The Bodleian’s recent reader experience survey will, I’m sure, rightly return the praise that Oxford’s library staff deserves. But beyond your uninspiring and vandalised textbooks, your college’s library will also hold far more interesting – and far older – books and manuscripts, locked away behind that door you’ve never entered. As President of the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles, my purpose is to unlock those doors and give students access to view and handle books that you will, almost certainly, never get a chance to see again.

Oxford must be a contender, if not the record holder, for the densest concentration of rare books and manuscripts in the world. These works are treasures in the heritage of mankind. Moreover, they are also crucial components both of the history of your college and of the University. For the most part, the books your college forebears used half a millennium ago are still sitting there.

And yet, most students will go through their undergraduate studies without ever entering their college’s old library. Often restricted to fellows and researchers, these libraries can feel like, and often are, no-go areas for undergraduates. There are valid reasons for this – rare books and manuscripts have to be viewed with extreme care, and generally under supervision. They can’t just be taken off the shelves and flicked through. But if they are not looked at, they are dead. The Bodleian reader survey will give credit to the superb service that the libraries provide for day-to-day work. But whilst the doors to Oxford’s inheritance remain closed, that heritage is wasted. Better access to the historic collections of their colleges can be gained by undergraduates.

Firstly, encourage the librarians to open your college’s old library for visits from time to time (if they do not do so already.) They will generally be happy to display some of the key items and give talks on the history of the collection.

Secondly, know what there is. In general the key parts of the collections will be on the college website and on SOLO; where they could be relevant to your course or your interests, ask to use them.

Colleges themselves should also encourage students (with grants, if need be) to conduct their undergraduate theses on the College’s collections.

Finally, students themselves should do more to work with, and help, their old libraries. Every college old library is underfunded to varying extents, and will have countless books and manuscripts that need restoration. Rebinding a book can cost hundreds of pounds, fully repairing it thousands. But once done, it will be in a readable condition for centuries. Every JCR has charitable functions where they raise money.

Reallocating some of that money to aid rare book restoration and to help preserve your college’s heritage is a noble cause, and one that will, almost certainly, be rewarded through a greater willingness by the college librarians to make these collections available.

The libraries belong to the past, and to the present, and to the future. Students can work to make available, and to preserve, this inheritance.

Lady Gaga’s performance of ‘Swine’ at the SXSW Festival in 2014 is pretty much the ugliest mainstream pop performance you will ever see. As Gaga sings the fi rst verse, a girl dressed like an extra in a Charli XCX video slugs green goo out of a plastic bottle and looks bored.

She is still dead-eyed and indiff erent when, after the first chorus, she sticks her fingers down her throat and vomits florescent ectoplasm over a rocking, screaming Gaga. They then proceed to ride a pig-shaped bucking bronco, simulating sex, the girl continuing to regurgitate as Gaga writhes, supine, beneath her. At a climactic moment Gaga shouts, “Fuck you Pop Music!”. By the end the green effl uence that covers Gaga and her performance partner has dried to black and they stumble down from the huge animatronic hog, fi lthy and exhausted. In Gaga’s own words, it’s a song, and a performance, about “rape and rage”.

Compare this, then, to another song about rape. Robin Thicke, Pharrell and T.I sung “I know you want it” back in 2012, and, rightly, a media maelstrom shouted down their rape rhetoric. Gaga is stripped to her fi shnets and a plastic apron, conjuring the fitting metaphor of a night out that ends in an abattoir.

Thicke, Pharrell and T.I’s victims, however, strut like show ponies, glossy-haired and healthy, the sanitised face of rape culture. It’s likely you will have heard someone make a joke about rape, or have been sexually assaulted, or know someone who has. When this next happens, I doubt what springs to mind is the heightened pop perfection of the ‘Blurred Lines’ models. Instead, the anger, dirt and vomit of Gaga’s video probably shape your reaction. There is a reason bales of straw form the backdrop of the ‘Blurred Lines’ video; Thicke , Pharrell and T.I are the swine that Gaga is screaming about. Don’t be a rape apologist or a perpetrator of rape culture. Leave it where it belongs, drowning in the grime of the pig pen.

