Don't marry her...

Camille Claudel is, to my eyes, a far better sculptor and greater artist than Auguste Rodin; her work is consistently warmer, more imbued with emotion, more genuinely passionate. That she is less celebrated is partly a result of the breakdown and subsequent incarceration which cut short her career in middle age, partly the perennial problem of female artists being consistently written out of art history by a male establishment.

A very good and thought provoking recent lecture, in which the mutually dependent/destructive symbiotic/antagonistic artistic relation between the two was the focus, has had me mentally revisiting their work and the interaction which it displays. A meandering journey which brought me to Claudel’s L’Age mûr and paused there.

L’Age mûr is usually seen as a despairing autobiographic public cri de coeur in the face of Rodin’s refusal to leave his lifelong partner Rose Beuret. In this interpretation, the elderly woman at camera left is the implacable fate Clotho (representing Beuret) leading the unresisting central male figure (Rodin) away from life in the form of his younger lover (Claudel) who pleads on her knees at camera right.

Looking at the sculpture today, it suddenly merges in my mind with the lyrics of a song: an equally passionate and doomed cry of anguish from a lover who also finds that she cannot use youth and flesh to overturn more compelling loyalties.

The song is Don't marry her, sung by The Beautiful South. There are two slightly different versions, the original release and a later radio edit which (this being a family show, and since either would equally do for my present purposes) I've decided to choose here:

Think of you with pipe and slippers
Think of her in bed
Lying there just watching telly
Think of me instead

I'll never grow so old and flabby
That could never be
Don't marry her, have me...

Melded together, as they now are, sculpture and song both appear to me in a sadder and kinder light.

Of course there's nothing unique in this context about these two particular pieces; it just happened that way. I could equally well, perhaps, have alighted on Tracey Emin's Everyone I have ever slept with 1963–1995 tent and Alanis Morissette's You oughta know...)

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• Paul Heaton and Dave Rotheray, Don't marry her. 1996 (quoted radio edit: 2002)

Easy Ryder

I've always liked and admired SophieRyder's work – both artistically and polemically (she is one of the few who successfully pull off that combination without selling one of them short).

And children are usually intrigued by her playfully tactile incorporation of recognisable industrial detritus into organic forms (for instance, her frequent use of chain to represent spinal structure).

Seeing this child (click for a larger view) nestle so happily and naturally into The minotaur and the hare, though, is a new thing to me – seeming to simultaneously enrich, clarify and validate Ryder's vision.

Shades of Mona

Though I am generally pretty black and white in my attitude to most military conflicts, the aerial interdiction of Libyan government forces attacking secessionist populations is a different case. Here are endless shades of grey.

It was in that frame of mind that I made an unscheduled visit to the Imperial War Museum in Manchester ... a place about which I am also ambivalent.

Leaving behind the displays, I walked up the enclosed concrete stairs of the AirShard and along the bridge for its view out over Salford Quays.

The bridge brought me, vividly but in appropriately monochrome tones, to thoughts of Mona Hatoun's sculptural installation work.

Ai Weiwei

I, the sculptor, am the landscape

From Barbara Hepworth's autobiography:

“All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures.

Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the form.

Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of fulnesses and concavities, through hollows and over peaks feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and hand and eye. The sensation has never left me.

I, the sculptor, am the landscape.”

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• Barbara Hepworth, Barbara Hepworth : a pictorial autobiography (ed: Anthony Adams). 1978, Bradford-on-Avon: Moonraker Press. 0239001796. [Republished 1985, London: Tate Gallery. 0946590338]

Crucible: Waiting for Godot

Not writing for a time doesn't stop the mind composing, and filing away, things which it would like to write. So it is with my recent fallow silence: there are several bits and pieces which half formed and now itch to be written down. This is the first to scratch its itch.

Gloucester cathedral, a while ago, hosted Crucible, a major exhibition of sculpture. I've heard a multitude of views from religious believers (friends, colleagues, acquaintances, chance encountered strangers), for an against and everything between, of which one was that a cathedral is not an appropriate venue for this work. Not for art, or sculpture, in particular: for this particular set of sculptures, or at least for some of them*.

For myself, both the work and the location impressed me greatly. Several trains of thought were triggered, some of them (despite my unrepentant and unreconstructed atheism) inevitably to do with religion and, for the most part, favourably so. I'll tease those out gradually, but will just kick off with one of them.

The photograph here shows a piece called Waiting for Godot, by Marc Quinn. As a nonbeliever I find it sublimely witty, and as I watched other visitors the most common reaction was laughter. More important, though: as a nonbeliever I was impressed by its presence, by the demonstration of both tolerance and willingness of believers to take a joke. I can't imagine a better piece of positive PR for religion.

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* The most extreme view I've heard was "there is not one single exhibit here that should ever have been allowed inside a house of God". To be fair, though, I've heard just as many voices expressing approval.