by Rod Mengham
Ian Dawson’s convulsive blend of colours and forms, ‘171 Elements’, seems to perform the act of creation in reverse. An extensive series of identifiable objects (chairs, crates, scooters, toys of various kinds) have been swallowed up by an expanding slick of plastic whose motion seems to have been arrested only temporarily. If medieval thought is fixated on light as the outcome of the first act of creation, as the means of introducing form into the world, Dawson proposes the secondary act of creation, the activity of artists, as a means of devolving form, of returning differentiated objects to an original state of potential. In this respect, his giant synthetic blastoma provides a challenging counterpoint to the highly specific development of Quinn’s foetal sculpture in the opposite aisle. Dawson has taken the evidence of modern everyday life in its most familiar and undervalued aspects and melted it down in a utopian gesture that suggests the possibility for reforming it in quite literal as well as metaphorical ways. Its ambivalence is such that it could represent the point at which light begins to disappear from the world, its separate colours on the point of muddied convergence, or it could stand for the hope that would accompany a second creation, the birth of new forms in the light of the artistic imagination.
2007
Margaret Tait
Selected Films 1952–1976 (Lux, 2006);
Subjects and Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader,
ed. Peter Todd and Benjamin Cook (Lux, 2004)
Margaret Tait has made little impact on the cultural history of twentieth-century Britain, and yet her varied output of films, photographs, poems and stories is both distinguished and compelling. Born in Orkney in 1918, she later went to school and university in Edinburgh, served in the Royal Army Medical Corps from 1943 to 1946, studied film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome between 1950 and 1952, and founded her own production company, Ancona Films, in 1953. From 1954 she was living and working in Rose Street, Edinburgh, returning finally to the ‘windy Orkney isles’ as she calls them in A Portrait of Ga – her affectionate short film about her mother – for perhaps the most productive phase of her career between 1968 and her death in 1999. Since her death, a selection of her films and writings has begun to circulate in the public domain, thanks mainly to the restoration and editing work sponsored by the Lux organisation.
Tait made only one feature film, and the greater part of her oeuvre shows little interest in narrative or character, focusing rather on the observation of everyday life and especially on the environs of her workplaces in Edinburgh and Orkney. Although learning a great deal from the Italian neorealist tradition and evoking often the preoccupations of the British documentary movement, Tait never uses film as a medium for the transfer of information. The sound consists of snatches of music or recordings of ambient noise; the speaking voice is seldom heard, and when it is, is often pushed into background indistinctness. The imagery is circular, with the same motifs reappearing in several works, yet always held in place quite specifically on each occasion. What separates one work from the next in the viewer’s mind is the fundamental but elusive experience of rhythm and structure.
This structural emphasis takes a form that is found only rarely in film but which is familiar to readers of poetry. It is indicative that the recent selection of Tait’s writings published by Lux has been given the title Subjects and Sequences. The poetic sequence offers the closest parallel to the way several of Tait’s longer compositions are segmented, with each component section often being given its own title. The modular structure both relieves and sharpens concentration. Within each section, the camera dwells on a chosen area, indoors or outdoors, often with only slight or gradual movement. The measure and pace are contemplative, which has the effect of transferring the responsibility of primary attention from filmmaker to viewer. Clearly, Tait is the one who has chosen the subject matter and who has positioned the camera, but the scope given to the individual viewer for a subjective exploration of each scene is pivotal; it reflects the kind of experience of a particular place in all its granularity that is simultaneously an experience of time. What one learns from these films is a rhythm of attention, a way of inhabiting duration that seems to be dictated more by the setting than by the intentions of the filmmaker. This is so much the case that when the shadow of Tait holding the camera comes into shot, as it does in Place of Work (1976), or when her reflection is seen in a mirror, as it is in Tailpiece (1976), the effect is one of intrusion and shock.
