Jul
16
The woman who really made Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’

You have to imagine the lines that follow in separate fonts to get the full sense of the nonsense in ‘Karawane’, one of Hugo Ball’s ‘verses without words’:

jolifanto bambla ô falli bambla
grossiga m’pfa habla horem
égiga goramen

And it ends not with a bang, but with … ‘ba-umf’. See the original and it’s impossible not to be impressed by the industrial-strength madness of Ball’s absolute certainty.

His poetics of nonsense claimed to drain words of meaning, but quite the opposite effect was achieved. The meaninglessness is itself meaningful: cognition is on an infinite loop. Sense or nonsense, Ball intended to show that ‘this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect’.

So, in the middle of this, our own humiliating age, it’s nice that the centenary of Ball’s Dada movement is being commemorated in a series of events, performances and exhibitions in Zurich. In his novel Flametti, or the Dandyism of the Poor (whose subject is a libidinous circus troupe) Ball cites the ‘laughable impotence’, ‘stupendous smugness’ and ‘self-evident limitedness’ of politics in 1916. If any of this sounds familiar in 2016, it proves that self-destructive Dada actually has enduring values. It was not a style, but a state of mind.

Read the full article at The Spectator

Jul
08
Going the whole hog: inside the Pig at Combe

The best account of a country house weekend was by Harold Nicolson, diplomat, diarist and, as resident of Sissinghurst, an expert with first-hand knowledge of his subject. In a celebrated essay, he described the languorous guests, chafing dishes, hot bacon under silver cloches and insistent drizzle outside the French windows. He exposed what he called the jade and lobster of the Edwardian period.

The best account of the English country house hotel is, however, by Robin Hutson, son of a south London heating engineer, who rose from pot-washer to GM to become a proprietor of genius. In one of Hutson’s Pigs, you have an ambience that is sophisticated, but relaxed. A fastidious eye has chosen everything, but not in an intimidating or controlling manner: authentic comforts are understood and addressed.

Read the complete article on The Telegraph

Jul
03
Don’t cover up sexist ads – they’re the best a man can get

I am not a casual sexist – my sexism is calculated and determined… – but why shouldn’t the advertising world acknowledge interesting distinctions between the sexes?

Last month, Unilever, manufacturers of cosmetics, cleaning products and edible fats (and one of the world’s biggest spenders on advertising), pledged to stop using sexist stereotypes in its commercials. From now on, its adverts for products such as Dove soap, Radox shower gels and Sunsilk hairspray, will portray more “authentic and three-dimensional” women reflective of new advances in gender equality.

At Cannes Lions, the advertising industry’s annual Mediterranean love-in last week, Unilever marketing director Keith Weed revealed that just two per cent of advertising presents women as intelligent or managerial. His plan to disrupt the ugly convention of portraying women as a docile and compliant playthings has begun with a revamp of the campaign for Lynx deodorant.

Read the full feature on The Telegraph

Jun
22
Sicily: a darkly romantic island

With no regard for safety and scant respect for convention, let alone the law, an unlit Vespa carrying three people roared towards us up a dark Palermo alley. Since the big trials of the Eighties and Nineties, The Mafia, they say, has been emasculated and trivialised. However, certain pirate habits of mind persist in Sicily.

Everything here is more deeply etched than the mainland. The Baroque is more Baroque, the wines are stronger, the volcanoes more active, the people more charming, the dolci more sweet, the despair more profound, the food better.

Sicily’s greatest writer was Giuseppe de Lampedusa, a Shakespeare scholar who spoke English with an exquisite Oxford accent, but who never visited England. Lampedusa spoke of the violence of the landscape, the cruelty of the climate and the continuous tensions in everything. Worst? The terrifying insularity of mind.

Read the full article at The Independent

Apr
02
Robert Mapplethorpe: bad boy with a camera

Robert Mapplethorpe made his reputation as a photographer in the period between the 1969 gay-bashing raid at the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street and the identification of HIV in 1983. This was the High Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, the Bourbon Louis Romp, the Victorian imperial pomp, the Jazz Age, the Camelot moonshot, the Swinging Sixties of gay culture in New York.

In the 18th century New York punished sodomy with death. This was later reduced to 14 years’ solitary or hard labour. By 1950, it was only a misdemeanour. By the Seventies, it was becoming positively fashion-able, like a ten-speed bike or a breadmaking machine. The bulk of Mapplethorpe’s pictures of this era, which include a lot of willies, active and inert, chained, pinned, licked and bound, are, depending on your taste, exhilaratingly frank or wince-makingly disgusting.

