The Milton Keynes Arcades Project

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What must it be like to have a mind that has direction and purpose, a world view with an overarching theme? My own mind roams aimlessly, illuminated by little sparks and linked by ad hoc connections that briefly show me something . . . or perhaps nothing. To be someone like Euan Uglow with a burning passion to follow an idea – what is that like? All-consuming, obsessive, uncompromising . . . but cohesive.

I’m not repining: those little sparks – my whims and starts – bring me interest and entertainment. Besides, I would find it difficult to reconcile an awareness of my various ignorances and πάντα ῥεῖ with something less unpindownable.

In the past few days I have:

  • stayed in Milton Keynes in a hotel with a view of God and Mammon (the Church of Christ the Cornerstone looks across at the vast CMK shopping centre; not up there with Milan though);
  • seen The Point, an entertainment complex built in 1985 that I visited occasionally and is now scheduled for demolition;
  • walked to Wickes for some paint tester pots, past a demolished Sainsbury’s and a derelict Toys R Us and through innumerable warehouse-size stores and car parks;
  • walked through CMK shopping centre a couples of times, observing how shoppers seem either sleep-walking or energised (me included);
  • added to my wardrobe in that same shopping centre;
  • read about the street disturbances/looting in Clapham;
  • visited the In Bloom exhibition and seen how a drive for moremoremore, allied to the opportunities to European life offered by capitalism and colonialism, brought rare plants into British gardens to such an extent that they are now a nuisance (rhododendrons again) or available for a pittance on garage forecourts;
  • started reading Grand Hotel Abyss by Stuart Jeffries on the Frankfurt School – mostly while eating and drinking in very nice restaurants;
  • reminisced endlessly.

This morning I listened again to an old In Our Time about Walter Benjamin to continue the Frankfurt School strand that I’ve begun. His commentary on the modern world chimed with all of the above – both in his intense interest in investigating memory and culture and what he had to say about them. I scribbled down some of what the speakers said about his unfinished Arcades Project – not because I can possibly say whether he was correct or not, but because of those little sparks going off again.

The [Paris] Arcades [of the nineteenth century], for Benjamin, represented architectural manifestation of the ephemerality of modernity . . . Baudelaire’s theory of modernity as focussed on the ephemeral and the transient. These architectural structures were themselves very ephemeral: they emerged in the 1820s and 1830s and most of them were demolished by the early 1850s. Not only did they contain some things that were fading away . . . as architectural structures they were themselves antiquated from the beginning.

. . . Identify the primal form of industrial capitalism as it is experienced . . . the place where the consumer is born, where the shopper comes into being.

. . . Inhabiting the streets as a site of stimulation, of electrical energy, which Benjamin sees as being incubated in the Arcades, but the the same time this is also the coming of the dream-sleep over Europe. We are going to succumb to the wonders and the beauties that are put before us because often in the Arcades imperial goods – intoxicating goods – of tobacco, chocolate and perfume were sold. So it’s the emblem of a very seductive form of capitalism, but it is also precarious, it disappears and becomes rationalised in the department store. Capitalism as the generator of fantastic relationships that will service our dreams.

[As the Arcades] become less fashionable they become the place of junk . . . all about things falling out of fashion and thereby revealing to us desires that we once had.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the giant carcass of Toys R Us near CMK railway station. Or The Point, where I laughed myself silly at A Fish Called Wanda. Πάντα ῥεῖ.

Euan Uglow: an arc from the eye

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I probably wouldn’t have gone to this exhibition without prompting, but there was something about the colours and the very deliberate process of creation that intrigued me.

So many large paintings of female nudes that, for all the geometrical precision and sumptuous shades, it was difficult not to come over a bit Mrs Grundy after the first half dozen. Uglow seems to have been an uncompromising artist, uninterested in being a success and simply driven to work through “an idea” on canvas. His marks are still visible, like tailor’s tacks, and some of his works took years to complete. Still lifes of fruit or bread took so long that you can discern the decomposition.

