The Prose of the Trans-Siberian

[I keep thinking of late of this poem and of Cendrars, who started and discarded so many styles and ideas in this one piece of poetry (and compelled Apollinaire to write Zone). Mainly, because I find myself thinking on and on of Soviet avant-garde and the way they transformed artistic worldview. In his much mythologised autobiography, Cendrars, who chosen and perhaps even pioneered this work-as-life style, then plaguing beatniks etc., completely invented his transsiberian journey. He's never been to China, but he did escape from home to go to St Petersburg and Moscow around 1904, because he was dong badly at school. He was a Swiss, who lived in Russia and US (1911-12), and lived only for 1 year in France, when he published Prose and subsequently took part in the 1st world war. In 1911 he changed his name, Frédéric-Louis Sauser, to Blaise Cendrars, incorporating into his identity the words “Blaze” and “Ashes”. Still, together with Apollinaire, a son of a Polish aristocrate, also a cosmopolitan to the bone, he's considered a French poet. The subtitle to Prose was "poemes, couleurs simultanees de tirage atteignant la hauteur de la Tour Eiffel: 150 exemplaires numerotés et signes", because it was initially published in a fabulous project by Sonia Terk-Delaunay, as a single sheet of apper, divided down the centre which was to unfold like an accordion through 22 panels to a lenghth of almost 7 feet. 150 copies lined up would made the height of Tour Eiffel. Marjorie Perloff is very good on this in her book on Futurism. I keep thinking of this metaphor of a train, so multifaceted in the early avant-garde (agit trains!) and something that until today may inspire imagination, as something embodying and aggregating every aspect of revolutionary art and spirit of modernity. And although Trotsky said (via Marx and Kautsky) that "Revolution is a locomotive of history", this concept of history and revolution - as a constant successful and ruthless progress, was then famously criticised by Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, where he challenged this positive image of history as a constant movement forward, that moves with you, arguing instead that history is something, that must be moved. Also, you know that something is wrong with a country, if a ticket to a city 70m distant costs 40 quid. Long live countries with cheap and efficient railway systems!]



The Prose of the Trans-siberian and of Little Jeanne of France

Dedicated to the musicians


Back then I was still young
I was barely sixteen but my childhood memories were gone
I was 48,000 miles away from where I was born
I was in Moscow, city of a thousand and three bell towers and seven
train stations
And the thousand and three towers and seven stations weren't enough
for me
Because I was such a hot and crazy teenager
That my heart was burning like the Temple of Ephesus or like Red
Square in Moscow
At sunset
And my eyes were shining down those old roads
And I was already such a bad poet
That I didn't know how to take it all the way.

The Kremlin was like an immense Tartar cake
Iced with gold
With big blanched-almond cathedrals
And the honey gold of the bells . . .
An old monk was reading me the legend of Novgorod
I was thirsty
And I was deciphering cuneiform characters
Then all at once the pigeons of the Holy Ghost flew up over the square
And my hands flew up too, sounding like an albatross taking off
And, well, that's the last I remember of the last day
Of the very last trip
And of the sea.

Still, I was a really bad poet.
I didn't know how to take it all the way.
I was hungry
And all those days and all those women in all those cafes and all those
glasses
I wanted to drink them down and break them
And all those windows and all those streets
And all those houses and all those lives
And all those carriage wheels raising swirls from the broken pavement
I would have liked to have rammed them into a roaring furnace
And I would have liked to have ground up all their bones
And ripped out all those tongues
And liquefied all those big bodies naked and strange under clothes that
drive me mad . . .
I foresaw the coming of the big red Christ of the Russian Revolution . . .
And the sun was an ugly sore
Splitting apart like a red-hot coal.

Back then I was still quite young
I was barely sixteen but I'd already forgotten about where I was born
I was in Moscow wanting to wolf down flames
And there weren't enough of those towers and stations sparkling in
my eyes
In Siberia the artillery rumbled -- it was war
Hunger cold plague cholera
And the muddy waters of the Amur carrying along millions of corpses
In every station I watched the last trains leave
That's all: they weren't selling any more tickets
And the soldiers would far rather have stayed . . .
An old monk was singing me the legend of Novgorod.

Me, the bad poet who wanted to go nowhere, I could go anywhere
And of course the businessmen still had enough money
To go out and seek their fortunes.
Their train left every Friday morning.
It sounded like a lot of people were dying.
One guy took along a hundred cases of alarm clocks and cuckoo clocks
from the Black Forest
Another took hatboxes, stovepipes, and an assortment of Sheffield
corkscrews
Another, coffins from Malmo filled with canned goods and sardines
in oil
And there were a lot of women
Women with vacant thighs for hire
Who could also serve
Coffins
They were all licensed
It sounded like a lot of people were dying out there
The women traveled at a reduced fare
And they all had bank accounts.

Now, one Friday morning it was my turn to go
It was in December
And I left too, with a traveling jewel merchant on his way to Harbin
We had two compartments on the express and 34 boxes of jewelry from
Pforzheim
German junk "Made in Germany"
He had bought me some new clothes and I had lost a button getting on
the train
-- I remember, I remember, I've often thought about it since --
I slept on the jewels and felt great playing with the nickel-plated
Browning he had given me
I was very happy and careless

It was like Cops and Robbers
We had stolen the treasure of Golconda
And we were taking it on the Trans-Siberian to hide it on the other side
of the world
I had to guard it from the thieves in the Urals who had attacked the
circus caravan in Jules Verne
From the Khunkhuz, the Boxers of China
And the angry little Mongols of the Great Lama
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
And the followers of the terrible Old Man of the Mountain
And worst of all, the most modern
The cat burglars
And the specialists of the international express.
And still, and still
I was as sad as a little boy
The rhythms of the train
What American psychiatrists call "railroad nerves"
The noise of doors voices axles screeching along frozen rails
The golden thread of my future
My Browning the piano the swearing of the card players in the next
compartment
The terrific presence of Jeanne
The man in blue glasses nervously pacing up and down the corridor
and glancing in at me
Swishing of women
And the whistle blowing
And the eternal sound of the wheels wildly rolling along ruts in the sky
The windows frosted over
No nature!
And out there the Siberian plains the low sky the big shadows of the
Taciturns rising and falling
I'm asleep in a tartan
Plaid
Like my life
With my life keeping me no warmer than this Scotch
Shawl
And all of Europe seen through the wind-cutter of an express at top
speed
No richer than my life
My poor life
This shawl
Frayed on strongboxes full of gold
I roll along with
Dream
And smoke
And the only flame in the universe
Is a poor thought . . .

