced a large outdoor billboard that combines the musical score of ‘Playful Pizzicato’ from Britten’s Simple Symphony and the Royal Bank of Scotland logo - both elements of an RBS television advert that aired several years ago. Their re-presentation, ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms, translate the advert into a physical visual object, and provide a score from which a small live orchestra will perform on the opening day of SNAP. This representation of music across contexts draws attention to how meaning is recuperated.

The limitless diversity and possible intricacy between words and music in song is a powerful metaphor for the many coincidences and divergences between artwork on display at SNAP 2013 and the corpus of Britten’s musical work and biography. Britten’s music has its own historical allusions, its own allegorical, social and political, or everyday, concerns. Its own emotional, imaginative and material processes. As do the artworks on display at SNAP 2013 which, in their peculiar ways, affirm his life. 

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1* Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, Continuum (1949/2004), p.5.
2* Paul Griffiths, A Concise History of Western Music, Cambridge University Press (2006), p.273.
3* Pierre Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, University of California Press (2012), p.5.
4* Interviewed by the author, April 2013.
5* Maggi Hambling, Artist’s Statement, SNAP 2013.
6* Ian Bostridge, ‘War and the pity of war’, The Guardian, Friday 23 September 2011.
7* Michael Bracewell, ‘Lost Hikers’, The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art, Tate (2009), p.xv.
8* W.H. Auden, ‘Night Mail (Commentary for a G.P.O Film)’ in Collected Poems, Faber (1976/1994), pp.131-133.

Oscar Murillo

Performance
with Jonathan P. Watts
26 April at 8 pm

as part of the opening

Ramón how was trade today?
Have a break… Sit!
Enjoy the food, but you’re not
welcomed at the table.

Opening
26 April 6 — 9 pm

Exhibition 
27 April — 6 June 2013



Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie
Schöneberger Ufer 61
10785 Berlin

www.bortolozzi.com

THINGS PUSHED DOWN TO THE BOTTOM

Threshold (FALLOW) is a work introduced from another context. Eight years ago, on the occasion of his first exhibition in ten years, at OUTPOST gallery, Norwich, Liddiment employed a professional road marker to execute this particular piece of work.1 The word FALLOW incongruently spanned the gallery space, finishing just inside the foyer. It was an anxious architectural intervention. The thickness of the paint - a flattened, industrial impasto - enabled it to ‘do’ things: hold open the gallery doors, trip people up. Functionally, the word connected two discrete species of spaces - the foyer (in-between inside and outside where drinks are sold, flyers distributed, the office is entered) and the white cube gallery space (where artworks can be artworks). FALLOW was intent on the architecture re-organising around it. Jamming open the door was a whimsical attempt at asserting some vestige of function in a space that always takes it away.

In the late 1950s Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert developed British road signage according to UN protocol. Their typeface, ‘Transport’, still in use today, is a vehicle for communication of simple meaning with maximum legibility. Transport self-effaces to deliver concrete meaning. On the road, these texts are not poetic fragments. SLOW is SLOW. Its function denies ornament. Can its form and matter imbue any word with concreteness? Lawrence Weiner says that a stone is a stone. FALLOW refers to no concrete object in the world, but it asserts object-ness. ‘My intuition,’ Liddiment explains ‘is to use language physically. Language is something that is felt but language is also a form to be sculpted, and also has a relationship to the visual.’ Under foot, the reiteration of the word ‘SLOW’ written in successive layers of street marking paint can be raised enough to cause problems. The potential awkwardness of that fascinates me. FALLOW was a positive sculptural image of a text. A figure in the shape of writing; an object in the shape of writing.

