"DREADFUL TIMES"

BIBLIOFILE

2011-10-18T02:43:00.000-07:00

The life and death of the poet Ernest Dowson (1867-1900) was recalled on August 2nd 2010, by a service in Brockley & Ladywell cemetery, London SE4 to mark the renovation of his vandalised gravestone. Dowson’s literary reputation has long been in decline, and is now mainly based on the legacy of such kitsch fragments as “the days of wine and roses” and “gone with the wind”, though the contrast between the rarified imagery of Dowson’s short poems and his often miserable existence makes him a fascinating figure, a casualty of the decadent nineties.

Dowson emerges from biographical accounts as a charming dead beat who suffered for his art, and though associated with many fin-de-siècle literary figures, was a marginal, ill at ease member of the Rhymer’s Club, happier drinking absinthe and playing billiards in The Cock, a pub in Shaftesbury Avenue, or carousing in the Alhambra music hall, before either finding a night’s kip on someone’s floor, or making the long trudge back to the unprofitable family dry docking business in Limehouse. A contributor to such journals as Temple Bar, The Yellow Book and The Savoy, chain smoking, congenital TB, and thujone poisoning (the active component of absinthe) steadily wore him down, until his early death in Catford.

Very much a disciple of fellow Catholic Paul Verlaine (whose funeral he attended), Dowson’s collection Verses (1896), showcases his ornamental lyricism. The writing conveys the defeated, somnambulistic mood of a psyche that has imported the French Alexandrine, but is unable to reconcile it with Anglo-Saxon English. Often motivated by unrequited love, or guilt, these poems are cloying and painful to read, with a patina of Classical allusion. However if you excuse Dowson’s fatalism there is much that is admirable in his verse, especially a liking for the moon, night time and amorous trysts, most famously with his beloved muse Cynara. Indeed in Arnold Schoenberg’s lush yet edgy Four Orchestral Songs, Opus 22 № 1 (1916), the composer set a translation by Stefan George of the words of Dowson’s poem ‘Seraphita’…

SERAPHITA

Come not before me now, O visionary face!

Me tempest-tost, and borne along life’s passionate sea;

Troublous and dark and stormy though my passage be;

Not here and now may we commingle or embrace,

Lest the loud anguish of the waters should efface

The bright illumination of thy memory,

Which dominates the night; rest, far away from me,

In the serenity of thine abiding-place!

But when the storm is highest, and the thunders blare,

And sea and sky are riven, O moon of all my night!

Stoop down but once in pity of my great despair,

And let thine hand, though over late to help, alight

But once upon my pale eyes and my drowning hair,

Before the great waves conquer in the last vain fight.

So Dowson does have an afterlife, and is commemorated by a group of enthusiastic readers who meet each year, and manage a Facebook page on his behalf. It’s nice also to think of him playing "blind chivvy", a game of his own making that involved racing his friend R. Thurston Hopkins from point A to point B across London using only alleys and short cuts, psychogeography avant la lettre.

To quote from W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Grey Rock’ (1914) in words addressed to Old Cheshire Cheese habitués Lionel Johnson and Dowson, “You kept the Muses’ sterner laws, and unrepenting faced your ends”.

This biographical stub accompanies my elegy for Dowson 'The Far Shore' published for the first time in The White Review #3, 2011. www.thewhitereview.org

