The black peony (a study in strange times)

Continuing my series on art in lockdown, considering the pictures on my walls.

I’ve written here on Prunella Clough ten years ago; she died eleven years before that – but her strange, bleak imagery still feels startlingly modern. No one else was making work like hers in midcentury Britain, balanced somewhere between figurative and abstract, often informed by urban settings but also by inner vistas. There are five of Clough’s works on paper in this house; each one is distinctive, beautiful in a sullen way.

With Clough, a flower wasn’t something romantic or sentimental, it was tough – like her Black Peony (Paper Flower), a lithograph from the mid-80s. The flowerhead is shut, like a fist, thrusting on its thin stem through the tangle of foliage around it. The ‘paper’ of the subtitle references the material the image is printed on, but also hints at the Latin name, Papaver (from the poppy family) Somniferum (literally ‘sleep bringing’). This is a narcotic, an opium poppy, slowly rising its dreamy head through a haze in which it almost disappears – the way you might in a dream, or in a cloud of smoke.

Delphic, Prunella Clough, 1996

Her imagery is like that sometimes – dreamlike, hard to pin down. Delphic means ‘obscure’ and ‘ambiguous’. In her screenprint of the same title, made for the Freud Museum in 1996, a black mass with a pointed peak fills a neutral space like an inscrutable mountain. Is this the cloak of the Oracle on a ceremonial tripod, or a temple flame burning on a pyre (a reddish fire emits from the right side of the mass)? Is Freud the Oracle to be consulted? Freud was acutely interested in the classical world and crowded his famous study with artefacts from Greek and Roman culture. There is something totemic and solid about Clough’s image, but also frightening. If this is a dream, it is a nightmare.

Prunella Clough, Bubble Wrap, 1993

Clough was fascinated by the architecture of things. Bubble Wrap is a lithograph from 1993 – a playful exploration of an ordinary packing material (the thing the picture is typically wrapped in rather than the star of the show) employed for its ability to create pattern. The choice of green suggests something plant-like – there is often a tension between the manmade and the natural world in Clough’s work. She’s not interested in perfection; she makes a tear that drives through the centre of these circular shapes (which to me look like fingerprints). With Clough, the abstract is in the objects around us – we just need to look closely to find it.

What do I get from staring at her images on my walls? They are endlessly mysterious, uncanny (going back to Freud), their meaning remains unfixed, no matter how long I’ve lived with them around me. They have a particular kind of quiet drama, which is the same quality I look for in a poem (I don’t know if Clough liked Wallace Stevens, but I find affinities between them). I thought of her the other day when I saw a discarded surgical mask on the pavement – I could see her making something of that, indeed of this whole pandemic with its enforced isolation, its hidden virus.

Solitary Walk

Continuing my series on art in lockdown, considering the pictures on my walls.

In the last two months, I’ve developed a different relationship with being outside, as if I’m passing through a hard barrier each time I venture beyond the front door. Here in London even before the pandemic it was not uncommon to see people (mainly foreign tourists – we residents are more blasé) wearing masks to protect them from our comparatively high levels of pollution. Now even the very air can make us sick.

Yesterday we escaped the city for the first time since lockdown and drove to meet friends for a socially distanced walk in the woods near their home in Oxted. I hadn’t realised until we arrived how much I’d missed nature – it’s a cliché to talk about the healing properties of trees and birdsong, but as I discussed in a previous post, it’s a cliché because it is true. It’s corny, but I felt free as we walked along the dirt paths through woodlands, sun spotting the ground with light, stopping now and then to locate the birds we were hearing on their high branches. It was (another cliché) restorative, after long days of being sequestered indoors, trying not to listen to the desperate reports on the news.

Maybe that’s why I love this print by the English artist Richard Bawden (son of that most English of artists, Edward Bawden). It’s entitled Solitary Walk, which suggests to me not the easy camaraderie of our woodland stroll with friends, but the kind of amble you make on your own, just to think. That kind of walking isn’t like the Situationist dérive, which, although prioritising dreaming as part of the condition of walking, is typically set in an urban environment, a sort of rebellious dawdling. The dérive is the same as drifting, which you might very well do in the woods, but the quality of drifting in the woods is different, just as the air is different.

The walk that Bawden invites us on is solitary because the path ahead has been made for the walker, who is also the artist, also the viewer – as if the trees have parted for him / her alone. The palette is simplified, almost monochrome – green / blue / white / gold – so that what we are immediately drawn to is the vertical pattern of trees, the horizontals of ground, horizon, sky, canopy. The walker is moving through a grid representing distance, along a path that narrows at its furthest reach. And distance is a beautiful geometry we can only appreciate when we are standing at a fixed point.

Bawden’s woods remind me of one of my favourite wooded walks – in Tunstall in Suffolk — which may not be coincidental, as Bawden is also based in Suffolk (although his patch is Hadleigh). Perhaps that’s why certain pictures chime – they remind us of inner landscapes we hold and return to again and again. The artist could never know this of course, but something seen and remembered connects us. I don’t make that Tunstall walk these days – and haven’t for some time even before lockdown – so all I can do is continue to hold those woods in my mind.

