Girl power vs. the Ancient Greeks (circa 2015)

(Source: Gaggle/Almeida Theatre)

I’m coming to the end of my time in London, so this week I managed to squeeze in two Greek plays at the Almeida (thank goodness for student prices). On Wednesday, I saw Euripides’ Bakkhai, newly translated by Anne Carson and starring Ben Whishaw as Dionysus. Then last night, I saw Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, performed by Gaggle and starring Charlotte Church. While the tone of these plays is very different (the first a tragedy, the second a comedy) both explore gender politics through the power (and the threat) of a large group of women speaking and acting collectively. Take these plays from their original context (fifth century BC Athens), and it’s surprising just how relevant the issues they present remain in contemporary society. It was only through seeing two striking groups of female performers in such quick succession that I realised how unusual it is to see women given a space in this way.

The Bakkhai are a chorus of women who have gathered in the mountains to carry out Dionysian rituals, to dance and wear ivy and drink wine. They are positioned physically and ideologically between the neglected, offended god Dionysus and the dismissive Pentheus, King of Thebes. To what extent this position is elected is ambiguous, creating a tension that runs right through the play to its painful climax. At a critical moment in the action, Ben Whishaw (Dionysus) stands opposite Bertie Carvel (Pentheus) in the middle of the stage. Whishaw is wearing a dress and holding a thyrsus that mimics the curves of his slight frame, while Carvel stands tall and straight, almost hypermasculine by comparison. Dionysus advises Pentheus to dress up as a woman, and Pentheus’ response is one of horror – it would mean giving up his status as man and ruler, and all the social and cultural connotations of this identity. Meanwhile, the Bakkhai interject with song and dance, commanding the stage with a different kind of control that contradicts their association with weakness and frenzy, making them more dangerous.

As object of worship, Dionysus is simultaneously compelling and repugnant (a combination which Whishaw negotiates very successfully, demonstrated similarly in his previous role as Richard II). However, Anne Carson and James MacDonald don’t make it easy for us as an audience – there is no explicit ideological stance taken in this production. This is most clear in the unforgettable (and troubling) acts of the Bakkhai women. Their idol-worship of Dionysus is uncomfortable, their final, brutal undertaking vicious and painful. In the rare moments in which they use speech rather than song, their robotic, monotonous use of the singular pronoun ‘I’ jars against their sophisticated musical harmonies. And yet the overwhelming impression they create remains one of incredible power. The other characters become secondary to their mesmerising collective presence. The Bakkhai women are not just a mass saying the same things in the same way. Instead, they create a textured visual and aural scape on the stage which continues to surprise, to engage, and to shock, far more hypnotic than Dionysus could ever be.

Bakkhai creates an uneasy ethical situation, especially as a woman viewer. On the one hand, the Bakkhai women appear to be possessed, being used as a weapon by a single male divine figure. On the other hand, to dismiss their anger, celebration and seeming liberation from repressive practices as a product of outside manipulation limits their agency and responsibility. It risks belittling the legitimacy of female anger and ecstasy. This problem persists in contemporary feminist debate, and is something at the forefront of Deborah Coughlin’s Lysistrata. Like the Bakkhai women, Gaggle completely own the stage. They stamp and they thump and they work with and against each other, making a wall of sound. Again, their collectivity is paramount, but they refuse to be homogeneous.

Lysistrata is about the capacity of women to influence change. Dissatisfied by pervading warfare, a group of women decide to hold a sex strike until war ends. Coughlin brings the drama to post-election Britain. There is a failed politician (Charlotte Church), a well-off alcoholic (Katy Menczer), a mum-of-ten (Jamie-Rose Monk), and an outspoken hairdresser (Lauren La Rocque). There’s also God in a glittery dress (Scarlett Lasoff) and an ever-so-slightly-irritating newsreader (Roberta Morris). And yet, to classify the women in this way (as if they were contestants on Masterchef) seems entirely to defeat the point. What this production demonstrates is that women from different backgrounds can work together to dismantle oppressive systems. It might not be plain sailing, it might even end up as a kind of tragedy itself (in the newspaper sense of the word), but the emphasis is ultimately on collective movement and energy, exploring the places where experiences intersect and differ, rather than pursuing a kind of individualism that ultimately reproduces rather than challenges existing structures.

