Review: 'Gauguin - Maker Of Myth' at Tate Modern

Tate Modern 30 September 2010  –  16 January 2011

This is what big institutional galleries like the Tate are for: only they have the resources and the clout to bring together a major artist’s work into a single huge show like this. Of course when a curator is given that much economic and cultural capital to play with, they feel that they need to make a statement, whether they have anything to say or not.

As far as I can tell the subtitle ‘Maker Of Myth’ is pretty much spurious: sure, Gauguin was obsessed with mythology, and was a conscious cultivator of his own myth as an artist, but he was as much a victim of myth as a manipulator of it. This more complex picture is not elided in the exhibition, but neither is there any coherent attempt to argue for the view of the artist expressed by ‘maker of myth’. I can buy that term applied to Picasso, say, but not poor old syphilitic, frustrated, misunderstood and finally penniless Paul Gauguin.

This is all by the by: whatever curatorial agenda there may be does not interfere with the work, which speaks for itself, and is hung in nine galleries, grouped according to themes such as self-portraiture, landscape, still-life, female subjects and so on. The themes are pretty sensible, although of course self-portraits are headed ‘Identity and Self-Mythology’, women ‘The Eternal Feminine’ etc. (yawn). There are also two rooms of ephemera which I didn’t linger in, as time was pressing: I saw enough to get an interesting inkling of the extent to which Gauguin was influenced by commercial art, however, and I’d be interested in how much influence he’s felt to have had on the commercial world in his turn

I know Gauguin from books, by and large: his paintings in the flesh are imposing physical objects, mainly by dint of their chromatic intensity. They are mostly smaller than I’d imagined them. There is also, oddly, a lot less paint on the canvases than I thought there would be: there is a good deal of dark underpainting, which gives the often gaudy colours a depth I had supposed came from a physical depth of paint. In fact, the weave of the canvas is visible over much of the painted surfaces, suggestive of a frugality at odds with the works’ visual opulence.

Seeing such an extensive sampling of an artist’s work has its pros and cons. On the one hand it’s a rich meal: there’s really only so much you can take in at one sitting, and at £15 a visit I’m not too likely to go back repeatedly. I stayed for an hour: on my own I might have stayed for two, but I’d have been boss-eyed by then, and really this show would take about ten or twelve hours to see properly.

On the other hand, seeing so many self-portraits together (for instance) gives you an opportunity to see the development of Gauguin’s practice, to see him probing, abandoning blind alleys, gradually gathering the threads of his mature work. His relationship with Van Gogh (which continues in his work long after the termination of their personal association) is a fascinating thread to follow: I’d love to see a show that puts the two together, like the Picasso/ Matisse show here a few years back.

On a technical level some dubious decisions were taken in hanging this show: the contemporary obsession with shoving the labels to the end of the wall often makes it confusing to find the details of the piece you’re looking at, and really, what harm does it do to have a little piece of text next to each work? And while I appreciate the aesthetic drawbacks of either board labels or clear stickers, the direct transfers they like at the Tate tend to have rubbed off a few weeks into the show. It was very hard to make sense of a few labels.

Clearly it’s hard to review a show like this. Gauguin is Gauguin: an opportunity to view his work en masse should be taken if you can. The way he sets blocks of colour singing against each other so that they seem to fizzle and vibrate on the canvas is for me very rarely matched, perhaps only by Rothko. The curator, despite some minor pretensions, has done the sensible thing and gotten out of the way, while these magnificent paintings blare out across the galleries like foghorns.

Review: Diwana

121 Drummond Street, London, NW1 2HL

The occasion was the London branch of my family’s opportunity to celebrate my 40^th, so it was unlikely the place I wanted to go would earn itself anything other than a good review. I’ve been eating here since I was three years old, and I have to say, each time I have a meal at Diwana it conforms precisely to my accumulated memories of what the food there should be like. Thirty-seven years of total consistency is a pretty splendid achievement in my book.

Diwana is a bhel poori house, of which there are a small number in the vicinity of south Camden’s North Gower Street: what this means is that it serves southern Indian cuisine, entirely vegetarian, and that it specialises in a brand of snack food, involving small fried breads, sev (chickpea noodles) and various interesting, aromatic seasonings. The other mainstay of the menu is the dosas, various weird and wonderful riffs on the theme of pancake. I didn’t have any of that.

When I lived in London during the early 90s I explored that side of the menu, but on this visit I returned to my old mainstay, since I very rarely eat there nowadays: I had the thali ‘Annapurna’. This is a stainless steel tray, full of small stainless steel bowls, each containing a different vegetable curry (except the ones containing some fantastically seasoned yoghurt, some pokhara, some rice, and some creamy, sticky dessert). I had some chapatis with mine as well. It was all very yum.

This is not a very hotly spiced cuisine, which means you can really taste the subtleties of the very complex spice combinations they use in all their dishes, and it’s all quite unlike anything else I associate with the term ‘Indian food’. These interesting aromas extend everywhere, including the desserts.

