Eggleston '77:America in the Rear View Mirror.

"You can take a good picture of anything, a bad one too" - William Eggleston.

That's certainly true - but in the case of Eggleston himself, it has to be said that his pictures err very much on the good side. I'd visited (and written about) his major retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery back in 2016 so his current show at David Zwirner in Mayfair is very much supplementary to that. It's a small show, just seventeen photos - fourteen of which have made the blog - all taken in 1977, all untitled.

...and all really rather wonderful. Some are portraits of people but they're all, in their own way, portraits. Portraits of rusting signage, chairs, and, most of all, cars. All of these things, through inventive camera angles, an inquisitive mind, and, above all, use of light are rendered nearly as human as the humans themselves.

Of course, nostalgia can be a wonderful thing, quite heartbreaking at times, and 1977 is forty-fucking-two years ago now so the fashions (in the model's tank top above, but also in automobile design) now look like the last word in retro cool. We're a long way from the idea, often put forward in the eighties and early nineties, that the seventies was the decade that fashion forgot.

A time when students danced to Abba ironically and wore flares to 'bad taste' parties. Now, the seventies look great. In many ways, and part of this is down to Eggleston not being afraid to embrace colour photography, it looks like the decade that finally embraced the possibilities of colour.

As well as colour, Eggleston has another advantage - America. There's a lot wrong with the country (God, guns, Trump, recent abortion rulings in Alabama that give rapists more say over a woman's body than she has herself) but nobody could deny that the USA is not a fascinating place to look at. The landscapes are amazing enough but man-made America is equally awesome.

Think of Eggleston less of a Diane Arbus or Danny Lyon style gritty realist observer of life and place him closer to great American painters like Georgia o'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler, or even Abstract Expressionists like Clyfford Still and Arshile Gorky. There's nothing abstract about Eggleston's work but, even in photographs that look at small detail, there is a monumentality at play. We're looking at something small but we know it's part of something much much bigger.

The gentleman with the ludicrously short tie looks like he's dressed for business. He seems content to be a small cog in a huge machine. I read his somewhat inscrutable expression as one of a man who is as pleased to be standing in a green field on a sunny day as he is to live in a country that rewards hard work and offers freedom. I'd wager that a black man that age in 1970s USA would have witnessed no small amount of racism (institutionalised and otherwise) and, sadly (we know now), if he's still alive he'll be witnessing the rise of the far right again. Seeing America, and its current venal president, at its very worst.

What a shame. The rusted iconic image of a Coke bottle (Andy Warhol said "what's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. The president drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and you drink Coke too") speaks volumes. You'd be certified insane if you genuinely believed America was a meritocracy now. The Coke's gone flat, the signs rusted, all is elegant chaos. Despair reins down on the ruined kingdom of Ozymandias.

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke. Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/andy_warhol_597858?src=t_coca-cola
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/andy_warhol_597858?src=t_coca-cola

Wear a stupid MAGA hat if you like. It won't change anything. You're lying to yourself more than you're even lying to others. It'll just make you look like a prick. It'll make you easy to identify for future historians (assuming your moron of a POTUS doesn't blow the whole fucking planet up) when trying to pick apart the reasons a once great country was brought to its knees.

But I digress, it's hard not to when you look at the current shitshow of an administration, and to escape such vile behaviour I look backwards to comforting imagery. William Eggleston, thankfully, documented a lot of it. The shining red chrome of a utility vehicle set against a blue sky, the jumble of signs that resemble a patchwork quilt of an Indian market place far more than they do a giant mall, and even the enormous parking lots you might found outside one of those malls.

The photo of the parking lots shows, even more than others, Eggleston's masteful use of space. The gap between the cars is almost worthy of comparison to the Japanese concept of ma. It might seem crazy to imagine meditative moments and salvation could be found between a Chrysler and an Oldsmobile in a Wal-Mart car park on the outskirts of Phoenix but inspiration comes to us at strange times, in unusual ways. A moment is a moment wherever it happens.

