Walter De Maria: Ocean Music (1968)
03/24/2010 · Alexander Keefe
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Walter De Maria: “Ocean Music” (1968) via UbuWeb
This is the first installment of what will be a series of posts to music I listened to and learned from during months of researching my piece on Pandit Pran Nath in the current issue of Bidoun. There will be everything from deep dhrupad to raucous No Wave, with much time spent in the middle, not to mention along oxbows and the trackless backwaters… However, no time will be spent linking to file-sharing sites, except in the case of recordings that have passed into the public domain somehow or other. The reason is that I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to many of these artists, sometimes directly and personally, for their help and inspiration. I know that many of them feel stolen from because of the file-sharing that’s done by people who, after all, usually are ardent fans of their music. It is a weird paradox. Please support these artists by buying their work! They deserve no less.
I’m starting in medias res — like Dante — and in a peculiar corner that nevertheless invokes, I think in a beautiful and completely trippy way, an entire scene and sensibility. It is something of a prelude to the main event, just to test the engines, although like the “chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun.” This is Walter De Maria’s “Ocean Music” from 1968, available on Ubuweb. De Maria is usually known as the “Lightning Field” guy, and this is understandable because the Lightning Field, from 1978, is incredibly sublime and, in my opinion, is easily one of the most important art works of the post-war era. That said, De Maria did a lot of other very interesting, and completely different things, including his two well-known permanent installations in New York from the late 70s, both of them in Soho: Earth Room, and The Broken Kilometer. What is less well known is that he was also a musician and composer, and came to New York from Berkeley about the same time as his friend La Monte Young, around 1959, did some sculpture and early conceptual works (the term concept art was coined by his friend and sometime band mate Henry Flynt), organized happenings, and performed on drums with the proto-Velvet Underground band called The Primitives, as well as with La Monte’s seminal and intense mid-60s group the Theatre of Eternal Music alongside Angus Maclise, Tony Conrad, and John Cale. De Maria’s drumming pulses without apparent time meter — achieving a kind of stasis-in-flux that you see in a lot of La Monte’s music as well — much more so than Angus Maclise, whose music tends more toward neo-pagan psychedelia and ritual frenzy.
By the time Pandit Pran Nath took up residence in New York, in 1971, De Maria had stopped playing music, but he was part of the same circle, and must have seen him perform many times. Like I said, this is an oblique beginning to the Pandit Pran Nath music series, but I think it is a really great example of where avant-garde music was headed, at least among the New York downtown composers, musicians and artists associated with La Monte Young, just on the eve of Pandit Pran Nath’s arrival on the scene.
In “Ocean Music” from 1968, we start with a very mundane, ambient field recording of ocean sounds, but it doesn’t linger there long, at least not only there. The sound begins to blend, at first imperceptibly, with De Maria’s wash of percussion. Then things start to get fairly psychedelic with some overtones and other apparent effects kicking in and taking it to a whole different place. Like a Hindustani alap, it starts slow but builds in intensity toward a full-on secular re-enchantment, an aesthetically induced state of kenosis, an exhilaration mingled with awe. The music so clearly points at the impending Land Art scene — in which he was about to play a major role — and toward the Earth Room, the first iteration of which was installed in Heiner Friedrich’s Munich gallery in 1968, the year of this recording. This was the last sound recording De Maria made, to my knowledge — I would love to find out that I am wrong — and it was used as part of the soundtrack to his 1969 film Hard Core a post-Spaghetti Western that itself slowly builds from mundane realia to post-minimalist freakout — a film that stands quietly alongside, or somewhere between the space-cowboy post-westerns of Jodorowsky and Hellman.
But De Maria is a Thoreauvian at heart, perhaps by way of Wallace Stevens, an American gnostic and desert-rat, a searcher after the effectual Real hidden behind appearances, an advocate of moments of rupture, of earthquake epiphanies and transcendent states of consciousness. His invisibility on the present day art scene is self-imposed and deliberate, but from what I hear he is not a recluse, and he visits the Earth Room regularly in Soho. So should you! I’m writing about his work as part of a forthcoming Bidoun piece — the follow-up to the Pandit Pran Nath profile — an essay that takes on the rise and shattering fall of the first ten years at Dia Art Foundation, from its cryptic founding in 1974 to its very public collapse and rebirth in 1985. Meanwhile, stay tuned for more music!
Pandit Pran Nath and the American Underground
03/20/2010 · Alexander Keefe
Shameless self-promotion: please check out my just-published story on Pandit Pran Nath, written for the wonderful folks at Bidoun Magazine, who were kind enough to post it in its entirety online, along with some great photos shared by the incomparable La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Here’s the teaser…
First comes the drone of the sci-fi supercharged tamburas, fluxing and oscillating, too high up in the mix for the bureaucrats and professors at All India Radio, way too high. It’s like the rush of a marsh on a midsummer night with a million crickets, or the howling wind stirring the power lines outside a cabin in backwoods Idaho, or the hushed roar of the stream in front of a hermit’s cave above Dehradun: see the blue-throated god lying there, recumbent and still, his eyes shut, the dangerous corpse of the Overlord waiting for the dancing feet of his bloody, love-mad consort.
