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| Viz's Roger Mellie to curate Tate Britain exhibition The cartoon's team will take charge of their own section of the Tate as part of a season on social satireRead more from today's diaryThere will be something just a little different coming up soon among the masterworks at Tate Britain – the world as seen by Viz magazine. Or more specifically, the world as it appears through the careworn eyes of Roger Mellie, the foul mouthed, uncensorable Man On The Telly. This week represents a milestone for the scabrous, phenomenally successful Viz, 30 years old and celebrated on Tuesday with an exhibition of original artwork at the Cartoon Museum in London. But final proof of the magazine's journey into the establishment comes next June, when we learn that the team will take charge of their own section of the Tate as part of a season on social satire. Nothing has been ruled out, so the expectation is displays of work featuring the full list of characters, such as Biffa Bacon, Sid The Sexist, Buster Gonad, Johnny Fartpants, Spoilt Bastard and Mrs Brady Old Lady. The Viz cartoons, highly regarded by those who know about comedy and artworks, will take their place alongside the traditional satire of Hogarth and Cruickshank, and Tate types say they will blend in nicely. Roger, as curator, will write the accompanying plaques. Profanity is all he knows. Sensitive souls, be warned.Tate BritainComicsArtVizNewspapers & magazinesMagazinesHugh Muirguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
To Sea and Back: The Heroic Life of the Atlantic Salmon by Richard Shelton Giles Foden is carried along by a holistic view of the salmon's lifecycleWhen Richard Shelton's first book The Longshoreman: A Life at the Water's Edge was published in 2004 it was acclaimed by Telegraph and Guardian readers alike. The main reason for its cross-cultural appeal was the engaging prose style in which Shelton described life as a waterfowler, fisherman and biologist; but there was something more to it. Here was a man who had lived a tweedy country life and was a keen angler and hunter, but who also had ecological knowledge and scientific credentials (he was director of the Freshwater Fisheries Laboratory in Pitlochry from 1982 to 2001) that are perhaps more usually associated with left-leaning environmentalists.In his new book Shelton continues in the same vein, but with rather more tweediness flowing alongside the science. Perhaps this is inevitable given that his subject is the extraordinary and mysterious life of the Atlantic salmon, for at least a century the fish of choice for anglers who can afford the very best waders. The skeleton of the book dramatises the life of an individual salmon as it progresses from Scottish burn to the Atlantic and back again ("less than a short January day had passed since the lordly cock salmon had exchanged the cooling sea for the biting chill of the river in winter").This exploration of the lifecycle of the species is supplemented by information about the fish's evolutionary context and threats to its survival, from global warming to overfishing. Very frequently, personal anecdote and historical reflection interrupt the scientific narrative as Shelton puts the salmon in a human context, from the Pict who incised a design of a salmon on a monolith, to a Victorian ghillie.Sometimes the human context is that of Shelton's own family (we visit the ghillie's life "through the eyes of his granddaughter, Catherine Forrest, my dear wife's late aunt"). On other occasions, the context is that of the various scientific endeavours in which he has been involved, as when he shocks his scientific peers inspecting fish traps on the Girnock Burn by producing a Victorian, leather-covered flask: "Drawing it triumphantly out from among layers of tweed and pouring a 'wee suppie' of the golden liquid into the measure, I asserted that surely now, under such majestic surroundings, there could be no better occasion than this one for my new colleagues to share a nip of 'the auld kirk'."We would all wish to be permitted such indulgences and they do have a place in a book of this kind, but now and then the onset of what used to be called "colour writing" threatens to obscure Shelton's ostensible subject.One of the focuses of anecdote is the great Victorian naturalist Frank Buckland, surgeon to the 2nd Life Guards, author of Curiosities of Natural History and pioneering inspector of salmon fisheries. Buckland was a fascinating character who did sterling work in enabling salmon populations to recover from the ravages of the industrial revolution and setting the foundations for the modern revival of the species on the Tweed and other rivers. We are told that Buckland favoured field mice on toast for tea; but did we really also need to know about the uses of ratskin in clothing manufacture, or