For Project/Number both the works Lawrence Weiner and Simon Liddiment are showing were conceived some years earlier, 1989 and 2005 respectively. The lightbox, COVERED BY CLOUDS, has been produced following exact (or as close as possible) directions from Weiner’s studio. It is installed on the threshold of the gallery above the door. Weiner programmatically defines language as a material object. It is not bound up with any specific context or manifestation. In each specific instance of the work it builds a relationship with the cultural context. ‘The work,’ writes Gregor Stemmrich, ‘draws together diverse cultural ideas, experiences, and modes of observation; and, instead of merely reflecting these “aesthetically”, it objectifies them and throws them back at the material entity of the context itself.’2

Liddiment has left the gallery space empty - a resistance to being drawn together, perhaps, and certainly an acknowledgement of its spatial eccentricities. Instead, he has lifted trapdoors in the gallery floor to reveal the architectural underpinnings. FALLOW, painted in road-marking paint, spans the width of the basement space. Distanced from the viewer by this upstairs-downstairs configuration, it can make no whimsical attempt at functionality - no holding of doors, no tripping up. The partial view down to this now lower-than-low object emphasises the act of vision. FALLOW in an obvious double sense - fallen low or dormant - is a dead or sleeping idea. Here, FALLOW becomes the image of a text. At its very surface a reflection of itself. 

¹ Simon Liddiment at OUTPOST Gallery, Norwich, 2-21 November 2005. See: www.norwichoutpost.org/artist_pages/13_simon_liddiment/simon_liddiment.html.

² Gregor Stemmrich, ‘Lawrence Weiner - Material and Methodology’ in HAVING BEEN SAID: WRITINGS & INTERVIEWS OF LAWRENCE WEINER 1968-2003, Edited by Gerti Fietzek and Gregor Stemmrich, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004, p.437.

Click: PROJECT/NUMBER WEBSITE

Cryes of London

Cryes of London, The Voice event, Wellcome Collection, Euston Road, London, 1 March 2013. Special thanks to my two mingling street criers: Caroline M. Williams and Phil Mann. Further information soon; For the time being click here. 

At the end of April I will be performing an abridged Cryes of London with Oscar Murillo at Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin. 

The Fallout of Living

A Review of Ryan Gander's 'The Fallout of Living' at Lisson Gallery July 11 - August 25, 2012. Published in Frieze issue 150, October 2012. 

‘I ask for your patience,’ wrote Victor Burgin in 1984, appealing to his readers’ better nature, ‘there is no other route.’ The setting for this journey was an early survey of the Conceptual art of the late 1960s to early ’70s, organized at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Titled ‘The Absence of Presence’, Burgin’s catalogue essay provides an archeology of a period of dematerializing objects, situating it against the early ’80s return to painting. His request for patience affirms the (unfortunate) commonly held idea that conceptual art is for intellectuals – that those who wish to pass by the route must first have learnt to read the sign posts. But forget the threat of painting, could Burgin really not have anticipated how Conceptual art would come to be fleeced and pastiched?

Revealing and concealing, visibility and invisibility are recurring motifs in Ryan Gander’s work. For his work I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorize (The Invisible Pull) (2012) at dOCUMENTA (13), the ground floor of the Fridericianum remained all but empty, as rigged air conditioning whipped up a gentle breeze that the artist intended to pull the spectator through the galleries. Meanwhile, back in London, two air-conditioning units expelled chill air in a room of the Hayward Gallery’s ‘Invisible: Art of the Unseen’. Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin’s Air-Conditioning Show (1972) was accompanied by a dense wall text explaining the work’s ambition. Gander’s work for Documenta implicitly invited a prestige association with Art & Language (who, incidentally, are also represented by Lisson Gallery); the inverse relation between volume of space and quantity of work in the Fridericianum indicated quite how seriously the still-young British artist was being taken.

