Week #85 Fake: A photographic series

Michael Cook’s photographs are so profoundly intelligent and beautiful, I could have chosen any one of his projects to feature here. Produced with equal impact over the last two decades, it seems he is continuously revealing a side of our culture we don’t know we’ve given into. Having something to say in art is one thing, but being able to capture that message and relay it with renewed vigour, almost as if drilling through the deposits of our constructs – constructs that even we are not conscious of having placed around ourselves and others – is exceptional.

I love photography, as has been well demonstrated by posts here in this blog, but rarely do I find an arbitrator holding the camera. Perhaps it is a necessity. Certainly, Michael Cook’s work is seeded, in my view, by an understanding that the intersection of art and story must coalesce. Both sumptuous and boldly reprised, each project tells us something new. Complication is inherent. And as we see its turnabout in his artful shots, it is the intersection with story that beguiles.

Both Majority Rule and Enculturation are wonderful examples of his corrupting influence on us. They are images not only hard to forget, but of perpetual use. They are the bedrock of something that needs to be undone in us so that we can be put back together in a more whole manner. So too for Civilised and Mother.

Fake, Michael Cook’s latest effort, is no less startling. Visually playful and luscious, the photos also hold a rather hands-off anxiety that stimulates their undercurrent. The characters are defiant in a way that we, the onlooker, are drawn to try to decipher. Everything is juxtaposed: a clashing chorus of glamour against a hard-lined monochrome landscape. It is a celebration of bold alternatives, not without their cost however, not without their extractions.

And so, perhaps it is this that makes Michael Cook one of the most versatile and yet focused artists I have ever come across. Content is as important as form. And each photo demands that we see what is imbedded into the shot, simply by its existence. A rare soliloquy binds us to the visual conundrum we are presented with. And, in the patchwork, hotch-potch of our minds, in the circular and chaotic nature we often employ to digest something that is not immediately accessible to us, these photographs are poised to disrupt our synapses and take our neurons down brand-new pathways.

Week #84 Joker: a movie

I wonder if the creators of the superhero comic book, Batman, Bob Kane and Bill Finger, ever imagined so much would be made of their villain character, Joker. But just shy of 80 years on, I believe, hands down, we are being treated to the best portrayal of the fiend since they let him spring from the box as the eponymous villain for Batman and Robin to battle with. Our world, of course, is a very different place. But perhaps, given so many iterations of the nasty scoundrel have been drawn, ones we’re still attracted to (well, in my case it’s the first), it might also be true to say that not much has changed.

This latest depiction of Joker is, there’s no doubt, a deviated from the rest in one major way. Rather than the antihero being flatly drawn as wholly formed and perniciously wicked, in Todd Phillips’ 2019 film, titled, Joker, we are presented with the backstory of the wicked man and a plausible road for imagining his dastardly and conniving nature. Originally depicted as a one-dimensional merciless killer who gave his victims ‘Joker venom’, the toxin leaving their faces smiling grotesquely, we now see him as child and victim, as outcast and sufferer, as misfit and casualty. While that, in itself, is nothing new as a tenet for the arc of a story to engage its audience (the good in the baddie) there is something so satisfactory about the fleshed-out character of Joker in this luminous and lusciously-filmed piece, that the production, which does remind me of theatre, is nothing short of mesmerising.

As a child, I was not enthusiastic about the American sitcom format or the thread of a comic book. Unusual among my siblings and peers, I found both constructs fatuous and repetitive. So, to find myself enthralled by Joker was surprising and, I think, a credit to the film-makers. Unlike earlier films in which the character of Joker appears, the elements surrounding the character, including the story, are understated and built-up slowly, the city of Gotham in particular. From the streets to the nightlights, Gotham is suitably menacing and familiar, a city in which people inhabit while containing everything that divides us.

In this slightly dystopian world, one in which we also perceive as naïve – it is a time that predates mobile-phones and CCTV footage – the forces of inequality are very present. Sparking a movement to right the inequity in the metropolis without intending to, we see in Joker a moral compass, a sense of right and wrong, which, rather than placating our thoughts of him as a dangerous being, make him all the more pernicious as he discovers the freedom and joy of unleashing his pent-up fury.

What, however, lifts this film into the realm of artistry is Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of Joker. From the internalisation of his unique and troubling laugh, iconic in its delivery and resonance, to the metre of the jokes that the want-to-be comedian, Joker delivers, to the most striking trait of all, his human form. Arresting in its painful and heart-rendering depiction, is the shape of his torso, its movement writhing and contorting with balletic insinuation. Everything else in the film falls into place behind this disturbing, sometimes macabre image of a body wrought by complication and impediment, by vulnerability and liability, by agony and pathos.

Watching the character’s labyrinthian interchange and realignment of bone and sinew and muscle to express and progress the emotion and anguish and distress in the man is not only worthy of note but contextually important both within the film and for the industry in general. It really does both tell of the character and give texture to the medium.

Week #82 The Picture of Dorian Gray: a play

Not turning in his grave, I think Oscar Wilde would be doing joyful acrobatics if he could see Kip Williams’ adaption of his century-old novella, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Drawing out of the text seamlessly, Williams has brought Wilde’s work to life in an explosion of contemporary theatre.

