You Know Me Better Than I Know Myself
April 29, 2008
The music video is nothing if it is not an advertisement for the song, is it not? When the director of one talks about making art as well as making money then what they mean, in most cases, is appropriating a style – looking like something. This, after all, is the most bankable way: tap into an imagery – a visual discourse, an appearance – that already has a set of connotations which define the artist and song. The rules of advertising apply, ie time is short, attention spans are limited, and the viewer is often passive and stupefied on a couch and is thus unwilling or unable to engage critically, intellectually, or even emotionally with the video. They’ll be a sitting duck for bombardment with unsubtle marketing manipulation. Pretty young people will do the trick. Naked ones are even better. And sparkly things too, maybe fireworks.
It’s crucial that a video can be easily read – that it places the artist effectively in a particular milieu with the minimum of confusion. There’s a visual shorthand for all sorts of pop music genres and sub-colonies; the signifiers are often clothing and fashion and they are very distinct and easily recognisable – hip hop very obviously has a different set than those of punk, for instance. In today’s visual-led marketplace even bands with small audiences are required to make videos. I’d probably denounce it as a dead art form, but it’d only invite conjecture about whether it was an art form to begin with. Generally I find them a tedious bind to even watch – not that I often do – and they must be even more tiresome to make. Necessarily, creativity must be stifled in order to streamline the product and drape it in the most easily understood rhetoric. Signifier and cliché are stitched into every shot in a way which is anathema to art.
That said, there are some opportunities for musicians whose marketable image is actually genuine creativity. Normally these musicians are – by their very nature – in the hinterlands of the mainstream. Perhaps because they are further from commercial restraints, it is these slightly peripheral musicians who can make videos which roll with a similarly more peripheral visual language.
The most recent video by nouveau art-disco avantress Roisin Murphy takes as its precept the work of Cindy Sherman. Though Sherman has pervaded mainstream imagery, it is doubtful whether the couched torpored masses would have the critical faculties and requisite knowledge of contemporary photography to enable them to unpick the references of such a video. They will though, likely recognise that it has the slightly haughty and aloof look of art. It is no surprise then that, as felicitous and accessible a pop romp as it is by Murphy’s standards, even the stonking lascivious bassline didn’t propel the song anywhere near the charts.
A musician with a high degree of visual literacy and understanding of image, as well as a career-defining interest in fashion, Murphy reiterates Sherman’s conceit of identity fluxed and flummoxed by image. Identity is constructed by appearance, by style, by visual signifiers. The video also quotes an aesthetic that is reminiscent of any number of contemporary photographers. It’s even set in the requisite suburban house, and there are the other standards – a whiff of alienation, the vague vestige of a perceived but undisclosed threat, a hint of hyper-real lighting, a quasi-supernaturalism lurking in the soft furnishings, and some other things recognisable from Gregory Crewdson et al. Both in subject and in visual style, this kind of rhetoric is well trodden by any number of contemporary photographers. An aesthetic not too dissimilar is often used brilliantly by Hannah Starkey, for instance.
Once you assume Sherman’s ruse that identity – or at least the perception of it – can be altered by image – or by the style, or fashion – then the whole shebang comes unhinged and starts flapping in the wind. Here we have a video which references images which themselves are in quotation marks. Questions arise, particularly at the intersection of art and commerce: Can you look like something and be something? Can you look like art and be art? Can you look like art and be advertising? Can you look like advertising and be art? Is it really relevant anyway? Such is the postmodern discourse.
The recognition that photographs are a construction is of course, old hat, so to speak. The image can be a set up, it can reference things outside of the frame; it is understood and accepted that a photograph is not the whole truth, but a selection of it – or even a verisimilitude of it – and that the cultural climate and the context are critical to the image’s reading. This is all basic critical stuff. Given that this is yer staple foundation to any critique of photography, it is interesting then to consider the hullabaloo created by Ryan McGinley’s latest show.
Much has been made of the way the photographs in his ‘I Know Where the Summer Goes’ show look a bit like the photographs you might see in advertisements. In particular they look a bit like fashion shots or images used to sell clothing. There has been, from many quarters, an imputation that McGinley’s photographs are too commercial-looking to be art.
The same critics who are take as given that the cultural climate and context are crucial to the understanding of work, are vitriolic that McGinley’s work is irrelevant or invalid because it looks a bit like fashion or commercial photography. Fashion and commerce though, are part the cultural context and climate, and a particularly significant part for the young or adolescent, which is who the show is about. The blind-spotting or discrediting of this context is a dubious critical position to take, and one which somehow seems anomalous and not commensurate with current critical thinking. The first utterance of ‘commercial photography’ scatters critics who’d previously held coherent critical values founded on the illusion of veracity of the photograph, how it can be reproduced and manipulated, how identity is a construct, etc. They seem to leave the axiological desert of their own creation, flee from the shifting sands of visual representation, connotation and identity, and retreat to the shade of a tree to prop themselves up against the trunk of modernism. From here they peer out their binoculars at McGinley’s photographs and chunter to the resting cheetahs that “he doesn’t have no authenticity, man”; that the images don’t show ‘the essentiality of youth’. Both of these are accusations that have been repeatedly directed – nay, doused in petrol and hurled – at McGinley.
I’d argue that if – and this itself is subjective – the photographs have some elements that are redolent of fashion photography, it is a resonance which could be complementary and sympathetic. This is after all, a series of photographs about adolescence and travel and temporality and transience. And in the images the models are very deliberately not in fashionable frocks and slacks, but are nude. And they’re often in a vast American desert. It doesn’t take much head-scratching to see that this could engender an interesting subtext for such a set of photographs – that the look of fashion photography could provide a useful undertow to the work. But I’ve not seen any discussion or considered thought about this. There’s only been a churlish harangue about the utter worthlessness of the images because of their likeness to photos used in commercial applications.
Commercial applications of photography pick up ‘art photography’, but art photography is still unable to pick up anything from commercial photography (mostly; unless it’s flagged up clearly). If it does then its identity as art is spontaneously combusted. Art, it could be argued, shouldn’t be a one way street, constantly trying to escape its shadow. In some ways this is something which McGinley’s photographs could be seen to touch on – self-awareness, the impermanence of youth, and identity and meaning. Not that anybody seems to care too much about this when there are petrol bombs to be made.
The invention of photography was a Rubicon for the image. Likewise, that photographic images are used in advertising, is something which cannot be undone. To pretend that they don’t is similar to pretending that the photograph offers a stable fixed and truthful essential nature of identity. It doesn’t; its meaning – its identity – is contingent on the world that is its context. The world we live in is capitalist, visual-led, and image-based. It is pointless and reductive to still be stuck in an argument about the dichotomy of art and commercial photography. To truculently posit them as opposites – incompatibles – is to render them Manichean; the whole world becomes good and bad, black and white. It is a recision of the particularities of photography, the very strengths of the medium that the work of someone like Sherman made overt. The identities of ‘art photography’ and ‘commercial photography’ cannot be easily separated into independent realms – they don’t have static identities which are distinct and unfettered by one another. Quite obviously the Venn diagram of photographic imagery has a big central area of overlap between commercial and art photography, and there isn’t any reason that this shouldn’t be the case. Art is a reflection – a product, if you will – of the circumstance of the creator, of their society. It is thus surprising that there remains such an abject refusal to even consider the artistic implications of a likeness to commercial photography. Commercial photography is part of the text. It can’t be ignored, or quarantined; it’s out there. And – though most people seem oblivious to it – there are times when the invocation of it is a subtext which only enhances artistic depth and substance. In McGinley’s photographs it is an apposite reference and, whether intentional or not, resonates and expands the meaning of the photographs in a cogent, and intelligent way.
McGinley’s art photos look a bit like advertising photos that are quoting art photos. Murphy’s video looks a bit like an advertisement and quotes art photos. In neither way is artistic value necessarily precluded from the outcome. Art is the primary context for the photographs in McGinley ‘Summer’ show. The primary context for Murphy’s video is commercial usage. Yet, McGinley has made money from these photographs and Murphy has made a film which is essentially an art short with a kicking disco-house tune overdubbed. Like most art these days, they both sit in the middle overlapping section (the technical name for which escapes me) of the photography Venn.
From underneath the boughs of modernism some of these critics have even been moved to witter incoherently about ‘intention’. McGinley’s intention was to make money, they surmise, ergo his work is not art. This is arguably part of the same vaguely atavistic mutter of “where’s the authenticity, Ryan?” Whilst there is an acceptance of the terms of photography in a postmodern culture – reproducibility etc – there is still some confused heatstroke-afflicted ghost with a residual hankering for things like ‘authenticity’ and ‘originality’. It’s a bit like the confusing twitch of a knee-jerk from phantom limbs amputated from current critical theory. When these critics talk of ‘authenticity’, what they are mostly talking about is authenticity of motive – ‘legitimacy’,’ validity’. Motive, of course, is even now of little – not always none, but little – consequence. Without rehashing the intentionalist fallacy here, any language is interpretative; the meanings that constitute a word are in the same state of flux as the clothes in Cindy Sherman’s images. Context is what is important. (Though some discussion could be more productively made of the intention of context.) To this end, the context McGinley’s show has been received in has been churlish, unsubstantiated, curmudgeonly, and, well, couched in stupidity.
‘Summer’ has been rounded on not just in the blogs on the nit-wit-ernet, but in newspapers by people whose opinions are held in some esteem. As well as being of debatable critical intelligence or value, the tone of criticism has also been inflected with a sort of infantile jealousy. Notably, it has been mostly a peculiarly male sort of jealousy too. This is the kind of unreconstructed vainglorious tush you normally hear in pub debates about football. It is hard to reconcile these art critics’ critical standpoint to McGinley’s photographs with the values they previously held, and reading between the lines I sense that some of the antipathy is because McGinley himself is young and acclaimed and lives in New York and has photographed beautiful famous women like Sienna Miller. He’s currently trendy and is receiving a lot of attention too, so all the invidious buttons are pushed to invoke in critics a regression to huffy adolescent contrariness and a sort of insecure objectionism. The intonation of some of the criticism is very noticeably akin to the way critics desert a band once they’ve become popular.
