In between sessions together, we’ve worked individually. Mathilde has researched further scientific data and created thin sections in the lab at theUniversity of Bristol from rock samples from Doniford beach, as well as undertaking her own creative explorations with the paints and the data.
Sara has been testing the potential of the earth pigment paints, using a variety of surfaces, binders and processing techniques. She has been stretching her explorations of the materials into combinations with other media, including oil-based glaze medium and figuring out the aesthetic and conceptual needs and potential of these works through a range of improvisations.
Convergence | Creative Lab | update 01 (v4)
We document our joint and personal explorations through a shared sketchbook and an online diary. These records have proved invaluable to track our evolving thoughts about the methods, themes, and purpose of the collaboration. Much of the learning is experiential and in the moment, whether walking the terrain, working with the paints or cutting rocks in the lab, so it has been essential to capture it as it emerges and keep each other up-to-date.
Convergence | Creative Lab | update 01 (v4)
We took a decision to remain located in a single rural, coastal environment, rather than traversing across and through the landscape. This has enabled a settling of collected experiences and materials, and offered the potential for a deepened immersion into a geologically-rich location.
Starting with an inhalation of the experience of being on Doniford Beach, we absorbed visual, tactile, geological, multi-sensory, embodied understandings and insights of this complex and dynamic coastal terrain. Back in our studio and laboratory environments, a wealth of questions and avenues for exploration have emerged from handling, processing and interrogating earths, rocks, videos and other visual data gathered from the beach.
Universal and global themes around the value of art and science coming together, rather than a place-specific narrative are emerging. Our choice to focus on one rich place is becoming a locus for expanding into broader, more universal themes.
Some of the strands we are actively working with are:
● Empathy vs disconnection Comparing our approaches to data collection and observing the detachment from the natural environment felt in the science lab, in contrast to processing the earths in a mindful and connected way in the studio. Industrial cutting, grinding and polishing in the lab feels disturbing and violent, and emphasises the detachment.How do scientific methods contribute to the detachment we feel from our environment? And in contrast, how does an artistic approach to manipulating pigments and source material help retain connection? This emergent collaboration explores how this connected artistic approach can infuse into scientific practice.
● Parallels between scientific and artistic processes and analysis Both Sara’s artistic approach in the studio (layering earth paints on 2D surfaces) and Mathilde’s process of making thin sections from rock (grinding them down until they are only 30 micrometres thick) are ways of making flat rocks. What is revealed in these flattening processes, discretely and together?
● Aesthetics Beauty (however defined) and its role and value in facilitating emotional connections recurs as a question, in particular when fostering a sense of relationship with a place. We explore both its function in art and its arguable absence in science.
● Soft; hard; organic; geometric Considering physical changes to rocks and earth through lab and studio processes, and natural and manmade alterations to the coast through erosion. We are questioning how these changes alter our relationship with the materiality of the natural environment.
● Other themes arise from the process of making such as the concept of migratory stones, as parallels with other forms of migration, and our ‘becoming one’ with, rather than observing the landscape. These are emergent themes which we want to delve into and further.
Where we’re headed next
We are fascinated by the ways in which the micro and macro forms and dimensions of the environment echo one another and how, along with the strands of inquiry above, they give rise to meta-questioning. The act of working together directly is eliciting new questions and the materials and matter of the place are contributing an additional participant to our work – becoming a third-party in our collaboration. The strands identified above all contribute to refining our collaborative purpose, methods, concepts, activities and outcomes.
We aim to share our works-in-process at an exhibition in September. We anticipate that we will present works which combine raw scientific data and visual storytelling with a strong sense of the materiality of our coastal encounters.
This presentation will be a snapshot. We will continue to develop the works into the autumn, in greater depth. As the artworks near completion, we also envisage a phase of sharing, dialogue, reflection and evaluation of the whole process to refine our collaborative methodology. We would like to document the learnings from our research and share them with others. We anticipate also having a film which documents our evolving process and interprets our emerging collaboration.
We hope ultimately to create a model of deep and purposeful art-science collaboration to share with artistic and scientific research communities.
In a chapter by Maria Kind called ‘Returning on Bikes: Notes on Social Practice’, she reminds us of something that should hopefully be obvious, namely that: ‘… not all social practice projects are interesting and relevant, just as all painting is not uninteresting and irrelevant’ (in Living As Form: Socially-engaged Art from 1991-2011, ed. Nato Thompson, Creative Time Books, 2012).
Convergence / Creative Lab. is a project being developed by geologist Mathilde Braddock and painter Sara Dudman; one that straddles the type of divide within art world thinking implicit in Kind’s observation. Essentially it’s a material “conversation” between the two women with very different disciplinary backgrounds and sets out to address a number of significant issues: creative, environmental and intellectual. A conversation that I have been privileged to join at a couple of points and hope to continue to do so.
Not the least of the questions this conversation raises is that of the vexed cultural relationship between “art” and “science”. Or, as I have suggested may be a more appropriate designation, between the often highly dogmatic mentalities of aestheticism and scientism. Mentalities based on presuppositions unthinkingly built into specialist disciplinary “languages” and transmitted via the ways those “languages” are used to make claims about how the world is known and understand.
In the remainder of this and the next post I have reconstructed Braddock and Dudman’s first ‘update’ on their work-in-progress. I’ve done so because I believe they are engaged in a project that intends to do something rather different from usual art/science collaborations. These tend to be based on assumptions grounded in deeply unequal “authority” positions. As a result, they tend to produce work that merely illustrates or, as one artist has memorably put it, “sexes-up” scientific work data. Data that would otherwise only be of interest to a specialist scientific audience. In short, that supposedly “popularise” science by refiguring it in a largely spurious “artistic” form’. This project, in contrast, is set to take a very different, and much more genuinely collaborative, approach; one that does not take for granted what so many other art / science projects tend to do.
My hope is that, as this project develops, I will be able to report on its discoveries.
[N.B. All images in this and the following post are copyright of Sara Dudman and Mathilde Braddock].
Can a collaborative art and science interpretation of the geology of a place bring us into deepened connection with the Earth?
This is the question at the core of our Convergence | Creative Lab which brings us – Mathilde Braddock and Sara Dudman – together to explore how a geologist and an artist interpret the landscape, what a deeper collaboration between these disciplines might look like, and define its value by testing its potential and limits.
Over the last six months, we have been combining art and science and the intergenerational perspectives of two women to blur the boundaries and explore our convergent and divergent approaches to interpreting the land and landscape. We have infused and disrupted our own and each other’s practice. We have spent time learning from and about a place, with care and attention for the planet, each other and ourselves as a central principle in all aspects of our work.
We are in the thick of exploring the potential of this collaboration, but some of the themes that are emerging include:
Empathy versus disconnection
“Flat rocks” – the parallels between our artistic and scientific approaches
The role of aesthetics and beauty
The contrasts of soft/hard, organic/geometric shapes and processes
Our exploration so far We kept our methodology open and fluid to enable us to follow research strands that felt most relevant and rich. We have been walking, sitting and spending time immersed in the landscape of the West Somerset coast, foraging for pigments, stories, data, visual and sensory resources.
We also spend time immersed in each other’s professional worlds.
Our exploration so far We kept our methodology open and fluid to enable us to follow research strands that feltmost relevant and rich. We have been walking, sitting and spending time immersed in the landscape of the West Somerset coast, foraging for pigments, stories, data, visual and sensory resources.
We also spend time immersed in each other’s professional worlds. in the lab at the University of Bristol pouring over papers, maps and microscope imagery:
and in Sara’s studio processing the earth pigments and exploring the visual information, earth samples and other resources gathered from our site visits:
Taking as his starting-point the dead girl in Rain Johnson’s 2005 film Brick and the subjects of any number of Victorian paintings – from Ophelia and Arthurian maidens through to G. F. Watt’s Found Drowned – Burnside suggests that such figures are best seen as allegories for a male ‘soul-self’ that is seen as a girl ‘because a seeming girlishness’ is what boys appear ‘to give up in order to be a man’. Like much of the book in which this appears – I Put a Spell on You: Several Digressions on Love andGlamour – what Burnside has to say in On Lost Girl Syndrome is not about the lost girl at all, or not in any literal sense, but about the problem boys have growing into full manhood in a patriarchal society. Burnside’s preoccupation with this was already present in 1988, the year The Hoop, his first volume of poems, was published. There, in the poem Psyche-Life, he speculates that ‘the soul’ may be a woman or, perhaps, a ‘dialect … of a common tongue’. A poem then that can be read as a prelude to On Lost Girl Syndrome.
