Pictures, forms, families (4): the poem

Death, Survival, Persistence


Luke Fildes, The Doctor (1891)*

1. Death
Pompeo Batoni

The robes, the cloth, the vase, the veil, the bow,
The posy, the leaves, the rising cloud, the lips.
These were ourselves, this is the cloth that slips
into shapes of cowls and hoods we cannot know.
We cannot decode ourselves. We move below
our surfaces, our griefs, our flowers, the tips
of our fingers. We know what it is that grips
the child in her numbed sleep, what winds still blow
about her. We put our ears to the cloud to hear
vibrations of the air, we measure our wrists
for pulse. We mist mirrors, move in our sleep
as if awake, make energies from fear
accumulated in our veins. We have made lists
of the dead. Our metaphors run deep.




2. Survival
Michael Andrews, as before

1.
Floating is next to drowning
and though the metaphor of dark
is simply metaphor the metaphor is cold.

Look, our children float against the cold
and though we hold them against the dark
we know the sea’s own metaphors for drowning.

2.
Those tender bubbles, sea-scum, illusion
of air, the clashing rocks that contain
the sea, they are our modes, our metaphors.

We cannot help but live through metaphors.
The bay contains the sea, the clashing rocks contain
our hands and bodies, our floating, our illusion

3/
of floating, and our pale skin, pale warmth,
the metaphor of childhood we find ourselves
employing time and again, like love, like hands

that bear up bodies that terminate in hands.
Dear children you become almost ourselves –
the metaphorical sea’s notion of warmth.

4.
My feet dissolve, my lower half in water.
Her face is strewn with hair, so we are joined
in this brief act, as brief as other acts,

as if water, drowning, floating, dark, were acts,
as if my life could float, steady and joined
to yours in the bay’s cold metaphors of water.




3. Persistence
Thomas Struth: The Smith Family, Fife, Scotland 1989


What is it looks out of us
so wary, so contemplative against
the glass that keeps us from the world?

What is the glass against which we press
our faces, that looks back at us
with its own blank puzzled face?

We cannot solve it, our presence, our eyes,
though we are gathered, clannish, cloned
in attitudes of familial power.

We have made it as far as the room
in which we sit. The glass confirms
the room, our eyes confirm ourselves,

just as we are in 1989
the year history ended,
the moment, the glass, our eyes.


*The Fildes was in the exhibition but I knew it too well. I use it here instead of the Batoni that I cant find.

Pictures, forms, families (3): the threatened child

I can't find Pompeo Batoni's moving, formal picture on the web. The couple in it were married in 1739, had one legitimate child Barbara, who died in 1749. Hoping perhaps to get over the loss they set out on a European tour. In Rome, as the catalogue note has it 'they commissioned Pompeo Batoni to paint this portrait of them watching over their dead daughter, united in their sorrow.' They had taken a miniature of her for the painter to work from.

The girl in the picture looks delightful. The painting is loaded with symbols of mourning. It is without mawkishness or melodrama. The couple contemplate the child who is more clearly defined than they are.

It is however a difficult and horrible subject. We have Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, what Toby Litt renamed as Deadkidsongs - infant mortality was common enough in the nineteenth and early twentieth century - but it's too much, too overwhelmingly much heartbreak. I can hardly bear to listen to the Mahler and I haven't yet opened up my copy of the Litt. Even here I prefer to illustrate this with a life-giving Picasso (life-giving is Picasso's great gift) rather than with a number of available Victorian deathbed scenes because Picasso always sees bigger and beyond to ever greater energy and restlessness.

The poem for the Castle Museum is divided into three parts, Death, Survival and Perseverance. The Batoni is sumptuous in its way, tragedy as a set piece with cello. Mortality with posies. What is love if not fear of losing? Love is in fact mortality, so mortality lies at the bottom of the family, as it did for mine when I was a child.

The next post will contain the poem.

Pictures, forms, families (2): going nuclear

 
My mother, father, brother and myself, c. 1955

One question raised by the exhibition is whether the concept family necessarily includes children. For me the answer is clearly yes. Even if there is only a couple they are the children of parents before them though, as an independent unit, they are primarily a couple not a family. As I imagine it however (imagine intuitively, not argue it) a family includes children. In fact the family is most itself at the moment when the latest child comes into the world. In other words it includes not simply children but infants.

The implication is that the family is most itself when it has the care of the most vulnerable stage of human life, the very beginning. It is therefore tied to responsibilities (for the adults) and utter reliance (for the newborn). It is as the line in The Waste Land, as suggested to Eliot by Vivienne, goes: What you get married for if you don't want children? Again, I have no wish to argue this: it is what my bones and viscera tell me.