In a neat summation of that, the title of the show has been widely mocked and poo-pooed. ‘I Know Where the Summer Went’ was an early Belle & Sebastian B-side, and those who are hip and smug have snarked that they’re a band that is now well past their ‘cool’ zenith. This is somehow put forward as further evidence that McGinley is a dilettante; and not just a dilettante, but not even a very cool one. The cognoscenti have scrambled to withdraw their patronage and rushed across town to the moral high-ground of a Vampire Weekend gig. In their petulant braying none of them have yet noted the possibility that choosing a band who used to be young and hip – and, to invoke a fashion term, trendy – and are now ‘past it’ may imbue a show about youth with some poignant resonances. Nor that the slightly self-conscious and gauche deployment of a B-side is also perhaps suggestive of the coltish – but slightly attention seeking and contrarious – naïveté of youth. That these considerations have been ignored or supplanted by sniggering mud-slinging is the kind of truculent critical intelligence – replete in some instances with sexism and homophobia – that’d likely be rejected by the Sun for being too vapid, petulant, boorish, and inane.
In a fitting twist, the joke might actually be on these critics. Their very identity founded on the fluctuations of cool of a Scottish indie band; crying out that McGinley is too commercial to have anything to say. It is not with irony that these people crow that the models in McGinley’s photographs look too much like ‘hipster kids’ to tell us anything worthwhile about youth or identity.
I’ve only seen a selection of the images from the show, so – even though this is the internet and seeing the work is by no means a prerequisite to having an opinion – I don’t want to make an assessment of it. I’ve no problem with people not liking it – I myself am still fairly undecided about it. But what I do find problematic is the tone of a lot of the critique; for whatever reason, the work seems to have provoked an unedifying playground squabble. Perhaps taking to heart the subject of the show, the critics seem to have regressed and begun to debate along the terms that teenagers would. A lot of these critics haven’t even seen the show and are making tasteless noises based on prejudice and rumours that they’ve heard while smoking outside the school gates with the cool kids. And even those who have seen the show seem to be judging it by a set of criteria that are entirely trite, irrelevant, or inappropriate.
The question is not whether it looks a bit like this or that. The only thing which is of significance is whether McGinley’s photographs do something. Perhaps those other things come into the matter if they are relevant to the effect of the work. In themselves they are only anecdote, and not grounds to dismiss a show on. The fact that he utilises an aesthetic or a style which isn’t far removed from fashion photography is in itself not an issue that should immediately cause muck to be chucked. It seems like people can’t get beyond this surface and see the way in which the surface is being used; which is ironically the very thing they accuse McGinley of.
Do the photographs do something which fashion images don’t? Do they take the conventions of this genre and transcend their normal outcome, do something different? Does McGinley get inside the clichés and deploy the aesthetic to an end which is affecting and revealing? Is the cultural code cracked open; what’s inside of it? I’ve not seen enough of the show to tell, but from what I have seen it seems to me that it is quite possibly this very blurring of the boundary between fashion or commercial photography and art that makes the work engaging – that makes it art. That tension seems to work when depicting youth. It is perhaps something to do with an intangible quality of youth or adolescence; the way it is peripheral to both innocence and self-consciousness, but depends on them both. The photographs are perhaps reflective of this. Yes, there are elements of appropriation, and this is perhaps indicative of the way that youth is experienced. In the models and the photographic artifice there is a nonchalance and insouciance in one moment, and then in the next the models and the artifice are self-aware, gauche and slightly awkward. Both the models and the artifice have a kind of identity which is unfixed. As these models trawl through the desert the naked, they are dislocated but simultaneously full of promise; there is a sense of purpose in a place with no landmarks.
From my limited experience of the photographs, they don’t seem to have anything like the vapidity and vacuity that the prevailing critical – or not, as the case often seems – opinion suggests. It feels like these critics have got scared when they’ve seen the appearance of commercial photography encroaching on art photography. I’d like to see more of the show, but it seems possible to me that these photographs could be seen to fill the empty surface of fashion photography with something; and indeed the fashion style perhaps says something about identity through the role of the surface – which is what fashion itself can do. Filling an empty image of something with something, is a bit like the process of adolescence. It is maybe not unreasonable to consider the state of youth as a tension between surface and content; between interiors and exteriors.
that was then / this now / that was just nostalgia
April 24, 2008
Sheffield is more visible from the M1 than Newcastle. Well, Newcastle isn’t visible at all from the M1 because the M1 ceases to be a motorway somewhere not far north of Sheffield, but some of Newcastle can be seen from the A1. The road sweeps past the Angel of the North and steeply down the Bowes Incline, and at night time there is such an expansive blanket of lights that it appears all of Newcastle and the north east of England must be visible. Go there in daylight though, and it turns out that many of the lights are the Metrocentre shopping centre. Those lights aren’t really Newcastle; they’re just an appliqued pattern on the surface. Newcastle for the most part is only unfurled from a vantage point away from the A1. But from a similarly elevated perspective, the main north-south road passes closer to the centre of Sheffield, and as it crosses high above the River Don, it affords a more revealing glimpse of the city. Along the riverbanks are the vicissitudes of industry; the river a transect of industrial development, reflecting the economic growth of the city right through to the Meadowhall shopping centre. Up on the knolled raises and rolling suburban hillsides there are the houses of a leafy commuter belt. As an outsider – someone like me, native to Newcastle – it could almost seem as though the whole of Sheffield is uncloaked and sprawled over the river for every passer by to see; its history and its secrets and its tramlines all on show. Perhaps too, people who are unfamiliar with Newcastle think everything is visible from the Angel of the North.
The Angel is ten years old this year. Ten years have seen two more ‘icons’ of Newcastle join the Angel in the brochure, with the Baltic and the Millennium Bridge now forming a ‘triumvirate of cultural icons’. This ‘trilogy’ (not my words; the words of local government), is central to the NewcastleGateshead Initiative’s rebranding of the city of Newcastle as a ‘World Class’ (yes, capital letters; no, I don’t know what it means either) ’cultural destination’. This ‘culture led’ economic regeneration means that as you crest the Bowes Incline and pass underneath the Angel you won’t see any poverty as you cast your eyes over Newcastle. Oh no. Though you will see hundreds of anthropologists scurring excitedly to the Quayside. It’s they, not shoppers, who cause all the traffic jams on the A1 by the Metrocentre.
Of course, once these ethnologists get to the Quayside they’ll find the artefacts of Newcastle to be surprisingly similar to those of other cities of 21st-century England; of, say, Birmingham, or Leeds, or maybe even Sheffield. There’s a Hilton, a Malmaison, a Pitcher and Piano, some patioed recreation areas agreeable to promenading by tourists, some ‘alfresco, European piazza-living, cafe culture-styled’ bars. And the ethnologists will also find that a cultural icon of the north east need not be created by locals (like the Angel – made by Hampstead born, Anthony Gormley – isn’t), or thought up by natives (like the Millennium Bridge – conceived and designed by architects and engineers in London – wasn’t), or represent them in any way (like the Baltic – run by Americans or Norwegians, full of art from places that are not north east England – doesn’t). In fact, it’s likely far more proftiable if they aren’t so terribly parochial. The tenets of cultural iconography, it turns out, are a lot like those of economic expedience. Someone should get English Heritage on the phone, because it can only be a matter of time before the Metrocentre is proclaimed a cultural icon. Indeed, in Gateshead council’s promotional descriptions, it already has the same cultural classification as the Baltic, the bridge, the Angel, and The Sage. Like the conflation of Newcastle and Gateshead, these icons of that new place are not social, historical, or geographically specific. They aren’t signifiers for that. They are monuments to events which have never happened; icons that represent the flattening of social diversities in order to be receptacles more easily filled by commercial interest. These are monuments/places/images built with the errected as flat-pack easy-assemble icons. That is precisely their failing; iconic status cannot be inferred on something by will, or by throwing money at it. These are not familiar objects, they’re alien; they have nothing to do with the people or the local society. But the norh east was festooned with these objects as an attempt to engender regional and cultural identity; as if these things could be plucked from the air.
Sheffield too has its own regeneration and development agency. ‘Creative Sheffield’ has much the same agenda and methodology as NewcastleGateshead Intiative; it seeks to addess the issue of loss of industry and the associated problems of poverty, dysfunctional infrastructure and loss of local identity by fostering economic growth through ‘cultural’ things like Starbucks, and by erecting vapid monuments to modernity. To this end, the Tinsley cooling towers next to the shopping centre at the side of M1 have recently been the subject of discussion. Apparently they were set to be demolished, until strong objection from locals who see the towers as a link to their industrial heritage and thus a symbol of their identity. The authorities (it’s unclear exactly which body, or bodies, has responsibilty for the decision) then decided they could utilise the towers’ familiarity and make the towers ‘Sheffield’s own Angel of the North’. The idea was a novel one, entirely without precedent, eureka-ed out of thin air, apropos nothing at all: fill a disused industrial building with modern art and put tourist signs on it. Ok, so it’s apropos NewcastleGateshead. In this way the towers could be a sort of Angel and Baltic on a single site! They would have the visiblity of the roadside Angel and, like the Baltic, be full of lucrative art and big empty space that connotes modern profundity. And there’d be a cafe and a shop selling sundry associated art tat and mush stamped with the silhouette of the towers. Brilliant!
