Richard Long: naturist

What is all this excitement about Richard Long’s retro at Tate Britain? The reviews were so favourable that he got an 8 in the Guardian’s review roundup. Is this deserved? No. (Only Rachel Cooke of the Observer didn’t like what she saw, and all praise to her.)

Richard Long is a naïf. He goes on long walks, and records where he went. He takes a short walk up and down, wears away a patch of ground, and photographs it. He picks up stones, puts them into simplistic patterns, and photographs them. Soon nature will take away his artwork.

He is the Ranulph Fiennes of the art world. Or rather, he’s the Ben Fogle of the art world.

He picks up stones and gets people to carry them to Tate Britain, and put them on the floor. These are his only actual sculptures. All the rest is photographs.

Long is not a ‘land artist’, he is an enthusiast with a camera.

And a maker of lists. Boring, forgettable, naïf lists of place names and weather conditions. In his early works, his framed lists of places visited, and the funny maps, also framed, have the titles written in by hand, with little pencil guide-lines (not rubbed out) done with a ruler. It’s like a child doing homework.

When he gets well known, this childish naiveté disappears. And then the little lines inexplicably reappear in 2006. It’s forced naiveté.

His 1960s photos are competent – but most of us can take a picture of a famous mountain – with our own tramping up and down visible in the foreground.

And then Richard Long tries to think. We get this:

Richard starts things off, but (he says) “Nature makes the rest – revealing the cosmic nature of the microscale.”

This is embarrassing. Small things are big things, really. That has been a cliché of modern thought ever since someone first looked down a microscope. Galileo, 1625, for example.

Then look at some of his recent photos, of Dartmoor, say. They have clearly been Photoshopped. So what happened to ‘nature making the rest’?

You can always trust nature – until you put her into Photoshop!

The new works for Tate B. are on the walls. These are mud works, or when not mud, liquid Cornish clay. There are finger marks everywhere. The last time Monsieur Apache saw anything like this, it was finger-painting from a children’s nursery.

Is Richard Long popular because he fits into an apolitical zeitgeist, in which people look to art for consolation and reassurance? Or popular for the Gaia idea that everything will grow back, so it’s all right really? That we can make our mark on the world, but only a tiny one, which nature – or the sea, or the growing grass – will soon wipe away? (And we wipe away our own little tears as this happens.)

Whereas the great issue of our day – and of the past 250 years – has been the way we have ripped goodness from the earth, and whether we can go on doing so.

It is a Prince Charles view of the world: safe, sentimental, unreal. But Long – like Charles – shows a ruthless commitment to his own limitations.

Being sentimental about “the land” is regressive. Giving Long a good review is regressive.

Richard Long is from Bristol. The only good artist from Bristol is Banksy!

Stephen Glover begins to get it

In his Monday Media column in the Indy, Stephen Glover is noticeably less enthusiastic about the Telegraph’s expenses campaign than he was two weeks earlier. Then, he spoke of its “courage” and historical significance. Now (1 June) he is more sceptical, and has realised that the Telegraph may actually be politically motivated.

He points out that the paper has been “softer on some than on others”, David Cameron in particular. He does a rather good analysis. “Only in paragraph three [of the Telegraph on Cameron] was his £680 claim to remove wisteria mentioned in a deadpan way”.

Stephen also points out – what not all of out here would have known – that Cameron does not have a “cottage” (Telegraph), but “a grand house” with a £350,000 mortgage.

Can Glover have been reading M. Apache? We pointed out on 20 May that his attitude to the Telegraph’s operation was naïve and star-struck. We pointed out how the right-wing paper had played verbal games trying to discredit Gordon Brown in ways that didn’t stick. Stephen now finds similar games going on, but pointing in the opposite political direction.

We don’t at all mind you lifting a critical attitude from this blog!

Well done, Stephen – come aboard!

Hereford Times journos oppose BNP

Congratulations to journalists at the Hereford Times who opposed the publication of a BNP advertisement (21 May).

The great majority were against it, but it appeared all the same.

Underneath the ad appeared these weasel words: "This is a political advertisement and it is pubished in good faith."

The editor of the Hereford Times is Liz Griffin (no relation).

The Telegraph and the crisis – and Stephen Glover (again)

Stephen Glover’s wide-eyed admiration for what the Telegraph newspapers have been doing gives us a chance to assess what he calls their “triumph”. The story will become part of history, Stephen says. And: “It will become part of journalistic lore”. He criticises the Times for not being hard enough on the MPs – one in the eye for you, Daniel Finkelstein. It “required some courage” to publish a few of the two million documents for which it paid an intermediary businessman either £100,000 or £300,000. That’s hard research.

Hero of the hour is Daily Telegraph editor Will Lewis, whose reputation will be “burnished” by the “hundreds of connections” his staff have made. There is even a photo of Lewis, looking up into the camera like the golden-haired visionary he is.

