The Outreach Officer at St Hugh’s College completed a 130km
run along the Kent coast this week to improve access to higher education.
Along the way, Lena Sorochina visited twelve schools from
Camber Sands to Whitstable, giving talks to pupils about applying to and
studying at the University of Oxford.
Visiting both secondary and primary schools, Sorochina’s run was inspired by recent research published by the Bridge Group in February 2019, which revealed a “stark contrast between the widening participation and outreach activities” in London and other parts of the country.
The research concluded that there was “a backdrop of highly
unequal access to cultural enrichment and outreach for students” depending on
where they lived.
The Principal of St Hugh’s College, the Rt Hon Dame Elish
Angiolini, said: “We are so pleased that Lena is bringing Oxford to so many
school pupils across Kent, and in such a novel way.”
“So many who would thrive at Oxford and other universities don’t
consider applying. Our message is loud and clear: we want the best students
from every background to consider coming to Oxford to study.”
Sorochina, who is currently studying for a DPhil in 18th-century French literature, thought a running tour was an unusual way to show young people that university can also be fun.
The distance covered in the St Hugh’s Coast Run is more than three marathons. Sorochina, who has been running since she was 16, has run one marathon and several half-marathons.
Sorochina said: “I hope that this tour will inspire children and young people to be ambitious and aim high, to realise that anything is within their reach if they put their minds to it.”
“I hope that it will encourage them to consider going to
university as not only an achievable, but a fun future destination. This
project also highlights the benefits of sport for physical and mental wellbeing,”
she added.
With 14 schools signed up, there has been a positive
response from local schools. Teachers and schools are eager to encourage their
pupils and raise their aspirations.
Mr Dan Shepperson, Head of Year 8 at the Charles Dickens
School, Broadstairs, said: “We are very interested in breaking down the barriers
pupils face in going to university, especially the top-ranked universities in
the country.”
From the BT studio to a national tour ‘How To Use A Washing Machine’ has grown from strength to strength. Imogen Harter-Jones talks to writers and directors Georgie Botham and Joe Davies.
The pub! Many of the best ideas occur there. Indeed, in the cosy nook of an Oxford hostelry is where Georgie Botham and Joe Davies brainstormed into existence ‘How To Use A Washing Machine’. Little did they know, in Oxford in 2018, that their newly penned and composed musical would not only have a successful BT Studio run but would also then progress (one year later with some editing and reworking) to a national tour with performances at Oxford North Wall Arts Festival, London’s Theatre 503, the Greater Manchester Fringe and the Edinburgh FRINGE itself.
Georgie and Joe discussed the development of ‘How To Use A Washing Machine’ from their rehearsal studio before the start of their summer UK tour. Impressively, Georgie wrote the book and lyrics of the musical whilst directing a play in the second year of her English degree and Joe composed the music during his Music Finals. From the outset, this project has been what they both describe as “a leap of faith”, but evidently one that has paid off. Their camaraderie, creativity, professionalism and trust as friends developing this project has been pivotal.
Despite their considerable previous directorial, acting and musical experience, ‘How To Use a Washing Machine’ is a first for both Joe and Georgie; this is their first original musical and builds on their ideas to create an exciting new show. Starting off with the simple question of “what it is like to go home for the very last time?” Georgie says that “it’s a show about finding yourself and trying to find your footing, that found itself along the way”. While coming from the angle of divorcing parents and the breakup of their traditional family unit, at some point everyone realises you won’t return to live in the family home for any extended period, if at all; it resonates with everyone.
Their take on the story is wonderfully unconventional and both profound and funny. Despite the small two-person cast, one male and one female actor (Cass played by Emelye Moulton and James by Joe Winter (in July) and Max Cadman (in August)), they were adamant from the start that “it is not a boy meets girl story”. Instead, it follows the relationship of a brother and sister literally boxing up their lives and childhood before moving onto adulthood. This is refreshing as many mainstream musicals focus on a tumultuous love story between its protagonists but this liberation from convention has allowed them to explore what Georgie believes to be the most “enduring relationship” of your life, the one with your siblings.
Joe explained that, despite ‘How To Use a Washing Machine’ being unashamedly a musical in form, they wanted to escape the cliché of just being a large, glitzy, over dramatic spectacle. The actors are accompanied not by the expected “classic keys, guitar, bass” but rather a string quartet. Joe’s aim as composer and musical director was to “isolate it (strings)” and show the “infinite possibilities” allowing them to sound as varied as a “rock band, jazz band and hip hop”.
The writing and rehearsal process for ‘How To Use A Washing Machine’ was a whirlwind which left Georgie and Joe with “no time to second guess” themselves. However, they believe that “liberated” rather than limited them. With an agreed basic plot, Georgie wrote the book and lyrics which she sent to Joe who developed them into the songs of the musical. Despite the inherent musicality of the performance Joe firmly believes that “the words and drama are the most important thing. The music is there to serve the drama, not the other way around”, and the harmony of the songs and their meaning and the accompanying music is evident in the finished result.
