Social Class 9

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering - because you can't take it in all at once.

Audrey Hepburn

Today started with a touch of innocence when I lifted the window blinds. There was a boy in the street with his mum, both waving at the passing rubbish collectors (Japanese equivalent of bin-men) who in turn waved heartily back. Such an endearing sight, as if straight from the tacky alleys of Disneyland. Except this was a show of a child’s genuine wonder. And no wonder these men in pastel-green uniforms turned at once dignified and impassioned.

Such scene would be harder to imagine in the gritty environs of, say, any impoverished country in Asia. North Korea would be an obvious exception, where I imagine schoolkids are told to wave red flags and sing songs of praise as the proud rubbish collectors cruise the streets, picking whatever meagre waste there is to pick.

The weather was absolutely gorgeous today – crisp, sunny, the air feather-light. At about 2 pm I decided to make my move. I got on a bike and cycled to downtown Kyoto. I had previously made a tentative plan to pay a visit to this particular art gallery, based on their poster which showed a urban scene from an unidentified country, presumably in the southeast Asia.

The gallery was somewhat difficult to locate as it was tucked in on the third floor of a nondescript block of flats – simply a flat converted into a gallery space. I opened the door without knocking. There was nobody inside apart from a woman at a desk behind a sort of folding screen (she was constantly on the phone during my 10-minute visit). When I entered she protruded her head from behind the screen and we smiled in acknowledgement.

The installation itself consisted of a 3-minute video loop projection (shot by a car-cam) and about a dozen of photograph prints depicting peopled cityscapes. Those taken on the streets of Vietnam (presumably Hanoi, the Old Quarter) were the most striking. The author, John Einarsen, is partial to blue-collar folks going about their daily routine – be it twiddling thumbs at a bird shop, washing pots and plastic potties, or revolving pieces of meat on a skewer.

Each (neatly framed) print actually carries a price tag of ¥20.000, that’s about €200. That these ‘photographic items’ are on sale is hardly surprising in our age of global commercialism. I imagined what sort of people would want to buy prints of the impoverished metropolitan ordinariness. The same middleclass philistine, I thought, who finds the aesthetic value in the exoticism of the under-privileged. The same sick middleclass kind who would hang these photos on their bedroom wall to glance at while having their middleclass shag in their middleclass comfy beds. That’s who, I thought.

And yet, to the casual observer like myself, these scenes also deliver a touch of colour, or at least the kind of surreal absurdity almost exclusive to the poorest stratum of any society. On one photo there is an untieable knot of umpteen electric and telephone wires that can be tolerated only by the ‘underclass’ and that makes you think how on earth they were put up there in the first place. On another there is a man’s head sticking out of a house tarpaulin cover and under him a street vendor with hands in his pockets and a body posture of someone who couldn’t care less. On another there is a cat trapped in a birdcage. On another there is laundry drying on a clothes line sponging up the smoke from a grilled meat takeaway underneath.

This kind of pathos evokes Italian and Yugoslav social satire films from the 60’s and 70’s. Directors like Fellini, Pasolini, Aleksandar Petrović, early Kusturica. But one particular film sprang to mind while I was at the gallery, that by Ettore Scola: ‘Brutti, sporchi e cattivi’ a.k.a. ‘Ugly, Dirty and Bad’ (1976). This was one of my favourites back in my formative years – I remember how we used to act out the whole scenes by heart. This synopsis from IMDB sums it up pretty well:

Four generations of a family live crowded together in a cardboard shantytown shack in the squalor of inner-city Rome. They plan to murder each other with poisoned dinners, arson, etc. The household engages in various forms of sexual idiosyncrasies, land swindles, incest, drugs and adultery.

Here we go: the (in)famous part in which the family has for once united in order to poison their miserly head of household, magnificently portrayed by Nino Manfredi. Warning: definitely NOT for the squeamish.

