Category: Culture

By Jack Fry

On my final evening in New York, I surfaced from Broadway subway station into the sticky humidity of a summer night in the city and walked the 200 or so yards to Clockwork bar, the archetype of an American dive bar. Having just swerved around a recurring character from “BRAT Summer,” Addison Rae, on the street, wearing a sparkly pink vest and flip-flops and sipping from a straw, I entered and ordered a Budweiser and a well shot of tequila. The bar was unassuming and poorly lit with walls painted black and graffiti scrawled across any and every surface and the speakers blasted the kind of music that you might find on an “indie sleaze” Spotify playlist. My plans for the night consisted of catching a set from two buzzy NYC artists who would most likely feature on said playlist; The Dare at a bar round the corner and Been Stellar at their album release show over in Brooklyn. Two artists who, if you are fan of Lena Dunham’s Girls, could very well have played at the Bushwick party in the episode ‘the crackcident’. After drinks, I joined a group of NYU students who I’d shared a cigarette with to head to Home Sweet Home where The Dare has accrued a cult following for his DJ sets that he of course calls “freakquencies”. 

The Dare, aka Harrison Patrick Smith, is a DJ and producer who emerged post-pandemic out of a supposed downtown scene that centred around so-called “Dimes Square” in Chinatown. You most likely recognise him from the Charli xcx and Billie Eilish remix of ‘Guess’. He has cultivated an image that is both striking and immediately recognisable: a uniform of a skinny Celine suit, sharp mod cut and dark wayfarers all worn with a careless affectation a la Bret Easton Ellis. The character created by The Dare is a nihilistic, horny, self obsessed, drug taking 20 something who lives to party – a kind of modern-day Dionysus. The music and his persona are as brazenly sex obsessed as Tom Ford-era Gucci (G shaped pubic hair and all). He is obsessed with both who he desires (everyone) and being desired. Consequently, much of the lyrical content could have been drawn from Superbad film dialogue. He has resuscitated polarising sonic influences from the electroclash era and injected a smuttiness. Thus his music was bound to be marmite and this is as he intends. He recently stated to the New York Times: “I just like music that rubs people one way or the other”.

The Dare’s music draws unquestionable inspiration from New York’s music of the noughties. His music is a pastiche of bands and projects such as The Rapture, Fischerspooner and LCD SoundSystem, mixing electronic dance music with indie rock and sing shout vocals. On his new album What’s wrong with New York? The Dare brings together his host of influences to make an evocative party record that is both intoxicating and jarring. Whilst electroclash is often cited as a reference point, I’m reminded of the dance and pop music that emerged in the early 2010s. His music, lyrically, is a parody of a lot of recession era pop. Think Ke$ha – when pop music was wholly concerned with “tonight” and the charged mythical promise that it held. The obsession with hedonism in pop music, while not new, was perhaps exacerbated post-financial crash as a form of escapism for Millennials. For Gen Z, the popularity of The Dare’s club-centred music and its inane lyrical content may stem from a similarly cynical mindset. For a generation that has grown up amid the existential threats of climate change and a global pandemic, the attraction to a narcissistic and fatalist debauchery seems apt.

The Dare’s remarkable production ability and DIY attitude have created a characteristic sound where synths resemble computer game samples, beats feel like those of preprogrammed keyboard tracks and his basses sound as if they are buzzing through a blown out speaker. On Perfume the chorus in both cadence and crudeness is reminiscent of ‘I’m too sexy’ by Right Said Fred and LMFAO’s 2010 hit ‘I’m sexy and I know it’. ‘You’re Invited’ invokes the funk warped cyber vocals of Chromeo and the hook in the bridge sounds uncannily like the Duck Sauce hit, ‘Barbara Streisand’. ‘All night’s’ production calls to mind ‘love in stereo’ a track from another indie sleaze icon Sky Ferreira. However, it’s not just electroclash and recession pop he’s drawing from; he is also combining the brash beats of on trend pc pop with the twinkly synths of the eighties.

