The Art of Talent: Evgeny Kissin

In the world of artistic discussions performance has been considered an experiential artistic work because with every performance of a piece the piece changes and takes on new character. I have always loved that about staged art, no matter how many times you see it, each time is unique. So the questions of artistic value for a performance become divided based on whether you are trying to analyze the creation of the original idea or that of the current interpretation. The problem with revisiting the classical works is that the original idea is not necessarily preserved to the creator’s specifications, then again Barthes that might not be a problem.Thinking a little bit about the intensely complicated issues that were only briefly described above I have had the enjoyment of listening to Evgeny Kissin at Carnegie Hall. He is no composer and therefore is not a creator of musical compositions and yet has been credited as one of the most talented artist playing piano today. This is an interesting form of art if you really look at it, yes it is easy to define him as an artist but the way he is “creating” art is not necessarily in the tangible world. The pieces he performed are credited to others, to the composers who first wrote them. It can be compared to how a copy artist might practice his trade by painting the work of a great master. However that comparison fails to recognize the performance aspects of staged art. Though the copy artist will add his own take to the painting, the ultimate goal is to make it look like the original. A better example would be that of Picasso who recreated Velázquez’s Las Meninas in his own style. Kissin isn’t appreciated because he sounds like everyone thinks the piece should but rather because of his phenomenal talent to do what ever he wants with the piano. His hands can be anywhere, his timing is flawless and his style is unique.

He is an athlete of the art world and just as the art of athletic performance can be valued in its own way; his ability has the artistic potential in his movement, in his sound, and in his style.

So is this a different way to look at the arts? Can we judge an artist for his talent in the field? Can this form of art be considered a revival of the talent driven art of the salons? And what about the Dadaist who will consider this nothing more than a copy? Beyond any question or answer that can be conceived the reality in my opinion is that the creativity needed here is more hidden and harder to define than with an artist in the traditional sense, and yes in this sense I am including the Dadas in the category of traditional since they were creating. It’s a creativity that is in the way a piece is interpreted, in essence perhaps the best comparison is to a translator. In literature a translator is creating her own interpretation of the work of art and is therefore cultivating a new art work in the simple fact that the words change. Since it is not a one to one relationship between two languages, it is far from that as Saussure defined for us in the beginning of the 20^th century. And in finding the best way to make that interpretation, a new work of art is born, and the translator becomes an artist. The same is happening here. In Kissin’s interpretation of how the notes on paper and the markings associated with them should be converted into sounds we hear. That conversion is creation and Kissin, the artist.

Thoughts…

-huysmans

From inside Carnegie Hall

Reporting live from within Carnegie Hall.
Just heard Jean-Yves Thibaudet play piano for Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra by George Gershwin.
Wow.
This is a real memorable experience.
What amazing talent and expression.
Overture to The School for Scandal, Op. 5 by Samuel Barber was amazing as well.
Awaiting Igor Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps.
Great night to go to Carnegie Hall

Huysmans out.

Liz Phair: Modernism and Modern Feminism

A while ago I wrote that the aim of shocking one’s audience is necessarily conservative. The example I used is South Park – the show is amusing and occasionally clever, but I’m really surprised that more people haven’t commented on its reactionary tendencies, which I find rather obvious. While they play the ‘messages’ at the end of episodes for irony, at least in the use of corny music, most of the episodes do make statements fairly unambiguously, and more often than not those statements are socially conservative. Exhibiting transgression as shocking, disgusting or laughable reinforces the idea that there’s something wrong with it; this is why Umberto Eco made the claim that all comedy is conservative. Perhaps South Park’s left-leaning fans just don’t want to ruin the show by teasing out its politics; I really can’t reconcile it with my beliefs, which are, in the end, really not that extreme.

I don’t reject art because I disagree with it, but I do find it interesting to think of how its political identity relates to that of its audience. Another example of intentionally-shocking art that I’ve been thinking about lately (because it’s been back in the media, naturally) is one of the great rock albums, Liz Phair’s ‘Exile in Guyville.’ The album may not be particularly shocking today (this is one of the reasons why Chris Dahlen’s review in Pitchfork Media claims that the album now sounds dated), but in its time it was fairly notorious for the highly explicit presentation of Phairs’s (Phair the character’s, if not Phair the actual person’s) sex life. The album has often been called feminist, and feminism often shows through in Phair’s independence and sexual aggression, which places her in a traditionally masculine role. But the absence of a traditional relationship is conspicuous, and the need for one comes to the surface in ‘Fuck and Run:’

Whatever happened to a boyfriend
The kind of guy who tries to win you over
Whatever happened to a boyfriend
The kind of guy who make loves ’cause he’s in it
I want a boyfriend
I want all that stupid old shit, like letters and sodas.

