by Natalie Bennett

There’s both irony and inevitability that my introduction to a great Australian artist, Fred Williams, should have been not during my first 25-odd years in Australia, but much later in London, today at the Tate Modern. I read there that for the art world he emerged in the 50s and 60s, but when I was at school in the 80s in Sydney the continuing cultural cringe ensured that “Art” meant long-dead white males – the European masters.

Williams had taken the inevitable path for the talented post-war Australian, coming to London to art school, and there’s one of his early works on show in the “Sign and Texture” exhibition at the Tate Modern, in which he is the dominant artist. There’s an early piece from London in 1955, “Coal Delivery”, displaying a murky, peasouper palette. Back in Australia, his “St George River” from 1960 traces of that influence remain – the richness of the brown is distinctly European.

By “Dry Creek Bed” (1977) his palette has evolved to perfectly capture the washed-out, tired tones of Australia’s ancient soils, combined with the dangerous reds of a leaping bushfire and the drained olive of a eucalypt in mid-summer. And he’s perfectly evocative of the landscape despite the abstraction of form: this semi-aerial view of in this narrow, mindlessly meandering, river through the sharply cut sandstone cliffs, exposing the bones of this ancient fragile ecology instantly took me back to a landscape of my youth – the dangerous wildlands around Fitzroy Falls just south of Sydney.

Nearby at the Tate is “Burnt landscape II”, its great sweeping horizon managing to convey the immensity of the fire’s power, its overwhelming textured blackness firmly routed in reality.

That Wlliams didn’t make it into my art curriculum might not have only been because of nationality. There’s something dangerously radical in his way of seeing the river as it really is, not in photographic form but its skeleton, its essence. Just looking at this painting took me back to hearing Tim Flannery, Australia’s foremost scientific public intellectual, saying that this fragile, damaged land could sustainable support just a few million rapacious humans.
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by Natalie Bennett

I can still remember the Eureka moment when I grasped that the book was a technology; when you think about it not as a given, but an artefact of time and place (and an artefact that even in my time has changed quite a lot – the relative cost has dropped enormously, and people now treat books far more casually than even a couple of decades ago.) Suddenly something that seemed a given was much more complex and interesting.

Forefronting the book, exploring its nature, understanding what it does to us and what we do to it, are at the centre of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s exhibition Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book. It is meant entirely as a compliment to say that this could easily be at the Tate Modern – or even the Pompidou in Paris; this is an intellectually sophisticated exhibition, if an uneven and sometimes oddly selected one.

It begins with by far its most powerful, even haunting piece, Kiefer’s “The secret life of plants”, a huge, 2m-high “book” of lead sheets bound with cardboard. On the “pages are partial maps of the stars. The stars themselves are solid accretions of white, thick and chancelike, the human labels, long strings of numbers laid on them by Nasa, and the occasional galaxy names are roughly written on with removable tape, the cardboard binding and these are frail, ephemeral things but the lead and the stars that mark it might survive, you feel forever, to be read (as nothing else we could leave conceivably could be read) by a future alien long after human life has disappeared into oblivion. (I can’t find an image of this particular work, but it is broadly similar to this.)

Many parts of the exhibition are more traditional – artists simply illustrating books, fine art bound with words. Standout among these for me included the edition of Jane Eyre illustrated by Paula Rego (you might recognise the name from her wonderful Germaine Greer portrait in the National Portrait Gallery). Today it was open at the page that has the text describing Mr Rochester’s young French ward Adele charming lady visitors. Beside it is a powerful lithograph of an uncertain child sitting in the lap of a gowned but far from aristocratic lady. In the background are figures from a child’s nightmares, giant menacing nurses, and a scene of a woman being torn from her bed. Nearby is Louise Bourgeois’s etching of a spider, both beautiful and terrible and Balthus’s lithographs for Wuthering Heights nearby are equally dark.

But it is when the artists play with the book, mutilate, trap it, deform it, that this exhibition really gets interesting, and has an explanatory power.
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by Natalie Bennett

At the heart of I Saw Myself there is a woman – a powerful, self-aware, sexual, physical woman. This is Eve before she was castrated by the Abrahamic religions. She’s not good – but she strong, and she glories in that strength. She’s a Western Kali – whether she uses her power for good or evil is to her incidental.

The woman, the queen, is Sleev, played here with passion and breath-stopping charisma by Geraldine Alexander. As the playwright, Howard Barker writes in the introduction, “we know the epic status of the faithful wife“. Here he grants the same to the faithless. As Sleev not so much says but proclaims: “I’m not Penelope, that flaccid packet of fidelity.”

Sleev plays the women and men around her like sacrificial pawns. She’s super-intelligent, manipulative, and magnificent, and with a different set of genitals she’d have made a superb king – a young Hal, but with brains. She plays games to stave off ennui, and is disappointed that no one can compete. We get little sense of her husband, killed in battle, but he was obviously no match for her. The only person in this troubled court who sees through her, but is still unable to resist her through the barrier of class, is her “best maid”, Ladder, played with sophisticated, passionate restraint by Jules Melvin.

This is a grand tragedy, in a pattern familiar for more than two millennium, yet there’s something new and fresh here in the previously unstageable honesty, and the preparedness to see and engage with women in their own terms. (It’s hard to believe this was written by a man.) Unlike their predecessors over many centuries, these characters aren’t trapped by stage convention into metaphors and symbols for sex – when they talk about sex, when they have sex, then that’s presented in all of its full frontal humanness.
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