The agonising and ultimately redemptive tale of the trapped Chilean miners captured the world’s hearts and headlines. At the time of writing, the 33rd and final miner has just been released into euphoria, and into the spotlight, from their underground entombment. Peter Stanford writing in the Independent said that: ‘it is a happy ending, yes, but more than that, it is a victory, on every level, for humanity’. This was certainly a story to celebrate in our bleak times. Speaking on Newsnight, former hostage John McCarthy said that there was something universal about the events that have unfolded over the previous two months. The rescue mission was one thing, but the morbid reality of their captivity – with the possibility that there might be no release (‘we were waiting to die’ said miner Richard Villaroel) – had also been pruriently captivating.

As we celebrate ‘Los 33’, our unholy fascination with underground interment continues with the inquest at the Royal Courts of Justice into the 7/7 bombings, replaying the terrifying ordeal of those trapped deep in the London Underground. These are ordinary people in extraordinarily horrific circumstances, with no visible means of escape.

Such intrigue also finds expression in fictionalised form. Emma Donoghue’s harrowing novel Room, shortlisted for the Man Booker, tells the story of a mother and daughter incarcerated in an underground chamber. Based on the appalling case of Josef Fritzl (the Austrian father to a trapped and sexually abused daughter), it conjures up the terrifying physical and psychological predicament of forced seclusion and overwhelming domination, from which there appears to be no escape. Rodrigo Cortés’ movie Buried - newly released (if you excuse the pun) – is a claustrophobic film about a man who wakes up to find he has been buried alive.

Whether there is a link between fiction and reality or not, all appear to be stories of humans triumphing over events that conspire to shroud humanity in darkness. Here people are confined in a potential death trap at the mercy of forces beyond their control. Each presents us with a horrifyingly inescapable prospect from which, in these versions, the ‘victim’ ultimately escapes (tragically, we forget those that never made it from the cellars of Belgian paedophile Marc Dutroux). The rescue is, after all, one heart-warming aspect to these appallingly tragic tales.

In general, what we admire is the redemptive resolution. The rescuers remind us of humanity’s care, selflessness and fellow-feeling, while the trapped remind us of the indomitable strength of the human spirit. Though unimaginable adversity, people’s resilience, humane character, and lust for life shines through. These tales are about more than just survival, they display a desire to rage against the dying of the light.

One book above all others captures this essence. Natascha Kampuch’s 3,096 Days, is the story of her eight and a half years of captivity at the hands of Wolfgang Priklopil. It is, on one hand a soul-wrenching story of a ten-year old chid snatched off the streets and thrown into a dungeon. On the other hand, it is a masterpiece of self-belief, determination and will to live.

In terrifying scenes that defy the senses of the casual reader, one finds oneself reading the book as a novel - blasé passages lull the reader into a blinkered acceptance of what is going on. This, to a certain extent, is the point: Kampuusch wants us to feel numbed – caught up in the narrative – for this is her way of explaining her predicament and her necessity to make a normality out of her utterly abnormal situation. Ever-present brutality jolts us back to the reality of her woeful condition. Locked in a cell, in pitch blackness (save for the relentlessly timed electric light) she has to endure beatings, psychological torture, unbearable loneliness, and constant monitoring from the early years of her childhood until she matures into an adult.

In a fascinating thread that runs through the book, she equates her imprisonment to her period of adolescence – drawing parallels between the timescale of her captivity and the period when her autonomy as a child would have been subjugated to the authority of adults in the real world. As such, she makes a pledge to herself that she will escape when she is old enough. It is an utterly remarkable rationalisation of intent. It also answers her critics who still cannot believe that she would never have tried to escape even though Priklopil sometimes took her on trips into the outside world.

Her life, she explains, had centred on Priklopil for her formative years – and aside from the terror he held for her, he was also her only companion. She says: ‘The person who had stolen me, who took my family and my identity from me, became my family. I had no choice other than to accept him as such and I learned to derive happiness from his affection and repress all that was negative. Just like any child growing up in a dysfunctional family’. That said, she is wonderfully dismissive of claims that she is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome – the medical explanation of hostages’ sympathy for their captor. Kampuch has been the victim of a terrible crime, but she refuses to be ‘turned into a victim the second time’.

‘I had withstood all of Wolfgang Priklopil’s psychological garbage and dark fantasies and had not allowed myself to be broken. Now I was out in the world, and that’s exactly what people wanted to see: a broken person who would never get back up again, who would always be dependent on help from others. But the moment I refused to bear that mark of Cain for the rest of my life, the mood turned.’

This book is Kampuch’s statement of intent. When she escaped, as promised, in 2006 at the age of 18, there was a similar response to that that greeted Los 33. But when she refused to play ball and be treated like ‘a broken girl in need of help’, she even received death threats. Unlike Los 33, she says people resented the fact that she had freed herself – that the social redemption that comes from a wide network of rescuers involved in a captive’s release, didn’t exist in her case. She had freed herself. She suggests that because of this, many people started to suggest that she couldn’t possibly have been held very forcibly against her will. Her story was challenged, her accounts of suffering were dismissed and she was even seen to have been complicit in her own capture. This book is a very touching, nuanced and determined two fingers up to those rumour-mongers.

Rather than a self-indulgent cartharsis, it is a gauntlet slapped in the face of her detractors. By doing this, Kampusch is determined to create a future that will not be dictated by the accident – the tragedy – of her past.

While revolving around the vile and vicious actions of her abductor, Wolfgang Priklopil; the central story reflects beautifully on the human spirit, and, in particular, on Natascha Kampuch who remains generous in victory. As such, it is a truly touching, well-written and delicately handled story. There are moments of self-deprecating humour and one often has to remind oneself of the nightmarish reality; although these lighter moments are the actual distractions that Kampusch introduced into her brutal world to keep herself sane.

As Luis Urzua, the last man pulled out of the mine in Chile’s Atacama desert said, ‘We had strength, we had spirit, we wanted to fight’. Natascha Kampusch was a terrified ten-year old when she was pushed underground. She too, refused to be broken.

Most art exhibitions have a particular theme, such as an anniversary, which may provide the critic with a useful lead-in to help evaluate the work on show. But no such aid is available here. There is simply the art itself, to be taken on its own terms, and all the critic can do is select what he or she feels to be noteworthy.

But first, a few words about the origins of what is on display here are in order, before getting down to the work of evaluating the material itself. Opened in 1906, the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest started life as a conglomeration of private collections that had been given to or acquired by the Hungarian state. The main collection was that of the Esterhazys (leading members of the Hungarian aristocracy), and had been built-up from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. By the mid-twentieth century, the museum’s collection had grown so large that Hungarian works of art were transferred to the newly established Hungarian National Gallery. This exhibition, bringing together works from both institutions, presents them as they were originally intended whilst placing Hungarian art within a broader European context. So what we have here is art collected in Hungary, not a collection of solely Hungarian art. And the artists featured here include leading figures from Raphael and Rembrandt to Picasso and Chagall.There’s something for everyone.Choosing what is especially eye-catching is not easy - but it can be attempted.

