Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela courtesy of Wikipedia

 When Nelson Mandela was designated an Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience, he said:
‘Like Amnesty International, I have been struggling for justice and human rights, for long years… But as long as injustice and inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest. We must become stronger still.’ 

Truly, there is nothing more to be said.

Obituaries: Two watershed artists

Two artists, each in his own way a man of the Sixties and whose work provided a  watershed in his chosen sphere, have left us.
Lou Reed, the pop star who changed the meaning of the title more than anyone in the 'sixties/'seventies, has died at 71. He left us a raft-full of new blueprints, their influence already disseminated widely by the millenium's end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCMCS_xwtNk


For more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24698207

Anthony Caro, the man whose medium was really the air-space contained by his big, brightly coloured constructions, has died at the age of 89. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/10401828/Sir-Anthony-Caro-British-sculptor-dies-aged-89.html

Syria

When Alex Salmond, the lone voice of sanity, condemned the proposed bombing of Bosnia towards the end of the Yugoslav civil war, as "an act of unparalleled folly", he was almost right. In the days before D-Day, the Allies carried out bombing raids all over the northern  coast of France, the intention being to 'soften up' the enemy, but in reality killing lots of the French people who were up for liberation. The damage was still easily visible when I visited and looked in the 'fifties. The USA repeatedly followed a similar routine in Vietnam later on, bombing villages each time they were taken over by the Vietcong.



Sahara Complex, near Damascus

Some of us are capable of learning from history, if our politicians cannot. Do we want to follow the same incoherent behaviour again, with the long-suffering people of Syria as victims this time? The answer must be no.

US Artist killed by taser

Chy Walton and other supporters hold posters during a vigil for graffiti artist Israel Hernandez-Llach, who died after being shocked by a police officer's Taser, in Miami Beach, Florida August 10, 2013.(Reuters / Gaston De Cardenas)

　

The victim’s father, Israel Hernandez-Bandera spoke to Reuters, calling Israel’s death an “act of barbarism” and an “assassination of a young artist and a photographer.”

Hernandez-Llach’s female friend and former classmate, Lucy Rynka, had touching words to say about him: “he was a genius… He showed me how powerful art can be, how you can use color and design to relay a powerful message.”

　

Good Night, and Good Luck

Originally published in Decode Magazine

 



USA 2005 1 hour 33 minutes

David Strathairn, George Clooney, Robert Downey Jr, Patricia Clarkson, Frank Langella

Paranoia was, for America in the 'Fifties, much more than a passing unease. Guatemala and the rest of Uncle Sam's 'backyard', Green men from Mars, brain-rotting comic books and of course the mirror image of US Imperialism, Soviet Imperialism. Americans ate and breathed the stuff. And smoked it, too. The 'Fifties were perhaps the apotheosis of smoking culture. This (black and white) film captures smoke throughout in several variations of backlighting in scenes reminiscent of those classic jazz photos. Smoke or no smoke, particular attention has been lavished on the lighting, and that, with the high-resolution and subtle gradations in tone and texture typical of colour stock, combine to make this a film worthy of lingering over, and adding to your collection when it moves down to DVD. But the time to see it is now, while it's still on the big screen, and director Clooney is quite honest about its intended relevance to what is happening in the US/UK today. It will prove to be the kind of movie where audience connection might be expected to include applause, and perhaps even some heckling.

The attention to period detail even unto the new Nylon shirts with visible vests, make it easy to forget that this is not in fact a documentary or at least an old movie; everything looks self-consciously Modernist and Important and you would not be surprised to catch a glimpse of the young Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster in there somewhere.

It's a reason to be cheerful that this film has been made now, with the War on Fright acting as a cover for the erosion of our hard-won liberties and democratic process, just as the 'Soviet Threat' was talked up before.

Ed Murrow, who began his broadcasting career in radio, moved into television with the conviction, like Reith in the UK, that its supreme function was to inform and educate. This is no encomium for a faultless hero though: there is a sly dig at his perhaps unconscious acceptance of the realpolitik of compromise to the extent of the product of one of the TV shows' sponsors, Kent, being placed permanently in his hand or stuffed in his mouth while he addressed his audience. Director Clooney is also able to hint that behind Murrow's elegance and finely-crafted polemics he was first at odds with his boss, as when he didn't quite round off an interview with Liberace, cutting it short rather than carry on with a bland guided tour of his home (an intercut with the actual Candelabra King, from the archives); the Bad Guy, Joe McCarthy, also appears in archive recordings, although his famously bombastic and occasionally drunken performances have been skipped, possibly to avoid giving the film the crude pantomime flavour of, say, 'Fahrenheit 451'. David Strathairn should have been close to an Oscar for his impeccably understated but dynamic performance. If he never acts again, he has a fine set of laurels to rest on.

