tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37684853903569190582024-03-27T07:37:53.366+01:00To Not Fall AsleepLutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.comBlogger52125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-85979135627462558662023-07-30T12:33:00.002+02:002023-07-30T12:36:42.168+02:00depth on the run<p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDS2K8iOpS81sucaxDHKsEhfH6Ln7nj37IrMc9BmjcPAKBtKLMRpIPvLHJU2dP5ISCuXtQlVGhYAdRUj9C05odLlUq7zJg-w1zQ5G2g3vpiLFawmtiu1Dg2-vFfNc5r-91S7jS2jIjQ0zAvi30Vmwn7PQKYA3V8kVUaKsBSNvcm8RBhUeGl9UIeLaOgpln/s1024/rowefest%201.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="1024" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDS2K8iOpS81sucaxDHKsEhfH6Ln7nj37IrMc9BmjcPAKBtKLMRpIPvLHJU2dP5ISCuXtQlVGhYAdRUj9C05odLlUq7zJg-w1zQ5G2g3vpiLFawmtiu1Dg2-vFfNc5r-91S7jS2jIjQ0zAvi30Vmwn7PQKYA3V8kVUaKsBSNvcm8RBhUeGl9UIeLaOgpln/w640-h360/rowefest%201.jpg" width="640" /></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div>hey, for anyone still following this here dormant blog, there are some more recent music-related posts (e.g. on this year's keith rowe celebration fest in berlin) over here: <a href="https://depthontherun.blogspot.com/">https://depthontherun.blogspot.com/</a>. <p></p>Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-36990690520890726552021-09-10T10:56:00.002+02:002021-09-10T10:56:57.599+02:00what i think i'm doing<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6jQPhdOK8gqmbHK9R9eZKNwVdgXr8er17S4dBkmWhu4N4Z4cCocALV-gxIpozNfS9XaIKsHJ2JKhUgD-kmGmJpSpq8lP0Ca5MJ3tirNVYMAgtMnJ9bvbTbiKuaakSzDwRyTc8Q6Yxmf6V/s2048/fragonard.jpg" style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1673" data-original-width="2048" height="522" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6jQPhdOK8gqmbHK9R9eZKNwVdgXr8er17S4dBkmWhu4N4Z4cCocALV-gxIpozNfS9XaIKsHJ2JKhUgD-kmGmJpSpq8lP0Ca5MJ3tirNVYMAgtMnJ9bvbTbiKuaakSzDwRyTc8Q6Yxmf6V/w640-h522/fragonard.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-30271118508009252182021-03-17T08:47:00.001+01:002021-03-17T08:47:06.838+01:00<p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxc3ABYHXoJzEqDQjQmi8I2ft7HtGfVo8YQeVacHHFF5BnhhnVhdXD9Yoe1kNBv73V4CJ2yLWCqqtlxzVTRm8mC8KQ2hgCOr3FC-dBEP0-f1ureXULfsVIkUIZ3qsHVQsps07MZms6KY2t/s1024/filter+bubble.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1005" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxc3ABYHXoJzEqDQjQmi8I2ft7HtGfVo8YQeVacHHFF5BnhhnVhdXD9Yoe1kNBv73V4CJ2yLWCqqtlxzVTRm8mC8KQ2hgCOr3FC-dBEP0-f1ureXULfsVIkUIZ3qsHVQsps07MZms6KY2t/w393-h400/filter+bubble.jpg" width="393" /></a><br /><br /></p>Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-7672249220281453622020-12-18T19:50:00.002+01:002020-12-20T13:16:21.278+01:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVbtl7VXFeKdY5fjerYyV4KBOWUFC3oWyuKa_4PvvALwQfniJnc14yOYiQGFdb3Squd0WEU-JAXNYYs5xV44en1GoMkbl3tr3i9dw1nE2N5dJTmqjKi6991ZEtLQDSCUqgteL5wC4McWAl/s2048/Hockney+Chronology.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVbtl7VXFeKdY5fjerYyV4KBOWUFC3oWyuKa_4PvvALwQfniJnc14yOYiQGFdb3Squd0WEU-JAXNYYs5xV44en1GoMkbl3tr3i9dw1nE2N5dJTmqjKi6991ZEtLQDSCUqgteL5wC4McWAl/w640-h360/Hockney+Chronology.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p></p><div style="text-align: left;">this is out and about now from taschen: my david hockney chronology that once went with a coffeetable-crushing luxury tome one could live in rather than look at ... re-packaged as a dirt-cheap standalone book fitting in any christmas stocking ... i like that david (whom i once shook hands with) wrote "that's the way i see it" on this thing, quoting the title of one of his autobiographies, because now i feel like i must have been there.</div>Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-51925994163309213242020-10-27T12:50:00.001+01:002020-10-27T12:50:44.745+01:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZquIYynJiRa2oz1TIlrXUi88MlZsrn-YTiUxgh6jfCRI2Aeh4xjMIzTFtCZGQ6KUaQ3D4_JsFAaYIyPdAmp2fZF1Z-rmJLf6ihw4HDEP35uocLjOznw-d-9N6yQriwkWxIAdCjg84RxFA/s910/peter+saul+1962.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZquIYynJiRa2oz1TIlrXUi88MlZsrn-YTiUxgh6jfCRI2Aeh4xjMIzTFtCZGQ6KUaQ3D4_JsFAaYIyPdAmp2fZF1Z-rmJLf6ihw4HDEP35uocLjOznw-d-9N6yQriwkWxIAdCjg84RxFA/w640-h540/peter+saul+1962.jpg" /></a><br /><br />it's been widely remarked upon that certain early peter saul paintings, like the above untitled one from 1962, noticeably prefigure elements of philip guston's work after his return to figuration at the end of the decade. but i've seen no explanation for the fact that this here painting exactly charts the mechanics behind the postponement of a guston exhibition in 2020. well?<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwT9NS6W_c0ESUPuwRf9OScYOp2tFjyO8_r36iN__feK0Zwt2v-PJdC1Ef3_NiBdAjOcXWlCTaq6tC0ubkm4G_xj2ZpY9xKBvfje6sbfx2FhX6RO1sZUXZ1sHf0f5ToFk4ZCWxNLi-V7Td/s1024/spread+philip+guston+now.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwT9NS6W_c0ESUPuwRf9OScYOp2tFjyO8_r36iN__feK0Zwt2v-PJdC1Ef3_NiBdAjOcXWlCTaq6tC0ubkm4G_xj2ZpY9xKBvfje6sbfx2FhX6RO1sZUXZ1sHf0f5ToFk4ZCWxNLi-V7Td/w640-h360/spread+philip+guston+now.jpg" /></a><div><br /></div><div>anyway, here's the catalog to that postponed guston exhibition. you don't need it, the images are muddy. conceptionally, it's mildly disappointing: the thing is called "philip guston now," and yet that "now" is merely ten artist statements on why they dig philip guston. the rest is more or less a chronological walk thru his work. so far so pretty unremarkable, but then indeed something seems to be missing: while the 1930s depictions of clansmen are discussed, the hoods from after guston's return to figuration are not really talked about in the curators' essays at all. they figure in a couple of artist statements, where glenn ligon calls them woke, which they may very well be ... still it's obvious that the exhibition makers did not think of this as a relevant topic (while there's an (i'm sure very good but as of yet unread by me) essay on the work's jewishness) ... it might have been simpler to just commission another essay than to postpone the exhibition for four years ... but clearly this catalog hasn't done its homework.<p></p></div>Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-82111997132040980582017-11-07T11:49:00.000+01:002017-11-07T11:49:30.128+01:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; 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<br />Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-67021738737929825482017-02-26T10:24:00.000+01:002017-02-26T10:24:36.854+01:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<iframe frameborder="no" height="080" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/308895230&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="080%"></iframe>Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-19133881354700993072017-01-07T13:37:00.000+01:002017-01-07T13:37:25.478+01:00The slip unleashed<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Bananas have many meanings. As that which the monkey eats. As something to throw at foreign footballers to demonstrate a racist attitude. As perfect product design with inbuilt packaging served up by nature<span style="font-size: xx-small;">TM</span> . As portraits of Warhol and, in a larger sense, icons of pop art. As easy sexual gratification to the male (when opened at the near end and cupped by thickly-painted female lips). As the lure of capitalism (this works best in East Germany, where the Wall had to be torn down for easier access to bananas). And so on.<br />
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But once the fruit is eaten and the skin dropped on the pavement, the banana develops an unusual singularity of purpose, sucking up all other narratives surrounding it into one plot point: the peel is there for you to slip on. Because that’s what the old joke demands. No matter that you’ve never seen it happen in real life, and that the origin of the trope in the 19th century reads very much like an urban myth. Many a London and New York news paper reported people breaking all manner of bones over banana peels... were the streets really that littered with rotting fruit skin, or did people maybe have a jauntier step and freer outlook to doom them? By the time the banana peel reached silent slapstick cinema, it had already become a cliché, and jokes would be played against expectations. Buster Keaton did not slip over a banana peel and made a gesture of triumph over that, but the public didn’t like it, so he cut in a second peel and went down. Charlie Chaplin, better catering to his audiences, had two escaped convicts dressed as pilgrims fall over a single peel in unison. Harold Lloyd slipped on a banana peel while climbing over the hood of a double-decker bus at full speed. Charley Bower gave an inventor the task of developing an non-slippery banana peel, mixing dozens of different chemical solutions to kill the germ of slipperiness (an athletic little critter rather giddy with a sense of its own fallibility) and proving the results on a specially constructed tester (pat. applied for), a moveable slippery slope to tumble down.<br />
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(Science says here: ‘Changes in the inclination of the floor, i.e. increasing ramp angle, are associated with changes in the ground reaction forces. For example, shear forces for level walking reach a maximum of about 1.5 to 1.8 N kg<span style="font-size: xx-small;">-1</span> (normalized to body weight). However, walking down a ramp increases this peak shear by about 61% for a 5° ramp angle and 128% for a 10° ramp angle. The normal forces also are affected by inclination angle, with an increase in the peak force of about 1N kg<span style="font-size: xx-small;">-1</span> for a 5° increase,’ explain Mark S. Redfern et al. in <i>Biomechanics of Slips</i>.) The successful scientific endeavour of Bower to invent a banana peel that stops you dead in your tracks nevertheless must remain iconographically fruitless. The banana peel still signifies The Slip, it remains sitting on the pavement, overdetermined like a work of art in the museum... like a work of art in a frame, or on a pedestal, patiently waiting for you to come by and slip on it.<br />
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As I write this I stumble across an article in Frieze about something else altogether, which mentions the ‘slipperiness between what you see and what it means’ (traced back here to the works of Duchamp like anything that makes art today more equivocal). Well, who knows what whatever means anyway, but to experience this as a cognitive dissonance already seems an advanced sense of slipperiness. We usually remain caught in the slipperiness of perception. So we need to move up one level to even see what it might mean.<br />
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In earlier times, before there was this amount of Duchampian slipperiness to cope with, reception went much easier. ‘All art is quite useless,’ said Oscar Wilde famously. And in a letter to a young man, who had asked for an explanation of that, he further took pressure from us, the viewers: ‘Art is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way. It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is sterility...’ (thus killing the germ of slipperiness). ‘If the contemplation of a work of art is followed by activity of any kind, the work is either of a very second-rate order, or the spectator has failed to realize the complete artistic impression.’<br />
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So to endorse the failure to realize the complete artistic impression is what the following deliberations aim for.<br />
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Let us first have a look at how the overdetermination of a potentially slippery object may liquefy. The mere fact of a pedestal (as opposed to the pavement) does not define a work of art, though some of the sculpture selected for a sort of exchange programme for equestrian statues in Simon Patterson’s <i>Under Cartel</i> do have their firm place in the canon, such as Verrocchio’s Colleoni or Falconet’s <i>Peter the Great</i>. Others are quite feeble gestures at immortalizing worldly power. But since horses today are rather for girls, their old functions of intimidation or provocation are no longer alive (except when you put a living threat in the saddle, such as a policeman), and with no fixed meaning attached to the beast, the equestrian statue has become a quaint and most slippery genre stripped of its original authority. It also has become a welcome object for institutional critique, where you may critique the pedestal and have it too (see e.g. the <i>Fourth Plinth</i> art commissions in London).</div>
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When Patterson suggests to swap one of these statues against another, the connotations start to ricochet. If you made Napoleon take the place of the first Duke of Wellington, and vice versa, would their respective audiences lose some of their historical identity? Presumably both former heroes are long enough dead so that a switch of personality wouldn’t hurt the social fabric much. (Isn’t there a TV show like this, where you swap wives and see how the families cope?) Exchange Friedrich III of Prussia, a half-hearted liberal who had laryngeal cancer already when he ascended, couldn’t speak a word and died after 99 days on the throne (as I learn on Wikipedia), and who most probably has a meaning for nobody alive today, against General Georgios Karaiskakis, who fought in the Greek War of Independence and was killed there in 1827, and it looks unfair because one death seems to make so much more heroic sense than the other, but then either man on either horse could surely do the same job very well in whatever surroundings... especially since to a German someone named Friedrich will always feel better prepared to tell us what to do. The power is in the name. (Most probably the German against Greek animosity in light of strained fiscal relations today would lead to graffiti bombings, though...)<br />
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It is of course important that we do not really swap the statues and only do it in our minds. If there were tons of money spent and local curators and politicians held speeches, then there’d be nothing at all left of the poor figure of historical impact sat upon his horse. It’d be reduced to art, overdetermined and demanding of a very different form of passive-aggressive reception...<br />
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There are no Friedrichs in Patterson’s <i>The Great Bear</i>, a plan of the London Underground where the names of stations have been replaced by all kinds of remarkable persons from history and today. Instead there are the Louis, monarchs of another country, who I guess lived better and died better and provide better entertainment value purely by dint of their name. One thinker who pondered the power of names and how they affect their bearer’s achievement was novelist George Moore, who judged a book by the sound of its author: ‘Dickens – a mean name, a name without atmosphere, a black out-of-elbows, back-stairs name, a name good enough for loud comedy and louder pathos... Now it is a fact that we find no fine names among novelists. We find only colourless names, dry-as-dust names, or vulgar names, round names like pot-hats, those names like mackintoshes, names that are squashy as galoshes,’ which is maybe why there is no novelists’ line on <i>The Great Bear</i>, instead we have explorers, footballers, actors, sinologues and saints. Some obscure, so the game is to recognize them, and to see if we can place them on the right line, some so famous that we feel we just shook their hand after the pang of recognition. <br />
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And then there is the single name painting: <i>Harry Houdini</i>. The great escapologist, the man who slipped out of all self-entrapments no matter how deadly the setup (at least in the make-believe). Iconic in the way he hung head downwards in shackles over a gaping void. Is his name maybe strong enough to also escape the frame it comes in?<br />
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In his video <i>Acer Pseudoplatanus</i>, Angus Braithwaite performs the reenactment of a chance failed Houdini. The video ominously begins with burning logs, bespeaking of home and man’s victory over trees. Then the narrator tells us of a watermill he used to visit as a boy, forbidden to him because of its dangers: ‘One slip would have resulted in limbs ground to pulp between wet wood and wall.’ The boy had a special relationship to all kinds of wood: ‘I knew all the trees. Some, of course more intimately than others.’ His most favourite was a sycamore, or death maple, which held the embryo of a tree house. A rope was attached to a branch a hundred metres (sic!) up, with a loop tied at the bottom, so one could use it as a swing...<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGTGUGCregkEwxIxQD9WA7lPTPCLZBZpNpZjsi7F2Ffkv25fuzJDJDo2mS8auTRB1xv3iQsVWXhmTzk2WlmHa7XbMYoWAeQaA22eY2MRJX_cN8aJdUkCOWw4Q_6GgUujku45IKpSTODtOH/s1600/B01.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGTGUGCregkEwxIxQD9WA7lPTPCLZBZpNpZjsi7F2Ffkv25fuzJDJDo2mS8auTRB1xv3iQsVWXhmTzk2WlmHa7XbMYoWAeQaA22eY2MRJX_cN8aJdUkCOWw4Q_6GgUujku45IKpSTODtOH/s320/B01.JPG" width="320" /></a>The boy improved on the construction: ‘Pulling a new loop I was able to create an adjustable opening – one which, once lined with the handlebar cover of my BMX bicycle, sat comfortably around my middle. You could now swing attached to the bottom of the rope with your body in a horizontal position. As the swing slowed I found that, due to my alterations, the rope had shortened and I now found myself hanging instead from my torso but with my feet five centimetres from the ground. After some effort I managed to slip one arm out of the noose, but my feet were still well off the ground and I had exerted myself just getting this far. I hung there for quite some time, catching my breath. The next step was to get enough slack to wriggle out the other arm, thus giving me two free arms to work on removing the neck. Fortunately this was something I never managed to achieve...’<br />
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Houdini of course would have gotten out of the sling easily, but had Houdini failed, it would not have been as slapstick. Although he didn’t actually die from a stunt, as I would have thought, but from an appendix burst after an admirer had punched him in the stomach without warning to test the entertainer’s iron muscles. (By the way, as film footage of Houdini’s stunts proves, he hectically wriggled out of entrapments in quite an undignified manner that resembled nothing so much as early psychiatric documentations of hysterical fits. Which must have required a lack of inhibition that Braithwaite by his looks and measured reenactment would never permit himself. Eventually the artist’s mother had to come and free him from his predicament all dripping shoes and flailing arms. Houdini’s mother couldn’t come and save him because an appendix requires professional treatment and because she had been dead for 13 years, and all her son’s attempts to make contact since had come to nothing.) <br />
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The story of the video being as inevitable as a banana peel sitting on the pavement (we see it coming from the first image of the rope sling) frees up the modes of depiction: the deadpan reenactment of supposedly historical details, sterile scenery close-ups of brooks and tree bark, fingers drawing imaginary trees on white walls and other illustrative imagery that actually prevents the viewer’s mind from picturing the scene. <br />
