Yesterday a group of us were
invited by Pete Lawler of the band Weddings Parties
Anything to visit the Percy
Grainger museum here in Melbourne. A group of us grabbed local bike share
bikes ($2.70 for 24 hours!) and mandatory helmets ($5 at the local 7-Eleven,
with a $3 rebate if you return your helmet!) and headed towards the university.
We were met by Monica Syrette and Brian Allison, curators at the museum, who
explained a little about the museum and Grainger before we began our viewing.
Grainger was a turn of the last
century composer, most known for some band arrangements that almost every
school band learns.
He was also a lot of other
things—among them a famous concert pianist who played worldwide. Band students
aren't told about all the varied aspects of his life, however he stipulated
that it should all be laid bare when his life's work was presented in this
biographical museum. His idea was that every aspect of a creative person’s life
has some bearing on their work. So this museum has rooms about his dad, who
built bridges and civic buildings around Australia (when he was sober), and his
mother, whose dresses are on display. It’s an admirable idea—to include more
context in the presentation of an artist’s work—though how much of his
attachment to his mum and her tragic suicide shows up in his composing is
questionable.
In his later years, Grainger
developed an aversion to English words with Latin roots—so the word “museum”
was, in this system, to be replaced with the term “Hoard House”. He hoped this
was what all museums would henceforth be called. I agree. The Guggenheim Hoard
House, the Hoard House of Modern Art—let’s be honest about what these places
are.
He lived in England for a while
and is remembered there as a folk song collector, and some of his compositions
show this influence. One of his famous tunes was called “Lincolnshire Posy”. In
the U.S. he is remembered as a concert pianist and composer. and in Australia
he is virtually unknown (this could be disputed, as most in Australia are at
least familiar with his arrangement of the folk tune “Country Gardens”). We
have, it seems, many biographies.
He had many diverse interests and
felt that artists were always in danger of being pigeonholed for one thing—I
have to agree. Here is a quote from him:
“The artist is not (as so many so called ‘inartistic’ people seem to
like to believe) a being supernaturally gifted with skill for some branch of
art. To sing, make music, paint, draw, carve and dance is natural to all
humanity, and it is only a lopsided civilisation, mad on ‘specialisation’, that
scares the ‘tame cats’ of humanity into abandoning their natural right to an
allround manysided life.” Source
Here’s another quote—a sort of
early idea regarding emergent art forms:
“I don’t especially
value ‘originality’ in art, as I consider the communal development of folksongs
is no whit inferior to the original achievement of a great outstanding
‘original’ genius. It is the universal that pulls me in all matters and I am
more thrilled by these points that all people have in common than in the
special achievements and specialness of individuals.” Source
He was the definition of an
iconoclast. At one point he and his wife had the idea to design clothing made
of towels.
This was not just some idle wacky
whim. Grainger had a thorough justification for these outfits:
“My mother was devoted to Lafcadio Hearn’s stories of Japan and she
worshipped many aspects of Japanese civilization—for instance its cleanliness.
And she and I often discussed the filthiness of European clothes: men’s coats
in which the sweat of years is allowed to gather, our shoes that bring the dirt
of the streets into our homes. And around 1910 (after we had both been fired by
the beauty of Maori and South Sea island clothes and fabrics seen in museums in
New Zealand and Australia) my mother mooted the idea of clothes made
of Turkish towels – cool in summer, warm in the winter, and washable at
all times.” Source
He actually wore these outfits
while teaching and writing, and he was assisted in making them by both his
mother and his wife.
“Between
1910 and 1914 I wore these clothes while giving many of my lessons in London
and continually during my composing holidays in Denmark. In 1932 or 1933 my wife and I took up again this
idea of clothing made of towelling and when in Australia in 1934 and 1935
we were amazed by the beauty of
the bath towels on sale in Australia—some imported from England, Chekoslovakia
and America, but most of them (and among them the most beautiful ones)
manufactured in Australia.” Source
And here he proposes a proto-Bauhaus
idea—the beauty and practicality of machine-made objects:
“Here was
a chance to show what could be done with the beauty born of machinery—a beauty
as rich and subtle, in its own way, as anything made by hand or loom. The
problem was to use the towels with as little cutting and sewing as possible,
and in this skill my wife shone.” Source
Now, you might be thinking, “Hold
on, this guy is crazy!” You might also be thinking, “This guy is straight?” One
could say he simply had the courage to indulge in his own very forward and
original ideas. The kinky sex part will come later.
In later years he got fed up with
performing, claiming—like Glenn Gould would many years later—that the music he
conceived was not translating accurately into scores or performance. The music
he was writing was getting quite complicated, and was often scored for unusual
instruments. Here’s a piece for an imaginary ballet:
His idea was to “free” music.
Some of his compositions at this time were free of a central tonality and were
in this sense way ahead of their time. These avenues of inquiry eventually led
to the invention of a host of oddball electronic instruments—including one that
plays via rolls of cardboard, which he called the Kangaroo Pouch machine. Here
it is in the Graingers’ house in White Plains, NY:
The cardboard rolls scrolled from
one side to the other, and the sheets were cut much like a range of hills and
valleys. Small rollers ran along the crests of these “hills”, which caused the
attached arms of various levers to go up and down and effect a change in the
pitch of 4 oscillators. The resulting music was a bit like a series of sirens,
all going up and down at different times. Not as unpleasant as it might sound.
You can hear a recording here.
Following Grainger’s wish that
nothing in his life be left out in the Hoard House we come to the biggest
surprise—the "Lust Branch". He left a trunk that he stipulated wasn't
to be opened until 10 years after his death, so the University held a big
ceremony for the trunk opening. What kind of wonders and unpublished musical
scores might be inside?
When they opened it up it was
filled with, amongst other things, bloody shirts, a large collection of whips,
diagrams showing various ways to be whipped, and photos of his naked backside
covered in bloody whip welts.
...they quickly put it all back
in the box. But by deeming that the lust collection be included in the Hoard House
it was clear that he wasn’t ashamed of his both sadistic and masochistic
leanings.
“I am a sadist & a
flagellant—my highest sexual delight is to whip a beloved woman’s body… To a
lesser degree I enjoy being whipped myself (& before marriage used to whip
myself every few weeks)…” Source
He knew the contents of the box would cause an uproar, but he wasn’t
trying to hide it and didn’t seem to think it was sinful or anything like that.
His wife even aided him in his painful desires or was the willing victim in
some cases one might assume—so it was a family arrangement. Here he wrote to
his future bride, "I shall thoroly thoroly (sic)
understand if you cannot in any way see yr way to follow up this hot wish of
mine." (Source) But she did manage his
hot wish, and they got married in a ceremony that capped a concert at the
Hollywood Bowl!
Grainger had what we would
now define as a dark side. Ever since he was a boy he was enamored of Norse
myths and tales, and he felt that these were obviously the product of an
extremely creative people. Not to take anything away from the Scandanavians,
but Grainger had a theory that Northern people were more creative than
Southern. By Southern he meant the Mediterranean people. He felt that Italian
composers and operas were overrated—this included the Semitic people and
composers whose symphonies were popular.
Grainger went so far as to take a
series of pictures of the eyes of composers and musicians he came in contact
with to show that the blue-eyed ones were superior. Oddly, this odd theory or
prejudice didn’t diminish his respect and admiration for other groups outside
of those he disdained—he was a big Duke Ellington fan in later years, for
example. He brought the Ellington big band down to his classes at NYU to
expound on the ingenious and novel approaches the Duke had taken to
arrangements. This was well before jazz was taken seriously in academia.
To further these ends Grainger went so far as to develop “Blue-Eyed
English”—a version of the English language purged of all Latinisms. Of course,
so much of our language has Latin roots that what he ended up with was
something truly bizarre. I’ll wrap this post up with this glossary
“translation” of many common words into Blue-Eyed English:
This image was captured by one of the cast members, Evan D'Angeles, in a moment when our rehearsal was interrupted by the fire alarm
The story follows former first lady of the Philippines Imelda Marcos, from her childhood up to the moment at the end of the People Power revolution when she and Ferdinand Marcos flee Manila (the infamous shoes were yet to be discovered, so they are not mentioned). Here Lies Love is entirely true and much of the lyric content comes from speeches and interviews the various characters gave over the years.
The production is a disco musical that I (with occasional help from Fatboy Slim) have been working on for many years. The production is directed by Alex Timbers and features a mostly Filipino cast of amazingly talented actors and singers. To make a long story short—it went amazingly well. Yes, there were problems, but all of them seem fixable. The main issues we were concerned with before the series of live performances were the following:
Can a story be imparted with almost no dialogue, and
Can we stage this "beast" (as Oskar at the Public Theater refers to it)—the reason Oskar calls the staging a “beast” is because the audience stands (and dances!) in the middle of the room while the action of the production takes place all around them.
The answer to both concerns is yes—the staging and the concept work. It works so well that I sort of cried at every performance. I attended all six performances, as we kept making small changes. To be honest, my tears at one show were because the sound mix was so atrocious, but at the others I cried because I was deeply moved by the story and emotions that the actors depicted. Now, one might say, “Sure, he knows the story inside and out,” and some might think that I got emotional because I was simply thrilled by seeing my vision finally realized—but I think some others may have had the same experience. In the end, I'd say it's the best thing I've done since the Stop Making Sense tour—which I guess is saying something.
The music, much of it done in collaboration with Fatboy Slim, is influenced by about 4 decades of dance music, much of which I have posted on this months’ streaming radio playlist. Funk, electro, disco, house, go-go, techno, samba, zouk, dubstep... I could go on and on. The score doesn't follow any particular club style—it hops all over to better represent each character's moment. This playlist is long (over seven hours of inspiration!) and it could have been longer—but this gives you an idea of the many beats and styles that fed into this thing.
There are many forms of collective creation that run the whole spectrum, from merely coloring in someone else’s existing drawing to the actual creation of a thing from scratch. Often this spectrum of distinction is lost in the rush to embrace the amazing and wondrous, collectively created works like Wikipedia and, um, Zagat guides—these being held up as models for the possibility of collective creation of all and every kind of activity—from politics to newspapers. I’ve maintained a fair amount of skepticism about the idea of crowd sourced creative works for some time, which is not to say some of them don’t work incredibly well. But, they’re not all the same. To me, even though Wikipedia is indeed an example of the wisdom of crowds producing an amazing work—one that is possibly better than those that are top down in their inception—it seems that the claims made for this kind of creative process are often a little misleading. Each Wikipedia entry is not vetted or added to by everyone—by the lumped masses—but by self-appointed experts on each subject. Then, after these experts have had their say, we, the masses, tend to accept on faith that they have haggled amongst themselves over a particular subject to determine what will be included and the accuracy of what is in the entry. Of course, everyone considers themselves an expert on some subjects…
I’m not going to claim that only folks nominated as experts should be trusted to manage our world and create the things we enjoy and consume. I’d be the last person to believe that a college degree or experience in a field gives one a guaranteed wise perspective—would you trust a Rumsfeld? Often, it’s the perspective of amateurs that is more accurate than the professionals who are embedded and entrenched within their field of work. That said, nature seems to have found that some level of specialization is proven to work on some level. Though it seems clear that certain ants are designated as “experts,” and are deferred to as such, I admit that I have a bias against deferring to experts. Despite the sound social management system of ants that is responsible for their long survival—a system that we often believe that we might do well to emulate—I refuse to believe that the bankers who got us into our current economic mess are the best minds to get us out of it. Similarly, I sense that one maybe shouldn’t trust the military in evaluating and establishing their own budgets. It happens over and over—the police have proven they can’t be trusted amongst themselves. Economists? Oh, forget it.
