New
leads, new director... in that situation it makes sense to look back
to the source. That's pretty much what happened in the comics all the
time.
But
does that really warrant a fomalised reboot?
Of
course not! The whole retelling of the origin is completely
redundant. Anybody in the audience will either know all that already
or not be bothered. With every Tarzan film, did they keep going back
to his origin? James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, both have had reams of
films made about them over the years. Did either of them even
have an origin? Did anyone ask for one? Did anyone
look at Holmes and say “but how did he get the
deerstalker and the enquiring mind?” And not “okay, master
detective, enquiring Victorian mind, let's go.”
But
you're probably better off just going with it. They do come up with a
new take, with Peter finding out about his father now made the motor
of everything. (Okay, new to Spider-Man, if a direct steal from Harry
Potter.) The great weighting weakness of the first trilogy was their
insistence each new adversary had to be tied into Uncle Ben's
killings, with increasingly absurd and convoluted results. (Maybe the
Sandman did him in, with a gun lent by the Green Goblin, but under
the orders of Doctor Octopus, based on an original idea by Kraven the
Hunter... no, no, NO!) Here the killer is exactly who he
should be, a no-hope nobody who holds up
dimestores. The whole Daily Bugle strand is also unceremonially cut
out, and you find you don't miss it at all.
If
you're after a proper review you could do worse than check
out Roger Ebert, who correctly calls it - better than the
initial instalment of the first series, not as good as the second.
Which may be partly because they can use the first films as trial
runs. If, for example, their predecessors got into awkward fixes with
the all-over mask and audience identification, they can find good
reasons for him to remove it. (Well, most of the time.)
But
the scene where they show they actually get
Spider-Man is the one in the basketball court. Superheroes, a genre
all about wish fulfilment, right? Where you can suddenly get
super-strong, act cool and out-bully the bullies? Except Spider-Man
is all about a world where that doesn't work, where solving problems
are not as linear or straightforward as throwing a punch. What if you
got those coveted super-powers, and they just made the whole thing
worse?
And
while I'm no fan of romcoms, getting a director like Marc Webb in
shows nous. Spider-Man is a teenage romance story which ups the ante
on intruding teachers and interfering parents by bringing in raging
super-villains, the teenage romance is still very much at it's heart.
Even
the part of the film which doesn't quite work, the
villain, still feels like a stab in the right direcion. Fittingly,
the Lizard's bad deeds all stem from good intentions. But his
character's simultaneously too undeveloped and, in it's schizo
duality, too similar to what's already been done with the Green
Goblin.
But
then, right at the end, it has to bring in that
line. Where the English teacher all-so-metafictionally tells us
“we're told there's only ten stories in the world. But there's
really only one. Who am I?”
And
this is supposed to be an English teacher saying
this? An English teacher who has either never heard of 'Jason
and the Argonauts', 'Hound of the Baskervilles', 'Animal Farm', 'The
Maltese Falcon' and so many others, or who imagines they
can be reduced to that small-minded schema!
But of
course it's not an English teacher. It's a Hollywood scriptwriter,
fresh from reading all
that noxious New Agey Christian Vogler claptrap. Dude, it's
you who only knows one story! And just like you
confuse the world with yourself, you're taking your myopia for
insight.
And
that's why superheroes now have to be constantly
bound and re-bound to their origin stories. Because the world is now
just some backdrop, some adventure game scenario for you to carry out
your own personal ego mission. Because the idea of doing public good
can only be made sense of if filtered through the prism of some
self-discovering crusade.
It's
the most telling line from any of the modern superhero films. In some
ways its even appropriate that it comes from one of the better takes,
because that marks all-the-clearer that this is the point they all
reduce to.
Who
are you?
I'm
afraid I can't answer that question in polite company.
Only a couple of months ago, I took in
the Melvins and Sunn 0))), two bands so similar and yet so dissimilar
it proved impossible not to play
compare and contrast with them. And then what should come
along last week but..?
THE CRAVATS
The Albert, Brighton, Sat 11th
August
”Sometimes... when I'm going
backwards... I feel like I'm going forwards.”
I'd commented in an earlier post on the
motley assortment of folk that were The Men They Couldn't Hang,
but their line-up has nothing compared to the Cravats. We have... a
singer who looks like he should be securing the door, in fact
considerably more so than the chap who is actually securing the door.
(And who, holding to this role, frequently tells us to “calm down,
please.”) A guitarist who arrives attired as a World War Two flying
ace. (And somehow retains this attire, despite the extreme heat.) A
bassist who looks like a Guardian journalist, perhaps initially sent
to review proceedings but now drafted in. A sax player who looks....
er, a little strange. And to top it all a spiky-haired youth on
drums, the only person present who at all fits the punk stereotype,
and (as events transpire) knows everyone in the mosh pit personally.
