Reviewing Daniel Ben-Ami’s excellent Ferraris for All, Bryan Appleyard dubbed him a ‘hard human exceptionalist’ for his defence of the need for, the possibility and benefits of economic growth and progress. Bryan may be a soft animal apologist when it comes to whether or not growth is good, but at least he does recognise the crucial importance and timeliness of the debate. He is also quite correct to identify the concept of human exceptionalism as core to where one chooses to take a stand politically today. So, which are you? Animal or human? Noble in reason, infinite in faculty, or no, not really, not so much? Does nature impose limits and obligations on humanity that we must learn to accept, or should we shape it in our interests? Must we live within the means of just one planet or is another world possible? Could, and should, we all enjoy the abundance once the jealous preserve of elites?

Ben-Ami’s starting point is what appears to be a fundamental paradox in mainstream attitudes to growth. When, as never before in human history, so much is owned by so many, why is it that they are so scorned and feared by the few? Less than half of people in the developing world now live below the $2 a day mark. This is an amazing, awe-inspiring, achievement: especially against the backdrop of a world population accelerating towards 7bn. Yet increasingly mainstream views warn these people away from the prosperity of the developed world and its insatiable consumers, caught on a relentless treadmill of novelty and status envy. The Prince of Wales finds spiritual lessons amongst the rag-pickers and open sewers of Mumbai’s Daravi slums. Millionaire Zac Goldsmith celebrates the poverty and ignorance of tribal peoples and laments the misery that ‘Western’ ideas like progress bring them.

Identifying and challenging such ideas, this ‘growth scepticism’, is the task undertaken by Ben-Ami in Ferraris for All. He traces the slow erosion of the concept of progress in Western thought post-war: the loss of faith in human productivity, most notably by what was once the left, who would now have the people chained rather than win a world no longer theirs for the taking. Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth is just one of many books that point to a ‘dilemma of growth’: caused by the ‘question of how a continually growing economic system can fit within a finite ecological system’. Limits – moral, social and natural – are to be served cold all round as a consequence. We must learn to live within our means, level down our ambitions in the name of fairness, and ration nature’s scare resources.

If ‘nature is just another word for our home’ as Appleyard claims, it is not the same nature that God gave us. We have changed it beyond recognition. Nature is very much improved as a result. We have cured diseases and made the inhabitable hospitable. Not only have we turned deserts into farmland and golf courses, reclaimed Holland from the sea, we have also rendered nature into something we might actually enjoy and love rather than fear. After all, the very possibility of the emotional response to nature that we see in Rousseau, Goethe, Wordsworth and Turner was not possible without overcoming natural dangers and obstacles through technological advancement. Kenneth Clarke in Civilisation writes that no ordinary traveller had admired mountain scenery before 1739: home, before then, to ‘bandits and heretics’. Wolves, goblins, and bears too, he might have added. Despite this, our work is far from done. People live in poverty with rats as bedfellows. Needless millions die from malaria.

Equally, the labour that has bettered nature has changed us too. We live longer, healthier, better-educated, more prosperous lives. We travel and interact with each other across the globe. We work together in a global economy and enjoy the resulting prosperity. We do things as well as consume things. We are producers. Yes, of course, we are indeed natural beings as the young Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts knew: but we are more specifically ‘human natural beings’ whose ‘human nature’ finds its cause and explanation in human history and society. That is to say, we meet our natural needs in an inherently social way, transforming the world to our ends, humanising nature and, in so doing, creating the breathing space from the brutal struggle to survive that is necessary to humanise ourselves.

Our capabilities are not bounded by nature. Rather by standing outside nature, becoming human, we become boundless.

This is not Panglossian fantasy. Ferraris accepts the considerable problems and challenges we face. It just believes we can act on them. In fact it argues that our nervousness about acting actually makes many problems not only appear but become so very much worse than they really are, or might be. Holding back on development due to uncertainty – the precautionary principle – condemns people to remain in poverty.

To critique growth scepticism is to expose the culture of limits, the fears, that hold back development and progress today to a far greater degree than the limits and contradictions of the market.

The implication of Ferraris is that the incessant focus on limits of all kinds today is about the idea of, the necessity for, limits per se rather than specific limits themselves. It stems from an attitude that sees humanity as flawed and in need of control. Limits are then sought out to play this role. They don’t really matter in themselves. Any attempt to argue that such and such a particular limit – the ‘tyranny of oil’ – can be overcome – with biofuels - will be countered almost immediately with another limit – a claimed shortage of land. We are left impotent with nowhere to turn. To act is a sin.

It is this underlying attitude towards the human – that we are weak and fragile, yet rapacious and dangerous – that demands passivity in the face of limits or, maybe more accurately, demands their active acceptance. This is where the problem and the debate lies. We should indeed recognise the real limits we face, those that matter to us, and transcend them. We do need to act on climate change. On poverty. On inequality. It is entirely wrong, however, to think that we must act within the limits of nature. We need more growth and for that we need more energy. Nature is not limited in this respect. As Philippe Legrain observes with breezy and refreshing optimism in Aftershock: ‘Tap the limitless energy of the sun, the wind and the atom and the false choice between growth and greenery is removed’.

We can develop Ben-Ami’s arguments and still concede the truth of some of the sceptics’ views. I for one have no problem with people being properly sceptical of growth. Questioning enquiry is always positive. Perhaps growth cynicism is a better target for the Ferraris critique. There is a truth, after all, in anti-consumerism. Consumption as a form of identity - I am my brand - is indeed a matter of shallow decadence: albeit democratic. Higher standards of living, however, are simply good for all: the result of us producing for our needs and desires. We should aspire to a marriage of material and spiritual prosperity. We need to be hard-headed, though, about the fact that less of the former does not lead to more of the latter. The material really does matter. Goods are good. They can also foster the spiritual side. Books are goods. Paintings. Medicines. And fast cars too.

Why does growth scepticism matter so much? Because growth benefits us all. We should not be taken in by the often apparently radical guise of growth scepticism. It is, as Ben-Ami argues, really an intensely conservative position: fearful of change, especially social change. It is opposed only to the destructive aspects of the market economy and seeks to stabilise it through regulation and restraint. Since the key driver of the economy is seen today as individual greed, then of course this restraint falls most heavily on us – the imperative becomes one of individual behavioural change. What is deemed most dangerous is the possibility of us all having more – the planet could not cope – and, therefore, most of us must making do with less. That is what is meant by sustainable development. Yet capitalism advances through a process that Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction’: the old must make way for the new. Without the destructive aspects, we will not have change but rather stagnation and decline. For example, the preservation of massive overcapacity in the car industry in America when workers and resources could be shifted to, for example, biomedicine.

To attempt to create a sustainable, resilient, capitalism is a fool’s errand, one that condemns us all to ever less: to an alternative world of low carbon, low productivity, and bovine contentment. Radical growth sceptics fail to appreciate the irony that they argue that there is no alternative to the limits of nature and, by so doing, limit our humanity.

How should we develop Ben-Ami’s ideas further? We must definitely hold on to core principles of the Enlightenment: humanism; individual freedom; and universalism. We should be watchful, however, of how these terms are increasingly redefined by those who have little or no faith in their original meanings. Matthew Taylor’s recent essay for the RSA, ‘Twenty-first century enlightenment’ [PDF], is just one case in point: stressing the ‘frailties of human nature’ and reason; demanding that we ‘reconcile human aspiration and the limits of our natural environment’. If this is enlightenment, it’s Kant in a sustainable straitjacket, Thomas Paine by the gloom of an energy-saving bulb.

Fundamentally, it is a matter of taking responsibility. It is true to say that it is not good enough to muddle along with short-termist responses to the challenges we face. On this many environmentalists are absolutely correct. We need decisive action now in our long-term interests if we are to avoid collapse into either barbarism or decadence.

Responsibility is a word whose usage is coterminous with capitalism. It used to mean the independence to act without authorisation, our ability to pay our debts and meet our promises. It was the responsibility of authority and the free subject. Today it has been completely redefined to mean having and doing less. We are constantly reminded that with rights come responsibilities, weighing upon us as obligations. Bankers are irresponsible. Gordon Brown thought boom and bust was dead, that we were living in the Great Moderation, but now castigates that period as the Age of Irresponsibility. To be responsible now is to act with restraint, within limits, with diminished agency: more like children than adults. Authority is ceded to other parties (parents): the state; the expert; science; nature. Politicians do not even trust themselves with the economy: it is increasingly given over to the Office of Budgetary Responsibility. We need to take it back.

