On forgiveness

For all the calumny so regularly and indiscriminately heaped on it by Conservative commentators, the BBC does sometimes earn its keep. For instance, by accident this afternoon, washing up after lunch and half-listening to the news, I stumbled over this, in which BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner interviews Lord Tebbit on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Brighton hotel bombing.

Gardner, who in 2004 while on a routine reporting assignment in Saudi Arabia was shot and left for dead by al-Qaeda gunmen, remains paralysed from the hips downward — none of which has prevented him from continuing to pursue a demanding career. His book about all of this, Blood and Sand, is significantly more interesting than the money-spinning disability misery-memoir one might reasonably have expected under the circumstances.

As for Lord Tebbit, his own serious injuries sustained in the Brighton Hotel bombing — an atrocity that killed five people outright, and caused great suffering to many more — have done little to constrain the energy, forthrightness and courage with which, as even plenty of those who don’t always agree with him ought to concede, he engages with the great issues of our day. The bombing did, however, change his world, leaving his wife, Lady Tebbit, permanently disabled, requiring round-the-clock care.

About a decade ago, I happened to see the Tebbits out together, shopping for a birthday card in a big London department store. Lord Tebbit pushed Lady Tebbit’s wheelchair, paused in front of the display of cards and discussed various likely options with her. Quiet, unflashy, in some sense totally unremarkable, the scene has stayed with me ever since, both as a vision of what real, serious, until-death-do-us-part married love ought to mean — and as testament to what terrorism all too often does mean in practice. (Department of silver linings: the disaster also forced Lord Tebbit to learn to cook, and my carnivorous family members assure me that his recent game cookbook, rather beautifully illustrated, turns out to be very useful, too.)

Anyway, in the interview about, Gardner and Lord Tebbit discuss quite a lot — not just what terrorism means, or who should be held responsible for it, either, but also the extent to which forgiveness is truly possible, especially where the terrorist still, in effect, holds that what he has done was justified. These aren’t simple questions, nor can they be answered easily, even by those in position to say something particularly interesting about them. Thanks, then, to the BBC for providing an interview which never slips away from moral complexity into mawkishness or sentimentality — perfect viewing, anyway, for a rainy Sunday evening, and highly recommended.

Making things happen? The 2004 Turner Prize

[This article first appeared on the website of the Social Affairs Unit.]

By some quirk of Turner Prize programme schedules, my husband’s timetable and the need for something to be on in the background while I was cooking dinner, Monday evening started off with a documentary — a BBC2 programme called The Curse of Oil: The Pipeline, repeated from September, in which an earnest-sounding presenter worked his way along the route of a new 1,100 mile pipeline linking the Caspian Sea with the Mediterranean. It was, in some ways, an absolutely typical product of our times and mores. On the one hand there was lushly beautiful footage of green mountains shrouded in mist, galloping coal-black stallions, amber-golden corn standing ripe in the fields — and on the other hand there was that earnest voice-over. What the title didn’t spell out, the commentary hinted at, in such polite and measured language as to suggest that no civilised person could fail to understand its adumbrations of the nastiness of corporate culture, the sinister nature of anything involving the US military, and a generalised sense of inchoate yet sophisticated unease relating to pretty much everything, full stop.

Or if you can’t work out what I mean from that description, try recalling any documentary made either by Louis Theroux or by any of his many lesser imitators that you’ve ever idly watched while waiting for something else to begin. Or think of The X-Files, or programmes about President Kennedy’s assassination, the pharmaceutical industry, Mark Thatcher’s finances, or more or less anything else you like. It honestly doesn’t matter. So pandemic is this particular, flawlessly-impartial-yet-oh-so-damning tone, that we all know it well, even if by now it has become so familiar we hardly notice it at all. It is, to adopt a register too rarely invoked in the world of television criticism, the sound of the clerisy in full cry. Don’t trust anyone, the voice tells us — except, obviously, the nicely-brought-up, public school-educated, probably Oxbridge-burnished, immaculately liberal intelligence behind the making of every paranoid, definitely ‘edgy’, yet entirely establishment-accredited programme you see, all of which you should trust implicitly. On one hand, the lack of explicit criticism flatters us on the subject of our own independence of mind, while on the other, we’re left in no doubt where the disapproval of all orthodox liberal believers ought to fall. Well, at least the photography in The Curse of Oil was very beautiful. I was left thinking that I should like to go to Azerbaijan someday, once it calms down a bit.

It’s that prize again
And then came the Turner Prize. By now, I guess, everyone who cares will know the result, which was a barnstorming, bunker-busting victory by the bookies’ choice, the critics’ choice and pretty much everyone else’s choice, Jeremy Deller.

Conventional wisdom isn’t always wrong. Out of the nominees on offer, Deller was almost certainly the right choice to win. He has the face of the better class of Tolkein elf, with a good indie-band haircut, dandyish clothes and a manner so unexceptionably well-mannered and forbearing as to melt all opposition in its tracks. He’s a credit not only to his parents, but to Dulwich College, the Courtauld Institute of Art and Sussex University, where he studied yet more art history. He works happily with ex-striking miners, cyclists, Texans, Quakers, bats, the Manic Street Preachers and others in the execution of his collaborative projects. And the nature of his art? Well, we’re talking about the Turner Prize, after all. Deller doesn’t make things — he makes things happen. This will perhaps discredit him terminally in the eyes of many Social Affairs Unit readers. Yet it’s to his credit — or so it seems to me, anyway — that these ‘things’ he makes happen are occasionally not only relatively interesting, at least by the present-day art world’s abject standards, but also relatively funny, nostalgic, double-edged and — to use a word that Deller seems to favour almost as much as Maurice Cowling does — complicated. And at very least, he’s an improvement on the infinitely tiresome Grayson Perry, whose technically incompetent and morally questionable pottery will probably vanish from our collective memories faster than the ugly-sister frock in which he rose to the podium to collect his £20,000 cheque last year.

