ARTISTS' WRITINGS: GEORGE BARKER AND PAUL GOODMAN ON THE PAINTINGS OF MARIE MENKEN

Towards Klee? But he is a philosopher. More like Gertrude Stein? But Marie is less programmatic, therefore never foolish.

                     - Paul Goodman on Marie Menken

The above images are reproductions of the brochure for Marie Menken's exhibitions of paintings at the Betty Parson's gallery, New York, Oct 31 - Nov 19 1949. The paintings themselves - and thoughts on Menken's provocative use of titles - will  be the subject of a later post. A  simple list of titles for the show's twenty five paintings is itself highly revealing about Menken's creativity, reading, and relationships:

COME UP IN THE AIR AND PLAY WITH ME 

"HUSH, SAD ONE, HUSH" - Ben Moore

CHAS, ADDAMS: HIS DOG

FLOWER WOMAN

HEAVENLY HOOSEGOW

SONG OF THE DEAD BIRD

"TO A GREEN THOUGHT IN A GREEN SHADE" - Andrew Marvell

ELEGY FOR HART CRANE

GREEN DREAM

"IN THESE POINSETTIA MEADOWS OF HER TIDES" - Hart Crane

SAINT SEBASTIAN'S WOUNDS

JEWELS OF THE MADONNA

"HELP! HELP! ANOTHER DAY" - Emily Dickinson

THEREFORE ALL POEMS ARE PRAYERS

JACOB'S LADDER

CELESTIAL DEW

GOD'S IN HER HEAVEN

MAGNET FOR A BATHYSPHERE

KIT SMART'S CAT JEOFFREY

PICTURE WITH A TEAR

HURRAYING FOR THE DODGERS

LEVITATION

WHAT THE SMALL BOY SAW WITH TEARS IN HIS EYES

"THE PUZZLED PARTS FALL ALL IN PLACE" - Paul Goodman

Here, I want to focus on the two pieces of writing contained inside the brochure: a short poetic endorsement from George Barker, and a longer essay from Paul Goodman, somewhat based around Menken's own comments. 

Like the endorsements and designs of the Gryphon Group brochures - reproduced here - such writings are valuable for showing both the range of writers and artists that were part of the Menken-Maas circle, and for expanding her written fan-base beyond the oft-cited tributes by Brakhage and Mekas.  

I also see Barker and Goodman as offering case studies of how Menken's work was seen as "poetic" - or, more broadly, how a notion of "the poetic" was working in Menken's constellations of artists and writers in New York in 1949. This is where even a preliminary examination of the titles of her paintings is useful. 

If the notion of "film poem" - as was claimed at Tate Modern - is still a limiting one for thinking about Menken's work, the following quotes at least allow the concept of "poetry" a more substantial presence and genealogy.

George Barker's short prose-poem of a tribute appears on the back cover of the brochure: 

 

When whales give up their secrets it is a spout and when geology gives up is secrets it is seismics and when doxology gives up its secrets it is poetry and when politics gives up its secrets it is pride and when comedy gives up its secrets it is a quartet of brothers to the great economist and when the Renaissance gives up its secrets it is Pico della Mirandola and when Lithuania gives up its secrets it is the fairy story in Marie Menken's mirror. 

Marie Menken,  A Green Dream, 1946, oil, sand, glass, and thread on masonite, 13 x 13 inches. Reproduced with the kind permission of Douglas Crase and Frank Polach.

Inside the brochure is this essay by Paul Goodman: 

Continuous with the childhood in her, she uses the kinds of Earth and Fire as natural signs or in simple allusions that are the first remove from natural signs. Dirt stands for earth and dirt (as in COME UP IN THE AIR); patina is age and rediscovery (PUZZLED PARTS) and waves are flowing waves (HART CRANE); if it has sheen, it is aerial, if it flames it is magic fire, that is primal-natural fire (HEAVENLY HOOSEGOW, CELESTIAL DEW); if the colors are red or purple they are Poinsettia passion (POINSETTIA MEADOWS OF HER TIDES), if they are ice-cold they are icy (TRAPEZE FOR ANGELS). When she wants to blot out the picture, to make a non-picture, she approximates the day-hues; yet in the dark it luminesces and is there after all (MAGNET FOR BATHYSPHERE). And the most rudimentary sexual and kinetic symbols, pyramids, circles, ups, and bars. Sparsely scattered jewels, like Plato's "reminders of the courts of Jove" - but they are only beads. This is the most naively direct picture-language that I know; examine it close, just what kinds of matters are there and the order in which they overlay, and you will know the thoughts, the aspiring, grief, and dread; without obscurity, without symbolic distance, or with little symbolic distance. 

