1/8/07

1/8/07

The English countryside in summer: green trees and hedgerows, yellow (or ochre) fields, pale blue sky. A strict division of zoning of colour fields, each seemingly allocated to denote a different function: a manufactured and regulated landscape, subject to distinct divisions of space. But hardly country in the real sense (at least, not along the line between Cambridge and London), but more land as yet residual to urban sprawl: a determinant of the city, an unintended leftover of it. Perhaps the most visible sign of this is how the structures being built in it are uncompromisingly urban: they take no heed of the fact they are surrounded by ‘nature’, and nature, by virtue of this, appears ‘degraded’ in the light of this dissonance. (Notice how sensitive you were to this degraded state of nature when you were a kid; wasn’t it one reason why you disliked the country so intensely?)The approach to London is now so heavily built up that one is no longer conscious of entering the limits of the city: the distinction has ceased to exist. The category of ‘country’ needs to be rethought, at least in southern England – or abandoned.
Most striking of all though is how all your antipathies and ‘weaknesses’ were revived the moment you came back here. You are more conscious than ever of how much England bores you – though ‘boredom’ hardly covers the sense of helpless despair you find yourself feeling (or perhaps: indulging yourself in) when you are here. It may be that having remained in this country has been one of the biggest mistakes of your life, and that you should have paid attention to, and acted upon, your early desires to go abroad: to Germany, to the United States, to Russia. You cannot at the moment say, and it is pointless trying to determine which. No amount of looking back will resolve these questions definitively, because the ultimate meaning of those events can only be determined retrospectively, by what you do now. Needless to say, it is not England in itself that is intensely boring, but the life that you have made for yourself here. (but what of the lives you might make for yourself?)

Tarkovsky as Slavophile: how much of the ideology of his films might be found in, say, the work of Glazunov? Could he merely be offering a more ‘sophisticated’ version of Glazunov’s ‘narrative’? And if so, does Mirror give the more exhaustive exposition of this narrative (consider, for example, the shots of soldiers marching across Lake Lagoda to relieve Leningrad as a modern, Slavophile version of Benjamin’s victors’ triumph, only instead of cultural artefacts they bear in their arms both the cause of their suffering and the means of their liberation, namely weapons). Could a painting, however large, ever hope to comment upon this film; can a non-narrative art offer commentary upon a narrative one? And what would be the point if it did? Would it not have to incorporate the ‘scene’ into its own symbolic narrative (a la Glazunov), only in a way that is formally more innovative and interesting? Imageine the artist: a young, clever careerist, who has accepted a commission to decorate the lobby, and perhaps also the stairs, of the Chechen parliament with a mural – whose subject is either the history of the Chechen people or of Chechen-Russian friendship. For this he uses Tarkovsky, though works by Tolstoy and Lermontov also feature, as do certain Chechen writers (who?). Title is History of the Vainakh. It is decided that it should encompass the recent Chechen war, whose causes in the picture are fudged, so to speak, and whose monstrous suffering is sentimentalised. He needs to create allegorical figures to represent each people. Its theme should be the gradual acceptance, through a series of horrific defeats, of the reality of Russian hegemony. The most heroic act is this acceptance. The picture will be self-consciously in the tradition of Russian imperialist romanticisation of the Caucasus. His struggle is to stop his real loathing of the Chechens seeping into his work. His solution is to make his own loathing of Chechens an attribute of the Chechens in his picture, whose implacable resentment of imperialist rule is thereby made palpable. In his spare time he is making his own work about the country: a long poem entitled Impressions of Chechnya.

29/7/07

The towerblocks swaying gently, like ships at anchor, against the horizon of lights: an optical illusion caused by your own (unconscious) movement, which must persist during the day, but which you are only able to perceive at night, presumably because the high contrast of dark and light enables the eye to register smaller movements.

Are you capable of writing poetry? The question is not an honest one; it should rather be: do you want to, do you need to? And the answer, judging from the last few thousand words, is that you do not, at least not yet. The objectives based on technical incompetence, on disdain for the amateurishness you believe you will express your thoughts with, are spurious; since this would amount to an argument not to begin at all. More convincing, perhaps, is the notion of suppression: that of a need, or of a self, that might successfully express itself this way. But this too is doubtful, for self-expression in your experience has always involved an active stance, the taking of a position, rather than a letting out or releasing what is suppressed. You act, and then you consider how you have acted; you do not give yourself 'permission' (or do you? Remember the Surrealist – you forget who – who spoke of another writer as having given him 'la grande permission' to write as he felt he needed).