His set at Freakquencies was filled with a large chunk of people who were probably using fake IDs to get in. The dance floor, although small, was packed with sweaty people jostling under the shattered glare of a disco ball and on the tables of the neighbouring booths. Despite the optics, it all felt rather affected or tame – almost like an attempt at recapturing the reckless abandon of previous generations, a parody of itself. There was a poise that British crowds tend to lack. Maybe it was too early on in the night but everyone seemed, like The Dare, aware and careful of how they appeared. It was almost like they expected to end up on Cobra Snake’s website the next day, caught wide eyed in the white flash, a Cory Kennedy look alike. I left after an hour but not because his set was lacklustre. Criminally, the bar didn’t have a smoking area and they refused re-entry if you stepped outside for a smoke. Much like the man we’d come to see, the scene is a projection, yet evidently it emits a rather seductive light. As I wandered to the subway I passed nearly two blocks worth of people still queuing to get in.

As I waited for the train, rats ran across the tracks strewn with detritus: a Mexican coke bottle, a watermelon vape, a shredded gig poster. I took the J train, rattling across the Williamsburg bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn, peeking at the skyline through the iron lattice. I walked under the screeching tracks until I reached Baby’s All Right where the pink glow of its neon sign illuminated the gathering crowd outside. I had arrived at the release gig for Scream from New York, the debut album by Been Stellar—a quintet from NYU and the latest group to attempt a rock revival in New York. Having already played storied venues like the Mercury Lounge and been on the cover of the NME, this attempt seems to be genuinely promising. 

Been Stellar clearly draws from the same time period as The Dare although they’re reaching into a different bag of sonic influences. Their rock harks back to both the garage era of the Strokes, incorporating shoegaze-y walls of noise, while the production of certain tracks is reminiscent of the post punk of Fontaine’s DC and their debut album Dogrel. Their music, coincidentally produced by the Irish band’s frequent collaborator, Dan Carey, has a fuzzy and gravelly texture that recreates the inescapable white noise of city traffic and construction. This dissonant wash of sound, coupled with a gnawing delivery by slocum in his at times Lou Reed like nasal drawl, gives the music an evocative sense of place. Every so often, however, the distinctiveness between tracks is lost in the slowed tempo guitar noise which drowns out the lyrics and melodies. 

Much like the bands who emerged in post 9/11 New York, Been Stellar have evolved out of their own generational defining crisis and in their songs they vividly portray images of mid and post pandemic in the city. On the titular track with a sound that is reaching for the anthemic, they attempt to tackle a subject beyond Manhattan itself seeking to capture a national mood. Frontman, Sam Slocum sings “It’s the end of the world and I feel fine” embodying a generation, who have become so accustomed to crisis they’ve grown apathetic to it “the people didn’t make a sound”. And so whilst he sings “I just don’t have the words they don’t make words for this” the music begins to take over for them. The guitars ring out like sirens, nervy and unavoidable, as if, through sheer force of vibration they could, at the very least, make you physically feel something. Crack the glass and break through the numbness and malaise.

Whilst The Dare is disinterested and that’s part of his charm, Been Stellar plays with a fervour and earnestness that lurks behind the former’s bravado. Amongst statements as expansive as the title track are moments that divulge a longing for intimacy. The band writes of the miscommunications and confusion that can characterise youthful romance across the album on tracks such as ‘Takedown’, ‘Pumpkin’ and album highlight ‘Sweet’. On ‘Sweet’, a song reminiscent of ‘The Rat’ by The Walkmen in its urgency of feeling (not a comparison that I make lightly), they also demonstrate a knack for an emotionally potent couplet: “It won’t always be this way, I know the tide.” 

