Over the past decade there are three series of images of human suffering on a scale which is difficult for most human beings to comprehend except through the circumstances of individuals. The first was those of 9/11. The terror of those in the aircraft which flew into the twin towers, the Pentagon and the fourth where the passengers attempted to overcome their captors knowing that pain and death was likely, coupled with those trapped in the higher floors of the building, especially those who decided to jump, and of the fire, police and other rescue workers who went into those buildings and then realising they were collapsing on top of them,
The second was the Tsunami rush of water which swallowed up populations of towns, villagers and holiday makers.
The third is only emerging now and I find them even more difficult than usual to bear. The firemen standing among the rubble of a community school where their dogs have confirmed what surviving local have said, there is no one left alive here and where those who survived are too shocked and full of grief to do anything of themselves.
Then there are the uplifting stories of the survivors, two children brought out from under the ruins after a week, a young woman who immediate sang a hymn of gratitude to her rescuers and her God. The frustration of the reporters, undertaking the essential task of bringing the horror to the attention of the world so that Government, agencies and you and me with reach into our pockets to provide a little of what will be required and press the authorities to get their act together and provide more and better help than they are have been able to do until now.
What impact will these experiences have on them and all those who are directly helping, the locators of bodies and providers of burials of the unknown reminiscent of the mud swamps of the first world war. This is real suffering and real pain although experienced at a safe distance by the majority able to continue with the rest of our lives as if nothing unusual has taken place.
The work of Sophie Calle, the contemporary concept and performance artist, photographer and mini film maker, which continues to impress me most is Exquisite Pain in which she compares her changing thoughts and feelings about a personal experience which devastated her at the time with that of friends who have experienced personal loss and physical pain of varying intensity and circumstance. The work is a brilliant demonstration of how our thoughts and emotions usually change over time and how in each individual situation it is usual to be overwhelmed and unaffected by everything else that is happening around us, including the pain of others, which objectively may be worse, until a distance develops between the actual moments of our individual experience and we can place the experience in the context of the rest of our lives, before and since, as well as in the context of the lives of others and the history of human and animal kind and our surrounding physical world.
In the same way that some people enjoy films about horror and blood shedding, including recreations of acts of extreme violence, I wallow in work of emotional intensity. I cry with any sentimentality at the cinema and over the past year have discovered the sophisticated grandeur of the live operatic experience of loss, self sacrifice and death with Madam Butterfly, Aida, Il Travatore and Carmen, and of Turandot, but to less extent. Five years ago I rediscovered the emotional fix live drama when the Playhouse reopened in Newcastle, and the Sophie Calle work was made into a theatrical performance without interval. This work had the most influence on how I approached my own project since visiting the Saatchi 100 show at the former County Hall building followed the same day by my first visit to the Tate Modern further along the south embankment of the river Thames. My two visits to the Sophie Calle exhibition at the Whitechapel in December of last year has not had such a dramatic impact as those before but reinforced and reinvigorated my work rather shifting it into a new direction. I returned to the gallery just before Christmas because of wanting to experience the bank of screens in which women performed the letter at the core of Take Care of Yourself, some adding their reactions. I watched what I thought was a set cycle in which one of the continuously playing screens became the centrepiece with sound. I discovered that the order of showing within each cycle changes which pleased me considerably. After the performance of Exquisite Pain at the Playhouse I had attended a short open session with the Director and actors and asked if they varied the order in which the experiences of Sophie’s friends are interjected between the changing account of her own. The reaction for the Director was in effect that I was daft to raise such a suggestion which seemed to me to miss a fundamental point of the work.
My visit in Christmas week also reinforced my view that that three distinct groups of people visit art exhibitions. There are the tourist attraction visitor who goes to the Tate Modern or the Baltic at Gateshead who have had no previous interest in contemporary art or prepared for the particular exhibition(s), who pass through and who may stop at a particular work, usually for seconds before moving on. There are those with an interest in contemporary art, knowing something of the work and the artist before arriving and may spend time in reacting and considering the exhibition and to individual works, but rarely from my experience attempt to take in everything in one session. And then there are the artists usually students and young who go to study as well as experience and enjoy, and where at the Calle, there was more evidence than previously experienced of those sitting somewhere with a note book. It was evident from both visits to the Whitechapel that the majority if not everyone had come with prior knowledge of the work of Sophie Calle, even if they had not experienced the work directly before. Having said this only one other individual appeared to stay experiencing the different screens as they went through a cycle. The average stay was for one or two screen performance. Perhaps having grasped the concept they were not interested in its execution and therefore missed the extent which the same subject, a letter, can be read and interpreted and in this instance performed by singers and musicians as well as read.