The subtitle refers to the great lengths he went to to view his subject from an exact viewpoint: Root Five Nude, for example, lies on a table lightly curved on the horizontal plane so that the artist’s eye was always the same distance from every part of his subject (the “arc of the eye”), and the Greek key design gives him 100 units to measure by. There was a 1976 Aquarius programme presented by Peter Hall where Uglow began painting Root Five Nude. His concentration – obsession – with looking, with light and his work was pronounced; he talked of “a few magic moments” in a week as he painted. Such an attitude was ripe for parody, but somehow you couldn’t doubt Uglow’s sincerity. There was something slightly unsettling about his obsession – just as there was with some of the positions he had his models adopt – but it did give his paintings a very distinctive feel.

In Bloom: how plants changed our world

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Having focussed so much on tulips, fritillaries, roses and camellias in the last fortnight (admiring, feeding, buying, moving), I went to an exhibition today featuring . . . tulips, fritillaries, roses and camellias! A brief history of European botanical collecting, from exploration to exploitation.

But first I had to get to Oxford. At the bus stop I took a photograph of The Point, which the Twentieth Century Society tried – and failed – to get listed. It is shortly to be demolished. Since I remember it being built (1985), this makes me feel very old! I have tried to remember the films I saw there:

  • A Fish Called Wanda
  • Hope and Glory
  • Black Rain
  • Hairspray?
  • The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne?

The bus takes forever; I have spent almost four hours on busses today and the re-opening of the line to Oxford really can’t come too soon for me, for there is still much of Oxford to explore. I thought I might recognise one or two places en route, but even Buckingham looked unfamiliar. The town gaol in the square is obviously still there, but my childhood memories of the yellow cellophane on shop windows in summertime and of the long-gone open-air swimming pool are more vivid.

Despite having spent time in Oxford less than two years ago, my sense of direction went haywire. My personal landmarks were haphazard: for example, I recognised the way to the Ashmolean only by some nearby balcony railings. Once I’d found it I decided to visit the current exhibition, In Bloom.

Good choice! There was so much to admire and spark interest. The exhibition followed mostly British and Dutch botanical discoveries, from early collectors in the 1600s to the commodification of plants for commercial exploitation as part of colonial enterprises. Knowledge turned into profit. Exhibit labels referred to man’s desire to collect and control nature; even the most beautiful Dutch still life of flowers and foliage was artificial (plants unrealistically blooming at the same time)  – although there was no mention of the way artists would include something (an insect, a spot of mildew) to remind the viewer that this beauty was transitory. That seemed to me like a big omission, but I guess it didn’t add to the exhibition’s theme. Even the modern still lifes in the exhibition included a “defect”: a nibbled leaf, edges browning on a camellia. 

The history. John Tradescant the Elder (from late 1500s) and Younger were Keepers of His Majesty’s Gardens, Vines and Silkworms at Lambeth; they travelled widely in their search for plants. Botanical gardens, royal/aristocratic patrons, sponsored visits to parts of Europe a long way from Lambeth and to North America, new ways of classifying, the spread of knowledge and interest. Beautiful volumes with hand-coloured engravings of new plants discovered overseas. (Such beautiful volumes that sometimes the publisher went bankrupt.) Botanical illustration became a distinctive artistic genre. The sexual nature of plant reproduction was understood in the 18th century, and illustrations expanded to include all parts of a plant. In the 19th century three-dimensional oversize models of plants and their separate organs were made for teaching purposes: these not only made plants like common fumitory look exotic but also rather grotesquely erotic. Plants were whisked up into capitalist whirlwinds of “florimanias”: there was money to be made by catering to an increasing desire for gardens stocked with fashionable plants from overseas. (Rhododendrons, anyone?)

And so we come to crops like tea, spices, cotton, rubber and opium – all big money-spinners for those in charge of their production and control of the lands where they could be grown. (Step forward, British Empire.) There was a Wardian case: an airtight glass container devised by Nathaniel Ward in 1829 that enabled plants to be transported from overseas and survive in transit without being watered. By this stage it felt (although this was never mentioned) like the Fall – from the (seeming) simplicity of the early gardeners to deep-rooted and ever-growing global economic activity.

The last section was by contemporary artists trying to reconnect us to the natural world and to rethink our relationship with it. Yes, well . . . perhaps. What I did appreciate were the flower sculptures made of banknotes by Justine Smith. And – with all that is being thrown at Iran at the moment – the otherwise rather ho-hum works by Anahita Norouzi were striking: 

Iris-like shapes made of pressed crude oil are created on copies of archival documents recording the acquisition of Iranian land by The Anglo-Persian Oil Company in the early 1900s.

