C103
Columns
Visual Arts/North
Visual Arts/South
Film and Television
Slave to the Machine
Fifth column
Film
and television
Stephanie
McBride
Who's Afraid
of Virginia Woolf?
"Novels are
frightfully clumsy and overpowering of course," wrote
Virginia Woolf in a letter. Transposing a novel to the
screen is often a clumsy business too. Nicholas Cage's
character in the film Adaptation struggles in the
process - eventually resorting to a screenplay-by-numbers
tactic. While adaptation still fuels film production,
critical commentary bristles with the vexed issue of the
literary and the filmic - ranging from an often conservative
approach in the heritage-period drama to more contemporary
and experimental sorties.
Currently
on cinema screens is David Hare's adaptation of Michael
Cunningham's novel The Hours, named after the working
title of its core element, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.
Woolf's modernist novel of 1925 exercises structural experiments
and techniques as her heroine moves through a single day
of moments and memories. Often her prose suggests cinematic
influences - building up montages of the urban and the
everyday, of shop displays and the sounds of time's passing,
of life and death. Cunningham reworks and interweaves
Woolf herself and her anxieties through his character's
lives and across the decades - from 1920s England, through
LA in 1950s to twentieth-century New York in a complex
layer of parallel narratives across three time frames.
If Mrs Dalloway was a challenge for screen adaptation
(after all, what happens? a society hostess goes out to
buy flowers for her party - where is the jeopardy in that?),
its postmodern cousin possibly poses even more problems
with its triangular structure of space, time-frame and
narrative.
Of course,
adaptation fundamentally involves data compression - character,
time, plot - but it's also a question of tone, register
and atmosphere - how we experience the stories on the
screen. With a literary novel, the compression process
may involve a loss of certain narrative allusions and
glancing quotations. While readers cling dearly to passages
and paragraphs, the adaptor often struggles to evolve
a film vocabulary or visual correlative for the depth
and gauge of the original prose. Linking the different
characters and periods in the early sections of The
Hours, parallel edits of flower arranging across time
and space appears contrived and strained. Yet it's a later
image of flower heads presented in a bowl which recall
Sally's daring in Woolf's novel - pulling to the surface
Clarissa Dalloway's desires and linking and echoing them
in the other women - Mrs Brown, ill at ease in her suburban
domesticity, another Clarissa in New York planning a party
in the midst of death and decay, of loss and longing...
Much of
the time, the idea of a film straining after the richness
of the original, attaining only a feeble rendition of
the novel is a commonplace in reviews. But why should
this be the case? Cinema, from its earliest days has been
a fluid, fluent medium. As The Hours in novel and
film forms indicates, we are invited to experience the
different dimensions of the stories, re-routed and reinvigorated
for a different time and space. What a plunge indeed.
Slave
to the machine
Michael
Cunningham
"Here's
one I prepared earlier"
Is it just
me, or does the production line in your typical modern
publishing venture bear an uncanny resemblance to Channel
4's recent TV series Jamie's Kitchen?
The rules
are simple:
-
take fifteen trainees who have never worked in the field
before;
-
show them the basic rules and techniques;
-
educate their 'taste';
-
teach them to speak a common language;
-
bring them up to speed so they can reproduce your fare
every night, in relatively large quantities, at short
notice and to a particular standard;
-
and do all this within the context of a smooth overall
flow of information or ingredients, a flow from the
raw stuff coming in one door to the 'prepped' (prepared)
ingredients, and on to The Finished Article going out
the other.
No offence,
but these subeditors don't have to be great designers,
just as Jamie Oliver's kitchen isn't full of star chefs.
Your production team won't need to build pages from scratch,
there and then, because there simply isn't time to reinvent
the wheel every night. What they serve up is variations
on a theme, constructed from templates, and with many
of the page shapes and elements prepared a long time in
advance.
