'EDUARDO PAOLOZZI'

This review of the great British Pop artist combines responses to three exhibitions, at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, ‘Collaging Culture’, a much older show at Chichester’s Pallant House gallery and the Paolozzi sections of their more recent ‘Pop! Art In a Changing Britain’. (More of which to come.)

”Automobile advertisements were followed by a sequence of pin-up girls; arrangements of magazine cut-outs led to the covers of pulp science fiction journals. Aliens, Coca-Cola, strippers, cars, robots, gaudy colours and images popped up in rapid succession.”

Dreaming Of Plenty

The Whitechapel show had the wit to start at just the right place, so let’s do the same here. The first thing you see on stepping inside the gallery is a fast-running slideshow. Imitating one which accompanied a lecture Eduardo Paolozzi gave at the recently opened Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1952, which has been described as “the opening salvo of Pop Art”. 

The quote above’s from a contemporary description. Except the 'lecture' turned out to be just the slideshow itself, the artist opening his mouth not once. Instead he just let the slides do the talking. Instead of collaging some of those elements onto paper, he made their rapid succession a collage in time.

And in some ways the enigma of that silence, that disinterest on context or explanation, resounds to this day. People continue to tie themselves in knots asking whether Pop Art was a critique or a celebration of American consumerism. If no-one's hit on an answer yet that shouldn't worry us, for art isn't some cryptic crossword you pursue until you arrive at the solution. (And Paolozzi himself said “a metaphor should promote an endless amount of interpretations”.) But when there’s only two available answers, neither of which seem even slightly satisfactory, that’s the time to consider that it’s the wrong question being asked.

Of course the Pop generation often saw the mass media the way the Futurists had seen the urban environment. It had become so all-pervasive, it was the height of absurdity to feign you were somewhere above and beyond it. And besides, wasn’t its immediacy thrilling? Instead of elitist disdain, we should revel in the situation, bathe in the cathode ray bombardment. Paolozzi’s slideshow became the famous 'Bunk!' collages, for an example see ’Evadne In Green Dimensions’, 1951, below.

That title, given to the series by this work, might be taken as a dismissive term. But by adding the exclamation mark Paolozzi makes it something vibrant and immediate, like a comic book sound effect. An American word for what was often considered an America phenomenon, it may well be a red rag raised against self-styled notions of Britishness.

ForAmerican mass culture had the peculiar effect of uniting in opposition both conservatives, who considered it a debasement of our greatcultural heritage, and the left, who saw it as a low-key but pervasive form of cultural imperialism issuing from the world’s most clearly capitalist nation. Entering into a relationship with itbecame effectivelydisruptive, notmerelyaneffective provocation but a handy rupture with the culture of yore.

Paolozzi himself said “the American magazine represented a catalogue of an eclectic society, bountiful and generous… an art form more subtle and fulfilling that the orthodox choices of either the Tate Gallery or the Royal Academy.”

But there’s an all-important extra element. In 'Shock of the New', Robert Hughes said British Pop Art “saw the gross sign language of American cities with the kind of distant longing that Gauguin felt for Tahiti.” Paolozzi's first exhibition had been in 1947, when rationing was still in full swing. His ICA lecture happened only a year after it finally ended.

“Distant” is key; he saw the gaudy world of American consumerism from grey raincoat Britain, as a kiddie with his nose pressed to the sweet shop window - and it’s that perspective which is captured in his collages. American Pop Art, which arrived later and without that separating pane of glass, was quite a different and a very much inferior beast. John-Paul Stonard suggests the collages originated as scrapbooks, where from a relatively young age Paolozzi was simply collecting images which caught his eye.

And I feel I can glom on to this because, though my era might have been decades later, things weren't entirely dissimilar. The mindset of rationing took a long time to end. The British comics of my childhood had at most one spot colour, while American comics came in glorious technicolour. Naturally, I preferred them. 

Even the adverts seemed part of the enticement. I used to fantasise about the taste of Hostess Twinkies with… well... distant longing. Today I could buy one from a shop I can see from my front window, but of course I haven’t – they'll just be gak and tooth-rot. But the point was never the cheap consumer product, it was the displacement from it. The desirous dream just needed something to fixate on, so it might exist.

Furthermore, American culture itself then seemed rationed, like a controlled drug you could otherwise overdose on. There was a regulated number of American shows on TV. And those American comics advertising the Twinkies were harder to find than their drab British cousins, and so required hunting down. You’d hit on a load of them in some byway newsagents like a prospector striking gold. All of which added to their air of exoticness.

And back then, America seemed so futuristic it was already itself science fictiony. The fact that the space rockets took off from there, that surely proved that it was closer to outer space than the rest of the world. That was why things were released there first, then slowly spread round to the rest of us. The celebrated 'This is Tomorrow' exhibition of 1956, held in the Whitechapel Art Gallery, was opened by Robbie the Robot from 'Forbidden Planet'.

Paolozzi had studied art in Paris, and not just been influenced by Surrealism – he'd always insist he was a Surrealist. After all, Ernst had fast-flipped through magazines to create an auto-collage effect in his mind’s eye, an embryonic hand-held version of Paolozzi’s slideshows. Adrian Hamilton of the Independent, writing about the earlier Pallant House show, comments “his work was enormously varied…but it was always informed, in true Surrealist fashion, by the sense of juxtaposition.”

Well, except it wasn't. This just comes from the lazy notion that ‘juxtaposition’ is a more polysyllabic and therefore smarter way of saying ‘collage’. But here there’s no lobster telephones, no unexpected encounters between sewing machines and umbrellas, no domestic families cheerily chewing on bicycle parts.

Collage already surrounds us, it’s there in advertising images and magazine covers. It doesn’t break down norms, it is the norm. So, rather than try and screw with it, Paolozzi simply goes with it. He’s more disciple to Schwitters than Heartfield. His intent isn’t juxtaposition but accumulation, to bombard you with imagery until you reach information overload.

That’s why the slideshow, with one image being replaced by another almost as soon as you take it in, is such an effective way to see his work. Take for example the Bunk! collage below, built as a tumult of images pouring out at you from that open oven door, everything somehow in front of everything else. Many of his images are those collage-like magazine covers. An artist of subversive intent would sabotage their layouts, degrade their comprehensibility, whereas Paolozzi keeps them intact but then overloads them further. In essence, his collages take the source material and make it look more like itself than it already did.

