Tag Archives: arts week 2018

Arts Week 2018: Black Mirror

Leave a reply

Caroline Mawer reflects on her experience visiting one of the more unusual events which took place during Birkbeck’s Arts Week

What tremendously thoughtful fun I had meandering round Birkbeck with a black mirror, gazing into a fairy ball!

This gazing ball is one of those black mirrors that tempt you into looking off to the side, at the unseen and unseeable.

Sheila Ghelani had designed our route by placing one of the mirrors she’d created onto a map: we were going to meander around the black hole thus created. Decked out with palm-size pebbles of mirrors in black velvet pouches and incongruously unromantic leatherette bum bags, we headed off into the unknown of John Dee and his magic 16th century angels.

It didn’t feel that unknown to start with, since our first stop was only in the square opposite Birkbeck. But we were reflecting. Literally, in our mirrors, and also with lots of the thinking sort of reflection. I pondered and confected. And the unknown gradually came into – or maybe I should say, out of – focus. Our black mirrors held deceptively small-yet-enormous universes. You really can see something remarkably close to 360 degrees when you angle them correctly.

We sketched the landscape like an artist: a 17th-century artist using a ‘Claude glass’ to produce something as eerily picturesque as a Claude Lorraine painting. We acted like tourists: 18th century tourists so horrified by the awesome crags of the Lake District that we could only view them in our black mirrors by turning our back on them. Then like more modern tourists, trying – and generally failing – to get the perfect selfie-shot in, and of, our Fairy Ball.

The nigh-on-360 degree views were, we discovered, seductively slippery. How many times did I perfect my view, to lose it when I tried to sketch or photograph it! And how many times did I discard an impressive vision of pillars or a tree (both, we discovered, were splendid subjects) – in the quest for somehow more perfect perfection. ‘Authenticity’ has sometimes been badged as a holy grail for ‘creatives’. And we kept on looking at, and so creating, authentic black mirror views. So authentic that you really do have to be there to see them. So uncopied, that they are nigh-on uncopiable.

We discussed materiality as another unpredictable and evasive construct. ‘Claude lenses’ and our own black mirrors are glass: sand miraculously made into liquid. The oldest constructed black mirrors were Aztec polished obsidian: volcanic glass was used for divination and as a status symbol. Water is, of course, another ancient black mirror. So we looked out for, and thought about, the water we had overlooked: the drains and rivers trapped under the streets we were walking on.

We noticed, too, how many modern black mirrors there are. Not just the mirrored sunglasses we had seen in Gordon Square, but all those blacked out cars and enigmatic urban windows. Of course, the ubiquitous mobile phones all have sleeping black mirror screens. We’re not that different from the Aztecs: our black mirrors, too, act as finely-graded status symbols and for 24/7 divination.

We were so busy reflecting – in all senses – that we didnt get  time to do any scrying. This is what it is called when you look intently into a black mirror – and not simply for reflection. Scrying has been thought to act as a portal to other planes of existence. But maybe we did well to miss that. John Dee, master mathematician and polymath, was convinced by his scrying partner, Edward Kelley, that the angels had informed him that God required them to swap wives. Fake facts are obviously not a new phenomenon! Nor is #metoo: Dee’s journal reports that the task was achieved ‘after initial protestations’ by his wife.

It’s easy to point fingers at the inhabitants of the past-is-another-country. We were not (quite!) as ridiculous. Only a minority of the passers by actually stopped and stared as I processed down the pavement gazing regally into what must have looked something like a shiny black football.

On reflection, though (ha! see what I’m doing here!), the black mirror and the gazing ball raised fascinating questions about how and what we can and do see.  The transitory nature of what could be seen is a great joy. I’m definitely going to keep on playing with the best souvenir present I ever got: my very own hand-crafted black mirror. Thanks. Sheila!

You can also construct your own black mirror.

Share

Arts Week 2018: Marilyn Monroe – An Unlikely Feminist?

2 Replies

Social worker Benjamin Meißner has had a lifelong fascination with Marilyn Monroe since he saw one of her movies as a boy and has been a member of her German fan club Some Like It Hot since it was founded in 1992. He attended Birkbeck’s Arts Week lecture while visiting London on holiday from his home in Kiel, Germany.

 

While I was in London, I was delighted to attend the event Marilyn Monroe: an unlikely feminist? which took place at the Birkbeck cinema. Gabriella Apicella who is a screenwriter and studied at Birkbeck herself, hosted the event, while Catherine Grant, Professor of digital media and screen studies at Birkbeck, gave a lecture about Marilyn as an actress. She showed film clips of some of her movies and interviews, and the focus was on her gestures and body language. She slowed down the footage so you could discover how much choreography there is going on in just a few seconds. Catherine selected the opening scene from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with Marilyn and Jane Russell both wearing the red dresses. By viewing it in slow motion, you became aware of how much acting there is going on. It is known that Marilyn worked very hard – Jane Russell once said in an interview that Marilyn was the first on the set and the last one to leave. Marilyn went through the dancing numbers with choreographer Jack Cole again and again.

