saving Clerkenwell and slow dancing

I like my job. Or rather, I still like my job. I've worked for the AJ for a record seven months now (yes, this is the longest amount of time I've ever had a 'proper' job) and while it was a bit harry coming back after Christmas, it's settled down a bit now and things are happier again. Already today, two interesting things have happened which exemplify why I like being here. I got a package in the post from the Press Officer at the City of London. Apparently the Planning and Transportation Committee is developing a 'Chancery Lane Area Enhancement Scheme' which is indicative of the fact that they must not have anything better to do or that they've been heavily leaned on by some fantastically effective lobbyists for the folks who work in the Royal Courts. A few things made me chuckle about the information they sent over. Firstly, I live in the Chancery Lane Area, and apart from constant building works, I can't really see that there's any seriously urgent need to 'improve' the area. The primary point that the CLAES publicity seems to be making is that they want Chancery Lance et environs to become pedestrianised. Again I don't really have any complaints to make about this proposal, and I do think Chancery Lane, and especially the streets around Lincoln's Inn Fields, would be much lovelier were they not filled with black cabs and delivery trucks, but again, surely the C of L has better things to spend its time and money on. When all's said and done however, I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth and I'll happily be nodding along with the proposers at the launch party for the public consultation next week in the Old Hall of Lincoln's Inn.

Another thing I can sometimes do a lot of is picture research for articles being published in print or online. It's not the most stimulating of tasks, but good things often come of it. This morning I was searching for an image of the new Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Centre in New York City. I'm not a big fan of the AT Hall - it looks like a shark's gaping jaws jutting up above the sea to swallow a gargantuan mouthful of sardines (yeah, I may have been watching some David Attenborough last night...). But while I was looking for these pics, I found a cool image of three dancers projected onto the side of Lincoln Centre.

What is this interesting looking thing, thought I and a few google searches later, I knew all I needed to know. It was a piece of installation art created by David Michalek where dancers perform about 5 seconds of movement which is then digitally slowed into a 10 minute film. The piece premiered at the Lincoln Centre Festival in July, projected on a triptych of 50-foot screens mounted outside the theatre - as shown in the picture above.

I've written about the 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge before, specifically in relation to Cy Twombly and his wonderful painting Treatise on the Veil, but whereas Muybridge was limited by the constraints of early photographic technology, and used a sequence of less than 30 images to provide a comprehensive idea of motion, Michalek is able to use a special high-speed HD camera (typically used by the military for ballistic analysis) to record his dancers at a staggering 1,000 frames per second. The dancers Michalek records perform almost the opposite of Muybridge's galloping horses, in that he captures thousands of sequential images to slow his dancers down, not speed them up.

This is one of Michalek's videos, it's of Herman Cornejo - a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre.

The videos are almost excruciating to watch. In our go bigger, go faster culture the attention required to watch such a still-moving object for an entire 10 minutes is surprisingly difficult. But the movements are fascinating - especially when Cornejo performs a jump or a turn, suspended in air for an eternity - and the amount of perceptible detail is simply astonishing - to see literally every muscle movement - well, that's quite something. As I dancer myself, I appreciate how strange it must have been for the dancers, used to perfecting movements in mirrors, to see their technique exposed so clearly. Though I find the videos stunning [you can see more at Michalek's website http://www.slowdancingfilms.com/media.html], I also find myself in agreement with a reviewer from the NYT: 'True, pinned butterflies are easier to study. But study is no substitute for seeing them move through the world.'

Cy Twombly: Il Miglior Fabbro

So occasionally I get a bit sick of living in London and want to pack it all in for a more exciting existence in Zambia or Puglia or anywhere "exciting." Generally though, I'm pretty content living in this city, and some days I even thank my lucky stars that I get to call the capital home. Today was most definitely a star thanking kind of day. I suppose it might seem odd that it only takes an art exhibition to garner such praise, but I need my humanist batteries charged regularly. Otherwise I tend to get grouchy. And I'm not much fun when I'm grouchy...

