Going round art galleries must be one of the most exhausting activities, physically and mentally, known to man. Some people seem able to keep it up for a whole day, but for myself I'm always worn out after an hour. Therefore I take care only to look at a few things I might actually want to see, rather than traipsing through gallery after gallery of our great national collections.
Yesterday, in my capacity as occasional art correspondent to this blog, I spent an hour and a bit in Tate Britain (always a pleasure - at least as compared to the ghastly Tate Modern). Ignoring (for now) the Millais blockbuster, I wandered around in the British 20th century - unsatisfactory in many ways, which I won't go into here - and then, in skirting the Turner Prize retrospective, I found Gallery 1 and a small, but startlingly beautiful, display of medieval English alabasters, on loan from the V&A - this tells you a bit about it, but sadly without images - and you really have to see these things in the stone flesh, up close. Battered and faded, they pack an extraordinary punch, partly as things of beauty in themselves, but with an added charge of desperate sadness for the lost world of rich and potent imagery they represent - the world of signs and meanings swept away in the brutal iconoclastic destruction of the Reformation (dang, there's always a downside).
This happened in our country less than 500 years ago, and, on a world scale, it was no isolated (or even especially brutal) incident. Is there something intrinsic to human nature that leads to this wholesale destruction in the name of a greater 'authenticity'? Or is it another of the delusions of rationalism, riding pilion on an atavistic desire to destroy what went before, to overturn the idols? The Catholic Mediterranean world seems to have a better record in this regard than the puritan wing of Christendom - or Islam - still less the destructive rational cults unleashed by the Enlightenment. Or maybe this is an illusion... Anyway, for a moving and beautiful - and short- encounter with art, you could harldy beat that small, little visited corner of Tate Britain.
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
"brutal iconoclastic destruction of the Reformation (dang, there's always a downside)."
ReplyDeleteYou mean there actually was an upside?
Although, of course, if you were like that professional miserabilist and misanthrope, Simon Jenkins, you would believe it was all upside.
ReplyDeleteThis blog is in danger of getting alarmingly reactionary. Even if New Labour's not that good I doubt we'd enjoy a return to pre-Reformation Europe. I think Galileo might back me up on this one. Then again, a few heads on spikes outside the city walls might be more effective than ASBOs.
ReplyDeleteSpongebob
ReplyDeleteWho wants to stay in medieval Europe? I, for one, would have preferred development based on continuity rather than rupture.
The Catholic Mediterranean did handle it's religious past pretty well, but they had their own upheavals too. France had a revolution, the Spanish a civil war and dont't forget the Italians invented Fascism. Rupture may be unavoidable (and sometimes even desirable).
ReplyDeleteThis blog is in danger of getting alarmingly reactionary.
ReplyDeleteYes, well Spongebob, as we reactionaries like to say: "Dare to struggle, dare to win!".
Spoken like a true Ruskinian, Nige.
ReplyDeleteThe English alabasters sound lovely, though it's always a bit odd to see things out of context, isn't it? I often think this when I'm in galleries looking at objets plucked from their natural setting and put in a case. And in the instance of your alabasters, they've been removed both temporally and spatially; their home place no longer exists at all.
But I think Recusant may be right that pre-Reformation England wasn't such a jolly place. Not that post- has been waaaay better.
yeah, it's a pain to have to search out one or two pieces that you like. there's only ever one or two. the trouble is it's a different one or two for each person. what is it you find ghastly about Tate Modern? the building, I guess - otherwise why would you go at all?
ReplyDeletedo you equate art with beauty, beauty with art, nige? it's interesting.
Susan B
ReplyDeleteI think you might have got my meaning arse about. Whilst I wouldn't want to swap living in the early 21st century for pre-reformation England, I would have preferred that to the 100 odd years after the reformation
Good point Susan - but then the context itself no longer exists, such was the destruction - we can only see them now as art objects, and this does in its way enrich them.
ReplyDeleteIan, I've nothing against the Tate Modern building - it's the layout and the stupid hang (and the people of course). I've never known anywhere that makes good/great art look so paltry.
And I'm inclined to equate beauty with truth and truth with beauty, but don't ask me to defend that position.
but the truth can sometimes be ugly, no?
ReplyDeleteThe Reformation, Republicanism, Restoration; one lot puts it up, the other pulls it down. When I visit Winchcombe and look on the remains of Sudeley Castle, I shake my head and quietly ask "Oliver, why? why? And, once, I'm sure I heard a voice answer: "Simple, it was one of theirs, not one of ours. We weren't in the slightest concerned with what future generations wanted with castles, great houses, galleries and museums, and their artefacts. Our job was to destroy, to teach a lesson. Now, go and ask Churchill and Harris "Dresden, why? why?"
ReplyDeleteAbout a third of the Baselitz show at the Royal Academy is well worth a visit Nige. All goes well until late in life he does insipid cover versions of his earlier work.
ReplyDeleteHope they've hung 'em the right way up Cap'n.
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