Catherine next compared the Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend numbers performed by Marilyn with those later in the film by Jane Russell. By watching them together, Jane’s performance seemed almost grotesque because it is so exaggerated.

Catherine also noted the queer elements of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. In the final scene, Marilyn and Jane are so much the centre of attention, one could be forgiven for thinking they were married to each other.

Host Gabriella then presented the highly-regarded author Michelle Morgan who has written several books about Marilyn and other Hollywood stars. In her latest work, The Girl: Marilyn Monroe, The Seven Year Itch, and The Birth of an Unlikely Feminist, Michelle discusses Marilyn’s influence on women’s liberation. Marilyn was ahead of her time in many ways, Michelle pointed out. Especially when she left Hollywood in 1955 for New York, taking acting classes and founding her own production company with Milton Greene.

Michelle explained how Marilyn became stifled by her image as the ‘fluffy blonde’. It seemed that some people just wanted to see her in these kind of roles, which left Marilyn herself very unsatisfied as an actress. Michelle illustrated how pervasive – and enticing – this image was by pointing out how a British electric company sent out its bills with a photo of Marilyn because they knew that people would pay attention to it and would open the envelope!

During a Q&A with the audience, Michelle was asked if Marilyn still continues to be a significant role model almost 56 years after her death. Michelle believes she still has an enormous effect. “We can still learn so much from Marilyn”, Michelle observed. Everyone has their own interpretation of Marilyn and there are still many aspects to discover. With so many people fascinated by her after all these years, it is interesting to consider the sort of influence she would have had if she was around today in an era of  social media networks.

Benjamin during his visit to London, at the Proud Gallery’s exhibition of Marilyn photographs by Milton Greene

Share

Arts Week 2018: Floating Islands

2 Replies

Ellie Warr is a full-time student on the Birkbeck and RADA Text & Performance MA. She is currently collaborating with members of the T&P course to develop a new show inspired by the offshore bars established by the LGBTQ+ community of New Orleans. She writes here about Professor Gill Perry’s lecture Floating Islands In Contemporary Art, and was drawn to the event by the promise of different perspectives on the way that islands, and the themes of exile and identity, interact.

Floating plastic waste … a trash island in the making

The lecture took place in the cinema at 43 Gordon Square, which allowed Visiting Professor Gill Perry to share large images of the work of Alex Hartley, Robert Smithson and Andrea Zittel with her audience. ‘Floating islands’ is a sub-category of the subject of Perry’s forthcoming publication, Islands in Contemporary Art, and the lecture provided an opportunity for Perry to work through some of the issues that she was encountering in her research, including the scarcity of women artists creating work in the topic.

Coverage of floating islands in literature is abundant, Perry argued, while in the visual arts the subject is a lot less busy. Perry is thinking specifically of 18th and 19th century science and fantasy fiction, such as Jules Verne’s, The Floating Island, in which a propeller-powered, aristocrat-laden mobile island tours the Pacific Ocean. For contemporary visual artists, the idea of the floating island is pertinent to critical ideas such as migration and ‘post-Brexit fantasies of our separate island status’.

Global warming was the direct cause of Alex Hartley’s ‘Now Here is Land’, an island in the high arctic region of Svalbard that Hartley ‘discovered’ in 2004. Now Here is Land (also pronounced ‘no where island’) was revealed as a result of glacial retreat and claimed by Hartley in a satire of colonial statement. After securing a commission from the Arts Council as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, Hartley won his appeal for the island’s independence and tugged a piece the size of a football pitch around the south west coast of England. His ‘new nation for a complicated world’ ornamented, or ‘disfigured’, the seaside snaps of holidayers from Weymouth to Bristol, many of whom became citizens via the island’s mobile embassy. 23,003 signed up in total, and were ‘rewarded’ for their global spirit by receiving a chunk of the island once the tour was done.

The commission was a subversive element of the Cultural Olympiad and Perry wryly commented that Hartley does not think the idea would receive funding if proposed today. As an anti-nation state, Now Here is Land pokes at the resurgence of the nation-state in recent years. Perry juxtaposed the island with the more easily recognisable Orbit, the 114.5-metre-high sculpture by Sir Anish Kapoor that has reshaped the East London landscape and exemplifies the ‘hubristic masculinity’ that Perry also recognises in Christo’s forthcoming Mastaba, a huge floating installation piece coming to the Serpentine this summer.

In contrast, Perry argued, Hartley’s work is more in keeping with the potentially ‘naive’ works of Lucy and Jorge Orta, whose Antarctica Project (2007) featured a series of tents decorated with flags from around the world recalling the temporary accommodation of refugees fleeing military and social conflict. Like Hartley, the Orta’s mimicked the processes by which nationhood is constructed, distributing the Antarctica World Passport, ‘which included a proposal to ratify the UN Declaration of Human Rights: Article 13.3. Everyone has the right to move freely and cross-frontiers to their chosen territory. No individual should have an inferior status to that of capital, trade, telecommunication, or pollution that traverse all borders.’ Perry emphasised the way that contemporary artists invoke symbolic citizenship as a form of political activism; acts of collective power that are exempt from the 21st century ideals of individualism and isolation that the island motif offers.

