Sunday 12th April 2026
Blog Page 934

Oxford Women beat Cambridge Men in Triathlon Varsity

Matthew Roller
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Oxford Women beat Cambridge Men in Triathlon Varsity

A Varsity win is always likely to be a special occasion, but for the Women’s Triathlon Blues, their part in the 5-0 trouncing of Cambridge at Emberton Park, Milton Keynes was particularly memorable.

This was not simply because this was one of the first times that all of the Women’s squad had had the opportunity to race together, nor was it the huge winning margin that Oxford managed against the Tabs’ Women’s team.

Rather, the most remarkable feat achieved was that the Oxford Women’s team triumphed against the odds to record better times than the Cambridge Men. This was not only an unprecedented result in Varsity Triathlon, but it is an extremely rare occurrence past the age group level of competition.

Speaking to Cherwell, Lucy Farquhar, the club’s Women’s captain who came second in the Women’s event to team-mate Sophia Saller, said: “It’s pretty much unheard of for this to happen, so it was an amazing thing to have been a part of.

“We knew we had done well, and there weren’t any Cambridge women anywhere near any of us, but we only found out about beating the Cambridge men later in the day.”

Farquhar, a second-year Engineer, was quick to point out the extent to which the sport has grown in Oxford: “OUTriC [Oxford University Triathlon Club] has come a long way in recent years and our result was definitely one of [the club’s] biggest successes.

“But it’s also only half the story: there were ridiculously many girls racing for OUTriC, which…shows that we have strength in numbers, as well as some top-performing girls.”

Indeed, in 2013, only ten women competed in the Varsity Triathlon event compared to some 26 this year: the club’s rapid growth is a credit to those who run it.

However, this was an important result not just for the Triathlon Club, but for women’s sport at Oxford in general.

Great strides have recently been made to try to bridge the gap in funding and importance between Men’s and Women’s Varsity matches. This year’s Varsity football fixtures saw the Men’s and Women’s matches played in a double-header for the first time, similarly to rugby and rowing—it is often the case that the Women’s fixtures play second fiddle, starting at an inconvenient time earlier in the day and playing the role of curtain-raiser ahead of the ‘main event’.

Therefore, results like this one must be highlighted as much as possible.

“All of us are massive advocates for encouraging women [at Oxford] to take part in any sport, not just triathlon,” said Farquhar. “We feel incredibly excited to be playing our part in bringing Women’s sport at Oxford the attention and recognition it deserves.”

Upon speaking to Farquhar and finding out more about the top handful of Blues athletes, it strikes me just how impressive a feat it is to fit their training schedule and their frequent competitions into their packed degree schedules.

“It really is a massive undertaking,” she continued. “We train an insane amount, and I don’t think anyone could disagree with that.”

She tells me that whilst the level of training between her, Saller, and current President Laura Fenwick differs from day to day depending on other commitments, they all manage a minimum of two sessions a day, “but usually more than that is the norm for us.”

With three different disciplines—running, swimming and cycling—to prepare for, there is an exceptional amount of work to do, especially when gym work, injury prevention sessions and physio time are considered.

“We train together as much as possible, and push each other to get great results. We also train a lot with the guys in our club to push ourselves that bit harder.

“The training environment here at Oxford couldn’t be any better, and it’s great to be able to show that academics and high-level sport is a combination that works.”

As in the majority of Oxford sports, Varsity is the pinnacle for triathletes, and the success at Milton Keynes will probably be remembered as the highlight of the 2016/17 season. However, that is not to say that the season is over. Indeed, the British Elite National Championships take place in a couple of weeks’ time, and the competition schedule is relentless: the Bundesliga, European and World Cups, and WTS races—among others—provide a constant cycle of near-future aims.

But, it is notable how much the top three competitors in particular love the sport and everything that goes with it. Farquhar refers often to the fun of training with her teammates and close friends, and when asked what the best thing about competition is, she is unequivocal in her response that it is “how much fun we have together.”

“Despite how seriously we all take our training, enjoyment and a love of the sport is the most important reason to compete.”

It perhaps is the case that many sports have a lot to learn from these athletes—their high level of performance is truly matched with a love for their sport. Things really are going swimmingly for OUTriC.

Woody Harrelson, lost in Oxford

Megan Husain
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Woody Harrelson, lost in Oxford

If last week you caught sight of a Woody Harrelson wandering around Oxford, or attempting to get into the Radcliffe Camera, your eyes were not deceiving you. Woody descended on Oxford and was taken on a tour by members of the Oxford Guild before showing his new film Lost in London at the Andrew Wiles building.

For an A-List celebrity who had spent his day walking around the most stress-filled university in the country, he was incredibly relaxed. A little too relaxed. Woody remained friendly, and joked away throughout the interview, but as he answered our questions, his laid-back, slightly distracted attitude was a little unnerving.

Maybe this calm manner was really due to how awestruck he’d been by our beautiful city after his tour from members of the Oxford Guild: “I saw a lot of beautiful buildings, it’s great to be in these places that have been around for literally hundreds of years, the vibe is strong, it’s fantastic.” Woody’s new film, Lost in London, has this same sense of the excitement on discovering a city.

