Horner's Corner

View of winter trees
before
one tree

in the foreground
where
by fresh-fallen

snow
lie 6 woodchunks ready
for the fire

William Carlos Wiliams

For more on the poem in relation to the painting, click here.

Jersey Lyric -Henry Niese

At the Hayward Gallery, South Bank, London is a wonderful exhibition by an artist of joyful, subversive power.

Pipilotti Rist (her first name his an amalgam of the two names she was called by family and friends respectively -’Pipi’ and ‘Lotti’) produces video installations that are sometimes minute (tiny screens, embedded in walls, floors, objects) sometimes huge (immersive experiences in which you seem to be at once viewer and image) and all sizes in between. A lot has been written about this artist, so I’ll keep my remarks quite brief. She is new to me. Anyway, the thing is to go and experience her marvellous work, not to read about it.

First Thoughts and feeling prompted by Pipilotti Rist’s Eyeball Massage -very tentative and partial, and missing a whole lot out, of course:

*Dreams It’s a cliche to say watching film is like dreaming, or that a dream one had was like a film, but these videos that migrate into handbags, packing cases and wombs: who is dreaming them? Rist’s work seems to be neither simply autobiographical (although it is her we see, in various guises, in most of the films) nor disconnected from her experience as a dreaming body. Here the videos seem to dream, or to invite us to merge their dreams with us.

*Shapes. The objects and shapes we move through, round or into in this exhibition -veils, sea shells, handbags, cradles, etc, seem to stand as analogues for bodies, and it is the body and its senses that seem to be the key to all we experience. The art is feminine: I would find it hard to imagine this being made by a male artist. Why? The female (Rist’s) body is the subject, and so are her dreams. The feminine -the feminism -is in the form of the works, not some ‘message’ to be found in them. The form is the content: in her joyful wisdom, Pipilotti Rist has created art that we need for the 21st century, a kind of expansive, unalienated experience rooted in a woman’s embodied dreaming. In place of the male subject who ‘stands for’ or ‘stands in for’ all of humanity, here it is a woman’s body that is the human form, inclusive, singular and universal. A woman who is the human subject.

*Pleasure. this exhibition is deeply pleasurable – a real massage. In it caressing warmth it seems to challenge the idea that the only kind of opposition to reification and alienation has to be a militant dysphoria.

*Machines of representation: They may be like dreaming things, but they are still machines and she never lets go of this awareness, and consequently, neither do we. We have an experience, highly mediated, of a physical immediacy. In what ways are we like these machines that make pictures?

* Within you, without you: We sometimes peer into small things to see videos, sometimes walk or sit in large spaces, surrounded by images and sounds. Ultimately the inside/outside organ/epidermis, building/world sets of alternations embraces the Hayward building itself, and then, as smoke filled bubbles, generated from the roof the of the building, floats far beyond.

*Sound. Sound: ambient music, shrieking, laughter, singing (including lip-synching to pop songs)..is a part of the experience of being in these affective spaces.

*Anxiety The main exception to the above might be her giant installation Suburb Brain. I won’t try to describe it, but the mouth we see and hear talking seems to be like that of an analysand, in which what is said (statements) seem overloaded, almost at times bending and failing under a weight of affect. There is questioning and anxiety here, felt through the staging, the saying, the multiple signifiers.

*Machine and body, nature and culture. Always interwoven, in all she does.

*Beyond the single dreaming subject. The videos dream for us, perhaps, in an inter-passive, inter-subjective manner. Rooted in the body, her films seem to evoke an experience that transcends the single subject that is structured and divided by language.

* Hysteria -a kind of productive, happy  hysteria? if this is possible, we find it here. And the exhibition has a kind of delirium.

*Play. There is a kind of utopian promise in play, and there is a strong play element in Pipilotti’s work. I think it links us to our childhood and to another world of pure, absorbed, non instrumental activity. I was particularly taken by her lip synch performance to Kevin Coyne’s Jacky and Edna (‘You called me Jacky’). The sight and sound of this is something I’ll remember for a long time.

*Go and see her work, go and be in her work.

An article on Rist:

Pipilotti Rist: We all come from between our mothers legs | Art and design | The Guardian.

