The Wanted's latest video, directed in London by Chris Marrs Piliero

Further to my last post, The Wanted's latest video, directed in London by Chris Marrs Piliero, seems to reference the Chav demographic (I am using the verb in its cultural-historic sense). 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r8G3SEGIV0

Above:  we see a chav gang, complete with intimidating dog, dressed in designer gear and walking with an unmistakable sense of menace.

Above:  architectural details suggest they are walking on, or near, a London council estate.

Above:  after a scenes of realistic and graphic inter-gang violence they break into a room where an attractive blonde woman is apparently being held captive, but instead of freeing her they...

Presumably the video is meant to be provocative. The majority of The Wanted fans are teenage girls.  Perhaps I am missing references that might make this narrative intelligible (I thought for a moment that the tied up woman might be a reference to Fifty Shades of Grey but I have not read that book, and have no intention of reading it, so I cannot say for sure).

Why the Olympics Opening Ceremony should concern us

Big article by Tim Adams in the Observer today about the Olympic Opening Ceremony.

The near-adulatory coverage throughout the media (with some exceptions) would make anyone hesitate to criticise the production and risk being described as "curmudgeonly" by Tim Adams.

A Member of Parliament who attacked the multi-culturalism of the parade has been so digitally kicked and slapped that we have the irony of a show supposedly celebrating "dissent" not tolerating dissent of any kind.

But as Oscar Wilde reminded us, there is nothing so false as approval of what is approved of.

So for the third day running I am going to write about why the Olympics Opening Ceremony should concern us.

Of course it was spectacular, and the crowds cheered.  But the 1938 Tag der Deutsche Kunst in Munich was spectacular and the crowds cheered.  The great cultural processions in 1950s Moscow were spectacular and the crowds cheered.  Even today spectacular parades in Pyong Yang are capable of being cheered.  The spectacle and the cheering do not validate the content.  The comparison with totalitarian circuses is deliberate - what we saw on Friday was a paen to totalitarian socialism.

Sports pundit Stan Collymore exultantly tells us the ceremony director Danny Boyle "put us ALL there, all of us".

This is not true.

Not everyone was there.

What was missing from the parade was English conservatism (small c, although the big political C variety was also non-existent).

This matters because British identity is, for me, inconceivable without reference to English conservatism.  To airbrush this out of "where Britain is these days" is both chilling and sinister.  Chilling because is illustrates a depth of socio-ethnic hostility seldom so overtly expressed; sinister because it indicates what English people might be in for as the incubus of anti-Englishness gains respectability and goes mainstream.

Of course, you might argue, there is no particular reason why Englishness should have any part in the Danny Boyle production.

Danny Boyle is from a cultural background of Irish socialism.  Writer Frank Boyce is from a cultural background of Irish socialism.  Many of the commentators whooping it up on the night (Newsnight's Paul Mason for example) are from a cultural background of Irish socialism or Scots-Welsh socialism or Indian or West Indian or African socialism.

What do they know of England who do not know anything about England? (as Rudyard Kipling did not say).

And of course I appreciate what a fine joke Danny Boyle has played on the politicians he obviously despises (according to the Observer Sebastian Coe, Boris Johnson and David Cameron could only look at the plans for the ceremony in the presence of, and presumably mediated by, Danny Boyle and his coterie).  

And is it not a grand laugh that so many of the big wigs in the government, overwhelmed by the sensationalism of the night, have already praised the ceremony to the skies so that they cannot now resile without looking stupid.

We were warned that the Labour party intended to rub the noses of "the right" in the policy of multi-culturalism.  I think we saw a manifestation of that on Friday evening.  It makes you wonder what further surprises might be in store.

Surprisingly candid comment by Tristram Hunt MP in today's Observer.  By the evidence of Friday night the Left have indeed won the Culture War.  And since the economy of a society is subservient to the culture of that society this does not bode well for the future.

Body fascism

The London Olympics are due to start this Friday.

This is an opportunity to ask a before and after question:  how will the United Kingdom be changed by the Games?

From an advertising point of view I think we are about to enter (have already entered) a sustained period of body fascism in which models with unattainable physiques are used to sell products, places, things.

Above:  for instance, a near-naked Adam Senn has been featured for some months to advertise the Dolce & Gabbana Sport fragrance.  Everything about this ad is heroic - full page, full colour, colossal creative impact.  The subliminal message of the ad is that you only have to splash on some of the magic liquid and you will also be transformed into a perfect physical form (without the tedium of doing any exercise).

There was something about the composition of this image that seemed familiar.  And then I realised that this is an updated version of Guido Reni's St Sebastian.  Considering this appeared on the back page of the Observer (one of our most atheist newspapers) this is a very seditious campaign.