Some of Eggleston's subjects, the human ones, appear lost in those very moments. The vivid saturation of colour that is the trademark of this era of his career does nothing to dehumanise those who appear in his work. In fact, it adds a deeper humanity. You almost feel an empathy with these strangers. They're so present you half imagine starting up a conversation with them.

Eggleston finds life in the gaps of post-war materialism and the fetishisation of consumerism and vehicles. His photos speak both of decline and of pride at the same time. They work in dualities and they refuse to apologise for doing so. The shadow of a chair, a corrugated wall, a makeshift fence, and even strewn litter are all given something of a personality. The photographs are made with a camera but the art is made in Eggleston's eye.

As with that 2016 show at the NPG, Eggleston's work on show at David Zwirner was warm, innovative, and anything but boring. The photos, as you'll see from my final Eggleston quote below, are there to be looked at much more than they are there to be written about. A picture, they say, paints a thousand words. It's taken me about 1,130 to write about a selection of them - and even then I've not even begun to do them justice. Read them anyway.

"Whatever it is about pictures, photographs, it’s just about impossible to follow up with words. They don’t have anything to do with each other". – William Eggelston.

Mermaids Are Doin' It For Themselves.

"Should I stand amid the breakers or should I lie with death my bride? Hear me sing 'swim to me, swim to me, let me enfold you'. Here I am, here I am, waiting to hold you".  - Song to the Siren, Tim Buckley.

An absolutely hilarious pub debate of yore used to be the vexatious question of what kind of mermaid would be best. Top half woman/bottom half fish or bottom half woman/top half fish? Either would prove logistically challenging and both are almost certain to never have existed. Discussions, however, could be guaranteed to be both ribald and ridiculous.

Needless to say, Sophia Kingshill's talk for the London Fortean Society, Mermaids:Fish, Flesh or Fowl, was slightly less puerile - though that's not to say there wasn't a fair bit of bawdy laughter along the way. The LFS have hosted talks on vampires, witches, killer clowns, and even talking mongooses so an evening of mermaid consideration would neither be out of their remit nor even particularly bonkers by the standards of the LFS.

In fact the talk had proved so popular that this was the second time the LFS had hosted it. They'd sold out Conway Hall with it back in February (an event that for some, now forgotten, reason I did not attend) and now they were back at The Miller in Borough for a second run through. Again it had sold out. A regular occurrence, it now seems, with these Fortean events.

Sophia had the air of a school teacher, but one with a wicked sense of humour which would later reveal itself, and she launched into the talk by explaining something we all know. Or we all think we know. What a mermaid is. A woman with a fishes 'tail' who lives in the sea, right?

Yes and no. The word 'mermaid' means simply 'water-woman' and, as such, mermaids are just as at home in ponds as they are oceans or treacherous rivers and straits. Some of the oldest images of mermaids from Mesopotamia and what is presently Syria show creatures with human bodies and fish tails that correspond with their modern equivalents.

Sirens too, now, are believed to have a similar genetic make up but more than two thousand years ago sirens had, instead of fish tails, wings and they'd often appear as decoration on tombs. Homer's Odyssey was written in the 8th century BC and contains this verse:-

Once he hears to his heart's content, sails on, a wiser man.
We know all the pains that the Greeks and Trojans once endured
On the spreading plain of Troy when the gods willed it so
All that comes to pass on the fertile earth, we know it all!

 

Sirens, in the poetry of Homer, were just song. They may as well have not had bodies at all. It was later illustrators who gave them, first, wings and then, eventually, fish tails. Presumably drawing something that is 'just song' being a little tricky. But why the move from birds to fish? What's that all about?

Could another character from the Odyssey, Scylla, hold the key? Scylla was described by Homer as a mutant octopus with about as many heads as she had tentacles (if not more). As time moved forward, Scylla's image was simplified and, eventually, she came to be drawn with just the one head (any more, presumably, a sign of decadence).