The plot follows Woody on a “terrible drastic night” out in London: his wife is on the edge of leaving him, he is taken clubbing by an Iranian Prince, he gets into a fight with his best friend (Owen Wilson), knocks over a disabled man and spends the night in jail for breaking the ashtray of a taxi. At times the film may seem slightly self-indulgent, in simply tracking Woody’s own life, but he assured us of the more meaningful element behind it.

“There’s something of merit to the story which is really a guy who has it all but doesn’t realise until he’s threatened with losing it all, and then he’s give a shot at redemption… at least thematically it is like It’s A Wonderful Life—that’s the kind of message that’s in it”

Yet, what has really grabbed media attention is the added layer of interest that Lost in London is the first live-streamed film to be created. It was shot in real time with one camera for 99 minutes and creates this sensation of following Woody around on his night out.

Surprisingly the shooting itself remains extremely slick, and Woody emphasises how it brings together the immediacy of the stage with the medium of the camera lens: “I was always a big fan of theatre, and then film, and I thought it was a good way to merge the two…This was definitely the most challenging thing I’ve ever done. It was like theatre but there were a lot of elements I didn’t have control of.”

The start of the film opens with a short explanation of the process of making the work, and it was clearly a difficult task which created numerous technical difficulties. Woody jokes, “boy, I regretted having that idea sometimes, but now I’m happy”. The audience was clearly happy too judging by their laughs throughout the screening.

Laughs is what Woody is famous for due to his acting in comedies such as Kingpin and Zombie Land. Lost in London too, is also extremely funny as we follow Woody’s mishaps and run ins. He explains how comedy like this, is still the most important thing for him: “That’s my favourite thing, making people laugh…I have other movies that I want to direct and they’re all comedies.”

During Lost in London he jokingly berates that fact that he keeps on getting roped into acting in dramas or other genres, and in the interview he reiterated his frustration with acting in more serious productions:

“The last play I did was on the West End and it was brutal. It was Tennessee Williams and it was heavy and if you did everything right as an audience member you’d feel like you’d be punched in the gut, and that’s if you do everything right… Why do you want that? I’d rather people laugh for 80/90 minutes and then let’s hit the pub!” Woody’s carefree jovial attitude is apparent as he jokes around with us, mocking our English accents and batting off more pressing questions about politics with a grin.

When pressed further on what makes something funny, and how he views comedy in general, Woody continued explaining that for him “comedy is born out of tragedy, or some kind of conflict or difficulty or dramatic thing. What is it they say, comedy is tragedy gone wrong, and tragedy is comedy gone wrong, something like that…”

Perhaps? We’ll let the English students among us decide that. Either way, it is clear that comedies is where he wants to remain for the foreseeable future.  He talked to us about his new screen play The Misfortunes of Mr Fitz, which sounds extremely exciting: “It takes place in Ireland…all in the space of 24 hours. I like slapstick, really kind of believable slapstick.” We’ll certainly look forward to seeing how another UK based film turns out.

However if you’re worried that Woody is swapping the screen for a notepad then fear not. As he assures us: “I’m going to keep acting, you know, until they put me out. I’ll keep doing it. I love it.”

Despite his humorous side however, Woody does have more serious attitude to certain important things. He has been a life-long environmental activist, speaking out about global warming, drug legalisation and veganism. We asked what drives his work – “I guess I’m driven by the fact that I can see we’re a bunch of lemmings heading off a cliff…. I remember when I first understood global warming it was in 1987, and I was just like this is a major problem. Back then they said we have 15 years to deal with this, or there’s no turning back from the cataclysm…we’re still not dealing with it.”

He takes a staunch line against corporations who are not doing anything to help the environment and talks with real feeling on the subject: “Some people are doing something, but the people who need to change, for example the fossil fuel industry, they don’t want to change. Maybe they have a department that are making solar panels or something, but they’re doing everything they can to get every last drop…these giant industries aren’t really thinking about anything but profit.”

When asked about his attitude towards drugs, we are again met with a very different kind of Woody who takes the question far more seriously. He has previously spoken very publicly in favour of recreational marjuna usage and continues to support the case for freedom of action: “I think that in a free country you should be free to do what you want, unless you’re hurting someone else or hurting their property.  So that’s not just drugs, it’s drugs, gambling anything – I call them victimless crimes or consensual crimes.”

Recently however, he announced that he had given up smoking pot. When we pressed him about this he was keen to explain that this is because he was abusing the substance, not because he is against weed: “I haven’t changed my attitude towards ‘erb’ I think it’s a great thing. My problem was that I was abusing it I ju st think the abuse of its probably not smart …I was literally in a perpetual cloud, not when I worked, I didn’t smoke when I worked, but as soon as I wrapped I smoked, and if I wasn’t working I would smoke, so I was either in a San Francisco fog, or a London fog…I don’t think that was really serving me, and I certainly couldn’t have done this movie if I had been foggy, I had to be really clear.” It is clear though that for Woody, it remains a ‘sacred plant’ – he jokily mentions how much he misses it.

Finally, as his assistant began to make motions for him to go and see his film, we quickly asked him about his experience of being a student at Hanover College and he provides advice that I’m sure many finalists would love to hear:  “I feel like if I went back and did college over again, first of all I wouldn’t stress so hard about my grades because you get out of college and nobody’s cares what your grades were when you go for a job… It’s like the merit of who you are in the room.”

