London and 'Celts: Arts and Identity'

     Another busy trip to London on Thursday.  The main reason for my visit was the exhibition 'Celts: Art and Identity' at the British Museum.  And I've been trying to quantify my response to it ever since as this exhibition raised some very interesting questions.  The premise of the exhibition is simple;  modern celtic identity is by and large a construct of Early Modernity based on a limited knowledge of the past and a series of assumptions that fed into, and were in turn fed by, that knowledge.  For the organizers of this exhibition the term 'celtic' is a cultural and not racial category.  The first mention of the 'celts' in written history was by the Greeks, who applied the term 'Keltoi' to people living in central Europe who traded with, and raided, the Classical world.  The Romans referred to the 'Galli'.  'Celt' was not a label that those people used about themselves - but then they left no written record.  And it is certainly not a name used, until the Modern Period, by those we now associate with celtic identities today - Breton, Welsh, Irish and Scots who became literate in Late Antiquity.  Since Thursday I've watched a BBC4 programme 'Meet the Ancestors' presented by Julian Richards and he assiduously avoided the label 'celtic' when he referring to Iron Age burial customs in England.  It was far too loaded a term.
     Now to the exhibition itself and the wonderful objects it contains. After a slightly wobbly start we meet 'things'.  Sculptures in the form of enigmatic warriors, or gods from central Europe and later grave slabs and the monumental Cross of St John (a cast) from Iona.  There are great swords and shields, and a spectacular horned helmet - votive offerings that have been recovered from rivers like the Thames and, here in Lincolnshire, the Witham where the ritual deposition of objects continued past the Anglo-Saxon 'takeover' into the Middle Ages.  Objects that because of their antiquity, and their use of a long forgotten visual and symbolic language, are mysterious, evocative things - not fully 'present' to us.  And there is gold - lots of it.  Torcs and penannular brooches and all manner of, well, treasure. The brooches, made in Ireland, are works of immense skill.  They are very small but they are decorated to within an inch of their lives.  Quite stunning.  And oddly, perhaps, it was the small things that remained with me the longest.  Anyway all of these objects are arranged chronological order from the Iron Age to Late/Post Modernity - today; from Paganism to Christianity and secularism.  Simultaneously moving across Europe from east to west.  From 'Hallstatt' culture, through the swirls of 'La Tene', through Classical Antiquity to Late Antiquity and what exactly?  And there, perhaps things get tricky; where perhaps that old, and persistent, clear cut notion of a dualism of 'Celt' and 'Anglo-Saxon' begins to soften.  One of the first objects on display is a gravestone, a 'Pictish' gravestone, and it is decorated with interlace and what are called 'Zoomorphic' animals.  Later on there is a wonderful gold item, a buckle I think, from the Sutton Hoo burial from near Woodbridge in Suffolk and it too is decorated with interlace and most incredible zoomorphic animal.  It is believed to be the work of an Anglo-Saxon goldsmith.  But which is the celtic object and which is the Anglo-Saxon?  They both contain the same motifs.  No wonder than that various other names have been coined to categorize these objects 'Insular', 'Hiberno-Saxon'.  Hanging bowls are another example: originating in late Roman Britain they continued to be made after the end of Roman rule (but in all likelihood outside the boundaries of Empire).  They are decorated with the swirls associated with 'La Tene' culture, and so are markedly 'celtic', but are overwhelmingly found in Anglo-Saxon graves.  In fact both interlace and the zoomorphic figure are believed to originate with the Anglo-Saxons, as did a number of smithing techniques such as chip carving, granular and filigree work, and cloisonné inlays that were taken up by goldsmiths working mainly in Ireland.  At this point in the exhibition it was these objects from Ireland that dominated; there seems to have been nothing comparable made in Wales or Brittany.  There was obviously more of a shared visual culture between the two, Celt and Anglo-Saxon, than we once believed.
     It is at this point historically that in architecture and in the visual arts that the 'celtic' slowly disappears giving way to firstly the Romanesque and then Gothic culture.  It is more, I think, than merely the politics of conquest and colonisation; both Romanesque and Gothic simply presented more compelling visual languages.