The popular hive analogy, which compares insect societies to human interactions and creation, is often applied to the idea of many doing and creating what one alone cannot. Even in the hive though, there are “experts”—worker bees are given right of way to accomplish their tasks by the other bees because it seems that everyone recognizes no one can do their job as well as they can—there is not a mass consensus meeting or discussion amongst the entire hive about the role of these worker bees. For example, it is assumed they know best how to forage for food. Like the worker bee, the area of expertise of Wikipedia contributors may vary widely, potentially covering topics from Glee to String Theory. When one of these experts writes an entry, and then annotates and/or expands on it, we (in some sense) assume they are wise and perceptive in their particular field. Also, we assume these contributions have been vetted by that expert’s peers—not by everyone. So we, the non-expert readers, give respect.
With ants it is similar. Certain worker ants (all of whom are female) have designated tasks. A quick smell, via an antennae brush, identifies what a specific worker is best at doing—foraging, cleaning debris elimination, guarding—and no one tries to “tell them” how to do their jobs. There are no bosses. It is possible for the worker ant to switch jobs, but usually, as with humans, that opportunity arises when the colony is relatively young. After that, the job pool, one’s career, is more or less set. Though, there are always reserves of other ants underground that are recruited if a new food source suddenly becomes available (Thank you Deborah Gordon’s TED talk 2003).
One of the ways an ant figures out what is going on is oddly similar to the Google search algorithm—it “counts” how many encounters it has with a specific kind of worker. Based on these encounters, the ant can deduce that there is, for example, a major clean up in progress. Instructions and situations in progress are not “described,” but are inferred by the aggregate of encounters.
The consensus “rules” of OWS were (are?) possibly a more accurate example of real crowd (or democratic) decision-making. How did the OWS group, who struggled to maintain their leaderless and self-organized identity, ever make decisions? They endorsed the idea of consensus as opposed to voting. The word consensus comes from a Latin word meaning, “feel together”. Consensus means everyone (eventually) arrives at a place where they will give consent, although they might not be in 100% agreement. The distinction seems a little vague to me.
The well-reported use of hand signals, as a means of reaching this consensus, was adopted (microphones weren’t allowed due to noise restrictions) by the movement. One would be very tempted to ask who exactly decided that consensus would be the mode for decision-making? Who and how was that decision made?
Many of the participants found the assembly and consensus reaching process a bit tedious and boring—some would wander off from lack of interest.
Maybe the ants are on to something. They too have no leader (the queen lays eggs but doesn’t manage the colony via smell, as used to be thought) nor do they have a central control. On the surface, this sounds very democratic—even anarchistic. A completely leaderless society—that works! Although it might appear this way to us when viewed from a distance, you, as an individual ant, are very much programmed by your evolved instincts and your innate reaction to smells and behaviors. While having no leader might imply absolute freedom, there are other restrictions among insects. The leader, the guide, the rules, are not external, but are built into you as an individual.
Therefore, it statistically appears as if there is no free will in the ant colony. Each individual seems to go about their task without questioning things or stopping to ponder why or what for. But, maybe on the individual level, to each ant, they feel like there is, in fact, free will. Maybe they do agonize and make specific decisions. Maybe they have simply “learned” that following the aggregate tends to give the best results for the colony as a whole. They may feel that they have made a personal decision to join along with everyone else; they may also feel that they have acted of their own free will and are not forced into joining a specific program or activity. They’re acting in consort because, from their point of view, they want to…. or so they may be telling themselves. Maybe, their “government” is internalized.
According to Gordon, when you look inside of ant colonies, the behavior seems pretty haphazard. They’re not the well-oiled, smoothly functioning machines we might expect from a species that has survived for millions of years. As in human society, the behavior of individuals is not predictable. We all, as individuals, appear to be acting on our own—but just as it is with the ants, there is a kind of decision-making based around aggregate behavior. I’m not sure how this translates exactly—how this process works with people. Does it mean that if everyone is “drinking the Kool-Aid,” I intuitively “decide” that I should too? If everyone watches Kim Kardashian, then I better join the bandwagon and do what everyone else does? If the ants appear to have some sort of free will on an individual level, but in actuality it is mostly an illusion, does the same apply to us?
How Does Anything New Come Into Existence?
I’m curious as to whether or not what we call creative works can come into fruition as a result of the contributions of countless individuals. Must a creative work inevitably be guided by the tyranny of one person’s vision—or at least a very small group (Pixar films, for example)? Can the crowd write a great novel? A symphony, or pop song? A feature film? (Hollywood films are notoriously made by a committee—and the results speak for themselves). Do we all have a kind of innate (possibly unconscious) wisdom that can profitably guide us to influence and direct the track and arc of a creative work? Do these deep instincts, if trusted and tapped into accurately, and without bias, result in a work that is inevitably true? Is this why we feel cheated when a Hollywood movie has an obviously happy ending tacked on? Do we sense that the instinctively “true” ending was abandoned? Or, is this why the happy ending was tacked on in the first place? Is the happy ending what we instinctively want in a narrative? (Is this making any sense?). If, to some extent, a sense and structure of narrative is innate, then are authorship and writing skill overrated? Superfluous?
A parallel to the question of how new works come into being are some ideas that seem to be related to collective creation, but that might not really be the same at all. Are open-ended works (e.g. video games in which the players determine details of the story) and self-generating works—such music and visual programs that accept outside input but are designed to endlessly generate content on their own—truly collectively created works?
There is an established tradition of what are called indeterminacy in music—a not so new idea that has now migrated to digitally programmed works (musical and otherwise). In these earlier musical works, used by John Cage and many others, the player was allowed to determine how long to hold a note—and sometimes, what note to play from a set of given choices. Terry Riley’s “In C” is like this, as is Cornelius Cardew’s “The Great Learning.” These are all works that almost always end up sounding wonderful, despite being as open ended as they are. The marvel is why they don’t go off the tracks. We expect that, given free reign, chaos will inevitably result. Though, it doesn’t seem to—not always, anyway.
Maybe what is key is that the overall shape of the work has been cleverly pre-determined. There is free will involved in the choices the players are given, but within very severe limitations. One might say that this process is a way of fostering the illusion of free will. Maybe it proves that these compositions and social mechanisms, when cleverly “designed” can appear as though they allow for free will but, in actuality, they involve lots of restrictions—which have the effect of guiding the structure and the finished work to be something beautiful.
Cage used other devices to introduce chance and randomness into the “decision-making” process, but the “programmer” was always lurking. More recently in music, this process has been moved into the digital realm—with algorithms that do their best to randomize the choice of notes, along with other aspects of a composition. The Buddha Machine is a good example of this—a transistor radio sized device that plays endlessly changing sounds, chosen by the program, from a given set of notes and sounds. There is, as one would expect, no arc to these compositions—no beginning, middle and/or end. They are merely states of being, not substitutes for narrative.
These indeterminate scores can be viewed a bit like the literature that emerges out of oral traditions—the great epics and sagas. The process is not so different than what occurs in a lot of folk music as well—blues songs that get passed from area to area and subtly altered each time someone new sings them… but the main thrust of the story and the song tends to remain consistent. Everyone recognizes the song despite every interpretation being absolutely distinct.
There was a text version of this process called Consequences. It’s a bit like Mad Libs, though it originated much earlier (pre-1918). One creates a sentence by filling in the following blanks (from Wikipedia, of course):
1. A Man's name 2. A Woman's name 3. A Place name 4. He said to her… 5. She said to him 6. The consequence was… (A description of what happened after) 7. An outcome
Then the resulting “story” is read (for example):
Scary Bob met voluptuous Alice at the zoo. He said, "This is delicious.", she said, "Hit me baby one more time." He gave her a red rose, she gave him cholera. The consequence was that they eloped to Mexico. The world said, "the femme fatale will always win".
Could one write a whole book this way? William S. Burroughs used an aleatory (chance) literary technique that he and Brion Gysin popularized, called cut-ups. Cut-ups are created in two steps: by cutting a finished text into pieces and rearranging the words and then, by folding the linear text and looking for resonant bits of text when overlapped and placed next to one another.
There is the visual equivalent—collectively produced artwork like the Exquisite Corpse drawings. The Surrealists created these images based on an old parlor game. The idea is that 3 or more people contribute to a “body” by drawing on a folded piece of paper and then passing it around without knowing what the next person will contribute below the fold. Restricted by the rule that one is obliged to draw either the upper, middle or lower portions of the body the resulting monsters are, yes, beautiful and strange things whose authorship we could say belongs to an invisible 4th entity.
Here is a Chimera collectively drawn by Joan Miro, Man Ray and Yves Tanguy. They sort of didn’t adhere to the normal rules (in which you are to add normal body parts appropriate to your segment):
I’d argue that all of these forms are in fact authored. The programmer that sets the ball in motion, the one who determines the set of simple rules is, in these cases, the author. While you often get marvelous things through these algorithms, I’d be inclined to think that what you don’t get is a coherent story arc, complex characters or even a consistent vision—musical, lyrical or visual. That is, unless the framework has already been provided by a “programmer.” Follow a framework modified with embellishments, modification, additions, etc.—as in the oral tradition of storytelling—and, as a result, you get a coherent form.
Some of our most resonant works of literature have emerged out of the tradition of oral storytelling and do not have a single author credited. The tales of the 1001 Arabian Nights, for example, is composed of stories that have all been embellished, edited, written and molded by an unknown multitude of individuals over a long period of time. The stories hold up, and continue to move us today, as do the folk tales collected by the brothers Grimm. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana epics are similarly composed by a host of unknowns, as is the Bible. These all were all derived from oral traditions—in which each storyteller would add subtle embellishments and refinements to suit the local culture, time and place. The basic story arc would tend to be maintained and serve as a skeletal framework—though, in many cases, we can see where successive refinements over time completely altered the “message” of the tales. We know this because people wrote down some of these tales at different stages of their evolution and transformation.
The Old Testament tales are, in many cases, embellished versions of stories that were told (sometimes even written down) for hundreds of years. Though, by the time the stories came to exist as they do today, they had already morphed into tales that emphasized the overthrow of the older matriarchal society and spirituality by a more rigid patriarchal one. (There’s a very nice analysis of this in the back of the Crumb comic version!)
Even though these particular tales changed their emphasis in a majority of cases, usually not too much fundamentally changed in the narrative framework. The embellishments were mostly superficial… until the cumulative effect of the changes became something more profound. When reading these works, one can often sense the fragmentary nature of the chapters and episodes—many of which contradict one another. At other times a plot point or explanation is dropped for political reasons, leaving one wondering why there was a sudden shift in tone of a story or the behavior of a character. A single author would be less likely to contradict him or her self. But often, if we take each single episode—such as a single Grimm’s tale or one of the tales out of the Arabian Nights—it is often consistent, incredibly well constructed, efficient and resonant—like a tool honed by use over centuries.
These stories behave like living creatures that have evolved over time—adapting themselves, over and over again, to the psychological needs of the listeners and the creative embellishments of the narrators and their audiences. They’re not, and never were, fixed stories with an Ur version—there never was a primal text. They survive and maintain their resonance by mutating, changing and adapting to the world around them. As soon as they become fixed, they die (in a sense). They become a work that is somewhat ossified—rooted in a specific time and place. Then, the core narrative quickly resurfaces in another form—a film, TV show or popular novel.
Folk, blues, house music, pop, hip hop and lots of other musical genres might be viewed the same way—not so much as individual songs or acts of unique creativity, but as the cumulative result of many creative narrators pitching in to tweak a form that already has a given and collectively accepted shape and framework. The equivalent of the narrative arc of a story is already there in these song forms, and we songwriters, producers and singers are the storytellers in our own oral tradition—putting our own spin on an existing form, but not making substantial changes in the form itself. The point is, a lot of music that we think of as being individual acts of creation might actually be narrators contributing to what might be viewed as a larger epic work.
