Expressway to reality principle: Inside the Barbie Dreamhouse

[director's cut of the review for ICON magazine]

For the first time I heard about Berlin Barbie DreamHouse, when the German branch of Femen activists and other feminist organizations were protesting against its opening and accusing it of sexist propaganda, and the Mattel company had it protected by the police. Frankly, one wonders what’s the point? Is the world really in such a bad state that the best way of entertaining girls is to put them through the possibly most reactionary experience of womanhood? And why in Berlin, a city afterall famous for its leftist political activism. Yet, the queues I encountered proved otherwise and a rise of tourism is also exactly what the city authorities are counting for.

The first “man-sized” Barbie fun-house opened in Europe confirms the design’s obsession with the ‘life-sized’ and the said ‘experience’. The idea, which partly originated from the Cedric Price’s “fun palace” and Situationists, idea of ‘interactivity’ and conceptual exhibitions in museums like Parisian Pompidou, posits experience always in the center of everything. And if we judged the House only by that, it definitely makes you experience. To an architecture connoisseur there’s a double pleasure/horror about it, depending on the way you look at it. The inflatable pink tent stood just next to Alexanderplatz, the flag GDR square, at the back of the new mall Alexa, so far as many thought the ugliest building in the area. Now there’s something to top this neoclassical kitsch.

With DDR blocks looming behind, it, the tent looks unbelievably tacky. Nobody will believe this is a castle, least of all the children. As the toys become ‘real’, the first association is that of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, with a gigantic shoe at the front turned into a fountain, around which little girls run and cry.

But they won’t ‘learn’ as Alice did. The color pink, an object of much mockery and attacks to stop making it the girl's colour, in BarbieHouse reaches levels of saturation surpassing the effect LSD or any other psychedelics could guarantee. A true pink-orgy. Which soon makes us nearly hallucinate, which I guess is the desired effect. The idea seems to be to “help” the girls to act out their fantasies, to which Barbie acts as an early catalyst. But is it really acting out or rather harsh conditioning to their future lives? The house is constructed as a magical sesame, a sequence of rooms unveiling little girl’s apparent desires. But is it realising them?

We start – of course – from the kitchen, but strangely the only thing you can make in this vast room is a cake. A cake small, medium or of a size of a little car. Not much nourishment, this is the “retro-feminism” kingdom, where cupcake is a king. The House is in constant whimsical indecision, whether Barbie is a princess or maybe an ordinary woman, with all hes weaknesses. A housewife, or a spaceship pilot? And tell me this isn’t ‘empowering’, huh? But who can blame her? From the salon with, in order: a piano, a horse, a 10 sq.m. bed, and a sofa, we gather she likes a bit of domesticity, and like all of us all she ever thinks of is shoes and handbags. Like all of us she looses her head during shopping (alleys of fake clothes, shoes and bags, imprinted on plastic, occupy several corridors) and dressing in sexy lace underwear in boudoirs and beauty parlours. Cosmetic fetishism is not even really the right word here. Finally, everything (as in life) must end in (cardboard) Paris, with girls hanging on a poor man’s paper Eiffel Tower. The construction is so tacky that lifting our heads we can see the plastic walls aren’t even touching the Styrofoam ceiling.

Hang on, this is for girls? The crudeness with which those adult desires are projected on girls is truly grim. As if seeing this might be too adult entertainment, the creators added some obviously childish elements, like slides, ponies or ballerinas. But it’s too late to be deceived. Soon girls also learn the reality principle: jewellery is secured to the tables, clothes are just the wall picture, dolls are behind the glass, the Barbie toilet doesn’t work and the blond women sitting next to them waiting for manicure smiling are dead. For an extra money, girls can do a catwalk or sing from playback on a rockscene. Yet, in the middle of that there’s a gigantic diamond ring – because all in all, Barbie is a traditionalist, she only wants to marry, and all those shoes were only for flirt. What is also striking is how we’re always made ready to buy: furniture is all made of arranged shelves, on which new and new versions of stylish dolls are packed, which lead straight to the shop. In the end, this is what Barbie House is, a man-size shop.

There’s nothing unnatural in transferring children’s anxieties and desires onto a doll, a human-resembling object, only why it has to be the one, which famously, if it was to become a real-size woman, it would die instantly from suffocation, and her neck and waist would break? By all means, if anyone could really live in the Barbie house, he’d instantly get a depression and lose the will to live. The fascination with Barbie on the side of the design world is then all the more objectionable. Why on the cover of the Architect's Journal issue on powerful women architects, they had to be symbolized by a Zaha-like dressed Barbie? Just mocking the stereotype or a casual, if quite astounding sexism? From what I know about life, if Zaha took after Barbie, British architecture world would’ve lost even this sole argument counter its feminist critics.