The prophet sea-god Glaucus (who'd been born mortal but had become immortal after eating a magical herb, obvs) had the hots for Scylla - and who wouldn't? - but the enchantress Circe was most displeased with this, Circe harbouring a tendresse for Glaucus that soon turned to bitterness and revenge. Circe, and this is bang out of order, "poured a baleful potion into the sea water which caused Scylla to transform into a frightful monster with four eyes and six long snaky necks equipped with grisly heads, each of which contained three rows of sharp shark's teeth. Her body consisted of twelve tentacle like legs and a cat's tail while six dog's heads ringed her waist".

This is the form Scylla took as she attacked the ships of passing sailors seizing separate crew members with each of her heads. It's one of those fantastic tales that crop up so often in Greek mythology and, like many others, it seems to have caused a little confusion down the centuries. Even artists of the time seemed to mix up Circe, Scylla, and the sirens.

Understandable perhaps at a time when most stories were passed on orally but in 13c Florence, Dante (who, it is generally understood, had access to manuscripts) confounded the mistake and mixed them up further. The full change from winged creature to tailed creature took about 1,600 years (800BC-800AD) and once Dante had not reversed it that change appears to have become permanent.

Sea nymphs, naiads, and tritons all get caught up in the mix too! With half, or more than half of your body, hidden by water it's difficult to tell who's who or what's what. The classical world seemed to have far more mermen than it did mermaids but come the age of the great cathedrals it seems mermaids started to take over. Sophia's theory being that craftsmen simply enjoyed carving breasts and monks, for obvious reasons, liked looking it at them. "Men like tits" - a memorable, and concise, explanation for the rise of the mermaid.

But while men most certainly do like tits they don't always like women. Mermaids and sirens were known to tempt, lie, and destroy - just like Satan, who were they seen as agents of. Even if the sight of mermaids was said to warn sailors of storms and tempests.

Many sailors of 15c/16c believed in mermaids and that's put down to the fact that many maps and charts of the era were embellished with images of mermaids. Ships figureheads too. Columbus claimed he saw three mermaids in what is now the Dominican Republic and complained that they were "not so fair as they are painted".

That's because they were, most probably, dugongs or manatees. Dugongs were so regularly mistaken for mermaids that one desperate sailor in the Red Sea did the 'deed of lechery' with one and remarked that the dugong genitalia was a remarkably good fit for a man. Rhinoceroses may have been more difficult to coerce into a session of inter-species sex but they were, around about the same time, often mistaken for unicorns. The 'mermaids' sighted in northern waters are believed to have probably been walruses. It's not held on record how accommodating a walrus vagina is to a human penis.

When people weren't molesting marine mammals they were creating images of mermaids. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century a cottage industry, particularly big in Japan, sprang up in which crude mermaids were constructed from parts of dead monkeys and chickens. Phileas Barnum owned the Feejee Mermaid which looked as ludicrous as it did grotesque. It didn't bother him though. Barnum was in the business of selling 'humbug'. Truth was irrelavent to Barnum and exposure was everything.

If dead mermaids could make this much money, what about live ones? In Edwardian times actresses would impersonate them to great acclaim and much amusement. Mermaids had come a long way from the legendary sirens, the Greek and Roman stories of metamorphosis, and with their new found popularity and the modern zeal for science people were beginning to ask how sex with mermaids could actually happen bearing in mind their bottom halves were all scaly. If you're after meat, you can't accept fish.

A theory developed that these fish tails were not permanent and that, in fact, mermaids could, and did, change from woman to fish at will. When the mermaids (and selkies, let's not forget them) come on shore to dance in the moonlight and tempt men they're half fish (half-seal for those selkies) but when you get them back to their mermaid beds they're all woman!

Another theory posited that mermaids would 'trick' men into marriage before revealing their inhuman form. These stories of water women seem to come from all continents. We touched on Chinese 'dragon brides', Russian 'waterfowl women', and the German Lorelei. Lorelei was originally, and still is, a rock on the river Rhine that's believed to be haunted by a female spirit who regularly crushes sailors to death against the said rock.