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Wood is the theme of many of Braithwaite’s works, and even books seem to matter as much for the material they were made from as for the words that make up their content. So in <i>The Moment of Conception</i>, a photo which shows the instant in which the artist conceived, quote, ‘all art works past, present and future’, a book (changeable in different manifestations of the work) is spanned into the wooden head construction like a pulp battery empowering the creative process. The installation <i>Father of the Woods (C. Willeford)</i> does away with the tree trunk altogether, just a couple of short lathes and ropes thrown over a metal bar high up that gives the slender construction tree-like proportions. There’s a hand-sewn banner that partly reads: ‘Father of the woods. The oak king. Gives strength of vision and backbone, producing great clarity for judging future events.’ (So who said all art was quite useless.) The ropes end in three pendulums hovering above three books like they would in some spiritistic session, spelling out letters from the dead, here three opened paperback novels by the American crime novelist Charles Willeford. In a clash of cultures, these prime specimen of pulp fiction were probably picked for the genre’s identification with wood pulp rather than a plot arc. The first of the novels, <i>Miami Blues</i>, ends with words that reference both slapstick and sexuality: ‘I never met a man yet that didn’t like my pie.’ <br />
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On the slippery slope between what we see and what it means, it can feel like the inclinations work against us, like all art is firmly installed on its pedestal and it is only us, the viewer, who can slip up. It may seem like most artworks have whole secret manuals of intent, yet when you enter a gallery space there is nothing on view to spell things out. (You can ask one of the guards, but good luck with that.) This phenomenon is not specific to the field, though. Even the mother of slips, the Freudian slip, came carefully prepared with its inventor’s intentions and was pre-programmed like an artwork before its actualization in the spectator.<br />
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(On a random google search to help me with this topic, I stumble over a heading in <i>Psychology Today</i>: ‘Most of us live in fear of unleashing a Freudian slip,’ it says. Presumably just like Victorian pedestrians had lived in constant fear of banana peels on the rampage.)<br />
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The original Freudian slip was an utterly bourgeois affair. A young man tellingly misquoted Virgil’s <i>Aeneid</i> in the original Latin (of course), dropping a word but repairing the sentence around it so the grammar remained flawless. The dropped word was then submitted to all kinds of learned associations (don’t ask). The other big example of a slip in Freud’s <i>Psychopathology of Everyday Life</i> was how he himself momentarily forgot the name of Renaissance painter Luca Signorelli and instead first tried the name of the better known Botticelli, and immediately noticing this couldn’t be right replaced him with one Boltraffio, an artist who today would be completely forgotten except for Freud’s famous parapraxis (highbrow term for the Freudian slip. By the way none of these appear on the blue line of Italian artists in Simon Patterson’s <i>The Great Bear</i>, one wonders why that is?). The sound of Freud’s replacement names in his own estimation had to do with matters of sex and death in ways too convoluted for our purpose here.<br />
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If we instead follow Sebastiano Timpanaro – who tells us that these slips were managed by Freud so he could avoid the topics that really scared him, such as being reminded of the common people – the poshness of psychoanalysis made it acceptable to the public, despite its shock value: ‘The neo-bourgeois has understood that just as Christ did not come into the world in order to abolish the ancient Laws, but in order to accomplish them, so psychoanalysis does not demystify bourgeois values in order to destroy them, but to reinstate and consolidate them. Thus as psychoanalysis gradually ceased to be a moral scandal and became a vogue, so too explanation of “slips” became a polite “pastime”. The neo-bourgeois who had learnt to play this game would himself collaborate in the explanations, and – in part against his will, in part with a touch of conscious snobbery – furnish Freud with the “free” associations needed for the smooth course of every analysis.’<br />
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Again, doesn’t that read almost like the way we play along with and subdue ourselves to the work of art and its proper subtexts? Interpreting art is like the parlour game of explaining slips. Note that ‘free’ is in scare quotes, the established order still upholds the right and the wrong, and both art and the official Freudian slip are just manifestations of a status quo.<br />
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There are no bananas in the <i>Aeneid</i>, but there’s pie throwing (sort of): ‘This realm rings with the triple-throated baying of vast Cerberus, couched huge in the cavern opposite; to whom the prophetess, seeing the serpents already bristling up on his neck, throws a cake made slumberous with honey and drugged grain...’<br />
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There are no bananas in Freud, where the penis is usually symbolized by a knife, a cigar or cigarette. There are also no cream pies in Freud, which is strange for a Viennese who invented the Pleasure Principle, but we do find a knife cutting through a layer cake symbolizing the layers of consciousness (also in possible reference to an American teen comedy).<br />
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Speaking of pleasure principles, one must usually admit that witnessing a person slip on a banana peel (or pretending to slip, as it’s an act that will happen only in the cinema) is usually something of an aesthetic let-down after all the build-up. The movement is swift, and while professionals will manage to kick the legs far up in the air, the peel is never more than the occasion for a fall and the scene does not transcend a simple feeling of <i>schadenfreude</i>. Whereas that other trademark action of silent comedy, the pie in the face, offers something considerably more sensual and cathartic. Just witness Laurel and Hardy’s <i>Battle of the Century</i>, which coincidentally starts out with Hardy planting a banana peel on the pavement with the intention of slipping on it to hurt himself and collect insurance. Instead a pie vendor steps in and falls first. Hardy, with another tell-tale banana still in hand, receives a pie in the face, then things escalate quickly... Sex/gender is a pronounced topic, especially in scenes of the lovingly delayed female pie on the male face. Then, in the final frame of the battle, a woman slips on a leftover pie on the pavement and drops dead down on it, with the pie now under her skirt and inside her underwear, as we learn from her movements when she stands up, wriggling uncomfortably but welcoming the discomfort, shooting guilty glances if anybody notices her secret pleasure... <br />
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‘Everything. Fucking. Everything.’ These are the final words in Benedict Drew’s video <i>Mainland Rock</i>, while a suspicious-looking crack in the stone emanates blue aura. Even more fucking is the intercut matter that looks like raspberry soft dough, or candied meat fibre surrogate, mucosal, slippery, yucky like a cream pie in your underpants (one German expression for which is, by the way, Slip). Both somehow seem the same, the rock and the sweets add up to the earth, together they form the stuff that makes up things...</div>
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But let us start at the beginning. We are stalking concrete buildings through layers of static made from filtering and digital degradation, superimposed drawings and other artificial detritus. The light is nice through our fingers, maybe autumn late in the afternoon, not too warm, the trees are comforting, the architecture is brutalist (in relation to the trees), and a female voice soliloquizes through delay effects and treatments like a platform announcer whose words we strain to catch, like a ship computer reporting back future knowledge through the hiss of time, like fragments of things we’d want to believe in if only they took sufficient shape. ‘Like Tiresias, I transmogrified,’ she says, and if we look that up and read that Tiresias was made a woman after witnessing two copulating snakes and killing the female one, it means she’s a male voice (the artist, maybe, or so we want to believe).<br />
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It takes an effort to make out the exact words, but the fragments we catch (different ones with each viewing), tell of oppositions between the different mixes of matter: ‘A man in the café told me that this complex was built after the student uprisings. That these buildings’ very reason for being is to quash protest... Buildings pretend not to care, their fake indifference is palpable... The sweaty lumpen flesh things are completely ignored by these structures... The trees are all chaos sprouting, growing, spreading, shooting their seeds everywhere...’ Floaters float through the images over the branches. The voice is speaking from a lesser god perspective, not quite omniscient, but making sense of the fragments of aspects as they can be extrapolated from the relations between things. It is never satisfied with anything except the trees. Of course, this is film, so perspectives are a matter of choice and identification, or of as-yet-slippery interpretations. ‘You can’t fuck with those in the make believe,’ reads a title. But they can fuck with us. <br />
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When the video’s second chapter takes us into the building (‘inside was like a necropolis of trees’), we move along library aisles and the voice seems to increasingly identify with the architecture. It is quite unhappy with the software that makes up its innards. ‘The control centre of the body lacks,’ it complains, and ‘its lackness keeps growing... its lackiness its lacknessesses its lackiness its lacknessesses its lackiness its lacknessesses’... and the voice gets caught up in the music of its own interrupted flow within the quite musical activities of the static that makes up the fabric of things. And we look over rows of library books, the poor objects (this is what trees die for?), each dwarfed by the fact that they need so many others around them to produce some sort of sense, no single book has any authority left by itself... ‘And what it does have,’ the voice continues full of disgust, ‘its haveness, is so lossy, so compressed, so full of holes and gaps and voids. Connected by images, not words, not writing. But not even images, connected by intensities... those fucking squiggly hieroglyphs.’<br />
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‘Of course, once, we were all slime,’ the voice remembers in the third chapter, to the images of rocks and pink dough described above. ‘Now we are somewhere in between, part slime, part solid rock.’ That is a memory of the <i>urschleim</i>, the slippery matter we had to selectively fuck our ways out of when our story began. It was first cooked up by one Lorenz Oken around 1800 and popularized by Ernst Haeckel, who described it in his <i>History of Creation</i> as a ‘mucilaginous substance, an albuminous combination, which exists in a semi-fluid condition of aggregation, and possesses the power, by adaptation to different conditions of existence in the outer world and by interaction with its material, of producing the most various forms... Oken was therefore right when, more divining than knowing, he made the assertion: “Every organic thing has arisen out of slime, and is nothing but slime in different forms.”’<br />
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(Additionally the rock and the artificial meat fibre and everything fucking in the make-believe read like a reference to the Death Valley scene in Antonioni’s <i>Zabriskie Point</i>, two flesh things fucking, then we blink and the desert’s full of them, now we blink and they’d been an illusion.) <br />
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<i>Mainland Rock</i> is the farthest we will go towards embracing the slipperiness of what we see, the pie in the undergarment, the farthest we will get away from language as something to believe in. ‘Not even images, connected by intensities,’ the voice said and the underlying images in the video are not even remarkable: universities, libraries, sceneries the likes of which most of us have visited as a matter of course. These are (the voice contradicting its own existence) connected by words as matter and meaning, and made uncanny by the intensities of treatments which push the neutral images closer to the insecurities of individual experience. The messinesses win out over the structured lives us flesh things try to lead, once slime, now part rock, which order can be imposed upon.<br />
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The attempts at ordering rock go back to the megaliths, stones erected as markers, gravestones, possibly sundials, or maybe just as messages to some higher beings pointing out that now we were capable of arranging things in relations. The British artist Paul Nash in 1935 made <i>Equivalents for the Megaliths</i>, a painting that shows an assortment of roughly geometrical forms sitting in a field, cylinders, a cuboid and a grid, forms that once constituted the vocabulary of various modernisms, vorticist or cubist. As the high forms of abstract art, they’re equally as spiritual and elevated as stones erected to unknown abstract powers, and they deserve the same admiration. Nicholas Brooks’ video <i>Transit of the Megaliths</i> takes its cue from here and from Nash’s road trip in 1934, during which he placed ‘several small geometric objects onto the roof of his friend’s car in order to photograph them,’ as Brooks explains. ‘He liked to travel by car to places of importance for him in his ever-expanding cosmology of the British landscape. He may have liked to see the objects up there, away from the clutter of the ground, somehow in obeyance to the clean, utopian pursuit of motoring on orderly tarmac...’<br />
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Proceedings start from the exact rearrangement of Nash’s <i>Equivalents</i>, before the forms are made to vary. But it is more fun just watching and not knowing any of this back story anyway (spoilers behind!) and to think that the forms just demanded to be driven around (as presumably they did demand from Nash). Their changing patterns sit atop the car roof, their object magic defined by perspective as if they sat on a Renaissance tabletop with somebody staring through a grid to establish a vanishing point. Sharing a perspective gives them a collective meaning that enables them to communicate with the surroundings they are carried through. Now and again, reality cracks open, when drawings are superimposed on the video image that seem to lend the landscape a sense of history, or when digital layers are peeled off the screen like an extra dimension projected over another. As the objects are carried through the world to measure themselves against the environment, symbolizing nothing assignable, a roof rack full of unspecified meaning, they drift through the project like floating signifiers (of whatever). Claude Lévi-Strauss defined these signifiers as ‘an undetermined quantity of signification, in itself void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning, whose unique function is to bridge a gap between signifiant and signifié.’ His example for a word that thus overcame the slipperiness of meaning was ‘oomph’.<br />
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The next step in regaining order is not merely to arrange things but draw up a plan and then find ways of reproducing it in reality. For which we need a fabric of commands, a programming language. Brooks’ video <i>end_stop_repeat_forget_series</i> shows us just that when it slowly pans across heavily compartmentalized abstract patterns. These are actually designs for silk weaving, which would be translated into punch cards to be fed into Jacquard looms, a technique invented around 1800. We move along floral shapes divided into squares divided into even smaller squares by a very orderly mind, over which a female narrator with a heavy foreign accent and the strange, anti-emphatic inflections of a text to speech programme, lists some simple rules these patterns follow: ‘Time over units’, she says. ‘Threads and units, thoughts and forget ting... and threads and units.’ Sometimes the voice folds back into itself, then we notice the sentences have been cut up. Some threads are left hanging, some are violently stitched together, the details do not fit in places, but it all hangs in place when viewed from a distance. ‘A flower, the red, the yellow against black against.’<br />
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And yet what sounds like tentative descriptions with an attempt at discerning the underlying principles of the designs, might actually work the other way around: ‘The text is a meditation on making images,’ the artist says. When we follow a plan that pictures beforehand what we can see only after the mechanized realization, then a description of the resulting image should be reverse engineering the plan. Along the two-way traffic in time, our thoughts become rearranged: ‘We assembled due to an escapement something caught, limited,’ the voice says.<br />
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It has long been a dream to sidestep the slipperiness of language altogether, to devise of a communication system where each sign corresponds to a piece of information. Such a system seemed to exist in the Egyptian hieroglyphs as long as they remained impenetrable. But when the means of translation appeared, ‘when the Rosetta stone was discovered in 1799’, as Johanna Drucker writes in <i>The Visible Word</i>, ‘it not only allowed the final veil do be drawn back from the mysterious image of the hieroglyphs, it also ended the long-standing belief that hieroglyphs functioned as a form of language which was directly apprehendable through the eye. The clue to hieroglyphic decipherment was the relation between visual signs and a spoken language for which they were the representation. Once it was clear that hieroglyphics corresponded to this spoken language, the properties to their identity as visual signs ceased to be significant to linguists – except insofar as they provided access or recognition. Here the linguistic notion of the <i>present</i> signifier serving a function as surrogate substitute for the <i>absent</i> signified is apparent in its most fundamental form. The hieroglyph, for so long the site of fantasmatic projection onto the visual, material image of writing, was reduced to serving an incidental function relative to the all-important linguistic <i>text</i>. The price of decipherment was that writing lost its autonomous existence...’<br />
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The <i>Glyphs</i> of Dermot O’Brien can be thought to go back before that sad moment of decipherment described by Drucker. Their language indeed is apprehendable directly though the eye. Some glyphs represent clear objects, others require some headscratching, but they all do not refer to a text but to things and thoughts, and they do not form sentences, except maybe where it is possible to find a thematic grouping for some of the objects. For example on one sheet, there are mostly round things: pill, pea, (pass), gum drop, (pass), coffee bean... these could be an inventory of things that relate to each other. The bigger glyphs, executed in silver ink on black card, speak of more complicated, more individualized things that are not just symbols for a certain group of objects, but might almost be portraits: flask pouring liquid into test tube, bristly brush, sickle, anchor, (pass)... Maybe the glyphs are most themselves in the simple small grid drawings, which pull them closest to more personal handwriting: hammer, candle, dynamite, pliers, flatiron... wait, is that a banana peel? The smaller studies are drawn in gold or silver point, a technique used since ancient times, producing a fine line and a surface rather than an artistic gesture. (So they stay away from expressionist, emotional connotations of an established art language just as much as from spoken word and textual syntax.)<br />