The plan according to Sheffield-native organsier and campaigner Tom Keeley, was that the space would be ’our very own [Tate Modern] Turbine Hall’. Hey, look, that’s another big industrial building filled with (much better) modern art and (equally profound) space! But, it gets cleverer yet: they were intending to fill the space with an installation by (Mumbai-born, London-based) Anish Kapoor! Lord alone knows what dimension of genius they plucked that idea out of. It would ‘really make people think about Sheffield differently’ says Keeley. Differently to how they think of it now perhaps, but the same as they already think of Newcastle or many other cities in England. The shape of the icons is different, but inside the buildings it’s all the same; behind the facade are the same connotations and the same ecomomic agenda.
But the plan has been changed again, and now the buildings are again set for demolition. On part of the site though, there is to be a £500,000 piece of public art. It will be ‘based around the theme of energy’, according to the Guardian. This way the council can have its new power station and a spurious lump of glass, lest anyone think Sheffield is not modern and hip and a ‘cultural destination’. Art and commerce: see how they sit cheek by jowl; see what agreeable bedfellows they make!
*****
The Long Blondes frontwoman Kate Jackson is one of those involved in the lobbying for the use of the Tinsley towers as an art venue of some sort. A bit like Pulp and the Arctic Monkeys before them, the Long Blondes name is unusually-often preceded by ‘Sheffield’s’. The single most important fact in understanding them seems to be that they are ‘Sheffield’s’. Their entire identity and validity as a band seems to be founded on Sheffield. From this everything follows. In reviews of the records or the gigs it’s ’Sheffield’s Long Blondes . . .’, or ‘Sheffield band the Long Blondes . . . ‘, as if any appreciation of their work or assessment of their art must be premised on comprehending their Sheffield-ness and taking that into account. Type ‘Long Blondes Sheffield’ into Google and it spits 182,000 matches. Incredible for a band who are really a bit of an oddball niche interest. Both the Arctic Monkeys and Pulp have sold many, many more records – even from un-Blondes places like Asda and Tesco – and both have a far, far larger profile – even amongst people with jobs and mortgages – yet even though they are routinely described as ‘Sheffield’s’, they each only yield around 100,000 Google results. The Long Blondes and Sheffield are inextricably linked. It is thus of some surprise that - as I remember – of the five members of the band only one comes from or even lives in Sheffield. And it wasn’t even playing in Sheffield which got them recognition or a record deal – indeed they were seen as a bit too leftfield for the city.
That their identity – and by proxy, their artistic identity and voice - should be so closely entwined with Sheffield is odd. That the one member of the band who does live in Sheffield (though she’s from Bury St. Edmunds) is frontwoman, mouthpiece, photographic focal point, and fashion ‘icon’ Kate Jackson, is perhaps a reason. It might be fanciful and pretentious to draw parallels between her band, Jackson herself, and Sheffield, but she did lobby to have the Tinsley towers turned into an art venue, and the comparisons are there to be made if you stick your neck out far enough. And fanciful and pretentious neck-sticking-out is, after all, the Insidious Lassitude dogma.
Released last week, it has been said that the Blondes new record is typical of ’second album’ syndrome, where – as the cliche goes – a band spend their lives writing their first record, secure a record deal, and then have to make a follow-up record with the mirror the first one held up to them; they have an audience, and a perception of themselves which is totallly different to the one which they previously had. This is maybe a bit like a city which has grown into the place it is because of an industry – like steel in Sheffield – and then has to subsequetly find a way to redefine itself and its identity. The Long Blondes sound like they didn’t want it suggested that they’d made the same record twice. Very anxious in interviews to define themselves as an art-rock band, ‘”Couples”‘ sounds self-consciously arch, arty, and deliberately brittle. Which is not to say that it’s at all bad. On the contrary, they’ve made another great record. A record that is tight, intelligent, sophisticated, stylish, witty, emotionally and musically coherent, authentic, and delivered with charm, flair and panache. They’re still as good a band as there is in Britain.
That said, although the new record is successful in all the criteria it defines for itself – those of an art-rock record, basically - it could be argued that whilst also ticking all those boxes their first record also ticked several more too. By imposing on themselves such strict art-rock doctrine, they seem to have deliberately eshewed some of what made their first record, ‘Someone to Drive you Home’, so successful - a kind of wry literacy, a warmth, perhaps a touch of lyrical melodrama - and replaced it with detached or aloof arty stylings and cleverness. The art-rock aesthetic is – perhaps ironically – one of limitation, and restriction. The things that make a band sound ‘arty’ are almost antithetical to qualities like warmth and melodrama. The art-rock doctrine is one of standoffishness; it opposes familiarity. Working in these narrow confines – almost an asceticism – the Blondes of ‘”Couples”‘ necessarily can’t pull off the remarkable magic trick they did on ’Someone . . .’ where they combined apparently competing forces (like familiarity and invention, for instance), because that would militate against – or indeed contravene - the tenets of art rock. And, frankly, it just wouldn’t be half as arty. This sounds vaguely paradoxical – denial in creation - but that’s the syntax of art-rock for you. That’s what makes it so darned clever. Ultimately, ‘”Couples”‘ sounds like the Long Blondes attempting to distance themselves a little from their former selves. (In addition to it just sounding like a damn fine record.) They sound like they’re trying to sound like something; or trying to not sound like something.
On the first record they were a particularly English sort of band. One of the reasons it was such a strong record was that, though they referenced pop culture that was sometimes American, they did so through a prism of Englishness. Even the album cover was a Jackson painting that showed Faye Dunaway of ’Bonnie and Clyde’ stood by a Ford Cortina. With a preoccupation with the 50s, or a sort of ’time of greater certainty’, there was an apparent interest in how the globalisation (or Americanisation) of the world changed human relationships and shifted identity. The new record still has these concerns, but whereas ‘Someone’ accentuated them by walking a magic tightrope between classicism and postmodern artyness - an aesthetic which was, briiliantly, entirely in keeping with the ’old in new’ agenda - ’”Couples”‘ perhaps sees this agenda muddied and obscured a little, submerged beneath the deliberate stylings and subjugated by the perceived importance that they are seen to be arty. An analogy could be made with a city like Sheffield recontextualising itself – the loss of the real things which gave it culture and meaning, to be replaced by the appearance of cultural significance by means not of local culture, but of imported art. The idiom of rock music is American, and what the Blondes first record did so successfully was translate that into an English vernacular. The new album flirts a little too crudely with art-rock, and what are now fashionable to call ‘disco’ backbeats – a sound which is very current and trendy amongst English indie bands. (Though much has been made of this ‘going disco’ in the press, it isn’t that much of shift; the Blondes were always grooved and disco-ed.) Again, this could be compared to the way in which cities appropriate from other cities, all the time reducing the particularities of identity – simplistically, for instance: Sheffield - steel; Newcastle – coal) and invoking a facade of interchangable modernity.
These analogies - albeit they’re interesting and possibly have some validity – are unfair on the Long Blondes. They may seem to imply that the Blondes have cynically manipulated themselves in much the way a city brands itself. On the contrary, I think that their motivation for an identity shift – or a development, because it they haven’t completely cast off their former skin like Newcastle has – comes not from a rebranding, but from a genuine attempt to distance themselves from that modern world of false icons, lost mythology and shallow expedience, and to very deliberately make their opposition to it even more overt by being arty and clever and very explicitly concerned with the loss of the things society has lost. It’s only that somehow, by doing this, they’ve maybe compromised their own identity.
Art-school educated Jackson talks a lot about the importance of the visual context the band are received in – how the artwork, the videos, the website, the image, are all constituents of the Long Blondes. She has attracted particular attention because of her interest in fashion and her penchant for vintage clothes; a clear visual representation of the themes of the music. Arguably her fashion ‘icon’ status is indicative of the foregrounding of image (by others particularly), in the same way that a city needs some recognisable image – some signifier – on which its meaning or cultural significance can be hung. Even music is now represented with a visual code. Rock music is given some of its meaning and cultural significance by its visual signifiers. But one of the similarities between identity in music and in place (or at least cities), is in the same way that these signifiers can now be hijacked by commerce. In the same way that the way music looks is important because the signifiers create a shorthand for its sale, art has been co-opted by cities as a shortcut to meaning or to engender modernity and cultivate a image which is marketable through today’s visual-led media. The western world is a marketplace now, images are everywhere, and as Jean Baudrillard once noted during a trip around America, we live in a world of images such that now the image is the thing.
Interestingly for the new Blondes album Jackson has made artwork that is eniterly monochrome, with a slight sepia tinge. This is again reflects the Blondes preoccupation with the past. It is suggestive once more of a yearning backwards look, to a time of greater certainty when things were black and white – there’s even a zebra on the cover. A consolidation of the Long Blondes Englishness preservation ethic, the artwork looks like it was made by photo-collage, bits of paper photocopied into place; the kind of rudimentary style that people used in the past. It is an aesthetic which is perhaps telling. On the first record there was painted representation of a cinematic icon of escape; now there is the use of photocopied images. It could be argued – although it’d again be very harsh on what is really a rather brilliant record – that such a difference is indicative of a shift in the Long Blondes music from authentic art to appropriated style.
These are interesting observations to make and there are certainly some things that can be read into the new Blondes record. But none of this is to say that they have in any way lost their way, or their singularity, and become caught up in the slough of disco indie doggerel that other English bands wallow in; they haven’t and they remain the only one with anything to say. English bands seem to struggle to make something authentic from the American idiom of rock, and despite the slight dissolution of their voice, the Long Blondes remain almost the only rock or indie band in this country who have a distinct artistic voice and who have something to say. The others – whoever they are - perhaps really are analgous to the city model of appropriation and branding; there is a template which they all use, a template which is quite possibly every bit as duplicitous, fatuous and facile as the one used by NewcastleGateshead Initiative. But it is maybe telling that even the Long Blondes, who stood apart – perhaps partly too because they weren’t seen as London-based, and were geographically distant as well as artistically - have been affected and blunted a little by the homogenisation of society and culture – albeit blunted only slightly, and precisely because of their endeavors to oppose it.
