In Terms Of

Tag: Paris

  • The Still Life

    Eric Banks
    Wednesday, December 2, 2015
    Creative Writing Program
    New School, Klein Conference Room, Alvin Johnson/J. M. Kaplan Hall, New York

    Eric Banks (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    In academic art history, the single-author, single-subject monograph—an extended study on an individual artist, a group of artists, or a chronological or geographic range—is typically considered the pinnacle of scholarly achievement. A parallel to it in the hierarchy of subject matter in Western art would be history painting, a large work that addresses a biblical, historical, or mythological subject. To continue the analogy, a coauthored or edited book is comparable to a portrait, and an essay in a book is a genre scene. The article published in a peer-reviewed journal would be the landscape. The lowest form is the book review—the still life of academic writing.

    “I’m a book reviewer,” said Eric Banks, director of the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University since 2013, to about thirty attendees of a talk at the New School. No kidding—he has assessed hundreds of books on a wide range of subjects (art, literature, nonfiction) over the last twenty years for the New York Times Book Review, New York Review of Books, Chicago Tribune, Slate, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Financial Times, to name a few. Despite this hierarchy established in the opening, the book review and its parent form, the critical essay, allow for a high amount of creative liberty for its author, as demonstrated every week in “The Critics” section of the New Yorker. “Writing about books,” Banks said, is “a springboard to talk about so many other things in culture.”

    The critical essay is the hardest thing to write, said Honor Moore, nonfiction coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at the New School, who introduced the speaker. Where do you begin? Who are you when you write one? How do you manage a voice that is neither an encyclopedia entry nor a bad sermon? All good questions. What seemed to concern Banks the most, when reviewing books, is to avoid writing that’s too “plotty.”

    Banks admitted that he misunderstood the initial invitation to speak and became preoccupied with preparing a talk on the autodidact as critic, or on what it means to be self-taught in the internet age. Another possible topic could have contrasted the work of a critic with that of an academic scholar or a writer of personal interest. (Is that a semiprofessional blogger or a contributor to Amazon or Yelp?) He could have kicked around a “praise of digression” but instead read his work and talked about it—a strategy Moore had suggested.

    The cover of Artforum in October 1997

    Before reading three of his own short critical essays from the past few years, Banks gave us a brief professional biography. In the mid-1990s, he found himself in a senior-editor seat at Artforum, his first real job out of graduate school. At the time, he said, voices in the magazine came from the belletristic tradition of poets and novelists, from people interested in film, photography, and fashion (“fashion was an extremely important thing around 1995”), and from art historians and graduate students. Art criticism is always tied to higher education, Banks remarked, but book reviewers for the types of publications in which he publishes (journalistic and cultural outlets covering literature and nonfiction) don’t interact with the academy. A good essay on art achieves good formal description, which Banks said comprises 90 percent of the text. “Students are really trained—and they’re trained very well by their professors—to be able to look at something and describe it. You can’t write a critical essay unless you really describe in form[al] terms, in descriptive terms, the object you’re writing about.”

    I beg to differ. First, I would put that figure at no more than 50 percent, because subject matter, biography, history, and cultural context are crucial topics. And this rigorous training of graduate students? A few years ago, while editing the first sixty pages of a doctoral student’s dissertation, I was astonished by the inability of the author to describe works of art: her words hardly corresponded with the accompanying illustrations. Then again Banks, as an editor for Artforum and Bookforum—two of the top publications of criticism of any kind—probably saw only the best stuff from the brightest academics.

    Twenty years ago, Banks observed, writers on art didn’t need to explain a lot in their criticism because their readership was small and dedicated. Now the art world has a wider audience that may not share the same knowledge base. When he took over the editorship of Bookforum from Andrew Hultkrans in 2003, and with the publication’s relaunch later that year, Banks said he wanted swagger from his writers.1 He led the bimonthly journal for five years before replacing Lawrence Weschler at the New York Institute of the Humanities.

