It's beyond doubt that Trump is a
bully. His response to debate, or even to being questioned in any
way, is to shout over or actively threaten people. Caught out on a lie,
he just tells another. And like any bully if he gets contradicted,
let alone challenged, he throws a tantrum like the over-entitled man
baby he is. We've seen this enough.
Okay, leaders are often bullies. But
Thatcher, for example, tried to cover up at least the worst excesses
of her bawling-out. She went for a strong image, but also had at least an approximation of appeals to reason. Trump foregrounds his bullying, it's become part of the
sales pitch. It proves he's a 'strong man'. His policies, such as
they are, are less a balanced programme than a means of expressing
this. He'll bring in protectionism, punishing those who don't comply.
He'll make those Mexicans pay for the wall. And so on.
Because in uncertain and volatile
times, where living standards are dropping and seemingly nothing can
be relied on, having a strong man to cling to can seem attractive. In
short what makes him loathsome to us (and let's be honest we don't
just oppose him, we loathe the total dickhead) is precisely what
makes him attractive to his hardcore supporters. (Note: That is not
an analogous phrase to “anyone who voted Republican last time”.)
In which case, pointing out how bad he is isn't much of a help.
Besides, accusations of fascism kind of
miss the point. Trump is like Putin in Russia or Erdogan in Turkey.
(The Alt Right clique, the ones who chant “hail Trump”, actively
compare him to Putin.) In all three cases, the leader simply imposes
their will. Their word is effectively law, even where the law
actually says something else. But in all three cases, they do so in
nominal democracies. And that's important. Stir in some cognitive
dissonance, and people can believe they live under a democratic
system, where they are ultimately in charge, where
we have checks and balances, and yet when the leader rides roughshod
over those checks and balances that just proves his exceptional
status, what a man he is. It's a classic case of wanting it both
ways.
And what do you do wth bullies? You
stand up to them, of course. But how?
Now of course, the Republicans don't
like the foul-mouthed orange faker either. He stole the nomination
just as he stole the election. In their time-honoured tradition they
'misunderestimated' him, while busily backing their own dog in the
fight, until it was too late. Now they'll be united under their
leader, and they'll be united against him. Except they'll now be
united behind MikePence, over whom the debate is whether he's as right-wing
as Trump or worse. Besides which, they'd then be united while
controlling Congress and Senate. We shouldn't unite with them, even
if we could stomach it. We have to hope they manage to make his ride
rocky, without unseating him.
We could of course back Clinton, who as
anyone knows got a majority of nearly three million. (Which is enough
to win a 'vote' as they are normally conceived of.) Except that
ignores how we got into this situation in the first place. The
Democrat vote went down, not the Republican up. There were the usual
tricks of voter suppression in Democrat-leaning black areas, in some
cases with hard-won Civil Rights legislation reversed.
But this combined with what commenters
disparagingly call ‘voter apathy’. If America’s first black
president, a candidate with break-with-tradition literally written on
his face, made no difference for regular folks then what price one
where stick-with-tradition was her main sales pitch? People weren’t
apathetic, they were disillusioned. And finding your illusions were
illusory will do that to you. We don’t know, and we probably never
will, what the blend of those is. But they had the same effect.
This is pretty much where we came in.
Knock out Trump and Trump alone, and people will just migrate to the
next 'strong man' and his empty promises. We need to be tough on
Trump and tough on the causes of Trump.
We should remember that to gain power
he has made promises he can't keep, and in many cases wouldn't if he
could. The rust belt workers who turned to him essentially want the
Eighties back, with regular unionised jobs on good pay and with
regular overtime. If Trump could offer that, he'd be one of the
people he was making poorer. But that in itself can't be relied on,
because they could as easily turn to the next snake oil salesman.
Trump neats to be beaten, not left to fail.
You defeat an enemy by going for their
weakness. And with Trump his most obvious weakness is his bloated
ego. He should be ridiculed, not monsterised. But his bigger and more
important weakness is his appearance of strength. Puncture that and
you deflate the whole bloated bravado act, he is the little man
behind the curtain. He is only President as long as people do what he
tells them. Otherwise he is President in name only. Everything he
does should be opposed, not via another celebrity endorsement, but
directly. And Trump is weak. Bullies always are.
