I came across an online clip of a song, ‘Proserpina’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEIFsm4PQnU), almost certainly filmed on someone’s mobile phone, that I found unexpectedly touching, and I sent a link to a friend who I thought might enjoy it. She replied straight away, saying that it was both wonderful and very emotional. I was sufficiently intrigued to try to discover just why it had that effect on us, and presumably on many other people too. Part of the answer to that question is clear. ‘Proserpina’ was the last and poignant song written by the Canadian singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle before she died in 2010. It tells the story of the Roman goddess who was abducted by Pluto and taken to the underworld, and how her mother, Ceres, laments her disappearance and walks the earth looking for her. Proserpina eventually returns, but only temporarily, establishing a cycle that has mythically been associated with the reappearance of verdant spring after the desolation of winter. The song’s melody is plaintive and full of yearning, and ever since Kate McGarrigle’s death it has been used as a kind of anthem by her children, Rufus and Martha Wainwright. Often performed at the end of concerts and frequently accompanied by family members and close friends, it is a moving testament to her memory, and my own response to it, having long liked their music and once having spent a little time with Kate and her sister Anna, is warmly melancholic.
The somewhat rough and ragged nature of the video clip, as well as the performance itself, add to their emotional authenticity. It is affecting to see Kate’s children, sisters, ex-husband, and various close friends (including Emmylou Harris) sharing a spirit of communal celebration, and their overwhelming tenderness does much to heighten the power of the moment. You sense their love and vulnerability, and how these qualities are communicated to each other and the audience. Above all, you feel the performers’ connectedness, their oneness, and how they belong together; as a viewer, however distanced, you somehow became a small part of that encounter.
This feeling of oneness and connection is not normally considered an aesthetic experience, although it is common enough at artistic events, especially when they’re musical, but it is often found at other communal gatherings, both big and small. This was confirmed by some internet exploration, which quickly revealed that the phenomenon is well known and called kama muta, a Sanskrit phrase that has been loosely defined as a ‘sudden experience of oneness - of love, belonging, or union - with an individual person, family, team, nation, cosmos, or God’. According to one website I visited, the immediate effects of kama muta may include a warm sensation in the chest, tears in the eyes, a lump in your throat, irregular or deep breathing, and - especially afterwards - a sense of exhilaration. Overall, the emotion is intense and comforting, and most of us will recognise it.
The term kama muta is usually translated as ‘moved by love’, and although that is fairly accurate, it is rarely added that kama is a word for sensuous ‘desire’ or ‘longing’, and often, more specifically, for sexual desire. Some academic writers are aware of this ambiguity, but nonetheless continue to use the term to describe the feeling that is generally agreed to be caused by ‘a sudden intensification of communal sharing’. It is also widely suggested that this is a universal emotion, common to people in diverse and different cultures, and there seems to be no reason to suppose otherwise. Rarely is it mentioned, however, that kama muta can easily be aroused by emotional manipulation, both benign, as in the case of deliberate sentimentality or exaggerated emotionalism, and corrosive, as can sometimes be experienced at gatherings that generate a pleasant feeling of solidarity at the expense of other people.
The concept of kama muta may perhaps be useful to identify a certain kind of agreeable social experience, but it is less helpful when applied to aesthetics. To continue within an Indian context, the aesthetic experience of 'oneness' is more fully and accurately defined by the theory of rasa. The Sanskrit word generally means ‘taste’, ‘essence’, or ‘flavour’, but in aesthetics it goes beyond that and often refers to the feelings of joy and transcendence that an audience feels when absorbed and moved by a work of art. Impossible to define adequately, rasa functions by arousing dominant emotions such as passion, laughter, sorrow, anger, compassion, fear, and wonder, and then transmuting them into aesthetic pleasure or delight. In a spiritual context the idea is taken even further. For example, according to the philosopher Shankara, rasa refers to a form of bliss that arises within oneself and does not depend on material things; it is spiritual, subjective, and intrinsic to our being. It is also related to the emotional form of religious worship known as bhakti. Although the experience of rasa is open and common to us all, it does not, on the other hand, especially emphasize shared feelings.
Returning, then, to the experience of the clip of ‘Proserpina’, it is probably fair to say that its effect is caused by a combination of gratifying kama muta and, to a lesser extent, the aesthetic enjoyment of rasa. This may not be how the performers or most of their audience would think of the song or its effect, but it is one way of considering them without diminishing their satisfying impact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-Cudn4goNo
http://kamamutalab.org/about/
https://escholarship.org/content/qt4zv550pt/qt4zv550pt.pdf
https://www.routledge.com/Kama-Muta-Discovering-the-Connecting-Emotion-1st-Edition/Fiske/p/book/9780367220945
Sunday, December 29, 2019
The Patron Saint of Outsiders
Patti Smith likes to visit the graves of artists and writers she admires, and she often writes about those encounters, accompanying her narratives with monochrome Polaroid photographs. In one of her more recent books, Devotion, she describes traveling to Ashford in Kent in order to pay respects to the memory of Simone Weil, the French philosopher and activist who was well-known from the 1950s to the 1970s, but who receives comparatively little attention today. Her grave is inconspicuous and not easy to find.
I can’t recall why I bought Weil’s Waiting on God many years ago, but it may have been because of the novelist André Gide’s remark, quoted on the cover, that she was the patron saint of ‘outsiders’. In any event, despite her dense style and obsessiveness, I soon grew to love the passion and austerity of her thought. But there may also be a wider context for my enthusiasm, one that is shared with Patti Smith. Laure Cagne, writing in her introduction to Weil’s Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us, says that it is not surprising that Weil, who died in 1943, ‘quickly achieved legendary status among a whole generation of countercultural intellectuals and spiritual seekers. Her writings are radically, vehemently anti-bourgeois, as was her short, intense life’. She adds that Weil ‘sought to uproot herself from everything - her parents’ solicitousness, the comfortable surroundings of her childhood, and even the normal benchmarks of academic achievement - to which she might form an attachment. Her goal was an untrammelled heart - the necessary condition, she believed, for knowing the truth’. It was for that reason that Weil, even though tempted to do so, was never willing to join the church.
What I do remember about my early reading of Weil’s writings is her emphasis on the importance of beauty in the world, the necessity of ‘attention’, which is an act that is close to what Buddhists call ‘mindfulness’, and her somewhat morbid attraction to suffering, which she called ‘affliction’. All of this explains why she has been regarded as a contemporary mystic, and it probably accounts for my own attraction to her books. After becoming aware of Patti Smith’s interest in her, however, my own curiosity was rekindled, and in the course of subsequent reading I discovered another side to Weil’s life, of which I was only dimly aware forty years ago.
Weil was an extremely clever woman, possessed of prodigious intellectual abilities, and in her early years she had little interest in overtly spiritual matters, although she soon became absorbed by ideas about truth, purity and poverty. This led to the development of a strong social conscience and activism, and after she began to teach in girls’ schools, she quickly came into conflict with educational authorities that strongly resisted her pronounced left-wing views. Weil supported workers in the towns where she was employed, engaging with marches, pickets, and writing articles for socialist journals. She gave away most of her salary. Before long she became a worker herself, taking jobs at a several factories in Paris, and was barely able to endure them. Partly because of her experience of poverty and suffering, she became involved with Christianity, despite her Jewish upbringing and ongoing attraction to Greek and other philosophies. Later, during World War II, she worked for the Free French in London. Deciding to fast in solidarity with soldiers at the front, whom she longed to join in active resistance to the Nazis, Weil restricted herself to what she believed were fighting men’s rations. She became ill with tuberculosis, malnourishment contributing to her predicament, and she died in a sanatorium in Kent, aged just thirty-four. The attending doctor described her death as ‘suicide’.
While thinking about Weil’s fate, Robert Bresson’s early film, The Diary of a Country Priest, based on a novel by Georges Bernanos, came to mind. It tells the story of a man who is determined to love others to the best of his ability and to trust in the reality of 'divine presence'. The setting of the tale is bleak and wintry northern France, its dark mood reflected in the priest’s face, which is perpetually solemn and withdrawn. His parishioners scorn and insult him; reluctant or unable to defend himself, he is unable to understand their hostility. The young priest suffers deeply, more or less stops eating, and becomes ill. At the end of the film he dies.
Although much of his politics was conservative and reactionary, Bernanos had no interest in bourgeois Catholic piety; he empathized with social outsiders, with people who were not at ease with themselves and even less with society. Feelings of shame, self-hatred, and estrangement are common in his books. The country priest, whose life has long been marked by loneliness and isolation, lives in fear of being mocked and rejected, but he is convinced that God loves us; he is also determined to be good to his fellows. From a Roman Catholic point of view these simple values are a way to salvation, and Elizabeth A. Dreyer observes that Bernanos’ novel ‘opens a window onto the difficult, beautiful, elusive presence of grace in the concrete, physical, "real" world.’ As the priest writes when faced with death, "Does it matter? Grace is everywhere.’
