"There was a single blue line of crayon drawn across every wall in the house. What does it mean? I said. A pirate needs the sight of the sea, he said & then he pulled his eye patch down & turned and sailed away."
-StoryPeople
Thursday
Ai Weiwei
Art and politics...
Protected by pictures
An interview with Ai Weiwei in the cellar of Munich's Haus der Kunst, where the artist was preparing to turn the place into a battlefield. With Hanno Rauterberg
What would megalomaniac modesty look like? Is there such a thing as relaxed rebellion? A state of peace which is all get-up-and-go? Well Ai Weiwei certainly exists. An artist who is not afraid to take on the mightiest of enemies, the dictators in Beijing. Who demands democracy at the top of his voice, freedom of speech, equal rights for all! Who refuses to be silenced, even if they lock him up, even if the police break down his door in the middle of the night and beat him to the ground, as they did just recently. He kept up the protest , even as the blood pured down his face, pulling out his camera and photographing the the police as they carried him off. It looks likes a family outing. The whole world should see this image: the terror and the un-terrified.
Ai Weiwei, September 2009
© Ai Weiwei
And now he's sitting here in front of me, a man of substance and pride, yet so completely withdrawn into himself. His voice, a whisper, his eyes flitting about the room. "I was so shy in school," he will tell me later, "that I'd blush every time someone looked at me." A man, who now has so many eyes trained on him, whose voice is heard like no other, a man who is probably the most famous fighter of injustice in the whole of China.
"I'm an ordinary person, very ordinary," he says and rubs his fac eyes light upe vigorously with both hands. "It was nothing to do with me," he says. "It was the others, the interviews. I'm probably the most interviewed person in China." Then he smiles for the first time, shrugs his shoulders cautiously, a shrug of wonder – how peculiar, why me?
Right now, the most interviewed person in the whole of China, is living in the cellar, in the catacombs of a Nazi palace in Munich. There, in the Haus der Kunst, which was built between 1933 and 1937, he has made himself at home for a few weeks, setting up camp with a 20-man team on folding beds all crammed into four rooms, to prepare for his first ever major exhibition worldwide, which opens on October 12. He has everything he needs down there, armchairs, TV, computer, close friends, a cook. He has effortlessly transformed this fortress into a cheerful shared apartment. Every now and tempting smells of Chinese food waft up into the museum halls, a museum attendant tells me.
"I'm not really a fan of museums, it so often feels as if they only display the corpses from long forgotten wars. We want to do something else here. We want to turn the Haus der Kunst into a battlefield."
© Ai Weiwei
Dropping a Han dynasty urn, 1995
A battlefield – his eyes light up. One minute he's the very picture of peace, and the next, he is seized by rage and cannot contain the biting sarcasm. He's contemporary art's sumo wrestler, portly and pot-bellied on short legs, and able to transform sluggish mass into pure power in a instant. He badmouths architects as "smart-arses", the Chinese government as "mafia", then instructs his helpers to say "fuck my motherland" into a video camera – Ai Weiwei's commentary on China's vast national celebrations.
Is that true? Is he a wrestler? Ai Weiwei laughs and shakes his head. "I'm more like a piece of wood floating down the river and no one knows where it will land. I have no plans, no aims."
He dropped out of film school in Beijing. He dropped out of art school in New York. And he has declared his architecture career over. He lets the things come to him and he never clings to them. He has lived from cleaning, carpentry, babysitting, gardening and, for two years, even playing blackjack. He went to New York at the age of 20, having promised his mother that he would return home a famous artist, like Picasso. But although he hung around with the art crowd, meeting Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, and he was a huge fan of Duchamp and his Readymades – he made no headway in the art world. "No one was interested in what I was making. And that's still the case today, however improbable it may sound. This exhibition in Munich is only my third ever."
It was architecture that first brought him fame – and even that was coincidental. He returned from New York and moved in with his mother, who was disappointed that he still had no success, no wife and no children to show for himself. Then one day he stumbled across a vegetable field on the outskirts of Beijing. He liked the place, asked the farmers if he could build a studio there. A house, very minimal, very austere, built using a traditional brick technique. When it was up lots of his friends liked it so much that they wanted one too – and soon it became a settlement. "Suddenly they were telling me I was an architect. I wasn't aware of it myself."
© Ai Weiwei
Dropping a Han dynasty urn, 1995
Not long afterwards he became the architect of one of China's top construction projects, the Olympic stadium. Basel's Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron were looking for someone at the Chinese end to advise them on their project. Together they developed the structure for the stadium, a chaotic tangle of metal struts which somehow forms a soft but clear order. Ai was over the moon – and then outraged.
"I think naivete is terribly important," he says with a smile. "Without a bit of naivete, you'd never start anything. But I was too naïve about the stadium." He hadn't wanted to accept that the Communist Party would turn the building into a propaganda platform. But as soon as he realised what was going on, he became very outspoken and told every microphone that came his way that this was self-glorification of an unjust state. And so it was that his most hated project – he never visited the completed building – that launched his world career as activist and artist.