As soon as we enter the exhibition we’re greeted with the ‘St. Andrew Altarpiece’ (1512) by the Hungarian Master, with our attention grabbed by the face of Christ crowned with thorns. The theme is continued with the ‘Lamentation’ (c.1510) by the Master of Okolicsnó showing the quiet, almost restrained grief of the mourners as they see the blood-spattered body of Christ. Devotional restraint is also maintained in the ‘Coronation of the Virgin’ by Maso di Banco (doc.1335 -135"0), with the Virgin the object of calm admiration by the on-looking saints. But the ‘Pieta’ (c. 1480) by Jacopo Parisati da Montagna shows a bereft-looking Virgin whilst the dead Christ’s face is a combination of endured agony and relief at the consummation of suffering. With the statue of ‘St. Sebastian’ (1757) by Philipp Jakob Straub, the martyr’s body almost leaps with the impact of the arrows as they find their target.

But, with the coming of the Renaissance, secular and classical topics begin to feature as subject-matter too. ‘Portrait of a Man’ (c.1555) by Paolo Veronese shows a fur-collared young man with a defiant look starting to emerge across his bearded face, perhaps expecting a challenge about what may be newly-acquired mercantile wealth. The painting of the ‘Children of the Elector Palatine Frederick V King of Bohemia’ (1628) by Conelisvan Poelenburgh shows them enjoying themselves in a pastoral setting, with only a nearby mound of the bodies of hunted deer giving a clue to their royal status. Mythology gets a look-in, too, with ‘Venus Lamenting the Death of Adonis’ (1626-30) by Francesco Furini. Here, the goddess is shown stomping about in an agony of shrieking grief. War - a perennial feature of any era - is represented by Leonardo da Vinci’s soft black chalk or charcoal ‘Studies for the Heads of Two Soldiers in the Battle of Anghiari’ (c.1504-05). One face is openmouthed - with grief,or the struggle of combat? - whilst its brow is furrowed with concentration. The face of the other, smaller head seems suffused with an almost wry smile, perhaps a manifestation of the dark humour needed to survive the horrors of the
battlefield.

If the coming of the secular marks the middle phase of the exhibition, pictures exemplifying the role of women take-over its final section. The ‘Portrait of the Empress Maria Luisa’ by Friedrich Heinrich Fuger (c.1790) shows her standing, composed, yet radiating a quiet firmness (is she preparing herself to withstand any collateral damage from the recently erupted French Revolution?). Goya’s ‘Water-carrier’ (c.1808-12) shows a hardworking woman (there is a tear in her skirt) exuding a sense of dignity as she almost thrusts a water pitcher towards us. Jumping ahead several decades, Gustave Dore’s ‘Young Woman with a White Scarf’ (c. 1870) shows her holding a folded fan, and with a questioning, almost defiant look. The late nineteenth-century’s much talked-of - and feared – New Woman is emerging here. Sexual openness is too, a result of the growth of psychology and sexology as academic and medical disciplines with much of their work originating in Germany and Austria. We see ‘Two Women Embracing’ (1915) by EgonSchiele showing two semi-clad women discovered embracing without the slightest embarrassment: one regards the act as perfectly ordinary, whilst the other directs a ‘so what?’ expression towards the onlooker.

The exhibition is worth a visit, not only because of what it gives, but also for what it omits. Firstly, this celebration of a long-standing Hungarian hunger for art is not simply a straightforward demonstration of artists’ skills, refreshing though that is: it is an artistic running commentary, as it were, on the intellectual and political ferment that Europe underwent from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. Secondly, it features nothing from the post Second World War era. This omission is significant: is it because Hungarians want to forget a painful half-century of their history, or might art from that period remind some people today of a time when they embraced the Soviet system, including its bloody repression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising? Change, decay, rebirth - this exhibition has them framed.

Till 12 December 2010

William Gaddis’ attack on the institution and on the entertainment industry, in his posthumous novel, Agapē Agape, claims that there is a ‘whole supified mob [that is] turning the creative artist into a performer (...) the man in place of its work’. Aside from the fact that a performer can be a creative artist as well, what William Gaddis was trying to warn us about was how too much importance was being given to the living subject, the person and its actions, and less to his work. No one cares how Marcel Proust was as long as we have A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. Likewise, it is of no importance at all that William Faulkner was a drunkard, or that William Burroughs was a lifelong heroin addict. What stands, what remains, is their work, not their fascinating personalities. Nevertheless, none of these writers, with the exception of William Gaddis, who thoroughly wrote about it, lived in the post-Microsoft age: until recently, information travelled neither quite as widely nor quite as quickly as it does now. These days, we are confronted with endless biographical titles, albeit some of them more fictionalised than fiction, since writers’ lives are seen as being as important as the work itself, if not more important.

Still, the notions of biography and fiction are very close to each other, so much that one could easily state that all fiction is biographical and all biography is fictional. It is not surprising, then, when writers use their own lives as the subject material for their fiction. They recreate their own predicaments in their characters, weaving together fact and fiction.

Looking at Philip Roth’s novel, My Life As A Man (1970), the reader is told by the narrator, who, conveniently, is also a writer, about his relationship with a woman he hates, but because of his upbringing is unable to break up with. At one point he is telling how she lured him into thinking she was pregnant ’[she] took a specimen of her urine to the drugstore for the pregnancy test – only it wasn’t her urine (...) She approached a pregnant Negro woman pushing a baby carriage and told her she represented a scientific organization willing to pay the woman for a sample of her urine’. In the follow up of this sequence, he continues, ‘I want you to marry me regardless of how the test comes out tomorrow (...) I would do my best to make it appear that in marrying her I had acted out of choice rather than necessity’. This, naturally, was and is sold as fiction, very nicely concocted fiction.

Eighteen years later, in Philip Roth’s autobiography, The Facts, the reader is confronted with the following sequences, ‘the urine specimen that she submitted to the drugstore for the rabbit test was purchased for a couple of dollars from a pregnant black woman she’d inveigled one morning into a tenement across from Tompkins Square Park’; and, ‘without doubt she was my worst enemy ever, but, alas, she was also nothing less than the greatest creative-writing teacher of them all, specialist par excellence in the aesthetics of extremist fiction (...) Reader, I married her’.

These examples taken from Philip Roth’s repertoire illustrate very thoroughly the relation between fact and fiction, and the act of writing both. Here, there are three temporal moments to be considered when looking at the relations between biography and fiction, a) the time when it happened, b) the time when it was fictionalised and c) the time when it was written as an autobiography.

Many other examples could be summoned, both from other writers and from Philip Roth’s own oeuvre. And the question arises, is it necessary, in order to have creative vigour, to lead a troubled life? Well… not necessarily. Many writers, and examples could easily come from the sci-fi genre, did not have to endure the predicaments present in their characters and their plots in order to write. Furthermore, normalcy, or middle-class bourgeois normalcy, is, these days, predicament enough. Still, each individual’s account, in fiction or real life, is full of drama because it is one’s own.

Notwithstanding, the act of using one’s own experience to write fiction is not to transform oneself into a celebrity or to transform one’s fiction into mere entertainment; it is not, by and large, to put the man in the place of the work. The transitional movement from fact to fiction, from personal to universal, when successful, is a subjective emanation to the artistic.