Yet Glover’s own paper has shown that Will Lewis is corruptible. The Independent on Sunday pointed out – at some length and on page 3 – that last Friday the Telegraph played down the sins of Yvette Cooper and Ed Balls because Lewis and Balls are friends. They both like karaoke, apparently. The story was “hidden” downpage on page 8.

The real scandal of the Friday the 15th paper was surely the front page coverage of Justice Minister Shahid Malik. Two huge photos, trimmed to the ears to maximise weirdness, showed Malik on the left and his landlord on the right. A sullen off-centre Malik contrasted with a smiling Tahir Zaman, who is conveniently wearing an “Islamic” beard. There is a racist undertone to this conjunction. The photos of both men are larger and more unsettling than the photos of white-skinned males that the Telegraph has been running.

Perhaps this is what Stephen Glover means when he says that “in some respects” the Tele looks like “a pale shadow of the Daily Mail”. A bit of apparently-justifiable reporting which just happens to have a racist component would, we think, be one of those “respects”.

Stephen also thinks that the BBC was slow to see the serious side of things. He recalls hearing on Sunday 17th “the joyous assertion on a Radio 4 news bulletin that the The Sunday Telegraph had been forced to eat humble pie”. But what did this relate to? Was it not the STel’s abject withdrawal of imputations against Gordon Brown? In its editorial the paper wrote about the cleaning bill shared with his brother Andrew (because the cleaner wanted a single bill for tax purposes) that “There has never been any suggestion of any impropriety on the part of the Prime Minister or his brother” (page 26, and again not easy to find).

This sounds like “humble pie” to us, and did to other commentators. Stephen Glover hears what he wants to hear.

The Brown story was meant to damage him. It featured as the first item on the first day of the “revelations”. On 8 May there is a photo (moderate size) of him under the heading “Brown paid his brother more than £6,000 for ‘cleaning services’”. Do you notice those quotation marks? They imply that the payment was not really for cleaning services, but for something else. (They are also accurate, but that’s not how it was meant to be read). In Saturday’s paper (9 May) there is a story headed “Cleaning cash for brother was legitimate”. Friday’s story implied that it was not legitimate. Way down in Saturday’s story we find a Downing Street spokesman saying that “The Daily Telegraph was ‘wrong to have claimed that Mr Brown “appears” to have paid for little of his own living costs since moving into No 10’.” So Downing Street was on to the paper’s little verbal tricks.

The Friday report keeps coming back to Brown, making different points each time, and giving the impression cumulatively – but never with decisive evidence – that there was “something” wrong about Brown’s cleaning services claim.

The paper wrote that Brown’s statement “is likely to give rise to questions as to why the PM did not simply lodge receipts directly with the cleaner”. This would be an example of the “hundreds of connections” that according to Glover the Telegraph reporters have been so courageously making. But they fail to make connections when it suits them!

Other examples: why headline Sinn Fein MPs when the real story of the day was downplayed just underneath – Hazel Blears avoiding CGT on the sale of a home? That was atavistic anti-Irish Telegraph stuff coming through.

We’re not convinced Barbara Follett was in the wrong to claim for security when she had in fact been attacked near her Soho home – it was a weekend patrol costing £4882.32 a year for five years. Only well into the story do we read that her former husband – both were anti-Apartheid –was shot dead in South Africa “in front of her two daughters”. In other circumstances this could have been a sob story of personal danger arising from political conviction. But not when you want to score a point against a Labour MP.

For star-struck Stephen Glover this is no doubt more “pale” shadowing of the Daily Mail – but for us out here it looks like insensitive political malice.

Even Stephen faults the Telegraph on its refusal to say that it paid for the 2 million-item CD. This “seems a bit coy”. This is itself a coy reference to Andrew Porter, the paper’s Political editor, who has been touring the studios saying – when asked what they paid – that he isn’t going to “reveal his sources”. It’s nothing to do with sources: we know the source is a nicked CD. This makes SG look distinctly naïve, despite his air of worldly judgment and his discovery that the Telegraph is a great paper after all.

Come on, Stephen, don’t be naïve – this is political, right-wing, opportunist stuff. It’s not a “great” newspaper at work.

Ruth Padel and John Walsh: was it him?

Big scandal around the election of Ruth Padel as Oxford poetry professor. The rival to “Paddle” – as Kirsty Young called her on Desert Island Discs – was the great poet Derek Walcott. Somebody circulated 100 potential voters with photocopies from a 1984 book describing the advances that Walcott made to two women students when he was at Harvard in 1982.

As a result, Walcott withdrew from the election, and Paddle got the job.

In the Sunday Telegraph (17 May) Padel is quoted denying as “ridiculous” claims by a former ~Professor of Poetry (not named) that she had colluded with John Walsh, “a friend and newspaper columnist” to do this. She said: “I used to know John 10 years ago and I see him once a year at parties”.

