White Noise

A ratty day in racy London can be a tremendous sensual experience. Just stand at the exit of Oxford Circus underground and let passengers pass you by, elbowing their way out while treading on your feet. Smell the stifling air in the narrow “Piss alley” between Market Place and Margaret street. Or venture onto Euston road and listen to the formidable roar made by tourist buses and trucks mixing with the sirens of ambulances and police cars. Even Bill Fontana’s White Noise – An Urban Seascape, conveyed by a dozen loudspeakers dotted outside the Welcome Collection building, cannot drown it out.  A recording of the sea at Chesil Beach is being transmitted live onto the pavement, drawing attention to the droning traffic by juxtaposing it with the rolling sound of the seashore. Few passers-by notice the trick, however. They look up, slightly puzzled, above the entrance of the Welcome Trust and walk by. I stand under the shower of noise, pebbles rattle in the water, waves hit the ground in guttural fracas, beeping taxis overtake each other. I let my eyes and ears shuffle back and forth, from the natural soundscape to the polluted road. The pink and orange hues of the evening act like a filter to the vibrating soundscape, which has become more palpable than ever. A remake of Sound Island in Paris, over 15 years ago. Another variation of Fontana’s classic ‘sound sculptures’ with water as its core element.

White Noise – An Urban Seascape, Welcome Collection.

Hand Made Tales – an in-sight into domestic art

In recent years there has been an increasing number of exhibitions devoted to craft objects in art galleries and museums, blurring the traditional distinctions between fine art and craft. Last year’s V&A’s ‘Quilts: 1700 – 2010’ exhibition unveiled magical stories behind the craft of quilt-making – the Rajah quilt was one of the highlights, made in 1841 by women convicts aboard the HMS Rajah as they were being transported to Tasmania. The current exhibition at the Women’s Library looks at domestic craft made in Britain in the last century or so and brings some hidden personal gems into the cultural limelight. After 40 years of feminism and the deliberate revival of needlework and watercolour in popular culture and contemporary art, dress-making and gardening are still viewed as having no or little cultural value. Why have homemakers been denied socio-cultural agency? Their activities throughout history have been an essential part of maintaining survival and enabling production. Why, then, is their work rarely valued or appreciated? What is the role of domestic creativity? The Women’s Library’s exhibition puts these questions on the kitchen table.

Hand Made Tales – a take on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, starts with a selection of books displaying the esoteric culture of craft and housewifery, from The Happy Home Good Housekeeping Institute (1955) to Amy Spencer’s The Crafter Culture Handbook (2007). Housewife by Ann Oakley (1974) is credited for having taken women out of their obscurity and revealed the full extent of their vacuous and unhappy existence in a patriarchal system. Recognising that ‘femininity can be a pseudonym for many forms of chronic insecurity’ and stating that ‘housework is work directly opposed to the possibility of human self-actualization’, the book is still relevant today for professional women reaching the glass ceiling, the debates around the remuneration of domestic work or the search for home/work life balance. At the other end of the spectrum is The Gentle Art of Domesticity (2007) by Jane Brocket. Described as ‘an eccentric delight’ by the Evening Standard, Brocket’s middle-class home is the hyper-feminine equivalent of the garden of Facteur Cheval.

A full wall of the exhibition is reserved to the craft of dress-making, lace-making, crochet and quilting by non-professional women throughout the 20th century. One of the beautiful garments on display is the hand-woven linen dress made by Edith Dawson for her daughter in 1917. As well as being a homemaker, Dawson was a water-colourist, writer and Art & Craft enamellist. Also made for her daughter c.1945 is a stunning viscose coat dress by Irma Cocco, the wife of a shoe repairer. Education and inspiration for a younger generation of women was high on homemakers’ book. One of the objects I found most interesting is a manual entitled Constructive and Decorative Stitchery (1923) by Glasier Foster, who aimed to inspire learners of the stitchery craft at school and at home. Showing knowledge of the Art & Craft movement and other early 20th century artistic developments, Glaser wanted to place stitchery as a ‘distinct and distinguished branch of the arts’. She writes that ‘all really and true beautiful work expresses the worker’s delight in what he [sic] is trying to express in Nature’. Art historian Alois Riegl attempted to valorise design in 1900’s Vienna arguing that geometric design is part of a whole aesthetic feeling about one’s relationship to nature and that forms and styles make explicit the inner value of one’s time and society. Glaser extends Riegl’s ‘will to create’ to the private sphere – placing the domestic worker’s self-expression on a par with that of the professional artist.

