WOTSONTELLY, DANCING WITH TITIAN.

THE NATIONAL GALLERY, PBC4.

We often complain about the intrusion on their subjects of TeeVee arts presenters and  it can be argued that any presence is an intrusion and although some, being truly kowledgeable - Mathew Collings, Waldemar Jabberwocky and Michael Wood spring to mind - are at least tolerable, others, such as Dr Tubby Ramirez, Queen David Starkey and Simon Russell Beale, 

Andrew Graham Dixon,
for fucks sake, 

are a noisy pollution, vandalising any subject upon which they chance.  
Neil Oliver, an able historian, presents not just history or archaeology but himself,  

as  hybrid rockstar-archaeologist;  

Dan Cruikshank appears as a conspiratorially eccentric uncle, 
while Dan Snow 

of the ghastly Snow Dynasty, 

has a muscle-bound, platitudinous  oafishness,  voiced from a face upon which you foot'd break  before you tired of kicking it.  

Dr Lucy Lisp, Keeper of the Royal Knocking Shops and media tart, is happiest 

 

posing for the nation  in  a  bath or laced-up in a Georgian corset, pouting and lisping her crass arty histories at us,  a pseudo-scholarly telly trollop, ghastly little stoat. 

Hi, big boy,
I'm Doctor Lucy,
buy me.

The arts show is now merely a branding exercise for its presenters.
No business like showbusiness.

The convention seems to be that simply showing us pictures or playing us music is insufficient, there must be a media star between us and the art; it is a device patronising, impertinent and ultimately philistine in its presumption. Last night, however, on PBC4 there came one of those events which justifies the license tax;  Frederick Wiseman's, the National Gallery,  had neither presenter nor voiceover, yet, for three-hours, was eye-wateringly entertaining, informative, educational and inspiring .

Cameras roamed through the Gallery among patrons, paintings and staff. In a boardroom meeting, Gallery Director, Nicholas Penny, 

faced-down a Siobahn Sharpe-type PR bint, who was urging him to get with the charity programme and allow the building to be used as a hoarding for something related to the London Marathon, it's4, like,  you know, charidee.  This, you stupid cunt, he seemed to respond, bless him, is the National Fucking Gallery.  Later, he appeared giving an impromptu lecture on Poussin to Gallery visitors and why he was the Director of the National Gallery became very clear.

Although the film revisited the boardroom to witness a discussion about the budget,  the bureaaucracy of the Gallery ended there and the film appeared to just wander around , stopping  at an interesting conversation or at a curious juxtaposition of paintings.  They don't just hang 'em, dissertations are written about  where, how and with what else pictures should be hung, and although these scholarly discussions were held on camera they weren't to camera, were as naturalistic and spontaneous as they could possibly be, given that a camera in the room changes and distorts everything.

Much of the film, as did the recent FilmFour Mr Turner, concentrated on light and lighting;  one scene involved a lighting technician, high-up on a self-propelling ladder, being directed by a curator on the floor, seeking optimum illumination of a triptych, suggesting this angle, that intensity, in the  end being forced - like all artists - to accept  compromise and abandonment, having to live with a level of shadow; another scene was a lengthy exposition of picture illumimation - then, in Old Master times, and now. Pictures were sometimes created or sketched-out, in situ - where they would be hung - and according to then-prevailing natural light; composition was servant to that light, as were varnishes, some concocted to illuminate and to enhance and enrich pigments deployed, the varnish was both part of the palette and a form of self-contained illumination, albeit that with time the varnish obscured what it once revealed. Old Masters, when painted,  were basically viewed in the relative darkness of candlelight, bathed a little in the reflected shine of wooden floorings and way above the natural eye-line, hung - as many were - over grandly high fireplaces.  

 Sections of the film were as much about seeing the painting - were we physically seeing what the artist intended - as about understanding or appreciating it.  Were we superimposing the Now on the Then? Rembrandt never painted for the electric light; any place, therefore, where  a modern curator hung a Rembrandt was, in purist's terms,  the wrong place.

This conflict, between technologically anachronistic hindsight  and the original work of art,  followed, even more critically, the conservator and his or her painstaking work

and again the question asked itself, What the fuck are we doing here, meddling with Time's ruinous handiwork, attempting  to restore something to a state which we can never know? All concerned were flagellating themselves like Mediavalists, for sins which they may not have committed, for their inability to time-travel, ask Velazquez, How, exactly, should this fucking thing look?

has someone already fucked it up, a hundred years ago?

