In 2014 the world finally spun off its axis into a suffocating vortex of incomprehension (just like the last half of Interstellar). Yet consolation was always available in the form of culture, which continued despite the progressing apocalypse. The next few posts will include some of this year's cultural consolers and a few of its challengers too - from Chekhov to Aphex Twin, the Oxford historian Selina Todd to the posthumous Vaclav Havel, Gang of Four to Gyorgy Lucacs, Nietzsche to the economist Thomas Piketty and many more.
9. The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov (dir. Katie Mitchell) at the Young Vic, London
See here for my post.
8. La Boheme by
Giacomo Pucini at Prague State Opera
Mercifully
bawdy, this opera by Pucini was amiable and exciting in all the right
ways. Sort of like highbrow panto. Fuelled by cheap sekt
(at least for us), we took our seats on upper balcony of the faded neo-rococo
auditorium. Helpful
subtitles kept us informed of the goings on far below. The building is the real star, however:
much-loved and in need of a paint job, it nevertheless emanates a
special charm, part glamour, part dysfunction. Originally opened at the end of the nineteenth century to
cater for Prague's German minority, it feels a lot like something out of a Stefan Zweig piece or Grand Budapest Hotel for that matter.. Unsurprising, then, that the
first performance here was of Wagner's The
Master-Singers of Nuremburg. Things
couldn't get more Dual Monarchy if they tried. Surrounded by the
biggest road in central Prague as well as the central train station,
its exterior balcony is also a fantastic place to watch the seething
city pulse by. Prague in a nutshell then: glamour on the cheap with
echoes of a vanquished past and a little hint of danger.
7. Ivan
Lutterer, Photography Retrospective at Prague Museum of the
Decorative Arts
Lutterer's photography examined the abandoned and forgotten. Action
is suggested, incipient, but never actually present. There is a
feeling that a quiet world is about to disappear for good, that a
disturbance will soon wake the world up. But in capturing the moment
before the change he prompts a longing for the disappeared world of
the past. A quietly devastating collection.
6. Slav Epic,
Alfonz Mucha, at Veletrzni Palace, Prague
The strangest but perhaps most ambitious single cycle of work I saw
this year was Mucha's Slav Epic. It had to make the list for sheer
ambition. In March I wrote:
"Though
the ideas at work in Slav
Epic
- mostly self-conscious paeans to banished medieval wisdom - are very
different to the earlier Paris work, the system of techniques remains
the same. Thus the Slav spirit was to be articulated with more or
less the same skill-set as his commercial period. Ecclesiastical
interiors are rendered with the same lilting intricacy as the floral
backgrounds of his Parisian street adverts. The adjustments of scope
and scale, of symbolic and theatrical tropes, can hardly conceal the
continuities. This is especially true of his recurring fetish for
highly stylized, very white
human bodies.
Slav Epic,
for all Mucha's attempts to juxtapose Slavdom with Germanic culture,
unfolds in just as racially exclusive a world as anything more
deliberately "Aryan". Not only is there no variety of skin
colour (except in the case of the typically marauding Turks at
Sziget), there's also little noticeable variation in the body-shape
of the dramatis personae. Indeed the thing is composed entirely of
easily transferrable and identifiable types - from steely youths to
wizened kings, it all feels a bit Tolkien. Given that it ranges over
hundreds of years, Slav
Epic's
cast is suspiciously homogenous."
5.
Kazimir Malevich retrospective at Tate Modern
A
reminder not only of Malevich's Suprematist shocker Black
Square but
also his painterly and experimental prowess. Also, brilliant
contextualisation by Tate. Barmy in the best sense. In September I
wrote:
"Malevich's
defining work, The
Black Square on White Background, is
frequently described in punctuational metaphors: that is, as either
exclamation mark or full stop. In this sense Malevich's key work of
visual abstraction
is quite often grasped in representational
terms. More accurate than the punctuational image in this case,
however, is the aforementioned syntactical one: that is, the
injunction of the avant-garde. Black
Square amounts
to a kind of visual correlative to Mayakovsky's "Throw them
overboard." (The pair collaborated in 1914 on, of all things,
some cartoon satires of the German army). So imposing is the legacy
of Black
Square that
the Tate has chosen to offset it by screening an off-kilter American
staging of the opera which inspired it, Victory
over the Sun (the
stage backgrounds designed by Malevich). Thus "The Icon" (a
pointed title for the room; one Malevich would probably approve of)
is relatively marginalised in an exhibition which builds
teleologically towards it. In the midst of such distraction (fuzzy
Californian accents from on screen Futurist antics puncturing any air
of reverence), Black
Square can
paradoxically be approached with fresh attentiveness. Its world
historical importance is not foisted on the spectator by the gallery
but rather left to hang dangerously in the suitably cacophonous air."
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