Sex in the City

National Review Online, December 3, 2002

There's a gift shop at the entrance to New York's new Museum of Sex with "edible body chocolate," "Kama Sutra" oils, nudie pens, and books such as New York Girls, Fetish Girls, Forbidden Erotica, Strip Flips, Peek — Photographs from the Kinsey Institute, The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline, and Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist — but none of this was enough for one downtown Jezebel, grumpy in Winona black as she gazed idly at pictures of Bob Flanagan's tortured form. "You'd think," she grumbled, "that there would be more here than this. There ought to be, like, you know, toys." After all the foreplay — the carding (no one under 18 allowed), the $17 admission ticket (now there's an obscenity), the bawdy, giggling anticipation, the titillating costume (all visitors are issued with a self-adhesive scarlet "X"), and the come-hither enticement (the museum's advertising features boots, spurs, and a very, very short skirt), was this a first hint that the actual Museum of Sex experience might, well, fall a little flat?

The museum, which opened in October, is located, appropriately enough, near a street corner. It's on 27th and 5th, just to the east of the old "Satan's circus," Manhattan's former Tenderloin district, in a slightly shabby building that may once have known some very shabby times: There's fevered talk that it was used as a brothel. The interior — whitewashed walls, bare floors, and (cathouse chic?) bead curtains — is almost as drab. Perhaps the austerity is designed to emphasize the seriousness of the museum's "mission": "breaking new ground in an area of human life that…museums…have previously treated at best with benign neglect. This… includes the consideration of both high and low sexual culture (in all their endlessly fascinating manifestations)…" High culture? Who cares about that? I was there for the low (in all its endlessly fascinating manifestations). The academic flummery is best seen as a disguise, camouflage for the peepshow, a scholar's gown for those too prim to be seen in a dirty gray raincoat.

But back to that "mission" — according to the museum's publicity materials, its inaugural exhibition, NYC Sex: How New York City Transformed Sex in America is devoted to an investigation of "the sexual subcultures of the city's past and present, and…the means by which they have influenced the development of modern attitudes about sex and sexuality." It's an appropriately narcissistic theme for a perennially self-absorbed city (or, more accurately, borough — the references to queens in this exhibition have nothing to do with Archie Bunker's old stamping ground). It comes with a flattering subtext: Out there in the sticks, the rubes, the birds and the bees were stuck doing it the same old way until those enlightened and sophisticated Manhattan folk started spreading the news.

That said, the first part of the exhibition is dedicated to prostitution, a business that even New Yorkers cannot claim to have invented. On this topic, the museum's main emphasis is on the 19th century: its most beguiling feature an interactive display highlighting extracts from Zagat-style guides to Manhattan's whorehouses, clearly a necessity for anyone wishing to avoid the perils of locales such as 14 Mercer Street, an unsavory joint where "gentlemen are never known to call a second time."

There's more to see than hooker handbooks, of course, not least a mummified penis, a chorus girl's costume, and a skull rotted by syphilis, but the real delight lies not in curios but in absorbing the details of this lost city of sin, a Gomorrah on the Hudson that had, in its downtown "fairy resorts," a suggestion of Sodom too. To be frank, though, this evidence of Victorian vice mainly comes across as a little bland. The passing of time and large amounts of soft sepia coloring mask both its erotic force and the brutality and squalor that must have lain not so far below it. All that remains is surface strangeness, best seen in a 1890s illustration of the Bowery by night, teeming, exotic, and menacing with more than a hint of a Blade Runner streetscape about it.

When the museum's visitors arrive in those sections of the exhibition that deal with the 20th century, improved photographic techniques literally bring the picture, and the reality behind it, into far clearer focus. This is just as well if the show is to hold our attention. Age can lend fascination to the most banal of knick-knacks, but once we reach the modern era there is not much in the way of alluring artifacts for the museum to display. An old tin of Ramses may be vaguely "Egyptian," but it's not exactly the treasure of Tutankhamen. Brave attempts are made: Exhibits include some nasty-looking bondage gear, a poster for the Village People and a 1971 handbook used to instruct the police on how to identify "toilet snipes," but a showcase featuring a forlorn pile of vintage peepshow tokens is a reminder why photography has to be an essential resource for this exhibition.

But, in a museum looking to chronicle behavior at its most intimate, this becomes, paradoxically, a problem. It's simply not that often that couples bring a camera into the bedroom and, unless they are a Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson, it's even more unusual for the rest of us to see the results. Every type of picture can tell a story, but when it comes to recording this area of human conduct, the paintbrush can be more effective than the lens. It's surprising how little art is included in this show. The heavy reliance on photography inevitably shifts the exhibition's balance away from the private sphere to public — or quasi-public — displays of sexuality, primarily pin-ups, pornography, and an orgy or two; interesting enough, but something of a caricature. We are shown more, but, somehow, it feels like less. It is an impression only heightened by a selection of photographs more weighted towards, shall we say, the mechanics of this show's subject matter than its broader social context. This is not history, just a vision of the past reflected in a funhouse mirror.

This doesn't always matter. That part of the exhibition concerned with New York's contribution to 1970s pornography succeeds on its own terms. As porn is never meant to be anything more than dirty pix there is no intimacy to lose. Spectacle is simply replayed as spectacle, and becomes the source of the museum's most entertaining sight — small groups of visitors earnestly clustered around monitors showing continuous loops of disco era smut. As the crowd gawped at the gropers, portable audio guides related the (forgive the phrase) blow-by-blow reminiscences of a star from that time, Vanessa del Rio — the "Latin from Manhattan," reduced, these days, to Brooklyn.

To see how a display lined with photographs can fail as a record of the history of sex, check out the installation devoted to S&M. It is redeemed only by the revelation that the ranks of the spanked received a significant boost from the arrival of refugees from Nazi Germany, a place where sadism was no fantasy. For the most part, however, this segment of the show is, ahem, dominated by pin-ups of the pinioned, the pummeled, and the trussed, posed by professionals and packaged by profiteers. These pictures tell a picaresque tale (the saga of Irving Klaw, bondage entrepreneur, cries out for a Tim Burton movie), but they are far from enlightening. They record not authenticity, but performance. On the other hand, having also glanced at the museum's small, but painful (holy urethra!), sample of the undeniably authentic Mapplethorpe oeuvre, I'm not inclined to complain too much.

When the museum turns its attention to homosexuality, the results are somewhat better. Whether it's in the bleak camera work of Thomas Painter, the Brassai of Manhattan's mid-century gay demimonde, or in plain brown envelope beefcake photos (including one of a naked Yul Brynner — the real shock is his full head of hair) from the 1940s and 1950s, pseudo-exotic, claustrophobic, and vaguely ill at ease, the impact of that era's repression is obvious. Later came the Stonewall riot (visitors can study the Village Voice's remarkable report of that "fairy tale the likes of which the area has never seen") and then the Dionysian 1970s (exhibits include a board game, "Gay Weekend," featuring Scott, Billy, Mark, Glen, Terry, Ritchie, a beach, a bar, and a truck stop). Inevitably, there's also an installation designed to describe the horror of the plague years that followed.

What we are never really shown is the gradual acceptance of gays into "respectable" society, an omission typical of an exhibition that consistently confuses the extreme with the cutting edge, and also tends to neglect the mainstream by much more than the show's stated purpose would suggest. That's a distortion of the historical record even for supposedly go-ahead Gotham, and it has another disadvantage. The exaggerated emphasis on the far out, and the touch of Coney Island that it brings to this exhibition, reinforces the sense of alienation and emotional distance already implicit in viewing images of other people's sex lives. For all the low culture thrills, I left the museum lost in mild, but oddly persistent melancholy.

Post-coital depression by proxy? I doubt it. Intriguing, prurient and more than a little kitsch, the Museum of Sex is certainly worth trying but you won't need a cigarette afterwards.

I See Dead People

National Review Online, May 2, 2002

When the dead are art, then art is dead. Corpses belong on the battlefield, in the morgue or underground, but not in an art gallery. Images of dead bodies, paintings, drawings, even photographs, are a different matter, but that is death at one remove, extinction at a decent distance. At the Atlantis Gallery, a loft-like exhibition space in London's East End, there is no such discretion. There they have the real ex-McCoy: Genuine corpses and the bits and pieces that once belonged inside them, all on view for the price of £10 ($14 U.S.) a ticket (discounts for children!). This is a cadaver circus, the best exhibit of the ex to the west of Lenin's mausoleum, and, judging by the long line that snaked down Brick Lane, quite a lot more popular.