Voice of the People - lyrics of Depeche, Human League, New Order, eurohouse & the Smiths and 80s/90s Eastern Europe

[extended version on my entry in the 'Words' #352 issue of The Wire, 'Babble On!' on the 'shitty lyrics']



“People are people so why should it be/you and I should get along so awfully”. To this day Depeche Mode fans are not exactly sure what Martin Gore meant by this lyric. But as with many other Depeche songs, this terminally clumsy attempt at significance wasn’t an obstacle to the contagious popularity of “People Are People”. It's a lot like life - that's their statement on Sado-masochist practices. In Jeremy Deller’s documentary The Posters Came From the Walls, on the phenomenon of the band's international fandom, fans speak nostalgically of forming squads more solid than in the army. We hear one Russian fan stating that “We’re Depechists the same way other people were Communists, or Fascists!” That’s motivation.

The power of Depeche Mode’s lyrics lay in a perfect combination of vagueness and a resemblance to agitprop, ending up somewhere between the political sloganeering of the falling Communist bloc and the promises of the Big Capital offered by the West. It was a formula that hordes of young people from both sides of the Wall, raised among Cold War paranoia, understood almost subliminally. Over this, they formed a perfect union, which remained stronger than the politically induced unifications after the Wall has fallen. Depeche could appeal to both Soviet Bloc and America, because aesthetically and lyrically they consciously flirted with both sides of the Curtain: heavy industry, Red Army, red stars, looming nuclear catastrophy and Potemkineqsue battleships for one side and lust, orgies, stock market, Eastern Tigers, money, high contracts and cocaine binges for the other.

Usually heavy-handed, staggeringly literal, simplistic—even didactic, given how often the crime must immediately meet its punishment, the lyrics of Martin Gore always hit upon something, touch us somewhere, always move. However you look at the following lyric, it can’t possibly pass as good: “There's no turning back/The turning point of a career/In Korea/Being insincere” (from  “Everything Counts”). Around Music for the Masses they achieved their trademark anthemic, grandiose style, perfected on songs like “Stripped” or “Never Let Me Down Again”, and then the tortured, synthetic, smoky blues of “Personal Jesus” and “I Feel You”. Enjoy The Silence is their manifesto, the famous lyrics are DM in a nutshell: “words are very unnecessary”, “feelings are intense, words are trivial.” They based the rest of their career solely on the intensification of this, while endlessly vaguely dwelling on the dialectics of sex, sin, atonement and the final release. That’s also the reason they’re a tough writerly topic—how long we can focus on the endless permutations of violence, sex and punishment? Writing on Depeche, one is challenged to participate in this collective emotion.

Yet, in the strange and fantastic world of pop music, words such as these can convey more than avant-garde poets could dream of. We often say lyrics are crap not seeing the special place they have in the history of the valuation of the spoken word. That is, the pop lyric is a perfect example of 20th century folk art. If after pop art, everything could be important for 15 minutes, the pop lyric makes sense only during the provisional three minutes of a single. The words hold meaning within the context of this magical moment, and nowhere else. It’s a metaphorical space of transformation, where temporary unions and associations can form. A pop utopia.

Sometimes a lyric is saved by the personality and charisma of the singer. Phil Oakey from The Human League achieved a new benchmark of crap lyrics with his group’s first single, “Being Boiled”, the only protest song in the world concerned with silkworms. Oakey not only conflated Buddhism with Hinduism (in India, renowned for silk production), but came up with the line “Just because the kid's an orphan /Is no excuse for thoughtless slaying”. Yet there is something moving about his delivery, the way he tries to keep his shaky voice cold. Oakey notoriously overdid cold war topics, making them camp – “Dehumanization/is such a big word/it’s been around since Richard the Third” (“Blind Youth”) or war, which becomes ludicrous in “The Lebanon”: “And where there used to be some shops/is where the snipers sometimes hide”. Or the cheesy aside in “Love Action”:  “This is Phil talking, I wanna tell you”. The Post-punk era's combination of the amateurish and overambitious was much reflected in League's lyrics - after all, written by an ex-hospital janitor and sung with two high school girls. Nothing was too good for ordinary people, to use the modernist maxim.

“When I was a very small boy/Very small boys talked to me”, sings Bernard Sumner of New Order, on 'True Faith', at his most honest. Yet it has strong competition in “One of these days when you sit by yourself/you find that you can’t shag without someone else” (“Subculture”) or maybe “I have always thought about/staying in and going out/tonight I should’ve stayed at home/playing with my pleasure zone” (“The Perfect Kiss”). Yet those mocking Bernard Sumner's efforts are usually those claiming how great Ian Curtis' verses were in turn. Really? A closer look at them will reveal, that Curtis’ premature, tragic death makes for at least half of their appeal. Without that, aren’t they simply nihilistic musings of a naïve boy who got very concerned after reading some history books? Sumner’s lyrics were a perfect match with New Order’s music: unreal, otherworldly, bathing in an endless Summer of Love. This land of innocence and constant highs where even sorrow is sweet was a utopian alternative to the reality of the 1980s. They're never really about anything, yet, despite sounding as if they were made up on the spot, the lyrics often unexpectedly hit at something. New Order had perfect simplicity, giving a mot juste of modernity to pop, like Kraftwerk – yet, where lies the difference with simple crap? New Order took their fans from trauma to euphoria, often drug induced, like in Touched by the Hand of God, where the lyrical I, after the crush of love is metaphysically resuscitated when touched by the title's god's hand. Like with Depeche, the ordinariness and generalizations of Sumner’s words were completed by their fans.

