Waiting For the Barbarians

In the opening scene of Civilisation, the BBC's original 1969 series, Kenneth Clark says "I can't define civilisation, but I know it when I see it", upon which he turns his gaze towards Notre Dame de Paris. In the new Civilisations series, the absence of authoritative discrimination implied by the plural might have made providing an updated definition a challenge, but Simon Schama neatly sidesteps this by insisting that "we recognise its opposite" over footage of the iconoclasts of Islamic State at work in Palmyra. This immediately suggests that the new production isn't going to pick a bone with the old, but will instead exercise respectful discretion, which is a disappointment. A far more interesting approach would be a direct engagement with Clark's landmark contribution, which has also been made available in full on iPlayer for the purposes of comparison. I don't mean by this a critique that simply mocked Clark's patrician viewpoint and manner, which would be both easy and redundant, but a discussion of the changing view on what constitutes civilisation and how we should approach its study. The new series certainly attempts the former, notably by splitting authorial and presentational duties between Schama, Mary Beard and David Olusoga, and by expanding its scope beyond Europe, but it does little of the latter.

An example of this is that Clark, in discussing England in the nineteenth century, can both casually dismiss Irish navvies as "ruffians" and sincerely recommend reading Engels, views that would in part or whole irritate a lot of people today. This is the sardonic voice of the nonconformist Tory who lauds humanitarianism while being sceptical of humanity. Schama, as the lead voice of the new series, naturally lauds humanity in the ecumenical way that you would expect, but has little to say about either the relationship of civilisation and political economy (something you could have predicted from his previous academic work, such as The Embarrassment of Riches or Citizens) or the impact of critical theory on cultural studies. If Clark's worldview was essentially antiquarian and anglocentric, and in stark contrast to the new thinking in art history that emerged in the 1960s, Schama's worldview remains heavily influenced by the English and French traditions of social history (which downplayed class) and transatlantic in both politics and style (throughout the new series, he has an annoying habit of pronouncing "mountain" to rhyme with "pain" rather than "pun").

In theory, Beard and Olusoga should provide a diversity of perspective, but the unequal airtime (Schama presents every other programme, from first to last, which means five in total while Beard and Olusoga present two each) means that their minority reports struggle to get beyond setting the scene and asking some obvious questions. To give her her due, Beard does smuggle in one amusing moment when she discusses the iconoclast assault on Ely Cathedral made by Cromwell's troops in the English Civil War, which destroyed the stained glass but illuminated the interior architecture, suggesting that Schama's simple definition by opposition has its flaws. Clark was sophisticated but anti-intellectual, in that classic English manner borne of aristocratic entitlement. He recognised a plurality of opinion, but was patronising because he remained ever the comfortable spectator, not to mention the monopoliser of voice. Schama, who remains a 1950s schoolboy at heart, is enthusiastic, reverent and slightly too emphatic. As he has proved over the years with his political interventions, he favours authority over plurality while claiming to speak to common humanity.

Clark spoke in the shadow of Auschwitz about the resilience of civilisation: high art was evidence of the triumph of good over evil. The plurality of the new series has no comparable moral or historical arc - not even the consolation of a Pinkeresque "things can only get better" - leaving us with little more than a eulogy to humanity's vital spark. What this highlights is an uncertainty in the relationship of civilisation and culture. What we know is that culture is organic and contingent, but that civilisation is discriminatory and programmatic: cultures happen, civilisations are built, albeit the results don't always match the blueprint and there are often competing builders. This should prompt questions about how certain cultural goods are elevated to the status of civilisation, but instead the new series simply (and perhaps unconsciously) reflects, rather than interrogates, the change in discrimination over the last 50 years. For example, the original series was more focused on architecture as an expression of civilisation and the preservation of values, with most of the art being adornments of buildings. The new new series places a greater emphasis on other plastic arts ("we are the art-making animal", according to Schama), but with no discussion as to what this change in emphasis means, or why whole art-forms such as music and cinema are excluded.

Another example would be the changing perception of the heroic artist, which has always been central to the concept of civilisation since the Renaissance. In an anecdote about Michelangelo, Schama emphasises "ars" as physical skill, but the story is part of a profile of "il Divino", featuring tales of his heroic determination, privation and admirable respect for the workers. This is little advance on Vasari's hagiography. In the neoliberal era, the heroic artist of the past has been recast as a "superstar"; his networking for commissions is now entrepreneurialism, his reliance on a studio (i.e. a production line staffed by others following his designs) evidence of a good business brain. For all the lip-service paid to labour, this is a world in which that other C-word, "capitalism", is notable by its conceptual absence. The series ends with Schama ligging with various contemporary artists, but his search for the vital spark means he misses the logistical reality. The Ghanaian artist El Anatsui's use of thousands of flattened bottle tops connects with the past of West African fabrics, but it should also remind us that it takes an industrial process to flatten all those bottle tops. Art is hugely expensive to make (modern studios are increasingly factory-scale), not because expense is unavoidable, but because that is what the elite art market demands of it.

