Thursday, November 11, 2010
infinite regress
Infinite Regress:
Writing About Writing and Not Writing
BY DONALD BRACKETT
"There is something missing....if I knew what it is then it wouldn't be so missing..."
Han, in The Recognitions, by William Gaddis, 1955
It has recently come to my attention that the meaning of life can be found in the 1996 novel by the late American author David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest. I can indeed confirm this, even though it is a delayed realization of some fifteen perplexed years. There are a number of explanations for why it took so long to realize that the meaning of life is easily found in Infinite Jest (page 492, to be exact) but those would not add anything salient to this basic empirical fact. The meaning of life also recurs on page 997 as well, as if for some sort of echo-effect that manages to reassure the astute reader that indeed, he or she is on the right track after all. But just where does that track lead? Did DFW find out? If so, after visiting from 1962-2008, he is regrettably no longer able to file his remarkable reports from the front. Or has he only gone on to the actual front? “One never knew, after all, now did one now, did one now did one.” As he himself said in the “radically condensed history of post-industrial life” from his Brief Interview With Hideous Men, 2007. Late late Wallace.
If one could envisage a large balcony jutting off a big old ornate building somewhere in the Swiss Alps (SA), with obscurely wounded inmates lounging on large deck chairs bundled in thick blankets and conversing about the meaning of life in each of their own distinct accents or dialects, then one could probably see that Harry Haller is there from the novel Steppenwolf, Hans Castorp is there from The Magic Mountain (he is their genial host in fact), Ulrich is there from The Man Without Qualities, Gwyon is there from The Recognitions, Benny Profane is there from Pynchon's V.,…should Salinger or…..God no, who wants to listen to Holden with his constant cringing and whining? Certainly not gentlemen of the caliber of Haller, Castorp and Ulrich. Old world, you know. He could always sit with Profane I suppose. After all, it’s a community of shadows of their former selves, or of their authors.
And of course, Hal Incandenza’s maker himself is also there from Infinite Jest. He looks tired. And why not, his was one hell of a ride. Blood-shot eyes that only his loving dogs Jeeves and Drone (or Bella and Warner) truly understand. His own personal V. was the under-read and over-written gem The Broom of the System in 1987, with Infinite Jest being an apparently obvious Gravity’s Rainbow-scaled achievement. At first glance.
But the remarkable thing is that the hyper-intelligent DFW, whose frenetic literary voice is already sorely missed, was not quite ever able to do what even a brilliant genius-thug like Norman Mailer was able to do: follow up the first astonishing salvo with a second barrage of brilliance: or in his case, pull off the great second follow-up novel and then hit the jackpot with a third that surpasses it. Mailer even explained himself eloquently in the opening introduction to Barbary Shore as someone desperate to prove that The Naked and The Dead had not been the full measure of all his talent at once, a one-shot deal. Not to mention The Deer Park or his masterpiece, Advertisements For Myself.
Surpass Infinite Jest though? You see, it has to be Infinite Jest that is considered DFW’s Naked and The Dead, see? Because The Broom of The System was nowhere near as gigantic a household name as IJ (incredibly enough given its girth), and since it went by relatively unnoticed by the mass reading audience, it was not something to even be surpassed. Therein lies the dilemma. Which is why such an effort on DFW’s part invariably leads to infinite regress: that foggy cul-de-sac in the overcrowded city of thoughts devoted to searching for origins and authenticity. Where there is none. Perfect for the math-sodden wretch who wrote Everything and More. Though at least in deference to his considerable and profound gifts, we can certainly say that he did manage to produce a whirlwind of non-novelistic writings that remain equally incandescent, pun intended, so called non-fiction essays that stand in counterbalance to his two and a half novels.
There have been some excellent appreciations of this talented writer’s work, the most notable of which was David Lipsky’s recent and remarkable Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, but there is something missing in the portrait that unfolds itself through his shimmering conversations with the late author while on a book publicity tour. If I knew what was missing, then it wouldn’t be so missing. But even though something is missing in it, Lipsky’s book is still a marvelous evocation of that novel’s celebration and its author’s surprising (surely especially to him) lionization by the international literary community. His glorious exchanges with DFW were originally printed in Rolling Stone Magazine in 2008, as The Lost Years and Last Days of.
It has now become part of his received legend that DFW was the designated depressed person. His dispatches about his and our inner demons and his and our human frailties
were delivered with deceptive clarity and tenderness by this hulking tender beast of a brilliant writer. In fact, in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men from 1999, he veered perilously close to all out aberrant self-revelation (his usual modus operandi after all) in the second story, titled with appropriate irony, “The Depressed Person”, as per : ‘The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.” (1) Fulfilled-dream syndrome: Mailer had it too, and Fitzgerald and Capote, and Hemingway.
But hold the phone, this particular depressed person was able to not only share and articulate but also diagnose and nearly heal upon reading and laughing with involuntary amazement, the many illusory and real sufferings to which humans are inclined. His was a voice that worked, outwardly at least, the kind of voice that materializes once in a rare while. Richard Brautigan was also such a voice from a generation earlier, and one who also succumbed to the same mis-interpretation of the consequences of his own insights, with the same dark self-homicidal results. Perhaps John Kennedy Toole, he of the posthumous Pulitzer for his lost Confederacy of Dunces, oops….he was yet another one of the early check-outs in the existential express lane with a minimum number of life-experiences to bag. Lipsky identified the check-out effect as one that has event gravity.
And at 31 he was even worse (as in sadder) than DFW, at 46. At least DFW managed to cram a whole literary life into his short corporeal one. While rhapsodizing about isolation, he has managed to produce a body of work that is scarily unified in its persistently blurred voices in he dark night of the soul. He was always telling us in the most up front manner possible that he was not long for these climes. Perhaps we thought he was being ironic with titles such as Suicide As A Kind Of Present ? or Everything And More: A Compact History of Infinity? or perhaps Death Is Not The End? Ironic, or documentary? Maybe life is just an accumulation of flukes after all, all misinterpreted.
As for example when he explains (again in The DP) that “Despairing then of describing the emotional pain or expressing its utter-ness to those around her, the depressed person instead described circumstances, both past and ongoing, which were somehow related to the pain, to its etiology and cause, hoping at least to be able to express to others something of the pain’s context, its—as it were—shape and texture.” (2). Isolation? But the System anointed him a Genius with its huge Macarthur Caress!
For some strange reason, DFW succumbed to an often entertained cultural contest between fiction and non-fiction which has historically focused erroneously on the notion that the meaning of life is supposedly being conveyed more effectively through fiction, rather than through anything that is other than fiction. This, of course, is but another cul-de sac. Blame Cervantes perhaps. In visual art this contest was also being played out as the wrestling match being drawing and colour for aesthetic supremacy. It’s a mug’s game. His life had already been embedded in his fiction, and his style was already opaquely memorial. It’s a pity he had to pit himself against this bipolar god of fiction versus fact, considering how blisteringly brilliant his so-called non-fiction is (such as of course, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again 1997, his first post-IJ work, or Consider The Lobster, 2005). When he is in his element he delivers top drawer personal journalism at the solo-ipsis archetypal level of Capote, Mailer, Updike, Cheever, Roth et al. Not to mention Hunter Thompson, oops…..another one bites the destiny.
DFW was working on his long awaited follow-up to Infinite Jest, entitled The Pale King, when his inner and outer demons got the better of him and he did a Phil Ochs-like swan-dive off our tenderly stricken movie set. But at least his erstwhile publisher Little Brown (which surely by now should be Big Brown?) has decided after due diligence to release his unfinished work with a clearly designated declaration that it is unfinished work. Broken bones of the novel have also been printed as “stories” over the last few years, but they were actually lost chapters in an impossible to finish fictional chimera.
Given the authorial roots of style on display by DFW all along, which originate as far back as Laurence Sterne for instance, and whose work when it is finished is so quintessentially unfinished anyway, a la 1759's Tristram Shandy for example, it thus makes perfect sense to approach and review The Pale King even before it is released in its prematurely skeletal form. Perhaps especially since the meaning of life was already clearly embedded in pages 492 and 997 of Infinite Jest. True, the same meaning was found in Dostovevsky and Faulkner, but then that’s the odd thing about meanings, isn’t it.
Therefore we now know what to expect from DFW’s The Pale King, since part of that same meaning apparently caused the mercurial Wallace to check-out whispering sweet nothings in late 2008. But perhaps he should have listened to the asthmatic cough of Baudelaire more carefully: life is a hospital where the patients are all obsessed with changing our beds. The subject of The Pale King apparently is boredom. After the swampy depths of delirium so expertly explored Girl With The Curious Hair, his second book in 1989, after which he checked himself voluntarily into a protective custody ward where they conducted ongoing suicide watches, boredom may be an improvement of sorts. Indeed, it does contain some of his most disturbing and disturbed writing. Kafka, Beckett, Celine, Burroughs, Kerouac, Barth, Hawkes, Robbe-Grillet….it’s a crowded and nightmarish alley. But it’s still one just chock-filled with yucks and boffos, even after all these years. He was in such good company in his own territory, once he had staked it out.
As a matter of fact, since poor DFW is now a ghost, or a fictional character, he could even Himself join that little gathering on the balcony, and with red bandanna in hand (in preparation for any untoward perspiration) he could hold forth while all the gentleman in question bring to bear on the question the particular perspective of their own personal authorial creators. Here then, the question, as Antonin A. used to intone it. A spontaneous seminar class in the sociology of suffering (a specialty of Haller’s), presided over by DFW, being honored as the youngest and saddest member of the assembly present:
Now guys, this may sound like self-help for solipsists but I’ll say it anyway….sorry I’m already sweating so much…..why thank you Hans, I’d love another schnapps yes…..I’ll say it anyway, or rather I’ll quote it anyway: “Circumstances are difficult only for those who draw back from the tomb. Virtue Reclaimed. As usual, the ignoble Marquis was quite correct. A eulogy for ourselves then....or at least a eulogy for our history of ourselves. What a charming idea. And who better to write it?” Well, DFW was certainly a man of his---
All along, DFW was writing his eulogy right in front of our (very) eyes. He had already decided perhaps ages ago, it now seems, maybe even when he was 10 years old or something like that. Mailer described it (the future travails of young DFW) like this when sharing the process leading to his own Barbary Shore, three years after his grand NATD breakthrough: how the book “emerged from the bombarded cellars of my unconscious: an agonized eye of a novel which tried to find some amalgam of my recent experiences and the larger horror of that world which might be preparing to destroy itself…..it has in its high fevers a kind of insane insight into the psychic mysteries of our time…it has the air of our time, authority and nihilism stalking one another in the orgiastic hollow of this century….” 3) Sounds like it was written yesterday by Mr. Lipsky on DFW. I didn’t mind Mr. Lipsky as much as Mr. Mason did in NYR of Books.
Mailer’s above Note From The Author first appeared in the “second advertisement”, called Barbary Shore, from Advertisements For Myself, 1959, the book which is most similar to DFW’s own oratorical self-eulogizing style. It is his best and my favourite. Only Nietzsche self-eulogized more than either DFW or Mailer for god’s sake. And all I’m asking for is an explanation, after all, as someone who seems to have developed a bit of an appetite for the strangely-spiced dish he specializes in concocting. Just a simple explanation. I’m less interested in analyzing or discussing how and why DFW wrote, since I also never analyze the sacred solos of either Charlie Parker or Jimi Hendrix, and they likewise just happen perfectly all by themselves, just as DFW’s most poetic prose does, such as his Mailer-like assessment of the time of his own time (1999) in On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand: “Do not consign me. Be my bell. Unworthy life for all thee. Beg. Not to die in this appalling silence. This charged and pregnant vacuum all around. This wet and open sucking hole beneath that eye. That terrible eye impending. Such silence.” 4)
So, we know how good he was (that above snippet may as well have been late Beckett), we know how well he wrote and with what degree of deceptive ease he thought and spoke, but we should all be far, far less interested in any of that then in why he stopped. Or even worse (as in sadder), why he thought he had to stop. Perhaps it was a notion he explored all to well in his terminally interminable surrealist therapeutic bromide The Broom of The System: that meaning is use, and if usefulness is absent then so is meaning. So, if his ostensible purpose, that of writing reports from the front, no longer existed, then wasn’t his own existence also called into question? He himself had no use (he imagined) since he couldn’t write anymore, therefore he had no meaning, or even less than what he already thought he didn’t have? So is meaning found in purpose then?
Lipsky’s own synopsis of the entropy curve is scary in its lucidity, almost suggesting that DFW lived his life at some sort of quantum field emotional level (ie: the light than burns brightest lasts only half as long): “His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. He was an A student, played football, played tennis, wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated from Amherst, he went to writing school, published the novel, made a city of squalling, bruising, kneecapping editors fall mooney-eyed in love with him. He published a thousand page novel, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive now, accepted a special chair to teach writing at a college in California, married, published another book, and hanged himself at age forty-six.” 5)
In terms of public meltdowns, his career arc was perhaps most scarily similar to the British blues musician Peter Green, the gifted but troubled founder of the band Fleetwood Mac, whose sudden success (they outsold The Beatles in 1970) was so intolerable, and his private doubts so grandiose that he skidded off the shared road altogether, ending up working as a gravedigger while his band-mates went on to conquer both the audience and the cash register to a blockbuster degree. In his own field, DFW was also similar to another talented young writer in that regard, F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose early fame was also followed by what he himself referred to as a “crack up” under the weight of early celebrity, over-indulgence and dark self-doubt.
Why did DFW stop writing? He didn’t. Writing stopped him. Soon after he stopped taking a certain anti-depressant called Nardil. In many respects that wall-hitting was also most similar to another large scale American male-liver/writer/dier, now Grandpapa Hemingway, in his own time quite a radical literary voice, and still utterly unique. He too was stopped by writing. In fact the number of writers who are stopped by writing and who eliminate their own actual characters is/was quite vertiginous: Zweig, Woolf, Thompson, Sexton, Kosinksi, Levi, Brautigan, de Nerval, Crane, Crevel, Crosby, Hemingway, Debord, Koestler, Inge, Mann, Mishima, Plath. Each of them were murdered by the books they could no longer write. And what is writer’s block after all, but disenchantment with the process of being written by the books you claim to write? If you have a friend on the AD’s, tell them to continue on, no matter what.
And since we will now no longer be receiving any further reports from his stilled voice, some people believe that it’s fit and proper to release as much of what we already have but have not yet read as possible. I’m not so sure. And I’m sure that DFW is not so sure. Expecting the sad fragments of his The Pale King is one thing, I’m up for that, since so much of his best bulk work was so often sent out in tiny epistles like literary canaries in the cultural mines via magazines and journals. But do we really need to have coming, in 2011 also, Fate Time and Language: An Essay on Free Will, which is an adaptation of DFW’s undergraduate thesis in Philosophy at Amherst, originally titled Fatalism and the Semantics of Physical Modality ? I don’t think so. No, not really.
On the other hand, DFW’s address to a commencement of students at Kenyon College in 2005, This Is Water: Some Thoughts Delivered on a Significant Occasion about Living The Compassionate Life, deserves to be widely distributed since it is emblematic of his obvious and acclaimed skill as a teacher of young people, and especially of young writers, who will now sorely miss his horrifying presence on the literary scene. He made everyone else better.
But what were we able to learn from DFW in his short 46 year sojourn amongst us?
Well, it’s like this. We learned that we are all mostly entropy in a suitcase, that our time is always almost up, yet we persist in lingering in order to tell our story, our stories, and we eventually discover that all we are is stories, that we are characters in search of something we know not what, who would if we could but we cannot we know, and my my, how time flies. And that was merely the lesson of his first tentative salvo, The Broom of The System. As usual, DFW put it best , in a 1993 exchange with Larry McCaffery:
“These are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” A hard lesson to learn.
We learn that often, rumination causes in us a humorous sadness. Musing on works after the physical, the metaphysical, induces an amusing melancholy. The meta-world just past the edge of the physical (about which he now knows a few things he didn’t before), and about which much can be surmised but little can be confirmed, while being excessively tantalizing though unyielding in its stubborn silence, remains a mere emblem of the enigma. There are of course, many emblems of the enigma but there is only one enigma. DFW’s notions about the meta-novel are now quite relevant to his current experiences in the metaphysical realms. I hope he brought his notebook along with him.
The nutshell story of this gifted nutcase is tenderly expressed by his sister Amy Wallace, and even more succinctly than Lipsky’s guy-pal version: “Interviewers were coming asking what David was like. But the questions always circled back to the same anxious ground. His phobias and low points. My own anxieties are many. My brother was a hilarious guy, a quirky generous spirit, who happened to be a genius and also suffer from depression.” 6) She also suggests that he may have kissed his dogs on the mouth and said he was sorry before hanging himself.
The meaning of life is that it ends. But the purpose of life is not to let it. A sudden ray of light emerges from the gloom: life is thematic, it isn’t really chronological at all. And so is DFW’s big book. This is one of the secrets the book reveals. It has a section at the back which outlines the chapters chronologically, if so desired, but the book itself proceeds according to thematic segments. The way actual real life does. The book flows according to procedures for a well-timed ending. Just the way DFW’s own story flowed, as it turns out. The Obtuse Ovid does it again!
What he left us contained the message that at such a terminal point, opposites cease to be contradictions. We have been manufactured by fiction to serve reality. That’s what some of his poetry taught us. A kindred realm of silence, gesture and immobility. One is forced to keep perfectly still out of the quite logical compulsion to witness the slow erosion of the dream. The dream decays before our dreaming eyes, it evaporates, and suddenly there comes an end to all surmise. And after all, who in such a situation would want to hazard conjectures about the future? Thus spake Incandenza.
Hans Castorp moves to rise from his chair and decides against it, choosing instead to pour a fourteenth schnapps; Ulrich has been scanning the mountainous horizon as if looking for hot-air balloons; Harry Haller has become considerable smaller and seems to be on the verge of shrinking away altogether; Gwyon has made a fateful decision to return to the clergy, but in a more monastic form; Benny Profane has been the busiest of them all during DFW’s scintillating diatribe, rehearsing his own next sequence of yo-yo moves across the snow-capped mountains; and only Hal Incandenza seems slightly melancholy, knowing that he will soon be pressed into duty (expected Spring 2011) as a character with a different name, acting out his author’s insightful whims throughout all or most of The Pale King. And he knows that that one is unfinished, just like he was. Just like the author was. And he just sighs that sigh that all created characters must sigh: that sigh that is so clearly outlined in all of their contracts. Near the bottom, in the author’s blood.
Before I encountered the Lipsky road trip book on DFW, I knew him only as one of over 400 writers who have killed themselves over the years (don’t even ask about the list of literary critics who did so). Since then, I’ve read all the books this poor brilliant slob left to us (except for Everything And More, which after having read so much DFW I can now proudly say that I have a phobia about mathematics that’s he’s more than welcome to try to cure). Most of it is amazing. Some of it is horrifying. All of it is captivating in its
bravery and audacity.
Girl With Curious Hair, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, and Oblivion are great collections of utterly sick stories, and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider The Lobster are great collections of utterly sane essays. But it’s his big second novel, Infinite Jest, that reveals the surprising meaning: that life is thematic and not chronological or sequential. The Pale King? I don’t want to. But I will. Because he wrote it.
In the end, it’s not just that life ends, well-timed or not, that provides meaning to its obscure passage, but rather that it is temporary in the first place, that it is temporal and unfolds in time, on time. And also that none of us know, as per the sad but still inspiring case of DFW, just how long or short that temporariness actually might be. John Updike, one of the elder statesmen in the difficult and demanding field of DFW, and one who, like Roth and Mailer, was able to keep on writing book after book long after his initial early celebrity binge, has commented somewhere that things being brief, temporary, conditional, provisional or contingent shouldn’t necessarily disqualify them. It’s the same with great writers. Sometimes, there’s just something missing.
*
Infinite Regress. The ancients defined knowledge as justified true belief. Justification was providing some reasons, a rational explanation for the belief. True opinion accompanied by reason is knowledge. The infinite regress arises when we ask what are the justifications for the reasons themselves. If the reasons count as knowledge, they must be justified with reasons for the reasons, and reasons for those reasons. This leads the skeptic to suspension of judgment. They [skeptics] hand down also two other modes leading to suspension of judgment. Since every object of apprehension seems to be apprehended either through itself or through another object, by showing that nothing is apprehended either through itself or through another thing, they introduce doubt, as they suppose, about everything.
That nothing is apprehended through itself is plain, they say, from the controversy which exists amongst the physicists regarding, I imagine, all things, both sensibles and intelligibles; which controversy admits of no settlement because we can neither employ a sensible nor an intelligible criterion, since every criterion we may adopt is controverted and therefore discredited. And the reason why they do not allow that anything is apprehended through something else is this: If that through which an object is apprehended must always itself be apprehended through some other thing, one is involved in a process of circular reasoning or in regress ad infinitum.
