Nico Tributes

Two tributes to the enigma that was Nico are planned for the coming week. In London, the South Bank is staging a tribute curated by John Cale on the 11th, while over in sunny Berlin, there is an event at the Volksbühne on the 17th.

Not quite sure why these are happening now, although she did die 20 years ago. Nonetheless, it's good to see her getting her due. For far too long considered a bit of an empty vessel to be manipulated by alpha male Svengalis, Nico produced a wonderful body of work in music and film. She had her problems, as is well known, but perhaps now is the time to reassess her legacy.

Also on at the South Bank in London is a new Warhol exhibit, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Among the visuals on offer (42 TV programmes!) is a clip of the Velvet Underground rehearsing at The Factory in 1966.

There sits Nico, beatifully lit at the centre of the group, while her son Ari plays at her feet. While chaos swirls around her, she implacably taps a tambourine with a maraca. Then the police burst in to close it down.

Here is a live clip of her from 1983:

LFF: Docs

A Walk Into the Sea (dir Esther Robinson)
We Want Roses Too (dir Alina Marazzi)

Two docs to ponder: Esther Robinson's is an exploration of the disappearance of her uncle, Danny Williams, in 1967. Using interviews with those who knew him from his work as a film editor and member of Warhol's Factory circle, the film creates a portrait of a sensitive young man, who seemed to be damaged and defeated by the competitive, druggy atmosphere of the Warhol crowd. While there is no narration, Robinson's voice is heard in the background asking questions of her family and associates of her uncle. She is puzzled as to how he could just walk out on a family gathering one evening and not return.

Most puzzling is Warhol's indifferent reaction at the time to Williams' disappearance, as they were lovers. But as a range of interviewees, including Factory acolytes Billy Name, Gerard Malanga and Brigid Berlin, explains, sensitivity to others wasn't Warhol's strong suit. Much like the Wagstaff documentary, A Walk reveals as much about the self-centred manipulation of the famous artist as it does about the less celebrated partner.

Even less conventionally authored is We Want Roses Too. Its subject is not immediately apparent as a woman is seen in lurid Technicolor window-shopping. Gradually, a picture emerges of Italian sexual mores from 1967 (that year again) until the late '90s, with women's roles shifting amid much protest and social ferment. Marazzi makes much use of found footage and women's diaries over the period, with voiceover reading the passages.

Again there is no narration but a patchwork of sources, including animation, tells an intriguing story of women's ambitions being thwarted by a combination of church, state and family and the attempts of feminism to change everyone's thinking. An hilarious advert for feminism exhorts: "Ladies, young ladies, girls. We're expecting you."

The Art of Lee Miller

V & A
London
Until 6 January 2008

Model, photographer, journalist, adventurer. Lee Miller's centenary is being celebrated in this exhibit at the V & A, continuing her belated recognition. The art is featured here, not the extraordinary life that began in oh-so-homely Poughkeepsie, New York (amazing anyone of achievement came from there) and ended in England 30 years ago.

In between, Miller became a Surrealist in Paris, then a war photographer and writer. She ended up doing features for British Vogue, coming full circle, having started as a model in American Vogue.

What comes through sharply in the exhibit is Miller's dissatisfaction with being a Thing, albeit a Beautiful one. She was clearly a woman of action, which must have been quite difficult in that era. The portraits of her as a young woman, by a range of male photographers, including her father, show a bestilled glacial beauty. She looks trapped and bored.

The most extraordinary photo of her is the earliest, a full-length shot from 1915, when she was eight. She appears as a handsome young boy with a crewcut, overalls and her hand clutching a post. Lips pursed, eyes veiled by shadows, she appears grave and solemn, but with a direct gaze. Given that she was raped at age 7, it is poignant indeed.

That she went on to become a model and a great beauty is an irony--always an object of someone else's gaze. She must have been keen to rebel against this fate, and at age 22 headed for Paris where some of her best work was done. Her nudes show a delicate sensuality and her eye for detail makes pictures of chairs and ironwork into works of art, unrecognisable as common-place objects. With Man Ray she developed solarisation, a technique which adds a magical quality to such portraits as that of Unknown Woman, 1930.

The exhibit includes a few drawings from this period, eye-opening depictions of a woman's head under a bell jar and another being pinned to a wall by daggers. Proto-feminist statements? Well, how about her Untitled [severed breast from mastectomy], which, far from being set in some medical scenario, is depicted on a dinner plate, complete with service? Surely, this is a woman with a critique of her surroundings.

Later, she worked in New York and then returned to Europe, turning her eye to photojournalism in London and in France during the Second World War. These pictures serve a different purpose, documenting the horrors of war, lest anyone deny or forget what happened.

She also became a war correspondent for Vogue New York, and her diatribe against the Germans she met accompanying the invading troops in 1945 makes for uncomfortable reading, especially as the layout contrasts the well-fed children of Germany with the murdered Holocaust victims. Miller's anger is palpable. Other work during this period includes a shot of her towering over Pablo Picasso in his studio in liberated Paris, the statuesque Miller, looking tired in her uniform, linking arms with a gleeful Picasso.

The pictures in Hitler's apartment in Munich seem quite off-colour, staged shots of her in his bathtub and a soldier reading Mein Kampf. What are they meant to depict? The banality of evil? If anything they seem disrespectful to the thousands of his victims, cocking a snook at a deposed dictator by turning his lair into a joke.

Curiously, Miller's work tails off after the war, just when she should have been at the peak of her powers and a double threat as photographer and writer. There is only a photo essay on Working Guests at her Sussex farmhouse from 1953 and then nothing, though she lived until 1977.

What happened? Did she retire? Did the work dry up? It seems sad that this cut-off seems to have coincided with her 50th birthday. Was the great beauty considered past her sell-by date? It is disappointing that after a life of action, she ended up becalmed.