Tears rise from the bottom of my heart
If I think, O Love, of my mistress;
She is but a child, whom I found, so pale
And pure, in the back of a bordel.

She is but a fair child who laughs,
Is sad, doesn't smile, and never cries;
But the poet's flower, the silver lily, trembles
When she lets you see it in the depths of her eyes.

She is sweet, says nothing you can hear,
With a long, slow trembling when you draw near;
But when I come to her, from here, from there,
She takes a step and shuts her eyes -- and takes a step.

For she is my love and other women
Are but big bodies of flame sheathed in gold,
My poor friend is so alone
She is stark naked, has no body -- she's too poor.

She is but an innocent flower, all thin and delicate,
The poet's flower, a pathetic silver lily,
So cold, so alone, and so wilted now
That tears rise if I think of her heart.

And this night is like a hundred thousand others when a train slips
through the night
-- Comets fall --
And a man and a woman, no matter how young, enjoy making love.

The sky is like the torn tent of a rundown circus in a little fishing village
In Flanders
The sun like a smoking lamp
And way up on the trapeze a woman does a crescent moon
The clarinet the trumpet a shrill flute a beat-up drum
And here is my cradle
My cradle
It was always near the piano when my mother, like Madame Bovary,
played Beethoven's sonatas
I spent my childhood in the hanging gardens of Babylon
Playing hooky, following the trains as they pulled out of the stations
Now I've made the trains follow me
Basel-Timbuktu
I've played the horses at tracks like Auteuil and Longchamps
Paris-New York
Now the trains run alongside me
Madrid-Stockholm
Lost it all at the gay pari-mutuel
Patagonia is what's left, Patagonia, which befits my immense sadness,
Patagonia and a trip to the South Seas
I'm on the road
I've always been on the road
I'm on the road with little Jeanne of France
The train does a somersault and lands on all fours
The train lands on its wheels
The train always lands on all its wheels

"Blaise, say, are we really a long way from Montmartre?"

A long way, Jeanne, you've been rolling along for seven days
You're a long way from Montmartre, from the Butte that brought you
up, from the Sacré-Coeur you snuggled up to
Paris has disappeared with its enormous blaze
Everything gone except cinders flying back
The rain falling
The peat bogs swelling
Siberia turning
Heavy sheets of snow piling up
And the bell of madness that jingles like a final desire in the bluish air
The train throbs at the heart of the leaden horizon
And your desolation snickers . . .

"Say, Blaise, are we really a long way from Montmartre?"

Troubles
Forget your troubles
All the cracked and leaning stations along the way
The telegraph lines they hang from
The grimacing poles that reach out to strangle them
The world stretches out elongates and snaps back like an accordion in
the hands of a raging sadist
Wild locomotives fly through rips in the sky
And in the holes
The dizzying wheels the mouths the voices
And the dogs of misery that bark at our heels
The demons are unleashed
Scrap iron
Everything clanks
Slightly off
The clickety-clack of the wheels
Lurches
Jerks
We are a storm in the skull of a deaf man . . .

"Say, Blaise, are we really a long way from Montmartre?"

Of course we are, stop bothering me, you know we are, a long way
An overheated madness bellows in the locomotive
Plague and cholera rise like burning embers around us
We disappear right into a tunnel of war
Hunger, that whore, clutches the clouds scattered across the sky and
craps on the battlefield piles of stinking corpses
Do what it does, do your job . . .

"Say, Blaise, are we really a long way from Montmartre?"

Yes, we are, we are
All the scapegoats have swollen up and collapsed in this desert
Listen to the cowbells of this mangy troop
Tomsk Chelyabinsk Kansk Ob' Tayshet Verkne-Udinsk Kurgan Samara
Penza-Tulun
Death in Manchuria
Is where we get off is our last stop
This trip is terrible
Yesterday morning
Ivan Ulitch's hair turned white
And Kolia Nikolai Ivanovitch has been biting his fingers for two
weeks . . .
Do what Death and Famine do, do your job
It costs one hundred sous -- in Trans-Siberian that's one hundred rubles
Fire up the seats and blush under the table
The devil is at the keyboard
His knotty fingers thrill all the women
Instinct
OK gals
Do your job
Until we get to Harbin . . .

"Say, Blaise, are we really a long way from Montmartre?"

No, hey . . . Stop bothering me . . . Leave me alone
Your pelvis sticks out
Your belly's sour and you have the clap
The only thing Paris laid in your lap
And there's a little soul . . . because you're unhappy
I feel sorry for you come here to my heart
The wheels are windmills in the land of Cockaigne
And the windmills are crutches a beggar whirls over his head
We are the amputees of space
We move on our four wounds
Our wings have been clipped
The wings of our seven sins
And the trains are all the devil's toys
Chicken coop
The modern world
Speed is of no use
The modern world
The distances are too far away
And at the end of a trip it's horrible to be a man with a woman . . .

"Blaise, say, are we really a long way from Montmartre?"

I feel so sorry for you come here I'm going to tell you a story
Come get in my bed
Put your head on my shoulder
I'm going to tell you a story . . .

Oh come on!

