4.28.05: Politics, Anonymous Art

The acting oil minister of Iraq will be Ahmad Chalabi, a Shiite once close to the Pentagon. Hold on, isn’t this the guy who was completely discredited a year ago as providing false and misleading intelligence? Isn’t this the Bush administration's favorite “Iraqi” weasel? I put Iraqi in quotes because he’s been an ex pat so long he has more ties to the Pentagon than he has to Iraq.

I guess from the U.S. point of view no matter what the new Iraqi government does to their people and the nation's infrastructure, the oil at least is safely in the American hands, via their puppet, and that’s all we wanted anyway.

This is also a big moment for Iraq's Shiites, who were brutally suppressed by Saddam Hussein's government. We will see if they can escape the dictum that the oppressed, when given or having taken power, most often revert to the behaviour they are most familiar with — that of oppression and corruption. “Become a tyrant in his stead” as the poem goes. Of course, being 60% of the population they deserve at least that percentage of the parliament, ministries, etc. But the temptation to assume the complete and total apparatus of power and then to wreak revenge on the Sunnis who oppressed them for so long will be great. If this all too human temptation is not re directed the path leads to civil war.

I’m on my way to Toronto tomorrow A.M. I am doing a public art installation of The New Sins organized in connection with the Contact Photo Festival which opens on the weekend. I did this installation once before, in Sydney, where I thought it worked very well. By that I mean that I could witness people actually stopping to read the pieces, I could see them scratching their heads or chuckling to themselves, and my name was either so small or so tiny that the work became almost anonymous, an issue that is fairly integral to the work for some of these public things.

I told Malu that my name would be on these, but really really small, and she didn’t understand. If you’ve done something why not be proud of it and let everyone know? They will be in bus shelter lightboxes around the city center. Since most of the time these lightboxes are filled with ads it will naturally be first assumed, unless otherwise announced, that these are ads too. I feel that if it is revealed right away that these are artworks they would immediately lose some of their power to amuse and to puzzle. Nobody actually puzzles over an artwork — by declaring itself art it is allowed to be as wacko, egocentric and obtuse as it wants to be. The excuse is that it is art. So it penetrates no deeper than that. “Oh, another waste of the public's money” or “Oh, those nutty artists” is what many people will instantly think. I would rather keep the arty connection under wraps for at least a moment in order to allow the thing to not be so easily justified or explained.

Probably for the same reason I often do these things in somewhat imitation of the thing that are normally in that place. While these particular ones look more like the paid propaganda of some fringe religious cult, I often design these things to imitate the graphic style of contemporary advertising or signage. So at first it probably gets taken as the ravings of a pastor gone slightly round the bend or as an advertising teaser campaign, as there is no product visible. This, to me, is good. It both raises the question of what normally goes in that space, and why, and what is this other thing, and why. There might, for some people, be a slight disjunction, as advertising platforms become such a part of the visual environment that we don’t give them a second thought. We almost don’t even see them any more — though I believe their images and messages still penetrate. It is the act of them being there, a presence in the street or elsewhere, that is taken for granted to the point to where they become partly invisible. So maybe by making something that is similar, but not quite the same, these pieces and other similar ones will draw attention to the process, the things, and what they are usually used for.

Well, we’ll see.

4.26.05: "Punk: Attitude"

Saw a screening at Tribeca Film Festival of a documentary called Punk: Attitude directed by Don Letts, former Clash associate, video director, etc. It’s a history of Punk using a lot of archival footage intercut with interviews with survivors that draws a crooked line from the Stooges and garage bands of the 60s to Blink-182 and other slicker more manufactured versions of the sound that exist today.

The interviewees, many of them, featured stunning examples of British dentistry at its worst. Or maybe I’m being unfair, maybe it’s the British diet that fosters rampant tooth decay. I can talk, my teeth are far from straight and perfect — I didn’t have braces when I was younger the way lots of American kids do now. Not that I really desperately needed them — which was the accepted justification back then. Now the bar has been raised and mere functionality and suitability of chompers is not enough, they have to be “improved” and made as close to perfect as possible.

Anyway, New Yorkers will be pleased at Letts’ version of punk history — it corrects the often mistaken impression that it originated in London. Henry Rollins, who is one of the interviewees, is amazingly articulate, funny, good looking and incisive. Many of the others seem sadly aged or somewhat damaged, unsurprisingly.

4.24.05: "Ashes & Snow", "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"

Earlier in the day Malu and I visited The Nomadic Museum, a massive temporary structure covering an entire pier designed by architect Shigeru Ban to house the photos and a film by Gregory Colbert (Ashes and Snow). That’s all it will ever be used for.