Film of Rist in conversation here.

For more on play, childhood and utopia see  here and here.

Pay for the directors of the UK’s top businesses rose 50% over the past year, a pay research company has said.

Incomes Data Services (IDS) said this took the average pay for a director of a FTSE 100 company to just short of £2.7m.

The rise, covering salary, benefits and bonuses, was higher than that recorded for the main person running the company, the chief executive.

Their pay rose by 43% over the year, according to the study.

A statement from IDS said that that figure suggested that “executive largesse is evenly spread across the board”.

Base salaries rose by just 3.2%, although that was above the median rise recorded by IDS this week for average pay settlements of 2.6% for private sector workers.

The latest consumer price inflation figures showed inflation at 5.2%.

Directors’ bonus payments, on average, rose by 23% from £737,000 in 2010 to £906,000 this year.

The Unite union has called executive pay “obscene” and has called for shareholders to be given more power to hold directors accountable.

The union’s general secretary, Len McCluskey said: “The Government should strongly consider giving shareholders greater legal powers to question and curb these excessive remuneration packages.

“Institutional shareholders need to exercise much greater scrutiny and control of directors’ pay and bonuses.

“It’s obscene and it shows that the City has learnt nothing during the financial troubles of the last four years.”

‘Complex’ packages

“I think it is very hard to justify these sorts of pay increases,” Deborah Hargreaves, chair of the High Pay Commission, told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme.

“When you think the average pay is going up 1% or 2%, it’s not even meeting price rises. These pay packages have become so complex that executives don’t even understand it themselves.

“We have got a closed shop here and someone needs to break it open.”

Brendan Barber, the TUC’s general secretary, said: “Top directors have used tough business conditions to impose real wage cuts, which have hit people’s living standards and the wider economy, but have shown no such restraint with their own pay.

“Reform should start with employee representation on remuneration committees, which would give directors a much-needed sense of reality.”

Steve Tatton, who edited the IDS report, said: “Britain’s economy may be struggling to return to pre-recession levels of output, but the same cannot be said of FTSE 100 directors’ remuneration.”

Mr Tatton said that while closer scrutiny of pay awards was expected in future, “remuneration committees will have to make sure that they are able to provide full and thorough justifications for the bonuses awarded.”

From:

BBC News – Directors’ pay rose 50% in past year, says IDS report.

As an alternative to the heroising portraits of Ingres, here are some specimens by Daumier, a great cartoonist (and sculptor, and painter) and Felix Nadar, the fashionable society photographer of the mid century.

Photos by Nadar, all the rest by Daumier: From the top: ‘Dore’; ‘The Legislature’; ‘Riches’;'Cremieux’;'we lost, but it’s not all bad: at least you got to hear my great speech’;Michelet;Baudelaire; Sara Bernhardt; caricature sculpture.

Max Horkheimer wrote in the 1930s that those who do not want to speak critically about capitalism should also keep silent about fascism.Does this mean that Wagner opened up the path that ends up in later neo-Romantic kitsch – a claim repeated over and over by Adorno? There are signs that point in this direction.

When, a couple of years ago, Plácido Domingo accepted the post of Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Opera, he immediately announced his intention to bring it closer to the popular Hollywood film industry using digitalized, cinematic special effects, and so on. It is little wonder that his first project was to stage a “Hollywood Ring:” Wagner’ s tetralogy cut down from its awesome fourteen hours to a collection of big numbers, ornamented with all the technoglitz. Cultural critics in the Adornian vein were quick to note that this was not simply a vulgar profanation of Wagner’s “high art.” The cinematic nature of Wagner’s Ring itself has often been noted. The stage instructions to Act III of Die Walküre Valkyries riding on clouds, and so on, for example, can be followed only on film even more so, perhaps, in today’s digitally manipulated cinema, in the style of The Lord of the Rings no wonder that Tolkien’s novel effectively takes its title from Wagner: in Das Rheingold, Alberich is literally designated as “lord of the ring”, another example of how an old art form can develop notions which call for a new art form that arises out of technological inventions. Wagner’s cinematic nature is then used to argue for the kitsch aspect of his music. It is no wonder that a leitmotif-like technique was widely used in classic Hollywood composition. Did Wagner really accomplish the first step towards the kitschy ‘fetishization’ of music that reaches its apogee in classical Hollywood?