The gallery's new show, Body Worlds, is dedicated to the work of the "Plastinator," a fedora-wearing German doctor with the vaguely sinister name of Gunther von Hagens. Over the last 25 years grisly Gunther has been working with "plastination," his patented technique for preserving the dead. Basically, it involves the doctor saturating the deceased's tissue with special plastics while cackling madly in a castle somewhere in Transylvania (OK, I made up the last part). Results will vary depending on the resin used: A plastinated lung was soft to the touch, a squishy gray sponge for a bath time in Hell, but a thin cross-section from the chest cavity was hard and rather shiny, translucent, red and white, a little like prosciutto left out in the sun for slightly too long, and then, for some mysterious reason, laminated.

These small samples were only a foretaste, a mere snack for Hannibal Lecter before the exhibition's full-bodied main course. For the show's real novelty is that plastination allows entire corpses to be displayed in "upright, life-like poses". The process solidifies what it preserves, but before the tissue finally sets, it can be posed in interesting ways. It's a bit like molding a Barbie doll except that the ingredients include human as well as plastic. What's more, there is another advantage: "preserved muscles can take over supportive functions." In other words, when plastination is complete, von Hagens's "specimens" (that's what he calls them) can stand on what is left of their own two feet.

But there's a catch. The Plastinator's definition of a "life-like" pose is, well, not exactly mainstream. The specimens do not look like anybody you would ever, ever hope to meet. They have been "anatomically prepared." I'll say. Von Hagens is a man who is comfortable in other people's skin. This jolliest of ghouls (he seems always to be smiling) is a slicer and a chopper, a Silly Putty vampire who treats the dead like Play-Doh. When plastination's promoters claim that the process allows "entirely new forms of anatomical display" they are not kidding. Body Worlds is more Doctor Phibes than House of Wax and so before I go any further, can we agree that those remaining readers of a sensitive disposition should now abandon this article and do something more cheerful with the rest of their day?

Now that the wimps have gone, let's cut to the chase, for that is what von Hagens likes to do. By the time that he has finished with them, his "anatomically prepared whole bodies" are nothing of the sort. If there is one thing that these bodies are not, it is "whole." To start with, most have been skinned. The idea is to reveal what lies beneath. To emphasize this point one luckless individual is shown holding up the bundle that was once his skin. It is complete, all in one piece, right down to the limp glove-shaped flesh that must have once encased its owner's hands. The skin's former occupant, meanwhile, is reduced to a red-brown-white mass of sinew and bone, politely proffering his discarded epidermis as if it were a garment being passed to a coat-check girl. Other delights include the filleted Muscleman and a startled-looking fellow who has been bisected absolutely everywhere, a posthumous worse-than-Bobbit for all to see.

It is difficult to believe that these displays add much to scientific knowledge, or would even be particularly innovative in an anatomy lesson. We live in hypocritical times, however, and attempts are made to portray the show as serving some sort of educational purpose. These are the didactic dead, complete with surgeon-general moments: A blackened lung or two (those wicked smokers) and a wizened liver (those naughty drinkers). Von Hagens also likes to talk grandly about "the democratization of anatomy." Everyone has a right to peek.

And then there is that last defense of the intellectually indefensible, the claim that the exhibition is "art." Von Hagens himself is carefully ambiguous on this subject. At times he will say that there is nothing artistic about his specimens. Their poses are, he explains, merely a teaching device. But then his vanity begins to seep in. He concedes that he is, perhaps, "a skilled laborer in the field of art." Reference is made to creativity, Renaissance traditions and "aesthetic-instructive presentations." Even his fedora is more than a hat. Von Hagens muses that it "symbolizes… internalized individualism…born of the conviction that an unusual outward appearance fosters non-conformist thinking." A mini-Mengele? Maybe, but there is also a touch of Dieter from Saturday Night Live.

The clearest evidence of von Hagens's artistic pretensions can be seen in his most "aesthetically" displayed specimens. The Chess Player contemplates the board, his exposed brain a reminder that this is someone long past checkmate. Nearby, a pregnant woman reclines in a ghastly parody of a provocative pose, womb cut open to reveal the eight-month fetus within. The skeleton of The Runner is suspended in motion, tendon and sinew flowing out behind him in an impression of speed. Rearing Horse With Rider features the husk of a stallion mounted by the remains of his rider, a man with a brain in each hand, one human, and the other equine. Art? No, just a savage form of carney kitsch.

This sense of the freak show increases in the section devoted to the unborn. The smallest are tiny, just wisps of life in a jar. Others, deformed and misshapen, are deeply disturbing, none more so than a pair of Siamese twins, two awkwardly joined gray homunculi, discomfort still visible on their pinched, twisted faces, good value, I suppose, for £10 a ticket.

The dead, of course, will never discover what happens to the bodies they left behind. What they don't know won't hurt them, but will it hurt us? Mankind is an inquisitive species: It is part of our genius. The exhibition was interesting, if morbid. And I am not alone in thinking so. Over eight million people have seen this show in different venues across Europe, but that large a number somehow makes the phenomenon more troubling. Societies that lose all sense of reverence for the dead will lose it also for the living. There is a small memorial slab (plastic, naturally) "to the body donors" at the entrance to the exhibition, but the show's cheerful, inquisitive visitors were clearly there for recreation, not a requiem.

And there's cash in these carcasses. Body Worlds is big business. According to the London Sunday Times, since its European debut the show has netted around $70 million. There are souvenirs for sale, no, not what you might think, but DVDs, mouse pads, posters, even a tee shirt featuring a plastinated rabbit, a Thumper beyond Uncle Walt's worst nightmares.

Plastination makes this all possible, and it provides the essential alibi. It sanitizes death. Von Hagens describes his "beautiful specimens" as "a sensuous experience…frozen at a point between death and decay." Well, what is the case is that the very strangeness of Von Hagens's grotesque tableaux eliminates almost any empathy that the spectator might feel. These dismembered and rearranged beings lose their humanity at the same time as they expose it. They are alien, almost literally so: Without much in the way of faces, their heads bear more than a passing resemblance to the invaders in Mars Attacks. There are some occasional traces of a lost exterior, a scrap of hair, perhaps, or a yellowing fingernail, but, for the most part (the fetuses are a striking exception), Von Hagens transforms "his" people into creatures of such peculiarity that it is easy to forget what they came from. That this is necessary for the show's visitors (and it seems to be) should come as a relief: It would suggest that we have not yet completed our descent into cultural barbarism.

Can the same be said for Von Hagens himself? I'm no psychiatrist, but he goes about his business with a gusto that is not altogether wholesome. To the extent that his work involves consenting cadavers (donor forms are available at the exhibition), it is difficult to object other than on the grounds of good taste. No one, after all, was made to go to the show, or to be in the show. Or were they? There are troubling stories (mostly denied), reports of bodies being bought, of a consignment of corpses shipped in from Siberia. To the extent that these tales are true, they are deeply disquieting (the fact that the Plastinator now works mainly out of China is not reassuring), but even if the rumors are false, their mere existence reveals unease about this exhibition that it will take more than resin to resolve.

As for me, I won't be eating prosciutto for a while.

Victorian Secrets

National Review Online, November 21 2001

Ernest Normand: Bondage

Judged by current standards, Ernest Normand's 1895 painting Bondage must rank as one of the least politically correct canvases ever to decorate the walls of a major gallery. This massive (six feet by ten feet) depiction of the sale of slave girls in an imagined Ancient Egypt manages to combine ethnic, sexual, and cultural insensitivity in a way that leaves Howard Stern looking like Maya Angelou. The villain of the picture is a sinister Eastern potentate of the pre-Islamic fanatic variety. This richly clad monster of decadence is reclining (these people never sit up straight) on a sofa as he contemplates the women being offered for sale by a sleazy slaver (vaguely Semitic, skullcap). At his feet a previously purchased (and, naturally, topless) slave girl fingers an unusually shaped musical instrument. The merchandise on offer to the salacious pharaoh includes one nubile pseudo-Nubian (dark skin, but with the sort of suspiciously Caucasian features that would suggest that there were very few Nubian models available to pose in Victorian London) and two naked white females (one of them, in fact, no more than a child).

The pseudo-Nubian, clad only in a gold-colored girdle, seems content with her lot as she stands proudly and provocatively in front of her potential purchaser. By contrast, the white captives, faced with the prospect of unmentionable foreign beastliness, and blessed, we are supposed to think, with a superior European sense of refinement, are cowering and ashamed. Their fate is not yet finally resolved, but they can take no comfort from the fact that, before taking his decision, the pharaoh is consulting with one of his concubines. This wicked lady has, you guessed it, also mislaid her blouse, and, by the look of her, she is someone, who is very comfortable with foreign beastliness.

Nominally, of course, Bondage is a deeply moral picture, a condemnation of sexual exploitation and heathen wickedness, and Victorian art lovers would have been shocked — shocked — if anyone had attributed their interest in this painting to anything other than the highest of motives. It is the tension between private fascination and its public justification that makes this particular work, and the new exhibition of which it forms a part, so interesting.

