Category: Culture

By Harry Laventure

Of late (and wherefore I know not), the grand movements of art history have found new determinisms. In this epoch of images, we the pedestrians have more exposure than ever before to any piece of art we desire. The dosage we receive is no longer at the behest or prescription of authenticated scholars, nor does it come with labels attached. Indeed, it is no stretch to say that our eyes can outrun the footfall of any Grand Tourist of old within moments. As such, the established nomenclature for movements of art have lost their gravitas, and we are more often – without further, deliberate investigation – to make our minds of what we see without clues. As such, large strokes of Baroque, Renaissance, and Mannerist art becomes “Italian, religious art”. Post-war abstract expressionists are the “my-children-could-do-thats”. Perhaps the cruellest public treatment has come to the Impressionists and their immediate successors. Victims of their own vanquishing, they are the “chocolate box artists”; the postcard landscapes; the wallpaper poltergeists. 

From this clientele, there remains no doubt an ostentation of mellifluously French names in the vocabulary of the everyman: Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Van Gogh (perhaps less French). Those who made totems of waterlilies, umbrellas, apples, and sunflowers have been rewarded with a lasting fame, fresh to the market and gallery alike. Among these heavyweights, one name you may not be so familiar with is Georges Charles Robin. Having spent a week in the company of his oeuvre, I’d like to present his case. 

Georges Charles Robin (“row-ban” rather than the red-breasted variety) was born in Paris, 1903. Although little is known of his early life and artistic education, his natural gift is unmistakable: Robin began as scenery artist for the Charleville Theatre, and the Dinan Casino. In his lifetime as an artist proper, however, his canvas would play host to several locations that were luminaries of his living arrangements. Among them, Rueil Malmaison’s more salubrious panoramas, Morlaix’s summer blooms, and the rivulets that etch the contours of the Loire Valley and the Dordogne region. More often championed for his rural than urban works, there is no pomposity or material opulence to his corpus: it was serenity rather than salon that formed his locus amoenus, and his delicate muses are to be found in the ornately rustic realm. Robin would live to his hundredth year, having become a member of innumerable French artistic societies, officer of the Académie des Beaux Arts, director of the Institute of “Instruction Publique”, and been decorated by the Hors Concours amidst countless other French art awards. In spite of this remarkable bundle of ribbons and statistics, Robin continues to be widely absent from the history books, and by extension the public memory. 

It is perhaps, after all, too easy for a man of subtlety to be lost in the parade of caricatures and radicals that preceded him. Indeed, one interesting thing about the repurposing of the Impressionist sunset for the tablecloth is the newfound quietude. Synchronically, we cannot understand the movement as anything less than an artistic equivalent of violent revolution. The late 19^th/early 20^th century assault in all its anti-classical insouciance was one of style and sentiment. As the art world’s establishments wept for the death of academicism in a few swift splodges of colour against total realism, new precedents were set by artists of immense impact devoid of certification. Principles of belonging as imposters have governed the art world since. And yet, if careless, one can break free from prison to find himself unemployed. Inheriting this debris, the sensible man asks what should be done, rather than what could be done. As one who was forged in this particular bain-marie, that is precisely what Robin did. 

And how we may read it on the canvas. Take his Bords du Loir, a delightfully tranquil scene: as we look up from the crystalline, stilled embrace of a river, speckles of figures bumble across an arched stone bridge, towards a cluster of sun-breathed buildings. Cypresses line the riverbank like emerald quills, and a bouquet of soft blues tangle with ivory clouds above. A rowing boat lays matchstick-like at the edge of the water, without an oarsman – perhaps they too have stopped to watch? There is nothing bombastic about the painting. On the contrary, the gentle dynamism of the brushwork makes shimmers of the scene, as if the most delicate of breezes would leave the canvas and its cast tremulous. This is no outlier – the very same is observable in my personal favourite, L’Eglise de Montrozier sur L’Aveyron. An altogether similar arrangement, but an opportunity to note his alacrity for tremors in the dust path we walk along to church, and survey Robin’s capacity for reflection in a stream that is neither too exact as to be false, nor murky to be unfaithful. His Impressionist forefathers found the limits of what could reasonably be done on a canvas in an anti-traditional fashion. Robin, however, refines the achievements of these predecessors rather than continuing their experiments. 

In no facet of his work is this more blatant than in his attitudes to palette. Firstly, if one takes numerous Monet or Pissarro works, there is a deliberate lean towards the psychedelic in normal subject matter. Whether in a congregation of flowers from the gardens of Giverny or a nocturnal Parisian street scene, there is a hunt for a kind of pyrotechnics in paint on the canvas. Likewise in Robin’s contemporaries Pierre Montézin and Edouard Cortès, fireworks of pinks and blues pollinate every pore of the picture, resulting in kaleidoscopic spectra in subjects as ostensibly simple as stacks of hay. Contrast this with the restrained palette of Robin’s paintings above, and you gain efficient insight into his mentality. As expert Anthony Fuller of Gladwell & Patterson’s Gallery puts it, ‘the juxtaposition of each colour softens them, and they have a quiet richness’. The precise colours of a moment are each fragmented into shades that differ with such minute playfulness as to leave every atomic subcategory as individual notes within grand chords. The resultant cadence is profound in a way that rewards rather than grapples your focus. 

