As far as I can see—although my eyesight is terrible—many filmmakers believe that artists live in enormous lofts located in the centre of major cities, cities which no longer have either artists or lofts at their centre. In these fantastical real estate spaces—industrial elevator, clawfoot bathtub, room enough to race a bicycle—artists talk about their work in an alphabetti-spaghetti of theoretical profundities, or they emote and grunt through a fog of turps and scotch. The temptation for directors to parody the art life or to romanticize it is strong. And artists are, for the most part, quite ordinary, even boring in some cases. Talking about art isn’t good cinema.
In her movie Showing Up, released in the US a couple of months ago, Kelly Reichardt captures beautifully a plain vernacular a lot of artists share. In one scene, the film’s protagonists—Lizzy, a ceramicist (Michelle Williams) and Jo, a sculptor (Hong Chau)—are walking along the street discussing another artist’s work. “Saw Mike’s show yesterday,” says Jo. “How was it?” asks Lizzy. “It’s good,” says Jo. Lizzy: “I heard he’s doing deserts again.” Jo: “Yeah, I liked his trees better.” Lizzy: “I like the deserts… I always forget Mike’s colour blind. Isn’t that weird?” Jo: “Totally.” The casual evaluations, the shorthand—“trees”, “he’s doing deserts again”—and that pinch of gossip made it one of the more realistic exchanges about art I’ve seen on screen. Reichardt’s 2019 film First Cow also has the most tense scene about milking a cow ever depicted in cinema. Hers is a rare talent.
The other day I started reading Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Jessica Moore. It’s a novel about three friends undergoing rigorous training in trompe l’oeil painting, “accepting the humility of artisans so they might better boast about painting as artists.” Kerangal builds her writing from technical terms. She relishes the names of the marbles and woods the students have to paint, the nomenclature of pigments, powders and tools. I can see why. Fleur de Pêcher, Cerfontaine, Henriette Blonde, veined Zebrano. Imperial black, veinette, Kolinsky sable. It’s luxuriant language. They are the kinds of details that authors, having diligently researched a specialist field, can often over-specify, perhaps anxious to demonstrate that they know what they’re talking about. (Authors of historical fiction are notably prone to this temptation.) Too many technically correct terms can make a scene less vivid in the mind’s eye rather than more. Homework isn’t a story. And one might know the proper name, but never use it. You might be thinking “Alizarin crimson” when it’s easier to just say “red.” But—so far at least, I’m only a few chapters in—Kerangal also has her characters eat chips, drink beer, chit-chat, pay rent, look at their phones, get backache. She describes the physicality of painting, how it feels in the body, something that writers frequently neglect when imagining the lives of artists, as if art has nothing to do with having a body at all. (Sure, maybe you get a fabricator to make your work for you, but you still have to breathe and talk and look.) The mundane, set in chiaroscuro with the arcane, is what seems to bring life to the novel.
(I’m perpetually part-way into a book, a TV series, an article. I’m sure you are too. I might finish it, I might abandon all hope and turn to something new. But the experience of that period of immersion, of being in the work rather than having come out the other end, is rarely deemed fit to print. It lives only in conversation: “I’m reading such-and-such at the moment.” “How is it?” “Dunno, I like aspects of it but…” This is the phase in which the intoxication, surprise, boredom, education, happens. The delicate sensations, the instances of recognition or nodding-off that are not registered in professional criticism. I think there should be a publication in which contributors only discuss works they haven’t finished. It could be called So Far: A Magazine of Mastication. To maintain the integrity of the idea, I don’t plan to do anything more about it.)
Terminology barnacles to art like crazy. It can be useful, and in specialist-to-specialist conversations, it has a certain efficiency. I’ve met people who like it because it signals authority, or because they have mistaken jargon for knowledge. It can be used as a lingua franca. It makes a person feel like they’re part of something special and it can cold-shoulder the unwanted. Still, for all the words at our disposal, there is much in art that goes unsaid, or occupies a space of tacit agreement that exists just short of words. Sometimes the best you can manage is “I like the deserts.”
