Doug Lang's blog

Memory pictures

I’ve always loved the many aspects of photography but I am especially interested in its relation to memory.

A photograph remains as is.
Or, does it?

We do know now that memories degrade, that when we remember something repeatedly, the most recent memory is actually a memory of the second most recent memory, not a memory of the actual source event. It’s like a Xerox of a Xerox. 

Self-portrait in a bathroom mirror

I remember a day I spent at Swansea beach with Cynthia Hudson in January 1964.  There were these large, sculptural rows of bleached driftwood and I took many photographs of Cynthia on the beach with and without the driftwood, with her camera. My memory of that day is the memory of those black and white photographs.  I was 22 years old. On that day the year 1984 was not only the name of Orwell’s vision but a year in the unimaginable future, just to give you an idea of how long ago it was. I left the Cynthia photographs in a trunk in London when I first came to DC in April 1973. They are long gone. In February 1999 there was a fire at my apartment at The Albemarle on Connecticut Avenue in which I lost most of the photographs I owned. They were close to where the fire started near my desk in my study-bedroom and they were destroyed or lost along with much of 30 years worth of work, in hard copies and on two computers, and a lot else besides. Fortunately, there was a bunch of framed photographs in the kitchen and in the living room, which survived. Some of my favorite photographs had been on the wall around my desk, including my all-time favorite photograph of myself -- they were all lost.

A violinist named Martha Edwards took that on the island of Paros in 1971 -- it showed me sitting with a ten-year-old girl named Jennifer Packer, the daughter of my friend Toni Packer. There was a whole world of memory in that photograph and now it is gone forever. I still have the memory of the photograph and it’s much stronger than my memory of the day it was taken. I was crazy about Toni and there was something special in the bond between Jennifer and me. Everyone knew it and everyone commented on how satisfied we both looked sitting on a whitewashed stone bench under the Aegean sun in that photograph..  “Everyone” being the community of (mainly American) artists and writers connected to the Aegean School of Fine Arts. When I looked at that photograph on the wall behind my desk at the Albemarle, I could imagine the massive night sky over Paros so crowded with stars, so close it seemed, it seemed you could touch them. There was a tremendous sense of peace under that sky. And I could remember my connection with Toni and Jennifer as my life among those galaxies and constellations, in that peace, not as a fantasy of domestic (or sexual) life, but as something that transcended all of that,

I believe that a photograph is an “object” made of light. But a photograph has the potential to “document” much more than the physical world; photographs have that potential for mystery and for magic.  

There’s a scene in a wonderful film called Queen Christina in which Greta Garbo is in a bedroom at an inn with her lover John Gilbert. She rushes around the room, touching everything, in attempt to memorize the room and its emotional, sexual, and spiritual contents via sensory perception, I feel like a modest version of Greta when I go about with my camera.

Taking pictures

I've always loved taking pictures, I've always loved photography. I love light. I love the tangible world. I love the relationship of photography to memory. I bought my Cannon Power Shot SD750 because I had always wanted to own a camera. Also, I thought that it would be a pleasure and fun to share taking photographs with Sandra, a wonderful photographer who had not yet crossed the digital threshold. I wanted to cross it with her. I am totally sympathetic to old school photography and the dilemmas caused by the phenomenon of digital photography, but I also appreciate the immediacy of digital photography, especially in relation to the internet.

And it has been so fun. I found myself using Facebook photo albums as a kind of journal. For someone with an intense and elaborate internal life, it’s a joy to focus so much on the external world. I find myself uninhibited by the fear of taking bad pictures, or being cheesy or arty or whatever. My approach is completely naive, although I think that I do have a pretty good eye. Speaking of skills, here's an anecdote.

While I served as interim dean at the Corcoran (1987-1988), I relieved the concentration of administrative work by taking a photography course with my friend and colleague Paul Kennedy, a superb teacher. Another friend and colleague, Bob Epstein was kind enough to loan me one of his cameras for the duration. It didn't go smoothly, not entirely. Paul told me that I had not only made just about every mistake imaginable (such as opening a box of paper in a lighted room), but I’d come up with a few no one else had ever even though of. What’s more, the course was titled Beginning Photography, but I was the only beginner in the class. Everyone else was there (mostly) for darkroom access and (also) to get guidance from Paul. So, whenever I asked dumbass beginner questions, the rest of the class got really pissed. I was wasting their time. My critiques were savage. I made some fairly appealing prints, I thought. They did not agree. One guy virtually foamed at the mouth because of the way I’d used a telephoto lens. He told me I was cheating. I was saved by administrative predicaments requiring my attention and and I quit the course with a couple weeks left.  

