The arrest of Dora

I’ve narrowly missed the anniversary of the legislation to allow (some) women to vote, but here’s a wonderful photo of the arrest in 1909 of Dora Marsden, women’s rights campaigner and individualist anarchist, for disrupting the chancellor’s speech at Manchester University, of which she was a graduate, hence her academic robes. A few months later she had a go at Winston Churchill. This extraordinary image is lifted from the flickr photostream of Greater Manchester Police, no less – but who was the photographer? Looking at this photograph, its perspectives so marvellously constructed around the focal point of Marsden’s serene and confident gaze, you can’t help but feel a profound admiration for her.

There are women bystanders in the background, but none of their faces are visible. Dora Marsden’s entourage is all male – a fine assortment of bemusement, amusement, embarrassment, condescension and stern disapproval. Someone really ought to make a poster out of this photo.

Marsden is a thoroughly interesting person, who broke away from the Pankhursts’ WSPU to form the Women’s Freedom League, becoming editor of The Freewoman, The New Freewoman and The Egoist, and in the process promoting and publishing the work of Pound, Joyce, Lewis, Eliot, HD and many other literary modernists. Her Stirnerite individualism later gave way to a personal form of syncretic religious belief. In 1935, sad to say, she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Dumfries, where she died in 1960.

Interestingly, according to the flickr blurb, members of her Women’s Freedom League later supplied the first of the Women’s Police Volunteers, an organisation that included many former suffragettes who had seen the insides of police and prison cells. I don’t suppose Dora was among them.

Snaps of mortality

Here’s a few odd things that turned up around corners on our recent trip up North. Even if I have a camera with me when I’m away, in the event I too often end up using my phone, though at times it gives a sort of pleasing phone-y quality, especially in black and white. (Click for slides and click lower right of the slide for full size.)

1: Wystan in Derbyshire

Who stands, the crux left of the watershed,
On the wet road between the chafing grass
Below him sees dismantled washing-floors,
Snatches of tramline running to the wood,
An industry already comatose,
Yet sparsely living. A ramshackle engine
at Cashwell raises water …

The boy W H Auden’s fascination with industrial dereliction was stimulated partly by, among other things, a holiday in Derbyshire, and the landscape of the lead mining areas contributes to the decaying backdrop of some of his earlier work. Here, by the side of the Cromford canal, are one or two abandoned buildings and the Leawood pumphouse.

 

2: Barbara in Sheffield

Spotted in the womens’ wear at John Lewis’s in Sheffield: Hepworth’s Writings and Conversations roped in as a signifier of  “Modern Rarity”, the flower arrangements in the cover image cunningly extended into the display. As prices of Hepworths continue to spiral beyond all sanity, Barbara herself, in trademark beret and stripey top, is now employed by Lewis’s as a “national treasure”, at least of a northern sort, it being not too far from Wakefield here.

 

3: Damien and Lucian

And on to Chatsworth, the simply too, too large residence of the Devonshires, for the eyeball-bashing “House Style” fashion and costume exhibition, knowingly curated as a stately spectacle of shameless excess. Dramatically subdued lighting made it difficult in places actually to see much of the clothes or to work out what it was that one was unable to see, not that the elbowing crowds of tablet snappers seemed too bothered. In one vast room, housing an elevated, candle-lit, Fellinian parade of sepulchral wedding dresses, I felt a little sorry for the Damien Hirst at the far end, on loan from Sotheby’s but now unable to hold its own against the invading weight of all the other kitsch. (An oversized gilded Saint Bartholomew, holding aloft his flayed skin, this is nicked from Vesalius, as all Hirst’s ideas are nicked.)

It was a relief to struggle out of the sumptuous vampiric gloom to find myself in a small, overlooked, sunlit corner hung with half a dozen Freuds, various Devonshires having trooped off to have themselves done by family friend Lucian in the ‘sixties. After all the spotlit satins, baubles and feathers, what a welcome dose of honesty! The upper classes as they are, beneath the costumes – saggy, vexed, irritable, bored, anonymous. Just people, in fact. The baby has a worrying quality of elderliness, as if Freud had seen in his or her features the sufferings of the adult to come. Now there’s a lesson in mortality that Hirst, a successful dealer in attractive surfaces, just can’t match.

 

4: Poor Keith

Another passed-over piece of corridor holds a sampling from the archive of Jorge Lewinski artist photos purchased by Chatsworth. Among the familiar faces I noticed the less familiar one of Keith Vaughan, photographed by Lewinski in 1963. Set against the company of his life sized young men, all hard edged, vigorous and assured, he himself seems ill at ease, poorly defined, subdued, resentful, as if the stick and the stool are there to give him something to do with his hands and feet. Or perhaps as if instructed, a bit too cleverly, to mimic the pose of the central figure, generating an unhappy irony. It’s too easy, of course, knowing of his suicide in 1977, to read suffering into any image of Vaughan, but looking at this, while admiring the painter one can’t help feeling for the man.