The whole historical phenomenon of infinite regress is ideally suited to the barely hidden mathematical genius of DFW in every aspect of his novelistic and journalistic observations. That is his special gift: having this astonishing power of observation and this amazing power of description, rarely combined in one writer, living or dead. It would be a moment best summed up visually in the SA metaphor of the balcony of discourse, a conference of the clouds: every individual in the SA metaphor has something missing. That was what made and makes them all so special. We also have something missing. We identify. They are our surrogates living at the edges of emotional extremis. They cater our dreams and nightmares. They tell us the stories that we would have discovered for ourselves if only we had been brave enough or smart enough to do so.
That observation is also at the heart of the recent review of David Lipsky’s book on
DFW, “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Who You Are: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace”. Although I understand the perspective of Wyatt Mason in his New York Review of Books piece on DFW, perfectly titled, “Smarter Than You Think”,
I think he may have misinterpreted both the strategy employed by Lipsky to trick DFW (a very difficult and disturbed savant) into talking freely, as well as the strategy employed by DFW for daily survival on earth, one which now must perhaps be called into question.
Wyatt Mason put it very well when he was busy taking Lipsky and DFW to task: “The story “Good Old Neon” in Oblivion is not a Dostoyeskian ten-page monologue by someone trying to decide whether to commit suicide; rather, it is a forty-page monologue by someone who has committed suicide, and who would explain not so much how he could have come to such an end as what we mean when we say someone takes his life, and what such a taking leaves us—what the moments we’re left with might be able to contain. All Wallace’s formal ingenuity would have been for naught if he hadn’t been intent on using those forms to probe at the most injured parts of being.” 7)
This is of course as brilliant as it is poignant. Hemingway took his life. Virginia Woolf took her life. I believe their books took their lives. They took back their lives, but only after first giving them to us through their works. This is the most touching thing about Mason’s remark…. “what the moments we’re left with might be able to contain” and “what such a taking leaves us”. So, what are we left with? Something that amounts to an SA moment: what Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain called a necessary science that yet to be invented, the sociology of suffering.
But of course, this current examination, somewhat of a prolegomenon, is about much more than DFW solely, it is in fact just as much about John Hawkes and William Gaddis and the American voice in general. A vernacular voice that also includes another primary DFW precedent, Herman Melville, most especially in his under-read The Confidence Man, from 1857, but most obviously in the titanic Moby Dick as an aesthetic a precursor. If IJ is anything, and it is many things, it is also a black shadow of that white whale. Needless to say, The Pale King is even more of an apt white whale image, the “big book” that Mailer eventually delivered with Ancient Evenings, perhaps, in 1983, a full 35 years after NATD. But it took DFW down the same way Ahab was enmeshed in the harpoon ropes and ended up sailing away with Moby, down to the bottom of the sea in the John Huston film version. Down to depths that even he probably couldn’t write about.
But one could also include Henry Roth or Harper Lee on that claustrophobic shortlist. And why was a tough old buzzard like William Styron able to overcome his inner demons and survive, even after writing a personal memoir about his depression called Darkness Visible and yet still go on to be 81 when he died of natural causes (such as not hanging, drowning or shooting yourself)? Whereas a young tough dude like DFW was not able to do so. Perhaps if he had addressed his depression directly in writing rather than in the coded ciphers that literally riddle his works he may have been able to overcome the black capsizing wave. Instead he embedded his feelings in a complex mythology of fiction versus fact versus nightmare, a battle ultimately won tidily by nightmare.
Similar ventures into the realm of dark laughter are of course legion, from Swift and Sterne onward but perhaps especially so in postwar American fiction. John Hawkes, one of the writers, along with Bill Gaddis, who most resonate through the crystalline vernacular voice of DFW, was engaged in a similar tag-team wrestling match with the history of literature and the history of doubt. And of course all of them toil in the huge modernist shadow cast by Joyce and others of his scope and scale. They are born ambitious, apparently.
Leslie A. Fiedler was one of the great advocates for both modernist literature and the
importance of literature in life generally, and in his prime he explored the precursors and their inheritors with an acute sense that the generation of writers that followed by modernists would be even more demanding and challenging. He was of course, both prescient and correct. In his masterful 1960 opus Love and Death in The American Novel, he managed to isolate and analyze several of the key subjects and issues inherent to the American literary voice, with particular emphasis on the curious obsession with depression and death that seems to haunt the American idiom.
One of the most accomplished yet least publicly known of visionary voices is John Hawkes, whose first novel in 1949, The Cannibal, cast a long shadow across a literary landscape which had naturally no inkling of the postmodern condition that would soon follow in a mere twenty years. This salvo was then followed in quick succession with: The Beetle Leg, The Lime Twig, The Blood Oranges, Second Skin, Travesty and The Passion Artist. Hawkes was therefore writing in a tongue that had yet to be created, precisely like other grand heretics such as Sterne and Kafka. Hawkes was therefore, like all heretics, living and working in advance of a broken myth.
Fiedler was doubly prescient when he wrote in the introduction to Hawkes’ The Lime Twig: “Everyone klnows that in our literature the age of experimentalism is over and an age of recapitulation has begun; and few of us, I suspect, really regret it. John Hawes neither rewrites nor recapitulates, and therefore, spares us neither terror nor truth. John Hawkes has managed both and is perhaps, after the publication of three books and on the verge of a fourth, is the least read novelist of substantial merit in the United States.” 8) He is also the direct precursor of a DFW, but ironically DFW would garner for the same kind of dark comedy a massive accidentally mainstream popular audience, something inconceivable for a Hawkes, or even a Pynchon.
He could also have been describing DFW in fact fifty years ago, when Fielder characterizes the contemporary literary dilemma this way: “Counterfeits of insanity (automatic writing, the scrawls of the drunk and doped) are finally boring; while the compositions of the actually insane are in the end merely documents, terrible and depressing. Hawkes gives us neither of these surrenders to unreason but rather reason’s last desperate attempt to know what unreason is; and in such knowledge there are possibilities not only for poetry and power but for pleasure as well.” 9)
This is anticipatory, visionary thinking in action, and in DFW, this notion is writ large in all his work, but especially in IJ, where that pesky meaning has been embedded, almost like a fossil, in the soil of his feverish imaginings. Or was it reportage? The fact is there is very little difference between the spirit and structure of his essays and the spirit and structure of his fiction, which makes his self-perceived unsurmountable problem all the more deplorable, all the more sad, all the more entertaining for all of us trying to fathom just what is contained in what he left us with when he took his life back and away.
And what is contained in what he left us? A cautionary tale warning against the dangers of literary solipsism, among other things, and for that matter, existential solipsism in everyday life, to which the author eventually surrendered. This position is most often confused with those Faustian themes that fuel most modernist styles as well as those that emerged afterward and needed to disguise themselves in something slightly more diverse and less monolithic.
In “The Power of Blackness: Faustian Man and the Cult of Violence,” from Love and Death in the American Novel, in 1966 (written when DFW was four years old) Fiedler discusses the idea of despair in Melville's works, asserting that Melville's style changed from gothic to romantic as his career progressed. He asserted that the reality of damnation he never denied; but the meaning of it, for one committed to a skeptical and secular view, he questioned. Especially in his later works, he presented the “mystery of iniquity” in such complexly ironical contexts that the wariest of readers is occasionally baffled.
Nevertheless, he kept faith throughout his fiction not only with the gothic vision in general, but with the Faustian theme. Likewise DFW would embrace damnation and the doom of a dark tragic comedy and he would similarly move from postmodern angst to a neo-baroque style while also exploring complexly ironical context which needless to say often baffles his readers. Or perhaps he only baffles people before they become his readers, since like most aspects of life, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who enjoy DFW and those who do not. Of course, there are also two other kinds of people in the world, those who think the world is divided into two kinds of people and those who do not.
Donald Brackett is a Toronto-based culture critic. He has published numerous articles essays and reviews, and two books on the dynamics of creative collaboration: one on Fleetwood Mac and one on the pathology singer-songwriters from Bob Dylan to Jack White. He is currently working on a book length study of the parallels between William Gaddis and David Foster Wallace, and the politics of writer’s block. He also teaches a cultural anthropology course with the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, and lectures on cultural history and theory at Innis College, U. of T.
Writing About Writing and Not Writing
BY DONALD BRACKETT
"There is something missing....if I knew what it is then it wouldn't be so missing..."
Han, in The Recognitions, by William Gaddis, 1955
It has recently come to my attention that the meaning of life can be found in the 1996 novel by the late American author David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest. I can indeed confirm this, even though it is a delayed realization of some fifteen perplexed years. There are a number of explanations for why it took so long to realize that the meaning of life is easily found in Infinite Jest (page 492, to be exact) but those would not add anything salient to this basic empirical fact. The meaning of life also recurs on page 997 as well, as if for some sort of echo-effect that manages to reassure the astute reader that indeed, he or she is on the right track after all. But just where does that track lead? Did DFW find out? If so, after visiting from 1962-2008, he is regrettably no longer able to file his remarkable reports from the front. Or has he only gone on to the actual front? “One never knew, after all, now did one now, did one now did one.” As he himself said in the “radically condensed history of post-industrial life” from his Brief Interview With Hideous Men, 2007. Late late Wallace.
If one could envisage a large balcony jutting off a big old ornate building somewhere in the Swiss Alps (SA), with obscurely wounded inmates lounging on large deck chairs bundled in thick blankets and conversing about the meaning of life in each of their own distinct accents or dialects, then one could probably see that Harry Haller is there from the novel Steppenwolf, Hans Castorp is there from The Magic Mountain (he is their genial host in fact), Ulrich is there from The Man Without Qualities, Gwyon is there from The Recognitions, Benny Profane is there from Pynchon's V.,…should Salinger or…..God no, who wants to listen to Holden with his constant cringing and whining? Certainly not gentlemen of the caliber of Haller, Castorp and Ulrich. Old world, you know. He could always sit with Profane I suppose. After all, it’s a community of shadows of their former selves, or of their authors.
And of course, Hal Incandenza’s maker himself is also there from Infinite Jest. He looks tired. And why not, his was one hell of a ride. Blood-shot eyes that only his loving dogs Jeeves and Drone (or Bella and Warner) truly understand. His own personal V. was the under-read and over-written gem The Broom of the System in 1987, with Infinite Jest being an apparently obvious Gravity’s Rainbow-scaled achievement. At first glance.
But the remarkable thing is that the hyper-intelligent DFW, whose frenetic literary voice is already sorely missed, was not quite ever able to do what even a brilliant genius-thug like Norman Mailer was able to do: follow up the first astonishing salvo with a second barrage of brilliance: or in his case, pull off the great second follow-up novel and then hit the jackpot with a third that surpasses it. Mailer even explained himself eloquently in the opening introduction to Barbary Shore as someone desperate to prove that The Naked and The Dead had not been the full measure of all his talent at once, a one-shot deal. Not to mention The Deer Park or his masterpiece, Advertisements For Myself.
Surpass Infinite Jest though? You see, it has to be Infinite Jest that is considered DFW’s Naked and The Dead, see? Because The Broom of The System was nowhere near as gigantic a household name as IJ (incredibly enough given its girth), and since it went by relatively unnoticed by the mass reading audience, it was not something to even be surpassed. Therein lies the dilemma. Which is why such an effort on DFW’s part invariably leads to infinite regress: that foggy cul-de-sac in the overcrowded city of thoughts devoted to searching for origins and authenticity. Where there is none. Perfect for the math-sodden wretch who wrote Everything and More. Though at least in deference to his considerable and profound gifts, we can certainly say that he did manage to produce a whirlwind of non-novelistic writings that remain equally incandescent, pun intended, so called non-fiction essays that stand in counterbalance to his two and a half novels.
There have been some excellent appreciations of this talented writer’s work, the most notable of which was David Lipsky’s recent and remarkable Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, but there is something missing in the portrait that unfolds itself through his shimmering conversations with the late author while on a book publicity tour. If I knew what was missing, then it wouldn’t be so missing. But even though something is missing in it, Lipsky’s book is still a marvelous evocation of that novel’s celebration and its author’s surprising (surely especially to him) lionization by the international literary community. His glorious exchanges with DFW were originally printed in Rolling Stone Magazine in 2008, as The Lost Years and Last Days of.
It has now become part of his received legend that DFW was the designated depressed person. His dispatches about his and our inner demons and his and our human frailties
were delivered with deceptive clarity and tenderness by this hulking tender beast of a brilliant writer. In fact, in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men from 1999, he veered perilously close to all out aberrant self-revelation (his usual modus operandi after all) in the second story, titled with appropriate irony, “The Depressed Person”, as per : ‘The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.” (1) Fulfilled-dream syndrome: Mailer had it too, and Fitzgerald and Capote, and Hemingway.
But hold the phone, this particular depressed person was able to not only share and articulate but also diagnose and nearly heal upon reading and laughing with involuntary amazement, the many illusory and real sufferings to which humans are inclined. His was a voice that worked, outwardly at least, the kind of voice that materializes once in a rare while. Richard Brautigan was also such a voice from a generation earlier, and one who also succumbed to the same mis-interpretation of the consequences of his own insights, with the same dark self-homicidal results. Perhaps John Kennedy Toole, he of the posthumous Pulitzer for his lost Confederacy of Dunces, oops….he was yet another one of the early check-outs in the existential express lane with a minimum number of life-experiences to bag. Lipsky identified the check-out effect as one that has event gravity.
And at 31 he was even worse (as in sadder) than DFW, at 46. At least DFW managed to cram a whole literary life into his short corporeal one. While rhapsodizing about isolation, he has managed to produce a body of work that is scarily unified in its persistently blurred voices in he dark night of the soul. He was always telling us in the most up front manner possible that he was not long for these climes. Perhaps we thought he was being ironic with titles such as Suicide As A Kind Of Present ? or Everything And More: A Compact History of Infinity? or perhaps Death Is Not The End? Ironic, or documentary? Maybe life is just an accumulation of flukes after all, all misinterpreted.
As for example when he explains (again in The DP) that “Despairing then of describing the emotional pain or expressing its utter-ness to those around her, the depressed person instead described circumstances, both past and ongoing, which were somehow related to the pain, to its etiology and cause, hoping at least to be able to express to others something of the pain’s context, its—as it were—shape and texture.” (2). Isolation? But the System anointed him a Genius with its huge Macarthur Caress!
For some strange reason, DFW succumbed to an often entertained cultural contest between fiction and non-fiction which has historically focused erroneously on the notion that the meaning of life is supposedly being conveyed more effectively through fiction, rather than through anything that is other than fiction. This, of course, is but another cul-de sac. Blame Cervantes perhaps. In visual art this contest was also being played out as the wrestling match being drawing and colour for aesthetic supremacy. It’s a mug’s game. His life had already been embedded in his fiction, and his style was already opaquely memorial. It’s a pity he had to pit himself against this bipolar god of fiction versus fact, considering how blisteringly brilliant his so-called non-fiction is (such as of course, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again 1997, his first post-IJ work, or Consider The Lobster, 2005). When he is in his element he delivers top drawer personal journalism at the solo-ipsis archetypal level of Capote, Mailer, Updike, Cheever, Roth et al. Not to mention Hunter Thompson, oops…..another one bites the destiny.
DFW was working on his long awaited follow-up to Infinite Jest, entitled The Pale King, when his inner and outer demons got the better of him and he did a Phil Ochs-like swan-dive off our tenderly stricken movie set. But at least his erstwhile publisher Little Brown (which surely by now should be Big Brown?) has decided after due diligence to release his unfinished work with a clearly designated declaration that it is unfinished work. Broken bones of the novel have also been printed as “stories” over the last few years, but they were actually lost chapters in an impossible to finish fictional chimera.
Given the authorial roots of style on display by DFW all along, which originate as far back as Laurence Sterne for instance, and whose work when it is finished is so quintessentially unfinished anyway, a la 1759's Tristram Shandy for example, it thus makes perfect sense to approach and review The Pale King even before it is released in its prematurely skeletal form. Perhaps especially since the meaning of life was already clearly embedded in pages 492 and 997 of Infinite Jest. True, the same meaning was found in Dostovevsky and Faulkner, but then that’s the odd thing about meanings, isn’t it.
Therefore we now know what to expect from DFW’s The Pale King, since part of that same meaning apparently caused the mercurial Wallace to check-out whispering sweet nothings in late 2008. But perhaps he should have listened to the asthmatic cough of Baudelaire more carefully: life is a hospital where the patients are all obsessed with changing our beds. The subject of The Pale King apparently is boredom. After the swampy depths of delirium so expertly explored Girl With The Curious Hair, his second book in 1989, after which he checked himself voluntarily into a protective custody ward where they conducted ongoing suicide watches, boredom may be an improvement of sorts. Indeed, it does contain some of his most disturbing and disturbed writing. Kafka, Beckett, Celine, Burroughs, Kerouac, Barth, Hawkes, Robbe-Grillet….it’s a crowded and nightmarish alley. But it’s still one just chock-filled with yucks and boffos, even after all these years. He was in such good company in his own territory, once he had staked it out.
As a matter of fact, since poor DFW is now a ghost, or a fictional character, he could even Himself join that little gathering on the balcony, and with red bandanna in hand (in preparation for any untoward perspiration) he could hold forth while all the gentleman in question bring to bear on the question the particular perspective of their own personal authorial creators. Here then, the question, as Antonin A. used to intone it. A spontaneous seminar class in the sociology of suffering (a specialty of Haller’s), presided over by DFW, being honored as the youngest and saddest member of the assembly present:
Now guys, this may sound like self-help for solipsists but I’ll say it anyway….sorry I’m already sweating so much…..why thank you Hans, I’d love another schnapps yes…..I’ll say it anyway, or rather I’ll quote it anyway: “Circumstances are difficult only for those who draw back from the tomb. Virtue Reclaimed. As usual, the ignoble Marquis was quite correct. A eulogy for ourselves then....or at least a eulogy for our history of ourselves. What a charming idea. And who better to write it?” Well, DFW was certainly a man of his---
All along, DFW was writing his eulogy right in front of our (very) eyes. He had already decided perhaps ages ago, it now seems, maybe even when he was 10 years old or something like that. Mailer described it (the future travails of young DFW) like this when sharing the process leading to his own Barbary Shore, three years after his grand NATD breakthrough: how the book “emerged from the bombarded cellars of my unconscious: an agonized eye of a novel which tried to find some amalgam of my recent experiences and the larger horror of that world which might be preparing to destroy itself…..it has in its high fevers a kind of insane insight into the psychic mysteries of our time…it has the air of our time, authority and nihilism stalking one another in the orgiastic hollow of this century….” 3) Sounds like it was written yesterday by Mr. Lipsky on DFW. I didn’t mind Mr. Lipsky as much as Mr. Mason did in NYR of Books.
Mailer’s above Note From The Author first appeared in the “second advertisement”, called Barbary Shore, from Advertisements For Myself, 1959, the book which is most similar to DFW’s own oratorical self-eulogizing style. It is his best and my favourite. Only Nietzsche self-eulogized more than either DFW or Mailer for god’s sake. And all I’m asking for is an explanation, after all, as someone who seems to have developed a bit of an appetite for the strangely-spiced dish he specializes in concocting. Just a simple explanation. I’m less interested in analyzing or discussing how and why DFW wrote, since I also never analyze the sacred solos of either Charlie Parker or Jimi Hendrix, and they likewise just happen perfectly all by themselves, just as DFW’s most poetic prose does, such as his Mailer-like assessment of the time of his own time (1999) in On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand: “Do not consign me. Be my bell. Unworthy life for all thee. Beg. Not to die in this appalling silence. This charged and pregnant vacuum all around. This wet and open sucking hole beneath that eye. That terrible eye impending. Such silence.” 4)
So, we know how good he was (that above snippet may as well have been late Beckett), we know how well he wrote and with what degree of deceptive ease he thought and spoke, but we should all be far, far less interested in any of that then in why he stopped. Or even worse (as in sadder), why he thought he had to stop. Perhaps it was a notion he explored all to well in his terminally interminable surrealist therapeutic bromide The Broom of The System: that meaning is use, and if usefulness is absent then so is meaning. So, if his ostensible purpose, that of writing reports from the front, no longer existed, then wasn’t his own existence also called into question? He himself had no use (he imagined) since he couldn’t write anymore, therefore he had no meaning, or even less than what he already thought he didn’t have? So is meaning found in purpose then?