This homogenisation of society is perhaps in part a consequence of Americanisation and the attendant threat to English culture, and also of the need to sell – be that records or cities. Appropriating what has worked elsewhere is a technique used by city planners and record companies alike. Unlike other English bands who – generally speaking - are caricatures of Englishness - mockney accents, slightly whimsical and twee songs - the Long Blondes have genuine English substance, and a voice that isn’t appropriated from other English contemporaries. But - almost as a direct result of their self-conscious search for an identity which is distinct and arty - that brilliant and knowing Englishness, that surefooted identity, has been diminished ever so slightly. Perhaps, like the debate about the use of the Tinsley towers, in a quest for authentic artyness they’re in danger of turning their backs on the things which gave them that it in the first place – their unique melding of the old and the new, the English and the American, the esoteric and the classic, the specific and the universal. It is maybe ultimately a question of artistic identity in a time when everyone wants to use art to signify something saleable – be they records or ‘cultural destinations’.
*****
Jackson has said her favourite film is ‘Paris, Texas’. In it a mute man is picked up in the desert by his brother who hasn’t seen him in years and taken to the city. The man sees himself in a mirror and flees. The film is about his struggle to not only find his self, but to reconcile this with the image of himself. He carries out of the desert with him a photograph of the place where he was conceived, a plot of land he intended to one day build a home on. The place was Paris, in Texas, and once the mute begins to talk again he recounts how his father would tell people that the man was conceived in Paris and withheld saying Texas so that they’d at first believe it to be Paris in France. His father told this joke so many times that the man came to ‘believe’ it; he began to become ‘lost in an image’. To reiterate this metaphor the narrative has the man’s brother employed as a billboard maker. The conflation of the image-place and the psychological/emotional-place is one of the key motifs of the film.
victim of circumstance
April 20, 2008
Ray Tintori’s film ‘Jettison your Loved Ones’ makes me think of Hanna-Barbera animated sitcom ‘The Jetson’s’. For no other reason than ’jettison’ is a near homophone of ‘Jetson’s’. Ok, so not very near; probably not near at all. But a bit similar, perhaps. Similar enough to give rise to the following musing: Imagine that Joan Jett had a son and upon his birth she left him on a street corner, in a basket, and, unbeknownst to Joan, it was, say, Jane Jetson who found him. Imagine that Jane took him home in her aerocar, and raised him in the Jetson’s space-caboose until one day he discovered his real mother wasn’t Jane Jetson at all, but mezzo-soprano-voiced, 80s vegan-rocker Joan Jett. Say he then sold his story to the Sun or some similarly low-rent, racist, xenophobic, everything-phobic, neo-fascist rag (The Daily Mail, perhaps) then the story could be headlined: ‘Joan Jettisoned!’. Joan would’ve jettisoned her loved one.
Are The Jetson’s and Ray Tintori really that different? My evincing of the similarities will be compromised because I’ve not seen a full episode of The Jetson’s since I bacame a grown up. And also because it’ll be based on only one of Tintori’s films. I’ve not seen the film he made after ‘Jettisoned’ because the only place it can be found on t’interweb (’tin’ suffix: clever, huh?) is iTunes, which is presided over by Americans. I’m not one of those, ergo they don’t like me and won’t let me in. I know he’s recently also made a readily available music video for inexplicably acclaimed musically-and-artistically-brassic New York dunderheads MGMT, but that’s, frankly, as risibly derivative as the band themselves. Incidentally, the film Tintori made after ‘Jettison’ is called ‘Death to the Tinman’, so Ray is clearly fond of linguistic play. If it was any cop (no, I know he’s not made of copper, it’s tin: the man’s made of tin) then a reviewer, who like me had a penchant for impish punnery and jocose wordplay, could perhaps be moved to lead with a headline like ‘Tintorious!’. Or ‘Tinspired!’. Or even, ‘Ray Illuminates Man Exhumed from an Abandoned Mine’; something catchy like that…
But I digress, the real watercooler in the middle of the room at the Tintori/Jetson’s shindig is a Rube Goldberg machine. The future portrayed in The Jetson’s is full of complicated labour-saving devices for everyday tasks; the regular malfunction of these often leads to a string of comic ramifications that are mined (oh dear) as a narrative device (as it were). The identity of the Jetson’s and that of their society is founded on the whizz-bang technologies of ‘the future’; technologies that are deleterious to identity. Depending on these inventions has estranged people from their self-identity and society. George Jetson sits bored in his office with no work to do; Jane Jetson sits bored at home with no housework to do; their kids travel around alone in panoptic-bubble spacecraft. In ‘Jettisoned’ the boy from the future invents a perpetual motion machine that causes a ’chain reaction’ of events that lead to the breakdown of society. Indeed, the story of the film is based on an absurdist rendering of a kind of perpetual motion/chain reaction analogy to the question of identity, and the satisfying of the search for meaning through identity. (Which is also, lest anyone doubt the validity of my off-the-cuff musings, the tin of chain reaction-intiating worms which I earlier suggested that Joan Jett could open in my not-as-spurious-as-you-(or I)-first-thought imagining.)
So there it is: man-of-the-moment New York filmist Ray Tintori clearly in thrall to 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon The Jetson’s. I’d guess that that’s an Insidious Lassitude exclusive.
No Direction Home
April 16, 2008
I’d assumed Willy Vlautin’s novel ‘Northline’ to be set in the past. Some time like the 60s – or maybe even earlier. The artefacts described are similar to those in Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’, or perhaps a bit like the cultural milieu that Michael J. Fox finds himself in when he goes Back to the Future the first time. This is an America of Cadillacs, diners, truckstops, casinos, condominiums, and Marlboros. These sort of things make up an oft-quoted lexicon of American pop-culture that connotes frontierism and the mythyical America of the American Dream.
Into this though, Vlautin deploys a curiously anachronistic set of signifiers. Half-way through the novel the internet suddenly appears and it is clear that this is a contemporary story. Once this is apparent then so too become the constant stream of things which were later additions to the same American lexicon of signifiers, but that are somehow camouflaged or divorced from their timeframe, and assimilated into the same cultural text. In the novel there are the 1980s cars, the video stores, the Compact Discs, People magazine. On her (80s) Walkman, the central character, Allison, plays cassettes of 50s country singers Patti Page and Brenda Lee. The ease that these apparent anachronisms are surreptitiously merged is telling. The fact that they may be missed by the reader – until the startling appearance of the internet – is indicative, perhaps, of the way that American culture works to constantly polish the gleam of the façade, while the actual constituents of the country are alien to that façade. The American Dream is the sustenance of a consistent mien, in spite of the estrangement or displacement of those providing the elbow grease. Under the bonnet of the Dolorean, is a spluttering engine of a quite unexpected sort.
The book could thus be read as a sort of paean to a lost America, and these anarchronisms – and the general sleight of hand with which Vlautin conflates eras – are possibly reflective of a loss of cultural identity. Allison’s boyfriend is called Jimmy Bodie – a name which conjures images of a young man who drives a Cadillac, wears a wifebeater, drinks bottled beer, and has dark hair slicked back with pomade. Sure enough, Bodie is a character painted in the broadest brush strokes to be all of those things. He’s also a neo-fascist; he calls Mexicans ‘spicks’, burns their houses, and is a member of the ‘World Church of the Creator’. His conversations about immigration and indigenous Americans reveal a man who is confused and angry about his own identity and that of his country. He abuses Allison and she drinks heavily, which only causes him to beat her more. Against this backdrop the diners and the truckstops are emblems of an America that is contested; an American dream that is dysfunctional or illusory to the young and the poor – arguably the very people such a myth is meant to seduce, and nourish with hope.
Allison falls pregnant by Bodie and wants to leave her hometown of Las Vegas before he finds out. Thus beginning another novel-long motif of estrangement and identity, Allison decides to move away and have the baby adopted. When she leaves she doesn’t know where to go. She tells her taxi driver to take her to the bus station, and when he asks her where she’s going, she replies, ‘Nowhere, I don’t think’. She is destination-less. She wants to leave but has nowhere to go; nothing to believe in.
She arrives in Reno; a place which – like anywhere else she could’ve chosen – she has no relationship to. She has no history there; no family; no friends. Not only are the cultural constructs questioned or contested, but in Reno she is also dispossessed of the personal constructs that traditionally engender identity. If contemporary – or postmodern – western society can be characterised as being shorn of a meta-narrative, the signifiers and signposts along the road divested of significance, then Allison represents the attendant fragmented and fractured personal and societal identity. As she did in Vegas, she wanders the streets after work, drunk. These bouts of fuggy peripateticism could be seen as indicative too of a postmodern condition where destination is absented.
This is the age of the internet and mobile communications but, in another twist of the era-dials in the Dolorean, Vlautin ignores the invention of mobile phones and email; in ‘Northline’ Jimmy Bodie writes letters, and Allison chooses whether to have a telephone connected in her new flat – physical location is entwined with emotional distance and availability. One of the key anachronisms of the novel is the way the interrogation of the way geographical space can invoke emotional distance. This is perhaps another facet of the mythical America that is proven untrue; the wide open spaces of America – and the roads through them – are divested of hope for Allison. They are only places of dislocation and identity-desolation, and this not an escape, or even a salve to her bruised sense of self. When she leaves for Reno she has no direction to go; no direction is better than any other. When she gets to Reno, she finds that she has the same struggles for personal identity as she had in Vegas. She still wrestles with the ghost of Jimmy Bodie, and her actions are still perpetuated by him. Living on the margins of Vegas or Reno is proven to be much the same; in each she is on the hinterland of society, on the verge of a featureless desert.