This euphoric trend continued after the break of 1989 and in the early 1990s in dance music, through House, especially in Eurodance. Even degraded words, devoid of meaning, within music can suddenly start a new life. Let's take international anthems, such as Coldcut's “People Hold On”, Rozalla's “Everybody's Free (To Feel Good)”, even “Happy Nation” by Ace of Base – all called to unity, to get together and to brotherhood above all divisions. Sterling Void's “It's Alright” - later reworked as a smash hit by one of the most successful pop duo in history, Pet Shop Boys  - might've been a blueprint, in which the lyric tried to combine the concern with the world and calling for a revolution, yet, for now, suspended for the sake of the happiness found within the dancing crowd, of the illusionary community of co-clubbers: People under pressure on the brink of starvationI hope it's gonna be alright/(Alright, alright, alright)/Cause the music plays forever and so on.

A temporary collectivity can be founded over lyrics even if those listening have little or no idea what is being sung. From my own experience, with English as my second language, I regularly mistook words in The Smiths’ songs, despite recognising Morrissey’s lyrical talents. Despite getting Smiths lyrics wrong, they were meaningful to me. For some reason, when I misunderstood them, and it was happening more often than I'd wish, they  usually ended up being more pessimistic than they really were: in "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before", I thought that “lied” in “who said I'd lied because I never, I never!” was “liked you”, as if it was obvious that all relationships must finish in rejection. Did it matter? Not much – what unified the fans of The Smiths all over the world was a feeling – something which seemed subjective, yet magically transsubstantiated into an intersubjective sharing between fans. Morrissey's lyrics are often a combination of the very intricate and obscure culture references and places in Manchester with the general themes of love, loneliness and rejection and to this second part they probably owe their mass appeal. The opposite was the case with Depeche Mode – their appeal was based on the big themes put in simple words. As we understood every second or fifth word, our version of the lyric was  already pretty crappy, frankly, but I guess we still got the most important part.

Sometimes pop music surprises us with lyrics which despite their superficial crappiness are sublime, or are sublime crap, like Manic Street Preachers. Written on any page, including the copybook of a bored 6^th form student, they are not passing the test of 'poetry' or tastefulness (if we were to be botehred by this anyway). MSP lyricist and ideologue, Richey Edwards, as if predicting his premature end, was only interested in Big Ideas: the Holocaust, communism, mental diseases, masochism, anorexia, life & death. Yet, who, in the ironic 90s was still interested? Pulp may have sung that “irony is over”, yet it was far from it. There was a guy who wanted to prove some stuff must be for real, even if that meant leveling crap written by a 14 year old and Guy Debord to one and the same level. As Adam Ant said, 'ridicule is nothing to be scared of'.

Counter Homophobia in Russia - a Look into Soviet Past

Evgeny Fiks, a photograph from the Moscow album

[I published this article as "Cruising Past" Photographer Evgenyi Fiks ressurects the Forgotten Gay History in Calvert Journal. Posting it here in slightly longer version for more political and other (like Fiks's other work) details, as the boycott of the Sochi Olympics spreads wide as a result of the horrific kidnapping and persecuting LGBT people in Russia today. What are the reasons of the recent progression of ever draconian laws from Putin? Why is he scapegoating gays? Is Russian society "inherently" necessarily homophobic? Or Maybe it wasn't always so? Also, this piece was published by New Statesman today]

Homophobia was never in a “better” state in Russia than it is today. The horrific murder of 23-year old Vladislav Tornovoy on 10^th of May in Volgograd shook the public, but not enough, it seems. He was raped with a bottle, castrated and stoned. One of the murderers admitted the reason for the killing was the “provocative” dress of the victim and his sexual orientation, which “hurts patriotic feelings”. The official authorities had to admit it was a hate crime. This way, after many years of abuse, Russian authorities had to admit there’s a homophobia problem in Russia.

At the same time, a solidarity demonstration planned for May 25^th was banned by the St Petersburg authorities. The protesters were still trying to carry out a “one person protest”, which became famous during the winter 2011-2012 protests, after the authorities banned several demonstrations –one person protesting doesn’t require a permission. Still, the people who tried this were arrested one after another. This didn’t happen to the counter demo, whose religious slogans apparently didn’t offend anyone.

