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…
Admittedly symphonic reworkings of
popular songs don't always have the greatest track record. However, as
mentioned after Steve Reich reworked Radiohead numbers three years ago, minimalism from the start saw the divide
between 'serious' and 'popular' music as an encumbrance, a barrier
that needed breaking down. True, in it's heyday this was more by
implication. It was only with post-minimalism, when it became less
bound by it's own structures, where it was able to formally deliver
on it's promise.
And even here Glass effectively meets
Bowie half-way. 'Low' and 'Heroes'
were two of his least poppy albums. As the venue's website puts it:
“During that period David and Brian [Eno] were attempting to extend
the normal definition of pop and rock and roll. In a series of
innovative recordings in which influences of world music,
experimental ‘avant-garde’ are felt, they were re-defining
the language of music in ways that can be heard even today.”
(Asked on the release of 'Low' whether it might
have less chart potential than earlier releases, he replied cheerily
“no shit, Sherlock”.)
Plus, all but three of the nine tracks
Glass uses are Krautrock-inspired instrumentals, with two choices
rather audaciously not even on the original albums. ('Some
Are' and 'Abdulmajid' respectively.)
It's quite a different prospect to Stravinski filching folk tunes.
Though the De La Warr's stage isn't
small, it still has trouble encompassing the forty-two piece
orchestra. I could only see the front end of the piano, so had to
assume there was a player attached to it somewhere. Most instruments
come in duos, trios or even quartets. (Except for the violins who are
arranged in two quartets.) And each mini-ensemble plays the same line
in unision, resulting in a rich and vibrant sound.
For the most part the brass take on the
bass role, underpinning the strings. At points the two get uncoupled,
and the brass players murmer to one another in the background, like
the below-water section of an elegant liner. The result of all of
which is pretty much win-win-win. It's as tuneful as pop music, as
hypnotic as minimalism and as dynamic as classical music.
It perhaps should be noted that this
era marked Bowie at his most sombre. Whereas, once transformed into
Glass's mini-symphonies, it becomes rhapsodic. (And, for two albums
from the acclaimed Berlin trilogy,
quite American-sounding, at points almost bordering on Aaron
Copland.) Some I suppose might not take to that.
However, for fairly obvious reasons,
now seems a good time to celebrate Bowie's music. Plus the downbeat
nature of those albums is often overstated, and was already being
worked out by the second one. The song 'Heroes' is
in itself triumphalist in it's will to overcome adversity. And as
conductor Charles Hazelwood says “it makes perfect sense” to play
them back-to-back as “one great symphonic journey. From the Low
symphony's dark beginnings to the white-hot finale of Heroes.” This
hadn't been Glass' original intention, having written his
'Low' four years before 'Heroes',
in 1992. But then Bowie hadn't been planning out a trilogy either. It
works perfectly, however accidentally.
Performed and partly televised at this
summer's Glastonbury festival, the symphonies became a bit of a
media event. Which is again fitting. Bowie had a talent for bringing
fringe things to the mainstream. And while some purists deride him
for that, he mostly managed to keep the essence of the original in
place. So a tribute which doesn't consist of some 'X
Factor' historically warbling their way through
'Heroes' seems fitting indeed.
Some snippets from Glastonbury...
BORIS
The Haunt, Brighton, Tues 20th Dec
Now coming up to their quarter-decade,
Boris have taken on a bewildering range of sounds from sludge metal
to J-pop, and collaborated with everyone from fellow Japanese
noisemonger Merzbow to (yes, really) Ian Astbury.
This time round they're revisiting
'Pink', an album a mere eleven years old. From
what little I know of the band's extensive and confusing history,
this was seen at the time as something of a breakthrough. While extensive research reveals it wasn't their first release to be divided into
individual tracks, rather than expansive side-spanning dronefests,
earlier albums had tended to be called things like 'Amplifier
Worship' and 'Feedbacker'.