Stay tuned for more, including a playlist of the incredible music I listened to for this piece very soon. And I’m researching the follow-up, another story for Bidoun on the first ten years of Dia Art Foundation, which funded La Monte Young and Pandit Pran Nath, along with a (very) few others you may have heard of: James Turrell’s Roden Crater, Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, Donald Judd’s Marfa project, Dan Flavin’s one-man museum in Bridgehampton… Time to take a fresh look at this history and the forces behind the stunted version of it we’re now stuck with.
Spoiler alert: a young Mr. Deitch is one of the bad guys.
American avatars, part 2: Walton Ford’s birds
02/25/2010 · Alexander Keefe
"Avatars- The Birds of India" 1996 Watercolor, gouache and pencil on paper, 59 3/4 x 40 inches
Next stop on the desultory voyage a l’avatar Americain is this huge watercolor by Walton Ford. I was flipping through his recently published super-deluxe Taschen coffeetable raisonné the other day at the public library and was especially struck by Ford’s Indophillic early 90s series “Avatars — The Birds of India.” The style of the series is the same as what you see elsewhere — retro Audubon-esque, done large on paper, with lots of ersatz marginalia scrawled across it in various scripts and media — and the theme is one he apparently returned to a lot in that decade, a theme I will loosely term: the scourge of Westernization in India. I may be oversimplifying but basically, in this bestiary of his, the allegory runs something like this: the nasty identical-looking starlings who arrive in hordes and fuck, eat, peck at and otherwise exploit beautiful, unique-looking native South Asian birds? Those are either lame tourists or even lamer old Orientalists. The beautiful ones getting ravaged? Well, those would be the natives. (It should be noted that NRIs don’t exactly get a free pass — they tend to hang out with starlings, let’s put it that way, as do parrot-collaborators.) Where he really nails the theme, however, is in the words: on one side you get the straight native dope (in this one I see some tantric symbols, some Sanskrit, and some earnest-looking all-caps wisdom: what pros in the Indophilia biz simply call “the classic”) and on the other, a bit of reductive western claptrap (here a nasty-looking blue jay — allegorically speaking, this is a tour-guide from Minnesota — squawks out bullshit explanatory texts sampled, it would seem, from various outdated surveys of Indian art, culture and society). The vulture and the stork? Don’t worry: both authentic natives. Both abound in ancient Sanskrit stories. But that little pink piece of flesh they are fighting over? That’s on you, West! Stay home!
Addendum: I almost forgot to add that I came across another Walton Ford recently, not at the library this time, but as the infographic to this Financial Times piece on the Indian art market called “Indians in Trouble.” Is this not a weird choice?
American avatars: the devil and Mr. Lyman
02/18/2010 · Alexander Keefe
VOL. 1 - NO. 1 JUNE 9 - 22, '67 BOSTON, MASS. 25¢/35¢ OUT OF BOSTON
I am going to burn down the world
I am going to tear down everything that cannot stand alone
There were so many American avatars before Cameron’s. Among them: the biweekly underground zine/mouthpiece of the banjo-playing acid-folk pioneer and charismatic hippie cult leader Mel Lyman, self-published between 1967 and 1969 in Boston.
Back Cover of Vol. 1, No. 1 JUNE 9 - 22, '67
I am going to shove hope up your ass
I am going to turn ideals to shit
The “shadow-Dylan” Lyman was many things, but he was no Indophile: his notion of the avatar comes via many layers of mediation, as part of our shared inheritance that is the Great American Weird, a sepulchral gift from Emerson perhaps. Ultimately, for Lyman and his followers the wisdom of the East was the “Eastern cop-out,” no better than the other “false resolutions,” no different from what they called the Christian cop-out, the African cop-out, the Humanist cop-out… Lyman’s revelations were meant to be as American as acid and Frankie Valli and Benjamin Franklin. It all reminds me of Nietzche, in his final, lunatic days, signing his letters alternately “Dionysus” and “the Crucified One,” no longer able to keep them apart. Lyman wanted to be the Avatar of a Bacchic Christ, not of a Krishna.
I am going to reduce everything that stands to rubble
and then I am going to burn the rubble
and then I am going to scatter the ashes
and then maybe someone will be able to see something as it really is
Echt post-Orientalist psychedelia from a megalomaniacal, hipster madman and his maenads:
NO. 9 EASTCOAST UNITED FREE PRESS SEPT 29 OCT 12 WESTCOAST 30 CENTS 25¢
VOL. 1 - NO. 4 July 21 - Aug 4 BOSTON 25¢ EVERYWHERE 1967
Eqbal Mehdi’s Charcoal Drawings
01/23/2010 · Mansi Shah
“It all started at the age of eight when he drew a picture on a wall with a piece of charcoal, stolen from his mother’s stove.”