I had been putting off going to the Cy Twombly exhibition because I didn't want to be disappointed. Although I find the building magnificent, the exhibitions drive me to despair: Duchamps, Dali, Gilbert and George, yawn, yawn, yawn. Surely it would be far more inspiring and educational for the art-viewing public to have regular exposure to less well known artists. When Nicholas Penny was appointed as the new director of the National Gallery earlier this year, one of the first things he said to the press was that blockbuster exhibitions don't teach anyone anything, and insisted he would concentrate instead on erudite shows of lesser-known artists. Finally, I thought, a man with some bloody good sense. As of yet, he hasn�t been director long enough to make good on his word, but he appears to have struck a chord with other galleries if this exhibition is anything to judge by.

The human mind must derive immense pleasure in the making of cross references, patterns, and connections in works of art; whether literature, music, or the visual, as we seem to love saying things like, �this band sounds like a cross between early David Bowie and Brahms!� or �this author is the new Hemmingway.� Twombly excels at this sort of cross-pollination and there are references, both ancient and modern, aplenty. Twombly makes no secret of his love of great poets, especially Rilke and Homer, but for me, the subtle or even unacknowledged connections were more intriguing. Twombly's early works, for instance, reminded me very much of some of the commercial work of Gary Fernandez, a modern illustrator. While the similarities are entirely tenuous (though I suppose it is possible Fernandez takes Twombly as inspiration), the vibrant, fresh, looseness of the Twombly is very evident in the illustrations of Fernandez. There�s something very illustratory (nice word, I know) in general about Twombly's early pieces which give them a surprisingly modern sensibility.























One of my favourite paintings from the exhibition, Treatise on the Veil, was entirely different from any other work displayed. Evidently these paintings were inspired by an Eadweard Muybridge photograph of a bride in motion. Muybridge was a photographic pioneer, using multiple cameras to create stop-motion action sequences of things like horses galloping or a couple dancing. Twombly�s series of six interlinked panels brilliantly echoes the concept (and the inspiration of a stop motion bride seemingly floating under her veil) while simultaneously remaking the technique into something completely new.



Quattro Stagioni, perhaps Twombly�s most well known work (the Modern's publicity for the exhibition is taken from this work), is hung in two different versions, completed roughly around the same time, 1993-95. These reminded me of something, but it took me a while to remember that, especially Estate, echoed the work of Clyfford Still, which I'd seen at an exhibition in Washington DC in 2003. You can see the difference between the two immediately, but that's hardly the point. The stylistic similarities are perhaps more intriguing. Still is far more controlled; he�s cleaner, harsher, more primitive, while Twombly is all whimsy, ragged, carefree, reckless insouciance, but it was Still's yellow painting below that I remembered and brought the resemblance to mind. I love discovering connections like these � as I'm not approaching this from an academic perspective, I don't have to consider the implications of whether they actually knew each other. I can simply enjoy the thrill of recognition and the remembrance and clarification of that recognition. I suppose it's this sort of thing that makes an unpersonal gallery exhibition into a far more personal experience.

The first two are the Twombly's, and Still's work is below.
















































































The last series of work in the exhibition is from Twombly�s 2005 Bacchus, Psilax, Mainomenos (for those non Greek speaking, anti-mythologists, Bacchus is the Roman equivalent of the Greek god of wine Dionysus, and even if you do know that, you probably don�t know that his rites were celebrated with orgies and animals being torn to pieces and their raw flesh consumed � see Euripides� The Bacchae for more fun and games). This was the only time where I felt the work on display represented something quite different to me than it did to the curators. The accompanying blurb indicated that Twombly�s initial inspiration for the work was Homer�s Iliad, which seemed sensible enough given Twombly�s classical leanings. The curators then went on to say that the brilliant, massive, red looped paintings were an expression of pure drunken abandon. Having three of the paintings in the room at once, there was little euphoria to be felt. They are marvellous pieces of work, but all I could think of was Christopher Logue�s War Music, a contemporary, pseudo-translation of the Iliad, with its haunting evocation of war, �Dust like red mist/Pain like chalk on slate. Heat like Arctic� and also �Moving at speed, but absolutely still/The arrow in the air. Death in a man/as something first perceived by accident.� In particular, the long streaks of dripped down red paint create a sense of morbid frenzy, the body exploding into a fine red mist. Not exactly jubilant...


Still, I found the exhibition to be absolutely superb (how many adverbs in one post?). I was so enamoured that I sought out a feedback form from the information desk and filled it in then and there. It basically said, �more like this please.� I hope they take my advice.