The Danube has a similar story and Paracelsus, the 16c Swiss physician, wrote of 'undines'. Or 'ondines' even. Undines/ondines are water nymphs that have cropped up in literature from Ovid to Hans Christian Andersen and one was the subject for a John William Waterhouse painting, dismissed by Sophia as "basically a page three girl".

Further grot in grottoes came in the form of other mermaids who were barely more than Victorian porn. Edward Burne-Jones's The Depths of the Sea for example. Jocular and fruity music hall songs about mermaids further propagated the myth that they were both sexually available and sexually unavailable at the same time and even suggested they were, to use that somewhat unpleasant term, 'ballbreakers'. Not least because in the realms of the underwater world, divorce was not permitted - so you'd be stuck with a fishy old hag for the rest of your life.

Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid appears to be the first story about a child mermaid. The first one about a mermaid who's not sexually mature, let alone sexually active. That didn't stop illustrators drawing her flashing off a bit of pert bum but Andersen can't be held responsible for all illustrations of his work and Sophia approved of Andersen's story because it was a rare example of a tale told from the mermaid's point of view.

 

Following on from The Little Mermaid, mermaids became perceived as virtuous and when Disney desexualised (Disneyfied even) mermaids further with their film version of the book it seemed that mermaids had finally come in from the deep and were now accepted as a non-threatening part of the fictional world.

The story of mermaids, of course, echoed and ran parallel to the story of women throughout the centuries. Or at least the story as it's been told by men. They were evil temptresses. They were hags. They were both sex mad and frigid at the same time. They were responsible for all of man's woes and, eventually, they were accepted - but only on the terms of men.

Nobody needed Sophia Kingshill to spell this out. It was apparent from the start of her fabulous talk and only became more so as the evening wore on. A Q&A afterwards touched on Marina from Stingray, Greek mythology (again), centaurs (aggressive drunks apparently - keep them away from the booze), sheela-na-gigs, and satyrs as well as a well informed debate on the etymology of the word 'nymphomaniac' and I haven't even managed to fit in two other parts of the talk. One about the battle between mythology/romance and crypotozoology and another that looked back to a time when people wondered if mermaids could be observed, caught, and exploited for financial gain!

In summing up, Sophia claimed the lasting fascination with mermaids may be because they offer an example of femininity that is not based around motherhood. These mermaids, we all agreed, are doin' it for themselves and in honour of both Sophia Kingshill and mermaids my final image is Sophia's favourite mermaid painting, Evelyn de Morgan's Sea Maidens from 1886. Now I return to the water.

Away With the Fairies:On the Hard Stuff with Jeremy Harte.

I'd been to talks about fairies before (Deborah Hyde's for Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub in December 2017 was fantastic) but, last month, when Jeremy Harte rocked up at the London Fortean Society for his Her Eyes Were Wild:Fairies and Madness it was a whole different trip - and not one I'm totally sure I understood. I asked my friends and fellow attendees, Simon and Dewi, and they didn't seem to be much clearer about what had just happened.

Even LFS co-host Scott Wood admitted that Harte was something of a "strong draught". Despite all of this, the event (at The Bell in Whitechapel) was one of the fastest LFS events to sell out ever. Jeremy Harte is a folklorist and he's clearly one who is not scared to drill deep into his subject.

Neither is he one who wastes much time with preambles or introductions. Or even visuals (which might have helped). Within seconds he was reciting from the 1827 diary of a County Clare school mistress. A story about a girl returning from Mass and being touched by a 'black man' (1820s in Ireland, eh?). An event which led to her spending a fortnight in bed unable to move one of her legs.

Eventually she rubbed a herb on her thigh, said a few Hail Marys, and, soon, she was remarkably better. Perhaps she should have gone for the herb/Hail Mary combo a bit sooner and not wasted two weeks lying around in bed. Damaged legs, we were told, are a frequent result of fairy attacks. Especially attacks by 'faceless' fairies. Or black fairies. Although that part of the story seemed to have been forgotten by this point.


