New Directions

M is for Modernism
M is for metaphysics
M is for metaphor
M is for melancholia
M is for modernity (don't mention this!)

I really hope that within the next few weeks I will be borne aloft on the crest of a PhD wave. Revision is needed. Rethinking is also needed. I don't need more time; I need more pressure - from myself. Woe is me! I've actually been quite sanguine about being preempted by a distinguished scholar. But to turn a page one day and see the very thing you'd written only a few hours earlier glaring at you, like it knew...that's a real shock, and not in the good old way of being uncanny. (I wish! No, I was in end-of-the-PhD-is-nigh mode. But not any longer.)

Apologies for the overworked metaphor, as well.

Turn the pages

Today's Observer Review has an article on reading devices. Naomi Alderman and Peter Conrad provide the cases for and against respectively. There's much to agree with in both writer's arguments. For instance, here's Conrad on the case against:

Reading on it left me feeling alienated from books I know well. The novels I sampled are chopped up into gobbets, with less than half the word count of a printed page, so there is no all-absorbing verbal landscape in which you can lose yourself. Gaps yawn between paragraphs, no matter how short they are.

Elsewhere in the same article Conrad writes affectionately of a battered, note-ridden, though still seemingly indestructible copy of Shakespeare's Complete Works that was given to him as a prize at school.

Alderman, however, is more open to the idea of ebooks:

Works written specially for the ebook reader are an even more exciting prospect. A piece of 'ebook native' fiction may allow you to hear the birdsong while reading a romantic outdoor scene, or may automatically subscribe you to a fictional newspaper mentioned in a crime thriller. Some will consider such things gimmicky and a threat to 'proper' reading, but different kinds of text can co-exist. Audiobooks haven't killed the printed word, television hasn't killed radio. What we're seeing isn't the death of the book, but the creation of a new art form.

That form is still in its infancy, but as a novelist I'm excited by the creative opportunities it will bring. Meanwhile, as a reader, I'm simply excited by the possibility of regaining some floorspace. The e-reader will never completely replace paper books, but it's got an awful lot to recommend it.

This is convincing stuff, and readers of this blog might also remember my own view on the multi-media possibilities of the weblog. But unlike in the case of the book, there is no material alternative to the weblog that meets the revered object of the book in quite the same way. Paper journalism? Disposable (well, recyclable).

The multi-media possibilities of the ebook that will enhance, compliment, and widen our experience of reading the words on the page (I very nearly said 'printed word' here, not even ironically!) do, however, present a certain problem for the future of reading. And it isn't in what Alderman has said but in an insert comment by Binky Urban, a New York 'super-agent', in the same feature:

'Many publishers, especially in the UK, feel threatened by e-readers, but I think they're a great development [I have both a Kindle and a Sony Reader]. Kids spend so much time playing computer games; if games techies would figure out how to make reading a book a more interactive experience, we could win back the younger readers we've lost to computers and TV.'

No, no, no!!! This is so wrong! Again, we mollycoddle the young into thinking their way is best, which has surely produced a generation of minds stubborn and closed to experiences that weren't established in their own times. In other words, we should not hold out for the multi-media experience of reading novels on ebooks because such added hi-tech elements forget the original awe-inspiring interactivity of the book itself: the interaction of the human imagination. We are failing young people! We are telling them that novels, plays, and poems are not relevant to them until they are repackaged with games-style interactivity. We are assisting in the closing of millions of minds to experiences beyond the ken of Grand Theft Auto. What we should be saying is this: 'Look, young people, calm down, wipe your eyes clean, sit down, breathe deeply, pick up a book in silence and solitude, turn the pages, read, and allow the printed word to open and revive your organic imaginations!'

This is what we should be saying. And while we're at it, we should do the same by turning off techno for a moment, and introducing them to calmer, more humane, less mechanistic music - like that of the opening of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. All these things can co-exist, but young people are pampered into believing that their own ways are the only ways. We need fresher, more open minds. We need to pick up real books and read them.

More..

..here, this time by Alan Dunn, on the poor old Futurist.

The Futurist. The poor old Futurist..

..here, in a loving work by Peter McCaughey.

