Archive for the 'Arts and culture' Category

Prospect reading group goes to town

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on September 4, 2008
in Arts and culture, Books and What we're reading
. 0 Comments

Last summer I introduced the Prospect reading group to these web pages, and started posting regular reports of our discussions. They stopped when I got distracted by illness in November, but now another reading group member, Roger Grimshaw, has filled the gap with this report on a special outing…

“The Hayward Gallery on a Friday night: not the usual setting for our reading group, but August is the time of year when we let our hair down. Some 10 members caught the show ‘Psycho-Buildings’ on the South Bank in London, discussing it in a wine bar afterwards. Two books had been suggested for background reading: Jane Rendell’s Art and Architecture: A place between, and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.

The Rendell book looks at a wide range of recent site-specific art, all stimulated by encounters with places, and discusses the significance of artistic montage and allegory in highlighting the non-obvious. For example, drawings of archaeological rubbish pits scored into the landscaped slabs of a shopping centre may serve to expose historical and contemporary ‘consumerism’.

While many of the works reviewed in the book seem grounded enough, the underlying theory appeared dauntingly abstract and conceptual. Would the Hayward exhibition be as opaque? In the event, the buildings there included a variety of constructions, de-structions and dis-assemblings, each more or less ready to disclose its magic and mystery.

Among the ‘destructive’ pieces was an interior seemingly being blasted into pieces, with the moment held as if in freeze frame by ceiling wires attached to every fragment of wall and furniture. Another consisted of two miniature houses in collision, one Korean and one American in design and content, reflecting a clash of cultures. And there was a savage but realistic interior of walls gouged by holes as if by a giant creature searching for an escape.

The gallery’s exterior was used to display three constructions. A geodesic dome made of plastic towered over us as we entered; the walled flat roof terrace was filled with water to create a boating pool ‘in the sky’; and elsewhere a film theatre, held together by crazy scaffolding, showed art features.

The most conventionally ‘enchanting’ work was by the British  artist Rachel Whiteread, who gave us a whole village of dolls’ houses, cast in darkness, but with each tiny twinkling house lit from inside. There was a charming quality too about walking up a sharply angled aluminium tunnel, lit from an opening above to show a myriad of reflections on its surfaces. A pink staircase made of see-through cloth hinted at the real thing. 

As a group that normally discusses books, we were inevitably attracted to arguments about the role of texts as interpreters of art, whether as simple wall-plaques or as book-length discourses. There was some cynicism about the roles of art criticism and commentary in demanding deference to the work.

Was it possible to draw out the message from some of the artefacts without a textual introduction? In the case of the two houses colliding, for example, it seemed that its cultural meaning might not have come through without a textual guide, even if the extremity of the clash was obvious to the eyes.

On the other hand, how far did the texts matter, if we were prepared to be open to the experience of viewing the works in their actual, challenging state? Did not their materiality and sensuality make us view familiar things in a new light? Was it always necessary to reference the known, or could art not produce new experiences, like imaginative fiction? Was traditional art any less bound up with ideas, as distinct from simple representation?

Our discussion showed clearly, if we hadn’t known it already, that the knowledge and expectations we bring to a work are crucial in determining our responses, although these can be reinterpreted in discussion. The exhibition worked, in that it brought us individual pleasure in one way or another. But it seems that art education – in the sense of explication and clarification – needs more work, if we are to approach exhibitions like this with confidence.” 

Being a patient

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on August 29, 2008
in Arts and culture and Health and medicine
. 7 Comments

This is the second in a series related to my cancer treatment. The aim is to talk about the personal experience of illness in a broadly analytical way. The first posting looked at blood, and how its condition affects our mental state.

This time I am focusing on patienthood. When you have a serious illness, being a patient is a major occupation, and not just because of the time taken up by medical matters – although, god knows your diary commitments, all of them once Very Important, go through a rapid reclassification after diagnosis. Patienthood also involves, potentially, a change in one’s entire take on life.

One reason is that you receive massive exposure to the way doctors think, and they think in a very particular way. This is partly because of their training and specialist knowledge, but it is also simply because medicine is what they do for a living.

The things that make doctors happy are not always the things that the patient thinks of. When I was first diagnosed, doctors were happy that my tumour tested strongly for hormone receptors, because that meant they could throw an extra treatment at it. I was not happy, because I had a freaking tumour.

