STARTING TO WRITE: Hatching Characters

I’ve just embarked on a new writing project but I haven’t written a word yet.  The story is in its first prototype, unformed and vaporous…just a muddle of ideas swimming in my head. My protagonist is pretty unformed at the minute, too – I’m not sure of looks, personality or even gender – it’s all a blank sheet I need to colour in.

It’s like this character has just hatched out of an egg, and that reminds me of the four chicks our broody hen, Ceredwin, raised this summer. The eggs cracked, and four fluffy heads poked out into the world, three yellow and one brown. They knew nothing, had no history and no expectations. As it’s impossible to sex newly-hatched chicks, we gave them gender-fluid names…Little Wings, Brown Wings, Yellow Wings and Pink Beak.

I've been writing about hatching a new character, and the lives of my hen and her chicks at WeareOCA.com, and you can read the rest of this post about writing HERE

Manhattan, Old and New.

Manhattan, Old and New

Part Five of Kitchen Table Writer's look at Art.

I've just been treated to a trip to the Big Apple to view the art, history and culture.

In A Cultural Experience in Manhattan, I chronicled my adventures on our arrival in Manhattan; the ballet dancers in Columbus Circle…the nighttime boat trip under Brooklyn Bridge and around the Statue of Liberty…dinner at the Mandarin Hotel. The following day, we'd booked up a full tour of the history of Manhattan from the moment Hudson landed in 1607 to the building of the Memorial Towers.

We’d both read our book on the history of New York, so felt girded up for the five-mile tour of historic Manhattan that would take the entire day. We met our guide, Jessie, at The Battery, named after the artillery batteries that were stationed there in the 17th Century. While we were waiting, we enjoyed taking in a huge statue near the fortress. Made in the 1970s of bronze and red granite by sculptor Luis Sanguino to celebrates the diversity of New York City and the struggle of immigrants, by showing the different kinds of émigré who came into Ellis Island, such as European Jews, as well as a freed African slave, a priest and a worker Chinese. It uses heroic symbolism with facial and bodily expression to emphasise the struggle of the dislocated, clearly about to arrive at Ellis Island, straining to catch a first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, some reaching out, some collapsing with hunger and emotion. It reminded me of how I’d visualised such an event last night on the Bateaux.

The Immigrants

 Jessie arrived a bit late, which peeved my punctual daughter, but we were soon chatting away, as she turned out to be (like all the New Yorkers we met), very friendly and obliging. She was a Brooklyn girl who ran her own small drama company, but was excited about the MA she was about to start in drama…at the Old Vic in Bristol. ‘We come from Bristol,’ we said. ‘You’ll love it.’ Clearly, she was keen on local history, so we told her to search out the history of our native city. I’ve always believed that history is written in the brickwork, skyline and landscape of any place…you can see this in the buildings, waterways and green places of Bristol…now it’s becoming clear it’s also true of New York.

We started outside the Clinton Castle, the little fortress built by DeWitt Clinton – the inventor of the Manhattan grid system – to keep the British out of New York after the revolution. From the tip of The Battery, we saw the Statue of Liberty for the first time in daylight – this is where you catch the boat to Liberty Island. She looked just as regal and godly through the distant morning mists that she had close up and illuminated the night before. Jessie moved us on to the Bowling Green, where in 1765 New Yorkers protested against the British rulers by burning the picket fence. Doesn’t sound like much of a protest, but I doubt it stopped there. A new metal fence was erected, and Jessie showed us how the decorative tops of the posts had been roughly removed. This happened in the early days of the revolution, so no one knows what the missing ornaments looked like, or why they were sawn off.  

Charging Bull

On Wall Street, named because early settlers built a wall to keep the Native Americans out (don’t tell Trump, Beckie whispered), is the NY Stock Exchange, where we see the newly famous Charging Bull and Fearless Girl, two bronze statues that arrived like mushrooms blooming overnight. The artist DoModica created a larger-than-life statue of a bull in his art foundry and arrived early one morning to install it inside a ‘street works’ tent. The Bull clearly represents all that is belligerent about the stock exchange; flared nostrils and wicked sharp horns, ready to gore; its testicles are massively visible and the tourists ('specially the women!) are queueing to be photographed nestling them in their hands. The little girl arrived years later in 2017. She reminded me of Francie Nolan, the young heroine in Betty Smiths’ 1943 book A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, (a book, a film and a blogpost here)  The Girl faces off The Bull in button boots and a cotton dress, her hair blowing away from her face as if the snorting of the bull is creating a strong wind. She looks ready to take on the world. Both works are guerrilla art, and New York’s City Hall still insists they are on borrowed time. 