Looked at from a humanist perspective, the story might be described as a tragedy, the tale of a true, albeit misguided, believer who is faced with the incomprehension and rejection of a cruel society. In that respect The Diary of a Country Priest has some connection with Simone Weil. The idea of self-sacrifice for a metaphysical ideal is completely at odds with contemporary culture’s core beliefs, and there are many today who would respond both to the country priest and to Simone Weil’s life and thought with puzzled dismissiveness. One recent commentator, for instance, has observed that ‘though prissy, sanctimonious, and prejudiced, Weil’s writing still has something to teach us about disconnection in modern society, and how we can begin to reconnect’. Susan Sontag, sceptical about most aspects of Weil’s life and thinking, has put it more generously, remarking that ‘she is rightly regarded as one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit’. Simone Weil might vigorously have argued that they are both completely missing the point.
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/faith/witness/who-was-simone-weil-introduction
https://aeon.co/essays/why-simone-weil-is-the-patron-saint-of-anomalous-persons
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-diary-of-a-country-priest-1951
https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/holiness-comes-through-humanness-not-opposition-it
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1963/02/01/simone-weil/
I can’t recall why I bought Weil’s Waiting on God many years ago, but it may have been because of the novelist André Gide’s remark, quoted on the cover, that she was the patron saint of ‘outsiders’. In any event, despite her dense style and obsessiveness, I soon grew to love the passion and austerity of her thought. But there may also be a wider context for my enthusiasm, one that is shared with Patti Smith. Laure Cagne, writing in her introduction to Weil’s Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us, says that it is not surprising that Weil, who died in 1943, ‘quickly achieved legendary status among a whole generation of countercultural intellectuals and spiritual seekers. Her writings are radically, vehemently anti-bourgeois, as was her short, intense life’. She adds that Weil ‘sought to uproot herself from everything - her parents’ solicitousness, the comfortable surroundings of her childhood, and even the normal benchmarks of academic achievement - to which she might form an attachment. Her goal was an untrammelled heart - the necessary condition, she believed, for knowing the truth’. It was for that reason that Weil, even though tempted to do so, was never willing to join the church.
What I do remember about my early reading of Weil’s writings is her emphasis on the importance of beauty in the world, the necessity of ‘attention’, which is an act that is close to what Buddhists call ‘mindfulness’, and her somewhat morbid attraction to suffering, which she called ‘affliction’. All of this explains why she has been regarded as a contemporary mystic, and it probably accounts for my own attraction to her books. After becoming aware of Patti Smith’s interest in her, however, my own curiosity was rekindled, and in the course of subsequent reading I discovered another side to Weil’s life, of which I was only dimly aware forty years ago.
Weil was an extremely clever woman, possessed of prodigious intellectual abilities, and in her early years she had little interest in overtly spiritual matters, although she soon became absorbed by ideas about truth, purity and poverty. This led to the development of a strong social conscience and activism, and after she began to teach in girls’ schools, she quickly came into conflict with educational authorities that strongly resisted her pronounced left-wing views. Weil supported workers in the towns where she was employed, engaging with marches, pickets, and writing articles for socialist journals. She gave away most of her salary. Before long she became a worker herself, taking jobs at a several factories in Paris, and was barely able to endure them. Partly because of her experience of poverty and suffering, she became involved with Christianity, despite her Jewish upbringing and ongoing attraction to Greek and other philosophies. Later, during World War II, she worked for the Free French in London. Deciding to fast in solidarity with soldiers at the front, whom she longed to join in active resistance to the Nazis, Weil restricted herself to what she believed were fighting men’s rations. She became ill with tuberculosis, malnourishment contributing to her predicament, and she died in a sanatorium in Kent, aged just thirty-four. The attending doctor described her death as ‘suicide’.
While thinking about Weil’s fate, Robert Bresson’s early film, The Diary of a Country Priest, based on a novel by Georges Bernanos, came to mind. It tells the story of a man who is determined to love others to the best of his ability and to trust in the reality of 'divine presence'. The setting of the tale is bleak and wintry northern France, its dark mood reflected in the priest’s face, which is perpetually solemn and withdrawn. His parishioners scorn and insult him; reluctant or unable to defend himself, he is unable to understand their hostility. The young priest suffers deeply, more or less stops eating, and becomes ill. At the end of the film he dies.
Although much of his politics was conservative and reactionary, Bernanos had no interest in bourgeois Catholic piety; he empathized with social outsiders, with people who were not at ease with themselves and even less with society. Feelings of shame, self-hatred, and estrangement are common in his books. The country priest, whose life has long been marked by loneliness and isolation, lives in fear of being mocked and rejected, but he is convinced that God loves us; he is also determined to be good to his fellows. From a Roman Catholic point of view these simple values are a way to salvation, and Elizabeth A. Dreyer observes that Bernanos’ novel ‘opens a window onto the difficult, beautiful, elusive presence of grace in the concrete, physical, "real" world.’ As the priest writes when faced with death, "Does it matter? Grace is everywhere.’
Looked at from a humanist perspective, the story might be described as a tragedy, the tale of a true, albeit misguided, believer who is faced with the incomprehension and rejection of a cruel society. In that respect The Diary of a Country Priest has some connection with Simone Weil. The idea of self-sacrifice for a metaphysical ideal is completely at odds with contemporary culture’s core beliefs, and there are many today who would respond both to the country priest and to Simone Weil’s life and thought with puzzled dismissiveness. One recent commentator, for instance, has observed that ‘though prissy, sanctimonious, and prejudiced, Weil’s writing still has something to teach us about disconnection in modern society, and how we can begin to reconnect’. Susan Sontag, sceptical about most aspects of Weil’s life and thinking, has put it more generously, remarking that ‘she is rightly regarded as one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit’. Simone Weil might vigorously have argued that they are both completely missing the point.
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/faith/witness/who-was-simone-weil-introduction
https://aeon.co/essays/why-simone-weil-is-the-patron-saint-of-anomalous-persons
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-diary-of-a-country-priest-1951
https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/holiness-comes-through-humanness-not-opposition-it
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1963/02/01/simone-weil/
Crowds
The author of a recent article in The Guardian grumbled about how major exhibitions around the world are now so crowded that it is almost impossible to enjoy them. ‘Can you really appreciate art when you have to crane your neck, dodge elbows, and wait for selfie-takers to move on?’, she asked. Overcrowding is not, of course, a recent phenomenon, as the number of visitors to museums and galleries have grown steadily in the last few decades, but it seems to have become something of an issue. There is now so much demand for new cultural experiences that the likelihood of anyone actually having agreeable or lasting engagements with art, at least in popular exhibitions, is becoming increasingly remote. As in most areas of contemporary life, cultural activity is usually based on a need for entertainment, distraction, and - at best - well-meaning curiosity. While all of these desires can be catered for in crowded rooms, the experience of art is diminished.
During the many years I worked at a Dublin gallery there was always pressure to increase visitor numbers, and the main reason for this was this was the supposed necessity to justify the funding that came from the public purse. In my final years the pressure became insistent and relentless. I resisted it, but although this sometimes gave rise to accusations of élitism, I was always pleased when an exhibition was popular. On the other hand, it wasn’t a priority; I liked the fact that the gallery was normally a quiet place, withdrawn from the bustle of city life, somewhere where people could slow down, gather their thoughts, and let the art work on them. I remember once justifying this approach, when pressed to do so, by saying that there was a great deal of purpose and beauty in a small whitewashed Greek church that was lit by a handful of candles and which wasn’t listed in tourist guides, and that I wouldn’t at all mind if the gallery had something of the same evocative and luminous anonymity. Apparently my analogy was not convincing.
There are other, perhaps more compelling, reasons why quiet galleries are a good thing, and some of them are to be found in John Dewey’s classic Art as Experience, a book first published in 1934 but still of relevance. Dewey is especially insistent on the idea that art is a form of transfiguration, and that it is not inherent in objects or commodities. When art is dissociated from life, he writes, it loses its power and just becomes a thing. The aesthetic experience, he adds, should not be reduced to the level of pleasurable transience but should help to create order out of chaos in a world that is constantly threatened by disorder. Otherwise, that experience is simply confirmation of what you already know or anticipate, with occasional moments of surprise. To Dewey, engagement with art implies reflection and the overcoming of uncertainty, a process that involves the suspension of judgement, at least for a while, as well as the willingness to endure a degree of ambiguity. This is close, he says, to the state of mind that the poet John Keats called ‘negative capability’. There is often, Dewey remarks, an intimate connection between slowness and depth of response.