My attraction to what Burnside is exploring registered a while back, although I did not really understand it. It appeared in connection with the image of the young Greek girls who, dedicated to Artemis, were called “little bears”. They took part in a ritual dance that’s described by Paula Meehan in one of the lectures in her Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them (2016). I first came across this years back in a short essay by the cultural anthropologist Károly Kerény dedicated to his nine-year-old daughter and called A mythological Image of Girlhood. At the it caught my attention as something psychically resonant, but nothing more.
Then, back on October 24th, 2022, I posted the last of Twenty-two Postcards for Utopias Bach on this blog. There I wrote that a momentary sighting in Alston had:
‘answered my question about the “grounding” of all Artemis stands for. A willowy tomboy in cut-off jeans and sweatshirt, maybe eight or ten, appeared from the back of a beaten-up old Landrover. She radiated an absolute self-possession that seemed all of a piece with her make-shift bow – a flexed wand of wood bent taut by its string – that was slung across her shoulder. She then half strode, half danced towards the Co-Op, followed at a respectful distance by her father and younger brother. All three disappeared inside and I saw no more of them’.
That sighting might best be described as giving me an elusive sense of another way of being, of an as yet “untamed”, intimate knowing of the world. One that I believe is related to what is called in Irish an saol eile (literally “the other life”). It’s this quality that, for me, links the epiphany of that sighting to John Burnside’s chapter.
The images below relate in various ways to these thoughts.
I am fascinated by the possibilities of artist’s books. I’ve made a few and at one stage set up a little publishing enterprise called Wild Conversations Press. (It faded away because I have no business sense whatsoever). More recently, I’ve used this website to “publish” what I would once have turned into some form of artist’s book. Although doing this is simpler than paper-based publishing, costs readers nothing, and is almost certainly better for the environment, I do miss the physical qualities of a book I can hold in my hands.
A while back I read the American poet and environmental writer Barbara Hurd’s Listening to the Savage: River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies (2016) and was intrigued by her including short phrases she had heard her granddaughter Samantha say. They sounded like lines from poems. Two summers ago, re-reading the book, I noted down some of those phrases and then used them as a starting point for making a series of small images, most of which were not finished until this summer and some of which have been abandoned. Here are some that I’ve kept.
I ended the first part of this piece by summarising my argument in terms of needing to better understand, and then to resist, the “Strict Father’ framing mentality in connection with silly generalisations that distort the complexities of necessary debate. I then suggested that engaging with poetry may be one way to help ourselves do that. Here I want to take up that notion.
Back in 1995 Simon Schama reminded his readers that: ‘to take the many and several ills of the environment seriously does not … require that we trade in our cultural legacy or its posterity’ (1995: p.18). Consequently I’ll start with a relevant aspect of that cultural legacy, the standard claim made against poetry by political activists: namely that it changes nothing. Those making this claim often support it by referencing the second section of W.H. Auden’s poem In Memory of W. B. Yeats (d. Jan. 1939),which includes the line: ‘… poetry makes nothing happen…’ (An argument that ignores what Auden wrote in the poem that follows it – In Memory of Ernst Toller (d. May 1939) – which is that: ‘We are lived by powers we pretend to understand’. But that, I think, is perhaps a separate issue).
In Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them (2016)Paula Meehan, a poet deeply concerned about both environmental and social issues, takes up what is said ‘about the failure of poets in the face of politics’. She argues that if, as Auden claims, ‘poetry makes nothing happen, maybe it stops something happening, stops time, takes our breath away…Maybe it’s like the negative space in a painting by which what is there is revealed, to be apprehended by human consciousness’ (p.19). I fear that increasing our capacity for wonder in the face of what is, however, is not going to cut much ice with those for whom only the actions about which they are passionate, only literally “making something happen”, counts as worthwhile.
Another poet, John Burnside, who was also passionately concerned with environmental issues, takes up the question of Auden’s claim in rather more detail. In The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century (2021) he points out that those in the English-speaking world who are happiest with seeing poetry as ‘marginal and ineffective’ dismiss it on the basis of ‘a fundamental misunderstanding of how poetry actually works, both on the individual imagination and in the social sphere’ (pp. 18-19). Burnside pointing out just how naïve it is to think that a poem, or a whole life-time writing poetry, could ‘change the world’. Rather, he insists, what poetry actually ‘does, first, is to survive… actively, on its own terms’. It is, he goes on to claim, ‘a way of being, a provider of context, an independent, non-oppositional, entirely autonomous state’. However, by that he does not mean that it has no communal role. Rather he sees it as a discipline, for both writer and reader; one that heightens attention to the world. He goes on: ‘This act of paying due attention is in itself a political act, for it enhances both our appreciative and our critical abilities, which are key to defining a position in a societal sphere in which both these faculties are currently at risk’ (pp.23-25). It’s at this point that I think his argument both aligns with Rebecca Solnit’s musings on the Left’s reaction against aesthetics and throws light on what I suspect is Monbiot’s real motive for making his silly claim about poetry.
It’s also the case, as Burnside goes on to point out, that what he argues about poetry applies equally to the literature and the humanities as ways of resisting what Jonathan Franzen calls ‘cultural totalitarianism’. I would want to add the visual arts to his list, although it’s of course often difficult to maintain his argument in relation to the visual; arts in the face of their increasing commercialisation and trivialisation by the pressures exerted by the “culture industry” and its various State-funded instruments. An industry hell-bent on merging the more “popular” aspects of the arts with commercial entertainment, while maintaining the supposedly “high” or “difficult” arts as fodder for forms of conspicuous consumption and elite posturing (much like “high” fashion). A world documented, if one’s willing to do some reading between the lines, in a book like Sarah Thornton’s 33 Artists in 3 Acts (2014). But all this leads into another whole line of thought, one that I’m not comfortable tackling but that, if I can get through and digest Justin O’Connor’s Culture Is Not An Industry: reclaiming art and culture for the common good (2024), I may feel obliged to return to.
Sometimes it’s a small thing that snags my attention and, like a thorn caught under the skin, it then has to be slowly worked out into the light of day.
Caroline Lucas begins the sixth chapter of Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story (2024), entitled ‘English Nature’, by quoting George Monbiot’s pronouncement, in Regenesis (2022)that: ‘One of the greatest threats to life on Earth is poetry’. For any number of reasons, not least because reading poetry helped me get through lockdown and because I choose to coordinate a small poetry-reading group that includes people who write poetry, that pronouncement struck me first as really silly and then as actually potentially dangerous.
One way of introducing what I want to set out in this essay is to suggest a major problem we now face is precisely the use of this type of silly, unqualified, “click-bait” generalisation, a habit that trivialises and so can seriously distort, very necessary debates about important issues, including about environmental issues that may well turn out to be matters of life and death.
I understand that, as a campaigning newspaper journalist who must produce regular copy, Monbiot needs to cultivate habits that enable him to hold the attention of readers and that one way of doing that, given his pitch, is to keep identifying and condemning new “greatest threats to life on Earth”. It was not unreasonable that, after Lula’s victory in the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, for example, he should have tweeted: “Bolsonaro was a threat not only to the lives of Brazilians, but to life on Earth.” I certainly wouldn’t quarrel with the basic sentiment behind that statement. However, as a particular individual politician Bolsonaro was one of a number of self-serving right-wing demagogues like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage; individuals who gain power and/or influence by divisively capitalising on people’s fears, prejudices and unreal desires. “Poetry”, on the other hand, is not of any one particular type, orientation, or set of qualities, not least because it’s been part of human expression across much of the world for several thousand years. (The first poems we know about, written by a woman named Enheduana who lived in what is now called Iraq around 2300 BCE, depict, for example, a world frighteningly subject to change, conflict, chaos, and contradiction beyond human control).
For Monbiot to make such a silly blanket generalisation about poetry, and for Lucas to repeat it, seems to me indicative of something more than just the use of a lazily provocative generalisation. What worries me is that, as a rhetorical habit, these are a milder variation on the kinds of generalised provocations used by Bolsonaro, Trump, Farage, and their kind. The same kind of generalisation, in the last analysis, as Trump’s absurd claim that all Mexicans are: “drug dealers, criminals, and rapists”.
