Lover Or Fighter: The Performance Of Masculinity In The Rocky Series

Can the Rocky film franchise be read as a feminist text?

Lover Or Fighter is an essay I wrote in 2012 about the Rocky movies and a potential link between them and feminist theory.

Far-fetched? A strange combination? Read and decide for yourself.

Lover Or Fighter:
The Performance Of Masculinity In The Rocky Series

Looking at The Male Body

Although the male body has long ceded its position as a comfortable resting place of the desirous gaze in the fine arts, that is not to say that it has been removed from public view; there is one location where it has hollowed out a secret niche – the popular cinema.

In the split between elite and popular culture, the male body has been firmly grasped by the latter and held aloft for public consumption by movie-goers and subsequently, by advertisers capitalising on the imagery spawned by the cinema.

Why a ‘secret niche’?

This gazing at the male body is sanctioned by the spectacle of the action film, yet, is burdened by the audience’s complex relationship to the violence and eroticism inflicted on the male body in these films. Hollywood blockbusters of the 1980s carried the extreme end of masculinity’s muscular mask from the relative obscurity of the bodybuilding subculture to international fame, so that the hero was “defined and determined by a focus on the body.” (Jeffords, 1994:53).

In examining popular culture’s representation of the muscular male body, it may be useful to consider a film series which has spanned a period of some thirty years, and the changing body of its hero, Rocky Balboa.

Rocky

The release of Rocky in 1976 met with critical acclaim, winning three Academy Awards, with nominations in seven other categories. The film was propelled into the popular imagination and the character of Rocky became one of the most heavily cited and enduring pop culture figures of the last century.

This essay will focus on the performance of the series’ complex masculine ideology, its use of the male body as a receptacle for the erotic gaze, and the meanings of the physical transformation of Rocky’s body over the series.

Much could be said about the phenomenon of seriality within the most popular films of the 1980s and 1990s, but that is more than may be allowed for at the present.

Masculinities

Just as this character’s performance of manliness has spawned countless copies and tributes, so was it formed as a copy of previous manifestations; boxers such as Chuck Wepner providing the inspiration, and Rocky Marciano the name.

Although a movie which uses boxing as its narrative vehicle may easily be misconstrued as being fixated on a single-sided masculinity, the first two films (separating these from the latter for reasons to be expanded upon) depend heavily upon conflicts within masculine ideologies for their success.

Let’s assume the traditional anthropological/cultural standpoint of women being associated with nature and men with culture. Rocky purposefully turns this around, giving us a character emblematic of natural masculinity.

His body is his means of providing materially, and is also his means of expression: through boxing alone he experiences success, proving to the world that he is more than ‘another bum from the neighbourhood’.

His speech is slow and slurred, although he speaks most when trying to seduce Adrian, the shy girl from the pet store; however, his words only go so far. In the romantic scenes within his apartment, it is his body to which she responds. He is thus portrayed as a natural man: genuine, without artifice and ultimately irresistible.

This focus on Rocky’s body introduces the contradictory qualities of the male bodybuilder hero. Tasker (1993: 78) describes the way in which the bodybuilder is an unnatural, manufactured product, existing precisely to be looked at.

The bodybuilder as a feminised man

Since ‘real men’ are not obsessed with their looks, this narcissistic element of performance marks the hyper-masculine bodybuilder as a feminised man.

“If, for some, the figure of the bodybuilder signals an assertion of male dominance, an eroticising of the powerful male body, for other critics it seems to signal an hysterical and unstable image of manhood… it is clear that both active and passive, both feminine and masculine terms, inform the imagery of the male body in the action cinema.” (Tasker, 1993: 80)

This leads us to the role of the feminine. Adrian is the voice of reason and intelligence – culture – in Rocky II – urging her newly bourgeois husband not to spend his money carelessly. Rocky ignores her advice, desiring to be seen as a financial success. As a result he finds himself eventually having to sell his ostentatious acquisitions to men who are, although physically and morally weaker, more powerful.

Feminine power and weakness

Each successive movie draws on the conflict of Adrian’s power and weakness. Adrian is never a figure of erotic interest within the films; she remains an unsullied figure of purity which Rocky must protect. Of course, this is a standard situation for women in action films:

“Intrinsically tied in with the necessity for fighting, and therefore for aggression, is the necessity to protect ‘a good woman’. The wife is both to be protected from other men… and to be protected from the ‘streets’…” (Burgin, 1986 :172)

Therefore Rocky expresses his rightful aggression by protecting her from her brother’s abuse, from poverty, and from Clubber Lang’s sexual advances in Rocky III.

