Bleakest snow scenes? The Victorians did it best!

My intellectual crush on Jonathan Jones can only grow. What else can I do when his most recent blog resonates with my artistic interests even more than usual. However, I do have to disagree with his choice as the bleakest snow scene.

I’ve written more words than I care to think about scenes of ice and snow, spent months of my life studiously dissecting the representation of Victorian polar explorers. These silly men who set the trends for the equally silly Edwardian explorer Robert Falcon Scott have always fascinated me. The most famous and bloody of the Victorian explorers is John Franklin, who through being unprepared to the point of delusion managed to star in a story bursting with death, misadventure, cannibalism and powerful Victorian rhetoric. This gristly story left deep scars on the Victorian psyche, and these scars show in numerous snow filled paintings.

Mr. Jones picks a scene of massacre as his bleakest snow scene. It’s a powerful painting represented a horrendous scene, but can it really match the subtle, painful hints of disaster that appear in Landseer’s Man Proposes, God Disposes? Here Landseer makes masterful use of artistic techniques that we are more used to see manifesting themselves as nauseating Victorian pathos. Russell Potter wrote a brilliant blog post unpicking this interesting painting on Visions of the North.

Honourable mention must also go to Thomas Smith’s They Forged the Last Link With Their Lives in the National Martime Museum. (I’m not sure why they’ve changed the name of the piece since I wrote about it three years ago, since it categorically couldn’t represent Franklin). The painting shows the last surviving men of the ill fated expedition dead and dying in a bleak and hopeless tableaux. Unquestionably, when considering the now generally accepted accusations of cannibalism between the survivors, it does work as a piece of propaganda, but it also shows the end of an almost unimaginably terrible narrative.

For people in the North West looking for a scene of snowy bleakness which could rival the streets of Manchester, a trip to the permanent galleries in the Manchester Art Gallery might be in order. This time not about explorers, but about Napolean’s retreat from Moscow.  A narrative scene over flowing with the futility and bleakness of war, I find Adolphe Yvon’s Marshal Ney Supporting the Rear Guard During the Retreat from Moscow almost mesmerising. The detail is compelling, the moment when you notice the naked corpse - presumably stripped of his clothing by frost bitten comrades - is positively shocking.

So that’s it. Three paintings which both perfectly demonstrate the Victorian taste of macabre scenes set in frosty snow swept wastes and will perhaps lend a little context to our current snowy predicament!

The 39 Steps @ Playhouse Theatre

It seems I can only write intelligently when I’m snarling like a beast. Give me something nice and fluffy to write about and I’m like Lennie from Of Mice and Men. I might adore it, but I’ll probably accidently crush it’s skull.

The 39 Steps is dangerously near perfect, a gloriously playful panto for the grown ups. To do anything  other than gush happily to the point of being incomprehensible would be to damn this play with light praise.

That’s it. It’s so good it’s actually fried my critical faculties... could I sue?

Urbis

It probably says something about my myopic view of the world that I could never really get with Urbis. To me it always seemed a soulless space with a paltry veneer of art and heavily edited culture splattered on the inside. This might well be because I've spent a lot of my time in the intellectual company of very dead, fairly bearded white men, with the result that I can often feel out of touch with the prevailing views on arts and culture.

My issue with Urbis is that it never provided me with the intellectual sustenance I was looking for... though to be frank, few exhibition do. I'm like a man who has been spoiled by a doting mother and excessive pornography, it is unlikely I will find a lady who will live up to my expectations.  Little short of the Great Exhibition of 1851 will please me.

This view hasn't changed with the decision to forcibly inject the National Football Museum in Urbis' glassy shell. I'm not going to retrospectively become horrified by football's ascendancy into a cultural space. In some ways it's a bit of a relief: I'll never feel that I'm somehow letting down the middle class art lovers side by my reluctance to subject myself to the cultural fare Urbis offered. It's football, and, like tripe, no one will mind if I turn my nose up at it.

Looking round Urbis on a rainy Sunday afternoon, it became clear to me that perhaps I should apply the same logic to the attitude of display that currently infuses the space. Audio-visual interpretative displays and blown-up photographs for me have always had a supplemental purpose - yet with Urbis they are the mainstay of both major exhibitions currently on display. The suggestion of smugness, which so offended their CEO, is not rescinded: the exhibitions remind me of nothing more than complacent secondary school text books, which the key difference that there is apparently no attempt to present a unbiased argument. Both the TV and Hip Hop exhibitions feel celebratory to the point of being blinkered.

However, I do understand that many people love the place, and with this in mind it's clear to see that the major issue with the Urbis decision is that it smacks of the same dangerous logic which inspired Southampton Council to attempt to sell art to fund a Titanic-themed tourist attraction. Economic decisions cannot be ignored when planning culture, but the public floundering over it the future of Urbis makes it seem that there has been no planning for something to take its place.

Just as the exhibitions seemed to sit superficially in the surroundings of that god-awful arrogant buildings, perhaps when removed from it they could take on a new subtleness and nimbleness? When I was 19 I wrote a plan for a building-less Gallery of Popular Culture - even then I knew that a building would hamper rather than help a curatorial idea which attempted to pin down something so ephemeral. I still have the document somewhere... if you're interested.