To be fair to Lucas, she doesn’t simply take Monbiot’s claim as given. She goes on to modify its sentiment so as to criticise what she sees as the effect of the ‘strong elegiac theme running through much of the literature of the English countryside, a mood of loss, mourning what has gone instead of fighting to protect what is left’ (p. 154). Again, I can’t really quarrel with the sentiment behind that view. However, the index of Lucas’ book lists ten references to the nineteenth-century poet John Clare, whose work she claims to admire as reflecting the insights of an ‘agricultural labourer with an intimate knowledge of the realities of rural life’ (p. 129). So how does she square her admiration for the poetry of John Clare with Monbiot’s characterisation of poetry as “one of the greatest threats to life on Earth”? I don’t believe she can, in which case it’s plain silly to use that click-bait quotation.
In an interview with Monbiot in Green European Journal, December 2022 the interviewer raises Monbiot’s generalisation about poetry: ‘you mean that our societies are clinging to a “ridiculous fantasy” of country life [which I presume is a phrase quoted from Monbiot], including the beauties of sheep and cattle herding’. To which Monbiot responds: ‘We have a real problem here that our perception of food policy is very dominated by aesthetics, by poetry, by pictures’. I don’t doubt that many people in the UK have a misplaced perception of the countryside, in no small part the result of a host of complicated historical and cultural factors. These include the war-time propaganda based on an ideal English rurality absorbed by my grandparents’ and parents’ generation, the way literature is traditionally taught in British schools, children’s books and, yes, the aesthetics of photographs, paintings, films, television, and advertising. But to simply dismiss the resulting perceptions as a “ridiculous fantasy” seems to me, at best, wildly patronising and, at worst and in terms of the psychosocial changes we urgently need to make, not just unhelpful but profoundly counter-productive. One question this begs, however, is just who do Monbiot and Lucas take to be their readers?
I suppose, as a lifetime member of the Green Party, I am one type of person they can reasonably expect to read what they write. My commitment to the Greens means that I understand and support both a good many of the changes they call for and, as it happens, share Lucas’ distrust of traditional elegiac pastoral themes. But that doesn’t mean I’m ready to accept silly, and ultimately dangerous, blanket generalisations. And I very much doubt I’m alone in this.
My view of Monbiot’s claim that “we” (?) have a serious problem in that “our” ‘perception of food policy’ is ‘dominated by aesthetics, by poetry, by pictures’, is that it’s underlying reductivism and negativity is informed by an attitude what Rebecca Solnit long ago identified in As Eve Said To The Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art (2001). It’s a book I constantly return to because, as its title suggests (and like her earlier Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West), her understanding of issues of land and environment is firmly intersectional and inclusive. It’s for that reason that it includes her thoughts on why traditional Leftist thinking often has trouble with aesthetics including, that is, both poetry and beauty.
Solnit argues that Western culture has had a problem with beauty ever since: ‘Thomas Aquinas disposed of it by asserting that the beautiful was the same as the good, which meant that it had no extramoral, no autonomous power at all’. This view was reinforced by the medieval notion that beauty ‘is mutable and therefore false’ (p. 83). These medieval notions connect in a number of ways to Monbiot‘s generalisation about poetry. One is suggested by Solnit’s understanding that those on ‘the Left would like to deny beauty as a motivating force altogether’ because they want to ‘deny the power of form and embrace content alone – as though the two were separable’. Like medieval moralists, many on the traditional Left seem to link formal beauty in the arts ‘with a corrupt seductiveness’ that might gain ‘power over us rather than we over it’. And here she goes on to identify what I take to be a fundamental issue. Many on the traditional Left enlist science and reason against what they see as the reactionary, emotional, irrationalism of Right-wing demagogies. They want not only ‘to reside in the rational space of the head’, but to weaponise an authoritarian view of reason itself. That inevitably opens them up to the implicit fear that to ‘be seduced’ by art ‘is to be reminded that there are things stronger than reason, than agenda’. A fear that haunts those on the Left animated by a vision of power where ‘authority is the desire to have the last word, to close the conversation’ (pp. 83-84). It’s on this basis that I think we should understand Monbiot’s hostility to poetry. That hostility would then be, at root, a fearful response to the fact that aesthetics, poetry, pictures, etc. have the power, in Solnit’s words, to keep the conversation open, to encourage us, where necessary, to ‘start all over again and again’ (p. 84). Poetry can be, in short, a challenge to the notion of “scientific” reason as a guarantee of authority.
Monbiot claims to have read over 5,000 scientific papers before writing Regenesis. I can’t help thinking it’s a pity he’s not also read more widely. For example, Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory (1995) might have helped him understand something of the historical complexities and paradoxes that inevitably underpin environmental debates. It might even have helped him to have read more widely in the scientific literature. Of particular relevance here would be the work of the cognitive scientist and linguist George Lakoff. Lakoff is author of More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (1989) – written with Mark Turner ‘in the service of helping the study of poetry function to promote ethical, social and personal awareness’ (p. 214); The Political Mind (2008), which explores how underlying “framings” influence political debate, and the paper ‘Why it Matters How We Frame the Environment’ (2010). Unlike Monbiot Lakoff, a Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, understands that poets are craftspeople who ‘use basically the same tools we use’ when we speak or write, in particular in their use of metaphor as a form of thought that is ‘indispensable not only to our imagination but also to our reason’. He argues that poets, by using ‘capacities we all share’, are able to ‘illuminate our experience, explore the consequences of our beliefs, challenge the ways we think, and criticise our ideologies’ (1989: p. xi). The value of Lakoff’s work to a journalist or politician turned author would be, at the very least, that it demonstrate why progressive political arguments based on “objective”, “scientific” reasoning are simply not sufficient to change peoples’ minds. But I suspect, having read Lakoff, that Monbiot is too wedded to his belief in the absolute, “scientific” rightness of his own standpoint to genuinely listen to anyone who would challenge or critique his views.
I won’t attempt to summarise the many-stranded argument of The Political Mind here. What I can say is that my concern about Monbiot’s underlying attitude is that while he argues for what he sees as environmentally-sound social and political actions, he all-too-often does so using a rhetoric framed by what Lakoff calls the values of ‘The Strict Father Model’. There’s often nothing wrong, other than his over-emphatic emphasis, with the scientific content of Monbiot’s writing. My problem with it is that his rhetorical assumption of moral righteousness and unwavering belief in his own ability to identify the real sources of evil – anything from Welsh sheep to all the other “greatest threats to life on Earth” he’s named over the years. Underlying assumptions and a self-belief that belong to a mindset grounded in a strict, patriarchal, religious morality that can easily shade into totalitarianism.
As Simon Schama reminds us, writing about the management of woodland under the Third Reich, it’s ‘painful to acknowledge how ecologically conscientious’, and how heavily committed to conservation of the natural environment more generally, the Nazi regime actually was (p. 119). My point being that an absolute commitment to radical Green values is not incompatible with a totalitarian mentality. As Schama points out, the militant wing of Green politics struggles with ‘the normal processes of representative democracy’ because it sees its cause as ‘a revolutionary contestation with bourgeois capitalism for the fate of the earth’ and, in consequence, craves ‘the authority to impose salutary solutions’ for what it presents, not unreasonably as ‘a crisis of paramount importance’ (p. 119). My concern is that, if we care about the fate of the earth and are to find some way to address the “wicked problems” we now face, we will need to find ways of arguing our case that avoids a tacit endorsement of authoritarian attitudes, the greenwash of bourgeois capitalism, and the blind denial of environmental realities adopted by Right-wing demagogues.
To do that we’ll need to be clear that the strict, ultimately authoritarian, paternalism that in different ways frames both radical authoritarianism and right-wing demagogy is best contested by fostering a progressive Green ‘politics of empathy’ predicated on ‘protection, empowerment, and community’ (Lakoff, 2008: p.81). Lakoff argues that narratives ‘are brain structures that we can live out, recognise in others, and imagine, because the same brain structures are used for all three kinds of experience’ (p.93). If an individual or group constructs a self-identity based on internalising the Strict Father Model, he or they are unlikely to listen to, or empathise with, the narratives that are of vital importance to others because, like the Strict Father, they will be convinced that they know best. The result is then likely to be first withdrawal from debate and, ultimately, violent confrontation.
