Midsummer.
Posted: June 21, 2017 Filed under: Meteorological, Public Announcements | Tags: Midsummer, Peadar O'Donaghue, Positive thinking Comments Off on Midsummer.
Sunset seen from Crystal Palace. © David Secombe.
Peadar O’Donaghue:
I wish to die on
A Summer Solstice night with a fish and chip sky,
death kissing me slow and taking me quick
under salty stars speckling the seaside malty dome.
Fuck winter when nothing more can be said
to make saccharine of what’s gone before,
I’ll quit while I’m ahead,
not washed out, wasted,
wistful for lost wishes, words and cadaverous dreams.
Let the tolling bells be
drop dead gorgeous midsummer night dead-ringer brunettes
or doppelganger blondes, light-headed in rosy oblivion.
May my life be lost in space, and earth’s other worlds,
let all meaning be beeps and dots and dashes and x and o’s.
I’ll check cheques and balances on the tightrope
of unequal parallels like comet tails in midnight flight
flashing listless lights bright across the beauty of barren skies.
Shooting words like fish in a barrel
sending messages of blood shaped craft
in drunken elevation of life and quantum delight,
as heady giddy twirling unborn space-age masses might
shift the warm succulent truculent air
in the shifting drifting shape of yourself,
as you are, as you were, as you will be,
in a world without end or beginning.
You who are not alone, are all alone.
You who know well that
those who are dead are gone, and not gone.
All that is, was.
The ghosts are the breeze that push you,
through the darkness they guide you,
their warm voices cannot forget you,
shouting loud while the lost world sleeps.
Tonight the cosmos ponders large
on everything in nothing
‘til the yawning chasm claims life,
in sweet embrace, leaving death alone,
soft surrendering as day to night in the
licentious vicissitudes of inexorable desire.
© Peadar O’Donaghue 2017.
‘Sweet Thames Flow Softly’.
Posted: December 31, 2015 Filed under: Architectural, Meteorological, The Thames, The Thames | Tags: Albert Bridge, Ewan McColl, fog on the Thames, James McNeill Whistler, London fog, pea souper, Sweet Thames Flow Softly 1 Comment
Albert Bridge in fog, 1st November 2015. © David Secombe
Happy New Year from The London Column.
Give a little Whistler.
Posted: November 6, 2015 Filed under: Architectural, Artistic London, Bohemian London, Meteorological, The Thames | Tags: 5th of November, Albert Bridge, flinging a pot of paint in the public's face, foggy day in London town, Guy Fawkes night, James Whistler, John Ruskin, Thames in fog Comments Off on Give a little Whistler.
The Thames at Chelsea in fog, November 2015. © David Secombe
From J.M. Whistler’s ’10 o’clock Lecture’, 1885, reprinted in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, 1892:
And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before us …
The recent fog in London, despite its inconvenience for air travellers, commuters, etc., proved to be quite a popular meteorological event: instead of invoking Bleak House’s November gloom it made the city look impossibly glamorous. The above photo was taken on the evening of Sunday, 1st November, during a wander along the Chelsea Embankment: Whistler territory. The great American painter was a local from 1859 until his death in 1903, and his ‘Nocturnes’ of the Chelsea/Battersea foreshore transform the Victorian industrial Thames into a Japanese world of shadows and fugitive lights. (Whistler was fond of applying musical terms to painting, so his nocturnes derive from Chopin: by the same token, Debussy was a fan and his orchestral Nocturnes return the compliment, evoking the Seine in the same mood as the painter’s Thames.)
James McNeill Whistler: Nocturne: Blue and Silver (Battersea Reach) 1872.
James McNeill Whistler: Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, 1872.
James McNeill Whistler: Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea 1871
James McNeill Whistler: Nocturne: Blue and Gold (Old Battersea Bridge) 1872-5.
The final nocturne was ‘The Falling Rocket’, a sort of proto-Abstract Impressionist take on fireworks at Cremorne Gardens, a pleasure garden located roughly where Lots Road Power Station is now. You don’t need me to tell you that this is the painting condemned by Ruskin in terms incendiary enough (‘I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’) for artist to sue critic. Whistler won the case but was awarded joke damages and went bankrupt. No matter. Posterity has found in Whistler’s favour; he even has his own statue now, on the north side of Battersea Bridge.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler: Nocturne: Black and Gold (the falling rocket) 1875.
