Crevices of culture - Village Magazine

VILLAGEAugust/September 

HERE is nothing to which Rod

Stoneman is not willing to turn his

attention so a broad canvas had to be

created to encompass his writings on every-

one from Andrea Mantegna to Banksy. The

hoary old statistic about our being daily

exposed to three thousand images is trot-

ted out here and might have given Stoneman

reasonable cause to consider limiting the

ﬁve-hundred years covered here.

But even having skipped the ﬁrst thir-

ty-thousand-odd years of human graphic

depiction since the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave

animal drawings it remains such a broad

canvas that there are occasional grounds

for suspecting that Stoneman is in danger

of losing himself in his own thesis:

“Undermining any tendencies towards

the univocal or unequivocal has led me to a

degree of continuous uncertainty about the

extent to which these analytical perspec-

tives objectively correspond to external

realities and the extent to which they are

determined by the point and place of the

subjectivity from which they are viewed”.

Fifty-four short essays and another

slightly longer one are bound together with

two-hundred photographs in this curious,

intermittently engaging publication which

melds memoir with philosophical, cultural

and academic exploration of the history of

the image. The entire production is immacu-

late and a veritable visual feast as the author

might have reported with his unquencha-

ble fondness for alliteration. But ‘virulent

vestiges’ and ‘crevices of culture’ hardly pre-

pare the reader for Stoneman’s musings on

/ when “, civilians perished, pawns

in the pitiless clash”.

Rod Stoneman is a political animal who

has spent over thirty years operating in the

middle and upper echelons of both ﬁlm and

television production on these islands. Yet

the ﬂeeting glimpses we get here of his ﬁrst-

hand experiences through these decades

leave us feeling short-changed.

In , as deputy commissioning edi-

tor for Channel , Stoneman commissioned

Anne Crilly and the Derry Workshop to

make a documentary called ‘Mother Ireland’

which included an interview with Sinn Féin

activist, Máiread Farrell. The events sur-

rounding the subsequent killing of Farrell

by the SAS in Gibraltar and the consequent

decision by Michael Grade and the Channel

Four board not to broadcast the programme

are related with sadly little new insight from

Stoneman’s unique perspective on these

events.

By contrast we are treated to accounts

that are mostly second-hand of events

extensively covered elsewhere such as those

surrounding the deaths of Che Guevara and

Captain – ‘I’m just going outside and may be

some time’ – Oates. The investigation of an

opportunity to make a documentary about

Oates which initially provides the slim jus-

tiﬁcation for his inclusion here

soon gives way to some beyond

bizarre – whoops – speculation

as to whether Oates’ and Hitler’s

motives for committing suicide

were somehow analogous.

Stoneman is immensely well

read and observant and meticu-

lous in detailing with elaborate

footnotes his every cultural ref-

erence and observation, when he

might instead on occasion have

credited his readers with – for

instance – knowing, or at least

knowing how to ﬁnd out, what

was meant by a Google Adword.

It may be a legacy of the author’s

many years of public service

that every base must not only

be touched but numbered, cata-

logued and cross-referenced.

So little faith has Stoneman in his read-

ers that we cannot even be trusted to reach

for ourselves the conclusion that the “moth

Crevices of culture

Meticulous and quirky but under-nourishing

visual feast. Review by Richard Callanan

Seeing is Believing: The Politics of

the Visual

Rod Stoneman

Black Dog Publishing

£19.95

Rod

Stoneman

CULTURE

BOOK REVIEW

Intermittently

engaging

publication

which melds

memoir with

philosophical,

cultural and

academic

exploration of

the history of

the image

“

August/September VILLAGE

drawn to a ﬂame” in all likelihood “singes

its wings”.

The number and length of the footnotes

necessitated their promotion from the foot

of the page to a sidebar where too often they

compete for the reader’s attention with the

photograph captions.

