In
perhaps the most classic case of Eighties nostalgia we've had yet,
Class War are back. Only this time they're rebranded as a political
party, and stand in elections. On the same kind of reformist platform they always jeered at when anybody else did it. (Just about impossible enough not to be likely to
happen, while falling way short of being genuinely radical.) But
otherwise unchanged.
Rather
than embark on all the hard work of grassroots social struggle their
chosen method was always stuntism. Perform a shock-horror action,
then get it replayed endlessly by an obligingly denunciatory media –
a reaction out of all proportion to the tiny numbers involved. It's
yippie-style theatrics in punk clothing. Combined with a crude and
fetishistic notion of class, where everyone is either a diamond
geezer knoworrimeanguv or else they're Boris Johnson. Despite what
we've heard on rotation the last couple of days, the problem with
Class War isn't that they threaten violence. Its that they peddle
only the theatre of violence in order to become the panto villain in
the media soap opera.
And
what better target for a media symbol of working class resistance
than a media symbol of gentrification? Those contemptible hipsters
who run Cereal Killers were happy to get their smug mugs in the media
as a symbol of the 'transformation' of the East End when they thought
it would add to the queues of credulous yuppies willing to pay
post-ironic prices for some soggy Cheerios in flavoured milk. There's
been times where you could scarcely open the paper without being
confronted by identical twins Twattledum and Twattledee. When it was
pointed out to them they were operating in one of the poorest areas
of London, so were effectively the bricks-and-mortar equivalent of
burning a twenty in front of a tramp, they refused to even answer any questions on the subject. Since
the protests they've been belatedly acknowledging maybe there is a problem after all, while stammering about it being a big broad issue and so nothing to
do with them, at all, honest, no siree.
...which,
inevitably enough, is the point the chattering class commentators
have taken up and run with. Protests to them are like strikes to the
Tories. They are not against them, they are always keen to insist.
They're just against every single example of them which has ever
happened in modern history. They sagely concede there are problems
and suggest at more positive alternatives without ever... actually
suggesting anything. The overall tone is a knowing
shrug of the shoulders. “But, darling, it's so difficult even
I don't know what to do? And I've got a
column.”Bridget Christie is one example, but by now there must be hundreds
more.
And
it's important to note that Class War themselves are complicit in
this. While the cafe got a bit of paint on its windows, the nearby
estate agents Marsh and Parsons had its windows smashed. And really,
who likes estate agents? This is overlooked by one side so they can
continually harp on about the sacred nature of small businesses, as
if they're run by benevolent and community-minded saints rather than
money-grubbing profiteers. And also by the other, precisely because
they see that media chatter as their oxygen of publicity. Class War founder Ian Bone has said bluntly “a
broken window at Foxtons isn’t going to get any publicity at all,
whereas we’ve seen what happens with independent shops. We’d be
stupid not to.”
So
if I don't side with either side you may well be asking at this point
what I am in favour of? As ever, the best leadership is example. The resistance to social cleansing going on in London's Sweets Way estate has seen much less press attention. After all, its
not based around meeting media expectations but the immediate needs
of a local community. (Inevitably, most of the publicity it
has seen has been via celebrity supporters, such
as Russell Brand.) But also, its grassroots opposition to the powers
that be will in the long run be more of a threat to them.
Watch
how the Fuck Parade and the security guards behave in these two
videos below. There's no point, of course, in directly comparing how
'aggressive' the two groups are. That's the sort of pat moralism that
decontextualises and depoliticises events until nothing meaningful is
left. Yet, just for a minute or two, let's take the media agenda and
assume there is. Because there's really no competition. Despite all
the hoo-hah, despite Twattledum and Dee in a classic case of
entitlement culture calling the protests a “hate crime” (while inexplicably being
able to open for business the next day) really very little happens.
I've seen worse go on in the East End, or for that matter here in
Brighton, on a regular Saturday night.
The behaviour of the security
guards at Sweets Way is far more threatening, far more violent. Yet
did it receive a fraction of the coverage the Fuck Parade did? I use
my words advisedly. Did it fuck. The class war continues, just away
from wherever Class War are. Real protest against gentrification goes
on, local people working together just as they should. Just don't
expect to read about it in the mainstream media.
From
the pulpit, the now accustomed position for addressing Fabrica
events, the speaker intoned “we are gathered here today to give way
to our surrealist urges”. Of course she went on to repeat the
by-now notorious reaction of the British censor to this classic
Surrealist film, back in 1928 - “if there is a meaning, it is
doubtless objectionable”. It was the Bill Grundy moment of its day,
so absolutely the reaction the movement wanted to evoke that it could
surely serve as their epitaph.
