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Postcards from London - January, February 2009
Sitting down in the dark, recently transformed in-the-round space of the Old Vic, on a cold January night, I had come looking for a miracle – or at least some significant good news. The autumn season in London had been particularly sleepy and uneventful, with a series of not-too-daring productions of reasonable quality but absolutely no distinction; the Old Vic had, indeed, provided the only ray of twilight, with its new staging of Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman conquests trilogy – perhaps not the newest idea, but at least almost flawlessly produced and brilliantly acted.
Elizabeth McGovern, David Suchet and Richard Dreyfuss in Complicit at Old Vic. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
So I can be forgiven for thinking, on that January night, that the production of Joe Sutton’s new play Complicit that I had come to see, with Kevin Spacey directing Richard Dreyfuss, David Suchet and Elizabeth McGovern, could be a brilliant start to 2009 and a sudden and radical improvement to months of boredom. And for having been so horribly, horribly wrong. In the following weeks, theatre bloggers would shake their heads in disbelief at the complete disaster of this production; after a repeatedly extended preview period was over, official critics would agree, and wonder how it could all have gone so wrong. Complicit, the story of an American journalist who publishes some top-secret data on the government’s treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo, and who is called to face the Supreme Court and reveal his source (will he, won’t he, that is the problem), would become the nightmare story of the season, and the proof that Kevin Spacey, the Old Vic’s artistic director, could still make mistakes (and big ones at that), in spite of the exceptionality of the last two years of his reign. But that night I did not know it, and I was completely unprepared for what followed: a confused combination of people shouting at each other and surreal scenes of torturers taking over the stage to perform water-boarding (the latter would be reduced and then eliminated from the play altogether in the following weeks, thus proving how quite incredibly raw things still were on the opening night), Richard Dreyfuss forgetting his lines and actually having to be helped out by the director assistant in the front row, Elizabeth McGovern rigid and lost in space – and, most importantly, a fragmented, confused, inconclusive, arrogant text, that completely failed the audience in its the lazy application of fast-food political principles to serious, crucial moral questions such as torture and human rights.
I like to believe that Complicit was the moment when the London theatrical mainstage touched rock-bottom, and suddenly woke up and started to come back up again.
This article continues, click here to read on…
Dance Massive
If you still can’t get enough of Spark Online’s Dance Massive coverage, then surf across to RealTime’s daily updates. There, Spark Online editors Jana and Carl have been trading overnight reviews with Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter. Massive.
Dance Massive: Untrained
Listening to Pavement’s great album Brighten the Corners ten years ago, I remember wondering what it would be like to try and approximate Stephen Malkmus’ voice: a particularly nasal, unstable voice, which tends to break with self-consciousness. I imagined a classically trained fan straining to produce a note-perfect version of Malkmus’ often toneless and creaky voice, with high notes lost to harmonics, and challenging phrases ground into a monotone. Pavement’s songs make no sense when performed by a trained singer: a direct route from A to B renders them melodically incomprehensible, even child-like. What they require is what Malkmus has: a way of moving from point to point precariously, taking a long, meandering path every time.
In Lucy Guerin’s Untrained, two dazzling dancers, Byron Perry and Antony Hamilton, perform alongside two untrained men, Simon Obarzanek and Ross Coulter, with a background in fine art. The four men file against a square box marked on the floor, as if lining up to take a basketball shot; after each performer makes his move, the pose is nonchalantly dropped. Therefore formal dance is understood to take place in the square, with all other movements cordoned off as a form of statistical error. When a dancer executes an utterly clean, professional whirl, the untrained men imperfectly reproduce that whirl, as if plotting a shaky graph around the original move.
What is the purpose of this arrangement? Does it allow the audience to identify with the position of the untrained: to imagine making an unschooled response to geometric patterns? Is it a learning exercise for the dancers–a way of inventing an unpredictable machine to do variations on your own immaculate work? Perhaps the angularity of Perry and Hamilton’s dance becomes newly arresting with a kind of reverb around it, as suggested by the movements of the untrained. As always, Guerin pushes choreography in the direction of the formless and the blank, generating randomness and riffs on existing patterns.
One issue this show doesn’t touch is the self-consciousness of the untrained. Coulter and Obarzanek are unflappable even when physically uncertain, and under no illusions that they can achieve grace. As in gymnastics, it’s all about the dismount: even the most ungainly act can be shrugged off and redeemed by a composed, symmetrical finish. For an untrained man, Obarzanek has a very actorly presence: he reminds me of John Malkovich with his obtuse expressions and elegantly shambling gait. Coulter takes on a more blokey and floppy persona, which easily finds laughs. Each man is a very particular personality; neither really serves as a “control.”
Things get formally interesting when the professionals start mimicking the moves of the amateurs, down to the last wobbly tic. To see two outstanding dancers trying to lose their expertise takes on the dimensions of a social experiment. Perry and Hamilton seem to regard the untrained as not merely unskilled, but as virtually untouched, or uncorrupted. When Hamilton describes working with untrained people, it’s as if he’s marvelling at a colonised and miraculously natural race, who can “make decisions about how to move” spontaneously. Is being untrained akin to being a kind of “wild child”–charmingly unschooled and guided by rhythm? When Hamilton sings a bar of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”, his voice, though subtle, cuts the air in the manner of an instinctive performer. But when Obarzanek sings, the atmosphere shatters: it’s a voice without tonal control, with all the uneven harmonics restored.
Occasionally the performers huddle in a scrum, resembling a men’s counselling group, yelping for inner release. It’s a kind of reverse arts therapy for trained dancers-aiming to reproduce the indirection and aimlessness of “normal” movement. As such, Perry and Hamilton represent a couple of aristocrats, looking to unlearn their innate sophistication-their mannerism-through contact with a primitive group, the society of the untrained.
Lucy Guerin Inc, Untrained, concept, direction Lucy Guerin, performers Ross Coulter, Antony Hamilton, Simon Obarzanek, Byron Perry, music Cusp by Duplo Remote, producer Michaela Coventry; Arts House, March 11-14; Dance Massive, Melbourne, March 3-15
Dance Massive: Melbourne Spawned a Monster
It’s an alarming space you enter the downstairs theatre at Danceworks for Melbourne Spawned a Monster. Hazard tape slung about, a huge plywood monolith in front of you. Turns out it’s the back of the steeply raked seating bank – seats pushed right up against the stage. The lighting is dim, the kind of dim that pixelates your vision, as your brain fruitlessly attempts to compensate for the lack of visual information it has to process and makes up stuff instead.
And then it is dark as dark can be, the kind of dark in which you can trick yourself into not being sure if your eyes are open or not.
Out of nowhere: the peculiarly identifiable sound of tennis balls being bounced off a wall and falling off the stage and into the audience. What was going on is amazingly clear, considering that it was one of the most unlikely things to have happened. Scattered laughter rose up from the audience. It really was what was happening. It was one of the most joyously playful ways to break the fourth wall on one hand and alienate the audience on the other.
I regrettably missed the original incarnation of Melbourne Spawned a Monster which premiered at Danceworks in September 2008. (Read Chris Boyd’s lucid review here. After you’ve finished with my ramblings you will crave lucidity. Trust me, you will.)
And having only seen Luke George’s performance of the work (and this in no way denigrates his interpretation, for it was glorious. Yes, glorious) I find myself yearning to be able to compare it with that of the piece’s Choreographer and Director, Jo Lloyd, who for matters I know not of, was not performing this time around.
I suppose this desire of mine to have seen her can be broken down thus:
a) I’m having a hard time imagining anyone other than Luke George performing Melbourne Spawned a Monster. (This in itself may be either because he was very, very good and inhabited the work totally, or because my imagination is woefully limited).
b) I think a woman’s performance may have absolutely re-contextualised the work.
