Music of Our Time

[I am posting this while listening to a mixtape I got this morning from a friendly Rouges Foam, Heck, You will hit something that looks like Mount Everest. He also become, for this sake, a cut-and-paste collage master - lovely! - but not really sure what to think of this sport imagination (below) - you must've become very americanised, my friend, during your stay in the US! It made me think though I should post this spiked live review for the Wire, which didnt get the editors' approval, making me think what is it, that I'm possibly getting wrong here? Why I find myself unable to appreciate the new music, at least from certain post-hauntological spectrum, find it boring, uneventful, conjunctural, moribund-without-a -reason. Rouge's mix, which encompasses much more than post-hauntology, shows at least certain interesting creative ricketiness, de rigeur moribundity, sure, but at least soundscapes in which something happens; the more 'happens' in music, the better, in my view; too much is just enough. Recently I was giving a lecture at the Krakow's Unsound festival about the end of personality in music: how lack of authorship, from interesting (from ballardian The Normal and such industry-jokes as Silicon Teens to anonymity of techno & house and then hauntology, Burial and so on) becomes today just a pose, just another element of reversed fashionable identikit. Characteristically, also in terms of sound, of things actually happening in the music, post-hauntology is rather uneventful and hollow, so alienated, so bleak (and so depoliticised). How strange, but also how apt, given this generation was born already to neoliberalism, from the beginning saturated in "there's no alternative"...Anyway, here're my thoughts after going to a gig of some of the hottest artists of the season, trying to at teh same time reflect on a style, of which Tri-angle roster seem most obvious exponent]

[wrote sometime betw. June-July 2012]

Holy Other + Vessel + LIE + Haxan Cloak + Evian Christ

Islington Mill, Salford, UK

There must be a method behind the intense, exhausting boringness of contemporary electronica shows: a group of people stand in complete darkness, listening to hisses and breaks coming from nowhere, while a stroboscope glides over their eyes from time to time. On some level it appeals to me: it helps contemplation. It seems to me musicians are trying to demonstrate the identitylessness of music-making in the times of the disappearance of much bigger things. Or indeed they transmit this identitylessness. Hidden under mysterious monikers and all that, in the darkness, amongst strobes and huge amounts of dry ice, Holy Other, Vessel, Haxan Cloak and Evian Christ, new artists on Brooklyn’s Tri-Angle label, presented themselves recently to the Mancunian public.

The evening at this former working mill, now artists’ residences, seems very much of a piece, a homogenously designed environment. Similar murky moods sweep into each other with no irritating changes. The most interesting of the pack is Holy Other, not for their sampling of soul singers, but because their sound seems to have more substance and physicality. Theirs is an airy, spacey music, like an all-encompassing cloud over which beats, samples and clicks occur, strangely deprived of the sensually charged atmosphere of R&B and hiphop. Evian Christ produce a similarly slowed down, foggy take on dance music using hiphop and R&B cut-ups. Vessel finally provides some opportunities for dancing within this stasis, with more readable beats and breaks. Haxan Cloak’s set has a Lynchian (or Badalamentian) moodiness, with violin and cello parts played from computer, but unfortunately this evokes a cheesy soundtrack to an improvised black mass rather than existential shivers. And as I understand this may be the beginnings of some of those very young artists playing live, and how this may differ from the recorded and mixed material, I can still expect from music to grip me, to take me, transport me with it. I see where they're going: Joseph Beuys on the cover, strong fascination with Joy Division, love for GYBE! And nowhere may be a still interesting place to be,  no doubt, but to me, this is still too uneventful even for a limbo. 

 

Tri-Angle (and not only, cos those artists now transcended their initial label) initially attempted to achieve a contemporary Gothic a la 4AD, but with various forms of urban music as source material. Its output may be juxtaposed with some of the music only a few years earlier, associated with Hauntology – not necessarily through how they sound, but in the mental climate they evoke. Hauntology has been criticised for empty miserabilism, philosophical vacuousness and occultist nonsense, but artists associated with it, like Rolan Vega or Burial, were at least addressing issues such as the decline of social democracy or the death of rave culture. The music of younger generation represented by Tri-Angle doesn’t match the activity of that same generation on the streets, though. but it’s telling, how much it is a music of the cold late capitalist world: with its energy as if from the start stifled, sucked in. Here, mourning has developed into melancholy and can’t really place its reference anymore. Fascinated by darkness, they make music which evokes depression in form, but seems to suffer from the more general malaise - lacking the potentially activating political claims. They add a different set of nostalgic references, sampling hiphop, crunk, triphop (Vessel’s Sebastian Gainsborough is from Bristol), UK garage or r’n’b, but the result seems purely decorative, very much ‘late internet’, where all those elements collide and mix into a nondescript mass.

There’s something Catholic about the show, but without the dramaturgy, leaving pessimism, eschatological thoughts and, finally, misery. There’s no doubt those musicians are adept at putting music together in a lush, Gothic way, but the paralysis they induce is sometimes unbearable. This is not music to bliss out to, like My Bloody Valentine, nor anything holding a hidden menace, like, say, Basic Channel or Tricky: it is a continuous wallow. A live recording from this gig could be added to Dominic Fox’s Cold World, a book on depression and melancholy, but whereas Fox sees a chance to turn passivity into militant negative euphoria, I can’t see much in this music beyond the contemplation of mental paralysis. There is a huge turnout – Salford is now a newly emerging space for indie culture – but while the gig may have taken place in a post-industrial space, its direct surroundings are a mass of recession dereliction, the ruins of new Great Britain, casting a longer and longer shadow.