Above:  Guido Reni's St Sebastian.  One of the most complex and influential paintings of the Rennaissance.  Not just a religious image, but also claimed by others (see http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/arrows-of-desire-how-did-st-sebastian-become-an-enduring-homoerotic-icon-779388.html).

Above:  the Guido Reni painting has inspired artists as varied as Yukio Mishima (left) and Pierre et Gilles (right).

Watteau

Recently I went to see two exhibitions on the 18th century artist Watteau.

I find looking at old masters helps me to deconstruct creative work and get to the essential meaning or message conveyed by an image and the techniques which transmit that meaning.

The first exhibition was at the Royal Academy in Piccadilly and was of Watteau's drawings.  These were incredible from a technical point of view.  Especially the economy of line with which he captured a particular scene.

You got the sense that he was collecting characters that he would later use in his paintings.  He took the everyday elements of his society (comedians, soldiers, shopkeepers) and integrated them into his own personal weltanschauung (which is what all artists should aim to do).  The fact that Watteau's weltanschauung was the frivolous fete galante shows you how dedicated he was to the mechanism of high art, irrespective of the purpose to which it was put (and in any case, you could argue advertising is just a form of depoliticised propaganda).

The second Watteau exhibition I went to was at the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square.  In an upper gallery about ten of Watteau's fete galante paintings were on show.  Looking at these canvasses you immediately saw the way in which he built huge elaborate scenes from innumerable tiny detailed studies.

I liked the double-meaning of A halt during the chase.

More: http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/watteau/ and http://www.wallacecollection.org/collections/exhibition/90

A good graphic

On page 7 of today's Times there is a graph that illustrates the government's Big Society policy. At last some has put down on in an A4 landscape space what the policy is all about. Newsnight yesterday had a gabbling interview on the subject, with no-one really knowing what they were talking about.

A good graphic can transform an information campaign. This one was designed by Matthew Swift. His LinkedIn page is at http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/matthew-swift/18/223/7b8 .

How women are going to look

Above: the Vivienne Westwood shop in Conduit Street.

Is this how women are going to look next year?

http://www.viviennewestwood.co.uk/collections/anglomania/

Stalking, and how it is portrayed in western culture

The video for Shayne Ward's new single Gotta Be Somebody has just been released. Directed by Billy Woodruff, the film was shot in Los Angeles. The narrative of the film shows a stalker pursuing the singer.



Above: the film shows the stalker taking photographs from a street corner across from the singer's (presumably fictional) apartment block. The entire narrative of the film is set in an urbanscape at night. Note that the stalker is very attractive and not the crazed obsessive type normally associated with stalkers.



Above: in what can only be described as an exhibitionist display the singer appears half-naked at a window and the image is captured by the stalker. The girl then follows him through the city with an undercover ingenuity that you would normally associate with a John Le Carre character. Eventually the singer corners her and snatches the camera away (when he looks at the images he sees the extent of her obsession).



Above: having chased the stalker away the singer returns to his apartment, apparently regretting what he has done. The stalker then appears, having gained access to the apartment, and approaches him. The ending is left unresolved.



Above: we think of stalking as a modern phenomenon but it is a theme that can be traced back to the middle ages. Roger Boase has analysed the idea of courtly love from a Freudian perspective. Is modern stalking the same as medieval unrequited love (and if so, how far back does this monomyth go)?



Above: the video for Justin Timberlake's 2002 song Cry me a river was directed by Francis Lawrence and shot in Malibu. The film won MPVA awards in 2003. The narrative opens with a sinister hoodie (played by Justin Timberlake) breaking into the home of a former lover.



Above: after rummaging through her possessions and ritually violating her bedroom the hoodie waits until his former lover returns.



Above: the narrative ends with the hoodie peering through the opaque glass of a shower unit while the naked (and unsuspecting) former lover is bathing - this image would be terrifying if it ever happened for real.



Above: this has set me thinking how far back we can trace the practice of stalking, and how it is portrayed in western culture. Elaine stalks Lancelot in Tennyson's Idylls of the King (and the Lady of Shallot). Keats writes of a knight stalking La Belle Dame sans Merci. Echo stalks Narcissus. The whole Trojan War cycle can be seen as an exercise in stalking (with Agamemnon in the Justin Timberlake role). So that takes us back fourteen thousand years at least.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Mu8MrCR5pQ&ob=av2n

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLGOm-NJVts

Tattoos

Recently I have been thinking about tattoos - what they mean historically, anthropologically, and in contemporary culture.