Lipsky’s own synopsis of the entropy curve is scary in its lucidity, almost suggesting that DFW lived his life at some sort of quantum field emotional level (ie: the light than burns brightest lasts only half as long): “His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. He was an A student, played football, played tennis, wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated from Amherst, he went to writing school, published the novel, made a city of squalling, bruising, kneecapping editors fall mooney-eyed in love with him. He published a thousand page novel, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive now, accepted a special chair to teach writing at a college in California, married, published another book, and hanged himself at age forty-six.” 5)
In terms of public meltdowns, his career arc was perhaps most scarily similar to the British blues musician Peter Green, the gifted but troubled founder of the band Fleetwood Mac, whose sudden success (they outsold The Beatles in 1970) was so intolerable, and his private doubts so grandiose that he skidded off the shared road altogether, ending up working as a gravedigger while his band-mates went on to conquer both the audience and the cash register to a blockbuster degree. In his own field, DFW was also similar to another talented young writer in that regard, F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose early fame was also followed by what he himself referred to as a “crack up” under the weight of early celebrity, over-indulgence and dark self-doubt.
Why did DFW stop writing? He didn’t. Writing stopped him. Soon after he stopped taking a certain anti-depressant called Nardil. In many respects that wall-hitting was also most similar to another large scale American male-liver/writer/dier, now Grandpapa Hemingway, in his own time quite a radical literary voice, and still utterly unique. He too was stopped by writing. In fact the number of writers who are stopped by writing and who eliminate their own actual characters is/was quite vertiginous: Zweig, Woolf, Thompson, Sexton, Kosinksi, Levi, Brautigan, de Nerval, Crane, Crevel, Crosby, Hemingway, Debord, Koestler, Inge, Mann, Mishima, Plath. Each of them were murdered by the books they could no longer write. And what is writer’s block after all, but disenchantment with the process of being written by the books you claim to write? If you have a friend on the AD’s, tell them to continue on, no matter what.
And since we will now no longer be receiving any further reports from his stilled voice, some people believe that it’s fit and proper to release as much of what we already have but have not yet read as possible. I’m not so sure. And I’m sure that DFW is not so sure. Expecting the sad fragments of his The Pale King is one thing, I’m up for that, since so much of his best bulk work was so often sent out in tiny epistles like literary canaries in the cultural mines via magazines and journals. But do we really need to have coming, in 2011 also, Fate Time and Language: An Essay on Free Will, which is an adaptation of DFW’s undergraduate thesis in Philosophy at Amherst, originally titled Fatalism and the Semantics of Physical Modality ? I don’t think so. No, not really.
On the other hand, DFW’s address to a commencement of students at Kenyon College in 2005, This Is Water: Some Thoughts Delivered on a Significant Occasion about Living The Compassionate Life, deserves to be widely distributed since it is emblematic of his obvious and acclaimed skill as a teacher of young people, and especially of young writers, who will now sorely miss his horrifying presence on the literary scene. He made everyone else better.
But what were we able to learn from DFW in his short 46 year sojourn amongst us?
Well, it’s like this. We learned that we are all mostly entropy in a suitcase, that our time is always almost up, yet we persist in lingering in order to tell our story, our stories, and we eventually discover that all we are is stories, that we are characters in search of something we know not what, who would if we could but we cannot we know, and my my, how time flies. And that was merely the lesson of his first tentative salvo, The Broom of The System. As usual, DFW put it best , in a 1993 exchange with Larry McCaffery:
“These are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” A hard lesson to learn.
We learn that often, rumination causes in us a humorous sadness. Musing on works after the physical, the metaphysical, induces an amusing melancholy. The meta-world just past the edge of the physical (about which he now knows a few things he didn’t before), and about which much can be surmised but little can be confirmed, while being excessively tantalizing though unyielding in its stubborn silence, remains a mere emblem of the enigma. There are of course, many emblems of the enigma but there is only one enigma. DFW’s notions about the meta-novel are now quite relevant to his current experiences in the metaphysical realms. I hope he brought his notebook along with him.
The nutshell story of this gifted nutcase is tenderly expressed by his sister Amy Wallace, and even more succinctly than Lipsky’s guy-pal version: “Interviewers were coming asking what David was like. But the questions always circled back to the same anxious ground. His phobias and low points. My own anxieties are many. My brother was a hilarious guy, a quirky generous spirit, who happened to be a genius and also suffer from depression.” 6) She also suggests that he may have kissed his dogs on the mouth and said he was sorry before hanging himself.
The meaning of life is that it ends. But the purpose of life is not to let it. A sudden ray of light emerges from the gloom: life is thematic, it isn’t really chronological at all. And so is DFW’s big book. This is one of the secrets the book reveals. It has a section at the back which outlines the chapters chronologically, if so desired, but the book itself proceeds according to thematic segments. The way actual real life does. The book flows according to procedures for a well-timed ending. Just the way DFW’s own story flowed, as it turns out. The Obtuse Ovid does it again!
What he left us contained the message that at such a terminal point, opposites cease to be contradictions. We have been manufactured by fiction to serve reality. That’s what some of his poetry taught us. A kindred realm of silence, gesture and immobility. One is forced to keep perfectly still out of the quite logical compulsion to witness the slow erosion of the dream. The dream decays before our dreaming eyes, it evaporates, and suddenly there comes an end to all surmise. And after all, who in such a situation would want to hazard conjectures about the future? Thus spake Incandenza.
Hans Castorp moves to rise from his chair and decides against it, choosing instead to pour a fourteenth schnapps; Ulrich has been scanning the mountainous horizon as if looking for hot-air balloons; Harry Haller has become considerable smaller and seems to be on the verge of shrinking away altogether; Gwyon has made a fateful decision to return to the clergy, but in a more monastic form; Benny Profane has been the busiest of them all during DFW’s scintillating diatribe, rehearsing his own next sequence of yo-yo moves across the snow-capped mountains; and only Hal Incandenza seems slightly melancholy, knowing that he will soon be pressed into duty (expected Spring 2011) as a character with a different name, acting out his author’s insightful whims throughout all or most of The Pale King. And he knows that that one is unfinished, just like he was. Just like the author was. And he just sighs that sigh that all created characters must sigh: that sigh that is so clearly outlined in all of their contracts. Near the bottom, in the author’s blood.
Before I encountered the Lipsky road trip book on DFW, I knew him only as one of over 400 writers who have killed themselves over the years (don’t even ask about the list of literary critics who did so). Since then, I’ve read all the books this poor brilliant slob left to us (except for Everything And More, which after having read so much DFW I can now proudly say that I have a phobia about mathematics that’s he’s more than welcome to try to cure). Most of it is amazing. Some of it is horrifying. All of it is captivating in its
bravery and audacity.
Girl With Curious Hair, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, and Oblivion are great collections of utterly sick stories, and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider The Lobster are great collections of utterly sane essays. But it’s his big second novel, Infinite Jest, that reveals the surprising meaning: that life is thematic and not chronological or sequential. The Pale King? I don’t want to. But I will. Because he wrote it.
In the end, it’s not just that life ends, well-timed or not, that provides meaning to its obscure passage, but rather that it is temporary in the first place, that it is temporal and unfolds in time, on time. And also that none of us know, as per the sad but still inspiring case of DFW, just how long or short that temporariness actually might be. John Updike, one of the elder statesmen in the difficult and demanding field of DFW, and one who, like Roth and Mailer, was able to keep on writing book after book long after his initial early celebrity binge, has commented somewhere that things being brief, temporary, conditional, provisional or contingent shouldn’t necessarily disqualify them. It’s the same with great writers. Sometimes, there’s just something missing.
*
Infinite Regress. The ancients defined knowledge as justified true belief. Justification was providing some reasons, a rational explanation for the belief. True opinion accompanied by reason is knowledge. The infinite regress arises when we ask what are the justifications for the reasons themselves. If the reasons count as knowledge, they must be justified with reasons for the reasons, and reasons for those reasons. This leads the skeptic to suspension of judgment. They [skeptics] hand down also two other modes leading to suspension of judgment. Since every object of apprehension seems to be apprehended either through itself or through another object, by showing that nothing is apprehended either through itself or through another thing, they introduce doubt, as they suppose, about everything.
That nothing is apprehended through itself is plain, they say, from the controversy which exists amongst the physicists regarding, I imagine, all things, both sensibles and intelligibles; which controversy admits of no settlement because we can neither employ a sensible nor an intelligible criterion, since every criterion we may adopt is controverted and therefore discredited. And the reason why they do not allow that anything is apprehended through something else is this: If that through which an object is apprehended must always itself be apprehended through some other thing, one is involved in a process of circular reasoning or in regress ad infinitum.
The whole historical phenomenon of infinite regress is ideally suited to the barely hidden mathematical genius of DFW in every aspect of his novelistic and journalistic observations. That is his special gift: having this astonishing power of observation and this amazing power of description, rarely combined in one writer, living or dead. It would be a moment best summed up visually in the SA metaphor of the balcony of discourse, a conference of the clouds: every individual in the SA metaphor has something missing. That was what made and makes them all so special. We also have something missing. We identify. They are our surrogates living at the edges of emotional extremis. They cater our dreams and nightmares. They tell us the stories that we would have discovered for ourselves if only we had been brave enough or smart enough to do so.
That observation is also at the heart of the recent review of David Lipsky’s book on
DFW, “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Who You Are: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace”. Although I understand the perspective of Wyatt Mason in his New York Review of Books piece on DFW, perfectly titled, “Smarter Than You Think”,
I think he may have misinterpreted both the strategy employed by Lipsky to trick DFW (a very difficult and disturbed savant) into talking freely, as well as the strategy employed by DFW for daily survival on earth, one which now must perhaps be called into question.
Wyatt Mason put it very well when he was busy taking Lipsky and DFW to task: “The story “Good Old Neon” in Oblivion is not a Dostoyeskian ten-page monologue by someone trying to decide whether to commit suicide; rather, it is a forty-page monologue by someone who has committed suicide, and who would explain not so much how he could have come to such an end as what we mean when we say someone takes his life, and what such a taking leaves us—what the moments we’re left with might be able to contain. All Wallace’s formal ingenuity would have been for naught if he hadn’t been intent on using those forms to probe at the most injured parts of being.” 7)
This is of course as brilliant as it is poignant. Hemingway took his life. Virginia Woolf took her life. I believe their books took their lives. They took back their lives, but only after first giving them to us through their works. This is the most touching thing about Mason’s remark…. “what the moments we’re left with might be able to contain” and “what such a taking leaves us”. So, what are we left with? Something that amounts to an SA moment: what Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain called a necessary science that yet to be invented, the sociology of suffering.
But of course, this current examination, somewhat of a prolegomenon, is about much more than DFW solely, it is in fact just as much about John Hawkes and William Gaddis and the American voice in general. A vernacular voice that also includes another primary DFW precedent, Herman Melville, most especially in his under-read The Confidence Man, from 1857, but most obviously in the titanic Moby Dick as an aesthetic a precursor. If IJ is anything, and it is many things, it is also a black shadow of that white whale. Needless to say, The Pale King is even more of an apt white whale image, the “big book” that Mailer eventually delivered with Ancient Evenings, perhaps, in 1983, a full 35 years after NATD. But it took DFW down the same way Ahab was enmeshed in the harpoon ropes and ended up sailing away with Moby, down to the bottom of the sea in the John Huston film version. Down to depths that even he probably couldn’t write about.
But one could also include Henry Roth or Harper Lee on that claustrophobic shortlist. And why was a tough old buzzard like William Styron able to overcome his inner demons and survive, even after writing a personal memoir about his depression called Darkness Visible and yet still go on to be 81 when he died of natural causes (such as not hanging, drowning or shooting yourself)? Whereas a young tough dude like DFW was not able to do so. Perhaps if he had addressed his depression directly in writing rather than in the coded ciphers that literally riddle his works he may have been able to overcome the black capsizing wave. Instead he embedded his feelings in a complex mythology of fiction versus fact versus nightmare, a battle ultimately won tidily by nightmare.
Similar ventures into the realm of dark laughter are of course legion, from Swift and Sterne onward but perhaps especially so in postwar American fiction. John Hawkes, one of the writers, along with Bill Gaddis, who most resonate through the crystalline vernacular voice of DFW, was engaged in a similar tag-team wrestling match with the history of literature and the history of doubt. And of course all of them toil in the huge modernist shadow cast by Joyce and others of his scope and scale. They are born ambitious, apparently.
Leslie A. Fiedler was one of the great advocates for both modernist literature and the
importance of literature in life generally, and in his prime he explored the precursors and their inheritors with an acute sense that the generation of writers that followed by modernists would be even more demanding and challenging. He was of course, both prescient and correct. In his masterful 1960 opus Love and Death in The American Novel, he managed to isolate and analyze several of the key subjects and issues inherent to the American literary voice, with particular emphasis on the curious obsession with depression and death that seems to haunt the American idiom.
One of the most accomplished yet least publicly known of visionary voices is John Hawkes, whose first novel in 1949, The Cannibal, cast a long shadow across a literary landscape which had naturally no inkling of the postmodern condition that would soon follow in a mere twenty years. This salvo was then followed in quick succession with: The Beetle Leg, The Lime Twig, The Blood Oranges, Second Skin, Travesty and The Passion Artist. Hawkes was therefore writing in a tongue that had yet to be created, precisely like other grand heretics such as Sterne and Kafka. Hawkes was therefore, like all heretics, living and working in advance of a broken myth.
Fiedler was doubly prescient when he wrote in the introduction to Hawkes’ The Lime Twig: “Everyone klnows that in our literature the age of experimentalism is over and an age of recapitulation has begun; and few of us, I suspect, really regret it. John Hawes neither rewrites nor recapitulates, and therefore, spares us neither terror nor truth. John Hawkes has managed both and is perhaps, after the publication of three books and on the verge of a fourth, is the least read novelist of substantial merit in the United States.” 8) He is also the direct precursor of a DFW, but ironically DFW would garner for the same kind of dark comedy a massive accidentally mainstream popular audience, something inconceivable for a Hawkes, or even a Pynchon.
He could also have been describing DFW in fact fifty years ago, when Fielder characterizes the contemporary literary dilemma this way: “Counterfeits of insanity (automatic writing, the scrawls of the drunk and doped) are finally boring; while the compositions of the actually insane are in the end merely documents, terrible and depressing. Hawkes gives us neither of these surrenders to unreason but rather reason’s last desperate attempt to know what unreason is; and in such knowledge there are possibilities not only for poetry and power but for pleasure as well.” 9)
This is anticipatory, visionary thinking in action, and in DFW, this notion is writ large in all his work, but especially in IJ, where that pesky meaning has been embedded, almost like a fossil, in the soil of his feverish imaginings. Or was it reportage? The fact is there is very little difference between the spirit and structure of his essays and the spirit and structure of his fiction, which makes his self-perceived unsurmountable problem all the more deplorable, all the more sad, all the more entertaining for all of us trying to fathom just what is contained in what he left us with when he took his life back and away.
And what is contained in what he left us? A cautionary tale warning against the dangers of literary solipsism, among other things, and for that matter, existential solipsism in everyday life, to which the author eventually surrendered. This position is most often confused with those Faustian themes that fuel most modernist styles as well as those that emerged afterward and needed to disguise themselves in something slightly more diverse and less monolithic.
In “The Power of Blackness: Faustian Man and the Cult of Violence,” from Love and Death in the American Novel, in 1966 (written when DFW was four years old) Fiedler discusses the idea of despair in Melville's works, asserting that Melville's style changed from gothic to romantic as his career progressed. He asserted that the reality of damnation he never denied; but the meaning of it, for one committed to a skeptical and secular view, he questioned. Especially in his later works, he presented the “mystery of iniquity” in such complexly ironical contexts that the wariest of readers is occasionally baffled.
Nevertheless, he kept faith throughout his fiction not only with the gothic vision in general, but with the Faustian theme. Likewise DFW would embrace damnation and the doom of a dark tragic comedy and he would similarly move from postmodern angst to a neo-baroque style while also exploring complexly ironical context which needless to say often baffles his readers. Or perhaps he only baffles people before they become his readers, since like most aspects of life, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who enjoy DFW and those who do not. Of course, there are also two other kinds of people in the world, those who think the world is divided into two kinds of people and those who do not.
Donald Brackett is a Toronto-based culture critic. He has published numerous articles essays and reviews, and two books on the dynamics of creative collaboration: one on Fleetwood Mac and one on the pathology singer-songwriters from Bob Dylan to Jack White. He is currently working on a book length study of the parallels between William Gaddis and David Foster Wallace, and the politics of writer’s block. He also teaches a cultural anthropology course with the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, and lectures on cultural history and theory at Innis College, U. of T.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
BRIGHT AND SHINY :
The Secret Music of Paul McCartney
By Donald Brackett
“And the fireman rushes in, from the pouring rain, very strange….”
Paul McCartney, 1967
“The fireman’s candle never goes out...”
Paul McCartney, 2008
Be prepared to be shocked. Paul McCartney considered as an avant-garde musician? As usual, truth is stranger than fiction, and certainly more interesting than myth. Thrillington, recorded in 1971, was merely the second of several secret identities which the ever erstwhile McCartney cleverly used to further his creative ambitions while still concurrently delivering the bright and shiny goods we have all come to identify with his illustrious name. The first persona of course was the world famous Sergeant Pepper, the second was Percy T., and the third was the relatively unknown The Fireman. But all are multi-faceted reflections, or refractions perhaps, of the complicated artistic world of this innovative musician. But he’s even far more innovative than some might imagine, given that most of his most adventurous work has been done either in secret or has been held back for a variety of reasons, both legal and commercial. The time is thus long overdue for a serious critical reassessment of the serious side of McCartney and his solo music, along with an in-depth appreciation for this almost unknown daring side to a profoundly well known and successful popular musician. Perhaps even too well known for his own good.
Perhaps prompted by the not so sudden decision to finally release his experimental sound collage, Carnival of Light, 1967 (or least promise to continue trying to do so), after nearly forty two years of languishing in legend, but equally inspired by his own deft solo work and recent collaborations with artists more than half his age, inevitably the re-examination of McCartney’s body of work also leads to some surprising revelations about his personal position in the history of taking creative chances. “It gets dangerous when you start believing your own legacy” is how he himself he puts it.
Speaking of legacies, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”, John Lennon once cavalierly joked, in the usual off-the-cuff manner that often belied the profoundly painful truths hidden beneath his vulnerable, vicious and beautiful armor. The reassessment of McCartney thus also has the parallel side effect of reconsidering Lennon, and determining just who was the cutting edge composer and cultural risk-taker between them. There is really no contest. Both were geniuses but only one of them was and is truly comfortable being a genius.
There's a difference.
McCartney has been unfairly labeled a commercial sell-out over the years due to the scintillating perfection of his admittedly perfect pop songs, and this has occurred at the expense of his other secret side, the side that was a far more accomplished avant-garde artist than his late partner could ever have hoped to be (even with the assistance of his black-clad goddess). In fact, Lennon’s own famous tape loop experiments in musique concrete (Revolution #9 from the White Album for instance) were pale solipsistic imitations of McCartney’s more confident excursions, with which he prepared a context for the source material from the BBC library that Lennon would later toy with after staying up too late one year. Someone had too much to think last night.
Indeed, many of their innovations together, such as the rushing tape reversals on “Rain”, the wonky guitars on Taxman, even the loops on “Tomorrow Never Knows”, and of course the Pepper excursions, to name but a few, were generated by the open confidence of McCartney and not by the notorious insecurities of his brilliant but disturbed partner. It was McCartney who firmly believed that taking chances was part of his professional job description, even as a Beatle, but definitely since then, even though much of his most interesting work was overlooked by a huge public in favour of his more feel-good material, a public that he himself helped create.
Lennon spent most of his precious time attempting to catch up to and surpass his partner’s obvious penchant for pushing the artistic envelope, with his Ono-alliance being only the most blatant attempt to do so. Few people Lennon encountered would ever catch a glimpse the soft soul crushed under that hard shell of his. Two people who did both feel it and fully appreciate it would later become his first and only songwriting partner and his second wife. It gives the term love-triangle a whole new meaning.
This much is journalistic liturgy: The Beatles were together for just eight years (really only six if you want to be psychologically accurate) until the split in 1970. McCartney has spent the greatest part of his life and career as a solo performer, with painfully less creative success than he enjoyed with Lennon, though with considerable of the commercial sort He concedes that he will probably never again write songs with the luminescence of “Here, There and Everywhere” or “Eleanor Rigby” from Revolver, 1966.