Both Been Stellar and The Dare namecheck New York in their album titles and they are also both making music with an inherent identity drawing from the city’s artists that have come before. For a band who titled their EP Manhattan Youth and had a song on it called ‘Kids 1995’ after the cult classic harmony Corine film, it’s clear that Been Stellar is set on capturing the spirit of New York for a generation obsessed with the past. By invoking these influences, they are blatantly wishing to become a part of the city’s musical canon. On ‘Manhattan youth’, an early single, Slocum sings of his peer group who are “certain of something stuck in the new” nostalgically longing for a bygone era. Perhaps Gen Z’s retrospection is borne out of our complete access to past culture in the age of the internet or maybe we have sought out the era of our childhood as a balm for the prospect of the present and the uncertain future. However, the trouble with indie sleaze or attempts to recreate it by Gen Z is that it never existed in the first place, it is a manifestation of a dream world, a self mythologised (see ‘Meet Me in the Bathroom’) golden age of a scene that was arguably created in retrospect. 
Furthermore, can good taste and a sum of influences become something equal to or greater than those things being referenced, a true original? As The Dare writes on his album closer, with a winking self awareness, “sometimes I steal what others wrote”. However, despite these objections and as derivative as some of the sonic and the lyrical themes for both acts are, they are also tapping into a timelessness. Every youthful cohort has felt like this in their 20s, directionless, lonely and seeking connection or meaning in the night or a new experience. It’s almost classic. Slocum wails on the album closer “I have the answer just for a little while”. The yearning in his voice embodies the elusive coming of age clarity that we are all in pursuit of. New York has perennially been the place to be in search of this answer; it is an endless well of romanticisation and inspiration. Who can blame a few more twenty-something year-olds (myself included), however naively, for following in this tradition? To reference Hannah Horvath of Girls, Been Stellar and The Dare may not be the voices of a generation but they may well be a voice of a generation.

Cinematic realism in the ‘70s

By Prithvijeet Sinha

For those who have seen 2022’s emotionally wrenching To Leslie, toplined by Andrea Riseborough’s tour de force performance that dares to show the price of an unfulfilled life, the imminent sense of connection with the material owes its debts to the ’70s. With its unobtrusive narrative, resonant treatment of small-town America, and needle drops like Dolly Parton’s Here I Am, there is an obvious harkening to the omnibus of John Cassavetes and Robert Altman. But the credit is due to the film’s director Michael Morris and writer Ryan Binaco for not just imitating the style of naturalistic filmmaking from an era where auteurism delved into the lives of women with rare empathy and psychological unravelling. Rather, it’s their own achievements that make discerning viewers like me cite one of the most prolific periods/decades of filmmaking. As I replay the film in my mind, Andrea’s very visage is so much like Shelley Duvall’s in vintage Altman oeuvre.

Even something as recent as Azazel Jacobs’ His Three Daughters (2024) exercises the same tone where the focus on the claustrophobia of spaces and frayed emotions is reminiscent of the filmmaking ethos that continues to remind this cinephile of its enduring influence when it comes to disseminating realism and truthful characterisations.

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The 1970s, as the advent of the real and true, is an extensive archive where filmmaking reached new heights of authenticity in terms of subject matter and execution in storytelling, extricated from the necessarily diegetic use of music and melodrama, bringing welcome relief to the internalised shades of human endeavours. 

What is particularly empowering to realise is that within the oeuvre of tentpole releases, character development was illustrated by long takes devoted to conversations between key people in the narrative, such as in Jaws (1975), Alien (1979) and even The Exorcist (1973).  Can one possibly forget the dining-room conversation between Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gary and Richard Dreyfuss where an interpersonal camaraderie exists to offset the mood of danger that is organically fleshed out by director Steven Spielberg? It’s a long take where smiles and affability, with Lorraine and Dreyfuss’ wit and Scheider’s laconic, reserved charm, stand in contrast to the individual instances in the screenplay where a grieving mother slaps the sheriff (Scheider) for his lack of action – it resounds far more because of the use of pithy words telegraphing her helpless emotional state. Or when Dreyfuss and Scheider are with the formidable shark-catcher Robert Shaw on a boat and their individual stands seamlessly address the pertinence of the issue at hand. There’s no foreboding situational musical cue or acting tick to overdramatise the proceedings. This slow-burning technique is particularly creepy and issues the vulnerability of the cast-members aboard USS Nostromo in Alien. Ridley Scott and his team let sound-effects and the gadgetry of the cavernous spaceship build up levels of tension without resorting to cheap gimmickry or jump scares.

Equally vulnerable are the moments in The Exorcist where a phone call from an absent father, a mother-daughter pair’s intrinsic bonding while the little girl is being put to sleep, or the extended opening sequence where Max Von Sydow’s archaeologist stationed in the Far East finds the heat, atmosphere and the inkling of evil with the discovery of ancient figurines and a sense of alienation, score the brutal underpinning of something invisible that upends normal lives. All three of them hence are not only beneficiaries of the quieter side of filmmaking that helps to divine the fearful in effective ways but ensures that the humanity of their particular domiciles and concerns wrought a moral centre. It is not just about the pursuit against insurmountable odds. It is about the confidence gained by interacting with each other through believable dialogues and colloquialisms of the everyday.

