This Is Civilisation

Last year we had Simon Schama’s The Power of Art on the BBC; a series to be loved and treasured as it brought to life in dramatic reconstructions, alongside Schama’s wry tones, the stories and period background behind great works of artistic expression by such notable figures as Caravaggio, David, Van Gogh and Picasso. This year, Channel 4 brings us This Is Civilisation which promises to do similarly marvellous things with artist and writer Matthew Collings (who isn’t on television nearly enough) travelling around the world as our guide.

It began last night (Saturday, 24th November) with Ye Gods, the first of four episodes in which our man takes us through his own history of art beginning with the ancient Greeks and leading right through the centuries to the modern age and its various controversies. The first installment focused on the importance of religion, particularly Christianity, Islam and paganism, as a subject and inspiration, and how in turn these works influenced our world. Later episodes entitled Feelings, Save Our Souls and Uncertainty will continue to explore the role and themes of art as a civilising, symbolic and soul-enriching presence and experience in our lives through many forms.

I like Collings; I like his enthusiasm, his soft English accented delivery and ‘nothing is strange’ approach to his subject matter. He’s written some great books on art: Blimey!, about London's modern art history, It Hurts, about New York's and This Is Modern Art, which was also a cracking BBC series presented by the author.

This should be the most watchable and fascinating television series of the year.

The Tea Time of the Self

The first step to self-help is buying the book. The second step is reading the bloody thing. These things always seem a good idea at the time: the blurb on the cover speaks of the wonderful benefit people have found through the information and advice inside, while the brief feeling of optimism at the life-changing potential of the words on the pages in your hand reels you in. Even an underwhelming flick-through in the bookshop doesn’t kill much of the appeal: take this home, read it properly and improve thy self.

I have a minor history of buying these books and not reading them. I’ve purchased the odd copy, usually when I’ve been at a fairly low ebb, and admittedly there is something to be said for the initial comfort they bring through their promise alone. However, once a few paragraphs have been navigated, I do tend to get the feeling I’m being pointed out the bleedin’ obvious and not getting provided with some brilliant insight into my own being, or type of being.

I imagine my problem is that of expecting instant miracles and thus upon discovering no effortless enlightenment I'm overtaken by an 'easier-said-than-done' kind of scepticism that encourages my cynical demons to block any willingness to patiently trust and implement any of the subtle changes advised. It seems I'm too pig-headed to learn self-knowledge from anyone but myself through my own way of going through life playing things by ear. I feel the best self-help book I could read would be one that deals with the obstacle of my own stubbornness when it comes to reading self-help books. Of course, I likely wouldn’t read that either.

Anyways, I very recently bought Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. It deals with a a world of emotions and problems and how best to face up to them. True to form, I’ve barely taken in a word of it. The author of this book doesn’t know me at all; she doesn’t even have so much as a first impression of me to go on. What help can she be? How can she understand my individual needs? Yet people swear by this book; they rave about it on Amazon; it’s been good for them; probably because they’ve allowed it to be.

Audiobooks may be the thing for me. An eloquent spoken word has more power than an eloquent written word, I find. I've found and am currently downloading a torrented version of the above work in mp3 format. Hopefully any future improvements to my disposition may not be unrelated.

Sunday Song #7 "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" by Gil Scott Heron

If hip-hop really did begin with this then it peaked at the earliest possible stage. Gil Scott Heron's angry polemic from 1971 is one of music's truly seminal moments, providing a blueprint for later generations of artists good and bad to crack their knuckles over and take to some logical conclusion.

The words flowing from the mouth are succinct poetry speaking of civil rights and urban unrest, black consciousness and the banality of media, with scathing name-checks for the slippery and later discredited men in office at the time (Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew) thrown in.

It's hard to argue with the power of what's being said here, nor is it easy to resist tapping a foot and nodding to the groove that carries this whole protest message across to your freed and funky mind.

Gil Scott Heron - "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" mp3

Seduced

Yesterday I stood amongst strangers and viewed a slide show that included sexually graphic nothing-left-to-the-imagination shots of anal penetration, and I felt completely normal. This must be the difference between looking at sex in art and looking at sex in porn; the context decides everything.

It was inside the highbrow environs of the art galleries at London’s famous Barbican Centre that I found myself so blasé. Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now is a new exhibition that runs until late January 2008 with a reassuring ‘adults only’ entry limit and content sure to raise a few eyebrows and provoke some wry smiles upon being discussed or read within the cultural reviews of the Sunday supplements or on the odd television or Radio 4 programme.