None of this is easy to achieve in a crowded gallery, and while it is certainly fair to argue that it is good and democratic to have more people enjoying cultural activities it is not unreasonable to counter with the suggestion that excessive popularity can destroy the very experience that people want to enjoy. Dewey proposed that the rise of capitalism removed art from life by making it a commodity of class, status and taste, but while there is probably a desire for upward social mobility in the growth in the number of visitors to major exhibitions, a more plausible cause to be found, as The Guardian article suggests, in the ubiquity of smartphones and in the dominance of social media, both of which encourage superficial notions of familiarity, novelty, and connectedness.
Not that long ago museums and galleries were for the most part muted places, even in capital cities, and popular exhibitions could be visited without too much discomfort. There was time to stand still and look, and this meant that moments of understanding and discovery were possible and often commonplace. I’m also sure that such experiences come to us through a form of grace, in the absence of wilfulness or desire. As Buddhism emphasizes, being is of more value than becoming. In J.D. Salinger’s masterly short story, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter, the main character, when asked by his fiancée’s mother what he will do when he leaves the army, replies that he would like to be a dead cat. Mrs. Fedder, who is interested in psychoanalysis, concludes that Seymour Glass has psychological problems, missing the point that he was alluding to a Zen parable about a spiritual master who said that the most valuable thing in the world was a dead cat, precisely because no one could put a price on it.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/dec/02/caught-in-the-crush-are-our-galleries-now-hopelessly-overcrowded/
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/02/11/art-as-experience-john-dewey/
https://hyperallergic.com/67081/reconsidering-john-deweys-art-as-experience/
During the many years I worked at a Dublin gallery there was always pressure to increase visitor numbers, and the main reason for this was this was the supposed necessity to justify the funding that came from the public purse. In my final years the pressure became insistent and relentless. I resisted it, but although this sometimes gave rise to accusations of élitism, I was always pleased when an exhibition was popular. On the other hand, it wasn’t a priority; I liked the fact that the gallery was normally a quiet place, withdrawn from the bustle of city life, somewhere where people could slow down, gather their thoughts, and let the art work on them. I remember once justifying this approach, when pressed to do so, by saying that there was a great deal of purpose and beauty in a small whitewashed Greek church that was lit by a handful of candles and which wasn’t listed in tourist guides, and that I wouldn’t at all mind if the gallery had something of the same evocative and luminous anonymity. Apparently my analogy was not convincing.
There are other, perhaps more compelling, reasons why quiet galleries are a good thing, and some of them are to be found in John Dewey’s classic Art as Experience, a book first published in 1934 but still of relevance. Dewey is especially insistent on the idea that art is a form of transfiguration, and that it is not inherent in objects or commodities. When art is dissociated from life, he writes, it loses its power and just becomes a thing. The aesthetic experience, he adds, should not be reduced to the level of pleasurable transience but should help to create order out of chaos in a world that is constantly threatened by disorder. Otherwise, that experience is simply confirmation of what you already know or anticipate, with occasional moments of surprise. To Dewey, engagement with art implies reflection and the overcoming of uncertainty, a process that involves the suspension of judgement, at least for a while, as well as the willingness to endure a degree of ambiguity. This is close, he says, to the state of mind that the poet John Keats called ‘negative capability’. There is often, Dewey remarks, an intimate connection between slowness and depth of response.
None of this is easy to achieve in a crowded gallery, and while it is certainly fair to argue that it is good and democratic to have more people enjoying cultural activities it is not unreasonable to counter with the suggestion that excessive popularity can destroy the very experience that people want to enjoy. Dewey proposed that the rise of capitalism removed art from life by making it a commodity of class, status and taste, but while there is probably a desire for upward social mobility in the growth in the number of visitors to major exhibitions, a more plausible cause to be found, as The Guardian article suggests, in the ubiquity of smartphones and in the dominance of social media, both of which encourage superficial notions of familiarity, novelty, and connectedness.
Not that long ago museums and galleries were for the most part muted places, even in capital cities, and popular exhibitions could be visited without too much discomfort. There was time to stand still and look, and this meant that moments of understanding and discovery were possible and often commonplace. I’m also sure that such experiences come to us through a form of grace, in the absence of wilfulness or desire. As Buddhism emphasizes, being is of more value than becoming. In J.D. Salinger’s masterly short story, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter, the main character, when asked by his fiancée’s mother what he will do when he leaves the army, replies that he would like to be a dead cat. Mrs. Fedder, who is interested in psychoanalysis, concludes that Seymour Glass has psychological problems, missing the point that he was alluding to a Zen parable about a spiritual master who said that the most valuable thing in the world was a dead cat, precisely because no one could put a price on it.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/dec/02/caught-in-the-crush-are-our-galleries-now-hopelessly-overcrowded/
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/02/11/art-as-experience-john-dewey/
https://hyperallergic.com/67081/reconsidering-john-deweys-art-as-experience/
Thursday, November 28, 2019
Dublin Friday
Nick Cave’s new record, 'Ghosteen’, has been unusually well received. Among the copious appreciative reviews, Alexis Petridis, writing in ‘The Guardian’, said that it ‘sets desperation against empathy’ and that its songs are the most beautiful Cave has ever created. The album has been widely perceived as a response to his son’s death, and Cave himself has talked about how this tragedy altered his work, explaining that he found a way to write beyond the trauma, moving ‘beyond the personal into a state of wonder’. The other day, browsing in the ‘Red Hand Files’, a website on which Cave answers all kinds of questions from people who write to him, I was struck by his response to a remark, predictable enough given the record's title, about how ‘Ghosteen’ seemed haunted. ’Perhaps the songs became a kind of free-floating conversation with the spirit world’, Cave replied,’buoyed up by the absence of the ones we love. Perhaps the ghostly forms of the departed are all around us, magnetised toward the act of creation. Perhaps they see that to be alive and upon the earth, at this time and against all the odds, is the most rare and coveted of things, and to be making art such a singular and fortuitous privilege, that they just wanted to come along for the ride’.
As they so often do, my thoughts began to make associations and connections, and I was reminded of Jandek, the outsider musician. He had recently come up in conversation, and Lars Iyer, in the text that he wrote for the small book the Douglas Hyde Gallery published to accompany Jandek’s exhibition and performance, makes reference to the Buddhist idea of the ‘Hungry Ghost’ - a term, coincidentally, that was also the title of a group exhibition that we had held some years before. I looked through my LPs, searching for ‘Ready for the House’, its softly blurred colour sleeve depicting a drab living room with a yellow blind pulled down over the window. Beside the plush sofa there is a small side table bearing a vase of red flowers, and perched carefully between the two, at the foot of the blind, is a paperback edition of Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan plays. Released in 1978, at first attributed to a band called ‘The Units’ and subsequently to Jandek, ‘Ready for the House’ was the creation of Sterling R. Smith, then an unknown musician from Houston, Texas. There have been many heightened responses to the album, most of them dwelling on the darkness of the songs and Jandek’s debt to the acoustic blues tradition, but one of the most evocative is the observation that the album ‘started nowhere, went nowhere, and ended up nowhere’, and that listening to it was like hearing a posthumous recording, a recording that was made after the musician had died. During the following years, as a stream of albums became available from the artist’s website, almost nothing was revealed about his identity, and the mystery became something of a cause célèbre and the subject of a full-length documentary.
On Friday, June 13th, 2008, Jandek performed at the gallery. This was a rare event, as he had only played live a few times before. In 2004, when he actually did turn up for the first gig in Glasgow, there was some uncertainty as to whether or not it was actually the man himself. In a sense, perhaps, it wasn’t, because Jandek, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist as a person but as a musical project, even though the artist, now known to be Sterling R.Smith, is usually referred to by that name. When you correspond with him, and when identification is required, the performer chooses to call himself as ‘Corwood’, or sometimes ‘a representative from Corwood Industries’. This isn’t as arch as it sounds. From the very beginning a strange kind of anonymity was at the heart of the project, and although a large proportion of the photographs on the album covers are presumably of the live Sterling R. Smith, they all look ghostly, spectral, as though they are images of a revenant. This quality, combined with their odd, naive quality, as though the photos had been taken by someone who didn’t know what a camera was and what it did, is what made me want to exhibit them.
I first saw the representative from Corwood Industries through the window of a moving car. Jandek - as I’ll call him now, for the sake of convenience - was walking slowly along an unfashionable and unremarkable street in Dublin, wearing a long black overcoat and hat. As I wasn’t driving, I couldn’t stop to greet him. The following morning, when I arrived at work, I came across him again, looking intently at the Gallery’s sign on the university’s railings, and when I introduced myself he was slightly taken aback, although cautiously friendly. Later that morning he went off on his own to hire a good guitar for the gig, and before long the gallery received a telephone call from the shop, enquiring about the man who was hiring the instrument in our name, as they were concerned that he couldn’t play it 'properly'. Then, at lunchtime, I found him alone in the small gallery where his album covers were displayed, gazing at the modest exhibition. He seemed pleased and surprisingly abashed. ‘Who would have thought it?’, he said when I joined him.