This is only one of many sad events in the story of homophobia in post-Soviet Russia. To this you may add the widespread laws “against propaganda of homosexuality”, which started their life in Novosibirsk, but were most notorious in Petersburg, where, among other things, there were attempts to ban Madonna from performing on that basis. The law has just been passed and accepted in the Duma for the whole Russia. As one Russian MP said: “Russia is not Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Yet Russia wasn’t always a homophobic hell. The Bolsheviks legalized homosexuality soon after seizing power in 1917, together with establishing equal rights for women. The work of the New York-based Russian artist and photographer Evgeny Fiks documents spaces of social dissent and revolution. His inquiry into the soviet story of homosexuality in his latest series of photographs Moscow is a part of the characteristic research of this self-proclaimed “post-Soviet artist”, highly identifying with the post-soviet condition, by which he understands a specific duty to react against the collective amnesia surrounding this period, focusing especially on the demise of the Left after the fall of communism, both in Russia and America. 

In here, he inspects spaces where homosexuals could express their sexuality,claiming the public space back for those past histories in order to reclaim homosexuality both from the horrific contemporary homophobia and stigmatization of other kinds of sexuality, just as he distances himself from Soviet, specifically Stalinist times. At first sight, titled just plainly Moscow, it could be just an ordinary photo album of the public places in the capital of Russia. We can see parks, squares, boulevards, riverside embankments and public toilets. We admire the splendid classicist architecture of the capital, its greenery, constructivist-classicist constructions and the care of the Soviet authorities to make even the toilets, like those on Nikitsky Gates, beautiful. What emanates from them is peacefulness and silence. But of course, learning that each and one of the locations of the photos were actually the areas of Soviet cruising instantly changes the way we see them. What we may suddenly perceive in them is in the eye of the viewer. Yes, there’s especially a lot of public toilets, and that may make us also see the public facilities in a different way, as sites that enable spontaneous relations between adults, which normally had to go on in hiding, away from the public eye – but paradoxically, are only possible in public. In addition to this, the author ordered the photos according to the time when they were popular, from 1920s to 1980s, which means here we’re looking at the complete history of Soviet cruising, at least in one capital city. But what about the post-transitional years? This is exactly the question Fiks makes us ask.

Moscow is a specific “work of mourning”, where pleshkas – Russian name for spaces of cruising become strange “lieux de memoire”, to use Pierre Nora’s idea, by which he meant repositories of collective memory, which also were inspirational in Holocaust studies to describe places of extermination. What’s  also striking is that the places are completely empty, abandoned, what increases the feeling of disappearance and silencing of the victims. And those spaces were dear to many: they acquired an inner slang, in which statues of Lenin and Marx, present in each Russian city, were called affectionately “Auntie Lena” and “Director of Pleshka” both for its familiarity and in an act of queering them. To use Situationist language, gay men were detourning these areas and symbols of revolution, showing there’s no real discrepancy between ideology and what they’re doing.

The current spread of far right feelings in Russia cannot be overlooked as just another effect of the years of communism, but rather the failed transition to capitalism. If homosexuality was banned in Soviet Russia, its anti-communist liberals would have a perfect argument – but it wasn’t. The Bolsheviks legalized homosexuality, because according to the original idea of communism, sexuality wasn’t there to be policed by the state. It was there to revolutionise the citizen, with love understood as a public good. Homosexuality was banned again in the mid-1930s under Stalin – a letter to whom is included in Fiks’ book, protesting the law, written by out homosexual and British communist Harry Whyte. Yet unlike the restrictions Stalin placed on women’s rights, the ban was not repealed under Khrushchev. Homosexuality wasn’t legalized again until 1993. Though unlike Stalin’s laws, homosexuality is not being banned again, in practice this puts it back in the ghetto, encouraging homophobia and hate crime.

There have been several artistic ways protests so far against these limitations on personal freedoms. Pyotr Pavlensky, a 29-year old performer and activist from Petersburg, did a public intervention under the Legislative Assembly, where he lay naked literally folded in barbed wire, so that the policemen who tried to remove him, couldn’t touch him, despite the wire hurting the artist with each move. Recently the popular Russian magazine “Afisha” published an issue with the rainbow LGBT flag on the cover and even for holding it during a demo somebody was arrested.

Homosexuality as a banned, shameful practice that goes on necessarily in hiding has a long history. And in fact some commentators argue that the current wars aren’t strictly between homosexuals and heterosexuals, but a conflict between two different versions of homosexuality – “Soviet” and “Western.” And in Russia it’s very deeply attached to the Soviet practice on a huge scale in Gulags. There, as the prisoners were on purpose deprived of possibility of expressing their sexuality (men and women were imprisoned separately), the homosexual act was associated with the criminal hierarchy and deeper humiliation of prisoners, where for instance those who were “passive” in the act were considered the lowest. This taboo attached to the homosexual identity prevents it from being seen as something “natural” in Russia. Yet suggesting natural means Western would be in here inaccuracy, given Russia de facto is a part of the West for several hundreds of years.