References
GADDIS, William (2004). Agapē Agape And Other Writings. London: Atlantic Books.
ROTH, Philip (1993). My Life As A Man. Vintage: New York.
ROTH, Philip (2007). The Facts. A Novelist’s Autobiography. London: Vintage Books.

It’s not just gravity that makes us fall. Hearts can have an equal pull, according to this charming but bitty piece for children from Croatia’s Theatre Mala Scena.

At one level, it’s a wordless lecture about the science of flight. In rolled down jumpsuits, Kristina Bajza Marcinko and Tomislav Krstanovic demonstrate the paths that objects take through the air, firing balloons that whirligig as they deflate and paper aeroplanes that soar gracefully towards us. The pair clamber over a cubic frame of scaffolding, perching on its corners or hanging off it. Momentarily, they seem to walk on air, pedalling their feet as if hoping over clouds like lilypads.

Yet, all the time, a game of chase is going on, as a playful friendship develops. The two seem to send each other spinning, at one point quite literally, as Krstanovic follows an arrow chalked on his chest like a dog chasing its tail. But they also offer mutual support, leaning into one another like balanced counterpoints.

The truth is, for all is gentle humour and humanity, Parachutists remains rather ordinary. Even when they hang a vast orange parachute as a swing, they rock only back and forth, smiling sweetly at us and each other. It never takes you anywhere, preferring instead to offer objects and body parts for ticklish examination – never transformation.

In fact, Parachutists starts strong: with a series of similar objects – socks, feathers, balloons - peeking from holes in a blue-sky mural before plummeting or plopping to earth. From there, in spite of a few jovial sequences of bawdy playground clowning, Parachutists never really takes off. It sustains itself and the interest of children for forty minutes, but it never achieves the terminal velocity needed for a long-haul trip.

Till 28 October 2010

Attempting to excuse her son’s patchy thesis, mother Beth suggests to her husband, Christopher, ‘He’s just trying to find his voice.’ Intellectual Chris fires back the lightning bolt reply: ‘Well, he’s not writing in the right language.’ This two-line exchange is the fulcrum around which Nina Raine’s play, Tribe, revolves. It is a beautifully constructed piece, which looks at language and belonging and the mutual sense of inclusion and exclusion that families – and indeed any tribe – provide. It is about the desire to stand out and yet conform; the drive one has to live up to one’s family but also live beyond it; and the mutual protection and exposure that family love provides. 

Raine has created a zeitgeist family that embodies and reflects the modern-day milieu, almost without trying. It is with the tiny verbal and physical details, the sharply observed asides and tics (Roger Michell directs with excellent precision), that Raine sketches out her backdrop. One of the first remarks from father Christopher (Stanley Townsend) is an acerbic response to a pasta dish: ‘It’s like being fucked in the face by a crab.’ Townsend could have been painted for this role – he has a belligerent glint in his eye - and his casually corrosive comment establishes this as an honest and combative family: one that offers ‘abusive love’ rather than easy comfort.

Christopher is, as his daughter Ruth comments, a ‘whore for words’. This obsession with language has filtered down to his children and makes for a smart and sparkling script. Son, Daniel, sneeringly refers to his sister Ruth as ‘enamelled with triumph’ and Ruth despairingly alludes to herself as a ‘Bonzai tree’. They are unlikely but brilliantly striking phrases, which slide delicately from the characters mouths and cement the idea of a highly self-conscious, intellectually aware and edgy, even vicious, modern-day family.

The only character who stands out (he is isolated on the side of the stage for significant periods of time) in this not-so-cosy environment is deaf son, Billy (Jacob Casselden). This disabled son is a brilliant character and conceit from Raine, which allows her fluidly to explore central themes, such as communication (Billy to his family: ‘You only hear me when I’m not talking.’), and also exposes chinks in this tough-talking family’s armour. Billy (Casselden is proud, tough and fragile) allows us to glimpse the heart pounding beneath his family’s sometimes hollow hollering.

There is a dazzling scene shortly before the interval, when Billy’s new girlfriend, Sylvia,  (who is gradually becoming deaf) visits and is confronted with the family’s battering questions. Christopher, seated in the middle of the table and spreading ripples of tension around every corner, probes Sylvia about communication within the deaf community. Surely, he argues, there is a simplicity to sign language that encourages a relatively simplistic outlook on life? In other words: does being deaf make one stupid?

Christopher challenges Sylvia (played by Michelle Terry, who could move tides with the emotions she generates on stage) to translate anything he says and she gamely accepts. A hush finally falls around the table and Sylvia puts on an extraordinary show. Every cynical phrase from Christopher becomes a gentle, incredibly complex and achingly expressive sign in the hands and fingers of Sylvia. It is a scene that not only symbolises love’s ability to open up new channels of communication but also emphasises theatre’s ability to translate words on a number of different levels. Raine ends the scene with Sylvia and the family behind a screen, listening to music that, for Billy, is ‘interference’ but for everyone else is something magical. She notches up the level of symbolism once more, allowing the stage to spell out the veil that exists between Billy and his family – and even his lover.

The themes and their symbolic representation, which so beautifully underpin the play’s first half, risk dragging things down in the second act. As is so often the case with young(er) writers, Raine pushes her delicate characters one notch too far and tries to force her ideas into a neat conclusion, which feels unnecessary.

Daniel’s story feels particularly overstretched, and Harry Treadaway is burdened with enacting a heady transition from surly son to a stuttering, weed-induced paranoid wreck. Fortunately, Treadaway manages to hold onto the reality of his role. Though he almost always plays edgy characters, he never blunts these edges by pushing too hard with his performances. In a final scene between Daniel and Billy, Daniel asks his brother for the symbol for love. It could have been a horrendously cheesy moment (‘the only universal method of communication is love’) but Tribes is a candid and hard-edged play, which has earned this rare moment of inspirational warmth and hope.

Till 15 November 2010

To be frank, it’s astounding that The Charming Man made it through the Theatre 503’s literary department in its current shape. Unwieldy, baggy and overlong, Gabriel Bisset-Smith’s play scuppers its satirical ambitions with a naivety that goes entirely unchecked. It makes Tim Roseman and Paul Robinson’s recent Guardian blog look all the more ill-considered.

Like criticism, satire need not offer a credible alternative. That is the job of the opposition. What it must do is diagnose the problems with the system and expose them as such. Good political satire is therefore entirely reliant on a sound understanding of the mechanics of contemporary politics. Bisset-Smith might manage the identification of its failings, but he cannot couch them in a credible world. Rather than let punches emerge from the politics, Bisset-Smith shapes the system according to the needs of his satire. As a result, despite being faced with the easiest political target this century, The Charming Man ends up flapping loosely and limply before simply wearing itself out.

More’s the pity, because Bisset-Smith has found a robust starting point: the conflict between honest, heartfelt ideology and populism needed in order to achieve power. It is the dilemma so obviously personified by the Lib-Dems during the last election and, though the play ostensibly concerns the Green party, one suspects that Nick Clegg is Bisset-Smith’s primary foil.