(A quickly thrown up piece, from
someone living in England who's never even been to the States. The
reader can take up if they find any of it useful, or ignore the whole
thing if they prefer.)
“Can’s Jaki Liebezeit was
responsible for restructuring rock’s basic rhythm, influencing
countless bands including early Roxy Music, Talking Heads and Joy
Division. He devised a more continuous, open-ended alternative to the
Anglo-American blues-based, verse-and-chorus model. In the late 60s
and early 70s, while a new generation of heavy rock and prog
instrumentalists were showing off their virtuouso prowess, Liebezeit
and fellow Can members... devised a way of playing and jamming that
was about creating space, rather than soloing pointlessly. Theirs was
a style... that achieved its ends through loops and repetition,
creating a cumulative intensity.”
“In the midst of the horrors of our
current president's fascist tendencies, the passing of Jaki Liebezeit
– a musician deeply committed to the idea of harmonious flow –
reminds us of the true potential of creative democracy and equality
for all. RIP Jaki Liebezeit. RIP Love Time.”
In his too-short life, perhaps Arthur
Russell's greatest proclivity was for pulling together apparently
unreconcilable musical genres. In the almost tribal New York scene of
the Eighties he worked as music director for experimental venue the
Kitchen, but also frequented disco clubs like the Gallery or punk
places such as CBGBs. Perfectionist and somewhat fractious, forever
starting new projects and rarely finishing old ones, little of his
music was released during his life. And he was still almost entirely
unknown when becoming a victim to AIDS in 1992, when only Forty.
'Tower of Meaning' was one of those few releases,
but in an edition of 320 copies.
Happily, our times are less hamstrung
by genre and things seem to be changing, with not only the UK
premiere of this piece but a Guardian retrospective written to accompany the concert.
If Russell is known for one thing, it's
finding common ground between minimalist music and disco. Ironic then
that, not using the repetitive phrases of Reich or Glass, 'Tower
of Meaning' seems less related to disco than minimalism in
general! Brass-dominated and composed of long, slow melodic lines,
instruments dropping out and re-joining give it a sense of momentum,
even though there's nothing you could call musical progression. In a
way it's more installation piece than composition. (It was originally
conceived of as a soundtrack.)
There's an almost stately feel to it
that makes it strangely calming, like a kind of second cousin to Bryan's 'Sinking of The Titanic', making for ideal Sunday night
fare, arriving after the business of the week was done. (The tempo on
the original recording was achieved by artificially slowing the
session tape, meaning for live versions it needed to be
re-transcribed.) There's an underlying assumption that it doesn't
need to travel anywhere, that it's precisely where it wants to be,
and so can just trace elegant circles – regatta rather than
journey.
Slightly eccentrically, the running
order of the supporting programme wasn't written up anywhere. I just
about guessed that none was by Russell himself, and that the opening
solo cello piece was yer actual classical. (It turned out to be Bach.)
A string quartet was later revealed to be by Mica Levi (of whom the record shows Lucid Frenzy to be a fan), 'You Belong To
Me'. the violins constantly pulling ahead while the cello
acts as a brake.
But my favourite from the first half
was 'Wolff Tone E-Tude' by Mary Jane Leach, a
composer previously unknown to me. Her work, it says here, “reveals a
fascination with the physicality of sound, its acoustic properties
and how they interact with space”. A description which, perhaps
against the odds, her piece lived up to. It built up steadily from a
drone, with each instrument slowly and steadily finding it's own
voice, yet rather than breaking away still contributing to the whole.
Certainly a name to look out for.
Two longstanding collaborators of
Russell's, Bill Ruye and Peter Zummo, stood out against the much
younger London Contemporary Orchestra and Oliver Coates of the recent Deep Minimalism mini-festival. The audience alike were
overwhelmingly young, plus plentiful, despite this being an overspill
from a sold out Saturday night. In fact, performed in the round while
punters sat or laid casually around, it had a much similar feel to
Deep Minimalism. Further evidence a thriving scene is building around
this music.
(Yes, finishing tomorrow.
Rush, my pretties, rush...)
”I could act as a Trojan
horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to
surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters.”