Architecture of Pleasure

Lina Bo Bardi, Museum on the Seashore, Brazil, 1951

[longer version of a review for Architecture Today #232)

Rowan Moore Why We Build

Agata Pyzik

Rowan Moore’s ambitious book starts with an image that is hard to beat: as a prominent critic of The Observer and a former Architecture Foundation director, he is taken by the Dubai’s satraps for a helicopter flight over the now so familiar landscape of thrilling, yet deeply unsettling city. The list of financial excesses and cost of the inaugural parties can be probably matched only by the declining Roman Empire. And just like with the Romans, the Emirates' millionaires seemed decadently aware of the fall that was just round the corner. Moore sees a greater meaning in this, and as if responding to people, who’d like to see architecture as something purely functional, makes a quasi-antimodernist argument: architecture was, is and will be built partly as a result of our madness, as a folly responding to our desires to change the world according to our visions.

VDNKh Moscow

The motor may be love for beauty, for money or for vice, or for power – all of those wishes are reflected in the madness of Dubai, as they are in seemingly much less controversial projects. His book then continues as a catalogue, or an atlas of human follies as architecture. His greatest interest and fascination lies with the fantastical. The most inspiring chapters consider the fake in architecture (or the fake that becomes real), the spaces for love and lovemaking (or simply sex trade) and spaces, that are expressions of power. He discusses alongside each other, Richard Rogers flag projects of Centre Pompidou in Paris and Lloyd’s in London, Stalinist Moscow’s metro and the unbelievable VDNKh, the All-Russia Exhibition Centre for all the Soviet Republics; John Soane’s uncanny house-museum, the billionaire Larry Dean’s Xanadu or rather Dynasty-like Dean Gardens, and the driven in its literalness phallic brothel by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, famous inventor of “architecture parlante”. He’s interested in how an even single building may change the city, always ready to give dozens of examples and in our fascination with power, stating very truthfully, that “we often like a presence of force in a  building, as long as we feel it’s not directed at us”.

Dean Gardens

My definite favorite is the erotic chapter, where Moore assumes a role of an infinitely interested observer, yet not a pornographer, with a wit confirming London’s reputation as a city of vice much surpassing anything ever done by the French. He gently mocks Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos, both erotomaniacs, who were in love with Josephine Baker, and their male fantasies about women’s sensuality and sexuality. Let's not pretend in the case of many of the cherished great inventors in architecture, starchitects as well as their less monied, less talented, but still powerful colleagues (all no doubt The Fountainhead lovers), their sexual (sometimes not only) fantasies laid way to many ridiculously self-indulgent projects. Money and power meaning abuse of women shocker; to which probably the chapters on fascinating brutalist Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi, as well as Zaha Hadid can be a counterbalance. Architecture remains a hopelessly men-dominated area and as I would oppose simplistic oppositions, it is rare on Moore's part to point out what often is hidden behind the spiky ambitions.

If the erudite delicious passages about the French neoclassicist architecture, bathed in erotomania have any predecessor, it will be the Anthony Vidler’s Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely or Robert Harbison’s unique Eccentric Spaces or Reflections of Baroque. Both are stylists, who want to take the architectural writing to somewhere more interesting, than just sheer journalism. The postmodern era in building spawned not only the atrocities of Philip Johnson (who gets kicking), but also some the most sophisticated writing devoted to make it an expression of the personality of both author’s and the strangeness of the built space.

The consequences of the financial aspect of those follies are present, but not those, that drove the Pomo architecture into the atrocities of the zero degree of architecture, which is speculative housing. The quality and at the same time problem of this book is that Moore doesn’t want to focus on mediocrity, and if so, only on the splendid, larger-than-life mediocrity, like China Central TV Headquarter, project in Beijing by OMA/Rem Koolhas or their Olympic Stadium from 2008. Despite pointing out the cynicism of the authorities, who publicly aim at the ‘openness’ and internationalism, it’s hard to resist an impression Moore is sparing us the final word. The time now is hectic and the readers become more and more aware of the political complications of the last 30 years in building – Moore resists yet an overarching argument, which would turn his book inevitably into a diatribe. Although it announces at the beginning it’s purpose is to “explain this universal drive to build”, we’d still expect more of an erudite of his sort.

LIna Bo Bardi, SESC Pompéia Sao Paulo, 1977

 This book is not a manual, the charm lies rather in those little snippets of information, some great lines ready to be quoted, especially on Soane, Ruskin or sex. it is a formidable puzzle trying to hold together as an answer to how we build and how we used to build, written with grace, a bit in the way of ancient, renaissance or baroque authors of architectural treatises. But what is sometimes lacking is the future tense here. for those willing to know more on architectire t is a great journey though, which in the end, makes us read his author’s and our own judgment between the lines.

Auf wiedersehen, Mr Beckett!