The original series was an interpretation of Western civilisation through the curation historically undertaken by people like Clark himself. This emphasis inevitably gave it a conservative tenor, focused initially on the decline of the Classical world and the defence of its precious legacy against the external threat of "barbarians", the "destructive force of Islam" and the "Dark Ages". As he rhapsodised the early Christian monastic settlement of Skellig Michael, Clark didn't stop to wonder at the civilisation of mainland Ireland that produced the food and other material goods on which those early monks depended. The new series doesn't make the same mistake, not only dethroning Classical Greece as the year-zero of civilisation but casting the net wide to other parts of the globe far beyond the Mediterranean, but it missed a trick in failing to address the role of cinema, not least because it could have used clips from The Last Jedi to show how Skellig Michael might have been less a beleagured outpost of civilisation (the first episode of the 1969 series was entitled The Skin of Our Teeth) and more a bolthole for an early medieval equivalent of ISIS

Clark was a conservative pleading for moderation in the face of modernity. Schama is a liberal pleading for humanity in the face of real people. This evasion avoids the prejudices of Clark, which have been made to look silly by the passage of time, but it means that the new series doesn't advance a theory of civilisation beyond the superlative: the exquisite, the remarkable, the emotionally arresting etc. Mary Beard is much more attuned to the uncertainties of history, operating as she does in a period that lacks the wealth of data available to historians of later periods, like Schama, and she is also more attuned to the social role of art and thus how it reflects struggle and compromise, not least in respect of gender (I'd quite like to see her take on Jordan Peterson's claim that order, and thus culture, is male and that chaos is female). This makes her more willing to pose questions rather than make confident assertions in the manner of Schama, but its also means that she can do little to slow the juggernaut of his conventional art-history.

Her first episode, How Do We Look?, clearly owes much to John Berger's seminal TV series, Ways of Seeing, and to feminist writers like Laura Mulvey, the author of the "male gaze". Her tale of how the works of civilisation can be misinterpreted and yet remain of value because of those misinterpretations, which she illustrates through Roman stories about the statues of Amenhotep III at Karnak, is the closest the series comes to a post-structuralist sensibility and the idea that meaning is never fixed. This suggests that civilisation is just another manifestation of the grand narrative of progress, and so ripe for critique as a social construct, but the limits of the form (i.e. a BBC feelgood series and the scant time afforded her) mean that Beard doesn't press the point. To make matter worse, in her second episode, The Eye of Faith, she concludes by defining civilisation as "an act of faith" - in other words, a secular impulse towards wonder and aesthetic solace that substitutes for religion. This is not just nonsense of the "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" sort, it also collapses civilisation back into the jumble of consolatory art presented by Schama. This is a pretty abject surrender.

While both Schama and Beard dutifully cross the globe to emphasise the heterogeneity of civilisation, David Olusoga is tasked with disentangling it from imperialism and slavery. This doesn't start well. His episode First Contact sounds like an SF trope, centred as it is on exogenous shocks like the Columbus moment and the potential for conflict. He does offset this with the tale of how the Portuguese encounter with West Africa in the 15th century was more a meeting of equals that led to integration through trade (by the early 1500s, 10% of the population of Lisbon was black), but this suggests that the sin of empire was exploitation and that trade was a force for good. To a degree, he has a point. In Radiance, the episode sandwiched between Olusoga's brace, Schama discusses various example of fruitful exchange: the influence of colour in Eastern art on the painters of Venice, the inspiration that Japanese woodcuts provided for the Impressionists, and the debt Matisse owed to Islamic art and design, but it's all unidrectional with Europe extracting and using. What Olusoga does better is to note the tensions and costs involved in this exchange, such as in North America and New Zealand, and how other societies can absorb and repurpose European culture.

In his episode on imperialism, modernity and World War One, The Cult of Progress, Olusoga dwells on the false dichotomy of barbarism or civilisation. While he rightly picks apart eurocentric hypocrisy, from Orientalism to the systematic destruction of native culture, he avoids the question implied in that other well-known phrase, barbarisme ou socialisme. As with the series as a whole, there is an assumption that civilisation exists independently of political economy. The role of trade is conceded, religion and humanism are given their due, and Olusoga in particular spells out the nature of art as a commodity, but there is no attempt to explain civilisation as a theory of society. Instead it is a given, even perhaps an arbitrary gift of the gods, which leads to the very old idea (immediately familiar to Kenneth Clark) that it can be lost through human catastrophe. In other words, civilisation is always under threat from aberrant society, which returns us to the trope of the Dark Ages. This results in Schama brooding on Goya's The Dog, which is held to represent the painter's despair. He explains the metaphor like a GCSE Art teacher: a dog without its master; Spain without its god; humanity without its civilisation.

Schama opens the last episode with the question, What can art do when horror comes calling; when civilisation itself is lost? Theresienstadt is offered not only as an example of that horror but as evidence that art can console, even though the reality was of art being used as propaganda, to delude and distract. Schama sees in art the light from humanity's vital spark and promptly goes looking for it among the superstars of the contemporary art scene. The Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang's use of gunpowder is a process that could have featured in a Joseph Wright of Derby painting, but Schama doesn't see the marriage of technology and industrial production so much as a tribute to Chinese history and persistent ingenuity. In contrast, Ai Weiwei's focus on the refugee crisis is resonant because it challenges the idea that "civilisation assumes a settled city population", and also because it implicitly debunks the idea that migration (as distinct from colonisation) is a threat to civilisation, the framing of the "barbarians" from Gibbon onwards. We are living through the greatest era of migration: from rural to urban areas (albeit mostly to small towns), and from the developing to the developed world (largely to replenish population rather than to flee persecution).

