London museum gets wildlife garden roof

This video is called Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England.

From Wildlife Extra:

V & A Museum to get a wildlife garden roof

The world’s greatest museum of art and design gets a new roof for wildlife

March 2013. Wildlife charity Buglife – The Invertebrate Conservation Trust, are due to start work on a Living Roof project at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in central London this spring.

Thanks to funding from Western Riverside Environment Fund – a partnership between Western Riverside Waste Authority and Groundwork UK, an area of the existing roof will be transformed into a wildflower meadow to provide food and shelter for wildlife including bees, butterflies and moths.

Clare Dinham, Buglife Brownfields Stepping Stones Officer, said “Creating a green space on the roof of a building in central London provides insects with a lifeline of food and shelter. Pollinating insects are in decline due to habitat loss so we hope to use the Living Roof on the high profile V&A as a flagship for other buildings, encouraging more people to get involved”.

In 2012, Buglife with support from the Green Roof Consultancy, produced the UK’s first living roof guidance report including details on why and how to create a living roof for wildlife, after creating a number of Living Roofs across London. The V&A Living Roof will be another vital habitat stepping stone for wildlife in the city.

Range of habitats for insects

The roof will boast a wildflower meadow with nectar and pollen rich plants, areas of bare ground for invertebrates to bask and burrow as well as piles of deadwood for mini-beasts to shelter and feed upon.

The new roof will be monitored by wildlife experts this summer as part of wider research to identify which invertebrates are using the roof. Previous studies on Living Roofs in central London have recorded many species of beetles, flies and bees including the nationally rare Brown-banded carder bee (Bombus humilis).

The Living Roof at the V&A will be designed by The Green Roof Consultancy. Dusty Gedge of Green Roof Consultancy said “We hope that installing a green roof on such an iconic building in central London will raise the profile of these important urban habitats for wildlife. The Living Roof will also include wetland features and we will be recording the species that use these areas, an under-recorded habitat on green roofs.”

…

Steve Hyde, Head of Estates for the V&A said: “The Museum is very excited about this project and it fits well with our on-going sustainability programmes and initiatives”.

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Abraham Lincoln and the British labour movement

By Tom Mackaman in the USA:

The British working class and the American Civil War: 150 years since London’s St. James’ Hall meeting

26 March 2013

On the evening of March 26, 1863—150 years ago today—as many as 3,000 workers packed into St. James’ Hall in London for a meeting backing the Union in the American Civil War and praising the Lincoln administration for the Emancipation Proclamation. The gathering was one of the most outstanding episodes of British working-class opposition to the Confederacy and slavery during the US Civil War (1861-1865)—opposition that emerged in spite of persistent efforts by British ruling circles and Southern operatives to blame the Union and Abraham Lincoln for the serious economic suffering caused by war.

The St. James’ Hall meeting had been called in the name of the London Trades’ Council, for “the purposes of expressing sympathy with the Northern States of America, and in favour of NEGRO EMANCIPATION,” as the bill for the event advertised. While a Quaker mill-owning Member of Parliament, George Bright, chaired,

Very probably, Tom Mackaman made a mistake here. Probably, the chair at the meeting was John Bright, Quaker mill-owner and Liberal MP; not “George Bright.” Also on John Bright and Lincoln: here.

the hall was filled “with the exception of a few guests [by] the members of the working classes,” according to an American diplomat sent to observe, Henry Adams—the remarkable journalist, son of US ambassador to the United Kingdom Charles Francis Adams, great-grandson of John Adams and grandson of John Quincy Adams.

Karl Marx, who followed the American war as a journalist, was present but did not speak. He may have played a significant role in organizing the meeting.

The meeting passed two resolutions and approved a letter to Lincoln. One resolution hailed Lincoln and the Union, declaring that “the cause of labour and liberty is one all over the word,” and further pledged that British workers would fight against the diplomatic recognition of any government “founded on human slavery.” The second condemned the support for the South among British “capitalists and journalists.”

The Letter to Lincoln read, in part:

“Honored Sir: —[O]ur earnest and heartfelt sympathies are with you in the arduous struggle you are maintaining in the cause of human freedom. We indignantly protest against the assertion that the people of England wish for the success of the Southern States… Be assured that, in following out this noble course, our earnest, our active sympathies will be with you, and that, like our brothers in Lancashire, whose distress called forth your generous help in this your own time of difficulty, we would rather perish than band ourselves in unholy alliance with the South and slavery.

“May you and your compatriots be crowned with victory; and may the future see the people of England and their brothers of America marching shoulder to shoulder determinedly forward, the pioneers of human progress, the champions of universal liberty.”

In a letter to Friedrich Engels, Marx noted that workers who rose at the meeting “spoke excellently, with a complete lack of bourgeois rhetoric and without in the least concealing their opposition to the capitalists.” Minutes of the meeting support this. An individual named Odger, a shoemaker, said that workers could not support a government that sought “to keep four millions of their fellow creatures in endless bondage.” Mantz, a compositor, declared that in England not “a hundred workmen could be found to meet together to justify a recognition of the Southern Confederacy, even on the ground of employment for the distressed operatives of Lancashire (Hear, hear.)” Cremer, a joiner, said that the Confederacy had “thrown down the gauntlet to the free labourers of the world.” Heap, an engineer, said that the meetings’ resolutions “would find an echo in the breasts of the working classes throughout the country.”

Charles Francis Adams sent copies of the resolutions and an official report to the State Department, which then forwarded these to northern newspapers. Articles appeared in Northern publications in April 1963, under the headline “VOICE OF WORKING-MEN OF LONDON.” Lincoln, who had written directly in response to a similar meeting held earlier in Manchester, this time responded through Adams that the “Trade Unionists have spoken the voice of the people of Great Britain.” Biographer Carl Sandburg would later note the novelty of Lincoln’s replies to the mass meetings of British labor: “It was not a custom for the ruling heads of nations to address letters to ‘workingmen’ in other countries.”

