Lats make my tatto: Can you See me Now!, such as I designed it below! This is a blog on August 16th Day Three In Edinburgh Highlights: . David Wilson Lear’s Fool at Olive Studio, Greenside at George Street (The Fringe); 2. Catherine Opie: To Be Seen at the Royal Academy of Scotland, Princes Street (the Art Festival); 3. Eva Rothschild: The Void Presses The Wall at Fruitmarket (the Art Festival); 4: Larry Dean: Hellbent, queer comedian at Beyond, Pleasance Courtyard.
The Monday of our trip to Edinburgh might well seem the day in which the theme was visibility; especially the issues we attempt to make visible which were made invisible by strong forces that required them to remain invisible. Such re-making of visibility, the artworks today strove to create, and that is so, if of lower ‘present’ political urgency in David Henry Wilson’s Lear’s Fool. We saw this in Liz Carruthers’ production with a talented cast in which the Fool from in the Shakespeare play King Lear is imagined as a woman of talent but with no opportunities for her intellect and talent but service of a powerful man’s fading ability to feel good about the world.
At the moment of this play’s start, she has aged with him. Wilson writes in explanation of his version of the story but first tells the story of the Shakespeare play thus far from its beginning. Lear divides his kingdom between his two flattering daughters ever ready to lie about their emotions for gain and disinherits the youngest, Cordelia, for proudly not being made to speak in such circumstances. The two now reigning daughters take the King’s resources and drive him to madness. Cordelia marries the King of France, who invades to restore order to England ostensibly.
Losing the decisive battle at Dover to the English forces under the control of the illegitimate son of the Duke of Gloucester, now having blinded and banished his father and taken his title, Cordelia and Lear are both taken to prison in Dover, although we never see them there in Shakespeare. Here is Wilson’s rationale for making visible scenes not recorded by Shakespeare:
But maybe things are not even as simple as that sincesome Shakespeare s molars doubt the last reference to the Fool as Wilson sees it is indeed that at all. It comes when Lear freed from prison in Act 5, Scene 3 re-enters carries with him the body of his daughter Cordelia and the news that: ‘I killed the slave that was a-hanging thee’. After some time and news of reverses including the death of Edmund, Lear in his dying speech, uses the phrase referred to by Wilson:
LEAR :
And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life?
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou ’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.—
Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there! He dies.
Why, those scholars say, would Lear refer to the Fool who served him when he carries in his arms the very dead body whose absence of life, caused by hanging, the rest of his speech mourns so brokenly. It seems a strange moment to generalise the fate of both the Fool and Cordelia, and some scholars and audiences have thought the word ‘fool’ to be meant to apply to Cordelia in nuanced affection. But Wilson strains in his play to justify the confusion of the two, not leazt by making the Fool a woman who might also be referred to in the feminine pronoun.
Morover, the Fool and Cordelia are hanged by the same ‘knave’ in Wilson’s play, in plain sight of the prison guard and tbe audience (it is a scene that feels very visceral though entirely mimed,) but unseen inpreparation or execution for Lear, Cordelia and The Fool are blindfolded and gagged to silence pre-knowledge their fate as well as deliver it the more cruelly. All of this is justified by political expediency by the English military under Edmund’s command. We see it all: the very thing Shakespeare ensured we should not see in his play where mortality is a thing that Kings best exemplify.
This play achieves something I could never imagine before, as a scene made visible on the stage: the redirection of empathy from a flawed ruler to the persons subjected to his errors, paticularly to the Fool, meanwhile using lifted quotations to show us that. At one point the Fool soliloquizes in the manner of Shylock about his Jewishness: ‘ Hath not a Fool eyes, …’ and so on.
From this event, with only coffee in between we turned the street corner to Prince’s Street and the RoyalmAcademy building of the Scottish National Gallery in order to see the Catherine Opie exhibition with its obvious reference to visibility: To Be Seen. On the surface of that theme I got some minimal version of Opie’s point. But to be entirely honest I disliked the show and as yet I do not understand why. I bought a catalogue (see below) and I will read it and write another blog if I eventually get her work in a way that satisfies me, as it does not now.
Interesting images barely succeed in stimulating me, whether in some way conventional portraits of people known to Opie such as the beautiful one of the late David Hockney, left in the collage below,or the staged tableau of a young woman enacting in tableau a modern version of Saint Sebastian, against a modern setting ruins reminiscent of war, ruin and imprisonment. Here I need help. I aim to get it in the catalogue.
A theme I found on the day irritating were emforced comparisons between modern male queer icons and the camp of some early play with Tartans and other Scottish dress in aristocratic portraiture of earlier centuries, as in the following examples. Again I need help before commentary by myself on these, for the obvious comparisons seem to me as yet very much on the surface, such as the mirroring of camp gesture, costume and body art in modern queer style and similar gesture, costume and pose in the earlier portraits. Here are two examples:
Does the pose, that used to be a joke used even by Alexander Pope that stereotyped the ‘effeminate’ man as a teapot with a handle on the side of the body where the free hand wasn’t used in two portraits,however camp tbe effect really tell me much, whereas in each case above the decor of the modern queer males is in itself interesting and vital but not manifestly so as ‘art’ in this stilled way. I am open to be educated and will allow the catalogue to do so.
