More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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18 August
The cinematic reference is : White Heat – or White Star ?
At the end of it all, whatever the merits of Kettle’s Yard’s (@kettlesyard) Gustav Metzger retrospective Lift Off ! in Cambridge (which runs until 31 August 2014), is one just left with ideas of responsibility and redundancy, and with exhibits that could be reliably reproduced by anyone following the instructions / principles involved ?
One wanted it to amount to more than The Science Museum in a gallery, but the overlap is really less than when, in his quest for understanding, Peter Diggs goes to look at Klein bottles in Amaryllis Night and Day (a novel by Russell Hoban*), and ends up meeting both the man who made them, and, much more, what they signify to him and his situation. Or, in another Hoban novel* (Angelica Lost and Found), an imaginary creature in the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto learns how, by travelling to a space of contradictory appearance, to become real and occupy human form – only to be haunted by art, and visit others with it, that unnervingly revisits that space.
Hoban (who died at 86 in December 2011) was full of life, and with an irrepressible interest in science and technology (as this writer touched upon in Russell Hoban at 80, a festschrift [http://hoban2005.co.uk/] from February 2005), so he could just as easily conceive of Jocasta as the organic computer Pythia, and invent interstellar voyaging by means of flickerdrive, which is based on the idea of what happens in all the spaces caused by the refresh-rate of the retinal image. This feels like a real meeting, a fusion of art and science.
In comparison, Metzger – not always easy to understand when he speaks nowadays – may have been talking about meeting The Who, how they wanted to do a benefit gig for his colleagues and him (but their management refused), and ending up doing a liquid-crystal light-show for a gig of theirs at The Roundhouse. However, it was in some obscure context, never curatorially explained, of having to be at The Central Criminal Court (The Old Bailey), and there was never any suggestion here of cross-fertilization between art and science – he did his things, they did theirs (almost a transaction**)
A note on so-called auto-creative art :
Put a primed canvas on an easel, line up a prepared palette and a selection of graphite, pencils, rags, brushes, solvents, water-jars, lock the room, and wait to see what happens…
Or set a process off (it could be a computer, generating fractal- diagrams, or liquid crystals that are being heated on a slide in front of a projector), and see what happens.
Both outcomes are predictable within certain limits, i.e. that the canvas remains as it is, or another piece that looks like a fractal-diagram is generated and the heated crystals distort into patterns that are projected, but there is no auto-creation. If there were, the canvas would be painted on, and one would not know what to expect of the program or the set-up with the crystals :
The exact patterns generated are not known beforehand, but they have not caused the process that gave rise to them (even if they did, via a feedback loop, that loop’s effect would have been envisaged and pre-ordained).
The show Lift Off ! is stochastic processes and applied physics, and, although some of the exposures of fibres moved around on photographic paper may be striking, it is essentially an aleatory method that can be repeated over and over, and one could fill the room with the things, but they largely resist having an artistic content. Dancing Tubes could just as well belong in a Health and Safety Commission training video about the dangers of releasing compressed air without controls, and any lab could set it up.
The scientific method says that an experiment should be capable of being reproduced, and these works can be by just having the notion of what is to be achieved and setting it up, which may even produce refinements or improvements. The idea seems temptingly close to the approach of Damien Hirst (except that he was the one who did first cut – or have cut – in half a formaldehyde-treated cow (and a calf)) and exhibit it (them) as art), and yet so far away, with his being across the line in art.
Not indisputably so, though, with works displaying concepts such as What Goes Up Must Come Down (1994)*** and Loving in a World of Desire (1996) (using the same essential technology), or, perhaps, the less-skilled spin paintings) but in terms of a body of work that is recognized as artistic. The Plexiglass, table-tennis ball and hair-dryer of the former differ from similar museum displays of the principle of keeping a ball in the air by explicitly being – or appearing to be – ready-made items, such that the hair-dryer coincidentally has the right amount of upthrust to keep the ball in motion (though its current may, of course, have been safely adapated to achieve this effect, by trial and error with resistors or the like, behind the scenes).
Hirst’s huge ashtray Crematorium (1996) (not his only repository for cigarette-butts), Roni Horn’s huge glass pieces (opaque, red, black, and one at least resembling an ashtray ?), take the artist into the hands of a manufacturer who will produce what the artist seeks, but the vision makes it more than any old order from a glassworks. There is even more artistry in generating a fractal diagram and giving it a colour-scheme than in most of these exhibits of Metzger’s :
Though some would sniff at fractals as art, but not hesitate to embrace Duchamp’s Fountain [http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573] (Tate Modern (@Tate) exhibits a replica in 1964) – there, the mistake is as to the real work of the piece, which was Duchamp’s gall and iconoclasm in submitting it to an exhibition at The Society of Independent Artists, not the urinal itself. A Museum of Curiosities seems a better place for what Metzger gives us, alongside automata, counting-engines, and elaborate orreries.