The role of the British working class in the American Civil War was indeed novel, and powerful, on many levels.

When Confederate leaders determined to pull their states from the Union in the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s inauguration in 1861, and then to precipitate the Civil War by attacking federal installations in the South, they calculated that Britain and France would gravitate toward diplomatic recognition, which very likely would have led to war. The Lincoln administration was fearful of this possibility, and for good reason.

The South’s cotton, produced by slave labor, had fueled Britain’s industrialization—or, conversely, Britain’s industrialization had generated the “Cotton Kingdom” of the South, and with it a dramatic growth and expansion of slavery. In 1860 over 80 percent of Britain’s cotton came from the South of the US; and Britain was the recipient of the lion’s share of all Southern cotton production. Though “white gold” was not the only important American link to the British economy—Britain was also dependent upon grain exports from the antislavery American Northwest—cotton created a powerful economic relationship.

Just as important, the European ruling classes remained deeply hostile to the republican experiment across the Atlantic. With Europe in the grip of reaction following the defeated revolutions of 1848, the US was, in Lincoln’s words, “the last, best hope” for democracy. The British and French ruling circles identified with the Southern elite; their newspapers propagandized against the Union and Lincoln. Britain manufactured warships for the South, granted it belligerent status, and came to the brink of a diplomatic rupture with the North over its naval blockade. For his part, Louis Napoleon used the American Civil War to install a puppet regime in Mexico.

The Southern elite calculated that the Cotton Famine would propel the British toward diplomatic recognition and then war, and presumed that British workers would play a role in this by protesting mass unemployment. Indeed, the South itself imposed an embargo on cotton exports to accelerate this process. Early in the war a Southern leader told the London Times, “We have only to stop shipment of cotton for three months and a revolution will occur in England. Hundreds of thousands of your workers will starve without our cotton, and they will demand you break the blockade.”

The response of the British working class astonished observers. Even in Lancashire, where unemployment approached 50 percent, the working class repeatedly expressed its hatred of slavery and its solidarity with the North, especially after Lincoln’s release of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. As Henry Hotze, a Southern spy working in Britain noted, “The Lancashire operatives [are the only] class which as a class continues actively inimical to us… With them the unreasoning…aversion to our institutions is as firmly rooted as in any part of New England.”

On December 31, 1862, the day before the Proclamation’s implementation, large meetings in support were held in Manchester and London. In 1863 British workers held 56 pro-Union meetings, according to historian Royden Harrison; meanwhile attempts by pro-Southern agents to organize competing meetings “invariably failed,” in the words of historian Philip Foner.

The British ruling class, in its support of the South and in its bitter opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation—which it viewed correctly as an invitation to “servile insurrection”—was at least in part restrained from its proclivities by the working class. Marx put great emphasis on this fact, writing Joseph Weydemeyer in 1864 that the “monster meeting in St. James’ Hall” had “prevented [Prime Minister Lord] Palmerston from declaring war on the United States, as he was on the point of doing.”

The powerful demonstration of working-class solidarity with the Union and the slaves also nourished a spirit of internationalism developing among the most advanced English workers and helping to set the stage for the founding of the First International (or the International Workingmen’s Association—IWA) the following year in London.

Marx, who was elected to the IWA General Council, wrote the organization’s Inaugural Address, which included the statement that it was “the English working class that saved the West of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the perpetuation and propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.”

In late 1864 Marx was tasked by the IWA with drafting a letter congratulating Lincoln on his reelection. Marx wrote:

“The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.”

This was also received by Charles Francis Adams and conveyed to Lincoln. In return, Adams delivered Lincoln’s personal thanks and added that the Union derived “new encouragements to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies.”

Notes:

Foner, Philip Sheldon. British Labor and the American Civil War. Holmes & Meier Pub, 1982.

McPherson, James M., “John Bull’s Virginia Reel,” in Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press, 1988.

Anderson, Kevin B. “Race, Class, and Slavery: The Civil War as a Second American Revolution,” in Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies. University of Chicago Press, 2010.

The International Workingmen’s Association 1864 “Address of the International Working Men’s Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America.”

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George Bellows, US American artist, exhibition

By Tim Tower:

The feverish pulse of the early 20th century: George Bellows, American modernist

22 March 2013

On March 16 a retrospective devoted to the works of American painter George Bellows (1882-1925) opened in London, at the Royal Academy of Art. The exhibition, subtitled “Modern American Life,” previously presented at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, offers a vivid picture of the burgeoning American powerhouse during the first decades of the twentieth century. In itself, that would be enough—but it has more and should not be missed.

George Bellows was born in Columbus, Ohio and attended Ohio State University, working as a commercial artist during his college years. From his arrival on New York in 1904, until an untimely death twenty years later, age 42, Bellows gulped the world. What you will see in the current show are among the most penetrating and resonant images ever created of American life. At the same time, one must admit that these are joined by a few that are superficial and, ultimately, humiliating for an artist of Bellows’ stature. The contrast itself is of interest and well worth considering.

“Stag at Sharkey’s,” 1909

Bellows’ Stag At Sharkey’s (1909), on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art, measures just over twelve square feet. The Metropolitan Museum curators reproduced a detail from the canvas many times its actual size for one wall of the entrance to the New York exhibition. A similar image fills the cover of the catalogue. The fascination with this early work is justified because it seems to capture an essential aspect of contemporary American life in its thirsting, aggressive, violent origins.