Gander is that breed of artist that Burgin was unable to imagine: a ludic style-hopping fleecer-pasticher of Conceptual art strategies. Last year, his site-specific Artangel commission, Locked Room Scenario, presented a ‘para-possible’ group show of invented artists the visitor was denied access to. Gander described this possible other world as the ‘fallout’ from a novel. So what exactly was the fallout referred to by the title of his Lisson show, ‘The Fallout of Living’? Installed behind the gallery desk, Investigation #64 – Phenomenomenomenomenology comprised two flip switches labelled ‘guns’ and ‘bombs’. Not only is Fallout a popular post-apocalyptic computer game, nuclear fallout is the residual activity of a blast, usually dust and ash. In ‘The Fallout of Living’, the material twixting of visibility fascinates Gander: images of smoke and fog are a thrilling contrast with substantial delicate forms. 

A series of four layered clear Perspex sheets lined the walls of the main ground-floor gallery. Numbered apertures of various shapes and sizes referred back to inventory-like fragments of text. These texts, inscribed on the reverse of the Perspex, referred to objects barely there. For example: ‘024 A standard yellow post-it note measuring 13 x 8 cm on which the word “Ghost” has been written with a chisel-tipped black permanent marker pen in large capital letters.’ Titled Associative Ghost Templates #2 – 5 (2012), these works are a continuation of Gander’s idiosyncratic method of association most vividly articulated in his 2007 book Loose Associations and Other Lectures (‘Hello, I’m Ryan,’ he begins the first lecture, ‘Erm ... all these things are linked somehow, but at times the associations may be a bit loose’). Elsewhere, he has called this method ‘spastic association’. However idiosyncratic, Gander’s interest is in the relationship between the spectator and the spectacle, where interpretation, as such, is a unique event for each individual. There is nothing ‘to get’. 

In the trio of works The way things collide (condom, meet USM cabinet), I is (i) and Tell my mother not to worry (ii), Gander’s loose association methodology and love of occlusion acknowledge their surrealist lineage. The first work is neatly hewn from a block of wood, substituting Comte de Lautréamont’s table for a cabinet, and the sewing-machine and umbrella for a used knotted condom. The flabby sheath is solid; the drawers unmovable. Wood rings run into fault lines across the wood. The latter two works appear to be an unknown object and a child covered by sheets, except Gander substitutes the fabric of the Enigma of Isidor Ducasse for marble. The extraordinarily delicate detail of contours, folds and ripples contradicts the monumental density and mass of the material. 

Though sometimes gratifying, one-linerish artworks can do themselves out of the job by making us feel we do actually get it. Two works in ‘The Fallout of Living’ almost did this. The Best Club (2011) consists of a blackout curtain covering the entrance to an installation, while a plaque to the side describes the work screened, a 16mm film transferred to digital video by the (fictional) Austrian artist Georg Paul Thomann. Pulling the curtain back to enter the darkened space reveals only the wall on which it is mounted – Tommy Cooper slapstick illusionism. The joke was on me: I walked into the wall. The other work is Kodak Courage (2012), an oak vitrine with ‘smart glass’: enter the gallery space and the glass fogs the colour of a light-exposed Polaroid, obscuring the small object inside. It is as if the assemblage were coyly self-aware, caught doing something it shouldn’t be doing. The identity of the hidden object is itself quite fantastical: a stone carving of Ryan Gander’s nose in the style of Rodin (who broke his nose several times). 

At Lisson, Gander seemed perhaps too preoccupied with playful apercus. This mattered less in his Artangel piece which aspired to a total para-possible world proceeding from the world. Isolated in the white cube it approaches solipsism. Inevitably the fallout of (art) history, as Burgin feared, has enervated Conceptual art’s political project. Gander is its fallout – that brand of artist unimaginable back in 1984.   

The Uses of Forgetting

I wrote this short text to accompany the exhibition 'The Impossible Heap' at Galerie8 in Hackney, London, which ran from 19 July - 26 August 2012. The text now seems excessively name-droppy, but I wanted it to have a Who's Who glancing quality about it.  

Ewa Axelrad, Study for Plague, 2012. 

'What we are urged to remember is bound up with how we are being urged to live. The preferred life has its set of preferred memories. Voluntary or involuntary - that is, encouraged or discouraged - memories always have a future in mind.' — Adam Phillips, The Forgetting Museum.

