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Peggy Guggenheim: Eternal Wound
Marguerite “Peggy” Guggenheim was not the text book poor little rich girl but, born in 1898 into a less successful branch of one the wealthiest of American families, she was reasonably rich and, at times, extremely unhappy.
She is known primarily as an art collector and patron. Although her active collecting years numbered less than a decade, her wider influence was considerable and she founded three of the most important showcases for the most radical art of the twentieth century: her London gallery Guggenheim Jeune, her Surrealist showcase Art of This Century in New York and her permanent museum The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
She lived in Paris at the heart of the roaring twenties, and was at the centre of the greatest avant-garde circles of the late thirties. In the Forties in New York, she helped transform American taste by bringing Surrealist art, and artists, across the Atlantic and helped support the rise of a new generation of American Abstract Expressionist artists. It was a series of moments that would help change the course of art history.
She lived out her later years in Venice, famous for her parties, for her ill-behaved Lhasa apso dogs and for sunbathing naked on the roof of the single storey Palazzo on the Grand Canal which to this day is a museum housing her personal art collection.
History has not been particularly kind to Guggenheim. In her own day she was met with a combination of awe at her apparent wealth and disapproval and mockery of her taste and uninhibited behaviour. She did however make a real difference to those figures she supported and championed, among them the novelist Djuna Barnes, the political campaigner Emma Goldman and the American painter Jackson Pollock.
These days even her most sympathetic biographer, Mary Dearborn, struggles to admire her, although commentators recognise hers was a life blighted by loss. In the milieu of high bohemia, with its shifting cultural and emotional sands, her partners and husbands were generally monstrous. Guggenheim herself was capable of great economic generosity and tremendous emotional callousness. She later said, “My fucking is only a sideshow. My work comes first every time.”
Guggenheim's maternal grandparents, the Seligmans, had gone in a single generation from immigrant shopkeepers selling galoshes to wealthy bankers. Her paternal family held a commanding position in the mining and refinery industries and a virtual monopoly in the markets for metals such as copper and silver.
Her home life in New York, in a sheltered milieu of Jewish high society was grand but also “strangely sexualised” in a household where her father Benjamin was frequently, and at times openly, unfaithful to her mother Florette. The seven year-old Peggy was once sent from the table for suggesting that the explanation for her father's lateness was that he must have a mistress.
In 1912, her father planned to return to New York from Europe in time to celebrate her sister Hazel's birthday. Finding that the ship he was booked on was port-bound by a strike he bought a passage on the Titanic. He went down with the ship.
If Peggy's father died in shocking circumstances, the rest of her immediate family's life was equally disastrous: her sister Benita died young in childbirth. Hazel's children died in mysterious and tragic circumstances, falling from the parapet of a New York apartment balcony. Hazel was undergoing a vicious divorce at the time. Although she was never charged, the police investigated the possibility that she had thrown them to their deaths.
In her personal life Guggenheim was unable to find any stability and had a deeply ambivalent attitude to her children. Her first marriage to Laurence Vail, a charismatic American brought up in France, whom she nicknamed the King of Bohemia, was dramatic and violent.
They travelled Europe and kept a house in the South of France, which became known for its bohemian lifestyle and hothouse sexuality. “Everything was free,” went one witticism, “apart from for Peggy who paid for everything.” The couple had two children, Sindbad and Jezebel, who was known as Pegeen, a diminutive of Peggy.
When the couple divorced, Peggy took up with John Holms, a charismatic but failed intellectual, who was also an alcoholic. They spent time in England at Hayford Hall, on the edge of Dartmoor, a remote house upon which Baskerville Hall in The Hounds of the Baskervilles had been based. There Peggy supported Djuna Barnes to complete her novel Nightwood.
Holms died suddenly under anaesthesia on the kitchen table at their London house in Woburn Square. He was undergoing surgery for a broken wrist, when his heart failed. He had been drinking the night before and Peggy blamed herself for not stopping the operation.
Pegeen a talented artist, but melancholy individual, had an unhappy life. As a very young infant she was often abandoned by her parents to the care of a nurse. She had a number of male father figures who then died or disappeared. Living in America as a teenager she ran away to Mexico, spending time on Errol Flynn's yacht and moving in with a poor native family determined to marry their son.
She had unhappy relationships with the older French painter Jean Hélion, whom she married, and with Ralph Rumney. He was ten years her junior, a hard living British artist on the fringes of the avant garde. Peggy opposed these relationships, but was unable to actively care for her daughter herself.