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(The text on the Rosetta Stone by the way is quite boring, mostly about a monarch being fair about taxes, and the only topic of any relevance to us is that monarch on his pedestal, because ‘a statue should be set up for King Ptolemy, living forever, the Manifest God whose excellence is fine – which should be called “Ptolemy who has protected the Bright Land”, the meaning of which is “Ptolemy who has preserved Egypt” – together with a statue for the local god, giving him a scimitar of victory, in each temple, in the public part of the temple, they being made in the manner of Egyptian work; and the priests should pay service to the statues in each temple three times a day, and they should lay down sacred objects before them and do for them the rest of the things that it is normal to do.’ Normal to do things like recognizing the name on the title card, ritually expressing the right amount of admiration and generally hoping not to slip up.)<br />
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O’Brien’s drawing <i>Untitled (Chalk Horse) </i>reaches even further back, in that it was executed on a small blackboard in chalk illicitly taken by the artist (as a foolish young man, of course) from the eye of the White Horse of Uffington in Oxfordshire. This is a possibly prehistoric 110-metre-long figure on a small hill, made by digging trenches and filling them up with ground chalk. (Since the figure needs to be cleaned and the chalk replaced regularly, chances are that O’Brien’s piece of chalk wasn’t placed there by the original artist.) The horse was meant maybe as a marker claiming possession of the land for a tribe, or even as some glyph for the gods to see, saying: this is a horse, though it might just as well be a cat from the looks of it. <br />
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But since the horse is officially agreed upon, O’Brien can say: ‘I find the security of this piece of work appealing, it is a chalk horse made from the Chalk Horse.’ So there would be no slipperiness to what we see and no slipperiness to the chalk horse drawn on a blackboard in reference to the one in Uffington, though I guess that could change any day in the light of new translation means to be discovered for hieroglyphical chalk horses (and the stone circles as well). <br />
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Truly overdetermined like a work of art in its frame, <i>This drawing is displayed here upside down</i> by Maria Theodoraki on first blush seems to offer a drawing of the text of the title in a careful serif font. Except that, if we accept its meaning, the drawing immediately contradicts its own condition, as it looks right side up. And furthermore if it’s true what the text says, then presumably the drawing must have been executed with its motif standing on the head. The main hint pointing our eyes towards this process behind the drawing is a pleasing awkwardness that makes every limb of every letter an infinitesimally different font size and the spaces between them uneven against their flow. And on further study we might even detect smudges in the surface revealing the position of the artist’s hands (for which one would have to see the actual drawing instead of the photograph I have before me, so I’m solely relying on a text mail from the artist for this detail). This process implies that the image was drawn as pure form, irrespective of the text’s meaning (if indeed it remains a text... I’m not sufficiently theoretically minded to go there, though we easily might). The treatment of the letters as form not information was probably facilitated by the fact that the sentence is in German: ‘Diese Zeichnung ist hier umgekehrt abgebildet’, a language that the artist is not familiar with. All of this adds up to a deconstructively self-referential double-loop of two distinct possibilities (the immediately received text message and the syntax-free drawing only apprehendable through the eye) that contradict each other but have overlapping connotations... the most slippery state a work of art might aspire to. Yet it is also a most stable slippery state: it is all contradictions at once, and never one after the other. (So on the slipmeter, we are a notch above Magritte and his Treachery of Images postulating: ‘This is not a pipe.’ Because if we accept the existence of a shared language of representational art, then when it’s not a pipe it is a representation of one, raising questions of how we interpret reality irrespective of the pipe’s use and meaning in everyday life. The connotations are quite manageable. It gets more slippery, though, in a preparatory drawing by Magritte: a study for the pipe that wasn’t to be a pipe. No matter if drawn from life or constructed as the perfect signifier of a pipe, this study occupies the same perfectly stable slippery aggregate between contradictions as Theodoraki’s drawing, though running through some different loops.)<br />
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Theodoraki’s video <i>I hope that this won’t take long because I am very busy today and have very little time to spare. I am only doing this because you gave me raki, honey and olive oil </i>similarly offers a point of entry through its title, which again is translated both into another language and into a state where it doesn’t function as text anymore. The video shows filmmaker John Smith trying to pronounce the sentence of the title in perfect Greek, repeating phrases, throwing enquiring looks, testing the roll of his tongue, sometimes giggling at hardly noticeable differences in pronunciation, not getting anywhere necessarily. It is clear there is someone prompting the phrases off-screen, but we do not hear a second voice. If, like me, you have no Greek, there is no way to judge success or failure. Smith remains loveable through all of this, unquestioning of the task, moving over the course of an hour from an upward, very eager position to a mild slump towards the right edge of the frame. If we follow the logic of raki, honey and olive oil, he is being held hostage by his obligation towards traditional hospitality.<br />
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To anybody fluent in Greek, of course, this will be a completely different work. They will be able to evaluate the efforts of Smith, measure his growing success in hitting the right inflections. It might appear as if he had learned something by the end, if only for the length of a short-term memory. On the other hand, his efforts will appear more pronouncedly useless (as all art should be). For us, who do not speak Greek, the spoken language remains freed ‘from serving an incidental function relative to the all-important linguistic text’, to quote the passage by Johanna Drucker on the Rosetta Stone again. The sounds of speech slowly take shape as the ear gets accustomed to the process, their forms become more detailed as they return in ever more laboured enunciation, producing infinitely varied little sound objects on the slippery road to an unattainable perfection, which gather meaning only in relation between them.<br />
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‘Dear connoisseurs, in a few minutes you will see Ingmar Bergman’s much-vaunted but also very controversial film <i>The Silence</i>. You will probably think you know what to expect, yet quite possibly you will still be shocked. The film challenges the viewer mainly in two respects: first, through its graphic immediacy in all things erotic, and second, through its surprising eventlessness...’ (its eventlessnesses). This is from a trailer in which a cultured male voice prepared German moviegoers before a screening of the film when it first ran in theatres, to spare their better feelings – with a surprising amount of spoilers to avoid all slipperiness of meaning. The silence of the title was explained with a quote by Bergman, in that it was the silence of God, which made it so hard for mankind to cope with the world.<br />
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When Rudolf Reiber projects <i>The Silence</i>, it is as a Braille transcription of Ingmar Bergman’s film as a 3D movie. It looks more or less like endless opening credits seen from the cockpit of a star ship crossing the universe, and now and then the passing stars move into formation and show us an undecipherable message in dot language. The internet tells me that not even three percent of blind people can read Braille; the percentage will be much lesser for the seeing, though their task is in nonsensical theory made easier by the use of 3D technology. ‘What does that mean?’ are the first words of the movie after two minutes, but we can’t read that. ‘I don’t know,’ is the correct answer, before another six minutes of silence.<br />
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If we know these connections while watching the video (and we can make out as much from the title card), there is no slipperiness to what we see. There’s also no slipperiness to what it means, as long as we do not follow it by activity of any kind (such as to learn Braille). The work is a complete triumph over the medium.<br />
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(‘The questioning and searching face of the boy shown in the last frames of the film reflects his desire to understand what has happened,’ the German instructional trailer ends its message. ‘The boy might succeed at that, because he knows how to ask questions and he wants to be friendly. Distraught viewers should not overlook this aspect of the ending.’) <br />
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‘The more closely we examine actual language’, says Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘the greater becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming vacuous. We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction, and so, in a certain sense, the conditions are ideal; but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!’<br />
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To go back, we need to go over Reiber’s <i>Losing Ground</i>, the entry floor of the gallery sanded down to the very ground layer by layer. The patterns that emerge are polished so smooth that they look very slippery, but the ground is still firm, so the area has to be cordoned off for the mind to slip on it... (‘For a valid assessment of slipperiness’, Wen-Ruey Chang et al. define the field in their Optimal Criteria for a Slipmeter, ‘measurement methodology should include the measurement of static, transitional and steady-state dynamic friction properties of the interacting surfaces and contaminants. It should also have the flexibility for selecting relevant measurement parameters, such as the normal force build-up time and rate, normal force and pressure, sliding velocity and contact time of the interacting surfaces prior to and during friction measurement. However, the requirements might be relaxed for devices designed mainly for routine testing in the field.’)<br />
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As a work of art, <i>Losing</i> Ground makes a pedestal of the floor. So maybe, out of respect and for better admiration, we should enter through the back door.<br />
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Maybe there is a back door for us, the viewers, to escape our fear of unleashing slips or getting art wrong, and it might well offer a fresh point of entry. Harold Bloom’s A Map of Misreading is an ode to empowerment for the reader, whose interpretational grasp must change the works as it receives them. Misreading is a creative act that requires a strong character full of disregard and an eager anxiety of influence. Misreading is work cut out for the artist hero type...</div>
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And then Bloom commits a welcome slip, right in the introduction, where he gives an account of the philosophy of one ‘Isaac Luria, sixteenth-century master of theosophical speculation’, who ‘formulated a regressive theory of creation, in a revision of the earlier Kabbalistic emanative theory of creation’. This theory has three main stages, first: ‘the creator’s withdrawal or contraction so as to make possible a creation that is not himself’. Second, ‘the breaking-apart-of-the-vessels, a vision of creation-as-catastrophe’. Third comes ‘restitution or restoration – man’s contribution to God’s work. The first two stages can be approximated in many of the theorists of deconstruction, from Nietzsche and Freud to all our contemporary interpreters who make of the reading subject either what Nietzsche called “at most a rendezvous of persons”, or what I myself would call a new mythic being – the reader as Overman, the Überleser...’ <br />
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The Überleser! ‘Überlesen’ in German means to quickly read over, to skip a part of the text. So as a Überlesers I am not, as Bloom supposed, an overwhelmingly awesome reader in analogy to the Übermensch. No, if we follow his model, then the more paragraphs we skip reading, the less we take in, the more that slips our minds, the more powerful we become. No art can hurt us now. We are the Justified Slippers.<br />
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So here is a beginning.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8-Rh6VafezdsRrgOFKgk79OUzQS9rCIXEafvbuJ2Z7TI6LK9k_hvyLip1N1Rg7cFLFntyzVb0oht-8tizv1q0z7nLRWfc8CBLzg-HzFOnFVPyxIFukC5dkXHTGJoShUdUxaLEIBZvlxsP/s1600/Slip.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="376" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8-Rh6VafezdsRrgOFKgk79OUzQS9rCIXEafvbuJ2Z7TI6LK9k_hvyLip1N1Rg7cFLFntyzVb0oht-8tizv1q0z7nLRWfc8CBLzg-HzFOnFVPyxIFukC5dkXHTGJoShUdUxaLEIBZvlxsP/s640/Slip.JPG" width="640" /></a>(This is my text for the catalogue of the exhibition <i>Slip</i> at the Städtische Galerie Villingen-Schwenningen, 5 July to 30 August 2015. Thanks to everybody involved!)</div>
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Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-85614782699137189012016-06-10T16:46:00.000+02:002016-06-10T16:46:03.273+02:00Deep dream incunable, 1952<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-83574397339053770082016-01-20T21:02:00.002+01:002016-01-20T21:02:25.785+01:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-85089055638606922912016-01-12T21:12:00.002+01:002016-04-13T11:25:58.038+02:00Favorite new music of 2015<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBSCIOAbdGS-71CyyUXf7vQCfJeF4HI7DMl8lq7fM_vuR0g6UHFnagDQbKVvfklWQjv8tBlPTXuJBBKHXqnBBK9lrYfn4ibKYdZ13_RkNmKIGvk3K2njJZuxkge1sWJB3r9OKqtcc48zkO/s1600/Piano+revenge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="488" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBSCIOAbdGS-71CyyUXf7vQCfJeF4HI7DMl8lq7fM_vuR0g6UHFnagDQbKVvfklWQjv8tBlPTXuJBBKHXqnBBK9lrYfn4ibKYdZ13_RkNmKIGvk3K2njJZuxkge1sWJB3r9OKqtcc48zkO/s640/Piano+revenge.jpg" width="640" /></a><br />
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Somehow I made a top ten of favorite music released in 2015 and added some comments which grew out of hand so I might as well post this. (Though I guess some of the comments make sense (if at all) only once you’ve heard the record in question.) Anyway, this list is completely objective as I do not rank perceived artistic values but the exact amount of pleasure each release gave me.<br />
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1 Debt of Nature: Salt Meadows + Small Silver Car (Lal Lal Lal)</div>
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i bought a serious number of cassettes over the year. here’s the best reason why: two members of 90s post-mvb band medicine forget their questionable musical legacy to collect found sounds, scramble up jams, fuse atmospheres, whatever comes to hand. and it’s exactly not the kind of music that should be cut in marble/vinyl, it's fully in the now and thus my favorite music of the year. if concrete is often about the classification of sounds (huge topic, another time), this music is joyously open to the world.</div>
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2 Devin DiSanto and Nick Hoffman: Three Exercises (Erstwhile)</div>
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i said upstream that i have never heard so many different attitudes toward sounds, or sounds meant so differently on a record ... i’d now add it’s like one of those youtube videos where you watch the score scroll by while you listen, except here it’s all audio and you can’t read music anyway ... also: it puts the prose back in process music ... the blurbs just keep coming ...<br />
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3 Keith Rowe: Live in Oberlin (Idiopathic)<br />
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i own and happily play the 4-cd rowe/tilbury release also from 2015, which very much behaves like a proper work of art, while this here tape documents what was probably not a very special gig—at least the first side doesn’t go anywhere at all, sounds very statically too much, as if the off-switch of rowe’s radio got stuck. and yet, this is what i love, i am not that precious. then side b begins with my favorite moment of rowe as a dj of classical music and from there on out it’s bliss.<br />
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4 Dean Blunt: UK2UK (self-released) <br />
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2013’s redeemer was a wonderfully weaselly record, but since then doing things like a real recording artist hasn’t worked as well again for blunt i thought. the year’s earlier babyfather release, while dropped as it should be on some russian message board, still contained way too much production. luckily uk2uk has some of his best lazy loops, readings of rap lyrics, sketchy oversaturated pocket epics—and i am the proud owner of one of the original limited soundcloud downloads!<br />
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5 Graham Lambkin and Michael Pisaro: Schwarze Riesenfalter (Erstwhile)<br />
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the piano as bourgeois fetish: pedal to the floor, we wallow in the boom of its tingling strings (to quote the title of a jon lord piano concerto). i would be against it (and feel like there’s been too much wide-eyed piano on recent releases?), but there’s no ignoring the powerful references (starting with track titles that point to trakl and schönberg), the old-fashioned poetry, and the visions of doom approaching straight-faced like a foggy metal intro to the untergang des abendlandes ...<br />
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6 Jin Sangtae’s SoundCloud page<br />
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one-minute audio instagrams recorded on a mobile phone, grainy, out of focus, sort of random, though the exact time limit and their daily appearance lend them stricter form than most composed music. the amount of acoustic action the man faces every day for these miniatures must be daunting. and yet there seems to be a curious lack of an other, of a field to record in. which makes these recordings so strange and personal, an unadulterated artist’s vision.<br />
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7 Alasdair Roberts: Alasdair Roberts (Drag City)<br />
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i have a handful of lukewarm records by roberts, bought expecting him to surpass earlier promise (mostly the wyrd meme ep) before discovering he had already done some of that (e.g. with the atrociously named appendix out) and was on a gentle downward slope (in relation to my tastes). which is decisively interrupted by this record: sparse and gorgeous, wonderful arrangements with clarinet and flute and stuff, and by far his most focused album as a songwriter. we need more songs in dispraise of hunger.<br />
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8 R. Schwarz: The Scale of Things (Gruenrekorder)<br />
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should i get new speakers or do all processed field recordings sound like they were made in a tunnel for testing phaser effects? this happens here too, but the shell is permeated by particles from the outside, in detail or moving in flocks of harmonic formations. it’s the “harmony of overwhelming and collective uncertainty, because this nature is chaos,” the press release informs us. actually what makes the sounds so great is that they’re fiercely structured. the blurb says in closing that the music is “expulsed from nature, as our brain is expulsed from nature.” which i can’t argue with and keep my brains intact.<br />