Having piped up at an open meeting to harp on about the solution that youth centres offer, Darren Lloyd (Syrus Lowe) finds himself fast-tracked through the ranks of the Green Party. Before long, he’s at its helm, which – given that he’s both gay and black – throws up a heap of concerns about the electorate’s level of tolerance. A quick spin of sexuality later, Darren finds himself hitched and hurtling towards number 10.

With his bitterest rival, oleaginous old-timer Marcus, heading up the newly-titled Neo Lib Dems, after his victory in a televised ice-dancing competition, Lloyd is pitched in a final televised debate that culminates in a rebuttal of spin and a reclamation of pride.

But Bisset-Smith’s presents a universe so alternate that he can’t really land punches on our political spectrum. How convenient, for example, that the Conservatives and Labour seem to have dropped out of existence? Or that his Paxman-equivalent should kick proceedings off with a question as panderingly easy as ‘Why should your party be in power?’ And what opposition leader calls a radio stations phone-in to personally attack his opposite number?

Bisset-Smith’s biggest mistake, however, is the stupidity of his characters. Does he really expect us to accept this array of morons as educated politicians? Good satire – no, functioning satire – crafts its stupidity intelligently, not simply as default. Stupid decisions are made by intelligent individuals in impossible situations under unbearable pressure.

Instead, the whole thing bears all the reality of a wacky BBC studio sitcom, a tone mirrored by Libby Watson’s atrociously overbearing design. Watson has surrounded the stage with blocks of shiny blue plastic – possibly representing office windows (poorly) – and a strip of bright red. It gives the action absolutely no space to breath whatsoever and is further undermined by an impractical set of wood furnishings that puncture all pace when reconfigured between scenes.

Redeeming features are few and far between. Bisset-Smith achieves a handful of sharp one-liners along the way, which might make it past The Thick of It’s script editors. He gives a nicely cynical view of Obama’s victory, presenting it as a gorgeously far-fetched conspiracy theory, including the ensured election of the worst white president paving the way for a black one, though certain elements – such as the West Wing’s role – have been previously voiced. The brilliantly cast David Verry gives a strong performance as the self-serving Marcus, lending him all the bloated pomposity of a bullfrog, and Kate Sissons does particularly well to mine credibility from the underwritten former activist Olivia. As the Charming Man himself, Syrus Lowe is likeable enough, but the text’s tasks are too great.

There’s ambition here, both from Bisset-Smith and Theatre 503, but – like Clegg’s Liberal Democrats – it ends up looking foolhardy and delivering next to nothing.

Till 13 November 2010

Getting ideas

This week on CW, Tessa Mayes reports from London’s Frieze Art Fair and ponders the triumph of art over politics, while Karl Sharro reviews a London exhibition of work by quirky Lebanese artist Walid Raad. In theatre, Matt Trueman reviews Ivan and the Dogs at Soho Theatre, Miriam Gillinson takes on the Southwark Playhouse’s Terror 2010, and Daniel B Yates enjoys Shirley Valentine at Trafalgar Studios.

And with the Battle of Ideas festival impending - the weekend of 30-31 October - Sarah Boyes interviews Frank Furedi on what it means to be a liberal today, as part of this year’s wide-ranging Battles in Print series.

21 October 2010

The abrupt end of the Lebanese ‘civil wars’ in 1990 was accompanied by a general sense of relief and an equal sense of dissatisfaction. Peace, when it came at last, was delivered by external agents through a complicated process of geo-political manoeuvring and horse-trading involving the US, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Although the ageing members of the Lebanese parliament, in office for two decades, had officially signed the accord that ended ‘the war’, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that they had no actual say in the terms of the agreement. The civil wars had ended with a question mark.

This aberration in historical punctuation provided the subject matter for many Lebanese artists and intellectuals after the war. Not so much in an attempt to answer any of the open-ended questions posed by the inexplicable end of the war, but as a supply of historical artefacts that provided a rich narrative source. Against the backdrop of the collapse of the grand narratives that dominated world history for decades, Lebanese art turned its attention to a much finer grain of narrative: the thousands of untold stories that formed the substance of the Lebanese wars.

Miraculous Beginnings is the first survey of the past twenty year’s work of one of the pioneers of this ‘genre’, Walid Raad. Raad, Associate Professor of Art at the Cooper Union in New York, is best known for his fifteen-year project The Atlas Group, which he carried out between 1989 and 2004. The Whitechapel Gallery exhibition combines The Atlas Group with Raad’s ongoing project titled Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Arab World. As such it records Raad’s exploration of Beirut’s current situation and the wider questions about art in the Middle East.

Raad’s work is at its most powerful when experienced in one of his fascinating lectures, but this by no means diminishes the significance of the work on display at the Whitechapel. The lectures are delivered by a slightly anxious historian, in fact an autonomous persona cultivated over the years by Raad. The presence of the obsessive historian could be felt at the exhibition however: the scribbled notes at the margins of the paper, the meticulous indexing, and the recurrence of history-writing paraphernalia. Raad’s extensive archive of images and documents from the civil wars is obsessively pored over by the historian who reappears in different guises.

A decade or so ago, I sat at what seemed to be a rather tedious urban planning conference as one speaker after the other talked about post-war reconstruction in this or that city. Then Raad, whose work was hardly known at the time in Lebanon, took to the platform and presented his amazing findings: a series of monochrome blue photographs, the negatives for which were found under the rubble of war-ravaged Beirut. When developed, they revealed the images of anonymous men and women found dead in the Mediterranean. Unbelievably, his other findings were no less startling, as I am sure you will discover at the exhibition.

To say that Raad’s work occurs in the space between truth and fiction is a cliché that doesn’t give the work the merit it deserves. A far better way of describing it is that it explores the space between the latent and manifest aspects of Lebanese culture and history. With the end of the Atlas Group project, Raad seemed to have shifted his gaze from the past to the present. His panoramic portraits of vacant lots caught Beirut as it prepared to reinvent itself once again. This however was no tabula rasa, as the ghosts of the war-scarred buildings remind us.

Perhaps the unyielding nature of the city led Raad to abandon his speculation about the present situation of Beirut. In the final section of the exhibition, the historian turns oracle. Miraculously, this is facilitated by him developing telepathic powers to communicate with artists from the future. At this juncture however, it seems that the work takes an introspective turn. The absent tabula rasa reappears within the large frames, and suddenly we are invited to divine the traces of the future with Raad. Questions about the nature of art and the nature of Raad’s work come to the fore, albeit in a very subtle manner.

Raad seems to be concerned by the context in which his work is circulated. One the one hand, he seems to question the European audience that insisted his work be culturally representative. On the other, he seems to question the emerging art market in the Arabian Gulf states that demanded the work be seductive. In either case, self-revelation becomes less controlled and gradually slips from the artist’s control. Raad’s response seems to be driven by the need to resist such acts of cooption. I will leave you to judge whether he was successful, but I personally miss the anxious historian. His quirkiness had always offered a relief from the burden of representation.

14 October 2010 - 2 January 2011
Whitechapel Gallery
Galleries 1, 8 & 9

One Autumn day, back in the early 1990s, I met a fresh-faced, enthusiastic young editor of a new arts magazine called Matthew Slotover. We were both young hacks trying to make it big in the media. His passion was arts journalism. Mine was political investigative journalism. At the time I thought politics was going to remain far more important than the arts so I shied away from his new magazine.