I ask you, with everything so
gloriuously askew - what could possibly go wrong?
This recent reformation was my first
chance to catch the Cravats. (Though I did see the Very Things, their
more psychedelic offshoot, sometime in the Eighties.) They had done
the whole punk thing, self-releasing their first single in '78 after
a loan from the singer's mum, using John Peel airplays as lifeblood,
even managing a release on Crass records. And yet it was clear from
the outset their run was not of the normal mill.
When most punk songs were about hating
your parents, your teachers or (at more of a stretch) whoever the
Prime Minister happened to be, the Cravats pitched in with a single
titled 'I Hate the Universe.' Which was their
whole schtick, absurdist black humour given a backbeat, Dada antics
mixed with English tomfoolery. (Though the early band member whose
on-stage task was to watch TV does not, alas, part of the
reformation. Unless he's still rehearsing.) At the height of the Year
Zero rule, when the Sixties were struck out of musical history, they
took from it's more sinister side. 'Who's In Here With
Me?' and 'Ceasing To Be' are like younger cousins to 'I Am the Walrus' and 'See
My Friends', with the air of menace not so much thickened
as stewed.
The Shend's vocals are a mixture of
plummy yodels and screeches, like an after-dinner speaker gone
through the looking glass. (With perhaps a nod to the Karloff-styled
narration of 'Monster
Mash'.) Rick London's sax is used less as a rock'n'roll
instrument and more a sound generator, sometimes injecting nigh-on
white noise into the mix. (After the gig, a friend avidly shows me
how he possesses more effects pedals than the guitarist.) The band
seem simultaneously on the edge of turning to free-form noise, whilst
remaining as tight and powerful as any punk band could wish to be.
You can hear klezmer or cabaret in there, not paraded as a set of
look-at-me influences but thrown into the whirlygig of sound.
The systematic deragement of the senses
you can dance to. What's not to like?
'Rub Me Out' live
from London a couple of years ago...
...and 'In Your Eyes',
from the gig above. Lower sound quality, but then that's punk, innit?
PUBLIC IMAGE LTD.
Brighton Concorde, Thurs 16th August
John Lydon (aka Rotten) was not just
the poster boy of Brit-punk and arch-stirrer of media shit-storms, he
was also a key ingredient in one of the finest albums in the history
of everything.
Of course, anyone who knows their music
will know of what I do speak.'Never Mind the Bollocks'
is a pretty damn fine rock'n'roll album. But it was after
the Sex Pistols, when Public Image Ltd released 'Metal
Box', that punk became post-punk and the rules of the game
were well and truly changed. Okay, so perhaps both changed music. But
with so many no-hopers taking 'Bollocks' as their
starting gun, only 'Metal Box' did it for the
better.
Of course since then Lydon's
increasingly fallen back on his chief career of being a TV
personality. He hasn't really made a great album since 1986's
'Album', in fact he hasn't relased anything
at all since 1997. Instead his chief occupation has been appearing on
TV documentaries about punk in order to put everyone else down. (“Be
a punk. Join the army!”) Well, that and advertising butter. He was
always entertaining, and somehow you can't help liking the
self-aggrandising snotty taunter. But it seemed the more a
self-caricature he became, the more often he got hired.
...which is hardly surprising when you
come to think about it. Like Damo Suzuki, Lydon has a natural talent
but plays no instrument, so is more-than-usual reliant on talented
collaborators. Yet he's too egotistical to stick collaborators for
long. The better they are, the shorter thy last. Famously he had
ejected the bassist from the Pistols, overlooking the small matter of
him writing all the music. Then replaced him with Lydon's personal
sidekick overlooking the small matter of him not being able to play
the bass. That really set the tone for his subsequent career. The
classic line-up of Public Image lasted twice as long (ie they made
two albums instead of one), but that seems something of a record.
And on the rare days when he did
perform, changes in his voice seemed to work as a barometer. Just as
he swapped intense glares for gurneying, his sneering put-downs
became more elaborate and theatrical, trilling consonants and
stretching vowels, like an elocution teacher on bad drugs. Ironically
they're in some ways not dissimilar to the Shend's, but it did seem
to dampen the threat element and make them more of a self-caricature.
Nevertheless, though he brazenly
continued using the name Pil for what were essentially solo albums,
announcing he'd 'reform' the band was a signal for those with ears to
listen. He'd decided to cut back on the TV punditry for a bit and get
serious about music again. The Pistols reformation involved the full
original line-up, and I didn't even bother to listen when they played
live on the radio. Pil has precisely one original member, Lydon
himself, and I bought my ticket as soon as they went on sale.
And they were good.
They were really, really good.