There’s nothing necessarily reactionary about the need for stability, even if takes the form of “letters and sodas,” and it’s fairly clear that the relationship Phair wants is an egalitarian one, but the album presents the alternative to jukebox-and-milkshake heterosexuality as bleak and loveless, and makes some pretty clear attempts to shock people with the details of it. This takes a bit of the irony out of these lines. There is a real longing for the courtship rituals of the (idealized) past in them.

But I don’t think this longing is reactionary. I would compare it with the sentiment of the Modernist poets, and in particular T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. If the main idea of Modernism was that poetry can only be successful if it has a strong sense of the ‘now’ – T.S. Eliot once claimed that the most important thing for a young poet to study is the internal combustion engine – the Modernists had very little affection for the time they lived in. The Modernists’ fixation on classical antiquity is in part explained by their belief that an understanding of the present must be grounded in an understanding of the past, but the genuine longing for a return to Byzantium was not peculiar to Yeats. What redeems the Modernists from being nothing more than curmudgeons is that they knew full well that the present was not the past, and that the time in which they lived really was that bad. Their longing for tradition came from a serious feeling of uprootedness that affected people across Europe and the U.S. in the first three decades of the twentieth century, and the sense of ‘tradition’ that they longed for never entailed stasis.

Phair’s work is, in much the same way, directed towards the present rather than the past – the record’s immersion in the indie rock culture of the early nineties is the other reason Dahlen calls it dated – and even though her longing for “all that stupid old shit” really is genuine, it does retain the bitterer part of its irony: she knows that it’s not coming back. The pathos in this situation could be interpreted as reactionary, except that Phair seems to be aware of the falsehood of the idealized past she craves; the real cause of her predicament is her inability to reconcile the actual nature of her life with the lingering remains of the tradition from which it has violently broken off which still reside in her consciousness. Classical feminism may not work this way – most of Katherine Mansfield’s protagonists, for instance, find themselves acting out social roles that they don’t genuinely feel engaged with, while Phair finds herself disengaged from social roles that she still has internalized. But that doesn’t mean Phair is not a feminist. Like Mansfield’s characters, she is after a way to resolve her life with the way she really feels, and a return to the strictures of the past is not the way to do that.

(Also, in response to the allmusic.com piece I linked to, which says of the album’s supposed parallel with the Rolling Stones’ ‘Exile on Main Street,’ “Just try to match the albums up: is the ‘blow-job queen’ fantasy of ‘Flower’ really the answer to the painful elegy ‘Let It Loose’?” Of course it is, and the fact that ‘Flower’ takes the place of a spiritual is one of the album’s most cutting jabs.)

~therighthandofnixon

The Persona as Form

The always insightful Mike B. of Clap Clap had a thought-provoking post last week about the status of celebrity gossip and the creation of public personae in our culture. One of the major points that he makes is that, though we tend to be ashamed when we read about the starts’ exploits, celebrities have become a form of entertainment in themselves, distinct from (though not always unrelated to) the media that initially made them famous. I would like to ask the question that we here at the Foundation always ask: can a celebrity persona be art? The creation of a unique persona is practically a prerequisity of a star’s rise to prominence, and it is often done with intent, be it by the celebrity him- or herself, or by a publicity agent, and, as Mike B. observes, it takes a narrative form quite similar to that of characterization in fiction.

One difference that Mike B. notes is that celebrity personae gain a special social meaning because of their general exposure. In a follow-up, he responds to the example of Bob Dylan’s carefully constructed public image. I would make a claim that Dylan’s persona is a work of art, but Mike B. observes that, though Dylan is well-known as a musician, the details of his character are mainly of interest to his fans, and don’t have the sort of cultural currency that facts about, to use Mike’s example, Brittney Spears do. Perhaps this means that Dylan’s is not really a celebrity persona – but couldn’t a celebrity persona equally well be a work of art?

~therighthandofnixon

Fun Myths and Inauthentic Fun: Robert Johnson and Gogol Bordello

The man that rock and roll fans most associate with acoustic blues, Robert Johnson, is not one of the more accessible blues singers. His music does speak for itself, provided you can get past the thin 1930s recording quality and the sometimes difficult-to-decipher singing style, but what’s really won Mr. Johnson more acclaim than other (I would say equally) worthy blues singers of his time like Blind Willie McTell, Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James, is the particularly alluring body of legend that surrounds him. The stories vary in credibility – that he was fatally poisoned at 27 for sleeping with another man’s wife (probably more or less true); that only two photographs of him were ever taken (true as far as anyone knows); that a few weeks before his death he had gone electric and started a rock band-like trio, fifteen years before Elvis (it’s at least conceivable); that he had sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads in exchange for his phenomenal guitar skills (most likely he just practiced a lot) – but as a whole they tend to build him up into a sort of metaphysical being sent to earth to plant the seed of rock and roll. Much has been written about the cult of authenticity, and how it’s really a sham, and I don’t have anything to add on that topic, but with Robert Johnson it’s not authenticity that matters, but myth, and even though it’s a sham the mythology really does work – it really makes listening to his music more fun. The question is, does it work better before you find out it’s all just myth – that he was probably just a regular entertainer trying to make a living and get laid?

