John Wyver writes: welcome to the fifth Postcard (with two more scheduled) from my and my wife Clare Paterson’s recent mid-west road trip, in this case embracing our visits, for two nights in each city, to Indianapolis and St Louis. The first four Postcards are here, here, here and here.
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John Wyver writes: with apologies for the hiatus in delivering these, welcome to the fourth Postcard from the American road trip that my wife Clare Paterson and I recently took across the mid-west. The first three Postcards are here, here and here.
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John Wyver writes: We are on the road! Having left Chicago, we drove to Fort Wayne and Sidney, Ohio (day one), on to Columbus, Ohio (day two) and then to Columbus, Indiana (day three). Not that it’s been entirely great, although it very much mostly has. First off, we had such a struggle picking up our Avis rental Toyota Rav4 at O’Hare; then there were problems with the hired satnav, which failed to charge in-car. So by mid-afternoon, deep in rural Ohio, we were relying on a paper map that I’d brought with me as a kind of totemic throwback.
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John Wyver writes: A second missive from the mid-West, following on from Postcard from Chicago, part one. And let me begin with a tale of two campuses (campi?). One morning this past I explored the low-level lay-out of the Illinois Institute of Technology, conceived and begun by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the immediate post-war years. It’s a seductive modern(ist) world distinguished by a number of Mies’ key buildings, including the hugely influential S.R. Crown Hall, 1956, above.
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John Wyver writes: Although posts of this kind are not directly related to the company’s operations, I occasionally scratch out accounts of my travels and other doings. In this case, my wife Clare and I are now on a long-planned holiday, with first of all a week in Chicago and then a 10-day road trip through the mid-west searching out architecture and art. Were I only a touch more pretentious I might say that, with the song, we have gone “to look for America”. More on that to follow, as there are likely to be four or five Postcards of this kind over the next fortnight or so.
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John Wyver writes: welcome to this week’s selection of stuff that I’ve enjoyed and been enriched by over the past week.
• Frank Stella went from Bauhaus to fun house: such a great appraisal by Deborah Solomon for The New York Times of the art and life of the artist who died on Saturday; I feel I’ve been looking at Stella’s art for most of my life, ever since in 1971 I bought the slim Penguin New Art volume about him written by Robert Rosenblum – I learned so much from that (I was 16, and just starting to look at modern art), and as my photo shows I still have it in my library, 53 years on. Plus, here’s a short Christie’s video of a studio visit with the artist five years back:
John Wyver writes: Apologies for missing last week – somehow the keynote for the University of Westminster conference Designs on TV, together with other stuff, just gobbled up the days. But here’s this week’s selection of twelve articles and audio elements that have engaged and informed and challenged me over, well, the last fortnight.
And I start with a link that would have led last Sunday, just a few days after the death of the great Kent and England spin bowler Derek Underwood. The image above is from my 1968 autograph book, when I spent many happy days at Canterbury, Folkestone and elsewhere watching the Kent team, with Underwood bowling to the equally legendary Alan Knott behind the stumps.
• Sawdust and spin: a simply gorgeous tribute to the left-arm spinner by Luke McKernan, including an encomium to one of the greatest of all cricket photographs taken by Dennis Oulds of Central Press on the occasion of the last ball of the Oval Ashes Test in 1968 – and this link is to another wonderful, deeply informed tribute to Underwood, by Mark Nicholas for The Cricket Monthly. But these are Luke’s words:
He always had that boyish air of one who simply wanted to play the game. It was the look of the daring young RAF officer held up in Colditz, the quiet but determined one, first to join the escape committee and start the fight again. He was the Leslie Howard of the game. All these things I will remember. Rest in peace, Derek Underwood.
And here’s a short video celebration from the Guardian:
John Wyver writes: another gathering in of articles and other bits and pieces that have engaged me and enriched my thinking across the past week. The image is from the controversial, seemingly both complex and simplistic Civil War, released this week, © A24; see below.
• Unwrapping Ancient Egypt, ten years on: on her blog this week, my friend Christina Riggs published three fascinating posts [the link is to the first, the others are here and here] marking a decade since the publication of her major study, Unwrapping Ancient Egypt, now available via Bloomsbury. She combines a personal account of her path to and beyond the book with lessons for us all about writing and publishing, with a brilliant top-level critique of Egyptology and its deep entanglement with colonialism (including excellent links to further reading, much of it open access), and with more wide-ranging thoughts about decolonisation across museums and academia.
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John Wyver writes: the week’s collection of articles and audio that I have enjoyed, learned from, appreciated and been challenged by over the past week, and that I think are worth sharing.
• All 40 Marlon Brando film performances ranked, in honor of his 100th birthday: a hugely enjoyable run-down of all of Brando’s movies, including the great The Godfather, 1972, above, compiled by Wilson Chapman and Noel Murray for IndieWire; of Last Tango in Paris, which comes in at no.3, they write:
read more »Actress Maria Schneider remained friends with Brando until his death in 2004, but Brando and Bertolucci’s behavior was inexcusable. Brando also delivers an irreducibly complex performance of the highest empathy and sensitivity, a performance that reveals what his work, at its best, could achieve: An illumination of the idea that people are more than one thing and that multiple, seemingly conflicting things can be true at the same time.
John Wyver writes: In November the distinguished art historian Lynda Nead (link to her page at Birkbeck, where she is now Emerita Professor), who is also a friend, gave the prestigious Paul Mellon Lectures at the V&A. In four original and wonderfully rich presentations titled British Blonde about aspects of the visual culture of post-war Britain, she explored the images and meanings associated with four iconic blondes: two actors, Diana Dors and Barbara Windsor; Ruth Ellis, who murdered her abusive lover and was the last woman to be hanged in Britain; and the artist Pauline Boty.
She also kindly persuaded the Paul Mellon Centre to commission academic and filmmaker Catherine Grant and me to respond to her ideas by making two short films each about her subjects, which were screened with a panel discussion on a fifth evening. Mine were made as close collaborations with colleagues Ian Cross, for Blonde Noir about Ellis, and Todd MacDonald, for the visual essay on Boty. Ian, Todd and I worked together on our two documentaries Drama Out of a Crisis: A Celebration of Play for Today, 2020, and Coventry Cathedral: Building for a New Britain, 2021, and to some degree, on a much more modest scale, these 5-minute shorts extend our interest in working creatively with archive images and films, and in developing distinctive screen languages for this.
The lectures will be published, but this past week, thanks to the generous support of the Yale Centre for British Art (YCBA) in New Haven, Lynda reprised the Pauline Boty lecture, and Catherine, Lynda and I screened the films at Yale and spoke about them on a panel. (We hope to arrange another such event in London, and I’ll post details of that once it is organised; currently the films are not otherwise available, but eventually we intend to remedy that too.) Our hosts could not have been more welcoming, the discussions both formal and informal have been stimulating, and we were also able to spend time amongst the glorious art collection of the Yale University Art Gallery. Currently supplemented by selections from the YCBA, which is closed for renovations, the Art Gallery’s holdings are extraordinary.
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