At some point, everyone needs to learn ‘How To Use A Washing Machine’; it’s an essential growing up experience. When it’s time to empty your room, and pack those boxes for the final time, it’s perhaps inevitable that you will examine your life, your decisions, what means enough to keep and what can be discarded; you wonder who you are, feeling nostalgic, tense and excited, as you move into your unknown future having revisited your past. With their ambitious four stop UK tour this summer, Georgie and Joe’s future dramatic and musical endeavours are definitely worth following.
Summer 2019 Tour dates for ‘How to Use a Washing Machine’: Oxford- North Wall Arts Centre – 15th – 16th July. London- Theatre503 – 19th – 20th July. Manchester- Hope Aria House – 23rd – 26th July. Edinburgh Fringe – ZOO Southside – Studio – 2nd – 26th August.
A former Nuffield academic who was dismissed from Cambridge for links to far-right extremists rejects the charges and is raising money to sue for wrongful dismissal. In doing so, he has enlisted the services of a man with close ties to the far-right, Cherwell and Varsity can reveal.
The man behind the Noah Carl Legal Fund, Conner Douglass, has a history of using his software skills to enable the funding of the far-right. Just two months ago, Douglass created an almost identical ‘defence fund’ for the far-right activist Laura Loomer.
Douglass was also behind MakerSupport, a payment platform popular with the far-right. He founded the platform after white nationalist Lauren Southern was banned from Patreon, and billed it as a “free speech” alternative.
The Noah Carl Legal Fund, which is registered in Texas, has accrued more than $81,000 in the last two weeks, with donations in US dollars and Bitcoin. Many of the donations have been made anonymously, including one of 1.17 Bitcoin (£11,176) made on the day the fund was launched.
Carl told Cherwell that Mr Douglass approached him
with the offer of establishing the crowd-funder, and that he has no concerns
about the anonymous donations.
According to Texas company filings, Douglass is behind no
fewer than three similar funds. The first of these, Support Loomer LLC, was
established in April and has served as the vehicle for more than $85,000 of
donations to far-right activist Laura Loomer.
Until 2017, Loomer worked alongside Tommy Robinson at the far-right
Canadian blog The Rebel Media. She has since been banned from Twitter,
Facebook and Instagram for extremism, and has attracted controversy for
spreading the conspiracy theory that school shootings in Texas, Santa Fe and
Parkland, Florida were staged.
Donations to Loomer have previously been found
to be directed towards anti-Muslim hate group The United West.
Prior to establishing these legal funds, Conner Douglass made his name in far-right circles by creating the online crowdfunding platform MakerSupport. MakerSupport was established by Douglass in 2017 after white nationalist internet personality Lauren Southern was banned from Patreon. (Southern has since been banned from entering the UK.)
MakerSupport received attention last year when, after a
series of crackdowns by payment platforms such as PayPal, Patreon and GoFundMe,
it became one of the last such websites available for use by the far-right.
White supremacist leader Richard Spencer said
at the time: “One of the other fundamental reasons why we’re on
MakerSupport is that this is all we’ve got. We have been de-platformed from all
major payment systems and other payment platforms. We can’t use them — but we
can use MakerSupport.”
Noah Carl is currently attempting to fund a legal challenge to his dismissal from St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. Carl was dismissed from his post after an independent investigation found that “Dr Carl’s appointment could lead, directly or indirectly, to the College being used as a platform to promote views that could incite racial or religious hatred, and bring the College into disrepute.”
Speaking to Cherwell, Carl said: “The web developers
who built my crowd-fund build crowd-funds for individuals who would be at risk
of having their campaigns shut down by activists if they used a traditional
crowd-funding platform. I have no connection to the other individuals for whom
they have built crowd-funds. All the money donated to my crowd-fund will go
toward my legal costs, and any money left over will be donated to a free speech
campaign of my choosing.”
Before taking up his position at St Edmund’s in 2018, Carl
had been a postdoctoral researcher at Nuffield College, Oxford. While at
Oxford, Carl courted
controversy for his links to the far-right.
Carl’s appointment to Cambridge’s prestigious Toby Jackman
Newton Trust Research Fellowship sparked weeks of student protest and led to
hundreds of academics signing an open letter against the appointment. The protests
led St Edmund’s to launch two separate investigations into Carl’s appointment
and his research. The latter investigation found that Carl was likely to bring
the College into disrepute, and so his appointment was terminated.
Apollo 11 is a recently released space documentary, utilizing never-before-seen 70mm footage and audio to detail the now famous 1969 moon landing. 50 years on, and with a UK release on the 28th June, I sat down with Apollo 11’s chief archival producer Stephen Slater, to discuss the film. Stephen originally began his career as a director, before moving into more specialist archival work in documentaries such as Hillsborough (2014) and George Best: All By Himself (2016). Shifting towards a focus on recapturing the intricate moments of man’s first lunar exploration, Stephen explains how Apollo 11 rocketed from a shared small passion project, to a feature length cinematic experience.
This year
of course marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission- was
there always an aim to get the film done by now, or has the project been in the
making for a while?
