Dan Fox is a writer, filmmaker and musician. He is the author of Pretentiousness: Why It Matters (2016) and Limbo (2018), both published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, and co-director of Other, Like Me: The Oral History of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle (2020).
The death was announced this week of the reclusive American writer J.D. Salinger, author of one massively influential novel, The Catcher in the Rye. Written in 1951, Salinger’s tale of teenage rebellion and intellectual precocity has to date sold some 65 million copies and remains a much-loved work of American literature. Salinger’s death will be widely reported, yet this week saw the passing of another bestselling US writer, one far less well-known than Salinger, yet someone who gave voice to rebellion and alienation in other ways: Howard Zinn, who died aged 87 in Santa Monica, California.
First published in 1980, Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States tells the story of the U.S. from 1492 to the present from the perspective of American women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor and immigrant labourers. It is a radically revisionist history of the States, yet since its release it has sold over 1 million copies, been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, German, Turkish, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Swedish, Norwegian, Czech, Portuguese, Russian, Greek and Hebrew, and taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country.
In a week when a Public Policy Polling nationwide survey also announced that the partisan right-wing news channel Fox News is the most trusted news network in the U.S., with an approval rating of 50 per cent, Zinn’s death has added resonance. Faced with criticism of the left-wing bias of his People’s History, Zinn was unrepentant. ‘It’s not an unbiased account; so what?’ he said in a recent interview for The New York Times. ‘If you look at history from the perspective of the slaughtered and mutilated, it’s a different story.’
Magazines and newspapers in late December and early January are awash with ‘best of…’ roll-calls of the past 12 months and forecasts for next dozen, and the current January–February issue of frieze is no exception. But before 2010 unfolds too far, there’s one item I really feel deserves mention as one of the real highlights of 2009: the DVD box-set released last year by the British Film Institute entitled Gazwrx: The Films of Jeff Keen.
Gazwrx surveys the 50-year – that’s right, 50-year – career of British artist and filmmaker Jeff Keen, and is essential viewing for anyone with even a passing interest in the history of experimental film and video. Keen’s films – from his first 8mm work Wail, made in 1960, to recent films such as Joy Thru Film (c. 2000) and Omozap Terribelis + Afterblatz 2 (2002) – are high-voltage visual shocks, eruptions of pulp imagery, eroticism, violence, language games, uncensored imagination and sheer giddy exuberance. His early films are love-letters to cinema history: to silent film and B-movies, to slapstick, thrillers, exploitation flicks and sci-fi apocalypses, his later works disquieting parades of video news imagery and documentation of his own creative processes. Frankenstein and Godzilla share the screen with Keen’s own cast of heroes and villains such Motler the Word Killer, Dr Gaz, Silverhead, Omozap and Mothman (often played by friends and family). Edited into machine-gun sprays of imagery, Keen’s pedal-to-the-metal, high-speed films are like animated collages – action painting with the stress very much on action. (‘If words fail use your teeth’, as an inter-title in one of his films declares.) In an interview from 1983 included on Gazwrx …, Keen argues how his fast cutting technique emphasizes the brutal way in which film works – the claw of the projector dragging the film through the gate, 24 frames per second, rapidly devouring and spewing images – although, as he also wryly puts it, ‘speed is relative, you know?’
