Weird and very wonderful

Pavel Buchler won the Northern Art Prize last night, but Manchester's Rachel Goodyear’s work insinuated its work most hauntingly into this viewer’s imagination. One of the most interesting new artists, she doesn’t shy away from excursions into the weird and warped, but gives them an uneasy beauty. Her delicate, unsettling works depicting humans and animals put me in mind of illustrations in fairy tale books of the moment when things get so dark that only magic can banish the curse. Goodyear’s subjects, resolutely contemporary, remind us that these tales are not confined to old books. Meticulously drawn and painted in pencil interrupted by blood red watercolour detail, the girl sewing together her feet with red thread, the family sitting with their heads and bodies embedded in a mass of darkness and the girl whose back is circled by a vast, scratching bat linger in the mind and ask you to construct the stories that led up to each trauma. Quietly and undemonstratively, they highlight strangeness, discomfort and fragility, and the terror that can ensue when things that are familiar shift context and become sinister.

Heaven - and hell on earth

There are only a few days left in which to see The Sacred Made Real, The National Gallery’s extraordinary show of Spanish religious paintings and sculpture. Faith is brought to compelling life – and death – here. If you can, go and see this profoundly strange, gory –a head of the decapitated John the Baptist features gruesome severed arteries – and fascinating collection. As you look, bear in mind that these 17th century statues are still taken in candlelit processions through Spanish streets, accompanied by penitents in pointed hoods and cloaks to the tune of sinister, sonorous drum beats, and borne on the backs of men who believe undergoing the physical pain of bearing their weight is a spiritual penance.
These works, lit as if by candles in an otherwise sepulchral darkness, are meant as realistic depictions of agony, spiritual passion, ascetic ecstasy, torment and death. Macabre to us, they reinforce the idea that the holy figures were actual, suffering humans in torment or – equally disturbing – self-inflicted extremis. Gregorio Fernandez’s Dead Christ is a cadaver who has been tortured, complete with flagellated flesh, gaping wounds and fingernails made of real horn. His glass eyes are rolling back in his head; his defeated open mouth reveals ivory teeth. Pedro De Mena’s Saint Francis In Ecstasy is equally intense. To understand why this small statue of a skeletal monk whose glass eyes appear to be looking into something more full of dread and wonder than any earthly experience, you need to know that St Francis was supposed to have been discovered in his tomb, 200 years after his death, and instead of being a decomposed corpse, was standing upright, looking heavenwards – as does this statue – and still bleeding from his stigmata: the wounds that manifest themselves on the hands of the faithful, as if by a miracle, that mimic the bleeding wounds inflicted on Jesus before his crucifixion.
At the other end of The National Gallery, equally realistic human figures are used in a context that is the profane opposite to The Sacred Made Real. The Hoerengracht, by Ed and Nancy Kienholz, is a walk-though installation that recreates Amsterdam’s red light district. The bodies of the women are modelled on real people, and topped by mannequin heads. Reminding the viewer that these figures are part of a long tradition of representing prostitutes, their tiny, shabby rooms are decorated with reminders of the visual traditions of painting fallen women; meanwhile, the way the women who inhabit these rooms have been, and continue to be, objectivised, is emphasised by the face of each being surrounded by a frame. As the figures of the saints and martyrs are intended to be as lifelike as possible in their agony, the garish prostitute women in The Hoerengracht are deliberately made into objects to be desired and consumed, whether as flesh or as art.

Fashion Flop

Was any other snow-bound house-troll, reduced to watching more telly than is good for them, disappointed by the clothes in Material Girl, BBC 1’s new fashion rom-com, last night?
Now, this may be prime-time televisual chick-lit but honestly. The paucity of imagination demonstrated by the costume team – presumably reflecting, they imagine, the middle-of-the-road tastes of its Grazia-reading target audience – left Gypsy Rose feeling sad. In particular, designer Ali’s supposedly most fabulous creation – the one that sparks catfights amongst warring fashionistas - was a bland column dress in black spangles that looked as if it could have graced an unadventurous matron with ambitions to sing on a cruise ship. At a pinch, it might have adorned a mature bellydancer in a Cairo nightspot, and although these ladies are glamorous beyond belief and have more moves in their little fingers than a whole floorshow of writhing lapdancers, their outfits unashamedly come from the tacky end of the wardrobe spectrum.
Isn’t it sad that the frock that we’re all meant to drool over looks like something from the ‘special occasion’ section of a high street department store, not something astonishing by Westwood or Galliano that transports its wearer into a world of dreams and the imagination? Something that takes the viewer’s breath away, and makes everyone who sees it turn green? The dress in question is meant to have been inspired by lightening striking the ocean: how they managed to come up with something that conventional and dreary is deeply puzzling. The dressing up boxes of fabulous girls should always contain wonders and make us feel as if every outfit can turn a day into an occasion. Material Girl’s offending garment, which looks as if it should be accessorised with helmet hair and fake tan, might just about do for us to wear doing the housework.