Barring the new stuff, 'Metal
Box' is the most visited album. In fact early on they
launch into the most 'Metal Boxy' of all tracks -
'Albatross.' If it's a more rocky version than the
original, it's still a chip off the 'Metal Box'
block – in fact it sets the tone for proceedings. While the
earlier, punchier numbers lie unplayed, tracks are stretched past any
kind of shape or structure. They have the same relationship to songs
as instillation pieces do to pictures, they become places to hang out
in. 'Flowers of Romance' started life as a single.
With this version I started to wonder if the very conception of
linear time had been an illusion all along. (Alas they don't play my
two favourite tracks from 'Metal Box',
'Poptones' and 'Memories', but
it's scarceley a greatest hits set they're doing.)
As 'Metal Box' is
the album on which Lydon sings least affectedly, making it's recipe
post-dub trance-outs plus emotional intensity, his more recent style
of singing doesn't always work out. 'Death Disco'
in particular seemed to lack something. Yet had 'Religion'
been any more intense, it would most likely have
provoked a war.
I am probably doing the show a
disservice and giving vent to nostalgia by not saying more about the
new songs, which are strong and distinctive. The deranged
'Lollipop Opera', which I'd seen on the TV without
quite getting... well it would be wrong to say it made
sense but somehow it clicked with me. I
found myself wanting to hear the new album, which wasn't something I
was expecting. The new band work well together, with the guitar of Lu
Edmonds (who's played with the Mekons and 3 Mustaphas 3) particularly
notable. (Probably meaning Lydon will fire him first, so get in while
you can.)
“We do this because we love doing
it,” Lydon tells us before leaving the stage. “Remember that.”
And against all odds, the rentagob
persona, the guy who denounced all other punks as fakes while making
butter adverts, you find yourself believing him.
Punk was always at it's dullest when it
started chasing some spurious credibility, ranting in mockney about
being unemployed in a bus shelter or sniffing glue against the
system. (The Exploited managed to rant in mockney despite being from
Scotland, surely the ultimate in self-caricature.)
Punk was always at its best when it was
creative and arch, aiming to stay in rock'n'roll just enough to
explode and expose it's absurdities, but mostly heading out
of it - into the unexplored. That two bands could come along in a
row, both from the classic era of Brit-punk, who are interested in
neither the nostalgia circuit nor in holding to some illusory musical
fundamentalism... if that's not an encouraging sign, I can't imagine
what is.
I should probably link to either a
'Metal Box' or a new track for the customary
vidclip, but for no good reason at all instead here's
'Rise'...
In other news... find yourself missing
other founder members Keith Levine and Jah Wobble? Wondering, if
there can be two competing versions of Hawkwind, why can't there be for Pil?
In such a spirit, Levine and Wobble have formed Metal Box in Dub.
With the singer from a Pistols tribute band and Levine's Beatles
T-shirt, this is surely staged at least in part as a fuck-you to
Lydon. (Whose antipathy to the Beatles is legendary.) But the music
is... wait for it... genuinely great, and I might even have been
tempted to London to see them had I known of it.
There's actually odd similarities to
New Pil's take on the tracks, they're not so much re-entacted as used
as the basis for bendy, stretchy workouts, less trance-out than the
originals, more free-form. And, while Wobble's bass was a key
ingredient in the classic band of yore, both are notably
guitar-dominated. This is their 'No Birds Do Sing'...
Okay, so another great from the classic era of American comics is gone, the like of which we won't see again. Are we really at that point where only Ditko is left? Classic Kubert anecdote, being told off by Carmine Infantino for not wearing a tie to the DC offices. Everything you need to know about his art style is in there. I mean, just look at some, the seeming roughness which gives everything a vibrant urgency, yet not a single stroke out of place. He was one of those artists who could make it all look so easy, until you actually tried to copy him.
Once
the Hayward seemed a hitter on the London gallery circuit. But since
the high of the much-celebrated 'Undercover
Surrealism', I find I haven't been back in some six years.
Admittedly, partly because I saw the John Cage show in Bexhill before
it transferred to London, and (alas) missed the
Rodchenko photography. But mostly because they seemed to
be becoming more and more mired
in Brit Art. And frankly I sometimes wonder if even
disliking Brit Art betratys too much of an involvement with it. What
would it take to tempt me back?
The
answer, it transpires, is an exhibition of invisible or otherwise
unseeable artworks, described by curator Ralph Rugoff as “the best
exhibition you'll never see.” Perhaps he should have pre-empted the
inevitable heckles and called it 'The Emperor's New
Clothes.' Needless to say, many scoffed. But is the result
gimmick, folly, one-note joke with stretch marks or actually
something worth taking in? Take that poster image (above), is it of a
man heading into infinity or just stepping himself into a corner? But
even if it just is a series of empty rooms with an entry fee, that
already sounds better than Brit Art, so I decided to find out...
(And
yes I did think of posting a blank review, broken up by empty frames
for the illos, of a review in white-on-white text, and all the other
variants...)
