For posterity…

Norm ‘Normblog’ Geras is running a posterity collection poll.

The story is that, civilization approaching its possible doom (not really, but it’s the premise of the poll), the normblog readership has been assigned the task of assembling for posterity a representative collection of the Arts of Humankind, to be preserved in a sealed container so that some future beings of intelligence, discernment and taste can discover it and be impressed. That’s you and me, and also you. What we all have to do is to nominate under the following 12 headings those artists whose work we would like to see going into the sealed container.

Well, here we go.

1. Poet – Thomas Hardy

I did The Mayor of Casterbridge for GCSE English Literature. I’m not sure it was the best choice for a room full of fifteen year old boys, and put me off Hardy for some time. I’ve since gone back to him and I find his poems particularly rewarding. I put Hardy here, ahead of a very great deal of competition, because the minor tragedies he describes recall a bygone age that he, writing at the turn of the century, saw being lost, leaving him nostalgic. The Choirmaster’s Burial is, I think, a good example of the Wessex he mourned. It captures something common across many peoples – the longing for the loss of an idealised past.

2. Playwright – William Shakespeare

His plays cast a long shadow down history; before Romeo & Juliet, romances (as we’d know them today) weren’t considered a serious subject. How many people, I wonder, know sections he wrote? Famous pieces like ‘To be or not to be’ and ‘O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth’ are probably well-known, but ‘bated breath’, ‘foregone conclusion’ and so on are just part of the many Shakespearean neologisms. Apart from the worth of his work and its influence on our language, other great works of art take their inspiration from him, whether operas (Verdi’s Macbeth, Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Rossini’s Otello), or art (Millais’ Ophelia must be pre-eminent), or, indeed, young adult fiction – I’m thinking of Malorie Blackman – where the timelessness of some of the themes dealt with by Shakespeare comes through.

3. Novelist – Alexander Pushkin

Pushkin was the founder of modern Russian literature and gave rise to the golden age of Russian novels. Much like Shakespeare, he added much to the richness of his language, inventing words where none yet existed to fit his purposes. He also has inspired follow-on works of art – Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Mussgorsky’s Boris Godunov and so on. Tragically, he died aged only 37, leaving works like Dubrovsky unfinished. An exemplar of his art, I think that Pikovaya Dama – The Queen of Spades – must rank as one of the great short stories. If it were made into a film today, it would resonate as strongly as when it was written.

4. Composer – Arvo Pärt

I’ve heard the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt attached to jazz, world music, neo-classical and post-modernist genres. He belongs to all of them, and more, and none. He has two distinct periods in his work, but it is united by the ‘revelatory’; it can all be traced to different parts of the European Christian musical traditions and the connection to the transcendent he seeks comes out. It is, to my mind, a great shame that he is not better known. Below is his Bogoróditse Djévo or Mother of God and Virgin; it only represents one of the many styles he has touched.

5. Jazz musician – Quintette du Hot Club de France

I’m assuming that I’m allowed a group instead of an individual. The Quintette was, essentially, Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli with an interruption in World War II. I’ve put them here for two reasons. One, they were great innovators in the European Jazz tradition, taking the roots of the music and placing them in a vernacular that fitted the European experience. They added strings to the traditional, brassy sound of jazz and in so doing widened it greatly. Secondly, they were great popularisers, bringing jazz, particularly, to a British audience.

6. Rock or pop star/group – The Beach Boys

I’m not sure about this one, but I think I’m going to plump for the Beach Boys, but only if I can include the solo work that Brian Wilson and Dennis Wilson recorded. They may have started off a little saccharine-sweet, but their later innovation and influence has to put them up here.

7. Country music ditto – Woody Guthrie

So come back Woody Guthrie
Come back to us now
Tear your eyes from paradise
And rise again some how

– Steve Earle, Christmas in Washington

Woody Guthrie, for me, embodies the most positive aspects of the US. He is fondly remembered and his music was important at the time, but he also did a lot to push forward the folk revival of the Sixties.

8. Movie director – Ingmar Bergman

Where to start with Bergman? Technically brilliant, his films were full of their own, dark beauty; his direction was masterful and his scripts condensed many parts of the human condition onto celluloid. The image of playing chess with Death predates him, but he brought it into modern popular culture as well as making the personification the ghastly white-faced figure rather than a skeleton. Although it is The Seventh Seal for which he is best remembered, his many plays and films touch on death, loss and insanity. Bleak, perhaps, but no less true for that.

9. Painter – Gilbert and George

We’ve had a lot of the transcendent; G and G are the opposite. Their corpus is so big – epic, indeed, as it averages out at one piece every twelve days for thirty-five years (thankyou, Wikipedia) that it is hard to cover it all. Their ‘art for all’ and use of themselves as an integral part of their art, starting, of course, with Singing Sculpture, did a lot to make art more accessible. It also did a lot to shock. Part of this was in their use of bodily excresences but was more in their contempt for religion, depictions of a ruined London and making us confront some of the prejudices that are around us all the time.

10. Photographer – Steve McCurry

Steve McCurry is most famous for one, chance photograph of Sharbat Gula, better known simply as ‘the Afghan Girl’. Indeed, it was seventeen years after the photo appeared on the cover of National Geographic that the sitter was identified as Gula. The point of McCurry’s photos – with one exception, the Dalai Lama – is that they are ordinary people, briefly interrupted while doing ordinary things. His photos range from the Hindu Kush to LA, and from Patagonia to Cambodia. Where someone like Annie Leibowitz – another excellent photographer – finds beauty in celebrity, McCurry finds it in banality.

11. Sculptor – Henry Moore

Henry Moore is on this list for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I really like his work. Secondly, his inclusion would explain a lot to those who found this collection about humans. While we like art, and feel the need to put it in public places, we don’t always understand what’s going on. Sometimes this leads to criticism along the ‘it’s not art’ line, but often enough people can accept a thing just because it is beautiful.

12. Architect – Charles Holden

I should probably say that it’s my future mother-in-law, who is an architect of some note, who should be chosen. I hope she won’t be offended if I go for Charles Holden. I had been thinking about another Charles as well – Sir Charles Barry – but I think Holden deserves it. This is something of a personal choice, but Holden’s works are really rather well known – he designed many of the London Underground stations on the Northern Line extension to Morden, the Cockfosters and Western extensions to the Piccadilly line and the improved stations at Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square. While not necessarily particularly imposing, they are beautiful (compare with the soulless Westminster station) and were total projects, with real thought going into the selection of tiles, light fittings and every detail. Using simple forms, they are, I think, what most people who live in London think a tube station ‘should’ be. Holden also worked for the Imperial War Graves Commission and designed the wonderful, Art Deco-detailed 55 Broadway building. For 55, he commissioned scupltures from Jacob Epstein that were so controversial that a newspaper campaign to remove them was started, with one director of LT even offering to pay the cost of removal. One of the other sculptures on 55 was Henry Moore’s first commission. At the time of construction, 55 was the tallest office block in London and remained so until the completion of another Holden edifice – Senate House.

Some final thoughts

It says something about me, or the world, or both, that everyone on this list is male and most are Caucasian. It wasn’t deliberate.

xD.