According to Mark Edmonds, who interviewed him recently regarding his newest work, “McCartney feels real, tangible, lingering pain about the Beatles, and particularly the fact that he has carried the blame for their break-up. The roots of the Beatles’ break-up go back to 1967, with the death of Brian Epstein. The group’s finances soon became chaotic and McCartney pushed for the Eastmans, his in-laws, to take over their management. Lennon opposed McCartney’s desire to control the band’s destiny and legacy, and proposed a new manager, Allen Klein, with whom he, George and Ringo had already signed. Stalemate ensued. McCartney wouldn’t budge, nor would Lennon. By then all four were ready to go their separate ways. McCartney sued to legally wind up the band, ensuring it couldn’t reform without him and leaving none of their legacy under Klein’s control. The split was messy and brutal.” (1)
Like so many others, I too fell for the myth that Lennon was the daring and experimental half of the legendary partnership, and indeed many of his songs were on the edge of a certain sonic border, but his was a personal and social radicalism, one that became entangled in the same sad web as all his other precious gifts. Yet surprisingly to some, myself included at first, it was McCartney who had the deep prior knowledge of serious new contemporary music required to even dream of incorporating it into his rock or pop music, let alone explore its outer limits authentically, as he did in his later orchestral compositions. It was McCartney who knew and loved the new music compositions of Cage and Stockhausen, a sonic landscape that no other Beatle wanted to visit at all. In fact, George’s typically cheeky response was, “I avant garde a clue!”
In that most radical of years, 1968, commenting on his famous songwriting partner’s “liaison” with the infamous Ono, McCartney himself sarcastically said, “When two great Saints meet, it is a humbling experience”. Yet he could almost have been describing the Lennon-McCartney musical miracle itself, just as easily as the Lennon-Ono heresy. As a solo artist, Lennon was a sullen sulk, but John with Paul was revealed scripture.
It appears there are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who believe the world is divided into two kinds of people, and the kind that don’t. But often, whether we like it or not, those two inevitably find each other. McCartney was half of one kind of person, Lennon was half of another kind. And then, each of them had their secrets sides. That makes four of them already. One was just more obvious about it than the other. In their secret sides, each of them had a kernel of the other embedded within themselves, and it was this potent combination of two very different pathologies, one relatively benign and extroverted, the other one self-destructive and introverted, simultaneously leading to both heavenly harmony and horrifying dissonance that gave their subtly nuanced collaborations such intense verve. Even today. Maybe moreso today.
His best known innovations should be examined in the context of his astonishing collaborations within The Beatles format. Rock’n’roll, that remarkably American invention, was already inherently dissonant and, along with jazz and blues, represents what could be seen as an artistic rejection of classicism. But McCartney, by reinventing its traditions, would push rock to an exquisite limit of creativity that transformed it forever. He then went on to explore the less commercial realms far outside those traditions.
This then in essence is the the story of these two drastically very different personal and professional reactions to the fact that the world really liked them, considering the scope of the changes they brought to the world, and two very different artistic directions taken after their partnership dissolved, one moving toward the world, one away from the world. While Lennon was the revolutionary person, McCartney was the revolutionary artist, and since he was relatively healthy and hugely happy with his genius instead of being fixated, potentially in the closet and as misanthropic as John appeared to be, Paulie thrived. Yet ironically they also each had two fully developed but spit-sides of themselves, one side of which they submerged and sublimated in order to collaborate with their partner in that swift magic they were capable of creating, but only together.
In terms of responding to the simple fact that the world not only loved but possibly adored him, each one had a pathology: for Paul, the world liking him made sense, since he was like-able, brilliant and beautiful, and he was also balanced in his repression of his secret side, which was allowed to emerge only in the form of John Lennon. Therefore the fact that the world liked him simply meant that he was doing something right. Meanwhile Lennon, who repressed his sensitive guilt-ridden vulnerability and allowed human compassion to emerge only in the form of Paul McCartney, clearly believed that if the world liked him then he must be doing something wrong, since naturally the world was compromised and doomed, so he went out of his way not to please people, and yet felt doomed himself because he could never escape the fact that even when he wanted to displease people, he still pleased them. The curse of fulfilled-dream syndrome perhaps.
McCartney has a totally different form of pathology than Lennon, but only on the surface. His particular compulsion is to perpetually entertain us, to soothe us. His half of the amazingly creative team that fueled The Beatles was also fraught with remarkable insecurities of a different order, the desire to please and the anger he somehow managed to sublimate and transform into perpetually soothing anthems of hopeful happiness and wistful loss. But his former songwriting partner never had that particular problem. He had others, of course, but McCartney was always able to rise above the inherent inner conflicts in his creative character as a solo artist, and to be authentically happy to entertain us. It wasn't him after all, whop took his lucky break and broke it in two. Though lately Paul he has begun to release a few thought provoking skeletons from his closet, and he is coming out from the commerical closet in quite a different way.
The popular myth goes like this: unfortunately for Paul, his powerfully creative and muse-like connection with John is all the more obvious today, when one recognizes that half of his own post-Lennon music, while being perfectly crafted and very popular, is about as compelling as traveling in an cozy elevator. Yet the other half, the secret half, is of an experimental order that makes us stop in our tracks. There’s a kind of bipolar genius here.
Some of McCartney’s experimental music even anticipates the rough-hewn and loose-limbed structures of Jack White’s best music in quite a visionary manner, since Paul’s original forays into raw self-produced and all-instrument virtuosity were conceived some thirty years before White’s ascent to global rock star status. McCartney was already busy getting back to the rough roots of non-studio rock music recorded on the fly with hyper-analog equipment, five years before Jack White was even born. And five years before that, he was also composing in a totally abstract and songless sonic language in "Carnival of Light". So it’s that second half of McCartney, the secret side sublimated through Lennon, that we’re interested in considering in the context of “Bright and Shiny”.
A good example of the harmonic divergence so well analyzed by Ian Macdonald would be to examine two different songs on roughly the same subject, such as a McCartney creation like “Penny Lane”, and a Lennon creation like “Strawberry Fields Forever”. Both songs are about their childhoods, but while one is a lyrical romp through a kindhearted fantasy world concocted through the generosity of Paul, the other is a fantastic visit to the real estate of abandonment courtesy of John. Both are among their best songs. Only on the surface does one appear more experimental than the other. Sometimes I wonder which is the real world and which is the imagined one, in these songs. But more importantly, both songs are made possible through the agency of the other partner, even if one or the other is officially considered the nominal author of the song itself. Each of these superb artists looks through the other, both mirror and window, in order to marshal their forces to uncommon creative heights. Until, that is, Lennon decided he didn’t want to do that anymore. Or that he couldn’t. Or he forgot how to. Or his black-clad goddess prohibted it.
But McCartney, having access to more than one side of himself (whereas Lennon had lost access to virtually any of his erased selves) has never forgotten how to be both an creative artist and a performer, a visionary and an entertainer, with perhaps too much of the best of everything. Either way, he seems to be engaging in the kind of introspective vault tinkering that a senior artist usually does when they’ve entered somethiong like the late-Picasso stage of their own career arc. Edmonds comments that, “He has almost breezily drawn a line under the messiest divorce in decades, and yet his role in the split from The Beatles still cuts deep. McCartney is clearly in touch with his mortality, and he doesn’t want his immortality tarnished.” (3)
But after all, it is the music McCartney was recording in-between takes of one of his masterpieces, “Penny Lane”, back then in '67, and which will finally be released, hopefully next year (or maybe the year after that, or maybe it's laready been secretly released as the seond half of "Don't Stop Running", on Electric Arguments) that really interests us here, as well as his early solo experiments with rough recording styles. But that little 14-minute romp through abstraction McCartney concocted with considerable confidence and aplomb was simply too much for the rest of The Beatles to tolerate musically, intellectually, emotionally, artistically, spiritually, mentally, and well, just Beatley.
This story is all about that other secret side. It’s a side celebrated in certain albums, and hidden away in others, so therefore it is through the ongoing recorded body of work that we can best trace these secret tendencies, as outlined in the table of contents portion of this proposal. The creative arc both begins and ends with "Carnival of Light".
Although McCartney was certainly not the only member of the group to feel constricted by the Beatle format and to try to escape from it, he was definitely the only one who made genuinely experimental music out of the fertile solo transition period immediately following his freedom. McCartney’s first three solo records, McCartney 1970, Ram 1971 and Wildlife 1971, were each a consciously meditated and mediated retreat from the sonic opulence of hyper-tech studio-made music, each recorded at home, without an engineer or producer. Each was not so much an anti-Beatle record of the sort John would unfortunately make, but rather an anti-hype and gritty basement tape kind of record that was far, far ahead of its time. As per the future Jack White.
It was almost as if the grand masterwork of George Martin’s final production for the majestic Abbey Road was just all too polished and sophisticated for his tastes as the reiterator of Rock’s roots, so McCartney allowed all the rough edges of his conception to be memorialized in the music itself on those first three solo efforts. In retrospect, this was very White-like long before anything like his arcane strategy had been dreamed of. The mid-career McCartney maturity phase is ironically also one of mid-life crisis, reflected in the abstract edges and slightly punk-edgy urges of McCartney 2, in 1980. His label for would not let him release McCartney 2 as he designed it, a demanding double record of considerable scope and scale, because the second disc was utterly experimental, and they explained that "this was not the Paul that people want to hear..." and he caved in.
True Himself does like to please. But a big part of him also likes to let his musical mind go wandering, where it will go. Yet look where his mind goes if he lets it, or if we let him. No one knew who or what The Fireman was back in 1993 when McCartney used one of his favorite motifs, donning the mask of an alter-ego within which he can go further than he could by himself, or perhaps more importantly, as himself, in order to collaborate with a gifted young producer-wizard and reinvent himself as a dance-mix master. For Paul it must just be another form of Pepper-like sound collage after all, a stylistic device that has long absorbed him. The very randomness of his current free form band is exactly the element he most cherishes.
Part of the purpose here in the assumption of an alter-ego is to have a means of channeling that secret desire for disorder, as McCartney himself described it to Thorpe: “It was a very random process but it is very liberating. It's an approach I've been interested in. With Sergeant Pepper, the whole idea was to create a band and we could pretend we were that band, not The Beatles. So we made that record with that in mind.Normally when John would walk up to the microphone, some part of his brain would be conscious that he was doing a John Lennon vocal. And that's sometimes a little bit of a pressure. So we created this idea in Sergeant Pepper where you're not John Lennon, you're Dirk. So you go up to a mic and you just sing how you want to sing rather than how you expect people think you're going to sing. And it's quite liberating to do that.” (5)
Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest, 1993, was particular exhilarating before the media and public discovered who The Fireman was. Flaming Pie, 1997, is one of the finest pieces of songwriting he has done in years, directly from his heart to you, in his most elegant of packages. It’s what he does best. But then he boldly followed up with both Rushes 1998, his second outing as The Fireman, a wordless and muscular dance experiment for people with alien hand syndrome, and Liverpool Sound Collage, 2000, which harkens back to his early tape experiments on Revolver and Pepper. The Fireman? He rushed in from the pouring rain, very strange!
As a matter of fact, McCartney has often remarked that he’d like to release the album everyone is afraid of, the one called Paul Goes Too Far. Bring it on. One of the purposes here is to encourage him do so. As a matter of fact, the subtitle to his new release may well have used that tongue in cheek line quite seriously, except that for our purposes he has gone just far enough. Wedged between his serious contemporary chamber music, along the lines of the English pastoral composers such as Vaughn Williams and Delius, in both Working Classical, 1999, and Standing Stone, 1997.
But then he once again returned from those exotic excursions, returned to form perhaps, returned home one might say, to visit his own backyard, both figuratively and literally, in Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, 2002, which was like fine aged armagnac. Twin Freaks, 2005, is an amazing experiment wherein McCartney gave free access to a treasure chest of his master tapes to one of his young collaborators, who then remixed well known songs in fragmented and sculptural ways with suitably shiny results.
The Fireman has three albums so far. His newest record, Electric Arguments, 2008 was a brilliant return to form which merges the two sides of his character into an almost conventional rock band format. But still, the music he had composed behind that persona mask is far from conventional, and contrary to his myth, McCartney always was and still is, a shockingly innovative and dissonant contemporary artist. He just hides it so well behind that beatific smile.
In fact, maybe I'm amazed that McCartney hasn't yet sought out Jack White to play with him, especially since White is just about the only person capable of matching Lennon's wicked voice and matching his astonishing charisma. But that might yet come to pass. His many and varied collaborations (such as Michael Jackson and Elvis Costello) will also be explored to a degree in this book, but only insofar as they represent his ongoing attempt to discover a new partnership as significant as the one upon which his legend is based. McCartney expresses it with suitably wistful insight into his character: “I like working with someone. I like giving up control. I don't need to have full control all the time. I like a bit, but I like to throw it open to someone. It's more fun than sitting in a room on your own all day.” (Ibid)
In a sense, this story is also book-ended by itself: on the one hand by the aborted attempt to release "Carnival of Light" in 1967 (the same year that the visionary Brian Wilson’s Smile experiment failed to launch) and on the other hand, its eventual release in, when 2012?, hot on the heels of a yet another record, as yet untitled, by a sixty-seven year old genius who is utterly comfortable being the Mozart of contemporary pop music.
Upon reflection, one of the best reasons he has for releasing "Carnival of Light" soon is precisely the fact that he is also still releasing some of the most accomplished and innovative records of his musical career, The Beatles included, and perhaps he’d just like to rightly remind us that he’s been doing this sort of thing, both stylistic sides delivered at once, for more than four decades now. It’s that legacy thing again. It must be difficult though, knowing that almost nothing you can ever do in this lifetime, no matter how beautiful or brilliant, will approach the legacy you shared with Mr. L. Quite a burden to live and perform with. But keep trying by all means. We're behind you all the way.
The Secret Music of Paul McCartney
By Donald Brackett
“And the fireman rushes in, from the pouring rain, very strange….”
Paul McCartney, 1967
“The fireman’s candle never goes out...”
Paul McCartney, 2008
Be prepared to be shocked. Paul McCartney considered as an avant-garde musician? As usual, truth is stranger than fiction, and certainly more interesting than myth. Thrillington, recorded in 1971, was merely the second of several secret identities which the ever erstwhile McCartney cleverly used to further his creative ambitions while still concurrently delivering the bright and shiny goods we have all come to identify with his illustrious name. The first persona of course was the world famous Sergeant Pepper, the second was Percy T., and the third was the relatively unknown The Fireman. But all are multi-faceted reflections, or refractions perhaps, of the complicated artistic world of this innovative musician. But he’s even far more innovative than some might imagine, given that most of his most adventurous work has been done either in secret or has been held back for a variety of reasons, both legal and commercial. The time is thus long overdue for a serious critical reassessment of the serious side of McCartney and his solo music, along with an in-depth appreciation for this almost unknown daring side to a profoundly well known and successful popular musician. Perhaps even too well known for his own good.
Perhaps prompted by the not so sudden decision to finally release his experimental sound collage, Carnival of Light, 1967 (or least promise to continue trying to do so), after nearly forty two years of languishing in legend, but equally inspired by his own deft solo work and recent collaborations with artists more than half his age, inevitably the re-examination of McCartney’s body of work also leads to some surprising revelations about his personal position in the history of taking creative chances. “It gets dangerous when you start believing your own legacy” is how he himself he puts it.
Speaking of legacies, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”, John Lennon once cavalierly joked, in the usual off-the-cuff manner that often belied the profoundly painful truths hidden beneath his vulnerable, vicious and beautiful armor. The reassessment of McCartney thus also has the parallel side effect of reconsidering Lennon, and determining just who was the cutting edge composer and cultural risk-taker between them. There is really no contest. Both were geniuses but only one of them was and is truly comfortable being a genius.
There's a difference.
McCartney has been unfairly labeled a commercial sell-out over the years due to the scintillating perfection of his admittedly perfect pop songs, and this has occurred at the expense of his other secret side, the side that was a far more accomplished avant-garde artist than his late partner could ever have hoped to be (even with the assistance of his black-clad goddess). In fact, Lennon’s own famous tape loop experiments in musique concrete (Revolution #9 from the White Album for instance) were pale solipsistic imitations of McCartney’s more confident excursions, with which he prepared a context for the source material from the BBC library that Lennon would later toy with after staying up too late one year. Someone had too much to think last night.
Indeed, many of their innovations together, such as the rushing tape reversals on “Rain”, the wonky guitars on Taxman, even the loops on “Tomorrow Never Knows”, and of course the Pepper excursions, to name but a few, were generated by the open confidence of McCartney and not by the notorious insecurities of his brilliant but disturbed partner. It was McCartney who firmly believed that taking chances was part of his professional job description, even as a Beatle, but definitely since then, even though much of his most interesting work was overlooked by a huge public in favour of his more feel-good material, a public that he himself helped create.
Lennon spent most of his precious time attempting to catch up to and surpass his partner’s obvious penchant for pushing the artistic envelope, with his Ono-alliance being only the most blatant attempt to do so. Few people Lennon encountered would ever catch a glimpse the soft soul crushed under that hard shell of his. Two people who did both feel it and fully appreciate it would later become his first and only songwriting partner and his second wife. It gives the term love-triangle a whole new meaning.
This much is journalistic liturgy: The Beatles were together for just eight years (really only six if you want to be psychologically accurate) until the split in 1970. McCartney has spent the greatest part of his life and career as a solo performer, with painfully less creative success than he enjoyed with Lennon, though with considerable of the commercial sort He concedes that he will probably never again write songs with the luminescence of “Here, There and Everywhere” or “Eleanor Rigby” from Revolver, 1966.
According to Mark Edmonds, who interviewed him recently regarding his newest work, “McCartney feels real, tangible, lingering pain about the Beatles, and particularly the fact that he has carried the blame for their break-up. The roots of the Beatles’ break-up go back to 1967, with the death of Brian Epstein. The group’s finances soon became chaotic and McCartney pushed for the Eastmans, his in-laws, to take over their management. Lennon opposed McCartney’s desire to control the band’s destiny and legacy, and proposed a new manager, Allen Klein, with whom he, George and Ringo had already signed. Stalemate ensued. McCartney wouldn’t budge, nor would Lennon. By then all four were ready to go their separate ways. McCartney sued to legally wind up the band, ensuring it couldn’t reform without him and leaving none of their legacy under Klein’s control. The split was messy and brutal.” (1)
Like so many others, I too fell for the myth that Lennon was the daring and experimental half of the legendary partnership, and indeed many of his songs were on the edge of a certain sonic border, but his was a personal and social radicalism, one that became entangled in the same sad web as all his other precious gifts. Yet surprisingly to some, myself included at first, it was McCartney who had the deep prior knowledge of serious new contemporary music required to even dream of incorporating it into his rock or pop music, let alone explore its outer limits authentically, as he did in his later orchestral compositions. It was McCartney who knew and loved the new music compositions of Cage and Stockhausen, a sonic landscape that no other Beatle wanted to visit at all. In fact, George’s typically cheeky response was, “I avant garde a clue!”
In that most radical of years, 1968, commenting on his famous songwriting partner’s “liaison” with the infamous Ono, McCartney himself sarcastically said, “When two great Saints meet, it is a humbling experience”. Yet he could almost have been describing the Lennon-McCartney musical miracle itself, just as easily as the Lennon-Ono heresy. As a solo artist, Lennon was a sullen sulk, but John with Paul was revealed scripture.
It appears there are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who believe the world is divided into two kinds of people, and the kind that don’t. But often, whether we like it or not, those two inevitably find each other. McCartney was half of one kind of person, Lennon was half of another kind. And then, each of them had their secrets sides. That makes four of them already. One was just more obvious about it than the other. In their secret sides, each of them had a kernel of the other embedded within themselves, and it was this potent combination of two very different pathologies, one relatively benign and extroverted, the other one self-destructive and introverted, simultaneously leading to both heavenly harmony and horrifying dissonance that gave their subtly nuanced collaborations such intense verve. Even today. Maybe moreso today.
His best known innovations should be examined in the context of his astonishing collaborations within The Beatles format. Rock’n’roll, that remarkably American invention, was already inherently dissonant and, along with jazz and blues, represents what could be seen as an artistic rejection of classicism. But McCartney, by reinventing its traditions, would push rock to an exquisite limit of creativity that transformed it forever. He then went on to explore the less commercial realms far outside those traditions.
This then in essence is the the story of these two drastically very different personal and professional reactions to the fact that the world really liked them, considering the scope of the changes they brought to the world, and two very different artistic directions taken after their partnership dissolved, one moving toward the world, one away from the world. While Lennon was the revolutionary person, McCartney was the revolutionary artist, and since he was relatively healthy and hugely happy with his genius instead of being fixated, potentially in the closet and as misanthropic as John appeared to be, Paulie thrived. Yet ironically they also each had two fully developed but spit-sides of themselves, one side of which they submerged and sublimated in order to collaborate with their partner in that swift magic they were capable of creating, but only together.
In terms of responding to the simple fact that the world not only loved but possibly adored him, each one had a pathology: for Paul, the world liking him made sense, since he was like-able, brilliant and beautiful, and he was also balanced in his repression of his secret side, which was allowed to emerge only in the form of John Lennon. Therefore the fact that the world liked him simply meant that he was doing something right. Meanwhile Lennon, who repressed his sensitive guilt-ridden vulnerability and allowed human compassion to emerge only in the form of Paul McCartney, clearly believed that if the world liked him then he must be doing something wrong, since naturally the world was compromised and doomed, so he went out of his way not to please people, and yet felt doomed himself because he could never escape the fact that even when he wanted to displease people, he still pleased them. The curse of fulfilled-dream syndrome perhaps.
