MICHAEL CAINES

Lo l i t a Ch a k r a b a r t i

RED VELVETTricycle Theatre

Mel Bochner, one of the founders ofthe conceptual art movement (his1966 show,Working Drawings and

Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessar-ily Meant To Be Viewed as Art, includedthe work of Donald Judd, Dan Flavin,Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt andRobert Smithson and has been called thefirst conceptual art exhibition), is grippedby classification, by the shapes that generallaws or principles impose on their material.Patterns, sequences, numbers, measurements– all are used to create a scaffolding to carryideas, just as punctuation, paragraphs andchapter breaks do for writers.Born in Pittsburgh in 1940, Bochner

imbibed the idea of information deliveryfrom a childhood spent as the son of a sign-painter. Some of his earliest works (not ondisplay in this otherwise extraordinarily fine,even thrilling, exhibition) are shaped inkedlists that describe, sum up, and subvert thecharacters of his friends and influences. “Por-trait of Borges” is a squared off spiral oflettering that spins around an empty centre,beginning “STRAIGHT LINE, DIRECTLINE, BEE LINE, STRAIGHT COURSE,SHORT CUT, HAVE NO TURNING”, evenas, Borges-like, the words jauntily turn in themiddle of that last phrase. The portrait of hisfriend Ad Reinhardt is blunter, moving from“QUIESCENCE STILLNESS QUIETNESSQUIETUDE CALMNESS” to “STAND-STILL STAND STOP DEADLOCK INERTINERTIA PASSIVENESS TORPID”through “SMOTHER STIFLED” beforereturning to more positive traits. Bochnermay have used minimalist tools, but there isnever any doubt about the sensations hiswork intends to arouse.“Theory of Painting”, a large installation

piece of 1969–70, sees Yves Klein blue paintsprayed on to newsprint spread across thefloor. Lettering on the walls presents the pos-sibilities for abstraction as either/or: “Cohere/ Disperse”, “Disperse / Cohere”, “Cohere /Cohere”, “Disperse / Disperse”. That is, onecan have a coherent figure on a dispersedbackground, a dispersed figure on a coherentbackground, a coherent figure on a coherentbackground, or a dispersed figure on adispersed background. If at the time this wasunderstood as a map for the future, it musthave seemed mighty depressing. But now, inretrospect, it is clear that it was, instead, arejection of the past, particularly of the rigidClement Greenbergian formula of the pur-pose and function of abstraction.For, says Bochner’s work, if language is

our mind, then colour is our body; if languageis meaning and thought, then colour is emo-

Enter, into his dressing room, the “Afri-can Roscius”: Ira Aldridge, the mostcelebrated black actor of the nine-

teenth century, stooping with theatrical oldage. On tour in Poland, Aldridge indulges arookie reporter with ten minutes of his time,not long before curtain up. In one hand theactor wields a walking stick; with the other,he conjures a savouring of a memory, an invi-tation to stay, and finally an angry dismissal.He avoids giving interviews most of the time,and this is why: the young lady starts to askhim about London, the centre of the English-speaking theatre world, and why he has notperformed there more often. The answer –and the rest of Red Velvet, bar an epilogue –comes as a bitter flashback.The actor playing the actor, both as a

veteran on the road – in exile, more like – andas a younger, more vigorous man, is AdrianLester, who played Henry V at the NationalTheatre almost a decade ago – a black Planta-genet king. Lester plays Othello at the sametheatre next year. But now, in the moreintimate space of the Tricycle Theatre, in aplay written by his wife Lolita Chakrabarti,Lester plays Aldridge playing Othello. RedVelvet is a fantasia rooted in theatre history,concentrating on the Shakespearean side toAldridge’s career, rather than his less digni-fied Jim Crow act. Aldridge might have beenmore precisely known as the “African Amer-ican Roscius” – readers of Bernth Lindfors’sbiography of the actor (see the TLS, June 15)will know that he was a New Yorker by birth.Eventually, on the British stage, he wouldplay Othello and Aaron the Moor in TitusAndronicus, to varying degrees of acclaim.Chakrabarti is sure to quote the very ugli-