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9 Loren Connors: Live in New York (Family Vineyard)<br />
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there’s not much lyricism here, this is a tough and gnarly record. connors coaxes feedback through the chain of pedals, more in a succession of tones and actions than a distinct overall form. lots of side noises, the first track seems recorded in a roomful of creaking doors with a dj on the next floor. the verité approach does not really add a sense of atmosphere or dialog, but speak to the artist’s unbreakable singleness of purpose.<br />
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10 Joseph Clayton Mills et al.: SIFR (Suppedaneum)<br />
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this release realizes its full potential only when left unheard.</div>
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(because the artist gave a recording to 7 composers who then wrote a score in hindsight. these are included, the packaging is great with little envelopes and stuff, there’s a postcard and a wallpaper sample and little jeopardy-style answer cards that pose as questions. the prospective listener’s time is well spent in first pondering what wondrous music could have created these different points of fictitious origin ... when i finally succumb and put on the cd, the music is nice, surprisingly percussive with sound fields drifting across. yet it seems of a kind that once set in motion would not require a score to determine its outcome ... which might be one of the questions asked, and some legs are kindly being pulled as to the artiness of open scores, and still it is in the very nature of the thing that with knowledge of the music many of the reverse composition’s possibilities have become unrealizable ...)</div>
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Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-82356944471034590242015-07-05T12:37:00.003+02:002015-08-15T01:20:05.107+02:00Every painting has a happy ending<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This is my (only) favorite painting by the belated classicist painter John William Godward, The Fruit Vendor from 1917. It's a slight outlier in what Christopher Wood in his book Olympian Dreamers labels the "toga and terrace school" (followers of Alma Tadema), in that it does not imagine the frolics and treacheries of antique high society, but portrays a more down to earth subject. Indeed for me one of the chief attractions is that the cobblestone pavement and the carefully rendered stains on the plinth/balustrade seem to project the image into a contemporary park with a whiff of dog's (or is it the lion's, whose balls are hanging out) piss. The interplay of close colors in the fruit and the girl's clothing is much more interesting than Godward's usual work (where luxury garments will correspond to precious flowers), also the pronounced rhythm of the melon slices running four beats toward the full measure of the fruit itself (I suppose the peaches and melon have sexual overtones and the vendor is pining because she lost her innocence to a lover on the run?).<br />
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Anyway, the star of the painting, and my chief fascination, is of course the marble lion, so relaxed and self-satisfied, goofily smirking straight into the painter's brush. An upbeat cartoon lion totally ignorant both of the tender feelings of the soft head touching its belly, and of the empathy we as viewers are supposed to carry into the picture. What does it mean? That art is eternal, so in the end every painting has a happy ending? Of course, intentions of artists from this school are sometimes hard to fathom, as these men were often in an honest search for a higher truth and beauty producing what looks like half-assed porn today. Maybe the lion is an archaeologically exact reconstruction of an antique sculpture? Godward would have known e.g. the Lion of Knidos then already in the British Museum (much larger and from on top of some monument, but still I put it here as a lazy reference. It also has a very alive and unstatuesque gaze.)<br />
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(Speaking of half-assed porn, here is Godward's funniest painting, from 1908. While the artist has suggestively draped the uncleft flesh bulge that would, according to the laws of decency of the school that fostered him, have made up Athenais' crotch, he amps up the explicitness of the picture by letting her carry her beaver on a stick: </div>
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Godward's historical position appears as that of the last in an overripe tradition, and he sort of added an exclamation point to the fact when committing suicide in 1924 at age 61. Wood writes: "By the 1920s, the rule of Bloomsbury had begun. All Victorian painting was denounced as absurd, irrelevant, and totally lacking in significant form; and none more so than Alma-Tadema's, whose works were a byword for bad taste. For a classical painter, there was nothing to do but give up, or put your head in the oven, and at least poor Godward had the courage to do it."<br />
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Actually, we don't really know much about his reasons at all (go <a href="http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/On-Line_Books/Godward/godward12.php#PART THREE: 21. To Mask a Tragedy (1922)" target="_blank">here</a> for a full discussion within a very detailed biography). The headline for the report of his demise in the Fulham Gazette has another focus again: "Fulham Artist Dead before Blank Canvas. Amazing Gas Tragedy. Cheque for Work on Door!" Simply amazed that an artist in this modern age and time would not be overjoyed to sell any work at all.<br />
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But the story of the last Victorian succumbing to the pressures of modernism was simply too good not to be true, and so an unfounded myth came up which said Godward had left a note stating the world was not big enough to hold both him and Picasso. (I've no idea how far back that kind of trope goes which I associate more with shootout situations in Western movies.) And so it is for the supposed arch-modernist to supply the last twist to the story. Because shortly before Godward's capitulation, Picasso had embarked on his own version of a toga and terrace school, a sort of beach and nightgown school, which adds new life(?) to the selfsame moribund tradition, and also is as hard to fathom in its serene goofiness. Just look at The Source from 1921:<br />
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It's the lion and a water vendor rolled in one? In deference to poor Godward, we will not think about why this might actually be a decent work (for an earlier post on Dalí making fun of Picasso's masterpiece of his beach and nightgown period go <a href="http://tonotfallasleep.blogspot.de/2014/09/genius-coasting.html" target="_blank">here</a>). The most interesting aspect might be the chaiseloungey rock the woman rests upon, which makes no sense at all except to carry her sculptural form, the most damning evidence might be the way the artist has carefully painted a more nicely-rounded face into the heavy figure, as if he were after proper beauty.<br />
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Anyway, judged from a classicist viewpoint, this is nothing to shoot yourself over. Godward would not have known these works, he probably thought Picasso was still painting cubist masterpieces. The Internet could have saved him.Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-35968022217119495412015-06-26T22:56:00.000+02:002015-07-06T10:11:56.578+02:00Duct tapeQuick post. I should do more quick posts. There's been a half-finished second epic on <a href="http://tonotfallasleep.blogspot.de/2014/10/uneasy-landscape-listening-post-1-otters.html">Uneasy Landscape Listening</a> sitting on my desktop for some months. So in other, strictly in-door music, here's a link to the promo clip for a favorite record right now, Three Exercises by Devin DiSanto and Nick Hoffman on <a href="http://www.erstwhilerecords.com/catalog/EA005.html">Erstwhile</a>. <br />
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Recorded in an elementary school, using the process of creation both as fictional narrative and structural device for the music ... the photos show the venue rigged up for the making of sounds, with numbered pieces of evidence from an elaborately cued lab experiment arranged geometrically on the floor. It's all a set-up: silly school science project, serious mapping of spaces, rules made up because they look good, rules followed by good kids ... I'm sure I've never heard a record with so many different attitudes toward sounds, or with sounds meant so differently. Depending on where in the narrative they sit, if they're music, test work, exploration, exposition, or frame story. Some sounds are dead funny (the actual entrance of the duct tape the voices speak about in the clip). Some come in scare quotes.<br />
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<br />Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-3402486015391022222015-05-10T21:28:00.001+02:002015-05-10T21:28:35.396+02:00Staples of the year that was<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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If you're into comics, <a href="http://thinkinginpanels.blogspot.de/2015/05/eleven-favorites-of-2014.html" target="_blank">here</a> is a belated write-up of my favorites from 2014.Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-63094337782456204262014-11-11T20:34:00.000+01:002014-11-11T20:34:23.815+01:00Waiting for the internet to happen<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-65586793289969820612014-10-16T23:16:00.002+02:002014-10-18T11:18:10.004+02:00Uneasy landscape listening, post 1: The Otters<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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“Landscape art has never taught us one deep or holy lesson; it has not recorded that which is fleeting, nor penetrated that which was hidden, nor interpreted that which was obscure; it has never made us feel the wonder, nor the power, nor the glory, of the universe; it has not prompted to devotion, nor touched with awe; its power to move and exalt the heart has been fatally abused, and perished in the abusing.”<br />
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That is John Ruskin talking, and actually he would have made an exception for the picture on top, which shows The Holy Island, Lindisfarne, as seen by J. M. W. Turner around 1829 and embellished with some of his trademark atmospherics. But let us not allow such exceptions, as truth must be absolute, and anyway, it is not painting we’re interested in today. Instead let us think of field recording as the landscape art under discussion. Field recording, a genre that seems to come with an inbuilt promise of penetrating something hidden, of catching something fleeting, since we automatically enter a more reflective space through the fact that our supposedly prime sense, vision, does not drown out the acoustic experience. To merely listen seems to offer some kind of meditation on the secret nature of things…and indeed, if we follow Ruskin further, maybe his demands from the landscape artist would be best fulfilled by field recorder: “The artist has done nothing till he has concealed himself—the art is imperfect which is visible—the feelings are but feebly touched, if they permit us to reason on the methods of their excitement.” Just put up a mike and press the button. <br />
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And yet once we’ve caught that which is fleeting on our storage device, we’ve hewn it in marble and disconnected it from its natural surroundings where alone it was fleeting in. And if we listen to the sounds in their new, inevitable form and sequence, they become less about place, and more about choice: of selecting certain sounds over others, of wanting to add a history or memory to the sounds or just tag them in space and time. So many choices, so much artistry revealed…field recordist Chris Watson defines the methods of his excitement already in the less than innocent act of listening: “Listening in a positive way, that is actively taking the decision to focus on certain things and reject others, is a very positive and creative thing to do in that it—for me, anyway, individually—it actually stimulates my thought processes, it makes me think perhaps more laterally about problem-solving, or how I can achieve a creative output for something…it makes me think in a different way, that’s why I find it so satisfying.”<br />
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This active mode of listening characterizes Watson’s artistry, where events are often so close-miked that they penetrate to the heart of what maybe never existed, but the sounds that surround me here at my desk remain relatively distant. I’m listening to <i>In St Cuthbert’s Time</i> from 2013, “a 7th century soundscape of Lindisfarne,” as the booklet promises. There is of course nothing in the wind and the waves and the birdsong that would tell me it is not supposed to happen right now. Still the sounds suggest a somewhere, and I love me a conceptual conceit, so I gather what information I can from the booklet: about Lindisfarne and its history, 7th century monasteries and the writing of gospels on one hand; Latin names for the birds in order of aural appearance on the other; but not much to connect the two.<br />
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So in the 7th century, Lindisfarne, a tidal island off the eastern English coast, was a center of Christian culture, a priory of monks with a high quota of saints living the community life with mutual washing of feet, conquering of human nature, and illuminating of gospels. Watson proposes not a sound image of, but background sounds for these activities: “The production aims to reflect upon the daily and seasonal aspects of the evolving variety of ambient sounds that accompanied life and work during that period of exceptional thought and creativity.” An active selection of sounds that make up a vintage vibe sorted by seasons and cleaned of modern civilization (there’s cattle here, though, I hope of an ancient breed). And yet immediately a historical narrative begins, not in the sense of a story, but as a portrait of the possible attention these holy men might have spent on nature while they wandered alone in solitude. There is a nudge for the listener toward this historical angle, as Watson sends an actor through the aural picture ringing a monk’s handbell. Anecdotal evidence: here probably comes a fellow monk also looking for solitary space to leave the world behind in; let’s walk another way so both our meditations can go uninterrupted.<br />
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Which makes me more and more minded to listen to the record in analogy to history painting, not telling a complete story, but adding an interpretation to a story already told in the hope of making us feel something about it. Adding a new perspective that only hindsight can bring. Happily, there is one relatively popular history painting of St Cuthbert, executed in 1856 by the pre-Raphaelite painter William Bell Scott. It shows an event the artist dated to 678: King Egfrid and Bishop Trumwine visiting the hermit to offer him the Bishopric of Hexham. This takes place near the end of summer on a more secluded island called Farne, which Cuthbert had chosen to remove himself one more step from the world, while he kept in loose contact with the brethren on Lindisfarne. (By the way he would choose to accept a bishopric after some years hesitation, but only to Lindisfarne, not what he had been originally offered.) We see him here with an Eider duck as an attribute, a bird that over the centuries would come to be associated with him. Above him the sweep of the swallows in the sky closely follows that of the atmospherics in the Turner watercolor on top of this post… Anyway, let us now devise a narrativity test and play an excerpt from Watson’s summer sounds against the painting and see what happens:<br />
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It works very well, doesn’t it? Here’s what Rossetti wrote about it: “The amount of work is very great. I suppose it is the only picture existing, of so definitely ‘historical’ a class, in which the surroundings are all real studies from nature—a great thing to have done. The sky and sea are sky and sea, and the boats are as accurate and real as if you had got such things to sit to you. The whole scene too, and the quiet way in which the incident is occurring, at once strike the spectator with the immense advantage of simple truth in historical art over the ‘monumental’ style…” It is as if he had made the same test to judge the painting, while we’re checking the usefulness of the sounds as a picture of bygone times (<i>Zeitgemälde</i> in the more layered German term). <br />
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Sound artist/musician Patrick Farmer will have none of that. In his review of Watson’s record for <i>The Field Reporter </i>he insists: “This is not a case of a prerequisite willing suspension of disbelief. Nothing here seems to be paraded as a fiction.” Instead, Farmer attempts to take the artist by his word (or his implications), and is immediately stopped in his tracks on a technical point: “Watson states, or muses, that the sounds herein are a representation of the Holy Isle, Lindisfarne, some 1300 years ago. Unease… How is it that one can listen to this over electronic speakers, through whatever electronic device is preferred, and ultimately made, with electronic equipment, the modernist of the modern!” Farmer’s own argument places him in the classicist camp of the modernist of the modern, as he would prefer an utterly abstract purity of concept: “Each time I felt the sounds therein were better suited to an unapproachable, almost playful, sense of abstraction. When I say better suited, I mean I prefer to treat them as sounds entirely distinct from the concept upon which Watson lays them… For me this is abstract electronic music. Leading me to listen as intently as possible to this disc, as sounds, rather than as any form of nature, re-presented or re-imagined.” Unease… How is it one can listen to readily identifiable sounds that clearly speak of the wind and the waves and the birds and pretend they are abstract just because they are rendered through an electronic medium designed to transmit the signals that creative people send us to our ears? (Though actually sometimes the nature portrayed in <i>St Cuthbert’s Time</i> seems to aspire to the condition of abstract electronic music: birds’ song appearing almost quantized in repeated rhythm, and the winnowing of snipe like heavy tremolo effects turned up and down through a pitch-shifter (I’m sure all sounds here have natural causes, but checking the winnowing of snipe against anonymous recordings of the same on youtube, or even against the track “Sunsets” in Watson’s earlier album <i>Stepping into the Dark,</i> they do have incredible electrified presence here). <br />
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Of course Farmer is right in his unease, that by these technical means we cannot learn what the monks actually perceived: “Microphones are not ears, and we, at least I, do not listen, and certainly do not hear, sequentially, which to my mind, is exactly the manner upon which the segments are here laid flat… We have a way to go (I hesitantly speculate) before the represented soundworld of <i>In St Cuthbert’s Time</i> is even a relative truth...” Clearly both artists have different agendas: Farmer wants abstract art (which would have to be passively consumed by the mind), while Watson wants to provoke us to lateral thinking (as if we needed provocation). Farmer rightly sees that the methods of excitement do not stand to reason; yet, in the end, saying <i>In St Cuthbert’s Time</i> is abstract electronic music is about as useful as saying that the Waverley novels are concrete poetry. It does away with so much on offer (and in case we are worried by the fact that we might simply mistake this for a pure landscape recording if we just go by aural information without reading the booklet, then that’s ok because in history painting you often need the extraneous information of at least a title to have a clue what’s going on…)<br />