Stephen
Slater: “It started actually with a small
crew of us doing a short 30-minute film about Apollo 17, which followed the
last visit to the moon in 1972. We partnered with CNN films and Statement
Pictures, a company I have been working with, based in New York. Like Apollo
11, that short only used archival footage of the astronauts, with no
discernible narration. I had endeavoured to manually lip sync the available
audio onto the footage of Mission Control staff in order to make the experience
look and feel authentic. It took hours to pour through and edit. After I
finished, the end result encouraged me to reach out to director Todd Miller in
early 2017. I told him that I had more footage covering Apollo 11, and asked
whether he wanted to do something for the upcoming anniversary.”
At what point did you realise the
project was developing into a full-length feature?
SS: “Probably about five months in- during research, we come across this
incredible cache of 70 mm film in the US National Archives. It gave us a lot
more footage of the actual launch. It allowed us to transition from a
relatively small film that may have had a home online or as a CNN broadcast, to
a feature length documentary with a worldwide IMAX release.”
How were
you able to discover the footage- was it a stroke of good fortune?
SS: “It fell of a lorry *laughs*. No, no, essentially, when you are shooting on film, you are always trying to track back to the source and find those original reels- they are often referred to as negatives. The same principle applied with our research- we wanted to source the best, most original material. We knew that was in the Maryland National Archives, which is the end repository of any film underwritten by the US government. When we got there, the archivist said, “by the way, there are 165 reels of 70mm film, if you are interested”. It turned out about a third had “Apollo 11” on them.”
One of the strengths of the
film remains how unadulterated the footage is- there is no traditional
narration or talking heads. Was that always the approach that the creative team
strived for?
SS: Definitely. I mean there is an element of
narration in one sense; there was a man who was sat next to the flight director
at Mission Control, called the Public Affairs Officer. He would come on the air
when this feed went out to the world, with the astronauts voices heard to the
world- he would cut in to say, “This is Apollo Control at 304 hours and Neil
Armstrong is entering the capsule”. But we wanted the focus to always be on the
footage itself.”
You were responsible for the sound sync of the 16mm footage, which particularly focuses on the Mission Control footage of the tech staff. Did you find that process to be a labour of love or where there times it proved tedious?
SS: “To coin a phrase from
Blackadder, it was like trying to find a small bit of hay in a massive stack of
needles. It was very time consuming. But it was all about balancing
authenticity with clarity. I will give you a good example. When the astronauts
are on the (moon)’s surface, Richard Nixon was patched through to the crew. His
voice had effectively gone up to the moon and back again, so it was badly garbled.
Originally, we intended to use that audio- but there were cleaner recordings of
him, so my suggestion was to go with them. Ultimately, that worked out better,
but the counterargument was of course that it was not as “spacey” and
authentic. So, these were the kind of the discussions we had to have.”
Editing wise, Apollo 11 seems
to have strong invocations of 2001: A Space Odyssey and even Scorsese’s
Woodstock- how much were they a source of inspiration?
SS: “The answer is (Stanley) Kubrick
filmed the whole thing, he faked the moon landing * laughs*, – we were always
on the lookout for him at the back of shots. No, it was eerie that it is so
similar to something filmed a year earlier by Kubrick. I think a lot of it was
because the equipment used, such as the 70mm cameras, was the same. Woodstock,
I know, was a definite influence for our director- it allowed the film to
develop strong cinema verité style”
What would you say is your
favourite movie on space exploration?
SS: “I have been doing
other interviews recently where a lot of people have been asking me what got
interested me into space exploration, and a big part of it was seeing Apollo 13
at the cinema when I was 8 years old- that really got me hooked. I also really
enjoy Shadow of the Moon (2007), which documents astronauts’ stories,
including 9 of which who visited the moon. It intersperses their memories
really nicely with footage- great music too! I would definitely put that up
there with some of the best.”
Ari Aster’s genre-blending
horror(ish) film Midsommar had an awful lot to live up to. Aster’s gut-wrenching
feature debut Hereditary established him as a masterful purveyor of
psychological torture and gorgeous gore in contemporary cinema. I bought into
the hype, but maddeningly Midsommar presents a ‘my type on paper’ kind
of problem – it’s a bit of a yawning let-down in the flesh.
The filmfollows Dani
(Florence Pugh) as she attempts to manage the trauma of family tragedy whilst
simultaneously clinging to the remnants of a dying relationship with her
vacant-eyed boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor). In the snowy opening sequence, Dani
awkwardly hints her way into Christian’s boy’s trip to a Swedish commune where
the festivities can begin.
Watching shots of her
wandering through wildflower meadows crosscut with drug-induced hallucinations,
Dani’s ties to her modern American lifestyle slowly sever as she becomes
increasingly entangled in the commune’s ancient Midsummer rites. By blending well
established tropes of paganistic Folk Horror with the raw energy of any breakup
ever, Aster manages to create a disquieting tale filmed entirely in lurid
daylight. Unlike Hereditary, in which the darkness that encloses the
family hides satanic figures, family secrets, and even a demented Toni Collette
scrambling around on the ceiling, here the dynamic is flipped. Midsommar
is a director’s reminder that we are much safer in the dark, before everyone
wakes up.