[text written and then shortened as a review for The Wire #333 which was in September last year]

Deborah Weagel

Words and Music. Camus, Beckett, Cage, Gould

In a way, relationships between words, especially poetry, and music, are self-explanatory, because poetry started as music or music started as poetry (Orphic hymns, oral epics, vocal music, oratorios, masses, operas). In turn, the idea of synthesis of arts, and especially a kinship between word and music appears first in the Greeks as ekphrasis, which is, in literal sense, an “expression” of an idea, a rhetorical device of expressing one art via another and perhaps also first ever definition of intermediality. Modern view on correspondences comes from German Romantics, who insisted on the idea of the interdisciplinary. Since then the idea of synthesis of arts was attractive to many, with Wagner’s Gesamtkunswerk as a most famous example and all kinds of 20^th century avant-garde experimentation: Dada poetry, visual poetry or even concrete and sonorist poetry or contemporary hypertext. All that was usually evoking musical language, but treated rather as a metaphor, neglecting its primary meaning. Yet something about the idea of blurring the distance between music and literature still haunts the humanities and interestingly it is usually the literary scholars than musicologists, who want to prove it.

In Words and Music Deborah Weagel interestingly overlooks all the literary avant-garde traditions, from symbolism to dada, and chooses to focus on four artists, two writers and two composers/musicians, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, John Cage and Glenn Gould respectively, which also happen to be well established High Priests of Modernism. She also states from the beginning, that what interests her are only two aspect of musicality of literature: music in literature and literature and music. First surprise may be engaging Camus to this crowd, whose work is not obviously musical. Yet, as it is exposed, author of L’etranger had a great affinity with both Mozart and Bach, believing, that music is an expression of “the unknowable world”, asscribing to certain natural phenomena, such as the look of the morning sun or of the sea thinkgs, like tonality and counter-tonality. Camus lived in an era full of all sorts of experimentation in music, from Schoenberg to Stravinsky or Messiaen, but it was a traditionalist Honegger, that composed music to his play. As we realise, the most common and perhaps basic way Camus and many writers understood musicality was a simple sonata form, A-B-A, that is: a topic, its variation(s) and a reprise. Yet the banality of the idea seems to be able to express itself in infinite number of ways.





In turn, there’s no doubt of Beckett’s interest in avant-garde music: minimalism and experimentalism of his work, from Godot to Krapp’s Last Tape invite comparisons to music and in his case rightly so. Sensitivity to voice, pitch, resonance and duration often make his manuscripts look like musical scores. There’s clearly parallelism between Beckett’s and some avant-garde artists, culminating in his collaboration with Morton Feldman on the play Neither. Playing with the idea of test/textlessness, Beckett’s primal element was word, and again, depending on what we understand by musicality of literature, we can take those experiments as inventing a new form or simply densifying of the linguistical texture. In turn, John Cage, everybody’s favorite avant-gardist, used certain musical procedures in his texts, such as Lectures on Nothing and Something or his famous book Silence. They were avant-garde, so not rooted in music or language yet – what gave an interesting, but perhaps one-off effects, that cannot be really pursued by anyone else. Cage’s elusive philosophy of work remains ever attractive, but it wasn’t actually a more flexible language of art, because it only can be bowed to Cage’s experimentation.



The last chapters, devoted to genius interpreter of Bach Glenn Gould are perhaps the least predictable and focus on his rarely discussed amazing radio works and auditions, like Solitude Trilogy, highlighting the piety and obsessive perfection, with which Gould approached editing and recording of sound. Trilogy is three sound documentaries, exploring the lifetime obsession of Gould, the counterpoint, with the spoken word, using the sound of the sea or train as basso continuo and exploring culture of Canadian Mennonites combined with songs of Janis Joplin. The author of The Prospects of Recording believed in the improving role of technology in maintaining our environment. Various kinds of sounds and the account of his less known work sound fascinating.

Yet, while being very informative, extensively footnoted Words and Music contribute less new to the general subject: it gathers the material, but do not attempt to demystify or challenge artists’ methods. What about Schwitter’s Ur-Sonate, Cage’s important influence: it’s a musical score written for speech apparatus, but there’s no meaning to it, then what does it have to do with literature, apart from its looks? You could say that these classifications aren’t necessary, that they impoverish an artform that is completely self-sufficient. Does this mean the efforts are futile? Not at all: it makes us contemplate the mystery even more.

Commemmorating Loss. Warsaw Jewish Community Today

[I was thinking what I could possibly post to resuscitate blog a little, and because it's Nov 1st today, which in catholic countries is the Day of the Dead, I decided to publish this essay written on the occassion of reviewing a Jewish music gig for The Wire #344 10/12. The great photo above is that of Guta Berliner, a beautiful athlete in 1930s Warsaw, who was a promising sport star of the Warsaw's Klub Makkabi but in 1934 decided to migrate to Palestine, which saved her life. Photo was for a sculptor Nathan Rappaport, later an author of the Ghetto Heroes Monument in Warsaw, Guta's sculpture was either unfinished or destroyed by the war...More photos of Guta and Warsaw prewar Jewish sportsmen here]

OHEL – 70. years of the liquidation of Warsaw ghetto

Ircha Gdola + Shofar + From thee to thee

Warsaw, Poland

For obvious reasons, playing music in Jewish tradition has in Poland special repercussions. But it must be said: in the last few years especially, the Jewish music has experienced a revival unheard of in this country before, that made this music enter a wholly new level. It is largely due to the rebirth of the Jewish community in Poland as such, which today still counts only around 20,000 in comparison to three million population before the Shoah. It’s thoroughly moving, how the community is growing back, but it is also, as one might expect, quite divided ideologically, namely around the question of Holocaust and Polish anti-Semitism, that did not ceased after the war and continued more or less in communist Poland, leading to the 1968 purges and many people forced to emigration.

