A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932

I picked up the third volume in the multi-part series of Picasso biographies by John Richardson with much excitement. It is very heavy and very expensive, not usually qualities that I look for in a biography but the first two were landmarks that I often turn to.

Unfortunately, the series is starting to get a little cranky and opinionated and Richardson’s interpretations of the works themselves a bit redundant, his grasp of the theory obscure. He uncritically accepts, for example, the greatness of the relatively short-lived ‘neo-classical’ period, when I believe Picasso himself quickly came to regard them as a dead-end. Whenever I’ve come across them in travelling shows, they have always looked overblown and empty compared with what came before. They look like battery-recharging exercises to me. Richardson intimates that they might have been done to impress his new conservative and socially ambitious wife, which chimes with Picasso’s ingratiating behaviour at the time.

There are several annoyances. Jean Cocteau was a constant figure in Picasso’s circle, often to his irritation, especially during the 1920s and the long association with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. Yet Richardson never lets a mention of Cocteau’s name go by with attaching a derogatory adjective to it. Now, it is incontestable that Cocteau could be an annoying, craven, social climbing little greaser, who was constantly trying to ingratiate himself with any passing member of society with a healthy bank balance, a bit of talent or a good arse. But let’s not forget people, that we are also talking about the author of La Belle et la Bette and Blood of a Poet. I, the reader, am quite capable of coming to my own conclusions about Cocteau’s behaviour without the author’s constant editorialising.

And why the squeamishness when it comes to Olga’s illness? This is not an unimportant detail. Picasso’s apparent horror at her symptoms was exploited in the vast canon of works dealing explicitly with Olga throughout the 1920s and 30s, so I would say the question is a critical one. Several times, Richardson insinuates that it was a gynaecological condition that remained uncured or inaccurately diagnosed following Paulo’s birth. He suggests it was something (he won’t say what) that resulted in haemorrhages, hence the frequent depiction of Olga in the later works as a screaming harpy clothed in various permutations of blood red. Is it a fault of research? Or does it reflect Richardson’s own prejudices? The reluctance to ‘go there’ seems disappointingly sexist, if that’s what it is. By all accounts Olga was a difficult customer and probably a nightmare to be married to, whether one happened to be a self-obsessed macho like Picasso or not. She certainly seems to have been mentally fragile, but Richardson’s persistent habit of connecting this to her ‘woman’s problems’ seems to reveal an odd Victorian-era connection between the uterus and ‘hysteria’. Whatever, it is not good enough.

Still, Picasso is vividly present on the page. This volume covers his famous ‘sell-out’ period when he shunned his grubby bohemian friends and took up fine clothes, socialising on a big scale, grand villas both in the country and the city and a very big car for the sake of Olga and her social pretensions. Probably his social pretensions as well, as this wasn’t a brief moment in Picasso’s life, but a fertile couple of decades.

Olga Khoklova the former ballerina is the big hole in this volume. Her personality remains remote. We get very little sense of this strange woman’s qualities, the qualities that a man as complex as Picasso found so captivating. Richardson just seems to note Picasso’s friends’ dismissal of her as a blank without trying too hard to dispel the impression, which was surely wrong.

Picasso was a complete shit to the women in his life, but then that is hardly news. He did, however, have a few saving personal graces. I particularly liked Picasso’s habit of getting about in his enormous town car with its Erich Von Stroheim look-alike chauffeur while dressed in paint-spattered work clothes. As far as I can tell from the picture, we’re talking about exactly the kind of car Norma Desmond got around in in ‘Sunset Boulevard’. That’s class you can’t fake.

It’s interesting that we are talking about Picasso now at all. Certainly his life, his art and his career are absolutely at odds with our era’s preoccupation with the political consequences of identity. Interesting because one can’t separate Picasso’s identity from the art for long. To even begin discussing Picasso’s constantly anthropomorphic work of the late 1920s and early 30s is impossible without unpacking his idea of sex, which is deeply antifeminist. Reading the book, I kept imagining myself standing in front of a class of eighteen year-old shrinking violets saying things like “Notice the internal rhyme between the female figure’s mouth and her vagina”, and “See how the sleeping Marie-Therese’s profile becomes the artist’s penis”. I shudder to think of it.

Is it definitive? Certainly not. There is much to be thankful for, but still questions that remain unanswered.

Orange Crate Art

In honour of Michael Leddy and his blog Orange Crate Art, here is a selection of real, honest-to-goodness orange crate art.