- Wilfredo Lam
Though almost always known through the
shorthand term 'the Cuban Surrealist', Wifredo Lam's talent was
incubated in Europe. He was painting before leaving Cuba, but the
work was conventional. It was initially Madrid which introduced him
to both artistic and political radicalism, after he won a scholarship
to study in Spain in 1931.
He became not merely pro-Republican but
Marxist, closely associating political change with artistic
innovation, not just creating agitational art but working in a
munitions factory (till the chemicals took a toll on his health).
While, in a manner not entirely dissimilar to the
early Malevich, his paintings cycled through copies of
Modernist styles. For example 'Composition I'
(1930, below) is an accomplished but somewhat generic exercise in
tick-list Surrealism – the moonlight dreamscape, the sexually
charged Hollywood blonde, the mannequin figures, the long shadows,
the highly symbolic body of water.
The most successful element is the
tugging perspective, the tilted-back head of the main figure leading
to the steps and the jetty, pulling the viewer into the composition as if it's aim is to leave you dangling at the end of that jetty. There's also a neat touch where her hair becomes linked to the
curtain draping the right half of the picture.
And if that doesn't seem generic
enough, the later 'Composition II' (1933) features
a giant Terry Gilliam foot. I'd always thought that was an image
people retrospectively assigned to Surrealism, in the same way they
imagine it was obsessed with fish. While other works are as
influenced by Matisse, such as 'Self-Portrait II'</>
(1938). Had he continued in this vein, he would have been but a
footnote in Modernism's history.
The Awakening African (Putting
The Black Back)
But from hereon emerges a pattern where
historical upset bouncing him around the map like a pinball, but
always galvanising his art. Fleeing fascist advance in May 1938, he
escaped to Paris clutching a letter of introduction to Picasso.
Something which might seem like one of those cursed magic objects of
folk tales, for the norm is for artists to either become trapped
within Picasso's orbit or escape it. Yet for Lam he seems to have
been an enabling figure, introducing him around and even exhibiting
with him.
It even seems to be Picasso who
suggested that Lam explore his African heritage in his art. One variant of the story claims that he saw an African mask for
the first time in Picasso's studio, and did not initially know where
it was from. In the vidclip below, his son Eskil claims Picasso used
the phrase “you should be proud of this”. The show also mentions
his becoming a visitor at the Musee de l'Homme. (Though Cuba had been
a Spanish colony, with it's different empire France would have had a
bigger hoard of African art.)
Notably, in his new African-influenced
style he created a self portrait, 'Self-Portrait II'
(1938); the show underlines the point by hanging it next to the
Matisse-dervied 'Self-Portrait II'. But a stronger
and more significant work might be the almost audaciously reductive
'Young Woman on a Light Green Background' (1938,
below).
With the figure herself a pale sandy
yellow, barely distinguishable from that background, it's the thick
black lines of the features which are pushed forward. The figure's
deliberately codified, broken down. A horizontal line serves for an
eye, three lines for a mouth, and two parallel diagonals for shoulder
blades. It's only their arrangement that gives them their
significance. It's as if Lam was no longer chasing the latest thing
in art, but instead tugging at it's roots.
Despite Picasso's comment it is
effectively impossible to reconstruct how much Lam was responding to
African art as a Modernist, taking inspiration from primitive styles,
and how much as a black man taking up his heritage. We should
remember he first saw African mark quite literally through
Modernism's eyes. But there do seem to be elements of both in the
art.
'Figure' (1939,
above) gives us an almost identical silhouette to 'Young
Woman'. But everything is transposed, the background a
roughly painted off-white while the figure itself becomes a window
onto coloured symbols and motifs. Once more, the figure looks female.
And Lam had been influenced by Surrealism, where female figures are
often totems for the id. Lam's Africa is not accoutrements, not
hangings on the wall, it's placed on the inside.
But stronger still is 'The
Awakening' (1938, below). Despite the title only one of the
two figures is waking. And, as in the title, she seems caught in that
act - eyes still closed slits, hands at her face as if her features
were a new thing. The grid patterns of the roof and floor suggest
confinement, particularly when compared to the non-backgrounds of the
previous works, and throws the figures' nakedness into relief. While
not necessarily specifically a painting about slavery, the work does
suggest an emerging black consciousness.
African influences were of course
widespread in Modernism. Even by this point, some thought the
influence played out and had started looking to more remote points on
the map for inspiration. Romantic as it sounds, there may be
something about Lam's heritage which allowed him to wholeheartedly
take up the influence and come up with something more original from
it.