Despite my thali including a dessert, I was compelled (for reasons of nostalgia) to follow it up with a portion of malai kulfi. Kulfi is Indian ice-cream: it is stirred and reduced, rather than being whipped like western ice-cream, which results in a very dense texture. In the past it was served in a tall cone shape: on this occasion the cone had been cut into four segments which lay flat on my plate. This may have something to do with the traditional shape’s tendency to go flying across the restaurant when you try to force a spoon through it. It was also very delicious, very delicately and engagingly seasoned.

They have no license, but you can bring your own alcohol, which in this case we did, although I’m usually happy with a couple of salt lassis (spiced yoghurt drinks) to wash my meal down.

I used to go running into this place for a plaster if I cut my finger while playing in the nearby streets. It’s not just the first Indian food I can remember having: it’s the first food I can remember having out, of any kind. Its flavours and colours and smells and atmosphere (and decor, it still has the same pine tongue-and-groove lined interior) are as much a part of me as anything else is, and so it is clearly completely impossible for me to give an objective assessment. I just love it, the way you love a family member. It’s my ultimate comfort food. I do maintain, however, that it is some damn’ fine cooking, and I have no reservations about recommending that you eat there.

City Story

This is another start to a story, like the one I posted a few weeks ago. Who knows, one day I may even carry on with it...

I have heard that there is an edge to the city, that if one travels far enough one will come to a fortified wall, greater than any known bastion, beyond which lies… what might be called empty space. Land without buildings. Bedrock the same as that through which the lower levels are burrowed, but covered with a layer of the same mold that is cultivated as a medium by olericulturists, which in its turn is populated by a vast crop of self-propagated plants. Such fantasies are surely wish-fulfillment, but who would not wish to see such a paradise, who could bear to deny its possibility once the idea had been presented to them? It is not dissimilar to that better known fantasy of the okeanopolis, inspired by the great marshaling basin of Salar, and perhaps has a similar origin, in a natural response to  great glasshouses like those at at Middlegate. The difference is that many believe that the okeanopolis is real, that there is a place where great wharves stand at the edge of a basin whose extent is too vast to encompass with the eye. I have even seen maps… 

In truth though, the city has an edge: it is where I live. All I must do to cast my eyes beyond it is to step through the window of my garrett onto the library roof, and look upwards. The boundary between roof and sky is too clearly delineated to deny, and one can easily suppose that there is also a lower boundary, although explorers have yet to fathom the deepest extent of the catacombs. It is in the lateral compass of the city that we must face the philosophical necessity of the infinite, and the axiomaticity of the proposition that the city in which we live is the universe, not a thing that is in it. Such a fallacy springs from the presence in our language of two words for essentially the same thing: but all the universe can be said to contain aside from the city, is the sky.

There are days when I could imagine that the library itself is the entirety of the cosmos. Although I am The Librarian, I have no assistants or apprentices. It was a wealthy and powerful family that collected the library, but although they still bear the title of Dynast, it is now little more than an honorific. It is as much as I can do to prevent the most important works from falling into decay, and my days spent conserving bindings, poisoning worm and cataloguing little used stacks are long enough that I often leave the library only during the hours of darkness. It is rare, and therefore welcome, for a visitor to the crumbling palace to require assistance in research: mostly they do not proceed beyond the well appointed reading room, which is kept presentable for the use of the family.

The Dynast Pel Horotin of Metateichan Parast is (or was) a moderately distant cousin of my employers, the Konefkin Dynasty, the owner of a small estate in the district of Parast that lies beyond the Peregrine Wall, separated from the refuse heaps and slums of the Scatapolis only by the River Óis. Like all metateichans he was prone to impetuous action, and ill founded, optimistic beliefs. He was however, a deeply intelligent, perceptive man, and a true scholar, notwithstanding that he was principally a man of action, and a feared duellist. In his company, and through collaboration with him, I have unlocked the meaning of much of the obscurest content of the Konefkin Library.

He first came to the library in a state of great agitation, bearing two ancient texts, small, hand copied codices that he had purchased from an archaeologist excavating deep catacombs to the far south. They were written in an admixture of ancient tongues, and promised to hold a clue to the proper reading of the Paleokiano language, which was known in many texts, but which had never been properly understood. Even its name was a description of its great age, and the fact that it was principally written in blue ink: no scholar had the first idea how it might be pronounced.

Dyn. Horotin, however (who to my great discomfort insisted I address him familiarly, as Pel) was no linguist, and, though interested, was not excited by the possibility of solving this ancient puzzle for its own sake.

The Paleokiano texts were the subject of much speculation by those who hoped to prove the reality of mythological sites: the okeanopolis mentioned above; the Citadel of Mikhtan, filled with its armoury of magical weapons; the great subterranean waterway of Kanna; and many others. His researches had led him to believe that our library’s Paleokiano texts might hold accounts of travels far beyond the regions that constitute the known world today, travels he himself wished to emulate. This was the source of his excitement: he believed he might find directions to ancient sites and treasures that would unlock the earliest history of the city’s peoples, and perhaps enable a scholarly account of the origins of the city itself. In short, he thought he had found a way to discover the identity of the putative First Builder.