Pegeen suffered from alcoholism and an addiction to Valium and sleeping pills. She died on her own overnight, in mysterious circumstances in Paris in 1967. An apparent overdose of medication drew many to believe that she took her own life. Peggy, initially believing that she had committed suicide, spent the rest of her life opposing the notion, convinced that her daughter would not have abandoned her children. “Pegeen had a miserable life,” said her father Laurence Vail, “It was a perpetual tug of war between Peggy and the man Pegeen was living with. Pegeen was the rope between the two and the rope snapped.”
Guggenheim's own memoirs, later revised as the book Out of this Century, are open about her uninhibited sexuality. She claimed to have hundreds of lovers and her sexual education from the frescoes at Pompeii. Among her many lovers were the artists Marcel Duchamp (he was a lasting friend and artistic adviser,) Yves Tanguy and Max Ernst whom she married in and brought to America in 1941. He shortly left her for the artist Dorothea Tanning.
In the winter of 1938/39 she had a very brief affair with Samuel Beckett. They met at a dinner with James Joyce on Boxing Day, he walked her home. “We soon found ourselves in bed,” she wrote, “where we remained until the next evening at dinner time.” Beckett slipped out briefly to buy them bottles of champagne.
Beckett was passive, spent long hours in bed and according to Guggenheim seemed as though in a dream. She called him Oblomov after the ineffectual bed-bound aristocrat in Goncharov's novel of the same name.
They were together for about 12 days. On January 7th after an argument between them, he was walking in his neighbourhood; when he was stabbed buy a local pimp when he refused to lend him some money. Amongst the first passers-by on the scene was a talented musician named Suzanne Descheveux-Dumesnil. She called an ambulance.
During Beckett's convalescence, it appeared that her steady competence would win Beckett over Guggenheim's capriciousness. “She made curtains,” said Guggenhaim later, “while I made scenes.” Suzanne Descheveux-Dumesnil was to become Beckett's life long companion.
Guggenheim, who died in December 1979, has been a challenge to biographers. Her behaviour no worse than the men she married or slept with, she was pilloried when her memoirs revealed her promiscuity in a curiously flat prose tone. Her reputation for meanness was unfounded, but based on the misconception that she had the near limitless wealth of figures like her uncle Solomon, who founded New York's Guggenheim Museum.
A typical pen portrait comes in a recent Pollock biography: “In shoe-black hair, blood-red lipstick, lizard-green eye shadow, and huge unmatched earrings (her clothes artfully torn to show she had nothing on underneath) she moved among her guests offering cheap whiskey, potato chips and outrageous commentary.”
The lipstick was Chanel, the wonderfully named Eternal Wound; the earrings were in fact artworks themselves. One set was created by the American artist Alexander Calder another by Yves Tanguy. The mismatch was deliberate. Guggenheim wore one of each pair to show her new transatlantic loyalties.
Guggenheim was brave, selfish and hard to love, but as Dearborn puts it, she was unique in collecting not from a distance but up close: “An alert and responsive patron who collected not from a distant remove but from the midst of the art world, a world she helped to shape. Peggy lived among artists as she collected their works; her choices affected the course of 20th century art history.”
Text by Moira Jeffrey
Further Reading:
Mary Dearborn, Peggy Guggenheim Mistress of Modernism
Diamanda Galas singing ‘Supplica a mi madre’ from Pasolini’s text.
My Brightest Diamond’s ‘Overture (Alfred Brown Remix)’
My Brightest Diamond’s ‘The loneliest man in history’
Bartok strings pizzicato
Edith Piaf’s ‘Jezebel’
Connie Francis singing ‘Siboney’
My Brightest Diamond’s ‘I’m never letting go’
Edith Piaf's Jezebel
In French
Jezebel... Jezebel...
Ce démon qui brûlait mon cœur
Cet ange qui séchait mes pleurs
C'était toi, Jezebel, c'était toi.
Ces larmes transpercées de joie,
Jezebel, c'était toi... Jezebel, c'était toi...
Mais l'amour s'est anéanti.
Tout s'est écroulé sur ma vie,
Écrasant, piétinant, emportant mon cœur,
Jezebel... Mais pour toi,
Je ferais le tour de la terre,
J'irais jusqu'au fond des enfers.
Où es-tu ? Jezebel, où es-tu ?
Les souvenirs que l'on croit fanés
Sont des êtres vivants
Avec des yeux de morts vibrants encore de passé
Mais mon cœur est crevé d'obsession.
Il bat en répétant
Tout au fond de moi-même
Ce mot que j'aime,
Ton nom...
Jezebel... Jezebel...
Mais l'amour s'est anéanti.
Tout s'est écroulé sur ma vie,
Écrasant, piétinant, emportant mon cœur
Jezebel... Mais pour toi,
Je ferais le tour de la terre,
J'irais jusqu'au fond des enfers
En criant sans répit,
Jour et nuit,
Jezebel... Jezebel...
JEZEBEL...