Famously, six years ago a 25 year old trainee teacher in America posted a photograph of herself on MySpace wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup at a party. The caption beneath read ‘Drunken Pirate’. When the dean of the teachers’ college saw the photograph the student was reprimanded for behaving in an ‘unprofessional’ manner and promoting drinking in ‘virtual view’ of underage students. Days before graduation the teacher was kicked off the course.

Increasingly the internet is the setting for our virtual lives, or more accurately the record of our virtual lives. Its pervasiveness in everyday life, its instrumentality in the construction of our identities, is shifting the boundary between our public and private selves, and in turn the legal and ethical implications of memory. Every online photograph, status update, Twitter post and blog entry we make can be stored forever. (Legal inheritance services urge customers to consider Facebook in writing of the will.)

Some claim the internet marks the end of forgetting and in reaction defend a ‘constitutional right to oblivion’ - guidelines for how long certain types of information can be kept online before being destroyed. Professor of Internet Law Jonathan Zittrain’s idea of ‘reputation bankruptcy’ is a variation of this: 

Like personal financial bankruptcy, or the way in which a state often seals a juvenile criminal record and gives a child a ‘fresh start’ as an adult, we ought to consider how to implement the idea of a second or third chance into our digital spaces. People ought to be able to express a choice to deemphasize if not entirely delete older information that has been generated about them. 

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, understands the drunken pirate as a significant measure of changing attitudes to ‘societal forgetting’. By forgetting, our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behaviour accordingly. Our online selves, without mechanisms for forgetting - the ‘right to oblivion’ or ‘reputation bankruptcy’ - risk being bound to all our past actions. Without some mechanism for forgetting, our misgivings will not be forgotten: without being forgotten we will not be forgiven. The ability to forget is an essential part of good mental health. Forgetting, as Nietschze once put it, is the doorkeeper of mental peace and order. 

In the short story Funes, the Memorious by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges the eponymous protagonist Funes loses the ability to forget following a horseback riding accident. Bed ridden, unable to walk, books are brought to him. He reads them once and remembers everything. Yet, in spite of his extraordinary memory, he is unable to transform the information he reads into knowledge. And without knowledge there is no wisdom. Published in English in 1954, this prophetic story seems to prefigure what critic Andreas Huyssen diagnoses as our contemporary society’s obsession with memory in which ‘Total recall seems to be the goal.’ ‘... Memory,’ he writes in Present Pasts: Media, Politics and Amnesia, ‘has become a cultural obsession of monumental proportions across the globe.... Is this an archivist’s fantasy gone mad?’ The internet, which has exploded contemporary humanity’s memory resources, satisfies our desire for total recall and availability of knowledge:  YouTube, Ubuweb, archive.org. But are we really any the wiser? 

Two strangely paradoxical qualities of the internet: never before has so much knowledge been so readily available at instant recall with which to learn and reinvent our identities, and yet at the same time our identities - at least our virtual identities - have never been so overdetermined. 

The Presence of Work

Oscar Murillo: work launched in December 2012 on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at the Rubell Family Collection, Miami. The exhibition opened on 5 December 2012 and runs through to August 2013. My essay, The Presence of Work, provides an exegesis of Oscar's work of the last two years.

Under the Sign of Brisées

"... A nod to the French Surrealist writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris, Helen Sear’s new body of work is called Brisées. Ornamented orbs zone out from small, often pixelated, monochrome photographs of woodland scenes. At their most, these orbs cover half of the picture space, at their least a sixth. Perfect spheres and distended egg-shapes appear arbitrarily placed, but then again balance carefully in stripped tree crowns, their insides apparently in mutualistic relation to their outsides. These photographs have been ‘ripped’ from the internet, found by typing ‘tree surgeon’ into Google image search. The many ropes and ladders trailing from inside the orbs are clues to their occluded subject..." 

