On political art

Modern Moral Matters is an exhibition of ‘protest art’ by the British artist Richard Hamilton at the pretty Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park. At the press conference, the artist, 88, talked about his work and about the relationship between politics and visual art.

Most members of the Independent Group – the artistic movement to which Hamilton belonged in the 1950s – thought it fashionable to be apolitical, aloof. Not Hamilton. His art was then, and remains, politically engaged; his sympathies left-leaning.

This small exhibition spanning five decades of his career covers  some familiar territory – Ireland and Iraq, Thatcher and Blair – as well as some that is lesser known.

The idea for his earliest protest painting was conceived in 1962  after Hugh Gaitskell, then leader of the Labour Party (which was in opposition at the time), sanctioned Britain’s use of nuclear weapons, saying he didn’t want the country to enter the conference chambers of the world “naked”.

Hamilton describes his Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland (1964) as his first “satirical picture”. In an essay on the painting, he writes, “In putting to myself the question ‘what angers you most now?’ I found that the answer was Hugh Gaitskell.”

He felt betrayed by Gaitskell, and turned his anger into creative energy. “A satirical painting should be topical and passionate,” he wrote, “I imagined the picture as one to be violently executed, it should be big, the paint aggressive, the meaning awfully clear.”

But art that refers to current affairs is often limited by that very current-ness: it can lower the art’s semantic life expectancy. Hugh Gaitskell now sits outside the span of many people’s political consciousness, so the painting’s immediate impact is diminished.

For how long is Pop art Pop art once its subject has left the realm of popular consciousness?

Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland (1964)
 

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Last week, Hamilton insisted that protest art was ‘worthwhile’ – which implies that, on some level, it works.

As I walked around the gallery after he had spoken, I wondered whether his art constitutes (or has ever constituted) an active protest – that is to say, a call for change, justice or justification – or rather whether it is simply a series of oblique responses to situations?

“Modern Moral Matters” is a title borrowed from the Eighteenth-century artist William Hogarth, famous for his depictions of  public and private corruption. I saw Hogarth’s The Election series at the Tate’s exhibition in 2007. This is the second of the series:

Canvassing for Votes (1754)

Perhaps Hamilton is a satirist in Hogarth’s image: engaged but detached. Hamilton doesn’t believe artists have a direct responsibility to “hold governments to account”, yet he has long believed in the effectiveness of art as a political medium. The pieces he created in 2009 for this for this exhibition, Maps of Palestine – a pair of maps showing the Israeli-Palestinian boarder as fixed by UN in 1947 and as it is today – he described as “a simple demonstration of a situation”.

Maps of Palestine (2009)

For him, the effectiveness of the pair lies in their simplicity: simplicity in the face of knotty political issues.

To me, the paintings seem impotent. The colours are unmodulated, flat; the compositions static. They remind me of uninspiring geography textbooks, and long afternoons spent sitting in classrooms, the real, moving world the other side of an open window.

The relationship between politics and art is, I think, something more fraught than a “simple demonstration”. Hamilton said as much when he admitted there are some subjects simply won’t touch: the current famine in East Africa, for example. “I can’t even imagine a painting that would be a response to that,” he sighed, suddenly looking very old.

On new media: ‘citizen journalism’

The term ‘citizen journalism’ – to denote the contribution of news by non-professional journalists – caused great upset  at the news:rewired conference.

It was bandied about in a panel discussion on ‘crowdsourcing’ between Kate Day, communities editor of Telegraph.co.uk , Ruth Barnett, SkyNews‘s first Twitter correspondent, and Andy Heath, comissioning editor of the ‘citizen newswire’ Demotix (a company that buys content from citizen journalists and sells it to organisations like the BBC).

The audience at was, for the most part, made up of professional journalists.  Many of this group had been journalists since the days of Fleet Street and many  protested that the term ‘citizen journalist’ devalued their professionalism.

Perhaps they are right to feel threatened. The very nature of the media is changing, rapidly. But I am not convinced that so-called ‘citizen journalists’ do pose a threat to professionals or to mainstream media organisations. 

It is true non-journalists, who outnumber journalists, are more likely a witness to an unexpected, news-worthy event. It is true, also, that technology can turn non-journalists into ‘citizen’ or ‘accidental’ journalists (such as the man who snapped the Hudson plane crash on his mobile) and that channels like Twitter allow them to spread their news themselves. That social media can turn home videos into ‘user-generated content’.