The use of measure in poetry is one of the chief means by which it relates to convention, intersects with tradition, and there is a similar yielding to the pressure of history in Tait’s work. For the filmmaker, the customary rhythms of work and play, the ceremonies of relationship marking the arrangements of days, weeks, years, provide the structure both of individual lives and of communities. John Grierson wrote of the necessity for the documentary filmmaker to identify and record those gestures that ‘time has worn smooth’ in order to capture the experience of communities bound together in time as well as space. Tait scrutinises gesture in a similar way, but while she searches out those gestures that already have a history, she also composes gestures that evoke one. This aspect of her work is perhaps most striking in her 1964 portrait of the poet Hugh MacDiarmid. The film conveys very little about the subject matter of MacDiarmid’s poetry, or the international range of his intellectual and cultural concerns; there is no indication of the significance of his socialism, or of his commitment to Scottish nationalism; there is only very sparse quotation of the poet’s own words. In place of all this, MacDiarmid is seen engrossed in conversation in an Edinburgh pub, or observed in the course of reading or writing, immersed in his daily routines; but most of all, he is seen performing a gesture that seems eccentric and whimsical at first, but which is also deeply satisfying as a reflection of his artistic modus operandi. His slight figure is seen stepping precariously along the kerbstones of Edinburgh, waving his arms to keep balance as if walking the tightrope, smiling but also frowning with concentration. This playful manoeuvre epitomises a lifetime of showing off, of confident risk-taking, of intellectual coordination and artistic agility. There is a related scene in which the linguistically amphibious MacDiarmid walks down some quayside steps to the water’s edge, advancing and retreating with sudden movements to avoid wetting his feet. These precisely choreographed gestures capture the poet’s impulse towards brinkmanship, which one can imagine him performing as a child as well as at the age of seventy-one.
Twelve years earlier, in 1952, Tait had composed a similar sequence of steps for her mother to perform in a country lane, a pensioner skipping like a young girl in the sunlit Orkney landscape. The economy of this image, which uses a single figure to suggest continuity between generations, seems somehow sharper in an island context, since islands in their boundedness provide a more intense focus on inherited practices and rituals, on customs in common. But the most unforgettable image in the film, one of the most arresting moments in Tait’s oeuvre, is that of her mother’s fingers unwrapping a sticky boiled sweet. This extraordinary performance, determined and painstaking, but also balletic and graceful, seems to sum up a lifetime of patience, resourcefulness and aesthetic tact that seems rooted both in personality and in a shared history.
2007
The Real Avant-Garde
I first walked into Kettle’s Yard shortly after arrival in Cambridge in 1973. I had come to study English and to try to write. For me – as for anyone concerned with experimental art – the house by the church gave spatial form to an historical problem. You could say it enshrined the paradox of the twentieth-century avant-gardes: the pursuit of new forms, the discovery of organising principles specific to the medium, and the vexed question of how these formalist goals relate to the society that has produced them. In Kettle’s Yard, the question of how we actually live with experimental art was given practical form – and a very English character – in Jim Ede’s arrangements, but the full scope of the question has been addressed and readdress
ed in a series of temporary exhibitions. To my mind, the value of these exhibitions was epitomised in the Polish Constructivism show of 1984. This was typically farsighted, bringing Polish Constructivist paintings, sculptures and publications to Britain for the first time, and typically overarching, exhibition and catalogue together encapsulating an entire history of debate around issues echoed in the more familiar wrangles of western art movements.
