Boring Like A Drill.

When I first wrote about Philip Guston, I mentioned being first impressed by “one of his big, abstract expressionist canvases from the 1950s, back when I was an impressionable nipper.” It was when a bunch of paintings from the Phillips Collection from Washington D.C. were shown in Adelaide. It was one my primary formative experiences of modern art, and wouldn’t you know it? The Phillips Collection has put its collection of American artists online.

So, for the record, here’s that painting: Native’s Return (1957). The pic below doesn’t do it justice: in real life it’s 65 by 76 inches.

I mentioned the Rothko room at Tate Modern last week, saying it had been left as before. It turns out this is not exactly true: the entire thing has been reinstalled (I thought they’d just closed off a door), as explained here:

In the dimness the paintings appear at first fuzzy, and move inside themselves in eerie stealth: dark pillars shimmer, apertures seem to slide open, shadowed doorways gape, giving on to depthless interiors. Gradually, as the eye adjusts to the space’s greyish lighting – itself a kind of masterwork – the colours seep up through the canvas like new blood through a bandage in which old blood has already dried.

I had wondered about the title card at the Tate explaining that these paintings were originally commissioned to decorate(!) The Four Seasons restaurant. Rothko couldn’t be serious, could he? The restaurant couldn’t be, could they?

“I accepted this assignment as a challenge, with strictly malicious intentions. I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room. If the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment.”

I’m still working through a backlog of stuff, but after the longish writeups of Samuel Beckett and Tate Modern (and too much time spent dicking around with pictures of John Hurt) it’s time for a few, short, stupid posts to break up the routine. See them below: one, two, three.

I woke in a cold sweat last night and had to get online to check my blog again, convinced that somewhere in my discussion of Monet and Rothko I had used the word ‘diaphanous’. False alarm, thank god.

Someone visited this site searching for “Denise Drysdale tits“. I’m speechless.

Urgent Ditsy Casual Pack

Speaking of the influence of Samuel Beckett’s antiphonal dialogues on Kenneth Gaburo’s music, UbuWeb has a complete recording, with sleeve notes, of Gaburo’s Maledetto, a 40-minute disquisition on the word screw “for seven virtuoso speakers”. If you’re unsure about downloading the whole thing, here’s a 2-minute excerpt (MP3, 3.5 MB). Hosted through the Boring Like A Drill Hit Parade.

Bonus Beckett links: Filming Play. Dunno if this could be any good (screenshots, Anthony Minghella, etc.)

Video clips of John Hurt doing a Krapp.

There were plenty of happy punters in the Tate Modern on Sunday: they had found the Dalìs. Four of them, by my count, and good ones too, made before the kitsch element of his work became overwhelming. (I’m not a Dalì fan, but if I was forced to have one on my wall I’d probably pick Mountain Lake, on display here – or else a really small one.) While in the new surrealism room I heard three people call their mates over to where the Dalìs were hanging.

How does the new surrealism room at the Tate compare to the old one? Tate Modern never had a surrealism room before! Its first and, until now, only hanging of its permanent collection was one of those dreaded “themed” arrangements whose main objective is the career advancement of museum curators. So if you liked surrealism, and a lot of people do, you wandered through room after room – all with titles like “The Body and Society”, or “Nature and Growth”, or anything else that sounds like a high school curriculum’s euphemism for sex ed – hoping you stumbled across the one with the Magritte in it.

(Did anyone pay attention to the putative themes of those galleries? Or did everyone just scuttle from room to room in a game of hunt-the-Dalì? Can anyone, even the curators, remember what the rooms were called?)

Sometimes, that Magritte wasn’t there at all. The arranging of work by ideological themes put the curators in something of a bind. The average art-loving punter stubbornly clings to the old-fashioned expectation that museums are places where you go to look at lots of great art. Put up too much good art, and your precious theme will be diluted to the point of giving the lie to your curatorial pretensions. On the other hand, put up third rate art that supports your thesis and your aesthetic judgement will become suspect. Now that the themes have been abandoned, the first thing everyone’s noticed is that there’s a lot more art up on the walls.

Sorry I don’t have 100% accurate information on what was hanging where, or how much of it is on loan to the Tate to supplement their own collection. I was there on a bank holiday Sunday and the place was packed, so I didn’t always get the chance to scrutinise the title cards. Besides, the main reason I was there was to accompany the girlfriend’s belated viewing of Embankment. Her verdict: it’s OK.

The most immediately obvious room is the one that squares off their big Monet Water-Lilies opposite a big (well, long) Pollock. Unfortunately it’s the wrong kind of Pollock. Blue Poles would look amazing in this company, but Summertime: Number 9A is a bare canvas soaked with an elegant scrawl of dripped black paint, highlighted with brushed on patches of primary colours. It isn’t a surface or a palette that matches Monet’s at all. Fortunately, a bench runs lengthwise down the room so you can face one painting or the other, with audio guides on hand for punters wanting to know more about either work.