In the evening, Jandek invited me to dinner. We went to a vegetarian restaurant that he had discovered the day before, and straight away he ordered a bottle of rosé wine, which he said was his favourite. In the course of an easy and intense conversation he began to tell me something about his early life, although not in great detail, and as he said the following morning that he rather regretted what he considered to be his indiscretion, it doesn’t seem appropriate to repeat much of the conversation. I gathered, however, that he had experienced some difficulties in early adulthood and that he currently had a comfortable occupation. He occasionally took time off, he said, to record and play music, wryly adding that many of his colleagues would be surprised to learn of his moonlighting. I enjoyed his company greatly.
The following evening Jandek performed to an audience of about a hundred seated people. With the lights dimmed, he walked formally to the front of the gallery, sat down with the guitar, placed pages of lyrics on a music stand, and began to play and sing, using unconventional tunings. The music was as difficult and weird as ever, a handful of people walking out after a few minutes, but the vast majority stayed to hear the long eight-part composition. I couldn’t make much sense of it, but the occasion was nonetheless compelling, and I wondered afterwards if the piece had some connection with Goethe’s ‘Sorrows of Young Werther’, which he had sent to me without comment a month or two before the gig. In any event, he sent me a very appreciative letter when he returned home, and a few years later he produced a CD and DVD of the performance, entitled ‘Dublin Friday’, which are still available on his website. We corresponded intermittently, usually after he sent me new releases, but eventually our communication came to an end.
https://www.theredhandfiles.com/uplifting-jubilant-record/
https://tisue.net/jandek/
https://corwoodindustries.com/
As they so often do, my thoughts began to make associations and connections, and I was reminded of Jandek, the outsider musician. He had recently come up in conversation, and Lars Iyer, in the text that he wrote for the small book the Douglas Hyde Gallery published to accompany Jandek’s exhibition and performance, makes reference to the Buddhist idea of the ‘Hungry Ghost’ - a term, coincidentally, that was also the title of a group exhibition that we had held some years before. I looked through my LPs, searching for ‘Ready for the House’, its softly blurred colour sleeve depicting a drab living room with a yellow blind pulled down over the window. Beside the plush sofa there is a small side table bearing a vase of red flowers, and perched carefully between the two, at the foot of the blind, is a paperback edition of Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan plays. Released in 1978, at first attributed to a band called ‘The Units’ and subsequently to Jandek, ‘Ready for the House’ was the creation of Sterling R. Smith, then an unknown musician from Houston, Texas. There have been many heightened responses to the album, most of them dwelling on the darkness of the songs and Jandek’s debt to the acoustic blues tradition, but one of the most evocative is the observation that the album ‘started nowhere, went nowhere, and ended up nowhere’, and that listening to it was like hearing a posthumous recording, a recording that was made after the musician had died. During the following years, as a stream of albums became available from the artist’s website, almost nothing was revealed about his identity, and the mystery became something of a cause célèbre and the subject of a full-length documentary.
On Friday, June 13th, 2008, Jandek performed at the gallery. This was a rare event, as he had only played live a few times before. In 2004, when he actually did turn up for the first gig in Glasgow, there was some uncertainty as to whether or not it was actually the man himself. In a sense, perhaps, it wasn’t, because Jandek, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist as a person but as a musical project, even though the artist, now known to be Sterling R.Smith, is usually referred to by that name. When you correspond with him, and when identification is required, the performer chooses to call himself as ‘Corwood’, or sometimes ‘a representative from Corwood Industries’. This isn’t as arch as it sounds. From the very beginning a strange kind of anonymity was at the heart of the project, and although a large proportion of the photographs on the album covers are presumably of the live Sterling R. Smith, they all look ghostly, spectral, as though they are images of a revenant. This quality, combined with their odd, naive quality, as though the photos had been taken by someone who didn’t know what a camera was and what it did, is what made me want to exhibit them.
I first saw the representative from Corwood Industries through the window of a moving car. Jandek - as I’ll call him now, for the sake of convenience - was walking slowly along an unfashionable and unremarkable street in Dublin, wearing a long black overcoat and hat. As I wasn’t driving, I couldn’t stop to greet him. The following morning, when I arrived at work, I came across him again, looking intently at the Gallery’s sign on the university’s railings, and when I introduced myself he was slightly taken aback, although cautiously friendly. Later that morning he went off on his own to hire a good guitar for the gig, and before long the gallery received a telephone call from the shop, enquiring about the man who was hiring the instrument in our name, as they were concerned that he couldn’t play it 'properly'. Then, at lunchtime, I found him alone in the small gallery where his album covers were displayed, gazing at the modest exhibition. He seemed pleased and surprisingly abashed. ‘Who would have thought it?’, he said when I joined him.
In the evening, Jandek invited me to dinner. We went to a vegetarian restaurant that he had discovered the day before, and straight away he ordered a bottle of rosé wine, which he said was his favourite. In the course of an easy and intense conversation he began to tell me something about his early life, although not in great detail, and as he said the following morning that he rather regretted what he considered to be his indiscretion, it doesn’t seem appropriate to repeat much of the conversation. I gathered, however, that he had experienced some difficulties in early adulthood and that he currently had a comfortable occupation. He occasionally took time off, he said, to record and play music, wryly adding that many of his colleagues would be surprised to learn of his moonlighting. I enjoyed his company greatly.
The following evening Jandek performed to an audience of about a hundred seated people. With the lights dimmed, he walked formally to the front of the gallery, sat down with the guitar, placed pages of lyrics on a music stand, and began to play and sing, using unconventional tunings. The music was as difficult and weird as ever, a handful of people walking out after a few minutes, but the vast majority stayed to hear the long eight-part composition. I couldn’t make much sense of it, but the occasion was nonetheless compelling, and I wondered afterwards if the piece had some connection with Goethe’s ‘Sorrows of Young Werther’, which he had sent to me without comment a month or two before the gig. In any event, he sent me a very appreciative letter when he returned home, and a few years later he produced a CD and DVD of the performance, entitled ‘Dublin Friday’, which are still available on his website. We corresponded intermittently, usually after he sent me new releases, but eventually our communication came to an end.
https://www.theredhandfiles.com/uplifting-jubilant-record/
https://tisue.net/jandek/
https://corwoodindustries.com/
Thursday, November 21, 2019
On the sofa, in the white room
Aleana Egan sent me an email which included a photograph of the cover of a new book about Édouard Vuillard, the French ‘Intimist’ painter. Further investigation quickly revealed that it was the catalogue of a summer exhibition at the Holburne Museum in Bath, entitled ‘The Poetry of the Everyday’, and I ordered it straight away, as Vuillard is one of my favourite painters. The same online search drew my attention to the imminent publication of another book on Vuillard, by Julia Frey, called ‘Venus Betrayed - The Private World of Edouard Vuillard’, and I ordered it too.
The texts in the modest but beautifully illustrated ‘The Poetry of the Everyday’ are conventional in their claims and explanations. Chris Stephens, in his foreword, writes that Vuillard’s ‘art is a celebration of the mundane, the everyday. Yet, in its succinct intimacy it is also highly complex, if not contradictory’. He goes on to suggest that in his early paintings ‘the quotidian becomes almost sacramental. In balancing form and content, psychological drama and abstraction, his pictures are about as close to poetry as any artist’s, and all the more brilliant for their understatement and the near imperceptibility of their craft’. In the main essay, Belinda Thomson writes uncontroversially, proposing that Vuillard’s poetic sensibility was able to transform the ugly everyday objects in his paintings, elevating them beyond rules of conventional taste.
All of this confirmed my suppositions about the artist, whose paintings I’ve known and enjoyed for many years, although I’ve never given them a great deal of thought. As suggested by his best work, he has always seemed to me to be a perceptive painter of interiors, acutely attuned to feminine sensibilities, an informal and intuitive craftsman, and often quite moody. These are the characteristics that characterise his early domestic work; Vuillard’s decorative schemes for rooms, both private and public, like his later society portraits, are not especially engaging. The former are usually attractive but generic; the latter tend to come across as somewhat brittle and unsympathetic. Compared to his friend and fellow ‘Intimist’, Pierre Bonnard, Vuillard always seems conflicted, not expansive, introspective rather than that extrovert - although it is true that Bonnard’s paintings became more complex and difficult as he grew older.