Though I am not a griot or epic bard, I am in my home studio making subtle adjustments and contributions to a form that came before me, and will later be picked up by others. I have the illusion of free will, of creating work and forms from scratch, but I am merely embellishing. Of course, successive embellishing will eventually lead one far from home…
That said—I believe I lean towards work that has a consistent vision. Don’t we want to feel that the version of a song, movie or narrative we have just spent time listening to, reading or absorbing is consistent—that every part was considered by its author, so as to adhere to a coherent vision? We assume that collective works don’t have the same intention as authored works. This view doesn’t totally exclude the author as a creative contributor to an ongoing epic storytelling effort though, as one still might hope for consistency from a narrator, songwriter or storyteller, even if the individual works that result are essentially modifications of something recurring and familiar.
Authorless Architecture
Architecture Without Architects is the title of a wonderful picture book, by Bernard Rudofsky, that came out in 1964. The pictures are presented as evidence that exquisite, “authorless,” architecture has existed for thousands of years—and that, despite not being designed by one person, it rivals individually designed works in beauty and, above all, practicality. One might view the simple and elegant furniture of the Shakers the same way. The buildings Rudovsky chose evolved much in the same way folk stories and oral narratives did—to best meet the demands of each place and society, while also maintaining an aesthetic and spiritual appeal.
Was the latter aspect an unintended consequence of meeting local and practical needs? Could one say that these entities that have evolved over time tend to be beautiful because we recognize that some deep parts of ourselves are expressed and manifest in them? Is the beauty a layer that is, in fact, serving another equally practical function that is as important to human beings as keeping out the cold or ventilation? Is the need for beauty and elegance also something practical?
It seems that the beauty these buildings possess is not an aspect added on, an appliqué, but an integral consequence of every other aspect of these kinds of works. When every other aspect is true and integrated, maybe you automatically get beauty. These buildings and houses have evolved so that they have a spirit of life deeply ingrained in them. By recognizing this, by sensing that these qualities are in there, we find the resulting structures beautiful.
In his book Rudovsky includes single-family homes, as well as monumental works.. All of them were molded over time by a kind of collective will and impulse; none were built by just one designer. The design is not open to anyone-—it’s clear that not everyone in the community would have voted on where the chimneys go—there are folks who know how to thatch a roof, for example, better than others. But, it’s the evolutionary process that tells the community, and the specialized workers within it, that maybe there is, indeed, a best place for a chimney or a best size for eaves—and that this wisdom shouldn’t be ignored.
Here is a vernacular plantation house in Hawaii and the Sankore Mosque in Timbuktu:
There are other types of architecture, not designed by “individuals,” and these are not so different from the mosque above—like these giant termite mounds in Australia (near Darwin):
The chimneys and air vents from underground allow the hot air, in the parts of the world where these things are built, to escape—so that the precious nurseries deep inside can maintain a constant temperature. It’s a fairly sophisticated bit of building and HVAC for a creature whose brain is the size of a pinhead. However, one might say that if you combine all of those pinheads, you get a more substantial mental capacity.
However, I’m not sure size is what matters. Heh heh. A fairly simple algorithm—rules and behavior that don’t require a lot of brain cells—can set in motion what, in retrospect, seems like a very complex bit of creation. So if over time evolution arrived at a structural solution by adapting to the situation at hand, and by using just a few rules, When these rules are set, the mental capacity of each individual doesn’t have to be so “big” at all. Everyone (or all of the workers anyway) can, and does build these incredible things instinctually.
Recently, there was a short film posted on the web of some scientists who poured concrete into an anthill to see what the network of nurseries and tunnels might look like. After the concrete (10 tons of it!) set, they painstakingly dug away the surrounding dirt to reveal an entire (miniature) futuristic city.
It’s easy to see how incredibly impressive the city is that these little things constructed. Overlap this town over a medieval city in Europe, in the Maghreb or in the Middle East, and one might see an almost an identical layout. It makes one think that: (A) we haven’t come so far, and (B) maybe the “hive mind” concept is more literal than metaphorical. Maybe we have retained elements of the insect mind, and we use and are guided by that, to order, build and organize our own cities. Like storytellers and songwriters, maybe in urban planning, we are merely embellishers too—we are reworking the same forms over and over, making slight adjustments to fit our own needs.
Others have preferred to view the social insects, not as social cities composed of individuals, but as single super organisms—more like one being made up of millions of semi-autonomous crawling “cells.” This would mean that these towering termite mounds and the tunnels of the ant colonies might represent the clothing or shell that belongs to a collective whole being. The mound is like the skeleton and the skin of a large creature. This view makes the cooperation of the little critters seem more like the cooperation and symbiosis of the cells and bacteria that make up our own bodies. The chambers are like the organs in our own bodies—each with its specific function and specialized job functionaries.
If we make that leap, then we too can be seen as sophisticated works of “soft” architecture. Just like the cities of the ants, bees and termites, one would never imagine that our little cells would be able to individually make and organize a structure as complex as we are. If we reorient our viewpoint, and can see ourselves as a kind of ant colony, we get a frightening insight that maybe our sense of free will is not much more than that of the ants and termites. Our most beautiful cities, and maybe we too, are not much more sophisticated than those of the social insects.
From the breakfast room in my Shibuya hotel one can see Fuji-san! It’s a remarkably clear morning and it looks like the endless city stretches until the foothills of Fuji begin (it doesn’t quite). It’s a weird sight—a vision of a planet that is all city, except for the occasional volcano.
I went to Tokyo to be present for the installation of a small art show (one piece likely needed technical tweaking). The space is in Harajuku, and it’s called Vacant. The parents of the gallerist are old friends of mine, and the dad had a chain of clothing stores that sold U.S. thrift store items. Similarly direct, it was called Department Store. He’s sold the business now.
When I was in town for my performances over a year ago I saw some photos he had by Ikebana (flower arranging) artist Yukio Nakagawa. I’d seen a few of his own photo documentations of his work in an ICP show that Noriko Fuku curated a while back, but now I was seeing a lot more—and was blown away.
I’ve seen some wacky Ikebana work before, but Nakagawa’s stuff is way extreme. Some of it isn’t even recognizable as flowers; though in the titles one finds that indeed is often the material used—but mashed, pulverized, sexualized.
These images are from some time ago. Nakagawa-san is still alive, though he lives in a nursing home now. Apparently he trained in a proper Ikebana school, but was sort of kicked out—gee, I wonder why. To us in the West this might not seem a big deal, but in Japan, where flower arranging is a big business—and being certified is like a law degree or a medical degree—certification all but guarantees you a living for life. So being "disbarred," as it were, was a serious business—it forced Nakagawa into a subsistence existence. My friend Seiji and his son Yusuke have been negotiating with the Nakagawa family to do prints for a show in early 2011.
Nakagawa was pals with Kazuo Ohno, the father of Bhuto dance, and a wild figure all on his own. Of course these two revolutionaries would cross paths. Though what, if anything, they did together, I don’t know.
My own show was some old and some new stuff, and most of them without text, as that’s a bit of a barrier here. There were two relatively new pieces—one of which is a piece with almost 100 guitar pedals that the public is invited to walk over.
Here’s a kid taking an audio stroll at the opening.
As he steps on each pedal it either turns on or off, depending on its current state, and the sound of a guitar loop (the guitar is off camera in this picture) is affected in some way. Echo, flanging, distortion, pitch shifting, delays, auto filters—the combinations are pretty limitless and sometimes sound quite nice!
This piece was originally done for a benefit The Kitchen (an arts space in NY) was having a year or so ago at which they were “honoring” the artist Christian Marclay, who does a lot of sound and audio works. So this piece was inspired by his work, in a way. However, the fire marshal at that event said the piece had to be removed, as I’d installed it in a hallway between two spaces—which I did as a further encouragement for folks to walk on it. Though I made a narrow safe passage around the side for the timid and for ladies in heels, the fire marshal was, I think, miffed that he’d never been consulted, so he showed us who was boss. By the time the partygoers arrived the piece was gone.
The oldest pieces in this show were some prints of some pictures I’d taken of a video monitor that were possibilities for the Bush Of Ghosts record cover. We ended up using similar pictures with little figures, that Eno took at the same time. In those days (1980, I think) one could mess with the color controls on a TV or video monitor, and with the addition of some video feedback get some pretty trippy vortex visuals. Turning the color settings way off and fucking with the contrast and other tiny knobs was very hands on, and not so different than messing with guitar pedals. One can’t do this with digital flat screen TVs—you’d have to access and manipulate a whole array of menus simultaneously, which isn’t really possible.
There were also some large banners of the inside of masks—Halloween masks of political figures (in this case Bush I and II hung on either side of Saddam Hussein). There is a whole series of these.
Note that the gallery space isn’t a white cube like the ones in Chelsea and elsewhere. It’s wood-paneled and half the floor is covered in wacky floral linoleum (made in Japan), so it has a little bit the feeling of a giant rec room or suburban basement.
There were some old and new lenticulars, which are sometimes known as winky dinks. In one older group Danielle Spencer and I altered some photos I’d taken of corporate tombstones so that from one view they’d have the name of the company, and from a couple of feet to the side they’d say something like “honesty” or “trust”—what these corporations would like to elicit from us, but certainly don’t these days.
Lastly, there was another group of lenticulars that each consisted of three photos of roundish objects on black backgrounds, but as one moved, the objects overlapped and almost morphed into one another. It becomes hard to see where one object begins and another ends.
Here’s a sample—as an animated gif. It’s not the same, but you get the idea.
We all went out for dinner a few times, and twice had a seasonal dish that Seiji said was made of the organ that fish eggs come from (but NOT the eggs themselves). He said its name is translated as “white baby.”
Needless to say, on my day off I went for a bike ride. There aren’t many bike lanes in Tokyo, but more and more people are riding anyway. There are lots and lots of bikes locked up here and there, and the bank where I used a cash machine had indoor bike parking! Not many banks in the U.S. cater to cyclists like that.
As some of the main thoroughfares are busy a lot of cyclists ride on the sidewalks, which is pretty insane from our point of view—though I didn’t see anyone get hurt or yelled at. But a few times as I was walking I had to jump out of the way as a housewife with a basket of groceries slalomed through the throngs of pedestrians.
I stopped at the Mori Museum—a contemporary art space on the top floor of one of Tokyo’s rare skyscrapers. This one in the middle of a development called Roppongi Hills that includes condos, offices, cinemas, shops, restaurants and a rooftop viewing area with a heliport. The main show was a retrospective of Odani Motohiko, a contemporary sculptor. He represented Japan at the Venice Biennial in 2003.
Then I biked to 21 21 Design Sight, a new design museum designed by Tadao Ando. The concrete building is half submerged in a park—which was a pleasant surprise, as a small urban public park is sort of a rare thing in itself in Japan. Though it’s a design museum and their upcoming show includes Sottsass and other furniture designers, their shows generally encompass an impressively wide range of material.
The show I saw was called Reality Lab, and it was curated by fashion designer Issey Miyake—who was also an instigator in the creation of this museum 3 years ago. Whether he curated all the parts, I’m not sure, but I think they were, which made it all the more surprising.
One section was an exhibit of meteorites—both actual and in large photo blowups, that allowed one to see their interior structure and makeup. In the same room were interspersed a collection of globes—some of Earth, but most of moons and other planets, colored to reveal their geologic structure or other features.
Further on there were large photos by Hiroshi Iwasaki of various items than had been frozen using a new technique called CAS (Cells Alive System) that minimizes tissue damage during freezing, which allows for specimen storage and food preservation than keeps nutrients, freshness and flavor intact. Like the meteorites and globes, this was almost more science exhibit than art of design, but the overlap was exciting.