It was at the gardens of City Hall that we had the best historic ‘buzz’.

I’d been reading about ‘The Collect’, a large pond that supplied the best tea-making water to the

The Collect Pond, copyright Wikipedia

settlers Quite quickly it was ruined by the growing meat industry (clearly, even early Americans loved their steak), when  it became a dumping for the waste products of slaughter. In 1800 it had become a stagnant mess and was drained, filled with soil from the small hills that had been flattened as the city expanded. Houses were built on the land, however, no one had noticed that The Collect was fed by springs. Very soon the buildings began to subside, losing their value. The entire area ended up as a slum, with hundreds of poor New Yorkers living in abject poverty in sinking houses. Jessie hadn’t been sure where the Collect was, but here was a timemap in the grounds of the City Hall, describing its position not far from where we stood…although it was several acres wide so we were probably on the edge of it. In delight at our discovery, we jumped up and down. I’m sure she thought we were quite mad.

NY public library

‘Where would you like to go for lunch,’ Jessie asked us.' Shall we eat like New Yorkers?' She took us to a diner where we stuffed ourselves to the gills on sandwhiches packed full of pastrami and other cold meats and cheeses, served with crisps and a gherkin before catching a yellowcab into the central area of Manhattan to look at more architecture. She explained that there were two main periods before the modern skyscapers of glass and steel; Art Deco in the Jazz Age, which was preceeded by beautifully ornate, colonnaded buildings, built during what we think of as the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Jessie described this as Beaux Art (although she annoyed Becki by pronouncing this ‘beaus-art).

We start our trail with the quirky Flatiron Building; 22 steel-framed floors of triangulation built in 1905, then on to perhaps the favourite of the older buildings we saw; the New York Public Library. As we walk around it, Jessie told us it had been built in 1908 for the people of NY and there are over 50 million books housed here. From the outside, it’s beautiful, with neoclassical pillars, bas-relief work and statues. Inside, the decorative motifs, murals continue, but what I loved was that the library has the smell and atmosphere of an ancient house of reading. Both of us could have happily stayed there for some time, perhaps in order to look at some actual books, and we decided to put it on the ‘last day’ list of things to do.

Whispering corner

Grand Central Station that took our breath away. Built in 1913, it’s more like a temple than a railway station. The architecture feels like ‘Beaux Arts meets Art Deco’, offering the best of both. The main concourse has a massive floor of rushing people, but if you look up, you’re transported to the heavens. The ceiling is painted with the 12 constellations of the night sky. This starry wonder is, however, astronomically inaccurate in a complicated way. While the stars within some constellations appear as they would from earth, other constellations are reversed left-to-right, as is the overall arrangement of the constellations on the ceiling. Jessie’s explanation was that the ceiling design might have been based on the medieval custom of depicting the sky as it would appear to God looking in at the celestial sphere from outside. It’s probably just an error, though! Always on the hunt of a good oyster, Becki was instantly taken with oyster bar, Central's oldest business, while I was enraptured by the ‘whispering corners’ which allow to people to stand at either side of an area of the main concourse and whisper secrets into the pillars of one corner, to be heard perfectly in the opposite corner. One imagines the Mafia of prohibition NY using this device a lot.

Ground Zero waterfall

Finally, we brought history up-to-date. No one would go to Manhattan and not want to pay their respects to the terror and horror of 9/11 by visiting the Memorial at Ground Zero.

Twin Tower Memorial

From a little way off, the 9/11 memorials look like two enormous holes in the ground; both so big you can’t see both at once. They are the exact footprint of ‘ground zero’ - the space made by each World Trade Tower after it was destroyed by terrorists on the 11th of September 2001. As I moved forward, I could see – and hear – the massive waterfalls that form an outer square of walls. The noise of millions of gallons of falling water drowns out traffic and pulled me in to the emotional intensity of these two enormous pools, which are titled “Reflecting Absence”. The water disappears into a simple, square hole at the centre. The noise, the beauty of the four walls of falling water (the largest man-made waterfalls in the US), and the black hole that’s sucking at the life of the water, moved us both incredibly and made think about life, and the way it can be snatched from you in a blink. Around the edge, the names of all the dead are deeply carved, including the firefighters who lost their lives, moving memorials in the world, small stars and stripes flags are tucking into some of the names. Rising above them is Freedom Tower. It’s a triangular column of glass, and on this brilliantly sunny day, it caught the light of the at the very tip of its 1,776 feet, the date of the American Revolution in New York. 