Further still, as a variation on the theme, the likes of Hassam and Suzor-Coté were castigated for their use of colours that had a fidelity to the ‘impression’ of a scene, if not its true likeness. This is most notorious in the manner that indigos and violets cling to their snow scenes: whilst it is perhaps true that the cocktail of sunlight and glacial blue renders a purple sensation for the viewer, this does not change the true colour of each constituent parts. (There is a lingering debate on truth, imitation, and likeness which I do not have room to sink my paws into here, perhaps another time). Robin, on the other hand, does not have to ‘adopt’ colours to fit a scene – they are the shades indigenous to a given subject. Nowhere is this more obvious than in La Seine à Bougival, Le Soir. Bruising is reserved for the sky, and flour white for the snow. All is coherent, none is superimposed. A cunning and useful symbol: amidst all the fog of this wintery nocturne, every vague angle of the composition draws our eyes to the path ahead and the peppery figures opposite who walk towards us, arm in arm. Each Robin requires the sincere attention to surroundings that one enjoys on a nightly stroll. He does not demand your eyes, but a glance is a tip of the hat. To indulge them proper is to participate – that is your choice. 

This subtlety, and the humble worship of that nature which has been documented for centuries, devoid of grandiosity or party tricks, is Robin’s greatest success. A rare sincerity reserved for the too oft ignored in the everyday. Alas, it is also probably the reason why you haven’t heard of him. 

This week just gone, I had the privilege of helping Gladwell & Patterson set up their new gallery in Stamford, Lincolnshire. Part of this privilege was unadulterated time to chew the cud on all things Robin with Anthony, son of Herbert Fuller, the man who discovered him. Anthony is as joyous as he is erudite on Robin, and he patiently endured a barrage of questions from me – for this I will always be grateful. Moreover, he enjoys a masterfully intimate command of the technicalities involved therein, and can reanimate the artistic mechanics behind each piece with accuracy far beyond these little jottings of mine. Anthony has long insisted that Georges Charles Robin is an artist of tomorrow. I happen to agree. 

Since Covid, the art market has seen an unprecedented shift towards Post-War, Modern, and Contemporary movements, which last year accounted for 77% of sales (by value) within auction houses. Beyond the pomp and gimmick of shredding frames and falling buckets of sand, may we hope to relearn the art of looking without the need for active stimulation. When we do, sincerity will await us like a bit of peace and quiet after a tube ride. Free from chocolate box prints, and dusted off for due attention, Georges Charles Robin will be there. 

By Maisie Jennings

In her diary, Anaïs Nin compares herself to a trapeze artist, suspended between two bicoastal marriages in a spectacular aerial performance across America. It isn’t difficult to imagine her in flight. Photographs of Nin depict a dazzling woman with long, pencilled eyebrows framing the dark eyes of a French film star. I’m always struck by the glamorous minutiae of her appearance, and it seems to me, that, more than anything, Nin embodies the performer tip-toeing across the taught line of the self – of its concealment and expression. 

The image of the balancing act occurs again in her novel, A Spy in the House of Love, part of Nin’s aptly named five book collection Cities of the Interior. It is a book entirely about secrecy; the fragility of its maintenance, and the terror of discovery. Sabina, the adulteress, lives in constant fear that she ‘could fall from this incandescent trapeze on which she walked’. The trapeze bifurcates every part of Sabina’s life like piercing a mirror, and it propels a kind of schizophrenia that shatters her sense of a singular, unified self. In a moment of reflection, Sabina sees ‘no Sabina, not ONE, but a multitude of Sabinas lying down yielding and being dismembered, constellating in all directions and breaking’. 

Nin expresses Sabina’s multiplicity of self through her sexual encounters. Indeed, sex is the sensual arena in which Sabina negotiates her selfhood. With every lover she takes, Sabrina is briefly able to control the splitting of her identity as, like an actress or a spy, she crafts her allure, she becomes desire. For these careful transformations, Nin provides accompanying music to Sabina’s sexual vignettes: Debussy’s “Ile Joyeuse”, “Clair de Lune”, Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde”, and Stravinsky’s “The Firebird”. The effect is heady, thrusting, trembling – the sex that Sabina pursues is orchestral and baroque in its intensity, and she surrenders to it. It is what Nin deems ‘a moment of wholeness’ in which Sabina’s self is subsumed by the rhythms and movements of desire. There is an almost atavistic quality to this passion:

‘They fled from the eyes of the world, the singer’s prophetic, harsh, ovarian prologues. Down the rusty bars of ladders to the undergrounds of the night propitious to the first man and woman at the beginning of the world, where there were no words by which to possess each other, no music for serenades, no presents to court with, no tournaments to impress and force a yielding [..] but only one ritual, a joyous, joyous, joyous impaling of a woman on a man’s sensual mast’. 

