"Threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress"

This story emerged in The Guardian last week. In sum, it seems that carrying placards and shouting slogans at British soliders is now enough to get you arrested (retrospectively arrested, too – if we decided we don’t like what you’ve done after you’ve done it, we’re going to come after you).

It really goes without saying that this is an obvious manifestation of a worrying trend that has emerged in recent years in the UK; a trend towards racial, social, and cultural profiling. (Of course, this is something that never went away, as the ingrained Thatcherite mindset of our times could too readily attest, were enough attention paid to it. For example, our newspapers & politicians have often told us (though not in so many words), that miners are brutish, unrefined working class animals – or at the very least, unfortunately, regrettably, expendable. Names, labels, faces, modes of dress, and justifications for singling out those possessing these, may change, but the motivating force remains at root the same.)

Those charged by the police were Muslims. One might well ask whether more worried heed would be paid to these arrests if those arrested were concerned white liberals protesting the BNP. Of course, this would never happen, as the BNP are a group we can all unite in hate against – they are the bogeymen we can all agree to loathe. (I don’t in any way mean to smooth over the worrying rise in their popularity, and the genuine concern felt by many at this rise; but I do wonder if they provide an easy way out for the increasingly right-leaning ‘mainstream’ parties– by being so openly racist and all the rest of it, they allow, for example, the Tories to present their own policies as eminently reasonable)). Well, white liberals might have been one thing – though of course they are much less worrying than evil hardline leftists like those nasty anarchists who have quite rightly been cracked down on in Greece or in London if G20 provokes them into their bestial action. These anarchists are acting merely to create turmoil, to disrupt our tourist snaps and the picture-perfect political co-operation of our leaders. No, not to dream of or to provoke the dissolution of insane systems of ingrained cruelty and of a loss of compassionate relation beyond the packaged tendresse of ‘charity’ (through which we can have the sensation of smoothing out troublesome creases in the fabric of society, through which we can feel good about ourselves, can bask in the warm cocooned glow of self-satisfaction with the excuse that we are really feeling good about helping other people.) Not to reflect, along with Martin Luther King, that “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring”; not to reflect, along with Blake, that “Pity would be no more/ If we did not make somebody poor/ And mercy no more would be/ If all were as happy as we.” No, the message is: smash no windows whatsoever, straighten your tie, and smile as you actively benefit from the misery of spirit and material circumstance suffered by others.

The terms are set, it seems: both as to who can protest and who they can protest against. And they most certainly cannot protest against ‘our brave boys’, who are our ‘heroes’, fighting for ‘freedom’ ‘on our behalf’ (forget ‘not in my name’ and all that bullshit, OK?). Yes, you may question (within the timid terms of tremulous liberal anxiety) the cause in which they have been sent to torture and ravage another’s country, another’s land, to commit everyday cultural rape. But they themselves are blameless as lambs.

Well knock me down with a feather if the real situation isn’t a little more complex than this nice fantasy. These soldiers, apparently so sensitive as to need the police to protect them from insults, are known as ‘The Poachers’, a name that implies that they hunt their prey as mere animals to be killed. Not exactly the most shy and retiring souls then – and perhaps, if their mindset is as suggested by their name, they view the use of force as the most obvious and logical ways to solve all disagreements (hence the police intervention; the soldiers themselves could obviously not lash out at citizens of their own country – at least, not yet, as the climate is still not quite ripe (though I venture to suggest that the time when such a response would be accepted is not far off, and is not merely the cautionary and never-realized warning of dystopian sci-fi)).

OK then, so I find ironic and bitterly laughable the notion that soldiers need defending from a few insults thrown (aren’t these the people whose job is to have deadly missiles thrown at them, and to throw deadly missiles back?). But I also find it worrying, as the obvious clampdown on civil liberties, on the right to protest, that it is; I find it worrying (though by no means surprising) that ideologically-motivated force is being exercised in the name of ‘law and order’. ‘Keeping us safe’ is always the excuse, though it’s unclear who ‘we’ are and what exactly our position is in the citadel we inhabit. Well, whatever the answers to those questions, the message here is ‘think twice about expressing dissent if you’re a Muslim, and keep your fucking trap shut.’

[Before anyone accuses me of spitting out one form of repression (right-leaning white western government) only to implicitly favour another (‘Islamofascism’), I should point out that I certainly do not support the use of religiously-motivated insults such as “British soldiers burn in hell” (though I would not go as far as to censor them by means of police intervention); I am firmly against repression and intolerance in the name of religion generally, let alone in the name of Islam. (And I'll note that a number of those arrested waved a placard reading, "Islam will dominate the world, freedom can go to hell.") But I would point out that slogans about hellfire and damnation do recall those used by White Christian Fundamentalists picketing ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera’. (On his website, Stewart Lee has published an example of the many hate mail letters he received; it warns him that, unless he repents, he will burn in hell). Now, forgive me if I’m wrong, but I would have thought that writing a satirical musical was less grounds for burning in hell than going to a foreign country and shooting people – though, evidently, that’s not what the police and other instruments of ‘law and order’ believe.]