(Towards Klee? But he is a philosopher. More like Gertrude Stein? But Marie is less programmatic, therefore never foolish.)

Not obscure; yet everywhere what are these threads? - Of course it is one thread, as a chronological study shows at once, for the thread has a unified career. "I outline with the thread," says Marie, "because it can be arranged." Good; in the very early ELEGY FOR HART CRANE the thread holds the figure together against the waves - but he drowned in the waves. (So DEAD BIRD) - for a time the thread is unbroken in the picture. But later (PICTURE WITH A TEAR, HELP! HELP! ANOTHER DAY, and especially POINSETTA MEADOWS) the threads are broken, they scatter. Then suddenly for a brief moment all is continuous again, in the sorrowful outline of a child or of oneself at last pitied, coming from? falling back into? the poor sober background ("It is brown and poor, I had no money for colors," HUSH, SAD ONE, HUSH). Well, then in the beautiful PUZZLED PARTS FALL ALL IN PLACE the thread is a moment at rest in the plane. This is the end of it. The end? Turn out the lights! The BATHYSPHERE of night luminesces with threads of sand. In the JEWELS OF THE MADONNA the threads are garishly, falsely I believe (they are painted!) "arteries." And oh, in the terrifying SAINT SEBASTIAN, they incrust as the prison bars that, sprung from the crabscar of the childless womb, are scabbing the picture, crusting it, effacing it. ("These are the wounds," she says. But obviously they are the scabs.) Is this bad? No; for see, the welted scabs are becoming three-dimensiohnal. She will make sculptures of them - this is what we all do. 

She "does not know" whether the background shape in SAINT SEBASTIAN, flaming to magic fire, is "a man or a woman," nor "from what part of the body that crabstar starts, maybe midway between the genitals and umbilicus, or it feels just from all over me." So. I know. It is a childless woman.

She says the POINSETTIA MEADOWS is "embarrassing"; it began all red, but she felt this was vulgar and put in the greens, but these of course just heightened the value of the red; then she began with the knots and bunches, but they unravelled, and that was "embarrassing."

The threads! We know that drawing, outlining, is character, for it is the active response of the soul; the colors and space are given.

Ow! There is an old Jewish proverb: "Take thread; sew together this pot that I've broken... All right; take sand, make a big thread, give it to me and I'll sew." Marie! ...Marie ...

THE VOICE AND NOTHING MORE: SIMON MORRIS AND ROB LAVERS

All images from Voice and Void, curated by Thomas Trummer, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (sep 16 2007 - Feb 24 2008). (ABOVE:) Christian Marclay, Double Doors (The Electric Chair), 2006. Private Collection. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

  

At the Slade School of Art on Wednesday lunchtime, Simon Morris - writer, performer and publisher of Information as Material - was launching  The Voice and Nothing More, a short festival of workshops, an exhibition and performances exploring the voice in contemporary art. 

Befitting his role as scene setter, Morris read a text that seemed to outline different properties of the voice. I heard sections on laughing, crying, and female orgasm. Several times he screamed mightily into the microphone.  I say "seemed" because Morris shared the stage with the saxophonist Rob Lavers. Lavers used the saxophone as an extension of voice, or maybe his voice was an extension of the saxophone. He breathed, growled, shouted, blowed raspberries, hissed and much more. Sometimes voice alone, othertimes into the saxophone mouthpiece, which was sometimes joined to the instrument strung around his neck, sometimes not. 

Other times the microphone was inside the bell of the sax. It expanded voice and instrument both. Oftentimes it seemed to expand beyond both. It lasted maybe twenty minutes - Morris talked of feeling, in this context, it should be the length of an academic presentation - prompting the fantastic thought of a panel session comprising three such pieces! It was a fantastic way to theoretically explore the subject of the voice whilst fully inhabiting its physicality  and potential.

Apart from two brief silences providing - as Lavers observed -  punctuation and shape, both Morris and Lavers played constantly. Sometimes Lavers drowned out Morris completely, other times the voice came through: a fragment of exposition, or just a sense of tone as the words themselves shifted toward sequences of notes moving and combining in time.