The United States had just emerged from war with Spain (1898), having seized Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines in the opening round of imperialist aggression. Domestically, union membership quadrupled from under 500,000 to more than two million, while Bellows was coming of age between 1897 and 1903. The country was witnessing a rise in the class struggle from bloody mine wars in Colorado (1903), to the shirtwaist strike in Manhattan at the end of 1909, the same city and year in which Stag At Sharkey’s was painted.

A “stag” was a boxer who took his chances for a small purse in the back room of a bar at a time when public prizefighting was still illegal. Private clubs like Tom Sharkey’s, located across Broadway from the studio Bellows occupied in 1906, circumvented the statute by accepting membership dues at the door. The artist was fascinated by the spectacle and could paint from memory. He once remarked, “I don’t know anything about boxing. I am just painting two men trying to kill each other.” Theodore Dreiser said of Bellows that intuition was his guide, and Dreiser was on to something.

Bellows’ many skills and talents—mental dexterity, the deft handling of paint and smooth, broad strokes from a fine muscle memory of practiced movements—were well suited to his famous series on boxing. As he did throughout his career, Bellows approached the subject from different angles, producing multiple works in pencil, ink, lithography and paint; and many are on view in the current show. The boxing ring was covered in stretched canvas—and if the self-portrait that appears at the lower right is any indication, the painter was close enough to feel it while envisioning his own piece of a finer weave waiting across the street. He was immersing himself in the raw material of urban life.

His mentor and friend for life, painter-teacher Robert Henri (1865-1929), urged students to get out of the studio and engage the toiling crowds, encouraging painting of live subjects and sketching in oils to bring a finished painting ever closer to the throbbing pulse of the streets. Classmates included Edward Hopper (1882-1967) and Emma Story (1884-1959), his lifelong companion.

A quick study and already master draftsman, Bellows raced ahead of his peers and even his mentor who tended to idealize similar subjects. Time after time, in various mediums, during his early work, Bellows pummeled the tradition of academic formalism with an unflinching portrayal of raw-boned and ragged metropolitan life. The elegant and carefully-studied realism of Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), for example, served as both challenge and inspiration to this prodigious talent at various points in his career. Bellows’ hometown, Columbus, Ohio, was big for the Midwest. But this was New York City.

“42 Kids,” 1908

After the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts withdrew the 1908 Lippincott Prize initially awarded to Bellows’ 42 Kids —a depiction of youth playing and diving from a broken pier into the East River—because the museum feared the sponsor would object to the unclothed children, Bellows quipped it was the “naked painting” the institution was actually afraid of.

The painter strove to expose conditions of life and social relations, and his empathy for his subjects is palpable. Among the first paintings he sold was Kids in 1906, featuring a squatting, giggling, young girl being teased and pulled in fun by friends. The influence of great realists, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Goya and Daumier among them, can already be felt. Dominant grays and browns form a ground for the radiating humor and human warmth.

In the boxing paintings, his palette was composed of tawdry creams and browns with blood red and glaring white mixed in on the canvas. He caught a moment between life and death set in a sadistic mass of cavorting, leering on-lookers; and the achievement finds echoes in mid-century abstract expressionism. Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), for example, used similar brushwork for intimate, psychological conflicts, and Franz Kline (1910-1962) comes to mind in the terrain of Appalachia. Art would never be the same after Bellows.

New York City

Precisely what prompted the young man to drop out of Ohio State and make his way to New York to become a professional artist is hard to pinpoint. He spoke about it briefly. “I arose surrounded by Methodists and Republicans… My mother wished me to be a bishop, my father planned for me to become president of a bank… By sheer luck I found myself in my first art school under Robert Henri, never having heard of him before… I had every equipment except all the essentials. My brains were as innocent as a college could make them. My life begins at this point.”

1903 saw the first automobile traverse the country coast to coast, the first wireless communication between Europe and America and the first sustained flight by a manned aircraft. For the talented Mr. Bellows, who had sold illustrations to local publications in Ohio and planned to play professional baseball, the world was beckoning from beyond the horizon.

Contemporary authors included Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Jack London and the recently deceased Frank Norris, along with “muckrakers” such as Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. The playwright Eugene O’Neill moved into the same block of apartments as Bellows and became his roommate for a brief period. Left-wing journalist John Reed, who would attend the founding of the Communist International in 1919, was another eventual colleague and collaborated with Bellows on a satirical book devoted to the evangelist (and former professional baseball player) Billy Sunday.

“Paddy Flanagan,” 1908

Sketches for Cliff Dwellers (1913), and drawings such as Tin Can Battle and Street Fight (both 1907) are also fully developed works. Bellows toyed with accepted practices, seeking more vital and succulent representations of life. Two major early portraits are typical. One of the sitters, in an otherwise formal setting, has all the marks of having just emerged from fisticuffs. Paddy Flanagan half-grins, defiant, chin up, from a tanned and bruised face. The pale skin of his whole torso is exposed, the shirt having been ripped apart. Nude Girl, Miss Leslie Hall (1909) shows a tired and irritated model. She seems distant from her relaxed predecessor in Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner Sur l’Herbe. The scandal stirred by Manet’s work had faded since 1863. We can almost hear the later sitter, who seems to have been interrupted while getting dressed, sigh, “Mr. Bellows, I’m tired, and I want to go home.”

In her excellent essay in the Bellows exhibition catalog, Carol Troyen comments that the artist’s income began to increase sharply around this time, rising from $600 in 1909 to $1,500 in 1910 as a result of “determined marketing of his paintings at home and abroad.” He was becoming the most successful artist of the time.

In March 1912 he donated a drawing to a fundraiser held by the left-wing Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) to aid children of millworkers engaged in the convulsive textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. That May he marched up Fifth Avenue in a demonstration for women’s rights and in November voted for Eugene Debs, along with a million others, in the largest vote ever received by a socialist candidate for US president.