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Farmer himself made a wonderful record in duet with David Lacey called <i>Pictures of Men</i> in 2013, the same year as Watson’s <i>Cuthbert.</i> An aggressively figurative title, these pictures are not of men themselves, but maybe of their belongings, their transport and surroundings, and mostly of their abstract electronic music. It mixes sounds of decipherable origins with abstract noise and musical tones at an anecdotal pace. But some of the ingredients are the same as Watson’s, so what could better prove the difference in concept than to compare these sounds under the same conditions. What story will they yield?<br />
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I like the interplay here, too; initially it works almost as well in the same way, perhaps the birds are less drawn from nature, but they don’t need to be, as we have them before our eyes. Obviously the topics of birds and sea are filed away more orderly in separate sections. And from the start, the electronically bolstered shape of the wind does seem to tug us toward something of a monumental style, which Rossetti wouldn’t have approved of… <br />
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<i>Pictures of Men</i> begins with the sounds of geese and pigs and probably some other animals thrown in agitatedly making noises, while now and then almost cartoonlike bangs and scuffles stir up the commotion further. Are Farmer’s pigs really more abstract because the artists don’t flaunt a concept? Or does the conceptlessness allow the animals to appear as a mere piggish idea of a sound? (Wouldn’t it be ideologically doubtful if the sounds of pigs were mere abstract noises to be used at thoughtless will by the artists?) So here’s one final narrativity test, Farmer and Lacey’s pigs against some of their species that have been abstracted into a landscape:<br />
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Hm. (Mama pig remembers the luddite revolution?) The sounds indeed offer more cartoony action but less of the story. Which may corroborate Farmer’s theories. The differences in atmosphere between the two ways of using field recording are tangible: in <i>Pictures of Men, </i>nothing is “laid flat,” as Farmer describes the sounds on Watson’s disc. There is a depth to the space that renders pigs in acoustic foreshortening, that simulates concrete space, there is drama, tension, incident…but as it won’t connect except as a composition of sounds, there is but one historical narrative, as is common with abstract art: the story of a whole being made from its parts, the myth of the work’s creation. Or that is what the review of this record from The Field Reporter suggests, written by Chris Whitehead: “Listening to <i>Pictures of Men</i> can be like finding an old cassette in the loft from 1980. One you recorded sounds on that have long since been forgotten, an early foray into what they call field recording. Some can be recognized for what they are whereas others are dull rumbles or rattles whose provenance is obscure...” Unease… The artist’s recording excavating our own personal history (would we have realized our own past alone?), our own unlearned creative listening. The artistic mindframe during the creative process causing a related mindframe (only passive, but still questioning, maybe spiritual) in the consumer (and do we consumers imagine a greater collection of hagiographies than the story of abstract art?) <br />
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The beauty of Watson’s recording actually is more abstract in the details. Just listen to this, six minutes into the autumn: all sounds modeled to perfection in fluttering detail with stunning virtuosity (by nature, by the creative ear, by sleight of post-production?):<br />
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The stream does not do it any justice but you have an idea. It’s incredible, each little movement rounded out with loving care. It is also massive, the liner notes seem to say these must be patterns formed by swirling flocks of starlings over their roost? <br />
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Anyway, here as elsewhere, the recording is quite dense, in several layers. There is no downtime, no meditation, but over the initial rumble of the sea and/or a dark wind, nicely muffled, very warm and deep, form a stage for a series of events, mostly birds that doing their thing, collective then more confident taking solos, augmenting each other, one group coming in as the other drops out, like the sections in a big band. Sometimes the listener is allowed closer, but what most strikes me is that the landscape keeps sitting in front of my speakers performing—this is no landscape to immerse oneself in. It remains resolutely an other, looking at me, waiting to be looked at. <br />
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Might Cuthbert maybe have listened to it like that? Like something outside his experience? Of course, the sounds on the CD perform (like Patrick Farmer said) in a different medium, but as I read Bede’s life of Cuthbert (Bede was around 15 when Cuthbert died and didn’t know him, still he later traveled the isles and experienced the monastery and its surroundings), the otherness of soundscape seems to connect with the story. There are no scenes of communication with nature in the book, but of course we can’t read too much out of that in a 7th-century narrative. Let us instead have a look into what details Bede will offer on Cuthbert: “He was so zealous in watching and praying, that he is believed to have sometimes passed three or four nights together therein, during which time he neither went to his own bed, nor had any accommodation from the brethren for reposing himself. For he either passed the time alone, praying in some retired spot, or singing and making something with his hands, thus beguiling his sleepiness by labor; or, perhaps, he walked round the island, diligently examining every thing therein, and by this exercise relieved the tediousness of psalmody and watching.” And I see Cuthbert staggering around the hills where god does not temper the wind to the tonsured lamb, zoned out, using sleep deprivation as a kind of drug, driving off sleep until he can stare at things in uncomprehending wonder, the world receding from him, standing in the background like a wall of noise. Watching things to relieve the tediousness of watching them…if something is boring for two hours, try it for four…<br />
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Reading Bede it appears as if the object of the hermit life was enhancing the distance, losing interest in all things (not as philosophical exercise, but as a kind of depressing fact). Hear this story, from after when Cuthbert had settled over and built a hut on a smaller Farne island to better escape all worldly thoughts: “Now when Cuthbert had, with the assistance of the brethren, made for himself this dwelling with its chambers, he began to live in a more secluded manner. At first, indeed, when the brethren came to visit him, he would leave his cell and minister to them. He used to wash their feet devoutly with warm water, and was sometimes compelled by them to take off his shoes, that they might wash his feet also. For he had so far withdrawn his mind from attending to the care of his person, and fixed it upon the concerns of his soul, that he would often spend whole months without taking off his leathern gaiters. Sometimes, too, he would keep his shoes on from one Easter to another, only taking them off on account of the washing of feet, which then takes place at the Lord’s Supper. Wherefore, in consequence of his frequent prayers and genuflexions, which he made with his shoes on, he was discovered to have contracted a callosity on the junction of his feet and legs. At length, as his zeal after perfection grew, he shut himself up in his cell away from the sight of men, and spent his time alone in fasting, watching, and prayer, rarely having communication with any one without, and that through the window, which at first was left open, that he might see and be seen; but, after a time, he shut that also, and opened it only to give his blessing, or for any other purpose of absolute necessity.” Here he literally shuts himself from the world and its sounds, the main objective a dulling down to offer god an empty vessel? (I love this image of the washing of feet as social gesture like monkeys lousing each other.)<br />
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If in a later age Cuthbert would be identified as somebody communing with nature and with a reciprocated fondness for eider ducks (is there some humor involved: eider downs vs. the man who doesn’t sleep), such ideas would fit better into the years e.g. around 1200, when they were lived by St Francis. There are a couple of stories of interaction with animals in Bede, though. For example Cuthbert is banning a bunch of crows after they steal thatches from the roof of his hut, then allows them back after they humbly apologize. That’s more to prove his authority over creation than his understanding of it. And finally there’s one very touching and special story. Bede again: “He would go forth, when others were asleep, and having spent the night in watchfulness return home at the hour of morning-prayer. Now one night, a brother of the monastery, seeing him go out alone followed him privately to see what he should do. But he when he left the monastery, went down to the sea, which flows beneath, and going into it, until the water reached his neck and arms, spent the night in praising God. When the dawn of day approached, he came out of the water, and, falling on his knees, began to pray again. Whilst he was doing this, two quadrupeds, called otters, came up from the sea, and, lying down before him on the sand, breathed upon his feet, and wiped them with their hair after which, having received his blessing, they returned to their native element.” </div>
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Beautiful, but again not speaking of any communication with nature, but god’s way of delousing the righteous man. The illustration I’m showing is to be found in a manuscript of Bede’s Life of Cuthbert, a history painting, too, from the late 12th century. So this is how it could have been:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlxn3L4DlFgiVmw4SomHB3K1vd4t6H5-_6k51QGVKtz9-5QRsEEkAsfwsktxGlnVhm-ULybTPDUIhiXOJZmpSAbqRU-l5OH0lot924pGh-jKb3jg6rfKz9rkPF5k8mgaNsabW3aBr4B4or/s1600/The+Otters.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlxn3L4DlFgiVmw4SomHB3K1vd4t6H5-_6k51QGVKtz9-5QRsEEkAsfwsktxGlnVhm-ULybTPDUIhiXOJZmpSAbqRU-l5OH0lot924pGh-jKb3jg6rfKz9rkPF5k8mgaNsabW3aBr4B4or/s1600/The+Otters.JPG" height="452" width="640" /></a></div>
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<iframe frameborder="no" height="80" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/172165660%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-Vyo10&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%"></iframe></div>
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Except I’m sorry I’m cheating: these sounds are not authentic history painting, they’re merely illustrative. I’ve mixed two scenes from Watson’s <i>Stepping into the Dark</i> (1996) and <i>Weather Report</i> (2003), records whose concepts allow for a closer detail: the former listening in on hidden atmospheres of special places; the latter a stunning wealth of close-up actions forced into a single image. <i>Weather Report </i>is indeed a record that has the “power to move” or “touch with awe,” even if nothing fleeting is caught, but what’s caught is fixed for potential eternity, like the medium demands. And actually, the recording’s method of blowing up detail is also something that should make Ruskin very happy: “The true ideal of landscape is the expression of the specific—not the individual, but the specific—characters of every object, in their perfection… Every landscape painter should know the specific characters of every object he has to represent, rock, flower, or cloud; and in his highest ideal works, all their distinctions will be perfectly expressed, broadly or delicately, slightly or completely, according to the nature of the subject, and the degree of attention which is to be drawn to the particular object by the part it plays in the composition.”<br />
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Finally, after all the creative listening, what’s with the monk’s creativity? We remember, <i>In St Cuthbert’s Time</i> aimed to project the “ambient sounds that accompanied life and work during that period of exceptional thought and creativity.” The Lindisfarne Gospels show both the figurative and the abstract. <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Meister_des_Book_of_Lindisfarne_001.jpg" target="_blank">Saint Matthew</a> sitting in a box with a curtain like in a photo booth (with a horn-blowing angel sitting on his head). Little grotesqueries that look like bathing ducks and stuff attached to ornamental patterns. Elaborate decor in wondrously outgrown, completely non-objective initials, like this chi-rho…or wait, is it a bird?<br />
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(With apologies to John Ruskin, whose second preface to <i><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29907/29907-h/29907-h.htm" target="_blank">Modern Painters</a></i> I’ve taken out of context. The Watson quote is from a video that shows all of his infectious and commanding enthusiasm <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL-nTv5LL9g#t=272" target="_blank">here</a>. Patrick Farmer’s review is <a href="http://thefieldreporter.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/297/" target="_blank">here</a>. Chris Whitehead’s review of the Farmer/Lacey is <a href="http://thefieldreporter.wordpress.com/2013/08/20/292/" target="_blank">here</a>. Read all of Bede’s life of St Cuthbert <a href="http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/bede-cuthbert.asp" target="_blank">here</a>. And <a href="http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/01/a-menagerie-of-miracles-the-illustrated-life-of-st-cuthbert.html" target="_blank">here</a>’s a very nice entry on the illustrations in a manuscript of that life from the late 12th century.)</div>
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Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-36075938144073196642014-09-25T23:11:00.001+02:002014-09-25T23:11:02.975+02:00The collective conscience of this object<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVuoX6g82atyQI0Yoaf-LJwkJQPBnv0AXlkM32RgvMDtC0-yEsMi-8frqo9O25MOD5F3MypEzlgBbsWNCIoZ97_bKgWR4IuuBGx7WjzVH2bhcPyGNz1fe2vkngZxYd4Ftj73DwncqOugWv/s1600/New+paradox+of+time.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVuoX6g82atyQI0Yoaf-LJwkJQPBnv0AXlkM32RgvMDtC0-yEsMi-8frqo9O25MOD5F3MypEzlgBbsWNCIoZ97_bKgWR4IuuBGx7WjzVH2bhcPyGNz1fe2vkngZxYd4Ftj73DwncqOugWv/s1600/New+paradox+of+time.jpg" height="380" width="640" /></a></div>
Arman’s accumulations of single things from the everyday belong to a general theme in the art of the mid- to late 1950s: paintings understood as objects. This identification is already complete with Jasper Johns’ Flags, created since 1954, where the common conceit is for the critic to wonder if it were a painting of a flag or indeed a flag itself. Within Arman’s more immediate circle, Yves Klein objectified color in the form of his trademark blue pure pigment (since 1956, often with a relief-like surface on his paintings and later in sponge sculptures). From 1957 on, Piero Manzoni created pictures in a white he described as colorless, whose composition was formed by folds in the fabric, hanging like crumpled sheets over the stretcher. During the same year, Klein’s brother-in-law, Günther Uecker from the group Zero, developed nail paintings (a technique he then also transferred to objects like furniture or musical instruments). And in 1958 Lucio Fontana started slashing his canvases, which for him meant part of a spatial concept where the gap offered a passage into another dimension, but which is usually received as an act of controlled violence against the holiest of holy art objects: the canvas.<div>
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This might not immediately appear as the proper context for Arman’s boxes of stuff, and yet the artist places himself within it when he writes: “Even in my volumetric compositions, my aim is always pictorial rather than sculptural. I want to see my proposals understood as involving the optics of a surface rather than a realization in three dimensions. On these surfaces the uniquely chosen element is a monotypic expression – although it is a plural one because of the number of objects – and therefore very close to the monochrome approaches of Yves Klein.” The work pictured above is Paradox of Time from 1961, and indeed on the most simple level it forces us to almost look at it like at a painting: we can see the collection of objects only though a single window-paned side of the otherwise closed wooden box. So as we watch the confined space from a fixed frontal perspective, the accumulation of old alarm clocks appears like an allover structure of similar forms, arranged in their container by chance and gravity without any attempt at hierarchization.<br /><br />Let us follow Arman’s own declaration of intent some more (all of this is from “The Realism of Accumulations” published in the Zero magazine in 1961, by the way). The artist states that any object collected “is not chosen according to the criteria of dada or surrealism. The question is not one of removing an object from its utilitarian, industrial, or other underlying context, presenting it from a certain angle or slanting it so as to provide it with a meaning completely different from its own, such as: anthropomorphism, analogy, reminiscences, and so on.” Instead, Arman’s multiple image of the alarm clock restores the object to its own proper context in the interplay between close repetition and slight variation (the allover): “The obsessional and emphatic aspect of the multiplicity of an object renders it similar to an even granulation, an expression of the collective conscience of this same object.” (The opposite approach would be to try and find a perfect embodiment of an idea, for example by choosing a particularly exemplary alarm clock that signals its piercing shrill ring at first sight and therefore has perfect properties for symbolizing its cultural function.)<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Arman had already addressed the subject of time more than once in his earliest accumulations from 1959. There the objects were still housed in small plexiglas boxes, much more like portable sculptures than single-view pictures. One of those collected cases of old pocket watches, another an accumulation of clock faces. Both pieces remain close to a collection of spare parts so the object does not fully develop a conscience… It is only with his Paradox of Time that Arman managed to breath sufficient life and character into the wound-down alarm clocks to suggest the previous lives of everyday objects before their presentation as an artwork.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOy1V6YzU-acU54qjyTNnIe_ahHWU62ycs9HrocjPUAOI7RJVtTfjBaUxFu6EMsrM3G9K5CajT1jdyd3sHupDylFtR7jo0k2UDwcmYEswB-90I-rTgDqVF1WtMcN33xDx2CSNZMIU_2gtY/s1600/Montre+ronde+1959.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOy1V6YzU-acU54qjyTNnIe_ahHWU62ycs9HrocjPUAOI7RJVtTfjBaUxFu6EMsrM3G9K5CajT1jdyd3sHupDylFtR7jo0k2UDwcmYEswB-90I-rTgDqVF1WtMcN33xDx2CSNZMIU_2gtY/s1600/Montre+ronde+1959.png" height="200" width="197" /></a></div>