So, after having a wonderful time with my Power Shot, I began to think about how I could improve my photographic acumen, Take a course? I didn’t think so. Corrective eye surgery? Nah, And so on. And then I got it: I should buy a better camera, which was how I came to own my Leica C-Lux 3.

And so my journal continues, and I’ve discovered that the process has seriously affected the way I see. I now see pictures, just the same way language I hear (or read) leads to poems, and the way stories I used to catch or imagine lead to fiction. I’m grateful to the digital era for making everything so much easier (the dark room was the worst aspect of my brilliant photography career in the late 1980s). And I’m very happy with my journal. You just don't know.

The Morriston Orpheus Choir

Cardiff

The Morriston Orpheus Choir
The Sounds of Cardiff Arms Park
1999

If you had told me, say, forty years ago, that I would not only own this recording, but would listen to it and be moved by it, I would have reacted with derision and/or hostility, because I would have regarded the proposition as ridiculous and/or insulting.  It’s a long way from Thelonious Monk, man.  It’s a long way from Jerry Lee Lewis, too.

Wales is known as The Land of Song.  Male voice choirs abound there.  When I was a kid in the 1940s, people sang everywhere and anywhere a group of more than a handful of people were gathered, on the bus, in the pub, all over the place, including any social gathering at all.  I wonder how many times I heard “Knees Up Mother Brown” and “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain When She Comes” and “Roll Me Over” and “If You Were the Only Girl in the World” and “We’ll Meet Again.”  When I was a teenager, the pubs were filled with sentimental “old-timers” (anyone over thirty) having a sing-along.  It represented everything that was not cool.  Add to that the provincialism and narrow-mindedness typical of Welsh culture (as I saw it back then), and the Welsh male voice choir was even less attractive than the singing boozers.  

The Sounds of Cardiff Arms Park adds yet another dimension: the culture of rugby football.  In my life, rugby was the game of the ruling class, the playing fields of Eton, and in Wales the province of everything I wished to escape, thundering force combined with blind patriotism and rigid conformity.  

So, you can see why I would rush out and buy a CD of a Welsh male voice choir singing songs associated with the most famous rugby stadium in Wales. Not just a Welsh male voice choir, but The Morriston Orpheus Choir, the most famous of them all.  Morriston is a village halfway between Swansea and Clydach, the place of my birth.  That is to say, about three miles south-west of Swansea. “Morriston was initially constructed for the workers of the tin-plate and copper industries that built up along the banks of the River Tawe in the 18th Century, and by the 19th Century it was the tin-plate capital of the world.” (Wikipedia)  It is also famous for its hospital.

The distances of time and place can change many things.  I never thought of myself as Welsh until my mother, my sister and I moved to Eastbourne on the south coast of England in 1963, where we were treated like lepers because of our accents.  I lasted two months there, before I left Sussex and moved back to Swansea.  Now, three thousand miles and half a lifetime away, the sound of a male voice choir singing “Myfanwy” or “Cwm Rhonda” “We'll Keep A Welcome in the Hillsides” or “Calon Lan” or “Sospan Fach” or “Land of My Fathers” brings tears to my eyes automatically.  And moves me, more deeply than I care to dwell on.  Those songs are all on this recording.  There is a Welsh word, “hwyl” – pronounced huyl.  The dictionary definition is “good spirit or enthusiasm” but every Welsh person knows that it is something closer to “soul” or to the Spanish “duende.”  This music has it, mixed in with pride and a kind of generic yearning.  I love these songs now.  In fact, I’ve always loved “Myfanwy.”  Myfanwy is a Welsh woman’s name, and the name of a famous figure in Welsh mythology, Myfanwy of Dinas Bran.

Myfanwy

But the song “Myfanwy” (pronounced Mo-van-oy) is a simple love song.