From reputation I'd thought it's sound
to be a combination of hardcore punk, metal and noise rock – all
short, sharp shocks. And indeed there are tracks with piledriver
drums and soaring guitars. But there's many other pieces which belong
to their more commonly employed heavy riffing/ doom drone sound,
reminding us they took their name from a Melvins song.
In fact these tracks are so
different I first imagined they must be bringing in extra material
from different eras. But it seems almost everything did come from
'Pink'. Yet the feeling of watching two different
bands is enhanced by on-stage behaviour. For the punkier songs they
start to move around and engage with the audience, even encouraging a
clapalong. (Well, if Low can have one...) While for the longer numbers they
lapse into the standard shoegazer stance, even wrapped in dry ice.
But then they play the whole thing as
one long set. Rather than pause between tracks they'd link them with
instrumental interludes. (Sometimes quite abstract, sometimes even
ambient.) Which made the set one ever-morphing organism. Rather than
act as a human jukebox serving up a known album, the gig became
something almost impossible to predict.
In fact, for all my normal complaints
about gigs dedicated to albums, I may have even preferred this to the previous time I saw them, some four years ago. Then there
was something of the sense they'd settled into a sound they'd grown
comfortable with. Here they were more volatile, like they were
willing themselves do everything at once and refusing all parameters.
At one point, to a wall of feedback
guitar, drummer Atuso stepped forward, crowdsurfed the length of the
venue, got carried all the way back and placed back on stage to an
uproarious cheer. Only for us to discover, that wasn't even the
finale!
This tour, it seems, had a trailer. (Do
tours have trailers now?)
...while this is from Glasgow, but the
same tour...
The
second in a two-part look at the 'Abstract Expressionism' exhibition at the Royal Academy,
London, (first part here) which doubles as another entry in the series on
abstract and semi-abstract art.
”We
favour the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the
large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to
reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they
destroy illusion and reveal the truth.”
-
Newman, Gottleib and Rothko, letter to the New York Times, 1943
Just
Abstract Enough
So...
those Abstract Expressionists, just how abstract were they really? Or
for that matter, why feel the pull of abstraction at
all? As covered in the first part, abstraction seemed to offer
universalism in art – a pan-language of non-specifity. And not
having to choose whether to represent involved not
having to choose what to represent.
In this era
America meant the wide open spaces, the Cinemascope of the Western,
but also the skyscraping city. Rightly or wrongly, New York was seen
as the arch-metropolis, the epitome of modernity, quite literally
towering over other towns. The 1962 film 'How the West Was
Won'ended with a montage sequence between the Western trail and a modern multi-lane highway. But montage is a movie trick. How could a visual
artist convey this? By not being stuck with literally depicting
either, Ab Ex were able to suggest both at once. The artists
themselves often moved between urban and rural bases during their
careers, most famously Pollock setting up studio in a Long Island
farmhouse.
Plus, if
counter-intuitively, there's their Surrealist influence. As mentioned
last time, their main interest in Surrealism was automatism. Yet to
the Surrealists this was an end, a creative way to surrender to the
subconscious, while to the Ab Exers it was but a means. So the
Surrealists moved towards symbols, but stopped there. They tended to
blow up symbols, with Dalian hyper-realism, or codify them like Miro.
But Kandinsky's codifying of those symbols until they became
essentially abstract didn't happen for Miro. While, for good or for
ill, the Ab Exers lacked this limit.
However,
though this show is often keen to wax lyrical over, for example,
Rothko “finally pulveris[ing] the figurative residues in his art”,
the clue is not so easily found in the name. Despite such talk,
despite all the ideological fervour and shock reaction which
surrounded the movement, the answer is often 'just abstract enough'.
If Kandinsky, himself a major influence, never truly burnt his boats to representation then much of the
time neither did they.
I
don't intend saying too much about Gorky here, who isn't necessarily
well served by the works shown. But let's start with a look at
'Waters of the Flowery Mill' (1944, above). The
show comments he “had a memorable knack for camouflaging forms that
they hover between objectivity and the organic or convulsive”. And
indeed, peer into it a bit and it looks like a more representative
work overpainted, with sections of the original still poking through.
