To Not Fall Asleep

A stray thought (Spur der Töne)

2011-12-25T10:25:00.002+01:00

Records of warfare: Monkeys vs. dinosaurs

2011-12-23T00:02:00.000+01:00

Salon painting from the Planet of the Apes. This picture almost pulls it off. The way the monkeys seem to share a thought on times many generations ago, when their forebears still were born as goldilocks that had to be dressed against the weather, cute but useless creatures. How droll life must have been . . . But, boringly, the artist shows the mother monkey chained, giving away the set-up. This is no exploration of the post-Darwinian blues, telling us that evolution will lead nowhere and might as well be reversed, man being the primate that he is. It’s called The Anthropology Lesson, by Gabriel von Max from around 1900, and in its modest aim to stage a droll and entertaining scene about the similarity of monkeys to us human beings—which nevertheless stresses the difference through the meticulously observed gesture of apish back-scratching—this image is safely within a pictorial tradition centuries old, from before the event of evolution, monkeys having been dressed up as people for our entertainment since about the time they first turned up in paintings and engravings.

I found the picture in a catalog on Darwin: Art And The Search For Origins, and somehow nothing in their selection of 19th-century images of monkeys really carries the dread that might come with the knowledge that we’re still animals inside, fighting our way through society as if it were a second nature red in tooth and claw. See, for example, this painting by Frantisek Kupka, Antropoides from 1902. It feels like it should be more impressive, ape men doing battle unto the death in full ferocity of unbridled emotions. In fact the dramatic sky above signals impressiveness in its foreshortened clouds. But then instead the viewer’s gaze falls upon the flowers in the hands of the female, and suddenly this is just a lame society joke, more fit for the cartoon page of a women’s weekly.

So, the monkeys are a disappointment. By the way I’m interested in two things here, which I’ve already discussed upstream in my post on Edwin Landseer: the idea of a fierce and cruel nature without god (and it might be monkeys are just too close to us to separate themselves from our worldview sufficiently to figure in that), and the humanizing of animals in 19th-century art that seems like a starting point for the evolution of comics. It’s clear how domesticated animals like dogs, cats, mice, etc. would be the obvious cast for a humanized portrayal (as in children’s stories), but shouldn’t there be a special treatment for the monkey? Somehow he fails to inspire, so I turn the pages to see about the other protagonist of the evolution story, the tragic hero, the dinosaur. And funnily, I find that same reversal of the tides as in the Max painting, a Planet of Dinosaurs, exist as an idea in 1830. Henry de la Beche’s engraving Awful Changes looks and appears as a pretty funny cartoon, but on top of that holds serious possibilities of a story about a School of Ichthyosaurs.

With that apparent fitness of the dinosaurs for the evolution of comics in mind, let’s start again with the Landseer painting I discussed in my earlier post, Saved from 1856, depicting a Newfoundland dog who holds between his paws the body of an unconscious boy he has just saved from drowning. From him, as we have seen, it’s just a small step into the world of Disney.

Let us now look at another giant of Victorian painting, John Martin, and his Country Of The Iguanodon from 1838:

If you zoom in, the composition of the group is remarkably similar to the Landseer, only we’re not in a country where men and dogs are best friends, but where Iguanodons feed on each other in pairs and even groups. Three of them, one properly hunted down and patiently waiting to be devoured between the paws of its captor, who himself cries out in surprise, because unnoticed a third one has crept up on him and is taking a big bite out of the undefended back. Two more are fighting it out in the middle ground of the picture. They are surrounded by a beautiful landscape with the sun shimmering through the volcano dust that will soon kill the complete species off (that’s of course not what the artist meant to say, but it sure looks like it, doesn’t it?), and all that the dinosaurs do day in day out is eat and be eaten.

Here’s a famous quote from William Buckland, who found undigested vertebrae in coprolites (petrified dinosaur shit) of the same species of Ichthyosaurs, which to him suggested the cannibalism shown by Martin in the usually plant-eating Iguanodon. “In all these various formations our Coprolites form records of warfare, waged by successive generations of inhabitants of our planet on one another: the imperishable phosphate of lime, derived from their digested skeletons, has become embalmed in the substance and foundations of the everlasting hills; and the general law of Nature which bids all to eat and be eaten in their turn, is shown to have been co-extensive with animal existence on our globe; the Carnivora in each period of the world’s history fulfilling their destined office—to check excess in the progress of life, and maintain the balance of creation.” (I have that from Deborah Chadbury’s delightful book, The Dinosaur Hunters, on the early discoveries and the beginnings of a dinosaur bone industry, but it has been the most quoted passage right from the 1830s, coming up in penny magazines etc., and it’s a passage that also inspired a lot of the images from the time, see the Martin above, everlasting hills and carnage.)

The most impressive thing to the minds of people wasn’t the cannibalism, but the diverse species fighting each other, each with their own special anatomical outfit, their attack and defense weapons, their battle characteristics. Here is an illustration by Éduard Riou to Louis Figuier’s 1863 book The World Before The Deluge. You see an Ichthyosaurus and a Plesiosaurus going to battle. The outcome seems obvious, the Plesio doesn’t stand a chance. His enemy has a mouth full of sharp teeth for biting, and its own long neck seems the obvious point of attack. But still it’s going into the face-off with quite a swagger. I fear though it won’t help that Figuier suggests “the length and flexibility of its neck may have compensated for the want of strength in its jaws, and incapacity for swift motion through the water, by the suddenness and agility of the attack they enabled it to make on every animal fitted to become its prey.”

If Figuier’s suggestion makes you doubt the outcome of the fight, here’s a detail from de la Beche’s immensely popular drawing Ancient Dorset from 1830, which shows a large chunk of the antediluvian food chain in action. And right, the teeth are for biting, the neck is for being bitten. (Though we should maybe keep in mind that the survival of the fittest is not yet officially in place, so the matchings have no deeper meaning, rather these are aesthetic choices made by researchers and artists.)

Now we have two dinosaurs as battle creatures with their own special sets of attack and defense weapons that would help them on their sole reason for existence: survival. Their limited set of character traits actually seems to bring them closer to us, we can read their roles. Tell me you can look at the following painting from the same time as Max’s monkeys and feel no empathy for the subjects:

These are Dryptosauri by Charles Knight (who was to become a leading dinosaur painter, creating many images that are still used in books today) from 1897. Well, maybe the feeling I have is entirely subjective, maybe the dinos don’t lighten your heart as they do mine until it screams bloody masterpiece. And maybe the monkeys just look like monkeys because they in fact were, von Max lived with and studied the creatures in his home, while the dinosaurs of course are imagined and would automatically contain more human brainmatter than beings one could observe. But no, the dinos are also much more like individual characters, not like case studies. They look generations more modern than apes. If I admire them, it’s not because they’re cute like 15 years later Winsor McKay’s Gertie the Dinosaur. No, it’s because like in good comics action is psychology, and my empathy is triggered by the joie de vivre of this soon to be extinct creatures, and by their unconditional readiness to do heroic battle for survival in the face of extinction.

Albert Oehlen knows all that when it takes him just a few generous brushstrokes to outline this beach scene. Barbecue this is called (food culture again, here from 1981). The artist is completely aware how much the dinos bring to the table, and again it’s a family scene: parent and two kids talking survival over a plate of, what is it, whale fingers? (The artist himself by the way explains his choice of subject in looking for something as old as painting, since painting already was very old indeed, and then he struck on the dinosaurs.)

(Painting of course has so far survived.)

In their readiness for battle, and the knightlike armor, dinosaurs are fit for a place further down the evolution of comics than Disney or McKay’s Gertie. The world they act out more closely resembles the world of superheroes and villains. (You will notice that all reptiles introduced so far seem to have more individuality and intelligence and altogether more sociability than that stupid monster Godzilla, for example. There are other works, too, like the silent film Lost World from 1925 after Conan Doyle, where a family of stop-motion Agathaumas heroically fights an evil T-Rex. The later heartless monsters of Jurassic Park have nothing to do with that tradition, they just reflect a lack of human empathy, whereas the recent infamous tearjerker of a dinosaur scene in Terrence Malick’s Tree Of Life has a much better understanding of the ultimate meaning the dinosaurs take on when they become extinct for us.)

Impartial science, in its attempt to read the use of anatomy from a few strewn bones, not just happens to stress the fighting characteristics of each species (a tendency the discipline is of course critically self-aware of), but it enables the dinos to do battle in proper comic style. See this arbitrary illustration I scanned from my kids’ dinosaur book: it shows the most famous example of making weapons out of potentially harmless bones, the Iguanodon’s thumb. (Remember the guys from the Martin painting that are actually plant eaters. They do not kill for food.) It’s a little extra panel titled “The thumb spike in action,” and depicts how the Iguanodon would use this to slash an opponent’s face as with a knife. (I look the fact up on Wikipedia and they say one author has even suggested the thumb was attached to a venom gland. Awesome!)

The backside to their forward-looking awesomeness is that dinosaurs in comics are strangely unsatisfying, since they have nothing new to offer.

This panel is from Age Of Reptiles by Ricardo Delgado, the first book Tribal Warfare from 1993. Okay, there is something new, the dinos now know martial arts moves. And they can do tail swipes like a Batman backhander, with ornamental droplets of spray blood sailing through aesthetic zero gravity. They act even tougher than they used to, that corresponds to the fact you do not know if Batman is a good guy anymore. But if you look at the earlier pictures above, they all already breathe the same spirit. Our understanding of them is still the same: dinosaurs are about survival, that’s their task in life, and since we know they will fail, it’s their symbolic achievement. Evolution has given them weapons that slay like no natural weapons before or since, but in the end they must succumb to the law of Nature like the supervillain to the hero. But they will give awesome battle. The farthest Delgado can go is show a carnivore kill for pleasure, spitting out his victim after the deadly bite. Scroll up again to Martin’s Country Of The Iguanodon and you’ll find even more contentment in deadly violence.

Evolution goes on. Next up is the Jurassic Strike Force, I think they’re space aliens creating amped-up bodies from T-Rex genes for themselves to become the ultimate fighting gang of the galaxies (I kid you not), but that’s only next year. Until then, happy holidays.

2011-12-15T14:08:00.002+01:00

. . . and will of course continue to do so in a minute. Before we get to that, though, there are some art news from below: I’ve started contributing to Ed Howard’s comics blog, Thinking In Panels. I hope I will manage there what I had planned for this place also, to write quick posts about staring at things in awe and wonder. I have one or two longer crossover efforts in the works that you’ll get to read both there and here, but on the whole I will keep contributions separate, so if you’re interested you need to follow the other place, too.

Then, I have just ventured on a sort of project exploring certain aspects of sound in early film. It will take months before I will start writing on that, but for now you can go to this page, where I’ll collect audio digests I make of the movies in question. These will not so much focus on the quality of the sounds and ambiences themselves or be like little radio plays, rather I’m interested in the narrative possibilities of sound events, themes underlying the dialogue, andsoforth. I’m cutting them down for listening pleasure, and if you want you can download. As I write, only the first one is up, White Zombie from 1932.

The panel above is from the wonderful Alexander Ross (no not that one), one of the crossover posts I’m threatening you with.

An unseen painting of the future

2011-11-28T23:53:00.002+01:00

I’ve written 14 entries on paintings for Taschen’s new modern art primer. If you know me from this here blog, you might hardly recognize me, since they are proper introductions that go by all the rules and suffer from a lack of space, but I’m reasonably proud of them and I’ve tried to give every single one an original morsel of research or at least an unusual glance on things. Of course I can’t very well reprint anything here, but I’m listing the works in the comments, and if anybody for some strange reason should be interested in my take on one of those, drop me a line. Anyway, as a big hello to any reader arriving at this blog after checking out who wrote what in the book, here’s an extra for you, a piece of research that got lost when Julian Schnabel paintings were switched during the writing.

I was happy to get a chance to explore Schnabel more deeply, first because it finally made me go and rent The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, which of course is a marvelous movie against the overwhelming odds of both premise and style—just how crappy this should have been becomes clear in that screamingly bad 15 minutes from where that dreadful U2 song kicks in and turns a flashback into a corny commercial against narrative, fate, love or generally emotion . . . where was I? The second reason I wanted to work on Schnabel was because it allowed me to spend most of my fee on that marvelous sort-of-autobiography of his, CVJ: Nicknames Of Maitre Ds And Other Excerpts From Life, which I’d seen before and had wanted to own and read. And indeed it is now in my top three of books by artists, along with Christopher Wool’s Cats In Bag Bags In River and any novel by Félix Valloton. The book is great for the way Schnabel uses images of his work as sort of a counterpoint to the text, telling their own story, setting their own punchlines, teasing the author’s thoughts on art with their own part-irrelevance, used freely in complete disregard to dimensional proportions or other stuff you would usually not go against in an art book. Maybe more surprising is how good the writing actually is. Here’s an artist unashamedly full of himself, but humble before the art, his own and that of others, always wondering what it is that makes a painting great, that small detail that maybe doesn’t even work which makes the whole come alive. Yes, it’s all so full of life, with maybe the most vivid marginal artistic observations outside of George Moore.