The exhibition Exposed: The Victorian Nude opened recently at London's Tate Gallery and will be arriving in New York next spring. It is not, let it be said, a showcase for much great art and in certain respects (notably the use and abuse of images of children) it can make for disturbing viewing, but as a demonstration of how the Victorians managed to satisfy their all too human interest in erotic spectacle within the constraints of a culture that was officially (if not always in reality) highly puritanical, the exhibition adds to our understanding of a society that was always less narrow-minded and more complex than the traditional caricature would suggest.

It was true that Victorian artists did face difficulties in attempting to reconcile the conflicting demands of propriety and pleasure, but the solution came, as so often, from that most helpful of vices, hypocrisy. The depiction of nudity could, apparently, be made palatable if it was somehow removed from any threatening hint of carnal reality. Sculpture, with its avoidance of those suspect flesh tones, posed few problems, while the trick with painting was to dress up the undressed in allegorical, classical, historical, or mythological guise.

Joseph Noel Paton: The Reconciliation of Titania and Oberon

The Tate show includes nudie pics of Galatea, Thetis, Andromeda, Harmonia, Circe, Diana (the goddess not the princess), four Lady Godivas, four Psyches, eight Venuses and one languid lovely who liked to lie naked on a cloud, lost in some deeply, ahem, mystical reverie. Contributing to the carnival are the ranks of the anonymous unadorned, innumerable saucy sprites, countless naughty nymphs, and, fluttering within the frame of Joseph Paton's The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania (1847, detail above), literally dozens of our little fairy friends. It was the addition of, say, gauzy wings, Mount Olympus, or antiquity that provided the necessary camouflage. They made it possible to deny that this otherwise unseemly nudity had any connection to contemporary existence, and as such it could be acceptable for public display, particularly if an improving moral message was attached.

An early example was William Etty's Youth on the Prow, and Pleasure at the Helm (1830-32). This painting, described, accurately but unkindly, by the great landscapist John Constable as "Etty's Bumboat" shows a young man on a vessel only marginally less flimsy than the robes (very) sporadically draped over the lucky fellow's entourage of enthusiastically unclad nymphs. The problem was that, despite some storm clouds over the bumboat, the supposedly devout Mr. Etty made sin look like a lot of fun, a difficulty also encountered by Oscar Rejlander in the production of his epic photograph The Two Ways of Life (1857), where the youth taking the low road (strewn with wanton naked hussies) looks considerably more cheerful than his downcast, yet supposedly uplifted, counterpart gloomily headed towards a dull, but virtuous, future.

Oscar Rejlander: The Two Ways of Life

Perhaps it was this ambiguity that led Etty to try a different approach the following year. In Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret (1833), a knight is rescuing a naked damsel from an evil torturer. Apart from the unusual twist that the knight is female, the painting is a classic of the genre. It borrows from myth and the past (Spenser's 16th Century poem Faerie Queene) and it shows a nude woman who has been tied up, to a pillar on this occasion. In John Millais's The Knight Errant (1870, detail below), the armored warrior is, reassuringly, a man, but the unclad rescuee is once again bound, this time, for variety, to a tree. At least she will survive. The seven naked Christian martyrs in Faithful unto Death (Herbert Schmalz, 1888: five women roped to posts, two women slumped on the ground) are not so lucky. They will not be saved, in this life anyway. The next item on their menu is to be the menu, devoured by lions in front of a leering, jeering Roman mob.

The Knight Errant by Millais

Even allowing for the not always gentle conventions of S&M, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that these surprisingly frequent depictions of trussed-up, humiliated, or otherwise degraded women were in reality symptoms of a wider misogyny, a misogyny that ultimately causes many of the paintings in this exhibition to fail, despite their often very high level of technical accomplishment. This was not an era that was comfortable with any public recognition of the assertive, let alone sexually assertive, female, and the portrayals of women in a good number of these pictures suffer from the failure on the part of the artist to acknowledge that in the bedroom, as much as the ballroom, it takes two to tango. Instead, these ladies tend to be presented as purely passive objects, listless, dead-eyed or, if they are John Waterhouse's morbid Saint Eulalia (1885), just dead.

The_Fisherman_and_the_Syren_c1856-8

In this context, it is no shock to discover that when the female libido is depicted, it is often shown as a menace. In Frederic Leighton's The Fisherman and the Syren (1856-58, pictured above), for example, we are left no doubt that the winsome, helpless Mediterranean fisherman (a weak-willed foreigner, of course) will succumb to the charms of the "syren" (misspelled for added antiquity and depicted as a mermaid far more lascivious than anybody in Splash) and her seductive, but lethal, embrace. Thirty years later, John Collier's Lilith (1887) is a delightful portrait of an attractive, lively blonde, but the fact that she is hissing sweet nothings into the ear of a serpent reminds us that, according to Jewish legend, she was Adam's ex-wife and, in her subsequent career, a demon.

John Collier: Lilith

Fortunately, as the Victorian era progressed it was also possible to detect signs of a more even-handed approach towards the fairer sex, whether it be self-assured Aurora, the beautiful goddess confidently opening Herbert Draper's The Gates of Dawn (1900) or the perfect calm of Theodore Roussel's The Reading Girl (1886-87), a Whistler-influenced study of (as the London Spectator angrily noted) "an entirely nude model" leafing through a newspaper.

Reading a newspaper? The nude, it seemed, was finally coming down from Olympus and, even more dramatically, journey's end, it was now clear, might include the artist's bed. A number of the later works at the exhibition are given additional force by their creators' obvious willingness to reveal the true nature of their relationships with their subjects, something that would previously have been close to taboo. This can be seen most notably, perhaps, in William Orpen's unabashedly erotic Nude Study (1906), a compelling portrait of his model, and lover, Flossie Burnett. It is a highlight of the show, and a clear demonstration that, as Britain entered the Edwardian age, times had indeed changed.

nude-study-sir-william-orpen

Public acknowledgement of private pleasure would no longer have to be reserved for the gods.

The Last Silo

National Review Online, November 4, 2001

 © Andrew Stuttaford

The desert south of Tucson, Arizona, bone dry, rocky, and mountainous, looks a bit, some say, like the end of the world. And that is just what it could have been. Take I-19 towards the Mexican border and, not far from a town with the optimistic name of Green Valley, the visitor can turn off the Interstate and take a narrow approach road to a place that could once have triggered the Apocalypse. It is quiet around there now, the only visible excitement seems to be Monday-night bingo at the American Legion, but it was probably quiet there then too, 20 or 30 years ago, except that at that time a very different game was being played a few yards on from that peaceful, dusty spot, a game that could have meant that all our numbers were up. In those days, any travelers who wandered a little further up the approach road would have come across a curious spider-web antenna on the right-hand side, and beyond that, a chain-link fence, some lights, and behind the fence, a slightly elevated chunk of concrete, the top of a storage tank, perhaps. Scrambling over that fence would have been a very, very bad idea. It would not have been long before the guards came, seemingly, from nowhere and as they carried you off, they probably would not have taken the trouble to explain that, yes, you were quite right. That chunk of concrete was indeed the lid of a storage tank.

 © Andrew Stuttaford

And what that tank contained was a nuclear warhead perched on top of a Titan II, the largest intercontinental ballistic missile ever developed by this country. The actual payload has never been disclosed, but it would have well been over one megaton, some claim as many as nine. A single megaton represents an explosive-force equivalent to the detonation of a million tons of TNT or, to put it another, bleaker, way it is around 80 times the power of that firecracker they let off over Hiroshima.

This monster, fortunately, had keepers. Four-person crews from the 390th Strategic Missile Wing watched over the Titan's silo in rotating 24-hour shifts that combined boredom, tension, and routine in a way that would have been very familiar to any sentry in any of mankind's past wars. And so, as two decades passed, the missile's guardians checked and double-checked and waited for the order that never came, the command to launch their rocket, that projectile that could have ended the world. In a strange kindness, the crews were not told the identity of their Titan's selected target. That, it was felt, would have been too much to bear. Moscow, Leningrad, Minsk? Better not to know.

The Green Valley silo, Complex 571-7, became operational in July 1963, part of a program that involved the construction of a total of 54 Titan II silos in Arizona, Arkansas, and Kansas. For more than 20 years these underground sentinels remained on alert, safe in their discreet, intimidating fortresses each containing just one missile, four men, and enough power to annihilate a city and, maybe, a civilization. The missiles endured and, it is no coincidence, so did we. Built in the era of Khrushchev, at a time when Berlin's wall was a still fresh obscenity, they were the brilliantly engineered product of a country realistic enough to be able to identify the danger it faced, and sufficiently tough to be prepared to do something about it.