Staying Interactive: Post Scriptum

As a fitting and timely post-scriptum to my previous post, this story came out in The Guardian last week, concerning a certain art gallery cleaner who thought a sculpture of a German artist Martin Kippenberger needed a bit of good old scrubbing:

“The work, called When It Starts Dripping From the Ceiling (Wenn's anfängt durch die Decke zu tropfen), comprised a rubber trough placed underneath a rickety wooden tower made from slats. Inside the trough, Kippenberger had spread a layer of paint representing dried rainwater. He thought it was art: the cleaner saw it as a challenge, and set about making the bucket look like new.” [http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/nov/03/overzealous-cleaner-ruins-artwork]

A very similar thing happened in 1986 to a ‘grease stain’ by Joseph Beuys, famous for his environmental pieces; to a plastic bag in 2004 at Tate Britain, a work by Gustav Metzger; to Damien Hirst’s beer bottles and coffee cups in 2001. In 1961 Piero Manzoni of the Conceptual Art movement, however, managed to flog his ‘art’ – tins containing the artist’s excrement – before an anxious cleaner could get too close. Incidentally, two of the tins were auctioned for €124,000 in 2007 and £97,250 in 2008 respectively. As to the contents of the tins, it seems they indeed contain crap – art as crap, crap as art, crap art: “Manzoni's girlfriend Nanda Vigo, who helped him produce the cans, claimed the contents really were faeces. Vigo's assertion is disputed by Manzoni's brother and sister, but some cans have leaked and confirmed they are indeed faeces — though whether human or animal has not been verified. An art dealer from the Gallery Blu in Milan claims to have detected a faecal odour emanating from a can.” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist’s_Shit]
One can only imagine what Nanda's 'help' actually consisted of.
 

Staying Interactive

Ever since Duchamp threw the bottle rack and the urinal in our faces ready-made objects never looked the same again – for better or for worse. He was most likely thinking along the lines of ‘If it’s signed and you can’t piss in it, it’s got to be art’¹, and that’s all very well. Still, groundbreaking ideas like Duchamp’s work only so far. It doesn’t mean that if you or I, in Duchamp’s words, ‘took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - created a new thought for that object'², it would ever make it to a gallery, let alone be considered art. I can’t simply place my old sock or a burnt frying pan on the pavement and put up a flashing green sign in front of it. No, that would not work because the aura of the artist, and even more the aura of an exhibition space remain and will always be the determining factors. Then there are further, no less important questions like: what if the objects we consider art are in fact not? Why, for instance, Tracy Emin’s unmade Bed is art and my unmade bed isn’t? Why is, or why should, my bed be more, or less, displaced than hers? Recently a friend of mine overheard two people in a gallery commenting at great length on the significance of a baby pram which stood on the floor amongst other various objet d’art, and while they were establishing the pram’s fine points of interconnectedness a mother came back with her baby and walked off with the pram, leaving our experts dumbfounded. Duchamp:

People took modern art very seriously when it first reached America because they believed we took ourselves very seriously (…) A great deal of modern art is meant to be amusing. If Americans would simply remember their own sense of humour instead of listening to the critics, modern art will come into its own.³

Duchamp furthered his readymades in the 1920s when he used glass plates to build motorized optical machines as experiments in optical illusion. Rotary Glass Plates (1920), composed of five glass plates painted in black and white, invites the viewer to become an active participant in the art by turning on the optical machine then observing it from one meter away. From that distance the rotating device would create an illusion of continuous concentric circles all on the same plane. Marcel didn’t consider these as ‘art’ per se as he was merely interested in the inconsistencies of the human eye, i.e. the fact that the eye retains an image for a fraction of a second after it has disappeared. Nevertheless, his mechanical contraptions from the 1920s were the true forerunners of what we now label ‘interactive art’. Incidentally, Duchamp’s experiments are apparently considered to stand for ‘pre-historic screensavers’⁴, anticipating the free-associative, kaleidoscopic moving images on our computer screens some seventy years later – remember After Dark, Ribbons, Flying in Space etc.? Similarly, Duchamp’s ‘Optical Disks’ and ‘Disks Bearing Spirals’ directly led to the first ‘3D’ film ever shot – Anémic Cinéma (1926).  This six-minute film has alternating shots of moving spirals which at times create a 3D effect, and shots of texts mounted on rotating disks which the viewers read from the outside inwards. The text sets are in French and – being French and Duchamp’s – carry a potent erotic subtext, which, again, requires the viewer’s interpretation.

Personally I am all for audience interaction: the viewer becoming part of the view, the visitor becoming part of an exhibit. Recently I visited, and became a willing part of, an installation at Kyoto Art Centre (for those of you who live in Kyoto, this is a converted primary school – well worth a visit if only for its Meiji era corridors and classrooms with creaky floorboards) whereby the audience participated by moving body parts and thus creating weird sounds and noises. My ‘performance’ was (un)luckily captured on camera

A few lines I wrote after the experience: 

Duped

after Tadasu Takamine’s ‘Japan Syndrome, The Other Side of the Ball’

I get myself duped, and voluntarily so.