Invasion of the car park people

When I was a kid, I always fancied becoming the person who put the squodgy white and yellow lines along the road with that great little machine on wheels. In that line of work the high moment of creative release must be to invent the little people who turn up on walkways in the best car parks.  (This would have been the ideal job for L S Lowry.) Though today’s regulation stencilled people are a bit of a cop-out, there are still wonderful freehand examples to be discovered. Here’s a quick collage of a few I’ve snapped recently. Don’t tell me I need to get out more often. I visit plenty of car parks.

Crass taste dummies

Recent diversions into selfies-with-display-dummies have prompted a recollection that in my youth a kind of idealised realism was the norm, and dummies all had faces. Is that strictly true? Maybe, judging by these murky – and now rather spooky – scans from colour slides of shop windows that I snapped in Leeds in 1971. It were grimmer up North in them days, and there were more realism too. [As always, click to enlarge.]

So is it an increased art school awareness of Giorgio de Chirico’s  blanked metaphysical mannequins and wig stands that has decided more recent dummy designers to wipe off the faces, in an instance of life following art? I notice that in John Lewis (where dummies are consistently faceless) the display people have certainly taken note of de Chirico’s advice as cited in my earlier post, placing some of their dummies, plinthless, directly on the floor, and sitting others on chair-like structures. Though as the figures are all seven feet tall, they’re still not really at human level. Incidentally, I’ve also noticed that a couple of de Chirico mannequin images employ a cropped composition that rather imitates the selfie –

It really does make a difference to the emotion (as de Chirico puts it) when the heads are faceless. Oddly, it makes the figures more alive – less like memorials to the dead and more like living automata in arrested motion. The examples here are from a day’s traipsing round the sales in Solihull. I have to say, you get a better class of dummy in Solihull.

If this doesn’t appeal, here are some other ideas for creating playful situations in large shops:

• Hand drier spotting. Once you start looking, you’ll discover a surprising variety of makes and models. It really is a whole new world.  But remember to take a note book and pen with you into the toilets.
• Escalator riding. Start in the basement, up to the top floor and down again. This can be timed if you like. Most rewarding with a grandchild of carriable size, maybe eighteen months.
• Man-seat challenge. (Sorry, I know they’re unisex, that’s just my term.) Aim to sample as many public seats in the store as you can, changing room antechambers included, but cafés excepted of course. This may test your patience, as some obstinate folks like to sit there all afternoon.
• Pushchair go-karting. Grandchildren love this, especially the fast bit down the final straight aisle, but it is to be avoided at busy times. Large department stores offer the best circuits.
• Shop-putting. Also known as shop-dropping, being the opposite of shop-lifting. Though inserting small items on shelves will require sleight of hand if the store security are not to be provoked. Use something small and unobjectionable – postcards, slips of paper with a message or a picture, religious tracts etc.
• Hide and seek. Probably my favourite, but it does require a grandchild as an accomplice, ideally able to count to twenty but still small enough to hide between garments on racks; three years old is about right.

All legal, all field tested.

Me and my new friends

At Christmas I became (at last) a smartphone user. So today I was able to divert myself photographically during an elongated shopping trip around the margins of Wolverhampton. The results are unedited. (Click for enlarged slides.)

Though this certainly beats some other shopping diversions (e.g. hand drier spotting), it’s trickier than you might think, given that shops tend, unreasonably, to elevate their dummies on plinths as if they were statues.

“To discover newer and more mysterious aspects we must have access to new combinations. For example: a statue in a room, whether it be alone or in the company of living people, could give us a new emotion if it were made in such a way that its feet rested on the floor and not on a base. The same impression could be produced by a statue sitting in a real armchair or leaning against a real window.” (Giorgio de Chirico, “Statues, Furniture and Generals”, 1918.)

And taking selfies from a low angle turns out to give a most most unfair impression of jowliness. I was unsure whether to go for deadpan or not, but in the event deadpan proved surprisingly difficult. I note a developing urge to mimic the body language of my silent companions.

Hatted and piped: photographing The Enemy

“I hope you will forgive me for speaking plainly,” wrote artist and author Wyndham Lewis to an unnamed London photographer in 1949, declining to buy the publicity shots he had commissioned. “Several are unspeakable … One or two are what might be described as photographic insults. Needless to say, I can make no commercial use of them … Of course I am sure you produced these photos with the best of highbrow intentions. But there it is. I have not exaggerated the displeasing impression, and in some cases the horror induced … P.S. Probably you ought to have a bigger camera.”

It seems that getting your press photos done (essential for the artist or writer in the public eye) was not always trouble-free. In the past, Lewis had successfully used George Charles Beresford, noted society photographer and a mate of fellow painters Augustus John and William Orpen. In 1913 Beresford snapped Lewis as moody bohemian, fag dangling from lower lip; in 1917 he did him proud cutting a dash in uniform. And in 1929 he captured Lewis in his current Enemy persona, arsing about with a big hat, a pipe and a plaster pillar.