One photograph which showed the Pope appearing from a window the Vatican at the very time that the Catholic Church acknowledged the ill treatment of native populations by European colonialism without offering an apology. It is an astute piece with the flamboyant Baroque architecture rendering the Pope as invisible unless you look carefully – a little like the fate of the marginalised native populations.
But do we see queer lives made visible in a wall of portraits of adlt males, however elaborate the face decor?
And when we see a series of portraits of male children what is the intention or the set of messages appropriate to that. I found them disturbing in the context of manifesting the invisible, partly because it is hard to know what we see in them – is it issues of sex/gender/sexuality issues otherwise masked, or is the fact that adult viewers may themselves sexualise what is not in itself sexual, or not in a way that is easily relatable to adult sexuality. Nevertheless, I found this disturbing and may return to it after reading more on Opie. Learning will be all here.
But I came out of the Royal Academy disappointed in the way Geoff, my husband often recognises. He decided to lead me to an exhibition we hadn’t planned but at the Fruitmarket, which I always enjoy. The topic was the work of Eva Rothschild, given the title The Void Presses The Wall. The content was sculpture described as ‘underpinned by the language of minimalism, with its geometric shapes, bold colours and repeated forms’, but disrupted by markers that disrupt the assumptions of abstraction in minimalism with emphasis of the space which interacts with the simple forms,; the aim being to ‘create complex spaces for us to occupy’ Is this the invisible – for we tend to think of the space around a form or opened up through it in 3-dimensional work, as empty rather than a space in which the contingent visual occurs, such thatall art pieces form an assemblage with others, and through which others (works, people viewing works,people interacting with the works or demonstrably denying doing so occurs.
The most obvious form is a sculptural architecture built for a park in which young boys were invited to interact in any way they wished and filmed. The aim Rothschild says is to show that our assumptions about young males often are built on totally inappropriate cultural stereotypes – the young males used the spaces in many ways but not to present a threat or dispay of ‘attitude’ as our culture expects. As audience. we are invited to sit into the minimalist geometric shapes treating them as sofas or viwing points, playing as much as the young males. It is as if watching space and its colouration mirrored that of the filmed artwork in performance. The void is no longer a void, it fills space and ‘presses against the walls’.
Many of the shaped pieces are more truly architecture landscapes or landscaped architectures. They might resemble construction scaffolding but colour or the amalgams that Constitution their materials – the large bricks are sometimes stone and concrete but sometimes foam or a mix of many materials of differing density -makes us see them and the spaces in between them with a difference – the difference a social art creates.
Some take a context like handwriting and dramatise it in 3 dimensions, sometimes with the black cursives shown more obviously as three dimrensional interwoven tubes themselves filled with colour as in Shorthand and Cursive below
Other forms seem more derivative (Brancusi comes to my mind) but make us, in the context of the rooms they stand in with other works, more a comment on how structures seem sometimes only supported by the spaces beteeen and within them – often braving marginal colour against the black backround
Simple lines often resolved into queer form, partially suggested by familiar material, such as clothing estranged in function:
Above two similar lines that started as hung textiles of differing original use before being hardened by resins into static form only have meaning in the frameworks that are the context, even when that context is only the space of a gallery populated with viewers and other objects (of art or otherwise). If we see the whole of the work on the right above we see a piece with many meanings: But these are meanings negotiated between the framed forms that contain other forms that resist their containment, in apparent volume or material density such the whole is hard to set margins too, the harder as you gaze at it longer.
Some pieces suggest the numinous whilst reminding you of the everyday nature of their materials, so that spitualised meanings, like those attached to clouds or magical escapes. The Cloud is a mix of semi-industrial materials, Houdini, a flowering mass of painted locks where escape and entrapment play with each other. Medusa is a tangled mass of metallic but as threatening as the supernatural of its title.
But the most fun comes from the work called The Grit, where a pile of multicoloured mattresses seem to rest unsteadily on an uneven rock underneath the tower they form. Rothschild herself points this work to the famous story of The Princess and the Pea but surely as only one context amongst many. For most viewers the fear-cum-desire about being the agent of toppling thse structure by the touch it invites matters enormously.
Replete we left the Galley our next show at at the Pleasant Courtyard at 8.oo p.m but when we got there at 6.00 p.m it was already raining. We found a show to go to by a comedian we didn’t know: the show being Larry Dean: Hellbent. From being a time-filler it filled up every space with joy when we found emergent from the experience the visible face of a comedian who layered and intersected comedy from his Glasgow working class background, queer culture and autism to tell of his recent marriage to his boyfriend, an English ‘Black Country’ accented and supportive man. What was made visible was something joyous if serious.
When we came out it as tipping it down, the queer for our 8.30 show stood in the rain so we went home, VISIBLY tired and wet. If only you could answer when I shouted ‘Can You see Me Now!’
With love
Steven xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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