Critic Watch / BlogSpot
Critic Watch
Monday, October 31
...and before I forget
I must award the coveted Golden Knob Award, since I know you are all
out
there biting your nails dying to know who's won. And since the Green
Room awards
were an internet event this year, Theatre Notes feels justified in
doing the
virtual ceremony. Yes, imagine a set like the one at last year's AFI
Awards
(which I almost reviewed as the worst I have ever seen...) with tacky
gilded
pillars, conjure the rubber chicken and frozen veg, and you're almost
there.
(Ahem)
Frankly, Melbourne's crrrritics have been a little boring lately. We
all seem
to have been behaving ourselves. But there is one late candidate for
the
Golden Knob - my spies tell me that a well-known freelance critic rang
the MIAF
office demanding an extra complimentary ticket to Le Dernier
Caravansérail and
threatened negative coverage of the show when he was told this was not
possible. This plumbs new depths of knobdom, past mere ignorance and
philistinism into
sheer corruption. Such action is, I hasten to add, very unusual. I
could be
very naive, but I've never heard of anyone else doing it.
But despite this high standard, one nominee
continues to rise above the
rest.
He has maintained impeccable standards of knobjockeyhood for years and
the
Melbourne Festival did nothing to lower them. Again and again he spat
on
innovation, declaring there is basically only one choreographer who
does anything
worth lo review. Yes - stand up, 2005 Golden Knob: Neil Jillett!
The t-shirt is in the mail.posted by Alison Croggon
@ 3:18 PM 0
comments
Wednesday, October 12
MIAF Knob-Jockey Awards
To err is human - why, even Theatre Notes has proved her humanity this
way.
Everyone makes mistakes, and in that giant jury in
the sky we all hope
that we
will be forgiven our sins, yada yada. But there's getting it wrong and
then
there's, well, something else. Sometimes Melbourne's critics get it so
wrong
that you wonder why they claim to be interested in art at all. To
celebrate this,
I've inaugurated the MIAF Knob-Jockey Awards, for particularly stunning
instances of critical philistinism during the Melbourne Festival.
So here are the candidates so far. (Drum roll) -
First, we can't overlook Neil Jillett, who has been doing his bit to
cheer
the hearts of Knob-Jockey afficionados everywhere in his Sunday Age
reviews.
Melburnians must be inured to Jillett by now, who for many years has
been a
reliable indicator of artistic worth - if Jillett hates it, it's
probably worth
seeing. Despite his distinguished record of Knob-Jockeydom, his review
of Green
in the Sunday Age was a doozy even by his standards. The review's not
worth
arguing with: it merely stands as an extreme example of Knob-Jockey
Activity at
its most destructively blind.
But it was the imperious, passionate diva Diamanda
Galas who seemed to
bring
out the worst in Victoria's Finest. I didn't see her first show,
Defixiones,
but it was, said Sunday Age critic Owen Richardson, "hard work".
Negating at
one stroke the extraordinary power of Galas's presence and voice,
Richardson
complained that Ms Galas neglected to sing in English, thus making it
impossible
to relate to the performance, although apparently a translated text of
the
poems was provided. "This may sound like Anglophone philistinism," says
Richardson querulously, "but surtitles would have done the trick."
Owen, here's some news: it is Anglophone
philistinism, actually.
Surtitles?
Ms Galas herself had something to say about this during the performance
of
Songs of Exile (which I did see): "I don't work for the Maytag
corporation," she
said. "And I didn't come here to give the people Down Under work that
was less
than room temperature..."
Ms Galas, who clearly likes taking the fight into
the enemy's territory
- my
kind of woman - also had some unkind words for the Age critic John
Slavin,
suggesting in Greek that he practises self-abuse. In this case, there's
more at
stake than a diva's wounded vanity. The review annoyed me as well.
At (yet another) forum yesterday on crrritics, the
Australian's Arts
Editor
Miriam Cosic told me she was shocked at the lack of rigor in Australian
academic and alternative writings about art. That may well be true, but
rigor is not
conspicuous in some mainstream reviewing, either. John Slavin's review
of
Defixiones is a particularly fine example of this. Among other things,
it shows a
staggering ignorance of 20th century poetry. That wouldn't matter if he
wasn't
writing about it with the authority of Melbourne's major daily
broadsheet
behind him - many people are staggeringly ignorant of any poetry - but
since he
was, I think it deserves pulling up.