Bill Dixon: Tapestries for Small Orchestra (Firehouse 12, 2009)

As Stephen Haynes notes in his online journal/blog on the recording sessions for this project, one of the challenges involved was providing enough distinction in the sound mix between five trumpeters/cornet players with similarly dark sounds. But Dixon does, after all, favour a dark palette, as amply demonstrated by his previous orchestral release, ‘17 Musicians In Search of a Sound: Darfur’, where the slightly larger ensemble produced slowly emerging chord-clouds and slowly shifting unison passages in which the ensemble mesh was produced by individual instruments in near, but not quite, total alignment. The effect is a kind of blurring, produced by a very careful manipulation of individual detail; a more horizontal than vertical approach, with solos emerging as parts of the texture – like a colour highlighted in a particular portion of a canvas – rather than as monologues supported by an ensemble background. This has always been the case with Dixon’s own playing, particularly given his use of electronics, and the fact that the other trumpeters also deploy electronics, in some cases seeming to mimic his approach – muted growls, breathy whispers, repeated mid-register notes, high-pitched flurries cascading into silence – adds to the collaborative feel. That’s not to say that there aren’t solo spots, though – for instance, ‘Motorcycle ‘66’ starts with melodic material for unaccompanied bass which succeeds in forcing an initial concentration, in ushering the listener in to a music which needs to be heard with open ears. In any case, neither ensemble nor solo passages contain a wasted note; as Dixon puts it: “Listen to the space in the room. If you can't do something more beautiful than that, shut the fuck up.” The result is a kind of substantial minimalism – very slow, seeming to lack any overtly linear development, predominantly atmospheric, almost trance-like. And yet even this apparent lack of activity – most pronounced on the sustained hush of ‘Adagio: Slow Mauve Scribblings’ – reveals itself upon closer inspection to consist of complex structural balances and connections. Low, slowly-shifting drones, shimmering vibraphone, occasional electronic tweaks, overlapping melodic lines, repeated upward flurries all combine to create a sound field that is unique in modern music. Inexorable yet fragile, ‘Tapestries for Small Orchestra’ is slow-moving, meditative, and deeply affecting.

dog star man - by brakhage

a brief note on structure might be in order to begin with: as much as the film can be said to have a 'narrative' (which in any case is in the order of epic or myth, rather than the 'story' of traditional film-making), it concerns the rise and fall of the dog star man (though the title can be taken two ways: either as the name of the man, or as a conflation of the three main visual threads of the film - a man, a dog, and a star (the sun, shown both in archive and original footage)). the man undertakes a physical journey up a mountain, where, accompanied by his dog, he chops down a dead tree: various dreams and remembrances (of his child and his wife) combine with sense impressions of the landscape around him (mountains, trees, snow, clouds, sun), as well as less obviously referential visual patterns created through superimposition and handpainting on film. the prelude combines footage from the four following parts and is concerned, broadly, with the cosmic - much use is made of footage of the sun (the 'star' of the title). part i introduces the footage of a woodsman, the dog star man (played by brakhage himself) climbing a snowy mountain with his dog, and chopping down a dead tree. part ii superimposes onto footage of a baby (one of brakhage's children) a riot of colour and rapidly changing visual phenomena, achieved thru the technique of painting on film, a kind of animation which he intended to approximate 'closed-eye vision' - i.e. what one sees when one closes one's eyes. part iii, a 'daydream of sex', is visceral and supremely physical, mixing footage of the sexual act with blood and organs - most notably, a beating heart. part iv returns to the woodsman, whose journey up the mountain comes to seem increasingly futile; trapped in an endless ascent, with no hope of reaching a summit, and made, through looping, to continuously chop at a tree which never falls, the man collapses on the ground, grimacing in agony, his wild long hair giving him a caveman appearance - the struggles against nature and physical limitation are unchanged from man's early beginnings. a mystical quality briefly emerges, hinting at some kind of hope, as the man reaches for a nightsky of twinkling stars, but these stars are, in reality, full of molten, deathly heat, as we see from the footage of the sun.

that's a very brief outline of what 'happens' in the film, although, in order to provide some sense of cohesion, i've inevitably imposed a too-schematic narrative outline on a film which lives moment by moment, as a profoundly immersive and visually busy experience. it's almost as if the absence of sound is made up for by what might at first seem to be an OVERcrowding of visual event; and watching the film silently, as intended, provides a very different experience of how one experiences the medium - one's eye trained to become more active, more able to discern connections, cohesions and fractures. therein lies the main problem with trying to describe 'dog star man' - for, fundamentally, the film teaches one how to read it itself, as it progresses: no amount of preparation will really equip one to the same degree as this instantaneous visual training. in that sense, the film is, like the best avant-garde art, a PARTICIPATORY piece, an experience which the viewer can share - but to do so, they must work, they cannot sit back and let the film-maker tell them something. this makes watching 'dog star man' a very personal experience, and the film itself is a very personal piece, showing the most intimate details of brakhage's life, the most intimate and extreme details of his fears and hopes. but at the same time, it has an epic scope rarely matched in conventional feature films. it is about the simultaneity of the local and the cosmic, about the struggle for security, for a home base, and the dangers and rigours of manual labour, of making one's way in a world full of overwhelming sense data, a world that shapes one and that is shaped into being by sense perceptions, rather than existing as something 'already there' which one can schematise, organise and make sense of.

moving in, from outline to detail, we might ask 'what do we have here'? and to answer that question would require a whole book (a frame-by-frame analysis is out of the question!) but, in brief, we can say that we have: perception nature repetition cycles recurrences man in the cosmos light movement the body organs sex fluid secretion the breast the penis the axe the tree the eye/ man as mythological figure an epic made from home movies the handmade handscratched handpainted the sun's molten leaps clouds passing the ascent the struggle up the mountain interludes lightness the woodsman playing with his dog (who, as we know from 'sirius remembered', decomposes in a quite horrifically beautiful way)/ back from the sense of narrative based around character development to the epic cipher figure yet with an utterly intense focus on the body inside and outside its environment (the dog star man, the woodsman, is brakhage himself but his motivations are not considered in the sense of a 'character study', though the preoccupations ARE very much diurnal - his baby, his home life sex, the mountain near his home, his cabin (in part iv), manual labour, struggles and fears in the moment revealing huge cosmic dramas) its environment snow falling thru and landing on trees twigs branches hand drawings of crystals superimpositions snow caught in hair snow struggled through and slippery hair skin organs blood opening and shutting the mouth beating of the heart blood red black/ we can say that we have the elemental (which is never, really, elementary)