McCartney has a totally different form of pathology than Lennon, but only on the surface. His particular compulsion is to perpetually entertain us, to soothe us. His half of the amazingly creative team that fueled The Beatles was also fraught with remarkable insecurities of a different order, the desire to please and the anger he somehow managed to sublimate and transform into perpetually soothing anthems of hopeful happiness and wistful loss. But his former songwriting partner never had that particular problem. He had others, of course, but McCartney was always able to rise above the inherent inner conflicts in his creative character as a solo artist, and to be authentically happy to entertain us. It wasn't him after all, whop took his lucky break and broke it in two. Though lately Paul he has begun to release a few thought provoking skeletons from his closet, and he is coming out from the commerical closet in quite a different way.
The popular myth goes like this: unfortunately for Paul, his powerfully creative and muse-like connection with John is all the more obvious today, when one recognizes that half of his own post-Lennon music, while being perfectly crafted and very popular, is about as compelling as traveling in an cozy elevator. Yet the other half, the secret half, is of an experimental order that makes us stop in our tracks. There’s a kind of bipolar genius here.
Some of McCartney’s experimental music even anticipates the rough-hewn and loose-limbed structures of Jack White’s best music in quite a visionary manner, since Paul’s original forays into raw self-produced and all-instrument virtuosity were conceived some thirty years before White’s ascent to global rock star status. McCartney was already busy getting back to the rough roots of non-studio rock music recorded on the fly with hyper-analog equipment, five years before Jack White was even born. And five years before that, he was also composing in a totally abstract and songless sonic language in "Carnival of Light". So it’s that second half of McCartney, the secret side sublimated through Lennon, that we’re interested in considering in the context of “Bright and Shiny”.
A good example of the harmonic divergence so well analyzed by Ian Macdonald would be to examine two different songs on roughly the same subject, such as a McCartney creation like “Penny Lane”, and a Lennon creation like “Strawberry Fields Forever”. Both songs are about their childhoods, but while one is a lyrical romp through a kindhearted fantasy world concocted through the generosity of Paul, the other is a fantastic visit to the real estate of abandonment courtesy of John. Both are among their best songs. Only on the surface does one appear more experimental than the other. Sometimes I wonder which is the real world and which is the imagined one, in these songs. But more importantly, both songs are made possible through the agency of the other partner, even if one or the other is officially considered the nominal author of the song itself. Each of these superb artists looks through the other, both mirror and window, in order to marshal their forces to uncommon creative heights. Until, that is, Lennon decided he didn’t want to do that anymore. Or that he couldn’t. Or he forgot how to. Or his black-clad goddess prohibted it.
But McCartney, having access to more than one side of himself (whereas Lennon had lost access to virtually any of his erased selves) has never forgotten how to be both an creative artist and a performer, a visionary and an entertainer, with perhaps too much of the best of everything. Either way, he seems to be engaging in the kind of introspective vault tinkering that a senior artist usually does when they’ve entered somethiong like the late-Picasso stage of their own career arc. Edmonds comments that, “He has almost breezily drawn a line under the messiest divorce in decades, and yet his role in the split from The Beatles still cuts deep. McCartney is clearly in touch with his mortality, and he doesn’t want his immortality tarnished.” (3)
But after all, it is the music McCartney was recording in-between takes of one of his masterpieces, “Penny Lane”, back then in '67, and which will finally be released, hopefully next year (or maybe the year after that, or maybe it's laready been secretly released as the seond half of "Don't Stop Running", on Electric Arguments) that really interests us here, as well as his early solo experiments with rough recording styles. But that little 14-minute romp through abstraction McCartney concocted with considerable confidence and aplomb was simply too much for the rest of The Beatles to tolerate musically, intellectually, emotionally, artistically, spiritually, mentally, and well, just Beatley.
This story is all about that other secret side. It’s a side celebrated in certain albums, and hidden away in others, so therefore it is through the ongoing recorded body of work that we can best trace these secret tendencies, as outlined in the table of contents portion of this proposal. The creative arc both begins and ends with "Carnival of Light".
Although McCartney was certainly not the only member of the group to feel constricted by the Beatle format and to try to escape from it, he was definitely the only one who made genuinely experimental music out of the fertile solo transition period immediately following his freedom. McCartney’s first three solo records, McCartney 1970, Ram 1971 and Wildlife 1971, were each a consciously meditated and mediated retreat from the sonic opulence of hyper-tech studio-made music, each recorded at home, without an engineer or producer. Each was not so much an anti-Beatle record of the sort John would unfortunately make, but rather an anti-hype and gritty basement tape kind of record that was far, far ahead of its time. As per the future Jack White.
It was almost as if the grand masterwork of George Martin’s final production for the majestic Abbey Road was just all too polished and sophisticated for his tastes as the reiterator of Rock’s roots, so McCartney allowed all the rough edges of his conception to be memorialized in the music itself on those first three solo efforts. In retrospect, this was very White-like long before anything like his arcane strategy had been dreamed of. The mid-career McCartney maturity phase is ironically also one of mid-life crisis, reflected in the abstract edges and slightly punk-edgy urges of McCartney 2, in 1980. His label for would not let him release McCartney 2 as he designed it, a demanding double record of considerable scope and scale, because the second disc was utterly experimental, and they explained that "this was not the Paul that people want to hear..." and he caved in.
True Himself does like to please. But a big part of him also likes to let his musical mind go wandering, where it will go. Yet look where his mind goes if he lets it, or if we let him. No one knew who or what The Fireman was back in 1993 when McCartney used one of his favorite motifs, donning the mask of an alter-ego within which he can go further than he could by himself, or perhaps more importantly, as himself, in order to collaborate with a gifted young producer-wizard and reinvent himself as a dance-mix master. For Paul it must just be another form of Pepper-like sound collage after all, a stylistic device that has long absorbed him. The very randomness of his current free form band is exactly the element he most cherishes.
Part of the purpose here in the assumption of an alter-ego is to have a means of channeling that secret desire for disorder, as McCartney himself described it to Thorpe: “It was a very random process but it is very liberating. It's an approach I've been interested in. With Sergeant Pepper, the whole idea was to create a band and we could pretend we were that band, not The Beatles. So we made that record with that in mind.Normally when John would walk up to the microphone, some part of his brain would be conscious that he was doing a John Lennon vocal. And that's sometimes a little bit of a pressure. So we created this idea in Sergeant Pepper where you're not John Lennon, you're Dirk. So you go up to a mic and you just sing how you want to sing rather than how you expect people think you're going to sing. And it's quite liberating to do that.” (5)
Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest, 1993, was particular exhilarating before the media and public discovered who The Fireman was. Flaming Pie, 1997, is one of the finest pieces of songwriting he has done in years, directly from his heart to you, in his most elegant of packages. It’s what he does best. But then he boldly followed up with both Rushes 1998, his second outing as The Fireman, a wordless and muscular dance experiment for people with alien hand syndrome, and Liverpool Sound Collage, 2000, which harkens back to his early tape experiments on Revolver and Pepper. The Fireman? He rushed in from the pouring rain, very strange!
As a matter of fact, McCartney has often remarked that he’d like to release the album everyone is afraid of, the one called Paul Goes Too Far. Bring it on. One of the purposes here is to encourage him do so. As a matter of fact, the subtitle to his new release may well have used that tongue in cheek line quite seriously, except that for our purposes he has gone just far enough. Wedged between his serious contemporary chamber music, along the lines of the English pastoral composers such as Vaughn Williams and Delius, in both Working Classical, 1999, and Standing Stone, 1997.
But then he once again returned from those exotic excursions, returned to form perhaps, returned home one might say, to visit his own backyard, both figuratively and literally, in Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, 2002, which was like fine aged armagnac. Twin Freaks, 2005, is an amazing experiment wherein McCartney gave free access to a treasure chest of his master tapes to one of his young collaborators, who then remixed well known songs in fragmented and sculptural ways with suitably shiny results.
The Fireman has three albums so far. His newest record, Electric Arguments, 2008 was a brilliant return to form which merges the two sides of his character into an almost conventional rock band format. But still, the music he had composed behind that persona mask is far from conventional, and contrary to his myth, McCartney always was and still is, a shockingly innovative and dissonant contemporary artist. He just hides it so well behind that beatific smile.
In fact, maybe I'm amazed that McCartney hasn't yet sought out Jack White to play with him, especially since White is just about the only person capable of matching Lennon's wicked voice and matching his astonishing charisma. But that might yet come to pass. His many and varied collaborations (such as Michael Jackson and Elvis Costello) will also be explored to a degree in this book, but only insofar as they represent his ongoing attempt to discover a new partnership as significant as the one upon which his legend is based. McCartney expresses it with suitably wistful insight into his character: “I like working with someone. I like giving up control. I don't need to have full control all the time. I like a bit, but I like to throw it open to someone. It's more fun than sitting in a room on your own all day.” (Ibid)
In a sense, this story is also book-ended by itself: on the one hand by the aborted attempt to release "Carnival of Light" in 1967 (the same year that the visionary Brian Wilson’s Smile experiment failed to launch) and on the other hand, its eventual release in, when 2012?, hot on the heels of a yet another record, as yet untitled, by a sixty-seven year old genius who is utterly comfortable being the Mozart of contemporary pop music.
Upon reflection, one of the best reasons he has for releasing "Carnival of Light" soon is precisely the fact that he is also still releasing some of the most accomplished and innovative records of his musical career, The Beatles included, and perhaps he’d just like to rightly remind us that he’s been doing this sort of thing, both stylistic sides delivered at once, for more than four decades now. It’s that legacy thing again. It must be difficult though, knowing that almost nothing you can ever do in this lifetime, no matter how beautiful or brilliant, will approach the legacy you shared with Mr. L. Quite a burden to live and perform with. But keep trying by all means. We're behind you all the way.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Friday, April 30, 2010
The Culture of Diagram
By John Bender
Stanford University Press 2010
Book Review by Donald Brackett:
-Highly Recommended
This is a critical genealogy of diagrammatic knowledge presented in an interdisciplinary format which covers the last 250 years of western culture and brings into clear focus the parallel paths of visual art, cultural studies and scientific representation. James Elkins has often commented on the forgotten third in the triad of writing/image/diagram, especially in his own “The Visual Domain”, and he has observed astutely that a diagram is an amalgam rife with internal discontinuities, detecting how its frontiers offer a realm where images model thought outside of all linguistic containment. In Bender’s new comprehensive survey of the diagram’s often secret history, new conceptual ground is broken in a manner both entertaining and informative.
This book is an archaeology of the diagram, in all its scope and mystery: it offers a means of fully appreciating the wide range of symbolic forms available to us as expressively creative creatures. No other means of unifying art, myth, religion, language and the sciences into a coherent whole which recognizes the organic nature of signification is quite as effective as that of the dinergic model managed by governing dynamics. The culture being explored here is that of visual thinking itself, a fascinating terrain where Bender demonstrates how words meet pictures and formulas meet figures. He has foregrounded diagrams as mutable tools for further blurring the boundaries between images and ideas. He has also managed to draw provocative lines linking the diagram itself to our own inner sense of modernity.
The master of symbolic forms, Ernst Cassirer, has remarked on their subtle operation in our lives in a way which sheds light on the importance of understanding how diagram can evolve into emblem, and how emblem can enforce embodied meanings. “Human culture taken as a whole,” he has remarked, “may be described as the process of people’s progressive self-liberation. Language, art, religion, science, are various phases in the process. They also tend in different directions and they obey different principles. But this multiplicity and disparateness do not denote discord or disharmony. All these functions complete and complement each other. The dissonant is in harmony with itself., the contraries are not mutually exclusive but interdependent, harmony in contrariety, as in the case of the violin and the bow.” The Culture of Diagram invites us to consider a realm where formal differences cease to be contradictions, one where word and image are wed.
By John Bender
Stanford University Press 2010
Book Review by Donald Brackett:
-Highly Recommended
This is a critical genealogy of diagrammatic knowledge presented in an interdisciplinary format which covers the last 250 years of western culture and brings into clear focus the parallel paths of visual art, cultural studies and scientific representation. James Elkins has often commented on the forgotten third in the triad of writing/image/diagram, especially in his own “The Visual Domain”, and he has observed astutely that a diagram is an amalgam rife with internal discontinuities, detecting how its frontiers offer a realm where images model thought outside of all linguistic containment. In Bender’s new comprehensive survey of the diagram’s often secret history, new conceptual ground is broken in a manner both entertaining and informative.
This book is an archaeology of the diagram, in all its scope and mystery: it offers a means of fully appreciating the wide range of symbolic forms available to us as expressively creative creatures. No other means of unifying art, myth, religion, language and the sciences into a coherent whole which recognizes the organic nature of signification is quite as effective as that of the dinergic model managed by governing dynamics. The culture being explored here is that of visual thinking itself, a fascinating terrain where Bender demonstrates how words meet pictures and formulas meet figures. He has foregrounded diagrams as mutable tools for further blurring the boundaries between images and ideas. He has also managed to draw provocative lines linking the diagram itself to our own inner sense of modernity.
The master of symbolic forms, Ernst Cassirer, has remarked on their subtle operation in our lives in a way which sheds light on the importance of understanding how diagram can evolve into emblem, and how emblem can enforce embodied meanings. “Human culture taken as a whole,” he has remarked, “may be described as the process of people’s progressive self-liberation. Language, art, religion, science, are various phases in the process. They also tend in different directions and they obey different principles. But this multiplicity and disparateness do not denote discord or disharmony. All these functions complete and complement each other. The dissonant is in harmony with itself., the contraries are not mutually exclusive but interdependent, harmony in contrariety, as in the case of the violin and the bow.” The Culture of Diagram invites us to consider a realm where formal differences cease to be contradictions, one where word and image are wed.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
in perspective
IN PERSPECTIVE:
Considering the Paintings of Anne-Marie Cosgrove
By Donald Brackett
“Each line is now the actual experience, with its own innate history.
It does not illustrate---it is the sensation of its own realization.”
Cy Twombly
The paintings of Anne-Marie Cosgrove being celebrated in this fifteen year survey show are ideal emblems for the abstract process by which the everyday life experience of an artist is graphically transformed into embodied moments of exceptional beauty and profound rigor. Her graceful collisions of calligraphy and brushstroke are also an effective means of exploring abstract ruminations on life’s minutest details. The resultant images in this perspective are raw but refined, accidental but organized, linguistic but silent. They are often also a vivid unconscious diary of the living process that created them.
Jo Petty has observed about great painting: “Mark making is the beginning of it all.” This perspective show is a veritable celebration of the magic of making such marks. It is the marks themselves which articulate the painter’s narrative, from one body of work to the next, in images where sign, signifier and signified are all synonymous.
For Cosgrove, there is far less of a boundary between the left brain that produces words and the right brain that produces images, since both can produce poetry: “Words are integral to what I do. I come to my visual perceptions through language; the subject of my work is loosely framed in a dialogue between the articulated surface and the politics of existence where I find myself.”
A work like 1998’s “The Messiness of Hope” for instance, seems to suggest a radiant poetry of the physical, a realm of structural meaning that mirrors the very arena in which language itself operates, and that painting, like all the bodies of work over this creative time span, utilizes a visual syntax and optical semantics made up of line, colour, shape, and composition.
The curious family resemblance between brushstrokes and sentences in 2001’s “Alphabet romantique” reminds us that long before language took over the job, graphic pictures were used to convey literal meanings. Indeed, this selection of paintings suggests that graphic form and colour content have their own personal dialect, one that provides pure retinal meaning.
The fierce quantum net of intersecting strokes suggesting a tapestry gone bonkers which we behold in 2010’s “Habitat” indicates a clear evolution of visual motifs introduced much earlier in this painter’s career arc. This is precisely the kind of thematic continuity we hope for in the art of painting and it is also the most crucial feature of the persistent gaze that is so clearly evident in all of Cosgrove’s work.
From the elegant urban cacophony of 1995’s “The View From Here” to the austere splendour of today’s “Habitat”, there is a stubbornness, commitment and dedication in evidence which rewards repeated viewing. Here, idea and language are merged with and mutated through the spontaneous contents of intuition and image as they both mutually graze on the experiences of everyday life. Though the written word itself serves as the principal motif that runs throughout her work over the past two decades, in her case neither word nor brushstroke is placed in subordination to the other. What you see, as Stella once remarked, is what you see.
Her ongoing oeuvre contains a total aggregate of the things to which the word abstract is applicable: she invites us not only into what the Greeks called the very forest of things, ourselves among them, but also into the forest of language, and the words we use to describe those things around us.
But things, just like the words that attempt to capture them, are in a constant state of flux, which is the other significant temporal reality consistently being explored in her work over the years. One common trait shared by the several bodies of work assembled here, apart from each being both visually beautiful and aesthetically rigorous, is that they capture some of the essence of what every good painting is really all about: time and its passing through us.
These works remind us how visually fresh and topically urgent painting can still be in this digital age. They also remind us of one very useful artistic adage: though no painter can go back and make a brand new start, everyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.
“Anne-Marie Cosgrove: 15 Years of Painting / A Perspective” was exhibited at the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, Toronto, from April 14th to 25th.
Donald Brackett is a Toronto-based art critic, curator and educator who teaches an integrated culture course at OCAD exploring the history, issues, theory and practice of art, design and architecture. He is currently curating an exhibition exchange between Canada and Belgium called “FUGITIVE: Painting In The 21rst Century”.
Considering the Paintings of Anne-Marie Cosgrove
By Donald Brackett
“Each line is now the actual experience, with its own innate history.
It does not illustrate---it is the sensation of its own realization.”
Cy Twombly
The paintings of Anne-Marie Cosgrove being celebrated in this fifteen year survey show are ideal emblems for the abstract process by which the everyday life experience of an artist is graphically transformed into embodied moments of exceptional beauty and profound rigor. Her graceful collisions of calligraphy and brushstroke are also an effective means of exploring abstract ruminations on life’s minutest details. The resultant images in this perspective are raw but refined, accidental but organized, linguistic but silent. They are often also a vivid unconscious diary of the living process that created them.
Jo Petty has observed about great painting: “Mark making is the beginning of it all.” This perspective show is a veritable celebration of the magic of making such marks. It is the marks themselves which articulate the painter’s narrative, from one body of work to the next, in images where sign, signifier and signified are all synonymous.
For Cosgrove, there is far less of a boundary between the left brain that produces words and the right brain that produces images, since both can produce poetry: “Words are integral to what I do. I come to my visual perceptions through language; the subject of my work is loosely framed in a dialogue between the articulated surface and the politics of existence where I find myself.”
A work like 1998’s “The Messiness of Hope” for instance, seems to suggest a radiant poetry of the physical, a realm of structural meaning that mirrors the very arena in which language itself operates, and that painting, like all the bodies of work over this creative time span, utilizes a visual syntax and optical semantics made up of line, colour, shape, and composition.
The curious family resemblance between brushstrokes and sentences in 2001’s “Alphabet romantique” reminds us that long before language took over the job, graphic pictures were used to convey literal meanings. Indeed, this selection of paintings suggests that graphic form and colour content have their own personal dialect, one that provides pure retinal meaning.
The fierce quantum net of intersecting strokes suggesting a tapestry gone bonkers which we behold in 2010’s “Habitat” indicates a clear evolution of visual motifs introduced much earlier in this painter’s career arc. This is precisely the kind of thematic continuity we hope for in the art of painting and it is also the most crucial feature of the persistent gaze that is so clearly evident in all of Cosgrove’s work.
From the elegant urban cacophony of 1995’s “The View From Here” to the austere splendour of today’s “Habitat”, there is a stubbornness, commitment and dedication in evidence which rewards repeated viewing. Here, idea and language are merged with and mutated through the spontaneous contents of intuition and image as they both mutually graze on the experiences of everyday life. Though the written word itself serves as the principal motif that runs throughout her work over the past two decades, in her case neither word nor brushstroke is placed in subordination to the other. What you see, as Stella once remarked, is what you see.
Her ongoing oeuvre contains a total aggregate of the things to which the word abstract is applicable: she invites us not only into what the Greeks called the very forest of things, ourselves among them, but also into the forest of language, and the words we use to describe those things around us.
But things, just like the words that attempt to capture them, are in a constant state of flux, which is the other significant temporal reality consistently being explored in her work over the years. One common trait shared by the several bodies of work assembled here, apart from each being both visually beautiful and aesthetically rigorous, is that they capture some of the essence of what every good painting is really all about: time and its passing through us.
These works remind us how visually fresh and topically urgent painting can still be in this digital age. They also remind us of one very useful artistic adage: though no painter can go back and make a brand new start, everyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.
“Anne-Marie Cosgrove: 15 Years of Painting / A Perspective” was exhibited at the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, Toronto, from April 14th to 25th.
