Thanks to 97p for finding this – the first copy of Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex edited by Wyndham Lewis in 1914. Certainly worth a look is the manifesto starting on page 11 if for no other reason than to admire the typography and page layout and definitely worth reading for its poetic invective, politically dubious as it may be.
Before you read any further, listen to this. That was Argh! by Folke Rabe. As its title suggests, it is an onomatopoeic collage of radio station jingles and aural detritus that scats between everything from the verbose ramblings of a radio DJ to local weather reports and the sampling of pop songs of the day. Invited to San Francisco’s Tape Music Center in 1965, Rabe became fascinated by the abstract and jazz like musical quality of American commercial radio DJ’s verbal lead in to a song – the way that they could continue talking through the introduction and right up until the very beginning of the vocal. This voice, Rabe thought, became an instrument in itself and the blurring of the edges between the DJ and the song became an interesting aural collage. Like an early kind of mixing. And that is one of the fascinating things for me about this piece: the way that it is an exact musical answer to Pop Art (it’s easy to think of it as the equivalent of a sonic Rauschenberg) and the way that it really preempted the cut and paste sampling of hip-hop. Jim O’Rourke – a big fan of Rabe, going so far as to even release several recordings on his own label – on the liner notes to the CD publication of Argh! in 2006 makes a similar point: “[Rabe] exposes the path that had been obscured: great composers everywhere, existing in a land before unknown to homebound experimental enthusiasts”. It was another 10 or 12 years before Grand Master Flash started giving his record collection a similar treatment.
What is also interesting is that this was a work that was produced on and for tape which gives it a wonderful, although perhaps hindsight adjusted, sense of intimacy. Rabe is doing for reel to reel magnetic tape what Grand Master Flash later did for two turntables and a cross-fader, but it is still hard to shake the analogy of the carefully crafted mixtape. Something similar to the teenage ritual of hovering over the the record and stop buttons trying to synchronize perfectly the fade between one song and the next. Only on this occasion, rather than trying to build a playlist of what you can’t quite or don’t dare put into words to the girl you are trying to impress (or even get notice you), Rabe behaves like the weird boyfriend who is into a bunch a freaky stuff and is more interested in trying to imitate the parlance of the DJ than relay the message at the heart of Petula Clarke’s Downtown. It is in explanation to his electronic drone piece What??, perhaps his most famous work, that this behaviour is explained:
I decided to make a continuous music, completely without breaks. This was a way to escape the tape noise that, with the technique of the 1960s, inevitably turns intermissions into noise instead of silence. Simultaneously I found that this was an expression of the electronic media’s untiring persistence. (NB: This was the time of Marshall McLuhan and his theories on “Understanding Media”!) Electronics have no muscles; electronics do not have to breathe. It can be switched on for ever, or at least as long as some volts remain in the wall socket. I was also striving for a measure of ambiguity and illusion and thus I decided to limit myself to harmonic tone combinations only.
Argh! itself, like the DJ it samples and the dead air the profession fears and the awkwardness of the enamored teen, seems to be as much as anything else about covering the illusion of silence and the awkwardness therein, or rather, the futility in trying mechanically achieve it.
In 1968 Sture Johannesson’s poster for a planned exhibition at Lunds Konsthall upset the Board of Directors so much they ordered all copies to be confiscated and destroyed. The show was cancelled. Johanesson was exiled from the Swedish artworld for 36 years. In the mean time, the Revolution Means Revolutionary Consciousness or, as it is sometimes known Hashflicka poster, no doubt as a result of this controversy, began to take on a life of its own and forge itself into the popular consciousness. As a poster celebrating marijauana produced in the sixties is wont to do, it became an emblem of those in the midst of turning on tuning in and dropping out before finally making a cameo in amongst others Lukas Moodysson’s film Together, the Ikea catalogue (naturally) and as a T-shirt design for Top Shop before finally in 2004 Johanesson reemerged with the postponed show at a more accepting and liberal Lunds Konstall.
In the mean time Johannesson experimented. He experimented with the everything from the technological to the chemical, at times simultaneously. He founded the Digital Theater, an art collective powered by a DIY network of first-generation Apple computers and in 1973, working with programmer Sten Kallin, he attempted to find the equation whose graphical solution was the outline of a cannabis leaf. Despite the psychedelic aesthetic going mainstream during his exile, the objectives of his work always remained constant. His practice continued to be enabled by the discourse of radical social politics of the 1960’s, however the Hashflicka poster probably remains the most concise example. Despite, or perhaps because of, the Swedish establishment allegedly trying to stop Johannesson by getting him declared mentally ill and harassing his friends and family, never again did he court quite the same controversy.
