Scenes at the British Museum

Scenes at the British Museum

All the great galleries and museums rely on benefactors, who may be very rich, and endow a gallery or wing or two, or just art lovers who stump up a modest but not negligible sum for various “membership” schemes.

Coventry Cathedral and Britten's War Requiem

Coventry Cathedral; “War Requiem”

The middle weeks of November 2018 have been given over to the centenary of the WW1 Armistice. What  sort of commemoration? Sombre pride at worthwhile sacrifice, or sombre bitterness at a colossal waste, or a sombre mixture of contradictory responses?

It was an apposite time to visit Coventry Cathedral, a vast memorial of conflict (the old Cathedral destroyed by bombing in WW2; the new one built adjacent to the former’s ruins). It is also an apposite time to hear Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem,commissioned for the dedication of Coventry’s new Cathedral. The themes of Cathedral and Requiem are different; even somewhat opposed.

The first thought that many people have when visiting Coventry is – why didn’t they rebuild the old Cathedral? Bombing and shelling in both World Wars destroyed countless churches in the UK and Europe. Most have been meticulously rebuilt (for example, Wren churches in the City of London, churches in Germany, the cathedral in Vienna). Coventry Cathedral lost its roof and inner arches, but retained its walls in recognisable shape. Its Tower is intact. It would have been possible to rebuild.

But here starts a journey to a shrine of commemoration. Let the ruins stand as bombed, it was decided – still part of the overall “Cathedral”. Let us build a new, reverently contiguous structure to stand for something new, something hopeful, after the destruction of war.

So up went the new church in the 1950s (architect Basil Spence). It’s a big warehouse shed of a building, in itself without much character, ancient or modern. What it does boast is a couple massive pieces of modern art – the tapestry of Christ by Graham Sutherland and the floor-to-roof stained glass window by Piper. These, each in its own way impressive, don’t really speak to each other (they are set at opposite ends of the building, at right angles to one another).

Although both are huge artefacts, they are also rather forlorn. To one standing at the end of the new Cathedral adjacent to the old, the tapestry is a distant area of colour amidst the gloom, on the wall behind the long concrete High Altar (which reminds one of a very basic railway platform).

The Piper glass is also an irruption into the otherwise utilitarian sombreness of the building.

One wonders what’s serving what: are the spectacular works enhancing the church, or is the church just a container for the works? There is no binding artistic or spiritual relationship between the art and the building, as there is in the best of churches built from medieval times to the C20.

The main purpose of the new Cathedral (and the old ruins) is to preserve and create images and spaces to showcase a concern with forgiveness and reconciliation.

Forgiveness and reconciliation are virtues not to be disparaged – but there is something relentless in the many ways the message is pushed here: inscriptions and chapels, crosses of charred wood and iron nails, crowns of thorns. 

The ruins of the old are poignant and freighted with meanings that do need to be made explicit.

But the spaces and symbols of the modern Cathedral don’t (as with the

Martin McDonagh- A Very Very Very Dark Matter

Martin McDonagh

A Very Very Very Dark Matter

He is at writerly ease with sociopaths. A typical McDonagh character may be set on extreme violence , or vengeance for violence, or be an intimate bystander to, or victim of, extreme violence; but they mostly all share an acceptance, if sometimes a puzzled acceptance, that this is how things are. (This is the mainspring of McDonagh’s black comedy – from plays like the Lieutenant of Innishmore, to his great films In Bruges and ThreeBillboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.)

Great War Symphony at the Royal Albert Hall

Royal Albert Hall – Great War Symphony

There was a strange concert at the Royal Albert Hall in early October, at times moving but often disconcerting. It was a programme of music marking the end of WW1, including a new choral symphony composed by the conductor for the evening, Patrick Hawes.

The Regent's Canal

The Regent’s Canal

I’ve known the Regent’s Canal, which describes a 200 hundred year old, East-West arc through London just to the north of the centre, for many years.

When I worked on the northern edge of the city of London, it was easy to reach for a lunchtime jog. It is also part of the least stressful route for cycling from further north to Limehouse, where the canal joins the Thames, and thence through Canary Wharf down to the Greenwich Foot Tunnel (firebombed in the zombie film 28 Weeks Later).