Although, perhaps her performance wouldn’t have re-contextualised the work, perhaps George’s performance was sort of gender-less (which now that I mention it I think it may have been). Not genderless so much as not really masculine. (I mean masculine in the broadest possible manner.) And perhaps Lloyd’s performance was similarly androgynous.
Hmm. I think I need to back up the truck here.
In my youth I craved a certain kind of male role model, one that was comfortable with his masculinity, one who could be poetic and graceful and humble and self-deprecating and not be competitive or protean, not needing to always prove his masculinity, one in whom the presence of softness and sensitivity needn’t mean femininity – it just didn’t really mean anything. I didn’t consciously crave this. Its wasn’t as if I was knocking about as an eight year old testing the men in my life on their verse, line, and emotional maturity, I think I became aware of the limitations implicit in the notion of “The Australian Male” early. This was the eighties. One had two choices:
a) Warwick Capper
b) Bernard King.
What I’m trying to say here is that Luke George displayed the kind of humanity that is all encompassing. His unchallenging, passive, yet commanding gaze was disarming and reassuring. It was another way in which the performance toyed with the audience and both alienated you and brought you closer to itself.
This was a proscenium show. From the front of which dangled strings of LED lights, illuminating both the performer and the audience and drawing our attention to the divide and when it was being crossed. He is us. He’s with us.
The LED light reflected on a simple, kitsch, ingenious backdrop of the Melbourne skyline, defined only by its windows, cut out of foil.
The choreography made little sense to me intellectually (as I’ve said before, I have no dance background, apart from tap-dancing lessons in a West Brunswick church hall with three middle-aged women. Not the most thorough preparation, I’ll admit) yet as it passed I was struck by its playfulness, its humour, its familiarity and its lack of equilibrium.
Duane Morrison’s perfectly realised music leant a pulse and a twitch to Luke George’s movements, reminding me of Harryhausen’s stop-motion skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts:
Or, perhaps more to the point:
Melbourne Spawned a Monster is a wonderfully original piece of work.
Melbourne Spawned a Monster
Dancehouse
As a part of Dance Massive
Choreographed and Directed by Jo Lloyd
Performed by Luke George
Music by Duane Morrison
Set by Rob McCredie
Dance Massive: Limina
Limina is the threshold of neither here nor there, a state betwixt and between. Michaela Pegum’s new solo piece explores how this does not equate to nowhere or nothingness.
The audience files in to find a lone figure lying on a white mat. The house lights dim and the spectators’ eyes adjust. The room is eerily silent for the first few minutes as the dance begins. We attune to the rustling of Pegum’s heavy black skirt and our own settling into the slow hypnotisation of watching the dancer twisting one direction and then its opposite. Her elegant bendings pulse with determined thuds of her body against the floor or walls. Here we may be on the verge of several states, but the dancer’s body is solidly, unquestionably present - wherever we may be.
Pace accelerates slightly and the back wall half-fills with abstract video imagery by Cherie Green. Sounds of wind and sea creep gently in, but the focus stays on the deftly layered and repetitive movement. The lighting design by Jennifer Hector allows expanding pools of light to open or close the space, offering an overlapping of occupied realms, despite the literal constraint that one dancer can never physically able to be in multiple places at the same time.
A limitation of representing ‘in-betweenness’ as a constant (perhaps even permanent) state can be that it denies the viewer the possibility of conflict or resolution. Without this, there is no dramatic imperative and as such response can be dominated by a process of meditative reflection. This in itself is worthy of exploration, but the demands of such non-linearity can grate on an impatient audience member. Fortunately, Limina’s mesmerising images calm and intrigue, so we’re not left nowhere, with nothing.
Limina. Choreography/ Performer: Michaela Pegum, Sound: Julia Mant, Video: Cherie Green, Original Lighting Design: Jennifer Hector. Dancehouse, March 7 - 8; Dance Massive, March 3 - 15.
Dance Massive: Mortal Engine
Chunky Move’s latest fusing of dance and technology induced my fading recollections of a primary school excursion to the Planetarium. Then, we had craned our necks back as the origins and the impossible of the universe were demonstrated in a laser show that seemed to suck us up into a vortex of the domed ceiling. I remember thinking this would be how stories would be told in the future, all shimmer and hologram.
As it turns out, that schoolchild musing was not far off the mark. Light years ahead in its sophistication, Mortal Engine (directed and choreographed by Gideon Obarzanek) achieves what many experiments of this nature tend to fall flat in. As effortlessly as the dancers’ bodies twist and curl around the stage, their physicality constantly distorted by the light that prods, chases and torments their movement. This conflict is not as antagonistic as it could be; rather, it’s a nuanced push-pull. Here is a flux between sleep and waking, following and initiating, growing and dying.
This seductive interactive technology is consistently spectacular, creating realms of terrifying electric surges and detailed amoebic activity. A central white rectangle angled at a seemingly impossible rake frames the performance space. Raised platforms split the surface at times, quakes that create scenic flats and disrupt established order. The relentless soundtrack is disjointed thudding and rumbling, though the composition is not always purely mechanical: there are times when sounds almost jar as organic, like sticky squelches or the scrape of the underside of a spade.
In this unforgiving context, the intimacy between the dancers is almost surprising. In duets their bodies are draped over each other like the familiar spooning of a couple in bed, with gentle tracing of each others’ bodies in their shared half-dreaming. When caught in a spaghetti tangle of laser effects they seem unified by the light, as if the body and the laser are one and the same. The solo segments have similar desire for connection, though here it appears in forms that evoke the multiplication of a cell or the murky, floating traces of in utero forms.
In the crescendo of the piece, dancers are trapped in a corridor of sharp laser beams, whilst the harsh green lights pans aggressively over the audience, making any choice for our escape just as futile as is for the dancers. The question of who or what might be in control at any given moment never ceases. This is emphasised by the nature of the technology that is at the core of Mortal Engine’s aesthetic – whilst the scenes follow the same running order in each performance, it is the onstage movement that prompts the sound composition, video and light in a concept developed by Freider Weiss.
Just as simulations of galaxies imploding before my young eyes once held me in awe of the unpredictable shifting of the universe, here my gaze downwards onto the stage left me in similar wonder as to how these delicate mortal bodies eclipse such dramatic shimmerings.
Mortal Engine, Chunky Move. Direction/Choreography: Gideon Obarzanek, Interactive System Design: Frieder Weiss, Laser and Sound Artist: Robin Fox, Composer: Ben Frost, Costume Designer: Paula Levis, Lighting Designer: Damien Cooper, Set Design: Richard Dinnen & Gideon Obarzanek Performers: Kristy Ayre, Sara Black, Amber Haines, Antony Hamilton, Lee Serle, James Shannon, Charmene Yap. Malthouse Theatre, March 4 - 8; Dance Massive, March 3 - 15.
Dance Massive: No Success Like Failure
I saw this work in 2008 and it was one of my favourite performances of the year. When I saw it had been collected for the sublimely programmed Dance Massive I rounded up a posse to attend. I, you see, am a fan.
The Fondue Set is somewhat unique in the Australian performance landscape, in particular, the Australian dance landscape. Akin to Wendy Houstoun (who directed No Success Like Failure), the ubiquitous Forced Entertainment, Lone Twin and even perhaps Panther’s recent work, The Fondue Set position themselves, with panache, in the realm of the amateur, that is to say they embody the joy of performance - the naff-ness of it. Their choreography sits somewhere between a jazz ballet class in 1989, a school formal and a drunken party. Yet it skilfully transcends kitsch for the sake of it.