Specifically, to give but a few examples, we should argue for less regulation in business and research, greater investment in transport, infrastructure and home building (yes, on the green belt), and less pseudo-populist condemnation of bankers. Finance did not get us in this mess on its own. It was compensating, in the developed economies, for that lack of growth that is really to blame. Weighting down finance with yet more regulation sends out quite the wrong message.

This is an exceptional and much needed book. There are those who concede the need for growth (but never too much) in the developing world, but those who defend it in the West, and for everyone, are rare indeed. Time to stand up and be counted, raise hard heads above the parapet. It is only lack of confidence that can bring us down.

Many critics, mainly those with a penchant for the political, have been raving about Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, proclaiming it a play of timely, political pertinence. The supposed standout scene is the central, near-verbatim peace of theatre, in which Churchill remembers the 1647 Putney Debates. The issues that arise (whether property ownership should equate to political power and what this means for the people who own nothing but lost everything in the Civil War) are certainly historically significant and the same ideas even rumble behind today’s dominant political tract, Cameron’s ‘Big Society’.  But the debates are not the most persuasive moments in this enthralling and challenging play. 

Churchill sketches in the complex political landscape – an England in the midst of a civil war, involving two and later three conflicting sides - by picking out small but fierce moments, modest but complex characters, to colour in between the lines. The ideas discussed in the Putney debates are realised through scenes of piercing emotion, which tell us much more about the hypocrisy, fear and inequality rife in 17th century England than the showpiece debate. 

Early on, as a restless England experiences a post-Civil War climate of suspicion, doubt and hunger, Churchill carefully turns her theatrical kaleidoscope, showing us this socio-political prism from every angle. She consistently inverses expectations with her characters and, in doing so, reflects a volatile and often unjust society, where no one gets what he or she deserves. She reminds us that strong does not mean brave, poor does not mean impoverished, religious does mean saintly and simple does not mean stupid. 

Director Polly Findlay is careful to draw out the contradictions vital to Churchill’s characters. Christopher Harper’s angelic-looking preacher, with golden hair and obscenely innocent eyes, seems virtue personified as he urges lost souls towards his parish. And yet, later, when Harper preaches alone, he is accompanied by the kind of throbbing music normally laid on for a James Bond villain. And it is not Jerusalem he is imagining – but a shit-filled world, full of endless suffering and oppression of the poor.

But Churchill does more than just nudge our consciences with hypocritical or unfortunate characters. She also blasts us with raw emotions which, whilst always a product of the play’s political situation, often come in scenes removed from the main action. 

With these abstract moments, it is as if Churchill has reached into the fire of her play and pulled out white-hot coals. One such moment arrives after the Putney debates, with England in a state of unrest, as the land is divvied out amongst the Parliamentarians. A butcher (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) strides across the mud-marked cross that runs through the stage, his apron gleaming white and a massive knife held high. ‘You’ve had your lifetime’s meat’, he rages at the rich, who he has seen settling on land fought for by the poor; ‘You cram yourself with their dead children!’ It is a blistering scene, which burns long after the debates have died down. 

Till 7 August 2010

From the census arises a picture of a nation torn apart. In the square outside the National Theatre, a civil war erupts out of the differences within a group of strangers. Londoners turn against non-Londoners, prisoners are executed by police and, amidst the resultant bodies, one man in the fifty-strong crowd kneels to demonstrate his belief in God or a higher being.

Domini Public (trans. The Public Domain) begins gently, using headphones to pose a series of questions to which we are asked to respond physically. Those who live north of the River Thames move to the right; those south of it, head left. The two groups face each other down in an amicable stand-off. Fists are raised signifying knowledge of the national anthem, hands cover the eyes of those that slept with the light on. People that lived at home for more than twenty years position themselves close to someone older

Gradually, the questions grow into a barrage. All of a sudden, you find yourself divided by salary, head in hand having lied to get out of sex or walking across the square testifying to having mistrusted an Arab. These are public confessions made in a city square, seen (though not understood) by onlookers. Those playing understand – or, at least, believe they understand, for one cannot be sure that everyone is responding to the same questions – the implications of your actions. Sometimes, there’s a twang of shame. Sometimes, there’s comfort in the shared confessionals. Sometimes, those things that you prized lose their value. Almost all of us, for example, believe that we are talented. Most have been on television.

Wisely, the game includes an element of reflexivity, questioning us about how we’re playing. Hands up if you’ve answered all the questions truthfully. Move forward if you’ve gone with the majority when undecided. At one point, we step across the square from left to right according to the cultural activities undertaken last week. Afterwards, once the scale is complete, the voice accuses: ‘Do you always have to be first?’

But it’s when our responsive physical actions become consumed by and translated into an emerging fiction that Domini Public really takes flight. Relatively early on, we are invited to don a coloured jacket according to our birthplace: London (orange), the rest of the UK (blue) or overseas (yellow). The voice in our ear, uncharacteristically urgent in tone as if narrating a chase, denotes us prisoners, police and Red Cross workers. Suddenly, the square is transformed into a battleground as our stand-off takes on new meaning. Raised fists and hands on hearts become aggressive, tribal and (strangely) earnest. Arbitrary divisions spawn mock executions and – in one genuinely uncomfortable moment – a symbolic rape of a prisoner by a guard. From here the spectacle grows until, finally, the square is littered with corpses and mourners.

It is, perhaps, more impressive from the outside, viewed – as it must be – with an incompete understanding of the driving forces at play. Yet from within it is a touch underwhelming, petering out without offering a truly grandiose climax. It’s almost as if the square is not enough: it should be the whole city. Mischievous and delightful that it is, Domini Public misses the sense of stomach-swelling euphoria that participatory work can achieve.

I have, in the past, complained of feeling dragged through audio-tours and audio-instructed participation. They have a tendency to feel like monorails, whereby we blandly follow orders and tread a well-worn path as dictated by the routemaster or puppeteer artist. Though it can feel deceptively active, the experience is essentially a passive one. Our role is dictated and to take action or choose an alternative is to scupper the whole by refusing to play along.

Domini Public, however, provides a novel alternative. By using questions and answers to orchestrate our movements, it gives up the need to stage-manage precisely. Rather than moving individuals around a game board, it trusts us to move ourselves. Given that our actions denote our individual opinions, histories and personalities, we absolutely own those actions in spite of their being prompted or instructed. We must take responsibility for ourselves: what we have done, who we are and how we play. (There is, of course, no need to answer honestly. Indeed, certain questions are provocative enough that honesty feels a daring action; one easily circumnavigated by a lie.)

Of course, who we are and how we play defines the game and allows divisions to emerge. We are cut and recut, order and re-ordered, shuffled like a pack of cards until you realise, perhaps, that each of us has a place and a voice. Add them together and you have a whole, neither united nor divided, but rather assorted. It’s noise – our various voices – is a glorious cacophony.

Run over.

It’s a good story: a disillusioned policy wonk and former cubicle drone forgoes the certainties of highly-paid intellectual work to find fulfilment in his own motorcycle repair shop. He muses about why this makes him feel better and writes a book about it that charts in The New York Times bestseller list and influences governments on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Case for Working with Your Hands is an entertaining ride. Crawford’s strange life, from his childhood in a nomadic commune and his formative years hanging at the tune-up shop, to his academic career and subsequent success in think tanks, has equipped him with contrasting views of working. The book is a brief history of work and education from what he calls a ‘progressive republican’ standpoint woven into a concise and unusual autobiography. It might sound like a smug, inspirational text for the self-help shelf; the kind of thing where some idiot gives up the rat race and then finds himself through becoming a puppy chiropractor, but it’s nothing like that. Whatever satisfaction Crawford has gained he has tried to share and explain, making an effort to engage with many other people’s ideas on many subjects. You might not agree with a single one of his conclusions but you can enjoy the polemic nonetheless. He bolts on his experiences of different kinds of labour to critiques of thinking about work that include the ancients, Karl Marx, Iris Murdoch, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Silicon Valley management gurus and Charles Murray, to name a very few.

We’re taken on a disciplined, whistle-stop tour of work and its human consequences from the pre- to the post-industrial, from the societal down to the individual cognitive scales. He comes to what he describes as radically conservative conclusions about the expectations and rewards of work and education and the relationships we have to each other through these. Among the many high points are his merciless contempt for concepts such as the creative economy and corporate culture and its practices, the funny anecdotes driving pithy interpretations of Tocqueville and Socrates, and all with an ongoing critique of Fordism.

Crawford’s well-aimed blows at scientific management principles, staff team-building exercises and the resistance of modern machinery to home servicing will strike chords with many, and he synthesises a fresh and thought-provoking outlook from his experiences. However, alongside the ambition of his remit (especially so in only 210 pages), his basic argument - that we can make the world a better place by fixing stuff - is pretty modest. Published originally in the US as Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, the English edition’s more demure title describes the work better.