Yet when he writes of “the great castra-

tion” (his quotation marks) of / we are

left completely in the dark as to the source

of what is an extraordinary take on those

events. Has Stoneman extrapolated this

unattributed quote from the the ﬁnancial

industry’s own term for its biggest and

brashest operators, the ‘big swinging dicks’

of Wall Street? Did the number of ﬁnancial

traders who died in the Twin Towers spark

this notion and this phraseology which the

author then could not bring himself to omit

or – understandably – include as a coinage

of his own.

Hints of celebrity anecdote pervade the

book. It was in Stoneman’s company that

Gabriel Byrne went on his last piss-up.

Gretta Scacchi was once a fellow tenant in a

damp basement ﬂat. Brendan O’Carroll and

the then head of the Film Board didn’t see

eye to eye. And so the banal litany of ﬂeeting

mentions goes on.....Peter Greenaway, David

Puttnam, Derek Jarman, Neil Jordan,

Michael D Higgins. Over thirty years of

meeting the great and the great-and-good,

is that all there is? If not, is it the author’s

recollection or his discretion which leaves

us so under-nourished?

The individual essays are grouped under

ﬁve general headings so it was with renewed

enthusiasm that I turned over the page from

the section on Art/Culture to that on Film/

Television which opens with a treatise on

the ﬁlm ‘Born Free’ which came out in ,

when the author was eleven years of age.

“She (Virginia McKenna playing the part of

Joy Adamson)....jodhpurs...uprightness....

khaki....buttocks...clench” and so it goes

on until in a post-adolescent about-face

the whole thing turns into an attack on the

“pink-skinned English” perpetrating some

sort of African cultural colonialism into

which David Attenborough is eventually

drawn. And, lest any American readers get

too comfortable, Stoneman hurries on to

shockingly reveal that Humphrey Bogart’s

‘Casablanca’ was actually a backlot in

Los Angeles where Hollywood frequently

indulged its “Orientalist fantasies” – to

bring us full circle, Master Stoneman.

Throughout the second half of the book

we are battered with constant reminders

of what’s amiss with the world. We have a

“ﬁnancial system based on greed and folly”

and we inhabit a ‘”destructive reality”. But

Stoneman’s greatest scorn is reserved for

one of the main sources of his own bread and

butter. Television is the “moronic inferno”

brought low by the “lapsed morality of tele-

vision executives”. It is not made clear when

this moral decline took place but we can

probably assume it was some time after the

author left Channel  in . Presumably it

was also since that time that “the body pol-

itic of broadcasting” became “permeated

with dissembling and deceit”, allowing us

all to be ill-used with a diet of “Jamie Oliver

and Gordon Ramsey instead of Edward Said

or Julia Kristeva”.

The director of the NUI Galway Huston

School of Film and Digital Media accuses

art schools of “disingenuously”

producing thousands of students

only % of whom continue to

make art after graduation and

only .% of whom earn a living

from the trade in their art. The

Slade School of Art is presuma-

bly no diﬀerent in this regard but

where Stoneman, Slade graduate

and ﬁlm-school director, stands

amongst these statistics is an

open question.

The design is sharp but reading

the text initially gave this reader

the impression that ‘The Politics

of the Visual’ was having a delete-

rious eﬀect on his eyesight. More

likely it was the use of up to ﬁve

diﬀerent font sizes and styles

on each page which proved so

testing. Indeed the last section

‘Verisimilitude and Delusion’

appears to reduce the general

font size further so it becomes

unclear who should be held to account;

author, editor or designer when we read:

“We are indeed conditioned and posi-

tioned, subjected in several senses, our

self-image set up and held in place and inter-

nal conﬂicts subdued”.

The “blizzard of sexual imagery” to which

we are daily exposed in my neighbourhood is

considerably less explicit than the examples

used by Stoneman to illustrate his thesis.

One of those examples is inadvertently cap-

tured accurately in the text on the adjoining

page – “aspects of sex and power literally

come together in your face”. From there we

move seamlessly on to coprophilia and the

sphincter “where the sun never shines”. •

Television is

the “moronic

inferno”

brought low

by the “lapsed

morality of

television

executives”

presumably

some time after

the author left

Channel 4 in

1993

“