In English
Jezebel... Jezebel
If ever a devil was born
Without a pair of horns
It was you, Jezebel, it was you
If ever an angel
Jezebel, it was you
Jezebel it was you
It ever a pair of eyes
Promised me paradise
Deceiving me, grieving me
Leaving me blue
It was you, Jezebel, it was you
If ever a devil’s plan
Was made to torment a man
It was you, Jezebel, it was you
Could be better had I never know
A love such as you
Forsaking dreams and all
For the siren call of your arms
Like a demon, love possessed me
You upset me constantly
What evil star is mine
That my fate’s design should be
If ever a air of eyes
Promised me paradise
Deceiving, believing, believing you
It was you, Jezebel, it was you
If ever a devil was born
Without a pair of horns
It was you, night and day, every way
Jezebel,... Jezebel...
Aristotle’s Poetics is the earliest surviving treatise on drama, though in itself it is incomplete and fragmented, composed around 330 BC it most likely survived through the transcription of student’s notes.
The Poetics theorises many of the key concepts of Greek drama such as comedy and tragedy, mimesis and in particular the notion of catharsis, a kind of “purging” of emotions like fear, said to be experienced when we watch tragedy. It is thus a foundation stone of western literature.
The suggestion that the literature and drama of modernism tore up the basic tenets of classical drama as expressed in the Poetics is debatable. While it is clear that many of its exponents intended to do so, others looked to classical models to escape more recent conventions.
The Historian in Untitled LoveStory refers to suggestions that Aristotle’s “lost” scrolls including his book on comedy might be amongst the thousands of papyri found in fragments in the library of Herculaneum the second of the great Roman cities destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 AD. Most of Herculaneum now lies under a modern suburb of Naples.
The search for this missing book forms the plot of Umberto Eco’s 1980 literary whodunnit The Name of the Rose, set in a medieval monastery. The novel expounds a vast range of ideas, including the subversive nature of laughter. The work which bridges both high and popular culture, scholarly enterprise and genre fiction is seen as one of the bench marks of postmodern fiction, particularly in its use of pre-existing works of writing. "Books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told."
Venice, a city whose rulers, churches and religious societies were once the great institutional commissioners of art, is now a series of elegant warehouses for private collectors of modern and contemporary art.
In the wake of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and with the ever expanding Venice Biennale acknowledged as the “tribal gathering” of the art world, Venice has become the place for current collectors to meet and display their art. The French luxury goods billionaire Francois Pinault shows his collection at the Punta della Dogana, Venice’s former custom house, and the remodelled Palazzo Grassi on the city’s Grand Canal.
The fashion empress Miuccia Prada and her husband Patrizio Bertelli have also opened their collection to the public in another Palazzo, the Ca' Corner della Regina. At the opening of the Venice Biennale in June, the city is flooded with collectors and their superyachts including Roman Abramovich and his girlfriend Dasha Zhukova, founder of the Moscow Garage.
The explosion of art collecting by the super rich in the last two decades has been the subject of much speculation and sociological examination in recent years. Prada, one of the more thoughtful of contemporary collectors, recently told the Guardian journalist Charlotte Higgins. “I hate being a collector…It's vulgar, this desire to own things, but it is also very human."
The contemporary art duo Elmgreen and Dragset turned the milieu of collecting and collectors into a riotously successful twin exhibition, entitled The Collectors housed in the Danish and Nordic Pavilions at the Venice Biennale in 2009. They treated one building as though it was a family home filled with art works commissioned from fellow artists. Visitors were told it was for sale and were taken round by an estate agent. It rapidly became clear that all was not well and the family of collectors who used to live there did so in domestic disharmony.
Next door one of the reasons for the dysfunction became apparent: the Nordic Pavilion had become a louche hangout filled with pretty things and real live pretty boys a Hockney painting of California come to life. The denouement was a male figure, the collector, floating face down in his own pool.
There is also a much longer literature about the psychology or even psychopathology of collecting. Bruce Chatwin’s novel Utz, for example, is about a collector of Meissen porcelain who finds himself imprisoned by his reluctance to abandon his collection. Chatwin himself was both a traveller and a collector he was profoundly ambivalent about his desire for possessions and his professional skills which he put to use working at Sotheby’s.
The novel is about the obsessive nature of collecting and alludes to it as a sickness: the Saxon Elector and Polish king August the Strong (1670-1733) coined the term 'Maladie de Porcelaine’, for his own porcelain collecting habit, which led to the foundation of the world famous Meissen works.
One of the novels explanations for Utz’s obsession with his collection lies in the early death of his father, a similar association is often made with both Peggy Guggenheim’s collecting and her promiscuity.