So what happened? Politics imploded whereas the arts seem to have taken over the world. Slotover found his place at the epicenter of the artsquake. He is a co-publishing director of Frieze arts magazine and a co-director of the annual Frieze Art Fair, an annual pop up home to 173 art galleries from all over the world as well as host to satellite art, talks, film and music events. The event has even got ‘improved financial stability’ according to Slotover, despite the global recession. Frieze actions sold 94m UK pounds worth of art this year.  Alongside Charles Saatchi and Damian Hirst, Slotover and his business partner Amanda Sharp are the British modern art establishment.

This year (14-17 October), the Frieze Art Fair was bigger and more packed, varied and international than before. A few years ago I was non-plussed by the art. This time you felt the world and all its art ideas had landed in Frieze’s big tent in Regent’s Park as Japanese artists displayed works alongside new, emerging galleries from Eastern Europe and Latin America and the regulars from London, New York and Moscow. There was even some overtly political art.

The first exhibit I had to jostle with the crowds to see was a giant mirror by Jeppe Hein, a Danish artist based in Berlin. As the mirror wobbled indefinitely, we all stared at our shaking reflections a man was filming us, holding his camera very steady. Were we part of the art work’s video installation? Opposite, London’s Lisson Gallery showed Anish Kapoor’s latest offering, a modest (by his standards) four foot high, wine red, perspex tuba-shaped object with parts of the polished surface glittering beneath the surface which made it appear undulating even though it was smooth. It was entitled ‘Untitled’ (2010) so I asked a random 8-year old boy what he thought it should be called. ‘A slide,’ he said.

Mike Nelson’s installation, an old wooden box scratched with ‘Torino 2001’ and surrounded by momento mori including a small skull object, a jar containing stubbed-out cigars and old horse shoes, was also ‘Untitled’ (2009). Olafur Eliasson’s work also seemingly untitled as ‘Untitled Sphere (working title)’ (2010) was a multi-sided, giant mirrored covered object inside which you could see your own yellow-hued image reflected back thanks to a bright yellow beaming bulb reflected by the mirrors inside. There was the work of Jonas Burgert from Produzenten Galerie, Hamburg, whose title was ‘no title’. So what was it about? Who knows but it was spectacular. Burgert had painted a large canvas showing a small monkey and other gremlin-type characters with bizarre pantomime costumes. On the right a whole load of them were depicted shooting out of a dark wall like some kind of nightmare, jack-in-the box gone wrong. It drew a crowd. Only one bare white wall (untitled) existed in the venue (somebody forgot to come?), a welcome oasis from the intense experience of looking at a massive display of art almost on top of and under other art.

Back to the other kind of titled stuff. Tomas Saraceno presented his ‘Hydrogen Cloud Explosion (working title)’ (2010) in the New York Tanya Bonakdar gallery stand. It drew a lot of attention, looking like a molecular model he’d stolen from a chemistry lab. His six foot long hanging structure was made of colourless perspex. Inside were thin black threads zooming out in all kinds of directions.  Meanwhile his black and white 156 x 22 cm-sized photograph of a similar object looked more like a plan for a new social networking site. It’s title? It didn’t have one. At least it used to have one – or perhaps the wrong one - but a title had been covered over with white stickers. I could just make it out: ‘Baltic web photo,’ (2010).

At the north end of the art fair there were several posters promoting the Save The Arts campaign in response to the proposed cuts in government arts funding. This was the political wing of the fair. Nearby were the works displayed by The Regina gallery in Moscow and London. These included a painting about gangsters showing a guy lying down with an erect penis with a head saying ‘Russia’ and wearing a cap saying ‘capitalism.’ I found it boring and obvious. Much more compelling was a grainy looking image of a tramp by Semyon Faibisovich. The work called ‘Tramp from the cycle’ (2009) was a close-up portrait, with the tramp collapsed on the ground looking so heavy, thick lipped and defeated (and perhaps drunk), melting in to the ground as if he would never get up again. Nearby was Sergey Bratkov’s ‘Mickey Mouse’ from a series of photos called ‘Juvenille Detention’ (2001). It portrayed a defiant looking young boy wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, one hand poking out from a plastered arm, a lit cigarette in his mouth. In other stand at the opposite end of the fair for the New York Paul Kasmin Gallery there was also an image of a child smoking. Nir Hod’s painting of a petulant, rich looking boy holding a lit cigarette was called ‘Genius “Oscar”’ (2010). Some kids grow up too quick.

‘Mickey Mouse’ from a series of photos called ‘Juvenille Detention’ (2001) by Sergey Bratkov

‘Genius “Oscar”’ (2010), by Nir Hod

At the Max Wigram Gallery (London) stand, they were showing the work of French artist Marine Hugonnier called ‘Art for Modern Architecture – Die Welt-Berlin Wall’ (2010). Her series of six, framed front pages of Die Welt newspaper comprised events from 1961 to 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall. On the front pages, brightly coloured, squares of plastic were stuck on them. Hugonier is inspired by the painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly who claimed the purpose of painting is to serve Modernist architecture, her dealer told me. This is why Hugonier imports abstract, modernist forms on to her work. Her other works include the same application works about the fall of the Soviet Union and the election of Margaret Thatcher. Why does she use old newspapers? ‘It depicts the restraint of information,’ said the dealer. 

Another artist has found an original way of funding his work and making a political statement about global money markets at the same time. Lourival Cuquinha showed his flag made of money (untitled) at the A.Gentil Carioca stand (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). British five and ten pound bank notes worth 1000 UK pounds were stitched together as a flag. It wafted gently in the breeze created by all the Frieze fair attendees floating by. Cuquinha sold shares in the piece to investors. When the flag was sold to a private collector for 17000 UK pounds at auction, the investors were paid interest.

My favourite works were by Marc Quinn, a British artist. His life size bronze statue of a man in an Adidas tracksuit holding a skull upside down, in the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (Salzburg, Paris) stand had a hypnotic effect. The statue’s robotic, angelic face was unnaturally smooth. The tracksuit’s folds looked deceptively real. Rainbow affects on the metal in places left an uneasy feeling that the statue wasn’t simply the product of metal casting but was perhaps a dormant machine, with an electronic life of its own. The skull evoked Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Quinn had titled the piece ‘A moment of clarity’ (2010). Would it turn itself on and suddenly start reciting from the Bard?

The artist has also fashioned a life size bronze bust of Kate Moss and a frozen head made of blood. His dealer showed me his catalogue including his painted, beautifully coloured, supernatural looking human eye iris. On other large canvasses at the fair Quinn’s flowers looked like they were made digitally using Photoshop. On closer inspection were painted.

Quinn’s work isn’t political. His artistic power lies in the mesmerising effect of his art to evoke different kinds of feelings and ideas that snatches the senses and draws you in. In the case of the ‘A moment of clarity’ statute, it would have worked equally well even without a title.

The Ivan of Hattie Naylor’s title might as well be known as the Moscow Mowgli. In a severely impoverished Russia, circa Boris Yeltsin, households must make any savings possible. For the poorest amongst them, this means evicting anything that needs food, drink and warmth. First to go are the dogs, thrown out onto the streets. Next, for the worst hit, are the children.

