Last night I attended a lecture by Alex Schmid, director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews, on state terrorism. Linking competing conceptual definitions of terrorism with the ongoing practice of state terror in countries around the world, it was incredibly confronting, largely due to the many slides Schmid displayed revealing statistics on the numbers of people killed, tortured, disappeared, incarcerated in concentration camps etc, from the 1970s till the present.

Then, today, I read David Thomson in the Guardian: “It may be fanciful to read national impulse in the tropes of art,” he writes, yet eloquently does just that. He muses on the violence in Hollywood’s latest cinematic output – from There Will Be Blood to Sweeney Tod: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, it’s awash with blood – and links it to America’s crises of conscience regarding its country’s practices of torture and prisoner abuse.

Can art really reveal a nation’s interior violence? I’m planning to see the Coen brothers’ latest offering, No Country For Old Men, this weekend, so will let you know.

 

This month, as I’ve banished my old friend drink, I’m planning to sit back and relax in the company of a lot more art. This weekend, therefore, I managed to fit in the brilliant new film 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days from Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, Katie Mitchell’s bold production of Women of Troy, and Louise Bourgeois’ fascinating exhibition at Tate Modern. While I’m sure I would have enjoyed each event if taken in separately over a prolonged period of time, seeing them in the space of 24 hours, one after the other, in that order, really enhanced my viewing pleasure (perhaps not quite the right phrase – for these works of art were often harrowing and depressing, some in an unremitting sort of way). I was able to trace links and themes between all three, most notably in the way women were presented.What really struck me, when sitting in the dark stalls of the National Theatre, hearing the women of Troy lament their heartbreaking losses at the hands of the Greeks, was that some men really can be bastards, something that Mungiu’s film, which I had watched the previous evening, evocatively emphasised as well: women’s lot, through the ages, in different and context-specific ways, is often appallingly unjust, especially when compared with that of men.

Then, wandering around level four of Tate Modern, neck craning to take in Bourgeois’s bollocks and breasts hanging from the ceiling, or bulging from great slabs on the floor or walls, I felt confronted with how one woman, tracing a searing psychological journey through her past, was attempting to articulate in sculpture some of the issues that women have to face: motherhood, sex within marriage, managing a family and a home …

This cultural trip across gender equality issues – from abortion, rape, sexuality and the public/private divide – could have left me feeling just depressed, and not much wiser. And yet, on leaving the cinema, theatre and gallery, I felt renewed with energy and hope. It was the strength of the friendship that the character Otilia so selflessly displayed towards her friend Gabriela in 4, 3, 2 that left me most stunned; and, departing the theatre to walk down the river towards Tate Modern, it was the loyal, unflinching demonstrations of support and succour between the women of Troy, displayed in dance or in a chorus of wails, that stood out for me as the message of that play. Bourgeois, meanwhile, often made me laugh out loud, her spirited self-analysis, drawing wider connections with structural issues of power, done so masterfully and often self-mockingly, that they couldn’t fail somehow to delight and inspire in their subversive resistance.

All of which made me think that themed arts outings are a really good idea. Selecting cultural events to see in a short space of time that centre on common representations or issues, even if they do so through different art forms and in different historical contexts, can be illuminating, making the whole experience really greater than the sum of its parts. A sort of cultural intersection of ideas.

This weekend, I’ve got tickets to see jazz pianist John Taylor at the Vortex – I’d welcome any tips for what films, books or plays I should make time for as well, to really enhance my pleasure of that performance. Taylor is performing a suite with his trio, and special guest Julian Argüelles, entitled Requiem for a Dreamer, which is intended to pay tribute to writer Kurt Vonnegut. Maybe revisiting Slaughterhouse-Five is a good place to start?