I had a plate painting to discuss, a portrait of Ross Bleckner from 1985. Here’s how Schnabel describes how he hit on the plate paintings (right beside the image of a plate painting of Jesus on the cross): “I had had a funny idea that I could make a painting the size of the closet in my hotel room in Barcelona and that I could cover it with broken plates. A rendering of the shadows of the plates on the closet seemed futile. I couldn’t draw it so I thought it would be a good painting. Maybe the image of an unknown painting freed me to make a mosaic. My interest, unlike Gaudi’s, was not in the patterning or the design of the glazed tiles, it was in the reflective property of white plates to disturb the picture plane. The disparity between the reflectiveness of the plates and the paint were in disagreement with each other and the concept of mosaic, because they fractured its homogeneity. To be honest, I didn’t know what I was interested in,” but he continues to fabricate the beginnings of academic interpretations of this yet unrealized way of working.

Finally in the studio: “I laid one armature on the floor and started placing plates around. I started breaking them with a hammer. The absurdity of this act spurred me on. I didn’t know what kind of glue to use; I used tile grout, tile adhesive, I mixed joint compound with Rhoplex to make my own binding glue. I went to a dental-supply house and bought dental plaster for the surface, thinking it would be durable. The plaster came in beigish-pink and Naples yellow. Both colors looked like rotten gums . . . Before going to bed, at five in the morning, I stood the painting up. I knew it was too soon but I did it anyway. I was beat. I had glue on my hands and was too tired to wash it off. Lying in the dark I heard a little clink. You know when you’re driving your car and you hear a ping and you hope it’s nothing serious and then your engine falls out? I heard a big crash. I figured what was left on the painting when I woke up was what it would look like. I fell asleep to the rain of plates.” Of course one can feel he’s putting on a yarn, but it fits the paintings very well—and he rightly concludes this passage: “I had something in my studio, I thought it was alive.”

There is also a beautifully appreciative passage on the art of Ross Bleckner, the subject of my painting, in the book. And in it there is one detail that struck me, a sort of coincidence that somehow does leave a nagging feeling of not being quite coincidental, at least not if you’re fresh from watching The Diving Bell And The Butterfly. The middle paragraph goes like this: “Ross’s interest is in the unfolding on the inside, from one painting to the next. The real battle isn’t trying to make a finished product, whose product is only its own objectness or an attempt to please the art audience; the battle is to use a painting to locate some unseen painting in the future.”

Now the background of Schnabel’s portrait quotes paintings Bleckner was making at the time, in the mid-1980s, lights hovering in front of a dark ground. The broken plates, though, not only age the face of the artist somewhat prematurely, but also seem to presage certain more circular, cell-like forms in Bleckner’s work. Now look at this here photo of the man and especially his art in his Sagaponack studio, which he moved into in the early 1990s. In retrospect, he’s making true the words his friend had published in 1987, who, as we can see, herewith provably at least once has literally won that which he has called the real battle: the battle of using a painting to locate some unseen painting in the future.

Coming to

2011-10-29T00:37:00.009+02:00

It’s probably safe to say that during his invention of acousmatics Pierre Schaeffer did not listen to a Graham Lambkin record.

I’m reading up Schaeffer because I’m listening to Softly Softly Copy Copy, and there’s the sound of breakers crashing in the background, while upfront somebody’s stepping through the snow, very deliberately crunching each grain of snowcrust because the sound is so good, and over that enters an orchestra of meadowlarks (I don’t know birdsong, that just seems an appropriate bird name here) from up in the wings . . . and I start to feel queasy, and I swear it’s not because I would imagine myself to be in those incongruous places all at once, as Schaeffer keeps insinuating. Rather, my reaction is to an illicit violation of craft, an undisciplined buttering-up of layers of field recordings.

Schaeffer sees sound as an object removed from the circumstance of its production. When we listen, we are only to hear a sound, not the thing or the person or the circumstance that made it. His perspective is not so much analytically minded, but rather that of the creative artist who feels the need to push sound toward greater abstraction. So he bases his theory on an assumption that sounds would implicate their source, and he tries to severe that connection, while I, more of an art-historical bent, am not primarily interested in how a sound came to be, but more in what it references. This may still lead to the same questions, it is just a switch in perspective. Obviously I at once start wondering if the noises referencing wind, which permeate the record, are actually field-recorded through an unshielded microphone, or if they’re a distorted undecipherable something else. The recording perspective is important in Lambkin’s work, the fact of the recording stands between us and the sound, the recordist acts as the unreliable narrator, so explicit that Lambkin will occasionally do dreaded Beavis and Butthead impersonations (that’s not my comparison, but standard terminology) over the recordings—and I cannot remotely imagine the frame of mind necessary to listen to these kind of skits. I guess as blank comments on aural proceedings they make sense (though I’m not sure if they’re not taking the piss out of the dutiful listener, but anyway, you can safely listen to Softly Softly, no grunts and mumbles here).

Sound objects, that is what Schaeffer calls the sounds he has abstracted from their source and that are now realized in recordings. It’s a wonderful word, and a concept that helps listening to this music, where sound objects in time are presented and rearranged; and sometimes they fall in place harmonically, and sometimes our unreliable narrator barely keeps them together with a kind of sloppy determination, because this is a music that also speaks of accidents: rough-hewn loops and unexpected dropouts.

As the music switches between field recordings, instruments, and more unidentifiable noises, I start categorizing figurative sound objects (those that reference nature), then non-objective (the noises) and maybe representational ones (the instruments). This sort of gives me a framework where my curiosity about the sounds will not get in the way of listening to the music. I still lack the right attitude to keep the ears uncluttered . . . until I notice that I sort of listen to the entry of each sound as if I were just coming to . . . from a darkness, not knowing where I was, and the sounds were the only sensory input available, and I had to read them if I wanted to make sense again. These amplified details of sound might carry messages to tell me what I needed to know, if only I could fit the sound objects into a larger narrative.

I found this excerpt on youtube, you may press play now.

There’s a storm out there, compressed into an old movie soundtrack mood, and for a moment it seems as if a deep voice wanted to escape from its fold, but the storm transmission wins over, sometimes emulating feedback frequencies, soon calming a little. Dropping out, then starting anew as if a sample had come to an end without the performer noticing and were hastily triggered again to paste over the silence. The storm rises once more and then really dies down, and when after a pause it begins again, cued in by some crackle, this time I’m sure it’s the same sample, because the same deep voice seems to want to escape from the whine right at the beginning. Immediately the birds come in, solo birds that I’m sure are field recordings, but the accompanying flock, flying formations, seem to break into pure noise when they fly too near, so maybe I just imagine they’re birds because I expect them to be by association. This theme of sounds appearing to be figurative objects maybe only in context, but turning abstract when cranked up to more menacing foreground volume, stays throughout the record. Metal clangs mark time, later chimes are added, more obviously musical objects that act like a background score to the sound protagonists. Then there are steps in the snow, leftovers from another part of the story, again birds swelling into white noise (surely this also is a reference to the trautonium avians in the Hitchcock movie, wild turns of badly superimposed patterns of flocks of birds flitting across the aural landscapes). More wind, this time imitating a simulation of itself on a flute . . . Then creature noises . . .

There might be a way to listen to this and not ask what it is. But what for? The changes in the shapes of the sound objects are so deliberate, and as mentioned there are the sounds that resemble natural sources by association which then dissolve into staged scenes recorded in the studio (so the percentage of field recordings is probably much lower than I would think). I’ve said it somewhere before that the idea of music as the most abstract art (the condition of which all other arts aspire to) seems strange to me, and I guess that idea only could work as long as you the psychology of a performance as completely outside the piece itself (which I think makes no sense, see my earlier post on Marina Abramovic) . . . Take the classic jazz situation, sax steps up to the microphone: maybe a character known to you from other recordings, with a clear-cut set of musical attributes, lean or heavy, cool or fiery, a musical persona often augmented through choice biographical anecdotes. That character now handles the narrative across the changes for a chorus or two, each note an anecdote that tells of the past and other players, but keeps possibilities open. While the frame of the story is sort of prescribed (well, at latest on the second listen to a recording), there is always the distinct possibility of failure, of not living up to the powers the player is documented proving at other times, of lacking depth of character. The music will be experienced blow by blow, and can be read as a series of decisions (one can review a 1940s small group session in the manner of teamsports aftertalk), but what I take from it and remember is a deeper impression of that fictional character, the player.

Less clear-cut, but similar, a character is built when I listen to Softly Softly, most obviously through the decision-making process whose traces have not been obliterated but rather are presented proudly. A perceived personality, an opponent on the other side of the speakers, who loves accident, the degradation of sound, and grafting together the surf, the snow, the birds, creating a hybrid monster. A comic book Shakespearean cutting up the unity of place and time.

And Pierre still looks unhappy because this music is just too damn concrete.

Over a hundred slaps

2011-10-23T01:27:00.002+02:00

He Who Gets Slapped from 1924 is a somewhat lackluster movie, given what one would expect from the combined mad energies of director Victor Sjöström (watch The Phantom Carriage instead) and actor Lon Chaney (watch The Penalty instead). Apart from some refreshing moments, such as the main character’s open delight at the bloody carnage committed by a lion he has let loose (for reasons that would only disappoint you, watch West Of Zanzibar instead), it’s stale waters, with a storyline straight out of an impotent teenage revenge fantasy (as in: they’re gonna be sorry once I’m dead), and the clichéd circus setting also doesn’t help (watch The Unknown instead). Still, the movie is interesting for the brilliant setpiece it revolves around, a circus performance that deserves a reading separate from the machinations that it motors.

Chaney plays a scientist who has made a discovery which will bring him fame and fortune. Unfortunately his presentation at the academy is hijacked by his baron benefactor, who claims the discovery as his own and immediately proceeds to move in with the scientist’s sweetheart. The man barely survives this both emotional and professional shock, and lives on only “to laugh at life.” . . . Years later we meet him in the circus ring, where he is realizing his little scheme for maximum laughter and abjection: “The brilliant scientist had, with a supreme gesture of contempt, made himself a common clown,” a title card informs us. He has designed a lavish production number with tons of allegorical props carried around, which circles around HIM, the clown, receiving as many slaps from his entorage as he possibly can: HE will make commonplace pronouncements about the world being round or flat and receive immediate punishment. As the man is gang-slapped and carried around in mock burial procession, the audience fall over themselves in hysterical laughter. There is a simple correlation between number of slaps received and audience gratification: “Over a hundred slaps last night, HE—you lucky fellow! Soon you’ll be getting famous,” his colleagues cheer him backstage.

There is a subversive element in this a priori assumption that schadenfreude will give the viewer such immediate pleasure:

Well it isn’t true, since I don’t laugh, I protest, but of I course know a whole industry of physical comedy was then thriving on the automatized feelgood factor of schadenfreude. So other people laughed, and they still do. It’s a nice touch that the title card is putting the physical slap last, to insinuate that when you have laughed at somebody slipping on a banana peel, you will of course have laughed at somebody taking a spiritual beating. The performance builds on cultural assumptions that are true even if you don’t recognize yourself in their generalized features. You are made to take responsibility for why the others laugh.

The clown takes each beating with glee, because every slap raises even more violent laughter and thus makes the performance worthier, as if being slapped were somehow a personal achievement, as if the quality of performance and the feedback of an audience under the artist’s control would only in turn provoke the slaps from extras who have been hired to perform that task. Again, shifting responsibilities toward an audience that is given no choice, and stressing the involuntarily participatory nature of this work.

The most famous slapfest in art history is of course the performance Light/Dark by Marina Abramovic and Ulay from 1977. The score is simple, it reads: “In a given space. We kneel, face to face. Our faces are lit by two strong lamps. Alternately, we slap each other’s face until one of us stops.”

In the beginning, the two are almost like a slow kinetic sculpture. Arms are stretched, their weight is made visible, hands are placed on cheeks with great deliberation. Volume in space, skin over bone, movement against mass. There seems no great psychology involved—here are merely two performance artists taking their craft seriously. Soon the slapping becomes automatic, and the need for development arises, for a sort of story arc. Thus the slapping accelerates. Abramovic sets the pace, she hits quickly, impatiently, to get each slap over with, she doesn’t really hit for effect. Ulay keeps up the deliberation, giving his slaps a little twist from the wrist. He’s obviously the more powerful, the one more into the act. But also, he anticipates each slap he receives, screwing his face up harder and harder in anticipation. He is closer to play-acting, or maybe one could compare him to a guitar soloist making discrete faces.

They speed up. Once they’re over a hundred slaps each, this looks like serious work. While the determination doesn’t flag, the steadily but slowly accelerating tempo drags a bit storywise, though. There is no place this can go really. Except of course if real emotion were involved, and they’d start hating each other, or pretending to. But they are too damn professional for that. The slaps get faster and harder, though the arms must ache by now, still the actors/actionists stay neutral. Cheeks are deformed and lazily wobble back into shape. Ulay makes ever sillier faces. Then he swings, and Abramovic feints, moving her head back, and that’s it. The merest hint of a disappointed expectation of post-coital relief.

There is a traditional reading to this, how it is about violence, preferably domestic violence. The male indeed does appear dominant, his slaps have a power that forbid true equality of the sexes. If Abramovic’s reactions wouldn’t be so short-tempered, if she’d put more thought into strategy, things might look better for womanhood—as it is, the man gets way more slapping time. I, the viewer, support all of this, I am again a responsible bystander. And I’m not just part of the narrative, like in the Chaney film, instead my pretenses to being an art connoisseur endorse these acts of violence (and that’s not mere theory, remember the performance where audience members had to save Abramovic from suffocating after she had fainted inside a circle of fire).

Still, since everything remains in control, I can gauge my own emotional reactions as if under laboratory conditions in real time: does it hurt me more when the woman is slapped, why is that, how come it seems
wrong both when I feel for the woman and when I don’t?