His phone hasn't stopped ringing since. Journalists want to know his opinion on Tibet, Mao, the death penalty, and all the other hot topics that no other intellectual in China discusses so openly. Of course he feels the pressure, the party bosses are spying on him, and censor much of what he posts online (Chinese blog). But the more pressure they apply, the stronger he becomes. "I'm not a political artist, it just looks that way," he says. "I just don't want to relinquish my civil rights." Where others seek safety in the private sphere, Ai has carved out a safe haven in the media channels, by making his private sphere public. He keeps an Internet diary, runs a sort of private TV channel on Twitter that features images and short texts: him half naked or with his cats, or showing his head wound, a life-threatening haematoma that formed in his skull after he was beaten by the police. Ai has dissolved the classical boundaries of private and public to form another barrier which keeps him out of jail.
© Ai Weiwei
Dropping a Han dynasty urn, 1995
You can see me, and as long as you can see me, they won't see you – that's his logic. But as soon as you can't see me any more, when you remove me from the screen, then you will be seen, then the eyes of the world will turn on you and everyone will know what happened to me. The images protect him. You could also say that Ai has tapped into the spellbinding power of images that harks back to the Middle Ages, when people thought they were alive and had magical powers.
"We are now seeing the beginnings of what you could call a civil rights movement in China," he says, unfolding his arms. He starts gesticulating, talking about Sichuan, where in May last year, over 80,000 people were killed in an earthquake, almost 6,000 schoolchildren among them." And why? Because thanks to corruption and corner cutting, the schools were incredibly badly constructed. The government should have launched an inquiry, punished those responsible. But what is it doing? Nothing." It didn't even want to say how many children were killed, it didn't want to release their names. People said that bereaved parents were being threatened with having their incomes cut if they talked to the press or even to Ai Weiwei, or told that they wouldn't be able to move into new housing. But Ai Weiwei made a public appeal to people on the Internet and several hundred helpers from across China signed up to travel to Sichuan and start researching names and accountability. Many of them received threats, many were imprisoned, but the list still exists and 5,826 children are on it. "The weak, the broken do not count in our society," says Ai. "Only the successful count. Is that how it should be?"
There is plenty of talk in China about this man who refuses to let anyone stop him researching and asking questions. And plenty of people are amazed that Ai was not locked up long ago, like so many opposition figures. "It's probably because of my father," he admits. "They probably can't do to me what they did to him." His father Ai Qing studied painting in Paris, and soon became one of the leading poets of his time, accompanying Mao on his Long March. But in 1957, the year his son Weiwei was born, the party decided to banish hundreds of thousands of intellectuals. The Ais found themselves on the edge of the Gobi desert, in a camp where the poet and his family spent years living in hole in the ground, protected from sandstorms and the cold only by a roof of twigs. He was not allowed to read or write and had to clean the public toilets in the village. "The children threw stones at him, the adults sprayed ink in his face, us kids would beg for food. We were outcasts."
Rooted upon, 2009
100 pieces of tree trunks 640 x 3500 x 1100 cm
© Ai Weiwei
The worst thing was the return in 1978, when Qing was rehabilitated. The cadre could not muster up more than one meagre sentence, so sorry, it had been a mistake to banish millions of people "For them it was one sentence, for me it was twenty years, my father would often say."
And for the son? A childhood in banishment, with no security, a father who is humiliated in front of everyone – how can you live like that?
Ai doesn't answer. Then he talks in a low voice about the long, dark years, about depression and trauma. And how he was saved by art. "You can change a lot of things. It was a secret haven for me, it gave me a chance to live with all the things I had seen."
His art today is still shaped by these experiences, his rebellion against state repression. Yet however much he fights injustice, Ai never loses sight of injury and destruction. The just and the unjust, the active and the contemplative form a very unusual balance in his art. On the facade of the Munich museum, he has written a Chinese sentence in several thousand rucksacks. They are the words of a mother from Sichuan, who lost her daughter: "For seven years she lived happily in this world."
Ai Weiwei: Remembering, 2009
Photo: Marino Solokhov © Ai Weiwei
But when you enter the museum, these words which are sentimental verging on kitsch, suddenly turn aggressive. We see Ai on a photo, dropping a Han dynasty urn – yes it's real. We see neolithic vases, 6,000 years old, spattered with industrial paint. We see antique chairs, tables, wooden temple pillars, all cut open and transformed into new sculptures. It this the same Ai?
"I love antiques, I collect, I store them, we have half a warehouse full of doors, chairs, everything possible. But you see I don't collect them for collection's sake." Few artists are more interested than Ai in China's cultural heritage. He is a conservative, a preserver of values, both politically and culturally. But can he separate preservation from destruction, memory from loss? "I still remember entire Mao speeches by heart that I had to learn as a child. Mao said we have to destroy the old world in order to build a new one. Sometimes it seems as if we are still following these orders." In the frenzy of progress, Chinese society is crushing its past underfoot. It has lost sight of its values, it doesn't want to hear about war and guilt. Ai's art is a painful reminder of what destruction looks like.
