[written for The Wire magazine, didn't make its way to the mag]
CHERYL
Islington
Mill, Salford, UK
If you ever
had a dilemma, whether art world is about art or party, the Brooklyn
performance group CHERYL will solve this problem for you. They cannot be
placed neither in the realm of performance (too trashy and silly), nor anything
as sexist as burlesque (not stylish enough) or just a hipster fancy dress disco
party dressed as ‘art’. It’s a gender-bender machine, in which everyone
have a little chance to participate in the exuberant, if they
dare, if not risking making a bit of fools of themselves. But I pity those, who
would be afraid of it - Cheryl are known for their crazy parties/performances
in New York and dozens of transgressive videos, where, to the tune of hacked
older and newer dance hits, they go the way of excessive make up-cum-wigs maxi-esthetics,
remaining somewhere between institutional critique (they did quite a lot of rioty things in eg. NY MoMA or White Cube, to a predictable effect) disco revival groups like Hercules and Love Affair, MGMT, who also like to dress up (or, if we were less generous, Scissor Sisters...), Eurovision and talent shows and the spirit
of films of John Waters, James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus, Paris Is Burning and Kuchar brothers, clearly expressing a kind of nostalgia after the disco era. In the work of those 1960s-1980s artists, there was a
real risk to the self denigration, that may or may not bring transgression. In the work of New Yorkers, the supoposedly outrageous can at best cause a smile of sympathy on one's face, it's too shamelessly silly cross-dressing not really meaning much, thus perhaps expressing the dying of forms in beyond-retro culture.
How does it
differ from an embarrassingly amateurish, average “queer” and “gender-themed”
graduate work of a Goldsmith's student, you might well ask? When I entered one of
their parties in Salford’s derelict mill turned artist residencies, where
Cheryl were trying to engage people in “psycho-aerobics class” (“Pirouette like
Jacko!”), it felt like the endless enthusiasm of Brooklynians met the usual
I-might-want-to-join-but-better-stand-back-and-stare reserve. For several hours
Cheryl were playing disco tunes from the last four decades, from Donna Summer
to 2000s dance-punk and synthpop. It reminded me of the work of Paul McCarthy
or Christoph Schlingensief, the way Cheryl wants to make everything more ugly,
more outrageous, less pretty, less seductive. It’s a freakshow, but one that
tells us at the same time, how much this itself has become only an esthetic,
cool enough to wow your friends in the ghetto. But even if it's ridiculous, I can't completely not like it, because of how far away from a "serious artist" posturing it is. We couldn't be further from Matmos or Antony, but we're also not in the realm of Diamanda Galas, for sure.
But there’s
something to the videos, where the members are covered in heavy layers of paint,
glitter and plasticine to the unrecognisability, wearing usually animal masks and
fantasy clothes trashed together. Strangely neurotic and come to think about
it, not so much mutually unrelated, clips about depression, recession (cartoon
stories about artists who had to sell all their belongings), gender confusion
are not even trying to obliterate the ultimate truth of their hipsterism. you call us flat and retro? We'll be more retro than you can possibly imagine. Critical art has the power of dissecting something hidden and ugly within the
society. What Cheryl does, detects that hipster monoculture reached its absolutely
critical point.
[longer version of an article published in The Wire March issue 2011]
On the wave of resurrecting, remastering and rereleasing great moments of the avant-garde past, this is perhaps a mile-step for the history of Polish experimental music. The independent label Bôłtis releasing 3 cds in what is to be continued series of Polish Radio Experimental Studio. Founded in October 1957, only 9 years after Pierre Schaeffer’s studio in Paris, 6 years after Studio fur Elektronische Musik in Koln, and 2 years after Studio di Fonologia Musicale in Milan, and one year before (sic!) the now much cult BBC Radiophonic Workshop, PRES was a phenomenon on this side of the Iron Curtain, inspiring then founding of Új Zenei Stúdió in Zagreb and Elektronski Studio Radio Beograda. The moment was proper. Death of Stalin in 1953, and the Thaw made it possible to release the bounds on culture a bit, and its no accident PRES was founded at the same time as Warsaw Autumn (October 1956), the festival of contemporary music, which was the proverbial door to the rest of the world for the composers in this part of Europe. Interestingly enough, PRES was supported by Radiokomitet, formerly in favor of socialist realism. The international fame was also proved by foreign composers, recording in PRES, such as Arne Nordheim or leaders of French avant-garde, Franco Evangelisti or François-Bernard Mâche.
[compare that now with Krzysztof Komeda's theme from Polański's Cul-De-Sac]
[PRES inspired music appears in many Polish films and animation of this era, especially Polish New Wave]
Given the radio was also to produce TV and film soundtracks, it has become a place of meeting of musicians, engineers, visual artists, designers, architects, filmmakers, set designers, making it a true total work of art. The real founder and promoter of the Studio was musicologist Józef Patkowski, who was trying to attract the young generation of composers to the radio. Pierre Schaeffer, himself an engineer, believed that the new radiophonic medium will transform the experience of sound and will give an access to a new class of sounds: objets sonores, that will liberate music from its material roots. He was right: the new possibilities of creating music opened a whole new world to many engineers such as Eugeniusz Rudnik or Bohdan Mazurek of PRES, who turned into a full scale composers.