Aesthetically, this work is very much a part of the current zeitgeist, as is, say, this:
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EURZuzHyWb0)
As music video geek, I find its aesthetic disarmingly familiar and comforting. I know what I’m getting. And I like it.
(Interestingly, isn’t the zeitgeist as a concept itself becoming a part of the zeitgeist? What happens then? How can it objectively select movements, works and things to become a part of it, if it, itself, is a part of it. Perhaps it operates like the Freemasons, or Rotary: entry by invitation of another member.)
Positioning itself loosely as a dance company and No Success Like Failure as a dance work, in Dance Massive, certain fundamental elements of their work come as a surprise. For me, a pleasant surprise, for others, perhaps disconcerting, or even tiresome. There is an overwhelming amount of text, and much of it is situated within the oeuvre of post-modern performance. For myself, with little to no dance background, this works.
Their comedy, arising from the tension between the performance act and the performers’ inherent self-awareness, is masterful and wonderfully executed.
The position that they inhabit, somewhere between dance and comedy is unique, and I must say it’s refreshing to see women embodying both dance and comedy without any particular nod to femininity. The role of women in comedy is dubious at best and The Fondue Set has carved their own niche, outside of the norm. They have a supreme self awareness that never results in self-consciousness. There is an absolute humanity to their self-revelatory routines, the comedy arises not only out of awkwardness and irony, but recognition. There certainly would have been more room for abstracted movement, without irony.
Upon a second viewing there are certain fundamental issues at play. What I had taken to be an extremely live event (by which I mean: fallible, susceptible to change, dangerous) now seemed much less so. In fact, I saw a lot more polish. Which isn’t a good thing where No Success Like Failure is concerned. There was a live-ness that was faithfully mimicked but somewhat disingenuous. The event that the audience is attending is always going to be roughly the same. Which is a shame. I can see how this work could genuinely fail, how many or even most of its sequences are journeys into endurance for both the performers and the witnesses, how many of its parts are journeys into failure, or at the very least uncertainty. But the thing is, they no longer are. They are very rehearsed. Some sections of direct address were hurried through without any real sense of the audience being read and responded to legitimately. This is the adversary of a live event. The creators must design mechanisms open to pure chaos. To achieve the desired spontaneity they must include the purely random and expose themselves to its inherent danger.
This is all upon a second viewing, remember. After seeing it the first time, I exited the theatre on a kind of taffeta and spandex induced sugar high. This time, I just had a bit of a come-down.
What resonated the most, was its genuine emotion: the ability to stimulate pure, atavistic emotional reactions from uncontrollable laughter (quite close to the beginning of the piece I heard one of my companions whimpering, not wanting to be the one audience member with the weirdly overzealous laughter) to extreme pity and grief. Even at its most self-reflexive it is offset by the inclusion of some movement, or some external stimulus that offsets the potential intellectual feedback loop and at one point leaves you in tears as your mirror neurons are working full time mimicking the performers’ induced emotional states.
And this is their genius: the truly confronting and hilarious nature of staring into their faces, contorted with grief and sadness, as they dance their way through an instrumental version of Everybody Hurts. It is something that begins purely as a mechanism (and is hilariously antithetical to jazz ballet) and is completely disingenuous tapping into our emotional cortex whilst we are forced to be absolutely aware of the intellectual conceits being utilized.
No Success Like Failure, The Fondue Set. Creators/Performers: Emma Saunders, Elizabeth Ryan, Jane McKernan, Collaborating Director: Wendy Houstoun, Outside Eye: Julie-Anne Long, Original Lighting Design/ Production Management: Neil Simpson, Collaborating Designer: Agatha Gothe-Snape, Producer: Rosalind Richards, Artful Management. Arts House, March 5 - 7; Dance Massive, March 3 - 15.
WOMAD: Natty Bo meets Proust
When too much of the Caribbean is barely enough, you want Natty Bo turning up at your festival. He is the leader of Ska Cubano, a British-Cuban band that meld Jamaican ska with Cuban mambo.
Your favourite virtue? Integrity
What do you most appreciate in an artist? Deliverance and soul
Your main fault? Insomnia
If not yourself, who would you like to be? I have many heroes: singers, musicians, artists, clowns, inventors, philosophers, filmmakers, actors but the Time Traveller Dr. Moses Nebogipfel looks like fun being able to travel back n forth in time though i worry about timelag (like jetlag but more extreme) you can experience anything and not have to own anything there is much wisdom knowledge excitement to be gained as long as there are no accidents
The first album you bought? Club Ska 67
Your greatest fear? Violence and filling in official forms
Your idea of happiness? A dream lover
Your favourite writer? Jorge Louis Borges
How would you like to be seen? As a friend
Your favourite indulgence? Sex, no… Records, no… sex
WOMAD: Tony Allen meets Proust
Tony Allen is one of the senior statesmen of African percussion. Revered as a pioneer of Afrobeat with Fela Kuti, Allen has been making music since the 1950s and 24 years after leaving Fela’s band, Tony remains a restless leader of new African music. Here’s what happened when he came up against our modified Proust Questionnaire.
Your favourite virtue? Coolness
What do you most appreciate in an artist? Creativity
Your main fault? Too many children
If not yourself, who would you like to be? Electronic engineer
The first album you bought? Soul Makossa by Manu Dibango
Your greatest fear? Not to have good musicians around me
Your idea of happiness? Being in my house
Your favourite writer? Wole Soyinka
How would you like to be seen? As my self, the way I look
Your favourite indulgence? Bad notes from the school about my kids
WOMAD: Interview with Seckou Keita
In the lead up to next weekend’s WOMADelaide festival, Andrew Dunn speaks with kora virtuoso Seckou Keita from Mali.
Click here to listen to the podcast.
10 minutes, 2.5MB, mp4
Jason Lutes: Jar of Fools
Jar of Fools by Jason Lutes
published by Faber Trade Fiction,
distributed in Australia by Allen & Unwin
RRP: AUD $29.95
It is the recurrent and tragic curse of the appreciation of le graphic novel in the Anglosphere that highest praise, just like in the geeky introduction to Jar of Fools, soars in this vein: “Jason Lutes not only writes and draws good comics, he writes and draws good literature.” Through the Pulitzer-winning Maus, spawning the documentary comic from Joe Sacco to Satrapi’s Persepolis, comics have found their way out of the geek ghetto as substitute literature, as books with pictures.
To praise an achievement in a medium by elevating it to another, superior medium, is nonsense. Just like no film can be flattered by calling it, say, so good it’s no longer film, it’s theatre, so should a graphic novel not be asked to be prose. In this conflation of words and excellence, American comics are caught in an uneasy point, in which credibility is bestowed upon them by literary reviewers, for whom wordiness seems to signify accomplishment, who may be well-placed to position Tomine with Raymond Carver or Jason Lutes with Hemingway, but whose understanding of the purpose of images within comics often seems no better than sketchy. In this precarious balance, trying to keep happy, on the one hand, an audience that rarely articulates its own preference (rather than tribal and personal taste), and on the other an articulate, but often profoundly misguided mainstream collective of reviewers, many graphic artists seem not to be learning the rules of their own medium. The community, in other words, sometimes seems to be breaking down as a guild, losing its craft, its sets of skills.