Ulzan's Raid (1972): A Re-Revisionist Western

Starring: Burt Lancaster, Bruce Davison, Jorge Luke
Music: Frank DeVol
Director: Robert Aldrich
Screenplay: Alan Sharp
Director of Photgraphy: Joseph Biroc

In 1954, Robert Aldrich directed and Burt Lancaster starred in ‘Apache’, a re-consideration of the negative role accorded Native Americans in the western film. Just under twenty years later, they re-united for another examination of the same subject, but the revisionism this time was as much a response to the kind of film made possible by the likes of ‘Apache’, as it was to the old myths of whooping villains (a la ‘Stagecoach’). Attention is paid to creating an almost deadpan examination of the minutiae of life in the west, with a literate script depicting the complex moral dilemmas that were faced in a time of rough-and-ready law-and-order and rampant racism. Not only the settings but the characters are more believable than was the norm for the western at the time (and, given such recent efforts as the re-make of ‘3:10 to Yuma’, is the norm today as well). Thus, we have such closely thought-through detail as the army scout shooting himself and the settler he’s escorting back to the fort, to save them from being tortured by the Apaches, and the tactical manoeuvres centring on how long horses can last during a lengthy pursuit. In addition, the scout played by Lancaster isn’t (as he probably would be today) the ‘cynical’, ‘world-weary’ character who must redeem himself by some heroic action; rather, he’s a competent professional, a man who lives with an Apache wife but who doesn’t buy the ‘Little Big Man’ myths of the peace-loving noble savage– a hippie era antidote to the racism of ‘classic’ westerns that actually presented a view just as distorted as theirs. ‘Ulzana’ is far from a one-man film, though, and it’s the relations between Lancaster and other characters that make it such an interesting picture. Most notably, there’s the idealistic young officer (Bruce Davison) who leads the expedition to chase Ulzana, the Apache who’s fled his reservation in frustration and is leading a war party to rape and murder local homesteaders. The son of a clergyman, the young man believes that it’s “an absence of Christian feeling” that’s led to the situation of mutual enmity between white men and Native Americans; however, when he sees the aftermath of Ulzana’s raids (for instance, a mutilated settler has a dog’s tail placed in his mouth; as Lancaster wryly observes, Apaches have a strange sense of humour), he quickly swings to the opposite view, and wonders how Lancaster can have dealt with the Apache for so long without hating them. The fact that men could be so cruel offends his notion that man is essentially good (“made in God’s image”) – particularly so when members of his own cavalry troupe start to mutilate the corpse of Ulzana’s teenage son. Lancaster, though, sees through the bullshit, implicitly pointing out that such a ‘humane’ viewpoint over-simplifies the questions of culture clash caused by the white man’s invasion of Native American territory. It would be easy to characterise the tribes as mistreated innocents suffering at the hands of bloodthirsty colonialists (the hippie view), or, as the young officer does, to believe that a little talking and good-faith would sort things out, and that both sets of men could exist together in peace, motivated by similar feelings of love and brotherhood, following ‘good moral principles’ in harmony. What that ignores, though, is the brutality present in the tribal culture (at least, in that of the Apaches, who were feared by other tribes as well as by the white men); commenting on the rape of white settlers, several characters note that “they don’t treat their own women much better.” A culture that is based around rites of manhood (as documented in ‘A Man Called Horse’) and the feats of male warriors is not all that dissimilar to that of bloodthirsty white men masquerading behind Christianity, ‘the American way’, or simple lust for land. Yet just as one is not going to be able to ‘understand’ the Apache by caricaturing them as evil, heathen savages, one is also not going to be able to understand them by trying to view them as surrogate white liberals: there is a difference, an otherness which should neither be romanticised nor ignored. Appropriately enough, all of Ulzana’s dialogue is presented, unsubtitled, in his native tongue: no cushy Kevin Costner characterisations here. Overall, then, one might characterise the film’s nuanced approach as re-revisionism: a corrective both to the old Hollywood myths which everyone by now knew to be untrue, and to the new hippie myths which were perhaps more ‘worthy’ but were also riskily naïve.

NB. Ward Churchill's 'Fantasies of the Master Race' might help to point up some of the errors in the above post. At least, it might teach me to do some more research, rather than just taking on trust what I've seen in a film (which is, after all, fictional).

Valdez Is Coming (1971)

Starring: Burt Lancaster, Susan Clark, Jon Cypher
Music: Charles Gross
Director: Edwin Sherin
Screenplay: Roland Kibbee, David Rayfiel
(based on the novel by Elmore Leonard)
Director of Photgraphy: Gábor Pogány

Like Martin Ritt’s ‘Hombre’, made a few years earlier, this was adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel, and, like ‘Hombre’, it presents as its hero someone from an oppressed minority who is forced into a confrontation against heavy odds, due to the violent actions of some unscrupulous characters who hold him in racial contempt. Happening across a shooting party, Mexican lawman Bob Valdez (Burt Lancaster) is forced into a confrontation with an innocent army veteran, a black man accused by the rancher who’s leading the party of a murder he didn’t commit. Stricken with guilt at having killed the man, Valdez tries to get the rancher to give him $100 to compensate the dead man’s Native American widow; however, he’s met with contempt and physical violence, and the main part of the film sees him taking his revenge. (Although one should note that it’s not straightforward revenge, as Valdez is acting as much to prove a point – to make the rancher accept his guilt and show some concern towards the oppressed – as he is to avenge a personal slight or injury.)