There is a great display of homemaker’s tools, one of ‘the areas less scrutinised in the craft tradition’. Framed in polished wood cabinets the rakes, spades and clippers and the preserving pans gain a hint of the distant aura of the art object but never lose their sense of purpose. If the earlier pieces of crochet, quilt and dress already belong to a distant past, taking on the status of cabinet curiosities, there is a homely, uncanny presence around the displays of pots and tools. My mother had an immense flower and vegetable garden and my summer days were filled with the sounds of her watering and pottering around. Although I complained about the chores of collecting greens or writing the labels on the preserve jars, there was a wonderful sense of serenity floating in the house at gardening time. My mother used to imitate the calls of birds so well that I would often stop in my tracks and listen to her talking to them. Such moments of intimacy came flooding at the view of an old pair of rusty secateurs. There is a note by Alice Walker above one of the displays that says: ‘I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible – except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have.’ There is little more fundamentally creative than tending flowers and fruits – the connection with nature, the caring of plants and trees, the collecting and distributing around friends and family, the gift of health and beauty, the joy of homemade cooking. Priceless work, yet denied value in our modern socio-economic reality. Instead we re-invent creativity to suit our contemporary souls and market logic, craving recognition as ‘creative types’ in the media industry and rushing into flower arrangement or printmaking classes to lift up the weight of alienation and find a channel to express our true selves. If the primary function of art is to induce and inspire the viewer/reader/listener into a reflection upon the self and society, then the professional and domestic crafts have much to offer in this area.

The last part of the exhibition is dedicated to what professor Lou Taylor calls the ‘secret expressions of self’ – the making of items towards a social or political cause that is closely related to the maker and privately consumed. The grave of Taylor’s great grandmother, a Polish and Jewish woman, was destroyed by the nazi in 1942, the year Taylor was born in England. In her honour, she made a colourful, poignant embroidery with tree branches over her grave intertwining with the words ‘Let her soul be tied to the knot of life’. Other pieces on display are an embroidered collar by Emmeline Pankhurst, made for a women’s demonstration around 1909, and a witty piece of crochet saying ‘good girl’ by Katy Deepwell, the editor of the contemporary feminist art journal n.paradoxa, subverting the domestic-as-docile dimension of craft. Those powerful expressions of self cross the line of what has been traditionally viewed as the role of domestic craft – to help make ends meet or as useful distraction for the enjoyment of the whole family.

From its early days, the feminist art movement started questioning the strict division between fine art and craft and the effects that it had exerted over female creativity. Feminist artists such as Faith Ringgold, Miriam Schapiro and Harmony Hammond, incorporated craft materials such as fiber and cloth into their work invoking domestic and feminine associations, calling attention to the long-overlooked labour of women in art traditions that are no less worthy of attention than the fine arts of painting and sculpture. Exhibitions such as ‘Deliberate Entanglements’ in the Los Angeles Gallery in 1971 or ‘Ten Approaches to the Decorative’, the first show of the Pattern and Decoration Movement in 1976 in New York, established a context for feminism to challenge the way art history honoured certain materials and processes instead of others. More recently the domestic crafts such as knitting gained popularity among feminist activists, partly influenced by third-wave feminism’s DIY and networking practices and by the success of such books as Debbie Stoller Stitch’n Bitch: The Knitters Handbook (2003). Stoller values the craft of knitting as a feminist act in itself believing that the denigration of knitting correlates directly with that of a traditionally women-centred activity. This type of reclamation, known as ‘craftivism’, has faced scrutiny from those who argue that the celebration of the domestic arts is neither politically effective nor feminist, and it is all but a trend that supports individualistic, apolitical consumerism ignoring the realities and history of domestic labour. More generally, critics have questioned appropriations that are a-historical and transcultural and thus standardise a practice without regards to its specific origins and meanings. Some feminists also believe that the valorising of craft risks perpetuating it as an alternative ‘woman’s tradition’ and undermines the wider, encompassing purpose of feminism and feminist values.