The weather somewhere else

As we are getting used to Zooming in on each other, I have become fascinated by the pictures people have on their walls. Last week when Matt Hancock gave a virtual Coronavirus briefing, he chose to stand in front of a Damien Hirst spin painting depicting the Queen, donated to the Government in 2015. Was that Hancock’s way of saying he has his finger on the pulse, that he’s both traditional and contemporary? Or were advisors simply trying to find an image to appeal to the beleaguered nation – while drawing attention away from a man who is very clearly unsuitable to the current challenge?

As so much of this blog has been dedicated to visiting art in other places, I thought this would be the ideal time to talk about the pictures on my own walls, which, although I see them every day, I perhaps don’t examine in such detail in busier times, and to consider what they say about me.

I bought the lithograph by Peter Doig shown above at an art fair twenty-five years ago, part of a portfolio series. It’s from Doig’s pre-Trinidad period; I’ve always responded to the sombre mood of his earlier works more than his bright Caribbean landscapes. Doig grew up in Canada, and so his frame of reference is similar to mine – his snowy landscapes were based on actual childhood places, but also on the densely-wooded mazes of 70s horror movies, such as Friday the 13th. I watched those movies too (sometimes hiding my eyes just as the axe made contact with its victim) which made my excursions into the wildernesses of New Jersey even more thrilling. Nature was real, and on the doorstep, but also mysterious. I’ve written before about my habit of hoarding nests and bird skulls and odd-shaped stones – something I do to this day. No matter where you end up (I think of myself now as an urban dweller) your early formative landscape is the one that remains with you. I see my own childhood in Doig’s woods and lakes and pines.

The filter of memory gives the picture a sepia tint like an old tintype, but that particular brown also screams 1970s: forest holiday cabins, ranch-style restaurants, Lincoln Logs, hand-tooled cowboy boots, simulated wood-grain panels on the sides of station wagons. It’s also the brown of old masters, which gives it the look of a renaissance pen and ink drawing.

The contrast to those modulations of brown is white. More often than not, it’s snowing in Doig’s Canadian landscapes. It snows a lot in Canada, as it did in New Jersey when I was growing up. Here the snow is a polka dot pattern laced through the sky, reflected in the lake. This is a child’s drawing of snow, depicted in great globes of white, more like stars or planets suspended in the sky. It’s like Currier and Ives on acid. When it snows now, it’s never as exciting as it was when I was a child, and the snow was just the way Doig shows it – brightening that brown veneer of boredom.

In this picture, I can travel not only to these silent woods, but back in years. It is a place of calm. I don’t feel a sense of dread despite the filmic source; Doig’s sites are backdrops, landscapes devoid of their human elements. When he does introduce a figure, he is always alone, miniscule in the vastness of the towering trees around him. In that sense, his Canadian landscapes are the perfect vision of peace for us in our isolated times.  

Peter Doig, Jetty, 1994

Life in the time of COVID

I look at the crossed-out entries in my diary and wonder what my week would have been like if we hadn’t gone into lockdown. I had a full schedule – a conference in Oxford on Monday, teaching on Tuesday and Wednesday, Society of Authors’ meetings on Thursday and Saturday, a couple of evening poetry events, a performance of Curlew River at the Barbican, and Sunday lunch with friends in Kent (which would have been happening as I write). All cancelled or postponed, apart from teaching – enabled by online conferencing. I am now familiar with my students’ front rooms and kitchens, their pictures and plants, the places they sit with their coffee and laptops. It’s oddly comforting, like popping over to each other’s homes, especially as that contact is now restricted.   

Tomorrow, I was due to catch a train to Saxmundham for the first day of a week-long writing retreat. The concept of a ‘retreat’ now seems quaint, the idea that five of us were gathering to ‘isolate’ ourselves in a house in Thorpness, ostensibly to write and share our work-in-progress. And now that I am ‘isolated’, it’s proving difficult to write. People are posting their COVID poems on Facebook and Twitter, giving virtual readings, sending chain emails inviting poem exchanges. I am cheered by the resilience and creativity of the poetry community, but at the moment, I don’t feel able to participate. It’s always been the case that whatever is happening in my life or in the world, my poetic response arrives sometime after the event. I am still, like many people I expect, in the middle of processing the most unsettling and cataclysmic event to occur in my lifetime.

What emerges at this stage is cliché. I’m reminded of Helen Mort’s thoughts on trying to write in the midst of climbing the Knud Rasmussen glacier in East Greenland, and how her initial ‘scribbling’, as she put it, was just cliché. She goes on to say: ‘I remember thinking that the reason clichés came to mind when I was watching the Northern Lights or the movement of ice in the fjord was because there was a degree of accuracy to how those phrases captured my emotional response.’ Cliché gains accuracy through repetition – it captures not only what one individual might feel, but also what many others have felt, which is how it becomes cliché – through commonality, and therefore, overuse.