Ultimately, although some of Reno’s most iconic buildings and casinos are torn down, Allison finds that she is unable to escape her past. In the same way that the site of the demolished buildings is to be built upon again, Allison begins a relationship with a new man because of the damage to her self that Bodie has caused. The icons change, but they are constructed on the same foundations. Relationships, buildings, identity, the past, the present, here, there: they all merge.
don’t want peaches, don’t shake tree
April 15, 2008
Pushing a shopping trolley, a nameless man and his young son make their way across an America that is ashed and desolate and wasted. Nothing lives except a few human survivors who feed themselves by pillaging the homes of the dead, looting abandoned cities, and eating each other. Some sort of disaster has befallen society and twisted and fossilised remains of cadavers are fused into the scorched earth. The sun is concealed behind a veil of ash; everywhere is grey and lifeless; snow and permafrost cling to the tarp the man and boy spend nights huddled under. The man wrestles with memories of his lost wife as he collects brittle charred limbs from fallen trees to build fire after fire by the roadside. In the long nights of black they eat tinned food from the shopping trolley. His son, emaciated and strangled with fear, peers out of a face smeared with another man’s blood and his own tears. They keep going, heading for the coast though there is nothing there except more death.
There is a lot I could write about Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’. Written in stark, economical prose it is a sort of lament for America, and also a sort of parable or prophetic poetic imagining. The novel has a relentless tempo, a slow death-march across the country; a dirge for America’s lost society and its dispossessed. McCarthy’s prose weaves a brutal blanket across the story; and with it he draws humanity and spirit out of vignettes of hopelessness and despair, but in the end it is unclear whether this spirit can possibly save the man and his son, or indeed what being saved is and whether the pursuit of salvation is a valid means to an end.
Metaphor and symbolism drive the novel and there are hundreds of McCarthy’s images that open out into ideas that could be discussed. Some off the top of my head: The road as a transect; the resonance of Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ in ‘The Road’; the significance of the shopping cart they push through streets as though they were aisles; the use lightening and fire as a central motif; the role of the gun in the constitution of a self and a society; the infinitely delayed destination of their journey; the role of a pilgrim in a postmodern society shorn of destination; the illusion of arrival; the pervasiveness of topological metaphors in everyday American metaphor; the derivation and contextual connotations of some American slang vocabulary; ‘The Road’ vs. Richard Brautigan’s ‘Trout Fishing in America’; the nuclear family vs. the state; the father figure vs. God; the child figure vs. Jesus . . . etc . . .
At times the imagery in ’The Road’ is very reminiscent of Robert C. O’Brien’s ‘Z for Zachariah’. Although ‘Zachariah’ was written in the 70s, both books share a similar sort of premise. O’Brien sticks a young girl, Anne Burden, in the only (as far as we are aware) valley on earth (or America really, but it stands – in that American way – for the whole earth) which hasn’t been affected by a chemical bomb. Here she lives self-sufficiently, assuming herself to be the only person alive until one day a man arrives on the horizon in a radiation suit. Mr Loomis has apparently dragged a cart along the road through America looking for a place unaffected by radiation. Drawing on themes of the book of Genesis and with echoes of neo-colonialism and modern war, a sort of power-struggle ensues, and the book ends with the girl stealing the radiation suit. Turning her back on what may be the only other human survivor, the girl takes to the road and travels west, hopeful of finding life.
‘The Road’ also reminded me of Sarah Hall’s ‘The Carhullan Army’. Influenced by ‘Zachariah’ and written around the same time as McCarthy’s novel, Hall ploughs a similar furrow and the first-person account of a post-breakdown/dystopian society tends towards a similar ideological standpoint as that implied in the narrative in ’The Road’. A woman, known only as Sister, leaves the city, the ’Authority’-ruled ‘Zone’, and travels through the flooded and desolate English countryside, to join a commune of ‘unofficials’ living on a farm up in the Lake District hills.
In none of these novels is the exact nature of the cause of the catastrophe made explicit. In ‘Zachariah’ it’s a World War III-esque scenario; in ‘Carhullan’ it’s an unspecific environmental and economic calamity – probably initiated by the pursuit and use of oil; and in ‘The Road’ it’s something else, something perhaps a little like the other two, but something which is open to interpretation and leaves room for divine intervention. One of the things that this makes evident is just how plausible this kind of scenario is. By leaving blanks, the reader is gently corralled into the realisation that these situations are closer than might be imagined. The effortless way the blanks are filled in by the mind is one of the reasons these stories are so powerful.
All three are set in what appears to be contemporary society. In all there is of course the supposition that this is ‘the future’ – and the narrative in ‘Carhullan’ may contain the odd reverie that is loosely recognisable as ‘today’ - but in each of the novels the premise is unfettered by historical detail. The stories could be read at any time in the past fifty years – or, in all likelihood, fifty years hence – and be taken as a depiction of contemporary society. Obviously, ‘Zachariah’ is already thirty years old, and it reads not as the past, or the future, but as a parable of now. This is ostensibly the future, but the dramatic impetus – as always with these things – is in the way the future looks frighteningly like today. There but for the grace of God. These are timeless warnings. They are also timely - and perhaps within them there is the suggestion, that unless they are heeded, they are warnings with a time-limit.
In ‘The Road’ the man and boy worry about resources constantly, yet aren’t economical with them or fastidious about the ways in which they use them up. Supplies are always just around the corner. I suppose this is analogous to the general attitude and specious political policy of America (and western urbanised civilisation in general) to the threat posed by the finite supply of resources like oil and gas – as well as the possibility of a food crisis, and also of environmental catastrophe. Interestingly, despite the foregrounding of the search for food – and the postulation that over-consumption is the canker that threatens America most - it is not lack of supplies which closes ’The Road’. The denouement that the man and boy have spent the novel staving off is in the end rejected entirely by McCarthy. The implied destination is once again thwarted, resolution is indefinitely postponed, when he chooses not to have them starve or run out of light or warmth. He doesn’t even have them eaten by a pack of ravenous nomadic curs, or gun-swinging cannibals. At the end of the novel, in dire and heartbreaking circumstances, he posits humanity – the cause of this catastrophe – as a cause too for hope.
In ‘Zachariah’ too, there is a well-stocked store in the valley, as well as a farmyard of animals. Food and supplies are never an issue in the tale. Burden and Loomis are aware of that the store is not a bottomless well of provisions, and spend much of the novel attending to a planting and farming strategy. But in the end it is not a shortage of food or resources which brings about their downfall; it is – fundamentally – their humanity.
There are many comparisons I could make between the books. The use and significance of dogs; the use and significance of fish; the characterisation of masculinity; the characterisation of God vs. the characterisation of masculinity; traveling to the coast vs. traveling to the hills; the symbolism of birds; the significance and subtext of ‘deal making’; the ‘Good Samaritan’ references; the individual vs. community/society . . . etc . . .
One of the small motifs that struck me most in ‘The Road’ was the number of times that the man and boy eat tinned peaches. Obviously, if your protagonists are scavenging in long-abandoned homes and shops, then the longevity of tinned foods makes them the single most plausible source of food. But the number of times McCarthy chooses peaches in particular is noticeable. And although tinned food very seldom appears in ‘Carhullan’, on at least one of the occasions that it does, it’s tinned peaches that is mentioned. Both McCarthy and Hall very overtly choose peaches as the tinned food for their characters.
Clearly they both make use of a wider tinned fruit metaphor. Indeed, though peaches seem by far the most frequently featured, McCarthy deploys several varieties of tinned fruit in ‘The Road’. The image has resonances of the book of Genesis. It’s also suggestive perhaps of the attempted capture, manipulation, or subjugation of nature by man. Here a commodity of soft, sweet, goodness is foisted into an armored shell and sealed from the world. There is too, the unspecific contrast of the sweetness of the fruit – particulary with peaches – in such a desperate world; the representation of fecundity and life and sexuality in a dead world. Peaches could even be seen as connoting something about people or society or state control – it’s a furry, soft, juicy fruit which has a hard inedible stone at the centre; and its tinned guise it has an additional hard manmade shell. But on top of those readings, there is the very specific symbology of the peach.
In Asian symbology peaches represent spring, as well as good fortune and prosperity. In ‘The Road’ the peaches are tinned and the spring never comes. The man and his son travel east, but never prosper. In ‘Carhullan’, Sister has a tin of peaches in her rucksack as she travels into the hills. Here they could be seen as being at odds with the state of the country – Sister finds them ‘overly sweet’. But more so, they are a representation of the loss of British identity, and, by proxy, autonomous personal identity. They aren’t an indigenous food, these tins are imported from America and Sister hates the dependency Britain has on them. But despite this, there is still the image of Sister carrying the peaches, just like the man and boy carry them; she carries a symbol of good fortune, carries that dormant fecundity, a representation of spring as she toils through the dark city and the fallow autumn fields, in search of hope and life.
In Chinese folklore peaches are a symbol of immortality; those who consumed the mythical ‘peaches of immortality’ lived an eternal life of tranquility. Again, McCarthy and Hall seem to be making use of this when they have their characters carry peaches as they search for a future.
As an aside – and to go back to Eden again, so to speak – though Genesis only ever refers to ‘the fruit’, in European or western representations of the Fall, it is, of course, most often depicted as an apple. It is interesting to note that the Latin for apple is malum, a word which has a meaning which encompasses words like ‘bad’, ‘calamity’, ‘plague’, ‘misfortune’, ‘disaster’, ‘punishment’, ‘harm’, ‘evil’, and ’sin’. The peach is malum persicum – literally Persian apple.
As another – possibly less anal and academic – aside, Google tells me that there is a ‘post-Apocalyptic’ play called ‘Canned Peaches in Syrup’. It ran in Los Angeles last fall (ahem, as Americans say), and it’s described (by the ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know it’ blog, no less) as ‘a post-apocalyptic Romeo and Juliet story between a cannibal and a vegetarian, the play takes place in a near environmentally-devastated future and it involves a can of peaches’. Split modifiers aside, the description makes it sound good. I’d look at the official website but – appropriately enough – it’s broken.