But just as he doesn't collect for collection's sake, he doesn't destroy for destruction's sake. That is the amazing thing about this person. He is driven by fear, which he transforms into courage. He demonstrates how trauma can be turned into power. "Art is always a beginning," he says.
A beginning that, for him, starts with a memory of fragility. "I seem to be something of a sandwich: a layer of politics, a layer of poetry and plenty of mustard in between, both sweet and hot." Then he rubs his face again, in a more leisurely fashion this time. "These things belong together for me, and even if my sculptures are more about meditation, what I'm trying to get at is physical presence, real feeling."
© Ai Weiwei with "Soft Ground" and Rooted upon", 2009
Photo: Jörg Koopmann
In the main hall of the Haus der Kunst, he invites his viewers to do just that. He has filled the room with roots and tree trunks, a profusion of twisting and bizarre knotting that is so fascinating because the uniqueness, the droll spryness of these things is only fully revealed in death, once the husks are freed from earth and bark. Contrast comes in the form of black and white photographs that line the walls, Chinese people, posing for the camera, sometimes proudly, sometimes anxiously, just after applying for a travel visa to Kassel. This was two years ago when Ai Weiwei invited 1001 Chinese to travel to the Documenta, to find out what it feels like to be a piece of wood, landing on a foreign shore.
On one side, the uprooted roots, on the other, the people ready for departure, all similar, all very different. And beneath them, a carpet, which is barely visible becasue it so brilliantly imitates the colour and pattern of the stone slabs of the museum floor – a woven trompe l'oeil, which clings so snugly to reality that it reveals it. Because as soon as you realise that the carpet is a carpet, then you notice the different patterns of the stone slabs, the distinct variations in the grain, the tiny cracks. Each one is an individual – in a house that was built to pay homage to the united racial corpus.
It is paradoxes like these that Ai Weiwei adores, plucking things out of the world and planting them in the museum, confident that they will take on another meaning, transform themselves before our very eyes. "I love Duchamp," says Ai Weiwei, "I love his humour, his lack of boundaries. He taught me that not only an antique chair can be a Readymade, but also that the Chinese constitution can be a Readymade."
Installation of "Soft Ground, 2009"
Wool 3560 x 1060 cm
© Ai Weiwei
Photo: Marino Solokhov
Ai applies the same methods to politics and poetry alike. He wrests things from their ordinary contexts, he wants the Chinese to see them with fresh eyes, take them seriously again, their cultural heritage, bit for bit, their human rights, word for word. But this sort of approach does not guarantee him friends in the west. He has no time for compromises, especially if someone tries to tell him that China needs more time, that democracy needs decades, centuries even, to develop. "We can't wait three, let alone thirty years," he says angrily. "We only have one life. Why should we be patient? What's so terrible about the truth? Why shouldn't we have democracy?" His eyes flash furiously, he hates western pussyfooting. He wants everyone to be able to talk about everything, just like he can.
Then all of a sudden, he's had enough. He wants to go, down to the catacombs. There is a waft of food in the air. But Ai, I persist, will China ever be democratic? A short laugh, and then he says, "A flower does not bloom because we want it to, but because it is spring. I can promise you one thing, though, I won't die before we see signs of democracy." That is modesty. That is megalomania. That is Ai Weiwei.
*
This article was originally published in Die Zeit on 2 October, 2009.
Hanno Rauterberg is an art critic for Die Zeit.
Translation: lp
Valentine's Art
Beginning a new art piece for a group Valentine’s Day exhibit. The theme is anatomical hearts and pin-ups. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of love represented by Cupid’s arrow piercing the heart, the bulls-eye metaphor, the blood, the pain, the death, the “it will kill you or make you stronger”. This violence of attraction, of hunting, of capturing prey is extremely beautiful to me. My new piece draws on this concept.Painting by Martique Lorray
"Exposing the Heart"
oil on canvas
24 x 36
www.CentaurArts.com
Wednesday
Sophie Calle "Take Care of Yourself"
Sophie Calle
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, USA
The genesis of ‘Take Care of Yourself’, Sophie Calle’s mesmerizing collaborative piece recently on view at Paula Cooper, is a break-up letter her then-boyfriend (dubbed ‘X’) sent her via e-mail. Calle took the e-mail, and the paralyzing confusion that accompanies the mind’s failure to comprehend heartbreak, and distributed it to 107 women of various professions, skills and talents to help her understand it – to interpret, analyze, examine and perform it. The result of this seemingly obsessive, schoolyard exercise is paradoxically one of the most expansive and telling pieces of art on women and contemporary feminism to pass through New York in recent years.