Colbert, according to New York Magazine, “got the idea (and funds) for the museum after his one-man installation in 2002 at the Venice Biennale’s Arsenale, a vast shipyard dating from the Renaissance. “Ashes and Snow” was the first solo exhibit ever to occupy the entire space. And every last piece of art in it was bought up by the chairman of Rolex, who then encouraged the artist to use the money to mount the show — as is — in other cities. So, Colbert asked the avant-garde Japanese architect Shigeru Ban to design a museum large enough to travel with it.”

Predictably the NY art critics hated it — it was panned and disdained — but the people come in droves. There is almost always a line, especially on weekends, and there must be some word of mouth bringing people in, because there are none of the arts section covers that usually hype an event of this magnitude — unlike The Gates, which was hyped to the max.

Here’s the temporary building under construction:

And an artist's conception of the inside — pretty accurate, too:

It does indeed inspire a sense of awe, induced by the massive scale of the building and the images of elephants and whales consorting with humans. The new age music that plays inside kind of puts the nose on the clown.

Malu was amazed at first, then soon began a guessing game — How did he get the elephant to do that? Was that landscape, with a perfectly flat horizon, Photoshopped? (answer: yes) How does the man (Colbert, doing some “modern dance”-type aquatic ballet) hold his breath underwater so long? (the camera people had a tank ready for him to take big gulps of air was my guess.) Why is everything in slow motion?

Malu also initially asked if he simply took these pictures of existing situations and peoples. A beatific young boy with a shaved head rests his head, eyes blissfully closed, against a docile elephant. A woman in a white flowing robe walks through an Egyptian temple as a hawk swoops over her shoulder. I think that initial impression of documenting a preëxisting place and people is intended, that we are meant to think a little bit that these things did happen and that in some exotic far-flung locales humans and animals happily coexist. That Colbert simply searched these places out and then photographed what he saw. That the world shelters amazing things beyond the civilized world.

Malu began so seriously doubt this “authenticity” after a bit. She sensed the situations were arranged, set up and even sometimes photoshopped. She didn’t completely understand why the sepia still photos looked like they’d been smudged, smeared or painted.

She was mesmerized then eventually bored by the film (a lot of scenes seem to repeat) but many people were rapt and stayed for the whole hour before it looped around.

Colbert seems quite the messianic type — the need for a whole building/museum, the hushed, worshipful atmosphere. And placing himself in many of the scenes. This extreme romanticism and self-exaltation is somehow disturbing to me. On one level it could be seen as a celebration of the wonders of nature and life on earth. Cavorting underwater with the whales and manatees looks like fun — I wish I was there — but his attitude and posture seem more than a little Christ-like. Maybe I’m just another arty cynic. If we can, after the passage of time, “appreciate” the romantic awe-inspiring work of Leni Riefenstahl — whose images, from Nüremberg to the Nuba, are now seen by some as beautiful in and of themselves and divorced from their service to the Nazis — then why not this? Aren’t they more or less the same?

Here’s Leni:

and again of a romantic ruin:

Colbert:

The interior of the museum:

And Leni’s stadium lighting:

Now, I’m not saying Colbert is a closet Nazi. Just pointing out many stylistic similarities (there are more congruencies, but I can’t locate the images.) Does all romanticism lead down the road to fascism and ruin? I think not, but it does seem to work in reverse — extreme nationalism, fanaticism, the feeling of a manifest destiny — have in their pasts a romanticization of history, culture and nature. And to merely find this attitude lurking behind evil, well, does that really imply that it was the cause of the evil? Not exactly. If that were true we’d have to check ourselves every time we took in an inspiring scenic vista or gazed in awe at amazing structures and lifeforms. Gazing at the Grand Canyon would be outlawed in case it fostered fascist tendencies.

Went to see the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room. As the movie was about to begin I heard a young man behind me say to his date, “the reason the teachers didn’t like me was because they all knew I was smarter than they were.”

How appropriate his attitude would be for this movie, where Greed is good, survival of the fittest and free market economics were the guiding “ethical” principals for the Enron set and their traders. As we watch the heinous behavior and complete lack of ethics and morals of this bunch we wonder, “how can people do this, behave like this, destroy other people, lie cheat and scheme and justify it to themselves?”

(I’m currently reading books about dictators as well as Vollmann's tome on violence, so the question comes up a lot.)