Doctors think in general categories rather than individual narratives. Naturally they wish the patient well, but other things are driving them. They want a good outcome – as measured against others in their field – so that their own reputation, and that of their hospital, is enhanced. They value skill and craftsmanship. I do not begrudge this. When the ultrasound specialist first spotted my tumour, after another hospital had missed it entirely, a flash of professional pride passed across her face. At one level, she was pleased. And why wouldn’t she be?

It is not just doctors who think a certain way, but medical establishments in general. When you become a patient, you submit to the system with both your mind and body. There has to be a system, of course, or nothing would get done, but when the system is deficient you end up being there for their benefit, rather than the other way around. It is a fine judgment to make, when to submit and when to challenge the system.

The everyday meaning of patient is ‘a person receiving medical treatment’ but as one person commented in a previous posting, its roots are in the Latin pati, to suffer.  A patient is therefore also defined as someone who ’suffers and endures the actions of others’. If you are a patient patient, you do it without complaint. 

The suffering results not just from surgery and medication, but from all kinds of smaller, regular invasions. My own bugbear is the canula: a piece of plumbing inserted into the vein which provides a port into the body’s interior. The insertion is painful and if the first attempt does not succeed, results in multiple bruises. It has an effect on the mind as well as body: the canula harpoons the patient’s private space and signals clearly to the world that one is enduring the actions of others.

There is a lot of information that medical people don’t think to volunteer, and if you don’t ask the right question, you may not get the answer. But you need information to know what questions to ask. So you become informed, using terms unimagined a short time ago. You start to make the same distinctions and comparisons as specialists.

The main change in outlook as a patient is the attitude to risk. I will look at this in the next posting of the series. Meanwhile, feedback is very welcome.

Why blood cells count

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on August 15, 2008
in Arts and culture and Health and medicine
. 9 Comments

This is the first in a series of postings related to my cancer treatment. The aim is to talk about the personal experience of illness in a broadly analytical way.

I am starting with blood: what it is made of, and how that affects our very being.

Blood and its qualities have long served as powerful metaphors for the human condition. And people spend a lot of time putting things into the bloodstream to alter their mental state. In the case of medical treatments, the alterations are less voluntary.

In the case of chemotherapy, you are also taking something away from the blood’s basic composition, rather than adding to it. Chemo works by killing off cells that divide and grow rapidly. This targets cancer but also catches other, more useful, cells like hair and the bone marrow, which produces red and white blood cells. So the patient feels worse during the long treatment, not better.

What is it like to receive a dose of chemo? It is like being in a pool, and someone throws you a boulder. The boulder drags you down into the water, until you shake free and float back up to the surface. In the body, the chemicals feel heavy, like an unmoved meal. They are heavy – body weight goes up by several kilos immediately after a dose, before coming down again a day or two later. 

Medicine worries a good deal about the effect of chemo on the body; specifically about the blood cell count, because a deficiency in red cells causes anaemia, and in white cells leaves you vulnerable to infection. Medicine doesn’t worry so much about the effect on the mind. (The mind, that is, as a complex process of thought and feeling, rather than a disembodied, Cartesian object.) But even when there is no physical emergency, the lack of white cells has an impact. Without those cells, you literally have no ‘fight’; no defence against a threat to existence. And this state exists at the level of feelings, not just as a physical fact.

At the lowest point in the chemo dose’s three-week cycle, it feels humanly hard to go on living. Not because you are depressed, but because you lack the basic bodily ingredients, which we otherwise take for granted, that make living possible. And in a long course of treatment this happens not just once but over and over again, leading to an accumulated feeling of precariousness. It is this specific effect, I believe, that makes chemotherapy the dreadful experience that everyone acknowledges it to be.

Future postings will look at the business of being a ‘patient’; attitudes to risk and mortality; and the impact of serious illness on our relations with others.

Any feedback on these themes, or any others that you think I should consider, is very welcome.

Reports from the cell face

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on July 20, 2008
in Arts and culture and Health and medicine
. 3 Comments

Back in April, I posted something here about the unexpected depilatory effects of chemotherapy, and asked readers if they thought there was a place for the personal in the Prospect blog. More generally, I asked, what makes writing about illness interesting to others?

The response was encouraging, both on the comments board and in private messages. To sum up, people appreciate having a clear description of things that don’t usually get noticed – sheer reporting from the cell face – and a level of analysis that can connect the particular to the general.