We'd only just started and I was struggling to keep up. Harte launched into tales of WB Yeats and Lady Gregory's articles about fairies (written in Connaught, I think, I was scribbling into my notebook hard and fast by now), relaying how most occultist fieldwork provides us with stories that resolutely do not have happy endings, and the underground and melancholy music of viols and lutes.

On a windy, stormy night a boy goes out for bread. He returns, dutifully, with said bread - but he only ever speaks again once in his entire life, a life he spends mostly in as asylum. That final sentence is reported to have been "I met awful people on the road"!

A lot of these Irish fairy stories take place in very prosaic, quite humdrum really, locations. Often horrors are visited upon people (females more often than not - gender, of course, raises its head in these tales) when they've just popped out in to the garden. Extensions to houses when new human babies arrive prove particularly prevalent, the idea being that the human world is encroaching on to the realm of the fairies and said fairies are displeased with this. Sometimes human children, daughters especially, are taken.

Fairies, Jeremy Harte informed us, have no inherent animosity. They act only in revenge - but they act in revenge often. We were regaled with a raft of awful stories about babies stolen from the fields (mostly in Suffolk and the Highlands of Scotland) while their mothers were out harvesting. Changelings were sometimes left in lieu of these abducted children.

The talk went deeper still - and further back. To the early twelfth century when many folk traditions combined and gelled together to create a fairy otherworld inspired by Old Norse and Greek mythology and folk traditions. Strip away the polytheism and the background narratives of these ideas, our speaker contested, and some of the minor characters become more important, take their place front of stage.

Those who made and served nectar at the foot of Mount Olympus, the outfitters for the Gods, and even witches were rarely, if ever, given names. By now I was losing the thread of the talk. I think Jeremy Harte was suggesting that, foklorically, fairies come from the same superstitions that gave us witches and polytheistic religions but I couldn't square that with his stories of a priest in Basle watching people singing and dancing in a field and an interview with a dead man in Dusseldorf.

 

The belief here is that the dead have families, they have weddings, they breed, they are (for some reason) much the same as living. The hierarchy of their societies resembles ours so closely that a cynic (such as I) may say that it can only be because it's been made up by one of us.

Jeremy Harte was not that cynic. Warming to his theme, he went on to suggest that the articulation of our fears is, quite understandably, our attempt to control those fears. At this point I was back on track. I got where he was coming from. But soon he was pondering the narrative grasp of Cistercian monks, a theory that shingles can be cured by scraping vertebrae from a church bell, the role of Puck in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the former Hobgoblin pub chain!

 

From there it was on to the "manipulation of dwarf bridles" (?!?!?), St Augustine, the Legendarium, Lancelot, Persephone, bag ladies, and the scarcity of food in the underworld. It was all a bit academic, a touch learned for me. I'm a pop kinda guy and much as I was enjoying the talk I was struggling a bit. Making notes to maybe one day do some research on 'eskimo hospitality rituals', fairy doctors, cunning folk, and 'pin vomiting'!

All things I don't know about but feel I'd like to. Simon (who'd had a few jars to build his confidence at a conference earlier) piped up with a question about Northern European and Scandinavian folk traditions but I stayed schtum, jotting away and trying to make sense of Harte's digressions into the worlds of aliens and his theory that zombies lumber because they're occupied, and operated, by demons who control them. You know, a bit like The Numskulls in The Beezer!

By the end I was flummoxed, yet fascinated, by the talk. I'd loved the line "social death in a remote cottage" and would have liked to have heard more on Harte's theories regarding mental illness, 'magical talking', and the talking cure but I was also relieved to be able to take a breath.

Jeremy Harte had delivered his lecture in the style of a flamboyant elder Rik Mayall and if I'd lost sight of him after the first few chicanes I at least had plenty of inspiration to learn more about fairies and the traditions and superstitions that fuel belief in them. Another, this time qualified, successful evening from the London Fortean Society. 'Away with the fairies' hardly covers it!

V-2 Snyder:Joan Snyder's River Becomes A Room.