Half a decade prior to Star Trek, the title does not yet allude to time travelers killing their own ancestors with unforeseeable (and therefore unrecordable) consequences (though not only in retrospect the idea already existed since the late 19th century). The Paradox of Time is a contradiction that we all know: we see time as a constant and use the watch as a tool for precise measuring. Yet depending on situation and occupation, individual time follows very variable speed lines, sometimes creeping along in utter boredom, sometimes hurtling forward like an express train (the standard image in explanations of relativity theory and time dilation). And indeed, for each and every clock in Arman’s work time also seems to pass at different speeds, marked by dents and traces of their history. The accumulation of time-measuring devices whose time has run out is like a classic memento mori, a vanitas still life of an object in quasi-cubist multiple perspective. But the clocks are not quite dead, they are in an in-between – their differences take on characters (not through anthropomorphism, but by them being so very clocklike), they create a composition of individually formed same objects to form a very alive work. And since they are being accumulated here for probably forever, it seems that somebody still has plans for them.<br /><br />Arman says: “They’re awaiting their fate.”<br /><br />Arman’s colleague Jean Tinguely, a fellow member of the Nouveaux Réalistes, also had found a time-themed programmatic paradox to propel his work of the period: he spoke of “static movement.” And it almost sounds as if he had Arman’s Paradox of Time in front of him when he proclaimed a changing art for changing times, when vanitas images would no longer be needed (this is from “Dynamo Tinguely” in the same 1961 Zero magazine): “Please, would you throw away your watches! At least toss aside the minutes and hours. Obviously we all realize that we are not everlasting. Our fear of death has inspired the creation of beautiful works of art. And this was a fine thing, too. We would so much like to own, think, or be something static, eternal, and permanent. However, our only eternal possession will be change.”<br /><br />And on that hopeful note, Arman’s alarm clocks keep patiently awaiting their fate. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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(Happily, we can check on some of their fate. The photo on top of the page is a recent one, and above here’s one from the Arman website, some couple of decades older. Not quite static, not quite moving, as you can see. Shake it like a kaleidoscope and get a slightly new composition each morning.<br /><br />This is a somewhat slapdash translation of a piece that recently appeared, in German only, in a book on the Scharpff Collection, called <a href="http://www.holzwarth-publications.de/pages_books/scharpff.html" target="_blank">Sammlung im Wandel</a>. If you want proper stylistics or check the footnotes, you can actually read the original over on the publisher’s site. Just click forward a couple of pages <a href="http://www.holzwarth-publications.de/page_flip/scharpff/index.html" target="_blank">here</a>.) </div>
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Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-85587855293137070232014-09-13T00:39:00.000+02:002014-10-16T14:23:32.260+02:00Genius coasting<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Wait,
this is funny:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">…and purposefully so, I’d argue. At the top is
Picasso’s Two Women Running on the Beach from 1922. The women are usually
identified as maenads, who make a habit of running around in bacchic frenzy, partying
or tearing somebody limb from limb, and if you keep that in mind the painting
might actually hold some sort of balance between frenetic energy and downright goofiness…that
is, until you see the Dalí beneath that, which is Women Lying on the Beach from
1926. It must be a direct riposte, no? An after to Picasso’s before, there’s
even a woman with a leg cramp! He</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 18.3999996185303px;">’</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">s pulling Pablo</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 18.3999996185303px;">’</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">s leg? Actually we know that Dalí had a color
reproduction of the Two Women on his studio wall at the time, says Ian Gibson’s
biography of the man (quoting the painter’s sister).</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">But
Gibson doesn’t mention the Women on the Beach, and usually the influence of Picasso’s
neo-classicist works on the younger painter is illustrated with a very related </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 18.3999996185303px;">Dalí </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">work, the much better known Figure on the Rocks, also from 1926. Here a
single woman is glued to the rock in something close to a crucifixion pose, with
overtones of Prometheus waiting for his eagle to return. She actually has one upstretched
leg like the woman with the cramp, but here it’s rested on a sort of rocky
pedestal. So indeed, one might approach this painting in proper terms and
conclude that Dalí used Picasso’s sturdy neo-classicism to give the topic some
weight…and yet, the Three Women stand more for what I like in early Dalí (I'm reacquainting myself with him for work, so I’m thumbing through the
complete paintings and reading the biography), the way he comes to Paris just asking
for trouble, taking over Tanguy’s complete shtick wholesale, or trademark elements of Arp
or Ernst, somewhere between appropriation and poking his tongue out. This confrontative attitude in hindsight gets kind of lost through our knowledge of the myth-mongering to
come. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">1926
is also the year that Dalí first met Picasso on an early trip to Paris. Here’s
how he tells the story in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí: “When I arrived at
Picasso’s studio I was as deeply moved and as full of respect as though I was
having an audience with the Pope. ‘I have come to see you,’ I said, ‘before
visiting the Louvre.’ ‘Quite right,’ he answered. I had brought a small
painting, carefully packed; he looked at it for at least fifteen minutes, and
made no comment whatsoever. After which we went up to the next storey, where
for two hours Picasso showed me quantities of his paintings. He kept going back
and forth, dragging out great canvases which he placed against the easel. Then
he went to fetch others among an infinity of canvases stacked in rows against
the wall. I could see that he was going to enormous trouble. At each new canvas
he cast me a glance filled with a vivacity and an intelligence so violent that
it made me tremble…”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Dalí
also doesn’t say anything, and this appears an indication that he’ll be worthy of
the master. Picasso would remain a lifelong obsession: in the early 1930s, for
example, Dalí pretended the two of them had collaborated on an etching, though,
to quote Gibson, “without the knowledge of the older artist, Dalinian additions
were made to a previous Picasso print [Three Bathers, we’re staying on the
beach] and then a new engraving of their ‘collaboration’ was run off.” Or, in
1933, there was a double portrait of Picasso being Dalí made by Philippe
Halsman, who often collaborated with the latter on elaborately staged
photographs that cemented the myth of the mad genius (who levitated cats or exercised
his moustache). One could easily characterize Dalí’s behavior as trollish (in
the modern sense of the word), before they drifted into different camps
politically, which led Dalí to attack Picasso as an anarchist, and Picasso to
ignore the younger man altogether. Anyway, to come back to the initial pairing
of paintings, I also found a little undated sketch, probably from that later period
(I guess, since it is inscribed in English) of one of the Women at the Beach.
And while the joke this time is a different one, note that again the motif is
used for a joke: “Picasso’s Influence,” it says on top of the sheet. I need
Picasso like I need a cramp in the foot.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The
point of Dalí’s obsession was genius. Picasso was regarded as the officially
approved undeniable genius as a force of nature, while Dalí had to work for/with
the concept, receiving inspiration through the antennae of his moustache, defining
and redefining his role (“the only difference between Dalí and a madman is, Dalí
is not mad…”—by the way it takes him ten times as long to throw the punch line
in the clips I’ve seen, often his humor gets lost in the delivery). Of course,
his is also the much more tolerable concept of genius compared to standing
around in underpants and projecting virility pointing a brush…but then again when I think of that Picassoan
self-image, I have to think of the film The Mystery of Picasso</span><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> by Henri-Georges Clouzot</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> <span lang="EN-US">from</span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> 1956, where the protagonist bends gender every bit as
subtly as his rival, the professed masturbator.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The
mystery of the title (which is, in more absolute terms, the mystery of
creation, which we are supposed to witness through the lens of Picasso’s
effort) isn’t to be found anywhere in the film, unfortunately. It doesn’t help that this is, for
my taste, the worst period for Picasso, in which he produced endless formal variations of his received themes
(bullfighting, women with funnily constructed faces), and had not yet found the formal casualness
of the late work, which allowed him to explore these and more private themes in more depth again. The circumstances of the making (the close camera eye, the unusual
paints and picture ground used to make each brushstroke visible on film) also
wouldn’t have helped. In the most interesting scene, the making of the movie itself is
staged: Picasso sits at the canvas under a bright spotlight (think
interrogation scenario) in the dark of the studio, and the director orders him
to start and stop creating on command, as supposedly film is running short (it’s all a bit
ridiculous, since obviously there are several cameras for the artist, the
director, the painting being done, the meter counting the length of the film,
etc.). In his willingness to please (though he’s very manly and professional
about it), Picasso seems almost vulnerable…or does he seem vulnerable because
the art is so pretty? He draws a bouquet of flowers, circumscribes it with a frilly
fish, sort of turns that into a rooster, with lots of nice decor in it…</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">“Just
stop at the black,” the director says. “Should I get the inks ready?” asks the
artist. “Yes but quickly, we have two minutes left.” They turn to color and
Picasso draws a silly head over the whole thing, interested only in how he can create,
one thing after another, no matter what. Then time is running out again, and no
aesthetic conclusion seems in sight, will we have to stop prematurely at what is not
yet a satisfying image? No, Clouzot says he’s been cheating,
there’s still more film left. You can do that to Picasso. If you keep him as an
art slave tied to your bedpost, he will deliver every time. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Dalí
describes him in his Secret Life: “Like a slave he is chained hand and foot by
the chains of his own inventions.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Picasso draws what is probably a picture of his genius, a smiling face and
around it the dove that always keeps coming back carrying an olive branch from
newfound territories. The artist has no need to question himself, surely he has
no shame, and maybe it’s the purest form of genius, unhampered by any intentions.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">It really doesn’t
seem as if the actual point of the film were what the art looks like. Rather it
is about the act, the flow of things as they take and retake shape. I thought
it might make sense to distill the pure sounds of Picasso creating stuff. (Listen
closely and you can hear the cars outside the window in the background. It’s
quite a nice recording, much more open than the visually arranged horror movie
laboratory darkness of the studio</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">…</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">) So here is, for you to keep, the sound of genius coasting:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18.3999996185303px;"><iframe frameborder="no" height="080" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/141760251&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%"></iframe></span></span></div>
Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-80989539839895604692014-04-11T23:35:00.000+02:002014-05-30T16:29:24.742+02:00Unknown at the level of conscious study<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Well, after in the <a href="http://tonotfallasleep.blogspot.de/2014/02/pattern-de-control-or.html" target="_blank">previous entry</a> we saw Kasimir Malevich blast a future critical impassé regarding Jasper Johns's crosshatch paintings (which was really Morton Feldman's fault in the first place), here he is again, helping us read our favorite comics of 2013. (If you scroll down to the bottom <a href="http://thinkinginpanels.blogspot.de/2014/01/five-favorites-of-2013.html" target="_blank">here</a> you can read that the image is from Malcy Duff's mini I Have Never Seen Anyone Hold Their Nose, which has a story written on the cover beginning: "We can see . . . A woman putting shards of glass all over the outside of her house." From there we thumb through eight pages of loosely pasted pattern fragments until finally we arrive at just what the story promised we would see: the woman standing before a rectangle inscribed as a house with little jagged fragments that read "glass." So if that doesn't prove the story then I don't know what will.)<br />
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Then, in the mostly marvelous book (and it's easy to know where to skip the tedious parts) on the Black Square by Aleksandra Shatskikh, I found this image of a 1915 work by Malevich. She describes that the artist "placed a verbal object, the noun 'Village' pencilled in thick letters, on a piece of paper in a square exhibition frame, and under the 'picture' he provided a commentary: 'Instead of drawing the huts of nature's nooks, better to write Village and it will appear to each with finer details and the sweep of an entire village.'"</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsCcNiJNiOBx1smRlLQOlLyJro-tYV3CCYFSuvzTaAYdLl2xKksVe12F9RWFHG8u90tVM41vi-1dRP5vY4oqOYgX-6iEA_aJDoP2kOdtPtvA474Z8aQMZ8Hkrzx3Hk3mCPuFSbGLsCJZmg/s1600/Malcy+Duff+Fire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsCcNiJNiOBx1smRlLQOlLyJro-tYV3CCYFSuvzTaAYdLl2xKksVe12F9RWFHG8u90tVM41vi-1dRP5vY4oqOYgX-6iEA_aJDoP2kOdtPtvA474Z8aQMZ8Hkrzx3Hk3mCPuFSbGLsCJZmg/s1600/Malcy+Duff+Fire.jpg" height="187" width="200" /></a></div>
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Now Shatskikh goes on to speak about how "by taking the figurative principle so important for traditional art outside the framework of plasticity, Malevich put a radical end to visual art and the object as such," and how "in his commentary, the intuivist-irrationalist showed himself to be an adherent of a philosophical tradition unknown to him at the level of conscious study: his 'village' was born in the speculative world of Platonic ideas, a noumenon capable of engendering a multiplicity of phenomena." This is all very well, but it also contradicts the "sweep of an entire village" that the painter himself postulates on the page below the image, where, as Shatskikh describes it, "the swallowed word endings and and the lines' sweeping haste tell us that the idea came over the author instantaneously and he set it down just as instantaneously." Again, a contradiction like this, blocking gut theory through the halting meta-thoughts of a later time, in which an artwork's achievement will be measured by how much historical sense it makes, might in the end provoke an interpretational impassé . . . but here Malcy Duff's panels return the favor by illustrating the painterly qualities of words in rectangles in almost didactical fashion:</div>
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PS: Just for the record, I have an email from Duff saying that indeed he has never seen anyone hold their nose. This might one day prove useful to know. The last two panels are from The Heroic Mosh Of Mary's Son from 2008, though. <br />
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PPS:<br />
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Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-59363895894096844772014-02-11T22:12:00.000+01:002015-09-02T22:39:00.000+02:00Pattern De-Control, or...<img border="0" height="559" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE7HQUfaXPQuZB73NgsIVXoXDrFfvNziIL9aP9GYWHwvsYG-jRutOpr-k_qpOClbzwWiwsG1Uq2QrVakA61s7Tau8TCxA9SXU_xFjyE-mb0dTu_rxlF2yr7RbF5Nc5QDzhZL5gQrRFYMS0/s1600/Square.jpg" width="640" /><br />
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<b>...how relating stuff to other stuff can make us less speechless</b></div>
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Rug-making was fashionable when I was a child and families still had unimaginable amounts of time on their hands. I remember making my own little rug, wearing out my patience and learning the valuable lesson that all aesthetic endeavour must come with such compromise as to take all pride out of it. For a while my rug hung over the sofa to humiliate me, until a parent made a really ambitious one to replace my faulty effort. I also remember my mother knotting a floor rug over months that was really huge and was said to follow traditional Turkish design. Only the colours were too fresh and the material had too much bounce, it would take a hundred years of nervously pacing back and forth to make it look good and valuable.<br />
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I think back to all of that now as I listen to Morton Feldman’s <i>Why Patterns?</i> (1978), his first work famously inspired by a fascination with antique Anatolian rugs. I’m trying to recall the bodily memory of my own knotting and my faded knowledge of the woolly texture from inside, and apply it to the music. It sure doesn’t sound like rugs. Comparing versions, I prefer the interpretation by California Ear Unit, which has a collective nervousness as if wearing a rug down, but Blum, Vigeland and Williams with their more individual voices following separate lines along sometimes symmetrical, sometimes ornamental contours sound much more as if the rug association made sense... And still, while the composition unfolds, their small adjustments to the coherent vibe, each knot its own situation, become stretched out so far that the thread threatens to loosen.<br />
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Sadly, I am not qualified as a listener to connect to my rug-making experience. The only memory I retain of music that happened a mere minute ago is one of mood and density, and the shape of the patterns and how they build one onto the other is lost already. In fact I can think of few musics where I follow the tide – somewhat different, somewhat the same – so contently and think less of a return of distinct patterns or situations. I needn’t feel bad about it, though, since Feldman is fine with me just listening for the sounds. He criticizes that “the preoccupation with making something, with systems and construction, seems to be a characteristic of music today. It has become, in many cases, the actual subject of musical composition.” (Surprisingly he’s not taking a swipe at Cage here, whose systems and construction are probably even better known than the sounds they brought us to hear, but at Boulez and his hardcore implementation of serialism.) “Of course, the history of music is, in a sense, the history of its construction,” Feldman goes on (this is his essay “Predeterminate – Indeterminate” by the way). “Music has always been involved with re-arranging systematized controls, because there seemed to be no alternative.” He describes how through the centuries control got tighter and tighter, to which twelve-tone music again offered no alternative, how systematics took over until complexity could no longer be handled. “What was emphasized was the unifying of all new musical elements into significant form. An emphasis on this more evasive element – sound – would have upset the precarious balance of the ‘ideal composition’.” <br />