Except,
as the speaker went on to tell us, the film then did the double and
managed to antagonise the Surrealists themselves. Some say Antonin
Artaud was himself outraged by director Germaine Dulac's treatment of
his script. (Though inevitably enough accounts vary, and Artaud might
not meet the strict legal definition of a reliable witness.)
Certainly Dali and Bunel's 'Un Chien Andalou' is
often cited as the first film in the style, despite being made a year
later.
The
speaker (whose name has now embarrassingly slipped my ageing brain)
went on to suggest, as a woman Dulac had managed to challenge and
subvert the standard Surrealist fetish of the female body. As the
fantasy writer Angela Carter was later to say of the brethren: “I
had to give them up in the end. They were, with a few patronised
exceptions, all men and they told me that I was the source of all
mystery, beauty, and otherness, because I was a woman – and I knew
that was not true. I knew I wanted my fair share of the imagination,
too... an equal share in the right to vision.” The idea of a
proto-feminist film-maker playing the Surrealists at their own game
and winning, succeeding in upending their orthodoxies - its certainly
appealing. Yet is it simply too good to be true?
Certainly,
the film starts in the tradition of Surrealist orthodoxy. The
Clergyman pours wine from a shell into vials, only to repeatedly
smash them. The General appears, seizes the shell from him and swords
it in two. We are probably on safe ground assuming the dark 'wine' is
menstrual blood, a kind of alchemic symbol for the essence of woman.
The Soldier interrupts to seize the shell and swords it in two. (The
gesture seems to parallel the infamously stomach-turning eye-slitting
at the opening of 'Chien Andalou', itself often
regarded as a metaphor for penetration.) In short he shows how its
done – with violence. The Madonna/whore dichotomy in attitudes to
women couldn't be clearer cut.
The
film may be best compared not to 'Chien Andalou'
but Dali and Bunel's later 'L'Age d'Or' (1930) –
and not just in the anti-clericalism. Their film is largely
structured around a repressive society keeping the two lovers apart.
While Dulac takes the thing the other way up, follows the Clergyman
as he endlessly tries to get in on the act between the General and
his Wife. When confronted by a Surrealist work, of course you first
reach for your Freud. The Clergyman is Freud's Oedipal child, trying
to off the Father (represented by the Soldier) to get close to the
Mother. When we first see him walk... well in fact he crawls. Hence
the scene where he interrupts them (in, inevitably enough, a
confessional) and assaults the Father. He's then shown proudly
brandishing a key, both a phallic symbol and an unlocker of
mysteries.
There
may be images which feminise the Clergyman – the tails of his
cassock extending like a bridal veil, for example – but this is
from a time when childhood and womanhood were associated. So... do we
need to reach any further than Freud?
But
then what, for example, of the Clergyman's stilted movements? They're
not in the least childlike. Check out when he's running, he looks
more like a stuffed shirt granted motion. (I won't say “come to
life”.) And besides, let's look again at that opening scene. The
pouring and smashing is kind of hard to parse. But it seems both a
male attempt to contain that essence, and the Clergyman repeatedly
attempting to transmute his desire into a kind of religious
iconoclasm. And both repeatedly failing, for like a magic object from
a folk tale the seashell never empties. The Clergyman doesn't even
seem to expect it to empty, he carries on with his ceaseless task in
a ritualised fashion.
And
the scene where he confronts the General and his wife We're rarely
shown two faces in the same shot, and we even see the General's head
split – all images of the fractured self, rather than three
separate characters. And on ridding himself of the Father, the
Clergyman later goes on to undress the Mother. But he's left not with
the naked female body he desires, she impossibly grows more clothing
and he's left clutching her bra. A notably somewhat seashell-like
bra. The title, we should remember, is 'The Seashell and the
Clergyman' - suggesting he is chasing not a woman but a
symbol, an idealisation.
Ultimately,
to break past his mental construction of femininity he must invert
the standard male gaze and look inward. The black globe is like some
relation to the vials of earlier, which is first polished and
treasured by fleets of maids – but then smashed. He sees his own
face in the broken pieces, but on bending down picks up the shell.
This is the key. It simultaneously takes us back to the opening scene
and out of it. To misquote Bakhunin, the destructive urge is not only
creative but liberating. With his mental construction of masculinity
demolished, he's able to drink directly from the shell. It's
definitely a film about the male psyche, in which women only appear
insofar as projections of his mind. But perhaps its angle on the male
psyche does come from outside...
But
then again... I browsed a few analyses of this film through the magic
of this interweb business. And, while I can't exactly claim to have
been thorough, I found myself dissatisfied with all of them. So I
wrote my own and, while I prefer it of the options available, now I
find I'm not dissatisfied with that.