These are my favourites. Enjoy:









I found these at the amazing BoxOfApples.com.

The site contains this helpful description:

BoxOfApples.com is the online museum (and gift shop) of fruit crate labels from the early 1900s to 1950s. Back in the days of our grandparents and their parents, people did their produce-shopping at markets that were more like a farmer’s market than today’s grocery stores. The fruit and vegetables would be displayed in their shipping crates somewhere near the railroad tracks, probably under a big shed. Each crate would have a label (up to a foot square) showing the name of the packer, and a colorful design to differentiate the brand. Fruit crates disappeared with the advent of self-service supermarkets and cardboard boxes, but thousands of vintage labels have survived in mint condition, rescued from warehouses and print shops, mostly on the West Coast. Beautifully printed by stone lithography with eight- or twelve-color inks, they are now collectors' items with a big following on eBay. On this site you can see dozens of different designs, and buy large-format, high-quality reproductions for home or office.

It includes an article on the history of crate labels.

A different kind of election?

Michael Leddy's comment to my previous post made me think that despite all the distance and the word-bites that constitute almost our entire picture of the American election, maybe it is possible to get the sense of it about right.

In what I have read and seen, I've been surprised and discomforted by the cynicism of the Clinton campaign, a kind of scorched earth policy that would bring the house down so no one else can live in it.

Yesterday, Guy Rundle was talking about the appearance of Hillary on Good Morning America, in which she apparently promised to "obliterate Iran". I'm surprised I missed it actually, as it's on at about 5.00am on our television and I'm usually up trying to get young Sweeney Payne, aged six weeks, back to sleep.

I can't imagine what she thought she was doing saying crap like that on morning television. I can only imagine the context, but it seems to me she often rushes to occupy the vacuum the failure of neo-conservatism has opened up, something Obama seems loath to do.

Hillary is angling to make Golda Meir look like a Geelong regional office special needs coordination program conflict resolution officer and part-time reiki masseuse, with an incredible ad which appears to suggest that Bin Laden started the War in the Pacific using Hurricane Katrina against Pearl Harbour, and the only person who can stop him/them/it is a pants-suited terminatrix from the future.

I was recently surprised to hear left-leaning friends of mine all enthusiastically endorsing Hillary, including Doug, whose passion for American politics and history should not be doubted. Even amongst informed people working in politics, the feeling seemed to be almost universal. I put it down to the powerful pull of the gender question. Does it look like a woman President is a more momentous leap into a progressive future than a black one? Given the economic and (there's no better word) moral state of America at present (I'm thinking of Iraq, Guantanamo, waterboarding etc, etc), it seems to me that Hillary the insider, behaving as she is, is not so much a step backwards but pretty much the status-quo, same-old same-old candidate.

In a comment, Michael says:

Here in the States (United, that is), the ABC moderators have been widely criticized for focusing the first half of the debate on distractions and nonsense — e.g., flag lapel pins. No one on the stage was wearing a flag lapel pin!

...And neither were most people watching the telecast! Surely that's the problem with the supercilious question: If a flag lapel pin denotes patriotism, and the lack of a pin suggests a lack of patriotism, then patriotism is in short supply on the streets of America given the woeful lack of flag lapel pins everywhere!

We could say a lot about the strange fetishization of the American flag in that country (without it, Jasper Johns didn't make any sense), except to note how very strange it looks to the rest of the world, if I can speak for the whole world for a moment. I'm trying to think of a flag that carries a comparable weight in the national consciousness - maybe the French? Certainly the tricolor is as symbolically loaded, but nowhere near as evident in their popular culture.

I say this as an inhabitant of a country whose flag is an image that is constantly under dispute. Statements of a Republican nature (yes we are still a nominal monarchy) always quickly lead to discussion of the flag. Personally I find the presence of the Union Jack on our flag bizarre. I'm always reminded of something my grandfather once said, that his Irish policeman father refused to acknowledge a flag that had the symbol of his enemy in the top corner.

There's no doubt that American political commentary goes some strange places. Yesterday 'The Australian' reprinted an op-ed piece of puffery by P. J. O'Rourke, who has at least the benefit of being funny, even if he often mistakes flippancy for wit.

Some people say John McCain isn't conservative enough. But there's more to conservatism than low taxes, Jesus and waterboarding at Gitmo. Conservatism is also a matter of honour, duty, valour, patriotism, self-discipline, responsibility, good order, respect for our national institutions, reverence for the traditions of civilisation, and adherence to the political honesty upon which all principles of democracy are based.