Walkerdine ties the act of physical fighting to the struggle to provide for a family – “it validates trying and fighting and therefore the singular effectivity of bodily strength and the multiple significance of ‘fighting’.” This translates muscular masculinity to mastery of external oppression. (Burgin, 1986: 172)

Yet, returning to Rocky II, Rocky has not opted for this physical fight; he values middle class intellectualism more than working class physicality. He aspires to an office job but is without qualifications, cannot read well, and can only scrape together menial work in an abattoir.

When even this low position is denied him, his last recourse is fighting.

Although disapproving, Adrian becomes the catalyst for the fight by becoming pregnant, presenting Rocky with a new paternal masculinity to live up to. His parents are alluded to in the first film, but now Rocky is forced to become the father figure that he is never seen to have.

Furthermore, Adrian’s disastrous premature labour and resulting coma is brought on by her lifting heavy items at work, which creates severe guilt in Rocky – the very lives of his wife and child have been endangered because of his inability to perform as a natural man, yet his wish to perform this in the only way that is available to him is forbidden by his wife. He is to blame both for failing as well as for trying, as her labour comes on after he has defied her and commenced training for the rematch with Creed.

This crisis becomes crippling and Rocky refuses to train, sitting at his comatose wife’s bedside. As Rocky devotedly reads to her in hospital he continues in following in the way she has provided out of his corporeal trap – by improving his mind. In so doing he shows the dependence of his masculine identity on the woman, acknowledging her power.

At the last moment, Adrian regains consciousness, gives her approval for Rocky to train, fight and win. With the authority thus conferred upon him, Rocky trains harder than before, fights harder than before, and this time, wins in a greater way; not just for himself but for his wife, child, and the world.

This ideology of masculinity is built around the feminine; however, we shall return to review the effects of Rocky’s physical transformation on this feminine appendage.

The Spectator

“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.” (Mulvey, 2009: 19)

The popularity of the heavily-muscled, often near-naked cinematic stars of the 1980s signaled the arrival of an era of “overt and newly acceptable male-on-male looking” (Powrie, 2004: 179), when young men were presented not only with the opportunity to look upon and admire the bodies of other men, but the means to do so without the association with homosexuality.

The sports film delivers this opportunity, as do other popular film genres such as sci-fi/war/police narratives. These categories presuppose the presence of weapons and liberal violence along with the opposition of heroes to larger-than-life villains, dictating the very necessity for the action hero’s incredible physical display.

The muscular bodies of Rocky and his opponents appear, sweaty and stripped to the waist, pounding each other ferociously, after undergoing vicious training regimes seen through montages set to music.

Yet this sexual objectification is diffused by the rational framework of the sports narrative, even more so as the cinema audience becomes the spectator of a spectator sport, watching the audience in the boxing ring as they watch the final match.

Mulvey (2009: 21) explains how the male movie star becomes, not the object of the erotic gaze, but the ego of the spectator as the process of identification with the protagonist occurs. Tasker (1993: 77) acknowledges Richard Dyer’s analysis of the structures of activity that are placed around the male body to thwart the risk of that body becoming feminised through passivity.

Therefore, the possibility of the male body as a landing point for an erotic look from any sex is cloaked.

The female viewer

One says cloaked as opposed to denied because, whether these categories and their conventions exist for vicarious identification, or to ease the plight of the male spectator, one may yet dare to suggest that the spectator may be female.

Unfortunately, within contemporary film theory one often falls back on methods which restrict outcomes to those which have been handed down – that is – that men look and women are looked at.

Walkerdine uses psychoanalysis as the basis of her consideration of Rocky II but argues that “by using psychoanalysis to understand relations within a film and then using voyeurism to understand the viewer, we are left in a sterile situation which assumes that all viewers ‘take on’ the psycho-dynamic of the film as far as it relates to the Oedipal conflict. As Laura Mulvey and others have pointed out, this leaves women as viewers in a difficult position.” (Burgin, 1986: 189)

The intense physical suffering endured by the action hero can be understood as a specific kind of sexual display.