Lysistrata ends with ‘Make Love Not War’, a song with a pulsing beat that reinforces the creativity and celebration involved in collective action, while maintaining the anger providing its impetus and dynamism. Instead of a usual music video setup, in which female performers are filtered through a gaze explicitly gendered male, Gaggle rock the boat. There are flashing penis graphics and all kinds of fun things, but, more importantly, there is a group of women confidently asserting their sexuality, for themselves and for each other. It was frightening to realise just how radical this seems. You only have to scroll absent-mindedly through the comments of almost any article on feminism and feminist action (or even just women) to find people who evidently feel intimidated by and hostile towards groups of women, especially ones who are enjoying themselves against the status quo, or demanding change. Two and a half thousand years after they were written, plays like Bakkhai and Lysistrata can still shock – not because of some incredible transcendent quality of the writing, but because our gender politics remain skewed to the extent that women collectively can still very easily and very believably be portrayed as a threat.

How to be both: women, writing, and literary prizes

Not drinking Baileys? Francesco del Cossa's April.

Last week, Nicola Griffith published data showing a gender gap in the books that win big literary prizes. While books that win awards like the Pulitzer and the Man Booker are written by women (although not as many as by men), they are almost never about women. Analysing the pie charts she has compiled, Griffith asks why women appear to have ‘literary cooties’, why women’s experience is a topic without a secure place in the literary establishment, and what strategies could be developed to examine this problem further.

A few days after Griffith's post went viral, Ali Smith won the Baileys Prize (formerly the Orange Prize), an award exclusively for women’s fiction that was set up in 1996. The prize has often been a topic of debate – in 2010, A. S. Byatt deemed it a ‘sexist prize’, and last year, Antonia Fraser suggested that it has become unnecessary, as women are shortlisted more and more for other literary awards. Meanwhile, Eimear McBride, 2014 winner of the Baileys Prize, offered an alternative viewpoint: ‘Part of the pleasure of being on last year's Baileys short-list was the relief of being able to just talk about my work rather than being continually obliged to quantify the relationship of my gender to my work and vice versa.’ In one sense, creating a space exclusively for women’s writing results in an elision of some of the issues at hand. In another sense, creating such a space is a political gesture, drawing attention to the historical implications of a literary environment in which most canonical writers have been male (and white, middle class, heterosexual, cisgender, etc.), and have written about people very similar to them. As Griffith’s research shows, these false norms still act as norms in contemporary writing, or at least the contemporary writing that wins prizes, and therefore the existence of an award like the Baileys remains politically relevant.

Within this context, Ali Smith’s How to Be Both seems incredibly timely. Whereas Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing explicitly addresses female experience from the perspective of a single, unnamed speaker, How to Be Both is a novel about two named characters, Francesco and George. Significantly, both of these characters are read as both male and female during the course of the narrative (apologies in advance for the inevitable abundance of the word ‘both’ in discussing this book). Francesco del Cossa was a real, little known painter of the Italian Renaissance. Smith revives him ­– but as a girl dressed as a boy, a complex figure who also comes to experience twenty-first century Cambridge through the medium of a teenager with an androgynous name: ‘This boy is a girl. I knew it.’

However, Smith doesn’t just turn the boys into girls and leave it at that – gender politics are highly charged throughout the novel, remaining fluid, moving from background to foreground and back again in the fresco style which Smith successfully experiments with in her narrative(s). There is something almost Orlando-esque about Francesco’s journeys through time and relationships with people, whether these relationships be familial, platonic or sexual. However, attempts to draw boundaries between different types of relationship seems to be exactly the kind of action that the novel resists. Instead, it traces the intense connections that can be made between people, overstepping cultural constraints of history, gender, sexuality. George’s mum sees a picture of one of Francesco’s paintings in a magazine, and immediately decides to go to Italy to see it with her children. Francesco forms intimate and yet transactional relationships with a circle of prostitutes, whose faces later make it onto the walls of the Duke of Ferrara's palace. George and H text each other song lyrics and scientific facts translated into Latin, back and forth between Cambridge and Copenhagen.

Steadily, threads unwind and spill out, like ‘a mighty twisting thing fast as a fish being pulled by its mouth on a hook’, or like the seed that leaves an expanding, circular ripple in a pool of urine. Smith maps the two stories onto each other, shifting attention from one to the other, from the painting on the surface to the sketched underneath, and yet constantly maintaining a glimmer of both, a flash of connection, the ends of a story before its start. Ideas of meaning become culturally specific, but also emotional, personal. Mrs Rock recounts the etymology of the word ‘mystery’, something that once ‘meant an agreement or an understanding that something would not be disclosed’ but now ‘tends to mean something more answerable [...] a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV’. Meanwhile, George becomes ‘so, so tired of what stories are meant to mean’, finding her own way to put things together, to make people notice.