It is also very, very funny. The respondents range from a criminal prosecutor, a cartoonist, a clown (whose excitement over the author’s use of parentheses far exceeds her interest in the content), a markswoman (heard riddling the letter with bullets in an adjacent room), a teenager, an expert in women’s rights at the UN and a nursery school teacher, who creates a list of age-appropriate reading questions, such as ‘How did the hero betray the pact?’ Assuming the entirety of the gallery’s barn-like space, the exhibition includes large-scale photographs of the women, written analyses, and more than 30 monitors showing simultaneous performances, dramatic readings and musical renditions. It’s easy to spend several absorbing hours in this interpretive hall of mirrors, completely enthralled, without getting any closer to having a clue what this letter means. If that was ever really the point.
The letter itself is available in a deliberately mountainous stack at the entrance, and you can read it in its English language translation or make a little paper airplane out of it – it’s yours to keep, the curator’s way of providing her own feedback. As for the content, a lawyer in the exhibition asserts that the author (a well-known French writer who will most likely never break up with a woman via e-mail again) has committed fraud by claiming his profession as a man of letters. No argument here. With the fugitive pronouns, passive constructions and general linguistic fuzziness, this letter has to be one of the most unsympathetic and least intelligible pieces of writing in what is typically a disingenuous and incoherent genre (my qualifications: writer, literary scholar). The Latinist, painstakingly trying for an exact translation, has an excruciating time with it.
Even with a less abstruse text, however, meaning can slip and slide under an avalanche of interpretation, and it’s no surprise that the sheer volume, diversity, creativity and pleasure of these women’s achievements and talents steal the show in a remarkably uplifting way. Yet despite all this fun and professional exhibitionism, the nature of the undertaking is destabilizing to female power. The only man in the room, invisible and unnamed, is still a domineering figure, multiply replicated, chased, tossed about in the interpretive tide, but overwhelmingly necessary. Without him, the entire exhibition would collapse on itself – the reason, the women’s participatory purpose, would vanish.
As such, ‘Take Care of Yourself’ is speaking very honestly to the complicated male-female interdependency at the heart of feminism. The dominant male art historical environment, acknowledged, ignored, or reviled, tends, for better or worse, both to marginalize and provide a basis for feminist art, and the relationship has always been an active and instable one. The reactionary ‘victimhood’ art of the 1990s, with its individual narratives of defilement, self-abnegation and accusation, has yielded to a more positivist trend in recent years, recalling the collaborative models of second-wave feminism, such as Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974-9) and the 1972 multi-sensory CalArts project, ‘Womanhouse’. Calle’s exhibition, brilliantly timed in its first appearance at the 2007 Venice Biennale, coincided with several landmark exhibitions and the opening of a feminist art centre in the US, and a higher profile for feminist art internationally. As a result, forums, and contentious internal disagreements, have sprung up to counter this question of feminism’s future. Calle, in using her own personal trauma to create and then problematize a model of group empowerment, is revealing the underlying affinity between these hotly debated approaches. It may not be to feminism’s advantage to spend too much time splitting hairs, after all. All movements will always require both – cooperation and that singular and terrifying journey into the submerged power relations found deep within the emotional recesses of the self.
--Jessica Lott
Ana de la Cueva, El Paquete
El Paquete was the premiere solo exhibition of new work by the New York-based, Mexican artist Ana de la Cueva at Jane Kim/Thrust Projects this past November. The exhibition was a journey into de la Cueva’s past, and explored male and female sexuality through the lens of her life. In her anthropological exploration, the artist tracked down ex-lovers, male friends, and men in her family and photographed them in their underwear. The photographs were printed on boxes identical to those of underwear packaging. As a new and unique form of portraiture, El Paquete was a wry commentary on things disposable and simultaneously intimate.Ana de la Cueva, Juanmirey, 2009. Sculptural print, 7.5 x 5.3 x 1.2 inches. Courtesy of Jane Kim/Thrust Projects, New York. © Ana de la Cueva, 2009.
In her own words, de la Cueva appropriated the format of the product’s description found on commercial underwear boxes to give us small hints about the men and their relationship to her. She sent a series of questions to each man inquiring on their fetishes, life mottos, and favorite positions (“postura” in her native Spanish can mean “position,” as in one’s mantra in life, or doubly, his preferred sexual position). Ana de la Cueva, who has previously used embroidery, painting, collage, and video to explore identity in her work, continued this theme in El Paquete. De la Cueva’s work is a subtle and subversive critique on the nature of relationships set against the backdrop of our consumer society.
Tuesday
The Falsetto
The apathy and the ecstasy
Ueli Bernays traces falsetto's high-pitched pop-musical passage from expression to gimmick and back again.
