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Personal Note Archive March 2008

4th March

Shibboleth by Doris Salcedo at the Tate Modern

If you think of art today, then you might picture art galleries with air conditioning, sofas provided for comfortable viewing, and nice coffee shops. Art in its earliest forms was a bit tougher to see. In the caves of southern France during the ice age 30,000 years ago, paintings and sculptures were arranged along the tortuous courses of underground rivers. The process of viewing the art was probably a cross between a ghost train ride at a funfair, and an army assault course. The physical trials, the fearful darkness and flickering fire light added to the emotional impact of the paintings. I recently visited the Tate Modern where a huge crack has been created in the floor of the turbine hall. There were lots of signs sensibly positioned warning people not to trip. It all seemed very different to those ice age caves. But on the other hand, if the Tate Modern shows a visitor anything it's that art need not be confined to a gallery. I left the Tate and couldn't help looking at things differently. Passing the benches outside I found myself thinking are they benches or are they art..? It's as though in struggling through unartistic places, my own version of the caves at Trois Freres in southern France perhaps, there can still be artistic potential. In fact the history of art is one of developments continually appearing in supposedly unpromising quarters. Read more...

 

14th March

Working on InfoBritain we have been to a lot of museums. Some people don't like museums. Youngsters especially sometimes drag around them, with the sense that none of this old stuff is relevant to them. Filippo Marinetti made his feelings quite clear when he wrote his Futurist Manifesto in 1909: "Museums: cemeteries!... identical surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to one another." Oh dear... Personally I love museums, and I see them not as a failure of confidence in the future, but as a modern invention that reveals the best of modern society, as well as some interesting things about the past. Read more on our History of Museums page...

 

 

22nd March 2008

I travelled to Wales recently for the sad occassion of the funeral of my ninety nine year old grandmother. She was a remarkable lady, one of the very first women to graduate from the University of Wales. On our way home we stopped at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire. Lacock seemed a rather fitting place to visit, since it provides a fascinating insight into the restrictions which women have long been expected to endure. Lacock was founded as a convent in 1232, and for three hundred years was the home to an order of nuns. Nuns were recruited exclusively from the upper classes. Upper class women had very little choice about their path through life. If they did not marry, wealthy families might decide to use a convent as an alternative. A career as a nun also offered a cheaper option for families with a number of boys to educate, and girls to endower. Poor girls never became nuns since employment in agriculture or industry was open to them, and also because their families could not afford the dowry necessary to secure a place in a convent. This is the social and economic reality of convents, often obscured by a spiritual smokescreen. On the other hand a convent like Lacock was run by women, and was one of the very few opportunities offered to women to enter a career leading to independent responsibility. When I visited Lacock I felt the Abbey had the atmosphere of an old public school. It was confined in places like this that some women had the chance to explore a life of thought and contemplation unusual for the times. Read more...

 

30th March 2008

Charles Darwin's Sandwalk at Downe House

Technology involving the growing of human stem cells within animal cells has been in the news recently, with certain Church figures talking of "Frankenstein" creations. Historically this is nothing new. The Church serves to present a world with clear boundaries, in which man is the central figure. In 1629 Galileo's Dialogue of the Two Chief World Systems offended the Church, after Galileo failed to veil quite enough his support for the Copernican sun centred conception of the solar system. Inspite of Galileo's political skills, he was tried by the Inquisition, and had to retract his views to avoid torture or execution. In the nineteenth century Charles Darwin ran into religious opposition when he suggested that the species of life were not created separately, but in fact existed as extensions of each other, each variation moulded by evolution. The fact is the Earth is not at the centre of the universe, and animal cells are no different to human cells. Stem cell technology holds the promise of relief for many people with terrible disease, and should not be delayed by a traditional view of nature which sees boundaries where there are none. In many ways disputes which seem consigned to history are still very much with us. They are dressed up in new clothes and rehearsed again. Looking at present controversy in terms of past ones gives us a useful perspective. Read more on our History of Science pages...