Keen was born in 1923, in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. He spent World War II working on experimental bombers and tanks; an experience which was must have been an influence on later works such as Day of the Arcane Light (1969) and the various iterations of his Artwar film throughout the 1990s, which feature images of warplanes, or civilian aircraft taken from the found footage or at airshows. After leaving the army, Keen moved first to London, where he encountered abstract and Surrealist art, and then to Brighton where he met and married Jackie Foulds, who features in many of Keen’s films from the 1960s and ‘70s. He was aged almost 40 when he made his debut, Wail, partly as a way of helping maintain a college film society which he was involved in running. In the early ‘60s his films found their way onto the UK’s small amateur film circuit, and later gained more exposure on the nascent underground film circuit of the late ‘60s, at venues such as Better Books in London (a hub for the city’s counterculture scene) and with both the BFI and the London Film-Maker’s Co-Op. Throughout the 1970s, ‘80s and into the ‘90s, Keen found support for his work from both art contexts (including the 1977 Hayward Gallery exhibition ‘Perspectives on Avant-Garde Film’) and British television, during the early days of Channel Four, when it had a commitment to more radical forms of broadcasting, rather than the trashy makeover shows and miserable reality-TV it peddles today. Early in 2009, Permanent Gallery in Brighton held ‘GAZWRX & RAYDAY’, an exhibition of works by Keen and Ian Helliwell, marking the launch not only of the BFI DVD set, but also a boxed edition of Keen’s lively broadsheet publication Rayday, produced by Permanent Gallery.
With their blunderbuss shots of plastic toys, comic strips, advertisements and pin-ups, a number of Keen’s films from the 1960s – such as Cineblatz (1967), White Lite (1968) and Marvo Movie (1967) – might be said to share certain formal similarities with British Pop Art, in particular the work of Eduardo Paolozzi, yet Keen never considered himself a Pop artist in the sense that it is understood today as a historical movement. For Keen, popular culture is just part of the contemporary landscape, there for the taking, and he admits to a nostalgia and preference for the handmade (though I’ve often thought that the handmade is a characteristic peculiar to 1950s and ‘60s British Pop – dowdy austerity Britain, dreaming of America’s glass, chrome and plastic visions of the future.). And it’s in the handmade, homespun quality of Keen’s films that much of their power resides. Though much of his work is made on 8mm and 16mm film – the filmstrips often scratched into, bleached or painted over, giving them a distinct sense of physicality, and often involving multiple projection – the handmade quality is evident even as Keen moves forward with technology: a good example being Omozap Terribelis + Afterblatz 2, which features animated, computer generated drawings made with a My First Sony toy. Also striking is the sense of community one gets from these works: friends and family all happily taking part, whether playing roles or just appearing in the many diary films from which Keen also sources much of his imagery. Mad Love (1972–8), for instance, is an affectionate homage to silent film and film history, constructed from still shots and tableaus featuring relatives or fellow artists and writers acting out scenes fondly spoofing or imitating movie genres; in Keen’s words, friends ‘playing at being stars’.
In this regard, Keen is a fellow traveller of US experimental filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith and Andy Warhol: his films convey a strong ‘can do’ attitude and sense of creative self-sufficiency and artistic self-empowerment. This could also be described as a punk sensibility, and some of his work – especially where they seem to evoke a kind of Cold War fear of impending apocalypse, as in the desolate landscape depicted in Day of the Arcane Light, for instance, or the violence of Artwar – seem to have a distinctly post-punk quality to them. In addition to its avant-garde aspects, Wail, for instance, predates Bruce Connor’s use of B-movie and medical imagery in his video for Devo’s Mongoloid (1978) by nearly 20 years, and many of the imagery used in the films suggests similar rock’n’roll, horror film and comic book reference points to Off the Bone-era Cramps or The Very Things’ The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes. The eerie soundtracks to Marvo Movie (which also features the voice of the brilliant poet Bob Cobbing) or Instant Cinema (1964–5/2007) could even be straight off an early 1980s record by Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire.
Gazwrx is a rich compendium of Keen’s work: it features four DVDs, and a highly informative booklet that, along with notes to the work and a biographical essay by the box-set’s producer, William Fowler, also includes a selection of the artist’s striking posters and drawings, which visually shout and scream with the energy and anger of a Jean Dubuffet or John Heartfield. Hopefully, with the release of Gazwrx, his work will now find wider audiences and in this new decade bring Keen – now 85 – the recognition he deserves as a pioneer of avant-garde film.
