Spring Adventures

It feels as though I've been waiting a long while for this week off that is just coming to an end: the lateness of Easter has removed it far from my last break. I spent a couple of days in Dorset, taking my Mum to West Bay and my sister to Knowlton Rings; zoomed to South Wales to see my friend Rain who has been going through all sorts of trouble, taking them to an antiques emporium (their choice) and Llandaff Cathedral (mine); London yesterday to see two more friends, one for lunch in the amazing surroundings of Mercato Mayfair which used to be the church of St Mark North Audley Street, and the other at Pret London Bridge (probably less worthy of a photo), and two exhibitions, Tim Burton at the Design Museum and Secrets of the Thames at the Museum of Docklands; and a final excursion today to Leigh-on-Sea. Funny place, with one old street along the shoreline full of fishing-themed pubs and a more modern one at the hilltop where the shops are. I spent a good amount of my time in Leigh trying to find somewhere that would serve me a sandwich and a cup of tea for lunch rather than fish-and-chips or tapas; I should just have gone to the church where they were offering community lunches!

I was also delighted to be shown a new and unheralded image of St Catherine at the Docklands exhibition - on a gold ring plucked from the Thames. Here she is, just visible, holding a tiny, tiny wheel, the last of a trio with St John the Baptist and the Blessed Virgin.

Oxford Springtime

I couldn't have picked a better day to visit Oxford than yesterday. The pellucid blue skies framed the golden-coloured buildings, reminding me of our trip to Florence many years ago (I'm not a very good traveller so it remains a rare foray beyond these shores). Here's a view of one of the Clarendon Building muses (which have an interesting history), seen beyond the Bridge of Sighs along New College Lane.

Although I did get to see some friends, the centrepiece of my day was a visit to the Holy Well of Holywell Manor. The Manor is the graduate block of Balliol College, and although I studied at Balliol it was only as an undergraduate so I never went there, and had only glimpsed the Well through a window in the gate of the Praefectus's garden. Yesterday I was allowed in to examine the site itself - though apparently my request had prompted the Manor's health-and-safety manager to examine the well and decide that it isn't as safe as it could be and needs to be added to Balliol's lengthening list of works! There is a horribly corroded-looking set of steps leading down to into the well-chamber and as Mr H&S had been down there to look that morning I was perfectly happy to rely on his photos. I am still picking through the tangled history of the Well so won't go through it here, but the chamber still seems to contain the stone tub identified by the Clewer Sisters who occupied the Manor in the late 1800s as an Anglo-Saxon font, rather dubiously I fear. The Praefectus's PA gave me a copy of the history of the Manor by Oswyn Murray, who I overlapped with at Balliol all those years ago but who I didn't have anything directly to do with. It has some useful details of ghosts and folklore!

The 'Oracles, Omens and Answers' show at the Bodleian is fun (the central African custom of divination using land spiders was news to me) and I went into St Mary Mag's, rather scandalously for the first time ever considering I lived yards away from it for three years. There is a dramatic statue of St Catherine on the high altar reredos.

St Catherine at the British Library

I learned a variety of things from the 'Medieval Women' exhibition at the British Library yesterday. Among them was that there is a patron saint of ice skating (Lidwina of Schiedam), and what Margery Kempe thought the Devil smelled like (rather nicer than one might presume, as it turns out); that the last ruler of a Crusader state was a woman (Countess Lucia of Tripoli), that Margaret of Anjou had a pet lion, and that about a third of medieval medical practitioners were women (not all of them midwives). There were also two images of St Catherine: a small woodcut made by the sisters of the Bridgettine convent of Marienwater, and the terrible, charismatic painting on the Battel Retable, with its face scratched out like its sister of Maidstone. But there is more: like the other saints depicted on the Retable, she is surrounded by astrological graffiti, charms against witchcraft, and geometrical patterns whose significance remains obscure. She is a saint not merely maimed, but neutered, and recruited to some other cause.

Coco Chanel at the V&A

Unlike the Diva exhibition, which I'm keen to see at some point if only because it includes PJ Harvey memorabilia and Theda Bara's spangly Cleopatra bra from 1917, I'm not sure I would have enjoyed the V&A's show about Coco Chanel (who they insist on calling Gabrielle) had I been paying to get in. As it was, I went with Ms Mauritia and the Snappers (that's not a band, the Snappers are a couple) and because they have two Museum memberships between them that was four of us admitted for nothing. 