Some really timely and interesting questions are asked. Why do we educate people the way we do? What, exactly, are we preparing them for? Not everyone is an academic, so why is that virtually the only form of higher education? Do you want to work in a cubicle pretending to be someone else your whole life? Haven’t we imported the soulless drudgery and alienation of the assembly line into the culture of the office in the so-called knowledge economy? Aren’t so many of the so-called creative jobs just badly paid processing? Crawford starts off all these debates imaginatively and doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, returning frequently to the camaraderie of the gear-head community and the satisfaction of knowing the people for whom he provides a service.

Restoring the connections and responsibilities between people that have been stripped away by corporatism and the globalisation of labour, in direct economic ways, underpins the modest proposals. Along the way he builds cases for reconsidering how we value all kinds of work that cannot be done online, from being a doctor or firefighter, to a construction worker or mechanic. He is concerned with the cognitive drawbacks of living in a culture where we can make few of our own decisions in our lives, whether it’s because we have to maintain a company line at work or because new cars don’t even have dipsticks for their owners to check the oil level. The re-engagement that his motorbike repair shop has brought him, with both the world of objects around him and with a broader community of their users, motivates his critical appraisal of alienation, both from products of our own labour and those of others.

The skilled mechanics Crawford has learned from and the customers who bring him their bikes comprise a sort of circle of life, where knowledge that can only be learned and put to use through experience of interacting with the material world is passed down and exploited for the general benefit. Crawford describes an antidote to the ephemeral and essentially parasitical activities of America’s post-industrial economy, trading in intangibles that can nonetheless destroy real economies, as with the US sub-prime credit crisis. He believes private property to be the cornerstone of liberty but says this does not square with the greater concentration of property in fewer corporate hands. The isolation of workers both from their customers and their employers further encourages, he says, the solipsism of the consumer, the ‘sovereign individual’, and the eroding of the relationship between people and between people and their material lives.

So fixing things doesn’t just feel good, it presents creative possibilities, easily and objectively judged, where we can take control of our own stuff. Controlling this stuff also takes us out of the realm of pure, abstract thought - where all double-knotted shoelaces can be untied by pulling on one end because it’s the only place where pure, perfect shoelaces exist. Hard science and theory are important, but a motorbike built on such has to contend with the dirt and grime of real roads. The mechanics who fix them get better at it as they experience more of the ways of the real world, developing cognitive functions that deal with realities. Humans, Crawford says, have a need to interact with the problems of objective things.

For Crawford, craftsmanship and the useful arts are distinct from the experience of consumers because, as Richard Sennett argues, the craftsmen is attentive to the particular thing while consumers must focus on the cultural back story used to persuade them to buy (p17). Factory farming methods idealise and standardise the earth while organic farmers must concern themselves with their particular piece of land to increase its yield. The useful arts that service and repair things like motorbikes are a kind of crack through which individuals may escape some of the consequences of the consumer society. Even if youngsters are not going to work as carpenters, mechanics, electricians or plumbers, they should at least spend some of their time learning those skills in shop class (that’s American for metal work, woodwork and design and technology fabrication skills). While we all rely on these sorts of skills as never before, while we are connected as never before, we seem to be more isolated from each other as we lose our connections with the things, and skills with those things, that make our society what it is.

Many will sympathise with the problems Crawford identifies and you can see the book’s appeal to politicians, both in the US and here in Britain, in a period of austerity. But Crawford isn’t in the make-do-and-mend camp; he believes positively in improving people’s lives through their striving for excellence gained by experience. He is convinced of the social benefits of the entrepreneurs who feel a moral responsibility to their customers, the way he does when he rides behind his own costumers, enjoying themselves on their newly fettled machinery. Small-town banks who knew what houses people could really afford would never have plunged the world into a mortgage assets crisis. Crawford’s emphasis on self-reliance, social responsibility and independence from state and corporate interference also has clear attractions for those, such as the coalition government here in Britain, who believe they must roll back expensive state machinery, but that’s not really where Crawford is coming from.

Useful arts and crafts can be used, he says, to encourage the rugged individual, to establish standards or work, behaviour and achievement that are organic to society and require no committees. The new kind of self that could emerge has a positive sense of agency, beyond the isolated consumer that seeks solace in shopping and can challenge the old-fashioned revolutionary with big plans for everyone. Finally, he concludes that: ‘The alternative to revolution, which I want to call Stoic, is resolutely this-worldly. It insists on the permanent, local viability of what is best in human beings’ (p210).

The trouble is, he hasn’t come up with a real alternative to the consumer, let alone the revolutionary. Crawford describes the community of car-tuners, or riders of old motorbikes as people who have put some distance between themselves and the ordinary consumer. He is scathing of the kind of car enthusiast who just bolts on so-called high-performance parts to his machine without working on it themselves or having proper tuning work done. First, the tuning shop community and the solidarity of owners of old and foreign motorbikes are all very culturally specific things to the US and not obviously transferable. Second, I am not convinced that the gear-head community of counter-consumerists he has joined is not really that different from the rest of us.

The US makes its cars and bikes very cheap in the home market, offering very basic models that buyers are then encouraged to personalise through their dealers and through a huge network of tuning shops. Once this pattern was set early in the last century, the then minority of foreign machinery enthusiasts set up their own shops as a sort of alternative but complementary auto culture. It is still relatively rare in the US for dealers and auto shops of any kind to sell or service both US and foreign machinery. This kind of auto market is virtually unique in both its immense size and style of local organisation (although parts of Australia have similar car consumption habits and Jeremy Clarkson often road-tests Aussie-tuned versions of American cars). There’s not really anything similar anywhere else except in terms of enthusiasts’ clubs and groups for particular marques, styles of machine or the communities around different kinds of racing.

Moreover, why is a person who buys an old machine, tunes it and then gets people like Crawford to fix it not a consumer like anybody else? Granted, such a person is an enthusiastic consumer and they may take a special interest in the manner of their consumption, but it is still only a manner of consumption, a definition of oneself by the product one chooses for one’s spare time. I have been riding for more than 30 years and own an old bike and a modern one (both modified with bolt-on parts). I do a bit of maintenance and enjoy some tasks very much, although I haven’t noticed any cognitive benefits. The brief escape from society in my garage is entirely private, and aimed at maintaining the pleasure I get from using a bike. I used to have a lovely old car (a VW Golf GTi Mk1 with the bigger engine) but I had to sell it because it kept needing the expensive attentions of independent mechanics like Crawford. Consumers and suppliers of goods and services seem to comprise the community Crawford says we can learn from; they are just a bit more enthusiastic and have deeper pockets.

In the notes of this well-referenced book, Crawford enlarges his explanation of the consumer with a long quote from Josie Appleton’s spiked review of Benjamin Barber’s book, Consumed (p216). In it Appleton argues against an ethic of consumption as such, and instead emphasises the tangible expressions that shopping and consumer choices can give to our personalities. I think Crawford has moved on from being a consumer, like me, on the outside of a commercial social elite that knows how to appeal to its consumers, to become a worker in an industry, someone on the inside of an informal trade club. He may enjoy the companionship of like-minded enthusiasts, but he is actually no longer one of them - he is a mechanic, dependent on consumers for work and upon suppliers and other mechanics for goods and services. This mode of living may indeed be Stoic, but is it an alternative to the revolutionary, or even to the radical?

What’s good about The Case for Working with Your Hands is the way he arrives at his conclusions and the description of the journey he has been on, both in his life and in terms of the many ideas he has grappled with. I think anyone could intellectually riff on the observations and analyses offered and the book could be as potentially valuable to the radical, or even the revolutionary, as it is to the Liberal-Democrat apologist for austerity.

A white mist unfurls onstage. Two armies filter forward – it’s hard to make them out through the fog - and begin to mime a battle sequence. They face the audience and are in perfect synch, their swords swooping in harmony. This ‘battle’ – a serene, serenaded affair - is broken up by a tentative Prince of Verona, ‘Another brawl? You men, you beasts.’ It doesn’t exactly scream conflict.

Director Oh Tae-Suk writes of his ‘Romeo and Juliet’; ‘The world has gone mad like an unbridled horse running wild. Suspicions, hatred, slander and screaming run rampant among generations…’ If only there had been a whisper of this vicious context in Tae-Suk’s production, but this is a predominantly light-hearted show. It is also surprisingly conflict-free – except for the final scene, which (somewhat incongruously) ratchets up the tension and depicts the two sides plunging straight back into battle. Most of the dance and battle sequences chime in harmony and the performances lack tension; the actors pluck out visual gags at will but seem reluctant to dig deeper.