Anti-Art
Was Just the Start
Things
kick off with Yves Klein's video 'Propositions
Monochrome', from the 1957 Paris exhibition of blank space.
(Commonly called 'The Void', though that was
theoretically the title of an empty vitrine within the show.) The
concept was that the artist had passed through the space, influencing
it with his personality, a parody of the great artist and his
heightened sensibilities. I wasn't sure whether the smart-suited
figure (actually Klein himself)was the artist inbuing the place with
his special presence, or a gallery-goer carefully inspecting these
empty spaces. I don't suppose it matters. It provides the vital spark
needed by every gag – the straight man.
He
went on to even more direct critiques of art as a commodity, selling
“zones of immaterial sensibility” for gold, a short-circuiting of
the artist's relationship with wider society, doing something
pseudo-mystical for the wallets of the wealthy. Purchasers received
certificates modelled on cheques, some of which are on show.
Similarly,
Tom Friedman's '1000 Hours of Staring' (1992/7) is
a piece of white paper he simply stared at for that set time,
ostebsibly taking those years to create it. Of course it doesn't
work, it's just a blank piece of paper, the supposed superior
hyper-intensity of the artist is not magically transmitted. (In fact
we don't even know if he actually did it, as he refused to document
anything.) Meanwhile in 'Untitled' (1991) Maurizio
Cattelan reported
the theft of an invisible work of art to the police, then exhibited
his copy of their crime report. Something out of nothing.
Such
Dada anti-art antics, aiming to fail and to take down with them the
whole of the rest of art, of course these remain vital. It's not just
a joke, it's a joke with the sting of the truth. We have a straight
choice. We can either forget about art, feign that it somehow
magically transcends capitalism's ability to regulate our social
relations, or embrace anti-art. And what better place to show this
stuff than today, and at this temple to Brit Art? Those conspicuous
consumers who buy pickled sharks from Damien Hirst, they don't really
like the work, do they? Any more than a Rolex
owner thinks it tells the time better than a more regular watch. They
just want to own a Hirst. They buy the price tag and the work comes
free.
Yet
twenty years ago, and full of piss and vinegar, I would have wanted
the whole exhibition to stay like this, repeatedly hammering the same
point home. After all, in Richard Hell's phrase, I belonged to the
blank generation. But it isn't so one-note, and today I'm glad of
that.
Pure
Dada is a bit like stripped-down, three-chord punk tracks. Music
generally goes back to that when it starts getting lost. But, for all
that both are negative sentiments, both are starting points. You
remember that essential lesson as you move on. They're not intended
as places for you to stay. Having quoted Richard
Hell, let's follow up with X Ray Spex: “anti-art was just the
start.”
As
things turn out, there's more to invisible art than straight
provocation. When the exhibition states boldly “works that share a
similar blankness can convey remarkably varied content,” it's
notable how fully it can live up to that promise. Though it would be
an exercise in folly to imagine that whiteness could be categorised
or the invisible boxed, let's run through just a few of them.
Art
Needs No Objects
If
conceptual art can too easily be conflated with anti-art, there is of
course an overlap between the two. The catalogue correctly sees in it
“a form of resistance to...the increasing power of the martekplace
to determine the significance of works of art.” With no artworks to
grasp, there were no items to trade. Simples. But conceptual art is
more an attempt to reset the priorities of art than a fist-pumping
attack on it.
Lucy
Lippard calls it “a dematerialisation of art” while Laura
Cumming in the Guardiancomments “it's only the thought
which counts.” Take Robert Barry's 'Inert Gas Series'
(1968) in whichhe released inert gases into the air, to allow them
to travel slowly but inexorably around the world, me and you
inevitably breathing a little of them in. It's perhaps the comsummate
conceptual artwork as its a mteaphor for conceptual art itself, or
quite possibly art overall. Art is about the release and
dissemination of ideas, with the rest either accoutrements or
obstacles.
Hence
conceptual art doesn't set itself up as a type of
art, as another ism, but as the purest form of
art, stripped of it's unnecessary appendages. The sinking stone was
only ever a means to get the ripples going on the pond. If you can
create them without the bother of the stone, so much the better.
However,
'Air Conditioning Unit' (1972, above) by Terry
Atkinson and Michael Baldwin of Art and Language gives conceptulism a
different spin. A room is empty save for two air conditioning units.
The outside wall is covered by a text explaining all this, in dense
and fairly incomprehensible language. There's also a poster
avdertising an early showing of this, which is itself almost all
text. (In fact the room existing at all was something of an
afterthought, it was not set up until four years after the work was
conceived and the idea disseminated.)
It
would be easy to take it as a skit upon the theory-heavy world of
Modernism. (Even the catalogue suggests they “set out to question
and subvert the basic tenets of Modernism.”) But their point would
actually seem to be a wider one – to render problematic the
supposed discrete reality of an art object. Language inherently
involves a cultural filter, I can't write “air conditioning unit”
in a way that will keep you cool, I have to write it in English or
some other culturally specific language, and so on. Art can feel free
of all that. A sculpture of Winston Churchill is simply a scuplture
of Winston Churchill, surely.