The story is book-ended by a celebratory dinner held for Murrow by his colleagues, opening with his welcome to the rostrum, going into flashback and ending with his catchphrase. This would be good enough as a punch line, but the film ends on a suitably wry, reflective mood with Dianne Reeves, who is caught in action in the next studio several times throughout the story, providing colour or emphasis, singing with Rosemary Clooney's old band, no less; and again, detail is observed, with Rosemary's own original arrangements. Tim Robbins' 'Cradle will Rock', the true story of art depicting Diego Rivera, Orson Wells and The Workers versus right-wing paranoid politics in 'thirties Manhattan, acts as a good prequel to this.

One of the important subtexts is the bravery Murrow showed in going against the flow, breaking news media ranks in standing up against Senator McCarthy at a time when Joe had grabbed the lead role in fighting the 'enemy within'. Today in the UK, practically all professional journalists and papers, rightwing or leftwing, are united in not merely tolerating but praising one-time Sun editor editor Kelvin McKenzie as no more than a decent bloke who likes a good laugh. Compare and contrast.

This story has all the complexity of the power politics to be found anywhere in publishing, broadcasting and of course, political life, from Shakespeare's 'Caesar' right up to the new millenium backstab tango in the House of Commons. If it has been trimmed to make a good movie, and it most probably has, it works. Clooney is managing very well to pull off the trick that Orson Wells established but lost interest in: making a couple of hack mainstream films, doing small parts in daft action movies to finance the important work, like 'Confessions of a Dangerous Mind' and now 'Good Night'. Long may his lum reek.

Eric's burden

Eric Burdon, ex-frontman of The Animals, cancelled a performance planned for Israel on 1st August, following complaints from interested parties. It has been suggested that he was threatened by the boycott fraternity, which denies having used threatening language or behaviour.
The US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott stated: "Although we and our allies urge artists not to cross the international picket line by performing in Israel, and although we make sustained efforts to educate performers about the reason for boycott, we have not and never will issue any threats against anyone who does not heed the boycott call."
  http://mondoweiss.net/2013/07/we-gotta-get-out-of-israel-if-its-the-last-thing-we-ever-do.html?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=c23b4890fb-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b86bace129-c23b4890fb-398415153

The Two Roberts

　

THE LAST BOHEMIANS
Roger Bristow
Published by Sansom & Company

“They came in one day and I was mesmerised by them. They were dressed in black from top to toe... I thought - Christ, these are real Bohemians!” Ken Russell

The two largely forgotten giants of Scottish art, known to pre-‘cutting-edge’ art students, particularly in Glasgow, and not that many art lovers and collectors, as The Two Roberts, have influenced countless younger artists through their followers. Joan Eardley, who created her own brand of expressionism, picked up their 'virus' in her earlier work, and successive generations have picked up and disseminated their influence. Many young artists will be employing elements of their vision without even having heard of the two 'R's.

But the Roberts, Colquhoun and MacBryde, burnt out too young to capitalise on their youthful success, which went up like a firework and hardly survived longer. Their story is of talent versus human frailty. A timeless kind of saga, but it has never been told yet, so the world has made do with the myths that surrounded these two lovers; some of the myths being their own inventions and others just growing to fill the spaces. One of their own making was the one about their having stolen the Stone of Scone while drunk, eagerly believed by several following generations of art students. And like John Byrne’s modernist play of 1992 produced at the Royal Court Theatre London, which had them sleeping rough out in Cork Street to force a gallery to give them a show, an excellent story, but typically not true - they didn’t have to struggle for the gallery. They doubtlessly camped, but not in a tent.

Roger Bristow has devoted nearly twenty years to hunting down the surviving contemporaries of the Roberts. In many cases he was just in time. Those he spoke to include Prunella Clough, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Patrick Heron, Ken Russell, George Barker, Jon Craxton and Daniel Farson. Fortunately the kinds of people who inhabit bohemia write letters, and keep them; so correspondence has added dialogue to the tale.

Colquhoun and MacBryde were both born to hard-working families in Ayrshire and grew up in the middle of the Great Depression. Colquhoun had the luck to be supported by his art teacher, who convinced two local patrons of the arts, one in the Church and one in the whisky industry, to provide grants allowing him to remain at school until he applied for a place at Glasgow School of Art, instead of becoming an apprentice as his father wanted. And in that, he was already the embodiment of the Scottish antisyzygy.

MacBride, as he was named until leaving art school, showed an early talent for singing, dancing and entertaining as well as drawing. But despite his artistic skills being encouraged at home and at school, unlike Colquhoun he had to slog through a succession of menial jobs before making it up Scott Street to the then recently-built Charles Rennie Mackintosh building.