Babu Eshwar Prasad
01/10/2010 · Mansi Shah
Untitled, 36 x 48 in., Acrylic on canvas
Untitled, 48 x 65.5 in., Acrylic on canvas
Anish Kapoor
01/08/2010 · Alexander Keefe
Confession: I’ve walked by Anish Kapoor’s Chicago “bean” (ok, ok: Cloud Gate) one too many times, and if familiarity has not, in this case, bred any real contempt, it has bred something akin to disinterest. It is an expensive-looking, starchitectural funhouse mirror cloaked with the same solemn air of profundity that the art directors of BMW web-ads achieve with a far greater economy of means, and far less self-importance. In a sense, it is perfectly emblematic of the corporatized busy funness and funny business of the Millenium Park vibe in general, and of the AT&T Plaza in particular, where the orecchiette-shaped behemoth sits demanding attention, looking a bit like a random freeze frame snatched from a sci-fi film: the part where a giant malevolent metallic demonoid robot shape-shifts into a fast-moving blob of all-devouring, extraterrestrial mercury.
Stilled in the midst of this collosal machinic alchemy, however, it evokes neither awe nor terror. A far better aesthetic journey can be had perusing the many amateur youtube videos featuring the object in question. And maybe, in the end, this simple technique could stand as a useful measure of the efficacy of any art object these days—and provide a telling spectrogram of its aura: ask yourself which is more interesting, the work itself or the youtube videos made of it by tourists goofing around? The Cloud Gate as it were, or the beloved “Bean”? Either way, it is most accurately categorized as an art-ertainment mega-bauble, one short step away from the Wynn Las Vegas. Watch out, Chicago: the Great Whore of our contemporary and cosmopolitan (remember, this is Anish Kapoor we are talking about!) Babylon has lost an earring on the way back to her suite, stoned and speeding, after a long and weird night at the Cirque de Soleil afterparty.
Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate (2004)
Anish Kapoor has made a career out of this sort of midbrow accessibility, engaging and cleverly surprising, producing gentle aha-moments and a sense of having thought something big and ennobling. This American Life, Wes Anderson, The English Patient and Malcolm Gladwell are all staring at me right now saying: “what the hell’s your problem?”
My strong feelings on the matter notwithstanding, when I was in New York last month I stopped by the Guggenheim to see his Memory. It is a corseted and ruddy corten-steel zeppelin, somewhat deflated looking although still plenty bulging and tumescent, belted and bolted and stuffed into a room seemingly too small to contain its swelling immensity. And that right there tells you that Anish Kapoor’s preferred brand of heavy-handed populism is about to nail you with a David Copperfield-style ship-in-a-bottle effect. Don’t fall for it. It’s the sort of thing that appears to have worked some magic over cosmopolitan sensibilities in this decaying late-capitalist moment of ours but the imagineer’s spell, after all, isn’t that powerful. There is a whiff of Andrew Carnegie’s megalomania about Kapoor’s work, an atavistic steel-baron gesturalism that imparts an old-fashioned appeal (this one is patinated with powdery-looking rust, an au courant steampunkish touch), and there is the inescapable stench of rampant Jindalism as well, the icy and soulless stainless-steel rot of maximalized modernist minitude.
Anish Kapoor, Memory (2008)
Memory wants so badly to be interpreted that it practically coerces it out of you. Jammed in to its undersized quarters, and forcing curious visitors to navigate uncertainly through the early-period Kandinskys and lavatory waiting-areas of the Guggenheim to take it all in, it is all about Memory, which also grows really big as time goes on, and also takes on a kind of slippery steel skin. The seams are visible, but they are tight. Nothing could escape from there… or could it? If you could open a window into it—but you can!—you would see a black square of absolute darkness—but I think I see a little light in there!—an unenterable black hole of memory and time past. I’m feeling like memory is empty and yet it is full. It is the past, but it is also endlessly protean and capable of creative change and refashioning! That black square sometimes looks flat and two-dimensional, like a painting, and sometimes looks three-dimensional, like a cosmic door. (I am at heart your guide on otherworldly journeys in time and space, says Kapoor with this, really working as a painter, but doing so surreptitiously by actually working as a sculptor). Much as in the David Bromberg joke about the original leather-bound edition of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet with all the significant passages underlined, here too every stinking word is underlined.