Of Time and the City

Was the cinema that Mark Kermode and Terence Davies sat in for their Culture Show interview the Futurist on Lime Street? The Futurist: the very same cinema that the characters visit in Davies' masterpiece, Distance Voices, Still Lives. The Futurist: the cinema that, in a cruel irony given its central location in the present European Capital of Culture, lies ruined, the botched job on its beautiful, original sign like a spit in the face of cinema history. And only a minute's walk from all Lime Street Station, the place where millions of tourists alight for their Capital of Culture destination. The missed opportunities! The philistine attitudes of the city council!

Let's be thankful for Terence Davies, that's what I have to say! Mark Kermode said he sobbed at the end of the Cannes screening of Davies' latest, Of Time and the City. Davies is experiencing much well-deserved attention on the international and national circuits, which as how it should be. And the interview with Kermode is timely, too, because this is the week that The Long Day Closes is released in a luxury package from the BFI.

Messiaen at the Proms

Tom Service writes here on last night's magnificent Prom from Myung-Whun Chung and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. I couldn't agree more with him. It wasn't so much of a concert as a ritual, and in the Royal Albert Hall the closest we can get indoors to Messiaen's conviction that Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum could be played in the mountains.

We should see and hear more of Chung. What a master conductor he was last night, and his wonderful French orchestra (or Chung's 'angels', as the conductor said), the model of a unique orchestra with a sound all their own. Actually, come to think of it, you can see and hear more of Chung here, in an interview made prior to a recent concert with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. (You can also watch Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Ingo Metzmacher talking about Messiaen).

Fictional non-fiction

It seems odd that a notable non-fiction prize should award a book for its fictional qualities, but this seems to be the case for the winner of the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize 2008. The coverage, presented by Kirsty Wark, contained a short feature and a mini-discussion on each contender. The most astute comments came - unsurprisingly, to my mind - from the Guardian's Claire Armistead. As is customary, Rosie Boycott interrupted her fellow judges, and not always because of overwhelming enthusiasm for what was being said. But most confusing for me was that Kate Summerskill's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: or The Murder at Road Hill House was rightly or wrongly claimed to be a real 'page-turner', meaning that amongst a number of other reasons, her book won because it didn't read quite like normal non-fiction books. This judgement concerns me. If prizes such as this Samuel Johnson have an effect on the reading public's tastes for non-fiction, then are we to see a shift in such habits towards non-fiction that is not so dogged by conventional forms of research? Perhaps not. The non-fiction reading public are surely a discerning crowd, although this may not be true if we include readers of autobiographies. And if we don't include this genre in the category of non-fiction, does this mean that non-fiction deals almost exclusively with historical subject matter? Well, yes, judging by the short list of the Samuel Johnson Prize. Four of the six books (including the winner) take us back in time, and the other two (Mark Cocker's Crow Country and Tim Butcher's Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart) blend the author's experiences in the present (tantamount to travel writing) with a historical undertow.

Those who didn't walk away with the prize must feel oddly defeated at the overwhelming judgement that their book didn't win because it failed to read like fiction. And why did academic writing come in, yet again, for a battering? I think it was Rosie Boycott who said that the refreshing quality of all the books on the short list was that they weren't written like 'academic books that remain unread on the dusty shelves of libraries' (or along these lines). Was it necessary to malign both the work of academics and libraries in the process of puffing up the contenders?

The unfortunate ones:
Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher
Crow Country by Mark Cocker
The Whisperers by Orlando Figes
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French
The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross

My Top Pierre-Laurent Aimard Recordings

With its unerring sense of liquid flow and structural rhythm, Aimard's disc of Debussy's Images and Etudes is up there with the best of them. He plays the music as if fresh off the page. It's Debussy as I feel Debussy should be played: as a modern, revolutionary, composer. Not one phrase goes by without Aimard's fine pointing. He's like a medieval craftsman, honing the sharp and smooth contours of cathedral stone with appropriate character and charm.

His Beethoven concerti are no less modern or charming. What I think he projected in last night's Proms Beethoven Rondo was an impish sense of fun; the contrary, therefore, of the serious heavyweight. Mitsuko Uchida's approach is similar, but she is more mercurial, whereas Aimard is much more statuesque. In his Beethoven cycle with Harnoncourt, there is all of the above. He wipes away layers of accumulated dust on these scores, and you come away from each concerto with a revived sense of Beethoven's artistic conception.