Here’s the trailer for it though:
I Don’t Care What You Think About Me
April 14, 2008
…Anybody who writes a song with a title like that probably does care what you think of them. They’re probably just pretending that they don’t. It’s premised on the understanding that the singer and the imagined audience both know that the opposite is true; that the meaning and the singer’s feeling stand in opposition to the words that are sung. Therein lies the tension that gives the song its power. The song goes on: ‘Sometimes the rain tastes so sweet . . . Tell me what I’m gonna do if I should fall in love with you’.
The song is by Ryan Adams, and is one of the 24 previously unreleased cuts included on the ‘Deluxe Edition’ of ‘Strangers Alamanac’ by Adams’ former band, Whiskeytown. (Though for Adams geeks like me there is a better, more yearning, version of the song on a bootleg – the erroneously titled ‘Heartbreaker Demos’.)
A quick précis: Whiskeytown released three records, of which ‘Strangers . . .’ is the penultimate, and the final to be released while the band were still together. A third, ‘Pneumonia’, was released after the band had disbanded and Adams had begun a solo career. Since 2000 he has released – counting on my fingers – nine solo albums that are ’wildly erratic and of scattershot quality’ (I’m quoting an imaginary composite review; its source is any review or interview or passing mention of Adams’ circa the last eight years).
‘Strangers’ has been one of my favourite records since it was released in ‘97. His first couple of solo records are two of my favourites too, particularly the first, ‘Heartbreaker’. His releases around the turn of the century are about as good as records get – up there with yer ‘Blood on the Tracks’, yer ‘Grace’, yer ‘Hounds of Love’, yer ‘London Calling’, and whatever else you’re inclined to mention. I like Adams’ turn-of-the-century records better than those, but it’s all a matter of taste, so let’s not argue…
Since then I’ve liked all Adams’ output – yes, even the slew of tracks that surfaced from the slough inhabited by his hip-hop alter-ego ’DJ Reggie’. And I even occasionally smirked at the odd tune by ‘WereWolph’, his tongue-in-cheek (pray God) screamo-thrash band. He lost me a little with the proselytising about Mariah Carey though. I go and hide behind the sofa when he does that. He has at least (presumably under the direction of his record company, or some grown ups) kept this larking about off his official records and confined it to the internet where - since the cyber world is bankfull-to-overflowing with inane clowning about – it goes relatively unnoticed. Still, since those first couple of solo records and the Whiskeytown records before them, there has – at least to my tastes – been something missing from his official records. Something that was there is not quite there anymore. Something is intermittent.
I’ve enjoyed all the records tremendously, and there’s definitely been some great songs strewn through them. But there remains in me a nagging feeling that the great songs really are strewn these days. They’re haphazardly scattered through his oeuvre like someone has ransacked his house and tossed everything out the window. From the detritus sometimes a great song will blow away and catch on tree or eddy in a street corner. Ryan’ll find it one morning and whatever tush the wind has cast next to it will be the rest of the record. Adams is a preternaturally talented songwriter; and his output his legendarily – or notoriously – prodigious. But listening to this new souped-up release of ‘Strangers’ in the context of his subsequent work, I feel like a little of the magic-dust has been lost; scattered on stony ground and fallen through the cracks or pecked at by pesky birds.
Amongst the puppet-shows (we can see your hands, Ry) and pictures of Knut the orphaned polar bear (aww; all the blogosphere go ‘aww…’), his blog has recently been detailing the writing and demoing of his next record. In what some would say is a rare display of self-awareness, Adams’ has been rifling around under the bonnet of his mojo and trying to figure out how the thing works. With an overall full of wrenches and books about Katherine Hepburn, he popped his oil-splashed face above the parapet last week and said:
I am going to write some more tunes tonight but I wrote one today called “Crossed-Out Name”. Man, it might be the best song I ever wrote. I can’t believe it. I re-listened to all the songs people love most. You know, even the songs people liked from my old band and I was just thinking about WHAT what WHAT made them connect to them the most . . . And what I think I felt was, they were the ones where I was not posturing, not stylizing, not projecting, but just being the moment and being real honest.
It’s been a few days since he said that, so ‘Crossed-out Name’ will probably have been superseded several times over, and a song that he wrote this morning will now be the best he’s ever written. In the liner notes to the new ‘Strangers . . .’ Jim Scott (who produced it) says: ‘Every song he writes is way better than the one he wrote five minutes ago . . . He wants to record the new one right now because . . . “Oh, those are old, I wrote that yesterday, that’s old. The one I just wrote down at the bar is unbelievable, you gotta hear it.”’
So, we can take the usual braggadocio with a pinch of salt, but seemingly Adams himself feels that his recent records have not been quite up to the same standard as his earlier releases. Or at least he knows that there are plenty of people in his audience who feel that, even if he himself might not (and my feeling is that he does, even if he won’t admit it publically). And as previously discussed, Ryan does care what people think of him. That’s why he’s sitting around listening to his old recordings and trying to find the reasons that made them great. So, what are the reasons? I think there are several that are worth considering, and the answer is ultimately probably a combination of them. Here are some ideas:
It is quite reasonable to think that in the view of a lot of people the work he makes is devalued by the huge amount of it that he releases. Precious things are scarce. This perception may be indicative of a general problem with the role of art in society that may be worth me exploring a little. The marketplace laws of supply and demand pervade the judgement of art, and the mythology of art tends toward the same implication too. That is: something which is ‘good’ can’t be easily made; things which are created quickly are stripped of their quasi-otherworldly mystique – the very quality that gives them value as art; the characteristic that elevates them from the mundane. This, of course, is a fallacy. There are many examples of acclaimed artworks which were conceived and executed quickly, that were made effortlessly and painlessly by artists who weren’t alone in a darkened room wrestling with ennui and demonic hallucinations. Almost all photographs, for example, have been made without a tortuous gestation period. One need only think of Henri Cartier-Bresson and his decisive moment to know that.
Of course, different art forms have different scales by which their validity is measured and assessed. But for performing arts – like music, dance, theatre, or comedy – a similar rationale applies as does to other arts: judge something not by its theory, but by its praxis. To appraise art on a scale that has on any axis ‘productivity’ or ‘rarity’ or suchlike, is to align art solecistically with commercial enterprise. Paradoxically that’s the very thing that recognising art’s indefinable ‘other’ – or valorising and preserving its incongruity - ought to make incompatible. Instead, its ‘other’ has been displaced – or eroded – as there has been an attempt to assimilate into the commercial world. It is now subject to the same judgement criterion as, say, petrol, but it retains something intangible which doesn’t allow it to integrate fully with such as system. It exists in an enclave, half-naturalised, but with elements that resist full integration. It is a bit like a kind of mixed-race child, forever on the periphery of the commercial-centric world, on the hinterlands of a society it isn’t indigenous to, but being subject to that society’s practices and infrastructure and tradition.
Having said all that – and to get back to the point – in the case of Ryan Adams, there are other, more profound, ways in which his prolificacy has impacted on the reception of his work. Art acquires meaning from its context. And, in this age of image-saturation and shallow engagement with art – or as people struggle to find a role for art and a scale to judge it by in an economic-centric world - the context is often delineated by personality and biography, fame or notoriety. Consequently, for Adams, the context for a record like ‘Love is Hell’ (sample lyric: ‘Come on forever/I’m tired and I want to sleep’) is determined by the brash slapstick DJ Reggie persona, Adams’ Hollywood actress-squiring lifestyle, his love of 80s hair-metal, or his fondness for comics. These are things which are external to the record, but proclivities which were (roughly) contemporary to it and thus informed appreciation of it – and probably militated against the serious-as-your-life, broken-down and morbid aesthetic of ‘Love is Hell’.
Obviously the context of the artist’s other work still plays a large role in the way any particular piece is apprehended. And in this case too, it is doubtful whether the presence of WereWolph’s ‘ Throw up on the Moon’ engenders a more sympathetic response to, say, a bare and heartfelt acoustic number called ‘Please do not let me go’. Songs like that are based on the audience committing to the sentiment; of feeling that this is entirely authentic. It must appear absolutely sincere; any doubt to that smudges the sentiment and makes it illegible. More than any other genre of music, the listener’s relationship the ’singer-songwriter’ demands intimacy, empathy, and connection. ‘The lone balladeer’; ‘the troubled troubadour’: these are personas that we buy into; feeling a kinship with the artist. The empathy wanes, and the kinship is estranged – or is at least potentially compromised or threatened – by the proximity of DJ Reggie and his obtuse comic skits about Kevin Costner, Bruce Willis and Cybil Sheppard.
As well as that, the context of each song on a record has an immediate impact on the way in which they’re apprehended. ‘Strangers’ has 13 songs; ‘Heartbreaker’ 14; and ‘Gold’ 16 – or 21 if you include the ‘bonus disc’ included with early pressings. None of these records feel overly-long. And none of them have any slack in them – there’s not a duff track amongst them, and every song works to drive the record as a whole. The structure and emotional coherence is one of the particular qualities of these records. Although they’re all relatively long records in terms of the number of songs, nothing is superfluous; every song is pared down and delivered with a precise economy. Here Adams stakes down everything with a meticulous rigour and makes records with an unusually cogency, intensity, and sustained mood. These records are a study in emotional literacy. After ‘Heartbreaker’ Adams gave an interview in which he talked about how making a record isn’t about choosing the best songs per sé, but choosing songs which will drive a record and give it a musical, lyrical, and emotional intelligibility. A listen to the outtakes from any of these three records confirms just how ruthless Adams was in his desire to make great records. This self-awareness, vision, focus, and objective-judgement was a hallmark of Adams circa the turn of the century.
