Picasso and sociology

On the wall above my desk is a black and white photograph of Pablo Picasso. In it he stands behind a window, hands pressed firmly against the glass. He is bald with calloused, wrinkled hands and lines deeply etched on his forehead. The trademark striped t-shirt is frayed at the edges, and stained with paint. A tiredness - of thinking and seeing but also of interpreting and representing what has been thought and seen - is shadowed over his weary face. He stands, pressing on the window, trapped.

The window is the device through which we see out into the world. Our gaze from outside to inside is through the medium of its glass. But we see doubly through a window, both what the window shows and the surface of the glass itself. On the window light and perspective tricks us, reflecting ourselves as we look through and at it. We see in Picasso’s window a stormy sky; an abstract metaphorical rage imposed onto his figure, echoing the expression of his face. A sharp, distinct black line – the edge of a shadow – and the frame of the window itself dissect the image, an accidental reference to the cubism of his youth. The photograph, by Robert Doisneau, is entitled The Line of Luck; a playful reference, perhaps, to what is on and of the window, imposed visually onto what is seen behind it.

Where is he trapped? As an artist, a painter, he seems trapped constantly into viewing the world as if it were behind a window, looking always for new reflections, refractions or representations to what is or is not there. As a celebrity, he is trapped inside the gaze of the world. Through the window, he seems frail and hardly there. Only the eyes, the hands and the t-shirt seem prominent. They are literally the tools of his trade (the hand and eye) but also of his self-identity: he is an artist, but the t-shirt is what marks him out as Picasso the artist.

The photograph is a powerful image. It moves me to look at. Yet it is a postcard, a reproduction that has been re-made a thousand times. Benjamin identifies the aura of an image as being related to distance, the further away from the original the less powerful it is for the observer (1968: 222). How, then, can a reproduced image such as a postcard retain an aura?

Pattison identifies three distinct factors that affect the response a person has to a visual object or image: antecedent, contextual and inherent. By antecedent he means the awareness a person has of an image before they see it, through, for instance, the narratives and fame built around an image, as well as the saturation with reproductions of the most famous images. Contextual factors relates to both the internal, psychological state of the person, as well as the time, place and company in which it was first viewed. The inherent is a more complicated phenomena, relating to what it is inside the image that makes an individual feel strongly toward that image, rather than any of the myriad other images seen with those same antecedent and contextual factors (2007).

Returning to my postcard photograph of Picasso, it seems Benjamin was wrong. My attraction to the photo is profound, despite it being significantly reproduced. The relationship with the image is derived from a combination of the factors Pattison introduced, unrelated to the distanced aura of the image. Picasso is perhaps the first significant artist I became acquainted with in detail, and his work still holds sentimental connotations. The postcard was bought from the gift shop of the Museo Picasso in Barcelona, on holiday there with a long-term girlfriend. The pose and aspect of Picasso in the picture seem on occasion to be analogous with my own, reflecting my life, somehow, like the window reflects the light and shade that illuminates it. These are specific internal and external factors that I have brought to the photo, regardless of whether it has been reproduced or not.

Aura, then, can perhaps be better defined as “the quality in an object that makes our relationship to it like a relationship with another human being” (Marks, 2000: 81, in Pattison, 2007: 61). If our relationship with images is human-like, then the range of our responses to it becomes as huge as the span of our responses to other humans. Elkins makes a study out of those who have responded to images by crying. He is convinced – and convincing – that we do not only ourselves but the artists themselves a great disservice by restricting relations with the visual to attempts at understanding and historically basing them (2001).

This essay, unwittingly, has convinced its author finally of the importance and validity of a sociology of visual culture and, indeed, a visual sociology. Sociology is the study of the micro and macro relationships humans have with each other, and the ways they mediate and structure those: if our relationships with the visual are human-like, what better discipline to examine, attempt to understand and point out the significance of them than sociology?


Bibliography

Benjamin, W., (1968) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books

Elkins, J., (2001) Pictures and Tears, London: Routledge

Pattison, S., (2007) Seeing Things, London: SCM Press

A comment on the surprises of post modern culture

Today I offered to buy a homeless guy a coffee.

Yes please, he replied. I'd like a latte (double-shot), with frothed soya milk and four sweeteners. No sprinkles.

Some of my journalism

This is a piece I wrote for Epigram, the Bristol student newspaper. I am relatively pleased with it, but encourage comments and criticism.