The Oculus

Next to the memorial is The Oculus. This is  extremely interesting architecturally… it’s  as bowed and compact as the Freedom tower is stretched and liberated. From outside, it reminds us both of a white bird, half in flight. Inside, where there is a terminus, it’s like we were in the body of a dinosaur. New York felt the destruction of the World Trade Towers strongly, took the deaths of its citizens very hard. They want to celebrate those lives, cut short, as well as proving to the terrorists who tried to destroy their way of life that life will go on.  

Grand Central Station cocktail.

There's a coda to our day of Manhattan history; that evening we returned to eat at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station.  With its tramline furniture and vaulted ceilings, it really looked the part. One could imagine the Bright Young Things and flappers of the 1920s coming here for their oysters. Of course, back then they wouldn’t have been allowed alcohol with their shellfish, and to Becki’s horror, Champagne still wasn’t on the menu! ‘I can’t eat oysters without Champagne,’ she announced.
I didn’t fancy the menu at all…I was thinking that since the 20s, the clientele had deteriorated somewhat. Bag ladies rubbed shoulders with workers at the end of their shifts on the long communal tables. ‘Let’s try somewhere else,’ I said. So we wandered througj the Central Station Concourse until we reached an Italian Bar, where we ate at the counter. We had salads – Bex with her glass of Champers and me with the most eye-watering vodka martini I have ever swallowed down. Becki said later that she watched me getting more and more drunk over the course of this one glass.

It was ten when we left. I was keen for an early-ish night as we had another full day of sightseeing tomorrow. But as we left the Station, Becki spotted a sign. ‘the Campbell Apartment!’ she squealed .’I’ve read about that. When the station was being built, John Campbell, who was overseeing the work, lived here – he had both his office and his bed installed so he could keep a close eye on the work. And then in the 20s, it became a speakeasy. In fact, it’s the only cocktail lounge in NY that was originally a speakeasy. Inside, it was small, but perfect. It looks like the galleried hall of a medieval palace, but was packed with punters having a great, if noisy, time, squashed together round tiny tables.

The Cambell Apartment

The drinks, however, were not a patch on the Italian bar. My vodka martini was a diluted replica of the previous eye-blower. And Becki took one look at her Tatti and said, ‘it’s flat. There’s no fizz.’

‘Is your drink flat?’ The girl sitting on the next table heard Becki and leaned over to give advice.

‘I’m sure it’s from the dregs of the bottle,’ Becki said. ‘Tell the waitress, she insisted. ‘Go on. Call her over and tell her.’ Quite soon, Becki was in possession of a sparkling glass, and we had a new best friend in friendly NYC. 

How Do you Read?

 How do you read?

Do you focus on the author's message and line of argument, evaluating modes of writing, such as voice, theme, structure, plot, narrative point of view, character, use of dialogue? Or do you just get sucked right in, so that you’re there, in the writer’s world?

I love the way reading feeds and refreshes me, and I wonder if readers like me filter their reading through their previous experiences, opinions and misconceptions. But there’s also bring an ability to get lost in the narrative, even when it is patently nothing like your experience of life. Most people surface-read, which leads to superficial retention, and poor comprehension, of the text. Deep reading uses the skills of analysis, synthesis and problem-solving, but does it  'spoil the story'?

I've just read the Booker winner, Milkman, by Anna Burns, an Irish writer who has produced a clever and absorbing book about 'the troubles'. Set, perhaps, in the 1990s, and located, perhaps in a Northern Irish town locked in sectarian dispute, it's about an 18-year-old girl who is pursued…stalked, almost… by a member of the IRA looking for a bit of eye candy for his arm. There's hardly any violence described, and yet the atmosphere is heavy with the idea of violence and death. I loved it, and fully recommend it, but it would be an easy book to skim read, being rather dense and there are only six chapter over its 350 pages). None of the characters are referred to by their real names...our protagonist is 'middle sister', a previously rejected boy as 'Somebody MacSomebody, and her lover as 'almost boyfriend' But it deserves to be read slowly, with thought. It's subtle, but under its skin there is clarity.. What it tells you about the troubles, are the things no news report could tell you.  Don't take my word for this, though. Here's Claire Kilroy  in The Guardian… Milkman calls to mind several seminal works of Irish literature. In its digressive, batty narrative voice, it resembles a novel cited by the narrator: Tristram Shandy. It is Beckettian in its ability to trace the logical within the absurd. 

I looked at my last two pieces of reading and asked did the reading hold me? Did I feel the passion of the writer? Did it explain itself to my satisfaction? Did the story increase reading pleasure? Or did my mind wander away from the page? However, this might be true of viewing story too. I read  The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood  in1985, and now I’ve watched the TV drama The Handmaid’s Tale.  This was faithful to the story, but included other character’s perspectives in the episodes, dedicating some episodes to quite periphery characters like the husband and the wife. 

