Fleapit revisited:Mudbound.

As occupied Europe is liberated from the yoke of the Nazis, soldiers and villagers dance jubilantly in the street. Peace is restored. Happiness is restored. From a bedroom window overlooking the scene Ronsel Jackson holds his girlfriend Resl in a tender embrace. The look on his face isn't one of joy though. It's one of sadness. Not just because it means him and Resl will soon be parted but also because it means he's going to have go back to Mississippi.

In the delta, Ronsel's not a soldier, he's not a liberator, and, in the eyes of many of the white folk who live there, he's barely a person. He's been risking his life on a foreign field so that they can sleep easy in their beds but when he gets back to America he's still not allowed to use the front door of the grocery store or ride in the front seats of the bus. He's returning to a place where every knock of the door carries the threat, latent or actual, of extreme violence.

Dee Rees' new film, Mudbound, is not a film shy to take on the big subjects. War, racism, one man's dominion over another, man's dominion over woman, and the age old struggle between doing what's the correct and moral thing and doing the thing that'll get you through the day either in peace or, in some cases here, in one piece.

Mudbound tackles these big subjects but it artfully remembers to do so at a human level. The wider upheavals and disasters of the thirties and forties can easily be extrapolated from this tale of two families sketching out meagre existences as Mississippi sharecroppers. The white McAllan family and the considerably poorer, though less dysfunctional, Jackson family who are black.

The McAllans have moved down from Memphis where elder brother Henry (Jason Clarke) has taken, as his bride, Laura (Carey Mulligan). Laura, before meeting Henry, was a 31 year old virgin still living with her parents and fond of playing the piano. It's clear from the start that she's never loved Henry but she loved the idea of being a wife, of being a mother, and of fulfilling both her marital and maternal duties.

Henry's brother, Jamie (Garrett Hedlund), is the fire to Henry's ice. He's handsome, worldly wise, cultured, louche, and a huge hit with the ladies. He looks at Laura, and she at him, in a way Henry never could - and they all know it. At the other end of the charm spectrum stands their father, Pappy (Jonathan Banks, correctly celebrated for his portrayal of Mike Ehrmantraut in Breaking Bad). Pappy is an unashamed and unreconstructed racist with no redeemable qualities whatsoever. Almost every other word begins with the letter 'n' and his sons tolerate him, more than they could ever love him.

Naturally, he's none too happy to have to share land with the Jackson family. Parents Hap (Rob Morgan) and Florence (Mary J Blige in a role utterly shorn of divadom) struggle to make ends meet and maintain their dignity while bringing up four children in the harsh, unforgiving, southern sun. When her eldest son, Ronsel, enlists after Pearl Harbor, Florence refuses to either watch him leave or pray for his soul as she believes these acts are signs of bad luck and bad faith.

Ronsel serves as a sergeant and tank driver and finds an acceptance in Europe that he's never had at home. Meanwhile Jamie becomes a flight captain and sees his friends die in front of him, as we witness his passion for whiskey develop into a full time occupation. When both Ronsel and Jamie return home they're both shocked by the complacence and ingratitude of those they fought to save.

For Ronsel, of course, it's worse. Pappy and other small town, small minded, racists seek to thwart his every ambition but in Jamie he finds a friend, a man who's seen similar things, a man who's had his eyes opened to the world, and a man who has no intention of slipping back into the narrow confined rut that society has dug for him.

From the late thirties into the mid-forties we follow the fortunes, and misfortunes, of these two families whose lives have, by land, work, and circumstance, become entwined and entangled inextricably. We see Hap's health worsen and the Jacksons money worries grow, we see how Henry's lack of passion turns Laura away from him, and we see Laura herself slowly begin to embrace her own sexuality and agency.

Terrible things happen, truly awful things, but also small acts of kindness are played out in an affecting, touching way that, nudged along by Tamar Kali-Brown's string soaked score, can't help but tug at the heartstrings.

The film is beautifully shot, the wide open spaces of the Mississippi delta are as colour saturated and picturesque to look at as they must be soul destroying and backbreaking to work, and each actor puts in an utterly bravura performance. Jason Mitchell plays Ronsel as a boy on the verge of being a man, a boy forced to grow up before his time, and, later, as a man of certainty and moral rectitude. Carey Mulligan, too, is superb as Laura. Her journey from cossetted ingénue to quietly confident matriarch would almost be strong enough for an entire film of its own.

