The exhibition in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall is currently these wonderful slides. They're not just for looking at, you can go down them as well. As the tallest one is five floors high, it's quite a ride.
But is it Art? If these slides were in a swimming pool or in a park, no, of course not. But they are in the Turbine Hall, which makes them, by definition, Art.
Condensing an obscene amount of intellectualising, academic back-and-forth, and general erudition, Art reflects, emphasises and amplifies life. So, why Slides? Well, last time I passed a playground with a helter-skelter slide I thought, 'how elegant'. The artist's work was done.
So, there I was, in the middle of reading The Swimming Pool Library, which, surprisingly for a novel set so firmly in the gay milieu had been very well received by the mainstream press, and enthusing about it to a gay (relevant, OK?) friend. He hadn't come across the Hollinghurst, but suggested that I might also enjoy Slaves of the Empire, by Aaron Travis, which he lent me at the next opportunity.
It's a slim volume, but as we all know, size really matters - it has to be the right size. I started reading. I couldn't make it out. I understood the words, and the order they came in, but I could not for the life of me grasp what the author was aiming at. Was the tone ironic? Was it a pastiche? Was it allegorical, with the gladiator slaves standing for the honest hard-working sons of toil, and the slave-masters being AIDS or summat?
And then I got it. It was Porn. Badly written porn. Exploitative, voyeuristic, improbable porn. And none of the last three adjective would have applied if it hadn't been so-oo-oo badly written. I was reading the Travis in the context of the Hollinghurst and came completely unglued. With that burden of unnecessary expectation lifted, I could finish reading the thing with a light heart, laughing, crying and cheering the travails of our various (extremly well-oiled) heroes.
And now I have a yardstick for homosexual pornography, hooray. Nothing so far to measure against it though. As to whether it's Art? . . .
UPDATE - I took out the picture that should have been at the top of this post. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get Blogger to insert the pic. - the Add Image pane looked like it was working, but the post wasn't updated. I coded the HTML manually, but it seemed that it just worked for me and no-one else. Argh.
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13 comments:
You're absolutely right about context.
I started trying to read the fabulous Confederacy of Dunces about six months ago. People on political blogs I was reading kept suggesting it, so I thought it was a political essay. It's not, it's a novel, but I still thought it was meant to be a political novel. I was so confused. I kept starting it and putting it down. What is this crap? I thought.
And then I forgot about it until I got the overdue notice from the library. Having now forgotten it so thoroughly that I'd forgotten why I checked it out, or that I'd ever thought it was a political essay, I picked it up again, re-read Walker Percy's introduction and began to enjoy this marvelous comedy of the human condition, set in New Orleans and as colorful, funny, broad, foolish and touching as the 1960s it was set in.
Er, what were we supposed to be talking about again... gay porn? I've read quite a bit of it. But I doubt that would make me a literary expert in the field...
I remember reading The Swimming Pool Library on the tube. After another interminable paragraph about someone's cock snaking lazily in his underpants I looked up to see an old lady reading it over my shoulder. I resisted the urge to tell her it was actually a well-regarded novel.
I don't know about gay porn but I think the slides are brill, watching the look on all the peoples faces when they come down, that's got to be art.
Valerie - Confederacy of Dunces - that's the one about the idle mountain of lard still living with his ma and pretending to write? With the mad office job? Genius. Why does it appeal to political types though, and why on earth have you read 'quite a bit' of gay porn?
Wyndham - you felt the need to defend your choice of reading matter! That's sweet! No no - Rule ONE - never apologise, never explain. Works for me. (The one bit of the novel that has stayed with me was the description of some bloke's bumhole smelling like the used water from a flower vase.)
Realdoc, no that's SCHADENFREUDE. I watched aghast as a tiny girl - she can't have been even three - landed, immobile with - well, disbelief I think, that anyone could have done this to her. She was hastily scooped up by I guess her mother, whom I could have spanked. For a number of reasons.
Mango, thank you for letting me know I don't need to bother with Aaron Travis. I think porn-writers have perhaps had their thunder stolen by the internet, and I can't say I'm that bothered for them. I find porn a vaguely footling thing to spend one's time on. All that blogging time wasted. Anyway, surely porn is better suited to the screen than the page, though perhaps I'm being a dinosaur.
I've soldiered through a few Hollinghursts and found them good enough, though it got me worrying about his lack of 'soul', as a Russian would put it. It all felt somehow flat, and empty. Though I fancy the posh boys he comes up with.
Aber, what I wanted to ask was, am I the only person who can't see the illustration accompanying this post?
BiB, no, no, do bother! It was a hoot! I think the printed word still has its place. Were you able to catch the BBC 'In the line of Beauty'? Or somesuch? V. beautiful people.
I'd like to know about the pic too. I had real trouble linking to the pic on the Tate Modern site, and ended up copying it to my hard drive and linking. Would that make a difference?
Um, I think it's best linked to from your hard drive, in case the link at the Tate Modern ever dies, but I can't see it here. Can you see it yourself?
I haven't seen screen-versions of Hollinghurst. Are they worth looking out for?
Dunno why you can't see it - that's annoying. If you click on the link which takes you to the Tate Modern site, then Images, it'll show you lots of lovely pics.
Dunno if anything other than Line of Beauty has been done. I taped it, have yet to watch it, but the trailers looked very alluring. I'm glad you find him calculating. I worried slightly that he might be representative in that respect, and that proves he isn't.
I am amused that his stories - the ones I've read anyway - are all set resolutely pre-AIDS. It's the one example I can think of where a demographic has a Golden Age a)actually within living memory and b) that was real.
Mangonel, sorry if this sounds patronising, but I think you need to upload the image to Blogger for other people to see it. Go to 'edit post' and click on the 'upload image' button, which is the last one on the right, it's a blue picture of a landscape. Then just follow the instructions...
Dear all, thank you for your advice. Unfortunatley, I think it's something to do with this particualr blog - my other one, where most of the pictues come from my hard drive, is fine.
Yes, the icon I use is the little blue landscape, which looks like its working, and when I press DONE, there is nothing there, or a white box. I had to hard code the HTML to grab the image from C:/. Which works for me, but for no-one else. Further investigation required.
If anyone knows which bit of HTML controls the width of my Post column, I would be very grateful.
YOUR OTHER BLOG? You can't just slip that sort of intelligence into conversation without further details. Spill. Spill.
If only it was that interesting . . . *sigh*. I have a widely distributed family - half in Germany, half in South Africa, with outposts in Dubai and Moscow and Milan. I love them all dearly (most likely because they are all so far away) but phone calls are expensive and time-comsuming, and writing a Christmas round robin excrutiatingly out of the question, so family blog it is. Now I need to skootch over to your blog to comment there . . .
Sorry M, I knew you'd be on top of it. It might be one of those pictures that doesn't allow itself to be posted. I get those sometimes. I don't know whether it's something coded into the picture to prevent unauthorised copying, or whether there's just something about them that Blogger doesn't like.
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