The really clever juxtaposition is a pretty Rothko on the wall adjacent to the Monet, at the head of the long room. Its greeny-golds and pinks, the translucence of its surface, play off against Monet’s water-lilies until the Monet looks like a Rothko and the Rothko a Monet. An ingenious pairing.

The room full of Rothkos has been kept intact, as you would expect. Plenty of bench space so you can spend an entire, melancholy afternoon in there if you like.

Unless my memory is played tricks on me, they left that Joseph Beuys thing where it was. Can’t blame them not wanting to lug that big pile o’crap around any more than absolutely necessary.

The recent British art on display is way lame. Dear Tate: don’t trust Charles Saatchi’s acquisitions advice!

I know the lefty press loves a good conspiracy theory but this is a bit of a stretch, even for them:

Who knows what the avant garde would have created if there had been no assassination in Sarajevo and no first world war? Or did the very extremism of cubist art somehow bring about the ensuing chaos?

That’s right Jonathan, World War I was fought over cubism. Actually, judging from his recent articles, it’s surprising he didn’t blame the Americans, for once.

Apart from weird digressions like this, I agree with most of what Jones says about the Tate Modern rehanging of its collection. It’s halfway done now, and I was going to wait until it was all open to the public before writing about it, but given that The Guardian is blabbing about what’s on the fifth floor I may as well say how it looks… soon. I’m too busy right now.

Funnily enough, Picasso was questioned in Paris in relation to the Archduke’s assassination. He told them Braque did it.

The best-known line in Samuel Beckett’s Play is one that is never heard spoken on stage, but its consequences are heard throughout the second half of the play, and define the drama. Out of all the plays being put on at the Barbican for the Beckett centenary, this is the one I was most eager to see: reading it, even with the most conscientious imagination, can in no way substitute for experiencing it in live performance.

Luckily, I managed to get to see it. (In an indication of my artistic seriousness of late, I missed most of the Beckett centenary events because I was in Italy doing pretty close to sweet bugger all. I had planned on going to see Krapp’s Last Tape when I got back but some fool cast John Hurt in it so it’s been booked out for months.)

In terms of drama, Play gives you everything and nothing. The plot is a received idea: a love triangle, the most hackneyed of cliches but an inexhaustible source of dramatic machinations. If in Waiting for Godot nothing happens twice, then in Play something happened, once. The three protagonists – man, wife, mistress, all long dead – pick over the details of the affair, interrogated in turn by an inquisitory light. What remains of the story when there is nothing more to it than memory?

The three, being dead – cremated, in fact – are ash confined to urns: the “action”, such as it is, consists of their voices and the light. Performing the play hinges on questions of timing and execution – musical questions – as much as of dramaturgy.

The connections between Beckett and music have always been obvious. Music appears as a character in its own right in several of his radio plays, and his stage scripts took on musical directions to varying degrees; from the mysterious Quad, a wordless choreography apparently more suited to dancers than actors, to Krapp’s Last Tape, a monologue with deft use of tape recording and playback that has been, or should be, the envy of composers who have attempted combining live performers with tape. (Morton Feldman, a composer who collaborated with Beckett on several occasions, was astonished to learn that Beckett didn’t own a tape recorder.)

Play is the text that most entices musicians: it’s closing direction “repeat play” caps off a text that resembles a musical score as much as a drama, with its dependence on vocal dexterity and precise timing between the three actors. Kenneth Gaburo conducted a performance of Play by his Mew Music Choral Ensemble (NMCE), interpreting the script as they would a piece of music.

Back when he was interesting, Philip Glass was hired to write music for a number of Beckett stage productions, including Play. What impressed him was that at every performance the emotional climax came at a different point in the play, proving that the substance of the play was not in its text, but in the relationship of the text between the actors and the audience. Play makes clear the audience’s complicty in theatre.

In this performance, the great emotive moment came early in the second half, as we realised we were hearing the same story all over again. The lighting, already wan, dimmed to near total darkness; the voices, already soft, retreated to a murmur that would have been unintelligible to anyone entering the theatre. This knowing use of sound, of how little of the voice was needed to carry through the small theatre, was the most successful part of the production. The audience silent, craned forward slightly to hear a tale they had heard before.

At first we laughed (the new received opinion: Beckett is funny) at the seemingly irrelevant details of their story, which seemed then to define the triviality of their minds. The second time around these little digressions became uncannily poignant, the enduring memories of a life irretrievably lost, clung to as dearly as their self-inflicted hurts and humiliations.

If you really want to see John Hurt perform Krapp’s Last Tape, he made a film of it in 2000, the same year he narrated The Tigger Movie.