Armory Show 1913

One hundred years ago this February, New York’s legendary Armory Show exhibited the work of European modernists (Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Cézanne, Duchamp, Dufy, Seurat, Picabia, etc.), many of them for the first time in the US. Writing in the New Yorker, critic Peter Schjeldahl locates a crisis in Bellows’ art resulting from the event. While the exhibition was undoubtedly disturbing to Bellows (both he and Henri resigned from the association that staged it), there were more powerful factors working on the artistic and intellectual milieu. The contradictions of capitalism were exploding to the surface, and world war was rumbling up through the fissures.

Bellows indicated in a January 1914 letter that he was critical of popular trends and searching for a clear artistic direction: “Having got what I can out of the modern movement for fresh, spontaneous, pure, color,” he wrote to Joseph Taylor, his professor and friend from Ohio State. “I am now turning my attention to… the old masters… I have come to the realization that permanence demands more care… That there are great dangers in too much spontaneity, in haste… But the old Masters got different results, and I want to know how they did it… This is the process of Rubens and Titian, Velazquez, Hals and the rest… This seems to be an extremely original attitude nowadays.”

Following the Russian Revolution of February 1917, Max Eastman asked contributors to The Masses —a leading left-wing journal to which Bellows regularly contributed—to sign a petition opposing US entry into the First World War, but the latter refused. “The Masses has no business with a ‘policy,’” Bellows objected misguidedly. “It is not a political newspaper.”

The United States declared war on Germany in April, and the artist proved vulnerable to the chauvinist hysteria that ensued. “I cannot put my finger on my war psychology at all,” he admitted. “I have always felt about art, that it was freedom that counted. A man must see things and say things his own way.”

Confronted with cataclysmic events, even acute intuition and profound sympathy for the oppressed, both of which Bellows possessed, proved inadequate to inoculate him against the drumbeat of war. Within months, the painter was lending his support to the war effort with a large series of paintings, drawings and lithographs depicting alleged German atrocities in Belgium, taken not from life, but on the contrary, from propaganda reports. His prized technique seemed to collapse in these pro-war works, as if vitiated from within by the prejudice and outright lies it sought to express.

Between 1911 and 1924, Bellows made a series of portraits of his wife and two daughters in fine dresses, reproducing various compositions from the classical repertoire. His orientation was shifting inward. Success and the accompanying change in lifestyle took their toll. He focused more on his own immediate impressions and circumstances to the detriment of conditions of life outside of his circle. El Greco’s spiritualism now seemed appropriate for paintings such as Gramercy Park and Tennis Tournament, both from 1920.

Commissioned by the New York Evening Journal to cover the September 1923 fight between heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey and his Argentinean challenger Luis Ángel Firpo, Bellows recorded a moment at the end of the first round when the challenger knocked the champ through the ropes.

“Dempsey and Firpo,” 1924

In Bellows’ Dempsey and Firpo (1924), the crowd, the press corps and, more importantly, the painting, itself, are now all respectable. Spectators, attired in black tie and suit coats, wave and shout and gasp in disbelief. But the blood and dirt and sadistic pleasure had been removed. There is a shadowy hand at Dempsey’s back, alluding to the controversy surrounding his return to the ring, but in large measure, the record had been sanitized. From his early days along the East River, the artist had changed.

In the interim boxing had been legalized—sport celebrity exploited as a diversion from social antagonisms. One has the sense that Bellows felt that he had arrived as well, and his decisions should now contribute to creating a popular icon. Fine brushwork, careful modeling, geometric composition and a complementary palette tend to balance and freeze the figures. Firpo’s composure, in the picture, sculpted muscles, solid stance and even the color of his trunks all contribute to the fiction.

Talent, determination, confidence and an intuitive orientation to the life of the masses carried George Bellows to great heights. He proved unable, in the end, to bring into his art in a fruitful manner great changes in American and global life.

Sadly, Bellows failed to heed the diagnosis of a ruptured appendix and the need for emergency surgery. He died of peritonitis in January 1925. His life and legacy are rich with gifts, as well as irony. The most memorable of both are two guys trying to kill each other.

See also here.

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Polish playwright Anna Wakulik on London stage

This video from Britain is called Anna Wakulik on ‘A Time to Reap’.

By Michal Boncza in Britain:

Reaping reasons

Thursday 21 March 2013

Interview with Anna Wakulik, a young Polish writer making her mark in Britain, about her new play

In the last decade or so Poland has seen an unprecedented emergence of women playwrights and in this country theatres have tentatively begun to use their studio spaces to test audiences’ receptiveness to what they’ve got to say.

It’s an initiative that has been pretty successful and 24-year-old Anna Wakulik is one of the latest crop to make her mark.

She’s in a philosophical mood – if somewhat worn out – following work on the production of Time To Reap for the Jerwood space at London’s Royal Court theatre and separately at Teatr Polski in Poznan, Poland – an impressive achievement.

The play’s raison d’etre is the stranglehold the Catholic church has on lawmaking in Poland, particularly when it comes to abortion. What inspired her to write it is “the hypocrisy permeating the discourse of church luminaries, parliamentarians and backward sectors of society,” Wakulik says.

The play’s narrative is deceptively simple. In a Poland turned upside down after 1989, a thirty-something Warsaw-based gynaecologist Jan (Owen Teale) is making a mint performing illegal abortions for women who can afford it.

He’s separated from his Catholic wife and viciously contemptuous of a state held hostage by a backward church hierarchy.

He periodically visits a small village in the south of the country where his son Piotr (Max Bennett) makes friends with the local postman’s daughter, the religious if inquisitive free spirit Marysia (Sinead Matthews).

Fast forward a few years and Marysia, now 17, unexpectedly appears at Jan’s Warsaw doorstep. She’s pregnant, jobless and homeless.