Above: It started when I went to the Skin exhibition at the Wellcome Institute in the Euston Road. I have to force myself to take an interest in scientific and medical issues, otherwise I would never look outside the liberal arts. The Skin exhibition I found interesting but also a bit grisly (one of the cabinets had displays of tattooed human skin).



Above: the exhibition was also reviewed in the Guardian (or is this the Observer?). If you click on the image you should be able to read the text. The newspaper has put this under the heading "Anthropology" but I have not seen any other reports by the newspapers Anthropology Editor.



Above: body art has a considerable antiquity in the British Isles. Painting the body with dyes made from woad dates back to at least Neolithic times. This (public library) book by Jamieson Hurry is a fascinating description of everything you need to know about the plant.



Above: Woad is a fascinating and versatile plant and traces of its former cultivation can be found almost everywhere, marked by place names. There are several thousand Woad Farms in England. The use of woad as an ink for tattooing is not very efficient (the shading is erratic) and so it is almost never used now.



Above: close-up of the pub sign. Thanks to the malign influence of the trashy film Braveheart, painting with woad is wrongly associated with primitive life in medieval Scotland. However it was found in all regions of the British Isles and all levels of society (the Anglo-Saxon king Harold II was identified by his tattoos after being killed at the Battle of Hastings).



Above: probably the practice of marking the body in blue relates to the prehistoric identification of family clans (groups of extended and inter-connected families of up to six thousand in number) with specific animals - bears, eagles, white stags etc. Symbols related to these auspicious animals were marked on the bodies of qualifying members of a particular community. It is possible the origins of heraldry can be traced to the symbolic language of these daubings with paint and skin incisions with blue ink.



Above: it is difficult to assess the influence David Beckham has had on the uptake of tattoos. Is he a fashion leader or a fashion follower? Here you can see David Beckham in an unusual pose that reveals the famous tattoo on his lower back.



Above: the lower back tattoo of David Beckham quickly became adopted as an expression of identity by White Van Man. The popularity of tattoos among other celebrities over the past twenty years has meant the practice has moved from being a fashion to being a convention. For young people today having a tattoo is now a very conservative act.



Above: are tattoos intimidating? Are they designed to intimidate? I saw this group walking across a beach, and everyone got out of their way.



Above: what will happen next? Will tattoos continue to grow in popularity and influence? Or will the practice come to an end as new generations reject the cultural fashions of their parents?

Masterpieces from the Uffizi Gallery, Italian Renaissance Drawings

I went to see the Masterpieces from the Uffizi Gallery, Italian Renaissance Drawings at the British Museum last week. The tickets were free, a gift from a client who was unable to go. ­­I went with Alan Nixon, who wanted to see if he could spot any collector's marks that he knew. Drawings I especially liked: Luca Signorelli's Shepherds and an Angel – fabulous expressions. Fra Angelico's beautiful King David. Fra Filippo Lippi's Virgin and Child with Two Angels – everything about this drawing is wonderful. I used to like drawing - it teaches you to observe the world closely. The Fra Filippo Lippi: http://www.lib-art.com/imgpaintingthumb/5/4/t13045-madonna-with-the-child-and-two-ange-fra-filippo-lippi.jpg

Olympic sculpture

Above: the new giant sculpture planned for the Olympic Park in east London has generated a lot of comment in the media. This is an article written by Fiona Phillips in the Daily Mirror. I kept looking at the design of the sculpture and thinking how it reminded me of something.



Above: it reminded me of the designs by Vladimir Tatlin for his Monument to the IIIrd International 1919. The same type of construction, the same heroic scale, the same chorus of disapproval. It was meant to symbolise the arrival of a new utopian world (but it was never built).

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatlin's_Tower

Alex Katz at the Timothy Taylor Gallery

Above: I went to the Alex Katz exhibition yesterday at the Timothy Taylor Gallery just south of Grosvenor Square. The gallery is not near any tube stations, so I got wet (despite the forecast for the rain to clear up by the early evening). Two rooms with the latest portraits by Alex Katz - and also one study of maple trees.



Above: If you click on the image you can probably read the gallery handout. The books on sale were too expensive, and in any case I have a self-imposed embargo on buying more books. No-one else was in the gallery while I was there, which is surprising considering how good an artist Alex Katz is.

Very large portraits of American professionals stare out impassively from the paintings. Alex Katz is the foremost exponent of representing the American jaw. I am looking forward to seeing his portrait of Ann Wintour, which will be displayed at the National Portrait Gallery later this year.

Jacob Epstein

Above: remnants of statuary on the former BMA building in the Strand. The building was designed by Charles Holden and the statues were carved by Jacob Epstein. When the hoardings came down in 1908 there was an outcry in the press on the grounds that the sculptures were so anatomically detailed they would corrupt the minds of people passing in the street.