And in fact Gorky had started out depicting a ruined mill in
Connecticut.
But
if that explains half the title the coloured overpainting seems to
resemble the 'waters'. Gorky had thinned his oils with turpentine, so
they run and smear more like watercolours. It looks like an occluded
front of colour, like the most psychedelic storm ever had been
unleashed on that mill. It's Kandinsky influenced yet with none of
his cosmic elegance. There seems something wild, enticingly out of
control to it. It almost looks ahead to the 'bad trip' sequences of
Sixties cinema. Yet at the same time still pinning it to that mill is
important.
Similarly, David Smith's 'Hudson River Landscape' (1951, above) doesn't represent a
landscape directly.But it's undulations continue to suggest
serpentine river shapes. Marina Vaizey of the Arts Desk describes his sculpture as
“hovering between representation, abstraction and three-dimensional
doodling”. Smith's own picture of it places it before a
landscape.
My
Wife & Other Monsters (De Kooning)
With
Willem de Kooning, however, the show talks of a “lifelong
oscillation between figuration and abstraction”. And while at times
he seems a little confused about the whole business, calling a work
'Abstraction' (1949/50) despite such clear
representational elements as ladders and skulls, his oscillating
rather finding a midpoint seems to cover it. And what's interesting
is that it's not just the figurative works that work, but it's the
figuration that makes them. (Some of the large abstracts frankly
verge on the self-parodic.) De Kooning said “flesh was the reason
paint was invented”, and in fact seems less interested in than fixated
on the subject.
For
example, 'Pink Angels' (1945, above) is based on
the classical genre of the nude. (Anfam believes he has found the
Titian it is based on.) And the tradition of the nude was of course
static and contemplative. De Kooning plays with this, giving us what
looks like a parked posterior in the lower right, but turning giving
the rest of the composition over to a twisting tumult of forms. Is
the main torso attached to that potato head which seems to be looking
back at it? Or is another figure sticking it's neck in? Whose eye is
that in the lower left?
And
there seems something provisional, almost sketch-booky, about those
criss-crossing black lines. Some forms look to be sketched out but
then abandoned. Are the certainties of earlier eras being reduced to
their delineations of the human body, and then parodied with these
grotesque forms?
And
yet there remains something sumptuous and eroticised about all that
piggy-pink, bordered by those sinuous curves. De Kooning often based
elements of his women portraits on cut-outs from glamour magazines. Francis Bacon was painting similarly fractured human forms in
England around this time, sometimes based on classical works,
sometimes bisected by linear frames, sometimes against lurid
backgrounds. But his images were more nakedly disturbing, without
this note of eroticisation.
‘Woman
I’, (1949/50) was, as the name might suggest, the first
in an important series for de Kooning. The famous story is that he
kept reworking it over some
eighteen months, before giving up. Then when the art historian
Meyer Schapiro saw it, with accounts often suggesting a chance
encounter, he was encouraged to take it up again. The series stemmed
from there.
But what's
significant is that the paintings aren’t the result of that long
process, the answer de Kooning came to after all that working out.
The paintings are instead a record of that working out. The unerased
charcoal lines of 'Pink Angels' have now become
oil scrawls, and there's little if any of it's vivid blocks of colour
under those occluded daubs. The thing looks messy, convulsive, less
unfinished than inherently unstable. The canvas doesn't capture the
expression but the struggle to express.
Norbert Lynton
described this series as the “the daughters of 'Demoselles
d'Avignon'”, and it's hard not to think of Picasso. Once
Cubism started to depict living rather than inanimate objects, it’s
analytically divisive eye started to take on a monstrous aspect,
however unintended. It’s like dissecting a frog in science class,
the teacher describes the spread out innards as part of a mechanism
but the child still faints away. This is partly true for Picasso
himself, as some of the Cubist planes found their way into later
portraits, such as 'Weeping Woman' (1937).