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And how could it have come to that, how could sound become sidelined by the forces of history? “The evolution of music is comparable to the multiplication of machines, which everywhere collaborate with man. Today, the machine has created such a variety and contention of noises that pure sound in its slightness and monotony no longer provokes emotion. In order to excite and stir our sensibility, music has been developing toward the most complicated polyphony and toward the greatest variety of instrumental timbres and colours.” That in fact was Luigi Russolo talking, whose take on civilization was more positive, but they’re discussing the same thing. Now Feldman is stuck in the middle of the century, with music at a total deadlock as compositional taxonomists immediately file away all innovation until, finally... “between 1950 and 1951 four composers – John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff and myself – became friends, saw each other constantly – and something happened.”</div>
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What happened was a “concept of music in which various elements (rhythm, pitch, dynamics etc.) were de-controlled... Only by ‘unfixing’ the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves – not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.” Feldman speaks as a maker of music here, such freedom of memories of other music cannot be demanded of the listener, who will perceive that the sounds actually reaching his ear have the same degree of fixedness that any other sounds mindfully listened to would have. It’s true that, say, if I knew the Cage piece I listened to was following systems of carefully calibrated chance procedures, and the notes were not meant to form a kind of musical composition in the traditional understanding, it would let me off the hook as I would not expect from myself to make sense of the musical incidents as they fly by... Yet no matter if born from chance or inspired by graphic notation, the sounds would still be intentionally produced or controlledly communicated, precise utterances of an artful concept or organizations of previously existing but usually unperceived sounds within SilenceTM.<br />
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Feldman is not enamoured with the conceptual side, so he thinks less of silence and more of the chance pieces. In his essay “Crippled Symmetry”, he explains the systematics: “What Cage did was to compile a table of sound events – some just a note or two, others arabesque-like figures of different proportions. Included in other charts was information pertaining to the gamut of musical parameters. Through the tossing of coins and consulting the I-Ching as oracle, the ordering and subsequent combination of all this material was arrived at. The music was then ‘fixed’ through the same method of tossing coins into a non-progressive, rhythmic ‘spatial’ notation, not unlike a distance scale on a map.” It is difficult to read about events of this complexity and still believe in de-controlling forces at work (except “fixed” is in scare quotes), since even composerly intent will have no wriggling room once the system is in place. Feldman’s explanation for why this still is sound-centred music accordingly comes from an unexpected angle: “Because this music is subject to the multiplicity of disciplines inherent in its detailed assemblage, its musical shape is only discernible at the moment of hearing – like images in a film.” (While that’s sloppy, as we don’t hear images, and most films are more like listening to our memories of the Moonlight Sonata than anything very chancy at all – we still note that his focus is again on the making, to the point of calling the work an “assemblage” of processes taken ready-made from other disciplines... it is as if the multiplicity of alien intentions were obscuring the raison d’être of the sound itself until it became pure, and that purely in the moment.) “It is not involved with the grammar of design,” Feldman says about Cage’s music, and it is noteworthy that he does not suggest, like Cage himself, it were free of intention, but free only of the language of intent. (And of course Feldman himself at that point was not interested in freedom from intention as a composer at all, he posed more like a patient craftsman, when e.g. in conversation with Cage he said: “I do it one way and then I do it another. I do it with four notes, I do it with three notes. I put it here, I put it there… and then when you’re really saturated I take C and I put it against A and it sounds like a million dollars.”) <br />
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But back to the essay “Crippled Symmetry”, back to stories of rugs and, I’m afraid, more systems again. The text is from 1981, three years after <i>Why Patterns?</i>, and the process still sounds fresh to him: “A growing interest in Near and Middle Eastern rugs has made me question notions I previously held on what is symmetrical and what is not. In Anatolian village and nomadic rugs there appears to be considerably less concern with the exact accuracy of the mirror image than in most rug-producing areas. The detail of an Anatolian symmetrical image was never mechanical, but idiomatically drawn...” (Here Russolo’s evolution of music as a multiplication of machines can again stand as the opposite position on the same development towards mechanization, which Feldman as a connoisseur of craft abhors. I do remember from my uncle, who also collected rugs, that asymmetries and off-colours would generally mean more ethnic handicraft and therefore more value, but that such looseness of pattern was often faked in semi-industrialized wares at least since the early 20th century. But back to the composer staring at rugs:) “I’m being distracted by a small Turkish village rug of white tile patterns in a diagonal repeat of large stars in lighter tones of red, green and beige. Though David Sylvester is right in commenting that our appreciation of rugs as this was enhanced by our exposure to modernistic Western art, still this ‘primitive’ rug was conceived at almost the same time that Matisse finished his art training.” Is it not the measure of a true aesthete that he is able to judge the most diverse arts after one set of high-strung aesthetic values, and beyond that expect the same perfectly precarious off-balance of detail from his everyday? “One day I studied that Oriental rug over there in reflected light, and followed the silver gleams which fell on its web of plum violet and opaque yellow. Suddenly it struck me how much it would be improved if I could place on it some object whose deep colour might enhance the vividness of its tints. Possessed by this idea, I was strolling aimlessly along the streets, when suddenly I found myself staring at the solution. There, in a shop window on Eighth Street, lay a huge tortoise in a large basin. I immediately bought it and brought it home. Then I sat for a long time, with eyes half-shut, studying the effect. Decidedly, the Ethiopic black, the harsh Sienna of this shell dulled the rug’s reflections without adding to it. The dominant silver gleams in it barely sparkled, crawling with lacklustre tones of dead zinc against the edges of the hard, tarnished shell. I bit my nails while I thought about a method that might remove these discords and reconcile the opposition of tones. I finally discovered that my first inspiration, which was to animate the fire of the weave by setting it off against some dark object, was wrong. In fact, this rug was too new, too petulant and gaudy. The colours were not sufficiently subdued. I had to reverse the process, dull the tones and extinguish them by the contrast of a striking object, which would eclipse all else and cast a golden light on the pale silver. Seen like that, the problem was easier to solve. I decided to glaze the shell of the tortoise with gold.” A connoisseur of rugs, a somewhat Esseintes-like aesthete (yes, that last passage was from Huysmans) – symbolists studying handicraft of the middle ages, cubist studios full of African sculpture, Feldman’s rugs and Cage studying the I-Ching – connoisseurship often inspires an avant-garde to productively misuse alien aesthetic systems of differently coded knowledge and transfer them to their own doing.</div>
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But we’re not through Feldman’s collection of rugs yet: “There is another Anatolian woven object on my floor, which I refer to as the ‘Jasper Johns’ rug. It is an arcane checkerboard format, with no apparent systematic colour design except for a free use of the rug’s colours reiterating its simple pattern. Implied in the glossy pile (though unevenly worn) of the mountainous Konya region, the older pinks, and lighter blues – was my first hint that there was something there that I could learn, if not apply to my music.”</div>
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I first came across the parallel inspiration of rugs and Johns’s so-called crosshatch paintings on Feldman’s later work in an essay by Steven Johnson (in the otherwise lacklustre book <i>The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts</i>). To illustrate this, Johnson takes the first painting completely given over to the crosshatch motive, <i>Scent</i> (1974), and starts analyzing its structure as something inherently musical (for elementary class): the painting is in three vertically divided parts – encaustic, oil on unvarnished canvas, oil on varnished canvas – and the crosshatches follow a repeating structure ABC CDE EFA. Then Johnson offers a structural analysis of <i>Why Patterns?</i> to prove the similarity of events with diagrams that look a lot like multi-panel paintings and so forth. And when I read this, most of all it struck me that here a painting’s musical properties served as the inspiration to a piece of music, and so it was more abstract than the music, while the music would reference both rugs and abstract painting to the point of threatening its own non-objectivity. (So much for Pater’s notion of music as the most abstract art the condition of which all other art constantly aspires to.) <br />
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Feldman goes on to relate what inspires him about Johns’s art, though reading the words one might suspect he talks more about his own work than the painter’s: “Rug patterns were either abstracted from symbols, nature or geometric shapes – leaving clues from the real world. Jasper Johns’s more recent paintings cannot be placed into any of these categories. Johns’s canvas is more of a lens, where we are guided by his eye as it travels, where the tide – somewhat different, somewhat the same – brings to mind Cage’s dictum of ‘imitating nature in the manner of its operation’. These paintings create, on one hand, the concreteness we associate with a patterned art and, on the other, an abstract poetry from not knowing its origins. We might even question in Johns whether they are patterns at all. When does a pattern become a pattern?” It is a common move in the Johns literature at least since the artist’s painting <i>Flag</i> (1955) to posit that e.g. this flag is not a flag (in the tradition of Magritte’s pipe not being a pipe), or even altogether non-objective. Here Feldman’s interpretation sounds like pretty average artspeak. Still it becomes clear that he was not in fact inspired by any music-like qualities, but rather by the opaqueness of the underlying systematic (which for him equals poetry), and so felt Johns’s work was occupied with similar questions of crippled symmetries and pattern variations as his own. <br />
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Further reading reveals that art historians generally seem uncomfortable with the crosshatch paintings when they try to reach beyond a structural analysis. In the standard catalogue on Johns’s work since 1974, Mark Rosenthal starts the relevant chapter by stressing how bewildering the paintings are, then quotes Barbara Rose, who called them “pseudo-abstractions – impersonations of an abstract style” (an abstraction that isn’t an abstraction like Magritte’s “pipe” again)... and somehow nobody thinks to have a good look back at Sol LeWitt’s four kinds of basic straight lines from 1969, which had delivered all the necessary clues even before the fact:</div>
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(Here’s Barbara Rose analyzing Johns’s <i>Untitled</i> from 1975: “1) Where edge meets edge, the brushstroke may continue in the direction it began, or it may be diverted in another direction, as if refracted by the edge of a square; 2) the direction of the stroke may remain constant while it changes colour; 3) both the colour as well as the direction of the brushstroke may remain constant across the boundary of a square; 4) in addition, the entire content of a given square may be mirrored in an adjacent square; 5) or the square may be repositioned or ‘flopped’ in the way that a reproduced image can be projected or printed backward; or 6) another possibility is that the medium may change from one square to another.” Morton Feldman analyzing <i>Why Patterns?</i>: “Example 1) is characteristic of a vertical pattern framed by silent beats; in this instance the rests on either end are slightly unequal. Linear patterns are naturally more ongoing, and could have the ‘short breath’ regularity of example 2) or anticipate a slight staggered rhythmic alteration such as in example 3). Another device I use is to have a longish silent timeframe that is asymmetrical, or a symmetrical frame around a short asymmetric measure.”)</div>
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In his structural reading of Johns’s <i>Scent</i>, Rosenthal sounds strangely tentative: “The flickering pattern of orange, violet and green brushstrokes is distributed across the canvas, and an overall compositional structure is present.” For anything marginally more complex he needs to quote an authority: “Thomas Hess noted that each panel is divided into three vertical subsections of about 12, 17 1/2 and 12 inches wide and that some of these repeat in a rhythm that can be described as a, b, c, c, d, e, e, f, a”... and from here on the analysis moves into the interrelations between patterns, panels and groundings. But once the canvas has been measured and he attempts the move into exegesis, all that Rosenbaum has to go on is the title. Pollock had painted a canvas also called <i>Scent</i>, and though Johns expressly forbade the connection, still Rosenbaum borrows a thought from David Shapiro, that Johns here gave “structure and permanence to Pollock as Cézanne has given to the Impressionists”. Which is very 19th century and the “fixing” (structure and permanence) does not have the required quote marks. Then Rosenthal closes with his own thought: “The only literal fragrance of scent is the paint medium itself. Yet the title suggests the presence of something masked in the lush brushstrokes, perhaps the structure that is hidden but sensed, as if a characteristic smell... Although he might otherwise be reluctant to suggest anything beyond what is literally given or literally implied, by giving <i>Scent </i>its title, Johns directs the viewer elsewhere, suggesting that the marks may in fact mean something.” <br />
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(“He had long been skilled in the science of smell. He believed that this sense could give one delights equal to those of hearing and sight; each sense being susceptible, if naturally keen and if properly cultivated, to new impressions, which it could intensify, coordinate and compose into that unity which constitutes a creative work. And it was not more abnormal and unnatural that an art should be called into existence by disengaging odours than that another art should be evoked by detaching sound waves or by striking the eye with diversely coloured rays. But if no person could discern, without intuition developed by study, a painting by a master from a daub, a melody of Beethoven from one by Clapisson, no more could anyone at first, without preliminary initiation, help confusing a bouquet invented by a sincere artist with a potpourri made by some manufacturer to be sold in groceries and bazaars.”) <br />
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Now what makes a reading of the crosshatch paintings so difficult, except that the artist never gave his own interpretation to guide the critic? (Johns only ever told the anecdote that he caught a brief glimpse of a car with this kind of pattern on it.) Is form all there is because in Johns we cannot trust even the abstractions? As I look down at the books strewn around my feet it strikes me that the way out of such speechlessness might lie in the much more trustworthy abstractions of Malevich, which are the mothers of all impaired symmetries and patterns abstracted from geometric shapes...</div>
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Indeed, Malevich has delivered several readings of his square that wasn’t a square. Browsing through his book <i>The Non-Objective World</i> it becomes clear that this artist’s more immediate connection to the abstract image has lost none of its usefulness: “The black square on the white field was the first form in which non-objective feeling came to be expressed. The square = feeling, the white field = the void beyond this feeling. Yet the general public saw in the non-objectivity of the representation the demise of art and failed to grasp the evident fact that feeling had assumed external form. The suprematist square and the forms proceeding out of it can be likened to the primitive marks (symbols) of aboriginal man which represented, in their combination, <i>not ornament, but a feeling of rhythm</i>.” Primeval mark-making as emotionally abstracted rhythm – this also takes care of the crosshatch paintings! Wayward geometric figures not identical with themselves, so not to be seen as themselves (and not as crosshatching, i.e. the ornamental rendering of volume) but individualized markers of time.<br />
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Malevich’s 1915 <i>Black Square</i> has another, similarly inspiring imperfection, and that is the maze of craquelure, which grew because Malevich had overpainted an earlier motif on a canvas in use.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLiCc0cVFHiDnJAubBvJg7EhqifROEEzhlT4ZGelYV1agqqO2nItQGRQ5t0Kp-s7A7JWub8UaSi9Wb6xQ_JUHHat0yyZCc_7AC2Wn3tYznne1KfwUSFxsNSet7OA8_qeKemPrMzF4tlXeR/s1600/1280px-Kazimir_malevich,_quadrato_nero,_1915,_02.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="390" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLiCc0cVFHiDnJAubBvJg7EhqifROEEzhlT4ZGelYV1agqqO2nItQGRQ5t0Kp-s7A7JWub8UaSi9Wb6xQ_JUHHat0yyZCc_7AC2Wn3tYznne1KfwUSFxsNSet7OA8_qeKemPrMzF4tlXeR/s1600/1280px-Kazimir_malevich,_quadrato_nero,_1915,_02.JPG" width="640" /></a><br />
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Rather against the intentions of the author, who would later paint more glossy (though still skewed) squares for exhibition, this has allowed viewers to identify the work as classical painting in the sense of Joshua Reynolds’s dictum: “All good pictures crack.” It is a lo-fi square, the bad technique and visual side noises reinforcing the basic shape and idea, carrying a suggestion that the shape might in fact mean something, might form a subject. (Instead of the incident of the making as the subject, like reading the Black Square as not a painting but the illustration to an art-historical event.) From here we might think of Cage’s SilenceTM as a lo-fi silence, the crackle of the everyday reinforcing the idea of us learning to be receptive to no intended input. It is one of Cage’s most famous words: “Music is all around us. If only we had ears. There would be no need for concert halls if man could learn to enjoy the sounds that envelop him, for example, at Seventh Street and Broadway, at 4 p.m. on a rainy day ...” An idea that had been around for some time... here is an earlier connoisseur of the everyday, Russolo again, in my favourite text from him, “The Noises of Nature and Life”: “Are we not surrounded by strange and curious noises in our own home, by the most indefinable timbres and the queerest variations of pitch, emanating from the various pipes for drinking water, gas and heat? Who can deny that these noises are less annoying than those made from morning to evening by the neighbour’s piano?”<br />
