Meanwhile, in his secret underground studio . . .

(Apropos of Art Now Vol 4, out now from Taschen, to which I've contributed short texts on Adel Abdessemed, Cecily Brown, Andreas Gursky, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Anish Kapoor, Jeff Koons, Chris Ofili, Michael Raedecker, Neo Rauch, Mark Ryden, and Piotr Uklański. You'll also find the explanation to the above, should you need one. If you're checking this blog because of Art Now, welcome! feel free to drop me a line.)

Cars and music

So I've written an essay on cars and music which you can read here in a new online music magazine called Surround. Even if you're more interested in art and less in cars and music you should still read it for my prose stylings. In fact you should read the whole magazine for all the diverse prose stylings and because some of the music discussed is very good and you may not know it (I can vouch for Kevin Drumm's Humid Weather and Michael Pisaro's The Punishment of the Tribe by Its Elders, of the few recent ones I've heard).

If you've hit on this site coming from the Surround article and are still wondering what the hell that was about, welcome! here are some links to other stuff I've written which might give some context. You'll find a post on Graham Lambkin's Softly Softly Copy Copy upstream on my blog; I've done a shorter structural reading of a record (Teatro Assente by Taku Unami and Takahiro Kawaguchi) in the finale of an article on theatrics and music in fluxus and eai for Eartrip; and in a text for a Keith Rowe exhibition you'll find some stray thoughts on narrative in conceptually-oriented music. (Should you, for some strange reason, want the Rowe text in your files, hit me for a pdf with the original illustrations I'd chosen for the exhibition folder. It made more sense that way.)  

Unknowable masterpieces and other catalog pitches

Somewhere upstream, I've been using a billiards boat by Rudolf Reiber to ponder the significance of the work of art yielding a good yarn vs. it being built from elements awkward to relate. When I feel I'm saying something witty by merely recounting the set-up, that's not just a social gift by the artist, but also relieves me from the duty of explaining the edificational use every work of art is expected to have, sharpening our mistrust of the act of experience.

Some of Rudolf's pieces make pretty good conversation, but thinking about the last bunch it struck me that maybe they were overdoing things in the opposite direction, by stating all that needed to be said and not leaving much room for thought to the viewer. (From me, that's not a dig, I want the artist to do all the work and act as a consumer myself.) This is not because his art would be making a concise statement about some objective, though, instead it creates a situation where connecting the dots might feel like an exercise in pedantry. So, to save the art from being smothered by close attention, here are a couple of catalog piece pitches for Rudolf.

Last year, he made A Whiter Shade of Pale, where he painted the four walls of an exhibition room in the shades of white used by leading art institutions: the MoMA, the Vienna Secession, the Centre Pompidou, and the Tate Modern. All there is to see are title cards near the edges of the room, naming the brand of white and the institution. (Accordingly, on his website, Rudolf presents the work as a zoom-in on one of these title cards (you'll find it after the link under "works, solid.")) An accompanying catalog essay would easily write itself. Since it's a piece about the White Cube, the essay would obviously start with a motto from Brian O'Doherty on the "Ideology of the Gallery Space." Then there'd be the history of the white monochrome, Yves Klein exhibiting an empty gallery, or, if a more historical take were required, centuries of trompe l'oeil wall painting. After such displays of profundity, the essay could end on a facetious note, with a quote from the lyrics of the Procul Harum song: "The room was humming harder / as the ceiling flew away," a clear reference to the defective neon light straining to contribute to the glare of the white cube.

But all of that is squirrelwork. So here's the real pitch: I will order me a set of Rauschenberg White Paintings from the Chinese internet site, whose showrooms I have tested in the pic above, offering "real" copies of historical masterpieces. I'll hang hang them on the walls of the installation (if such it is), then return to the White Cube everyday with fresh eyes and record my changing impressions of the canvases in situ. (That of course refers to T.J. Clark's The Sight of Death, subtitled "An Experiment in Art Writing," for which the author visited a couple of Poussins over a stretch of time. I am restaging the experiment to prove its objective textual results.) Obviously I cannot foresee how my own experiment staring at dead wall space and at the work of art in the age of cheap manual reproduction will be colored by the subtle shadings of the different institutional whites, but by the end of the process the white monochromes on white background should have developed sufficient shadings that I could name a Robert Ryman period for each Eskimo word for snow.