The arguments about - and chiefly against - nuclear families that were raging in the sixties and seventies meant little to me. My whole apprehension of life was of the family endangered. Half my family were wiped out in the war, my mother and father were almost destroyed by it. I almost died at the age of two, and here we were in a new country where we knew no-one but ourselves. That is if we knew even ourselves.

If I felt this as apprehension, my parents knew it as experience. It was a miracle that families survived, that children survived, that any of the four of us was here at all. I think it made life uncomfortable. Psychologically the pressure was acute. I sometimes think it drove my mother to the edges of madness. As an adolescent I hated it. It was strangling, obsessive. The family absolutely had to be together on Sundays. There had to be family excursions. Even after I married my mother had to be everywhere, know everything, be a presence.

I now think that was because she had been so close to being an absence.

But the visceral feeling is not about pleasure or discomfort. It is the reality sense, not the value sense. However they may overlap, they are different. The madness lies is assuming they are exactly the same. The poetry, if it comes from anywhere, also emanates from this region.

Pictures, forms, families (1)

Michael Andrews Melanie and Me Swimming 1978-79

Along with three other poets (Martin Figura, Helen Ivory and Andrea Holland) I was commissioned to write a poem / poems for the exhibition Family Matters: The Family in British Art, currently at the Castle Museum, Norwich, The reading and discussion took place yesterday afternoon, after which I wasn't home till gone midnight so no blog yesterday.

The Great British Art Debate may not amount to much more than what the curators already know and may be keen to tell us in their missionary endeavour, but then again it might. This show was particularly well curated with paintings, prints, photographs, videos and sculpture arranged in broad themes rather than chronologically, so the catalogue itself comprises five booklets headed Childhood, Inheritance, Parenting, Couples & Kinship and Home. The well known was balanced against the hardly known and the British aspect included immigration from the Commonwealth rather than from many other possible places, but that was a reasonable and perfectly justifiable decision since the British connection is bound to be stronger from within the old empire. The fact is, it is a moving and exciting show well worth going to see.

How do we go about writing? In my case I went in with a notebook and more or less wrote out two out of three poems, finished the third at home, then drafted all three into shape. I didn't get the catalogue for some reason so it had to be more or less then and there. But that is often how it works for me anyway: start writing, follow some distant glimpsed light and gallop there without breaking pace. It's an act of almost absolute trust in the improvisatory moment-by-moment process. It is how it has always happened before, even with the long poems. Go hell for leather while the light is visible or just round the corner and stop once it is no longer there. Complete a section. Then return, because you know, or have a very strong hunch, that there is more light.

The three works that offered the prospect of light were, paradoxically, all rather dark in tone and mood were Pompeo Batoni (1708-1787) The Hon. Thomas and Mrs Barrett-Lennard with their daughter Barbra Anne, 1750, Michael Andrews (1928-1995) Melanie and Me Swimming, 1978-9 and the photographer Thomas Struth's The Smith Family, Fife, Scotland, 1989.

Why is that? A separate post for it.

Sepptic Tank

Photograph from FIFA's own website.

I know it's 'only football' and I am sure the pun has been made before, but why not make it again? It has been clear for a good while now that Sepp Blatter, president of FIFA, has been running a corrupt organisation prone to duplicity, bribery, secrecy, high-handedness, smugness and, now it turns out, an indifference to racism. It is hard to think of an organisation as blatant in its corruption as FIFA has been since Blatter took over. Good to hear that he has been telling the IFA conference in Zurich: We have to be transparent. The corruption has been the only transparent thing so far. And then there are the damage-limitation photos.

According to Forbes magazine Blatter is the 63rd most powerful person in the world. Having suggested that women footballers should wear something more tight-fitting, he has boldly declared that the future of football is feminine. More teams in pink then.

Forbes under its Profile heading says:

FIFA recently announced a raft of reforms to restore credibility to the corruption-ridden organization. "In a nation of 300 million [soccer players], there will be some violence, doping, racism and corruption. But the institution is not corrupt."

2011 Highlight: In June Blatter won a fourth term as FIFA's president after a ­scandal involving cash for votes sidelined his only viable opponent.

It is perhaps no surprise that David Beckham and Gordon Taylor, or any English football figure should call for Blatter's resignation in light of the fiasco concerning the awarding of the World Cup to Dubai when the England party were promised votes they did not get, a decision that was followed by a certain sniggering by the FIFA board. Surely there could have been no question of money changing hands? Surely not with Dubai? It was a fiasco that continued to delight and amuse when everyone was astonished to discover that Dubai is too hot for football in the summer and that, in consequence, every country's winter season would probably have to be abandoned. Even greater hilarity ensued when both the FIFA Vice-President and Blatter's 'only viable opponent' in the election for the presidency were forced to resign.