It's always spring in the Fijis
You lay around
The lovers swoon in the high grass and hot syphilis drifts among the
banana trees
Come to the lost islands of the Pacific!
Names like Phoenix, the Marquesas
Borneo and Java
And Celebes shaped like a cat

We can't go to Japan
Come to Mexico!
Tulip trees flourish on the high plateaus
Clinging vines hang down like hair from the sun
It's as if the brushes and palette of a painter
Had used colors stunning as gongs--
Rousseau was there
It dazzled him forever
It's a great bird country
The bird of paradise the lyre bird
The toucan the mockingbird
And the hummingbird nests in the heart of the black lily
Come!
We'll love each other in the majestic ruins of an Aztec temple
You'll be my idol
Splashed with color childish slightly ugly and really weird
Oh come!

If you want we'll take a plane and fly over the land of the thousand lakes
The nights there are outrageously long
The sound of the engine will scare our prehistoric ancestors
I'll land
And build a hangar out of mammoth fossils
The primitive fire will rekindle our poor love
Samovar
And we'll settle down like ordinary folks near the pole
Oh come!

Jeanne Jeannette my pet my pot my poot
My me mama poopoo Peru
Peepee cuckoo
Ding ding my dong
Sweet pea sweet flea sweet bumblebee
Chickadee beddy-bye
Little dove my love
Little cookie-nookie
Asleep.

She's asleep
And she hasn't taken in a thing the whole way
All those faces glimpsed in the stations
All the clocks
Paris time Berlin time Saint Petersburg time all those stations' times
And at Ufa the bloody face of the cannoneer
And the absurdly luminous dial at Grodno
And the train moving forward endlessly
Every morning you set your watch ahead
The train moves forward and the sun loses time It's no use! I hear the bells
The big bell at Notre-Dame
The sharp bell at the Louvre that rang on Saint Bartholomew's Day
The rusty carillons of Bruges-the-Dead
The electric bells of the New York Public Library
The campaniles of Venice
And the bells of Moscow ringing, the clock at Red Gate that kept time
for me when I was working in an office
And my memories
The train thunders into the roundhouse
The train rolls along
A gramophone blurts out a tinny Bohemian march
And the world, like the hands of the clock in the Jewish section of
Prague, turns wildly backwards.

Cast caution to the winds
Now the storm is raging
And the trains storm over tangled tracks
Infernal toys
There are trains that never meet
Others just get lost
The stationmasters play chess
Backgammon
Shoot pool
Carom shots
Parabolas
The railway system is a new geometry
Syracuse
Archimedes
And the soldiers who butchered him
And the galleys
And the warships
And the astounding engines he invented
And all that killing
Ancient history
Modern history
Vortex
Shipwreck
Even that of the Titanic I read about in the paper
So many associations images I can't get into my poem
Because I'm still such a really bad poet
Because the universe rushes over me
And I didn't bother to insure myself against train wreck
Because I don't know how to take it all the way
And I'm scared.

I'm scared
I don't know how to take it all the way.
Like my friend Chagall I could do a series of irrational paintings
But I didn't take notes
"Forgive my ignorance
Pardon my forgetting how to play the ancient game of Verse"
As Guillaume Apollinaire says
If you want to know anything about the war read Kuropotkin's Memoirs
Or the Japanese newspapers with their ghastly illustrations
But why compile a bibliography
I give up
Bounce back into my leaping memory . . .

At Irkutsk the trip suddenly slows down
Really drags
We were the first train to wind around Lake Baikal
The locomotive was decked out with flags and lanterns
And we had left the station to the sad sound of "God Save the Czar."
If I were a painter I would splash lots of red and yellow over the end of
this trip
Because I think we were all slightly crazy
And that an overwhelming delirium brought blood to the exhausted
faces of my traveling companions
As we came closer to Mongolia
Which roared like a forest fire.
The train had slowed down
And in the perpetual screeching of wheels I heard
The insane sobbing and screaming
Of an eternal liturgy

I saw
I saw the silent trains the black trains returning from the Far East and
going by like phantoms
And my eyes, like taillights, are still trailing along behind those trains
At Talga 100,000 wounded were dying with no help coming
I went to the hospitals in Krasnoyarsk
And at Khilok we met a long convoy of soldiers gone insane
I saw in quarantine gaping sores and wounds with blood gushing out
And the amputated limbs danced around or flew up in the raw air
Fire was in their faces and in their hearts
Idiot fingers drumming on all the windowpanes
And under the pressure of fear an expression would burst like an abcess
In all the stations they had set fire to all the cars
And I saw
I saw trains with 60 locomotives streaking away chased by hot horizons
and desperate crows
Disappearing
In the direction of Port Arthur.

At Chita we had a few days' rest
A five-day stop while they cleared the tracks
We stayed with Mr. Iankelevitch who wanted me to marry his only
daughter
Then it was time to go.
Now I was the one playing the piano and I had a toothache
And when I want I can see it all again those quiet rooms the store and
the eyes of the daughter who slept with me every night
Mussorgsky
And the lieder of Hugo Wolf
And the sands of the Gobi Desert
And at Khailar a caravan of white camels
I'd swear I was drunk for over 300 miles
But I was playing the piano -- it's all I saw
You should close your eyes on a trip
And sleep
I was dying to sleep

With my eyes closed I can smell what country I'm in
And I can hear what kind of train is going by
European trains are in 4/4 while the Asian ones are 5/4 or 7/4
Others go humming along are like lullabies
And there are some whose wheels' monotone reminds me of the heavy
prose of Maeterlinck
I deciphered all the garbled texts of the wheels and united the scattered
elements of a violent beauty
Which I possess
And which drives me

Tsitsihar and Harbin
That's as far as I go
The last station
I stepped off the train at Harbin a minute after they had set fire to the
Red Cross office.