Lights, camera — fine art, apparently
For the canapé-munching clerisy present at Tate Britain on Monday night, there were, I imagine, two ‘safe’ remarks to make about this year’s Turner Prize. The first would have noted this year’s emphasis on video art. How poignant it was that the Prize should be awarded on a concluding night of I’m A Celebrity. Well, here comes a moment of genuine personal confession that will be recorded by no video camera. God, how I hate video art! For if there is, somewhere out there, a gene that allows people to watch video footage for more than ten seconds without achieving a catatonic or at least militantly bored-and-angry state, I suspect at some point my poor infant son will have to be in receipt of gene therapy relating to it, because he certainly won’t have inherited it from his old Mum. On a good day I can co-exist in the same room with, say, Late Night Review or an old Father Ted rerun — or, as we have seen, some random documentary made up of two-part-travelogue-one-part-paranoia — for more than five minutes running, but it helps if there’s washing up to do, laundry to be hung, and a friendly cat craving attention. The reason I became interested in art in the first place had a lot to do with liking paint and what can be done with it, and yet somehow I often end up in cavernous gallery spaces being expected to spend time watching films that would not manage to earn to three whole figures’ worth of revenue had they been screened in a commercial cinema. I can count on one hand the number of gallery-sited video works that have detained me for more than a minute. All of which means that this year’s Turner Prize was hardly rich pickings for me.

For the oddity, this year, was less the absence of painting — now, alas, just an unremarkable cliché of Turner Prize competitions, as much a part of the tradition as Matthew Collings’s anxious commentary or Tracey Emin’s cleavage — than it was the omnipresence, the virtual triumph of video art. To this end, all the four Turner-listed artists provided video-based offerings. From Deller there was Memory Bucket, a documentary about his time in Crawford and Waco, Texas. From Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell there came a remarkably boring film about an Afghan warlord’s trial, which was ultimately pulled, lest it prejudice an Old Bailey case. (I saw this when it was at the Imperial War Museum; you can read a rather dated, yet heartfelt review of the exhibition here.) From Kutlug Ataman there was perhaps the most unspeakably tedious bit of film ever shot, which — I am told by the press releases — has something to do with reincarnation, although its epic ineptitude may well have disguised this fact from most of its observers. And finally, there was Yinka Shonibare’s film, Masked Ball, based on Verdi’s opera about the assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden, but with more dance and groovier fabrics than you might expect — unless you’re familiar with Shonibare’s work, in which case fabric, and lots of it, is exactly what you’d expect. Well, if you don’t like actually looking at things, preferring instead to look at slightly aimless film of things, this was the Turner for you.

What any of it has to do with art, however, is another question entirely. For when is a film not a film? When the person making it is an artist, apparently – at which point only a philistine would judge the result by anything but art-world standards. It is a point to which we shall return presently.

Post-modern politics?
The other stock theme aired by the art world’s great and good, there amongst the cocktails and canapés, was self-congratulation about what more than one serious critic has characterised as the ‘highly politicised content’ of this year’s Turner exhibition.

To which I can only say, don’t believe everything you read in what used to be the broadsheet papers. Obviously there must be punters out there who can still get themselves into a fine fit of anger over Gustav III’s assassination and its geopolitical implications for the world of 1792 — although sadly, perhaps, the merits or otherwise of Enlightened Despotism no longer occupy quite the central role in policy discourse they once did. And no, I don’t believe that the use of colourful imported fabrics, even when they are selected by a black artist, automatically comments meaningfully on race, imperialism or much else. While Shonibare’s work is pleasant enough, he’s a one-joke artist and his joke is very tame indeed.

Perhaps, though, the rest of the videos were sizzling with hot political content? Um, no, actually. When I saw the Langlands & Bell video at the Imperial War Museum, I was struck more than anything else by its completely persuasive air of total disengagement — its insistence that these people going through the motions of a jury trial were indeed far-away folk of whom we not only knew little, but could hope to know little. From watching their film, I derived no more information about whether Langlands & Bell thought the suspect was guilty or innocent than I did about whether they thought the American campaign against the Taliban was justified at all. But then detachment is what Langlands & Bell do. They are not even the Kraftwerk of the visual arts (the Kraftwerk of the visual arts is of course Gerhard Richter, but that’s a different essay) — they are the Gary Numan of the visual arts, obsessed with electronic gadgetry and a very dated form of ice-cold minimalism. And for his part, Turkish-born Kutlug Ataman was apparently once tortured in prison for his opinions, but that does not actually translate into making his boring, obscure, sloppy-looking film somehow intrinsically political. No, if there were politics evident in any of these works, they were simply the near-subliminal ones of the documentary genre mentioned earlier — a vague sense of distrust, a shimmering implication of doubt and blame that vanishes as soon as the viewer tries to pin it down, and yet leaves him feeling that the film-maker has somehow ‘dealt’ with race, or terrorism, or belief. The fact that anyone looks to films to ‘deal’ with such issues says volumes — whereas the films, sadly, say virtually nothing at all.

A fine romance
And as for Jeremy Deller, what are his politics? Can anyone be sure? Here, perhaps, I should declare an interest. Less than three yards away from me, above the sofa on which I am writing this, hangs Jeremy Deller’s History of the World — a graphic piece in which acid house music is schematically linked, inter alia, with brass bands. It’s the multiple that corresponds with the larger piece in Tate Britain. Why give this piece house-room? When I first saw it, I liked it for two reasons. The first reason was formal — I liked the way it looks. True, it’s about as far from traditional, representational art as it’s possible to get. It’s like random scribbles on a blackboard, like inspired lecture-notes, but with a brisk graphic flourish redolent of some of the gestural painting that interests me most. I liked its black-and-white toughness, its literal quality, its graphite greys and silver-white. In its hurry to get some sort of complicated yet urgent message across, it reminded me of the late seventeenth century cheap popular prints that will, I hope, someday face it. It’s not great art, but there’s something alive, funny, wistful and faintly self-deprecating about it. With a background in academic history, I like what it says about the way in which connections can persuade, but also surprise, please and amuse.