In Monbiot’s case, his insistence that he can and must argue so as to ‘close the conversation’ is underpinned by his belief that his arguments contain the scientific content makes his case incontestable. What this insistence has meant is that, when he tries to put his ideas into practice in contexts where others frame the values of landscape and memory differently, things inevitably go wrong. This happened with his attempts to substantially “re-wild” the Welsh uplands. (See my posts on this blog from 08.03 2022). The problem of a rhetoric based in an unacknowledged “Strict Father” framing, and in particular its implications for any hope of achieving real change, are at the heart of what lies behind my concern about Monbiot’s silly generalisation about poetry.
Of course I fully acknowledge that, for Monbiot and for those Greens for whom he can do no wrong, all this will be an irrelevance, a distraction from winning the argument set out in Regenesis. That being the case, it’s important to add that none of what I have written above means that I dispute the broader trajectory of that argument – namely that we need to radically change how our food is produced. Rather, my concern is that Monbiot’s argument is undermined by underlying assumptions about himself and others, including his contempt for those whose view of country life he dismisses as a “ridiculous fantasy”. That it’s possible to propose alternative routes towards similar ends to Monbiot’s, but without evoking contempt for the historical situation of ordinary people or their attitudes, is suggested by a book like Colin Tudge’s Six Steps Back to the Land (2016).
In short, my argument here boils down to our needing to better understand, and then to resist, evocations of the “Strict Father’ framing mentality, whether we encounter them in the generalisations of a “man of the Left” like Monbiot or of the Right-wing demagogies he quite rightly criticises. Engaging with poetry is, in my view, just one way in which we can help ourselves do both those things. The “how and why” of that claim is the subject of the second part of this essay.
A week ago, when the effects of racist riots were felt all over Britain, I had an online conversation with Mohamud Mumin, a co-founder and artistic director at Soomaal House of Art, who is also an artist working in photography. We had been introduced virtually by an old friend of mine, Prof. Christine Baeumler at the University of Minnesota, who had suggested that Mohamud get in touch with me to talk about our shared interests in place-based initiatives and deep mapping as positive forms of place-making. Forms that have the potential to strengthen links between communities, rather than generate the kinds of division that were all over the media – here and in relation to the presidential elections in the USA.
I remember noticing a large number of Somalis when I visited Minneapolis St. Pauls some fifteen years ago, but did not know then that the city has the largest Somali diaspora population outside Africa. I learned from taking with Mohamud a little about the ways in which he and others at Soomaal House which, as an organisation, has been built up from scratch, are fostering creative expression and cultural understanding within the Minnesotan East African community.
I find the degree to which various crude and reductive nationalisms allied to racism have been used to generate a rhetoric of hatred in across Europe, in the USA, the Middle East, India and elsewhere using lies and distortions to feed prejudice, deeply depressing. So it was very cheering to find positive common ground and shared values with Mohamud, who is dedicating his time and energy to encourage, support and educate for a broader, deeper perspective on the world, one that unites rather than divides.
One of the things that cultural work at its best provides is ways of “translating” thoughts and feelings grounded in very different mentalities. This in turn can help us address what Paul Ricoeur calls: ‘the danger of incommunicability through … protective withdrawal’. A withdrawal that results from refusing to look beyond internalised and fixed attitudes embedded in a given mentality. Shared cultural work and enquiry can give us the ability and willingness to translate and mediate, through creative conversations, between distinct mentalities that are deeply entangled with heritages, both our own and those of others. This relates to the first of Paul Ricoeur’s three models ‘for the integration of identity and alterity’, namely ‘the model of translation’. Also to George Steiner’s observation that translation is central to both culture and consciousness. A view that leads him to argue that, without translation, ‘we would live in arrogant parishes bordered by silence’. This is one significant reason why we need to see the activities we categorise as “the arts” not as the “product” of a “culture industry”, but rather as one vital way in which we can help to cultivate what Ricoeur calls ‘a translational ethos’. An ethos that is central to any society that aspires to being a genuine democracy and one that we need to do all we can to promote.
‘Why do they come to us, the animals? What do they want, inhabiting our dreams’?
James Hillman (in James Hillman & Margot McLean Dream Animals San Francisco, Chronical Books 1997, p. 13).
Ken Kiff Acceptance
Gerhard Richter has claimed that nature is always against us, knows no meaning, pity, or sympathy, because it is absolutely mindless so the antithesis of the human. That Richter’s claim that nature is “mindlessness” now appears somewhat over-simplistic, as the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn has amply demonstrated, is ultimately secondary here. I reference it because it duplicates the mindset of the Western status quo as predicated on assumptions that the Enlightenment inherited from Christianity. These assumptions include the presupposition that nature is lower than and opposed to, human culture; something to transcend, conquer, tame, or exploite. As already indicated, a significant aspect of Kiff’s work lies in his rejection of such assumptions in favour of an inclusive sense of inter related wholeness.
Kiff much admired Sienese painting so will have known Sassetta’s Wolf of Gubbio in the National Gallery in London, an image in which St. Francis takes the wolf’s paw so as to ratify an agreement negotiated on behalf of the townspeople of Gubbio. This visual evocation of a contractual parity between a human and animal is, to my knowledge, unique in Western iconography. As such, it points directly to the quiet, but profoundly radical, nature of Kiff’s painting Acceptance and the images related to it. However, while the topic of The Wolf of Gubbio is significant here, the strict division between urban and natural space in Sassetta’s painting is the antithesis of the unified space in Acceptance. Given his interest in Indian art, it is possible that Kiff also recalled any number of ragamala paintings, many of which depict empathetic face-to-face meetings between a single person and one or more animals – deer, birds, a snake, a bull, etc. If so, these may have influenced his development, over a decade, of the cluster of paintings evoking such meetings that includes Acceptance, given that they show striking similarities of format, simplification, colour and imaginative tenor. (I have in mind works like the Basohli ragamala painting Pancham Raga, c. 1690-1695, reproduced in W.G. Archer’s Indian Paintings from the Punjab Hills 1973, 28, no. 14 (ii). Archer had been Keeper of the Indian Section, Victoria and Albert Museum, London and this work was formally in his private collection).
Ken Kiff Elements with salamander (Sequence 43)
Acceptance, begun in 1967 and extensively reworked between 1975-8, occupies a pivotal place in Kiff’s work, not least because of its emphatic title. (Kiff’s normal practice was simply to name the entities that form a work’s topic). Acceptance is one of six works begun in 1965 on square boards primed with heavy gesso. In two others, a naked man also communes with a non-human being (a salamander and a fish respectively). Acceptance reworks and simplifies the topic of the earlier Elements with Salamander (S. 43), probably begun in 1972, with its salamander’s inter-elemental associations (they are traditionally associated with fire), and its emergence from water onto land and into air. Kiff also further develops the dominant yellow of the earlier work into an all-embracing, glowing yellow field, which is only qualified in the tree and the small area where the blue of the pool moves through a transitional green that runs through the head and shoulders of the emergent lizard.
Ken Kiff Man and salamander
To understand what is implied by the title Acceptance, we must reference Kiff’s other works that evoke meetings between humans and animals. These include Pink Man and Green Lizard, 1966-70, and Man and Fish, 1968-70 in the same group, together with numerous significant Sequence images.Ubu, Salamander and symbol (S. 134), probably started around the same time as Acceptance was reworked, reconfigures the meeting in the earlier Elements with Salamander (S. 43), where the relationship between the figures is more tentative. The pensive figure in the earlier work is replacing by Alfred Jarry’s anti-hero Ubu, dressed as a portly English gentleman who tentatively reaches out towards a salamander that looks back at him as it walks away on its hind legs. The predominately yellow palette of the earlier work is now restricted to the hill behind Ubu, emphasising the contrast between the figure and the salamander. The inclusion of Ubu – a figure known for his infantile engagement with the world – has today taken on an additional resonance. We might remember, for example, that the UK establishment spends many billions of pounds a year subsidising a fossil fuel industry directly linked both to human deaths from air pollution and to conflict and ecocide across the globe.
Ken Kiff Ubu, Salamander and symbol (Sequence 134)
The salamander or lizard that reoccurs in many of Kiff’s works from this period also plays an important role in Bonnefoy’s series of poems Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve, suggesting possible ways of reading its recurrence in Kiff’s work. John Naughton draws particular attention to Lieu de la salamandre in his exploration of Bonnefoy’s concern with ‘incarnation’, the state of being he links to moments of: ‘epiphany and oneness’ when we may become conscious of an intuition of the co-existence of the eternal and the here-and-now. This may be as close as we can get to describing the overall mood of Acceptance and related paintings.
