Richard Hamilton, Inventor of Pop Art

Everybody is talking about (sorry - seeing Irving Penn at the NPG and The Sweet Smell of Success in the same week has addled my brain) Richard Hamilton. Hamilton is the grandaddy, no -  inventor of Pop Art. He has a show on at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, London, England which I saw last week.

It's a mixture of old work and new work with some of the newer  work not quite hitting the spot - as  This Guardian review   points out. It doesn't work "where politics take over and the art becomes subordinate".  And here's another review which says why Hamilton makes art out of the obvious.

I like the obvious because  it is often not that obvious (and certainly not as obvious as we assume it to be - from our little self-contained world of self-contained assumptions). We need constant reminding of the obvious to help us stay human, to help us remember that killing and lying and stealing are bad. The simplicity and directness of the Palestine Map works incredibly well, especially with the Mordechai Vanunu print (based on the photo above) right next to it. It's obvious but it still manages to be visceral.

 Hamilton's work clears the smoke and mirrors of the world around us and then reapplies it until only the memory remains. It's influential (you can see bits of Hamilton directly in some of Paul Graham's work for example, as well as so, so many other people working with photography), and for me, the only pieces that dont' work are the Blair-based prints and mouldings, but that is because Blair is a slippery, chimerical character who exists only in the realms of his own fevered parallel-universe of an imagination. Nothing good can come out of him - not even good in a bad way, or bad in a good way.

The Times calls him the most important artist in Britain.

"America being America, the claims of Hamilton, Paolozzi and co to having instigated pop art have been ruthlessly swatted away. But the facts are the facts. And the facts tell us that, by 1954, Hamilton was producing collages and screenprints filled with film stars, comic heroes, pin-ups, pile-ups and kitchen goodies, whose chief purpose was to question the modern relationship between a consumer and his goodies. Even today, in this serpentine display at the Serpentine, Hamilton is surreptitiously investigating the manipulation of the buyer by the seller"


And this is Hamilton speaking in an Interview with the Telegraph

“I have a concept of being rejected for most of my life,” Hamilton tells me, with a smile. “When I had a show at the Tate in 1992 [his last London exhibition], it was rated the worst show of the year. And I felt rather proud of that, really – I’d come out on top for something at last. But I’ve always felt the same way: I never did anything that anybody else wanted.”

And the picture at the top is by Juergen Teller.

Solsbury Hill by Adrian Arbib

I wandered into Toppings Bookshop in Bath and was delighted to find the excellent Solsbury Hill by Adrian Arbib in the window.

The book documents the protests that met the building of the A46 Bathampton bypass, aka The Road to Nowhere, the treehouses that were made in the, er, trees, the Solsbury Hill benders and the protest camps on Bathampton Water Meadows.

I didn't live in Bath at the time, but I do now and see Solsbury Hill and the meadows every day, and drive along the pointless bypass to get to Brown's Folly, home to the world's second oldest bat and where I make many of my pictures.

Sadly, Arbib's pictures are still relevant as another pointless project is being proposed which will further destroy the Bathampton Water Meadows - a Park and Ride scheme. You can see some of the arguments on why it's such a bad idea by clicking on the links on the Solsbury Hill blog. I think subsidised, nay free public transport that is taken out of the hands of First Great Western, a company that makes public transport a luxury that is more expensive than taxis, is part of the answer.

You can buy the book here, view ephemera from the protest and link up to Arbib's blog, which hopefully will develop with time.

Hunger

picture: Peter Marlow



The Bath Film Festival comes around once a year - one of the highlights this year is Serious Steve McQueen's Hunger, which the story of the IRA Hunger Strikes of the 1980s. The Troubles have been reinvented a little (they gave warnings bless!) in the wake of the London Tube Bombings and 911 - an event characterised at the weekend by Stella Rimington, ex-head of MI5, as a normal terrorist incident, but one which had a response that was a huge overreaction.

Anyway, it's always good to cast one's memory back a few years and remember the days when bombing campaigns almost annihilated the entire British government and the terrorism threat consisted of rather more than the vulnerable individuals bearing incompetent bombs of the present.

In connection with all that, in the weekend's Observer, Sean O'Hagan writes a fascinating article on the Dirty Protest and Hunger Strike, and connects it to current security conditions. As Dostoyevsky said, "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."

"Back then, the most vivid description of their conditions came from Cardinal O'Fiaich, the then-Roman Catholic Primate of All Ireland, who visited the prison in 1978. 'I was shocked by the inhuman conditions prevailing in H Blocks 3, 4 and 5, where over 300 prisoners are incarcerated,' he said. 'One would hardly allow an animal to remain in such conditions let alone a human being.' O'Fiaich compared the H Blocks to 'the slums of Calcutta', adding: 'The stench and filth in some of the cells, with the remains of rotten food and human excreta around the walls, was almost unbearable. In two of them I was unable to speak for fear of vomiting.'

His public statement prompted a response from the Northern Ireland Office, which began: 'These criminals are totally responsible for the situation in which they find themselves. It is they who have been smearing excreta on the walls and pouring urine through the cell doors. It is they who by their actions are denying themselves the excellent modern facilities of the prison.'

The conflicting tone and message of those two statements, the one emotive and outraged, the other detached and clinical, prefigured the coming battle of wills between Republicans and the British state. In the eyes of the British government, led by Margaret Thatcher, the prisoners were simply murderers and gangsters and were to be treated accordingly. To the Nationalist population of Northern Ireland, who were becoming increasingly agitated about conditions inside the H Blocks, they were political prisoners standing up for a defining principle of Republicanism."

Read whole article here