the chances of hippophagy solving a working-class food crisis?Chairman of the Buckland Foundation, Shelton himself is very much in the same mould. By the end of the book you realise that like The Longshoreman, it is really about him – about his passion for the natural world and the individuals who have inspired him in trying to conserve it. If, sometimes, there is too little distinction between significant and non-significant information as regards the life of the salmon, then that's fine. This is a book with a large hinterland written by someone whose outlook is genuinely holistic. At a time of ecological crisis, when there is a requirement to perceive how all parts of the environmental system interact, we need people such as Shelton to inspire us in turn.Giles Foden's Turbulence is published by Faber.Reference and languagesScience and natureSocietyGiles Fodenguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Adam Thirlwell on art and madness The other night, in the rain, in the dark, I watched Serge Bromberg's documentary on the salvaged rushes of Henri-Georges Clouzot's abandoned film from 1964: L'Enfer. According to Clouzot's meticulous storyboards, the film was about a young couple, Odette and Marcel Prieur, who own a remote hotel beside a lake. The plot, it seems, was simple: the elongations of the husband's paranoid jealousy.The everyday was to be filmed in black-and-white – the medium of realism – while the medium of fantasy was Technicolor. This was where Clouzot wanted to experiment. In colour, the husband's paranoid fantasies were offered in gorgeous hallucinations: infinite formal machinations.So I was partly there to see what Clouzot had done – this film maker so despised by my adored Nouvelle Vague film makers – as he tried to invent a film which would out-experiment them all. But really I was there, in the dark, in the rain, for Romy Schneider. I was there for her body glazed in olive oil, wrapped in cellophane. And it's true that the body of Romy Schneider was vulnerably visible: the Technicolor lilt of her hips as she waterskied, or another shot in experimental black and white, where her breasts are doubly exposed.Soon, however, I felt something else entirely. It wasn't that each individual innovation, with mirrors and inverted colour, wasn't a pleasure. But these experiments soon made me feel scared.After seeing the initial rushes, Columbia had given Clouzot an unlimited budget. And so he demented himself with form. Over four days, according to Schneider, Clouzot filmed her lips. Her lips! For four days, the makeup and lights made her lips green, or blue, and he filmed them, smoking, open-mouthed, pouting. This wasn't the end of Clouzot's meticulous mania. He had two crews on set at all times. It was meant to speed up the filming. Instead, it only led to dead-ends, to confusion. He reshot scenes in a haze of repetition. Eventually, the lead actor, Serge Reggiani, left the set. And finally Clouzot had a heart attack, at which point everyone, relieved, could end the shoot.According to the notes, Clouzot had "spent most of the 1930s in institutions, a period he obliquely referred to as 'a depression'": and as I watched I began to think that there was a strange overlap between these various conditions – personal, artistic, fictional – between his depression, his artistic experimentation, and the husband's fictional jealousy. They were all forms of paranoia, when the human becomes invaded by infinite anxiety.And this is one reason why Clouzot's film was called hell. Because we all know that hell isn't other people. Hell is when other people have disappeared.So I sat there, scared. Because this has always been what scares me most: the easy possibility of madness. Of my many fears, my greatest is the fear of going mad. It has always terrified me. And as I watched Clouzot's fragments, I developed a new inflection to this fear: the ordinary idea of madness now seemed eerily similar to the everyday practice of formal experiment. Madness seemed the reasonable result of trying to invent the new vision of Romy Schneider.And then I went to see The Museum of Everything's collection of outsider art – and the same question presented itself, just inverted. Clouzot's problem had been his unlimited commercial backing. So it was impossible for him to finish. The problem in the art of the unknown, the unexhibited, is of having no backing at all. So, it seemed, it was impossible to finish.This was obvious in the repetitive, infinite size of so much art in the museum. But it was also obvious, in miniature, in so many works' refusal of empty space. Everything had to be filled. There was no clear way of finishing. Perhaps, then, this is why the wonderful, saddening, disturbing works in the Museum of Everything are both art and not art, simultaneously. They are objects which have acquired some kind of