The curators of Hand Made Tales made it clear that they were aware of the critiques towards such revival practice. Perhaps as a result, the show seems less about reclaiming the domestic arts than reconsidering the role of craft and the values it created for women. The finely crafted objects, books and photographs displayed in the exhibition unthreads personal stories and personalities – not the public face of personalities, nor the private life of known artists or celebrities, but our mother’s and grandmother’s intimate thoughts, hopes and desires crocheted in a shirt or a journal’s quote. It uncovers homely routines, personal struggles and successes. It activates memories and lost connections, causing people to look at domestic life and work differently and to reflect upon the depths of daily rituals.

Bronzino rescued from Limbo

Last week I made a pilgrimage to Florence to view, church by church, the Renaissance chefs-d’oeuvre I had read about in the course of my studies and unashamedly forgotten about. It was also the last chance to see Bronzino’s first ever retrospective as a ‘painter and poet of the court of the Medici’ at the Strozzi Palace. The show generated a flurry of scholarly and less scholarly reviews about this said second-class High Renaissance artist who, although praised by Vasari and his contemporaries, had been dismissed for centuries for his wayward painterly ways and, even during his second ‘renaissance’ in the 20th century, was never given the chance to measure himself against the other grand masters of the period.

In 1527, Rome was about to be ransacked by Charles V, the Medici expelled from Florence and the Catholics to further counter-attack against the Reformers. Shuffled through these social and economic upheavals, art moved away from the classical ideals and equilibrium of the Renaissance to a new style, which Luigi Lanzi would identify as ‘Mannerism’ in 1872 and which would develop throughout the 16th century in Italy and Europe. The maniera moderna of the great Renaissance masters was emulated so as to create a style awkwardly strange and artificial as if removed from reality. The classical contrapposto was so exaggerated that figures look languid and overly sensual. Naked or clothed in tight garments, the bodies revealed their forms – as if airbrushed in a sleek-and-smooth fashion, they looked like shiny, rose-tinted porcelain. The cold light used by Mannerists and their juxtaposing of colours such as purple, apple green and orange also enhanced the weirdness and mystical aura of the paintings. Pontormo’s Deposition is probably the quirkiest and most baffling Renaissance altarpiece I had the chance to scrutinise, my head in between the railings surrounding the Capponi chapel in Santa Felicita. In this painting, there is no cross, no tomb, the figures seem to be floating above the ground – their intertwining and contorted bodies create a nervous agitation in the composition, reflecting the intense emotionality of the subject matter. Three of the four tondi in the corners of the chapel, representing the four Evangelists, are attributed to Pontormo’s pupil, Bronzino – one of them is particularly puzzling, his head leaning out of the picture, an arm squashing an angel and his wide eyes starring intensely into mine. His golden curls, luscious mouth and distraught expression are similar to the features of the crouching figure in the Pontormo’s Deposition altarpiece. Although copies of the three tondi were exhibited at the Strozzi Palace, the crowds prevented me from approaching them and I had to move on with just a hint of exasperation. This will be my main criticism of the exhibition – the swarming of groups with impossibly loud Italian guides following me around and shouting in my ears, denying me the pleasure of contemplation (the other criticism goes towards the London National Gallery which didn’t lend the fantastic Allegory with Cupid and Venus to the Strozzi).