He created, after all, a significant art show in and using materials found around a brand new laboratory in Swansea : if that influenced anybody, then we need to know how and why, and that should be at the heart of curation. Instead, the rather unhelpful assumption is of an unannounced starting-point, and hence of shutting off discussion, to the effect that any distinction between art and science is arbitrary : yet the fact is that anything that can be depicted as a continuum has no point where something ceases and another begins does not render it meaningless to ask the question*** and to set limits (e.g. abortion and the medico-legal test of how many weeks old a foetus is).
However, the one-day conference Art, science and social responsibility in 1960s’ Britain largely took tangents from Metzger, and shied off, much of the time, from stating clearly why we should care about him now, whatever his approach was 50+ years ago, and not just forget about it as a by-way : Metzger, sadly in a wheel-chair, was ‘in the room’ literally (the aptly Zen Lecture Theatre 0), but he was rarely the topic.
A brief summary report on the conference – to come…
As to auto-destructive art, the Conference seemed to have assumed that what Metzger did in 1960 with a large pane of glass, a larger piece of nylon stretched across it and applying hydrochloric acid that neither the set-up, not the outcome needed to be described : the Tate (@Tate) has has done it for us.
Again, it is to be noted that the description of auto-destruction is simply wrong : the nylon clearly did not destroy itself, Metzger destroyed it by painting acid on it, otherwise, if I kill someone with a gun, I could call it as meaningfully self-shooting syndrome.
End-notes
* Respectively, Bloomsbury, London, 2001 and 2010.
** The allusion is to the play Shopping and Fucking by Mark Ravenhill.
*** One of Zeno’s paradoxes starts with a grain of millet, and adds one, and then another : when does it become a pile ? Blurring boundaries because of the in-between ground is as much a fallacy as the law of the excluded middle (where anything that is not X must be Y, whereas it could be Z, in that middle ground), and it ignores the obvious fact that two grains are not a pile, 20,000 grains are. A chemistry experiment is not a piece of art, and a work by Watteau is not science.
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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27 January (updated 10 February)
When Russell Hoban published his novel The Medusa Frequency in 1987, the dust-jacket bore an enhanced version of Vermeer’s painting Head of a [Young] Girl, as here
The painting was not referred to as Girl with a Pearl Earring*, because it was not called that then – Tracy Chevalier did not publish her novel, using that description, for another twelve years – but so popular has the title become since the book (1999) and the film (2003) that even the Mauritshuis in The Hague, where the painting ‘normally’ hangs (it’s not there when Hermann Orff, in the novel, goes to see it), is using it in favour of the name employed by Hoban (or Girl in a Turban and variants thereof, although Orff also does call her The Vermeer girl.
Looked at objectively, yes, the earring is there, but to assume (as the description does) that it is not one of a pair seems over-precise or even fanciful (as if the other side of the girl’s head-dress or even head may not be there, because we cannot see it), and, in comparison with the turban, the earring is not the most obvious thing in the painting, unless you are Chevalier and want to make it the centre of a mystery and a story concerning it, of course. (And several easily available images show her wearing earrings (plural), too.) Historical novelists do such things, after all.
Of course, a model for the painting might only wear the earring that can be seen, but I’d be surprised if she didn’t hold out to wear them both – just this once. I forget what Hoban has Orff say about the painting, but it is notable, amongst Vermeer’s work (it is thought to date to around 1665, ten years before his death), not only for not having a background, but also for having the face and upper body appear in complete darkness, save the light that we can see reflected from the young woman.
However, other models appear with not just jewelry, but pearls, such as the Woman with a Pearl Necklace (thought to be slightly earlier), which she seems to be holding out for someone the other side of the window to see (unless she can see her reflection in a mirror to the left), who also has earrings
So does the Portrait of a Young Woman (thought to be a couple of years later), but she has more elfin-like features than our Scarlett Johannson lookalike (but the same dark background)
Other than cashing in on notoriety, then, is there any real reason to have renamed with a title that does not exclusively describe the Hoban / Chevalier portrait, just because the latter writer gained attention by using it ? Could we imagine retitling the later works of Gorky to which André Breton helped him give names – I think that One Year the Milkweed and The Liver is the Cock’s Comb might have come out of that collaboration, but maybe they did not know best, and some marketing people could find even better names, which would have people search out these canvases worldwide.
We already have Duchamp’s La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même more conveniently known as The Large Glass, and then existing in multiple forms thanks to Richard Hamilton’s work and Duchamp’s endorsement.
On that precedent, artists who have sometimes used names, as Roni Horn has for drawings, that do not say very much, or others who, worse, insist on pieces being just Untitled, could have official titlers who go around after them, fixing them with names for good PR…
Post-script
Of course, it has been known to be done before, but not in this Chevalier-type way :
1. The sitter is Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of Francesco
2. Thus the punning Italian title, La Gioconda (which is La Jaconde, in French), because the feminine form of the surname means one who is jocund
3. The form of address 'my lady', madonna, came, at that time, to be contracted to mona (though, nowadays, monna)
4. Therefore Mona Lisa - and not a historical novelist in sight, coming up with a new name, based on earrings...
End-notes
* Though, rather foolishly (I feel), the official Russell Hoban web-site does use that name.