If this quest for the comic in Romeo and Juliet had been adopted with conviction, then perhaps this could have been a pleasingly jolting, defiantly flippant production. But there is little consistency here - and, with a drastically cut and freely adapted text (the play is performed in Korean with surtitles running above stage), consistency of tone should have been this show’s backbone. Without this interpretative and atmospheric cohesion, there is little anchorage left. The piece feels erratic and frequently undoes itself, stumbling upon delightful sparks of comedy but injecting it in strange places.

The direct performance style of the Mokwha Repertory Company also feels out of synch with the play. Take Romeo’s and Juliet’s first meeting. Following another harmonious dance – during which girls in alternately coloured skirts skip out their rainbow – the lovers glimpse each other across the dance floor. They act out their courtship kneeling down, one behind each other, both facing and addressing the audience. It is a mode of delivery that takes some adjusting to - but I don’t think it is my lack of acclimatisation to foreign performance styles that is the problem here. The measured, distant mode of interaction just doesn’t suit the moment. I’m sure this ‘unseeing’ delivery between two lovers could promote pathos – could magnify the impossibility of Romeo and Juliet seeing ‘eye to eye’ – but, in this case, it dilutes their first encounter. How can we believe they love each other, if they only have eyes (and beaming faces) for us?

On their wedding night, Romeo (Kim Joon Bum) and Juliet (Moon Hyun Jung) frolic on their gleaming white wedding sheets, stretched across the stage. There is a touching innocence to their aimless courtship. Romeo manages to get himself embroiled in the sheets and quickly cocoons himself completely. He looks not unlike a giant condom. It is a clever little moment, as Juliet delicately tries to rescue her hero and the laughter bubbles through the audience. It takes Juliet nearly ten minutes to finally liberate her Romeo and yet, when Romeo finally emerges, Joon Bum jumps all over the audience’s relieved laughter. If one is going for hearty guffaws - especially at moments that don’t automatically generate such emotion – then one has to encourage and incorporate these laughs into the show.

That Kin Joon Bum did not fully acknowledge this grandstanding moment suggests an actor unsure of the effect that he, or his production, is after. Cheo Eun A, as the nurse, is the one performer who seems sure of her role and its purpose. This is probably because her waddling, vodka-willing, capricious nurse is the only character in synch with the essence of this production; one that reaches out to its audience and makes it chuckle but does not, as the director intended, make one’s ‘inside glow’.

Till 25 July 2010

There was once a rather daft Iraqi soldier, new to his job policing the curfew. His mission is simple: if he spies anyone out and about after 9pm, he is to shoot on sight. At about 8.30pm, the soldier sees an old man trot into view and shoots him dead. ‘Why did you do that?’ ask the other, flabbergasted, soldiers. ‘I know that man,’ replied the soldier, ‘He never would have made it home in time.’

Amidst the blazing, politicised headlines, it is easy to forget that, for thousands of Iraqis, this ongoing, Rubik’s cube mess of a war has become an everyday reality. It has become something Iraqis have had to learn to laugh about. New York Theatre Workshop Production’s Aftermath, by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, contains a cluster of similar, wrenching jokes that divulge illuminating local details about life in Iraq, following America’s initial invasion in 2003. The script is a tapestry of interviews held with Iraqi refugees now living in Jordan; there are some delicate, unassuming and illustrative stories here, which gently open our eyes to life amidst a constant, ever-changing, conflict.

These are gentle stories and fragile characters, though – and the Old Vic Tunnels, deep beneath the Waterloo train tracks, is perhaps not the ideal location. This underground venue, with its dank and shadowy vaults, accompanied by the constant rattle of trains passing overhead, is certainly atmospheric. Indeed, it’d make a great location for a site-specific, interactive piece about life in a conflict zone. But this is not a promenade piece. Instead, the production is relatively traditional in its staging and we stay seated in one, less evocative location, for the duration of these stories. Though the sound of thundering trains initially adds a certain texture to the show – we are (sort of) hearing these stories in the aural context in which many of them emerged – it eventually becomes obfuscating, blotting out the quieter moments and diminishing their impact.

Still, the stories that filter through the booming backdrop are worth straining for. Translator Shahid (a sympathetic, neutral performance from Fajer Al-Kasai) is at the centre of the piece – he is at the side of every interviewee and sews the scenes neatly together. He is also the main source of humour in this nicely shaded show, which is careful not to over-define its characters or its message. Early on, Shahid tells a joke about an Iraqi man searching out the best repair deal for his TV. He goes to a catalogue of repairmen and their prices are all too expensive. Finally, he comes across a chap offering a surprisingly cheap deal. The man returns to the shop the next day, only to find a picture of Saddam slapped on front of his still broken TV; ‘That’s all you’ll be watching, anyway,’ insists the repairman. 

A similar joke pops up in The Lives of Others, during an incident in the Stasi canteen, when a young recruit dares to defy the regime by laughing at it. He tells a joke about the sun, which responds to the Stasi’s tireless interrogation all day long,  right up until sunset, when the sun finally retorts, ‘I don’t have to speak to you now. I’m in the West.’ Jokes such as these are important, artistic records of authoritarian regimes – as well as inspiring evidence of man’s desire, man’s reasoned ability, to fight back. 

Dermatologist, Yassar (played by a shamelessly slimy and preening Amir Arison), sustains the unassuming humour that pulses through Aftermath. Desperate to be seen as a contemporary hero, a man of the moment, he looks amusingly retro in his open shirt and golden chains. When he describes his skill as a dermatologist – ‘I can diagnose…down the phone!’ - he delivers the line like Superman. Later, despite blithely insisting on his own materialism, we watch as he struggles to abandon his homeland. It is neither money nor stature that is binding Yassar to Iraq but something instinctive – something instinctive and, perhaps, spiritual.

The sections involving Abdul-Aliyy, an imam ejected from Iraq after being accused of terrorism, are tricky and provocative. Demosthenes Chyrsan plays the role with a fiery indignation, which gradually becomes difficult to stomach. It feels at odds with the gentler arguments voiced in this show. I found myself instinctively recoiling from this figure. Is that prejudice? Is it down to Chrysan’s forceful performance? Or is it the near-hysterical media coverage, which frequently depicts ‘that imam with a hook’ but spends much less time looking at the positive, Muslim role models? It is too complicated to unravel – but it disturbed me that I might not be responding to this Muslim leader on stage with an open heart or open mind.

Run over

Man unveiled

This week on CW, Michael Atkinson writes about the bio-legacy of Ernest Hemingway, and argues that the viciousness evident in much contemporary biography is not only uncivil, but in this case reveals contemporary society’s intolerance of badly-behaved, red-blooded humanity. Geoff Kidder reflects on the struggle between cautious artistry and manly negativity in the World Cup final. Lauren Grillo reviews the Horniman Museum’s exhibition about Taureg men in veils, and Dave Porter reviews wallpaper in Manchester. And Graham Marsden writes about the value of the arts following an RSA panel and screening of Destino – A Contemporary Dance Story.

19 July 2010

Authors’ biographies have traditionally delivered varying ratios of worship and destruction – the first quantity an organic by-product of book-love, the second an equally natural result of exposing life details that the subject in question, or anyone, would have preferred to have kept secret. But today the scales seem to be tipping, toward open combat. Of course, at their most bewitching biographies can still rescue the history of obscure figures, uncover revelatory truths about the famous, provide startling new insight to finger-worn life stories, and simply tell a thumping good true tale of a span on Earth we can vicariously enjoy, for reasons of our own. Often, however, recent acts of biography can fall onto the grave of the unwitting subject like a spitefully dumped load of trash.

We can all chalk up instances, and reviewers do so virtually every week, of biographies written as acts of vengeance or exploitation or unexplained hostility, often and at least, it would seem, in countrapuntal response to what is seen as a writer’s or artist’s received public image. The drill is tiresomely familiar: the excavation of hidden sexual proclivities, the extrapolation of psychological interpretations, the whitewashing of the unjustly condemned, the condemnation of the unjustly whitewashed… Biographers need to sell books, too, we know, and if you can suggest a heretofore unsuspected Amy Winehouse-ish trace of social-sexual mayhem in the pleats of, hypothetically, Emily Bronte’s garniture, more’s the rock n’ roll and the odds of a New York Times Book Review Page One.