Movies of this period often revel in the portrayal of the hero’s undergoing physical wounding, pain, and vulnerability. Referring to such moments in the Rambo series, Jeffords⁽¹⁾ states:

“On the most straightforward filmic level, such moments rationalize sustained attention to the exposed male body, scenes that, as Steve Neale pointed out some time ago, are sources of anxiety in a Hollywood film tradition in which the female body is usually the exclusive object of erotic desire. Although all three films are devoted almost exclusively to the portrayal of Rambo’s body, these scenes are among the few in which that body is still… Consequently, audiences can examine Rambo here at some leisure and explain any anxieties aroused by that examination as anxieties of plot and not pleasure.” (Jeffords, 1994:50)

Yet this does not elide the fact that there is considerable eroticism lavished on the body on that ‘most straightforward level’, and that this eroticism is often experienced because of the hero’s endurance of pain and not simply coincidentally because the hero’s body is still; here, we are immediately reminded of the erotic iconography of Saint Sebastian.

Without this, how do we understand the abundance of scenes in which the hero’s desirable body is beaten, cut or tortured, yet manages to rise to the film’s triumphant climax? Surely relying on Freudian or Lacanian analysis is a fundamentally flawed approach, using one of the most important tools provided by patriarchy, but instead of making a break, buttressing the edifice of the system.⁽²⁾

A different system is needed to avoid returning to phallogocentric discourse, denying the female gaze.

Transformation

On their first date, Rocky shows Adrian his nose, stating that it has never been broken.

It stands as a symbol of pride in resilience, displaying how little he has to show for his efforts, but also his inner worth in the midst of his apparent shortcomings. When he loses his perfect nose to Creed in the climactic match the loss is justified – Creed is the greater boxer and in this instance there is no shame in having this virginity taken by a worthy opponent.

Thus Rocky exchanges this small symbol of personal pride for a far greater one, and the physical transformation describes a liminal transformation.

While this physical crossing of a threshold for the character is important for the first film, it is the transformation undergone by the character’s body over the gap between the second and third films which is of greater interest, precisely because it is an organic transformation, occurring externally to the movie series and being written in Stallone’s body, altering Rocky and the films’ masculine ideology.

From the domestic to the political

The domestic nature of the narrative in Rocky seems to preclude a link to Jeffords’ portrayal of the hard-bodied action hero functioning as a symbol or symptom of Reaganism.

Yet by 1985, Rocky is “pitted against an enemy whose identity and nature makes the hero into an emblem of the national body”, (Jeffords, 1994:53) when in Rocky IV he fights the robotic Soviet fighter Ivan Drago. This remarkable shift – the “bum” fighting for self-respect in 1977 becoming the very emblem of America itself fighting the USSR – was reached due to a sharp change of direction by the point of Rocky III.

The film opens with newspaper and magazine articles charting Rocky’s successes in the ring, and when we see the man himself, we see a new product of the 1980s. His expensive clothes, watch and haircut all mark him as a changed man, whom we learn has been weakened by his success.

It is, however, in his body that the change is quite stunning: Stallone/Rocky has become harder.

The fleshed-out face has given way to chiselled features and sunken cheeks, and his musculature is much more defined – to use the correct terminology – ripped. It appears that once the transition from underdog to champion was made, the external fat – that which was soft, more feminine – surrounding the body had to be expunged. What actually occurred was not, though, simply a concern of plot; what happened was Rambo.

The Rambo effect

Both Rocky III and First Blood were filmed in 1982. Whereas Rocky was an outsider brought inside by social relationships, John Rambo, the hero of First Blood, was an outsider left on the outside.

One operated on the domestic level, the other on the national, but both through Stallone’s body.

The violent sexuality of Rambo’s narrative caused a more overtly sexualised gaze to be exercised in Rocky III. During the scenes in which Rocky and Creed run along the beach in training, the camera glories in close-ups of their muscular thighs (in very short shorts). Finally, we are given the marvelously homoerotic slow-motion sequence of the men celebrating after their run on the beach, jumping in the surf, splashing and hugging one another.

Now Rocky is harder, faster and stronger than ever before, and has truly crossed from contender to champion.

The change in Rocky’s body reflects the change in the films’ female voice. Although still a passive character, when Adrian does speak, it is to shriek a melodramatic speech at Rocky wherein she persuades him to fight once again, but this time for himself alone.

“How’d you get so tough?” he asks, to which she replies, “I live with a fighter.”

Not only has the male hardened externally, but the female has hardened internally. The decade’s performance of hardness slices away the feminine appendage to create a singular, streamlined masculinity, all encased in an impregnable hard body with no added fat.