I’ve always assumed that Vuillard was unusually sympathetic to the inner lives of women, but Julia Frey’s substantial book sets out to demonstrate that this last preconception is deeply misguided. She remarks that very often Vuillard’s women are depicted in ‘uncomfortable or conflictual poses: facing away from husbands and lovers, confronting other women or pointedly ignoring them. Frequently their body language is frankly disturbing’. He also showed women sleeping, reading, sewing, or seen from behind - women who ‘do not know’ that they are being watched - and she considers this to be an invasion of their privacy. Admitting that Vuillard was a sensitive man, she nonetheless emphasizes that he ‘disguised his misdeeds, denied his vices, and occulted his sex life’. Almost all his works tell stories, Frey observes, ‘in which his secrets have a special role’. All of this is spelled out in the foreword, and in the rest of the book she unpacks psychological interpretations of a large number of Vuillard’s paintings, based on her familiarity with the artist’s journals and notebooks. It makes for engaging reading, but rarely have I finished an art book disagreeing so frequently with a writer’s reflections on the content of its images. More often than not I found them intrusive and speculative, but admittedly I ended up understanding that there is often more to Vuillard’s pictures than I have hitherto supposed. I concluded that Vuillard may have had difficulties with personal boundaries, grounded in the fact that after his father’s early death he lived in a small household with three generations of women, to all of whom he was strongly attached. He had little privacy or independence. He may, perhaps, have been fearful of being swallowed up by feminine intimacy, which gave rise to his characteristic opposition between impersonality and closeness, or attachment and detachment, but this psychological trait is far from being as odd and maladjusted as Frey suggests it is.
The novelist Julian Barnes, whose enthusiasm for the artist has led him to describe Vuillard’s work as ‘one of the most supreme and complete explosions of art in the last two hundred years’, looks at the similar issues rather differently. He astutely observes that Vuillard’s paintings ‘both offer (and withhold) a narrative’, as if their figures had ‘a life beyond the paint that depicts them’. Making a comparison with the ideas of the French Symbolist poet Mallarmé, a friend of the artist, Barnes says that Vuillard was more concerned with painting an object’s effect rather than the thing itself, and that he attempts to evoke the character of people and things by placing them deliberately in the shadows, referring to them allusively and never by name.
I once used a Vuillard image on the cover of a small publication, called ‘Hidden’, a collection of short essays on women artists, musicians, and writers. In the first chapter I made reference to Freud’s ideas about the uncanny, the ‘unheimlich’, which is the result of the resurfacing of repressed memories, and especially those of intimacy, and to the proposal, from the perspective of Freudian theory, that the most uncanny place of all is the mother’s body. The art historian Norman Bryson, writing about still-life and genre painting, suggests that such work often bears traces of male exclusion from the ‘maternal domain’, and that from a man’s perspective nostalgia and ambivalence give to feminine space an intense power of attraction, but that it nonetheless remain’s ‘other’, out of reach. The Vuillard painting, ‘On the Sofa (in the White Room)’, a blurred and soft depiction of a woman lying on a sofa, probably reading, with her head turned away from the viewer, was used in ‘Hidden’ to suggest that idea.
Barnes, writing in an another essay about Pierre Bonnard, remarks that ‘a little biography is a dangerous thing’, and that our tendency to interpret artists’ work through their lives is often irrelevant and sometimes harmful to its understanding. Perhaps, Barnes suggests, instead of looking at an artist’s life and letting it colour or decide our view of his or her art, we should look at things from precisely the opposite direction. In this I sympathise with him - but Julia Frey would very probably disagree.
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/review/vuillard-holbourne
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/oct/21/vuillard-and-madame-vuillard-review-barber-institute-birmingham
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/On_the_Sofa_%28The_White_Room%29_by_%C3%89douard_Vuillard.JPG
The texts in the modest but beautifully illustrated ‘The Poetry of the Everyday’ are conventional in their claims and explanations. Chris Stephens, in his foreword, writes that Vuillard’s ‘art is a celebration of the mundane, the everyday. Yet, in its succinct intimacy it is also highly complex, if not contradictory’. He goes on to suggest that in his early paintings ‘the quotidian becomes almost sacramental. In balancing form and content, psychological drama and abstraction, his pictures are about as close to poetry as any artist’s, and all the more brilliant for their understatement and the near imperceptibility of their craft’. In the main essay, Belinda Thomson writes uncontroversially, proposing that Vuillard’s poetic sensibility was able to transform the ugly everyday objects in his paintings, elevating them beyond rules of conventional taste.
All of this confirmed my suppositions about the artist, whose paintings I’ve known and enjoyed for many years, although I’ve never given them a great deal of thought. As suggested by his best work, he has always seemed to me to be a perceptive painter of interiors, acutely attuned to feminine sensibilities, an informal and intuitive craftsman, and often quite moody. These are the characteristics that characterise his early domestic work; Vuillard’s decorative schemes for rooms, both private and public, like his later society portraits, are not especially engaging. The former are usually attractive but generic; the latter tend to come across as somewhat brittle and unsympathetic. Compared to his friend and fellow ‘Intimist’, Pierre Bonnard, Vuillard always seems conflicted, not expansive, introspective rather than that extrovert - although it is true that Bonnard’s paintings became more complex and difficult as he grew older.
I’ve always assumed that Vuillard was unusually sympathetic to the inner lives of women, but Julia Frey’s substantial book sets out to demonstrate that this last preconception is deeply misguided. She remarks that very often Vuillard’s women are depicted in ‘uncomfortable or conflictual poses: facing away from husbands and lovers, confronting other women or pointedly ignoring them. Frequently their body language is frankly disturbing’. He also showed women sleeping, reading, sewing, or seen from behind - women who ‘do not know’ that they are being watched - and she considers this to be an invasion of their privacy. Admitting that Vuillard was a sensitive man, she nonetheless emphasizes that he ‘disguised his misdeeds, denied his vices, and occulted his sex life’. Almost all his works tell stories, Frey observes, ‘in which his secrets have a special role’. All of this is spelled out in the foreword, and in the rest of the book she unpacks psychological interpretations of a large number of Vuillard’s paintings, based on her familiarity with the artist’s journals and notebooks. It makes for engaging reading, but rarely have I finished an art book disagreeing so frequently with a writer’s reflections on the content of its images. More often than not I found them intrusive and speculative, but admittedly I ended up understanding that there is often more to Vuillard’s pictures than I have hitherto supposed. I concluded that Vuillard may have had difficulties with personal boundaries, grounded in the fact that after his father’s early death he lived in a small household with three generations of women, to all of whom he was strongly attached. He had little privacy or independence. He may, perhaps, have been fearful of being swallowed up by feminine intimacy, which gave rise to his characteristic opposition between impersonality and closeness, or attachment and detachment, but this psychological trait is far from being as odd and maladjusted as Frey suggests it is.
The novelist Julian Barnes, whose enthusiasm for the artist has led him to describe Vuillard’s work as ‘one of the most supreme and complete explosions of art in the last two hundred years’, looks at the similar issues rather differently. He astutely observes that Vuillard’s paintings ‘both offer (and withhold) a narrative’, as if their figures had ‘a life beyond the paint that depicts them’. Making a comparison with the ideas of the French Symbolist poet Mallarmé, a friend of the artist, Barnes says that Vuillard was more concerned with painting an object’s effect rather than the thing itself, and that he attempts to evoke the character of people and things by placing them deliberately in the shadows, referring to them allusively and never by name.
I once used a Vuillard image on the cover of a small publication, called ‘Hidden’, a collection of short essays on women artists, musicians, and writers. In the first chapter I made reference to Freud’s ideas about the uncanny, the ‘unheimlich’, which is the result of the resurfacing of repressed memories, and especially those of intimacy, and to the proposal, from the perspective of Freudian theory, that the most uncanny place of all is the mother’s body. The art historian Norman Bryson, writing about still-life and genre painting, suggests that such work often bears traces of male exclusion from the ‘maternal domain’, and that from a man’s perspective nostalgia and ambivalence give to feminine space an intense power of attraction, but that it nonetheless remain’s ‘other’, out of reach. The Vuillard painting, ‘On the Sofa (in the White Room)’, a blurred and soft depiction of a woman lying on a sofa, probably reading, with her head turned away from the viewer, was used in ‘Hidden’ to suggest that idea.
Barnes, writing in an another essay about Pierre Bonnard, remarks that ‘a little biography is a dangerous thing’, and that our tendency to interpret artists’ work through their lives is often irrelevant and sometimes harmful to its understanding. Perhaps, Barnes suggests, instead of looking at an artist’s life and letting it colour or decide our view of his or her art, we should look at things from precisely the opposite direction. In this I sympathise with him - but Julia Frey would very probably disagree.