When pop musicians sing, they often express euphoria in the same, high pitched voice that they use to express pain. Think of soul singer Al Green, rocker Robert Plant, disco star Barry Gibb or Pop king Michael Jackson. They might evoke very different moods in their music, but if you concentrate on their voices, abstracting them from accompaniment and arrangement, they all have one thing in common: they all regularly return to the highest vocal registers in order to signalise neuralgic values of sensibility or emotionality. This feminine or puerile-sounding singing can be off-putting. It disrupts the accepted norms of human behaviour or manliness at least. And it makes the singers sound like mediums to some superhuman, transsexual force, which is making itself heard in the lambent flames of falsetto.In pop and rock traditions, singers tend to switch to falsetto when they want their voice to rise into alto or soprano registers: as soon as the vocal chords vibrate only halfway, the voice rushes up to the next octave, into falsetto. Falsetto singing is nothing new in pop music. But it is particularly popular at the moment. In recent years more and more rock and pop singers are using these honeyed tones. The list is not restricted to any one genre: think of Pharrell Williams, Justin Timberlake, Cee-Lo Green, Mayer Hawthorne in soul and r'n'b Thom Yourke (Radiohead), Chris Martin (Coldplay), Matthew Bellamy (Muse) in Brit pop and stadium rock and Mika, Antony Hegarty, Scissor Sisters, MGMT, Passion Pit in Indie.
In classical music, by contrast, falsetto has long been frowned upon. For centuries now, it has been thought of as the "false" voice, in line with its etymology. In the early days of European opera, falsetto might have been permitted to allow men to slip into women's roles. But as soon as female singers were allowed onto the stage, vocal registers were divided strictly along gender lines, and it was deemed lewd, effete, and downright "unnatural" for male singers to insist on using falsetto for alto or soprano melodies. As to whether or not it is natural, on the one hand, male and female voices overlap much more than commonly believed; and on the other, the falsetto voice is a product of physical disposition. The falsetto "ban" was less about nature than socio-cultural sexual determination.
Indeed there are a number of musical traditions that actually cultivate it. Alpine yodelling, for example. In West African cultures, falsetto was even believed to be a sign of heightened potency. African slaves brought their falsetto culture to the USA and their high-pitched field hollering influenced not only the early forms of African-American music but also folk and country. And yodelling immigrants from Europe also left traces of falsetto in the American musical landscape. So it is thanks to all of these influences that falsetto has always been accepted in American popular music.
Falsetto has different meanings and functions that vary according to singer and style. Misfits like Smokey Robinson, Frankie Valli, Jimmy Somerville (Bronski Beat) and Jeff Buckley, who simply felt most at home in the falsetto voice, inspired clusters of imitators. But the quickest route to the male falsetto takes us to singing boy groups: in the harmony arrangements of Doo Wop or the multi-layered vocals of bands like the Beach Boys or the Bee Gees, the highest registers are all intoned in falsetto. The distribution of falsetto is different in every genre. Interestingly the style in which it features most heavily is hardrock and heavy metal. It might seem anomalous that strutting rockers like Robert Plant are so partial to expressing themselves in such seemingly feminine registers. There are two reasons why this might be: in music it is generally the higher-pitched instruments and higher voices that take on the melody – and therefore in rock and pop too, singers – and especially male singers with high voices - are over represented; but it is among the thundering of metal guitars that the high voice, the falsetto, really comes into its acoustic own. The falsetto speaks volumes about the emotional culture of rock: the singers work themselves into ecstasy. The composure needed for verbal communication gets lost in an excess of emotional information and the voice transforms into a non-verbal medium, somewhere between primal scream and guitar solo.
In all genres, the falsetto indicates a build-up of sensuousness and feelings. Although the semantics certainly oscillate. The aggressive metal falsetto contrasts dramatically with its folk counterpart where, with singer/songwriters like Jeff Buckley, it shows vulnerability. The implications of falsetto in soul are different again. In this genre, which translates the religious passion of Gospel into the secular drama of love, falsetto singing, sighing and shrieking are used, particularly in expressive caesuras, to express moments of extreme joy or grief (brought on for example by the dominants of blues cadence particularly at the end of a verse, before an instrumental solo or at the end of a song.) At the end of the Sixties and beginning of the Seventies, the soul falsetto was all the rage. This is exemplified in the career of Marvin Gaye. Initially he only climbed into falsetto for expressive accents but by the end of the decade, the whimpering falsetto had become a ubiquitous means to express his grievances and demands.
At the same time falsetto virtuosos like Al Green and Curtis Mayfield were producing the last artistic high points in soul music. In Mayfield's case, falsetto was already starting to free itself from the narrative logic of the song and becoming something like a continual expressive high pressure over the driving rhythms. The soul song was being usurpted by the more open, rhythmically-driven forms of the funk track. Funk falsetto was not about dramatic climax. It emerged as the sound of fleshly lust, the sign of hedonistic euphoria. And disco's hour had arrived too. When the Bee Gees, who years beforehad had modelled themselves on the Beatles, re-formed in the mid-Seventies, they decided to go the funk route, propelled by electricity of Barry Gibb's vibrating falsetto. And so they put their stamp on an epoch that was already filled with falsetto in all number of funk and disco formations – the Ohio Players, for example, Earth, Wind & Fire; even Mick Jagger was suddenly singing in a high-pitched disco voice for "Emotional Rescue".