The Hashflicka poster forms part of the “Danish Collection”, a series of works printed in Copenhagen between 1967 and 1969 – a body of work that combined both typography and collage and was inspired by the likes of John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch. It was meant as an interpretation of the Delacroix painting Liberty Leading the People that appears in the top right of the poster. Instead of a woman showing her breast holding a gun and a banner, on the poster there is a naked woman holding a peace pipe and a sun flower with the text “Revolution Means Revolutionary Consciousness” – you can just see the small bubbles that rise from the pipe she holds are in fact not bubbles but small cut-outs of Che Guevara’s head. The poster was attempting to indicate a pacifist alternative to the romance of violence surrounding the armed struggle demanded by the revolution. Needless to say, this also upset the “serious” left wing with it’s “delerious drug politics“. A no win situation.
The only good picture I managed to take at Joanna Newsom’s concert at Somerset House yesterday… some nice disembodied hands and picture in a picture thing going on. I am not a photograher. Proof here… I have never been to a concert where the crowd were so hushed during the performance; emptying their ears of everything except the music. It was an amazing show.
I’m tempted to read this paragraph from Jonathan Jones in the Guardian at least three times before each and every artist statement I have to write:
It is a vice of second-rate art to come with its own eloquent explanation attached. If an artist can translate the meaning and purpose of a work into easily understandable words, it means one of two things. Either the artist is lying, in order to ease the way with patrons and funders; or the artist is a fool. And if dishonesty is the reason, that too is something that vitiates art. No serious art is easy to interpret. Nor is there ever a single valid interpretation of art. If art is good, there are many things to be said about it and much that will remain unsayable.
I don’t particularly hold with much he is saying in it – especially the underlying endorsement of artspeak – but it is an elegant mantra to chant while beating a blank piece of paper into submission.
On the subject of artspeak, Paddy Johnson has a good critique in the L Magazine.
An obituary is a strange way to meet, but until last week when the platitudes poured in, I had not been aware of Bruce Conner – his art, his collages or his videos. But perhaps it is not such a strange way to meet after all, because Conner, over the course of his life, advertised his death on several occasions. The first was in 1960 when he titled an exhibition of his work “The Late Bruce Connor” and the second 7 years later in 1967 when he quit being an artist for the remainder of the decade – “…At that time, whenever I’d get any letters about art related events, I’d send them back or throw them out. Sometimes, I’d write deceased on them. I was listed in Who’s Who in American Art and I sent back all their correspondence with “Deceased.” After three years, Who’s Who believed me… So the artist is definitely dead.””
By all accounts Conner was a bit of a control freak during his life when it came to matters concerning his work; on one occasion pulling out of an opportunity to hold a retrospective at SFMOMA because of disagreements over the conservation of his assemblages and the fee being charged to get in – Conner wanted the show to be free. From Open Space, the SFMOMA blog -
“They practically informed me it was a post-mortem,” the artist said – invoking, in part, the avant gardist cliché of the museum as mausoleum, or morgue. More to the point, however, Conner was hoping to retain, or recover, some determination over his work, and his public image. “Everything was being run as if I did not exist,” he declared.
This seems to be a concern he had a contingency for. Being opposed to the display of his work online during his life, lawyers have been instructed upon his death to request the removal of as much online content as they can get their hands on. The SFMOMA’s collections access online page for Conner is blank, all 10 images removed. Likewise there have been cease and desist messages to numerous blogs to remove embedded Youtube videos. The request has also gone direct to Youtube.
This appeared in the comments of Chris Ashley’s Looksee blog -
“At the direction of Jean Conner, Bruce’s wife (wdow) and the copyright holder on Bruce’s work, I request and demand that you remove the video “TEN SECOND FILM” from your blog and or website. I am an attorney and made similar requests for Bruce, who was adamantly opposed to on-line display of his films. Ms. Conner is of the exact same view. Please remove the video. Thank you for your anticipated prompt cooperation with this request. Steven Fama”
In 1923, a Los Angeles real estate group unveiled a massive billboard to promote their new Hollywoodland development. The sign is more than just nine white letters spelling out a city’s name; it’s one of the world’s most evocative symbols – a universal metaphor for ambition, success, glamour.
Welcome to Hackney Wick.
Via Anaba
One of the favored analogies of the people on the Rhizome chatboards attacking current art on blogs and WIKIS is “using animated GIFs and default blog templates is like using acrylic paint and prestretched canvases!”
I use acrylic paint, prestretched canvases, and default blog templates. Whoah… short circuit…. against protocol…… getting weaker……
So if I make drawings, pencil on paper, do I default the default?
A little context.
Second Wind