Ivan Mishukov jumps before being pushed. He escapes his mother’s alcoholic, abusive boyfriend and his ‘fists like forever’ for a feral existence on the city’s savage and over-crowded streets. Alone and unequipped for survival, the four-year-old finds himself watched over by a pack of dogs. It’s not long before he’s joined them, shedding his human traits for canine manners.

The same story was, of course, told by physical theatre troupe New International Encounter. Where their comic, clunky version was drawn with marker pen, Naylor’s is etched out in faint watercolours. The dog that appears projected behind Rad Kaim’s Ivan is as ethereal as a cloud on a blue sky; almost a protective spirit.

Naylor’s script is beautifully played by Kaim, a presence as tender and refined as the finest sirloin. His Ivan recounts his existence ‘as if it were now’ in a voice on the edge of breath. He almost whispers and we lean in to listen. The feral nature is found not in animal savagery but a soft, vulnerability: more dormouse than deerhound. His presence is an airy retreat, tucked unseen into urban crevasses and shadows. His eyes flicker, scanning for danger, but Kaim seems simultaneously serene. Until, that is, flight must be swapped for fight and he stands, upright for the first time, his voice grown full, and barks and howls and guards himself with a relative majesty. Still a child, but also a lion.

In all this, Kaim is aided by one of the most fascinating designs this year. Naomi Wilkinson presents a small white box (almost a miniature Appiah space) on stilts. It makes a puppet theatre of the Soho’s space, allowing Naim to fill it rather than seem adrift. Like Kaim’s delivery, Wilkinson’s space draws us in; it’s theatre’s equivalent of a pinhole camera.

Certainly, it presents Kaim a range of physical options. For the most part he sits, legs dangling, on its edge, like a child on an adult chair or a puppet on a shelf. When inside he crouches, primed for fight or flight. He folds himself into corners and – at the points where Naylor’s script has Ivan at his most animal – Kaim hops to the floor and stands upright, as if at his most human.

If there is a problem, its Naylor’s script itself, which never manages to tear the story open and gorge on its real points of interest. The combination of broken English and child’s eye view – though it increases the softness – flattens the language and the telling glosses over more savage, animal elements, as if embarrassed by them. It is all light and maternal. Occasionally Naylor needs to stop protecting her protagonist, else she risks sentimentality.

The curiosity is that Naylor’s text has birthed an interesting piece in Ellen McDougall’s fine production. In itself, it is flawed, but its manipulation and execution employ such delicate slight of hand that they are circumnavigated deftly. A simple and pure piece of theatre, superbly performed, but Ivan and the Dogs needs more bite.

Till 6 November 2010

Thrillers are all the rage right now (the originator of this trend was Ghost Stories, which started at the Lyric Hammersmith and then swept into the Duke of York Theatre) and lots of West End producers are currently digging around for this perceived theatrical gold. Some savvy programming, then, from those at Southwark Theatre, who have commissioned a Terror 2010 event. They’ve also got some names with real clout on board, including Mark Ravenhill and Neil La Bute, both of whom are known for writing current, dangerous, frightening plays. But this collection of works is playful not powerful, fun rather than disturbing and though there are some laughs – more often than not for the tight-faced zombies – they aren’t the type to send shudders down the spine.

Ravenhill both wrote and directed the opening play, ‘The Exclusion Zone’, which is certainly the best of this clashing and diluted collaboration. It is set in the countryside: a prime location for Lost-like sound effects and lots of frightened murmuring in the dark. Two not-yet men meet on an abandoned hilltop, having originally ‘clicked’ on an internet dating site. They flirt, prowl and generally spook each other out.

A ghost story follows. Pete (Sam Swann), the initiator of this meet, confesses to James (Kieran Knowles) that he once lured a former lover to this very same spot and killed him. It was a mercy-murder, though, since his lover had a Chernobyl-linked cancer. The audience is never encouraged to take this tale seriously – both the actors have a pronounced, comic style of delivery and everything is knowingly camped up – and, when James admits to taking the piss, it’s no great shock.

But then follows Ravenhill’s real shock. I won’t reveal the plot-twist, but the violence is notched up tenfold and what was once a jesting, jolting piece, hardens into something that feels closer to film noir. Everything becomes bathed in darkness. But, with the violence and fear at its highest pitch, James spurts out a vitriolic monologue about the misery of his 9 to 5 job. These modern-day miseries are not hinted at earlier on and the monologue feels suspiciously like last minute box-ticking – there to fulfil the requirements of a Terror 2010 play, rather than a dramatically meaningful result of careful storytelling.

Perhaps I’m taking it all too seriously – but it is hard, when serious themes are consciously inserted into a play, to analyse Ravenill’s, and his collaborators’, works as skits rather than genuine play attempts. There is certainly a playful feel to the night overall: Sarah Louise Young performs glib and gory cabaret numbers in between the plays, which actually work very well – but the themes of these plays, as well as their central and invariably disturbing moments, are surely meant to be taken seriously.

It is the kind of awkward combination that makes for some moments that seem in bad taste. Neil La Bute understands what scares people and does occasionally frighten with his play, ‘The Unimaginable’, but the way he generates fear feels gratuitous. We open on a near-empty stage, throbbing in the half light: an open toy chest lies centre stage, with fading baby dolls spilling over the top, their eyes glazed over and their bodies twisted at painful angles. It is odd, still and unsettling. A dark-cloaked man then enters and admonishes the audience for abandoning their children at home, leaving them vulnerable to dangerous, floating figures, such as himself.

Over and over again, this rasping man accuses the audience of neglect and invites the spectators to imagine their children being kidnapped. The script seems to suggest that child-kidnapping is a pretty common occurrence and ends with the threat, ‘Who knows, it may already be too late…’ Plays about current fears are frightening because they tap into present, palpable concerns and dangers. But plays that suggest these kind of ‘unimaginable’ acts happen all the time actually alleviate the fear, making this dreaded act a common, unfocused threat, lacking the kind of local and believable detail that really has the potential to shock.

There is a cheapening of the things that truly terrify us that sucks the fear out of this event. Again, no doubt a lot of this was meant to be silly rather than shocking – but when combining fear and fun, one needs to pick the subject matter a little more carefully than this.

Till 31 October 2010

As the smell of frying drifts through Trafalgar Studio One, Shirley Valentine shuffles eggs around a pan, chattering away brightly. In some ways it’s like a scene from reality television, an evening in the Big Brother house. Set in a floating Formica domestic simulacrum built solely for exposure, Shirley’s forthright honesty with the audience, her extrovert storytelling, her regionality, all conspire to something like a composite of all the reality show’s watchable characters. Yet Shirley’s kitchen sink moment (replete with plumbing) stands for the superiority of theatre’s reality over reality television. A timely reminder that playwrights like Willy Russell are still available to convey to us the national ordinary, a nuanced picture of the regions, to convey discourses of class and self-transformation with more honesty and in fuller flesh than the reality television format could ever aspire to.