Perry opened the floor to questions towards the end of the session, inviting her audience to comment on the wide-ranging nature of her research so far. One of the issues of the subcategory of floating islands, Perry explained, was in constructing a justifying criteria. However, while the international campaign to recognise the Trash Isles, the island of plastic floating in the Pacific, as an official country continues to raise awareness about the critical issues of the contemporary, I think Perry’s efforts will remain highly relevant.

Share

Arts Week 2018: Gaelic hardship in Flann O’Brien’s ‘The Poor Mouth’

Leave a reply

Charlotte Deadman, a researcher in fin de siècle Anglo-Irish culture, the Gaelic League, Gaelic Revival and the Irish literary revival, comments on Arts Week event Gaelic Hardship.

The key theme of this sell-out event was an exploration of movement between languages in Brian O’Nolan/Flann O’Brien’s 1941 novel, An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth), considered the first post-modernist Irish language novel. The panel – Joseph Brooker, Tobias Harris and Eoin Byrne – commenced proceedings with a timeline tracing O’Nolan’s background (born in 1911 into a highly-literate Irish-speaking Catholic family), his career as civil servant, epistolarian and novelist.

O’Nolan (as ‘Flann O’Brien’) contributed regularly to the letters page of The Irish Times, leading to his own column, ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ (‘full little jug’), under the pen name Myles na gCopaleen: O’Nolan’s aliases – ‘brand names’ – were pivotal to his deliberate blurring of identity. In a letter to Sean O’Casey in 1942, O’Nolan wrote that An Béal Bocht was his ‘honest attempt to get under the skin of a certain type of Gael, which I find the most nauseating phenomenon in Europe’. The novel satirises the government’s gaelicising of Irish culture to the point that an onlooker could believe ‘all Irish literature was written for school children and nuns.’

An Béal Bocht was O’Nolan’s only Irish language novel; the fossilisation of the language, as he saw it, persuaded him to henceforth write only in English. However, O’Nolan refused to sanction an English version of his novel; Patrick C. Power’s translation was published in 1973, seven years after O’Nolan’s death. We learnt that the genesis of The Poor Mouth can be located in O’Nolan’s ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ column and that the narrative framing – Bonaparte O’Coonassa’s autobiography edited by ‘Myles na Gopaleen (Flann O’Brien)’ – was intended to toy with reader expectations of the genre. The novel’s complex intertextuality draws upon a patchwork of phrases and events excised from well-known Irish language autobiographies, blended with pseudo-Gaelic myths, the significance of some of which has apparently been lost in translation. Eoin Byrne explained that the pen names in The Poor Mouth mirrored contemporary reality: while writers adopted nom de plumes, they all knew who was who and, affecting ignorance, publicly trashed each other.

Guest speaker, Hugh Wilde, read a passage after which Tobias Harris explained the significance of the ‘comic extension’ therein conveyed, suggesting O’Nolan’s ‘Jams O’Donnell’ represents a ‘sense of dual consciousness, of two cultural worlds’ – one promoting the idea of the heroic ‘Gael of Gaels’, the other Anglicised and hostile to the Gaels, expressed in Jams O’Donnell’s duality of language; Harris illustrated this duality, citing Irish passports which bear the holder’s name in both Irish and English.

Eoin Byrne speaks at the event

Eoin Byrne explained that the education system in Ireland set about eradicating the Irish language and that the resultant national linguistic divide became fundamental to a sense of identity: while colonial rule punished speakers of Irish, the Irish Free State’s ‘de-Anglicising’ agenda punished speakers of English. The Poor Mouth is effectively a collage of historical times, chronicling the ‘de-anglicising’ of Ireland, the English language symbolic of oppression.

Joseph Brooker then read a passage which he described as ‘a performance piece’, the Gaelic language portrayed as a marker of social prestige: O’Nolan’s parody of the Gael autobiography genre blurs into nonsense and consequently is incapable of saying anything of worth. Eoin Byrne’s animated re-reading of the passage in its original Irish form was a high spot of the evening.

The final reading was given by guest speaker, N. J. Harris. The event culminated in a focus on the novel’s portrayal of characters ‘living up to stereotypes…to their literary fate’ – although this is Bonaparte’s story, he is symbolically rendered silent – and that, central to the novel, is circularity of time, woven through in variations on the leitmotif ‘their likes will never be there again’. At the novel’s conclusion, parody is displaced by poignancy, reflecting on the cycle of imprisonment that runs in Bonaparte’s family: the novel is ultimately a commentary on the restrictions urban Dublin society inflicted on rural Irish speakers.

The panel summed-up The Poor Mouth as ‘a response to the cultural violence of extreme nationalism’ within the Irish language movement: a demonstration of post-modernist pessimism. This was an excellent evening, striking the perfect balance between informal and informative. I look forward to their likes being there again.

Share