But there's
more... Some have suggested that the reason for Picasso's frequent
switching of styles was his frequent switching of lovers. As his
heart would swing almost with each beat, he'd paint his latest beau
lovingly, shortly to be followed by his loathing. Whatever the truth
of this, with 'Woman I' it's like the
contradictions in 'Pink Angels' aren't resolved
but heightened, and de Kooning 's contradictory feelings are fighting
for control of the same canvas. It’s “she loves me, she loves me
not”, only all at once. It’s trying to depict someone and trying
to rub them out trapped in conflict with one another. (Unlike the
philandering Picasso, de Kooning had one long but tempestuous
marriage. Make of that what you want.)
'Woman
as Landscape' (1965/6), with a title either brilliant or infamous, is perhaps the most grotesque of the
bunch. The ‘firm flesh’ of classical sculpture, as bound by rules
of proportion as is geometry, flies out of control, multiplying
itself like cancer cells, bulbously erupting, oozing around the
canvas. It’s simultaneously comic and horrific, the very definition
of grotesque.
These portraits
share a child-like quality. We know the woman in 'Women
I' to be a woman not from anything in her features but her
exaggerated breasts and her women's clothes. (If those are her shoes
and she doesn't just have hooves for feet.) But more, it's as if he's
trying faithfully to depict the likeness of a subject but
unconsciously unloading his psychological baggage concerning it. And
this makes the savagery, the feeling of attack to
the mark-making, still more striking.
On first being
shown, they generated a debate over whether they were misogynistic or
not. It doesn't seem clear why we needed one, the answer stares you
in the face. They certainly mark a good point to reflect how few
female artists there are in this show. But they’re
interestingly misogynistic, they offer insight
into the misogynistic mind. The contradictory roles which patriarchal
society thrusts onto women, normally made into a woman’s problem,
here collide and attempt to overwrite one another.
Up
Abstraction Alley
Regular
readers might concur that I can take to art or music which might not
appeal to the majority. I like to indulgently imagine that, through
writing this stuff, every now and then I'll manage to convey to
someone else just what I see in something. But ironically, every now
and again I'll have pretty much the majority reaction. And in
particular my reaction to the artists here runs the gamut, from
absolute awe to total indifference.
For
example, Franz Klein's furious stabs with painter's brushes just look
to me like something Tony Hancock would throw up to briefly become
the toast of Paris. True, they look expressive. But they only
look expressive. Yes, you can see them as a frozen record of a
gesture. But so what? It seems doubly perplexing that Klein has such
a name when others in the show, such as Pousette-Dart, Smith or Tobey
are less-known.
Yet even Klein
stands above Barnet Newman and Ad Reinhart. The only achievement I
could find in their blocks, squares and stripes of colour was that
they were able to drive themselves further down the blind alley where
Mondrian seemed to have already hit the back wall, an achievement of
sorts even if only of obstinacy. (And yet Reinhardt's cartoons could
be fabulous! Go figure.)
In their case I
just looked across the walls, shrugged and pretty much passed on to
the next room. There seems nothing expressive to these abstracts at
all. It might be bizarre to have such wide-ranging responses to a
show given over to a single movement, in the case of de Kooning to
different pictures by the same artist. But perhaps,
due to their afore-mentioned fixation with individualism, it's
inevitable. And it's also, in it's way, appealing. It
suggests there's no schema to be relied on, that the whole thing's
wide open, that each individual work must be looked at and assessed
on its own merits. This may be more true of visual art than other art
forms, and if so it's to be welcomed.
A much-heralded
hexagonal room, literally the centrepiece of the exhibition, is given
over to Mark Rothko's colour fields – for example 'No. 4
(Yellow, Black, Orange on Yellow/ Untitled)' (1953, above).
Being in this room was, I'll concede, the closest I've come to liking
Rothko. (Though it may have been achieved by comparison to what went
before.) The works seem to shimmer, almost to hover. There are
paintings which come out at you, and paintings which draw you in –
like portals to some other space. Rothko draws you in. And the
feeling is somehow multiplied by multiple paintings - facing each
other, like a room of doors.