In the Q&A afterwards, Morris provided some information: source texts included passages from Mladen Dolar's book - from which the festival takes its name - as well as a re-writing of Becketts Not I that put back in the personal pronouns Beckett left out. Morris and Lavers had rehearsed the piece, and Morris was reading from sheets of A4, some of which were white and some yellow to indicate for Lavers key points in the performance.

That said, the sheer energy of the performance spoke to variations that unfolded live, due both to deliberate improvisation and to slight shifts in alignment of planned sounds and words. Morris and Lavers performance was fascinating in that it depended on a strong, taut connection between them, which immediately collapsed if the sounds were too literally related to the texts views on, say, sneezing or laughing. But what is a literal connection when sound, too, has both a free, non-signifying quality and a contagious connection to words and context?

A short Q&A afterwards raised various issues: 

The Kenny Goldsmith Factor. Both had worked on a film about Kenneth Goldsmith (Sucking on Words, 2007) - that, Morris said, had opened Lavers ears to a wide range of musical possibility. What does Goldsmith's idea of "uncreative writing" mean applied to the voice to singing to song?

The Bon Iver Factor. There are lots of conventional songs, and hip-hop, where you can't hear the words. Bon Iver in The New Yorker (Jan 12, 2009) talks of his lyrics as "sounds that eventually turned into words."

The Meaning Meaning Meaning Factor. What is it and where. A performance like this could be seen as a disruption or avoidance of meaning as would be conveyed by Morris reading his text alone. Or we could shift the meaning onto the level of the mark or the note itself. The critic suffocates the art work, said Morris. 

The Is-This-A-Performance Factor. All these issues, like the voice, are hugely fragile and are changed through the formality of performance. Morris observed that when they performed just for Lavers' girlfriend everyone had ended up in laughter. Here it didn't seem funny at all.

(TOP:) On the performance by Jospeh Beuys "How to Explain pictures to a Dead Hare." Galerie Schmela, Dusseldorf, 1965. 1965. Hand printed silver gelatin print, torn edges on baryte paper. One of series of four. Photo copyright Ute Klophaus, Wuppertal; (MIDDLE:) Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Opera for a small room, 2005. Private Collection Jill and Peter Kraus Collection, New York. Courtesy of Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, and Luhring Augustine, New York.(BELOW:) Julianne Swartz , Open, 2007. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Dean Landis, New York. Courtesy Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York

That's enough Factors but also emerging from the Q&A were thoughts on speech rhythms and how musical rhythms and sounds relate to the phrasing and rhythm of speech, as language comes to be responded to for its musical qualities. Where and how is the boundary formed, crossed and crossed again? Perhaps both states are always inhabited simultaneously.

There was talk, too, of the Assault Factor in Morris and Lavers performance, which attained a highly visceral intensity. When someone mentioned that the sound had removed the space for their usual mental wandering during an academic lecture, it made me think of Artaud, his desire for sounds and actions acting with directed precision on particular organs of the audiences body.  

It was curious, too, how easily as an audience we accommodated  ourselves to disorientating material, and how that state of familiarity can be disrupted and postponed by certain tactics. I wondered, too, about social indicators on the formation of the voice -  the gender factors identified by Carol Gilligan's In A Different Voice, or the voice accented through formative pressures of place. Here the voice seemed a free bio-physical phenomenon, asserting a heritage back through Goldsmith to Kurt Schwitters, and the Ursonate as a kind of avant-garde esperanto. 

Morris joked at the beginning that maybe Vallie Export would have been a better opening act for The Voice and Nothing More. Certainly, Exports Tonfilm (Soundfilm), an imagined performance of 1969, opens up a still provocative and disturbing area of investigation:

a photoelectric resistor is built/surgically into the glottis and connected with a light sensitive resistor, which is attached to the outer skin below the ear. the photoelectric amplifier controls the volume. when there is a lot of light, lots of electricity is directed towards the amplifier, the volume is high. with low light it is the reverse.

the live soundfilm works like this, people scream horrifically at midday - as a side effect of the glottis irritation enormous salivation and intestinal cramps etc. occur - with increasing twilight the register of the nation is subdued.

soundfilm offers a lively panorama of early morning chirping, middday slobbering and screaming and absolute night's rest. communication is made possible over thousand meters, the secret disappears (evenings without speaking, midday only screaming)... also this a new way of communication! (VOICE AND VOID, 105)

SIMON MARTIN AT CHISENHALE GALLERY

Simon Martin, Untitled (2008). Single screen video installation. Courtesy the artist and Chisenhale Gallery.