We also live in an age when two-thirds of the global population has a mobile phone and a lot of them have seen at least one Star Wars film. This fluidity and commonality is surely key to any understanding of what civilisation means today. For all the nationalist talk of exceptionalism, should we really be thinking of a single global civilisation, or is that simply another vector of neoliberal hegemony? Schama ends the series with the idea of art as marks made to speak to the future, which makes it enduring and profound. This is romanticism. No one today seriously believes that civilisation retains its original meaning of urbanity, and historians like Beard have long shown that historic civilisations such as Rome were multifarious and the "barbarians" no less cultured. Equally, few would now claim that it is the elite production of a historically-specific culture, though the usual suspects will try (in his rancid Daily Mail review, Quentin Letts revealed his true self by marginalising Olusoga and calling him "Henry"). But surely the idea that civilisation and art are synonymous, and therefore a matter of socially-constructed taste and distinction, is just as ripe for critique? Schama ends on a democratic note - "something for everyone", "our shared humanity" - but the series is dominated by elite art and elite opinion. For all the nods to modern pieties, this isn't much advance on Clark's magnum opus.

Empire of the Celts

The British Museum is currently exhibiting the Celts, while Tate Britain offers an exhibition entitled Artist & Empire. The former is subtitled "art and identity" and imagines an informal empire of soft power extending across both space and time. The latter is subtitled "facing Britain's imperial past" and suggests a reevaluation of the propaganda of empire. The two institutions are of course treasure troves of imperial looting and monuments to exploitation, from the Benin bronzes to sugar, and both embody the notion that identity and social relations can be captured in material objects, which is fundamental to the fetishisation of commodities. Though the exhibitions appear to be quite distinct, with only a slight overlap in the history of Ireland, they are essentially about the same thing: British identity. Of course, that's British identity as seen by the upper middle classes who curate exhibitions.

The Celts, as a people without their own written history, have been manipulated for political ends since classical times. Much of what we know from the "sources" is merely the projection of Roman political and social concerns, from the words put into the mouth of Calgacus by Tacitus in his Agricola ("To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace") to Cassius Dio's ventriloquising of Celtic female desire ("we consort openly with the best men, whereas you let yourselves be debauched in secret by the vilest"). In recent years we have interpreted these as anecdotes of native pride and sexual equality, back-projecting a "civic nationalism" that is no less romantic than the imaginings of Walter Scott, when they were actually meant to chide the Roman elite for its cupidity and lack of moral fibre - i.e. the failure to be sufficiently Roman, to the point where you could be lectured by barbarians. Victorian Britons got the intended message: "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din".

In the nineteenth century, the Celts were recuperated for nationalism, most notably in France. In 1789 the Gauls were the embodiment of ancient rights that predated the Frankish kings, and then a symbol of national defiance during the counter-revolutionary wars. Gauls and impending war became a recurrent French theme: in 1865 a statue of Vercingetorix was built on the site of ancient Alesia as tensions with Prussia mounted (in 1875 the Prussians built a statue to Hermann the German, aka Arminius, in the Teutoberger Wald in part to celebrate the victory of 1871); in 1910 the Gaulloises brand of cigarettes was launched, with its distinctive (and archaeologically unfounded) winged helmet marque; and Asterix first appeared in 1959 at the height of the Algerian War. Yet parallel to this, Celtic identity was also used to advance regionalism in Brittany against the French state, mirroring similar developments in Wales and Cornwall. Thus the national "Gaul" co-existed with the regional "Celt".

After World War Two, the idea of a common Celtic civilisation, stretching from Ireland to Turkey, became popular not just as a precedent for an emerging cooperative Europe, but as an alternative basis for a shared origin that wiped away the nonsense of Aryanism. While genetic research has shown the idea of a Celtic ethnicity to be nonsense too, the idea of a common culture continued to be popular, particularly as archaeology showed the Celtic peoples to be more sophisticated (i.e. luxury-goods fondlers) and bourgeois (oppida becoming mini-cities) than the caricatures of Caesar's Gallic War. Over the course of two centuries we see the employment of the Celts as symbols for regional identity, national identity and a supra-national identity. All three ideas remain current, which explains the contemporary difficulty in pinning down this elusive "people".

By the late-1980s, the Celt was in danger of becoming the prototypical EU citizen. The I Celti show in Venice in 1991 was apparently "conceived with a mind to the great impending process of the unification of Western Europe" with the Celts "being the first historically documented civilisation on a European scale". Though there has since been a turn away from the idea of the Celts as constituting a unitary civilisation, the idea that they were more technologically advanced than classical writers allowed, and that they were also traders on a continental scale, has continued to grow. The recent BBC series (The Celts: Blood, Iron and Sacrifice) advanced the fashionable theory that the Atlantic coast was the backbone of Celtic art, a pre-echo of the epochal shift away from the Mediterranean in the 16th century. The British Museum show makes much of this skill in the crafting and trading of luxury goods, to the point that the exhibition occasionally feels more like an upscale jewellers than an academic discourse, a sense heightened by the Clannad-like ambient music.