"Magic Realism" at Tate `Modern

Magic Realism at Tate Modern

The Exhibition’s title, Magic Realism, is a little pedantic, obscure, and perhaps misleading. The subtitle, however, cuts to the chase: Art in Weimar Germany 1919-33. But the headline may have had the effect of enticing into the free display some of the meandering crowds of summer tourists, hoping for something rather more comic book than what is in fact on offer.

WG Sebald

WG Sebald

For some time, I’ve been aware of the name, WG Sebald. I was aware that he is highly regarded as a writer (the word “cult” is sometimes used in reference to him, in various combinations: cult following, cult writer – but that gives me a bit of the creeps). 

"Aftermath" at Tate Britain; Postcript - the Royal Academy's Great Spectacle

Aftermath at Tate Britain; Postscript - the Royal Academy's Great Spectacle - 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition

The Exhibition called Aftermath at Tate Britain is a strange affair. Its starting point is the First World War. The Exhibition claims to “explore the impact of the ..War on the art of Britain, France and Germany between 1916 and 1932”.

(Why those dates are chosen is something I’m still puzzling over. 1932 was the last full year of the Weimar Republic in Germany – Hitler came to power in 1933.)

Self-help from Aristotle

Self help from Aristotle

In my on/off time as a student of philosophy, I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with Aristotle. When an undergraduate, I think I avoided him altogether. Later, as a “mature” MA student, I quickly decided to concentrate on other areas of the Ethics syllabus, but not without some preliminary grapplings with lectures and texts concerning the great man.

John Gray in Conversation

John Gray in Conversation

I have written before about John Gray in a blog about liberalism and toleration (Feb 2016). To recap: Gray is a genial pessimist about human societies, but a staunch upholder of human decencies. He rebuts any notion of a benevolent Progress, or History, always moving humankind towards a better future.

Lounging at Gatwick Airport

Lounging at Gatwick Airport

I’ve written about the Purgatorio of Stansted Airport. Here I relate a happier airport experience, if not quite Paradisio.

The North Terminal at Gatwick is a pretty functional place, like most other terminals. Its main purpose (like everywhere else) is to inflict you with a Long March through its sinuous arcade of duty free concessions before debouching you into a big hangar with the usual collection of “normal” retail and food outlets.

Flat Minds; Flattish Arguments

Flat Minds; Flattish Arguments

There’s a book out that I’m not going to read. It’s called “The Mind is Flat” and it’s by a psychologist, Nick Chater. Why am I repelled, as if by an opposite magnet? Well, there have been a couple of sniffy reviews, in The Guardian and Prospect. But the main reason is that the author has written a longish summary of his thesis in the former publication https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/01/revolution-in-our-sense-of-self-sunday-essay?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other. I find it rather incoherent.

Opera Stagings

Opera Stagings: Carmen and Midsummer Night’s Dream

Two operas with stagings set far from their originals, as once envisaged. At the Royal Opera House, Carmen, seen by the excellent cinema streaming offering, had a high, wide and steeply raked, one-side-of-a-ziggurat, set of steps. Benjamin Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, put on by the English National Opera, was fixated on beds, of the sleep-in sort (but a pun was intended..).

One succeeded; the other not really.

Safety of the People..

Safety of the People or War of All Against All

“Salus populi suprema lex esto”  (“the safety of the people should be the supreme law”) wrote Cicero in the last days of the Roman Republic, before civil wars and dictators fatally threatened the salus.

This principle has been a cornerstone of Western political theory since at least the C17.

Consciously or not...

Consciously or not..

Philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists have for many years suffered a lot of intellectual perplexity trying to fit, into one or more of their many pigeonholes, the nature of human consciousness – the experience of self awareness in our sensations, thoughts, feelings, memories, dreams.

Airport folly

Airport Folly

A fine line separates complacency and idiocy.

False Impressionism? The Tate's "Impressionists in London"

False Impressionism? The Tate’s Impressionism in London

The consensus of art critics’ reviews of this exhibition has been pretty damning. Essentially, they say, the Tate is guilty of using the catnip label of “Impressionists” to lure the public to an exhibition of mainly mediocre works by mainly mediocre French artists, among which motley crowd lurk a few works of quality by genuine Impressionists (mainly Monet and Pissarro).