A text I have written, Under the Sign of Brisées, appears in Helen Sear's new photobook Brisées. It has been designed and published by GOST books. The book launched at the Photographers' Gallery on 31 January 2013. For more information about Helen's work go here. GOST is Stuart Smith and Gordon MacDonald; to learn more go here. 

'Unreal Estate' - On Michael Hamburger & W.G. Sebald

IRISH PAGES is a biannual journal edited in Belfast, and publishing, in equal measures, writing from Ireland and overseas. An essay I wrote on the poet and translator Michael Hamburger, 'Unreal Estate', features in the current Autumn-Winter issue. Click here to download a PDF of the text. And click here to go to the Irish Pages website. 

13th Venice Architecture Biennale

Earlier this year I traveled to Venice to write about 'Venice Takeaway', the British pavilion at the 13th architecture biennale, for Blueprint Magazine. 'Venice Takeaway' was curated by Vicky Richardson and Vanessa Norwood. Participants were invited to be 'explorers' and travel to foreign countries to find solutions to architecture and design problems in the UK. Here is an article I wrote on 'Venice Takeaway' for the Frieze magazine blog. 

Mockery of the Fitness of Things

A response to Raid the Icebox, an exhibition selected by Andy Warhol at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1970.

Laden down by a tape recorder, camera and movie magazines, Andy Warhol staggered into the director’s office of the Museum of Art at Rhode Island School of Design. ‘We’re going to have a lot of fun today,’ the director Daniel Robbins told Warhol, ‘What are you doing?’ Andy Warhol wasn’t sure. In place of the institution’s curator Warhol had been invited by the Museum of Art to enter the storerooms and make a selection of artefacts for exhibition. The exhibition would be called Raid the Icebox, a pun referring to the museum’s storage facilities, kept on ice for its preservative qualities. Retrospectively it seems a rather disingenuous name at odds with Warhol’s performance of identity: his disinterested, detached, style imputes little of the vigour of the raid, with its masculine connotations of irruptive foray.

The exhibition was conceived as a means to open up the museum’s collection. In the exhibition catalogue essays by Dominique de Menil, director of the Institute for the Arts at Rice University, Daniel Robbins, director of the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design and critic David Bourdon tell a fantastically quixotic tale of enthusiastic advocacy and equal measures of befuddlement. At the brink of the institution’s understanding of its growing obsolescence and irrelevance, Raid the Icebox was conceived at a decisive moment. Engage with contemporary art – let the debunkers in, or roll over into catalepsis.

In her cosmic-allegorical foreword de Menil likens Warhol to an oracle or priest. Whilst critics, curators and scholars can open many doors to help the general public see the aesthetic value of artefacts, they can become blind. ‘Only prophets and seers open the royal gates,’ she writes. Whole realms have been unsealed by the likes of Duchamp and Breton, or Picasso who ‘saw’ the ritual sculptures of Africa and Oceania for the first time. Dusty pieces of ethnography were suddenly turned into miraculous art. What has been accomplished by the Pop artists, reckons de Menil, is even greater. They ‘saw’ supermarket wares, highway signs, bathtubs and Coca-Cola bottles and elevated them above their ordinary significance. ‘What is beautiful to the artist, becomes beautiful. What is poetical to the poet, becomes poetical,’ she writes, ‘So let’s visit museums with poets and artists.’

Robbins’ essay Confessions of a Museum Director bristles with nervous neurotic energy. Like a pathological character from a Gogol story, he is harassed by stuff. Racks of paintings hung floor to ceiling and stacked against walls impose themselves in the ‘appalling, stuffed storage’ of the museum. Sand bags to stop the paintings slipping obstruct the walkways. A dark cubicle at the end of the room houses twelve to fifteen thousand prints by Rembrandt, Daumier, Canaletto. There’s not been a curator of prints for twenty years. No one gets to see any of the stuff! There is nowhere to turn without endangering a precious object:

We have so much that is exciting, beautiful, informative, problematic, teasing to our knowledge, and because no one can get at it, no one excepting a very small and overworked staff, sentiments in storage range from wild exhileration to black despair. Furthermore, as the collections grow and storage becomes fuller, the danger of accident increases sharply.