Similar lines of development from expressive falsetto to falsetto mannerism and cliche can be traced through other genres. With his slightly thin, but electrifying voice, the singer/songwriter Jeff Buckley set new standards in expressive form – and the falsetto became an organ of pain. His singing spawned countless imitators over numerous musical generations, like Buckley fan Thom Yorke, the singer of the avantgarde Brit-pop band Radiohead. Once upon a time Tom Yorke used falsetto in moderation – as a technique for expressive limits: in Radiohead's hit "Creep", for example, where after two verses of self-humiliation, the voice suddenly flips into the angst-laden frenzy of falsetto. Later the falsetto became the trademark sign of Yorke's vocal expressiveness: notoriously highly strung and hysterical. And in his turn, Yorke inspired countless musicians from Coldplay to Keane and James Blunt to sing high.
"Tracing back" the use of falsetto to bygone idols is symptomatic of pop music today. There is very little pop music being made in any genre that does not rely on revival, quotation, exaggeration or parody. But this does necessary means an absence of creativity, as Prince demonstrated in the Eighties. He instrumentalised the falsetto as expressive cliche, on a par with the Hendrix guitar. With breathtaking vocal virtuosity, he combined moaning and screaming with quivering falsetto sighs to orchestrate an orgiastic, parodic, even grotesque sex sound ("Do Me, Baby", "Sexuality", "Kiss").
But in other songs Prince made innovative use of the falsetto. In "Sometimes It Snows In April", for example, at the beginning he expresses his grief over the death of a friend in falsetto. He then collects himself sufficiently to return to verbal expression, and intones the next verses in a well-tended chest voice. Ten years ago, the American neo-Soul star D'Angelo was similarly creative. His combination of falsetto soul with funk and hip-hop beats on his album "Voodoo", brought new highlights to the art of falsetto.
In the retro cult of contemporary pop culture, falsetto mostly crops up in quotations of earlier styles and idols. But with such frequency that you wonder whether this isn't saying something else about today. If you concentrate on individual singers, it's like the wood with the trees. Someone like Antony Hegarty has made a name for himself as a solitary artist who uses falsetto to stride across gender lines with considerable virtuosity; and Cee-Lo Green or Jamie Lidell are, in terms of the falsetto soul they sing, highly original traditionalists. Seen and heard from a distance, however, even these individualists are part of the contemporary falsetto choir, which is setting a trend most typical of our time..
The falsetto mode can be read as a symptom of a dilemma: on the one hand, there is so much pressure in pop culture to produce expressiveness and desire. On the other hand, it's not clear what this desire and strength of expression is meant to motivate any more. Sensibility and emotionality seem to be at such an all-time low that they are unable to find expression in new musical styles; and there is also insufficient musical pioneering going on to trigger artistic fervour. This is why the falsetto is often little more than a gimmick or fake used over and over to simulate hedonistic intensity. The falsetto of big name r'n'b singers like Pharrell Williams, Justin Timberlake and Cee-Lo might always generate a certain warmth, but it is basically just emotional theatre. A donning of aesthetic prosthetics. You could compare falsetto with a candle which you light in the temple of lust, whether or not you still believe in the religion of love, sex and liberation.
In "Falsetto" by r'n'b star The Dream, the falsetto is only used to parody the girlfriend's lust. "As soon as I hit, I got her talkin' like this . . . / In a falsetto, She's like 'Ooh, ooh! Baby! Ahh, ahh, ahh! Ohh!', in a falsetto." With acts like Mika, Scissor Sisters, MGMT and Passion Pit, which are closer to glam rock, disco and electro pop in style, the expressiveness of the forced falsetto swings between parody and hysteria. The notoriously highly strung in this case stands for parasitical copy cats, who are desperately clawing at the roots of expressive traditions. This is not to say that the above musicians are not eager pop musicians, who are just making the most of the last expressive energies.
So today's falsetto, true to its name, has indeed become a "false" rather than true voice, in which simulation replaces expression. Ironically, this excess of emotional forgery has itself advanced the use of an artistic instrument which, though not new, is strongly characteristic of the present day: the auto-tune. This is actually nothing more than a technical effect that is used to correct intonation errors during recording. But if you correct an entire song line using auto-tune, it sounds like a robotic voice and, with its empty, honeyed timbre, like falsetto. Many hits that use the auto tuning effect are also sung in falsetto - "Got Money", for example, by Lil' Wayne and T-Pain or "Heartless" by Kanye West. Also typical is "I Wanna Love You" by Akon. This r'n'b singer is cultivating the coolness of the disenchanted, the cynicism of the post-naive: "Love" is shown to be nothing but an act, an act of purchasing. And the auto-tune falsetto exudes false, robotic passion. Here the expressive falsetto, once a sign of ecstasy and euphoria, tips over into its expressive opposite: it becomes a sign of apathetic distance and melancholy.
*
This article originally appeared in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on 8 January, 2010.
Ueli Bernays has worked as a jazz bassist and journalist. In 2000 his novel "August" won the Robert Walser Prize. Since 1999 he has been writing about pop and jazz for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
My new friend and I
"I'm at that point in the day where I'm tired of myself, she said, so if you don't mind, I'm going to be someone else until bedtime & we had a lovely time together, my new friend & I"
-StoryPeople
Monday
Balthus Exists.