Donald Brackett is a Toronto-based art critic, curator and educator who teaches an integrated culture course at OCAD exploring the history, issues, theory and practice of art, design and architecture. He is currently curating an exhibition exchange between Canada and Belgium called “FUGITIVE: Painting In The 21rst Century”.
Monday, April 5, 2010
IN VITREOUS VERITAS
By
Donald Brackett
“..between the tunnel and the train, between the victim and his
stain, once again once again, love calls you by your name…”
Leonard Cohen
The poet Rilke once opined that surely all art is the result of having been in some danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where one can go no further. Cohen would probably agree with the sentiment. Now, Rilke was seldom wrong, especially in matters of the heart, however, what I think he meant to say was that all great or interesting art is thus derived. That slight difference is also a significant one, since our attention is seldom captured by the expression of everyday comforts.
Stuart Reid’s most recent body of work, though following a sense of continuity within his own practice as a visual artist, is also a drastic departure which was inspired by the sensation of being in emotional extremis, for a variety of reasons. This work is a veritable cartography of the feelings associated with the twin poles of loss and longing.
Many artists aspire to unveil or reveal the sense of objective truth, either through representation or expression, in a locus of near universal values which are shared by the viewer. Fewer artists struggle with the more dangerous realm of subjective truths, personal verities which the viewer will soon come to realize they share but which they may not initially recognize.
Fewer still are the artists who willingly step into the in-between zone, that interstitial zone between the extremities of yes and no. Whether it is the tension between control and accident of his glass notations; or the wrestling match between memory and imagination of his drawings drawn from an immersion into the chaos of mourning, or the love affair between object and environment of his amorphous installation arrangements, his core subject and theme seems to me to remain relatively constant. The polar embrace of presence and absence.
I’m not quite sure why, but the notion of stumbling home from Banff, the ostensible narrative source for the show’s work, suddenly appeared to me to be ironically similar to that of slouching toward Bethlehem, as originally envisioned by another poet of the darkness, Yeats. But rather than wondering what rough beast is being born, we are imagining what smooth creature has survived.
Stuart Reid is both concocting and sharing maps of a territory which seem to meet all the requirements of what early medieval mapmakers called terra incognita, the unknown land. The exception is that his geography is that of an interior territory made of feelings and the meanings we make of them. That, in the end, might be all that any great artistic expression consists of : the application or superimposition of meaning onto the mayhem of quotidian living.
Originally trained as a painter as well as an architect and glass artist, Reid’s strikingly minimal and emotionally raw surfaces capture the essence of what it means to be successfully interdisciplinary. “Our Coupling”, a piece with obvious domestic overtones which also contains uniquely dialectical undertones, conveys a delicately balanced drama with two distinct layers.
The first layer is the intimate relationship between a long term couple, with a journal entry bringing the viewer far closer to a personal recognition of the fragility of friendship than they may be prepared for. The second layer deals with any coupling, any polarized experience of two beings, or even two objects sharing something of near existential consequence.
This deeply subjective material applies equally to the ongoing challenges inherent to sustaining long term friendships or love affairs as well as to the crucial realm of loss, such as the artist’s aesthetic responses to the emotional blow inflicted by the loss of his father. Both realms are significant enough to the view that we all share the conjoined experience of longing, whether the longing for the loved one, or the longing for the lost one. Sometimes both at once.
How does an artist demonstrate and convey these parallel concerns and issues? Just like this. In Reid’s case, he has managed to channel these basic emotions into both a visual language and a medium mutation. In fact, his work embodies what it really means to walk the line between artistic mediums, those of drawing, painting, glassmaking, and installation art, and also to walk the line between two individuals, or situations, engaged in an intimate relationship.
That invisible line is identical, whether it charts the course of a marriage, or the course of a paternal partner. After all, childhood continues, no matter how old we are, until the parent is gone, and it is just as much a partnership as any other emotional transaction. It takes artistic nerve to walk that line so boldly.
The emotional content associated with the loss of the paternal partner fuels much of the experimentation he has utilized in this body of work. Creating a hybrid between the cousins of drawing and writing, and the siblings of glass and painting, his current pieces register as profound sculptural meditations on one of the most important but seldom explored aspects of nature, that of Dinergy.
What is Dinergy? Quite simply put, Dinergy is everything. It is the source of all patterns of any kind in nature, the material motive for the blending of polar opposites, through the balancing of opposing forces without which no pattern is possible. It is essentially duality writ large, and operates at an unconscious level in everything we either do or are.
Through the perpetual frisson between the edges of any opposites, whether male and female, father and son, living or dead, our roughness is polished smooth. We start out as jagged as sharp boulders but end up as smooth as river stones, all as a result of the way our experiences are absorbed and translated into art and poetry. Like the monochrome glass objects and cryptic sentences incised into many of the milky glass canvases.
In Reid’s case, he approaches the challenges of what he calls “maneuvering between dualities” in a multitude of ways and means, but always within a rigorous format which yields classical conceptual art. Merging images with text has long been a part of the modernist vernacular, as has the hyper-graphic over-abundance of self-annihilating handwriting. What’s new here though, is the use of glass as a delivery system for these ideas. Save for Duchamp, view artists felt compelled to allow the transmission of light to coincide with the transmission of notions.
Reid’s notions occur in the form of notations: journal entries in glass and graphite where the message is engulfed by the entropy of the scratched words.
Similarly, the drastically outlined drawn figures overlap with themselves as well as each other, subsuming a clear image and looking hauntingly like those of the Italian sculptor Giacometti.
This, by the way, is not meant to suggest that they resemble the drawings of Giacometti, rather that both artists descended into an existential well and drew from it poetic material which celebrates the brevity and fragility of existence, the shape of which apparently requires the same degree of graphic vulnerability and contingency.
At this stage, a third poet must be called upon to round out the chorus of voices compelled into service in the appreciation of Reid’s work: the American original, Wallace Stevens, who once defined poetry as “the search for the inexplicable…” You’ll notice he did not say the inexpressible, which would have left him nothing to say, but instead designated that which cannot be explained, thus allowing himself wide latitude for rhapsody during his search.
Reid also has a wide latitude for rhapsody, whether it is about the loss of his father, the adverse effects of which course through every scribbled word on glass, or the dynamics of his own intimate family relationship, another duality every bit as pertinent and poignant as that between life and death.
There are, of course, some rough landscapes in the territory of the human heart, the kind of rugged terrain which Rilke alludes to in the creation of all art.
Again I would stipulate, all useful art. The uses of such art? To transmit infinite variations on the meaning of life.
And the meaning of life? The meaning of life is that it ends. But what useful art does is to help us cope with and celebrate this fact, so forceful in its fleeting qualities, by providing us with the comfort of Now. Stuart Reid’s work, walking that fine line between the deeply subjective and the surprisingly universal, offers us the comfort of Now. Who could refuse that?
By
Donald Brackett
“..between the tunnel and the train, between the victim and his
stain, once again once again, love calls you by your name…”
Leonard Cohen
The poet Rilke once opined that surely all art is the result of having been in some danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where one can go no further. Cohen would probably agree with the sentiment. Now, Rilke was seldom wrong, especially in matters of the heart, however, what I think he meant to say was that all great or interesting art is thus derived. That slight difference is also a significant one, since our attention is seldom captured by the expression of everyday comforts.
Stuart Reid’s most recent body of work, though following a sense of continuity within his own practice as a visual artist, is also a drastic departure which was inspired by the sensation of being in emotional extremis, for a variety of reasons. This work is a veritable cartography of the feelings associated with the twin poles of loss and longing.
Many artists aspire to unveil or reveal the sense of objective truth, either through representation or expression, in a locus of near universal values which are shared by the viewer. Fewer artists struggle with the more dangerous realm of subjective truths, personal verities which the viewer will soon come to realize they share but which they may not initially recognize.
Fewer still are the artists who willingly step into the in-between zone, that interstitial zone between the extremities of yes and no. Whether it is the tension between control and accident of his glass notations; or the wrestling match between memory and imagination of his drawings drawn from an immersion into the chaos of mourning, or the love affair between object and environment of his amorphous installation arrangements, his core subject and theme seems to me to remain relatively constant. The polar embrace of presence and absence.
I’m not quite sure why, but the notion of stumbling home from Banff, the ostensible narrative source for the show’s work, suddenly appeared to me to be ironically similar to that of slouching toward Bethlehem, as originally envisioned by another poet of the darkness, Yeats. But rather than wondering what rough beast is being born, we are imagining what smooth creature has survived.
Stuart Reid is both concocting and sharing maps of a territory which seem to meet all the requirements of what early medieval mapmakers called terra incognita, the unknown land. The exception is that his geography is that of an interior territory made of feelings and the meanings we make of them. That, in the end, might be all that any great artistic expression consists of : the application or superimposition of meaning onto the mayhem of quotidian living.
Originally trained as a painter as well as an architect and glass artist, Reid’s strikingly minimal and emotionally raw surfaces capture the essence of what it means to be successfully interdisciplinary. “Our Coupling”, a piece with obvious domestic overtones which also contains uniquely dialectical undertones, conveys a delicately balanced drama with two distinct layers.
The first layer is the intimate relationship between a long term couple, with a journal entry bringing the viewer far closer to a personal recognition of the fragility of friendship than they may be prepared for. The second layer deals with any coupling, any polarized experience of two beings, or even two objects sharing something of near existential consequence.
This deeply subjective material applies equally to the ongoing challenges inherent to sustaining long term friendships or love affairs as well as to the crucial realm of loss, such as the artist’s aesthetic responses to the emotional blow inflicted by the loss of his father. Both realms are significant enough to the view that we all share the conjoined experience of longing, whether the longing for the loved one, or the longing for the lost one. Sometimes both at once.
How does an artist demonstrate and convey these parallel concerns and issues? Just like this. In Reid’s case, he has managed to channel these basic emotions into both a visual language and a medium mutation. In fact, his work embodies what it really means to walk the line between artistic mediums, those of drawing, painting, glassmaking, and installation art, and also to walk the line between two individuals, or situations, engaged in an intimate relationship.
That invisible line is identical, whether it charts the course of a marriage, or the course of a paternal partner. After all, childhood continues, no matter how old we are, until the parent is gone, and it is just as much a partnership as any other emotional transaction. It takes artistic nerve to walk that line so boldly.
The emotional content associated with the loss of the paternal partner fuels much of the experimentation he has utilized in this body of work. Creating a hybrid between the cousins of drawing and writing, and the siblings of glass and painting, his current pieces register as profound sculptural meditations on one of the most important but seldom explored aspects of nature, that of Dinergy.
What is Dinergy? Quite simply put, Dinergy is everything. It is the source of all patterns of any kind in nature, the material motive for the blending of polar opposites, through the balancing of opposing forces without which no pattern is possible. It is essentially duality writ large, and operates at an unconscious level in everything we either do or are.
Through the perpetual frisson between the edges of any opposites, whether male and female, father and son, living or dead, our roughness is polished smooth. We start out as jagged as sharp boulders but end up as smooth as river stones, all as a result of the way our experiences are absorbed and translated into art and poetry. Like the monochrome glass objects and cryptic sentences incised into many of the milky glass canvases.
In Reid’s case, he approaches the challenges of what he calls “maneuvering between dualities” in a multitude of ways and means, but always within a rigorous format which yields classical conceptual art. Merging images with text has long been a part of the modernist vernacular, as has the hyper-graphic over-abundance of self-annihilating handwriting. What’s new here though, is the use of glass as a delivery system for these ideas. Save for Duchamp, view artists felt compelled to allow the transmission of light to coincide with the transmission of notions.
Reid’s notions occur in the form of notations: journal entries in glass and graphite where the message is engulfed by the entropy of the scratched words.
Similarly, the drastically outlined drawn figures overlap with themselves as well as each other, subsuming a clear image and looking hauntingly like those of the Italian sculptor Giacometti.
This, by the way, is not meant to suggest that they resemble the drawings of Giacometti, rather that both artists descended into an existential well and drew from it poetic material which celebrates the brevity and fragility of existence, the shape of which apparently requires the same degree of graphic vulnerability and contingency.
At this stage, a third poet must be called upon to round out the chorus of voices compelled into service in the appreciation of Reid’s work: the American original, Wallace Stevens, who once defined poetry as “the search for the inexplicable…” You’ll notice he did not say the inexpressible, which would have left him nothing to say, but instead designated that which cannot be explained, thus allowing himself wide latitude for rhapsody during his search.
Reid also has a wide latitude for rhapsody, whether it is about the loss of his father, the adverse effects of which course through every scribbled word on glass, or the dynamics of his own intimate family relationship, another duality every bit as pertinent and poignant as that between life and death.
There are, of course, some rough landscapes in the territory of the human heart, the kind of rugged terrain which Rilke alludes to in the creation of all art.
Again I would stipulate, all useful art. The uses of such art? To transmit infinite variations on the meaning of life.
And the meaning of life? The meaning of life is that it ends. But what useful art does is to help us cope with and celebrate this fact, so forceful in its fleeting qualities, by providing us with the comfort of Now. Stuart Reid’s work, walking that fine line between the deeply subjective and the surprisingly universal, offers us the comfort of Now. Who could refuse that?
emblems of the enigma
EMBLEMS OF THE ENIGMA
The Art of Vessna Perunovich
Curated by Donald Brackett
“Human blood is the ink of History…”
Robert Duncan, Poet
Sometimes, when we look closely at works of art, that is, when we let our senses do the thinking and our thoughts do the feeling, we can recognize art objects for what they really might be: intimate conceptual buildings designed by artists for us to live in briefly. Briefly, but also just long enough for them to alter our perceptions, and maybe our attitudes toward life, forever.
The subtle architecture of these temporary places functions as a private theatre providing an ideal opportunity to talk about time, passage, protection, transition, security, domestic life and safe places in general, since we all share such issues. Such insights into the nature of our reality are also exactly the purpose and function of the multi-layered art works which I have curated in this retrospective survey selection called “Emblems of the Enigma: The Art of Vessna Perunovich”.
Her compellingly beautiful paintings, sculptures, mixed media installations, videos and performances are mesmerizing in the manner they use to suggest and situate our experience of these very core elements of our existence. Her collective body of work, an impressive and internationally recognized one, is part of a personal narrative with broad cross-cultural implications, especially in the methods she uses to articulate certain key ideas relating to internal and external exile, time and identity, the body and its boundaries, the home.
There was a strange Medieval Latin term that seemed to presage her style of emotive measurement and representation: perturbationes animi, a term which includes all states of feeling and thought to which human beings are dependent on the outside world. Which is to say, that part of our experience which holds us ransom to the real world. But how does one express the enigma of this, our condition?
As if in response, the surrealist poet Andre Breton once remarked that “Painting, photography and sculpture are lamentable expedients for expressing the ineffable, but they will have to do until something better comes along.”
I would like to suggest that something better has come along: a format for the manifestation of art objects which combines and merges all the above disciplines, plus a few others. I am of course, referring to the methodology of mixed media conceptual installation, a format which also includes theatre, performance, video, poetry, even the very air we breathe while in the gallery or museum.
This multi-media and multi-layered format, as evidenced by Perunovich’s own subtle conceptual architecture, allows us to explore some of the more important themes facing all of us as we navigate into a new century and a new millennium. This is the century when all prior artistic formats must coalesce.
Perunovich has managed to accumulate a remarkable series of physical insights which clarify the relativity of our reality in a sometimes harrowing and often elegant manner. She has, in her work of the last nine years particularly, constructed a personal theatre which celebrates the temporary places she conceives and designs as part of her actively engaged aesthetic. Each installation is a temporary place providing a striking scenic stage for varied contemplations, primarily on the nature of mortality and human interaction. Each is an exploration of and elaboration on the solemn geography of human limits.
A piece such as “Soul Searching” for instance, from 2007, is practically a living lament to the limits of human consciousness: an apparently bloody book
which is the sole result of all our religious projections and their frenzied toll.
As well, each individual piece is a portion of a greater sequence, almost like a diagram or equation which leads the intrepid viewer to a grasp of some natural and supernatural law managing all behaviour, or even our thoughts about behaviour. In retrospect, and as the pieces themselves demonstrate, her oeuvre has been a past puzzle to be assembled in the future. In other words, here and now.
As such, her contributions to our cross-cultural dialogue are profound in their content and charming in their context: they present a museum of dreams for our consideration, dreams which are indistinguishable from the everyday life which appears to manufacture them.
The works in this survey exhibition, whether in the form of drawings, paintings, wall works, sculptures, assemblages, video projections, or performance, are all linked by one single thread that frays off into multiple directions : the subject of shelter.
In the 2006 “Puzzle Pieces ” series for example, there is a special kind of obscure homesickness at work: are we witnessing a nostalgia for the house we were born in, for the country we used to live in, or for a home we have not even yet discovered? The answer is: yes. And there is no nostalgia quite as poignant as the nostalgia for a future we innocently hope somehow to construct from our own origins.
The puzzle pieces in question evoke an existential homesickness, they are contour maps which feel domestic, with family dynamics often reflected in symbolic house and figure shapes, but their core message still seems to be the obscure nature of human identity, reduced to emblems which register as equations or diagrams of sanctuary.
This notion, explored in the exhibition through the use of several quite different pieces from different periods and in different media, is further attached to her profound grasp of the primal idea of haven, of protected enclosure, of treeless treehouses and fortifications, of childhood concepts for seclusion in the safe place.
In short, artworks that manifest not only a subjective structure but also a universal one which is part of our shared hardware. This intricate zone of intimacy is immediately played out in all of her works chosen for inclusion in this survey show. “Continuum”, from 2000, one of my favourite sculptures, is an ideal example, in three dimensional sculptural form, of something she often also mutually explores in what I can only call a four-dimensional format. It’s a diagram of time, not just passing but morphing before our eyes.
This four-dimensionality is sometimes literally expressed, as in those media of duration such as film, video or performance, as in the case of time-based pieces like “Hanging By A Thread” from the recent Story Girls exhibit, but it is equally explored in certain physical objects which are nonetheless sculptures in four dimensions, such as the highly mutable “Couples” (1998-2007), with its ever shifting allegiance to containment. Which is just another form of shelter, after all.
While literal in the “Continuum” emblem, with its child’s legs morphing into an adult’s boots, the continuum principle per se is metaphorical in many other works, such as the compelling performance piece she executed in London in 2003, “Transitory Places: I Hug The World and The World Hugs Me Back” (a piece which has surprising resonances with Joseph Beuys’ own “I Love America and America Loves Me”.)
Her performance piece and its documentation in photographs is essentially an exploration of thresholds: spaces between people which can easily be amplified into spaces between nations. Such spaces between countries are often occupied by the ghostly presence of exiles from either one or the other, or both.
It is also a tender if unsettling emblem for the relationship between an artist and the public which views her works. As a threshold dweller, she also aptly gives credence to what Arthur Danto once identified as the basic definition of the art object: it is an embodied meaning.
All Perunovich’s works are clear examples of embodied meanings. Embodiments of shelter, displacement and diffused family origins abound in her work. This is an exhibition which searches for the why hidden in the how: because after all, in the end, our whole world is merely an empire of exiles.
“Life isn’t one straight line. Most of us have to be trans-planted, like a tree, before we blossom…” the artist Louise Nevelson once observed, another expatriate sculptor who harboured a nostalgia for the future.
The notion that foreign rather than native soil is more fruitful for us is an
intriguing one, especially since it appears to run counter to our intuitions.
Perhaps it is more the case for artists, who owe an aesthetic allegiance as well as
an ethnic or political one, and perhaps artists are always inviting us, through
their work, to consider wider and less restrictive horizons than our meager
maps allow.
Perunovich’s emblematic objects and images chart a territory quite exclusive
of political or ethnic maps. They may be territories of desire, as suggested by a
recent piece’s title, but each one is also a threshold experience outside
cartography, and all it might take for us to enter these expanded territories is the
desire to do so.
We must pass through such a threshold just as we pass through our own bodies: in wonderment and awe. And the artworks which approximate our passage, such as one of the best examples of her allegorical thresholds, the 1998 piece called “Aftermath”, in which sculpture and pedestal dissolve into one another, and a single drop of textile blood travels downward to the gravity-laden floor, always suggest a solidified flow which is literally our history in transit, our experience turning into our identity, and our identity creating our relationships.
In this kind of simple yet staggering tableau, one typical of all her output, we can see the traces of what one historian once called empathic unsettlement, the ability to put oneself in another’s position without taking the other’s place. It sanctifies the sorrow of political or social displacement common to exiles everywhere, and accomplishes what Lynne Bell once termed an “engagement of the viewer’s empathic imagination”, thus creating a “political space for critical rememberance”. Such insights are both reassuring and disconcerting at the same time.