Among Bronzino’s court portraits were delicious discoveries such as the Portrait of a Woman (Matteo Soferoni’s Daughter?) whose relatively mature (she is probably less than 30) and irregular features had none of the frozen looks associated with his style of portraiture such as the impassive Eleonora de Toledo or the beautiful but cold Lucrecia Panciatichi. The Portrait of Guidobaldo II della Rovere also moved me – or rather, the bottom half of the portrait which includes the magnificent head of a white Labrador next to the prominent orange codpiece emphasizing the power and virility of the great military leader. Beside these stunning portraits, the painting which gave me the most pleasure was Resurrection – an overt celebration of flesh, I found the body of Christ particularly attractive, and the two teenage boys with angelic faces flanked by his sides a rather sexy pair. Unfortunately, this was also the view of his contemporary critics who found them too ‘lewd’ for a public altarpiece (but appropriate enough for smaller, devotional paintings). The fabric of the soldier’s uniform on the right is so thin it reveals every muscle and twist of his formidable back and the full roundness of his buttocks. Another man lying at the bottom clearly couldn’t take the ecstasy of the vision and lost both his consciousness and sense of modesty.

The painting that attracted the strongest opprobrium, during and after Bronzino’s days, was the Descent of Christ into Limbo (1552), which I stumbled upon in the Refectory of Santa Croce. Like the Resurrection, its huge scale (about 4.5 x 3m) and mass of intertwined semi-naked beauties makes for a great show. It is the naturalist portraiture, which Bronzino included in his religious paintings that aroused criticism. Among the contemporary Florentines he portrayed in Descent into Limbo, he daringly included two great beauties of the day that he clothed in transparent veils and little more – a practice that religious extremist Savonarola condemned as an ‘insult to God’ in his Lentens sermon in 1496. This was backed up by the Council of Trent in 1563.

Countless criticism against the painter’s lascivious poses and inappropriate nudity were recorded thereafter, the most vigorous of them being voiced by – you guessed it – 19th century Victorian prudes of the likes of John Ruskin. The French didn’t mind so much. Stendhal wrote in his diary that, after seeing the painting for the first time in 1811, ‘je fus touché jusqu’aux larmes… je n’ai jamais rien vu de si beau’ et ‘la peinture ne m’a jamais donné autant de plaisir’ (‘Painting has never given me so much pleasure’). My friend and I sat in front of it for half-an-hour without uttering a word, hanging in the balance between virtuous grace and devilish beauty. Whether it was the accumulation of fine art and dizzying splendours seen along our daily eight-hour pilgrimages, or the physical and emotional exhaustion as a result, that led to this ‘Stendhal effect’ remains unclear. Placed underneath Cimabue’s Cruxifix in the noble Santa Croce’s Refectory after having undergone a 4-year restoration scheme, it was a sight for sore eyes – its naturalistic stunners only matched by the hideous demons and other fantasmagorical creatures hanging, tits and claws, from the ceiling. There is also an interesting anomaly in this painting: instead of Christ alone rescuing the unbaptised souls from Limbo, a woman is helping them to get onto the rock… Grace in the form of a ravishing female nude?

The very last work we saw was Bronzino’s fresco The Martyrdom of San Lorenzo (1569), requested by Cosimo for the wall of the church of San Lorenzo, otherwise known by my friend and all-things-mannerist guide as ‘the gay sauna’. Here, the maniera of Michelangelo is taken to its extreme and near comical end, the mass of convoluted poses and anatomical display verging on the grotesque. Rather than arousing pain and torment in our poor souls, the lackadaisical saint, his torturers and supporters seem to be enjoying the hot stove, hanging round strutting their stuff – the group of women and children in the foreground look almost out-of-place in this display of vane and detached masculinity.

