What is left

Rachel Whiteread’s work has always been about absence, most typically the absence of humans in a space. Ironically, what made me want to write about her now is the absence of her own work from the galleries of the Royal Academy, where Modern British Sculpture is currently showing (an absence which marred my enjoyment of the exhibition). Perhaps that’s ok; maybe it’s incorrect to think of her in terms of conventional sculpture, as she hardly ever creates “new” objects; in her casts of baths and boxes and rooms and stairways, she is memorialising the ordinarily domestic, making sarcophagi of the accoutrements of the living. She is showing us what is already present, just from inside out, from one remove.

The first piece of hers I knew was House, her concrete cast of a derelict Victorian dwelling at 193 Grove Road in Mile End, still stubbornly standing even after the rest of the terrace had been demolished. This is what Andrew Graham-Dixon said in 1993, when House was first on view:

To visit House or (as many will do) simply to come across it, isolated in a scrubby patch of parkland at the corner of Roman Road and Grove Road, is to be suddenly and disconcertingly transported elsewhere. It is to be taken to another world, like and yet completely unlike this one: the world of the photographic negative, with its phantom-like reversals of known fact; the world that Alice enters through her looking glass; the world that lurks behind the molten silver mirror in Cocteau’s Orphee, where normal relations between objects have been summarily suspended. Denatured by transformation, things turn strange here. Fireplaces bulge outwards from the walls of House, doorknobs are rounded hollows. Architraves have become chiselled incisions running around the monument, forms as mysterious as the hieroglyphs on Egyptian tombs.

The comparison to the Egyptian tomb seems very accurate. I thought at the time that House looked like a grand mausoleum, only you could never enter (and therefore, never leave); it had gone from a building with a doorway and windows, to something shut in, complete. Rather than looking out of or into, it was something to look at, a monument to itself. I thought it was beautiful, but also very ugly (Whiteread has said in interviews she likes making objects which are both), a mark of the way the city makes ruins of the old. We are used to garbage, to the ubiquitous brownfield, a place of waste and statis. So House stood as a symbol for that urban wasteland too.

I finally wrote the poem that follows several years later, not exactly in response to ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, but to Auden’s idea in that poem of “the human position”, how the ordinary resides alongside the miraculous; and that’s what art does, it shows us the juxtaposition.  And there it was in House: the monumental and the commonplace combined.

The final irony was of course that Whiteread’s House was eventually demolished, the victim of one of those ridiculous public debates about the value and meaning of art, etc. I later entered my poem in a poetry competition sponsored by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, and to my great surprise, I won – with a poem about a building, which was really the concrete cast of a building, and was neither ancient, nor, in the end, preserved.

House

The concrete fills the spaces between

the walls and what they held – a child’s cry,

an argument, dulled. It hardens, cools.

The house is peeled away like a skin:

a fire protrudes from the shell of a room,

the ghost of a fire gone out. 

A mausoleum to newspapers and spoons,

deep pile carpets, nights consumed

by the bluish glow of the TV,

perched in a field, a grassed-over street

where once other houses stood,

gathering lives together.

Obits

On first opening any newspaper, I go straight to the obituaries. It is a habit of a lifetime, which most people who know me do not find at all surprising. But I don’t think it is particularly morbid. Reading the obituaries shows an interest in people and their achievements rather than a fascination with death (although I could be accused of both). When the front pages show us, the living, concocting new and more horrible ways of making this planet uninhabitable, those celebrations of interesting and fulfilled lives are more uplifting. The Michigan undertaker and poet Thomas Lynch sees his trade not so much as “something done with the dead [but] something done for the living, to something done by the living – every one of us.”

The Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco began ‘collecting’ obituary headlines in the 1990s. In his current Tate Modern show, there is one gallery filled with these texts, printed on long, vertical (grave plot-sized) sheets. All his headlines are taken from the New York Times, where the convention is to list the name of the deceased, followed by his or her age, and then a pithy line summing up the life. Orozco has removed the names and ages, so what the viewer is left with are these random headlines. These include:

Expert on Infidelity

Villainous Pro-Wrestler

Famed Rainmaker in Drought

A Leader in Abstract Algebra

Built a Cosmetics Empire and Adored Pink

Dumbo’s Creator

There are twenty-seven headlines on each sheet, all printed in the paper’s old house typeface Bookman (which has since been replaced by Cheltenham; the Bookman face is the one I remember as a child, the one which always signified “news” to me). They are reprinted in different sizes, as when they first appeared, to signify the importance of the life. They are arranged on the sheets so that some lines are indented, to appear more like fleeting, incomplete statements, rather than a list (the way certain lives weave in and out of our own). The whole effect is like a found poem, a gathering of the great and the good and the downright eccentric, all reduced to one headline moment, and all lofty enough to have earned their place in the New York Times. The result is profoundly moving, but also humorous, as part of the game is to pick out some of the wackier lines, as well as to try and match the headlines to their subjects.