The politics of the History of the World, such as they are, remain opaque. So we return to the question — what are Deller’s politics? The answer is less than clear-cut. A few non-committal, softly liberal public pronouncements apart, in which it can be seen that he is ‘interested’ in ‘people’ etc., the politics apparent in Deller’s work itself seem to be pretty much anything the viewer wants them to be.

Although in theory Deller won the Turner Prize for Memory Bucket — and the myth that contenders are judged on single exhibitions, rather than life achievement, is a minor but persistent defect of this prize — far and away his most famous work is The English Civil War Part II, a filmed re-enactment of the so-called Battle of Orgreave Colliery, one of the nastier run-ins in the course of the 1984 Miners’ Strike. Deller compiled many hours of interviews with veterans of the Miners’ Strike (including police, miners and South Yorkshire residents), organised for a combination of ex-miners and Civil War re-enactment societies to take part, and collected documentation relevant to the whole event, which — backed up by ArtAngel funding — appeared first as a Channel 4 documentary. In the course of ‘making things happen’, Deller seems to have gained the confidence of the local mining community. He persuaded former miners to play the role of police officers; he persuaded sceptical working-class socialists that he was doing something other than aestheticising their life-changing experiences for the benefit of a middle-class metropolitan elite. And it seems to have worked. An online review on a Miners’ Advice website not only describes the film in some depth, but praises it from a pro-strike point of view. As a part of the documentation, the CD and book that followed on from the project contain a selection of songs redolent the Miners’ Strike. These are, needless to say, all protest songs, rather than the FCS songbook classics with which some Social Affairs Unit audiences, myself included, may be more familiar. And this is typical. The emphasis here is on a wryly nostalgic sympathy with the striking miners and their families, rather than on anything more analytical, hard-edged or — in the strong sense of the word — political. In other words, it’s just that pervasive documentary bias again — but done gently, almost incidentally, with more enthusiasm than guile.

And this, I guess, is the other reason why Deller’s work appeals to me. Heaven only knows what he thinks his art is about. For me, though, somewhere behind all the interviewing, the cataloguing, the pious gathering up of small actualities and the mildly eccentric sketching out of connections — and leaving aside for a minute that rhetoric of ‘making things happen’ — there is more than a hint of an older, place-specific romanticism, antiquarianism even, in Deller’s work. He seems to me the first cousin of the sort of person who collects obscure Cumbrian sheep-herding dialect terms or the folksongs of rural Sussex, Cockney children’s counting-rhymes or pre-reformation Lancashire burial customs. I’m surprised that more on the Left don’t intensely dislike The English Civil War Part II, if only because there’s a level on which it takes the sting out of some fairly raw wounds by slotting Orgreave prematurely into a mythic, distant, romanticised local history that’s the stuff of costumes, hobbyists and recreational Saturday afternoon outings. And if there was a surprise in his Memory Bucket, it was his ability to resist poking easy, Louis Thoreaux-type, liberal-left fun at small-town Texan social mores. This was, I think, not so much a matter of good manners, or of rigorous artistic decision-making, as of focus — Deller is here not to hammer home some easy point, but rather to wonder at a café-waitress’s world-view as innocently and honestly as he would wonder at the sheen on a bat’s wing. Deller is no Gilbert White of Selborne, but his amateur’s-eye-view of our world as a complicated web of relationships offers, to me at least, a vague hint of something similar – reframed, obviously, for the glib, superficial, faithless and throw-away times in which we live.

Loud goings-on in a cul-de-sac
So, then — by way of summary, there was too much video, and not much political content, but given the short-list, faut de meiux, probably the right man won. Is there anything else to say about this year’s Turner Prize, or can we safely ignore the whole subject until next October, when this particular art-world circus comes creaking, more threadbare and mangy than ever, back into town?

Well, yes. As the Turner Prize programme began and I sat watching a strangely subdued Matthew Collings, his new hairstyle making him look like Gary Bushell’s long-lost secret brother, attempting to goad his ‘shadow prize jury’ into cogency, I couldn’t help but stop and wonder about the relationship between ‘art’ — the kind of self-conscious, gallery-going, prize-winning art celebrated in events like this one — and the real world beyond it. What, for instance, was the difference between The Curse of Oil and Langland & Bell’s film about the Afghan trial, or Kutlug Ataman’s film about reincarnation, or Deller’s Memory Bucket? All were films that traded on exoticism, an awareness of difference and distance, mixed in with a little human curiosity about how other people live. To varying degrees they all partook of that detatched, rather arch and knowing tone that I mentioned earlier, and if Deller’s film was less guilty than most, one watched it against a background of expectations in which anticipation of that tone played a part. And how would it have been different if Yinka Shonibare had simply organised the costumes, choreography and setting for a production of Verdi’s Masked Ball, as hundreds have done before him, without trying to present this activity as being the work of a visual artist? Now that art — the kind of art that wins £30,000 prizes, anyway — isn’t painting or sculpture, but instead looks like normal things we find in the world all around us, how are we supposed to judge its quality? And by the same token, why should we treat it in the careful, thoughtful, slightly reverent way in which so many of us are used to treating art?

There are many possible answers to this — enough, in fact, to swell a short review into a longish monograph, complete with lots of head-banging stuff about the nature of modernism and so forth. Let’s spare you that. Actually, let’s spare all of us that. Not least, there’s no shortage of prose to read on the subject of the Turner Prize. At least since the death of the great Peter Fuller, probably the best and most sustained criticism of this two-decade-old institution and the sort of art it endorses has come from Stuckism International, on whose strangely designed yet oddly compelling website the reader who wants to pursue this further can read, inter alia, Charles Thomson’s trenchant comments about the pointlessness of this year’s video-centric offerings. The site also includes the text of David Lee’s intemperate, frank and wholly plausible expose of the people and institutions behind the whole dreary Turner Prize ritual. The intervention of a Labour junior minister into the obligatory Turner Prize ‘debate’ a couple of years ago generated this on a website I used to help run, in which my dissatisfaction with the sort of art that wins the Turner Prize is fairly clear.