Room One sports a screen

flanked by smaller screens. I stand

on a dotted line, in front a sensor,

limbs twitching undulating

into sound-shrapnel of reckless din –

a New Millennium Theremin.

Room Two across the courtyard

sports a screen, invariably blurry.

On it not a thing moves

till a stranger enters Room One

flapping her limbs about

like a more amiable fool.

Got ourselves duped, and happily so.

References:

1 – R. Appignanesi: Introducing Postmodernism, Icon Books, 1999, p.35.

2 – 'The Richard Mutt Case', The Blind Man, New York, no.2, May 1917, p.5.

3 – Tomkins, Calvin: Duchamp. A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. p. 226

[http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_5/articles/dur/dur7.html]

4 – http://transmissiondifficulties.vancouverartinthesixties.com/images/ScreenSaver.pdf

Blue Riders

Last Friday’s visit to Kandinsky retrospective at ‘Hyogo Bijutsukan’, which revolved around his Blue Rider period (1911-14), made me reread extracts from his essay published in the Blaue Reiter Almanac (1912), which in turn were reproduced in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (one of the few theory books I shipped from UK to Japan nine years ago).

For the uninitiated, the Blue Rider was a coterie of artists, a movement of sorts, including among others, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Gabriele Münter, August Macke, Jawlensky, Schoenberg. The group published an Almanac and held two exhibitions (WW1 cut the movement short). Kandinsky's writing on the problem of form in The Blue Rider Almanac is considered as one of the first and best defences as well as promotions of abstract art, his ideas quickly catching up especially in the English speaking world. Here are a couple of extracts from the Almanac:

If the reader is able to free himself for a while from his own wishes, his own thoughts, his own feelings and skims through this book, going from a votive picture to Delaunay, from Cezanne to a Russian folk print, from a mask to Picasso, from a glass painting to Kubin, etc., etc., then his soul will experience many vibrations and he will enter into the world of art. Here he will not be bothered by outrageous defects or aggravating errors. Instead he will experience a spiritual plus instead of a minus. 

                                                            […]

The artist, whose life is comparable to a child’s in many respects, frequently can reach the inner sound more easily than anyone else. In this respect it is especially interesting to see how the composer Arnold Schönberg paints — simply and confidently. As a rule he is interested only in the inner sound. He omits, without regard, all embellishments and refinements and ‘poorest’ form in his hands becomes the richest (his self-portrait, for example).

                                                            […]

In order to ‘understand’ [an abstract] picture the same liberation as in realism is necessary, i.e., here too one must learn to hear the whole world exactly as it is without any representational interpretation. And in such work abstract forms (lines, planes, spots etc.) are not important as such, but only as inner sound, as life.

                                                           

For Kandinsky it seems colours and sound are one, or at least interchangeable. Schoenberg ‘paints’ with his music, and in turn music permeates abstract art. Kandinsky, himself an accomplished musician — he learned the piano and cello at an early age — claimed that when he saw colour he heard music. He even went as far as associating colour tone with timbre, hue with pitch, and saturation with the volume of sound!

Kandinsky incorporated musicality early on in his pointillistic works, employing mottled dots and blobs of colour. One such work was on display at Hyogo Gallery: Russian Beauty in a Landscape (1905), through which, in Kandinsky’s own words, he tried to ‘express the musical spirit of Russia’. These referential qualities, as we know, are gone once Kandinsky embraces abstraction: the later paintings are left to their own, self-referential, vibratory devices (or the lack of them). I stayed with one such painting — Composition VII — for some time and the experience was rewarding as I was able to draw out a host of ‘small pleasures’ from the lines and shapes dancing, floating, hovering, rebounding or blending into each other.

But no matter how invigorating Kandinsky’s abstract work may be, I think one should be always on guard against the overinterpretation, careful not to ‘overstay’ a painting’s welcome. One of the pleasures of abstract painting, after all, is that you can always come back to it and detect musical intricacies anew. Actually, I’ll be totally honest here: the main reason I went to the exhibition (it took me good two hours by train in one direction) was to see Paul Klee’s painting Cacti (1912). Or let’s put it this way: if it hadn’t been for Klee I doubt I would have gone. Yes, it is all to do with my fixation with the plant, with the fact it was painted by my current painting hero, and of course with the title of this blog.