If nothing else, Chanel has to be celebrated for her colossal success in building a business that survived so long, and remaining actively designing clothes into her 80s. But it's that very commercial success which I think is possibly the more interesting story to be told, as opposed to the nature of her clothes as design artefacts, and of course it's that which the V&A necessarily focuses on: get a group of social history curators to plan the same show and they'd come up with something completely different. At first it seemed this exhibition didn't have much of a 'story' at all: it was only when we emerged from the War and dealt with Chanel's counterattack on the Dior style that things seemed to move forward at all, even in terms of design. But the show has a couple of dramatic visual set-pieces which will linger in my memory a long while. A turn from a dark corridor of jewellery leads to a vast space lined with a parade of airborne dresses which are slightly intimidating - haute couture doesn't get much higher than that - and the exhibition culminates in a mirrored staircase which recalls Chanel's final show in 1970 (I think). Rather a triumph of the curator's art, that.

'The Rossettis' at The Tate

To London to visit the Tate's exhibition on the Rossettis with Dr RedMedea and Ms Mauritia. It seemed on the pricey side and when the first room was full of Christina Rossetti's poetry and one painting I thought we'd been diddled, but in fact as we followed the route it was clear there was enough to justify the cost - even if art is always a bit exhausting, and art in one style more tiring than that, and when finally an artist is producing multiple versions of the same picture weary is not the word. The furniture made for a nice palate-cleanser. We liked Gabriel Rossetti's prints and drawings more than his lush and famous paintings which are technically stunning and emotionally empty: 'It's all about the hair!' said Dr RedMedea. Discovering that Ken Russell had made a BBC film in 1967 about the Rossettis full of Gothic nonsense means I will have to try to find it.

Goth Old, Goth New

The display about the foundational Goth club, the Batcave, at the Museum of Youth Culture in Soho, is only open for a few days. Madame Morbidfrog and others were there for the private view during the week, but I could only get along today with Ms Mauritia after celebrating Mass for the Annunciation this morning - a case of from blue to black. Lots of monochrome photos of young people in the particular style of that moment (spiky hair, studded collars and fishnets all derived from punk), posters and flyers covered a wall, introduced by a very helpful big map showing the Batcave's various venues during the years of its existence. There was also a little display case of objects, again mainly paper, but also including a club t-shirt and what looked like a teddy bear in a gimp suit: without a caption its significance was unclear. Between the map and the display were a set of information captions which for inaccessibility in size or type rivalled any I have seen in my career in or out of museums. We eventually realised, from the page numbers, that they were taken from a book. Now, I would have been prepared to pay and even pay through the nose for a nice glossy history of the Batcave, but it turned out that the book accompanied a compendium of music which amounted to a do-it-yourself guide to '80s Goth, and even if it has a few unfamiliar gems in it I could live without that. The show, essentially, was promotion for the product. We were not delayed long, therefore, and set off in search of free art galleries and afternoon tea.

Tea gave us a chance to complain about the current domination of the Goth world by nostalgia, or at least the sense of retrospect. I know it's a bit rich for me to moan about this as I've been banging on about its history for ages, but nobody now seems to produce anything else. As real Goth clubs go under, we celebrate one of the places where it all started; as fewer Goths seem to appear in public, we analyse where those that remain have come from. There are two major books coming up in a month or two examining the history of Gothic, John Robb's The Art of Darkness and Cathi Unsworth's The Season of the Witch - I wonder how they will each justify their space in an increasingly crowded field? The bands our friends occasionally rave about, even when they're newcomers, don't seem to bring anything very fresh to the table. On LiberFaciorum at the moment I seem to be bombarded with adverts for Goth-friendly clothing retailers - Disturbia, EMP, Killstar - and under the televisual influence of Wednesday Addams big white collars in various styles seem to be in for women, but, most of the fashion seems to be, in Ms Mauritia's words,  'Goth as Shein imagines it'. (Mind you, Stylesock seems to be doing interesting things, not all of them Gothic by any means, if you're a young person with enough money to spend on them, even with much-neglected men's clothing, which most of the time boils down to t-shirts and little else). Ah, age does terrible things to us, friends, and not even just physically.

An Art Evening

It's ironic that I went to the Brick Lane Gallery Annexe - not in Brick Lane at all, but Sclater Street - in order to support my friend Monsieur HaslandGraphica and didn't photograph any of his art at all. He was contributing to this multi-artist show based around abstract art, and as Lady Wildwood couldn't make it down from north of the capital due to strikes on her line I wanted to make the effort, especially as it would also balance out working on the night of Candlemas Day. Msr HaslandGraphica developed this particular sequence of works while in lockdown in France, filtering the cliffs and rivers of the immediate surroundings into digital paintings. 