Woody certainly does have a presence in the room, and maybe this is because he is such a daring figure, constantly getting involved in new things: “I do like to scare myself at least once a day, doing something a little bit scary, climb up on something, jump off something.” This feels somewhat to believe when staring at a man so subdued he was 15 minutes late to his own screening. But, his wild side and element of craziness (or idiocy maybe) is unmistakable. His sage wisdom and advice then, was a plea for us stressed students to be as light-hearted and happy-go-lucky as he is.

Cliché of the week: “Without troubling the scorers”

Matthew Roller
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Cliché of the week: “Without troubling the scorers”

After his duck at Headingley against Sri Lanka last summer, Joe Root was, as has been commonplace for years within the game, said to have departed “without troubling the scorers”.

But this mindless phrase shows a complete lack of appreciation for those who tirelessly partake in an oft-forgotten role.

In fact, an early dismissal is the stuff of nightmares for a scorer. Unless the majority of the cricketing world has managed to avoid playing at a low-level, they should know the pain of being handed a scorebook after being shunted down the bottom of the batting order.

A string of single-figure scores has left you with no choice but to fill in every run, every extra, every dot ball and, most importantly, every wicket, in a book that looks about as nonsensical as Sanskrit to the average person.

Just as you start to get the hang of it—filling in two different boxes and crossing out a number when even a single run is scored—a wicket falls.

Panic ensues. The person on your team who knows what he is doing looks over your shoulder as you struggle manically to work out the not out batsman’s total, the partnership, and a whole host of seemingly useless statistics. You are barely halfway through the detail when the new man walks to the crease.

Is it really the case then, that another wicket now will not trouble the scorers?

Indeed, a first-ball duck is about as worrying a phenomenon as is imaginable for the pencil-bearing ‘volunteers’. It is time their efforts are recognised, and we consign this phrase to history.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the slime of Turkey

Michael Shao
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Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the slime of Turkey

Undoubtedly a cruel authoritarian with a badly trimmed moustache, a forehead wider than all of Anatolia, and a vague resemblance to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, Erdoğan, the President of Turkey, is slowly dragging his own country through the dirt. That is, more acutely worded, Erdoğan, a man who will never be the man his mother is, whose status as a lazy canine animal is located somewhere in the middle of his name, is turning the wonderful nation of Turkey inside out, and crushing the ones who are trying to stop him.

Given that I am no Jan Böhmermann, a German satirist whose mocking of the Turkish President faced direct criticism from Chancellor Merkel at the behest of Erdoğan, I will move onto discussing exactly why Erdoğan is the slime of Turkey. Last week, a video shot in front of the Turkish American embassy showed US police struggling to protect protesters, and two Turkish bodyguards being briefly detained after an incident in which they violently assaulted protesters. A few days later, a much more revealing video showed clearly Erdoğan mouthing orders for the assault to one of his henchman out of his car, who then passed it down the line and engaged in the “quelling” seconds later.

That incident wasn’t the first during an Erdoğan visit. Last year a fight erupted outside a nuclear security summit in Washington attended by Erdoğan. Since then, American senators have threatened lawsuits if the bodyguards responsible were not properly prosecuted. In a nation where as many as 800 families of the deceased from September 11 pursued lawsuits against the entire nation of Saudi Arabia, such a threat should not be taken lightly. In addition, Lindsey Graham threatened “potential implications for assistance to Turkey” if the bodyguards were not properly prosecuted. In the event, the two detained were set free and returned to Turkey. The behaviour of Erdoğan’s thugs directly, and quite obviously, breach American laws protecting free speech and the right to assemble.

Instead of delivering a rationally formed apology, the Turkish response has been, instead, to employ a strange gaslighting policy, similar to a physically abusive husband accused of domestic violence. Instead of apologising for what even an infant could make out to be an ordered attack, Turkey summoned the American ambassador on Monday to protest what it called “aggressive and unprofessional actions” by American security personnel. Turkey didn’t specify the actions by US security officials it deemed inappropriate. The statement was interpreted as a much needed reaction to the public and national reaction of the videos spreading online, but was horribly done and thus merely resulted in another wave of criticism.

Turkey’s reputation is being destroyed slowly but surely by Erdoğan. The country has long been considered by some to be part of Europe, given its geographical location in Eastern Thrace and continental Europe. Formerly known under the auspices of the Ottoman Empire as ‘The Sick Man of Europe’, it was a man of Europe none the less. Turkey was one of the fi rst members of the Council of Europe in 1949, and its current position as a member of NATO has marked it as one of the few nations that was at once part of the western and middle eastern international community. Turkey’s ability to avoid being partitioned among western powers and to form its own sovereign nation on its own terms, unlike the rest of the Middle East, was not only admirable, but marked a future of social and economic progression. Guided by the policies of Ataturk, Turkey joined the international community gracefully. Now, while the attacks on protesters by Erdogan’s thugs might seem like an isolated incident, the perception of Turkey in the international community is shifting, to a country that is determined to shut down and eliminate freedom of speech within its borders. Leaders like Erdogan panhandle the idea of an obtusely strong executive, exclaiming admiration for absolutist dictators of the past.

Remember this is a man who, at a televised press conference, stated that he believed a presidential system was possible in a unitary state, and cited Nazi Germany as an empirical example for his proposition. And where are we now? Last month the disastrous constitutional referendum, which faced electoral fraud of astounding proportions, cemented Erdoğan’s iron grip and established the presidential system that he was daydreaming about in the press conference. I often urge people to avoid sliding into marking everything they disagree with as “literally Hitler.” But one should often how far the comparison is required to go until a logical equivalence is actually reached, as Erdoğan continues to actively deny the Armenian genocide, censor and jail journalists en masse, and violently crack down on opposition movements.

Unfortunately, Erdoğan’s influence in Turkey has its very real effects on the West, not just by nature of geographical proximity, but also by a disturbing cultural effect. There is an increasing fetishisation of autocrats like Erdoğan and Putin in the West, which is reflected in a growing support for power consolidating bureaucrats masquerading as benevolent dictators. In Hilary Term, the former 13-year editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, delivered a speech on his new book, The Fate of the West, in which he discussed a number of issues facing western democracies, and democracy in general. He mused on the toxic combination of self-proclaimed admiration for leaders like Putin by western politicians, and the simultaneous McCarthyist fear mongering of the Russian state. When Erdoğan was questioned about the previous comment he made in admiration of the Third Reich, he stated that he was simply admiring the strong executive of the Nazi regime. So, in this country, when the words ‘strong and stable’ seem to have such great effect, we should only naturally be disturbed.

Erdoğan is coming very close to single-handedly destroying the legacy of Ataturk and the status of a secular and democratic Turkey. Sozcu, a Turkish opposition newspaper and staunch supporter of the legacy of Ataturk, published their most recent issue completely blank, citing a mixture of protest and a genuine inability to publish more material following the recent arrest. Various websites continue to face censorship, while according to the highly respected organization Reporters Without Borders it is not China, but Turkey, that is “the world’s biggest prison for journalists”. To this degree, I stand firmly for the freedom of expression of Turkish journalists, and violently condemn the actions of the slime of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Facebook’s fight against fake news is only a starting point

Jack Spence
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Facebook’s fight against fake news is only a starting point

Fake news: the phenomenon promoted by Alex Jones and his merry band of miscreants which may well have tipped the 2016 presidential election in favour of Donald Trump, which led to a South-Carolinian man firing an automatic weapon into a pizza shop, and which may well have influenced the EU referendum.

Without a doubt, it is having a real-world impact, and tackling it needs to be made a priority for anyone who values truth and honesty in democracy. Finally, social media companies such as Facebook are starting to wake up to their obligation, and unique ability as the new broadcasting mediums, to do something about it, and they should be applauded for doing so.

Facebook and other social media companies are in an almost unique position in being able to control the flow of (mis)information itself. Fact checking and refuting sensationalist claims after they have already been circulated does not normally achieve a great deal. Once people have read the same thing a number of times, and agreed with it, confirmation bias makes it extremely difficult to actually change the reader’s beliefs through rational discourse. A more effective solution to the problem posed by fake news would be one which, as Facebook has proposed, identifies websites and authors who are known for publishing false or misleading content and penalises them in their algorithms. Instead of being rewarded with publicity, clicks and advertising revenue for their ‘share’ inducing content, the sites will be penalised by being less likely to show up in user’s feeds.

Snopes and other fact-checking organisations are not in a position to do this; they cannot help control what ‘news’ people consume, but can only try their best to call out the lies and publicise the truth. To bring in a medical analogy—the vaccine, that social media companies such as Facebook are in a position to provide, is far more effective than any medicine that could be provided by fact-checkers.

A concern often put forward about the suppression of fake news is the potential detrimental effect that such a scheme could have on free speech. What one man calls fake news another might accept as gospel, and to deny what another believes and to suppress the promulgation of their beliefs sends social media down a slippery slope that could result in the other side of debates being oppressed.

This, some argue, is exacerbated by the fact that those setting the policies and developing the algorithms to determine what counts as ‘fake news’ are Facebook themselves. And without the transparency and accountability that the democratic process provides, there is a very real danger of an ideological skew that could easily go unchecked.

But this argument can be met by providing safeguards in the processes by which fake news is tackled, or even by erring on the side of caution when deciding whether a particular story or publication is untrue and can’t stand to cancel out the prevailing public interest in ensuring that the integrity of truth is maintained.

There are other legitimate concerns that can be posited about social media companies trying to stem the flow of misinformation in general. As the frameworks within such schemes will likely be established in house, there is a risk of a lack of consistency in the approach taken by websites and the possibility that some content will be permissible on one platform but not another.

This concern is perfectly valid and what’s ultimately needed is surely a legislative solution, preferably a transnational one, that establishes an independent body to ensure that falsehoods (not mere different opinions) are identified and prevented from running rampant. However, while this is an aspirational target that should be aimed for, a dogmatic pursuit of this final goal should not be the enemy of making first steps, such as those Facebook are taking, which could have a real-world impact.

Facebook should therefore be praised, for accepting the moral obligations it has from being at the centre of content distribution on the internet and taking steps to ensure that the content shared on its site is accurate.

Christ Church win record 33rd Summer VIIIs headship

Matthew Roller
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Christ Church win record 33rd Summer VIIIs headship

Christ Church M1 finished Head of the Year at this year’s Summer VIIIs, after holding off the challenge of a Blues-heavy Keble boat.

In the Women’s competition, Wadham won the headship for a fourth year in a row, having rowed over on each of the four days of the competition.

The Men’s headship was a hotly-contested position this year: last year’s winners, Oriel, started VIIIs as third-favourites behind Christ Church and Keble, who were both boosted by the presence of several Boat Race winners.

Indeed, Keble boasted four Boat Race winners in their boat, with Matthew O’Leary, Jamie Cook, Joshua Bugajski, and Olivier Siegalaar all holding off Cambridge’s challenge on 2 April.

There was controversy in the build-up to the race as well. Not only were Keble accused of being ‘Blues buyers’ by Oriel College Boat Club’s Facebook page but the JCR voted against an emergency motion to allow them to burn a boat in the event of a headship.

However, as Keble closed in on Christ Church on a balmy evening on the Isis, the klaxon sounded due to an infringement, and their headship was confirmed.

In the Women’s race, Wadham held off the challenge of a strong Pembroke crew to secure a fourth consecutive headship.

Whilst there was a point in front of the boathouses when Pembroke looked to be closing on Wadham, the Parks Road College were always in control, and rowed over for a fourth consecutive day.

Several colleges also managed to secure the honour of Blades, bestowed on a crew which manages to bump on all four days of the competition.

Balliol M1, St Catz’s M1, Jesus M1, Queen’s M1, St John’s M1, St Catz’s M2, Green Templeton M1, St Hilda’s M1, St Peter’s M2, St Benet’s M1, Queen’s M2, and Keble M3 all won Blades in the Men’s competition.

In the Women’s racing, fewer crews managed to bump on all four days, with only Worcester W3 and St. Edmund Hall W1 managing to secure Blades.

Several thousand spectators made the trip down to Christ Church Meadow on Saturday, with the vast majority of Colleges opening bars or barbecues to keep fans involved.

And those who went down early in the day were rewarded for their persistence: the overcast skies gave way to a resplendent sun, as temperatures soared towards the mid-twenties.

To find out individual boats’ results, head to the OxBump website.

A tempestuous tribute to a perplexing artist

Anoushka Kavanagh
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A tempestuous tribute to a perplexing artist

A spiny woman lies splayed, horrifically contorted, with her elongated neck severed
just below her gasping head, in what has become the most conspicuous piece of Giacometti’s haunting new retrospective at the Tate Modern. This surreal insectile being, writhing in pain, that is ‘Woman with her Throat Cut’ (1932) is a far cry from the near impalpable spindly spectres, that are more associable with the French artist. Yet it has been singled out for
a reason: it sets the tone for the rest of this show that accentuates a more perplexing side of the master. Full of torment and turmoil, the Tate’s retrospective presents an oeuvre permeated by the artist’s own inner conflict and frustration, not just the embodiment of European inter-and post-war anguish that is most often read into the Frenchman’s work.

Throughout his life, Giacometti was obsessed with the human form, something demonstrated
by the army of heads that greet us in the first room. Whether it be in oil, plaster, ink, or bronze, the artist returned again and again to the figure, chipping away at his portraits in frustrated attempt to find a likeness. These ten rooms portray this with surprising proficiency, doing well to dispel the often unavoidable repetitiveness of his work.

Yet the figure was something that also evaded Giacometti constantly. It provided the source of much dissatisfaction with his work throughout his life, and was responsible for many an ‘artistic crisis’. For instance, in 1959 Giacometti became disheartened by the ‘lack of likeness’ in his oil portraits of the Japanese philosopher Yanaihara, then sitting for him. These grey, smudgy paintings on display here reflect this grievance in their frantic, multi-layered brushstrokes. In ‘Bust of Yanaihara’ (1959), the philosopher’s head is crowned by a smudged white halo—these rough marks appear to prove repeated reworkings of the facial features, and along with the multitude of scratches that define his face, highlight Giacometti’s frustration.

Similar frenzied marks pervade most of the artist’s portraiture hanging here, especially pictures of his loved ones. ‘Diego Seated’ (1948) reads like a compilation of vertical brushstrokes, blurring his brother into unrecognition, whilst multiple paintings of the artist’s wife, Annette, show her shrouded in darkness with unruly lines absorbing her being. Giacometti did not conceal the challenge his creations posed and often confessed to difficulties: “Diego has posed ten thousand times for me. When he poses I don’t recognise him…When my wife poses for me, after three days she doesn’t look like herself”.

It is not just from these paintings that dissatisfaction emanates. Up close and personal, the infamous stick people show Giacometti’s inner conflict over artistic expression to be a recurring theme. Tate’s acquirement of less familiar plaster and clay figures—displayed alongside their bronze counterparts—aids this impression, for it becomes evident that the production process itself facilitated constant readjustment.

One of the show’s highlights is ‘Women of Venice’ (1956), eight plaster sculptures of the
female form produced for the Venice Biennale of that year. Each woman was moulded by hand—so that they are all slightly different—in an attempt to highlight variation of the female figure (perhaps a seminal moment in the representation of women). Giacometti chipped away at the plaster once it had semi-dried, reworking the forms with sharp knives, before reapplying liquid plaster to achieve a product with which he was eventually satisfied.

Alongside this creative conflict, some sentiment of post-war anguish undeniably also permeates Giacometti’s slender, distorted figures. A sense of the ‘existential despair’ adrift on the continent radiates from the starved figures, scarred faces, and distorted limbs. His brushstrokes are emotionally charged, and there is striking violence in the hacking away of the bodies outlined above. Works like ‘The Glade’ (1950) invoke both aggression and isolation in composition alone—lean, cutting figurines pierce from their bronze base like arrowheads at various distinct intervals. Indeed, his first show of the harrowing bronze casts at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1948, incorporated an essay by Jean-Paul Sartre—‘The Search for Absolute Truth’—into the catalogue that established this anxious, despairing tone.

Such torment makes itself clear again in earlier inter-war surrealistic pieces, which are adorned with sharp spikes, or formed from disconcerting shapes. Violent eroticism surfaces here in ‘Man and Woman’ (1928-9), whereby a spike painfully pierces a concave dish within the abstract assortment of cast bronze shapes. Whilst ‘Limping Figure’ (1931-2) evokes a distorted being, the wooden sculpture penetrated by three legs awkwardly
mismatched in length. A continual line of turmoil is observable in Giacometti’s oeuvre
throughout this retrospective then. This theme is not surprising when noted that he witnessed the excruciating death of his travel companion Pieter van Meurs in 1921, which haunted the artist since. We are left with the suspicion that he was deeply conflicted both emotionally and artistically.

There is more depth to Giacometti than these haunting human shapes, as Tate’s retrospective masterfully exposes. Throughout the course of ten rooms, we are captivated by more benign cubist creations and abstractions of African art, enthralled by his own fascination with Egyptian mythology, and treated to glimpses into the artist’s mind in an extraordinary selection of sketches and notebooks—before arriving at the more macabre output.

Simultaneously we are alerted to his wider philosophical musings via portraits and connections with figures like Yanaihara, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and Jean-Paul Sartre. These links heighten the sense of existentialism and frustration radiating from the tormented art, and bind together beautifully this tempestuous tribute to a highly complex man.

“Careless” press pigeonholes artists that deserve far more

Anoushka Kavanagh
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“Careless” press pigeonholes artists that deserve far more

Earlier this month the 2017 Turner Prize shortlist was released. Boasting two black artists, one of Palestinian descent, and one German, three women, two painters, and two over 50s (for the first time ever) amidst the four of them, the nominees show diversity in both their ethnicities and works. Personally, I was more than excited by this line-up because compared to the mundane bullshit that has been selected in recent years—over conceptualised to the point of incomprehension, and lacking in any degree of skill, sensibility, or aesthetic value—these four artists’ works are refreshingly different: full of purpose and genius.

In truth, the shortlisted shows don’t offer much innovation in medium or practise, but that
is forgivable as they hammer home their messages clearly and cohesively. Though very different in their presentations, the artists all launch dialogues on cultural and societal perceptions.

Lubaina Himid MBE—born in Zanzibar—explores black cultural visibility and history in her pieces. ‘Naming your money’ (2004), which is on display at the Spike Island show for which
she has been nominated, presents 100 life-sized cut-outs of 17th-century slaves. Accompanied by a soundtrack that discusses the transformations in the figures’ lives when entering Europe—such as name and occupation changes—the installation emphasizes the loss of black cultural visibility in British society and reasserts African identity.

Hurvin Anderson’s paintings similarly expose conversations between Afro-Caribbean and
British cultures in his barbershop displays and Caribbean landscapes. In ‘Is it ok to be black?’,
displayed in his shortlisted exhibition at New Art Exchange, Nottingham, Anderson highlights cultural vitality through portraits of Martin Luther King, Malcom X, and other famous black figures hanging on the blue barbershop wall.

In Andrea Büttner’s works, societal issues take prominence, as beggars’ grasping hands emerge from faceless hoods in vibrant woodcuts, questioning the way in which we judge those we don’t know. The last artist on the list, Rosalind Nashashibi, addresses external perceptions of other cultures in her cinematic work. The highlight of her contribution to documenta 14 in Athens is her film ‘Electrical Gaza’. In this half-documentary,
half-animation, Nashashibi invokes her Palestinian roots to depict Gaza from a native viewpoint, at odds with that which is portrayed so often in the media here.

Collectively, these shows reveal a shift towards a lesser glamourized, more eloquent side of the contemporary art world. Perhaps the representation of more substantiated, globalised work is, in itself, enough of a development—finally giving space to under-represented sectors and ideas. That would be so if these works were welcomed sincerely. But as commentary on the nominations has surfaced, it seems that these artists may not get the recognition for their talents and discourses that they deserve.

The Guardian’s crude headline read, ‘A cosmopolitan rebuff to Brexit provincialism’ whilst a
rather aggressive freize post by Paul Clinton—’The Turner Prize and Identity Politics’—likewise
appeared to self-righteously attack, perhaps unintentionally, Eurosceptics: “Of course, it’s
difficult not to hear echoes of Brexit Britain and protectionism in these responses.” Undeniably diversity must be defended, but the problem here is that if petty Brexit hysteria is to dominate commentary, the issues these works truly seek to promote—and indeed the value of the physical art itself—will be wholly overshadowed. Failing to engage in the debate about BME artists’ place in the art world at the expense of attacking Brexiteers will fail to make visible the invisible. This is illustrated by the lengthy list of comments under the Guardian article that argue ferociously about Brexit but mostly fail to touch upon the art itself.

The ineffectuality of this analysis is illustrated by the example of Lubaina Himid, who made a name for herself in the 1980s as a leading figure of the Black British Art Movement. Much of the work occupying her listed shows was produced in the decades prior to her nomination and tackles representation of black artists on the contemporary art scene. As she explained in an interview, black artists initially “weren’t [visible] on the television or the newspapers or media at all”. It seems that the press are still failing to make her purpose any more visible—instead of rambling on about Brexit, commentary must positively address the celebration of black culture and heritage that is concurrent in Himid’s works.

The Turner Prize nomination and recent multitude of acclaimed shows have started to grant
Himid the attention she deserves. But appropriating them in Brexit battles is therefore inappropriate. In an interview for Apollo Magazine, Himid recognised that resentment hindered the proper narration of histories. Though she was talking about the struggle of the 80s, this is a resonant message today. For the resentment surfacing again around Brexit debates appears to detract from the detailing of black cultural history.

For instance, a recurring theme is the repurposing of European masters to indicate the institutional void. In ‘Freedom and Change’ (1984), Himid transformed the two women in
Picasso’s ‘Two Women Running on the Beach’ (1922) into black women, their hounds dashing
before them, warding off racism. Her 1986 work ‘A Fashionable Marriage’ likewise repurposed
Hogarth’s ‘The Countess’ Morning Levee’ to offer commentary upon the position of black artists in cultural circles. The castrato became the art critic—dithering over whether to support the minorities himself, or wait until the art world gave permission—whilst the slave became a black woman artist. Symbolic of her contemporary place, the slave suggested that black artists then were still “signifiers of white corporate wealth, expensive to keep, but oh so decorative and useful for dealing with awkward situations”. They worked for nothing, without recognition. Her work is so much more than ‘rebuffing provincialism’ therefore—it’s about finding a place for black artists in the art world.

I’m not saying that these works don’t deserve the attention—far from it. But it is careless of
the media and art institutions to present the works in this light. Last time I checked, neither
Zanzibar, Jamaica, nor Palestine were in the EU. By appropriating the art in this debate critics are not only wrong, but are unnecessarily alienating the works via negative and exclusive language. Comments need to be phrased more positively to celebrate and engage with the diversity of the work—after all, the Turner Prize is intended to encourage wider interest in contemporary art, not raise further barriers.

“A woman sitting alone, doing nothing”

Tilly Nevin
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“A woman sitting alone, doing nothing”

Mary Ruefle’s prose poem ‘Self-Criticism’ in her new collection, My Private Property,
begins “In a typical poem by myself, a woman is sitting alone doing absolutely nothing. She notices a fly crawling across the table and strikes up a conversation with him”. Ruefle’s prose poems (for want of a better term) on first glance might appear to be about a woman sitting alone, doing absolutely nothing. These poems begin when the speaker strikes up a conversation with a fly, or speaks through the mouth of a yellow finch watching a woman through her windowpane, or sees crumbs on a countertop or notes the strangeness that is a plastic Christmas Tree. Many of the pieces in the collection are about a woman ‘sitting alone’. But from such simplicity, from the detail of everyday life comes a striking beauty: the woman who sits alone, alienated and aging, is not really just doing nothing but creating something beautiful and startling from the ordinary.

In an interview with The Paris Review, Ruefle says “the unspooling of the body leads to rather grand contemplations at the same time it leads to the quotidian, the daily aches. It is the most beautiful and heartbreaking of paradoxes. It’s life”. Noticing a Christmas tree becomes an analysis of contemporary society and its strange arbitrary social rituals, about poverty and time. Remembering a moment when as a teenager she sprinkled salt and pepper
in a friends milkshake, an older woman is caught between two versions of her self—
similarly, in ‘Personalia’ the speakers says, “Now I am an old woman who wants to die and lodged inside me is a young woman dying to live: I work on her’”, a line I can’t seem to shake.

A shrunken head is both a literal object and yet also metonymic of both colonialism and
of our afterlife in memory: ‘Don’t we carry photographs of the heads of those we love who have died?’ The collection asks if we can stay close to loved ones as well as to the past selves we once knew—does a woman remain both the young girl she was, skipping school, and yet also go through the menopause?

The epigraph to the collection, taken from Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget reads “what an extended body in which to die” and most of the pieces in My Private Property in some way or another are about aging, the effect of time on the body. When you age, Ruefle
points out, you notice how a Christmas tree might not really be a Christmas tree at all but
a symbol for the cycles of life. Still, Ruefle says “my allegiance to poetry, to art, is greater than my allegiance to knowledge and intelligence”: age doesn’t give a simplistic, quantitative
knowledge of how time works, but a greater allegiance to art, which provides a space for the wonder, the humour, and the grace one can achieve with age.

My Private Property is stunning—each work in the slim volume holds more in its simple, almost childlike tones than Victorian novels might. Some call Ruefle “the best prose writer
in America”. It is impossible to decide whether Ruefle’s new collection counts as prose or
prose poetry—it is impossible to label such works. The quasi-refrain, describing different
types of sadness in different colours (“Blue sadness is sweetness cut into strips with scissors”) to some evidences the poetic quality of the texts. Although Ruefle herself calls some of the pieces prose works, the author also notes that in the refrain “if you substitute the word happiness for the word sadness, nothing changes”.

Whether you call My Private Property prose or poetry it doesn’t matter, “nothing changes”. Ruefle would probably note the strange insistence with which we do classify literary texts. In doing so we risk missing the joy, the brilliance glimmering in these works.

Class and conflict in the works of Leonora Carrington

Priya Khaira-Hanks
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Class and conflict in the works of Leonora Carrington

2017 marks the 100th anniversary of Leonora Carrington’s birth, and her native country is keen to reclaim this celebrated English Surrealist. In recent years, a retrospective at the Tate Liverpool, a new biography, written by her cousin Joanna Moorhead, countless celebratory Guardian articles, a beautiful new edition of her short stories published by Silver Press, and even a Google Doodle, have all brought Carrington back to Britain, drawing her genius back to the motherland with reverence and adoration. Yet her life and paintings are testament to an opposite and opposing journey, that of an artist that spent her life trying to get as far away as possible from the England of her youth.

A photograph from 1934, showing Carrington being presented at the court of King George V, could be a still from a Tim Burton film for its gothic and unsettling aesthetic—yet for the then 17-year-old, this was not a spooky set, but a real-life nightmare. She stands next to her mother, silk train puddling round her feet, and stares directly at the camera, a look that sends a desperate plea for help across the decades. The image marks the alternate life that Carrington could have lived, her pale gown and porcelain skin dissolving into the matching rococo wallpaper, another talent subsumed by the stifling convention of the English class system.

This was a woman that, even at an early age, found the bounds of upper-class English society excruciatingly restrictive. After being expelled from two boarding schools and a French finishing school, she followed the path of many a rebellious teenager, by defying her father and enrolling in art school. She was forcibly cutting her ties with the British elite, yet, in doing so, she also waved goodbye to financial support and security: the price of freedom was being cast adrift.

This difficult choice, and the sacrifice required to gain true autonomy, are expressed in ‘Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse)’ (1937-8), the first painting where we see Carrington’s distinctive style come into its own. She paints herself as the young English rose at leisure, trussed up in her riding habit and perched on her boudoir chair. Her hand, however, stretches to the lactating female hyena at her feet: though the world she inhabits might be ordered and superficially beautiful, she is drawn to the rawer, uglier, and wilder side of femininity. Through sickly yellow damask curtains, painted so realistically we can almost smell their musty mothball aroma, the white rocking horse becomes a real creature outside of the gentility of the home. It’s a Pinocchio narrative turned on its head: in the fairytale it is obedience that turns a wooden toy into a real being, whilst in Carrington’s life, it was breaking the rules that allowed her to truly come alive. She disobeyed her father in pursuing painting, which led to her meeting—and falling in love with—Max Ernst, and eventually, by way of France and Spain, arriving in Mexico, the country she would adopt as her true homeland.

Nevertheless, even in the left-wing, creatively fertile Mexico of the 1940s (Frida Kahlo was an acquaintance), Carrington still mined the aristocracy for its rich comic and satirical potential. In ‘Bird Pong’ (1949), two upper-class women are engaged in a game of ping pong whilst their children play in the corner, the manicured gardens of a stately home glimpsed through the window. Yet they accessorize haute-couture millinery with feathered bodies and bare feet, and instead of balls they rally with tiny birds that seem to burst into feather as you watch. Their cruelty in hitting the minute creatures with bats is complicated by the fact that they themselves seem avian. These successive, perpetuating layers of cruelty and captivity perhaps evoke the way in which aristocratic women imposed ownership on others, yet were simultaneously owned themselves by husbands and fathers.

Some may argue this is trying too hard to read Carrington’s autobiography in her work, and in fact her paintings were meant to live in the dynamism of incomprehensibility and irreverence, forever evading narrative. Yet part of the unique joy of her art is the way it can function as a stimulus for flights of fancy: each image, with its vivid characters and arresting landscapes, could spawn a film franchise, complete with new fantasy species, fan theories and a sprawling, encyclopaedic IMDB page.

Take ‘Hunt Breakfast’ (1956), another painting born from the bourgeois rituals of Carrington’s youth. In a forest rich with tiny, luminescent creatures, a prim and proper Edwardian gentlemen stands beside a phantasmagorical, triangle-headed figure, as they sit down to a post-hunt meal. A mixed-race marriage, a questionable dowry, the leisurely meal of the rich about to be disturbed by the teeming forest they have tried to exploit—stories abound, various and simultaneously possible. Susan Aberth, writer of the first book in English to survey Carrington’s life and oeuvre, noted that in her art “meanings have always been permeable and shifting, encouraging multiple levels of perception”. Yet in this nebulous space, one thing is certain: Carrington’s England never truly left her, and therefore, it could never escape her eviscerating, uncompromising artistic gaze.

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