The filmmakers attempt to answer that question by including some clips and information on the Milgram experiment, a series of psychological tests done decades ago. In these tests the test subject was required by a “scientist” to help an unseen person learn some phrases by administering small electric shocks when the unseen person got the answer wrong. As they got more wrong answers the “scientist” instructed the subject to increase the voltage. The point of the test was to see just how far the subject would go before ethics and morals would kick in and they would refuse to harm the invisible person.

As it turned out, people go depressingly far before stopping. The invisible subjects would be screaming in simulated pain (no real shocks were administered), begging the subject to stop, while the “scientist” urged use of increased voltages. Many subjects “killed” their invisible students, partly because they could say they were just doing their job, that the scientist was obviously an “expert” and maybe partly because the person was unseen — though the screams could be heard.

The inference is that, yes, as the Greeks and every other civilization knew, left unbridled (deregulated, free market) and given some quick reward — Enron execs and traders made fistfuls of money — people will destroy one another and social order will quickly crumble. One might say that the collapse of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and others proves that the market is working. Tell that to all the little people who lost their life savings.

I think it shows that deregulation and free markets are an excuse for bullies and unethical types to swindle as many as they can — and that while too many regulations stifle creativity, too few encourages people's worst instincts.This is not Nature at work. Not even animals get to behave like this for very long. There are checks and balances in the wild that rein in extreme behavior. Only viruses and plagues seem to run unchecked for lengthy periods.

4.16.05

Had a talk with Yale (Luaka Bop) yesterday re: the visa restrictions the U.S. has imposed on foreign musicians in recent years. This was triggered by a discussion regarding the scheduling and budgeting of Susana Baca’s next recording, which will probably take place in both Lima and NYC.

The tightening of the borders in recent years, while it may be understandable regarding genuinely suspicious individuals, is in fact applied with almost no rhyme or reason — although in fact it may only appear to be without reason. A friend told me over a lunch meeting that a chunk of Pina Bausch’s troupe of dancers, based in Wuppertal, Germany, were denied entry, which effectively scuttled the performances that were booked months ahead of time. A tango group in Buenos Aires told me a week or two ago that they have toured Europe 3 times recently but have been consistently denied U.S. visas, so at this point the U.S. doesn't even figure into their performance plans. Yale says that some of the new regulations make the applicants pay when they apply, without knowing if they will even get the visa. Needless to say some individual members of many bands and troupes are refused visas, usually at the last minute, which effectively cancels the tour. The promoters in the U.S. have become loath to even book or schedule foreign acts these days, as the odds are just not in their favor. The prospect of spending money on promotion, ads and radio only to have the show cancelled by the INS when the act applies for their visas is discouraging, and financially ruinous to some small promoters — so they eventually just don’t end up taking the risk. Likewise, many small U.S. labels who might release recordings by foreign artists will think twice if there will be little likelihood of a local live show to generate press and interest. Often that’s the only way they have or generating press and word of mouth. So, many times, the labels “edit” what they release based on these legal and economic factors.

It amounts to a kind of cultural censorship. Call me paranoid, but given all the manipulative tricks the Republicans have gotten up to recently, I am prepared to believe that this has less to do with Homeland security and more to do with keeping the American public ignorant and free of foreign influence and inspiration. An ill-informed, isolated, ignorant populace is a populace easily manipulated. Fed a diet of reality shows coupled with faith-based reasoning (an oxymoron if ever there was one) and you have a perfect recipe for a country in which the government that can do more or less whatever it wants. Democracy becomes a farce without access to information. And culture — music, theater, dance, etc. — is information for the heart. Yes, we can still obtain news reports and recordings online, but without live performance there is a hole where there should be face to face “news” about how others live, how they love and why and what their passions are.  If we are not allowed to feel the rest of the world then we can be told anything about it and not know what those people are really like. If the Other is hidden from you, then you don’t even know to ask or inquire about what it is you’re not getting — because you don’t even know it exists.

Any government that can cynically manufacture fake news reports, install fake reporters, create fake media outlets and then simply shrug it off when caught is capable of doing this as well.

Went to a discussion at the NY Public Library between Paul Auster and Chico Buarque. Buarque has written numerous novels over the years, so despite being known mainly as a Brazilian songwriter, he’s now also part of the literary world, hence the Auster connection.

A number of times he mentioned that he writes the words to songs last — that the music comes first and words are eventually found to fit the existing meter and melody. The chart, the framework for the text he referred to a “monster”. Meaning that he writes a more or less nonsense text that fits the melody, the accents and the meter, and uses that as a guide… and he calls this a monster version of the song.