    The covers of three books on horse racing from the collection of Eric Banks

    The first text Banks that read tonight, “Pony Up,” came from the April/May 2012 issue of Bookforum. The piece grew, he disclosed, from evolved from avoiding a book review (Patricia Meyer Spacks’s On Rereading from 2011) to a musing on his longtime obsession, horse racing, and in particular, his collection of “ridiculous books” on the subject (from pulp novels to betting tips). Banks eventually shoehorned the book review into the piece, in the fourth of seven paragraphs, but the essay was truly his own thoughts—delightfully self-indulgent, if not somewhat neglectful of the author.

    Banks said his stuff is good when it hits both high and low culture. He also identified the pitfalls of the middle-ranged piece, which plagues many writers of short-form criticism:

    People have written a lot of short reviews, reviews in the fifteen-hundred-word range, which are just long enough to take you forever [to write], and to involve a lot of work and … thought about how to structure an essay, but just short enough that you really can’t get into great depth into the kinds of things you’d like to get into. It’s eye opening, because you frequently will go back and read something you’ve written and think, “I have no idea what I was trying to say with this sentence. I have no idea why I reviewed this book. I don’t even remember reviewing this book.”

    Some reviewers, he said, don’t even remember reading the book.

    Banks apologized in advance for the scatological passages from the Franz West catalogue essay he read, saying he is uncomfortable with colorful language.2 The piece was structured into three sections: Twinkies, roses, and sausages. Banks read from the sausages passage, telling us how the artist’s studio often ate at a Chinese restaurant nearby and sourced their own lentils to accompany the brown rice, and how West’s body was deteriorating because of illness, looking not unlike Ichabod Crane, bad teeth, still smoking cigarettes and marijuana. In West’s work on paper, “sausage equals dick equals turd equals sausage.” Banks described a handful of sculptures and drawings, how the artist’s work was autobiographical despite the collaborators in his studio, and how his audience-engaged pieces differ from that of Relational Aesthetics (they are private).

    Eric Banks reads from three review essays (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    “Public Anomie,” his review of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, recently translated from French to English, was freshly published by Bookforum. It was difficult to avoid thinking about the November terrorist attacks in Paris, Banks mentioned, which took place after he wrote the review. Banks remarked how both his essay and a New York Times review of Submission compared Houellebecq to Lars von Trier, which Banks thought was his observation was a special discovery. Sometimes things are in the air. The plague of modern life, Banks said, borrowing a term from Benedict Anderson, is short-lived communities we form. Those which surround books (and their reviews) still engender “magic conversation.”

    Moore moderated the event’s Q&A, first addressing the solitude of book reviewing. Banks thinks about voice a lot, and he writes, rewrites, and rewrites. Moore concurred, “One has to keep rewriting to find out what you think.” Banks replied, “You’re always writing criticism in your head. You’re constantly taking notes in your head for essays that will never be written.” Yet “When you finally arrive at something, it’s almost like the smelling salts have been broken open, and you’re really alert to what you’re thinking about, reading about, what you’ve read [already].” Critical writing, he implied, sharpens your perception of the world. “There’s something about the critical essay, it makes you more attuned to … a lot of things. Somehow your senses are shot into another level of awareness. It’s the cocaine of writing, or something.” Yet he worries if a piece be embarrassing in a year—not unlike many people’s regret, the next day, about their behavior on the illegal stimulant.

    Banks wished he was more daring in certain areas. Born and raised in Louisiana, he feels he needs a weird Southern high-brow persona yet cannot write a history of the South. Nor could he write a book on smoking cigarettes (he once was a smoker) and the invention of obscenity in the Middle Ages. The questions I didn’t ask were: Is it harder to write about art than about books? How important is the editor, and what is it like writing and publishing without one?

    In Terms Of count: 3.