The Italian novelist Francesca Melandri, has written a ‘Letter to the UK from Italy’, published in The Guardian on Friday. In just two days her piece has gone viral (if we’re still allowed to say that). People have found it moving and hopeful; the reason is that it relies on cliché (in a good way) as comfort. Her use of the future tense throughout is more than prediction – she is saying we know how you will act, because we have been there already. What people are seeking now is the familiar, and knowing that Italians also planned their days around meals, joined dozens of social networking groups and then didn’t have the strength to participate, started vast dystopian novels then put them aside, makes us feel better because even in isolation, we are all going through the same rituals. Those who continued to gather publicly even after official advice told them to isolate, and were later demonised might be considered foolish and even criminally irresponsible, but perhaps their reaction wasn’t simply rebellion or stupidity, but just human instinct. Not to say they shouldn’t have heeded guidelines that are there to protect us all, but maybe their response stems from disbelief that this could really be happening – and also fear. Perhaps they continued to gather because the alternative – returning to their homes to be completely alone – was too much to contemplate.

detail from the cover of the first edition of High Rise by JG Ballard

Disbelief is why we thought it would be a great idea to reread The Road or Brave New World or anything by JG Ballard, but really, we don’t need to know some author was supernaturally prescient and posited that one day we’d find ourselves in this predicament. If we attempt to put ourselves in the mindset of worst scenarios (which scientists do all the time, and they’re not writing fiction), we might write a dystopian novel that will become true for the next generation. I can’t stop thinking about the incredibly brilliant BBC series Years and Years, set at the time of broadcast in 2019 and concluding in 2034. The future it posed wasn’t that far into the future: everything still looked the same, people dressed the way they do now, the shifts were subtle but tangible. The future became the present before the characters in the series could adjust, because they were simply going about their day to day lives.

As we were, before our lives suddenly changed, and the ‘new normal’ became the desperate search for toilet paper and eggs, understanding the true measurement of two metres. There will be another ‘normal’ to replace this one, but what is frightening is the thought that whatever happens next, we can’t go back to how things were – that ‘normal’ is already in the past.

The Roaring Twenties

It’s been a long while since I’ve posted on Invective, and in the grand tradition of New Year’s resolutions, here I am, with all good intentions. It seems the right time to return to this project, given not only the dawn of the new year, but also the arrival of a new decade; and while I wish world events were less bleak, it’s important that we keep going. So in the spirit of positivity, I start as I mean to continue.

Yesterday I went to the Barbican Gallery with my friend, the poet and publisher Paul Rossiter, to see the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art . The show was at its best when it amplified the excitement of those often clandestine spots — the crazy pick & mix of artists and provocateurs, scandalous sartorial statements (or their naked absence), potent drinks with names such as Whiskey Flipp and Kiss Me Quick. While the harsh-lit brutalist bunker of the Barbican was sometimes at odds with the wildly louche material, there was an undeniable energy in seeing how people came together and created a space for themselves, often in times of war or difficulty, often with the forces of the law against them.

My favourite club in the show was the Cabaret Fledermaus in Vienna (a city that still oozes a hidden degeneracy in its golden Klimtian swirls), which the Barbican nobly attempted to recreate, right down to the mosaic of rainbow bright ceramic tiles that crammed the walls of the original room. But it was undeniably missing debauched punters, a thick cloud of fag smoke and Miss Macara performing her Grotesktanz.

And of course both Paul and I would’ve been front row for Hugo Ball and his experiments with Lautgedichte (sound poems) at the Cabaret Voltaire. Ball’s project was to reinvigorate poetry by inventing a new language: I don't want words that other people have invented . . . I want my own stuff, my own rhythm . . . I want words that are seven yards long. But even if in the world then, we’d have had to be quick — we were shocked to learn the club only lasted five months (its impact still reverberating with us now) in its futile attempt to make a stand against the war raging all over Europe.

Like the Cabaret Voltaire, most of the clubs in the show were short-lived; perhaps it’s not so surprising, considering the makeshift nature of their existence. Art really was underground and precarious, and happened without grants and advance preparations.

As we sat in the concrete-clad coffee bunker afterwards, Paul and I mused on the clubs of our youth — his beloved Soho jazz cafés of the 60s, my Lower East Side dives of the 80s — and wondered why their kind no longer exists. We talked about places in London like Café Oto and Iklectik that showcase what’s current in music and poetry, but they feel like notable exceptions. It’s true our city currently feels devoid of joy as we face our separation from the continent. Perhaps that’s part of the reason — we are not open to what’s new as we once were.

Again, like Cabaret Voltaire, it’s interesting to realise that many clubs rose up in times of crisis, so perhaps we are ready for a revival. It’s time to inject a little Weimar decadence into grey old London. We have just entered the Twenties after all . . .