Welsh lyrics:
   
Pa ham mae dicter, O Myfanwy,
Yn llenwi'th lygaid duon ddi?
A'th ruddiau tirion, O Myfanwy,
Heb wrido wrth fy ngweled i?
Pa le mae'r wen oedd ar dy wefus
Fu'n cynnau 'nghariad ffyddlon ffol?
Pa le mae sain dy eiriau melys,
Fu'n denu'n nghalon ar dy ôl?

2. Pa beth a wneuthym, O Myfanwy,
I haeddu gwg dy ddwyrudd hardd?
Ai chwarae oeddit, O Myfanwy
 thanau euraidd serch dy fardd?
Wyt eiddo im drwy gywir amod
Ai gormod cadw'th air i mi?
Ni cheisiaf fyth mo'th law, Myfanwy,
Heb gael dy galon gyda hi.

3. Myfanwy boed yr holl o'th fywyd
Dan heulwen disglair canol dydd.
A boed i rosyn gwridog ienctid
I ddawnsio ganmlwydd ar dy rudd.
Aug hofiar oll o'th add ewidion
A wnest i rywun, 'ngeneth ddel,
A rho dy law, Myfanwy dirion
I ddim ond dweud y gair "Ffarwel".
   
English lyrics:

Why is it anger, O Myfanwy,
That fills your eyes so dark and clear?
Your gentle cheeks, O sweet Myfanwy,
Why blush they not when I draw near?
Where is the smile that once most tender
Kindled my love so fond, so true?
Where is the sound of your sweet words,
That drew my heart to follow you?

2. What have I done, O my Myfanwy,
To earn your frown? What is my blame?
Was it just play, my sweet Myfanwy,
To set your poet's love aflame?
You truly once to me were promised,
Is it too much to keep your part?
I wish no more your hand, Myfanwy,
If I no longer have your heart.

3. Myfanwy, may you spend your lifetime
Beneath the midday sunshine's glow,
And on your cheeks O may the roses
Dance for a hundred years or so.
Forget now all the words of promise
You made to one who loved you well,
Give me your hand, my sweet Myfanwy,
But one last time, to say "farewell".

Male voice choirs (and rugby crowds) have always had a diverse repertpoire, and that aspect is represented here, also, with the inevitable “Danny Boy” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” as well as the bizarre Tom Jones hit song, “Delilah” and a very nice version of the Maori song turned Bing Crosby classic, “Now is the Hour.”  The latter was also one of those songs that I heard repeatedly when I was a kid, a song sung by people who had direct experience of the sentiments the song expressed.  Overall, this CD kills me, and it kills me that it kills me, but I love it, except for the parts I don’t love.
 

Night Music of West Sumatra

Night Music

Night Music of West Sumatra (Music of Indonesia Vol. 6)
Smithsonian Folkways
1994

Terry Winch gave me this great CD.  I'd listened to music from Bali and Java, but I was unfamiliar with the music of West Sumatra.  I still have not learned that much, aside from listenting to this recording.

Here is an excerpt from Philip Yampolsky's introduction to the acclaimed 20-CD series of Indonesian music issued by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings

Indonesia's music is as diverse as its people. Best known abroad are the Javanese and Balinese orchestras generally called gamelans, which consist of gongs and other struck metal instruments, but gamelans are only one aspect of a much larger musical universe. Solo and group singing and solo instrumental music (typically played on the flute, shawm, plucked lute, bowed lute, plucked zither, or xylophone) are found everywhere, as are ensembles of mixed instruments, and ensembles dominated by instruments of a single type--especially flutes, drums, xylophones, zithers, or gongs.

And here are two statements from the Amazon.com page for this CD.  First, a general overview:

This highly intimate chamber music is performed with only one or two singers and a single accompanying flute or bowed lute. These 1990–1992 recordings focus on one of the richest traditions of the performing arts found in Indonesia.

And this from an online reviewer, "Music Lover" --

I have all the CDs of this series and this is one of the best. As the title suggests, night music, it is very focused, even if it uses a very restricted range of elements. As you can hear in the sound selections, they have a refined sense of pitch in a microtonal domain.

I had played this recording a couple of times when I first got it.  I played it again in order to write about it, two weeks ago, and found myself playing it repeatedly.  The reviewer is correct.  This is very intimate music, intimate and not quite hypnotic, but compelling in a very low-key way.  You can hear traces of Indian music in it, but it has its own distinct musical ambience.   I don't find it at all "exotic"  -- it has an immediacy that  is very gratifying.

