Culture

Womaddening or… or gladdening?

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

Look I’m decidedly post Womad. By that I mean that my head is kindof woolly, my feet ache and there’s that run-down bad-breathy feeling going on in me throat. Not good. So lock oneself away, maybe find a piece of Kendal’s Mint Cake – yup, sorted! – and unwind those tired (pre)tensions and racy uncertainties. About individual bands/the nature of performing to largish bundles of folk. Mm. Because I’m medium vexed or maybe just fascinated by certain notions this whole festival thing has cast; shadows over the undoubted sunshine.

But lest you worry, sagacious reader, that I may be veering in blissful ignorance towards Grumpy Ole Gitsville, like some ancient vicar at the helm of a Morris Traveller, let’s start with the joys, the highlights I personally encountered. And there were several, which I will recount in a meaningless but instinctive order reflecting either something very profound, or something like partial memory loss.

  1. El Tanbura (Egypt)
  2. Dub Pistols (UK)
  3. Hassan Erraji’s MoRocan Rollers (Morocco/UK)
  4. Anda union (Mongolia/China)
  5. some of Donso (Mali/France)
  6. Anda Union (cooking and playing)
  7. Gogol Bordello (USA)
  8. Giving Soul – film animation.

All these offered something special… and there is no doubt I missed plenty of unmissable stuff too. Like your favourites?

I cannot, however, proceed any further without briefly alluding to the context of my Womad experience, as the presence of my own nuclear family – kids aged 12 and 8 – plus former longish term Tanzania resident (known out of earshot as The Wife) inevitably enriched/compromised said experience both qualitatively and in terms of consumption.

I watched a fair bit of stuff with an 8 year old girl bopping either enthusiastically or limply upon my shoulders. I watched some stuff drifting stealthily through the comatose flanks, from beneath cooling trees, or ideally placed by the sound men – whom I may have pretended to oversee, authoritatively. I could not, in other words, smash down tequila pops and then MASH IT UP with either Dub Pistols or Gogol Bordello – both of whom I saw and enjoyed in a regrettably rather mature fashion. But this is, I contend, the nature of the festival scene, often its strength; being exposed to the colours of the thing as a group.

Which brings me to El Tanbura. Friday, 3pm, on the open air stage. Classic Womad, being billed as the “Musical elders with the soundtrack of a revolution”; being welcomed with well-earned R.E.S.P.E.C.T. from us Guardian/Indie and crucially, Womad Festival Programme reading masses. Being a quietly acquired joy, engaging and truly worth our attention. Being probably absolutely what a festival of this nature is all about – music as conscience as well as toe-tapping opiate. Respect and even that pinko-tinged but genuine feeling of brotherhood was unmistakeably in the air for the soundtrackers of Tahrir Square. What have they seen, compared to us, in their recent past! If I could I would bless them.

The programme then drew a lump of us over to watch Taraf de Haidouks – “the true Gypsy kings”. But they were apparently playing at the wrong speed and their trebly, virtuouso shrillness was not, alas, for me. Similar but different were The Boxettes, an “all-female beatboxing quartet”, who were intermittently striking but I felt not well served by indifferent sound. Their extraordinary vocal bass notwithstanding, it felt like a gig that wasn’t working. I needed a break and food.

Dub Pistols brought the street-wise energy and mosh-pit testosterone levels right up, being the “renegade furistic skank” artists the label described. Those of us influenced and indebted to Two Tone and punk enthusiastically re-stepped the skankified ground of the Specials with these spiky geezers, these lads. It was a show fit to headline and close the night… and when we walked out of the darkening Big Red Tent it seemed frankly weird that having seen all this, it was only 8.20 pm.

So I prob’ly didn’t need or much want anymore. Not that same Friday night. Consequently either I failed to engage with Alpha Blondy, or he failed to engage with me.

There was, by this time, already the feeling that too many “How you doin’ Womad’s?”/elongated introductions to band members/laboured calls for audience ‘participation’ etc. etc might be undermining the truth of things. I’m not looking for a particularly purist entertainment folks, don’t get me wrong. But is it just me or is there something of an issue with global musical awareness – amongst artists(?) – inevitably leading to fusionization of individual musics? So nearly every major African headlining act gets a western-sounding Les Paul wielding axeman for those suddenly necessary breaks. And you have to have appropriate stagecraft. And get the audience to sing something back at you. Are these the inevitable consequence of time/familiarity/knowledge/the need to entertain large numbers of folks all at the same time?

I’m afraid I’ve gotten a tad distracted with this one… but is festival fever (surely an interesting social phenomenan in its own right?) complicit in the bastardization or undermining of real world music whilst at the same time bringing it, wonderfully, to a wider, newer audience?

Can I leave you to think about that one whilst I put on the metaphorical kettle, returning later with hopefully a stress-freer review of some of my own real highlights. Of which there were several.