Jan falls head over heels for Marysia and takes care of all three problems. The feeling is reciprocated but their relationship is tested when Piotr, who now lives in London where he is supposed to be studying law, returns for a brief sojourn. He ends up inviting Marysia, with his father’s blessing, to London for a fortnight break.

But Piotr has abandoned his studies and leads a hedonistic existence in the upper echelons of the moneyed Brits. A fatal attraction develops – Marysia gets pregnant and when both return separately to Warsaw all relationships implode spectacularly.

The trio, Wakulik explains, embody separate perceptions of and responses to Polish reality. Jan cynically exploits women trapped by oppressive anti-abortion legislation, while the errant Piotr drifts aimlessly – at his father’s expense – and hates having to fly in planes full of Polish labourers.

Meanwhile Marysia sees her ambition of becoming an architect thwarted by her class origins and lack of financial means.

Wakulik equips Marysia with a rich range of emotions, a razor-sharp intelligence and an abundance of side-splitting repartees.

Sinead Matthews inhabits the role with engaging veracity and blistering energy. Her final feminist take on Hail Mary, breathtakingly anguished, is terrifying as a desperate admission of defeat. Teale and Bennett are the perfect foils for her and convincingly nuanced as deeply flawed, selfish and ultimately untrustworthy men.

Time To Reap’s impressive staging owes as much to Wakulik’s perceptive writing as the nurturing direction of Caroline Steinbeis and the admirably seamless translation by Catherine Grosvenor.

The London and Poznan runs have sold out and that demonstrates both the need to open spaces for a better understanding of one of the largest group of economic migrants in Britain and the dearth of a serious public debate on women’s control over their reproductive rights in Poland.

Wakulik is particularly disappointed these issues have not been picked up by Polish reviewers in her native country, who for the most part engage in self-censorship to protect their careers.

She admits to being unequivocally on the left but perceives her role more as an instigator of debate than as a political activist.

A big concern is the lack of job opportunities and growing inequality. Yet when she tells me that half her friends and acquaintances have already left Poland there is optimism in her voice as she explains that she’s a great believer in reason and the empowering might of learning.

It’s ironic though that when Wakulik sends off a batch of grant applications to develop her next play a good few will be posted to addresses abroad.

Time To Reap runs at the Royal Court Jerwood, Sloane Square, London SW1 until March 23. Box office: (020) 7565-5000.

Related articles

• A Time To Reap at Royal Court: Abortion and sin in Catholic Poland (metro.co.uk)
• A Time to Reap, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, review (telegraph.co.uk)
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• 19 Polish Miners Rescued After 7-Hour Search (abcnews.go.com)

Medea, opera in London

This video is about the opera Medea, playing in London, England.

By Anna Chen in Britain:

Medea

Coliseum, London WC2

Tuesday 12 March 2013

An ENO version of Medea ignores its subversive possibilities as a vision of imperial plunder and betrayal

It’s curious how many operas feature women who are outcasts in some way.

Carmen, Turandot, Violetta in La Traviata and Cho Cho San in Madam Butterfly transgress social norms and have to be punished for it.

ENO presents the first British production of Marc-Antoine Charpentier‘s 17th-century French baroque opera Medea, which has perhaps the ballsiest tragic outcast heroine of them all, bringing intellect and magical powers to the mix.

The action opens in the sanctuary of Corinth after Medea (mezzo-soprano Susan Connelly), princess of Colchis, has helped Jason (Jeffrey Francis) steal the golden fleece in order to restore him to his rightful place as king of Iolcos. She has betrayed her father, killed her own brother and escaped with Jason, bearing him two sons.

Having thus burnt her bridges spectacularly, she is in turn betrayed by the ambitious Jason who falls for Creusa, daughter of King Creon of Corinth.

Thomas Corneille‘s libretto echoes Euripides’s play of the Jason myth, which painted Medea as an archetypal woman scorned, her white-hot fury destroying not only her love rival but also her own sons in order to punish an errant husband.

Its misogynistic message – that powerful women are a devilish disturbance in the cosmic balance – demands questioning.

Coming from the edge of the ancient Hellenic world in what is now modern Georgia, where Asia and “barbarism” begin, Medea would have been a dark-skinned “other” compared to the fair Corinthians.

Mistrusted for the very powers that fulfil Jason’s ambitions and then, as a shamed, humiliated and displaced queen with nowhere to go, her sons would have been no better than slaves. Was killing them an act of mad revenge or one of mercy when all was lost?

The only hint of the latter is in the line buried in Euripides: “If I hesitate now someone else will murder them more cruelly.” Medea’s dilemma is fascinating and beyond any mere domestic upset.

It is therefore a pity that ENO’s production ignores those dramatic possibilities, sticking to the cliche of wrathful harpy aided by the demons of jealousy and vengeance.

Having timidly distilled conflict into blonde versus brunette, the designers stick Medea in a dowdy knee-length skirt suit with white tights that undermine her transformation into a supernatural force. This is a queen of somewhere very dark, not a bank manager.

Played by awesome house-shaking bass Brindley Sharratt, Creon’s fascist impulses (“We must silence all discontent”) are linked to his depraved incestuous desire for Creusa.

But, although the setting is updated to World War II, by failing to subvert the traditional reading of Medea’s motivations, this production misses the chance to do something exciting and different with a murderous tale of imperialist conquest, theft and betrayal.

Runs until March 16. Box office: (0207) 845-9300.

