A Tale of Two Museums

I get it. I really do. The renaissance is sexy. The Baroque is sexy, if you like Caravaggio. Modern art is clearly sexy. Medieval art, however, has taken vows of chastity and is hiding in the corner. Probably self-flagellating.

This seems to be the message of how people see the medieval world. Shame I love it, then. Shame also that I work with medieval art on a daily basis. Silly me.

Matters are made worse by the fact that I don’t just like medieval art. I tend to be into decorative art and design, rather than painting or architecture. Most people can be persuaded to get excited about a building. Far fewer get excited about embroidery. Still, them’s the breaks. I can accept this.

No, what really winds me up (sometimes) is the way in which museums can unconsciously reinforce this message. Two trips I made recently to Milan and Berlin summed up what medieval art too often is, but might be.

Milan’s a wonderful, messy, bustling city. And sitting like a spider at the heart of it is the massive Castello Sforzesco, an enormous castle that’s utilised by the city as a series of museum spaces for many of its art treasures. The obvious one being Michelangelo’s final work, the Rondanini Pietà. The ground floor sculpture galleries – which include some pretty impressive medieval works, by the way – are impressive, and must have been done about fifteen years ago. A couple of floors up, the visitor then walks through a new gallery on the history of Milan. Then there follow a whole series of (to my eye) dull paintings galleries. The route continues into another part of the building, at every stage giving the world-weary visitor the chance to jump off the ride, give up and leave, having seen what presumably, they most wanted to see.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But the persevering visitor can continue up onto the battlements. This is wonderfully Italian – little signage, no particular nods to the gods of Health and Safety, and a route up to what promises to be a complete waste of time and energy. However, emerging breathless into the upper reaches of the castle, I was met by a whole other suite of galleries. These took me through ceramics, musical instruments, and finally, into the gallery housing the metalwork and medieval ivory carvings. The galleries had become pokier and pokier, and I don’t imagine that these spaces have been given a facelift in fifty years. Not that I’m complaining – I understand how hard it can be to get funding, and besides, museums have to prioritise. But I spent forty minutes to an hour wandering in this unprepossessing gallery, looking at some truly gorgeous works of art. And during that time, I was the only visitor who’d managed to penetrate the museum’s defences that far. The subliminal message is what interests me – only an obsessive will find this stuff interesting. The rest of you – give up. It’s not worth it!

And this is what I would call ‘Normal Setting’ for medieval art in museums. But in Berlin, I had the wonderful experience of visiting the Bode Museum, which specialises in medieval and renaissance sculpture, but also currently houses a wonderful display on medieval metalwork in the basement. The Bode is beautiful. More than anything, it just shows how strong medieval art can be when it’s shown to the public with the same confidence that you’d have if you were displaying a piece by Leonardo da Vinci or Donatello. The art itself is fine. It’s the signals that are sent out by the way it’s presented that is so often the problem. I especially enjoyed coming unexpectedly across these two tomb figures in the basement.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m not complaining about curators. They know the value of what they’re looking after. And I’m not complaining about ‘ignorant’ museum visitors either. After all, people respond, naturally, to the way in which works of art are presented to them. If the display says it’s important, then they’ll pay more interest. What I’m whinging about is two-fold. On the one hand, there’s only a limited amount of money to spend on museums, and so often it’s spent on the most well-known things, making them even more well-known and more likely to have money spent on them. This is a cycle of ever-decreasing returns. On the other hand, it seems to be human nature to see works of art in a way that is more circumscribed than we might like to believe by the way in which it’s presented to us. This explains why lost works by great masters can be ‘rediscovered’ and suddenly be thought to be masterpieces, while works that people thought were amazing a hundred years ago can now more often than not be ignored by the modern visitor. So – does art have any kind of inherent value, or is it all about spin?

The Ceramicist of Barcelona

I’d love to collect art, but I never feel I could justify the prices I’d have to pay to buy the things that most excite me. Which is why the only real ‘art objects’ I own are ceramics, which are a beautiful and affordable way to buy handmade works of craft and design. The time when I seem to be most receptive to this sort of thing is on holiday, and I’ve visited a number of art potters’ studios dotted over Britain.