In form as well as in subject matter, Smith questions the usual trajectories of meaning in narrative fiction. Half of the copies of How to Be Both are printed with the modern story at the beginning, the other half with the fifteenth century one. It makes for a reflexive reading experience, both within the novel's covers and beyond them, encouraging contemplation of reading cultures more generally. What does it mean to have a book that doesn’t have a singular beginning and end? What would have happened if the copy had been printed the other way around? I'm glad that my book began with Francesco's narrative. However, I’m planning to lend the book to my mum when I get home, and I think she’d prefer it the other way. Perhaps I could get her to read it from the halfway mark and go back.

It’s strange being able to think about a book in these terms. Not only does Smith create a complicated idea of women’s experience, but also a complicated idea of reading. When positioned as the winner of the Baileys Prize, the novel can be conceptualised more specifically in terms of women readers, both the all-female judging panel, and beyond. Literary prizes produces a goal-driven, top-down model of assessment, a narrative in which prizewinners accumulate to form a history, a club of their own. Somehow, How to Be Both seems to feed into the debates of gender and reading and writing that emerge from discussions like Griffith's, and yet also to refuse to be limited by them.

I’m unsure what the fate of a women-only literary prize will be, and even exactly what it means to have a women-only literary prize. The fact that we’re still having to talk about the presence or absence of ‘female perspectives’ and ‘women’s experience’ in books granted status by the literary establishment is incredibly frustrating, as if ‘women’s experience’ could be unified in this way. Instead, we should be able to talk about gender in all its multiplicities in literature, gender as it intersects with race and class and sexuality and disability. As a winner, though, How to Be Both is (both) effortless and challenging, suggesting that literature is firmly ahead of the structures that attempt to place a value on it. However, that doesn’t mean these structures should stop trying to catch up.

The £9000 generation: notes on education, elections, etc.

We all know the story of the Lib Dems. Once upon a time, a man in a yellow tie called Nick Clegg promised to scrap university tuition fees. Suddenly, fees almost tripled, and university cost £9000 a year. Nick apologised and it became a funny YouTube video. We all laughed heartily as we filled in our student finance forms.

Next came Mr Gove, as he was affectionately known in the newspapers. The divisive Conservative Education Secretary fought for more exams, harder exams, and a return to 'traditional' (read uninspiring, regressive, elitist) teaching methods. Academies and free schools galore. Competition and performance. 'Get Gove Out' became the slogan for striking teachers. Meanwhile, David Willetts tried to sell off Higher Education.

The last five years have not been the whole story, with New Labour laying the foundations for many of these changes, but it has certainly been a strange five years to be a student. At the last General Election, I was fifteen, in my first GCSE year. Now, halfway through my degree, I'm gleefully harbouring a debt of (so far) nearly £30,000. With my arts degree (which doesn't amount to much going by the ever-pragmatic 'global market' rhetoric of both the Labour and Conservative parties), it's unlikely I'll ever make the money to pay it all back. There's about £30 billion of this apparently virtual money hanging around unpaid, according to recent statistics.

In light of the manifestos released in the last few days, the £9000 figure seems short-lived, and I'm still a bit unsure where it came from in the first place. Labour promise to cut fees to £6000. The Greens promise to cut them entirely. I get a piece of paper once a year with some numbers on telling me that some money is going from somewhere to somewhere and is vaguely attached to my name. I can't help feeling that this monetary value granted to university education is arbitrary, a confused formality. This is, obviously, very dangerous. One day not far from now, real, actual money will be leaving my account every month.

It never ceases to amaze me that for some students, the ones who have been educated at private or public schools, university education is comparatively cheap. Last month, some researchers published a report on how different types of schools prepare pupils for Cambridge University. Unsurprisingly, students from privileged educational backgrounds are the most at ease in an institution historically associated with students from privileged educational backgrounds. By contrast, students from state schools, although likely to have good independent learning skills, are also likely to experience social and intellectual anxiety at Cambridge. This can affect eventual performance, but also general day-to-day interaction. As a state school student myself, I can vouch strongly for these feelings of anxiety and inferiority. It's taken me two years to feel even remotely comfortable with the Cambridge 'supervision' system, and I wouldn't describe my background as disadvantaged (other than in the highly distorted relative terms that the Cambridge University demographic suggests).

Although reports like the one mentioned above are useful in that they highlight different lived experiences of elite universities, they elide complexities in the categorisation of the education system.  State education is far from monolithic, and is becoming ever more complicated. For example, the year after I took my GCSEs, my school became an academy. The Tories claimed, and continue to claim, that academies encourage better teaching, better education, better results. But my school's GCSE pass rate (already significantly below the national target) dropped by a further 10% when granted academy status. Nobody really talked about the students whose futures would be dramatically affected by this.