Related articles

• Medea, Coliseum – review (standard.co.uk)
• Gritty ‘Chorus Line’; Glamorous ‘Medea’ on London Stage – Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
• Medea, ENO, London Coliseum, review (telegraph.co.uk)
• Some thoughts on ENO’s new Medea (butterflyinthelibrary.wordpress.com)
• Medea – review (guardian.co.uk)
• Sarah Connolly and David McVicar interview: fury of an opera scorned (telegraph.co.uk)
• Despite some misfires, Medea at ENO casts a powerful spell (metro.co.uk)
• Medea Movie and Play: A Reflection/Review (thingsaboutstuffetc.wordpress.com)
• Passion and Revenge Medea’s Curse (davidallsopclassics.wordpress.com)

Cranes, cities, poetry, new film

By Emma-Louise Williams in Britain:

Cranes’ global reach

Wednesday 13 February 2013

Director explains why her film on ‘local’ living highlights universal issues of migration and regeneration

When I first saw Michael Rosen‘s play for voices Hackney Streets in 2008 I was so moved by this collage of voices and lives which moved across time and space that I wanted to engage further with it.

So I had the idea of taking Michael’s original piece of writing and making a textured, audio-visual art piece with it – a “film-poem,” as it’s been called.

I started making Under The Cranes – the title is a line from the final poem in the film – at the beginning of 2009 and continued to work on it over a two-year period.

My background is in radio and I had never made a film before, so I just jumped in before I had a chance to scare myself out of the idea.

The film evolved as I worked on it with a tiny team, recording voices, researching the archivex, shooting on super-8 and 16mm film, finding music, editing and recording and creating the sound track.

Under The Cranes premiered in April 2011 at the East End Film Festival in Dalston. With this new run of screenings, I am delighted that we continue to find new audiences for a not-for-profit film like Under The Cranes. This is largely a testament to the power of its engaged, poetic writing.

One of the film’s main themes is the question of “regeneration.” This has become a global phenomenon and yet, as an idea and a fact on the ground, it can only be interrogated locally.

Under The Cranes is indeed “local” but what it looks at is happening or has happened in places like Paris, Detroit and Berlin.

The pattern is nearly always the same. There is an area of dilapidated, derelict property in the inner city which comes to be squatted or there are local people trying to use it for shops, cafes or workshops.

The city authorities get hold of it, sell it off to a developer who moves the local people out and “regenerates” the area by putting up blocks and bringing in the multinationals to sell coffee.

The other local-global theme that the film explores is migration, showing some of the struggles – fighting racists, if necessary – that people go through to secure a place for themselves but also how migration brings diversity and the seeds of renewal.

Again, this can only be interrogated meaningfully at a local level though of course it’s a worldwide phenomenon which any audience can relate to their own experience and family background.

In the film I have tried to approach the subject in an artistic way, defamiliarising what we’re asked to look at and inviting the audience to see the places and spaces they live and work in, in a new way. At the very least it invites them to ask questions about how these places are appropriated, owned, used and changed.

I’ve tried to contrast the lives lived by real people across generations with the way in which developers try to get in and make money out of the built environment “in the moment.”

For me, Under The Cranes is an expression of feeling about place and home and the beauty to be found in an urban site, which is why you see in the film the work of three painters who depict the urban landscape – Leon Kossoff, Jock McFadyen and James MacKinnon – just as I have tried to do with the camera.

Under The Cranes is being screened at the Bishopsgate Institute, 230 Bishopsgate, London EC2 at 7pm tonight, March 6 at Stratford East Picturehouse, May 9 at Rich Mix, Bethnal Green and May 12 at the Brighton Festival.

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Anarchist bookshop arson, by nazis?

This video from Britain says about itself:

London’s oldest anarchist bookshop and publisher Freedom Press was firebombed early on Friday Febuary 1 2013. Andy speaks about how the shop will bounce back shortly after the incident. The shop was previously targeted by Combat 18 in an arson attack in 1993.

By Alexander Pouget in England:

Freedom from the flames

Sunday 10 February 2013

Angel Alley, a dark, smelly offshoot from London’s Whitechapel High Street overhung by a gaudy KFC sign, is the sort of place people pass by without noticing during the day and avoid at night.

The little cut-through to a small industrial area in the heart of Tower Hamlets is a favourite haunt of tour guides looking for a spot where they can chill their audience – a place where Jack The Ripper once stalked and anarchists still plot the destruction of capitalist society in their tottering, blackened fortress of Freedom Press.

Freedom itself is a clapped-out four-storey pile preserved, in the main, as a corner of east London eccentricity that most locals are only vaguely aware of but which is central to organised anarchism in the city.

The bookshop on the ground floor keeps bills paid while the rest of the building is opened as offices to groups such as the Advisory Service For Squatters, Corporate Watch and the Solidarity Federation or for talks, meetings and exhibitions on a huge variety of topics. Intentionally independent of other tendencies in the anarchist milieu, it provides a near-unique resource for libertarian socialist thinkers and activists.

On Friday February 1, someone tried to burn Freedom down.

Lifting up a shutter, they broke a window and poured a flammable liquid through before setting it on fire.

Although there were no injuries, more than 200 books were totally destroyed and hundreds more may have to be thrown out if their charred covers and ash-stained sides can’t find buyers.

Electrics were melted, the ceiling wrecked, the windows all but destroyed, shelving went up in smoke and firefighters arrived only minutes before the offices above would have caught fire, all but guaranteeing the destruction of the rest of the building. The Press archive, kept so historians could have an easily accessible resource, was singed and soaked and barely survived.

Freedom, which had run out of insurance only a week before, has been left with a bill that could potentially run into the tens of thousands of pounds.

Theories abound as to who did it, with many blaming the far-right – the Press was attacked twice in the 1990s by grumpy skinheads – but with police taking away CCTV recordings and saying little since then supporters can do little more than speculate.

The real story isn’t the fire or the culprits, however, it’s the response.

The news broke on social networks at around midday. Within hours hundreds of people had pushed the news on and the phones of Freedom collective members began to ring off the hook.