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Cage took the Rosenthal article quoted above, extracted the original Jasper Johns sayings from it and made them into a poem: “the idea of background / (and background music) / idea of neutrality / air and the idea of air / (In breathing – in and out) / Satie’s ‘furniture music’ now / serving as background for music...”<br />
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Silence being the new furniture music, which serves as the background to our connoisseurship of everyday noises. But that, as we’re out of rugs to stare at, is for another occasion...</div>
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Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-92053795469037954232014-01-19T21:51:00.000+01:002014-01-19T21:51:18.807+01:00One more car, or just an impression of it...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSXCljBpAM5K59wqo1x27YZsQH4hzkL94YEIa7tLNG6PYi23f1lYWzwqDMqTdPi4yX1CGMtnnIJUpIo4N2CmEtg6FYnnmvzjb4acN9FYdmAyVOGsWeEtm-v7f5XRF1DYs6i3u2lomZOklk/s1600/Malcy+Duff+Hands+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSXCljBpAM5K59wqo1x27YZsQH4hzkL94YEIa7tLNG6PYi23f1lYWzwqDMqTdPi4yX1CGMtnnIJUpIo4N2CmEtg6FYnnmvzjb4acN9FYdmAyVOGsWeEtm-v7f5XRF1DYs6i3u2lomZOklk/s1600/Malcy+Duff+Hands+1.jpg" height="290" width="640" /></a></div>
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If you're interested in comics, you can find my five favorites of 2013 over <a href="http://thinkinginpanels.blogspot.de/2014/01/five-favorites-of-2013.html" target="_blank">here</a>.Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-15978884864750955892013-06-24T14:59:00.000+02:002013-06-27T11:31:58.974+02:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Meanwhile, in his secret underground studio . . .<br />
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(Apropos of Art Now Vol 4, out now from Taschen, to which I've contributed short texts on Adel Abdessemed, Cecily Brown, Andreas Gursky, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Anish Kapoor, Jeff Koons, Chris Ofili, Michael Raedecker, Neo Rauch, Mark Ryden, and Piotr Uklański. You'll also find the explanation to the above, should you need one. If you're checking this blog because of Art Now, welcome! feel free to drop me a line.) <br />
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Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-29672388037396597772013-03-24T13:34:00.000+01:002013-03-24T13:34:02.810+01:00Cars and music<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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So I've written an essay on cars and music which you can read <a href="http://surround.noquam.com/through-limbo-on-cruise-control/" target="_blank">here</a> in a new online music magazine called Surround. Even if you're more interested in art and less in cars and music you should still read it for my prose stylings. In fact you should read the whole magazine for all the diverse prose stylings and because some of the music discussed is very good and you may not know it (I can vouch for Kevin Drumm's Humid Weather and Michael Pisaro's The Punishment of the Tribe by Its Elders, of the few recent ones I've heard).<br />
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If you've hit on this site coming from the Surround article and are still wondering what the hell that was about, welcome! here are some links to other stuff I've written which might give some context. You'll find a post on Graham Lambkin's Softly Softly Copy Copy <a href="http://tonotfallasleep.blogspot.de/2011/10/coming-to.html" target="_blank">upstream</a> on my blog; I've done a shorter structural reading of a record (Teatro Assente by Taku Unami and Takahiro Kawaguchi) in the finale of an article on theatrics and music in fluxus and eai for <a href="http://eartripmagazine.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/eartrip-issue-7/" target="_blank">Eartrip</a>; and in a <a href="http://www.luettgenmeijer.com/rowe.html" target="_blank">text</a> for a Keith Rowe exhibition you'll find some stray thoughts on narrative in conceptually-oriented music. (Should you, for some strange reason, want the Rowe text in your files, hit me for a pdf with the original illustrations I'd chosen for the exhibition folder. It made more sense that way.) <span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 16px;"> </span></span>Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-13374007055258235382012-08-14T02:02:00.003+02:002012-08-29T14:25:27.409+02:00Unknowable masterpieces and other catalog pitches<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Somewhere <a href="http://tonotfallasleep.blogspot.com/2010/10/this-is-first-post-in-small-series.html" target="_blank">upstream</a>, I've been using a billiards boat by Rudolf Reiber to ponder the significance of the work of art yielding a good yarn vs. it being built from elements awkward to relate. When I feel I'm saying something witty by merely recounting the set-up, that's not just a social gift by the artist, but also relieves me from the duty of explaining the edificational use every work of art is expected to have, sharpening our mistrust of the act of experience.</div>
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Some of Rudolf's pieces make pretty good conversation, but thinking about the last bunch it struck me that maybe they were overdoing things in the opposite direction, by stating all that needed to be said and not leaving much room for thought to the viewer. (From me, that's not a dig, I want the artist to do all the work and act as a consumer myself.) This is not because his art would be making a concise statement about some objective, though, instead it creates a situation where connecting the dots might feel like an exercise in pedantry. So, to save the art from being smothered by close attention, here are a couple of catalog piece pitches for Rudolf.</div>
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Last year, he made A Whiter Shade of Pale, where he painted the four walls of an exhibition room in the shades of white used by leading art institutions: the MoMA, the Vienna Secession, the Centre Pompidou, and the Tate Modern. All there is to see are title cards near the edges of the room, naming the brand of white and the institution. (Accordingly, on his <a href="http://www.rudolfreiber.de/" target="_blank">website</a>, Rudolf presents the work as a zoom-in on one of these title cards (you'll find it after the link under "works, solid.")) An accompanying catalog essay would easily write itself. Since it's a piece about the White Cube, the essay would obviously start with a motto from Brian O'Doherty on the "Ideology of the Gallery Space." Then there'd be the history of the white monochrome, Yves Klein exhibiting an empty gallery, or, if a more historical take were required, centuries of trompe l'oeil wall painting. After such displays of profundity, the essay could end on a facetious note, with a quote from the lyrics of the Procul Harum song: "The room was humming harder / as the ceiling flew away," a clear reference to the defective neon light straining to contribute to the glare of the white cube.</div>
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But all of that is squirrelwork. So here's the real pitch: I will order me a set of Rauschenberg White Paintings from the Chinese internet site, whose showrooms I have tested in the pic above, offering "real" copies of historical masterpieces. I'll hang hang them on the walls of the installation (if such it is), then return to the White Cube everyday with fresh eyes and record my changing impressions of the canvases in situ. (That of course refers to T.J. Clark's The Sight of Death, subtitled "An Experiment in Art Writing," for which the author visited a couple of Poussins over a stretch of time. I am restaging the experiment to prove its objective textual results.) Obviously I cannot foresee how my own experiment staring at dead wall space and at the work of art in the age of cheap manual reproduction will be colored by the subtle shadings of the different institutional whites, but by the end of the process the white monochromes on white background should have developed sufficient shadings that I could name a Robert Ryman period for each Eskimo word for snow.</div>
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This is Secret from 2012 (in Rudolf's <a href="http://payneshurvell.com/2012/06/losing-ground/" target="_blank">Suspiria</a> solo show at Payne Shurvell). He commissioned his partner to do a painting for him, which was then packaged away into the pictured crate. Nobody has seen the work except the painter, not the artist nor gallerist or buyer (who have to sign an agreement not to open the thing). It's maybe not the strongest work, since this kind of thing has been done before . . . though usually the artist is the one in on the secret, so here lies the shift in meaning: the hired hand (more typically the studio assistant executing work according to the instructions of the master) is the only one knowing the content of the work, though that is to all purposes completely overshadowed by the discretion of the master, who keeps the work on a pure meta level.</div>
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If we want an essay to add something to the piece, then we would have to flesh out the plight of the assistant, make that which is packed away not just a prop in a conceptual ploy, but a secret of real value, something whose unattainability actually hurts on some higher kind of level. What we will do to achieve this, is to appropriate Balzac's classic story, The Unknown Masterpiece (you will remember, male white genius tries to paint beauty but can't to his own satisfaction, finds the right model after many years, is inspired to a frenzy of creativity and paints the perfect painting, only to find that others will see nothing but a chaos of brushstrokes (and one perfectly executed foot), leaving the masterpiece unknown since it exists only in his head). We won't need to rewrite much, a word here or there, a gender switch: our heroine will be driven by the desire to create a perfect painting worthy of the scheme the artist had thought out for it (btw, think of the story Rauschenberg told how de Kooning selected a good drawing for him to erase: "I want it to really hurt," he said), then we'll change this into an artistically happy ending, where she does create an undubitable masterpiece . . . though of course we'll never know that and even the artist won't believe she has it in her. (Tense conversation over the kitchen table. Let's hope the couple will somehow cope with the psychological complications that our essay will bring on them.)</div>
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In that same exhibition, Rudolf showed The Silence, which is a braille transcription of Ingmar Bergman's film as a 3-D movie. Again we can join the dots. It's "silence" during the Cage centennials and the year of the Paralympics. Silence, which according to Beuys has been overrated in the secretly busy Duchamp, moving at us like the names of stars on the silver screen in endless opening credits. This film gives haptic a bad name. </div>
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But I'm not even attempting to go into the motions. Despite the artist covering all the angles, the piece has a purely slap-to-the-head kind of brilliance.</div>
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It's a braille movie in 3-D. </div>
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<br />Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3768485390356919058.post-79491551720521689852012-05-28T01:19:00.000+02:002012-05-28T16:02:17.414+02:00More to laugh than to make you cry<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This is my favorite political painting: Apollo and Marsyas by Bartolomeo Manfredi, an image from the class wars, 1620 as well as today. This spoilt brat from the one percent, slightly flabby because of all the drugs and good times, but powerful and so damn worldly wise and dangerous. He doesn’t blink an eyelid while methodically skinning us alive, he’s rather curious as to how we’ll take it. What can we do? We stare inwards in a resigned sort of dignity facing the question: at what point did it go so completely wrong? We didn’t have a chance ever for a second, did we? A painting so to the point, it’s still the same confrontation and the same outcome 400 years later . . .<br />
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I’m not being clever, by the way, this is what it really is. Just try a quick search and you’ll reassuringly find that the Marsyas myth already played a symbolical role in the class struggles of late Roman antiquity and figured in the political stage plays of the time, and that later it was discussed in that light by historians such as Giambattista Vico in his New Science from 1725. Apollo stood and stands for the patricians, Marsyas the plebeians. Class confrontations are nothing unusual in the art of the time, even though they’re mostly interpreted more mildly. You will know Velázquez’ Apollo at the Forge of Vulcan from the same period (around 1630, see here a detail). It’s similarly obvious about the artist’s sympathies with down to earth natural dignity rather than the fop satirized by a halo of self-importance. Still the image is much more complicated and much less political. It is serious about telling the myth (the details of which don’t interest us here), and more than about class conflict itself it seems about a contrast between fancy decadent high art (Apollo the god of music and poetry) vs. the mythical blacksmith as an honest craftsman. So there is satire, but not the brutal urgency of the Manfredi. But then nothing I know really compares to that.<br />
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I am thinking about favorite political art because I have just read T.J. Clark’s fantastic book Image of the People about Courbet as a political painter in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution. What makes the book so great is that it allows no easy connections between an artist’s interest in the people, his realist efforts to catch a truth about them, and the resultant political impact of the painting. Clark isn’t the only one to reject these easy connections, but I don’t think I’ve ever encountered such a thorough dividing up of all the elements at play: what the painter knew, what he wished but failed to express, what the painting knew (more than the painter, of course), what it accidently communicated at its time and now reveals to us, and how the mindframe of the contemporary viewer would allow only certain parts of the message to be painted in the first place. In the most spectacular chapter, a handful of the stone cold classics of realism slowly travel from the countryside to Paris over several exhibitions after the Salon of 1850 had been postponed. They were well received but nothing special in Ornans, where they’d been produced, immensely successful in Besançon, purposefully ignored in Dijon, gaining ever more political heft until in Paris they became a statement, because the suffering peasant population there was a headline not a fact of life and as such had more impact. And why did the country personage look so bourgeois anyway, it was insidious. <br />
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Today a painting like the Burial at Ornans cannot be read without a guidebook (well, not by me), but Clark also shows that city audiences then were almost as clueless as we are in front of the object. He quotes the critic Haussard who asked what the viewer was to make of “this long file of ludicrous masks and deformities copied from life . . . those two churchwardens with noses as crimson as their robes, this joker with the funny hat and turned-up moustaches who carries the coffin, this brawny gravedigger who poses solemnly on one knee at the graveside; this seriousness and this buffoonery, these tears, these grimaces, this Sunday-best mourning, in black coat, in smock, in beguine cap, all adding up to a funeral from some carnival, ten yards long, an immense ballad in painting, where there is more to laugh than to make you cry?” <br />
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Clark makes sense of all of that, he paints the social situation, the bourgeois fears, he shows how the paintings could be felt to threaten exactly because the motives behind them stayed unclear and so they could be connected to something larger than the socialist leanings of their author, bad enough as that was . . . But to apply his thorough research and ingenious reasoning to the fullest effect, there is one thing Clark must do: cut off the timeline before Courbet starts painting completely unreasonable paintings. Clark like others just mutters something of a descent into alcoholism and fades out early. Because, look at this, from 1861: <br />
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Alcohol might explain it. The stag fleeing from the hunt, throwing a pained look skywards, seemingly checking the weather . . . but then I remember the contemporary review of the realist masterpiece above, and isn’t this also “a ballad in painting, where there is more to laugh than to make you cry?” More responsible than drink might be the virtues of academic painting, like catching a moment most pregnant in narrative which would ennoble a nature piece to almost the status of a history painting. The same aspirations could also explain the somewhat too human expression of the stag (which reminds us of Landseer’s lifesaving dog, the forebear of the Disney comic which has had two appearances already on this blog, so enough of that). <br />
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While we’re in somewhat hilarious mood, let us look back again to one of the realist classics discussed by Clark in detail, the more obviously political Stonebreakers of 1849: <br />
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This is one of the most interpreted images ever. Courbet himself said the moral was that in this job you started carrying huge loads like the young guy and ended up bent like the old one. The men are rendered anonymous, one averted and one below the rim of his hat, which is usually read as a meaningless job killing the individual. So this is realism, a word that today seems to mean an artistic approach, but sometimes it will mean no more than a thematic engagement with some kind of low life. Because the method is rather Victorian in its close realism of detail and overall poetry, and doesn’t the picture look almost related to something like, say, a William Dyce? (Partly because the coloring is somewhat unlike Courbet—the work was destroyed in 1945 so the photo looks almost handcolored.) Courbet had seen the two stonebreakers out on the road and then invited them to the studio as models. Probably the pot sat, too, and some heaps of stones were arranged for scrutiny. The old man is carefully if stiffly bent, his left knee cushioned by some yellow grass. And then the nicest touch of balladry, this time with a more subtle humor that just makes you smile: after all the years on his mind-numbing job, the old man still puts such loving care into each single blow. He is about to hit the individual, smallish stone after some more moments of almost Zen-like concentration . . . <br />
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Contrary to the Manfredi, the image no longer works like it used to. It does not tell you about the plight of the plebeian, it is no avatar for social change. Especially when you compare it against Jean-François Millet’s prose statement on how work makes you tired and stupid a decade later:<br />
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</div>Lutz Eitelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18265424358386584255noreply@blogger.com0