Best of 2021

“Every now and then a mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (abbreviated)

Following on from last year’s Films of the Decade, we asked six of our regular contributors to pick three cultural highlights released in 2021, which particularly struck a chord or made us see the world a little differently. Read on for an eclectic selection, from new books, films, and exhibitions to live (or live-streamed) music and theatre, documentaries, and a trio of zines.

Grace Crabtree

Paula Rego at Tate Britain, exhibition, July-October 2021

Animals lurk, shadows take on monstrous features, and women creep across the floor. Six decades of Paula Rego’s artwork filled 11 rooms in Tate Britain from July to October 2021, a long-awaited major retrospective in the UK. Born in Lisbon in 1935, she grew up under the authoritarian regime of Salazar’s Estado Novo until being sent to England aged 16 to enjoy the freedoms that were so severely limited in Portugal. This experience permeates Rego’s paintings, and the exhibition presents Rego as a chronicler of political struggle: early instances include surrealist collages in the 1960s and 1970s that draw on “caricature, newspaper articles…nightmares, wishes, fears”. In 1998, in response to a failed referendum to legalise abortion in Portugal, her series of intensely moving and stark portrayals of women in the aftermath of illegal abortion influenced a second, successful referendum. In the 1990s she abandoned painting in favour of a “fiercer”, more tactile painterly-drawing technique with pastels, moulding the muscular limbs and large, dark eyes of her characters – sometimes defiant, strong, snarling, sometimes vulnerable, submissive. It took two trips to soak up the extraordinary display of psychological drama and exquisite draughtsmanship, and I hope that gallery walls will be filled with yet more Paula Rego in the next few years.

Although the Tate exhibition has ended, you can still catch an online exhibition, Paula Rego: The Forgotten, by clicking the button below and at Victoria Miro, London – until 12th February: 

Lydia Davis, Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles, Hamish Hamilton

In this second collection of non-fiction pieces, the American short story writer and translator Lydia Davis collates pieces written over the past two decades on the art of translation, prefaced by a list of its ‘Twenty-one Pleasures’ – including the pleasure of solving a puzzle, and of being subsumed by another writer’s style: “You are ventriloquist and chameleon.” In essays ranging from the translation of Proust to an experiment in ‘modernising’ texts, such as Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, she shows how the process of altering phraseology and vocabulary lends a new form to a text, and, hopefully, a broadened readership. Translation is the slippery art of shapeshifting: both transformation and ‘annihilation’, while endeavouring to keep the author’s idiosyncrasies alive and present. The joy of these essays comes from Davis’s acute specificity in detecting and translating these, down to the particularities of punctuation in Madame Bovary: rather than smooth out Gustave Flaubert’s sometime eccentric use of semicolons, she recognises their effect in creating a “more deliberate, heavier” rhythm in a sentence. Throughout the essays, Davis proffers her translation conundrums, misgivings, and tangents, with the lucidity and originality that fills her writing, whether non-fiction, fiction, or in this hybrid space of translation.

Patti Smith - Live Concert, The Forum, Bath, October 2021

As the incantatory force of Blakean-infused lyrics filled the room, the concert hall radiated with the pulse of an audience’s sheer elation at hearing live music once again, and from such a presence: at Bath Forum in October 2021, Patti Smith and her band played their first indoor live concert in nineteen months. Over one hour, the audience was spun back into the 1970s with Free Money and Because the Night and back into the present with a drawling testament to a patient audience holding onto their tickets for 17 months, and anecdotes about her perpetually untidy hotel rooms when on tour. Now 75 years of age, Smith’s voice is as powerful as ever, even holding more strength and resonance as she commands the stage with, at one moment, the quiet power of a poet and the next, the explosion of an art punk performer.

Stefan Matthews

Trio of zines: Gendered Machines | Whitney Humphreys 

Utilising imagery sourced almost entirely from the fabulous Internet Archive (seriously, check it out), Whitney Humphreys’ Gendered Machines is an exploration of gender labels and non-human machines. Carrying the gender-studies lit torch of Judith Butler, Humphreys analyses and probes both fictional and real spaces to examine the creation and function of machines; what form is given to something made both in the image of man, and made to be subservient to man?