ARTFILE

2011-09-08T02:46:00.000-07:00

In 2004 I was presented with a brief window of opportunity to enter a derelict three storey Georgian house and atelier in Steward Street, Spitalfields, London, prior to its imminent demolition. The building had once been occupied by the now largely forgotten Georgian portrait painter Mason Chamberlin. The plain wooden staircase had collapsed in on itself, so clambering cautiously up to the garret with its dusty weaver’s windows it was hard not to be struck by the absolutely destructive nature of historical change. Alone however in this melancholy space for a few moments my materialist self got the better of its philosophical counterpart as I impulsively wrenched off a 10 inch piece of decorative iron work from the grate of the lovely second floor fireplace as a souvenir of this impromptu visit; an exquisite Soanean fragment. So who was Mason Chamberlin? Mason Chamberlin the elder (1727-1787), alledgedly a pupil of Francis Hayman, was “a Presbyterian, and a devout man of retired habits”, a friend of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and one of the founders of the Royal Academy. Today his best known oil paintings are of Sir Benjamin Franklin (1762), which can be found in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a fascinating half-length picture of the surgeon Sir William Hunter (c.1781), notable for being the first to use arterial injection as a means of preserving cadavers, and shows him beside a bronze écorché figure. Incidentally this work was presented to the R.A. by Chamberlin in 1769, probably to mark the appointment of Hunter as Professor of Anatomy at the Academy. Grove's Dictionary of Art damns Chamberlin with faint praise, saying that “he was capable of producing a good likeness but his paintwork was very thin”. However the satirical poet Peter Pindar, real name John Wolcott (1738-1819) was less reticent in the 'Lyric Ode to the Royal Academicians' of 1782, predicting that his stiff figures will eventually be natural “When it shall so please the Lord/To make his people out of board”. Chamberlin's portrait of Franklin, commissioned by Colonel Philip Ludwell III, a rich Virginian living in London, is far from wooden though, and depicts the Promethean inventor in a stock pose, at ease in his study during an evening thunderstorm. Sat beside two bells designed to give a warning when the lightning rod of a house became electrified, the background view through the window is of a generic landscape with an exploding house and toppling steeple. Ever the businessman, these objects are in fact so-called "thunder houses", or "powder houses", toy models in Honduras mahogany made to demonstrating the efficacy of lightning rods, especially the pointed version developed by Franklin. This is the immortal Franklin of The Botanic Garden (1791), Erasmus Darwin’s poem which conflates his scientific and political achievements: “The patriot-flame with quick contagion ran/Hill lighted hill, and man electrised man.” Edward Fisher's 1763 mezzotint of this selfsame portrait was very popular with Franklin at the time, who distributed them to friends and colleagues as one way of cementing his position in the growing pantheon of 18th century science. The prints are inscribed at the base “Sold by Mr.Chamberlin in Stewart Street Old Artillery Ground, Spitalfields 5s”. This image was also copied by François-Nicolas Martinet in 1773 for a print that served as the frontispiece to a French edition of Franklin's writings. In effect the image, of a scholar in situ, has antecedents that stretch back to St.Jerome in his study (c.1390-1441) usually attributed to Jan van Eyck, though Chamberlin's painting also functions as a trade ad intended to sell Franklin's equipment, whilst evoking medieval emblems of apocalypse and the end of the world. The prosaic aspect is reinforced by Franklin's choice of dress, which as in the portrait of him by Scottish painter David Martin (1767) is quite sober and businesslike, still very much the inventor responsible for introducing the terms "battery" "charged" and "electric shock" into the language, rather than the influential politician he was to become. Only in the portrait by Charles Wilson Peale (1785) does he don a magnificent turquoise banyan, a kind of long-sleeved flowing robe often made of wool or heavy damask that connoted wealth and intellectual prowess, very much a symbol of the 'made man', a heroic polymath in the world of enlightenment scholarship. Today luxury 1 & 2 bedroom flats, and a Cali-Mex burrito bar occupy the former Chamberlin site, part of the relentless transformation around Liverpool Street Station, London.

BIBLIOFILE

2011-07-27T00:31:00.000-07:00

For the Greek born, London based artist Christina Mitrentse, the activity of drawing is far more than a means of illusory representation. It serves her heterotopic practice as a tool for critical enquiry, for mapping space and ultimately the construction of discrete worlds. In this multiverse fashioned from draughtsmanship, ‘vintage’ artists’ bookmaking, silk-screen prints, sculpture and site-specific installation, drawing functions as a supermetaphor twisting its way through her work, constantly opening up visual possibilities.

This privileging of drawing fits into its wider resurgence, that since the San Francisco punk phenomenon of the 80s, and recent Goldsmithian endorsement, has seen it get a facelift, no longer a mere preparation for something bigger, but in Mitrentse’s case an autonomous art form, hand-held, a powerfully inclusive technique.

The new series of large scale works showcased at Art Work Space in Add To My Library Volume II e.g. ‘Stonehenge’, ‘WWW’, ‘New Tate’, ‘Emblem’ and ‘Ruins I’ all confirm Joseph Beuys’s proposition that drawing is “a special kind of thought”, and in this instance one where historicity is compressed, and its iconic edifices are left hanging. Mitrentse begins and ends with neo-Gothic images of a ruin. a highly charged species of conceptual drawing that avoids visceral gesture, being primarily intended to make the viewer ponder their ‘text’ of civilisation in crisis.

2009-06-05T04:37:00.000-07:00

This is the watershed of a new era. The destruction & disintegration we see on both the economic and political fronts is evidence of underlying tectonic movement. Old ways of seeing and thinking are being found out as inadequate. Social structures that offered security in the past no longer do so. The individual is exposed as never before to massive impersonal forces. The shift from global corporatism to state capitalism, albeit the Chinese one party model, the Russian 'organised crime' model or the neo-liberal type, is a growing dynamic trend, and would appear to be an event of a similar magnitude as the Black Death, with all the social restructuring that followed in its wake likely to be the case now. Meanwhile the threat of a mutated H1N1 virus lurks in the background, an X-factor to throw into the future mix.