Unlike the villagers in Robin
Hardy’s classic The Wicker Man, who cruelly taunt the Catholic police officer,
herethe Swedish community show no interest in concealing their violent,
sacrificial practices from outsiders. They even explain a length every ritual
to their audience of gawping outsiders. Their unsettling candour elegantly
parallels the larger motif of exposure that runs throughout Midsommar. Exposure
is expressed through relentless sunlight, aerial shots of wide-ranging flat
landscapes, and scenes showing the encouraged use of dandelion infused hallucinogenic
teas that ‘break down your defences’. However, this candour has the unintended
effect of revealing far too much, far too early, and drains multiple scenes of
their power to shock or scare. In one particularly dull gory scene, a
traditional suicide ritual is so protracted that it quite literally falls flat
on its face.
Undoubtedly, Midsommar
has its moments of strength. Aster’s sickly pastel colour palette combined with
carefully chosen (bizarrely on trend) embroidered costumes are visually
arresting. The style achieved calls to mind another impressionistic, dreamy
nightmare structured around a natural landscape’s indifference to human pain: Peter
Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. Aster also introduces several nice worldbuilding
touches including the fabulist mural painted on wooden panels (the work of
contemporary artist Mu Pan), which open like curtains before the first scene. Pugh’s performance as a traumatised Dani is
accomplished, but it simply serves to highlight the lack of psychological depth
in the surrounding cast. With a lacklustre script and a nearly 2 ½ hour run
time, it was a struggle to stay engaged.
A quick glance around at
people’s responses in a cinema is always telling. It is a relief that Aster allows
dark comedy to creep into the peripheries of his tale, because some sleepy
sounding laughter was the only truly audible response he received from my audience.
All I’m saying is, people were shouting at the screen watching Get Out, and
I pulled a muscle watching Hereditary. Well-paced, subtle Folk Horror
has the power to disturb and delight in equal measure. This does neither.
In one interview Aster
revealed that of all his characters, it was Dani whom he most readily
identified with, admitting that he often finds himself in her position of
‘clinging to something that’s dead because I’m not done with it’. Perhaps this
sentiment reveals a difficulty in his artistic practice too. It’s time for
Aster to stop clinging to horror tropes that have already been mastered.
Aster’s eye for detail remains brilliant, and this is far from thoughtless
filmmaking, but he seems to have performed his own ritual sacrifice of substance
for style. Catch me rewatching The Wicker Man for the fourth time as I await
a deeper, more affecting film from Ari Aster.
If you were to make a list of ‘trigger warnings’ for Pier
Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, it would be
hard to know where to start. Even forty years after its release, the film
remains banned in several countries. The film, loosely based on the notorious
Marquis de Sade’s novel Les 120 Journées de Sodome, has been branded as
the “sickest film of all time” by critics. Its unrelenting look at the
depravity which humankind can sink to has lost none its power to shock.
Whilst de
Sade’s novel was the starting point for Pasolini’s project, the director shifts
the context away from eighteenth-century France, setting the film instead in Salò,
a town in northern Italy which Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government
effectively made their capital from 1943 until their fall from power in 1945.
The place had particular relevance for Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose brother – an
anti-fascist activist – was killed there in the final year of the Republic’s
existence. In the film, four Italian libertines kidnap eighteen teenagers,
planning to use them purely for their own sensual indulgence, using sex and
violence with complete amorality. The film follows the grim progress of these
four months, and is divided into three parts: the Circle of Manias, the Circle
of Shit, and the Circle of Blood – a structure alluding the definitions of Hell
in Dante’s Divine Comedy. These names give you some idea of why the film
has an infamous reputation within the history of transgressive cinema.
The film is one which attracts folklore,
adding to the mysterious aura which surrounds the work. Legend has it that the
critic Roger Ebert owned the film for years after the film’s release, but
supposedly died without ever watching it, as he was too intimidated by the
graphic content. During the making of the film, several reels of footage were stolen,
and thieves demanded a ransom for their return. Yet most notably of all, the
director was murdered before the film was even released in Italy – life seeming
to mirror the gruesome content of Pasolini’s own art. A seventeen-year-old male
prostitute, Giuseppe Pelosi, was arrested when he was found with Pasolini’s
car. Although he admitted running over Pasolini several times with the car
after an argument, many years later, after his conviction, Pelosi denied his
participation in the murder, claiming that three mysterious men were involved.
The case remains unsolved.
Pasolini’s homosexuality is a
crucial aspect of the film’s story. As a gay communist, there was no place for
him within the post-War political system of Catholic Democracy. Everything
about Pasolini – his sexuality, his radicalism, his aesthetic principles – violently
offended the sensibilities of Italy’s cultural and political elite. Openly
despised by many, one reviewer urged that Salò be shown as a defence
exhibit at the trial for Pasolini’s murder, on the assumption that anybody
capable of directing such a film was practically begging to be murdered. Pasolini
was uncompromising in his disdain for bourgeois convention – the film seeks to
shock its audience so as to reveal the limits of their repressive tolerance.
John Waters, another film provocateur, described Salò as a film about
the “pornography of power” – a film which shows the gruesome reality of what
happens when a desire for unadulterated sensuality meets unchecked authority.