The results are fascinating, with Humphreys drawing parallels between society’s inherent need to label gender, the patriarchal domination and fear and worship of said labels, and how said labels have unsurprisingly bled into the machine, the non-human object. Gender labelled technology built to serve man and man’s desire, a new age ideal femininity. Humphreys is here to shatter the Stepford Wife.

Short Film: Good Morning, My Wife in Heaven | dir. Shumin Wei

Yes, I am aware that everyone is covid-ed out, and that we don’t want any more of it on telly that’s not what we pay my license fee for and aren’t those Tories disgusting with their parties and we’re sick of the rampant misinformation and the anti-vaxxers and we won’t be able to go to the pub if they lock us down and we want to have a party but our neighbours are judging is why can’t they just sod off and the new variant isn’t even that deadly so I don’t know why you’re isolating for fucks sake we just want to live our lives —

And then you watch Good Morning, My Wife in Heaven and realise that maybe wearing a mask in M&S isn’t quite so bad. After all, how many of us are now living completely alone, our partner of almost forty years dead? How many of us had to lie on a metal bench outside a hospital with our dying wife? Let’s not get lost in the maelstrom of British whining. Let’s not forget the true horrors of covid. Let’s not forget the hope that is still out there.

Interactive Documentary: Ukraine. Grey Zone | Benas Gerdziunas

A haunting piece of interactivity, this documentary interrogates the territory of Cipa, the infamous military zone in eastern Ukraine, a simmering pot of international tension. Ukraine. Grey Zone is split into three chapters – those who live, those who fight, and those who fought – and focuses its attention on the metaphorically, and literally, split-down-the-middle mining town of Zolote.

Zolote is filled with Ukraine nationalists and Russian-led separatists, families and friends, librarians and humanitarians, all of whom live among the constant attrition of disinformation, poverty, propaganda and war. Through the use of an interactive narrative, the documentary reveals how the grey zone has blurred the lines between normal and military life, highlighting a town ravaged by war as its soldiers and civilians “fight in trenches just metres from their homes.

Jack Wightman

Graphic novel: Barry Windsor-Smith, Monsters, Jonathan Cape  

 A hugely ambitious project 35 years in the making that is, in itself, a monster. Each page is alive with Windsor-Smith’s electrifying artwork, which is as proficient at portraying explosive action sequences as smaller domestic moments vibrating with underlying tension. A creation so long in gestation, so often operated on, can leave a feeling of disjointedness, but this benefits the modern-Frankenstein parable of traumatic memories better left buried, and the horrifying deformities they can cause. Windsor-Smith’s Monsters is a combination of unusual parts stitched into something unique, a rippling torso of pulp tropes, a poignant romantic heart, and a complex brain which invites probing to find out how monsters, especially the ones that look just like us, are made. 

Exhibition: Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience

Van Gogh’s artwork is of a ubiquity to suffer the dread of familiarity that regularly moves disappointed Louvre attendees to say of the Mona Lisa, ‘I thought she’d be bigger?’. The Van Gogh Alive exhibition tackled this head on by placing us inside his paintings, shining massive projections of Van Gogh’s work across every surface, so the familiar can be explored in an unfamiliar way. While this was refreshing, the great achievement of the exhibition was the accompanying quotes from Van Gogh’s letters to his beloved brother Theo, expressing the highs of creativity and lows of rejection. These moved Vincent out from behind the epochal canvases to show the man in love with nature, excited to find an artistic home in the Yellow House, and fatally succumbing to mental illness. To feel the humanity of a great artist and the passions that guided the hand behind the iconic art was a truly special experience.