But
of course that's the point of the thing. The most important word in
that quote up top about meanings to be found is “if”. It's like
Artaud is the General, Dulac the Mother and us the poor befuddled
Clergyman. Like him we try to strip Dulac, rob her of her mysteries.
But we manage at most a few tokens. As Artaud said “I never
considered this film as the demonstration of any theory whatsoever.
It’s a film of pure images. And the meaning must be got from the
radiation itself of these images.” To search for an answer in the
film, to study it for clues, in many ways seems to mistake its
nature.
The
alert reader may have noticed I have talked about the film through
the introductory speaker more than its soundtrack. Another quick
trawl through yonder internet suggests the most common problem when
soundtracks are set to this film is that they're too polite, too
refined. They tend to, so to speak, use classical instruments
classically. Perhaps that's simply a result of ensembles taking it on
who “do” silent cinema, with a result akin to the BBC Symphony
Orchestra playing 'Purple Haze'.
Thankfully,
the duo here didn't use supposedly 'contemporary' instruments, like
the film is a period piece. Miles Brown largely performed on
theramin. (Which was already in existence by this point, even if
no-one ever thinks of it like that.) While Drill Folly contributed
found sound, samples and electronics. These throbs, hums and whirs
made for a reasonable stab at the sound of the subconscious,
conveying the repressions of the Clergyman's troubled psyche. While
there doesn't have to be one way to score Surrealist films for today, as I said after Steve Severin's soundtrack to Cocteau's 'Blood of a Poet', music concrete and manipulated sound makes for a pretty good choice –
the interchange between the familiar and the strange.
However
it generally alternated between 'dark' and 'light' sections – with
the 'light' parts more conventionally musical. They were at their
worst when, for the ballroom scene, they literally contributed
ballroom music. Hardly the thing for a style based around creative
juxtapositions and unexpected ruptures! Perhaps they were bound to
come off as second best against the really-rather-splendid Partial Facsimile soundtrack to 'Cabinet of Dr Caligari' the previous week.
The
mudering-the-Father sequence with, despite all I say above, not so
bad a soundtrack...
'THE
CABINET OF DR CALIGARI' (WITH LIVE SOUNDTRACK)
Fabrica,
Brighton, Thurs 10th Sept
This
expressionist classic from 1920 is always good to catch again, but
was given a new lease of life by improvising troupe Partial
Facsimile. With a demonstration they wouldn't be pulling out any
stops, they started proceedings by processing onto the stage dressed
as characters from the film. Fabrica's origins as a church came into
its own, the vocalist even performing silhouetted in the pulpit.
The
very first line of the film - “spirits surround us on every side”
- seemed to set the tone. I was reminded of the way new technologies
of the time such as radio waves increased belief
in spirits, seemingly proving the existence of unseen forces. After a
while I even came to conceive the players were mediumistically
calling the film into being through their performance. (I am given to
flights of fancy like that.)
Perhaps
the test of a live soundtrack is that it leads you to see a film in a
new way. I had previously tended to see the somnambulist Cesare as
the shadow self of hero Francis. He happily tells his pal Alan they
shouldn't fight over the affections of heroine Jane, yet later that
night Alan is murdered by Cesare. Cesare then goes to stab Jane under
Caligari's orders, but on raising the knife hesitates and abducts her
instead.
This
time, and perhaps through the vocalist being dressed as Caligari, I
came to see the film as being about the title character. Cesare's
first victim, after all, is the clerk – who only Caligari has any
beef with. As Caligari finds the book by - bear with me here - the
historical Caligari he is himself possessed by it, just as he comes
to control Cesare. The key scene becomes where, after reading it, he
sees “You must become Caligari” written across the sides of
buildings. (This became the film's tag line on release.) The
overpowering force of the past, its ability to inscribe itself upon
the present until it can rewrite itself, is of course a common Gothic
theme.
But
perhaps my favourite reading of the film is undimmed. It is of course
most famous for its expressionist style, the crazy angular sets and
so on. Perhaps we have become too familiar with these, and what's
often overlooked is the way this style persists. It's never framed or
contextualised. Caligari's arrival doesn't visually 'corrupt' the
once-innocent town in the manner of 'Nosferatu',
it looks that way before he gets there. It exists even in the (often
argued-over) framing sequence, which supposedly makes sense of the
whole thing. We're subliminally aware there are no exterior shots,
that this style is all-pervasive and inescapable.