The
liberation came also through the simplicity, aiming at the purity of the
abstract visual arts of its time: first tune produced by studio was an Study for One Cymbal Stroke (for tape) by
Włodzimierz Kotoński, recorded in 1959, consisting of a few minutes of Turkish cymbal with a soft medium-sized precission mallet. Source material was filtered into six frequency ranges and eventually 11 pitches. Here, the serial method of composition was transposed
into the musique concrete: the
original sound of a cymbal was filtered and then transposed into levels
of sound, which were then layered onto each other. Quite differently, in Microstuctures by the same composer, the
intro material for the further transformations were recordings of stroking the metal,
wood or glass objects. This shows how very different were the approaches
incorporated into the task of actual producing of music.
It didn’t
restrict to that two, of course. Andrzej Dobrowolski’s Passacaglia was based on
5 percussion sounds transformed into 45 sound items, Rudnik’s Collage contained
for instance a tragicomic sample capturing a voice of the Party functionary, announcing
the “removal of the fish stock from the cold stores”, and Krzysztof
Penderecki’s Psalmus was based on the element of a human voice. It is interesting, how the school
of Polish sonorists (Penderecki and Dobrowolski among them) was involved in both electronic and instrumental ways of making music.
The young
founders of Bôłtnot only went through the hours of the old
recordings, but decided to test the studio’s output a few decades later by
giving its reinterpretation to such remarkable European improvisers as John
Tilbury (long time Polish scenes frequenter). Michal Libera, theoretician and
free impro promoter in Poland,
is cooling the attractive image of brooding through the piles of old recordings
in sotsrealist buildings. – Most of it I
just had as mp3 at home. You have to have the patience to listen to hundreds of
hours music, but then you find such pearls as Mazurek or Rudnik. It was
epiphanic. The most idiosyncratic, unconventional, free music was made by sound
engineers, not composers. Maybe it shows they’re not flexible enough with the
mew media? – ponders Libera.
Also, importantly, they were still interested in producing scores, taking the challenge of the versatile music material itself, that didnt have so much to do with the contemporary schools of music, like Elektronische/Serielle idiom of Stockhausen and Darmstadt school or Schaeffer's dictum. Shaeffer
wanted to put the listener into a new situation of listening, and this fact is
only complicated by the task Libera given to Zeitkratzer. The possibilities of
transposing electroacustic pieces to the amplified instruments seems to have
extraordinary possibilities. The fact the PRES composers didn’t have the
technical means to realize their ideas, as Reinhold Friedl of Zeitkratzer says,
made them to look for other solutions.
In the UK they can obviously be linked with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and indeed it is one of the kinds of artistic expression, that unites, not divides the East and the West in the cold war era. Composers were aware of each other's output, which was possible precisely because of the mutual great narrative, provided by the cold war. Also, a few years ago Simon Reynolds in the Inner Sleeve column in The Wire wrote on the Electronic Panorama LP which contained many of our heroes like Kotoński, Dobrowolski, Penderecki among thier foreign colleagues, again, seeing them as one and the same phenomenon, sadly not mentioning Polish composers in specific. I think while BBCRW composers were clearly interested in popularising concrete music (which lead to producing such gems as the still electryfying theme to Doctor Who by, among others, Delia Derbyshire - basically, a piece of musique concrete for the popular public, Tomorrow's World and The Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy), PRES authors still saw themselves as composers in relation to classic notions of music, composition, form etc and avant-gardism of the early 20th century. Perhaps it has also to do with the fact there 'popular culture', in the Western sense at least, didn't exist in the communist Poland as an expression of the rotten capitalist West. BBCRW was also very much associated with the popular idea of futurism: sci-fi books, comic and TV, cosmic exploration, other dimensions of reality, psychedelia, modern design and architecture - and the potential futures they was activating, futures available for me and you - but once again, they were inescapably futures under consumerism, full of goods that you may buy and have. Not so much in the People's Poland, although of course I'd be telling untruth if I said that Poland didnt have popular SF fiction, comic books and cinema:
The fact of living on this side of the
curtain paradoxically helped PRES.Out
of the three cds released by Bołt, the most up to date and attractive may be
the one by Bohdan Mazurek, the only one, that contains solely the archive
material. Mazurek is at the same time lyrical and exact, and still very
original, even in the face of the revolutions of 60s and 70s, what makes his
music so contemporary. Funnily enough, most of Poles know him unconsciously,
because his pieces were used in popular TV children programs. But the interpretations
on the PRES Revisited and Zeitkratzer Plays PRES take us back to
the present day, showing that every music takes place in the present, and that
music in general exists to be performed.