The two frying eggs are slightly ambiguous in Russell’s text. Certainly they stand for servility, the yolk a yoke. Shirley cooks for a husband whose dull regularity and lack of appreciation for her supporting role is beginning to chafe. Yet they also speak of a mother’s empty nest, providing the impetus for Shirley’s squeezing out from under the limits of her class and gender horizons. And so they also might stand for rebirth. Shirley’s story is one of transformation, a theme shared with Rita in tonight’s double-bill as part of the Trafalgar’s Willy Russell revival. Unlike Rita, Shirley doesn’t turn to eagle-eyed investments in cultural capital, rather she relies on a summoning of herself, a Liverpudlian facing-up to matters, a soft stoicism and presence of mind. Because Willy Russell’s play still stands for a progressive cultural conception class, where personal and regional qualities can overcome a culture of poverty, where a signifying woman can be an agent of her own destiny, and with the power to say no, can transform her life.

Both of Russell’s plays are like a breath of fresh air in a landscape where the narratives of self-transformation are corralled by the reality format. Where Russell might have stood twenty years ago giving voice to the national ordinary, now reality shows and their techniques - from gameshows to docusoaps to news programmes - increasingly proclaim their democratic victory, telling us we are finally reflected to ourselves. Yet even a cursory glance at these claims reveals their emptiness. Far from reality, reality shows offer a cultural space where transformation, especially that of women, is predicated upon certain distorted judgements. We’re familiar with the roll call, too fat; too old; too tarty; too frumpy; too real; too fake. As the class theoristy Bev Skeggs has noted, these programmes dangle a bland and consumerist middle-class ‘universal particular’ above their contestants, which is wielded as both carrot and stick, a noose with which to hang excessive class gestures and sexuality, a gameshow prize to deliver a glittering new life. At the same time as these shows actively plot paths to our own transformations, they ruthlessly carry out an obliteration of difference and depth.

Where the reality show promises that the knots of resentment and failure that accrue over a lifetime can be ironed out by a layer of gloss, a smooth pose, a camera flash transition into a world of media values - Shirley Valentine denies this weightlessness. She is rooted by culture, class failure, a living gender, anchors that make changing life and locale a matter of guilt and complexity. Her negotiations with herself, with her educational history and self-esteem bear the structural traces of a real life.  Sitting on a beach sipping wine at a table with its feet washed in the Aegean sea, realising her dream entails realising its limitations, she finds more questions, more negotiations. Shirley is the type of person we would willingly invite into our living rooms. With Shirley, becoming never looked so real.

Till 30 October 2010

Art and the historical moment

This week on CW, Chiara Marchini looks at how the Serbian art scene has responded to the new ‘normality’ of Western capitalism. Miguel Fernandes Ceia considers how Hermann Broch’s 1930s German trilogy The Sleepwalkers might speak to us today. And Valentine Rossetti welcomes the return of an aesthetic sensibility in recession-hit cinema, while Matt Trueman reviews Rory Kinnear as Hamlet at the National Theatre in London.

Meanwhile over at the Battle of Ideas festival website, new Battles in Print include Andrew Calcutt on journalism and Karl Sharro on architecture, while Sarah Boyes interviews Frank Furedi on what it means to be a liberal today.

14 October 2010

In the decade since the fall of Milošević, Serbian artists and curators have mounted a rich critique of the changes that have accompanied the country’s recent political transition. Claiming the legacy of the conceptual art movements that had free rein under Tito, and deeply aware of developments in the international contemporary art scene, visual art in Serbia has represented a strong critical voice that has articulated the shift from common state to nation state, the increasing privatisation, the country’s contradictory relationship with the neighbouring EU. Ironically, despite the country’s increasing openness and prosperity, today Serbian art can rely on fewer structures of support than under Socialism and even under Milošević.

After the collapse of the Milošević regime Serbian artists hoped that along with so-called political and economic ‘normalisation’, an art system with buyers and institutions like in the West would materialise, curator Branislav Dimitrijević explains. Dimitrijević was co-author of the exhibition ‘On Normality’, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade in 2005, which offered a critical review of the Serbian art scene at the turn of the millenium. Under Milošević, the public art institutions were tightly controlled in favour of an ethnic-nationalist agenda. However, an alternative scene flourished, sustained in part by the financial support of the philanthropist George Soros’s non-governmental Open Fund for Democracy.

‘On Normality’ argued that an adherence to the ‘religion of normality’ was wide-spread amongst the citizens opposed to Milošević once his end seemed inevitable: the faith in an ideal of social harmony synonymous with economic liberalism. A group of theorists that congregated around the School of Art History and Theory (1999-2002), of which Dimitrijević was a co-founder, and then around the journal Prelom (2001-), problematised the ideal of a harmonious society without antagonisms as a neoliberal, pan-capitalist illusion.

In his essay ‘The post-Yugoslavian Condition of Institutional Critique’, the philosopher Boris Buden, who was also involved in the School of Art History and Theory, argues that in the post-Communist discourse, the process of transition towards liberal democracy has been portrayed as a process of normalisation. The West, according to this reading of history, is the embodiment of the historical standard, and what is wrong with the institutions in the East is that they are not yet Western. Artists and curators in Serbia have been persistent in offering alternative readings of the recent political changes in their country.

A video entitled ‘Partisan Songspiel. Belgrade Story’ (2009) by the Russian collective Chto Delat articulates the situation of Serbia today in relation to its Communist past. In what is set up like a Greek tragedy inside an industrial ruin, a group representing the ruling class of politicians and industrialists, clad in the dark suits and shades of Mafiosi, invoke their embrace of the EU, of foreign investment, of progress. Below them, a foursome representing the weaker sections of Serbian society – a Roma refugee from Kosovo, a fingerless worker, a lesbian, a veteran of the 1990s wars – illustrate their plight. All the while, a choir of ‘dead Partisans’ calls on its children to form new ranks in the name of Communism. The suggestion that a serious engagement with the Socialist past is necessary permeates the humour of the piece.

The exhibition ‘Political practices of (Post-)Yugoslav art’, held at the Museum of the 25th of May in Belgrade in 2009, in which ‘Partisan Songspiel’ was shown, proposed new readings of the artistic scene and production of the socialist years as an inspiration for a new kind of politically engaged art: ‘transformative and emancipatory, not merely propagandist’. The exhibition was curated by Prelom’s Jelena Vesić with the collaboration of a host of pan-Yugoslav and international researchers, and presented new work alongside case studies from socialist Yugoslavia. The interconnectedness of official and alternative cultural actors in the 1970s and 80s was brought to light through the presentation of the activities of the Student Cultural Centre, among others. Founded and financed by the ministry of culture, the centre was conceived by the artists circulating around it as a self-organised place of learning and saw exchanges with international artists such as the UK collective Art & Language. The centre’s core group included all the significant Serbian artists of that generation, including Marina Abramović.

No comparable cultural policy as that which backed the Student Cultural Centre in the 1970s and 80s exists at the level of the state today. Branislava Andjelković, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, argues that the state’s lack of engagement in culture reflects a misguided fear that such an engagement might be perceived as ideologically tainted. Andjelković curated last year’s October Salon, which for the past fifty years has been Belgrade’s most visible artistic event, and is funded largely by the city of Belgrade. In an interview published in the Salon’s catalogue, Andjelković argued that through ‘deideologisation’, the public has become subservient to another logic, that of capital. What is missing for Adjelković is an open public space beyond the platforms granted for the celebration of sports and other types of spectacle, a space for the formation of political consciousness.