I was immediately attracted to Klee’s cactussen for their subdued colours, the picture unusually dark for such prickly, palpable species, as if saying ‘don’t waste time on me, I am obviously not that special’. Yet the more I looked at the painting the more I got convinced there was more to it than just the sinister-looking pots — who can tell for sure what those teeth-like projections inside the middle pot are? And where is the blinking cactus in that one?! Isn’t it altogether missing? It made me feel a bit disconcerted at the time. Days later I came across this anecdote which, I felt, almost vindicated my previous ignorance. In 1895 Kandinsky saw Monet’s Haystacks at Giverny, after which experience he later stated: "It was from the catalogue I learned this was a haystack. I was upset I had not recognized it. I also thought the painter had no right to paint in such an imprecise fashion. Dimly I was aware too that the object did not appear in the picture..." (http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/kandinsky/).

I was also happy to see a number of paintings by Kandinsky’s friends from the Blue Rider group — Münter, Macke, Jawlensky. One that struck me in particular was Gabriele Münter’s Jawlensky, Werefkin (1908-9), in which she paints the couple in a leisurely yet rather enigmatic pose while resting upon the green hillside. One is never completely sure as to the nature of their current sentiment — whether they are in love, or upset with each other, plain indifferent, whatever. The blank faces and plain flowers may add to the feeling of tranquillity, but for me the absence of facial features only raises the emotional stakes in this kind of painting. And then there is that ominous-looking yellow bolt that splits the sky…

My tour ended some 90 minutes and three gallery rooms later, still enough to tire me out as I hardly could stand on my two feet. I ended up buying a Kandinsky A4 folder, a B2 Blue Rider poster (which now hangs in my room), and a ‘3D Stereo Viewer’. Kandinsky would have been proud. Well, I came across this telling anecdote related to the old man Kandinsky’s worsening eyesight (and some would say worsening art).

The year was 1944. Kandinsky had died on December 3rd of that year after coping with failing health since early March. By the summer his eyes had become almost permanently half-closed. After his death his widow Nina explained that he possessed the rare talent of being able to represent in his mind the world of his paintings with their colours and their forms, exactly as he later set them down on canvas. It has been suggested that these forms, their myriads of rings swimming across the surface of the work, were the effects of phosphenes that can be impressed on the eyeball when the eyes are closed. Towards the end of his life Kandinsky would have been painting what he was seeing with his eyes closed. That might suggest that he lost his grip on reality to some extent, but Nina says not.

http://picsandpoems.blogspot.com/2009/03/kandinsky-did-it-first.html

‘I shut my eyes in order to see’, said Gauguin. Finally, do have a look at this cool kinetic Kandinsky. Who knows, this is how the man himself might have seen it with the help of those phosphenes.

Klee Rules

Seeing Paul Klee’s paintings first hand is a great experience. The current exhibition at MOMAK (National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto) entitled ‘Klee: Art in the Making’, has been beckoning for weeks. I finally made it this past Sunday, at first having to wait for a hailstorm to clear off – it rained for the best part of the afternoon.

There is so much music and rhythm in Paul’s work. The paintings are beautiful in their duality: on the one hand intuitive, poetic, spiritual; on the other organized, orderly, architectural. Someone described Klee’s drawings in Pedagogical Sketchbook as ‘creative arithmetic’ — nicely summed up. The MOMAK exhibition, as the title suggests, sheds light on the actual process and methods Klee used to produce his art. The methods were paramount to him: from 1911 onwards, Klee kept an ongoing list of his works as each entry included, beside a title, a detailed description of the techniques used. In this Klee was a fanatic: the earliest entry relates to the work from 1883, when he was only four years old. Klee documented this "working process" with photographs of his atelier in various periods (spot Klee in his Bern studio, 1926), and even marked certain paintings as "Sonderklasse (Special Class)", ‘keeping these works at hand to use as models to reflect on’. Klee’s techniques were varied, and the exhibition outlines them into four distinct parts, evidently following Klee’s own categorizations:

Process 1: “Ölpause — Oilpause” (sketches colourized, only slightly modified)

Process 2: “Zerschnitten/Neukombiniert — Cut/Reassemble”

Process 3: “Teilstücke — Parts” (“non-symmetrical balance”)

Process 4: “Recto/Verso — Two-sided Sheet” (IR scans reveal the underlying images, which seem to have little to do with the painting itself, apart from a possible thematic inspiration — one such very spare painting has a background drawing of what looks a heavily tattooed Hell’s Angel-type fella with a mean-looking mutt on the leash! How progressive is that!)

