# data[].attributes.body
new website design

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Art, Culture + Democracy

7-9pm, Tuesday 24 January 2017
Location: St James' Church

Thrapston has a famous historical link to the family of George Washington, the first president of the USA. This talk took place in St James' Church which bears the Washington family crest and featured three American-born speakers discussing the role of democracy in art as well as human culture and society in general.

Anna Brownsted is a Cambridge-based artist who works with sound, text, installation and encounter to make interventions into the public realm. Fascinated by the dynamics of trust, uncertainty and possibility, her practice explores the space between fiction and reality.

Jessica Harby was born in 1980 in Oak Lawn, Il, USA and studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her practice encompasses drawing, installation, film and sound. Often using humour to address uncomfortable ideas, she has recently explored the importance of cows in the history of art galleries, the overblown masculinity of Arnold Schwarzenegger's face, and why Donald Trump exists.

Fath Davis Ruffins is Curator at National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. She is a specialist in ethnic imagery in popular culture and African-American cultural history and joined the discussion live from the USA.

This talk took place shortly after the 45th US presidential inauguration and coincided with the launch of Fermynwoods' seventh Open Online exhibition, which featured both artists Anna and Jessica.

Thanks to Northamponshire Community Foundation and Arts Council England for their support.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fermynwoods Contemporary Art " Art, Culture + Democracy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
7-9pm, Tuesday 24 January 2017 Location: St James' Church Thrapston has a famous historical link to the family of George Washington, the first president of the USA. This talk took place in St James' Church which bears the Washington family crest and featured three American-born speakers discussing the role of democracy in art as well as human culture and society in general.

# data[].attributes.body
Spent a wonderful two days leading workshops for young people at Fermynwoods, followed by voting on Referendum (Tell Me How Do You Feel).

# data[].attributes.body
Anna Brownsted and I preparing for our Free Exchange talk Art Culture + Democracy
24 January 2017, St. James' Church Thrapston

# data[].attributes.body
Our boiler tried to kill us with carbon monoxide so we had a surprise emergency vacation on a farm with poor phone reception, meaning I felt like Agent Gordon Cole on every professional phone call I took.

# data[].attributes.body
20 January 2017

# data[].attributes.body
Hosted a sketchbook workshop in my studio 15 January to test some ideas. Thanks everyone who came and made some mess!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Whenever the U.K. faces cuts in public funding for the arts, we instinctively look to the U.S. From our end, we see a generous philanthropic corporate class and entrepreneurial non-profits operating without federal and state handouts. Meanwhile, arts organizations and artists in the U.S. often view the U.K. with envy. We are blessed with a mixed funding model that enables generous support for audience development, arts education, and professional training, all the while we retain an appetite for state-sponsored experimental work. However, the art worlds on both sides of the Atlantic have been rocked by Trump and Brexit. We stare at each other in disbelief but also with a renewed appetite for action.

A scan of our respective funding and policy landscapes suggests we might have much to learn from each other. Both the U.K. and the U.S. are endowed with nineteenth century art forms delivered through twentieth century institutions to 21st century audiences. Our government agencies are intertwined. Arts Council England's predecessor (the wartime Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts) was established with money from the Pilgrim Trust (a private fund stuffed with American money). In turn, the Arts Council provided the template for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which was established 19 years later, and celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. The NEA largely has been kept starved of funds, while the Arts Council has grown in scale and resources-though a conservative government in Britain with a penchant for cuts and privatization is watching the arts with that familiar dastardly look in their eyes.

A transatlantic truth is that arts policy is always absurd. And the absurdity is heightened when government agencies are faced with cold, hard questions about resource allocation, and collide with the diffuse rhetoric of the visual arts. What kind of world would the NEA or ACE like to see? Do they want to foster good artists, or good aesthetes? Talented painters or astute consumers? Doers or seers? The answers from Washington and London look strikingly similar: they want everyone optimally engaged, artists fulfilling their potential, and as much of the best kind of art as possible.