Pain was also the subject of the last Wallander of the second series of three dramatizations of the nine novels of Henning Mankell. As with the other works, the subject is familiar, that of revenge killings where there is similarity in the modus operandi but the absence of an link. The killings are all of men where the victims die horribly. One retired man spends his time watching birds, and is impaled when he falls from a tampered viewing area. A florist is kept prisoner, starved and then tied to a tree to die. A jogger is placed in a bag loaded with rocks and dropped into water, with only the face exposed and also three were able to look into the face of the murderer before they departed, Only the fourth is prevented, a railway guard as he is about to be pushed under an arriving train.
Wallander and his team gradually discover that the connecting link is a self help group for women who have experienced violence within a relationship and that the organiser of the group is the likely murderess whose mother had also been a victim and had recently died. And then we come to the significant difference between this work and most others and will become an award winning episode among all three award winning masterpieces of dramatic storytelling scripting and acting.
The special ingredient is the character and life of Wallander and acting of Kenneth Branagh.
In this episode there is the sudden death of his father. Wallander visits his father at the residential home where the man has placed himself aware he is a burden to his family as Alzheimer’s takes stronger hold and he pleads with Wallander to takes him home where his life had some meaning. In one of the brief moments of clarity he talks of the joy of just sitting watching the passing of nature’s time and tells his son that he also should have someone to sit with him. Shortly afterwards, Wallander, while in the midst of the murder inquiry, is told that his father has died and he rushes to find that this is so and is immediately confronted with all the unresolved issues of their relationship, his father’s rejection of him, which was not just illness generated, and his own failure to spend more time with the man, and where the nature of his work and its demands was an important factor, but only one of several factors in the gulf between them, a gulf which one suspects had always been there.
I project this because of my own experience where my biological mother denied my existence in public throughout my life until going into care at the age of 96, when Alzheimer’s had already taken a strong hold and showed no affection during my childhood, never talked of my father or of our subsequent relationship and where in fairness several aspects of my life did live up to her fears about me and that I never measured up to any hopes and good wishes she possessed for me. And this was so until moving her to a residential home in South Shields where she progressed from the sad and angry stage of the disease into a demonstrable loving and happy person retaining the childlike belief in her Catholicism until her last breath, despite the pain and discomfort of her last weeks and days at the local general hospital. I was in the fortunate position of being to visit almost every day staying an average of one hour and although at times as he was unsure of who I was and although our ability to communicate directly ended over time we communicated and stabled a bond stronger than ever before and I had my childhood through her progress into babyhood and felt atonement for my many failures in other relationships and experiences.
This was not so for Wallander and worse was to come when arriving just in time to meet his daughter at the station for the funeral he found that his ex wife was with her at his daughter’s request. This was the first time they had met since the divorce and both communicated the challenge of the situation and he was confronted by his own loneliness and inability to come to terms with what had happened between them, especially when she confirmed that she was happy in the life that had developed since their parting. She has moved on, he had not. The film ends with both returning to his father’s graveside, and he leaves his wedding ring behind.
There are two other memorable magic moments. The first when he calls at the home of someone who had a relationship with one of the murdered men who physically abused her against her wishes. He is attracted to the woman who also reacts in a positive way to his visit as does her young son. On the wall he sees one of his father’s paintings which she inherited when acquiring the apartment. She thinks this is a print and he explains that his father only painted the same scenes with slight variations throughout his life, producing thousands of editions. The moment was wonderful because of the way Kenneth Branagh was able to communicate the pride felt in being able to explain about his father’s work and recent death to someone who appreciated the painting.
However the moment which was one of the most the most remarkable of dramatic portrayals of reality I have experienced during my own lifetime was when Wallander confronts the murderer and who manages to take him prisoner producing a gun with the consequence that colleagues, including a marksman, focus on the murderer. Wallander pleads with the woman to surrender or she will be killed unless she puts down the weapon and for a few seconds it looks as if he is successful as she breaks down in floods of tears in his arms but then turns the weapon on her self.
What had emerged beforehand is that the killing spree had commenced shortly after the mother of the women died and Wallander having just experienced the death of his father knew from his recent experience which included, meeting his wife after a period since their divorce that it can trigger extremes of behaviour with some children experience relief and a sense of freedom where others are devastated because of the closeness and bonds which had existed. There was also empathy for the murderess built up during the episode as we learnt of the extent to which those killed who had physically violated their partners, some assaulting a succession of women. Branagh was playing someone whose work and conviction was to apprehend the guilty and bring them to the justice of the society which employed him for such a purpose. At the same time Branagh also conveyed a man who believed he understood why the woman had behaved as she had. She would still have to face action of society against her and indeed punishments for actions for whatever the trigger and justification, the killings were premeditated and horrific involving torture and infliction of intense pain, but he also wanted her to have the opportunity for atonement and redemption. The level of acting was extraordinary.