You can’t hurt the dead, really. But you can kneecap the intent and trust of the biographer’s pact with the reader. This is of course a relativist take – I’m not a biographer, and my sympathies usually lie with the biographied, who are (usually) not in a position to write a letter to the editor or show up on a doorstep and pop the biographer off his feet with a fist to the chin. The biographer-subject confrontation has never been a fair fight, and it can be discomfiting to consider how coldbloodedly we as readers consume the ‘lives’ of the dead, who absolutely must suffer the underwear-drawer snooping with dignity and silence. Still, any contemporary writer might easily imagine wanting to kill their potential future biographers in their cradles, before they grow up and labour to detail our shortcomings and rudenesses and fetishes in print, and then contrive to have all of that illuminate whatever writing we left behind. Although these days many writers hanker for self-exposure and flaunt their tragedies, I still think we’d all think twice before desiring to have someone else narrativise, say, our attraction to certain types of porn, or our instances of outright personal betrayal, or, perhaps especially, our craven efforts to attract attention through our shortcomings.

This rat’s nest of ethical concerns has arisen for me recently in a testily practical way. A while back I’d begun a series of mystery novels in which Ernest Hemingway is pressed into unlikely service as an amateur sleuth, largely due to his often pickled sense of personal justice. My research at first was light – don’t we already know too much about this guy? – but soon enough I began buckling down with The Facts, just so I wouldn’t at least make unwitting errors with the historical record. The Facts weren’t terribly hard to come by, since virtually every moment of the man’s life on Earth seems to be accounted for in print; I was able to find a fallow swatch of time in 1956 when Hemingway appears to have been doing nothing in particular, and so that’s when the first book is set. (Book #2 entails more history but takes more liberties, in 1937 during Hem’s time in Spain.)

It’s a project about mortality and writing and speculative moral compunction, but at the very least I want the books to exude a knowing sense of barroom fun. I think Hemingway deserves as much. I was surprised to find that not everyone felt this way. My chow-down on the Hemingway bio-legacy revealed that the poor schmuck, by general vote the most important English prose stylist of the 20th century, and arguably the greatest short story writer in any language in the same period, has undergone a kind of pervasive personality demolition in recent years. Everywhere I looked, Hemingway took hits in the neck, belly and groin. In the books published since the Reagan era, he is predominantly a compulsive liar, a womanising turd, a wifebeater, a pathetic alcoholic, a reprehensible bully, an amoral opportunist, and quite probably bipolar to boot. I half-expected to find conjecture that he was a paedophile and a cheater at cards as well. In the words of Morris Freedman, lamenting the Hemingway dress-down in the Virginia Quarterly Review, ‘the centennial of his birth, 1999, loosed a torrent of disparagement plunging from grudging, carping concession of his merit to venomous insult and debasement’.

The books can still amaze. Charles Whiting’s Hemingway Goes to War (1999), for instance, begins in a pitch of sardonic mockery and never lets up. ‘Hypochrondriac and almost pathological liar that he was…’; ‘unpatriotic’; ‘suffering from a severe sexual disability’; ‘a prematurely aged and sick 44-year-old’; guilty of ‘latent anti-semitism’ and of being a simple scumbag: ‘For him the war was to be exploited, in the same way that a greedy gold-miner might hack away, secretly and jealously, at a newly discovered rich seam of ore.’ Whiting even quotes an obscure English aristocrat who claimed that ‘he struck me as androgynous!... Distinctly emasculated!’ The author was a prolific British military historian, and finds himself morally capable of condemning Hemingway for his use of profanity, his supposedly dishonest depiction – in fiction! – of how British officers spoke (‘This was a gentleman’s war,’ Whiting hilariously maintains), ‘Anglophobia,’ and so on.

Although Carlos Baker’s Hemingway: A Life Story (1969) dallied mightily on Hemingway’s unsavoury behavior, the onslaught may’ve begun in earnest with Jeffrey Meyers’s Hemingway: A Life (1985), which psychoanalysed Hemingway into a sorry, squawling, malevolent infant. Kenneth Lynn’s Hemingway (1987) and Mark Spilka’s Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny (1995) spear-headed the movement toward defining Hemingway as a frustrated transgender Oedipus. There’s been a one-man, off-Broadway show, performed by Len Cariou in 1996, that dramatised Hemingway’s most drink-sodden and vicious tendencies. And even editor Matthew Bruccoli, in the introduction to Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame (2005), a miscellany of Hem-authored ad copy, reviews, blurbs, prefaces and the like, rips him up as a self-serving megalomaniac.

Quite possibly the most curiously rabid biographer is Stephen Koch, whose book The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos and the Murder of Jose Robles (2005) surveys the mid-1930s for Hemingway, when he’d gone to Spain as a journalist reporting on the civil war. Taking Dos Passos’s and Martha Gelhorn’s grumpy autumnal memoirs as law is one thing, and so is acknowledging Hemingway’s bulldozer behaviour as his fame was gaining steam. But, for quite another thing, catch Koch’s judgmental tone: ’[H]is physical uncleanliness was stomach-churning. Beneath his charm was a mile-wide mean streak. He was arrogant to an insufferable degree.’ ‘Hemingway was a blamer. In his last years this character fault became psychosis: he became clinically paranoid.’ ‘In reality, that “good life” was always contaminated by the sadistic self-loathing that lurked coiled inside his psyche lifelong.’ ‘Causing agony, the man lived in agony. Lord Lazarus did his comeback really well.’ In painting a scene where Hemingway somehow supposedly “humiliates” John Dos Passos with the news that his friend Jose Robles has been reported dead, Koch declares that Hem ‘looked almost too cheerful. He was beaming’. In a photograph, ’[t]he man looks almost sick with hatred. He is slouching, joyless and defiant… This man is ready to strike. He is ready to inflict pain.’

For a man who simply wrote books, drank booze and divorced wives, this is a little rich. Koch believes everything in Dos Passos’s fictionalised memoir Century’s Ebb, and of course sympathises with Pauline Pfeiffer, Hemingway wife #2, but finds devious lies, when it suits his position, in virtually everything written or said by Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Joris Ivens, and journalist Josephine Herbst. (Gellhorn maintained for over 60 years, until her death at 90, that she shipped to Spain in 1937 without Hemingway’s assistance or funds, but Koch says she perjured through her teeth.) Koch goes so far as to boldface bits of Hemingway’s invective, to really make them leap off the page. Koch is perfectly free to write as hyperbolically as he likes about people he’s never met and events for which he was not present. But what did Hemingway ever do to him?

What seems to be at work on the surface layer of this trend is a strange kind of historical moral absolutism. Hemingway as a semi-mythified figure has come to inspire unfettered malice, from many corners, including the supposedly rigorous systems of academia.  You could say this has arrived as an opposite and equal reaction to the cataracts of deification Hemingway has enjoyed, for years before and after his date with that Boss double barrel. He hasn’t been, not since the 1940s, a mere writer and man, but a preposterous piece of Americana, a living riposte to a 20th century that seemed to otherwise deplete opportunities for masculine privilege and duty as the years of industrialisation, commercialisation, domestication, and entertainment-media saturation rolled on.

To be sure, Hemingway himself bridled against the depletions mentioned above, in virtually every aspect of his life from adolescence on, and he also did what he could, between tipples and sentences, to foster the idea of himself, sometimes conscientiously, sometimes not so much, as a man’s man trapped in a small-boned world. But chalking up a pervasive cultural perspective like this as merely Newtonian ignores a lot of runoff and context. There’s little point, given the tenor of the discussion, to mention that Hemingway was also a documented generous gift-giver and a devoted friend to scores of memoir-writers; that he had the moral compunction to not just go to Madrid for the war in 1937 but to spend months beforehand raising money to buy ambulances to help the Republican cause, and once he was in country to help the struggling government in any number of public-relations ways. You read him, even his NANA dispatches from Spain, and you hear the voice of sympathy in your ears.

But he was not well-behaved, and that all is his recent biographers have needed to know. It would appear, for one thing, that the moralism flexing its muscles all over this particular life story is a form of political correctness, which in the broadest sense certainly has its proper role in balancing out centuries of white-straight-male oppression. But it is an assimilated factor in our lives by now – you no longer have to be B Ruby Rich or Henry Louis Gates to score tenure points by publishing ‘research’ about the oppressive social codes and historical venalities of white male power. Nor do you have to be a ‘person of colour’ or a woman or gay to fathom their impact, or to get the analysis. Hemingway would seem to be the perfect target, a big sleepy bull standing in the crosshairs of critical theory, a privileged white man who conscientiously epitomised the spirits of male supremacy and far-flung colonialism.

Whoever writes it, the new critical approach in the post-structuralist wake isn’t merely about explicating: it’s political, and so therefore it’s about assigning blame, righting perceived wrongs. Applying psychological methods to a biography is an unarguable method, but since when do biographers feel the need to condemn their subjects for what’s uncovered, acting more like Puritan schoolmarms than psychologists or scholars? You could see the anti-Hemingway rage as part of a culture-wide phenomenon, a paradigm shift that’s as interpersonal as it is political. For an adult, the shift may have come as a surprise: suddenly, we as a culture are intolerant of selfish misbehavior. Politeness and civility among adults have been legislated to the extent that the contemporary workplace has the enforced-kindness norm structure of a kindergarten classroom.