And afterwards – Mrs Mounter again and again few more Japanese prints. I noticed from the postcard selection in the gift shop that I had seen some of the Ashmolean prints last week at the Whitworth.

The Great Wave

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To the Whitworth (while I waited for an iphone repair) for an exhibition of Japanese wood prints, mostly by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1868). In one room landscapes, in another more urban scenes and beautifully-rendered figures of actors and courtesans. They are examples of Ukiyo-e – “pictures of the floating world*” from the Edo period (1601/03-1868), a time of peace, creativity and comparative stasis. Prints that now line the walls of art galleries were once cheap and commonplace; I thought of the woodcuts and engravings of artists like Dürer, but it was the colour of Japanese wood prints that was so striking. A print by Kunisada of a printer’s workshop gave an idea of how production was shared out, from the cutting and smoothing of the woodblocks to the manufacture of paper and paints to the eventual printing.

To my untutored eyes, they hover between sublime and strange. The Great Wave, for example: so decorative but with a sense of terror when you notice the tiny boats and even tinier humans inside them.

The change in their status over the years from commonplace “illustrations” to “art”. Hiroshige, for example, drew for the “Illustrated Guide to Famous Places in the Sixty-odd Provinces”. (I love that “odd”: hadn’t they counted them?) And Hokusai did similar collections for waterfalls (which he may never have visited) and Edo. Is that a bit like getting John Piper to illustrate the Shell Guides? Or those beautiful watercolours that illustrated botanical guides before photography? (Flashback to Edward Wilson in Antarctica.)

The various interpretations assigned to The Great Wave – e.g. contemporary anxieties about Japan being overwhelmed by the US and Europe, or modern concerns about the environment. One could even place Fukushima in the wave’s path.

The workshop element of production – which made me think all the way from Duccio’s altarpieces to Bridget Riley and Damien Hirst’s use of assistants. It takes you away from the idea of The Artist.

The two-way influences between Europe and Japan. At first I thought only of Japan’s influence on artists like Van Gogh, or how Hokusai’s “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” was reflected in Monet’s endless paintings of Rouen cathedral or haystacks. But it worked the other way too: Dutch works influenced Japanese artists, and western synthetic dyes were eagerly adopted.

* Subsequently I read labels at the Ashmolean that interpreted Ukiyo/the floating world more narrowly, as the demi-monde of actors and courtesans, where class was of less importance than money and taste.

The Good Boss (2021)

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Director Fernando Léon de Aranoa with Javier Bardem

A black comedy that would have been something-and-nothing without the central presence of Bardem. He plays the smug, hypocritical, paternalistic boss of a manufacturer of scales (a metaphor that the film balances on) who has to contend with some potential PR disasters while the company is in the running for a prestigious award. His smarmy charm turns nasty as things escalate. There’s a kind of comeuppance; the fact that it’s engineered by a young woman is satisfying, but, as usual, it’s the Poor Bloody Infantry who suffer.

The Laing

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I always like going to the Laing art gallery. Today I wandered again around the “Northern Spirit” gallery, focussing on the glassworks (Sowerby, Davidson’s) which grew up around the Skinnerburn and Ouseburn, and Maling Pottery. I noticed that J Atkinson Grimshaw’s children also became painters. I looked more closely at Ralph Henley’s paintings – some are a bit twee, but something like “Seeking Situations” is worth thinking about. And I compared two landscapes: one by John Atkinson and the other by Duncan Grant.

Dark River (2017)

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Director Clio Barnard with Ruth Wilson and Mark Stanley

A bleak and gruelling film. The ever-flowing blackness of wicked deeds. Woman returns to family farm after abusive father’s death and comes into conflict with her brother over ownership. They are both damaged and inarticulate; the scene where he gets drunk and violent is interwoven with her expertly skinning and gutting a rabbit. Like Ken Loach and Andrea Arnold, the grimness is leavened all too briefly by encounters with the natural world and moments of connection. It was well done: the photography was good (although my reaction to sheep-cropped hillsides may not be as swooning as a nature-deprived townie’s), the actors excellent, and the film got under the skin of a narrow farming life and its particular knowledge and skills. The contrived ending irritated me somewhat: she emerges cleansed by the storm while he spends the rest of his life “atoning”.