Hard Travellin’

The mighty turbines of rhetoric that produce this avalanche of trivia are slowly grinding to a halt. Google maps have been printed, bags are packed and the car filled with fuel. Everything is in place for a speedy departure in the direction of Yorkshire and Scotland in pursuit of arcane imagery and useless information. As usual, we’ll be equipped with a plentiful supply of out of date guidebooks. We may be sometime.

All Gold

Exciting news from the British Museum where a statue of Kate Moss, entitled Siren and made from gold by Marc Quinn has just been unveiled. Read what The Times has to say about it. The museum could not be a more appropriate location for this momentous event given its function as the storehouse of all that is finest in human creativity. Nobody can now accuse the museum of holding itself aloof from contemporary celebrity culture. As for Mr Quinn, his reputation for stunning creative leaps of the imagination that overturn all our preconceptions is surely unchallengeable. Kate Moss, with her sober and reflective lifestyle, her friendly and approachable manner, her modesty and her disdain for material values, gets nothing less than she richly deserves.


It’s an idle presumption to imagine that this artistic triumph could be improved upon but a modest proposal might not be entirely out of order. In 1961 Piero Manzoni produced, signed and numbered 90 tins each containing 30 gms of merda d’artista (artist’s shit) and offered them for sale in return for a sum equivalent to an equal weight of gold at that day’s prices. If the gold statue were melted down, the proceeds could be spent acquiring all the surviving tins. The tins could be opened and Mr Quinn, with due regard for Health and Safety, could model the contents into a new likeness of Ms Moss. Finally, there’s an opportunity for Ms Moss to make her contribution to the creative cycle by providing some of her own faeces to refill the empty tins. There would be no shortage of galleries willing to exhibit the results and Ms Moss would have the satisfaction of being a fully engaged member of the art community with a glittering future ahead of her.

Tram Topics

Welcome to the second in an occasional series about trams – the last such posting was on the subject of Milan. There was a time in the early decades of the last century when the tram was the pre-eminent means of urban transport. In Britain it declined rapidly as the motor bus became the favoured choice. This did not happen to the same extent in mainland Europe where trams survive in numbers to the present day. These colour photographs, bought in a local antique market, come from the late 1960’s or 1970’s, a time when trams had long been banished from British streets where planners were hopelessly fixated on the dubious charm of the internal combustion engine.


The olive green vehicle in the uppermost image has a note on the back, Malmo, Sweden, Oct 1969, but none of the others have any information about where they were taken. The cream coloured tram appears to be in a French speaking city (Belgium?, Switzerland?) and the red and cream tram seems to be in a German speaking district. Any further information from someone more expert than myself in matters of identification would be very welcome.

Cut from the rock

Last Monday night BBC Radio 3 broadcast a programme in which the Classical sculptor, Alexander Stoddart, considered how the Mount Rushmore monument in South Dakota works as a sculpture. Stoddart expressed a low opinion of Gutzon Borglum’s sculptural competence but found that the power and scale of the setting of the monument enabled him to transcend his limitations on this occasion. There is symmetry in the way that this monument to America’s greatest presidents was inaugurated by Calvin Coolidge, recognised by many as the worst of American presidents. I read once that, as Washington was commemorated by a 555ft. obelisk, then Coolidge deserved nothing less than a 555ft. hole in the ground. The present incumbent may have an even stronger claim to this melancholy distinction and only 3 months remain in which he can fix his place in posterity. What is certain is that this monument has become an indispensable element in the Great American Iconography and that’s a good reason to display this postcard folder from 1949, some 8 years after completion of the project.


Blasting, drilling, wedging and chiseling went on for 14 years and the finished monument has some unique features including 22 inch projections around the iris of the presidential eyes to reflect light and produce an illusion of sparkle. Teddy Roosevelt’s spectacles present another very satisfying illusion by means of carved marks that define the form by the impact on the flesh above and below the eyes. As for scale, Borglum calculated that if the figures had been portrayed in their entirety they would have each been 450ft. in height.