“I can’t stand idly by”

84-year old Hedy Epstein escaped the Nazi concentration camps that killed her family before embarking on a lifetime of political activism. When she came to Bristol to talk about her work in Palestine, Rob Trotter went to meet her.

Meeting Hedy Epstein is like coming face to face with history. The violence and suffering of the twentieth century lies in her memory and in her eyes. A remarkable woman, she merits the clichés passionate, intelligent and energetic more than anyone else I have met.

Born in Freiburg, Germany on August 15th 1924, the only daughter of a Jewish businessman and his wife, she was eight years old when Hitler was elected chancellor. Six years later she escaped to Britain, one of the ten thousand Jewish children who left with international support. Her parents, unable to leave Germany, were deported to a concentration camp in Vichy France during 1940. Two years later they were sent to Auschwitz where both, along with nearly all her extended family, died.

Around this time, she received a postcard from her mother. It read: “Travelling to the east…sending you a final goodbye”.

In England she worked in a munitions factory before returning to Germany in 1946 to work for the American government. She was a prosecution researcher at the Nuremberg Medical Trial, where the doctors who conducted experiments on concentration camp inmates were tried. Then, in 1948 she moved permanently to the United States where she became involved in the political activism that has occupied the rest of her life.


The conflict between Israel and Palestine is a central concern of hers. As an escapee of the holocaust - an event that helped trigger the creation of Israel in 1948 – her criticisms of Israeli policy attract a lot of attention. As such, some Jewish commentators have called her a “self-hating Jew” and “anti-Israeli”.

She strongly denies this. Her concern with the conflict has, she says, always been in response to events and the suffering of the people there. She describes her “wake up call” as being the massacres at Sabra and Shatila in 1982, when the Israeli army allegedly allowed Lebanese Phalangist militiamen to enter two refugee camps and massacre hundreds of Palestinian interns.

Her stories seem endless. In 2004 she was returning home from her second visit to Palestine. Whilst passing through Ben Gurion airport in Jerusalem she was asked to step aside by two security guards. They stripped and cavity searched her, an act that made her feel “utterly humiliated and angry”. She was 80 years old. Despite this, she has still visited Palestine every year since, enabling her to say of it: “The first time I went I was just appalled by the situation…and each time I’ve come back its worse”.

On a more personal level, she emphasises memory as a motivation for activism. She says at one point: “remembering is very important…but it also has to have a present and future perspective…if you know what it is like to be oppressed then when you know another people is oppressed then try to not stand idly by…that’s how I feel, I can’t stand idly by”.


Her speech to the packed church hall begins with a short, unassuming account of her extraordinary life. When she begins to talk about Palestine her eye becomes more focused, the action she describes more detailed. Her analysis of the conflict is told through a series of short episodes. A story about being unable to leave a village because of too many invitations to coffee, for instance, sits easily next to a description of being tear gassed, or of taking a companion to hospital with shrapnel buried in their leg.

Slowly the impact of each story accumulates, each spinning outward and into the others until a detailed picture of everyday life begins to emerge - violent and tense, yet utterly ordinary.

The way she speaks, I think, reflects the way she views the world. The intense logic at the heart of her political engagement – that the memory of her own suffering drives her to oppose the oppression of others – demands a concern with the experiences of ordinary people. It is these stories that illuminate history. Remembering them, as her life shows, is a vital political act.

A problem I have with journalism: 1

The 'inverted pyramid' is a commonly used system for structuring stories. It means that the most important information in the story is first; the further you read the less vital and more detailed it is. The story is purposely designed to be cut from the bottom up, to have in-built obsolescence.

Q: Is it arrogant and misguided of me to not want anything I write to be obsolete?

Blog blah blah

Day two of the new blogging dawn and I can think of nothing to say apart from that I have nothing to say. This is the problem I have with the 'democratisation' of the media that blogging so fervently symbolises. Access, once granted, does not require usage. Pluralism does not engender quality. Just because everyone is allowed to write blogs, does not mean everyone should. Frankly the majority of writing published before the new dawn was bollocks. On the whole, all that new media etc etc has achieved is to vastly increase the amount of shit to be sifted before anything good is found.

Hypocrisy has always come easily to me. I am of course merely adding my own foul excrement to the general milieu, but fuck it, no one reads this shit anyway.