The piece is certainly in keeping with Orozco’s interests as an artist, as he is concerned not just with pattern, shape and scale, but how the man-made coexists with the natural, how the human scale measures up to what we find around us. His practice is always questioning, but playful with it. That’s the poet’s job as well.

I’ll finish with the words of Thomas Lynch, talking about the similarity of poems and funerals. The role of the eulogist is very much the same as the obit writer, to tell a good story. And from that story of a life, the artist or poet selects the most resonant moments:

A good funeral, like a good poem, is driven by voices, images, intellections and the permanent. It moves us up and back the cognitive and imaginative and emotive register. The transport seems effortless, inspired, natural as breathing or the loss of it. In the space between what is said and unsaid, in the pause between utterances, whole histories are told; whole galaxies are glimpsed in the margins, if only momentarily.

 http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/gabrielorozco/

Nature morte

On the cover of Paul Muldoon’s most recent collection, Maggot, is a photograph of a dead bird. The bird is not pretty or peaceful in death, like those Victorian depictions of Cock Robin (thinking particularly of the amazing tableaux created by the taxidermist Walter Potter for his Museum of Curiosities). The bird is in the process of decomposition, and we can see through its feathers and flesh, straight to its bones, the contents of its stomach – the plastic detritus of beaches and garbage dumps which probably aided its death. The bird is a dull brown (apart from the brightly-coloured plastic exposed once again to the elements) to match the earth it lies on; eventually it will merge with the earth.  The earth is as parched and dead as the bird.

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but the poems in this book are about the body in its slow crawl to disintegration. In an interview in the Economist, where it was suggested that the subject matter explores the ‘grotesque’, Muldoon said:

I don’t know where the grotesque begins and ends. It first refers, as you know, to paintings seen in grottoes or the basements of ancient buildings in which there were murals that represented animals and human figures that were seen as being somehow distorted or exaggerated. I think the business of making metaphors almost inevitably involves distortion or exaggeration. My love is like a red red rose only in a very specific sense. I tend to see the canker in the rose, I guess, which may account for your sense of the grotesque. A grotesque is also a term for a clown or a fool and there’s a lot of clowning in these poems. A lot of acting the maggot, as we describe acting the buffoon. The clown’s face is a death mask, I suppose.

But my purpose is not to discuss Muldoon’s book, as many critics have done that already, really more to think why death continues to be so attractive a subject for poets, as it has been for many years (reading Muldoon’s recent poems took me back to Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress’ and Donne’s ‘The Funerall’, those dead poets we still carry with us as living poets). The most obvious reason must be the inevitable truth of death; the poet’s need to explore the notion of his/her own mortality (not to mention the desire to leave something of oneself for posterity, even if what you leave behind is a few slim volumes).

But there is more to it than that. Poets like to get below the surface of things, to dig deep, and once you’ve described the sweet soft flesh of a lover, it is only natural to want to get under the skin; so that the poet is a kind of maggot too, not just in the sense of the clown as Muldoon has suggested, but as a seeker of deeper meanings. Poets are parasitical, in that they steal from each other, feeding off those poets of the past that they love, but also feeding off their loved ones for their stories and their emotions. Anything for a good poem.

Also, a lot of poets live in a continual state of greyness. By that I mean they (and here, as throughout, I really mean ‘I’) see both sides of every situation, and often there is a chink of blackness within the light. But that doesn’t mean they are depressing, just realistic. There is not a lot of joy in our current world, and any joy we make comes from human contact and communication. As Muldoon reminds us, the rose will wither and die. The point is that it is beautiful for a moment. The moment is important, but so is what comes after.

In my recent reading of nature poems for my upcoming workshops, I have been struck by the amount of ‘dead nature’ I’ve encountered. Perhaps a chance for the poet to view up close a creature that was in life too fast to capture. Perhaps an opportunity for comparison as well as reflection. Muldoon reminds us, after all, that the poet is in the business of making metaphors. Death presents us with a way of saying a few final words on what finality really means.

More dead birds, and other creatures here, courtesy of poet Karen McCarthy Woolf, whose poem ‘Wing’ was featured in the Winter issue of Poetry Review : http://opennotebooks.co.uk/2011/01/wing-takes-flight/

Full Muldoon interview here: 

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2010/10/new_poetry

Image is Cezanne’s Nature Morte, 1866-67

Rain, steam and speed

For those of you who have been following Invective since the beginning, you may be surprised by my choice of image today. Yes, I’ve given you Peter Lanyon and Prunella Clough, who, although they are very different painters, both represent a particularly British way of looking at landscape – which is at once modern and complex, and driven by internal as well as external forces. Both of them wanted to celebrate the landscapes they loved: for Lanyon, the West Penwith coast; for Clough, the brown field sights of South London and Essex. But neither one of them could have painted the way they did without Turner. Not to say that Turner was a direct influence, but it was Turner whose ground-breaking style (if that’s not too much of a pun when talking about landscape painting) gave them permission. Rain, Steam and Speed is one of Turner’s most extraordinary images, and for me it represents the moment when the industrial meets the pastoral (like in Hardy’s novels, or Wordworth’s poems). Andrew Graham-Dixon says of this picture: 

The train was not just a contraption which moved Turner from place to place more quickly than ever before. It moved him emotionally. It made him see the world as never before. He put this into the very style of his picture, conjuring up effects of blur and rush to celebrate a new speeded up vision. Turner had looked the future full in the face. He had found it beautiful. He had found it exhilarating.