O Paris
Great warm hearth with the intersecting embers of your streets and your
old houses leaning over them for warmth
Like grandmothers
And here are posters in red in green all colors like my past in a word
yellow
Yellow the proud color of the novels of France
In big cities I like to rub elbows with the buses as they go by
Those of the Saint-Germain-Montmartre line that carry me to the
assault of the Butte
The motors bellow like golden bulls
The cows of dusk graze on Sacré-Coeur
O Paris
Main station where desires arrive at the crossroads of restlessness
Now only the paint store has a little light on its door
The International Pullman and Great European Express Company has
sent me its brochure
It's the most beautiful church in the world
I have friends who surround me like guardrails
They're afraid that when I leave I'll never come back

All the women I've ever known appear around me on the horizon
Holding out their arms and looking like sad lighthouses in the rain
Bella, Agnes, Catherine, and the mother of my son in Italy
And she who is the mother of my love in America
Sometimes the cry of a whistle tears me apart
Over in Manchuria a belly is still heaving, as if giving birth
I wish
I wish I'd never started traveling
Tonight a great love is driving me out of my mind
And I can't help thinking about little Jeanne of France.
It's through a sad night that I've written this poem in her honor
Jeanne
The little prostitute
I'm sad so sad
I'm going to the Lapin Agile to remember my lost youth again
Have a few drinks
And come back home alone

Paris

City of the incomparable Tower the great Gibbet and the Wheel

Paris, 1913




Translated by Ron Padgett

RON PADGETT’s books include the poetry collections How Long, How to Be Perfect, You Never Know, Great Balls of Fire, and New & Selected Poems, as well as three memoirs, Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan; Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers; and Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard. Padgett is also the editor of The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms and World Poets. His translations include Blaise Cendrars’ Complete Poems (buy it here), Guillaume Apollinaire’s Poet Assassinated, Valery Larbaud’s Poems of A. O. Barnabooth (with Bill Zavatsky), and Flash Cards by Yu Jian (with Wang Ping). He has collaborated with artists such as Jim Dine, Alex Katz, George Schneeman, and Joe Brainard. Padgett has received Fulbright, NEA, Guggenheim, and Civitella Ranieri grants and fellowships, and was named Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. In 2008 he was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He also received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. For more information, go to www.ronpadgett.com.

Don't take the magic away....

[unedited version of a gig review published in The Wire 335 January 2012 issue]

Maria Minerva, Gary War, John Maus
Tufnell Park Dome
London

Tufnell Park Dome looks like a strange combination of a provincial ballroom, with all its kitschy firemen’s ball lights and stage ready for a brass band, and a former site of political rallying. These days the only crowd it attracts is a good looking, fringed, oh-so-ironic faux-fur and moustache wearing eloquent youth from East London. When I arrive, a long queue of black-wearing tousle-haired youngsters wait resigned outside, because tonight’s show is a sold-out: no wonder, given the line up, that would sex up even an agriculture show in Carpathian village: electrifying songstress Maria Minerva and Ph.D. sex god John Maus. Putting Californian freaks and Ariel Pink associate, Gary War, in the middle, seemed like a gesture of disrupting this too safe hipness of the show consisting of the most-liked acts of this year.

When I come inside, the loud talking of the crowd nearly prevents me from noticing that Maria Minerva already started her set: conceived as half karaoke, half live show, the sound quality is actually so low, that I can barely hear, whas she’s singing. Here’s lo-fi for you. I was preparing myself for something like this. But instead of the usual sexy dressRT and spreading the aura of Eastern European woman-child, she stood there in an oversized hoodie, with newly blond-dyed hair (crisis of personality?), right from Lisbon, where she lives. She seemed tired and insecure, and unnecessarily spoiled the effect of perhaps the most beautiful songs recorded in 2011, there were only two or three songs from Cabaret Cixous, including Soo High, whose chorus Baby baby baby/ You make me so high/ When I'm around you/ Time just flies by sung in a half desperate false note, was all the more painful for someone, who, like me admires her work. Ok, on records she also frequently pays with the notion of detuned/badly recorded/brittly analogue, but here, deprived of some of her sonic toys, stripped bare voice couldn’t deliver the vocal subtleties of the record. Looking detached, she stared at the monitor, which seems to be these days a popular manner of many electronic performers live. What the fuck? Why do I have to ruin hipster spectacle for myself, whenever I turn up? It's insufficient that beer costs 4 L and you have to queue half an hour being pushed and elbowed, you just don't wish to be young anymore. Thing is also, that we don't really interact with each other. At hipster gigs I frequently have this feeling everybody create some kind of network. I know I'm an outsider there, these are not my networks or gigs & they'd run away screaming seeing where I live, but funnily enough - they'd kill for my gig. Was Maria just reading the lyrics? Hard to say, but seems that fresh to scene performances, she must yet negotiate the way she presents herself to the crowd - or get a better soundman. “Half freaky, half Britney”, she was more on the freaky side this time. Otherwise, are we to believe this poor performance like from a coked-up house party, with bored crowd pottering sheepishly from one end of the room to another, is supposed to be a new peak of “I-don’t-care” made in Hackney cool? And to think 2 hours before I got back on a plane from Zagreb, where Maria's idol from Goldsmiths, k-punk, was talking to the hopeful lefties about the importance of Starbucks as a degenerated, fallen public space and radical chic. Here, my EEuropean hope didnt give a fuck about my expectations and wore Fila.

In turn, solitary member of Gary War turned the sleepy crowd onto some serious dancing. Derived half from Ariel Pink’s all-over-the-place sound, mixing the sound of old records, early Animal Collective psychedelia and Cali-punk into a blissed out sound candy, he was equipped only with a guitar, delivering “invisible” drums by a pedal, making it uncanny where the whole wall of sound was coming from. It was an intriguing performance, acting like a manifesto for the whole scene: faceless, with copious curly hair purposely covering the whole face, with lyrics, if any, unrecognizable in the sonic magma, this music has in a sense, nothing to say, if not only to communicate us its playfulness and narcotic flash, id-like death drive joy of astral destruction.

