Arts and Minds - Journals of an Arts Addict 2007-2013
EPISODE 11 May/July2009
MAY /.JULY 2009
JOHN TUSA
No matter how often the arts demonstrated with chapter and verse that they were worth supporting, successive ministers for culture always called for more evidence of their economic impact. It was a Treasury backed default position. Ministers’ lack of guts was total. The rest of us had to make up for the deficiency of their support.
Thursday, May 28. Speech at the Cumberland Lodge conference centre in Windsor Great Park. I make an unashamed pitch, that the arts ARE a special case, that they deserve special treatment for at least two reasons; one is that they have used the additional funding given them well; the arts deliver quality and “excellence”` in a quite extraordinary way. Next, the arts institutions have absorbed the government’s “instrumentalism” agenda, and absorbed it without being sunk by it. By being better run, they can put more into the arts themselves. It amounts to a decade of internal revolution that deserves recognition rather than being undermined by further cuts that will decimate the arts and will not save the economy. It goes down a storm, voted “Quite the best Cumberland annual lecture, absolutely brilliant” by the historian, Sir Michael Howard. The director, Alistair Niven, is over the moon with excitement, especially as the plaudits continue to flow in the following day.
Anniversaries are useful, can be important but should avoid feeling just routine commemoration.
Sunday, May 31. The Anniversary of Joseph Haydn’s death. Andras Schiff plays the traditional 11.30 Wigmore Coffee Concert, with top tix at a mere £12!! Schiff progresses chronologically from an earlyish “Capriccio”, an extraordinary fantasy work, through two Sonatas, another Capriccio, played without a break, ninety minutes. This is Haydn the muscular, the intellectual, though never brawny, with bones under the brilliant surface. Gilhooly takes us, the Schiffs, Ulli Gerhardtz from Steinway, David King, the senior house manager, Marie-Helene Osterweil, the head of development, to lunch after the concert. I ask JG how the fee was arranged? JG: “There was none! Andras did it for nothing! He was so moved to be asked to play on the exact anniversary of Haydn’s death that he took no fee!” A great man. “Guardian” reviews the Schiff and the whole Haydn weekend at Wigmore in glowing terms, “trumping” the South Bank’s two concerts! Am I competitive – you bet I am. No one ever offered to “help” Wigmore when it was in trouble; noone cared if the Wigmore sank when the Queen Elizabeth Hall opened; no one offered to help the Barbican in its early struggling days.
The opportunity for a total change of mood. It looked like a rarity. This exhibition was a revelation.
Monday, 1 June. The British Museum opens a unique exhibition - paintings from the Royal Court of Jodhpur that have lain unknown or ignored for 1-200 years. They reflect the local religion, the local holy men, and a world and art view that is Indian rather than Persian/Mughal influenced. The colours are intense, the sense of composition dramatic and bold, the iconography original. The experience of looking at images not seen for hundreds of years, that will be seen nowhere else outside India is in the proper sense, unique. The final room, where three figures, one of them seated on the shoulders of a human animal, float on a simply patterned background, have an ecstatic atmosphere.
A more worldly affair this evening, the celebratory dinner to mark the opening of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Truth to tell, the guests are as interesting as most of the art works.
Tuesday, 2 June. The RA Summer Dinner is packed. The conductor, Bill Christie, promises to “do a turn” for us at Wigmore in 2011 - “I’ll do it at cost!” The painter, Tai Schierenberg, says there’s no point in painting me so long as I am so sunburned! I say I can’t afford him anyway. Germaine Greer gives a largely incomprehensible speech, starting with aborigine art and ending with Tracey Emin’s “wonderful ability to draw!” But the laudatory references to poor Tracey only embarrass her. (I was sitting close to her). GG gives us all that stuff about young women identifying with “Tracey’s sense of pain” in her drawings. Afterwards, noone seems to have liked or understood the speech. In his turn, the RA President, Nick Grimshaw, said how glad he was to have had the chance to read it three times beforehand. Only Nick could get away with such an owlish, donnish barb!
At the Clore Leadership Programme we believed that in addition to helping future generations of arts leaders to “find their voice”, we could have fun by brokering ideas from existing arts leaders and practitioners.
Thursday, June 4. Clore Open Day at King’s Place. The theme, “It’s the Art, Stupid”, courtesy Bill Clinton. Four of my favourite artists to speak on innovation and discovery: the potter, Grayson Perry, the choreographer, Sue Davies, the playwright, Kwame Kwei-Armah and the fashion guru, Louise Wilson. Kwame has been up all night writing because he suddenly thought he had a solution to a problem. Thus: “Don’t be burdened by inspiration! Art is about making mistakes”. Do be burdened by a “desire to be original”. You must draw from the past because “the present is not strong enough to sustain a human being”. His challenge to Clore Fellows: “What are you going to do to create the environment to engage with talent?”