est, tut-and-hiss-eliciting of contemporaryreviews in response to Aldridge’s debut atthe Theatre Royal in Covent Garden as Oth-ello in 1833. The great Edmund Kean has justgiven his last performance in the same role,and Kean’s son Charles remains a primemover in the company. As superbly playedby Ryan Kiggell, Charles is a dangerouslypompous fool, all battened-down indignationbuilding to fury at the thought of this blackintruder actually playing a black character.It does not help that this doubly black Othellodares to kiss Desdemona on the hand.Charles is due to marry Desdemona, or ratherthe actress who plays her, Ellen Tree(Charlotte Lucas), and he had assumed thathis father’s role of Othello was due to him,too. Others, including Ellen, are more opento both Aldridge in person and Aldridge’smethods, which the play dubiously presentsas little short of revolutionary, to chime withthe political turbulence of Britain in the1830s. The rehearsal ends when Charlesstorms off – equally offended, it seems,by this parvenu’s rapport with Ellen, his“melodramatic” vigour and his unfeignedblackness. Other thespians cleave to the “tea-pot” school of deportment; the tea itself ispoured by the mostly silent Connie (NatashaGordon), the theatre’s Jamaican servant.These are not happy and settled times.

Parliament is still debating the abolition ofslavery. The Theatre Royal, caught up in ageneral atmosphere of unrest, is in danger

of having its windows smashed. In a wittilydirected and acted scene, the company“rehearse in” their newest member, strikingfixed poses around Ira as he dares to suggestthat Desdemona might look at Othello at themoment of their reunion in Cyprus, and totamper with the accepted mode of recitation.He is a harbinger of change, perhaps even ofprogress, not only for the colour of his skinbut for his belief that impressing an audienceis less about posturing than passion. “If thepassion isn’t simmering between us”, he tellsEllen, “they’ll feel nothing at all.” She ishooked, and later goes to his dressing roomafter the performance to continue the discus-sion. When they do not join the others for theusual round of post-show socializing, arumour is born.Red Velvet goes on to complicate matters,

not least by giving us a taste of what anineteenth-century Othello might have beenlike. For all his talk of a kind of theatricalnaturalism and using his emotional responsesas a guide to speaking verse (“Truth altersrhythm and gesture, don’t you think?”),Aldridge appears to be as much a swirling,ranting ham as the next leading man whosevoice has to reach the back of the vast CoventGarden auditorium. We see him and Ellen asthe Moor and his bride before the interval ofRed Velvet; the second half begins with himpacing up and down, fretfully enunciating theword “handkerchief”. He, too, calls blithely

on Connie for tea; “Why you kill your wifeon the back of such careless talk?”, her sharpform of Shakespearean criticism, brings himup short.“English audiences have a prejudice in

favour of European features”, states one ofthose damaging reviews, although it goes onto concede that on the night in question theaudience applauded and the manager couldduly announce that Aldridge would be repeat-ing his Othello, despite his “faulty” declama-tion: “false emphasis, incorrect readings, and. . . vulgarisms of pronunciation” (anti-Americanism is at work here, too, perhaps),although Lester, as ever, delivers his lines sosmoothly that it is difficult to believe that hisAldridge ever had a rough edge to his tech-nique. Red Velvet does not suggest that suchreviews were wholly the product of prejudice– hence its own handkerchief scene, acknowl-edging Aldridge’s supposed limitations. ButChakrabarti does give him some of the trap-pings of tragedy, dressing him up, finally, notas Othello but King Lear (“they told me I waseverything; ’tis a lie”) – an old man cheatedof his place at the heart of things.The director, Indhu Rubasingham, has

enlivened Red Velvet with touches such asswift, dance-like scene changes and havingmembers of the company making up or seem-ing to talk in their dressing room to stage-right. Entertaining and fast-moving though itis, however, the most powerful scene is alsothe simplest, as Aldridge and his manager, anold friend who ultimately has to betray himby sacking him, circle one another on a bare,bleakly lit stage. With this reluctant Judas,passing on society’s condemnation of its sac-rificial victim, the true history of Ira Aldridgecompletes its metamorphosis into myth.