And
it's this setting which determines everything. Like Romanticism, the
urban environment is alienating, it drives us all into somnambulists
wandering its streets. Unlike Romanticism there's no escape from
this, it's all dream and no waking, all Oz and no Kansas. The
establishing shot of the town, covering a whole hill, rising to an
apex, are similar to many of the images of the Tower of Babel.
(Compare it with Breugel the Elder's version below.)
And
underlying this is how... well, filmic the film
is. It is often called 'theatrical', and true its sets are very often
theatre flats. Most bizarrely, it has a redundant division into
'Acts' which recalls the guy with the flag walking in front of the
motor vehicle. But our rush to the term 'theatrical' most likely
comes from our cultural assumptions that film is a more 'realist'
medium, and anything not conforming to that narrow view is reassigned
to the theatrical. (The popular conception of Expressionism is that
it was merely a visual art movement.) Many of the shots are extremely
short, for example the classic image of Cesare with Jane on the
rooftop lasts only a few seconds. The classic scene of him awakening,
slowly opening his eyes, is only possible through close-up. The urban
environment was a common theme of modern art in this period. And its
this association of the medium of film with the equally modern urban
environment which cements it. An skewed environment for a world bent
out of shape.
Partial Facsimile promise “we will re-appear in the Spring/Summer of 2016 with an
hour-long sonic-visual concept performance”.
CUZ
FEATURING MIKE WATT
Sticky
Mike's Frog Bar, Brighton, Sat 12th Sept
Legendary
ex-Minutemen bassist Mike Watt, you are allowed to play up his name
like that – after all it's what they did for the poster. Last time the man played our humble town, with the Missingmen,
he'd brought with him a punk rock opera about the paintings of
Hieronymous Bosch. These assuming his return would naturally deal
with Breugel the Elder may have to wait a while longer. For instead
he's playing in a trio with Sam Dook of the Go! Team. (Who, despite
being a Brighton band, I know not of.)
This
is one of those reviews that tries to hit a moving target. The set's
wide-ranging nature often seemed to be vocal-led, in that very often
different vocal styles (or even methods) determined the differing
nature of numbers. There'd be for example an incantatory folk-style
vocal, a Slint-style narrative-to-musical-soundtrack vocal, a
recorded vocal (which didn't sound sampled but like a whole thing
committed to tape) and a beat poetry vocal by Watt. (Described by him
afterwards as “my Walt Whitman shit”.)
And
when they're good, they can be very good. But unfortunately quality
seemd as wide-ranging as style. Nothing fails exactly, but not
everything is all that memorable either. The set proceeds in the
manner of mud slung at a wall, with the inevitable mixture of
sticking and not-sticking. Had I been listening at home, I would have
pressed fast-forward more than a few times.
Perhaps
the problem was that there didn't seem to be any one colour of mud
sticking better than the others, not the muscular boogie rock
workouts or the more reflective folky stuff. And the lack of any
distinct identity was compounded by the 'odd couple' performers –
Watt the outgoing and avuncular American, Dook the reserved
Englishman hidden behind a combination of cap, beard and thick
glasses. Bands these days can sound like an i-Pod on shuffle, like
they're just regurgiating back music they've heard without character
of their own. This sounded more nascent, like an early rehearsal
somehow promoted to gig status. It was different. But it was too
different to even be itself.
If
King Crimson are can sometimes be seen as the archetypal prog band...
well, perhaps they were. Pink Floyd, Soft Machine and the rest had
definite roots in blues, psychedelia and pop. (Prog fans tend to be
most blind-slighted about that pop business.) Whereas with these boys
its like they just showed up one day sounding like they did. So it
might not be surprising that they were one of the few bands labouring
under that often-desultory label to do what was promised on the lid.
Much
of prog's aspiration was really delusion, it served up bog-standard
rock music merely gift-wrapped in pseudo-classical ostentateon.
Whereas Crimson, at their best, actually progressed
things. I racked my mind for a musical analogy for guitarist and main
man Robert Fripp, but simply couldn't come up with one. The nearest I
could muster was “the English Frank Zappa”. But it only really
works because the two could cover so much musical territory while
still sounding like themselves. Part of which meant never sounding
like one another. Perhaps he's most like Top Cat. You know, the one,
the only, truly original.
No-one
had much expected this reappearance, as Fripp had announced his
retirement from a music industry he never cared for. It seems to have
followed him winning a righetous yet protracted battle for creators'
rights, which had left him in his own words “too happy. Time for a pointed stick.” When it was announced this would be a return to the sound of the
first run of the band (there's been eight), people then wondered
which era (there were three).