The Titan II missiles were eventually phased out in the early 1980s, and the silos were decommissioned. Some were dismantled, some were abandoned and, this being America, some were sold as potentially prime real estate for the really nervous homeowner. Green Valley is now the only silo that remains reasonably intact. Turned into a museum in 1986, it still houses a Titan II, but this last surviving guard dog is toothless (the warhead has long since been removed from the missile). Even now, however, the ageing weapon still merits a little respect: This complex must be the only museum in the world set up in a way designed to satisfy satellite scrutiny. The silo's 760-ton door is permanently kept half open, and before the defanged missile was replaced in its launch duct, it was, very publicly, made inoperable. As is noted in the museum's guidebook, "Treaties deal in numbers, and it would not be wise to count a museum as part of our arsenal".

There were not many visitors to "big missile country" the time I visited Complex 571-7. It was hot, even for Arizona in August, just another mellow, lazy afternoon in that long untroubled summer of 2001, that tranquil, slumbering season which was to come to a terrible, unimagined end just three weeks later. But back in that now hopelessly remote then, in the deceptive peace of a country where Mohammed Atta was already making his final arrangements, unfashionable conflicts drew few crowds; the sites of our neglected Cold War triumph were, it appeared, of fairly limited appeal. There were two or three history buffs, earnest with note pads and questions, and a family group, father, young son, granddad (but no wives — the Titan museum, I suspect, is one for the guys).

 © Andrew Stuttaford

To reach the silo's command post, it is necessary to climb down a steep staircase that leads to a small cage 35-feet below ground. This "entrapment area" is the last holding point before entrance to the corridor to the bunker's reinforced core. The mesh gates open, and we are in. It is a functional place, all metal walls and lime-green institutional paint, a little bit like the below decks of an elderly aircraft carrier, until that moment when, after walking through long corridors and past enormous blast doors, you find yourself on the set of the Starship Enterprise.

It is a vision of Shatner chic, high-tech, 1960s style, clunky steel boxes, punch-card computers, illuminated buttons, and old-fashioned digital counters, only this was no science fiction, these were the controls of a rocket that could really fly. A genial guide talks us through Armageddon's rituals, the warning message over the speakers, the walk to the safe containing the launch codes, their insertion into the command console, the final authentications, and then that last stage before irrevocability, the two simultaneous flicks of two separate keys into two separate mechanisms (kept sufficiently far apart so that one man alone could not send off the missile). After that, there would have been nothing to do but wait. This was a procedure that left no opportunity for second thoughts. Once the keys had been turned, the missile would take off a minute later. There would have been nothing that the men at Complex 571-7 could have done to stop it. As the missile shot five hundred miles into the sky, its former custodians would have had little to do other than contemplate the remains of their future. The silo contained enough food, water, and air for 30 days. After then, well, no one could say.

The guide is standing by the console. He summons a small boy out of our group. Side by side the guide and the child insert the keys to doomsday, they turn them, make believe, but accomplished Strangeloves, with perfect synchrony (the keys have to be turned within two seconds of each other if the system is to work). As a proud grandfather applauds, Hell's ignition light goes on. Klaxons sound. Lift-off! Except, of course, that it wasn't. The missile cannot be launched; that old Titan was, as we all knew in that safe, deluded August, a harmless, spooky souvenir of more dangerous decades, a reminder of an era when this country was under constant threat of attack, a time, we thought then, that had passed forever.

In the long years of its operation Complex 571-7 was never a place for such illusions. Built and run by men who could contemplate destroying a planet to save it, it is a palace for pessimists, blast-proofed, locked and barred, much of its equipment, even, mounted on springs, able to bounce back from the tremors of a nearby nuclear explosion (the silo could survive almost anything other than a direct hit) with no great damage. It was a last line of defense, the threat that kept the peace, and everyone knew it. The Titan II was the weapon to be used when all else had failed. So the crews that lived with it beneath the earth did what they had to, relentlessly, dutifully and accurately completing those dull daily chores that made Mutually Assured Destruction credible and, as a result, impossible.

You can see some of their faces in photos that line the site's frugal visitor center, fading now as fast as the memory of their unsung vigil, those unknown heroes of an essential struggle, dedicated individuals who understood that to win a war it takes time, courage, patience, determination and, if necessary, a willingness to do the unthinkable.

Is that, I wonder, something that enough of us still understand?

Star Monkey

National Review Online, September 3, 2001

Ham's Grave, Aug 2001  © Andrew Stuttaford

The astronaut's grave is plain, a metal plaque on a slab of concrete on the grounds of the Museum of Space History just outside Alamogordo, N.M. There is no statue, no elaborate monument, just the silence of a desert hillside. Wreaths do not flourish in the dryness of the American Southwest, but some kindly individual has left a pancake-shaped cactus in memory of the dead flier. A face has been cut into the plant, two eyes and a jagged smile. The carving was, doubtless, well meant, a tribute, perhaps, to a simple, friendly, soul, but the impression it leaves is faintly grotesque, more Jack O'Lantern than Smiley. That is not inappropriate, because to modern sensibilities there is something disturbing about the story of the deceased, a small dark space pioneer by the name of Ham, America's first Astrochimp. Yes that's right. Ham was a chimpanzee, a space-suited representative of the species known technically, and somewhat insultingly, as Pan Troglodytes. It is largely forgotten now (although not in the Comoro Islands, a fine nation that, a few years ago, issued a stamp in Ham's honor), but the early days of America's attempt to storm the heavens were marked by the space-bound trajectories of a number of luckless mammals.

Various rhesus monkeys, all called Albert, were shot off into the sky from captured German V2 rockets. As the space program progressed to homegrown technology, other tiny simians, Able, Baker, Sam, Miss Sam, and Gordo all followed in the Alberts's exhaust trails, as did a squadron of mice, but this was not enough for NASA. Before Homo sapiens could be risked, the space agency moved up the evolutionary scale, turning to man's closest relative, known then, as now, to be the chimpanzee, but quite how closely related, well, in those days, nobody could be sure.

Times have changed. DNA testing has now made it possible to argue that the traditional division between humanity and the four species of Great Ape (Chimpanzee, Bonobo, Gorilla, and Orangutan) owes more to vanity than biology. According to this view, we are simply the fifth, and most sophisticated, variant. Within this new, and alarmingly expanded, family, our nearest relations, the chimps, turn out to be closer to us than they are, for example, to the gorillas. What is more, over the last 30 years, detailed observation of chimpanzees in their native setting has established that they have at least the rudiments of a culture, one that includes the use of tools, barter and primitive medical techniques. As noble savages, however, the often unruly and violent chimps fail to make the grade. The mark of Cain turns out, depressingly, to be a sign of a good brain.

Quite how good is far from clear. Measuring animal intelligence is difficult, and prone to anthromophic exaggeration, but it does seem that a chimp possesses the intellectual ability of a two- to three-year-old. That may be no revelation to a parent of toddlers, but it is a fact worth remembering when considering what happened to Ham in the years that followed his abduction from his African birthplace. The derivation of his name, "Holloman Aerospace Medical," gives the critical, ominous clue.

The museum in Alamogordo takes up the narrative, although, sadly, the simian spaceman does not make it to the museum's pantheon, a plaque-bedecked Valhalla known as the International Space Hall of Fame. No, Ham's story is confined to the building's lesser regions, more specifically, a corridor decorated with a series of educational posters, the first of which provides a good prologue. It features a glorious color image of a rocket at launch and the headline, "Before there was John Glenn or Neil Armstrong there was…," and there right in the corner is a little circular cut-out of Ham's head, a Caliban satellite for the giant, gleaming Saturn 5, an enigmatic, humbling reminder of where we all come from.

Other posters show some of the chimponaut training process. We see three chimps being taught to become accustomed to sitting in one place for up to 24 hours. It is a scene out of daycare hell. One ape sits, impassive, a cross-legged lama, the second slumps, pensive with a hint of Rodin, while the third wriggles like the bored two year old he so clearly resembles. Another shot shows the three chimpanzees reclining side by side, each in an open container. Two are holding hands. Reassurance? Other grimmer tests ("windblast", "acceleration/deceleration") are, tactfully, not shown and nor is the darker side of the "mild" electric shock/banana pellet routine used to train Ham to pull the right levers when he was in his capsule.

There are, of course, pictures of the great day, January 31, 1961. Ham is in his spacesuit, an eerie mix of the futuristic and the primitive, looking like a suspicious old man as he stands with his trainer, showing few signs of the "friskiness" that had earlier earned him his ticket to the infinite (and with that ticket came a name; previously he had been known as "61"). Later, we see him lying in his "couch", NASA's Ikea-style description of his capsule-within-a-capsule. During the flight our chimpanzee Columbus is photographed staring out of his little window, face impassive, eyes as black as the space through which he was flying. Finally, after his safe return, Ham is portrayed reaching for his reward, an apple (John Glenn, it has been pointed out, got a Senate seat for pretty much the same achievement). He looks, to humans at least, to be grinning, but if it really was a grin, it must have been one of relief.

