Georgina Dettmer
This week we virtually sat down with Joanna McClurg, fine arts student, actor, and artist, for her Best of the Best.
To start off then, what is your absolute Best of the Best? Art, music, theatre or writing. Absolutely anything!
At the centre of David Bowie’s album Diamond Dogs (1974) there are three songs: Sweet Thing, Candidate and Sweet Thing Reprise. These songs form a suite or tryptic at the album’s heart; one slips seamlessly into the next. The album itself is a conglomeration of various bit and pieces Bowie had written for what he had hoped would be a fully-fledged stage adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. Denied the rights by Orwell’s estate, Bowie reworked his material, creating his own lead character/stage persona, Halloween Jack, and a new setting, the decaying Hunger City. Much of the album was written using the ‘cut-up’ technique Bowie had learnt from idol, William Burroughs. This involved cutting up one’s writing, or text from a newspaper/book/magazine, into single-sentence fragments, then mixing them up and splicing them together to create new, unexpected narratives. This was a technique for a postmodernist world that seemed to have lost any sense of a ‘great narrative’. Bowie’s fragmentary ‘Sweet Thing’ suite was then an anti-narrative for an atomised late-20th century. A lone sax is blown throughout; jazzy, sonic shorthand for the urban, the nocturnal, the sinister. One feels as if they’re on a smoky noir film set; a nameless venom hangs heavy, like the one that moves through Winston during 1984’s two minutes hate. Listen to the concert version on David Live (1974) for max suspense, max swagger and max emotion.
Moving from music to laughter, what is something that never fails to make you laugh?
The only 100% honest answer to this question is Shaun the Sheep. I can recite whole episodes of the Mighty Boosh, I nearly croaked when I saw Stuart Lee’s stand up show Snowflake/Tornado last term at the Oxford Playhouse, I love all sorts of wordplay and whimsy but the single thing that is certain to get a giggle out of me every time is Shaun! The stories those Claymation modellers are able to tell without words, the laughs they can elicit, it’s brilliant. I will always advocate for the genius of Aardman animations. I think they’re sort of like Britain’s answer to Studio Ghibli, comparable in terms the level of artistry the goes into their animations and the way in which they appeal to completely diverse audiences. I recently heard Mark Kermode say, in a joyous review of last year’s A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmagedon, “I started smiling in the first 10 seconds … and then I giggled and chuckled and guffawed and beamed my way through the whole movie. … I am about as old, tired and cynical as it is possible to get and I just absolutely loved it.” High Praise! Plasticine, it’s life affirming stuff.
On the same sort of theme then, what’s something that has recently made you smile?
Whenever I’m wanting a bit of a boost, I’ll often pick through The Collected Dorothy Parker. If the woman were alive today, she would be hailed as a ‘queen’, not to mention massive on twitter. I have spent a sorry amount of time trying to memorise her fabulous witticisms and scalding reads so as to whip one out as if it were my own words, were a situation to ask for it. I’ll give you a taste:
“This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it."
“You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.”
“Brevity is the soul of lingerie.”
How about something you’ve rediscovered recently that’s also brought you some comfort or joy?
Recently, for the first time in years, I broke out my boxset of the BBC drama, Hustle. One night, I must have been about ten years old, I got into my mum’s bed beside her. My dad was away on a work-related trip and I had decided that this was the perfect opportunity to escape my single bed and experience a night of opulence in my parents’ turquoise King. On this night Mum decided to turn on BBC One, with volume down, to “help her get over”. She made quick work of it.
I, however, remained wide-awake, glued to the screen, absorbing all the delights of post-watershed telly for the first time. The volume crept up as mum’s breathing got heavy and nasal. The alarm clock beeped eleven and on came this show called Hustle; a show about a motley group of London-based con artists who, throughout the show’s eight seasons, pull off an array of daring and intricate ‘long cons’ on corrupt fat cats. I became smitten. I adored the gasp-inducing twists, the glamour, the fashions, the rooting for the ‘bad guys’. But even more than that, I was fascinated by the deception; the different aliases and accents, the actors playing ‘actors’. It wouldn’t be unusual to see a single character embody a maintenance man, an arms dealer, a lorry driver and a land developer all within the course of a single episode. I have never seen multi-rolling done so brilliantly on screen since. I imagine it must have been a heap of fun for the actors, like being in an ensemble theatre troop, it certainly ignited the actor in me (not that I knew it at the time for at least a full year of my life, whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I proudly said, “I want to be a grifter!”).
After discovering the actor in you, have you discovered any performances that have completely blown you away? Anything we should make sure to watch over the coming weeks?
Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence, hands down. I had, over the years, heard Sam Mendes, Jennifer Lawrence, Sarah Paulson and Cate Blanchett all cite this performance as the most brilliant they’d ever seen. I decided it’d probably be a bit embarrassing if I didn’t give it a watch. I, therefore, went into the film expecting to be blown away, which you’d imagine would lead to disappointment. The truth is that Gena Rowlands is downright exquisite in this role. I wish I could answer this question with a lesser known, less-praised performance but it would be a blatant lie and I could hardly live with myself. Gena Rowlands is heart-breaking and comedic, panic inducing and joyful. I wince as I write these words. I don’t feel any attempt of mine to describe the thing could do it justice, so I’ll not try - she makes you feel dead reverent like that. I can, however, confidently say that I have never seen a film which speaks more poignantly about mental health
Before we wrap up, we’ve got to know what your favourite work of art is! What is a piece you think we should all see?
There is a painting by the Russian artist Ilya Repin called Religious Procession in Kursk Province (1980-83) which I adore. It feels totally cinematic. It’s the composition; the great big swathe of empty, chalky, blemished ground at the forefront, the diagonals created by the crowd and the hill. It’s the colours and how they are used to create a hazy heat. It’s characters; the young boy with the walking aid, the vain priest in with golden hair and robes, the Cossack militiaman on horseback, brandishing his whip, the frightened faces beneath him, the peasant girls at the edge of the crowd, their faces shadowed by their shrouds and the wealthy ones, gleaming at the centre. Repin’s choice of subject seems to have been rooted in an awareness of the injustice within Russian society. He wrote: “life around me disturbs me a great deal and gives me no peace - it begs to be captured on canvas”. His social conscience was shared by his fellow ‘Wanderers’ (a society of like-minded Russian artists, active in the late eighteen and early nineteen hundreds who aimed to present unvarnished representations of contemporary Russian life), and can be forcefully felt in another of his most famous paintings, and another favourite of mine, Barge Haulers on the Volga.
Joanna is a second year student at Oxford University studying Fine Art. Take a look at her website here and check out her original pieces: https://joannamcclurg.wordpress.com/
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