And
while I confess to not being as familiar with their output as I'd
like, I side with those who favour the final era. By the last album,
'Red', time on the road and general attrition had
reduced them down to a trio. It was the hard centre which remained,
the heaviest, most condensed, most riff-based incarnation. And what
makes it is what's in the riffs themselves, sounding like something
beyond standard rock fare. There are those who liken hard rock to the
sturm und drang of classical music. King Crimson are one of the very
few bands who can actually wear that comparison.
There's
two things about the live line-up that immediately strike you. First,
in his characteristically contrarian insistence he's not going to
confirm to rockism, Fripp has taken to looking as much like a
chartered accountant as he can. And as the band assemble on stage
they're all bedecked in his customary uniform of shirt and tie. It's
unusual attire for a drummer, yet the only concession to them is
they're allowed black shirts instead of white.
Yes,
“them”. There's not only three drummers, making up nearly half of
the seven-piece group, but they line up at the front of the stage.
It's bassist Tony Levin who takes pole position behind them, pushing
Fripp himself to the edge. (From where I sat his head occassionally
popped up atop a cymbal.) He has spoken with some glee over this swapping of conventional“backline” and “frontline”.
This
must surely be
the first time they’ve ever played precisely this setlist, even if you were to disregard the new
tracks. By the time they were in their third phase they’d burnt
their bridges to anything from their first. (The link claims they'd
stopped playing 'Epitaph' before the end of the
Sixties.)
But,
happily for me, its mostly that later sound they take up tonight.
There is, before you ask, the inevitable drum solo. But the lined-up
solos so often associated with prog yield to ensemble playing. The
drummers dominate, often both starting and finishing numbers like a
unit in themselves. They can synchronise like reiterating the beats
in triplicate, but spend most time shuffling elegantly around one
another. Guitar lines often arrive not just quitely but
distantly, like the approach of stealth bombers.
Its
a sound which is perhaps reflected in the poster image. The figure
has Fripp's favoured attire of button-down shirt and tie but is also,
and perhaps more noticeably, single in his vision. While the band
members are listed like chemicals in a compound. (An earlier symbol
of the band had been knotwork.) It's all about how things come
together.
There
does sometimes seem a tension between their wanting to take this new
line-up and run with it, and the need to serve up the classic tracks
the audience will recognise. (You can tell when they go back to an
earlier point because one of the drummers will have to shift onto
keyboards.) This makes it almost impossible to ascertain whether this
is a celebrity “lap of honour” tour or the start of a bold new
era – the glass was almost exactly half-full and half-empty. And
there are times when sheer cleverness does get in
the way. Like coffee nerves, some tracks run through a whole slew of
ideas without ever settling on any of them.
But
then if I didn't like everything, I'm yet to hear a King Crimson
album where I liked everything. They're just too idiosyncratic, too
inscrutable for that. And the parts I liked... I reckon myself to
have heard music I've not before, and most likely won't again unless
I get another chance to see King Crimson.
They
finish on what's perhaps their signature number, '21st Century Schizoid Man' Perhaps predictable, but then it
remains strange in essence - no matter how many times you hear it.
Arriving with their first album, it's perhaps the earliest example of
their “heavy riffing from Mars” style. With its distorted sound
and scratchy vocal, its too wired, too agitated, to fit in with prog
or even hard rock. It almost looks forward to punk, but is too grand
and terrible, too overpowering for that. It's a track that never
really fitted signifying a band that never really fitted.
The
gig starts with a recorded message from the band asking for people to
watch the gig rather than film it. And it looks like their wishes
have been obeyed for, bar a few rehearsal clips, there's little
YouTube footage of this tour. You'll just have to take my word for
it.
(Yes,
really! An art exhibition reviewed while its still on!)
“What
a fairyland we find ourselves in”
- Letter
from Cornell to Dorothea Tanning, 1947
Boxing
the Fantastical
With
barely concealed pride this show tells you “Joseph Cornell did not
draw, paint or sculpt, and declined opportunities to train in
traditional artistic methods”. Instead he devoted his energies to
collages and assemblages, specialising in what he called “shadow
boxes” - constructed environments presented behind glass like
cabinets of curiosities. By day commuting to work from suburban to
downtown New York, by night he'd assemble artworks on the kitchen
table when not caring for his disabled younger brother. Though he
knew, exhibited with and was admired by many other artists, he kept a
distance from the art world.
As Ben Luke points out “all this reads as a textbook
biography for an outsider artist — the kind of visionary who never
intends to be an artist, whose body of work is discovered at their
death. But Cornell, though undoubtedly eccentric and socially
awkward, was very much an insider in art-world terms.”
In
fact he was first inspired to create not by some inner compulsion but
by encountering Surrealist art. We even know the date and place - the
Julien Levy Gallery in '31. That Surrealist influence is clear and
acknowledged, with early works dedicated to Ernst and Magritte.