For the flight would have been a juddering, jerking nightmare for anyone, let alone for a passenger unable to understand what was going on, but bright enough to suspect that it was nothing good. To make it worse, almost everything that could go wrong, did. The exhibit skirts the issue, but, to put it bluntly, Ham was nearly toast. Right at the start, his rocket started sucking in fuel too fast. As a result, the angle of the craft's climb was too steep and too high, subjecting poor Ham to g-forces far fiercer than ever expected, a process repeated on re-entry sixteen minutes later, when the retrorockets cut off too soon, sending our once-frisky Icarus plunging down to earth at nearly 6,000 mph, 1,400 mph faster than planned. These were not the only difficulties. Quite early in the flight, cabin pressure collapsed, a development that would have been fatal for an astronaut, but not, fortunately, for an astrochimp safe in his self-contained couch. On the other hand, no one ever subjected Neil Armstrong to "mild" electric shocks every time he pulled the wrong lever, which was the threat that continued to hang over Ham even as his capsule careened through space.

In fact the redoubtable chimponaut, hardened by the rigors of his bleak training regime, performed very well, going about his preordained tasks (Watch for the white light, pull the left lever! Watch for the blue light, pull the right lever!) with surprisingly few outward signs of stress, despite the massive g-forces and the weightlessness. One final insult remained, however. On splashdown, the capsule promptly sprung a leak. By the time rescuers arrived on the scene (late, of course: they had expected Ham to land somewhere else), our hero was in severe danger of drowning. Once recovered, he appeared distinctly unimpressed by this shambles of a trip. Ham may have taken NASA's apple, but for a few hours the biting, irritable chimp displayed every symptom of the syndrome we now call air rage, something probably made worse by the gesticulating, shouting, flashbulb-popping Cape Canaveral press corps that surrounded him on his arrival back on dry land.

NASA did not seem to mind. The agency had what it wanted — good publicity (Ham made the cover of Life!) and good science. To quote from his tombstone, Ham "had proved that mankind could live and work in space." All was now set for Alan Shepard's historic flight. Unfortunately, America's Soviet rivals were even quicker to get the message. The next primate to leave the Earth, less than three months later, was Yuri Gagarin. As for the astrochimp, it was back to the barracks for him for a while, but a rival, Enos, got the first orbital mission, leaving the discarded Ham to be retired to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. There, at least, there were no levers, no shocks, no crazed wild rides, but it was, apparently, a somewhat isolated existence, a miserable fate for such a gregarious animal. After 17 years this Chimp of Monte Cristo was moved to a more congenial zoo in North Carolina and, finally, the company of his own kind. He met Mrs. Ham; in fact, some say that he met two Mrs. Hams, but these better times were not to last. Within two years Ham had died of, poetically, an enlarged heart.

To judge Ham's treatment by current standards would be posturing of a type that is, these days, regrettably familiar. We are often too quick to apply contemporary criteria in measuring the supposed failings of the past. Nevertheless, from what we know now it is clear that humanity does need to take another look at its handling of the Great Apes. And if Ham's strange, sad odyssey can remind us of that, he will have helped out yet another species.

His own.

Lenin’s Last Stand

National Review Online, April 22, 2001

© Andrew Stuttaford

Shrines should be for saints, not killers, but no one seems to have told them that at Gorki Leninskiye. There, twenty miles outside Moscow, a holy place still stands, a tribute to a tyrant, and an insult to his victims. It is paid for by a state unable to cope with the truths of its terrible, barely acknowledged past. Its citizens have a better understanding. They know what is celebrated there and they prefer to avoid it. "Why would you want to go there?" I am asked, "there is nothing to see." "I'm interested in Soviet history." There is a shrug in response, no words, just silence. Navigation is difficult; there are no signs pointing the way, no billboards, no fluttering flags or excited crowds, just country roads, a few disheveled hamlets and the stillness of the Russian plain. Finally, after an hour or so, we drive up to a statue, more than twenty feet tall. Massive, monumental and an eyesore, Lenin still stands, eternal, hectoring, damaged now in one leg, forever gazing out at that radiant future that was never to come, still signaling to visitors that they had arrived in Gorki Leninskiye, the place where the father of the revolution was taken to die.

© Andrew Stuttaford

Before the Bolsheviks, Gorki (the "Leninskiye" came later) had been one of those pleasant country estates that are the backdrop to our sunny image of aristocratic Russia before the Fall: silver birches, a river, a yellow stucco manor house in the neo-classical style. In 1909 the widow of an early financier of the revolutionary cause bought the manor. Ungratefully, the revolutionaries nationalized the place in 1918. Lenin first came to stay that same year, despite, according to his wife, "exquisite embarrassment" over the size of the accommodations.

The Lenins evidently got over this shame and their frequent visits made Gorki a natural choice when the time came to find the Bolshevik leader somewhere to recuperate after a series of strokes. Despite the efforts of a team of foreign doctors (the Great Man eschewed the "usual Soviet bunglers"), recovery proved elusive. Deteriorating rapidly, Lenin spent most of the last 18 months of his life effectively confined to Gorki, and it was here, on January 21, 1924, that the "genius of geniuses" finally succumbed.

Past the statue, we find the road toward our objective. We are alone. There are no tour buses, no wheezing, dirty Ladas or struggling rusty Volgas, no Red Army trucks, no determined pedestrians. It was not always this way.

In the old days, half a million pilgrims would come to pay their respects each year. It was a patriotic excursion, a break from the factory, school, or barracks, a day in the country for all those young pioneers, kindergarten Octobrists, Komsomol kids, Party members, and plain, ordinary working folks.

Now there is just us. As we get closer, the site appears abandoned, the route to its empty parking lot blocked off by a needlessly locked gate, a gate without fences.

To reach the first, and newest, part of the shrine, the Political History Museum, it is necessary to climb up a slight slope. At one time, this must have been a reminder to visitors that to be worthy of their destination they were expected to elevate themselves to some higher level, an impression that the temple-like architecture of the museum was clearly designed to reinforce. It fails. Thrown up, with exquisite timing, in the later Gorbachev era, the building would have embarrassed Albert Speer. It is a gimcrack Parthenon, worthy only of some Neanderthal Olympus. Grass now peeps through the cracks of its empty, stone steps, but an open door signals that the faithful are still welcome.

They are not, however, expected. My wife and I are the only visitors. Sold our tickets by an astonished attendant, we walk up a sweeping staircase past a large statue of a pensive-looking Lenin. Another attendant switches on a wind machine and a red flag begins to flutter behind the marble revolutionary. As we reach the top of the stairs, the machine is turned off. It is a pattern that is repeated in each exhibit room. On our approach, an attendant darts ahead to switch on the lights, and on our departure the room is plunged back into darkness. Lenin used to say that Communism was "Soviet power plus electrification." It is a mark of progress that his successors have to contend with utility bills.

The exhibits themselves are worthy of that most bureaucratic of revolutions, production statistics, in addition to pamphlets, philosophical treatises, and proclamations. There are also some banners and photographs of the Communist leadership looking like Communists should, sullen, discontented, and filled with self-importance. Of the camps, the prisons, the mass graves, the famines, the torture chambers, there is nothing.

It is a disgusting omission, all the more so in an institution that is funded by the Russian state, but it is also typical of a country where there is no shared understanding of Communism's savage history. When the Soviets fell, too many of their myths were allowed to survive. An exhausted people and a compromised governing class had no wish to examine the past, preferring instead to reveal a few glimpses here, an archive or two there. The spirits of the gulag dead were to be appeased by no more than a few half-measures.

So, it should be no surprise that when, in 1994, the decision was taken to empty out Lenin's old Kremlin apartment (it had been a tourist attraction for privileged visitors during the Soviet era), the contents were neither destroyed nor placed in context in some proper place. Instead, they were taken to quiet, damp Gorki Leninskiye and dumped not far from the Political History Museum, in one of the original buildings of the Morozov estate, waiting, perhaps, for better days — out of sight, but not, quite, out of mind.

To reach this building, one must trek through silent woodland with only the crows for company. Unlike in the years of more closely shepherded visits, there are few signs to point the way, but another helpful Lenin (red granite this time and hoisted, appropriately enough, on the shoulders of the proletariat) tells us that we are on the right track. It is not a long walk, fifteen, twenty minutes at the most, and at the end of it we are back in the early Soviet era.

"It was all moved, almost overnight: 40,000 objects put into trucks and not even catalogued," the attendant explains, shocked by the sacrilege. She is a pleasant, educated woman, one of those intellectuals caught on just the wrong side of a changed Russia, with a degree, perhaps, in Marxism-Leninism and, maybe, a doctoral dissertation on some forgotten revolutionary. Too rooted, it seems, in the old order to adapt to or even understand the new one, she prefers to recreate the past, cataloguing, listing, and displaying the relics that she so loves, comfortable in this building that no one comes to visit, a place where it is still January 21, 1924, and where every clock is stopped, literally, at the moment of Lenin's death.