There’s no place in an English music magazine to consider the complexities of Jewish identity and its crucial problems today, like relation to its past, politics of Israel and politics of memory, but discussing Jewish music renaissance we also cannot completely by-pass it. Pre-war Warsaw was one of the most vivacious Jewish and Yiddysh centers in the world, where different Jewish cultures and political factions - that of Bund and that of Zionism and many others existed. You cannot overestimate the weight the occasion of the concert: 70th anniversary of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, which started July 1942, could possibly carry, in a situation, where Jews are still looked at suspiciously by some groups in Poland, despite their incredible suffering and sacrifices they made for the Polish nation. All three acts that participated in the concert are formed by young musicians in their thirties, that at certain point in their careers decided that their identity it too important to be left out of their music, especially, since there’s quite 'radical' (also in the Zornesque meaning of the word) sense to performing Jewish music, especially today. But the ways of resurrecting this music can be as diverse as the community itself – and lets be aware of the danger of the holocaust kitsch hanging there with great possibility.

The open-air event took place near the center of Warsaw, on the terrain of the ex-ghetto (everyone walking around Warsaw cannot miss it, as the wall is traced with a memorial line on the pavement), from the beginning had an incredibly solemn atmosphere. Between the recitations, the musicians were actually trying to decompress this slightly po-faced seriousness. Ircha Gdola is a Polish-British fusion of the talents of many improvisers: saxophonist/clarinetist Mikolaj Trzaska, Michał Gorczynski, Paweł Szamburski, Waclaw Zimpel, and Ollie Brice and drummer Mark Sanders, Trzaska, experimental jazz musician, known for participation in many dissimilar around-jazz projects, from Łoskot to Milość and playing on polish avant pop records, a few years ago felt he has to pay a tribute to his own jewish tradition, absent form his music. His aim is to play Jewish music, as if the tradition wasn’t suddenly broken with the war, but continued, to keep it alive. And to get it, he goes to Armenia, Turkey, Egypt or Transilvanian Roma, where you can hear untouched Jewish influences.

The act was based on the melancholic sound of the many clarinets and , with tone predominantly elegiac and longing – I was curious, how the musicians are going to make it more diverse? And this way was supposed to come from free jazz, with which Trzaska, collaborator of the likes of Peter Brotzmann, is not a novice. Discreet microtonal whistles and rustles pervaded the sound, which nevertheless couldn’t overcome a slightly ethnographic tone and Mark Sanders, known for many more outré projects with Evan Parker or Derek Bailey, unfortunately wasn’t trying to intervene too much, being entirely a background to his friends efforts. Simple arrangements and harmonies were sweet, but didn’t really stopped sounding a bit too predictably. Does melancholia have to express itself only as a lament?

Raphael Roginski of Shofar says he wants his music to be a musical equivalent of Talmud; as many traditions there is of commenting the scripture, it should be reflected in the music. Songs come from musicological expertise done in result of research and traveling around Ukraine, Moldova, former pale of settlement. Roginski, supported by Trzaska and Macio Moretti on drums, bent so low over his guitar you can believe he’s really in a trance. Drastic sounds of electronic guitar spread from his corner, while Trzaska finally dropped his melancholy and Moretti was his equal partner. This project, though too often looses edge in noisy jamming and juvenile garage spirit, at least put a bit of life into this a bit too static event. I’m not entirely sure Rogiński is right, but in that night he displayed Marc Bolan’s groove.

That certainly wanst the case with the last band, From Thee to Thee, which succumbed to all sorts of solemn Schindler’s List kitsch. Dozen of musicians supported by singer Ola Bilińska drowned in pseudo-seriousness, that made them only generate somber, one-note elegy, with pseudo-poetical lyrics vaguely waxing on loss. I instinctively feel this is not the way to do it. The question of appropriateness of commemorating such occasion without becoming sacrosanct, falsely pious is a difficult one. When Schoenberg, such rigorous objector of any unnecessary ornament, composed a very sentimentalist Survivor from Warsaw, his previously biggest proponent Theodor Adorno noted, as a larger stamement on post-Shoah experimental music, that if even him cannot convey thsi experience in a way that is not kitsch, no one could. Up to now, there’s no view of musical version of Paul Celan - poet, who managed to reinvent the language to talk about the trauma - but with the two first acts, especially Shofar, I felt Warsaw community got at least some not entirely embarrassing way of commemorating their loss.

Agata Pyzik

Boris Mikhailov: A Retrospective in Berlin

[based on a review originally published in Frieze D/E Issue 5 Summer 2012]

Only over the last twenty years Boris Mikhailov gained recognition in the Western art world. Without a doubt, the belated discovery of the 74-year-old Ukrainian photographer’s work has to do with the collapse of communism and its aftershock. This large-scale retrospective in Berlinische Galerie reaches back even further and reveals Mikhailov as an avid chronicler of both the pre- and post-Soviet eras by presenting works made between 1966 and 2011. His photographs from the last 10 years are devoted to street life in Berlin where he has lived since 2001. The 1990s saw the first publications on art from the Soviet Bloc with special issues often built on simplistic anti-communist praise; recent years have seen exhibitions mourning the perhaps too easily dismissed socialist order, after the brave new world of capitalism provoked unprecedented economical damage and societal degeneration.

Despite the broader historical perspective, the exhibition seemed weighed down by some ideological prejudices – albeit from the West. When we read in the catalogue, Berlinische Galerie director Thomas Köhler writing that ‘in the 1990s [Mikhailov’s] focus was existential, threatening. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he turned to those who had lost out in the social transformation, took their portraits and depicted them in their poverty and despair, the result of the merciless, repressive Soviet political system’, we see what theses Mikhailov is supposed to help in proving. This overlooks the blindingly obvious fact that the photos actually depict the effects of a merciless new capitalism on the post-Soviet poor.