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/review/vuillard-holbourne
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/oct/21/vuillard-and-madame-vuillard-review-barber-institute-birmingham
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/On_the_Sofa_%28The_White_Room%29_by_%C3%89douard_Vuillard.JPG
The hand that holds the desert down
Trisha Donnelly opened a new exhibition at Matthew Marks in New York at the beginning of November. As always with the artist, it has been presented with minimal explanation and few images, so visitors are encouraged to make sense of everything as best they can. This is not easy as it sounds, because as the art writer Martin Herbert once observed, adding yet another layer of mystification to Donnelly's reputation, ‘hers is a chess-playing act, one of timing and artfully mobilised viewer psychology’. She works in a variety of media, creating enigmatic installations that are intended, according to another commentator, to create doubt, confusion and wonder, and there is often a theatrical or performative element in the art that holds everything together. At her first major exhibition opening in 2002, at Casey Kaplan in New York, Donnelly arrived on the back of a white horse and delivered a speech, supposedly Napoleon’s declaration of surrender. Everything she has done since then has been coloured by that event. To some, her inscrutable art is magical and bewitching; others find it pointlessly arcane and wilfully obscure.
It would not be unfair to say that when I worked with Trisha Donnelly at the Douglas Hyde Gallery about a decade ago, it wasn’t an especially easy experience for either of us, although everything ended up well, and the exhibition was very good. As I recall it now, the show included photographs, works on paper, sound, a video, and at least two forms of sculpture, one of them being a mass of greenery cut from pine trees and hung, drooping, over the balcony. Although undervalued and overlooked at the time, the exhibition's best moments were memorable and beautiful.
One of the photographs, small, monochrome, and called ‘The hand that holds the desert down’, depicted part of the Great Sphinx in Egypt. Its effect was dependent on the unexpected mental spark that was struck by the title, and although unremarkable visually, it succeeded in inverting expectations in an interesting way. It didn’t occur to me then, although it does now, that there is an intriguing connection between that image and the life of the unconventional explorer and writer, Isabelle Eberhardt, to whose work Trisha introduced me at the time. Eberhardt, born into a peculiar family in Switzerland of Armenian, Russian, and Jewish extraction, travelled to North Africa with her mother, became a Muslim, learnt Arabic, dressed as a man, travelled extensively and wrote evocatively about her experiences. She died at the age of 27, the victim of a freak desert flood.
Eberhardt’s book entitled ‘Dans l’ombre chaude de l’Islam’ (‘In the warm shadow of Islam’) has been described by a biographer as ‘one of the strangest human documents that a woman has given the world’, and while this is probably an exaggeration, it conveys something of its odd and powerfully exotic flavour. It is understandable that a masculine disguise was indispensable for her travels and integration into Arab and nomadic life, but her increasingly unconventional and unpredictable behaviour infuriated the colonial French, as it did some of the Arabs, one of whom attempted to assassinate her. Sharon Bangert, who has translated some of Eberhardt’s writings, puts the matter vividly and with a touch of humour when she remarks: ‘We would be less shocked if she had behaved consistently, as a man in a man’s world. If she had lived a careful, scrupulous, celibate life: the perfect man, the perfect Muslim, the perfect mystic - she would be tolerable. But she is maddening… The disguise we want her to wear is the one we all hide behind: the veil of predictability’.
Eberhardt enjoyed nostalgia, and as Bangert writes, ‘one could almost say she was most at home in homesickness. With her first glimpse of a new land she anticipated her eventual departure, when the place would be transformed from merely real to an ideal'. She could be sentimental, and in 1901, during a stay in Marseilles, she reflected on the past, as she so often did, with passionate lyricism: ‘When I lacked nothing materially, but lacked everything intellectually and morally, I was often gloomy, endlessly cursing life while having no real knowledge of it. It is only now, in the midst of a destitution of which I am proud, that I acknowledge life as beautiful and worth living’.
At about the same time as I began to read Isabelle Eberhardt, I came across the music of the Ethiopian nun, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. They are linked by a few coincidences as well as their pronounced willingness to reject cultural expectations. The daughter of a wealthy and respectable family in Addis Ababa, Emahoy was sent to boarding school in Switzerland at a young age, where she began to learn to play violin and piano. In the 1930s, on her return to Addis, she became a bright young woman, independent and headstrong, who enjoyed her car and parties; moving in influential circles, she once played and sang for Emperor Haile Selassie. When the Italians invaded Ethiopia, her life changed. Emahoy was sent back to Europe but soon went back to North Africa; later, at the age of nineteen, she turned away from all she had known and became a nun in a remote country monastery, where she gave up her music. In time, though, she embraced it again, developing an idiosyncratic style that was a unique cross between western classicism, ancient Ethiopian modal church chant, and jazz. Now well into her 90s and living in an Ethiopian monastery in Jerusalem, Emahoy continues to play the piano and compose when she has the opportunity to do so. Her music is intimate and refined, its unconventional timing and rhythms reflecting a complex sensibility and a determined yearning for harmony.
https://www.matthewmarks.com/new-york/exhibitions/2019-11-08_trisha-donnelly/
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/11/feminize-your-canon-isabelle-eberhardt/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08mb1ft
It would not be unfair to say that when I worked with Trisha Donnelly at the Douglas Hyde Gallery about a decade ago, it wasn’t an especially easy experience for either of us, although everything ended up well, and the exhibition was very good. As I recall it now, the show included photographs, works on paper, sound, a video, and at least two forms of sculpture, one of them being a mass of greenery cut from pine trees and hung, drooping, over the balcony. Although undervalued and overlooked at the time, the exhibition's best moments were memorable and beautiful.
One of the photographs, small, monochrome, and called ‘The hand that holds the desert down’, depicted part of the Great Sphinx in Egypt. Its effect was dependent on the unexpected mental spark that was struck by the title, and although unremarkable visually, it succeeded in inverting expectations in an interesting way. It didn’t occur to me then, although it does now, that there is an intriguing connection between that image and the life of the unconventional explorer and writer, Isabelle Eberhardt, to whose work Trisha introduced me at the time. Eberhardt, born into a peculiar family in Switzerland of Armenian, Russian, and Jewish extraction, travelled to North Africa with her mother, became a Muslim, learnt Arabic, dressed as a man, travelled extensively and wrote evocatively about her experiences. She died at the age of 27, the victim of a freak desert flood.
Eberhardt’s book entitled ‘Dans l’ombre chaude de l’Islam’ (‘In the warm shadow of Islam’) has been described by a biographer as ‘one of the strangest human documents that a woman has given the world’, and while this is probably an exaggeration, it conveys something of its odd and powerfully exotic flavour. It is understandable that a masculine disguise was indispensable for her travels and integration into Arab and nomadic life, but her increasingly unconventional and unpredictable behaviour infuriated the colonial French, as it did some of the Arabs, one of whom attempted to assassinate her. Sharon Bangert, who has translated some of Eberhardt’s writings, puts the matter vividly and with a touch of humour when she remarks: ‘We would be less shocked if she had behaved consistently, as a man in a man’s world. If she had lived a careful, scrupulous, celibate life: the perfect man, the perfect Muslim, the perfect mystic - she would be tolerable. But she is maddening… The disguise we want her to wear is the one we all hide behind: the veil of predictability’.
Eberhardt enjoyed nostalgia, and as Bangert writes, ‘one could almost say she was most at home in homesickness. With her first glimpse of a new land she anticipated her eventual departure, when the place would be transformed from merely real to an ideal'. She could be sentimental, and in 1901, during a stay in Marseilles, she reflected on the past, as she so often did, with passionate lyricism: ‘When I lacked nothing materially, but lacked everything intellectually and morally, I was often gloomy, endlessly cursing life while having no real knowledge of it. It is only now, in the midst of a destitution of which I am proud, that I acknowledge life as beautiful and worth living’.
At about the same time as I began to read Isabelle Eberhardt, I came across the music of the Ethiopian nun, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. They are linked by a few coincidences as well as their pronounced willingness to reject cultural expectations. The daughter of a wealthy and respectable family in Addis Ababa, Emahoy was sent to boarding school in Switzerland at a young age, where she began to learn to play violin and piano. In the 1930s, on her return to Addis, she became a bright young woman, independent and headstrong, who enjoyed her car and parties; moving in influential circles, she once played and sang for Emperor Haile Selassie. When the Italians invaded Ethiopia, her life changed. Emahoy was sent back to Europe but soon went back to North Africa; later, at the age of nineteen, she turned away from all she had known and became a nun in a remote country monastery, where she gave up her music. In time, though, she embraced it again, developing an idiosyncratic style that was a unique cross between western classicism, ancient Ethiopian modal church chant, and jazz. Now well into her 90s and living in an Ethiopian monastery in Jerusalem, Emahoy continues to play the piano and compose when she has the opportunity to do so. Her music is intimate and refined, its unconventional timing and rhythms reflecting a complex sensibility and a determined yearning for harmony.
https://www.matthewmarks.com/new-york/exhibitions/2019-11-08_trisha-donnelly/
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/11/feminize-your-canon-isabelle-eberhardt/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08mb1ft
Wednesday, November 20, 2019
The Trickster
It was in Harlem, about two decades ago, at a time before visits to gospel services became integrated into tourist itineraries. One bright Sunday morning in autumn, a friend and I, who were spending some time in New York, made our way uptown on the subway, and with some difficulty found the inconspicuous church where the service was to be held. We were greeted politely, and after being told that a modest financial contribution would be welcome and expected, we were shown to seats towards the back of a large room. My friend, Kazuo Katase, was more at ease than me; as the only white person in the church, I found myself feeling unexpectedly self-conscious and something of a voyeur. The hall was only partially filled, its atmosphere informal and relaxed; people came and went, chatted amongst themselves, and the choir soon began to go through the motions, singing enthusiastically but without a great deal of passion. Musicians, carrying instruments, would occasionally walk up to the front and join in, and from time to time the pastor would encourage the congregation to praise the Lord. It made for a pleasant and memorable morning, but the service had little of the transcendence of ‘Amazing Grace’.