     And then the long 'Celtic Twilight', which makes up the final quarter of the exhibition.  That cultural 'half-life' that I find so fascinating.  It starts out, oddly enough, with English Antiquarians such as Lincolnshire's very own William Stukely (1687-1765), who was happy to accredit anything ancient and not obviously Roman to the 'Celts'.  Even odder was the view Stukeley, a Anglican priest, had of the Druids, who he saw as practitioners of an ideal rational, 'natural' religion.  He inadvertently started a trend that was picked up by the emerging Romantic Movement.  Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams) is a notable example.  Williams, (1747-1826), was born in Wales, lived in London, and was a mason by profession and a radical in politics.  In London he was active in a couple of Welsh societies 'The Honorable Society of Cwmrodorion' and the 'Gweneddigion'. Like Stukely he re-invented the Druids as followers of 'Natural' religion.  A kin to Deism, I suspect.  He also re-invented the Early medieval Welsh past as a Golden Era of liberal politics - something that still occurs today; you only have to read 'The Rough Guide to Wales' to see that.  Like James McPherson, in Scotland, Morganwg was not averse to fabricating celtic verse.  In 1794 the first meeting of his Gorsedd was held on Primrose Hill, North London.  The ritual was claimed to be authentic.
      The exhibition has a number of items objects associated with the National Eisteddfod, which is a descendant of that first meeting in North London.  I was stuck immediately by their secularised religiosity; they either took there cue from 19th century Anglicanism - for instance the banner at the start of the exhibition, or the stole that makes up 'vestments' one of the officials, or looked as though they were designed by use by some group of ritual magicians like 'The Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn'.  Perhaps there is some link through the radical Williams to Freemasonry.  Opposite are two Scottish paintings, both luscious in colour and heavily Late Romantic in feel - dreamlike one could say: the famous and fabulous 'The Druids; Bringing in the Mistletoe' by the Glasgow Colourists George Henry and Edward Atkinson Hornel; and the less well known 'The Riding of the Sidhe' by the Dundee artist John Duncan.
     Duncan contributed to Patrick Geddes's short-lived magazine 'The Evergreen', and 'Celtic' was to have a profound influence on the Arts and Crafts movement as it developed in Edinburgh and Dublin - what was called the 'Celtic Renaissance' in Scotland - and also affected Arts and Crafts design in England. In all cases it was essentially decorative, rather than architectonic. Both these paintings display a shift in attitude to the 'Celtic' from Stukeley and Williams, who saw in the Celtic as a progenitor of Enlightenment Values to one in which the Celtic is held up as an alternative to Modernity, a place of dream, of mysticism and other values (including unease) beyond the 'greasy till' of mercantilism (to use W B Yeats's telling phrase).  This view of the Celtic has its origin in the revolt of Romanticism, and is essentially conservative. It is there in the works of Sir Walter Scott and later W B Yeats and J R R Tolkien.
     I have in my collection of pamphlets and guides a catalogue of an exhibition held in Dundee Art Gallery in 1973 of the work of a contemporary of Duncan's called John 'Dutch' Davidson.  The title is 'The Hills of Dream Revisited'  An apt for this exhibition too, for in the nebulousness of the term, in the mystery of the art - of its not being entirely 'present' to us - 'Celtic' becomes the receptacle of both our wishes and our unhappiness.  We back project on to it.  And it is that that unites William Stukely, New Agers, New Celtic Christians, Nationalists and Romantics, radicals and conservatives.