Not only are we catapulted across the decades and thrown into Wilde’s lavish tone and diabolical turn of phrase, we are led behind the mirrors that excoriate and unpick one of the ugliest of human characteristics, that of vanity. With the bones and muscle of the work in place, it is the dressing with which the production has been marinated that allows the audience to drink it in. Theatre, you say? We will never look at theatre again in the same way.  

But it’s not only the reimagining of the play in a modern high-tech extravaganza that’s thrilling, it’s the alteration to the way the work is structured that’s impressive. To have created a performance platform which is pinned around a one-woman show, is, as the fliers say, genius.

In the brilliant and unscrupulous move of a woman playing Dorian, not to mention the other twenty-six characters in the prose, Kip Williams’ artful decision not only sets something right for all the years in which men played women on the stage, it brings an alacrity that lends itself to the flamboyance of the prose. The effect is stunning. Wigs and facial hair, suits and corsets, trousers and braces and puffy-sleeved shirts, remind the audience, not only of the element of narrative but the playful mechanisms that are so often woven into Wilde’s work.

At the foundation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, however, lies a cautionary tale. Indeed, all these decades on, as the play so boldly reminds us, even the young are affected. And because of the swippling that’s managed between modern technology and an age-old desire, a scaffold has been built for a whole new generation to climb.

Straddling that time, the play, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is, it would seem, enhancing the work. Indeed, the play manages to both hold true to the original idea and resonate with current meaning. Sending it off into the stratosphere it has found with sure footing where to take hold. And, in the process, rather than something having been lost, Kip Williams has written and directed an adaption of Wilde’s fable that holds a ruthlessly honest mirror up to our modern era. 

Week #81 500 thermal portraits from today 37degrees C 28 XY 010222: photographic video

It’s unusual for me to write about someone twice on my blog. Chris Friel, however, has been so adept at developing the craft of photography and finding new ways to disrupt and reinvigorate his view through the lens, that I just must.

After early work that captured country fields and lonely trees, to dark landscapes and multi layered pictures, Chris Friel turned to portraits. The faces he depicts are stripped of distraction. Life lies in their large baleful eyes and uncompromised presence. He seems to be interested in the statement of life through portraiture, here, (there are many clear portraits like this if you look through his work here) but in 500 thermal portraits from today 37degrees C 28 XY 010222 he takes this statement of life and distorts it. As you watch the image build and undo, fracture and reconstruct, digitalise into abstraction and then balloon with a naïve palette, back into full face, an understanding passes between artist and viewer that is personal.

This facial splintering is, for me, an allegory of our modern lives. We have, the work seems to be saying, not only many faces but many realities as the digital world pulls on our psyches. The process and, by extension, the work is both brutal and subtle, insidious and straightforward. In high temperatures which nature did not intend (or certainly not presently) the effect is exacerbated. And as we watch, we are ruptured without notice and built back with layers of fillers. We are rounded and boxed and blackened-out and both coded and discombobulated. We are stretched beyond recognition.

The ‘stills’ I have posted here are indications of Friel’s work, signatures of one of the current threads his work is exploring and that I have chosen to highlight. They, in themselves, are full of the lattice-work of life, its hard wiring and broad dough, its ineffaceable truth and angelic naivety. Even through our abstraction, humanness is undeniable.

Week # 80 Lonelinesses: a photographic series

Antoine Buttafoghi has not only centred his camera in order to take these images but, as if the gadget is an extension of his body and mind, he has centred his being. Broad in scope and yet personal to a fault, Buttafoghi’s work takes the viewer away from themselves and into the reality of someone other. Presented in grand meticulousness, the images are sharpened to the point of beauty. However, what makes these photographs truly attractive is the humbleness in which their protagonists have been portrayed.

Often times dwarfed by a large canvas, these pictures knit the world into the soul of someone. The person depicted is not so much overwhelmed as integrated; not so much awestruck as grounded; not so much bound to a scene as present in one. Because of this, the capturing of a person in their environment, these photos reflect back to us what it is to be current, contemporaneous and in progress even when we are still. For more distillations look here and here. Or choose from Buttafoghi’s gallery, here.

Week #77 This Thing of Darkness: a podcast

Understanding homicide, as it turns out, helps in understanding the human condition. Who could have known? But the podcast, This Thing of Darkness, produced by the BBC and superbly written by Lucia Haynes and Anita Vettesse, tells us a lot about us: about how we think and why, about what it takes to commit murder and why, and, about love and how distortion and anxiety can pervert it. It isn’t hate we’re shown but the other face of love, which can deadly.

Despite the presence of brutality – you can hardly have murdered without it – what we hear is why life can produce brutality in an individual. The reasons, of course, are vast and deep, cruel and illuminating, sobering and disturbing. But, underlying it all, they are very human and because of that, ultimately decipherable.

Perhaps the reason This Thing of Darkness can boast to have achieved such a high standard of insight, is because the story is so beautifully choreographed. As it swings from the personal to the theoretical, the narrative reveals how the unresolved in us, can build. Without realising it, we are pushed ever closer – often by distortion – to bring about a resolution. For some of us this eventuates in things being resolved in a deadly way.