Less downbeat and more unbelievable in its development than ‘Hombre’, this is nonetheless a film I wanted to like, and one which certainly has something to lift it above your average western. It’s not a ‘message’ picture, as was the vogue at the time (‘Little Big Man’, ‘Solider Blue’ et al); rather, its revisionism is gentle and easy to miss, often just a seemingly throw-away line (asked when he hunted Apache, the titular hero replies “before I know better”). The fact that Valdez is a Mexican also runs counter to the usual western clichés of those ‘over the border’ being either caricatured bandidos (Calvera from ‘The Magnificent Seven’ and General Mapache from ‘The Wild Bunch’) or poor, oppressed farmers, essentially innocent but often incapable of defending themselves without the help of white mercenaries (again, we can turn to ‘The Magnificent Seven’ and ‘The Wild Bunch’ for examples). Indeed, an exchange between Valdez and his old friend Diego, where Valdez impersonates the rancher who will prove the villain of the piece, nicely captures the mix of scorn and idealisation which characterises the white man’s view of the Mexican: “well, you’re a good greaser, Diego. As long as you’re a good greaser, I treat you fair and square – yes sirree, Diego, you people sure know how to live: singing, dancing, screwing – you don’t worry about nothing.” It’s one of the best moments of the film, in part because it’s so understated, yet underlain with a certain dramatic tension: having begun wryly, ironically, Lancaster delivers the final line with what is almost a sigh; a shift to a new, quiet seriousness and determination which is signalled by the faint rattle of Morricone-esque percussion on the soundtrack, and which sees him ride out on his horse for his near-fatal second encounter with the rancher.

Given all this, it’s unfortunate that the Mexican is played by a white man in make-up, although I’d accept that, back in the 70s, there were less bankable Latin stars of the kind who crop up in Hollywood films today (one can imagine Benicio del Toro playing this role, for example). Not that Burt Lancaster’s make-up is particularly bad; and, after all, the fact that he played the hero of Robert Aldrich’s ‘Apache’ in similar ‘brown-face’ didn’t prevent him from giving a very fine performance in a very fine film. His blue eyes do look a little out of place here though, and the henchman character, ‘El Segundo’, looks like a pantomime villain, with hair that sprouts in huge, wild tufts on either side of his head, and dollops of face-paint which make him look like Laurence Olivier’s Othello. Indeed, several of the protagonists also look distinctly like 70s TV characters: I’m thinking primarily of the woman Valdez kidnaps, and her man, the villain of the piece.



Particularly in the second half of the film, ‘Valdez is Coming’ threatens to become a rather tedious revenge/chase movie, though the plot is slightly more complex than this. Nonetheless, there is something rather pulpy about the way that Lancaster turns from put-upon minor lawman to brilliantly competent guerrilla fighter, shooting a man from a 1,000 yards, easily picking off the numerous armed riders sent after him, and sneaking into the heart of the enemy camp without anyone noticing. It’s particularly noticeable partly because of the understated, resigned quality that characterises his performance in the initial stages of the film: moving slowly and speaking carefully, almost deferentially, Valdez is a character not exactly resigned to his lot (which is being treated with open or concealed contempt by his white neighbours) but understandably cautious about being too outspoken. From the moment he pulls his old army gear from under the bed and starts to growl, “Valdez is coming,” he is suddenly athletic, hyper-alert, and a crack shot who never misses the target. The one-man-against-impossible-odds storyline seems here actually more unbelievable than in ‘Chato’s Land’, where Charles Bronson’s character has the advantage of knowing the terrain – as the film’s title indicates, it is the desert which accounts for the fate of the posse he stalks as much as it is the actions of Chato himself. Valdez, though, eludes capture with such ease that the fact he is forced into a final showdown comes as rather a surprise – though, given the mechanics and conventions of plot, it has to happen.

It’s the old Elmore Leonard trick (seen also in ‘Mr Majestyk’) of having the passive, good-natured hero take his revenge after suffering some memorable indignity (in ‘Majestyk’, this involved the machine-gunning of a crop of melons; here, the incident has Lancaster forced to struggle through harsh terrain with a wooden cross strapped to his back). But whereas that sort of thing might be expected in a simple action film like ‘Mr Majestyk’, imposing such a cliché on what could have been a reasonably realistic look at life in the Old West means that ‘Valdez is Coming’ fails to live up to its initial promise. The end result is a rather uneasy compromise between action-movie set-pieces and something more thoughtful and interesting. Still, it’s worth an hour and a half of your time – even if that’s for what it could have been more than for what it is.

Some Exhibitions in London, November 2009. (Kapoor/Kiefer/Jodorowksy/ Montandon)

Anish Kapoor at The Royal Academy (26 September-11 December 2009)

Art galleries now are always white, the huge smooth spaces of their well-lit walls and shiny floors as much a part of any exhibition as the artworks themselves. This is made explicit in the Anish Kapoor show at the Royal Academy – most notably, in the two exhibits (Shooting Into the Corner (2008-2009)/ Svayambh (2007)) involving large quantities of red wax being smeared over venerable wooden door-frames, splattered on the whiteness of those walls in a pile of meaty red waste. Of course, one must always stand behind the white line to view such an ‘unrestrained’ mess. This leaves an odd, dissatisfying disjuncture: the freedom to subvert is managed, something to provide a hook for the show, to draw people in, without in reality moving any of the boundaries between spectator, artist and work which all too often are internalised and taken as read. Anish Kapoor is allowed to fire a cannon of red wax into a corner; anyone else would be taken by the scruff of the neck and marched out for crimes against art (or art galleries).Something similar happens in a room full of variously shaped and curved mirrors which Kapoor calls Non-Objects. To my mind this seems nothing more than an arty version of what one might find in a Victorian fairground, actually stripped of the sense of wonder present in the fair because of its sterile context, because viewers tip-toe round the mirrors wanting to burst out laughing as their shape is stretched so as to become hugely fat or thin or short or tall, but facing disapproving glances whenever anyone goes too far. (This place has, after all, the atmosphere of a secular church, and, like the church, is governed by a system of elitism, money and privilege by which the ordinary spectator is supposed to be awed, a participant only as a passive receptacle for the presentation of that which is ‘above’ their normal experience (though, of course, packaged into its own set of experiences – what one should do and feel in an art gallery).)

