StuRants

Trip art bits

We saw a lot of art while we were away, and I feel enthused enough to share. Hopefully this enthusiasm will make up for any ignorance demonstrated in these comments.

Fra Lippi, Madonna and Child with two angels, Uffizi Gallery, Florence

The Uffizi, art palace of the Medicis, is obviously a holy grail for Renaissance art lovers, but I found it a bit of a trial. The place was packed (just our luck to be here on a free museum day!), I was sporting a stylish new head cold, and I was busting for a piss with no facilities in sight. Ok, so the Botticellis blew my socks off, and Michelangelo's Doni Tondo was good, but the painting that I most like was this one by Lippi, an earlyish Renaissance master, mainly because I was informed by our guide that the Madonna was actually Lippi's wife and the cheeky cherub whom the Madonna is smiling at, (completely ignoring Our Lord Jesus Christ), is actually a portrait of Lippi's young son. That Lippi uses a standard painting form to do a family portrait is outrageous enough, but Lippi has the boy staring at us with a kind of 'aw shucks' expression.

I guess what made this painting most memorable is that under the heavy weight of all the monotonous Christian art in te Uffizzi and indeed everywhere we went in Italy (St Sebastian full of arrows, St John the Baptist looking like Catweasle, and - occasionally - some saint with a meat cleaver stuck in his head) it was nice to see a bit of charming humanist subversion. Good work, Lippi!

Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, Villa Borghese, Rome

The most depressing aspect about the Uffizi gallery was an endless parade of undifferentiated marble statues in the main corridors. Were they antiquities or copies of antiquities? And even if they were antiquities, were they Roman originals, Roman copies of Greek originals, or Greek originals? (Ok, they were unlikely to be Greek originals, but, you know.) Faced with all this bland statuary, it was hard to care about any of them. It reminded me, closer to home, of the identical sequencing of a million bedroom electronica producers.

Now Bernini's in the same sort of game - marble sculptures with classical themes - but he's certainly not generic. Sure the agonised expressions of the figures are reminiscent of the famous Laocoon group from Hellinistic Greece, but the sheer bravura of his work, capturing as it does Daphne's salvation from the predations of a randy Apollo by her father (via the unusual means of turning her into a tree; thanks Dad...) is beyond anything Greek, Roman, Renaissance, Mannerist, Rococo, or otherwise. Walk around the sculpture and from one angle Daphne's a woman, and from another she's a tree. Apollo's still randy from whatever angle, but he looks a bit apologetic about it.

Now, the subject matter isn't really my thing, and the exaggerated style isn't very subtle, but the execution is out of this world. This isn't just Paganini "look at me!" showing off, this is an otherworldly act of skill. Dude knows how to work stone...

Alexander Calder, Mercury Fountain, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

What got me excited was the use of mercury, kind of like water but with the viscosity all wrong. Dangerous stuff, too.

Actually, Miró's work was great too, but for the first twenty minutes I wasn't sold and the mercury fountain was the clear winner. The first Miró stuff you see in the museum is late sculptures and textiles. The sculptures with the dangling genital bits, and the textile hangings looking like someone had eviserated a shag pile carpet, left me a bit cold. Further in I was much happier with the constellation paintings of the 40s. I have to say I'm a little suspicious of abstract art, but with Miro you really feel that your kid couldn't have painted it like that. And I got it, for a change. Take this example, the Azure and gold one.

It's not that complicated, but somehow the elements are in perfect poise. Dude knows what he's doing. It's also much more impressive in the flesh.

Too often I found Miro's stuff being all about the dangly genitals, but he saw clearly something we like to forget: humans are mostly about nads. That said, there's not much more to communicate in this than that simple fact, so it would be better to give it a rest, now and then, surely. Then again you get the impression from Miro (and indeed Picasso and Dali), that as truly great as he was, much of what he did he did was about trying to piss off the religious and the bourgeois. Come on man, grow up!

Palau de la Música Catalana

The Palau de la Música Catalana is a concert hall with a lot of stained glass bravado. We read that the best way to see it was to go to a concert there, so we went and saw David Byrne, who happened to be there when we were (he was in Wellington in January, but I didn't see him then). Anyway, the Palau was amazing. All that colour and geometry, could have been a bit OTT, like an acid-head's migraine, but somehow it worked.

As for David Byrne and co., he was doing a retread of Stop Making Sense-era Talking Heads, without the hassle of hanging out with his old band mates. The show was high energy, but the energy of the crowd was higher still. I was seated with the band to my right and the audience to my left, and I was resigned to deafenment in my right ear. However by the end of the fairly short show, the left ear was worse off from the frenzied appreciation of audience, largely comprised of the Barcelonan equivalent of ageing thirty- and forty-something hipsters. Great fun!