Amongst the music featured in Untitled Love Story, is the song Sumiglia, by the group A Filetta, one of the most prominent modern exponents of the musical tradition of Corsican Polyphony. The group was formed in 1978 by the then 13 year-old Jean-Claude Acquaviva at a time of heightened and renewed interests in Corsican folk music and oral traditions.
A Filetta take their name from a local fern and from a colloquial phrase: when someone leaves the island and forgets their roots locals might say "S'e' scurdatu di a filetta" (he has forgotten the fern).
Corsican Polyphony is a tradition of unaccompanied male singing usually in groups of between three and nine voices and often in close family groups. Songs are usually in three parts, with the idea that a fourth part thus emerges from “nowhere and everywhere”. These days exponents sing both traditional and new songs and the form has been associated with a Corsican cultural revival and at times with political subject matter.
Although its origins are unclear commentators relate Corsican Polyphony to a number of Mediterranean influences (Corsica, now part of metropolitan France, has a long history of invasion and conquest including periods under Moorish incursions in the 8th century and papal rule in the 11th century) and it is sometimes seen as a bridge between the Christian and Muslim traditions. Because it is used in both church and folk music it also both sacred and profane.
The song Sumiglia, meaning likeness or resemblance in the Corsican language, is described by the group themselves as “falling somewhere between an Islamic prayer and Christian madrigal songs” Corsican Polyphony takes a number of forms from madrigals and lullabies to funeral masses and it is often closely associated with death and mourning.
One of the art movements that the collector enthuses about, in Untitled Love Story, was an international and loose grouping of avant-garde artists, performers and musicians set up in Germany in 1962. The term was coined by the Lithuanian American artist George Maciunas implying fluctuation or continuous change.
Maciunas did provide some theoretical basis for Fluxus in his own writings, but the movement was characterised by attitude and interest rather than a clear set of stated aims or a stylistic identity.
Fluxus, which lasted around a decade, was closely associated with the idea of happening or events rather than exhibitions, with the street and the concert hall rather than the studio or the marketplace, and with publishing, multiples, mail art and ephemera rather than the exclusive art object.
One of the most important aspects of Fluxus was its emphasis on intermedia; that is artworks that fell between categories rather than sat within or combined existing media.
Practitioners came from a variety of backgrounds in dance, music and the visual arts but many of them were from the circles around the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen or had encountered the music or lectures of the American composer John Cage. Like them Fluxus was notable for its interest in aspects of Zen Buddhism including meditation and the operation of chance.
Among the best known Fluxus artists were George Brecht, Alison Knowles, La Monte Young, Yoko Ono and the Korean artist and video pioneer Nam June Paik.
In Wiesbaden in 1962 the latter enacted one of the key early works of Fluxus, when he carried out La Monte Young’s instruction to “draw a straight line and follow it”, by dipping his head and hands in a bowl of ink and tomato juice and sliding them down a paper roll. What had first emerged through experiments in musical notation had become a signature method of art making sometimes known as the “instructional art work.”
Fluxus performances often engaged the active participation or involvement of audiences and the engagement or vulnerability of the artist, most dramatically in Yoko Ono’s performance Cut Piece where members of the audience were invited one by one to cut away a portion of her clothing.
According to art historian Thomas Crow, one of the characteristics of Fluxus performance was that it “need never take place for the piece to exist, though it is crucial that its enactment in time and space be realisable and repeatable.” This helped distinguish it from poetry, for example.
In Untitled Love Story, when the Historian refers to Cain and Abel, he is speaking of the painting by Tiziano Vecellio, better known as Titian. Titian was a leader of the 16th century Venetian school of Italian High/Late Renaissance. Titian contributed to all of the major areas of Renaissance arts painting altarpieces, portraits, mythologies and pastoral landscapes. In 1544 he executed three ceiling paintings for the ceiling of the church Santo Spirito in Isola. These paintings are characterized by the spiraling movement of the figures. They are now they are in the sacristy of Santa Maria della Salute in Venice.
The “German philosopher” referred to by The Collector in Untitled Love Story is Martin Heidegger, who turned his attention to the nature of art and artworks in a series of lectures and writing in the 1930s, the most famous (and contested) of which is On theOrigin of the Work of Art.
Heidegger’s writing on art addresses itself to the fundamental questions of what art is and what it does. His first definition is that art is “the happening of truth”; later suggesting that art is only one of the ways that truth happens.
Heidegger’s definition of art frees it from debates around the aesthetic towards a belief that art is not simply in the world but actively makes the world or, at the least shapes a community’s historical understanding of itself.
In his thought art is a struggle to disclose or “unconceal” the truth, a struggle, therefore, between intelligibility and unintelligibility. The art work is “something which opens up the world”, in one of three ways: through revealing what matters to us (things, as he memorably puts it, thinging), revealing the way that art itself works, or transforming a community’s understanding of what is and what matters.