At the other end of the myth spectrum is the Brooklyn-based “Gypsy punk” band Gogol Bordello. Roma music has very little place for the illusion of authenticity – like the culture, it’s heterogeneous and malleable to the point that the “real thing” is impossible to pin down – and it has no scruples about wearing its appropriation on its sleeve, which makes it pretty much immune to origin myths. (Their Web site has an “Origins” section, but it’s jokey and it seems designed to instantly shoot down any sense of mystique that might develop: “But let’s not get too nostalgic here…” ends one page. “That was basicly [sic] two weeks ago.”) Robert Christgau writes that the guitarist of the Serbian Roma band Kal, who toured with Gogol Bordello, uses Chicago blues-style licks “not as a reference but as a common resource, just like the Nusrat Fatah Ali Khan speed syllabics.” Gogol Bordello relates to its source material in much the same way. There’s certainly some artifice to it – I suspect that the singer, Eugene Hütz, who grow up in the Ukraine, exaggerates his thick accent on purpose, and I’m pretty sure some of the grammatical errors in his English lyrics are intentional. But when I listen to the music I don’t care – if Hütz is exaggerating the signs of his eastern-European origins, he’s not doing it to distance or even distinguish himself from the listener. It’s not self-conscious multiculturalism, but more like aculturalism, and the result is that the band actively resists being mythologized as exotic. They never sound like anything more mysterious than a bunch of people playing whatever they want to play, not worrying about what cultures they’re borrowing from.

~therighthandofnixon

Bob Dylan, Visual Art, and Marketing

The recent Times interview with Bob Dylan has mostly gotten attention for the (characteristically cryptic) endorsement of Barack Obama that Dylan threw in at the end. The Times even published a news article about their own feature in order to expand on the point. As a Dylan acolyte, I am certainly glad to hear that the man himself likes the same candidate as me, but there’s more to the interview than that endorsement, and it relates in particular to the subject of this blog, which is art. Dylan has become a painter.

The particular point I want to comment on is the position of an artist with a reputation in one area crossing over into an unrelated one. Of course, the celebrity novel that rides on name recognition rather than actual quality is not an unfamiliar thing, and one could easily assume the same of Dylan’s visual art – that it would not be in a gallery if it were made by an unknown. (Dylan has published a novel, by the way, although it’s hardly the sort of thing you’d expect to come of a celebrity book deal – from what I’ve read of it, it’s reminiscent of André Breton’s automatically-written Nadja. It’s calledTarantula.)

But while a People Magazine-level actor would hardly have trouble getting a novel out there, the world of visual art is different from that of trade publishing. Sez Dylan, “The critics didn’t want to review it. The publisher told me they couldn’t get past the idea of another singer who dabbled. You know, like, ‘David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Paul McCartney…Everyone’s doing it these days.’ No one from the singing profession was going to be taken seriously by the art world, I was told, but that was OK.”

Perhaps this reflects well on the visual art establishment – that Dylan’s celebrity status turned out to be a hindrance to getting his art out there rather than a boon. Dylan himself compares the visual art world favorably to the music industry: “From the small steps I’ve taken in [the art world], I’d say, yeah, the people are honest, upfront and deliver what they say. Basically, they are who they say they are. They don’t pretend.” In any case, it shows that critics have a much more prominent place in visual art than in literature, which tends to listen much more to the market than to the experts. What complicates the issue is that it’s not just a matter of the difference between a gallery, which is a destination, and a book, which is a product: the first edition of Dylan’s art book, Drawn Blank, came out in 1994, while his first gallery exhibition, held in London, is just opening until this Saturday.

As regards the art, I’m reserving final judgment until I see more of it, but I haven’t been blown away yet. From the examples that the Times article provides, it seems to go for the same sort of mood that Dylan’s most imagistic songs convey, and it pulls it off fairly well. I’m not sure whether it really adds anything substantive to that mood, but I like to think that it’s getting attention for its own merits, and not just because it’s Bob Dylan. Even if it’s read as outsider art, which it probably could be considered, that’s a better position to be in than celebrity tie-in.

~therighthandofnixon

The Mixtape About Nothing

I figured I’d follow up my post about tongue-in-cheek “tributes” to popular culture with something a little more positive: the up-and-coming rapper Wale’s tribute to Seinfeld, The Mixtape About Nothing. It really only uses Seinfeld as a jumping-off point, but Wale’s fondness for the show is clearly there, and he manages to come off as appreciative but not fawning. Apart from the Seinfeld references, Wale has a fresh sound, and he avoids spending the whole time rapping about the fact that he’s rapping, a tendency that has ruined a lot of promising MCs in the past. I recommend this mixtape unreservedly. And hey, it’s a mixtape so it’s free.

