ARTS AND MINDS - JOURNALS OF AN ARTS ADDICT 2007-13

EPISODE 17 APRIL - MAY 2010

ARTS AND MINDS – JOURNALS OF AN ARTS ADDICT 2007-13

JOHN TUSA

“The arts world between Labour Instrumentalism and Conservative Austerity”

Episode 17 April to May 2010

Introducing Poles to the idea of arts management. The gas chambers of Maidanek. No words. Van Gogh’s final letters - seen in the flesh. Richard Hamilton gets political -at Tony Blair’s expense. Chris Offili is spiritual in his ”Upper Room”. “Minds on seats not bums on seats” – a young Chinese arts leader. Why Glyndebourne’s John Christie didn’t like Benjamin Britten or his music. Dancers and their “change” - how to manage the transition. David Attenborough suggests I take a Saga flight to the North Pole.

Sunday, April 11. To Lublin in Eastern Poland close to the huge River Vistula. We travel in the shadow of the catastrophic plane crash which killed the Polish President, and the top swaith of the nation’s political and administrative figures. What if we lost the PM, the Governor of the Bank of England, the Chief of the Defence Staff, two Archbishops etc etc in one plane crash? We would have gone hysterical, melodramatic. Poles take it stoically and with huge grief but real grief. We land in Warsaw half an hour before the plane carrying the President’s coffin. The entire road from the airport to Warsaw is lined with people several deep. Quiet, intense, sometimes alone, the very picture of the deepest shock. The road into Warsaw is nose to tail with traffic, surely all going for one purpose – to pay their respects. Where else should they be, what else should they do?

Our driver tunes the radio restlessly from one station to another to get the best, most immediate accounts of the scenes in Warsaw. Sometimes he dashes a tear from his eyes. In Lublin, there is a carpet of red and white candles alongside the Pilsudski memorial and outside the City Hall. There is no rule book, no precedent for such a ripping out of the political leaders.

Monday, April 12. Geography apart, Lublin is a city of extremes with one of the Second World War’s worst Holocaust extirmination camps – Maidanek - on its very edge, impossible to overlook, forget or ignore. I have seen the bleak, mass mound graves of Bergen/Belsen, Dachau, the grisly vitrines of Auschwitz, the offhand cruelty of Buchenwald. Nothing prepares you for Maidanek. It is huge; hectares and hectares. You could almost mistake it for a park! It is very close to the city, two kilometres perhaps. We stand at the monumental entrance carved out of limestone blocks, dwarfing you by their scale. They rest on pillars at the top of a long flight of stone steps. A solitary man in a blue jacket walks up and down the steps without pause. Is it a kind of prayer, a personal penance, an obsession, a compulsion?

For the rest, the sheer formulaic nature of the system can never stale by repetition. After all Rudolf Hoess, the Nazi commandant from Auschwitz, made it clear at the Nuremberg Tribunal that he was interested in the efficiency of his extermination operation. It was a business. Annie declines to go in to the gas chambers themselves; I do but only very incompletely engage with what really happened here. You can’t stand on the spot where thousands were stripped, shaved and then gassed and take it in or respond. This is no ordinary point of history. Even those words are puny and feeble. But what else?

Tuesday, April 13. Speech on cultural management in Lublin at the suggestion of the British arts administrator, Rose Fenton. She warns: ”They need to learn almost everything about it!” About 200 people, artists, administrators, students turn up. Where to start? I advise them to form and define an arts policy before their new building(s) open. Politicians must learn to influence at “arm’s length”. This is a new word for Poles! Similarly, they have no word at all for “governance”. They think it is the same as “management”. I talk of budgetary discipline, a hard learned lesson in Britain. Reckless spending is not creative; “overspending is not the badge of creative freedom!” They find this hard. They must be realistic about commercial earnings; unsentimental about pricing, flexible about programming. Some in the audience are already onside; others are puzzled. They have broken away from communist central direction; now they are told to be personally responsible. Can they be both responsible and free? I say “yes; responsibility is the guarantee of artistic freedom.” Some look worried. Others see the point. Now it is up to them.

Sunday April 18. Amazing Royal Academy party in the evening – not an opening but a closing party for the “Van Gogh Letters”, funded by Goldman Sachs banker, Richard Sharp. Free flowing champagne, oysters, canapes, prawns by the hundred on mountains of ice. Freshly made sweet pancakes, delicate creme brulees. A feast for the arts establishment, at my estimation not a penny less than £25k. The architect Richard McCormac is there looking forlorn. He is about to give up work. Can we meet for lunch? Annie says the dispute over his plans for the BBC’s Broadcasting House broke his heart. He is a lovely, gentle person.