Virtually any incivility can be prosecuted as ‘harassment’, regardless of the gender or race of those involved, so long as there is a difference between them of some kind, and so the incivility takes on a political character, and is therefore outlawed. A Georgetown Law Journal article argues that under current statues a persecutable ‘hostile work environment’ can be caused by such things as ‘political statements, religious proselytizing, legitimate art (such as prints of Francisco de Goya paintings), sexually themed (perhaps not even misogynistic) jokes, and other kinds of speech that are generally seen as being entirely constitutionally protected’. Uttering racial epithets in public can get you arrested; if such a word is uttered during a crime, a misdemeanor could turn into a felony and you could spend years in prison. ‘Offending’ someone is now a budding form of criminality. Whether you look at business, contemporary parenting, full-frontal media (pundits and talk radio blowhards have gotten craftier and more ubiquitous, but the language that, say, Bob Grant used to enjoy would get them all fired in a heartbeat and on occasion has), school regulations or the law, compulsory mild manners are the public rule.

By pointing this out I’m not advocating racist cant or bullying or rudeness, but I’m not altogether comfortable outlawing them either, nor am I convinced that the culture is made healthier or happier by the slouch toward thought-crime and word-crime. It amounts, in many instances, to criminalising petulance and grouchiness and causticity. This is part of what the late George Carlin called it ‘the pussification of America’, but it’s not a local phenomenon; the industrialised world is quickly catching up to us with legislation and evolving norms, with Germany somewhat understandably leading the pack, imprisoning writers Soviet-style for revisionist-historical hallucinations. Here, though, the prospect of a writer or politician or public figure doing as they like regardless of how ‘respectful’ or decent it is, and simply being accepted for the nasty, uncaring, runaway-train bastard that they are, is close to nonexistent. (Twentysomething girl stars act out, but often it’s limited to dance-floor pass-outs and bulimia.) The internet has become the last refuge for scalawags and china-shop bulls, because it is lawless and it is detached and it can be anonymous; it is also a poor substitute for reckless individualism, and a piddling expression of society’s more misanthropic nether edges. The days of tolerance for what has become known online, perhaps in mourning, as the Bad Motherfucker, are long gone.

But if Hemingway should be allowed to be an impolite egomaniac, why can’t his biographers? I don’t care if they are, frankly; all I care about is that the project of biography be executed with a semblance of decency and history and objective fairness. Do not do your subject dishonour. Being a Bad Motherfucker is one thing, impacting those immediately around you and that’s all. Using biography, in relation to someone you’ve never met, as a mode of personal prosecution is another. Am I alone in thinking that insulting someone in a bar or starting a fistfight are minor and momentary infractions beside publishing an entire book attacking a perfect stranger? Generally, I’ve always liked the Bad Motherfuckers, and am sorry to see them go. In the world we live in today, the legacy of someone like Ernest Hemingway doesn’t stand much of a chance; he is still the epitome of masculine egotism, with a timeline littered with bitter witnesses and whimsical brawls and willful crusades of self-destruction. He does not appear to have been someone you’d want teaching feminist lit to undergrads, or supervising our children on the playground, or training young secretaries at an ad agency, and so therefore he is deserving, apparently, of our general animus.

As counterpoint, you look at the new and widely reviewed biography of VS Naipaul, The World Is What It Is by Patrick French, which is something of a prototype of serene even-handedness over recounting the life, mistakes, achievements and fuckups of another man. Dealing with a living author, who authorised the book but apparently did not interface with its production at all, French was confronted with what might potentially be the most overwhelming amount of nasty shit ever left in the wake of a 20th-century writer: wife-beating, subjugation, rampant infidelities, public humiliations, unashamed rascist pronouncements, etc. And yet, though he presented it all in daunting detail, French refrains from forming an ethical ajudication about Naipaul. We are expected to decide what we think on our own; more to the point, we are allowed to also suspend judgment, knowing as any awake biography reader must that we are only getting slivers and facets of a life story, and that we should not decide we know Naipaul by book’s end. (Most of the man’s associates and female companions claim not to grasp the man, either.)

Truly, thinking you’ve acquired enough information about a dead person you’ve never met to write an entire and ‘accurate’ book about them is galling enough, objectively speaking. But to judge them, too? It is as if the anti-Hem contingent had never read him, or, at least, had not understood and taken to heart his sense of the world, which bleeds with sympathy and wonders at the mystery of our fellow man, which feels the ache of vanishing dignity between the words and hears the tragic echo in the distance between people. This, the throb of unspoken feeling woven into Hemingway’s sentences, the aura of loss, is why this conversation rolls on still (new Hemingway movies are rolling, a new musical has appeared in London, and a novel about Hadley just fetched a cool half million at auction). Not because the man had a barrel-chest and photographed well and often made a publicity-whore of himself. Yet this essential ‘lesson’ of Hemingway – the breath-caught and elusive love we feel for the average man, woman or child after reading him, the lack of judgment – is exactly what seems to have slipped the noose.

Reviewing the Meyers biography in The New York Times back in 1985, Raymond Carver focuses, as well he might, on the sorcerous experience of Hemingway’s prose style, not on its import. But he sums up the conflict perfectly:

‘The only possible antidote for how you feel about Hemingway after finishing this book is to go back at once and reread the fiction itself. How clear, serene and solid the best work still seems; it’s as if there were a physical communion taking place among the fingers turning the page, the eyes taking in the words, the brain imaginatively re-creating what the words stand for and, as Hemingway put it, ‘making it a part of your own experience’. Hemingway did his work, and he’ll last. Any biographer who gives him less than this, granting the chaos of his public and personal life, might just as well write the biography of an anonymous grocer or a woolly mammoth.’

One thing is a given – Hemingway was no paradigm of machismo or hard-drinking writerdom or struggling artiste-hood or literary celebrity, or anything at all. I know this, because I’m an adult with scars and children and fuckups and dreams and bitternesses of my own, I know that he was no paradigm but just a man who wrote (the fact that we’re still rewarded by reading him doesn’t make him more than that), a man who disappointed wives, a man lucky and unlucky enough to attract attention and become famous to a great many people he never knew. He was selfish and generous, he had savvy moments and dull ones, he gave gifts and started fights and either embraced or ignored each day’s weather.

That’s all he was, or, truly, that’s all we know for sure. Anything else is spittle. You grow up and write to be read, the least you can do is respect the man, just as you’d respect a living writer, or an unfamous or sober or polite one, or your neighbour, or the anonymous grocer, or your reader, or yourself.

This fascinating exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery is the first major UK Exhibition of artists’ wallpaper, with work by over 30 artists, including Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol and Sarah Lucas. It shows how artists have leapt on the possibilities that wallpaper offers to magnify and multiply their vision, so if you want art hanging on your walls, it now doubles up as wallpaper!
 
Repetition, of course, is the name of the game here, and Warhol’s influence looms large, his ‘Cows’ being a classic example of the power of one image repeated many times. But where Warhol leaves little to the imagination, some of the best pieces here are intricate and detailed montages of startling images and often highly-sexualised motifs. Hirst’s ‘Butterfly’ is undeniably beautiful and feels like it could take wing at any time; and his minute reproductions of bottles of pills, which looks from afar like a computer circuit board, is actually laced with Biblical sayings. Religion as a drug, anyone?

The domesticated setting of wallpaper is reinforced with a number of sexually-charged prints which are both playful and disturbing, Sarah Lucas’ ‘Tits In Space’ belonging to the latter. Not for the prurient, this exhibition comes with a warning about the graphic nature of some wallpaper examples. But for the nostalgic and innocent, there are wonderful evocations of childhood with prints of the Man Utd squad, Barbie, Batman and – whisper it quietly – even the Spice Girls.

Appropriately enough, the show is divided into several rooms. One of the most disquieting of these is entitled ‘Subversion’, with its displays of wallpaper which comes loaded with political and social messages. ‘Bullies’ by Virgil Martin is in the form of a high school year book: its youthful smiling faces sit at odds with the title and the knowledge that as a young gay man Marti suffered at the hands of his classmates. Other prints recall racist colonialism and the plight suffered by the Afghan people post-9/11. In such instances, repetition of the images leaves little room for argument. ‘London Toile’ by the Glasgow-based Timorous Beasties reveals London as a dark underpass where young people meet each other with violent retribution.