Waters’ description demonstrates how Pasolini’s film is a work for our times. The spectacle of today’s demagogues is distinctly pornographic – images of Trump or Farage being ‘outrageous’ are the background noise of our lives now, always present even if at a low level. We have become numb to their bile, unable to feel the shock which we know should be there. One of the libertines in the film says: “All is good if it’s excessive” – they carry out their awful deeds in the name of glutting their sensual pleasures to the excess. The populist message of today is similarly in thrall to the sensual – it is a politics of carnal slogans and impulses. You don’t think through: ‘Take Back Control’, you feel it on a gut level. If Pasolini’s film speaks to our age, then it should remind us why we need works like his. We need films which violently shake us awake, forcing us to confront what we would rather not think about or pretend wasn’t there. Pasolini uses the language and imagery of obscenity in order to shock, but if not shocked, we would only be indifferent. And indifference would be infinitely worse.
I’ve always loved Spider-Man. Spider-Man was my very first
word (allegedly). I owned Spider-Man annuals, action figures, Top Trumps,
lunchbags. Sam Raimi’s original trilogy, meanwhile, introduced to the young me
a new imaginative universe on the fringes of the real world, where Peter Parker
would fight the Green Goblin or Doctor Octopus before hurrying back to Queens
in time for dinner.
I steered clear of the Andrew Garfield films; I was older
now and besides, they looked too clean, too cool, too effects-driven. It was
with some trepidation that I watched Tom Holland don the suit in 2016’s
‘Captain America: Civil War’ and then 2017’s ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’. I
enjoyed them both, but I wanted a bit more from the superhero I’d always liked
the most- greater stakes, bigger threats, and action that twisted and swerved
with all the improbable physics that the character’s (frankly bizarre)
superpowers seemed to demand.
‘Spider-Man: Far From Home’ found my hopes met. Post
snap-reversal, Peter Parker and his schoolmates head to Europe on a vacation
which, far from being the break from crime-fighting Peter hoped for, turns out
to be the setting for his greatest challenge yet. What follows is terrific: a
pitch-perfect teenage (read: awkward) romance with great action, all anchored by
solid performances from the ever-maturing Tom Holland, a charismatic Zendaya
and Jake Gyllenhaal, in a role that isn’t what it first seems.
Ok, so after ‘Avengers: Endgame’ the stakes feel slightly
diminished, despite the best efforts of the script (‘Now, this is an Avengers
level threat!’ being one slightly on-the-nose example). Still, this remains
pure blockbuster filmmaking- polished, snappy and buoyant.
Last week’s open days saw more than forty people take part in the Alternative Open Days Tour, which aims to cast a light on Oxford’s “uncomfortable” past and present.
The tour, an initiative of the Oxford Climate Justice Campaign and the Uncomfortable Oxford Project, aimed to raise awareness among prospective students and members of the public of Oxford’s historic involvement in British colonialism and its contemporary involvement in fossil fuel extraction.
Sites of interest included
the India Institute, Hertford, New College, All Souls, the Rhodes Statue, Oriel
College’s façade, and Wadham College.
Tour attendees were also
told of Wadham’s recent efforts to come to terms with its legacy, such as its
moves towards fossil fuel divestment and its request for an ‘Uncomfortable’
investigation of its own colonial past, the first for an Oxford college.
The Divest and
Decolonise tour is the two groups’ first joint programme, and both say they
are planning to continue with similar tours at the beginning of the academic
year.
One participant, Christabel
Buchanan told Cherwell:“The divest and decolonise protest tour
was fantastic. Extremely eloquently delivered, the tour guides took us to
places with particular significance to the university’s colonial past and
present. As an Oxford resident who has never been to the University, this
really opened my eyes to how tied the University is to colonial practices such
as resource extraction and dirty investments.
“We learned that, thanks
to pressure from students, there are moves away from profiting from the fossil
fuel industry and towards renewables or other environmentally sound investment
choices. Thanks to its international reputation, Oxford University could lead
the way in local and ethical investments, and it is encouraging that some
colleges such as Wadham are taking this stance, alongside mindset shifts in
other previously colonial institutions like the Rhodes Scholarship. It’s
certainly not easy to find out where powerful institutions’ investments
eventually end up, so this student group is doing great research, campaigning,
and – thanks to this tour – outreach!”, she added.
The Oxford Climate
Justice Campaign (OCJC) is an official campaign of the Oxford University Student Union, and campaigns
for the full divestment of University and college endowments from the fossil
fuel industry. The campaign has attended several open days at individual
faculties, handing out flyers to prospective students with information about
Oxford’s investments and responses to climate change.
Uncomfortable Oxford,
which was founded by students last year,is a public engagement project which
aims to raise awareness of uncomfortable historical legacies present in the
University’s past or present. The project runs ‘uncomfortable’ discussion-based
walking tours informed by archival research, covering topics such as imperial
and colonial legacies, gender and ethnic diversity, ethical funding and wealth
inequality.
An OCJC spokesperson
said of the tour: “As evidenced by the recent school strikes across the world,
young people are angry at the apathy of those in power towards the climate
crisis. Oxford owes its prospective students a reformed attitude towards the
future. While visitors gathered for the open day, the Oxford Climate Justice
Campaign and Uncomfortable Oxford urged the University to engage with its
history of exploiting both people and planet, and to use its wealth and
international prominence to construct a fairer world for the next generation.”
University Council voted to
institute a blacklist on direct investments in coal and tar sands in 2015.