When John Maus got finally on scene, it was obvious, who the public came here for. Must say I feel ambivalent about the whole carefully invented, yet based on “authenticism” Maus persona, who, in spastic, hysterical, nervous-breakdown movements delivers his message to the world - here there are at least lyrics to ponder. There’s perhaps nothing more exciting than a very handsome professor of philosophy and Deleuze specialist doing crazy disco performances, and this is what part of his craze comes from. Starting from Quantum Leap from his album We Must Become Pitiless Censors of Ourselves, he raved the public, and kept them like this for the next 40 minutes too exhausted to continue. Having seen another Maus performance, it’s hard not to believe in the truth of his stage acting-out, as if by his movements he wanted to take out, react to all the conformity and smugness of his public. Giving his madness away (Maniac!) so cheaply, for only 10 L, he must all along realise the hopelessness of the whole project. I’m trying to take Maus seriously, just as he’s taking seriously things he deals with love, pain, beauty. But where is a real suffering or drama of the artist? Is it a sheer attempt at intellectualizing the otherwise quite obvious and banal (music to dance to) object? I can’t find the real drama in Maus, and that stops me maybe from fully enjoying his ecstatic, diverse music. In the end, it’s just too cool for me. Coming back on to Woolwich, I’ve come across yet another Londoner, talking loudly to himself. ‘Care in the community’ they call it. Real madness is no fun, I’m telling you.

Building the Revolution

[first appeared in Icon 103, 1/2012]

Seeing yet another replica of Tatlin's Tower on the courtyard of the Burlington House in London, done by Jeremy Dixon and partners, I thought the 'Russian avant garde', as we like to call it, couldn't be more disfigured and less properly interpreted than its original creators conceived it. Originally projected by committed Bolshevik Vladimir Tatlin, this 400 meter-high, steel and glass Monument to the 3rd Internationale, built to the glory of Komintern's growing success in the world popularisation of communism, has since the 1970s endured some kind of obsession with tiny, usually 1:40 or 1:50 replicas, built invariably as various exhibition's decoration.



Tatlin's idea was indeed to surpass the benchmarks of western engineering, on one hand the ultimate example of Eiffel's Tower in Paris, on the other, New York and Chicago's skyscrapers. But with its projected neon, glimmering lights and its progressing movement in a whirlpool, twisting around its axis, depicting the infinite progress of socialism, sheltering at the same time a building inside, it was an ultimate tower, tower of towers, a Gesamtkunswerk of communism the way it never was. Designed in 1919,as a result of systematic replacing of the old Tsarist monuments with the new revolutionary ones, it was never to be actually built, an impossible projection of Communism's or anyone's technical possibilities really, becoming a prevailing tribute to the “Soviet Utopia”.



In the underdeveloped Soviet Union of the 1920s, the possibilities evoked by Constructivists remained largely a dream. Shows such as Building the Revolution. Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935 in Royal Academy remind us how our ambitions of building the new world are paltry in comparison to those now cherished as 'Russian avantgardists'. This internationalist group of agitators-engineers-radicals-propagandists were deeply devoted to serving the new Communist system from 1917.





Lenin wasn't their fan, believing in the conservatism of the working classes, at the same time no one was stopping them from leaving the mark on the regime's visual shape – most obviously in the built environment. This was wide ranging. There were office blocks (like the outstanding Gosprom in Kharkiv, Soviet Ukraine capital, by Samuil Kravets, 1929), houses for communal life, cooperatives, schools, youth centres, factories and workers clubs, but also state communications, heralding the regime via radio (such as the beautiful Shabolovka radio tower in Moscow by Vladimir Shukhov, 1922), newspapers like Izviestia or Pravda and various Palaces for the press, or even the news stands designed by Gustav Klutsis, not even mentioning theatre and the arts. They were creating new ways of life from start to finish, and in the way the interiors were distributed, also new forms of work and social, family or sexual life.





The show's focus on architecture’s importance shows how this art actually succeeded among other avant-garde activities under the communist regime. Even if the Constructivists themselves were not always architects, their approach to composition exposes a totally architectural approach to the world, which in their eyes becomes a fully mechanised, rectilinear, precise landscape on which industry put the final mark. Yet many of the featured architects were classicists both before and after the 1920s. They changed their course under Constructivist influence, and then, after the avant-garde's suppression by Stalin, they changed course again. The exhibition gives hints at this not necessarily strictly fanatically avant-gardist approach all the time, be it expressionist (like Soviet Doctor's Housing Cooperative by P.Aleshin in Kiev) or even semi-classicist, Palladian impulses (like Ivan Zholtovski's MoGES, a modernist power station with Renaissance arches). Also, the internationality of the style is visible in the Western import, most notably engaging giants like Le Corbusier (Tsentrosoyuz in Moscow) or Erich Mendelsohn (Red Banner Textile Factory in Petersburg). There was room for variety of styles within Constructivism, but perhaps this openness contributed to its subsequent demise, replaced by an architecture “Soviet in content, nationalist in form”.



Whether killed during the purges, opportunists who gladly joined the new regime, or degraded to the insignificant roles like Melnikov, who ended up designing radiators, the Constructivists were in the end defeated by something perhaps inherent to the Russian character - a predilection to tsarist flamboyance and kitsch. They leave behind a group of buildings unmatched in their disciplined beauty, now largely decaying, as is shown throughout the show on the grandiose photographs by Richard Pare, who has been documenting their history for some years, also in support to Moscow's preservationist society to save what has left after Stalinist and post-soviet era. Namely, from Moscow's now ex-meyer Luzhkov and his business-minded likes, who has been vandalising the city for too long. For well known reasons, this period of Soviet history hasn't been incredibly popular among the post-Soviet satrapes and city councils.

Unsurprisingly, constructivists always had and still have now quite a lot of admirers in the West, who, inspired by them, launched a plethora of styles, from abstraction to pop-art and postmodernism. But when today we read the architectural manifestos of ManTownHuman or Patrik Schumacher, calling for a “new ambition architecture once had”, let's remember that Russian architects were responding to a revolutionary social demand, rather than realising their Ayn Randesque fantasies.

Building the Revolution. Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935 Royal Academy, London until 22.01.12

Polish Socially Engaged Arts

Full version of an article originally published in the Guardian CiF April 17th, 2011.