Yet as
the catalogue says art was never about “the inherent
characteristics of an object... but with how it is positioned within
a larger symbolic network.” A statue of Winston Churchill in the
park may look straightforward enough, but actually is just the tip to
the iceberg of whole set of cultural assumptions. The artists are
attempting to invert things and show us the iceberg.
The
Invitation of Incomplete
Surround
white with other colours and it stops being a blank canvas and
immediately becomes a vivid foreground colour. (I've used that trick
with my own comics.) Equally, silences in music can be arresting or
even profound.
Similarly,
some works here use the unseen as a trigger for the imagination, with
the works as pointers, giving the audience just enough of a framework
that their minds can start to fill it. Perhaps the majority of works
fit this caregory to some degree, for even the all-white works are
framed, not empty spaces on the walls.
The
mosty clear-cut example might be Carsten Holler's 'The
Invisible' (1998, above). Asked to design a racing car for
an art project, a kind of modernist 'Wacky Races',
his contribution was an “invisible car.” We see it's starting
block laid out on the gallery floor, but that is all. Being a
natural-born cynic, I did not imagine an invisible car had actually
been built and now sat there. But somehow, I found I couldn't walk
over those lines.
It's
not that each of us constructs a working model of what that invisible
car might look like, and so ends up with their own personalised
artwork. It's more that the space becomes a focus for thought, and
your mental assumptions come to inhabit it. It's like those horror
films that avoid showing you the monster, figuring whatever is
formless in your imagination will always be scarier than anything on
screen.
Taking
a Chance
We've
all long since turned against any notion of art as didactive, a fixed
object transmitting a set meaning into the audience's mind. We
recognise it as a collaborative process between the transmitter and
the receiver's ears. But the interchange, the radio static is still
often seen either as a simple passageway or an obstacle to be
overcome. Yet that game of Chinese Whispers is just as much a part of
the magic happening. Once you start to think in this way, chance
becomes a method of creating art just like a paintbrush or a camera.
Bruno
Jakob released a series of 'Invisible Paintings',
where the paper or canvas was subject to rain, snow or other elements
which would corrode or undulate the surface. The catalogue tells of a
Venice exhibition in 2010/11 in which he left the paintings outside
for the elements to 'paint' as the show progressed.
These
probably stretch the show's theme, they're more ultra-minimalist than
actually invisible, in the manner of John Cage's visual art. But they
provide a useful contrast. Particularly when put in the context of
pristine white works, they show how the brain needs very little
suggestion to start seeing the work as a painting. See a sheer white
sheet in a frame and you think “art statement” and check out the
indicia to see what the artist was thinking of. Add just a few pale
indications and you think “art work” and look at the canvas.
Art
As Impermanence
We're
always being told great art is timeless, which must be the highest
form of visibility there is. A corollary notion is that art must
always be kept in its original state. Works are preserved or
restored, with any failure to do so presented as a tragedy. But of
course nothing lasts forever, putting (as they have done in Brighton)
a
piece of Banksy graffiti under glass is just staving off
the inevitable. So what happens not just when you make art that is
impermanent, but is about that impermanence?
Take
Song Dong's 'Writing Diary With Water'
(1995-present, above), in which he kept a diary by writing with water
on stone. Of course the water just evaporates.
As a
diary represents a life, they also contain the concept of sedementary
layers. A conventional diary is a record of progress, a moving from
one state to another. This diary accumulates, as if our memories are
not a series of events, but a set of pictures each superimposed on
the ones before, not advancing like a career but growing like coral.
Oddly,
there's no attempt to explore the overlap with auto-destructive art.
Chance creation of art is all very well, but should the processes
stop there? Could they actually start after that
point? Gustav
Metzger's (semi) recent show explored the way it's erosion
and decay could become the subject matter of a work of art.
Significant
Absences
But
also, and in a paradoxical reversal of everything above, art can also
be used to make visible the otherwise invisible. The invisible can be
used to represent the ideological, the stuff you don't notice because
it's become so naturalised in your mind.
For
example, in 1974 Michael Asher took a wall out of the Claire Copley
gallery in Los Angeles, to expose the gallery offices and “put on
display issues related to labour and the selling of art.”
(Unreproducable here, of course, but mentioned in the catalogue.)
And of
course there's also a political dimension, where history and even
geography render some events and people invisible. In the German city
of Kassel a a public fountain, erected by a local Jewish
businessman, was destroyed by Nazis. To simply rebuild it would be
to remember its original donor, but also wipe Nazi crimes from the
record. Horst Hoheisel's 'Ashcrott Fountain'
(1987) instead rebuilds it but upside-down, sinking into the earth,
“a funnel into whose darkness the water recedes,” thereby marking
both the original fountain and the attempt to wipe it out.