I would want to see Ulay cry . . .

I cannot work up any emotional involvement, though, these are just reactions my mind tells me I’m supposed to have. Because what I see is still only two professionals who are damn good at doing their work. I see two athletes trying to overcome their physical limitations for the best possible performance. On top of that, their show has a solid theme. Their images translate immediately and with force. The audience reaction is as hardwired as the laughter in He Who Gets Slapped. Only, where the film had the fictional audience on the screen react as a postulate of my own behavior, and I was free to react against that, Abramovic and Ulay leave me no freedom except to quit reading their performance figuratively and instead view the abstract effort.

And then she dodges a hit, and, though after 20 minutes as a watcher you’re somewhat blunted, you still think: that’s it? No more? The average boxer takes much more. Lon Chaney took much more, he’d been stabbed and stood up dying to take another slap. That was the limit? Pussies.

If this were not my blog but I was paid for 500 proper words, then I’d have to give you the whole iconographical works about domestic violence and such. Funnily, though, I suspect I’d have the artist’s support in not believing the iconographic implications of this piece. The catalog for Abramovic’s 2010 MoMA retrospective comes with a CD that contains her commentary track to the catalog, page by page (a brilliant idea which unfortunately lacks in the execution, since her voice mostly repeats well-chewed over statements to the works illustrated). Her comment on Light/Dark was still a surprise to me, the shortest of all, a mere ten seconds: “Light/Dark piece was really about the sound. It’s about how to use the body as a sound instrument.”

Now if one took that seriously, this would be the most crappy piece of sound art ever. Instead I take it as a permission not to believe in the psychological implications that this performance's iconography seems to suggest.

The Placeholders

2011-09-13T17:56:00.000+02:00

“I wonder,” thought the Hedgehog, “if the horse lies down to sleep, will it choke in the fog?” And slowly he began to make his way downhill to get into the fog and see for himself what it was like inside there. “Oh, look! I can’t see my paw!” —S. Kozlov

Look here are human beings too

Let us begin at the beginning, in the primordial stew, if you will. A sauce made from fresh tomato, zucchini, and canned tuna fish, cooked by the artist himself in 1998. It struck me then that while this was his first painting which had immediately to do with our reality, it wasn’t a simple still life, wasn’t about a hard stare at what’s in front of you. Instead I called it an icon as it guarded over what mattered in our lives: this sauce over spaghetti independently served as our staple food all through our student days. It must have been a spiritual thing, since it didn’t even taste good, none of us ever found out how to prepare it correctly, so the tuna tended to take on an awful wet cardboard texture. Still we cooked that sauce, again and again. The painting now sits on my bookshelf and stares me hard in the back of the neck as I write this.

And here we should be reasonably close to the real beginning in art-historical terms. It’s a phalanx of small paintings which contain a lot of the formal explorations to follow while still being grounded in a small patch of home turf. These are Stadien from 2001 in an early playful hanging. The title translates as either arenas or as stages in a development. And truly these pieces contain several stages, most apparent a balancing of the representational versus the abstract that very systematically tackles right at the outset of Tim Eitel’s oeuvre a fundamental problem every painter has to find a stance on. The choice of a sports court feels obvious for that task, since it has straight and regularly curved lines painted on it—a utilitarian drawing from real life that can be balanced into a satisfying composition.

Even in paintings that might seem to exist for purely formal reasons, we should at least take the time and check the subject for emotional content. So suppose these were sports courts in the life of the young artist, who wouldn’t take to ball games naturally. Out on the court, in his attempt to avert the gaze from active play so that his teammates would not pass him the ball, his eye would necessarily hit on these angles . . .

I ask him if there’s anything to that and he says no.

In one of the paintings, there is a fashion-conscious woman standing with her gaze directed toward the left edge, and another canvas sees a female figure partly outside the frame. The shadows they cast on the scene make it clear that they’re standing in front of a landscape painting within a painting. People gazing at paintings or at nature as if it were a painting, viewers striking poses as role models or model recipients, this kind of double play, with or without a single remove, was to become central over the next work period . . . but the two paintings also reach out toward the present work: a boy in a fog bank, throwing a shadow unto the thick soup surrounding him, as if it were a picture he was considering to enter.

I have what feels like a distinct recollection of staying in the artist’s studio at the old Leipzig cotton mill for a visit. I’m sure it’s a composite memory, patched together from different situations, still it’ll have to do: waking up very early as the light hit unrestrained through the huge windows of the old redbrick, I was lying on a mattress on the gray concrete floor—a smooth, unreal gray, since the artist had just painted over the traces of earlier occupants with a fresh coat of color. Somebody was up already practicing cello down the hall, sounding like a hangover from the relentless pounding of the downstairs club called Tangofabrik through most of the night. I looked up at a painting on the wall hit by yellow sunlight, there was the half figure of a young woman in profile, with her gaze directed toward the left edge of the canvas, and where as a backdrop I remembered there used to be sky and a landscape with trees and stuff when I’d last seen it yesterday, there now was something like a smooth concrete wall with a huge round window, inscribing the figure in a near perfect circle, and somehow the thought bothered me of the landscape buried beneath the clean outlines as I tried to go to sleep again.

Now these were the two work groups at the heart of the oeuvre until the mid-decade: people viewing art within gallery spaces, inscribed into the dynamic of modernist architecture, or people out in recreational areas, as close to nature as one would get on a daytrip from urban civilization.

The museum interiors felt absolutely spot-on, because it made immediate sense for the artist to explore the uses his paintings would serve at that early point in his career. So yes of course these would become commodity objects for the white cube (within that strangely apart system, the art world, that strangely allows an artist to do great work both for and against it), and they would become respectable carriers of cultural tropes hanging on museum walls. Both his own paintings or classics from Mondrian to Murakami made their cameos, and the painted viewers measuring up to them brought their own self-conscious pose into the painted exhibition space, and the resulting confrontation made both parties look good. The spaces could become quite close, though, the paintings quite dark, especially when there were no discernible artworks to fix the gaze and the museum architecture became a tailor-made enclosement of the pictured viewer frozen in the futile defense of a doubtful gesture.

The full impact of these paintings could of course only be experienced in an actual exhibition situation, when the real-life viewer was all but forced to relate to the posturing on view. Here are two snapshots I took at the solo exhibition in Backnang in 2005. The first reaction you see is imitation (the woman mimicking the pose in the painting was by the way not talking about the art, while she drew the sleeves halfway over her hands instinctively feeling cold for the bathing figure behind her).

The second photo shows the self-consciousnesses of a whole catalog of viewers side by side, trying to emulate the reflective pose of the protagonist on the picture itself. Here the classic back figure, which we know so well especially from romantic paintings—and Caspar David Friedrich has often been cited as a main influence on the artist—is extended into the room by the viewer, of course referencing the pretty sorry tradition of installation photographs that show the work with a viewer in front of it to gain a sense of proportion and not make the artwork look quite so lonely.

Of course I do not know how a contemporary viewer would really have felt facing the back of a figure in a Caspar David Friedrich painting; today at least these have aged less well than the landscape in front of them. Maybe it’s just the clothing, but these back figures are hard to identify with, instead I’d rather elbow them out of the way because they stand between myself and the (sublime) subject. I may be aware that the figure does the same thing as me, staring at nature in more or less wonderment, but the distance in time and fashion has become so great that it doesn’t make me empathetically self-aware.

The fact that I find it much easier to identify with Tim Eitel’s paintings, no matter if they take place in nature or a museum, may be because they depict people just like me. But then it also may be that they in return identify with me more closely. You will probably know Friedrich’s Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog, an arrogant fop standing on a boulder looking down on ridges drowned in clouds, all lofty aspirations, and if you want to read uncertainty of fate into that master figure (as is usually done), you have to paint both man and nature as two superheroic forces holding each other in deadlock.

Against that, for the kid standing facing the fogbank we’ve seen above, it is composure in the face of the unknown that is his own little victory. “Oh, look! I can’t see my paw!”

So when we went out into the countryside, as far as daytrip would take us, we went there to view nature as if it were art. So estranged were we that we managed to consume what we were supposed to be part of in the first place, be it art, or nature. We were not scrambling about as the figures in Friedrich’s Rügen, that satire on mass tourism, but kept our distance, not out of awe, more out of an awkward sense that the pose would not resonate as in more accustomed surroundings.

Landscape is a huge topic, and a painter will have to compete against, say, both a Ruysdael, who portrayed the gnarly souls of trees, and a Gainsborough, who painted deliciously feathery brushes straight out of landscape gardening. Today, the backdrop has receded even farther. The woman in Abend from 2003, after she has overstepped the sand trail that marks the visual borderline between foreground and distance, will still remain a tourist in her own painting. While the artist takes us as far as we’re willing to go, there can be no beyond within that line of questioning.

It’s a privilege of close familiarity with an artist that you get to root for them and feel emotionally involved in every step of their development. You start guessing what’s up next, and will they hit the exact point when they need to come up with something new, or will they have to tread water until a pathbreaking idea finally materializes. Will the next exhibition reveal a luminous masterpiece, or will you have to apply your utmost connoisseurship to dig up the hidden qualities within the art to save face in front of anyone who knows that you somehow care.

When the artist went to the U.S. in 2005, first to L.A., then New York, I of course had placed my bets on how L.A.’s sunny, car-driven culture and New York’s picturebook metropolism must surely affect the painting (I’ve never been to these places, so I have to operate on suchlike clichés, I’m afraid). Just see these photos the artist as a young man took on a tourist trip to New York: the city looked like film noir and early Jarmusch alright.

In retrospect I notice that I’ve constructed a very pat narrative, where everything fits a little too well together, grounded just firmly enough in something resembling reality that I can’t help doing it. The storyline runs like this: as soon as the artist arrived at the West Coast, his paintings became all dark gray and muddy, like he was overcompensating beach life through some extra heavy interior sunglasses.

And when the artist settled in New York in 2006 (here a view from his studio window that, mostly due to the bridge, meets all my expectancies for a stylish locale there), it felt like his subject matter would change completely. He produced some large canvases that leant themselves to metaphor, showing detachments of people in environments whose level of abstraction seemed potentially hostile. And then there were pictures almost as blunt in topic as they were shadowy in treatment, of homeless people or still lifes of their belongings on shopping carts, all in shades of gray so dull they sucked the light out of any exhibition space.

When I see Rauch from 2006, my first reaction is to fondly remember how I read Jules Verne as a child. Verne’s calculated and rather pedantic sense of wonder taught me how to build something concrete out of the unruly figments of imagination. Even if that concrete thing might not be as sublime as originally projected, at least it now existed. Here, it’s the writer’s Journey to the Center of the Earth that the figures seem to fit into, when they’re traveling through cathedral-like caves made of thick smoke over a flat ground. Shrunk and sent on a fantastic voyage into their inner selves. These are just associations that I have, and not intended references on the artist’s part, but anyway, it is this kind of narrative space that opens up—running deeper than the media imagery of explosions and other catastrophes that you might associate with the smoke formations—when you try to decipher the gray ground in the paintings of this period. The gray isolates the anecdotal evidence appearing within, framing it, and attributing it special import. As we’ve seen, earlier figures tended to be isolated by abstract lines and planes that could have happened in real-life spaces, which meant a sort of home to them. But here in the smoke, there is nothing outside, all is concentration along the one sightline, a single, possibly inward view.

As these figures do not have an aestheticized arrangement of lines and planes to call a home, and they do not find themselves anchored within the socializing context of a clever composition, they instead become the sole focal points of their paintings, worlds unto themselves, their own centers of gravity, attracting discarded movable property. Their energy, though, makes that the pictures are not completely dark, there is some warmth, even tenderness.

It all happens in the safety of the studio (now set up in Paris), a laboratory for flattening the world ideally in a way that seems to add an extra dimension. So could this be an exploitation art, in the same way that painters have used the graphic violence of Christian mythology or the sensual thrill of perfumed exoticism? I’d say no, since the art will not use the individual subject as material for metaphor, or as an ornament in formalism, but instead it is an art about that individual, in and out of the picture.

You must believe in painting for this. You must believe in some sort of transfiguration taking place on the canvas. What that transfiguration might be, apart from the work involved and the skill and focus, is not easy to define. A simple camping bed can become pregnant with meaning when it is painted. Is that too easy an achievement? The outcome indeed depends on the layers of meaning hidden in the object itself (as it does in object art based on the readymade).

The most loaded subject of course is the human figure, but it also can be the most meaningless if it only suggests a vague “us” as a species. Then again, even when we can’t sufficiently read the figure’s alignments or its individuality, the surroundings might still offer it up as a placeholder for our own sensibilities. That is what most of Tim Eitel’s larger gray paintings do. The small canvases, on the other hand, often get quite close to the subject, sometimes approaching the anecdotal in the process, projecting somebody to identify with. Of course identification in art is different from the narrative media, like film: there are no role models, a painting will mostly offer a gesture or expression that has immediacy and a surprising similarity to whatever the viewer will bring to the picture with a desire for it to be completed. The process is subjective and mood-dependent, yet it has to do with truthfulness of depiction.

Or maybe the viewer identifies through the brushwork. Think of Adriaen Brouwer, who dealt in painting country yokels in pub fights for the urban dweller to feel superior to. As soon as his simple subjects take a breath, he can’t help lending them a sense of dignity that seems to almost unavoidably come with him being so fine a painter. I still do not feel very close to his people, again, like with Friedrich, I cannot bridge the centuries, and his original customers would presumably have felt a similar distance. But as we slowly begin to make our way into the painting and see for ourselves what it has to offer, the truth of it becomes delightfully clear, and we make connection. “Look here are human beings too.”