Reading a novel alongside a play or film demonstrates how differently prose fiction and dramatic script can be. I’ve done this too with the film Arrival; it blew me away and I immediately got the book of short stories it comes from on my Kindle. The original,  Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiang, is basically the same story, but the screenplay reimagining the landscape and made more of a final twist.  

Arrival  (2016 screenplay by Eric Heissere) is a film that had its genesis in short story Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang 2002, Tor Books) I saw the film, watched the ‘extras’ on the DVD and bought the book of short stories, I was so enamoured with the film. Having read the story on the page, I asked myself about the way the adapting writer approached the challenge of taking a long short story into a movie. For instance, there is a massive, esoteric plot twist at the end of the film, which in the book, is known by the reader almost from the start. The theme of both is linguistics and precognition, which is slowly revealed in the film, but fully apparent from the start of the story. The filmmaker reimagined the sci-fi element so that it was far more pleasing, visually. The poster does not give away any of the subtle of story, the theme or even that there will be a mystery within it, revealed at the end. It is focused on its stars, in the hope they will sell the movie. The ET spaceship, which is visible to the left, is not clarified, except as an UFO which is being threatened, or attacked, by the US helicopters. The film is a complex emotional drama, and very beautiful in both script, structure, and art work, but it’s almost as if the poster wants to hide this, instead giving the wrong impression that this will be like most sci-fi movies. Which it is not. 

May Angelou said in her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. 

I can identify with that. Story is massively important to humans. Lisa Crone has been re-examining the human experience of story, demonstrating that the brain craves story, not for ‘entertainment value’, but because it allows us to plan for the unknown. She believes that very early man listened to stories and processed them as ‘simulators’ which might point out ways to approach and survive the unknown and unexpected. The reason we get so ‘lost’ in books, storytellings and dramatisations is a deliberate ploy on the part of our brain…it’s a surge of the neurotransmitter dopamine that’s triggered by the intense curiosity that that an effective story instantly engenders…we don’t turn to story to escape reality, we turn to story to navigate reality because story translates big ideas, dry facts, abstract concepts, into very specific scenarios… watch her TED talk Wired for Story here.

Everything we read isn’t story, however. I noted down everything I’d read (and written and heard) in a 24 hour period, from 6.30 am to 10.30

All the stories are in red.

READ emails on phone

READ Weather  “ “

READ Cookbook for recipes

READ some of  The Lie of the Land by Amanda Craig

WRITE shopping list

WRITE emails online

HEARD The Radio 4 Story of the Week

READ Guardian (some of it)

READ seed packets

READ plant food box

WRITE My Welsh Homework

READ the Welsh handbook at Welsh class

READ The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey, first chapters

READ internet info on The Power

WATCH the news at ten

READ (in bed) The Waves.

In Death of an Author, Roland Barthes argues that readers should ‘liberate’ their reading, from the ‘interpretive tyranny’ of the critical reader, who first looks at the writer, their ethnicity, politics, religion, even personal attributes and relates these to the read. For instance, if the writer was a known 30’s fascist, then that would be immediately taken into consideration to be part of gaining the meaning. As we’ll be doing textiles later, I liked this quote…text is a tissue of quotations, drawn from innumerable centers of culture, rather than from one, individual experience. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the passions of the writer; a text's unity lies not in its origins, or its creator, but in its destination, or its audience.

I like the idea that the reader is as important as the writer. And in a way, I think most people do believe the reader can and should interpret what they read, in just the same way as one interprets modern dance, a sculpture or artwork, or even an installation or video art, such as Battle of Orgreave by Jeremy Deller, which I talked about in a previous blogpost review. I can certainly be swayed by what people say about a book, and often don’t buy one if there are bad reviews (although I might borrow it). 

The approach in Death of an Author works well for literature written by people we’ll never known or have chance to understand, possibly because they are long dead, or a recluse like DJ Saligner. He seems to argue that a writer's views about their own work are no more or less valid than a reader’s interpretation, as real as the author's intention. It certainly eliminates an issue of reviewing/discussing/interpreting books – how anyone can ever know what the writer intended? It also makes a point with regard to the way women in the past had to publish under a male name, like the Bronte sisters, or anonymously for other reasons, as JK Rowling did, when she wanted to see how her crime novel would be accepted. Of course that ‘rouse’ could only work once the real name of the author was revealed, otherwise The Casual Vacancy would have dropped like a stone. On the other hand, readers don’t seem to be interested in this as a literary argument; they don’t really ‘utilize it’. Otherwise, the Radio 4 favourite, Book Club, wouldn’t be so loved. In this programme, you are told in advance which author will be attending with a studio audience, who will ask questions about the author’s recent work. For the same reason, Book Festivals, are massively attended. We all want to hear what the author says about their own work.