Sometime after ‘Gold’ though, Adams seemed to abandon this ethos in favour of a kind of all-you-can-eat buffet style of record making. Don’t like piano ballads? Have a fairy cake instead. Rockabilly get on your nerves? Take the sting out of it with some finger food. Not keen on sparse country songs? There’s some cheese and crackers just down the table. Consequently the post-Gold records have lacked this cogency, this urgency, this emotional coherence.
They’re not, by any means, bad records. But the decision to work fast and loose and let the audience sort the wheat from the chaff has ramifications for how even individual songs are perceived. A song like ‘Anybody wanna take me Home’ would arguably sound even stronger if wasn’t stranded alone on an island of great songwriting surrounded by the sneering Kurt Cobain-channelling, Oasis hat-doffs, Husker Dü nods and Joy Division winks of the ‘Rock n Roll’ album. Stick a version of it on ‘Heartbreaker’ and it would be received in an entirely different context. A context that would probably be more in keeping with the content and scope of the song, and which would allow it to resonate like Adams likely intended it. Simply put, it would be a context that would do the songwriting justice. As the frequency of the releases increased, so too did the quick ‘n’ easy style of the buffet. Where Adams once seemed intent on using his capacious stock of ingredients and talent to deliver a Michelin chef of a multiple-course banquet; he now seems to toss a few things together as quickly as possible so he can rush out of the kitchen before anyone else grabs the Karaoke mic and gets Dokken cued up.
It’s not necessarily a problem caused by stylistic variation. The songs on ‘Gold’ for instance, were rendered with a pretty expansive palette – albeit most colours on that palette came from paint tubes marked ‘The 1970s’. But there was a unification of the writing, and a consonance of delivery that transcended the way in which the songs were dressed up. Fundamentally perhaps, it is the difference between style and substance. Certainly on ‘Rock n Roll’ the emphasis was entirely on the ‘posturing, stylizing, and projecting’ that Adams talks about on his blog. The one track on the record where that isn’t the case is ‘Anybody wanna take me Home’. And the reason it’s not the case on that song is principally because the posturing, stylizing and projection has – largely – been shorn from the songwriting; it’s still there in the rainswept vaguely-Smiths-esque 80s English clothing the song is draped in.
‘Rock n Roll’ isn’t a good choice to base an argument on because it is perhaps the least typical of Adams output. But it does exemplify some things, such as the ‘posturing’ that Adams talks about in his blog. And the record was such an anomaly that by making the record he may have effectively sequestered himself from his oeuvre.
As the story goes, Ryan turned up at his record company with ‘Love is Hell’ and they took one listen to its sullen, murky, maudlin, distended mawk and requested he make a record they could sell. In a shop. Adams bristled at this intrusion of the indices of commerce into his art and stalked off in a huff cussing that if they wanted a commercial rock record that they could sell in Wal-Mart, then that’s exactly what he’d give them. He rolled back up at the record company offices a few days later with a new record comprising 12 entirely new songs (plus ‘Anybody . . . ‘, which he already had) of cynical rock n roll knock-offs, mock college art-rock, and alt-rock pastiche.
The record is, of course, brilliant. As I remember, one review said it was ‘throwaway but indispensable’. He conjured a record of such devastating conviction which was so at odds with anything he had made before (or since) that it may have been a career-defining moment. Previously his records had been founded on a clarity of sincerity, integrity and communication; this record was founded on appropriation and impersonation. By making it – and doing so with such breathtaking swagger and off-the-cuff aplomb - Adams effectively undermined the rest of his oeuvre; once he had disclosed to his audience how effortlessly he could deploy any artistic device under the rock n roll sun, then he’d opened the door to the possibility that he was merely doing that on his other records too. It could be seen as the crossing of a Rubicon. There was a sea change in critical opinion of him and he has subsequently been widely regarded with some suspicion.
Perhaps too, the idiom of Adams’ recent records has caused his work to be viewed in a less sympathetic light. He has moved increasingly away from what could be called ‘country’ or ‘folk’ (Strangers and Heartbreaker), or even something which could be approximated as ‘classic rock’ (Gold), towards something which sounds a bit like ‘middle-of-the-road’ – a pigeonhole also variously labelled ‘trad-rock’, ‘dad-rock’, or ‘adult-orientated-rock’. Whatever you label them, such genres are not the places where artists are found. They’re the places where coffee is sold, and mortgages are taken out for soft-furnishings while Radio 2 simpers in the background.
This sort of music is more difficult to appreciate because it’s characterised by a shallow emotional involvement. Commercially-driven and creatively impoverished, this is music divested of critical engagement or artistic endeavour. Previously Adams’ music had been lent an extra gravitas because he was building upon a historical precedent of important, culturally-significant music; he was adding to a discourse or a text. The likes of ‘Heartbreaker’ or ‘Strangers’ were engendered with a sense creaftsmanship, imbued with deep cultural resonances; locked into something timelessly human. The difference is possibly a bit like the difference between being given a piece of art by someone you have a relationship with (cultural encoding; aesthetics) and buying a factory-made, shop-sold picture from Ikea. Almost by its very nature middle-of-the-road music is disposable.
Ok, so Adams has at no point morphed into Phil Collins, or anything remotely like that. But, there have been times (some of ‘Easy Tiger’, for instance) when, stripped of their edge and studied emotional complexity, the songs have aimlessly drifted across the carriageway with Adams apparently woozy and torpid at the wheel. No longer does he boast as he once did that if rock n roll was a car he’s in the ditch at the side of the road trying to straighten out the fender having crashed it to see what would happen. There are times now when Gawker could probably note sightings of him sedately meandering in a people carrier, lethargic from the air-con and wearily humming along to the second side of Easy Tiger as he makes his way to Ikea. Or Barneys.
Ah yes, latter day-Adams’ pre-occupation with fashion! It might not be too fanciful to plot Adams’ artistic output (put the video camera away, Ry; I’m talking quality, not quantity) against his shopping trips. On one axis we could plot ‘Gopping Designer Fashions Sourced from Barney’s at High Cost’ and on the other something like: ‘Good Songs’. We’d probably find a direct inverse relationship: the more ridiculous PVC jackets he acquires, the less coherent his musical output is.
Though, as ever Ryan does a nice line in self-effacing humour:
Ok, so you gotta finish off that chic new stuff with paratrooper boots. That’s how I win when fashion is napping. Oh fashion, fill my empty corrupted soul with narcissism.
But as much as he mocks himself, the Harry Potter glasses, tattoos, beards, ties, and faux-nouveau-riche shirts are arguably indicative of someone grappling with a latent self-consciousness. They are perhaps the accoutrements of self-mythologisation; the manifestation of a struggle for identity that has lurched into self-pastiche. It is tempting to view them as another side to the problems indicated from his musical output. With the odd fashions he seems to be doing an artist-by-numbers impression; and with the music he seems to be trapped between arch high-jinks, and self-impersonation. Sometime around ‘Gold’ he seemed to become aware of his artistic voice, aware of the perception others had of him. Since then he has used a sort of lexicon of signifiers to communicate with his audience. The fashions are one of them – “Look, I’m a serious artist” the glasses say. “See, I’m a musician” the boots say. “I’m being ironic” snigger the shirt and ties. “I’m really troubled” sigh the cigarettes. And the musical signifiers are just as prominent – the downbeat ‘Heartbreaker’-lite ‘Suicide Handbook’ record; the snarky clever posing of the rap records and alt-rock appropriations; the repeated lyrical imagery; the bruised mid-tempo acoustic number . . . etc . . .
In the past he made use of these signifiers – after all, rock music is founded on the mythology connoted by many of them – but they were in addendum to the music. They were stylisations that were unobtrusive – a subtext that was sympathetic and congruent to the music; a set of signifiers that added to the music and aided its reading. The problem now is that the music plays second-fiddle to this posturing; the artist is obscured by it, his voice lost amongst the wittering of the various proclamations of the signifiers. Perhaps he has collapsed into an image of himself. Perhaps he has gone through the looking glass.
Nowadays, Adams’ output arrives in quotation marks, trailed by parenthesised signifiers. The songs perpetuate an imagined-self. Possibly it could be surmised as: in the past songs begat the self; now the self begets songs. In a fact that neatly entwines the fashion and art self-signifying and self-quotation Ryan even has ‘Heartbreaker’ tattooed on his arm.
On ‘Anybody wanna take me Home’ Adams sings about his youth ‘disappearing like magic’. It’s a great line. The innocence of youth disappears as if by means of magic, but more so: it disappears like magic itself does when you grow up. It is perhaps this struggle with loss of innocence which is problematising Adams work. When he made ‘Strangers Almanac’ he was an artist searching for something; perhaps he was forging an identity – both artistic and personal – but he was doing it without an awareness of what he was pursuing; there was a lack of self-consciousness. He now has an artistic past and a self which is an image at least partly constructed by the perception of others – he is after all, an artist releasing art to be judged and performing in front of an audience. Like magic disappearing, like growing up, that past and that self-image are things which can’t be reversed.
Perhaps now he’s found that the identity he was searching for is a destination that cannot ever be reached; the illusion of a destination. Identity is in the process; unlike magic where an end result is reached without any discernable process.
His self-perception is inextricably linked to what his audience thinks of him. But like he himself says, it is perhaps all about ‘just being the moment’; free of the ‘posturing’ and the ‘projecting’ of a self.
And perhaps without the ‘stylising’ of the Harry Potter glasses too.
Oh Boris, you’re so darned hip! Look at the jazzy style!
At first I thought: ‘Why didn’t his mother comb his hair before he left for school this morning? And she knew the school photographer was coming today too’
And then I noticed that after every cut his hair is different. Every film cut, that is. Not hair cut. He didn’t have several haircuts during the course of a three minute film. That’d be ostentatious, even for Boris. Though it does look like it grows fast. (”If I’m elected I intend to make severe and uncompromising cuts. Begining with my hair. London simply cannot support such lavish expenditure. And also, to be frank with you, I’m fearful that it’s been infested by a terrorist cell. Militia of dubious ethnic extraction I suspect. They’re hell-bent on seizing it, overthrowing my conditioning regime, and transforming it into a rogue state. They’re probably Bomb-and-Go fundamentalists…”) But after every take – and one can only guess the lovable oaf took many – after every one his hair is dandied differently.