Sabina’s performances of her multiple selves, her dark cape and shadowed eyes, the flimsy gossamer of her trapeze, all dissipate with the ecstasy of sex. In many ways, Nin liberates herself from patriarchal literary conventions, anticipating the Sexual Revolution by embodying her work – she ‘endows words with flesh and blood’ as she subjectivises taboo female sexuality. Here, it is crucial to understand that the distinctly female perspective Nin embodies within her work is her own. To me, Nin’s novels and diaries represent an early form of autofiction – they retain an ambiguously fictional level, allowing the author to manipulate episodes of her own life through the constructed insertion of her self as a character or heroine. In A Spy in the House of Love, Nin writes Sabina to inhabit the portrait she constructs of herself in her diaries. She uses Sabina to reveal aspects of her infidelities, as well as concealing any autobiographical details through the nebulous and labyrinthine distortions of Sabina’s mind. There are only fragments of New York, recollections of an interwar Paris we might connect to Nin’s affair with Henry Miller, and the maritime locations of Provincetown and New Jersey that resist factual readings through Nin’s oblique narrative style. 

After her death in 1977,  Nin was exposed –  a ‘consummate liar’ whose body of work encapsulates her need for meticulous, artful self-invention. In her obituary in the New York Times, she was listed as being survived by her husband, the wealthy banker Hugo Guiler. In the Los Angeles Times, her husband was listed as Rupert Pole, an actor nearly twenty years her junior. Contemporary feminists reviled Nin’s bourgeois proclivities; she was a 20th century Madame Bovary, and, after the publishing of her erotic collections Delta of Venus and Little Birds, a dollar-a-page pornographer.  

I think it is both impossible and irrelevant to attempt to reduce Nin to either the merciless upper-crust adulteress or the impenetrable feminist sexual pioneer. Whether she wrote to seek some kind of absolvement, or to bring into being a new world of feminine erotic literature is also beside the point. For me, Nin is best understood in her own words: ‘We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection’. Certainly, Nin, by careful construction and insertion, explores all the tastes and sensations of a vivid erotic life.

By Lydia Firth

Having recently moved to Sussex, I was excited by the prospect of rolling hills, proximity to London, and new cultural hotspots. Charleston House quickly made my list of places to visit. Charleston was the home and studio of the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and it became a meeting point for the Bloomsbury Set: a group of artists, intellectuals, writers, and philosophers in early 20th century England. Frequent visitors to the house included Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard, alongside the great E.M. Forster. The house itself is positioned among a truly novelistic English garden full of dahlias and drooping trees in the orbit of a pond laden with lily pads. Perhaps it was just the haziness of the hot September day on which I visited, but it felt quite genuinely magical.

For magpie-minded individuals like me, the house is an absolute treasure trove of stunning interiors and objects. Each room is so delightfully curated and reflects the Bloomsbury group’s originality and collaboration. No surface is left untouched, and each object is handcrafted. The side of the bath is adorned with a painting of a reclining nude; fired in the house’s own kiln, the kitchen sink tiles are painted with pink silky fish; a lampshade made from a painted colander pleasantly throws out gentle stripes of light; rugs lay supine and hand-tied in a myriad of colours. A bust of Virginia Woolf casually placed in a bedroom window reminds me of the time she spent here. 

Above and below the window of Bell’s old bedroom, Grant elegantly depicted both a cockerel and the family’s lurcher to wake her in the morning and guard her by night. This epitomises the consideration put into the design of their home – it exists as a little in-joke between the couple, as well as being ornamental.

There is precision in the artistic curation from room to room: the colour palette melds the house together in one harmonious aesthetic, punctuated by the consistent display of Bell and Grant’s paintings throughout. As well as seeming calculated, the design retains its spontaneity in both the freehand murals which cover doors, chairs, bedheads, and the thin washes of warm-toned paints which coat walls, brushstrokes peeking through. It could be described as ‘interior design nonchalance’: colours, shapes, and patterns obviously came very naturally to the residents. There is a surprising sense of the contemporary, and the textiles, colour palette and adorned furniture remind me of the likes of Oliver Bonas and Anthropologie. Writer and curator Charlier Porter points out the irony “that Charleston inspires stuff that gets mass-produced, because what the house asks you to do, always, is to think for yourself.” 

Whilst the house is preserved exactly as it was, the space remains dynamic. An unpainted pelmet may appear tomorrow with a little floral flourish, for example. The lack of stagnation speaks to their authenticity and reflects their ideology. Grant himself was originally drawn thereto because the agricultural work that the house implied his part in made him exempt from conscription from WWI – perhaps a literal lifeline for the conscientious objector. Furthermore, it meant that the visitors of Charleston’s unconventional and often intertwining romantic lives were able to play out in what was a counter-cultural refuge from London life. Dorothy Parker quipped that the Bloomsbury Group “lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles”. The house could almost be seen as one of the members of the group: it feels like both a companion and a living representation of their dislike for convention. Indeed, the level of detail employed on every surface and in every corner cements it as an externalisation of their ethos.

I urge you to visit and enjoy this submersion into 20^th century artistic living.

By Harry Laventure

The title “Visual Identity Review” is a prompt that no sane creature could wish to answer, let alone ruminate on.

It is also the heading for a 22-page document published by none other than the Northampton Saints rugby team as a proem to their newly unveiled logo. Once enclosed, the veritable badger may undergo frisson at a carnival of surveys and experiments curated to articulate the present plight of English domestic rugby, and the acute necessities for individual franchises to save themselves by any panacea possible. For shallow is the clock. Worcester Warriors, London Wasps, and London Irish have already been disposed of alongside the superfluous bloats of PPE; Leicester Tigers and Exeter Chiefs both groped at cash inoculations to survive the pandemic’s debilitations. Precious few of the teams that remain operate at a profit.* As the Saints’ investigation itself purports, less than 1/3 of people can name a Premiership club. Although rugby union is the fourth most followed sport in the country, it doesn’t even make the Top 20 for Gen Z (EY Sports Engagement Index, Nov. 2023). It is perhaps a set of studs rammed to the begging hand to note that one of the larger surveys within the report only garnered 1611 responses. Thus Webb-Ellis’ great game of rough football with fingers wheezes.