Sal Mosca

Sal Mosca

I just found out that Sal Mosca died.  He was a singular modern jazz pianist, even though he was obviously a disciple of the legendary Lennie Tristano.  If you don't know his work, listen to the 1971 Lee Konitz recording, Spirits, with Ron Carter on bass and Mousie Alexander on drums. It's fabulous music, clean as air (used to be).
I was looking for material about the poet F.T. Prince, and saw Mosca's name on a list of obituaries at The Guardian.  Here's the obit:

Richard Williams
Thursday August 9, 2007
The Guardian

The chances of finding the jazz pianist Sal Mosca, who has died from the effects of emphysema at the age of 80, playing in a New York club some night in his seven-decade professional career must have been infinitesimal, given the long absences because of his preference for private practice over public performance. There he was, however, one night in November 1981, co-leading a quartet at the Village Vanguard on Seventh Avenue with the tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh, another fugitive figure and fellow graduate of the informal school of jazz named after the blind pianist and teacher Lennie Tristano.

The music they created that night, like everything they ever played, bore Tristano's hallmark: an air of detachment that derived from the intensity of their involvement in their source material. Mosca was among the most gifted of those acolytes who, even in unbuttoned surroundings, continued to devote themselves to an austere investigation of the inner workings of chord sequences borrowed from standard Broadway tunes, rather than go for the cheap emotional outreach.

Mosca, born to first-generation Italian immigrants in Mount Vernon, New York State, was fascinated in boyhood with the sounds from the household pianola and was soon attracted to the music of such early jazz pianists as James P Johnson and Fats Waller. At 12 he began formal lessons at the keyboard; three years later he played in local nightclubs, a moustache disguising his age.

After Mosca's two years of wartime service in an army band ended in 1946, the GI bill enabled him to enrol at the New York College of Music, where he studied classical composition by day while listening to such giants as Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum in the clubs of 52nd Street at night. Soon he met Tristano, a controversial but magnetic figure who, over the next eight years of study, shaped his destiny.

His fellow pupils included Marsh and the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, and it was with these two distinctive young musicians that Mosca made his first recordings in 1949, the powerful influence of Tristano on his own playing apparent on pieces such as Marshmallow and Tautology. By 1957, on a Konitz album titled Very Cool, his real originality emerged in a series of short solos full of startlingly asymmetrical phrase-shapes, mixing close-voiced chordal passages with agile single-note lines that seemed to double back on themselves.

Konitz and Marsh remained his most frequent musical companions and a 1971 recording with Konitz, titled Spirits, contains several duets that demonstrate how adventurously the pianist had developed away from his model. He also made a few poorly distributed solo records, including A Concert, documenting a 1979 recital in New York and displaying the full extent of his technical resource and emotional rigour.

Like his mentor, Mosca spent most of his career shunning the public gaze. Instead he concentrated on practising and on passing on his knowledge to younger musicians at his home in Mount Vernon, where he adapted Tristano's specialised teaching methods.

He is survived by a daughter, two sons, and many pupils. Among these in the mid-1950s was a 13-year-old, Bob Gaudio, from New Jersey. For the first few weeks of tuition, Gaudio was required to do nothing but learn to scat-sing Louis Armstrong solos. Then he was invited to play classical pieces on a piano with weighted keys, to help develop speed and dexterity. Three years later Gaudio went on to join three other Italian-Americans, including the lead singer Frankie Valli, in a doo-wop group called the Four Seasons, for whom he co-wrote a string of million-selling hits. Then he gave Mosca the most unexpected, and incongruous, credit of his career on the cover of the Four Seasons' 1969 post-Sgt Pepper concept album, Genuine Imitation Life Gazette. "Salvatore Mosca: Private instructions," it said.

One pupil had not forgotten. Nor did anyone lucky enough to have witnessed his artistry one random night in Greenwich Village, more than a quarter of a century ago.

· Salvatore Joseph Mosca, pianist and teacher, born April 27 1927; died July 28 2007

Rembetica

Rembetica

Rembetica: Historic Urban Folk Songs From Greece
Rounder Select
1992

Certain kinds of Greek folk music remind me very much of traditional Irish music, that driving, lilting, tilting, intoxicating thing, that groove, that brings out my deranged inner Celt.  And this is that kind of Greek music.  My friend Tom Mandel gave me this disc a few years ago. Thanks again, Tom. 