If you'd like some help with reading more widely, deeply and passionately try these books; 

The Novel Cure: An A to Z of Literary Remedies by Ella Berthoud 

Jacob's Room is Full of Books: A Year of Reading by Susan Hill 

Maps and Legends; Michael Chabon

Reading like a Writer, Francine Prose

The Child Books Built by Frances Spufford.

The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life by Andy Miller

Grayson Perry – The Most Popular Exhibition Ever

 The Most Popular Exhibition Ever:

 Part Four of Kitchen Table Writer's look at Art

I've been a fan of Perry's for a long time, probably since seeing a TV programme about the journey he took by motorcycle across Bavaria with his childhood bear Alan Measles. And then I listened to his Reithe  Lectures which were both anarchic and academic – a mixture of belly laughs and perfect truths.  So when my friend Liz asked me to accompany her to his retrospective exhibition, along with a bunch of Open College of the Arts students, I jumped at the chance. 

As soon as we arrived at the Arnolfini (Bristol's 'Tate Gallery'), I spotted the bike, a pink and pale blue Kennelworth called Patience; it was pride of place in the gallery with a backdrop of an Alpine scene. I loved the way Perry managed a huge number of themes and metaphors all in one go; travel, biking, masculitity, feminity, childhood memories (and long-lasting affection for teddy bears), cross-dressing, the strangeness of strangers, acceptance, humour, exploration and pushing boundaries. Now, as an exhibit, devoid of Perry in mauve leathers, and with only a photo of snowy mountains instead of the cold air and crunch of the real thing, the bike felt a bit out of context. Did that make it even more ‘a piece of artwork’ than when it was roaring along a Bavarian autobahm? I tried to visualise how people might have felt, standing outside their chalets and watching it appear on horizon, when it must have been more like the talking point of the week (year!), rather than an artwork.

We toured the exhibition slowly until lunch, each taking our separate ways. There were over 25 works in several rooms and corridors throughout the gallery, so it was sensible to zone in to the ones we felt drawn to. I started on the ground floor, which was dedicated to the idea ‘what is a man’, a concept Perry uses a lot in his work, and has written a book about, The Descent of Man, reviewed in October 2016 by the Guardian…https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/23/descent-of-man-masculinity-grayson-perry-review-a-mans-man-is-yesterdays-hero-gender-role  As Perry says…Maybe there is room for all kinds of masculinity, including tough guys, as long as everyone is kind to each other.

The major artwork downstairs was a massive woodcut, a self-portrait of Perry, lying back on a couch in his studio, surrounded by the paraphernalia of his work. He’s naked, but has given himself breasts, and assumed the sort of attitude taken by female artists’ models of

past centuries. In conventional art, the female naked form is so much more idealised than the male, which might echo the way the patriarchal societies across the world and down through centuries function, and I think this is part of what he was trying to say. This woodcut  remained my favourite piece, even after seeing all the exhibits. It spoke directly to me as a woman, but I like to think it can speak directly to men as well, suggesting ‘we are all androgynous’, although others might find a more aggressive message and some might be forced to look away. Perry said about this work, People seem as interested in me as in my work, so why not make a piece about that idea, that here I am, in my studio, in the nude or in a fantasy version of myself in the nude.  

I stood for a long time, looking into the woodcut, Animal Spirit, (you can view the artwork here) in which an aggressive 'horned and horny' bear stands over a naked baby in a wasted industrial landscape. Sometimes, what Perry says is a bit obvious, but the imagery here stopped me in my tracks. However, he uses words a lot, something I’ve never been sure of in his work because this is the obvious bit, too ‘readable’ by half, he’s almost telling you what to think. The bear’s guts are filled with abstract nouns, never the best of words if you’re aiming for metaphor…Sensible  Rational, Prudent…etc.

Brexit Ceramics, with thanks to
http://www.channel4.com/info/press/news/grayson-perry-reveals-his-brexit-pots-ahead-of-new-documentary

I like the ceramics, such as the two Brexit pots, one 2 % larger, one 2 % smaller. In a video viewable at the exhibition, Perry’s talked through his ideas behind this – to give visual voice to both sides of the argument by asking the general public to send in images of themselves…and the way they voted. “I thought it would be an interesting experiment to make a work that involved, to use the fashionable term, crowdsourcing via social media. The two pots have come out looking remarkably similar, which is a good result, for we all have much more in common than that which separates us”. Commonalities found on both pots, include: bacon and eggs, the local pub, walking the dog, family, David Bowie and Marmite. However, I’m wondering if these  images were successful in delivering the message he hoped. They did look awfully similar…does that mean we are all the same? Was that the message he intended? I don’t think so, but what I like about Perry’s art is that he doesn’t mind if what he might have said can’t be interpreted as he wanted it to be, but rather reinterpreted, again and again.