To praise Jar of Fools for its literary merit is an even greater overlook, specifically because Jason Lutes is as good as he is because he understands the difference. Reading Lutes’s work, one is astonished by the fluidity, the ease with which images tell the story, so skillfully is the eye guided through the images. Lutes writes and draws, visibly, in the cartoonish Franco-Belgian school (citing Herge’s Tintin as a huge influence), characterized by a certain light, solid craftiness, and has often made a public attempt to remove himself from the American mainstream. In interviews, he has often complained about the lack of simple mastery of the medium that graphic artists (in the US) seem to exhibit: from the angles employed, the story-telling tempo, to the right amount of text on the page. To my surprise, I find that his clear, realistic yet simple style, and slightly off-beat humour, remind me strongly of Max Bunker’s Alan Ford, although it would be a strange coincidence indeed if Lutes was aware of this Italian classic. What may be shining through, instead, is a loan from the Italian simplified realism, artists such as Manara, or Giardino. Whichever case, it is a finely wrought graphic skill quite unlike the clunky, self-conscious attempts of the underground artists, or the over-computerized stylization of the new American mainstream. Like the best of craftsmen, Lutes makes his medium invisible.
Jar of Fools, first published by Black Eye Productions in 1994, re-published by Drawn&Quarterly in 2003, and finally available in Australia in a sexy faber&faber edition, is Lutes’s first graphic novel. Not quite fitting into any category, it is simple, genreless, graphic novelism. In a Seattle that’s neither now nor in the past, a hopeless, aimless magician Ernie Weiss is trying to get over a failed romance and rebuild a career with the help of his mentor, Al Flosso, who is combating dementia. A con man with a little daughter (who may be the greatest magician talent of them all) joins them in their drift through life, while Ernie’s ex-girlfriend Esther wanders in and out of the story, haunted by the suicide of Ernie’s brother. Jar of Fools evokes many things: early 20th-century stories of hunger and unpaid rent, from Hamsun to Hemingway, monochrome early Jarmusch, the vague sadness of the urban loser graphic novel genre. Most incisively, however, Lutes is able to say great things about bereavement and loneliness, using nothing but clean, subtle drawings.
It is an autumnal, quietly poignant tale, and it trots along with poise and grace until, in a sudden injection of haste, the last 15 pages turn the book into a rushed, Hollywood-like tying of loose ends, coupling of the separated and tragic but inevitable parting of the close. There are many reasons why a serialized comic in the early 1990s would take such a turn, but not a single one makes up for the fact that a fine, very fine graphic novel is thus turned into something similar to a well-done weekend afternoon television movie: a little gem unloved by every part of the system that creates it, except the enthusiastic author.
The Berlin books, Lutes’s current project, is certainly a more mature, balanced read. The second part of the envisaged trilogy, Berlin: City of smoke, has been recently released and is ammassing praise around the world; and it is the one Jason Lutes work I would suggest merits the ‘masterpiece’ moniker. Jar of Fools is merely a solid first graphic novel, and a good introduction to an ambitious young artist, committed to his craft.
Shaun Tan: Tales from Outer Suburbia
Shaun Tan: Tales from Outer Suburbia
published in Australia by Allen&Unwin,
RRP: $29.95
I do not understand the paradox of Shaun Tan. In a country with no tradition, and subsequently little undestanding, of illustrated books, from comics to picture books, Shaun Tan, who is essentially a creator of both, is revered as a national treasure. From the brouhaha that followed the publication of The Arrival in 2006, which went on to win every award available to a book, you would think that Tan had single-handedly discovered the graphic novel. And yet, while among the awards was the Angouleme International Comic Festival Prize for Best Comic Book, in Australia Tan was being awarded mainly as a children’s novelist and picture book artist, and many a visually-ungifted person was suggesting that keeping the hues of an entire page consistent, in order to achieve consistency of mood, was Shaun Tan’s ground-breaking invention, and loudly wondered what this new genre, this wordless book in which action was moved by - gasp! - images, was going to be called.
My hazarded guess would be that, while Australia seems to have inherited a healthy tradition of books for children from England, image still seems to be viewed as something suspicious, lascivious, out of control. As we are collectively descending into a willful misunderstanding of childhood, sentimentalised, idealised and fantasised into a fairy-tale for adults, children’s books have become part of this sacred area of life, in which we all strive to protect the untouchable purity of childhood. The double-edged fascination with Shaun Tan’s work seems to derive from a complex mixture of total charmedness with his work, usually interpreted as complex and imaginative children’s stories (rather than complex allegories for adults, which they could easily be), thus taking part in the holy battle against the McDonaldization of our children, and high incompetence in all things pictorial, adding a dash of blind reverie to the healthy respect. Whichever way, Tan enjoys a status that no other maker of images in this country currently has. The joy we derive from reading his beautifully crafted, and exquisitely printed books comes hand in hand with a moral uprightness that no other popular artist seems to beat.
It is, thus, commonly understood that Tan’s work stands apart from every book currently in existence: that The Arrival is not a graphic novel, The Lost Thing not a picture book, Tales from Outer Suburbia not a collection of illustrated stories. Why, with such adoration ready to be showered on one artist, Australia doesn’t have a healthier graphic publishing industry, is a mystery yet to be resolved. For now, though, Tan has achieved the stature that allows him to create as he wishes, and is using his freedom well.
Tales from Outer Suburbia is a slender book of great quality: fifteen short stories, ranging from traditional illustrated stories to two-panel illustrations with words. Tan dives head-on into the coherently, convincedly magical realm of childhood, recreating the solidity of all the beliefs children stick to whilst unable to prove. Treating the paradoxes of this outlook with the same seriousness he applies to the juggle of paradoxical beliefs that we call the adult life, Tan creates a malleable, colourful and softly uncertain world. When the two brothers in Our expedition embark on a quest to find what’s beyond the last pages of their father’s street directory, the reader is as uncertain as they are as to whether the city simply ends with a clear cut. Equally, in Alert but not alarmed, government-prescribed ballistic missiles in every back yard are slowly painted, decorated and turned into bird houses; whether one kind of swarm intelligence is better than the other is entirely up to you to decide.
Meanwhile, the mysterious asocial, and alienatingly denatured yet inurbane world of the Australian outer suburbia is, in Tan’s book, as grim and exciting as in real life, scrubbed of sentimentality, yet enchantingly full of possibilities. The mysteries in the book are not in the forest, beyond the hill; they are not immediate, dark and scary. No, they are the mysteries inside the neighbouring houses (as in No other country), the unimaginable vast society beyond the suburb (as in The Amnesia Machine), or in the behaviour of the transitory, alien people that populate outer suburbia (from Broken Toys to Stick Figures). Tan’s interest in migration, deeply investigated in The Arrival, is present again. In the wonderfully observed Eric, an exchange student asks questions that “weren’t the kind of questions I had been expecting”, while his mother comforts the host boy by saying that “It’s a cultural thing”. Coming to terms with the world of adults is paralleled by the learning that inevitably accompanies immigration in No Other Country, or even, in Grandpa’s Story, marriage. Unlike the magic possibilities of the Victorian mansion, or the industrial city, the mysterious possibilities of outer suburbia are less a function of its crammed fullness than its vagueness.
Tan, who has graduated in both Fine Arts and Literature, has a knack with the words, but the brilliance of his work stems really from his mastery of visual story-telling. In Outer Suburbia, there is never a word used where an image would be better suited, and no image inserted at any point in the story that isn’t just right. In distant Rain, a collage of words and small images, is a stuttering, rhythmic story that changes colour with mood, and breaks into a two-page ominous climax just before the words rain down and the cloud dissolves into a pink, quiet epilogue. The entire centre of Grandpa’s Story, the honeymoon adventures of the narrator’s grandparents, are given over to panel-large images, and every turn of the page in Eric was considered in the terms of the accumulation of new information.
Small and unpretentious, Tales from Outer Suburbia is no more a children’s book than an illustrated, say, book of recipes would be. It is a pretty, light and deceivingly innocuous-looking read, equal parts whimsical and wise.