To the
outsider, watching the raw copy and pictures being knocked
into finished pages at great speed, it can all seem very
confusing and mesmerising. But rewind the tape and watch
what they're doing in slo-mo. The subeditors have surrounded
themselves with a wide array of 'palettes', from which
they are grabbing various chunks of information, dragging
and dropping them into the pages, then cropping, snapping,
tweaking, kneading and reshaping until each page is done.
To continue
the cooking analogy, these stacks of palettes are like
the chef's 'mise-en-place'. They are your set-up, your
assembled materials, your tools, and, to some extent,
even your state of mind.
Or as Anthony
Bourdain put it in his culinary best-seller Kitchen
Confidential, mise-en-place is the religion of good
line cooks:
As
a cook, your station, and its condition, its state of
readiness, is an extension of your nervous system - and
it is profoundly upsetting if another cook or, God forbid,
a waiter - disturbs your precisely and carefully laid-out
system. The universe is in order when your station is
set up the way you like it: you know where to find everything
with your eyes closed, everything you need during the
course of the shift is at the ready at arm's reach, your
defenses are deployed.
Then at
the end of this cycle, just as the kitchen puts the leftovers
to good use in the stockpot and so on, the subeditors
will add some of the leftovers back into the stock of
templates and 'library objects' (in the likes of Adobe
InDesign), further enriching it.
Web publishing
is probably even more dependent on this approach. From
anecdotal evidence, I reckon the vast majority of internet
developers who use Javascript have never written it from
scratch. But most of them would know what certain particular
lines of code do, and can tailor them to their particular
needs. Programming per se is even more modular and reliant
on chunks of recycled code.
At the
end of the day, it's about the accumulation and evolution
of ever more complex and sophisticated structures of information.
Yet these are all based on the simplest of building blocks,
the most subatomic of particles on which the entire digital
universe is built: binary code - long strings of ones
and zeroes.
Visual
arts north
Brian
Kennedy
Me me
meme
Titian
for me is one of the greats. After seeing his Danae in
the Capodimonte Museum in Naples last year I named a new
e-mail address after it. The fact that there is going
to be a large exhibition of his work opening soon at the
National Gallery in London has me searching for cheap
flights and entrance tickets. When I read that they were
recreating the legendary room originally created by Alfonso
D'Este, Duke of Ferrara, I drooled. This small room will
have three works by Titian and a fourth that was started
by Giovanni Bellini and finished by Titian. It will be
the first time in over 400 years that the works have all
been brought back together. I totally understood the National
Gallery's David Jeff when he recently told the Guardian
newspaper, "He's the tops, the greatest. Awe-inspiring,
gob-smacking. He's the goods." Not the most academic aesthetic
judgement of Titian's work, but at least you know he has
a passion for the work.
But what
about an aesthetic judgement? Colour balance, harmony
of form, structural balance within the composition, etc.
You all know the type of writing I am referring to and
how it is still used to inform us about painting and sculpture
today. The problem is that it is impossible to apply it
to much of contemporary practice.
The difficulty
in applying a traditional aesthetic reading to a contemporary
work was brought home to me when I went to see Alastair
MacLennan's exhibition at the OBG. Alastair has always
created wonderful, thought-provoking performances. The
strength of these performances is in Alastair's ability
to communicate with people. Brian Eno says in his A
Big Theory Of Culture,
Color
theories, and dimension theories, golden means, all those
sort of ideas, assume that some objects are intrinsically
more beautiful and meaningful than others. New cultural
thinking isn't like that. It says that we confer value
on things. We create the value in things. It is the act
of conferring that makes things valuable.
I think
Eno's idea of conferring is important. I have seen Alastair
standing on a street in north inner-city Dublin with a
tree hanging from a rope around his neck. He was making
art for and with people who would never normally look
at art. They were talking to him and placing mementoes
on the tree for loved ones who had died from drugs. It
was the conferred value on these objects that was important,
not their aesthetic value. There was also a conferred
importance on the communication and interaction between
artist and audience.
The problem
is, how can we look at this conferring of importance or
the interaction between artist and audience? One possible
solution is memes. Richard Dawkins invented both the concept
and the actual word 'meme'. In his book The Selfish
Gene he defines the meme as a unit of intellectual
or cultural information that survives long enough to be
recognised as such, and which can pass from mind to mind.