The above is, of course, a gross simplification of an extremely complex area of philosophical thought. For a more informed discussion see:
Martin Heidegger. Basic Writings, "On the Origin of the Work of Art."
Iain Thomson, "Heidegger's Aesthetics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/heidegger-aesthetics/>.
Three Studies of a Male Back, referred to by the Historian, is one of 28 known large triptychs painted between 1944 and 1986 by the Irish-born artist Francis Bacon (1909-1992). By the 1950s Bacon had developed his distinctive style as a figure painter, depicting distorted human forms within stark spaces. Although Bacon painted many nudes, singly or coupled it is believed he never painted a nude from life. In an interview recorded in 1966 he said “Even in the case of friends who have come and pose I’ve had photographs taken for portraits, because I very much prefer working from photographs than from them”.
Intertextuality is one of the characteristics of literary postmodernism. The term, first coined by Julia Kristeva, in 1966 has a specific meaning in post-structuralist theory, involving the claim that meaning doesn’t go straight from writer to reader but is filtered by ideas or “codes” from other texts.
It is now understood in a wider sense that we understand books or texts in relation to other texts, that the history of literature is in fact interwoven. This is reflected in the actual practice of interweaving existing literary and cultural materials, and diverse genres into new pieces of writing. Common examples are the prevalence of fairy tales and detective fiction in postmodern novels and the borrowing of canonic literary texts including Don Quixote.
In this light Untitled Love Story has a debt to Samuel Becket’s short play Krapp’s Last Tape that goes beyond simple influence or inspiration. Like Krapp, the characters reflect on key moments in their life, and in particular lost moments of erotic love. Both plays have an almost mystical emphasis on light and dark, and a prosaic interest in bananas.
The text of David Leddy’s play is peppered with allusion to Krapp, uses direct quotes, and misquotes, assonances and alliterations, the use of recorded sound, in particular the recording and replaying of the human voice and anti-chronological techniques used by Beckett. In addition certain words in the text which are borrowed from Beckett have been subject to alteration according to the techniques of the literary movement Oulipo.
Untitled Love Story also makes reference to among other sources, other works by Beckett, especially his use of the disembodied head or voice and to incidents from Beckett’s life story, to the memoirs of Peggy Guggenheim, to the novel Death in Venice and the Benjamin Britten opera based on it. The play’s title is drawn from the film script referred to in the movie Sunset Boulevard.
Any definitive history of the relationship between recent Western culture and the practice of meditation would need to take in some of the greatest artists of the 20th century, including figures as diverse as the American composer John Cage, the pop guitarist George Harrison and the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović.
Unfortunately it might also have to acknowledge figures such as the British pop musician Sting and his wife Trudie Styler or the fictional PR woman Edina Monsoon from the British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous.
Indeed such is the contemporary fashion for pop stars, Hollywood starlets and lifestyle gurus to declare an allegiance to the practice of meditation that it can be hard to remember that the introduction of practices like meditation and philosophical frameworks from Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism and above all Zen has been one of the most important drives of radical art and music, particularly since the end of the second world war.
The influence among American musicians who have used meditation as part of their daily lives or as a fillip to their musical experiments include the soul singer Tina Turner, the performer. The singer songwriter Leonard Cohen is a qualified Zen monk. David Leddy, who wrote Untitled Love Story cites the experience, age 12, of seeing Cohen in concert at the Albert Hall, as a key moment in his creative life.
But the most important contribution of Buddhism to Western Art comes in the shape of the art and teachings of the composer John Cage who began studying eastern philosophy in the mid- forties. Cage’s art adopted from Zen, the operation of chance, including use of the I ChingorBook of Changes, an emphasis on play, playfulness and above all the attempt to erase the difference between art and life.
Cage was a composer, musician, artist, teacher, respected amateur mycologist and by all accounts a very good cook. Through his performances, friendships and above all through his teaching at places like the progressive school Black Mountain College, Cage was an influence on and collaborator with some of the greatest American artists of the period including his partner, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg.
Another, radically different, tradition of performance allies itself with more extreme meditative practices, resulting in martial feats in which the performer’s body must overcome pain, fear or discomfort and endurance.
“Marina Abramović,” writes the art critic Michael Archer, “pushed her body to its physical limits as a way of emptying it in readiness for a fuller spiritual experience.” Abramovic’s tests of endurance in the mid-seventies included silence, self-injury, risk-taking and extreme passivity in the face of her audience.
Later in her career, the link with meditative practices and her interest in Tibetan Buddhism became explicit. The four day silent meditation performance Nightsea Crossing (1981) was repeated worldwide and had a number of collaborators including a Tibetan Lama (spiritual teacher).