This post is really a couple of years late, as there was a reportedly excellent show of Whistler’s Thames paintings at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. I say ‘reportedly’ because I was marooned on the south coast at the time and missed the bloody thing. But I’m back now, which is why I chanced to be walking along the Chelsea Embankment on Sunday night … (As it happens, I am writing this on Guy Fawkes night. Even in the pissing rain, I can look out of my 6th floor window and see the whole city lit up by sparkling lights. Some of them are even fireworks.) D.S.
Sugary Fun.
Posted: January 30, 2014 Filed under: Architectural, Artistic London, Meteorological, Monumental, The Thames | Tags: Anish Kapoor, Britart, Carsten Holler, Dorothy Salcedo, Hyundai sponsorship, Robert Hughes, Tate Modern, Weather Project Comments Off on Sugary Fun.
Tate Modern. © David Secombe 2004.
Robert Hughes, The New Shock of the New:
People need beauty. … And so, we seek out zones of silence and contemplation, arenas for free thought and regimented feeling. Museums have supplanted the church as places, both of social congress and of civic pride. They are the new cathedrals. And despite the dubious quality of some of the stuff that actually goes in them, or even outside them, there’s a growing hunger for the direct experience of art on a museum wall.
David Secombe:
Robert Hughes’s eloquent classification of galleries as cathedrals (from his 2004 documentary) is especially apt for Tate Modern. This post-industrial monument, the most popular modern art gallery anywhere, is situated plumb south of St Paul’s: twin bastions of belief squaring off across the Thames. You don’t have to be a religious person to love St Paul’s; but I don’t know how Christians who have lost their faith feel about it, or any other cathedral. Does it become a poignant symbol of loss, a reminder of disappointment?
Tate terrace, looking north. © David Secombe 2010.
Tate Modern has just announced that Hyundai has taken over (from Unilever) the sponsorship for its major space for new work, the Turbine Hall. The inaugural work for the Hall, Louise Bourgeois’s majestic Maman, was bound to be a tough act to follow, but since those spiders we’ve been treated to Anish Kapoor’s gargantuan ear trumpet, Dorothy Salcedo’s vandalism of the floor (which injured at least one unsuspecting elderly lady) and Carsten Holler’s slides, the hit of half-term: ingratiating, family-friendly, corporate-friendly installations that make good copy for broadsheet and tabloid alike. It has been hard to escape a growing sense that the Hall has become a sort of Battersea Funfair for the Boden set, a place where entertainment masquerades as cultural engagement.
Bankside. © David Secombe 2010.
Away from the vast Hall, the nannyish curation of the regular galleries seems intended to prevent the art from speaking for itself: one feels manipulated by an entity determined to impose itself between the art and the viewer. An unsympathetic observer might see Tate Modern as a temple underwritten by the bling of ‘BritArt’, an edifice dedicated to the Traceys and Damiens beloved of feature writers and plutocrats alike. Outside its walls one sees the monolithic, zone-changing retail development that follows artistic success like a blight: the contemporary equivalent of trinket-shit peddlers blistering the walls of medieval cathedrals. Bankside is Southbank east. (Psychogeographers will doubtless point to the golden age of Bankside, when The Globe, The Rose and The Swan premiered Shakespeare and his contemporaries, whilst punters not interested in the fate of Desdemona or the Duchess of Malfi could watch the bear-baiting. Modern Bankside doesn’t offer any bear pits, but there’s a Pizza Express and at least one Starbucks.)
But the building remains sublime, even if its function as a gallery is compromised by the fact that (like the Guggenheim galleries in New York and Bilbao) its architecture overpowers the greater proportion of its content. And it would be bilious to deny that the Turbine Hall occasionally hosts something really good. As Robert Hughes concluded in The New Shock of the New: ‘We’re seeking value, looking for meaning, a place outside ourselves that tells us there more to life than our everyday concerns and needs. You could see this in the crowds gathering for Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern. Hundreds of monofilament lamps that suppressed all colours except yellow, shedding a gold light through gloomy air thickened by fog machines underneath a mirrored ceiling. People lay on the floor, staring up at themselves reflected in that ceiling, lit by the pale yellow light of their new sun god’.
Weather Project installation, Tate Modern. © David Secombe 2004.
‘The success of the Weather Project with its two million visitors shows that the hunger for new art is as strong as ever. The idea that aesthetic experience provides a transcendent understanding is at the very heart of art. It fulfils a deep human need. And despite the decadence, the confusion and the brouhaha, the desire to experience it, live with it and learn from it remains immortal’.
The London Column 