Title taken from a short epigraph by Jeff Keen published in the booklet for Gazwrx: The Films of Jeff Keen
The New York Times reports that a major survey studying the effect the recession is having on American artists has been published by non-profit artist-support organization Leveraging Investments in Creativity, in collaboration with Princeton Survey Research Associates International and the Helicon Collaborative, a consulting firm that advises non-profit groups.
When it comes to discussions about art and money, there is the popular and erroneous assumption (usually parroted in the UK by newspaper columnists who should know better) that, just because super-remunerated artists such as Jeff Koons or Tracey Emin earn a tidy wage, the vast majority of contemporary artists are rolling in cash. Although the Leveraging Investments in Creativity survey focuses on a range of creative people from the visual arts through filmmaking to architecture, music and writing, and how they have been affected by the economic downturn since last year, the survey also reflects the hard financial reality that most artists face, regardless of market boom and bust.
It’s been announced that Claude Lévi-Strauss, the well-known French anthropologist, also regarded as one of the most influential Structuralist thinkers, has died, aged 100.
Sat in the cinema the other day, waiting to see Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, I caught an advertisement for Absolut Vodka. In 60 syrupy and platitudinous seconds, we see a sequence of common transactions such as buying a bus ticket or giving money to a busker. Instead of exchanging money, a hug or a gentle peck on the cheek is given for each service or item bought. The range of people and locations is demographically and geographically balanced, in the heavy-handed, focus-group driven sort of way that only expensive advertisements seem able to achieve: good-looking white 20-somethings buying cinema tickets, an elderly Asian man (included, it seems, to represent some notion of kindly serenity in the midst of poverty) hiring out bicycles on a hot dusty road, two motherly Scandinavian-looking women in a market, hugging each other as one hands the other a great big fish. The colour palette of the film is graded in mute, pale tones – the sort that seem intended to convey artsy sensitivity, or, in their washed-out colouring, careworn memories. Accompanying the ad is a wretchedly cloying version of ‘Money Makes the World Go Round’; all cute electronic burbles, sickly sweet female vocals and bloodless, indie-ish guitar riffs. Worst of all, the final icky chorus of the song sounds as if it’s sung by a small child, presumably far too young to consume the gut-rottingly strong spirit the ad is selling.
As the film trailers continued, I thought about how the Absolut advertisement is the just the latest in a line of commercials released over the last few years – including the ‘bouncing balls’ (below) and ‘paint’ ads for Sony Bravia, Ford Mondeo’s floating cars, the rainbow and dance films for Orange, and Barclaycard’s rather more self-consciously bathetic urban waterslide – that form something of an advertising subgenre. Each ad presents a scenario in which we see a number of supposedly ordinary people, in everyday situations, either directly engaged with, or witnessing, some form of extraordinary activity or phenomena; millions of small, coloured balls inexplicably bouncing down the hills of San Francisco; cars floating from balloons above city streets; a household chore that turns into a graceful ballet across sun-dappled lawns; the inhabitants of a local community running a relay race through their streets with rainbow-coloured streamers. Invariably accompanying these ‘magic-realist-lite’ scenarios are emotively epic or gently melancholy songs designed to ramp-up the levels of pathos in the ad. They function as a kind of signal jamming device that helps detach our emotions from the product in question, and reattach our feelings about the brand to some woolly, warm, vague notions of innocent creativity, big ‘life moments’ (birth, marriage, having kids – no death though), community spiritedness and global harmony. Sat in front of the big screen, I slurped on my lemonade and wondered just what it was that these commercials were trying to convey. ‘Don’t worry!’ they seem to be saying. ‘Cars, mobile phones, banks and mass-produced spirits are just like animals, trees and fun, creative, homespun games with your neighbours – they are your friends!’