However, the University’s official position on divestment falls short of
campaigners’ demands to remove both direct and indirect investments in coal,
oil and gas.
Furthermore, an
investigation carried out by Cherwell in 2018 revealed over £150 million
invested by Oxford colleges in offshore funds that include exposure to fossil
fuels, tobacco and arms.
Within individual Oxford
colleges, 26 common rooms have passed motions in favour of full divestment from
fossil fuels, and three colleges, including Lady Margaret Hall, Wadham and
Balliol have set up official divestment working groups, which report to
Governing Body. St Hilda’s has moved its endowment to Sarasin’s Climate Active
Fund, which monitors and encourages the transition of companies in the
portfolio to net zero-carbon targets.
Over 70 British
universities, as well as five Cambridge colleges, have committed to full or
partial divestment from fossil fuels.
White curtains quiver in the non-existent breeze that haunts
the clinical interior of the Hayward gallery. With that slight movement, too,
the image projected onto the curtain sways – Victoria Sin’s wide eyes flicker
involuntarily as the camera slowly zooms into their face. In sparkling lingerie and full drag inspired
by Cantonese opera, the model, laid out demurely across
a satin curtain, stares back at the starers; sometimes sultry, sometimes vulnerable,
always, somehow, piercing.
“Look. Look. Look – At her.”
Victoria Sin’s A View from Elsewhere, Act 1, and She Postures in Context, three film-art pieces projected onto a curtain-enclosure, embody the spirit of the Hayward’s latest exhibition Kiss My Genders. The exhibition, made up of over a hundred artworks by thirty different international artists, centres around gender identity and fluidity. Physically enclosing their viewers in the wavering medium of cloth and projection, Sin appears to comment on the insubstantiality of gender boundaries, but in subverting perspective and viewing experience, also draws attention to the role of performance, presentation and spectatorship in all elements of identity. Hayward claims the exhibition focuses on “content and forms that challenge accepted or stable definitions of gender.” Paintings of hunter-gatherer tribes with drag elements question the West’s suppression of third-gender narratives, while sculptures made of artificial oestrogen and testosterone break down, biologically, what it means to be “male” or “female”.
But more than just gender identity, the exhibits are an expression of the individuality and the internal or cultural conflicts of the artists. Amrou Al-Kadhi teams up with Holly Falconer to explore what he describes as the “disorienting” experience of being drag as a person of Muslim heritage by modelling as drag persona Glamrou wrapped in a Persian carpet. Cloned in different poses through triple exposure to express the incongruence of these disparate cultures, Al-Kadhi demonstrates their successful unification in the persona of Glamrou. Meanwhile Juliana Huxtable’s photographic self-portraits deflect identity-labels entirely; using makeup, costumes and fantasy backgrounds, she deflects the reductive categorizations ascribed to her as a “black intersex artist” by creating personalized embodiments of mythology, sci-fi and super-heroes. Kiss My Genders thereby becomes an exploration not only of the boundaries perceived in gender – but of individuals’ cultural identity experiences.
With this exhibition, an art assistant explains, the Hayward is attempting to break the mould of LGBTQ+ and gender-related exhibitions, which often focus on the violence and oppression experienced by these communities. Instead they want to celebrate different identities. Nonetheless, the exhibition is palpably political: Zanele Muholi explores black lesbian and transgender experiences in South Africa through photography – and acts of violence are still an all too present component of that. In her series Crime Scenes she stages the aftermath of brutal murders, photographing the upturned feet of model corpses buried in sheets of plastic and litter. Paintings like YESSIR! Back off! Tell me who I am, again? combine illustration and collage to satirize the way gender transition is spoken about. The artist, Flo Brooks, depicts a fictional cleaning company scrubbing away at a therapist’s room, reflecting his experience of the “hygienic spaces” he experienced while transitioning; “spaces designed to clean, conceal and correct” things socially considered “dirty, abnormal or other” – but also addresses the way transgender issues are generalised and “sterilized” through neat clinical terms. Artists in Kiss My Genders marry the intensely personal with the social, emotional with the playful, and at the same time evoke all the contrasting feelings of pride, comfort, fear, frustration, belonging and exclusion.
The exhibition succeeds in its “celebration” and “expression” of identities – but the presentation, at times, is confusing. The works of some artists are split across multiple floors, the labelling unclear, and it is generally worth asking the art assistants to talk you through the rooms – difficult, when the gallery is at its busiest and a shame for an exhibition set on “opening doors.” Perhaps this is all the more noticeable as the exhibition appears to be catered towards an audience that identifies with binary genders – many of the artworks require the context of the theme or artist in order to be appreciated. Often, however, this is used in a positive way; many of the exhibits are truly thought provoking.