The problem is, this is the vocabulary of apolitical fairy tales, not sober policymaking. They cannot escape the challenges of selecting winners and losers, choosing between work that is laudable and that which should be dismissed, and ultimately distributing limited resources between a multitude of noisy and deserving non-profits. These are, ultimately, political questions. Luckily for the NEA, their constrained resources means they are less expected to "do something" at points of crisis; the Arts Council, on the other hand, is often seen to perform a more paternal role in times of trouble.

And that time is certainly now. Strong currents of populist revolt are being felt the world over, while artists are still speaking primarily to those who would rather the status quo remain just that. National surveys of adults in America and England have returned consistent findings in recent years-gallery goers are disproportionately white and well educated. Meanwhile, other data shows there are gross inequities in the distribution of funding to artists and communities, depending on where they are located. Disparities in race and class, in particular, are often replicated in the funding decisions of arts agencies. There have been many attempts to redress these imbalances (often using under-resourced and short-lived programs) and despite the best of intentions these haven't really made an impact.

In 2016, long-standing structural inequalities relating to arts access on both sides of the Atlantic seem to have been joined by a fresh and yet more intractable policy dilemma: the cultural estrangement in both Trump-leaning counties in the U.S. and the Brexity bits of Great Britain. It seems likely to me that art (as an indicator of cultural relations, identity, and meaning) will become an intermittent flashpoint in both countries as cultural divisions are laid bare and artists seek to understand and express just what on Earth is going on.

The fate of artists in this brave new world seems no less straightforward. Are artists special creatures, to be protected from the evils of the market economy or rather thrust into it, as designers, animators and engines of social and economic growth in our innovative and creative industries? The atmosphere created by inward-looking and protectionist policies will either send artists running for cover or more likely induce them to renew efforts to reach out beyond arbitrary national boundaries and reaffirm our common humanity through free expression and cosmopolitan outlooks. Either way, artists are going to need back-up. And two important studies ( one in the U.K. and one in the U.S.) indicate that they face very similar issues in our two precarious economies.

Both studies examine why artists are poor: sometimes caught by their own economic illiteracy, other times by their disavowal of capitalism? Regardless, they are beloved by city planners busy with Creative Placemaking projects. Artists occupy and revitalize the low-grade spaces which are subsequently suffocated by an influx of moneyed speculators. Municipal governments stand by, stupefied by the complexity of the situation and hampered by the deregulated planning laws their predecessors have set in place. It's the same everywhere. Policy solutions are in short supply.

As we sail into this unchartered territory, the major agents of change in the U.S. will be trusts and foundations, who collectively have the power to affect the fate of nonprofits in the arts in a way that ACE and local government agencies might here in the U.K. The culture wars of the 1990s saw to the emaciation of the NEA and with it, strong federal funding of the arts in America. Upon reflection, perhaps you should be thankful that the national arts agency can't be a powerful agent on behalf of your incoming President. Hamilton? "Over-rated!" SNL? "Boring!" And MoMA? Well, we will have to wait for a tweet. And after decanting the NEA out of their landmark offices in D.C., the art world is waiting with trepidation to hear who will succeed Jane Chu as NEA Chairman.

Meanwhile, in the background, the monolithic institutions in big cities seem immune to the changing politics of our time. The National Galleries and major museums look like they are going to outlive Trump and Brexit by serving an international crowd, while their neighborhoods and cities change around them. Despite local flavor, the works on site follow a familiar encyclopedic pattern: a Rembrandt here, a Van Gogh there, a handful of Picassos everywhere. The one percent look like they'll survive this too, that merry band of interchangeable private collectors who lubricate the art markets in London and New York. The flats in Mayfair probably resemble the apartments in the Upper East Side and there's always enough Warhol for both.

The U.K. often sees itself in the midpoint between the continental model of arts policy (rich in subsidy and state patronage, funding spread evenly across regions, formalized arts education systems) and the U.S. approach (reliant on private enterprise, resources concentrated in a small number of artistic centers, minimal state intervention). As we approach 2017, our state apparatus, hastened by post-Brexit maneuvers, looks increasingly vulnerable to privatization-and we in the U.K. edge ever closer to the U.S. way of doing business. Ireland better get out the way, we're coming through.