In fact, the whole show challenges a view of the Soviet system, in which the monster is controlling every aspect of every citizen’s life, just as much as the condescending sympathy about those "repressed by socialism". This view is often followed by something like ‘but of course the bold Soviet people were capable of finding the ways out, there was also space for laughter, picnics, flirtation, sex and silliness’ or worse, by that ‘actually a little bit of ideology would be nice’, that for example some of the recent shows or books on the ex-communist countries often imply.

Mikhailov is some of the most prominent artists emerging out of the crashed Soviet Union, who basically continued what he was doing before the collapse, but without making his art in any way more tasteful or palatable for the foreigners. He was influenced by Russian conceptual art (Moscow Conceptualists, Collective Actions) and to a degree, sots-art, but evolved it in its own, sublime, and  documentary way. His attitude varies from a Czech New Wave little realism, not afraid of the abject and sarcasm, but still sweetly funny, and something much darker and visceral. He's also a well known erotomaniac and exhibitionist. when the nude pictures of his wife were found by the KGB, he was fired and decided to take up photography full time.

Then he made his first and incessantly stunning, Red series(1968-75). Mikhailov obsessively photographed red-coloured fragments: found on a girl’s knickers and in blood on her buttock, at a playground, on socks, trams or a babushka’s headscarf. He’s haunted, not so much by the colour of communist ideology, but by the ever changing world around him. It’s as if he believed that looking at something long enough might lead to the discovery of its molecular construction. On his photos the ideology is present in the micro- as well as the macro-image, like in the mass ornament, parades, flags, commemorations. Yet seeing only the ideology behind the colour would be akin to following the official party line; so much more is going on. Anyone looking for unhappiness under the regime couldn’t find the evidence in these completely unofficial photos. Crimean Snobbery (1982) – a monochrome rest after the brightness of Red, where the young and old, skinny and obese, enjoy the sensual pleasures of the seaside resort – could be seen as a parody of the propagandist Bloc newsreels explaining why we’re no worse than Saint-Tropez. But these images also offer an anthropological and behavioral inquiry, much like Black Archive, series compiled from 1968 until late 1970s, another series full of sexual mystique, made by an author simply fixated with the woman’s body. The leitmotiv of his art remains Mikhailov’s subjects: strangely exhibitionistic, open, giving him a large access to their privacy. We never know if they’re acquaintances, lovers or relatives.

Regardless of the political system, Mikhailov has always refused to be a passive observer and kept on actively looking after 1991. The horrifying Case History (1997-99) and At Dusk (1993) series centre on the newly homeless and dispossessed around the ever appearing hometown Kharkov. They’re the biggest accusation of what happened after, not before 1991. It’s a complete collapse of any acceptable reality, of any limits of existence we could still call ‘humane’ (this word happens to be often applied to Mikhailov). The first are full format portraits of the homeless, presented in all their degeneration and disintegration. Extremely harsh, even too intimate in their frankness, they at least do not repeat condescending views on “the poor men and women”, but let them be just the way they want to be, grin, cry, showing their tattoos or genitals. At Dusk shows blue-suffused everyday scenes from Kharkiv: begging, lying with face on the street, dying. Cripples, drunks, old people, ill people.

If I was a German…(1993) where the naked author, his wife and friends are playing scenes dressed as Nazis occupying a small Ukrainian village in kitschy, SM pornographic poses, comes as a relief, although a brief one: soon discomfort takes over. Mikhailov took his stay in Germany seriously, picking the most taboo fragment of its history; self-mockery and exhibitionism are a vital part of the series’ creepiness and power. Why are you looking at me looking so hideous and ridiculous, viewer? – asks its protagonist. Aestheticized, campy Nazi imagery is nothing new to the fashion photography and indeed, in keeping with the original portraits of the perfect Aryan bodies. David LaChapelles of this world, beware: horror can turn back onto you.

Travels in Rural & Municipal Britain: Patrick Keiller in Self-Retrospective

[alternate version of a review of Patrick Keiller's Tate show from ICON #110]

From a foreigner’s point of view, it is hard to find an artist more parochial, more English (not even British) than Patrick Keiller. This filmmaker, researcher, former architect, polymath, obsesses over Britain, the relation between the land and economy, but strangely, it is not making him provincial, because it’s hard to be provincial, if one’s obsessive topic is the logic of western capitalism, hardly a local phenomenon. But Robinson, the character he created, is himself a kind of an exile, an outsider, a queer, and this is precisely, what allows him to see “the problem of London”, problem of the UK and subsequently, the whole western world, increasingly endangered by the food and natural catastrophy.

The current show in Tate Britain is a complex course in Keillerism and Robinsonism, but already so advanced and multilayered, such a rhizomatic net of references, varying from general, historical and political to extremely personal, that a novice may have easily get lost in this construction. It’s as if it was trying to imitate this arch-English novel, Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, with the complicated, impossible storylines displayed as paintings, books fragments, photographs and scattered data (which makes you wonder what kind of architect Keiller could have been if he didn't drop it years ago; we know he was in the team designing famous London brutalist estates, Alexandra Road and Thamesmead); as if begged by his fans, Keiller made a map of his brain and way of thinking. But no worries: it’s a very rational, very logical brain: even English romanticism was rational, and in dealing with the monster of the late capitalism, one should be rather cool-handed.