Perhaps
I am just a romantic but I imagine an America who had held to the
'Tribute in Light' commemoration of Ground Zero would have
been less likely to invade Iraq.
Invisible
Walls, Invisible Bridges
There
are always works which don't fit your clumsy categories, and the
invisible inevitably does not take well to an imposed order. Fitting
nowhere above but a welcome addition to the show is Jeff Hein's
'Invisible Labyrinth' (2005, above), where
headsets vibrate a warning whenever you hit an unseen wall of his
virtual labyrinth. This work is fun, involving and charmingly
site-specific. It's fitting that they're vibrations not verbal
instructions, as it makes them feel more like a 'sense', and less a
command. Alas in this less-than-blockbuster show there was only one
other person trying it when I got there, when it really needs a small
crowd, but you can't have everything.
The
steward opening a section of a clear white wall to adjust controls
was presumably just performing a function, but it still felt like an
integral part of the piece - a glimpse of the hidden world of works
behind the smooth passages we traverse.
However
the blurb is surely getting carried away by claiming it “disrupts
conventional patterns of behaviour.” Already that day not only had
I been unable to step on the starting pad of Holler's invisible car.
I'd seen a Tube station guard challenge people who'd walking in to
an 'out' section of the station, surely the equivalent of a buzzing
headset. Surely we follow invisible walls all the time, sticking to
lines marked on the floor, standing to the right on escalators. I've
been to that Tube station frequently, and probably now consider those
floor markings as impermeable as an actual wall.
But
this seems more like the success of the piece than the failure.
Foregrounding a sublimnal activity, renewing our awareness – that
feels like something art should be doing.
And
talking of making use of the gallery space...
No Art Here, Let's Look at the Gallery
Bethan
Huws comments that attendees “tend to pass from one work to the
next, as if the artworks were little islands, and the seas – white
walls/ concrete floors in between – go unnoticed. They pass from
New York to San Francisco to... so to speak, without noticing the
surroundings.” Of course this is similar to John Cage's infamous
silent piece, which aimed to bounce us into noticing the ambient
sounds of the performance space. Huws' means to get us to reaquant us
with our surroundings was to hire an actor to pose as a gallery-goer,
but do nothing out of the ordinary for the role.
Now
me, I'm one of the contrary types who always
notices the layout of galleries, just like I take in the typography
of books. And the look here is quite vivid; vast white spaces, with
what works there are spread apart, the indicia on see-through perspex
or faded grey. (You can't even see these from a distance, so spied
from a distance other attendees look for all the world like they're
staring at bare walls.)
Of
course the gallery space affects us, perhaps more strongly if only
taken in subliminally. In 'The Air Conditioning Show'
I got all the conceptual backstory about
art-as-text, but mostly just found the room a calming space to hang
out in. Sitting down, I started tuning into micro-details, such as
the way the two air conditioning units had different hums. It was
actually hard to tear myself away, I had to focus on the promise of
the rest of the show and other errands I then had to run. The
whiteness of the gallery became, for me, a vivid foreground colour.
Notably Glenn Ligon's 'He Tells Me I Am His Own'
(2003) names an all-white print after an evangelical hymn, riffing
off religions usage of “white light” as a metaphor for the holy.
...which
is perhaps unsurprising. Due to the accursed Olympics, London was
more-than-usual cloged with crowds, cops and flags (not necessarily
in that order). Even the more enjoyable stretches, such as the South
Bank, are stimulating rather than relaxing. Compared to those teeming
streets, the show felt like a little slice of heaven. (Think of the
all-white heaven in 'A Matter of Life and Death.')
It even seemed designed to evoke this, inverting the normal flow of
rooms, so you came to the cathedral-like space of the biggest,
whitest room last. (A sacrifice for this payoff being they couldn't
get you to exit through the gift shop, normally the gallery
equivalent of chocolate by the supermarket tills.)
It
feels reminiscent of how I felt about the
Brian Eno exhibition at an Old Church in Brighton.
Galleries are fast replacing Churches, as the place we can indulge
our less worldly feelings yet also keep them combined with our fix
for personal comsumption.
It
also brought to mind two colliding quotes. Alan Vega' said of the
notoriously confrontational punk gigs put on by his band Suicide in
Seventies New York, “people were coming in off the streets...
hoping they’d be escaping and all we were doing was shoving the
street back in their face again.” While Peter Blegved, interviewed
in the Sound
Projector, once commented on his changing tastes in middle
age “I'd pay more for silence now than music.”