This
room was described by Laura Cumming in the Guardian as “a
quasi-chapel”, and there is an association with the coloured light
of stained glass windows. Yet his 'Gethsemane' (1944), placed earlier in the show, looks like a Surrealist work with
the irreligion taken out. While these colour fields can look like
religious works with the religion taken out, like some New Age guru
emitting meaningful-sounding stuff. Notably the guide, which has up
till now said entirely sensible things, starts on stuff like “his
art should in a sense 'defeat' the walls with his plenitude”. Yeah,
deep...
Arguably
it's Rothko's very accomplishment which makes him seductive, and
therefore more dangerous than inferior artists such as Klein.
Rothko's the Pied Piper who can lead you lost. It leaves you thinking
Walter Benjamin was right after all, that art escaped religion when
it beached against modernity and Rothko was left decorating the empty
hulk as everyone else settled in the new land.
Which
seems to link to the famous story of his withdrawing his work from
the Seagram building after finding out it was to be hung in the
restaurant. Leading to the inevitable response - get over it! Rothko
may mark Abstract Expressionism at it's most extreme. He faithfully
reproduced many of Expressionism's self-romanticisations, such as the
depiction of the artist as being beyond society and in touch with
more eternal concerns, and his art thereby being above and beyond
mere commerce.
So many, in fact,
that all Pop Art had to do was to duplicate Dada's withering
critique. (Well, with populism replacing the communism.) Suddenly it
was squaresville to have seriousness of purpose or heroic ambition,
to sit in your studio contemplating a shade of blue. Suddenly it was
de rigeur to be flip and ironic. You didn’t make
art by contemplating the depths of your soul, but by taking surface
features of the world around you and recombining them, in short by
finding virtues in what Ab Ex had seen as problems.
And it was a
similar story with Conceptualism. How to fill those vast shoes Ab Ex
had left us? Don't bother, just kick them away! If they made
gargantuan, aura-emitting canvases we respond with works which are in
themselves incidental – or quite possibly entirely absent. If their
art was to do with the psyche of the individual artist, with art as
therapy, we'll make art as a cultural product, which make it's points
calmly and clearly with none of that self-important tomfoolery. In the recent Tate show 'Conceptual Art in Britain', we saw how
critic and Ab Ex champion Clement Greenberg was a target.
And besides, even
what was positive about Rothko was later supplanted by works such as
Carlos Cruz-Diez’s instillation 'Chromosaturation'
(2010), part of the Haywards' 'Light Show', in which three connected
rooms were saturated with the three primary colours. If Rothko
offered us a door into a colour field, Cruz-Diez opened it and pulled
us through.
Expressionism
Goes Fractal (Pollock)
But
if this seems to be shaping up into an overarching rule, where too
much abstraction is just too bad, it's time to come to the grand
exceptions. Let's remember the image on my visual art blog page, the one picked to sum up
the art that I like, is a Pollock. (Not one in this show, but still a
Pollock.)
This
show was pre-announced with the news that his 'Mural'
and 'Number 11, 1952', better known and henceforth
referred to as 'Blue Poles', were “to be united for the first and probably only time”. And it
not only dedicates it's largest room to them but hangs them on facing
walls, inviting us to compare them.
Certainly,
both are affecting works. I'll often notice other gallery-goers
spending more time reading the indicia than looking at the works.
They'll quickly glance over the thing they nominally came to see, and
they're off. Yet with the Pollocks people knew to linger, trying to
take in the immensity of the thing. We are, however, better off
contrasting them...