    1 Banks’s career path was chronicled in Cynthia Cotts, “Banks Knows His Books,” Village Voice, July 1, 2003.

    2 Rachel Harrison and Eric Banks, “Hostess with the Mostess,” in Darsie Alexander, ed., Franz West: To Build a House You Start with the Roof (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

  • Running in Circles

    This essay was largely written during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Olivier Mosset in Conversation with Marie Heilich
    Wednesday, November 18, 2015
    Parapet/Real Humans, Saint Louis, MO

    The speakers, from left: Marie Heilich, Olivier Mosset, and Amy Granat (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Olivier Mosset was in town for the opening of his exhibition at Parapet/Real Humans, a project space run by Amy Granat in a storefront in the Fox Park neighborhood of Saint Louis. On view was a framed set of four lithographs of two thick black stripes on a square of white paper. The set, it turns out, was made for a Swiss Institute benefit in 2004. Granat said the work reminded her of September 11—I suppose any two vertical lines will do that. The artist compared them to an optometrist’s vision test. As someone who can’t see six inches past his nose without glasses or contacts (and who never skips his annual eye-doctor visit), that made more sense.

    With long gray hair and a long gray beard, Mosset easily looked the part of a sixties Euroactivist and biker outlaw—he has lived in Tucson, Arizona, since the mid-1990s. His interviewer was Marie Heilich, assistant director of White Flag Projects in Saint Louis, a slender brunette with bangs, dressed in all black and armed with an MA in curatorial studies from Bard College. Mosset’s talk—a rare speaking engagement for him, we were told—was largely a monologue. Heilich made intermittent comments and Granat, who was operating a smartphone that projected slides of the artist’s work on the wall beside the speakers, jumped in every so often.

    Heilich encouraged Mosset to revisit his early years, so he gave a brief history of BMPT, a group of four European artists (Mosset with Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni) that came together in 1966. “The idea was to question what gives value to painting,” Mosset said, targeting uniqueness, personal expression, and color as culprits. His conception of art, however, began changing a few years earlier, when Mosset had been floored by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whose work he saw at Kunsthalle Bern in 1962. “This was in,” he recalled his excitement, “This was happening.” Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955–59), the sculpture of a shaggy taxidermied goat stuck in a car tire, “was quite a shock—is this art?” But Mosset still had classical modernism on the brain, as he twice emphasized the painted nature of Piet Mondrian’s work, declaring that reproductions of it are nothing like the real things. Though he wasn’t familiar with Russian Constructivism and Swiss Concrete art at the time, he acknowledged an affinity with them. I got the sense that Mosset is unburdened by tradition, not antagonistic toward it. Give painting autonomy, he even said at one point.

    Olivier Mosset, Sans titre, 2004, suite of four lithographs on Rives, 200 x 200 cm (artwork © Olivier Mosset; photograph by Christopher Howard)

    For Mosset, Rauschenberg taking home the Golden Lion, the top prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale, marked the end of the importance of Paris, where he had moved two years before, at age eighteen. Previously the French avant-garde consisted of the Nouveau Réalisme movement: Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Piero Manzoni, and others. BMPT reacted against that group’s preferred materials: found objects and rubbish. Earning notoriety after its first event, BMPT was invited to participate in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, where the artists painted their works—Buren’s stripe, Mosset’s circle, Parmentier’s fold, and Toroni’s brush mark—during the opening, not in advance. (They subsequently withdrew from the exhibition the next day.) At that and other events they projected slides, played audiotapes announcing “art is the enemy of freedom” and “art is the enemy of presence,” among other statements, and handed out their propaganda pamphlets. “Ideas are the art, not the paintings,” Mosset declared. Audiences soon came to recognize each member’s signature style, so the four agreed to do each other’s work.1 Mosset began painting stripes and later introduced color: gray stripes on white, then green on white, then white on color, and so on. After that he made monochromes (more specifically, they are single-hued paintings).

    Mosset continued his monologue, which by this point felt like someone reading a Wikipedia article—it was all factual recollection in a dry tone. Even in Paris, he said, people were talking about New York, so he traveled there in 1967, where he met Andy Warhol. After moving to the city ten years later, he sought out the painter Marcia Hafif after she wrote an essay on contemporary painting called “Beginning Again,” published in Artforum in 1978. With her and Joseph Marioni, he formed the New York Radical Painting group, which had exhibitions at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1983 (New Abstraction) and at Williams College in Massachusetts in 1984 (Radical Painting). Mosset also got hip to a newer scene of artists, including Peter Halley, Philip Taaffe, and Jeff Koons. In the 1990s, Mosset worked with John Armleder, Sylvie Fleury, Steven Parrino, and Cady Noland, but the artist barely mentioned these collaborations during tonight’s talk.