What I really loved was the way he'd address issues by representing a person as icon. To the left is his 'working-class boy'. I imagined a street gang member, stuck in his life and unable to see his way out of drinking, drugs and violence, was depicted by this  youth, peirced (with his own and other people's) sharp impliments, badges and beer bottle tops. 

At lunch in the querky Arnolfini cafe, we downloaded our thoughts. We talked about some students disappointment in discovering that he does not create his work 'from scratch'. For instance, he'll ask a potter to throw a ‘naked’ pot, rather than taking the clay and throwing a pot himself, then paint and transfer in his designs. He also sends his digital designs away to be made into a tapestry, rather than doing the weaving. I was surprised this was an issue with anyone, it didn’t worry me. I’m thinking that people might as well ask the painter to mix his paints from basic ingredients, as they did in Holland in the 17th Century, or for photographers to go back to film and developing…I know some do, and are, but that’s not the issue. The art isn’t in making two pots, 4% different in size. That’s a craft, and bit of science, perhaps. The art is in covering them with what you want to say about something. 

Liz had brought with her, an article by Adrian Searle about the exhibition  (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jun/06/grayson-perry-the-most-popular-art-exhibition-ever-review-the-court-jester-strikes-again) . Searle took exception to the title (The Most Popular Exhibition Ever), which he clearly did not, or could not, fully accept as ironic. Instead, his article berated most of the exhibits; the jokes become laboured and the Brexit Pots were better on TV…

I decided to put this to one side and make up my own mind.  Okay some of the imagery was not so appealing, and I have to admit that Searle had a slight point; I did prefer the pieces that made their point more subtlety.

I wasn’t initially so keen on Death of a Working Hero, (You can view this artwork here)
simply because the imagery he used wasn’t attractive to me, imagery associated with the banners of the trade union movement, and reminiscent even of the Orangemen marches in Belfast. These symbols are signifiers with strong and clear meanings but there are often deeply personal emotions reactions in people (as there was in me) which wouldn’t be expected by the artists, perhaps. I have no idea why I take against these symbols because it goes back to at least my teens. Maybe it goes back as far as the church and chapel banners of my childhood, although I have no distressing memories of any of these, I think I’ve always found them a little to ‘shouty’. For me, they also signified strongly, the boredom of being in church.

After lunch, we went round again, trying to spot the things we'd missed. I wanted to watch the people going round. The gallery was filled with families, okay, a lot of them were gallery-going families, but even so there were a huge amount of kids enjoying a Saturday outing – clearly in the week, the schools are coming too. Every age group seemed to be enlivened by the work, and by loving or hating, or not understanding, or by understanding by a process of osmosis – that moment when you take in an artwork and know you know something.

Our Mother

I wrote two poems, there and then, sitting on a bench in the gallery. The first is about Our Mother, which affected me deeply. She is doing what women all over the world do…holding on, and holding up, and this 'holding' is represented by everything she loves and cherishes and needs being attached to her bending body. Made of cast iron with string and cloth, she's a moving indictment of poverty. I feel it brought into life the images of stateless people worldwide, but wierdly the image also reminded me of a TV children's programme from the sixties, which included a quiz called Double or Drop:

DOUBLE OR DROP

So, what you had to do, 

Was step up and stand on the stool,

Say your name and where you came from,

Laugh when he made a joke, 

Answer when he fired a question.

So, when you got your question right, 

Meccano boxes and Dinky cars were pushed into your arms,

Dollies dangled from your fingers,

Toys and games for every right answer--

Cauliflowers and wooden spoons for every wrong one.

The pile growing, 

People laughing, 

Soon, you couldn’t see over the top.

So, the idea was, never to drop a prize.

But every time you got a question right, 

There was another thing, tumbled upon the others…

Exam success, qualifications, jobs,

Sex, boyfriends, parties,

Unaffordable fashion,
LIving in flats,

Wedding rings, mortgages, DIY,

Babies, children, families,

Holidays on credit

Until it was all impossible to hold!

So, what you couldn’t ever do, 

Was drop the baby.

I also tried a poem on a theme suggested by Liz, that we should try 'climbing into a ceramic vase. I climbed into The ‘Remainer’ vase of the Brexit pair.