But what if the original sin had already been committed by Beethoven? Undoubtedly his music often verges on kitsch – suffice it to mention the over-repetitive exploitation of the “beautiful” main motif in the first movement of his Violin Concerto.

Beethoven

Finding an appropriate conclusion for the Ring Cycle caused Wagner immense difficulty. His ideas for the end changed several times as his political and philosophical views evolved. The story of these changes is so well known that only a brief summary is necessary.

The Ring’s trajectory begins with his first written project, “The Nibelung Myth as Sketch for a Drama” (1848), in which Siegfried and Brünnhilde rise above Siegfried’ s funeral pyre to Valhalla to cleanse Wotan of his crime and redeem the gods; there is no suggestion that the gods will or ought to suffer annihilation. In a new version written a year later as “Siegfried’s Death,” Brünnhilde’s final oration also stresses the cleansing effect of Siegfried’s death.

In 1851, Wagner developed the story backwards, by adding a vast “prequel” (consisting of the events staged in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre) and expanding the role of Wotan, who became the central figure. In the new ending, the gods achieve redemption, but only in their death. The next version, written a year later, shows the traces of Wagner’s passionate debates with Bakunin, as well as his study of Ludwig Feuerbach. Here, the Bakuninian notion of the purifying role of radical destruction (which clears the field for a new beginning) is combined with two basic insights from Feuerbach: gods are merely a product of the human imagination, and among all human acts, sexual love is the greatest.

Finally, in 1856, Wagner again rewrote the ending under the influence of his discovery of Schopenhauer and his reading of Buddhist texts. This “Schopenhauerian” ending focuses on resignation vis-a-vis the illusory nature of human existence and on self-overcoming through the negation of the will.

After much deliberation, Wagner nonetheless decided not to set the Schopenhauer-inspired words to music. Why? As a rule, this omission is interpreted not as a sign of Wagner’s abandoning Schopenhauer, but as proof of his artistic sensibility. By the end of his composition of the Ring (in 1874), Wagner realized that the music itself, not the words, should deliver the final message of the cycle. Is this, however, really the case? [1] Does this standard reading not rely on a rather primitive aesthetic rule (that the work’s message should not be stated explicitly, but arise “organically” out of the depicted content)?

Gotterdammerung

It is a well-known fact that, in the last minutes of Götterdammerung, the orchestra performs an excessively intricate cobweb of motifs, basically nothing less than the recapitulation of the motivic wealth of the entire Ring. Is this fact not the ultimate proof that Wagner himself was not sure about what the final apotheosis of the Ring “means”? Not being sure of it, he took a kind of ‘flight forward’ and threw together all of the motifs. This rather vicious hypothesis was proposed by Adorno (in his In Search of Wagner): Wagner did not know how to end the cycle, so he merely spun together a few obvious motifs; Adorno added that the final bars of the Ring (the “redemption through love” motif) were used simply because they were the most beautiful sounding – beautiful in the sense of kitsch, not of authentic artistic beauty.

One is effectively tempted to paraphrase the ending with this beautiful motif as something like the sentimental wisdom: “What does it matter if all of this is a mess – the important thing is that we love each other!” So the culminating motif of “redemption through love” cannot but make us think of Joseph Kerman’s acerbic comment about the last notes of Puccini’s Tosca in which the orchestra bombastically recapitulates the “beautiful” pathetic melodic line of the Cavaradossi’s “E lucevan le stelle,” as if, unsure of what to do Puccini simply desperately repeated the most “effective” melody from the previous score, ignoring all narrative or emotional logic. [3] And what if Wagner did exactly the same thing at the end of Götterdammerung? Not sure about the final twist that should stabilize and guarantee the meaning of it all, he resorted to a beautiful melody whose effect is something like “whatever any of this may mean, let us make sure that the concluding impression will be that of something triumphant and uplifting in its redemptive beauty …” In short, what if this final motif enacts an empty gesture?

