On Nancy Spero @ Centre Pompidou

You can come to the work of Nancy Spero, shown here at Paris's Centre Pompidou in a posthumous retrospective with all sorts of biographical and ideological preconceptions. It's an enormous credit to an artist so easily identified with the pop-art, feminism, ant-war protest and all sorts of counter cultural reference that the visual and physical presence of Spero's work can stand outside and above the biography, theory and reportage and leave one quivering.

The work here spans almost fifty years, from dark washes of ink on paper in the late 1950's to encyclopaedic serigraphs created prior to Spero's death in 2009. There's a range of work here, mainly on paper, here spanning drawings, watercolours and prints, surrealism, abstraction, classical quotation, graphical and typography but throughout it is positively charged with a recognisable and common energy of line and colour. Everywhere you see the way that marks seem to have been made on the paper, in a kinetic blur or a with a slap of pigment but with an urgent assertion. It's this visual energy that makes Spero's urgent commitment far more than a lecture in ink and paint.

The earliest works here are dark monochrome smears, where people and words emerge in dark from an off white paper. In small drawings the figures might be the marks of features on a shroud or shadows seared into the walls of Pompeii. With a minimum of ink these lithographs look like memories, the men or women are isolated shapes on the paper that have been reduced down to the characteristics of totems. Across the same room and within four years the dark ink has filled the frame and figures seem to contort out of black smoke almost in the shapes of Blake's Job. Whether having figures pushing out of smoggy backgrounds or using a minimum of marks on the blank paper the common Spero characteristic is economy. Less happens than you might think, she just seems to make every stroke matter.

Part of the brilliance of this show is that is demonstrates how Spero takes on new stimulus, the media coverage of the Vietnam war or the poetry of Antonin Artaud, without ever losing her essential visual signature. The war pictures bring in harsh arbitrary shapes like the cross blades of the helicopter and we see human figures chewed and stripped to the bone, smeared with violent colour. People are tossed and ripped as if in rough Guernicas, twisted from the inside out and left motionless on piss-yellow washed backgrounds. Spero shows figures as if they were broken toy soldiers or the faceless repeated victims of conquest on triumphal Egyptian wall paintings. As she brings in these influences her economy of mark remains and adds to the impact of the paintings, the restraint prevents her from making war the spectacle that she abhors.

The war paintings also include explosive surrealist portraits of single figures that can remind you of Francis Bacon's contortions of Louise Bourgeois's genital surreality. Here Spero creates figures that might be Sumerian or Inca, disembodies heads that turn into sexual organs. Mouths spew blood and colour slashes and swirls and the overall effect are a series of aborted angels of death. Oddly at the end they remind you of Goya more than Spero's contemporaries. To be honest these pieces are far more effective than the text based works here. Slogans, no matter how you cut them up, lack the depth of great art. It's in these pieces is the most obviously a 'political' artist but they have the least ability to make us re-evaluate how we feel or to challenge us to action. The problem is a common one, politically motivated art tends to repeat a dogma and in doing so it loses the ability to connect in a human way.

The biggest work here, wrapped in three lines of large prints around three walls,'Azur', is a delirious archaeological montage. The individual images are like photocopies of artefacts, changing and degrading or the charcoal rubbings made of medieval funereal brasses, immediately they look like obsessive replication. But the lines of prints start to look like a fast cinematic montage and the juxtapositions and repetitions ask a question for every one they answer. It's not exactly analytical, but it looks like messy unresolved thought, the mind using images to wrestle with an idea. Intentionally or not they bring to mind patchwork quilts as much as radical collage. The colours are flashes almost like filters and throughout it is as if Spero has been playing with the combinations that visual culture offers us, cheesecake women come in cold blues while ancient sculpture pulses in technicolour. The persistence of the technique reminds us of its craft just as the quilt does, but it also suggests that nothing is fixed, that re-evaluation is an imperative and that we must question and question and question what we see.

The repeated printed image makes for visual poetry and punnery too. In 'Relay' Spero takes a classical Greek image of a woman running and repeats it, inverts it, reverses it, overlays it with colour and scratching and swathing it with colour. The effect (reminding us of the circularity of painting around a vase) is something both glorious and futile. This woman crosses colour and time, passing on something without ever reaching a finishing line. Ambiguity gives the piece depth but also helps show us how Spero's wok can be committed and ideological whilst still retaining an essential humanity and empathy. The answer to centuries of women not controlling the representation of their own image is for women to ceaselessly make images, not to simply state the issue and sit back in ideological smugness. Thats sense of vital imperative makes these works feel essential and timely.