We all need to experience both kinds of pain, that of the actual relayed and that of the drama and the performance. We do not need to experience directly and many people’s experience is limited in their lifetime although I suspect those who never experience directly are small in number. Because of this there is need to prepare for the eventuality and where through the reporting and experiencing in dramatic form we are able cope better when it happens to us and to show compassion and provide support to others when it happens to them.
The second was the Tsunami rush of water which swallowed up populations of towns, villagers and holiday makers.
The third is only emerging now and I find them even more difficult than usual to bear. The firemen standing among the rubble of a community school where their dogs have confirmed what surviving local have said, there is no one left alive here and where those who survived are too shocked and full of grief to do anything of themselves.
Then there are the uplifting stories of the survivors, two children brought out from under the ruins after a week, a young woman who immediate sang a hymn of gratitude to her rescuers and her God. The frustration of the reporters, undertaking the essential task of bringing the horror to the attention of the world so that Government, agencies and you and me with reach into our pockets to provide a little of what will be required and press the authorities to get their act together and provide more and better help than they are have been able to do until now.
What impact will these experiences have on them and all those who are directly helping, the locators of bodies and providers of burials of the unknown reminiscent of the mud swamps of the first world war. This is real suffering and real pain although experienced at a safe distance by the majority able to continue with the rest of our lives as if nothing unusual has taken place.
The work of Sophie Calle, the contemporary concept and performance artist, photographer and mini film maker, which continues to impress me most is Exquisite Pain in which she compares her changing thoughts and feelings about a personal experience which devastated her at the time with that of friends who have experienced personal loss and physical pain of varying intensity and circumstance. The work is a brilliant demonstration of how our thoughts and emotions usually change over time and how in each individual situation it is usual to be overwhelmed and unaffected by everything else that is happening around us, including the pain of others, which objectively may be worse, until a distance develops between the actual moments of our individual experience and we can place the experience in the context of the rest of our lives, before and since, as well as in the context of the lives of others and the history of human and animal kind and our surrounding physical world.
In the same way that some people enjoy films about horror and blood shedding, including recreations of acts of extreme violence, I wallow in work of emotional intensity. I cry with any sentimentality at the cinema and over the past year have discovered the sophisticated grandeur of the live operatic experience of loss, self sacrifice and death with Madam Butterfly, Aida, Il Travatore and Carmen, and of Turandot, but to less extent. Five years ago I rediscovered the emotional fix live drama when the Playhouse reopened in Newcastle, and the Sophie Calle work was made into a theatrical performance without interval. This work had the most influence on how I approached my own project since visiting the Saatchi 100 show at the former County Hall building followed the same day by my first visit to the Tate Modern further along the south embankment of the river Thames. My two visits to the Sophie Calle exhibition at the Whitechapel in December of last year has not had such a dramatic impact as those before but reinforced and reinvigorated my work rather shifting it into a new direction. I returned to the gallery just before Christmas because of wanting to experience the bank of screens in which women performed the letter at the core of Take Care of Yourself, some adding their reactions. I watched what I thought was a set cycle in which one of the continuously playing screens became the centrepiece with sound. I discovered that the order of showing within each cycle changes which pleased me considerably. After the performance of Exquisite Pain at the Playhouse I had attended a short open session with the Director and actors and asked if they varied the order in which the experiences of Sophie’s friends are interjected between the changing account of her own. The reaction for the Director was in effect that I was daft to raise such a suggestion which seemed to me to miss a fundamental point of the work.
My visit in Christmas week also reinforced my view that that three distinct groups of people visit art exhibitions. There are the tourist attraction visitor who goes to the Tate Modern or the Baltic at Gateshead who have had no previous interest in contemporary art or prepared for the particular exhibition(s), who pass through and who may stop at a particular work, usually for seconds before moving on. There are those with an interest in contemporary art, knowing something of the work and the artist before arriving and may spend time in reacting and considering the exhibition and to individual works, but rarely from my experience attempt to take in everything in one session. And then there are the artists usually students and young who go to study as well as experience and enjoy, and where at the Calle, there was more evidence than previously experienced of those sitting somewhere with a note book. It was evident from both visits to the Whitechapel that the majority if not everyone had come with prior knowledge of the work of Sophie Calle, even if they had not experienced the work directly before. Having said this only one other individual appeared to stay experiencing the different screens as they went through a cycle. The average stay was for one or two screen performance. Perhaps having grasped the concept they were not interested in its execution and therefore missed the extent which the same subject, a letter, can be read and interpreted and in this instance performed by singers and musicians as well as read.
Pain was also the subject of the last Wallander of the second series of three dramatizations of the nine novels of Henning Mankell. As with the other works, the subject is familiar, that of revenge killings where there is similarity in the modus operandi but the absence of an link. The killings are all of men where the victims die horribly. One retired man spends his time watching birds, and is impaled when he falls from a tampered viewing area. A florist is kept prisoner, starved and then tied to a tree to die. A jogger is placed in a bag loaded with rocks and dropped into water, with only the face exposed and also three were able to look into the face of the murderer before they departed, Only the fourth is prevented, a railway guard as he is about to be pushed under an arriving train.