Big Day Out: My Morning Jacket
This year, Australia saw My Morning Jacket for the first time, and although we had heard rumours of their amazingly long live shows- at the 2008 Bonnaroo Music Festival they played a thirty-five song set lasting almost four hours-they were restricted to a sixty minute set at this year’s Big Day Out. They were assigned a more ‘intimate’ stage and were not billed particularly highly, but for many watching them, they were the most anticipated act of the festival.
My Morning Jacket are not well known in Australia, although this has started to change in recent times-Evil Urges, their latest album, gained extensive exposure on Triple J last year. Listeners hearing MMJ for the first time could be excused for categorizing them as just another twenty-something’s indie rock band, before moving on to the next Triple J-recommended boy wonders. The beauty of My Morning Jacket, and one of the driving forces that continues to make them so interesting to listen to, is that this is to undeniably underestimate them. They seem to reinvent themselves with every album, at the same time retaining a distinct sense of loyalty to the music on their previous recordings. There is a clear sense of anticipation whenever news arrives of an upcoming My Morning Jacket album. It’s like we’re children on Christmas Eve, eagerly waiting to see what surprises are wrapped up for us. Unlike Christmas, we kids aren’t disappointed.
MMJ’s set at the Big Day Out included crowd favourites such as Gideon, Off The Record and One Big Holiday, as well as a string of songs from their latest release (Evil Urges). At some points it seemed My Morning Jacket were only interested in playing the crowd favourites, but then their albums are just so consistent I was left wondering: Do they have any songs which aren’t crowd favourites? Surely, this is one of the ingredients which makes their live shows so captivating to an audience for such sustained periods of time. In 2005, My Morning Jacket released the album ‘Z’ to critical acclaim. It is to this album that most people attribute a dramatic shift in the band’s direction-where they adopted a more beat driven electronic sound. Although the album can be seen as an obvious turning point for the band, it would be facile to view this point as the single moment when everything changed. To be fair to the band, and it was quite obvious to avid listeners, they had been consistently developing their sound right from the release of their first album, Tennessee Fire, in 1999. In fact, because it was such a fluid process, it probably went somewhat unnoticed until such a dramatic ingredient as electronic sounds were introduced in the 2005 release. Taking a step back and listening to their live performances, the transition from country rock to out-there psychedelic mayhem is suddenly less jarring and far more appreciated. One element that becomes particularly apparent is MMJ’s uncanny ability to blend the old with the new. Just when you think the band has abandoned everything that worked so well for them on previous recordings, you are quickly reminded of the past, and why this band is so great-the melodic wailing of Jim James, pumped with plenty of reverb, possesses a certain resolute quality that makes it hard to forget that this band hails from deep within the United States (Louisville, Kentucky, to be precise). It’s an important reminder and a point that both links the band to a grand lineage of forebears and differentiates them from the banal rock voices plastered across the FM dial these days.
The ongoing development and maturity of the band makes their live shows such intriguing prospects. While their recordings offer plenty to talk about, it’s their live performances which herald the real conversation. As well as having the pleasure of hearing an incredibly diverse musical repertoire crammed into a matter of hours, it’s the mind boggling amount of energy and intensity the band consistently exerts over a three-hour period-a feat most bands struggle to do for even an hour. Jumping, thrashing, pounding away, all in perfect synchrony, it’s an incredible sight to watch, let alone hear. You feel pitiful as you begin to get tired from merely standing in the crowd before them. While they are clearly masters of the epic live show, this year’s Big Day Out confirmed that they are also well suited to the shorter festival format, and the arrangement of their songs really seemed to captivate new listeners. Their anthemic, almost soothing sounds provided a platform for them to intimately engage with the listener, while the level of noise and complexity grew throughout the songs until you found yourself watching the band jump and thrash around the stage like madmen. It’s a process which is remarkably engaging and keeps you standing there for “just one more song”-an act which ultimately leads to most people staying for the entire set. Of course, it’s not just the arrangement of their songs which makes MMJ such a powerful live package. They are clearly all masters of their instruments, and have an uncanny ability to work together in perfect harmony. Each member seems to be able to predict the direction of the song, adding their own flair just when it is required. This fact has not gone unnoticed and Rolling Stone even included Jim James and Carl Broemel in their list of ‘Top 100 Guitar Gods’.
Unfortunately, at the end of the performance, before anyone had a chance to catch their breath, thank the band, and truly appreciate what they had just experienced, hoards of teenagers-draped in Australian flags, in case we forgot-barged through the crowd to secure a spot for the next band, Cut Copy. But it didn’t matter, the crowd was still riding high from an electrifying performance from what remains, locally at least, a truly under-rated band. You can’t help but feel that their next excursion to Australia will command a much larger following.
Big Day Out: Neil Young
It has been five long years since Neil Young has made an Australian appearance, but it seems it was well worth the wait. Appearing in his first Big Day Out, Young was given an uncharacteristically long ninety minute set list (compared to the standard sixty minute set list usually offered), a privilege not often offered by the Big Day Out organizers.
At 8:30pm Neil Young bounded onto the stage, pounded out the first few chords of Love and Only Love (Ragged Glory, 1990), and it quickly became clear that Young hadn’t lost any of the intensity he was known for decades prior. The anthemic crackling of Hey Hey, My My instantly got the crowd singing along and it was evident that this was going to be a set list heavily weighted towards Neil’s more electrified, rough and ragged persona. The trademark stomp, wailing guitar, and thumping chords presided over the next twenty minutes, while most of the crowd came to terms with hearing and seeing the legendary “Godfather of Grunge” in person for the first time.
The brooding, Cortez The Killer (Decade, 1977), an epic tale which depicts the murderous
downfall of the Aztec Empire (modern day Mexico) by the Spanish conquistador Hernan
Cortez, brought an eerie silence over the crowd. “They came dancing across the water.
Cortez, Cortez”. Again, the trademark stomp and wailing guitars were in force, but this time
it contained a darker, drawn out, somewhat hair raising sensation.
Before the crowd could gather their breath, Young ripped into the crowd favourite
Cinnamon Girl, featured on the record Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere from 1969, Young’s first album with the renowned backing band Crazy Horse.
Disappearing momentarily, Young reappeared at the back of the stage in front of an organ,
harmonica at the ready. Without any backing, Young performed an incredible reworked
version of Mother Earth (Ragged Glory, 1990), a stark reminder of the consequences of
toying with our vulnerable planet, in which organ and harmonica take centre stage in all
their glory.
With harmonica still in tow, Young preceded to showcase a number of his stripped back
numbers which made him a household name decades ago. Backed by his wife Pegi Young
on vocals, and Ben Keith on electric slide guitar, The Needle and The Damage Done,
Heart of Gold, and Old Man all sounded as good as they did on the original recordings some thirty years ago.
Back into full swing, Young and his band broke into a thirteen minute version of Cowgirl in
the Sand (Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, 1969). Young would wield his guitar wildly
for five minutes at a time before quickly breaking back into another short burst of lyrical
respite. An incredible display by any means.
Possibly the highlight of the show, although hard to pick, came towards the end of the set
when Young thumped out the first three chords to the timeless rock anthem Rockin’ in The
Free World (Freedom, 1989), to a massive cheer. Every member of the audience, young
and old, seemed to embrace the opportunity to pump their fist into the air and belt out their
best version along with Neil.