We were told about the church by the African American artist David Hammons, an acquaintance of Kazuo’s, with whom I especially wanted to work at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin. We had met on Friday evening at a downtown African institute, where he had been watching a film about revolutionaries in Tanzania. As we walked in the dusk towards the restaurant in the East Village where we were going to eat, Hammons bent down to pick up two pairs of expensive high-heeled shoes and several potted plants that had been left on the pavement outside a nearby house, something that New Yorkers often do when they want to dispose of unwanted possessions. I had no idea why he would want such things, but a short while later it became clear. He took us to the spot where, in 1983, he had made one of his most celebrated artworks, ‘Bliz-aard Sale’, a performance piece that involved the sale of carefully crafted snowballs on the side of the street. There were already several people standing at the corner, all with apparently valueless items positioned in front of them. Without comment, Hammons placed the shoes and plants in a careful straight line. We waited for a few minutes, and then walked on, leaving the objects behind. Later, in the restaurant, after discussion of a book about African coffins, fantastic creations modelled on cars, animals, fish, fruit, and vegetables, the conversation flowed easily but took some unexpected turns. I could see that Hammons was taking a certain pleasure in catching us off-guard. This was characteristic; reputed to have several homes in the city where he could spend the night, and refusing to tie himself to a particular commercial gallery, Hammons enjoyed playing the part of a trickster. He did it very well, and as a consequence I never quite succeeded in asking him if he would be interested in showing in Dublin.
The mercurial Hammons seems not to have changed much since then, and although he remains uncommitted to any of them, he has since been taken up and courted by several important galleries. One is Hauser & Wirth, with which he recently held the largest survey of his work to date and his first in Los Angeles for forty-five years. Dedicated to the memory of the jazz musician Ornette Coleman and called ‘Harmolodic Thinker’, the show had no press release, no checklist of works, and no labels other than the occasional pencilled scrawl on a wall. Alongside clearly finished artworks, such as his beautiful drawings made with basketballs, found-object sculptures, and some grubby abstract paintings, there were dozens of informal oddments from the artist’s archive, and some Ornette Coleman memorabilia, which may have included the pair of suits that were on display.
In the gallery’s central courtyard there was a colourful cluster of camping tents, on some of which Hammons had stencilled the words ‘this could be u’. The tents probably referred to the problem of homelessness in LA, perhaps especially in areas adjacent to the gentrified Art District. Hammons being what he is, though, the piece may not have been what it seemed. A review of the exhibition in Frieze magazine, entitled ‘Is David Hammons Trolling His Gallery?’, went on to suggest that that ‘the installation is a trap: a parody of pious, politically activist art’, and quoted Hammons’ statement that ‘I can’t stand art, actually. I’ve never liked art, ever’. This well-known remark, typical of the artist, sheds a mystifying light on his exhibitions at blue-chip galleries and the extraordinary sale of a glass basketball hoop adorned with backboard, lights, and chandeliers, which was knocked down at auction in 2013 for $8 million. It is said that the piece was consigned by the artist himself.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/13/amazing-grace-review-aretha-franklin-documentary
https://www.hauserwirth.com/hauser-wirth-exhibitions/24162-david-hammons-los-angeles
La Pelle
Some weeks ago I received an email from Eva Vermandel, who was in Venice for the Biennale. She spoke highly of the exhibition by Luc Tuymans, the celebrated Belgian painter. These days I rarely travel, so I decided to look photographs and reviews on line. She was right. It is an exceptionally good-looking show, elegantly installed in the Palazzo Grassi on the Grand Canal, a flamboyant 18th century palace with internal renovations by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando and now owned by the French billionaire and art collector François Pinault. The exhibition is called ‘La Pelle’ (‘The Skin’), its title taken from a 1949 novel by the Italian Curzio Malaparte, which details social and moral collapse in World War II, and including about eighty paintings, spanning Tuymans’ whole career, as well as a huge new mosaic, comprising thousands of tiny tiles, which is displayed in the columned atrium. The mosaic is based on his 1986 painting that in turn was inspired by drawings made by Alfred Kantor, a survivor from the Schwarzheide concentration camp, and it depicts dark pine trees against a white background. The composition is split by black vertical lines, a reference to how the original drawing was cut into strips to avoid its confiscation by guards. On the first level of the grand staircase of the Palazzo Grassi, emphasising the point, is a small portrait of the Nazi Albert Speer, architect and minister of armaments and war production.
Nothing is quite what it appears in Tuyman’s paintings, which are full of false trails, red herrings, and decoys. Typically, his images are somewhat bland, their colours faded and bleached, apparently innocuous and unremarkable scenes that are usually borrowed from other sources. Almost invariably, however, his images actually refer to ideologically charged subjects that are not at all obvious to the viewer, who has to rely on additional information to get their points. This obfuscation has helped him to become one of the most respected painters in the art world. Tuymans likes to think of his works as ‘authentic forgeries’, proposing that his paintings, like all images, offer only a limited understanding of reality, and that they are refracted through our own memories and preconceptions, both personal and collective. It is certainly true that without knowledge of their hidden meaning, Tuymans’ pictures can be deceptively empty.
When I worked with him at an exhibition at Dublin’s Douglas Hyde Gallery twenty years ago, Tuymans was as forceful and self-confident as he appears to be now. It had taken several attempts to convince him to show there, and when he came to install his precisely conceived exhibition he did so in a masterful way, having first made it clear that he had no interest in the interventions or opinions of curators, light-heartedly illustrating this by saying that he had once worked as a bouncer at a night club. He worked through the options methodically and carefully, making full use of negative space in the gallery, just as he has done at the Palazzo Grassi. At talks following the installation he told the audiences that he was the best painter in the world, with the possible exception of Gerhard Richter, and that he always finished his canvases in a day. Not all the artists in the audience found these statements totally convincing, and even now, thinking back to his performances,I don’t know if he was being provocative or ironic. He was an agreeable companion in a social context, and as he rarely smiles, it wasn’t easy to know when he was joking.
In recent interviews, Tuymans still goes against the grain. He talks, for instance, about what he believes to be the insane stupidity of the contemporary world and how, after the age of sixty, life is simply a process of ‘anger management’. Born in 1958, he now considers himself as part of a generation that ‘is over’. Perhaps, though, this rhetorical exaggeration is a way of emphasizing his seriousness and that of his paintings, precisely because their stylistic understatement often suggests otherwise. Significantly, he has also mentioned that his pictures, now extremely expensive, have been perfectly copied in China, adding that he finds the facsimiles meaningless because they lack ‘intentionality’. This distinction may buttress the financial value of his paintings, just as it is intended to justify the fundamental gravity of his practice, which he likes to present as a form of cultural resistance, but it is not entirely compelling. Tuymans’ melancholia is persuasive, but one of its consequences is the emptiness that lies at the heart of his work - a quality that makes his paintings acceptable both to rich collectors and to earnest, politically correct, critics.
http://www.evavermandel.com/
https://frieze.com/article/luc-tuymans-retrospective-palazzo-grassi-venice
Nothing is quite what it appears in Tuyman’s paintings, which are full of false trails, red herrings, and decoys. Typically, his images are somewhat bland, their colours faded and bleached, apparently innocuous and unremarkable scenes that are usually borrowed from other sources. Almost invariably, however, his images actually refer to ideologically charged subjects that are not at all obvious to the viewer, who has to rely on additional information to get their points. This obfuscation has helped him to become one of the most respected painters in the art world. Tuymans likes to think of his works as ‘authentic forgeries’, proposing that his paintings, like all images, offer only a limited understanding of reality, and that they are refracted through our own memories and preconceptions, both personal and collective. It is certainly true that without knowledge of their hidden meaning, Tuymans’ pictures can be deceptively empty.