Here is travel writer Matt Barrett:

“Rembetika music is the music of the Greek Underground. It originated in the hashish dens of Pireaus and Thessaloniki around the turn of the 20th century and was influenced by oriental elements that came with the forced immigration of 2 million Greek refugees from Asia Minor. It gave way to Greek Popular Music (“Laika” in Greek) which used the same instruments in similar ways during the early 1950s.”

It’s clear that Greek folk music got its singy-singy bits from Europe (esp. harmony vocals), and its dancy-dancy bits from the East (not surprisingly, after 400 years of Turkish occupation).  Solo vocals do have that trance inducing eroticism found in Eastern music.

L. H. Kritikos has a good, informative site, here:

http://home.earthlink.net/~lkritikos/index1.html

The recordings on this disc were made between 1906 and 1946, although most of them were made in the 1930s.  They are unusually vivid for their vintage.  The opening track, “Sousta politiki” by Adonis Dalgas, just takes right off.  Rolling accordian, Eastern-bluesy vocal. It’s amazingly uplifting.  Rembetica, like jazz and blues, has that compelling blend of sorrow and joy.  Roza Eskenazy’s “Ime prezakias --  tsifte telli” starts with Dimitrios Semsis, the "best violin in the Balkans" and then in comes “the great lady of Smyrna,” and it’s all atmosphere, and very dancy-dancy, amazing vocal, all ecstatic gravita.

Rosa Eskenazi

“Taxim – zeimbekiko” by Markos Vamvakaris has some fabulous guitar and baglamas play – a baglamas is a Turkish stringed instrument, not unlike the bouzouki.  There’s a good deal of magnificent playing on this disc, superb harmony and solo vocals.  I must mention Rita Abatzi, who was Roza Eskenazy’s big rival, it seems.  She, too, has a zeimbekiko (a typical Rembetika dance, Turkish influence).  Rita’s voice is limited, but her singing is not.  Her “O psilos” is another great track.

Rita Abatzi

“Taxim – zeimbekiko” by Markos Vamvakaris has some fabulous guitar and baglamas play – a baglamas is a Turkish stringed instrument, not unlike the bouzouki.  There’s a good deal of magnificent playing on this disc, superb harmony and solo vocals.  I must mention Rita Abatzi, who was Roza Eskenazy’s big rival, it seems.  She, too, has a zeimbekiko (a typical Rembetika dance, Turkish influence).  Rita’s voice is limited, but her singing is not.  Her “O psilos” is another great track.

I lived on the island of Paros for three months in 1968, then most of 1969, and was back again for a couple of months in 1971.  Paros was very different then than it is now, based on what I’ve heard.  There were only two cars on the island (both taxicabs).  There was no paved road around the island. And the port, Parikia was the only one of its four towns with any life in it. It was a tourist spot, mostly for mainland Greeks, who came to visit the Church of a 100 doors (which had 99 doors).  Otherwise, there were some Americans, Brits and Germans, mostly. The Americans tried to speak the language, at least.  The Brits were appalling, speaking more loudly and slowly in English to waiters who understood only Greek, and did not understand, despite the growing emphasis and impatience.  There were a couple of modest high-rise hotels, nothing much really.  And the ferry boat, the Elle, came once a day.  Television appeared on the island during my second stint there. Now, there’s a heliport, a paved road, lots of cars, rows of high-rise hotels along the shore, and masses of international tourists. I was happy to learn that the Aegean School of Fine Arts, an American-based art college where I taught creative writing, still exists there. 

When I lived on Paros, there were feast days about two or three times a week, seemed like, and there was always music. One of my all-time records is a 45rpm disc by Irini Konitopoulou, “I’m Going Back to Paros.”  She came to Paros and performed while I was there. Awesome singer.  Very different than the popular Greek music of the day, which I liked well enough, but nowhere near as much – the Mikis Theodorakis / Zorba kind of thing.  I guess that was more “Laika.” The music on Rembetica reminds me of Irini, very much.  There is a Women of Rembetica disc, also.

Photographs, Paros, 1968:

Paros1

Paros2

Paros3

Sirena Recorder Quartet

Sitting Ducks

Sirena Recorder Quartet
Sitting Ducks
BIS 2000

How many recordings of serial music by recorder quartets do you own? Exactly. It's either none, or this one.