For while I do rather like what Jeremy Deller does, and indeed feel no great animus against any of this year’s contenders — all, at the very least, a great improvement on Grayson Perry — still, it still seems strange and unfair to me that such a small, mannered and self-indulgent corner of the broader art world receives, ever year, such a lavish dose of cash, press coverage and genuine if bemused public attention. There are, needless to say, still plenty of people out there who still paint pictures or who make attractive objects, as well as a lively market in the traditional art of the more or less recent past. All over Britain, our larger and smaller commercial galleries are full of traditional, often representational work. Nor are degree shows as barren of recognisable figures and landscapes, or of evidence of the pursuit of technical skill, as some of our gloomier critics might suggest. Yet to find such art, we have to go out of our way to encounter it. In contrast, the Turner Prize is simply there each year, in our newspapers and on our televisions and claiming elbow-room for itself in the arena of public discourse. Conceptual, project-based and video-centred art may all be inhabitants of a tiny little cul-de-sac of the art world — but that is the cul-de-sac where all the noise and excitement and outrage is being generated, and so it’s the inhabitants there who gain our attention. Theirs is too often an art that can be described in terms of gimmicks, personalities, frocks. And to an extent it does little harm. Britain has long had a place in its heart for the artist-as-an-amiable-freak, all the way through from the greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery, foot-in-the-grave young men of the 1890s to the Soho-haunting luncheon companions of Francis Bacon in the 1950s, to Lucian Freud and his super-model following, or David Hockney and his dachshunds, today. A little colour and controversy at the more demotic end of the art world is perhaps no bad thing. We are in danger, sometimes, of taking art too seriously.

Making things happen?
And yet in the end there was a detail that left a faintly nasty feeling in its wake. The Turner Prize programme was, as ever, interrupted by a profusion of advertisements. Most of this was froth, enlivened here and there with a glimpse of Nicole Kidman or George Clooney. Yet oddly, there was also a trailer for a future programme, directed by Sorious Samura. Samura is an African film-maker perhaps best known for his documentary Cry Freetown, about a rebel insurgency in Sierra Leone in January 1999. Here, by contrast, was an example of a documentary that was anything but disengaged. For one thing, Samura was risking his life by compiling the footage that he did. But he was also testing his own moral principles to the limit. To what extent is it all right to condone injustice in order to be allowed to gain the evidence that will show that same injustice to the world? Where does the role of the observer end, and the role of the moral actor start? Anyone who saw the film will remember, painfully, how tough these choices were, and how grave and terrible was the impact of Samura’s footage, which did in the end manage to raise the profile of Sierra Leone’s suffering and to point the way towards an improvement in the situation there. No, it wasn’t a happy film to watch, but it was an unforgettable and important one. For whatever else this was, it was a project drenched in conviction, explicit politics, and engagement with the real world — not just the real world of galleries and ‘making things happen’, either, but the world as all too many people know it all too much of the time.

The advertisement evoked Samura briefly — and then we were swept back to the bright lights, colourful cocktails and refulgent egos of Millbank. All hush! It was time for the winner of the prize to be announced! The excitement in that brilliant, bustling room was palpable. Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of the Tate and Chairman of the Turner Prize jury, took to the podium. The focal point of his remarks? Well, it had been a grim year for the art world. He made reference to the warehouse fire earlier this year in which much of Charles Saatchi’s collection of near-contemporary British art had been reduced to cinders and insurance claims. A look of solemn grief crossed his features as he intoned the following:

The response of some sections of the press, who saw this as a moment of catharsis or even celebration, was in some ways reminiscent of the response to the book burnings in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

To their credit, many those present at the dinner looked shocked at the epic crassness of this comment, which seemed to conflate a bit of bad press coverage with genocidal mass murder. Only a few applauded. But it’s at moments like this that it becomes a little bit harder to forgive sections of our our arts establishment their pomposity, their shallowness, their supreme and hideous self-importance. The portrait of the art world thrown up in that moment was anything but inspiring. If Turner Prize-style art wants to start making a public case for its own validity, even in its own terms, it’s going to have to do a bit better than that.

Liberalism amongst the ruins: Dan Cruikshank and the Lost Cities of Iraq

[This article first appeared on 3 February 2003 on the Electric Review website, which within only slightly more than a year would become a Lost Website. Just as well, really.]

Dan Cruikshank and the Lost Cities of Iraq (Sunday 2 February, BB2, 9 pm) provided more than its fair share of ‘can he really have just said that?’ experiences, but for me, at least, the most jaw-dropping moment came when our trusty narrator visited a Syrian Orthodox monastery ‘well within the Northern no-fly zone’, gaped briefly at the architecture, gave the ancient reliquary covering the bones of a local St Michael an encouraging pat, and the proceeded to quiz a monk about the state of interfaith relations in Iraq in the wake of the last Gulf War. Immediately, two things became clear. One was that Mr Cruikshank very much wanted the monk to say something along the lines of ‘Well, Mr Cruikshank, ever since the wicked Americans and the British started bombing us, radical fundamentalist Islam has become very popular and so our happy co-existence with our Islamic neighbours has come under enormous pressure’. The other thing that became clear, though, was that the monk was having none of it and instead ended up making equivocal little sounds while screwing up his face into ever more poignant grimaces of embarrassment. Whatever his answer, he obviously did not wish to commit it to Mr Cruikshank’s recording equipment.

Faced with this problem, Mr Cruikshank nodded, full of understanding as ever. Having concluded the interview, he stepped out in front of another of those staggeringly impressive panoramic views that dotted the programme like lovely fat currants in a rather ill-conceived pudding. Black-and-white-checked headscarf firmly in place, he turned his sunburnt face towards the camera and intoned a little homily, basically setting forth the sort of argument that he felt the monk should have made, had not the monk been too tactful, terrified or otherwise tongue-tied to make it — which was, give or take a degree of subtlety, that anything bad that happened in Iraq, architecturally or otherwise, was America’s fault. If, Cruikshank continued, America and Britain once again waged war against Iraq, things would only get much worse for the poor old Syrian Orthodox community and their neighbours. It would, in Mr Cruikshank’s words, threaten the ‘tolerant and peace-loving society’ now thriving under Saddam Hussein.