Other expressions of continuum, the most obvious one being the repeated use of crimson fabric which suggests to me that distressing ink of history, abound throughout her thoughtful oeuvre: there is a continuous thread devoted to contemplating sanctuary, domicile, the house, and most ironically, privacy in public. The proposed purpose of art, as I see it reflected in every piece this artist has produced since her arrival in North America back in 1988, is both simple and striking: art is a means of calculating the exchange value between spirit and matter. Just as money can be considered frozen desire, the collective bodies of work by Perunovich amount to frozen spirit. The currency of consciousness itself.
“Bloodlines”, the 2006 drawing installation consisting of a narrow, almost calligraphic scroll is the most tangible example. This distressing merger between poetry and science, with its endless paper coils of dripped and scratched vital fluid, is a veritable diagram of irony: the very substance which is the core of our genealogies, our own blood, is also used to write the history of our follies on the world stage.
Perunovich’s most recent video pieces both appear to quantitatively approach the subjects of construction and destruction, as well as the entropy of structure in general, including the structure of relationships.
In “Infinite Wall”, 2007, she is seen enacting a tranquil performance of assembly and unraveling, adding and subtracting a string-based sculpture on a blood-red wall , while softly humming the tune from Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy”. The task and the humming are one.
There is a striking set of visual and cognitive contrasts here which somehow manage to indict all of European history as a misadventure in mayhem concealed beneath romantic and heroic splendour. The building of walls becomes a metaphor for our entire place and role in the world, one self-evident especially in the recent history of Europe.
Meanwhile, in the video “Borderless”, also 2007, she and another figure traverse a passage that precludes meeting, they trace movements towards and away from each other before the same red wall, until they eventually meet and swoon away together in a surprisingly emotional climax. Her economy of means for conveying the feelings in such deceptively simple pieces is startling both for its austerity and its paradoxical impact on the viewer.
This is an artist who has long investigated the primal territory of the heart’s home. Her work dwells, emotionally and philosophically, on the subject of boundaries, both physical and psychic, and by yielding a shape to the invisible, she invites the viewer to dwell momentarily in their own safe place: a shelter bounded by the installation.
A shelter unbounded by the mind of the maker or the viewer; a shelter designating the territory which has no map, or is itself a map without a territory.
So it is with the construction of a conceptual building such as Perunovich’s overall body of work: a theatre for the elaboration of fleeting ideas that coalesce into an experience which is transitory, fragile, sensuous, and cerebral and yet nonetheless solid, actual and able to be occupied, briefly by our bodies, permanently by our minds, eternally by our spirits.
Some of the artworks in this survey selection strike me as being mental tattoos, which after all is just another way of appreciating the functioning of emblems in our lives.
If the visitor can slow down their visit, to a standstill if at all possible, they will come to appreciate the generous elegance and almost opulent splendour which has been devoted to making their brief passage through her installations a heartfelt one.
As a gifted artist with a compulsion to fully explore the limits and edges of her varied media, she has succeeded, by actually using Time itself as one of her raw materials, in building what the poet Goyen called a “house of breath”. She is interested in using the inherently narrative function of her art to create meaningful situations and appropriate symbols of our collective history.
An unavoidable part of that shared history is the violence of dislocation, the burden of displacement, the energy of exile, the politics of sustaining identity under threat; in fact the very conflict between the left and right sides of our brain which sentences us to life in the third dimension in the first place. Can we know more than what we think we know? Do we even know what we think? How do we reconcile the left side and right side of ourselves which causes the apparent battle between the arts and sciences?
How do we resolve apparently concrete duality itself? These are the perplexing questions her work offers to the thoughtful viewer. The works themselves are those questions. The answers, if there are any, are hidden inside each of us, in those damp places of ultimate exile.
With each new addition to her ongoing practice she has shown herself to be a unique kind of architect: designing and making buildings made of time, houses made of breath. She has persistently and consistently chosen to create emblems of the enigma. This is surely the subtle architecture of temporary places in action.
What is an emblem? Originating in the Middle Ages, when belief was
reinforced with behavioural modification, it is one of a number of symbolic
forms which bear witness to a systematic program of composing, compiling,
transposing and recording allegorical imagery.
Emblems, iconologies, symbologies, and systems of signification all share
something in common with each other and with visual artworks. They tell a
story, allegorically, visually and poetically. Most emblems originally consisted
of three portions: the lemma, or motto; an arresting visual content; and an
explanation of its meaning contained within its own structure. To that degree,
all emblems are signs in the formal sense, and as such, the artist featured in this
survey show produces an exemplary kind of allegorical sign, the structural
analysis of which using semiological methods reveals that her mixed media
works qualify as formal signs per se.
This is specially so since a sign is defined as consisting of the signifier and the
signified, and in the case of this artist, those elements are inextricably blended
and merged with the physical character of each piece of work. The signifier is
the art object, the signified is its meaning as perceived by the viewer.
In her most recent bodies of mixed media work, in my opinion also her finest to date, Vessna Perunovich continues a trajectory which explores a wide range of non-physical geographies, using a specific talent for feeling and projecting emotions which are available to everyone but which we only seem to fully recognize in the subtle otherness of formal artworks.
But regardless of the formal shape they take individually, her work as whole still conveys that startling continuity, and lends itself to the extended reverie of story-telling in order to assimilate the sustained state of intense focus and emotional rapture which runs across her entire artistic practice.
So it is that works from a decade ago manage to maintain their grip on the imagination. Works like “Tiny Deaths” and “Couples”, and “Splitting Up”,
all from 1998, share a certain vibration which is later elaborated and animated within videos, performances and other later sculptural objects. Yet each object, while also performing a role in a larger conceptual and almost theatrical tableux, or what linguists call the fabula, still nonetheless has a significant aura of its own. One that demands private and uninterrupted observation and which subsequently reveals its own little microcosm of the narrative.
“Tiny Deaths” is a small but intense sculpture consisting of a file box containing unknown contents which illuminate a Buddha hand hovering above it. One gets the feeling that a collection of tiny deaths might occur moment by moment, which also means that perhaps there is a large death surrounding many tiny lives. But we don’t know why we feel this. An empathic exile has observed it however, and we feel the impact of her sharing.
“Splitting Up” is an installation piece which captures the existential essence of relationships, whether personal or political, or both. It seems important to note that the kind of antique saw used as one of its compositional components requires two people in order to function as a cutting implement.
Uncannily, the shadows cast by the red strings which form the bed (shadows are always as important in her work as the objects which cast them) are also spookily similar to the graphic arrangement she would later explore in her “Fencescape” works nearly a decade later, with its wall made of skin cells. This is continuum writ large.
And again, strangely, yet so very powerfully, “Tiny Deaths” also relates to a recent piece done also almost a decade later, “Soul Searching”, 2007, and it resonates in a most alarming way within the entire emblematic narrative.
“Soul Searching” is an installation of two items on what can best be described as a deacon’s bench: a bowl full of red stained latex gloves, next to book saturated by red pigment floating through pin-pricked pages. The book’s message has been transmogrified into a powdery substance which resembles bloody dust.
There is a gripping relationship between “Tiny Deaths”, 1998, and “Soul Searching”, 2007. The hand that hovers above the filing drawer containing a history of who knows what miniature mayhem, is also the hand that must pick and handle the book imbued with a red powdery and blood-like substance.
Except, of course, for those intrepid enough to eschew the use of the gloves and to handle the book directly, thus taking away little microscopic fragments of the sculpture when they leave the gallery. One can almost imagine those visitors going home and needing to wash off the crimson ink, however it is not quite so easy to cleanse oneself of our history.
The conceptual fables, a word derived from fabula, which abound in Perunovich’s work are as elusive as dreams and as subtle as sentient air. There is a reason for this, which also helps clarify their sometimes layered meanings.
Maps of meaning are walls constructed around the inexplicable fact of our being here, and her works tell us: look how they can be built and destroyed so easily. Like Nevelson’s insight into the nourishing aspects of the non-indigenous, Perunovich’s mixed media pieces celebrate a kind of anti-aboriginal stance, meaning that they focus on the virtues of being somewhat unsettled.
Our world is rife with references to the comforts of home and hearth: to settle in, to settle ourselves, to avoid being unsettled, since settlement itself is the gauge by which we measure our distances from the nomadic to the supposedly civilized state permanence.
But all of Perunovich’s works suggest that permanence is illusory, something we merely imagine for ourselves in order to carry on, and that the unique state of unsettlement is far more in keeping with our true condition. Needless to say, such artworks are by their very nature, somewhat unsettling.
That fragile membrane between the artist and her work, between the work and the public viewer and between the broader political and cultural discourses that result, are the key factors in what I see as this artist’s main cartographic function : art objects as a system for conducting metaphysical measurements.
That threshold, between the artist’s experience and the public’s recognition of their own, is where the sign becomes active and the emblem is invoked.
Certain artists and their work seem ideally suited to the rarified task of making such spiritual measurements, the kind that become emblematic of the enigma of both our existence and the identities that encapsulate it.
Some even manage to approach and communicate these ineffable sensations with a nearly shocking sense of clarity: boldly inviting the invisible to materialize before our eyes. Perunovich does this through a concerted emphasis on what the ancient Greeks referred to as anamnesis, the power of memory to memorialize itself through a kind of unconscious mourning.
Her work of the last twelve years or so has been quietly building a consistent language of images and objects designed to achieve her aesthetic agenda with maximum psychological impact. This overall continuity is of three major sorts: thematic continuity, in terms of the ideas explored; material continuity, in terms of the media and objects utilized, and psychic continuity, in terms of the personal feelings she is able to convey within a wider public and political context.
Since we all share some degree of complicity in today’s disintegrating world, we are able to actively enter into a dialogue with her work which results in unearthing the overall narrative, the story which her art tells us. Or rather, stories. The voice of her visual art, like the voice of an author, remains constant, while the stories that swirl through that voice shift focus and develop a meta-narrative, one based on what I believe is a compelling purpose. In her case, the stories and their purpose are one in the same.
As an artist, one of her roles is to provide a kind of evidence, for something which might pass unnoticed if not for a prolonged reverie state: evidence of the melting of time, the dislocation of space, the dissonance of mind, the mutability of self and other.
Perunovich’s aesthetic agenda, and the works that make it manifest, is strongly aligned with this kind of awareness, the realization that the once solid ground of history has become a softer, swamp-like environment. Her works are veritable diagrams of transition as the only permanent state. They frequently, if unconsciously, also mirror the building and tearing down of walls between people.
Often, her videos are also live documentations of the construction, deconstruction or performative aspects which otherwise silently reside in the static realm of her drawings, paintings and sculptures. They animate the emotions relating to building and destroying, using themselves as emblems for that special kind of entropy that accompanies every single move forward through transitional states.
Her pieces are the legible and visible patterns which reflect the wide range of feelings from fear and frivolity, to fury and fantasy, to exile and return, to enclosure and freedom, to living and dying. From the psychic dissonance arising from displacement, to the strange sad joy of reinstatement as a citizen of sentience, the works themselves are signposts on a pilgrimage enacted to both ritualize exile and to embody the entropy of exile.
Two such signposts are the related series of newer pieces called “Currency”, a video installation consisting of an apparent spill of blood spreading across a white void, projected behind one of her familiar elastic fences, and “History Repeating”, also from 2007, a sequence of panel paintings which capture the same spill in two dimensions.
Both appear to be daring time capsules which contain visual evidence, almost in a scientific format, of one of the principal messages behind much of her work, a feeling most accurately summed up in a line of poetry from Robert Duncan: Human blood is the ink of history.
I like to think of her art objects, whatever their medium, as metaphysical mneomics (another manifestation of anamnesis) as devices designed to help us memorize the repetitive feelings provoked by our déjà vu like existence. The patterns are ritualized in her artworks, since she manages to perform the role of empath so well, registering and calibrating the emotions associated with recurring parts of life and making contour maps of their topography. So that future travelers will remember our own brief journeys here.
And ironically, continuum itself, the link between two things or a series of things which blend into one another so gradually that we can’t detect when one becomes the other, is one of her principal subjects.
Oddly enough, those same child’s leg’s and shoes were also clearly featured in another incarnation as the focal point of her video made some seven years later, “Hanging By A Thread”, in which an unseen girl (actually the artist herself) plays on a playground swing surrounded by the unnerving sounds of screaming seagulls.
Perunovich asks us to consider the possibility of a future where emotions, and the enigmatic emblems which embody them, can be studied as if they were music. The reason? Because this is music. Frozen music. In a very real way, she engages in the orchestration of objects which contain the preserved energy of human emotions. Like the crystalline amber of certain ancient trees, these works memorialize those moments in which our emotions start to throw their weight around.
Two of the best examples of the empathic functioning in her work are found in “Blood and Belonging” and “Towers of Belief”, from 2004 and 2005 respectively, in which the barriers between human beings are reduced to the stark emblems of both simple walls and religious symbols. Such walls are always manifestations of human conflict, first internal and then externalized into the environment. Their deceptive simplicity conceals a gigantic sorrow.
In the end, the symbols are also walls of course, but of a different sort, walls of meaning imposing inclusion and exclusion onto spiritual experience. The obvious impact of using the cross, crescent and star images of the three most conflicted and yet most intimately connected religions is a way of creating a head-on collision with our most precious and dangerous delusions.
This must be what supreme disillusionment feels like, perhaps expressed so succinctly in a series like “Dark Tales”, when engaged in the sort of psychological weightlifting that I suggest Perunovich’s work represents. The presence of three key elements, the blood spill, the grey figure adjacent, and the chalkboard with erasures, suggests to me that the tales are dark because we never learn our lessons from history.
In her case especially, Perunovich manages to capture something fleeting that often artists overlook, or underlook: the sensation of what it feels like to engage in ritualistic looking. According to Merleau Ponty, our enigma is that our bodies simultaneously see and are seen, thus what we use for looking outward can also be used for looking inward, at ourselves.
In this regard, Perunovich has an exemplary grasp on what it means to try to grapple with inchoate and sometimes incomprehensible feelings and sensations associated with being alive. This is why I have coined the phrase which serves as the title for this survey exhibition: emblems of the enigma. She regularly produces emblems of the emotions provoked by our responses to the enigma of our existence.
But Perunovich, while contouring the emotional content slightly, definitely insists that the texture of emotions in her works remains as rough and abrasive as they need to be to call attention to what she wants us to feel and see.
Such a subtle study of both the dynamics and stasis of human interaction will undoubtedly be developed more concretely by science in the future. For us still living in the present, we have the presence of artworks such as both the “Wasted Youth” and Vicious Cycle” series from 2007, each one a harrowing sequence of advertisements for the abandonment of restraint in portraiture, seeking to portray people at a sub-humus level with a shattering intimacy that goes far beyond mere personality or character.
Her art objects do not necessarily denote meanings, they don’t, in other words, point at something and describe it. But they are connotations of meanings, suggesting that they can wear the conceptual clothing necessary to the job at hand. The job of expressing inexpressible feelings for things that are inexplicable.
Amongst these many diverse objects in mixed media and interdisciplinary contexts, I am delighted to report that there is also still a vestige of a very old and even ancient world in her overall sensibility. I think painting is still very important indeed, especially in our era, and I was delighted to discover that in addition to exploring her fabula in videos, installations, performances, drawings and conceptual, somewhat neo-surrealist sculpture, she has also produced a substantial body of painted work.
It too has a consistency enhanced by the fact that they are frequently sequential and serial, so it was a great pleasure to be able to situate her paintings within the overall scope of her output, and to show through selection, how the paintings further manifest a kind of emblematic cartography of feelings.
Of course, even though she still embraces the desire for painted images, she does so in her own distinctive manner, eschewing the use of traditional art materials in favour of her own palette of ingredients more often associated with the building trade.
Not surprisingly perhaps, given her interest in the drama of domesticity as it originates in the home and extends out into the world of society and politics, she produces her paintings with industrial housing materials, such as plaster and house paint, as opposed to the pretty tools of the trade in former times.
Each medium she uses is enlisted for a specific purpose, and the trajectory of this exhibition travels smoothly from its cardinal points of Home, Exile, Separation, Transition, Refuge and Sanctuary. The final suggestion being that home is in our heads, rather than necessarily in the soil of the homeland.
Beginning to think of the mind and spirit as a kind of psychic soil can help us come to grips with the pressures implicit in projecting and overly identifying with strictly physical geographies. It is, after all, the non-physical geographies of the imagination which are being mapped so incessantly by this gifted artist.
Here are documents in a dramatic tongue which give witness to things both horrid and hellish, while also being imbued with a poetic elegance and beauty that disorients us long enough to awaken from our nightmares, which in the end, might be the true purpose of all important art. History, another poet once remarked, is a dream from which we cannot awake.
Vessna Perunovich traces the stains from the ink of history in works that approach the threshold of awareness and situate us there gently, but with passion. After all, inexplicable doesn’t necessarily mean inexpressible.
Donald Brackett
Curator/Critic
The exhibition Emblems of the Enigma traveled across Canada to six public museums: Peterborough, Mississauga, Cambridge, Algoma, Halifax and Kelowna, and is accompanied by a handsomely illustrated catalogue.
The Art of Vessna Perunovich
Curated by Donald Brackett
“Human blood is the ink of History…”
Robert Duncan, Poet
Sometimes, when we look closely at works of art, that is, when we let our senses do the thinking and our thoughts do the feeling, we can recognize art objects for what they really might be: intimate conceptual buildings designed by artists for us to live in briefly. Briefly, but also just long enough for them to alter our perceptions, and maybe our attitudes toward life, forever.
The subtle architecture of these temporary places functions as a private theatre providing an ideal opportunity to talk about time, passage, protection, transition, security, domestic life and safe places in general, since we all share such issues. Such insights into the nature of our reality are also exactly the purpose and function of the multi-layered art works which I have curated in this retrospective survey selection called “Emblems of the Enigma: The Art of Vessna Perunovich”.
Her compellingly beautiful paintings, sculptures, mixed media installations, videos and performances are mesmerizing in the manner they use to suggest and situate our experience of these very core elements of our existence. Her collective body of work, an impressive and internationally recognized one, is part of a personal narrative with broad cross-cultural implications, especially in the methods she uses to articulate certain key ideas relating to internal and external exile, time and identity, the body and its boundaries, the home.
There was a strange Medieval Latin term that seemed to presage her style of emotive measurement and representation: perturbationes animi, a term which includes all states of feeling and thought to which human beings are dependent on the outside world. Which is to say, that part of our experience which holds us ransom to the real world. But how does one express the enigma of this, our condition?
As if in response, the surrealist poet Andre Breton once remarked that “Painting, photography and sculpture are lamentable expedients for expressing the ineffable, but they will have to do until something better comes along.”
I would like to suggest that something better has come along: a format for the manifestation of art objects which combines and merges all the above disciplines, plus a few others. I am of course, referring to the methodology of mixed media conceptual installation, a format which also includes theatre, performance, video, poetry, even the very air we breathe while in the gallery or museum.
This multi-media and multi-layered format, as evidenced by Perunovich’s own subtle conceptual architecture, allows us to explore some of the more important themes facing all of us as we navigate into a new century and a new millennium. This is the century when all prior artistic formats must coalesce.
Perunovich has managed to accumulate a remarkable series of physical insights which clarify the relativity of our reality in a sometimes harrowing and often elegant manner. She has, in her work of the last nine years particularly, constructed a personal theatre which celebrates the temporary places she conceives and designs as part of her actively engaged aesthetic. Each installation is a temporary place providing a striking scenic stage for varied contemplations, primarily on the nature of mortality and human interaction. Each is an exploration of and elaboration on the solemn geography of human limits.
A piece such as “Soul Searching” for instance, from 2007, is practically a living lament to the limits of human consciousness: an apparently bloody book
which is the sole result of all our religious projections and their frenzied toll.
As well, each individual piece is a portion of a greater sequence, almost like a diagram or equation which leads the intrepid viewer to a grasp of some natural and supernatural law managing all behaviour, or even our thoughts about behaviour. In retrospect, and as the pieces themselves demonstrate, her oeuvre has been a past puzzle to be assembled in the future. In other words, here and now.
As such, her contributions to our cross-cultural dialogue are profound in their content and charming in their context: they present a museum of dreams for our consideration, dreams which are indistinguishable from the everyday life which appears to manufacture them.
The works in this survey exhibition, whether in the form of drawings, paintings, wall works, sculptures, assemblages, video projections, or performance, are all linked by one single thread that frays off into multiple directions : the subject of shelter.
In the 2006 “Puzzle Pieces ” series for example, there is a special kind of obscure homesickness at work: are we witnessing a nostalgia for the house we were born in, for the country we used to live in, or for a home we have not even yet discovered? The answer is: yes. And there is no nostalgia quite as poignant as the nostalgia for a future we innocently hope somehow to construct from our own origins.