The idea of the Celts as a loose federation of traders, peripheral yet highly influential, has obvious ideological resonance in Britain, just as the idea of them as the origin of the nation remains strong in France. What the exhibition doesn't do is reconcile the profusion of wealth with the contemporary and later depictions of Celts as half-naked, blue-painted savages, with barely a pot to piss in. In other words, the economic context of Celtic society is largely absent, even though it is central to the historical records of late Celtdom in Early Medieval Ireland (the point about Brehon law is not its sophistication or recognition of women but its obsession with property and financial dues). The explanation for this is that British ethnography from Elizabethan times onwards emphasised the backwardness of the Celtic fringe to justify empire, while the riches that adorn continental museums were the result of nineteenth century state investment in national archaeology.

Where the exhibition is better is in tracking the employment of different images of the Celt to suit a political purpose, which is neatly encapsulated in the competing Protestant and Catholic narratives of Cu Chulainn: a defender of the Irish against the British, and a defender of Ulster against the rest of Ireland. The Tate Britain exhibition also opens in Ireland, with the siege of Enniskillen Castle in the late 16th century, and includes Marcus Gheeraerts's remarkable portrait of Captain Thomas Lee in which his bare (and rather chilly looking) legs are meant to reference both the Irish "style" and Roman heroic models. This is an early example of the British tendency to see empire as an excuse for dressing-up (or down), part of the wider cultural appropriation that links the 44th Regiment making their last stand at Gundamuck in 1842, attired in their recently-acqured Afghan coats, back to Captain Lee in 1594.

The Celts of the nineteenth century Celtic Revival were an invention whose roots lay not only in the search for a distinct Irish (and Scottish) national identity but in the growing British unease with the nature and course of empire. Like the contemporary fascination with the decline and fall of the Roman imperium, the Celtic Twilight was a projection of British fears as much as Irish hopes, which is why so many of its central figures were Anglo-Irish. Though mercantilism had been successfully laundered through the ideology of free-trade, and the naked economic purpose of colonialism had been obscured by Christianity and the "civilising" mission, there was still a sense that Britain's empire was a temporary role, fortuitously acquired and reluctantly assumed (the white man's burden etc), whose ultimate purpose was to oversee the development of native self-rule at some indeterminate future point.

While Anglo-Saxon history was (and still is) framed in terms of kingdoms and their "forging" into a national whole, Celtic history was seen as essentially tribal and wedded to concepts of familial loyalty and blood revenge (a view that runs from from Rob Roy through The Playboy of the Western World to Braveheart). This was used to both justify empire as a historical necessity in the transition from archaic to modern social forms (the example of the Romans in "birthing" West European kingdoms being stressed) while suggesting, through the persistence of atavistic habits (from cattle-rustling to vendettas), that the tribes were not yet ready for self-determination, and quite possibly never would be. The legacy of this way of thinking can be seen in the fascination with tribal or clan loyalty and honour killing in the popular characterisation of Pakistanis (and Afghans, and Albanians, and Africans etc).

The British Museum Celts exhibition suggests that "Celtic" is essentially a style, synthesised from many European influences and still being refined today, embodied in commodities from prehistoric torcs to modern tattoos. While it recognises the role of nationalism in influencing the style, it ultimately prefers to see it as supra-national, a product of the market for fashionable goods (initially European, now global). This same approach is evident at Tate Britain, where the propaganda of empire is rehabilitated as a collection of ironic commodities or recuperated in self-aware commentaries: keep calm and raise a wry smile. As you leave Artist and Empire, some of the exhibits reappear in the gallery shop in the form of tote-bags and prints. From strong-arm "traders" and expropriators justified by native outrages (the Indian Mutiny looms large as ever in the imagination), we arrive at the cliché of a nation of shopkeepers.

The Tragedy of the Subaltern

Freedom of expression is essentially a property right. This isn't a particularly contentious statement, as it is broadly accepted across the political spectrum. The left draws attention to the way that free speech is conditioned by wealth: no money, no voice. The right believes that all rights are ultimately property rights, deriving from ownership of one's own person: the one, irreducible human right. The left's view is cynical (in the original and non-pejorative sense of that word), recognising the reality of power in the world. The right's view is cynical (in the pejorative sense), being a self-serving defence of existing privilege. The irony is that the former accepts the non-perfectibility of man, while the latter insists on a universal human right. This cuts across the traditional view of the left as the inheritors of the Enlightenment's secularisation of religious perfectibility and the right as the repository of skepticism and the preference for practice over theory.

In practice, what I have characterised as the left view is usually relegated to the margins by the liberal shibboleth of freedom of expression as a universal human right independent of social context. This liberal orthodoxy reveals its true, pro-property colours when it is challenged explicitly as a property right. A current example of this is the early closure of Brett Bailey's Exhibit B art installation at the Barbican. I should say at this point that that the campaign to boycott the work is neither politically insightful nor engaged with the piece as art, but that is precisely where the power of its objection lies. This is a dispute over property, not a critique of the artist's worldview or technique. I've not seen the work, but then what interests me is the argument it has stimulated, which is a joint production of the artist, the gallery, his liberal supporters and the protestors.

Predictably, the protestors have been criticised as "bullies" and "freelance censors", and absurdly equated with Mary Whitehouse (of The Romans in Britain fame) and the prosecuting counsel in the trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Whitehouse and traditional censorship were examples of propriety: the idea that certain things are so unpleasant that they must not be expressed or acknowledged publicly (though they can be indulged privately, particularly among "responsible" social elites). This is not the same as the totalitarian instinct to thoroughly erase heterodox views, to the point of rewriting history and reengineering language as in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is also not the same as the insistence in respect of Exhibit B that "the Black community refuses to have racism defined for them by wealthy, white liberals". This is a contest over rights, not a refusal or rejection of them.