His text is peppered by elipses, commas, brackets, exclamations and question marks. ‘Is it a total waste?’ he asks in existential disarray. Art students at Rhodes Island School of Design have no time for the museum. Inviting a contemporary artist to select from the reserve could be a liberating, if potentially risky venture. He needs Warhol to see his way around things but struggles to shake his anxiety. If the artist who selected the material were strong enough, would he impose his personality on the objects? If he were famous enough, would it not oblige the curious to look? Might his attitude not do violence to the true nature of the objects?

In the exhibition catalogue the Orientalist mystic, the paranoid terrorised by artefacts and the storyteller furnish the narrative field against which Warhol works. It takes an individual liberated from the burden of objects, with a scrupulous non-hierarchical procedure of segmentation and ordering, to ‘see’ the museum.

In the company of Robbins Warhol went underground in Providence, down into the stores. Robbins’ hope was that the artist might bring out some unfamiliar and unsuspected moldering treasures, inaccessible to the public, yet rather than going into the dark places people hadn’t been for years, Warhol began in the first room he came to – the costume collection. Upon discovering racks upon racks of shoes he decides to include the entire lot in the exhibition. Instead of displaying the finest Windsor chairs he selects those kept as salvage for spare parts. Instead of the museum’s richest ecclesiastic vestments, Coptic cloths and African weaves, he plumps for Native American blankets. Faced with a Cézanne still-life he asks ‘Is that a real Cézanne or a fake one? If that’s real, we won’t take it.’ In his essay Robbins lists the ‘fine examples’ Warhol missed and there was considerable surprise at what he didn’t select. There were exasperating moments, Robbins admits, when staff felt Warhol was exhibiting storage rather than works of art. At last he arrives at the realisation that what is being exhibited is Andy Warhol.

Objects in the exhibition are listed in the catalogue beneath two simple categories, singles and series. Drawings and watercolours, paintings and sculpture ranked under the category of single objects, whilst bandboxes and hatboxes, baskets, ceramics, chairs, costume accessories such as footwear, parasols and umbrellas, paintings, sculptures, textiles and wallpaper were categorised in series. Warhol’s indiscrimination, what Arthur C. Danto has called his ‘deep egalitarianism’, amounted to the view that everything was equal: ‘It was fun to see the Museum of Modern Art people,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘next to the teeny-boppers next to the amphetamine queens next to the fashion editors.’ Warhol expressed the zeitgeist of the emerging consumer society, translating its technology into technique in his art practice. The film camera, multiple reproduction of imagery, the cassette tape recorder – techniques of mass reproduction – shared something in kind with production lines of factories that appealed to him. They afforded consistency, a kind of machinic democracy:

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

It’s no coincidence that the democratic approach seems resolutely American. Father of modern poetry and champion of democracy Walt Whitman attempted to echo his personal-political ideology in his work, writing rapturously and indiscriminately about everything. Some years later, asked what he had been taking pictures of, the American photographer William Eggleston replies, ‘I’ve been photographing democratically… I’ve been outdoors, nowhere, in nothing.’

Warhol’s attention to the surfaces and artifices of mass-media and everyday culture disintegrated distinctions between rules of high and low culture, aesthetic categories of European civilization. It’s the same sensibility that ranges across all aspects of his practice at the time: in Raid the Icebox it’s writ large. Pop sensibility as curatorial strategy is brought to bear on those artefacts. With the exception of a few photographs (high-modernist art photography), none of the objects from storage are products of the age of mechanical reproduction. Their value comes from their handicraft and even when presented in a series each artefact exhibits singular qualities. Warhol treats artefacts of an older historical order to his machinic democratic sensibility. Interestingly they succumb with little resistance. Abstracted from their function or utility, in profusion, the artefacts exist as objects without identity. Liberation from the icebox restores identity, transforming it under the aegis of Warhol.