Guided meditations which feature in Untitled Love Story had parallels in the practice and performance of many Fluxus artists, whose performances, events, and music involved instructions to the performer and the audience, as well as the operation of chance. Performance artists of all hues drew on symbolic elements such as fire and water, and ideas about the relationship between mind and body that were conceptually important in meditative practices.
“The typewriter model called Valentine” referred to by the Historian in the play is the Valentine Typewriter designed by Ettore Sottsass for Olivetti in 1969. Sottsass incorporated Pop Art inspired elements into his design for the Olivetti Valentine and described his design as “a Biro amongst typewriters”.
The terms modernism, modern art and the avant-garde are related but not interchangeable. Defining them has eluded some of the greatest critical minds of the century, so we won’t try that here.
An understanding of the drives behind modernism in visual art might point out to the era of artistic self-consciousness and a break with tradition that began in the mid-19th century with painters like Courbet and Manet. It was an impulse that art must meet the challenges of social change in particular of modernisation, that is the processes that were turning European countries into urban and industrialised economies. These experiences were allied to the exposure of European artists to non-western cultures and the growth of new sciences of the self culminating with the writings of Freud.
A second aspect of modernism was that a key measure of art was its ability to perpetually innovate, to break again and again with history. This in itself created a kind of linear story of art as a series of successive movements and defined and dismissed a whole category of cultural activities that fell outside this measure, later identified by terms like academic or kitsch
Modernism encompassed both positivist, rational and scientific impulses, a belief in progress for example, or the doctrine of truth to materials and in, some of its early twentieth century avant-garde guises such as Dada and Surrealism, profound and self-conscious irrationalism, often related to the traumatic technological nature of modernisation and the cataclysmic experience of the first world war.
Many of the modernist works of art we now understand as key moments in art history were barely seen in or little understood in their own time, even by advanced artists, including Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon and the early “readymades” of Marcel Duchamp.
In literature, Modernism might be characterised as an era and an attitude rather than a movement. Key figures including Pound, Woolf, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Literary modernism rejected realism and other literary traditions and embraced formal experiment.
Modernist art works had a second chance at reception, when the centre of modern art activity moved from Paris to New York during and after the Second World War, a transatlantic shift that was epitomised by the tastes of collector Peggy Guggenheim. Modernism thus had a second high point and a uniquely American flavour in the US in the fifties and, in the sixties, a fresh legacy known as the neo-avant-garde.
Modernism is both very familiar and very strange to contemporary audiences. The art historian TJ Clark has argued that modernism, because it engaged with a world, modernity, that had not yet actually arrived, is unintelligible in a world where modernity has actually triumphed. “Modernism is our antiquity in other words; the only one we have”
These days a whole cultural and academic industry is dedicated to examining both the substance and legacy of modernism and the avant-garde.
In the last two decades the “look” associated with modernism in architecture, design, literature and the arts have become a key pre-occupation of everyone from the most serious of contemporary artists to the most mundane of high street furniture retailers. We think we know what it means but we might not. The artefacts of modernism have become both as acceptable, fashionable, and possibly as misunderstood as ancient ruins were to the romantics.
Ouvrior de Littérature Potentielle or Oulipo is a literary movement founded by the poet Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) and the mathematician Francois le Lionnais in Paris in 1960.
It is characterised by complex word play and systems by which a writer must work with or against systems that either constrain output or act as “machines” for generating new writing.
Queneau had been associated with the Surrealist movement, which was itself very interested in puzzles and parlour games, but Oulipo was in some ways a reaction against Surrealist interests in the unconscious and the “automatic” in literature.
Oulipians pursue the word in all its myriad forms, from riddles to crosswords, puzzles and lipograms and they use systems such as codes, grids and mathematical formulae.
The greatest example is Queneau’s own poem Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes, which contains ten sonnets whose lines can apparently be detached and permutated in 100,000,000,000,000 different ways. Then there is the novel by Georges Perec (1936-1982) which is translated into English as A Void, and manages to fill 300 pages without ever using the letter e. In Untitled Love Story, the letter e, on the historian’s typewriter is broken; He can type the word art but not the word love. Oulipians are liberal and open in their use, reuse and remaking of existing texts.
Oulipian writing is often unstable or unfixed: in the process of either making or unmaking itself. This forms the central plot of Perec’s Oulipian masterpiece Life: A User’s Manual, in which the central character Bartlebooth creates watercolours of his life’s travels, and then arranges to have them made into jigsaws, which are to be later reconstructed and ultimately destroyed.
Available in a brilliant English language version translated by David Bellos, the novel examines the lives and histories of the inhabitants of a Paris apartment block where Bartlebooth lives. Like Untitled Love Story the narrative appears to move back and forwards in time and place but is actually set within a restricted location in a single moment in time. Perec moves around the apartment block like a chessboard according to a mathematical system
Perec’s novel might have been a withered academic exercise, but instead it is an utter joy to read, one of the great books of the 20th century, teeming with life and incident, full of red herrings, shaggy dog stories and references to great literature.