And that might be the overriding thing about our perception of American culture - distance made it seem homogenous to us, in a way it never would to a native. From afar aliens, Coca Cola, strippers, cars and robots did go together, in fact there they all were. Even the Hostess Twinkies seemed part of the comics, not just ads which interrupted the story.

Rust And Flesh (Sculpture of the Machine Age)

Yet however good his collages are, it’s the sculptures which show Paolozzi at his strangest and most unique. They’re the opposite of the smooth, universalised sculpture of Moore and Hepworth, the generation before his. Paolozzi makes their attempts to evoke primitivism look timid, genteel and merely Classical.

But they are just as unlike the bright, clean surfaces most associated with Pop. They even look quite unlike Paolozzi’s collages, yang to their yin. Perhaps for this reason the Pallant House’s ‘Pop’ show barely included them. While with the collages he became aligned with the Independent Group, the sculptures were considered examples of the Geometry of Fear style, from a name coined by Herbert Read: “These new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance... Here are images of flight, of ragged claws ‘scuttling across the floors of silent seas’, of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.”

In their first show, the Pallant House described them as having “the qualities of an ancient sculpture pulled from the earth and reassembled.” African fetishes, designed for function not contemplation, soon became worn through use. Their magic purpose often involved hammering other objects into them, and the like. Paolozzi’s sculptures evokes this, they look worked, rough, abraded. See for example ’Icarus’, (1957), below.

But as ever their strength comes from being ancient and modern. Contemporary reviews often brought up Hiroshima, which is I think off the mark. The Pallant House comes much closer in seeing their rough, encrusted, corrugated surfaces as “evoking the brutalist architecture of the machine age.” We should also remember that Paolozzi’s sculpture often became public art, so was most widely seen among that new brutalist architecture.

They’re made by accumulating found objects then casting them in bronze, unifying those varying elements into one. And that transformation, from collage to single object, is important. Generally, we think of sculpture as something worked down from a single block, of wood or stone. We can accept assemblage sculpture when it foregrounds the parts it’s made from, as in Picasso’s ‘Baboon and Young’ (1951). Whereas Paolozzi creates assemblages which don’t look like assemblages.

In fact he sometimes did the very opposite. Cast sculpture cannot avoid marks of it’s production process, the holes used to pour the metal into and the plugs to hold it, marks which are normally removed like erased underdrawing. Whereas Paolozzi would leave them in. All of which leaves them irresolvable to the eye.

And this irresolvability gives them an indeterminate, ‘thing between’ nature. They can look like anthropomorphised machines or objects, such as ’Table Object (Growth)’ (1949, above), which might well scuttle off somewhere. The Whitechapel uses its expanse of floor space to great effect by clustering them, as if they’ve gathered in groups. They can look biomechanic, ‘Icarus’ starting off with rocky legs before turning to machine parts as it rises.

They can look like the practitioners of some fetishistic cargo cult, the marks of circuit boards and machine parts embedded on their bodies like scarification marks. (Further evidence of the influence of Dada and Surrealism on Paolozzi is his resemblance to Picabia’s biomechanic forms.)

Having Your Heads

We are made up of our surroundings. Archeologists can reconstruct the diet a person had from their bones and teeth, because our bodies are effectively built out of that diet. Similarly, what we consume culturally, the world we encounter, doesn’t just affect us but goes on to compose us. And Paolozzi’s screenprints can effectively x-ray all that, show us back to ourselves in all our constituent parts. See for example the two images below - ’Automobile Head’ (1954), where a head is composed of car parts, and ’Man Holds The Key’ (1972), which reworks the human body as a transmutational “chemical factory”.

But Paolozzi’s not yet done with the head…

As said after the Academy’s ‘Revolution: Russian Art’ exhibition, “we tend to think of the human head, representing individual identity while forming one of the most basic shapes, as one of the those irreducible ‘building blocks’ of art.”

We regard the head as the most indivisible part of us, the centre of the self, the part of us where ‘we’ actually reside - hence expressions such as “keep your head”. Even in collage, several different heads from different sources are normally combined to make a ‘complete’ one. Whereas, in works such as ‘The Return’ (1952, below) Paolozzi takes a whole head and chops and segmentises it like an apple.

But perhaps the real point is to combine those two notions. The indivisible self we once liked to conceive of is no longer, the accultured world we inhabit now interpenetrates between your synapses. The head of parts, the segments with spaces so open to input, has become our portrait. Brand names now enter our dreams at night.

Not that we should necessarily take this as a negative. A 1963 screenprint is called ’Metalization of a Dream’, a neologism replacing the more expected “manifestation” or “realization”. The ‘open head’ is seen as a two-way street, allowing our dreams to escape our confining craniums and take root in the external world.

The Future Arrives, The Future Disappoints (The Shiny Sixties)

In the Sixties Paolozzi started working with screenprints, their colours vivid and sumptuous at one at the same time. While the ’Bunk!’ collages had been rough and extemporised, these were produced by the professionals of Kelpra Studios. The Whitechapel describes them as having a “sleeker machine aesthetic.” An example, ‘Wittgenstein In New York’ from the series ‘As Is When’(1964/5) is below.

The tall figure motifs are compared to the buildings behind them, with one having his insides divided into rooms. While the other sports a digestive system which looks remarkably like pipework. The text refers to Wittgenstein’s “apparent physical vigour”, as if New York has energised him. When you’re in the city you’re also of it, some of it’s power and energy charges you.

Yet by this point an exchange has been made. Later Paolozzi is so much like later Dali. Everything is so much better, slicker, more accomplished. But in opposition to what came before, with their complex design they look a lot cleverer than they really are. When an artist can’t do their earlier work any better they instead do it more skilfully, as if hoping no-one will spot the difference. 

Noticeably the text isn’t incorporated into the images but now accompanies it, like reading an illustrated book. Which feels like a retreat from ’Bunk’s conceptual overload. Even the sculpture became sleeker and smoother, losing it’s original junkyard aesthetic.