While the gulf between murderers and the rest of us may seem vast, this podcast not only manages to clarify and inform us about why murder occurs, but to bring those who commit it, closer. It demystifies our tendency to think of them as outside of us. Like the warp and weft of material, the text never excuses their behaviour but seeks and succeeds in showing us the fabric of the human condition even if it leads to the act of killing.    

Deftly pieced together, This Thing of Darkness shows us how we love and how that love can be misshapen.

Week #75 Dead Europe: a novel

Christos Tsiolkas is probably best known for his novel The Slap. Here, however, I want to recommend his third novel Dead Europe, my favourite of all his books. Not only is the narrative layered with all the mysterious and atmospheric veils of a myth, but it pulls the reader into a rippling search for place and timely-location. As a young man, a photographer, goes on a trip through Europe, he must come face to face with the claws of his past and the way in which they have been worn down.

It is the undercurrent of life that Tsiolkas is interested in: the roof-top chats, the ugly outskirts of Paris, the lonely barren insides of a Greek café. Energetically brutal while engagingly normal, Tsiolkas is a writer who excoriates the personal, sometimes to unbearable depths.

Eerily, Dead Europe has the feel of a prophetic missive, a kind of current dystopia. But what’s most arresting about this novel is what lingers, that of a bitter sweet reminder that the human experience is at the behest of historic whimsy. And the pain to understand our location in the world is often packaged in brutal truths.

Week #74 Casablanca Not The Movie: A photographic series … Yoriyas

How do you get just enough movement and stillness in a photograph? Actually, how do you get just enough modernity and tradition in a photograph? The complimentary juxtaposition of subject matter and form are a quintessential aspect of Yoriyas’s photographs. They abound with it: humour and seriousness, colour and blanch, fantasy and reality. Devoid of judgement, they allow a taste of everything of variance to be packed into one image.  

Yoriyas Yassine Alaoui is a Moroccan photographer who seems to have come to the art in an organic manner. From chess to mathematics to hiphop to dance this is a person who follows their passions, and his photography is definitely one to be celebrated.

Documenting daily life in almost poetic distillation, you can see more of his work here and here. And for a recent look in the time of COVID, here.  

Week #73 A Day Out: a photographic series

Martin Parr is interested in people. He photographs them without apology, capturing their lives and representing them with humour if not a stark honesty. Often touting a relaxed veneer, the photographs have a deep resonance. They are bald reflections of life sometimes opening up on the absurd and banal.

Quintessentially English – although not exclusively so – Parr gets below the radar of his photographic subjects and into the national psyche. He ekes out an individual’s essence and reflects it back to us with an empathy that goes all the way to truth-telling. It’s not that it’s harsh but then, these shots are not taken in a deprived land. In fact, it’s plenty that might be the more problematic protagonist, plenty that is usually the backdrop for those who are anything but rich.

No matter what informs the shots – whether they are brazen or brutal – these photos are warm. At one end of the spectrum they celebrate the human spirit and at the other they are pictures of an overwrought world?

Certainly, Martin Parr’s efforts are glorious to the eye. More of which can be elucidated here. And – my favourite of his collections taken in Manchester –  here. And if you’re still hungry, you can go here.

Week #71 Facts about Deer: a poem

Sometimes a piece of art just won’t let you forget about it. Facts about Deer is one of those pieces for me. I first read it in Narrative Magazine in 2016 and, as I said, it’s been coming back to me ever since – a poem so conscious of itself and yet so intriguing. A poem seemingly about death but also about choice and decision-making and secrets. This poem, while melodious, shudders with a brittle undercurrent. It’s a poem that pulls at meaning and brings a story to light. It uncovers a personality.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram has written other poems. You can find out more about her work here and here.

Facts about Deer

Because this is still a poem with an animal in it
and I am still trying—I might say “it offers you
its meaty heart, with no lasting conditions.”

If you’ve seen a struck deer thrash its life out
on the shoulder, a burner that clicks
without flaming, you know how they seize to death.

Who cares what I think, but I wished just then
to have a knife. I wished I knew a little about guns
and to own one or to know something sorcerous.

Because nothing but blood tastes like blood, I’ve cut
myself for its coppery flavor. Only God knows
I’m good. My mother says I’ve no scruples, the way

I make no claims to being a permanent person,
how my move from husband to ex-husband came on
a wave of expediency and self-promotion. If you’ve gone

to the store and left behind a life—the kind that comes
with seating, spare change jars, someone’s green thumb
—then you know how I angered at the woman

shrieking behind the wheel of her cracked Escape,
phone to face, doe spasming on the shoulder.
Someone should knuckle up and kill this deer. A roadway

in America and there’s no policeman on hand to squash
a neck? It’s early evening & the sky’s poetically
blameless gray fills your throat with the thick despair

so familiar to the heavily indebted. Mountaineers know
you can’t save anyone on good will, that high altitude
is minus morality. So, Confessionalism. Or,

Two Truths and a Lie: I married a man I met
on an airplane. I killed that deer. I have no patience
for even the most cherubic of children.