In their hour of need, the Saints have built a new cross: a modernised logo. As an appeal to the digital vernacular, the much-simplified shield posits a daffodil yellow skeleton of St. James’ crux to straddle bands of ebony and Heineken green. As such, Northampton recalibrate to align themselves with every sporting franchise from Juventus to the New York Yankees (cited precisely in the report as examples of efficacious branding) in the sleek, sterile new era. Charmingly, the cross itself is derived from the teamwear in the oldest pictures we have of the then St. James Improvement Class, 1884. It is this detail, declares the club, that permits the memory of forefathers whilst preserving the blood for generations of technophants to come. Alas, for this writer, the cost of lost alleles eclipses the cosmetic.

Images courtesy of the Northampton Saints website

A brief twig of aesthetic genealogy. In 1880, a reverend with the nominal bristle of Samuel Wathen Wigg founded the Improvement Class of his St. James Church. Between then and 1951, the Improvement Class would become the Britons, and the Britons would become the Saints, with accompanying palette changes of scarlet strips to the present black, green, and gold. From chrysalis to adult, the team’s students designed arms for their blazers that would endure to this very year. The Northampton Borough heraldry of 1617 was their starting whistle: two lions grin rampant guardant with the proud symmetry of a Dragontail, between them the solitary turret of Northampton Castle. To this, the students added nimbs, wings, the crimson rose of Northamptonshire, and a trinity of scallop shells. In doing so, they demonstrated erudition and tact that is not usually – unfairly – associated with the muddy foot soldiers of fifteen. Indeed, there is density in the detail. Beyond the elements that made saints out of lions, the scallop shells not only refer symbolically to St. James but tap into the heraldic legacy of the Spencer family, who have historically resided in the nearby Althorp Estate. In this fashion, to poach from Burnett and Dennis, ‘fact and fancy, myth and manner, romance and reality’ enjoy exuberant union within a small patch. A grandiose castle of around 1100 CE finds its rhyming couplet with the sketched halos of post-WWII students. Between history’s pomp and shrapnel, there is plucked taut the golden thread of a place eternal and changing. This is the story of all heraldry, and the martyrdom to which it has glumly plodded for the best part of two centuries is painfully indicative of a recent malady in our attitudes to communication.

Image courtesy of the Northampton Saints website

The Old French hiraudie (deriv. Frankish, Hariwald) animates the imagery of chivalry and other anachronisms by association and fact. A form of identification card for the budding noble combatant, the home-and-away strip of knightly tournaments provided a defensive canvas for the exhibition of lineage, location, and claimed attribute. It is this vast well of opportunity in expression, aesthetic and figurative, that made heraldry a kind of practical art. The bolster of the aristocrat becomes the banner of the company – a charring claim to individuality in the collective of the militant mind. It is a cheap trick of the tongue to note the importance of a topic by citation of its own scholarship, but humour me to direct you towards the contents of Richard Blome’s 1685 The Art of Heraldry. From bordures charged to labells, ineschocheons to orles, fesses to celestials, and four chapters dedicated to the different postures and parts of lions, it reads more like the ingredients list for amateur incantations than history of art. This visual zest has rendered the topic the branding of childhood lessons on medieval England – the de facto décor of the veteran history teacher. Indeed, it seems only yesterday that I charged down Senlac Hill (the mound of our cricket pavilion) under the handled pinion of Normandy’s double lions. But of heraldry, alas, history has not made a victor. Perhaps it is now the moment to calculate why.

Not just yet. An entertaining but relevant digression comes in G.K. Chesterton’s The Defendant (1901). Nestled between the obdurate esteem of Baby Worship, Nonsense, and China Shepherdesses, the writer finds a nook to document the unfortunate denouement of heraldry in his (now our) times. In light of the newly-ruled illegitimacy of God’s nominated representatives, Chesterton argues, the rhetoric becomes more about dragging down the elite than aspiring to conduct oneself by the expectations of their ranks. So the ‘road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect’ becomes one not taken, in an ironic inflection of snobbishness. The tobacconist finds not a shield for his crossed briar pipes; the cheesemonger no war-cry of Wensleydale. The pictorial ‘suggestion, without naming or defining is rendered extravagance’. And men may argue over the ‘wittiest thing about the spring’ that is theirs to inherit, rather than serve. Indeed, Chesterton proposes that it is the continued use of heraldry that permits pubs to exercise their continued, mysterious attraction (…). How easily nostalgia binds itself to English ink. But not entirely off the mark.