Who better to play the dauntingly polyphonic Ives than Aimard? Refreshing levels of light and shade; monumental contrapuntal definition; emotional candour; massive dynamic range - these you can expect in abundance in his recording of the Concord Sonata. In the final movement, that particular quality Ives's music has of drifting away like fog into nothingness is conveyed by Aimard's startling touch. Wow.

What can be said about his formidable Ligeti Etudes? Except that it is perhaps one of the most legendary recordings of solo piano music ever committed to vinyl, tape, or disc, or whatever. His virtuosity is frightening (how can one human play all of these notes at once!), especially in the case of L'escalier du diable and Coloana Infinita, which will leave you shaken.

But there's so much more in his back catalogue with Warner Classics, and now that he's signed to Deutsche Grammophon, hopefully we'll see Aimard recordings more frequently that lately we have been used to.

BBCBBCBBCBBCBBCBBC

Proms. It started last night, and to my mind with an old-style programme that surely Sir Henry Wood would have been proud of. It was a refreshing alternative to the concert-length work of the Andrew Davis era, and the familiar style of overture-concerto-symphony, which they would never do on the First Night, anyway. But I was outraged, after a moving performance of Strauss' Four Last Songs was followed by a grossly insensitive plug for the celebrity guest's programme: Dragon's Den. At this point I realised what On An Overgrown Path was talking about after all. A number of responses on the Radio 3 discussion board express equal outrage; though I am also outraged by some of their comments, like the one which passed over Pierre-Laurent Aimard's appearance without so much of a mention of his actual name. How rude. Obviously some of these people know nothing about piano playing or its repertoire. (One such 'commentator' described Aimard's playing as 'four square' and Aimard himself as a 'note-thumper'. I'm sorry, but these people really know nothing about piano playing. Aimard's attention to dynamics in the solo Carter piece was phenomenal. And how wonderful to have such a piece played in the presence of six thousand very quiet, attentive people, most of whom will have booked for the Mozart Oboe Concerto and Strauss' Four Last Songs. No doubt most of them will have left the Royal Albert Hall deeply unappreciative of Carter's sharp, bold creation, but the genius of the Proms is to let them have a go.)

BBC Proms, if you are reading (and I doubt that they will be), I urge you to end this crass self-advertising immediately. It doesn't happen during your wildly frequent sports coverage, and music deserves to be treated with much more sensitivity and respect than the lowest common denominator pastime that is sport. There's nothing wrong with having celebrities enthusing about their love for the music, but stop at drawing analogies between the musical process and their chosen skills (in last night's case, business), which is another way of advertising your less-esteemed products. Make sure you bring back the real commentators - the person from the London Sinfonietta, for one; Phillip Hensher for another - and keep them there. Take Hazelwood and his crew back into the auditorium, rather than in that dreary studio in which the guests are at the other end of the couch - or London. And make the fonts bigger and more elegant. I love the Proms so much that I'd like everything about it to be perfect. But most of all, most of all, congratulations on the First Night, which was a wonderful melee of music (which did have structure and did make sense); and don't listen to any one who thinks otherwise. (I mean, some of these people on the discussion board don't even know who Pierre-Laurent Aimard is. Need I say more?)

The blog's the thing? (2)

Perhaps our master blogger has yet to materialise, however paradoxical that might be. Reading writers from the past, I can't resist thinking about how they would respond to the demands of this frustrated medium. The blog, as far I can see it, might have been Walter Benjmain's medium of choice. Though unfinished because of his untimely, tragic death (would Benjamin have kept the mosaic quality had he completed it?), it's possible that Benjamin's Arcades Project would have been written today as a blog. With its rhizomatic, mutli-media possibilities, Benjamin's Arcades blog will have taken in videos, photographic images, and, as I say - and utterly crucial in view of its extant structure - rhizomatic links to a myriad other sources, resources and blogging territories.