Film: Dune | dir. Denis Villeneuve

The original space opera of human adaptation, famously impossible to adapt, has arrived once again to the big screens (although the screen hardly seems big enough). While I don’t believe Dune is impossible to adapt, the combination of Frank Herbert’s novel and Alejandro Jodorwosky’s doomed adaption in the 1970s, dubbed the Greatest Movie Never Made, launched the idea of Dune into the realms of unreachable myth. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is not a greedy attempt to claim Arrakis for himself, like a directorial Baron Harkonnen, eager to wipe out its predecessors, but an earnest exploration of the evergreen ideas inherent in the iconic desert planet, honouring Herbert’s novel and Jodorowsky’s dream, while creating something new. The result is a gargantuan science fiction vision, a Lawrence of Arrakis revelling in dizzying spectacle and the minutiae of universe-building, a wide (blue) eyed experience as transportive as a bite of Spice Melange. 

Fred Warren

Theatre: Stevie Smith: Black March | Oliver Rowse and James Lever, Dead Poet’s Live (streamed from the Sam Wanamaker Theatre)

Modernist/naïve, classical/puritanical, sub-urban/counter cultural, whimsical/morbid: the writer Stevie Smith inhabited all these labels during her career stretching from the 1930s to the late ’60s. Stevie Smith: Black March, broadcast from the candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, provides a unique introduction to this poet whose deceptively simple verse and illustrations continue to perplex and provoke.

The play takes the form of a kind of extended interview/reading/analysis with Julia Stevenson acting as Stevie Smith performing her poems and James Lever sat alongside providing commentary and biographical notes. Despite hardly interacting, Lever and Stevenson have a real chemistry with Stevenson wryly interjecting and undermining Lever’s attempts to summarise Stevie Smith as poet and person.

The play masterfully treads the line of exploring the author’s life without letting it smother the meaning of her poems which remain as aloof and parabolic as ever with a poem like ‘Our Bog is Dood’ only feeling more relevant in these tribalistic times:

“[..] How do you know your Bog is dood

My darling little child?

We know because we wish it so

That is enough, they cried”

This Dead Poet’s Live series has been going for a while, but this production (I think) was the first to be filmed and broadcast for free. I hope it becomes available to stream again because it’s a treasure and sets the standard for how poetry should be encountered!   

 Documentary: Zimov Hypothesis | dir. Denis Sneguirev

With paralysis and denial still characterising much of the political response to the climate crisis, 2021 has seen the continued rise of guerrilla tactics and projects to try and kickstart a response; from beaver introductions in Britain to Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow up a Pipeline. Perhaps none are more ambitious, however, than those trying to prevent the release of greenhouse gas locked in the arctic permafrost. Welcome to Pleistocene Park in Siberia, where a small team are working to restore a lost Ice Age ecosystem with large herds of megafauna like bison, horses, reindeer, whose trampling and tree clearing could help slow the thaw.

The idea is known as the Zimov Hypothesis and Denis Sneguirev’s documentary of the same name is a fascinating account of one year at the project. The documentary focuses principally on the charismatic and stubborn scientist Sergey Zimov and his hard working son Nikita tasked with the difficulties of implementing his father’s theory. The family dynamics are fascinating but it’s Renaldo, the man tasked with helping the animals acclimatise to Siberia, who steals the show. Having left his job at the Russian civil service, he lives as a modern-day monastic on the project, sometimes going weeks without seeing another human as he does his best to help support the animals on which the success of the project rests. Such personal stories help to bring a human touch to this fundamentally more-than-human project.

It’s ultimately heartbreaking how such a planet-altering project seems to come down to a handful of individuals working in their spare time; Sneguirev’s documentary functions as an urgent call for national and international government support and engagement which the project clearly needs if it’s to be upscaled.

Exhibition: Helen Frankenthaler | Radical Beauty | Dulwich Picture Gallery

It can sometimes feel, amid the crowds, selfie sticks, and temptation to eavesdrop on the couple standing next to you, that art galleries are not the best place for connecting with visual art. Until, that is, you see a show like Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty at the Dulwich Picture Gallery which reminds you just how enchanting and memorable a well-curated exhibition can be.