Rob Morgan and Mary J Blige get to look dignified and pensive a lot and Jason Clarke gets a bit of a water carrier gig, playing the unlovable, but practical, Henry. Henry's no active racist but he tolerates Pappy's vile language and behaviour. Jonathan Banks really gets his teeth into playing the villain of the piece, and you wince every time appears on screen, but it seems to be that it's Garret Hedlund who gets the most fun job of all.

The PTSD suffering boozehound Jamie gets to kick pails of milk over, crash his truck, and roll around in the mud, and it's him and Ronsel that prove to be not only the heroes but the warm heart of an often very dark drama. A very dark drama that anyone interested in either the twisted racial politics of the 20th century, the machinations and motivations of the human psyche, or anyone who simply enjoys good stories shot well, acted well, and told well should consider getting along to see.

Jack Whitten:More than two but less than three.

If you read my blog about Tate Modern's recent Soul of a Nation:Art in the Age of Black Power exhibition you'll know that I was bowled over by the show and not timid in coming forward to say so. I'm clearly not the only one to notice the huge impact this exhibition has had - and, surely, will continue to have. At least two supplementary shows have appeared for those who wish to delve deeper into the art made at the time of the American Civil Rights struggle and beyond, and both of them, now, have had the dubious pleasure of me writing a blog about them.

Frank Bowling's Fishes, Wishes in Summertime Blues at the Hales Gallery in Shoreditch was a riot of exuberant colour and sensual surfaces but the Alabamian artist Jack Whitten takes a very different, considerably more muted, approach. Whilst the surfaces of his works still seem to be inviting you to have an illicit stroke they don't seem anywhere near as friendly as Bowling's. The muddy greys, the bleached out yellows, and the rather boring browns are the overcast hangover to the sunshine day round the pool that is Bowling's latter work.

That's not to say they're bad. They're not. But they're definitely not as immediately aesthetically pleasing. Jack Whitten was born in 1939 in Bessemer, a small town in Alabama based around the coal industry and once home of Matilda, listed by Guinness during her lifetime as the World's Oldest Living Chicken. Whitten's father, a coal miner, died while he was a child, and the young man entered Tuskegee University planning on training to become an army doctor.

 

Black Monolith I, A Tribute to James Baldwin (1988)

 

There he became inspired both by the maverick black botanist George Washington Carver as well as a trip to nearby Montgomery to hear Martin Luther King Jr speak during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the event in which Rosa Parks was so famously arrested for refusing to give up her seat in the whites only front of the bus.

 

Politicised, he shifted his focus towards art and took a course at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana while, at the same time, taking an active part in Civil Rights demonstrations. In 1960 he moved to New York City, graduating from Manhattan's Cooper Union four years later, and showing at the Whitney in '72. Mentored by both Willem de Kooning and Norman Lewis his interests moved towards both the materiality of and the 'transfiguration of paint'.

 

Visiting Hauser & Wirth's Savile Row gallery for his retrospective show, 'More Dimensions Than You Know:Jack Whitten, 1979-1989', you get it straight away. There's clearly an internal struggle between pure unadulterated childlike expression and the grown up need for order and structure and the lack of resolution of this is the key to understanding, or more realistically, accepting to not understand Whitten's work. All the talk of 'psychological locations', 'a nuanced language', and 'subjective qualities' that make up the word salad of the free leaflet you can pick up on arrival left me cold but the art itself didn't. Or, at least, not in a bad way.

 

Ode to Andy:For Andy Warhol (1986)

 

Yellow Cross for Naomi (1980)

 

A piece named for Andy Warhol, one year before that artist's death, gives us some idea of the milieu in which Whitten operated. It would've been a vibrant time in NYC with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring still both alive and at the peak of their powers, hip-hop booming, and rents cheaper than they'll probably ever be again. Whitten had more than two decades on Basquiat so it would be interesting to know if he viewed these younger upstarts with disdain or saw them as pushing the envelope he and his contemporaries had opened ever wider.

 

It's not clear but, like the work of Basquiat, Whitten's paintings have more going on under the surface than first appears. The scratches and incisions he's obviously laboured over for some time clearly have some deeper meaning to the artist but, alas, it's hard for us to work out exactly what. I've written before on the selfishness/self-indulgence of some artists and how forging connections through one's art seems to have been replaced by vacuous demonstrations of ego and at times Whitten sails very close to the edge on this. 