"Painting is the way I speak. I had such an anxiety-ridden youth that when I started to paint, it was as though I was speaking for the first time. I was creating a visual language through which I could say anything I wanted" - Joan Snyder

The River Becomes A Room (2018)

If it's true that painting is the way Joan Snyder speaks then it has to be said her words don't often make a lot of sense. That doesn't mean they're not interesting. It doesn't mean they don't sound pleasant. It doesn't mean I don't want to hear them. It just means I am not blessed with the skills of being able to interpret these daubs into any form of recognisable narrative. My bad!

Or is it? I'd popped into Blain/Southern on Hanover Square to have a look at her Rosebuds & Rivers exhibition on Saturday afternoon and I have to admit I didn't spend as long looking at the entire show as one couple spent pondering one solitary painting. They seem transfixed by every minute detail of last year's The River Becomes A Room, at one point even poking the side of the canvas. Something I'd assumed would have been frowned upon by the gallery.

Perhaps I was right. Perhaps they were. Perhaps these works need time, not a mobile phone camera lens and a man in a rush to move on to the next thing. I'd seen Snyder's work before at Blain/Southern as part of their 2017 Playground Structure show (which also featured both Mary Heilman and Jeff Wall) and I wasn't totally sure what to make of it then. I'm still not.   

Milk & Rosebuds (2018)

Celadon & Silk (2018)

After that show I'd written, somewhat pretentiously, about her dissolving the grid and embracing its possible fluidity (before seemingly complaining that her paintings didn't include the promised/threatened tits and fannies) and, to continue in that hi-falutin' style, I'd say that Blain/Southern's Rosebuds & Rivers show starts from the point where she's left 'the grid' way behind.

These paintings don't seem formally beholden to any pattern. Colour is everywhere, abstraction dominates. But, still, tiny figurative, er, figures crop up in paintings like Celadon & Silk and dominate the canvas in works like 2017's Yellow Figure. Snyder, now 79, broke through in the late sixties with her 'stroke' paintings in which she claimed her idea was "to study the anatomy of a stroke, isolating them and using them much like creating a symphony or a piece of music".

Yellow Figure (2017)

Amor Matris (2015)

Almost a reaction to the minimalist aesthetic, Snyder started filling her paintings, overpopulating them with stuff. She claimed to "speak with symbols and marks and colours and materials", she built up her art with organic matter as well as paint, and she asserted there was some kind of story to be told in her art. 

Which is where she loses me. It's one thing to claim that this "language" can't be "easily described" and that it's "coming from the collective unconscious" but it's quite another to expect anyone else to reply with anything other than "okay, nice painting". I know I'm ranting about press releases again but they've got so lame of late (probably always have been) that not only do they not enhance the art, they actually put me off it. 

Fragments of a Soul (2018)

Small Rose Altar (2014)

Snyder says "there's a kind of magic that happens" when she paints but she doesn't seem to care if the Earth doesn't move for us too. I mean, it was nice and all that but, let's be honest, it's more a wank than a long satisfying shag in front of a roaring fire with glasses of Rioja on hand for post-coital refreshment. 

It's a pity that such grand claims are made for this art because, truth be told, it's quite pleasant. Milk & Rosebuds uses a lovely shade of red, the yellow of Summer Fugue is imbued with a sad light that coaxes you in, and Floating Soul makes use of such rich purples and browns you can't help be drawn to it.

Summer Fugue (2010)

Floating Soul (2018)

Song Cycle 6 for Molly (2016)

Song Cycle 6 for Molly (I've got no problems with pretentious names for the artworks, that seems like part of the fun) is also the kind of painting you'd not get bored of if you had the funds to have it on your wall. But that's to talk of art as mere decoration and Snyder seems to be aiming higher. Like many artists.

Like most of those artists she also fails. There's nothing wrong in pure decoration and on that very basic, and honest, level these paintings are somewhat delightful. Any grander claim, I'm afraid, ain't cutting it with me.

Proserpina (2013)

Take 5 (2017)

Winter Rose (2013)