Polish artists are interesting because of their relation to history
AGATA PYZIK

After more than 20 years of introducing a brutal, neoliberal economy into a decaying late communist reality, and creating a capitalist market, Poland now also has a much-desired “art market". A few years ago, when there was something of a boom in Polish art, an attempt was made to label it Young Polish Art, after the British equivalent. This trend has now begun to fade, especially since numerous events during the long Polska! year promoting Polish culture in the UK failed to attract much publicity. It’s true that Miroslaw Balka got a prestigious Turbine Hall commission in 2009/10, which is as close as you can get to canonization in the modern art world, but I don’t think recognition of Polish art worldwide changed much.



What has shifted is the political impact of Polish critical art at home. Polish art, rather than being simply an entertainment for the rich, is engaging with politics on the levels many of the Western artists can only dream of. It’s been seriously clashing with politics, many times finishing in court. it was not sheer epather le bourgeois - the visual arts taken the task of challenging the society on a much harsher, deeper level than film or literature.



This is the legacy of the 1990s, when makers of so-called “critical art" were reacting to the years of censorship, superficiality and lack of democracy, revealing that not much has changed in the new democratic reality. We enjoyed on a smaller scale a version of the Viennese Actionist movement. Artists such as Katarzyna Kozyra, Artur Zmijewski, Zbigniew Libera, Robert Rumas and Grzegorz Klaman were excavating Polish traumas, touching upon themes such as Polish religiosity, too-soon forgotten memories of the Holocaust, intolerance and exclusions (of homosexuals, women, disabled), various taboos, like non-normative sexuality, the body and its visceral aspects or ageing, and the way individuals are controlled in a free, but actually extremely oppressive, society. Much more rarely the inequalities wrought by the transformation from communism to capitalism.





They were playing upon the central theme of the individual versus the system, exposing the fact that the choice between one oppressive system and another is not really a choice, at a moment when the majority of society regarded liberalism as the only option and the brutal transformation from communism a necessary evil. By self-exposure (such as Kozyra, who posed as Manet’s Olimpia while suffering from cancer) or assuming the role of a perpetrator (Żmijewski asking a former concentration camp prisoner to “renew" the tattooed number on his arm), critical artists were working through and acting out numerous traumas, frequently becoming the object of harsh, politically motivated censorship and hostile social ostracism by right-wing politicians. Gallery closures were common, as was the removal or even destruction of work. The most famous case of censorship was the 8 years-long trial of Dorota Nieznalska, concerning her 2001 work Passion, where she put male genitals photo onto a cross. She was finally cleared of the charges, but this process remains a reminder of the free speech abuse in Poland.







A couple of years into the new decade of the noughties, however, some of the most successful critical artists, such as Żmijewski, started to criticize this kind of art for being self-indulgent and for its lack of visible political success. Critical art had not disrupted the system, it was claimed. Worse, it had become a playful, attractive gallery object, all the more pathetic given its initial ambitions. In 2005, Żmijewski became an art editor of Krytyka Polityczna, a newly emerged but increasingly popular political club and magazine where he published his manifesto, Applied Social Arts, which prompted fervent debate about the political impact of Polish critical art.



Interestingly enough, at the same time Żmijewski was accusing his peers of political indifference and lack of taking serious risks, he, Althamer and Kozyra were becoming renowned names, appearing frequently in international art magazines. And exactly when a new generation of artists born in 70s and 80s entered the scene and were cutting off from the “critical” generation, they, to whom Bałka also belongs by age, had started to get the official nod: there were huge retrospectives for Libera and Kozyra as well as big group shows in the key Polish art institutions. Apparently, they no longer threatened the establishment, they wouldn’t shake Poland. Oh really? In this one sense Żmijewski was wrong: critical art was capable of political agency, because it provoked national debates that redefined the status quo.



The real question with which Polish artists are now struggling is mapping the realm in which art can still mean and effect something. Attracting gallery visitors was never their aim. It was later said that critical art was only really interested in the big existential questions, ignoring the social reality of the poor and excluded. Żmijewski responded to this by making a number of socially engaged works: he filmed dozens of demos, rallies and protests for his ongoing series Democracies; in his Work series he filmed people doing particularly unattractive, numbing jobs: a cashier in a hypermarket or a street cleaner. Recently he made a film about the mourning of the Smolensk air disaster, Catastrophy, which studied the behaviour of the crowd that stood in front of the Presidential Palace brandishing a giant cross, raising all kinds of social tensions. Żmijewski himself chosen to provocatively side with the religious crowd, presenting them in a positive light. That’s what makes his work ambivalent because the same square saw also the only moment when a counter crowd manifested itself, yearning for a secular country and calling for releasing the city space from the church’s domination, but they are not his favorites.



Żmijewski’s aim is always to provoke the viewer to his own political choices, he’s not saying that anti-church is necessarily enlightened and pro-church backwards and oppressive. Maybe he wants to actually redefine the senses in which we become a community, what constitutes us as such and what did it actually mean to be a Pole during those difficult days of the mourning, that now will come back, as we have the 1st anniversary. But I sympathize more with actions of a very important public space artist Joanna Rajkowska, whose actions prompted debates about public spaces in Poland again. Some of them formerly belonged to one ideology, and later were obliterated, such as the square in the former Warsaw ghetto, where the contemporary Israeli trips come to the Synagogue, and a church vis-à-vis was selling anti-semitic brochures. In this toxic area Rajkowska built an artificial pond, so called Oxygenator, that was mainly used by the formerly neglected pensioners living nearby, who were suddenly enjoying this space, and what a different view for the Israeli teenagers on their compulsory Holocaust trips, that are told they are coming to the land of death. Despite the pond’s popularity, city authorities objected to prolong its few months existence, but it has changed this space forever.