Eventually the statues were partially destroyed on the spurious grounds that they were unsafe.

Added 19th March:

I meant to go on to discuss the way in which society has changed, and public nudity is now so commonplace we hardly notice it (there was a recent report on Newsnight about the way we are bombarded with hundreds of sexual images just walking down the street).

I then meant to go on to discuss Dolce & Gabbana advertising and their use of photography that combines nudity with implicit violence.

But as usual there is never enough time.

Peacocks

Recently I've been thinking about the cultural impact of peacocks.



Above: The appearance of the peacock is impressive, particularly the train which opens like a fan behind its head. The feathers contain tones of green, gold, purple and blue. The birds can fly short distances, and like to be high up.

The cry is melancholy and unforgettable.



Above: I saw these peacock feathers in a church. The bird is a religious symbol of rebirth and regeneration. The Old Testament mentions King Solomon obtaining peacocks from the coast of India: “once every three years came the navy of Tarshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks”.



Above: peacocks were probably brought to England by the Romans and have remained here ever since. In the 14th centiury Chaucer used the peacock as a metaphor for pride. I saw this peacock in a garden centre, just walking around nonchalantly.



Above: I was walking along the Regents Canal where it goes through London Zoo and I saw this magnificent sight. Everyone on the tow path stopped to look. It was amazing.



Above: stuffed peacock in a window display. Aubrey Beardsley used peacock motifs in the 1894 illustrations for Oscar Wilde's play Salomé. The department store Liberty is famous for its peacock printed fabrics.



Above: another window display. As a visual image the peacock achieves instant recognition. Peacock images were used by the designer William Morris (his work is currently undergoing a revival of interest).



Above: the peacock pub (has some very attractive engraved glass windows). The pub was named after a 19th century publican called peacock. The family name Peacock indicates an ancestor who was a showy dresser.



Above: German tapestry design. Peacocks also have a decadant and slightly sinister aspect. The feathers are, in some cultures, seen as representing the "evil eye" (jealousy).



Above: The Summer of the White Peacock is a classic 1980s novel (describing a few weeks in the life of an intensely narcissistic clothes-obsessed minor actor). The White Peacock is also the title of a novel by DH Lawrence (one of his best). Literary references to peacocks have been made by Aristophanes, Keats and George Eliot.

Maharaja exhibition at the Victoria & Albert museum

Above: leaflet they gave out at the Maharaja exhibition.

One of the exhibitions I went to see late last year was the Maharaja exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum. I meant to go and see it again, but it closed last week so that chance is gone. I also meant to buy the full catalogue, but at £35 I'm not sure if I can justify the expense.

The exhibitition was about "royal" India, the semi-autonomous princely states that made up two thirds of the sub-continent prior to 1947. The exhibition was publicised and reviewed as a display of extravagant bling, but it was much cleverer than that. It was really an explanation of how power is communicated.

Power is projected through two main channels: abstractly through written laws (interpreted and enforced) and visually through physical displays. Both of these conceptual manifestations interest me. I was fascinated by the exhibition's practical demonstration (in pictures and objects) of the Hindu idea of darshan which explained so much that previously was not clear.

One of the great historical puzzles is how British rule in India lasted so long. Viewed objectively, it seems ridiculous that a tiny country the other side of the world could subdue and dominate a vast territory containing many hundreds of millions of people. "Divide and rule", superior weapons technology, ferocious intimidation - none of these arguments are convincing (and would subdue a country for ten years maximum before back-firing on the occupiers).

The Maharaja exhibition illustrated how notions of darshan were incorporated into the way British imperial power displayed itself, which seemed a new way of looking at things.



Above: not all of the reviews of the Maharaja exhibition have been good. This article, which appeared in The Guardian, said it was patronising. Other reviews have dismissed it as just glitter (which makes me wonder whether the reviewers bothered to read the captions).



Above: this book (by political scientists Susanne Hoeber and Lloyd Rudolph) is one of the most interesting I have ever read. As India reinvents itself as an economically powerful and confident nation it will have to come to terms with its history (currently mostly interpreted through juvenile expressions of nationalism). Like France (only more so) they will have to cope with the realisation that during an extended period of foreign domination a very large minority (perhaps even the majority by a small margin) of their population were collaborators.



Above: immediately after reading Reversing the Gaze I read this memoir by a British official employed by the state of Hyderabad in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. It illustrated the way in which very ordinary people from Britain could enter the ruling class in India (an intoxicating process that most of them never really recovered from). The British rule of India was on the whole bad for the United Kingdom, but became impossible to stop once once it had gained momentum.