Big hats, of course, were a standard signifier of artisticness in this era, though the pipe was Lewis’s touch. His Tyro figures of the early ‘twenties all have hats, as do many of his self-portraits; the pipe appears in his last drawing of himself, from 1938, and had an outing in the newsreel of the T S Eliot Royal Academy scandal of that year. In the “Enemy Interlude” in Lewis’s fiercely rambling poem sequence One Way Song (1933), the Enemy persona is noted as “cloaked, masked, booted, and with gauntlets of astrakan,” but also in a “large black steeple-hat,” completing the association with cartoon anarchists and banditti.

I’ve noticed a few images from this shoot, but like best the full length studied-casual-with-faraway-gaze-and-column shot (left). Somehow it encapsulates modern but classical, ironic but serious, visionary but engaged. A cropped head and shoulders variant appeared in number 3 (1929) of Lewis’s one man review, The Enemy, captioned “A recent photograph of the Enemy, Mr. Wyndham Lewis,” while a similar image, minus column, was used in his Blasting and Bombardiering (1937). It’s a version of the former, ex some newspaper photo library, that turned up on eBay recently, finding its way to me for the price of a coffee (below, right).

But look closely: what I actually have is a photo of that photo. To “improve” Lewis’s riskily diagonal posture, the original print has been tilted and re-photographed, the re-photographer’s bench being clearly visible in the triangular gaps created at each corner. This, then, is a new photograph of a cropped print of an original photograph. (To push things a bit more in a John Berger direction, what you’re seeing here is a digital image of an upload of my scan of that photo of a print of a photo; the reader of the time would have viewed a grainy screened reproduction of it on newsprint.)

Now a final irony. For much of his career Lewis was plagued by frequent confusions between himself and his namesake, the humourist D B Wyndham Lewis, “Beachcomber” of the Daily Express and then Daily Mail columnist. At one point Lewis even claimed that Lord Rothermere of the Mail had “invented” DB to plague him, in revenge for a dinner party quarrel. On the reverse of my photo is a faint agency stamp and a picture editor’s typed label:

In the News.
D. WYNDHAM LEWIS.,
The wellknown author.
MAR 1940

The “wellknown” identity is confirmed in ink. I’ve no idea what DB was up to in 1940 to be “in the news,” but at the time our own P Wyndham Lewis, now eleven years older than his photo, was having a very grim time in a dreary mock-Tudor hotel in Toronto (a transatlantic wartime experience later mirrored in his harrowing novel Self Condemned ). A silver lining, perhaps, that he was thereby denied the opportunity to catch his own carefully constructed brand subjected to “photographic insult” in whichever English paper it was that carried this misidentified image.

All of which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to do a piece here claiming Lewis and One Way Song as an early progenitor of hip hop. Yes, from The Enemy to Public Enemy … One day before too long, perhaps.

Welcome to Darlo

I’ve pretty much neglected this blog lately, and in particular have failed to report, as I fully intended, on the welcome show of the wonderful Gerald Wilde at the October Gallery, finishing tomorrow. Apologies.

To begin again, a word of praise instead for the extraordinary show of photos by Janet Mendelsohn, just opened at the Ikon in Birmingham, taken in Balsall Heath in the late and grim ‘sixties. Disturbing, affectionate but quite unsentimental, and oddly contemporary in some respects. And in black and white, as they have to be.

My childhood and youth were one long wait for both films in colour at the pictures, for colour snapshots, for colour tellies, for the Sunday colour supplement, and for the startling introduction of colour into men’s clothing circa 1967 as permitted by the passage of the psychedelic experience into mainstream design. Before these, in a real sense, we all saw the world in black and white because all our visual points of reference were all in black and white. But psychedelics are a flat, colouring book business, and after these our awareness of everyday tonality was hugely reduced.

About ten years ago I took a dozen shots on a walk around Darlaston, just down the road in the Black (and white) Country, but could never think what to do with them. After seeing the Mendelsohn photos, it dawned on me that mine too deserved to be in black and white, so – thanks to the greyscale option – here they are. (Click for slide show / enlargements.) They’re not the sharpest images, but I think the change suits them. The Darlaston they portray appears depopulated, showing only sad traces of human activity. But you have to admire (while condemning his homophobia) the chutzpah of the graffiti writer who couldn’t spell “bastard”.

Smooth just got smooth

(Photographed recently in Wolverhampton)

“Soon, collage will be performed without scissors, razor blades, paste etc … Leaving behind the tables and portfolios of artists, it will take its place on the walls of cities, an infinite field for the production of poetry. Never before has the popular saying which suggests that poets can ‘eat bricks’ [or ‘live on thin air’ – Trans.] acquired the concrete meaning which knowledge of poetry’s lithophagous power can bring. No longer is it possible to believe that the one and only goal of the awful, solitary, sanctimonious and interchangeable poster artists is to exalt the virtues of this or that commercial product … With or without the consent of these people, the posters that have fallen asleep on their feet will awaken and poetry will devour the walls.”

Léo Malet, 1942, quoted in Ralph Rumney, The Consul

Chav Meeting Point

“Leccie box” outside the school where I work. Stunningly beautiful … (Click for bigger version.)

Northern decollage

From a black and white print made from a lost colour slide, Leeds, 1971