Yet, the persecution of gays must be a serious PR blow to Russian liberals who’d like to see Russia as a potential market, free of the typical “eastern barbarism” our part of the world is often still associated with. Yet the supposedly moralistic homophobia somehow hypocritically leaves intact the enormous sex industry post Soviet Europe has, only proving that this has nothing to do with morality, but only hate and prejudice. Soon this will bring even more horrible consequences and spread even more violence – what really has to happen so that the law makers loosened their bigotry? “Political figures have provoked anti-gay sentiment by portraying the gay community as a bunch of freaks,” one of the May 25 protesters have said. “They are accomplices in the killing.”

Putin’s anti-homosexual laws are aimed at bringing him back the crashing popularity, damaged after the protests of the Winter 2011-12, when even his followers are more prone to expect a clear, coherent politics from their president.  Channeling homophobia is here only one, albeit especially nasty way of getting back a now especially illusionary “unity” in Russia and divert teh attention from the real political turmoils in Russia today.

Fiks's work is also a subtle but potent protest. As someone who migrated quite soon after the dissolution of USSR (he left for America in 1994), Fiks clearly saw how the reality which succeeded it was actually worse. His artistic strategy is to make “interventions in history”, treating it indeed in a dialectical way: not as frozen and dead, but as a space of the present, lived experience. Especially the latest activity: the idea for a competition for the Monument to Cold War Victory in the US (sic!) challenges various thinking clichés of history. It’s exercise in “political imagination” within the present, a protest against “the end of history”. At once a reminder of the cold war obsession with monuments and an attempt to stop the current obliteration of the recent history, as the communist monuments are removed everywhere. As ironically as the idea may sound, it’s true the Cold War’s legacy persists, whenever we like it or not, but we are yet to find an appropriate aesthetical form for it. As in Moscow, this project starts from an ironic confirmation of a certain stereotype, in this case certain political melancholia and nostalgia, to in the process change it into a living scene of living history.

Sounding the Body Electric: Experiments in Art and Music in Eastern Europe 1957-1984

Bogusław Schaeffer, one of his "poliversional" music scores

On the occassion of the opening in London, a review of Sounding the Body Electric show (adapted from a text published in The Wire, August 2012), which first debuted in the Lodz, Poland's Museum of Art in June-August 2012 and currently, though adapted for the new space, is available in Calvert 22 gallery in London, UK.


a newsreel about the Polish Radio Experimental Studio

There were many decisive dates in the history of the Cold War, but little mattered so much as 1956. It meant very different things in different countries: choice of Khrushev for the Communist Party secretary in USSR brought the alleged ‘thaw’ in the Bloc. For Poland workers’ protests brought to power a relatively popular reformed Communist regime; but for Hungary, a revolution that was quickly and brutally suppressed. It meant relief on the culture in Poland, but in Hungary, it lead to a revolution against the Soviet government, that, after brutal suppression by Soviet tanks, brought more control, only less thinly veiled. For everyone it meant changes, and nowhere it was welcomed more enthusiastically than in Poland. Politburo wanted to "repair" the damages it has done, and did it via science, experiment and lifting of the previous censorship. Basically, it tried to help its damaged image with culture. It was supporting various cultural initiatives impossible before, including promotion of abstract and experimental art, suddenly liberated of accusations of formalism and opening to the Western influence.

In music life the most important aspect was inauguration of the festival Warsaw Autumn, but first of all, founding of Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES) in 1957, answering the challenge of Schaeffer and Stockhausen with their respective studios for music experiment, Studio d'Essai in Paris (pioneering in effecting the musique concrete, which term was coined by Schaeffer) and WDR Cologne. The chamber, lushly arranged and superbly researched show Sounding the Body Electric 1956-1984, is located in Lodz – Polish Manchester, in the Art Museum co-founded by Constructivist pioneers Katarzyna Kobro and Wladyslaw Strzemiński. It was supervised by a renowned expert on Eastern European art David Crowley and Daniel Muzyczuk, and sees PRES as a chance to put together and explore the most intriguing experiments in the crossover between music and visual arts in the Bloc.

The interior of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio; in the background visible the vertical panels by Oskar Hansen

It was an era of developing cybernetic, electronic and information technologies. At the same time, the question of how the Bloc was actually forward or competitive to the West in terms of technology remains open. You could say that embracing technology was one of the ways of compensating the promises unfulfilled by the politics. On the other hand, artists could reconnect with traditions of artistic modernism, the first avant-garde, buried by Stalinism: hence the Neo-constructivism, comeback to the kinetic art, to light and sound experiments, cybernetics, computing, exploring of the electro-acoustic possibilities. The beautiful, moving, colorful, mechanized, industry-related art, just like the avant-garde before, was to create a new aesthetic, and then, new social relations. What is great is how the show, by meticulous choice of artworks and reconstructions allows us to experience, sometimes for the first time after 1989, the originality of post-war Soviet art.

