Spring Time for Hitler and Germany
It is grey, so grey. It is the morning of the Artists Talking talk, I have a sore throat. It may be an artist croaking. Also as part a long tradition of public appearance mishaps I have developed a huge cankerous scab above my eyebrow. It is a cage fighting wound and while the Over Forties Academics Cage Fighting Association of Ipswich (OFACFAI) is not exactly in the premiere league, injuries do happen. My OFACFAI name is The Shrew, I am bitter to the core, and when I remove my glasses and squint across the ring I am sure if I could see that I would see fear in my opponent’s eyes (though due to thumb weakness my gouge is not what it used to be). But this morning I am bruised more emotionally than physically.
Yesterday I performed a little art sociallising in Ipswich. Not always the easiest thing to do but yesterday Eastern Pavilions had come to town. First there was a talk by painters in a show O Painters! My Painters! curated by Kaavous Clayton.
It was evident that Romanticism was alive and well in the world of painting with much talk of struggle and machismo a gogo. I am biased but I was pleased when Annabel challenged a few of these ideas. Later we went to an opening of another Pavilions event in the new studios being set up in the old ‘O’ block of Suffolk New College (now UCS). I used to teach there and remember fondly being spat upon by the catering students on the balcony above. There was some interesting work tucked discretely around the edges and a table tennis table in the centre where I worked on rehabilitation my own machismo with a fellow redundant Andrew Vass (he won with superior spin). There later still I heard second hand that a member of staff at Firstsite had be offended by my presentation of Operation Pusscat. It was, he felt, anti-semitic. I am assuming that the areas he felt most uneasy with were, the gassing of a section of the population and my Pearl Art Prize logo (pictured below).
I am not going to say much about this as I have no claims that my choice of imagery was particularly deep or clever, I also felt that the whole project was sufficiently self-undermining to make the point that it was not made to slaughter a down trodden group but instead to highlight a number of issues relating to funding and success in the UK art scene. I am also not going to claim some sort of immunity due to Jewish ancestry. I remember a revelation when I was about 12. I was listening to an interview with David Byrne and he was explaining how he had assumed “a voice” (my quotes) to write Psycho Killer. These weren’t his own feelings, it wasn’t him speaking. “Wow”, I thought, “that’s clever”, the idea that he was able to voice a point of view other than his own was amazing to me (I was about 12).
The other issue is whether it can ever be right to evoke horrible events in our history in art or humour (sly Adorno quote noted). Should such events only be treated in one way (seriousness and dread) should there be an omerta?
I saw, last night while in a depression that Himmler’s postcards to his mother had gone on sale. I wonder what he wrote while killing 6 million people.