It may be that Blatter is just a very old fool who feels so secure in his position that he can make 'good sportsmanship' and 'simply shake hands' noises when faced with a scandal he doesn't recognise or understand. It may be that he's just an old-fashioned charmer who has always enjoyed a nod and wink.

So all continues charming in the pile of dung.

An Old Review of Bill Brandt (2)

Continued from yesterday. Strange to think this was written eighteen years ago. It seems no time at all, and Brandt still seems like that to me.

2.
Knowing what we now know of Brandt’s development, it is amusing to consider that his first book of photographs, The English at Home, had been turned down by one publisher in 1936 for not being ‘erotic’ enough. Eros and Thanatos are patently his tutelary gods, or so they appear to us looking back at his work from this, the wrong end of the lens. Things loom and stretch or lurk in shadows, form dark masses against light, part reveal and part hide secrets. There are many pictures of people looking, fewer of what they see. The English at Home shows social masses: the upper classes as a block of hard hats and frock coats, the lower as softer, more battered shapes. Often their backs are to us: we are creeping up on them. We creep up on the lovers in ‘Top Floor’ in 1938, or appear to. We know it is stagy, that it has been set up as a version of film noir, that Brandt often did set his subjects up, nevertheless there is discovery or at least a process of exploration. We forgive Brandt his contrivances because we know that we are being enticed into a world of fiction rather than of hard facts and that the first question we instinctively ask before his pictures is not What Really Happened but What Is Really Happening, meaning by that, what is really happening to us.

Brandt is unapologetically stagy and inward. From the empty Bermondsey street of 1938, through portraits and fashion photos, through all the lives of barmaids, miners, nippies and parlourmaids it is obvious that the events they enact are scenes from the internal dramas of an isolated psyche. Eventually, the creatures that had been the animating force in his journalism, take over entirely and desire realises itself. It does so most dramatically in the nudes.



One might complain that these, indeed all his pictures, are intrusions into real lives. After all, aren’t even these distorted nudes in the haunted rooms of the forties people after all, with their own jealously guarded inwardness? Such complaints wouldn’t be fair or even sensible. It is not as if Brandt were pretending to be objective. Think of the earlier work. A maid dips her hand into a bath; a wild couple devour each other in a shaggy bar; pretty girls lie around in a wartime holiday camp as if they were dead; naked soldiers enter ridiculous open-air contraptions for showering, boffins buzz away inside the illuminated hives of their offices, children strut on the verge of adulthood or lean like elementals out between lace curtains. Families play at death in bomb shelters, bend themselves into extraordinary shapes ; hills turn to bodies, bodies into rock; paths and hedges wind like luminous vertebrae into the dark soft sky. Images are constantly juxtaposed: like the girl carding wool in Giotto’s ‘Annunciation to Anna’, a woman weaving in one picture seems to drag closer the dark storm clouds of the neighbouring photograph with every turn of the wheel. The soldier hitching in the car’s headlight turns into a terrified rabbit in the next. Everything is electric and intangible. Naked objects of desire stretch out enormous demanding palms towards us, as commanding as Pratt the parlourmaid in her own element. Women are dominant figures; in one aspect delicate and hungry, in another vast as primal landscapes. They are secret principles more than individuals and it is useless to ask about the inwardness of principles, especially when everything else is principle.



Towards the end of his life Brandt turned his attention to assemblages. His friends were rather puzzled by these. He employed feathers, skeletons, shells, string, fragments of wings and arranged them into ambiguous patterns whose compositions remind us of Miro and Ernst. Some of these are on show at the Barbican, but most of the collection, purchased from Noya Brandt, the artist’s widow, can be seen at the Reed’s Wharf Gallery near Tower Bridge. The resultant objects are joky, threatening, fetishistic, obviously pregnant with meaning. Coming at the end of Brandt’s career they can only serve as a coda, but it would be a great mistake to imagine them as mere dabbling. To Brandt they were numinous, unknown, unknowable magical objects exciting memories and desires. Compositionally they are not unrelated to either the Hampstead nudes of the forties or the body-as-landscape nudes of the fifties. They stand a little melancholy in the cold Thames light, as I suspect Brandt might have done. Brandt’s attitude to the Other is tender, tangential and passionately evanescent. The impression of an angel is not absolutely misleading. He is certainly one of the great photographers, perhaps the most poetic and subjective of the lot. Both exhibitions should be seen. The world is richer, more melancholy and magical for them.

An old review of Bill Brandt (1)

from The Perfect Parlourmaid


It being late and the evening filled with marking I am ransacking old articles and have found this one from 1993. It appeared originally in Modern Painters, reviewing Bill Brandt: Photographs 1928-1983 at The Barbican and Bill Brandt: The Assemblages and Associated Vintage Prints at Reeds Wharf Gallery.