Yet, because Rocky does not fight in the way that Rambo does, this shared body must be displayed in a different way.

Heavy-duty signifiers

Hence, we are presented with ever larger and more outrageous opponents, all caricatures of hypermasculinity, which the hero must match and defeat. Rocky’s weakness now stems from his relationships to other men – the deaths of Mickey and then Creed, who each serves successively as his trainer/father figure/friend. He must first overcome his emotions and then avenge their deaths, achieving both of these through beating other men.

This reaches its peak in the figure of Drago, a giant man so stripped of any trace of weakness/femininity that he is effectively a machine.

The scenes which see Rocky preparing for this fight amazingly call on an array of signifiers to express his superior masculinity: not only does he grow an impressive full beard, but he trains outdoors in the Russian winter, using the most basic, makeshift equipment, whilst his foe trains under artificial conditions in a state-of-the-art gym. The hero then scales a snow-covered mountain in his pursuit of physical and mental preparation, demonstrating not only his natural masculinity, but that he has actually conquered the natural world.

Ultimately, this performance could not be maintained, and Rocky V was an unsuccessful attempt to return the character to its roots, wounding the now too-hard hero by stripping him of his money and health, returning him to his old neighbourhood and even to his old clothes, focusing on the father-son relationship.

Only with the final wound of aging does the focus on the feminine fully return – and this has to be achieved by the drastic step of cutting away the woman entirely. In Rocky Balboa, we learn that Adrian has died, and it is the internalisation of the pain/the woman, that rescues the character and returns it to critical acclaim.

Conclusion

Much more can be said about the series’ projection of its masculine ideology and its effects on culture; this essay serves merely as a brief introduction to some of the concepts which may be explored through the medium of the films and their place within the “innumerable copies of masculinities floating around in culture”. (Reeser, 2012: 18)

Just as this character’s performance of manliness rose from previous manifestations, it has spawned countless copies and tributes; so at the risk of enforcing what may be decried as an unnecessary intellectualisation ⁽³⁾, Rocky may be posited as a text worthy of in-depth critical analysis.

Notes

Jeffords’ aim is to draw parallels between the hero’s hard body and the ‘national body’. These examples are used within the ‘national body’ metaphor, to show that past wounds can be overcome and survived through self-repair – but that as this process is unimaginable and unbearable by the individual man in the cinema, the nation’s weakness is in fact weakness at an individual bodily level. (Jeffords, 1994:52)
Laura Mulvey describes this as “…the ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like a language (formed critically at the moment of arrival of language) while still caught within the language of the patriarchy? There is no way in which we can produce an alternative out of the blue, but we can begin to make a break by examining patriarchy with the tools it provides, of which psychoanalysis is not the only but an important one.” (Mulvey, 2009: 15) As for Walkerdine, her approach is “to analyse the constitution of subjectivity within a variety of cultural practices”… asking “how people make sense of what they watch and how this sense is incorporated into an existing fantasy-structure”, (Burgin, 1986: 192) the basis of which is to be found in Freud’s analysis of dreaming.
Both Tasker and Walkerdine are against “the ‘intellectualization of pleasures’ which seems to be the aim of much analysis of mass film and television.” (Burgin, 1986: 168)

Bibilography

Brennan, T. (ed). 1989. Between Feminism And Psychoanalysis. Routledge. UK

Burgin, V. et al. (eds) 1986. Formations Of Fantasy. Routledge. UK

Darwent, C. 10/02/2008. Arrows of desire: How did St. Sebastian become an enduring homoerotic icon? The Independent. available online at: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/arrows-of-desire-how-did-st-sebastian-become-an-enduring-homoerotic-icon-779388.html accessed 07/11/2012

Jeffords, S. 1994. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity In The Reagan Era. Rutgers University Press. New Jersey, USA

Powrie, P. et al. (eds) 2004. The Trouble With Men: Masculinities In European And Hollywood Cinema. Wallflower Press. UK

Mulvey, L. 2009. Visual And Other Pleasures. Palgrave Macmillan. UK

Reeser, T. W. 2010. Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell. UK

Tasker, Y. 1993. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre And The Action Cinema. Comedia. UK

Related artworks

My earlier work clearly dealt with issues surrounding the depiction of the male form in fine art, but this particular subject has directly informed my “muscle series”, including Fight, pictured below.