And what a treasure trove there is to see, souvenirs of the public man (complete with wall maps of the young Soviet Republic, the telephones, the long meeting table) and the private. We see Lenin's furniture, his bed (and, in a separate room, that of his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, dull, shrill, and neglected, a Rodham avant la lettre). Wait, there's more. Lenin's desk! Lenin's piano! Krupskaya's briefcase! A monkey bust from Armand Hammer! There is not much on the walls: a family photograph here, a pin-up of Marx there, but little else. We are led down corridors deep into the labyrinth of Leninist myth, into the realm of an ascetic philosopher-king. "He could read six hundred pages a day!" There are books everywhere, turgid treatises in plain brown covers, with broken spines, underscored, and filled with scrawled commentary, the giveaway spoor of somebody who had spent too much time in libraries.

The kitchen and dining room feature utilitarian furniture, mismatched cutlery, and a few old pots and pans. The message is clear, and false; we are told that the plain-living Lenin shared the tough times endured by the starving Russia of the early 1920s. That the always well-fed Soviet leader saw famine as just another political weapon ("Desperate hunger will give us a mood among the broad peasant masses that will guarantee us [their] sympathy … or at least their neutrality") goes unmentioned. There is no place here for the real man, the cynical murderer and didactic thief who destroyed a civilization.

No, the Lenin that haunts these strange, transplanted rooms is the Lenin of our guide's Soviet childhood; it is the Lenin of legend, the hero of the Finland Station, the austere visionary. And this, sadly, may be the Lenin of Russia's immediate future. Rather than reckoning with the past, Vladimir Putin is trying conceal it under the façade of a unifying national narrative, a narrative that will include, he says, "the best" from the Soviet years, a narrative that may well devote more time to the 40,000 objects in Lenin's apartment than the more than 20 million killed in Lenin's dystopia.

In the end, President Putin will probably be unsuccessful. The ghosts of the past will not be so easily exorcized. In the meantime, the shrine at Gorki Leninskiye will endure, dishonest and misleading, funded by the state but abandoned by its worshipers; in its own way, a fitting memorial to a god that failed.

Gulag Amazonia

Amazons of the Avant-Garde

National Review Online, October  22, 2000

Long, long before the NEA's chocolate-smearing Karen Finley, there was Natalia Goncharova. Tall, thin, and living in sin, the occasionally cross-dressing Natalia managed to scandalize turn-of-the-century St. Petersburg. She would cover her body with daubs and designs, a ziggurat, perhaps for the face, naughty drawings (why not?) for her breasts. Imperial Russia was not quite ready for this. Goncharova's "Pink Lantern" cabaret performances ended in riots, and her paintings were condemned as sacrilegious and obscene. They were neither. And, as we are reminded by a current exhibition at New York's Guggenheim Museum, in yet another contrast with the Finleys of today, her work was often very good. The exhibition, "Amazons of the Avant-Garde," is dedicated to Goncharova and five other women artists of early Twentieth Century Russia, Olga Rozanova, Liubov Popova, Alexandra Exter, Varvara Stepanova, and Nadezhda Udaltsova.

Mercifully, despite its name, the show is no work of feminist revisionism. The description of these painters as "Amazons" dates from their own era. It is a quote lifted from the writings of one of their (male) contemporaries. Despite this, Goncharova and her friends were not generally seen as specifically "female" artists. Nor did they seem to have viewed themselves in that way, a dereliction of duty that appears to have disappointed Charlotte Douglas, one of the contributors to the book that accompanies the Guggenheim show. As Ms. Douglas sadly explains, the Amazons " accepted and worked almost completely within the male exhibition-and-sales paradigm." What vulgarity. Ladies, presumably, are not expected to do anything as grubby as selling their paintings. Worse, these traitors to their sex "considered themselves artists first…In this, a gendered identity seems to have played hardly any role at all." How disgraceful.

What the exhibition does do, however, is remind us yet again of the vibrancy of the late-Romanov period, a time too often characterized as a Lara's theme park of troikas, palaces, and pre-industrial peasantry. In reality, it was an age of rapid, and generally positive, economic and social change, and it had the art to match. Strikingly, for those of us used to the Soviet-nurtured notion of Russian "otherness" it was a culture that, at least in its avant-garde, played a full part in the wider European cultural scene.

The Amazons traveled in France and Italy. They moved in the same circles as Picasso, Braque, and Leger. Their art reflects this. There are experiments in Futurism, Rayonnism and Cubism, all part of a dialog with their counterparts in the West. Often, delightfully, these are combined with elements of the painters' own national traditions. In Goncharova's marvelous "Mowers," we see hints not only of Gauguin, but also of Russian vernacular lubok prints, while her "Evangelists" owe an obvious debt to the icon painting of earlier generations.

But tradition was not really where the Amazons' interests lay. In keeping with the restless spirit of their age they wanted to be innovators, increasingly testing the limits of abstraction along with fellow members of the Russian avant-garde, if sometimes a little derivatively. Some of Olga Rozanova's Suprematist works of 1916 add little to what Kasimir Malevich was doing a year or so before. On the other hand her extraordinary "Green Stripe" (1917) anticipates Mark Rothko's color fields by more than thirty years.

1917, of course, was also the year of the Bolshevik Revolution. This was no coincidence. The red flag and the Green Stripe were connected, both of them symptoms of the collapse in the existing economic, political, and cultural order. It should be no surprise that the Amazons rallied in support of the Communists. For years, they had, like many others in the world of Russian arts, spouted a hysterical Susan Sarandon-style leftism. They saw themselves as part of a more general assault on the ancien régime. These people may have drawn on the rich resources of Russia's heritage, but, when the time came, they were quite prepared to join in its destruction.

Given this political orientation, and the usefully dehumanizing Implications of the Russian avant-garde's "scientific" view of painting, this was welcome support for Lenin's new administration. The parallels with Soviet ideology were obvious. Both these artists and the revolutionary authorities wanted an absolute break with the past. They were determined to impose their own supposedly scientific rules, whether it be at the easel or on the population. The squares, circles, and triangles of the new art became the typeface of the new regime.

To artists this was heady, flattering stuff. Now they could live their revolutionary dream, remaking society on the streets as well as on canvas. To her frustration, Natalia Goncharova was out of the country, but the other Amazons were quick to take up jobs within the new system. They were content, it would appear, to support the work of a government that was already beginning to slaughter any possible opponents including, in the case of Nadezhda Udaltsova, her father. Interestingly, it was not a government that Goncharova was ever to see at first hand. She continued to proclaim leftist beliefs, but at a safe distance. She never returned to the Soviet motherland, opting instead for the West and relative obscurity. It was a wise choice.

Staying in Russia, however, was not. Popova and Rozanova were both to perish of ill-health within a tragically short time, victims of the terrible living conditions that prevailed in the early Bolshevik years. Exter got out in 1924, but, as an emigre, was never to recapture her former glory. Udaltsova, who should have known better, persevered in the workers' paradise, even managing to survive the execution of her husband in 1938. She lingered on, miserably poor, into the Khrushchev years. Stepanova enjoyed a relatively successful career in the USSR, at least for a while, as a propagandist for the regimes of both Lenin and Stalin. However, as Party orthodoxy changed away from her own brand, she found herself increasingly marginalized. Unlike so many discarded activists, however, she avoided the Gulag and died, largely forgotten, but untouched, in 1958.

If there is a certain sadness about this fascinating show, it is because it is a tale of six tremendously talented individuals, each of whose lives were to end in failure, mediocrity and waste. Like many of the cruelest tragedies, it was, at least in part, self-inflicted. It is an irony apparently too awkward to be addressed at the exhibition, but each of these women played a part in the building of the system that was to ruin their lives. In a way they were even lucky. They died in their beds, and in their art they at least have a monument. Millions of Russians were not so fortunate.

This raises another question. It is not a comparison that you will find made at the Guggenheim, but were its Amazons really so morally different from Leni Riefenstahl, the warrior queen of another avant-garde, that of Hitler's Germany? Goncharova may have been a cheerleader from the sidelines, but the other Amazons were active participants in the cultural support system of a Soviet regime that was murderous from the start. Like Riefenstahl, they were brilliant innovators whose talents were put to the work in the creation of a vicious totalitarian state. And so, just as Leni Riefenstahl's work, however spectacular, can never, quite, avoid the stink of Auschwitz, nor should the art of the Amazons be shown without any reference to its Gulag taint.

Sadly, in this exhibition, the Guggenheim is doing just that.

Are You Experienced?

