Desk Notes No.27

Antony Gormley and James Turrell at Houghton Hall; and Rachel Cusk’s Parade

Jun 30, 2024

Dear friends,

Hope you are all well. We are experiencing a heatwave here and I write this to you sitting outside. On hot days I like to get in the garden early. Ideally I’ll be out from seven with an iced coffee, a book or my notepad, until the sun gets high in the clear blue sky and chases me back inside. I’m a Goldilocks when it comes to the weather, too hot when it’s sunny, too cold when it’s not. My suburban garden isn’t large but my troubled relationship with the sun has seen me set up a handful of different seating areas. An east-facing bench by the pond that catches the morning sun on cooler days but provides shade on sunny afternoons; a west-facing patio does the reverse, protecting me from a mid-morning blaze but catching the last of the gentle evening sun; and a spot under the lilacs that stays cool all day.

Meanwhile, the plants are chasing the sun around the garden. You might remember that last year, I moved two raised beds from a west-facing site to a south-facing one. The bush tomatoes and courgettes are already doing much better. This new garden spot has given me my best crop of strawberries yet, planted in Grandad’s old wheelbarrow. I’ve even sown some notoriously temperamental ‘Florence’ fennel as an experiment. The bulbs have a fresh aniseed taste and go well with salmon. The fluffy tops can be steamed with the fish which imbibes its flavour. This month, inspired by this success, I relocated the cold-frame which had been performing poorly, shaded out by the spreading branches of a Corkscrew Willow. For the last two weeks it has been catching the sun all day. Six spindly chilli plants have now begun filling out. It might even be a little too warm for them, on the hottest days.

With the sun shining, it’s hard to recall just how unseasonably cold the evenings were a fortnight ago, which kept the tomatoes, cucumbers and courgettes under cover. After managing to get all my veg sown on time — a record for me! — they languished in the greenhouse, desperate to get their feet in the ground. Outdoors, the heavy rain has seen foxgloves prosper and the perennials reach extraordinary heights. Who knows what July will bring, the weather now so unpredictable. Fingers crossed the Mediterranean veg will feel at home and catch up on all the rays they missed.

Places— Houghton Hall, Norfolk: Antony Gormley’s Time Horizon (until 31 October 2024) and the permanent sculpture trail

Print — Parade by Rachel Cusk, 2024

Places

Houghton Hall, Norfolk - Antony Gormley’s Time Horizon (until 31 October 2024) and the permanent sculpture trail

On the A148 from King’s Lynn to Cromer the traveller is bombarded with signs for art exhibitions at Houghton Hall. I’ve driven by three years in a row, but this time curiosity got the better of me. I wasn’t disappointed. Aside from a walled garden to die for and the Palladian architecture, opulent ceilings, and sweeping staircases of the house designed for Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton is also home to an impressive sculpture collection. On temporary display until 31 October is Antony Gormley’s Time Horizon, a series of 100 life-size male sculptures spread across 300 acres of the estate. A few stand elevated on plinths, others are buried from the knee or the torso, some have only their heads visible. It’s a surreal site in the open landscape of the park, the figures drawing us in, inviting us to explore.

“My ambition for this show,” says Gormley, whose most famous work is perhaps the epic Angel of the North, “is that people should roam far and wide. Art has recently privileged the object rather than the experience that objects can initiate. Time Horizon is not a picture, it is a field and you are in it. The work puts the experience of the subject / visitor / protagonist on an equal footing with all material presences, organic and inorganic.”

Gormley goes on to describe the changing weather, which affects how visitors might interpret or experience the work. Publicity photographs reveal how Time Horizon appears to a lonely visitor in the morning dew, the mist rising into pale grey cloud, turning Hall and trees into a dreamy blur. It invites repeat visits and raincoats. But another large-scale art work, this time in Houghton’s permanent collection — James Turrell’s Skyspace — invites us to experience the mutability of the weather in the very smallest of moments.

Approaching this wooden building by a winding, gentle incline immaculately bordered by a spherical, undulating box hedge, there is little to suggest what might await inside. Two sets of heavy doors open upon a small room edged by reclining benches. I gasp at how light it is. Once sitting, a square gap high in the roof, frames the sky. Clouds pass rapidly across its surface, like the current of a stream. Moving between benches, the perspective changes. One position frames grey cloud only. Another, a sublime azure void. I wonder what it would be like to sit here on a rainy day. How lightening might appear. Or the night. It strikes me how much more I notice, through this restrictive viewfinder, than when the sky is presented en masse. The shape of the clouds, their pace, the precise variation in their shade. I’m in awe, I wish I could take it home.