Their budding friendship as fellow Ayrshiremen on the daily train-in became mutual devotion when they began sharing a flat near the School. Years later, Colquhoun’s mother, in this precious quote, summed it up ‘defiantly’:

“Bobby met Robert MacBryde on the first day he attended Glasgow Art School. They became such close friends, what could I do about it? And where would Bobby be without MacBryde? Robert MacBryde did a lot for Bobby.”

It was in the pressurised atmosphere of student life that the two, recognised for their precocious talents as much as for their reputation as loners, became known as ‘The Two Roberts’ - or just ‘The Roberts’ - a composite person. If any of their friends or lecturers suspected that their relationship was intimately physical, they would either have ignored the signs or have been unable to believe them. Scotland, socially and legally weighed down by the presence of the Presbyterian Church well into the 1980s, would have been the last place to openly admit to being homosexual, and the Roberts were so successful in keeping themselves to themselves that one close friend and one-time tutor, Ian Fleming, went to his grave convinced that they were ‘definitely not homosexual... certainly not while they were in Scotland.’

Fleming’s double portrait of the boys, while not being ‘great painting’, speaks volumes about them and about their relationship. I found myself referring back to it while I read the book. Colquhoun is moody, unstable and looking outwards while MacBryde plays The Wife, sitting behind, enigmatically smiling towards his friend and very much in charge. Despite MacBryde’s laid-back appearance in the portrait, he was the one who would tend to break into song or dance at the slightest opportunity, while the dangerous-looking Colquhoun was in fact the more withdrawn and introspective of the two, and both attractive to and attracted by women.

When their art school life came to an end with diplomas in drawing and painting for the two, Colquhoun won the Travelling Scholarship for 1938. This posed a problem for the two, as they would be forced to function for a time as separate halfs - two shells with no oyster. Even the School governors and staff were aware of this. But the Chairman of the Board came to the rescue with a personal donation to MacBryde.

And so the two set off on the Grand Tour, doing Europe: including Paris, Amsterdam, Florence and of course Rome, where they were arrested, in the current amosphere of antipathy, by a policeman who mistook them for Frenchmen . They were forced to return quickly as war broke out across Europe again, and held an exhibition of drawings from the journey, in Kilmarnock. This and other student shows were the only times their work was exhibited for sale in Scotland during their lives.

On their return to Scotland though, they eventually had to contend with the effects of the war. Colquhoun was conscripted; the experience led to serious deterioration in his physical and mental health, and MacBryde, partly out of concern for his partner, decided to drop his conscientious objections to soldiering and sign on. He, too, was found to be unwell, enough to be rejected by the army. A long-established problem with his lungs had left him open to tuberculosis while living in poverty after the European tour.

It was in the midst of this despairing scenario that MacBryde met John Tonge, journalist and art critic, in Waverley Station. A slim chance that reversed the Roberts' fortunes. Tonge was the fast-track connection to London, and this was followed by Colquhoun's discharge from the army.

The two moved south, their painting styles coincidentally maturing into a kind of Euro-modernism; happily in tune with society's reaction against the drab inter-war years. Being homosexual also helped give them entré to patrons and collectors. Their personas as exotic, mad, Scotsmen contributed to the spread of their fame as much as their work did, and they became the Golden Boys of Bond Street. They inevitably had their decriers, being accused of posing as professional Scots (they tended to wear kilts; this may have been an affectation they only took up in London) but on the other hand had to defend their heritage from people like Michael Ayrton, who carelessly included Colquhoun in a radio programme about English art.

In London with its webs of intrigue, the power games, the triumphs and disasters, the account begins to read a little like a thriller. Despite that, there are so many players and so many galleries, publications, new homes and pubs that it could add up to a dry catalogue of facts, and with the added look at painting techniques at best a scholarly exegesis, but Roger Bristow is able to keep it moving along. The Roberts' fame was such that in 1949 The New Statesman could run a clerihew competition about them:

‘There’s a trick we haven’t tried, MacBryde.’
‘We will soon, Colquhoun.’

Before the slow fall from grace, their regular studio soireés attracted Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, John Minton,and Dylan Thomas among many.

MacBryde lived on, incredibly, well into the Swinging Sixties, convincingly sporting a Beatle jacket; a man from another world - his lonely vigil ended by a hit and run driver.

This may not be the lavishly illustrated coffee-table book, but there are more than enough reproductions to keep the afficionado happy and to wise-up the uninitiated, and while there are no smoky shots of the Coach and Horses or the French House, the photos add flesh to the text. This is, with its exhaustive catalogue raisonné and fastidiously compiled index, The Book.

Yet more, by Frances Spalding, at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/apr/24/last-bohemians-roger-bristow-review