At its core is a bracing yet melancholy examination of the nature of creativity and memory in Bartlebooth’s attempt to spend half his life creating and his (failed) attempt to spend the other half unravelling that creation. Amongst other travails he is pursued by a ruthless collector who wants to acquire the paintings.
The emphasis on game-playing should not be understood as a lack of seriousness, some commentators emphasise that absence and erasure in Perec’s work plays out his family history and the historical Jewish experience. Born in France of Polish Jewish extraction his father died while fighting in the French Army in 1940, his mother was murdered in the Holocaust.
One of the dangers of reading too much Oulipo literature is that you start turning into an Oulipian yourself. The journalist Steven Poole’s recent newspaper review of Perec’s The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise is written in the unpunctuated, flow chart style of the novel.
There are of course plenty of precedents for this type of parodic praise one of the most famous is Kenneth Tynan’s famous 1958 review of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. Entitled Slamm’s Last Dunk, (Slamm is a critic, Seck his assistant) it ends like this:
SLAMM: Is that all the review he’s getting?
SECK: That’s all the play he’s written.
Pause.
SLAMM: But a genius. Could you do as much?
SECK: Not as much. But as little.
Tableau. Pause. Curtain.
Text by Moira Jeffrey
Further Reading:
Raymond Queneau Exercises in Style
Georges Perec Life: A User’s Manual
George Perec A Void
George Perec The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request For a Raise
Postmodernism might be understood as a moment in time, a philosophical or historical condition, an architectural style, a movement in music, philosophy, art and literature, a body of work in sociology and linguistics or, simply, by the term’s many detractors, as a lazy buzzword. Even the most rigorous of theorists are reduced to describing it as a “cluster of values”.
Charles Baldick in TheOxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms in 1990 gives the following useful definition:
“ a cultural condition prevailing in the advanced capitalist societies since the 1960s, characterized by a super-abundance of disconnected images and styles – most noticeably in television, advertising, commercial design and pop video…a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning originality and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals”
The culture of the postmodern era is suspicious of grand narratives, questioning of scientific paradigms. It rejects the linear chronologies and emphasis on innovation of Modernism, emphasising instead the multiple viewpoint, the uncertain chronology and the unreliable narrator. The writer Samuel Beckett is often described as poised on the knife edge between modernism and postmodernism.
Postmodernism’s key theoretical figures are now regarded as the continental writers Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and its transatlantic populariser Fredric Jameson, most of whom undertook their key work in the 1960s, 70s and 80s and died at the turn of this century.
Indeed the very super abundance of theorists of Postmodernism might even help us understand it. Postmodernism is the framework in which works of critical and cultural theory are understood not as ancillary but as main cultural products in themselves.
Postmodern in literature is characterised by an abandonment of problem-solving narratives, and an emphasis on playfulness, chance, irony, pastiche and techniques like metafiction. For commentators like Chris Barker. “A sense of the fragmentary, ambiguous and uncertain quality of the world marked by high levels of reflexivity is said to be characteristic of postmodern culture. This goes hand in hand with a stress on contingency, irony and the blurring of cultural boundaries. Texts are typified by self-consciousness, bricolage and intertextuality. For some thinkers, postmodern culture heralds the collapse of the modern distinction between the real and simulations.”
David Leddy, who wrote Untitled Love Story has engaged in the debates around postmodernism through his own practice-based PhD. Leddy emphasises postmodernism as a practical creative tool, emphasising the fragmentary and the self-reflexive, the mix of genres and shifting subjectivity.
The play draws on many of the techniques of postmodernism. It is for example an extended play on Samuel Beckett’s 1958 work Krapp’s Last Tape, it adopts techniques and ideas from sources as diverse as Aristotle and the movie Sunset Boulevard, it contains both fictional and historical characters and stages imagined encounters between different categories of character. It tells a story but its non-chronological timeframe, and use of recorded voices, like that of Beckett’s Krapp, reveals yesterday, today and tomorrow simultaneously.
The Winged Victory of Samothrace: Humanised but not Human
On February 20 1909, the Italian artist F.T. Marinetti, declared war against the cultural establishment. He used the front page of France’s most popular newspaper Le Figaro to publish his Futurist Manifesto, a diatribe against what he saw as a moribund culture. Amongst the most famous of the pronouncements in the manifesto, was his declaration that a speeding car was “more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace”, a claim that might have struck a chill in the heart of any cultured European.