An ubiquitous feature as Carrie (1976) too finds its prom scene and especially the titular protagonist’s savage humiliation soundtracked by an overhead bucket’s movement and then the slow-motion unravelling coinciding with a hall full of laughter. The beeping sound of Carrie’s telekinesis and her mother’s cry of “they’re all gonna laugh at you” repetitively ringing in her head maps her psychological condition in that mortifying moment morphing to terror and mayhem in the annals of cinema.

This freedom of realism made the era’s compact body of work attach itself to the likes of Martin Ritt’s Sounder (1972), Hal Ashby’s The Landlord (1970) and Michael Cimino’s Thunderbolt &  Lightfoot (1974) for instance. Three works that are distinct in their respective tonal registers and personal concerns but are able to balance the dramatic and comic elements with finesse precisely because they are not reliant on grand gestures or musical cues to heighten the situation. In their brevity of shots and lucid cinematographic output, they make the interpersonal bonds build authentic tales of the inner fight against racism in the South, a modern interracial community in Harlem, New York and an unusual “bromance” spread out over wide open American country roads respectively. In Sounder especially, the Depression era set story literally finds the humidity, the call of crickets, nondescript Southern homes, and barren patches dictating the characters’ journey. Also pertinent here are the voices of these African-American folks who pine, sing, stay silent and verbally recede when negotiating with racist authorities while talking and behaving in ways true to their socio-economic stations. This leads to the classic scene where Cicely Tyson runs towards Paul Winfield as he makes his way home after a year in prison. It’s the heat, the excited bark of the titular dog and Tyson’s impassioned call of her on-screen partner’s name that packs an emotional wallop for the ages. The sweltering atmosphere and the sounds of the surroundings serve as the soundtrack to this reunion. It’s this same unobtrusive benchmark that makes Tyson’s historic Emmy winning turn in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974) one of episodic gravitas and emotional resonance.  Be it in the lakeside scene where a young black man’s speech becomes a source of discomfort for white eavesdroppers or the final stretch where a century old woman walks all the way to a water fountain to mark her evolution in the Civil Rights epoch. It’s just the mouth organ and the facial terrain of resolve that punctuate this outstanding passage in cinematic history sans dialogues or narrative preliminaries.

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Taking stock of non-diegetic use of music, Leonard Cohen’s lilting,  acoustic soundtrack is a haunting presence in Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), with its meditative and realistic approach to the frontier using mostly the guitar to strip the Western genre of its grand-standing, epic vision. Take the final scene itself where the acoustic bulwark lends a poignancy to McCabe’s death in freezing snow and Mrs. Miller is physically frozen in an interior space, smoking, their individual tragedies written down in the final anonymity of their stations. Arthur Penn’s The Missouri Breaks (1976) similarly delves into the frontier by casting the legendary likes of Marlon Brando, Harry Dean Stanton and Jack Nicholson. The real triumph here is in letting the action subsist on anticipation and dramatic understatement. Slow burn is the mode of operation in these instances.

This intimacy of interaction between two lonely young females in Three Women (1977) by Altman also designs scenes around both their individual and collective experiences. The atonal soundtrack in some crucial junctures cracks at the deeper tides of this relationship; though it never lets us forget that the lines between social alienation and taking over someone’s personal orbit can become blurred.

This was, after all, the era where boundaries of folk, rock, blues, country, and standard Americana were being readjusted, reframed for posterity, and adapted into malleable forms to inform the soft palettes of Joni Mitchell (her iconic album Blue), James Taylor (on songs like “You’ve Got A Friend”, “Fire and Rain”, “You Can Close Your Eyes”, “Carolina on My Mind”, and “Handy Man”), Roberta Flack (“Killing Me Softly”, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”), Linda Ronstadt (“Heart Like A Wheel”, “Lose Again”, “Blue Bayou”, “Desperado”), The Eagles (“Hotel California”, “Tequila Sunrise”, “Lyin’ Eyes”), and The Carpenters.

Which is why an exemplary documentary feat like Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1978), a tribute to The Band’s swan-song and assortment of the biggest folk-rock artists of the time, feels so timeless in retrospect. It is about being of the moment, bringing one’s unobtrusive camera lens and love for music to a venue and preserving it for future discernment. Today, the film’s legendary status hasn’t dated one bit nor has the pioneering musical imprints of the artists in their ’70s heyday.