Every election in itself produces enough material to arguably be considered art. From campaign posters, debates and public appearances, each element is tightly controlled by spin doctors, campaign managers and script writers to evoke the greatest emotional response from the audience with the hope that this may eventually transform into votes. The simpler politicians try to make events appear, the more thought appears to be involved. This is achieved through a variety of visual media. The plethora of politicians suddenly showing an interest in industry, wearing silly outfits and placing themselves as nature’s greatest enemy by turning up at flooding sites in wellies (somewhat reminiscent of Caligula declaring war on the sea) is just one level of this ridiculous game. Cumatively this could be argued to be one massive dystopian modern art exhibition, the gallery being Britain and the impact unnervingly real.

Indeed elections are perhaps one of the most concentrated examples of human creative skill and imagination, partly due to the ambition of the artists themselves and the sheer amount of misdirection required to run a successful campaign. One of the most talented figures on the scene today is Lynton Crosby.

Crosby’s success in Australia has earned him the nickname “the Wizard of Oz”. With such a stage name, his role in the artistic world is clear. His favourite stroke technique is the ‘dead cat’ manoeuvre, a way of distracting the press into talking about a less damaging topic. His work is remarkable in the context of his position of power and the spectrum of his previous employers goes just some way to demonstrate this artist’s global dominance.

Arguably the most powerful brush in the campaign manager’s palette is visual advertising. Back in 1995, there was an exhibition in the Saatchi Gallery in London, exploring advertising as a concept – the advertising industry’s relationship with art is already well established. Speaking of the purpose of advertising itself, Crosby is reported in The Guardian to have said, “The most effective advertising is that which takes an existing perception and leverages it. Advertising is, of itself, not a very persuasive medium or a mind-changing tool. Its purpose is really to reinforce and trigger existing perceptions.” Such a description shares similarities with the motivation of much modern art. Crosby was hired by David Cameron in 2015 to run the General Election campaign and if results are anything to go by, especially given the uncertain polls in the lead up to election day, Crosby’s art cannot be doubted for its impact.

One of the most strikingly effective posters of the campaign, was an image of Ed Miliband in the pocket of Alex Salmond. This poster worked by making a powerful political debate appear self-evident. The comedic element to this piece was significant in evoking a public response. However, such an advertising campaign was not without witty backlash. The decision to put Cameron’s big shiny head on many public billboards afforded an apparently endless scope for parody (example above). 

Political advertising is a field which just gets more ambituous with time, as politicians have to find news ways to turn the electorates eyes from the truth; a task doubled in complexity with the advance of the internet. With the referendum on Europe recently announced, the future looks more artistic  than ever.

In Paradise
by Miriam Gordis

In paradise there are lemon trees
–when life gives you lemons
squander them, let them fall, and grow white
In paradise there is only one wall
–there are fish that have gone blind
from always swimming in darkness
In paradise there is no babel
–one language for poetry
and only one word for ticket
In paradise there is no memory
–lethe wiped clean of art
of suffering and of love

Note:

This week Miriam Gordis gives a dystopian perspective of paradise, producing an unsettling picture of a familiar concept. The final line is perhaps the most uncomfortable in the poem, as the idea of no memory, while comforting, is uncanny. In the same way, with “one language”, what becomes of art? Is such simplicity beautiful, or just grotesque?

Miriam Gordis is reading French & Czech at Jesus College, Oxford. She won first place in The ISIS Magazine 2014 Fiction Competition and her work has appeared in Cherwell, Vulture Magazine, Spleen Factory, Litro Online and The Ampersand Review.

In the Oberkassel area of Düsseldorf’s district four, on the west side of the river Rhine, stands a rather remarkable building. It has white walls and a black roof, with numerous windows of various sizes – including a rather elegant loft extension. Indeed, if we ignore this extension and the roof terrace which sits above it, the building is reminiscent of the seminal Bauhaus building that stands a little over 300 miles to the east, in the otherwise relatively inconspicuous city of Dessau. The Düsseldorf Building, having been erected in 1907, predates the Bauhaus Dessau, and has been variously used as a lamp factory, a corset production facility, a picture frame factory, and a theatre workshop. It now houses Julia Stoschek’s eponymous collection, predominantly formed of time-based media art.