Recently, though, I was in Barcelona, and stumbled across the shop and studio of Carmen Balada. In this tiny shop, she designs and makes a number of her pieces. Larger works are produced in a workshop outside the city.

The shop is a treasure trove, filled with designs and sketches for new works, half finished pieces, and completed objects on shelves, tables, the floor.

Ms Balada herself is charming. We had a fun chat about the new V&A Ceramic Galleries. She told me that she is an enormous fan of the Museum. One of the interesting areas she’s moved in to is the depiction of insects in her work, and not prettified up, either. They appear on pots, but I think are at their best on the white tiles she produces.

What is so appealing about Carmen’s work is her blending of European with Japanese traditions, and the tension between graphic and plastic within her work. I came away with two bowls and a tile. I’ll be returning for more.

You know you’re obsessive when…

… you’re cleaning the kitchen, and decide that now would be a great time to pull out your collection of gourmet tequilas and have an impromptu taste off. To be quite honest, the only thing puzzling me is why on earth I didn’t come up with this idea before.

Wine connoisseurs will sneer at me, because this has to be the most poorly organised tasting ever. First off the bat, it’s neither ‘vertical’ nor ‘horizontal’. In a vertical tasting, you try several vintages of the same wine. Well, fair enough, that doesn’t really apply to spirits like tequila. Horizontal tastings compare several wines, often from the same region, all from the same year. In other words, the aim is to compare like with like. And that’s where my little tequila party falls down.

See, for those of you who still think tequila is Jose Cuervo slammers at a student party, posh tequila comes in several different varieties. They have one thing in common, though. They are all made from 100% agave. The agave plant looks like a giant aloe vera, and it’s the mashed up pulp that becomes the starting point for the distillation.

Well, my own little collection, assembled haphazardly over several years, has representatives of various styles, from the unaged spirit (blanco or silver) through Reposado (partially aged) to Anejo (several years of aging in wooden casks). But it’s a small collection, and not exactly systematic.

Anyway, caveats aside, I lined ’em up, and started tippling. And here are my un-expurgated tasting notes:

Corralejo reposado: hard hitting, acidity, clean, slightly chemically, in a good way

Don Julio reposado: really smooth (too smooth?) and oaky

El Tesoro de Don Felipe anejo: easily the most vegetal, an exotic and punchy taste.

Patron silver: smooth, yet with a raw vegetal quality.

The surprise here for me was the fact that I came out of this not really feeling great about the Don Julio Reposado. The Don Julio brand is a high quality, modern one, and they do everything right, to the extent that they’re very popular with tequila enthusiasts. On the other hand, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the Corralejo. Now, this is a distillery with history – it’s one of the oldest in Mexico, having been established in the seventeenth century. But for years, they produced a bastardised, non 100% agave product, and their tequilas are regularly criticised for having too strong a flavour of alcohol, and an almost chemical edge.

But what I realised is that tequila is, perhaps more than any other spirit, in the eye of the beholder. The tequila renaissance has been fired by being aimed squarely at the US market – in other words, at drinkers who have been educated to prefer quality bourbons. But tequila can run the gamut from tasting purely vegetal, through a rum-like sugar flavour, through to the smoothness that you get from ageing in oak barrels. For me, the Don Julio is just far too well behaved. It tastes like a bourbon. The Corralejo, on the other hand, while it tasted more punchy with alcohol, had a lot more vegetal character. I think that of all the tequilas here, it would be by far the best mixer. The blanco Patron I found too rough in comparison.

My fave, though, easily, was El Tesoro. But that’s because although it was aged, it still had bags of vegetal character. And for me, that’s what tequila’s all about. Now I guess I’d better get back to cleaning the kitchen…

The Portia or The Shylock Show?

So, as someone whose life revolves around the medieval and renaissance periods, it’s perhaps inevitable that Shakespeare occupies a special place in my heart. My taste for his work runs fairly broadly, too – from histories, through tragedies, and even to some of the ropier comedies or ‘problem plays’ when I’m in the mood. Having said that, one play that I’ve consistently had a problem with is The Merchant of Venice.