Charlotte Lucas as EllenTree andAdrianLester as IraAldridge

Trappings of tragedy

JUDITH FLANDERS

Me l Bo c h n e r

I F THE COLOUR CHANGESWhitechapel Gallery, until December 30

Joyous,pointlessinformation

arts 17

TLS NOVEMBER 9 2012

tion and sensation. This comes together mostbrilliantly in “Event Horizon” (1998), whereeighty-three standard-sized canvases arecovered with shop-bought, unmixed acrylics,and assembled into a random-seeming row ofsizes and shapes. The whole is tied togetherby a white line running down the centrewhich, at irregular intervals, marks off a seriesof measurements. The length of the piece(nearly 30 metres) means that the viewer isobliged to stand some way off to see it in itsentirety, before moving closer, and walkingalong its length to work out the system, ornon-system, of measurement. The standardiza-tion of colour and canvas is counterbalancedby the hand-drawn nature of the numbers andthe white line, and the brushstrokes visible inthe acrylic; the pointless information by thesheer joyous shout of colour that movesacross the wall. “Event Horizon” is the heartof Bochner: a vibrant, promiscuous, knee-snapping march it is impossible not to becheered by, even as the rational mind acceptsthat its purpose is to indicate lack of purpose.The “Thesaurus Paintings”, for which

Bochner is perhaps best known, are a partialreturn to the list-portraits of the 1960s, but inthe intervening decades these works datingfrom the 1990s to the present have beenexpanded and universalized. Their frequentlybright, almost circus-like colours prime ouremotions and senses with one story, while thewords create another for the logical andrational parts of our brains. Bochner hastaken art-historical dichotomies – the ten-sions between perspective and the picture

plane, between figurative and abstract art –and transformed them into threads of lan-guage and colour, meaning and emotion.He thinks of his work, he says, not as

finished or unfinished, but as a process. Tohim, the images are gerunds, verbs that func-tion as nouns, both doing and done, at oneand the same time.The words in these paintings are initially

taken from the thesaurus; Bochner thenselects, adds, refines and expands. (The cata-logue shows some of the artist’s working

drawings, marvels of nuanced attention to gra-dations of meaning, as well as of calligraphiccomplexity.) In general, the order they finallyappear in moves from formal to demotic, fromurbane to vulgar – from “Master of the uni-verse” to “Gotcha by the balls”, from “Noth-ing. Negation” to “Pffft”. Many of the paint-ings are psychological pen portraits of a busy,buzzy, constantly chattering world of despair,even as the colours that embody the wordsglow and shimmer and vibrate with happi-ness. The way “Oh Well” (2010) starts

blithely, before darkening, is characteristic:“OH WELL, THAT’S THE WAY IT GOES,IT IS WHAT IT IS, WHAT CAN YOU DO?WHAT WILL BE WILL BE, DON’T GETYOURHOPESUP, SHITHAPPENS, NOTH-ING EVER CHANGES, JUST LEARN TOLIVEWITH IT . . .”. “Silence” (2012), creamon cream, is a mute shriek of impotence, thewords becoming more overtly hostile as thelettering becomes fainter: “SILENCE! BEQUIET! CAN IT! COOL IT! GAG IT! ZIPIT! MUZZLE IT! STUFF A SOCK IN IT!JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!”.Producing some of his most powerful work

as he moves into his seventies, Mel Bochnercategorically repudiates the stark choices hepresented four decades ago in “Theory ofPainting”. There is, he shows, no defendedborder between realism and abstraction. Hislettering and colour choices are matters ofpure abstraction, even as at the same time noone can fail to recognize the reality of theworld his words depict.The Whitechapel Gallery has done Boch-

ner proud with this beautifully mounted,carefully selected exhibition, the first majorshowing in Britain of an essential, essential-ist artist. For this show he has painted a vast(2.8 x 5.3 metres) entry piece: “Blah, Blah,Blah”, it tells us, forty times over. Here thesquidgy, smudgy letters replicate only toostarkly the contentless content we are allforced to endure daily. “Your call is impor-tant to us, please hold” is perhaps the ulti-mate abstraction – meaning without meaninganything at all. Blah blah blah.

