Heart of Darkness and A Humument fifth edition

Photograph Catherine Ashmore

 

Heart of Darkness was premiered with some success at Covent Garden’s Linbury Theatre. Reviews were generally enthusiastic about Tarik’s richly inventive score as well as the staging and set, the excellent band and the strong cast (especially Alan Oke as Marlow). Many reviewers also singled out for a mention (as does not always happen) that shadowy operatic drudge, the librettist.

Herewith a link to the Observer’s account (not on this occasion by their chief critic since one cannot be blown by one’s own strumpet) and one from that independent and often contentious blogger who sidles to his seat under the name of operacreep.

Tarik and I gave talks before the shows and it was he that pointed out that the first email exchange about the project was in 2002. Not quite ten years before the mast but a long haul. It already seems unlikely that this will be our last collaboration.

With the opera launched, Cicero published, and the Olympic Coin minted, time for fresh woods and pastures new: in this case to join those who have stumbled at the wide brooks and the high fences of translating Rilke. But this is an even longer venture hoping to have text and pictures for all the Duino Elegies (which the loftiest poet of the 20th century started in 1912) ready in a couple of years.

Meanwhile, the longest term of all my projects, A Humument heads for its fifth revised edition in the New Year. I have written a new introduction that has now come through a protracted battle with copy editors who do not like semi-colons. There are more than fifty newly revised pages. Although these were delivered with the introduction to Thames & Hudson only last week, the book has already appeared on Amazon.

Ornament

Ornament, pencil 2011, 30cm diameter

Long ago I teamed myself up with Jessica Rawson to prepare an exhibition at the Royal Academy that would define and celebrate Ornament. We made a trip to the vaults of the Vatican to start the hunt for likely exhibits, and travelled to Vienna to continue the search. It was there over supper at the Sacher Hotel that we discussed in earnest what the show would say and what it might contain.

We questioned each other's choices of the previous days. It soon emerged that our concepts of ornament, its nature, status and role in art were quite different; in effect irreconcilably opposed. With tempers frayed we retired to our respective rooms.

I intended, before finally turning in, to jot down a few clarifying notes, but eventually sat up half the night composing a manifesto that I could read out to Jessica (and to Simonetta Fraquelli who was with us) over breakfast. I only half realised that this would mark the end of the collaboration and the evaporation of the project as a whole. It was this polemical pamphlet that some months later I presented at the RA's Architecture Forum.

Ornament frequently creeps into what I do, usually by way of borders and framing devices. That it was on my mind at the time can be seen in the drawings that obliterate the many agendas and minutes of Merry Meetings (D3 Editions 2005) including its cover illustration.

On my return from Vienna, remembering Derrida's contention that the margins are at the centre, I set about an ambitious exercise in pure ornamental mode. I soon got lost in its improvised and unsystematic convolutions and set it aside as unsolvable. My artistic performance had not matched my rhetoric.

I have now retired from the business of formal portrait painting and stepped down from committees. Taking advantage of new resultant gaps of time I could return to the drawing abandoned so many months ago. Unravelling and reravelling I managed at last to bring it off.

Duino Ornament, h42cm x w29cm, 2011

I made a smaller coloured version, making minor adjustments to balance the field of energy. To this I added, as if to challenge the ornament's autonomy, the opening words from Rilke's first Duino Elegy which kept running through my mind; with various translations forming and reforming as I worked. Not a title but an accompaniment. Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen? Perhaps this could be the official badge of the order of angels.