Nevertheless, history would push Lam
two more times before his mature style would emerge...
Horns and Hybrids
Again fleeing the advance of fascism,
Lam was caught in Marseilles in June 1940 – including Andrew Breton
and many of the prominent Surrealists. The show presents this period
as a kind of incubation chamber. Like unattended house guests, with
little else to do they occupied their own time - drawing together,
often collectively. The situation was doubtless fraught. Lam wrote at
the time of “another day of anguish and disgust”. Yet his
Marseilles Notebooks, as they came to be called, came to be
significant.
The show wisely includes some of these
(sample page above), and even gives over a small room to his general
drawings. They're full of linear and often flat drawings of women and
animal hybrids, much of which sticks in his art. But describing them
as “a new pictorial zodiac of creatures” suggests they were some
kind of preparatory aid. Whereas his drawings cannot really be
separated from his main body of work, for reasons we'll come onto.
These hybrid figures emerge in an
important (if transitional) work, 'Portrait of HH'
(1943, above). The thick, geometric black lines have now been
softened and curved, the bold colours gradated. Despite being adorned
with horns the face is sympathetic, with the torso contoured into the
shape of the chair. The subject,Helena Holzer, was in a relationship
with Lam at the time. Yet the mixture of strength and softness gives
off a highly maternal feel.
While the Surrealists were mostly able
to escape to America, Lam was briefly interned before – in August
1941 – returning to Cuba. His work came to be influenced by the Yoruba religion, which can be regarded as related to Voodoo. The
main product of this was 'The Jungle' (1943), generally regarded as Lam's finest work. Unfortunately,
created on paper, it's now considered too delicate to travel, so is
not part of this show.
However, this show does have 'The
Sombre Malembo, Gods of the Crossroads' (1943, above),
which is perhaps not just Lam's second-greatest work but a variant on
the theme. The colour scheme, dominated by deep but mottled greens,
is entirely new. Though outlined in black, and at points highlighted
in purple, the figures seem to blend into one another (as with his
hybrid drawings) and to be half-emerging from, half fading into the
background.
Though you initially see a forest setting, there's really
a print-like pattern of leaf forms and mere suggestions of sectioned
bamboo-like trunks. This effect is most likely because the figures
themselves look so plant-like, with their tuber-like heads, flowing
hair and rooted feet. Their features are as impassive and inscrutable
as the African faces earlier.
Rather than a realised work, a window
onto a scene, it looks like a portal, a doorway into some other kind
of space. These aren't semi-camouflaged figures hiding out in the
jungle, like fairies living at the bottom of the garden in children's
stories. Nor are they symbolic lords over it, like Cuban Oberons.
These are more animist works, both apparition and nature scene, where
Lam is conveying the spirit of the jungle.
Andre Breton said of Lam's work of this
period: “This aspect of the human issued from the idol, still
half-entangled in the legendary treasure of humanity... the
architecture of the head sinks onto the scaffolding of totemic
animals which are believed to have been driven off, but which
return.”
The show makes much of Lam employing
the secret symbols of tribal religion, used to counter suppression.
Yet it's important to note that he wasn't interested in the Yoruba
equivalent of Bible illustration. Though figures and motifs recur,
he's principally using Yoruba as a repository of images and themes.
He commented “I have never created my pictures on terms of a
symbolic tradition, but always on the basis of a poetic execution”.
Take the horns, now moved from the
portrait of HH to these bulbous heads. Significantly Elegua, the
messenger of the Gods, had a horned head. But according to Western
tradition so did the cuckold. And Lam was in a sense cuckolded by
history, himself a hybrid creature. This was a time when 'mulattos'
(a pejorative term for mixed race akin to 'half-caste') often
suffered increased discrimination. It's inaccurate to see Lam as a
primitive artist, channelling his Third World roots onto the canvas,
someone to be stuck in a box marked 'ethnic'.
It doesn't seem conceivable he could
have created these works if he'd simply stayed in Cuba. Not only did
his art develop through encountering Modernism in Europe, he needed
to return to Cuba to see, as the show puts it, “the country with
new eyes”. (While his estate's website refers to his “exile to the native land”.)