Perhaps the only criticism of the set was that it somewhat resembled the playlist of his
Greatest Hits album released in 2004. This is, however, less a criticism and more an
observation. There’s a reason they’re called his greatest hits. Because, well, they’re pretty damn great. And to Young’s credit, he mixed it up well with lesser known, but equally engaging numbers such as Mother Earth, Just Singing a Song, and Spirit Road. Perhaps it was a tactic employed to capture the younger, less experienced members of the audience. If so, it worked incredibly well. Looking around, it became obvious that in recent years Young’s music has stretched far beyond the recognizable (sometimes aging) band of faithful listeners to include a growing number of newer, younger listeners discovering him for the first time.
Young played out his ninety minute set with a surprisingly well adapted cover of the classic Beatles song A Day in the Life. Played with such intensity that Young physically ripped the strings from his guitar towards the end of the song, he started repeatedly smashing them against his guitar, an exercise which created a deafening roar throughout the arena. It was the end to an incredibly diverse and fulfilling set list from one of rock’s most seasoned veterans.
Set-List:
Love and Only Love
Hey Hey, My My
Everybody Knows This Nowhere
Spirit Road
Cortez The Killer
Cinnamon Girl
Mother Earth
The Needle And The Damage Done
Heart of Gold
Old Man
Cowgirl In The Sand
Just Singing A Song
Rockin’ In The Free World
A Day In The Life
Editor’s Note: the rebellion at the heart of sixties rock lived on in the crowd at Neil Young—the younger fans continued an age-old tradition of lighting up joints, while the balding fans in Polo tops stuck it to the man in the rather more bourgeois manner of surreptitiously videoing the entire concert.
Sleepwalk
Sleepwalk by Adrian Tomine
published by Faber, distributed in Australia by Allen & Unwin
RRP: AUD $29.95
Although Adrian Tomine has been self-, then just -publishing since 1994, his books have only recently become available in Australia. After the international success of his first long graphic novel, Shortcomings, in 2007, Sleepwalk, a collection of his earliest short stories, was finally published in the UK by Faber. The same little (but precious) publication has recently become available in Australia, distributed by Allen & Unwin. With this splendid cartoonist, local publishing has been moving counter-clockwise: while Shortcomings has been around since its international debut, Summer blonde, the middle child, is a near miracle-find.
Pity, because it is Tomine’s short-format work that sets him apart from the usual American indy crowd. While Shortcomings was a self-imposed challenge to move towards a longer narrative, it is also hard not to see it as an attempt to fit better into the current graphic novel market, which prefers a thick book over a vignette any time. Perhaps because it looks more respectably like a literary product. Inaugurations of Tomine’s entry into the indy pantheon were made when it appeared in stores, and I hope he has succeeded, if only to let him write short without worry.
Tomine was a child prodigy of a sort, getting signed by Canadian Drawn & Quarterly soon after publishing the first few issues Optic Nerve, a Xeroxed comic zine, in 1994, while he was a college loner. Sleepwalk collects issues 1-4 (and Summer blonde continues with issues 5-9). These are miniatures of graphic story-telling, often no more than two panels long, and one of the best stories in the book is a mere panel. To call them a slice of life would be deeply misleading: they are more akin to the crumbs falling off the table. In Long Distance, it takes eight frames for a girl to agree to talk dirty on the phone to her boyfriend, on an internship in New York. Layover is four pages of alienated semi-suburbia, as a man misses his flight, and spends 24 hours wandering around the city avoiding his friends and girlfriend. There is not a superfluous line, nor a superfluous word in these stories.
These are the same Gen-Xers that the boys in Fight Club embark on a mission to shake out of existential stupor. What sets Tomine apart from the usual American independent comics, all strongly autobiographical vignettes of mundane, is emotional svelteness. While he looks at the same narcissistic urban loneliness, he avoids both the self-melodramatizing angst (that seems to be the sin of female authors) and the self-loathing grotesque (domain of their male comrades), opting instead for extreme qualificatory minimalism. His cliffhanging, taut understatement has often been compared to Carver, not incorrectly, but I prefer to see it as a particularly Japanese sensibility (Tomine is fourth-generation Japanese-American), an unsentimental yet empathetic observation of the world one finds in Japanese literature across the board, from Bashô to Tanizaki, and in the work of such mangaka as Jiro Taniguchi. Indeed, if there is an essential flaw to Shortcomings, it has much less to do with it being a non-eventful stretched miniature - Banana Yoshimoto pulls that off repeatedly - than in being so atypically jaded, plunging into the overt ugliness that Tomine had hitherto avoided. Sleepwalk brims with ugliness, emotional and geographical, but it is drawn and written with the lightest touch, neither grotesque nor self-deprecating, deep and wide yet suspended mid-air with utmost grace. One can recognize oneself without feeling either condoned or condemned. And most of the time, given Tomine’s precision of observation, it is hard to avoid recognition. In Supermarket, a local favourite, a blind man shops for groceries with the help of a checkout girl he has become friends with. For five panels, they have a light, yet cordial conversation while she finds the items on his list. In the last panel, however, when she passes him by on the street, she pulls her friend closer and goes quiet, avoiding the encounter. End of story.
Ned Beauman nails Tomine’s art in The Guardian, calling it “so simple and realistic that it sometimes resembles an airline safety leaflet.” He works with the precision of a clean line and a metronome, avoiding pictorial drama as thoroughly as he avoids a narrative climax. What normally fails to impress in American comics, the emotional aridity of the art, is here sharpened to its highest effect. The panels are as static as chronic pain, but this is suburban, torporific time we are looking at, a grinding ticking of uneventful nothing, simultaneously awkward, anxious, ordinary, light and neverending. The stuttering fluidity of 3×3 frames is rarely expanded into a deeper breath, a wider horizon. Small frames, clean drawings, light tones, a near-absence of dialogue frame a facial expression here, a half-gesture there, an important word, a lingering uncertainty or a missing conclusion. American independent graphic novelism, in these pages, reaches perfection.
There aren’t many artists today that make quiet resonate so loudly. While waiting for Summer blonde to find its way to the local bookstore, snatch Sleepwalk before it disappears. You would be missing on one of the best publications of 2008.
Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean: Mr. Punch & Signal to Noise
The Comical Tragedy or Tragical Comedy of Mr Punch,
published by Bloomsbury, distributed in Australia by Allen & Unwin.
RRP: $22.95
Signal to Noise,
published by Bloomsbury, distributed in Australia by Allen & Unwin.
RRS: $22.95.
I have always, heretically, valued McKean’s input over Gaiman’s in their joint work. Certainly, Gaiman has forced graphic novelism to take some seminal steps. Yet the exquisite brilliance of these two works, it seems, is in its visual dramaturgy (so to speak). While Gaiman’s Sandman series helped American comics make a gigantic leap (mainstream comics we’re talking here, and thus the mainstream audience, which is to say almost all the audience comics have) by etching an undisputable connection between the superhero genre and the classical epic storytelling, sagas - making Sandman a sheer work of wonder to those of us less immersed in the superhero tradition - it is… it was… a joining of the dots. Sandman did something between the past and the present. Once accomplished, it is not needed anymore.
McKean, on the other hand, whose comic writing came later and out of the work he did with Gaiman, illustrating his mainstream, semi-superhero comics first (Violent Cases in 1987, Black Orchid in 1988), then as the cover artist for Sandman, is charting a future for the medium. While imitators of Gaiman (which is to say, good writers) have grown to be many and numerous, it wouldn’t hurt now to have more imitators of McKean among those we disparagingly call cartoonists. For he lets comics sing in pictures. There are only a few such figures in the graphic-novel world, Danijel Žeželj and Sergio Toppi among them, people who understand that the strength of their medium lies, above all, in the flow within the static image. These artists create works that have little to do with the form, time and space of literature, or cinema. As Fellini wrote, a graphic novel can lend cinema its characters, its stories, even its type of imagination, but it cannot lend it its most secret mode of expressivity, which is the stillness of a pinned butterfly.
