Arts feature

It’s a crisp afternoon, and in a darkened room in central Amsterdam a woman is being smothered in snakes. Projected on to three walls is a massive video close-up of her face. She is young and beautiful  and remarkably composed: just a nose twitch here, an eyelid flutter there, as a python wriggles across her mouth or languidly caresses her cheekbone with its tail. In the room behind me, another woman stares fiercely back. Her shoulders are bunched with muscle, arms stiff at her sides, like a nightclub brawler about to nut someone. But it’s the bull’s horns sprouting from her forehead, and the mane of matted fur marching down her back, that make it hard to meet her gaze.

Once upon a time in communist Hungary – 1975, in fact – four students at the Liszt Academy decided to form a string quartet. That’s always an interesting choice. For a gifted and ambitious young musician, it takes a special kind of self-knowledge to pool your artistic future with three colleagues. But it’s what followed that makes the Takacs Quartet so fascinating. A relocation from the eastern bloc to the free West, the retirement of all but one of the founding members – and yet 51 years later the Takacs Quartet is still, recognisably, the same group. Some would say that it’s currently the finest string quartet in the world.  But throughout the story, there has been one constant: the group’s cellist, Andras Fejer.

More than 30 contemporary artists have contributed to the Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition, which asks what it’s like to age at a time of unparalleled longevity. But as so often happens at the Wellcome’s exhibitions, it’s the ephemera that draws the eye first.  ‘These 2 men are the same age,’ says a leaflet advertising Kellogg’s All-Bran breakfast cereal. ‘One has driving power – energy – the will to succeed. The other is listless – tired all the time – it is an effort for him to plod through each day’s work.’  The point being that ageing is, to a not inconsiderable degree, something we do to ourselves, and something we do to each other. It is a process, not an event.

By the end of Siegfried, the third opera in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, the king of the gods is in freefall. In the first opera, Das Rheingold, Wotan is a confident protagonist; a world-builder. In Die Walküre, we’ve seen him discover the limits of power, and felt his heart break. Now, in Siegfried, he’s a haunted figure; the solitary Wanderer, searching the world for answers that his all-powerful wisdom can no longer supply. He confronts the young hero Siegfried, and his law-giving spear shatters on the sword of a reckless, clueless boy. ‘All he can say is, “Go, then.

Van’s genius, without Thought or Lecture,Is hugely turn’d to Architecture. Jonathan Swift’s dismissive jest has never been forgotten. It may not be as vituperative as ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’ but it is there ready for duty whenever the skirmish between the principals’ proxies is resumed in all its petty self-importance. It’s England, so social class looms. While Vanbrugh strode with ease among kings and bitchy duchesses, heavily made-up Foppingtons and grand cru horizontales, the resentful Hawksmoor – his collaborator – lurked in the shadows meekly giving great forelock and not receiving the commissions he deserved.

If you lived anywhere near Kilburn half a decade ago, you might have noticed the messages one of our neighbours kept spray-painting over our walls and bridges. They’d appear overnight across a fairly wide swathe of north-west London, always in an immediately recognisable loopy handwriting, and the content was always recognisably loopy too. This person was trying to communicate something, but it was hard to tell exactly what. The messages said things like ‘STAND UP TO BLACK MASSES’ and ‘MERCY FROM DR HACK’ and ‘TAKE MERCY UNTO ME TAKE IT OUT OF IT’. Every few days for about a year, I would come across another one of these messages, and try to piece together exactly what the author was trying to tell me. There was something going on in the world, something bad.

Ann Lee was a sharp-tongued woman from the back streets of 18th–century Manchester, celebrated for put-downs worthy of Coronation Street’s Bet Lynch. But instead of calling time on regulars at the Rovers Return, she announced that it was closing time for the whole of humanity. As a young woman Ann had joined a maverick Protestant sect that became known as the Shakers, or ‘Shaking Quakers’. In fact their shaking was the least of it: they howled, gurned and gibbered while flirting with the notion that God would return to Earth in the form of a woman. All sexual activity, even between man and wife, was forbidden.