Most strikingly, Something for the Boys takes us through a spiral of ruched curtains in metallic pink – as if we are walking into a private adult show, yet at the same time, as if we were walking onto a stage. In the centre of the spiral we find ourselves in a circular womb-like room with a screen. Cutting between various LGBTQ+ spaces in Blackpool, the projected film shows an increasing disconnect between sound and image; a drag queen mouthing to “I am who I am” off-sync, interjected with a club-dance choreography, stills of gay clubs, the camera panning over pornographic videos and fetish-wear, and back to the drag queen – except this time she just mouths, and all we can hear is industrial sounds – once again connecting gender-identity and sexuality to cultural identity as a whole. But there is also something intimately performative about the display – the gesticulations and dances, unhinged from their appropriate music, seem to point to a theme of performance and spectatorship at large. And suddenly, that circular room no longer feels like a private theatre. It starts to feel like a stage, and the question crosses our minds – who is really the performer here, the drag act, or us, playing up to our female/male expectations? Just as Victoria Sin’s insistent murmurs, Kiss My Genders seduces its audience into truly looking – and becoming aware of the instability of their perspective in the process.
To say that the Kronos Quartet have been influential in contemporary classical music would be an understatement; they have defined the genre since their founding by violinist David Harrington in 1973. Over their incredibly successful career thus far the San Francisco-based quartet have sold over 1.5 million records, won two Grammy awards, have had over 900 works written for them, and even appeared on Sesame Street.
What characterises Kronos is their commitment to performing
works from outside the European classical tradition and of which they are the
first performers, from composers from Malawi to the Congo to Israel. They also
reach a global audience; I speak to Kronos’ founder and Artistic Director David
Harrington fresh from a sound check in Detroit.
He is friendly and gracious and immediately puts me at ease over the phone, as I was nervous, having been a massive Kronos Quartet fan for years. I ask him about his vision for Kronos, and whether it has changed over the 40 years spanning their career.
Famously the founding of the quartet was catalysed when Harrington
heard George Crumb’s Black Angels, which
is considered by many to be an anti-war piece, and the quartet was founded with
the backdrop of the Vietnam War.
“What I’ve noticed is there have been other wars since the
American war in Vietnam, and it seems like my country just tends to get into
conflict. The experience of hearing Black
Angels was extraordinary having grown up playing Haydn and Mozart and
Beethoven and Schubert. That was the music I knew about and then around age 15
I heard Bartok for the first time and the next year I started playing music by
living composers. The backdrop to all of this was the war that was going on and
it was on our television every night. At a certain point every young man my age
had to deal with the draft.
“Do you know the story of why we didn’t record Black Angels for 16 years? The reason we
didn’t record it is that I always wanted Black Angels to be the first piece on
an album. In those days you couldn’t just go onto Spotify and hear whatever you
wanted; I wanted people to have to confront that piece; to not be able to get
away from it, to have no preparation, just like when I heard it. I just turned
on the radio and a moment later there it was; I wasn’t ready, I had no idea
what it was I was hearing, it just grabbed me. It was so physical.”
I question whether Harrington thinks that music has a different energy or meaning during wartime, especially music that was composed around the time of the Vietnam War for Americans.
“One thing that you need to know is that when I called George Crumb (the composer of Black Angels) before our album came out, I wanted the programme notes for that piece to be in his words. I explained to him that for me this was an anti-war piece and I said, “in your opinion, is this what it is?”. And he would not say that. That taught me that music belongs to each one of us and the way we interpret it is very personal and yet it is just as valid as what the composer thought. If you look in the score it does say “in tempore belli” (in the time of war). I asked him if this was his response to the Vietnam war and he would not say yes or no; what he said was “there were strange things in the air”.
We moved on to the topic of why music compels Harrington and he brings up a quote that stuck with him from composer Henryk Gorecki:
“I remember when I was twelve years old; we went out on a school visit to Auschwitz. I had the feeling the huts were still warm. (this was in 1945)… The paths themselves—and this image has never left me—the paths were made from human bones thrown onto the path like shingles. We boys—how to walk on this? This is not sand, not earth. We were walking on human beings. This was my world. The only way to confront this horror, to forget—but you could never forget—was through music… The world today, it’s the same. Also a nightmare, crushing us. Somehow I had to take a stand, as a witness and as a warning… The war, the rotten times under Communism, our life today, the starving, Bosnia—what madness. And why, why? The sorrows, it burns inside me. I cannot shake it off.“
Harrington reflects on this.
“This experience shaped his entire life and the only thing
he could do as a response was music. I think there are these moments in life
that are so huge that we don’t recover from them; we absorb them, we deal with
them, we listen to them and I kind of think that is what musicians do. Is that
our job? I’m trying to figure out what my job is every day!
“What is the purpose of music? What is it for, what are we doing; what is a musical experience? For me these are fluid questions and the answers keep changing and perhaps each new piece is an answer to that.”
Kronos are notable partly for their collaborations with musicians
from all around the world; one of my favourite albums of theirs is Pieces of Africa, which features African
composers from across the continent. I ask Harrington how he decides on his
collaborations and what makes them successful.
“I’m interested in learning new things about music and there
are so many people in the world that can teach us things that we don’t know. I heard
marvellous recordings when I was in high school from places in Africa; and I
just noticed a feeling and I realised that I’d never heard a violin or viola or
cello have that sound and I filed that away and realised that someday, I wanted
my instrument to sound like this. And eventually it became clear that my
instrument is not the violin; it’s the string quartet.
“It’s thrilling and amazing to be able to participate in
music from cultures that we’ve never had a chance to physically visit but
through our imaginations we can go there at will.