And if all of us are journalists, perhaps none of us are journalists. In a nice blog for the Telegraph titled ‘Why journalism is like cooking’ (written after the conference), Kate Day argues that it’s not the person but the result that matters - not the chef or the hack but the food and the story.

But while citizen journalists have the potential to break news faster than professionals, major media organisations retain the greater credibility. News-consumers rely on such organisations to verify stories, even – perhaps particularly – if they were broken by non-professionals.

All three speakers on the panel emphasised the need to verify ‘crowdsourced’ information, just as they would any other source. Demotix check the coded information within the photos they receive to determine whether they really depict what they say they depict. SkyNews took those Iranians more seriously who had been tweeting news before the protests than those who began once they realised the West was following.

Demotix illustrates well the balance of power between citizen and professional journalists. Their business model – buying from citizens to sell to professionals  – works because the mainstream outlets remain the most comprehensive disseminators of news.

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Citizen journalism is not just un-threatening but potentially helpful to major media outlets. Their audiences now talk back, and, if they ask them questions, they not only create stronger communities (= stronger ‘brands’ and more £) but get answers that can inform investigative journalism.

Mainstream media outlets that use social media effectively also save time and money. When the MPs’ expenses scandal broke, SkyNews urged its Twitter followers to check their local MPs’ claims: the Quentin Letts bell tower example was uncovered that way. ‘Crowdsourced’ information is often given freely and worth money: professionals would be foolish to ignore it.

Though the role of major news outlets is moving from breaking to verifying, they retain the lion’s share of the audience – many of whom are now willing to help them do their job. That’s got to be more help than hindrance.

On new media: Online Communities and Free Speech

This is the second of a series of posts re-fashioned from the notes I made at  news : rewired, a digital journalism conference hosted by Journalism.co.uk at City University, London. (My first post, on the changing role of the BBC, is here.)

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Almost all newspapers several years ago turned their Op/Ed sections in print into discursive forums online, allowing readers to comment and exchange views with each other and the newspapers’ journalists.

Yet these online communities vary in nature, specifically with regards to their level of “moderation” by those in charge.

Jessica Reed, an editorial assistant on Guardian.co.uk’s Comment is Free (CiF) and a speaker at the conference, said that comments posted on CiF articles are often radical and ranting (the chat room alter-ego having now had a good decade to develop).

Part of her job is to remove comments deemed offensive. With 30-40 articles per day commissioned and published by CiF (alongside those originally written for the print edition) and sometimes hundreds of comments per article, this process takes time.

Robin Hamman, head of social media at Headshift (a social business consultancy), put forward comment/tweet “curation” as an alternative to CiF-style “moderation”. On his personal website, Cybersoc, he simply picks the five best tweets in any given discussion and publishes only those on an embedded Twitter feed. He is more like a museum curator, chosing and arranging the best exhibits, than a schoolteacher trying to catch snatches of bad language in the playground. 

The way Hamman treats tweets is the reverse of how CiF treats comments, and it seems suited to his smaller, more subject-specific site. If Jessica Reed adopted Cybersoc’s method I suspect CiF commentors would feel excluded and eventually stop contributing to conversations that they no longer felt were open.

Kate Day, Communities Editor of The Telegraph, put forward yet another solution. She does not ”moderate” comments posted on My Telegraph – a readers’ blogging site, set up about two and a half years ago – but instead responds to individual complaints and removes inappropriate comments once they have been flagged up by a reader. Apparently the Daily Mail has just started doing the same on its website.

This method is less labour-intensive and, Day believes, strengthens the community of readers who feel they are being heard. And if no active, “moderation” decision is made then The Telegraph cannot be seen to condone an offensive stance.
Or that’s the theory. In reality, publishing the views of those other than their paid writers is a tricky business for media organisations. The line between commissioning (and finding acceptable) and publishing can seem blurry to readers.

In theory, any reader should be able to start a My Telegraph blog. But when the British National Party’s London Assembly Member Richard Barnbrook decided to exercise this right Day was faced with a “difficult decision”. In the end she decided to let him blog. 

In his second post, titled “Blame the immigrants”,  Barnbrook wrote:

“I have had enough of political correctness. I have had enough of people being afraid to actually say what they really want to say. Yes … it is the immigrants. The real crime is on the streets, and it is the young people who are being attacked every day now by knives and guns. Most of it is being done by immigrants or by the sons of immigrants who have been protected by a despicable government desperate for the Ethnic Block-Vote.”

