Category Archives: Arts

Architecture, Arts, Culture, Scotland

The V&A Museum of Design

SCOTLAND

DUNDEE’S equivalent of the Pompidou in Paris or Bilbao’s Guggenheim is now on full view. The V&A, designed by Kengo Kuma, is simply staggering.

With its instantly recognisable outline – part sea cliff, part galleon – the £80.4million V&A Museum of Design may soon find itself revered as a global design icon.

Certainly, few who have seen Scotland’s first dedicated design museum are likely to be left unmoved by its dizzyingly ambitious zigzag slabs of rough concrete, described variously as a crash-landed Egyptian pyramid, the ribbed carcass of a beached whale and the ragged remains of a mighty shipwreck. Art in its full splendour and glory.

On display: The £80million museum’s collection is expected to attract 500,000 visitors in its first year.

Following its official opening, the “V&Tay”, as it is ostensibly and affectionately known to its London colleagues, is expected to attract some 500,000 visitors from around the world in its first year alone, generating tens of millions of pounds for the local economy.

Critics may welcome a time when this controversial project starts to pay its way, having been blown off course by years of construction delays and escalating costs before finally anchoring itself at the heart of the city’s £1billion waterfront regeneration.

Since its conception, the original £45million budget has almost doubled and its Japanese architect and designer had been forced to tow his initial plan for a water-bound structure back to dry land.

On the V&A’s opening, however, a preview which was attended by dozens of the world’s media, Mr Kuma pronounced himself satisfied that his vision to create a “living room for the city” had been realised.

The attraction’s galleries showcase 300 objects, including Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Oak Room and the painstakingly reconstructed interior of Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street tearoom which has not been seen for 50 years.

Mr Kuma said: “It is fitting that the restored Oak Room by Charles Rennie Mackintosh is at the heart of this building as I have greatly admired his designs since I was a student.

“In the Oak Room, people will feel his sensibility and respect for nature, and hopefully connect it with our design for V&A Dundee. I hope the museum can change the city and become its centre of gravity.”

He said the magisterial light-filled atrium with its sweeping staircase and waves of oak panel boards was a nod to Mackintosh, who was deeply influenced by oriental art and design.

Mr Kuma said: “When I saw [Mackintosh’s] buildings as a student I was very surprised at how Japanese they were. Japanese quality, [and] Japanese sensitivity exist in his designs.”

Everywhere in the museum, glimpses of the Tay can be caught through small windows, while the hall and stairs glint with fossilised coral set into limestone flooring.

Complementing his daring design are the – often quirky – exhibits of the Scottish Design Galleries, from the so-called Valkyrie tiara, created by Cartier using more than 2,500 diamonds for Mary Crewe-Milnes, Duchess of Roxburghe, in 1935, to cutting-edge environmental material crafted from the fibres of stinging nettles by Dundee-based firm Halley Stevensons for Glasgow backpack-maker Trakke.

There is also some hand-coloured Beano artwork for a Dennis the Menace cartoon strip from 1960.

Also in the collection is the largest remaining fragment of the Titanic – part of a door from the first-class lounge of the liner – and a costume worn by Natalie Portman’s character, Padmé Amidala, in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, which was created by Trisha Biggar, the Glasgow designer.

A full-sized clay model Jaguar car sits between the entrants to the permanent collection and the opening touring show, Ocean Liners: Speed and Style, which tells the story of Scotland’s role in the golden age of cruise liners.

V&A Dundee’s director, Philip Long, said “it was with some emotion” that he was finally able to unveil the museum and that the challenges that beset the huge project had been overcome, more than a decade after it was originally proposed.

Another V&A director, Dr Tristram Hunt, said Ocean Liners: Speed and Style could “not be a more appropriate inaugural exhibition for Mr Kuma’s amphibious, semi-nautical, wonderful museum that is so successfully reconnecting the city with its historic waterfront”.

Dundee City Council leader John Alexander told invited guests to the first viewing of the museum that he felt a “tremendous sense of pride” in the building.

He said: “There’s a fire in the bellies of Dundonians that wasn’t there ten years ago. Dundee is leading the charge in cultural-led regeneration.”

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Arts, Films

Film Review: Puzzle (15)

REVIEW

Modest champion: Actress Kelly Macdonald in Puzzle

A FILM can sometimes be so quiet and uneventful, yet at the same time so full of tenderness and charm, that at the end you would stand up and applaud if such exhibitionism weren’t so utterly at odds with what you’ve just seen.

Instead you simply sit there, smile or maybe even dab with a finger at the corner of your eye. Puzzle is such a film. It stars Kelly Macdonald, the brilliant Scottish actress whose ability to play a sweet, uncomplaining example of what the Americans call homemakers was recognised years ago by the Coen brothers.

Her performance as Carla Jean, the meek loving, anxious wife of Josh Brolin’s ill-fated Llewelyn Moss in the Coens’ 2007 masterpiece No Country For Old Men was one of that great film’s many pleasures.

But in Puzzle, Macdonald’s exquisite performance as an unassuming, unassertive, devoutly Catholic homemaker is the principle pleasure; all the picture’s other virtues radiate from it. She plays Agnes, whom is both cherished by her blue-collar New England family and taken completely for granted.

At the start, someone is celebrating a birthday. Agnes carries a cake ceremoniously into the room, but in fact the birthday is hers. She has made the cake, bought the candles, lit them, and now she blows them out, a deeply reluctant object of attention.

Her principle purpose in life, other than to attend Bible classes, is to care for her husband Louie (David Denman), who runs a car-repair workshop, and their two teenage sons, Ziggy (Bubba Weiler) and Gabe (Austin Abrams). She sees it that way, and so do they.

At first, her domestic drudgery and its drab backdrop, even the clothes she wears, suggest a period piece, a story of small-town America perhaps set in the 1950s.