I started scoping out some themes right away for a series of postings, but got distracted by treatment and other major life difficulties. Now I am back. The aim is to find a language to talk about the body that is neither personal nor impersonal. It’s about a particular experience, but not “my story” in narrative. That old literary form, the personal essay, delivered by blog.

The first in the series will focus on blood: how the composition of what is flowing through our veins can affect the mind, and our existence generally.

Others will look at being a “patient”; the way one learns to assess risk and mortality; and the impact of serious illness on our relations with other people.

Any feedback on these themes, or indeed others that you think I should consider, is very welcome.

 

Saudi Sinatra rocks the casbah

Published
by
John Kelly
on July 7, 2008
in Arts and culture and Middle east
. 1 Comment

The 10,000 crowd at the Fez festival of world sacred music were ecstatic—some literally so—when Mohamed Abdou (left) took centre stage on 15th June. The Saudi Sinatra is virtually unknown in the west, but in the middle east he is a multimillion-selling superstar. Backed by the magnificent syncopated strings of Abderarahim Mountassir, with a full mixed choir and desert percussion, the white-robed crooner rocked the casbah, or, more accurately, the magnificent gates of Bab Makina, surely one of the world’s most exotic venues, with a selection of hits old and new. His repertoire deals poetically with the poetry of the desert, sand, night and palms, but mostly Allah.

Non-believers were thin on the ground, perhaps because the event was unhelpfully billed as “Monotonous Chants of Heijaz,” but Prospect contributor and world music expert Joe Boyd and myself were converted. File under “you had to be there,” but George W needs to know that Islam has some of the best tunes.

My “Glastonbury moment”

Published
by
Will Daunt
on July 2, 2008
in Arts and culture
. 0 Comments

This year’s Glastonbury reminded me why I first fell in love with the festival. I have been one of the faithful, having slogged my way through the last five Glastonburys, even declaring 2007’s Helm’s Deep of slush and sewage to be a success. But this year was faultless. The intricacies of on-site weather meant that Thursday’s downpour was in fact a blessing, preventing the site turning into a dustball in the ensuing three days of sunshine. Jay-Z was predictably brilliant. Neil Diamond was unpredictably brilliant.

But there was more to the experience than enjoying good weather and seeing good acts. For this year, I was one of those acts. Having played in bands since I was 18, I was asked to fill out a friend’s alt–country/folk outfit. We were due to play the Park stage at 11am on Friday, a small beer tent later that evening, then an even smaller green tea trading tent in the healing fields on Saturday afternoon. The first of the three gigs was great—four or five hundred people sitting down, enjoying breakfast, then kindly standing for an ovation, of sorts. The other two were fun, relatively low key, and pleasantly experienced through the warm fuzz of organic cider.

But the most intriguing thing about playing at Glastonbury is the strangely relaxed perspective it grants. A combination of soundchecks and gear-lugging means that instead of the endless walking involved in being a punter, racing from stage to stage, you’re coerced into drinking with a bearded sound engineer who has worked at the tiny tea tent every year for the past 15, and who in all that time has never even seen the Pyramid stage. Our gig in the healing fields, an area devoted almost entirely to alternative medicine, was watched by no more than 30 people, all of them happily drinking herbal tea. Yet, when we finished, the proprietor of the bar forced a plate of lentil curry in our hands, leaving me with the feeling that I had had a definitive “Glastonbury moment.”

Of course, I’m not suggesting that such experiences are reserved for the likes of Jack White and Amy Winehouse, just as I am in now way comparing my own foray onto the stage with theirs. It’s merely that in previous years I have been guilty of wanting to ‘make the most’ of the festival, by squeezing in as many bands as possible. This year I saw fewer than ever, and at the risk of sounding like an old hippie, experienced more than ever. And the backstage toilets were clean. Let’s not forget that.

The pendulum

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on June 13, 2008
in Arts and culture
. 2 Comments

Catch it while you can: Prospect contributor Alexander Fiske-Harrison can be found at the Jermyn Street Theatre until the end of this month starring in his new play The Pendulum. A historical drama set in 1900s Vienna, Fiske-Harrison takes the lead as one lieutenant Friedrich von Leiben, a soldier whose marriage to a young artist of Jewish ancestry is threatened by a climate of increasing suspicion and prejudice, as well as by his own jealousy.

