Steep Holm diary

Wind force 0, no cloud, 28°C, brassy sea.
(For notes on the Steep Holm diary, click here)

Lute

I enjoy polymaths. They don't have to be world straddling Leonardo da Vinci figures; the only important attribute is an eager interest in a breadth of things. I'm fortunate in knowing several. Four of them have blogs which interact from time to time with this one. I ran into one yesterday and spent an enjoyable couple of hours feeding when I should have been doing other things.

And to another I sat and listened for an hour today.

Eric Franklin is nominally a chemist, and an infectiously enthusiastic one, but with a range of other passions from ferrets to early music. Today grew from the latter: he took an audience through a history of the lute music. The journey was delivered in three simultaneous, interweaving strands: commentary, document, and music played on a series of instruments appropriate to each period and built at home.

Fifty years ago, Miss Norville (primary school teacher) told me that Greensleeves was written by King Henry VIII. Yesterday, Eric disillusioned me; it was, apparently, written decades later.

The photograph was not taken yesterday. It's from the week when I first encountered Eric, four years ago, and has been lifted from the Artist at work project.

The obstacle race

It's with very great pleasure that I see Ray Girvan at JSBlog highlighting the blatant marginalisation of women in western art history. Writing this on the wing, I have neither the reliability nor the bandwidth to follow his link immediately but will do so later when opportunity permits.

When I recently muttered about the “great man theory” of history popping up everywhere, including popular music, I received several emails gently suggesting that such and such person had been a turning point. Putting aside the distinctions between being, or marking, or representing a historical point of inflexion, I think some of these correspondents felt that I was devaluing the influence which an iconic individual had upon them. Nothing could be further from my intent. I cannot agree that Janis Joplin (for example) or Joan Armatrading (to take another) changed the course of music; but both of them certainly influenced me greatly, becoming the vector through which the spirit of the time acted upon me, and my life would be different today if I had not heard each at a particular place and time.

As I've mentioned before, an early siren calling me into the arts was Elisabeth Louise Vigée-le-Brun. In exactly the same way, I would never say that she changed the world: but she is a hero to me, and her Countess Golovin wrought a crucial change in my life. How I chanced across her in the early nineteen sixties I don't know. Certainly I never encountered any other women on the painter's side of the canvas in any of my subsequent art history consumption until I met my (now ex) wife (a passionate painter, sculptor, historian and feminist) a decade and a half later. At that later point I was suddenly introduced in a single exhilarating rush to the work of Sofonisba Anguissola, Paula Modersöhn-Becker, Rosa Bonheur, Suzanne Valadon, Käthe Kollwitz, Gwen John, Artemisia Gentileschi ("the magnificent exception" of Germaine Greer's The obstacle race , a few years later), Kay Sage, Natalya Goronchova, Mary Beale, Françoise Duparc, Mary Cassatt...

As Ray says, the restitution is still only partial. Many of those women artists are head and shoulders above the male contemporaries who have eclipsed them. That Gentileschi's astonishing work should for centuries have been attributed to her pedestrian father Orazio is laughable. I recently won and easy bet because an art historian I know (and, in general, deeply respect) refused to believe that a Judith slaying Holofernes was by Gentileschi and not Caravaggio (teaching and received wisdom are very effective blinkers; once persuaded, he willingly agreed that Gentilieschi's rendition was infinitely more powerful tahan Caravaggo's, and he didn't know why he'd never seen that they couldn't be from the same hand). Women artists are still not represented in art school or university art history curricula in anything like proportion to their number. Few people, watching Night at the museum 2 or visiting the US Capitol Rotunda, when asked to guess who produced the massive statue of Abraham Lincoln (the work of a teenaged Vinnie Ream Hoxie) come up with s female name.

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• Germaine Greer, The obstacle race : the fortunes of women painters and their work. 1979, London: Secker and Warburg. 043618799X

The bad lieutenant as crucifixion myth

One of the blogs which hadn't floated to the top of my “other voices” sidebar for a while is Simon says, which yesterday popped into view with a live event notification. Simon says is the low key window onto a quiet but very interesting person: Simon Taylor, "a human being, a father, a husband, a Christan, a priest and a theologian (in something like that order)", whom I met through an education day responding to the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004. As I've said several times before: being an atheist myself doesn't mean I can't recognise a good person or good mind in believer's clothing.

Having been alerted by appearance of Simon says at the most recent update position in the list, and having popped over there t see what what had been added, I followed an article link. Since the article is dated more than six years ago, I am obviously very slow off the mark ... but hey, better late than never.

Every major society on earth, however secular it may be, is shaped by its history and, thus, by its religions/mythologies (take your pick, according to your viewpoint). In the case of western Europe and its new world descendants that means the abrahamic religions in general, christianity in particular, with the crucifixion as a central dominant image. Simon Taylor's examination of the film The bad lieutenant, from his theological perspective, though the crucifixion metaphor, is fascinating reading regardless of where you stand on belief.

As Unreal Nature often rightly points out, disagreement stimulates us to think; Simon Taylor always delivers on stimulation, and this example is (however belatedly) no exception.