emotional value, inseparable from living: like Emery Blagdon's constructions of wire and copper coils, which Mark Titchner calls "machines for healing that just happened to have a sculptural form".Probably the most famous artist in the Museum of Everything is Henry Darger, who wrote a 15,000-page story: The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. This strip cartoon describes a great sadness. In it, Darger tries to create a world where children are saved from the malice of adults. At a certain point in its composition, Darger added illustrations, so the story became a vast collage cartoon strip. The vastness is important, as is the fact that it's a collage. For Darger's style is a bricolage of the mass styles of others. His battle scenes are taken from film stills in magazines; the drawings of little girls are from clothes catalogues; the flowers are from children's books. Even the clouds come from cartoons. One way, therefore, of putting this problem would be to ask how far Darger has a style.Madness, wrote Foucault, is the absence of art. But if only this were true! If only there were a neat frontier between them, with flags and sentry boxes. The everyday problem is in working out how much madness one can bear; at what point a style emerges from infinite experiments, or infinite private repetitions. So although I agree with Peter Blake, who writes in the museum catalogue that the deep pleasure of this art is the "privacy" in which it was made, without the possibility of its ever being exhibited, it seems to me too difficult to be so definitive.All art is public art and it is private art. And this is a problem.One of my favourite formal experimenters is Gertrude Stein. Of these experiments, my least favourite is probably her 1,000-page The Making of Americans. But this non-novel, it occurs to me, seems to be a valuable aspect of this collage. It was, after all, a version of outsider art, since it was written around 1906, but not published until 1925, in a limited edition. And also because, in the middle of this style, so close to madness, there is this admission of experimental defeat:"Sometimes I am almost despairing. I know the being in Miss Dounor that I am beginning describing, I know the being in Miss Charles that I am soon going to be beginning describing, I know the being in Mrs Redfern, I have been describing the being in that one. I know the being in each one of these three of them and I am almost despairing for I am doubting if I am knowing it poignantly enough to be really knowing it, to be really knowing the being in any one of the three of them. Always now I am despairing."Art is when the knowledge of imaginary others is known poignantly. With that adverb, Stein bravely refutes her experiments in the depiction of character. And it moves me partly because it is an admission of fictional defeat; but also because it proves her sanity.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Book of the Year: 'The Help' needed no assistance Why are we naming Kathryn Stockett's The Help USA TODAY's Book of the Year? Well, you can't stop reading ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
The digested classic Picador, £7.99Renewed fighting in Vietnam, trouble on the Falls Road. Everywhere , new developments, new indignities. Into this uncertain climate, on the first day of term, the Kirks, a couple of the present, have decided to have a party. Not just any party; a party that is so genuinely unstructured, it needs its own five-year plan.Howard is a sociologist at Watermouth University, a liberated consciousness-conscious Marxist with a wide intellectual constituency of Maoists, squatters and inconspicuous consumers. Barbara, too, is radical in her own way. She campaigns for teenaged girls to be given the Pill and sends food parcels to IRA hunger strikers.But history has not been as kind to Barbara as it has to Howard. Since they met at Leeds University in the late 1950s, Howard has gone on to become the darling of the left thanks to his book on the paternalistic dialectics of his own marriage – not that he or other academics would have defined its theoretical construct so narrowly. After writing a number of comment pieces for the Guardian, he has spent the summer on his own – apart from his regular Wednesday afternoon horizontal explorations of RD Laing's Marxist-Freudian theory of the sexual dynamics of female undergraduates – writing his latest book, The Defeat of Privacy.After giving birth to two not-entirely wanted children, Barbara has found her consciousness raising activities to be somewhat curtailed. Yet after a number of affairs that have made their marriage revered as the iconic apotheosis of 70s liberation, and by taking deliberately non-exploitative advantage of the childcare opportunities offered by Howard's bra-less Sandinistas – "it would be wrong to dishonour their