The adherents of the American alt-right are not known for their delicate aesthetic sensibilities, but there is an exception. They love neoclassical architecture and are calling for it to be deployed in the 250th celebrations this year of what they still call ‘the country of liberty’. Judging from the desecration of the Oval Office and its surroundings, and the plans for the world’s most expensive dance hall, what they have in mind is a style derived not from ancient Greece and Rome but 1950s Technicolor movies. Donald Trump’s White House interior reminds me of Hogarth’s crisp verdict on French 18th-century rococo interiors: ‘All gilt and beshit.’ Expect more of the same.

In the days of the Belle Époque and Jazz Age, a trip to Paris would have included, for the discerning tourist, a visit to the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame and the Comédie Française, but also to Le Chabanais, the One-Two-Two or Le Sphinx. There would have been no need to give the driver an address: they would have known exactly where to go, for these were Paris’s most luxurious brothels, famous the world over for their beautiful inhabitants, sumptuous interiors, outlandishly themed rooms and specially designed erotic furniture. This year marks the 80th anniversary of the abolition of the French maisons closes system – also known as maisons de tolérance – the network of officially sanctioned whore houses that sprang up in the early 19th century.

A few days after Tom Stoppard’s death last month, Michael Baum, a distinguished surgeon, wrote a letter to the Times. He explained how Stoppard’s discussion of chaos theory in Arcadia had inspired him to discover a new and far more effective chemotherapy to treat breast cancer. ‘Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia,’ wrote Baum. I’ve long been fascinated by the relationship between science and drama. I knew Tom Stoppard and when I was professor of history and philosophy of science at UCL, we had several illuminating conversations about art, science and theatre, which he recalled in a 1994 article entitled ‘Playing with Science’ for the journal Engineering and Science. ‘Science and art are nowadays beyond being like each other.

Some time in the next few weeks, a great ocean liner will be lost at sea. One of the greatest, in fact. When the SS United States made its maiden voyage in July 1952, it was the last word in transatlantic liner design. In an age of ocean-going elegance, the ‘Big U’ was the newest, the sleekest and the swiftest. To this day, it holds the Blue Riband – the all-time record for the fastest transatlantic crossing by a passenger ship. Now, after five decades rusting in dock, and a series of unsuccessful preservation attempts, the United States is about to make its final voyage. Stripped of masts, fittings and its massive red, white and blue funnels, it will be towed out and sunk as a diving reef off the Florida coast. It’s heartbreaking to admit that this might be for the best.

To accompany an exhibition of paintings by Philip Guston at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2004, a performance was arranged of Morton Feldman’s composition written in homage to Guston, for which I was persuaded to page-turn. For Philip Guston runs non-stop for four hours and the thick A3 bundle of manuscript paper balanced precariously on a flimsy music-stand was a matter of concern: what could possibly go wrong? Once the performance ended, I snatched the bundle of £20 notes that I’d been promised, sprinted to the bathroom, then fortified myself with the chunkiest slice of cheesecake I could find in Patisserie Valerie on Old Compton Street. Nothing had gone wrong but, boy, did I need a sugar-kick.

In the ruins of a 16th-century mosque, in the heart of the ancient silk-road city of Bukhara, dozens of abstract figures stand mute and motionless. As the desert sun dips below the horizon, and the shadows thicken, the effect is eerie. Wandering among the statues alone, you feel as though you’ve stumbled upon the aftermath of a forgotten, inscrutable rite. But these aren’t Ozymandian relics. They’re an artwork, ‘Close’, installed last summer by the British sculptor Antony Gormley. His work was one of more than 70 scattered across the Unesco World Heritage city as part of the inaugural Bukhara Biennial, which ran from 5 September to 23 November last year.