Even when collaborating with a writer, like in these two books, McKean’s images are much more than just of second-order importance, illustrations of words. They are the novel itself, they are the frame for the words. It isn’t a consistent effort, there are slippages. To illustrate: in the second chapter of Signal, a frame with traffic lights, followed by an image of the narrator looking at his left hand, is paired up with the words: “At a traffic light I stole a glance at my palm.” This is the unfortunate redundancy of information between the words and the image that often occurs when labour is divided between a writer and an illustrator. At their worst, comics become little pictorial illustrations of not-enough-text-to-fill-a-short-story. And both Signal to Noise and Mr Punch are wrestling with the overwhelming language. But whenever the images prevail - and McKean is a great enough artist to climb on top of Gaiman’s splendid, but dangerously heavy load of words - we get art. We get something composite but seamless, a thing rather a puzzle.
While Gaiman was busy writing literature back into graphic novels (riding the Moore wave), McKean was restoring its visual potential. His art, collages of photography, drawings and found objects - much before computers made it possible not to have to stick real ivy in wooden boxes on two sides of a painting - was ambitious enough within the realm of illustration. In a sequential art that still thinks primarily through the monotone ticking of small, monochrome frames, McKean’s outrageous experiments were met with instant disdain and instant worship from those unused to fine art in their geek world.
However, for all his fancy flourishes of craft, McKean has never been anything less than a stupendously gifted graphic novelist: publicly expressing a predilection for images that tell a story, he understands the rhythms and the narrative time of flowing images. While there are painterly comics that weigh on the page, static like furniture or small elephants, McKean’s art is closer to water: deep, slow but fluid. This slowness is crucial to both Signal and Mr Punch: cleaner, lighter art would be deadly to these meditative, pondering stories.
The other key ingredient is the trust between Gaiman and McKean. In both works, McKean appears to have the last word, freedom to abandon the text when necessary. In the graphic equivalent of Regietheater, a subsumption of language into the visual data, he may paint words over, twist them out of shape, or repeat in a varying rondo until their meaning all but washes away. The beauty of the language is still Gaiman’s; the rhythm, the emotions, the accents and the silences are all in the images.
The Comical Tragedy or Tragical Comedy of Mr. Punch is a journey into the unreliable memory-world of childhood. Our protagonist, the invisible narrator, sent to stay with his grandparents in a seaside town as an eight-year-old, patches the story together with both blurry images and vague emotions he can recall. It is, logically, an enormously unsettling book, wasting no time on smug ironing out of that horrific ontological confusion that childhood is woven from, the anxiety of which adults often learn to forget. Mr. Punch is immersive, rather than explanatory. It is hues of gray and brown, twisted photographs and constantly dissolving faces. It is not only the inconsistency of memory that McKean is illustrating, shifting technique, palette and mood, disfiguring photos into haze and burying drawings under the collages of text, paint, paper scraps. It is the entire sum of unreliable information that a child must negotiate into a worldview: eavesdropped conversations; shifting confessions; coded words; improbable threats (”I’ll take you back and get another little boy!”); absurd jokes (”I had an aunt who claimed she had a tail, beneath her dress”); simplified explanations; fantasies aimed at the generic child and tailor-made lies and, ultimately, blunt commands to remember or forget. Having just witnessed a brawl, the grandfather tells the boy: “You didn’t see anything.”
Not only do characters mutate from photography to line drawing, but the consistency of single panels is constantly broken into compositional asymmetry, colour range and technique abruptly shifting. Even the relationship between the text and the image is fluid: the image may linger while the words tick on, or the two may part ways completely, allowing McKean to meander into surreal games of free association. There is more than a hint of Francis Bacon in the fluid, morphing humans and beasts that populate this phantasmagoria, in which the most solid point of visual reference are Punch and Judy, photographed in all their papier-mache tangibility. The frightening, but predictable series of murders in the puppet show seems to hold the key to all this inexplicable horror that the world brims with, one that Gaiman and McKean never open up to the omniscient adult logic. The result is a powerful, dark and intimate book, en par with Hoffmann’s original Sandman in its deep understanding of the drama of childhood memories. (The comparison doesn’t need to stop there: Hoffmann too played with the abject nature of puppets as the meeting point of adults’ secrets and children’s imagination.) If, as Gestalt psychology ponders, our early memories are what defines us the most, then each one of us carries within a well of fears and questions, a wild storm within.
At the other end of the human condition, Signal to Noise is a small, but weighty story about death, art and the end of the world. One man’s refusal to give up his art while he is dying is paralleled with the exploration of the 999 Anno Domini, prophecies of the apocalypse. Fear, anger. Madness, exhilaration. Resignation, forgetting. Flagellants and cancer cures. Babies are crying, and a drunken cripple is singing in the snow. The narrator notes, The world is always ending for someone. Numerous epilogues and postludes, the neverending unfinishedness of the world, as the artist’s producer is left with the returning trivial questions, just like McKean has been returning to Signal to Noise, expanding and re-writing it for a film that will never happen. For all its apocalypse, Signal is a much calmer, wiser book, not flinching away from difficult conclusions. This makes it immediately less appealing to a casual reader, but how rewarding the effort is! A circular battle between the noise of existence and the clear signal of wisdom, this is a masterpiece of graphic storytelling. As Jonathan Carroll says in the introduction, “experiencing these works is like a month spent in the high alps. You return thinner, stronger.” If Mr Punch is built on Hoffmann, Signal to Noise is not unlike Tarkovsky’s diaries. It is a relentlessly honest book, and there is something deeply truthful in there. Something small, but how many works of art ever achieve this? It left me slow and observant, in a changed world.
It’s the end of the year, and we are all a bit mortal. Not the end of a millenium, but the apocalypse is very much in the air. Signal to Noise is not just a perfect book for this time of the year. It is also, together with Mr Punch, a resonant, immersive voyage through what graphic novels could be. If they are both new editions of old work - Signal was first published in 1992, and Mr Punch in 1995 - I am hoping we will have not recognized a historical breakthrough too late.
Holy Headshot!
Holy Headshot! A Celebration of America’s Undiscovered Talent by Patrick Borelli & Douglas Gorenstein
published by Simon & Schuster
holyheadshot.com
Borelli and Gorenstein’s book compiles some of the strangest, funniest and deeply saddening head shots and résumés circulating casting directors’ offices in the US, but presents it without much of a comment, mute and matter-of-factly. The hopeful, the brave and the impossible is on silent display. On p.94, Nikolay Shimunov’s hand-written résumé gives nothing but a list of his favourite actors, adding: “HOW I CAME acting and my BIO I GIVE you IN PERSON. THANKS FOR YOUR INTERESTING.”
Brian Costello’s head shot on p.66 comes with a long, angst-ridden memoir instead, full of self-loathing narcissism and failed attempts at humility. “During my 29th birthday vacation, I had travel (sic) to California (two week road trip) and visited Universal Studios theme park.” Costello narrates with the absorption of Proust. “I decided to indulge myself and took the VIP tour of the par and studio (sic) (I highly recommend it). While on the tour, several people (guests of the park and employees of the studio) had asked me if I was in the industry. Did I actually have the look that people see that separates those whom are seen on film and television from those who watch?”.