If this had been an installation on a similar theme by Steve McQueen, say tableaux vivant from 12 Years a Slave, it is hard to imagine there would have been the same protest, but then it would not have been the same piece of work because McQueen, both as an artist and an actor on the political stage, is not the same as Bailey. That said, there is an interesting parallel between the works. The key scene of the film is the moment when Chiwetel Ejiofor's Solomon slowly turns to the camera and holds our gaze. Similarly, the key device of Exhibit B appears to be "the steely stare that each performer locks on to the spectator". The difference is the way that cinema heightens the confrontation: you cannot break his gaze and must endure the long take. In a gallery, you can look down at your shoes or your exhibition guide and move on. Though the installation aspires to "lock" the spectator, I suspect it suffers the same fate as any living history re-enactment -  i.e. superficial engagement or embarrassed avoidance by much of the audience.

As far as I can tell from the various reviews, both of the Barbican show and its earlier incarnation at Edinburgh, Bailey sought to confront the audience with the living, breathing reality of the institution of slavery, the subsequent colonial commoditisation and ethnographic control of subject races, and the continuity of this with current attitudes to immigration and asylum. Bailey's defence of the piece ("The listed components of each installation includes spectators – it is only complete with an audience") suggests that the work is not for a black audience, but is designed to be consumed by a comfortable white audience primed for liberal guilt, some of whose ancestors will no doubt have been slavers and colonial administrators. Given the demographics of gallery-going, this is both reasonable and lazy.

The central plank of the boycott is the belief that, as a white South African, Bailey has no right to appropriate black history, even for anti-racist ends, rather than distaste over his artistic method. This is essentially a dispute over rights to the property of history, hence the protestors repeated reference to their "ancestors". In contrast, method (e.g. the depiction of anal rape) was central to the motivation of Mary Whitehouse (unless I'm much mistaken, she did not hold strong views on the historiography of Roman Britain). What is common to both the artist (in his asssumptions about his audience) and the protestors is the idea that they are tied to their ancestors through the inheritance of rights and obligations. This is a fundamentally conservative philosophy.

The treatment of black history, or any marginalised community's history, as a property in which only certain people have copyright has been common to both art and cultural analysis since the rise of subaltern studies in the 1970s. Originating in a post-structural reinterpretation of Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony, this provided a handy framework for emergent identity politics in the 1980s, which meant it was contaminated by commoditisation from the off. Its focus on expression ("Can the subaltern speak?") was quickly exploited on the right as evidence of "political correctness", while liberals reduced it to the fatuous "giving voice to the voiceless" (the key word is the verb give, suggesting a donation).

This conservative tone can be seen in the way that defence of such property rights quickly comes to rely on exclusion. For example, some of the Exhibit B protestors implicitly criticise black arists who participated in the installation as Uncle Toms: "Black artists have a dubious track record of appearing in and supporting racist art in the past, for example the black and white minstrel shows" (as if they were making an error of judgement rather than making a living). The implication is that being a member of the community does not guarantee property rights, which reminds you that property is ultimately held solely by right of possession. Similarly, when you hear someone deride those who would contest property rights as "bullies", you know you are listening to someone who is already in possession. It's worth noting that much of the liberal critique of the protest has employed the same condescending tropes (violence, intolerance, stupidity) used against "flying pickets", the original Irish boycotters and other ne'er do wells.

The wider significance of this minor cultural kerfuffle is the way that the principle of free expression has been polluted over the last 40 years by the development of property rights as the chief means of enforcing social and political exclusion. This was a deliberate shift in elite strategy following the failure of traditional group rights under the onslaught first of democracy and then civil rights over the preceding 50 years. From the 70s onwards, class prejudice and racial discrimination were diverted into an abrasive, selfish ideology that David Simon accurately describes as "Fuck 'em I got mine". The tragedy of the subaltern is that equal rights have been replaced by exclusive property rights, while the "lost voices of history" have been recuperated as commodities.

There is no better illustration of the political dominance of property rights than George Osborne's recently-announced plan to abolish tax on inherited pension pots - the privileging of the beneficiaries of unearned wealth - which furthers his wholehearted support for patrimonial capitalism. There is no better illustration of the social dominance of property rights than the way that we struggle to debate the operation of the Internet in any other terms, with "free speech" and "privacy" reduced to matters of copyright and reputation management. Exhibit B will live on as an artwork, with the copyright invested in Brett Bailey, while the protestors will continue to insist on their right to manage the reputation of their ancestors. George Osborne is still in tune with the times.

Doing it in the Streets

Derek Cianfrance's latest film, The Place Beyond the Pines, is an interesting addition to the canon of American Catholic cinema. A triptych, it concerns the trinity of a father, a son, and the strange ways of the spirit. Ryan Gosling plays Luke, a fairground stunt motorcyclist with dodgy tattoos. He is an absent father and existential loner, whose eventual desire to provide for his son (the J boy) threatens the holy family (he beats up Joseph) and leads to his own death after one too many bank heists. Bradley Cooper plays an older Jesus, rather portentously named Avery Cross. He's a trained lawyer, the son of a judge, who decides to pursue his ministry on the streets as a rookie cop. He kills Luke during the last, botched getaway, perhaps unjustifiably. He is privately gnawed by guilt at leaving a boy fatherless, while publicly celebrated as a hero. He is twice tempted by the Devil (first corruption and then ambition) and succumbs the second time.