Thanks to Passion of the Weiss for pointing me towards it.

~therighthandofnixon

American Blog Post

From Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One:

“Dennis sat in one of the arm-chairs, put his feet on the trolley and settled himself to read. Life in the Air force had converted him from an amateur to a mere addict. There were certain trite passages of poetry which from a diverse multitude of associations never failed to yield the sensations he craved; he never experimented; these were the branded drug, the sure specific, big magic. He opened the anthology as a woman opens her familiar pack of cigarettes.

“Outside the windows the cars swept past continuously, out of town, into town, lights ablaze, radios at full throttle.

“‘I wither slowly in thine arms,‘ he read. ‘Here at the quiet limit of the world,” and repeated to himself: ‘Here at the quiet limit of the world. Here at the quiet limit of the world” . . . as a monk will repeat a single pregnant text, over and over again in prayer.”

I posted earlier about evocative phrases that seem to be evocative only, in some way, through cheap trickery, and here they are is again. Dennis Barlow is not only a poetry addict, but a well-known hack poet, and like nearly every character in a Waugh novel, is entirely superficial and devoid of any genuine concern for the world. Whether we’re only meant to be laughing at Dennis for his superficial use of the poem (Tennyson’s “Tithonus”), or whether Waugh is making fun of Tennyson as well (which seems likely), this sort of relationship between reader and phrase is familiar. All Dennis is after, here, is the physiological effect that the particular phrase “at the quiet limit of the world” has on him. There is certainly something wrong with his superficial style of reading and failure to move beyond the old and familiar, and that is the main point of this scene, but it also brings up an issue about poetry in general that I can’t resolve. I can’t come up with a qualitative difference between a good poetic phrase, which still has a primary purpose of creating sensations, and a “branded drug” that may turn off the discerning reader, but that is nevertheless effective. What makes one way of evoking a sensation seem ‘cheap’ while another does not?

One major difference, I suppose, is originality, which bears on the reader as well as on the poet. Outside of poetry, one example of the “branded drug” I’ve found is the use of of the word ‘American’ to give a sense of import to a title. Thus, American Pastoral, American Psycho, American Gods, American Splendor, American Graffiti, American Beauty, American Beauty, American Gangster, American Gangster, American Water. The word, used in this context, seems to have turned, over the years, into an empty commonplace used to signify that This Is Big And Important. (American Pie doesn’t count because it is nearly impossible to make food sound serious.) The reason it might seem empty now, as it seems for me, is simply that it’s been done so many times before – setting the doubts that that casts on the creator aside, that gives it the sense of being prepackaged, particularly since it is used in the title, where it can easily resemble a brand.

But it’s not just originality or novelty, and it’s not just the fact that flashy phrases can distract from bad writing, dull ideas, aesthetic blunders, and so on. Some phrases just seem easier than they ought to be, and we, too clever to be so readily manipulated, push them away. I think there is more to our preference for poetry that avoids taking shortcuts on the way to our seratonin glands than simple admiration for the amount of effort put in by the poet. But where exactly is the corny different from what we perceive as genuinely powerful?

~therighthandofnixon

Found Art Found Everywhere

The prime piece of remix fodder for this week happens to be “Pretty Much Everywhere, It’s Gonna Be Hot.”

This one is a bizarre 9-second interchange on a news show, possibly Haitian, though they speak English. It sets off my stupidity detector, sure, but it also sets off involuntary laughter. It may work for you, it may not, but what I want to ask is, can we call things like this art? Is the process of selecting, or at least stumbling upon, a strange old video that happens to have some peculiar entertainment value, and doing just a bit of cutting too easy? Or is the end product the only thing that matters?

I don’t think many people would argue that, for instance, The Atomic Cafe, a film constructed entirely out of old footage and audio recordings from the early Cold War, is not art. It has a clear identity of its own, a narrative arc, even though the only work the creators did involved selection, cutting, and sequencing of the source material. The same could be said of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, which I have been listening to a lot lately – Smith not only took the trouble of amassing old records and picking out the best, but he sequenced them so that they commented on each other and formed a vaguely historical arc. Perhaps not everyone would agree that the Anthology should be called a work of art, but that view is not uncommon.

If we’re going to argue that these examples are instances of art, while a single found video is not, then we will have to come up with a clear place to draw the line. It is hard to argue that one piece of art has a vision while another does not – how do we know what was in the creator’s head? – and it is also hard to argue that a single piece of footage does not reflect on the world around us. What, then, is the difference?

Thoughts?

~therighthandofnixon