Showing Up reminded me of something I overheard in the post office the other day. A woman was buying stamps. “I’d like a sheet of those cartoony ones,” she said to the window clerk. She was pointing to a set of stamps, pinned next to the parcel scale, celebrating the American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. I wondered whether, in the customer’s eyes, they were simply colourful designs in an attractive old comic book style. Or whether she had seen a Lichtenstein once in a museum and the stamps had triggered a pleasant memory of the visit. Or whether she was a professor of art history in a hurry, using shorthand to save time, assuming that the post office clerk wouldn’t know who Lichtenstein was. And that the post office clerk—having once been an art history student, perhaps even a studio assistant to Lichtenstein in his later years and then through a set of complex circumstances following the artist’s death found herself working for the postal services—knew full well what they were but decided not to have that conversation because the line of customers was getting too long and she simply didn’t have time to discuss the significance of benday dots as a motif in postwar American painting.
Woolly description is all that most of us have got when we’re digging outside our field. After visiting the post office I attempted a list of things that I could only describe in equivalents to “the cartoony ones” or “doing deserts.” I gave up after fish and footballers. Last week my friend Chris Wiley, an artist and critic, wrote an entertaining piece for The New Yorker about U.F.O. photography. “In the world of U.F.O. hunters,” he observes, “the lack of high-quality photographic proof has always been a vexing problem. […] Now with high-definition photographic tools held perpetually in the palms of billions of people across the globe, this problem should give us even more pause.” U.F.O. taxonomy is a vague business. Categories include ‘flying saucer,’ ‘flying cigar,’ ‘flying football,’ ‘black triangle,’ ‘tic-tac’ and ‘boomerang,’ labels as fuzzy as the photographs they describe. Wiley quotes writer Mark Pilkington, whose 2010 book Mirage Men places U.F.O.s in a peculiar zone between official disinformation and folklore: “Ultimately, it’s a matter of taste—whether you want to let the mystery ring or be absorbed by the dull thud of the mundane.” Conversations about U.F.O. photos aren’t that different to conversations about art. They’re both about objects in search of identification (or at least a connection). Even the categories of art history are low-definition, as plain as U.F.O. types. Landscape, still life, portrait. Conceptual, Minimal, Pop. Trees, deserts, cartoony ones.
The issue of what we name people and places—to distinguish, fix in place, make visible, rally around, use against others—has been one of the most contentious of the century so far. I think it’s important, with art, to let a new thing go unnamed, even for a short while, as it cooks in the studio and first cools off in public. In 1970, the artist Robert Barry made Art Work (It Is Always Changing…). A simple text, with the cadences of a riddle, it reads:
“It is always changing.
It has order.
It doesn’t have a specific place.
Its boundaries are not fixed.
It affects other things.
It may be accessible but go unnoticed.
Part of it may also be part of something else.
Some of it is familiar.
Some of it is strange.
Knowing of it changes it.”
Art Work (It Is Always Changing…) was designed to exist in a different form in each person’s imagination. (At the time he was also working with invisible inert gases, radiation and radio waves.) But every artist will recognize something of their process in his words too. The moment when a rough shape begins to form, when go-to methods meet new ones. The way a piece can look great when you leave it in the studio at the end of the day, then seem unfinished on returning to it the next morning. Spotting the link—a phrase, a shape—that tethers one work to another. Suddenly finding the meaning you didn’t even know you’d created until years later. Maybe it’s only then that the name begins to fit.
Finding the right label for your art is hard. Artists want to be recognized as unique, uncategorizable. But recognition, at least in professional terms, often requires being categorized. The 1970s American band Death, formed by three brothers from Detroit—Bobby, Dannis and David Hackney—were originally called Rock Fire Funk Express. They changed their name to Death after their father was killed in 1974. The trio wrote hard rock songs, melodic and tight in form, thoughtful in attitude. According to legend, Death recorded a demo which landed them a meeting with powerful music executive Clive Davis. He liked the music, but urged the group to change their name. They refused and Davis turned them down. Doors closed in their faces. Bad timing and bad luck stymied their career. The band’s name was hardly the only obstacle they faced, but it was a major issue. People lacked the imagination to know how to place a black rock group calling themselves Death. At the end of the 1970s the brothers gave up on the band. It wasn’t until 2009, when a set of extraordinary chance circumstances led to their music being rediscovered, that they found the recognition they had deserved all along. The name became a point of interest.