Modern scholarship suggests that Bronzino’s assemblage of Michelangelesque inventions should be viewed within the complex relationship between Bronzino and his contemporary artists and critics – notably Vasari and his own vision of the arts, which placed Michelangelo at the centre of the Florentine artistic galaxy. As art historian Carlo Falciani puts it, ‘those unnatural nudes… are the parody of a conception of the arts that had transformed the impenetrable path and quest for the absolute of Michelangelo into a hollow rhetoric of form’.More than a century before then, Masaccio worked on the frescoes of the Brancacci chapel, which were to become the starting point of the Italian Renaissance in painting. His revolutionary use of linear perspective, foreshortening, atmospheric perspective, cast shadows, unified light source and contrapposto contributed to making the scene so immediate to the viewer – an extension of his own space. The expressions and poses of his Expulsion of Adam and Eve were to be particularly influential on Guirlandaio, the teacher of Michelangelo, and thus on the Master himself. Seeing and breathing both Masaccio’s and Bronzino’s frescoes in the course of an afternoon was an absolute eye-opening treat.

Des Dieux et des Hommes (Of Gods and Men)

Retour sur image – nous sommes le 20 septembre 2010. La campagne autour de Balleure, le village de ma grand-mère étalant ces quelques maisons dans la contrée clunisienne, est encore baignée d’une douce lumière de fin d’aprés-midi. Sous ces dehors paisibles, la tempête couve dans l’ignorance et l’hypocrisie générale. Je suis allée au cinéma pour calmer l’agitation colèreuse qui bouillait dans mes veines et me donnait des brûlures d’estomac depuis ce matin. Des hommes et des dieux de Xavier Beauvois est à recommander à la gente balleurienne, à Jean, Joseph et Janine, à tous les racistes et anti-islamistes du coin, enfin à tout le monde, croyant ou pas, français ou algérien, américain ou belge. Puisqu’il s’agit moins de religion que de foi, d’amour et de haine, et de l’incroyable folie humaine, quelque soit son visage. ‘Je deviens fou’ dit l’un des moines trappistes, mort de trouille sous la menace latente du GIA (Groupe Islamiste Armé), et Lambert Wilson de répondre: ‘mais il était déjà fou de devenir prêtre!’. Portraits filmés en gros plan de ces moines réclus, sur fond panoramique de l’Atlas décliné sous les lumières des quatres saisons. Dans une des dernières scènes, qui ressemble à la cène, ils sont beaux comme des dieux qui laissent échapper des sourires et des larmes d’hommes. On dirait qu’ils prennent un trip: l’un deux apporte 2 bouteilles de vin et met Le Lac des Cignes de Tchaikovsky, et alors la cérémonie commence. Ils ne parlent pas, ils se sourient, ils échangent des regards de connivence, ils boivent un peu, ils communient, ils s’aiment. En quelques minutes, ils passent de la joie triomphale de vivre ensemble, à la peur de la mort qui prend aux tripes, qui rend humble et sombre, et pourtant les yeux brillants, ils s’envoient en l’air, au seuil de la connaissance, de la renaissance. Et l’autre, cet ange épuré, dénué de chair et de peau humaine souffle déjà l’espoir de la délivrance… C’est certain, ils sont en plein trip, le leur est de marcher dans les pas de Jésus, de vivre la Passion, le sacrifice ultime pour leur dieu et le reste de l’humanité. Ah folie passionnelle, quand tu m’entraines… Je pleure, j’ai le ventre noué, les machoires me font mal, j’expire longuement… me laissant emporter par ce sentiment d’extase, je revois papa pleurer dans mes bras cet été, maman rire de joie avec les écureuils dans Hyde Park, Manu, Gégé et moi communiant avec nos djembés sous la pluie, et le regard de James aprés un de ces coups de gueule sans espoir qui nous portent à bout et nous laissent pantois.

Le frère Luc, médecin asthmatique, est fatigué de ses 150 consultations par jour. Pourtant, il affirme au prieur de pas avoir peur des terroristes, ne pas avoir peur de la mort. ‘Je suis un homme libre’. Camus disait que tous les gens se croyaient libres – de circuler, de converser, mais qu’on ne pouvait pas être libre tant qu’il y aurait des fléaux. Des fléaux contagieux comme la peste, qui se répand par gènes et côtoiments physiques, et des fléaux comme la guerre, qui s’étale misérablement de par les mèmes, mèmes de nos religions et idéologies à la con.