The
problem of this show with nothing to see isn't that it doesn't work,
that the blank walls bore, it's that it works far too readily. It
presents itself as something radical and challenging when its
actually something of a chill-out space. What we can't see, was that
ever going to hurt us? In the video below Rugoff talks of
“forego[ing] the complacency of seeing”, yet also of the show as
“a pallete-cleanser, at a moment when London is having an endless
series of spectacles.” Does this show want to keep its Dada roots
and eat them?
Let's
be upfront, I can recognise some of myself in that Blegved quote and
enjoyed being in that serene space. Purging the mind of clutter and
instilling a zen state of calm, that's a credible purpose of art and
invsiblity seems a likely means towards that end. But should it
over-rule all the others? Weren't we told near the start that there
could be as many forms of invisible art as any other? The
antagonistic anti-art that kicks off the show, should that just be
kicked out from there-on in?
A
Slice of Darkness
As if
acknowledging this, some of the more recent works try to spice things
up a bit. For example, in Tom Friedman's 'Untitled (A
Curse)' (1992, above), a witch has hexed the space above an
empty plinth. While with his afore-mentioned '1000 Hours of
Staring' the failure had been the point, this time the
failure seems just that. For it to work we would need to be
transported back five hundred years, when we last believed in such
stuff. After being unable to step on the starting block of the
invisible car, my first reaction was to stick my head just where the
curse would be. I am, at the time of writing, not feeling any ill
effects.
The
most clear-cut attempt to inject a bitter undertaste was Teresa
Margolles' 'Air'(2003), at first sight a straight
replication of 'Air Codnitioning Unit'. But the
air is from humidified water previously used to wash down Mexican
murder victims. Yet again the effect seemed insufficent. On a daily
basis, we consume stuff based on the crippling exploitation of
others. The clothes we wear might well have been made in a sweatshop
where workers were beaten or killed for trying to form a trade union.
There's nothing strong enough here to bring any of those repressed
thoughts home. (Perhaps we should initially be told it's mountain air
from outside a Swiss sanitorium or some such, and encouraged to
breathe deeply, before being told the truth.)
The
catalogue mentions a 1974 Warhol invisible scuplture surrounded by
burglar alarms of different pitchces, primed to go of as soon as
visitors approach them. Something like that would have been warranted
here, to shake up the calmness a little. (And certainly it would have
been better than the Warhol piece they do show.) Another possibility
would have been to include an empty room, unmarked by signage or any
other indication whether it was another artwork or simply a space
left bare.
There's
precisely one piece which actually does succeed in unsettling. James
Lee Bryar's 'The Ghost of James Lee Bryars' (1969)
is nothing but a jet-black room to commemorate his inevitable death.
(And restaged after his actual death in 1986.) It's the yang to the
yin of 'Air Conditioning Unit', the dark to... oh
wait, you saw that one coming. After all that gleaming white,
plunging yourself into the pitch black is startling, like diving into
icy water from a hot day. A woman before me visibly had to marshall
her efforts before she could enter. (In a smart move, you haved to
pass through that room to reach the rest of the exhibition.) It feels
closing not opening, and I felt none of my earlier desire to hang out
in there. It's stark and unfunerary, with none of those flowers,
shared memories or talk of “better places”, just a stone-cold
fact. Some things, there's just no escaping.
Of
course it's possible that the black room only
feels so dark from all the whiteness everywhere else. An artwork
reliant on a cultural context is an inevitablity. But in this case,
this work might have been reliant on the context of this particular
show for it's powerful effect. In, for example, a show devoted to
death it might fit in far easier. That might be thought a step too
far into relitavism.
Invisible,
The New Visible
...which
is perhaps what we should expect. Unlike his earlier-discussed works
Klein seems serious about his proposed 'architecture de l'air', with
buildings held in place by jets of air, to “dissolve social mores
and conventions.” He even tried to patent them. But that liberating
open-ness now doesn't seem that far removed from the glass-and-steel
constructions that dominate the modern London skyline, such as the
near-completed Shard I passed on the way in.
A
credit card company I once worked for were working feverishly on a
transparent card, which they clearly saw as a kind of holy grail.
Apple have virtually trademarked the colour white with their
branding. Once gold or blue were the signifying colours of status.
Now, especially since the banking crisis, every corporation is aiming
at this 'open' look. Even the idea of the show as a kind of Zen
refuge from the London streets, perhaps even that can be criticised.
Perhaps it's actually their epitome.
One
argument would be that presenting all this as a gallery show at all
was an inveitable diluting of the concept. The programme talks a lot
of invisible art as a with-holding. Perhaps they should have copied a
trick used by Barry and just released the programme, tied to a
non-existent gallery complete with unreachable map instructions.)
My
natural reaction was to bask in this exhibition as if it glowed.
Presented with an all-white room, my heart was briefly at peace. But
my brain had nagging questions for both the show and my heart.