The show does have a certain immediate appeal – a protruding white ‘belly’ which appears at first to be an illusion does something to break the white flatness of a gallery wall (as if the building itself has become pregnant, a disquieting notion which bellows the work’s smooth gracefulness of shape), and what looks to be a painting of a giant yellow on yellow sun turns out to be a false wall with a large central hole (the opposite of a belly, perhaps). (When I Am Pregnant (1992)/ Yellow (1999). But such illusions reveal little beyond themselves: they are neat tricks with no secrets to yield, no truths to deliver, no paradoxes beyond the slight thrill of being tricked or confused: trompe l’oeil in the age of minimalism. The same with the hall of mirrors; the same with the sculptures made of colour and grouped under the title '1,000 Names', which hint at something vaguely religious and ritualistic (inspired by Kapoor’s visits to India) but lack the courage to make this explicit (and certainly without the courage to do anything political). Similarly, large sculptures such as ‘Slug’ (2009 – winding marble coils surrounding a shiny red vulva – do impress by their scale (taking up entire galleries), yet evoke no more wonder or fear than a single shot from a Jodorowsky film or even from Hollywood fare such as ‘Alien.’ Placed as it is in the front courtyard of the RA, neatly tucked in from the shiny lights and large scale of a street of shops, ‘Tall Tree and the Eye’ (2009), a sculpture consisting of connected glass balls, resembles nothing more than a giant modern Christmas tree. If, as Werner Herzog claims, we are in desperate need of new images to ensure the survival of our civilisation, they will not be found tidied away in a world of privileged white space and precious, tethered, quasi-subversion. Wander from the spindly broken pots and containers of the ‘excreted cement’ sculptures ‘Greyman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked’ (2008-2009) onto a building site; wander from the sticky red mess fired from a cannon every 20 minutes, during gallery opening hours, to the sticky red mess at the end of machine gun bullets every minute, around the world. Seen in this light, Kapoor’s work seems to do far less than it could, or should.



Anselm Kiefer: 'Karfunkelfee' and 'The Fertile Crescent' at The White Cube(s) (16 October-14 November 2009)

Perhaps my beef with the Kapoor exhibition is as much with the gallery setting as with what is presented within it. Let’s put that to the test: not far from the Royal Academy, in an Old Mason’s Yard (not that you would recognise it as shut) can be found the ‘White Cube’ gallery. This is perhaps the ultimate example of the trend to whiteness – the name of the gallery paying testament to its aesthetic (away with the black, the dirty, the broken, if it’s not contained within a large ‘steel and glass frame’). The immaculate cube certainly provides a spacious arena for Anselm Kiefer’s ‘Karfunkelfee’, four huge triptychs depicting gothic forests, and a smaller painting tucked away in the ‘lower ground floor lobby’ (at the other White Cube, in Hoxton Square, a companion show entitled ‘The Fertile Crescent’ depicts the ruins of Indian brick factories). Yet Kiefer’s work evades the tendency to alluring, polished and unfeeling minimalism exemplified by the sepulchral whiteness of modern galleries; indeed, the seriousness with which he treats his simplified subject matter comes close to caricature. This has its dangers: his work strives for portentousness in a manner not helped by the sort of critical comments hurled his way whenever he unveils his latest piece. The wounds of history, the aftermath of Fascism and the Holocaust, the cruelty of nature with the broken and slender promise of hope as a flower springing from the wasteland: such heavy symbolism threatens to drag down Kiefer’s canvases just as much as the thick encrusted impasto of his paint. But such interpretations, while perhaps true of the less successful work produced throughout the artist’s career, do not do justice to the best of his oeuvre.

What might be best would be, at least initially, to approach the canvasses with less of a worthy desire to make them mean humanistically and politically worthy things, to approach them with regards to the physical handling of material, to the sensuous experience of standing before them. It’s hard to miss the way in which they have been wrestled onto the canvas, a tactile struggle shared with Pollock and Auebach, the thick encrustations of their texture mimicking ‘nature’ (cracked earth, broken surfaces of ice and snow, wasteland, desert, human desolation of rubbish dumps and building sites) in what is more re-enactment and re-living than simple mimesis. This might give an appearance or atmosphere of desolation, yet there is also something approaching exuberance in the violent struggle with paint, the slashes and slabs and stabs. In a recent interview with The Independent Kiefer has this to say: “Children take all as given, and it is for this reason that ruins are beautiful – to me, extremely beautiful. I think the most beautiful movie in the world is the one when planes were sent after the war over Germany to film the ruins – these are for me the most beautiful pictures. It's wonderful because the vertical becomes the horizontal, you know? On one side, something is hidden because it's buried and on the other something is exposed – you see the forms. I love this.” Ruins, then (such as the ones in ‘The Fertile Crescent’), are not just symbols of transience, are not just about the horror of buildings which have outlived their original function, about the terrifying absence of the human: they have an aesthetic delight in themselves, if anything enhanced by the deep-seated fears which they also evoke. Similarly, for all their spiky forbidding, the brambles placed in front of the Karfunkelfee paintings seem meticulously arranged, carefully-smudged and smeared photos coiled round them, even a real snake carefully hidden in shadowed thicket; a semi-recreation, bringing the outside into a space where it becomes aestheticised – in the process losing the full force of its ‘sublime’ impact, nagged by fears which are more submerged, which creep around in less obvious ways than in the German Romantic art which is always present in the background of Kiefer’s works.