Polish artists are looking for new models of engagement, since the sense of community we had earlier was destroyed, and the only new community we’re offered is manipulated by the Catholic church or by a sense of victimhood. In neoliberal Poland, caught between the cynicism of the right wing populists and the cynicism of the liberals, between lack of self confidence and an inferiority complex, this sense of community is what we must restore.

more links

project of a group of post-critical artists after the Kaczynski brothers (Law & Justice, PiS, right wing & nationalistic, though combining it with more social policies)

Katarzyna Kozyra in Art in America

Sound in the Early Soviet Cinema

[unedited version of an article appeared in The Wire in #329 July 2011 issue]


KINO: Russian Film Pioneers 1909–57
BFI, London, UK


For everyone not acquainted with the early works of Soviet cinema seeing the early, experimental pieces of the 1920s must be a striking experience. It is a succession of groundbreaking masterpieces that transformed the 10th muse. How was that possible in the basically state controlled cinematography, nearly uniquely devoted to propaganda of new Soviet order, with no nods towards mass culture, to maintain its initial innovation and experiment, while remaining also entertaining, joyous watch? The Russian Film Pioneers section of the British Film Institute's KINO season, running until 30 June tries to capture this phenomenon, with all its tensions, eruptions of brilliance and ideas. One of them was the introduction of the sound at the end of 1920s and the transition from the silent – where so much had to be suggested by editing, acting and expression of the visual material to the explosive opportunities of sound. Introduction of the sound techniques left many of the most forerunning artists, including Eisenstein, initially skeptical. The first, who adopted the sound among the avant-garde luminaries, was the one who most vivaciously was denying himself an artist: the pioneer of camerawork, documentary and heartbreakingly beautiful propaganda, Dziga Vertov or the authors of Eccentric Theatre manifesto (1922), Kozintsev/Trauberg’s directorial tandem in their various Shostakovich collaborations. Shostakovich, still in early 20s, after completing his great Gogol-inspired operettas, becomes filmscore author, only to cause a massive scandal: in The New Babylon (1929), bold, astonishing rendering of Paris Commune days by the duo of directors, he masterfully captures the psychological and political nuances of any scene, juxtaposing Offenbach and Tchaikovsky’s grandiose operatic sound with more mundane sound of cancan, and above all things, importing the new, wildly modern sounds of jazz - in a truly postmodern, yet invigoratingly original manner.

No wonder that his satirical approach met instant opposition from the censorship. One can compare watching (and listening!) experience of Vertov’s Enthusiasm to eg. Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, but only on the base of oppositions. Whereas Riefenstahl insists on her artistry and sublimity and what she gains is kitsch and rather dull apotheosis of Nazism, Vertov’s apotheosis of shock-workers in Donbass during the realisation of 5 Year Plan (and Symphony of Donbass was the film’s alternative title) remains as striking a masterpiece as it was on the day it was made, pushing the art of sound galaxies ahead. Vertov amassed the scenes of dismantling the old order (iconoclastic looting of the monasteries) with the New: striking images of 'Udarniki' in Ukraine, undergoing mechanization of labour. The New is also expressed by power of the Radio – here scenes of a radio transmission are interwoven with the images of glory of Soviet achievements. The soundtrack, recorded by Vertov himself in situ and then synchronized, was a depiction of mechanization itself, being an aural attack consisting of industrial sounds of steelworks and furnaces working at full temperature and speed, put together with compositions by Shostakovich and Timofeev – here epitomizing the New Economic Policy, that rhythmic sledge hammering of steelworks were to obliterate. The use of sound by Vertov was contrapunctual, or, risking a cliché – dialectical in its construction. The emphasis was on work, how things are made, how the film itself is being made. Sound was supposed to be as tough and heavy as the work itself. The workers liked the final result, because it was showing the work as it really was: shockingly hard, the authorities not so much – the attention to human labour to build communism was not in the political climate of the late 20s.

Another fascinating use of sound happened during the festival screening of Pudovkin’s Storm over Asia (1928), a tremendous first attempt on an alternative western, or rather an “Eastern”, with the congenial soundtrack of Yat-Kha, a contemporary traditional Tuvan band. The musicians sadly couldn’t play it live, stopped by the lack of visas, so soundtrack was played from a dvd. Film is striking in combining the breathtaking visuals from the Republic of Mongolia, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist message and a revolutionary agitation. Tuvan musicians approached it with a similar playful eclectism, combining traditional drones and throat singing with nods to Western pop-culture, guitars and traditional rock, ironically quoting even The House of the Rising Sun, to a successful comic effect.

Cinema was a crucial, highly theorized art for the Constructivist avant-garde. Their writings remind us how popular metaphor of abstraction musical composition was. “There’s nothing else in musical composition, than relation of pitches to one another” wrote literature theorist Victor Shklovsky. The play of a disciplined form and arbitrariness happens in the early Soviet films in its fascination with the rhythm, which equated the modernity, the reality of speed, of mechanized life. Rhythmization was also preventing an easy fulfillment of the mimetic powers of cinema, a strange Verfremdungeffekt. Soviet filmmaker wanted to melt various features of an artwork as a Gesamtkunstwerk. In their films Vertov dreamed of becoming a seeing machine, while Pudovkin presented human brain as a machine.

In the end, sound contributed to all that, but, just as its appearing intersected with the consolidation of a Stalinist power, it couldn’t fulfill its revolutionary promises. Still, even in Stalinist era musicals, such as Alexandrov’s Happy Folks, Circus, Volga, Volga were not just simply russified Chaplinesque or Hollywodian forms. Watched after the years they seem strangely Brechtian vaudevilles. Soviet avantgardists were seeing a filmwork as a dense multilevel whole, equally a montage of attractions or the disruption of an artificial visual spectacle, and the sound acted like a final storm, sending the filmwork the final revolutionary shivers.