There were more varied groupings of more science related items here and there, but the largest room featured a collaboration between Miyake and some scientists and students that eventually, no surprise, ended up as innovative designs for clothing.
Next to a wall covered with mathematical formulas (used in the process) were the beginnings of the designs—which were experiments in paper folding. Like Ikebana, origami has broken free of its roots and is now a hands-on way of investigating serious studies of morphology and topology. Believe it or not, the shapes below were made by folding flat pieces of paper!
In some display cases were samples of these paper foldings that one could touch and examine. I pulled a few apart gingerly to see how they were made, and even the Japanese kids around me were amazed, we all went ooh and ahh. I then had a little bit of a hard time getting the pieces to resume their folded shapes—luckily the paper has some memory, so it guided me.
Miyake then had the students do similar foldings with fabrics, which were sewn along just one side, creating a tube, and unfolded to make dresses that retained much of their foldings. He had metallic pigment (almost like silver leaf) roughly added to the top surface when the items were folded, so you saw what was exposed when the garment was in its folded configuration. Here is the garment emerging from its flat form in reverse order.
Waste Land is a documentary by Lucy Walker about artist Vik Muniz’s “Pictures of Garbage” series, a project done with the help of the pickers at Jardim Gramacho, the largest dump/landfill in Latin America, located outside Rio de Janeiro.
Vik is Brazilian, and though his home and studio are now in NY (Brooklyn), he wanted to “give something back” to Brasil. He had done a series years ago called “Sugar Children” in which he made portraits of the children of sugar plantation workers on the island of St. Kitts, and he says in the film that he considers that series one of his best — I agree.
Vik’s typical process is to take photographs of something, or use a work of art, and then reproduce it using some ephemeral material — sugar, chocolate, Pantone chips, spaghetti — and in this recent series, garbage.
The Gramacho pickers live by the dump, and every day they converge when the trucks arrive, attacking the mountains of refuse, from every class of Carioca. Various people specialize in certain kinds of recyclable materials — plastic bottles, PVC, and almost anything that can be recycled. These are “harvested” and then assembled in containers for another set of trucks to pay for and pick up and take to the recycling center. Here’s Vik at the dump with the pickers in the background.
To make a long story a little shorter, Vik photographed some of the pickers and then asked them to come to his studio in Rio where they help him assemble their own portraits — made from materials they’ve collected — as Vik directs from above.
These pieces are then photographed and the original assemblage is destroyed. The resulting giant photographic prints will, in this case, be auctioned, and the proceeds will go to help the community of pickers.
If you look closely you can see the tires, shoes, bottle caps and plastic bottles that make up the shading and lines of the image.
All good so far — but there was an interesting moment that I can’t forget. Vik and Janaina, his soon to be ex, are discussing, in a very emotional way, a dilemma they face. After working in Vik’s studio making art for a couple of weeks, the pickers don’t want to go back to the dump. “How do you send them back to the farm after they’ve seen Paris?,” as the old song goes.
It’s even more complicated than that. As we witness in the film, the pickers are more or less happy with their lives in the dump. Sure, they want better, and one of them has formed a cooperative to help organize and improve their situation — but we mostly see them laughing, sharing food, helping each other and getting along. We don’t see dead shells of humanity or zombie drones… we see lively, wonderful human beings.
But now they’ve tasted the outside world — suddenly, contemplating the return to their old lives, they’re unhappy. Like the Biblical Fall, a vast sadness has been introduced into the world. A little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing.
Previously in the doc, Vik has told his own story — how as a lower middle class Brazilian growing up in a situation where to aspire to become an artist was ridiculed, despite the ridiculous odds, he followed his inspiration. He feels that as it was with him, the seed of dissatisfaction will be a prod that will force the pickers to find a way out of their situation. Discontent breeds ambition and action, he maintains.
Others in that discussion are not so sure. Some see the unhappiness of the pickers (who, inevitably, will return to their work) and feel guilty at being involved in their new despondency. After all, it’s not a given that they will be able to better their circumstances — the world is notoriously cruel and unfair. That newfound ambition could drive some to become prostitutes, criminals or drug dealers, it is argued — anything for a quick buck.
This moment in the film opened up a world of questions for me. Charity: does a well meant gift sometimes sow devastation? A one time gift would often seem to have that effect. The tales of the tragedies of lottery and sweepstakes winners are legendary — fights over the money, jealousy, bad investments and conspicuously luxurious purchases. No lasting happiness.
But as has tediously often been said: “Give a man a fish and you feed him once, teach him how to fish and you feed him and his family for a lifetime.” A school and its teachers, employment, and empowerment, are all more important than the immediate gratification that might be asked for, begged for, or might be tempting to give. Bags of grain to Africa might alleviate a famine — a little bit — but that generosity won’t prevent a tragedy from occurring the following year. Who could be so cold-hearted to deny the bags of grain or infant formula? — but without planning, the relief is short lived. Vik’s solution to this dilemma seemed to achieve a balance.
In the same way, simply giving anyone a taste of a more luxurious (I won’t say better) life, or more material goods has the immediate result of increasing envy, jealousy, dissatisfaction and anger. In Vik’s case, though, I don’t think it was exposure to a higher class, or to stuff, but exposure to art that opened up a new world for him as a young man. It wasn’t luxury he was lusting for, but a creative outlet.
[Spoiler alert] But, at least in the film, a series of cards at the end tell us that most of the pickers we followed, and that Vik photographed, have indeed changed their lives — and we are led to believe most of those changes are for the better. The money he raised from the sale of the photos — a lot of money — went to the individuals, but also to their advocacy organization, a library and to buy them their own truck. So while they had the opportunity, if they wanted, to squander their own personal funds, a good portion of the proceeds was also designed to have a lasting effect on the whole community. The transformative power of art — in more ways than one.
My daughter goes to an art school in California called CCA, which stands for California College of the Arts. It used to be called the College of Arts and Crafts, but the crafty part got dropped some years ago. She recently asked me why.
I replied that I thought it might stem from the fact that artists who work in certain materials have, for decades, usually had trouble being taken seriously as fine artists. Glassblowers, ceramicists, textile workers, furniture makers and, until a few decades ago, photographers were all not usually welcome in fine art galleries or the museums that show fine art… unless it was a show dedicated to only ceramics, for example.
There were exceptions, but until quite recently those were rare. If we ignore Duchamp, whose work implied that anything could be art if he said it was, the restrictions have held firm, though photography broke the barrier first in a big way.
Photography was allowed in during the late ’70s and ’80s — Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Richard Prince, and soon the whole Düsseldorf school of Becher students, broke the embargo by generally showing large prints that were about ideas or even performance rather than being about the craft of the print. Part of their choice to use photography as a medium was a reaction to the large, messy, “bad” painting works, mostly by men, that were prevalent at the time — Schnabel, Salle, Baselitz, etc. These new photo-based works were shown as fine art — not primarily as photography. Things were so restrictive that for decades, color photography was not even accepted as fine art photography. I think this was because color photography was traditionally associated with drugstore prints, family snapshots and with advertising. In addition, it was almost impossible for a color photographer to handcraft a print in the same way B&W photographers did — to do so meant using the very expensive dye transfer technique, and even then the available scale was limited. Bill Eggleston had his film developed at the drugstore — though he went with high-end dye transfer for his prints. This relative absence of the artist’s “hand” was troublesome for some folks.
In my opinion it was an earlier generation — Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Douglas Huebler, Smithson, Oppenheim, Baldessari and others in the US; and the Bechers, Katharina Sieverding, Bas Jan Ader (below, his photo: “I’m too sad to tell you”),
Jan Dibbets and other “conceptual” artists in Europe — who in the late ’60s and early ’70s established that photos were a medium that could be used and accepted as fine art, and one did not have to be a skilled craftsperson in the art of photography or in printing to successfully communicate in that way. The photography was in service to something else — an idea, emotion or concept.
Granted, almost none of these folks worked in photography exclusively, so there was no immediate danger of them being called a “mere” photographer.
They were saying, in effect, that you didn’t have to be a good photographer to use photography as an art medium. You could even have someone else take the photo. You didn’t have to have skills or craft, not in the traditional sense, to make serious work. It’s similar to a punk rock DIY attitude — that anyone can make a great song, and if you can only play two chords, well, it can still be great. This news was pretty upsetting to a lot of people, and apparently still is. Get over it. A song is not better because it has more chords, and it certainly isn’t better because I labored over it longer — odds are, that extra labor might mean it’s simply overworked.
Some of the aforementioned artists eventually began to command high prices for their photo-based work that were WAY above what traditionally skilled photographers were getting. There was some serious jealousy and head scratching. I heard that both Avedon and Mapplethorpe couldn’t quite figure out why their work didn’t qualify — why these “bad” photographers’ work was selling for more than their own.
The attitude towards photography is slightly different than towards other crafts, but there is some definite overlap in the way photography was viewed with the way other crafty mediums are considered. My daughter was having a conversation with a well-respected fine artist not too long ago, and when my daughter said she was loving glassblowing and such, the response was a snarky remark and a sneer. Some fine artists, like Kiki Smith, can use blown glass in their work, and Sterling Ruby can show funky ceramics, but a full-on glassblower or ceramicist has a hard time being accepted in their world.
Ken Price has made weird, modest-sized ceramic pieces his whole life, but it seems he is only now getting a begrudging reception from the art world.
Grayson Perry, the transvestite potter who won the Turner Prize a few years ago, was quoted as saying, “It’s about time a transvestite potter got this prize!” He also said that it was even more significant that a potter got the prize than a transvestite. He’s right.
Part of this snobbish attitude goes back to the Renaissance. In order for painters to separate themselves from the various craft guilds, and establish their own worth, they had to form the idea that expression, concept and idea were worth at least (and maybe more, in their opinion) as much as skilled craftsmanship. They had to convince patrons that their work was valuable enough that they should no longer be paid by the hour. So, when crafts people sometimes make a stealth foray into the art world, they’re often rebuffed.
Decorative arts have also always been considered vapid, at least by the fine arts crowd. From their point of view, that work is just about pleasing the eye — looking good as background, without meaning or consequence. It’s a valid point, but there are exceptions, and there is plenty of fine art, especially with the booming market, that is clearly made to sell, to attract buyers.
The biggest exception to the “merely eye candy” view is in the traditional arts of Japan and China. A raku fired dish or tea bowl, out of the Zen Buddhist tradition, or the simple objects employed in tea ceremony, all had huge conceptual and philosophical meaning. Though they maintained their status as functional objects, they also made the statement that there is beauty in the mundane, humble and even the accidental. (Often the coloring that resulted from this raku glaze technique was partly random.) They were far from being just nice looking; if anything, they were plain, even ugly, to some eyes. So, though being, in our view, part of the craft tradition, they often aren’t about virtuoso skills and fine detail work. They embodied a way of looking at the world, as the best fine art does.
In Japan part of this aesthetic is referred to as wabi-sabi — which, loosely translated, means, “imperfect, transient, incomplete, modest and asymmetrical.” These ideas are very different from the ideals embodied in Western craft and decorative arts. In the East these craftsperson artisans are viewed in somewhat the same way the West views fine artists — as provocateur philosophers and visionaries. So the split might be largely cultural.
This schism between art and craft creates problems in art schools like CCA. There are some students who are there to learn a skill, a craft, and feel that the work in their field should be judged by how well it is made. Some teachers feel the same. A sloppily executed great idea is not good enough, in their opinion. These folks would presumably prefer jazz or classical over alt rock or hip-hop.
