Wastelands

Being no stranger to wastelands, as poem, insomniac mindscape, metaphor or childhood playground, the Wolf is looking forward to seeing the new Wasteland exhibition at the Newlyn Gallery, by students of the first Curatorial MA at the University of Cornwall. A busy opening night, crammed with people mwaahing each other like it's 1999, is good for the gallery and social cohesion of the local art world, but not so good if you don't know anyone to mwaah with and can't see the art.

What he could see made him wonder what the claimed connection with the Eliot poem was. The Wolf has an intimate connection to the poem, having a line or two tattooed into his skin and loves it almost as much as he struggles to understand it. He first read it while at sea in an old copy of Eliot's collected work, which is when he realised that unlike novels, poems could be read again and again, without finishing them - a real boon on the 10 day trips he was enduring at the time.

The poem is famous for being Eliot's reaction to the fracturing of early 20th Century society and the absence of spiritual cohesion, desolate and multi-voiced, hopeless. And yet the Wolf (knowing no better when he first read it) paradoxically found it forming a coherent narrative, a gestalt. He also found much solace and instruction in The Wasteland, it's bare and broken terrain enabling him to gaze at himself without distraction and to try to work out how to get from Here to There. It's inclusion of the many voices, voices he recognised, he saw as a positive. The inclusion of the arcane symbolism of the Tarot, the mediaeval elements Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Spirit allowed multiple personal interpretations, its unblinking reminders of death and loss implicit in life and it's final message of acceptance ("Shantih, shantih, shantih") fitted very well with his outlook as a fisherman. Many voices yes, but not a cacophony, all from one consciousness, so maybe not so much fractured as diffracted.
But, then he’s a Wolf so what does he know.

An easy hook to hang an exhibition on thinks the Wolf. If you are going to curate a show around the poem, you have a range of potential themes which you can use, other than the traditional God's Dead and We're All Fucked mantra/whine of the last 100 years. Disappointingly the theme used is the obvious one; fracture, alienation, collapse and of course the loss of the spiritual, which most of the works echo in some way at least.

The Wolf cannot understand why people think the modern world is devoid of spirituality, it’s chock full of the stuff; half-baked new-age energy bollocks, after-life millenarian schlock, Secret Lore paperbacks, anti-science medicine, nature worship, and all the global mono- and pantheistic religions, crushing women, dividing schools, tearing bloody chunks off of each other across the globe and still trying to tell the Wolf what he can and can't say about them. Seriously, that’s more than enough fucking spirituality for the Wolf.
Humans eh?

The Wolf takes a turn around the show again, without the crowds and without reading the notes - unless he draws a blank. He has three favourites, i.e., those which provoke the most reaction in him

The first Redressing the Balance is a ruined cardboard city emerging or subsiding into the sands, which works brilliantly. The Wolf thinks his son and his friend would love to wage war with their Space Marine models across this broken, desolate town. It also resonates with the endless images of real marines fighting and dying in dusty mud walled towns such as the Wolf sees nightly on TV. Seen like this, from a god-like perspective, hard to think it's worth dying for. And yet it could also represent the skeletal remains of a once vibrant and beautiful civilisation, something to be explored and re-imagined, that could enrich our present with exotic images and different perspectives if we could know it, something worth years of struggle and research perhaps. And, of course, the image of the ruined city, the fallen towers implies the end of all our works, ultimately. So what, thinks the Wolf, suddenly resentful. That's then, this is now. Enjoy. Where is the art that celebrates what we are, what have done?

The second is the Ruths, heavy training dummies lying on the floor and against the wall in positions implying attitudes of helplessness and vulnerability, but which are truly disturbing to the Wolf. Not so much the lazy half-arsed fetish reference (red and black latex [?] instead of canvas) but the inert 70kg dead weight, the mass of them. The Wolf has horrible memories of dragging the real thing up through several smoke-filled pitch black decks in a fire-fighting exercise that almost went wrong. An immense and hateful load that you cannot let go, but which could potentially destroy you. All sorts of resonances there for oppression, toxic relationships, memories of past pain or abuse, servitude etc, take your pick. The Wolf shudders. But can that sense of menace be experienced by anyone who has not carried a Ruth across their shoulders and felt that sullen oppressive weight? What do people see who haven’t carried them?

The last is Lucy Willows beautiful and intricate Memento Mori images, black and purple jewel-like glints in the corner of the gallery. The original Memento Mori as the Wolf understood it in earlier times was an artistic device, meant as a reminder to exult in life, to revel in it, bite hard on it, because it isn’t for ever. The later 19th Century ‘gothic’ sensibilities seemed to re-interpret the device as a call to fear death, rather than to embrace life, to walk through the valley in dread until the end, wailing; while those in the 20th referenced it by growing mysterious fringes and wearing black - whatever their complexion. Now that's scary.

There is an acknowledgement of death here, more fascination then obsession perhaps, and yet the pictures seem more concerned with the textured surface of the remains, the rich process of decay, the changing through time of the organic structure without the animation of life. In the Wolf’s mind Death occurs once and instantaneously; the gothic fetishisation of it into a looming presence, a state to be feared long before and after it occurs (rather than a dimensionless event to be avoided and not feared) is not for him, but the pictures fascinate him nevertheless. Sad and melancholic. Beautiful.

Although vaguely disappointed at first, the Wolf came away with an immense amount to think about, provoked both by the art he liked and didn’t like, triggering new avenues of thought and reflection. Sure, a couple of them failed to work at all for him, but still. The biggest failure to the Wolf was in the missed attempt to celebrate The Wasteland in any new or challenging way, which after all was the poem the exhibition supposedly had at its core.
But that’s today, tomorrow he might feel different.
Or he might be dead.

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

-T S Eliot. The Wasteland