The teething process of academisation did not ensure better results. The constant restructuring of schools like mine, accompanied by repeated changes to exam specifications, instead created dispossessed school leavers. My school was already failing, but it continued to fail, as did most of the other schools run by the the academy chain. Similarly, free schools, marketed by the Tories as beneficial for local communities, only make education a matter of private interests, in both financial and ideological terms. The Conservative manifesto proposes 500 more of these schools. They also pledge that every failing school will be academised.

Privatisation of the education system is not an answer to failing schools. Rewriting the system according to a competitive business model is dangerous. 'We will not allow state schools to make a profit', the government says, and yet somebody somewhere is already profiting from state education. The not-for-profit charitable trusts in charge of academy chains and free schools can use outsourcing and subcontractors for non-teaching staff. Similarly, in universities, zero-hours contracts and pay below the Living Wage allows a minority to continue to make money from the education system.

Consistent emphasis on numbers and measures to assess performance and value creates a culture which is alienating for young people. According to Conservative Party proposals, children that do not achieved the required results in SATs exams will have to resit them upon arriving at secondary school. Aged eleven, children will be told that they are not good enough, and that exams are the only way to show that they are good enough. Enforcing a rigid testing system as a way to reframe the importance of literacy and numeracy is not helpful. Neither is appointing an all white, all male Ofsted committee to regulate schools through testing for things like the teaching of 'British values'.

Writing these notes, I don't need political rhetoric to tell me that the education system is in crisis. The tuition fees scandal is an easy way to pinpoint the government's continued attempt over the last five years to define and redefine the value of education, but this is something that affects all levels of the system, including the places where there aren't strikes and protests and people holding up signs and shouting. Education will always face constraints, constraints of funding, constraints of time, but with 40% of teachers leaving the profession in the first five years, it's clear that current models of education are offering unstable futures.

Young people voting in the General Election for the first time in 2015 have been directly affected by the loose canon of recent education policy. The Lib Dems cannot expect the student vote this time round, and their failure to deliver seems instrumental in the shattering of the three-party dominance of previous elections. In 2015, we have more choices, but also more uncertainties. As young people, we are constantly asked to question what we are worth, especially as part of the potentially brief £9000 generation.

We've been the testing ground for experiments that have failed, ideas that have been retracted, the rapid increase in privatisation of the education system, and the constant restating of values. Young people who do not fit within the streamlining of academisation and the uncompromising ideas of what constitutes success have fallen by the wayside and will continue to fall by the wayside. I'm privileged in that I have access to a university institution in which my ideas and opinions are encouraged, and, more importantly, listened to. But, even more importantly, this story is about many more young people than just me.

The novels that made my summer

I've recently reached the conclusion that I'm not very good at novels. This is not ideal for someone doing a degree in English Literature. I spent the first few weeks of my holiday stressing out over my destined-to-fail dissertation idea, while cramming bits of various 600-page novels in a desperate attempt for material. Not only were these novels not cooperating with my unfair demands, I was finding that I wasn't hooked by any of them; their characters, their emerging plots. The dissertation became poetry-based, I left the novels half-finished on my bedroom floor, my sanity was only briefly compromised.

Luckily, my exis/English-tential crisis (really?) coincided with my discovery of two authors; one old, one new. With far-from-gentle and far-from-comforting words of encouragement, they made me read properly again; slowly, attentively, pleasurably. I am, perhaps, 'pearl-lined', as Jeanette Winterson puts it.

Dylan Thomas, that marvel of poetry and casual sexism, described Djuna Barnes' Nightwood as 'one of the three great prose works ever written by a woman'. While this comment is utterly ridiculous, it did introduce me to the novel, which is one of the greatest and most interesting prose works I've ever read by any author, regardless of gender. The novel follows several idiosyncratic characters and is structured around their interaction and emotions. There is the false Baron Felix Volkbein, steeped in ideas of ancestry and nobility but really made up of 'tarnished gold threads', one so busy 'wishing to be correct at any moment' that he exposes himself as emotionally impotent and perpetually 'embarrassed'. At the other pole is the false Doctor Matthew O'Connor, who muses upon everything from drink, to religion, to the night. 'You know what man really desires?', he asks. 'One of two things: to find someone who is so stupid that he can lie to her, or to love someone so much that she can lie to him.' While the Baron replies that he 'was not thinking of women at all', and the Doctor agrees, love, desire and self-deception pattern the novel from its beginning. Between the Baron and the Doctor flit Robin Vote and Nora Flood, creating victims of themselves and their temporary lovers.