Many blogs are multi-generic, blending diaries, virtual art installations, photographic narratives, polemics, rants, essays, and recommended links, 'stumble-upon' stylee. In short, blogs, though they exist chronologically, are non-linear and sometimes gloriously mutli-voiced. Mikhail Bakhtin might have appreciated the blogosphere, similarly Thomas De Quincey. At one point in his Confessions of an Opium-Eater, De Quincey even indulges in a spot of self-referentiality, describing his own text's digressive method via a reference to Piranesi's Imaginary Prisons:

Some of them represented vast Gothic halls: on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery . . . expressive of enormous power put forth, and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself; follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose, at least, that his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on which again Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld; and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours: and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall.

Upper gloom of the hall. An apt image, this, coupled with the image of infinity, of the potential infinitude of the blogosphere. Perhaps we could forgo the desperation implied by De Quincey's account, but our wish would surely be to retain the sense of the artist-hero 'busy on his aspiring labours', replaced in this day and age by the seemingly relentless tapping-away at the keyboard of the ambitious blogger.

Blogger as 'artist-hero'? Still we struggle with this weather-beaten blog of ours. We return to Sutherland's point, which is, essentially, to ask where our master blogger is. Will one step forward and offer themselves, like Piranesi, the artist-hero, 'busy on his aspiring labours as he struggles upward towards some elusive pinnacle of serenity from which he may view the mysteries of human existence embodied in the events of his own life'? (Grevel Lindop, introduction to Oxford World's Classics edition of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, 1985.) It's fascinating to consider whether De Quincey might have given the blogosphere a second mouse-click.

The blog's the thing?

John Sutherland, as always, argues convincingly about the dwindling presence of lit-crit in our lives. Well, mostly papers. He refers to the recent case of the Los Angeles Times, a publication that has cut back its coverage of all things literary, shoving it in a murky corner of the comments pages. I can say in all honesty that if this happened to the Guardian, I would be devastated; I look forward to Saturdays precisely for its Review, a richly comprehensive resource for those who can't afford - or don't want to afford - the Times Literary Supplement. The Guardian is the only British newspaper that offers coverage of this kind and extent. I deplore the way the Sunday Times houses their reviews in a gaudy, advert-infested colour supplement that looks no different from their style or holidays sections. Their recent redesign made no attempt to redress this issue. On the other hand, the Guardian has both content and design spot-on. Call me a newspaper fetishist, but I do like to hold a well-designed publication in my hands.

I've digressed slightly. Sutherland's blog post blames the dwindling presence (I can't say 'death of', because it sounds too final, and I don't agree with it, anyway) of lit-crit on three main factors: our age's concern for all things 'sexy' (literary criticism is not sexy); academics (who aren't sexy, but that isn't the only point made by Sutherland); and lit-crit's emigration from print to online forums. This last factor brings in the much-weathered blog, which has been blamed by other eminent people for the decline in critical, even literacy, standards, all of which doesn't bode well for the future of literary criticism and writing at all. Sutherland points out that 'writing against the clock, bloggers often write hastily and thoughtlessly. The blogosphere, under pressure, is doing for literary style - the elegance, for example, of a John Carey or an AS Byatt - what texting has done for punctuation'. There is truth in what Sutherland says here about the blogger writing against the clock. But really, I fail to understand why this has to be so. The example he gives of his favourite blogger whose beyond-blogging commitments forced him go on sabbatical testifies to the nature of blogging itself: being a less than even part-time activity, the blogger must make a substantial commitment to blogging if s/he is to maintain writing standards. Writing hastily doesn't do writing any good - from basic intelligibility to the more ambitious qualities of elegance and concision. And yet you would think that the effect of such time pressures on a generation's relationship to writing - in texts, on blogs, in emails - would make us all speedier thinkers and producers. But of course, the evolutions in our language nurtured (or de-natured) by new technologies such as mobile phones and the Internet has had the drastic effect (as some would say) of lowering standards to below even basic levels of intelligibility. It's a situation in which English is continually forced through a a graphic pinhole in order to save the time and effort of forming full-length words.

How does all this relate to standards in literary criticism? Is the blog the right home for literary criticism? Normblog's regular Writer's Choice feature confirms that yes, the blog can be the proper home for literary criticism. But there are other online forums beyond blogging itself that can function as the home for literary criticism. Hamish Hamilton's new, free online magazine, Five Dials looks to set industry standards. Its contents may not be exclusively oriented to literary criticism, but it does feature writing that would persuade even the most dyed-in-the-wool lit-crit jeremiah that all is not lost.