If music is the key then Lady Sings the Blues (1972) paints a raw, unerring portrait of the biographical picture where the soft, almost unbearably vulnerable notes of Billie Holiday’s oeuvre are given new life by megastar Diana Ross. The most affecting moments of Billie’s life are defined by music such as when she listens to Bessie Smith on the radio but nothing wipes out the circumstances of her life as an assault by a drunken man or her descent to working in a fallen place as a cleaner. Music is her key and the performances retain their emotive power here. However, the quiet coil and recoil of her trauma, dependency on drugs and mental breakdowns are all traced with the weight of a beleaguered personal history. There’s no music in these scenes, just the raw reflection of hardscrabble truths. This silence is suffocating and primal even as she’s in jail or in the hospital, battling lifelong demons.

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As we shift our gazes towards the era’s films and their relationship with action and reaction, titles like The French Connection, Invasion of The Body Snatchers, Straw Dogs and of course Taxi Driver come into our view for how they treat debased corners of  human existence. The iconic car chase in The French Connection (1971) is all about the dogged pursuit of anti-social elements by Gene Hackman’s Popeye but it’s the automobile’s movements through New York City, its skidding tyres and mass of humanity in its way that finds parallels with slimy, dirty abandoned buildings and the subway. The ignominy of violence arising out of locational xenophobia and sexism bursts forth with silent backgrounds and immediacy of action in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), mirroring the final showdown in a fallen hotel in Taxi Driver (1976), the corporeality of it all reflected in the body-horror dynamics of Invasion of The Body Snatchers (1978).  The violence is unerring and the reactions spontaneous because the mid-century axis is relentlessly moving towards a brutal reckoning with the lawlessness of the world in each instance.

A more underrated counterpoint to the supposed action dynamics of a cop saga is found in Sidney Lumet’s The Offence (1973). Sir Sean Connery’s verbal and mental states inform much of the film’s sense of dread. In it, a bulb in an interrogation room, or a countryside’s dark recesses invoke the loss of humanity that gets into the head of a police officer. The silence boils and tears apart all his defences when faced with a manipulative antagonist.

From Eraserhead‘s (1977) similar invocation of industrial surroundings and ominous sound effects to A Very Natural Thing‘s (1974) subdued investment in the lives of men in love with other men in ’70s New York to the realistic stakes of a divorce in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) down to Iranian classic Chess of the Wind‘s (1976) impressionistic probe into human corruption of the mind, this era mined the subconscious and psychology to blur lines within genres and styles, giving us a body of work that has stood the test of time.

From the melodrama, strings-laden excesses and mostly inert studio sets of the previous decades, the 1970s came out of the woodwork of established norms to settle for unflinching realism. Gone was the necessity of happy endings or cliches. What was begotten was the grammar for not intruding upon individual lives with appendages of sentiment alone, but approaching crises and moral dilemmas with a touch of deeper understanding about the whys and whats of fraying social lines.

Hence I close this article with one of the most definitive images of the era that stands out for me. In Hal Ashby’s seminal Coming Home (1978), the journey of two individuals injured within a California military unit concludes with Tim Buckley’s beautiful ballad “Once I Was”. A montage sequence, the movements of these bodies towards liberation from constrictive ideals and personal freedom is not final but constructs their present as one of individual victory. That is how I see this whole period of cinematic canon as marking the advent of the real and true.

Image credit: online.stereosound.co.jp

By Lydia Firth

The Turner Prize is considered the most prestigious art award in Britain. In 2023, the winner was Jesse Darling, with an exhibition involving a series of erratically distorted modern objects including crowd control barriers and barbed wire. The apocalyptic scene is both disturbing and humorous; it’s almost unclear whether the humour lies in the cartoonish contortions of the objects which make them look strangely animated, or in the simplistic, haphazard, (dare I say shoddy) nature of the art – which was awarded the biggest honour in the British art world. The Turner Prize is notoriously divisive, with traditionalists scorning entries like Darling’s, reflecting on what they perceive to be the decline of art, disdaining the fact that Romantic painter JMW Turner’s name is associated with contemporary ‘nonsense’.