Barnes' prose style, then, is dense and chaotic, 'a mass' not only of 'tangled grass' but also of languages, place-names, a 'look', a 'gaze', a 'liver and a long-spent whisper'. Rather than explicitly tracing a plot and movement, much of Nightwood's style occurs as the 'sensation of a thought'. At its centre lies the Doctor, discovered in a dinghy flat dressed in women's clothing by Nora, who in turn has been abandoned by Robin for Jenny Petherbridge, the 'bird, snatching the oats out of love's droppings'. 'Doctor, I have come to ask you to tell me everything you know about the night', she says. 'The very constitution of twilight is a fabulous reconstruction of fear, fear bottom-out and wrong side up', he replies, before a long, sensual meditation on what the night means in this novel. It is a time and place where 'distress is wild and anonymous', where 'night people [...] sling the creature, husked of its gestures'. It is the night that seems to account for Nightwood's strangeness, the defamiliarising, unheimlich phenomenon that traces its agony, passion and suffocation from its beginning to its absurd end. I read the novel mainly on buses and in bed, and its 'fabulous reconstruction of fear', fear of betrayal, of social responses and of one's own identity and weakness, is intoxicating wherever and whenever its pages are turned.

Where sympathy and attention flits between characters in Nightwood, often settling on the abstraction of emotion itself, consciousness when reading Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is felt intently through its speaker and protagonist, the eponymous 'Girl'. It would be easy, to describe the novel, stylistically, as stream-of-consciousness, but this also seems lazy. McBride has constructed a syntax, an entire mode of experience, to reconfigure her girl's relation to the world. Its beginning in the womb, simultaneously fluid and fragmented, sets the tone for the novel. The girl is positioned in interaction with her brother, the intimate and near-constant 'you' of the story. In the beginning, she 'loved swimming to your touch', a touch she will later try to restore, painfully: 'My name is. Water. All alone.' Despite the distance that the girl wedges between herself and her family, '[i]n the stitches of her skin she'll wear your say'. It is her brother who will 'give her name', and it is this name that is 'gone' in the book's final sentence. What remains, though, is a pervasive 'I' and a 'you', and the harrowing details of sexual abuse, familial disintegration and prejudice heighten the sensations of a sister-brother relationship, one in which the brother has an incurable brain tumour.

When condensed in this way, it seems extreme, unrealistic. Yet A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is spare and visceral. It's poetic in a bone-crunching, stomach-dropping kind of way: 'I met a man. I met a man. I let him throw me round the bed. And smoked me, splits and choked my neck until I said I was dead.' And later: 'Here. mY nose my mOuth I. VOMit. Clear. CleaR. He stopS up gETs. Stands uP. Look. And I breath. And I breath my. I make.' And later again: 'Water blaze across with sun. No one to touch. Far out. Far gone the ground. I do not need I do not. Carry me over. And silent morning. No one to hear the lap lap on me. Island. Moving stealth and through the clear the brown but all the same. It lick off hurt my face and hands. Strip pain all the parts off me.' McBride's language makes sense in a remembered way, in an almost pre-linguistic babble that shapes its world solely through the black marks on the page. Ironically, it reminds me of the first stanza of a Dylan Thomas poem:

Before I knocked and flesh let enter,
With liquid hands tapped on the womb,
I who was as shapeless as the water
That shaped the Jordan near my home
Was brother to Mnetha's daughter
And sister to the fathering worm.

McBride takes many thematic and stylistic markers from her predecessors in the Irish tradition, Joyce and Beckett. However, the experience she creates is distinctly female, fragmented even further with a tone and style that makes the novel difficult to piece together in any way other than its own. And it is here that Nightwood and A Girl is a Half-formed Thing come together. The former published in 1936, the latter in 2013, they both follow their own linguistic schemes, and I was thinking about how impossible it would be to make either of them into films without seriously compromising the quality of the narratives and relationships told through such distinct voices. Both of these novels possess a kind of alchemy, wholly different from each other, but each contributing to how the unwritten and unspoken might be written and spoken.

Shut Up Actually Talk – Chiara Fumai at Nottingham Contemporary

Shut Up, Actually Talk: aggressive, progressive, brilliant.

When leaving the Carol Rama gallery space in Nottingham Contemporary after Shut Up, Actually Talk, I feel a little intimidated and more than a little bewildered, to the extent that I can’t even gauge others’ reactions to the piece. However, upon reflection, once the initial shock of a first encounter with performance art has had time to mellow, Chiara Fumai’s brief ‘radical feminist freak show’ remains challenging and provocative but is ultimately very effective.

Fumai has fashioned herself as faux-Circassian beauty Zalumma Agra, an attraction in P. T. Barnum’s nineteenth-century circus. Presented as a ‘star of the East’, as a pure woman saved from the impurity of slavery, this figure is forced into a role that works through a number of racial, sexual and gender stereotypes. This is especially poignant because Zalumma Agra was not permitted to speak when performing; her value as a freak show attraction required her silence. She was something to look at, something for others to surround with mythical discourses rather than a person with a voice of her own. Fumai addresses this problem of necessary silence, and offers the woman behind Zalumma Agra a language that shatters her illusory persona and turns the tables on the dumbfounded audience.