Kino: Russian Film Pioneers 1909-1957, BFI Southbank, London, 1st pt until June 30

We Want to Be Modern - Polish design exhibition

[unedited version of an article that appeared in ICON 094 April 2011here]

more photos

“We are aiming at a beautiful future, but we cannot see its shape yet, we cannot imagine the form and the scope of the life we are aspiring to. Which is why we want and we demand that visual arts show us this good, just and happy future life” – so said Jerzy Hryniewiecki, designer and theorist in the 1st issue of the “Projekt” magazine from 1956, heralding the new commandments of life after the 'Thaw' in People’s Poland. Modernity became a fetish for the society. The exhibition We Want To be Modern. Polish Design 1955-1968 from the Collection of the National Museum in Warsaw shows a flamboyant, glamorous and complicated face to the oft cited, but frequently misunderstood socialist-era Polish design. This period proved to be the most interesting in the vast collection of the Museum, which still has no permanent exhibiting space and seeks for a new one to store over 24,000 objects, now hidden in magazines. This show seeks to change it.

In post-war Poland there was a general necessity of restoration. It was not only a dream, but rather a dramatic necessity in a country left in total destruction after the war. The break was Warsaw's World Festival of Youth in 1955, a mass event typical of the People's Republics. Carnivalesque street decorations were designed by the students from the city’s Fine Arts Academy. Before the 'Thaw' Polish designers couldn’t refer to the 20s and 30s avant-garde, because Socialist Realism did not permit any steps outside its canon. The liberation from sotsrealism brought enormous hunger for everything new. That included also not purely decorative arts: literature, theatre, music. This time saw the formation of the Polish schools of poster design (Tomaszewski, Cieślewicz, Młodożeniec) and cinema (Wajda, Polański, Munk). In other words, it was the most original culture Poland had in the 20th century. Lots of formerly forbidden experimental art from the West was available, the new generation of artists, who started their education after the war left the academies, and there was a chance that the promises of the failed avant-garde projects of the interwar period could be introduced into life.

Many Polish artists of the period were devoted socialists, believing they were building the new Poland, but designers were apparently less subjugated to the power apparatus and much less controlled. It seems that decorative arts were freer than so-called pure art. Their call was to make the life under socialism finally beautiful, and polymaths, like architect Oskar Hansen, author of the famous “open form” theory with wife Zofia, film-maker Jan Lenica, Jerzy Sołtan, Wojciech Fangor, Wojciech Zamecznik, were designing everything from film posters or book covers, to cars, a pioneer shawl or a lipstick advertisement, at the same time being painters and sculptors. There were no barriers between artistic/commercial.

Among the most popular features of the new aesthetics were soft lines, vivid colors, natural, light materials, asymmetrical, slanted forms taken from biology or science, made possible by the use of plywood, fiberglass, or textile printing techniques. Art was supposed to parallel the exploration of the world on a micro as well as a macro scale. Hence Polish designers were taking from such giants as Alvar Aalto, Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen or abstract high art as well: there’s an influence from Henry Moore, Picasso, Matisse, but also Klee, Arp, Brancusi, Pollock or Informel painting. The Warsaw’s Institute of Industrial Design was the queen bee’s cell of the Polish design of that era - there the artists were preparing the prototypes, which were then presented on exhibitions and sold to factories. This way an average Polish family could afford a fragment of the futuristic dream of luxury in their houses. The then very popular and now rare and sought after Ćmielów ceramic figures are a perfect example of the more mass produced but stylistically unique design of the time.

The question lurking in the exhibition space is whether it was possible to develop a specter of a luxurious consumption when there was no real possibility of consumption. Many of the projects were never actually introduced into life, unacceptable to government officials. But the main elements of the style remained in every Polish house and they were truly showing the nation the importance of material culture again after the war.

We Want To be Modern. Polish Design 1955-1968 from the Collection of the National Museum in Warsaw February 4th – April 17th 2011

Wielkanoc, "Girlscarbines"

[first published in The Wire #330 August 2011]

Wielkanoc
Dziewczyny Karabiny
CD
Manufaktura Legenda

Virgin Mary does the splits – the world falls in!/The communion of holy white wafers of snow covers her eyes and face/ The world of white altars – cemeteries of paradise. This is not, surprisingly, from any Norwegian Black Metal band, but a song called Snow Queen by the Polish new wave group Wielkanoc (Easter, or Great Night, to render its double meaning) from a small Polish industrial town of Lubin, in Lower Silesia, who lasted less than 3 years and were killed, alongside with so much of what was interesting in the Polish alternative scene, just after the collapse of communism around 1990.

Dziewczyny Karabiny (Girlscarbines) was never actually released, and compiles live recordings from the festivals where the group wowed the public and critics, such as Jarocin in 1988, or from the Rozgłośnia Harcerska radio (known for its support of progressive groups in People's Poland) the same year. No wonder they did – live Wielkanoc was a knockdown combination of the moody and the unpolished. Even today it is amazing, how such sophisticated groups were possible in the suicidally grey Poland of the 1980s. As young people from a small industrial town, they knew they had to invent a world around them to have anything on their own. Pretty much, you could say, as did the post punk bands of British industrial areas, but they certainly didn’t have the Citizen Militia running at them with truncheons after the gigs.

What is greatest in Wielkanoc is probably the originality and real provocation in the lyrics. Kasia Jarosz was a truly charismatic vocalist and lyricist, introducing to the nearly all-male Polish scene a rare, assured yet raw female presence, and giving the censors lots of work. Regular meals/Warm checked blankets/Speedy sidewalks/Slit-eyed spiders/Rainy alleys/Train station open/public toilets/female male copulate/The promised protein/no-mans protein. Nobody at that point dared to sing about grim sexuality in communist Poland like this, and there’s definitely no sadder elegy for a spared sperm on the toilet door in any music.

The album’s publication after so many years comes as a part of a wider retrieving of the lost legacy of the Polish punk scene by the same people who were engaged in the volume Generacja (The Wire Feb ‘11). Along with the booklet (sadly, only in Polish) which gathers unique pictures of the band and festivals and (translated) lyrics, Dziewczyny Karabiny tells a fascinating story of the functioning of the new music under the decaying socialist regime. Mainstream and alternative meant something completely different in this economy, where every small dom kultury had a certain budget they had to spend, and frequently supported young rock bands, running alongside the first attempts to capitalize on the music by the more commercial bands of the era. And the fact 1990 destroyed such a rich musical culture only adds another fascinatingly ambivalent layer