Radiohead’s music and art are inseparable, and a constant source of inspiration for me. I couldn’t miss this exhibition at The Ashmolean in Oxford.
Across several rooms, This Is What You Get explores the collaborative relationship between Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood and the visual material they’ve created for Radiohead, Yorke’s solo albums and The Smile. It’s not everyone’s idea of “good art”[1] and this show doesn’t attempt to frame it as such — instead, it offers a window into an experimental process often wrestling with creative block, uncertainty and the search for meaning. We see how setting constraints, relinquishing control and responding to external pressure can sharpen focus. Many of the most compelling images emerge from their willingness to embrace being amateurs — consistently trying new things and flailing around in the hope that something interesting will emerge.
It’s all refreshingly down-to-earth. We learn that good things often happened by chance, Yorke and Donwood always downplaying their abilities and keen to emphasise that “we had no idea what we were doing”. A reassurance for me, considering my own working methods, is how the pair combine seemingly unrelated sources to find a direction, or discover something in a single poem, painting, place or process that will act as a wayfinder.
When multiple elements align perfectly, an album can impact some of us so profoundly that we’ll live our lives enriched by the belief that everything about it — the music, yes, but also the material that contextualises and expands it — holds the highest creative value. And music moves with us in such a way that if you’re sensitive to it as a measure of your life, it can forever intertwine with memories in ways painting or sculpture rarely does. In Radiohead’s case, each body of work becomes an instantly recognisable cultural touchpoint, capturing the moods, anxieties and technologies of its time while resonating with millions of people. In my world, this qualifies as very good art.
I spent today reading the essays and interviews in the accompanying catalogue, and it’s worth buying if you love this stuff. As is often the case, the book covers more ground than the show and allows for a deeper dive at a slower pace.
It was a lovely day trip to Oxford. We had coffee at New Ground, strolled along Broad Street and browsed the Tardis-like Blackwell’s bookshop. As it was Geri’s first time in the city, we ambled around The Bodleian Library, Radcliffe Camera and a few old lanes. We also met up with Jon and Leigh Hicks (and their daughter, ’Mantha) at The Ashmolean as they also love Radiohead and live nearby. It’s always fun to hang out with them and we had a good catchup over drinks and tapas at Al Andalus before the long drive home.
Jon’s photo of us at the exhibition.
With reference to this review and the critic’s fixation on whether the artwork, when separated from the music, qualifies as “good art”. ↩︎
In Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite, an anthropologist named Marghe arrives on the planet Jeep in order to research a lost human colony. When she stumbles into sacred territory, she is taken hostage by the Echraidhe, a people who live an isolated and difficult existence in the cold northern climes. Against the odds, Marghe escapes, and later meets Thenike, a viajera—one who travels from place to place, serving as storyteller, news bringer, healer, negotiator, and more.
Marghe had asked Thenike why the Echraidhe were so inflexible, so bound by tradition.
“Because they are so few,” Thenike had said. “Because their sister’s mothers are also their choose-mothers’ sisters. They’re born too close. All their memories interlock and look down the same path to the same places. Each memory reflects another, repeats, reinforces, until the known becomes the only. For the Echraidhe, it’s not real if it can’t be seen elsewhere, in their mother’s memory, or their mothers’ mother. For them, perhaps, there is no such thing as the unknown.” Thenike shook her head. “It’s a danger to all who are able to deepsearch into their memories well, or often.”
To “deepsearch” is to enter a trance-like state, one in which a person travels back among the memories of their ancestors, seeing and experiencing what people who lived before them saw and experienced. Thenike continues:
“You can see so much of the world through others’ memories, places you’ve never been, faces you’ve never seen and never will, weather you’ve never felt and food you’ve never tasted, that sometimes it’s hard not to want to just feel, taste, see those familiar things over and over. Truly new things become alien, other, not to be trusted. There are those who know their village so well, through the eyes and hearts of so many before them, that they can’t leave it to go somewhere else. They can’t bear to place their feet on a path they have never trodden, on soil they have never planted with a thousand seeds in some past life as lover or child. Some become unable to leave their lodge or tent, or can’t sail past the sight of familiar cliffs. Many who can deepsearch powerfully enough to be a viajera end like this.”
The danger of deepsearch is that of nostalgia: a wistful longing for the past that never was exactly as we remember it. However real and strong a memory is, it is still an echo, still a reflection, not the experience itself. The women of the Echraidhe have become enthralled to that reflection, such that they cannot see what’s ahead, cannot imagine anything changing. And so they become unable to see the change that is already underfoot, the way the winters are getting longer and colder, their children sicker, the tribe smaller and weaker.
In this way, nostalgia can be a kind of toxin, a poison that keeps us forever walking backward, gaze directed at our footprints while our feet step awkwardly into a future we scorn to see. Communities which are hardened to outsiders—which refuse trade and companionship from other people (as the Echraidhe refuse), which demand that nothing changes even as the seasons pass and the rivers shift and new mountains form—begin to rot from within, to eat themselves because there is nothing outside to eat. Like an AI training on its own output, each generation disintegrates further into madness.
“And you?”
Here Thenike had smiled, though Marghe saw memories of bitter times written on her face. “I’m fortunate enough to have the memories of a thousand different foremothers, some clear, some not. Fortunate, too, to become bored with the past and eager to sail over the horizon or walk over the crest of the hill and see what’s on the other side.”
Because the other side is where the life is. To live is to accept the discomfort—and pleasure—of a future that is undiscovered, undetermined, uncertain. Unknown and unknowable. But alive, alive as only that which changes can ever be.
Beautiful sunset at the Indigo Girls and Melissa Etheridge show at The Minnesota State Fair last night. Both were great but I’d never seen Melissa before and… Wow!
the latency of eink is slower so there is always a slight lag when drawing, and due to the inherent nature of the technology it can be frustrating to draw with, but at least i don’t have to suffer the glare of the ipad, plus it is more forgiving than pen and paper. i also like the idea that digital drawings are a lot more portable, but there is still something so romantic about the physical sketchbook. i guess for me, every medium has its seasons.
(thanks to @katebingburt for the inspiration to do these b&w drawings)
Female velvet spiders exhibit a remarkable type of maternal care unique among arachnids. Upon the birth of her brood, the mother spider liquefies her internal organs and regurgitates this material as food. Once her capability to liquefy her insides is exhausted, the young sense this and consume the mother.
Animal biology seems to have an asymmetric ability to generate horror rather than affirming metaphors.