Fight, oil on paper painting by Lee Devonish, 2016 — Fight. Oil on paper, 2016.

Can You Use Pure Sable Brushes With Oil Paint?

Can you use pure sable brushes with oil paint?

I sure hope so, because I do!

Seriously though, it seems as though every brush guide makes the blanket assumption that hog bristles are for oils and sable hairs are for watercolours. Unfortunately this just glides over the vast range of possibilities that paint holds out; there is no single way to paint in oils, and no single type of brush can cover every technique.

Sable brushes with oil paint

I’m using them with very liquid, thinned oil paint, so they serve my technique much more than rough hogs hair brushes do – although I’d been getting by with sable and synthetic blends beforehand.

It’s the only way to create the fine lines and flat surface I’m after.

My current brush set:

I recently bought four micro brushes, two riggers, two brights, one angular liner, one filbert, one spotter and one domed filbert.

I’ve used watercolour brushes for oils for a long time now, and I can’t see myself going back. I keep my old, scrubby hog brushes for mixing paint and pick up the colour from the old brush with the soft new one.

They arrived just in time to start a new painting (watch this space), and so far I’m delighted with the investment.

Keeping sable brushes in good condition when painting with oils

Of course, keeping a soft brush like a sable in good condition is going to be more of a challenge when using oils as opposed to watercolours. Besides doing my heavy-duty mixing with my old, scrubby brushes and a palette knife, I clean them more carefully than my older bristle brushes, first with a bit of Sansodor and then with good old soap. Nothing more expensive needed!

A bit of conditioner also helps to keep the hairs… well… conditioned. So far they’re holding up brilliantly and I’m looking forward to expanding my kit and sharing the latest additions and new work!

Precedent

The story behind this drawing – a piece that is unique in my practice – is simple; it was made purely from a need to try. It was based on an old sketch I had done a decade before, and as I had changed so much in the intervening time, it felt fitting to revisit that image and make it into something more meaningful.

The title – Precedent – refers directly to the original drawing that preceded it, but also to all of the time I had spent sewing to try to earn a living as a single parent, setting the precedent for working with polycotton thread.

Experimenting

One essential part of my working method is to indulge my curiosity, to break away from my preferred media and experiment with materials.

Textiles

Monochrome prints are a traditional extension of my drawings, but although drawing in yarn and thread may appear to be a digression in style, they hold much expressive potential. The physical process of puncturing canvas or fabric with a bodkin, and the deliberate placement of line, can create a real energy and tension in a yarn drawn piece.

Machine stitching

Machine stitch drawing seemed to be a natural interpretation for a sketch of myself I had done just before marrying and moving to another part of the world.

Thread was the most apt vehicle for depicting the intervening years, which had been largely spent immersed in textile work. The commercial connotations of the thread as well as the process of machine stitching tell their own story, and juxtapose with the colour and expression of the figure.

Finding the right materials to create a shortcut to a narrative is extremely rewarding.

Interdimensionality

Consisting of lines with no substrate fabric or ground, the drawing and surface are one and the same. The delicacy of the mesh and fragile lines, which can move slightly within the grid, give an air of sadness and loss to this drawing.

Mounted away from a surface, the threads cast shadows, line and background become one, and the two dimensional drawing becomes sculptural.

I like the fact that, without its frame, this piece could simply be crumpled or folded like any other fabric. Its flimsiness as well as its hidden strength as an interconnected fabric makes me think of it as a metaphor for life, and not just my own.

First Look: NCC Creative Writing Course

I’ve recently signed up for a Creative Writing course through NCC Online. I’ll be posting a full review later, but I just wanted to give my initial thoughts on the course setup, as it might be handy to compare to my opinion once I’ve finished the course.

Reviewing a writing course like this is actually very interesting for me, as I’ve enjoyed studying in bricks-and-mortar universities, but recently I’ve wondered if the physical experience of attendance in person is worth the price, or whether a similar outcome could be achieved by doing a course from home.

First impressions

At a glance, it definitely inspires confidence.

With 14 modules it certainly appears comprehensive and holds the promise of value. The modules cover a wider range of writing styles and genres than I had anticipated; there is always the worry that an online course may come up thin, but so far, so good.

The Quick Start Guide PDF is excellent for letting you know exactly how to go about actually using the material presented to you – it’s worth reading through it straight away and not skipping over it just because you’re at home in your pyjamas.