The works!! Seeing Vincent’s last letter to Theo, utterly normal, his last drawing of his last painting, is incredibly moving. And his final Auvers paintings, calm, gentle, expansive, lyrical, 26 paintings in 26 days, is a revelation. Such a change from the seething, boiling torment of the Provence works, and from this mood he shot himself. Still impossible to comprehend. Lavinia Grimshaw, wife of the RA’s President, says: “All these diary pages will now go into a darkened, temperature-controlled vault. Even at the Van Gogh museum, all you will see will be facsimiles”. It is a special privilege.

Monday April 19. Richard Hamilton at the Serpentine, a show of his political works. The Mick Jagger image, treated in eight different ways, becomes political but so strong, Hamilton’s work has transformed it into universality. Israel/Palestine before and after, two simple maps, side by side, the shrinkage of Palestinian territory brutally clear, that’s political too. Tony Blair as a gun toting cowboy in a work called “Shock and Awe”; Blair smug, tanned, in love with his image, glib, superficial. Not so much the power of the pen, the power of paint. We part company with Hamilton on one issue only - the IRA prisoner and hunger striker, Bobby Sands, presented as a suffering Christ in his shit smeared cell misses the point badly.

Down to Tate Britain for Chris Offili, about whom Annie is doubtful. His early work is detailed, decorative, but fantastically well constructed on the canvas. “The Upper Room”, a great Christ image at the end really transcendent but the use of the uniform “monkey with cup” image limits the idea intellectually and emotionally. It is up with the Mark Rothko Chapel as a set of images for contemplation. Finally, “Trinidad” – a dazzling swerve of direction but still the man who constructs a canvas with confidence. The dots and patterns are gone, but the swirling elongated shapes in a simpler colour palette have replaced them. And three big works in the deepest midnight blue with darkened shapes emerging from the depths of the saturated colour.

Tuesday, April 20. Evening British Museum opening of “Renaissance Prints and Drawings”, a brilliant joint BM/Uffizi Gallery show. Anthony Griffiths, Keeper of Prints and Drawings said people kept on asking him: “Working with the ‘Uffizi’ must have been tricky?” He replied: “Not very, their Keeper and I were students together many years ago! That’s all you need to do – keep in touch with your colleagues!” The evening starts with a virtuoso opening speech by the historian Simon Schama defending the idea that something different happened at the time of the Renaissance: “just look at the drawings!” He does a “turn”, hands waving, almost shouting into the microphone, wonderfully over the top. The Renaissance scholars stand in a huddle and hate it; but they are wrong.

Saturday, April 24. We drive down to, Madeleine Bessborough’s Roche Court near Salisbury for Richard Deacon’s show. Roche is ravishing, the sculpture newly placed through out the landscape , the Barry Flanagan “Double Hare” well down the valley, challenging the oaks, and playing off a great blasted oak a quarter of a mile away in the meadow. In the meadow, a complex Philip King piece which, Madeleine says, the cattle love rubbing against. Near the house, a huge rookery in the great stand of oaks, Madeleine says they get bigger and closer to the house every year. Some Londoners bleat, “How can you stand the noise!” Richard Deacon’s show is based on cardboard shapes, then covered with porcelain, fired and leaving the porcelain objects as his sculptures but with the ribbing and textures of cardboard clearly visible. Richard says he feels a great sense of relief; his previous work had been full of metal and it exhausted him; cardboard and porcelain are “light”, the shapes original, the structures malleable.

Thursday, April 29. A lovely forty five minute walk to King’s Cross from Canonbury. I meet Nigel Carrington, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Arts London (UAL). Nigel is taking David Noyce, CEO of the Higher Education Funding Council, (HEFCE) over the University’s Central St Martin’s site. It has come on in leaps and bounds, in tons of concrete, in reality, it will be spectacular. David doesn’t get away scot-free! I make various points about the Higher Education sector as a whole: twenty years behind the arts in efficiency terms; poorly managed; in hock to the unions; and bad at conveying the value of excellence in academic terms to a carping government. The arts faced similar government calls for “instrumentalism” by doing two things: responding to the instrumentalism agenda without giving up on the “excellence” agenda, insisting that instrumentalism without excellence was a betrayal and a contradiction. The arts won the argument. Now academics, scared by questioning about “value”, have to fight the “excellence” battle on identical or very similar grounds.