It is from this collection that the Pembroke College JCR Art Fund has been loaned three pieces of media art, currently being exhibited alongside the College’s own works in its purpose-built gallery space. The Art Fund was created in 1947 by Anthony Emery. A particularly enjoyable anecdote within its history is that in 1953 it acquired Francis Bacon’s ‘Man in a Chair’ for £150; in 1997 it was sold for £400,000. However, whilst Emery created the Fund in fear of “the ignorance of the majority about the art of their own time”, the gallery only opened its doors to the public last year. This is probably why you haven’t heard of it.

The three pieces displayed are by Elizabeth Price, Helen Marten and Ed Atkins. The exhibition seems fitting, as each artist has their own Oxford link: Price taught at the Ruskin, Marten graduated from the Ruskin, and Atkins grew up in the town. The works themselves are of rather varying quality. The Atkins piece, ‘Delivery to the Following Recipient Failed Permanently’, has none of the arresting uncanniness of his Serpentine Sackler Gallery installation. Rather, it contains only the weaknesses that seem to permeate his work more widely – a poor command of lighting and a seeming lack of eye for composition. Whereas the Serpentine installation was able to somewhat redeem these faults through the sheer strangeness of its CGI protagonist, ‘Delivery’ comes across much more like a student art fi lm – complete with abrupt cuts and rather randomly inserted screens of white and black. Even the visual language of the piece is trite: a head, facing away from us, backlit with a circular light, so as to create an angelic, halo-bordered silhouette. We have seen this imagery before, and often in better lit and composed situations.

If you are a particular fan of wholly CGI spaces and thus shudder at the thought of Atkins foregoing this medium, fear not, as Marten’s piece fills the void. It is a playful work, complete with a Greek column that both talks and has bizarrely expressive eyebrows. But it seems a little vacuous and unfulfilling, never shaking off its reminiscence to Clippy the Paperclip (Microsoft Word’s ‘intelligent user interface’ of aeons ago, remember?)

Where the other two works variously misfi re, Price’s piece succeeds. Formed largely of static shots of the interior of a modernist home, it satirises the fetishisation of personal living spaces that has occurred as a result of the rise of interior design. The lighting is cold, the composition tasteful yet wholly stereotypical. Price seems to be emphasising the distance and voyeurism inherent in the viewing of another’s living space: when text flashes up imperatively telling us to “ENTER THE HOUSE,” the shot that follows is of the doorway, but is taken from inside the house. The emphasis is that we will never really enter this home, but rather will only look on it as a sort of design pornography – something that exists only to be visually enjoyed.

In the panel discussion held immediately prior to the exhibition’s opening, Dr Elisa Schaar spoke of the need to “perform” digital works of art, as otherwise they remain merely as bits of code. For all the talk of such a performance, the three video installations are not given their own, darkened room(s), but rather are interspersed with the gallery’s own collection. This reduces their potency. I presume as a result of this choice to display them in a lightfilled room, the works are displayed on ultra- HD screens rather than projected. Resultantly, every time there is a cut to black in any of the films, one is left staring at one’s own reflection – a rather strange and unsettling experience. In terms of sound, each video has two headphones, though the headphones on Atkins’s piece were broken during the opening, forcing the audio of the work to be played out loud and thus be drowned out by the hubbub of the gallery goers. Of course there are always going to be teething problems, but for an exhibition that is running for less than a month and only for two hours on two days of the week, every moment of mishap is costly.

That said, Pembroke is doing something admirable here. Its collection is a first for Oxford colleges, and the decision to open its doors to the public is commendable. Whilst the exhibition is by no means perfect, by bringing works from Düsseldorf to Oxford, Pembroke is providing a public service not only to Oxford students, but the community more widely. Give them the thanks they deserve and take a half hour out of your day to pay the exhibition a visit – it’s worth it.