However, it’s risky for a teacher to criticize an idea — it may be killing something amazing before it has a chance to grow and mature. But most would agree that there isn’t much wrong with learning basic skills in whatever medium one chooses; one can, I hope, always abandon or pervert those skills later on, and one doesn’t need to be a virtuoso. Even punk rock songwriters hewed to a form — their playing skills may have been minimal, but their writing, and sometimes performance, can be top notch.
Other students feel that the idea should be privileged — that, to them, a beautifully made piece, with no innovative idea behind it, is merely empty, vapid.
I’m exaggerating — these opposing views are the extremes — but it’s not far off. How should the school compromise? I’d suggest that students be expected to show a certain level of skill — maybe in a variety of mediums — and that if they want to go further, as far as developing their skills in one medium, they continue to graduate school — or maybe, better yet, apprentice themselves to the established, successful crafts artists in their field. Very Renaissance, again.
Reykjavík airport had been closed for a few days due to the shifting winds moving the ash
cloud around. I had intended to fly Sunday, but was delayed until Tuesday. It
reopened in time for a flight that would put me in town the opening day of
their arts festival,
in which I have two series of photo works. There would be no time for me to
oversee the installation… but, Danielle, who manages my studio, flew in earlier
in a noble attempt to get some of the work to Reykjavík at least one day in
advance. In order to accomplish this she had to fly to Glasgow, and then double
back to Iceland. At first only a small airport in the north of Iceland was
open, so there was a chance she'd have to fly there and then take the arranged
bus service across the center of the island nation — along a very scenic road that
passes by glaciers and barren rocky landscapes. But after all that traveling, I
doubt too many would be looking at the lava fields and ice.
While stopping over in Glasgow, Keflavik airport in Reykjavík reopened, and the work got in OK.
Cindy was showing in this festival as well, so we decided to make the trip, ash cloud permitting. After we arrived on the morning of the 12th and had a jet lag nap, I went to view some of my work before the festival officially opened. One series, Moral Dilemmas, is a series of 15 — at this point — multiple choice questions placed on info kiosks around town. Each question is accompanied by a picture I took of a CCTV camera. I did a few of these some years ago, but never as public pieces, and never so many of them. These have new questions tied to the banking and financial crises such as Iceland has just had.
Here is one:
In the background one can see the big new concert hall that is being built. All work stopped when the country’s economy collapsed. The city came to the rescue, and it’s started up again. Ólafur Elíasson, the Icelandic artist who did the waterfalls in NY and the sun in the turbine hall in London, is doing the windows. They’re being fabricated in China.
Here are some more info kiosks:
And here is a link to some close-ups that are easier to read.
The festival is partly photo-oriented, though there are musical acts, and I saw a show of fabric works as well (with “wool” spun from moss!), so the festival format is somewhat loose. Both my series have photo elements in them, so they qualify.
The second group of images consists of photos I took of old-style curtains (and one of doors, from Belsay Hall near Newcastle) stuck on the windows of Reykjavík's modern art museum. These are printed on the same material that is often used for ads that cover, for example, the sides of busses, including their windows. The parts that cover the windows have thousands of tiny holes in them, so they are a bit like two-way mirrors. People inside can see out fine, and to them the windows just seem slightly tinted, but from the outside it's very difficult to see in — one sees only the image.
It's not like I had this idea and was just waiting to place it somewhere. The festival had offered the windows a while ago... though what could one do in this situation? To make something physical, one would have to be in Reykjavík for quite a while, and probably assemble a group of local helpers — not likely to happen within their newly frugal budget. So dioramas and the like — objects to be viewed through the windows — were out. I also didn't want to completely obscure or kill the light coming through the windows with an image or material... that would seem cruel to those inside, who would then be enclosed in a dark space with only artificial light. Iceland is dark enough for much of the year!
It occurred to me that there was a material I'd photographed a number of times that might be perfect. I'd taken lots of pictures of those ads on busses and trucks that wrap over gas caps, grills and often even over the windows. In the latter cases I noted that the material became different over windows, and wondered if there might be some image that could be applied over these museum windows, printed on that kind of material.
I looked through my archive of photos for inspiration. Maybe something I had taken over the years — I'm constantly taking pictures with no idea where they'll end up — might unlock this puzzle. At first I thought of using some phone pix I'd taken recently. I'd reversed the color and I thought that blowing up an indecipherable lo rez phone image might be strange and beautiful. There were also a couple of pictures of frilly curtains on file, and one of curtains in a fabric store in Mérida, Mexico. One was taken in a hotel meeting room in Easton, Pennsylvania, where my last tour started. I didn't have enough for all the museum windows though — I'd have to take a few more. The resolution on some of the older ones wasn't high enough, as these would be enlarged to the size of the full windows, about 6 by 8 feet. So, on recent trips to Providence and elsewhere for my bikes and cities events I made time to seek out some more curtains. There were some nice big fancy ones at the Biltmore.
Danielle did a Photoshop mockup of these images on the museum windows, and it looked perfect. But would the printing be rich and detailed enough? The advertising company in Iceland that produced these did tests of both a curtain image and a reversed phone image. They both looked a little washed out — the phone pic even more so — so we went with the curtains, and asked if they could make the colors more saturated. We sent a paper print as a sample to follow for color intensity. They did one in which they hit the plastic twice with the ink... and that came close, but for some reason it still looked washed out. I was about to give up. Meanwhile, the Moral Dilemmas images were being printed by a lab (Griffin) in NY which does fine art prints, and we knew they'd get the hot day-glo style colors on those... but the window pieces had to be done remotely, and the situation was looking doubtful.
Someone pointed out to me that maybe the fact that the white backing paper — which is removed before application — was showing through all the tiny holes might dilute the intensity of the color. Duh. So, I peeled off the back of the double hit sample, and slapped it onto the window of Cindy’s apartment. She has a balcony, so I could view it from both inside and out. It worked! It wasn't as saturated as the original image, but it had holes in it, so what do you expect — even the ads I’d seen on busses were less rich when the images passed over windows.
So it was a go. The company in Iceland knew how to attach these things — there’s some skill involved. They stretch a little, and if the installation was screwed up, they would have to be reprinted. The sticky reverse side, like contact paper, was a bear to get right. (They did have to reprint one in the end.)
Ultimately I was thrilled with the result. In contrast with the minimal modern exterior of the museum, the frilly old-fashioned curtains were pretty funny... and the trompe l'oeil effect worked too.
The Moral Dilemmas looked good too, but were scattered all over town, and initially we were misinformed as to their exact locations. But I managed to find most of them eventually.
Now we had two days before the opening of Cindy’s show of her famous film stills — the first time seen here, I believe. We rented a 4 x 4 and headed towards the volcano. On the map it seemed like one of the dirt roads that leads into the interior might allow us to sneak around behind the gal (volcanoes are female here), and as the ash cloud was blowing south and out to sea we might get sort of close by using that approach.
We did find that road — the same one that leads by this waterfall... a waterfall you can hike behind!
But further up, the road was blocked by a man in an emergency vehicle, and he was making cars turn around. He seemed mildly annoyed at the volcano tourists... we weren't the only ones to be turned back.
So on then to the little town of Vík, where I had reserved a hotel room... and despite a recent BBC News video showing the town covered in ash, the hotel was still open. Volcano eruptions are common here.
On the way we stopped by a pasture at the base of a mountain behind which lay the glacier and volcano. One could see a massive black cloud rising from one corner in the distance.
Driving on, the sky looked dark ahead, as if we were about to drive into a thunderstorm. It was no thunderstorm. Below the dark sky was a kind of brown fog, and when we entered it we had to slow down. It was as if night had suddenly descended, and the ash was so dense that one could hardly see ahead.
Everything was covered — barns, cars, mountains and the lava fields. We stepped outside and were instantly covered — it was finer than sand but not quite as bad as the talcum powder fineness I'd heard it was at first. Our clothes were coated and I could taste it... yuk. Dove back in the car and moved on, not really sure how much further it would extend.
After maybe 30 km we began to see the sky becoming slightly lighter ahead... we were coming out the other side. It wasn't much cleaner, but at least we could see. Looking back one could see the big black thing stretching out across the sky, heading for the north Atlantic and Europe.
A little further on, we stepped out and looked back towards the mountain, and now we could see the actual volcano. It wasn’t spewing lava (which was the “tourist volcano,” as the Icelanders refer to it), but throwing up a constant, billowing plume of dark gray ash from the mountain peak —
enough ash to cover Europe.
Onward. Past Skógar, where we would eventually return, and where, we were later told, access to the “tourist volcano” could have been had in the early days of the eruption. One would drive a monster truck up over neighboring Mýrdalsjökull glacier and onto Eyjafjallajökull. At that time there was none of the ugly billowing ash, as the glacier water hadn't yet melted, and that's what makes the ash plume — when the water gets superheated and explodes as steam.
Around a mountain promontory and we were in Vík, which still looked pretty filthy.
A shop window was almost covered in ash.
Two men stood with hoses trying valiantly to wash the ash off their cars and houses. Another man wore a protective mask. Maybe not a good idea to stay here. We moved on, across a great, endless, sandy desert that soon became an endless lava field. The guidebook warned of sandstorms that could strip the paint off a car. We saw one in the distance.
I recently got an email from Annie-B Parson, the choreographer/director who helped on my last tour. She’s in France, where The Anticodes Festival is funding development of a new show by her group Big Dance Theater, and the company is touring their previous show. She said some of her choreographer/dancer pals were upset at Tino Sehgal’s piece that just closed at the Guggenheim. To some of these folks, it seemed like “cheating” — the idea of putting a theatrical/performance/dance work (it is choreographed, in a way) into what is certainly a more financially lucrative context. A museum presumably pays more than doing a similar show at Dance Theater Workshop or The Kitchen.
Of course, Sehgal’s piece is somewhat conceived specifically for museums and art spaces — I saw it at the ICA in London, another art space which, like the Guggenheim, was emptied out to become a rambling shell expressly for this performance piece. It’s true this particular piece wouldn’t work on a conventional, theatrical proscenium stage — but in quite a few alternative performance venues it wouldn’t be too much out of place.
The piece consists of a series of hired people, of ascending ages, who one at a time engage the visitor in “conversation” while leading them around the institution to an encounter with the next conversationalist, who replaces the previous one. In my experience I took it all in naturally — I’m sort of used to being asked curious philosophical questions by total strangers, so this didn’t seem out of the ordinary at all. Well, not much anyway. In London I answered the questions the conversationalists asked sincerely, and didn’t notice the ascending age aspect, or much else, until it was maybe half over. There’s a whole structure here! Duh. I also didn’t try to subvert the piece or ask meta questions such as, “Do you get tired asking the same questions all the time?” It seemed that if one were to experience the piece one had to play along.
As a theater piece it’s unusual, though I’ve seen quite a few that are site-specific. Anne Hamburger, who later became an executive at Disney, did a bunch of site-specific works in abandoned theaters when 42nd St. was mostly shuttered, and one in the Meatpacking District at night when it was still a derelict zone at that hour. There were elements of urban archeology as well as narrative mixed together in those pieces. Noémie LaFrance has staged dance shows in a stairway and in a parking structure. Other theater pieces I’ve seen required interaction and audience movement as well. There’s one that was done in London recently in which the actors are anonymous bodies milling about in a train station crowd, but the audience — seated on benches nearby — can hear them via radio mics… and soon enough can follow a little drama that takes place. So the argument that the Guggenheim show is something in which the context has been changed is not without validity, though I would say that as it seems to have been conceived specifically for these large rambling spaces, it isn’t as much a fish in a different pond as some might claim.