But ‘Walls Are Talking’ is nothing if not humorous, and relief comes in the shape of artist Lee Bowers’ head morphed into a flower and video installations with disappearing icons. Grab your plumb line and go along, you won’t be disappointed.

Till 30 August 2010

At a time when a multitude of debates have formulated over the meaning of the veil in modern times, it’s refreshing to explore the symbol in a traditional context. The Horniman Museum successfully does so with its ‘People of the Veil’ exhibition, in which the culture and identity of the Tuareg people are explored through their jewellery and clothing. These symbols not only serve to unite the Tuareg people, but also serve to reflect divisions within their own society.

Despite the fact that the Tuareg are spread throughout the North West regions of Africa, they find their roots within the clothes and jewellery they wear. Through these symbols, the Tuareg are able to make connections with their people and traditions. By dressing in such a manner as to emulate their value system, the Tuareg people feel obliged to act in accordance with this system. As a result, their outward, physical appearance directly correlates to the construction of their internal identities.

The Tuareg society is founded upon two principles, the first being asshak, which embodies honour, pride, and dignity. The second, tekarakit, upholds ideals of decency, integrity, respect, and restraint. In accordance with this, they are expected to hide their emotions, especially when it comes to showing affection in public, and to be calm and dignified at all times. Through neatly folded veils and headdresses and geometric, silver jewellery, the reserve required by tekarakit is portrayed. Asshak, on the other hand, is illustrated through graceful movements, and therefore calls for the voluminous, flowing robes and jewellery. As a result, wearing the symbols of asshak and tekarakit in a physical sense allow each individual to identify with these values in an internal sense as well.

The cultural symbol most closely related to the Tuareg people is the indigo veil. The indigo cloth was very expensive in the past and reserved for the upper classes of Tuareg society, but with today’s mass production it is now available to the entire population. The veil is also used to differentiate between the sexes, as the veil is worn by the men and a headcloth by the women. Unlike in other cultures, it is the men who cover their faces with the cloth. A boy is given his first veil once he reaches puberty, marking his cross over from childhood to adulthood. The veil can also be tied in various ways, which is used to reflect the different regions, social class, age, and tribal affiliations within Tuareg society. Although the veil is, in many ways, used to divide the culture, it is simultaneously the most unifying symbol of the Tuareg people. For men, women, and Tuaregs of all classes, tribes, and regions, the headdresses reflect respect for the social rules held so closely at the foundation of Tuareg society.

The Tuareg clothing can also be used to represent the culture’s history. Today, many of the women wear black or white synthetic blouses decorated with red embroidery and sequins. These blouses are called Temse n Rhissa, meaning the Fire of Rhissa, as a symbolic tribute to Rhissa ag Boula. In 1995, Tuaregs in Nigeria and Mali revolted, seeking autonomy and their own nation-state. Rhissa ag Boula was the main rebel leader in the fight, and the sequins on the shirts are said to represent the bullets he fired during the revolt. Even today, the shirts remain very popular and serve as a constant reminder of how the Tuareg fought for their independence.

Jewellery also serves as an important marker for women in Tuareg society. As physical appearance is held very dear to the culture, jewellery helps enhance a woman’s beauty in their eyes. Yet it also functions as a source of protection from the evil eye, which is believed to inflict injury or bad luck on the person at which it is directed. All ages wear triangular amulets, which represent the shape of a woman seated from behind and the female pubic area. These pieces not only celebrate the woman’s body, but also unite all Tuareg women in their quest for ultimate beauty and protection.

The jewellery can, in a sense, also be used to separate each woman from the others as specific pieces are used to indicate different stages of a woman’s life. For example, when a woman is getting married her groom is expected to give her a silver necklace, called a tadnet, a bracelet, ring, heavy earrings, and gold jewellery. Gold is regarded as a stable and secure investment as it is much more expensive than the everyday silver jewellery. As a result, gold jewellery is used to represent the status of a woman in a committed relationship.

Although the Tuareg work to maintain their identity as a single, unified culture through these various symbols, the different regions also struggle to establish their own, unique identity. While the Ahaggar Tuareg of Algeria don a djellaba (woollen robe), the women of the Aïr Mountains strategically place black makeup on their eyes and lips and white and red geometric patterns on their nose and cheeks. In conclusion, while the veil and amulets allow the Tuareg to unite and recognise their similar societal values, their culture also allows them the freedom to establish their identities.

The Horniman Museum does an excellent job of allowing its viewers to explore this culture from an interesting angle. In investigating the Tuareg through clothing and jewellery, the exhibition is able to get to the core of what the culture and society is founded and its traditional modes of displaying these values.  There is in-depth information not only on the clothing and jewellery itself, but also how it is deeply related to the Tuareg society and its traditions. It is very interesting to see how the Tuareg rely so heavily on their external appearance to establish their own identities, and how the veil is used in this context. All in all, this exhibition is definitely one worth visiting.

Till 27 February 2011

Destino is a circular story of the transformative power of the performing arts, in this specific case, contemporary dance.  It plots the course of two school-age boys earning a living on the streets of Addis Ababa, who, with no preconceptions, join a community dance project, where the magic of dance transforms them and fills them with the determination to become professional dancers.

Today, in their new roles,  Junaid Jemal Sendi and Addisu Demissie perform three works.  First is a sensitive, masculine duet, ‘A holding space’, demonstrating the interdependence of the two men as they struggle to achieve independence and freedom from their imposed or self-imposed prison.  Second is a sextet showing the fragility of manhood in a frenetic, rocking, street context, ‘The Empire’s Fall’.  For the third piece, the dancers bring a community dance project to the schools, senior dance classes, conservatoires and young offender institutions near Sadler’s Wells.  In ‘Full Circle’, performers range from nine to ninety, are there by choice, by being chosen or by compulsion; some with, others without dance experience. 140 performers running hell-for-leather in two giant spirals waving red scarves is both exciting and energising for the audience and also demonstrates the practiced precision and trust that developed between the inter-generational performers.  To complete the cycle, Junaid Jemal Sendi and Addisu Demissie developed another community project to work with 50 young people in Addis Ababa, 11 of them disabled, some in wheelchairs, in a dance called ‘Wekt - The Seasons’.  The physical, intellectual and emotional commitment of the dancers was tangible in their every cell during the performance and the huge smiles and whoops of joy afterwards were uplifting.

The cities of London and Addis Ababa were shown to be so similar yet contrasting.  Interviews revealed similar levels of background traffic, low-rent rehearsal spaces and prestigious performance venues.  Yet, children face death everyday on the streets of Addis.  Although commonplace, ‘disability is misunderstood in Ethiopia’.  This was the first time disabled performers had taken to the Ethiopian National Theatre’s stage in Addis.

In the panel discussion after the film, Dr Tiffany Jenkins steered the discussion skilfully to find points between the false dichotomy of art for art’s sake vs publicly funded art for community improvement.  Nobody present failed to observe the self-actualising and transforming power of participation in such projects, however, the dichotomy raised its ugly head several times with the admission that publically funded projects need to be justified by having their beans counted because those are the rules the politicians have made.  Alan Davey expressed a desire for arts organisations to be cleverer at self-justification.  Perhaps, as Chief Executive of Arts Council England, he could write a short briefing paper how arts projects can avoid the enforced diversity monitoring.  After all, it is the arts Council itself that is required to represent the diversity of the nation.  Projects in monochrome towns are valid too, surely?

Two evenings later, on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, some useful statistics came to light in support of maintaining funding for the arts.  The total UK arts budget costs only 17p per person per week.  A pound of government grant withdrawn from the arts will result in £2 of lost income to London.  The regions would suffer £6 of lost income for the loss of the same £1. The prestigious RSC has maximised its ability to gain philanthropic funds and is unlikely to squeeze any more from an age of austerity.  How will less prestigious community projects make up their lost government funding?  Reducing spending on the arts is a false saving.  Arts bring jobs, kudos, tourism and money to a region.  The RSC draws in £58m to the Midlands from just £15m in subsidy. Dance United (partners in the Destino project) worked with 33 young offenders for 6 hours a day, over 12 weeks, as part of their community sentences and prevented eight of them from reoffending.  According to a recent Guardian article, for every person who doesn’t reoffend, £82,000 of public expenditure is saved.

In the general discussion at the RSA, unanimous support for art projects and arts funding in general, was unsurprisingly offered.  What was unexpected, though, was a teacher from one of the Euston schools involved in the project, who expressed his initial scepticism.  10 girls were chosen to take part because they were persistently disruptive in class, unmotivated, unpleasant, on-track for permanent exclusion.  Watching them rehearse, he saw them develop self-awareness, trust in others and empathy, stillness and a sense of achievement.  For the first time in many years, they completed something they started.  Their bad attitude changed to a positive one.  Their places, roles and standing in society and understanding of society have changed.  They have become part of their community and remained in school where they sat their GCSE exams this summer.