Being familiar with this way of writing — it’s the way I usually work, too — it was amusing to see the reaction of the audience — almost disbelief. Being literary types the primacy of the word is paramount for them, so imagining that choosing words primarily because they fit a tune and a meter must be anathema, unbelievable. Well, more or less — I’m exaggerating a little. There were quite few questions from the audience that to me attempted to challenge this idea — people just couldn’t believe, for example, that a song written for a musical or a film didn’t have words first. I mean, it had to fit the story, the character, right? Well, the words even for these often don’t come first, and yet they still adhere to the subject, and if they’re well written they give the impression that the words and music arose simultaneously.

Afterwards, at a dinner party, there was a lot of discussion re: the lack of books in translation in the U.S. It’s another way in which the US has become more isolated, closed, shut off. It’s a little harder to ascribe this to a willful conspiracy like the visa rulings — it might be the legacy of years of cultural dominance, a dominance which is gradually disappearing. Part of the backwash, or blowback as the CIA calls it, of globalization is that cultures and regions around the world have rediscovered their own cultural resources. Rather than simply seeing themselves as a market for American goods they see America as a market for their goods, services and culture. It goes both ways. So, while the US might not be interested — there isn’t a true reciprocity — the self-image of many nations has changed. Music charts in most countries are no longer dominated by U.S. or English language product, much or which was force-fed and is no longer seen as relevant, and likewise the book lists around the world are no longer dominated by translations of English language writers — there is a more equitable balance… though this balance is not reflected in the U.S. Rome still believes that it makes and the rest of the world should simply buy and consume.

These writer reporter guys at this dinner party exchange amazing stories — that the U.S.-installed president of Afghanistan is a well known pederast (he likes young boys), for example… but everyone is loath to put that in print. I was sort of mystified — why not print it? The explanation seemed to be that it's not unusual over there and it deflects attention from whether or not he's actually doing anything about pulling that country together, which is deemed a more important issue.

Hmmm. I see.

4.15.05: CQMD, "Hurlyburly", "Random Families"

Saw another French group at Joe’s — CQMD (Ceux Qui Marche Debout).  A funky brass band obviously inspired by the New Orleans grooves and bands, but also by James Brown, Charles Brown (they did a Go-Go cover) and others. Vocals mostly chanted by a host of the players led by a young mulatta who resembled a more athletic Josephine Baker. Incredible grooves, tighter, I would bet, than many of their New Orleans models… but not rigid, as white people can often be when they do this — this group has a mighty swing.

It made me think they will certainly be seen through the lens of reverse discrimination here — they will not be appreciated or written about because the are not black. The same goes for black rock groups, black classical composers, etc it goes without saying.

Saw a play last night — Hurlyburly — a revival of a David Rabe play about a bunch of guys and gals on the fringes of the movie scene in LA — it’s basically a vortex of bullshit and self-delusion, fueled by drugs, anger, sex and more drugs. The writing, poetic speeches full of narcissism, backstabbing and sheer lunacy, was often oddly beautiful.

Went by a talk by Adrian LeBlanc, the writer of Random Family, a book I read recently. She’d spent 10+ years with an extended Puerto Rican family, including boyfriends, step parents, etc… and her book details rough lives in the South Bronx and the various poverty-inspired tragedies — with the characters often ending up in jail — women and men both.

She basically lived with these people during that time, and the writing describes every sordid, loving, hopeful, happy and fucked-up detail of their lives… except the presence of the writer. One gets a deep sense of each person, their connections to each other and what motivates them to behave in ways that white middle class folks might objectively view as self-destructive or mean. We see them as human beings, in other words, not as examples, news stories or statistics.

But her deep involvement brought up lots of serious journalistic issues, which she and her editor and a collaborator tried to address. She mentioned that as she got sucked into the Bronx world, more and more her downtown life began to shrink, until eventually she had no “personal” life at all. At the rare dinner party with downtown friends she would be assaulted with questions as if she had just returned from some strange planet. Her friends and others wanted amazing stories, which there were in abundance, but Le Blanc felt these were cheapening and betraying the humanity of her uptown friends, and eventually she just kept quiet about her uptown life.

When she did eventually realize it was time to put the stories down into words it was extremely difficult for her at first. She’d lost the gift of seeing the uptown world as an outsider — she was seeing it as its inhabitants did, more or less. So when she began to write she left lots of stuff out. Her editor, however, began to prod, through conversations and meetings, and the details began to emerge.

These deeply immersive journalists realized they often ignored or denied seeing lots of things. At one point one of them attended an uptown family party with a photographer in tow… a party at which some kids were maliciously teased by their grandfather. Teasing that led eventually to violence and humiliation. The writer took it all in stride, denying the violence and remembering only sort of rough horseplay. But then later the photographer said, “no, look at my pictures… this was violent and cruel, you're just too close to it.”