[a longer version of a review published in ICON 106 March 2012]
It is significant that as we see practically a murder of public financing and social housing policies worldwide and the death of the idea of the welfare state, the more we get exhibitions and publications on the heroic age of modernism, which was encouraging all of them. The magnificent survey Ernst May 1886-1970 - accompanying a thorough exhibition that took place in Deutsches Architektur Museum in Frankfurt am Main last year, the place where Ernst May left his enduring landmark legacy in planning and building – perfectly inscribes into the trend for 21st century-end of times nostalgia and neoliberal fatalism. May, with his immense scope, is one to go to when yearning for the function architecture once had, and lost. He reinvented decentralized city planning and a new type of dwelling – together with Bruno Taut and Hannes Meyer.The fact this is the first English-language book on May is a result of the complicated history of modernism. As someone who didn’t attend the crucial Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne in 1933, but went to work in Soviet Russia instead, he missed the proclaiming of the Athens Charter and a different idea of modernism by Le Corbusier, Giedion and Gropius, who went to work in America soon after. May, Taut, Meyer with their interest in collective, socially managed housing, were for years obliterated by the international style stripped of any ‘red’ complications that triumphed during the cold war.
Such commemorations emerge probably against growing misuse of modernism: either as an ideology that ‘failed’, as we’re told, or that has become a luxurious hobby for middle classes, who now live in privatised social housing. This son of a wealthy Protestant factory owner got his professional break in Britain, studying under town planner Raymond Unwin, then involved in Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire, the pioneering development founded in 1903 by Ebenezer Howard, father of the Garden City Movement. Despite similar examples of ‘Siedlungs’ (settlements) like Hellerau near Dresden and Falkenberg near Berlin, it was the British new ethos – of urban decentralization, ecological conservation, communal land ownership, and humane scale - that shaped him. His various realizations in German cities, including Breslau and New Frankfurt, realised between 1925 and 30, emerged as a part of the post-WWI reconstruction of society: enticing political stability, equality and stable workforce. Within 5 years New Frankfurt contained 15,000 houses, which won May international attention also in the Soviet Union, then in the middle of its Five Year Plan.
Initially May shared early modernist humanist presumptions. His striving for modernity seemed something natural, characterizing himself as “culpably indifferent to political matters”, left simply with no other choice but to flee Nazi rule. He and his by then famous “Brigade” (among them Mart Stam) left Germany in 1930 for the Soviet Union, to complete “the biggest task for an architect ever”: building the lands of “enthusiasm”, as Dziga Vertov called it, the new cities on the Siberian end of the world, masterplans for Magnitogorsk, Novokuznetsk, Tyrgan, Leninsk, Kemerovo, Danube Basin and Moscow and at least ten other places (here a fragment of his "City Building in the USSR" from 1931) – something firmly denied under Stalinism. Until the post-1956 Thaw, the investigation on May’s real role in the USSR, as well as a reassessment of his political positions was difficult. At some point his activities in Standartgorproekt (Standard City Project) between 1931/2 included being in charge of over 800 employees and a leader of important governmental organisations. Later he explained his decision through a fascination for the revolutionary Soviet avant-garde. The failure of modern style, or ‘Neues Bauen’ in Russia and its abandonment for the sake of classicism and historicism had more to do with the presence of a modernist faction in the government, which was subsequently purged, as Stalin expanded his power. The austere Siedlungs still remain scattered around Russia, badly kept, looking like messages from a better future that never happened.
Siedlungs were innovatory not only because of their
functional, simple, basic form, but equally importantly because of their
rejection of ownership for the sake of rent. This is visible in the design
itself, in the equality of the buildings and a huge amount of the communal
spaces. “This architecture derived from the idea of living in solidarity, and
its realization was based on non-profit housing cooperatives. The type of
ownership and architecture formed an inseparable unity which is what accounts
for the epochal achievement and value of these Siedlungen,” writes DW Dreysse in the book. After work in Kenya,
where the conflict between the British Army and Mau Mau left him disillusioned
in the social potential of architecture, he decided to go back to West Germany in
1954, unusually for German architect of his caliber. Here he continued his work
in spectacular postwar urban reconstruction for the Wirtschaftswunder. He worked
as chief planner for several cities, including Hamburg,
Mainz, and Wiesbaden.
This amazing life, spanning three very different regimes, is a new, unknown
story of the modern movement. It demands to be studied.
[slightly changed version of an essay that appeared on the Afterall.org online]
Whatever happened to the architecture of the Eastern Bloc? The shock
therapy brought in 1989 to install capitalism economically meant a year zero
between the past and the present, shattering all the previous networks between
countries. What followed was the biggest decline since Great Depression. The late
communist economy, a distant shadow of original socialist ideas, dragged down every other dimension of life, erasing also the
way cities were planned. Urban and social planning disappeared for the sake of
a so-called ‘freestyle’ in architecture, reflecting the new methods of the free market.