As the reviews for the show all note, this pieces offer nothing really new – not that that is the point of what Kiefer does. One senses that he wants each and every painting that he creates to be always-already a monument, to embody history. Odd, then, that this never occurs in a public space – by which I mean a REAL public space, not just a swish. immaculately polished gallery off Jermyn Street with its bespoke shoes and expensive tailors. How would a Kiefer compete with the flashing billboards a few miles away, the buzz of traffic and shoppers and shops? Perhaps the answer is that, though Kiefer is attempting to deal with historical traumas which effect us all, he is not doing so in an obvious or zeitgeisty way – this is not ‘Schindler’s List’ or ‘Saving Private Ryan’ or some film dealing with more recent horrors. One might note, in particular, the absence of figures –something heightened, in this show, by the presence of empty shirts, smocks, hoods, the hint of a path, a large book whose pages, curled as if aged paper, turn out to be made of rusted, weathered lead (echoing Kiefer’s earlier work, ‘High Priestess’). The work is in a sense an escape – to the ‘exotic’ strangeness of what Kiefer saw in India, to the German Romantic dark forest – but it is also an escape to dreams and nightmares which embody the fears suppressed and ignored in the busy, flashing world outside. Rather than taking that world on directly, Kiefer moves his reference points backwards (dealing with Germany’s 1940s legacy of guilt, drawing from older Germanic traditions, painting ruins, those symbols of the past), at the same time as trying to move them out of obvious temporal reference – to unchanging natural scenes, empty of human cultivation – to more primal fears.

We see this in the way that, as with Francis Bacon, echoes of western painting’s religious heritage sound in a human context: in the case of ‘Karfunkelfee’, the triptych form, with large, empty and decaying objects – a large smock, a small metal plane, a book made of lead – taking the place of Christ, the supreme figure of human suffering. This actually subverts a desire for catharsis, to be purged of plague desires and horrors (Grunwald). Only ghosts remain – and maybe not even ghosts, for memories lose their grip as those who held them die. Thus, the hooded smock in the centre of one of the triptychs is the shroud of the corpse that has disappeared, not because, like Christ, it has been resurrected, but because the body has rotted away; the smaller smocks tangled in the bramble below, almost mockingly, recall perhaps massacres of children, lamb’s wool caught in the thicket, and it’s arguably MORE disturbing to discover them this way, than to present explicit horror, than to depict an actual human corpse. For the fear of death is not so much that one will die, but that NOTHING OF ONE WILL BE LEFT: no memory, no trace, no poetic or artistic monument (Kiefer’s desire for monumentality, mentioned above, is nevertheless a desire for a different kind of monumentality to the norm; his monuments are monuments to the decay that follows great destruction, not the survivors of the glory that precedes it). In ‘Narziss and Goldmund’, Hesse writes that "perhaps...fear of death is the root of all our image-making"; Kiefer takes on this notion, but takes it further, ensures that in his works this fear is, at least partially, realized. No anonymous model will be immortalised as a statue in a "quiet dark cloister church, smiling with the same lovely mouth, as beautiful, young, and full of pain", for Kiefer's work has no human model. And that’s why his work still has such resonance – it’s not about doing something new, about some new trend – and it’s not just about an individual fear or an individual’s fear of death – it’s about a fear that, despite the apparent absence of the human, encompasses the whole human race, empathetically and collectively – that (especially given the recent fears of catastrophic environmental damage) not just one man or woman will disappear without trace, but that this will be the fate of all people, that the world will become uninhabitable and uninhabited by homo sapiens. Perhaps at some stage spaces such as the White Cube will be covered in brambles for real, Kiefer’s paint mingling with the dust and dirt with which it has so far only been lightly and consciously sprinkled.



Alejandro Jodorowksy and Pascale Montandon at The Horse Hospital (7-28 November 2009)

The series of watercolour and ink drawings by Alejandro Jodorowsky, in collaboration with his partner Pascale Montandon, are refreshingly located in a less grand setting. Down a side street, one comes across the words ‘Horse Hospital’ painted in white letters on a brick wall, and, a few meters further on, one has to press a buzzer to be admitted into the gallery space. The prices listed next to each work in the catalogue make more explicit that in the RA or White Cube the ridiculous money that goes into the art world, perhaps leading one to be automatically less disposed to like the work – even though it is by Jodorowsky. Starved of finances to make a new film for many years (1989’s ‘Santa Sangre’ is his last notable work), Jodorowsky might, one suspects, have turned his ideas into visual arts out of frustration. At the same time, they allow him a certain freedom, to paint things he couldn’t depict in the medium of film – or at least, not without considerable expense, effort and technological know-how. Thus, painted in a naïve style somewhat reminiscent of children’s book illustrations, we see figures with prominent genitals giving birth, having sex, raping and being raped, being mutilated, dancing, standing, singing; we are presented with bodily space transgressions and penetrations (arms going through bodies, one body sprouting many heads, a rabbi with sprouting extra fingers, headless corpses holding their smiling faces in their laps, green voyeur smiling dogs, plants with thick red lips). Despite all this, and despite what it shares with films like ‘The Holy Mountain’ and ‘El Topo’ – a preponderance of arcane mystical and religious symbolism, a fusion of extreme sex and violence, a love of images which are bizarre, arresting and taboo-breaking – these works are, if anything, less excessive than the films. Without the tie to real humans (actors), physical sets, location shooting, and without the combination of sound, music, speech and image, they are more safely removed into framed, almost whimsical fantasy, lacking the disturbance, the derangement which was always at the heart of what Jodorowksy did as a director. I’d take them over Anish Kapoor, though.