Eventually the ads ended, I wolfed down the last of my chocolate Maltesers, and settled into my seat to enjoy the main feature. Synecdoche, New York revolves around theatre director Caden Cotard (played by the ever brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman), a man estranged from his artist wife, Adele, and their daughter, Olive, and in ill health. Covered in pustules, his eyesight malfunctioning, and his self-confidence atomized into a million shards of neuroses, Cotard is at the end of his tether when, out of the blue, he receives a MacArthur Fellowship – nicknamed the ‘genius’ grant – and a huge sum of money with which to work on any project he pleases, no strings attached. Given this new lease of life, he decides to embark upon a hugely ambitious theatrical masterpiece, which he intends to be ‘a work of brutal honesty’. Gathering an ever-expanding cast of actors in a vast warehouse in New York, Cotard sets about reconstructing key episodes in his life. He wanders through an increasingly elaborate replica of New York that fills the warehouse (and which, in turn, is itself replicated, like a Russian doll, inside the warehouse), watching his life being replayed over and over, as he gives actors notes on their performances, analyses his mistakes and regrets, and – in a Borgesian twist – ultimately begins to write himself out of his own life, deferring decisions to those actors playing him. If synecdoche is a literary device whereby a part is used to represent the whole, the ‘parts’ in this particular synecdoche – the actors – literally start to become the whole of Cotard’s life.
What, you’re probably wondering, do my idle ruminations on modern commercials have to do with Synecdoche, New York? Well, the first thing that struck me about the film – as with those of his sometime collaborator, the director Michel Gondry – is how much of a similar aesthetic it shares with the magic-realist-lite advertising subgenre, albeit with a far darker twist. As with Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, co-written with Kaufman and artist Pierre Bismuth), The Science of Sleep (2006) and Be Kind Rewind (2008), Synecdoche, New York is a big-budget film that takes everyday characters, in supposedly ordinary environments, and subjects them to some form of pop-surrealist device. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for instance, Gondry tells the story of two lovers whose memories of a failed affair are scrubbed clean by a brain-wiping machine, and in Be Kind Rewind, that of a man whose body becomes magnetized, thus erasing the contents of all the VHS tapes in the beleaguered video rental shop in which he works, resulting in all its employees having to make their own lovably low-fi versions of all the shop’s missing blockbuster films. In Synecdoche, New York we are first shown Cotard’s creatively frustrating life in suburban Schenectady, before his theatrical Gesamkunstwerk is introduced and we enter his world of actors playing actors acting themselves, and the crazily huge New-York-within-New-York theatre set. I don’t mean to suggest that Kaufman and Gondry’s films are ideological peas-in-a-pod with the magic-realism-lite ads. Their films are, by-and-large, old-fashioned stories about love and loss wrapped up in pop-surrealist form. What is curious, however, is just that: why, now, is this kind of pop-surrealism so popular in cinema and commercial films?
The magic-realism-lite advertising subgenre tends to use three modes, often at the same time. The first is grand spectacle (Ford Mondeo cars floating from balloons, for instance), the second a form of low-fi, homespun whimsy (for example, the rainbow streamers in the Orange ad), and the third – usually by way of music – a kind of epic, epiphanic atmosphere. Both Kaufman and Gondry’s films use similar strategies. (Gondry, interestingly, made a name for himself directing television commercials, and a number of highly acclaimed music videos for the likes of Daft Punk, Radiohead and The White Stripes). Their films oscillate between two poles of spectacular visual drama (in Synecdoche, New York, for instance, we see stunning wide-shots of airships floating slowly through the warehouse, across replicas of New York tenements) and sentimental charm (_Be Kind Rewind_ gives us whimsically homemade interpretations of Ghostbusters or Robocop, whilst Synecdoche, New York depicts Cotard’s artistic masterpiece being lovingly constructed by theatre craftsmen, an old-fashioned experimental theatre world in which technicians and actors labour for nearly 20 years with little complaint, as if such hubristic projects were as commonplace as cars floating on balloons or high-rises exploding with paint). They also make strong use of music. Sony Bravia’s ‘bouncing balls’ commercial was given extra emotive heft through its use of José González’ 2003 acoustic cover of ‘Heartbeats’ by The Knife, and the Orange advert, featuring a couple dancing through their garden, ratcheted up the poignancy levels with Brian Eno’s ‘Music for Airports’ (1978). Grammy award-winning composer Jon Brion has supplied the soundtrack to both Eternal Sunshine… (which also made bittersweet use of the upbeat ‘Mr Blue Sky’, 1977, by Electric Light Orchestra) and Synecdoche, New York; his slow, mournful jazz ballad ‘Song for Caden’ shuffles through much of the film’s second half, juxtaposing melancholy torch-song intimacy against the surreal vistas of Cotard’s theatre set, a heartstring-tugging combination that helps maintain a constant sense of the romantic tragedy of Cotard’s epic but heroic failure as artist, father and husband. (This romanticism is further emphasized by the architecture of his warehouse set, which is that of a notably idealized NYC: brownstones, old warehouses and chicly decrepit apartments. This is the New York of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, 1977, or Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, 2001, the kind of fictionalized New York analyzed here in frieze by Steven Stern).