London: the British Museum and Wilton's Music Hall

     The bf and I went up to London yesterday.  It was a beautiful spring day when we arrived in the capital and we strolled down from King's Cross station to Lamb's Conduit St, which has a great selection of independent retailers and places to eat.  After lunch we popped into my friend Ben Pentreath's shop 'Pentreath and Hall' which he runs, (alongside an architectural and interior design practice) with his business partner Bridie Hall.  It's always a visual treat and a good place for ideas.
     From there we went to the British Museum and the exhibition:  'Defining Beauty: the Body in Ancient Greek Art'.  The museum was impossibly crowded, but the exhibition calm.  In fact there was an almost religious air such is the place, the reverence indeed, that these sculptures have in the Western Canon.  They are foundational.  And I have to admit the experience was quite moving at times; these statues seemed to exist simultaneously in two planes: the physical and, well, the spiritual.  It was as though they were caught up in their own thoughts, (the contemplation of their own existence), and their presence in our three dimensions was merely incidental.  A lot has been said about the 'humanism of the Greeks' but there was definitely something religious about much of this art.  It mustn't be forgotten that this art was produced in a pre-modern civilization and hence drenched in the religious.  This other-worldly, even transcendent, quality, may however be the consequence of the loss of the original colour, but I'd like to think that this was not the case.  It would be a mistake to believe that this representative art is merely a copy of life: it is not there is something definitely 'artistic', something transformative, in the work.
     And before you think that this exhibition was solely about monumental depiction of the divine there was a lot of other work: some of it funny and grotesque, some of it domestic.  I will point you in the direction of the small and exquisite bronzes that dot the exhibition, easily missed in the midst of all that monumental white marble.  What unites them all is the amazing quality of the work.  There was example after example of the most sublime technical virtuosity.  I find it almost incomprehensible that Greek cities were just filled with this stuff; incomprehensible too the cultural explosion that produced this work.  Work that is almost out of time - and hence 'Classical'.
     The final room of the exhibition was a slightly strange affair.  All too diffuse.  In one corner a map (the same map as the beginning of the exhibition) showing the extent of Greek civilisation and cultural influence.  This was by no means detailed enough.  By it were two sculptures; a beautiful head of Alexander the Great and a Buddha from Gandhara.  Neither was quite enough, but the culture of the Greeks in Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent is perhaps another, and exciting, exhibition.  The centre of the space was however, occupied with a dialogue between two great Antique sculptures the 'Belvedere Torso' (on loan from the Vatican) and one of the reclining Gods from one of the two pediments of the Parthenon. Both statues have suffered from the effects of time and that is what I took with me.

     We went to 'Polpo at Bird and Ape' for an early dinner.  As a loyal reader of this blog may now realise Polpo is a bit of a favourite of mine.  It was the bf's first visit.  We started with Chopped Chicken Liver crostini, and then shared a Fritto Misto, Pork and fennel polpetti, and really delicious salad of Zucchini, Parmesan and Basil.  We going to have a go tonight in re-creating the latter.

     Our evening was spent at Wilton's Music Hall in the East End.  I have wanted to visit the place for some time, and it really, really did not disappoint.  A small Victorian building tucked away in a side street, it has been restored in a particularly atmospheric manner. The hall itself is magnificent, rather as you might imagine Vanbrugh or Hawksmoor having a go at designing and not, thankfully, over restored.  In fact it seems, again thankfully, they have done merely that which is necessary to protect the structure - the walls, for example, have been stripped to the original surface but not repainted.  The lighting is perfect: trails of tiny lights hanging from the central ceiling rose like a bell tent.  Quite breathtaking.  The reason for our visit was an evening of early silent comedies bought to us by the Lucky Dog Picture House, the people 'dedicated to recreating the original cinema experience'.  It was a fantastic evening. A brilliant job they did of it: five musicians playing witty, clever original music. There were six films in all; 'Undressing Extraordinary' (1901), 'Mary Jane's Mishap' (1903), 'The (?) Motorist' 1904, 'A Dog's Life' (1918) and after the interval: 'The Lucky Dog' (1921), and 'Liberty' (1921).  The last was the funniest: Laurel and Hardy in a broad, physical farce that culminated in a literally breath taking scene on the top of a skyscraper.  I have to confess that thanks to watching Laurel and Hardy films as a child on television I have not had a great liking for this sort of stuff, but it is a completely different experience seeing these films with live music and an audience.  As I have said on this blog before, do not hesitate, if you have the chance, to watch these films in the manner in which they meant to see.  It is wonderful thing to do.