RABBIT HOLES

She dreamed that she peered through the little door 

And saw a landscape filled with starry circles

And two people kissing like it was all the world

But she was too tall to get through the door

And there was no little cake to eat

Or potion to drink.

The white rabbit,

Marching down and down the vase,

Dangling his fob like a hypnotist,

Frightened her so much 

She ran past all the people with jaded faces and deadbolt eyes,

Past swallows and a woman holding a sad cat,

A guitar man, 

A box of nesting sparrows

And a falcon with a fierce stare.

When she landed at the bottom, all she found was an earthen pot.

It had all been a dream.

Learning from the Experts

Writers, especially writers of fiction long and short, sometimes have trouble getting their story structured so it makes the best sense, the most interesting read and yet becomes something fresh. In fact, structuring fiction is an elastic technique that can stretch story into new shapes. 

One of my favourite authors, David Mitchell, is a ‘structure Titan’, taking the way a novel works and starting from scratch, approaching storytelling with innovation. In a single book he can span the geographical and historical world, chop stories in half then join them together again, invite in characters from previous novels, and catch his reader out with shocks and surprise twists in books like Cloud Atlas,(Sceptre, 2004) which consists of six interlocking short stories spanning 500 years, each narrative breaking off suddenly at the half-way point before moving on to the next half-tale.

Mitchell has won a bookcase full of awards, including two Bookers and the Costa Novel prize and now, the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. On October 6th he’ll be at the Cheltenham Festival in conversation with Peter Kemp, and as a taster of what we can expect if we manage to get a ticket for that event, he was interviewed by Francesca Angelini for the Sunday Times, in which he revealed what she described as ‘his literary ticks and tricks’. 

I've just written a blogpost for We Are the OCA blogsite, to encourage my students to experiment like the experts, passing on five of his writing tips. 

You can read about them here.

Is it Art? The Battle of Orgreave

Is it Art? The Battle of Orgreave 

Part three of  Kitchen Table Writers' look at contemporary art

Seventeen years after the 1984 minor’s strike, conceptual artist Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave, reconstructed its most violent confrontation in documentary film and showed on the UK’s Channel Four. 

What was the battle? During the miners'strike, picketing took place all over the county of Yorkshire. One such picket was at a coking plant near Rotherham called Orgreave. The miners picketed and the police came to break this up so that the coke could continue to be shipped out. 

Jeremy Deller was asking…was it that simple?

The police had swelled ranks bussed from all over the UK – some were not police at all, but subscripted from the army. The miners also had many strike sympathisers bussed in to increase the picket numbers. The clash turned into a running battle, resulting in over 120 people injured and 93 arrests. Jeremy Deller wanted to reproduce the battle to get to the heart and the truth of it, which he believed did not emerge at the time.

I first encountered Jeremy Deller in 2012, when I heard, through my Druid friends, that he had conceptualised the idea of a life-sized bouncy castle replica of Stonehenge. I can recall him saying online, that this was ‘a bit of fun’. He reinforced this with the title ‘Sacrilege’. I’m a druid, and was horrified to hear that a group of druids wanted to hire the castle in an attempt to get into the Guinness Book of Records…how many fully-robed druids can you get on a bouncy castle shaped like Stonehenge…

Image courtesy of Jeremy Deller

Druids have a varied press, from satanic to dippy, and bouncing on Stonehenge wasn’t going to improve our image, in my opinion. I was somewhat pacified when the idea was abandoned due to lack of funds, but to this day, I shudder at the thought. 

Deller won the Turner Prize for Memory Bucket, (a video study of Texas) in 2004, but I was still not convinced. An artist who used the words bouncing and Stonehenge in one breath would surely do nothing more than fatuous hommage to the miner's strike with a single video reconstruction.

Before I watched it, I imagined that The Battle of Orgreave would hardly be art at all – despite becoming part of an exhibition at the Tate…The Battle of Orgreave (An Injury to One is an Injury to All).

The Channel Four documentary, directed by Mike Figgis, also wove together interviews, live filming of the battle’s rehearsals and footage of the original event. Such programmes are usually for entertainment and information, not art’s sake. What does one remember about a BBC 4 documentary on the Romans? Not Mary Beard talking about history. It’s the re-enactment that’s impactful. Done well, battle scenes can be good telly, but surely they are not a piece of art.

But watching it on Youtube, I had to admit to myself that The Battle of Orgreave was informative, dramatic and engaging. The re-enactment itself hit home emotionally, even knowing the truncheons were plastic and the bricks were foam. I was moved and newly informed. 