This language is the words of Italian radical feminist Carla Lonzi and her 1970s manifesto Rivolta Femminile. Fumai is verbally aggressive, spitting out the original Italian with the same vehemence as she uses when she spits on the gallery floor, at first seemingly reacting to an inadequate audience response. Her eye contact is persistent and intense, and her slight figure combined with the big hair falsely attributed to the Circassian race is imposing. There are long pauses, and meditations laced with malice on ‘who says…’ followed by a quotation or belief, each quickly revealed to be antithetical or at least not quite fitting to radical feminist thinking, instead feeding into the patriarchal frame of reference that allows figures like Zalumma Agra to function.

Fumai uses relations of speech and silence very successfully; the fact that Barnum’s Zalumma Agra is ‘shut up’ allows her to ‘actually talk’ on a symbolic level. Zalumma is an explicit example of routine oppression and interpellation, a template which applies not only to gender, as in this context, but could also apply to other intersectional forms of oppression involving race, religion and sexuality, for example. Fumai certainly actually talks during this performance, rendering her audience speechless, momentarily weakened and exposed by her verbal strength. In this sense, those who in the past have talked, those who have provided the narratives, are forced into silence. Fumai as Zalumma announces that she has finally found her ‘sort of humans’ and, once this has been achieved, it is ‘time to go’. She has actually spoken in a way that has shut us up, before stalking out of the room, while everyone shifts a little uncomfortably in their seats. I have stared at her as though she is an attraction at a freak show, and yet, by the end of the performance, I feel as if it is me who is being stared at.

Shut Up, Actually Talk is bold and intelligent, despite being initially unnerving. Its simultaneous subtlety and vulgarity interacts with the backdrop of Carol Rama’s works made up of bicycle tyre tubes: both artists contrast the spoken with the unspoken, the explicit with the implicit. For both, these relations seem to have a political, in this case feminist, edge. Fumai and Rama challenge the conventions surrounding whose thoughts, language and expressions carry authority, repeatedly asking: who gets to call who a freak?

Making Colour at the National Gallery

Source: National Gallery

Colour is an important aspect of they way we view objects and link concepts in the world. As a visual format, colour is also important in art, and has been for centuries. What the National Gallery’s exhibition Making Colour does, then, is to historicise this use of colour in art across the world and across the ages. It’s easy to view art from a different time and place with the same eye – an eye which experiences the Pantone Matching System almost daily on mugs, or absentmindedly plays with the digitised colour scale on Snapchat. But creating and reproducing colour is bound up in physical processes, technology; the hand as well as the eye. Making colour takes skill.

Instead of lying flat on a canvas, colour really does take centre stage in this exhibition, gaining new political, economic and technological dimensions. Making Colour is divided into different sections, beginning with the theories of colour developed by scientists like Isaac Newton and Ignaz Schiffermüller before moving through different individual colours: blue, green, red, yellow, orange, purple, gold, silver. These colours are inextricably linked to their origins and processes of collection and manufacture into pigments: a lump of lapis lazuli nestles beside Monet’s Lavacourt Under Snow and a petri dish of cochineal.

Even more strikingly, the exhibition suggests that our visual conceptions of myth, religion and history are bound up in the politics of colour. The Madonna is depicted in blue because ultramarine was so rare and difficult to extract that it became more precious than gold. It is less flashy, more modest – suitable for the mother of Christ. However, in paintings such as Sassoferrato’s The Virgin in Prayer, this ultramarine is rich and smooth and decadent, with a visual depth that upstages the gold leaf of earlier Italian religious art. Similarly, purple came to be the colour of royalty because of its difficulty to produce, highlighted by the paintings of Queen Victoria and her family in the synthetic, accidentally discovered mauveine.

Some of the pieces on show were flooded with colour, their bold tones foregrounding colour as a kind of subject for the work. Edgar Degas’ Combing the Hair is bright with fiery reds and oranges, the girl’s reclining pose and long hair fashioned as one long sweep that becomes the background. A section of Roger Hiorns’ Seizure glitters on the wall, accompanied by a photograph of the whole object, a disused flat crystallised with copper sulphate. In other cases, colour is part of the subtlety of creating a work, revealing the techniques behind it. For example, one of the information videos shows that green was often used as a base for white skintones, to make them appear more natural. In some examples, the paint laid on top has deteriorated, leaving the face with an eerie green tinge. Another video demonstrates the making of oil and egg tempera paints. Once again, the seemingly abstract notion of colour becomes physical, existing as insects and minerals and powders and pigments to be mixed and crushed.