Man in desert (Sequence 119)
This does not, of course, limit the many different resonances that attach to the loose cluster of paintings that includes Acceptance. Man in desert (S. 119), begun the same year Kiff resumed work on Acceptance, is a powerful articulation of his view of human/animal relationships. The painting freely reworks the traditional Christian iconography of St Jerome with a lion in the desert, and is indicative of Kiff’s radical unsettling and reconfiguration of traditional presuppositions. Man in desert reverses the traditional Christian presuppositions of the Great Chain of Being, the hierarchy descending down from God, through the angels, to man, down through woman, to the natural world, concepts that would inform Western culture’s belief in its own exceptionalism, in the superiority of humans over animals, and in various gender differences. The iconography of Kiff’s image directly questions the hierarchical distinction between human saint and lion. Here the lion is powerfully self-composed while the saint, who has acquired the head of a donkey, appears ill at ease as he lifts his eyes from his book, perhaps to contemplate the Miro-like twined signs that float above. Saint and lion are linked by a sweep of blue (a river or stream?) which, in its colour, echoes the crescent form in the abstract configuration above (the “elements” named in Sequence 43).
In conversation Kiff referred to this Miro-like configuration as “the parallelogram and spike”. Although I pressed him on a number of occasions about its specific significance, his response was always ambivalent. He seems to have had two distinct lines of thoughts regarding this configuration. One related to earth, air, fire and water. The other to the material, the elements, from which a painting is made; literally the flat rectangle support, but also brushstrokes, colour, intervals between forms and their echoes, each of the basic aspects of what a painting does. These, then, along with what these evoke in the world. He added that he thought of these elements as a chemist or physicist might, and sometimes thought of them as ‘molecules’. While I understand the reasons for Kiff’s ambivalence, I also think it’s possible to suggest more about the function of the parallelogram and spike in his images, together with its relevance to the cluster of works in which it appears, many of them related to Acceptance.
Ken Kiff Sun-moon and flower (watercolour)
Elements with Salamander (Sequence no. 43) marks the first appearance of the parallelogram and spike and, unusually, names it as “elements”. The configuration subsequently appears with some variations throughout Kiff’s work, in each case relating to the image as a whole in ways analogous to the placing of figures of Saints or the Virgin in the vernacular art of Catholic retablos. As such, it evokes a sense of another, nameless but perhaps numinous, dimension to the image – one that is, however, without a prior, given, meaning but perhaps analogous to the pairing of yin and yang, the opposing yet complementary forces of Daoism. Any such identification must, however, remain provisional since, in the watercolour Sun-Moon and flower (1997), the title identifies the parallelogram and spike with the sun and moon. I would argue however that the Daoist analogy is not incompatible with Kiff’s inflection of his ‘elements’ as ‘molecules’. The writer Jeremy Lent supports this when he reminds us that Song dynasty Chinese thinkers rejected all notions of transcendent meaning in favour of seeing it as intrinsic to the world all about them. He also notes that their philosophy both remains relevant today and that it shows a remarkable correspondence with findings in contemporary systems and complexity science. There is insufficient space here to pursue the parallels between this claim and the concerns Kiff shares with Bonnefoy. However, I hope their potential is sufficiently clear to encourage any interested reader to explore them further if they so wish.
In this and the previous section I have touched on synergies between Kiff’s work and Bonnefoy’s concern with the world in its concrete appearing. For Bonnefoy language breaks up the evidence of the world by extracting it from the place of its being, arguing that when we stop reading any text, we of necessity ‘become painters’ because, in the moment we raise our eyes from the text to see the world in its concrete visibility. (A movement that might also be linked back to discussion of Kiff’s images’ in relation to dinnsheanchas). A world of hope and despair, life and death, love and loneliness, because the true painter accepts the world as it is, greets it, opens her or his painting to light and colour, to all the phenomena of the real, which then enter the painting from the world beyond the painting, and in the process make visible how they have entred so that work and world coexist in a constant dialogue and exchange.
It is here that, perhaps, we approach a fuller sense of what works like Acceptance evoke. That Kiff regarded this act – of raising of our eyes from the page (whether written or drawn on) so as to see the world in its concrete visibility – as vitally important is, I think, implicit not only in Man in desert (S. 119), but in images such as Energies (S. 46), Unlikely Angel (S. 67), Typing in the garden (S. 93), Writing (S. 97) and, perhaps most explicitly, in the large pastel Tree with black trunk and person reading (1990). While Bonnefoy identifies this “seeing the world in its concrete visibility” with the work of the painter, I suggest that in terms of a current reading of Kiff’s work, we need to take this thought a little further.
Ken Kiff Tree with black trunk and person reading (pastel)
Another Modernity?
In this essay I have tried to show how Ken Kiff departed from the mentality underpinning the post-1955 orthodoxies of Modernist visual culture by creating an expanded realism that evokes the process of rediscovering, reclaiming, and bringing into being a new wholeness, one inclusive of both the life inside and outside a self grounded in relationality. I have also indicated how this relates to his sense of the Feminine and, drawing on Martha Kapos, to love. Arguably, then, his work belongs to quite another sense of modernity; one that might in part be identified with the Nobel-winning poet Octavio Paz’s notion of a place where all time, whether past or future, real or imaginary, becomes pure presence and who, in his linking of the present to presence, exactly echoes Yves Bonnefoy’s understanding of incarnation. But only if, along with the poets John Burnside and Randall Jarrell, that sense of presence is seen as inseparable from ‘the dailiness of life’.
If Kiff is to be considered some kind of visionary, this is surely the nature of his vision. Norbert Lynton, Kiff’s long-time critical supporter and friend, observed that: ‘He knew a lot and knew more profoundly than most, for the simple reason that he cared immeasurably. This dual activity, caring through his work and caring through attention, was central to him’. (Thinking about Ken’ in Andrew Lambirth Ken Kiff London, Thames and Hudson 2001, p.8).
This suggests that, for Kiff, making art was never simply a professional activity, but part of a larger caring in which aesthetic concerns were a means, not an end. A way of understanding his relationship to the world at large that is comparable, in a strictly this-worldly, incarnate sense, to that of a traditional icon painter. If that is the case, Lynton’s reference to Kiff’s immeasurable care, which we might also call love understood as agape, begs the question: care or love for, and attention to, who or what? A question that extends the one implicit in Jeremy Deller’s claim that all good artists are socially engaged.
Kiff’s images articulate a concern for the innumerable internal conflicted, and shifting desires, ideals and interests of human beings in all their complexity; for qualities that, if properly understood and respected, wholly undermine the stereotypical binary of “Us” and “Them” fundamental to current exploitation, inequality and injustice globally. Through making such images, Kiff engaged with processes that permeate all areas of human life in a variety of forms and shapes that cannot be conceptually delimited. They can be visualised, however, as a net of connected relations spreading in all directions without any set trajectory. This echoes those human processes that change as we come use, interpret, reuse and understand them, the processes I suggest The Sequence was intended to evoke. Far from simply painting his own idiosyncratic nightmares, as John Hoyland claimed he did, Kiff was in fact contesting the presuppositions that, as we are now coming to understand, link the climate crisis to a crisis of culture, and finally of imagination; the same understanding that underwrites Amitav Ghosh’s analysis of the roots of the Great Derangement, the consequences of which derangement we are now increasingly suffering.
Kiff’s art evokes what is overlooked or repressed by those with most to gain from maintaining a politics and economics underpinned by possessive individualism, while obscuring their own complicity in that Great Derangement. Their continuation of a modernity that repurposed, rather than broke with, previously religiously sanctioned exceptionalism and hierarchy. The deeply embedded hierarchies of value and entitlement encoded in, and so ultimately reinforced by, much of the West’s visual art. A visual tradition that Kiff, in the spirit of early modern painting, worked to refigure and revalue through a radical visual polysémie that was also open to the cultural values that underwrite the visual traditions of the Indian sub-continent and China. In doing so, he perhaps anticipated Bruno Latour’s insistence that what really counts today, when we must face the possibility of the collapse of our psychic, social and natural ecologies, is to understanding whether we can ‘managing to register, to maintain, to cherish a maximum number of alternative ways of belonging to the world’. (Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Cambridge, Polity Press 2018, 93-95 & 16.
This is, surely, as good a way as any to understand the immeasurable sense of care that animates Kiff’s work?