Angels of Anarchy @ Manchester Art Gallery

With a whimper my review of the Angels of Anarchy show at Manchester Art Gallery has gone up on their beautiful micro-site, you can take a look at and disagree with my vacuous opinions here. 

The Rise of Women Artists @ Walker Art Gallery

Lady artistes seems to be in vogue at the moment. Angels of Anarchy is making waves over at Manchester Art Gallery, and, apparently timed to coincide with their Bridget Riley micro-retrospective, Walker Art Gallery presents The Rise of Women Artists.

Though prominently asking questions - Does the gender of an artist matter? Should artists be labelled? Are decorative arts any less significant than paintings? - this exhibition stoically refuses to make any kind of argument. It is like a rather earnest, rambling, but not well developed, discussion of the possibilities art holds for the fairer sex.

Frankly, for me, the whole thing got off to a pretty poor start. Right by the entrance, a corner of tapestry seems to imply needle work was automatically creative art and the women who practised this craft automatically artists. To begin an exhibition with such a un-nuanced and wrong footed statement doesn’t inspire. At the end of the day, even though undoubtedly some women found creative output in stitching dainty napkins, isn’t it a bit like stating that all children working in Primarni sweatshops are somehow fashion designers?

Laying aside the oppressive curatorial notes, this is both a beautiful and pointless exhibition. Beautiful, because it brings together an incongruous collection of art and objects from a broad selection of periods and practises, with nothing more than the impossibly broad remit of gender. Pointless, because it evokes one of my favourite types of gallery space: those small regional collections where works are placed together without the stifling dependency on movements, periods and themes. Art for enjoyment, rather than didactically forced interpretation.

If this exhibition serves to illuminate anything, rather than the subject of females who make stuff, it is the tension between art and culture. Teapots and needlework may not be art, but they are certainly cultural objects. Neither, I'm certain, is it historically accurate to designate the decorative arts as women's work. It’s just unfortunate that this delicious oscillation has to be sidelined by a clumsy faux-wave-feminist essay.

Fantasies, Follies and Disasters: The Prints of Francisco de Goya @ Manchester Art Gallery

There is perhaps only one thing which could rival my post Manchester Blog Awards hangover this morning for sheer warped horror and disturbing folly.

I mean, of course, the prints of Goya.

On my last visit to Manchester I ducked into Manchester Art Gallery, and managed to edge my way into the crowded Fantasies, Follies and Disasters: The Prints of Francisco de Goya.

I remember when I first saw one of his prints, perhaps during my first year at university. It was like I could not comprehend what I was seeing. It’s odd that I was so shocked, one of my earliest art memories is pawing over a book of Hieronymus Bosch paintings in late toddlerhood. So why are these prints so much more shocking?

We all know that the playful horror of his prints are embedded in a very real social/historical/political situation. The scenes are not purely imagined, for all the strange witches and winged creatures. There is a reality to the images which seems to smash against reason, threatening the comfortable solid institutional surroundings of Manchester Art Gallery. They are the falling man of the 17th Century.

The medium lends Goya’s representations further hysterical power. It’s one thing for an unsettled mind to set down on paper something so horrifying, but to carefully create for reproduction is something else. It is just too calculated to figure into our current understanding of artistic practice. Just as the images undermine our faith in society's innate goodness and stability, they rankle against our snug understanding of the consumable nature of reproductive art. These images are not for bedroom walls and postcards to relatives, unless you are a member of the Adams Family.

The Chapman Brother’s gruesome micro-sculptures Disasters of War are the perfect addition to this compulsive exhibition. The toy vignettes of Goya’s horrifying scenes lend to the unsettling atmosphere. It is like thinking for one moment you glimpsed a severed finger in a packet of pink wafer biscuits. It’ll be a while before you’ll be completely happy tucking into pink wafery goodness. You’ll never be able to look at a toy solider casually again, and the idea of old men marking out historical battles with tin figurines takes on a bloody, calculated air.

This is not an easy exhibition, there is something car crash like about it. You leave feeling as though you have been rubber necking. It seems to reveal the innate instability of society, lifting the skirt of our comfortable lives and revealing a rotten, rickety pair of legs beneath. It is both compelling and compulsive, and has left me thoughtful and moved.

Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2009 @ The Cornerhouse

The aspect which links all the works in Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2009, currently at Cornerhouse, is a certain lack of depth. It feels like a vaneer of art, rather than a well rounded exhibition. To me it is apparent that the content we are presented with is not art as practise, or art as product, but art as produce. It’s the equivalent of a biggest vegetable competition at a country show. There is only so much you can be impressed by a marrow, how ever bloody big, shiny and perfectly formed it is.

The issue is that New Contemporaries feels like a very glossy degree show, which in many ways is exactly what it is. The best bits are attractive competent demonstrations of art by rote, like Barbara Wolff’s photography/painting/textile works. The gauche and embarrassing reaches it’s pinnacle in Hannes Ribarits painful video The Void, but is supported by numerous works which are simply just utterly unimpressive.

This show left me feeling unaffected and slightly bored. Yes, often technically brilliant and theoretically solid, but lacking something important in both its components and composition.