Admittedly we’re not seeing these works as intended. They were made to be loosely bundled in a box, with some images on acetate, allowing you to combine them as you chose, shuffling the pack like playing cards. Stuck on the walls, they inevitably lose those sparks of free association. Both galleries feature closed cabinets of the plates, with the Whitechapel adding a video of people flipping through them. Alas, not enough.

For this reason the multi-image screenprints such as ’Will The Future Ruler of the Earth Come From the Ranks of Insects?’ (1970, above) work best. These were presumably based around the mini-ads you’d sometimes see in American comics, for patches or the like. Here the eye does what the hand would do with the print portfolios, not ‘reading’ across the images like panels in a sequence but zipping between them according to its own inclinations.

While his films worked for a similar reason, such as ’The History Of Nothing’ (1962, still above) or ‘Kakaponkakoon’ (1965). Like a sequel to his original slideshow, the films are made up of roving close-ups of sections of collages, accompanied by snatches of music. They’re almost precursors of the legendary Faust Tapes album, described on release as music that “time was pressing them to play”.

In 1968 Paolozzi spent three months in California, as a Visiting Professor in the University’s Art Department. After which it became unarguable. The glass window is now smashed, and the boy’s inside the sweetie shop tasting the Twinkie. And what could kill any romance more quickly than moving in together? It would of course be reductive to pin it all to a single incident, and indeed his art had been changing before then. But still, it’s indicative. Austerity was his rosebud, allowing him to dream uninterrupted. In abundance he lost his way.

(Some suggest that Paolozzi became more sharply politically critical of America as the Vietnam war progressed, and this has an impact on his art. But he certainly didn’t take up any kind of protest artist. If this contributed it just helped kill the unrequited love song without generating the bitter break-up number.)

Paolozzi later goes back to smaller, more condensed prints in the style of ‘Bunk’. with less bright geometries and more found images, as well as embarking on new exploits such as abstract art intended to represent music. But one highly significant aspect of his work is his public art. This is unfortunately passed over by all three exhibitions but the greatest sin is the Whitechapel’s, given how much of that art is in London. (Disclaimer, it did include a 1982 study for the 1986 mosaic at Tottenham Court Road tube station.)

Paolozzi was influenced by some of the titans of Modernism (Schwitters, Giacommetti, Picabia) but had a remarkable ability to absorb and incorporate them, effective make them into elements of one vast, ongoing assemblage creature he concocted. In both his approach and importance he becomes a kind of British cousin to the great American post-war artist, Robert Rauschenberg.

Like Rauschenberg, Paolozzi tries to reinvent himself relentlessly, and like Rauschenberg by mid-career he ended up no longer himself. But, and also like Rauschenberg, he stages something of a late recovery. But mostly, like Rauschenberg, when he was at his best he represented a pinnacle of post-war art.

THE COSMIC DEAD/ PREOCCUPATIONS/ STEVE EARLE/ FORT PROCESS DISPERSION/ RADIO 3 EXPOSURE (SUMMERTIME GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

THE COSMIC DEAD
Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar, Thurs 12th July

On my second sighting of the Cosmic Dead, I remain as convinced as ever of the virtue of their collision of space rock with noise. (And before anyone starts, I know officially space has no sound to make noise in.)

Among the many reasons to despise New Age music is it’s fondness for star field backdrops, like they see the universe as some giant chill-out room complete with twinkly little lights. The cosmos… the actual cosmos is vast, unknowable, full of convulsive forces which would tear us apart in an instant. The drummer’s T-shirt promises “the light will devour us all”, which seems to sum the whole thing up quite nicely.

In fact since last time the band have had their own upheavals, and now sport both a new drummer and keyboard player. They start, perhaps unexpectedly, by singing and playing along to the pre-show Abba track over the PA. They then launch into a full-on noise number, with just a repeatedly chanted mantra vocal at the centre of the primordial chaos. This proved a baptism of fire for some, and numbers had thinned out before that track was done. Each to their own, I suppose.

Things coalesce a little more after that initial big bang. The penultimate track even has something of a groove, with the singer spinning seemingly spontaneous words about seagulls. (After someone in the audience kept shouting about them.)

Then the final number is lumbering, monstrous and very definitely riff-led. As if the sonic assault wasn’t enough on it’s own the band, while playing, dismantle the crowd barriers and venture out into the audience. As they handed out mikes to budding primal screamers, I assumed things would only degenerate, plunging into ear-shredding chaos until the plug was pulled. But they somehow managed to regroup back on stage and hammer that riff back into shape.

Which seemed to sum up the whole thing. They’re illustrating very much the opposite of the steady stake theory of the universe. Creation and destruction not as opposing poles but ebbing and flowing tides of energy. You’re probably wondering if I’m going to go on and say it was both lucid and frenzied. The answer is yes. Yes I am.

Lo-fi but from yer actual gig! Watch out for your lugholes…



PREOCCUPATIONS
The Haunt, Brighton, Sat 14th July

Preoccupations channel the music of the post-punk era, to the point be they could be a Factory signing who somehow fell through a time vortex and found themselves in contemporary Canada. There’s the freak disco of A Certain Ratio (as sighted only recently and in this very venue), to the point that when they spot a mirror ball aloft they ask for it to be lit up. But there’s also the haunted spaces of Joy Division and the “raining shards of glass” guitar sound of Keith Levene.

The guitarists often swap over to keyboards, though you’d often not know which was chosen sight unseen. Band member Scott Munro has commented “my ultimate goal would be to make a record where nobody knows what instrument is playing ever.”

They use cross-rhythms, the drummer in particularly could often be playing in the opposite direction to the rest of the band. (In, you know, a good way.) But the rhythms are themselves often pretty off-kilter, which makes for music weird down to it’s very marrow. The result sounds spectral and visceral at the same time, like a hand passing through a wall that still punches you in the chest.

Most people will know about the controversy over the band’s original name. Now they are no longer trading at Viet Cong, there doesn’t seem much reason to still bring the thing up. But in a way it shows how dodginess differs through the generations. Sixties anti-war activists would often uncritically champion the Viet Cong, in order to neatly divide the world into Yankee Imperialists and freedom fighters. Whereas now the term’s just become a sign, detached from any context and interchangeable with other signs - the way the coins in your pocket are interchangeable. And the only thing worse than bad politics is no politics.

