| ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1’ or ‘Portrait of the Artist’s Mother’, Whistler, 1871
Awful writes put boring limits on things. Whistler’s painting, which he called ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1 ‘ became a painting of his mother once it was written up in a catalogue. Vasari gave a name to Leonardo’s ‘Mona Lisa’. Maybe those writers thought they were being helpful.
A couple of years ago the owner of Annabel’s nightclub decided to rename a Picasso ‘Annabel’. Nothing helpful about that, unless one of the club’s patrons for some reason needed reminding where they were. His tangle with culture reminds me, though, of something I see happening, more often than not, if I turn to the ‘culture’ pages of any national newspaper (particularly the Guardian). It’s not entirely a straightforward connection, maybe more the reverse: as if someone had tried to rename Annabel’s Picasso.
I mean … attempts to dress up some high-intensity, of the moment, close-at-hand experience as something special. As if someone who finds themselves at Annabel’s every night thinks, after a glass or two, maybe a line or two, that where they are is super-important, a phenomenon, what matters, is laden with significance. Who would argue with them? Aren’t they, in that moment, surely, at the very least, a god?
I wouldn’t recommend this line of thinking.
If culture is being cancelled anywhere it’s in black and white, on the pages of newspapers that tell us they are all about thinking. This writing is not about thinking. Thinking is often difficult. It complicates life before it simplifies it.
Guardian writers, for example, look at where what you write about comes from and what it does. What’s its effect beyond some brief narcissistic fandango you might feel because of its nostalgia, the way it might hopelessly lunge at a target commonly identified as hate-able, or the way it avoids complicating your life.
Here are some words that you could use as a guide of what to cancel from your output:
Netflix. Amazon. You.
Please write something that will somehow upset most of your readers.
Kafka wrote that we need ‘books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.’
I think Kafka often used to fall about laughing when he read his writing.
I read this picture in many different ways, and always Giotto reminds me that there’s more to a scene than a story. Or a single story. This painting might offend you because of its anti-semitism. It might bring up particular feelings in you if you are a Christian.
Art necessitates a reaction. Art is like love. What follows is scattered, I’m afraid (again, like love, which has trouble staying in one place). A kind of shrapnel of ideas broadly involving something called ‘cancelling’: withdrawing permission for someone to be known; blocking someone in the first place from presenting themselves. Their passionate thoughts about the thing we could say that they love, or the way that they love something, are unacceptable..
I find the Kiss of Judas frightening for what it says about love and permission. Judas’ kiss seems to have been a sign, although the gospels don’t go out of their way to explain this, of who Christ was. It marked him out so that he could be arrested. The kiss was an act of betrayal. Following it both men died: Christ was crucified and Judas either hanged himself in a field after returning the 3o pieces of silver he received for the betrayal; or burst open after buying a field , the Field of Blood, with the money.
Love is art.
If I kiss someone expecting something in return I betray them. If I say to someone ‘I love you’ hoping for the same to be said to me, I offer a sign of my disloyalty. I offer that person up in the name of me.
Love needs to be given without a thought of return. Thinking and love don’t really go well together, but of course they must. You can’t offer it without something already agreed: you can offer it because you have permission.
What you receive is before what you give. The love given out of permission permits the love of ‘I love you’.
That’s about people.
Whatever I get from a painting, good or bad, comes from the permission I have to look at it. The permission, that sign of freedom, has to be preserved. Without it there is no possibility of love. There’s only the Field of Blood.
That’s about art.
All of this is about life. Cancel culture takes us to a dead end, Akeldama, the Field of Blood. Life continues with permission: the freedom to look, to act, to ask.
Before we get to thinking about words, I’d like to introduce a picture. The Wilton diptych is one of the first pieces of art I ever looked at closely even though my first sight of it, when I was a child and I caught a glimpse of it in one of my mother’s books, took little notice of the figure kneeling in the foreground. I loved the blue-robed angels, the way that some had their arms folded (which made them seem as if they were fed up waiting for something), all the wings like sails and how that seemed to let me glide away somewhere beautiful, majestic, maybe to find creatures like the white hart painted on the reverse.
Recently I watched the BBC’s Hollow Crown adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard II and afterwards found myself looking at reproductions of the diptych for the first time in years. My attention fell on the kneeling, gold-robed figure in the foreground: Richard II, one of the first English monarchs to have himself represented in art produced during his lifetime.
It’s strange to see how Rupert Goold, the director of the Hollow Crown production of Richard II, develops this relationship with painting as a way of remaining faithful to something in language. Goold lets us know Richard not by trying to let us into his thoughts as words, as information, but by sharing with us appearances: gestures, movements, possessions and positions. Richard’s thoughts drive what we see in mysterious ways, ones closer to dreams than the narratives which usually propel films.
Virginia Woolf wrote how ‘words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.’ They are ‘the the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things.’
The Wilton Diptych is a dream, a thought. Richard’s thought. If we look at it, we know him a little but possibly far more than through any historical account.