 

Site I (1986)

 

Edysis I (1989)

 

Annabelle II (1984)

 

 He's saved by works like Yellow Cross for Naomi and Annabelle II that purport to be nothing more than art for art's sake. But the DNA series makes more hi-falutin' claims. It's supposed to act like a light sensitive photographic film awaiting activation, so that 'different tonalities' might be projected within the component parts surfaces. My snaps don't really do justice to the work but even in the gallery I felt distinctly unmoved by these four squares of nothingness.

 

The works that seem to have been built up of wire mesh, manhole cover moulds, car tyres, and walls seem to speak much louder. There's something of the Rauschenberg about them but they forsake that artist's often vast scale for something more intimate, more reflective. Both Edysis I and The Gift seem to incorporate found materials that, like the German collagist Kurt Schwitters, somehow succeed in painting a picture, or at least a snapshot, of the times and the city that Whitten was living in. One that is neither fully abstract nor wholly figurative. Topography of the psychogeographical realm, perhaps?

 

If that's not pretentious or pie-in-the-sky enough Animism was another influence. Animism is founded on the frankly bonkers belief that a supernatural power organises and animates the material universe and that 'Spirit' needs Matter to manifest itself. Whitten had gotten these ideas from the Black Fundamentalist Church he'd grown up within (even though they were not formally condoned) and even though they're very silly they helped push him towards this third, not quite abstract but not quite not abstract, style of art.

 

Willi Meets The Keeper (For Willi Smith) (1987)

 

DNA II (1979)

DNA XII (1979)

DNA XI (1979)

DNA X (1979)

 

The Gift:Dedicated to the Memory of Packy (1988)

 

After the blockbuster that was the Tate show and the multi-coloured mayham of Frank Bowling it was hard not to feel a little underwhelmed at this exhibition. Jack Whitten seemed like an important artist when placed together with his contemporaries, on his own he's merely a competent, talented, artist. Perhaps a fuller retrospective would've shown him to be extraordinary but I like to think this all just goes to show that Whitten, like the rest of us, works better as part of a whole. A disappointment - but only a small one.

 

Confirmation I:Happy Birthday Mary (1979)

 

Site IV (1986)

Torbjorn Rodland:An octopus full of honey.

"We're all to some degree a result of how we're seen, held and touched" - Torbjorn Rodland.

It's always pleasant to take a walk along Exhibition Road from South Kensington tube station and in to the gorgeous Kensington Gardens. Past the Albert Memorial and Francis Kere's temporary pavilion and over the bridge, looking out to herons & Egyptian geese on the Long Water, and pedaloes and swans on the Serpentine. It's great that both the Serpentine gallery and its younger sibling, the Serpentine Sackler gallery, are both free but of late I've had one or two disappointing visits so was hesitant about what I'd discover at Stavanger born, Los Angeles based, photographer Torbjorn Rodland's The Touch That Made You exhibition.

I needn't have worried. His portraits, still lifes, though less so his landscapes, are all great. He seeks to 'simultaneously inhabit and defamiliarise the realm of the everyday', to reveal 'layers of discomfort and pleasure', and to create work that is 'conceptually playful and psychologically active' and, for the most part, that's just what he's done.

 

Freckles (2014)

 

Rodland's photos aren't just about trying to freak you out. They're made up of pretty prosaic, day to day stuff, on the whole - but, usually, with a little twist. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes less so. The red spots on the girls face in Freckles look a bit alien but she's an attractive young woman and you're asked to consider how you feel about her. It's hard to work out if the Drunken Man is a happy or an angry drunk but what Rodland's trying to focus on is the hand touching his shoulder, the interconnectedness of all people and things.

 

Human connection is just one of the many themes that thread the show together. Fetishism, playfulness, body shock, the grotesque, and an almost erotic sensation towards things and the surface of things rub up together time and again from the mournful androgyny of Young Head via pictures of babies and toddlers urinating to the horror schlock of Apple, First Abduction Attempt, and Summer Scene. Some of these could be stills from Paranormal Activity or more gruesome slasher flicks that prey on suppressed childhood trauma and fear.



 

Drunken Man (2014)

 

Young Head (2013)

 

Apple (2006)

 

First Abduction Attempt (2014-16)

 

Summer Scene (2014)

 

Rodland's also big on incorporating recurring tropes so, alongside the flesh, you'll see a surplus of socks, shoes, hair, and cutlery. Honey, too, crops up a lot. Often dripping across the surface in a vaguely pornographic way. Untitled (East Hampton) also plays on an uneasy tryst between sexual desire and discomfort. Attractive smooth skinned girl wearing nothing but - some kind of oven glove decorated with bees! What's going on here?