    BMPT, Manifestation 1, January 3, 1967, 18th Salon de la Jeune Peinture, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. From right to left: Michel Parmentier, Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Niele Toroni (photograph ©Bernard Boyer)

    Mosset affably stated that he has no strategy, does what he wants, and cannot control trends. “I’m basically interested in abstract painting,” he said, and somehow people are attracted to what he does. Heilich questioned him about his social and flexible practice, in which he diminishes his own authorship (evident, for example, in his work with BMPT), but Mosset construed the question differently. “The art practice is very selfish,” he responded, and exhibitions involve a community. “It’s personal when you do it; it’s social when you show it.” Mosset believes the gallery gives you the distance to see your work differently.

    During the Q&A, an audience member inquired about the meditative nature of his circle paintings that, she conjectured, might signify emptiness or completeness. Mosset deflected this impression and said he was thinking of the shapes found in works by Johns and Kenneth Noland, which have formalist, not symbolic, meanings. (He also recognized that he did invent the circle.) The questioner asked him if the circles got better and better as he made more of them. Yes, he replied with a smile, but they were still the same.

    Heilich asked, “Do you see any contemporary approaches that stand out to you, for better or worse?” He didn’t identify any artists or styles but instead considered the differences between then and now. “At the time in Paris, we could react against what was happening, whereas today, I don’t know exactly what you can react against. It’s a different era.” And who else to blame but the internet. A younger audience member argued that “artists will always respond to each other, and to each other’s work, but that kind of clear dialogue [from the sixties], I don’t think it’s actually possible now.” Today everyone has a voice and a platform, she continued, but with equity that voice is minimized. Mosset agreed—there are now more artists and more information. I feel sorry for them, overwhelmed by online communications, and am sure artists from forty to fifty years ago probably had the same anxieties about their own ballooning art world. The audience member was relieved that artists are becoming activists again. Culture is important, Mosset chimed in, especially after the recent terrorist attack in Paris.

    The audience at Parapet/Real Humans (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Earlier Heilich had observed that Mosset’s practice—producing circles, stripes, and singular colors—united painting and the readymade in the same object. This idea made sense at the moment but unraveled the more I thought about it. His practice is actually artisanal and small batch, not mass production, and analogous to someone like Gilbert Stuart, whose cranked out 130 versions of the Athenaeum Portrait of George Washington in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. “A second painting might be a repetition,” Mosset said in a recent interview, “but it can never be a replica.”2 You can’t help but admire the audacity of painting the same type of picture for years, if not decades, while at the same time pity the paucity of ideas.

    Trying to vary the topics, Granat asked about Mosset’s interest in motorcycles, which he collects, rides, and occasionally exhibits with his paintings. While such lines of inquiry did not lead to interesting discussion, the effort was appreciated. And while I enjoyed hearing from an artist whom I have not previously studied, I was disappointed with the light moderation—Mosset did not get into much detail about the meaning of his work and with art itself. It seemed as if Heilich was too timid (or just too polite) to cross-examine this art-historical figure about any radical ideas he has or might have had, or to find out what makes him produce what appears to be redundant or complacent work.

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    1 Olivier Mosset made circle paintings from 1966 to 1974. Daniel Buren obviously never stopped with the stripes.

    2 Sara Stephenson, “Collaborative Reduction: Q+A with Olivier Mosset,” Art in America, February 10, 2011.

  • Needle on the Record

    Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution with Michael Denning
    Friday, September 4, 2015
    Interference Archive, Brooklyn

    “You might say that a people or a movement must be constituted musically before it can be constituted politically.” This was one argument among many declared by Michael Denning, a professor of American studies and English at Yale University, during a talk for his new Verso book, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution. Denning, however, made it clear that the music culture during the brief period of time studied in his book—from the widespread use of electrical recording in 1925 to the early years of the Great Depression—was not revolutionary politically.