Suddenly, many carefully planned cities in the ex-Bloc started to look like
cheap, Third World versions of North American über-capitalist
cities, with horrifically lumpen versions of skyscrapers and financial
districts. This so-called ‘style’, characteristic of
so many post-Soviet metropolises (most of all, Moscow) wasn’t exactly postmodernism,
although it was similar to the stylistic
mish-mash of bombastic forms, pastiche historicism and love for money that typified the roughly contemporaneous style in the West.
Far more apt is the term coined by Bart Goldhoorn and Philip Meuser on their
book about post-1989 Russian architecture, Capitalist Realism.[1] and cultural critic Mark Fisher in a book of the same title (Zero Books, 2009).
The term was actually coined on the occasion of an
exhibition by the West German group of painters, like Gerhard Richter, Sigmar
Polke or Wolf Vostell in Dusseldorf
in 1963, Demonstration for Capitalist Realism, where they took their name from. Young generation of artists reacted to
growing consumerism and media-saturation, and though inspired by Pop art’s
attitudes, the austerity of German painters never actually shared Pop’s
affirmation of capitalism hidden behind irony.
Who was building these new edifices? Did the architects of the previous system disappear? In Poland
often the very same architects, whose practices had
been privatized, embraced the new
reality, and designed Poland’s
new parodies of New York and Chicago. Their
ability to work in this idiom didn’t come from nowhere, but from
the specific, complicated experiences that
Polish architects endured in the 1960s and 70s. In that period, they were employed en masse by underdeveloped
countries, most of all in the Middle East and North Africa, to work on building and city-planning projects. In
recent years, architectural historian Lukasz Stanek and his collaborators at the ETH in Zurich have been working
on a research on the interaction between the former Second and Third
Worlds, telling a surprising story about development and “underdevelopment”.
In the new capitalist architecture, the legacy of the socialist times
was still visible, now expressed through the most grandiose and then-hated
reminder of the old regime, Socialist Realism. Many tend
to see Socialist and Capitalist Realisms as oppositional ideologies,
which obscures how much they have in common. Traditionalism, nationalism,
symmetries, grand scale – all that is reflected in both architectural styles.
For example, the 90s and 00s skyscrapers of Moscow and Astana were directly
modeled after those of late 40s and 50s Moscow and Warsaw, which in turn had
been inspired by 1910s Chicago. What happened between Stalinist Socialist realism and Capitalist Realism were three decades of Modernism, mostly in the
form of prefabricated social housing. The model for
this actually came from pre-War
experiences. Poland,
for instance, had built Modernist, co-operative
public housing estates in the 1920s and 30s. In USSR,
Modernism ceased in the early 1930s when the General Plan for rebuilding Moscow demanded a new,
Stalinist style termed ‘socialist in content and national in form’.[2]
The new socialist realist style, deployed
after the Second World War, has effects that
are still visible in all ebuilt
Eastern Bloc cities. Those Polish cities, like Warsaw, that had
been nearly completely destroyed by the Nazis, were reconstructed from
scratch by the new, Moscow-controlled
authorities. The Polish Six Year Plan (1950-1955) saw
Warsaw
spectacularly brought from the dead. Similarly, a building boom happened in the
rest of Poland, with reconstructions of Gdańsk, Wrocław, Tychy,
and the building of new towns like Nowa Huta –
essentially - a steelworks
colony, built by an outrageous effort between 1949 and 1954 in suburban Krakow in a grandiose Socialist Realist style, with boulevards wide enough to be able
to host tanks in case of the Third World War. This was the reality of the Cold
War – a constant competitiveness in all fields including technology, which the
Soviet Bloc could mostly win only by propaganda. But where did the rest of the
postcolonial world fit in this division?
In the ‘thaw’ of 1956 Boleslaw
Bierut, the Communist Party of Poland, died,
and was replaced during great turmoil by Władyslaw Gomułka, who
criticized the period of Socialist Realism as “the era of errors and
distortions”. This event opened a new chapter
in Polish planning and architecture. What was from
then state-supported was entirely opposed to the totalitarian opulence of the
Stalinist Palaces of Culture - cheap, prefabricated blocks of flats. With a housing crisis still pervading society after
the war, the quickly built, though initially well-planned estates started to
fill the cities in the whole Bloc. Interestingly, this spectacular achievement
put Eastern Bloc architects at the frontline of new ideas for housing
solutions, as masterplanners and city constructors.
The success of this attracted ‘developing’ countries from outside the
Eastern and Western Blocs to hire the cities’ planners
and architects. Large state-owned
national architectural practices like Miastoprojekt from
Krakow or Energoprojekt from Belgrade
started working for Middle Eastern and African
countries who were members of the Non-Aligned Movement.[3] Miastoprojekt, the designers
of Nowa Huta, won a prestigious competition for Baghdad’s
master plan in 1967, a
general housing programme for Iraq between 1976 and 1980. They continued to work in the
Middle East until the 1980s.