National Review Online, August 27, 2000

© Andrew Stuttaford

"Turn left on Mercer and drive for a few blocks. What you are looking for is the blob at the bottom of the Space Needle." My friend Steve may not be an architect, but he knows a blob when he sees one. A few years ago Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen asked Frank Gehry, the creator of the Guggenheim's extraordinary Bilbao extension, to build him a "swoopy" building for Seattle's new rock 'n' roll museum. What he got was a blob. It sits, shining in its multicolored aluminum skin, a crushed jelly-mold duomo. Its campanile, the Space Needle, is all Jetsons geometry, the product of a time when we thought the 21st century would be straight lines, monorails, and Mission Control order. Now that we are arriving there, we believe in a crumpled, curvier, softer future, more Barbarella than Bauhaus, an age, it seems, when gee-whiz museums feature not atom science, but Atomic Rooster.

As blobs go it's impressive, but I'm not sure that Mr. Gehry's new building is quite as innovative as Paul Allen might have hoped. In the aftermath of Bilbao, the Seattle museum looks suspiciously like a retread, a scrunched-up re-run of the earlier Spanish triumph. Maybe this is only justice, as the idea of a rock 'n' roll museum is not exactly novel either. As miffed folk in Ohio will be pointing out, they've had one in Cleveland for a few years now. Its architect, I. M. Pei, was also associated with a dramatic extension to an existing museum, in his case a pyramid at the Louvre. Mr. Pei's construction is meant to be reminiscent of a turntable, Frank Gehry's is said to be inspired by one of Jimi Hendrix's smashed guitars. The two also share something else much more significant: the problem that rock music is a difficult subject for a museum.

Rock music, any music, is about the moment, the moment that may become a memory. It's that rush as an old familiar riff slides out of the speaker, or the dawning excitement one minute, two minutes into a song, when you realize that this new band is very, very good. And it's nostalgia too. There's a sweet pleasure in listening to those tunes that take you back to your first kiss (Rod Stewart, I'm afraid), university days, a trip abroad, or even that one glorious, delirious night in a Tennessee bar. It's the memories, the associations, and, of course, the sheer joy of the music itself that count. Anything else, like the packaging we used to have on CDs, is just so much clutter. Sure, as VH1's current programming shows, the story of rock 'n' roll can be interesting, but its artifacts, unfortunately, are not. Be warned: The Seattle museum has 80,000. It's the Hard Rock Cafe, but with less emphasis on the cheeseburgers.

There are guitars, hundreds of them, some in pieces (thanks, Jimi!), but most are intact, battered, shiny, painted, Gibson, Fender, and Les Paul, the guitars of the famous, the guitars of the obscure. Near the entrance, there is even a sculptured cascade of guitars. Silent, all these instruments are dull, lifeless totems. Like the stuffed animals in our more depressing natural-history museums, there's not a lot of point to them. It's the same way with the museum's prize architectural exhibit, preserved like the Temple of Dendur in New York's Met, the wooden arch that once led to Moe's Mo' Roc' n Cafe (Seattle, 1994-97) or the tatty finery of bygone rock stars (Janis's feather boa, Heart's sort-of-medieval gowns). I mean, who cares? Only the posters and handbills, visual art of a sort, are really still worth a look, miniature reflections of their respective eras: simple text from the plain Jane 1950s, Haight-Ashbury rococo, the angry sub-Constructivism of punk.

Luckily, however, you get more for your $19.95 than this. Sensing, perhaps, that these exhibits might not quite make it into the Tate, Mr. Allen and his team seem hesitant about calling their blob a museum. No, formally, it is an "experience," the "Experience Music Project" (EMP). The name, of course, is a tribute to Jimi Hendrix, a Seattle native and an idol of the software billionaire's, but it also reflects the fact that this display is (probably inevitably, in a project funded by the new economy) "interactive." Now, when I was a boy an "interactive" (not that we used the word) museum exhibit meant pressing some button on a dingy control panel. A number of bulbs would light up, and you would know just a little bit more about the circulation of the blood or the habitats of some dreary animal. Or you wouldn't. Normally several of the bulbs were out, and to your surprise you would discover that no corpuscle ever reached the foot or that the rabbit was extinct.

We have moved on. The EMP features a "sound lab" which "invites your inner musician to come out and play." We all have one, apparently. My inner musician joined the crowd pounding the "Jam-O-Drum" (it generates rhythms and colors) a few times and made a fool of itself on some machine designed to show that any idiot can play the first few chords of Louie, Louie within a few minutes. Not this idiot, apparently.

The inner egomaniac, meanwhile, could be tempted by "On Stage," a high-tech version of the air guitar you used to play (admit it). The visitor is taken to perform in a virtual arena "complete with smoke, hot lights and screaming fans." The instruments are programmed so that even an novice can "play," and "play" the novices did. Those standing in the real and very long line outside could watch their virtual show on closed- circuit TV.

Then there's MEG, the "Museum Exhibit Guide," an extraordinary upgrade of the battered cassette players that are most galleries' "audio tour." MEG is a device that looks a little like a tricorder from the old Star Trek. Point it at many of the exhibits and a menu will pop up, offering much, much more detailed information, often in the shape of oral history and, crucially, snatches of song. It does its best to bring those dead guitars, and the EMP, to life. Rock 'n' roll nerds can even bookmark areas of particular fascination and, using the ticket I.D. number, download yet more material onto their PCs when they get home to their darkened bedrooms.

Technologically, it's spectacular. It's also spectacularly stupid.

All these megabytes to research Megadeth? Conservatives will, correctly, see the EMP as yet more evidence of a dumbed-down society, but they should get some comfort from the fact that in its vaguely new-agey way, the EMP is a squeaky-clean, family-values sort of place. Much of the interior may be rough and unfinished — an attempt, we're told, to recreate the feel of a rock venue — but it fails. This is the rock in Norman Rockwell. There's no spilled beer, vomit, or smell of reefer. It's "smoke-free." Parents and children wander round together, bland in their khaki shorts and pale polos, checking out the B*tthole Surfers' memorabilia together. The heart of the building, its "gathering place [and] personification," a cavernous space, 85 feet tall at its highest, is even described as a church, the "Sky Church." (Well, I did say new-agey.) EMP is also patriotic — British music hardly rates a mention. Those Beatles will never catch on.

Ultimately, EMP is absurd, of course, a ludicrous allocation of $240 million, but so what? There's no need to worry about that. It was Paul Allen's money, his to spend how he wanted, a great, glorious self-indulgence, his reward to himself for entrepreneurial success. And yes, his museum may be a poor tribute to rock 'n' roll, but as an advertisement for the wild energy of the free market, it's right up there, right at the top of the charts.

Feywatch

The Frick Collection, New York City: Victorian Fairy Painting 

National Review, December 21, 1998

Richard Dadd: The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke (Detail)

CONFOUND Victoria, and the slimy inhibitions/She loosed on all us Anglo-Saxon creatures!" That was what the New England poetess Amy Lowell thought back in the 1920s. To judge by a fascinating exhibition (and the response to it) currently on view at New York's Frick Collection, hers is an opinion still with us today. For the Victorian era is the foundation of our town, and, as such, it has now become yet another battleground in the culture wars. Bring the Victorians down to our level, and we can reassure ourselves that our shambles of a society is really not that bad.

The exhibition is called "Victorian Fairy Painting" and it is dedicated to our tiny fluttering friends. The little people hover, frolic, and entice in canvas after canvas, along with a supporting cast of goblins, elves, and imps.

John Anster Fitzgerald: The Captive Robin

Strange to us, yes, but in their mid-Victorian heyday, these pictures were popular, in tune with their era. According to reviews of this show, they are also in tune with our own age. Writing in The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl notes that "this stuff. . . feels right on time for us." Leslie Camhi at the Village Voice likewise uses the fairies to admit the Victorians to our own idiot carnival. Both periods, apparently, have "seen the revival of druidism, crystal worship, and a host of ancient spiritual practices."

So were the Victorians old-time New Agers? Writing In New York magazine, Mark Stevens claims that the Victorian interest in the occult "honored what could not be explained or ruled." I doubt it. The New Age rejection of the scientific method would have appalled a nineteenth-century culture obsessed with the search for explanations and rules. With their relatively primitive science, the Victorians may have come to some loopy conclusions, but they were at least trying to get at the truth.

Yes, that's right, the truth. Unlike many of us post-moderns, the Victorians believed in an objective truth. But not, for the most part, in fairies. Even in art. To get the supposed pixiemania in proportion, take a glance, for instance, at the leading paintings of the 1846 Royal Academy Exhibition. They're a down-to-earth lot, far from any enchanted glades. Highlights include Mulready's Choosing the Wedding gown, four animal pictures by Landseer, and Redgrave's thrilling Sunday Morning—The Walk from Church.