Starting out

I didn’t know what to expect when I signed up for this… how different would an online course be to the methods of learning I’ve already tried?

Right now, I can honestly say I’m genuinely excited. In the first evening of sitting down with the course materials, I found myself in one of the exercises pouring out words that had only rattled around my mind for years. I had to pull myself away – that can only be a good sign!

In fact, I have to pull myself away from saying too much right now, as I want to reserve most of my insight for my final review in order to give a full picture.

Criticism

There is a glaring error in the overview section that deals with the Creative Writing exam where it states, “Once you have read through the Underpinning Knowledge you should of gained the Knowledge to take the Exam”.

Should of?

I’ll be honest: this severely dented my confidence, but I was willing to see this as an oversight by an administrator tasked with drawing up brief descriptions, and not as a foretaste of what would be in the course itself.

Small things like this are extremely important when it comes to convincing learners of academic merit when it comes to courses, especially learners like me, who have been through extensive formal education and expect a high standard of provision. Still, nothing in the course material has given me reason to doubt its usefulness.

Overview

The course materials seem to be well-written and thought provoking, and I’m looking forward to digging deeper into them and seeing how this experiences affects my writing. Come back for my full, in-depth review at the end of the course.

The Trouble With Tradition

The trouble with tradition… as I see it.

As artists or writers, we are taught conventions and traditions of thought and practice. In fact, I should go back to the start – as human beings, we’re taught to follow conventions and traditions.

People work well with established routes towards fixed outcomes because they’re efficient and they make us feel safe. Clichés, stereotypes, tropes, archetypes, whatever – the repetition of a recipe is attractive because we know what we’re likely to get before we start, and we don’t like to fail.

Fair enough.

Benefits?

There are many benefits to be had from learning the rules and why they’re there; in fact, I’m a firm believer in knowing the ins and outs of your craft in order to be able to know the best way to break the rules to get the results you want.

I speak and write Bajan whenever I like, with the firm knowledge that my spoken and written English is very good. I paint in a very traditional way because I enjoy the process and the meticulous frame of mind it puts me in. I know the rules and when to ignore or incorporate them.

My problem with traditions comes when they restrict thought, and even worse, rip you off.

Tradition is just marketing in disguise.

Most of us make purchases blindly, because of the way it makes us feel. It’s not just the rush of having new stuff, it’s the sense of becoming a part of a tribe or a family – the sense of belonging.

When you’re a visual artist, you tend to cultivate your sense of belonging through your chosen medium, but beyond that, you place yourself at the end of the long line of artists, some of whom have become cultural titans.

Some of these names are trotted out to sell everything from chocolates to cars. The cultural capital wielded by the names of long-dead famous artists is immense, and if you want to think of yourself as using the same material as them, therefore being like them – belonging with them – then you’ll surely pay a premium for it.

Really, tradition for tradition’s sake is a huge money-waster.

For example, you can buy a party dress for a few pounds, but a wedding dress will set you back an awful lot, despite the fact that any dress you wear to your wedding is a wedding dress.

You can buy materials from a hardware store and knock up a “masterpiece” (another term redolent of unhelpful tradition, but that’s another story), but you can get fleeced in an art supply store and come away with little more than a sense of belonging in the club. That’s not to say that there aren’t many specialised artists’ materials that are worth their price, but too often there’s more than a hefty premium for the right branding.

How many products can you think of that have nothing to do with art, but bear the name of a famous artist? How often have you seen the Italian Renaissance referenced in aid of entirely inappropriate clobber, or French impressionists plastered across incongruous tat? Start in the museum or gallery shop, and end in the second hand car dealership.

The trouble with tradition is the appropriation of cultural highlights for commercial gain.

I found a masterpiece in the loo at work, for example. Duchamp was not the artist being referenced.

Traditions are like a cozy duvet, but most of us who are able aim to get out of bed at some point during the day.

Tradition for its own sake is ancestor worship.

Personally, I don’t understand the appeal of doing things you don’t like and being with people you don’t like in places you don’t like because it’s traditional – that’s just doing things to keep dead people happy. Really, being overly dependent on received methods of working, thinking and acting is a sure way to be restricted, unhappy and broke.

I enjoy art and writing that understands its place in history, its influences and its roots. This doesn’t mean it has to be a pastiche; on the contrary, knowing where you’re starting from can help you to define where you want to land.

Says she who makes oil paintings.