Or, anyway, words to that effect — it is hard, after all, to take accurate notes while making indignant references to Kurds, Marsh Arabs and political dissidents all at the same time. One doesn’t have to be much of an enthusiast for the forthcoming war to recognise that Saddam’s record minority rights is absolutely wretched — as is his record on most things. Yet from the empty museums (their treasures hidden from bad Americans) to the omnipresent overflying aircraft (flown by bad Americans) to the lack of a lucrative tourist trade (idle, unadventurous, bad Americans!), a catalogue of misfortune and misrule was effectively re-attributed away from Saddam’s own shambolic statecraft towards that George W. Bush and his allies in wickedness.

To say, then, that The Lost Buildings of Iraq had a strong political message is to do an injustice to the obvious. This was a campaigning programme, pure and simple. The point of the campaign was to try to discourage Britain from going to war with Iraq. This is, I suppose, the point at which one traditionally lays into the BBC for daring to spend our tax-money making whiny agitprop films, how dare they, etc., etc., but — respectful of tradition though I am — I trust ERO’s readers will have already formed their own views on the BBC by now. Suffice to say that the interest of The Lost Buildings of Iraq lay less in what was being attacked per se, than in the habits of mind left curiously unguarded by Mr Cruikshank in his haste to launch that attack. And here, Mr Cruikshank proved himself such an exemplary, old-fashioned, unspoilt liberal that he ought to be put in a museum himself.

Whisper it softly
The form of The Lost Buildings of Iraq was at least as interesting as its content. This was, first and foremost, Mr Cruikshank’s programme. As has long been the vogue in such things, he was the star of his own narrative, the ultimate subject of his own attention, and by extension, ours too. We watched with interest as he waved his long arms about, as he exclaimed ‘good Lord!’ at piles of bricks, as his nose grew ever more sunburned. He was seen napping in cars, drinking tea in a tent, checking into hotels and scaring the children of bandits with his geniality. His voice bridged the gaps in a rich, variegated soundtrack, offering not only his expert reflections but his personal experience and even his emotional state. Best of all, though, was his habit of not so much speaking as whispering to the camera.

This worked on several levels. First, it is human nature that when someone whispers, we listen extra hard to catch what’s being said. If someone is whispering to us, we feel we are in receipt of a confidence of some sort. But there was more to it than that, as I suspect Mr Cruikshank well knows. For despite all his icy denunciations of America, Mr Cruikshank prefaced the programme by pointing out that he would be very limited in what he could say to camera, because if he said the wrong thing, he and his film crew would be booted out of the country. Now, given that much of the hard work underpinning programmes such as this takes place not in front of the camera, but in the editing suite — editing and sequencing the raw film, adding in music and so forth — it would presumably not have been beyond the wit of man to edit in a new voice-over over the old film, in which Mr Cruikshank could say what he wanted to say without fear or favour. And by the same token, from his choice not to do this, one may surmise that there was something he preferred about the setup in which he could proclaim disingenuous things, apparently spontaneously, to a waiting camera.

And this, I think, is the real point of this hushed voice business. All that whispering to camera proclaimed that Mr Cruikshank isn’t just some weedy architectural critic — he is a real journalist, virtually a war correspondent, brave enough to go into really hazardous places, his camera crew trailing behind him. And this, in turn (or so sloppy conventional thinking would have it) means that he is a good person, and a person whom we ought to trust, because we have seen him real and unedited — despite the fact it takes a lot of editing to produce effects like this. Still, a satisfying impression of spontaneity, veracity and immediacy was created. In television, impressions are the main thing. Such impressions need not be straight-forward. One might have thought that the need to whisper when in the presence of his Saddam-lookalike ‘minders’ would have conveyed something negative about the regime, but in fact it could be read another way — as betokening a sort of generalised danger, a sense of geopolitical unease, as if Mr Cruikshank were less anxious about Saddam than about the jet fighters overhead.

Four thousand years in sixty minutes
The ostensible purpose of The Lost Buildings of Iraq was, paradoxically, to draw the viewers’ attention to the extraordinary archaeological and architectural legacy of the Fertile Crescent before they are lost. In some ways this was a magnificent idea for a programme. Not everyone, after all, associates this troublesome innovation called ‘Iraq’ with the ancient civilisations that grew up between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers — the people whose kingdoms included Mesopotamia, Sumeria and Assyria, who virtually invented civilisation and whose magnificent artefacts will be familiar to many from, inter alia, the British Museum. But this, in a way, explains why The Lost Buildings of Iraq was perhaps doomed from the start to be about something else altogether — because its subject simply could never fit into an hour-long slot. In a different sort of world, this programme could have been an entire series, and a very good series, too. It could have taken an hour over each of the major successive civilisations, dealing with religion, politics and culture as well as art, a bit of topography and plenty of photogenic ruins. It could have avoided the nightmare of trying to talk about four thousand years of history in less than sixty minutes. In doing so, it would not have been forced to omit everything between the ninth century AD (the building of the amazing spiral minaret at Samarra) and the end of the last Gulf War. It then might have had something to say about cultural continuity (or otherwise) beyond simply showing a few Iraqis obediently asserting that these ruins are their ‘heritage’, it might have given an idea of how remarkable (or otherwise) the presence of that Syrian Orthodox monastery really was, and it might have actually provided more than a vague impression of size, majesty and wonder, much of it mediated through Mr Cruikshank himself.