The founding of and collaboration with the Non-Aligned
Movement was part of the geo-political development of a ‘third way’ between capitalism and communism. And there was a lot in between: the oil-rich Middle East,
Africa emerging from colonial rule and Latin America.
They were all underdeveloped and needed new kind of cities and housing. The
fact that socialist Poland assisted in it was a source
of prestige for urbanists, was seen as proof of the success of socialism, and
thus expressed the Eastern Bloc’s political and economic support for the newly
founded states. Through this, Functionalist
urbanism became a global idiom in the 1960s at the hands of architects from the
‘socialist countries’. Master plans of Baghdad (1967) and Aleppo (from 1962),
administrative buildings in Kabul, museums in Nigeria (from 1969), and the
trade fair in Accra (1967), followed by governmental buildings in Ghana, were all drawn up by Polish architects, and were recently
collectedin the exhibition ‘PRL™ Export Architecture and
Urbanism from Socialist Poland’[4] at the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art in 2010. The exhibition showed conclusively
how the USSR
and its periphery, which had gone from being rural to industrial economies in
rapid time, were considered by Non-Aligned countries to be a model for their own modernisation. During
the 1970s this work abroad was increasingly economically motivated, as Poland had to pay off the loans taken in the 70s by the new
leader Edward Gierek. As the crisis in Poland developed,
it sparked a crisis of belief in ‘real socialism’ among its
citizens. Polish architects were especially keen on exporting their work,
as their task was completely subsumed under the requirements of the state
building industry and bureaucratic apparatus.
Until a certain moment Polish skills and
techniques were highly desirable. They stopped
being so in the late 1970s, when imperialism
moved into the Non-Aligned nations, forcibly
shifting alignments: Indonesia
faced a US-backed coup in the 1960s; Egypt reconciled itself to the USA after Sadat became
president and in Iraq,
Saddam Hussein similarly had the USA’s support. From being
the forerunners of architectural planning, all
of a sudden Poles had to learn and absorb a completely different architectural
idiom – a more Americanised form of postmodern architecture and planning. And
perhaps now that the countries of the Non-Aligned
Movement were no longer neutral, they were no longer so keen to be
associated with the Eastern Bloc.
Rather than being modern, from this point former Non-Aligned countries were keen to market themselves as tourist
destinations and started to favour more traditional architectural
styles, exoticising
their otherness. Meanwhile, countries that became wealthy from oil in the 1970s soon had the
wealthiest ruling class in the world. Thus they wanted to build aptly representational
buildings, focusing less on housing and basic infrastructure and more on
display. One can endlessly ask the question of what caused the rise of postmodernism,
but it is clear that the reaction happened
everywhere. Each country, in the First, Third and Second Worlds, had adopted modern
architecture, so in the end an attack was made
across the board on a style apparently boring, monolithic and monofunctional.
The replacement was a corporate and parodic aesthetic. Much of the
criticism and pomo ideology came from the US, where the new architecture was
already incorporating the elements of what was once-considered avant-garde
modernism - collage, violent juxtapositions – and calling it new. Postmodern architecture’s leaders like Philip Johnson once created
boring modern architecture, then decided to clad it pink and make jokes. At the same
time, postmodernism was socially reactionary, stripping modernism of everything
social: welfare state, equality, planning. A symptomatic case is The Iron Gate in
Warsaw – a famous, Corbusian council estate built in the center of the city between 1965
and 1972, with micro-flats of 11 sq m per inhabitant. It is now overshadowed by tacky
capitalist realist skyscrapers such as Atrium (built in 2001) by architects Kazimierski &
Ryba, previously the designers of a ‘Sports-City’ in Latakia, Syria. The Iron
Gate, criticized as “a good idea went bad”, was itself the subject of a recent
film[5] - the interviews with
inhabitants showed it is still often popular, with residents using
the communal spaces provided in exactly in the way designers projected.
The
problem there now, is the light and space permanently taken by corporate high-rises
built onto the parkland originally between the blocks. It’s an interesting
example of how modernist zoning (the area was zoned solely for
housing) was replaced and crowded by
banks, office blocks and restaurants, that all belong not only to another ‘zone’,
but another social class. When the influential American writer Jane Jacobs
opposed zoning, she was opposing the tendency of spaces in estates to become bleak
and abandoned. But what followed was the insistance on making places “vibrant”. In the case of
the Iron Gate, this meant building around the monolithic, huge and identical
Ville Radieuse-style blocks in green space a net of significantly higher, clad with an especially cheap and perishable material - trespa, speculation flats & and imposing office/retail developments like Atrium.