Sue Davies: the artist must be a de-stabiliser. “Dismantle your previous learning” to free yourself up for the next stage. She now has a building to work in, but “I don’t want a home! I want a windy corner, a place of waking, constant transfer”. Art forms should not merge into one another – there should be a natural gap between them. “The gap is where the creation takes place”. Then: “Creativity and innovation are lazy buzz words. They pull you off like elastoplast!”
Grayson has a hangover. He is provocative. “I don’t want to be creative! Creativity is mistakes”. Beware the “cult of youth”. They can’t be creative when young; it happens much later in life. Psycho-therapy is dangerous: “It cleans up your toolshed!” Warming up: “I don’t want failed artists to be curators. I don’t want to be a rung on their career!” New ideas are like “furry creatures at the edge of a forest.” Don’t frighten them away. The process is a “war of attrition – there is no ‘Zen moment’!” “I don’t love contemporary art. Time makes things beautiful!”
We are London folk, always have been. But when a (rare) invitation to the country did come we decided to take it to find out what we were missing.
Saturday, 6 June. Visit to Wiltshire. Two things about the country! The sight of English downland, especially in June, makes me go to jelly. English gardens, villages, market towns, ditto. But the “problem” in the country for us is “What do you do once you are there?” Especially, “What do you do with guests?” We know our place, how to behave: “Get out of your hosts’ hair!” We go to Salisbury to see Bill Pye’s water sculpture Font in the Cathedral. Salisbury Close probably the grandest and most extensive in Britain; the Cathedral, harmonious and unified in conception and execution was disastrously “cleaned up” by Wyatt. It feels cold. Bill Pye’s baptismal font is one of his copper, rectangular, cruciform, meniscus pieces, with the water spilling out of small spouts at each corner. When it was consecrated on the cathedral’s 750th anniversary, the Archbishop blessed each side of the font with holy oil. This left four irregular cruciform marks on each side as the oil reacted with the copper! Beautiful! Tho’ some cathedral idiots tried – and failed - to rub them off! Other worthy locals thought it wasn’t right for the Cathedral! Can’t they see that the stillness and perfection of the meniscus is a perfect symbol for eternity?
The International Society for the Performing Arts (ISPA) is a loose and enthusiastic biannual gathering of people, practitioners and organisations involved in almost any aspect of the arts. Now, the chance to see some of Brazil, not a country or culture that I knew.
Wednesday, June 10. ISPA in Sao Paolo. The gossip flows randomly from all corners and from every delegate. Thus: the Concertgebuow Orchestra does an occasional turn in the pit at the Nederlands Opera in Amsterdam. At present they are playing “Carmen”. Robert Carsen, the Director, will have 500 extras on the stage in Act 4, AND two horses. The orchestra said: “No way, it could be too dangerous for the players if the horses bolted!” Management pleaded: ”It is needed for the Director’s conception!” Orchestra: “Our conception is that our players shouldn’t be killed if a horse ends up in the pit!” End of Director’s concept!
Sunday, June 14. The Brazilians don’t spend their time fighting over cultural categories and distinctions – ie high/low, classical/pop. Why is this? Because they have a very strong genuinely popular culture – Amazonian, poor Catholic, pagan – which they cherish. The second layer is Brazilian popular music, ie Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, which is absolutely national. Noone is going to surrender that for homogenised “globo-pop” rubbish. Then their own western classical roots are there too and they don’t see the point in fighting over whether it has a place in the nation or not. How they go beyond Villa-Lobos is the question they explore. They want to “be” Brazilian but not to “sound” Brazilian. Yet they don’t want to be mindlessly international.
Important as all their community work is, a sense of proportion was introduced by a very bright guitarist, Savon. “You can’t overlook training, skill and knowledge! Just getting kids to dance a bit only achieves what it achieves. We must not pretend that is the end of the matter. Education is more than that!” The arts get a degree of attention here because their value is understood more intensely than it is in Europe. We look very “old world” in our weariness, in our cynicism, our feeling of being overburdened by a glorious past and heritage. For Brazilians, the future really does lie ahead.
Musical partnerships develop in many ways: like with like, deliberate mismatch, experimental hook up. What drove the partnership of the youthful baritone, Mathias Goerne and the veteran pianist, Christoph Eschenbach. To the Wigmore for Part Two of their series of the three great Schubert song cycles in a single week.