For many, this exhibition would prompt the reductive phrase uttered in many a modern art gallery, “I could do that”. There are several responses to this: the camp that would reply, “yeah but you didn’t” (and then slightly risk validating any art or any artist by default), and the camp that would claim “you just don’t get it”. Perhaps the latter is the case for the uninformed viewer of Darling’s work, as by reading more about his winning exhibition, I began to appreciate it a bit more. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it required much skill to assemble tattered bunting and old office files, but reading about Darling’s intentions and beliefs helped to somewhat enlighten his detritus. The arranged objects evoke themes of nationality, identity, austerity and immigration. On further examination, the objects are manipulated precisely and cleverly: the barriers are drunkenly tilted, union jack flags sag mournfully, crutches lean against the wall on standby. The Guardian’s Adrian Searle deemed it ‘a theatre of last things’. I think Darling somewhat captures the zeitgeist, which I suppose is easy, and worrying, when it can be represented by a series of broken things.

For me, it’s a fine line between defending this type of art from those who would immediately dismiss Darling’s work as clumsy and deny any validity to its political and social sentiment, but also having the integrity to question whether it is good. Of course, whether art is good or not is mainly down to the viewer, or in the Turner Prize’s case, a jury who commended Darling’s evocation of “a familiar yet delirious world invoking societal breakdown”. Conceptualising ‘good’ art raises the point that our definition of what art should do, or be, has shifted: we can surely assume the impressionists would look upon this room of fragmented debris and be utterly repulsed. Our conception of what can be defined as art has widened – now, art does not exist solely as an object of absolute aesthetic beauty, but it can also be inherently unaesthetic, political commentary, akin to Darling’s. Through championing the latter, we must not let the former slip away, or be dismissed for frivolity. What is visual art if not somewhat superficial?

Where I find most difficulty with Darling’s exhibition, and then with much of conceptual art, is that it fails to stand alone without any supplementary literature. I fear this has become a chronic issue in contemporary art. The point of visual art is that it is visual; we shouldn’t need to read to understand what the artist is trying to do, because then it is only excelling with the help of literature. It’s an all-too-familiar feeling for me, walking into an exhibition open-minded and yet still desperately looking for something to read that will enlighten the artwork. Art should stand alone without a literary crutch, and it should provoke the viewer (whether emotionally, intellectually, viscerally), not just mystify them. 

I am undecided on Darling’s landscape of broken and discarded things. I would defend it from reactionary traditionalists, highlighting the warped barriers that allude to painfully current themes such as the right to protest and political boundaries. I would also refrain from calling it excellent art. Whether this speaks to its failure, or perhaps its success, I’ll leave up to you.

Image credit: The Art Newspaper

By Lizzy Holden

An eerie ring, the steady thumping of a heart and the stutter of gunfire marks the opening of Ellen Kuras’ new biopic LEE. For a moment the fractured sounds of battle suspend us in time, the audience set at a distance from the chaos as we focus in on a figure seeking cover from the explosions; a camera clasped between white knuckled hands. 

The owner of this camera is Lee Miller.

Model, surrealist, muse, photographer, WWII correspondent, and culinary genius, Miller was a woman who walked between lifetimes and refashioned herself repeatedly to become perhaps one of the most complicated figures of the twentieth century. Her life was a tapestry of variety right up until her passing in 1977, and yet, many of her accomplishments went unrecognised until after her death. 

Born in 1907, Miller’s childhood was characterised by difficulty. She was expelled from multiple schools; suffered sexual abuse from a family friend; and was photographed nude by her father, an amateur artist. While this exposure to photography through her father would teach her the technical minutia of the art form, there is no doubt these experiences stuck with Miller. Indeed, she is now famous for saying that she “would rather take a photo than be one.”

Despite this, on the 1927 cover of British Vogue, the reader is held prisoner by the eyes of an illustrated Miller. Dashes of light summon the viewer to New York, where the emerging glass landscape of the urban world promises opportunities for wealth, social grandeur, and the latest fashions. Clad in a vibrant blue cloche and adorned in pearls, Miller stands at the centre as the incarnation of modernity and 20’s femininity. While literally crafted by another’s hands, Miller’s modelling experiences would aid her as she took up the artist’s brush and reflected for herself on the world and womens’ position within it.