If you got through the second sentence without feeling nauseous, you're better than I. It follows that if you're Liberal, you must be dishonorable, cowardly, unpatriotic, irresponsible, with no sense of duty and so on and so forth. This is civilization?

Debates of the living dead

As usual, Guy Rundle's column in Crikey today made me laugh out loud. The zombie Barack and zombie Hillary as an old bickering couple, airing their ancient greviences in front of the guests. This is not a particularly original observation, but he sure knows how to spin it to comedic effect.

So was it really the last debate? Barack Obama seems to think so, saying in last night's Philadelphia slugfest that he could deliver Clinton's lines and "she, I'm sure, could deliver mine". That's sure what it felt like – the last arguments of a couple who are over, a couple whose dinner parties start tense and collapse into the recitation of ancient wrongs.

First time it happened, it was buttock-clenchingly embarrassing – boy these two either really really like angry makeup sex, or genuinely hate each other. You didn't know where to look, thought of setting fire to the tablecloth, made your excuses. But the years have gone on, and now it's got tired. You just wish they'd split up, or that one of them would clutch their chest and fall over.

'No Country For Old Men'

It’s sometimes the way that a filmmaker's best or most characteristic work is overlooked by the Academy Awards, and everyone knows it. So when the same director comes up again with something a little weirder or less likely, the Academy gives them the gong out of sheer embarrassment. Something like this has happened to the Coen brothers’ ‘No Country For Old Men’.

It is an exceptional film, to be sure, but its qualities are a little more remote from easy apprehension than, say, Fargo’s were. It is the sort of film that needs to season in the memory before coming properly into focus. I suspect it has more to say on repeat viewings.

There are several memorable scenes that will be discussed on the way home by those who have seen the film, including the opportunity the existentialist murderer Anton Chigurh gives an uncomprehending gas-station owner to save his own life with a coin toss. One of the reasons it is terrifying is that this dim character barely registers what is actually going on. It’s enough that we the audience know. “Call it” says Chigurh. “I need to know what I stand to win”, says the gas-station owner. Chigurh replies, “Everything”.

But there are other less celebrated scenes that I’m sure will reward repeated and careful viewing. One of these for me is the confrontation between Chigurh and the bounty hunter (played by Woody Harrelson) stalking him. It takes place calmly, while sitting in a motel room, and the discussion remains civil even though these men have history and one of them is holding a large weapon at the others’ chest. Harrelson is extraordinary, his face a concerto of emotions as he visibly sweats over the inevitable outcome, while playing out the possible scenarios in his head of how this (how he) will end. We later learn that Harrelson, who we know is a Vietnam veteran, is actually a former Colonel. Suddenly the scene retrospectively seems charged with suggestive possibilities of how these men might have met before, under what circumstances. It is just one of the many moments that add up to a very rich experience in the cinema.

Several parallels with the Coen‘s earlier masterpiece ‘Fargo’ suggest themselves. For much of the film’s length, it looks like we are going to get a confrontation between Chigurh and the sadly bewildered good cop Tommy Lee Jones. This possibility almost, but does not, occur, in a particularly suggestive way. Chigurh is the latest in a long line of Coen characters who are utterly, almost transcendentally, evil. They seem to be mainlining some cosmic current of supernatural malice. Dialogue can even suggest such inspiration. At the conclusion of ‘Fargo’, when the pregnant policewoman faces down the hitman and he flees, it is like matter meeting anti-matter.

I suspect the Coen’s are aware of how outlandish Chigurh is, a kind of absurd, murderous clown, with his hairdo and his low sing-song voice. The risk was great that audiences would simply laugh at him, and they might have if not for the strange relentlessness Javier Bardem gives him. It helps that his motives are inscrutable. Just when we get used to his willingness to murder on a whim, he chooses not to act on the impulse and we are never sure exactly why. Several times he almost shrinks from those who resist him, as when he encounters a beehived receptionist at a trailer park who won’t co-operate and he withdraws without use of violence. I suspect there is a pattern with such behaviour, but it might take another viewing to crack it.

One of the things that every person I’ve spoken to mentions (and this is a movie that need to be talked about afterwards), is the strange, suggestive ending.