It is no coincidence that a number of the most striking works on display at the Frick are by painters who were outsiders. The greatest of them all, Richard Dadd, murdered his father. His obsessively detailed masterpiece. The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke, was the product of nine years' work in a lunatic asylum. That's also where Charles Doyle (father of the creator of Sherlock Holmes) ended up. His Self Portrait, A Meditation, shows a man all too aware that the spirits surrounding him are the product of a troubled mind.

Chatles Doyle: Self-Portrait, A Meditation

And they were certainly nothing to do with pollution. In a Sierra Club twitch, the Frick tries to explain the fairy paintings as "an escape from the grim elements of an industrial society." Not really. Arcadian fantasy had been around long before the factories of Victorian England. It is a nice irony, however, that the great engineer lsambard Kingdom Brunel was the man responsible for commissioning the only fairy painting by Queen Victoria's favorite artist, Edwin Landseer. Actually, be wanted a Shakespearean theme for his dining room. What he got was A Midsummer Night's Dream, featuring a sultry Titania, and Bottom, of course.

Sir Edwin Landseer: Scene From 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'

In fact, quite a number of bottoms. Offbeat nudity was a good part of this genre's appeal—both at the time and to later critics eager to show that the nasty Victorians were both repressed and (bonus!) perverse. To Mr. Schjeldahl these paintings exemplify "Anglo-sexual hysteria." More cautiously, the Frick's own introduction to the show refers to an "indulgence of new attitudes towards sex." "Hysteria," a "new attitude"? Nudie pics were popular long before the appearance of the fey babes now tumbling along the walls of the Frick.

Tumbling, one must admit, in a way not normally associated with Victorian Britain. Yet this was a Britain where John Simmons's Titania, a lissome blonde vaguely draped in the most diaphanous of robes, could be displayed without scandal. For that, thank the butterfly wings sprouting from the fairy queen's shoulders. They took Titania out of the real world and transformed her into something too ethereal for the grubby business of sex. To Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times, all this is "a form of collective sexual denial that is a root of the phrase 'there'll always be in England."

John Simmons: Titania

Oh, come on (full disclosure: I'm English). Foxy fairies were just an update of an old trick. Earlier artists had used "classical" themes (a "Venus" here, a "Sabine Woman" there) in much the same way. Ultimately, these paintings were just about fun. As Charles Dickens understood, "Fairy tales should he respected. … A nation without fancy, without some romance, never did, never can, never will, hold a great place under the sun." Sentimental and coy they may have been, but to most of their fans, the fairies were just otherworldly entertainment, a very small part of a very rich culture, little more than the science fiction of an era when imagination was lagging behind technology.

If we try to project out own obsessions onto them, it is we, not the Victorians, who are in Never-Never Land.

Joseph Noel Paton: The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania (detail)

A Hemp Museum

National Review, June 3, 1996 

Cannabis  Museum, May 1996  © Andrew Stuttaford

The streets of London, they used to say, were paved with gold. Maybe that is true of the City, the British capital's financial district, but take a walk five minutes to the east, to Shoreditch, and the surroundings are more mundane. Here you will find a theme park of pre-Thatcher Britain. The pub at the end of Redchurch Street is no exception. A drab spot despite its exotic dancer, the White Horse sports a cautious sign noting that Shakespeare is reputed to have drunk there. But if the White Horse is timelessly East End, the East End is itself changing. Not so long ago Redchurch Street was part of that old stereotypical London of the Ealing comedies and the kindly bobby. Now it is also home to a mosque, a Bengali grocery store, and, most recently, a cannabis museum. Located in a nondescript office building, the museum was opened amid some fanfare in April. Howard Marks—a graduate of both Balliol College, Oxford (politics, philosophy, and economics), and the American prison system (cannabis smuggling)—was the guest of honor. The press came, and so did the police. There are, of course, drug laws in Britain, and a wide range of "hemp" products was on display. Hemp? The police were wise to that alias. Hemp is also known as Cannabis sativa, a name it received, somewhat alarmingly, from the Emperor Nero's surgeon. No contraband was found, however. The hemp jeans passed muster. Even the revolting "Hemp 9," a "high energy protein mixed seed bar," was allowed. British law permits the manufacture of hemp products so long as they contain no more than 0.3 per cent tetrahydrocannabinol, hemp's narcotic element. Smoking a hemp T-shirt would be a waste of time; even Bill Clinton could inhale.

The police left satisfied, as well they might. For Redchurch Street is the acceptable face of cannabis. Part Ripley (George Washington grew it! Queen Victoria took it!), part agitprop vehicle, the museum is relentlessly upbeat. It is, after all, run by CHIC, the Cannabis and Hemp Information Club. The aim is to "inform and educate people about the history and many uses of this incredibly versatile plant."

Cheery, if occasionally misspelt (a side effect?), posters accentuate the positive. Cannabis, it seems, can be turned into mighty ropes, excellent paper, and an ecologically sound fuel. It can be used to treat glaucoma and relieve the nausea associated with chemotherapy. Fans of the former British foreign minister will be glad to know that cannabis "hurd" (its inner stalk) can be mixed with lime and water to produce a building material more durable than concrete. Finally, and this is a clinching argument in an era of anxious English mealtimes, hemp might make a healthier animal feed. Given that Britain's maddened cattle seem to have been subsisting on abattoir sweepings, this must be right. There have, after all, been no cases of stoned-cow disease.

Cannabis Museum, May, 1996 @ Andrew Stuttaford

CHIC makes an impressive case. Cannabis does indeed seem "incredibly versatile." So versatile, in fact, that visitors may feel a vague sense of resentment against this leafy overachiever—until, that is, they discover its little weakness. Cannabis is, as one display notes, also "a social intoxicant," safer perhaps than some of those available at the White Horse, but an intoxicant nonetheless.

And this, of course, is the source of the problem. It is the intoxication that enrages an officialdom that once warned (in a possibly misguided approach), that cannabis could lead to "weird orgies, wild parties, and unleashed passions." It is the intoxication that interests users. No one would risk jail time for something that was just a building material. It is unlikely that there will ever be, say, a stucco museum on Redchurch Street. With consumers enthusiastic and governments appalled, disaster was inevitable.

Cannabis Museum, May 1996  © Andrew Stuttaford

Sure enough, the saddest section of the exhibit describes the progress of the American war against cannabis, a miserable saga of mounting ferocity and futility. Prison photographs of the detained line the walls. They pose awkwardly with their families, standing in front of backdrops painted to give an illusion of somewhere, anywhere, other than the penitentiary. The faces, carefully selected no doubt, look innocent, and the injustice on display appears horrifying.

Wisely, perhaps, there is no discussion of cannabis's rougher associates: London will have to wait a while for a crack museum. The connection between the use of cannabis and of other drugs is never explored. Does one lead inexorably to the other, or are rising rates of hard-drug consumption an inevitable consequence of prohibition? NR discussed these sorts of issues a few weeks ago, but its rational approach would not win many friends in Redchurch Street. The museum's amiable staff may have been born too late for Woodstock, but they are hippies pur et dur, albeit with a Nineties twist: "Please respect our No Smoking policy."

Hippies were never too keen on logic. The positive impact of much of the exhibit begins to dissipate the moment one is told that smoking grass is part of the "permaculture." Indian spirituality makes its inevitable appearance. Wasn't that a poster of Ganesha, elephant god and popular head-shop deity, on the wall? Zany politics are also on view, most prominently in the shape of a large, unfinished, papier mâché display, in which a clumsily executed factory appeared to be menacing idyllic pasture. As artworks go, it was a shambles, but the message was clear: Industry is bad. We need to return to a simpler life, and hemp would show the way. "Industry" had, it was argued, played no small part in the banning of cannabis in the first place. There had, surprise, been a conspiracy. DuPont, no less, had been a force behind the original anti-cannabis legislation for commercial motives of its own (bleaching chemicals for pulp—it's a long story). As CHIC explains, "It is only when governments stop protecting the interests of the multinationals that we will be free to benefit fully from cannabis."

Well, maybe, but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the museum's case for cannabis is getting muddled at this point. Some environmentally flavored Marxism seems to have been thrown into the mix. It does not belong there. At its core the argument for legalizing cannabis ought to rest on a fairly restrictive view of the rights and capabilities of government. This is not an approach normally associated with the paranoid Left—or the EPA, for that matter. A commissar is still a commissar, even if he does drugs.

Maybe this is just carping and the confusion is to be expected. We live, after all, in an absurd time, when even the medicinal use of cannabis is prohibited. An honest discussion of drug policy seems all but impossible. The Cannabis Museum does at least raise some serious questions. Perhaps it is too much to expect more. Since only the bravest politician will question prohibition, debate has, with notable exceptions, become the preserve of the eccentric and the obsessed. Meanwhile, drug-related problems worsen and the official approach will continue unaltered, unsuccessful and ugly.

Sadly, it will take more than CHIC to change this.