“Someone asked me once, “How can you do this? What do you know about African music?” and I remember saying: “I didn’t go to Vienna, Austria until I was about 35 and I grew up playing Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, who all lived there. They all were of the same religion, they spoke the same language, they were all white guys. I was from Seattle, Washington; what do I know about Vienna?”
“Music is an imaginative thing; it’s a way that we humans
have figured out to share information with each other and to express things
about our lives or cultures. So much can be embedded in music and none of us
own it; we just get to share it for a little while.”
One of Kronos’ most important new projects is Fifty for the Future, an educational venture of unprecedented scope in the contemporary music world. They have commissioned fifty new works from 25 female and 25 male prominent and emerging composers from around the world, designed to guide young professional string quartets in performance of 21st-century repertoire. All of the scores and recordings are available free to use for anyone around the world, and Kronos performs at least one of these works in all their concerts.
I ask why there such a need for it, and why young string
quartets are not playing more 21st century music.
“When I was 12 years old, I joined the Columbia Record Club;
you sent in a penny and got five or six LPs. I was reading a biography of
Beethoven and I read about the Late Quartets, and that month one of the
offerings was the first Late Quartet. I put on the recording and the opening
E-flat major chord just wiped me out. I thought it was the most incredible
sound I had ever heard in my life and I wanted to learn how to make that sound.
So what I did was made my way down to the Seattle public library and checked
out the score and parts. I called some friends and a couple of days later we
were in a room trying to play that piece. For a split second that opening chord
sounded like the record! It was really a split second but that’s all you need
to give you the confidence to show you that you can do this, that you love
this, that you want more of this. That’s what happened to me.
Years later whilst coaching we realised that no one could
get hold of the music we were playing, and the music schools were asking Kronos
to send Xerox copies of the parts of published music. We can’t do that; it’s
illegal, and we began thinking how can we solve this problem. The idea of Fifty
for the Future happened naturally out of this.”
I ask Harrington how he had the idea and got the quartet up
and running.
“I was not such a good student; I had trouble learning. I went to the University of Washington – this was in the time of the Vietnam War. I studied poetry, and latin for a little while, and at this point I’d stopped playing violin. I had to work so hard to learn latin that it got me back into the discipline of being able to play violin. I went back into the music school and there were these very wonderful high powered European male teachers, and I couldn’t learn a damn thing from them. They all had one set way of doing things, and I shrank. At age 21, I ran into the woman who became my teacher for the next 30 years, Veda Reynolds.
“Veda became my teacher and her approach to the violin was so beautiful and individual. She studied with Carl Flesch, had all the training she could have, and this made her infinitely flexible, not rigid, as a teacher.
“We had the most magnificent lessons. In our final lesson,
there was a sound I wanted to make and I couldn’t make my body do it and we had
a four or five hour lesson on this note, and the last thing she ever said to me
was “the great thing about music is it can always be better”. That was her
approach; you find a way, you use your imagination, you think about imagery.
“I was about 21 and I thought the US army was going to draft
me and I decided I was not going to be part of that war. I would not; they
could put me in jail, do whatever they want. I found out that the Victoria
Symphony in British Columbia had an opening for the violin, so I auditioned and
got the job. In the meantime I had my draft board appearance and the US army
didn’t want me! But by then I’d signed a contact with the Victoria Symphony so we
went to Victoria for a year and the conductor knew I loved playing quartets so
one day he asked me if I would like to be involved in setting up a series of
chamber music concerts at the Provincial Museum. So I got my first training in
setting up concerts and organising musicians in Victoria.
“We came back in the summer of 1973 and a few weeks later was when I heard Black Angels on the radio, and a week later than that was when Kronos had its first rehearsal. Everyone I talked to in the music business in Seattle said this will never work. In the first two years of Kronos we played in countless different venues; from classrooms to ferry boats to art galleries. At a certain point we realised Kronos was a West Coast group so we moved to San Francisco; we didn’t know anybody, but we decided that was the place we needed to get our energy from.
“That first year I went to a concert of a very prominent American string quartet; they even played Beethoven Op. 127 (the first Late Quartet), and I was invited to the party afterwards. I was talking to one of the members, and I said that I hoped one day that my group will sound like you and have the kind of ensemble you guys have. He put his arm on my shoulder and said “don’t worry kid, you never will”. That pissed me off so much!”
I remarked that they had the last laugh…
“No, it still pisses me off! This is part of music
education, and that was the underlying feeling I was getting from so many of
the authoritarian figures in the world of music at that point. A little pat on
the head, maybe someday you’ll sort of get it right…
“I have never ever wanted Kronos to be part of that conversation and that approach to music, that exclusive club of those who can and the rest of us that can’t. For me music is something we get to share with each other; the sound of the string quartet is one of the magnificent creations of humanity and the impact that it can have is something I want to celebrate. I want more of the world into this sound, that Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert created the foundation for and I think a great way of celebrating them is for this art form to be more and more vibrant. “
Kronos Quartet present Sight Machine at the Barbican on 11th July.
Kronos Quartet & Trevor Paglen: Sight Machine is part of the Barbican’s 2019 season, Life Rewired, which explores what it means to be human when technology is changing everything.