Won’t Wash Clothes

Cradled by the crescent moon
The monkey strums an idle tune
Lost in a world where anything goes
What a shame it Won’t Wash Clothes.

He’s the hardest working brand character of the Victorian era. On his shoulders rested the responsibility for persuading the great British public that a block of Monkey Brand soap was an indispensable household commodity even though it Won’t Wash Clothes. This is our second visit to the bizarre imagery of the strange world of Monkey Brand publicity and some very curious images are on display. This refugee from the wild and untamed jungles of the Victorian imagination is pressed into service in an astonishing variety of disguises from commedia dell’arte to mandarin, tamed and costumed in an elaborate sequence of charades calculated to break down customer resistance by indulging the secret fears and prejudices of the prosperous readership of the Illustrated London News and similar publications. A world without order and a world without hygiene being uppermost among their concerns.


There seems no end to the indignities that our simian hero must endure. Portrayed as a beast of burden, crushed by the weight of an outsize bar of Monkey Brand, then reduced to the proportions of a child, clad in evening dress and posed on the ample thigh of John Bull. But for sheer horror nothing can equal the image in which the hapless creature is skinned and mounted by a grinning child brandishing a whip. This image of sadism and subjugation is almost overloaded with peculiarly Victorian obsessions including an unhealthy preoccupation with the forms of naked children. I like to think that the uncanny resemblance between the monkey fur and the hair of the child was a sly comment on the part of the artist. Perhaps we are looking at a celebration of the triumph of imperialism or an allegorical rejection of Darwinism.


Surrealist poets and painters were much attracted to the notion of the incubus – a supernatural creature of the night that invaded the bedchambers of the innocent for the purpose of illicit sex. The image of the Monkey Brand as cherub (previously seen perched in the lap of the seductive figure of Leisure) has all the characteristics of an incubus except, of course, for reproductive organs. A sensible omission to avoid fatal contamination of the brand! Incubus or not, this curious flying figure, with an ability to insinuate itself into the most private of spaces, possesses formidable power to threaten and disturb. Redemption finally came in the form of a trip to the Universal Exhibition of 1900 in Paris where he is solemnly invested with the order of the burnished frying pan by a comely demoiselle. A trip to the top of the Eiffel Tower and a drink of champagne from the demoiselle’s shapely slipper is the least he deserves in return for all the years of faithful service.


Victorian commerce created the modern advertising industry. Advertising proliferated in the absence of regulation to cover virtually every surface in the modern metropolis. Advertising agencies were a Victorian innovation and we have them to thank for developing the concept of branding and brand characters. The latter half of the 19th. century was a period of massive expansion in marketing and promotional techniques. The activities of the industry with the Victorian passion for outlandish stunts would make the basis of a fascinating TV drama series along the lines of Mad Men, based on mid-century Madison Avenue. Alternatively, if only Gilbert & Sullivan had turned their attention to the world of Victorian advertising, the gimmickry, the sharp practice, the outrageous claims and the ubiquity of publicity would have made perfect targets for their brand of satire.

Celebrity Endorsement Victorian Style

This is the great Emile Zola, boyhood friend of Cézanne and pioneer of French Naturalism, in 1894 giving his support to a marketing campaign for Mariani Wine. By the time this advert was published Zola had completed his Rougon-Macquart series of novels, Captain Alfred Dreyfus had been arrested and the final chapter of Zola’s career was underway. Zola’s grave expression suggests that he might have some premonition of the great miscarriage of justice that would engulf the last 5 years of his life. According to Zola, Mariani Wine was “The Elixir of Life, which combats human debility, the one real cause of every ill – a veritable scientific fountain of truth, which in giving vigour, health and energy, would create an entirely new and superior race.” Even his harshest critics never accused Zola of understatement. Zola’s destiny, tragic as it was, could not be compared with that of his fellow celebrity endorser, the composer Charles Gounod. Despite the benefits of “The admirable Mariani Wine, which has so often rescued me from exhaustion”, Gounod had been dead for over a year by the time this advert appeared in the press.