Moreover, Cuba was itself a hybrid
culture. Lam's antecedents had been but one group of Africans to
move, or be moved, there. And Yoruba was itself heterodox, like
Voodoo borrowing from Catholicism. Lam himself said: “When I came back to Cuba, I was taken
aback by its nature, by the traditions of the Blacks, and by the
transculturation of its African and Catholic religions”.
And this was seem in microcosm within
Lam's family. His life did not become polyglot the day he moved to
Spain. His godmother had been a Santeira princess, his father
Chinese. His son says, again in the vidclip below, he considered
himself a citizen of the world. And it's in not concealing but
bringing all these traditions together, in seeking to unite past
traditions with the present, that Lam was a Modernist. Here he paints
the Gods of the Crrossroads. And like them he was not just on
but of those crossroads.
”But Which Returns” (The
Shadow Scenes)
Like most, knowing Lam's career only
through the highlights, I was surprised to discover how brief this
period was. 'The Eternal Present' (1944, above)
comes only a year later, but is already heading for pastures new.
There are compositional similarities, an arrangement of hybrid
figures around a darkened centre, horns raised at the apex of the
picture. But those verdant colours soon become quite sombre, with
this work in monochrome brown. In fact the colour looks strangely
absent, as if faded away. And the background, while it still has some
sense of a dark recess to it, also incorporates a wrapping curtain.
It's less a hazy apparition, more of a tableau.
But mostly, what's unmissable is the
Surrealist saturation of art with sexualised violence. Two naked
projecting bums bookend the work, while vulvas and penises project
everywhere. In the upper centre a head of corn protrudes from a
vulva-like ear, while another vulva adorns a tail at lower right. Of
two prominent knives, the one at lower right seems to sprout a bird
head for a handle. The horned head on the platter and the two-headed
spear are motifs which will recur throughout this work.
This develops into works featuring, as
the show puts it, “bright foreground bodies shrouded by dark forms
in the shallow space.” Indeed it becomes challenging to frame the
figures as they bend off in myriad directions, often snaking right
across the canvas, unconstrained by the normally alloyed number of
limbs. The influence of those earlier Surrealist automatist drawings
is here, you can't imagine these compositions being composed
so much as being created impulsively. And it seems clear enough why
the figures should be unclear, as they soon start to lose their
differentiation from one another.
'The Jungle' and
'The Sombre Malembo' could be said to be sinister
works. Their spirits don't look the insipid New Agey sort, there to
fill the heads of Western visitors with feelgood wisdom. But they're
strangely inviting, connecting one world with another, metaphorically
as well as literally colourful. While what follows is unmistakably
savage. As art critic Marco Valsecchi commented “Lam alerts us to
the existence of a disquieting state of being”.
The show presents three large
paintings, first show together in a New York exhibition of 1948, all
characterised by a kind of anti-symmetrical parallelism. Let's focus
on the first two, which feature two figures trapped in a kind of
symbiotic adversity. In both cases they look respectively male and
female, telegraphed by the first being titled 'The
Wedding' (1947, below).
The side figures 'rhyme' one another,
the right one with a long tapered leg suggesting femininity. While it
has a tail and finishes in a hoof, the male figure is shadowed by
some animal creature. (I suspect these shadow forms mean something
between spirit, second self and true nature.) A central figure is in
an inverse crucifixion form. A horn-like ribcage, horns above and
wheel below grant the figure something close to symmetry. Yet he
holds out different objects, a sword and a candelabra, to the others.
The show suggests this figure is
Maldoror from Lautremont's epic poem, whose opposition to religious
morality made him a significant figure for the Surrealists. One of
literature's most irreligious figures is given the role of the
marrying priest. These elements may be opposed but their existence is
predicated on that opposition, they could never be extricated from
one another. The work's character is ritualised, perhaps even
ceremonial, yet simultaneously savage, suggesting some primal civil
war which locks us into it's patterns of violence. (And if another
picture in the trilogy is called 'Nativity', you
can probably draw your own conclusions...)
And this paralleling is echoed in the
next picture, 'Belial, Emperor of the Flies'
(1948, above). Though there's a bizarre echo in the right-hand leg,
generally the genders of the figures look reversed, the left figure
composed of curves and the right angles, with a rather testes-like
Adam's apple . Unusually for Lam in this era, the darkest point isn't
the centre of the frame but taken by the right-hand figure. His
malevolent grin seems to dominate. There's something like the
upside-down central figure of 'The Wedding',
though pushed to the right and perhaps incorporated with the dark
male.