Des dieux et des hommes (Of Gods and Men) de Xavier Beauvois – sortie en salle en Angleterre fin décembre 2010

Eclectica

Inspiration came in waves and sudden urges in the past week, reflecting my current state of mind and the eclectic range of exhibitions I found myself wandering through as if I had used the Serendipitor or played with Joey Steven’s personalised cultural catalyst device Cube of Art. High on my random list was Philippe Parreno’s video installation at the Serpentine gallery – and high it remains. It is one of the most uplifting shows I have seen this year. It enfolds like a theatre using the dramatic effects of Baroque art and technology but for the contemporary sensorium – the structure of the gallery is used as a stage for the four film projections, one in each room including the entrance hall. They start with the smooth rolling down of the electronic curtains and invite gallery wanderers to sit down and be enchanted for a short and vivid spectacle before moving onto the next one. The first film to grasp my imagination is Invisible Boy (2010), showing the fantasy world of a small boy living illegally in China Town, New York filled with strangely moving creatures and snowy cityscapes. Juxtaposed with an elevating, electro-orchestral soundtrack, this partly animated video (the fuzzy creatures are scratched into the film stock) has a Donny Darko-esque quality mixing the harsh reality of the Chinese immigrant community and the most enchanting means of escaping from it. I am hooked from the first images, from the first chords so much so that, when the whole show is over, I can’t resist the temptation to come back and watch it again – it feels like a dream, short, non-linear and wonderfully intense. June 8, 1968 (2009) has the same compelling intensity of viewing. Filmed in 70mm format, it retraces the train journey of Robert Kennedy’s dead body after his assassination, from New York to Washington DC. Parreno used old photographs taken from the train looking over the landscape and the people dotted along the railway tracks, and re-staged the journey with actors over beautiful background shots as the train moved slowly by. The recreation is spellbinding, poignant, superbly photographed, eloquently displaying a critical slice of American history – the immobile, mournful bodies of the onlookers are also shockingly bright and colourful, and we can hear the wind blowing in the big, wild tree exposing its roots and the colourful people lined up around them. Rarely does art feel so good to experience within the white walls of a gallery. Outside, Anish Kapoor’s field of mirror sculptures complete the feel-good escapade with illusory playfulness and sensual reflections of bodies and sunset skies.

The Bloomberg New Contemporaries at the ICA is a mixed bag of media and genres, most of which left me slightly perplexed and mildly amused at best. Two works stood out from the ill-structured, crowded exhibition rooms and corridor displays. Kristian de La Riva’s line drawing animation of a man’s multifarious attempts at self-mutilation is painfully difficult to watch. The perilous performance art of Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic and more recently, the body cuttings of Regina José Galindo came to mind. The animation doesn’t stop at the blowing up of genitals or dismembering of bodies, however, it explicitly shows the pain after the act, which I find actually sickening in a snuff movie sort of way rather than ‘hilarious’ as described on the ICA website. If thirst for violence and pain inflicted to self/others has always featured preponderantly in human history (unconsciously motivated by the feeling of hostility one feels towards a person or environment), the images of such compulsion has been reflected ad infinitum by tv and the big media industry propagating it as a heady mixture of self-indulgence and self-harm – product of our time and our hyper collective unconscious? De La Riva’s animation is located somewhere within that spectrum. In the 70s, performance artists sought to communicate this state of madness, clinically dissecting the (self-)violation or (self-)mutilation process for therapeutic or self-knowledge purposes. Marina Abramovic pushed the limit of the body in the ultimate aim of understanding the nature of the self, finding out in the process how vulnerable the artist (the self) is when left in the hands of the participatory audience (the others). Viennese Actionists’ bloody performance reflected a message of despair towards the potential for self-inflicted violence around the world. Being confronted to such apparently insane behaviour baffles, excites and repulses but above all moves us beyond the confines of our reality, making us question our impulsive nature but also the point of such art – and, more importantly, the point of art in general. What has been the political implication of such works? De La Riva’s work is an obvious parody of performance art, directly referencing the myths of Van Gogh’s ear chopping madness and Viennese Actionist Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s penis-slicing mutilation. Rather than being another twisted reminder of our self-destructive nature, however, it also seems to question the limit of such performing action. Where it succeeds is in the repackaging of body art into a brutally eye-catching and aesthetically refined drawing animation – to which we are only powerless voyeurs.