-James Doeser

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Who Better Supports Artists-Americans or Brits?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Whenever the U.K. faces cuts in public funding for the arts, we instinctively look to the U.S. From our end, we see a generous philanthropic corporate class and entrepreneurial non-profits operating without federal and state handouts. Meanwhile, arts organizations and artists in the U.S. often view the U.K. with envy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Reports on the rise of fascism in Europe were not the American media's finest hour

smithsonian.com

How to cover the rise of a political leader who's left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society? Or does it take the position that someone who wins a fair election is by definition "normal," because his leadership reflects the will of the people?

These are the questions that confronted the U.S. press after the ascendance of fascist leaders in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

A leader for life

Benito Mussolini secured Italy's premiership by marching on Rome with 30,000 blackshirts in 1922. By 1925 he had declared himself leader for life. While this hardly reflected American values, Mussolini was a darling of the American press, appearing in at least 150 articles from 1925-1932, most neutral, bemused or positive in tone.

The Saturday Evening Post even serialized Il Duce's autobiography in 1928. Acknowledging that the new "Fascisti movement" was a bit " rough in its methods," papers ranging from the New York Tribune to the Cleveland Plain Dealer to the Chicago Tribune credited it with saving Italy from the far left and revitalizing its economy. From their perspective, the post-WWI surge of anti-capitalism in Europe was a vastly worse threat than Fascism.

Ironically, while the media acknowledged that Fascism was a new "experiment," papers like The New York Times commonly credited it with returning turbulent Italy to what it called "normalcy."

Yet some journalists like Hemingway and journals like the New Yorker rejected the normalization of anti-democratic Mussolini. John Gunther of Harper's, meanwhile, wrote a razor-sharp account of Mussolini's masterful manipulation of a U.S. press that couldn't resist him.

The 'German Mussolini'

Mussolini's success in Italy normalized Hitler's success in the eyes of the American press who, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, routinely called him "the German Mussolini." Given Mussolini's positive press reception in that period, it was a good place from which to start. Hitler also had the advantage that his Nazi party enjoyed stunning leaps at the polls from the mid '20's to early '30's, going from a fringe party to winning a dominant share of parliamentary seats in free elections in 1932.

But the main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke. He was a "nonsensical" screecher of "wild words" whose appearance, according to Newsweek, "suggests Charlie Chaplin." His "countenance is a caricature." He was as "voluble" as he was "insecure," stated Cosmopolitan.

When Hitler's party won influence in Parliament, and even after he was made chancellor of Germany in 1933 - about a year and a half before seizing dictatorial power - many American press outlets judged that he would either be outplayed by more traditional politicians or that he would have to become more moderate. Sure, he had a following, but his followers were "impressionable voters" duped by "radical doctrines and quack remedies," claimed The Washington Post. Now that Hitler actually had to operate within a government the "sober" politicians would "submerge" this movement, according to The New York Times and Christian Science Monitor. A "keen sense of dramatic instinct" was not enough. When it came to time to govern, his lack of "gravity" and "profundity of thought" would be exposed.

In fact, The New York Times wrote after Hitler's appointment to the chancellorship that success would only "let him expose to the German public his own futility." Journalists wondered whether Hitler now regretted leaving the rally for the cabinet meeting, where he would have to assume some responsibility.

Yes, the American press tended to condemn Hitler's well-documented anti-Semitism in the early 1930s. But there were plenty of exceptions. Some papers downplayed reports of violence against Germany's Jewish citizens as propaganda like that which proliferated during the foregoing World War. Many, even those who categorically condemned the violence, repeatedly declared it to be at an end, showing a tendency to look for a return to normalcy.

Journalists were aware that they could only criticize the German regime so much and maintain their access. When a CBS broadcaster's son was beaten up by brownshirts for not saluting the Führer, he didn't report it. When the Chicago Daily News' Edgar Mowrer wrote that Germany was becoming "an insane asylum" in 1933, the Germans pressured the State Department to rein in American reporters. Allen Dulles, who eventually became director of the CIA, told Mowrer he was "taking the German situation too seriously." Mowrer's publisher then transferred him out of Germany in fear of his life.