A number of commentators have remarked upon the bizarre similarity between Synecdoche, New York and writer and artist Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel Remainder, in which a man receives a vast insurance payout after a freak accident (the equivalent of Cotard’s MacArthur Fellowship windfall), and with the money creates a huge theatrical set in south London where he employs actors and technicians to perpetually reconstruct and re-enact half-remembered vignettes from his life. Kaufman denies having read or even heard of Remainder whilst writing his film, and it’s not for me to say what grist the similarities between the novel and the movie might or might not provide McCarthy for his long-standing interests in repetition, duplication, authenticity and fakery. However, that two works of art so invested in ideas of reconstruction and simulacra should themselves turn out so close to each other is almost too neat to be true. What Synecdoche, New York certainly reminded me of was Alain Resnais’ astonishing 1977 film Providence, (pictured above) in which a dying writer, played by John Gielgud, struggles with both his haemorroids and the plot of his final novel. As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that his nocturnal mutterings and cursings are directly linked to the strange, emotionally cold scenarios being played out by Dirk Bogarde, Ellen Burstyn and David Warner against the backdrop of an un-remarked-upon terrorist war, in a non-specific European city (one minute it could be Vienna, the next, London) and all with the help of heroic quantities of chilled white wine. (If you’ve ever tried to play the Withnail and I drinking game, in which viewers match the on-screen characters drink-for-drink, then, I am reliably informed, you’ll probably also enjoy Providence.) Aside from the central ideas of paternalism, creative control and personal determinism explored in Providence – Bogarde, Burstyn and Warner turn out to be Gielgud’s children as well as his creative muses – Synecdoche, New York also borrows from Providence the idea of events played out amidst un-remarked-upon social turmoil (Alan Rudolph’s 1985 film Trouble in Mind also uses a similarly unexplained martial law situation as a backdrop to its plot.). As Cotard and his cast spend year-upon-year immersed in their vast recreation of New York, bomb explosions start to be heard in the background and troops begin to fill the ‘real’ New York streets outside the warehouse, as if to emphasize not only the enormous length of time Cotard spends developing his play (at one point an extra laments ‘When are we going to get an audience in here? It’s been 17 years…’), but also his self-absorption: society descends into violent conflict outside, whilst the artist ascends further up the backside of endless self-analysis, his giant theatre set essentially becoming one big therapy session.