This search was to prove the impetus to the transformation of the Konefkin library, to a great leap forward in the scholarship of ancient texts, and sadly, to the almost certain death of that brave, intelligent, foolhardy and misguided man.

A Great Crowd Assembled

A great crowd assembled, at the end of a road.

They gathered around the small, black, glossy, hard pellet of damage

that had extracted sticky filaments from each of them

and tangled them in a web of which it was the centre,

but to which it was not connected.

All of them stared at it,

that black hole spider,

accepting all their gazes, absorbing their attention

and reflecting nothing.

Some of them perhaps had never seen such a thing:

to most, it was unknowably familiar.

To many it was on the periphery of their vision,

just behind one shoulder, stalking them;

to many others it was invisible,

so that when they stared at it directly

they saw what they imagined was behind it:

but not on this day.

On this day it seated itself in dark splendour

unfurling its robes over the steps of its dais like a dowager empress.

On this day it held court

and all the people in that shuffling haggard crowd offered tribute.

I knew a man who went to Africa,

a man who had soul,

a man with two names, one in each of his native tongues.

He was a full man, rotund with humour,

corpulent with intelligence.

He was a music lover.

He is a minister in the court of that shadowed presence.

I knew a man who went to America

disguised as Fidel Castro,

who also had two names:

one for his family, and another for his thoughts,

which were songs about buildings, the coin of our speech.

He has been my shoe size.

He is a henchman of that glossy, matt horizon.

I knew a man who went to India

armed only with a flute.

He had a dog as tall as him,

and I ate powdered milk from beneath his sink,

consumed his bandes dessinées.

He set me in motion.

He sleeps at the feet of that oblivious master.

I knew a man who went to Spain

and dwelt in his father's house.

He stole images

from the quick and the lovely,

and dashed himself on the rocks

of his saline imaginings.

He is a tumbler before the chancellor of that absence.

I knew a woman who went to Norwich,

whence came the man who went to America,

who once lived in part of London

where the man who went to Spain

and the man who went to India came from;

and the man who went to India had a child,

who lived near the woman who went to Norwich.

This is how that jet puppeteer weaves its net.

And that great crowd began to drift away,

returning each to their business, or so they thought.

They are still gathered there,

at the end of that pleasant, wooded lane,

bound.

Bound not by oath or loyalty to that hated compulsion

which drew them together,

but by that tight net of tacky threads which it elicited

but which they alone created.

Bound, an arch of only keystones

at a certain unchanging distance

in orbit of that unreciprocating singularity.

We cannot see it or imagine it

and so we do not fully believe it

but it is all there is.

We are its cadets, and we will be its slaves.

Some of us will serve it as midwives, or couriers:

but every single one of us will be its mute parishioner.

We will be complicit in the sentences and decrees of its court.

We will polish its smooth surface,

and admire our reflections in its light sponging outer boundary.

We will eat its meal of ashes,

and drink its wine of dust,

and hating it, will submit to its excruciation,

until we love it.

Until we welcome our dessert, and sleep.

Suffolk, November 2010

Grey Town Sky

Grey town.
Sad and happy life.
The tragicomedy of:
days pull you forward
like sad happy children grasping your hand;
corks bob
on intersecting swells and currents.
It is not walking, but falling:
that is what we mean by time
(unwrapped gifts can't be re-unseen
however carefully we patch paper.)
Grey town sky happy sad day children's tug:
'bittersweet' is unequal to the task,
because it doesn't say time,
and time is what sad and happy are made of.

Essex, October 2010

Echoes

A light goes out.
I drive: I pass a gorgeous young woman on a bike,
a geeky looking young monk in elaborate robes,
tourists from the far east,
cast iron bollards,
dreaming spires,
autumn, spread across an affluent town
like effluent on the steps of a dining club;
and none of them feels a dimming.
Not one of them feels
the slightest diminution of the light,
and I feel their indifference like a fist.
How can they just keep existing blankly
as though that extinction were irrelevant,
as though it were just
that your daughter should grow motherless?

A light goes out.
I examine all the desert places once illuminated,
moistening and salting them.
A light goes out and it is wrong
so fucking wrong
that shade does not fall across
the whole blasted heath of my sight.
It is wrong that
the babe, the monk, the tourist,
the bollard, the spire, the leaves, the slanting light
fail to see how impoverished they are
by that casual circuit-breaking.

A light goes out
and I want to shout.
This is me shouting your name
wanting echoes to slap back infinitely,
but the future is bottomless,
and swallows all reflection like a greedy child.

Cambridge, October 2010


This one is dedicated to Alex Perry, and was inspired by the appallingly tragic news of her passing.

Big Pictures

Those big pictures make me breathe in,

thinking I could make images like that from words,

excited by all those worlds I will make.

The way they dwarf me

makes me want to buy their cheap and sentimental wares,

paste made bright by rich scaffolds.

After I look at them

(blinded by daylight

in streets I thought benighted)

I'm propelled by their momentum,

walking out their sequence. 

Yes, those big pictures breathe me in

and out again, like a clock or a key.

Suffolk, October 2010