There was something angelic about the elderly Bill Brandt. I only remember him from a television programme many years ago, before he died. He looked thin, white and insubstantial, spoke gently and seemed both bewildered and wise. From his photographs of nudes, which were the only works of his I knew at the time, I had imagined someone darker and racier, a David Bailey or Helmut Newton type. It was one of his pictures of The Perfect Parlourmaid he was talking about, images of children, landscapes, air-raid shelters and pubs already having passed before us on the screen. Pratt was the Brandt’s own parlourmaid, a stern, slightly sinister Mrs Danvers sort of figure. But she was not a frightener primarily. The picture had pinned her precisely behind the set table beside her assistant, She was under control, not just as a menial who ruled over little but maintained her self-respect in the ways available to her, but as a psychic force, I thought the picture understood that instinctively. Brandt looking at it, blinked, and said: Anyone could have taken that picture. Anyone. Meaning: You too would have seen what I saw. But to see thus; to remember the precise awe of the awed child and at the same time imagine being the object of that awe is not so easy. Artists do these things for us. They find and redefine the language that makes it possible. If one pays any heed to the proposition that life passes like a dream, or that history is a nightmare from which one is trying to awake (Stephen Dedalus’s words) then such photographs, which arrive like frozen moments out of a pageant of suggestions, may serve to intensify, thicken and clarify that dream.

Brandt does in fact have a photographic essay on dream which is included in his major Barbican retrospective. In a series of pictures a woman rises from her bed, meets a bearded figure on the landing, passes him, or another, on the stairs, She floats out summoned by a dreamers’ moon. It is a poor piece of work. The ‘Lullaby of Broadway’ dream sequence from Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1935 has far more power and punch and makes Brandt’s look rather pallid. Perhaps he is too close to home: talking about dream rather than experiencing it. What he did experience was far closer to reportage, and therefore, paradoxically, for him, more genuinely dreamlike: its complexities reflecting the complex and marginal career of an outsider.

Brandt was that poetic archetype, a sickly and, in some ways, protected child. He was born in Germany to a father who was a British subject and a German mother with interests in the arts. His travels began following his treatment for tuberculosis in 1920, contracted when he was sixteen From Hamburg, his birthplace, he moved to Switzerland and thence to Vienna in 1927 where he was psychoanalysed by. While in Vienna he met Loos, was encouraged into photography by friends and met Ezra Pound who arranged for him to spend some time with Man Ray in Paris. Three months of Parisian Surrealism in Ray’s studio combined with journeys to England, Spain and Hungary provided him with a body of work we know little about and is sparsely represented in the exhibition, though what there is demonstrates a blend of dreamlike humour and theatrical insecurity: a pair of headless mannequins of 1929 in Paris for which Crevel wrote a text, wax figures in a museum, funerary sculpture and gestures of gypsies, beggars in Spain. In Hungary a drunken postman balances himself against the immensity of the plain and a hog rolls in mud.

In 1931 the newly married Brandt and his Hungarian wife, Eva Rakos, settled in England, opting for obscurity in a country where he had no reputation and therefore little work. His career as a photo journalist - albeit never quite a conventional one - was to develop here. Slowly, the commissions arrived and he joined that mass of talented men sent out on assignments to photograph days in various lives, or places and events of interest to the general public. The magazines for which Brandt worked had their own agenda of course. They ranged from the populist Weekly Illustrated, through the documentary Picture Post and the respectably but slyly erotic Lilliput . The caption is always an important element in the reading of pictures and these inevitably tended to simplification: they set out to domesticate and familiarise whereas Brandt’s instinct was to alienate. This should be qualified. At this time Brandt alienates within a secondary context. One finds references to the films of Hitchcock and Cocteau, to other photographers such as Kertész and Brassai, to certain graphic artists and to visual stereotypes derived from childhood. Brandt’s language took time to evolve: it had to work through whatever imagery lay to hand. Ian Jeffrey, in his informed and imaginative catalogue essay, suggests that Stekel’s psychoanalytical method made a lasting impression on Brandt, in that it provided him with an “iconographic depository” that he could ransack. It is a moot question how far a sophisticated man who has spent some time under such analysis can avoid self-consciousness or a programmatic approach to imagery. Perhaps that is precisely why his documentary work was so valuable to him. If, as Jeffrey says, the “whole of Brandt’s career amounted to one long submission of dreams to an imaginary analyst”, and he was “a paraphiliac, in love with the symptoms of his own condition” (which is perfectly possible since his or her own condition is one of the few fixed points in any artist’s mind), it will have come as welcome relief to have been set a given task. It will also explain his progress across genres, and the rather lurching quality of his career.

(to be concluded)