Colour in this context, then, is not only aesthetic, but also scientific. A flake of the surface of a painting can be trapped within resin and left to dry, and then the resulting transparent block placed under a microscope. Using this method, the different individual layers and colours can be viewed as a cross-section, while other, more advanced technology can identify the specific pigments in a painting. This stripping away of the ingredients of a painting, just for a moment, allows a glimpse of it without its aura; it becomes its layers of paint, its brushstrokes, its combination of colours. For a moment it is not otherworldly – it is skilled human handiwork.

As is to be expected, though, there is slight disjointedness between the art and the science in this exhibition. Viewed on a wall from a certain distance, fleeting images of impressionism and luscious painted velvet possess a kind of magic. However, placed on dark walls next to a description of the exact shade of green in the leaves, Making Colour sometimes falls short of what it sets out to do. The biggest problem seems to be that the text and the history surrounding the works fails to bring the disparate works together. While it is interesting, even necessary in an exhibition like this, to span a large temporal and spatial period, it often seems as if the paintings are visibly too spaced out in the gallery, and there is little real interaction between works, when this could have been very enlightening in itself. Perhaps a few more paintings would have helped to bridge this gap, or some more considered attempts at integration. Nevertheless, Making Colour encourages discussion about aspects of art often forgotten or overshadowed. When I think back to what I saw in the National Gallery on that rainy summer Tuesday, I remember the bright azurite sheen of a skirt, the yellow of a desco da parto, and the sparkling minerals from whence they came.

Spring Awakening, Cambridge Arts Theatre

From my dad's brief comments and garbled Wikipedia plot summaries skim-read over lunch, I had a vague notion of what Frank Wedekind's Frühlings Erwachen was about; that it was 'shocking' and 'sexually explicit'. Sitting in the Cambridge Arts Theatre, I was having a conversation about my uncertainties regarding the use of technology in modern drama while half-watching the actors on stage playing on what appeared to be a very unstable set of swings. Unfortunately I'm in no position to to make any meaningful comparisons between the original play and the play I saw tonight. But Anya Reiss' adaptation felt modern, close enough to lived experience and emotions, yet imposing a disquieting distance.

The use of technology, contrary to my doubts, actually formed a very successful medium for highlighting adolescent isolation and anxieties in a society pervaded by the internet. The graphic pornography was pixelated as if enlarged beyond its resolution; the moving shapes blurred to the extent that the experience became mainly one of sound. This sound was worrying, ambiguous, animalistic, and I wasn't sure what to make of it until Wendla asked Melchior to tie up her hands with his school tie and hit her. Ilse's video call to Moritz just prior to his suicide revealed the frantic, smudged eyes of the very vulnerable girl on a large screen, the smile a little too large, doubled through her literal presence on stage. At one point, Ilse and Moritz were sitting next to each other on the bed, her facing her phone, him facing his laptop. Technology formed a means of communication, but also a means of miscommunication, as Melchior and Moritz waded through a range of socially transgressive porn and Melchior apologised to Wendla via email.

The characters often emerged from behind the strips of plastic forming the screen - it became a permeable surface that united them all, despite creating partitions. The backdrop to Moritz's suicide was a particularly effective: a photo of a garden patterned with computer icons, in which a digitalised Moritz went prepared to hang himself with a belt while the real Moritz watched. The modern world creates a community of people whose everyday actions can be tracked, and hardly anyone exists without a digital trace. But each one of the characters in Spring Awakening displayed signs of loneliness and exposure to what was going on around them. Their self-conceived roles were never quite stable.

This was heightened by metatheatrical scenes in which the characters became their parents and teachers, caught trying to act out their perceptions of adulthood. Sometimes, these impressions seemed deliberately shaky, revealing the adolescent underneath the sensible cardigans and glasses. However, the actors seemed to occupy these new roles when the action required it. Wendla's attempt to talk about sex with her mother was almost physically painful, but became more so at the crisis point of the play: Wendla's rape by Melchior. This was staged on top of a bunk bed, while Martha (playing Melchior's mother) left a voicemail for Moritz. The split-screen effect was simultaneously hypnotic and utterly horrifying.