Showered by state money, the Studio was designed by the most progressive artists of that era: architects, directors, musicians, engineers. The room was “mechanised”, with vertical panels, one side sound-absorbing, other sound-reflecting, painted in red and yellow, that changed colours according to the type of activity. It was designed by an architect Oskar Hansen, now considered a major influence of that era with his completely original idea of modernity, based on his concept of the Open Form (drawing from architecture, but surpassing it in all sorts of directions, and encompassing the whole world of social relations). Similar experiments in constructivist approach presented conceptual artist Alex Mlynárčik, with his collages of new Metropolis or composer Dubravko Detoni, with conceptual, kinetic artist Aleksander Srnec, who together authored a 1972 Proposal for a Lenin Monument in Belgrade, a monumental, glimmering, sound-emitting diagonal, evoking Tatlin’s Internationale monument in form and message. It’s an era of splendid collectives: Béla Balázs Studio for experimental film in Budapest, VNIITE All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Technical Aesthetics in Moscow or Prometheus Institute in Kazan, founded by Bulat Galeyev, developing Lev Theremin’s inventions with synaestesiac prophecies of Alexander Skriabin into electronic sound the name of the space race success – all this financed by Moscow money!

This is the era of utopianism and burgeoning conceptualism. So Boguslaw Schaeffer draws graphic scores to realise his idea of “Poliversional music” in PR I VIII series of potential “supra parameter” music, where all the elements, pitch, duration were variable. Yes, John Cage’s (and Fluxus/concrete poetry) influence on the whole generation of musicians (he visited Warsaw in 1960s) is obvious, but Eastern artists looked everywhere: Mondrian and Malevich, happening, performance, also feminism (sexually fuelled films of the phenomenal, feminist artist Katalin Ladik!).

This is, for comparison, some feature film she played in, as she appeared in many TV and else rpoductions - not entirely sure what's going on in this one, but it's definitely sexy!

At the core were biomechanics and organicism, and a reflection over how a living body interacts with the environment. The Studio served recording of film and TV music during the day, and the tape leftovers were used by engineers, such as Boguslaw Mazurek or Eugeniusz Rudnik, who cut, pasted, reversed and manipulated it, pioneering the aesthetics of trash and plounderphonics. Musical and visual effects are stunning: published scores – because only a published score was considered music by the authorities - look like utopian architectural sketches for a futurist city. Synesthesia inspired architectural hybrids, as much as of new morphing interpretations of abstractionism.

Teresa Kelm, Zygmunt Krauze and Henryk Morel’s Spatial-Musical Composition

The most stunning reconstruction is that of Teresa Kelm, Zygmunt Krauze and Henryk Morel’s Spatial-Musical Composition, six acoustic booths emitting different sounds and shining different colours of light – by walking, we shape the installation. Those knowing the Polish film new wave, will see how much Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk (or early Polański) emerge straight from surrealism – the show opens with The House (1958) by those two, an oneiric animated film full of visual and acoustic objets trouves, generated by Wlodzimierz Kotoński. This elegant avant-gardism followed by years of flourishing experiment is closed unexpectedly, in less than a decade, when 1968 brings anti-Semitic crisis in Poland and the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. Szablocs Esztényi and Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Bare Transmitters from 1969 with performers playing various, also forbidden stations is no longer a Cageian “chance” operation – rather a grim scene of oppression, a power-play, work of hope lost in art as the liberatory power.

Three times food: Czech surrealism in cinema

Fetishization/obsession with food is one of the leitmotifs of the Czech New Wave kind of surrealism. It has definitely a lot to do with the legacy of Czech surrealism, which had some of the most interesting art and artists in that spirit. Food gains new meaning within socialist economy and culture: it's precious, you're not supposed to waste it or play with it. Waste is a crime against the working people and ultimately against the state. 

Yet there's also no excuse for wasting food within capitalism, at least according to the early, protestant ethics, which can be also traced paradoxically in American Pop Art, with its gigantisation of food, a specific "food porn", where within the mass market, consumerist capitalism becomes monstrous and breeds all sorts of pathological relationships we have with it - especially women, whose activities have been endlessly associated with preparing/making/eating it. Maybe in this, in denying the food the usual meaning it has (including sacredness!) there lies a power to subvert both systems, or any system? The anarchic food waste and obsessing about it finds also amazing effects in Czech feminist art. In communism, famous for food shortages, gathering food was often extremely difficult, and it was also on women, where lay the responsibility for keeping the family alive. In capitalism, we have no shortage of food anxiety and insecurity.

Resulting from the physical, oral, "wet" contact with food is its sexualisation, pornography of food, where both the sex and the neurotic activity of capital are present. Food as fetish, and woman as an object to consume, an 'edible woman' is a renowned motif in feminist art, including the difficult relationship between food and woman's body. Which, according to the punishing, coercive beauty ideals, simply can't have a proper relation with the food, she can never do right.

This and many other uses is at play with the outstanding "food art" or food anarchism we encounter in Czech experimental cinema.