Frankenthaler is perhaps best known for her large abstract expressionist paintings of the 1950s-1970s, yet this exhibition shifts the attention to her late-career woodcuts. As a solo artist known for her use of free-flowing paint, the move to the more contrived medium of printmaking – where a final print is slowly laboured towards in collaboration with a workshop of technicians and craftsmen – might seem peculiar, yet the results that emerged are striking, elegant, and invite endless looking. Over the course of five or so rooms and one short film we see how Frankenthaler pushed the medium to its limit and made it her own, for instance by pioneering a technique she called ‘guzzying’ which gave the prints a softer, more unpredictable texture.

A particular highlight of the exhibition is seeing some of the drafts exhibited alongside the final prints, sometimes marked with Frankenthaler’s notes and annotations. These function as a rare externalisation of the intense thinking and decision making that goes into abstract art but is usually hidden from view. The result is a real sense of, in Frankenthaler’s words, “the mulling, experimenting, perfecting to reach the print” which is “often where all the work and magic lie”.

This exhibition runs to April 2022 and is only £5 for under 30’s so see it if you can – it will stop you (and that noisy couple standing next to you) in your tracks.

Bryony Moores O’Sullivan

Series: Time | dir. Lewis Arnold

Convicted of manslaughter Mark Cobden (Sean Bean) a gentle, alcoholic, ex-teacher is plunged headfirst into the brutal realities of life in the British prison system. While harrowing, this three-part BBC drama is inescapably compelling and expertly written. There was a chilling sense of reality throughout and while not ordinarily a fan of Bean, I cannot knock this stellar performance nor that of his co-star Stephen Graham.

Music: Numb | Mesadorm (single), Babylegs Records

This is a shameless excuse to introduce readers to this band, who have taught me more about unconventional song writing, genre mixing and raw emotional/poetic explorations than any other. For me, their single ‘Numb’ explores unfolding oneself into a tumultuous and unknown space and using music to make sense of it, an important theme for me in the latter half of 2021.

Panel discussion: Land Justice, Decolonisation and Our Right to Nature | Brainchild festival.

With representatives from Landworkers Alliance, Land in our Names and Right to Roam.

This incredible, diverse panel of women expertly explored themes such as the reclamation and proper use of British landmass for growing healthy and affordable food that furthers social and environmental justice. They discussed the intrinsic connections between racial and environmental injustice in the UK, particularly in relation to the ownership of land, and argued for access to nature as a basic human right. 

Tom Beed

Film: Censor | dir. Prano Bailey-Bond

Good horror allows a glimpse into the cultural anxieties of the day, and the best examples of the genre re-evaluate those of the past at the same time. A clever, passionately crafted psycho-cultural horror, the film offers a look at a grimy and sexist 80s Britain through the eyes of film censor Enid (Niamh Algar), who becomes obsessed with a ‘video nasty’ which corresponds to her personal trauma and erodes the distinction between real and non-real.

Book:  Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons | Daniel Heller-Roazen

How can someone be less than one? Heller-Roazens latest study draws insights from an array of cultural practices, legal documents, myths and fictional texts, presenting surprising arguments about the complexities of non-personhood.To vanish, be lessened, or to merely survive - to this triptych of non-being he adds, in a brief final chapter, the state of “being it”, of being “counted out”, in an analysis of childrens rhyming games. Menacing and fascinating implications can be discerned everywhere in this book, none more so than this final point; 

“The ways of being it are many; the scale of nonpersons is indefinitely variable. What is constant is this minimal demand: that there be at least some person who is scarcely one.”

Composition: Promises | Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, & The London Symphony Orchestra
Years in the making, this nine-movement collaboration stretches a simple motif played on various keys to its absolute limit. Marrying ethereal ambience cut through with Sanders’ inimitable sax, delicate vocal passages mingling with Shepherd’s synths, and string arrangements of such splendour I shall not attempt to describe them, Promises is astonishingly inventive. A sweeping, one-sitting listening experience to rival all others.