Different venue but same tour…



STEVE EARLE + THE DUKES
The Dome, Brighton, Tues 17th July

Despite his high reputation and multiple years of service, I wasn’t previously very up on American country artist Steve Earle. In fact the catch-up nature of the experience reminded me of seeing Richard Thompson in this venue seven years ago.

So much so, in fact, I’d be tempted to call Earle the Richard Thompson of country. Both have been making music since the late Sixties (’68 and ’67 respectively). Both gigs focused on recent material but kept up a high hit rate, despite Earle playing the best part of two hours. Both gigs focused on roots music, but weren’t so exclusive as not to pull on several roots. Earle took in rock’n’roll and blues, including a cover of ‘Hey Joe’.

Earle is regarded as a more political songwriter than Thompson, something that comes up in his choice of emblem (a skull combined with a hammer and sickle) and his ’tween-song chat. (He is, it transpires, not the greatest fan of his current President. Can’t imagine why.) But rather than polemics he mostly writes character songs, which is often the best way into politics anyway, so even there the difference isn’t so great.

There was a strangely familiar deja vu effect where I’d keep imagining I’d heard songs before. Even if I have heard more Earle than I remember, it couldn’t have been in those numbers. I suspect it’s more a mark of their rootsiness, they work in so well they feel like they’re already in your blood on first hearing.

I may be remiss not just on Earle but Country in general. After the Thompson gig, I did manage to catch up on him at least a little. Whereas, several years back, after seeing Emmylou Harris (again in this venue) I vowed to start digging into her catalogue. But alas life intervened. There’s neither enough hours in the day, nor days in the week. Hopefully, I’ll have more luck in Earle’s case. If anyone has a favourite album to recommend…

From the gig! Yes, really, from the gig…



FORT PROCESS DISPERSION
De-la-Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, Sun 15th July

This “dispersion” was described by organisers Lost Property as “an all day building takeover at the historic and magnificent De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill”, as a warm-up for the full-on Fort Process in September.

Among all the noise assaults and musical experimentalism, The Legend of St. Winiborde was something of a surprise - though a welcome one. It was effectively a throwback to 1972, when folk music, left field strangeness and children’s TV didn’t seem like exclusive categories. It was a part sung part narrated fable, somewhat in the tradition of Oliver Postgate. The music went from charming naive melodies, illustrated by both the calm measured-voiced narration and the slideshow of simple lino cut drawings, to stranger instrumental sections.

Ostensibly it was quite a conservative story, how the natural harmony of a society is disrupted by someone who dares question things. Yet the evil apprentice figure became semi-sympathetic, perhaps even the protagonist. In other words, even his disruption became part of the natural order.

Whereas Plurals most definitely were leaving behind standard instrumentation. Two of the trio had guitars, but used them sparingly and as input devices, rather than as primary instruments. They also utilised radio voices, though I’m not sure whether they were recorded or plundered live from the airwaves.

The most common complaint about this sort of music is that it doesn’t go anywhere. But that’s just imposing rules on it from other genres, which don’t apply. First, it did develop, in the sense of shifting gears, building sounds up until they mulched into a drone, they graffiti-ing noise guitar on that wall of sound, before returning to the more ambient beginning.

But more importantly, it’s not intending to go anywhere so much as open up a space for you to get lost in. The band’s name surely comes from adding things together, not taking them forward. But there’s more to it than that…

Recently deceased Steve Ditko, genius comics creator (hurrah!) and Objectivist tub-thumper (boo!) took as his credo the phrase “a thing is what it is”. And if that sounds confining then fortunately its not even true on it’s own terms. Metamorphosis happens in nature all the time, and failure to notice it is Cro Magnon thinking calling itself common sense.

And a great appeal of this type of music is that a thing doesn’t have to be what it is, that it can’t be broken back down into notes like a sentence into syllables. Particularly with the addition of the radio voices, it had a liminal ‘between stations’ feel. Even what you hear you only semi-discern, like spying the shapes of objects in the fog.

Pursuing the radio metaphors, Johanna Bramli was less on my wavelength. Her set had its moments but was marred for me by some saccharine la-la vocals, which I just found New Agey.

The visuals, on the other hand… There’s no absolute need for a visual element to this type of music. The only thing I’d say is when there isn’t, arranging things in a traditional audience/ performer face-off becomes a bit redundant. But when there is, it should be done like this. Anything suggesting the tropes of rock videos or even any kind of narrative is clearly out.

This focused on “the brink of nature”, as the indicia said to an otherwise unremarkable exhibition elsewhere in the De La Warr. It’s the point where the natural tips into the abstract - roving close-ups of the pattern of tree bark, rock surfaces or the tide lapping on the shore. It’s not about introducing the foreign but reframing what you already see, finding the strange in the familiar.

The one thing you could say about this warm-up, without fear of contradiction, was that it was quite definitely warm. The De La Warr was essentially built for days like this, when the Channel becomes a turquoise colour field you could almost mistake for the Med, and ‘the English Riviera’ almost becomes a viable concept. (I took a few snaps, which I’ll post at some point.)

And Bolide were to conclude the afternoon playing from the outside bandstand. It would have been splendid to soak up their sounds and the sun from deckchairs, in such salubrious surroundings. Alas they were beset by sound problems, meaning half the band couldn’t hear the other half. (Something of an impediment for improvised music.) 

It concluded with someone audibly exclaiming “Thank God that’s over!”, who turned out to be a band member. Still, a grand day out overall - with the full Fort Process yet to come. It was a highlight of last year’s season, so hopes are high.

St. Winiborde and Plurals, though neither from the Dispersion…





Us true obsessives then hung around, littering up the normally neat De La Warr past sundown, awaiting...

RADIO 3 EXPOSURE
De-la-Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, Sun 15th July

Exposure is a series where Radio 3 tour new music venues to broadcast… well, new music. I think I have previously seen precisely two events which might be described as new music at the De La Warr, one of which was earlier that day. Café Oto it ain’t. But no matter, it’s a decent venue.

I only really took to one track from Jobina Tinnemans’ set, ’Silt’, where strummed strings were combined with some almost Goblin-like otherworldly vocals. In general, her work seems to stem from specific places and aiming to convey the weirdness of the local landscape. But that track, written about and first performed in Iceland, seemed the only one to genuinely stir up something.