Its architects even quote Socialist Realism as a source of inspiration: “It is
the only contemporary style noticeable and consequently realized in Warsaw. In the arcades
and cornices of Atrium we applied a pastiche of Socialist Realism, to which we
added signs of our time”: atriums, elevators, facades etc.”[6]
Some of the new ideas came from Polish architects’ earlier adaptation of
modernist rules to changing local conditions in their Non-Aligned clients. This
is too easily read as an embrace of ‘freedom’. In fact, Middle East countries,
such as Iraq or Kuwait were much more harsh and undemocratic
than any Eastern Bloc country - they treated their political opponents in a
much more brutal way than General Jaruzelski did after introducing Martial Law
in Poland
during 1981.
In 1991 Miastoprojekt Krakow transformed itself into a trade company,
consisting of fifteen different offices
coordinating the overall practice. The highlights of their practice include,
for instance, the headquarters for Philip
Morris in Krakow. The planners of cities first
in Poland and then the Middle East have become the designers of malls, banks,
conference centres, private villas and
speculative offices. It’s this movement, from involvement in the Non-Aligned
countries before 1989 and then new buildings in Poland after, in which the
architects evoked Socialist Realism more often than Modernism, that forms the
subject of the exhibition ‘Postmodernism Is Almost All Right’, held at the Warsaw School of Economics last autumn.
It would be interesting to more closely examine
the strange recurrence of Socialist Realism, first, as the USSR’s equivalent of the
capitalist architecture of the US,
drawing at the same time on native Tsarist
flamboyance, and then later
rhyming with the Po-mo shift worldwide and after 1989, fitting so well
within the demands of Capitalist Realism. The future of Socialist Realism is complex.
In the West and the newly Westernised
EU-members of Osteuropa, it is alternately rejected as a relic of the condemned
past or unexpectedly embraced – the grand public spaces of Karl-Marx Allee in
Berlin or the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw are now often liked by
locals, although certainly no new buildings try and emulate them. In the East,
sometimes a very far East indeed, the style unironically adorns undemocratic,
turbo-capitalist regimes, from Ukraine
to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and even extends to oil-garchies Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Mecca’s Abraj al Bait skyscraper closely evokes
the Stalinist towers of the 1950s, with its grandiose historicist ornament, its
axial symmetry and its lofty spire. With a sense of guilt for ‘exploitation’,
this kitsch oligarchitecture is occasionally exposed in contemporary design
magazines or exhibitions, but is seldom taken seriously. But is there really
such a distance between the ‘high architecture’ of, say, cityscape of Dubai or Norman
Foster’s sinister glass Pyramid of Peace for the Kazakh capital, and the
‘kitsch’ simulation of Stalinist styles in the same city’s Triumph Astana?
These recent projects and exhibitions on the many worldwide legacies of
socialist architecture ask some pointed
questions about where we might position the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. We find
first, an authoritarian Socialist Realist style abandoned in the late ‘50s
which is then evoked, stripped of its direct political associations in the new
capitalist architecture of the 1990s; and when we try and find out where this
evocation of demonized styles comes from, we find the experiences of architects
forced to adapt to new trends from the west. Nothing is certain, nothing
corresponds to the cliché of totally hostile rival Blocs. More than anything
else, we find an era and an architecture that was struggling for alternative
scenarios of modernity, rather than limiting itself to a familiar dichotomy
between Empires East and West.
[1] Bart Goldhoorn and
Philipp Meuser, Capitalist Realism: New
Architecture in Russia, Berlin: DOM Publishers,
2006. (the book has parallel text in English, German and Russian)
[3]The Non-Aligned Movement, like the similar Group of 77,
was founded during a thaw in the Cold War in 1961 inBelgrade
to unite the ‘Third World’ countries that were
neither a part of the capitalist West nor the Eastern communist Bloc.)
[review spiked from The Wire, written in September-October 2011]
Ayshay
WARN-U
12”
Water
Borders
Harbored
Mantras
CD
With a growing stable
of intriguing artists, Tri-Angle is the 4AD of the 2010s, in the times when
the latter publishes artists like Iron & Wine, St. Vincent or Beirut. For some reason,
the 00s were marked by a shift from multidimensional projects like This Mortal
Coil swiftly replaced by tedious, repetitive mutations of singer-songwriter. We
have a problem with defining authenticity, which for many people must
invariably mean a guy with a guitar singing wistfully covers of Sufjan Stevens
in a pub basement. At the same time, anything too spooky,
kitschy or ridiculous or just too ‘serious’ was a faux pas. But not all is lost. Suddenly
artists are not ashamed of strangeness or mysticism even. Dark spaces of the internets,
anonymity of modern music making bear a strange resemblance to the gothic
spirit. Those connections are explored in depth by a doctoral thesis by Mark ”k-punk”
Fisher, Flatline Conctructs. Gothic
Materialism and Cybernetic Theory Fiction, a 'Gothic Materialism' which has more in common with William S. Burroughs than Bram Stoker. Robin
Carolan, the founder of Tri-Angle, consistently the spookiest of internet
labels, who is not bothered by suspicion of kitsch - au contraire, pushing its
esotericism to an extreme – at the same time is a fan of the lush sound of pop. What
his artists, be it Balam Acab or How to Dress Well, have in common, is an
interesting alternative to the default “poptimism” of chillwave, consistently
penetrating grey areas.