Ken Kiff Green hill
Coda
I started writing the original essay from which this version is derived in less troubled times. Revisiting it now, during deepening social unease shading into fear and worsening environmental decline, has at times led me to doubt the value of doing this. Against that background I have to set Ken Kiff’s dedication, not only to his own work but to a belief in the value and benefit of the free exercise of an attentive and inclusive imagination as a fundamental human necessity. There is also my sense that life, and perhaps the human world itself, would be impossibly diminished without the many and various arts that help us attend to, value, and so learn to genuinely care for, the world. That remind us that there are values iother than those of the economic bottom line, naked self-interest, lust for power over others, and so on.
Sitting quietly with the reproduction of Ken Kiff‘s Green hill, with its tiny figure going down into a darkness that is also a route to what nourishes the natural world, and with the memory of the vastness of the hill above, is somehow a confirmation that, however difficult the times, it is possible to find a sense of necessary continuity, of the need for care for those who will, hopefully, come after us.
The Sequence, images forFolk Tales of the British Isles, and others reconsidered.
Ken Kiff Cottage in a field (Sequence 106)
The Sequence, begun in 1971 and still incomplete at Kiff’s death in 2001, consists of almost two hundred loosely cross-related images. A highly unusual body of work for which there are no close parallels, it sits right at the heart of his achievement as an artist. It has been written about in some detail by Norbert Lynton, Martha Kapos, Ken Kiff and myself in Ken Kiff’s Sequence, published in 1999, and subsequently by various other writers (largely in passing) but also, more recently, in considerable detail by Emma Hall. Because of the volume of images it contains, along with the scope of its subject-matter, The Sequence is not an easy work to discuss. Kiff himself spoke of it primarily in musical terms. I sense, however, that there was a certain defensiveness in this choice, perhaps a consequence of the unusual nature of its underlying topics and the largely uncomprehending or dismissive critical reception of his work when The Sequence was begun. With hindsight, and in addition to the important musical aspect of the work, I would now suggest that Kiff may also have had in mind a number of possible visual models. Given his interests, these might well have included early Sienese predella panels, Galway Kinnell’s 1968 translation of Yves Bonnefoy’s long poem Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve, and examples of the tradition in the Indian subcontinent of artists making series of musically-themed miniatures known as Ragamala paintings. It’s important to note however that Kiff himself, when speaking with the artist Wynn Jones, referred to The Sequence as his attempting to produce a form of painterly thinking not previously undertaken before.
In the wider cultural context, Kiff is perhaps best understood as a visual thinker whose trajectory, while quite distinct in its form, converges with that of a number of other thinkers. With the work of the poets already mentioned, with Gaston Bachelard, with Paul Ricoeur’s thinking regarding the multiplicities of meaning in metaphor and image, and with the post-Jungian thinker James Hillman, who writes of the soul that it is ‘ceaselessly talking about itself, in ever-recurrent motifs in ever-new variations, like music’. (Re-visioning Psychology New York, Harper Collins 1977, p. xvi.) Hillman is here acknowledging the “polytheistic” or “animistic” consciousness located in multiple figures and persona, rather than in terms of the privileged relationship to the individual ego that characterises the “Expressionist” understanding of art and, indeed, helps underwrite the culture of possessive individualism. The visual thinking set out in The Sequence also parallels Hillman’s understanding that authenticity requires ‘the perpetual dismemberment of being and not-being a self’; the acknowledgement of a mode of being that ‘is always in many parts, like a dream with a full cast’. (Healing Fiction Woodstock, Spring Publications Inc. 1983, p. 39).
Ken Kiff Love and shadow (Sequence 30)
I suggest that this parallel offers perhaps the best way to approach, for example, the status of male figures resembling Kiff himself who appear in many of The Sequence’s images as this figure may relate to the persona of the artist. As a “dreamer” in the sense set out earlier Kiff is, at the very least, both himself-as-the-artist-making-the-work and his ‘double’, one among the many disparate beings that populate The Sequence. Yves Bonnefoy asks, in an essay of the greatest importance to Kiff, who it is that we struggle against in creative work if not our own double? Is it not against the other in us who would have us feel that the world has no meaning, that creative work is irrelevant? Ní Dhomhnaill’s view of the connection between her personal life and what comes down to her ‘through the language and through folklore’ may be also be helpful here. In acknowledging a reciprocity in which the development of the tradition through its personalisation by an individual, and the enrichment of an individual through engaging with the tradition, the maker is distanced from any exclusive focus on the “heroic” ego of possessive individualism and remains, instead, within the living flow of an ever-changing cultural tradition. For Kiff, “tradition” is nothing less than the entire imagery of a Western culture still haunted by the myths of Classicism and Christianity. An imagery in need of being simultaneously extended and re-visioned, in no small part through the artist’s referencing of parallels and possibilities latent in quite other cultures, so as to help free us into a new polysémie better attuned to a more inclusive understanding of a shared world.
Ken Kiff Typing in the garden (Sequence 93)
In this context it is worth identifying something of the range of cultural material referenced in The Sequence. (For reasons of space, I will not touch on Kiff’s use of a wide range of “formal” themes, for example the red/green polarity associated with the late medieval and Renaissance art of northern Europe, which he employs in thevarious portraits in which it is included). The Sequence references Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland, Classical and Biblical imagery, the works of Poussin, Goya, and De Chirico, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu, the poets Rilke, Yeats, and Mayakovsky, the actor W.C. Fields, Greek popular folk puppets, and variations on his own images made to accompany the stories in Folktales of the British Isles. All of which references are woven into evocations of a variety of everyday events such as leaving home, eating, sexual activity, walking in the street, excreting, taking pleasure in the experience of people, animals and objects, the acts of writing and drawing, receiving help or healing, spitting, traveling, reading, aging, being ill and communing with the dead.
I believe that the images Kiff made for Michael Foss’ Folk Tales of the British Isles (1977) are best seen as translations; as invitations to discover the rich, complex and nuanced world inhabited by those in the past whose worldviews differed from our own. If we look at three of these folktale images – No one dared go near the hill, It was surely some man that was in that dog, a soul in trouble and He went through the wood on an old lame white horse (see the three images below) – and compare these to, say, Arthur Rackham’s fairy tale illustrations, we at once see a fundamental difference of approach. While Rackham employs a generic style that, at the level of “language”, homogenises the distinct tones and feelings of different stories, Kiff focuses on “translating” the qualities of each tale as he experiences it by seeking out an appropriate visual equivalent. The artist and writer John Berger’s discussion of ‘true translation’ is useful here.
Berger points out that translation is not a two-way transaction between two languages but is in fact a triangular act, its third point being the experience that animated the text to be translated prior to it being written. Translation, then, is predicated on an empathy that seeks to return to our pre-verbal experience through a study of the original work; one that reaches through to, touches, whatever vision or experience originally prompted that work. That sensing of another’s pre-verbal experience must then be used to ground choices about the language into which the original is to be translated. In this way the translator can persuade that second language to absorb and welcome what is to be articulated. Berger continues, in terms that can be applied directly to Kiff’s images for Folk Tales: that non-verbal languages of signs, behavior and spatial accommodation are related to ‘(rhymes with?)’ ‘a mother tongue’. (See John BergerThe Guardian Review, Saturday 13th December, 2014, p. 17).
To approach Kiff’s Folk Tales images as translations is consistent with his sensing of reality as experienced by an ensembled self, one aware of multiplicity at every level, rather than a reality reduced to fixed concepts or represented through a single, signature style. The Sequence has, perhaps rightly, overshadowed the sixty plus paintings and drawings that Kiff made for Folk Tales (not all of which appeared in the final publication). However, I suggest that making visual “translations” of those tales reinforced Kiff’s ability to transgress modernity’s insistence on an absolute distinction between humans and animals, the living and the dead, between body, psyche and spirit, and so on. In doing so, it facilitated his ability to evoke interactions between “the other world” and the everyday, reinforcing the fluid sense of reality that makes The Sequence a multi-layered collective psychodrama continuously being remade and renewed. (In this respect it might be related to the novels of Madeline Miller, with their remaking of the Homeric world so as to reconfigure its values in ways that can now speak directly to our own most urgent need for deep adaptation). Nor did Kiff’s interest in translating folk topics end with the commission for Folk Tales, as a large later charcoal drawing like The road past the goblin’s house (1991) below demonstrates.