By the later 1930s, most U.S. journalists realized their mistake in underestimating Hitler or failing to imagine just how bad things could get. (Though there remained infamous exceptions, like Douglas Chandler, who wrote a loving paean to "Changing Berlin" for National Geographic in 1937.) Dorothy Thompson, who judged Hitler a man of "startling insignificance" in 1928, realized her mistake by mid-decade when she, like Mowrer, began raising the alarm.

"No people ever recognize their dictator in advance," she reflected in 1935. "He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will." Applying the lesson to the U.S., she wrote, "When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American."

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Like this article?
SIGN UP for our newsletter

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
smithsonian.com How to cover the rise of a political leader who's left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'We Have to Resist': A Conversation with Rebecca Solnit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It is difficult to define Rebecca Solnit. Is she an historian, a cultural theorist, a journalist, an activist? She cites reserved intellectuals like John Berger and Lawrence Weschler as influences, and she is also on the front lines of protest: she was an outspoken proponent of Occupy Wall Street; she was in Standing Rock, at the Dakota Access Pipeline, where protestors recently gained an unexpected victory; and she co-founded the Stop Trump project, which ideologically resists the U.S.

# data[].attributes.body
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.” - Martha Graham

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The connection between writing and dancing has been much on my mind recently: it's a channel I want to keep open. It feels a little neglected - compared to, say, the relationship between music and prose - maybe because there is something counter-intuitive about it. But for me the two forms are close to each other: I feel dance has something to tell me about what I do.

One of the most solid pieces of writing advice I know is in fact intended for dancers - you can find it in the choreographer Martha Graham's biography. But it relaxes me in front of my laptop the same way I imagine it might induce a young dancer to breathe deeply and wiggle their fingers and toes. Graham writes: "There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open."

Fred Astaire represents the aristocracy when he dances," claimed Gene Kelly, "and I represent the proletariat

What can an art of words take from the art that needs none? Yet I often think I've learned as much from watching dancers as I have from reading. Dance lessons for writers: lessons of position, attitude, rhythm and style, some of them obvious, some indirect. What follows are a few notes towards that idea.

Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire

Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly

" Fred Astaire represents the aristocracy when he dances," claimed Gene Kelly, in old age, "and I represent the proletariat." The distinction is immediately satisfying, though it's a little harder to say why. Tall, thin and elegant, versus muscular and athletic - is that it? There's the obvious matter of top hat and tails versus T-shirt and slacks. But Fred sometimes wore T-shirts and slacks, and was not actually that tall, he only stood as if he were, and when moving always appeared elevated, to be skimming across whichever surface: the floor, the ceiling, an ice rink, a bandstand. Gene's centre of gravity was far lower: he bends his knees, he hunkers down. Kelly is grounded, firmly planted, where Astaire is untethered, free-floating.

Likewise, the aristocrat and the proletariat have different relations to the ground beneath their feet, the first moving fluidly across the surface of the world, the second specifically tethered to a certain spot: a city block, a village, a factory, a stretch of fields. Cyd Charisse claimed her husband always knew which of these dancers she'd been working with by looking at her body at the end of the day: bruised everywhere if it was Kelly, not a blemish if it was Astaire. Not only aloof when it came to the ground, Astaire was aloof around other people's bodies. Through 15 years and 10 movies, it's hard to detect one moment of real sexual tension between Fred and his Ginger. They have great harmony but little heat. Now think of Kelly with Cyd Charisse in the fantasy sequence of Singin' in the Rain! And maybe this is one of the advantages of earthiness: sex.

When I write I feel there's usually a choice to be made between the grounded and the floating. The ground I am thinking of in this case is language as we meet it in its "commonsense" mode. The language of the television, of the supermarket, of the advert, the newspaper, the government, the daily "public" conversation. Some writers like to walk this ground, recreate it, break bits of it off and use it to their advantage, where others barely recognise its existence. Nabokov - a literal aristocrat as well as an aesthetic one - barely ever put a toe upon it. His language is "literary", far from what we think of as our shared linguistic home.