Others have had issues with Sehgal’s business savvy that also relate to context issues. The NY Times reported that he “sold” the rights to a different piece to MoMA for 70k — whatever that means. (Does it mean that it can only be performed under the auspices of whoever now “owns” the piece? And can they presumably have it performed, like hanging a picture they own on a wall, wherever and how often they like?) Maybe the poverty-stricken alternative theater and dance folks got wind of this new kind of transaction and are jealous or incensed that he found a way to cash in on the same kinds of work they’ve been doing for years — except most of them haven’t been getting anywhere near that kind of cash. Should one congratulate him, or is he in fact “cheating”? Would they even want to “sell” a piece in this manner?
When artists who do live pieces perform them in galleries, I’ve been informed that they might not get paid, or at least not much — and admission to galleries, unlike many museums, is free for all, so there isn’t that source of income from which to draw. Often photos of the piece or other ephemera are sold to in effect fund the performance.
Last week I went to the Whitney Biennial and there were a number of pieces I really loved. Pae White’s giant woven piece depicting smoke blew me away (pun intended), but four others struck me as being all about this context issue. Kelly Nipper’s five minute video of a masked woman dancing is, in my opinion, weirdly out of context — much more so than the Sehgal pieces might be construed as being. It’s a single screen video of a short dance. The soundtrack is someone counting numbers. Whether it’s a good dance or performance or not is besides the point — it seems to me it’s better suited for the Whitney’s short film screenings, or a collection of shorts on DVD like Wholphin. Actually, it wouldn’t fit that well on Wholphin, but someone should start a DVD “magazine” of dance and performance work, and there it would be perfect. Similarly, Rashaad Newsome’s almost 7 minute long video of voguing without music has some conceptual underpinning about the movement and gestures being passed on — but it’s pretty much some nice voguing with the typical music removed. Nice to see some cool voguing, but refer to the previous dance piece for suggested placement. Jesse Aron Green’s 80 minute video of some folks doing old (1858) German exercises is an interesting idea, but again, why here?
The work is a dance piece shot — or rather, documented — with a video camera. Lastly there is Marianne Vitale’s video — an 8 minute harangue regarding an imaginary philosophy called neutralism — which is funny and disturbing, but this one really could be included in Wholphin.
I hate being negative about anyone’s work — and I hope this doesn’t come across that way — but in these cases I have to agree with Annie-B’s friends, as I feel that the recontextualization doesn’t add anything. In fact it makes one less likely to watch the whole thing! I might sit down for an 80 minute video of a dance piece at home — or go to a screening, if it is sufficiently filmic… or even watch it at a gathering of friends. But on a hard bench in a museum, no way. The Sehgal piece belongs in a museum much more than these do, in my opinion.
Annie-B pointed out the other day that dance is notoriously hard to film. When we experience dance, or any performance, she suggests that we simultaneously get the big pictures and the details — we see the shapes and bodies moving about on a stage, how the thing is organized, and at the same time, we see individual performers’ bodies and faces. Perceptually, we see with our minds both close-ups and wide shots at the same time. Not everyone is in agreement with this. Others have told me they think we “edit” between the two — making choices as to what to focus on. This would explain why film editing isn’t more jarring to us than we might expect.
Obviously video and film can jump from one to another via edits, or do split screens, but they can’t quite duplicate that experience — that simultaneity — to say nothing of the social/physical experience of being part of an audience. Multiple screens can sort of do it. Annie-B believes that an installation with one screen showing a wide shot and another showing details comes vaguely close. One can be aware of the intensity of an individual performer and at the same time how they relate to the whole… but it’s still a weird substitute. The wide shot that comprises the German exercise video only gives us part of the picture, for example — and a part that is, objectively, the whole thing — but subjectively much of the emotion that we would derive from closer shots is missing.
Movies As a Kind of Installation
Not only dance videos, but a lot of experimental film has recontextualized itself over the last couple of decades. Relatively short videos and films (between 10 minutes and an hour) are often shown in galleries inside black sheetrock boxes, usually with just that same uncomfortable bench for viewers to sit on. There are no “showtimes” and no sense of where one is when one enters the “theater.” You could be near the end or still have an hour to go, there’s no way of knowing. Full disclosure: I’ve done this myself with some of the short (4 minute) PowerPoint-generated videos I created. Most of the time these are not like the above works — documentations of performances — but works in which the editing, the effects, and the manipulation of the footage all contribute.
For filmmakers who show in galleries, the possible upside is that their work can, in this context, be sold for thousands of times more than what these same filmmakers with the exact same work would net from screenings at Anthology, IFC and similar venues. Those film houses used to show the works of Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, Bruce Conner, the Kuchar brothers and others — work that is not entirely dissimilar from what’s in galleries today. Sometimes, in purely visual terms, the 16mm films they made in earlier decades were easier on the eye than contemporary video works — they had higher resolution, and film, until recently, was simply nicer looking than many of the grainy videos shown in galleries. Film grain in general is nicer than video grain or pixels.
I think that when these works are shown in galleries they are generally sold in limited editions to collectors for sizable sums. What does that mean? Does it mean that the new owner can show them to their friends at their homes but no one else has access to the work? Imagine having one of five copies of, say, Pink Flamingos? Or Gus Van Sant’s Elephant? No one else would know about the film from then on except by hearsay — which, depending on your taste or lack of it, might be considered a good thing. It would be like only seeing the masterpieces — like the one Steve Wynn put his arm through, or the Barnes collection — in reproduction, unless they were lent out from time to time.
One might think these artists are cashing in, but I’m informed that the cash part might actually be negligible. While many more folks may see their work as they pass through the Whitney, for example, the artists would presumably have previously shown the work in a gallery, whose attendance is nothing like the crowds at major museums. Those galleries actually have a pretty hard time selling most video works, so the change of context can’t be all about money in many of these cases. Prestige or glory maybe, but not strictly cash.
At least these videomakers and filmmakers who show in galleries have found a way to get their work out there. Or some have, at least. At last, some might say. Brakhage and many others used to teach to support themselves. They taught young folks how to make films somewhat like theirs… folks who, until this new situation arose, would inevitably be looking to replace Stan at his teaching position before too long. The British artist Steve McQueen used to show in the gallery/museum context, and still does sometimes, but his film Hunger, about hunger striker Bobby Sands, was shown in cinemas. I saw it in Wellington, New Zealand! Likewise Sam Taylor-Wood used to show videos on flat screens in galleries — and maybe she still does — but her latest is a regular feature on the childhood of John Lennon. Cindy Sherman made a movie, as did Robert Longo, David Salle and Julian Schnabel. But those folks didn’t really ever try to survive showing short films or videos — that’s the difference. Matthew Barney does show his films in cinemas, though I doubt these theatrical runs recoup the cost of making the nice prints and ads. I suspect it’s his sculptures that pay for the movies — though the DVDs are sold in limited editions in super elaborate packages. You essentially get an artwork that happens to have a DVD tucked inside it.
Granted, many gallery and museum video installations aren’t things that could ever be screened in cinemas; they are immersive pieces that can’t be experienced in any other way — they have multiple or oddly shaped screens, for example. But… even so, Warhol’s Chelsea Girls was shown on multiple screens simultaneously too, and in regular movie theaters. But despite the success of that film, he mostly had to churn out silkscreens to fund his films — the recontextualization wasn’t an effective financial strategy.
Sometimes the switch in context goes the other way. Not too long ago MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach did a reversal of this at P.S.1. He took all the episodes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s TV series Berlin Alexanderplatz and screened them simultaneously in a museum — as if it were an art installation! There was a circular construction that filled a large room, with all the episodes running at once; in other spaces there were larger fragments from the series projected on screens. Later the films of Kenneth Anger were screened at P.S.1 as well — in a large, dark, rubberized space — again with many films running simultaneously. These were pretty cool environments, immersive and considered, though free of any narrative or episodic structures that might be inherent in the works. They are also miles away from what the filmmakers might have envisioned when they made the work.
At a recent art world dinner Biesenbach mentioned to me that he’d crossed paths with Lady Gaga, who said that she felt she was a performance artist — or an artist of some sort. Biesenbach responded that she was not, and reportedly she was a bit taken aback and stunned at his reply. Biesenbach
didn’t exactly detail as to why in fact she wasn’t an artist, but by way of a
sort of explanation he related that Susan Sontag had pronounced to him, “All we
have is our opinion.” We must be referring to cultural critics like
herself and other curators. Well, her opinions were always backed up by
extremely well-written and thought through arguments, and Biesenbachs’s
opinions now carry the weight of MoMA — so while some opinions are qualified,
some have more resonance and repercussions than others.* On the interweb everyone has an opinion, but most of it doesn’t matter. There’s no pretence of equal opportunity or democracy in the art world — which is probably fine. Komar and Melamid did “democratic” art as a kind of ironic exercise, and from their example I can say we seriously don’t want Wiki culture. According to their poll results, this is what folks in the USA want to see in a painting — even down to specifying that it should be “about the size of a dishwasher”:
I asked Biesenbach about the Fassbinder and Anger shows, and he quoted the attendance figures — 100k or so. Much, much more than might turn up to see screenings of Anger films at Anthology, I replied. The Fassbinder comparison is a slightly more complicated one, because it was originally a TV series — and it’s possible that many more than 100,000 saw it in Germany, though certainly not in the USA. The fact that Anger’s work was made to be watched in a cinema setting, and that changing the context to an installation might be in fact changing the work, wasn’t discussed. I have a hunch that Anger might have approved the rubber, clubby setting as a fun, kinky ambience for his films even if most viewers didn’t watch many of them all the way through in this new setting. His films were already about changing context — throwing leather boys and low car culture in front of bohemian experimental film audiences.
Recontextualizing work is a savvy strategy these days. In an extreme view it might appear that some folks simply move the exact same work around to different kinds of venues until it clicks — and the money magically starts to flow. Some see any presumed cleverness or market savvy on behalf of an artist or performer as distasteful. They feel that serious work should be driven primarily by passion or some kind of authenticity and purity, and that financial considerations — figuring out how to monetize one’s work and activity, as it is phrased in dot-com terms — is tacky, and goes against the rules. What rules? Where are these rules written down? Shouldn’t artists be cheered for making money if they can, if they don’t dilute their work?
The “rules” as I intuit them say that cultural production takes place on some moral and ethical high ground where money is not a consideration. According to these rules, for an artist or musician to take financial factors into consideration is to automatically lower and demean work that is supposed to stem from and engage our higher impulses. The work, once money enters the picture, is now assumed to be “work for hire,” to use the legal term. This is why fine artists often look down their noses on craftspeople, illustrators and graphic designers. During the Renaissance, they worked hard to separate themselves from the laborers of the trade guilds, and worked hard to gain acceptance for the idea that they were more than mere craftspeople — so to risk slipping back into that ignoble territory is completely unacceptable.
Speaking of craftspeople and work for hire, I’d argue that some TV ads, which are most definitely “work for hire,” are as innovative and transporting as any art film you can name. The production values are quite a bit higher, so the poor struggling artist can’t afford to compete. But, as if to balance the scales of value in some way, whispering into our ear is a little guy saying, “But it’s an ad!”
Here’s a recent Audi advertisement that features gymnasts as a machine:
Some ads appropriate — steal might be a better word — ideas from the bohemian art underbelly and redo them with higher production values and tighter editing. The experimental gets absorbed into the mainstream, inevitably. One could cry foul, but to some extent it’s just proof that the idea was good. When I did a feature film, I hired Meredith Monk, Spalding Gray, Jo Harvey Allen and a few others on the performing arts circuit who had inspired me to do what they did, or sort of. Better they themselves get paid and make their own unique contributions than just get copied, uncredited.
According to the old fine art rules, it’s nobler to be poor — which is a cliché for sure, but one that is still held on to dearly. The assumption is that being paid well allies one with the bourgeois one is supposed to be busy offending and shocking. As if anything is shocking today. And making art — if these innovative car ads could be considered art — in service of machines that guzzle fossil fuels is not exactly seen as taking the high road either. Musicians have the same problem — in certain territories one’s peers look askance should one of the old gang get seriously financially rewarded for their work, the hip hop community excepted.