The image seems to seethe with barely
sublimated conflict. She stands solidly on all (yes, really) four
legs, a knife held (concealed?) behind her while he pushes to the
centre of the frame. The pointed arrow at the top of the frame seems
to counter his thrusting hand, while also echoed by the two feet set
toe-to-toe against one another. At the same time as this barely
checked violence there's birth imagery, with the egg to the right,
while the head held aloft on the platter could be read as a foetus.
Belial is a demon from the Hebrew
Bible, while Emperor of the Flies sounds close enough to the Lord of
the Flies, aka the Devil. Yet the show suggests he's also Chango (the
Youruba deity of Thunder), and Mars against her Venus. Venus and Mars
were often depicted in Classical art as lovers, often with an
implicit “make love not war” message where she was able to sooth
his lust for battle, for example in Botticelli's' Mars and Venus' (c. 1483). Whereas with Lam it's very much
Venus being dragged into Mars' world.
Cruel Geometries
The Fifties saw the wild, loose-limbed
figures give way to more geometric forms, almost like animate
symbols, while the colours become bolder. Sometimes these could be
literally made into painted totem poles of motifs and symbols, such
as 'Totem To the Moon' (1955) and 'Totem
For the Moon' (1957). (They also saw him once more upset by
events, having to flee the imposition of the Batista dictatorship in
Cuba in 1952. From there he lived variously in Italy, Switzerland,
and back in Spain, Paris and Cuba. However, the change in his art
seems to come first and now, with the main elements of his style
complete, his work becomes less informed by outside events.)
'The Threshold'
(1950, above), for example is sharper in an almost literal sense, and
with it crueller - dominated by a triple diamond formation. Symmetry
is associated with power art, and here they seem to be descending
like a portcullis on a limbless and already broken figure beneath.
The only humanised features belong to the one mute witness, shadowed
in the lower left. (The expression is of shock, but the horns would
seem to implicate it.) We've gone from the primacy of violence to the
primacy of sacrifice. Notably, as with the earlier trilogy, the more
you look at the work the more the symmetry starts to break down. The
forms inside the diamonds vary considerably, particularly in their
lower half.
If not quite giving due attention to
Lam's drawings, the show does present his prints. There's often a
paradox to them. They can give the figures a fluidity, a sense of
motion beyond the paintings, their stretches and contortions
virtually wrenching the eye across the frame. Yet they can feel a bit
too fixed, too visible, too in plain view. There's a sense in the
paintings of the figures never quite being capturable, while the
prints shine on them a spotlight which denudes them of their mystery.
The best are in the 'Apostrap' Apocalypse' series
(1964/6, example above), created with the Romanian poet Gherasim
Luca. These are looser, more plasticated, splattered with tints and
tones. Bird forms come to predominate.
'The Soulless Children'
(1964, above), though a decade and a half later, recalls 'The
Wedding' both in it's use of multiplied elongated forms and
paralleling of a male and female figure. But this time there seems
more of a scene, actually looking quite domesticated. The male figure
seems to be examining a horned dome-head like some sort of specimen,
while the female has countless morphing figures on her lap. The space
between them, which seems to double as third figure and cabinet, is a
tumult. Children are presented as some sort of infestation, with no
likeness between them and their parents.
While 'At the End of the
Night' (1969, above) brings back the diamond forms of
'The Threshold', but again in an entirely
different way. They now light the work in clusters of soft colours,
like the lights of a distant city. Two figures, composed of less
geometrically perfect triangular forms float towards this, their
limbs already linked to it by a series of intersections. It's about
as Jungian as the earlier works were Freudian. It looks like an image
of the soul reaching the afterlife, so much so it's surprising to
discover Lam lived until 1982.
Coming in the New Year!
Assuming Dickhead the First doesn't kill us all as soon as
inaugurated, more of the same. More visual arts reviews and gig-going
adventures, for at least the next two to three months. The
mini-series on abstract and semi-abstract art might even pick up
again at some point. Then maybe time to dip back into that science
fiction business…