One argument in defence of such literary language might be the way it admits its own artificiality. Commonsense language meanwhile claims to be plain and natural, "conversational", but is often as constructed as asphalt, dreamed up in ad agencies or in the heart of government - sometimes both at the same time. Simultaneously sentimental and coercive. (The People's Princess. The Big Society. Make America Great Again.) Commonsense language claims to take its lead from the way people naturally speak, but any writer who truly attends to the way people speak will soon find himself categorised as a distinctive stylist or satirist or experimentalist. Beckett was like this, and the American writer George Saunders is a good contemporary example. (In dance, the example that comes to my mind is Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, whose thing was tapping up and down the stairs. What could be more normal, more folksy, more grounded and everyday than tapping up and down some stairs? But his signature stage routine involved a staircase pressed right up against another staircase - a stairway to itself - and so up and down he would tap, up and down, down and up, entirely surreal, like an Escher print come to life.)

Astaire is clearly not an experimental dancer like Twyla Tharp or Pina Bausch, but he is surreal in the sense of surpassing the real. He is transcendent. When he dances a question proposes itself: what if a body moved like this through the world? But it is only a rhetorical, fantastical question, for no bodies move like Astaire, no, we only move like him in our dreams.

By contrast, I have seen French boys run up the steps of the High Line in New York to take a photo of the view, their backsides working just like Gene Kelly's in On The Town, and I have seen black kids on the A train swing round the pole on their way out of the sliding doors - Kelly again, hanging from that eternal lamppost. Kelly quoted the commonplace when he danced, and he reminds us in turn of the grace we do sometimes possess ourselves. He is the incarnation of our bodies in their youth, at their most fluid and powerful, or whenever our natural talents combine ideally with our hard-earned skills. He is a demonstration of how the prosaic can turn poetic, if we work hard enough. But Astaire, when he dances, has nothing to do with hard work (although we know, from biographies, that he worked very hard, behind the scenes). He is "poetry in motion". His movements are so removed from ours that he sets a limit on our own ambitions. Nobody hopes or expects to dance like Astaire, just as nobody really expects to write like Nabokov.

Harold and Fayard Nichols

Harold and Fayard Nicholas

Writing, like dancing, is one of the arts available to people who have nothing. "For 10 and sixpence," advises Virginia Woolf, "one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare." The only absolutely necessary equipment in dance is your own body. Some of the greatest dancers have come from the lowliest backgrounds. With many black dancers this has come with the complication of "representing your race". You are on a stage, in front of your people and other people. What face will you show them? Will you be your self? Your "best self"? A representation? A symbol?

The Nicholas brothers were not street kids - they were the children of college-educated musicians - but they were never formally trained in dance. They learned watching their parents and their parents' colleagues performing on the "chitlin" circuit, as black vaudeville was then called. Later, when they entered the movies, their performances were usually filmed in such a way as to be non-essential to the story, so that when these films played in the south their spectacular sequences could be snipped out without doing any harm to the integrity of the plot. Genius contained, genius ring-fenced. But also genius undeniable.

"My talent was the weapon," argued Sammy Davis Jr, "the power, the way for me to fight. It was the one way I might hope to affect a man's thinking." Davis was another chitlin hoofer, originally, and from straitened circumstances. His logic here is very familiar: it is something of an article of faith within the kinds of families who have few other assets. A mother tells her children to be "twice as good", she tells them to be "undeniable". My mother used to say something like it to me. And when I watch the Nicholas brothers I think of that stressful instruction: be twice as good.

The Nicholas brothers were many, many magnitudes better than anybody else. They were better than anyone has a right or need to be. Fred Astaire called their routine in Stormy Weather the greatest example of cinematic dance he ever saw. They are progressing down a giant staircase doing the splits as if the splits is the commonsense way to get somewhere. They are impeccably dressed. They are more than representing - they are excelling.

But I always think I spot a little difference between Harold and Fayard, and it interests me; I take it as a kind of lesson. Fayard seems to me more concerned with this responsibility of representation when he dances: he looks the part, he is the part, his propriety unassailable. He is formal, contained, technically undeniable: a credit to the race. But Harold gives himself over to joy. His hair is his tell: as he dances it loosens itself from the slather of Brylcreem he always put on it, the irrepressible afro curl springs out, he doesn't even try to brush it back. Between propriety and joy, choose joy.