There are films that end prematurely out of an inability to resolve whatever issues the film itself raises in the lives of the characters. This isn’t one of those. It has a sudden, abrupt ending, incorporating a truly fearless plot ellipsis, which only seems appropriate after contemplation. It’s perfect in its own way, only seeming abrupt because we’ve been so thoroughly convinced of the independent existence of the characters over the last two hours, like they could go on living after the lights have gone out.

Poor Heath (Poor Gilliam...)

Like everyone else, I was quite shocked at the news of the death of Heath Ledger yesterday. Looking over his filmography, I was surprised how few of his films I have actually seen, and yet, at least in recent years, the guy seemed to be everywhere.

He certainly had ‘star quality’, whatever that is, and a refreshing willingness to choose roles that continually pushed him, often to the edges of his range. I can’t believe it was easy for an up-and-comer with a lot to lose to select ‘Brokeback Mountain’ as a vehicle, considering the censoriousness that often accompanies the choice of gay roles in the American entertainment industry. Still, he did it and had the last laugh, because despite what seemed to me to be an excessively mannered performance, Ledger had no trouble conveying a vivid sense of the humanity of the man, allowing multiplex audiences everywhere to relate to a gay character. One, what’s more, who was actually depicted making love to another man. No wonder he was so apparently loved by the gay community. They recognised what a gift that film was in their quest for acceptance.

I first saw him in ‘Two Hands’, opposite veteran Brian Brown, and his performance had that wide-open, effortless quality that really gifted actors can convey. It would be interesting to contrast that film against the more mature actor in ‘Candy’, which had the same quality with more skill and ambition.

I almost shook my head in disbelief when I also heard that he had died while still shooting a film for Terry Gilliam. Is this man the most unlucky film maker in the world? I don’t know whether enough of the film had been shot for the project to be saveable, but I hope so.

A brief glance at his record is probably enough.

The studio producing ‘Brazil’ hated the ending and the convoluted story structure. They delayed releasing the film for a year, preferring a version with a happy ending. Gilliam won after waging a bloody media campaign, but the studio's cut was shown on TV.

‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen’ was delayed by a budget blow-out and production problems. New management at Columbia Pictures decided it didn't like the film and it was given a very limited release, effectively sinking it.

‘The Brothers Grimm’ was made in a hostile environment after the Weinstein brothers imposed various compromises on the director, documented in the book ‘Dreams and Nightmares: Terry Gilliam, the Brothers Grimm, and Other Cautionary Tales of Hollywood.’

‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’ ground to halt after the aging star developed a back injury and could no longer ride a horse. Freak storms wiped out the production after only a few days of shooting with Johnny Depp. It was abandoned but a fascinating documentary called ‘Lost in La Mancha’ came out of the experience.

And now this. No word yet on what will happen to ‘The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.’

I understand the movie was made with $30 million of independent financing based largely upon the strength and popularity of Heath Ledger. Those investors may still cut their losses and take their money back. Sad for all concerned.

A school for disenchantment

Looking at Modernism: the Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond by Peter Gay, I came across this passage in a discussion of Proust and what Proust called "the intermittences of the heart":

The expression tersely epitomises one of Proust's most disheartening, and most irresistible, conclusions about the vicissitudes of existence: the human heart fails when its endurance and judgement are most needed. Life is many things, to be sure, but most conspicuously it adds up to a vast array of mistakes, of mismatches, of sentiments out of phase with realities, of experiences not reflected in feelings. We get experiences wrong; everyone gets experiences wrong... Life therefore, is a perpetual act of revising, of correcting, what we think we know; it is a school for disenchantment.

Somehow I think Michael Leddy might agree.

R. B. Kitaj 1935-2007

Every so often one hears about the death of another of the 'great souls' as I like to think of them, and the day discolours a little, with an odd sense of generalised grief for someone you never met. I felt this strongly a couple of weeks ago when I heard of the death of Ronald Kitaj, surely one of the greatest artists of the late century, even if most have never heard of him.

Kitaj was a 'literary' artist, if I can use the term that his friend Francis Bacon regarded as the worst insult that could be hurled at a painter. Bacon meant that kind of art which was reducible to the written word, or which didn't aspire to anything beyond a description of itself. He put much self-consciously postmodern art in this category.

I use the word to mean that Kitaj's painting had a unusually intimate relationship with the written word, but also that it frequently aspired to intellectual significance in a kind of discursive continuum that might include written texts. He was a thinker, with the thinking frequently embodied as art. Examples might be the long series of works featuring the "cafeist" Joe Singer, a character Kitaj made up to embody the notion of the wandering Jew, after Auschwitz, a picture of anxiety.