A Tribute to Sirone

News has just emerged that the bassist Sirone (Norris Jones) died in Berlin on Wednesday, at the age of 69. So, another one of the great free jazz musicians has passed away; warning that it's more urgent than ever not to rely on those early pioneers still being around and still keeping their music fresh. With Leroy Jenkins' passing a few years ago, this now means that, of the Revolutionary Ensemble, only one surviving member, Jerome Cooper, remains.

In tribute, I've put together a playlist of some of the Sirone performances in my collection. In some instances, I've excerpted bass solos from longer tracks (often when the bass isn't so well recorded, probably a legacy of the traditional jazz notion that the rhythm section is only a backdrop to the horns); in others, I've kept the whole track, as Sirone's accompaniment plays such an active role in the whole texture.

Sirone appears on albums with (to list just a few) Marion Brown, Pharoah Sanders, Noah Howard, Sonny Sharrock, Clifford Thornton, Dewey Redman, Cecil Taylor, and Dave Burrell, and collaborated with many others throughout his career. Born in Atlanta, he played with John Coltrane in the last year of the saxophonist's life, and became highly in-demand on the emerging 'fire music' scene: one might almost describe him as a free jazz session bassist, though that wouldn't do justice to the quality he brought to each session. Free jazz allowed him much more leverage than traditional routes; he was less an accompanist, a 'rhythm section' player, more an active participant, goading on the saxophones and trumpets and contributing sometimes pithy solo statements of his own. In these, he could be heard to take on something of Charles Mingus' very physical approach to the instrument, whereby the sound of fingers on strings had a real snap to it, the sound of slapped and struck vibrating gut; something, too of Jimmy Garrison's flamenco-flavoured strumming; and he developed, more than either player, a trembling higher register sound which would stand him in good stead for his later collaborations with the violinist Leroy Jenkins. In fact, even at this stage, he was the sort of player who meshed very well in unusual instrumental settings, especially with other stringed instruments to work or contrast with; on Gato Barbieri's 1967 ESP Disk recording, 'In Search of the Mystery', his pizzicato playing forms the turbulent backdrop to the piercing, near-anguished melodies played by Barbieri and cellist Joel Friedman.

1/ La Sorrella (bass solo)
from ‘Why Not’ (Marion Brown, 1966)

2/ Domiabra (bass solo)
from ‘The Black Ark’ (Noah Howard, 1969)

The first track in the playlist is a bass solo from 'La Sorrella', the opener on Marion Brown's 1966 album 'Why Not'. This is the longest solo Sirone is allocated (he solos on most tracks, but only for half a minute or so), and a good example of his interaction with Rashied Ali's drums, and their restless refusal to remain rhythmically stable. Following that, a solo from ‘Domiabra’, the opening piece on the 1969 Noah Howard classic ‘The Black Ark’; after the howling fury of Arthur Doyle, a bass solo might seem like respite, but Sirone’s springy jumps and bends round high and low registers are just as exploratory.

3/ Communications Network Part 1
from ‘Communications Network’ (Clifford Thornton, 1972)

Clifford Thornton, a trumpeter and trombonist (as well as cornet and electric piano player on this date) recorded some fine albums in the early 70s, probably the best known of which is the ambitious large-ensemble suite ‘The Gardens of Harlem’, recorded with the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra. For the first two tracks of ‘Communications Network’, Thornton features an unusual small group which, given the presence of Sirone and Jerome Cooper, is pretty much The Revolutionary Ensemble, with L. Shankar (of Shakti) replacing Leroy Jenkins on violin. This group has a very different sound, though; Shankar’s ecstatic raga lines over Thornton’s electric piano create a fusion feel which sits oddly – but very nicely – with Sirone and Cooper’s free jazz rhythms. Thornton’s cornet playing (he’s presumably overdubbing the electric piano) is declamatory and dark-toned, and, even if he and Shankar are very much the lead voices (bass and drums are way down in the mix, often obscured by the electric piano), it’s an interesting context in which to hear Sirone.

4/ Spring of Two Blue-Js Part 2 (excerpt)
from ‘Spring of Two Blue-Js’ (Cecil Taylor Unit, 1973)

Perhaps the greatest challenge for a jazz bass player is the immense stamina required: whereas a saxophonist can take a breather after blowing hard, bassists will most often play for the entire duration of a piece. Call this problem exacerbated in the music of Cecil Taylor, his pieces stretching to lengths that surpassed even those of John Coltrane, and whose fundamental characteristic was what Ekkehard Jost termed ‘energy’ (as opposed to ‘swing’), though of course Taylor has a lyrical streak which has grown more pronounced in recent years (sounding almost Debussyian at times). Robert Levin recounts one occasion where Taylor’s ‘Unit’ was playing in a jazz club; towards the end of the piece, his bassist at the time, Buell Neidlinger, had become so exhausted that he stopped playing, propped up by his instrument, his eyes closed as if, for all the world, the music had drained so much energy out of him that he had simply expired on the spot. If anything, Taylor’s music had grown even lengthier and more energetic by the time Sirone joined his Unit. An extreme example of this is the triple-LP (now double-CD) ‘One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye’, and to get a real sense of Sirone’s contribution to the music, one would probably have to listen to the whole thing – the cumulative intensity and accumulation of detail into a kind of trance-like block of sound is something that has to be experienced in the listening, rather than the describing – to be experienced as something total, complete. So I’ve chosen a short excerpt from the second piece on ‘Spring of Two Blue-Js’ (1973), an album recorded live at Town Hall in New York (at a concert dedicated to Ben Webster). We’ll hear the tail-end of the energy rush ridden and spurred on by saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, followed by Sirone’s solo, and a brief interaction with Taylor on piano ending the piece.