Prince & Micheal Jackson

Michael Jackson and Prince

On YouTube you will find them, locked in many dance-offs, and so you are presented with a stark choice. But it's not a question of degrees of ability, of who was the greater dancer. The choice is between two completely opposite values: legibility on the one hand, temporality on the other. Between a monument ( Jackson) and a kind of mirage ( Prince).

But both men were excellent dancers. Putting aside the difference in height, physically they had many similarities. Terribly slight, long necked, thin-legged, powered from the torso rather than the backside, which in both cases was improbably small. And in terms of influence they were of course equally indebted to James Brown. The splits, the rise from the splits, the spin, the glide, the knee bend, the jerk of the head - all stolen from the same source.

Yet Prince and Jackson are nothing alike when they dance, and it's very hard to bring to mind Prince dancing, whereas it is practically impossible to forget Jackson. It sounds irrational, but try it for yourself. Prince's moves, no matter how many times you may have observed them, have no firm inscription in memory; they never seem quite fixed or preserved. If someone asks you to dance like Prince, what will you do? Spin, possibly, and do the splits, if you're able. But there won't appear to be anything especially Prince-like about that. It's mysterious. How can you dance and dance, in front of millions of people, for years, and still seem like a secret only I know? (And isn't it the case that to be a Prince fan is to feel that Prince was your secret alone?)

Prince's shows were illegible, private, like the performance of a man in the middle of a room at a house party

I never went to see Michael Jackson, but I saw Prince half a dozen times. I saw him in stadiums with thousands of people, so have a rational understanding that he was in no sense my secret, that he was in fact a superstar. But I still say his shows were illegible, private, like the performance of a man in the middle of a room at a house party. It was the greatest thing you ever saw and yet its greatness was confined to the moment in which it was happening.

Jackson was exactly the opposite. Every move he made was absolutely legible, public, endlessly copied and copyable, like a meme before the word existed. He thought in images, and across time. He deliberately outlined and then marked once more the edges around each move, like a cop drawing a chalk line round a body. Stuck his neck forward if he was moving backwards. Cut his trousers short so you could read his ankles. Grabbed his groin so you could better understand its gyrations. Gloved one hand so you might attend to its rhythmic genius, the way it punctuated everything, like an exclamation mark.

Towards the end, his curious stagewear became increasingly tasked with this job of outline and distinction. It looked like a form of armour, the purpose of which was to define each element of his body so no movement of it would pass unnoted. His arms and legs multiply strapped - a literal visualisation of his flexible joints - and a metallic sash running left to right across his breastplate, accentuating the shift of his shoulders along this diagonal. A heavyweight's belt accentuated slender hips and divided the torso from the legs, so you noticed when the top and bottom half of the body pulled in opposite directions. Finally a silver thong, rendering his eloquent groin as clear as if it were in ALL CAPS. It wasn't subtle, there was no subtext, but it was clearly legible. People will be dancing like Michael Jackson until the end of time.

But Prince, precious, elusive Prince, well, there lays one whose name was writ in water. And from Prince a writer might take the lesson that elusiveness can possess a deeper beauty than the legible. In the world of words, we have Keats to remind us of this, and to demonstrate what a long afterlife an elusive artist can have, even when placed beside as clearly drawn a figure as Lord Byron. Prince represents the inspiration of the moment, like an ode composed to capture a passing sensation. And when the mood changes, he changes with it: another good lesson.

There's no freedom in being a monument. Better to be the guy still jamming in the wee hours of the house party, and though everybody films it on their phones no one proves quite able to capture the essence of it. And now he's gone, having escaped us one more time. I don't claim Prince's image won't last as long as Jackson's. I only say that in our minds it will never be as distinct.

Janet Jackson Madonna Beyonce

Janet Jackson / Madonna / Beyoncé

These three don't just invite copies - they demand them. They go further than legibility into proscription. They lead armies, and we join them. We are like those uniformed dancers moving in military formation behind them, an anonymous corps whose job it is to copy precisely the gestures of their general.