A few words of (re) introduction

So, world. This is me re-kindling my previously pathetic attempt at clinging desperately to the back end of literary zeitgeist and starting a blog. They tell me that the more you write the better you get. Blogging seems an easy and relatively stress free medium for practicing. Despite my doubts and cynicism then, here we go.

It seems appropriate, I think, to start with this - an excerpt from the style guide Hemingway was given on his first day as trainee reporter at the Kansas City Star. They say he had it tacked above his desk until the day he died. And, if its good enough for old Ernest...

Use short sentences.

Use short first paragraphs.

Use vigorous English.

Be positive, not negative.


Sounds easy eh? We'll see...

500 word Article Entry for Inter-Rail Writing Comp

DREAMERS, ARTISTS AND TRAVELLERS: “TO MOVE IS TO LIVE”

Travel as a concept means many things to many people. Mention that you are going “away” in a casual aside and people will leap upon your comment, their imaginations instantly conjuring up images of red wine and poetry in Paris, bare feet and blue seas in the Caribbean or sun-burn and sex in Majorca, depending on their particular cultural bent. This I think, is the beauty of it – that travel is considered, by nearly everyone, to be a fabulous interlude in hectic work lives, an antithesis to business as usual. Certainly it is this, but it can also be more, much more.


James Radcliff is a scruffy free-wheeler nursing a cup of coffee and a hangover in a café in the new glass-and-metal shopping complexes that make up modern Sheffield. He curses as he burns his tongue on a scalding “Americano” and testifies how “bloody typical” it is. Apparently it’s not only his tongue that gets regularly burnt, these days – “ I’ve had enough of Britain. No rides and cheapskates everywhere. There’s no-one up for giving an honest road man a break, anymore.” After listening to him wax lyrical for a while about the difficulties of hitchhiking in 21st century Britain, I wonder, aloud, just why someone having such an apparently miserable time would choose to stay on the road. His response is instant, profound and forceful – “To move all the time is to live, man, I just wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s the freedom of it, going wherever the thumb points and the traffic’s moving, I could never give it up, not yet anyway.”

This is not an uncommon response from road people of any generation, although it is rare, post-hippy, to still hear these sentiments in such a pure, eloquent form. For many, travel is about more than getting away from it all, more than just a synonym for holiday; it is both a means to an end, and an end in itself. Movement assumes primary importance in an individual’s life, to the extent that staying in one place can seem like cheating yourself, and can create that strange feeling of being “outside”; outside the loop of life and, consequently, of who you really consider yourself to be.



Dreamers, artists, travellers and others of that lonely ilk are often accused of ignoring reality – washing up, after all, always needs to be done. But I disagree; it is not a deliberate running away from “real life” that causes travel and the traveller’s instinct, but in actuality a desperate searching for and toward it. Travel is a search for that feeling that what one is experiencing is on a higher plane, that it is somehow more real, or at least considered to be so. It is part of a searing desire to graduate beyond mediocrity, to experience (in the purest sense) on a more profound level.

On Bob Dylan

Part 2 – The Song

All Along the Watchtower – Bob Dylan

In the early to mid sixties there was, centred around the young, hip, influential community of New York’s Greenwich Village, a revival of interest in American traditional music. Of the many wide-eyed, denim-trousered proponents of this scene, the youngest, hippest, and ultimately most influential - the one with the widest eyes and the most ragged denim trousers - was unquestionably the great Bob Dylan. Viewed as a whole body of work, his albums, moving quickly from purism, folk whimsy, weird humour, to harsh social protest, drug-fuelled surrealist poetry, to amphetamine burn out, drop out nightmares, symbolise, whether intentionally or not, the progression of a generation. Or rather, that part of a generation which always considers itself to be the outsiders, the vanguards, the bringers of truth, love and the new dawn, and which, in Dylan’s decade, happened to be vocal, vociferous and violent enough to consider itself representative of the rest of its country.

Perhaps this is the greatest of Dylan’s considerable achievements; that his songs are powerful enough to transcend the heavy connotations of the time he lived in, to escape the chains of being a part of the “sixties”. All art, and music especially, is inevitably a product of the context in which it was produced, but perhaps great art is defined by being able to stand alone outside of that context, implicit within it truths, concepts, feelings, melodies which are in some way universal. I feel that Dylan sits, firmly, in this category.

To be continued...