As for Mariani Wine, it was a powerful concoction fortified with 6 mg of cocaine per fluid ounce of wine. Little wonder it was so popular with sovereigns and pontiffs. Leo XIII and Pius X and Queen Victoria herself were all known to be satisfied consumers. There’s even a story that, stripped of alcohol and carbonated, it was an ancestor of Coca-Cola. Given that Coca-Cola had been in existence since 1886 and its origins are shrouded in mystery, it’s not a claim that’s easy to verify.

Art, money and shit

Watching Robert Hughes battering away at the iniquities of the art market on Channel 4 (The Mona Lisa Curse) last Sunday I found my mind wandering to Piero Manzoni and his tins of artist’s shit (Merda d’Artista). An artist of sly wit and a beguiling manner, Manzoni’s work posed all the great questions about the relationship between art and money, about the definitions and boundaries of artistic activity and about authenticity, originality and the limits of public acceptability. His life’s work was completed by 1963 and he explored his chosen territory with charm, humour and a lightness of touch that never excluded the possibility that the entire enterprise was a satirical exercise. The first generation of conceptual artists began to emerge in the late 1960s and stretched the ideas that Manzoni had played with in every direction possible. Within a decade those possibilities appeared to be exhausted. By 1980 the market had to be refreshed and the chosen vehicle was the reappearance of hand held brushes and paint on canvas. Another decade had to pass before a new generation of artists began to excavate the conceptual heritage and discovered a rich vein of material that has been exploited ever since. At the same time a deal was sealed with the dubious world of celebrity culture. It’s the work of this generation over the last 20 years that has dominated the market for new art and finally triggered a massive critical meltdown for Robert Hughes. He loathes this stuff with a genuine passion and in his recent incarnation as ancient, battle scarred curmudgeon, dispatched a barrage of withering scorn and contempt at it.


It was amusing to read the thoughts of Germaine Greer in yesterday’s Guardian as she strapped herself to the Brit Art bandwagon and delivered an imperious rebuke to Hughes. Greer’s opinion is that Hughes is incapable of “getting” artists such as Hirst, Basquiat and Baselitz and an enemy of innovation in the visual arts. The beauty of all this is that she exhibits precisely the intolerance that she identifies in Hughes. What matters to Greer about art is whether she gets it or not; what matters to Hughes is whether the art is good or bad. There’s a lot of art that I like that, by the definition of Hughes, is bad art and there’s a lot of art that he defines as good that I don’t like. Liking something doesn’t make it good but on the other hand, nobody can oblige you to like something because they say it’s good. In between liking and good lies respect – a position where it’s perfectly possible to appreciate the value and importance of art without actually deriving any great pleasure from it. In the end I prefer Hughes because he continues to make the effort to distinguish the good from the bad which puts him in an awkward and uncomfortable place where it’s all too easy for the likes of Greer to toss a little light abuse at him.


Returning to Manzoni, he seems to be genuinely subversive in a way that none of the artists Hughes had in his sights could possibly claim to be. His work undermined the commodification of art and the personality cult of the artist. His tins of shit were sold for a sum equal to the value of their weight in gold on the day of sale. He produced lines on paper cylinders of various lengths that were sealed in chromed containers, he made artworks out of bread rolls and fur, he distributed hard-boiled eggs that bore his thumb print and he claimed the entire planet as his own creation by constructing and positioning a giant inverted plinth into which were incised the words “Source du Monde”. I love his work for its insolence and humour but was he a good artist? I believe he was, because he pushed on doors and rattled cages that nobody else had thought of doing. He presented a master-class in the art of logical absurdity and in doing so he shifted some of our ideas and preconceptions about the relationship of art to consumer culture. That’s good enough for me.