This one consists of:
Karina Helene Jensen, soprano, alto, tenor and bass recorders
Helle Nielsen, soprano, alto, tenor and bass recorders
Marit Ernst, soprano, alto, tenor, bass and C bass recorders
Pia Loman, sopranino, soprano, alto, tenor and bass recorders

They formed an ensemble at the Carl Nielsen Academy of Music in Odense, to perform both newly written compositions and early music. Sitting Ducks is all new stuff, some of it composed for this quartet specifically. There are ten compositions by five composers on this disc, the oldest of whom was born in 1930, the youngest in 1957.

Four of the compositions are by Ryohei Hirose (b. 1930), including the serial piece, Lamentation, and two others that are more archaic sounding, and very pretty.  My favorite is the title piece, by Chiel Meijering (b. 1954), a brilliant  piece of minimalism and lots of fun. The playing is superb throughout the recording, with wonderful intonation and great,  playful creativity with timbre.

It is music that requires attention, preferably through repeated listening.  It does not do well as background music. although, when I was playing the disc after I had just acquired it, five or six years ago, I was at my computer, typing, and I thought there must be a truck backing up right under my window (that beep beep beep beep), but, no… it was Sirena, having fun.

Sirena

Antigoni Goni

Antigoni Goni
Laureate Series, Guitar
Naxos 1997

Antigoni Goni

For those who like to listen to classical guitar music, this is a first rate recording. Goni manages the vital issue of repertoire well. She has work by five modern composers. And her playing is dazzling without being flashy – superb phrasing, gorgeous tone.

Carlo Domeniconi’s Koyunbaba suite is pretty hypnotic.  Its Turkish influence is evident throughout.  I was unfamiliar with this Italian composer, and would like to hear more of his work.

Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo is famous for his Concierto de Aranjuez, and his Invocacion y Danza from Hommage a Manuel de Falla has much as of the same feel as the concierto.

Federico Mompou has been spoken of as the Spanish Satie in relation to his piano music, not inaccurately, since he was very much influenced by the French composer.  Mompou’s piano music is even more minimalist than Satie’s, and very meditative. There’s an excellent 1993 ECM recording by Herbert Henck of his Música Callada Book 1-4.  His Suite compostelana on this CD is similar to his piano music, very compressed and subtle.

I was very glad that Goni included Agustín Barrios Mangoré’s Un sueno en la floresta. This virtuoso guitarist and wonderful composer was a contemporary of Segovia, and he is reputed to have made the first ever recording of classical guitar music. Barrios was greatly influenced by the folk music of his native Paraguay. Un sueno en la floresta is, “…a spell-binding exercise in tremolo, utterly idiomatic to the guitar, as are all of Barrios’ works.” The Naxos liner notes say it much more precisely than I could.  Barrios was a poet, also.  Viva Barrios!

Barrios

The widely admired Cuban composer Leo Brouwer is known for using indeterminacy as part of his compositional methodology, and his El decamerón negro does have a kind of edgy feel to it.  Brouwer's influences include Messiaen, Bartok, Shostakovich, and Stravinsky. Like a good amount of the music on this disc, El decamerón negro suite is kind of brooding.  No speedmetal here, sweetheart, but plenty of intensity.

My Guitar


There is a deep mystery in your sonorous

Garden heart, guitar of mine,

You enjoy suffering, and in your joy

Ecstasies of passion, teardrops of crying.

 

The sweet Moor gave you your heart,

The Iberian gave you your untamed soul

And Virgin America, you might say,

Put in you, because of its love, all the treasure.

 

And so on your supreme strings

That vibrate with an almost human accent

There is, at times, your voice, like a lament.

 

As a sigh from your lonely heart

In whose sad and mystical plan

Sentiment forever flourishes.

                 
                                            Agustin Barrios Mangoré

 

Wolfgang Tillmans

Wolfgang Tillmans

Tillmans

at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Independence Avenue at Seventh Street SW
(Metro: L'Enfant Plaza)
Through August 12
Open daily 10 to 5:30.