This is Secret from 2012 (in Rudolf's Suspiria solo show at Payne Shurvell). He commissioned his partner to do a painting for him, which was then packaged away into the pictured crate. Nobody has seen the work except the painter, not the artist nor gallerist or buyer (who have to sign an agreement not to open the thing). It's maybe not the strongest work, since this kind of thing has been done before . . . though usually the artist is the one in on the secret, so here lies the shift in meaning: the hired hand (more typically the studio assistant executing work according to the instructions of the master) is the only one knowing the content of the work, though that is to all purposes completely overshadowed by the discretion of the master, who keeps the work on a pure meta level.

If we want an essay to add something to the piece, then we would have to flesh out the plight of the assistant, make that which is packed away not just a prop in a conceptual ploy, but a secret of real value, something whose unattainability actually hurts on some higher kind of level. What we will do to achieve this, is to appropriate Balzac's classic story, The Unknown Masterpiece (you will remember, male white genius tries to paint beauty but can't to his own satisfaction, finds the right model after many years, is inspired to a frenzy of creativity and paints the perfect painting, only to find that others will see nothing but a chaos of brushstrokes (and one perfectly executed foot), leaving the masterpiece unknown since it exists only in his head). We won't need to rewrite much, a word here or there, a gender switch: our heroine will be driven by the desire to create a perfect painting worthy of the scheme the artist had thought out for it (btw, think of the story Rauschenberg told how de Kooning selected a good drawing for him to erase: "I want it to really hurt," he said), then we'll change this into an artistically happy ending, where she does create an undubitable masterpiece . . . though of course we'll never know that and even the artist won't believe she has it in her. (Tense conversation over the kitchen table. Let's hope the couple will somehow cope with the psychological complications that our essay will bring on them.)

In that same exhibition, Rudolf showed The Silence, which is a braille transcription of Ingmar Bergman's film as a 3-D movie. Again we can join the dots. It's "silence" during the Cage centennials and the year of the Paralympics. Silence, which according to Beuys has been overrated in the secretly busy Duchamp, moving at us like the names of stars on the silver screen in endless opening credits. This film gives haptic a bad name. 

But I'm not even attempting to go into the motions. Despite the artist covering all the angles, the piece has a purely slap-to-the-head kind of brilliance.

It's a braille movie in 3-D. 

More to laugh than to make you cry

This is my favorite political painting: Apollo and Marsyas by Bartolomeo Manfredi, an image from the class wars, 1620 as well as today. This spoilt brat from the one percent, slightly flabby because of all the drugs and good times, but powerful and so damn worldly wise and dangerous. He doesn’t blink an eyelid while methodically skinning us alive, he’s rather curious as to how we’ll take it. What can we do? We stare inwards in a resigned sort of dignity facing the question: at what point did it go so completely wrong? We didn’t have a chance ever for a second, did we? A painting so to the point, it’s still the same confrontation and the same outcome 400 years later . . .

I’m not being clever, by the way, this is what it really is. Just try a quick search and you’ll reassuringly find that the Marsyas myth already played a symbolical role in the class struggles of late Roman antiquity and figured in the political stage plays of the time, and that later it was discussed in that light by historians such as Giambattista Vico in his New Science from 1725. Apollo stood and stands for the patricians, Marsyas the plebeians. Class confrontations are nothing unusual in the art of the time, even though they’re mostly interpreted more mildly. You will know Velázquez’ Apollo at the Forge of Vulcan from the same period (around 1630, see here a detail). It’s similarly obvious about the artist’s sympathies with down to earth natural dignity rather than the fop satirized by a halo of self-importance. Still the image is much more complicated and much less political. It is serious about telling the myth (the details of which don’t interest us here), and more than about class conflict itself it seems about a contrast between fancy decadent high art (Apollo the god of music and poetry) vs. the mythical blacksmith as an honest craftsman. So there is satire, but not the brutal urgency of the Manfredi. But then nothing I know really compares to that.