The blog post was picked up my Media Guardian, among others, and The Telegraph responded this statement:

“Our readers are entitled to their opinions and, within the law, they’re entitled to publish them on the My Telegraph blogging platform. We believe our readers are intelligent and discerning enough to avoid the content they dislike and report that which offends. That doesn’t mean the Telegraph necessarily endorses their opinions nor promotes them.”

The post has since been removed. Whether this was the decision of by Kate Day or Richard Barnbrook himself, I am not sure, but it does reveal the ethical problems inherent in censoring a community of free speakers.

On new media: The BBC

Last Thursday, I attended news : rewired, a journalism conference hosted by Journalism.co.uk at City University, London. During lectures and discussions on digital journalism, social media and crowdsourcing I made notes (on paper, quite unfashionably) which I have re-wired as blog posts.

This short first post is about the changing role of the BBC…

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Kevin Marsh, editor of the BBC College of Journalism and former editor of the Today programme, opened news:rewired with a talk on “the challenges of learning new multimedia and social media skills”. (Watch the video here.)

According to him, the launch of a “multimedia room” in April last year transformed the Corporation. BBC podcasting and blogging is now free-er (the Beeb took a while to embrace the latter). BBC journalists now work often in “story communities”, pooling skills and knowledge and using Twitter to communicate with each other and tap into “trending” topics. Learning digital journalism skills has been, for BBC staff, a collaborative effort.

Yet Marsh seemed rather suspicious of new media. He admitted that, at 55, he is glad to be the tail end and not the start of his career in broadcast journalism. Ours is a daunting time in which to be setting out, he said, with the parameters shifting and expanding so fast.

Just as new media is changing the ways broadcast journalists work, it is also changing the role of traditional news outlets like the BBC. Marsh pinpointed the reporting of the 7/7 London terrorist bombings as a turning point. For him, it was the first time the BBC’s ability to “break news” was really shown up by faster media channels (the BBC originally reported that the explosion at Edgware tube station was caused by an “electrical surge”, while others were getting the story right).

After this point, the BBC’s focus became more on getting the facts right, not first. In a widening sea of bloggers and commentators, the BBC’s mission became verification. “If there is one thing the public expect from the BBC it’s reliability,” said Marsh.

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Kevin Marsh is on Twitter @bbccollege. Search Twitter for news : rewired tweets with #newsrw.

Video: More on William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives

In these videos, Garima Dutt talks to William Dalrymple about Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India.

In the first clip, WD describes himself as ‘a shadowy presence in the book [...] there only at the margins of the stories’. He says that 90% of the book is reported speech – that of his interviewees. 

The author’s ‘shadowy presence’ is one of the most remarkable things about Nine Lives (and someting I commented on in my last post). Garima Dutt is quite wrong to compare Nine Lives to The Age of Kali (1998), a collection of WD’s travel writing/ journalism, for his latest book has no explorer-writer figure at its centre.  

In the first clip WD refers to Nine Lives as a collection of ‘non-fiction short stories’. In this next clip he tells Garima Dutt that he enjoyed using the ‘short story form’ and finding ‘a way of making  non-fiction and factual writing fit that frame’ so the stories have ‘the same narrative pleasure’ as a novel…

(You can read a transcript of this interview at new aesthtic, an Indian website for ‘contemporary urban’ writing.)

William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives

William Dalrymple’s publisher describes Nine Lives as his ‘first travel book in a decade’; this is rather misleading. Dalrymple’s own, contradictory phrase, ‘linked non-fiction stories’, is closer to the truth.

This collection is, in some respects, a conscious departure from the books Dalrymple wrote a decade ago and more. His acclaimed literary debut, In Xanadu (1989), was, he says, published at a time when ‘travel writing tended to highlight the narrator’: its subtitle, ‘A Quest’, suggests a focus on the act of exploring rather than the people encountered. ‘With Nine Lives,’ he writes in the Introduction, ‘I have tried to invert this, and keep the narrator in the shadows, so bringing the lives of the people I have met to the fore and placing their stories firmly centre stage.’

Large portions of the resulting nine stories read like interviews. The words of the interviewee are unadulterated and unironised, and the interviewer seems at times the mere facilitator of their remarkable stories. The Independent‘s description of Dalrymple as ‘an unobtrusive cameraman’ is apt.