Amy come back.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

I’m ill at ease with my previous blog. Apart from its cheap ego-centrism – how dare I call into question her realness when all around are saying Amy Winehouse was absolutely (and possibly uniquely) the real deal? An apology may yet be in order. But I do cling with a little confidence to the notion that I can legitimately make some argument here a) because I have to my knowledge no beef with the woman (not even for her later, unappealing habit of pooping on her fans) b) because there were years in my life when music was The Most Important Thing Bar None and c) I could, in the words of another icon of The Smoke, be wrong.

So setting aside the ripeness of the moment – which I fully understand may be difficult for the majority – I think the process of appreciation for any real artist is such a rich and rewarding and on times such an enlightening thing that I ask you to persevere right on past my gaucheness. To, ideally, a place where I can ask whether that instrument of hers was that of a truly great jazz/soul singer?

Sure it was magnificently easy; there was something of the sublime there, in the cadence of the thing. It was utterly in tune with a smoky, druggy London; out on the town with it, swigging bourbon and creasing into cleavage-wobbling laughter. And most of that appeals to the wannabe metropolitan in most of us – happy or sad. What I’m not sure about is how moving any of this carousing was.

It may be a mistake to entirely associate greatness with the ability to truly ‘move’. Pop can be great/a horn section can be great; what does that tell us about commonalities between great human noises? Naff all. The matter may then be complex but the issue at hand is this; whether or not Amy Winehouse went past music into the colours of the heart. Many would answer an emphatic YES to that one.

Me, I wouldn’t. So I’m going to have to listen to ‘Back to Black’ again, ‘properly’. Check out whether these were good songs or ordinary songs. Whether there’s anything being said as well as whether that voice was really special. I’m looking forward to that.

Judge the work

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

I’d like to write a post about Amy Winehouse that doesn’t get too trapped. Or that’s what I was thinking. Partly because although there is no question that she was a talent, and it is (always) a loss, I have to confess that I found her voice affected rather than affecting.

By that I think I mean that I felt she was kindof pitching at some role rather than truly expressing her self.   Consequently I let the music drift away – or maybe even pushed it. Right now that feels a pretty shockingly harsh judgement, but my soul’s response to that salty/soaked velvet croon was to simply fail to believe in it. It was unreal. And in the face of so much contrary emotion, I find that interesting, even if it does reflect badly upon me.

Now I’m aware of the absurdity – insensitivity even – of indulging in this particular moan at this particular moment. It may be something to do with wanting to ‘balance’ the understandable hyperbole. And I am heavily aware of the relative weakness of my position in terms of critical opinion. But when the critics and many of the great unwashed are foaming, look out, right? Especially when so much cool factor is invested, right?

Acclaim is surely a fickle and politicised beast; sometimes we suspect its motives as well as any intellectual quality it may have or lack. In addition, in the Winehouse situation, the thing is loaded with edgy but marketable ‘issues’ – drugs/irresponsibility/stridency/the inevitable car crash factor – all, arguably, clouding anyone’s ability to judge. For how many of us remain neutral in the Heroin debate, the What’s Her Family Been Doin’ debate, the Rehab With Your Loyal But Heavily Disappointed Fans debate?

On the one hand, cruelly, it seems Amy had a lot of support. On the other a void, an absence – her own. She wasn’t there when she needed her and presumably neither were the real friends that might have supplanted the illness. Or likely not.

We are fortunate that the music persists; the relatively small back catalogue that so gripped the handers-out of major awards as well as millions of ‘ordinary fans’. As is always the case with an artist – judge the work.

Points of departure

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

The idea that Miro seems to have needed a ‘jolt’, a shock or an accident to begin making his art is perhaps no great surprise. Maybe all of us who do creative work rely on or gratefully latch onto a source. For Miro it may have been an imperfection, a stain on canvas ‘primed’ by cleaning his brushes upon it in order to stimulate such an inspirational event. He does speak at some length about this process and one of many things that resonate/jar/jolt is the affirmation that

A piece of thread, therefore, can unleash a world. I invent a world from a supposedly dead thing. And when I give it a title, it becomes even more alive. Miro, XXsiecle, interview with Yvon Taillandier, 1959.

We can most of us, in our turn, fly with this attractive notion. But before we do, let’s remind ourselves that the bulk of humanity, when informed of this cosmic spontaneity, might belch out a not unreasonable protest. Like what kind of painting is that? Beginning with a fucking splodge or a hole or a stain? That’s a fraud! We’ve all heard that stuff.

So what kind of painting is it?

Miro – who, let’s make clear did not always paint the same way (and therefore dear viewer, should you require of your artist the obvious ability to draw the obvious relatively obviously, please refer to… The Farm say, of 1921-2) – Miro I suspect came to depart from these flecks of dust in a heightened state of both confidence and susceptibility. Requiring of the immediate (physical?) impulse but trusting that this sprang from unspoken understandings.