Artangle Media described the making of the documentary as a ‘decoy’ – it would raise sufficient money to pay for the reconstruction in the first place. This led me to rethink my position. Why would this reconstruction be a contribution to conceptualised art? I was reminded of Walter Benjamin’s argument…a work of art has a presence or aura that was the consequence of its authenticity.

The Battle of Orgreave (An Injury to One is an Injury to All).The Courtesy of The Tate 

Deller says of the original event, the clash in 1984;  I had witnessed as a young person on TV, images of striking miners being chased up a hill and pursued through a village. It has since become an iconic image of the 1984 strike – having the quality of a war scene rather than a labour dispute. Immediately after the original confrontation, questions were raised. There was a suspicion the operation was under government control, and that police instructions were to switch strategies from the defensive protection of collieries to actively breaking up crowds and making arrests. It was revealed that the police charged on horseback prior to any major violence by the pickets. The subsequent case made against the arrested miners was thrown out of court. 

Prior to the reconstruction, Deller made posters he displayed at other art events he created (for example ‘Acid House’ at Tate Liverpool), printed on fake parchment and announcing a re-enactment of ‘The Bloody Battle of Orgreave’ under the title The English Civil War (part 2) . All this sounded very esoteric. You’d have to be in on the joke. On the other hand, it would raise anyone’s curiosity, so it was an excellent advertising move.

In the documentary, re-enactment expert Howard Giles pointed out how ‘Roman’ the original confrontation was, and how rudimentary the weapons were. The police were licensed to use only truncheons, but they did have protection; helmets and perspex shields had recently been issued as part of riot gear. The miners had stones, no protective gear, but a strong belief in what they were doing. They were lined up in traditional battle format, the miners in front of the coking plant. The police moved towards them with a basic strategy of hold the line and attack from the middle of the ranks, with a cavalry charge pursuing the strikers through the village. Roman, medieval, or reminiscent of the Napoleonic wars – certainly not the UK policing in the 1980s.

The re-enactment was held on a field very close to the original site. Over 800 people took part, mostly veteran re-enactors, but also former miners and policemen. The footage of interviews with them demonstrates how vividly they relived the events they’d taken part in. I had difficulty believing they considered what they were doing an artistic endeavour, it felt more urgent than that, and far more like a social protest. It came across strongly that they wanted people to be aware of what really happened. It’s also fair to say that many participants did not know the full extent of their involvement in an artistic project. Individually, some of them weren’t there to make art at all.

Photo of Deller Courtesy of The Tate 

Deller wrote…The image of this pursuit up the hill stuck in my mind and for years I wanted to find out what exactly happened on that day with a view to re-enacting or commemorating it in some way. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the strike, like a civil war, had a traumatically divisive effect at all levels of life. 

Deller then, did not plan to re-enact what was reported to have happened on that day (which most historic re-enactments strive to do), he wanted to document the truth as he perceived it…or, as it turned out to be when reconstructed. At first, this reminded me of factual media programming, investigative journalism and reconstructions of crimes ontelevision. But I recalled Pablo Picasso’s words, Art is a lie that makes us realise truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand’ . There is something in this which suggests an artistic concept, without leaving the social comment behind at all. 

Until that point I had been keen to spot ‘artistic filming’ or things like the use of music or heightened language (as in Pinter’s plays) in the television programme, and had been disappointed to realise that the reconstruction was almost as chaotic and unconstructed as the original battle. Once I began to think of art as 'realising the truth', I began to see how the work was propelled essentially by an aesthetic interpretation of passionate socio-political ideals, which Deller presented within an imaginative and original piece.

So, after viewing the documentary, and doing my research around it, I’ve had to extend my view about what art can be, and ask myself, can art be an idea in the mind an artist that will need many other people, often with skills artists don't have, to bring an artistic project to fruition? There are two aspects to this piece of art; the actual re-enactment itself, with or without the video that recorded it, and, afterwards, the TV documentary programme, that actually only showed snatches of the re-enactment alongside the other aspects. Both seem quite valid, and the entire project made me look at how art raises emotions and forces the viewer to re-evaluate their perceptions, often, as in this case, by creating a work appreciated for its integral truth.

Watch the documentary here

Jeremy Deller (born 1966) is an English conceptual, video and installation artist. Much of Deller's work is collaborative; it has a strong political aspect, in the subjects dealt with and also the devaluation of artistic ego through the involvement of other people in the creative process. He won the Turner Prize in 2004, and in 2010 was awarded the Albert Medal of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA). Deller is known for his Battle of Orgreave (2001), a reenactment of the actual Battle of Orgreave which occurred during the UK miners' strike in 1984  http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/jeremy-deller-3034