The Nativity. In ‘Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance’, Elizabeth Bishop ends her travelogue-poem – St Peter’s, Mexico, Dingle, Marrakesh – by opening the Bible. ‘(The gilt rubs off the edges/ of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)’ She gives us the famous stable, ‘lulled within, a family with pets’. Domesticated, nothing out of the ordinary, yet prefaced by strangeness: ‘the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light,/ an undisturbed, unbreathing flame.’ Undisturbed because it is an illustration and therefore fixed. Undisturbed also because it is the Holy Spirit – steady, unchanging – not spirited, but spiritual. Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill has a school nativity: ‘“I am the Angel Gabriel,” he said in a suffocated voice.

Slavoj Zizek        Hegel thought that, in the movement of history, the world spirit passes from one country to another, from the East to the West. Something similar happened at the beginning of the 21st century: the world spirit passed from cinema, the art of the 20th century, to the TV series.

When Gurdain Ryatt, Ojas Adhiya, Milind Kulkarni and Murad Ali Khan take to the stage at Milton Court this Sunday they will be united by a common language: the tradition of Hindustani Indian classical music, rooted in the north of India. Ryatt and Adhiya’s job will be to keep beats circulating on their pitched, drum-like tablas, while Kulkarni’s harmonium will sustain drones, apparently towards infinity. Khan plays the sarangi, a string instrument famed for its uncanny invocation of the wavering of the human voice. Shankar’s tireless advocacy spawned a crossover culture that he felt too often sullied the very music he loved British audiences have a head start when it comes to appreciating this tradition.

The history of the male ballet dancer is a chequered one. In the early 19th century, he was the star of the show, albeit more as an acrobat and tumbler than fairy-tale prince. The vogue for sylph-like damsels floating in white tulle put paid to that, reducing him to the auxiliary role of porter and attendant. Then came the comet of Nijinsky, introducing a note of mysterious Slavic androgyny that left the male dancer suspiciously homosexual and prone to the ‘pink tights’ cliché. Nureyev and Baryshnikov cemented the exotic Russian connection, until the late 1990s when the allure of the musical Billy Elliot and Matthew Bourne’s version of Swan Lake opened ballet up to a generation of British boys who would otherwise have preferred kicking a football around.

Britain’s heritage is slowly going up in smoke. Medlock Mill was Manchester’s oldest standing textile mill until it burnt down in June. It joins Grade I-listed Woolton Hall – destroyed by a catastrophic fire in August. But it’s not just the buildings that are under threat, but the entire system designed to protect them. Prior to the disaster, the architect Stephen Hodder had proposed gutting the mill and converting it into a 37-storey block of student flats. A coalition of concerned citizens and conservation charities fought for a stay of execution by applying for the mill to be listed. After reviewing new archaeological evidence, Historic England concurred and recommended it for Grade II.

If you lived in the 1760s and were affluent enough – and curious enough – science could be a family affair. The instrument maker Benjamin Martin actually marketed scientific equipment for amateurs, complete with an instruction manual listing simple, edifying experiments for home enjoyment. And so in 1768, in ‘An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump’, Joseph Wright (1734-97) painted a group of family and friends attempting Experiment 42 in Martin’s manual. You’re sure to have seen it: a darkened room with a white bird wilting in a glass bulb while the faces of the participants – a magus-like scientist, a fashionable couple, a frightened little girl burying her face in her dad’s coat – are half-illumined in a pure, almost supernatural light.

The last Yana-speaker in the world died in 1916. When Ishi was born, the Yana were still a small but healthy collection of tribes ranging the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, where they lived off what they could hunt and the salmon they caught in the rivers. But gold had been discovered in California and every year tens of thousands of settlers were arriving to stake out a claim. When Ishi was four years old, there was a massacre of Yana people near what’s now Mill Creek; Ishi’s father was one of the people killed. The last few survivors disappeared into the hills. The white settlers never encountered them again; as far as they knew the Yana had been wiped out.