A callout for help was quickly prepared which also went viral and mainstream press sources began to pick up on the story, ensuring it would go well beyond anarchist circles.

The next day, Angel Alley filled with more people than it had ever seen before from across the left of the political spectrum. So many we could barely fit, hauling the books out, cleaning them, cleaning shelves, washing walls, sorting what could be saved, painting and getting in each others’ way.

Then, each day afterwards, more people came to keep the work going. Collective members who knew what needed doing gave volunteers a steer and left everyone to organise themselves.

On Monday the bookshop reopened in a limited sort of way. By the following Friday it was repainted and the books had all been cleaned and sorted. And now a collection of skilled volunteers are going over what needs to be done to make the bookshop better than it was before.

Online, hundreds of solidarity messages came through from all over the world, alongside promises of donations, fundraising events and other gestures of support, including a book of poetry which has had over 350 submissions at the time of writing and two separate music albums from Scribbo and Iron Column Records.

As a result of this astounding spirit of mutual aid the Press has now got the fighting chance that bewildered collective members had feared would be denied them as they stared at the burnt ruins of decades of hard work.

While the bookshop is not out of the woods yet and will need more donations to get back to business as usual, what has happened so far is a triumph.

To donate, you can send a cheque made out to “Freedom Press” to 84b Whitchapel High Street, London E1 7QX, or you can go online to freedompress.org.uk and buy books, followed by emailing shop@freedompress.org.uk to let them know it’s a donation.

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• Freedom Anarchist Bookshop in the UK firebombed (indybay.org)
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French painter Manet London exhibition

By Christine Lindey in Britain:

Manet: Portraying Life

Royal Academy, London W1

Saturday 09 February 2013

Edouard Manet‘s portraits defied convention by conveying the essence of his subjects through the act of painting itself,

The invention of photography in 1839 had a momentous impact on art, not least on portraiture.

Previously most portraits had depicted the ruling class but now the petit bourgeois and professional classes had likenesses of themselves. But this partial democratisation gave renewed social status to painted portraits and as the bourgeoisie gained in size and power so grew the demand.

By the early 1860s when Edouard Manet (1832-1883) reached artistic maturity, most artists saw portrait painting as a tedious but necessary means of survival as they aspired to the elevated heights of history painting.

So why did Manet, a man of independent means, bother to paint portraits? And why should we pay £15 to look at his depictions of people with most of whom we have no connection or knowledge? Because his portraits transgress their subject’s identity and many are not purely portraits anyway.

Manet answered the poet-critic Charles Baudelaire‘s call for artists to distill permanent and heroic beauty from the evanescent spectacle of contemporary urban life. A republican and a realist, Manet was impatient with the hypocrisies of the Second Empire. Challenging its aesthetic and social expectations by which philosophical and moral ideas were communicated through biblical, historical or mythological narratives, Manet painted non-narrative representations of the everyday on a grand scale.

His passion was for people. Making the most of his privileged gender and wealth, he strolled through the boulevards, parks and cafes of Haussmann’s Paris observing details of dress, gesture and comportment in the fast-changing city’s public places where social classes intermingled.

Painting directly from models or friends and family posed in the studio, he recreated his vivid impressions of modernity.

Manet often portrayed people to characterise social “types,” whether commissioned or not, and entertainers and their clients in the leisured classes feature large. The Street Singer depicts a life-size, itinerant busker emerging from a bar clutching her guitar while The Artist: Marcelin Desboutin shows the subject in scruffy clothes. His bushy beard and long hair protruding from a battered hat typifies a bohemian.

The Amazon typifies Madame Saguez, a shop keeper’s daughter, as an elegant horse woman, the newly fashionable bourgeois pastime in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne.

Only occasionally did Manet use the traditional portrait convention of identifying a sitter’s social role through attributes – the writer Emile Zola is pictured at a book-laden desk and the painter Eva Gonzalez at her easel, palette in hand.

Manet understood that conveying modernity was as much a matter of form as of subject. Realising that speed characterised modern times he echoed this by working quickly and spontaneously to retain the freshness of his initial responses.

Leaving hands or parts of the background seemingly unfinished imply previous and potentially imminent mobility of hands, bodies and facial expressions.

When most artists vied with photography to reproduce detailed illusions of their subjects Manet welcomed the medium as a liberator from such laboured, glass-like finish. He replaced the academician’s modulated half tones, glazes and repressed brush marks with stark tonal contrasts and broad, visible brushstrokes, while unmodulated areas of colour and visible outlines stressed the flatness of the canvas.

To contemporaries such audacious lack of finish signified professional incompetence. Exposing the materials and processes of his craft was a revolutionary act which asserted that the “how” of painting was as important as the “what” in conveying meaning.

Manet’s paintings impart his pleasure in manipulating wet paint to convey the physiognomy and character of his sitters.

Observing his subject intensely, he then outlined the curve of a cheek, the pleats of a dress, the swirl of a hat with swift and accurately judged sweeps of the paint-laden brush.

With similar boldness he made sharp transitions of tone. In his portrait of the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, the velvety black of hat, eye and necktie contrast with the pale creaminess of nose and cheek

The exhibition would have worked better as a smaller and more rigorously defined one in the Royal Academy’s upstairs galleries. Its main spaces are padded out by closing two rooms, filling another with reference material and, oddly, giving the medium-sized Music In The Tuileries Gardens a room to itself despite its being a crowd scene rather than a portrait.

Some of the captions give distracting and overly detailed information about the portraits’ sitters but they also provide interesting explanations about patronage and the social significance of dress and settings.

If working now Manet would depict people wearing jeans, hoodies and trainers in coffee shops and shopping malls. Extracting beauty from the commonplace, Manet’s paintings express and transgress his own times.