Polish Constructivism between the mid-1920s and the late 1930s was essentially a series of arguments about the relationship between art and twentieth-century production processes. There were three overlapping phases, each associated with different artistic groupings and group publications. The first, Blok, was the earliest and most shortlived, initiated in 1924 and succeeded in 1926 by Praesens, which lasted until 1939, despite a major change of direction and of personnel. Both of these movements involved collaboration and rivalry between artists and architects. The distinguishing feature of the third phase, which led to the formation of a group calling itself a.r., was a series of joint projects involving both artists and writers. The initial letters a.r. stood alternatively for awangarda rzeczywista [the real avant-garde] and for arstysci rewolucyjni [revolutionary artists]. The obvious protagonist in each of these three scenarios was Wladyslaw Strzeminski, the most radical formalist in the history of Polish Constructivist painting, and the busiest controversialist. The reason Blok was so shortlived was intransigence on the part of both Strzeminski and Mieczyslaw Szczuka, who clashed over the theoretical subordination of art to questions of social utility. Szczuka wished to place art at the service of town-planning and industrial design, while Strzeminski believed in its independence from existing forms of urbanism as the basis for imagining entirely different social structures in the future. Praesens started harmoniously with the idea of promoting collaborations between artists and architects, seizing opportunities to impose abstract painted designs on existing buildings, and to interpose abstract sculptures in the spaces between buildings. However, after three years, Strzeminski left the group, together with the painter Henryk Stazewski and the sculptor Katarzyna Kobro, convinced of the need to replace these partial measures with a unified programme of urban design, where the emphasis was on the composition of the entire architectural environment according to the same principles. During the 1930s, Strzeminski pursued the goals of a.r. through the much narrower focus of typographical design, with remarkable results. His settings of the poems of Julian Przybos regarded the entire page as a unified field in which the various interrelated elements were of equal significance. By these means, the visual structure could be equal in importance to the aural structure.
After seeing the relevant works in the Kettle’s Yard exhibition, I was offered a job soon afterwards that would put them close to the centre of my life for the next three years. In October 1984, I went to a Readership at the University of Lodz in Poland. Lodz is home to many things: the site of the second largest Jewish ghetto; the Polish film school; an extraordinarily unified nineteenth-century architectural heritage; the Museum of Modern Art. The latter was the source of practically all the works in the Kettle’s Yard Exhibition. Here they made sense not only in the context of the history of the European avant-gardes, but in terms of local buildings, murals, applied art of various kinds, and in their influence on the stubborn formalism of post-war experiments in various media, particularly film. Strzeminski had taught in local schools and the results were widespread, affecting the practice of various crafts, especially textiles. If the official art of the communist era was socialist realism, it seemed that Constructivist principles were more immanent, less declamatory but more pervasive, less aggressive but more tenacious. I was impressed by the extent to which radical abstraction could be deployed as effective resistance to a dominant ideology. It deepened my respect for Strzeminski, for the consistency and coherence of his practice, and my curiosity about, and acclimatisation to his work led to cooperation with Jozef Robakowski and Jarek Jedlinski, whose film about the painter appeared in 1993. I prepared the text for the English version of this, and provided the voice-over for the soundtrack. But although Strzeminski had been the driving force behind the conceptual integrity of Polish Constructivism, the most beguiling objects that it ever produced were the sculptures of Kobro, which I had seen for the first time in Castle Street. Over three years, I got to know them well and to appreciate the scope of Kobro’s remark ‘sculpture is a part of the space around it’. The positioning of the work, physically, socially, culturally, was an unignorable element in its reception. When the Polish art collective fabs asked me in 2000 for a statement of compositional practice, I began with Kobro’s dictum, believing that it could reflect my sense of how I wanted the poetic text to relate to the different languages that surround it. But the debt was acknowledged in more suitable form in 1998, when the Museum of Modern Art published my poetic sequence ‘Kobro’ to coincide with a major retrospective exhibition there.
Part of the debt is owing to Kettle’s Yard for introducing me to all of this. The point is not the coincidence of those works being exhibited in the very year that I was contemplating a move to Poland. The point is that Kettle’s Yard is the kind of space in which those kinds of works will be shown. If the idea that sculpture is a part of the space around it is not actually inscribed on the lintel, it is implied equally by the dispositions of the house and by the exhibition programme of the gallery space. It is an idea whose true scope should never be underestimated.