(This post is a slight edit of my essay for the catalog to Tim’s current exhibition at Hakgojae gallery in Seoul. No colors today, since that was our original plan for the references, large spreads in glorious black and white.)

A roomful of replicas

2011-06-25T23:37:00.005+02:00

Tomorrow morning I'm off to Berlin for the opening of the Keith Rowe exhibition at Lüttgenmeijer. Should you check this blog because you've been there, have read the embedded remix of my Rowe essay (see below) for the occasion, and are curious for more: there will be another post on the artist up in a couple of weeks or so, right after a vicious slapfight between Lon Chaney and Marina Abramovic. Stay tuned . . .

UPDATE, early September. As you can tell, I've been distracted. Some of the stuff I've been writing can eventually go up here, too, but I'll have to wait till some grass grows over it. I had hoped I could meanwhile link you to the Rowe essay mentioned above, but it's still not up on the gallery site yet. So if you want to read it, just drop me a line at spurdertoene[at]mail.com, and I will send you a pdf.

UPDATE, two days later. Ha! You can now download a pdf with exhibition views and the text of my essay from the gallery site. Additional payoff to this document is how conscentiously I took the fact that I hadn't yet seen one of these works in the original, that it might completely change my perception to encounter them in the flesh, only to be greeted by a roomful of replicas!

Cheers, Lutz

My gaze holds the tableau in balance

2011-05-11T01:33:00.000+02:00

The right figure is the artist. Well, at least it looks like him, and everyone takes it to be a self-portrait, but he says it isn’t or at least we’re not supposed to be sure. But I say to him, look, that guy sees into the future, the back of his head tells me that, and the future for a figure in a painting can only be the finished painting, and only the artist can visualize that. I’m not really sure, though, what makes me know that he’s looking into the future, that he’s seeing shapes taking form within the fogbank looming before him. Is it just that overly ambitious posture in which he lies there consuming, devouring nature? If he’s not careful he’ll pop a vertebra—this guy relaxes like Tom Cruise on the run. Of course, he has reason to be a little nervous, since as the artist he’s the only one in the picture who consciously feels the viewer’s gaze piercing his back. He feels we’re judging his performance, on more than one level.

In the middle, that is the art. Not a symbolic personification of all art, but a stand-in for the works that the artist painted before, pictures of individuals that could not function as they seemed lost to their surroundings which receded to make room for an isolating gray. Sometimes homeless people, like this figure now lying shoeless on a thin blanket. His head is still wrapped in foggy reminiscence of the past, but it seems like a withdrawal into self-awareness is imminent. An action, a small defensive movement, will suffice for a complete change of position.

On the left, that’s me. (I’m half-pissed that I don’t have a cameo here, after all the artist, Tim Eitel, is my brother, so he should one day put me out of my mortality.) No, I’m only in the picture as the viewer. My gaze holds the tableau in balance, my knowing acceptance of things as they are. I do not meddle with the art. I seem to have a defeatist sense of humor. I tell the viewer without the picture how to read the scene, my attitude reveals that the misty mass is not The Fog of movie stardom, a natural habitat for things that will kill us. It is more like the inner void as an alive canvas for projections.

If the above reads a little too willful, of course it is. What desire I feel to project any kind of concrete meaning into the figures stems from their subtle incongruousness: they are almost like collaged together. The scene isn’t a group, all three postures seem so individual. Where are they from? The right figure, as it lies by the water, makes me think of a fountain by Ammannati, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the middle were a variation on a posture from that supreme quarry of existential poses, The Raft of the Medusa. But somehow the possibility of art-historical references doesn’t interest me here. Reflection the painting is called. But none of the protagonists is aware of the reflected image of self. Which does bring us to another artwork, Caravaggio’s Narcissus, of all the pond paintings I can think of the most relevant here.

The Caravaggio painting is supposed to be about a youth who cannot avert his gaze from a reflection of his own beauty (and he will die for that and, if we follow Ovid’s silly conceit, sort of turn into a flower). It doesn’t at all look like it, though. We do not see the youth lost in himself, but rather locking gaze with his other half, which is reflected in the pond. Since they both part off the space between them in almost a perfect circle, with the knee at the heart (in Caravaggio I’m sure with strong sexual connotations) it seems more like pondering the pond itself, from both sides. Reflecting upon nature to come closer to our own nature, a study of life force and the way we contain the whole world within ourselves because we cannot see from outside and must remain self-centered.

And this, more complex but less to the point, is about where Tim’s painting takes off, too. Three attitudes towards that, maybe. Tim’s effort is not allegory, that was what immediately struck me when I first saw the painting hanging in the gallery: it was not, like many of Tim’s earlier efforts, a painting that tried to be about people. Take his Boat from 2004, it is splendid allegory on the human condition, but the artist’s viewpoint is from above, indicating the demiurgic will to make that scene happen before our eyes. In Reflection (from 2010, by the way), we’re really all in the same boat, or rather on the same narrow strip of wasteland. Protagonist, artist and beholder alike. And, I don’t know, that made me feel upbeat when I saw it. It’s such an optimistic painting, did you notice?

All ego is lost to meaning

2011-03-23T01:29:00.001+01:00

“As a painter, Arnold Schönberg was a one-hit wonder. You will find The Red Gaze from 1910 in a lot of modern art primers, despite the fact that it’s a pretty bad painting. (Should you feel in the mood to challenge that verdict: look at the shape of the eyes. They have been carefully drawn by an artist biting his tongue, and they carry no expression all. The superficial energy of the gaze lies solely in the make-up.) Why has this picture become a part of the wider canon? And not one of those that look more interesting to our eyes today, like the clumsy proto-Gustons and the hilarious proto-Condos? (Well, apart from the fact that our painting has come to look like the ghost of Andy Warhol?) . . .”

That’s only a teaser, if you want to read on you have to get issue 6 of Eartrip, a pdf mag on freely improvised and other adventurous musics edited by David Grundy. My article is not about Schönberg, but rather the visual art of two European musicians, Peter Brötzmann and Keith Rowe, explored mostly through what they have put in the gallery of their record covers. Do download, give it a read, then report back.

Thanks. I’ve lately been thinking much about the use of references, how they work or don’t, and if there’s an established way of reading them. Simply because I can’t help doing it myself, even if it doesn’t really interest me: still, you want to pretend you’re doing hard science onto a piece of contemporary art, then you have to sleuth out unconscious forebears and conscious references and write an ersatz art history around them. Is that kind of thing more rampant now than it has been? Since I have neither the authority nor the miles for blanket statements diagnosing trends, I am lucky to have stumbled across a Frieze article by Dan Fox, who thinks the fault is in the art, not in the way I read it. “Confusing the footnote with the essay,” he calls this bad habit: “Sociologists use the term ‘prostheses’ to describe how people use the symbolic value of the clothes they wear or items they own in order to demonstrate their cultural competence or literacy. In contemporary art, we can identify this in the referential turn—‘X work references Robert Smithson, Martin Heidegger’s theory of Dasein and the music of Donna Summer in order to . . .’ etc. As a strategy that has permeated the way much work is made and is signposted for interpretation, it has now entered its mannerist phase. Critical value gets transferred from the formal or conceptual functions of objects and images to the collection and arrangement of impeccably chosen cultural products, events and historical allusions. In many cases (though not all), the auratic value of a well-appointed suite of references creates a smokescreen of illusory scholarship and can falsely imply an historical lineage between the artist doing the referencing and the thing being referenced. It masks the fact that creatively little is being done such sources in the first place.”

I agree with most of that, except for the underlying value system. (And hey, I’m more aggressively highbrow than Fox, since I mention Renaissance hermeticism in my discussion of Rowe’s rich table of connotations, while Fox talks of a “mannerist phase”—these being two currents within the same intellectual movement.) In contrast I enjoyed myself, I had a field day trying to decode the Rowe paintings a little beyond the artist’s remarks published in interviews, and with reasonable success, I flatter myself. The central point here may be that the art doesn’t expect me to be able to read anything out of it, the connotations are in there not for purposes of communication, but because the artist feels that they should be in there. And when I put some effort in, I get the reward of discovering that all is in place for a reason, and I learn to trust the artist even where I’m clueless. Which means from then on I simply dare to enjoy without intellectual remorse. (Trust being a fundamental virtue in contemporary art.) The references don’t seem about establishing an “illusory scholarship,” but rather about the artist placing himself through thoughts and enthusiasms. Now excuse me while I quote Jeff Koons, who seems to have regularly recurring epiphanies in front of his own recent photoshop collage paintings: “When I look at the paintings and realize all the historical references, it’s as if, for a moment, all ego is lost to meaning.” To him, it’s about “the dialog of art,” and I think his approach works very well. While his new paintings are later work that is way past ambition, and while (despite the continuing myth of perfectionism and a workforce of dozens in the studio) the execution has mostly become rather sloppy, when Koons layers a doodle after Courbet’s Origin Of The World with the blow-up of a drawing that his own kid has done, then that is conceptually a beautiful move.

And then I think of Stop, Repair, Prepare, a smash hit from 2008 for Allora & Calzadilla, who destroy a grand piano (referencing Fluxus) by sawing a round hole into it (referencing Matta-Clark), preparing the strings (referencing Cage) and sticking a musician through the hole (referencing Andrea Neumann’s inside piano), who plays the “Ode to Joy”—well, that makes Beethoven part of the form of the work, so that’s not a reference, but since the music’s a readymade of course it references Duchamp, and the performance history of the music references Furtwängler’s Dilemma and the whole Erbauungskultur of the Nazis . . . Stop, Repair, Prepare is well crafted, rich with surface text, a pleasing arrangement of meanings behind historical probabilities and performative facts, there is the real-life allegory of the player pushing a piano around the gallery and some music everybody can hum to.

But what have they done to the references? The “Ode to Joy,” I learn from the catalog, was actually played in 1933 at the laying of the foundation stone of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, where official Nazi art would be shown during the Third Reich. That was also the place where Allora & Calzadilla’s piece was first realized, and at that exact spot the choice of music makes real and deep sense. But when the piece is exported to gallery spaces, that sense seems to vanish behind a smokescreen indeed: the artists’ “research” collected in the catalog tells me that “The Ode to Joy” was adopted as the National Anthem of Rhodesia, it served as a soundtrack to a popular japanese anime series, Pope Benedict likes it and so do the Maoist guerilla of Peru, it was played at the official bringing down of the Berlin wall and at the 1938 Reichsmusiktage for a pleased Adolf Hitler . . . it goes on and on, a bit much for a single work of art to handle. It’s often unfair to quote catalog essays, but here we go: Allora & Calzadilla “dismantle Beethoven’s ‘hymn to humanity.’” That’s a brave act. What worked so very well with the very concrete frame of reference at the original place of performance, now has become overblown holier-than-thou scattershot self-importance for easy consumption.

The other two major references don’t fare much better. The circular hole in the piano transforms it into a shell for the player, and the artists have even switched the piano pedals so that they show inwards and can still function. That is all so very useful (despite the Sisyphean note of the player having to push the grand around, it’s still useful for the purpose of performance) and it has nothing to do whatsoever with Matta-Clark ripping up the shells of our cocoons, except an exact quote of the form. Same with Cage: the piano is prepared to somehow distort the music, which is an evergreen through ages and cultures. That’s a most questionable act of having your cake and eating it: taking the most popular music in the world and delighting everybody with the fact that they will recognize it, then incorporating some token strange sounds so it all will appear like serious art. Which has of course nothing to do with experimental music, or music period. In fact I think it’s pretty offensive, pure exploitation of something that has come to signify eternal avant-garde. And the exploitation is what makes the piece so popular, even with the critics, despite the fact it has no more poetry than a table of contents. Oh wait, Roberta Smith says it has poetry.

If only it were really in homage to Andrea Neumann (hey, they’re all part of the Berlin scene, they should know each other). It would simply be called Innenklavier, they would stick her in it and she’d perform funny noises in off-spaces. That would be brilliant, even with the strings attached.

An obsession with innovation

2011-03-19T14:56:00.001+01:00

Just a short postscript to my earlier post on Carl Hofer. I have found the kitchen painting I’d been looking for: Girl With Coffee Grinder from 1954. My memory for once hasn’t betrayed me, it’s a touching painting full of worldliness. Stylistically it is obvious that Hofer took his cue mostly from the late efforts of the French old masters of classical modernism, to try and loosen himself up a little. Contentwise, this is oh so literal, right down to the clock: Darn it we’re late already, coffee hour is 4pm sharp in this household. Ah, what is the silly girl dreaming about again.

If one considers the turf battle Hofer was involved in during these years, one might expect every single painting from him would read like a manifesto. He was busy fighting an “obsession with innovation that had taken on the form of a sickly hysteria serving nobody except the vain craving for recognition of the so-called avant-gardists.” (Thoughts On Abstract Art from that same year, 1954.) He viciously (in post-war Germany) equaled being part of the current art movements with blindly following “the party.” In an interview with a glossy, the 75-year old director of the Berlin Art Academy confessed, “When I found out how easy non-figurative painting was, I quickly lost interest in the genre,” which lead to quite a storm in the tea pot with several colleagues leaving the German Künstlerbund in protest. And Hofer backs it all up with a dreamy coffee grinder in a funny nouvelle vague hat, the gratuitous amount of her visible undergarment suggesting that he’s playing a sickly bourgeois and repressedly wanton Greuze to Picasso’s Fragonard. Which is a good thing for one single picture.