I will highlight only a very few here. In Jan Svankmajer food becomes basically "existential" and stands for the general hopelessness of human existence; the hopeless mundanity, the routine and repeatability of everyday activities, such as eating three meals a day; which is deeply felt also in the 'Meat love', a motif of which he repeats in his late film Lunacy, or The Loonies, which was partly inspired by Marquis de Sade, a huge influence present also, in a sardonic way, in his Conspirers of Ecstasy. The world in Svankmajer is always impossibly twisted and distorted to the degree we merely recognise any familiar elements, stripped down to the libidinal rudiments of id, all consuming, violents and unpredictable:









Quite different is food for Vera Chytilova. Daisies features a lot in my future book, Poor but Sexy, so here only briefly: Daisies is and isn't about working/not working, laziness and boredom; it also hints at the all encompassing futility of existence, but with much stronger feminist and anarchic/(anti?) socialist accents. It questions what the citizens do and not do under socialism, it also questions the seeming liberalisation in Czechoslovakia and possibilities for womens' lib. It's a praise of laziness and boredom as reclaiming of time from under the political regime, and at the same time it questions this as means of feminist or any other liberation. And it's dedicated to those, "who cried over the potato salad". Women laughing, women eating, women destroying:





The two Marias do a lot of feminist transgression: they not only waste food, burn meat etc, they also cut their dresses, ‘deconstruct’ them, the necessities for women’s fashion. They walk on food, crush it with their high heels (an analogue scene is repeated by Ulrike Ottinger in her Portrait of a Drunkard, with the character walking on broken glass). They want desperately to break free, but it’s always illusionary what they do, it lasts two seconds and then the jouissance goes away, much like under capitalism.

After the disaster they promise to themselves: “We will be hard working and everything will be clean, and then we’ll be happy”.

The screenplay for Daisies was developed together with Pavel Juracek and Ester Krumbachova, two amazing artists in their own right. Especially Krumbachova, a strikingly original costume designer, writer and director, interests us here, as a somehow tragic, unfulfilled figure, who made several astonishing films with Chytilova, like Fruits of Paradise, and co-wrote The Party And The Guests by Jan Nemec, Karek Kachyna's The Ear and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders by Jaromir Jires, but then, as a self-relying director didnt have similar success. Watching her only film, Murder of Mister Devil (1970) we already see, what in Daisies belongs to Chytilova, and what to Krumbachova and that only by working together these women could bring the best in their art.



In Murder, which I only watched in Czech, the visual means overshadow the actual content. We see a perfect bourgeois woman in a perfect flat preparing a real feast for her rather unimpressive functionary partner/husband. The feast is completely unproportionate to the small scale of the evening, yet the dishes just keep coming and coming, more and more breath-taking, and the whole film reminds me rather of Marco Ferreri's La Grande Bouffe or any transgressive anti-capitalist 70s fantasy. Yet given the title, and the superb poster, in which the screaming man is to be drowned and eaten in a ice-cream sundae by a smiling Medusa-woman (by Eva Galová-Vodrázková, in the best traditions of Czech and Polish school of poster, with excessive irony and surreal/dada spirit, from where Linder Sterling must've learned some of her technique too), it was a strongly feminist statement playing with anti-feminist semtiments, of a woman who's using her only 'weapons' - food, as a way to make everything in the world implode.

Going on the Wild Side - Jean Rollin

(on thye basis of a review for The Wire, April 2012)

Various Artists

The B-music of Jean Rollin

Finders Keepers CD LP

Philippe D'Aram

Facination

Finders Keepers CD LP

Pierre Raph

Requiem for a Vampire

Finders Keepers CD LP

The 1970s were a splendid era for a certain kind of auteur cinema, not exactly in the patchy category of art house, though definitely being an art of some sort: the exploitation movie. From that the gerat moments of giallo, art horror and thriller emerged. Jean Rollin, author of an absolute cult artsy soft porn horrors mostly featuring beautiful female vampires and a lot of unashamedly bright red blood, just as much as feminine breasts and kinky gothic S&M outfits, was one of the titans of that genre. Similarly to Dario Argento (and gialli as such), Walerian Borowczyk or even John Carpenter, Rollin fearlessly realized his own private vision of the sublime, which in his case meant some tremendous rewriting of the vampire’s classic metaphysical/physical drama, caught between life and death. Also, all those directors had a taste for some best music of that era, now being rediscovered: prog rock or heavy synths aren’t anymore a sign of cheese, but rather a full-on gripping aesthetics. And however ridiculous the plot/plotlessness was in Rollin’s films, the clothes, the colors, finally, the music, were always stupendous and unforgettable. Let’s take Pierre Raph’s Requiem for a Vampire, one of three just re-released by always treasure-seeking Finder Keepers’ Andy Votel, for the first time in full.