In the same way that the gene is the basic building block
of biological life, the meme is the basic building block
of our minds and culture. Dawkins, a great promoter of
Darwin, seems to want to use memes to extend the Darwinian
theory of evolution into culture. Thinking of Alastair
on the street again, he was definitely placing memes in
the minds of his audience.
Given its
novel and slightly nebulous nature, it is not surprising
that the meme is often used in finding new ways of looking
at contemporary culture. Since I have said that traditional
aesthetic values cannot be applied to contemporary practice,
perhaps I should come up with a definition of a meme that
we might use. So, a meme is a viral infection of the mind
that propagates through cultural interaction. So has this
column started working on your mind? Will you mention
it to someone else and infect their mind? The trouble
is that in ten minutes time you are more likely to be
humming that awful but catchy tune you heard on the radio
this morning or you are apologising for what you said
in the pub last night and it has been on your mind all
day. This column and contemporary art practice have a
fight for survival on their hands in the meme pool.
Visual
Arts South
Aidan
Dunne
Lucrative
art
The decision
to dispose of what was the Michael Smurfit art collection
highlights the problematic area in which art, property,
financial and cultural values overlap. As far as it goes
the issue is straightforward. The art collection was part
of the holdings of a commercial company. The company was
sold. The new owners decided the best thing to do was
to realise the value of one of its assets. The collection
will be released onto the market tactically with an eye
to maximising its return and not distorting the market.
In his
book Stealing the Mona Lisa one of the areas Darian
Leader explores is the way that, while art is often associated
with considerable monetary value, that association is
not as straightforward as it might seem. Certainly it
is the focus of a great deal of public and journalistic
interest in art, but the nature and level of that interest
actually underlines its singularity. If an artwork is
stolen, the journalists' fist question is how much it
is worth. That information is habitually combined with
a mixture of awe and incredulity.
On the
one hand in a materialistic society the mere fact of extremely
high value engages a level of respect, perhaps grudging
respect that something should be worth so much. On the
other there is an implication that the extremely high
monetary value doesn't make any sense, that it represents
a kind of trick, money for nothing. As Leader points out,
that is more or less true. Because part of the point of
an artwork is that, within its wider cultural context,
it is implicated in but somehow apart from the register
of monetary value. Its value must be somehow beyond money
as such, and that is why it not only can but even must
be worth a disproportionately large amount of money -
to emphasise the fact that it is worth something more
than, something distinct from, money. The top of the journalistic
scale for art theft is: "A priceless painting by the Dutch
master..."
It is partly
this extra-monetary dimension that, Leader suggests, makes
art such an attractive proposition for people who are
materially wealthy. There is a mystery, a mystique there
to which their wealth seems to afford them access. This
mystery comes with a range of attractive cultural kudos.
But also the realisation that, while the work of art can
be bought, whatever it is that makes art priceless cannot
quite be bought. Leader's argument in this regard is that
the work of art is in the nature of a decoy, that there
is something beyond it that the work itself prevents us
from seeing.
He offers
a detailed account of what that might be, but the essential
point here is that art occupies a place in a culture.
This symbolic place is wherever the artwork happens to
be, but over time it has also become fixed and formalised
as the museum or the gallery. The artwork is in a sense
haunted by its cultural placement, it can never be convincingly
detached from it, can never, for example, move altogether
into the register of monetary value unless it sheds its
magic entirely - becomes, say, an ethnographic curiosity.
People
donate works of art to public collections for all sorts
of reasons, more often than not financial. In Leader's
scheme of things, using art to ward off taxation is consistent
with its cultural role of warding off the evil eye. And,
apart from direct financial incentives, there is often
a more generalised sense of cultural appeasement or duty,
even if the selfish hope of the donators is that they
will benefit from the reflected glory of the art they
offer. Underlying all of these calculations and negotiations
is an awareness of art's cultural role.