Beloved of the continuity editor I’m sure, Boris is evidently one of those boys who hate to look smart. After every take Frau Johnson comes over and combs his hair with a medicated nit-comb and rubs his face with a bit of her spit on a handkerchief. And everytime she turns her back Boris screws his face up and ruffles his locks again. Oh he’s such a devilish rogue! He tousels that barnet up like a foppy Dennis the Menace or Roger the Dodger would do. And then he goes off on his bicycle and does some dastardly pranks with the Bash Street Kids. Probably pranks that are destructive to the environment. Probably pranks which he metes out to the socially-deprived underclasses. It’s all jolly good fun though.
Oh Dave…
April 8, 2008
Ok Dave, here’s my idea for the new Conservative local government election broadcast. What I was thinking was that we could plonk you down in the middle of the 1950s. Maybe you could wear a crisp white shirt. But not in a staid way, Dave. No, no, we’ll tuft you up just enough to give you a raffish edge, don’t worry. Now, I know what you’re thinking: ‘edge’ is a strong word. I know, I know, but we’re just looking for a hint of it, just a tinge. Sort of like Clark Kent. You’re a bit like Clark Kent, Dave. Sort of smooth, but with a slightly rakish air - a tuft of hair, a waspish hand gesture, a tie that’s a touch too knotty – just an undercurrent that hints at the superpowers that lurk within you Dave.
So, we’ll pop you down in the 1950s and, you know, we’ll surround you with period pieces – whisky tumblers, leather-bound books, pictures in nice frames. Oh God no, don’t worry, you won’t be able to see the actual images; no no, it’s more about the frames Dave, the frames. We want it to be homely, yet austere. See what we’re doing? Anyway, I thought what would be really nice would be if we desaturated the film slightly to accentuate the ‘time of greater certainty’ schtick that we’re working. Maybe give it a bit of a warm glow too. Warm in that brown and homely way. You know, like a nice worn leather chair that holds your buttock firmly but softly, know what I mean? We want to evoke things like that – a safe and comfortable environment, things that you can trust, that get better with age. Nice, warming, traditional things. Dependable but stylish. Sort of like a nice brandy.
So, we’ve got you cossetted in the 1950s, now what I thought was that we could have you talk earnestly to the camera. Not too earnestly though; remember, you’re a man of the people, Dave. You want to be serious, but at the same time retain that glnt in your eye. You know, you’re cheeky smile is ever-present; it has to be, we’re hanging our whole shebang on it. But also, we want to show your steely resolve. Remember Clark Kent, Dave. Yes, he was approachable and down-to-earth, but underneath that starched shirt was a barrel-chested vigilante. You’re a vigilante, Dave. You’ve the eye of the tiger. You’re a rufty-tufty bureaucracy-baiting streetfighter. We want to be sure to make a feature of that. So, what I thought was that you could pick up some paperwork, and toss it disdainfully aside. Show it no mercy, Dave! You know, really be swashbuckling in demonstrating your utter disgust at it. Give it some bravura; maybe a little pout of the lips after you’ve done it. We’ll make it a nice thick wadge, so it makes a satisfying slap when you pulverise it and dismiss it – quite literally – out of hand. No, no, it doesn’t matter what’s written on the paper. It can be anything, it’s not important. What’s important is the gesture. We’re saying that you’re a hard-cookie; you’re going to be tough on unspecific and varied issues. It’s all in the gesture, Dave; all in the gesture.
You’re going to need dialogue, Dave. So here are some lines I wrote for you. These are just ideas, you understand. I know you like to freestyle, so, you know, just riff Dave, just riff. But here’s some starters for you:
“A decade ago the internet was just a buzzword. Now it’s changing our lives.”
Remember ‘The Webcameron’, Dave? Oh God, what a masterstroke that was; I’m such a wit, aren’t I Dave? Ah, such japes! Anyway, remember the glorious success of the Webcameron. Well, we’re going to bring it to the party again. We can’t afford to leave a weapon like that on the sidelines. Whatever you do, make sure you mention the internet, and how whizz bang you are with it. People today love the internet, Dave. They’ll think you’re the right man to lead this country if you show that you know stuff above it. It’s a signifier of the modern age, you know. The new modern age. Like ships used to be the modern age; now computers and rockets are the modern age. And you - you Dave - you’re our captain, our commander. Oh, no, no, don’t worry about dropping it into your dialogue when there’s nothing in the scene that is newer than 1955. Of course it doesn’t look like you actually are just using it as a buzzword. Don’t be a silly-billy Dave.
“We know what real change means”
When you say that we’ll cut to a wide-shot of the 1950s. No, it won’t look silly. What we’re saying is that we know what real change is: it’s founded upon the past. Those superficial things – modern objects and the like – are just that, Dave, they’re not the implements or appliances of real change; we are. Or, more accurately: you are, Dave. No, of course that doesn’t condradict what we just said about the internet and stuff. Don’t worry, the modern world can be full of contradictions, Dave. Nobody will notice. Say something about crime or taxes quickly afterwards just to make sure you distract them wit the ol’ kneejerk sleight of hand. It’ll be fine. Remember: they’re stupid.
“[In other countries] they’ve put local people in charge of the police, and made them accountable to them. That’s what we’re going to do here, and it’ll make a real difference”
Just after you’ve made a show of tossing the papers aside, talk about how we’re going to give people the power back. Oh it doesn’t matter what it means, Dave. Come on, it has the appearance of meaning something. People won’t question it. Don’t worry. Of course it doesn’t sound like we’re advocating putting drug dealers, paedophiles, murderers, and lepers in charge of the police force. That would be daft. By local people we mean local citizens. Poor people aren’t citizens, Dave. Not like you and I. And anyway, no one local to Hampstead is a peadophile, Dave, and I should think that it’s the same Britain over.
“Why is all this change important? Because the world is changing”
Oh yes! That’s the clincher. Stare off into the distance prophetically when you deliver it. Oh Dave, it’ll be devastating! No, it doesn’t mean anything. You know that. You do ask some funny questions, Dave. But you’re a likeable sort and I think we can work with that. The public are going to love you! Now, get in that soft leather chair and emote.
Oh, and no, no, none of ths will make you look podgy, Dave.
We’re all nixed!
April 4, 2008
Working in a studio that looks like a bombsite – or at least the imagined-site of an agoraphobic hoarder’s utopian fantasies – Lori Nix builds and photographs dioramas of America. The first series of Nix’s to receive recognition, 1999’s ‘Accidently Kansas’, posited the state of her upbringing as the centre of Middle America and its associated values and beliefs. The models are of disastrous, vaguely apocalyptic events being meted out to the state, apparently apropos nothing. Throughout the series though, there is the trace of man’s hand; his collusion in his own downfall. There are planes crashing, oil spilling, factories belching out filth, powerlines bisecting nature, farm animals mewling and lost. Many of the events take place under oppressive threatening skies, and of those which don’t, most appear straight out of a clear blue sky – 9/11-like. (Which, in a twist which surely valdates Nix as some kind of prophet – or a member of the Al Qaeda Kansas branch – was subsequent to ’Accidently . . .’.)
Somewhere in the margins of these images is the suggestion that Kansas itself has become lost; Nix once spent her childhood there, and now she’s exiled from that innocence – that time of greater certainty; that time of straightforward American values. She’s in New York now, making models of that place and time being wasted. The threat to Ameica is pervasive and spreading like the plague of insects Nix often uses in her images. The message seems clear: ‘We ain’t in Kansas anymore’.
Subsequent to ’Accidently . . .’, Nix has continued to plow a similar furrow. The images are no longer tagged ‘Kansas’, but are often unspecific, generic American scenes. This may be indicative of a perceived expansion of the threat from a parochial concern, to a nationwide and worldwide scale. Those marginalised by the American Dream are now legion; those displaced by the rapacious pursuit of it are now not just Americans, but whole civilisations; distant lands, and folk who have never even heard of the film ‘Dude, Where’s my Car?’, let alone laughed at it.
Some of the images – particularly the earlier ones – have a playfulness, though I find many of them a bit twee and glib – a Zeppelin flying into a powerline, anyone? And some come accross as simplistic hectoring. (They go down like a lead balloon, if you will.) But, like a child playing with toy cars, airplanes (as I believe Americans call them), choppers (ditto), trucks, and skyscrapers, Nix uses the mechanisations of capitalism - the apparatus of commerce; the iconic symbols of aspirationalism – as she takes the vernacular of the American Dream and reconstructs and recontextualises it. Nix literally uses the paraphernalia, the flim-flam, the ornery tat and plastic tack of American culture, and builds a depiction of a future where it destroys itself. Props to her for that (which seems an appropriate phrase; and an appropriate appropriation of an American idiom). It’s a reasonable conceit.
Those images of hers that work best are the ones in which the threat goes undisclosed a little more; those images which are subtler and more is left unsaid or open to interpretation. ‘Outpost’ (underneath) works because it allows various possibilities to arise in the viewer’s mind, and the suggestions are given space to collude and brood together – Star Wars defence system; undisclosed threat; alien activity; the unknown; secret government surveillance; the earth as but one of many planets. Here, where we live is an outpost, a hinterland, a place on the edge of things.
More at www.lorinix.com
And at www.coolhunting.com which includes an interview in which she wheels out an anecdotal aside about the length of time it takes her to make each diorama – anyone wishing to assuage a cold or negative reaction to the work should be pleased to note that it’s apparently “anywhere from three months to two years”. So there you go, it must be good.