My favourite bit of the whole show was a large black canvas decorated with patterns of black, scarlet, and rust-red, but I wasn't going to reach down the back of the sofa to pay for it. I was also intrigued by Hannah Robinett, who reads Psalms and decides which colour they make her think of, before blocking the words out with gold. I wondered which translation she uses, and also whether there was anything I could justify buying. There wasn't, I fear.

Watts Gallery Excursion

The last time I went to the Watts Gallery at Compton was some years ago, before the artist's former home of Limnerslease was open to the public: I was part of a group being given a preview while it was all being set up. So I was grateful when Dr RedMedea suggested we go to see the gallery's current temporary exhibition (she had also been before, with Archangel Janet and Lady Wildwood). This was examining the generation of artists at the end of the 1800s and start of the 1900s who looked back to the original Pre-Raphaelites and used their idioms and styles to explore fantasies, dreams and symbolism. As always I was as much taken by fragments and details as overall pictures. In Limnerslease I shouldn't have been taking photos at all, but this was only pointed out to me when it was too late: 'the signage isn't very clear', the attendant admitted, and in the temporary exhibition you're positively encouraged to snap away, exactly the opposite way round from the practice of most museums and galleries. Mary Watts's amazing reredos for the Military Chapel at Aldershot reminds me, at least compositionally, of the one that still graces St Paul's church in Dorking, which I thought I had illustrated on this blog but now can't find!

Even the gallery shop brought surprises. They are selling a gin that apparently uses water from the holy well at Walsingham, and on picking up a copy of a book I knew had been planned about local buildings made of Bargate stone I found a picture of my own house in it, so just had to buy a copy to be supportive.

Fuseli at the Courtauld

Although getting to London yesterday was more problematic than usual, requiring catching the train at Woking rather than anywhere further down the line, I made the journey so I could visit the Fuseli show at the Courtauld along with Ms Mauritia. Henry Fuseli has a relationship with the Gothic tradition especially via the various versions he painted of The Nightmare, but also his treatments of scenes from Shakespeare, and other fantasies - including his fantasy women, who are on display in this exhibition. In fact, they are not complete fantasies, but I'll come to that.

I was already familiar with most of the images, but hadn't seen them in the flesh before, and gathering them together creates a slight sense of oppression as Fuseli obsessively repeats poses and ideas, using swirly dress to experiment with form and movement. He hardly ever drew from life: the story went that he would mark a paper with four random dots and use them to dispose the limbs of his figures. Many of his subjects are (imagined) sex workers, but far more erotic and striking than the exposed breast or six is what seems to be the main object of the artist's obsessive interest, hair. During the earlier part of Fuseli's life, wealthy women did indeed have towering hairstyles, but he creates weird, geometric and elaborate shapes for his figures to wear, curls, fringes, sculptured structures, decorated with beads and papers, which must often, surely, be completely unreal. Ms Mauritia remembered the 20th-century fetish artist John Willie who drew women in impossible high heels - another way of simultaneously depicting women as powerful while defusing that power with disabling dress, shoes you can't walk in, or hairstyles you can't move without disarraying. 

But the ladies in this show aren't entirely unreal. Gazing from many drawings, the dramatic features of Fuseli's wife Sophia are unmistakable even when she's not acknowledged as the model. Her hair is the most fantastic of all, but she, the young English model who became the artist's spouse, is real enough, and there's something very odd going on psychologically in the way her husband depicts her: he adores her and fears the fact he does. He shows her next to a head of the Medusa; he draws her making the corna gesture that signals cuckoldry. What kind of a person was she? Of course you get no clues from this art: Fuseli wasn't interested in showing real people, just moments from his own imagination. She's supposed to have had quite a temper, but perhaps that was just from being married to him. 

Horror!

A week last Saturday I went with Lady Wildwood and MaisyMaid to see The Horror Show! at Somerset House, a bit nervously as it was my suggestion we should. We all quite liked it though my friends preferred the first bit with its nostalgic glimpses of punk, New Romantic and early Goth ('My memory isn't wrong, people really did dress like that', MaisyMaid mused at the blownup footage of early-80s club nights, being a few years senior to her Ladyship and myself), but I thought all of it was good fun even though a couple of bits were a little queasy: the artist who'd sculpted himself as a hyperrealistic drowned corpse under an archway admitted in the captions that even he'd found it thoroughly unsettling to make. I was almost overcome being brought face-to-face with Sue Webster's Banshees jacket: 

The premise of the show is that the mode of horror has been used to analyse society since the breakdown of the hopes of the 1960s in three broad phases, that the curators categorise as 'Monster' - figures and institutions of power are made monstrous, and to oppose them nonconformists construct spectacular selves that are also monstrous; 'Ghost' - the sense of reality collapses into nostalgia and pastiche, paranoia and hysteria, fragmentation and the uncanny; and 'Witch' - narratives of power and authority are deconstructed and reconstructed into new expressions of self-determination and connection. There are multiple ways of arranging even the specific art of rebellion across five decades, of course, but this is as interesting as any.