 This To-Restore/Not-Restore conundrum had niggled so much that the Gallery's dictum  now states that any retouching done by this generation must be easily removed by the next,  the future must be able to readily see the past unmediated by the more recent past, even if that recent past had already been mediated by earlier restorers. It is the sort of dilemma from whose horns there is no escape.

And so it went on, questioning, well, I suppose the survivability of works of art, asking, Can we actually do this, Are we - as quantum physicists alter the observed  merely by observing it - in seeking to conserve art  actually destroying it? And the answer, of course, is yes. 

 I am the world's worst - or best - restorer;  the furniture fetishist loves patina, patina is dirt;  I love to clean the dirt off.

 

This chair was jet black when we met, with two centuries of soot and I wanted to see the crazy elm figuring and see the sunshine from half a millenium ago. So I cleaned it. I don't try to remove scuffs or scratches or natural imperfections, just dirt. A collector would rather have had it in the soot-blackened, greasy state.  My decision, though,  gives more pleasure to more people, is more egalitarian and promotes, I know, a much greater interest in wood, trees, tools, furniture making, social history and Creation. It's the way I tell 'em.  Cleaning up dirty old pictures, even if it's wrong, it's right.

Several scenes revolved around a conservator, Larry, explaining to a small Gallery audience the well-intentioned damage done by generations of his fellow, Road To Hell  craftspersons. His predecessors, of course, had no access to x-rays and blotches,  revealed once the old varnish had been removed from a Rembrandt,  had been tinkered with, touched-up,  by earlier generations. 

Larry's x-ray of the painting showed that the portrait, of a burgher on horseback,  had been painted over another, similar subject; Rembrandt had merely recycled the canvas and what  History's  experts had judged careless execution  by Rembrandt was actually the earlier painting leeching through;  hard to know, therefore, with any certainty, which bits are Rembrandt and which Rembrandt Improved.

 Yet for all his professional hauteur and expertise, Larry, like so many in the National Gallery is an amateur, doing what he  does from love and en-theus-iasm, filled with God

 I came across this, decades ago, in McLuhan's Understanding Media, typed it up


and it's always been around, somewhere, on a shelf, a mantelpiece.
Nothing that I do is Art but some of the things which I have done I have done as well as I can. And I think that for all their agonising, the Gallery
  
the guides,
 
the attendants,
 
the craftspersons and the experts do that, too.

Even though there were, predictably,  too many gobby, arty men in carefully knotted scarves and expensive spectacles they were  a minor irritation, outnumbered by ordinary people, from everywhere, just gazing at  the pictures, one of the greatest collections in the world. 

There were three hours of conversation, discussion, explanation, notably about Leonardo, Velasquez, Titian, 

Rembrandt and our own Mr Turner. 


Collings was filmed shooting his own excellent show,
Turner's Thames. Not as excellent as this one, though.

And there was music, too, and finally, dance.  A pianist played to a small Gallery audience,  the Scherzo from Beethovens Sonata opus 31, while, echoing the stacatto of the music, the camera whizzed  and rattled through unidentified paintings and fragments of paintings. At various points in the film there were brief discussions about an upcoming dance  to be performed before a pair of Titians, what was the floor made of, what would the light be like, until eventually it dawned on the performers' representative that it was the pictures that mattered,  the pictures, the dancers would just have to cope with it being the National Gallery and not Sadlers Wells.  Despite everything else revealed by and hinted-at in this extraordinary blessing of a film, it was all really just about the pictures, looking at the pictures.  I suppose the difference between this and all the other TeeVee arts shows is that this, like Mr Turner, was a film and  not a programme, was truly Art, for Art's Sake.

    

When at the end, came the dancers, they were incongruous; so much lively  athleticism among centuries-frozen, two-dimensional mythology but my head and my heart were soon stolen away.  I came but lately to early music and Byrd just does that thing to me, the thing to which mr bungalow bill testifies, guilt and fretful isolation; his icy descant blended so perfectly with the gilded, ancient oils and the muscular arabesques that I thought my heart must break.