Only when confronted by the photographs did the journalist realize what she’d witnessed.

Oddly, the reaction from the book's subjects was, “you didn’t tell enough, you left out some of the craziest shit” …which apparently was partly true. It was decided that the intended readers would lose all sympathy for some of the characters if all of their behavior were described. Without long and detailed descriptions of context it was just too hard for downtowners, for example, to understand why an incarcerated man had to have new Nikes etc. when his wife or girlfriend could barely feed her kids. It just made him seem cruel and unfeeling, which he was apparently not. It seems shoes are so crucial in jail to his place in the world, in society, that it almost became a matter of life and death.

4.13.05: Diane Arbus, Nouvelle Vague

Went to the Diane Arbus show at the Met. As the web and the blogosphere mentions it’s particularly remarkable for the way it integrates her diaries into the photos. Her writing is so poetic and amazing that some of the time the photos become background — illustrations of the diary texts. One dark room has been built as a kind of secluded installation dedicated to her life — and it takes the form of her darkroom and various other elements from her house. Her enlarger and test prints are in one area and along the ceiling are her collection of books, mostly books by other photographers.

In a way parts of this show verge on the tacky dioramas similar the ones in the Mormon museum recreating the boyhood home of Joseph Smith or the one we saw in Auckland recreating the Antarctic base complete with piped-in wind and voice excerpts. This approaches the same fakey re-creation, but stops short of complete realism — Arbus’ books are not on real book shelves and they’re displayed partially spread out, not side by side, and the “darkroom” lacks lots of pipes, chemicals, red lights, etc… it’s meant to evoke, not recreate.

Anyway, her diaries, postcards to friends, letters and scribbles are incredible and it was smart of someone to make them such a special part of the show — normally a museum show like this might show just the work, chronologically, neatly mounted and framed on off-white walls, with a few diary excerpts quoted on wall texts at various intervals, and this show has some of those familiar display elements intact. But by launching into the realm of her inner thoughts it makes the show less about the work and more about her. Luckily she holds up to scrutiny, otherwise it could turn into a cult of the personality type show.

I remembered when I first encountered her photos — I might have been in my early 20s entering art school — and to me at that time they were shocking. Not so much the photography, but the people, the subjects. To invite us to stare at midgets, naked transvestites, nudists, retarded kids and other freaks and fringe elements of society was irresistible. These were the people our parents (some of them) told us NOT to stare at — “it’s impolite” — and with Arbus’ somewhat classical formal approach to photographing  them we were being invited to do the forbidden — to ogle and stare as long and as hard as we liked — to pore over and scrutinize these parts of humanity that had been excluded, edited out of polite conversation. These were the people we didn’t see on television, or even in the movies very much. Look how wide-ranging and extreme humanity can be! By photographing them at their homes she made them seem even stranger — because seeing them at home forced us to imagine what their daily lives might be like — that they even had daily lives — rather than seeing them simply as freaks on display.

Caught a showcase gig by Nouvelle Vague, a French combo whose record is just out on Luaka Bop in North America. The record is vaguely lounge bossa nova type interpretations of post-punk songs — a Clash song, PIL song, Joy Division, etc. It shouldn’t work, it should be a one-joke gimmick, but it does work — it’s a moving and marvelous record. Some of the songs sound fully equal to the originals.

On center stage are two young women bookended by two more or less bald neatly dressed young men on keyboard, laptop and acoustic guitar. This setup makes it seem like the whole thing might have happened spontaneously — perhaps one late night in someone's apartment the guitarist began strumming old songs he knew and the girls in the room — it was late and everyone had had some drinks — began to casually sing along and dance with wine glasses in their hands. Then maybe they all realized it would be so easy to do it again in the daylight and make a little record. And maybe that casual, loose, approach, a way of making something with no ambition or audience in mind, was what made it succeed.

4.12.05

Lots of articles about the new Rem Koolhaas Casa do Musica building that just opened in Porto. It’s a music hall, symphony hall… small — 1300 seats. Not one word, not even one, in all the articles about how the hall sounded. Not a mention of acoustical engineers, baffles — nothing. Only that the hall is box-shaped, which sounds like a recipe for acoustic disaster.

Most of the people arrested around the Republican convention held in New York last year were arrested and detained for no reason — some were merely out picking up their takeout orders — no reason except the reason that the Republicans desire a police state and mayor Bloomberg was happy to kiss their ass and comply. This was all painfully obvious at the time, that the city conspired with the Republicans, but now it seems there is hard evidence, so it is actually news to some folks.