Like Owen Richardson, Slavin found Galas'
performance was much too
"intense"
and "weird" for comfort. Its discomfort - and its subject matter, the
genocide
of the Armenians and other 20th century atrocities - makes him reach
for his
Theodor Adorno. He has reached for exactly the same quote before, on at
least
one other occasion. It is Adorno's most famous statement: "After
Auschwitz,
poetry is no longer possible".
This is a much debated quote which has reached the
status of a cliche;
it's
also not quite what Adorno said. He actually wrote: "The critique of
culture is
confronted with the last stage in the dialectic of culture and
barbarism: to
write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the
knowledge
which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today." It
comes
at the end of a complex essay that argues that it is "barbaric" to
write
lyric poetry because the culture that produced some of the greatest
lyric poets in
Europe also produced the concentration camps. The language can't help
being
fatally saturated with the conditions that made the death camps
possible.
Adorno also said, in response to Paul Celan's poem
Todesfuge ("Death
Fugue")
"No lyric poetry after Auschwitz!" Which can be interpreted to mean
that in
the face of such human enormity, it is no longer possible to make a
lyric beauty
that is not, at the same time, denied.
Slavin does not hint at any of this complexity,
however: he takes it as
meaning that Adorno endorsed a blanket ban on poems. According to
Slavin, Adorno's
statement is "contentious" because poetry is the "paramedic of
culture", the
task of which is to "cleanse language" that is "polluted" by "history,
politics
and media".
Hmmm...
It was precisely this "cleansing" function of
language which Adorno
claimed
was barbaric in the face of the death camps, which were intended to
cleanse the
pure Aryan race of the pollution of Semites (and homosexuals,
dissidents,
Gypsies and other undesirables). "Cleansing" is a word we now associate
with
"ethnic cleansing", an activity patented by the Nazis themselves. I'm
sure that
Slavin doesn't intend to back the Final Solution in his review; but if
he does
not intend it, he is showing an inexcusable carelessness of thought.
He clocks that Galas' work is "political". It is, in
fact, profoundly
so: in
the questioning way that at once creates and destroys beauty, that
refuses the
seductive and lulling comfort of consumable art for the raw, unmediated
pain
of lament. But for Slavin, "political" can only mean that Galas is
making
"protest art", "like the Beat poets of the '50s and 60s" with whom she
has,
apparently, "much in common". This "protest art" fails because it
doesn't
communicate "a position which can be shared and acted on". Slavin
should read his Adorno
again, and not only to get the quotes right: there are screeds of
arguments
against precisely this kind of instrumental view of art.
Aside from this, the comparison to Beat poets makes
no sense at all.
Anyone
with a modicum of knowledge about 20th century poetry (and who has seen
Galas
in action) can only say, huh?
Galas was singing the words of a number of poets in
Defixiones. It's
news to
me that the distinguished Greek poets Yannis Ritsos and George Serferis
were
actually Beats. And I'm sure it would be news to the Syrian poet
Adonis, whose
poems Galas also sang that night. These are, to my knowledge,
completely
different poetries, even from each other. But I guess you learn
something new every
day.
Finally, Slavin dismisses the enthusiastic audience
response to
Defixiones as
"romantic despair": nothing more than an adolescent pose for
dysfunctional
"Goths". It's not really possible to tackle the implications of this
statement
here; it requires a book. (I'm quite certain that it wasn't "romantic
despair"
that Ritsos suffered all those years in prison; and also that "romantic
despair" doesn't quite cover the response to atrocities like genocide).
Suffice to
say that Galas certainly articulates human grief; but despairing she is
not.
I should say again I didn't see this particular
show, so I can't give
you my
view on it. My spies tell me that there seemed to be a big problem with
the
sound system that night, but neither of our astute critics appeared to
notice
that.
This is about more than mere disagreeement about the
aesthetic quality
of a
performance. Whether a critic likes a work is really neither here nor
there (I
liked Galas, Slavin didn't; so what?) It's about the quality and
integrity of
response. Slavin merited Galas's wrath, because he was talking
pretentious
nonsense. And he fully earns his Knob-Jockey nomination from Theatre
Notes.
Congrats, fellas!
posted by Alison Croggon