The play has received good notices thus far, although there have also been some slightly consternated notes struck about how “relevant” its tale is to the present day. The Guardian, for example, muses that “if there are contemporary parallels, they are not obvious.” It’s a question the author may well be glad people are struggling to answer. As he put it to me:

I wanted to write something better than the drear recycled themes parading themselves as relevance so that I could act in something with some genuine drama. “Blood and sperm on the stage, darling,” as someone once said to me.

What with press deadlines, I haven’t made it to Jermyn Street yet myself, but I’m looking forward to a slice of modern drama that won’t include soliloquies which could have been taken from the leader pages of the Independent. Although I hope the author has been restrained enough to interpret his interlocutor’s advice figuratively…

In praise of Jay-Z

Published
by
Will Daunt
on June 2, 2008
in Arts and culture
. 0 Comments

After the promotional giant Mean Fiddler took over organisation of the Glastonbury festival in 2004, cynics argued that the move was symbolic of the demise of music festivals in general: once a bastion of anti-establishment sentiment, Glastonbury had become complacent, corporate and disingenuous. The fact that Glastonbury’s organiser, Michael Eavis (now succeeded by his daughter Emily), pioneered the very concept of a music festival has, if anything, worked against him. How could a man responsible for capturing so much revolutionary spirit concede to the pressures of sponsorship and security? Critics branded the new Glastonbury as an overpriced, cocaine-fuelled blowout for thirtysomething media types, proclaiming its originality while slipping into bland homogeneity.

So Emily Eavis’s decision this year to book rapper Jay-Z as the Saturday night headliner should have been greeted with the respect such progression deserves. For me, the most enjoyable part of Glastonbury has always been the sense of discovery and surprise which wandering around the site grants you. Avoid the main stages and you’ll come across anything from a capella hip hop to comedy groups. By booking Jay-Z, Eavis junior has extended that element of surprise, displaying the type of innovation that made Glastonbury famous in the first place. Yet many commentators have blamed the Jay-Z booking for the festival’s sluggish ticket sales—they’re still available a month and half after going on sale, compared with last year when they sold out in an hour and a half.

Continue reading ‘In praise of Jay-Z’

The pigs of Hay

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on May 29, 2008
in Arts and culture and Books
. 0 Comments

Some delightful blogging from comic author and sometime musician Julian Gough at the Hay festival, in which he reports on his (successful) mission to steal Will Self’s pig in protest at a literary prize seemingly determined before the announcement of its shortlist. The video alone makes essential viewing, as much for the dapper cut of its protagonist’s suit as any porcine poaching. But should we credit Gough’s impressively well-documented claims? According to the Times, festival organizers have reported that “Will Self’s pig is safe and secure in a secret location”—although the Telegraph blog contents itself with noting that “this is almost certainly the world’s first literary prize pig ransom video.” I have my doubts. Then again, the very prospect of trying to move a pig against its will strikes terror into me.

This is probably because Hay is the location of my own worst ever pig experience. During an extremely damp walking tour of the Brecon Beacons last year, I found myself strolling beside a farmyard, and paused to admire a couple of piglets playing in a pen. At this point, their mother—a sow of similar dimensions to an adolescent hippopotamus—lumbered into view and began to take a keen interest in my presence. I backed off along the path, in response to which the sow lowered her head, inserted it beneath a large steel five-bar gate, wrenched said gate off its hinges with a flick of her neck, and began to charge towards me. Suddenly recalling some kind of nature programme in which a farmer had boasted that pig-bites are among the most painful wounds known to man, I hurled myself over a fence into a small river, where I remained for some time.

Will Self may have had a lucky escape.

Movies made me

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on May 27, 2008
in Arts and culture and Inside Prospect
. 4 Comments

Since its birth just over a century ago, cinema has perhaps changed the way we see the world, and ourselves within it, more than any other art. In his essay this month, Prospect’s film columnist Mark Cousins takes a long look at what cinema has meant to him throughout his life, and the innumerable ways in which it touches our society.

Movies, Cousins argues, shape our aspirations and desires. We live through them, we seek structures and emblems for our lives within them; and—as with all art—we are challenged and jarred by their friction with the world. Most movies aren’t great art, of course; and much movie-making is about money, plain and simple. But, as Cousins traces the course of his own cinephilia, he finds that film does matter; and that, throughout its mixed, imperfect lifetime, it has dramatised certain kinds of human hope and struggle as nothing else has managed.

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