The latest two:
San Francisco Water Borders, a duo of producers
Amitai Heller and Loric Sih, and Ayshay’s Fatima Al Qiadiri, Senegal-born, Kuwait-raised
and now a New Yorker are very intriguing exercises in this new mysticism. They show us how we actually
consume music: if we’re accepting the exotic, it is only in a certain highly
conventionalized form of ‘folklore’. Their music can be qualified as an
experiment in modern ‘world’ music, having nothing to do with any cliché of it
you previously knew. Ayshay relies solely on various transformations of
Al Qiadiri’s voice: her singing acapella reinterpretations of the traditional
Islamic hymns, but the way you never thought of the Middle
East music. Filtered to degrees of complete unrecognisability, stripped
bare of any instruments, that would make it Qiadiri’s voice resemble an old
man, a child and a young woman at the same time, layered together in one
piercing drone, with a tribal beat in the background. Is it real religious
devotion or pop travesty and does it matter? Sounding so intimate, we feel like
we interrupted the artist in some private religious ritual.
In turn,
the full length from Water Borders is a richly packed experiment at marrying
the gothic and the exotic, engaging rich layers of Gamelan and African drums
and industrial sensitivity. There’s something very post-punk about the way the
seemingly incongruous styles are mixed here – the nearest memory is that of bands
like This Mortal Coil, Cocteau Twins, Current 93 or even Dead Can Dance (sic!). It reminds us
how industrial, dressed in radical politics, was actually another mutation of
gothic – and on Harbored Matras romantic,
gothic and exotic exist on equal rights. Industrial shared the gothic's obsession with technology, moral and civilizational decay, sexuality, exoticism, and above all, transgression. It is "religious" both in the sense of the old flirtation with occultism and with the transcendent, otherwordly, spiritual, celestial... According to Jon Savage, investigation of "cults, wars, psychological techniques of persuasion,
unusual murders (especially by children and psychopaths), forensic pathology, venerology, concentration camp behavior,
the history of uniforms and insignia" and Aleister Crowley's magick was present in Throbbing Gristle, but we can
apply that to many others. Then it's passed onto Joy Division and PiL, whose
marriage of cold and visceral influenced both popular goth post punk like Bauhaus and 4AD artists.
The reason This Mortal Coil records aged so well is in the end an effect of sheer
prettiness – it’s beautifully recorded, romantic and dreamy material, a
timeless Goth seduction soundtrack. In its beauty, its ritualistic, watered,
dubbed out aquatic qualities, and its rich imagery, Harbored Mantras may
have a similar future - I can easily imagine a contemporary
Goth lightening candles and playing Water Borders as a seduction record. While
the now rarely mentioned artist Muslimgauze was a music ethnographer whose
findings were to serve the fight for Palestinian Autonomy, Ayshay and Water
Borders are clearly pop. Their goal is making beautifully recorded music with a
timeless sound.
UPDATE: a few months after I wrote this review, Simon Reynolds has published a post on "the new exquisite", which was a confirmation of my intuitions that the New Complicated (to this I'd also count Julia Holter or Cold Cave) is being born somewhere in the intersection of seemingly incongrous contemporary musics and esthetics.
[longer version of a review first published in The Wire #338]
Julia Holter
Ekstasis
RNVG CD/LP/DL
Not long ago Julia Holter smitten us with the
enigmatic and eccentric Tragedy, one of those records you can’t predict until
they happen, a samples and
distortions-made vehicle for some really moving vulnerability. Now it turns out
simultaneously with those tormented cantilenas she was working on a far sunnier
record, though, fittingly with her Greek tragedy fascination, she called it
Ekstasis. Well, don’t expect ecstasy in an…ecstatic, climactic way. It’s a
rather playful and poppy record, where tremors and anxiety of Tragedy has been calmed
by serenity. It is largely due to Holter’s fresh and girly soprano voice, which
is far from operatic force, yet manages to express a palette of emotions. Main
emotion here is bliss and a mature understanding, what bliss is. There’s
nothing that seem to menace this sense of joy, even if, like on Marienbad or In
the same room, it can assume at moments quite dramatic form. In the former,
playing with her harpsichords and keyboards, she intuitively associated the
jumbled construction of the Resnais’ film with the way she puts together
fragments of different songs, some upbeat and percussive and some otherworldly and
droney, which collapse into each other, just as layers of time and space, people
and sculptures collided in the film.Holter
displays here remarkable compositional talent and capacity with sound
techniques, with virtuosic sound distortions, sampling, and lines of clear
voice, which comes in and out. Mostly it’s difficult to work out what’s played
and what’s sampled.