The graphic nature of Spring Awakening is still incredibly shocking for a twenty-first century audience, dealing with fairly explicit rape, violence, masturbation and pornography. However, there were occasional glimmers of hope beneath the surface, like the moment when Ernst turned to Hans after kissing him and said: 'In thirty years time we might look back and think this is stupid, but, for now, it's beautiful, isn't it?' However, the re-stacking of chairs didn't solve the almost apocalyptic turmoil generated in the course of the play, and this was something which, once begun, never really left. Melchior's brooding on morality and subjectivity was the only thing that I felt lasted slightly too long, but it succeeded in creating a stifling sensation, a crisis with little room for manoeuvre. This stifling vision was frozen in the final scene of the play, when all of the characters put on their cardigans and glasses and tweed jackets and stood at the front of the stage, both as the adults they previously depicted, and the vulnerable teenagers beneath. The idea of the emergence of a new cycle of parents avoiding honest communication with their children was one of the scariest thoughts suggested by the play, particularly since two of the central characters did not form part of this line-up.

Anya Reiss' rendition of Frank Wedekind's play was provocative and emotional. The moment, about halfway through, when all the lights went on and the stage was presented in harsh white lighting, was similar to the way that I felt at the end, attempting to renegotiate myself among these characters representing youth and coming of age, but a coming of age caught up in both real and virtual acts of violence, asymmetric power, and dishonesty.

The death of the author – Gabriel García Márquez

About a week ago, I was flicking through a copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love and Other Demons in a bookshop in Nottingham, wondering whether to buy them. I remembered a lecturer back in November ordering us all to read some Gabriel García Márquez, promising we would not regret it. But in the end I bought another book, one originally written in English (these are the constraints that come with constantly thinking about what you could write about in an exam, in combination with student budget).

Gabriel García Márquez died yesterday. Upon hearing of his death, I felt guilty that I'd never read any of his work while he was alive. A similar thing has happened many times in the last year: I read Things Fall Apart around the time of Chinua Achebe's death and The Wasp Factory around the time of Iain Banks's death. Before he died last August, Seamus Heaney was merely the GCSE poet I didn't study. It's difficult to say whether it's a good or a bad thing that many people only read an author once he or she has died; the texts have new audiences, allowing them to become a more permanent part of literature, but it always seems a shame that the writer wasn't alive to see the effect of his or her work.

The real 'death of the author', then, far from any abstract Barthesian concept, highlights the cultural prominence we place on authors. We can critically detach a work from the person that wrote it, can eradicate any consideration of 'intention' and chant 'it is language which speaks, not the author' until we are blue in the face and have started to question whether 'author' is even a word. But, outside of an essay or a dissertation, literature is something that connects people, and real people, not just people as robotic networks of cultural experience. Literature, as it is felt on a daily basis, is about people writing books and people reading them; stories, experiences, language, the way that we communicate.

An author's death, like any other person's death, is a reminder of the fragility of individual human existence. An author's words leave a trail, both the shadows of a living, breathing person, and simultaneously so much more than them. Books are certain places and times and attitudes once their authors have died, but we continually relocate them and reidentify them with the people that wrote them, regardless of whether these books reflected the true places and times and attitudes of their authors. What would Sylvia Plath's poetry be without her immortal presence standing just behind it? It would still be wonderful poetry, but (again, outside of essay-land), there is, at least to me, something fascinating about Plath as a person that casts light (or darkness) on everything she wrote. Most people who read, watch and appreciate Shakespeare would be interested to find out exactly what it was he did before he appeared in the London theatre scene in the 1590s. People are always fascinated by people, even if it is only in the bikini shots in glossy magazines or in some weird social media trend.

The 'death of the author', in popular not literary terms, is an opportunity for celebration of the achievements of an individual, achievements that influence and form part of the body of literature that we are able to study critically. It seems ridiculous that Chinua Achebe is regularly attributed with the title 'father of African literature', and that Gabriel García Márquez is used as a similar poster-boy for Latin American literature, despite the fact that these writers only became active in the 20th century. It seems, at least to me, that statements like these are the fruits of a blinkered, Anglocentric vision, denying the literatures that shaped writers like Achebe or García Márquez (and even this statement is painfully overgeneralised!) However, at least these somewhat limited labels open up the discourse, allowing other authors and texts to emerge from where they may previously have been ignored, and allowing us to find fairer and more successful ways of discussing literature and author and culture.

Of course, I will now go on and read One Hundred Years of Solitude, and surely that can only be a good thing. In one of the multiple articles and obituaries surrounding this 'death of the author', Gabriel García Márquez is reported as saying:
'I don't really like to say this because it never sounds sincere, but I would really have liked for my books to have been published after my death, so I wouldn't have to go through all this business of fame and being a great writer.'
I would rather conclude with a quotation from his novels or short stories, but unfortunately I came across this 'business of fame', the words of others, before Gabriel García Márquez's own words. However, the prospect of these words, and the words of any writer, being discovered by new readers including myself, is the reason the popular cultural status of the author as a fellow human, writing to be read, remains important.