There are reasons for this. And not just the usual uneasiness with the play’s perceived anti-Semitic content. Although it’s partly that. No, the thing is that The Merchant and I have ‘Previous’. This was the first of Shakespeare’s plays that I ever encountered, at the tender age of 11, in school English Lit class. Anyone who’s been there will remember how hearing your bored classmates reading lines from the play over a series of weeks like a group of Elizabethan zombies who are mouthing words that yet mean nothing does nothing for appreciating the literary value of a piece. Then, there are the structural issues. The play is mainly remembered for Shakespeare’s creation of the character of Shylock; typically for him, the playwright couldn’t resist turning what should have been a simple, straightforward anti-Semitic stereotype into a living, breathing character, with feelings, motivations and a degree of sympathy. Which is fine. As far as it goes. But Shylock is hardly the main character. In fact, he only appears in a few scenes, and his storyline is mercilessly cut short as soon as his campaign to kill Antonio is foiled.

Much more space is given over to Portia, the heiress who is being forced to choose a husband through a tedious and repetitive riddle-game. The play often feels more than schizophrenic, and the abruptly happy ending hardly sums up what has gone before. To me, the play was always a mess.

Until recently that is. When I heard that Rupert Goold and Patrick Stewart were teaming up again to do The Merchant, I knew that I had to put my prejudices aside and book. I’m still kicking myself for having missed their much-feted production of Macbeth a few years back. And I loved the ‘arctic explorers’ Tempest. From the moment it opened, it became clear that The Merchant was going to divide critics and audiences down the middle.

Well, about a month ago, I got my chance to make my own mind up. And my mind says, ‘Wow’. I was completely in love with this production from the moment I walked into the theatre, which had been transformed for the evening into a Las Vegas casino. The play has been set in contemporary Vegas, with gangsters, showgirls and even Elvis Impersonators (step forward, Launcelot Gobbo). Ducats become dollars, giving the play an enormous immediacy. And most boldly of all, the Portia sub-plot becomes a reality TV show, ‘Destiny’, along the lines of one of Paris Hilton’s ghastly BFF series.

Now, this could all sound like so much buzzy razzamatazz. Empty, clever-clever and bogus. But here’s the thing: in performance, it works like a dream. The production had me enthralled right from the opening moments, when the stage fills gradually with the casino’s patrons, the action starts to become frenetic around the craps table, and finally Elvis emerges to sing ‘Viva Las Vegas’, complete with a full-on production number dance routine. Some of the reviewers, have inevitably, felt that the Las Vegas setting doesn’t work. But I have to disagree. Okay, so Venetian businessmen aren’t really exactly the same as gamblers and players in Vegas. But the setting really isn’t meant to be literal, so much as metaphorical. In this world, everything is about greed, peoples’ angle to get what they want/need, and above all, about surface. Things are judged to be what they appear to be, rather than what they are.

And, it turns out, that’s what the play’s all about. One of the best things about this wonderful production is that rather than shying away from the Portia section in favour of Shylock, the production puts both stories centre stage and shows how the two characters have much in common. The tragedy is that Portia (who like Shylock, isn’t allowed to be the person she really is) shows herself throughout the play to be one of the more racist and prejudiced characters. What I loved, though, was that the new setting not only worked for the big things. It also helped clarify even little bits of the play. Here’s a great example. At one point, Shylock meets a fellow Jewish business colleague, Tubal, who’s just back from Milan. Tubal tells Shylock that he’s heard a lot of rumours about Shylock’s daughter spending the money she stole from her father prodigiously. He says that he saw a ring that had been pawned, and shows Shylock a drawing. Shylock recognises the ring as his wife’s wedding ring, and is devastated. Only in the new production, it’s not a drawing at all – which is a pretty contrived device. Instead, Tubal reaches into his pocket to produce his iPhone, on which he’s snapped a photo of the ring, and hands it to Shylock. This idea works so much better than Shakespeare’s original, and is perfectly comprehensible to a modern audience. Details like this abound in the production.

I also loved the way it’s structured. The first half is light, even comic. After the interval, however, the mood completely shifts, as the various chickens come home to roost. The trial scene, conducted in a gangster-movie-like meat storage locker, is incredibly visceral. The audience, all of whom knew exactly what was and wasn’t coming, visibly squirmed, gasped and reacted. They – and I – were spellbound. The play finishes in a tragi-comic mode, completely flipping Shakespeare’s happy ending into an incredibly hollow victory – and all to the tune of ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’. Fabulous.