(Like the art or not,
this article is fantastically written.)
Nymphs in the afternoon
Cologne's Museum Ludwig presents the first solo show of French painter Balthus, the self-styled "King of Cats"
Balthus exists. That was the first news about him and it was written by a poet, Rainer Maria Rilke - as though there were something to doubt about this existence. As if one had to take precautions against the suspicion that he might just be a fictional character. In a way, that's what he is, a fictional character, a calculated, staged appearance, half enveloped in twilight. Rilke remarked about the boy, that he would become an "artist with talent, perhaps with genius." And that he might cast doubts on himself.
Balthus was born in 1908, in the midst of old Europe and he became one of its most characteristic creatures. He died, as befitted his social status, in an arisotcratic carved wooden house on the side of a mountain in shouting distance of the Swiss Alps in 2001. Balthus enjoyed, if not promoted, the uncertainty of his being. He liked to say that he was one of those feline types, like a character in a film who makes us shudder: a dark frontier runner between worlds who turned into a predator in his castle by night. Or was he thinking of the nymphs in his paintings who loll about like cats and wile away the afternoons in feline languour? Did he see them as his prey or his playmates, his sisters by night?
He styled himself as the "King of Cats," which is also the title of his only self-portrait. It shows a spoilt, imperious creature of the oldest, irresistible aristocracy, a "King of those regions that will remain forever unknown to my gloomy contemporaries," as the young painter once said of himself.
The cat has, of course, always been the heraldic animal of this prince, ever since Rilke added a preface to the little picture book Balthus made as a boy. It is the tale of the mysterious, seductive cat "Mitsou", which appears out of nowhere and disappears into nowhere. It is a creature one remembers as one might an apparition that appeared in a voluptuous Sunday afternoon dream. Hence the poet's reassuring words at the end of his short preface: not the cat, but Balthus exists.
Of course he existed: he was master of a number of castles in France and Switzerland. He claimed to possess an old European aristocratic title - Comte Balthazar Klossowski de Rola – to have relatives in the Scottish Highlands and to be a blood relative of the heroically beautiful and contemptuous Lord Byron - as though such things could be acquired like old manors. He knew how to pass himself off with the proud air of other-worldliness, a passionate charades player, who made his first appearace as the darkly wreckless rake Heathcliff in "Wuthering Heights" and his last as a kind of samurai in Japanese knight's armour. Residing in his Swiss wooden castle, he presented himself to the bemused visitor like a dinosaur from lost worlds.
Balthus, "Patience", 1943
© The Art Institute of Chicago/VG Bild-Kunst Bonn 2007
Balthus is the painter of terrible and sublime children who, like their feverish siblings in Jean Cocteau's masterpiece, "Les enfants terribles", inhabit their own in-between kingdom inaccessible to grown-ups where, as Cocteau wrote, they promptly "fall silent when adults approach" and where they "follow the rhythm of another world". Balthus is a painter of fine-limbed stretching nymphs and provocatively sensual Lolitas for whom the soft-focus, the chaise longue and the frilly blouse seem to have been invented. He is also the painter of cheaply perfumed infants of desire, who appealed so deliciously to the age of Bilitis, thanks to the active support of David Hamilton as Master of Ceremonies. Against today's backdrop of rampant child pornography they provoke nauseousness and incomprehension, more than anything else, at the shallowness and poor taste of this all too tackily decorated thrill.
But above all there is the painter Balthus who, as his friend Antonin Artaud once put it, used metallically harsh, razor sharp techniques a la Jacques-Louis David to 'crucify' reality and employed his brush to guillotine the metaphysical bombast of modernist painting which bloomed between Klee and Kandinsky. The Balthus of the 1930s, of the Paris years, painted scenes of mysterious trepidation: knives are pulled with a dangerous flash, said Albert Camus, but no blood is spilled. His characters are either perpetrators or victims or both, like David's dead Marat. Frozen figures hinting at smouldering drama in this magically fixed moment – a drama that cannot be seen, but is tangible nonetheless.
Balthus, "The Street", 1933, © 2006. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn 2007
He was the bold and pompous creator of some of the finest works of the 1930s, where Magical Realism, Neue Sachlichkeit, Classicism and Surrealism blend wonderfully. His work is now on show in Cologne, where some two dozen paintings consort with much a larger volume of drawings, spanning his entire career from its spectacular start to the gradual fading of his mastery in his changing country homes.
At the exhibition's centre, however, is the sturm und drang period of Balthus, the young player of heroes. It begins in 1934 with the legendary exhibition at Galerie Pierre in Paris, where the central and hallucinatory work - the one also shown Cologne - was the large format painting "The Street". This is followed by portraits from the mid to late 1930s, and the phenomenal portraits of the girl-next-door,Thérèse Blanchard, which launched the nymph phase and, fortunately, are far more Enfants Terribles than Bilitis. Only first-rate works are assembled here from the painter's mental cosmos: the painting of the "Blanchard children" for instance, which Picasso identified as a masterpiece and later went on to buy; "The Golden Days" which is the portrait of an era of lascivious temptation and bitter desire; and the "Nude with Cat" and spread legs who surrenders herself to the light of day as if it were some horny Greek god.