Quiet and mean

BBC2’s Nurse Jackie is a great character. ‘Quiet and mean. Those are my people,’ she tells awkward junior nurse Zoe. Under the guise of quietness and meanness, and for all her caning of prescription medication and extra-marital sex with the hospital pharmacist, Jackie is unfailingly efficient, dryly witty and carries out so many acts of kindness and mercy – and retribution, that might be seen as divine, such as when she flushed the ear of a sadist who had tortured a woman down the lavatory - that AA Gill wrote in last weekend’s Sunday Times that she could be seen as a very contemporary kind of saint.
Now, surely, competence and humanity are what we expect from the medical profession, not solely the attributes of saintliness? But Jackie, who doesn’t have to make nice to be nice, is less urban Mother Teresa and more like a fairy tale character who waves a magic stethoscope and transforms the lives of those who are fortunate enough to come under her care. Florence Nightingale, who was famously forthright, would undoubtedly approve of the way her profession is being represented in the modern media, though she might wish there were enough money to provide properly for all the overstretched and underpaid true-life Jackies doing their best on the frontline of the NHS. Jackie is make-believe: a wish come true; a fairy godmother in scrubs at a time when in real hospitals in real places, pensioners are left in corridors to die on trolleys.

Reasons to be cheerful

Rock music has always had a problem with artifice, which is why it was so rail-roaded when punk came along. The orthodoxy was that rock was about something tedious called authenticity: freak-out dancing and smelly armpits anyone? Punk, on the other hand, was about dressing up, showing off and living in the moment: what working class Brits have always done on a Friday night. And above all, it was a direct descendent of music hall: rude, raucous, crude, comic, short and sweet. It was low-rent, high art performance, with the street as a theatre full of grotesque clowns.
Matt Whitecross’s Ian Dury biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll – out yesterday - understands this perfectly. The first frames of Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll show Serkis, in white-face and bowler, silhouetted on a deserted stage in a derelict music hall. From there we see him pulling scarves from the mouth of a saxophone and handkerchiefs from thin air, all the time cranking out lewd knees-up ditties with irresistible rhythms. It’s a cracking performance, in all senses of the word.
More than any other performer of his time, Dury was about music hall: the dark inheritor of George Formby’s crown, a sharp-tongued tricky dicky. He was a one-off but his look and his wilfully unpretty delivery were plundered wholesale. Johnny Rotten, he claimed, burgled not just his razorblade earring, but his whole style – gurningly ugly, deliberately freakish, pure carny.
Rock history, uncomfortable associating itself with anything so purely entertaining as music hall, has often downplayed Dury’s influence. It loves Sid Vicious, and choses to overlook the fact that he added a piece of Grand Guignol to the Sex Pistols’ theatre. The distaste of those who prefer instruments that are made of wood for music hall goes on: more recently, when Carl Barat and Pete Doherty proclaimed their love of Chas And Dave, muso-squirming reached epidemic proportions.
To say Serkis makes the role of Dury his own is an understatement. He’s wriggled into his character’s twisted persona – physically crippled by polio; warped because Dury oozed rancour – as if he’s insinuated himself inside the man’s skin. His Dury puts on the performance of his life all the time: when there’s an audience, it’s spellbinding, and when there isn’t, much of the time it’s such a car crash that you can’t stop rubbernecking. But like music hall itself, once the curtain rises, the tawdry bits and pieces that make up a life become transformed into something unforgettable.
Conversely,for all the appearance of artifice, Dury was utterly, entirely authentic. He was a larger-thank-life maverick with a way with words. The film has been criticised became Serkis’ performance overwhelms the other characters. Well, that’s exactly what it must have been like for all those, in Dury’s life, who were below him on the bill. He was the star of the show, and Serkis shines brighter than anyone else in his. In both cases, we have reasons to be cheerful.

Fairy Tales, Not Just Of New York

Our culture is so currently in thrall to the enchantment of Park Avenue Princesses and their tooth-pick-thin, WASPY, uptown ilk, that it seems to have forgotten that the real princesses in fairy tales were usually not primped, pink-clad dollies with cascading blonde curls. Cinderella? Slept in the dirt. Rapunzel? Grew up in a turnip patch. The Sarah Jessica Parkers of this world would shudder in their Manolos at the prospect of getting their manicured hands dirty.
So Disney's first African-American princess, the appealing, Anika Noni-Rose-voiced Tiana, is a savvy specimen of fairy tale princess. Her ethnic identity has been the subject of much media coverage, but with the stately Michelle Obama effectively queen of the new USA, Tiana's princess appeal couldn't be more timely; the only sad thing about her is that she wasn't conjured up a long time ago.
Princesses come in all manner of shapes, colours and sizes. Kate Moss, with her elfin Arthur Rackham face, has fairy tale qualities that make her the perfect Cinderella for the modern world; she even looks as if she’s still a bit covered in smuts. Poor Eugenie and Beatrice, royal by birth but seemingly untouched by any magic wand, are very unprincesslike in comparison, though they do seem to end up at a lot of the same parties.
What gives Tiana particular appeal is that she's not desperate to snag a handsome prince. Like many beauties, she's both a pragmatist, and fond of food, and her ambition is to open a restaurant. When her prince arrives, he's the missing ingredient, rather than the recipe for the rest of her life. As a role model, Tiana has a lot going for her.
If nothing else, Tiana might act as a useful reminder that princess doesn’t have to mean “stroppy little madam,’ and isn’t a euphemism for ‘spoilt.’ Our idea of what a princess should do and be has shifted from the idea of magical transformation – from rags to riches, abandonment to love, ignorance to wisdom – to the image of someone over-privileged with too much sense of personal entitlement falling out of a nightclub in something that cost more than a year’s Josbseekers Allowance.