There seems to be very little talk of fate, but an exquisite, a poetic appreciation of the journey from the automatic to the liberatingly real through the process of painting. Something is being found; something more wonderful than that which could have been found by knowing the destination beforehand. I think this may be Miro’s definition of human experience; this expression of faith in the life of the imagination.

I’m besotted with his contrary genius. Farmboy/cosmonaut; diligent mercurial-instinctive doodler. Sign-maker and allotment-holder. Man of principle/man of business. Surrealist and… farmboy. What seems constant however, is the graft, the integrity of the man. He detested dilettantes and those who abused the true calling – at one stage being highly critical of Picasso for his slavery to the franc and the dollar. He worked at it, for decades; quietly, but like a fighter too, in training. Earning the right to express himself, then calling out to the universal.

Miro did ordinary stuff – family stuff, being skint stuff – but dug for the sublime. He left ciphers and signs for all of us to gather, knowing surely that we would lack the confidence to allow them to work upon us or baulk at the work involved in getting them. Always he moved forward and on, in relative independence, in his exacting, exhilarating way.

I find my titles in the process of working, as one thing leads to another on my canvas. When I have found the title, I live in its atmosphere. The title then becomes completely real for me, in the same way that a model, a reclining woman for example, can become real for another painter. For me, the title is a very precise reality.                 Miro, interview as above.

These are not the words or the ways of a fraudster.  Please, go after him; follow.

Finding Miro

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

I’ve recently been to ‘the Miro’, the stunning exhibition at Tate Modern. I’ve been to Barcelona too; once, briefly, like a tourist. I took my family on a near-depressingly hot slalom up to Montjuic – hotel map was garbage, honest. Traipsing through a treacly sun we were, sacrilegiously trading moans as the city and the Med emerged in the hushed, glorious haze behind us. Finally, a sweaty “Wow”, then on, down to the nearby Fundacio Joan Miro, which was and is a beautiful space, with beautiful art and a ver ver decent caff. (Go). It’s all got me thinking about… about figures, or ciphers, or being bothered.

Deep breath and a beginning, an opinion…

So let’s be clear about this, in my view we have to/need to shed some of the snaky certainties, the horny machismo, the intellectuality goddammit, shaping our approach; and then we really may find something. Understanding stuff like this might just be a combination of contrary engagements; relaxing as well as fine-tuning our focus; believing and discerning; really standing there. This then may be a way into the vocabulary of the thing – if there ever is a vocabulary – for abstracted art.

Joan Miro hated and was offended by the very notion of his art being ‘abstract’. He was a slowish, diligent painter all his life. He could barely have been more attached to his land, his family farm, his keenly felt Catalan roots. He could not associate his art, his concrete testaments, with abstraction, since they were surely and clearly and obviously the natural expression of his being. (Even if they were mythic or symbolic in ‘nature’ or ‘about’ going beyond the plastic facts). Miro tilled his canvas, and there’s a fabulous tension between his quietly belligerent modesty, this visceral simplicity on the one hand and his ambition for and poetic sense of the search for absolutes, for wonder, for truth.

All the pictorial problems resolved. We must explore all the golden sparks of our souls!          Letter to J F Rafols (Montroig, Oct 1923)

But he was an extraordinary man. On the one hand a proud and committed Catalan; on the other a serial abuser of the provincial “handful of imbeciles in Barcelona“. (Letter to J F Rafols 1919).

Almost shockingly clear about the two polarities; 1. The abundance, the dynamism, the cultural sweetness of Paris was essential; 2. His farm (Montroig) was essential, but Barcelona was suffocation and death.

Whilst it makes complete sense that Montroig was not Barcelona, and that Paris was mind-expanding, what continues to fizz – arguably for fifty years – is the HOW/WHY of Miro’s liberation from the shackles of (a prevailing) dogma or form. He was a surrealist who left surrealism emphatically behind. He was time after time a pioneer, somehow kindof quietly; perhaps he played a good game rather than talked it. Miro did, however, choose to involve himself in sometimes unavoidable causes – chiefly to do with his homeland and the civil war – but generally persisted as an outlier. Both Picasso and Breton came to respect his individuality, his importance even.

Often he would let nobody see work in progress; his studio was typically immaculate and private in comparison to many of his contemporaries. There is this real sense – reinforced by reading Selected Writings and Interviews/ Da Capo and Joan Miro/Tate – that he was conditioning himself throughout his extraordinary career, readying himself for the next ‘jolt’ which would imbue both spiritual force and method. And yet this itself was an organic if revelatory process; one which he had to let happen and believe in.

In 1940 Miro began working on a series of paintings called the Constellations. In a letter to his dealer Pierre Matisse you sense his quiet confidence that something “important” was happening. But what is also fascinating to me is the following

I can’t even send you the finished ones, since I have them all in front of me the whole time – to maintain the momentum and mental state I need to do the entire group.