This is a chance to see originals gathered from all over the world by a giant of Modernism whose works are so supremely visual that no printed or digital reproduction can do them justice. Go if you can.

Runs until April 14. Box office: (020) 7300 8000.

See also here.

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Animal photography competition

From Wildlife Extra:

ZSL Animal Photography Prize 2013

£10,000 prizes for ZSL photo competition

February 2013. The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) has launched the ZSL Animal Photography Prize 2013, a competition and prize fund set up to discover the world’s most amazing animal photography.

Returning after a great debut in 2012 which saw entries from all around the world, the competition is back with a fantastic line up of judges including ZSL Honorary Conservation Fellow and television presenter Kate Humble, environmentalist David Bellamy, and Dr Joseph Zammit-Lucia, one of the world’s leading animal portrait photographers.

£10,000 prize fund

Astounded by the calibre of the entries last year, including the captivating shot of an infant gorilla behind the camera, the judges are expecting another influx of breath-taking images in 2013. With a £10,000 prize fund and the chance for the images to go on display in a stunning exhibition at ZSL London Zoo in September, the competition aims to inspire amateur and professional photographers of all ages to get out and capture the magic of the animal kingdom.

ZSL Director General Ralph Armond said: “We were blown away by the quality of the images submitted for the ZSL Animal Photography Prize 2012 and cannot wait to see this year’s entries. Our lives revolve around animals at ZSL and we know just how captivating they are – every day we see visitors to our Zoos absolutely enthralled by them.

“But animals around the world are facing increasing threats to their existence and as an international conservation charity we know that raising their profile is vital to their survival. This competition gives us the chance to inspire people to help us protect amazing species around the world, and share our passion for wildlife.”

7 categories

The 2013 competition features seven categories in which to submit photographs, including Last Chance to See?, the Weird and Wonderful and The Birds and the Bees.

Visit www.zsl.org/photo-prize for more information or to enter images into the competition.

Art against nazis, homophobia and austerity

This video says about itself:

Feb 11, 2011

Audio visuals and behind the scenes of Gomez de Villaboa photo shoots in Milk and Lead gallery with the stunning pieces of art of Iris Schieferstein, all video and editing by Pablo Taran de Regil whose work is invaluable.

By Emmanouil Balomenos:

Resisting the hatred fuelled by austerity

Tuesday 29 January 2013

Throughout Europe people are battling with the policies of austerity and the resulting unemployment, rising poverty and political instability.

In countries such as Spain and Greece, where the unemployment rate has risen to 26.6 per cent and 26 per cent respectively, people feel that government-imposed austerity is unbearable, condemning their countries to years of painful cuts and job losses.

Social suffering, insecurity and turmoil have given rise to fascism and xenophobia in countries hit by austerity policies and recession.

The Greek situation is particularly dramatic. Far-right party Golden Dawn, which until recently has been marginal, has surged in popularity. In last June’s parliamentary elections it gained a 6.92 per cent share of the national vote.

It also came third in several opinion polls, after the conservative New Democracy and pro-EU left-wing party Syriza.

LGBTQ communities in countries such as Greece are facing an alarming rise in the number of violent homophobic attacks and hate crimes, which are strongly related to the rise and empowerment of far-right parties.

It is not only the LGBTQ community that is affected – attacks on ethnic minorities are also increasing.

And police corruption and brutality is another face of the rise of fascism.

The Greek government recently used riot police to raid worker occupations in Athens in an effort to restore “law and order.”

Polls indicate that approximately half the Greek police force supports the Golden Dawn.

Recession, austerity policies, unemployment and oppression have made the situation insufferable for many young people in Europe, some of whom decide to relocate to other countries such as Britain. Many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people are among those who flee.

LGBTQ people Britain need to be aware that what Greece is experiencing today, they may face tomorrow. The long queues for food in cities such as Barcelona are now a reality here in Britain too as poverty rises.

So to mark February as LGBT History Month, Unite London & Eastern LGBT committee and Sertuc LGBT network are holding an exhibition of new work by the Spanish photographer Francisco Gomez De Villaboa.

The exhibition is a celebration of the contribution that young LGBTQ people, from countries hit hard by austerity policies – Greece, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Ireland and Portugal – have made to the queer scene in London and the south-east.

It consists of portrait photographs of some of them, such as the Cypriot London-based artist Hermes Pittakos and longstanding Irish activist Joseph Healey, currently a leading light in Queers Against the Cuts.

Francisco himself is part of the LGBTQ scene, his art being part of such landmarks as the Joiners Arms and Antagony night club, along with recording works by queer performance artists.

The exhibition aims to raise awareness of the contribution these people made to the LGBTQ scene and also to be a sign of solidarity to our LGBTQ sisters and brothers in those countries.

Furthermore, we aim to draw inspiration and urgency to our own resistance to the austerity policies of the Tories, which are wreaking havoc on our communities, and impacting on the LGBTQ scene here in London.

Emmanouil Balomenos is an LGBTQ activist from Greece.

The photographs by Francisco Gomez De Villaboa, curated by David Sharkey (Unite London & Eastern Region LGBT committee), will be on display at Unite House, 128 Theobald’s Rd, London WC1, from 6.30pm on February 4, with a presentation by Rachel Newton of the Greece Solidarity Campaign.

During the 80s, transgender Greek artist and prostitute Paola Revenioti published the trans-anarchist fanzine Kraximo. Funded by her own prostitution, the zine pioneered the fight for gay and trans rights, combining interviews with Greek poets and intellectuals alongside Athens street hustlers and her own photography, since compared to the work of Larry Clark and Walter Pfeiffer. Today she continues to work as an artist and activist, making Athens-based documentaries with her “Paola Projects”. This interview is taken from the May issue of Dazed & Confused: here.

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