Wednesday, June 17. Tonight is remarkable for the intensity of Goerne’s story telling, the brilliance of the imagery he evokes, the intensity of Eschenbach’s playing. Does Goerne occasionally over sing? Probably. Does it move? Not in truth, me. But it is intensely memorable. At supper, Goerne explains that Monday went very well because they have done “Schone Mullerin” in public only once before and he took many risks, but Eschenbach took up each one with unfaltering speed and sensitivity.
Saturday June 20. The last in the Goerne/Eschenbach series. What more is there to say? Goerne breaks the rules. This is not “classical” singing; it is dramatic, heroic, intense, theatrical, epic in a way that some will not, do not like. Annie says that in the savage last five Heine songs of “Schwanengesang”, she felt not pity, not pathos but true fear. As for Eschenbach, this frail figure, with fastidious touch and taste, Annie tells him afterwards he played the Schubert B flat Sonata as if it was the first time ever! Eschenbach says, “That is the greatest possible compliment!”
Occasionally, personal memory, personal understanding is jolted in an unexpected way. At a BM reception, I am introduced to the grandson of the Director of the Brno Opera from the Czech Republic. ( I was born near Brno). As we talk, something happens.
Tuesday, June 23. Suddenly, I am back in Brno, recalling the feeling when I was attending the Brno Opera for the Janacek Festival a couple of years back. As I looked round the foyers, filled with square-ish, stocky-ish, Moravians, I felt a huge, surprising sense of fellowship and identity. These are my people; I am one of them; I look like them. Had we not left for England in 1939, this is what, who, I would have been. It was curiously heart-warming.
It needs saying and repeating: the arts offer in London is extraordinary and must not be taken for granted. What is on offer is remarkable in its originality, its extent, its sheer quality.
Sunday June 28. Hearts and minds lifted with two Tate exhibitions. Richard Long at Tate Britain moves Annie hugely – certainly I am not indifferent. The main room with five floor sculptures – slate, chalk boulders, granite, basalt- is utterly, heart stoppingly beautiful. Long is a great photographer too, and his assemblage of word impressions based on the sights and sounds of a long walk - they are all long – is sheer poetry. Years ago, 30 years for sure, on Dog’s Bay headland in Connemara, we came across a spiral of stones on the headland. Even then it looked man made, carefully so. We have a photo of it. Long worked in Connemara and one of his post cards has a very similar, though not identical, photograph of such a sculpture. That ties him to us even more closely.
We take the Tate Boat to Tate Modern - this is like being on holiday in a foreign capital. Left to herself, Annie would not have gone to Italian Futurism, the Richard Long was so intense. But in the event we are bowled over. It is not just Futurism, an exhilarating painting movement with a mad leader. The works are dazzling, brilliantly coloured, dazzlingly constructed. But it links Futurism with Cubism; then with Russian Constructivism and Suprematism, then with English Vorticism, in short, all our favourite movements within the great flow of the C20. It is dazzling painting if barmy thinking. But Marinetti’s manifesto to English Art - “stop being so bloody polite, so sentimental, so gutless!” – has a great and terrible ring to this day.
In all this time, I cannot recall a single thought, a single intervention, a single policy by a Secretary of State for Culture that contributed usefully to the arts world.
Tuesday June 30. The Director’s annual dinner at the British Museum. Niall Fitzgerald observes that it is almost three years since he became Chairman of the BM: “During that time, I have dealt with four Secretaries for Culture, Media and Sport! Tessa Jowell, James Purnell, Andy Burnham and now Ben Bradshaw! How can one be serious about culture when ministers turn over at such an insane rate?”
What makes a good piece of “public art” especially public sculpture? Far easier to identify the bad examples of which there are too many.
Wednesday, 1 July. Nicholas Goodison, the arts patron, and Andrew Shone, the critic, are campaigning at the way Hyde Park and other places are being turned into not very good – actually, bad! – sculpture parks. The Horse Memorial in Park Lane was bad enough, the proposed memorial to the dead of 7/7 is still worse. Public space for quiet is precious and increasingly rare. But the Treasury constantly put pressure on the authorities to “add value” – ie earn money – and so events and public occasions increasingly take over what should be public space for private moments. “Community”, admirable as that is, has taken away any idea that the personal and the private may be essential rights that people want and deserve. The more governments talk of community, the less of genuine community and belonging there is. It has been “professionalised”, dehumanised and owned by bureaucrats and social workers.
2 Oct 2024 JT