But online literary magazines do not count, precisely because they are not produced in the same way as the blog post. Surely all contributions to online journals are subject first to the writer's own editing process and continual scrutinisation by hand or on exhaustively saved Word documents; they will also be proof-read by an independent mind - the publication's staff member or writer's friend or professional colleague; and then the final stages of proofing will be done as the finished product is scrutinised for mistakes and presentation errors. For the blogger, all of this is executed by the same person, squeezed into a corner of a daily schedule. Blogging, really, does not share with its other more esteemed formats the luxury of time or energy from - as outlined above - all directions. This is why the online magazine doesn't count; it differs from the printed version in final destination alone. (Correct me if I am wrong.)

So Sutherland is correct in his assumptions about the hastily-written and poorly-structured blog post. This environment surely cannot hold the vaunted jewels of literary criticism. Blog posts are invariably 'stumbled upon', as is reflected in the title of the bookmark engine. Bibliophiles are unlikely to fall head over heels for the Kindle or other such new reading technologies, demonstrating the fact that dedicated readers are mostly unwilling to do on-screen reading for long periods of time. If this most discerning community of readers promised to deliver bold new blogging forms, then we are surely out of luck. The very people who are likely to read and write the kind of literary criticism of which Sutherland speaks remain attached to the physical actuality of books, with all the writing and editing processes that lie behind it intact.

Memory Map

It's been a week since I was there. Still no answers about the people standing up in a sort-of circle. What was their point? I'll never know. Or perhaps I'll find out years down the line in a newspaper report I'll chance across in the public records office of Manchester Central Library that I will be consulting for some reason or other. Who knows?

He was ripped, as they say, standing up proud at the bottom of the mountainous stairs to the MEN Arena. A display of masculine pride and beauty at the sunny centre of a day uncommon to Manchester's inclement life. Shining above his seated - more modest, dressed - friend, he defied all possible criticisms for his not being in work or college.

So soon after this midday machismo, the borderline of the city, cut off suddenly into the hinterland of Strangeways. On the day, something held us from venturing further. Perhaps it was memory of the hostile Cheetham Hill Road, where, except for the synagogue that now houses the Jewish Museum, history has been erased.

The heat is on...

From a man who has declared he can't provide a solution to society's problems to, er, this.

Homomania

Hasn't there been so much homophobia in the news over the past week? Sir Ian McKellen, a modern gay saint if there ever could be one, hit the nail in the coffin of the institutions that love to whip up hatred for gay people. Wonderfully precise stuff. And of course, Bishop Gene Robinson was no less eloquent.

Amongst all the pointless twaddle over 'h o m o s e x u a l i t y', a brighter future is celebrated here for Cuban gays.

Granta 102: The New Nature Writing

Evolution thrusts some things forward and consigns other things to oblivion. Eco-systems, as we know, are very delicate. Or, like Robert Macfarlane, you could call this the phenomenon of 'ghosts', a situation in which certain humans are somehow 'out-evolved' by their natural surroundings. Macfarlane writes about a group of such people in - where else but - East Anglia, focusing on Eric Wortley, an 98 year old farmer, who in those ninety eight years has barely left his farm, having visited Norwich only once and London, never. Eric Wortley is intrinsically part of the landscape that he has tended for all of his life, continuing the ancient agrarian lifestyle that no longer exists as a widespread fact of life in our world - a consequence, as Macfarlane outlines, of mechanisation at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Historically, the idea of ghost species has been confined to the non-human kingdoms. But sitting in Eric's kitchen that January day, it seemed clear that there were also human ghosts: types of place-faithful people who had been out-evolved by their environments, and whose future disappearance was almost assured.

Robert Macfarlane's portrait of ghost-species in East Anglia is both moving and imbued with the kind of deep melancholy for the loss of things that can be found in Sebald. (It seems odd that as far as I've read in the magazine, no mention of Sebald has been made.)