2007
Sutton Hoo
The Shipping Forecast
The correct approach to Sutton Hoo is from the river. The larger mounds on the ridge above the east bank of the Deben were designed to be seen from ships nosing up the channel after their journey from Sweden. Suffolk and Sweden were the only places in Europe where ship-burial was practised around the year AD 600. At Sutton Hoo, the ship-biers were dragged from ten feet above sea level to an elevation of one hundred feet in less than half a mile. The gut-wrenching effort is our best measure of East Anglian stubbornness at a time when pagan burial customs were being replaced by Christian funerary rites in other parts of the country. Two of the mounds at Sutton Hoo contained ships. The larger of the two was over ninety feet long and contained the richest grave goods ever found in Britain. The historical records for this period are scant and retrospective, and there is nothing conclusive in what was dug up to identify the occupant of Mound 1, although it is reasonable to suppose he was a Wuffing (the name given to all the East Anglian kings). The most popular nominee has always been Raedwald, who was king from 599 to 625. His name was put forward by the Cambridge scholar Hector Chadwick, who visited the first excavation in 1939, and the Raedwald idea has stuck ever since, partly, one suspects, because more is known about Raedwald than the other candidates, and what is known makes a good story. The historical evidence is incomplete, the art historical evidence allows for an earlier date, the carbon dating allows for both earlier and later dates, and the most promising dating equipment, a bag of Frankish coins, was assigned initially to c. 650; the subsequent back-dating, carried out in 1960, was jiggled, rather remarkably, to 625 precisely. But it does not matter whether they pushed the boat out – or rather in – for Raedwald, or for some other Frankish coin collector, since the culture, a culture in every sense on the move, would have been the same. The culture presided over by Raedwald was schizoid; history shows that the direction it moved in was towards us, towards what we think of as English; but the direction it moved away from was equally English, and very different.
Bede tells us in passing that Raedwald converted to Christianity on a visit to Kent, the first of the English kingdoms to import the new faith, but got such a frosty reception on his return home, it convinced him to erect a new temple with altars both to Jesus Christ and the Devil. He gets the approval of Bede, however, for his obligingness in the story of King Edwin’s conversion. Edwin was a Northumbrian royal on the run from his vindictive brother-in-law Ethelfrid; Raedwald provided a sa
fe house, but took a serious interest in selling one Northumbrian to another before his wife intervened and introduced him to the concept of honour. Edwin’s survival fulfilled the prediction of a mysterious supernatural agent who expected and obtained his conversion just for being right; Raedwald’s action helped to realise a providential pattern, an important one that resulted in Edwin becoming the Christian ruler of everywhere south of the Humber. But it did not revive Raedwald’s own flagging interest in the new religion; and the wife who taught him morality – the first Ethics girl – had also rubbished the idea of changing faiths when Raedwald brought it home in his luggage from Kent. Raedwald’s temple was a betting shop, and the occupant of the buried ship, or whoever made the funeral arrangements, showed a similar keen interest in gaming in the shape of a large gaming board complete with a set of whale ivory pieces. The body in Mound 1 showed up in the dig as a patch of different-coloured soil, and this physical vagueness matches the elusiveness of the body’s identity. Whether Raedwald or not, there was very little in his post-mortem kit to indicate that he had staked much on the chances of a Christian afterlife: only a pair of spoons, inscribed ‘Saulos’ and ‘Paulos’, which might have suggested an amiable willingness to do the conversion-job properly, if it came to it, rather than a solid conviction that the first attempt had actually worked. The spoons do not figure much among all the other stuff: the famous helmet, the bundles of spears and angons, the exceptional lyre in its beaver-skin bag, the ceremonial whetstone, looking like an imperial sceptre, a pair of shoes size 7, and the largest hoard of late Roman silver from the eastern Mediterranean ever found in northern Europe. And then the coins, which Philip Grierson thought were to pay the ferryman with, or rather, to pay a spectral crew to man the ship. They were all foreign, the coins, not the spectres, because they could not be anything else; there was no mint in business anywhere in England at that time – this was the last moment before the country asserted its island identity with its own currency. The different-coloured patch was no islander; his business interests and family connections were across the North Sea, out in the shipping lanes.