Ten minutes before closing I happen upon one final artwork tucked away in the old stables — Raemar Magenta, also made by Turrell in 1970. Deceptively simple it consists of a huge blue rectangle bordered by white light. In the otherwise unlit space it appears the darkest black, violet only at the edges. Once inside, the black rectangle exerts a hypnotic, magnetic force that pulls me closer and closer. Approaching the line that reads ‘do not cross’ I can see the violet light only in the very periphery of my vision. It feels as though the cavernous void will suck me in. There is something visceral and unnerving about it, that I have never felt before. “This must be what infinity feels like,” says my father. It wants to swallow me, to pull me towards my own annihilation. Part of me wants to give in. I’m hypnotised by the depth of its black and begin to feel afraid.

I believe Mark Rothko desired his work to absorb the viewer in a similar way. I’ve stood before his pictures in the Tate, trying to focus on the centre, to let them melt, to see them and let them engulf me. I’ve never quite managed it. Leaving Raemar Magenta felt like breaking a trance; it takes some strength to step backwards and away, to deny its magnetic pull. Three weeks later I’m still thinking about that strange feeling; that sudden, terrifying desire for self-destruction.

Print

Parade by Rachel Cusk, 2024

“They expected a storyteller to demonstrate his mastery and control by resolving the confusion and ambiguity of reality, not deepening it,” writes Rachel Cusk in her latest novel. It’s precisely what she refuses to do; precisely why her writing is so revelatory and cerebral. Parade contains elements that read like non-fiction, and the narrator might be one or more people, who’s who is never quite clear — it’s slippery fiction of the best kind. A succession of artists known only as G explore the relationship between illusion and reality. Our deeply observant guide is the victim of a random attack and a witness to the complex relationships of her friends and acquaintances. As a relative newcomer to Cusk’s novels, I’m drawn to these unusually meditative narrators whose ideas flow like an open tap. The prose demands careful attention — Cusk spoon-feeds nothing, her narrative loosely bound together by its themes.

Along with its parade of artists, the novel’s title might suggest the relationship between parents and children: an ever continuing chain of love and anguish. Collected within the novel’s pages are a series of difficult deaths — adult children struggling to cope with a loss that’s comprised largely of the last, missed opportunity to resolve life-long conflicts. That these characters are also parents allows the complexity of perspective and truth to emerge. Reality is frequently inverted. Indeed, the upside down paintings of one woman’s husband — “the feeling of everything seeming right yet being fundamentally wrong” — remind her profoundly of “the condition of her sex.”

In Cusk’s exploration of the relationship between female artists, love and motherhood, I recalled Celia Paul’s beautifully written conversation with Gwen John. What’s striking is how openly Cusk addresses the women’s subconscious complicity with their own oppression, which she presents as the result of engrained social conditions that shape women’s feelings about themselves. “The most visceral impulse” of female artist G, is “the desire for male freedom and prestige” — she gives us women measuring their success in terms of what success looks like for men. When G is asked by her daughter, ‘why are there men?’ her response is piercing:

“The answer seemed to be that there needed to be men because G thought men were superior. The idea of a world filled with mothers and children repelled her. It would be a world that lacked the crystalline force of judgement. If men were dispensable, then so was her desire for superiority. She identified mothers and children with mediocrity. How could that be when she herself was a mother? Men are great, she answered.”

In a thread that recalls John Berger’s landmark text Ways of Seeing, G’s feelings of inferiority are subtly connected with the submissiveness demanded by a society built on capitalism and possession.

“Other people had photographs of their children blowing out birthday candles or playing football, but G’s husband never photographed their daughter doing such things. It might have been that he wasn’t interested in her on those occasions. The photographs required an act of participation that was also a form of submission: her distraction was not permitted. Over time G noticed something changing in the photographs of her daughter, because as the child came to realise she was being observed her submission became more visceral.”

Later, when G begins to sketch her daughter, she does it without looking, without allowing her daughter to know she is being observed. Submission is itself a kind of violence.

In many ways Cusk’s work could be viewed as pretentious — her characters engaging in the kind of high-brow conversation that feels unlike anything that exists in real life. Rarely do people articulate their ideas so clearly, so fully formed. Yet there is something beautiful in the way Cusk’s prose invites us to think. The moment I leave one of her worlds, I have the urge to begin all over again.

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