As suggested above, this exhibition doesn’t flinch from the nitty-gritty with much ‘hardcore’ material on display, albeit with the key distinction being made early on that this is ART, with the purpose primarily to provoke thought and emotion rather than pornography’s sole aim to sexually arouse. I tend to agree as nothing here really aroused me at all, while there was some thought inspired, albeit in quite a whimsical sense, by the various representations of intercourse and stimulation that mostly begins, as much does, with the classical Greeks and Romans - each with their wickedly salacious sets of Gods, nymphs and satyrs honoured in marble statues and wall paintings depicting ancient nookie.

Looking to provide something for everyone the curators also include sexually infused pieces from the Renaissance age as well as Chinese, Japanese and Indian pieces, the latter informing myself that we, in the West, have been for years misinterpreting the philosophy of the Karma Sutra and wrongly attaching our own mucky ideals to it completely inappropriately.

With much of this early stuff fairly humdrum, the exhibition doesn’t really find its edge until it reaches the photographic age and that extra bit of explicit detail the camera provides. Paintings and sculpture portraying sexual acts retain an ambiguous detached-from-reality quality, but photographs mirror exactly what people get up to.

American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s pictures have the greatest shock appeal in the exhibition. There’s something about fisting that never fails to create unease within me, even in a shiny black and white shot. Sadomasochism too, has never been my bag at all, though I can appreciate Mapplethorpe’s technically excellent recordings of such acts between consenting gents in medieval dungeon gear.

Seduced has household names amongst its roster of artists: Andy Warhol gets two films, Blow Job and The Kiss running on loops; Tracey Emin pops up right at the start, while Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon are represented by a painting each. These are some of the highlights of the exhibition with a rarely-seen piece from Picasso’s wondrously melancholic blue period revealing an incongruously happy scene of oral pleasuring. Bacon’s painting, Two Figures in the Grass, while striking, doesn’t seem to be about sex at all, but rather loneliness, given that there appears to be only one figure in the work, and in some distress. Maybe I'm just looking at it all wrong.

So, sexually intercourse didn't begin in 1963 at all, and has actually been going on for ages and ages. Seduced, without being particularly enlightening, provides interesting evidence of its longevity and how it has informed so much of what we do through history. You're probably even thinking about it right now.

Eastern Promises

So David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen decided to get hitched and live happily ever after. Well, this marriage of director and actor is still young but thus far it’s produced two films that stand as the career highpoints of both men; first in 2005’s crackling A History of Violence and now this: Eastern Promises, a terrific London-set tale that delves into the chilling underworld of Russian mobsters complete with some of the most bone-crunching, uncomfortable in-your-face violence you’ll see on a screen.

Not that Eastern Promises goes out of its way to be brutal for kicks; this isn’t action entertainment, this is a depiction of a tough world where extreme unpleasantness is part and parcel of business and the camera’s eye doesn’t flinch from following it so, regardless of the teeth-gritting effect it will have on its audience. The film earns its 18 certificate within its first two minutes, and though the body count remains relatively low throughout, it’s the visceral anti-cartoon nature of the violence that leaves the sick taste in the mouth. A steam room punch-up late in the film will be spoken of in debates for decades to come, I’m sure.

How we find ourselves in this murky world is largely through the efforts of midwife Anna, whom delivers a baby from a young dying girl and is moved by the tragedy of the situation and the discovery of the girl’s diary to investigate the unfortunate circumstances without being perturbed and compromised by the very dark and very sordid alleys to which her interest leads. Something of an angel with a sadness in her eyes, Anna is played by pretty Naomi Watts, whom is even prettier with an English rose accent and such a sympathetic character so excellently portrayed.

It’s Mortensen who is truly on fire here, though. He’s tell-all-your-friends fantastic as the fascinatingly ambiguous and very tough Nickolai; a driver and disposal man for the Russian mob whose past is literally etched all over his body in the form of tattoos which we learn are important symbols of experience and status to separate the men from the boys in grisly Soviet criminal culture.

Even if Mortensen was the only good thing about this film, it’d still be worth going to see for his performance alone. Handily, there’s classy support from the always-excellent Vincent Cassel as the emotionally-troubled, temperamentally-volatile Kirill, as well as from Armin Mueller-Stahl as his ruthless, domineering mafia boss father - a deeply unpleasant man indeed, behind the charming facade of a friendly Eastern European restaurant proprietor who can whip up a cracking bit of Russian tuck to disarm any threats to his criminal empire's longevity.

Grim, hard-hitting and with shots of very black humour, Eastern Promises may be the best and most memorable thing you’ll see all year.