Walsh is a columnist for the Independent. On 28 April he wrote a deplorably partisan column for the paper. He declared himself a supporter of Padel, and then took a hatchet to Walcott, reprising the 1982 allegations, which were set out in a book called The Lecherous Professor published in 1984. The book is not about Walcott – he features on pages 29-33 and again briefly on p. 36.

Walsh’s cynical column does exactly what the 100 anonymous envelopes did.

So do we have anything but Padel’s word that it wasn’t him?

Some irony was introduced by a Sunday Times piece by the mischievous Sian Griffiths (17 May again), claiming it’s widely known that a Padel poem called “Home Cooking”, which ends with a fuck on the kitchen table after a couple have glazed a Sainsbury’s free-range duck, is about John Walsh. “She did not deny Walsh was the lover”, the ST writes.

Walsh is one of the weaker brethren among columnists, and it’s always been a surprise that he was once literary editor of the Sunday Times. Perhaps that’s why the paper’s journalists are so well-informed about his kitchen activities.

All Sunday’s papers write against Walsh and whoever sent the Walcott photocopies. All, that is, except Emily Dugan in the Independent on Sunday – she contrives to write the story without mentioning him once.

In the Observer Catherine Bennett directs some well-deserved sarcasm towards Walsh (17 May). But she makes a point nobody else has the courage or knowledge to make: Padel is “a mediocre versifier”. That is absolutely right– she’s certainly not in the Carol Ann Duffy class.

Oxford’s decision is a disaster. Ruth Padel is a weak poet – “Home Cooking”, as a subject, suggests that – and she hasn’t got anything interesting to say beyond 600 words. An hour’s lecture won’t amount to much. She’s a conventional thinker, a nineteenth-century leftover. She lives off the boring fact that she is Charles Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter. To her credit, she sounded genuinely upset by Walcott’s withdrawal.

If she thinks the activities of her ex-lover Walsh have “poisoned” her appointment, why doesn’t she just resign?

Come on, Ruth: you’re not going to win the Nobel, as Walcott did. There’s still time to get out.

No French dictionary at the Guardian?

Monsieur Apache is again dismayed by bad French at the Guardian (see Laura Barton’s efforts with Deneuve, below).

A photo of a Trafigura ship full of toxic chemicals has the words “L’Europe intoxique L’Afrique” painted on its side by Greenpeace.

The Guardian thinks this means that Europe has been “intoxicating” Africa.

“Intoxiquer” in French means “to poison”.

It doesn’t mean you’re making them drunk.

(See 14 May, pages 12-13 – also for a marvellous account of how Trafigura’s lawyers have tried to stifle facts and comment.)

Well, down at the Coup de Poing, we think Trafigura did it.

“In a bate”: conservative default culture

You’re a right-wing journalist or blogger in a hurry. You need a cultural reference. You dig down deep, to default culture territory. To all that stuff that’s buried so far down, you hardly know it’s there.

You are Quentin Letts, probably on your third article of the day. And you need to abuse Speaker Martin over his rants in Parliament. You write:

“In the middle of Mr Martin’s bate…”.

His what? Where did that come from?

Rather sadly, M. Apache knows where. From the Jennings and Darbishire books written by Anthony Buckeridge. When form master “Old Wilkie” was angry, he was said to be “in a bate”. Young Apache used to read these books – it all began in 1954 with Jennings Goes to School, and reprints are still being published.

Letts was born in 1963, so he would have started out with Speaking of Jennings!, published in 1973. Or else he picked it up at Haileybury.

But how extraordinary that Quentin Letts should think that Daily Mail readers are likely to respond to antiquated public school slang.


Then there’s Guido Fawkes. He blogs us with Lord (George) Foulkes’ successful attack on BBC presenter Carrie Gracie, when she admitted to a salary of £92K. But in Guido’s world no politician can ever be right, so he blogs the incident under the heading “Foulkes Doesn’t Like It Up Him”. This is from Dad’s Army, whose last new episode was broadcast in 1977. Foulkes showed no sign of being troubled, so the heading makes little sense.

What is it with rightwing culture and the 1970s?

What is Paul Staines?

Paul Staines – Guido – is not a “fascist”, as Nicky Campbell called him, but a rightwing anarchist libertarian. He is also barely articulate, and not very nice.

Another of the same kind, but all too articulate, is historian David Starkey. He was allowed a free run on the Gabby Logan show a couple-three weeks ago. The studio (Gabby was away) loved it – here was a real Oxford professor slagging off Gordon Brown! You could hear the thrill.
It didn’t occur to anyone to ask him a testing question – this was culture, right there in the studio.

The appalling Starkers only knows about one thing – Henry VIII.

Quite why a libertarian anarchist should go for the authoritarian Henry is difficult to work out. But that’s right-wing culture for you.