I am thinking about favorite political art because I have just read T.J. Clark’s fantastic book Image of the People about Courbet as a political painter in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution. What makes the book so great is that it allows no easy connections between an artist’s interest in the people, his realist efforts to catch a truth about them, and the resultant political impact of the painting. Clark isn’t the only one to reject these easy connections, but I don’t think I’ve ever encountered such a thorough dividing up of all the elements at play: what the painter knew, what he wished but failed to express, what the painting knew (more than the painter, of course), what it accidently communicated at its time and now reveals to us, and how the mindframe of the contemporary viewer would allow only certain parts of the message to be painted in the first place. In the most spectacular chapter, a handful of the stone cold classics of realism slowly travel from the countryside to Paris over several exhibitions after the Salon of 1850 had been postponed. They were well received but nothing special in Ornans, where they’d been produced, immensely successful in Besançon, purposefully ignored in Dijon, gaining ever more political heft until in Paris they became a statement, because the suffering peasant population there was a headline not a fact of life and as such had more impact. And why did the country personage look so bourgeois anyway, it was insidious.

Today a painting like the Burial at Ornans cannot be read without a guidebook (well, not by me), but Clark also shows that city audiences then were almost as clueless as we are in front of the object. He quotes the critic Haussard who asked what the viewer was to make of “this long file of ludicrous masks and deformities copied from life . . . those two churchwardens with noses as crimson as their robes, this joker with the funny hat and turned-up moustaches who carries the coffin, this brawny gravedigger who poses solemnly on one knee at the graveside; this seriousness and this buffoonery, these tears, these grimaces, this Sunday-best mourning, in black coat, in smock, in beguine cap, all adding up to a funeral from some carnival, ten yards long, an immense ballad in painting, where there is more to laugh than to make you cry?”

Clark makes sense of all of that, he paints the social situation, the bourgeois fears, he shows how the paintings could be felt to threaten exactly because the motives behind them stayed unclear and so they could be connected to something larger than the socialist leanings of their author, bad enough as that was . . . But to apply his thorough research and ingenious reasoning to the fullest effect, there is one thing Clark must do: cut off the timeline before Courbet starts painting completely unreasonable paintings. Clark like others just mutters something of a descent into alcoholism and fades out early. Because, look at this, from 1861:

Alcohol might explain it. The stag fleeing from the hunt, throwing a pained look skywards, seemingly checking the weather . . . but then I remember the contemporary review of the realist masterpiece above, and isn’t this also “a ballad in painting, where there is more to laugh than to make you cry?” More responsible than drink might be the virtues of academic painting, like catching a moment most pregnant in narrative which would ennoble a nature piece to almost the status of a history painting. The same aspirations could also explain the somewhat too human expression of the stag (which reminds us of Landseer’s lifesaving dog, the forebear of the Disney comic which has had two appearances already on this blog, so enough of that).

While we’re in somewhat hilarious mood, let us look back again to one of the realist classics discussed by Clark in detail, the more obviously political Stonebreakers of 1849:

This is one of the most interpreted images ever. Courbet himself said the moral was that in this job you started carrying huge loads like the young guy and ended up bent like the old one. The men are rendered anonymous, one averted and one below the rim of his hat, which is usually read as a meaningless job killing the individual. So this is realism, a word that today seems to mean an artistic approach, but sometimes it will mean no more than a thematic engagement with some kind of low life. Because the method is rather Victorian in its close realism of detail and overall poetry, and doesn’t the picture look almost related to something like, say, a William Dyce? (Partly because the coloring is somewhat unlike Courbet—the work was destroyed in 1945 so the photo looks almost handcolored.) Courbet had seen the two stonebreakers out on the road and then invited them to the studio as models. Probably the pot sat, too, and some heaps of stones were arranged for scrutiny. The old man is carefully if stiffly bent, his left knee cushioned by some yellow grass. And then the nicest touch of balladry, this time with a more subtle humor that just makes you smile: after all the years on his mind-numbing job, the old man still puts such loving care into each single blow. He is about to hit the individual, smallish stone after some more moments of almost Zen-like concentration . . .

Contrary to the Manfredi, the image no longer works like it used to. It does not tell you about the plight of the plebeian, it is no avatar for social change. Especially when you compare it against Jean-François Millet’s prose statement on how work makes you tired and stupid a decade later:

The audience object followed him everywhere

I’ve written a rather lengthy article on performance art with musical leanings, Fluxus to now, for the recent Eartrip issue. So if you have any interest in the music and antics of, in chronological order of appearance: Wolf Vostell, Joseph Beuys, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, La Monte Young, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mattin, or Taku Unami, you can download the magazine from this site and read it. While you do that, I’ll stay here in the Beuys room, wishing I had a nice pillow of lard to lay my weary head on.