In part three, the two mens' sons, Jason and AJ (Avery Junior), meet and form a combustible teen friendship centred on drugs and father issues. AJ cannot connect with his dad, who has sublimated his guilt beneath political ambition and keeps the boy at arms-length, while Jason initially knows nothing of his. Their anger and sense of loss leads (somewhat implausibly) to a mutual breakdown of trust and bloody assault. When Jason finally finds out that Avery Senior killed Luke, he threatens him with a gun. Cross shows remorse and asks for forgiveness. The burden of guilt lifted, we see AJ at his father's election victory rally having an epiphany of love for his dear old dad (either that or he's still high). In contrast, Jason buys a second-hand motorbike. The seller asks if he knows how to handle it. Jason says nothing but shows his competence by revving the engine, echoing a scene in part one where Luke has scared the baby Jesus, sorry Jason, by revving his bike. Jason rides off, perhaps to join the circus. The film title is a rough translation of the name of Schenectady, the upstate New York town where the action takes place, though the frequent use of long shots of the verdant surrounding hills, often bathed in late afternoon sunlight, suggests the place may be somewhere else.

Cianfrance is on record as a Catholic boy who lost his faith but remains drawn to holy stories. His previous film, the breakthrough Blue Valentine, starred Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as a couple who marry when they find she is pregnant, though both suspect that he isn't the father. The film then charts this holy family's gradual loss of faith. The mixing of the sacred and profane is a classic trope in American Catholic cinema, which is best thought of as films that explore Catholic themes, particularly forgiveness and grace, rather than films that feature nuns. In other words, Mean Streets rather than Sister Act. Coincidentally, Scorsese's classic was on the telly the other week, which perhaps tuned me up for Cianfrance's film. The core of the earlier work is the frustrated attempt of Charlie, played by Harvey Keitel, to steer between church and family while trying to save Robert De Niro's Johnny Boy from his own stupidity.

Another happy coincidence was seeing the current exhibition of the work of George Bellows, Modern American Life, at the Royal Academy. Bellows was a Methodist from Ohio, but he made his name as a New York artist and member of the Ashcan school of painting. His short career (he died at 42) lasted only a couple of decades spanning the First World War. He is most famous for his boxing scenes, notably A Stag at Sharkey's (above), though he was equally accomplished in gritty cityscapes, rhapsodic landscapes and sombre, anxious portraits that show the influence of Goya and Velasquez. Scorsese's Raging Bull shows the influence of his boxing pictures, but it was fascinating to see the extent to which Bellows also employed traditional Catholic motifs, perhaps influenced by the religious street theatre of the Lower East Side as much as old Spanish masters. A painting that owes nothing to the boxing ring is Fisherman's Family, an obvious Holy Family posed by the artist, his wife and child.

 

Bellows' external scenes are usually lit from above with a heavenly light, partly obscured by clouds or falling between intermittent storms, such as in An Island in the Sea. While this is conventional enough for the great outdoors, it's a more deliberate ploy in the bustle and grime of New York where it appears to alight like grace on fallen humanity. In one scene, Excavation at Night, centring on a vast pit being dug for Penn Station, the light from the workmen's brazier down below echoes the light of the streetlamps up above. This fondness for images of the fallen and of blessing is repeated explicitly in Benediction in Georgia, a prison scene where light coming through the barred window is echoed by the prisoners hooped uniforms, but is also implicit in Out for the Count, where the referee raises two fingers to heaven with one hand while reaching to gently touch the head of the stricken boxer with the other.

Bellows' boxing scenes are intensely physical and meaty, the fighters looking like faceless carcasses in an abattoir, but they're also staged like devotional groups. Dempsey And Firpo (below) is clearly the descent from the cross, while the various ring scenes are centred by light falling on the dynamic turmoil of flesh, surrounded by a sea of obscure faces. His boxers are Christ-like figures. Together with the dramatic dynamism of his drawings, which were published in the magazine The Masses, there is a stylistic influence that can be traced to the later generation of commercial artists who would develop the superhero comic in the 1930s, such as Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, also raised in Ohio, the creators of Superman (absent father, world saviour etc). Adding yet more coincidence, the trailers ahead of The Place Beyond the Pines included one for Man of Steel, the latest Superman reboot (rather than a biopic of Stalin).

There is no particular moral here, just interest in the stylistic thread that runs from Bellows, through Shuster and Siegel, to Scorsese and Cianfrance: the Holy Family, the struggling Christ, the benediction of light. If there is a common political or philosophical thread, it is the belief that we are compelled to action in the world. As Charlie says in Mean Streets: "You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it".

Way Out East

So I got out. Today the wife and I took a trip on the recently opened Emirates Airline, the rather grandiosely-named cable-car that runs from North Greenwich across the Thames to the Royal Docks. Predictably, the sky looked like somebody's grubby fingers had been all over it, and a slight but steady drizzle did its best to lubricate all moving things. It's still a cracking view, mind.