Whether that was some dilemma purely of my own, which I merely
projected onto those vast white walls... well, if an empty plinth can
be termed a piece of art, to encourage a more active response from
the viewer, then so can a review. It's up to you to decide.
Coming soon! More out-of-date exhibition reviews...
Between
availing myself of my ticket and placing myself in my seat, I
realised I didn't have very many expectations for this gig.
Needless
to say, I've always adored Fraser's mellifluous voice and loved her
original band the Cocteau Twins. To this day, 'Treasure'
is one of my most cherished albums. But as time went on they
seemingly turned more and more into the outfit their detractors had
always claimed they were, something shiny and ornate but
substanceless, musical bling. A later album was called 'Heaven
or Las Vegas', as if they'd started out pretty close to
heaven but had inclined further and further towards Las Vegas.
Moreover,
not only do we have this long performing gap but there's also the
absence of Fraser's long-term musical partner Robin Guthrie. Besides,
there was always something mediumistic about their music, as if they
were channelling something they weren't really in charge of. Was
there any actual basis for expectation? I even started to wonder
that, if I'd seen the actual Cocteau Twins back in the day, I might
not have bothered with this latter-day reappearance at all.
And at
first, I managed to keep true to my inner curmudgeon. There were new
tracks apleantly but they seemed too much like photocopies of the
old, similar in form but more pallid.
But as
things went on it all started to mesmerise me. The audience adoration
she received may have been a little overstated, perhaps more down to
their being glad to see her back than what she was actually doing.
(She was presented with numerous bouquets of flowers like she's our
generation's diva. Which I suppose she is.) Not everything worked.
There were moments of AOR-style trebly guitar. A duo performance with
Steve Hackett on acoustic, clearly signposted as a showstopper,
didn't really convince.
But
ultimately things turned about, and the old tracks started to reshap
themselves in the shadow of the new. This was most definitely the
case by the two encores, first a jawdropping version of 'Pearly Dew Drops Drops.'
And then...
Though
people were shouting for it I hadn't really considered that she'd
even play 'Song to the Siren', much less close on
it. (It not being an actual Cocteau Twins song, it being a cover and
so on.) As it was, she reworked it to such a degree that we didn't
know to start clapping until the opening lines.
In the
original, and unlike Tim Buckley's own version, the song to
the Siren is sung in a Siren-like voice. I've never been sure why
that works so well but it does. The original is sung resplendently
yet strangely, as if really the voice of some actual otherworldly
creature. I'm not sure if it's sung in an actual open tuning but with
the held notes it resounds, like those
Bulgarian folk choirs we were only just talking about.
The
new version is in the best sense of the word solo, like those missing
Cocteau Twins aren't really missing after all. The backing music is
stripped back, throwing the emphasis on her voice just as it becomes
less flamboyant, less dramatic. You no longer feel like you're being
called to, more like your ears are eavesdropping. Yet there's
something murky going on under the surface of the music, like
submerged rocks.
It's
perhaps an odd thing to say about such a delicate performance but
it's more mature, more assured. It's not someone looking back, hoping
they can still do what they did. Liz Fraser is looking forward.
But,
with the magic of the interweb, you don't need to take my word for
it. Here's the original version...
...and
the new...
Coming soon! Some much-promised out-of-date exhibition reviews...
It's
that time of year again when I take a few of my favourite pieces here
and compile them into a print digest format, which you can then pick up
and read just like we did in the old days, pa. These are put together
by a team of top-notch graphic designers then compiled using the
latest cutting-edge laser technology, and anyone who saw me at the
copier in my local shop just now... that's purely a co-incidence,
honest!
These
worth... I mean priceless items will be available
for public perusal at tomorrow's Alternative Press
Fair, the impending alt-comics convention Caption,Comics Friends
United and possibly even other places.
(I
first started doing these as calling-cards for the blog, but as far
as I can figure out there seems to be little or no audience
overlap, like print and pixel are just two different channels. But I
keep doing them out of some inner peversity.)
...all
of which seems as good a time as any to remind ourselves of the
tag-lines used for the original Olde Printe Versions of 'Lucid
Frenzy'...
“The
world's not impersonal perzine”
“Despite
popular demand!”
“Too
young to live! Too dull to die!”
“Raising
the bar on lowering the tone for... oh, about a year or so now.”
“Not
dead! Just not smelling too good!”
“Too
damn stupid to know when to lie down and die!”
“It's
back! And it's baaaaaaad! (The term “bad” is not used here in the
“wicked” sense.)”
“Make
way for more age without wisdom...”
“Nine
instances of neither use nor ornament!”
“Never
knowingly understood.”
...finishing
on my personal favourite...
“Who
will stem this flow of ill-informed outpourings from the pen of the
stalk that walks?”
Incidentally
there is no point asking for copies of the original print 'Lucid
Frenzy.' Not because I don't have any left. There's just no
point...
,-1992.-Photo-Linda.jpg)