This is the first of that series, 'The Jew, Etc.' (1976). Joe Singer is Kitaj's image of compromised survival. The Jew in a train compartment visualizes the physical and psychological restriction of the Diaspora. The cramped composition presses in on the man who also physically holds himself in. A hearing aid heightens the isolation. Being on the move, travelling on a train, is Kitaj's metaphor for the state of restlessness Jews are heirs to. The only safe place to escape is the world of thought.

This mirrors Kitaj's own situation, since he was American by birth and a wanderer in his youth (as he might have put it), serving as a merchant sailor and in the US Army before settling in England. Before his death, he returned to America. I think of him as a man in that tradition of displaced Americans, a man's man like Hemingway and a compulsive builder of structures like Eliot.

His extensive writing on the situation of the Jewish artist, not to mention the works themselves, are a self conscious attempt to engage with the tradition of Jewish thought and to take a place in it.

I've seen people wince at this title ['The Jew, Etc.']; sophisticated art people, who think it's better not to use the word Jew. Kafka, my greatest Jewish artist, never utters the word once in his work, so I thought I would. This name-sickness, which many Jews will recognize and understand in different ways, is so touching to me, that I've also given my Jew a secret name: Joe Singer. Now it's not secret anymore.

His writings were an increasingly important aid to this enterprise and they had a fascinating, often independent relationship to the paintings themselves. Sometimes, they amounted to a commentary on them, an exegesis of their themes, sometimes even a contradiction of them.

An example is a work called 'Two Brothers' (1987), that appeared accompanied by a text of subtle literary ambition.


Kitaj wrote a text to accompany the image. He begins with an epigraph from Camus:

The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to re-read. His endings, or his absence of endings, suggest explanations which, however, are not revealed in clear language but, before they seem justified, require that the story be re-read from another point of view. Sometimes there is a double possibility of interpretation, whence appears the necessity of two readings. This is what the author wanted.

I'm intrigued by the implicitly Talmudic nature of the request: Before you look at the painting, it implies, read the text. Before you read the text, read this bit of Camus. Before you get into this Camus, refer to Kafka. But before you come back to the text, you must re-read Kafka! The meaning, he warns us, is not revealed in "clear language" (like the language he is using), but must be read from other points of view - that is, from the stand point that what we are reading is never the final word: "there is a double possibility of interpretation". "This is what the author wanted", Camus (and Kitaj) tell us. We're entitled to ask: which author, since we're already in a room full of authors?

Got that? Right, on we go:

For many years, this painting was called ‘Bub and Sis’. It depicted a lesbian couple and was inspired by a picture story about Times Square, which I’ve kept from the old Life magazine. Then I painted it over in black.

The new picture is about two brothers I got to know almost 30 years ago. I was a student at the Royal College of Art and I used to lunch now and then at a cheap Polish restaurant at South Kensington called Dacquise. It’s still there and still cheap. One day I sketched two men at a nearby table speaking Polish to each other. They noticed me and after a while, as they were leaving, one of them came to my table and asked if I would show him my sketch, which I did. He said he loved art and gave me his card which said ‘Count Martinus a Grudna Grudzinski’ and under that: ‘Fine Art Consultant’. They were quite old brothers, remnants of Ander’s army, who lived (and died) a few doors from the restaurant. To make a long story short, the Count appeared at my degree show and bought a life drawing. I visited them irregularly in their large dark flat. The Count lovingly kept a picture collection including Sickert, Corinth, Menzel, Polish painters I didn’t know and and unknown artists like myself. His brother kept small birds - he is clutching one in my painting while the Count is looking at a Matisse-like Polish painting.

Without pausing, the author (whoever that might be), double takes and simply ploughs on:

For many years, this painting was called ‘Bub and Sis’. It depicted a lesbian couple and was inspired by a picture story about Times Square, which I’ve kept from the old Life magazine. Then I painted it over in black.

The new painting is about two old brothers I knew almost 40 years ago. They lived together in the sam rooming house, in the 18th district (Wahring) of Vienna, as I did when I was a 19-year old student at the Art Academy in the Schillerplatz. The fat one was a poor painter who had a Matisse-like style as you can see in my painting. He had been a student at my very school along with Schiele, whose work he hated. Somehow, through thick and thin, he had survived as a painter. They painted and lived and kept small birds in a single large room. My landlady told me they were Nazis. I didn’t tell them I was a Jew because my landlady, Frau Hedwig Bauer, was a dear old (Gentile) friend of my grandmother and I didn’t wish to cause her trouble so I ignored the two old men. I was courting a Christian girl and my life was overflowing. The awful thing was to have to share a bathtub with the bastards.