Conrad Sheldrake’s shtick was to turn samples into songs - combining sound files as though they were instruments, one as the bass line, another the rhythm track and so on. He’d often run through those samples before launching into the song, foregrounding the elements which made up the collage.

His first song was dedicated to Carroll and Lear, and generally things had a comedic, absurdist edge to them. Which is something inherent in pop music anyway, waiting to be drawn out, the thin line between “Awop bop a loo bop a lop bom bom” and “Goo goo g’job.”

I kept feeling I should have liked his set more than I did. He was doing the sort of stuff I’d normally go for and was executing it effectively. The only formal drawback was his less than characterful voice. But, at least to me, he somehow failed to achieve lift-off. There was perhaps too much of an emphasis on cleverness, which can mar the bright clear pictures of pop songwriting.

It may well be that neither were natural live performers, so we were not hearing them at their best. (Rather summed up by the description of “sound artist Jobina Tinnemans performing a piano-based set”.) There’s something almost animist to electroacoustic music, as if sounds are held to embody a spirit, and so work like spells upon the listener. Whereas once the sound is detached from its source it becomes like a butterfly on a pin, something merely aesthetic.

In Sheldrake’s case, the set may have worked better had the sound files had been linked to film clips. By seeing those sounds produced (even if not live) may have linked them more with their source in our minds. But you have to take what you get.

My heart did not leap at the news Trevor Watts and Verion Weston played free jazz, a genre to which my general reaction is “respectfully disagree”. But parts of their set ventures into blues and soul, at times played surprisingly straight, at others put through some kind of organic distortion filter. True, at others, they veered back over to the other side of the highway. But I fared better than my expectation.

In the end, none of the three acts really grabbed me. Each seemed in it’s turn like the other act, the bit I was willing to sit through before my thing came on. So the night was neither a resounding success nor a crashing failure. Based on this exposure, I’d say the state of new music is fair to middling.

You can hear the whole thing on Radio 3 from Thursday.

Coming soon! After that surprise burst of music stuff in a normally relaxed July, the gig-going will now abate for more than a month. At which point the September spate will most likely arrive in earnest. Until then…

THE LENS OF LUCID FRENZY IS BACK IN BONNIE SCOTLAND...

To be precise, Inverness, gateway to the Highlands. More Scottish pics to follow at some point. As ever, full set on 500px.

Coming soon! Well hopefully, me getting some data from my dead old hard drive. Otherwise, very little coming soon...

NORMAL SERVICE SHOULD NOT BE ASSUMED...

Old computer now deaded. In the midst, I kid not, of my writing my most scintillating newest blog post. Replacement purloined, despite dent caused in pocket of public sector worker. Hence my ability to write these words. But now that post plus others imprisoned on old machine. (Don't ask me if it was backed up unless you want to see a grown man cry.) The lead they sold me to transfer data over doesn't fit one of the machines. To be precise, it doesn't fit the new machine they were selling me the very same time as the lead. Should those posts ever be liberated from their current captivity you'll be the first to know. In the meantime, here is some light music...

YUNOHANA VARIATIONS (FEAT. YOSHIMI) – GIG-GOING ADVENTURES

De-la-Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, Wed 27th June

This improvising trio got me trekking out to Bexhill through the legendary Yoshimi, here trading as YoshimiO, previously seen playing with Japanese noisenauts Boredoms and her own band OOIOO. I only found out on arriving that they also comprised Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, also known to answer to Lichens, who I’d previously seen playing with trance-out wizards Om. (The third player, Susie Ibarra, stems more from the jazz world and was previously unknown to me.)

Ironic then, that Om provided the closest match to them. Certainly they were neither as song-based as OOIOO nor as devilishly destructive as the Boredoms. Though that match worked more in terms of spirit than sound, the promoters explaining Lowe’s “practice is strongly rooted in exploration of moments and the hypnagogic state.”

Unlike so much impro music they weren’t ceaselessly frenetic but measured. And, perhaps not entirely by coincidence, each player took up their principal instrument and worked it. YoshimiO and Ibarra, facing one another, drummed together. Yet Lowe’s electronic contributions, more often than tones or squelches, produced more beats. The result was quite a rhythmic set for an impro outfit, even if those rhythms were quite unorthodox.

They sometimes sounded like a string quartet squashed flat by a steam roller, at others like the waddling of a bug. (Think of the Fall of ‘Bug’s Life’ or ‘Dr. Buck’s Letter’.) Instead of a ready-made contrast you therefore got a much more creative interplay.

And atop the rhythms both YoshimiO and Lichens sang. At times they genuinely sang, at others they seemed to have become mantra monks gone mad or taken up Dr. Doolittle’s talk-to-the-animals routine. Quite early on, I became convinced that YoshimiO had hit on a means of calling to an ancient aquatic race, and that they’d soon be stepping out the sea and heading for the venue.

Combinations of impro artists seem to come and go with bewildering speed, the speed daters of the music scene. While others like the Necks can last for decades. The plan seems to be to make Yunohana Variations into a going concern, and we can only hope that happens.

Same tour, different night...

‘RED STAR OVER RUSSIA’

Tate Modern, London

”Art must be everywhere – on the streets, in trams, in factories, in workshops, in worker’s apartments.”
- Mayakovsky

Art Made For Sharing

This is the third art exhibition I’ve seen devoted to the centenary of the Russian Revolution. And what might sound like overkill doesn’t even feel like enough. Partly because of the importance of the event, partly because each show had the smarts to take on it’s own remit. 

Only the Royal Academy’s ‘Revolution’ boldly tried to capture everything, by packing out it’s succession of cavernous Victorian rooms. The Design Museum’s ‘Imagine Moscow’ took unrealised architecture, albeit exploiting the (considerable) overlap between architectural plans and art. 

While this show focuses on posters, graphics and art for reproduction. Designer David King amassed a vast collection of the stuff, totalling over 250,000 objects, before his unfortunate demise the year before last, bequeathing the lot to the Tate.

As previously seen, the painters more-or-less divided between those who took up the revolution and those who took advantage of its new-found freedoms. Whereas every single one of these images was purposefully made as agitprop. (The term ‘agitprop’ even stems from this time, via the Department for Agitation and Propaganda.) Some even came with an injunction that to tear them down was a “counter-revolutionary act!”