Ken Kiff The road past the goblin’s house (Photo by Angelo Plantamura)
Seen in the way I am suggesting, TheSequence and Folk Tales appear as the two aspects of a single project; with the first relating more to the development of a tradition through its personalisation, and the second to an enrichment of the individual through emersion in manifestations of the cultural psyche evoked by folk material. Taken together, they illuminate a new (or possibly very old) way of exploring the fluid, shifting nature of human identity and the elusive, mercurial, echoing reminders that flow from “the other world”, so as to enlarge and extend our multiple selves in relation to a shared polyverse.
Ken Kiff Orange sky (Sequence 187)
India and TheGoddess paintings
In the summer of 1981, Ken Kiff travelled with his family to the Artist’s Camp established by Vivan Sundaram in Kasauli in northern India. A trip that, while not particularly productive for Kiff in terms of actual work made, nevertheless gained him friends among contemporary Indian artists and considerably extended his knowledge of both contemporary and traditional art in the Indian sub-continent. In September of the following year an exhibition of forty-four Indian artists, including the work of six who Kiff had met in India the previous year, took place at the Royal Academy of Arts. That exhibition strengthened Kiff’s contact with contemporary Indian art since, of those exhibiting, he had already engaged with Arpita Singh, Jagdish Swaminathan, Krishen Khanna, Manu Parekh and Vivan Sundaram at Kasauli.
Goddess-red-green
Commentators have frequently assumed, somewhat to Kiff’s irritation, that his Goddess paintings were the outcome of his Indian trip. This group of paintings and drawings – Goddess in the Street (1982-3), The Feminine as Generous, Frightening and Serene (1982-3), Woman Affecting the Everyday (1983) – certainly have parallels with Goddess images common within Hindu culture. They should be seen, rather, in the context of Kiff’s concern with such numinous female figures since the early 1970s, for example Goddess, attendant and cloak (S. 59), Yellow Woman in Street (c. 1975) and Goddess in Street (Narrow Version) (c. 1980). While Kiff’s red and green goddess painting may very well reference images of Kali or Chinnamasta, it also echoes long-standing concerns in Kiff’s work and, furthermore, was actually painted before he knew he was going to India. (It is possibly influenced by memories of an image in one of W.G. Archer’s many books on Indian art).
Ken Kiff Woman Affecting the Everyday
We should also keep in mind that, within the Western tradition, certain Christian saints have iconographic attributes that may ultimately be traced back to tales of both nurturing and destroying Goddesses that are part of a very old and common root in Indo-European folk culture. For example, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill refers in an essay to St. Catherine, from whose decapitated head milk flowed instead of blood, and to the fact that any number of Irish folktale motifs relate back to a primitive Indo-European unity. The writer on art Andrew Lambert has emphatically refuted the notion that Kiff opportunistically appropriating the imagery of a culture other than his own. I would add to his argument by suggesting that Kiff’s concerns in these paintings flow, like those of Gulammohammed Sheikh in his Kaavad: Travelling Shrine, from a quite proper desire to articulate a meaningful transcultural imaginative synthesis, one able to speak to fundamental shared concerns in our time. While the issue of appropriate is a complex and often thorny one, it is important to recognise that such acts have usually been part of a two-way traffic and have a very long history indeed. For example, the sculpture produced in India by the Gandhara school between the first and sixth century CE happily married Buddhist subjects and Indian iconography with stylistic influences derived from Greek and Roman works.
The initial reception of Kiff’s Goddess works was decidedly mixed. Nicola Jacobs, with whose gallery he exhibited at the time, could not bring herself to like them. Indeed, they have sometimes been read as misogynistic or anti-feminist, a view Kiff emphatically rejected. He wrote to me that:
‘The “goddess” paintings I did: I heard a couple of girls in the gallery in which one was showing say, ‘He must hate women’. It’s the kind of thing which is very distressing. But I’d already asked my wife and daughter, and a number of women, including writers, at least one of them Indian, about these paintings of mine, and every one had said the paintings are pro-feminine’. (Letter to the author, 10th June, 1998).
While this clearly shows both Kiff’s sensitivities and a degree of empathy and support for these works from women viewers, for many viewers they none-the-less remain demanding images.
Perhaps the most “difficult” of this group of images in this respect is Woman Affecting the Everyday (1983), in which the figure is clear menstruating. The background to this image, as the artist’s daughter Anna Kiff has pointed out to me, is Kiff’s knowledge of the Mother Goddess Kamakhya, the ‘Bleeding Goddess’ as a significant focus in Tantric worship, whose temple in Assam is a famous pilgrimage site. In that context menstruation is revered as the ability of a woman to conceive and so as a celebration of this shakti within every woman. A reverence reinforced by the fact that, each June, the nearby Brahmaputra river turns red, which is taken to be an externalisation of the Goddess’ menstruation.
Perhaps understandably enough, Andrew Lambert avoids engaging with the psychosocial resonances of such images, focusing instead on what he sees as Kiff’s concern with the feminine within himself as an artist and on the Goddess as signifying the eruption into the everyday of the unknown’. Martha Kapos, by contrast, confronts their difficulty head-on in a catalogue essay for Kiff’s 1986 Arts Council travelling exhibition. In a detailed analysis of The Feminine as generous, frightening and serene, she acknowledges the relationship with images of the goddess Kali, but focuses on a hard-won melding – of the Indian image’s condensed and paradoxical nature with Kiff’s handling and colour – to articulate extremes of feeling. Through a detailed analysis of that articulation, she argues that the works loosen conventional forms by cutting through the apparent polarities enacted by bringing together senses of extreme vitality on one hand and extreme destructiveness on the other. She goes on to describe how the material aspect of the painting activates an awareness of new possible relationships of meaning that can provide an enhanced sense of reality, a new psychological truth that goes beyond the solely aesthetic in a way she compares to falling in love. Seen this way, this work and its companion pieces may stand as perhaps the most extreme examples of Kiff’s concern to articulate his sense of the Feminine in relation to that of wholeness in the sense of full psychic inclusivity.
Ken Kiff saw the evocation of a sense of inclusivity or wholeness as the central challenge shared by visual art, poetry, and music. Typically, he used a Shakespeare sonnet to discuss the challenge involved in relation to his own work. He notes that the Shakespearean sonnet has: ‘… a syllabic construction but on top of that he overlays rhythms caused by alliteration, and another brought about by the relative force of the words, or by abrupt stops – then he might reverse some of the stresses. Shakespeare is a master because he can hold the basic structure in his subconscious all the time yet do all these other things too’; adding that the poet needs ‘all these structural things moving along’ in his own work, but needs them simultaneously ‘all flowing into one organic thing’. (quoted in Inge ‘2019 Archive interviews with painters: Ken Kiff’). This concern with wholeness as a confluence of multiple, tensioned, yet also closely related, elements becoming ‘one organic thing’ informed his work and was informed in turn by his reading very widely and in particular, according to his daughter Anna, his reading of Chinese philosophy. A philosophy that, unlike the elevation of the spirit/intellect over the bodily that characterises cultures based in the binary religious of the West, recommends a down-to-earth holism predicated on the observation that the heart-mind is nothing without the body and the body is nothing without the heart-mind. A view that can serve here to link Kiff’s search for wholeness with his commitment to a “realism of the psyche”.
A Realism of the Psyche
‘Elusive, mercurial, the unconscious is not a place, not a state, but a dark ironic brother, an echoing sister, reminding’.
James Hillman (On Paranoia Dallas, Spring Publications Inc. 1988, p. 41).
In Flight Out Of Time the Dadaist Hugo Ball writes of the search for new forms with which to depict the actualities of inner experience necessary to social and cultural renewal. A search that, starnge as it may now seem, united groups as apparently disparate as the Dadaists and the Jungian Psychological Club. In the visual arts that search was informed a wide range of aesthetic experiments, including the Orphic Cubism of Kupka, Delauney and Chagall. A key aspect of their experimentation, all-too-often misrepresented by Modernist art historians as the early pursuit of a “pure” abstraction, was in actuality the exploration of the evocative power of colour-as-a-felt-structuring, an approach that emerged in its earliest full form in Chagall’s work during his time in Paris. In an important article from 1985, Martha Kapos uses this element of Chagall’s work to challenge the presuppositions used to validate the re-emergence of figurative painting in exhibitions like Timothy Hyman’s 1979 Narrative Painting (which includes Kiff’s work) and the Royal Academy’s 1981 New Spirit in Painting (which did not).