This absence is sorely felt in Belgrade, where both the National Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art have been closed for refurbishment since 2003 and 2007, respectively. While these shortcomings can be traced back to the lack of a clear political cultural agenda the situation has been exacerbated by the virtual non-existence, until recently, of serious private investment in the arts. As critic Saša Janjić suggests, a vicious circle is at work whereby the low visibility of the arts means that the state and private investors do not see it as a worthwhile area for sponsorship.

A big step forward was made in 2007, when the Norwegian telecommunications firm Telenor began setting up a collection of art made since 2000, combining very young artists with more established ones. The collection has been shown at various public venues around Serbia, in accordance with the company’s explicit aim to decentralise culture in Serbia. Kjell-Morten Johnsen, CEO of Telenor in Serbia is quoted on the company’s website saying he hopes that the Telenor collection will be ‘an invitation for other companies to provide help in development of the art market in this country’.

Darka Radosavljević, founder of the independent art association Remont, served as an advisor for the establishment of the Telenor collection. While in her writings, Radosavljević laments a turn to ‘management art’ since the late 1990s in Serbia, with artists applying marketing principles to their work, she welcomes the interest of Telenor. Although Telenor’s efforts in the field of contemporary art also belong to a marketing strategy, they represent a bold move in an area of activity that is rather marginal in the local public consciousness.

If Serbian artists have become more calculating in formulating clear themes and thinking in terms of target groups, as Radosavljević argues, this has been a side-effect of their search for a place on the global scene. At the 2009 Venice Biennale, Katerina Zdjelar, who lives in Rotterdam, showed a work which reflected on the role of language as a vehicle for intercultural communication. In the video, entitled ‘There is no is’, the artist tries in vain to teach a Japanese woman to correctly pronounce her name. Zdjelar cleverly presented the globe-trotting visitors to the Biennale with a situation they will have easily identified with. Importantly, Zdjelar affirmed Serbian cultural identity as one of the many centres of our polycentric world worth engaging with.

Fortunately, over the course of the past decade Serbia has not just exported artists but increasingly attracted artists and curators from abroad. Real Presence, an annual international workshop for art students founded by Student Cultural Centre veteran Biljana Tomić celebrated its 10th anniversary in September and has already attracted hundreds of students from all over the world. The October Salon has gone international, with a non-Serbian curator being appointed every other year. This year, Johan Pousette and Celia Prado from Sweden are mounting the exhibition, which will address questions of the mediation of history. The complex network of the Serbian contemporary art scene, of which Belgrade is only one site, has provided a key critical platform for the analysis of political change in Serbia and beyond. It is to be hoped that it will obtain the institutional support it deserves.

The commercial release earlier this year of the film ‘I Am Love [Il Sono L’amore] – directed by Luca Guadagnino and co-produced by Tilda Swinton – marked a turning point in contemporary cinema and perhaps the beginning of a new epoch in aesthetic appreciation. Centring around a wealthy Milanese family at the turn of the Millennium, as they face a number of upheavals, it could have been just another character led art-house extravaganza aimed at the discerning cinephile, but it was something much more.

This film sought to do something different, as described by the editor of Sight & Sound, Nick James, after it was shown at the Toronto film festival: ‘Several people who saw the film felt it had a certain quality they hadn’t experienced for some time….the impalpable flavour of some vanished cinematic essence. He went on further to say, ‘I knew what they meant: the film has a heady, operatic, high-art atmosphere, created by its careful milieu-property of the rich Milanese dynasty at its centre; there’s also the unabashed sensuality with which Guadagnino renders the tastes and power struggles of that world, espousing a Romanticism that has perhaps become unfashionable’.

With words of praise such as ‘Sprawlingly ambitious’ and ‘Ravishingly beautiful’ coming from almost every critic from Paris to Los Angeles, the intoxicating effect of this resplendent piece of art-house cinema was clear for all to see, appearing to bewitch even those who had previously regarded art-house as just confectionery for the movie snob, the very effect which the makers of the film had set out to achieve.

I am Lovewas not, as many would assume, a mere flash in the pan, 2010 has seen a resurgence of films from Hollywood, continental Europe and beyond where the evocative elements of aesthetics played a key role in their success, standing out from the crowd in the early months of the year was A Single Man written, produced and directed by former Gucci guru Tom Ford and starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore. Based on a novel by Christopher Isherwood, the film focused on a grief stricken professor who contemplates suicide after the tragic death of his boyfriend in a car crash and the further frustration of being a gay man in the restrictive environment of early 1960s California, it was described in The Times as ‘A thing of heart-stopping beauty’ and ‘Seductive and visually enthralling’ by CNN, albeit not just for the superb writing and acting, but for its seamlessly detailed production, which was given an equal amount of attention by Ford.

As the months went on, a cornucopia of European and Middle Eastern films hit the multiplexes, including Vincere directed by Marco Bellocchio and starring Italian stage legend Giovanna Mezzogiorno and Filippo Timi, others included the Austrian Lourdes directed by Jessica Hausner and the Israeli Eyes Wide Open directed by Haim Tabakman. Even the old masters such as Tim Burton (Alice in Wonderland) and Abbas Kiarostami (Certified Copy) toyed with the more romantic elements of high production.

It’s not just in Hollywood and the high-culture bastions of mainland Europe that filmmakers are bringing beauty back to the big screen, but in Britain too. Looking at the upcoming offerings from BBC Films, there is Rowan Joff’s adaption of the classic Graham Greene novel Brighton Rock and West is West, Ayub Khan-Din’s follow-on from his 1999 debut East is East.

Perhaps this magnificent renaissance could be attributed to the feeling that in the wake of the global financial crises, the film industry has become the whipping boy of governmental culling departments the world over. As cuts in government funding for the arts have come thick and fast, more rigorously than any other, the film industry in particularly is predicted to shrink dramatically, in Britain alone the beating heart of the industry – the British Film Institute – which since its inception in 1933 has encouraged the distribution, promotion and archiving of British and world cinema throughout the United Kingdom and beyond, has faced a withdrawal of a gargantuan £45,000,000 government pledge, there are also further worries that the BFI may be scrapped all together, and this could be just one of many blows as the once cushioning effect of private funding looks just as uncertain. Not only in Britain, but across the world, the film industry is facing some very rough seas ahead, financially and also from the increasing beast of piracy: in June of this year, it was revealed that piracy is the greatest threat to Bollywood’s revenue.

Cinema is often described as a swinging pendulum, swaying from one dominant style to the other, but with the situation in cinema being so dire, the pendulum is swinging towards a style which has not been seen for many years, those who once put ambitions of creating lavish cinematic gems, aiming for true box office success, aside and stuck to tried and tested methods, topped with a ‘Don’t put your head over the parapet’ mentality, are now re-igniting the fire of creativity. Perhaps it is because the very foundations of the film industry itself are under threat from all areas; the urge to create beauty on screen is no longer the preserve of Merchant-Ivory but the contemporary solution to weathering the storm.