Author: Michael Chappell

Blouin Art Market Info is reporting this morning on the effect of Brexit in the world’s art market. The opinions cited range from ‘unclear’ to ‘business as usual’. It is difficult to read into these responses anything approaching the ‘remain’ camp’s sky is falling, immediate and gruesome end of life as we know it predictions.

What we’ve seen, and what soon to be former Prime Minister David Cameron certainly should have seen, is a desire on the part of a surprising majority of the electorate to be shed of yet more government, and a desire for a pared-back government to be- what a surprise!- responsive to and working in consonance with its constituency.

With European financial and currency markets taking an initial dive, and then fairly quickly bouncing back, the casualties amidst all of this appear predominantly to be entrenched politicos in Great Britain, and, if Brexit is contagious, which seems likely, there should deservedly be amongst most senior European government  leaders, and all Brussels functionaries, a rapid movement toward updating their CV’s and finding other work before being turned out en masse.

With that query, everyone in England beyond the age of three would realize that the speaker was about to pour tea. Since the early years of the 19^th century, tea service would have been the province of the lady of the house who was invariably wife and mother, perhaps not assisted, as would have been de rigueur a generation earlier, by a footman in livery to pass and carry.

It seems terribly formal all of this, but the early years of the 19^th century saw the proliferation of a middle class, wealthy by the standards of today, but who nevertheless were without the army of servants that attended the aristocrats of an earlier day. That this lack of human buffers in the form of servants bred an informality in domestic comportment is easy to understand- one’s behavior was less driven by a fear of what the butler saw.

As intended- sofa table in front of a settee, with a silver tea urn.

As with so much else, change in circumstance, and change in social convention, likewise wrought a change- actually a development- in accoutrement. One such development was the sofa table, the ubiquitous element of every drawing room by the end of the first quarter of the 19^th century. Designed to be placed in front of a sofa, it was of a height to allow for the pouring and service of tea while the hostess herself was conveniently, and demurely, seated. With parlour chairs near about easily pulled up to the sofa table, several people at once would be able to enjoy the late afternoon staple it would become by the end of the century. As it was invariably meant to float in front of a sofa, the sofa table is double sided, often with working drawers, meant originally to contain table linens and serviettes. Opposite the ‘business’ side are generally faux drawers, meant to provide a pleasing aspect to the piece for those viewing it from the front.

As used- behind a sofa, a casual bookshelf. Courtesy of Colefax and Fowler.

In the 20^th century, though, the fashion gradually changed for low tables, so-called ‘coffee’ tables, to be placed in front of the sofa. Style of dress, and style of comportment, changed and the proliferation of soft furnishings made it possible to lounge about, comfortably bend over, and pick up a book, and set down a cup of coffee, cocktail glass, or champagne flute.

The sofa table, then, migrated to the rear of the sofa, serving most typically now as the support for a table lamp or two to provide illumination for those seated in front of it, and the side with the faux drawers, now of even less use than before, placed against the sofa. A side note- this now typical placement has, a century or so on, resulted in very many sofa tables sun faded on their ‘business’ side, but shielded from sunlight, retaining something close to their original, native colour on the reverse.

For all Americans, it is right and proper to stand with Orlando, and understand that the gay community there has, as have gays and lesbians worldwide, been the target of an unreasoning hatred and discrimination that continues to result in violent death.

While the widespread expressions of sympathy are certainly appropriate and well-meant, they do at their core very little to counter the larger issue- that hatred and violence in America is institutionalized, and that a hardcore of our citizenry, wrapping themselves in the Constitution, allow the public sales of weapons that serve no purpose than to kill our innocent fellows.

Xenophobic rhetoric does nothing but add to this climate of hate which, in this most recent incident, the gay and lesbian community has borne the brunt, but what of Sandy Hook? What of Virginia Tech? Terror was wrought by those whose unbalanced states of mind was given a means to an end by killing machines in the form of assault weapons easily obtained.

I grew up in a sporting family, where shotguns and rifles were around and used to hunt game. As a child, precedent to obtaining my first hunting license, I attended, along with my fellows, a hunter safety course prepared and sanctioned by the National Rifle Association. The takeaway from this course was- guns are lethal. There was no underlying political message, nothing to the effect that Americans have a sacred right to possess an assault rifle, an instrument of terror that, if used in its prescribed manner, could kill dozens of people with one sustained pull of the trigger.

What’s happened? Why do we now feel the political necessity to defend and continue without remorse to legally sanction the ease with which we are able to kill one another?

No one would deny the existence of enemies outside our borders, who, once inside, would seek to do harm. But that is beside the immediate point- what happened in Orlando, no matter how the story is spun, was mass murder committed with firearms purchased legally in this country.

The flags will soon be flown at full staff, the vigils will cease, and the gay freedom flag will be less prominent on social media. What will remain, though, unaffected by grief and mourning, is the ability to purchase assault rifles and the odds-on certainty of another Orlando.