Ken Kiff On brown
She sees the Neo-expressionist claim to ‘individual expression’ which underwrote not only European Neo-expressionist, Transavantgarde and, in time, much “post-modern” painting, as reactionary in the sense of being predicated on the notion that artists are wholly self-contained and exceptional individuals able to express a unique self-based vision in paint. A notion that, as she points out, entirely fails to acknowledge the larger psychosocial processes that help shape both self and work. She exempts Kiff and Chia from this criticism, however, citing their engagement with Cubism’s potential to both radically reorganise pictorial structures and to liberate colour so as to enable new, more open, forms of figuring reality in all its complexity. Adopting these concerns in turn enable them to challenge the ideological formation and control of given or assumed unities and continuities within both the self and the world by both opposing and transforming conventional presuppositions about representation. This “return” to a genuinely radical re-figuring of the painted image enhanced the poetic polyvalence of painting, allowing it to access new pictorial structures and, as a result, new ways of knowing and envisaging self and world. It is this that enables Kiff not only to break with expectations regarding self and world, but also to alter, expand, and altogether transform them; to undertake, in the phrase Kapos borrows from Chagall, a new ‘realism of the psyche’.
Ken Kiff Head incorporating blue space face towards the street
Kapos’ analysis of Chagall’s use of colour is fundamental to understanding the importance of his paintings to Kiff, but I would also want to stress the relevance of Chagall’s commitment to an inclusive approach to imagery. One that relates to his desire for art as ‘an open invitation to everyman to “look in his own way, interpret what he sees, and how he sees”’. The resulting balancing act, matching Cubism’s radical restructuring of the world with a sense of a common and inclusive reality, seems to me fundamental to Kiff’s approach. One that once again might be related to Ní Dhomhnaill’s concerns as an Irish-language poet with vivifying that language in a post-colonial context.
Or, equally, to the Indian artist Arpita Singh’s shift from non-figurative painting so as to submerge herself in the forms of Bengali folk art in the late 1970s, before moving on to draw together the possibilities she discovered in both types of work. I cite such parallels so as to offer a reminder that Kiff’s psychic realism is, in no small part, an attempt to overcome the alienation produced by the supposedly heroic “progressivism” and the absolutism within Western European and American Modernity; its ultimately authoritarian/colonialist insistence on subordinating all other ways of knowing, including alternatives within its own geo-political region, in an attempt to induce them to serve the reductively monolithic conception of reality that, in turn, serves global capitalism.
Drawing on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Ní Dhomhnaill identifies two interlinked forms of this alienation: a self-distancing from a shared reality and a disassociation from the daily language of interaction in home and community. Taken together these constitute a psychic fault-line all-too-easily denied or glossed over. I believe it was precisely to address this psychic fault-line that Kiff revisited the radical possibilities of early twentieth century painting when looking for the means to reimagine everyday life; possibilities that would enable him to refigure the world in terms of understanding that life as inclusive of both “inside” and “outside” worlds, and from the viewpoint of a multiple self. In so doing he attempted another kind of thinking, one articulated through the visual polysémie necessary to any genuine realism of the psyche. His visual poetics thus enabled him to evoke objects, animals, and human beings in the context of a relational sense of “home” and “community” in ways that parallel the richness and expressive potential that Ní Dhomhnaill draws from the use of her native Irish, over against the psychically-colonising language of English, so as to write a properly contemporary Irish poetry.
Against the grain
Above: Ken Kiff The Selection Committee’s Fear of the Irrational (Sequence 140)
Below: Ken Kiff The Conversation (Sequence 139)
Within his work as a whole, only a few of Kiff’s images – for example The Selection Committee’s fear of the irrational (S. 140) and The Conversation (S. 139) reproduced above – suggest something of his response to the prevailing critical culture within the visual arts in his time. Among other things, a dominant culture contemptuous of the direct articulation of psychic realities as these relate to daily interactions in the home and the community. In turn, the dominant art world culture’s perception of Kiff is all too apparent in the two comments directed at his work discussed below.
In 1980 the art critic Stuart Morgan suggested that: ‘to walk into a room of Ken Kiff paintings is like finding a grown man in tears at a bus stop’. He goes on to claim that, in such circumstances, ‘an excess of fellow feeling, well-meant but sentimental’ follows an initial coldness and distaste that makes it ‘doubly hard to sympathise with the stranger or to truly understand his problems’. He continues: ‘spectators like being permitted to condescend to artists, and Kiff, like the man at the bus stop, gives them every opportunity. They leave in a spirit of emotional largesse, confident that they have discovered a new Chagall or an L.S. Lowry’.
However, Morgan then goes on to identify what he sees as a central problem for reviewers of Kiff’s work such as himself. In doing so, he appears to distance himself from his own, rather convoluted, initial position, perhaps suspecting these may say more about his own personality than they do about Kiff’s work. He goes on to suggest that, while reviewers will ‘concede that Kiff is no naïf’, they will still face the problem that his concerns are not those ‘of any other advanced abstractionist’, since to do otherwise would be to ‘deny the power of his imagery’. Morgan then claims that, because looking for ‘buried narrative is futile’, ‘the rightness of… these works resembles that of a nursery rhyme’. (‘Ken Kiff at Nicola Jacobs’, Artforum April 1980, p. 86).
It is hard to know from his observations whether Morgan does in fact sees Kiff as a sophisticated painter whose work is undercut by a child-like imagery or whether he views Kiff’s work as offering something more positive. After all, a good proportion of nursery rhymes began life either as more or less coded political satires or as “Mother Goose Songs” or “Old Wives’ Tales”; that is as indicative of the traditional understanding of vernacular folklore. All in all, it seems that at best Morgan’s attitude towards Kiff’s work is both itself convoluted and highly coded, suggestive of a critic more anxious to protect his own sense of sophistication than to honestly engage with work that challenges it. Although, in the last analysis the review is possibly less dismissive on a careful re-reading than might initially appear, it remains indicative of the critical reluctance to engage with Kiff on his own terms rather than those of the “advanced abstraction” dominant at the time.
Ken Kiff Dog in the street (Sequence 63)
What I suggest Morgan fails to engae with can be indicated by a brief discussion of Dog in a street (S. 63), a work easily presumed as visualising a scene from a nursery rhyme or children’s story. At first sight the image appears mundane enough – “dog discomforted by over-friendly man”. Kiff’s subtle stylistic shifts clearly question the conventional expectations about the relationship between dog and man. The three-dimensionality of the cringing figure of the large dog, emphasised by black outline drawing, contrasts with the less emphatic figure of the man who appears all of a piece with the wall behind him (and, by implication, with his surroundings more generally). The resulting sense of tension between isolation and belonging puts in question the emotional expectations conventionally attached to encounters between a large dog and a man. The painting suggests what might be called a “dog’s eye view”, one in which, faced with the man’s gesture, the dog is perhaps uncertain as to whether it is being greeted or threatened. This focus on the emotional state of uncertainty of a non-human being is, I suggest, a significant aspect of the quiet radicalism of Ken’s work, its challenge to conventional expectations. If, as an image, its’ ‘rightness … resembles that of a nursery rhyme’, then it is surely a nursery rhyme that offers a highly unusual and empathetic view of the lives of non-human beings.
My second example is a claim by the abstract painter John Hoyland, who fully identified with the ideology of Modernist painting. Hoyland dismissed Kiff as turning his back on ‘all the understanding of what’s gone on in modern art’ and, as a result, ending up doing ‘some idiosyncratic little kind of painting’, ‘an escape’ said to result in the artist painting his own ‘nightmares’. (A rather extraordinary characterisation of Kiff’s work, given the sense of joy and wonder articulated by much of it). Hoyland’s assumptions about the “progressive” nature of modern art are part-and-parcel of High Modernity’s professionalised alienation from any connection with, or attempt to inform, common life. Perry Anderson has indicated the cause of that alienation in Modernist culture: its complicity with a market preoccupied with ‘commodities, including works of art’. For Anderson, the revolutionary possibilities that informed Cubism and Surrealism came to an end with Abstract Expressionism, after which painting in the West was increasingly driven by a commercial gallery-system that needed a regular turnover of new styles to supply a market increasingly aligned to the cultural values of ‘haute-couture’. To Hoyland, wholly identified with the Modernist belief in a “progressive” abstraction, Kiff’s work could only appear isolated and regressive. That work appears very differently, however, if we accept to see it in Kiff’s terms; namely as the articulation of an expanded, and inclusive, visual poetics concerned to maintain connections with, or attempt to inform, common life.