Balthus, "Therese dreaming". © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/VG Bild-Kunst Bonn 2007, Photograph by Malcolm Varon, 1988
Visitors won't necessarily experience a conclusive, rigorous investigation into and categorisation of the Balthus mystique in Cologne; this still remains to be seen. But thanks to the expertise of curator Sabine Rewald, visitors can get a first-hand impression of the painter's mastery at the highest level. He wasn't just a rumour, he existed as a thorn in the side of the past century. As the king of cats: a bitterly cynical snob and a dissolutely dangerous beast of prey.
"Balthus - Time Suspended. Paintings and Drawings 1932 to 1960." 18 August to 4 November 2007 at Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
*
The article originally appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on August 21, 2007.
Manfred Schwarz is an art critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Translation: Claudia Kotte
Sunday
Rasputin's Daughter, Maria
(Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin 1869 – 29 December was a Russian mystic who is perceived as having influenced the latter days of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II. Rasputin had often been called the "Mad Monk", while others considered him a "strannik" (or religious pilgrim) and even a staret, believing him to be a psychic or faith healer.
Rasputin's daughter, Maria Rasputin (Matryona Rasputina) (1898–1977), emigrated to France after the October Revolution, and then to the U.S. There she worked as a dancer and then a tiger-trainer in a circus. She left memoirs about her father, wherein she painted an almost saintly picture of him, insisting that most of the negative stories were based on slander and the misinterpretations of facts by his enemies.
thought was predatory. Her strong body seemed about to burst out of its cashmere dress and smelled of sweat. Society ladies kissed the tall teenager and called her by her pet names "Mara" and "The writer Vera Zhukovskaya later described sixteen-year-old Maria as having a wide face with a square chin and "bright-colored lips" that she frequently licked in a movement ZhukovskayaMarochka" during one gathering at her father's modest apartment. Zhurovskaya thought it was odd to see Rasputin's daughter receiving so much attention from princesses and countesses.
Maria published the first of three memoirs about Rasputin in 1932. It was entitled Rasputin, My Father. She also later co-authored a cookbook, which includes recipes for jellied fish heads and her father's favorite, cod soup. She also worked as a cabaret dancer in Bucharest, Romania and then found work as a circus performer for Ringling Brothers Circus. During the 1930s she toured Europe and America as a lion tamer, billing herself as "the daughter of the famous mad monk whose feats in Russia astonished the world." She was mauled by a bear in Peru, Indiana, but stayed with the circus until it reached Miami, Florida, where she quit and began work as a riveter in a defense shipyard during World War II. She settled permanently in the United States in 1937 and became a United States citizen in 1945. She was married to a man named Gregory Bernadsky in 1940.
Maria worked in defense plants until 1955 when she was forced to retire because of her age. After that, she supported herself by working in hospitals, giving Russian lessons, and babysitting for friends.
Saturday
Naked for Rain
PATNA, India - Farmers in an eastern Indian state have asked their unmarried daughters to plow parched fields naked in a bid to embarrass the weather gods to bring some badly needed monsoon rain.
Keeper of the Left
"Keeper of the Left"
from Adult Bedtime Stories
Original story and live reading by Martique Lorray
to purchase book go to www.CentaurArts.com
Parkour Motion Reel
art in motion... now that's a rad way to tell a story.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbol51_parkour-motion-reel_creation
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbol51_parkour-motion-reel_creation
Wednesday
Fuck 'em
Fuck ‘em.
By Martique LorrayFuck ‘em if you can’t fuck ‘em.
Creation is messy – sweaty and dirty. It’s different. It sucks and it pushes. It’s invisible and it smells. It makes you ripe. It makes you rotten. It bites you when you turn your back and it twists your nipple when you want to cry. It will pull your pants down and expose your ass to everyone. It is your best friend, your comrade in battle; always there to put the rock in your shoe that says, “Remember. Remember who you want to be. Remember the dream, the vision. Remember those times when you were so sure, when you were invincible… and remember the laughter – the messy laughter - the mess of laughter. Yes, the laughter should be messy, too. Bringing down the snot and the tears. Bringing down the urine in your pants. Making your nose snarl. Screwing up your face in all directions that forces that vein to pop out in your forehead… or your neck – that’s the laughter vein. Cut that, and you’re dead. Laughter is the thread that ties our bones together. Our cells feed themselves on dirty jokes. Our heart is one big “Ha-Ha!”
So fuck ‘em if you can’t fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em if they won’t get messy with you. I know you can make the most terrific mess all by yourself… I’ve seen you pick up turds with your toes and fling them away… good job. Fucking funny.
Above image by Martique Lorray
"Preparing to Scratch"
charcoal on paper
www.CentaurArts.com
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