The Tremper children- Elsie, Carson, Tobin, and Brycen- helping their elderly great uncle clean off family grave markers at Belmont Memorial Park in Fresno.

At the behest of my mother, this last weekend we went around to the local graveyards containing the mortal remains of past generations of family members. This was surprising, as my mother, heretofore, has not been a hunter of tombs, but with my eldest nephew- her grandson- and his four children- her great grandchildren- in tow, we set out.

Surprising, too, that my great nieces and nephews, ages 12, 9, 7, and 5 greatly enjoyed themselves. Mind you, they didn’t ask penetrating questions about their local forebears, but that this was an all-day event involving 4 cemeteries and that they helped clean and decorate every single family grave marker- well, let’s say that by at least this objective measure, they were engaged with what went on.

Me, too. Some of the graves I hadn’t been to in nearly 50 years, but in my very young life, it was with my own grandmother an annual event. She was a tiny and rather round lady, but she nevertheless was able to make and place a floral display on every marker. And no silk flowers she. Her own bountiful flower garden provided ample blooms, making before we set out the trunk of my grandfather’s Oldsmobile 98 a sight to behold.

Funny with all this, though, given the business we’re in, I think quite a bit differently about heritage. On the one hand, I value it and the material culture that is the product of heritage. On the other, I realize that we are all of us mortal, and that generations and the memory of man pass quickly. Consequently, when I see grave markers that were intended to if not to actually immortalize then to at least lionize and extend the  mortality of those memorialized I realize how ultimately futile the effort is. When we decorated the grave of my great great grandmother, whose memory was sacred to my own grandmother, whose memory is sacred to me, it was sad to see that it was the only grave nearabouts that was decorated.  My great great grandmother, a remarkable woman who crossed the continent with her husband in a wagon pulled by a single yoke of oxen, whose memory has by now nearly faded into the mists of time.

Or has it? With our jaunt to the graveyards last Saturday, the most recent generation of my family will now have some sense of their own heritage. What will it gain them, I wonder? It might only be the prospect of an event occurring no more than annually, performed out of some vague sense of obligation to someone they once knew and esteemed. Perhaps though it will also lend their lives a sense of greater depth and meaning, with the knowledge that their here and now was at least partly formed by others known to them at a remove of sometimes a number of generations. Perhaps this will then form something of a larger philosophy, that in fact they are connected with a world broader and more significant than those satisfactions immediately gained by watching TV or playing video games or sending text messages.

Still not so old and not so jaded- no chortling from the back of the house- but where I find Jesse Helms’ tirade about the work of Robert Mapplethorpe an anachronism from the benighted days of the Moral Majority, Mapplethorpe’s work itself is as freshly, vivaciously intense now as it was- my goodness- 40 years ago. Astonishing, isn’t it?, how and what achieves canonical status, while its criticism becomes period buffoonery.

Initially, my enjoyment of the new documentary ‘Mapplethorpe: Just look at the pictures’ was as it served primarily a nostalgic walk down my own memory lane. Too many paid the price for the gay hedonism of the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, but no one who’s honest would say it wasn’t fun, and it was. Senator Helms castigation of Mapplethorpe’s work, with his ‘Just look at the pictures!’ on the floor of the US senate a ranting, prima facie indictment of the photographs beyond which, he reasonably assumed, no further discussion was necessary, indicates his place in a terrifyingly marginal world much more limited, ironically, in its outlook and experience than the one he sought to demonize.

The fact is, gay sex was then, in the early years of liberation, overwhelming celebratory, and I just don’t see any of the Mapplethorpe images, whether erotic or not, anything less than ecstatic. And if that ecstasy and celebration spilled over into what one might euphemistically term some of the byways of sexual expression why, after centuries of repression, would one expect anything else?

Keith and I had a vague connection with Mapplethorpe, and indeed yet maintain a friendship on social media with mutual acquaintance ‘That Boy’ Peter Berlin, himself interviewed for the documentary. Both though, were successful in their lifetimes as flagrant self promoters, but pulchritude wanes, and Peter has seen a revolution of the clock hands- as have I- a very many times. This sounds as though I am implying that Mapplethorpe’s images are, with his death in1989, trapped in time, representative only of the era in which they were taken, and, frankly, that’s not the case. Mapplethorpe wasn’t a tremendous photographic technician. Indeed, he required a substantial amount of assistance in the darkroom and processing to yield the types of images his best work represents. But with all that, he was a master at framing a picture and selecting subject matter, with his work, even his still lives, maintaining an energy that lifts the images out of any time.  We know that, because we can still take Senator Helms’ cue- ‘Just look at the pictures!’ Old and jaded I may be- ‘may be’ I said- but looking at Mapplethorpe’s work yet remains a pure pleasure.

‘Mapplethorpe-“Just look at the pictures!”’ on HBO Documentaries

‘Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium’ at the Getty Center, through July 31, 2016