Missing in my list is John Cage, who does make a short appearance, but it still surprised me how unwilling he was to be integrated into the Fluxus part of the story. Obviously he would belong at the beginning of that. For example: one of my other tasks while writing this piece was the translation of a forthcoming essay on Cage’s 4' 33'' by Dieter Daniels, where the author relates an anecdote on how Cage would allow the complete credit for Fluxus to be ascribed to him: “When in 1990 I asked him in a letter if George Maciunas wasn’t overstating things when he called the detailed Fluxus charts he had made the Travels of Saint John—because they feature John Cage as the most important protagonist—Cage simply answered: ‘No.’” Or take the Fluxus chapter in Michael Nyman’s Experimental Music book: it begins with Cage at his first happening in Black Mountain College 1952, holding forth from on top of a ladder (!!!). This is the source, isn’t it.

Well, twenty years before Daniels asked him, Cage sounded much more uncomfortable with the artists whose work seemed to somehow draw from his fountain.* In For the Birds, conversations with Daniel Charles from around 1970, he said: “I am not very familiar with Fluxpieces; I believe it has something to do with distributing directions to the audience concerning the most varied actions.” Which was meant as an insult, since intentionality, or rather the lack of it, was what at that point he was most interested in. And “distributing directions” would be the most evil thing an artwork could do. In Allan Kaprow and Fluxist Dick Higgins’ work, “intentionality is present,” he lamented. “They make true objects of their happenings.” If that doesn’t sound like a mortal insult today, objectification seems to have been a mighty weapon back then. Oldenburg (as quoted in my essay) impishly saw the audience as a mere object to be provoked, and then of course think of Michael Fried’s Art and Objecthood from 1967. If a thing materialized that much, it was a bad, commodifiable thing. Compare against that Cage on why he did it better: “I, on the contrary, am committed to letting anything happen, to make everything that happens acceptable.” (Which sounds a bit like Jeff Koons embracing our past, shameful taste and all.)

Daniels points out that this acceptance of everything which might happen doesn’t mean freedom for the performer, as becomes clear from a letter Cage wrote to the orchestra of the Zürich opera, berating the musicians that they had misinterpreted his work. But as a listener, you’re even worse off, you sort of need an instruction manual for 4' 33'', there’s so much you can do wrong. The audience at the premiere in 1952 were wrong. Cage: “They missed the point . . . because they didn’t know how to listen.” The listener is bound to fail.

Except George Brecht might still save the day, because around 1959 he came up with the concept of the virtuoso listener. Brecht’s score of the same name simply said: “Can hear music at any time.” Which has been read as a jibe on 4' 33'' and would be pretty funny as such, though a bit square. But it can be much more than that, since Brecht answers a real need that Cage’s piece poses. If (pretty big if) the performer of 4' 33'' doesn’t get in the way of the experience, the burden of carrying the work is shifted to the listeners’ side, who have to find something they can hear like never before. When there’s only the usual shuffling and coughing, they are in desperate need of listening virtuosity to even begin coping. Because Cage hasn’t been distributing directions, he’s been dropping urgent hints elsewhere, and now the audience object has to follow him and make the event happen in exactly the right way.

Maybe that pressure on the audience to perform has contributed to the piece’s astonishing resonance, just as much as its position in musical history as a point of no return. Cage himself was the very definition of the virtuoso listener, for whom “all sound may be music” (Brecht), but once everybody was in on basic virtuosic listening techniques, 4' 33'' became an incredibly fruitful influence on other music. There is now a deep tradition of composing with silence or sounds from the everyday without the pressure to deliver musical events (though still with high pressure on the audience to make music out of incidental sounds and noises).

Cage was right about the objects. Brecht’s pieces work best when little events indeed become like objects, or maybe even only possible objects. There is now a tendency to read the work in fashionable terms as pushing the boundaries of music. So thanks to Brecht dripping water has now become music. Polishing the instrument is music, too, proof, check, andsoforth. That would make Brecht’s work an appendix of Cage, though still an interesting one, since the areas he pushed the boundaries into were extra-musical but sort of believable as compositional events. It is maybe no coincidence that where Brecht staid within undoubtedly musical territory, his work was maybe not at its strongest. For a Drummer from 1966 read: “Drum on something you have never drummed on before. Drum with something you have never drummed with before.” These are wise words for the drum clinic, but as a performance score, they don’t exactly encourage reading deeper layers of meaning into them.