The first commercially released electric coffee grinder hit the German market two years later and was a smashing success right from the start.

Of human ambition

2011-01-29T01:50:00.000+01:00

I don’t usually do hilarious, but this is irresistible. A Henry Moore book from 1973 called Energy In Space. If you’re not immediately sure what the above image does to you, let me read you the front flap: “All at once the beholder grasps, in a truly elemental way, the aims of one of the greatest artists of our century and becomes aware of those parallels and affinities which fuse the sculptures with their environment.” All at once, so quit brooding and immerse. See what strength the female figure gains (symbolized by the very determined block of a right forearm) from the mammary dome rising behind her. It mimicks a desert landscape, and immediately the parched skin of the sculpture begins to crack under the dry heat.

The premise of the book actually makes sense. Art in public space seldom gets to fuse with the sublime. See to the right the Moore I’ve grown up with (I took this recent image from wikimedia, I couldn’t find a historical one which shows where it reclined when I was little, it had a spot of grass to itself). Isn’t it sad how inevitably, humorlessly it is displayed now for one-way aesthetic consumption? Which of course works very well, she’s a pro, and she has aged in dignity, growing verdigris wrinkles—but she might as well sit in a cage. When instead she should have a coastline for a Recamier.

There is something I haven’t told you yet. “The photographs included in this volume are the fruits of several years of collaboration between Henry Moore and John Hedgecoe, Head of the Photography Department at the Royal College of Art in London.” Well. Several years of collaboration. Fruits. Hm, at least I guess I can say I had safely filed Moore away and might never have spent a thought on him again if it weren’t for these “photos.” I usually like Moore, because his sculpture engages the eye and mind in a way that makes traditional values of the medium come alive. When I look at the image to my left, I see the challenge of a problem of form. I become part sculptor myself and try to balance the figure over the cliff a little more comfortably. In contrast to the brutalism of, say, Serra and the school of rust, the scope of Moore’s sculpture seems so very human, and the ambition also seems human. At least I thought so . . .

Imagine the frustration eating up the 75-year old shared greatest artist of the century, mother of all art in public space with a reason for existence. He has strategically occupied every district in the world, mankind learns aesthetics through coping with his problems of form, recreation parks are defined by their ability to picturesquely backdrop a Moore. Still, he needs a rough pair of scissors to effectively fuse his works with nature. How sad must it be to be able to envision an artwork that’s on an equal footing with nature, to be able to deliver that work, and then to have to live with the fact that the best habitat it can hope for is a few shrubs on a trampled spot of green where the dogs do their business. Is it any wonder, then, that there is a secret desire he harbors in his cooling heart: to rape a lakeside with two oval shapeshifters in nazi dimensions, two giant golden needle eyes through which a rich man can drive his tanker truck over the dead body of the landscape?

Here’s the image at the heart of Energy In Space which tells it all. If it helps you read it: the work the artist pushes around is Two-Piece Knife-Edge. I think the central light must be in allusion to Moore’s atom pieces. Other than that, I give up.

The most representational monochrome abstractions in human history

2011-01-17T12:53:00.001+01:00

The artist Rudolf Reiber (remember, he of the Caromboat) has now put everything he ever did or has heard rumored about him into a comprehensive website, as artists should today, because its plain boring when a name that comes up is not immediately exhaustible at a click of the mouse. (The only problem for me here would be that usually no names come up, so my art conversation goes something like: the artist who did the thing with the other thing in it, now that was quite good, I seem to recollect . . . maybe, but did it remind me of something that, like, I’ve seen before, we were in that exhibition together, or was it that art mag?)

Anyway, Rudolf’s site is eminently visitable, and best of all he has his catalogs for grabs as free pdfs, so if you click Words and then Books on the left, you can download German Skies from 2010 and, should you read German or French, follow my instructions on how to approach the pieces step by step. After that, of course you will want to go to the distributor and purchase a physical copy, since the color plates have been tipped in by the artist’s shaky own hand. (If you do not read German or French, there is still Blast of Silence, the first book we did together.)

Above are German Skies in front of the studio before an extra sanding session. One can see at a glimpse that they’re the most representational monochrome abstractions in human history ever delivered to an artist’s doorstep . . .

Some degree of beauty

2011-01-03T01:11:00.000+01:00

This is something special. A pietà from 1774 by Ignaz Günther in a chapel on the village graveyard of Nenningen in the Swabian countryside. You’re standing in the back of the small room a little to the right of center. It’s amazing how much the picture changes when you shuffle a few feet sideways. The postcard view is from dead center, more harmonious but also sort of undecided around where the figures grow out of the base. From where you now stand the construction lays bare, and the statics of the load that Mary has to bear become tangible (take the load off her, will you). This is the spot from where you can draw the nicest compositional diagram—there are four cavities: the two mouths, opened in pain past and present, Jesus’ gaping wound, and the hands barely holding each other. Together these four form a cross standing on its head. Some limbs of Jesus are sagging mightily, but part of his body seems to work at keeping upright, exploiting the support that rigor mortis offers and the magnetism of bodily affection. Again, shuffle sideways by a few feet and his left hand which rests in his mother’s in a sort of resigned trust becomes a claw frozen in a final cramp.

Wood is the material to strike this balance, rigid with a hint of flexibility, with a weightiness that seems in relation to the human body. The color mounting fits like a tight skin in a perfect shade of pale, and it’s not like in stone sculpture where a successful impression of something soft and vulnerable always is a virtuosic miracle against nature (and this is not at all meant as a nod to the dead boulder that is Michelangelo’s pièta), but somehow warm and human . . . read Michael Baxandall’s wonderful book on the German limewood sculptors of an earlier epoch to learn how humanism lay in their medium of choice already.

Jesus is worn down by exhaustion from insufferable pain and the exertion of saving our souls; Mary’s grief is dynamic, she has ergonomically followed his body’s contortions to always ease the suffering. Their opened mouths bring to mind that Lessing had published his Laocoön only a few years before, in 1766. You have heard this before: “There are passions and degrees of passion whose expression produces the most hideous contortions of the face, and throws the whole body into such unnatural positions as to destroy all the beautiful lines that mark it when in a state of greater repose. These passions the old artists either refrained altogether from representing, or softened into emotions which were capable of being expressed with some degree of beauty.” It’s highly improbable that Günther had read these words, their two worlds were far apart—the first German freelance writer in Berlin (thanks for the introduction of this form of drudgery, dude) and the leading sculptor of catholic Bavarian “rococo”. But they both were concerned with the same issues, and the sculptor clearly took a lot from classicism in his last years to deepen the emotional impact of his work (which is the opposite direction to the schematizing tendencies of high classicism).

Googling the chapel to verify that I didn’t dream it up, I see that it has suffered a prize-winning restoration three years ago and will now work as a distancing instrument between viewer and art. So read me as a voice from the past.

The season’s greetings

2010-12-12T12:30:00.000+01:00

Dear stray reader. That’s it for the year, I’m tucked in under the Christmas tree trying to write a dozen or so little texts that must make at least an attempt at coherence, since they will be published in a grab-baggy modern art primer. Here at my place in the new year, expect a slapfight between Lon Chaney and Marina Abramović, a painting by Tim Eitel, some short-circuited thoughts on art referencing art, Keith Rowe’s canned cultural templates, scary German architecture of the Bismarck-Gothic, and the story of my unrequited love for the comics medium. Or maybe none of these. Have a jolly good time.

Nothing can shock you anymore

2010-12-06T23:34:00.006+01:00

Karl Hofer is a painter who believes you just have to stand a human figure on a canvas to arrive at humanistic art. And that that’s the only way to do it. In his effort, he’s helped out, but often also hindered by the fact that he paints in a style which renders features simplified until they’re deindividualized. His calm gaze sometimes makes for a low-key tenderness which can be very moving. But it can also develop into a pretty goofy kind of deadpan.

Of course, Hofer did not invent the slight abstractedness of figure himself. He was rather mainstream in this respect, even if it is always stressed that he was a solitary on the German scene. He was handed down the mask-like face from Ensor through the Brücke painters, and gave it a touch of 1920s social caricature. While in Ensor the mask still had a clear function as the expression of an other self-estranged self, while in Picasso and early Kirchner it energized the figure through primeval forces, somewhere through the Brücke development a mask-like face became more like a batch of the recognizably modern painter, it was the done way to portray the human face, and it no longer held a deeper amount of psychology.

I tell you this because, if you please, take a look at Hofer’s The Touch Of Death from 1945. This was between the carpet bombings and the Russians, and I’m not sure that I can see it the way the artist intended it, try as I might. Or what kind of comics did he read? There’s a lot of narrative, notice the still full glass of absinthe (ah! Degas, Picasso) vs. the toppled glass, the embrace of death (ah! Baldung Grien e.a.), admire the triangular construction of lines that the gazes describe on the picture plane, from the analytical narrator directed toward his friend, then up and hitting us straight in our safe off-space in front of the image from the skull’s empty sockets, still—what for can all this art-historically informed construction work be? if the players are instructed to act the yokel in mute histrionics.

We’re ahead of ourselves, though, let us go back to the time the Nazis took power. Like many a German artist who thought they were inventing a new and expressly Germanic art, Hofer was very surprised when he was classified degenerate, he thought it was all by mistake, even though he must have been aware that he had been vocal against the Third Reich. This meant from 1933 on he was barred from all exhibitions or public sales. Since he always had one or two patrons, he could continue working, and he wasn’t forced to restrict his subject matter, as e.g. Otto Dix had to, who was only allowed to paint landscapes for years. Still Hofer’s world grew very small indeed, and he’s one of the artists that are often described as staying and working in Germany during the Nazi regime in a kind of “inner emigration.” That’s a loaded term, which was used to defend those who had stayed and therefore secured their sinecures immediately after the war against those who later came back from the US or elsewhere and threw a fit because all profitable positions were already occupied and major talent wanting to come back to Germany was more or less stonewalled. Anyway, however you want to judge the term, Hofer was a near-perfect specimen of a painter in inner emigration. As mentioned above, he felt he and his art were deeply German, so much so that to him it was “a deadly thought” (quote) to consider leaving the country, although his situation was not bound to change for the better, and he had previous experience living abroad, in Rome and Paris, before the first war. What’s keeping him in Germany? His letters show a man who was increasingly loath to even leave his home: “I can no longer stand the bodily presence of those people,” he writes in 1943. By the end of the war, he doesn’t even accept invitations from friends.

Man In Ruins from 1937 is a painting that inevitably often gets read as a premonition of the bombings and destruction to follow, but of course that kind of voodoo isn’t necessary since Hofer had seen the ruins of an earlier war, and it feels more natural to relate the image to the state of his own soul. In a letter from December that year he writes of “the bleak loneliness and hopelessness which is the worst thing that can happen to man. The only preparation against this is to fully understand the abysmal horror in its greatness and its all-destroying power, and then nothing can shock you anymore.” These are sentences that can be easily translated into the deadpan of the painting’s protagonist. (By the way, reading his letters, Hofer seems to have been self-centered to the point where inner emigration probably meant a natural habitat.)

The picture that strikes me as the most emblematic work from a painter in so-called inner emigration and for the concept itself is The Record Player (literally translated simply: Girl with Record) from 1939, the year the war started. It has such touching awkwardness, such a desperate grasping after what may remain of civilization in the sorry staging of a bohemian tableau. Actually, I am not sure if that bohemian aspect was on the mind of the artist at all, I only can’t keep it from mine. Judging the wall, we’re in simple surroundings, maybe a cellar where you can listen to forbidden music at volume without the neighbors overhearing you. A gramophone and records are on the table. And there’s the girl, in a blue underdress, her right shoulderstrap carefully slipped to appear lifelike, tired eyes, hair still damp after washing. She is holding a record, presenting it like something valuable. The label looks like it could be identified, so I ask Jonathan Ward from the wonderful blog Excavated Shellac what it is, and he says it is an Odeon, a German label that used this design with the gold semi-circle around the bottom half from the 1920s to the late 1930s. By 1939 they would have been under strict Nazi control. Today an internet search after Odeons that look like the one in our painting throws up that the hands-down most popular recording artist on these is Richard Tauber, the Austrian Kammersänger who had emigrated in 1938 after the Anschluss and was persona non grata in Germany (because of that and of his Jewish ancestry). Would a viewer in 1939 read the record that way? I can’t promise you, but it stands to reason.

The record and the carefully bared breast, yes, they dream of Bohemia.

There is unfortunately another version painted two years later, and this time Hofer gets it all wrong. Everything allows a little more of the concrete: more room in a wider frame, more carefully fleshed-out face with eyes that annoyingly want to connect, more pout, too languid a pose, too firm a body. And, worst of all, I can’t read the record label. This painting has nothing going for it really except still a slight awkwardness.

Thankfully, things look up. Germany loses the war, Hofer helps reform a Berlin academy, becomes director in 1949. He bickers with the abstractionists. Or, both parties stick burning needles into screaming dolls of each other.