This was made literal on Beyoncé's Formation tour recently, when the general raised her right arm like a shotgun, pulled the trigger with her left and the sound of gunshot rang out. There is nothing intimate about this kind of dancing: like the military, it operates as a form of franchise, whereby a ruling idea - "America", "Beyoncé" - presides over many cells that span the world. Maybe it is for this reason that much of the crowd I saw at Wembley could be found, for long periods, not facing in the direction of the stage at all, instead turning to their friends and partners. They didn't need to watch Beyoncé any more than soldiers need to look fixedly at the flag to perform their duties. Our queen was up there somewhere dancing - but the idea of her had already been internalised. Friends from the gym stood in circles and pumped their fists, girlfriends from hen nights turned inwards and did "Beyoncé" to each other, and boys from the Beyhive screamed every word into each other's faces. They could have done the same at home, but this was a public display of allegiance.

Beyoncé's lesson is quite clear. My body obeys me. My dancers obey me. Now you will obey me.

Janet Jackson kicked off this curious phenomenon, Madonna continued it, Beyoncé is its apex. Here dancing is intended as a demonstration of the female will, a concrete articulation of its reach and possibilities. The lesson is quite clear. My body obeys me. My dancers obey me. Now you will obey me. And then everybody in the crowd imagines being obeyed like Bey - a delightful imagining.

Lady writers who inspire similar devotion (in far smaller audiences): Muriel Spark, Joan Didion, Jane Austen. Such writers offer the same essential qualities (or illusions): total control (over their form) and no freedom (for the reader). Compare and contrast, say, Jean Rhys or Octavia Butler, lady writers much loved but rarely copied. There's too much freedom in them. Meanwhile every sentence of Didion's says: obey me! Who runs the world? Girls!

David Byrne

David Byrne and David Bowie

The art of not dancing - a vital lesson. Sometimes it is very important to be awkward, inelegant, jerking, to be neither poetic nor prosaic, to be positively bad. To express other possibilities for bodies, alternative values, to stop making sense. It's interesting to me that both these artists did their "worst" dancing to their blackest cuts. "Take me to the river," sings Byrne, in square trousers 20 times too large, looking down at his jerking hips as if they belong to someone else. This music is not mine, his trousers say, and his movements go further: maybe this body isn't mine, either. At the end of this seam of logic lies a liberating thought: maybe nobody truly owns anything.

People can be too precious about their "heritage", about their "tradition" - writers especially. Preservation and protection have their place but they shouldn't block either freedom or theft. All possible aesthetic expressions are available to all peoples - under the sign of love. Bowie and Byrne's evident love for what was "not theirs" brings out new angles in familiar sounds. It hadn't occurred to me before seeing these men dance that a person might choose, for example, to meet the curve of a drum beat with anything but the matching curving movement of their body, that is, with harmony and heat. But it turns out you can also resist: throw up a curious angle and suddenly spasm, like Bowie, or wonder if that's truly your own arm, like Byrne.

I think of young Luther Vandross, singing backup a few feet behind Bowie, during Young Americans, watching Bowie flail and thrash. I wonder what his take on all that was. Did he ever think: "Now, what in the world is he doing?" But a few performances in, it was clear to everybody. Here was something different. Something old, and yet new.

Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov

Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov

When you face an audience, which way will you turn? Inwards or outwards? Or some combination of the two? Nureyev, so fierce and neurotic, so vulnerable, so beautiful - like a deer suddenly caught in our headlamps - is faced resolutely inwards. You "can't take your eyes off him", as people like to say, but at the same time he is almost excruciating to watch. We feel we might break him, that he might crumble - or explode. He never does, but still, whenever he leaps you sense the possibility of total disaster, as you do with certain high-strung athletes no matter how many times they run or jump or dive. With Nureyev you are an onlooker, you are a person who has been granted the great honour of being present while Nureyev dances. I don't mean this sarcastically: it is an honour to watch Nureyev, even in these grainy old videos on YouTube. He's a kind of miracle, and is fully cognisant of this when he dances, and what did you do today to warrant an audience with a miracle? (See also: Dostoevsky.)