So here we have it, a demonstration of the double interpretation. Does it make any difference to the painting? Of course it does. The image itself is ambiguous. What is happening and who are these people? Context creates meaning. Meaning is never completely free of the artist's intention, but what was his intention? To make it quite clear we are in a hall of semiotic mirrors, he tells us this painting has another painting underneath it. He doesn't tell us why he "painted it black", obliterating it - a telling phrase. We can't know if that's true, but how closely does this image parallel the one under it? Closely, it's implied, since it wasn't just any picture but a picture of two women, two figures, just like we see here. It suggests that meaning in art is malleable and contingent while the artist still works on the painting, since figures can be men, women, or whatever the artist wants to suggest.

But, but... After all that, Kitaj was a visual artist of power and daring, a magnificent draughtsman and a bold colourist of great ambition. Have a look at 'The Oak Tree' (1991). A drawing-in-paint I want to call 'supple', but also a work of surpassing strangeness. I don't know where that colour comes from, but what a powerful, memorable image.


UCLA's Centre for Jewish Studies is about to open an exhibition from 8 January: "Portrait of a Jewish Artist: R. B. Kitaj in Word and Image". This will be held in conjunction with the Skirball Cultural Centre exhibition: "R. B. Kitaj: Passion and Memory, Jewish Works from His Personal Collection".

Terrorism Claus?

Buying a car insurance policy on Friday, I had one of those zeitgeist moments. You know the sort of thing. You're trying to open a website for your eight year old son to play games online, you can't work it out, minutes go by, and then he calmly hits the return key. Presto! You feel the tide of history has suddenly risen up around your nostrils...

Anyway, I'm reading through the fine print and come to this:

TERRORISM EXCLUSION

This policy does not cover loss, damage, liability, injury, illness, death, cost or expense arising directly or indirectly out of or in any way connected with:
a. any act of terrorism arising directly or indirectly out of or in any way connected with biological, chemical, radioactive, or nuclear pollution or contamination or explosion; or
b. any act of controlling, preventing, suppressing, retaliating against, or responding to any act referred to in (a) above.

An act of terrorism includes, but is not limited to, any act, preparation in respect of action or threat of action, designed to:
a. influence a government or any political division within it for any purpose, and/or
b. influence or intimidate the public or any section of the public with the intention of advancing a political, religious, ideological or similar purpose.

I note that under the second section, clause b, I would have been guilty of an act of terrorism by handing out How To Vote cards on the 24th of November.

I find this difficult to respond to without simply shaking my head in disbelief. If ever a claim was made on these therms, I can just imagine the fun to be had in the courts over the definition of "terrorism."

Please forgive me, I've been away...

Please accept my apologies for neglecting you, most grievously. Let's just say that my professional obligations rolled over the top of every other aspect of life (almost), but I'm happy to say that the outcome was rather positive. Like, pinch me in case I'm dreaming positive.

Anyway, that's all outside the mission of this blog, and cultural life does not grind to a halt just because of a measly election. "On", as Beckett might succinctly put it.

For no reason other than that I like it and I want to see it on this page, here is a stunning caricature that appeared in The Australian's Literary Review this morning. It is of course V S Naipaul, who is called "a prig, a prick and a pig" by Peter Craven, a man not generally given to beating about the bush, as you might tell from the headline.


Anyway, it's by Eric Lobbecke, and it is a stunningly dynamic drawing, especially the hair and the confluence of features around those doleful eyes.

Big Heads 2

Here is the next in a series of large scale drawings I've been a-workin' on for some time. Last time I posted a drawing as a progressive sequence, but here is the finished article.

It started life as the top half of a toy my son likes to play with. Actually, he appears to enjoy playing with the top half more than he ever played with the complete toy.

An extraordinary thing. It's a crude transformer-type toy which begins as a black rhino. By moving the hinged pieces about, it transforms into an extremely angry muscle-bound man with a very suggestive yellow horn on his head. I was hit between the eyes with the metaphorical significance of this bizarre thing. The man's rage seemingly provokes his literal metamorphosis into a rhino. A depiction of raw Id if I've ever seen one.