But perhaps it is that latter point, rather than financial or logistical ones, that explains why we were given one programme rather than, say, five. For had Mr Cruikshank, or someone like him, made a serious programme about the history of the fertile crescent, he might have had to face up to some unpleasant truths. A longer programme would probably have required some sort of explanation of the twentieth century history of the region, not all of which Mr Cruikshank might find entirely agreeable. Instead of presenting these ruins as fragile relics of a shared civilisation, he would have had to admit that many of these cultures grew out of warfare, thrived on warfare for a while, and then were eventually finished off by warfare. Or to put it another way, it may be that the lion-hunting kings of Assyria would be less surprised by the mutual belligerence of Saddam and the Great Satan than Mr Cruikshank claims to be.

North-west of Eden
On the other hand, there’s no point in reviewing programmes that never happened. Let’s stick to the one that did. The narrative of Lost Cities of Iraq followed Mr Cruikshank on a short road-trip round the country, accompanied by various creepy-looking minders, as he toured a succession of ever-more fantastic honey-coloured brick ruins, most of them glowing refulgently against a lapis-blue sky. (Oddly, all the ruins seemed to be in the middle of nowhere — even at Mosul, which is not only one of Iraq’s largest cities, but one with a particularly charming Old Town, too, and some fine Christian churches.) Some of the names were familiar to me from the archaeology books of my childhood or from days of listlessly wandering around the British Museum to escape work on my PhD, back when the British Library still shared its site. Others were totally unfamiliar. As is the way with nicely-filmed programmes of this sort, though, all these images made me desperate to go to Iraq as soon as possible to see these wonders for myself — an urge that the lack of concrete information only encouraged. Mr Cruikshank’s response to these sites was articulated either in terms of superlatives, or of his own emotions, or sometimes both. All the sites, of course, were shown as being completely free of visitors, archaeologists or anything else in the way of life. And all of that, obviously, was the fault of the USA.

Along the way, there were a few detours. The Syrian Orthodox monastery was one. Another was a terrible thing — a British military cemetery dating from the First World War that had apparently survived very well until the past decade or so, in which it had been destroyed. A hermit lived under a shelter made out of broken tombstones. Mr Cruikshank evidently found this distressing, although the presumably this, too, could be added, in however elliptical at fashion, to the American government’s charge sheet. Finally, near the end of his journey, he visited Qurna, the town that has long been believed to have been the original Garden of Eden. Shabby and faintly down-market, its Tree of Knowledge stood withered and dead in a dusty little plot. Beyond it, the river glittered and gleamed inscrutably. The imagery here was no less compelling for being so very obvious.

Perhaps, ultimately, these things simply come down to matters of faith. Mr Cruikshank is doubtless neither foolish nor wicked, but he appears to believe that buildings are more important than people. This is not to say that he does not believe that people are important — I am sure he does. But he shows every sign of thinking that great monuments, being part of some sort of shared heritage, are more important than virtually anything. In The Lost Buildings of Iraq, there were only two points where he showed what appeared to be genuine anger. One was at a site at which Saddam, who likes to style himself as a latter-day Nebuchadnezzar II, is helpfully re-building one of his predecessors’ palaces — unfortunately, destroying the actual archaeological site in the process. When Mr Cruikshank noticed a brick stamped with Saddam’s name in the ancient Assyrian fashion, the ardent contempt that swept across his face surpassed description — could anyone do anything worse?

But worse was to come. At Ur, he dutifully climbed the ziggurat, accompanied by his minder. Ur is one of the oldest cities in the world. It is also, however, close to Basra, which is to say, on the main road connecting Bagdad with the south and, indeed, Kuwait. The guide had shown him bomb-damage to the base of the ziggurat left over from the last war, but at this point, Mr Cruikshank uncharacteristically mentioned American reports that Iraqi military aircraft had been parked nearby. The guide denied this. Atop the ziggurat, however, Mr Cruikshank was able to see (but not film) a large airstrip, very close indeed, full of military planes. And here his indignation very nearly did get the better of him. How on earth could anyone possibly use these precious relics, these fragile treasures as propaganda — let alone (although Mr Cruikshank didn’t say this, clearly it is more to the point) as a sort of ‘heritage shield’?

And this, I suppose, is the crux of the thing. Mr Cruikshank didn’t want to know about political dissidents, or Kurds, or Marsh Arabs. Beyond the odd cursory vox pop, he didn’t seem to have much interest in how present-day Iraqis understand and articulate their own history. (A good programme could be made on this, though — if Mr Cruikshank has forgotten that Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Solomon’s Temple, Saddam almost certainly has not.) For Mr Cruikshank, what mattered was architecture, civilisation, the shared nature of — well, the sort of decent, civilised, polite things that Mr Cruikshank represents.

In a way, of course, he has a point. As the proud grand-daughter of a colonel in the United States Air Force, even I have to admit that the USAF has a terrible record when it comes to balancing military and ‘heritage’ priorities, not only in places like Pisa and Monte Cassino, but more recently in the wholesale destruction of important Serbian Orthodox churches and the frankly bizarre decision to allow bomber crews returning from the former Yugoslavia to discharge unused munitions in the Venetian Lagoon. And although as a Christian I know that a single human life is more valuable than the loveliest Gozzoli fresco — well, that’s no excuse to destroy a Gozzoli fresco unnecessarily, is it?

The Lost Cities of Iraq was fascinating as well as infuriating. It failed, for me, in its smug assurance that a certain set of liberal values — not least, the worship of Art and Culture and Civilisation as ends in themselves — was the only set of values on offer, coupled with its tendency to act as if the greatest enemies of these values were the United States and Great Britain. This just didn’t make sense, and it showed. The result was, even as televisual tourism goes, a faintly disreputable exercise — if also, at times, a genuinely moving one. I am not sure I support war against Iraq. Indeed, I’d dearly love to see for myself the ancient cities so telegenically hinted at on Sunday, and I hope they survive for many millennia to come. But to suggest that the reason not to fight is in order to preserve some ruins — ruins, no less, thrown up by long-ago warrior civilisations — is grotesque beyond belief. Can he really have said that? Alas, I am afraid he did.

