Month / February 2015

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Exhibitions for Expotitions (February/March 2015)

I have a Google spreadsheet on which I keep a list of exhibitions that I am thinking of going to. It isn’t complete, it’s south-east centric and check before you travel if it’s on or open. (Plus if I’m not going to be interested in a thousand years, I don’t list it).

I’ve trued to be clever and list here the show opening or closing between now and 31 March 31, by ordered of urgency (THEY’RE CLOSING). Unfortunately, in switching between programs my highly logical European date format (day/month/year) have converted to the odd US ones (month/day/year) and I’ve no inclination to correct them this time.

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Deus-ed Up, Or: All the Deus-Bros.

Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015)

Here be spoilers, although not really until paragraph eight onwards (nine if this is one). I’ve tried not to give the ending away. 

There’s a reading of Harrison Ford’s rather plank-like performance in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982 etc) as Rick Deckard that suggests it is in fact a rather nuanced representation of a replicant. It doesn’t make sense as a reading, but there you go (he can’t be one of the six escapees because…).

I got the same feeling about Domhnall Gleeson about ten minutes into Ex Machina. It doesn’t make sense as a reading, but then again, what does? I was also reaching for Bluebeard and Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), neither of which end well.

Bluebeard is the one when a duke invites his bride to stay in his castle whilst he goes off on a jolly, leaving her with the keys to all the rooms but instructions not to unlock the seventh door. Obviously she does, just as Eve ate the fruit and Pandora opened the box. It’s Story.

So Caleb (Caleb Williams, son of Jephunneh or son of Hezron, a villain in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a computer game character who is a gunslinger) is a computer jockey who wins the golden ticket and gets to go to the chocolate factory the CEO of Bluebeard Bluebook’s secret lair. Before you it, know he’s flying across a landscape straight out of Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) to the secret lair. If Gleeson has a look of both Nathan/Justin from Queer as Folk, Oscar Isaac’s Nathan is more bearish, pummeling a punchbag, swigging a beer from a bottle and being furry under a vest. Apparently he is a genius. (Nathan — son of David, Nathan Fillion played Caleb…)

Caleb, before he goes any further in his bonding over beer, vodka and sushi with Nathan, has to sign all kind of non-disclosure agreements to make sure we feel uneasy.

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Coinage?

At one of the first sf conventions I went to, Tom Shippey used the word “intergenrification” in conversation with Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks. It seemed to be a useful word, for the ways in which genres collide and intermingle with each other, or the way in which a text belongs to several genres at once. This may well have been one of those moments when we were getting all excited over slipstream — the genre of fiction of postmodern sensibility — that comes along every year or so. A decade or so later, people were getting excited about interstitial texts, texts which belonged to no genres, although its name suggests that these are texts between genres. Despite this being, frankly, arrant nonsense, I was recruited to write on this subject, “Between the ‘Deaths’ of Science Fiction: A Skeptical View of the Possibility for Anti-genres”. For that matter, my contribution to the Festschrift (bless you) for John Clute and Judith Clute considered the fluidity of genre boundaries at the heart of (John ) Clute’s project. I reviewed Gary Wolfe’s Evaporating Genres for Science Fiction Studies, with the sense that for Wolfe the genre had not so much evaporated as never solidified in the first place.

And then, as part of a new module, Popular Genres and Popular Culture, I delivered a lecture on intergenrification I wanted to talk about the way in which the sitcom has overlaps with docusoap and fly on the wall documentaries and game shows and chatshows and I googled the word “intergenrification“.

It gives two results. The second is to a PDF, which apparently includes the quotation, “It may be the case that intergenrification is a staple of postmodernist literature, but there may be other readings of the novel.” Ah, a believer in PoMo, I presume.

The first is to something I wrote, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the British Boom“, my Pioneer Award-winning article: “As Steve Jeffery wrote in his review: ‘Levy’s debut is assured but tries perhaps too hard … to be too many things at once: sf thriller, fantasy, dystopia and romance’ (Jeffery 28). This intergenrification is typical, however, of the British Boom.” See how I use the word, confidently assuming that people will know what I mean?

I did some hunting around for my JFA piece, but failed to find a file on this computer and or  online, although there is a book that does at least cite it.

quote

Butler, Bakhtin, Derrida. Not bad company.

It looks as though, should the word ever make it into the OED, I’ve got dibs along with the other chap on the citation quotation – and, believe me, I checked for the entry.

It was only today that I’ve clicked on the other link, and discovered it’s a PDF of my PHD and presumably vaguely official. Who knew it was out there?

So, should I ever want to do more work on this, I have the primacy. I don’t have the JFA article to hand, but I have a draft, in which I write

We hold these truths to be self evident: i) no genre is ever pure, ii) no text ever belongs to a single genre, iii) no text is genreless. Our justification for the latter two truths comes in part from the essay by Jacques Derrida called “The Law of Genre” (1979). “As soon as the word genre is sounded,” he writes, “as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind” (224). But that limit is already transgressed. The law of genres is that genres are not to be mixed – but the law of the law of genre is that genres are contaminated, impure or parasitical. Individual texts overflow the boundaries, become larger than their limitations, transcend their classes. Derrida advances the thesis that a text does “not belong to any genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text, there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging” (230). And, lest we forget, Brian Aldiss reached a similar point two decades earlier in a review: ‘[T]here is no sf novel that is purely an sf novel. At some stage all sf novels turn into something else’ (Aldiss, Brian (1964) ‘[Review of] Judgement at Jonbar’, S. F. Horizons 1: 22.). This is not just the case for sf novels.