The other odd thing is that he seems to have already possessed animal attributes before the transformation had begun, with this bizarre phallic horn on his bullet head, as if the first stage was taking place when this first impression was made.

Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del fauno)

This film is highly original, a very Grimm fairy tale. I’m not sure this is a legitimate literary parallel, but it was very much in the Magic Realist style of latin novelists like Marquez.

It presents reality very much as the child Ofelia sees it, while still allowing us to see outside and beyond her view to include events as they might be objectively. The lovely thing is that it is not ever apparent whose eyes we are seeing with: Ofelia’s, whose world is filled with mythical creatures or the adults’ that act around her, whose reality is fascist Spain, 1944.

I loved the design of the film, especially the faun itself and particularly of the Pale Man, who places eyeballs in the stigmata in his hands. We are very much in the territory of surrealists like Jan Svankmajer or the Brothers Quay.

Nevertheless, for me the experience was marred by its luxurious (and eventually deadening) brutality. It bothered me very much that a film that is so solidly for the importance of the imagination, and places such a high value in the purity and innocence of the child Ofelia can be so frank about its very impure lust for violence. I’m not talking here about the characters’ lust for violence, but the film’s itself.

It is important, for example, that we register what a sadistic monster the step father is by hitting us between the eyes with the kind of violence he’s prepared to dish out to partisans or even just those suspected of sheltering them when the children are out of view. Did we need to see him smash in the face of a suspected partisan with the end of a wine bottle in a long take? Possibly not, but at least a point was being made.

I thought this apparent strategy was clever. Shock the audience early and every suspenseful situation thereafter is filled with dread. We’ve seen what he is capable of and so we fear the same end for characters we have grown to care about.

But shortly after, writer/director Guillermo Del Toro seems to dispense with such bourgeois restraint and gives it to us in bucketloads. By the time I got to Capitan Vidal stitching up his own razored face in the mirror, I started to feel like I was watching a movie directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis. This was clearly a moment intended to create pandemonium amongst the teenagers in the back row, and it worked in my loungroom, let me assure you.

It’s not violence per se I object to, but the bad faith. I am very much in the minority here, since the film has received almost universal praise, but by the end of the film I felt like he was having a lend of me and I intensely disliked the sensation.

Banksy's easel

Trying to encapsulate why I think Banksy is important, I couldn't do better than this little contribution. Hilarious and - I hesitate to say it but it's true - profound. It is called 'Blue Period'.

Whenever I come across another article in my local media calling for hanging to be reintroduced to deal with 'vandals', I understand the underlying concern with property damage, illegality and so on, but I think "And yet, and yet...".

This is nothing less than a redefinition of the concept of public art. Illegal most of it may be, but it is public art nevertheless. The best of it, at least. Is it right to condemn a medium because of its worst manifestations rather than its best?


More of his work can be found at Wooster Collective.

Big Heads

Making good on a threat I issued some time ago, here are some more of my drawings.

This is the first of an ongoing series I'm doing in collaboration with Greg Neville, which we are tentatively calling 'Big Heads'.

A bit different from my usual subject matter, the intention here is satirical (not exactly ripped from my very soul, if you know what I mean). It consists of a series of very large drawings in charcoal and mixed media of disposable plastic toys intended for children, some of them originally no larger than a couple of centimetres tall.

The drawings are massively expanded in scale, like the muscle-toned body of male aspiration, yet their sources are often quite tiny figures from throw away bits of consumer ware. These plastic mass-produced objects both embody and grotequely distort the classical ideal and the ideology of the Olympic stadium, which was itself a mortal echo and a tribute to the acts of the gods themselves.

The figures themselves depict rippling hyper-masculine supermen with expressions of extreme aggression and strain, in a display of extraordinary excess.

I hope the drawings will have a commanding physical presence as objects, drawn in vertiginous perspective, with an ironic nod to the tradition of classical statuary. The disposability of the objects both embodies and mocks the long tradition of Western figuration that informs them.

I thought it would be interesting to record the evolution of the drawing, so here are progressive shots of the first one under way. This is quite big, about a metre and a half high. Others I am working on will be even larger whole figures, but I thought I would start with details, see how it went, and work my way up.

The last shot is the finished article. The original for this one is a small plastic candy-dispenser, with a ring at the top. It has a hinge at the back and you flip it open to get the little candies. It would be about six or seven centimetres high.