In his films Warhol gives minimal direction, his outward appearance and expression in writing exhibits a kind of performative indecision. It’s a radical indecision but it’s never, nor could it be, absolute. Raiding the icebox Warhol engages in making decisions of value, albeit perverse ones: broken chairs over good ones, Native American smocks over Chinese Emperors’. Whilst it digs behind the institution’s foundations, this gesture isn’t simply destructive. His indecision shares something of the negative capability of irony. In its most common rhetorical use irony is a mode of speech of which the meaning is contrary to the words. A more expansive definition offered by the dictionary is yet more revealing:

Expression of one’s meaning by language of opposite or different tendency, esp. Simulated adoption of another’s point of view or laudatory tone for purpose of ridicule; ill-timed or perverse arrival of event or circumstances in itself desirable, as if in the mockery of the fitness of things; use of language that has an inner meaning for a privileged audience and an outer meaning for the persons addressed or concerned. Simulated ignorance.

For the critic and poet Friedrich Schlegel writing at the eve of the eighteenth century, irony was the only weapon there was against death, against ossification, against any form of stabilisation and freezing of the life stream. If one reads a poem composed according to formal rules or experiences an institution that protects the lives and property of others, laugh at it, mock at it, be ironical, blow it up, point out that the opposite is equally true. ‘Corresponding to any proposition that anyone may utter,’ Isiah Berlin explains in his study The Roots of Romanticism, ‘there must be at least three other propositions, each of which is contrary to it, and each of which is equally true, all of which must be believed.’ It’s a strategy for escaping the logical straitjacket of physical causality, or of state-created laws, or aesthetic rules about perspective, or historical painting. In short it’s a negation of the idea of a stable structure of anything.

In practice though there are a couple of problems the individual taken to irony will face. When the ironist ceases to be ironic, their sincerity becomes thinly veiled. ‘True it is that once you gain a reputation for the habit,’ writes D.J. Enright in his study of irony, ‘you will barely be able to enter your local baker’s and ask for a loaf without getting a stonily suspicious glare.’ Further, the artist who uses irony is in a fair way to being disliked for setting himself up as being smarter than other people, whereas in reality not only are his intentions inoffensive but, by virtue of their earnestness, more often than not they defer him from being clever at all. Both of these consequences play out in Warhol’s exchanges with the director of the Museum of Art at Rhodes Island School of Design.

In his 1993 collection of essays Raiding the Icebox – a title that acknowledges the Rhodes Island exhibition and modifies it to infer cultural inquiry as process in continuation after its manifestation in writing – cultural critic Peter Wollen observes how strikingly close Warhol’s sensibility coincides with Susan Sontag’s definition of camp as sketched out in Notes on ‘Camp’. ‘Reading Sontag’s essay today,’ Wollen writes, ‘is like reading through a litany of Warhol’s tastes, allusions and affinities.’ Tiffany lamps, Bellini operas, bad movies, idolization of Garbo, corny flamboyant femaleness, dresses made of millions of feathers. Like irony, but much younger, camp has an equally potent capacity to usurp. Camp was an attempt at redemption from the banality of life, the unpredictable mixing of sheer frivolity with passionate commitment, the taste for extravagance, ‘dandyism in the age of mass culture’ as Sontag put it. Wollen reminds us though, that camp involved a rejection of the late-modernist aesthetic as espoused by Clememt Greenberg, the New York critic who saw himself as defending the gates against the barbarians of kitsch. Camp taste, with its hyperbolic aestheticization, its playful connoisseurship of kitsch, played a decisive part in the demise of Modernism. It also helped alter the self-image of a museum of modern art in Rhode Island.