Donne was right (at least by his own deeply reactionary lights): solitude is 'the Devil's company', and regular social engagement is effective in keeping you sane, not least because it sustains, and enforces, a consistent sense of identity, without which you discover that 'identity' does not exist, or certainly that it isn't what you thought it was, as its components begin to come apart. This, surely, is part of the mechanism operating here. You need to keep in mind that every act is a willed one, and some of what seems an abdication of will is actually a perverse kind of self-punishment (and hence supremely deliberate). If this is the case, then it becomes in principle possible to change.

31/7/07

The arched brick arcades along King's Cross station have a likeable austerity: they remind you of how many of your childhood memories must be of these bare, brick, utilitarian walls (usually part of some railway engineering works), for their presence has lodged itself somewhere deep in your subconscious. The back wall of your parent's garden is surely one source of this, as is Auden Place which adjoins it. Interesting that the courtyard full of ruins cars that you remember playing in should have become a doubtful memory, and deeply confused with dream. Other high, brick walls include the cutting below the bridge at Chalk Farm, and the Roundhouse – both creations of the railway. They are always sinister and deeply familiar, and they always signify entrapment. The fondness you have for them must by nature be ambiguous. You shall never escape because you shall always return. Ironic that presently haute-bourgeois Primrose Hill should remain at bottom an industrial landscape. Or rather, industrialisation itself becomes a layer or sediment of the past (laid down, among other places, in your own mind). Other brick walls: along Chalk Farm Road, around Primrose Hill School (the school itself brick, tall and forbidding), along the canal: the vaults of the bridges over the canal particularly. You remember now that your childhood was haunted precisely by the ghosts of industrialisation, by its vanishing folk-memories, which adults, who themselves had hardly any direct memory of them, would parade in front of you as a means of inspiring fear, awe, and obedience.

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?

22/7/07

When all urban, or architectural, space becomes 'ideologised' - that is, consciously made the product and expression of a specific ideology - then everything within it becomes metaphor. Thus at VDNKH today the occupation by small, tawdry, privately-owned shops of the Stalinst pavilions lining its boulevards was metaphor made concrete, and in what is perhaps the crudest and most obvious of ways: the impression of a new, dysfunctional market economy camping out in the ruins of a defunct empire is palpable. Perhaps most remarkable - 'expressive' - of this are two things: the exhibition of the 'economic achievements of the peoples of the Russian Federation' held in the central exhibition hall, which was clearly an attempted revival of the great shows of the past, but which really amounted to a tawdry collection tourist trinkets and a lot of rather self-congratulatory photographs of official committees and receptions; and an exhibition of waxworks, whose real focus of interest was not, as its 'official' publicity claimed, figures of Hitler or Brezhnev, but people with severe congenital defects - parasitic twins, extra eyes, no legs, etc: in other words, it was a collection of sideshow freaks in wax. There was something highly fitting about the fact that this show should be in the central pavilion of the park of economic achievements, surrounded by friezes and statues of workers, collective farm girls and scientists. For both are, in their respective senses, popular forms of art: only the libidinal shift that became expressible with the fall of Communism couldn't be clearer. And indeed what was undeniable was that VDNKH remains as popular a weekend destination for families as it probably was in Soviet times; the crowds were numerous and seemed to throng the shops selling cheap electric goods, the cafes playing their cacophony of tinny music, and even photographed themselves climbing all over the architecture - which remains eminently photographable, not only despite but because of the changes that have taken place. To place wax simulacra of freaks in the centre of this complex somehow makes perfect sense - you now only need to work out why (is it merely a return of the architecture-ideology's repressed?). This tradition of public architecture was always, it seems, popular in the sense of being accessible, immediately comprehensible and applicable (in theory) to all: it was both 'inclusive' and asserted a norm, an ideal. It is, peculiarly, in its festive atmosphere - the atmosphere aimed at at VDNKH - that this norm seems most false, most forced. VDNKH is a place of eternal celebration, although the objects of the celebration have long since disappeared. It is another instance of the aesthetic of the facade: no surprise that Bulatov used it in his work. What is the significance of the literal text in his paintings, which superimposes itself upon the visual one of the ideologised environment? Is it perhaps that the ideology has now become so undermined and weakened t requires 'support' in this textual form? Is it that it has petrified now to pure image (= photograph), whose 'affectlessness' and redundancy requires a caption? These buildings, like certain scenes from a Werner Herzog film, have become materialised dreams:

Heaven smiles, and states and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

What aura, what charge is it that these ruins or fragments have retained - or indeed acquired?
Consider the ideological materialisation (or the materialisation of ideology), the pavilion building and the dream, and the affinities among these.
Note how VDNKH, with its variously themed pavilions representing different branches of industry and different Soviet nationalities provides a kind of ideological model or map of the Soviet Union.