I am tempted to recommend it as a prank Christmas present to all your aspiring actor friends, but the book is more than just an attempt at a mean laugh. As David Cross points in the foreword, jokingly but not without truth, how do you think any of the greats were cast for their roles? This recklessly self-promoting, beautifully bold and profoundly American pursuit of fame is the fuel for an entire dream industry. The aspirationals included all seem genuinely happy for the exposure they have received so far, and have participated in a little talent show to promote the project. This is the sort of uncritical, untroubled self-belief that few nations have in bucketfuls. However, flicking through the endless amateur photography of obese middle-aged women and gun-toting gang boys, noting the glaring absence of upper-middle-class college graduates, one is confronted with a particular kind of working-class delusion, working-class aspiration. It is an uncomfortable read for anyone with a little social conscience, or any experience in upward mobility. Modern-day America, with its blazing, mesmerizing poverty, with its crumbling welfare system, and an entire underclass of excluded, forgotten people, is etched on these pages. All the memories of all the hopeful bullshit résumés one has ever written will be awoken, and the inability to manipulate signs, send the right signals, not being versed in the language of the powerful, is not exactly a laughing matter.
For a little coffee-table book of toilet humour, Holy Headshot is profoundly troubling. It is to Borelli and Gorenstein’s credit that there is little guidance as to how to read it. Laugh at it or get depressed, it will ultimately say more about you than about any of the untroubled self-promoters gracing its pages. Any one of them, for all we know, may be the next big thing.
Letter from Osaka
Yasumasa Morimura. Daughter of Art History (Princess A), 1990.
Self and Other: Portraits from Asia and Europe
National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan
September 30 – November 24, 2008
The major impulse of this exhibition is curiosity. A survey of Asian art depicting Europeans, and vice versa — from 18th century Japanese stencils of Dutch traders, to German attempts to recreate Chinese porcelain figures, to Yoko Yamamoto’s etchings of Warhol in the 1980s — it shows us a tradition of artists aesthetically (or wishfully) interpreting other lands. This is not the domain of racial caricature. It’s more about study as a form of play, sketching the aesthetic and creative uses that might be made of the “other” — speculating about foreigners’ moods and habits, their ways of working and relaxing.
When we look at Japanese portraits, in particular, of 19th century European and American delegates, there appears to be endless conjecture about the way others live — even standing and seating postures are documented with an interested and inventive eye. There is also, perhaps, a kind of glamour attached to the way the other conducts himself in private — how he regards himself in the mirror, the poses he inhabits in his bedroom and study. These are moments probably not witnessed, but considered at length, in a series of “lifelike” depictions of foreigners at night, coping with different climate conditions, the playing habits of their children.
We see a range of early images where the foreigner is depicted firmly within the frame and conventions of a long pictorial tradition — often to the extent of implicating him in what looks, to a modern viewer, like a drag pageant or pastiche. A 17th century Mughal picture of a “European woman drinking wine” is done in the style of an Indian ruler’s portrait, and the model is “European” only in the precise details of her carriage, and the presentation of her bosom. Here, the pose and essence of the other has been refined, and pantomimed — stylistically appropriated in a way which now seems postmodern. In Yokohama etchings from the 1860s, American merchants often resemble Japanese dowagers in drag. If the modern crisis of perception has been diagnosed as a lack of willingness to identify with the other, these pictures show the effects of too much identification. Most of the artists in this exhibition depict other as self, them as us — but does this indicate a warm sense of inclusion, or an inability to see the other along (literally) certain lines?
These sudden reversals of perception occur throughout the show — particularly with the Dutch paintings of 19th century Asia, which display, in near-photographic quality, scenes of Japanese daily life we’ve hitherto seen only as line drawings (and which we might have imagined occurring on a two-dimensional plane.) Surprisingly, in the majority of curated images, the “other” is not cruelly exposed or flattened, but allotted significant mental space: often depicted in study and repose, with a careful approximation of stance reflecting a scholarly interest in reproduction. However, this level of attention tends to expose hierarchies in the observed culture. “Chinese and Dutchman”, a scroll by the 19th century Japanese artist Keiga Kawahara dramatises the master-servant relations of two cultures, showing a Chinese merchant and his manservant juxtaposed with a Dutchman followed by his Indian attendant, who looks warily outward, either wistful or fatigued.
Arguably, Japan has never stopped speculating about the potential uses of the other, given that interesting and “improved” takes on Englishness and Francophilia are everywhere to be seen in modern Tokyo, from department-store design, to the pageants of blonde male impersonators in takarazuka, to the daily feast of drawing, graphic invention and animation one gets at bus stops, convenience stores, public toilets, pavements - any surface which can be engraved with a pastiche of Euro-style.
The show’s last section leads us into a future where we might expect that ethnicities have been thoroughly and indistinguishably swirled — so that all cultural artefacts exist on the one plane, like the quotes in Tarantino’s genre-hopping films. However, according to the curators’ statement, the effect of contact with the other is that “sometimes people’s identity, that is, their sense of belonging to a particular region or culture falters, sometimes, by contrast, it is strengthened.” Until now, the surprise and pleasure of this exhibition has been the naturalness of trans-cultural immersion: the idea that drifting into another head, body or landscape is something one might do imperceptibly. This section represents something of a return to order, in that cultural transgression is seen as a form of cosplay, with borders more clearly defined than ever. The prime example of this is Yasumasa Morimura’s Daughter of Art History, Princess A (1990), in which a rather puffy and awkward Japanese head sits on top of a distinguished pose of European royalty. It’s a work designed to disconnect the dreamer from his or her imagination, pointing up the incongruity of one’s identification with an ill-fitting and unsuitable set of values.
Much more enjoyable, but in a similar vein, is the video shown in the final room, Cao Fei’s Cosplayers (2004). It’s a short work Jacques Demy would have loved; a group of young people escape the mundane by inventing a wondrous world where they dress as multi-cultural punk warriors and act out exciting scenarios. As they prepare for these night events, we see them alongside a deadpan cast of co-workers, parents and bystanders, who look on impassively as the young heroes eat, text, or wear disaffected expressions of cool. References might be the X-Men trilogy and Bill Mousoulis’ A Nocturne, in relation to the theme of warriors in a workaday world. But are these fantasies seen as adolescent and indulged, or real and necessary? Cao gratifies her protagonists by granting them the ambience they require, and the editing moves to support it — but we are also invited to laugh at the intensity of their absorption, and the absurdity of losing oneself in a trans-cultural fantasy. However, surely one of the points of this exhibition is to show how easily and spontaneously the mind builds mythologies from contact with the new. Right now, a single-note portrait may be the strangest object to encounter of all.
The Band’s Visit
The Band’s Visit begins with a gently absurd level of theatricality. Not the kind of camp histrionics that Baz Luhrmann starts his movies with, but rather the stylised simplicity of Akira Kurosawa or Roy Andersson. In the opening shots, cleaners at the airport walk across the frame from edge to edge, creating an implicit proscenium arch, and the palette is chilled to a pale blue that matches the uniforms of the Alexandria Ceremonial Orchestra, the eponymous musical outfit, who have travelled from Egypt to Israel to perform at the inauguration of an Arab Culture Centre.
The band is led by the pursed lips and imposing nose of Tawfiq Zacharya (Sasson Gabai), whose pride is made manifest in his moustache. With the most elementary of phonetic mistakes, Tawfiq and his orchestra end up in one of those villages of parched concrete banality that dot the deserts from Tripoli to Samarkand. There is nothing for the band to do but idle away the hours until the next bus; a conceit that gives writer-director Eran Kolirin the opportunity to patiently play with a microcosm of Arab-Israeli relations.
In an interview included on this edition of the DVD, Kolirin explains that the aesthetic of the film emerged from an imagined moment of a uniformed, disciplined Arab man singing a plangent song, unaccompanied by instruments or fanfare — a carapace surrounding a palpitating soul. It is a stirring image and one that has inspired a beautifully crafted and tender film whose humour and strict cinematic vocabulary save it from any charge of self-indulgence or cute exoticism.