(Selected Writings and Interviews, Da Capo.)

I imagine Miro serenely immersed in some contemplatory groove/purple patch through and during which he expresses an astonishing new force. One which would later lead Andre Breton to say – specifically concerning these paintings – that

No surrealist painter has shown greater capacity for renewal, nor moved further forward in the confirmation of his mastery, than Miro     (Interview in ‘Le Litteraire’, 1946).

These signature works are surely bewitching? To me they are. But do we take them as a challenge to our sense of (the order of) things, or… how?

Miro the populist would have no problem with this confrontation. Are they doodles, do they irritate us? In the current cheap colloquialism is this the kind of modern art cobblers that “any child could do?” Is somebody who can’t draw taking the piss? Is that the essence of this proposition? Would it be easier to feel cheated and metaphorically or literally walk away, muttering? The answer is clearly YES. After all, the man is pretty much basing his pictures on chances and accidents – marks on the paper, imperfections! It becomes then a matter of integrity.

So listen. Look. Read. Find Miro, or Pollock, or Rothko or… you name him/her. Because you will find without exception an intense and rather magnificent sense of real purpose which will exorcise the doubts. Will help you get it. (I know the following may sound preposterous but) often what these artists have said or written is almost as exciting and inspiring as the work itself. And I recommend you listen to it. Because the artist deserves your attention and you will benefit. My own extra-curricular work has turned out the following; Miro is unquestionably the quiet genius I hoped for. For his extraordinary faith in pursuing the golden sparks; for his low-burning graft towards freedoms; for his undemonstrative courage. Look at the work.

For many of us actively trying to engage there are difficulties – we are badly trained/lazy/typically at some level visually inarticulate. We can’t make sense, or enough sense of the ciphers/symbols/lines/dots. But what a fabulous challenge! When the artist is trying with such heart to find a new glory he believes common to all of us, how can we not want to follow him, to understand him, to appreciate him, to support him, to enjoy him?

Me, I am finding Miro an absolute wonder.

7th July 2011.

Painting from withinside the head

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

In my last missive I warbled on pseudo-stylee about ethereal connections between Ian Chapell and staccato dance and ready positions. Extraordinary – as David Coleman might have said – given my visceral nature. Today I am ready to move on to further, similarly abstracted considerations relating to art. Because – unbelievably – not only is bowlingatvincent fluent in ECB Coaching Directives, he is genetically predisposed to appreciate yer Miro and yer Vincent ; and wishes to share these things with you.

So bowlingatvincent will roam, sometimes dangerously over diverse terrain.
And
today where I’m pitching up – doctor who-like, though perhaps in a yurt aromatically muggy in (phworr!) a frankincense stylee – is in the over-populated midfield ‘twixt art and theory. Or does it feel more like the trenches? And the thrust of what is emerging is perched upon the following gambit: that everything beautiful now gets painted from withinside the head.

Simon Schama knows this and I gladly refer to him as an inspiration and a teacher. In particular his understanding of the searing magnificence of revolutionary art, for him and me the exhilarating pinnacle of human possibility. What I don’t know is… does he like cricket? But this is irrelevant. Unlike the notion that art’s power is lashed, Simon says, to the exercise of invincible boldness and i.n.s.p.i.r.a.t.i.o.n. – a phenomenon that may be independent of ‘traditional’ painting skills; that may piss all over any sense of the literal, the figurative as god. Because it sails beyond, it pierces existing possibilities, re-defining the wonderful.

I paraphrase, atmospherically, but if you are in any way attracted still to the notion that figurative art is highest and best, classical and irrefutable, you need to get real. And get a life. An abstracted one, a theoretical one, an emotional one; one where you feel the colour of natural human experience and you don’t have to recognise its shape.

On the mighty Vinny’s journey to greatness and excruciating revolutionary triumph, he made the Potato Eaters. It’s a sensational picture in which his workaday (one might say prosaic) appreciation of working peasants is described thus

I have tried to emphasize that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish and so it speaks of manual labour and how they have honestly earned their food.

But the picture smoulders darkly – brownly! – with a radical philosophical intent. And it looks like it speaks; a new level of sympathy, of understanding, having being spawned in the moment of choosing feeling before verisimilitude; or rather developing verisimilitude into a newer, richer realness. Van Gogh was making himself – had made himself -a great draughtsman – but the perspectives being dismembered here are (the existing) linear views of art and perception itself. The painting is that important, that wonderful. And I am close to tears every time I read that which I quote above.

Cleverly, I’ve proggled the ear of your half-interest with a rather unchallenging picture. It’s after all relatively figurative; any moron can see what it’s about. There are figures. But greater challenges lie ahead.                 June 25thth 2011.