The exhibition itself is divided in eight sections, each a small platform, like a dry herbarium, with screens, canvases and memorabilia. And as if straight away answering the “but I haven’t seen any films of his” dilemma, he, the most ferocious chronicler of the present financial crisis, makes a shift and retraces us to the very beginning, the start of industrial revolution. One of the first objects in the show is the threshing machine, one of the first ever technologies introduced to the countryside, forerunner of mechanized production and the object of Luddite movement’s hate and destructive attacks. It’s huge and heavy – hardly a precursor to an Ipad. In his Robinson film trilogy, Keiller examined the tension between the rural and industrial Britain. Where has the 500 years of capitalism led us and what maelstroms happened on its way?

We come back to the prehistory of modernity: the land enclosure changed everything on those isles and in the perception of the world as such. The show documents many movements of resistance to this act, mutinying peasants, who saw it as a seizure of their freedom. From now on it’s impossible to imagine common land with no possessions, where people live together and share, although the show also documents attempts at independent communities. Since then everything becomes a potential profit-maker, open to the speculations of the market. Keiller shows how our thinking would be impossible without this revolt, with signs of melancholy, even nostalgia after an unmechanised, rural world, a ‘biophilia’, as he calls it, to the most basic forms of life. But it is in a landscape after the humanity: we exploited everything, we had massive food crisis, we disappeared, leaving behind the scorched earth. But even at his most ‘biophiliac’, Keiller is not Tarkovsky gazing melancholically at the Zone, but an ironic, politicized observer. With what delight and suppressed anger must have he displayed the screens with the war economy (multiplying maps of the war zones, photographs of roads, lanes, closures, private accesses, warnings). Maps of Oxfordshire and Berkshire, primal locations of his films, overlap with maps of Iraq – because maybe the truth of one can be found in the other. Robinson believed he can best explore the world by walking, as if then the land unfolded itself in an act of political-economical transformation. We can also only do as much, images at the show haunt us, as if staring at them intensely enough, we could see the molecular basis of the historical events.

This obsession pervades his work. In London (1992) he looked at the UK capital of the late Tory rule, where, interestingly, only capital itself is left: we see what happens, if all the social relations are gradually stripped of any additional meaning than monetary and reduced to generating income. We see the strife of London of the early 1990s, with the systematic destruction of declining socialist infrastructure, IRA bombings, and other sinister effects of the Tory period. The city there was becoming a dark, independent organism, slowly decaying amongst the technocratic negligence. Then, in Robinson in Space from 1997, he went outside the city to see what happened to the countryside, finding the non-architecture of corporate sheds, retail parks & military zones. This was where the machine was still working, unnoticed. It anticipated the New Labour, also in terms of their architectural legacy: sheds, speculative, shoddy and expensive housing, symbolising the “boom” and what came after the bubble cracked.

Watch Patrick Keiller's London in Entertainment  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

In Robinson in Ruins (2010), after his tormented and ferocious Robinson is released out of prison, put there after he invaded a closed military zone, he relocates to a caravan, where he collects all his previous research and then mysteriously disappears, leaving his legacy to the Institute. The film itself, narrated by the person from the eponymous 'Robinson Institute' (after the real death of Paul Scofield, role took up by Vanessa Redgrave with a perfect, emotionless, flat voice), previously involved with the now deceased Robinson's ex-lover, is supposed to be fragments of his own film-reels. What a beautiful way of building another level of mystery and shaking off rules of autorship Keiller takes his final epopey's element to, denying himself not only the auctorial voice, but also any involvement in what we see on the screen. And what we see is filmic rudiments, stripped to absolute basics: no music, not any non-diegetic score, only nature's images, in long, neverending shots, eternally contemplative, and, one could seriously ponder, an anti-thesis of Tarkovsky's wistful, metaphysical approach to static filming of nature.

And so in the latter, we feel the presence of God, who is 'looking' and 'directing' the image, when the human is absent (nature is never solitary, remember), it is left in its eternal "beauty and mystery"; but of course, we know: we feel such an immense, stubborn presence of Tarkovsky's own eye and sensibility, that we cant really stop thinking about it. Keiller is not giving himself this luxury of rich directing. Of course, like only the great ones do, he is capable of 'directing' the nature, but in his films there's no one looking. Nobody watches, God's dead (sic), people disappeared, even work as such is dead, replaced by machines, there's nothing, only a very uncanny presence of machines (let's not forget the lichens too, of course); and the anonymous, deadly Production going on, that could seemingly go on even after we're all dead (at this moment of crisis, which may also become a serious food crisis, so and so megatonnes of food, it's said, mostly oil seed rape used as biofuel, was not meant for human or animal consumption). Invisible hand of the market at play. Tricks of the trade. Nature's pure relentlessness.

'Robinson's Institute' is also such an erudite delight all along - Warhol’s portrait of Goethe with Kippenberger’s The Happy Ending of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika”, novel, from where Robinson was born; Richard Hamilton intaglios of uncanny agricultural equipment, looking rather like some medieval miniatures, fragments of Quatermass series – and dozens of books. But something tells me that the copy of Borges’ Labyrinths is there less important than, say Engels, Marx, Hobsbawm or Karl Polanyi. And the ultimate message of the show may be to read and use this knowledge against the state of things, rather than attend a psychogeography evening.