 

Untitled (East Hampton) (2005)

 

Stockings, Jeans and Carpeted Stairs (2013-17)

 

I think what Rodland is trying to do is to both arouse and make us feel uncomfortable in our arousal at the same time, to confuse, to discombobulate. The muscular male arm cradling a stockinged foot is one thing but an image of Anne Frank on a mobile phone?

 

Some (Bathroom Tiles, Arms) are aesthetically pleasing in the extreme. You can almost feel the cold of that bathroom floor, wince (or maybe rejoice) at the sensation of an octopus tentacle writhing around your arm, or even smell the blue and white paint in Pump. Others, much less - and those are the ones that don't work so well. Comb Over comes across as a weak joke, Pads is hard to decipher, and The Morning After doesn't appear to even belong in this collection so much of an outlier is it.

 

Not quite as much as the Andy Capp gelatin silver prints, the room full of supposedly banging techno, or, it would initially seem, the utterly bizarre coda to the exhibition which comes in the form of one of Adolf Hitler's drawings of the Seven Dwarves. The story goes that Hitler owned a copy of the 1937 animated film and screened it to his private circle, the drawings of Bashful and Doc were found hidden behind a watercolour of an Alpine house after the Nazi leader's death. Hitler and the Seven Dwarves? One of real life's most horrendous characters next to some of fiction's most adorable. That would seem to be Rodland and his work in essence. 

 

Blue Portrait (Nokia N82) (2009)

 

Bathroom Tiles (2010-13)

 

Comb Over (2015-16)

 

Pads (2010-14)

 

The Morning After (2005)

 

Arms (2008)

 

Red Pump (2014)

 

Pump (2008-10)

 

Of course it's pretty difficult to make a career out of finding cartoon characters drawn by megalomaniac mass murderers. It seems unlikely Stalin ever completed a My Little Pony colouring book or that Pol Pot ever got round to finishing a Scooby Doo jigsaw puzzle. So Rodland has aimed to do something similar with the raw materials of everyday life.

 

Photographing oranges, dust, ear buds, morsels of food, and bent and twisted knives and forks with all the precision of a high end fashion snapper, even his methods involve the fusing of two seemingly disparate styles. The highbrow meets the lowbrow as surely as the paint hits the patent leather, the cream saturates the strawberries, and the strands of hair work their way through some kind of strainer.

 

Trichotillomania (2010-11)

 

Shadow Work no 2 (2014)

 

Mountain Lake, Evergreen Trees (2007-14)

 

Plate and Spoon (2015)

 

The Geller Effect (2014)

 

Five Berries (2014)

 

Butterflies (2007)

 

Hair (2010-14)

 

Hair, like Avocado, and much else in Rodland's repertoire plays on the opposing forces of freedom and restraint. The hair, long and free, seeks to escape in just the same way the polka dot handkerchief (?) seeps out of a very unrealistic looking 'avocado'. At the same time they're both, in some way, caged.

 

With his love of music (there's the aforementioned techno room, a photograph of a Beethoven statue in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, and he's even collaborated with musicians from the Norwegian black metal scene) it's no surprise that Rodland is interested in the juxtaposition of structure with informal events, that's how most music works, and if, occasionally, he doesn't quite succeed in hitting the right note most of the time his photography plays a pretty sweet tune, even when you can't quite understand the words.

 

Avocado (2013)

 

Disney's Bashful by Hitler (2008-10)

Chasing a Bee?

I always get a buzz when I attend London Skeptics in the Pub in Camden's Monarch pub and Rebecca Nesbit's Save the Honeybee? proved to be no exception. At £3 I didn't even get stung and, don't worry, there's plenty more apian punning to come.

But there are serious points to be made too. Rebecca is an ecologist and writer with a particular interest in the science and ethics of setting conservation priorities. Since completing her PhD on butterflies she's written two books, a novel called A Column of Smoke and Is that Fish in Your Tomato?, which aims to debunk a few myths about GM foods.

Her contention was that conserving the honeybee was not nearly as big a priority as we've been led to believe in recent years. She wasn't proposing we tell them to buzz off so much as suggesting that they're actually doing very well as it is. We've all seen, or read, the stories about how the bee is under threat and if the bee goes we may not be far behind it. But how true are those stories?

It's certainly true that, ecologically, ours and previous generations have presided over something of a disaster. It's looking like our generation will be, almost uniquely, leaving the Earth with less species on it than were here when we arrived. But it's highly unlikely the honeybee, apis mellifera, will be one of those to take the final curtain.