Three hours, three helpings of conceptual art

It’s that prize again
In the end, I suppose, the right man won. It wasn’t so much that Keith Tyson deserved the dubious honour of a Turner Prize, as that his three shortlisted rivals apparently deserved it even less than he did. And, to give him a sort of grudging credit, even if the concepts behind his work are just as sclerotically dull as the concepts behind most of what passes for conceptual art these days, at least his paintings have enough in the way of formal qualities — things like colour and line and faint designerish stylishness — to hold the eye for more than a moment, which is more than one could say for the competition.

Still, this was hardly one of the all-time great Turner Prize years. Culture minister Tim Howells did his bit, manfully trying to start a scrap over the merits of contemporary art before being swatted down by a band of smirking leader-writers. Meanwhile the likeable Tracey Emin, knowing that it would not feel like a real Turner Prize evening without a flash of décolletage and an explosion of Margate vowels, complained loudly that the prize was ‘undemocratic’ as if this were a bad thing. But there was a strong sense of deja vu coupled with a sense of having seen better, too. On the banks of the Thames in a bijou little gallery, hundreds of people were partying the night away in celebration of a type of art known more through reputation than direct contact, and here we sat one Sunday evening, watching them on television. No, I didn’t envy Matthew Collings the task of having to present Turner Prize 2002 (Channel 4).

It is hard these days to separate Matthew Collings from the prize that he, and Channel 4, have made so firmly their own. There are plenty of people out there who have spent years studying art, creating art, thinking about art — Collings’ USP as a critic is to combine all that easy stuff, somehow, with a distinctive ability to appear as if he’s just a really normal guy who has stumbled into all of this, knows no more about it than we do, but who at the same time finds it all quite interesting. Whether this persona is infuriating or endearing is a question of taste, or perhaps even mood. Suffice to say, last night, Collings — an experienced broadcaster — looked as if he’d stumbled into broadcasting, knew no more and possibly less about it than we did, and at the same time found it all frankly terrifying. His scripted material was well-organised and occasionally funny, but the live interviews were all over the place, not helped by the way in which the jittery hand-held camera (why?) kept showing the poor man, nose buried in his notes, frantically swotting up on something as a elegantly-turned-out if boring Sadie Coles hyped her eponymous gallery.

By contrast, the pre-recorded profiles of the four contestants, whoops, artists were trenchant if, understandably given the gnats’-attention-span hour-long format, extremely short. Collings had, I suppose, a mandate to flesh out four uninspiring stereotypes: the scientific one (Keith Tyson), the clever one (Liam Gillick), the rude one (Fiona Banner) and the nice but not very distinctive one (Katherine Yass). Here and there, we were also given a glimpse of the faces, haircuts and sartorial inclinations behind a handful of famous artworld names. And as if to shore up Collings’ claims to blokey ordinariness, the impenetrable art-speak quotient was very high indeed.

So, what did we learn? As far as the artists were concerned, probably as much as most of us will ever need to know. Tyson has a beard, gambles a lot, and theorises even more — and probably less profitably, too. His ‘art machine’ concept, where a computer generates projects for him to complete so as to ‘erase all traces of personality or authorship’ from his work, is much less interesting than the works it generates — all of which, incidentally, look as if they were done by Tyson. So much for that concept, then. Gillick is a middle-aged, middle-class, slightly bald person who thinks hard before coming up with rectangular shapes which are then fabricated by someone else. This is presumably why he is considered clever — the adjectives ‘capable’ or ‘multi-talented’ certainly don’t spring to mind. Compared with all this, Catherine Yass seemed all the nicer for being so very unassuming. Her photographs and film of Canary Wharf have a definite lyrical quality. She thinks hard, too, but in her case the concern is about how her images will look and the sort of impression she will make, which seem to me a legitimate concern when it comes to making art. But is photography really ‘art’, or if so, is it an art so consonant with, say, painting that it deserves to be judged alongside painting? For reasons too complex to raise here, I’ve never been convinced that this is the case. But having said that, I remain unconvinced that what the annoying Fiona Banner produces is really art, either. By carefully describing, word by word, a hard-corn porn film in pink paint on a large canvas, she tried to live up to the great Turner Prize tradition of using sex, swear-words and femininity to generate column-inches, but in the event even journalists are so bored of this stuff by now that virtually none rose even limply to the occasion. The problem with porn is that it is either repulsive or boring or both. Fiona Banner captured this quality, but did it need to be captured?

So much for the artists — on to the commentators. Jake Chapman, an artist I’ve never much liked, turns out to be a sharp-witted and sharp-tongued critic, olympian yet toxic when he wants to be. He ran circles round the great blowsy woman arts journalist with whom he was paired. Adrian Searle — a man who, unlike his broadsheet competitors, rarely writes anything really boring or obvious — came across as funny and down-to-earth. On the other hand, Julian Stallabrass, a youthful Marxist firmly ensconced at the Courtauld, has a shifty way of looking out of the corner of his eyes that is so distracting as to make his words unintelligible. Strangely, one of the best comments of the evening was made by a person named Claire, whose surname I missed, when she suggested that Liam Gillick’s work makes a better impression if you’ve also had the benefit of experiencing his warm, attractive personality.

And in a way, this summed it all up. The Turner Prize is, to use an annoyingly art-world type reference, centred around what Walter Benjamin described as ‘spectacle’ — not art, exactly, but all the artists and critics, the journalists and the arts ministers, the hand-held camera making kidding us that we are there amongst the milling crowds, having our champagne spilled by a thoughtless Nick Serota, and isn’t that Neil Tennant over there at the bar with Sam Taylor-Wood? It pretends to be about popularising art, but mostly by allowing anyone who wishes to press his or her nose against the cold glass and to admire the scene, without really having to understand or engage at any deep level with what goes on inside. Matthew Collings is himself a good illustration of all of this, his thin veneer of ostentatious cluelessness adding piquancy to, rather than contradicting, his privileged insider status. The Turner Prize is, I suppose, ever — at least in recent years — thus.