Within a year we have witnessed thereopening of two of the world’sgreat collections of that Protean

subject, “Islamic Art”, a term so sweepingyet in some ways so specific in its meaningthat it still defies definition. One of the mostbasic diagnostic tests is probably still themost effective: you know it when you seeit. And see it we certainly can, at the Metro-politan Museum in New York after nearlyten years’ closure, and at the Louvre afteralmost as long, where the new galleries forma conclusion to the twenty-year enterpriseof “le grand Louvre”.The Met hedged its bets over the use of the

term, “Islamic”, preferring “Galleries of theArt of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, CentralAsia and later South Asia”, though the vol-ume accompanying the opening referred un-abashedly to “the Department of IslamicArt”. Sophie Makariou, the director of the

Islamic department of the Louvre, has care-fully qualified the French understanding ofthe term: in French, “islam” designates thereligion and “Islam” the civilization, therespective adjectives being “musulman” and“islamique”. In Paris, we are unequivocallyin the presence of the second version. Andwhereas the Met, as the new title implies,broke up its display into a number of sec-tions, the Louvre has gone for the grandsweep. If there was any patronizing doubtabout the status of “applied art”, it is ban-ished here by two huge galleries, which makea claim for “Islam” to have produced one ofthe greatest aesthetic cultures ever known.I found that the much-vaunted “golden

canopy” by Rudy Ricciotti and Mario Belliniwhich covers the upper gallery was disap-pointingly dull grey underneath, failing to dojustice to the collection, but the lower floor,in the basement, provides a thrilling displayof treasures emerging from the darkness.The great “Basin of St Louis”, a superbpiece of medieval metalwork, glows like asun; the gorgeous carpets, hitherto hidden

away, now extend in great silky stretches ofrich colour.The Islamic department has taken the

opportunity not only to have major workscleaned and restored but to re-consider mat-ters such as dating and the reading of inscrip-tions, making the catalogue accompanyingthe opening a valuable academic contribu-tion. Thus it has been possible, inter alia, forGwenaëlle Fellinger to revise the attributionof a celebrated fourteenth-century enamelledflask and for Claire Déléry to further researchthe provenance of the “Lion de Mazon”, aniconic Andalusian fountain-head which thenew galleries have adopted as their emblem.Like the arrangement within the galleries,

the book is divided into four broadly chrono-logical sections plus a fifth, “Les Arts duLivre”. The four areas are not inflexiblyarranged according to regional cultures butsee the development of an early artistic unitywithin the Arab territories, moving towardsthe emergence of elites and regional fragmen-tation, and take the story on to the rise ofempires, concluding at the start of the nine-teenth century. Each section includes exami-nation of particular aspects such as ornament,technical innovation and the urban setting. Aseries of maps at the end of the volume formsa valuable practical resource.So vast was the task (some 3,000 works are

displayed in the new galleries) facing SophieMakariou and her team that one hesitates tocriticize, but there is one notable omissionfrom both the display and the book: there is

little concern with religious context. Thisseriously undermines the “Les Arts du Livre”section, which lacks extensive considerationof that quintessentially Islamic achievement,the calligraphy and illumination of theQur’an. The Louvre has some beautiful laterPersian and Ottoman manuscripts, but themajor French holding of Qur’ans is inthe Bibliothèque nationale which inheritedthe Royal Library. It might have been moreconvincing to accept this inherent weaknessin the Louvre’s otherwise rich collections,and not to attempt a separate section whichdoes not play to the museum’s strengths, sostunningly demonstrated elsewhere.