We were on the way to the Compressor House gallery, to see the exhibition of David Bailey's East End photos. I had vaguely thought of walking along the docks to get in the mood, but the realisation that this would only provide an uninterrupted view of the Excel Centre, together with the drizzle, persuaded us to board the DLR for a few stops. The area seemed to be heavily populated by Olympic volunteers, all dressed in their purple and vivid red jackets, though not all wearing their regulation beige slacks (which do look a bit middle-aged, to be fair). Bailey's selected photos are made up of work from the 60s, 80s and recent years. The earliest include a number of large scale colour prints of cockernee characters, including those nice boys, the Krays, plus the inhabitants of various boozers and card clubs. They're amusing, but they try too hard. I imagine they were originally intended for photo essays in magazines: "How the other half lives", that sort of thing. The better works are the black and white shots of decrepit areas and their equally ruined denizens, those these too shade into caricature at times. There are old Jewish shop signs aplenty, and images of Brick Lane that wouldn't have been out of place in the Lodz ghetto. It's obvious Bailey was keen to capture what was visibly disappearing through slum clearance and city development.

The 80s shots are concentrated on the Royal Docks area. This was the fallow period between the docks decline and the LDDC regeneration, and before London City Airport arose in Silvertown just across from the Compressor House. The photos are appropriately depopulated except for a handful featuring Bailey's new wife in ironic, noirish compositions, dressed to the nines and holding a handgun (a small echo of the Krays, perhaps). The skies are generally lowering and the buildings sinister. Not wholly unlike today. These are the set of photos that show Bailey in his professional pomp, wholly in control of the subject and able to extract visual interest from even the bleakest environment. They lack the exuberance of the 60s set, and the wit of his more recent work, but they have a cold and compelling beauty to them. The use of black and white might appear regressive, even nostalgic, but it's better suited to what are essentially sculptural subjects, old pubs in otherwise flattened landscapes, dock gates and railings, and the serried ranks of cranes in the background.

The recent photos were large and in colour, many picking up the vibrant hues of saris and modern shops frontages, but interspersed with junk and jetsam from earlier eras. There's no theme here, these are random shots after all, but there is an air of sadness. Heads are usually turned away from the camera, in contrast with the face-on 60s work, and sometimes cropped out of shot altogether. There is also a single panel of photos of Bailey's family from the 40s and 50s, including the first picture he took, a group shot on the beach. These look like the record of a destroyed Mitteleuropa. His first recognisable art photo is a shot of his sister, Thelma, in silhouette. This photo hints at the faceless compositions to come.

The sequence in chronological order moves from family, through community, via deserted wasteland to multiple communities and personal isolation. You get the sense that Bailey has ambivalent feelings about the evolution of the East End. It's a good exhibition, worth the trip (particularly via the cable-car), but do take a brolly.

36 views of Mount Shard

Today sees the official inauguration of the Shard. Rather than cutting ribbons, this will involve lasers cutting the night air, picking out other London landmarks. Whether this is meant to symbolise architectural solidarity or Nuremburg-style triumphalism is not clear, but the main purpose is presumably a sales pitch for the as-yet unlet offices and apartments. The Shard, by virtue of its size, target clientele and foreign funding, is a handy emblem for the state of the capital.

In yesterday's Guardian, Simon Jenkins laid out the critics' case. While some of this was sound ("money trumping planning", though 'twas ever thus), some of it was just hysterical: "the Shard has slashed the face of London forever". This is a bad case of bonkers metaphor. The Shard is less like a razorboy's calling card and more like a unicorn horn. Perhaps he meant that the Shard itself is a razor, left sticking out of someone's forehead. Nope, still doesn't work.

Jenkins is the chairman of the National Trust, so you'd expect him to harp on about the organic unity of the London skyline: everything in its proper place, well-ordered and well-mannered. Preferably people as well as buildings. However, his nostalgia over the cityscape of Canaletto conveniently ignores almost 300 years of industrial and commercial development, including such skyline-dominating monstrosities (now well-regarded) as Bankside and Battersea power stations. No doubt there were many in the mid-19th century who cited Canaletto's view of London as they regretted all that ugly, modern Victorian architecture. Jenkin's regrets that the Shard will ruin the view from Parliament Hill and Primrose Hill, without noting that the best views on the latter are from the top floors of Victorian terraced houses that now retail for millions.

Planning and architecture always has a class dimension. This point has come out very clearly in the excellent BBC series, The Secret History of Our Streets, which incidentally opens with an image of a dark, ugly Victorian city. Class has been centre stage in terms of misguided planning (well-meaning middle class planners poorly serving working class communities) and the process whereby streets "go up" or "go down" in terms of social class, a largely one-way movement in the modern era of gentrification. The recent episode on Portland Road in Notting Hill was particularly good at the starkness of the class divide and the by turns hilarious and depressing lack of interest or understanding between either end of the street. As one of the council tenants noted, it's as if there is an invisible barrier, a sense you get in many parts of London.

In last night's episode about Reverdy Road in Bermondsey, just down the road from the Shard, one of the older residents noted that the council had effectively followed a sons and daughters policy for council housing during much of the latter part of the 20th century, though he suggested this should be seen as intentionally parochial rather than de facto racist. Today the "respectable working class" of the road are being supplanted by middle-class incomers, rather than ethnic minorities, and are making a tidy packet in the process having bought their houses from the council in the 80s. The resident also noted that the council policy was strongly supported by Bob Mellish, the then Labour MP and a resonant name in recent London history. He was a social conservative, bluntly unsympathetic to anti-racism. Together with his vice chairmanship of the LDDC, this brought conflict with his constituency party as it became younger and more left-wing in the 70s. The result was the bitter 1983 by-election in which Peter Tatchell lost to Simon Hughes.