If there was an innovation, it came only at the end. Daniel Liebeskind, the architect of the Imperial War Museum Manchester, awarded the prize. So in place of someone who was a famous pop-star back when Collings & Co were young — well, less old, anyway — who missed the point with her look-at-me, aren’t-I-daring f-word, we instead had a genuine art-world insider who made polite little jokes, looked contaigously happy and did nothing to suggest that there might be some sort of world outside of this happy little enclosed-sphere. Keith Tyson, for his part, made an equally polite little speech by way of reply, which he ended by wishing his 87-year old grandmother a happy birthday. Was this a real-world moment, or just another conceptual ploy?

The art of Blu-Tack
The winner of last year’s Turner Prize was Martin Creed, whose show consisted of a room in which opening the door caused a light to switch on. Creed has also made works out of a small block of masking-tape, a ball of scrunched-up paper, and a little blob of Blu-Tack. All of which is, I suppose, pretty conceptual, but which made surprisingly interesting television nonetheless. In recent months Channel 5 — unmissable for those of you who are interested in soft-core porn, serial killers and unsecured credit, but generally pretty worthless otherwise — has amazed us all with a series called Art Now, consisting of twenty minutes’ worth of interviews with contemporary artists. This week it was Creed’s turn. Creed, it transpires, is a softly-spoken Scot dressed in a lime-green shirt, much given to writhing about in his chair and wringing his hands. More than anything else, he looks like some minor figure from some minor indie band that faltered in, say, the mid-1990s. And oddly, it turns out that he plays in a band, although if the examples provided on Art Now are anything to go by, he is unlikely to build up much of a following. (One of his songs apparently consists of the phrase ‘suck and blow’, repeated endlessly, with a bit of inept guitar thwanging away in the background — no prizes for guessing what those eminent MTV commentators, Beavis & Butthead, would have made of that.)

It is a strange if perhaps meaningless irony that Creed’s surname recalls so poignantly the word for a set of things one is sure one believes, for Creed, it turns out, does not really seem very clear about much of anything. ‘The most difficult part of a work is making decisions, but it is difficult to make a work without choosing’ says Creed, sounding vatic. ‘My work comes out of trying to make paintings — trying to paint but not feeling able to.’ He also speaks about ‘an anxiety I feel about adding stuff to the world.’ Luckily for him, if not for us, a blob of Blu-Tack is not a particularly formidable addition to the world. Nor is a bit of masking-tape. Some of his other works are simply phrases, in neon or in — well, writing of some sort. ‘The whole world + work = the whole world’ is a representative example. He has also half-filled a white-painted room with white balloons; when photographed (as it was here) with enough adorable children playing in it, it looks marvellous — until one notices that one’s eyes have been trained on the children, not the work.

Creed, I suppose, must feel one of two things — either that no one can blame him if he doesn’t take much of a line on anything, or that this position of non-choosing is some sort of very striking and profound choice. But then he also has a slightly whimsical, ‘can-I-really-get-away-with-this?’ charm, and — poignantly — a print of Dürer’s famous, Christ-like self-portrait over his desk. Of course the all-interview, no-narrator format is a shocking abdication of critical initiative, while the editing process presumably allows those repressed critical impulses to surge forward anyway, albeit in a strangely indirect, passive-aggressive form. All the same, I shall certainly watch Art Now in the future.

A worthwhile concept, for once
Which brings us to Painting the Christmas Story: At the National Gallery with John Drury, the programme that followed Art Now. Frankly, had I not been watching Art Now and been momentarily too busy to switch off the television, I’d have missed it, and yes, once again I did check to make sure that I was still watching downmarket, sordid, populist Channel 5. Well, if this is populism, all I can say is that the BBC, for one, should be doing a lot more of it.

Here’s the format of Painting the Christmas Story. The Dean of Christ Church, the Right Rev John Drury, a thoroughly ordinary-looking well-spoken middle-aged man in an unremarkable suit, stands in front of paintings in the National Gallery and proceeds, clearly and matter-of-factly, to unpack their iconographic content. Yesterday’s programme — the first of four episodes — focused on the Annunciation. It must have cost about £10 to make, but the result is informative, intelligent and engaging in equal measure.

The Dean is not a natural televisual presenter and, unlike Matthew Collings, this looks genuine, not like a pose. When he has to speak to camera, he comes across as rather awkward, as if unsure why he should be addressing a piece of machinery. Yet in front of a painting he likes, there’s a sense of real admiration all the more striking for being such a departure. His interests are rarely formal. When line or colour is mentioned, as both sometimes are, it is always in the service of some particular theological point. There is none of that Neil MacGregoresque need to distance ourselves from Christianity, no insecurity about the universality and relevance of the Christian message. Yet the Dean also speaks powerfully about the sense of anxiety, as well as hope, that accompanies Christmas. His Christianity is complex and suggestive, as are the messages he finds in the three works he examines: one by Duccio, one by Fra Filippo Lippi, and one by Poussin. But it is also obvious that he really enjoys the sensory qualities of art, and his enjoyment is infectious. ‘This is one of the great yellows in the history of painting,’ he says of the Virgin’s robe in the Poussin painting — the sort of spirited assertion that makes one desperate to see this painting again.

The Dean has written a very fine book on religion and art, as well as the booklet which accompanies the television series. He looks closely and patiently. Of the Poussin he says ‘it is a great painting, but like a lot of great things, it takes a long time to understand its greatness’ — a phrase which, in the world of contemporary art, carries more shock value than a canvas-full of Fiona Banner’s overused swear-words. But in a way, the comparison is a neat one. By concentrating on iconography rather than formal issues, the Dean reminds us that a great deal of pre-modern religious art was, in some sense, highly conceptual in nature, in that the formal values were at every stage servants to a higher conceptual purpose. But rather than the playful, silly, rather contemptible concepts of most contemporary art, the concept underlying this functional devotional art could hardly be more serious. It’s a difficult message to convey today, and it is to the credit of the Dean — and to Channel 5 — that it has been conveyed at all, let alone so crisply and clearly.