Elsewhere in this beautiful, wide-ranging, and fascinating edition is Paul Farley's and Niall Griffiths' dialogue on the housing estate in which they both grew up in Netherley, Liverpool. It too examines the drastic imbalance between the human and nature, particularly in the piece's conclusion, in which both writers talk about the brutality of children towards animals; in this example, humans loom horribly large over nature. It's as if the mutilated cats of which Griffiths speaks have borne the brunt of human resentment at being 'out-natured'; denied the conditions of creaturely stability that maintain the human's own delicate (psycho-) bio-system. Farley's and Griffiths' piece blends sociological and cultural observations with each writer's memories, testifying to Jason Cowley's view in the Editorial that the new nature writing admits of many genres and modes of writing.

One of the other highlights so far are some entries from the notebooks of the late Roger Deakin. A treasure from a truly wonderful human being.

Arise, Sir Salman...

Booker of the Bookers.

Lament for a Modest Building

A myriad objects, stories, anecdotes, photographs, buildings: they all structure the haphazard maps of our memories. In the attempt to remember, recall, recollect, we turn to these things in order to revive lost moments. But what happens when this situation is reversed? What happens when we plunder the memory of such lost moments to gain access to lost objects? This makes for a disorienting experience. I have found myself in this very situation since Tuesday.

I live across the road from a wonderful park. It has a beautiful ornamental lake with an island, closed off to humans by the ducks and swans; its magnificent trees chart the seasons, particularly in the summer when they wrap us in their vernal embrace. In the middle of this landscape is a modest though handsome manor house, once a residence and much later an art school, but latterly a dilapidated habitat for vandalism and mass pigeon gatherings. All conspired to make the building a ruin, despite the fact that two pleasant walled gardens, very much in regular use, sat beside it; it was therefore a building aching to be put back into use, possibly with the community in mind. But a fire broke out in the early hours of Tuesday, and the local council acted swiftly to demolish. One day the dog walkers circle a ruin, the following day they peer into barbarous rubble, their hopes and dreams for a sadly neglected building whacked out of existence by the wrecker's ball.

And a thousand ideas wiped out of existence too. I had hoped that the people who govern us might have made this building work for the community, not least the young people whose itinerant lives might have found a warm and safe shelter for a few hours here and there in the winter months. No; gone forever. A community's history is also wiped out with it, so the past and the future are nullified in one violent act against a weak structure.

This building wasn't an international or even national landmark, but it was one in the sense derived simply from the word itself: that it marked the land, for the people who traversed the park or who viewed it from the periphery. All such navigation points for the eye and the walking body are somehow put off kilter by this negativising of space. It seems odd and painful to look at the pile of rubble, but much more startling to walk by it and feel the increase of light caused by its fresh absence.

Eerie, too, that only a few weeks ago did my friend and I decide to take our camera with us on a mid-afternoon walk through the park. Memory maps are not necessarily linear, which is why we considered it significant to capture signs of the building's dilapidation, as if recording the obvious reasons for its demolition (which might trip off the tongue of the philistine councillors who issue that very instruction).

The hopeless smears of grey paint make their odd judgement on the vandal's art. Look, this building attracted the wrong sort. It was a danger to the community. Something had to be done. Perhaps the vandal might have received rehabilitation inside the building - had it survived. Disconsolate, depressed youths might have found a new purpose.

When buildings and objects disappear, so too do the things kept in mind around them. Quite possibly a million memories and thoughts are now desperately clinging to a great many minds, quivering in the wake of this sad event. There's no turning back, though, as we all know. Re-creating what is lost defeats, fairly literally, the object.

Two Random Things

I love this because it manages to be both the object and its representation at the same time. I remember arriving at Tate Britain for the first ever time when I arrived in London for university. I was thrilled to be there, like I was entering a cathedral where I could worship art and where art was worshipped. Roy Lichtenstein had died only that day or the day before, and beside one of his paintings was a token of the Tate's respect for the passing of his life: a single flower in a small vase. An understated gesture for an artist whose work in which life was writ large.

I love this because Pipilotti Rist controls her performance right down to the last detail of wearing a dress that provides no support for her breasts. In this way, she emphasises the comedy of the performance itself, at the same as she reminds the viewer that the artist's attention to sculptural detail and composition did not end with painting and sculpture itself.

Time Slips Maps?

It's possible.

Time Slips