Simon Martin at Chisenhale Gallery, 28 Nov - 18 Jan 2009.

It's amazing, really, how ambiguous a very large projection of a frog can be. For Simon Martin's new show at the Chisenhale Gallery the large, cavernous, chilly space comprises just and only that, on a screen maybe two metres long and six foot tall. But it's a subtle, unsettling piece, all the more so for the minimalism of means. If, that is, one can really call a large technicolor frog minimal.

The frog isn't really alone. Nor is it really a frog, but more on that later. Entering the space I encounter a projected image of the frog sitting on a leaf, shifting slightly between a variety of positions. These are interspersed with titles suggesting quotes from realist novels, of an uncertain time - or maybe a hybrid of times. Several descriptions are rich on ornaments: Chinese screens, fourteenth century Burmese buddhas, Hiroshige prints, Japanese Tansu.

Is the frog our Tansu? I discover later the intertitles are phrases extracted from airport novels, but the overall effect is less of particular genres of writing, than particular times or environments infected and transformed by particular details - a Victorian drawing room, say, suddenly found to contain a lap top or a mobile phone; a Japanese buddha with a games console.  A soundtrack makes similar shifts between rainforest sounds and orchestral music. 

What is it with this frog? It sits centre frame, seeming to pose for us, but of course not really. What seems to be for us isn't actually for us at all. THIS FROG IS NOT POSING. Each time we return to the frog this tension builds between the apparent and the actual. Is this:

(a)Frog madness 

(b)Frog frustration

(c)Frog rapt 

(d)Frog nihilism

Back to the orchestral music. I don't know what it was, but it fitted some vague modernist template in my mind.  This implied the frog was itself a marvel of modernism. Other times, however, when image cut from intertitle to frog, the music was pure mood, Hollywood score dramatic tension, Frog Psycho. Just for a moment, then image and music were separate again. It was all sorts of fluctuations and shifts like that - involving image, music and text - that made this film so enjoyable.

I wasn't sure how far to extrapolate, which is a natural consequence of having to look at a large frog on a loop for an extended time. At one point I observed the frog as made up of several constructivist planes of colour. Now Frog was some kind of modernist housing project; Frog was utopian architectural vision, but notice no children playing on its red, reflective back.   

Which was partly just free-associating whilst the frog blinked, twitched and burbled, but then I read the gallery blurb. Martin originally used a found photograph to make a photorealist painting of a strawberry poison dart frog in 1998. This current project took that engagement into the level of digital animation. As Martin observes:

A picture of a poison dart frog is something we could all be familiar with from a TV documentary or a museum postcard. An image like this becomes the start of a discussion or a springboard to somewhere else. An event or situation can also coalesce into a memorable image, one that we can try to reproduce or simply hold in our heads. 

How are images used to try and direct our attention and what information unwittingly leaks out in the process? What did the image-maker not see? What does the frame exorcise? Why this particular image? 

And how is it that some images remain, despite familiarity or analysis, potent or strange whilst others will slip by, barely noticed? 

Maybe I'm gullible when it comes to frogs, but this one had seemed pretty real to me, if a bit day-glo. I wondered if there was some genetic engineering at work, but my knowledge of GMO's rivals my knowledge of frog colouring. All of which fed into an engagement with construction and "life" - as in "what is life?" - running through both rainforest and gallery.  

That said, as I watched on, the presiding emotion didn't seem to be a cooly detached or overtly intellectual one. Many discussions of AI or human-animal relations focus in some way on consciousness, which was what the animated frog image both suggested and strongly denied: the pose that is not a pose and now is.  

Or, it shifted us away from appearances towards the animation program or the code that generated the movements. That was how I came to see the language of the intertitles, too: the details of lap top and phone that entered in - viral like, gene mutations - shifting the whole constellation. 

What are the consequences of all this? If you should meet a large HD animated frog here are two questions I suggest you should ask: 

Are you about the future or the past? In regards to modernism: are animated HD-frogs the new stainless steel? 

FLUXUS SCORES, ECOLOGY, ART WRITING AND ARTISTS' FILM

Catherine Yass, Lock, 2006. Two simultaneous projections of 16mm film transferred to HD-MPEG digital files, with sound, 9 mins 44 secs.