Now, then. Take a gander at the ludicrous excess of the Coat of arms of Baldomero Espartero, Prince of Vergara (1793–1879). Even in an extravagant art form, there are extravagances. Artefacts like this smoothly demonstrate what it means for any piece of art to be imbalanced away from us. It is needlessly overwhelming in what it tries to throw all at once, expecting us not to drop the ball for a moment’s lack of subtext. A reaction of eye-rolling dismissal is not only natural, but justifiable. Because it is natural, it seems right. We are always quicker to note that which inconveniences us. Something that requires more discipline to spot is the imbalance of art at our service, or worse, mercy. That which curries our favour without asking for any form of participation in return is little more than a sycophant’s counsel. I am describing the modern phenomenon of branding. By definition, it is designed to pamper and pander to the lazier instincts of our faculties. Obviously, its only purpose is the successful and swift achievement of your investment. All else is irrelevance – for why would any vendor rely on his customer’s capacity for active evaluation of their product? Neither true commerce, nor free creative expression, heraldry lacks the poise to find a habitat in this landscape. Here we see the true inhospitality of our epoch. 

Duchamp once considered the concept of real artistic meaning as the electrified space between a transmitter (artist) and receiver (audience). At its worst, the martyrdom of heraldry is the parable of a collapse in this traditional mode of exchange. Catalysed by the online medium and the general disenfranchisement of the public on the back of the modern era’s artistic experiments, both sides have failed to keep their perfect tension. To reconfigure to a new (but very, very old) image of the Caduceus, the serpents have lost their rhythm with one another. One, gluttonous and slow, waits to be anaesthetised repeatedly by the fangs of a hyperactive other. In the resultantly anharmonic heap, the golden rod has no centrifuge to hold its salute. This is that space between, and it fell with little more than a metallic twang.

Possibly, the true cynic could go further still. In the traditional mode of doom-mongering, they would suggest that the corrosive attitude bred by the casual proliferation of these commercial transactions is a septic tank slowly bleeding into the water supply. Moreover, you can read it in the disposable nonchalance and sterility of this generation’s architecture, infrastructure, art, and literature. And we might consider the sanding down of ornate Parisian lampposts to the aluminium and glass cuboids of central New York. They may even direct you to a Tiktok contrasting the cornices of Schönbrunn with the tubing of the Centre Pompidou. Rising skirt hems, lowering IQs, and things just aren’t built like they used to be. Let us not stumble into satire with no interesting point but laughter. Here sleaze numerous conflations and generalisations, but the questions they elicit are not entirely unrelated to our symposium. Woven as the theme is with strands of pessimistic nostalgia, I do not think that the commercial tectonics dictating art’s place in our lives have been entirely without condescension as of late. Conf. Banksy. When was the last time you saw a piece of contemporary art that was neither blatant nor untenable to you? Harsh, but fair. Fragrances of these ponders are relevant, others are ludicrous. For now, this punter backs away burnt, and concedes that perhaps the more grandiose abstractions of enquiry are for now to remain like the impacts of the French Revolution. Too soon to say. 

In this mess of pretence, it’s easy to forget that we started on the logo of the Northampton Saints rugby team. If we cannot put the artistic atmosphere of our times to rights over this dilettante’s aperitif, we may at least try to reconcile our introduction. It is a shame, but after all that I do feel we must concede that the Saints’ metamorphosis is evidence of evolution in the truest sense: a shot at survival. Practicalities must, and there is no space for the detailing of a centuries old crest in a profile pic. As mentioned earlier, there are fond anecdotes of the Reverend Wigg’s wife knitting the very same cross of the new logo on the St. James’ Improvement Class teamwear. This essence of approach, regardless of execution, should be admirable to the dustiest of Earl Marshals.  

As for heraldry more generally, it seems all too sadly obvious. In the mid-19^th century, Somerset Herald James Robinson Planché despaired to admit that it had been called ‘the science of fools with long memories’. Fond as I am, it now appears self-evident that the truest mystery of any cult’s rites exists only for those already initiated. But this panegyric must refuse to conclude in this key centre. Instead, we may remark that heraldry’s finest lessons and attributes survive in whispers, too subtle in their blatancy to offend. Men still do not ‘argue over the meaning of sunsets’. From the blood-peppered fork of the Zulfiqur, to the three (preferably beer-marinated) lions of an England shirt, the most formidable banners of our histories will survive us. And so, let the obituary conclude with a new definition. One of my favourite poets once determined his work as ‘the movement of a self in the rock’. Surely, if nothing else, this ditty has proven heraldry to be none other than ‘the aspiration of ourselves in the rock’.

*Since this article was written (12th August), seven of the ten Premiership teams have declared that they are balance sheet insolvent.

Dan Whitlam and a New Iteration of Poetry By Callum Tilley.

As those of us not immune to social media trends will have noticed, everything – and I mean everything – now has a space online. Whilst some might critique this impulse as shallow, the hollowing-out of arts like fashion, literature, and film for likes and online fame, it also means that creatives have new platforms on which to broadcast their work, and this art can find new audiences. Whilst this debate about the use of social media for art might rumble on – does it represent a superficial manifestation of technological capitalism, or a democratising impulse in creativity and the arts? – one man has been using media to broadcast his own art, and it is truly quite remarkable.

Dan Whitlam has been posting videos on Instagram (@danwhitlam) since 2017, and on Spotify since 2021. His work consists of a unique blend of spoken-word poetry, coupled with musical accompaniment that renders his work emotionally touching. Now amassing around 137,000 followers on Instagram (as of March 2024), is his significant following a symptom of the democratisation of the arts through social media? And how is work so uniquely modern, yet steeped in a rich poetic tradition? Is Dan Whitlam the future of poetry?