Which is
perhaps why the disposal of an art collection built cumulatively
over a great deal of time, one relatively focused within
a specific cultural context, is not directly equivalent
to the disposal of buildings, or companies, or even jobs.
It is as if someone has missed the point of the artworks,
mistaking them for something else. There is no obligation
on people who collect art to do anything in particular
with it, yet because art is not quite like other possessions,
there remains something almost sacrilegious about the
idea of breaking up a collection and flogging it piecemeal
to the highest bidders.
Fifth
column
Nathalie
Weadick
The problem
with pie in the sky
Castles
in the air - they're so easy to take refuge in. So easy
to build, too.
Henrik
Ibsen, Norwegian dramatist, The Master Builder,
III, 1892
We all dream,
build utopias, castles in the air, we dream of more funding,
happiness, more funding, success and more funding.
I was discussing
the notion of dreams to a colleague of mine recently;
she said her dreams were like cinematographic epic stories
with an engaging dialogue, in full technicolor. There
is actually no distinction between the real and the unreal
during the experience and she is totally absorbed into
the most vivid imagery farthest removed from waking thoughts.
Genuine mise en scène stagings of random encounters
not open to the public, but for private consumption and
entertainment. A movie screen in her head containing imaginary,
symbolism and sensation. In the real and conscious world,
imagery, symbolism and sensation are central elements
of the art experience. In the realm of galleries and venues
there is a responsibility to address public consumption,
to increase audience numbers, which has direct influence
on institutional solvency. We fall dramatically from the
dreamlike state with a thud!
Increased
numbers means more people can come into contact with the
art experience, which should translate into more funding.
Private consumption alone cannot sustain organisations
and causes an ineffective presence in society in general.
The instantaneous applause by a gathering of people during
the lowering of the final piece of the Spire on O'Connell
Street was the closest we have come to a spontaneous burst
of emotion over an art object. While this reaction is
important, it is not always the case.
In the
public realm there are many examples of collective attention
that communities share. People can cause surges on the
national grid when they simultaneously boil their kettles
during ad breaks of The Late Late Show. Strain
on services is a regular occurrence, especially during
major sporting events such as the World Cup. Collective
action and ceremonial conditions associated with the aforementioned
events are rare in the art world. Is it the case that
the art world has failed to notice that it has lost its
audience to other, more poignant concerns of the public?
Some people
promote the concept of art as ritual: ordinary objects
or acts acquire symbolic significance through assimilation
into a shared belief system. Mass gatherings reinforced
by similar aims were more prevalent hundreds of years
ago when art was directly linked with ceremonial ritual.
The audience shared some background understanding or context
within which the artwork was experienced. In primitive
or sacrificial art of ancient times, or fifteenth-century
Catholic institutional patronage of artworks, the intention
of artistic production as venerating a higher power was
clear, accepted and unchallenged.
Contemporary
art does not have the same effect or connection with the
public as described in the art of the past. The reason
may be explained as part of social evolution and the enveloping
power of mass culture. Unlike our brothers and sisters
in sport and tourism, art is not always event- or spectacle-driven.
Nor should it be, and it is a dream world we are living
in if we assess the value of all three in the same way.
Strategies for developing audiences for art cannot borrow
much from sport or tourism. Art behaves differently, it
is difficult to define.
Equally,
we are also living a fantasy if we don't actively set
in place programmes to increase our audience. Organisations
work very hard and within limited resources to initiate
projects whose goals are to engage the public in an effective
way that has long-term consequences and pays dividends
in years to come. Relationships forged within the community
need to be sustained, continued and constantly renewed.
Patience and effort is required on both sides. Collective
energy and attention can be harnessed and supported but
it evolves slowly and its impact on participants is deeply
felt and ultimately very enriching. It is not as easy
as building castles in the air.
Nathalie
Weadick is Director of Butler Gallery, Kilkenny.
Do
you have an opinion on this article? If so, please click here for our comments form.
| No reader feedback so far - awaiting your input! |
Back
to top of page
|
|