However, in the very last seconds of Götterdammerung it is not only that out of all the chaos of destruction we still hear the “redemption through love” motif: three additional, subordinate motifs are heard, that of the Rhine Maidens, celebrating the innocent playfulness of the natural world; that of Valhalla, rendering the dignified majesty of the rule of law; and that of Siegfried the free hero. Do these final moments not imply a subjective position that, as Badiou suggests is paradigmatically feminine, as the three motifs are colored – transfigured – by the fourth, by love? Sublime as they are, even the most intense natural beauty, the rule of law and the most heroic acts are finally doomed to fail: “Yet the possibility of a love like that expressed in Brünnhilde’s final act changes everything, in a way that heroism does not, even in the face of death and the ending of the world as we know it.” [4]

Is this ending of the Ring not also unique with regard to Wagner’s other (six great post-Rienzi) operas? They all focus on the deadlock of a sexual relationship, clearly repeating the Kierkegaardian triad of the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. In the refusal to compromise desire (even to the point of embracing death), Tristan represents the first. Meistersinger counters it with the ethical solution: true redemption resides not in following the immortal passion to its self-destructive conclusion; rather, one should learn to overcome it via creative sublimation and to return, in a mood of wise resignation, to the “daily” life of symbolic obligations. In Parsifal, finally, the passion can no longer be overcome via its reintegration into society in which it survives in a gentrified form: one has to deny it thoroughly in the ecstatic assertion of religious jouissance. The triad Tristan-Meistersinger-Parsifal thus follows a precise logic: Meistersinger and Tristan render two opposite versions of the Oedipal matrix, within which Meistersinger inverts Tristan (the son steals the woman from the paternal figure; passion breaks out between the paternal figure and the young woman destined to become the partner of the young man), while Parsifal gives the coordinates themselves an anti-Oedipal twist – the lamenting wounded subject is here the paternal figure (Amfortas), not the young transgressor (Tristan).

One can argue that this triad repeats the triad The Flying Dutchman-Tannhauser-Lohengrin: The Flying Dutchman ends in the deadly apotheosis of the love couple; Tannhauser, like the later Meistersinger, focuses on a singing competition, which, following Marx’s famous paraphrase of Hegel, occurs first as tragedy and then repeats itself as comedy; Lohengrin is the son of Parsifal. Each time we get the same basic answers to the fate of a love relationship: the obscure sexual death drive, marriage, and asexual compassion. The Ring, however, stand s out as the exception, with an additional fourth instantiation of fate, as a solution to the deadlock, in the guise of Brünnhilde’s act.

Parsifal (Odilon Redon)

Notes
[1] Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht, Finding an Ending. Reflections on Wagner’s Ring. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
[2]. Alain Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner. New York: Verso, 2010.
[3] Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
[4] Kitcher and Schacht, Op. cit., p. 201.
[5] Ibid., pp. 182-4.
Art: Jimmy Raskin

From: Lacan.com (Lacanian ink)

When did English writers lose their ambition? Why is it that Ian McEwan,  Martin Amis and Julian Barnes are regarded as leading lights of the contemporary novel? They, and their like, fill the review pages of the ‘quality’ newspapers every week. Yet their archness, fear of emotion and avoidance of experiment leave them as mere purveyors of bourgeois comfort food. They are raised middlebrow: middle brow fiction that gets treated as if it were high art.

Middlebrow, says Wikipedia is a term for ‘forced and ineffective attempt at cultural and intellectual achievement, as well as characterizing literature that emphasizes emotional and sentimental connections rather than literary quality and innovation’. Of course,  Amis & co publish  novels about ‘important’ and ‘significant’ things: death, rites of passage, violence, and they are knowing and cynical, rather than sentimental in any obvious way. But they are a variety of middlebrow, middlebrow that gets taken seriously.

This is because they do what middlebrow has always done:  giving the reader what s/he wants, what won’t confuse or disturb, while simulating ‘literary quality and achievement’. What the  reader seems to want just now is  fast paced narrative larded with semi digested popular science, (McEwan), an authorial voice that never lets itself go and is never surprised by anything real, such as emotion (Barnes), fast moving yet erudite sex ‘n’ violence, US style, (Amis). And then there are the Justin Cartwrights and Hilary Mantels reinventing the historical novel, and practically every bloody Booker prize winner since the 70s (the theatre has this kind of thing too: think of the way Tom Stoppard flatters his audience’s intelligence).