Mellish's failure to build alliances between the old and new working class, not to mention his facilitation of the Docklands property boom, was of a piece with the gradual social fragmentation of London that started in the 70s. Simon Jenkins' claim that the Shard is out of place assumes a unity in the city that has been lacking for decades now. A walk down Bermondsey Street, away from the Shard, is a good example of this. As it happens, I made this walk yesterday as part of a much larger perambulation around the big pointy building. For purely whimsical reasons, I decided to take 36 photos from different vantage points, in homage to the Japanese artist Hokusai's 36 Views of Mount Fuji.

The full series is here.

Up close the building dwarfs the nearby Guy's Hospital and City Hall, yet it doesn't feel quite as intimidating as you might expect, perhaps because it's so incongruous and sci-fi that you wonder whether it may just be CGI trickery. As you walk away, it quickly shrinks until you struggle to locate it on the horizon in Kennington, a mile and a half to the south.

Most people live their lives at ground level, and rarely get a complete vista of the London skyline, which is another reason why Simon Jenkins' complaints sound a little de haut en bas. As Bermondsey found, trying to defend against change can have the ironic effect of facilitating other, equally profound change. Perhaps in years to come we'll develop an affection for the Shard, like Parisians and the Tour Montparnasse, or perhaps we'll simply decapitate it, lopping off the luxury apartments and hotel on the upper floors, leaving a dead ringer for the Ministry of Truth.

Line and length, lad

Now that walking weather has returned, I ambled up to town for a couple of exhibitions recently. The first was the Eve Arnold photo show, All About Eve. This was held in the Artsensus gallery, which is housed on the second floor of an office block behind Westminster Cathedral that also houses Tom Ford. The stairwell was populated by beautiful, willowy young women having anguished conversations on their phones while clutching unlit cigarettes.

The photos were so-so, the iconic shots of Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable on location for The Misfits being the main draw, though I was most taken by some of her photojournalism away from the stars, such as US Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell at a Nation of Islam meeting, or the itinerant Irish labourer in Manchester for whom a bed looked as distant a prospect as an Oscar.

The second show was the Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy. This involved some middle class queueing, with various parties furtively casing the joint to see if they could sidle in without causing "a fuss". The crowd inside was rammed, in no small part due to hordes of visiting schoolkids. One of the middle-aged day-trippers was heard to opine that "they shouldn't let school children in during the day", which for stupidity was on a par with those complaining that Yorkshire roads aren't orange, nor ploughed fields purple.

The colour in Hockney is a massive distraction from his structural intent. Each work is a careful composition of lines and curves, washed in hedonic hues. Despite his clear signposting (the show is called A Bigger Picture), most critics seem to have missed the bleedin' obvious, namely his use of grid lines and fractures to simultaneously fragment and contain the picture.

This use of structural lines is apparent from his earliest work and becomes in-yer-face with his Californian compositions in the 60s, heavy on the rectilinear architecture and palm trees. Garden design has never been the same since. The use of Polaroid collages in the 80s takes it to another level, with the fracturing now being a function of the medium, rather than just a form imposed by the artist. Technique and technology are used to deliberately fragment and displace. It's apparent in his subsequent interest in camera lucida and fax, and the now dominant use of multiple panels.

His use of a grid of slightly askew cameras on a jeep-mounted rig, which allows him to film a hedgerow in a fractured single take, was treated as a mesmeric object of near-religious contemplation at the RA (a darkened room always helps). In contrast, most people seemed bemused by his use of the iPad, or even dismissive of it as shallow technophilia. The Polaroid SLR camera had been around a decade before he started using it in his art, so perhaps his latest obsession is seen as just a bit too keen, a bit too Stephen Fry-ish. The attraction of the iPad for Hockney, I think, is it's rectangular shape. A single device that can generate and store multiple "panels" in portrait or landscape orientation. Perfect for his purpose.

The real subject of the exhibition is our dear old friend, Death. This is not just because it is a retrospective, spanning early art school work up to his latest musings. The changing seasons, the retreating path, the tunnel of greenery with a light at the end. All these are classic tropes of mortality. The tree stump that features repeatedly has a feminine, almost Venus de Milo, shape to it, which inevitably triggers thoughts of his mother whose death brought him back to Bridlington.

The felled logs can also be interpreted as mortal, though I think (half mischievously) that they may also represent all the fags he's smoked, or perhaps all the cock he's had (do comedy Welsh accent at this point). And the hawthorn and other blossom, which some have likened to patisserie, look more like turds. Do not be misled by the colour.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of the show, though the least popular with the crowd and critics, is his series of variations on a Claude Lorrain landscape depicting the sermon on the mount. Claude's oeuvre, reflecting the fashion of his time, was highly allegorical. The mount, which looms large, contains what appears to be a small rock-cut tomb on one side. Hockney has faithfully replicated this small detail in each piece, while keeping it obscure. I think it is at this point that a bigger picture becomes the bigger picture.