WWII was the morbid catalyst for this artistic reflection, taking the surrealist tendencies of her earlier work and transposing them into striking photos exploring life on the home front. For while the threads of conflict had been weaving themselves for years leading up to 1939, it wasn’t until war was officially declared that the full tapestry of disruption came into view. As such, the bodily and spatial displacement associated with surrealism through composition and juxtaposition was the perfect vehicle for Miller to capture the events unfolding. Her work acts as a journal where fact and emotion seamlessly run alongside each other. 

This record was particularly related to the activities of women. Whether as farmers, secretaries, ATS officers or nurses, women were the vital cogs turning the war effort. Miller placed the lives of ordinary people at the centre of her work as she photographed candid moments in their lives, the artificiality of a set lost as the women instead posed as they pleased or not at all. For women, so often the fantasised muses of art, the importance of having photos taken of them in this way cannot be understated. Miller treats them not as passive objects but as voices of interest whose lives deserve to be remembered. 

Cast in the watery light of morning, the piece, US Army Nurse’s Billet, is a prime example of this. Ghostlike, laundry and a nurse’s jacket hang next to each other, waiting for their lost owner to return. In the days following my viewing, I found myself returning, in awe of the fragile intimacy of this stolen moment. The soft lines of the fabric alongside the rigidity of the windows and the darkness of the curtains perfectly speak to the contrast of the domestic and the industrial for women. Indeed, the underwear becomes symbolic of the private world, while the jacket is the external cover for the public. Found in the space between is the imprint of this unknown woman, her dual existence immortalised.

This depiction of seemingly unremarkable objects or settings that carry greater symbolism is a common thread across Miller’s work. Take the geometric lines of a harshly clean bathroom ushering the viewer into what is now Miller’s most notorious piece. Serenity relaxes the lines of Miller’s face as she watches over her discarded clothes, the photo every bit the mundane relaxation of a bath. Yet in the shadows of the room, the photo of a single figure shifts the entire meaning of the piece. 

This is Hitler’s bathroom. 

In it, Miller washes off the dirt of Dachau. Her boots carry ghosts into the room, who rub their mired, broken feet into his bath mat. 

Taken on the day of Hitler’s death, this remains a controversial photo, yet its significance cannot be denied. Especially alongside a photo of Sherman, the Jewish collaborator of Miller who also used the bath, Hitler’s shower head raised above his anguished face. 

Yet, despite her dedication to capturing the truth, and the trauma she suffered to do so, much of Miller’s work went unpublished. Her record of the concentration camps; of the destruction of Europe; of the lives broken…all of it went untold. 

This censorship is discussed beautifully by Kuras when Miller (Kate Winslet) storms into Vogue’s offices and starts destroying the negatives she tirelessly sent over. In this heartbreaking scene, we see Miller on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Winslet’s performance is flawless as she hyperventilates: “Who cares? Nobody saw them. You didn’t print them.” She holds up the image of a girl photographed in Dachau, pleadingly asking “Raped and beaten, how does she move on?”

This question is posed to Audrey Withers (editor of Vogue played by Andrea Riseborough), yet the piercing stare of the little girl challenges the audience: how do victims of war move on if their suffering goes unrecognised?

For the governments at the time, Miller’s photos were too disturbing for a population who had already suffered through the Blitz and the loss of too many families. Their decision to omit the full scope of Nazi occupation, not only denies the public access to truth but also prevents the processing of trauma for victims.

The duty of the bystander to conflict is a complex one; yet war in the Ukraine and Middle East places us in a position where we must rise to it. Our world is a tragic melody of brokenness and the life of Miller, and the biopic that recounts it, challenges us to recognise, in brutal clarity, the reality of global politics. 

Her experiences in the war made and unmade Miller. Her work from the period – totalling over 2000 photos, contact sheets and negatives – is nothing short of miraculous in its beautiful artistry and unspeakable poignance. 

There is more to her life than I would ever be able to do justice to in this one article. Her experiences in war – while significant – are only one aspect of a woman whose life included travelling around Egypt; a battle with addiction; studying with Man Ray; befriending Picasso; and mothering a child. She is an inspiration, and one I have only grown fonder of even as I squabble with her complicated biography in writing this piece. For the kaleidoscope of Miller is truly never ending, one layer leading to the reveal of another, until all that is left is awe. 

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.