I've written two piece for the RSA's new Art and Ecology magazine, edited by William Shaw. The first was a short paragraph on Catherine Yass's Lock  as part of the site's Best of 2008. The second was an essay on fluxus scores, trying to unpack my intuition that such event-scores embody ecological attitudes and principles and, most importantly, can inform some contemporary, ecologically informed (art-) writing practice.

The essay focusses on Yoko Ono's current show at BALTIC, surveys a range of recent score-focussed exhibitions and publications, before highlighting Alison Knowles artist's  book/anthology A Bean Concordance (1983) as the most developed example I know of an artist using a score-based approach to research the natural world. 

I conclude by proposing what a contemporary score-based practice might be, looking at Hans Ulrich Obrist's recent Formulas for Now project, and the pedagogical theory of Hannah Higgins, Charles Garoian and Yvonne M.Gaudelius.

The Best of 2008 piece, meanwhile, was a chance to review the year specifically focussing on work that seemed to make an effective intervention in debates about the environment. I have a broad, rough working-sense of much of the work I am interested in - and this blogzine - as "ecological' in the sense that it proposes a working system within which materials and ideas flow, generating feedback.  

In the context of Art & Ecology magazine I was looking for some combination of this conceptual-ecology with particular environmental issues. Two shows seemed to possess this balance. Here is the short paragraphs I wrote about each:

Catherine Yass: Lock 

High Wire, her recent Artangel commission, may have garnered more attention, but it was in her exhibition at the Anthony Jacques gallery (16 Jan-23 Feb) that Catherine Yass tackled current environmental and political issues most directly. Her film installation Lock was a response to the Three Gorges Dam in China's Yangtze River. 

Whilst Jia Zhangke's Still Life - released at the same time - documented the turmoil and destruction of riverbank cities soon to be flooded by rising water levels, Lock confined itself to a journey through the dam's ship canal. Projected as two large, wall-filling images, Lock remained open and suggestive, but it also confined arguments about the dam's impact to its architectural form, highlighting loss of perspective and any sense of scale amongst its vast walls and gates.

Katie Paterson: Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull

Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull,  at the ROOM gallery in Shoreditch (25 Jan-17 Feb 2008), presented three videos of 12" records, each made from the waters of a different glacier. With needle and grooves these "glacier records" could be played like any other, sound and image changing as they gradually melted. The time this took, of course, far exceeded the average gallery visit, which meant the piece existed as a delicious idea or proposition as much as an experience in the gallery. 

Three glacier ice records, played until they melt...

Like Paterson's other works - including a mobile phone embedded in a glacier that allowed callers to hear the glacier melting -  the ROOM show drew on a history of conceptual artists in the landscape, combining a pleasure in its own creativity and humour with a more unsettling sense of breakdown and collapse.

*

As for writing itself, the research for the fluxus essay, turned up two understandings of the score form that positioned it as part of a broader eco-system of writing practices. The first was by Emmett Williams - himself, of course, a fluxus writer and performer. Introducing the section he edited for  the 1973 anthology Open Poetry, Williams tells how he abandoned plans for two separate anthologies, one of concrete poetry and one focussed on the "Intermedialists", finding, in the process, a sharper focus in the concept of "Language Happenings":

They have belonged together all along. They have been separated from one another by definitions, manifestoes and self-imposed distances..."Language Happenings"  is a title, nothing more, under whose aegis a number of workers with words are allowed to coexist without labels. 

All of them are involved in a new Poetics in which poetry is scurrying off the page in all directions at once - toward painting, film, theater, music, sculpture and concept art. 

And artists, film-makers, composers and scientists are bringing their talent and technology to bear on the new poetry. A small part of all this activity - a part that can adequately take place in book format - is exhibited in "language happenings. (279)

A second source for this ecological score-based writing practice would be Scenarios: Scripts to Perform, a ground-breaking 1980 anthology of performance texts, which included scores by Brecht and Knowles alongside scripts in various formats by The Living Theatre, Richard Foreman, and Robert Wilson, amongst many others. 

Kostelanetz observes: "It is my polemical purpose to suggest that all these possibilities belong to a single category, which I call Scenarios."(9) He explains the rationale for this all embracing category:

My editorial assumption is that innovations in theatrical art in part depend upon scripting so radically alternative it insures that a performance cannot be realized in conventional ways. If the standard theatrical script has dialogue interspersed with stage instructions and the standard work of music has notes and durational instructions written on staves in horizontal lines, an alternative script, by definition, offers other kinds of text, to induce radically different kinds of performance.