Unfortunately, Cotard’s endless self-analysis is just what prevents Synecdoche, New York from ever achieving much beyond a rather pedestrian level of faux-profundity. Early in the film, as we watch his marriage fall apart, and his health deteriorate, Cotard’s abject self-pity is balanced against amusingly disinterested and disdainful hospital specialists, or the shameless money-spinning of his sexually unhinged therapist. Although Kaufman does not go for out-and-out laughs in the same way he did with his screenplays for Being John Malkovitch (1999) and Adaptation (2002), there are some nice moments of levity, one of my favourites being the hilariously pretentious attempt, by his ex-wife’s American lover, at affecting a German accent after they move to Europe to become the toast of Berlin’s art scene. Over the final third of the film, however, as Cotard is surrounded by people eager to please and take part in his life-imitating-life project, Kaufman lets the dramatic tension go slack, leaving the visually impressive set to shore up trite ruminations on self-determination such as ‘There are millions of people in this world … and none of them are extras. They are all leads in their own story.’ The more interesting possibilities offered up by the script – such as the moments when actors start interacting with the actual characters they are supposed to be playing – are passed over in favour of too many repetitious scenes of Cotard agonizing over his personal and creative neuroses, ultimately rendering him a distinctly unsympathetic, cartoonishly tortured character. As a study of creative narcissism, it works all too well – each character is entirely wrapped up in themselves, unable to communicate with those around them, trapped in prisons of over-privileged self-regard. You sense that if you were to have a conversation with Cotard, he’d be the kind of artist who would never ask you any questions about yourself.
The subject of artistic hubris is certainly interesting, as is the idea of a life that begins to imitate art. However, if Kaufman has missed a trick with Synecdoche, New York, it is in tying these threads into a reflection on the mechanisms of spectacle. The film, for instance, glosses over Cotard’s desire to make a huge theatre piece that shows ‘the truth’, and the implicit assumption that a great work of art necessarily needs to be on a grand scale. It misses the chance to use Cotard’s play as a means to look at how such contemporary phenomena as television talent shows, celebrity gossip magazines or behind-the-scenes documentaries create a false sense of media transparency, whilst simultaneously setting up a false sense of accessibility and ‘you too can be famous’, individualist entitlement. Instead, Kaufman remains too much in thrall to Cotard’s old-fashioned auteur perspective, and as such gets stuck paddling around some rather wanly existential ideas about responsibility and destiny. In Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman’s undeniably fertile imagination seems to be adrift, like cars floating from balloons, or thousands of balls bouncing wildy down the street.
Fifty years ago, the British writer and scientist C.P. Snow delivered his influential and controversial lecture ‘The Two Cultures’ at Cambridge University. Snow’s argument was that a rift had developed between the sciences and the humanities – the ‘two cultures’ – resulting in an increasing ignorance of each other’s activities that was holding back society’s ability to tackle the world’s problems. ‘A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists’ wrote Snow. ‘Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?’
To mark the anniversary of Snow’s lecture, the Royal Society is holding a public debate ‘to revisit the two cultures argument and assess its applicability to our situation today’. The debate will be at 6.30pm, Tuesday 5 May, webcast live at royalsociety.org/live and available to view on demand 48 hours after the event.
The shortlist for the 2009 Turner Prize was announced today.
This year’s nominees are Enrico David, Roger Hiorns, Lucy Skaer and Richard Wright.
EnricoDavid has been nominated for his solo exhibitions ‘How Do You Love Dzzzzt By Mammy?’ at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, and ‘Bulbous Marauder’ at the Seattle Art Museum; Roger Hiorns for his Artangel commission Seizure, and his solo exhibition at Corvi-Mora, London; Lucy Skaer for her solo exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh and ‘A Boat Used as a Vessel’ at the Kunsthalle Basel; and Richard Wright for the work he exhibited in the 55th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh and his exhibition at the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh.
The members of the 2009 jury are Charles Esche (Director, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven), Mariella Frostrup, (writer and broadcaster), Jonathan Jones (art critic, The Guardian), and Dr Andrea Schlieker (Director, Folkestone Triennial, and curator). Stephen Deuchar, Director, Tate Britain is Chair of the Jury.
Work by the shortlisted artists will be shown in an exhibition at Tate Britain opening on 7 October 2009. The winner will be announced on 7 December.
Hugs in an Absolut W..