'Object (Soap Bubble Set)' (1941) doesn't just a
feature a pipe but what's clearly a reference to Magritte's pipe. Yet
for all this he never identified himself as a Surrealist. We might
wonder why.
Surrealist
artworks tend to be about bursting the barriers between dream and
wakefulness, between the conscious and the unconscious, so have a
tendency to erupt with lurid and provocative imagery. They have a
fondness for the Victorian cabinets of curiosities, but use an outer
similarity to the obsessive cataloguing and brown-label tagging to
wilfully juxtapose unlikely objects – affecting order while
practicing its opposite. Plus the sauce on their pudding was a
recurrent fixation with the Freudian id, the sexualised subconscious.
(Think for example of Ernst's
'The Virgin Spanking the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses', 1928.)
Cornell
called all this “black magic” to his “white magic”. He
participated in a 1936 exhibition titled 'Fantastic Art,
Dada, Surrealism', which handily delineates the differences
for us - his work is more fantastical than surreal. His methods he
described as “creative filing/ creative arranging/as poetics/ as
joyous creations”. In an absolute reversal to Ernst, one of his key
themes is the innocent curiosity of childhood. His last major exhibition was a show he arranged especially for children, with the boxes displayed at child height and with the opening party
serving soft drinks and cake.
'Tilly
Losch', (c. 1935, above), perhaps one of his signature
images, shows the strings on the flying girl without our seeing what
she is attached to. There's a Pinnocchio sense of a puppet that's
overcome its limitations, that she's now pulling her own strings.
There's a sense that, floating legless in her birdcage dress, she is
herself the balloon - as if rising by sheer effort of will. A
three-dimensional figure against a background flat as a theatre
backdrop, she flies free.
But
perhaps what's most illustrative isn't what makes him not a
Surrealist but what makes him not a Dadaist. In brief, his work isn’t
disruptive in the same way. His shadow boxes are constructions not
destructions, not spanners thrown into our reality but hermetic
environments, other places we can peer into. Anti-art statements such
as May Ray's 'Object to be Destroyed' (1923) would
be foreign to him. His works don't come out at you, you peer into
their strangeness.
The
Dada assemblages of, for example, Kurt Schwitters may have some
formal similarities. But they're made from ephemera and detritus, as
if he's been rummaging through the waste-paper basket of our culture.
What to Schwitters was mere material with Cornell became something
closer to muses. When Schwitters uses, for example, bus tickets he
simply uses them. Whereas, in something we'll come
onto later, Cornell employs the iconography of travel. As Robert Hughes said of him “To others, these deposits might be
refuse, but to Cornell they were the strata of repressed memory, a
jumble of elements waiting to be grafted and mated to one another.”
It’s
a concept which lends itself to the romantic notion of the
super-sensitive artist scouring junk shops waiting to encounter
inspiration. At times the show plays up to this, referring to his
seeking out “keepsakes”, its web page describing the works as “charged with personal
histories” - as if his thriftstore acquisitions came complete with
a kind of psychic history only he was attuned to. The opposite,
perhaps, of Duchamp's depersonalised shop-bought readymades. Instead
he seems to have accumulated material which he diligently if
eccentrically catalogued, then used as a kind of cross between an
image repository and a palette board. (See here for some visual examples.)
In
this way the glass front is not incidental, not just a way of keeping
things together or preserved, but central. Notably he often uses
glass within the boxes, incorporating drinking glasses or phials. As Victoria Sadler comments “these boxes remain sealed, the
glass lids fixed and closed. The worlds Joseph created always
remaining out of reach, untouchable.” In this way these products of
the imagination are much like the imagination, vivid but untouchable.
Like any peepshow, the peeping's as important as the show. Fittingly,
Jennifer Hamblett's film of 'Beehive' (1940/8)
merely lets light play on the work and, with a remarkable similarity
to the films of the Quay Brothers, this flickering suggests
imperceptible movement.
The
World of Shadows
A
Cornell exhibition is a must for quite a fundamental reason. His
works aren't flat collages but objects, which means reproduction
(including all the illos here) don't fully capture them – you need
to go to a place where they are in order to really see them. As one
example, at the same time the boxes are enclosed doors, windows, cut
holes and other apertures appear all over them. 'Untitled
(To Marguerite Bleach)' (1940, below) presents a book with
cut-out chambers. It's reminiscent of a child's view of reading, as
they start to decipher the alchemic symbols they find they have the
power to make objects appear in your mind. (Its similar to the way
children's books will sometimes drop images into text, a little
drawing of a dog or a ball replacing the word in a sentence.)