The Theater of Ritual
Along with being upset with Tino Sehgal’s clever dealings, some also view Marina Abramović’s recreations of her earlier performances now on view at MoMA as sacrilege — or at the very least, inauthentic. I can see their point — lots of work that has power in a garage, a funky loft, or in a cold and drafty art space loses some of that power when set in a well-lit white museum room.
The show is a retrospective, so there is a lot of stuff — live people reenact earlier pieces, videos of older pieces run on screens, stills line the walls, and there are also some objects. It’s noisy too, as opposed to what one might imagine these pieces engendered when originally presented — a somewhat respectful silence in the observer. The bustling crowds at MoMA don’t allow for that.
Is it that these pieces weren’t originally created for these museum spaces? Is that what bothers some folks? Are they just nostalgic for the bad old days? Isn’t almost half the stuff in museums — tapestries, frescoes, altar pieces and Greek vases — out of context? Didn’t those objects come from temples, churches and castles? Only contemporary artists really make things for the museum context — giant, oversize paintings and sculptures that wouldn’t fit in any homes I know. The context for many performance pieces might have been more solemn than what I saw — but I have to remind myself that I don’t dismiss all the sacred art displayed in the world’s museums automatically… though I feel a little queasy that much of the power has been drained from it.
Looking at the feats of endurance and bodily mortification on display, I wonder: Are these performances more or less powerful than when Iggy Pop cuts himself or stage dives, or when — to really stretch things — David Blaine lives in a Plexi bubble or is frozen in ice? Are those guys not performance artists too? Are they any less as artists? In some respects aren’t they are doing very similar things? The context is vastly different, again, and something tells me Blaine makes money off his stunts… as did Houdini. So the context seems to be what makes all the difference.
Why, in a museum setting, don't they exhibit all the documentation of early pieces instead — couldn't that make up the show? Because it's sexier, and will sell more tickets, if there are a dozen naked performers on view. And the alternative might just seem a bit too academic and boring.
Another difference, maybe, is that by clearing space around these acts, placing them in a less sensational, muddled, chaotic or media-saturated environment, they are given an aura of solemnity, ritual and spirituality. At one extreme are sideshow freaks and geeks, and at the other is Abramović cutting herself with a razor blade or Tehching Hsieh living in a cage — or even religious ascetics. Iggy and Blaine are somewhere in the middle — though something tells me that Iggy is loved by both artists and sideshow performers.
Here’s a still from the Buñuel film Simon of the Desert, in which a religious ascetic in Spain isolates himself atop a pillar.
I’ve seen Hindu adepts during the Thaipusam festival in Malaysia pierce themselves with steel rods and hooks, and others in Bali attempt to stab themselves with daggers while in trance. The performance of these rituals is open to the public — though it’s not usually advertised as a “show.” SEE the man hang from a hook going through his tendons! SEE the Indian sadhu buried alive! SEE men covered in ash and blood!
Usually it is other faithful who turn out to view and witness — I think that word is key — these acts. And that might be what happens in certain kinds of performance art as well — the art faithful come to bear witness. In many Asian religious festivals there is just as much noise and chaos as at a rock show or at the MoMA, filled with visitors — but the attendants manage to keep their focus despite all the possible distractions.
A sadhu is an ascetic who has renounced the world and seeks liberation through contemplation, often via tests of extreme physical endurance. I would argue that performance art like Abramović’s and that of Tehching Hsieh has a similar goal in mind… and like the sadhus, they present themselves and their mortification of the flesh to the public as examples to be witnessed. They don’t hide their asceticism or physical feats from the public — they’re not locked away in temples or monasteries — quite the opposite. According to the photographer’s blog, the sadhus above quickly disrobed and struck a pose when they saw Boiteau’s camera come out.
Likewise aren’t these artists “striking a pose” in museums? Does that make them, or the sadhus above, less authentic?
The Kumbh Mela, a gathering of ascetics, is the world’s largest act of faith… and that’s saying something. In some areas of India it takes place every twelve years, and in others every six years. The pilgrimage in 2001 was — get ready — attended by 70 million people! Not only did that make it a huge show of faith, but it was also the largest gathering of people ever in the whole world! Woodstock? Feh.
Obviously, not all of these people were sadhus — many came to watch. Some watch out of curiosity, and some as believers who observe as the sadhus act, in a way, on their behalf. Does that make it a show? Many of the acts and images here are undeniably and incredibly theatrical — one could argue that the events here are evidence for an innate human tendency for stagecraft and organized, aestheticized spectacle.
A mosh pit, but more artistic, almost staged… and with mostly older men:
So one way to look at performance art is as a form of aesthetic ritual enacted so that the faithful can bear witness — the art faithful, in this case. As we in the West have lost much of our deep faith, we still long for what is missing, and part of that is ritual — ritual that goes beyond the proscribed and formalized behavior of business meetings, PowerPoint lectures, conferences, frat house initiations, toasts and drinking games. Here, rather, are rituals and performances in which the performer, to some extent, loses their identity — either by disguise, nudity, unnaturally formalized behavior, collective activity or muteness — and using slow and methodical movement (implying considered intent), an action manifests and takes place that resonates with us in some hard to define way. The fact that this resonance is elusive is probably part of the reason ritual has so much power. It’s doing something nothing else can do.
If the museum is a kind of church — and I’m not original in saying that — then besides the art that has become the altars and sacred objects on the walls, one needs the presence of real body-based ritual to complete the cycle of need and connection that we all share. Some smells and bells would be nice too.
In the rituals that adhere closest to the above traditions, it is naturally out of place to buy and sell “rights” to the “performance” — to do so in a religious setting would be outrageous, sacrilege. Performance works that come close to these traditions likewise have a heavy aura.
Germano Celant is the curator who arranged Abramović’s piece “Balkan Baroque,” which was performed at the Venice Biennial in 1997. It has been re-created, or rather re-imagined, for the MoMA show. He felt strongly that much had indeed been lost in translation. In the piece she continually cleans a pile of beef bones, and in Venice the bones still had traces of meat and blood on them — and after a while, it got stinky and foul, and reportedly there were even rats.
While cleaning she sings songs from her Serbian childhood, and tells a story of a Wolf Rat that eats it’s own when it is afraid. It couldn’t be more clear. This conjures an image of the artist as a woman who has taken on the dark chthonic role of scrubbing bones as metaphor for memory, guilt, and pain. It is the artist becoming a mythological figure, a stand-in for historical memory; it’s pretty powerful stuff, even without the rats and smells. It’s a fairy tale image straight out of Grimm. Celant claimed that by cleaning things up — the MoMA bones have no flesh hanging off — the power of the piece is diminished.
Hard to argue with him in this case, but in other instances I see the change of context as being inevitable and well, deal with it. Some folks complained, for example, that all the pieces in Abramović’s show were originally performed by her, and that teaching others to do them is just not the same.
A friend says, “What's lost is witnessing the woman who feels she must endure this penance, the more punishing the better; we're witnessing her self-flagellation, knowing that she finds (somewhere) pleasure in it; the audience gets off on her suffering. That can't happen with paid performers.” The art and the artist (the artist or musician’s body) in this case are presumed to be one, inseparable.
No, it’s not ever going to be the same when someone else does it — but sometimes, if we’re lucky, it might even be better. Though, as my friend says, any presumed masochistic motivations and subtext are gone. People get all nostalgic over bands they saw in dank clubs, plays and musicals they saw with the original cast, and operas with specific divas in the lead roles. Yes, sometimes one cast or one set of musicians is better than others, but sometimes the first incarnation isn’t the best either — sometimes a new performer brings fresh life to a role or song. At some point, when a work is truly without resonance, no one will want to see or hear it anyway, regardless of whether the originator is performing or not.
Some of this might have to do with the presumed connection between the author and performer in certain mediums — but that presumed unity is a whole different discussion.
Songs being re-performed by successive singers who didn’t actually write or perform the songs are too easy to bring into this — we’re used to songs being reinterpreted. I prefer Fred Astaire’s version of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” over Sinatra’s — though some will go for Bono’s spiritualized version. (There are recorded versions of Cole Porter doing his own songs as well, though I doubt most people would prefer those. So much for the author being the best interpreter.) That a piece — a song, a play, an opera — can be reinterpreted is acceptable. It means we see it again, and from a new angle. New aspects are brought to light or are sometimes obscured, but if it works at all, the song or the role remains alive, which is the point. It’s a kind of continual resurrection, in which the new being is never the same as the old one.
Alternative Models
One could, following a connection between performance art with other performing arts, also view performance art for what it is — a performance, a special kind of show, and a subset or genre of theater. Just as I perform in front of people for money (or not), I sometimes feel that why shouldn’t others be subjected to some of the same forces as I am? — ticket sales, audience attention span, word of mouth and patience. Why not? Maybe, instead of selling the rights to a piece to the Guggenheim, Sehgal and the museum might have considered splitting the income from admissions. Maybe any performance artist, videomaker or artist whose work has no physical manifestation might do the same thing. When there is nothing physical to sell, you can always sell tickets. (Maybe they should even have merch tables like we musicians do to supplement their income and provide keepsakes?) Fundamentally we musical and stage performers don’t have anything to sell either — we are selling an experience that takes place at that moment. That moment and no other. It happens and then it’s gone. If you pay to be there, you experience it — and a live record, still photo or video is a poor substitute, a mere souvenir. A totem, a relic. A phone video? Forget it — it’s not the same.
The downside of that idea — treating performance art as if it is like any other performance — is that inevitably less popular work would eventually get pushed aside because not as many people would buy tickets. (But haven’t less popular musicians, and theater and dance groups, managed somewhat to survive? Yes, but barely — most still make very little money.) Not just less popular work, but work that doesn’t require a long time commitment to experience might also not fare so well. One might want to gaze for a while, in curiosity and weird rapture, at someone uncomfortably suspended on a wall or counting to a million, or at someone living daily life in a window or a cage, but how long can you view these things? How much would you pay for a glimpse? Many are not very theatrically engaging, so would you actually pay to see them? There’s no entertainment value either. These artists begin, as stated, in galleries, if they’re lucky — where admission is free — so only when they achieve enough success to be given a museum show can this admission idea come into play… but by then, they’re broke.
Part of the high art idea is that important work should NOT have to be popular; value, in that world, should not be subservient to market forces. It should not be expected to be simply or mainly entertaining. It’s got a higher agenda. I would say, yes, lofty and serious work should be allowed to exist free of Walmart or Wall Street. However, one could argue that they are simply ruled by another, alternative and more rarefied market with a set of forces of its own — a market that has other criteria and rules of play. Some of these criteria are, as advertised, heartfelt, intellectual, innovative and creative, while others are neither better nor worse than the values of the common market forces — just different, as are those of other unique subcultures: trainspotters, stamp collectors and comic book geeks. Each of these values things according to criteria that they alone understand. There are market forces at work, but only within a proscribed world.
Anyway, I say more power to the artists who can place what they do, without adulterating it, into a context that will possibly provide them a living and ideally expose the work to a larger audience. Even those videos of short dance pieces might be reaching a larger audience than they might otherwise (though I still have issues with whether folks are really watching them). One doesn’t necessarily always do better work with more freedom or money. Sometimes to write you just need a pencil and paper, and you can create a whole universe.
Among musicians there is the aphorism, “The musician who doesn’t pay attention to their business soon doesn’t have any business” — which is a response to the snobbish and romantic attitude that to be pure and authentic one mustn’t be concerned with money.