At one point there’s a photo of St. Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum in 1941, which instead of art merely displays empty frames. The actual art was being more safely stored in the basement, from fear of Nazi bombing. But the image still tells a poetic truth. Because of course reproductive art was the logical place for agitprop to go. As the show puts it:

“Unlike the precious, unique paintings and sculptures owned by the ruling class before the revolution… the mass produced image...became the focus of the new artistic culture… Art became accessible to millions through prints, posters, journals and photobooks.”

Production itself was often a “collective practice”. To this day we still don’t know who some of these artists were.

And so this message mixed with the medium. In ‘Soviet Union Art Exhibition’ (Victoria Kulagina, 1931, above) it’s as if the poster’s not just dominated but being put up by the construction worker within it, the upper left edge fuzzy as if still being stuck down.

While the lithograph ’The Train Has Reached Us From Far Away With Precious Gifts’ (unknown artists, 1919, below) is a poster which shows the effect of all these posters (if, inevitably, in an idealised form). A train unloads not food or machine parts but books, with figures who look like they should be unpacking already avidly reading. There are murals alongside the side of the train, which also adorned trams and even steamers.

With the first room working as a kind of ante-chamber, entering the exhibition proper you’re hit with a wall full of these propaganda posters. Described by Michael Glover in the Independent as “a furious flurry of visual stimulation”, it’s an early injunction not to generalise. There’s abstract art marshalled into political purpose, stuff so crudely straightforward as to effectively be folk art next to modelled and fully realised figures, boldly Futuristic geometry, full-on science fiction, in the many languages spoken across Russia. See for example the eyeball-assaulting apocalyptic ’The Nightmare of Future Wars’ (1920, below), written in Tartar.

”The Time of Monsters”

But let’s step back a second to the art of the first, failed revolution of 1905. Neither of the other exhibitions stretched back this far. While King devoted a whole book to it; his first, ‘Blood and Laughter: Caricatures From the 1905 Revolution’ (1983). As Cathy Porter describes in the introduction, “a flood of satirical journals poured from the presses, honouring the dead and vilifying the mighty [containing] drawings of frenzied immediacy and extraordinary technical virtuosity.” King estimates there were more than 380 of these journals, dodging their way through or just defying censorship. These were cheaply printed, often in black and white or with one spot colour. (With blood red a favourite.)

Alas the exhibition rather sidelines these, neither starting with nor devoting much space to them. Perhaps because they're not really Modernist, there’s no causal link, no neat timeline, by which they can be roped up to Malevich’s black square or Lissitzky’s red wedge. They are, in short, unTateworthy. Yet this is precisely what makes them both interesting and powerful.

Perhaps partly because the Russia of 1905 was still-more backward than of 1917, they’re rooted in folk images. They sometimes echo the tradition of the World Turned Upside Down, one even featuring the classic image of of a man bearing a donkey. But while that tradition was based around an annual festival, these images are not celebratory but morbid and funereal. After all, this period was sparked by a massacre – Bloody Sunday. (January 1905, when Tsarist troops opened fire on an unarmed demonstration.)

Skeletons, black horses and carrion birds endlessly recur. Their world seems an inversion of peasant life, where the land yields up only death. In ’Future Fable About Present Reality’ (1906) Death draws a line of black warhorses to drink from a blood river; in the back cover to ‘Bee’ (1906) a skeleton farms skulls and bones; while ‘Field, Oh Field Who Has Strewn Thee With Dead Bodies?’ (1906) is self-explanatory.

Police reports often referred to the contributors not as communists or anarchists but nihilists. Though in Russia there was a self-avowed Nihilist movement, the term’s most probably being bandied as a cross between a generic description and a smear, as ‘anarchist’ so often is. Yet despite all this, it’s oddly appropriate for the images’ tone. And as this would be a revolution that would fail, this makes them seem fitting as we look back on them.

But their defining characteristic is the marriage of the scathingly satirical to the phantasmagorical. Hence for example ’The Moscow Vampire’ (1906) is a monsterised version of Moscow’s oppressive Governor-General Dubasov. In one publication Gorky described the old order as “more animal than human. Morbid, lustful, intoxicated with suffering, cruelty and blood, their one aim to gorge themselves, their one pleasure to have power over others”. Gramsci was to say “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”. (True,not until 1930 and it’ssomething of a mistranslation. Butit’s too appropriate not to use.)

But when you combine the conventions of political cartoons with phantasmagorical imagery, aren’t they actually more likely to clash? One is by nature demeaning, bringing down the mighty and powerful. (Think of our current crop of Tsars and Governor-Generals – Theresa May, Boris Johnston, Donald Trump. Do they resemble all-powerful otherworldly monsters, or are they just petty creatures, fumbling with powers handed to them by their money and status, walking examples of the banality of evil?)

While the other is by nature unnatural, suggesting things on the border of our perceptions, whose mere existence may be enough to break our world apart. Fantastical literature often makes explicit the notion of the liminal, spaces overlapping ours which we’ve so long trained ourselves to shield our eyes from that we no longer realise they exist. They never look like metaphors, they look more like the fullness of reality laid bare now the artist has stripped the illusions from our eyes.

Furthermore, personifications of concepts can be frustratingly anti-political, a way of shutting down any consideration of the social causes of phenomena. War and Famine just show up like surprise guests, arbitrary arrivals. But here they’re so visceral! Those shrieking faces simultaneously shock us and mock us with their familiarity. They never seem reducible to allegory, even if that was their original impetus.

Boris Kustodiev’s ’Invasion’ (1905, above) did make it into the show, albeit retitled to ’Moscow: Entry’, and is interesting for two reasons. First it has compositional similarities to his later ’The Bolshevik’ (1920), discussed as part of the Academy show. Both feature a gargantuan figure striding out of an avenue, which lies like a ditch around his ankles, coming towards the viewer. But these similarities merely underline the differences.

His Bolshevik stands boldly upright, face proud yet impassive. He arises out of the masses who surround his feet, their champion. Whereas the invading skeleton steps into a no-mans-land between two warring groups, representing neither side but the conflict itself. Hunched, grimacing, bloodied in hand and foot, he’s a feral beast.