Firstly, I would argue that Whitlam’s style is novel, but not radically new. Whilst being a pioneer of his art form, he has not invented a new category of literature (if such a thing is possible). Spoken word poetry has a long and rich history, its oral tradition reaching as far back as Homer; and in a more modern context, its influences and iterations include theatre, jazz, and blues music from the early twentieth century. His art is not revolutionary, but perhaps a new iteration of this rich art form for the modern (or post-modern) age. 

Arguably, the novelty of Whitlam’s poetry comes from addressing problems unique to his (and our) generation. Perhaps my favourite of his works, ‘Paper People’, is about what could conventionally be described as a break-up. The speaker explains that he doesn’t know if he and his former partner can be friends, because,

“That would mean writing over what we were

Those rose-tinted days

Turning it into something less special

And slightly more mundane.

A lower level of pain – 

You no longer want me as your lover

But wanna hold on to my best bits

When your chest hits

The arm of another.

I don’t think we can be friends.”

The emotional distress Whitlam transmits is acutely familiar to anyone who has gone through a break-up in the past. The feeling of having to turn what was a hugely special relationship into something that, whilst no less important is much less intimate, is something that only those with immense emotional strength can manage. The pain of seeing a former lover in the light of friendship, and knowing that you lost something – or wondering about what could have been – is perhaps too strong an emotion to translate into a friendship. 

Whitlam effectively captures this emotional turmoil in a uniquely modern way. Whilst conventionally interpreted as a failing relationship, it is never explicitly referred to as such. This ambiguity could refer to the diminishing importance of labels when navigating modern love; poetry has absorbed the ambiguity of post-modern dating. Would it be too much to suppose that Whitlam is describing the emotional fallout after that perilous quasi-relationship-like place, the ‘situationship’?

Take, for example, another piece, published on Instagram. The poem opens,

“Nothing stranger than lovers turned friends.

As you both slowly forget your beginning and

Only remember the end.”

Perhaps the most piercing line comes later; when the couple meet again, as friends, 

“Just as strangers with a hidden knowledge

Who have to sadly pretend.

[…]

Where laughter’s not quite as close

But still holds the memory.

Or smiles that aren’t as deep…

But they’re still your remedy.”

In Whitlam’s emotionally sensitive phraseology, the pain of not quite knowing where you’re standing – emotional no-man’s-land – is rendered crystallised. It cuts straight to the buried point of tension, where your complicated feelings and questions about a relationship that cannot be quite defined – that, like Whitlam, avoids labels – and pins it down. The poet won’t let you escape your pain; he expresses it for you. You cannot be friends with someone who was once more than that. You might be friendly, but you either operate on a new plane of relationship – a halfway-point, where you operate as friends but know one another as lovers – or, if too painful, you cut and run. Whitlam leaves it up to us, the audience, to make that choice for ourselves. For him, or his poetry at least, it is too painful.  

If Rupi Kaur is the millennial poet, Dan Whitlam is the emotional mouthpiece of Generation Z. He voices our concerns about the instability of relationships, refusing to define them as we often refuse to define our relations to a lover, and gives intense and beautiful words to the complicated and often un-utterable emotions that characterise our feelings for someone who does not necessarily reciprocate in the same way. It’s painful to listen to, emotively read and set to music, but it’s reflective of our post-modern understanding of love.

This framing of our understanding of relationships finds a uniquely modern platform. Shared on Instagram, Tiktok, Spotify, these poems are directly targeted at the generation of people they discuss. This democratisation of his art allows Whitlam to reach everyone – or, anyone with access to the Internet – which is remarkably modern. So, too, is the blurring of the boundary between music and literature, so that this new iteration of spoken word poetry finds a modern setting over low-fi beats. 

What is not modern, however, is Whitlam’s discussion of loss. I am struck by the intense sadness that runs through his work, but never at any point do I get the impression that he regrets it. This recalls Tennyson’s famous lines,

“’Tis better to have loved and lost 

Than never to have loved at all.”

Whilst Whitlam might be communicating intense emotional turmoil, one emotion left off the page (or screen) is regret. Like Tennyson and countless others, whose rich tradition of love poetry Whitlam now continues, there is no sense that we should protect ourselves from these feelings. Before, I argued that his framing of relationships is uniquely modern; his framing of love, however, is definitely not.

Perhaps the only anti-modern thread in Whitlam’s work is the advocation for feeling these emotions; for loving and loving harder, for experiencing these emotions regardless of the potential consequences, because to fail to do so insulates you from one of the most natural aspects of the human experience: heartbreak. Discussed for thousands of years as an almost universal theme in poetry, Whitlam’s work continues this legacy of advocating for the pursuit of love whilst pushing back against the current impulse to not feel and remain emotionally bubble-wrapped. He reframes age-old poetic tropes of love and loss for post-modern contexts and audiences. Despite being intensely modern in his approach and his medium, Whitlam reminds a modern audience that not to love is worse than loving, and losing.