'Mural'
was painted in 1943, when Pollock was commissioned by Peggy
Guggenheim to cover a wall of her Manhattan townhouse. It remained
his largest work, and in the words of curator David Anfam
“jump-started abstract expressionism”. It is a
great work. And yet placed in this context, when we can see what
comes ahead, what's most noticeable is how rooted in representation
it is. Another work is called 'Enchanted Forest'
(1947), and like it this is a forest. You can see the canopy at the
top of the picture, the accumulated debris of the ground at the base,
the black thrusts of the tree trunks and branches taking up the
centre. The colour scheme is verdant greens and autumnal yellows.
And
there are ways in which 'Blue Poles' (1952, above)
is similar, thick black lines running over and connecting swirls of
colour. The 'poles' were even made by applying planks of wood. And
yet now the forest is truly gone...
Formally the
change is that this is one of Pollock’s drip works, where he'd
flick the brush above the canvas without directly touching it. These
works have sometimes been called Fractal Expressionism, an evocative
name as one effect is that you never know when to stop looking. Bald
canvas is visible at the edges. Yet there still seems to be no back
to the picture, no canvas wall for your eye to come to rest against,
just further fractal-like recessions. And the harder you look, the
foreground seems to move out, into the room with
you, in almost a 3D effect.
Lou
Reed once said that with 'Metal Machine Music' he
wanted to create a long composition not based around repeated beats
but which never stood still - “like the universe”. And the poles,
the most immediately striking part of the painting, grow nodes at
intervals - like the lines which join up the bright stars in maps of
constellations. (Those long central strokes appear in other works,
for example 'Phosphoresence', 1947.) But then, if
a clear night, as you keep watching the sky the once-dark background
behind those constellations becomes richer and richer. With Anselm Kiefler, as he left the earth behind and grew more cosmic, he
left me behind. But with Pollock it's the exact opposite. His heart
belonged out there in the stars.
Except
that 'Blue Poles' isn't depicting the universe,
even in part, the way 'Mural' is in part depicting
a forest. Note in the Lou Reed quote he says “like” the universe,
and similarly with Pollock this is merely an analogy. Pollock is
painting the cosmic in the other, broader sense of the word – the
immensity and irresolvable complexity of everything, the way we
struggle to comprehend what's inside an atom and at the same time
look hopefully up at the sky. Pollock was more like Mark Tobey than
he was Gorky or de Kooning, his desire was to describe the
indescribable and abstraction was his chosen means. He could take
abstraction and make it work.
And there's
another point which seems associated. People hear of his drip
painting method and imagine a kind of rock’n’roll painter,
throwing up works in some state of absolute abandon while swigging
from a bottle of JD, outside of and against any artistic tradition.
’Time’ magazine’s nickname for him, Jack the
Dripper, best conveys this. The fact that he died in 1956, when
rock’n’roll was still starting up, should tell us how accurate
any of that was.
In fact Pollock
was a deliberative painter, who tried out his drip technique before
he’d exhibit any of the works, ensuring he’d mastered it like a
neophyte labours to master a brush. (And this was precisely his
innovation. Ernst had already dripped paint onto works, but used it
as a random element he could then paint around.) And, having invested
all that time and energy, he did not always take kindly to the
suggestion he just chucked paint about for a living, barking back “no
chaos damn it!” A page on the Tate’s website specifically debunks Pollock myths, including “probably the most absurd and easily refutable fantasy…
that he… created his best works while drinking.”
And in fact we
need to refute all this from an earlier point. When you hear Harold
Rosenberg coined the term 'action painting' the same year as 'Blue
Poles', it might seem auspicious. Yet when the Telegraph describes it in terms of “spiralling
skeins of paint that recorded the physical reach of [Pollock’s]
body and arm” they're reciting the received wisdom. We’ve been
trained to see those arcs of paint like the motion lines in comic
strips.
But in fact,
unlike 'Mural', rather than picture it being flung
into life you can't really conceive of 'Blue Poles'
being painted at all. I know full well how it was done, there's
abundant film of him at work. (While almost any art book can be
guaranteed to have a still of him.) But I can't stand before the
painting and apply the knowledge, I can't visualise it in the process
of happening. Rather than see the expressive gestures you do in
Klein, or the ceaseless overpainting of de Kooning, it seems almost
impossible to trace it back to the hand of the artist who made it.