Baryshnikov's face dances as much as his arms and legs. He is whatever you need him to be

With Baryshnikov, I have no fears of disaster. He is an outward-facing artist, he is trying to please me and he succeeds completely. His face dances as much as his arms and legs. (Nureyev's face, meanwhile, is permanently lost in transcendent feeling.) Sometimes Baryshnikov wants to please me so much he'll even try tap dancing with Liza Minnelli, risking the scorn of the purists. (I am not a purist. I am delighted!) He is a charmer, an entertainer, he is comic, dramatic, cerebral, a clown - whatever you need him to be. Baryshnikov is both loving and loved. He has high and low modes, tough and soft poses, but he's always facing outwards, to us, his audience. (See also: Tolstoy.)

Once I met Baryshnikov over a New York dinner table: I was so star-struck I could hardly speak. Finally I asked him: "Did you ever meet Fred Astaire?" He smiled. He said: "Yes, once, at a dinner. I was very star-struck, I hardly spoke. But I watched his hands all the time, they were like a lesson in themselves - so elegant!"

* Swing Time by Zadie Smith is published on 15 November (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99). To order a copy for £15.57, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The connection between writing and dancing has been much on my mind recently: it's a channel I want to keep open. It feels a little neglected - compared to, say, the relationship between music and prose - maybe because there is something counter-intuitive about it.

# data[].attributes.body
This year you can vote for who I am.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Can You Hear Me?

1 January - 31 December 2017
Redefining transmittance
and evading the digital cacophony
Some 17 million historically-significant photos - including Nelson Mandela's imprisonment and JFK Jr. saluting his father's coffin - were acquired in 1995 for commercial purposes from the Bettmann International Archive by Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates. The rights were sold on again in 2016 to a Chinese stock photo and licensing company. To who does this heritage of data really belong?

Our seventh annual curated online exhibition asked what role artists can play in transmitting data of political or social importance and whether digital processes can reveal new perspectives. Post-Truth ('relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief') was named as The Oxford Dictionary's word of 2016. In light of recent referenda and elections, we presented two artworks that reflected the current emotional climate in UK and American politics, the diminishing public trust in factual evidence, polls and the shifting perceptions of the establishment.

Artists

Introduction

Anna Brownsted is an American artist currently (2018) resident in the UK. Diplomat was a series of short meditative films capturing unpredictable 'remixes' of a warped long-playing record. The record, issued in 1964, was a heat damaged and almost comically warped memorial album for the then-recently assassinated American president, John F. Kennedy, featuring several of his most famous speeches. Each time the album was played, it revealed a slightly different variation of the words due to the record player needle bouncing across the surface of Kennedy's Oath of Office and Inaugural Address, partially erasing the fabric of the recording medium in the process. What initially seemed to be a single short film was actually 100 short films - one for each of JFK's first 100 days in office - beginning with a randomly selected short.

Jessica Harby is an American-born artist who was considering becoming a British citizen. In Referendum she turned over her citizenship decision to the public by inviting them to vote. The artwork reduced the practical and legal arguments for citizenship to a flood of visuals concerning the country of her birth and the country she now calls home. These two animated GIFs cycled rapidly through images associated with the United States and United Kingdom, together with a pertinent quote from Rebecca Solnit's book Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Would the visuals have an effect on the viewer's decision? Underneath was an interactive ballot where the viewer was invited to cast a vote that will influence Harby's choice of citizenship at the end of the year.

Fermynwoods would like to thank Gary Thomas (Associate Director, Animate Projects) for his assistance in selecting the artists for this online exhibition.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fermynwoods Contemporary Art " Can You Hear Me?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
1 January - 31 December 2017 Redefining transmittance and evading the digital cacophony Some 17 million historically-significant photos - including Nelson Mandela's imprisonment and JFK Jr. saluting his father's coffin - were acquired in 1995 for commercial purposes from the Bettmann International Archive by Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates.

# data[].attributes.body
2017