There’s a similarity between him and the horse-riding skeleton of ’Peace and Quiet’, (1906) who gallops over a landscape strewn with corpses. The situation depicted is not triumphalist but out of all control… in fact the artwork itself seems out of all control! The artist seems merely a seismograph, a mute witness, channelling forces beyond him.

Factories Make Workers

Dmitri Moor’s post-revolutionary ‘Death To World Imperialism’ (1919) similarly personalises the enemy, in a work as visually striking as any of its 1905 forebears. But two things happen at once. The art is much sharper and slicker, coloured concentric circles making up an elegant sun. And the fiery-eyed serpent is not some beast from beyond but a clear visualisation of capitalism. It might as well have the word stamped on it, as allegorical cartoons can do.

While the amassed, unified ranks of sailors, workers and peasants are not victims beneath it but worthy adversaries. It’s like the conceit in a horror film where being able to name the monster, reduce it to a specific meaning, is akin to being able to defeat it.

For all that, however, the monster figure is still characterised as unnatural. The serpent does not belong to the buildings (seemingly a fusion of factory and living space), it’s extra-diegetic, a thing from outside inserted between the workers and their workplace. In many ways understandably, given that this was during the war with the Whites, when Russia was under attack. But which still suggests that all that’s wrong with capitalism is the capitalist, that the problem of capitalism reduces to a problem of ownership.

After all, through this time wage labour wasn’t just continuing but being ruthlessly expanded. Though it may be we see the weakness of such an image more clearly now. For as time went on such images of monstrous capitalists became more and more anti-semitic, built on the insidious lie that once we rid ourselves of one scapegoat group all will be fine.

Similarly Adolf Strakhov’s ’Emancipated Woman: Build Socialism’, (1926, above) aligns and compares the red banner of the poster girl with the factory chimneys. She herself has not just a steely gaze but a metallic grey complexion, as she looks past us to the future. You’ve compared her to machinery before you even meant to.

While in Aleksandr Deneka’s ’A Puzzle For the Old Man’ (1926, above), God gazes aghast at women labouring in a factory. In another meta device a thick black frame is introduced in order to place him outside of it, gazing as if through a window. The ‘natural order’ of things is reversed. Unlike the serpent, God’s already been banished.

”The Journey of Modernisation”

Gustav Klutsis’s ’Under the Banner of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin’ (1933, above) is a clear echo of Isaac Brodsky’s painting ’Vladimir Lenin and a Demonstration’ (1919), again part of the Academy show. In both, scale displays the relative importance of the revolutionary leader and the masses. With the twin exceptions that Klutsis is less interested in fidelity to pictorial space, and that he gives us four leaders for our money. 

Of course, this is Stalin keen to insert himself into a lineage, as usurping Kings would. (Though he later had Klutsis killed regardless. Contrary to the official slogan, the innocent had very much to fear.) But more’s going on...

Under the four heads there’s an orthodox Marxist version of a Darwinian timeline, more clearly viewable in a larger version here. To the left, under Marx, they’re something of a disordered rabble, clutching primitive weapons. (Presumably representing the revolts of 1848.) By the time we reach Stalin they’re marching boldly out of the frame, beneath a power line. And these evolutionary timelines, described in the guidebook as “the journey of modernisation”, are everywhere.

Alexander’s Dienkenka’s 1937 mural plans for the Soviet Pavilion at the International Exposition only exist as three ‘painterly sketches’, which the show arranges as originally planned. Two long works, labelled ‘1917’ (above) and ‘1937’ are placed facing one another and leading into a third - ’Stakhanovites, 1937’. Each long work effectively doubles as a timeline in it’s own right; in ‘1917’ ostensibly workers take up arms for the revolution but they also leave the fields for the town. 

In ‘Stakhanovites’ a parade of model workers stride boldly out of the frame. The once ubiquitous revolutionary red now exists only at the sides of the image, the main figures are in shades of white which barely distinguish themselves from their background. It’s as if they’re marching into a secularised heaven.

At one point in the show a schoolbook quotes Lenin: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country”. Communism and industry were then seen as synonymous. History was teleological, urbanisation and industrialisation were not merely prerequisites for communism, but steps in it’s inevitable development. 

In short, as part of their factory fetish, history was itself conceived of as a production line. Basic materials went in one end, and were transformed by inexorable processes into sophisticated products. And people were similarly transformed through this process, from simple peasants into self-aware proletarians. Except unlike famous quasi-Darwinian timeline instead of an abstracted upright man at the far end, in this quasi-communist variant there’s a worker with a cap clutching a hammer.

Today, as we’re mired so deeply in neoliberalism, those neat lines look absurd and schematic. But back then it was widespread. True, it’s so widely disseminated in the posters as it was such a handy get-out for the Bolsheviks. Anyone who pointed out that they were still wage-labourers working for a boss class could be dismissed as overly impatient. All we had to do was wait for things to take their course. (Contrary to popular belief they never actually claimed the Soviet Union was communist, instead it was held to be ‘socialist’ or proto-communist.) But it wasn’t a notion which started with, nor was limited to them. Which only made its use more effective in their hands.

The Fold-Out Future

What might be the most ingeniously creative material of the show are the “montage books” of El Lissitzky and Sophie Lissitzky-Kuppers, or Rodchenko and Stepanova, an outpouring of ingenuity – often with elaborate inserts and fold-outs. ’USSR In Construction’ (1935, cover above), was roughly A3 in size, its twelfth issue ambitiously featuring a fold-out parachute. Its subject matter was always some aspect of the USSR and it was perhaps a metonym of the USSR as it saw itself – bold, over-size, innovative.

El Lissitzky himself insisted ”in the new order of society there will no longer be small groups producing luxuries for a restricted stratum of society but… work [will be] done by everyone for everyone.” Yet despite such lofty goals, the show suggests these fancy affairs, with their high production values, were more often used to impress foreign contacts than shown to the workers.

For the 1928 International Press Exhibition Lissitzky and Sergei Senkin designed ’The Task of The Press is the Education of the Masses’ a twenty-three metre photomontage also reproduced as a brochure. In yet another meta gesture it’s subject was the Soviet Pavilion itself (below), with it’s three-dimensional and mobile elements.