There's no unpicking it like a jumper. It's too intricate, too
endlessly layered. Even the human touch of the signature, in the
lower left, looks slightly incongruous. The thing looks just
there, impossible to trace back to it’s
construction.
Above
all, and contrary to the stereotype of An Ex angst, 'Blue
Poles’ is not melancholic but rhapsodic. To quote Norbert Lynton it's “graceful rather than violent or wild,
rhythmic rather than random, balletic and mystical in effect”.
True, every word.
Cosmic
and Visceral (Clyfford Still)
If
Pollock has the largest room of the show and Rothko the centrepiece,
Clyfford Still is given the next size up. Plus it's a piece of a
Still, 'PH-950' (1950) making up one version of
the poster (see up top). He seems to be the the third of the show's
self-styled hits. It's an audacious move to so big up an artist most
won't have even heard of. But it's one which delivers. A great favourite of
mine was 'PH-150' (1950), detail below.
Still
seems to have been an individualist among individualists, a maverick
even compared to mavericks. In 1961, keen to distance himself from
the art market, he moved from New York and spent the rest of his life
on a Maryland farm. While his conditions for showing his work were so
exacting they pretty much guaranteed it wasn't shown at all. Happily,
things seem to be changing with a dedicated Still museum existing in
Denver since 2004. (From which the works on show here were loaned.)
If
Pollock's signature mark was the fleck, Still's was the tear. To the
point where I initially assumed he'd been influenced by the look of
torn wallpaper and peeling paint. (Perhaps influenced by a photo in
the previous room, Minor White's 'Resurrection (Peeled Paint on Window, Jackson Street, Produce Area, SanFrancisco', 1951.) The idea of blown-up images of something
everyday set against Pollock's cosmic macroscopes seemed appealing.
And in fact something still clings to it in my mind, even if it's an
official wrong answer.
In
fact, they seem intended as something more geological. (Which of
course still offers a complementary opposite to Pollock, just of a
different sort.) The show describes them as “by turn visceral and
cosmic”, and they seem redolent of the way the geography we treat
as facts on the ground is in fact the result of rupturous violence,
mountain ranges thrusting themselves into being. The show speaks of
“verticality being Still's enduring leitmotif”, representing
“spiritual transcendence”, navigating”yawning abysses” like
seismographs of soul journeys.
Despite
such talk, despite their vast size, they don't seem at all
ostentatious and self-important. In fact, in another comparison with
Pollock, it's hard to imagine them being composed. They look too
immediate to be deliberated. The best works are those where the
colour is applied flatly, without a 'painter's touch'. They all have
those alphanumeric titles, as if just named after catalogue numbers.
Like all great artists, Still can make the whole thing look easy.
Time
was when I saw American Abstract Expressionism as a load of
self-important, man-paining flim-flam designed to impress art
critics, with Pollock and de Kooning as the exceptions that proved
the rule. True, I had already gone past that not altogether nuanced
view. But one advantage of this group show is that it brings to the
fore some of the lesser-known names. Some of which have cropped up
here. Others were more deservedly forgotten, but that's life.
But putting on a
show now also creates a direct comparison between our era and theirs.
And times have long since shifted from the days when Ab Ex occupied
the cutting edge, championed by critics and often derided by a
bemused public. The two have effectively swapped sides, almost as
much as they have over Impressionism. And these works are so at odds
with today’s post-modern art market they confirm the old adage
about the past being another country. Which makes now a very good
time to look at them again.
Once Ab Ex seemed
to have trounced all criticism, been given it's head and gone off the
deep end, and Pop Art seemed a necessary corrective. But for us it’s
the reverse. And the surprising thing is that many reviews did seem
to acknowledge that. To quote the Telegraph again: “At a time when
the virtual world has rendered most aspects of life slightly ersatz
and people crave authenticity, the art here has all the realness and
rawness anybody could possibly want.” Yup.