And
where else in Modernism do we see this interplay of text and image?
Of course in Cubism. If the association with Surrealism is
understandable and instructive, if not entirely accurate, some of the
other connections made for Cornell are fanciful. (For example, the
odd splodge of paint fallen on one or two works supposedly
prefiguring abstract expressionism.) Yet with Cubism there's perhaps
more of a connection than is generally acknowledged. 'A
Parrot for Juan Gris' (1953/4, below) is dedicated to the
Spanish Cubist painter. Clearly its a playful take on the theme.
Cubism arose as a solution to the 'problem' of rendering
three-dimensional objects on flat canvas. Here Cornell finds a
child's solution by adding on the third dimension. At the same time,
Cubists often incorporated collage elements, such as Picasso's 'Still Life With Chair Caning' (1912), which is precisely
what he does here. The parrot is in relief, its relief claws
clutching a relief branch. Yet it's sat atop an actual piece of wood.
The parrot suggests we see the box as a cage, yet the newspaper
lining behind it also suggests a drawer.
Similarly,
'Habitat Group For Shooting Gallery' (1943, below)
has (at upper left) a drawn perch which then continues into the real
thing. Detritus lies at the bottom of the box as though these were
real birds in a cage. Yet the presence of actual objects in the box
can only emphasise that they're merely cut-outs. They're even tagged
in a (functionally useless) numbering system, as if illustrations in
a book. Not particularly visibly in this illo, the glass of the case
is cracked in the centre – the notion this might be a bullet-hole
reinforced in the work's title. The bird behind this, and another to
his right, are rendered in black-and-white. Yet flecks and blobs of
colour are splattered onto the wall behind them (some yellow still
clinging to the upper bird's tail), as if the colour has been shot
away from them, as if they've been robbed them of their radiance.
Cornell
frequently used bird images, even titling a 1949 exhibition
'Aviary'. And as the indicia points out these were
often parrots and cockatoos – birds capable of mimicking human
speech. Let's remember he was influenced by Ernst, who devised the bird alter ego Loplop. Yet for Ernst Loplop represented the overcoming of
inhibition, free will in flight. Cornell's birds are more ambiguous –
are they confined to those boxes, or does their shadow world
represent escape from our space? Here the box seems penetrated,
perhaps infected by the outside world. (One theory is that it's a
wartime work, representing how war's shadow fell even on Cornell's
basement studio. Generally he doesn't seem a social or political
artists – his cosmology is entirely private. But there may be
something to this.)
The
Mind Might Travel
Cornell
barely left New York State in his life, never venturing further than
the East Coast. Yet as the show says “the imagery of travel
permeates [his] work, from maps and postage stamps to timetables and
hotel advertisements.” Europe we're told was “to him an ideal
realm not so different to a fairy-tale land”, and indeed there's a
whole series of works devoted to hotels he never stayed in, often
with images purloined from their glossy brochures. 'Naples'
(1942, below) is a memento of a town he never visited. Perhaps what
matters is the distance, and for me that brings an irony. New York
itself has been celebrated in so much music and art yet I have never
clapped eyes on the actual place, making it easy for me to see it in
this semi-mythologised way. Yet of course what it meant to Cornell
was subway rides to work.
It
would be tempting to believe that he saw such postcards and hotel
brochures as a stimulus to the imagination, and wanted to dream of
places unfettered by the undoubted tawdry reality of cramped beds and
tip-hungry staff. And yet that would imply a cut-off point, beyond
which it wasn't a benefit to know more. Better to have the appetiser
then stop eating. Yet he seems to have read of foreign places as
voraciously as he was able, and his knowledge was detailed and
accurate. In an anecdote on his meeting Marcel Duchamp, they
discussed the streets of Paris at some length, only for him to then
astonish the Frenchman by saying he'd never been there.
Cornell's
quoted as saying that he remained a virgin, thinking sexual activity
would rob him of the ability to create. Travel was surely similar,
and the signs are that he knew this. When success in later life (he
gave up the day job in 1940) brought invitations abroad he always
declined them. And he was as interested in people and places of the
past, for example reading of Romantic ballet dancers he could never
hope to see perform. They're evocations rather than descriptions. The
show puts it succinctly: “above all, he longed for the state of
yearning itself”. In the wanderlust which titles the show, the
wandering is just something to pin the lust onto.
And,
always socially awkward, people were as distant to him as places.
Think of how many pieces seen already have been dedicated to someone.