Sources:

Dan Whitlam’s Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/danwhitlam/

Dan Whitlam’s Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/artist/4t4zanmCp0GBomHaX5hXt8?si=j9bMkWsfRKW6QYVj1ywgsA

Dan Whitlam, ‘Paper People’, extract on Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/p/C3p4kyoo77P/ 

Dan Whitlam, ‘Nothing Stranger’, extract on Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/p/C4slEHjovs4/

Dan Whitlam, ‘Paper People’, on Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/album/5ao1mH7SdctA1afS3CtklP?si=RWGyXOrcQ5u7tP5GM4x-Ug
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 27, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45336/in-memoriam-a-h-h-obiit-mdcccxxxiii-27

By Chloe Stiens

I was in a folky rocky acoustic mood this week. Featuring new music from St. Vincent only.

You can find this week’s playlist at the top of the ‘Spring 24’ playlist, here:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5FaZdPSwOS8sEOx6Dq0yB1?si=528b996c66b74f05

Laura Marling, Alexandra

• This song was the soundtrack to my 2020 lockdown, i.e., sitting in the sun with my Bluetooth speaker and a glass of wine, so as soon as it gets sunny this song makes an appearance.
• The song is inspired by the Leonard Cohen song ‘Alexandra Leaving’. Here, Marling questions what happens to the woman-muse after she is no longer relevant to the writer.
• I like chromatic descent in the internal harmony, in which the flat 7 note lends mixolydian modal folk sensibility.

Funkadelic, Can You Get To That

• From their celebrated 1971 album, Maggot Brain. It is actually a reworking of an earlier Parliament’s track, ‘What You’ve Been Growing’.
• I love how the drums come in accompanied by a piano glissando, and the low ‘I wanna know’ in the chorus.

St. Vincent, Big Time Nothing

• From St. Vincent’s new album, All Born Screaming (it has also been released as a single). This is the first album entirely self-produced by St. Vincent, in which her previous sonic influences are excitingly combined; in this song, the Masseduction-esque synth gives way to a funk influence first explored on  Daddy’s Home.

Big Red Machine, Fleet Foxes, Anaïs Mitchell, Phoenix

• Big Red Machine is the collaborative project between Aaron Dessner (of The National, and co-producer of Taylor Swift’s Folklore/Evermore and The Tortured Poets Department), and Justin Vernon (Bon Iver). 
• The piano writing here brings to mind one of my favourite Evermore songs, ‘Dorothea’. The percussion is very interesting; the backbeat is composed more of fills than grounding kicks. I also enjoy the subtle horns combined with the other country/folk acoustic instruments.

Mac DeMarco, Moonlight on the River

• My favourite song off of 2017’s This Old Dog. 
• The reverb on the lead guitar brings to mind reflections in water, before it gives way to simple acoustic guitar, bass, and drums for the verse.
• I love how it goes crazy at the end, as ‘everybody dies’. While the rest of the song can be interpreted as the narrator coming to terms with his father’s impending death, the ominous sounds here could be his grief taking over.

Gang Starr, Full Clip

• This song is from the rap duo’s eponymous compilation album, released in 1999, and samples Cal Tjader’s instrumental ‘Walk On By’. I particularly like the scrubbing on the chorus.

Joni Mitchell, California

• Joni Mitchell’s music is back on Spotify!
• I too have been ‘Sitting in a park in Paris, France / Reading the news and it sure looks bad.’
• I love how her voice floats upwards on ‘Just give you the blues’.

Land of Talk, Compelled

• From the Canadian band’s 2020 album, Indistinct Conversations.
• The layered guitars and synths from 2:21 create a kind of ‘indistinct’ soundscape.

Taylor Swift, The Bolter

• One of my favourites off the Anthology portion of her new album, The Tortured Poets Department. I’ve chosen the clean version, just because I don’t enjoy how the explicit lyrics in the chorus jar against the sentiment of acceptance and renewal.
• Dessner’s country/folk influence is strong here, and perfectly compliments Swift’s vocal writing. I really like the minor turn at the end of the chorus.

Grateful Dead, Deal – Live at Gizah Sound & Light Theater, Cairo, Egypt, Sep. 16, 1978

• I was visiting friends in Cairo, so downloaded this album for the flight. The Grateful Dead were the first band to play at the pyramids!
• ‘Deal’ is my friend’s favourite Dead song at the moment, so it was on repeat during my trip.
• I really like the solo (which is actually in the first half of the song, starting at 1:23)… you can really hear Jerry’s banjo techniques in the arpeggiation. 

by Vadim Goss

‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master’ is the greatest opening line to the greatest villanelle ever written. 

On a first reading, ‘One Art’ begins ostensibly simplistic. How yes, indeed, it is easy to lose door keys and have an ‘hour badly spent’. But that’s ok — ‘their loss is no disaster’. And then, in its heartbreaking final stanza, we understand what the poem is really about. 

When Elizabeth Bishop was 40, she was awarded a fellowship to travel South America; and it was during her travels in Brazil when she met Maria “Lota” Soares, a daughter from a prominent Rio de Janeiro family. Bishop was only supposed to stay for two weeks in Brazil. In the end, she stayed for 15 years. It was during this period Bishop wrote her third and most outwardly joyful volume of published work, Questions of Travel, in 1965. The work is markedly different from her previous collections, North and South and A Cold Spring, with the shedding of her insular, New England upbringing in favour of a more mature, more outward facing poetic. And whilst the theme of place remained (and indeed, would always remain), what it signified underwent significant alteration. That instead of it being somewhere one has been, rather, place became somewhere one arrives. 

