In her review of the new Jackson Pollock exhibition in yesterday's Observer, Laura Cumming points out that Pollock's early work is now,
closer to Victorian times than our own.
If that comes as some surprise, we might think of some of Turner's more abstract canvasses or the use of light in Monet and think that not all Victorians were so conservative but we might also calculate the midway point between Victorian times, which ostensibly ended in 1901, and now and establish that it is 1958. Thus Elvis Presley, Albert Camus and James Dean are all closer to Victorian times than our own.
It is a regular source of amazement to me and some of my contemporaries that in the early 70's, Bill Haley seemed pre-historic but was only 15 years ago. That now makes him all but contemporary with David Bowie and that gap is significantly less than that between the first Oasis album and now. Time continues to play this fascinating trick on our perception of what we've lived through. In 1972, Larkin and Ted Hughes were major living poets, Seamus Heaney still young and Paul Muldoon just making a precocious debut.
It presumably doesn't seem to a younger generation that not much has happened since but now Larkin and Hughes are as distant from us as Auden and Eliot were then.
I honestly don't take all my reference points from The Observer, it's only that The Sunday Times is still home to A.A. Gill and Jeremy Clarkson, as far as I know, and The Independent never has anything to read in it. However, I found reference somewhere over the weekend to Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, a critique which, among other things, identifies barriers to expression that have led to a kind of soul-less, meaningless art, presumably due to the rapid commodification of anything vaguely threatening to make it marketable. (And that is my loose paraphrase. I haven't read Fisher's book and am not likely to). But that, or something like it, might account for the apparent fore-shortening of our perspective on the time between now and 1901. There is a bit of a vacuum in the last 20 or 30 years in pop music, literature and perhaps much else in which much great work might have been done but not much seems to have happened. Perhaps it was ever thus for those middle-aged observers who grew up with a lively interest in everything they found but became less enamoured with each 'new' wave. But certainly, even if an Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp or Stravinsky were to arrive today, what would they do. The avant gardistes of the C21st look like quaint nostalgia merchants, revivalists who are like Showaddywaddy compared to Eddie Cochran or merely still devoted to re-working a well-ploughed furrow.
But even Fisher complains in vain. He is a 'cultural theorist', and I'm sure is glad to rejoice in the name, but it sounds to me only like a new nomenclature for an old opposition between radical and revisionist when compared with the opposite of 'cultural theorist' which I take to be 'management consultant'.
Every age must have had people who thought they had reached the end and there was nowhere to go from where they found themselves. Fukuyama announced 'the end of history' somewhat prematurely, Baudrillard debated whether we should be counting down or up to the millennium but nothing really happened either way, did it.
Perhaps Jackson Pollock, and all those we thought of as 'modern art', the Modernists and all the innovations of the brilliant, horrific adventure of the C20th will gradually look nearer to each other, and much more similar to Victorian than we can yet appreciate. There might not, one day, seem to be so much difference between Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot. Those of us who readily identify fundamental differences between T. Rex records made in 1971 and those from 1974 had to be there to know. But, mainly, not for the first time, if we have, as it would appear, moved into a new age of ultra-conservatism and corporate 'product' run by expert consultants on hourly rates, let those of us lucky enough to have been born between roughly 1945 and 1965, be grateful that we benefitted from the mood of the beatnik, the democratic spread of liberal education, the enjoyment of art for art's sake. Poets now qualify on Creative Writing degree courses where all such things will have been explained to them. It takes many years to recover from an education. We are all going to be Showaddywaddy from now on.
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Octagenarian Poet Publishes First Website
So, I'm delighted to be able to draw your attention to Cliff Blake's new website,
www.cliff-top-poems.simplesite.com
The poems are as traditional as anyone could want. I have read that Cliff believes that poetry should rhyme but now is not the time or place to debate that old horse chestnut. It depends how far you want to go back, and into which culture, but we might find that our ideas about rhyming poetry are not entirely traditional and possibly arrived in Britain from Italy in the middle ages but I will happily stand corrected on that.
But it is good to see Cliff still at it and embracing all this new-fangled interweb stuff.
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My progress through George Eliot continues steadily.
I had thought that The Mill on the Floss was somehow less than Adam Bede but it is building purposefully, if episodically, with the admirable Maggie Tulliver apparently some version of a self-portrait by Mary Ann.
As uncle Pullet tries to be jocular with young Tom Tulliver,
A boy's sheepishness is by no means a sign of overmastering reverence: and while you are making encouraging advances to him under the idea that he is over-whelmed by a sense of your age and wisdom, ten to one he is thinking you extremely queer.
'Ten to one' here is meant to mean 'very likely' in a much misunderstood usage by those unfamiliar with betting parlance. Properly, it should say 'ten to one on', that is 1/10, not 10/1, but such is language that the reader needs to take the obvious intended meaning rather than the literal sense.
I would not be reading George Eliot's novels quite so systematically if she wasn't being installed as my favourite novelist. And I wouldn't be reading her if I was aware of anything better that I should be reading instead.