28/7/07 (Dali at the Tate)

Re Dali; the crucial development he made in Surrealist painting was the literalisation – that is, the rendering realist and photographic – of its hitherto semi-abstract forms, the introduction of three-dimensional, illusionist pictorial space into the flat spaces of, say, a Miro. Consider the transition from the early ‘Cubist’ and beach and bather scenes to the ‘properly’ Surrealist works of the late twenties and thirties. This introduction of ‘conventional’ pictorial space brings with it metaphor: something neither Cubism nor pure abstraction were capable of – or intended to – generate. And metaphor, of course, belonged to the terrain of the subconscious. Compare Dali’s literalisation of ‘abstract’ forms with Donne’s literalisation of poetic metaphor, which set the preconditions for ‘metaphysical poetry’. Donne’s method, too, involved a commitment to precision and clarity. Both could be interpreted as a kind of petrification or ossification of form. And both, of course, implied a reactionary aesthetics (I think it is safe to say) which comprised an earlier, ‘good’ phase (the twenties and thirties, the Songs and Sonnets), and a later degenerated one (the ‘Hollywood’ period, the religious poetry).

The exhibition is interesting in revealing how early the connection with Hollywood, and mass culture in general, came; as well as Dali’s clear ambitions in this area. But it is also clear that Dali’s later career was an overt and extravagant selling out, a long, and apparently gleeful, prostitution of the methods worked out in its earlier phase. The paintings, this time, seemed less than successful: you admired them from afar. It was Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or that stood out; those, and a few of this collage letters.

28/7/07

Note a quality that several works of ‘innovative’ British writing and filmmaking of the 1970s seems to share: a kind of directionlessness, which does not allow itself to end coherently. The later (and not only later) novels of B.S. Johnson, Chris Petit’s Radio On, and the Clash documentary by Hazan and Mingay all exhibit this, and it is of course difficult now not to interpret it in the context of the wider directionlessness, and the impending political dead end, experienced by the left in the later seventies. In each case there is the sense of something being initiated that is not sustained, like the weak attempts at narrative development that intersperse the documentary. As Petit said of making Radio On, “when there’s few other people around doing what you’re doing, it makes it difficult to get better”. And none of them in fact did get better; Petit’s subsequent career, and Johnson’s death – perhaps – show this (though with Johnson there were obviously other reasons for his suicide). Indeed Johnson’s suicide could be interpreted as an index of his commitment, and ambition.

But what all these works manage to convey despite, or perhaps because of, their deficiencies is a remarkably strong sense of the time in which they were made – the Clash documentary in particular. The variety of nostalgia this carries with it is interesting in itself: the dilapidation and crass ugliness of the urban environment it depicts, together with the physical (and linguistic) unruliness of those that appear in it, both today carry the memory of a social space less tightly controlled and administered than it is today. Next to contemporary urban ‘regeneration’ projects, with their ‘landscaped’ public areas and bristling with CCTV cameras, their installment of retail units in almost every available space, the neglected, decaying urban landscapes of the nineteen seventies speak of lost freedoms – if also, perhaps, of greater physical dangers. The verbal violence in the form of swearing, which is indiscriminate and thereby almost, at times, good natured, is another instance of this; today it, together with obscene gestures like the fuck off sign (so ubiquitous in the seventies), has almost completely disappeared, and obscenities have acquired a violent charge they probably never had in the past (perhaps, too, they are more likely to provoke violence if used – or rather, state violence, the intervention of the police). What all this amounts to is that the working class, carnivalesque atmosphere that one sees present at the gigs – which is wild, spontaneous, uncontrolled and open to all, and which inherently involves risk – has become ever more difficult to create, if it is possible now at all. Tillmans has spoken of this process in one of his exhibition catalogues, and no doubt it has been widely commented on by others. Your own ‘conservatism’, and ‘dislike’ of popular music has meant that you have only become fully aware of it recently – and in large part by virtue of your experience in the former Soviet Union, where one quickly becomes aware of the absence of physical controls on movement through the urban environment which are so ubiquitous in the west that one no longer notices them. This process of suppression, or absorption, of spontaneous social activity and its replacement, ‘from above’, with its controlled simulacrum has been one of the most striking developments of the last thirty years. It goes hand in hand with processes of ‘professionalisation’ (also notably absent in the Clash documentary), and the creation and saturation of information technology and media markets, whose simulacra come to substitute themselves for the things they represent. What seems in the documentary to express all that is anachronistic and naïve in the rather befuddled political stance it tries to assume, is the basic, and unquestioned, assumption that the band’s politics and its professional ambitions within the music world were somehow compatible, and would not inevitably come into contradiction with each other. This assumption has not survived. Perhaps the Clash only seem so good now in the light of what happened next in popular music. Who, if anyone, might properly be considered their heir today?

25/7/07

This stay in Riga was ill-judged, and almost certainly wasted: an unnecessary interruption and distraction to the article you should now be planning in your mind (interesting how the nearer you come to writing it the further you travel away from it in your mind: an apparently self-frustrating process, but apparently also a necessary one). But there were one or two compensations, most notably the Museum of the Occupation, which turn out in the circumstances – though this may only have been a consequence of having recently left Russia – to be reasonably even-handed in its account of recent Latvian history, as well as informative. There was perhaps too little emphasis on the population’s general support for the Nazi invasion of 1941, and still less on popular Latvian participation in the SS and Wehrmacht. But it was better than one might have expected; only the tacit treatment of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as morally equivalent – that is, as occupying foreign dictatorships – jarred. One had a policy of imprisoning or executing all opposition, real or imagined; the other had a programme of genocide: though both were heinous, they were fundamentally different. But the core of the Latvian perspective remained national sovereignty, or rather the taking away of it: next to this, everything else came second (since on this view the Holocaust itself can be seen as a consequence of the abolition of national independence). It is for this reason surely that the museum compared unfavourably the Soviet policy of resettling 700,000 Russians in their country with the proposed Nazi one of installing only 174,000 Germans. And it is so in part no doubt because of the political repercussions this policy of resettlement is still having.

Otherwise Riga seems to have become richer, sleeker and more expensive over the last year, with the old town beginning to lose the last vestiges of its crumbling Soviet facades and turning into an all too familiar tourist zone of cafes, restaurants and bars: an affectless, neutral and almost generic Euro-space. The city itself is physically remarkably modest and self-effacing: low-lying and dispersed, and situated either side of an enormously wide river, it is almost invisible from its banks, so that it still retains, oddly enough, the character of a settlement that it must have had since it was founded. Riga is largely without pretensions: this is one of its attractions.

But why are you writing approvingly of the Latvian Museum of the Occupation when you opposed the Georgian one? What difference does thirty years make (or even, for that matter, two hundred)? Or is it that the Latvians are northern Europeans and consequently undeserving of Russian domination, while the Georgians are southerners in need of “modernising” (=civilising) by their large neighbour? Doesn’t your difference in attitude towards the two reveal a racist and imperialist discrimination? And if so, where have you gone wrong: in believing the Latvians or in disbelieving the Georgians?