2013 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

CULTURAL STUDIES I Jesus College Annual Report 2013 25
Herbert Read edited to accompany the
exhibition, suggests two reasons for the
attractiveness of the subject. The first of these
has to do with national policy for the arts. In
response to Read’s queries about the
relationship between art and government,
Hillier offers his opinion that it is, or at least
that it should be, the obligation of the State
to safeguard cultural production as a social
good. ‘Much could be done to assist in
cultivating the public taste’, he writes, ‘and,
at the same time, in supporting the artist, this
latter being an important consideration at the
present time […] when the rich private
collector is fading into the realm of
mythology.’ Hillier suggests that, like
national-scale electrification, art ought to be
understood as a kind of public works project
too important to be left to the whims of
private enterprise.
The second reason pylons appealed to
British painters like Hillier who were
entranced by surrealist exemplars was that,
by virtue both of their form and of their role
in the network they sustained, no great leap
of intuition was needed to see them as objects
capable of mediating between the abstract
and the figurative. With their solid airiness,
their engineered abstraction, and above all
their incarnation of electrical insubstantiality
within industrial substance, pylons appealed
to artists who like Hillier found themselves
pulled between competing aesthetic theories:
the figurative and the abstract, the realist and
the surrealist, the romantically organic and
the classically austere.
Poets, too, acknowledged the duality of the
pylon, which marked a certain kind of
spoliation as well as heralding a new electric
utopia. Stephen Spender, for instance, in
‘The Pylons’ – a kind of type-specimen for the
genre of pylon-poem – offers what seems like
a nostalgic lament for the demise of ‘sudden
hidden villages’ and ‘the valley with its gilt
and evening look’ before turning to survey
the skyline with its ‘Pylons, those pillars /
Bare like nude giant girls that have no secret’.
In 1934, Cecil Day Lewis felt able to write
that poets ‘are learning to communicate
through a new kind of power, like the pyloncarried
wires of which Spender writes.’ Yet
Spender’s portentous poem was wide open to
parody, and quickly came to stand for a genre
unkindly and rather homophobically
described by Julian Symons as the work of
‘Pylon-Pitworks-Pansy’ poets. It was still
being mocked in 1943, when G.W. Stonier
wrote this more genial send-up of the
previous decade’s poetry:
Everywhere trippers in shorts and on
bicycles poured along the roads, swarmed
up lamp-posts, threw caps in the air.
Pylons!
Arterial roads, semi-detached villas,
Butlin’s camps, ping pong, scooters!
Hurrah!
But chiefly the pylons.
We craned our necks to get a closer view
of these Martians, representative of a new
leisure and mastery, striding the hills.
‘Like nude giant girls’, said Stephen
Spendlove with that wonderful felicity of
his for daydreaming.
As the contradictions in Spender’s poem and
in Stonier’s parodic squib suggest, these are
structures that instantiate a peculiarly
atavistic power of taboo, that prohibitory
magic which Freud describes as being
‘transmitted by contact like an electrical
charge’. Consider the enormous humanoid
pylons which stride through the 1938
watercolour Landscape with Pylons by Julian
Trevelyan – another Cambridge alumnus.
Look at Eric Ravilious’s The Wilmington Giant
(1939) in the right way, and this vast
humanoid figure, arms spread out to grasp
two straight lines, the whole thing viewed
through the wire of a rickety fence, begins to
resemble the familiar form of the pylon;
follow the trail of ancient stones across the
face of Paul Nash’s Landscape of the Megaliths
(1937), and they too seem to stalk off over the
horizon like a prehistoric pylon line. These
too are paintings about the relationship
between landscape and forms of non-human
power. For Hillier, Trevelyan and others,
pylons seem to have generated a similar
mixture of awe and estrangement, the idol of
a new object of veneration – progress, in its
avatar as electrification – which remains
hidden from view.