5/ Seeds and Deeds
6/ Meditation Submission Purification
7/ Joie de Vivre
8/ Qow
from ‘Coincide’ (Dewey Redman 1974)

Next, four complete pieces from Dewey Redman's 'Coincide' (1974), one of my favourite Redman recordings. Sirone and drummer Eddie Moore appear on all tracks (apart from 'Phadan-Sers', a Redman zither solo), and the other players are violinst Leroy Jenkins and trumpeter Ted Daniel. 'Seeds and Deeds' opens the album with some 'hard-driving jazz' (to borrow the title of the John Coltrane/Cecil Taylor collaboration), Redman and Daniels blasting away, Sirone and Moore skittering all over the place to create an exceptionally jittery, energetic feel. By contrast, 'Meditation Submission Purification' has its tone set by the otherworldy sounds of Redman's zither, Sirone's arco harmonics, and Eddie Moore's 'bowed and struck idiophone'. The arco playing of Jenkins and Sirone was one of the finest things about the Revolutionary Ensemble, opening up textures and sonorities which had previously been thought of as the province of 'classical' music (and still are, to some extent, despite the work of John Edwards, Barry Guy et al), and, with the zither coalescing into hanging clouds of sound rather than taking a lead role, Sirone's playing is perhaps the most dominant voice here. It's an entrancing piece with a very special atmosphere. 'Joie de Vivre' shows yet another side to Sirone's work: after the free jazz of 'Seeds and Deeds' and the 'extended techniques' textural work of 'Mediation...', he proves that he can play very fine pizzicato straight jazz ballad bass on 'Joie de Vivre'. It's the same trio as on 'Mediation...' (Redman, Sirone, and Moore) but with a very different use of space: whereas on the previous track the effect was of time standing stil, here it just moves very slowly, in graceful and unhurried comfort. All three musicians sound supremely relaxed. Beginning with an equally relaxed sound, but at a faster tempo (a brisk, happy walk, rather than a slow stroll), ‘Qow,’ the longest of my four selections from this album, opens with Redman playing off Sirone’s catchy repeated riff before his rough-edged smears move things further ‘out’, Sirone switching to fast walking bass and then taking a popping, bubbling solo.

9/ Manhattan Cycles, Side A
from ‘Manhattan Cycles’ (The Revolutionary Ensemble, 1972)

10/ Ponderous Planets
from ‘The People’s Republic’ (The Revolutionary Ensemble, 1975)

Sirone’s probably best-known for his work with violinist Leroy Jenkins and drummer Jerome Cooper in The Revolutionary Ensemble, which formed in the early 1970s. Jenkins had moved to New York from Chicago, where he had been an important member of the AACM. Given the realities of being a jobbing musicians in the Big Apple, the Ensemble was formed partly to fulfill the need for a regular group which could explore some of the subtleties that had characterized the AACM – the so-called ‘chamber jazz’ carried over from the Creative Construction Company, in which Jenkins had played with Anthony Braxton. A long period of practice prefaced the Ensemble’s official emergence. as testified by the flowing interaction of the music – in some ways a contrast to the ‘blow as loud and hard as you can’ school of free jazz. Cooper’s drumming never asserted itself so much as rolled into being, repeating in slowly developing waves, or cells of sound, and Sirone meshed with Jenkins’ melodically assertive violin, rather than trying to sound out as a lead voice. It was this quality in particular that made the Ensemble such a special group – for though, as we’ve heard, Sirone could be an assertive player, he was perhaps at his best when creating a textural thread that altered the whole sound of a group without one quite realizing that, or how, it had been. The Ensemble’s first album came out on ESP-Disk (it’s just been re-issued under the title ‘Vietnam’) and has been criticized for the sound quality, which failed to capture the subtlety of the groups’ quieter, spacier moments. In fact, though, the tape hiss and drone comes to seem almost a part of the music at these times, something entirely appropriate as the ensemble would make use of tape recordings and other non-standard sounds to supplement the basic violin, bass, drums line-up. Thus, on ‘Manhattan Cycles’ (the entire first side of which I’ve included in the playlist), Billie Holiday’s voice floats out, muted, Jenkins picking up on the ghost memory and turning it into living, flowing improvisational lyricism. ‘The People’s Republic’ (apocryphally supposed to have invoked the ire of Quincy Jones over dinner with Herb Alpert, and the subsequent cancellation of A&M Records’ jazz sub-label Horizon) is one of my favourite of the Ensemble’s recordings; the tracks are shorter than on the long-form ‘Vietnam’ or ‘Manhattan Cycles’, with some particularly gorgeous melodies (such as the beginning of ‘New York’) , a spacey, African-flavoured piece for vocals and percussion (the title track), and much atmospheric use of gongs, cymbals, musical saws, and the combined arco playing of Jenkins/Sirone (‘Ponderous Planets’).

11/ Berlin Erfrahung
from ‘And Now’ (The Revolutionary Ensemble, 2004)

During this time, Sirone made a few recordings under his name (it would be more than 20 years before he did so again). The Revolutionary Ensemble split in 1977, and, like many American avant-jazz musicians, he settled in Europe, finding the climate there much more receptive than in his home country. Based in Berlin, he nevertheless to maintain a presence in America as well, going on to work with Charles Gayle, Billy Bang, Cecil Taylor, and the George Adams/James Blood Ulmer group Phalanx. In 2004, the Revolutionary Ensemble, which had been dormant since the late 70s, unexpectedly reunited, releasing an acclaimed album on pi records which demonstrated the same virtues as their 70s work, as fresh as ever. Each member of the group contributed two compositions: Sirone’s ‘Berlin Erfrahung’ offers a strongly melodic approach to composition.

Sirone was still working in the years leading up to his death, recording a couple of albums under his own name with European musicians as well as with the violinist Billy Bang. Needless to say, his music lives on.

Download link for Sirone Tribute Playlist: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?1o1mozmvn0n