As mentioned, there is an immense amount of joy in Questions of Travel. For we get to witness Bishop’s voice grow as if a bird learning to fly — beginning as the outsider in ‘Arriving in Santos’, before developing to that of the full-fledged native in ‘The Riverman’. Such joy is compounded in its context, running parallel with Bishop and Soares’ love story — a journey which too began under foreign skies and found its home through a blissful familiarity, reaching the clouds. For as much as the work is a love letter to Brazil; as much as it is a testament to the importance of travel and the virtues found in new beginnings, more significantly the work is an ode to Soares; to the discovery of love and the long-awaited aggrandisement of Bishop’s own homosexuality. It is an object which unveils how love is transformative across all strata.  

Questions of Travel was Bishop’s most hopeful collection. A work which encapsulated the sheer happiness of a life kept waiting now living. But this happiness, like all happiness eventually one must suppose, was not to last. Yet in this particularity, its ending was that of superlative horror. In September 1967, very shortly after she went with Bishop back to New York, Soares took her own life. Questions, in turn, gained an unwanted context and thus an unwanted new way of reading it — becoming a work that no longer lived in happiness, but could only reminisce. More than that, it felt (and still reads now) as if it is begging to reminisce. 

8 years later, Bishop began writing ‘One Art’. Conversely, one might question why it took her 8 years to address the subject. But as the poem itself answers, grief makes the memory of love as young and as old as yesterday. “Lota”, who had been gone for 8 years, had never left. Perhaps any attempt at elegy had eluded her for 8 years. Or perhaps, for Bishop, it had only been 8 minutes.

Like Dickinson before her, Bishop had a singularly small body of published work (just a little over a hundred poems), making her, too, anomalous compared to other great poets. Indeed, she was an extensive drafter, known to spend months at a time working and reworking a single poem. ‘One Art’ was no different, amounting to 17 drafts in total. The title, for example, went through several iterations, such as ‘How to Lose Things’, ‘The Gift of Losing Things’, ‘The Art of Losing Things’. Another notable revision was the line ‘I shan’t have lied’, originally ‘I am lying’. And so on. These drafts are particularly revealing, not only in relation to her signature, artistic anxiety, but also in demonstrating an equally real human one. 

But how different would ‘One Art’ really be for example, if the title was ‘How to Lose Things’? Or if she wrote ‘I am lying’ instead of ‘I shan’t have lied’? If the former was the title, perhaps it seems Bishop is telegraphing an instruction manual of letting go. If she opted for the latter as the line’s composition, Bishop willingly admits that the poem’s thesis — of how ‘it’s no disaster’ to lose things — is untrue. And yet ‘One Art’ is a product of the struggle between these two anxieties; a constant tremble; an endless grappling between her responsibility as a renowned poet and as a lover who never stopped loving. In this light, ‘How to Lose Things’ suddenly becomes a question Bishop is asking herself, desperately trying to write the answer to rid the pain. ‘I am lying’ becomes Bishop’s own doubt invading an art form which demands a disguise to the writer’s Caliban. Yet I think one has to concede: all these tensions exist in ‘One Art’, whether it’s a draft version attested in her notebook, or the final version.

These tensions define ‘One Art’. They are why it comes across so undecided and elusive. On one hand, we have the poet — the silent communicator whispering to the reader permeable meanings. And on the other, the mourning lover who simply wants to scream and to cry and to convince herself of her own meanings. And whilst this is not unique to the elegy itself — one has to look no further than Tennyson’s In Memoriam and the dedication to his “friend” Arthur Henry Hallam (and we can even go as far back as Milton and the veneration he pays to his “esteemed fellow” Edward King in ‘Lycidas’) — ‘One Art’ is unique because it does not pretend to uphold the elegy’s mythos. There is no attempt to re-write a national consciousness; no lamentations on the state of the English Church. Bishop does not divert her attention to state apparatus. She does not dilute the meaning of the elegy. She stares down at grief undiverted, for they have Lota’s eyes. She demands for them to close, for yet cannot bare the sight of Lota’s light becoming lost forever. For Love is ‘filled with the intent / to be lost’. It should be ‘no disaster’. And yet it will always be. This is the concession that renders heartbreak. 

One would be tempted to think there is no “resolution” in ‘One Art’ of which we expect in the traditional elegy. There is a misconception however, that the elegy is supposed to be some sort of cathartic experiment healing the writer from its pain. No doubt this is the consequence of the form’s male lineage, in which coming to terms with grief and “turning away” from it are the same thing. But grief exacts an emotional struggle seemingly too demanding for the masculine sensibility. No male elegists have ever been able to properly deal with grief (except maybe W. H. Auden) because men must always conquer their emotions. They must have their victory over grief. But in grief there is no chance for victory. We have already lost. Bishop’s female sensibility understands this. The “resolution”, if one can call it that, is simply one of this understanding. Grief will always be a cruel contradiction. ‘One Art’ is therefore the anatomy of grief itself — a psychology of contradiction constantly wanting to preserve, to get back, and to let go. 

‘One Art’ towers over later twentieth-century poetry. What first appears as an ode to the elegiac tradition becomes something more confessional, more fragmented, and more human. It refuses to be lofty, nor does it seek to be universal — “to speak for everyone”. Bishop speaks her own voice. She sings her own song. It’s the reader’s job to listen. And at its heart, what we hear is a declaration, both mournful and proud. ‘I have loved. I still love.’