Kapuściński The Biography - the best novel about post-war Poland so far?

[a much longer version of an article first published in the Guardian's Review in print on 4.08.2012, an online version in here]

Ryszard Kapuscinski has been the biggest cultural Polish pride abroad, a rare example of internationally recognised name, like ‘Milosz’ or ‘Polanski’, who gained fame due to his vivid literary reportages on power back in the 1980s. Emperor, The Shah of Shahs, Soccer War gained interest not only because of their authors unique position – a star reporter directly from the darkness of the communist Poland, then in the midst of the martial law after a failed workers revolution, but perhaps mainly due to their unusual style – very personal, meticulous, literary, digressive. This wasn’t the usual way of writing journalism and similarly, Artur Domoslawski’s stylish, digressive, written in the unusual present tense, nearly 500 pages long Kapuściński – The Biography is not a conventional biography. Both the author and his hero – also, a friend, a master – stand out of what is accepted in first – the cold war world and now – the post-communist neoliberal Poland by pursuing the truth. And if The Emperor was by some called "the best post-war Polish novel", Domoslawski's book can easily compete as the best novel about this time.

First of all, anyone familiar with the 'reportage' or 'travel' literature will know ‘colouring up’ is one of its commonest devices (think Robert Byron, Curzio Malaparte, Bruce Chatwin, even Oriana Fallaci and others), although it should be perhaps called just ‘literature’. And this was one of the biggest paradoxes of Kapuscinski’s writing, but well showing the enigma this man was. Some say, from today’s, ahistorical perspective, his journalism, from historiography point of view, is simplistic, even naïve “Lonely Planet” style travel writing for beginners, stating the obvious, making mistakes any serious research would wipe out. But what does it matter some Berkeley professor who studied the life of Reza Pahlawi for 30 years, has a better expertise than a poor, sleeping in a car and rags-wearing journalist from the Soviet Bloc country had back in the 1960s? It just doesn’t stand.

Domoslawski is trying to unpack his enigmatic hero, a life-long shy, unconfident man, whose main preoccupation was to be liked (find me a photo without his trademark innocent smile): by the regime, by colleagues, by readers, by critics. it reveals a man with high level of uncertainty. A huge section is devoted to tracing the relative lack of criticism Kapuscinski’s experienced, which was set precisely not to touch the taboo of his past: if they started to criticise him, they’d also have to start a painful debate over the engagement of the current elites in communism and perhaps change their current course: that would be too dangerous for the status quo.

The paradoxical shifts in this great reporter’s career are worth studying not only for the fans of his writing, but because they show in a nutshell the complications of Polish history. How come someone could be first a dedicated socialist, highly engaged in building the new post-war system, then its flagship reporter, traveling to all the revolutions across the war, then a supporter of Polish opposition, who sat with workers in the shipyards and then reluctant supporter of the transition, who nevertheless never really felt comfortable in the post-89 Poland. The censorship, suppression of any criticism made him feel disappointed with the promises of freedom. “Poland is becoming a boring, provincial country” – he told Domoslawski, “and more so, than it ever used to be.”

To understand his importance it’s enough to recall the controversies that arose upon the publication of Kapusciński – Non-Fiction (its original title)  in early 2010, both in Poland and abroad. The main reason for the foreign commentators was how he feigned or colorized the truth, in service to the style or political gains – that he met Che Guevara, Lumumba, Idi Amin or Salvator Allende, that a few times he avoided death from a fire squad. In Poland the widow tried to stop the publication of the book, due to its unembellished descriptions of the writer’s private life (in particular his extramarital affairs). But much more dangerous was confirming Kapuscinski’s firm belief in socialist ideology while the system continued and his uneasy adaptation to the post-89 reality, where he, the star reporter of the previous system, despite his support for the opposition, had to live in a denial. an honest biography required dealing with the political manipulations of memory, that are the daily bread of the Polish social and political life – how could a hero, a master, turn out to be doubtful in the one and only path Poland took after 1989?

Kapuscinski’s biography was tightly and intimately connected with various aspect of communist order and cold war and contemporary politics in Poland is still incredibly determined by the relation to its past history. In the post-1989 Poland there were only two acceptable ways of looking at the previous 50 years, which keeps reproducing ritual wars in politics: one is regarding communist regime as illegitimate, but still something that just has happened and after which we draw a “thick line” between the past and the present. The other one condemns the system unilaterally, in strongest terms, considers it criminal and considers those, who worked within is basically traitors, that therefore should be tried (the infamous “lustration” and a wave of processes for collaboration, effected mainly by the Law and Justice party of the Kaczynski brothers). Kapuscinski, member of all kinds of socialist organisations and a flag PRL reporter, himself was accused of being an agent a few years before his death and spent the last few years of his life in constant fear. Domoslawski goes beyond this binarism and produces a refreshing, essentially left-wing commentary, in which we see rather Kapuscinski a left-wing, a lifelong anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist.

The reason his past could possibly come as revelation is because this mysterious man had to lay low and keep quiet about his involvement in PRL from the start of the ‘democratic’ times. Between the witch-hunt for the former agents, that started in the 2000s Poland by the paranoid right-wing government and the support of the Iraq war by the liberal elites, he truly must’ve felt lonely. While the Polish ex-oppositionist media – particularly Adam Michnik’s "Gazeta Wyborcza", publisher both of Kapuscinski and Domoslawski – fervently supported the Iraq war, Kapuscinski was a rare figure of the post-communist intelligentsia to publicly oppose the war.