Rebecca was no enemy of the bee, she's even taught them to detect explosives though I'm not sure how, and started off with a little background on the insect we all hate to love and love to hate. Honeybees are just 1 of 20,000 species of bee in the world (in the UK alone there are 24 species of bumblebee and 225 'solitary' bee species) and, as it stands, it's estimated there are 80,000,000 honeybee hives around the globe.

That's the most ever in history - and the figure's rising. Sure, numbers are down in some places (Germany & USA for example) but they're more than compensated for by the rise in hives in countries like China and Argentina. So, globally, honeybees, unlike many other creatures, are in no imminent threat of demise.

The threats they do face are pesticide, habitat loss, climate change, and little critters called varroa mites, parasites that transmit diseases like the nasty sounding deformed wing virus (didn't they play at the Dublin Castle once?) to larval or pupating bees. If any of these was exacerbated to an extinction level event then it'd be pretty serious.

Bees are very important pollinators but they're not the only animals that pollinate. Ants, birds, bats, wasps, moths, and even giraffes all do their bit in the pollination process. Though, without bees, it seems we'd soon be without both melons and Brazil nuts. To be honest, I could probably get by.

But, having established that extinction is not something we need to worry about, Rebecca's talk (at all junctures she was keen to express she wasn't giving answers, but asking questions) expanded into wider questions about bee conservation and conservation in general.

Why do we conserve? Is it all about us? Do we save animals that help us (like the honeybee) and let ones that don't perish? Do we save animals because they're cute? The fact that pandas have become the poster boys and girls for conservation (while not pulling their own weight by simply getting on with shagging each other, one can only assume bamboo is an abysmal aphrodisiac) suggest there's some truth in this.

Are honeybees even wild animals? It's debatable. Most of them live in 'farms'. They may not be fenced in like cows, pigs, or sheep but they're pretty dependent on their relationships with beekeepers, relationships that are simultaneously interdependent and dysfunctional! I've never heard of a campaign to save the cow or pig from extinction. Farmers just get them to breed more and, unlike the pandas, it seems they're mostly willing. Stuck in the same field your entire life you'd be grateful of the chance for a bit of bovine bonking or some ovine organ grinding, especially if you were blissfully ignorant of the fact that you, your partner, and your offspring were all gonna be shoved in the back of a lorry, driven to an abattoir to have a bolt put through your head, before being ground down to be sold as the filling of a Ginster's pasty in a motorway service station. That'd really ruin the moment.

Taking my ranting vegetarian hat off for a while (I'd not worn it for a while and had forgotten just how comfy it was) what can we do (and not do) if we're concerned about conservation? For a start don't sign online petitions calling agrichemical companies evil. They may or may not be but that's just blaming others, and governments shouldn't be listening to surveys to decide policy but using critical thinking, it's not like they've dismissed the concept of expertise, is it!?

Don't introduce more beehives when we've already got as many as the 1982 regional final of the Mari Wilson lookalike competition. But do stop throwing so much food away, agriculture is bad for wildlife. Agriculture is necessary to grow our food but if we're just going to throw it away then we've destroyed valuable habitat for no reason.

It takes way more space to rear animals than it does to grow crops (plus those animals are reliant on crops being grown to feed them therefore doubling the problem) so reduce consumption of animal products or stop eating animals entirely. I can't be too smug about this as I've not been able to, and nor will I ever be likely to, make the jump from vegetarianism to veganism but there are so many compelling cases for it now, and tasty alternatives, that it's very very difficult, nigh on impossible, to make a moral case for not doing it. Veggies care about people too, most of us.

Lastly, how about trying to save animals that genuinely are threatened. Rebecca suggested her personal favourite, the water vole tic. These little blighters aren't ever going to shift as many posters as pandas or seals (they won't need to chop down any trees for them - which is surely another bonus) but they play a crucial, if infinitely complicated and decidedly unglamorous) role in the ecosystem and without them other more well known, cuter, species could be threatened. Perhaps we need to start at the bottom of the food chain. As with politics the trickle down policy hasn't been working so let's help out the most needy at first.

I don't have the first bit of scientific knowledge about bees, water vole tics, or, indeed, agriculture so in this blog I've just been relaying Rebecca's, possibly contentious, opinions. She made a clear, learned, case and I came away thinking the subject was a lot more interesting than I went in. As I walked out into the streets of Camden they were swarming (penultimate one, honest), but alas not with beekeepers as, sadly, only one attended the event.

Buzz buzz a diddle it.