The Fluxversions of this piece (usually retroactive notations of realizations found for a score by the composer or his close circle) are immediately more interesting, if seen independently from the main score. Fluxversion 1: “Performer drums with drum sticks or drum brushes over the surface of wet mud or thick glue until brushes or sticks get stuck and can’t be lifted.” This is nice as an imperative to fail and so sends a different message. Since the outcome is fixed, though, and it probably would take a good amount of science to find a mud or glue which would really grab hold of the sticks or brushes instead of just hardening to the attacks, probably performers must rather choose to act the part—and as fiction the exercise becomes less interesting than as genuine experiment.

The second of the pieces also invites an entertainment approach: “Performer drums with sticks over a leaking feather pillow making the feathers escape the pillow.” The fifth is just awful, but strictly music again: “Performer dribbles a ping-pong ball between a hand-held racket and drum skin.” Seven is the most interesting since it has an extra layer of meaning: art being used for something useful (against the classic Oscar Wilde definition that it must be “quite useless”): “Performer drums with brushes inside a vessel filled with cream until cream is thick.”

An earlier piece by Brecht, Incidental Music from 1961, proceeds from a recital situation and, like the drum thing, distorts it through elements of absurdity, of failure, and while not of usefulness, of being used like a tool. One jumping-off point seems to have been Cage’s piano preparations and playing inside the body of the instrument. After the piano seat has been tilted against the instrument, Incidental Music part two of five goes: “Wooden blocks: A single block is placed inside the piano / A block is placed upon this block, then a third upon the second, and so forth, singly, until at least one block falls from the column.” A very cumbersome instruction for a simple task that children will discover on their own. But here there is nothing to discover, the game is surrealist in the incommensurability of the elements, and the ultimate failure is methodical.

The performer then photographs the situation, throws dried peas or beans on the keyboard (Dalí reference?), before finally, in the last part, “the piano seat is suitably arranged and the performer seats himself.” Him seated there, the obvious next act to follow this up with would be a romp through 4' 33''. Under the title: Music for Piano Lid.

There is a kind of influence, which you need to acknowledge because it is historically important in the chain of events, but which does not really help understand the work, if you take it in terms of content, because the temperaments of the supposed master and those following might be too different. Keith Rowe uses an expression for that which I think works very well, when he says (e.g. in a conversation with Radu Malfatti on the Erstwords blog): “One way of being influenced, is that people give you permission to do things. I always feel that Cage gave us permission to do something.” It was nice to find that this was actually an expression used by Cage himself, here talking about the time that he, Morton Feldman, David Tudor, and Christian Wolff met in the early 1950s (quoted after Calvin Tomkins): “Things were really popping all the time. Ideas just few back and forth between us, and in a sense we gave each other permission for the new music we were discovering.”

* Salomé Voegelin in Listening to Noise and Silence compares 4' 33'' to Duchamp’s urinal. “In many ways like Fountain, 4'33" is a ‘ready made.’ It brings silence, an extra-musical sound concept, into the concert hall, and thereby asks comparable questions of musical materiality and its conventions of performance as Duchamp did in relation to the aesthetic content and exhibition of visual art works by bringing a urinal into the gallery space. Both works introduced new, everyday, material into the realm of art and broadened the artistic process, proposing new aesthetic possibilities.” This flies in the face of most readings of 4' 33'', which usually go along the lines that silence does in fact not exist in the everyday (and therefore it is rather the concept of silence in music that is questioned to allow for the sounds that always will exist independent of the situation). But then . . . in my Eartrip piece I niggle about Brecht’s Drip Music often being realized with a pour instead of a drip, so that it sounds like somebody taking a leak! So Brecht’s piece would be a reference to 4' 33'', which I hadn’t caught before reading Voegelin’s book, and probably drops a broad hint for us to understand 4' 33'' according to her terms?!

Feierabend teaser trailer

  feierabend, the exposition by spurdertoene

Just when it had become obvious there was no way anything would happen anymore . . . Listen to the complete chain of events, and all that preceded them, over here.

Records of warfare: Monkeys vs. dinosaurs

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.

. . . 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

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

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.