In a recent interview with Ann Powers, musician P.J. Harvey talked about the pleasure of being in the moment with music, “wanting to tap into that really pure place where you just feel, and you just experience, and nothing yet really has a name.” There’s a scene I like in the fly-on-the-wall documentary Reeling With P.J. Harvey by Maria Mochnacz. Mochnacz is following Harvey on her 1993 tour through Europe and America. Harvey is singing in the toilet. Scales and drills in Italian. Classical exercises to aid breathing, relaxation and range. Her voice is bright and her diction is crisp. Mochnacz is with her in the loo, backstage at Glasgow’s Barrowlands. You can practically smell the bleach and stale beer. The pair get along well and some of the most illuminating conversations between them in Reeling take place in grotty bathrooms, away from the rest of the band and crew; all men, all hostile to Mochnacz’s attempts to film them. (“This is the mark of the decline of civilization, that hand-held camera”, complains one.) Harvey finishes her vocal warmups. “Is this from your singing teachers?” asks Mochnacz. “Yeah,” replies Harvey, “[…] he just said I’d been using my voice like a percussion instrument, which I have, so he was really trying to stop me using it like a drum and start using it like a voice […] It’s like trying to relearn everything.”
The film cuts to Harvey onstage with the band. They’re doing ’Snake’, a volatile song which whips from quiet menace to exhilarating roar. The classical exercises, that which goes unseen by the crowd, are what give her voice its stridency. It’s early in Harvey’s career, between her first two albums, Dry and Rid of Me. Her songs from this period speak frankly of sex, seduction, abjection, and revenge. The arrangements are minimal, just guitar, bass, drums and voice, but the recordings are engineered to sound muscular and tense; even the slightest brush of a snare or finger touching a string feels as if it could explode. Harvey’s voice runs from whisper to scream. She does not come across like a singer “trying to relearn everything.” She sounds, already, unmistakably, like PJ Harvey.
Three decades on, this summer she released the album I Inside the Old Year Dying, which sounds nothing like the music captured in Reeling, but it’s still unmistakably Harvey. Now there are field recordings and synths. Close mics and dry-sounding room ambiences are mixed into wide, reverb-heavy atmospheres. Listening to the album is like observing a garden over different seasons: on repeat listens the textures and colours alter, they thicken and they thin. It’s sung in the Dorset dialect of Harvey’s home, and draws its lyrical imagery from Orlam, a narrative poem she published in 2022. She uses her higher register more frequently these days. Subtle shifts produce narrative effects. ‘Seem An I’, for instance, opens with a hymn-like melody, Harvey imitating a wobbling child’s voice burred with a strong Dorset accent, then moves to a lower range, losing the accent, assuming an adult perspective. She blends her voice with male singers—actors Ben Whishaw and Colin Morgan make cameo appearances—and on ‘The Nether-edge,’ fuses it with a percussive synth to sound as if her voice has been hammered with rivets.
It’s common to talk about an artist’s “voice,” even when the form of the art doesn’t involve speech or words. (See also: what the art work “says,” how it “speaks to” us, or what—if the artist is a certain kind of moral entrepreneur—an artwork “calls for.”) Audiences generally like a voice to be consistent. People, by-and-large, get that an artist needs to change, but like to know what they’re paying for. Therefore it is fun when an artist adopts an entirely new accent, as Rene Magritte did in his ‘Vache’ period of the early 1940s, when he briefly turned away from his signature neo-classical dream-style and began to make deliberately, enchantingly, ugly images. But what if, as a young, aspiring artist, the voice you discover you have is not the voice you wanted? What if you don’t know how to stop making your voice sound like a drum? Ambition has to be reconciled with what the hands and sensibility can do. In my favourite Christmas film—Peter Capaldi’s 1995 short Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life—Kafka, played by Richard E. Grant, is struggling to write the opening to his famous short story ‘The Metamorphosis.’ He can’t find the right thing for his protagonist, Gregor Samsa, to wake up and find himself transformed into. A banana? A kangaroo? After a series of interruptions, a cockroach scuttles across Kafka’s desk. He kills it and finds his inspiration. Samsa turns into a giant insect! But when a sinister knife salesman comes looking for his missing friend, Jiminy Cockroach, the writer is filled with remorse for squashing the bug. Kafka sets about trying to make right, realizing that the cockroach—the thing he despised, the revulsion and horror he felt within him—was to be embraced rather than rejected from his writing.