effort with a bourgeois financial transaction" – she has begun to spread her wings a little and, on occasion, she now goes to London for a "wicked weekend" where she indulges in a little shopping at Biba and a lot of sex with drama students half her age.The party is now in full swing. Howard toys with his Zapata moustache as he moves from room to room. There is one woman he doesn't know, who introduces herself as Miss Callendar, a new member of the English faculty. "Tell me," he asks, "where do you stand on the permanent revolution of existential thought?" "I'm just a 19th century liberal," she says, "who happens to be interested in story."Story is something that should occupy Howard more. He has already read enough of The History Man to understand that he is just a vehicle of satire, a man of indefatigable false consciousness, and that as such his character will remain shallow and undeveloped. But then, perhaps satire has its own historical inevitability and there is something to be said for starring in the definitive campus novel."I would like to show you my semiotics," he purrs."I don't think so, Mr Kirk," she replies.She leaves and he retires to his basement study, where a third-year student, Felicity McPhee, is reading a manuscript of The Defeat of Privacy. "You are invading my privacy," he says. "I'm no longer a lesbian," she replies and he reluctantly unzips his flies to release his means of production, looking up to the skylight to see Miss Callendar looking down. What he doesn't notice, because people like Howard never do, is the desperation of his old friend Henry Beamish, with whose wife Myra he once slept, as he puts his arm though the bathroom window.The next morning Howard reasserts his feminist cultural identity by leaving the washing-up to Barbara and drives towards the campus, stopping en route at the flat of Flora Beniform, senior lecturer in developmental psychology for an intellectual and fluid exchange."What did you make of Henry's injury," she asks."It was an accident," he says."For someone who believes in historical determinism, you can be remarkably stupid," she answers, as he deterministically writhes on top of her. "If you want to see me again, I have a half-hour diary slot on Thursday evening."The constant heavy-handed juxtaposition of theory and practice might have wearied some readers who had long since got the point, but the dialectics of satire are unforgiving, so now we must follow Howard to the social science faculty, where he is to be found furthering his own ends with a conspiracy about a proposed guest lecture by the racist geneticist, Dr Mangel, before rearranging the bourgeois furniture construct of teacher and taught for his first seminar of the term on normative theories of reductive consensus."You are an anal fascist," he shouts at Mr Carmody, an unfortunate beblazered student, who has dared to write out an essay – an essay laced with Weberian imperialist assumptions – in full. "You have failed the course."Mr Carmody is unhappy about both his marks and his treatment and complains to Professor Marvin, the head of department, and in due course Howard is summoned to his office to explain himself."Carmody is a neo-Nazi," Howard says. "He deserves to fail.""Yes, yes," Marvin replies. "He is an inadequate student, but I have read his papers and I feel he is a borderline pass.""Then that just shows the limitations of subjectivity."With the kind of relentless satirical determinism the reader has come to expect, the book follows its course through comedy and pathos, through departmental set-pieces and Barbara's unhappiness, to its inexorable conclusion with Carmody accusing Howard of gross moral turpitude for his relationship with Felicity.Howard, of course, shrugs off such charges with his usual liberal panache. Partly this is because he knows that much as Bradbury mocks the emptiness of sociology, he also secretly admires it and longs himself for the applause of its self-congratulation. But mainly because he knows that Bradbury is an English academic and that there is nothing more historically inevitable in modern fiction than a psychologically unconvincing catharsis to bring about a desired conclusion."I'm aware I'm the only one who's stood as a mirror to your flawed radicalism throughout the novel," says Miss Callendar. "But for no apparent reason, I have now decided to sleep with you and defend you against dismissal from the university."So there we must leave Watermouth. Carmody's departure from the university goes unnoticed by all, while Howard continues to dazzle. But there is time for one more piece of historic inevitability, the fictive symmetery. So as the pages come to an end, we see the Kirks having yet another party. Only this time it's Barbara who puts her arm through the bathroom window.FictionJohn Craceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |