Dear Jude,
Thank you for the tip on your blog about “Roadkill”. It is terrific.
I am afraid I can’t agree with you about museums and, especially, about art galleries. The only problem I have with them is that my back and my legs ache after about an hour. That is why I make a bee line for those video installations where you can sit down on an artificial tree trunk or rock. The day is coming when I’ll invest in a wheelchair solely for museum and gallery use. The smaller the museum, the better the experience. The best ones are those that can be viewed in an hour, before paralysis begins to set in. There are wonderful museums in Carlow Town and in Tralee, and of course the Blasket Centre in Dunquin is a joy.
Art Galleries? Ah, Jude, you are missing the point. They are erotic. It is about sex. I started visiting them as a teenager in search of naked flesh. There wasn’t much of it about anywhere else. Of course there was a great disparity between how the sexes were displayed. There seemed to be no problem about displaying male genitalia. But always there was something obscuring the female form, a lock of hair, a fig leaf, for God’s sake, even a lamp (and you’d wonder why anyone would be holding a fig leaf or a lamp in that precise location). I remember when I was in primary school, I visited the National Gallery of Art in Merrion Square with a school friend and his younger brother and sister. We were standing in front of a sculpture, it may have been that Canova Amorino. My friend’s little sister said “Oh look, I can see his dickie bird!”. The two boys blushed crimson, and I knew, even then, that a family secret had been revealed. That was how they referred to it! I had been taught to refer to it as my little man, but I would have been mortified if any of my school friends had been aware of that. Universally, outside the home, we referred to them as our mickeys. Inside the home, it was a different matter. My cousins down the road referred to theirs as their barneys. Years later my mother reported to me that when my sister had been bathing her children, her daughter had asked why her brother had a little man and she didn’t. Both my mother and my sister thought that this was hilarious. I thought it was a reasonable question, but I was also stunned. Jesus, if my sister knew this term, it can only have been in reference to me. And if this had been passed on to the next generation, how many more generations had it been passed down? I though of my paternal great-grandfather in the army in India, and my maternal grandfather in the Boer War, both fearing what the insurgents might have planned for their little men. And I thought of that poem of William Allingham that we learned at school:
Up the airy mountain
Down the rushy glen
We daren’t to go a-hunting
For fear of little men.
The National Gallery was full of little men. You couldn’t escape from them. The female equivalent was completely absent. Again, I believe that this was universal. It explains why Ruskin, already a famous aesthete, was shocked into impotency on his wedding night by the sight of his wife’s naked form (there is a good portrayal of this in “Effie Gray” on Netflix, with all the usual suspects: Emma Thompson, Robbie Coltrane, Derek Jacobi etc. Well worth a watch).
Anyway, I digress. I spent some of the best moment of my life in art galleries – in London, Paris, Brussels, Florence, Rome (especially Rome!), Washington. LA, Chicago, Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto – wherever we had an archival meeting I would try to escape from the interminable discussions about the concept of record-ness and go in search of naked flesh. Yes, I am a failed archivist, and scarcely more successful as a flesh fetishist, but at least I tried. Along the way my senses were honed to other aesthetic values. Even as your pupil, I remember going into the Municipal Gallery on Parnell Square on Sunday mornings in the 1960s and soaking up the lectures about the Impressionists.
Jude, visit your local art gallery. You never know what might happen!
Best wishes
Dave
Comments are closed.