There’s certainly a difference between simply being on top of your business and letting the business guide and influence your creative instincts. That’s a valid distinction, but the border is often fuzzy. If something is placed in a new context and becomes successful, was it necessarily because the creator cynically tailored the work exclusively to a business plan? Not always. But yes, sometimes.
So, what do I think? I would argue that nothing exists in isolation. Not an original idea, I guess, but we still tend to view things as discrete — songs, performances, artwork — though they’re not. Maybe the stuff around an object, film or performance is as important as what we’re looking at or listening to. Maybe context is the work. In which case we might be back to “all we have is our opinion.” Sheesh.
Good news part one is that Sagmeister Inc. won a Grammy
yesterday for their design of the Everything
That Happens CD package. Enjoy your stay in LA, Stefan.
This from an e-mail he sent:
....the
night before at the nominee party, Tia Carrere asks me: "What
category are you nominated in?" "We
are up in the most significant and glorious category of them all: Packaging!" "Oh,
you are wrong dear, wrong. 'Best album notes' do KICK YOUR ASS."
In other news today, the NYC Design
Commission met—that’s the committee that “reviews
permanent works of art, architecture and landscape architecture proposed on or
over City-owned property” and determines what sort of public art can
become permanent additions to New York’s landscape. Part of their agenda was
deciding issues involving my bike racks. I
didn’t go. The upshot is they decided that the ones that are already up could
stay, but that, for example, the one I designed and that was approved by the
New Museum, can’t go up.
It’s a pretty tame design—basically a standard staple shape,
like regular bike racks, but slightly larger and with indentations in the
outline of their unique building:
The
other one I offered them—in the shape of a bottle of Thunderbird—was deemed to
be in bad taste by the museum (this one didn't go to the Design Commission for approval, just the building-shaped one):
According to someone who was there it seemed like it was mostly
a political decision and not an artistic (or even practical) one, though who
knows? The DOT, who put up my bike racks, is by law allowed to erect things and
make changes here and there without the Design Commission’s approval, with the
provision that they are not permanent additions to the city landscape. Such as placing
a geodesic dome (on loan from a gallery) on city property on the occasion
of an exhibit celebrating Fuller’s design work, or bringing in a
muralist to paint over an ugly and temporary wall. (See DOT’s Urban Art Program for more examples.) These things
go away after a while, and my bike racks were no exception. They were legally
allowed to be up for 364 days, but if they stayed up one day longer—if they
crossed that line—their continued presence would have to be voted on by this
committee of experts on cultural matters.
So, between my office, the New Museum and the DOT the
requisite applications were filled out and filed in the fall and then the wait
began—months later the day of reckoning arrived (that would be today) and the
cultural gatekeepers who would decide the matter were, it seems, mightily
pissed off. They were annoyed that the DOT had—in some of their eyes—encroached
onto their territory, and this effrontery would not stand. As a compromise they
would allow the existing—and can I say well-received?—bike
racks to stay, but as retribution for not going through said gatekeepers the DOT
(and the rest of us) would be punished by no more additional bike racks being
allowed. Well, not funny designed ones at least.
It was suggested by the gatekeepers that more artists and
Parsons and SVA students etc. etc. who had ideas for city projects should come
to them—maybe via Creative Time
or other organizations (with whom I have collaborated more than once)…I wonder
how many emerging artists would have the patience for the form-filling,
waiting, and political stupidity that is involved in going via the gatekeepers—not
many, I would think.
The DOT did in fact obey the rules, but in putting up
something a little artier than bollards or such they were perceived as making
cultural decisions and incursions—and that—in the view of the gatekeepers—was
intolerable, even if the work was practical and popular! So, no more bike racks
from me for NYC—unless a building or institution wants them on their own and
not on city property. Sorry folks, sometimes stupidity wins the day. (But at
least the ones that are up can stay.)
The LA Opry production of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” is budgeted at $32 million. 32 million! Jeez, Broadway shows don’t cost that much; U2’s concert tour might, but then that’s a stadium show… and in those latter two instances the people who wrote them are still living! (And presumably get paid, which is part of the cost.) Wagner has been dead for a long time last I heard, so one assumes it’s not the composer or the librettist whose agent is charging the moon. Granted, it is a 4-part epic so that budget might be divided in 4. A recent article reported that they are worried about being able to cover $20 million right now. I shouldn’t wonder they’re worried, especially in LA, not known for its arts funding.
Here’s a production picture. Who knew that Wagner anticipated the light saber?
A $14 million bailout for the opera is coming from the county, as the LA city government is called. The opry folks need that $20 million this week… so, reach into your pockets, opera fans. What makes this situation notable is not the amount of money — movies often cost a lot more than $32 million to produce — but the fact that the audience will be so small, and that the state is footing part of the bill.
Simultaneously, a number of museums around the world have scuttled their plans for new buildings or expansions, some of them designed by starchitects. Part of these austerity measures are of course due to the economic downturn, but my guess is that most of these projects were underway well before the crash, and were going to result in a mess anyway — as these insitutions simply thought that, like Bilbao, if they built a wildly impressive new museum in, for example, Milwaukee (Calatrava did the new entranceway and the car garage — the car garage!) or in Indianapolis, that folks from all over the world would come to visit. I was in Indianapolis recently, and would have gone to the art museum, but as we only had one afternoon, we went to the Indy 500 museum instead. Never was there ever any mention of what amazing and innovative shows would go into these future spaces, which were regularly featured in magazine articles with lovely renderings attached — that didn’t seem to be a priority.
Granted, Bilbao did work, in the sense that it gave tourists a reason to visit a place that many US citizens had never heard of before. It was truly amazing to behold how one building could change a whole town. The show that’s up there now is a Frank Lloyd Wright survey (previously exhibited in NY’s Guggenheim), and a permanent collection hodgepodge — not exactly reasons to make a special trip. One can imagine how tempting it must have been for city councils and museum board members to hope that the Bilbao Effect could be replicated in their own town. LA’s Disney Hall looks almost exactly like the Bilbao Guggenheim. Everybody wanted one.
However this mess ends up, my thoughts are that maybe it’s time to rethink all this museum, opera and symphony funding — and I refer mainly to state funding. A bunch of LA museums just got a bailout from LA real estate king Eli Broad, and that’s great, but I suspect there will be county money involved there somewhere too. I think maybe it’s time to stop, or more reasonably, curtail somewhat, state investment in the past — in a bunch of dead guys (and they are mostly guys, and mostly dead, when we look at opera halls) — and invest in our future. Take that money, that $14 million from the city, for example, let some of those palaces, ring cycles and temples close — forgo some of those $32M operas — and fund music and art in our schools. Support ongoing creativity in the arts, and not the ongoing glorification and rehashing of the work of those dead guys. Not that works of the past aren’t inspirational, important and relevant to future creativity — plenty of dead people’s work is endlessly inspiring — but funding for arts in schools has been cut to zero in many places. Maybe the balance and perspective has to be redressed and restored just a little. Plus, there are plenty of CDs and DVDs of the dead guys out there already, should one be curious.
Funding future creativity is a real investment — there’s a chance these kids will build, write, draw or play something that will fill theaters, clubs, stadiums, web pages, whatever. The dead guys won’t write more symphonies.
The problem of course, as far as private funding goes, is that what billionaire wants to fund school education? Where’s the glamour in that? You don’t get your name etched in marble on the outside of a hall for that, or get invited to amazing galas, so what’s the point? That’s why I’m focusing on public and state funding — let the private funders bankroll the opry halls, if that’s where they want to hang out.
I sense that in the long run there is a greater value for humanity in empowering folks to make and create than there is in teaching them the canon, the great works and the masterpieces. In my opinion, it’s more important that someone learn to make music, to draw, photograph, write or create in any form than it is for them to understand and appreciate Picasso, Warhol or Bill Shakespeare — to say nothing of opry. In the long term it doesn’t matter if students become writers, artists or musicians — though a few might. It's more important that they are able to understand the process of creation, experimentation and discovery — which can then be applied to anything they do, as those processes, deep down, are all similar. It’s an investment in fluorescence.
So how did things end up like this?
Well, there is the aforementioned glory of getting your name on a museum or symphony hall rather than on an elementary school — David Geffen got his start managing popular folk rockers, and now his name is on art museums (and AIDS charities). But I think there are other factors.
Thomas Hoving, the former king of the Met Museum in NYC during the ’60s and ’70s, just passed away. He and his rival, J. Carter Brown, king of the National Gallery in DC, both felt that democratizing art meant getting everyone to like the stuff that they liked. It meant letting everyone know and feel that HERE, in the museum, was the good stuff, the important stuff, the stuff with aura and depth. Here is a promotion the Met did in the ’60s in LIFE magazine:
The idea was that even reduced to postcard size, reproductions of verified masterpieces still had enough power to enlighten the American heathen. It seems almost humorous — as if postcards of certified works of art had some mystical power to educate — or, more accurately, to indoctrinate.
Music is the same. Here’s an ad in today’s NY Times book review section:
This isn’t about learning to play for enjoyment, creation, expression or fun — it’s purely about valuing the classics more than anything you and your pathetic friends can make. It’s a little more expensive than the $1.25 the Met was asking back in the day, but then, times have changed.
Hoving and a couple of others, following this line of thinking, created the blockbuster museum show — which famously brought Tut to the masses, and made the Met and other like-minded museums into temples for all, instead of the dusty halls for academics they had become. Hard to remember, but the Met was once a fussy old place, and now it’s super popular — which is not in itself a bad thing. Although the idea was loudly espoused that art was for all, and all could benefit from exposure to it (something like a flu shot), this idea was not exactly democratic, not as I would define it — though it was certainly portrayed as democratizing art and culture. What the movement was actually doing was letting more people know that culture was, and is, HERE, and you slobs, you hoi polloi, are over HERE. We want you all to look at it, and listen to it, but don’t even think you could ever make it, or that your feeble efforts are anywhere close to these Himalayan peaks we have on display.
I know it’s not exactly the same, but I would say: show someone three chords on the guitar, show them how to program or play beats, or play a keyboard (something I can’t really do), but don’t expect virtuosity right away. Everyone knows you can make a song with almost nothing, with really limited skills, so be satisfied and enjoy that, and don’t feel inadequate because you’re not Mozart. I myself wish I’d learned keyboard, but I did find that on guitar, I gravitated to where my interests (and abilities) took me. Over time I learned a lot more chords, began to be able to “hear” harmonies and tonal relationships, and, of course, I learned a lot more grooves over the years — how to feel and enjoy them. But at first I found I could express something, or at least have fun, with my really limited means. When I made something, even something crude, I could momentarily discredit the feeling that if I couldn’t match the classical model, then I was less of a musician.
There are some classical musical works that I can groove with — but, for example, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven I never could get, and I don’t feel any the worse for it. There’s plenty left to love and enjoy. This whole rant, I guess, derives a little from the fact that I resent the implication, and sometime-feeling, that I’m less of a musician and even a person for not appreciating those works. It’s not true!
Ditto with visual art and literature — some of the classics I love deeply, but like many people, there are many Great Works of Literature that lie unfinished on my shelves, and thank God for that, as I was probably doing something more interesting instead… maybe reading something more inspiring, or even trying to write something myself.
It’s true that sometimes the newest thing on the block is 500 years old — and sometimes the way forward is through the past — but not exclusively! And we don’t have to stay there. It’s more important to encourage creativity than to imply that good work can only be made by professionals — your betters.
Hoving, however, did ride a bike, so he can’t be all bad. In fact, his stint as Parks Commissioner before his Met years was incredibly fruitful — and he was offered the job with no prior experience (so much for letting experts tell us what to do!). He closed Central Park to cars on weekends and established over 100 pocket parks around the city, using vacant lots and weird, unused parcels of real estate.