Mapplethorpe then made a second reputation, after an Aids diagnosis. In his decline, he shot a series of self-portraits showing the ravages the disease wrought on his once- pretty features. These mix residual narcissism with pitiless self-analysis. When he died, aged 42, in 1989 the New York Times obituary described him (and the foundation he established) as ‘a symbol of courage and resistance to the disease’. It said perhaps a little less about his photography.

Read the full article at The Spectator

Feb
27
‘I enjoy the banal’: Stephen Bayley meets Martin Parr

‘I like ordinary people,’ says the extraordinary photographer Martin Parr, pushing a few high-concept smoked sprats around his plate at St John, the Smithfield restaurant.

Parr is Britain’s best-known photographer, but he is no acolyte of celebrity. Like the Italian anti-designers, his Seventies contemporaries who wanted to dull the sheen of modernism by elevating the mundane (or valorising crap, as I would put it), he is a devotee of the ordinary. But is he celebrating the everyday or mocking it? He never quite answers, although he does say, ‘I enjoy the banal.’ Ask me and I’d say the banal is what we want to avoid.

Since 2014, Martin Parr has been president of Magnum, the celebrated international photographers’ collective. But not every fellow professional warms to him or his work. Some find themselves a bit allergic to his equivocal posturing. ‘My objection is not intellectual but visceral,’ says a senior figure at the Photographers’ Gallery. ‘I just don’t like looking at his photographs.’

Read the full article at The Spectator

Nov
13
We’ve sneered at pop culture for too long

America, as usual, is streets ahead of us in accepting props and costumes from Breaking Bad into its leading museum

Pop culture is a curious term. What are the alternatives? It’s a bit like those signs declaring the existence of “Accessible Toilets”. Are there really any other sort?

In culture, or anything else, popularity is the only true measure of value. Sure, great art is not always immediately accessible, but always becomes so. When you read a programme note that says “not performed since 1754” you know that it’s going to be mind-numbingly awful. As Joni Mitchell said, an art that speaks to only half a dozen people isn’t really art at all. It took an Anglophile American, TS Eliot, to recognise that culture includes both cabbages and cathedrals.

Read the full article at The Times

Oct
22
Why Lego isn’t awesome any more

The street value of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene is going up. ABS is the plastic used to make the Lego bricks. It lends itself to precision moulding and most parents will know only too well the sharp spasm of agony felt when treading upon a carelessly abandoned brick while creeping out of a child’s bedroom at night.

There may be enough Lego in the world for every single person to own 86 bricks, but demand still beats supply. This week, the announcement that Lego cannot meet its Christmas orders will inflame hysteria and inflate prices. Plastic bricks may be a better investment than gold.

Lego lust has already stimulated an international crime wave. A New York woman was arrested for stealing 800 box sets. A syndicate of thieves specialising in Lego emerged in Phoenix. There have been Lego-related truck-jackings in Watford Gap and armed burglaries in Australia. The once innocent children’s toy has become a vulgar object of feverishly traded novelty among adult mouth breathers.

Read the full article at The Telegraph

Oct
13
The death of the Playboy nude is a tragedy of our times

I very much enjoy images of beautiful, naked women. Titian and Rubens, of course. Renoir less so, a little saccharine for my taste. The sometimes transgressive Klimt and Schiele, naturally.

Playboy, too. Tom Kelley’s famous centrefold of Marilyn Monroe in the magazine’s first edition of September 1953 is one of the history of art’s great female images. If any blue-nosed puritan or shrieking feminist disagrees, I’d be happy to debate how it compares to Ingres.

But now Playboy’s nudes are taking their place in history with the Old Masters. Which is to say, they are no more.

Read the full article at The Telegraph

Sep
16
Some Victorian buildings should be left to die

There was something seriously wrong with the Victorians. Their architecture has an inclination to ugliness that defies explanation by the shifting tides of tastes. So much of it is wilfully challenging, even visually hostile.

After millennia of experience, jobbing builders and, since 1834, professional architects acquired certain rules about proportion and detail that were generally agreed to work well, both practically and artistically. These so many Victorian buildings contumaciously defied. We look on them now with blank horror.

Of course, the thing about taste is that it does change. What is acceptable in one era is despised in the next, only to be revived later. The Bloomsbury aesthete Lytton Strachey said we can be absolutely certain that nobody will want to revive the Victorian era. Half a century later we had Laura Ashley.

Read the complete article at The Telegraph

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