Wolfgang Tillmans achieves two things with this exhibition.  He subverts the hierarchical value system of (fine art) photography; and he subverts the standard functions of museum exhibition and museum exhibition viewing.  On July 6, Smithsonian curator Merry Foresta gave a precise, informative and provocative talk about this show, the fulcrum of which was an argument about the concept of the archive, and how this was relevant to the exhibition.  My simplification of this would be that the contents of a photography archive depend on the input of a viewer for meaning and for cultural significance to be established.  This is somewhat like the idea of negotiation in literary reception theory, formulated by Hans-Robert Jauss, in which the meaning of a text is  determined according to the individual’s set of life experiences and cultural background. This theory was to some degree an amplification of Hans-Georg Gadamer idea of a “fusion of horizons” in which the reader takes measure of the text’s history by reconciling it with their own history.  What reception theory achieved was the displacement of a concern with the author’s intention by a concern with the activity between reader and text as a way of establishing meaning.  What Merry Foresta achieved in her talk was recognition of the photographer’s intention being based on these ideas, directly or not.  The archive, i.e.,  the entire exhibition, or, archives (each of the ten separate galleries housing the exhibition on the second floor of the Hirshhorn), form a kind of neutralization of both standard museum function (instruction, authentication), and the viewer’s practice (relatively passive reception).   Thus, the fusion of horizons is activated.  The beauty of Foresta’s talk was that it jump-started the processes of appreciation in a very particular manner.

My immediate responses to the show, before hearing Foresta’s talk, were all about how anti-museum the show was, and, in some ways, anti-photography.  The latter, insofar as it clearly challenged the hegemony of aesthetic purity in photography; the former, insofar as it ignored the standards of exhibition.  It was a thrilling thing to see.  Most of the photographs were unframed and taped to the wall.  Many of them were snapshots (size and style).  Many of them were the size of postcards.  Some were massive blowups.  Placement was erratic, and some were too high on the wall to be seen clearly.  One room was full of tables with photographs and texts concerning war, poverty, AIDS, homophobia and other social issues.  This room was called the “Truth Study Center” – and its impact managed to be both ironic and passionate at the same time.  Another room was full of blank photographic paper (or, photographs of blank photographic paper), including a huge grid of dark blue and black vertical rectangles, called “Memorial for the Victims of Organized Religions".  

After hearing Merry Foresta’s talk, it was much easier to appreciate what kind of “fusion of horizons” was possible in viewing the Tillmans exhibition.  Most especially, it was feasible to consider the limits of one’s own cultural background as they were being challenged by Tillmans.  Also, it was possible in my case to see how some of my own biases were being validated.  It seemed to me that the Tillmans show was the first I’d seen that clearly belonged to the age of the Internet, an age in which all information was made equal, in some respects, almost in the manner described by a famous American motto, “God made men and women, Samuel Colt made them equal.”  In terms of photography, this made me think about John Berger distinction regarding the uses of photography
(in About Looking), “…photographs which belong to private experience and those which are used publicly."  I wonder what Berger thinks about Flickr and other online photo sharing.  Anyhow, issues concerning public and private, high art and mass art and not-art all came to mind.  The dominance of a high art mentality in fine art photography came to mind.  But, yo, we were in the archive now.  No high art, no mass art, no not-art.  Not yet.  My own bias was not anti-high art, but anti-high art exclusivity, anti-high art contempt for mass art.  This has been complicated in recent times by one’s having been beaten over the head by POPULAR CULTURE, with the fetishization of everything from film noir to Britney’s knickers.  Which brings us to Kant.

In a comment on a recent post at Mark Wallace’s Thinking Again, David Michael Wolach said, ”There is a Kantian argument here, that is: poems needn’t justify being—they are ends not means.”  The question arising in the archive is, if the photographs are the ends, how is that end arrived at? And, how many ends does it consist of?  I am a populist by nature and inclination, and the bias that was validated in the archive for me was one that was against the prescribed limitations to what might be experienced looking at photographs.  In a subtle way, Merry Foresta’s real impact was to give us viewers permission to think, to really think for ourselves.  Not a popular activity, like driving, or eating.  No, an unpopular activity, like listening.   