But you know I actually enjoyed myself standing there digging the op-art special effects emanating from this dead-black yolk of a hundred-year egg, this unplayable ocarina of the titans. It was much better than Cats, which is also about memories. I felt a yawning sort of gravity in front of that window-door, a dicey pull into the enclosed and yet bottomless black. It even felt safely dangerous for a moment. That and the fact that it doesn’t feature dildos (Chelsea’s galleries right now, wow, dildo-central)… it may be just enough. But if challenging and dark post-Minimalist beauty is what you’re after, go upstairs and see what Kitty Kraus did with a light bulb full of black paint and two panes of glass. Mr. Kapoor, if you insist on plying me with quasi-mystical promises, then offer me hard, maddening wine, not some sweet watery spritzer!
Chitra Ganesh
01/03/2010 · Alexander Keefe
Chitra Ganesh’s Lady Mollusk (2009) sits stonily, with the aura of a prophetess demonstrating an old and meaningful wound that is unlikely to cicatrice itself closed any time soon. To the contrary, it looks cosmically alight, spilling ectoplasmic fairy-dust like a mystical inkjet womb. Bubblegum shoelaces stream from her eyes sideways at a distant, dispersed set of heavens, and although this is one war that never seems won, what’s under attack here are clearly the poofy-sleeved perspectivalisms and vanishing points of the Western hegemon’s scopic regimes: instead of concentrating our gaze on the lady herself, these florescent laser beams shoot off at invisible horizons, pulling us wonderfully toward inscrutable objects that float, weightless, beyond the edges of the image. Newton be damned: chrome plastic bubbles form and dissolve in the air around her according to some hidden and unfamiliar physics, blinded and dully reflective. If I look closely I can see myself standing there tiny, entrapped and multiplied by fourteen, with no head, upside down.
Lady Mollusk (2009)
There is a deep mock-Orientalist archival riff at work behind this piece, a bass note sample one hears looping away a lot in “Indian” (post-Saatchi, I can only use that in quotes because I don’t know what it means) art these days… often overplayed frankly. Here, happily, it actually advances the cause, giving its otherwise pixellated, digitally flattened, deliberately low-fi painted lady a set of ghostly black shadows, tiny points of unknowable nullity impervious to any kind of analog light. For more empirical thrills, we have to reckon with the coarse, black, sloppy, tangled braids turned loose from beneath her shawl—refugee tresses quickly tied and spilling forth onto the floor, coming at the viewer with an uncertain, possibly dangerous set of motives.
She’s obviously some kind of shamaness, a sorceress busy at a spell. The monstrous, many-eyed, tongue-pink nudibranch that she cradles like a Spanish guitar, backlit with a chemical phosphorescence and draped gently over her shoulder like a friend pulled from a house fire? That must be her familiar.
Thanks to Nitin Mukul for the photo!
Abdul Ghani Khan – Pashto Artist/Poet
11/28/2009 · Mansi Shah
Translation of When Man Sits Down In Dust:
Manhood stands tall and high, and becomes madness;
The self takes leave of being and becomes ecstasy.
When iron sated with blood embraces love,
It turns into a bewildered sitar string.
When time robs man of love and the loved one,
He sees the beloved’s glory and his own.
How man sprouts when he sits down in dust!
A manjila resting on riches becomes a serpent.
Don’t shower houris and gilman over me. Enough!
God, I swear, I’m not concerned with anyone save you;
Abdul Ghani Khan and his wife, Roshan
Where today, I walk oblivious and proud,
God knows, to this garden, who will be the heir.
I am a Pukthun and am not afraid of death;
I am angered at an empty life and a desolate end.
The river of doubt runs deep through my heart,
Wondering when the brilliant waterfall of hope will flow.
My heart gazes at your indifferent eye and so,
At times the great string breaks into tears.
Is music lament or rapture — I cannot decide;
Every tone now moves us, now becomes shrill.
Khan's sculptures
The self takes leave of being and becomes ecstasy.
When iron sated with blood embraces love,
It turns into a bewildered sitar string.
When time robs man of love and the loved one,
He sees the beloved’s glory and his own.
How man sprouts when he sits down in dust!
A manjila resting on riches becomes a serpent.
Don’t shower houris and gilman over me. Enough!
God, I swear, I’m not concerned with anyone save you;
Princess Durru Shehvar, Khan’s drawing of the Princess
Where today, I walk oblivious and proud,
God knows, to this garden, who will be the heir.
I am a Pukthun and am not afraid of death;
I am angered at an empty life and a desolate end.
The river of doubt runs deep through my heart,
Wondering when the brilliant waterfall of hope will flow.
My heart gazes at your indifferent eye and so,
At times the great string breaks into tears.
Is music lament or rapture — I cannot decide;
Every tone now moves us, now becomes shrill.
_____________________________________________
Read about Khan here/here and the Pashto language here.
Ghani Khan’s poems sung by Sardar Ali Takkar:
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Sonia Khurana
11/17/2009 · Mansi Shah
Still from Bird, 1999