In 1954, the year before his death, Hofer paints a girl with a record again. This time around, it seems like the topic does not really register with him, the painting is about circular forms, I guess, so the records come in handy. The artist had to be occupied mostly with questions of style, since this is really the first time that his paintings change. Hofer’s mature work had switched between the two closely related modes that the works shown above illustrate, sometimes a little more flat and somber, sometimes more rounded and anecdotal—but essentially from the 1920s to the 1940s he consistently and gracefully dulled down from hints of caricature to a resigned deadpan. Then suddenly, after the war, his work becomes directionless and very uneven, but open again for the times that he lives in. This girl looks so German 1950s it’s amazing—I know what her kitchen looks like (actually, there is another girl from the same period who I seem to remember grinds coffee in that kitchen, I’d show her if I could find an image, somebody out there, please? Edit: never mind, I found her). I watch the girl until I suspect she is solving the puzzle of how to open up the record, and her strength of forearm suggests that she will succeed.

Outside, they clear away the ruins, the happiest beings Hofer ever painted.

Beer under palm trees

2010-12-03T11:20:00.006+01:00

I don’t remember anything. Which is okay, since this is a shout-out to a largely unknown painter.

We’re in Paris, I guess it’s 2004. We’ve done honest tourist work somewhere on the fringes of sightseeing, now we’re sitting in a café, relaxing. There’s a flyer on the table which says that exactly this afternoon the arrondissement we’re in will open its artist studios for anyone to visit. That’s great. Of course we don’t go for the art, we’re voyeurs who want to see how people live.

We get to see students’ dumps and garden houses hidden within city blocks where people have too much money and too much time. A maghrebian joint serves spice tea with the art. I have a vague recollection of walking into the particularly promising back entrance of a pretty ramshackle historicist building, wide stairs, plaster dripping from the vaults. We have to go all the way up, and there, behind an inconspicuous door that should lead to the attic, is paradise.

I mean, like I said, I don’t really remember this. Also you can’t separate the rooms from the fact that they’re in Paris, and no sane person should be able to afford them, but anyway, this must have been the most beautiful studio I’ve ever seen. Rather irregular, high windows following the roof slope to the back. A rather dark partition to the left (but then it’s getting night and we can see the city turn electric over the rooftops) where paintings are hung.

How were the paintings? Well, not great, but worthwhile. Figurative but with a twist to it that I can’t find a description of in my brain files. They looked rather like the work of a young man who’s just a little step away from hitting on something really good. So we were somewhat surprised when we met the artist himself, a very interesting looking seventyish man who still had the air of somebody with a motorcycle in his life. We didn’t really talk to him, because, well the art was not quite marvellous enough for the slow-burning ecstasy we felt at the fact of his existence. So we nicked a small catalog from 1976 and an invitation card from 1985, which is all he had to his name, and took our leave.

The internet doesn’t know much more about him than that old catalog. Werner Ritter, born 1933 in Basel, Switzerland, has a secure footnote in art history as one of the first generation of Swiss pop and a member of the Farnsburggruppe, a kind of smalltime secession that formed 1967 in his hometown (they have an archival website, in case you read German). By the mid-1970s, his style had arrived at something close to photo-realism filtered through a kind of heavy fuzz that seems informed by Gerhard Richter’s black and white work and today again looks pretty young, if not massively original.

The catalog (really just a brochure) is called Automobile, that’s German for cars, and it comes with a motto by writer Christoph Mangold, which roughly translated reads: “At home cars were parked even in the marmalade, under the pillow, in the fridge. The kids could not talk in complete sentences yet, but they already knew the names of the race drivers and the car brands.” There are only two color illustrations in here, but these seem to show a use of mauve and beige and pastel blue in these car pictures that chimes very well with the domestic motto. (Girl colors, as my own kid would have it, and which he would never use except to paint a present for his mother or some other girl. The artist is much freer.) I’ve selected a black-and-white image of an accident painting called Spalenring, though, which I much like because here real life has done its best to emulate an artistic translation of facts into aesthetic forms, and the painter just had to record life’s poetic license with the integrity of things in a realistic manner.

The only other evidence I carried from the studio was the invitation card from 1985 you see on top. I must admit, at first view I thought this was pretty gruesome stuff. But hey, the title of this is Beer Under Palm Trees, so it can’t be all bad. See how subtly these four folks trying to look purposefully businesslike are undermined (the blurry faces, the beer bottles on the floor), and how with very sparse means—just a few stray palm leaves and some girl-colored light on a shutter—their self-perception as extras from a Miami Vice episode is suggested . . . I think I do get what it’s about and why it needed to be painted, so it gives me pleasure.

I’ve found one newer image on the net. This is called Bunkoman and is from 2000 and looks like a transitory jumble of all kinds of motifs and styles (now I wonder why I seem to mention Picasso in almost every post here, but the old trickster seems clearly referenced through that). I think if I really strained I could read something allegorical into it, but frankly I don’t care for the thing, so I won’t. Now if only I could tell you what the 2004 paintings were like that we saw in the studio. Not like that, but they also were of people, not cars. And they were good enough to make us feel glad that here was a man who had his work cut out for him, who seemed to do his thing regardless of a lack of public recognition, and who stood in the most beautiful studio in the world and managed to make sense there and have deserved it all.

It says on the internet that now he’s back in Basel. That’s not something I would have wanted to know.

All stays in the family

2010-10-28T20:51:00.003+02:00

I guess I can’t very well expect you to scroll through several generations of bourgeois ancestral back story for a work of art, which I would tell in the uninvolved mock-genealogist style best mastered by Balzac spreading boredom for a hundred pages before he cuts to the meat of his story—still, since Alexej Meschtschanow has answered my request for an image with the most unassuming piece I’ve ever seen from him (in Balzacian terms: the poor country cousin), I think we can’t avoid throwing a quick glance at its forebears if we want to understand what this family of fettered furniture stands for, or better, carries on its upholstered backs.

The forebear nearest to my heart (for sentimental reasons) is this club chair from 2004, from the second year of sculptural works in this mode, which has become a sort of trademark for Alexej. Here is a piece of furniture with much higher pretensions than the footstool above, one that I suspect would care whom it’d be seen with. Not that this lies completely within its own choosing, because it must live with—depending on how you judge the situation—a support to put its broken bones upright, or a structure of shackles to keep it in place. Of course it is both at the same time, and the balance varies from model to model, since Alexej builds an individual tubular steel support for each piece, subtly reacting on the character traits of the furniture it carries, until it’s like an externalized ornament determined to hold its own. Here, the front legs of the club chair are held in the firm grip of a steely echo of leather cuffs, and its tiny wheels dangle in the air helplessly. The white tubular steel frame with its hospital bed wheels and the very practical handle in the back overpower the club chair and force an added efficiency on it that, as added efficiency will do, puts us in a wistful mood (even if we welcome progress in real life).

What is remarkable about this chair and all the others, the buffet and the children’s bed, is that they all have their thing so tightly together. As a viewer you needn’t bring much, you needn’t know what it’s called or what the secret intention is; the art draws on your powers of empathy and proportionally rewards them. Because of their communication skills, some of these pieces have almost iconic potential, well, as long as all stays in the family. A family that still grows, and I for one do not tire of their growing numbers, since each is an utter individual.

So the artist has sent me the poor country cousin, which I guess needs some extra love, because people tend to overlook it. The photo above helps, it is taken roughly from the perspective of a small child just able to stand on its own feet and to whom every object still has an inherent monumentality. Also, to whom the fettered footstool has a droll face, with beady eyes and a mustachioed lower edge. This perspective we wouldn’t share as normal exhibition goers; our gaze from lofty elevation down to that humble piece of furniture would rather try to see something useful in it, despite of its art status. And succeed. (I see my kids brushing their teeth when I look at the work. Seems safe enough if too narrow for the both of them at once. Only, the material is not suited for bathroom tiles, you’d always have to place it on a mat or some such nuisance.) Also, the forms seem quite happy in their easy encounter: the tubular steel lovingly repeats the funny keyhole that adorns the top of the stool. Yes, I think this country cousin of our sadly optimized club chair seems to be a rather happy-go-lucky fellow, his supporting structure uplifting in all senses of the word. The simple and open relationship between the two borders on the symbiotic, improving chances of survival . . .

All of this plays so directly into my habit of reading artworks for their psychology (which of course is the correct approach) instead of asking what the hell they mean, that I almost might overlook the obvious fact that these objects are hybrid beings sawn together by some mad Frankensteinian genius in his sleepless nights, impotent monsters that carry their self-defeating functional enhancements on their sleeves for us to ponder. Which is one thing that we need from art: monsters, I think I said that before.

After Alexej had created such varied cast of characters, they stood around in galleries waiting to be assigned roles, and since 2006 this is what he has given them. His exhibitions have become quasi-narratives acted out by sculptures, like in the recent Feierabend show at Klemm’s in Berlin, where the lone chair, a tubular-steel Breuer descendant held matter-of-factly in almost balletic grip by its support, pores over the floor plan of the exhibition, masterminding the whole scene.

Again, pretending it’s all between the artwork and the viewer.

Our eyes above each other

2010-10-04T23:33:00.011+02:00

So, following on the Magritte post somewhere upstream, this could be the second part of a new series called: artists that don’t speak to me at all, except they’ve done the one single piece which absolutely floors me, should floor anybody, and deserves top entry in the canon. And again, I remember slouching into a gallery room (this one in Bietigheim-Bissingen, if you really need to know), and being hit by the thing—most squarely against the eyeball not least because everything around from that same guy, Max Pechstein, was run-of-the-mill Brücke expressionism that could be categorized into its leanings to more idiosyncratic colleagues work by work (and I’m not exactly a sucker for German expressionism in the first place, most of it seems to have yellowed before its time, read: instantly).

There’s not a lot science I can do here really. Just register the love with which the indecision of the boy’s pose between defiance, or maybe just being cold, or maybe just having to squat has been rendered. And yes, his eyes are blank pits of the deepest deadest darkness, this is not just because I scanned a postcard. I didn’t even have a kid when I first met the painting, so the resonance was mostly with my own boyhood. I’m not sure how far out of Germany this really translates, but I played with houses like that that came down from my father, and all of the forms are related to a history that to me included the mysterious unspeakability of the Nazi past, but of course to Pechstein in 1916 they did not. Boy With Playthings this is called. They surround him like twelve dolors in almost military formation.

For some reason (mostly colorful), the sobriety, dignity, and all-around humanity of that little fellow (only three years old when he was painted, at least that was the age of the artist’s own son then), to me goes so very well with a late Picasso painting from 1969, sort of a self-portrait as a spoilt child with a rapier and flower as his own playthings . . . While the Pechstein is much greater art, these two offset each other’s charms so very well.

(I really don’t know what to do with verticals on this blog, they look so bad. I mean, what’s the idea anyway, why would anyone do verticals in the first place, it’s not like our eyes were set above each other, is it?)

To drown and never be heard of again

2010-10-03T00:10:00.010+02:00

This is the first post in a small series where I invite artists I know and like to send me an image of something they’ve done without much information except the technical data. I will then proceed to wrack my poor brains and see how far I get. The above image will in any case be the easiest of the run, since I’m probably the world’s leading expert on Rudolf Reiber. Ha! So much so that while I had not seen his Caromboat (2010) before he mailed me the photo, it already felt familiar, because he once had told me over a beer: “I’m taking a boat next and will be putting a billiard tabletop in it.” I immediately retorted with what every sane person would think, as long as they’d be anchored to the real world by a beer: “What in the hell would you want to do that for?” And like most of the good artists I know, Rudolf didn’t launch into a lecture about boats and billiards and their inherent meaning, but just said: “Wait. It’s gonna be good, you’ll see.”

I probably should have spoiler-tagged the image above. Because, let’s stay with the artist’s declaration of intent for the moment: it can actually prove a ballast pretty hard to throw overboard—and has been for me. I sort of had to reacquaint myself with the reality of a project that had seemed sort of exhausted once I had turned Rudolf’s description of it over in my mind for a couple of times. While it’s very easy to translate this piece (like many of Rudolf’s) into immediate words, I certainly wouldn’t choose the Caromboat to explain what the he’s up to to anyone, it just doesn’t sound good enough in words. I’d rather mention the work where he put an alarm system on an empty gallery wall, or the one where he blotted out all the stars in the sky of a Thomas Ruff artprint. These two seem much better when you translate them into words, because they’re more meta, they relate to Yves Klein exhibiting a void, or Rauschenberg erasing de Kooning, and all of that is mothered not by Cage’s silent piece itself, but by Cage saying that the audience didn’t have to experience the work personally, it would be enough to know it existed. That is to say, we’re on safe ground.

Anyway, I simply couldn’t help judging Rudolf’s piece before actually seeing it. And it didn’t make for a good story. While this is art you sometimes can easily put into words, these words can top the work like a bad haircut.

To continue in the same mold, I should probably have written about it blindfolded. Rudolf sowing the references, me reaping the connotations. The boat is almost too easy, German romanticism, Böcklin, but also Dante, Homer (Winslow as well as the Odyssey dude), Jerome K. Jerome, Hitchcock, you name it: a boat is a vessel to carry meaning. And then billiards . . . well, actually I have to seriously mention one table there, because else you wouldn’t trust me anymore, and that is from Gabriel Orozco. The artist made it elliptical and constructed a setting where the red ball sort of bombs the other two from above. Elliptical table of course stands for the world; apart from that the work seems about the game itself to a surprising degree, it’s like the revenge of the red ball, that’s the one you usually don’t play, is it?

While now I could go on and list the similarities and differences between the two works, it would get me nowhere, because the objects modified in these pieces that can be translated into simple sentences do not really seem susceptible to classical iconography, they’re still too much the things they were before they ever dreamed about becoming art when they’d grow up. They represent reality that’s been willfully screwed with (and I’m sure the beer still figures in here somewhere).