JANE JAKEMAN

LOUVRE – ISLAMIC GALLER IES

S o p h i e Mak a r i o u , e d i t o rLES ARTS DE L ’ I SLAMAU MUSÉE DU LOUVRE

550pp. Paris: Hazan. ¤39.978 2 75410 619 1

arts

“Blah, Blah, Blah” (detail), 2011, byMel Bochner

Indian elephant door knocker, from theIslamicGalleries in the Louvre

Agrand aesthetic sweep

18

TLS NOVEMBER 9 2012

tion and sensation. This comes together mostbrilliantly in “Event Horizon” (1998), whereeighty-three standard-sized canvases arecovered with shop-bought, unmixed acrylics,and assembled into a random-seeming row ofsizes and shapes. The whole is tied togetherby a white line running down the centrewhich, at irregular intervals, marks off a seriesof measurements. The length of the piece(nearly 30 metres) means that the viewer isobliged to stand some way off to see it in itsentirety, before moving closer, and walkingalong its length to work out the system, ornon-system, of measurement. The standardiza-tion of colour and canvas is counterbalancedby the hand-drawn nature of the numbers andthe white line, and the brushstrokes visible inthe acrylic; the pointless information by thesheer joyous shout of colour that movesacross the wall. “Event Horizon” is the heartof Bochner: a vibrant, promiscuous, knee-snapping march it is impossible not to becheered by, even as the rational mind acceptsthat its purpose is to indicate lack of purpose.The “Thesaurus Paintings”, for which

Bochner is perhaps best known, are a partialreturn to the list-portraits of the 1960s, but inthe intervening decades these works datingfrom the 1990s to the present have beenexpanded and universalized. Their frequentlybright, almost circus-like colours prime ouremotions and senses with one story, while thewords create another for the logical andrational parts of our brains. Bochner hastaken art-historical dichotomies – the ten-sions between perspective and the picture

plane, between figurative and abstract art –and transformed them into threads of lan-guage and colour, meaning and emotion.He thinks of his work, he says, not as

finished or unfinished, but as a process. Tohim, the images are gerunds, verbs that func-tion as nouns, both doing and done, at oneand the same time.The words in these paintings are initially

taken from the thesaurus; Bochner thenselects, adds, refines and expands. (The cata-logue shows some of the artist’s working

drawings, marvels of nuanced attention to gra-dations of meaning, as well as of calligraphiccomplexity.) In general, the order they finallyappear in moves from formal to demotic, fromurbane to vulgar – from “Master of the uni-verse” to “Gotcha by the balls”, from “Noth-ing. Negation” to “Pffft”. Many of the paint-ings are psychological pen portraits of a busy,buzzy, constantly chattering world of despair,even as the colours that embody the wordsglow and shimmer and vibrate with happi-ness. The way “Oh Well” (2010) starts

blithely, before darkening, is characteristic:“OH WELL, THAT’S THE WAY IT GOES,IT IS WHAT IT IS, WHAT CAN YOU DO?WHAT WILL BE WILL BE, DON’T GETYOURHOPESUP, SHITHAPPENS, NOTH-ING EVER CHANGES, JUST LEARN TOLIVEWITH IT . . .”. “Silence” (2012), creamon cream, is a mute shriek of impotence, thewords becoming more overtly hostile as thelettering becomes fainter: “SILENCE! BEQUIET! CAN IT! COOL IT! GAG IT! ZIPIT! MUZZLE IT! STUFF A SOCK IN IT!JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!”.Producing some of his most powerful work

as he moves into his seventies, Mel Bochnercategorically repudiates the stark choices hepresented four decades ago in “Theory ofPainting”. There is, he shows, no defendedborder between realism and abstraction. Hislettering and colour choices are matters ofpure abstraction, even as at the same time noone can fail to recognize the reality of theworld his words depict.The Whitechapel Gallery has done Boch-

ner proud with this beautifully mounted,carefully selected exhibition, the first majorshowing in Britain of an essential, essential-ist artist. For this show he has painted a vast(2.8 x 5.3 metres) entry piece: “Blah, Blah,Blah”, it tells us, forty times over. Here thesquidgy, smudgy letters replicate only toostarkly the contentless content we are allforced to endure daily. “Your call is impor-tant to us, please hold” is perhaps the ulti-mate abstraction – meaning without meaninganything at all. Blah blah blah.