He produced a series of votive works to famous women, called by the
indicia “intense shrine-like portraits”, blurring the Catholic
devotional with Hollywood glamour. Surrealism fixated upon the female
body, while for Cornell it's always the face. They resemble youthful
crushes on distant film stars – obsessive yet strangely chaste.
Twigs
For Forests
If
Cornell remained in part an outsider artist, this is most evident in
the way his work involves microcosms of the world. For example
'Palace' (1943, above) employs twigs to stand for
a forest. But its clearest in his many cosmological pieces. These
tend to be based on Orreries, clockwork models of the solar system
popular among the Victorians. For example 'Celestial
Navigation' (1956/9, below) employs key-rings as the
arranged spheres and plants flags on a scrap of driftwood like a
cratered moon. In others white balls become planets.
In
one sense he's playfully upending the certainty of that clockwork
precision, the Victorians' hubristic assumption that they knew how
the whole process ran. Notably he keeps the reassuring dark woods of
the cabinets, even as substitutes the objects within. Yet he retained
a Victorian view of science, from a time where lectures doubled as
shows. He preferred its antiquated term 'natural philosophy', viewing
science as human curiosity on the wing rather than any kind of
formalised discipline, and called his studio a laboratory.
And
he never lets go of their sense of order, even as he plays with it.
Several works have blue sand, either on their base or held inside a
lower draw. And sand might seem a virtual symbol of unpredictable
disorder, the way we use sandcastles as an image of impermanence. Yet
captured in a draw the sand seems more to represent the tides,
themselves a measure of the moon. 'Penny Arcade, Pascal's
Triangle' (c. 1965) makes the link between Orreries and
their perfect geometry with arcade games.
Please
Don't Touch
As
said earlier, a Cornell show is something that must be seen, in every
sense of the phrase. However there’s a paradox at the heart of his
work, and it cuts right across this show. As mentioned, his shadow
boxes contain unattainable otherworlds. Yet at the same time they can
be interactive to the point of being tactile.
'Object
(Compass Set)' (1940, above) is but one of many works
described as “compartmentalised constructions, the treasures
revealed gradually as they are unpacked”. While a work like
'Untitled' (1939/40), a series of images on what
resemble circular playing cards, is an endlessly rearrangeable
collage. The point of these works is they don't have a 'correct'
combination, their state is permanent flux, like an irresolvable
jigsaw. (Presumably why it couldn't even have a fixed name.) In a
similar example 'Untitled (Musical Box)' (1947) is
a scaled postage parcel which “contains unknown objects that, when
handled, produce random sounds”.
But
perhaps most egregious of all is 'Museum' (1949)
of which we're even told “here the usual advice of museums to look
but not touch is inverted. Only by handling the scrolls can their
contents be discovered”. It is little short of a taunt to be told
this then have the promise unhonoured. You long to let your fingers
discover those inner chambers, pull out layers and look beneath them.
Deprived, you feel like a child whose nose is pressed up against the
window of a closed toy shop. The solutions they find, supplying
videos demonstrating the white-gloved opening of the objects or sound
recordings of the Musical Box, are inadequate workarounds and just
make the sealed-off prospect of the objects themselves more enticing.
Which makes the exhibition an exercise in both revelation and
frustration.
Weren't
these objects made for use? Like the toys in 'Toy
Story', if they could talk wouldn't they tell us they'd
rather be worn out through use than aridly preserved? The curators
would doubtless reply that the gallery doesn't even own these works,
and they'd be unlikely to get loan of them if they intended allowing
us punters to get our grubby mutts on them. This is of course part of
a wider problem where artworks have lost their primary purpose and
become more investments, and true enough we don't want all
exhibitions put on hold until such time as capitalism is brought to a
close. But perhaps more of a middle way could be found, where
reproductions of some of the works were assembled (like copies of
bronzes are sometimes cast) and left out for use. This might have
also given the show more of a 'playpen' atmosphere, which would have
suited Cornell's work. They could even have served soft drinks and
cake.
'The
Life of Ludwig II of Bavaria' (1941/52, above) contains a
book of that name, but also photos, objects and ephemera connected to
him. Some of the connections are literal, others more tangental. This
is a person as you might think of them, rather than write a biography
of them, an unsettleable jumble of impressions. And, by gathering his
work, accumulating his multi-chambered cabinets, the show responds to
Cornell in a similar way. The 'atticy' upper gallery at the Academy,
a nest of nooks and crannies, is as fitting for Cornell as the vast
expanse of the main gallery was for the recent Anselm Keifler exhibition. There's a thousand
juxtapositions, then escape hatches and rabbit holes that lead you
from that reading into something else. Despite its undoubted flaws,
this is the best chance you're likely to get to see inside Cornell's
private world.