Jessica Harris’s film Rain Translation translates an audio recording of rain into language – or rather, into a suite of non-sensical English words. Using a system that measures the sounds and assigns them different letters, a strange poem is created. In Rain Translation Translation, the poem is read aloud as in a chanting canon, sentences are juxtaposed, building up to an amazing cacophony of sounds. The sounds gradually and randomly merge, slip into each other, reforming the sounds of raindrops as I imagine them falling from a dark, swollen sky. At times the curtain of rain is so heavy that I can’t distinguish any other sounds but an impression of white noise. Letters suddenly intertwine, a swashing sound comes to the fore, the rain becomes thinner and transforms into a trickle of water. I am listening to the language of rain, but this one feels more like a dance in my head, a rhythmic code dissolving and reforming as it penetrates my ears, body and mind. Sound poetry performing magic.

I leisurely wandered the rooms full of Treasures from Budapest at the RA, marvelling at the beautifully crafted Saint Andrew Altarpiece and the exquisitely coloured Northern Renaissance paintings. In Lucas Cranach The Elder’s Christ and the Virgin Interceding for Humanity before God the Father, adorable angel heads fly around an angry figure of God whose arrows aim at mankind – the superior kind of princes and churchmen whose lies and corruption made them susceptible to the all-mighty’s blaming and shaming. Nothing ever changes. The Virgin of Mercy gives them protection under her cloak – they look like chicks seeking shelter under their mother hen – not quite a celebration of our proud humanity. The figure of Christ is particularly attractive, flaunting a beautifully shaped body, long limbs and soft features. The Virgin is a pretty young woman with seductive blond curls as are the cherubs floating around. More than a religious artist, Cranach was above all a painter of suave and sexy female nudes and a great portraitist of the Reformation era. His style gradually became even more refined, tending towards mannerism at the end of his life. Jumping a couple of centuries ahead, I stopped and stared at Karoly Ferenczy’s Woman painting for a long while, feeling the warm sun falling on the hand of the woman holding brushes and palette in front of her canvas. Ferenczy had spent some time studying in Munich and Paris before moving to the artist colony of Nagybanya in today’s Romania where the plein-air method of Julien-Lepage was being fostered. The painting shows both the woman artist and her canvas in profile – as in a full-frontal confrontation. She scrutinises her work from a distance, grand and free within the natural background, looking up to her art. There’s a fantastic composition with trees, tripod, branches and brush and play with shadows and sunlight in the bushes. Her feet almost cut by the frame, the painter seems to be floating in a field of greenery.

The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2010 had a few beautiful shots and interesting subjects – Wafa by Felix Carpio, a young woman looking at me with a wry smile while playing with her fingers is particularly compelling. Shot in Damascus, Syria, her dark eyes sharpened by eyeliners and the green headscarf framing her pretty oval face made me think of one of these Northern Renaissance portraits of chaste but alluring women. The five winning portraits are also about girls. Teenage girl on the hunt, twin sisters, open-legged wife, obese girl looking down, thin-as-paper girl blurring with the naked landscape. One of my favourites is about a boy – Not even Magic Saved the Genocide by David Graham shows a teenager who lost his parents in the Rwandan civil war, clinging to a Harry Potter book. Beyond the irony that help should come in the form of a Western fairytale, the angelic face and somber eyes under his hood makes for a deeply poignant portrait of crushed childhood.

Finally, although I missed John Wynne’s award-winning untitled installation for 300 speakers at the current Saatchi exhibition Newspeak (it was unfortunately shown in part 1), I stumbled across two male nudes by Graham Durward, which made my visit worthwhile.