But, obviously, if Professor Shippey wrote something down, I’d certainly admit priority to seniority.

Bibliography

  • Aldiss, Brian (1964) [Review of] Judgement at Jonbar, S. F. Horizons 1.
  • Butler, Andrew M. (2003) “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the British Boom”, Science Fiction Studies 30(3).
  • Butler, Andrew M. (2004) “Between the ‘Deaths’ of Science Fiction: A Skeptical View of the Possibility for Anti-genres”, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 15(3), pp. 208-216.
  • Butler, Andrew M. (2012) Review of Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature, Science Fiction Studies 39(1), pp. 155-158.
  • Derrida, Jacques (1979) “The Law of Genre”, Critical Inquiry 7(1), pp. 55-81.
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Peter, Paul and Rubens

Rubens and His Legacy: Van Dyck to Cézanne, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 24 January-10 April 2015

Pretty well all I knew about Peter Paul Rubens was that he painted women … of a fuller figure. It was a surprise then to begin with a study for John Constable’s The Haywain. I’m guessing I’d only just seen this last year, when I’d done Tate Britain’s Late Turner and the V&A’s Constable exhibitions in one day. Both painters appear to have drawn on Rubens’s romanticised landscapes. I wonder – does this pad out an exhibition which had an odd corridor between rooms?

The fuller figures appear quite late, but then the thematic approach – Poetry, Elegance, Power, Compassion, Violence and Lust – obscures chronology. The tricksy subtitle – “From Van Dyck to Cézanne” – is odd, given the inclusion of Pablo Picaso and Oskar Kokoschka, who surely postdate Cézanne and French Impressionism. It’s in the falling of the damned that they are first visible – suggesting that gluttony may be a factor. In the penultimate room the women are described as “buxom” and “corpulent”. Tricksy thing, language.

Tricksy thing, influence. Oskar Kokoschka’s “Loreley” seems very distant from Rubens, but that’s a corpulent Victoria.

Loreli

Those painters are clearly copying that canvas – but that’s not in the show (“A Flemish Kermis“, for example), nor is there a reproduction.

Flemish Kermis

When it’s an altarpiece or a ceiling I guess it can’t always be reproduced. But still. A little visual context.

For me, though, the highlight of the exhibition was La Peregrina, a room of twentieth century artists inspired by Rubens, although it’s hard to see how Sarah Lucas’s fried eggs and kebab quite do that. Curated by Jenny Saville, her own black and white drawing “The Voice of the Shuttle” stands out, even among the company of Bacon, Warhol, Freud and Auerbach. These are corpulent rather than buxom.

I can’t say Rubens blew me away – I preferred Giovanni Battista Moroni, oddly, a couple of weeks back – but certainly this exhibition definitely held my interest for just short of two hours.

 

On the other hand, the RAA gallery assistants trying to sell audio tours are getting as bad as chuggers and I wish the RAA would decide where its ticket desk is.

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Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014)

The short version: it’s very pretty, so who cares about the flaws.

The longer version: remember that recent film that kills off a major character only for him to come back to the protagonist – except it’s all a hallucination due to oxygen starvation? Imagine waiting an hour, hoping it’s all a dream.

The even longer version:
We are haunted by 2001, A Space Odyssey. Like it or not, it has become the yardstick of the serious sf movie, the sf art film. It travels at the kind of pace that we rarely see in Hollywood film these days and when we do, I often find it self indulgent rather than joyous. Alternatively, given the action takes a couple of million years and travels to infinity and beyond – sorry, beyond infinity – that’s somewhat speedy as an average. The apes take a while and the stargate sequence really frustrates my students, but there is a joy in the miniatures and the classical music that has rarely been bettered. Hal 9000 created a new stereotype, the evil shipboard computer, to such an extent that I never trust a computer to run a ship.

And so comes along Interstellar, another pretender to the tradition, weighing in at 2hr 49 mins, nine minutes longer than its daddy, minus overture and intermission, or indeed Strauss, Ligetti and Wagner on the soundtrack. Nolan’s done interesting movies – I’ve a soft spot for Falling, a disappear up its own fundament psychological thriller, I enjoyed Memento, despite our not knowing much more at the end than the beginning and The Prestige is an interesting take of Priest’s novel, unfortunately shorn of its present day framing device. I eventually caught up with the Dicklite Inception on DVD and it has its moments, but too many of them seem to being situating women as less good than men. He did some comic book franchise, too, set in a dystopia where almost all women had died out.

So we have Interstellar, a film which I had singularly failed to find three hours to see prior to Saturday, and which I saw in one of the smallest cinemas in existence. We have nostalgic talking heads, telling us how things now have changed, We have Matthew McConaughy as Coop, an actor I last saw in Reign of Fire alongside Christian Bale, and the facial resemblance here suggests that so kind of synthespian shenanigans have been going on. We have a future in which the crops are failing one by one – Death of Grass anyone? – and the solution to this is to ruin the soil even more by growing the same crop in the same fields. Me, I’d be exploring hydroponics and such like. This is a world that needs more farmers and fewer engineers (although in guessing there’s a wriggle out of this) and where there’s a Sekrit Plan to evacuate Earth run by Michael Caine. But that is to get ahead of ourselves because there a Sekrit Messages being sent to Coop’s daughter, Murphy, including binary or Morse code coordinates for the Sekrit Rendezvous (because poltergeists, like the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, know where Greenwich Meridian Line is. Before you know it, Coop has met Dr Brand and her father, Michael Caine, who turns out to be an old friend and clearly marked for death in tragic circumstances at the three quarters point if the movie.

Look away now. Spoilers.

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