[Interlude: When my brother and I became old enough to spend our afternoons in front of the tv screen, as is proper, our family suddenly had a sort of spare playroom. It wasn’t sufficiently large for table tennis, so they decided to get a smallish pool table. While that soon became no more than another powerless tool to try and kill time with, the table always kept a certain media-supported glamour (The Hustler!), something of an elementary coolness (plus on the few occasions when later in life I was in a situation to play, I proved myself rather more adept than most of my unsuspecting playing partners). Though the thing standing there through my early teen years means I of course will never again have a desire to play again, I still remember its green surface with fondness, it speaks to me of the profound luxury of boredom, that is the privilege of youth. (Both of which I’ll never enjoy again.)]

So now, instead of having everything figured out beforehand, I will actually have to think about the thing, because I have a photo. Look above. (I haven’t seen the darn canoe in the flesh, by the way, and I don’t intend to, and anyone who tells you that you can’t talk about art which you haven’t seen in the original is a capitalist dead bent to destroy the frigging ozone layer. I’m serious.)

Part of what immediately endears me to the boat is that I know how they do the so-called Gartenschau, the landscape park on parade, here in Germany. Carefully groomed recreational areas within city limits—touched up not to provide little pockets of nature with prescribed viewing points like in English gardening, and not to rape nature just to prove the superiority of reason like in French gardening, but to furnish the green, make it inoffensive, habitable, and mildly useful. Within that, the boat is really an outpost of art in public space in general, which is usually about power structures—and you could argue that the best examples of that sad genre are probably the most reprehensible in their gender policies, but that’s for another post.

So rather, let’s walk the knoll like Diderot used to walk the academy into a painting, looking not for motif and meaning, but for psychology. The Caromboat is like a creature, maybe restricted in the sort of sense it makes, or rather, a mutation maybe senseless in itself (like all good mutations are before evolution harnesses them), and one that will not reproduce—there will be no billiard boats throughout the history of art like there are ferries into the nether lands. But there it is, and it has a vibe.

The boat houses three billiard balls that have an inclination to react against the elements together, they huddle more than they smack each other, they wouldn’t want any outright confrontation, that would be more drama than they could take. (The lake they live in might be small by objective standards, but it is completely sufficient for a billiard ball to drown in and never be heard of again.) So the balls seem to depend on each other. They stay close, following each other’s movements; there’s nothing they can do against their situation, but they can gain some solace from a solidarity which stands in opposition to the game they were originally created to serve.

Any object with sufficient mass creates gravity that longs for company from any other object.

But Rudolf, what if it rains?

Blown about the desert dust

2010-09-18T23:32:00.030+02:00

When I recently searched this painting out again, it struck me that while I remembered the composition rather well, my mind had added colorful detail to the bear on the left: I was absolutely sure it would have a bloody snout and paws. Which of course doesn’t even make physical sense; and without the additional gore, it’s a much better painting. Still it’s clear where that mental image grew: the famous Tennyson verse from In Memoriam, where man was a creature “who trusted god was love indeed / and love Creation’s final law,— / tho’ nature, red in tooth and claw / with ravin, shrieked against his creed.”

The painting is better with paws licked squeaky clean, but it still strikes a precarious balance between gloating grimness and operatic smugness—the bear on the right relishes the tasty spare rib of an explorer with eyes closed in histrionic satisfaction. Think what a strange subject for a painting that really is, two ice bears devouring the frozen bodies of the members of a polar expedition, sort of seen from the animals’ vantage point. When Edwin Landseer painted this in 1864, the fate of John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition in search of the North-West passage was still very much on the public mind (the full story became official only in 1859), and it seems the artist made several references to the actual reports (the weather, the impotent rifle, etc.) that left no doubt whose bones the animals were chewing on. Is that what the artist wanted to offer, a graphic illustration of a miserable fate, now creep yourself out?

Don’t trust an artwork until you’ve read the title. And that is: Man Proposes, God Disposes. That’s really really grim. These polar bears are god’s cleaning squad, removing the remains of a human ambition that has of course rightfully been thwarted by the higher being. And they get to enjoy themselves doing it high time. The theme jibes rather well with the Tennyson quote above, both works are partly products of a first wave of Darwin reception. Only that Tennyson shrieks in pain against the slaughter that god will endorse, while Landseer seems to offer an ultra-puritanical stance which rejoices in the misfortune of those who seek a truth outside of scriptures. Luckily, it doesn’t work this way. God just adds a spiritual dimension to the horror. “It may be questioned whether the representation is not too purely harrowing for the proper function of art,” the Illustrated London News noted at the time. The public loved the painting and shuddered with delight. It is a pure (and successful) exploitation painting. And after the violence, here’s the porn:

It was good for both of them. This is The Shrew Tamed from 1861 and must be the most blatantly postcoital painting ever. Which one’s the shrew? The woman would have been read by the cognoscenti of the times as one Catherine Walters, highly celebrated close-to-last courtesan in London. Again, the critics did notice a deviation from the proper function of art in this portrait: “A high-bred horse of soft silken coat, dappled with play of light and shade as on velvet—subdued by a ‘pretty horsebreaker,’ is certainly unfortunate as a subject.” More remarkable than the subject itself, and perhaps more unfortunate for the critic, is the bearing of the horsebreaker, that of an independent, even dominant but carefree woman. The painting seems to celebrate her freedom, which comes with the privilege of an outsider status that is the product of projection from those powerful enough to be bored by the society they rule.

The courtesan’s spaniel on the hay takes the position of a leopard in an earlier painting, Isaac Van Amburgh And His Animals from 1839, whose composition is sort of abbreviated in the later work. Alerted as we now are to the rather free and easy play with gender and sexual signifiers, it becomes difficult not to see van Amburgh as staging a rather decadent tableau here. It is interesting that the animal tamer’s reputation (allegedly he was the first to deliberately put his head in a lion’s mouth) does not suggest his stage act fit the somewhat effeminate image. On the contrary, when he came under attack for spreading cruelty and moral ruin in his own country, the United States, van Amburgh quoted the Bible, “Didn’t God say in Genesis 1:26 that men should have dominion over every animal on the earth?” and continued to mistreat his feline wards, and who knows maybe the lamb too. He was usually portrayed in not quite so languid a pose, among other artists by Landseer himself, but rather as a tyrant within the empire of his cage. I would guess that our portrait was part of a public relations program, since there is another by Landseer, where van Amburgh is shown caring for his flock like a good shepherd.

Again, who’s the shrew (here the tamer tamed?), anyway Landseer seems to go about his job with such evident gusto, delivering the limp hero in somewhat faggish terms, that I suggest the painting very well knows what plush abode it is setting up. See the strangely subdued society visible without the bars, are their looks not disapproving of that bohemian lifestyle of the fop within who shares his diggings with the viewer?

I’ve dwelled on these two paintings partly because I find it much easier to see an intelligent painter at work in a sort of frivolous painting than I do in kitsch (and of course much of Landseer’s main oeuvre to us today comes across as maybe quaint and able but definitely on the queasy side). The intelligence of this painter has been described by John Ruskin in his rather famous eulogy on The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner from 1837 (which I’m not showing, because it’s, well, oh so corny). “Here the exquisite execution of the glossy and crisp hair of the dog, the bright sharp touching of the green bough beside it, the clear painting of the wood of the coffin and the folds of the blanket, are language—language clear and expressive in the highest degree. But the close pressure of the dog’s breast against the wood, the convulsive clinging of the paws, which has dragged the blanket off the trestle, the total powerlessness of the head laid, close and motionless, upon its folds, the fixed and tearful fall of the eye in its utter hopelessness, the rigidity of repose which marks that there has been no motion nor change in the trance of agony since the last blow was struck on the coffin-lid . . . these are all thoughts—thoughts by which the picture is separated at once from hundreds of equal merit, as far as mere painting goes, by which it ranks as a work of high art, and stamps its author, not as the neat imitator of the texture of a skin, or the fold of a drapery, but as the Man of Mind.”

My favorite of the corny paintings is Saved from 1856. (Yes, that image looks kind of fishy, I couldn’t find another one. There’s something wrong with that dog, see the displaced front paws. Oh, but it’s a Newfoundland of the kind that has since taken over Landseer’s name, so . . . ) If I tried to analyze what makes this painting special for me, I’d have to think on Ruskin’s terms. The relaxed pose of the rescued boy (who’s unconscious yet) tells the story of how shortly before his struggle for life would end in exhaustion he suddenly realized he would be saved by a Newfoundland ex machina—and then the boy just let go and passed out. That, Ruskin says, is thought, but no matter how convincingly rendered (and, yes, subtle), I cannot see it as thought exactly, it’s such a cheap story. The highest thought in the painting, judging by the Ruskinian method anyways, would be the expression of the dog himself (I’m sure it’s a he). When I stare at his mouth I feel my tongue loll in exhaustion, my gaze strays, my brow begins to knit and my ears fall back behind me. Supreme though rules the dog’s one visible eye. It can be translated into several sentences that to me read: “Lord have mercy, I’m getting too old for this job. I know that you know and I know that I will do it again, and it will be the death of me. But you’ll grant me one more, I’m sure of that, we have a deal.”

So I detect the special quality of these works exactly at the point where Ruskin places it—in the gaze, in the poses, in the anthropomorphization of dogly details—but I no longer read them as thoughts. What I do read into them is an animation of animal psychology that is really a forebear of comics, the kind of cuddly comics that lets men have dominion over all the animals of the earth and sort of peaks with the Disney brand. (I’m foolishly dropping this here by the wayside, is there a history of comic books aware that John Ruskin had postulated a philosophy of the genre roughly contemporary with the first Rodolphe Töpffer publication?)

What is also interesting is that here we are at the exact opposite of our view of creation from what the first polar bear painting said. Now we have Nature flossed and pedicured. But it doesn’t matter. Like our Ruskin paragraph seems to suggest, the proper function of art works from the largest possible amount of narrative, and aims to bring in more narrative through means fair and foul, details and titles. The nature of that narrative will be secondary, as long as it related to man.

Funnily (but no, it’s not surprising), Landseer needs none of that. Here’s The Desert, a painting from 1849:

Study of a dead lion, is it? No, it’s much more. And Tennyson chimes in, we take him up at the exact spot we left him. He now wonders, should man “who loved, who suffer’d countless ills, / who battled for the True, the Just, / be blown about the desert dust, / or sealed within the iron hills?”

The answer has bitten the dust.

(PS: I've posted some follow-up thoughts on Landseer's Saved, paintings of apes, dinosaurs, and their fitness for the evolution of comics here.)

Falling asleep update

2010-09-06T09:09:00.001+02:00

Now 16 months old, my younger one will approach the bed in the evening of his own free will, throw his darling fox into it, look after it longingly for some time, then demand to be let in. Immediately regret sets in, and he will demand to be let out again. After two or three times back and forth, he will rest one cheek against the fox, pull his knees forward and lever up his behind, and hum himself into sleep on a tritonic scale or gently mumble. His favorite syllable for that is blah, mocking all his yet unuttered words he has just started to learn.

Silencing the old blunderbuss

2010-08-10T00:14:00.019+02:00

If ever the work of a painter needed to be retold and all visual evidence trashcanned, Magritte is the man. It doesn’t even help that he’s aware. “I always try to make sure that painting doesn’t draw attention to itself, that it’s as invisible as possible. I work like a writer who strives for a simple voice, refusing all stylistic effect, so the reader cannot see anything beyond the idea that I want to express. The painting itself remains hidden.”

It also doesn’t help that Magritte painted a pipe which says it isn’t a pipe but a welcome introduction into sort of conceptual art and illusion for gullible abecedarians.

I well remember walking into a room in a Brussels museum and being hit by that thing above. It’s who? Magritte? It’s when? 1948? Is that even possible? How can he, way before pop art, or the affichistes, or most anything else with a feel for the sublime in the low in art, understand the power of comic books so well as to condense their spirit into a single image? This is as good as the reformed Guston would become, but Magritte had it way harder to get there. There is really nothing halfway related, except for the fact that Picabia had painted his magazine nudes by the early 1940s, which are not as worthwhile as images themselves, but a similarly surprising anticipation of much more contemporary tactics in art on canvas.

The painting belongs to a work group called the période vache, which Magritte completed within five weeks for his belated first solo exhibit in Paris. The critical consensus seems to be that he was giving the Paris art world the finger. I can sort of believe that when I look at the work group as a whole, really there’s only one other painting that I like, again historically surprising, since this was painted 30 years before the invention of the Duracell bunny. I’m not into the other paintings any more than into Magritte’s default mode, which he would return to immediately after this exhibition. I’m only into the one painting.

There is too much love there, it cannot mean the finger. It’s called The Ellipsis, but it doesn’t feel as if anything had been left out. There’s that shadow of distrustful amazement where the barrel hits the face. There’s the relaxed tenderness of the disjointed right hand resting on the rather tense left. There’s the interplay of eyes—I sort of wish the one staring out at us from within the hat wasn’t there so very obviously, but it carries so many implications, so much of the artist as he would know himself, checking in on the new-found guy who easily knocks off a painting per day, that it really adds a whole new layer of meta fiction.

I followed a notion and googled the possible German word “Pistolenschnauze” for this post. I hit on this automatically translated excerpt from a novel by one B. M. Bower:

“Casey sah nach unten und sah, dass das, was er danach erklärte, war, das mittlerster sehender Mann auf der Erde, das Richten des Breitesten gerade bei ihm machte Schrotflinte, die er je in seinem Leben gesehen hatte, mundtot. Sein Fänger verlagerte die Pistolenschnauze zum Rücken von Casey Hals und stocherte das Keuchen herum, bärtiger alter Mann mit seiner Zehe.”