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• Simon J Taylor, “It all happens here: locating salvation in Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutentant”, in The journal of religion and film, April 2003, vol 7, no 1. University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Portrait of the artist to be

I always go to, and always enjoy, student shows. The level doesn't matter: degree shows, primary school shows in the local library, or anything in between. Whatever it produces, whether or not the product is to my taste, new vision is always exhilarating – as is interacting with the still fresh passion of those who have created the work.

Three times this past week, though, I went back to one of the most stimulating show I've ever seen. It's not in a big art school, it's in a further education college (for US readers, an institution spanning many functions of senior high school, community college and two year university). And I don't just mean one of the most stimulating student shows, either; it was an experience not to be found in the most spectacular big name, big national gallery exhibition. That sound hyperbolic, but I stand by it.

I have no connection to the college, I neither teach there nor know the students, so I could be relaxed and impartial, just enjoying the work for its own sake. The work itself, across the range, was without exception well worth seeing and in many cases truly superb. And, unusually, all of the college's art students from all courses were exhibiting at the same time on the same site. many rooms, on two floors, but one big show. Walking through the corridors and adjoining spaces took in a range from sixteen year olds on post GCSE courses to mature students finishing foundation degrees, from graphic design and illustration through fashion design, video production, photography, to fine art painting and sculpture. That was really the factor that finally made it so exceptional: the opportunity to see all of that variety, all of that range, that contrast between different ways of seeing and different levels of experience, in one place at one time.

Something which you'll frequently find at a student show, but rarely at the exhibition of work by established artists, is access to the development and research journals. These contain all the sketching, thinking, false turns, research, ideas, explorations, which led to and away from and around about the final piece shown on the wall. Very often, the most interesting work is that supported by the most detailed development work. I spent a lot of time at this show looking through the supporting material, again made all the more interesting for being represented at a variety of levels.

I'm tempted to mention particular names to whose work I kept returning, but that would be invidious. I couldn't possibly choose a favourite piece of work, or even a top ten. And if I did, it would be unfair to the rest who are no less talented or exciting for not corresponding to my own leanings. Instead, I've plucked out examples at random and without identifying them.

Another "great man" joins the throng

Though I always tend to think of it in a politicoeconomic context, the "great man" theory of history is a tough weed which can grow anywhere. One might think, from many accounts, that there would be no calculus without Newton, evolution without Darwin. Despite my admiration for the achievements of those figures, I doubt that their fields would have withered on the vine if they had not been born ... someone else, or several someone elses, would have come along. Leibniz, in fact did come along in the case of calculus; Russell for evolution; but even they were not necessary. The development of ideas had in each case reached the point where it was inevitable that calculus and and a theory of evolution would sooner or later emerge.

So it is in western popular music. I grew upon the myth that Elvis Presley had single handedly taken it by the throat and dragged it into a track where it wouldn't otherwise have gone. Later, the Beatles gained the same mythic status. Don Mclean dubbed Buddy Holly's death "the day the music died". I have no feelings one way or another about Presley or Holly; I enjoyed McLean's song, and was a Beatles fan in my day; but all of them rode a wave of the time rather than creating it.

Now, with the death of Michael Jackson, we repeatedly (five times in half an hour, yesterday evening) hear an American fan describe this too as "the day the music died". Not having ever been much affected by his work, I'm in no position to judge whether he was as great as everyone is saying he was; but I can see that he is already being installed as the latest "great man", and being credited with the same single handed paradigm shifting status. While rejecting that mythologising, I hope that he is remembered for his music (whatever its quality) and not for the freak show media circus around his life and lifestyle.

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• Don McLean, American Pie, 1971

Murder is murder

In the UK, there is shocked news comment at emergence into the public domain of a document suggesting that in 1944 a chemical warfare attack on Tokyo's civilian population was considered.

A chemical attack on civilians certainly is, to me, a shocking intent in principle ... but I'm bemused at the idea that its consideration was shocking in view of the subsequent nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saturation conventional bombing of Tokyo, the "thousand bomber raids", the firebombing of Dresden, cold war ICBM targeting of Soviet Bloc cities, Eisenhower's willingness to consider an all out preëmptive nuclear attack on Russia in the early 1950s, napalm attacks on Vietnamese villages ... I do not find the willingness to do, or to consider, any of those things less shocking. To wage total war on civilian populations is shocking in itself; once it has been considered, the mechanisms are secondary.

If I were dying of massive nuclear or chemical burns, would I consider this somehow "better" than dying of chemical poisoning? I can't imagine so. Is the cold blooded consideration of practicalities involved in poisoning me somehow worse than the equally cold blooded consideration of practicalities involved in burning me? I can't manage to think so.

Once human beings have crossed the Rubicon of considering mass murder, nothing thereafter considered by way of means is particularly surprising. Our tendency to sit wilfully oblivious amidst unimaginable cruelty and agonise over one or two of its particular modalities is sickening sentimentality.

Surfer 9

It’s nearly seven years since I last reviewed Surfer, from Golden Software. Not from neglect, but because this is the first full digit version upgrade (from 8 to 9) which Golden have released in that time. Even seven years in, however, Surfer 8 was a finely tuned tool for its purpose; upgrade to 9 makes it even more so. [more...]

EndNote X3

EndNote goes from strength to strength, its development over recent releases consistent, restrained, and impressive ... You think that a product has reached the limit of its niche, and can’t get any better; but then it quietly does. [more...]

News on Jim Putnam

Jim has provided his own update, and so this post has been taken down.