Art for art’s sake?  Money: for God’s sake.  Who will fund the arts in future?

Destino on YouTube.

The 2010 World Cup Final was a disappointment. The Spanish, who were the most skilful team in the tournament, only sporadically tried to force the issue and break through the Dutch defence. They spent most of the match trying to pass the Dutch to death. The Netherlands, who have proved in previous matches to be a very talented side, spent most of the first 90 minutes trying to stop the Spanish from playing, by fair means and foul.

The hostile reaction to the Dutch game plan is an indicator of how football has changed in the past 20 years. More and more physical aspects of the game are now penalised, such as the tackle from behind and slightly mistimed tackles, and so the Dutch approach which would have been the norm in a previous age is considered beyond the pale today. As Dutch legend Johan Cruyff revealed, the aim was to recreate Inter Milan’s style in winning this year’s Champions League. But the Holland coach Bert van Marwijk has been shown up on the biggest stage of all, as at best a poor man’s Jose Mourinho. 

The Netherlands adopted a lite version of the Argentine approach to the 1990 World Cup Final against West Germany. Knowing that they only had one world class player in their team, Diego Maradona, the rest of the Argentinian team proceeded to foul and break up play for 90 minutes, before losing 1-0. The Argentinians then complained vociferously about the referee who had given a soft penalty which lead to West Germany’s winning goal. The Dutch have spent 48 hours complaining about the referee failing to give them a couple of free kicks, ignoring the fact that if the referee had employed stricter standards during the match they themselves would have been reduced to no more than nine players by half-time.

I used to be very concerned at the prospect of football becoming a non-contact sport, and at times things have gone too far. Overall though, I cannot say that the changes on the pitch over the past two decades have been to the detriment of football. The Netherlands game plan, whilst understandable, really jarred with the way modern football is played at the highest level, and I was very pleased that they did not win out.

Goal line technology

FIFA President Sepp Blatter declared that ‘A goal was not given in a match between England and Germany and it went all around the world, it was like a cry’.

It does now look as if some form of goal-line technology will be trialled in the coming years. Whilst I’m not a great fan, it can probably be brought into the upper reaches of the game without too many difficulties. The problem for me is that the spontaneity and continuity of the game will be disrupted. The approach of examining the evidence to check that every decision is correct, rather than seeing incidents as part of the cut and thrust of the game, seems a danger in the longer term. If you start with goal-line technology, why not extend it to offside decisions, bad tackles and other controversial areas. Ultimately it could be argued that every decision in the match has to be proved correct.

Was the Frank Lampard disallowed goal for England against Germany, which would be re-examined if goal line technology is introduced, any worse than the Carlos Tevez offside goal for Argentina against Mexico which would not?

One of the reasons for the reaction against the Netherlands on Sunday was the repeated showing of foul tackles from every angle in a way that would not have happened even 10 years ago. Mark van Bommel, the Netherlands defender may have been lucky not have been sent off in the World Cup Final, but he is a very effective central defender who is a master of his art. He has now been demonised, except in Holland, as a pantomime villain as every foul tackle he made was analysed in such detail. It really should be left to the referee to deal with these incidents as he sees them during the match.

Donetsk here we come

There is much talk and anticipation of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, but in the meantime we have Euro 2012 Poland/Ukraine to look forward to.

It could be argued that this tournament is a showcase for Eastern Europe in much the same way as the 2010 World Cup was for Africa. I hope that the commentators and pundits will have as generous a view of Poland and Ukraine as they did of South Africa, as too often the residents of Eastern Europe are dismissed as peculiar people with primitive ideas.

Until then, as David Pleat would say, au revoir.

Penalty box theatrics

This week on CW, Matt Trueman brings us more theatrical highs and lows from London’s LIFT festival, including species-affirming bread-making and dilettantish politics, while Giulia Merlo reviews Lulu at the Gate. Meanwhile, Geoff Kidder bangs in another World Cup blog on sportsmanship, with Joel Cohen sending in a handy cross from West Africa.

8 July 2010

In England the inquiry into our disappointing World Cup campaign has only just begun, although hopefully the announcement that Fabio Capello will remain as manager will add some stability to proceedings. I was critical of Capello in my last blog, but if his presence can dampen the current mood of national self-flagellation it can only be for the good.

On a brighter note, teenagers in Cornwall have criticised the county council for removing goalposts from public pitches during the World Cup. Cornwall Council has its reasons, but as Saltash teenager Tom Davy said ‘The kids want to play football’. I don’t want to get involved in this dispute, and the players can always use ‘jumpers for goalposts’, but it is encouraging that these youngsters feel so strongly about going outside to play football and emulate their heroes.

SPORTSMANSHIP

Uruguayan striker Luis Suarez controversially punched the ball off the line in the last minute of the World Cup quarter final between Uruguay and Ghana, preventing a certain goal being scored. Suarez added fuel to the fire by declaring, ‘I made the save of tournament’ and referring to Diego Maradona’s infamous goal against England in 1986, ‘The hand of God now belongs to me’. The Ghanaian sports minister has suggested football’s governing body FIFA change the rules to award a ‘penalty goal’ when a professional foul is committed which directly prevents a goal.

The Ghanaian argument is that if a ‘penalty goal’ had been awarded, Ghana would have won the match they lost last Friday. This proposal seems totally contrary to the spirit of football, however. Firstly, politicians and national governments should keep out of football, and allow the football authorities to run the game. Secondly, professional fouls are part of the game. Suarez punched the ball off the line, was sent off by the referee, banned from the next game and Ghana were awarded a penalty. The fact that Ghana missed the penalty which would have won the match is all part of the beautiful game.

Debates about handball and sportsmanship have played a large part in the current World Cup campaign, from Thierry Henry in the qualifying play-off against Ireland to Luis Suarez in the quarter-final, and I am organising a discussion on this subject at the Battle of Ideas festival in October. The more these controversial events occur, the more I feel that sportsmanship or the lack of it, is integral to the sport and should be treated as such.  The resulting drama only adds to the proceedings, and as they say ‘hard cases make bad law’. Even if in the case of Frank Lampard’s disallowed goal against Germany it is very hard to stomach.

WORLD CUP FINAL

The last week has seen the remaining European teams assert their dominance on the world stage. The self-destruction of the Brazilian team after they conceded two goals to the Dutch had to be seen to be believed. The final between Spain and the Netherlands will result in a new name on the Jules Rimet trophy for the first time since France in 1998.

Admiring the quality of play in the semi-final between Spain and Germany, I realise that barring an act of god, it will be many years and require a complete change of footballing culture before England can hope to produce 11 players who look this comfortable in possession of a football.

Travelling is never easy, thats the fun of it. When you don’t speak French and you are driving thousands of miles through Francophone West Africa in a fairly banged-out right-hand drive Ford Fiesta, the challenges that face you multiply. Luckily for myself and any other linguistically inept summer travellers, football is the universal language of the moment, there to get you a bit further along the journey with a quick succession of match-long friends.

Whilst yelling ‘Le Coupe Du Monde’ with a bit of cheer works as a great way to disarm even the toughest-looking of foreign officials, the best ice-breaker in the World Cup traveller’s arsenal is the cycle of naming teams or players in a slightly foreign accent untill both you and the local you are talking to come to an agreement about who exactly you will base your conversation on, and then exchanging sponteneous, barely informed judgements upon them through a combination of grunting and thumb-led indicators. The high number of World Cup players in the English Leagues also works as a great invitation to any local with ‘small, small English’ to engage the English traveller into a more lengthy conversation about our football - this is a great way to make a local friend of any age if they have the English.

These conversations may not help you get particularly ‘up close and personal’ with the native psyche, but they do serve as an easy mode for cultural comparison: a group of locals and a television is a potential learning curve for many a curious nomad. Some locals might have invited you into their homes to watch the next game or you may have heard the blare of vuvuzelas from a shop-owner’s set and decide to join them and often many of their only semi-employed friends huddled round a tiny set. It often feels as if the World Cup Song is a rallying cry of invitation to warm the heart of a weary nomad wherever he is. (It is also pretty unavoidable playing in nearly every TV or radio advert - and ringing as many African’s ringtone.)

Just as some travellers have used the world cup as an invitation to explore Africa itself, I think it is safe to say that every traveller all over the world, from any competing nation, and all those not, have reaped the benefits of using the World Cup as a tool in their travels. Whatever you think of globalisation, this ‘pro’ of making a global citizen is without flaw; it’s just a shame that it doesn’t happen every time I decide to go abroad.