Thomas Sutcliffe
Thomas Sutcliffe: Don't let amenity go down the pan
Published: 09 December 2005
I found myself thinking about the word "amenity" the other day - and mildly regretting its recent fall from grace. I may be alone in this but its employment as a lavatorial euphemism ("Would you care to use the amenities?") seems to me to have left it with a faint whiff of disinfectant block and corporation functionalism.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Gate theatrics too close for comfort
Published: 02 December 2005
The physical presence of the actors has always been one of theatre's trump cards over film and television. The latter forms might boast greater liberties of setting and narrative style - but, in the end, theatre always has proximity up its sleeve, the suggestion that you might find yourself within the immediate sphere of influence of a great performer.
Thomas Sutcliffe: How does our garden grow?
Published: 25 November 2005
I always look forward to the Today programme's occasional cultural debates, not so much for the content as for the dependably comic way in which the producers usually try to stir up a controversy where non exists.
Thomas Sutcliffe: The depressing truth about Fowles
Published: 18 November 2005
John Fowles's death got me thinking about cultural disillusionment. This wasn't anything to do with the published extracts from his diaries, which revealed him to be a figure of comically unvarying gloom. Somewhere in an alternative universe, you can't help but feel, Eeyore, Savonarola and Cassandra are sitting round a table, chewing the fat, and one of them is muttering, "Don't look now... here comes that misery-guts Fowles. Just say that chair's taken - or we'll be here all day." But, although there used be a time when I credulously believed that sensitivity to language and ideas had some direct connection to serenity of spirit - that time is long gone.
Thomas Sutcliffe: It pays to be a bad artist
Published: 11 November 2005
Walking round Tate Modern's Rousseau exhibition, I found myself engaged in a slightly odd mental exercise. "What would these paintings look like," I wondered, "if he was a better painter?" The answer in most cases was "absolutely awful". Just think of these works replicated in the slick pompier style to which Rousseau aspired and all their charm decays in an instant.
Thomas Sutcliffe: The poor old Bard's a bit past it
Published: 04 November 2005
Sometimes, when I'm bored and can't reach a book, I play something I call the Shakespeare game. This simply consists of imagining that Shakespeare is sitting next to me and needs some explanations about the modern world.
Thomas Sutcliffe: In dance, ignorance is bliss
Published: 21 October 2005
When it comes to dance, I am a philistine. Dictionary definition: "A person who is hostile or indifferent to art, or who has no understanding of it." That about does it for me as far as dance is concerned - though I'd like to scratch the word "hostile", while remaining uneasily aware that at least some of my past responses to the art form have had a certain defensive aggression to them. To the rest, though, I willingly hold up my hand. "Indifferent"? Absolutely; years can pass - and have passed - without my coming into contact with any dance work of any kind.
Thomas Sutcliffe: What's in a name? Quite a lot
Published: 14 October 2005
I heard Rachel Whiteread the other day on Front Row explaining why she'd called her new installation in the Tate Turbine Hall Embankment. Artists sometimes get a bit cagey about dissecting their own work, but - despite a hard day with the kind of media outlets that contemporary art doesn't usually reach - she was straightforward and obliging.
Thomas Sutcliffe: They're boring for Britain
Published: 07 October 2005
After visiting the sixth British Art Show, just opened at Baltic in Gateshead, I worked out that if you were to watch all the video installations for their advertised running times you would have to spend 16 hours, 35 minutes and 42 seconds on those works alone.
Thomas Sutcliffe: No offence meant - but lots taken
Published: 30 September 2005
I am coming to loathe the word "appropriate", which (usually in negative constructions) has a very active life these days as a euphemism for harsher truths. The phrase "not appropriate" can mean a lot of things - "it was too expensive", "we couldn't be bothered" or even, as it does in Tate Britain's recent press statement about the withdrawal of an artwork from public display, "it would be too scary". "Having sought wide-ranging advice," the release read, "Tate feels that to exhibit the work in London in the current sensitive climate, post-7 July, would not be appropriate."
Thomas Sutcliffe: Strictures at an exhibition
Published: 23 September 2005
There is an art to the titling of exhibitions. I don't mean the blunt utilitarian bits of the title - the ones that tell you who the painter is, or what the parameters of the selection are. I mean the fancy bit that is supposed to sound visionary and enigmatic.
Thomas Sutcliffe: The clever writer flatters the reader
Published: 16 September 2005
A few weeks ago, Zadie Smith said something self-deprecatory about the business of being a novelist. Novelists don't really have to be clever, she said, they just have to be intuitive. I paraphrase, because I haven't actually been able to track down the source of the remark - but, unless I've dreamed the whole thing, which is always an outside possibility, the gist is accurate.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Lights, camera - but no action
Published: 09 September 2005
I think it was Andy Warhol who coined the notion of the film that it was more interesting to hear about than actually see. He had in mind his own films - such as Sleep and Empire State - the first of which is five hours and 21 minutes long and consists entirely of footage of a man sleeping. Empire State is much longer (eight hours and five minutes) and considerably less eventful - a single, static shot of the Empire State Building, in which the only action is the fading of daylight.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Melvyn must be having a laugh
Published: 02 September 2005
I know that End Timers tend to have a list of earthly signs that give advance warning of the termination of worldly things - pestilence and deluge or the numerological oddities of a President's name. But I will know myself that the cogs of the universe are seriously awry when the new season of The South Bank Show is announced and there is no press comment about "dumbing down". It is virtually part of the social calendar now, this "row" (and it is never a genuine row, with genuine passion - just one of those conceptual squabbles that exists only in the newspaper columns).