Let me translate that back: Casey looked downward and saw that what he would later explain was the middlest man who saw on the earth, silencing the blunderbuss he had ever seen in his life, adjusting it at its broadest. His catcher shifted the muzzle to the back of the Casey neck and poked around his wheezing, bearded old man with his toe.

Which fits the present context pretty amazingly.

The ugliest music I’ve ever heard

2010-08-09T12:43:00.012+02:00

I first posted something like this on Jazzcorner in July 2007, shortly after my second Ivo Pogorelich concert in two years:

We saw him in 2005. He was my woman’s favorite pianist, she’d caught him live every possibility, so I was prepared that he had developed in strange ways since his pretty idiosyncratic last record in 93 or so. She warned me that the experience probably wouldn’t be overwhelming, since no pianist can really fill the Gewandhaus here in Leipzig with sound, but it should be deep, even if Scriabin and Rachmaninov for the second half didn’t exactly make my mouth water. But, to start with, there would be a mix of Chopin pieces, then a sonata.

A grumpy looking bald guy slouches in boxer style. We’re making ourselves comfy. Then he hits a single ugly note, then something hits me, and I’m struggling to get a grip of what’s happening here.

It feels incredibly slow. And very bleak, cold at heart. The only association I have is Loren Connors, tones emerging from a forlorn center, reaching out, trying to connect but dying before they can, opening up spaces. It sounds nothing like Chopin, though the tune is somewhere beneath the slow chords, played like under the breath, with incredible virtuosity, but more as a background. Pogorelich moves through minimal gestures, staring on the keyboard with intense concentration, and after a while it seems like he’s able to choose which notes to pick out of the text and lift them into those slow chords in real time; there is a improvisatory element to his choices.

As if that weren’t complicated enough, a third layer unfolds, one of ugly treble notes that Pogorelich punches out aggressively, one every couple of measures or so. It takes me a while, but when I start to hear them they fall into very slow melodic lines. Once I notice, listening gets really complicated. Pogorelich might start another part of the composition within the main text of his playing through a break, but then the next high note hits as a logical progression from the one before stuff wound down, and the mind’s ear has to paddle back and hear a transition instead of a break, trying not to lose the thread that keeps proceedings together all the while.

I try closing my eyes to concentrate better, but then I understand nothing—I have to watch his hands to keep a grasp.

He mixed all the pieces into each other, no pause for applause or anything, then a quick bow and off he slouched. We picked our jaws from the floor and drunkenly stumbled into intermission. (I should note here that while the above is mostly my own attempt to make sense of musical proceedings and you shouldn’t trust me, my woman is a pianist and knows these pieces inside out, and she was hit just as hard. There were tons of musicians in the audience, many of whom hated it, one mumbling, “That’s the ugliest music I’ve ever heard,” another, “I don’t want to hear music I don’t understand.”)

With us, exhilaration slowly set in. Classical classical concert pianists usually just don’t do this kind of thing. There are of course many who do “eccentric” interpretations. Those who play a more modern repertoire are different animals anyway, but Pogorelich always played only the chestnuts often in these “eccentric” interpretations. This was a completely different experience, though. It was radical, like taking the pure text of the music, taking it completely out of context, and building new sense out of it from the root up. It was the greatest thing that somebody from the so very conservative recital scene (and as indicated above, musicians can’t just challenge themselves by playing contemporary composers when they’re really part of that beat, it’s just not within their mind frame, it’s a different world) felt the need to keep pushing until Chopin was the most challenging music on the planet.

But there was no joy in his interpretation, it was too intense, almost desperate, there were some really bad vibes coming from the stage. Then again, we were sure, he couldn’t do it again after intermission, it was just something that had happened due to mood glitches. He couldn’t do it with Scriabin and Rachmaninov.

He did it again. The Scriabin was even more bleak, but more pure, as more of the text could be put into the slow chords, and as it’s colder stuff to begin with. Again, no break, but straight into the Rachmaninov where sometimes incredibly fast stride passages were clashing into the mood, and the long finale had lost all its virtuosic aspect and was more about punishing the piano with force and precision. We were completely exhausted from trying to listen, from trying not to miss anything Pogorelich was doing. It really seemed like a superhuman effort, like in some 70s flic where a mutant brain can change the course of asteroids or shake down cathedrals by sheer will power—if only the brain cells won’t melt before.

Then it was over, some people freakin’, most just doing the clapping game like they always do—we ourselves were too washed out to really applaud. No encore, what more was there to say? We stumbled out into the night and from then on Pogo was the family patron saint, and we invoked his name whenever we did something half-assed (which of course means he was around a lot).

Yesterday he played the Gewandhaus once more. He couldn’t do it again. Or could he? My woman had a nightmare in which he took things even further, but luckily she didn’t remember the details.

He wouldn’t even try. A Brahms Intermezzo was just that, an endless transition between nowhere and no place special in a mock-romantic gesture that seemed slightly ironic. Then he slept through a Prokovjev, ogling the sheet music (of course he’d played by heart two years ago). Technically wondrous, yes, and some nice unforeseen passages, but he made no sense. It was as if he were trying out possible angles on the piece but too tired to follow things up. Intermission. I was depressed. My woman was relieved as her nightmare hadn’t come true and earth still survived.

The second half started with three dances by Granados. Now the early Benedetti Michelangeli could play something like this and miraculously transform it through impeccable taste and touch. Pogorelich gave it the whole works. My interest actually picked up by the third time he was flying with full flags through an unspeakably banal chorus, my woman was rather more pissed off, still we agreed: guy’s making fun of us, must be. At least he’d woken up and now he gave an ice-cold rendition of Gaspard le Nuit that went deeper than everything he’d played before, but in the end it was depressing, the interpretation following nuance for nuance what he had recorded 20 years ago, only cooled down here to where there’s no feeling. (Actually I found that piece very impressive but I don’t want to know what it implied about the mood of the performer.)

This time an encore, don’t ask me, it did involve lots of notes.

Right now we’re a sad household. You could suspect that Pogorelich just is a somewhat arrogant dude who tries his stuff out in public, so during that he’s lukewarm, but once he’s mastered all the innards of the tunes he’ll slay you. I don’t think so, since he played stuff he’d done before. If you consider his personal tragedy, and the fact that he will usually have received no love for his more extreme and beautiful take on things—somehow it really felt like he had given up, like he no longer knew what he was on stage for but he vaguely remembered the motions. And he probably doesn’t even know what it could have meant to two folks up in the wings—and since the man seems to be the saddest man on earth, that’s what we want to tell him: you sailed around the moon single-handedly, and it fucking matters.

Drowsy mind of the creator

2010-08-08T15:05:00.012+02:00

Some rooms into Olafur Eliasson’s Inner City Out exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, I’m hit by a very depressing vision. First let me ask, are you aware of the myth of the Studio Eliasson? It’s often portrayed as an experimental laboratory: scientists selected for their degree of madness meet with modelers selected for their degree of geekdom, all donning white overcoats to experimentally verify which of nature’s laws will translate into forms that secretly advance mankind while pretending to do no more than tickle the aesthetic funnybone. But lo and behold, here in front of us is a table littered with tons of small models that look like hesitant little mathematical formulae glued together from parts of plywood, with little filmic projections on their irregular surfaces that relate the model as it lies there to the single moment in its life when it seemed to make some sort of sense to the drowsy mind of its creator, before it had to take on the status of art straight-faced . . . It’s sort of sad—because all that the accumulated brainpower within the Studio Eliasson can come up with appears to be mildly schematic-looking bric-a-brac. When what we really needed from art was the birth of a monster glued together from the rotting remnants of the applied sciences.

Perhaps that is too much to ask. The exhibition is a good arrangement of well-timed one-liners, and some of them work very well. When I look into the Mercury Window, a huge bumpy mirror facing me in an early room, the reflections indeed behave like quicksilver due to the irregular surface of the piece. Is that science already? Or a metaphor on whoever steps in front of it? It’s not the only work where the viewer gets to act out a part, but since our reflections or outlines mostly tend to be aestheticized here, I’m not sure if they get us anywhere beyond the constrictions of our silhouette. (At least my colored quintuple shadow up against the wall looks kind of cooler than most of the stages-of-an-ape-developing-into-modern-man-during-mid-gallop schematics, I grant you that.)

Curator Daniel Birnbaum stresses that in works like these you don’t have an art object to look at. You have a very simple arrangement of conditions, with a row of spotlights on the floor, and the work is sort of the meeting that takes place between the viewer and a space carefully prepared by the artist. Which in theory means that the manifestation of the work could be somehow open-ended. In reality each viewer becomes alike.

It’s probably most fruitful to understand the best part of the exhibition as op art extended into space and situation, where you try to decipher the aesthetic rules a work follows, then try to decide if these rules make the work look either good or bad, or if they don’t matter at all except that they help you recognize the artist and tag stuff accordingly. But somehow the looks of these simple arrangements and apparatuses were the only thing that interested me on a deeper level. I became more interested in the machinery that seemed to want to hide behind the image, it seemed the obvious point worth pondering over. Because many of the pieces sit quite uncomfortably between slick high-production values and a careless sketchiness that suggests an idea is more valuable than the finished work. Would the art be better if everything had been pimped up to hectoring perfection? Or more plainly, if there had been more money spent? Maybe so, there was a whole wing drowned in colored fog, titled Your Blind Movement—this could have been a thoroughly emotional walk through psychedelic John Carpenter territory, except for the wood paneling of the floor, which refused to lend itself to out-of-your-mind experiences and patiently told you, dude, you’re still in a museum, just follow the grain and you’ll be fine.

That same question of production values also applies to the centerpiece of the exhibition, Mikroskop, pictured above. You have to enter through its behind-the-scenes, a huge scaffold covered with some sort of plastic sheets, so you’re sort of warned as what to expect, space wrapped in itself cheaply. Still, when you enter the room, it seems vast, the light seems glorious, the space seems vague but connected to something out there, up there . . . until . . . you regain your senses and start to connect all the dots and explain the illusion to yourself. Which happens rather quickly, and the moment you go into these details, the whole thing is no longer that aesthetically pleasing. The visible section of the dome doesn’t seem cut out very well, some of the braces are interrupted rather rudely, some seem left hanging . . .

Anyway, the artist states in interviews that the work is situated right at the central theme of his exhibition: Inner City Out. Through the glass dome the Berlin light shines and is supposed to let in some of the spirit of the city. Of course it sort of does, by power of pure situatedness, but the glass is frosted, which renders the light as anonymous as sunrays can possibly become, and the whole arrangement really doesn’t feel particularly communicative. Forget about circumstance, the title of the piece is much more evocative: Mikroskop, and if it’s a microscope, we’re the little specks caught down there in a drop of liquid on a slate, being watched dispassionately by a giant blind eye from above which refracts its thirst for knowledge into a kaleidoscope of blank screens. This is a reading that translates into pure emotion for a split second before spatial orientation sets in, and we’re back into a dome wrapped by mirror foil (remember that wood paneling on the floor in the other room as a similar distraction?).

If the inner-city-out theory immediately falls flat (imho, obviously), I’m left in a room covered with thin reflective plastic skin drawn tightly over standard scaffolding, reflecting rather good but not knock-down-dead late 19th century architectural engineering, the sky, and unfortunately myself over and over (and how can an army of scientists be not aware that my presence in an artwork destroys all of its deeper meaning. Wait, where was I?). That plastic skin produces wrinkles and crackles that quickly become the aesthetic focus of the room (schooled as we have been in op-art tactics through the warped mirrors etc. earlier in the exhibit). It’s optic glitch in an analogically produced virtual distance. One could use that as a metaphor and label the piece as lo-fi poetry built out of a grand idea executed in carelessly applied mirror foil.

And that’s really the point for me. I do suspect quite a percentage of the work on display is manufactured to elicit spontaneous gasps of aesthetical appreciation. But within the pretty confused mock-scientific invitations to easy ogeling, there’s some rather serious poetry collecting at the fringes. Growing like mildew, one would hope, and rotting the studio myth from the inside out.

To not fall asleep

2010-05-01T13:49:00.022+02:00

This blog is named in homage to my twelve-month old, for whom delaying sleep is the major objective in life. He has developed considerable strategical cunning. He won’t lie down in the pram but sit in a position that will make him fall flat on his face when sleep overpowers him. If the pain doesn’t instantly bring him back, he can trust that it’s a sight I just cannot bear and that I will try to move him into a different position, which effort will wake him up again. If he cannot keep the sitting position for weariness, he will lie sideways with his teeth hooked into the railing, so that every bump in the sidewalk will give him pain, and every curb makes him bleed from the mouth. Then, when despite all his efforts he’s down to reserve power, he will start blindly climbing over the side, hoping for an adrenaline rush, or maybe a hit on the asphalt.

I do not know why he does that. Of course, sleep is the little brother of death, but there seems to be no fear of the void involved. More of a hunger for immediate context. I guess the stream of consciousness may not be broken, since once it is, you awake with a sloppily cleaned slate and have to start stitching the narrative back together again. A year of life without the narrative to keep you full of purpose, why, that would be unconditional surrender to your instincts. That’s how all the best ideas die, when it takes too long to frame them in the emotional circumstance they were born under and you have to give them some semblance of continuity the morning after. So I’d better not fall asleep.

(The photo is by my four-year old, picture-hunting among his toys.)