His subjects include a South Indian ‘devadasi’ (temple prostitute), a Buddhist monk who fought the Chinese invasion of Tibet and an illiterate Rajasthani goat heard who sings – and keeps alive – a 4,000-line sacred epic. They represent the religious pluralism and geographical diversity of the Subcontinent, yet they all live in the parts ‘suspended between modernity and tradition’ and their ways of dealing with the threat of modernisation have much in common. These are neither the drivers nor the benefitters of India’s economic ‘boom’ and it is from their persepctive that it is presented.

The ‘Modern India’ of the book’s subtitle duly forms the backdrop not the focus of the opening story, ‘The Nun’s Tale’. The threat to this Jain nun Mataji’s life comes not from outside – from the changing nature of her society – but from within. Mataji tells of the death of her sole companion, Prayogamati, with whom she walked the roads of India for the duration of her life as a nun in the pursuit of enlightenment, having renounced all possessions but an unstitched white sari. On being diagnosed with TB, Prayogamati decided to embrace ‘sallekhana’ (self-starvation regarded by Jains as the final renouncement and beginning of the next life). Mataji struggles with the demands of Jainism against human attachment: ‘When I realised [Prayogamati] had left, I wept bitterly. We are not supposed to do this, and our guruji frowned on me. But I couldn’t help myself. I had followed the steps correctly until she passed away, but then everything I had bottled up came pouring out. Her body was still there but she wasn’t in it. It was no longer her.’

Mataji speaks not in the conscious, styled voice of a writer but in a voice that is believably hers. There is a certain eloquence in her plain sentences, but readers who enjoyed Dalrymple’s take on, for example, the ‘Essex man from the East’ his Punjabi taxi driver Balvinder Singh in his 1993 book City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi will find little of the same wit here.

Still, around these nine quasi-monologues is set the evocative description and lively historical exposition for which Dalrymple is famous. ‘The Monk’s Tale’ is set in the Himalayan town of McLeod Ganj, home to the Dalai Lama and ‘the place to which countless displaced lamas and landowners, refugee peasants and farmers, exiled townsmen and traders, have made their way, clustering like barnacles on a rock a round the temple residence of the Dalai Lama.’ Below is the Kangra Valley, ‘where the hilltops emerge from the flat blanket of winter morning mist like humps of a school of whales rising from the deep.’ In brief passages like these Dalrymple shows he can still summon a scene.

Nine Lives is not ‘vintage’ Dalrymple but it is a brave and, for the most part, engaging departure from the format and style of his work so far. In this updated kind of ‘travel writing’, the egocentric gives way to the anthropological: Dalrymple does not record his journeys between his subjects’ diverse homes – indeed they are not even part of the same trip – but focuses on on the ways their faiths inform their daily lives. The result is mature and self-effacing yet lacking the presence of the jovial writer-figure which the readers of his previous travel books so enjoyed.

For pages at a time one might forget about the writer altogether, until, that is, some passing comment made by his interviewee: ‘I was very scared as he was very hefty, very fat,’ says the temple protitute Rani Bai of a client, ‘Much fatter even than you.’ In a book remarkable for its author’s very absence, such moments confirm that his ear for the comic is still there – perhaps just lying in waiting.

This book review was for The List; read the original here.

Maharajas at the V & A

The Victoria and Albert Museum is within close walking distance to my latest temporary home in London. Right now, as well as its impressive permanent collection of glinting treasures, it is home to Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts.

Visitors walk through the rooms as through history – chronologically. It all begins in the early eighteenth century, when the decline of the Mughal Empire left a vacuum for the old regional kingdoms to reoccupy.

The Maharajas sought to reinforce their position with opulent and symbolic spectacle. A  life-size, artificial elephant forms the magnificent centrepiece of the first room. It would have been the focal point of a stately procession, adorned in all the bejewelled and woven finery the maharaja atop could muster.

Beside the elephant are displayed the ruler’s various accessories including an impressive pair of karnia (round fans), once belonging to the Maharaja of Merwar. Each has a sun on one side and a moon on the other, indicating both his permanence and his claim to have descended from the sun.

On the walls around to the elephant, the modestly-sized scenes of religious ceremony and court life seem impossibly intricate. Visitors get right up close: the busy detail draws them in, like a Where’s Wally? double-spread. Paintings almost three hundred years old seem to teem with life, the jangling, hooting sounds of a procession in Udaipur recorded earlier this year providing the soundtrack.