Certain pieces of art come loaded with layers of reference, historical borrowings that weigh down the work and put the viewer in their place. It is as if we are being told "If you understand all of these things you might just be worthy to pass judgement on me". Others works tap into the vein of memory that pulses through our culture using the images that transmit and translate our shared experience, letting them bring their deep currents and seismic presence without hectoring the viewer with erudition. Spero's best work (and that's most of it_ transcends agit-prop and simple conceptual posturing. Wit and anger and movement and ambiguity make these works personally political and implicate the viewer. Feminism in art needs urgent powerful voices but too often gender studies ideology breeds sterile jargon (as does any ideology) and forgets that blood and skin and breath and tears and doubt and death are universal and that great art starts with there. Nancy Spero knew that and it's that heartbeat that survives her so wonderfully.

On The Crucible

Some experiences form you more than others.  Perhaps fifteen years ago, I snuck out of the office where I was working and saw Arthur Miller give a reading of his novella, 'The Homely Girl' in an Oxford theatre.  Afterwards he answered questions generously and candidly for at a couple of hours.  The experience did two things, firstly it introduced me to the work of Louise Bourgeois who had illustrated an artists book of the work; secondly it caused me to sneak around the back of the theatre find Miller and thank him.  Just to thank him.

Watching the Sydney Theatre Company's performance of The Crucible, which isn't exactly bad, more frustratingly patchy, made me think how great work can still transcend hamfisted production.

It might seem high praise to say that The Crucible is one of the great humanist works of art of the Twentieth Century.  But such an accolade, true as it is doesn't really do it justice, this is a work of art that claims its effect through painting the shaky portrait of humans both noble and frail in a century blighted by ideology and theory.  And that's precisely the problem for so many directors who approach it.  We all know what The Crucible's about, we know that it is rich in parallels about the abuses people heap on one another when religion or ideology make conformity inevitable.  When Miller has already created a play that does that through analogy what now?  More often than not the answer is that productions are linked explicitly to current affairs, and in doing so lose the power of a universal message.

If notion that cliché and stereotype are the enemy of art is somehow doubted then the next theatre director who proposes incarcerated characters be dressed in any form of orange jump suit ought to be made to use a set of Victorian pyjamas with convict arrows instead.  We miss much when we bludgeon Miller's text with contemporary references, when its very lasting resonance has come from its archetypal ambiguity.

The production struggles with religion.  The Reverends Parris and Hale highlight this.  When a director decides to evoke the modern day evangelical preacher they all too easily fall into the traps of shiny suits, declamatory hand waving and hammy eye-rolling.  That's the case here, and whilst Nathan Lovejoy is far more restrained as Hale we have been conditioned to find all these 'Elmer Gantry' (or even Reverend Lovejoy) tropes comical, it's hard for any actor to pull that back.  

The emotional core of the play ought to lie in the relationship between Elizabeth and John Proctor, a woman accused of witchcraft and her adulterous husband, whose dalliance with Parris's niece Abigail is the dramatic engine of the play.  It's strange to say that the performances of Marta Dusseldorp and Joe Manning are both very good, in and of themselves.  However the problem bigger problem, the problem of the whole production, is that as they head toward the inevitable climax their scenes together, in jail or courthouse, are played with such shouty histrionics that their power is lost.  Revenge, hysteria, and the brutal logic of a culture of accusation and denouncement, isn't a dish best served hammy.

I often suspect that directors feel they have to 'do' something.  That their imprimatur os somehow required on any text.  The dilemma is that while that 'something' so often this means 'more', greater emphasis, contemporizing irony, crashing literalness but a play as innately powerful as The Crucible benefits from less.

Miller spoke most eloquently against groupthink, against the vicious momentum of conformity and precedent as it crashes into an individual's conscience.  That is not a political position, but an ethical one.  Whilst Miller may have had an admirable political commitment (and it's worth remembering he wrote The Crucible before he was called up by HUAC) and target with the play its power to make us weep and roar cannot be attributed to a local rail against McCarthyism alone.  Spurious staging whether in the shape of Guantanamo jumpsuits of Hillsong spivvery dilutes that essential universal massage, by removing that leap of recognition we make for ourselves directors disengage the audience.

It's difficult to ruin The Crucible' but by making it 'contemporary' we make it historical and partisan.  The Crucible ought to remind us that there is no monopoly on goodness, that "Life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it."  

We should all thank Miller for that this reminder of the importance of that sentiment.