I have stood in front of this painting many times and felt moved, not just by the sensation of speed Turner is able to evoke, but moved emotionally. It’s an odd feeling to be moved by a painting, and it is difficult to say why. Something about a particular arrangement of shape and colour and line. The same way a poem affects you when you don’t always understand its meaning, but the language and imagery strike something subconscious.

The poem that follows (which was published in my last collection, Fetch) is directly inspired by not only Turner’s painting, but the experience of standing in front of it in the National Gallery and being moved, and then watching other people standing in front of it perhaps experiencing the same transformation. I’m a fan of Andreas Gursky’s large-scale photographs observing crowds of people in galleries, and I wanted to capture something of that collective experience of looking at art in a public place (while undergoing some private emotion).

I’m off to Tate Britain in a little while, and although I am not going for the Turners, I feel I will have to call in on them while I’m there, just to say hello.

Portrait of a Couple Looking at a Turner Landscape

They stand, not quite touching,

before a world after storm.

There are drops of moisture in her hair,

in his scarf

                 the colour of a gentler sea, his eyes,

while trains depart every minute, steaming

into the future, where the hills

unroll themselves,

vast plains of emerald and gold

            (she undressed for him, slowly,

             her skin like cloud under dark layers)

after rooms of Rubens and Fragonard, flesh dead

against old brocade

                                (their flesh alive in the white sheets).

There are trains departing.

                                        When they part

it will be night, outside a theatre, near the station,

        and the sky will be blown with stars,

too dim to see in the glare of neon.

They will stand on concrete and asphalt,

                                    the innocent shining sands

lost. The world tilts to meet her face,

he holds her face close

           and something closes in on them,

the weight of silence in the street,

the winter horizon, bright, huge,

the moment before

                                 the sky opens and it pours.

Natural selection

In my garden in Stockwell I often see a pair of jays, not to mention our resident blackbird (with very distinctive white markings on his wings), blackcaps, robins, blue tits and an occasional wren. I’ve seen a heron fly over the house once, and a sparrow hawk twice. And last winter there was a spectacular invasion of redwings, perfectly at home in our uncommon snow. Beyond my garden is a low-rise estate, and beyond that, the Stockwell Road, which leads to Brixton. Not the most bucolic place, with its constant sirens and chicken take-away debris. But the birds don’t seem to mind, because they are birds, and as long as they can find enough to eat, they will stick around. As a city-dweller for the whole of my adult life, I still notice their presence, they still make an impact, and I am glad for their small music as I sit at my desk. City-dwellers are always in search of little patches of nature, parks and playgrounds, churchyards and canal towpaths, which make our concrete and tarmac existence more bearable. The whole rus in urbe thing.

I have to say that I never felt much of a longing for nature. The city has always been enough for me; as O’Hara says in ‘Meditations in an Emergency’, “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.” Cities are easily navigable, and city-dwellers understand the politics of street and transport systems. We have a capacity for ugliness, for the burnt-out and uninhabitable. I like nothing better than a jaunt to some far-flung, forgotten corner of London with my friend Vici MacDonald (aka ‘Art Anorak’ http://artanorak.tumblr.com/), a great connoisseur of urban ruin.

So as I skim pleasantly through anthologies of pastoral poems, in anticipation of two upcoming writing workshops looking at aspects of poetry and landscape, I wonder what has happened to me to make me even want to enjoy the blade of grass, let alone write about it (and encourage others to write about it). I have no ‘natural credentials’. I am not a gardener by trade, like Alice Oswald or Sarah Maguire. I do not know the names of plants and trees (although I am getting better with birds). I have the language to describe the urban experience, but I am ill-equipped to say much about flowers and fields. It doesn’t stop me from trying, sometimes in what feels to be a string of clichéd phrases. The built environment seems easier to sum up somehow, because I am part of it; the natural world operates in mystery.

However, I am beginning to realise that part of my problem is compartmentalisation. It is wrong of me to create a division between the urban and the rural. After all, aren’t the birds in my Stockwell garden part of the natural world? Richard Mabey, whose brilliant book The Unofficial Countryside has just been reprinted, says:

Our attitude towards nature is a strangely contradictory blend of romanticism and gloom. We imagine it to ‘belong’ in those watercolour landscapes where most of us would also like to live. If we are looking for wildlife we turn automatically towards the official countryside, towards the great set-pieces of forest and moor. If the truth is told, the needs of the natural world are more prosaic than this. A crack in the pavement is all a plant needs to put down roots.

Mabey’s project is to get us to embrace the lichens and weeds growing amidst the ruined buildings and between the railroad tracks, and therefore to see that we are not separate from nature. And that may make the (so-called urban) poet’s task less difficult when faced with that blade of grass.