Like Argento, who had the best curious musicians of his era by his side and was even a part of the band Goblin which provided the trademark synthetic terror to his films, Rollin had great musicians of his era by his side. he knew everybody in the Parisian underground and took prog bands like Acanthus, otherwise hidden in complete mystery (they provided the soundtrack to Le Frisson de Vampires and feature heavily on the compilatory B-Music) or musician Raph, who replaced them on Requiem. If Antonioni knew their music, he would never have taken Pink Floyd to his Zabriskie Point. The ease of Raph’s improvisations combined with the flamboyant panache, ease and sexiness of the proggy, airy sounds, have something sincere and straight-forward about them. Audibly influenced by Neu!, they also are in the same veneer as Ennio Morricone’s giallo and spaghetti western soundtrack classics. Similarly on Fascination, Philippe D’Aram’s daring synth choral masterpiece of a soundtrack, as synths became so popular as a horror movie music. Accompanied with droning guitars yield a spectacular, wide and dreamy sound, provocatively interluded with sounds of menace and bloody dialogues from the film, expressing usually final dread or going over to the wild side, which sums up the drama of a newly-bitten vampire.

Music from both soundtracks and a few more Rollin films is collected on the compilation The B-Music Of Jean Rollin. The sadomasochistic horror, the toll of passion beyond comprehension, the consummate fear and sexual liberation and the final inevitable pitiful death – all is expressed in special effects and synths, that may be typical or generic for the era, but refreshing today. B-Music proves that Rollin’s films had some of the finest free rock of the 1970s. It’s not about conscious kitsch, but a grainy, blood and flesh beauty, with meaty riffs, dreaminess and sexual mystique – a letter from a lost era that eclipses any notion of irony.

Telly as a prefiguration of death: on Susan Hiller

Susan Hiller

Channels

Matt’s Gallery, London

(on the basis of a review written for The Wire)

Apparently all of us project sometimes our own death, and the best art often makes us realise its inevitability as well as grasping its meaning, and maybe more importantly, the meaning of what precedes it. Contemporary culture is yet playing perfectly on something that Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle described as Sex/Death conundrum: that is, what happens when capitalist visuality involving a multiplication of spectacular effects, at the same time serves our morbid exposure. Contemporary culture is morbid, surrounds us with macabre images of death everywhere, yet the last thing it does is prepare us for dying as such, suffocating in a cult of fitness and youth. The impressive new work of Susan Hiller, occupying a good part of the gallery room, is precisely addressing this paradox. Hiller is an increasingly canonised contemporary artist, with the recent retrospective in Tate Britain as only one of major events. Channels are a much more chamber event, which in turn makes one focus on one work only. Her works often require (and make at the same time possible) a total immersion within the mulitisensory experience. It's no different this time.

Basing Channels on numerous accounts of so called near-death experiences, she constructs a wall-sculpture of TV sets, blinking to us in uncoordinated series of colours, static and transmission signals, interrupted by the voice recordings sharing the clinical death experiences, their timbre indicated by the pulsating green line, like on a heart rate monitor. To increase the feeling of chaos the voices recorded are in different languages (apart from English, I detected Spanish, French and Chinese), augmenting the blurriness of the undelivered message, until we feel like we want to fall asleep, much like at an airport, surrounded by communiques in unknown languages.

Susan Hiller, Witness, 2000

 Screens do evoke better than anything our subconscious, or better yet - for the post-war man, they simply create it. Staring into the screens all day, maybe this is what we also see when closing our eyes, when dreaming, maybe also when dying (today computers or iPads would be more apt than TVs, perhaps). But it’s this seemingly old fashioned medium that in its function is the closest to hypnosis. And this way, like a patient etherized upon a table, despite the moving aspects of the stories told: concerning car crashes, suicidal attempts, cardiac attacks and other such stories, what we grasp from the installation is the overwhelming, calming noise of the machines. White noise fills the gaps between the otherworldly stories, pulsating, even scary. And despite the beauty of the blinking screens, forming a splendid De Stijl-esque pattern, it makes us close our eyes. Because it seems the real piece can be seen only after shutting your eyes and just listening to it, even asleep.

This way, Hiller gets to the core of the experience of her characters, not because but in spite of them. Deceitfully designed in a manner instantly recognizable for any 20^th century art history aficionado, in the style of the “new media” movement of which Hiller, born in 1940 in New York, was a part, it almost nostalgically recalls the works of Fluxus, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Nam June Paik or Yoko Ono. Yet if their art served partly as a critique of the media manipulation and use of information, Hiller uses it in a much more intuitive way, as she demonstrated in her Dream Mapping, the light visual installation Belzhazzar’s Feast, to name only a few and in her lifelong interest in Freud. Commonality of watching TV can serve as some sort of prefiguration of death even; another thing that we definitely have in common. It is not like this work doesn’t have it’s limitations: we're still obviously not even close to feeling what it is like to be nearly dead and the multi-language audio resembles too much a special breed of twee "globalist" artworks telling us "how we are different and yet the same". We aren't and whereas I agree that life is a chaos, it's maybe a different kind of chaos, than can be viewed on telly. Still, Channels remains a bold work, a modern, Ballardian urban lullaby.