Thomas Sutcliffe: It's all right to be unmoved by art
Published: 26 August 2005
How often do we feel about art what we're supposed to feel? I can only answer for myself and I would guess that it's something like two times out of a 100, which may sound a rather depressing strike rate but seems to me a quite bearable ratio - or, at least, a realistic one. I can easily imagine that I might boost the hit rate a little in conversation, so as not to sound quite so numb and unresponsive, but if I'm honest with myself, low single figures are closer to the truth.
Thomas Sutcliffe: The voice of the people
Published: 19 August 2005
There are few things that actors find it harder to imitate than real people. They're usually very good at figures and types and characters and "living metaphors" - in fact, the gamut of cultural replicants that we've got used to seeing on stage. They're also often brilliant at acting actors, which, since most of us spend far more of our life performing than we'd like to think, is not quite as redundant as it sounds. But what they really find elusive, what only a few can pin down, is people just artlessly being people.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Fiction as an incendiary device
Published: 29 July 2005
We reach all too easily for the word "unimaginable" these days. It is the superlative of choice when it comes to expressing moral shock or consternation, and the recent London bombings - achieved and unachieved - provoked another flurry of sightings. And nine times out of ten the word turns out to be misapplied. It's nearly always the case, for example, when what's proposed as "unimaginable" is the grief of those bereaved by an attack or the terror of those caught up in it.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Here's hoping for a very special effect
Published: 22 July 2005
I saw a new Star Wars movie this week - and it turned out to have all the usual Lucasian hallmarks: orchestral bombast, dazzling graphics and performances hewn from solid mahogany. But Star Wars: Revelations wasn't actually a George Lucas movie, and it had virtually nothing to do with Skywalker Ranch, Lucas's digital toy factory. Star Wars: Revelations is a fanfilm - and the fan in question is Shane Felux, a resident of Virginia who has devoted three years of his life and $20,000 of his own money into producing a 40-minute addition to the Star Wars series.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Much ado about eavesdropping
Published: 15 July 2005
On-air conversation quite often continues after the red light has gone out on Saturday Review, the radio programme I do every week. It did last week - and, as we sat talking about Peter Hall's production of Much Ado About Nothing, one of the guests came up with a rather good idea. We'd been discussing the eavesdropping scene, in which Benedick overhears his friends talking about how much Beatrice loves him, and moved on to Shakespearian overhearing in general. "There's a book about that", Piers Plowright said, "Arras and Hedge".
Thomas Sutcliffe: Return of a man called horse
Published: 08 July 2005
How Stubbs would have hated Stubbs and the Horse, the National Gallery's celebration of his genius. And how he would have squirmed - once the technological wonder had subsided - to find that the exhibition was to be accompanied by a short film season called Horses Galore. This sounds like a collection of Thelwell cartoons - gruesomely devoted to a gymkhana vision of the world in which the universe rests on four iron-shod hooves - and it perfectly captures the doom Stubbs feared for himself: to be consigned to history as a mere trader in horseflesh.
Thomas Sutcliffe: The day Jonathan Ross had to follow his script
Published: 04 July 2005
"Wow Bob, It's Huge" read a banner, and nobody could doubt it. Nobody except the BBC perhaps, whose day-long coverage of the world's largest music event began with a mood of jittery reassurance.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Why all the fuss for a premiere?
Published: 24 June 2005
Two cheers for Tom Cruise. He hasn't exactly been a benchmark of emotional control just lately - what with capering like a gibbon on Oprah's sofa, and other expressions of romantic delirium - but he did a lot better than I could manage if I'd just been squirted in the face by a cretin. In case you missed the moment, it happened at the Leicester Square premiere of War of the Worlds, and the squirter was one of those comedy ambush interviewers, who lie in wait on reception lines to pour cold water on a star's ego. Traditionally, the cold water has always been metaphorical - but the witless individual responsible for this stunt couldn't even think up a novel insult, so he settled for the real thing instead.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Why the idyll has had its day
Published: 17 June 2005
Odd word, "idyll", and even odder when you've heard it repeated several times in rapid succession - as it was in the second episode of David Dimbleby's television series about British landscape, A Picture of Britain. We all know what idyll means these days, of course, particularly when it's paired with the word "rural". It means insulated from the modern, either because there's no evidence of civilisation visible at all, or because what evidence there is is at least a couple of centuries old. And this is exactly how it was being used in this particular programme, which began by visiting various sites in Suffolk and noting how they had barely changed since being painted by John Constable some 200 years ago. "Idyll" here, rather specifically, was being used as a way of saying "pretty as a picture".
The simple art of making sense
Published: 27 May 2005
I was watching the first part of the BBC's forthcoming drama documentary on Beethoven the other day when I found myself uttering one of those sub-vocal moans of dismay that register an unexpected blow to the prejudices.
The art of the weather report
Published: 20 May 2005
It took me a couple of days to pin it down, but I've finally identified the nagging sense of déjà vu I felt whenever I looked at the BBC's new 3D graphics for the weather report.