I can hear here both
the vocal experiments of modern composition and of outré pop, from Salvatore
Sciarrino to Laurie Anderson’s pranks with vocoder, but they never come out as
second-fresh. It’s because Holter also has a feeling for pop, especially her
native California:
think the Beach Boys' idea of multilayered pop and candy-like production, a
sunny, but flawed Neverland; or Fennesz's Endless Summer - cheerful surf-pop
broken with 21st century melancholy. But think also this Scandinavian melancholy cliché, Stina
Nordenstam singing on the wind, who nevertheless took modern composition
classes, or even "worse", this supposed queen of kitsch, Enya - the latter seem to have a huge, unannounced comeback, at least as an unlikely inspiration for many "good taste" records. It’s also a very dream-pop record, full of long beatless stretches,
like the airy, spacey Boy on the Moon, where Harold Budd-like drones encompass
Holter’s soprano. What is also intriguing in singer’s approach is her lack of
flirtation, delicacy – although it also may limit her palette, because you
can’t expect her to go all of a sudden Diamanda Galas or Karen Dalton.On the last track, This is Ekstasis, she puts layers of her voice with
brusque drums, reminiscent of Roxy
Music’s Bogus Man, and the displaced random sounds of a saxophone (sic!).
Ekstasis is full of such undermining moments, though free of the intentional
kitsch that characterises so much contemporary production.
[longer version of a review first published in The Wire #338]
Elodie + Eyvind Kang & Jessica Kenney
Cafe Oto, London, UK
Eyvind Kang’s latest project and LP, The Narrow Garden, reaches for early French troubadour poetry or non-western poetry from Persia and Far East, which challenged a lot my training in modern Western poetry. We think metaphors are something to decipher, put into set of cultural references, and forget the contemplative & epiphanic meaning that poetry used to have in pre-modern times and which even someone so devoted to classic erudition as TS Eliot could still appreciate in religious, pre-romantic approaches of his favorite Dante & Cavalcanti. But given the circumstances, I’m sure the reception both Kang and Elodie wish for is non-academic. Elodie started this two-act gig in a completely packed Cafe Oto on the first night of snow this winter. It was organised as the first of a Stephen O’Malley-curated series, helping to promote two new works by some rarely seen musicians of the contemporary experimental scene. Such a chamber-like event demands absolute silence and focus, and one could feel the crowd, only seconds ago occupied by chat and gossip, melting minute by minute under the spell of Andrew Chalk’s tipping of the guitar and his Belgian collaborator Timo van Luyk’s flute. Their methods of effecting sound out of their instruments seem just as elusive and delicate as extremely modern in recalling 20th C avant-gardes – preparation, tipping and touching, suppressing the air in the van Luyk’s flute especially, so that shimmers and air flows are equal with the conventional “sound” itself, or even so that there was nothing such as an “orthodox” sound. The texture gets this way complicated in a way we didn’t predict – and the palette escapes any easy search for a melody or sound progression.
Chalk, immersed completely in the guitar, demonstrated some gripping focus on his instrument, with cymbal-like tapping, making shimmers, sounding like movements of the air as it was moving between the flute and the strings. In his review in The Wire 337, Nick Richardson aptly compares Elodie to Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, in that both are sacrificed to contemplation of exquisite patterns of the smallest gestures, as if stroking glass, like glissandos of a harmonica. Their latest record is called La Lumière Parfumée – something as delicate as the sound they’re making, seemingly contained in repetitive arrangements, but in fact happening in the light equation between the two musicians, so well placed together that it seemed nothing could interrupt their mutual alchemy.
The second part of the evening brought the pitch-perfect soprano of Jessica Kenney together with Kang’s musicianship. It started with Kenney walking across the room, between the crowd, who parted to let her in, and Kang following, with her singing single high notes, as if she was examining or mapping the resonance of the place. With that gesture, one could feel they absorbed the whole space into their performance. Kang and Kenney resurrected the spirit of the early medieval music without sounding anything like ethnographers or some society of Early Music. I’m quite sure that we were closer to the originals because both are capable of ‘thinking’ troubadour or Eastern music spirit, and not just mechanically rendering them. The effect was stunning. Kenney has one of the most beautiful and at the same time non-intimidating voices I’ve ever heard: sweet, multifaceted, deep and youthful, capable of capturing all the drama of her Persian or Provençal masochistic lovers, unhappy widows and loners. Kang was her perfect partner, masterfully rendering melodies in various musical scales on violin, guitars, flute, charmingly multi-layered by delays, echoes and feedbacks, creating complex musical patterns, cantilenas, drones and polyphonies. It seemed even too pure and indeed this evening was a test asking whether we are still capable of listening, of experiencing something so delicate, of such unknown beauty, such incredible austerity, at times clinically cold, otherworldly and distant. Something that seems to have nothing to do with the way we live our lives now, but that seems to matter, here and now; that brings us back to ourselves, to our bored and tired bodies, refreshes and renews them and the spirit that inhabits them.