Gaudi stuff everywhere, Barcelona

Well, I'm not qualified to pass comment on Gaudi's melted icecream facades, tile fantasies and stone chameleons, but I have to say that coming from a town largely comprised of characterless Brutalist buildings and (more recently) green glass monstrosities, it's nice to see buildings where people have put in a bit of effort, and where the architect had enough money to play with that he could make it look good.

Cycladic idols, Brera Gallery, Milan

We had 3.5 hours in Milan and we managed to get in the Cathedral, the Castello Sforzesco, and the Brera gallery. It was all a bit of a blur. At the Brera we saw Artegna's foreshortened Christ (Christ apparently had stumpy legs like Toulouse Lautrec), and a thousand pieces of crap mannerist art. I tell you, when you've seen one 16th century painting of limbs splaying everywhere in contorted poses, you've seen them all. That post-Caravaggio, every subject ended up being painted in the dark (apparently), isn't much of an improvement. In a side gallery we saw a display of ancient and primitivist art from the collection an eccentric 20th Century Italian collector. In this room we saw some Cycladic idols, like I'd studied in Greek Art at university. They were bigger than I expected. After all these fiddlededee oil paintings it was good to see something a bit more straightforward. In this room there was also a Roman mummy portrait, and other bits of slightly wonky late Roman and mediaeval art. Good call!

Michelangelo's unfinished pietà (Rondanini Pietà), Castello Sforzesco, Milan

I've never thought much of Michelangelo's David. His head and hands are too big. In fact the whole sculpture's too big. I saw the fake one in the big town square in Florence (couldn't be arsed paying to see the real thing) and went, 'nah'. I also saw Michelangelo's Pieta in St Peters, and while it was absolutely splendid, all shiny and otherworldly, it was a bit lost amongst all the clutter of that vast and fairly excessive cathedral. We did of course see the Sistine Chapel, and that did impress me, especially the panel showing God creating the Sun (take that, Sun!) and moon before hooning off to do some more creatin', somewhere else in the cosmos. Michelangelo renders God's bum, allegedly for the first time in Western art. Comedy gold.

The problem with the Sistine Chapel is, what with everyone looking up, you forget there's some pretty good stuff on the walls where you can see stuff properly. Raphaellian tapestries, or copies of the same, plus a lot of Botticelli.

Anyway, to the Rondanini Pietà. It might be the handsome way in which this sculpture is set and lit, but it felt to me to be the most dramatic of the sculptures I'd seen by him. Also, because of the unfinishedness, the sculpture felt kind of modernist. You could see Michelangelo's chisel marks on the back, and a remnant arm from a previous attempt is just stuck on. The whole thing was ambiguous, and had wonderfully enigmatic appearence, moving me much more than the finished article would have, probably.

Bronze horses, Saint Mark's Basilica, Venice

This was probably the highlight of the trip for me, art-wise. The four bronze horses are of late Hellinistic or early Roman origin (the technique used in casting suggests they are Roman, but probably copies of Greek originals). They were probably dispatched to Constantinople by Constantine himself. Then, when Venice sacked Byzantium the horses were duly swiped and placed on Saint Mark's Basilica. Similarly, when Napoleon conquered Italy, he sent them to France. When he got done they returned to Venice. Suffice it to say that these horses have some history...

The animals are strangely affecting. They're not only pretty good representations of equus ferus caballus, but they have (to me at least) a lot of character. They seem almost soulful. Anyway, it was good to get a gander at several soulful and historical bronze horses.

Peggy Guggenheim Gallery, Venice

This modernist gallery is housed in a modern (50-60s) building. In this setting you kind of forgot you were actually on a dodgy esturine island on the Adriatic. Everyone was there: some suitably obscene Ernsts, some Pollock spatterings, Magritte's weird grey levitating spheres, and Italian Futurists. Probably a bit of Picasso in there as well. Look, I can't quite remember. Anyway, after the stodgy ceiling frescoes of the Doge's palace it was quite good to a bit of modernism in. The stuff I enjoyed most was this exhibition of this Scottish artist who did weird things with resin. Hanging around in the sunny garden outside the gallery was equally delightful. The ridiculously pretentious American art students manning the place were a bit over the top, but I guess they were just continuing Peggy's tradition.

This photo is of us as reflected in an odd sculpture in the gallery's garden. Priapic Dude on a Horse not pictured.

The Time-Traveler's Wife (it made me angry)

It is a well-known fact that I have long harboured ambitions to be a novelist. In fact, not only that, I yearn to be a Great Novelist, indeed. Sadly, I suffer from a problem called "No Plot Imagination". I think up characters and scenarios, but not how to link it all together. Also, I tend by nature to try and make everything funny. And, also, as this blog regularly attests, my writing style is clunky and my vocabulary is a bit stink.