Yet we were feeling exceptionally skeptical, we could claim the Pavilion was an idealised version of a factory sprung from the brow of a clean-fingered Futurist, like Alexander Dienka’s ’Textile Workers’ (again from the Academy show) full of smoothly moving parts, without the grease and sweat.

From Tragedy To Farce

King collected so many pictures of Trotsky his house came to be nicknamed “Trotski-lodge”. And he wrote a whole book, ’The Commissar Vanishes’ (1997) on Stalin’s subsequent attempts to ‘disappear’ him and other similarly inconvenient figures from history.

Here a room is given over to reiterating this point. Though it’s a point most were familiar with to start with. And if anything these laboursome pre-Photoshop patch-ups seem innocents in the art of smooth stage-managed lying, compared to Fox News and Russia Today. The time spent on them seems still more mistaken when you think how quickly 1905 was rushed over.

Admittedly, it best demonstrates what a black farce the purges were, like a game of Murder in the Dark with deadly consequences. This is best caught by the cover of King’s book (below); as more and more of Stalin’s compatriots displease him they’re removed, until the whole group is gone – leaving him alone.

And something else crops up. When we look back on the era, our natural tendency is to assume everyone sussed Stalinism but also saw the sense in staying scutum. But the show also displays personal copies of official photos, also amended. Some reviews suggested this would have been done out of compliance or fear, but the images themselves don’t back that up.

Some have the offending figure neatly cut out as if that image was cancerous, in others it’s vigorously excised in a frenzy of scratching – either way, unlike the more surgical official changes, the eye’s naturally taken to the act of elimination. A fearful soul would more likely have thrown away the whole photo. They’re more the actions of someone, after a bitter break-up, scouring their ex from their holiday snaps. Which may suggest more kept the faith under Stalinism than we like to think.

Propaganda As Mass Production

After a Thirties largely devoted to Uncle Joe and glowing grain fields the war years saw a new quality in propaganda art, perhaps reflecting its newfound purpose. Even the hand-stencilled images of the Civil War era returned, out of sheer necessity, often produced by TASS (the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union). But the formal similarity reveals the changes. These works are much slicker, and so look more modern – in the wrong way. Once everything looked slightly rough and ready, like maps scrawled quickly on a napkin of places semi-built. Now it looks realised, complete, no space for change or addition. This is propaganda as mass production.

After Stalin had reversed many of the equality measures for women, war requirements drove a return to the emancipation imagery, as seen earlier with Strakhov. Fedor Antonov’s ’Let’s Rebuild Stalingrad’ (stencil poster, 1943, above) features a woman brickie. Though, sporting some unlikely lipstick, she looks more like a posing model while the less photogenic workers are kept out of sight. It suggests by this point that Moscow was competing with Hollywood as much as Washington. And for another example take Victor Koretsky’s photo-posters, often retouched with paint to achieve the required hyper-reality. (See ’Red Army Soldier, Save Us’, 1942, below).

Similarly, the photographs of Yevgeny Khaldei are searingly powerful images. In ‘Murmansk’ (1941, below), the remaining chimney breasts of the bombed city standing like graves to the gone buildings, reminds you of Ballard’s phrase “war is surreal”. But he was not above pasting in those foreboding clouds from another image. He also took the famous ’Soviet Soldiers Raising the Red Flag Over the Reichstag’ (1945) as Berlin was taken, which most people now know was staged.

Learning Nothing From History (A How-to Guide)

Michael Glover commented in the Independent “this exhibition is for the likes of we old-guard pinkish nostalgists”. And sadly he may be right. In a complete contrast to the endless swill unleashed during the centenary of the First World War, and despite the two events being so inimically connected, it’s notable how muted the centenary of the Revolution has been. In fact it’s barely been noted outside of galleries, reduced to an aesthetic movement. (When, as I’ve hopefully demonstrated, you can’t even understand the art without the political context.)

But alas even that has been under attack. Numerous educated idiots have been insisting these shows should never have happened, lest it lead attendees to try and re-annexe East Germany after they’ve exited via gift shop. (Which seems part of a wider trend. There was for example Peter Hitchen’s absurd response to the black comedy ‘The Death of Stalin.’)

The point here isn’t that I’m not a Stalinist, though obviously I’m not. The point is that I don’t even know any bloody Stalinists, because it’s not a remotely credible position. So the notion that “the metropolitan elite” had some secret Stalinist agenda to unload, via the cunningly devised means of curating shows at central London galleries… of course it’s beyond ludicrous. King himself devoted a whole book to cataloguing the terror of Stalinism (‘Ordinary Citizens: The Victims of Stalin’, 2003), a subject which came up in all three exhibitions. Stalin bad. Known thing.

A favourite argument was to ask whether there’d be a similar exhibition of fascist art. Somewhat overlooking the Tate’s Futurist and Vorticist shows. Or the Estorick collection of (mostly) Futurist art now celebrating its twentieth year. All achieved without attracting Antifa mobs.

But then of course the point of such stuff isn’t to sound convincing, it’s to set an agenda. It’s the equivalent of a boxer taking a broad swipe. He know it won’t land, he just wants to keep his opponent on the defensive. You can respond by insisting you don’t support Stalinism, only to be endlessly told your protestations are too feeble and you need to try harder. Pretty soon, you’ve devoted days to the hopeless task. While all the time the actual questions go unasked.

Besides, if we’re to reduce art to it’s political surroundings in this crudely deterministic way shouldn’t we be saying that, for example, Turner exhibitions shouldn’t go ahead because of the horrors associated with enclosure and enforced industrialisation? If you’re going to be an idiot, you could at least be a consistent idiot.

But more to the point, this is from the very same berks who tell us we need to “listen” to the far right, because otherwise we’re not being “inclusive”. We all became wearily familiar with the false equivalence between fascism and communism, where calling for all Jewish, gay and disabled people to be murdered was seen as interchangeable with saying workers should get the gains of their own labours. But now we’re sufficiently softened up by that, to the point everyone repeats it back without ever thinking to run a sanity check on it, it’s time for the next step.

From now on, we need to listen to fascists, otherwise it isn’t fair. But no-one should ever listen to us, because that wouldn’t be fair. Quick, look away! Don’t even consider the idea another world might be possible. It’s like stepping on the cracks. Those Russian bears will get you.

Coming soon! More behind-the-times art reviews...