When I worked with him at an exhibition at Dublin’s Douglas Hyde Gallery twenty years ago, Tuymans was as forceful and self-confident as he appears to be now. It had taken several attempts to convince him to show there, and when he came to install his precisely conceived exhibition he did so in a masterful way, having first made it clear that he had no interest in the interventions or opinions of curators, light-heartedly illustrating this by saying that he had once worked as a bouncer at a night club. He worked through the options methodically and carefully, making full use of negative space in the gallery, just as he has done at the Palazzo Grassi. At talks following the installation he told the audiences that he was the best painter in the world, with the possible exception of Gerhard Richter, and that he always finished his canvases in a day. Not all the artists in the audience found these statements totally convincing, and even now, thinking back to his performances,I don’t know if he was being provocative or ironic. He was an agreeable companion in a social context, and as he rarely smiles, it wasn’t easy to know when he was joking.
In recent interviews, Tuymans still goes against the grain. He talks, for instance, about what he believes to be the insane stupidity of the contemporary world and how, after the age of sixty, life is simply a process of ‘anger management’. Born in 1958, he now considers himself as part of a generation that ‘is over’. Perhaps, though, this rhetorical exaggeration is a way of emphasizing his seriousness and that of his paintings, precisely because their stylistic understatement often suggests otherwise. Significantly, he has also mentioned that his pictures, now extremely expensive, have been perfectly copied in China, adding that he finds the facsimiles meaningless because they lack ‘intentionality’. This distinction may buttress the financial value of his paintings, just as it is intended to justify the fundamental gravity of his practice, which he likes to present as a form of cultural resistance, but it is not entirely compelling. Tuymans’ melancholia is persuasive, but one of its consequences is the emptiness that lies at the heart of his work - a quality that makes his paintings acceptable both to rich collectors and to earnest, politically correct, critics.
http://www.evavermandel.com/
https://frieze.com/article/luc-tuymans-retrospective-palazzo-grassi-venice
Something of the other world
The other day I went to a concert in Dublin, at which Brìghde Chaimbeul was one of the main performers. From Skye, Chaimbeul plays the Scottish smallpipes, softer and less strident than the better-known bagpipes, and on her debut album, ‘The Reeling’, they envelope the listener with complex and drifting melodies, kept intense and trancelike by incessant drones. It is very beautiful music, recorded live in a small Scottish highlands church.
During the interval - it was a long evening, with three other acts taking to the stage, including the wonderful Lisa O’Neill, who played at the DHG in Dublin shortly before I left the gallery - I happened to have a conversation with a friend who had just returned from a trip to Scotland, where he had visited a substantial number of museums, galleries, and exhibitions. He seemed particularly taken by a display of small photographs by Francesca Woodman which he had seen at the National Gallery in Edinburgh, set in the context of work by two other American photographers, Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe. Like Brìghde Chaimbeul, Francesca Woodman was very young when she first came to prominence, and they have overlapping sensibilities. There is something especially feminine and dreamlike about their work, as well as a quality that is simultaneously archetypal and evanescent.
Woodman had already passed away when I worked on an exhibition of her work in 2001 at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, but her ardent spirit still seemed very much alive in the photographs. Many of them showed women, often herself and frequently naked, blurred or merging with their surroundings. They were monochrome, almost always modest in scale, commonly shot indoors in abandoned or deserted places. Following the example of the critic Rosalind Krauss, who wrote about her in the 1980s, it is often said that her work focuses on issues of gender, self, how her body relates to the world, and that it ‘attempts to resist the male gaze’. Although possibly true, this reading strikes me as overly conceptual and reductive of the mood of the images, which I found oneiric, mysterious, almost ethereal, as if they had been fashioned by someone only half in this world.
Her mother’s recollections of Francesca were simpler and more straight-forward. In an interview in ‘The Guardian’, Betty Woodman once remarked that her daughter wasn’t a ‘deeply serious intellectual’ and probably wouldn’t have recognised the feminist claims that are now made for her work. ‘She had a good time, her life wasn’t full of miseries. She was fun to be with. It’s a basic fallacy that her death is what she was all about, and people read that into the photographs. They psychoanalyse them. Young people in particular feel that she’s talking about them, somehow. They see the photographs as very personal. But that’s not the way I approach them. They’re often funny’.
A close friend and contemporary took yet another perspective, quoted in the same article. ‘She was kooky, and at first I didn’t want to be anywhere near her’, said Betsy Berne, a writer and journalist. ‘She seemed to be born in the wrong century - she was totally outside pop culture; she never watched TV; she couldn’t care less about music. But if she wanted something, she was going to get it, and when we moved to New York, I sublet the place she lived in and that’s when we became close. She was very loyal and intense. She was the kind of person you either loved or hated’.
The late George and Betty Woodman came to the installation and opening of the Dublin exhibition, and their presence added much to the occasion. They were keen to talk about their own work as well as that of their daughter’s; George painted and took photographs that had been influenced, at least to my eye, by Francesca; Betty was a ceramicist, well known for her vibrant and colourful baroque forms. I particularly remember something about which we all seemed to agree, and that was the feeling that Francesca had managed to fill her brief life with extraordinary intensity and accomplishment, as if she knew that she would not be here for long. My memories of the show are of momentary glimpses of her flighty inner being and passing hints of a dimension beyond those in which we customarily live, as though their subject were a changeling. There are music traditions in Ireland, and in Scotland too, that have much to do with the ‘other world’, and this is what I sense in the reels of Brìghde Chaimbeul and Francesca Woodman’s uncanny images.
https://www.brichaimbeul.com/
https://www.victoria-miro.com/artists/7-francesca-woodman/
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/aug/31/searching-for-the-real-francesca-woodman
During the interval - it was a long evening, with three other acts taking to the stage, including the wonderful Lisa O’Neill, who played at the DHG in Dublin shortly before I left the gallery - I happened to have a conversation with a friend who had just returned from a trip to Scotland, where he had visited a substantial number of museums, galleries, and exhibitions. He seemed particularly taken by a display of small photographs by Francesca Woodman which he had seen at the National Gallery in Edinburgh, set in the context of work by two other American photographers, Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe. Like Brìghde Chaimbeul, Francesca Woodman was very young when she first came to prominence, and they have overlapping sensibilities. There is something especially feminine and dreamlike about their work, as well as a quality that is simultaneously archetypal and evanescent.
Woodman had already passed away when I worked on an exhibition of her work in 2001 at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, but her ardent spirit still seemed very much alive in the photographs. Many of them showed women, often herself and frequently naked, blurred or merging with their surroundings. They were monochrome, almost always modest in scale, commonly shot indoors in abandoned or deserted places. Following the example of the critic Rosalind Krauss, who wrote about her in the 1980s, it is often said that her work focuses on issues of gender, self, how her body relates to the world, and that it ‘attempts to resist the male gaze’. Although possibly true, this reading strikes me as overly conceptual and reductive of the mood of the images, which I found oneiric, mysterious, almost ethereal, as if they had been fashioned by someone only half in this world.
Her mother’s recollections of Francesca were simpler and more straight-forward. In an interview in ‘The Guardian’, Betty Woodman once remarked that her daughter wasn’t a ‘deeply serious intellectual’ and probably wouldn’t have recognised the feminist claims that are now made for her work. ‘She had a good time, her life wasn’t full of miseries. She was fun to be with. It’s a basic fallacy that her death is what she was all about, and people read that into the photographs. They psychoanalyse them. Young people in particular feel that she’s talking about them, somehow. They see the photographs as very personal. But that’s not the way I approach them. They’re often funny’.
A close friend and contemporary took yet another perspective, quoted in the same article. ‘She was kooky, and at first I didn’t want to be anywhere near her’, said Betsy Berne, a writer and journalist. ‘She seemed to be born in the wrong century - she was totally outside pop culture; she never watched TV; she couldn’t care less about music. But if she wanted something, she was going to get it, and when we moved to New York, I sublet the place she lived in and that’s when we became close. She was very loyal and intense. She was the kind of person you either loved or hated’.
The late George and Betty Woodman came to the installation and opening of the Dublin exhibition, and their presence added much to the occasion. They were keen to talk about their own work as well as that of their daughter’s; George painted and took photographs that had been influenced, at least to my eye, by Francesca; Betty was a ceramicist, well known for her vibrant and colourful baroque forms. I particularly remember something about which we all seemed to agree, and that was the feeling that Francesca had managed to fill her brief life with extraordinary intensity and accomplishment, as if she knew that she would not be here for long. My memories of the show are of momentary glimpses of her flighty inner being and passing hints of a dimension beyond those in which we customarily live, as though their subject were a changeling. There are music traditions in Ireland, and in Scotland too, that have much to do with the ‘other world’, and this is what I sense in the reels of Brìghde Chaimbeul and Francesca Woodman’s uncanny images.
https://www.brichaimbeul.com/
https://www.victoria-miro.com/artists/7-francesca-woodman/
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/aug/31/searching-for-the-real-francesca-woodman
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