Notwithstanding all the horror, the artwork that caught me up most was Susan Hiller's Homage to Joseph Beuys, which is 86 bottles of holy well water collected from a variety of sacred springs and sites between 1969 and 2016. I couldn't quite see what was uncanny about that. Lady Wildwood suggested that the healing capacities of the water were there to counteract the fractured and baleful material around it: nice try, I thought.

And It's Free!

The day will come when I have something related to the fair parish of Swanvale Halt to talk about, but that day is not yet. Instead, here is news of a pleasant surprise last Thursday when I was in London checking the route of a long-planned Goth Walk scheduled to take place in August, and having tea with a friend. Between these two events I remembered that I used to go quite frequently to the free exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection in Euston which were often fun and, well, free, so I decided to go there again for the first time in years. Sure enough, there were two shows, one about plants and one about air. The first was an exploration of the human relationship with plants, and combined artefacts with art: there was a very innovative section examining the use of plants in indigenous South American cultures, their exploitation and representation by colonial powers; the weird floating thing you can see in one of the photos is a holographic weeping eye, projecting onto a spinning fan, which inevitably made me think of Orlam. The second display was even more abstract and art-based - when your subject is air, there aren't that many artefacts you can bring out. The audiovisual presentation on the social and political implications of clouds was remarkable - I hadn't anticipated how left-wing the stance of the Wellcome might be.

And the art wasn't over! Just along the street, I recalled, was the Crypt Gallery beneath Old St Pancras church, another exhibition space I've often called in on. Was anything happening there? There was indeed - a show of degree work by a group of art graduates (I'm not sure where from). I thought whoever put together the display of curved bits of cardboard in one of the niches with the caption claiming they were 'in a dialogue with the spatial dynamics of the location, encouraging the onlooker to examine their own experience of their surroundings' was pushing their luck a bit, to be honest.

Another Gothic adventure in London many years ago was my Goth Walk about wells, which visited St Chad's Place in Kings Cross, the site of a holy well with a set of pleasure gardens attached in the late 18th century. Someone on the UK holy wells group on LiberFaciorum had been there and decided that St Chad's Well did indeed survive as a dribble of water visible below a mysterious grille in the pavement. I went to find it, and sure enough, if you peer down into the grille you can see in the photo, in contrast to all the other drains in the alleyway, there is water running - albeit about twenty feet down. Could the Well indeed survive? It would be nice to think so!

Two Artists of Varying Misery

Quite a number of people I know had been to see the Dorothea Tanning exhibition at Tate Modern in London, so on Thursday I went as well. Fewer have visited the British Museum's Edvard Munch show but I decided to take that in as well. 

Of the two, I enjoyed the Tanning more. I knew very little about her (not even that she was married to Max Ernst!) apart from having seen a couple of her weird nightmare paintings from the 1940s. What seemed to come across from the display was someone well alert to the ambiguities and subtle horrors of human life, but also to its lights and joys - not a misanthrope at all. Tanning admitted to being a great fan of Gothic literature in her young life and one of the nicest pictures in the show is A Mrs Radcliffe Called Today from 1944, though its sequel, 1988's Mrs Radcliffe Called Again (Left No Message) isn't there. She references the Gothic tradition a lot. There's a lovely film of her showing off her studio in perhaps the mid-1970s: her mild, almost dreamy voice delivering what's very clearly a script pretending not to be (and signalling its own pretence) reminded me oddly of Alfred Hitchcock's infamous trailer for Psycho in which he wandered around the set giving away the plot. 'We're going to see my paintings ... But don't ask me what they mean,' muses Tanning. 'Now, I wonder what else I can show you?' she goes on as the camera pans towards another bizarre canvas. It's a complete hoot.

The hanging tassels in A Mrs Radcliffe Called Today make me think of Edward Gorey's Les Passementieres Horribles in which people are menaced by giant curtain fittings: I wouldn't be surprised if that's where he got the idea.

The Munch exhibition is subtitled 'Love and Angst' but to be honest it was mostly the latter. It's pricier than the Tanning, all prints apart from a couple of woodblocks, and, shall we say, lacks an equivalent sense of fun. I suppose, however, I shouldn't have been surprised. 

Outside, the sun beat down on the mucky Thames and the plate-glass towers along it. I sat on a bench and had my sandwiches and was quite grateful for not being Edvard Munch.