The above methods are not unlike how a modern poet, especially one equipped with a word-processor, might compose verse. I recall an interview with the poet Hugo Williams in the ‘Horizon Review’, in which he was asked about the materials he uses to write with — here is Hugo’s answer:

A pen, which never leaves the house; a beautiful Parker. After that I type it out, then handwrite it, and it goes back and forth from typing to writing until I’m happy with it. One thing I do sometimes is type out individual units, bits that stick together. Very often I find though that I don’t know what order things are in, so I have to find that out by getting a beginning and an end. Then, to find the middle bits, I make strips of paper with the text and move them around on a desk. I suppose that’s what people do with computers but I just do it on the desk.                       

 [http://www.saltpublishing.com/horizon/issues/03/text/brown_phil.htm]

Another important work from the MOMAK exhibition is Klee’s Tightrope Walker (1923). The whole drawing is hovering, like its protagonist, between the tragic and the comic. The work has been commonly interpreted as a metaphor for a precarious existence of a modern man, yet Klee used this particular piece for an even more important end: to demonstrate his dynamic concept of space and perception. In the aforementioned Pedagogical Sketchbook Klee’s tightrope walker with a bamboo stick is ‘emphatically concerned about his balance. He calculates the Gravity on both ends. He is the scale’ (p. 42). As he walks the balance is alternately disturbed and restored, left to right, right to left. Klee uses this elegant metaphor to allude to the subjectivity of human perception. As Sibyl Moholy-Nagy explains in her introduction: ‘Man, precariously balanced on two unstable legs, uses optical illusion as a safety device. Horizon as concrete fact, and horizon as an imaginary safety belt that has to be believed in…’ (p.10). Indeed, Klee shows us another example:

 

asking if the representation of the house wall is incorrect. He concludes that it is not incorrect logically (as the lower windows are larger perspectively since they are closer to the eye), but are incorrect phychologically, because ‘every creature, in order to preserve his balance, insists on seeing actual verticals projected as such’ (p.41). Klee’s idea of balance is non-symmetrical though. It is achieved through the ‘equalization of unequal but equivalent parts’. Here is Klee’s illustration:

As Moholy-Nagy puts it: ‘The purely material balance of the scale finds its counter-part in the purely psychological balance of light and dark, weightless and heavy colours’ (p.10). Klee thus challenges our conventional perception, ushering us into the world of metaphysical and spiritual — his invitation to approach art intuitively. This ‘transition from observation to intuition’ defines, as Moholy-Nagy suggests, Klee’s deepest axiomatic wisdom: TO STAND DESPITE ALL POSSIBILITIES TO FALL! Sounds cool. I should hang this up above my writing desk.

Klee’s concepts and speculations are no less fascinating than his paintings. Having so far only scratched the surface, I will keep probing and investigating. Expect further musings on Paul Klee. To wrap this entry up, here is a 4 minute video of Klee’s few paintings as they drift in and out of a low-key jazzy tune. The beauty of juxtaposition.

April 27, 2011

Songs for Classic Guitar and a Voice #1

A SONG FOR YOUNG MATISSE

A young Matisse made a stop

On the tiny island of Belle Ile

To gaze at a single colour

A thick intense colour

That wore intense colours on top

And within each even more

You see

He’s never seen a colour be-fore

He’s never seen a colour be-fore

Oh but it’s never too late…

He gazed and gazed all day long

While John Russell’s beautiful wife

Made biscuits and coffee strong

Said Russell’s wife would you like

Some biscuits & coffee strong

Some biscuits & coffee strong

You see

He’s never seen a beauty be-fore

He’s never seen a beauty be-fore

Oh but it’s never too late…

On the tenth day Matisse left

The tiny island of Belle Ile

For by now he felt a bit unwell

Like a gust of air he left

Was it by now all too belle

To be bearable at all

You see

He couldn’t stand it any more more

He couldn’t stand it any more more…

Suggested chords: E – G / E – A – G / D – A 

Matisse’s greatest contribution to art—his celebration of colour as an expressive force independent of a descriptive function—developed not from his formal training but from his personal life. The artist came from a drab city in the north, characterized by grey skies. His only exposure to colour and light came in the rich textiles produced in his region. A turning point in Matisse’s art came during his stays on Belle-Ile-en-Mer in Brittany during the summers of 1895–1897. Particularly important to Matisse was an Australian painter, John Peter Russell, who ran an art colony on the island that owed a great deal to the theories of van Gogh, his late friend and former classmate. Matisse credited Russell with introducing him to the Impressionists’ theories of light and colour, especially to the contributions of Monet. 

from The New Criterion, January 1999. 

Review of The Unknown Matisse A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1909 by Hilary Spurling

Link:

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/matisse-wayne-2948