    Denning’s words were well suited for the summer exhibition at Interference Archive, if a song could be freedom … Organized Sounds of Resistance, which explored intersections of music and politics through record covers, song books, and music memorabilia, all with a predilection for insurgency. Most prominent were three walls of record covers, some from popular music, such as Rage Against the Machine’s Evil Empire, Meat Is Murder by the Smiths, and Bikini Kill’s self-titled EP. Revolutionary-minded jazz players Sun Ra and Rahsaan Roland Kirk were represented, as were obscure proletariat titles like They’ll Never Keep Us Down: Women’s Coal Mining Songs.

    Drawing from the first chapter of his book, Denning provided ten instances of early electrical sound recordings from around the world. Before this technology, singers and musician performed live in front of a machine that cut grooves into a platter—the master recording of the session was a record. In the mid-1920s, engineers developed a more advanced method using microphones and amplifiers to electrically inscribe sounds onto a cylinder, disc, or film, which could be taken elsewhere for manufacturing. A son band was recorded in Havana in October 1925, followed by Louis Armstrong’s bands in New Orleans and Chicago a month later. In Cairo the legendary vocalist Umm Kulthūm recorded songs for a set of ten 78 RPM records in May 1926, and the Jakarta singer and dancer Miss Riboet laid down the kroncong classic “Krongtjong Moeritskoe” in November. Other recordings were made in Honolulu, Zanzibar, Accra, and Johannesburg—and Django Reinhardt in Paris. Denning played twenty to thirty seconds of each example to give the audience a taste of the explosion of music from back them. He also created a Spotify playlist for the book.1

    Michael Denning describes the early electrical recordings of Louis Armstrong (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Denning could not overstress the importance of colonial port cities, connected by steamships. After the invention of electrical recording, companies such as Gramophone in the United Kingdom, Victor in the United States, and Pathé in France, sent engineers around the world, usually twice a year, to port cities—Manila, Honolulu, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Tunis, Bombay—to record the locals in order to sell products back to the local markets. It was a commercial enterprise relatively unconcerned with preservation. One British music reviewer, Denning said, noted that even though England produced the physical records, they were imported quickly and therefore hard to find. In the United States, homegrown music was marketed as “race records” and “hillbilly” music, often become trendy in the metropolitan cities. Though the recordings of the electrical era came from all over the world, they were mislabeled as jazz, a catchall term for syncopated music that might actually be tango, rumba, or rebetika.

    In those port cities lived professional musicians who could read music, as well as those learned by ear. “You see it in Havana, you see it in New Orleans, you see it in Shanghai,” Denning said. “The mix of these two sets of musicians” produced localized—I hesitate to say indigenous—music outside the formal, orchestrated scenes in London, New York, and Berlin. Creating makeshift studios in hotel rooms, engineers would sometimes put up a sign that essentially said “We are recording and need musicians.” Other times they would locate performers on the edge of musical culture—those musicians who were trained but were part of the community—who would become musical directors that recruited from the local scene and even registered (or assigned) a recording’s copyright. In colonialism, he remarked, a class of subordinate elites served as intermediaries between the ruling class and the general population, and musicians could be found there. These musicians, Denning revealed, are the “key protagonists or heroes” of Noise Uprising.

    Installation view of one wall of if a song could be freedom … Organized Sounds of Resistance (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    While some might see exploitative capitalism at play here, Denning took a deeper look. “These musics are best understood not as an emergence of the music industry,” he said, “nor was it simple popular music.” Instead, “it was a vernacular revolution,” not unlike the effect of the invention of the printing press on language. The author called the emergence of these records a “decolonization of the ear,” sparking a political unconscious in music that later would become conscious. The young intellectuals in port cities, he said, were drawn to their local music. Denning stated, “Political decolonization—the decolonization of territories, of legislatures—depended on a cultural revolution.” The creation and circulation of records from the late 1920s onward supported enfranchisement, he claimed, serving a role that books and newspapers once did. Denning commented that the record covers on the wall of Interference Archive, such as those by the politicized Nigerian bandleader and politician Fela Kuti, exemplify the evolution.

