Pharaohs, Troubadours and Drag Queens:

What I learned about masculine expression from a day of culture.

On the last weekend of summer in London, the weather was hot; many people were still away, and the three day weekend put us in a holiday mood. My son was at a festival; my daughter with her friends, so my husband and I decided to have a day of culture in the city.

We went to the British Museum in the morning, walked to the Barbican after lunch, and in the evening, rode our bikes across the river to see the new Almodovar movie, Julieta. I came home full of images, thoughts about art, masculinity and where we are now in the cultures of my two countries: the US and the UK.

The exhibit at the British Museum was called Sunken Cities: Egypt’s Lost World. Artifacts from under the bay of Alexandria evoked daily life in a drowned world. But there was one extraordinary piece of sculpture — the torso of a woman draped in a clinging material that revealed her perfect body, so realistic the archaeologist who found her described worrying the fabric might dry, forgetting for a moment that she was not real.

This torso represented one of the early Ptolemaic queens, whose own brother married her to seize power. She was portrayed as a beauty of goddess-like proportions at a time the Greek Egyptian generals needed to endow themselves with the divine rights of Pharaohs. That an artist centuries ago could make a piece so eloquent, spoke across the sands of time, filling me with gratitude and wonder.

Later, we walked to the Barbican to see the Ragnar Kjartasson exhibit. I would not have gone to see this on my own, but my husband had seen it earlier in the summer and was blown away. He tried to explain why and failed. I will probably fail, too. Many critics consider the Icelandic Kjartasson the most profound performance artist in the world today; if you are like I am, you may think that is not saying much.

Yet I felt my heart give way as soon as I walked into the first room. A group of bearded, soulful young men, strumming on guitars, lying on mattresses, perched on stools, surrounded by empty beer bottles, sang lines from a video clip projected on the wall above them. The projection was from an old movie starring Kjartasson’s own parents (both actors), as a housewife and the handyman who comes to “fix her pipes.” The piece is called “Take Me, Here By the Dishwasher.” It was silly, funny, tacky and yet also moving, touching. It had the quality of real art to say something new in the world which has not been said.

(Here’s a you tube clip of Kjartasson talking about the exhibit where you can see some of this and other pieces).

The best piece in the whole exhibit, as everyone who sees it seems to agree, is the Visitors. In it, the artist lies naked in a bathtub in an old mansion in the countryside. He strums a guitar and sings a poem written by his ex-wife, while a group of musician friends join in, each in separate rooms, projected on large screens. You experience the music and images building slowly to a climax and retreating. You move through the space with all the other people whose faces are reflected in the dark: amused, curious, defended, yearning, empathetic.

I saw several couples around me embrace each other. My husband and I wandered apart, yet as time went on, I wanted to draw closer to him, to touch him, hold him. The music got under my skin with its romantic yearning, its swells and ebbs. I felt moved and opened, vulnerable and longing for connection, even as I understood it was all an artifice, a performance, as the piece emphasized — beginning and ending with the players setting up and closing down their work.

In the evening, we got on our bikes and rode to the movies to Julieta, the latest Almodovar movie. Normally, I love Almodovar; his characters are like drag queens, wearing the outsized wigs of their emotions and enacting a hyper-real femininity which echoes and amplifies true life. Although it started with a close up of a deep, red, satin robe, the colour quickly dulled. Almodovar is the master of heightened emotion, and here the women had it all, but I never felt it. Maybe I was being over ambitious, a binge consumer who had just had too much.

Later I found out the movie was based on short stories by Alice Munro: a bad combination — like mixing tuna and chocolate. Munro is the master of understatement; her artistry allows us to see the wilderness inside her monochrome Canadian characters. Almodovar is all surface, no subtext.

Even though the movie did not catch fire for me, while others have loved it, the combination of all three experiences left me pondering.

Since the time of Thonis-Heracleon, male artists have used the feminine image to comment on the world around them and the world inside them. There’s nothing wrong with this. Some of the most compelling female figures in art and literature have been created by men. Women are just as capable of turning men into objects to suit our needs. But women artists are more comfortable with inner exploration. They know how to dig into their own wild mess. From Frida Kahlo’s baths to Bjork’s vulnicura, women artists mine autobiography for insight and revelation. Fewer men seem willing to stand naked and alone under the spotlight.

Why does this matter? Emily Lindsay has written eloquently on Medium about how women’s drive to own their right to inhabit male economic space has not been equally matched by male bravery about owning their emotions. This has begun to happen, of course, but it may not be fast enough.

Not fast enough because of what feels like a terrible, angry backlash happening in the US and the UK against the challenge of living with otherness. I do not think it is a coincidence that the two men urging us to usher in a “glorious future,” which looks a lot like the patriarchal, mono-cultural past, are both serial philanderers, men who use women, like the electorate, to boost their self-image. Boris and Donald can seem more cartoon than real, down to their signature yellow and orange hair. But they are human and vulnerable, and the more they project themselves onto their bluff and blustering cartoon selves, the more I think how weak and afraid they must be, inside. Their supporters, too, seem so full of vitriol and fury. Why? When you understand we are all equally ridiculous, equally vulnerable, anger is never the response: only empathy — and a good laugh at your own expense.

We need less anger, more humour, less enmity, more recognition of mutual vulnerability, fewer pharaohs and more naked bodies strumming guitars.

I came back from my day of culture to think we need artists and writers like Kjartasson (or my other Nordic crush, the messed up, ever tender novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard). These artists stand inside the carapace of male invulnerability and open the doors and windows to reveal the dirty sheets and beer bottles inside. And that feels new and really interesting.

There is a moment in the Visitors when the musicians sing in the words of Kjartasson’s ex-wife: “there are stars exploding all around us, and there’s nothing, nothing you can do about it.” Shortly afterwards, Kjartasson’s soft, bearded body emerges from the bath. He wraps a towel around himself and joins the others, and they all go off together down a sloping lawn, the camera following as they grow smaller and smaller in the distance: a group of humans, fragile, alone, coming together in the short space of time we have.

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You might also be interested in: The New English Revolution, Life Through Two Lenses or On Cross Cultural Unions, Conflicts and Compromise

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