The puzzle pieces in question evoke an existential homesickness, they are contour maps which feel domestic, with family dynamics often reflected in symbolic house and figure shapes, but their core message still seems to be the obscure nature of human identity, reduced to emblems which register as equations or diagrams of sanctuary.
This notion, explored in the exhibition through the use of several quite different pieces from different periods and in different media, is further attached to her profound grasp of the primal idea of haven, of protected enclosure, of treeless treehouses and fortifications, of childhood concepts for seclusion in the safe place.
In short, artworks that manifest not only a subjective structure but also a universal one which is part of our shared hardware. This intricate zone of intimacy is immediately played out in all of her works chosen for inclusion in this survey show. “Continuum”, from 2000, one of my favourite sculptures, is an ideal example, in three dimensional sculptural form, of something she often also mutually explores in what I can only call a four-dimensional format. It’s a diagram of time, not just passing but morphing before our eyes.
This four-dimensionality is sometimes literally expressed, as in those media of duration such as film, video or performance, as in the case of time-based pieces like “Hanging By A Thread” from the recent Story Girls exhibit, but it is equally explored in certain physical objects which are nonetheless sculptures in four dimensions, such as the highly mutable “Couples” (1998-2007), with its ever shifting allegiance to containment. Which is just another form of shelter, after all.
While literal in the “Continuum” emblem, with its child’s legs morphing into an adult’s boots, the continuum principle per se is metaphorical in many other works, such as the compelling performance piece she executed in London in 2003, “Transitory Places: I Hug The World and The World Hugs Me Back” (a piece which has surprising resonances with Joseph Beuys’ own “I Love America and America Loves Me”.)
Her performance piece and its documentation in photographs is essentially an exploration of thresholds: spaces between people which can easily be amplified into spaces between nations. Such spaces between countries are often occupied by the ghostly presence of exiles from either one or the other, or both.
It is also a tender if unsettling emblem for the relationship between an artist and the public which views her works. As a threshold dweller, she also aptly gives credence to what Arthur Danto once identified as the basic definition of the art object: it is an embodied meaning.
All Perunovich’s works are clear examples of embodied meanings. Embodiments of shelter, displacement and diffused family origins abound in her work. This is an exhibition which searches for the why hidden in the how: because after all, in the end, our whole world is merely an empire of exiles.
“Life isn’t one straight line. Most of us have to be trans-planted, like a tree, before we blossom…” the artist Louise Nevelson once observed, another expatriate sculptor who harboured a nostalgia for the future.
The notion that foreign rather than native soil is more fruitful for us is an
intriguing one, especially since it appears to run counter to our intuitions.
Perhaps it is more the case for artists, who owe an aesthetic allegiance as well as
an ethnic or political one, and perhaps artists are always inviting us, through
their work, to consider wider and less restrictive horizons than our meager
maps allow.
Perunovich’s emblematic objects and images chart a territory quite exclusive
of political or ethnic maps. They may be territories of desire, as suggested by a
recent piece’s title, but each one is also a threshold experience outside
cartography, and all it might take for us to enter these expanded territories is the
desire to do so.
We must pass through such a threshold just as we pass through our own bodies: in wonderment and awe. And the artworks which approximate our passage, such as one of the best examples of her allegorical thresholds, the 1998 piece called “Aftermath”, in which sculpture and pedestal dissolve into one another, and a single drop of textile blood travels downward to the gravity-laden floor, always suggest a solidified flow which is literally our history in transit, our experience turning into our identity, and our identity creating our relationships.
In this kind of simple yet staggering tableau, one typical of all her output, we can see the traces of what one historian once called empathic unsettlement, the ability to put oneself in another’s position without taking the other’s place. It sanctifies the sorrow of political or social displacement common to exiles everywhere, and accomplishes what Lynne Bell once termed an “engagement of the viewer’s empathic imagination”, thus creating a “political space for critical rememberance”. Such insights are both reassuring and disconcerting at the same time.
Other expressions of continuum, the most obvious one being the repeated use of crimson fabric which suggests to me that distressing ink of history, abound throughout her thoughtful oeuvre: there is a continuous thread devoted to contemplating sanctuary, domicile, the house, and most ironically, privacy in public. The proposed purpose of art, as I see it reflected in every piece this artist has produced since her arrival in North America back in 1988, is both simple and striking: art is a means of calculating the exchange value between spirit and matter. Just as money can be considered frozen desire, the collective bodies of work by Perunovich amount to frozen spirit. The currency of consciousness itself.
“Bloodlines”, the 2006 drawing installation consisting of a narrow, almost calligraphic scroll is the most tangible example. This distressing merger between poetry and science, with its endless paper coils of dripped and scratched vital fluid, is a veritable diagram of irony: the very substance which is the core of our genealogies, our own blood, is also used to write the history of our follies on the world stage.
Perunovich’s most recent video pieces both appear to quantitatively approach the subjects of construction and destruction, as well as the entropy of structure in general, including the structure of relationships.
In “Infinite Wall”, 2007, she is seen enacting a tranquil performance of assembly and unraveling, adding and subtracting a string-based sculpture on a blood-red wall , while softly humming the tune from Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy”. The task and the humming are one.
There is a striking set of visual and cognitive contrasts here which somehow manage to indict all of European history as a misadventure in mayhem concealed beneath romantic and heroic splendour. The building of walls becomes a metaphor for our entire place and role in the world, one self-evident especially in the recent history of Europe.
Meanwhile, in the video “Borderless”, also 2007, she and another figure traverse a passage that precludes meeting, they trace movements towards and away from each other before the same red wall, until they eventually meet and swoon away together in a surprisingly emotional climax. Her economy of means for conveying the feelings in such deceptively simple pieces is startling both for its austerity and its paradoxical impact on the viewer.
This is an artist who has long investigated the primal territory of the heart’s home. Her work dwells, emotionally and philosophically, on the subject of boundaries, both physical and psychic, and by yielding a shape to the invisible, she invites the viewer to dwell momentarily in their own safe place: a shelter bounded by the installation.
A shelter unbounded by the mind of the maker or the viewer; a shelter designating the territory which has no map, or is itself a map without a territory.
So it is with the construction of a conceptual building such as Perunovich’s overall body of work: a theatre for the elaboration of fleeting ideas that coalesce into an experience which is transitory, fragile, sensuous, and cerebral and yet nonetheless solid, actual and able to be occupied, briefly by our bodies, permanently by our minds, eternally by our spirits.
Some of the artworks in this survey selection strike me as being mental tattoos, which after all is just another way of appreciating the functioning of emblems in our lives.
If the visitor can slow down their visit, to a standstill if at all possible, they will come to appreciate the generous elegance and almost opulent splendour which has been devoted to making their brief passage through her installations a heartfelt one.
As a gifted artist with a compulsion to fully explore the limits and edges of her varied media, she has succeeded, by actually using Time itself as one of her raw materials, in building what the poet Goyen called a “house of breath”. She is interested in using the inherently narrative function of her art to create meaningful situations and appropriate symbols of our collective history.
An unavoidable part of that shared history is the violence of dislocation, the burden of displacement, the energy of exile, the politics of sustaining identity under threat; in fact the very conflict between the left and right sides of our brain which sentences us to life in the third dimension in the first place. Can we know more than what we think we know? Do we even know what we think? How do we reconcile the left side and right side of ourselves which causes the apparent battle between the arts and sciences?
How do we resolve apparently concrete duality itself? These are the perplexing questions her work offers to the thoughtful viewer. The works themselves are those questions. The answers, if there are any, are hidden inside each of us, in those damp places of ultimate exile.
With each new addition to her ongoing practice she has shown herself to be a unique kind of architect: designing and making buildings made of time, houses made of breath. She has persistently and consistently chosen to create emblems of the enigma. This is surely the subtle architecture of temporary places in action.
What is an emblem? Originating in the Middle Ages, when belief was
reinforced with behavioural modification, it is one of a number of symbolic
forms which bear witness to a systematic program of composing, compiling,
transposing and recording allegorical imagery.
Emblems, iconologies, symbologies, and systems of signification all share
something in common with each other and with visual artworks. They tell a
story, allegorically, visually and poetically. Most emblems originally consisted
of three portions: the lemma, or motto; an arresting visual content; and an
explanation of its meaning contained within its own structure. To that degree,
all emblems are signs in the formal sense, and as such, the artist featured in this
survey show produces an exemplary kind of allegorical sign, the structural
analysis of which using semiological methods reveals that her mixed media
works qualify as formal signs per se.
This is specially so since a sign is defined as consisting of the signifier and the
signified, and in the case of this artist, those elements are inextricably blended
and merged with the physical character of each piece of work. The signifier is
the art object, the signified is its meaning as perceived by the viewer.
In her most recent bodies of mixed media work, in my opinion also her finest to date, Vessna Perunovich continues a trajectory which explores a wide range of non-physical geographies, using a specific talent for feeling and projecting emotions which are available to everyone but which we only seem to fully recognize in the subtle otherness of formal artworks.
But regardless of the formal shape they take individually, her work as whole still conveys that startling continuity, and lends itself to the extended reverie of story-telling in order to assimilate the sustained state of intense focus and emotional rapture which runs across her entire artistic practice.
So it is that works from a decade ago manage to maintain their grip on the imagination. Works like “Tiny Deaths” and “Couples”, and “Splitting Up”,
all from 1998, share a certain vibration which is later elaborated and animated within videos, performances and other later sculptural objects. Yet each object, while also performing a role in a larger conceptual and almost theatrical tableux, or what linguists call the fabula, still nonetheless has a significant aura of its own. One that demands private and uninterrupted observation and which subsequently reveals its own little microcosm of the narrative.
“Tiny Deaths” is a small but intense sculpture consisting of a file box containing unknown contents which illuminate a Buddha hand hovering above it. One gets the feeling that a collection of tiny deaths might occur moment by moment, which also means that perhaps there is a large death surrounding many tiny lives. But we don’t know why we feel this. An empathic exile has observed it however, and we feel the impact of her sharing.
“Splitting Up” is an installation piece which captures the existential essence of relationships, whether personal or political, or both. It seems important to note that the kind of antique saw used as one of its compositional components requires two people in order to function as a cutting implement.
Uncannily, the shadows cast by the red strings which form the bed (shadows are always as important in her work as the objects which cast them) are also spookily similar to the graphic arrangement she would later explore in her “Fencescape” works nearly a decade later, with its wall made of skin cells. This is continuum writ large.
And again, strangely, yet so very powerfully, “Tiny Deaths” also relates to a recent piece done also almost a decade later, “Soul Searching”, 2007, and it resonates in a most alarming way within the entire emblematic narrative.
“Soul Searching” is an installation of two items on what can best be described as a deacon’s bench: a bowl full of red stained latex gloves, next to book saturated by red pigment floating through pin-pricked pages. The book’s message has been transmogrified into a powdery substance which resembles bloody dust.
There is a gripping relationship between “Tiny Deaths”, 1998, and “Soul Searching”, 2007. The hand that hovers above the filing drawer containing a history of who knows what miniature mayhem, is also the hand that must pick and handle the book imbued with a red powdery and blood-like substance.
Except, of course, for those intrepid enough to eschew the use of the gloves and to handle the book directly, thus taking away little microscopic fragments of the sculpture when they leave the gallery. One can almost imagine those visitors going home and needing to wash off the crimson ink, however it is not quite so easy to cleanse oneself of our history.
The conceptual fables, a word derived from fabula, which abound in Perunovich’s work are as elusive as dreams and as subtle as sentient air. There is a reason for this, which also helps clarify their sometimes layered meanings.
Maps of meaning are walls constructed around the inexplicable fact of our being here, and her works tell us: look how they can be built and destroyed so easily. Like Nevelson’s insight into the nourishing aspects of the non-indigenous, Perunovich’s mixed media pieces celebrate a kind of anti-aboriginal stance, meaning that they focus on the virtues of being somewhat unsettled.
Our world is rife with references to the comforts of home and hearth: to settle in, to settle ourselves, to avoid being unsettled, since settlement itself is the gauge by which we measure our distances from the nomadic to the supposedly civilized state permanence.
But all of Perunovich’s works suggest that permanence is illusory, something we merely imagine for ourselves in order to carry on, and that the unique state of unsettlement is far more in keeping with our true condition. Needless to say, such artworks are by their very nature, somewhat unsettling.
That fragile membrane between the artist and her work, between the work and the public viewer and between the broader political and cultural discourses that result, are the key factors in what I see as this artist’s main cartographic function : art objects as a system for conducting metaphysical measurements.
That threshold, between the artist’s experience and the public’s recognition of their own, is where the sign becomes active and the emblem is invoked.
Certain artists and their work seem ideally suited to the rarified task of making such spiritual measurements, the kind that become emblematic of the enigma of both our existence and the identities that encapsulate it.
Some even manage to approach and communicate these ineffable sensations with a nearly shocking sense of clarity: boldly inviting the invisible to materialize before our eyes. Perunovich does this through a concerted emphasis on what the ancient Greeks referred to as anamnesis, the power of memory to memorialize itself through a kind of unconscious mourning.
Her work of the last twelve years or so has been quietly building a consistent language of images and objects designed to achieve her aesthetic agenda with maximum psychological impact. This overall continuity is of three major sorts: thematic continuity, in terms of the ideas explored; material continuity, in terms of the media and objects utilized, and psychic continuity, in terms of the personal feelings she is able to convey within a wider public and political context.
Since we all share some degree of complicity in today’s disintegrating world, we are able to actively enter into a dialogue with her work which results in unearthing the overall narrative, the story which her art tells us. Or rather, stories. The voice of her visual art, like the voice of an author, remains constant, while the stories that swirl through that voice shift focus and develop a meta-narrative, one based on what I believe is a compelling purpose. In her case, the stories and their purpose are one in the same.
As an artist, one of her roles is to provide a kind of evidence, for something which might pass unnoticed if not for a prolonged reverie state: evidence of the melting of time, the dislocation of space, the dissonance of mind, the mutability of self and other.
Perunovich’s aesthetic agenda, and the works that make it manifest, is strongly aligned with this kind of awareness, the realization that the once solid ground of history has become a softer, swamp-like environment. Her works are veritable diagrams of transition as the only permanent state. They frequently, if unconsciously, also mirror the building and tearing down of walls between people.
Often, her videos are also live documentations of the construction, deconstruction or performative aspects which otherwise silently reside in the static realm of her drawings, paintings and sculptures. They animate the emotions relating to building and destroying, using themselves as emblems for that special kind of entropy that accompanies every single move forward through transitional states.
Her pieces are the legible and visible patterns which reflect the wide range of feelings from fear and frivolity, to fury and fantasy, to exile and return, to enclosure and freedom, to living and dying. From the psychic dissonance arising from displacement, to the strange sad joy of reinstatement as a citizen of sentience, the works themselves are signposts on a pilgrimage enacted to both ritualize exile and to embody the entropy of exile.
Two such signposts are the related series of newer pieces called “Currency”, a video installation consisting of an apparent spill of blood spreading across a white void, projected behind one of her familiar elastic fences, and “History Repeating”, also from 2007, a sequence of panel paintings which capture the same spill in two dimensions.
Both appear to be daring time capsules which contain visual evidence, almost in a scientific format, of one of the principal messages behind much of her work, a feeling most accurately summed up in a line of poetry from Robert Duncan: Human blood is the ink of history.
I like to think of her art objects, whatever their medium, as metaphysical mneomics (another manifestation of anamnesis) as devices designed to help us memorize the repetitive feelings provoked by our déjà vu like existence. The patterns are ritualized in her artworks, since she manages to perform the role of empath so well, registering and calibrating the emotions associated with recurring parts of life and making contour maps of their topography. So that future travelers will remember our own brief journeys here.
And ironically, continuum itself, the link between two things or a series of things which blend into one another so gradually that we can’t detect when one becomes the other, is one of her principal subjects.
Oddly enough, those same child’s leg’s and shoes were also clearly featured in another incarnation as the focal point of her video made some seven years later, “Hanging By A Thread”, in which an unseen girl (actually the artist herself) plays on a playground swing surrounded by the unnerving sounds of screaming seagulls.
Perunovich asks us to consider the possibility of a future where emotions, and the enigmatic emblems which embody them, can be studied as if they were music. The reason? Because this is music. Frozen music. In a very real way, she engages in the orchestration of objects which contain the preserved energy of human emotions. Like the crystalline amber of certain ancient trees, these works memorialize those moments in which our emotions start to throw their weight around.
Two of the best examples of the empathic functioning in her work are found in “Blood and Belonging” and “Towers of Belief”, from 2004 and 2005 respectively, in which the barriers between human beings are reduced to the stark emblems of both simple walls and religious symbols. Such walls are always manifestations of human conflict, first internal and then externalized into the environment. Their deceptive simplicity conceals a gigantic sorrow.
In the end, the symbols are also walls of course, but of a different sort, walls of meaning imposing inclusion and exclusion onto spiritual experience. The obvious impact of using the cross, crescent and star images of the three most conflicted and yet most intimately connected religions is a way of creating a head-on collision with our most precious and dangerous delusions.
This must be what supreme disillusionment feels like, perhaps expressed so succinctly in a series like “Dark Tales”, when engaged in the sort of psychological weightlifting that I suggest Perunovich’s work represents. The presence of three key elements, the blood spill, the grey figure adjacent, and the chalkboard with erasures, suggests to me that the tales are dark because we never learn our lessons from history.
In her case especially, Perunovich manages to capture something fleeting that often artists overlook, or underlook: the sensation of what it feels like to engage in ritualistic looking. According to Merleau Ponty, our enigma is that our bodies simultaneously see and are seen, thus what we use for looking outward can also be used for looking inward, at ourselves.
In this regard, Perunovich has an exemplary grasp on what it means to try to grapple with inchoate and sometimes incomprehensible feelings and sensations associated with being alive. This is why I have coined the phrase which serves as the title for this survey exhibition: emblems of the enigma. She regularly produces emblems of the emotions provoked by our responses to the enigma of our existence.
But Perunovich, while contouring the emotional content slightly, definitely insists that the texture of emotions in her works remains as rough and abrasive as they need to be to call attention to what she wants us to feel and see.
Such a subtle study of both the dynamics and stasis of human interaction will undoubtedly be developed more concretely by science in the future. For us still living in the present, we have the presence of artworks such as both the “Wasted Youth” and Vicious Cycle” series from 2007, each one a harrowing sequence of advertisements for the abandonment of restraint in portraiture, seeking to portray people at a sub-humus level with a shattering intimacy that goes far beyond mere personality or character.
Her art objects do not necessarily denote meanings, they don’t, in other words, point at something and describe it. But they are connotations of meanings, suggesting that they can wear the conceptual clothing necessary to the job at hand. The job of expressing inexpressible feelings for things that are inexplicable.
Amongst these many diverse objects in mixed media and interdisciplinary contexts, I am delighted to report that there is also still a vestige of a very old and even ancient world in her overall sensibility. I think painting is still very important indeed, especially in our era, and I was delighted to discover that in addition to exploring her fabula in videos, installations, performances, drawings and conceptual, somewhat neo-surrealist sculpture, she has also produced a substantial body of painted work.
It too has a consistency enhanced by the fact that they are frequently sequential and serial, so it was a great pleasure to be able to situate her paintings within the overall scope of her output, and to show through selection, how the paintings further manifest a kind of emblematic cartography of feelings.
Of course, even though she still embraces the desire for painted images, she does so in her own distinctive manner, eschewing the use of traditional art materials in favour of her own palette of ingredients more often associated with the building trade.
Not surprisingly perhaps, given her interest in the drama of domesticity as it originates in the home and extends out into the world of society and politics, she produces her paintings with industrial housing materials, such as plaster and house paint, as opposed to the pretty tools of the trade in former times.
Each medium she uses is enlisted for a specific purpose, and the trajectory of this exhibition travels smoothly from its cardinal points of Home, Exile, Separation, Transition, Refuge and Sanctuary. The final suggestion being that home is in our heads, rather than necessarily in the soil of the homeland.
Beginning to think of the mind and spirit as a kind of psychic soil can help us come to grips with the pressures implicit in projecting and overly identifying with strictly physical geographies. It is, after all, the non-physical geographies of the imagination which are being mapped so incessantly by this gifted artist.
Here are documents in a dramatic tongue which give witness to things both horrid and hellish, while also being imbued with a poetic elegance and beauty that disorients us long enough to awaken from our nightmares, which in the end, might be the true purpose of all important art. History, another poet once remarked, is a dream from which we cannot awake.
Vessna Perunovich traces the stains from the ink of history in works that approach the threshold of awareness and situate us there gently, but with passion. After all, inexplicable doesn’t necessarily mean inexpressible.
Donald Brackett
Curator/Critic
The exhibition Emblems of the Enigma traveled across Canada to six public museums: Peterborough, Mississauga, Cambridge, Algoma, Halifax and Kelowna, and is accompanied by a handsomely illustrated catalogue.
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