OK, much of this is not really that new, maybe.  I’m no expert on photography, by any means.  I’ve looked a lot and I’ve read some.  And I am intensely attached to the work of some photographers, such as Andre Kertesz, Sylvia Plachy, Steve Szabo, Francesca Woodman, Sandra Rottmann and Marcus Haydock.  But I am vastly ignorant concerning the critical history of photography and the contemporary issues involved.  And I don’t know that much about Gadamer and Jauss, either.  I’ve owned books by both of them, but I’ve never read them, at least not thoroughly – just enough to get some ideas, which I may well have misunderstood.  As a matter of fact, I don’t want to be an expert on anything.  I’ve worked in academia for almost four decades, in Wales, in Greece, and here, and I have no interest in becoming an academic.  Academia is about territory, and that’s just not my bag, man, you dig?  It’s not that I don’t love academia, I do, truly. All those scholars, sussing stuff out and all.  Que wow.  Their work is an endless source of pleasure and enlightenment.  And I don’t mean to apologize for my dumb ass, either, you dig.

Latido Negro

Latido Negro: Perú’s African Beat
Directed by Rafael Santa Cruz
Gala Teatro Hispano
June 7 – July 1, 2007

July 1st, Sandra and I went to the Gala Theatre on 14th Street to see the last performance of this show, which was kind of a capsule history of Afro-Peruvian music and dance. We had excellent seats, right in the front row. The music and dance components were framed by a somewhat clumsy, near vaudevillian narrative, which Sandra hated and I liked. It did take a while for the music to start, and I know that Sandra was expecting a kind of non-stop music and dance performance.  

The dances were distinctive. There was the alcatraz, a kind of erotic pantomime in which the dancers had tissues attached to their lower backs, which their partners tried to ignite with candles; and Son de los Diablos, a street masquerade dating back to the thirteenth century, appropriated by Afro-Peruvians after the abolition of slavery. Most exciting was a sequence of tap dances with origins in the seventeenth century, three hundred years before the Nicholas brothers and Bill Robinson (not to mention Fred and Ginger) showed up, and a couple of hundred years before tap dancing emerged in North America, supposedly in the 1830s.  

Rafael Santa Cruz is a charismatic performer and a member prominent in Afro-Peruvian culture.  (If you view the video, he’s the man with the broom in the first scene.)  In this show, he also plays Pancho Fierro (1809-1879), an artist and archivist of Afro-Peruvian culture.

A Latido Negro video may be found at youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXvQUVPHYWc

About two and a half minutes into this video, there is a spectacular performance involving the cajón (box), which is the national instrument of Perú and came into being in the nineteenth century after the Spanish prohibition of skins and drums among slaves.  It was one of the highlights of the show.

Latido Negro made me think of the relation of Latin American music to the music of North America, and made me wonder about the hidden layers of contingent music under the surfaces with which we are most familiar.

For example, take Carmen Miranda, a performer remembered for her crazy tutti-frutti hats and her caricature of the red hot Latina mamacita in many motion pictures.  One has only to listen to Carmen Miranda (1930-1945) on Harlequin Records to get to the next level in this case.  She was a fabulously gifted musician.  Samba was about a decade old when she started her recording career, and one wonders about what else was going on in Brazil in the teens and twenties and during the fifteen years represented on this recording. I will also recommend the documentary film Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business (1995), directed by Helena Solberg, for an excellent portrait of Carmen Miranda, and of her times in relation to the Americas.

Jelly Roll Morton said, “Now in one of my earliest tunes, "New Orleans Blues", you can notice the Spanish tinge. In fact, if you can't manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz.”

Obviously, the history of jazz is rich in infusions of Latino music.  In the 1940s, bebop made a huge connection with Afro-Cuban music: Charlie Parker and others played in Machito's orchestra, Chano Pozo played with Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Kenton made many forays into Afro-Cuban jazz and featured the Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida in his orchestra.  One could go on and on with this, from beatnik bongos to the samba/bossa nova, Getz/Gilberto phase and beyond.  

One of my all-time favorite recordings is Cubop City by Machito & his Orchestra, with solos by Howard McGhee and Brew Moore, which I first heard as a two-sided 78 rpm record, when my friend David Dooley borrowed it from his Stan Kenton fanatic cousin Brian Williams, in Swansea, long ago.  When it was issued on the Original Mambo Kings compilation in 1993, Cubop City was credited to Howard McGhee & His Afro-Cuboppers, but it was Machito’s band.  However, I digress.

And I am not entirely sure of what it is from which I do so.  I guess the revelations of Latido negro have made me wonder about the musical innovations of Latin America and the Caribbean of which I am ignorant.  There is no really original thought here, more like older thoughts brought home by the power of a live performance.