    In Trinidad, a song by the calypsonian Raymond Quevedo, better known as Atilla the Hun, called “Commission’s Report” responded earnestly to the official government report on the Butler riots. After the British cracked down on dissent, he recorded two more songs that were sympathetic to the replaced colonial leaders, and a third, called “The Strike,” that cheekily avoided direct commentary. The knowing wink became powerfully prevalent. “Often the most innocuous songs,” Denning said, “carry anticolonial and nationalist connotations in the eyes of the authorities and in the population.” In Hawaii, “the romantic lyric tribute to the land, built on the simple musicality of place names,” was a form a resistance. “What some understood as tourist picturesque actually signified colonial dispossession.”

    But what about the commercial exploitation and appropriation of the music? Many of the recordings were a mingling of Western and non-Western instruments, a hybrid evolution of styles that differed from music from isolated, rural locations, which relied on the oral tradition. Even though the folklorists find commercialism suspicious, Denning said, leading figures such as Alan Lomax came to realize the cultural and historical significance of the recordings. In a letter to the Library of Congress, Lomax claimed that the commercial companies did more of a service than the folklorists, who sometimes repackaged the old commercial recordings as indigenously authentic. Denning noted that much of Harry Smith’s celebrated collection , Anthology of American Folk Music, was drawn from early electrical records produced for the market.

    The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók sought pure folk music, Denning said, not the popular music played by gypsies for money. The search for authenticity or purity is short sighted, if not misguided, I think, because it fetishizes tradition and allows no room for development and change. In the early phonographic era, Denning said that the song was considered more important than the performance—improvisation was secondary. This attitude reversed. (Reinhardt, for instance, listened to and learned Armstrong’s improvisations.) In addition, a reliance on Western interpretations of exotic music declined. Before 1925, American listeners got Tin Pan Alley renditions of Hawaiian music. Folks no longer needed W. C. Handy’s written notations of the blues because, ten years later, they had the immediate gratification of listening to Armstrong and Bessie Smith. There may have been better trumpet players in New Orleans twenty or thirty years before Armstrong, Denning said, but we don’t have the recordings to prove it.

    Michael Denning gives the thumbs up (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    While some may prize the work of the anonymous collective over the individual or stars, the early electric recordings featured individuals who were stars. Denning argued that the cult of the popular bandleader was not dissimilar to those for charismatic political figures in the decolonization era. The leaders of newly free nations often sponsored the work of musicians to establish not only a national identity but also a national industry. Import substitution is the concept of manufacturing and selling goods within your own country to obviate the need to buy from others. Some musicians were even encouraged to sell their records in New York and London, not just in Lagos.

    Denning pointed out the social and sexual contradiction in music. The division of labor was traditional: men are instrumentalists and women are singers. At the same time, he said, women were able to perform in public for the first time. From 1925 to 1930, Denning told us, musicians were not trying to revolutionize music for politics. Records reinvented daily life, making music regular, not occasional. At the time, he continued, music was associated with vice (drinking, drugs, prostitution), with carnival and military marching bands, and with vaudeville and theater. In the port cities, Denning noted, working-class musicians played for working-class people.

    Denning compared the early electrical period to the dot com boom of the late 1990s: internet companies had no idea how to make money, but investors poured millions into ideas for websites. In the mid- to late 1920s, record companies recorded anything and everything, because the technology to produce and consume music was so new. Ten to fifteen years later, and after the Great Depression, they knew how to market music and make money. Denny, though, reminded us to focus on the music, not on the industry. The energy of labor precedes capitalism’s capture, Denning said. He urged us to transcend the leftist critique of industry and get to the powerful human impulses to make music—and also to have it heard and shared.

    In Terms Of count: 3.

    1 During the audience Q&A, an attendee was curious about Denning’s relationship to archives. “In many ways I feel like my archives have been that world of collectors and discographers on the internet,” citing the blogs Excavated Shellac and Haji Maji. Record collectors are the true archivists, he said. Those who collected Robert Johnson records in the 1960s found that, by the 1980s and 1990s, these became too expensive. The collectors turned elsewhere, to the world music that Denning’s book is about.