Lately I’ve been thinking about making a short film on the topic of juvenilia. For some 25 years I had thought that I had lost a pair of VHS tapes which recorded my first attempts, aged 17, at making video art. In 2021, I wrote an essay about the videos, published in Stanley Schtinter’s book The Liberated Film Club. I described what I remembered of the tapes, my regret at losing them, wiping them, whatever it was that had happened. My mum read the essay and on a visit home she directed me to a Sainsbury’s carrier bag buried at the back of her wardrobe. There were the tapes, untouched. I brought them back to New York where they sat in another bag in my own closet for a further year, quarantined by anxiety at seeing them again and lack of funds.
I finally had them digitized a couple of months ago. They’re somewhere between art films and music videos. At the time most of what I knew of artist’s films was confined to descriptions in books, but music videos were what I had actually seen and loved, being an avid viewer of The Chart Show, Snub TV, and Top of the Pops. (I didn’t have access to MTV.) There is a lot of busy Super 8. There are attempts at making ‘scratch video,’ collages of clips taped from the TV. You can see and hear the clunks and whirrs of a sluggish domestic VHS machine stopping and starting, mechanics which give the tapes accidental texture. One piece, which wasn’t too bad, collides shots of me gazing out of my bedroom window with a clip from Un Chien Andalou, which I must’ve found on an arts documentary. Another, which could’ve been a blockbuster this summer, features fragments of Robert Oppenheimer’s famous speech quoting from the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become death…”, which I recall pulling from the prestige ITV series The World at War. (Way ahead of you, Christopher Nolan.) Thirty years on, I can barely remember what I meant by them.
The most instructive moments on the tapes are the most embarrassing. One, a real wince-inducer, involves my earnest recitation of a Jack Kerouac poem over images of a crucifixion, a target, words scattered on a table in a kind of William Burroughs cut-up style, my face in profile, and a whole load of corny in-camera ‘paint’ effects. It’s excruciating to watch. Yet I made it.
Every artist’s work is shaped what is rejected, cut, tried then discarded, but one of the drivers of that editing process—the one that has nothing to do with rationality, with rigour, training, or any other terms that signal professionalism—is embarrassment. It’s a part of artistic development that is rarely discussed. Sally Bayley, in The Private Life of the Diary, describes teenage journals as “a form of identity practice and self-production, a workshop for our future selves” in which the author can test out “a bad performance of being adult,” and “project all the mess and maelstrom” of adolescence. In an essay on juvenilia, for Gulf Coast journal a couple of years ago, I wrote that “early,” in an artist’s career, “is art school or university, the starting blocks of professional life. Anything before is pre-historic. Formative experiences are validated by the reputation of your chosen institution and the league tables of who-taught-who, on the networking value of a particular postgrad course. […] The languages we are trained in before we are trained to speak art are forgotten.” Early work is as instructive as late period but what artist wants to deal with their own cringe? Still, that work exists, and this would be an unrealistic conversation if we pretended otherwise.
RECOMMENDATIONS
—Speaking of things you do when you’re young, this is a beautiful recording by the Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, of ‘Youth and Love’ from Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel.
—On a bit of an Iris Murdoch kick recently, I came across this interview with the writer, recorded for Icelandic TV in 1985. The title credits are superb.
—Dept of Nepotism; Subdivision: Friends Who Paint. If you’re in New York, there is a small painting, in a small group show, in a small gallery on the Lower East Side, which is by Claire Lehmann, and which I keep thinking about. It’s titled Hierophany, and it is, like all her paintings, a technically accomplished piece which evokes an atmosphere I cannot place. (Back to UFOs again…) Luxe, hellish, psychedelic, futuristic, digital, mechanical. (The gallery is Harkawik, on Orchard Street.) Meanwhile, a website called Curator (very 2005), which describes itself in the kind of boilerplate that makes Lorem Ipsum seem thought-provoking (“a contemporary art & design platform dedicated to building a more connected global creative community”) has published a lovely short interview with Tim Braden, conducted by Simon Grant, in which the painter discusses his work, and a teenage epiphany meeting Patrick Heron.
—In 1993, the American musician Marc Ribot recorded a beautiful album of compositions by his mentor, Haitian composer and classical guitarist Frantz Casseus. I learned of it only recently, from this long interview with Ribot on Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide FM show.
—Finally, a new video for The God in Hackney, made by me and Andy Cooke. The first minute is pre-amble. The cartoon proper starts a minute in. But yes, that’s me tied to a chair with a t-shirt pulled over my head.