The delicate licking of the brush onto the contour of the torso, the low-key brown, white and purple colours and the sinuous posing of Untitled (Man with Fruit) and Hotmail brought about an intense feeling of sensuality. Both of them have their faces wiped up under a layer of white or black paint – the focus is on their attractive, sexually arousing bodies. Durward was interested in the numerous photos of solitary men on the net who mask their face to protect their anonymity. He sees them as ‘primitive paintings’ and wanted to explore this further. These 2 works shows a rare display of masculinity, which is still remarkably hidden in our visual culture dominated by heterosexuality in which women remain the traditional erotic objects for men’s pleasure. There is a vulnerability enveloping them which makes these men all the more desirable. I still have to come upon, and be touched by an image of a male nude by a woman exuding such seductiveness and eroticism.

Philippe Parreno at the Serpentine gallery until 13 February, Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2010 at the ICA until 23 January, Treasures from Budapest at the Royal Academy until 12 December, Newspeak: British Art Now Part 2 at the Saatchi Gallery until 17th April 2011.

Primal sounds of the machine

Since Kurt Schwitters wrote his Ursonate in the 1920s, dozens of performers have paid their respects by interpreting and performing his highly influential sound poem. Now is the turn of a digital German speech software programme to have a go at translating it for us.

Czech-born artist Pavel Büchler fed the software programme with the score of the entire sound poem, which is currently diffused in its electronic spoken form through a wall of megaphones at the Max Wigram gallery on Regent’s Street. The result is expectedly strange and lacks the scratches and rawness of Schwitters’ own 21-minute recording of the sonata and the distinctively German intonation of his voice. It is also twice as long, the machine stuttering over the original score’s impossible syllables and amalgamation of consonants, producing an even more alien-sounding language.

In the art-as-life spirit of Dada, Schwitters created his poem with the intention to move away from the rationality of the art being produced in his lifetime, placing the accent instead on subjectivity, individuality and nonsensicality. He asserted that ‘I prefer nonsense… until now it has been so neglected in the making of art, and that’s why I love it’.

Although the poem is built on a highly-patterned structure and was written for German vowels and consonants, the score is left to the imaginative interpretation of the reader or performer. In the words of Schwitters himself ‘the letters applied are to be pronounced as in German. A single vowel sound is short… Letters, of course, give only a rather incomplete score of the spoken sonata. As with any printed music, many interpretations are possible. As with any other reading, correct reading requires the use of imagination’. Memorising the text and performing it live, the Dutch artist Jaap Blonk pronounces the poem with a clearly-identifiable Dutch accent, giving fluidity to the harsher sounds of German. His energetic delivery transforms the more severe tone of Schwitters’ recital into a jovial sonic performance. Schwitters himself varied the rhythm of his sonata to perk up his performances and insisted that each reader – and by extension, each listener – had their own capacity for making up associations of ideas, saying that ‘everyone has different experiences and remembers and associates them differently’.

Searching in its limited coding a rational sonic translation to non-sense, the digital programme reiterates the original text in a standard spoken German pronunciation, reproducing an uncannily faithful rendering of the human voice. After a short while, one detects in the phoney voice identical patterns in the pronunciation of syllables repeated over three or four phrases and an incredibly monotonous tone pervades throughout the sonata. It starts to feel as unnerving as a corporation’s telephonic pre-recorded message or an unintelligible platform announcement. While these robotic messages have a fairly innocuous effect on our social lives, one can easily imagine the extended use of such technology that aim at standardizing and codifying speech. Pavel Büchler originates from Eastern Europe and issues such as state control, censorship and propaganda are close to his heart. By associating new communication technology with old instruments of propaganda in the forms of megaphones, and juxtaposing them with Schwitters’ ideal of individual creativity and artistic freedom, Büchnel sabotages the machine of social management and control, making it look ridiculous and powerless in its rational attempt at brainwashing us. Like Schwitters, he subverts codes and rules to overthrow the power of logic and, collating sense with nonsense, allows for greater artistic expression.

Pavel Büchnel Studio Schwitters is at Max Wigram Gallery until 13 November