In a long scroll showing the Maharaja of Mysore heading up a procession, every face in the crowd is different. Turbans are of different colours, skin various hues, and beards and noses individually-shaped. If the artist used stock figures, it’s hard to spot the duplicates.

Their subtly individualised features seem to bestow upon these figures a measure of individual intent. They are all depicted side-on, but some point left and others right, all apparently following their own noses. If they weren’t extras in an eighteenth century court scene, they could be the figures who bustled up and down Chandni Chowk, the congested beating heart of Old Delhi, when I walked its full length on my last day in India. Behind the coolly stylised, half-closed eye lids, I could see at once in these crowd scenes the chaos born of individualism.

My favourite of these paintings is Maharana Swarup Singh of Mewar at Holi (1851). Holi, the Festival of Spring, is still very much a feature of the Indian calendar: I celebrated Holi this year in Jaipur, Rajasthan, where I watched teams of men astride elephants sling powder wildly at each other ‘playing Holi’.

Though the kings and courtiers in the painting are on horseback, the scene is remarkably similar. Framed on four sides by the turreted white architecture of the palace at Udaipur plumes of red, green, blue and yellow colour cut soaring arcs through the air. The artist, thought to be ‘Tara’, looks as though he might have had an ‘spray paint’ aerosol can among his materials, so fluffy and light are his streaks of colour.

Maharana Swarup Singh of Mewar at Holi (1851)

The paintings and jewelled objects in these first rooms are full of significances and symbols beyond my comprehension; they draw on a visual language I cannot read. While some symbols, like the karnia’s sun and moon, are at least partly decipherable, others are more obscure. The label beneath a small painting of Raj Singh of Mewar explains that he is shown offering paan (nuts and herbs wrapped in betel leaf) to his guest ‘as a token of polite dismissal’.

Walking through the first rooms of this exhibition, one gets the sense of a culture – of its customs, symbols and self-representation – largely untouched by Western tastes and values.

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Enter the East India Company. Bhim Singh receiving Sir Charles Metcalfe in the Mor Chowk (c.1826) is, at first glance, like the paintings that precede it. But look again and there are white-skinned British officials in uniform sitting stiffly at Bhim Singh’s feet, their legs crossed in half-lotus position. In another painting in the same series painted slightly later the British and Indians sit at the same level on Western chairs. Just as they did under the Mughals, the maharajas were beginning to adapt to the cultural norms of their foreign conquerors.

Bhim Singh receiving Sir Charles Metcalfe in the Mor Chowk (c.1826)

The next room takes us past the 1857 ‘Indian Mutiny’ or ‘First War of Independence’ (depending from which side you view it) to the time of the Raj, when the Brits where no longer canny traders but rulers with direct control over three-fifths of the subcontinent known as ‘British India’. (They controlled the remaining two-fifths indirectly.)

Though they had been relegated by the British from ‘kings’ to ‘princes’ or ‘native chiefs’, the maharajas seem obsessed with impressing them. The gifts of a formal exchange are displayed: the maharajas gave magnificent jewels, swords and shields; they received, in return, bibles and dictionaries, the supposed benefits of a British culture and imperial rule.

On the wall opposite a vast depiction of Queen Victoria’s coronation as Empress of India (in absentia) is an only slightly less giant sepia photograph of Jai Villas in Gwalior. The two tell of the great gulf in understanding and respect between the two peoples.

The enormous Jai Vilas, modelled on the Palace of Versailles, was purpose-built at vast expense by Jaiaji Scindia of Gwalior to house the Prince of Wales on his one-night stopover in 1875. The apparently uncomfortable sprawling pile makes a mockery of Jaiaji Scindia’s desperation to impress his British counterpart, just as the sheer size of the coronation scene is made ridiculous by ‘the Empress” conspicuous absence.

William Dalrymple writes in the Guardian: ‘The exhibition examines the legacy of India’s princely rulers, and especially their fateful relationship with the British. Jai Vilas is really as good a symbol of any of the misunderstandings that always beset that troubled relationship.’

This culturally-intelligent exhibition ends with a pair of portraits of the Maharaja of Indore in morning coat and in Maratha dress: in neither does he look he entirely comfortable. Inhabitors of a country beset by invadors since Alexander, the maharajas have always had to adapt to foreign ideas and tastes while maintaining native traditions and local power. It is just another facet of India’s remarkable – though not untroubled - pluralism.

 

Sir Yeshwant Rao Holkar, Maharaja of Indore

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Maharaja exhibition curator, Anna Jackson, on the opening night