Monday, May 3. Elisabeth Leonskaya, Wigmore at lunchtime playing Schubert, an Impromptu and the A major sonata, then two more Impromptus as encores! She really understands the unfolding, evolving sometimes convoluted nature of Schubert’s writing, less a structure, certainly a flow, something to be felt and turned into a structure. It could not be more different from Beethoven who with his taut and muscular athleticism shapes and conditions our listening to everyone else. She turns Schubert’s phrases, feels them, introduces almost unperceived checks in their movement in a way that enhances their sound rather than breaking it. Leonskaya lights up an otherwise dreary day.

Tuesday, May 4 . Sandy Nairne, the Director, throws a celebratory lunch at the National Portrait Gallery for the Tenth Anniversary of the opening of the Ondaatje wing. Drinks in the Tudor Rooms, the portraits staggeringly brilliant, strong characters, a high gloss finish, lit by those sharp pencil lights that illuminate the whole face without flooding it like a spot. One portrait of a Tudor courtier looks the spitting image of Peter Hall, heavy jowled, tough, almost threatening. We relish the fact that the solution by the architects, Jeremy Dixon and Ed Jones, to the NPG extension was to slot in – almost literally – the whole of the back section of the NPG facing the National Gallery. Every floor fitted at the right level, every one made a coherent space, there are no awkward joins and turns. It was more like a natural growth. We muse that since “Dixon-Jones” have subtly but decisively altered the NPG, Royal Opera, Somerset House and the National Gallery entrance, they - or he - should be elevated to “Lord Dixon of Covent Garden”. It is all very London like: how do you take the existing fabric of the city and then gently give it a face lift without making it grotesque and unlike its true self?

Maggi Hambling, the painter, at lunch. She is a great monster of whom I am very fond and she of me. Art movements? “Never, I never belonged to one, you just have to do what you believe in but you don’t mess about with movements!”

Thursday, May 6. Michael Hopkins’ 75^th birthday party at the RIBA. The architectural establishment is out in force. David Attenborough is there recently back from the North Pole! “Does Easyjet fly there?” I ask. “No,” David replies dead pan. “ But Saga does. You should go, it is easy!”

Friday, May 7. Tonight is Laura Samuel’s last concert at Wigmore as second fiddle in the Belcea Quartet. They play Szymanowski Two brilliantly, a moody, temperamental, often elusive work. Big hugs for Laura in the Green Room. She is going to the Nash Ensemble: “New repertoire and after 16 years, time for a change.” Annie observes that, especially after getting her Strad to play on, Laura has contributed a strength to the quartet to match the brilliance of the charismatic leader, Corinna Belcea.

Tuesday, May 11. The effervescent double bass player, Chi Chi Wannaku, wants an RPS award for an orchestral player: “ Colin Davis or Simon Rattle don’t need another award! The poor desk players do and there are some great people there who keep the orchestras going! I think I have got the RPS and the Association of British Orchestras to put in £500 each!“ I am shocked and say “Skinflints! At that rate, we will put in £500 of our own money for the prize!” There is a wonderful tribute to Philip Langridge from Simon Rattle and from John Tomlinson. Philip’s widow, the mezzo Ann Murray, tells me that “Philip couldn’t have borne a long illness. It is best it happened as it did.” Then: “A word of advice. Go home and write down on a piece of paper all your passwords, for computers, emails and so on. Philip didn’t and it is murder!”

Grayson Perry, in a black leather dress that needs inflating with a bicycle pump and a huge white Tudor collar, gives a brilliant speech: “Now I’m going to talk about the ‘c-word’”.(Dramatic pause!) “ ‘Cool!’ Don’t do it, don’t try to be cool, it is death. Never forget that you must be serious, nothing else is worth while!” Funny and commonsensical.

Thursday, May 13. Clore interviews by phone for a Fellow from China, a breakthrough. One really brilliant woman this morning. Her obiter dicta included: “ We want minds on seats not bums on seats!” That’s good! “There are so many facts round us; where is the meaning?” That’s better! Or: “We cannot know what we want to know immediately.“ Think about it! And: “Leadership is all about balancing and juggling”. Let us hope she is that original in practice rather than drawing on “Chairman Hu’s Bumper Leadership Book”.

Thursday, May 13. To the evening private view of “Collect”. The great British artists are well represented: our friends like Edmond de Waal, the potter, Jennifer Lee, the ceramicist, Kelvin Birk, the jeweller. The basic “going price” is around £4-5k! Thank goodness we bought our pieces years ago at significantly lower prices. People often ask if we are “collectors?” We always say, “No, we buy what we like and have done so over the years but we do not ‘collect’!” Joanna Foster, the Chair, says the Crafts Council runs courses for “those who say they want to learn how to ‘collect’!” Annie says: “Trust your eye, learn from what you buy, buy for love or interest, do not buy because someone says you should, and above all do it for its own sake not because you are ‘collecting’”.