Once upon a time all this used to offend me. Surely I had genius just waiting to pour out of me. However, after reading The Time-Traveller's Wife (hereafter TTW) I feel strangely comforted. After all, trying to write a novel when you can't really write is like going out so sea in a dinghy without a life jacket with a storm front bearing down on you head on. HEAD ON.

You see, at about the time the TTW came out I too had an idea in mind for a similar story. It would be about a guy who did not actually time travel, but lived his life out of sequence, each day being randomly jumbled about. As an extra twist however, the guy's brain would however develop sequentially. So he might wake up in the body of himself as an 85 year old, but only be experientially a few days old, and would behave like an 85 year old with the mind of an infant.

Of course, there would also have been romance at the heart of the story, but it soon occurred to me that if someone's life was scrambled in this way they would probably spend most of their days in a mental institution, and the chances for romance would be somewhat limited.

Anyway, TTW came out and I had to give the idea up. I was curious about reading TTW but the cover made it look kind of literary (which is funny, in retrospect), so I figured it wouldn't be much fun. A couple of weeks ago a friend recommended it and made it sound pretty cool. Now, having read it, I can confirm that it certainly is a compelling read. Alas, plenty about it also angers me:

• The protagonist is the author. Audrey Niffenegger's day job involves paper-making and book-binding. Her heroine Clare is a sculptor who works with paper. Hero Henry works at a library. Write what you know. Sure, but this is getting a little bit too specific, surely?


• The protagonists are so fucking cool. Henry's a time-travelling librarian. But he also loves all the right bands in the early 1990s, speaks German, takes drugs, is self-confessedly alcoholic and likes getting into street fights. Sounds a lot like every librarian I've ever met... Their friends are even more insufferably cool. I would have been quite happy if he was a bit dopey and had a soft spot for the Osmonds.


• The protagonists fuck incessantly. We get the idea already!


• Tedious class comedy. Clare's family is rich rural Catholic. Sounds a bit like Brideshead Revisited. There is much sneering observation about the follies of wealth. There's a black cook who talks sassy. Who gives a rat's arse?


• It's twice as long as it needs to be. There's something to be said for going in depth to tease out subtle character traits and giving out clues like cards being spread out on a table. And then there's just meandering along slowly. Use a typewriter, for Christ's sake. That'll give your editing a bit of focus.


• Every event in the story is foretold in advance. It's true that time-travelling back and forth will lead to considerable fore-knowledge. But must our characters gossip like fish-wives about it, incessantly? Some of the most effective passages in TTW were those that weren't revealed until they actually happened.


• The author is American. I'm sure it would have been better if it had written by a pom. And, frankly, a man.*


• Fatalism. Niffenegger clearly subscribes to the space-time relativistic view of Einstein - space and time is fixed, events only happen once. What about Many Worlds? Imagine what you could do in a playground like that?! Come on, Niffenegger, expand those horizons!


• Where's the grand vision? Oh sure, it's a love story, but when you're dealing with something cool like time travel, couldn't you add in a bit of epic scope? Why confine it to such a small cast? Keeping it intimate might appeal to Oprah's book club types, but for me, well, *yawn*.


• Time travel being "genetic". Perhaps I've been made a bit grumpy after years of the TV Heroes talking cobblers about how certain gene sequences can allow people to VIOLATE THE LAWS OF PHYSICS, but this is perhaps the worst aspect of all. You can't explain something like this - not with technobabble and horseshit - don't bother! Make it an ineffable mystery. It's okay...** Also, it might seem like a good idea to give the hero a hope of a "cure" for his afflication, but why not just have him man up and accept his fate without toying around with him. Have a heart, Audrey!


• Nudity - so whenever Henry time travels he turns up somewhen else naked, Terminator-like. Fair enough. But after a few dozen tedious descriptions of the fact he's naked and that he needs to find clothes it gets a bit repetitive. Just give him some pants.

Now to be fair there were plenty of good moments in TTW and the premise was excellent. It's just a shame that the delivery was so contrived and well, low-brow. And this from someone who quite enjoyed watching Twilight on the plane!

In fact, the (inevitable) movie adaptation coming out this year, (inevitably?) starring Eric Bana could potentially be a lot better than the book, if it keeps the story taut and sticks to the good bits. But then, after that whole Benjamin Button nonsense perhaps the movie-going public are a bit sick of these gimmicks.

* Preferably a man who wrote it in the 1950s. As a subtle satire on Cold War politics.
** Although resolving a certain plot point in a certain SF show by explaining that they were in fact an angel is not okay.