The title of this Mozart adaptation implies a superficial superimposing of contemporary culture on to the classic canonical opera – a possible nightmare example of lip service to modernity. However, this is decidedly not superficial. Placing layer upon layer, a modern couple are debating whether to watch the Marriage of Figaro or Keeping Up With The Kardashians. What ensues is a tri-partite comic analysis of marriage through analysing the Count and Countess of the original, Chris Humphries and Kim Kardashian and the earlier mentioned fictional couple; concluding that it is not an institution that works for all. And the character of Figaro watches over all, becoming a Tiresias-type figure who impartially sees the events of the three plotlines which all begin to intertwine; while contemplating his own coming marriage.                           

The music will vary – the original score will be preserved for the Count and Countess, while the other plotlines have variations on this, including synths and even a new pop song performed by Figaro. The operatic voices were universally strong and the acting likewise impressive. Although conceptually complex, the songs maintain interest in the opera through the novelty of hearing the classic melodies given new comic lyrics, and avoids being sunk by the possible pretentiousness of the concept by successfully fusing elements traditionally associated with both high and low culture in an accessible and funny piece of pop art.

In short, this reviewer feels optimistic about this piece. It was surprisingly thoughtful for a piece which threatened intellectual complexity and snobbery; and manages to balance the fine line between being faithful to the original and showing creative innovation to keep up with the times. This is a bold show that looks to be another fine example of adapting Mozart’s classic comic operas.

With The Somme Battlefield: The Top 20 Places to Visit, former soldier Ruaraidh Adams-Cairns offers us something quite different to an ordinary battlefield guide, thanks to the inclusion of both factual information, and moving personal testimonies. Adams-Cairns attributes this interest in the individual experience of war to having listened to the historian David Rattray, who placed deliberate emphasis on the personal experiences of those involved in the conflict. It is this attention to how soldiers responded to astoundingly brutal circumstances that makes the guide so particularly gripping.

It is, after all, easy to become overwhelmed by the staggering scale of suffering wrought by the five gruelling months of warfare that made up The Battle of the Somme. As Adams-Cairns reminds us in his introductory ‘Background to the Battle’ section, roughly 200,000 British and Commonwealth lives were lost in an offensive intended to last only seven days. Should you find the sheer scale of destruction understandably difficult to get your head around, however, Adams-Cairns never allows his focus to remain too wide, nor too impersonal. After laying out the battle in broad, factual terms, we then move onto the twenty sites that make up the author’s tour of the battlefield. Accompanying each place are the often harrowing recollections of those soldiers who had the terrible misfortune of participating in the battle, adding fresh, urgent poignancy to the vast human cost.

Personal testimonies not only lend a suitably sorrowful tone to the guide, but also remind us of just how extraordinarily soldiers reacted to unthinkable conditions. Adams-Cairns names the story of the Reverend Theodore Hardy as his favourite, and it this account of such an unlikely war hero that adds some colour to a bleak, if compelling picture of the battle. Serving as an army Chaplain, Hardy was a quiet and unassuming figure who initially attracted little attention. However his utter fearlessness eventually earned him the moniker ‘The Unkillable One’ and Hardy was even appointed Chaplain to the King for his valour. The picture Adam-Cairns gives us of this remarkable man is a touching one; Hardy would take sweets and cigarettes up to his men, distinguished by the catchphrase ‘It’s only me!’ Hardy may not have survived the war, but his exceptional time at the Front is a fitting reminder that personal courage and compassion were able to endure, in spite of the horrors of the trenches.

If, like me, you are a reader with relatively little understanding of the Somme, it may seem easy to focus your attention almost entirely on the personal side to the work. Engaging with stories of human courage requires no specialist knowledge. Yet the guide also presents an accessible overview of the main events that happened at each site, and which clearly benefits from the author’s military background; before working for Savills, Adams-Cairns was commissioned into the Queen’s Own Highlanders. If you should find yourself among the surprisingly pristine fields of the Somme battlefield, then you can do far worse than to have this particular guide tucked under your arm.