Within a year we have witnessed thereopening of two of the world’sgreat collections of that Protean

subject, “Islamic Art”, a term so sweepingyet in some ways so specific in its meaningthat it still defies definition. One of the mostbasic diagnostic tests is probably still themost effective: you know it when you seeit. And see it we certainly can, at the Metro-politan Museum in New York after nearlyten years’ closure, and at the Louvre afteralmost as long, where the new galleries forma conclusion to the twenty-year enterpriseof “le grand Louvre”.The Met hedged its bets over the use of the

term, “Islamic”, preferring “Galleries of theArt of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, CentralAsia and later South Asia”, though the vol-ume accompanying the opening referred un-abashedly to “the Department of IslamicArt”. Sophie Makariou, the director of the

Islamic department of the Louvre, has care-fully qualified the French understanding ofthe term: in French, “islam” designates thereligion and “Islam” the civilization, therespective adjectives being “musulman” and“islamique”. In Paris, we are unequivocallyin the presence of the second version. Andwhereas the Met, as the new title implies,broke up its display into a number of sec-tions, the Louvre has gone for the grandsweep. If there was any patronizing doubtabout the status of “applied art”, it is ban-ished here by two huge galleries, which makea claim for “Islam” to have produced one ofthe greatest aesthetic cultures ever known.I found that the much-vaunted “golden

canopy” by Rudy Ricciotti and Mario Belliniwhich covers the upper gallery was disap-pointingly dull grey underneath, failing to dojustice to the collection, but the lower floor,in the basement, provides a thrilling displayof treasures emerging from the darkness.The great “Basin of St Louis”, a superbpiece of medieval metalwork, glows like asun; the gorgeous carpets, hitherto hidden

away, now extend in great silky stretches ofrich colour.The Islamic department has taken the

opportunity not only to have major workscleaned and restored but to re-consider mat-ters such as dating and the reading of inscrip-tions, making the catalogue accompanyingthe opening a valuable academic contribu-tion. Thus it has been possible, inter alia, forGwenaëlle Fellinger to revise the attributionof a celebrated fourteenth-century enamelledflask and for Claire Déléry to further researchthe provenance of the “Lion de Mazon”, aniconic Andalusian fountain-head which thenew galleries have adopted as their emblem.Like the arrangement within the galleries,

the book is divided into four broadly chrono-logical sections plus a fifth, “Les Arts duLivre”. The four areas are not inflexiblyarranged according to regional cultures butsee the development of an early artistic unitywithin the Arab territories, moving towardsthe emergence of elites and regional fragmen-tation, and take the story on to the rise ofempires, concluding at the start of the nine-teenth century. Each section includes exami-nation of particular aspects such as ornament,technical innovation and the urban setting. Aseries of maps at the end of the volume formsa valuable practical resource.So vast was the task (some 3,000 works are

displayed in the new galleries) facing SophieMakariou and her team that one hesitates tocriticize, but there is one notable omissionfrom both the display and the book: there is

little concern with religious context. Thisseriously undermines the “Les Arts du Livre”section, which lacks extensive considerationof that quintessentially Islamic achievement,the calligraphy and illumination of theQur’an. The Louvre has some beautiful laterPersian and Ottoman manuscripts, but themajor French holding of Qur’ans is inthe Bibliothèque nationale which inheritedthe Royal Library. It might have been moreconvincing to accept this inherent weaknessin the Louvre’s otherwise rich collections,and not to attempt a separate section whichdoes not play to the museum’s strengths, sostunningly demonstrated elsewhere.

JANE JAKEMAN

LOUVRE – ISLAMIC GALLER IES

S o p h i e Mak a r i o u , e d i t o rLES ARTS DE L ’ I SLAMAU MUSÉE DU LOUVRE

550pp. Paris: Hazan. ¤39.978 2 75410 619 1

arts

“Blah, Blah, Blah” (detail), 2011, byMel Bochner

Indian elephant door knocker, from theIslamicGalleries in the Louvre

Agrand aesthetic sweep

18

TLS NOVEMBER 9 2012