Monday, May 17. Sheer joy at Covent Garden in the evening with the music agent Stephen Wright, a relief both needed and deserved: Donizetti’s “La Fille du Regiment”, a slight work but given the works, wittily directed by Laurent Pelly and sung to the skies by Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Flores. She is gamine, hyper energetic, funny, and vocally brilliant; he brings the house down with his pistol clear top Cs and everyone shouts with joy. You will never see it sung or produced better.

Monday, May 17. Dancer’s Symposium run by Clore Fellowship and Nesta taking place in the wholly grotty subterranean conference rooms of the Royal Festival Hall. The theme is the “dancers’ transition ” or “the change” – yes, it is like the change of life - when they move from dancing to, well something else. This causes difficulties, is often unaddressed, unadmitted and unacknowledged. Many speak of “grieving” when they stop dancing. As often, Sue Davies, the choreographer, is the star. People should recognise that dancers have a wide range of skills, filled with “intelligence”. But people such as her must be “less maternal towards them, I must not sort out their knowledge!” Dance is just as intelligent and rigorous as any other art form. “Dance is not just a talent, it is not just for or about those who are young, beautiful or physical.” We all work in contained spaces; “crack open all the many shells we create around us!” Paul Bronkhorst says it is hard for dancers to recognise their skills. They are disciplined, responsible, serious, punctual, well presented, quick and adaptable. I say how extraordinary that people with so-called “conventional intelligence” – ie most of us – can’t sing or move but discount two of the skills most fundamental to humanity. I urge dancers not to sell themselves short.

Thursday, May 27. Riotous party at the Museum of London to open their splendid new galleries. Boris Johnson is on fantastic form, a real turn, who eclipses Barbara Windsor and Michael Caine, reflecting ”old Lunnun”. Boris is neither part of the dignified part of the constitution, nor the effective part, according to Bagehot’s classic distinction. He is something special; part of the hilarious part of the constitution. Just as some men get women into bed by making them laugh, Boris wins votes by making us laugh.

Saturday, May 29. A foul day for our first Glyndebourne, “Billy Budd” in the new Michael Grandage production. (Much earlier, David Attenborough had asked “who are you going with?” I replied, “Noone - we bought tickets!” David, incredulous: “ I have never bought tickets!” But then he is and has been a “national treasure!”) Was it worth buying? Oh yes. Searing, desperately sad, agonising, tragic, the deepest pathos. Afterwards as we embrace John Mark Ainsley in his dressing room and ask him how he gets over it, he says, “ I crash out next day, then have a large gin and tonic at 6 and start to feel human!” Gus Christie says his grandfather, John Christie, did not like Britten’s music nor Britten himself much: “He rather expected John to foot all the bills, so there was a long gap without Britten here!” I need a brandy after the performance, not something I have ever done before or needed to do. The sadness lingers.

Monday, May 31. Ian Bostridge and Tony Pappano do Schubert’s “Schwanengesang” preceded by three songs, one of them “Die Sterne” - then “Liebesbotshaft” as an encore. In between, so to say, Ian gives the most tortured, anguished, expressive, painful version of “Schwanengesang” we have ever heard. The anger, the bitterness, the suppressed violence emerge in a terrifying way. Afterwards he says: “Yes, it’s interesting how the second performance differs when you do two in a row!” Lucasta is anguished as I throw my arms round her: “It all comes from inside him! And when his voice isn’t quite right, he just finds more inside, he takes such risks! I have to look after him, to protect him, and to look after the children and to do my own work!” No self pity or anger, just sheer strain. It was a moment of sheer human vulnerability.

Tuesday, June 1. German Embassy dinner about the restoration of Berlin. Reunifying the city artistically. Fine, but the centre of Berlin now begins to feel culturally overloaded – the historic cluster of galleries, so-called “Museum Insel”, is glorious, of course. When the old Prussian Royal Palace is rebuilt close by, then the cultural impact will be massive. And the big issue of why the elevation of the building involves restoring the original appearance is not addressed. (Later, the excellent ambassador tells us that, embarrassingly, the day after the dinner all investment in those projects was suspended pending debates on the German budget and the deficit.) This will not mean a rethink of the Royal Palace project which is a shame. But if even the Germans are re-thinking the scale of their investment in the arts, then the outlook for the rest of us is bleak.

3,376 words 25 Feb 25