This book, while letting all kinds of critical voices – colleagues, friends, family, his professional critics, specializing in the areas Kapuscinski stood out the most: Africa, Latino-American revolutions, Iran – still, more than anything is a conformation of the greatness of the reporter. When Kapuscinski started to gain fame abroad, the Empire and the cold war itself entered a new, dangerous stage. He dropped his communist Party card and joined the liberal opposition supporting the Solidarity movement, and, preventing his American editors, removed the potentially inflammatory fragments about the role of the CIA in the overthrowing the Mossadegh regime. He subsequently gained an international recognition for his beautifully written reports from the conflict and other disasters-ridden Third World countries during the cold war, mostly Africa, always identifying with the weaker and politically misrepresented.

Domoslawski has lots of admiration for his hero’s dedication and sacrifice. Yes, plenty of questions arise about what was the real "cost" of the free traveling around the globe equipped with hard currencies. However his contemporary critics can allege about the pay back he had to do to the Party for his career – being a member of the intelligence, namely – the poor, mostly hungry, often ill and endangered by death Kapuscinski definitely didn’t gain much in comparison to his not only Western colleagues. What did he gain in return? – speculate his friends in the book – ill and endangered by death, how did he himself measure his ‘success’ as a writer from some communist country? It must have been a tremendous political passion and humanism, that made him such a profound critic of the wars in Africa or, especially, the Cuban revolution. He was wholeheartedly supporting Castro and rebelliants, and it was his passion for socialism, not cold war anti-americanism, that gave him insight into the negative role of USA in feeding the dictatorships worldwide. His reportings from Latin America could’ve been written yesterday. Yet this mutual appreciation had also darker sides: did Kapuscinski realise that his friends in Politburo were involved eg. in bashing students in anti-Semitic witch-hunt in Poland 1968? He found himself in the net of connections, that at the same time allowed him to travel and write and brought him suspicion from the persecuted friends.

And the book, not only because the constant speculations about the level of Kapuscinski’s engagement in the regime, reads at times a bit like a John Le Carre novel. The question of identity, one’s own image, of truth, of confabulation, shifts constantly and gains new meanings, turning the whole book into one great quest in search of Kapuscinski’s personality. Who he was? Not even the closest friends or family can answer this question.

His story remains determined by his origins – born in the 1930s in Pińsk, part of the pale of settlement, a Jewish town plagued by all possible atrocities of the WW2, although his own life was not in danger, he experienced enough of misery – holocaust, invasion first of Russians, then of the Nazis, and of Russians again, that it is believable everything he’s done subsequently was inspired by this image. He was from a poor family – and for the first time for people like him the PRL createrd chances. He took it with all belief of the neophyte – as a youth and student organizations activist, and then as debuting reporter. Maybe there his later need for bigging himself up and confabulation came from, having to do with social class and complexes of being from a peripheral country? He had to become what he aspired to be. One of his friends say “Rysiek produced a great work. However, in order to do it, he had to create himself, his own image. In the mid-1980s in America I observed how he learned that a writer must create his own image to gain success. He put a great deal of work into it – it was hard for him, but he passed that exam with flying colours. The image of a fearless war reporter. He reckoned without this legend no one would listen to a writer from a faraway Poland.” That would explain also, why he kept saying his father was nearly killed with 20,000 Polish officers in Katyn in 1940. And this myth of Kapuscinski really started a life on its own, sometimes to the harm of its creator.

Domoslawski is not a mindless unanimous communism-monger, but points out the disadvantages where he must. He gives full details of his character's espionage (he had the code names “Poeta” and “Vera Cruz”), in particular the notorious case of him spying on the academic and reporter Maria Sten in Mexico). But it's striking, how similar role in the end both of them ended up playing: Domoslawski is a reporter specialising in Latin America, freely presenting his soft or not so soft left views in this otherwise liberal newspaper, similarly to his hero, he's kept in reporting from faraway, at an arm's length.

Kapuscinski is an especially neeeded character today. In Poland of the last 20 years everybody behaved, as if communism was just an anomaly in our history, with everything Polish being necessarily anti-communist: church, Home Army, opposition. But mention it to them, Poles will remain curiously precious about “their” communism, as it happened only in there. Kapuscinski was seeing beyond this localism; that’s why he was capable of seeing Cuba, Iran or Guatemala as valuable struggles in “our” socialist case, and not in the simple cold war, pro-American black and white dichotomy.

When the moment came for coming to terms with the crumbling Soviet Empire, he completely missed his chance. Imperium (1993) (some of the many photos he did there here)is a book written in denial, a book, in which its author, normally so engaged, who could’ve told us the most griping story of his own engagement, disappears. Kapuscinski reacts with the biggest act of censorship - the argument must’ve been that it would be announcing to people in the new Poland, that he was a communist, so he had to choose to present himself as a victim. Truth be told this system left no other way than being at the same time both a victim and a beneficiary of it: both were equally true. But when it comes to history, in the post-1989 Poland there was no space for grey areas, there was only black and white, either you’re a victim or a perpetrator. He had to have an answer for his potential critics: How could I resist the system, look how powerful it was! The earlier reporter was trying to write the other, nuanced version of history – the feted Kapusciński of the new Poland was unable to do so. A hero is most revered when he’s silent - that’s why this book is valuable, both in bringing back the true voice of the reporter and for making clear where he stayed silent. For that only, Domosławski’s book is a truly great achievement.