The  overvaluation of this stuff as art it what gives me a pain. and it  seems to be a peculiar problem from anglophone, and especially English lit right now.

But what’s wrong if people like this sort of thing? If this is what the reader wants, why not give it to them?

Imagine this: suppose an artist (or better, a large and influential mass of artists) were still painting in broadly the styles inspired by Constable, or Gainsborough, but in 2010. Would anything be wrong with this? well, on one level, obviously not: no one is gets hurt by an oil painting; lots of people like pictures of haywains. In music, suppose composers just wrote pieces essentially in the style of the classicists, Beethoven etc. Same point: we all like a good tune, after all.

Well my objection is that the average ‘well made’ novel (or film see: Merchant Ivory)  is like that: perfectly fine for what it is, of course, but from another perspective, aesthetically sterile. To be clear: this complaint is about form and content: it isn’t about gloomy subjects. I’m not saying Beckett is better than Barnes because the former is ‘about’ ageing or death and the other isn’t. Barnes does death too. And there can be joy, ecstasy or whatever in a modernist art (see Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Henry Green, Saramago (and Beckett!) etc or in painting Mondrian, Klee Matisse, Cy Twonbly etc).

Perhaps there is nothing new in this: easy art gets an audience; the difficult stuff has to wait until it has created the taste by which it is to judged. After all, Herman Melville lost readers because he stopped giving them easy fare. Only later was he seen to be doing something wonderful through his ”difficult” novel about a White Whale (which even now most college educated readers I know won’t tackle). I am depressed though, by the lack of interest shown by most critics for anything beyond this, the only exceptions that coming to mind being James Wood and Gabriel Josipovici (do read the latter’s wonderful Whatever Happened to Modernism?)

What sells has usually been unchallenging, and there will always be a market for middlebrow (it’s the sales of that stuff, arguably, that make the harder stuff economically viable). But art should be about more than just churning out what sells, and it’s the way in which critics and reviewers (not always the same thing) have lost the ability or the will to tell the difference which has led to the current literary super stardom of the Amis-Barnes-McEwan cabal. This doesn’t  happen to such a degree in the other arts: whatever the debates may be about the value of the candidates for the Tate prize art critics don’t confuse what they are trying to do with what Jack Vettriano produces.

The Raised Middlebrow Novel  dominates the review pages of the qualities – naturally it does, I suppose.  This is the sort of writing in which the prose reports the events, whether those of the ‘outside’ world, or the inner thoughts of a character, untouched by problems of representation or knowing. Even when it gestures in that direction it remains timid, smug and pleased with itself. It certainly  “does” Gulags, global warming, mid life crises, etc . Middlebrow art groans under the weight of the Serious and Significant.  But: It’s pretty dead, dude. Why do so few critics acknowledge this in print?

If this is what ‘literary fiction’ is supposed to be now I’d rather read genre fiction that doesn’t give itself airs, or non fiction that at least leaves me knowing more at the end than I did when I picked up the book.

Why be against simple enjoyment? I’m not. But middlebrow novels, raised or not, (and the same in  art, music and film)  that pretend to be ‘about’ something, consumed in quantities,   actually helps to contribute  to the deadening of life. Like any pap, too much is bad for the adult digestion. But who will supply the roughage?

Public House (Bloomsbury, London.)

This photograph was taken in the 1960s-70s by John Gay (Gay was the English name taken by Hans Gohler,  a German who left his native land when Hitler rose to power  in 1933;  he was not a Jew, but was disgusted at the way the Jews were being treated. He became a naturalised British subject and took wonderful photographs of this country, usually in b&w. He died in 1999.)

A classic cover by Robert Frank for what may have been The Rolling Stones’ best album (nothing after it was as good, certainly):

The heroic version by David

Read more about David’s five versions of the painting via Napoleon Crossing the Alps – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The more realistic version by Delaroche