We only learn this is the present because one of Agnes’s gifts is a modern smartphone. She does not welcome it – “like carrying a little alien robot in your purse”, she says – but is delighted to receive a challenging 1,000-piece jigsaw, which she completes in no time, then breaks it up and does it again. It is a map of the world, an irony not lost on us, even if it is on her; Agnes is the daughter of Hungarian immigrants, but could hardly be less worldly.

The short journey to New York counts as a daring adventure for Agnes. But she undertakes it, because only there, in a shop called Puzzle Mania, can she find more jigsaws like the one she has just completed.

She also finds an advert, “Champion Desperately Seeking Puzzle Partner”, and digging even deeper into reserves of boldness she didn’t know she had, answers it.

 

THIS leads her to a wealthy, lonely Robert, a man as urbane as she is provincial, played with quirky, beguiling charisma by Irrfan Khan. The unlikely duo start practising for a doubles competition in the National Jigsaw Puzzle Championships.

If they win, they will go on to the world championships in Belgium. They appear to have a chance, because Agnes has a genius for competitive puzzling that leaves even Robert agog.

But what this also means is that she must somehow explain to her husband why she’s no longer reliably at home every afternoon, preparing his dinner and darning his socks.

Certainly, a lesser drama would make him a demanding brute. But Louie is a decent cove who adores his wife, albeit preferably on his own terms. She is his puzzle, and maybe that’s the significance of the film’s title, because actually jigsaws are an irrelevance, though a delightfully wholesome one.

Agnes could have demonstrated a rare talent for juggling or mental arithmetic and the one-line synopsis would still be the same: a middle-aged woman seeing beyond the narrow horizons’ life seemed to have mapped out for her.

Moreover, as she grows in confidence, she begins to take charge of the relationships with the men in her life – Louie, her boys, even Robert. She learns how to be assertive with more than just jigsaw pieces.

Of course, this kind of personal growth is not exactly original cinematic territory – in fact, Puzzle is directly inspired by a 2009 Argentinian movie. But nothing about it feels derivative or predictable.

Marc Turtletaub, a first-time director, has made a terrific job of shaping the screenplay (by Oren Moverman and Polly Mann) into a sensitive and very moving film. Hats off to the whole production team for a very lovely film.

Verdict: Charming and captivating

★★★★★

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Arts, History, Philosophy

(Philosophy) Marx: On Religion and Faith

“Religion is the sign of the oppressed . . . it is the opium of the people.” Karl Marx (1818–1883)

THE philosopher, social scientist, historian and revolutionary, Karl Marx, is, for good or ill, the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in the nineteenth century. Although he was largely ignored by scholars in his own lifetime, his social, economic and political ideas gained rapid acceptance in the socialist movement after his death in 1883. Until quite recently almost half the population of the world lived under regimes that claimed to be Marxist. This very success, however, has meant that the original ideas of Marx have often been modified by the forces of history and his theories adapted to a great variety of political circumstances, for the most part detrimental to those upon whom they have been enforced. In addition, the fact that Marx delayed publication of many of his writings meant that it has been only recently that scholars have had the opportunity to appreciate Marx’s intellectual stature.

Marx, and his associate Friedrich Engels, developed a philosophy known as dialectical materialism. This essentially is the merger of the ideas of dialectics and materialism, which surmise that all things in the universe are material, that evolution is constantly taking place at all levels of existence and in all systems, that defined boundaries are manmade concepts that do not actually exist in nature, and that the universe is an interconnected unified entity in which all elements are connected to, and dependent upon, each other. The philosophy holds that science is the only means by which truth can be determined.

TO understand Marxism, you must understand the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Enlightenment. Marx was part of a larger movement in German Enlightenment philosophy; his ideas didn’t come out of nowhere, they were an extension of the theories that had been developing in Europe throughout the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s. Marx was a member of the Young Hegelians, which had formed after the famous German philosopher Hegel’s death. Hegel’s philosophy was based on the dialectic.

After Hagel’s death, his philosophy continued to be taught in Berlin and an ideological split occurred among the students of Hegel’s teachings. Eventually a right, centre and left branch of the ideology emerged, the Young Hegelians taking up the leftist branch of Hegelian thought. They began using Hegel’s dialectical method to openly criticise Hegel’s own work, attempting to prove that Hegel’s own philosophy, when fully extended, supported atheistic materialism. The Young Hegelians criticised religious institutions and, as a result of this, many of them were denied professorship at institutions around what was to become Germany and further afield. Thus began Marx’s period of disassociation from his relatively wealthy origins and his move towards the austerity that was to last the rest of his life. He ended up living and writing his greatest work, Das Kapital, in London and is buried in Highgate Cemetery.

Marx’s own contribution to Hegelian debate was to write the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which contained in its introduction the oft-paraphrased paragraph: “Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

MARX viewed religion as a consequence of man’s relationship to the means of production. It was a result of man’s unhappiness with life and man’s lack of understanding of social and economic forces. Therefore, the Marxist position on religion is: 1) that criticism of religion and the advance of science are important weapons for combating religious views; and 2) that religion will never be fully eliminated until man has control over the economy and man is no longer alienated from productive forces.

It is a misconception to believe that Marx was saying that religion was a metaphorical drug, created, maintained and tolerated by the ruling class to keep the masses happy. Marx was actually concerned with far more weighty problems. Among other things, he was describing the basic human conditions under which an abstract human being could exist. “Man is the world of man, state, society,” he concluded, and the concept of God was a necessary invention in an “inverted world”. Once the world was right side up, the idea would not be needed. In other words, religion was a requirement of the proletariat to deal with their living conditions. Once the revolution had created a just and purposeful society, the need to believe in anything other than that which “is” or that which has material existence would be gone.

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