Wallander and his team gradually discover that the connecting link is a self help group for women who have experienced violence within a relationship and that the organiser of the group is the likely murderess whose mother had also been a victim and had recently died. And then we come to the significant difference between this work and most others and will become an award winning episode among all three award winning masterpieces of dramatic storytelling scripting and acting.
The special ingredient is the character and life of Wallander and acting of Kenneth Branagh.
In this episode there is the sudden death of his father. Wallander visits his father at the residential home where the man has placed himself aware he is a burden to his family as Alzheimer’s takes stronger hold and he pleads with Wallander to takes him home where his life had some meaning. In one of the brief moments of clarity he talks of the joy of just sitting watching the passing of nature’s time and tells his son that he also should have someone to sit with him. Shortly afterwards, Wallander, while in the midst of the murder inquiry, is told that his father has died and he rushes to find that this is so and is immediately confronted with all the unresolved issues of their relationship, his father’s rejection of him, which was not just illness generated, and his own failure to spend more time with the man, and where the nature of his work and its demands was an important factor, but only one of several factors in the gulf between them, a gulf which one suspects had always been there.
I project this because of my own experience where my biological mother denied my existence in public throughout my life until going into care at the age of 96, when Alzheimer’s had already taken a strong hold and showed no affection during my childhood, never talked of my father or of our subsequent relationship and where in fairness several aspects of my life did live up to her fears about me and that I never measured up to any hopes and good wishes she possessed for me. And this was so until moving her to a residential home in South Shields where she progressed from the sad and angry stage of the disease into a demonstrable loving and happy person retaining the childlike belief in her Catholicism until her last breath, despite the pain and discomfort of her last weeks and days at the local general hospital. I was in the fortunate position of being to visit almost every day staying an average of one hour and although at times as he was unsure of who I was and although our ability to communicate directly ended over time we communicated and stabled a bond stronger than ever before and I had my childhood through her progress into babyhood and felt atonement for my many failures in other relationships and experiences.
This was not so for Wallander and worse was to come when arriving just in time to meet his daughter at the station for the funeral he found that his ex wife was with her at his daughter’s request. This was the first time they had met since the divorce and both communicated the challenge of the situation and he was confronted by his own loneliness and inability to come to terms with what had happened between them, especially when she confirmed that she was happy in the life that had developed since their parting. She has moved on, he had not. The film ends with both returning to his father’s graveside, and he leaves his wedding ring behind.
There are two other memorable magic moments. The first when he calls at the home of someone who had a relationship with one of the murdered men who physically abused her against her wishes. He is attracted to the woman who also reacts in a positive way to his visit as does her young son. On the wall he sees one of his father’s paintings which she inherited when acquiring the apartment. She thinks this is a print and he explains that his father only painted the same scenes with slight variations throughout his life, producing thousands of editions. The moment was wonderful because of the way Kenneth Branagh was able to communicate the pride felt in being able to explain about his father’s work and recent death to someone who appreciated the painting.
However the moment which was one of the most the most remarkable of dramatic portrayals of reality I have experienced during my own lifetime was when Wallander confronts the murderer and who manages to take him prisoner producing a gun with the consequence that colleagues, including a marksman, focus on the murderer. Wallander pleads with the woman to surrender or she will be killed unless she puts down the weapon and for a few seconds it looks as if he is successful as she breaks down in floods of tears in his arms but then turns the weapon on her self.
What had emerged beforehand is that the killing spree had commenced shortly after the mother of the women died and Wallander having just experienced the death of his father knew from his recent experience which included, meeting his wife after a period since their divorce that it can trigger extremes of behaviour with some children experience relief and a sense of freedom where others are devastated because of the closeness and bonds which had existed. There was also empathy for the murderess built up during the episode as we learnt of the extent to which those killed who had physically violated their partners, some assaulting a succession of women. Branagh was playing someone whose work and conviction was to apprehend the guilty and bring them to the justice of the society which employed him for such a purpose. At the same time Branagh also conveyed a man who believed he understood why the woman had behaved as she had. She would still have to face action of society against her and indeed punishments for actions for whatever the trigger and justification, the killings were premeditated and horrific involving torture and infliction of intense pain, but he also wanted her to have the opportunity for atonement and redemption. The level of acting was extraordinary.
We all need to experience both kinds of pain, that of the actual relayed and that of the drama and the performance. We do not need to experience directly and many people’s experience is limited in their lifetime although I suspect those who never experience directly are small in number. Because of this there is need to prepare for the eventuality and where through the reporting and experiencing in dramatic form we are able cope better when it happens to us and to show compassion and provide support to others when it happens to them.