The Winged Victory of Samothrace (220-185 BC) is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest individual art works of the classical world and along with the Venus de Milo (also in the Louvre) is still regarded as a defining image of beauty in art. When generations later Audrey Hepburn was to pop out from behind the same sculpture in the film 1957 Funny Face she was both reinforcing its status and poking gentle fun at this essential stop on any tourist itinerary.
The sculpture of this Greek messenger goddess was unearthed in incomplete pieces in March 1863 on the island of Samothrace, by a team led by Charles Champoiseau, a French vice-consul to Turkey and an amateur archaeologist. Carved from Rhodia marble, the sculpture was created as an ex voto offering to the gods of fertility, probably given in thanks for success in a naval battle of the period.
She was designed to sit in a rock niche in the hillside overlooking the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, who were most frequently invoked by seafarers and those in battle. Archaeologists have speculated that she may originally have been placed in a pool of water, so the ship-like pedestal on which the sculpture sits would appear to float.
The sculpture was to exercise generations of subsequent artists, either as a model of dynamism and movement in realistic sculpture or (as in Marinetti’s case) as another example of obsolete culture to be toyed with. Another Futurist, the sculptor Boccioni’s seems to have used Victory as one of the models for his own (famous but possibly rather dismal) attempt at modern dynamism, the bronze figure Unique Forms of Continuity in Space of 1913. The sculpture, editions of which are in the collections of Tate in London and MoMA in New York, was shown alongside other Futurist works in an exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in 2009.
Yves Klein painted plaster casts of both Victory and Venus in his International Klein Blue. More recently, at the 2009 Venice Biennale, her image was used by the Russian artist Andrei Molodkin a former solider whose art has addressed such controversial topics as the Chechen War. The artist had casts of Victory made in clear hollow Perspex and filled their centres with red and black fluids that purported to be blood and oil.
The Winged Victory has also been an influence in commercial and industrial design from the so-called Spirit of Ecstasy, the mascot for Rolls Royce motor car, to the first FIFA World Cup trophy
Anyone visiting the Louvre today to see the original Victory will be left in no doubt as to her perceived prestige, but it’s hard not to feel a little sympathy for the uprooted goddess. She is surrounded not by her fellow gods, but thousands of camera-toting tourists, her head, feet and arms still missing. Her right wing is largely a plaster copy of the left created during her “restoration” in the 1880s. For some commentators, like the French novelist and adventurer André Malraux it was this very mutilation, “Humanised but not human”, that formed part of her appeal.
As Untitled Love Story notes, Venice, with its humid climate and island architecture built around canals and the lagoon, can be a bit smelly. There is a considerable literary tradition that alludes to the smells of Venice.
This is often interwoven with the city’s history of contagion and confinement, which included the development of the first ever plague hospitals and extensive quarantine methods. This practice was based on the theory of miasma, that is that diseases were spread through noxious gases. The historian Jane Stevens Crawshaw has drawn parallels between plague measures and other forms of social containment in the city.
Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella Death in Venice portrays the final days and erotic longings of Gustav von Aschenbach, a writer who becomes obsessed with a young boy he observes on the Lido. Von Aschenbach notices that Venice has a very distinctive smell. It is not the smell of putrefaction, but of the disinfectant sprayed throughout the city, which it turns out is in the throes of a cholera epidemic that is being kept low key to protect tourism.
The story fuses a number of real-life events including the death of the composer Gustav Mahler in Vienna, the biography of the gay poet August von Platen-Hallermünde who died of cholera in Italy and Mann’s own interest in a 13 year-old Polish aristocrat he observed on his own trip to the Lido in 1911.
A mysterious sickness is one of the central themes of Untitled Love Story, at least the sickness is mysterious to the character of the Historian himself but being a sexually promiscuous gay man in 1979, he is likely to be undergoing what we now would call HIV seroconversion, the moment of short, sudden illness when the virus takes hold within the body and the person transitions from being HIV negative to HIV positive.
In 2007 the Italian environmental Legambiente, reported that climate change threatened the return of tropical diseases such as malaria to Italy. Since 2003 100 cases of tick-born encephalitis had been reported, many of them in the area around Venice.
Text by Moira Jeffrey
Further Reading
‘From a Distance it Looks like a Castle’: Contagion, communities and confinement in early modern Venice, Dr Jane Stevens Crawshaw. http://pulse-project.org/node/337
The engraved marble bench saying "savor kindness because cruelty is always possible later" spoken about by the Writer, is taken from the Survival Series by Jenny Holzer. Holzer is mostly known for her large-scale public displays. The main focus of her work is the use of words and ideas in public spaces. In 1983 – 1985 she created a series of 46 texts, the Survival Series, that speak to the great pain, delight and ridiculousness of living in contemporary society. In 1997 she created a series of 8 benches as part of the Survival Series.
The bench can be seen at the Peggy Guggenheim museum in Venice.
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